Western Standard - FILDEBRANDT： How Trudeau broke immigration

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00:00:30.000 G'day, I'm Derek Fildebrandt, publisher of the Western Standard.

00:00:46.020 Today we're talking migration, mass migration.

00:00:50.160 We've got a really special guest in today, Tony Keller.

00:00:54.380 He is a columnist with the Globe and Mail. Don't hold it against him.

00:00:58.280 He does some really fantastic writing on the topic and has recently published a book that I've read a good deal of excerpts from.

00:01:10.060 Not the whole thing yet, but I'm absolutely going to be ordering a copy to get through the whole thing.

00:01:14.200 He's the author of Borderline Chaos, How Canada Got Immigration Right and Then Wrong.

00:01:20.920 Tony, thank you very much for joining us here today.

00:01:24.960 Derek, it's good to be here with you.

00:01:26.040 So we'll dive straight into it.

00:01:29.300 As I said, I didn't read, I have not read the book yet, but I'm absolutely, I'm going to order it actually as soon as I'm done in here.

00:01:34.920 I got to read the whole thing.

00:01:36.420 We were talking just before we started rolling that, you know, two years ago, immigration only started to come onto my radar.

00:01:44.780 I'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.

00:01:56.480 It wasn't in my face daily life.

00:01:58.400 But 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.

00:02:05.340 I probably wouldn't have rated it in my top 20 as an issue I would care about as a Canadian or Albertan voter.

00:02:11.000 But today it's, it's number one, it's, it's kind of a litmus test issue of candidates I will vote for.

00:02:19.000 I 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.

00:02:24.820 What are you going to do about immigration?

00:02:26.320 Um, 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.

00:02:44.800 Um, but that, that has obviously changed.

00:02:48.100 Uh, why do you think that's changed?

00:02:50.800 So, um, to go back to the, the subtitle of my book, how Canada got immigration right.

00:02:56.560 And then wrong, let's, you got to talk about the right before you talk about the wrong.

00:03:01.180 And then what Canada got right.

00:03:03.260 And 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.

00:03:14.200 Um, 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.

00:03:25.920 Canada 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.

00:03:41.300 And 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.

00:03:51.640 Yet we had no political controversy because Canadians, I believe largely felt that immigration was a choice.

00:04:00.880 It 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.

00:04:07.240 And Canadians felt like, Hey, this is all under control.

00:04:10.720 And 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.

00:04:20.080 And 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.

00:04:45.520 And 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.

00:04:58.580 So, uh, let, let's talk about that.

00:05:01.000 I think I can't find anything to disagree with what you're saying.

00:05:04.500 Uh, I mean, pretty hardcore conservatives were maybe a little more skeptical of migration.

00:05:11.380 They'd say, well, let's maybe be a bit more picky and choosy about, I like this country more than that country.

00:05:16.540 You know, people from that part of the world, maybe integrate a little bit better than that.

00:05:20.140 But on, in the broad strokes, pretty much was ever, everyone was agreed that, yeah, this, we're choosing economic migrants.

00:05:26.740 Yeah, we had family reunification, stuff like that, that were maybe a little more controversial, but they never met it onto the mainstream political debate.

00:05:33.380 Uh, the, the, the debates were always on the margins, uh, on this, and that's changed.

00:05:40.040 Uh, so, but broadly speaking, most people think like yourself, we got migration right for a pretty extended period of time.

00:05:47.880 And then we changed things pretty radically.

00:05:50.520 Actually, 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?

00:06:04.160 Yeah.

00:06:04.880 So, so a few different things happened.

00:06:08.420 Um, and the, the Trudeau government came into office kind of wanting to argue, I think that, that, that the conservative party understood.

00:06:20.520 Stephen Harper had, had somehow been insufficiently generous and insufficiently open to immigration.

00:06:29.220 Um, 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.

00:06:46.460 Sorry, 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.

00:07:00.700 And 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.

00:07:09.700 Is that what you're talking about in terms of perception that the conservatives were seen as, uh, not open enough to migration?

00:07:16.460 I think that was, I think that is a, that was a part of the piece.

00:07:20.160 Um, 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.

00:07:28.580 Um, Stephen Harper has run an immigration policy.

00:07:31.320 That's, that's not fully Canadian and generous and we're going to do more.

00:07:35.840 And we're never particularly specific about this.

00:07:38.400 Um, Syrian refugees was part of the piece and by the way, the Syrian refugee arrival worked really well.

00:07:43.580 And to me, the Syrian refugee arrival was actually an example of how the Canadian immigration system works.

00:07:50.000 Well, every single one of those people who was brought here as a Syrian refugee came from overseas, was vetted before they came.

00:07:57.940 Um, the numbers were not.

00:08:00.100 Excessive.

00:08:01.100 And the truth was what the heart, what the Trudeau government did wasn't that much more than what the Harper government would have done.

00:08:05.900 It was somewhat more, but not that much more, but that was actually a fairly small piece of it.

00:08:10.400 So there was this rhetorical push, um, from the Trudeau government to say more immigration would be better just vaguely without specifics.

00:08:19.780 And as they went on, they started to get into it a bit more.

00:08:23.660 Um, and it, but it really, really exploded during the pandemic.

00:08:28.740 So prior to the pandemic, there had already been this run up in the number of temporary

00:08:35.380 foreign workers and foreign students.

00:08:37.960 And, and what people don't understand is that Canada basically went from having one immigration

00:08:46.720 system, which is permanent migration.

00:08:50.880 You become a permanent resident and you become a citizen of Canada.

00:08:53.700 That was always the core of the Canadian immigration system.

00:08:56.440 We kind of developed a second system, which is people who come here as temporary foreign 1.00

00:09:01.300 workers or as students and a large percentage of those students are temporary foreign workers in, in disguise, because

00:09:09.640 they're, they're going to not particularly high quality programs and they're working full-time while, while they're in school.

00:09:15.280 The government's finally scaled that back, but they had scaled it up previously.

00:09:18.220 So you kind of had these two parallel systems and the temporary system by 2022 had become bigger than the permanent system.

00:09:27.640 And by 2023, it was much bigger than the permanent system.

00:09:30.240 And that's how you went from having a fairly small number of temporary residents in Canada.

00:09:36.040 Uh, 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.

00:09:47.380 But the temporary resident number is so much bigger than the number of permanent resident places available each year.

00:09:55.840 So 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.

00:10:13.300 If you kind of have to say, hang on a second, there have to be some limits.

00:10:16.180 So the government under the Trudeau government, permanent immigration was doubled, but temporary immigration went up far, far more than that.

00:10:25.840 It was quadrupled or quintupled, um, that's that.

00:10:30.940 And, 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.

00:10:38.200 And there were no caps on the number of temporary foreign workers that businesses could hire.

00:10:43.580 Um, 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

00:10:54.700 educations 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.

00:11:09.160 We 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.

00:11:22.680 Uh, which I don't think is at all the case, but the government momentarily became convinced of that by business.

00:11:28.220 So it was a strange marriage of progressive ideas and, and, and, and business lobbying.

00:11:33.740 So I, I want to, uh, go further on that.

00:11:36.600 Uh, 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.

00:11:45.700 I 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.

00:12:02.020 Uh, 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.

00:12:10.660 Like, 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.

00:12:21.500 And, 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. 0.80

00:12:37.460 But 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. 0.99

00:12:50.140 And 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. 0.81

00:13:05.320 Especially when you have, you know, fairly high minimum wages.

00:13:08.760 Um, why was there no pushback from, you know, people or organizations that are kind of supposed to represent that part of the labor market?

00:13:18.240 I 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.

00:13:28.360 Uh, I, I might save, you know, 25 cents on my Uber eats.

00:13:33.760 Uh, and so I guess there's a, you know, I'm not competing for that labor market.

00:13:37.660 So there's a benefit for me as someone who's not at the bottom end.

00:13:40.540 So I, I benefit maybe a little bit by that.

00:13:43.300 Uh, but people at the lower end don't seem to get any benefit by this.

00:13:46.660 Why was there no pushback for those people in the Canadian labor market who were displaced?

00:13:51.540 That 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.

00:14:04.140 Um, you know, you have groups like the century initiative.

00:14:08.840 So that would be sort of, as you put it, big business elites saying, Hey, Canada does need higher immigration.

00:14:15.060 We need more numbers and they, they, they had some details on better immigration, but they really focused on more.

00:14:21.840 You have all kinds of small businesses and not just big business.

00:14:25.280 You're all your local businesses are saying, we want to be able to hire temporary foreign workers.

00:14:31.480 Um, one way or another, because the guy down the street has been able to do it.

00:14:35.760 So we want to do it.

00:14:36.460 So it's not just sort of some people off on a tower in Bay street on the 45th floor.

00:14:42.180 It'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.

00:14:48.120 You'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.

00:14:55.940 And some of them were super responsible about that.

00:14:58.560 And a lot of institutions, lower end institutions were not at all responsible.

00:15:03.840 You have a number of provincial governments who are lobbying the federal government and saying, we want more immigration and we need more temporary 0.99

00:15:11.580 migration, 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.

00:15:22.260 As we think that's going to help finance our higher education sector.

00:15:26.220 Um, and again, the students tended to go in Ontario to the lowest end institutions, not the highest end institutions.

00:15:32.740 You've got progressive groups saying immigration is good inherently.

00:15:36.960 Like it's a value, it's not a, it's not a practical matter, it's a value.

00:15:39.660 And if you're saying more immigration, that's good.

00:15:41.620 And if you're saying same or less, that's bad.

00:15:44.280 The liberals themselves rhetorically kind of adopted that.

00:15:46.860 So there's sort of nobody against it.

00:15:48.240 And to me, the surprise is that there was not really any pushback from labor.

00:15:55.740 Um, but there, there really wasn't, uh, and yeah, that, that is kind of a surprise.

00:16:02.320 I 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.

00:16:13.060 So for someone who's upper middle class, having, or middle class, upper middle class, certain things become cheaper.

00:16:19.960 If 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.

00:16:32.320 And 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.

00:16:39.400 Um, so it's a, it is about choices.

00:16:41.920 Like 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.

00:16:54.340 They're, they're providing labor, but they also need benefits. 0.54

00:16:57.880 So 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.

00:17:10.120 They still have to use healthcare services.

00:17:12.160 So 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.

00:17:22.280 So everything's got costs and benefits, and there was just not really a great deal of thought about the costs.

00:17:29.000 And there was an enormous focus on look at the benefits and pretending as if there was nothing on the other side of the ledger.

00:17:35.520 So 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.

00:17:54.000 Uh, 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.

00:18:04.360 Have you considered coming to Canada to which I thought that is the most insane advertisement ever.

00:18:09.660 Like we're, we're saying come to my store so I can give you something for free.

00:18:15.000 Uh, that that's a one way transaction.

00:18:18.560 Uh, you know, that's why we should at least in theory limit, uh, family unification migration, because.

00:18:24.000 Uh, 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.

00:18:37.920 Uh, 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.

00:18:49.860 I, and that was very recently after things are supposed to have been tamped down.

00:18:54.780 Um, 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.

00:19:01.020 Yeah.

00:19:01.440 So, so I don't want to put, um, too much weight on that ad.

00:19:05.740 Cause again, keep in mind, you know, government of Canada puts out 5,000 web pages a day.

00:19:10.920 This was one that sort of got blown up and highlighted.

00:19:13.740 Uh, I forget even which ministry it was in.

00:19:16.620 Just wanted to say, Hey, look, here are the advantages of coming to Canada.

00:19:19.260 It was citizenship and immigration.

00:19:21.000 Was it?

00:19:21.260 Okay.

00:19:21.600 So, so for what it's worth, yeah, but for what it's worth, that is actually one of the benefits of coming to Canada.

00:19:27.660 So, so we should try to sell the benefits of Canada, but we should also be thoughtful about sort of choosing who gets those benefits.

00:19:36.840 And 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.

00:19:48.680 So 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.

00:19:58.000 But 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.

00:20:13.240 That to me is, is, is the key we should try to sell Canada really hard and get the best immigrants possible. 1.00

00:20:19.400 And, and in the past we had family reunification, but that was around sort of 20% of the system and it still is.

00:20:27.000 We had refugees that sort of 15% of the system and it still is. 1.00

00:20:31.480 And we had economic migrants sort of 60 something percent of the system, but the percentages didn't change that much.

00:20:37.220 What really changed was we became much less choosy on the economic immigration side and we dropped standards enormously.

00:20:48.020 So 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.

00:21:00.240 So, uh, I, I've read, I think in excerpts and I've, uh, watched or listened to some of the interviews you've already

00:21:07.140 done and, uh, so in it, you know, you've said, you know, they, the liberals did not change, uh, uh, the immigration

00:21:16.360 policy is necessarily a particularly ideological agenda.

00:21:20.640 It was not meant to replace the Canadian born population.

00:21:25.300 Um, and I, I very much agree that, yeah, there was big business pushing for things.

00:21:30.440 There was this kind of all stakeholder, at least the stakeholders they'd listened to all stakeholder consensus.

00:21:35.680 And 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.

00:21:42.920 Um, but historically in the broad strokes, migrants have tended to vote liberal or progressive.

00:21:50.320 Um, there's been, uh, you know, the, the anomaly to that was 2011 federally where the conservatives had a major breakthrough with new Canadians.

00:21:58.680 Um, 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.

00:22:07.680 Historically 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.

00:22:22.680 Uh, 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.

00:22:41.680 Is 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?

00:23:00.680 So 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.

00:23:18.680 I, I, I, again, other people can try to look into this.

00:23:21.680 I have no reason to believe that's, that's what was going on.

00:23:24.680 What I will say is that the liberal party did believe, and a lot of progressive people believe that immigration is a, is a value.

00:23:34.680 And, and, and, and as a result, they don't think about immigration in the way I'm thinking of it.

00:23:41.680 I'm thinking of it as, as a calculus.

00:23:43.680 I'm saying, okay, look, we're going to have some, we're going to have immigration.

00:23:46.680 We should have immigration.

00:23:47.680 There are all kinds of positive things about immigration.

00:23:50.680 Let's try to maximize the positives and let's try to minimize the negatives because every, every policy choice has positives and negatives.

00:23:57.680 So 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.

00:24:04.680 And once we get to that higher level, we should have even more because it's up value.

00:24:07.680 What 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.

00:24:18.680 That's good.

00:24:20.680 Um, so I, I think that's, you know, that's a, that's how I'm coming at this.

00:24:26.680 I, I, I, I, one other thing I want to say is on the issue of how immigrants vote, it's complicated.

00:24:35.680 Um, people's votes, you know, change over time.

00:24:38.680 And one of the things that I've found very interesting, you brought up the 2011 election where the Harper government did very well.

00:24:46.680 Um, non white and immigrant voters and really was shifting the needle. 0.64

00:24:52.680 And 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.

00:25:09.680 They were upset about various issues such as crime and they shifted to the conservative party.

00:25:14.680 So 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. 0.51

00:25:26.680 They aren't, no one's running against immigrants, no one's, or historically no one has for generations.

00:25:34.680 And that's great.

00:25:36.680 There's there, all the parties have essentially said, if you're a Canadian voter, we would like you to vote for us.

00:25:41.680 We're not targeting you except we're trying to, we're trying to reach you with our message to me.

00:25:46.680 That's, that's a pretty good thing because we all have to live together.

00:25:50.680 Um, 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.

00:26:02.680 Canada 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.

00:26:16.680 We have to figure out how people of different races and ethnicities and faiths and beliefs can all live together and all love Canada.

00:26:25.680 And 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.

00:26:36.680 They're going to break down on ideological lines, which is fun.

00:26:39.680 So I want to go down this path a bit more as I guess this is the spicy part of the topic.

00:26:45.680 Um, so, you know, you've talked about the economic and labor market impacts.

00:26:51.680 Uh, you know, it's, I think where this actually really started to break into the mainstream conversation was around housing.

00:26:57.680 All of a sudden, you know, housing is actually, it's a multilayered issue.

00:27:00.680 It 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.

00:27:08.680 But 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.

00:27:17.680 Uh, that does make me racist, but what's behind this?

00:27:20.680 Oh, okay.

00:27:21.680 Migration has started to enter the mainstream conversation from their, uh, social services.

00:27:25.680 We 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.

00:27:32.680 But 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.

00:27:43.680 That it's, uh, it's not just the people look differently in your communities.

00:27:48.680 It'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.

00:27:56.680 And 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.

00:28:07.680 You 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.

00:28:12.680 We all, we all, we like all that.

00:28:13.680 Um, but some broad cultural norms that you have to be assimilated into language, et cetera.

00:28:20.680 We haven't been able to do that.

00:28:23.680 And I think that is where the, uh, the migration conversation is also going.

00:28:30.680 It's beyond the economic, it's beyond the physical, it's beyond the labor market and housing.

00:28:35.680 It it's in the, what do you think has been the cultural impact of, of this policy?

00:28:42.680 Yeah.

00:28:43.680 And what do you think has been the backlash or where do you think that backlash is going?

00:28:47.680 So 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.

00:28:54.680 Like I, I want to keep the conversation on, um, economic issues.

00:28:59.680 I 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.

00:29:07.680 That's where I want to focus.

00:29:09.680 I 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.

00:29:24.680 I, one, I don't know how to do that too.

00:29:26.680 I don't want to do that.

00:29:27.680 And I don't really think it's possible.

00:29:29.680 Look, my ancestors came to Canada.

00:29:33.680 Um, so on my mother's side from the Russian empire, they practiced a weird religion.

00:29:40.680 They didn't speak English or something or.

00:29:44.680 Uh, they were Jewish. 0.97

00:29:46.680 Ah.

00:29:47.680 Um, and here I am talking to you in English and you just think I'm a white guy, Canadian.

00:29:52.680 Um, but I, if I show you pictures of them, you would think they were weird, exotic people.

00:29:56.680 And 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.

00:30:03.680 Um, 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. 0.97

00:30:11.680 So, and yet somehow, you know, um, Canada's Canada actually does, has historically done an extremely good job of.

00:30:24.680 Canadians don't like to use the word assimilation.

00:30:26.680 Um, 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.

00:30:34.680 I 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.

00:30:42.680 And I don't know how to do things differently.

00:30:47.680 And I, I honestly don't want to, um, run this on run the immigration system on, on kind of cultural metrics.

00:30:57.680 I think the logical way to do it is to say, let's run it on economic metrics.

00:31:03.680 And 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.

00:31:18.680 It would have been nice if they had said we want 10,000 more doctors.

00:31:22.680 Look, 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.

00:31:30.680 You 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.

00:31:46.680 And we're like, Oh my God, where did all these anti-Semites come from?

00:31:49.680 And, you know, yeah, it's got the regular blue haired college, uh, or university campus types.

00:31:55.680 It'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.

00:32:07.680 And we're all of a sudden, you know, saying, Oh my God, where did this all come from?

00:32:12.680 And we're all kind of afraid to say it.

00:32:14.680 Uh, 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.

00:32:22.680 And 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.

00:32:33.680 And, and I, that's, that's cultural.

00:32:35.680 I don't think, um, necessarily, you know, targeting the, targeting this recalibrating to my, uh, to economic issues would necessarily fix that problem.

00:32:48.680 Maybe you disagree.

00:32:49.680 Tell me where I'm wrong.

00:32:50.680 Yeah.

00:32:51.680 So I, I look, I disagree with you on, on two bases.

00:32:55.680 One, as I said, I don't know how we can run an immigration system based on some kind of a cultural test.

00:33:01.680 Um, 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.

00:33:15.680 Boy, there are a lot of white people.

00:33:17.680 There are a lot of white progressives who were born in Canada and went to university in Canada.

00:33:21.680 So these are cultural shifts that I think would be happening regardless of the immigration system.

00:33:28.680 Um, and, and so, and I, and again, I don't know how we can talk about this given that Canada is already.

00:33:39.680 Um, a, a, a multicultural, multiracial, multi-ethnic society.

00:33:44.680 I just think it would tear society apart.

00:33:47.680 If we said there are certain religions, we don't want any more of those people in Canada. 1.00

00:33:51.680 They're already in Canada.

00:33:52.680 They're all, you know, Canada already has millions of people of different races and different religions.

00:33:57.680 And I, I don't know, like there's no turning the clock back.

00:34:02.680 We got to figure out how to make it work with the clock going forward.

00:34:06.680 That, that is my argument.

00:34:08.680 All right.

00:34:09.680 Well, let's, let's look forward about how, how we fix this.

00:34:12.680 I think you and I will probably see eye to eye on a lot of it.

00:34:15.680 Um, you know, the guy producing this show right now, uh, he, he, he's, I won't, I won't get into his details.

00:34:21.680 He, he'll, he'll get bashful, but, uh, you know, he, he's a relatively recent migrant. 0.88

00:34:25.680 Uh, I'm not just blowing smoke up as ours here, but he's, he's a hard worker.

00:34:29.680 He's competent.

00:34:30.680 Uh, despite not being fairly recent, I think fairly assimilated.

00:34:34.680 Uh, he's, he's brought some of his interesting food into the office from time to time and we like it.

00:34:38.680 Um, you know, so we, even in this wave.

00:34:42.680 Some 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.

00:34:52.680 Now you've said that, you know, the government started to turn down the tabs.

00:34:56.680 They've not turned off the tabs, nowhere close to turning off the tabs.

00:34:59.680 Um, 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.

00:35:11.680 The actuaries of how this is going to work out for government budgeting for social services going forward.

00:35:16.680 Uh, the housing market.

00:35:18.680 Um, and then, well, you and I might disagree.

00:35:20.680 I, I would say very much on the cultural side that we have not, we've taken so many so fast that we cannot.

00:35:25.680 Uh, adequately, uh, assimilate people.

00:35:28.680 Um, should we not send.

00:35:34.680 Uh, like a lot of these folks who are not citizens.

00:35:37.680 If you're a citizen that's sick or sank, you're here. 1.00

00:35:39.680 Uh, but should we not be sending a lot back?

00:35:43.680 Um, like, do we need a moratorium on this to just catch our breath for some time?

00:35:49.680 And then, you know, a decade or whatever it is from now, we can say, okay, we've caught our breath.

00:35:54.680 Uh, labor markets recovered, housing markets recovered.

00:35:57.680 People have assimilated a bit.

00:35:58.680 Now we could, we could start this up again.

00:36:00.680 Uh, how do we fix this?

00:36:05.680 So yeah, what the government said, what the late Trudeau government said and what now the, the, uh, Carney government has said is okay.

00:36:13.680 First of all, permanent immigration. 0.86

00:36:15.680 We've lowered the numbers a bit.

00:36:16.680 Second of all, we're aiming for considerably lower numbers of new temporary migrants and foreign students.

00:36:24.680 Um, and the assumption is that a lot of the people who are, you know, we could start this up again.

00:36:29.680 A 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.

00:36:39.680 We'll choose some of those and everybody else is going to have to go home and it's going to be challenging.

00:36:44.680 Like that is actually going to be the hardest part.

00:36:46.680 And 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.

00:36:59.680 Would have their temporary, um, permits expire, I believe in 2025 and 2026.

00:37:05.680 And that's way more than the number of people who can become permanent residents.

00:37:11.680 We're going to pick fewer than 400,000 permanent residents.

00:37:14.680 Some of them will be refugees.

00:37:15.680 Some will be family reunification.

00:37:17.680 A chunk of them will be economic immigrants chosen from overseas.

00:37:20.680 You have less than a hundred thousand places left for economic, for temporary residents in Canada to become permanent residents.

00:37:27.680 And 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.

00:37:32.680 And so we're probably going to have a much larger number of people who are in Canada, not legally, um, and continuing to work.

00:37:41.680 So 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.

00:37:52.680 I think we can, we can create a much better system.

00:37:55.680 Um, we can choose better.

00:37:57.680 We can get the numbers to a more moderate level.

00:38:00.680 And again, by the way, we'd still have higher immigration than most European countries.

00:38:04.680 And 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.

00:38:19.680 Well, 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.

00:38:26.680 You 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.

00:38:39.680 Like a moratorium for some period, you know, with some exceptions, you know, like the extremely high valued economic migrants.

00:38:46.680 We've got high level doctors, high level engineers.

00:38:49.680 Okay, fine.

00:38:50.680 You know, we're not saying hermetically seal the border here, but in, in broad measure, we need to more.

00:38:55.680 Uh, I, I, I've been in an opinion that we need more or less with some reasonable exceptions, a moratorium here.

00:39:01.680 You, you disagree with that and think we more or less just, we can get away with reverting to where we were before this.

00:39:06.680 I wouldn't put, yeah, I wouldn't put a moratorium on immigration, but to, to put things in perspective.

00:39:11.680 Okay.

00:39:12.680 So in between 2022 and 2024, um, net immigration to Canada.

00:39:19.680 So that's new permanent residents, but also all this temporary stream Canada took in 3.1 million people in the space of 36 months.

00:39:29.680 And that, and again, just to make that number really clear, that includes deducting people who left.

00:39:35.680 So temporary migrants who came minus temporary migrants who left, you get 3.1 million.

00:39:40.680 It's an enormous number.

00:39:41.680 So we have to get to a much lower number than that.

00:39:45.680 And that's basically the government's plan.

00:39:49.680 I don't have a problem with the plan so much.

00:39:51.680 I 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.

00:40:01.680 And for several years, the temporary immigration stream is actually going to be negative.

00:40:06.680 There are going to be more temporary immigrants leaving Canada than arriving under the government's plan.

00:40:12.680 And it, and, and that has to be the case, um, because the numbers were so large over the previous three years.

00:40:21.680 So 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.

00:40:34.680 But 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.

00:40:49.680 That's actually their policy goal.

00:40:51.680 I think they're going to have a lot of trouble achieving that, but that actually is their policy goal for a couple of years.

00:40:56.680 Um, there was an old general, uh, Von Molke said, no battle plan survives contact with the enemy.

00:41:05.680 And I can see this on paper being a good plan, but it's going to have contact with reality.

00:41:14.680 Do 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?

00:41:24.680 And now, of course it would never be a hundred percent.

00:41:27.680 That'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.

00:41:35.680 Uh, 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.

00:41:43.680 Uh, but in the end, we're going to make you a permanent resident and a citizen at some point.

00:41:48.680 And that's, there's kind of a bait and switch here.

00:41:51.680 And, uh, you know, so they, I, I, I, I'm not blaming the migrants.

00:41:55.680 I'm blaming the system as, as you do in your book here.

00:41:57.680 It's not the fault of people who want to come to a richer, wealthier, more secure country.

00:42:02.680 It's, it's the fault of the people who brought them in on, on a, on a misleading basis.

00:42:06.680 Uh, or, or actually maybe that was actually the intention.

00:42:09.680 It's just no longer the intention.

00:42:11.680 Um, but there's going to be a bunch of people I think who do not voluntarily self-deport here.

00:42:17.680 And 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.

00:42:35.680 Uh, 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?

00:42:49.680 Uh, so how successful do you think that'll be?

00:42:51.680 And 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?

00:43:04.680 Okay.

00:43:05.680 So 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.

00:43:11.680 So for the last 30, 30, even 40 years, um, illegal immigration has been a huge issue in the United States.

00:43:19.680 There's an enormous amount of noise around it.

00:43:21.680 And there's enormous amount of performative enforcement where, um, Republican governors, Republican governments make a big noise.

00:43:30.680 And Trump is the latest of look at how much we're doing, um, to address this.

00:43:36.680 And Canada, on the other hand, has traditionally had very little illegal immigration.

00:43:42.680 And it's because of a whole bunch of subtle bureaucratic measures that used to work and could still work if we use them.

00:43:51.680 So, you know, you can't just get on a plane and come to Canada.

00:43:54.680 It'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.

00:44:03.680 Um, it's actually much easier to go to the United States.

00:44:05.680 The 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.

00:44:13.680 People, for example, people from Nigeria were doing this.

00:44:16.680 Um, and they couldn't have flown to Canada because Canada wouldn't have given them a visa, but the United States would.

00:44:22.680 So Canada had all these subtle measures.

00:44:25.680 We need to have various subtle measures.

00:44:28.680 Um, 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.

00:44:40.680 They already have a job.

00:44:41.680 They already have an education.

00:44:42.680 It makes sense.

00:44:43.680 We were going to take in a certain number of people, 400,000 ish, or a bit less as permanent residents.

00:44:49.680 Boom.

00:44:50.680 They're part of that quota.

00:44:51.680 They fit the criteria they're in.

00:44:53.680 So it's going to have to be a mix of.

00:44:57.680 Yes.

00:44:58.680 Some of these permanent, some of these temporary residents are going to become permanent residents.

00:45:03.680 And some of these temporary residents are going to be by various subtle ways encouraged to leave because they don't qualify for permanent residency.

00:45:14.680 It's going to have to be subtle tools.

00:45:16.680 And 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.

00:45:24.680 Employers can only hire people who are legally allowed to work in Canada.

00:45:29.680 Um, that shouldn't be a controversial thing.

00:45:32.680 That shouldn't be a controversial thing.

00:45:34.680 I don't, I really don't.

00:45:35.680 I'm not sure it is anymore.

00:45:36.680 Actually controversial.

00:45:37.680 Um, but I will say for, so for example, in the United States, you may think that that exists in the United States.

00:45:44.680 It doesn't like the Americans have a system called E verify, but no employer is required to use it.

00:45:50.680 So in theory, in the United States, employers can check the legal status of every potential employee for their company.

00:45:59.680 But the law doesn't oblige them to use it because Democrats and Republicans have historically both agreed they don't want to happen.

00:46:05.680 They want that to happen.

00:46:06.680 One, 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.

00:46:11.680 And 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.

00:46:22.680 Which 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.

00:46:33.680 And 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.

00:46:46.680 Well, they're running things for my benefit.

00:46:48.680 Um, the Americans kind of did the opposite and they ended up with 40 years of, of, you know, chaos and conflict and controversy.

00:46:56.680 We 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.

00:47:11.680 Um, we got to get back to that.

00:47:13.680 Yeah.

00:47:14.680 I, you know, I, I always caution against bipartisanship because very often it's just both parties conspiring to screw the common people together.

00:47:22.680 Um, we've immigration, but sometimes, but I gotta say sometimes, sometimes, sometimes it's the opposite.

00:47:30.680 It's cause it's actually, you know, both parties sort of look at what the average person wants.

00:47:34.680 Yeah.

00:47:35.680 And they're like, yeah, you know what?

00:47:36.680 We can run it that way.

00:47:37.680 So I, I really think that the Canadian immigration system pre 2015 was not controversial.

00:47:45.680 Um, 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.

00:47:54.680 And therefore Canadians weren't upset.

00:47:56.680 And 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.

00:48:07.680 It's because circumstances changed.

00:48:09.680 And so Canadians said, hang on a second.

00:48:12.680 I'm, I was happy with the old system, but I'm not happy with the new system.

00:48:17.680 And I wish you would, I wish you would make things more like they were before.

00:48:22.680 So let me leave with a final question on this, which is both, I think, retrospective and forward-looking.

00:48:28.680 Um, so yeah, immigration polarization is a new thing to at least modern Canada as we've known it today for, from my lifetime.

00:48:37.680 It's never been a major thing.

00:48:38.680 It'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.

00:48:46.680 Uh, it was really cranks on the fringes.

00:48:48.680 Uh, but it's now front and center, major issue.

00:48:51.680 We've joined the conversation with the United States and with Europe.

00:48:55.680 They're different circumstances.

00:48:57.680 Uh, 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.

00:49:08.680 Um, 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.

00:49:15.680 We've been having the conversation for a long time in different forms.

00:49:18.680 We're new to the conversation, at least in modern Canada.

00:49:21.680 How do you think the, uh, the immigration debate in Canada and the United, sorry, in Europe and the United States is impacting Canada?

00:49:31.680 Uh, 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?

00:49:44.680 So 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?

00:50:00.680 How come Canada isn't having these immigration controversies?

00:50:04.680 How come immigration isn't tearing up American politics the way it is Canadian politics? 0.53

00:50:09.680 But I think they tended to not understand the reason why the reason Canada looked super liberal to liberal Americans on immigration is cause.

00:50:22.680 Super liberal on immigration Canada was also very conservative.

00:50:26.680 It was both at the same time.

00:50:29.680 Canada said we're going to have higher immigration than the United States.

00:50:32.680 We're also going to have way more border control and a sense of control over immigration than the United States.

00:50:39.680 Immigration will not be perceived by Canadians as an imposition.

00:50:42.680 It will be perceived by Canadians as a choice.

00:50:45.680 So I think that's the historical thing that Canada got right.

00:50:48.680 And that's what made Canadian immigration politics so different from American immigration politics.

00:50:54.680 And I think to avoid ending up in the place where American immigration politics is now, we have to get back to that.

00:51:03.680 And that to me is that that's the left, right coming together.

00:51:08.680 That's the yin yang that a lot of people did not understand about the Canadian system.

00:51:15.680 It was so baked in that the liberals couldn't understand that if you want to be pro-immigration, you better be pro-border control.

00:51:23.680 You better be pro-limits.

00:51:25.680 And if you're pro-limits, then you can actually afford to be pro-immigration because people will understand while you're doing it. 0.79

00:51:32.680 Where the US system, things kind of fell apart.

00:51:35.680 I 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.

00:51:51.680 Um, 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.

00:51:58.680 And he didn't have a plan because the left essentially said, you're not allowed to have a plan.

00:52:02.680 Um, so, and that reelected, that is a major contributor to reelecting Donald Trump.

00:52:09.680 It may be the most important contributor to reelecting Donald Trump.

00:52:12.680 So, um, I want Canada to end up in a different place.

00:52:16.680 Uh, 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.

00:52:28.680 And was better and smarter until a number of years ago.

00:52:32.680 And that's really the point of my book.

00:52:34.680 All right.

00:52:35.680 Well, I greatly appreciate your time.

00:52:38.680 Uh, I think I'm with you on a lot of it.

00:52:41.680 Maybe 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.

00:52:48.680 I think it's a very, uh, insightful work that you've done.

00:52:50.680 I'm going to make sure I read the full thing in, uh, in detail.

00:52:53.680 Uh, 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.

00:53:00.680 So thank you for the work you've done here and, uh, sharing your time with us today.

00:53:04.680 Thank you very much for having me on.

00:53:06.680 And, you know, like people don't always have to agree about everything.

00:53:09.680 It's good to be able to have conversations with people you don't agree with a hundred percent.

00:53:13.680 Cause nobody should agree with everybody a hundred percent.

00:53:15.680 We should still be able to be, um, civil and have conversations and listen to one another's perspectives.

00:53:22.680 Even if we don't a hundred percent agree.

00:53:24.680 Yeah.

00:53:25.680 Well, uh, I, amen to that.

00:53:27.680 Thank you very much for joining us and, uh, best of luck with your next project.

00:53:31.680 Okay.

00:53:32.680 Thanks, Derek.

00:53:33.680 Great to talk to you.

00:53:34.680 All right.

00:53:35.680 Cheers.

00:53:36.680 Uh, that was, uh, Tony Keller, global and mail columnist and author of.

00:53:42.680 Borderline chaos.

00:53:43.680 How Canada got immigration right. 0.99

00:53:46.680 And then wrong.

00:53:47.680 Thank you for joining us today and God bless.

Western Standard - November 03, 2025

FILDEBRANDT： How Trudeau broke immigration

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