In this episode of the podcast, I talk about how Justin Trudeau's immigration policies are hurting Canada's housing affordability, and why it's time to elect a Conservative government to fix the problem. I also talk about why the Liberals should have been more vocal about immigration in the past, and what they should do about it now.
00:00:00.000Besides the staggering incompetence of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Canada's next federal election is going to be about immigration, and the Liberals would love it to be about anything but that.
00:00:10.920That's why they're spinning so hard to pretend that their new housing strategy is amazing or to get voters' attention on things like their new universal dental program, which barely anyone can actually access, and trying to smear Pierre Polyev as being extreme and that Canadians need to vote for Justin Trudeau to ward off the extremism of the new Conservative Party.
00:00:31.320Completely ridiculous, but it's all in an effort to not talk about immigration.
00:00:35.600Pierre Polyev just came out with a good statement on immigration, saying that we cannot have immigration rates that exceed our ability to actually build houses and supply health care in this country.
00:00:46.340I'll show you that clip right there, and I want to show you what is likely to be the new Liberal talking point against what Pierre Polyev is saying.
00:00:53.760Steve Lambert from the Canadian Press.
00:00:56.060You mentioned in your opening remarks the impact, the fact the government was warned two years ago about the impact of immigration on housing prices.
00:01:05.600A lot of the pressure seems to come from the temporary residence stream.
00:01:08.620What would a Conservative government do in terms of the impact of immigration and temporary residence on housing?
00:01:16.500Well, first of all, I find it incredible that CP didn't even mention the name Sean Frazier in its article on this issue.
00:01:23.560Sean Frazier was the Minister of Immigration when the government warned him that his policies were leading to housing price inflation.
00:01:34.540And now, Justin Trudeau has promoted him to housing minister.
00:01:41.200You wonder why you can't afford a home?
00:01:43.400Well, there's your answer right there.
00:01:45.580Because Justin Trudeau named Sean Frazier due to his ability to generate media puff pieces and do photo ops rather than make housing affordable.
00:01:56.280Justin Trudeau's policies, whether it's printing money or funding government gatekeepers that block home building or failing to make the link between the number of homes and the population growth, have doubled housing costs after he promised to lower them.
00:02:14.380So, common sense conservatives will get back to an approach of immigration that invites a number of people that we can house, employ, and care for in our health care system.
00:02:29.140Obviously, you need to build homes if you're going to bring in people.
00:02:33.440I know a lot of people have been going after Polyev because they've been saying, well, why hasn't Polyev been talking about mass immigration in the past?
00:02:41.920Well, he should have been more vocal before.
00:02:44.020And while you can say that, I actually believe what the Conservative Party strategy has been is waiting for these reports from government officials saying that the immigration was too high in order to then break the ice of the issue.
00:02:54.820Because there is a lot of fears around if you start talking about immigration without the stats to back it up to prove how disastrous it has been for housing and for health care wait times, then you're going to get attacked for somehow just like fear mongering against immigrants.
00:03:09.960This way of them bringing it up by using government officials' own words saying that the immigration rate is too high for our housing supply, now people like Sean Frazier, Christy Freeland, and Justin Trudeau cannot basically cry racist in response.
00:03:24.220So I think they've been more so not being coy about it for reasons of being nervous, more so waiting for the perfect opportunity to release the attack against the Liberals.
00:03:34.300But in response to just what pure Polyev said, there has been actually quite a bit of silence from the Liberals.
00:03:40.440They haven't officially come out against them for saying this, even though usually the Liberals will come out within a few hours to attack a statement they don't like from the Conservatives.
00:03:49.020They know, though, that this issue is actually fairly toxic for the Liberals to jump into without sort of weighing sort of their rhetoric.
00:03:56.580If you look at any of the polling, it's like 69, 70% of Canadians think our immigration rate is way too high.
00:04:03.720But that is a massive majority of people on side on that issue, considering there are also people like 10, 15% who are undecided, leaving a very small sliver of people who think that either our immigration rate is fine or should be going up even past 500,000.
00:04:20.320That's not even counting the temporary residents as well as students, many students going to scam universities that are just a pathway to becoming citizens as well.
00:04:29.140But the Liberal response, if you can really call it that, is a lot of people from different strategy firms or different organizations connected to the Liberals seemingly trying out talking points and seeing how they work in the public.
00:04:42.900So I noticed that this one man, Mark Marison, released this tweet in response to Pure Polly's statement, and he said,
00:04:50.220First of all, let me just say, investment in social housing does not help.
00:05:05.900Government jamming money into the housing market has never created a substantial amount of houses.
00:05:11.020There's a reason why you get parody, almost parody level stories out of places like Los Angeles and San Francisco.
00:05:17.320When they want to build a singular bathroom, it costs $2 million because of the amount of sort of ridiculous building and developing laws that you have to follow in their jurisdictions to be able to put up anything.
00:05:31.300That does mean it's a bit of a local government as well.
00:05:34.680In Canada, local governments need to be less restrictive on house building.
00:05:38.460It doesn't mean, like in Calgary, like they're trying to do, getting rid of all zoning restrictions.
00:05:44.240What it takes in Canada is fast-tracking developer sort of approvals and also lowering immigration.
00:05:52.200I think it should probably be lowered at this point by at least two-thirds.
00:05:55.300We should probably lower it more than we have to right now to get a control over the situation and then see what we want to do with immigration in four to five years.
00:06:02.820But that guy's main attack, and I think the start of it, is what the Liberals are going to pivot to.
00:06:08.920He works for a strategy firm that the Liberals currently employ, and I guarantee the Liberals are going to go after the angle that Pyrapaliev is attacking immigrants themselves.
00:06:23.340Pyrapaliev has not said anything wrong about individual immigrants.
00:06:26.320He obviously does not hate individual immigrants, as no Canadian particularly does.
00:06:30.440What he has an issue with is immigration being too high.
00:06:34.200It's like saying that if the maximum capacity on a restaurant says it can handle only up to 300 people, it's like saying that they hate human beings because they won't let 400 or 500 people in.
00:06:45.380That if we do not have the capacity for people in our housing market, then obviously they cannot come in without creating massive problems.
00:06:52.260That's not racist like he's trying to imply.
00:06:54.900That's just common sense, but this is what the Liberals are probably going to do.
00:06:59.160Play on people's emotions and try to add it to their narrative that Pyrapaliev is extreme because he actually understands that you can't just jam 25 people into every new house built in this country to make up for the fact that we don't have enough houses to fit reasonably sized families.
00:07:14.200Anyways, another thing I noticed, that was a crazy response from Freeland in the aftermath of this.
00:07:20.180She never came out against Pyrapaliev, but this is her talking point that she's been using, is that Freeland said, and this is the headline from the National Post, that Freeland on why immigration levels are high.
00:07:31.100Canada has the social capacity to welcome immigrants.
00:07:34.180I want to play you the clip of her talking.
00:07:36.120This is such an insane response from her.
00:07:38.240The idea that, well, we should be bringing in immigrants to Canada because Canada's social spirit, like the spirit of Canada is to bring in as many as possible.
00:07:47.020No, we cannot fiscally, economically, responsibly bring in that number of people, so we shouldn't.
00:07:54.260Just because you've told yourself a story that Canada should bring in millions a year does not mean that we should do that.
00:08:00.440That is an active, like, that is a position that would destroy our economy over time and keep people from being able to buy homes even into their 40s.
00:08:09.760Anyways, here is her talking at a press conference in response to someone's very good question to her.
00:08:15.220...tained by Canadian Press Show, your government was warned that housing construction had not kept up with population growth, largely because of Canada's immigration targets.
00:08:24.540Why did your government not heed that warning in lower immigration levels?
00:08:43.740As a country, Canada is probably the country in the world, which is the most welcoming of new Canadians, which is the most welcoming of immigrants.
00:08:59.800What does that have to do with anything, Chrystia?
00:09:02.080And as finance minister, I have to say, that is a huge economic strength.
00:09:09.420It is a real driver of our country's economic growth.
00:09:16.740Our GDP per capita has been going down.
00:09:19.500So if we're just talking about the raw number of our GDP, I guess she's correct.
00:09:23.720But in terms of the actual living standards of individual Canadians, this policy has actually been driving us into the floor.
00:09:30.100And at a time when all of the industrialized countries in the world are facing huge demographic challenges, we are extremely fortunate as a country that we have the social capacity to welcome immigrants.
00:09:51.840You are quite right that if we want to be a country that welcomes new Canadians, and I strongly believe that's the right thing for all of us, we have to build more homes faster.
00:10:17.200The point is you cannot build enough homes to house all these people.
00:10:21.840Canada per capita for, like, the current population, we actually built a lot of homes compared to places like the United States and the UK, France, all these other G7 countries.
00:10:34.160Even then, we can still not build enough to take in more than 600,000, 700,000 people a year who are coming here, some temporary, but many of them end up, because of our very lax immigration laws, end up finding loopholes in order to also get on the track to become citizens.
00:10:50.280I talk to people, again, I'm running for the Calgary Signal Hill Conservative Party nomination.
00:10:56.240If you live in that riding, buy a membership, vote for me.
00:10:59.000When I'm door knocking, there's a ton of immigrants that I talk to, people who are permanent residents, that they've only been here for a couple of years, and they say the problem in Canada is that our immigration rates are too high.
00:11:10.160I tend to live in a higher network neighborhood, or riding in general, and those people, obviously, they come here with enough money that they can comfortably live in Canada, and those people will tell me that they need to put in a means test, because they know a ton of people who come to this country, not realizing that if you don't come to this country with at least $50,000 in your bank account, you're going to have a very uncomfortable time even renting in this country, let alone getting enough money to put a down payment on a mortgage.
00:11:37.080We don't seem to actually even care about the immigrants coming here.
00:11:40.700We almost bait them into pretending Canada's a land of opportunity.
00:11:44.440When the amount of taxation and regulation on the economy by the Liberals has turned it into a subsidy economy, unless you're well connected and can get a subsidy or get a waiver for a regulation or get some tax credits, it's very hard to succeed here.
00:11:57.200Then we bring in 500,000 immigrants a year to become citizens and pretend like this is the Americas in the 1910s, where you show up and there's not a lot of social programs available for people, but if you work hard, you can succeed.
00:12:10.980It's really hard to just work hard to succeed in Canada these days.
00:12:13.940You've got to be living in the right area at the right time with the right policies in these little microclimates where there's a lot of subsidies going around for certain industries in order to succeed, unless you're just insanely lucky.
00:12:25.800That's the problem with the Liberals in general, that their policies have made it so that hard work no longer pays off.
00:12:31.880It's mostly luck at this point, whether or not you're going to succeed or connections to government officials.
00:12:37.100It is a corruption economy, and immigration is just like a pathetic way of pretending that our GDP is going up.
00:12:44.880Yes, we're adding productivity, but per person, our productivity per capita is going down because there's just too many people for the amount of jobs we have, the amount of houses we have.
00:12:55.100So GDP is going up for the amount of spending, but it's a lot of bloated, artificial, inflation-driven spending.
00:13:00.780Sorry, this has been a bit of a rant for me, but I think Polyev has come out on the right side of this issue.
00:13:07.400You're still getting PPC people out there saying, well, Bernier was talking about mass immigration back in 2018.
00:13:12.960Sure, cool. Polyev wasn't in charge of his party back in 2018, and within a year and a half of becoming the conservative leader, he has taken a decisive position on wanting to lower immigration.
00:13:23.960So if you keep hammering on this point, you're just going to look like a weird Puritan who is not allowing Polyev to take good positions.
00:13:31.620Again, I think it's that conservatives roll out policies when the time is best.
00:13:36.680You don't just kind of dump all your policies out as soon as you become leader.
00:13:40.720You kind of wait for the liberals to trip up, and then you release a policy in response to them, like you finding a chink in their armor.
00:13:49.160Anyways, that should be it for me today.
00:13:50.660I do have my usual Give, Send, Go link in the description of this video below.
00:13:54.540If you want to donate money, it's a legal fund.
00:13:58.280I'm winning that lawsuit, but it's a ridiculous defamation suit, alleging we have said bad things about him, which he provided no evidence of in any of his filings.
00:14:06.460And in response to our filings, it's basically through my questioning, demanded we give them more and more information, give them more stuff through different sort of means.
00:14:16.080Like, basically, they can require me to go get them, you know, how many times was the article that we wrote posted on Twitter, and they want me to go find that out for them.
00:14:23.960So they're almost just trying to intentionally waste my time to draw back the date in which they will inevitably lose or have to drop their suit.
00:14:30.700Other than that, I'm also running for the Calgary Signal Hill Conservative Party nomination, which I've mentioned before.
00:14:36.420Again, if you live in this riding, make sure to buy a membership.
00:14:39.360Vote for me number one whenever the nomination date is called.
00:14:42.400Or if you know people in Calgary, check with them, see which riding they live in, and get them to buy memberships.
00:14:47.920I would even suggest everyone should buy memberships, regardless of what riding you're in, because in your riding, you want to make sure that very liberal people don't try and slip into the conservative nomination and win it because they know the liberals can no longer win in their area.
00:15:01.840That happens a lot with the conservatives, where you get kind of fake people running in ridings because they have enough friends that they can get themselves the conservative nomination, while they cannot demonstrate they believe anything conservative at all.
00:15:15.220They just kind of pretend like, I'm a businessman, and I've been in business 20 years.
00:15:23.100So a lot of these guys, they'll just say they're against the carbon tax.
00:15:25.920And then if you ask them about parental rights, if you ask them about lowering taxes overall, spending, military spending, anti-terrorism laws, and whatnot, they have no clue because they're just running to run.