Tony Keller is a columnist with the Globe and Mail and author of Borderline Chaos: How Canada Got It Right, And Then Wrong. He joins us to talk about his new book, "How Canada Got it Right, and Then Wrong."
00:01:36.420We were talking just before we started rolling that, you know, two years ago, immigration only started to come onto my radar.
00:01:44.780I've cared about it in the context of Europe and do a lesser extent of the United States for a long time, seeing some, maybe some negative things happening in Europe that I have an affinity for and care about, but wasn't affecting me.
00:01:58.400But it wasn't in my, it only started to come on my radar in the last two years as a major issue four years ago.
00:02:05.340I probably wouldn't have rated it in my top 20 as an issue I would care about as a Canadian or Albertan voter.
00:02:11.000But today it's, it's number one, it's, it's kind of a litmus test issue of candidates I will vote for.
00:02:19.000I mean, I would, I'm only slightly exaggerating to say it's a litmus test about who I would vote for, for school board trustee.
00:02:24.820What are you going to do about immigration?
00:02:26.320Um, unlike Europe and the United States though, Canada for, at least in our modern history, as long as I've been alive, essentially, immigration has not been a major issue of polarized political debate in Canada.
00:02:44.800Um, but that, that has obviously changed.
00:03:03.260And it's quite remarkable is we had this kind of left, right consensus, conservatives, new Democrats, liberals, all basically were happy with the same immigration policy.
00:03:14.200Um, Canada actually had a fairly high rate of immigration, but we also had a fairly high level of border control, meaning that people who immigrated to Canada were largely chosen by Canada.
00:03:25.920Canada had a real focus on economic immigrants and on trying to attract and choose immigrants who had high levels of skills, high levels of education, meaning they would benefit Canada when they came here and you put it all together.
00:03:41.300And so Canada had this kind of magic situation where we actually had much higher levels of immigration than the United States or most European countries.
00:03:51.640Yet we had no political controversy because Canadians, I believe largely felt that immigration was a choice.
00:04:00.880It was a national choice, the level we were getting, the number of people we were getting, the type of people we were getting was all a national choice.
00:04:07.240And Canadians felt like, Hey, this is all under control.
00:04:10.720And in fact, because Canada controls its borders and controls its immigration, we're going to actually have even more immigration than, um, the United States and Europe.
00:04:20.080And I think the, the sense of confidence that Canadians had in the system collapsed in sort of 2021, 2022, 2023, um, and that's, you know, my book is about that, the, the happy past, but it's mostly about the things that then went wrong over the last few years, um, that really did damage the immigration system.
00:04:45.520And Canadians lost confidence with good reason because the system had been changed in, in, in, in, in ways that were, that were not good for Canada and that caused Canadians to, to lose confidence.
00:05:01.000I think I can't find anything to disagree with what you're saying.
00:05:04.500Uh, I mean, pretty hardcore conservatives were maybe a little more skeptical of migration.
00:05:11.380They'd say, well, let's maybe be a bit more picky and choosy about, I like this country more than that country.
00:05:16.540You know, people from that part of the world, maybe integrate a little bit better than that.
00:05:20.140But on, in the broad strokes, pretty much was ever, everyone was agreed that, yeah, this, we're choosing economic migrants.
00:05:26.740Yeah, we had family reunification, stuff like that, that were maybe a little more controversial, but they never met it onto the mainstream political debate.
00:05:33.380Uh, the, the, the debates were always on the margins, uh, on this, and that's changed.
00:05:40.040Uh, so, but broadly speaking, most people think like yourself, we got migration right for a pretty extended period of time.
00:05:47.880And then we changed things pretty radically.
00:05:50.520Actually, how did, and this began under the Trudeau government, uh, I think in kind of halfway through it, uh, roughly, why, what was it they so radically changed and why did they make such radical changes?
00:06:04.880So, so a few different things happened.
00:06:08.420Um, and the, the Trudeau government came into office kind of wanting to argue, I think that, that, that the conservative party understood.
00:06:20.520Stephen Harper had, had somehow been insufficiently generous and insufficiently open to immigration.
00:06:29.220Um, and, and I think there may have been a fair number of voters who actually believed that the truth of course, was that under the Harper government, Canada had basically the same immigration levels that it had had under the Paul Martin government and under the Kretchen government and going all the way back to Mulroney.
00:06:46.460Sorry, sorry, I don't mean to interrupt, but are you referring to, I remember that 2015 election that was right around the time as the Syrian migration crisis, uh, Germany obviously made some decisions that had big implications for itself and for the rest of Europe.
00:07:00.700And it, I remember that became a big topic and it kind of got into a bidding war between the liberals, the NDP and the conservatives at that time about who was going to take the most refugees.
00:07:09.700Is that what you're talking about in terms of perception that the conservatives were seen as, uh, not open enough to migration?
00:07:16.460I think that was, I think that is a, that was a part of the piece.
00:07:20.160Um, but there are, there are words in the liberal platform and they aren't really backed by any substance, just saying, you know, we're going to be more open.
00:07:28.580Um, Stephen Harper has run an immigration policy.
00:07:31.320That's, that's not fully Canadian and generous and we're going to do more.
00:07:35.840And we're never particularly specific about this.
00:07:38.400Um, Syrian refugees was part of the piece and by the way, the Syrian refugee arrival worked really well.
00:07:43.580And to me, the Syrian refugee arrival was actually an example of how the Canadian immigration system works.
00:07:50.000Well, every single one of those people who was brought here as a Syrian refugee came from overseas, was vetted before they came.
00:08:50.880You become a permanent resident and you become a citizen of Canada.
00:08:53.700That was always the core of the Canadian immigration system.
00:08:56.440We kind of developed a second system, which is people who come here as temporary foreign
00:09:01.300workers or as students and a large percentage of those students are temporary foreign workers in, in disguise, because
00:09:09.640they're, they're going to not particularly high quality programs and they're working full-time while, while they're in school.
00:09:15.280The government's finally scaled that back, but they had scaled it up previously.
00:09:18.220So you kind of had these two parallel systems and the temporary system by 2022 had become bigger than the permanent system.
00:09:27.640And by 2023, it was much bigger than the permanent system.
00:09:30.240And that's how you went from having a fairly small number of temporary residents in Canada.
00:09:36.040Uh, let's say in the year 2000 to today, we have 3 million people in Canada who are temporary residents, all of whom came because they want to become permanent residents.
00:09:47.380But the temporary resident number is so much bigger than the number of permanent resident places available each year.
00:09:55.840So there was like, some of this stuff is just an incredibly basic failure to count, to figure out that if you're going to let a lot of people through a side door who hope to get in through the front door, you, you kind of have to count.
00:10:13.300If you kind of have to say, hang on a second, there have to be some limits.
00:10:16.180So the government under the Trudeau government, permanent immigration was doubled, but temporary immigration went up far, far more than that.
00:10:25.840It was quadrupled or quintupled, um, that's that.
00:10:30.940And, and, and, and the second part, the temporary immigration part, there were no caps, there were no caps on the number of foreign students who could come to Canada.
00:10:38.200And there were no caps on the number of temporary foreign workers that businesses could hire.
00:10:43.580Um, and that is sort of the problem that we, we, we went from a system that had a sense of control and limits and targeting high end immigrants who got
00:10:54.700educations and skills to an immigration system that became very tilted towards bringing in people who could work low end jobs in warehouses, in fast food, um, delivering Uber eats, things like that.
00:11:09.160We actually torqued our system towards filling low end jobs and the government became convinced, um, that Canada had a massive labor shortage and a labor shortage at the bottom of the labor market.
00:11:22.680Uh, which I don't think is at all the case, but the government momentarily became convinced of that by business.
00:11:28.220So it was a strange marriage of progressive ideas and, and, and, and business lobbying.
00:11:33.740So I, I want to, uh, go further on that.
00:11:36.600Uh, you know, I think you called it, you know, it was kind of the, uh, paraphrasing you, but it was, you know, it was kind of the liberals, I think, view corporate and business as conservative.
00:11:45.700I don't think that's necessarily true, but it was, you know, it was kind of corporate elites wanted this, uh, but at the same time it, it fit with kind of a progressivist ideological need to be more multicultural, more multiracial, more multilingual, et cetera.
00:12:02.020Uh, and so they, they, they saw no conflict, but I think the obvious conflict, I don't know why they'd ever said anything should have been labor.
00:12:10.660Like, you know, like labor organizations appeared, maybe I just missed it, but I watched these guys relatively closely and I didn't see a peep from labor organizations.
00:12:21.500And, you know, it, it, it cut the, the lower rungs kind of out of the labor market, replacing them with, uh, you know, I, I think of, you know, if I go to Tim Hortons or McDonald's used to be, you know, Canadian, mostly Canadian born kids with their first job, getting a little experience.
00:12:37.460But if I have to pay them a $15 minimum wage, uh, for someone to fill that job, I'd probably rather hire a foreign adult who's like more likely to show up for work on time than a unreliable Canadian kid.
00:12:50.140And that's why I, why I, I, that, that's at least why I think I, we're just not seeing as many Canadians working these low end jobs or, or, or Uber eats, you know, it's not entirely, but mostly I think new, new migrant labor and kind of cut the bottom out of the labor market.
00:13:05.320Especially when you have, you know, fairly high minimum wages.
00:13:08.760Um, why was there no pushback from, you know, people or organizations that are kind of supposed to represent that part of the labor market?
00:13:18.240I get why big business wants to suppress wages at the bottom end, because then you end up suppressing them kind of everywhere else when you suppress them at the bottom end to, to an extent, at least.
00:13:28.360Uh, I, I might save, you know, 25 cents on my Uber eats.
00:13:33.760Uh, and so I guess there's a, you know, I'm not competing for that labor market.
00:13:37.660So there's a benefit for me as someone who's not at the bottom end.
00:13:40.540So I, I benefit maybe a little bit by that.
00:13:43.300Uh, but people at the lower end don't seem to get any benefit by this.
00:13:46.660Why was there no pushback for those people in the Canadian labor market who were displaced?
00:13:51.540That to me has always been sort of the, the fascinating thing that this was a policy where there was kind of an all stakeholder agreement.
00:14:04.140Um, you know, you have groups like the century initiative.
00:14:08.840So that would be sort of, as you put it, big business elites saying, Hey, Canada does need higher immigration.
00:14:15.060We need more numbers and they, they, they had some details on better immigration, but they really focused on more.
00:14:21.840You have all kinds of small businesses and not just big business.
00:14:25.280You're all your local businesses are saying, we want to be able to hire temporary foreign workers.
00:14:31.480Um, one way or another, because the guy down the street has been able to do it.
00:14:36.460So it's not just sort of some people off on a tower in Bay street on the 45th floor.
00:14:42.180It's people right down on main street who are saying, look, I want this opportunity because the business down the street is getting the opportunity.
00:14:48.120You've got colleges and universities lobbying for it saying we, if we can bring in more and more and more foreign students, we can make some money.
00:14:55.940And some of them were super responsible about that.
00:14:58.560And a lot of institutions, lower end institutions were not at all responsible.
00:15:03.840You have a number of provincial governments who are lobbying the federal government and saying, we want more immigration and we need more temporary
00:15:11.580migration, there's a labor shortage and some governments, Ontario in particular saying we want more temporary foreign, more students, more foreign students, lots more foreign students.
00:15:22.260As we think that's going to help finance our higher education sector.
00:15:26.220Um, and again, the students tended to go in Ontario to the lowest end institutions, not the highest end institutions.
00:15:32.740You've got progressive groups saying immigration is good inherently.
00:15:36.960Like it's a value, it's not a, it's not a practical matter, it's a value.
00:15:39.660And if you're saying more immigration, that's good.
00:15:41.620And if you're saying same or less, that's bad.
00:15:44.280The liberals themselves rhetorically kind of adopted that.
00:15:48.240And to me, the surprise is that there was not really any pushback from labor.
00:15:55.740Um, but there, there really wasn't, uh, and yeah, that, that is kind of a surprise.
00:16:02.320I will say that you made one point that I think is, is quite important, which is for someone who's upper middle class, like everything in the economy has costs and benefits.
00:16:13.060So for someone who's upper middle class, having, or middle class, upper middle class, certain things become cheaper.
00:16:19.960If you have a lot more people arriving to do low end jobs, if you're doing a bit of wage suppression at the bottom end of the market, um, your burrito is going to be a little cheaper.
00:16:32.320And the delivery of your burrito is going to be a little cheaper and your ability to order something from Amazon and have it delivered is going to be a little cheaper.
00:16:41.920Like there are, so there are benefits to that, but what you have to remember is that every person in the Canadian economy is, you know, they're a taxpayer, but they're a user of taxpayer services.
00:16:54.340They're, they're providing labor, but they also need benefits.
00:16:57.880So if you have a whole lot of people at the bottom end of the labor market, earning very low wages, all those people still, um, have to send their kids to school and, and they still have to use social services.
00:17:10.120They still have to use healthcare services.
00:17:12.160So if you're bringing in a lot of people whose, whose wages and hence whose taxes are going to be much lower, someone else is going to have to help subsidize those services.
00:17:22.280So everything's got costs and benefits, and there was just not really a great deal of thought about the costs.
00:17:29.000And there was an enormous focus on look at the benefits and pretending as if there was nothing on the other side of the ledger.
00:17:35.520So I know they've, they've tampered things back a bit, but I, I'm not, I'm not convinced we'll get into how we fix this, uh, you know, further in the interview, but you know, I saw there was an ad, uh, or a social media post running as an ad from Citizenship and Immigration Canada.
00:17:54.000Uh, uh, uh, just, uh, I saw it just the other week, uh, where I forget the exact wording of it, but I think I'd be fair when they said like, uh, Canada has free healthcare.
00:18:04.360Have you considered coming to Canada to which I thought that is the most insane advertisement ever.
00:18:09.660Like we're, we're saying come to my store so I can give you something for free.
00:18:15.000Uh, that that's a one way transaction.
00:18:18.560Uh, you know, that's why we should at least in theory limit, uh, family unification migration, because.
00:18:24.000Uh, you know, grandma and grandpa coming from, from overseas, they're not spending their life as taxpayers, contributing to the social contract of things and therefore then able to receive the benefits later in life.
00:18:37.920Uh, no, he was just saying, come here and you know, whatever illness you have, we're, we're going to take care of it, et cetera, uh, advertising the burden on the Canadian taxpayer for it, not, not the benefit.
00:18:49.860I, and that was very recently after things are supposed to have been tamped down.
00:18:54.780Um, so you know, you could address that if you're like, yeah, let's talk quickly about that before I go on to what I want to talk.
00:19:21.600So, so for what it's worth, yeah, but for what it's worth, that is actually one of the benefits of coming to Canada.
00:19:27.660So, so we should try to sell the benefits of Canada, but we should also be thoughtful about sort of choosing who gets those benefits.
00:19:36.840And I, and listen, what I want to say is look, my book is a pro immigration book, but it's also a pro limits and thoughtful, sensible behavior around immigration books.
00:19:48.680So I think people of every race, every nationality, every ethnicity, every religion should be able to come to Canada, should be able to apply to come to Canada.
00:19:58.000But let's just be thoughtful about who we choose to allow to come to Canada, which is how the system was working, uh, for a generation and how it sort of stopped working over the last few years.
00:20:13.240That to me is, is, is the key we should try to sell Canada really hard and get the best immigrants possible.
00:20:19.400And, and in the past we had family reunification, but that was around sort of 20% of the system and it still is.
00:20:27.000We had refugees that sort of 15% of the system and it still is.
00:20:31.480And we had economic migrants sort of 60 something percent of the system, but the percentages didn't change that much.
00:20:37.220What really changed was we became much less choosy on the economic immigration side and we dropped standards enormously.
00:20:48.020So to, to, to kind of, uh, uh, anticipate a followup question here, that's where we got to go is be smart on who we're choosing on the economic immigration side.
00:21:00.240So, uh, I, I've read, I think in excerpts and I've, uh, watched or listened to some of the interviews you've already
00:21:07.140done and, uh, so in it, you know, you've said, you know, they, the liberals did not change, uh, uh, the immigration
00:21:16.360policy is necessarily a particularly ideological agenda.
00:21:20.640It was not meant to replace the Canadian born population.
00:21:25.300Um, and I, I very much agree that, yeah, there was big business pushing for things.
00:21:30.440There was this kind of all stakeholder, at least the stakeholders they'd listened to all stakeholder consensus.
00:21:35.680And also I think a lot of people like myself were just not paying attention to it cause it just hadn't been a major issue here before.
00:21:42.920Um, but historically in the broad strokes, migrants have tended to vote liberal or progressive.
00:21:50.320Um, there's been, uh, you know, the, the anomaly to that was 2011 federally where the conservatives had a major breakthrough with new Canadians.
00:21:58.680Um, but even then, you know, I think essentially mitigated the liberal advantage on it, perhaps, uh, but, you know, they didn't necessarily become a strong conservative cohort, but that was a one-off.
00:22:07.680Historically speaking, and not just in Canada, uh, but in the Western democracies broadly, migrants have tended more often than not to vote for more progressivist parties that are seen as more open to multiculturalism, etc.
00:22:22.680Uh, that happens in Europe, happens in the States, um, and, and at least the kind of the, the more for, it's, it's an abused term, but the kind of the woke progressivist wing of the liberal party saw whiteness or Westernness as inherently evil and guilt-ridden.
00:22:41.680Is there really no partisan, was there no, uh, uh, partisan or ideological aspect of this beyond just kind of the, the stakeholder consensus to do this because it would be a good in and of itself to change the demographic makeup of Canada?
00:23:00.680So I'll say two things on that one is I, I, I don't, I have no reason to believe that there was any sort of conscious calculation, uh, within the liberal party or anybody else to say, aha, we're going to change the demographic makeup of Canada.
00:23:18.680I, I, I, again, other people can try to look into this.
00:23:21.680I have no reason to believe that's, that's what was going on.
00:23:24.680What I will say is that the liberal party did believe, and a lot of progressive people believe that immigration is a, is a value.
00:23:34.680And, and, and, and as a result, they don't think about immigration in the way I'm thinking of it.
00:23:47.680There are all kinds of positive things about immigration.
00:23:50.680Let's try to maximize the positives and let's try to minimize the negatives because every, every policy choice has positives and negatives.
00:23:57.680So let's just try to do immigration well, rather than doing immigration badly, rather than simply saying, however much immigration we have, we should have more.
00:24:04.680And once we get to that higher level, we should have even more because it's up value.
00:24:07.680What I'm saying is it, let's try to do this as a rational policy analysis of benefit to Canada and benefit to Canadians, as opposed to just, we, we must have higher immigration.
00:24:20.680Um, so I, I think that's, you know, that's a, that's how I'm coming at this.
00:24:26.680I, I, I, I, one other thing I want to say is on the issue of how immigrants vote, it's complicated.
00:24:35.680Um, people's votes, you know, change over time.
00:24:38.680And one of the things that I've found very interesting, you brought up the 2011 election where the Harper government did very well.
00:24:46.680Um, non white and immigrant voters and really was shifting the needle.
00:24:52.680And you also saw it in the, um, in the most recent federal election where, uh, in Brampton and some other areas, the GTA analysis suggests that a whole lot of immigrant and non white voters, um, shifted to the conservative party.
00:25:09.680They were upset about various issues such as crime and they shifted to the conservative party.
00:25:14.680So I, I think one of the great things about Canada is that the conservative party, the liberal party, the NDP, they all want to attract immigrant and non white voters.
00:25:26.680They aren't, no one's running against immigrants, no one's, or historically no one has for generations.
00:25:36.680There's there, all the parties have essentially said, if you're a Canadian voter, we would like you to vote for us.
00:25:41.680We're not targeting you except we're trying to, we're trying to reach you with our message to me.
00:25:46.680That's, that's a pretty good thing because we all have to live together.
00:25:50.680Um, and you know, so I don't subscribe to any theory of controlling immigration or limiting immigration for sort of racial, ethnic or cultural reasons.
00:26:02.680Canada is already a multicultural, multiracial, multi-ethnic society that the numbers, uh, you know, Canada has changed a lot in the last generation and we can't turn back the clock on that.
00:26:16.680We have to figure out how people of different races and ethnicities and faiths and beliefs can all live together and all love Canada.
00:26:25.680And even if we, as we have disagreements about which political party we vote for and which party we want to have in government, but hopefully those disagreements aren't going to break down on racial lines.
00:26:36.680They're going to break down on ideological lines, which is fun.
00:26:39.680So I want to go down this path a bit more as I guess this is the spicy part of the topic.
00:26:45.680Um, so, you know, you've talked about the economic and labor market impacts.
00:26:51.680Uh, you know, it's, I think where this actually really started to break into the mainstream conversation was around housing.
00:26:57.680All of a sudden, you know, housing is actually, it's a multilayered issue.
00:27:00.680It would be very unfair to place it squarely on, uh, the feet of migration, but migration wasn't major is a major component of it.
00:27:08.680But that's where it started to become mainstreamed is like, well, I'm not racist for talking about the fact that, you know, I'm, I'm 30 years old and I have no chance of ever owning a home.
00:27:17.680Uh, that does make me racist, but what's behind this?
00:27:21.680Migration has started to enter the mainstream conversation from their, uh, social services.
00:27:25.680We talked about that, you know, uh, how are people going to pay into the system when you've kind of flooded the bottom end of the mark, uh, labor market.
00:27:32.680But one of the big things that I think has become a more mainstream conversation lately, despite, I think the reticence of many to talk about it is the cultural impact.
00:27:43.680That it's, uh, it's not just the people look differently in your communities.
00:27:48.680It's that they're acting differently that we've taken in so many so fast that there hasn't been an ability to assimilate them.
00:27:56.680And I, I know we don't like to use the word assimilation in Canada, but at the end of the day, a successful migration policy has to involve assimilation to our, our, our, our basic values, our cultural norms.
00:28:07.680You might, you know, we're all fine, keep eating, but you know, the food from where you're from, that's, that's all fine and good.
00:28:43.680And what do you think has been the backlash or where do you think that backlash is going?
00:28:47.680So this is sort of where I, my, I'm on one side of this line and, and, and you're on the other side of this line.
00:28:54.680Like I, I want to keep the conversation on, um, economic issues.
00:28:59.680I want to keep the conversation on how do we benefit Canada in ways that will, you know, benefit the labor market, benefit Canadians, benefit our social services.
00:29:09.680I don't know how to run an immigration system based on kind of, you know, ways of preserving Canada's culture, the way it is, or ways of not changing Canadian culture.
00:29:24.680I, one, I don't know how to do that too.
00:29:47.680Um, and here I am talking to you in English and you just think I'm a white guy, Canadian.
00:29:52.680Um, but I, if I show you pictures of them, you would think they were weird, exotic people.
00:29:56.680And I'm quite, and I can tell you, I can guarantee you the people who encountered them when they arrived in 1894 thought they were weird, exotic people.
00:30:03.680Um, on my father's side of the family, they came here from, from Germany, also Jewish, also wouldn't have spoken, wouldn't have spoken English.
00:30:11.680So, and yet somehow, you know, um, Canada's Canada actually does, has historically done an extremely good job of.
00:30:24.680Canadians don't like to use the word assimilation.
00:30:26.680Um, but the truth is we have, we, we, you know, people come here and they, they become Canadians and they, and they come to love Canada and it all works.
00:30:34.680I can't guarantee you that every single person in every single place, but it is going to, you know, it's going to work out, but it is, it is generally worked out.
00:30:42.680And I don't know how to do things differently.
00:30:47.680And I, I honestly don't want to, um, run this on run the immigration system on, on kind of cultural metrics.
00:30:57.680I think the logical way to do it is to say, let's run it on economic metrics.
00:31:03.680And again, to kind of, and sort of flesh that out a bit, we built a system, an immigration system over the last few years, the Trudeau government with the help of the provinces and businesses built a system that said, we really want a hundred thousand new fast food workers.
00:31:18.680It would have been nice if they had said we want 10,000 more doctors.
00:31:22.680Look, I, I'm with you on the economic side, but I, I think, yeah, we perhaps are on different sides of the line on the cultural side.
00:31:30.680You know, you know, we kind of woke up, um, one day to find crowds of people in our streets, not all migrants, that'd be very unfair to say, but large components being migrants holding, uh, anti-Semitic demonstrations.
00:31:46.680And we're like, Oh my God, where did all these anti-Semites come from?
00:31:49.680And, you know, yeah, it's got the regular blue haired college, uh, or university campus types.
00:31:55.680It's got them in there and, you know, your regular crunchy professional protesters, but big components being migrants who come from a part of the world where disproportionately there's a bit of conflict.
00:32:07.680And we're all of a sudden, you know, saying, Oh my God, where did this all come from?
00:32:12.680And we're all kind of afraid to say it.
00:32:14.680Uh, I I'm a little less so, but like that, that is, that's a shocking thing to many people when we see this kind of thing in our streets.
00:32:22.680And it is not entirely, but in significant measure, an imported issue, uh, that we would just wouldn't have seen on our streets until that recently.
00:32:35.680I don't think, um, necessarily, you know, targeting the, targeting this recalibrating to my, uh, to economic issues would necessarily fix that problem.
00:32:51.680So I, I look, I disagree with you on, on two bases.
00:32:55.680One, as I said, I don't know how we can run an immigration system based on some kind of a cultural test.
00:33:01.680Um, uh, two, honestly, um, you know, having, having gone to some of those protests to see who's doing what and who's, who's, who's protesting and chanting from the river to the sea.
00:34:30.680Uh, despite not being fairly recent, I think fairly assimilated.
00:34:34.680Uh, he's, he's brought some of his interesting food into the office from time to time and we like it.
00:34:38.680Um, you know, so we, even in this wave.
00:34:42.680Some great folks have come through, but obviously far too many have come through and far too many who are not of the previous caliber we used to expect have come through.
00:34:52.680Now you've said that, you know, the government started to turn down the tabs.
00:34:56.680They've not turned off the tabs, nowhere close to turning off the tabs.
00:34:59.680Um, but you know, even if we were to fully turn off the tabs, I mean, there's a lot of damage done here on the economic side, the physical side, you know, just.
00:35:11.680The actuaries of how this is going to work out for government budgeting for social services going forward.
00:36:16.680Second of all, we're aiming for considerably lower numbers of new temporary migrants and foreign students.
00:36:24.680Um, and the assumption is that a lot of the people who are, you know, we could start this up again.
00:36:29.680A lot of the people who are here on temporary visas, temporary foreign workers and temporary foreign students, um, will, some of them will become permanent residents and citizens.
00:36:39.680We'll choose some of those and everybody else is going to have to go home and it's going to be challenging.
00:36:44.680Like that is actually going to be the hardest part.
00:36:46.680And this is where, this is where we're going to see, uh, kind of the, the fallout in years to come is, um, you know, the last time I saw some numbers that suggested that about a million people.
00:36:59.680Would have their temporary, um, permits expire, I believe in 2025 and 2026.
00:37:05.680And that's way more than the number of people who can become permanent residents.
00:37:11.680We're going to pick fewer than 400,000 permanent residents.
00:37:17.680A chunk of them will be economic immigrants chosen from overseas.
00:37:20.680You have less than a hundred thousand places left for economic, for temporary residents in Canada to become permanent residents.
00:37:27.680And you have like a million of them who are going to have their visas expire and who in theory are supposed to just get on a plane and go home.
00:37:32.680And so we're probably going to have a much larger number of people who are in Canada, not legally, um, and continuing to work.
00:37:41.680So this is going to be a challenge, um, that we are going to have to, um, or the government's going to have to work through and it isn't going to, it isn't going to disappear instantly.
00:37:52.680I think we can, we can create a much better system.
00:37:57.680We can get the numbers to a more moderate level.
00:38:00.680And again, by the way, we'd still have higher immigration than most European countries.
00:38:04.680And we still have higher immigration than, um, the United States, but we'd be doing a better job of, of, um, controlling who we choose and, and choosing well as we did pre 20, 2015.
00:38:19.680Well, I want to kind of come back to restate the crux of my last question though, about, uh, is what you're saying that we should.
00:38:26.680You know, refocus on my, uh, on economic migration and bring the numbers down because you don't think then that like so much damage has been done here that we should not have.
00:38:39.680Like a moratorium for some period, you know, with some exceptions, you know, like the extremely high valued economic migrants.
00:38:46.680We've got high level doctors, high level engineers.
00:39:41.680So we have to get to a much lower number than that.
00:39:45.680And that's basically the government's plan.
00:39:49.680I don't have a problem with the plan so much.
00:39:51.680I have a problem with the way they're going to execute it because they're basically saying we're going to have around 400,000 or a little bit less than 400,000 permanent immigrants a year.
00:40:01.680And for several years, the temporary immigration stream is actually going to be negative.
00:40:06.680There are going to be more temporary immigrants leaving Canada than arriving under the government's plan.
00:40:12.680And it, and, and that has to be the case, um, because the numbers were so large over the previous three years.
00:40:21.680So if you look at the numbers in that way, you'll say, wow, we're, we're lowering immigration a lot to compensate for what happened from 2022 to 2024.
00:40:34.680But I think it would be, it would make no sense to put any kind of a moratorium on immigration, but effectively, you know, look on the temporary migration side, what the government has said is what the Kearney government has said is happening is we're actually having negative immigration.
00:40:51.680I think they're going to have a lot of trouble achieving that, but that actually is their policy goal for a couple of years.
00:40:56.680Um, there was an old general, uh, Von Molke said, no battle plan survives contact with the enemy.
00:41:05.680And I can see this on paper being a good plan, but it's going to have contact with reality.
00:41:14.680Do we really believe though, that all of these people who came in on a temporary basis and are then here illegally are going to go back?
00:41:24.680And now, of course it would never be a hundred percent.
00:41:27.680That's never going to happen, but I'm in the broad strokes because, you know, uh, in your writings, you said there was a wink, wink, nudge, nudge.
00:41:35.680Uh, it was a wink, wink agreement to these people that you're going to come here as a, as a phony student, and you're going to get to work at Uber, you know, driving an Uber or something.
00:41:43.680Uh, but in the end, we're going to make you a permanent resident and a citizen at some point.
00:41:48.680And that's, there's kind of a bait and switch here.
00:41:51.680And, uh, you know, so they, I, I, I, I'm not blaming the migrants.
00:41:55.680I'm blaming the system as, as you do in your book here.
00:41:57.680It's not the fault of people who want to come to a richer, wealthier, more secure country.
00:42:02.680It's, it's the fault of the people who brought them in on, on a, on a misleading basis.
00:42:06.680Uh, or, or actually maybe that was actually the intention.
00:42:11.680Um, but there's going to be a bunch of people I think who do not voluntarily self-deport here.
00:42:17.680And that I think then leaves us with broadly speaking, two options, ice style raids where we're sending out law enforcement to round up illegal migrants or an amnesty where we reward people for breaking the law.
00:42:35.680Uh, where do you, one, I guess, how successful do you think it's likely to be in the absence of some kind of ice style enforcement against illegal migrants who have not voluntarily self-deported?
00:42:49.680Uh, so how successful do you think that'll be?
00:42:51.680And then two, if it's not successful, do we go the route of then that kind of hard law, that kind of hard enforcement, or do we go the route of an amnesty that would reward people for breaking the law?
00:43:05.680So I want to go back and talk a little bit about history to try to explain this and to do a contrast between the Canada and the United States.
00:43:11.680So for the last 30, 30, even 40 years, um, illegal immigration has been a huge issue in the United States.
00:43:19.680There's an enormous amount of noise around it.
00:43:21.680And there's enormous amount of performative enforcement where, um, Republican governors, Republican governments make a big noise.
00:43:30.680And Trump is the latest of look at how much we're doing, um, to address this.
00:43:36.680And Canada, on the other hand, has traditionally had very little illegal immigration.
00:43:42.680And it's because of a whole bunch of subtle bureaucratic measures that used to work and could still work if we use them.
00:43:51.680So, you know, you can't just get on a plane and come to Canada.
00:43:54.680It's really hard to get a visa to come to Canada if you're from anything other than a, a, a highly developed first world country.
00:44:03.680Um, it's actually much easier to go to the United States.
00:44:05.680The reason Roxham road existed is because people could get on a plane and fly to JFK airport in New York and then get on a bus and come to Canada.
00:44:13.680People, for example, people from Nigeria were doing this.
00:44:16.680Um, and they couldn't have flown to Canada because Canada wouldn't have given them a visa, but the United States would.
00:44:22.680So Canada had all these subtle measures.
00:44:25.680We need to have various subtle measures.
00:44:28.680Um, at the same time, a certain number of people who are temporary residents in Canada will be chosen year after year to become permanent residents because they have skills.
00:44:58.680Some of these permanent, some of these temporary residents are going to become permanent residents.
00:45:03.680And some of these temporary residents are going to be by various subtle ways encouraged to leave because they don't qualify for permanent residency.
00:45:14.680It's going to have to be subtle tools.
00:45:16.680And one of the ones that I recommend in my book, and a lot of people will find it harsh, but I, I think it's sort of necessary is to have a system where.
00:45:24.680Employers can only hire people who are legally allowed to work in Canada.
00:45:29.680Um, that shouldn't be a controversial thing.
00:45:32.680That shouldn't be a controversial thing.
00:46:06.680One, cause they're being lobbied by progressives on one side and the other cause they're being lobbied by big business on the other side.
00:46:11.680And so the U S essentially encouraged a labor market of people who are not legally allowed to work in the United States to work, continue working in the United States or to come to the United States to work.
00:46:22.680Which is, which is not a good way to run things like you want people to feel that your immigration system is legal and it's, and it's functioning.
00:46:33.680And if you really need to bring in more people, do it legally, not illegally find smart ways above board ways that create confidence among voters that, Hey, the government's running things.
00:46:46.680Well, they're running things for my benefit.
00:46:48.680Um, the Americans kind of did the opposite and they ended up with 40 years of, of, you know, chaos and conflict and controversy.
00:46:56.680We avoided that because we were, we had a sensible, sane bureaucracy that was about being both pro immigration and anti irregular illegal and unusual immigration.
00:47:14.680I, you know, I, I always caution against bipartisanship because very often it's just both parties conspiring to screw the common people together.
00:47:22.680Um, we've immigration, but sometimes, but I gotta say sometimes, sometimes, sometimes it's the opposite.
00:47:30.680It's cause it's actually, you know, both parties sort of look at what the average person wants.
00:47:37.680So I, I really think that the Canadian immigration system pre 2015 was not controversial.
00:47:45.680Um, and you, and, and, and, and polls said that very few Canadians were upset about immigration cause it actually was working for Canada and for the average person.
00:47:56.680And the reason Canadians are now upset about immigration is not because, you know, as I say in my book, it's not because the entire country caught airborne xenophobia as some kind of disease.
00:48:38.680It's been limited largely to cranks, uh, who maybe in retrospect, I, I, I feel a little bad for shaming, but, uh, it, it was really cranky.
00:48:46.680Uh, it was really cranks on the fringes.
00:48:48.680Uh, but it's now front and center, major issue.
00:48:51.680We've joined the conversation with the United States and with Europe.
00:48:57.680Uh, you know, uh, Europe also being nation states, they're, they're different than more civic constitutional creations like Canada and the United States, uh, with civic nationalism.
00:49:08.680Um, so they're, they're, they're not, uh, they're not exactly apples to apples, but they, uh, both, uh, Europe and the United States have been having the conversation.
00:49:15.680We've been having the conversation for a long time in different forms.
00:49:18.680We're new to the conversation, at least in modern Canada.
00:49:21.680How do you think the, uh, the immigration debate in Canada and the United, sorry, in Europe and the United States is impacting Canada?
00:49:31.680Uh, and then in reverse has Canada and our more recent, uh, experience with, uh, largely uncontrolled mass migration, are we impacting the debate in those places?
00:49:44.680So I think Canada in the past, um, did impact the debate in the United States a little bit in Europe, but especially in the United States where Americans, particularly liberal Americans would look at Canada and say, what's going on in Canada?
00:50:00.680How come Canada isn't having these immigration controversies?
00:50:04.680How come immigration isn't tearing up American politics the way it is Canadian politics?
00:50:09.680But I think they tended to not understand the reason why the reason Canada looked super liberal to liberal Americans on immigration is cause.
00:50:22.680Super liberal on immigration Canada was also very conservative.
00:51:25.680And if you're pro-limits, then you can actually afford to be pro-immigration because people will understand while you're doing it.
00:51:32.680Where the US system, things kind of fell apart.
00:51:35.680I mean, particularly under the Biden administration was the last straw where a whole lot of voters said Biden doesn't seem to know what to do about these exceptionally large numbers of people coming across the Mexican border.
00:51:51.680Um, and so like, he doesn't seem to have a plan to sort of handle this in a way that's going to be acceptable to Americans.
00:51:58.680And he didn't have a plan because the left essentially said, you're not allowed to have a plan.
00:52:02.680Um, so, and that reelected, that is a major contributor to reelecting Donald Trump.
00:52:09.680It may be the most important contributor to reelecting Donald Trump.
00:52:12.680So, um, I want Canada to end up in a different place.
00:52:16.680Uh, but I think we have to learn the lessons of our own immigration history and we have to understand how our immigration history has been better and smarter than recent US immigration history.
00:52:28.680And was better and smarter until a number of years ago.
00:52:32.680And that's really the point of my book.
00:52:38.680Uh, I think I'm with you on a lot of it.
00:52:41.680Maybe not everything, but, uh, I I'd say I I'm on with you with, uh, more than even many of our own columnists, uh, on any given controversial topic.
00:52:48.680I think it's a very, uh, insightful work that you've done.
00:52:50.680I'm going to make sure I read the full thing in, uh, in detail.
00:52:53.680Uh, I feel a little guilty not doing it before here, but I think I, I had taken enough in that we were able to have a really great, uh, conversation.
00:53:00.680So thank you for the work you've done here and, uh, sharing your time with us today.