00:00:00.000Hello and welcome once again to The Blueprints. This is Canada's Conservative Podcast. I'm your
00:00:07.620host at Jamie Schmael, Member of Parliament for Halliburton, Kawartha Lakes, with new content for
00:00:11.300you every single Tuesday, 1.30 p.m. Eastern Time. Don't forget to like, comment, subscribe, and
00:00:16.300share this program because on today's show we are talking about Canada's immigration system
00:00:21.660and the Prime Minister's view on that and whether it means more or less at our borders. To talk
00:00:28.500about this and so much more. We bring on Brad Radicopp, the Member of Parliament for Saskatoon
00:00:33.140West in the beautiful province of Saskatchewan, also the Vice Chair of the Immigration Committee
00:00:38.400here in Parliament. Happy Thanksgiving. Yeah, same to you, Jamie. Great to be on the show.
00:00:42.440I hope you had a good turkey weekend and everything was good. Yeah, family's great.
00:00:46.160All right. My suit's a bit tighter, so clearly went okay. Oh, you look fine.
00:00:51.080Oh, you're too kind. That's why I keep bringing you on the show. Always good with the compliments.
00:00:54.680But we're talking about immigration because that seems to be a hot topic lately.
00:00:58.620We have, you know, word from the government that at one point through Stats Canada that the numbers had actually dropped in population for the first time in decades.
00:01:08.960But the revised numbers came out and it turns out it didn't go that way at all.
00:01:16.340The government was, you know, very proud of the fact that they were reducing immigration, reducing the number of temporary residents in our country.
00:01:23.280and Stats Canada backed that up with about a 200,000 person drop in the population.
00:01:30.140And then they revised it recently and said, oops, actually we were wrong.
00:01:33.640It actually went up by 200,000 people.
00:01:36.880So, you know, obviously the plan of the government isn't quite working the way they wanted it to.
00:01:41.700And it seems to be the way the government, especially under Trudeau,
00:01:45.620used those kind of tactics to hide the economic slowdown that the country was experiencing
00:01:52.920because they would bring in more people that would create economic activity through buying
00:01:58.200and selling, that sort of thing. But really, Canadians in general, at large, were not feeling
00:02:03.820any benefit in terms of getting wealthier. No, and it's actually very simple to understand
00:02:08.100because you have a pie and there's this much of a pie. And if there's 10 people wanting a piece
00:02:14.140of pie, that's one tenth for each. But if there's 12 people, that's only one twelfth for each. The
00:02:18.000pie slice gets smaller. And that's essentially what we had in Canada was a certain amount of
00:02:22.000economic activity divided by more people means that everybody gets a little bit less and that's
00:02:26.120what we've been experiencing in the country and that's what Canadians are feeling. And typically
00:02:29.940from like our memory, our generation, as long as you can go back and really it's this government
00:02:39.540because whether it's Trudeau or Carney at the helm, it's still the same people behind the scenes
00:02:44.300making these decisions but immigration was always used as a check for the most part against inflation
00:02:50.960You had more jobs than people. You opened the taps a bit more to let more in so that wages didn't get too far off the charts where businesses couldn't afford it anymore.
00:03:01.760And vice versa. When there were more people than jobs, the taps were turned off so that you didn't have Canadians lining up at food banks like we see now to the point where they can't find jobs.
00:03:15.920Carney's continuing this, and we'll get into that in just a second.
00:03:18.860But really, the gold standard, which was Canada's immigration system for decades and was admired around the world, has been turned on its head by this government.
00:03:29.040And if you look back in history, you'll see that the immigration numbers would go up and then down and up and down, just like you described, based on the economy and the needs.
00:03:36.140And even more importantly, during the Trudeau era, the Liberal government, and now into the Kearney era, those numbers have just gone up.
00:03:43.440They've just gone, you know, they're not doing this, they're just going up.
00:03:46.340And the other part of this that's important is that who we're bringing in is critical.
00:03:49.860We need to bring in people that fill those gaps in the labour market that we don't have right now.
00:03:54.380And the focus of immigration under the Liberals has been just let everybody in.
00:03:58.380And we really need to return back to that really measured and precise method of bringing in exactly the people that we need to make our economy stronger.
00:04:06.580And it was that well-known point system that we once had.
00:05:21.580I was going to go to the next slide, but before I do, you raised a very important point and to our comment earlier.
00:05:28.020So the wages part, which many Canadians, I'm sure, would say have not been keeping up with inflation.
00:05:34.820But the wages part is very important because when you have, again, more people than jobs, wages get suppressed.
00:05:41.940They don't rise as fast as they normally would.
00:05:44.760Yeah, absolutely. And that's, it's proven very simply and universally understood that more supply of labour means wages are kept low. And that's exactly what's happened in Canada over the last decade, is that we've had an overabundant supply of low wage workers, mainly coming in from overseas. And that has just kept those wages down. And so minimum wages and the wages at the lower end of the scale in particular have been depressed and kept lower. And that's causing a huge affordability problem with Canadians.
00:06:13.080All right, let's go to the next slide here. So we have issues with their immigration system, but the minister, the so-called head of that department, isn't much better. And we have a slide here, unaware of a very, very important court case that has to deal with refugees and how they're treated and what the process is to allow them to stay or to have them leave Canada.
00:06:38.320and the minister was just caught flat-footed.
00:06:41.080As we talked about just a few moments ago,
00:07:01.100and it would have been part of the briefing for sure.
00:07:03.000And so it's just another embarrassment for the minister.
00:07:05.560I think she, you know, as they were trying to explain it to her and, you know, throwing her a lifeline, you know, and she just still wasn't getting it.
00:07:12.840And then I think finally she said there are, well, there's so many, because it was about the name of the decision was Singh.
00:07:18.880And then she said, well, there are so many Singhs and so many decisions, you know, like, oh, well.
00:07:23.340But really this has to come back to Carney.
00:07:25.700Carney is the one who has appointed this minister.
00:07:28.260Carney is the one who is maintaining this minister as his person on this very important file.
00:07:33.860A file that he himself is talking about being under control, and yet, is this under control?
00:07:40.180You know, there's a question of competence there.
00:07:43.660So as you said, it was a language barrier, according to the minister, that was the problem
00:07:48.780in a very, as we said, a very important court case that basically has a lot of impact on
00:07:56.780how the immigration department operates.
00:07:58.520Yeah, and particularly about C-12, which was a major change to the immigration system.
00:08:03.080And there were many things in there that we supported, many more things that we wanted the government to go further with in terms of controlling asylum seekers and things like that.0.99
00:08:46.800So what does that mean for Canada if there is a so-called associate membership or whatever it wants to be called?
00:08:52.960Well, these are all questions that we don't know the answers to.
00:08:55.900And Europe is very famous for its immigration problems and its challenges right now.
00:09:01.240I mean, just in the summertime, we had the big, the Suda event where there were 60,000 people in the Spanish enclave that crossed, we all saw the images, you know, crossing over the walls and along the ocean there and trying to get into Spain.
00:09:14.940And I think that the questions that brings up in my mind are if we're part of the European Union in some form, the European Union spreads those asylum claimants out over their member states, or at the very least there's financial compensation that has to come from the member states to somebody that's absorbing all these asylum claimants.
00:09:33.180And so what would Canada's role in that be? Would there be plane loads of people landing at Pearson with migrants coming from Europe into Canada?
00:09:40.560Or would we be sending billions of dollars over to Europe to compensate some of our partner countries that are dealing with these issues?
00:09:47.940These are the questions that we don't know the answers to.
00:09:49.800And very important questions that we have to get an answer to because, as we started off the show talking about, things like housing, schools, can we find a family doctor in British Columbia?
00:10:01.180it's very difficult. It's not much better in other parts, but some other parts of Canada,
00:10:05.720it is better. At the same time, what does that mean on the pressures for the systems we have in
00:10:10.920place? Well, and even setting all that aside, the current government plan is 380,000 new permanent
00:10:17.740residents each year right now. That's a city the size bigger than Saskatoon, where I'm from.
00:10:23.740Saskatoon is about 300,000 people. So every year we're adding a city bigger than Saskatoon to our
00:10:28.700country. So where are those houses being built? We're not building the housing that we need to
00:10:32.480maintain our population, even at that rate. And so, you know, then when you look at the
00:10:37.180possibility of more migrants coming from potentially Europe, that just exacerbates0.99
00:10:41.080that problem and makes it even worse. And I think also the question is,1.00
00:10:44.840which part do we want, right? Like if we're talking the energy policy of Germany, maybe
00:10:50.820the immigration policy of the UK or the tax policy of France, I'd probably say,
00:10:55.460no, that's not what we should be looking at.
00:11:53.880And he seems like he's taken us down this path, regardless of what Canadians want, and hasn't mentioned it in Parliament yet, as far as I know.
00:12:02.240And have you heard a vote on this yet?
00:12:17.120And it comes back to the fundamental question of trade.
00:12:20.780And do we ignore our largest customer and focus on some new ideas, which we do need to diversify, there's no question.
00:12:30.000But we can't just ignore and eliminate 70% to 80% of Canada's trade in hopes that maybe someday we'll get a few more percent somewhere else.
00:12:38.940And our hope that our companies that are making stuff can navigate the bureaucracy and the rules that exist in the European Union.
00:12:48.940You have a couple of examples right in front of you here about some of the standards that the European Union has come out with.