The Blueprint: Canada's Conservative Podcast - September 07, 2017


Shadow Minister Michelle Rempel on Canada’s border crisis

Topics
immigration and citizenship shadow minister refugee camps and accountability border crisis and immigration backlog
Hosted by
Jamie Schmal
Mentioned
Justin Trudeau Tony Clement Michelle Rempel-Garner Mark Carney Pierre Poilievre Andrew Scheer Speaker Yazidi
Justin Trudeau’s payout to a terrorist Andrew Scheer launches the Supporting New Parents Act

Episode Stats


Length

13 minutes

Words per minute

168.08

Word count

2,236

Sentence count

169

Harmful content

Toxicity

2

sentences flagged

Hate speech

4

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, Conservative MP Michelle Rempel and Finance Minister Pierre Poirier join me to discuss immigration and border security, and the growing number of asylum seekers crossing the border illegally into Canada. We also discuss the Prime Minister's new plan for dealing with the growing refugee crisis.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 You're listening to The Blueprint, Canada's Conservative Podcast.
00:00:09.000 Well, they thought they were going to have an easy day over there today, but not so fast, Mr. Speaker.
00:00:16.640 What is it going to take for the Prime Minister to have any respect for any laws in this country that may curb his out-of-control behaviour?
00:00:25.320 And now, here's your host, Tony Clement.
00:00:30.980 Welcome to The Blueprint, Canada's Conservative Podcast. I'm your host, Tony Clement.
00:00:36.860 For another edition, hey, summer may be over or nearly over, but our Conservative MPs have been hard at work in their constituencies and throughout the country throughout the summer.
00:00:47.540 But now we're into a new phase. We are here in Winnipeg, Manitoba as a Conservative caucus, a national Conservative caucus.
00:00:56.620 We're going to have caucus meetings. We just finished a shadow cabinet meeting with all of the people who have specific responsibilities for various portfolios to shadow the ministers, the Liberal ministers,
00:01:09.280 ask the right questions, demand the answers on behalf of Canadian taxpayers and citizens.
00:01:16.140 And with me today, we have two of my colleagues who are part of the shadow cabinet, part of leader Andrew Scheer's shadow cabinet,
00:01:25.280 who have specific responsibilities and some very important issues that have been raised, really, throughout the summer.
00:01:32.320 And we have every anticipation that this will be topics that will be heard in the halls of Parliament when we get back on September 18th for question, period.
00:01:43.080 So, without further ado, let me introduce them to you. We have Calgary MP, Michelle Rempel.
00:01:48.880 Michelle.
00:01:49.120 Hi, thanks for having me, Tony.
00:01:50.540 It's great to be having you on The Blueprint.
00:01:53.680 As well, Ottawa Area MP, Pierre Polyev, who serves as the finance shadow cabinet person.
00:02:03.480 So, congratulations in that role, Pierre.
00:02:05.720 Thank you very much, Tony. Good to be with you.
00:02:07.480 By the way, Michelle Rempel serves as the immigration and citizenship shadow minister as well.
00:02:13.120 So, we have both of them here and we're going to talk about those two topics that you probably have been thinking about yourselves throughout the summer.
00:02:21.680 But let's get the update on it.
00:02:23.340 First of all, Michelle, obviously, one of the issues that has been top of mind with Canadians is our borders, the security of our borders.
00:02:34.040 We've had numerous instances, obviously, of border crossers. 0.99
00:02:38.540 I'm going to leave it to you to explain what has been happening and what your reaction to that is.
00:02:43.700 Sure.
00:02:44.040 So, we're in a situation now, two years after Justin Trudeau took the prime minister's role, where Canada used to have an open, fair, and compassionate asylum claim and refugee system.
00:02:57.580 And Justin Trudeau has broken that.
00:02:59.700 And this has been evidenced over the summer by Justin Trudeau setting up two refugee camps on Canada's border.
00:03:07.060 Can you – let's just stop and think about that for a minute.
00:03:10.320 We have refugee camps on the U.S.-Canadian border.
00:03:15.880 This is really unprecedented.
00:03:17.020 It is unprecedented.
00:03:18.200 Why is this happening?
00:03:19.260 So, if we rewind to January of this year, you'll remember that the Americans put in place an immigration ban.
00:03:27.380 And on that day, Trudeau tweeted out this knee-jerk tweet that said, all are welcome to Canada, hashtag welcome to Canada.
00:03:35.900 And in that moment, you know, we're here in Winnipeg today.
00:03:39.140 I grew up in Winnipeg.
00:03:40.320 I know what it's like in January in Manitoba.
00:03:44.240 Sure.
00:03:44.500 You know, so he sent out this tweet basically telling people to take part in an unsafe activity.
00:03:51.520 That we basically didn't have a border.
00:03:53.020 That's right.
00:03:53.520 He did.
00:03:53.960 With that tweet, he erased the border.
00:03:55.520 And this is so uncompassionate because many of the people that are illegally crossing Canada's border, those asylum claims that they're making, they won't be found valid.
00:04:05.720 Right.
00:04:06.000 But the problem for Trudeau is because he's increased the amount of people that are making these claims by promoting the illegal border crossing with that hashtag welcome to Canada tweet,
00:04:16.060 by doing things like removing the visa requirement on Mexico without a proper review, he's actually creating what Public Service of Canada is now forecasting to be an 11-year backlog in reviewing asylum claims.
00:04:32.100 So that's a technical term for saying that it's going to be 11 years before the government of Canada deems whether or not somebody who's illegally crossed the border has an asylum claim.
00:04:42.720 And during that time, they are entitled to receive social assistance benefits, subsidized housing, access the Canadian health care system.
00:04:52.360 And he doesn't have a plan to pay for any of this.
00:04:55.380 And the other side is there's people who have legitimately gone through the system.
00:04:58.680 You've got it.
00:04:59.240 Who haven't jumped any queues, who have filled out the right forms and who are waiting for their hearing to see whether they can seek asylum.
00:05:07.680 So Trudeau sent Mark Garneau, one of his ministers, out in the middle of the summer to talk about this because I think he's been a little bit afraid to own up to his mistake.
00:05:18.640 When he sent Mark Garneau, I think Mark Garneau actually said, well, we're going to have work permits for these people.
00:05:23.980 So can you imagine being somebody, let's say you're somebody who's trying to sponsor your spouse into the country or you're coming into the country, trying to come into the country through legal, proper channels to hear that, that if you've crossed the border illegally, you know, we're going to prioritize work permits.
00:05:41.600 You know, this is one of those things where I think, Tony, Canadians are, they understand that immigration is part of Canada's fabric.
00:05:48.720 But the problem with Justin Trudeau is that he's been so irresponsible and reckless about it.
00:05:54.020 He's actually, I think, taking away social license to operate in Canada's immigration system.
00:06:00.360 And, you know, when you look at people around the world right now, like we've, you know, you helped me with this.
00:06:04.720 We did so much work on the Yazidi genocide.
00:06:07.060 You've been in Iraq.
00:06:08.220 You've seen people that are facing.
00:06:10.860 Genuinely facing us.
00:06:11.940 You know, we want to be in a position to help there.
00:06:14.340 And you remember what it was like fighting the government, trying to get them to help legitimate genocide survivors.
00:06:20.860 And now we're talking about setting up refugee camps.
00:06:23.880 Like nobody's fleeing persecution from the United States of America.
00:06:27.300 So we've been fighting hard all summer, trying to hold the liberals to account.
00:06:31.600 I feel like Canadians are waking up to what a shambles the system's at.
00:06:36.660 But, you know, to anyone who's listening to this, you know, you reaching out and voicing your opposition on this issue in a common sense way that says our system is no longer compassionate.
00:06:46.700 It's broken.
00:06:47.100 It's really helped, I think, move the dial on this.
00:06:49.820 And I think it's Justin Trudeau starting to wake up to, oh, my goodness, I've got a real problem here.
00:06:55.160 We're listening to the Blueprint Canada's Conservative podcast.
00:06:58.820 I'm speaking with Michelle Rempel, Calgary MP, the shadow cabinet minister for immigration and citizenship.
00:07:10.420 Michelle, what's the call to action here?
00:07:12.400 You talked a little bit about how people are getting upset about this issue.
00:07:16.680 What do you plan to do in the fall?
00:07:18.560 Sure.
00:07:18.860 And how can they be involved?
00:07:20.160 There's so many questions to be asked.
00:07:21.620 First of all, we are going to be holding the government to account in the House of Commons, in Parliamentary Committee.
00:07:27.900 But we've already started to talk about some of the things that the government could be doing to fix the situation.
00:07:34.100 First of all, Justin Trudeau himself has to come out and say, no, it's not hashtag welcome to Canada.
00:07:39.980 You cannot and should not be entering the country illegally.
00:07:43.100 It is illegal.
00:07:44.120 It's unsafe.
00:07:45.240 And if you do this, your claim will be processed quickly.
00:07:48.420 And now, as a caveat, he has to fix that system that he's broken.
00:07:51.620 And when your claim is found invalid, you will be sent back to your country of origin. 0.91
00:07:56.560 And then he needs to follow through with that action.
00:07:58.820 Well, this is the bizarre thing about it.
00:08:01.440 I'm glad you raised this point, Michelle, because what we're seeing right now is Justin Trudeau sending out his ministers to go to the United States at various points,
00:08:12.360 to go to various communities, ethnic communities, and say, we were just kidding.
00:08:18.840 We weren't, you know, hashtag welcome to Canada didn't mean that we had no border.
00:08:23.220 And please don't take it literally.
00:08:25.420 So he's trying to backtrack or to have it both ways, really.
00:08:28.360 Yeah, and, you know, this week, something I'll be raising in the House, I don't know if you read this, Tony.
00:08:33.500 So not in addition to the refugee camps, they actually are, as I understand it, buying RVs or trailers, heated trailers, and putting it at the border.
00:08:43.980 Wow. 0.67
00:08:44.300 Like, I shouldn't laugh, you know, because it's just so ridiculous. 0.91
00:08:47.880 But what kind of a message does that send?
00:08:50.980 You know, like you said, oh, sorry, we're just kidding, don't do this.
00:08:54.280 But then, you know, winter is coming, and their solution is to roll tent trailers into small communities.
00:09:00.620 Like, I've been down to the border here in Emerson.
00:09:03.020 Right.
00:09:03.520 You know, these communities are overwhelmed.
00:09:05.900 They're overwhelmed.
00:09:06.560 So, you know, there's some concrete things we'd like to see him do.
00:09:09.180 There is an agreement that we have with the United States that basically recognizes that both of our countries have asylum claim systems that are fair, they're compassionate, so that if you enter into Canada and make an asylum claim, you can't go to the U.S. and do the same thing, like sort of shop for asylum claims, and vice versa.
00:09:29.800 That's called the Safe Third Country Agreement.
00:09:32.200 There's a loophole in it.
00:09:33.860 The agreement's silent on what happens when somebody illegally crosses the border.
00:09:38.140 In between these two.
00:09:40.140 So we want the government to look at that agreement and close that loophole.
00:09:45.600 The other things, there's technical things that they could do.
00:09:48.060 They could open up more official points of entry.
00:09:50.400 We know where people are coming across the border illegally, they could designate that as an official point of entry and start applying the Safe Third Country Agreement more effectively.
00:09:58.840 They need to, you know, they need to deal with this mess that they've created at the IRB.
00:10:04.920 That's the Immigration Refugee Board.
00:10:06.820 That's the board that looks at asylum claims.
00:10:10.040 You know, they haven't been appointing judges in that area.
00:10:13.660 Well, that's the other thing.
00:10:14.380 There's a backlog partially because they haven't appointed new IRB judges.
00:10:18.680 And the other thing is it's not just that that backlog isn't just because of the illegal migrant crisis.
00:10:23.840 It's also because they've done things like rescind the visa requirement on Mexico.
00:10:30.940 And what that means, back in 2009, Tony, and you'll remember this, we saw a huge spike in asylum claims coming out of Mexico.
00:10:38.860 Many of them weren't valid.
00:10:40.580 And we said, look, this is costing the Canadian taxpayers money because it costs money to process these claims.
00:10:48.320 It costs money to have people access the social assistance system.
00:10:53.080 And many of these claims aren't valid.
00:10:54.440 So we put in place a visa entry or visa requirement on Mexico.
00:10:58.580 Those claims went down to zero.
00:11:01.400 Trudeau actually removed that without any sort of review.
00:11:04.860 So we're probably going to see, and the public service has forecasted it.
00:11:08.940 It's not just me saying that.
00:11:10.160 A huge spike in claims there, further backlogging the system.
00:11:13.440 So it's just, like, Tony, it's a disaster.
00:11:16.860 And, you know, who would have thought that our asylum claims were going to be from the USA and Mexico?
00:11:22.300 These are supposed to be, as you say, for people facing genocide, like the Yazidis in Iraq and Syria or other...
00:11:30.000 LGBTQ community members in Iran or in Chechnya, right?
00:11:34.380 Yeah, yeah.
00:11:34.740 I mean, that's the purpose of it, you know, not to encourage forum shopping, which is what's going on now.
00:11:41.480 But the global forced migration crisis is a huge policy concern.
00:11:46.080 But we have to start talking about the fact that people are economic migrants.
00:11:52.160 And we have to start looking at the fact that we need a plan.
00:11:56.860 The government needs to look at the immigration levels in Canada writ large
00:11:59.860 and start asking how we can help the world's most vulnerable more effectively.
00:12:05.280 You know, again, I want to emphasize that Canada is a compassionate country.
00:12:10.360 We are a country that's based on immigration. 0.99
00:12:13.500 So it's not a question of if, it's a question of how.
00:12:15.720 But, like, Trudeau, like, the problem in Canada right now is that the rhetoric is so polarized
00:12:20.900 because Trudeau has completely bungled and lost any faith in the Canadian public to do the how properly.
00:12:28.640 And we're going to hold them to account on that.
00:12:30.820 Michelle Rempel, Member of Parliament from the Calgary area,
00:12:33.620 thank you for being on the Blueprint Canada's Conservative Podcast.
00:12:37.960 And we wish you well in holding the government to account on this crisis that is bringing migration. 0.99
00:12:43.160 Thanks for all you do, Tony.
00:12:44.160 You're awesome.
00:12:44.780 Well, we all try here.
00:12:46.680 We all try.
00:12:47.180 Thank you for listening to the Blueprint, Canada's Conservative Podcast.
00:12:59.400 To find more episodes, interviews, and in-depth discussions of politics in Canada,
00:13:03.680 search for the Blueprint on iTunes or visit podcast.conservative.ca.
00:13:08.060 Thank you.
00:13:08.720 Thank you.
00:13:17.180 Thank you.