In this episode, we talk all about immigration with Michael Bonner, an author, political consultant, and former policy director with the Ontario government. Michael talks about the new immigration minister, Michelle Rumpel-Garner, and her cluelessness when it comes to immigration.
00:00:00.000Great. Knowing the sacrifices that you made, where you were, the importance of your role in shaping the country that we now enjoy and that we're so privileged to live in. So thank you so much for joining the podcast. God bless you. And thank you again for everything.
00:00:16.860Thank you very much. It'd be nice stopping you.
00:00:18.700Now, as you can see, I interviewed Jim Parks. Jim Parks is a tremendous, remarkable person. And I'm happy to report that he's still with us. He recently turned 100. And so back then when I interviewed him, he was 98 years old. It was three years ago. And it was an incredible interview. I urge you to go over and watch the entire interview. We will link that below.
00:00:40.580And let me tell you that that tribute and that interview influenced me so much that that is why I named this organization Juno News. It was based on that reporting that day, that interview, and just the importance that this day had on our country, our nation. Canada really became the country it is today because of those efforts during the Second World War.
00:01:01.820Obviously, there were other important moments, important battles, both in the First World War, Vimy Ridge comes to mind, and the Second World War. But really, the way that the Canadians fought had an outsized impact on the outcome of that war happened that day, D-Day today, that we pay homage to 81 years ago today.
00:01:20.400And I definitely urge everybody to go watch that interview and take a moment to pay respects to those who fought for Canada, right? The Canada of 1944 was obviously a very different country than it was today. But the ideal that those men were fighting for should still inspire us and guide us today.
00:01:37.640Okay, I want to switch gears a little bit and introduce Michael Bonner, our guest. So Michael is an author, political consultant, and a former policy director with the Ontario government. We're going to talk all about immigration.
00:01:49.500So first, Michael, welcome to the show. It's great to have you.
00:01:54.520Okay, so let's start with the immigration minister who just appears absolutely clueless when it comes to immigration. So yesterday, in question period, Michelle Rumpel-Garner, the MP from Calgary, asked a very reasonable question about immigration, just asking a very simple question.
00:02:12.380And the newly appointed immigration minister, Lina Dab, accused her of lying and spreading misinformation. Let's play that clip.
00:02:20.960Why did the Liberals bring half a million foreign students to Canada during a massive housing shortage and while youth in Canada can't find jobs?
00:02:28.760Mr. The Honourable Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship.
00:02:33.280Mr. Speaker, thank you very much for that question. Those figures are inaccurate. It's misinformation. This new government is hard at work to improve our immigration system and the introduction of Bill C-2.
00:02:50.840Tuesday was an example of that. We are taking significant steps to preserve the integrity of our system while also upholding our humanitarian commitments because we understand a well-managed immigration system is essential to a safer, stronger Canada.
00:03:08.880So, isn't that just a typical response from a liberal? Like, I don't like the numbers, so I'll just accuse you of lying and spreading misinformation.
00:03:16.720Well, unfortunately for Ms. Diab, the immigration minister, Michelle Rumpel came back with this doozy.
00:03:23.120I got those numbers from the minister's website. I went on the website and I read them.
00:03:29.020So, in the middle of a housing crisis, she brought 500,000 people to Canada. These people compete with Canadians for jobs, require housing and health care.
00:03:42.660If her department's numbers aren't the real numbers, what are the real numbers?
00:03:50.440The Honourable Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship.
00:03:55.120Mr. Speaker, let me give the opposite member a lesson on immigration and on numbers and on permits of visas.
00:04:06.000There's many applications and many individuals. We recognize that to balance our immigration and to have a good country, we need temporary and we need permanent residence.
00:04:19.460Some applicants have multiple, multiple numbers. And so, therefore, I would suggest that we look into those numbers a little bit more in detail. Thank you.
00:04:29.840So, she's quite animated there, but I don't think she's really making the point she's trying to make.
00:04:34.440She's trying to say that what Michelle Rumpel-Garner doesn't really understand immigration and the reality is that we need temporary workers and permanent, but she doesn't really explain why that's the case.
00:04:43.580To me, I mean, that just shows how totally clueless she is. She was totally exposed for being clueless not only about the numbers in her own department, but also wildly out of touch with Canadians with regards to what we want from our immigration system.
00:04:59.020Yeah, I would agree. I mean, there's sort of the general sort of garden variety in competence, but there's also, you know, if we want to be charitable,
00:05:08.180we can allow for the fact that she's still being briefed up or, you know, not fully on top of the file.
00:05:14.300But I see all of that as secondary to a more fundamental problem, which is that the way immigration numbers are presented to the public is really untransparent, opaque, confusing.
00:05:30.820And, you know, the levels are set in a sort of quasi-secretive way by cabinet and so forth.
00:05:39.640What it means to have, you know, what exactly is temporary, in fact, about temporary immigration, you know, all of this stuff is sort of unclear.
00:05:51.160And as you say, the case for this stuff is pretty dubious, if you actually sort of get into it.
00:05:59.480Multiple people might be or sort of a single individual might be holding multiple visas.
00:06:06.400And, you know, that number can be sort of confusing.
00:06:10.580People can disappear and go underground and what have you.
00:06:13.880But, you know, the numbers that get presented to the public when it comes to, you know, how many people actually come here every year, you know, whether we're talking about permanent residents, student visas, temporary foreign worker permits and so forth, you know, depending on how you present this information,
00:06:36.520you can either fudge it to make it look like there are far fewer people in the country, which I think is what she's trying to do there.
00:06:43.900Or if you actually look at the number of the number of permits and persons that are that are on the books at the moment, the number is significantly higher than I think most Canadians would be would be comfortable with.
00:06:59.240Right. Well, I think survey after survey shows that Canadians almost unanimously want immigration to go down significantly.
00:07:07.100This is True North reporting over at Juneau News just a couple of days ago.
00:07:10.960Canada took in 817,000 new immigrants in the first four months of 2025.
00:07:16.780And to your point, Michael, this sort of like opaque, like, you know, they have different targets.
00:07:20.860They have different numbers. They have different streams. Right.
00:07:22.920So it's like, OK, they'll say how many permanent residents come in and that's what they consider immigration.
00:07:27.360But then on top of that, they have temporary foreign workers. And on top of that, they have the student, the student workers.
00:07:32.800And so when True North tallied that all up, we got 817,000.
00:07:38.420The thing I want to go back to with the minister's point there is somehow she's like talking about how Canada needs both temporary and permanent immigrants.
00:07:48.300I think this is totally counter to what the liberals have long advocated for.
00:07:52.380Right. When Justin Trudeau became prime minister, one of the first things he did was make it much, much easier to become a citizen.
00:07:58.600They cut the number of days you had to be in Canada. They cut the language requirements for almost all immigrants.
00:08:04.040They made it easier in every single way. And the justification was that they want the people in Canada to be like fully bought into the Canadian community and culture and society.
00:08:13.240They didn't want two tiers of people. They didn't like the idea that you could come and leave.
00:08:17.620Like they wanted everyone to have a pathway to citizenship and for it to happen quickly.
00:08:21.520And so the case for these temporary foreign workers and for the students, it doesn't align with it.
00:08:28.860I think that post-COVID, Canada was experiencing a serious sluggish economy and Justin Trudeau needed fast growth.
00:08:37.980And the easiest way to do that is just to open up the doors and let in as many people as they can find and basically say anyone who wants to come can come.
00:08:46.920We saw millions of people come to Canada that way.
00:08:50.400And yes, it boosts GDP, like just increasing the number of people in the country will increase the GDP.
00:08:54.840But actually, GDP per capita has been trending downwards.
00:08:58.720And so it's sort of like, you know, it was a cheap, cheap trick to try to boost the economy.
00:09:02.980It didn't work. And recall that Justin Trudeau actually came out and apologized and recognized that they let in too many people.
00:09:10.540This was back in November 2024. Let's play that clip.
00:09:16.680In the last two years, our population has grown really fast, like baby boom fast.
00:09:21.600And increasingly, bad actors like fake colleges and big chain corporations have been exploiting our immigration system for their own interests.
00:09:44.740Like, why is it that here we are six months later and we're still experiencing those incredibly high numbers of immigration?
00:09:50.840Yeah, if only our economy could run on apologies from Justin Trudeau.
00:09:56.220You know, we might all be, you know, rich by now.
00:09:59.340But the per capita thing that you just mentioned is at the heart of the problem.
00:10:07.360And I think that a lot of politicians and as far as I can tell, you know, the entire media, you know, don't understand what per capita means.
00:10:17.500But the kind of GDP growth that we have had, as you allude, is not the kind that we need.
00:10:26.900What we need is greater productivity in this country, which would normally imply a much higher level of skill being deployed within the economy.
00:10:44.760A huge number of temporary foreign workers being brought in at the low wage, low skill end of the economy has had an extremely depressing effect on wages.
00:11:03.800And it has priced, you know, priced Canadians out of those what are normally considered entry level jobs, especially in something like the service industry.
00:11:18.620I completely reject the idea, and I think most Canadians would agree, that there's anything about that equation that we actually need.
00:11:39.860That is what we had until, for the most part, until, you know, comparatively recently.
00:11:46.900And what Trudeau has left out of his explanation or apology there is that the avoidance, you know, the avoidance of a recession or, you know, the kind of temporary boost to GDP or to economic growth that we had is kind of like, you know, a drink in the morning to ward off a hangover.
00:12:16.020You know, it hasn't addressed the problem.
00:12:19.460Our economy has suffered since at least the early 1970s from underinvestment, low productivity, in fact, decreasing productivity, and the per capita GDP has been slowly declining with maybe tiny bumps to the contrary along the way.
00:12:42.140But the general trend has not been positive.
00:12:46.020And, you know, the net result is the kind of sluggishness and almost like a kind of stagnancy that we all feel right now.
00:12:59.440The solution has nothing to do with bringing in more low-wage, cheap labor.
00:13:08.840That is the equivalent of an unhealthy government subsidy to unproductive businesses that don't want to invest in Canadians.
00:13:24.080Well, and it doesn't seem like the government is really listening because I think that, I mean, from my perspective, Canadians have just had enough of open border immigration.
00:13:35.060We saw Bill C2 introduced to crack down on some asylum seeker cheats.
00:13:40.880And we'll talk about that in a moment.
00:13:42.540But I want to just point to this chart that was sort of going viral on social media.
00:13:48.540So the account Mario Narfal, which is one of the biggest news accounts on X, he posted that Canada's immigration graph just turned into a rocket ship.
00:13:56.540Canada's bringing 2.5 million people by 2025.
00:13:58.700It's the biggest peacetime immigration spike ever for a country its size.
00:14:01.840The chart literally goes vertical after 2021.
00:14:33.960In fact, during the election, Mark Carney even walked away from it.
00:14:37.760And yet we're still getting those wild numbers.
00:14:40.480Earlier this week, the liberals tabled a new bill, Bill C-2.
00:14:45.960We talked about it in depth yesterday with constitutional lawyer John Carpe and some of our concerns when it comes to civil liberties.
00:14:51.060But the purpose of the bill was to crack down on, in some ways, to help fix the border, to strengthen the border, protect the border, to meet the demands of our American counterparts.
00:15:03.760And one of the things that I think is actually a step in the right direction is the changes for asylum seekers.
00:15:09.860So I'll just go through a little bit of what the bill actually did, the Strong Borders Act that was tabled by the Liberal government this week.
00:15:16.960One of the things it does is it puts time limits on asylum claims.
00:15:19.920So there is a one-year limit for in-Canada asylum claims.
00:15:23.280I mean, honestly, I think there should be like a one-day time limit.
00:15:26.560Like, if you're actually fleeing persecution and you come to Canada, you should probably just declare refugee status or ask for refugee status the moment you get here.
00:15:36.100Instead, what we're seeing happen is people come on visas and then their visas are about to get revoked or run out and they can't renew them.
00:15:42.920So they just make an asylum claim after being in Canada for like five years.
00:15:45.500It's really just a way to game the system.
00:15:47.380So this is saying a one-year limit asylum claims made more than one year after an individual's arrival in Canada will not be referred to the Immigration and Refugee Board, the IRB, for a hearing.
00:15:57.720And so this is at least a step in the right direction.
00:16:00.200There's also a 14-day deadline for U.S. border entrance, even though, I mean, hello, the whole purpose of the Safe Third Country Agreement is that there should be zero applications coming from the United States border.
00:16:10.240So a 14-day deadline for U.S. border entrance is interesting because it's kind of saying, okay, well, we don't actually really care about the Safe Third Country Agreement.
00:16:20.080Anyway, the bill also strengthens the Safe Third Country Agreement.
00:16:23.900So it introduces a measure to prevent circumvention of the Safe Third Country Agreement, which mandates that asylum seekers make their claim in the first safe country.
00:16:33.200Maybe you can help me understand what's happening there.
00:16:35.780Next, they also have enhanced control over immigration documents.
00:16:40.780And so at least they're addressing that there is a problem when it comes to some claimants.
00:16:45.880These are some of the reforms that have been needed for years upon years.
00:16:50.020Recall that the former prime minister, Justin Trudeau, basically didn't apply this rule at all, the Safe Third Country Agreement, the entire debacle at Roxham Road.
00:16:59.820For years upon years, we had a steady stream of migrants just walking across our border to be met by police and CBSA officers putting them in buses and taking them to Montreal or Toronto.
00:17:12.560Like, yes, they finally closed that, but after years upon years of it happening.
00:17:16.660So what do you make of these specific changes with regards to Bill C-2?
00:17:20.820Well, as you say, I approve of tightening up the asylum regime.
00:17:33.260The, you know, I have read, as I think you have also, that there are potentially aspects of the bill that could be susceptible to constitutional challenges and which may be on the wrong side of civil liberties questions.
00:17:57.000If that's the case, you know, that, that would be unfortunate, but this is the reason why we should never allow ourselves to get into this position.
00:18:08.220Whenever the balance of public trust in, in, in, in policy is, is disrupted, there's always a reaction that has to go in the, in the opposite direction.
00:18:22.480And, you know, what the liberals did in the previous, in, in, you know, in the last, uh, uh, 10 years, uh, was to wear out public trust, to wear out public trust to the point where, um, some would say an overreaction, uh, is, is required.
00:18:41.960And, you know, this is not, this is not the position that, that, that, that, that we should be in.
00:18:48.760And it's not a good one to, you know, it, it can have potentially disastrous effects for, for civil, civil, for civil liberties or for people who, you know, are, I don't know, potentially tourists crossing the border.
00:19:02.380I'm not sure. Like, there's a lot in there that seems to pertain to forcing people to hand over documents, you know, this, like the, it's not hard to foresee how that, how that could, how that could, uh, could go wrong.
00:19:14.100But keeping that equilibrium of, you know, a relatively generous, uh, uh, immigration system with one that the public is willing to support and tolerate, or at least not, uh, complain about, you know, that has been completely thrown out of whack.
00:19:30.320And that's why we are at this point, uh, right now.
00:19:35.180Now, I, I can easily foresee some very difficult conversations and debates that will go on about this bill.
00:19:42.240Um, not, you know, from conservatives who, who are in favor of tighter, uh, who are in favor of a tighter regime, but who may, you know, be uneasy about, um, increasing, uh, government powers.
00:19:58.400And conversely, there, there, there will be the, the, the, the, the sort of inverse from, um, uh, more left-leaning organizations who would prefer to, to things, to, things to, to, to, to go the opposite way.
00:20:14.600So the liberals are potentially open to a great deal of uncomfortable criticism and, uh, you know, sort of awkward, awkward political fights in the, in, in the coming weeks over this.
00:20:27.520Uh, so, you know, I wish them the best of luck in, in sorting this out, but the bill that we have before us right now may not be the one that eventually, uh, you know, gets, get, gets passed and so forth.
00:20:40.720But the answer to this problem is, you know, not to have got into this position in the first place.
00:20:46.240And, you know, for this, like, you know, the Trudeau regime is going to have to, uh, take most of the blame.
00:20:51.580Well, it seems that the liberals aren't really getting the memo that Canadians want real change with immigration.
00:20:58.760You had a piece over in the hub saying it was time to basically drastically overhaul, totally overhaul our immigration system.
00:21:07.360I hope the liberals will go on over and read that because I, I agree.
00:21:10.920I don't understand why we have these temporary workers.
00:21:13.340I, I do see that there are industries that say that there are labor market, uh, labor shortages.
00:21:18.040Great. Let's train and hire Canadians to do those jobs.
00:21:21.080There is a lot of, there are a lot of young Canadians that are looking for work, looking for a career, and we should do a better job matching Canadians to industry as opposed to just importing a third world, uh, which we get all kinds of problems, uh, from that.
00:21:35.000Well, Michael, I really appreciate, uh, your time and your insights.
00:21:37.520I encourage everyone to go read Michael Bonner's piece over at the hub.