Even though we haven t gotten everything we wanted as Conservatives on the issue of immigration, I think it s a big win that even Prime Minister Justin Trudeau s federal Liberals are having to put in place heavier restrictions on new permanent residents, temporary foreign workers, and foreign students. This demonstrates that even they know that mainstream Canadian politics wants tighter immigration restrictions.
00:06:16.940We had lower immigration, specifically in 2020 and 2021, maybe compared to previous years.
00:06:23.320But that's like saying 150,000, 200,000 was closing our doors.
00:06:28.320That was still too high for our housing crisis that we have going on.
00:06:32.620And obviously, again, the problem is that there is zero checks on anyone entering the country.
00:06:37.300So we have people from ISIS entering the country.
00:06:39.580We had Roxham Road just allowing random people to walk across the border into Canada.
00:06:44.380People who have fake medical licenses, people who don't actually have the credentials they say they have, who can't work more than minimum wage jobs, undercutting just, you know, teenage Canadians, people who need their first job.
00:07:12.720You don't get $3.50 of the workers' wage subsidized by the federal government if you hire a domestic Canadian, only if you hire a foreign Canadian who likely cannot do the job as well.
00:07:24.420But, you know, I think a lot of it is also just the education system has let down our work base.
00:07:29.880When I was in BC, I was hearing about, like, how much you can get paid for pretty, like, manual labor-type roles on blueberry farms.
00:07:37.600And it was like you could get $23 an hour or so.
00:07:39.960A lot of young guys in high school would probably do those jobs if they knew about them.
00:07:45.000But our entire education system is about trying to, like, get people into universities so they can get a degree they don't need.
00:07:51.760And obviously, tons of university degrees are very useful.
00:07:55.220But I think it's not a stretch to say that we have a few too many sociologists and anthropologists in our society and not enough people who work as electricians, plumbers, construction workers, all that sort of thing.
00:08:07.720Trades jobs are often so much better than the degreed jobs that you get in university.
00:08:13.060In order to keep Canadians safe, to respond to the crisis we were going through at that moment.
00:08:17.300What that meant was once the pandemic closures were done, we had significant labor shortages.
00:08:26.980We needed to get our economy rolling again.
00:08:29.220Why do we have such high unemployment rate and even a low workforce participation rate if we suddenly have all these jobs that need filling?
00:08:37.680No, no, no. You get business lobbyists who lobby for these temporary foreign workers to come into the country because they're subsidized labor.
00:08:46.860And they say that Canadians don't want to work these jobs because they don't get to pay Canadians artificially lower the way you do with a temporary foreign worker.
00:08:56.320And it's basically just modern day slavery. Having a bunch of people show up, like 15 guys, sharing half a basement suite, driving for Uber Eats and working for Tim Hortons.
00:09:05.920And that's supposed to be the normal labor base for an economy. That's crazy.
00:09:10.500That's like what Qatar does to people who come in and work construction and whatnot.
00:09:15.360They take away your passport and you can't leave because they don't let you have enough money to be able to buy a plane ticket.
00:09:19.680We listen to business. We listen to colleges and universities. And we boosted the number of people coming into this country.
00:09:28.140That was a response to the COVID slowdown and shutdowns. But now our economy is in a different place.
00:09:35.700We've seen massive population growth over the past years, particularly in the area of temporary workers and temporary residents.
00:09:44.880And we are now saying, OK, we need to let our communities, our infrastructures catch up to the population.
00:09:54.320And that's why we're pausing population growth by reducing immigration numbers for the next two years.
00:10:00.800It doesn't pause it if you're still bringing in over 300,000 people.
00:10:05.820It's crazy. I'd have to explain this to somebody like Prime Minister Trudeau.
00:10:09.640And he's acting like this is such a novel idea that maybe we need to let our infrastructure catch up with the population by not adding more population onto it.
00:10:19.240But also, too, the thing is, and this goes back to just so many fundamental issues with Canada right now, it goes back to the government being too big.
00:10:27.460The reason why companies want this really cheap, low-skilled labor is because their taxes are too high.
00:10:33.600Income taxes, corporate taxes, the carbon tax, everything is such a high cost.
00:10:38.300They're trying to nickel and dime their way to stay within profitability, to stay profitable.
00:10:44.640You can't blame them by working with the government's current framework around high immigration and using that to their advantage so that they can be able to actually afford to keep the lights on.
00:10:54.440But hiring in Canada, hiring domestic employees is a little bit tougher.
00:10:58.880You can't under the table pay them less.
00:11:02.400You can't get subsidized labor with domestic Canadians.
00:11:06.440And so these businesses are demanding more foreign workers and these universities because we haven't increased domestic tuition in so many provinces in decades.
00:11:15.400And when I say we haven't increased it, I mean that it technically goes up every year, but it lags behind inflation so much that students today barely pay anything compared to students 20 years ago.
00:11:27.340And so because domestic students are so heavily subsidized by taxpayers and they pay so little into education,
00:11:33.840the only two options we have are either taxpayers directly subsidize the universities more or you bring in foreign students who can pay double or triple what a domestic student is paying.
00:11:44.500And so universities played in the framework the liberals had created in different provincial governments and started making half of their classes foreign students.
00:11:53.140And then when we put caps on them, then they started having to make program cuts.
00:11:57.140I used to be on the general faculty council in the Mount Royal University.
00:12:00.760I can tell you they do need program cuts because they waste a lot of money.
00:12:04.280But overall, nobody wants to address the idea that we tax taxpayers so much to subsidize universities without having a thought.
00:12:12.700Maybe the person getting this degree should pay a little bit into it, especially if they're taking something that's probably not going to be beneficial in the future.
00:12:20.060Maybe someone having to pay $6,000 a year to go into or $7,000 a year, $8,000 a year to go into anthropology.
00:12:27.820Well, think to themselves, if they're actually going to be able to pay these student loans back with those skills that they're going to get from the degree.
00:12:34.020I don't think an engineer is going to be dissuaded from going to university when they have to pay higher prices.
00:12:39.100But I think that those who are taking soft skills, arts degrees, might think twice.
00:12:44.600And I'm saying this as someone who got an arts degree, but I knew why I wanted it and what I was going to use it for.
00:12:52.560And the thing I'm going to also just mention here when it comes to Pure Polyev and the conservatives is I do want them now that the liberals have said that they want immigration restrictions.
00:13:03.120I want Pure Polyev, Jamil Javani, and because he's actually taking a lead on immigration.
00:13:11.180They need to start naming the number that they want.
00:13:14.260And I think they should say we want $100,000.
00:13:16.860Around $100,000 a year for the next decade is how we stabilize things.
00:13:21.140We need to lower taxes or let people have their own families, not say like, oh, my goodness, I can't believe people are having kids when they give half their income to the government every year.
00:13:31.240Goodness, just go out of people's way and they actually might be able to increase the population themselves.
00:13:38.940This is a wacky video I want to show you from Sean Fraser, the man who used to be the immigration minister before Mark Miller.
00:13:47.700His deputy minister said that immigration rates are too high for housing, and now he's going to try and shame the conservatives on affordable housing.
00:13:56.360When their leader was actually in the position of housing minister, he got only six affordable housing units built across the entire country.
00:14:03.460We're going to focus on what matters to Canadians, not the distractions that they try to put on the floor of the house economy.
00:14:08.520$195,000 was the number, and that's a number that that minister would only dream of building.
00:14:12.680Six is the number of affordable housing units that the government helped build.
00:14:17.300They're trying to take credit for the number of homes that Canadians built.
00:14:27.400The whole point is that the government gets to take credit for the behavior they enable when they're in government.
00:14:33.760So if you're a government that reduces crime because you had tougher on crime loss, it's not because you were jumping in front of bullets and stopping crimes as they were occurring.
00:14:41.540It's that you create an environment where less people commit crimes.
00:14:44.180If you create an environment where more housing is built, more affordable housing is built, that means that you get to take credit for that.
00:14:50.780The liberals are trying to take credit for a plan that hasn't even worked yet, which is to build 4 million new homes.
00:14:56.420Did they actually say that they were going to build them themselves?
00:15:55.580Here is this Mark Miller thing right here.
00:15:57.480They start asking him about on the day of the immigration announcement what he thinks about Justin Trudeau staying on as the liberal leader.
00:16:06.200You know, before we're done, Minister, I do have to ask the question because we can't ignore the fact that at the end of your news conference today, the questions asked of the prime minister were about his future as liberal leader.
00:16:15.640Not so much about your policy change, which makes me wonder, is Mr. Trudeau's leadership now a distraction for your government?
00:16:22.720I don't think I think it's it's a distraction to who we need to be focusing on, which is Pierre Polyev in the current iteration of the Conservative Party, which is extremely toxic.
00:16:32.660And I think fundamentally you just endorsed the Conservatives immigration philosophy of lowering it just today.
00:16:41.120If elected would be destructive to Canada.
00:16:43.500The Canadians are starting to realize that he's not only an unqualified, unpleasant character, he's starting to roll out policies and points of views that we've seen him take in the past over the last 20 years of his incessant talking in the House of Commons about what he would do to this country.
00:16:57.600Canadians need to focus a little more intensely on that and everything.
00:16:59.680Every minute spent on sort of this internal liberal stuff is a minute that we're not spending focusing on the real threat that is Pierre Polyev.
00:17:06.800And that's where the real threat, which is Pierre Polyev, who you've just taken part of his immigration policy from, because he's toxic and he's like his incessant talking in Parliament the last 20 years.
00:17:23.080He is paid to speak and represent his constituents.
00:17:25.420But I guess that's a tough concept for Mark Miller to understand anyways.
00:17:30.380So what I want from the Conservatives from here on out is that we need a very solid number of immigrants that we are saying that we want per year.
00:17:37.800I think temporary foreign workers should be reduced by like 80 percent or more.
00:17:42.760And the thing is, I don't want to just lower it and then say deal with it, business community.
00:17:46.560I want it lowered while we lower taxes.
00:17:48.880So I want taxes on the federal government level, income tax brackets, lowered by 3 to 5 percent.
00:17:55.060Corporate taxes need to be lowered by 3 to 5 percent.
00:17:57.780And we'd actually bring in more tax revenue if we did that.
00:18:00.460It's the classic Laffer curve scenario.
00:18:02.820We are at such a high fever pitch tax rate right now, tax burden, that we are bringing in less revenue because people are leaving the country or they're working less.
00:18:40.140And the thing is, if it's a degree that's worth it to you, you do it happily.
00:18:43.160Anyways, so we need to lower taxes, put a heavy cap on temporary foreign workers, get rid of these wage subsidies for temporary foreign workers.
00:18:53.040And we need to reduce new permanent residents to around 100,000, 80,000 to 120,000 is a good year-to-year range with a real values test, with a real test of the person's ability to be productive.
00:19:07.080And that's how we get on the right track.
00:19:09.600And the conservatives need to push a solid plan on those things because I don't want them to just basically make sounds about the immigration system is broken.
00:19:17.180I like Pierre Polyev. I thought actually his response to Mark Miller and Trudeau's announcement wasn't quite right because he talked about how they broke the immigration system, which is true when it comes to them letting ISIS terrorists across the border and all this other stuff hurt the country.
00:19:30.360But I think that we need a solid number to then pressure the liberals towards, if not achieve once they're in government.