Western Standard - September 10, 2025


HANNAFORD: Immigration, inflation and Canada's fading Carney romance


Episode Stats

Length

22 minutes

Words per Minute

176.55167

Word Count

3,971

Sentence Count

248

Misogynist Sentences

1

Hate Speech Sentences

6


Summary

In less than two weeks, Parliament resumes after a recess of three months. What s top of mind for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau when the House resumes on September 15th? Would it be temporary foreign workers? With me tonight to talk about these things is Ginny Roth, a partner at Crestview Strategies, a former communications director for the Conservative Party of Canada, and a long-time Polyerve surrogate.


Transcript

00:00:00.000 Good evening, Western Standard viewers, and welcome to Hannaford, a weekly politics show.
00:00:21.600 It is Thursday, September the 4th. In less than two weeks, Parliament resumes after a recess of
00:00:27.600 three months. But Canada has not been without a government for all that time. It has just been
00:00:34.080 without a supervised government, and importantly, without a budget. What has been going on? Should
00:00:40.560 we be worried? With me tonight, to talk about these things is Ginny Roth. She's a partner at
00:00:46.640 Crestview Strategies, a former communications director for the Conservative Party of Canada,
00:00:52.400 and a long-time Polyerve surrogate. Good evening, Ginny. Good evening, Nigel. Nice to be here.
00:00:58.800 Good to see you again. Thanks for coming back. Ginny, what's the top of mind for Pierre Polyerve when
00:01:04.080 the House resumes on September the 15th? Would it be temporary foreign workers?
00:01:08.800 I think that's up there. If you look at the latest polling, not on popularity of the leaders,
00:01:17.200 but on the issues. This issue of Donald Trump and the Canada-US trade relationship
00:01:23.600 is starting to fall. It's just not as salient as it was during our general election campaign.
00:01:31.040 Cost of living is still a huge driver of concern and anxiety for people. Immigration is part of that.
00:01:39.040 Crime remains a challenging issue for people. And housing, continued shortage of housing, which also
00:01:45.040 is tied to the immigration issue. So I think part of the reason you saw Polyev talking about temporary
00:01:49.760 foreign workers today is he wants to point out that while the Kearney government has curtailed
00:01:55.680 immigration on some fronts in some ways, they continue to pursue programs that bring thousands
00:02:02.640 of newcomers into the country at a time when we have a shortage of supply of things. We have a shortage
00:02:08.800 of supply of jobs. We have a shortage of supply of housing. We have a shortage of supply of healthcare.
00:02:14.800 And I think a lot of Canadians now think that's because we have just brought in too many people
00:02:18.240 for the amount of things that we have. You see youth unemployment really quite high, concerningly high.
00:02:24.240 And so he's talking about temporary foreign workers to sort of say, I've got real solutions
00:02:28.800 to these problems. And Prime Minister Carney doesn't.
00:02:31.360 Now, Jenny, obviously, you have better insights into what Mr. Polyev thinks than what Mr. Carney
00:02:38.000 thinks by the nature of your past positions. Nevertheless, can you make any sense of what
00:02:43.520 the Prime Minister has done when he's promised to cut back on immigration? And apparently,
00:02:48.080 it proceeds apace and may even be increasing.
00:02:50.080 So to give the government some credit, the levels that they've set are quite a bit lower than the
00:02:58.000 levels of the previous government for new permanent residents, for all sorts of categories across the
00:03:04.080 immigration plan. But the only reason that they're lower is because they were so, so, so high.
00:03:10.720 They were generationally high. The challenge is, one, actually sticking to those levels is a challenge.
00:03:18.400 So they're already tracking to be above the levels that they've set for this year, which is concerning.
00:03:24.160 And the people that were brought in at the peak of the deluge are still here.
00:03:30.960 The people who have overstayed their visas are generally not being deported.
00:03:35.360 We don't, it's very difficult to do that.
00:03:38.000 So there's a bit of, you can't get the toothpaste back into the tube,
00:03:41.360 which I think is why you see Polyev calling for the flat population for a number of years
00:03:46.320 until we can get the supply and demand dynamics right again.
00:03:50.000 And even though Carney sort of pulled back a bit from Trudeau era immigration,
00:03:54.800 you can tell he doesn't want to talk about it. He doesn't want to take further measures.
00:03:58.480 And I think that's because he's so close to corporate Canada
00:04:01.440 and so many big employers just like having this constant influx of labor available to them.
00:04:07.360 And I don't think Carney wants to be offside of that. I think he's close to corporate Canada.
00:04:10.800 I think he's sympathetic to their wants and their needs.
00:04:13.360 And he thinks an economy needs lots of new labor. That puts him against public opinion.
00:04:18.560 Public opinion is saying too much, too far. You have to pull it way back.
00:04:24.400 And while he may think that Carney's pulled it back a little bit,
00:04:26.720 they don't think he's pulled it back enough.
00:04:29.440 Well, that's certainly the opinion of most people by the sounds of the polls
00:04:32.800 and by the sounds of the news stories. The fact of all this immigration has been to depress wages
00:04:38.560 and actually to make it very difficult for people who've been here for years to get work.
00:04:43.760 But you have to give Mr. Carney, I think, the benefit of the doubt for about another two weeks,
00:04:49.200 which is when Parliament comes back. Although he was an advisor to Mr. Trudeau,
00:04:55.440 I get the sense that when he finally got into government, it was a little bit like parents
00:05:01.040 coming home and finding that the teenagers had a party while they were away for the weekend.
00:05:06.800 A total mess. What do you think? Should we give Mr. Carney a break for just taking over from Mr. Trudeau?
00:05:17.040 I think you're right that part of what Mark Carney has done successfully is he's taken some middle-of-the-road
00:05:23.200 common sense positions that Justin Trudeau refused to take, whether it was canceling the carbon tax or
00:05:28.960 suggesting that we should continue to develop oil and gas in this country. Just some basic things that
00:05:38.960 Trudeau was offside on. He's taken those up and said, yes, I'm onside with that. And that has made
00:05:44.880 people think that he is reasonable, moderate, etc. But I don't think that he's gone far enough. And the
00:05:52.800 challenge is he's banking on the fact that expectations were so low after Trudeau that even
00:05:58.160 the slightest improvement, you know, putting your shoes on the right feet looks like the height of
00:06:03.520 competence. And I think Canadians for a while have been happy to see that. But I think that will wear
00:06:09.680 thin quickly. You know, the Canada-US issue is dropping in salience, but it is still important for a lot of
00:06:14.880 people. And for those people, they believe that Mark Carney promised them that he would solve it. And that really is
00:06:20.320 what he ran the election on. He said he was the guy to deal with Trump. Well, we have no deal. Canada remains
00:06:27.200 heavily tariffed. We're about to enter the renegotiation of KUSMA, our most important trade agreement and
00:06:34.480 terms of the Americans do not seem like they're good. Things do not seem to be going well. And so while Carney, I
00:06:40.000 think has a bit of a honeymoon, because his demeanor, the sort of vibe he gives off, gives people a feeling of
00:06:47.280 competence and calm. I think that's starting to wear thin. And you're right that when Parliament comes
00:06:54.640 screaming back in a couple of weeks, I think Paliyev is going to spend a lot of his time trying
00:06:59.280 to lay that bare for Canadians and make it clear to them that progress has not been made.
00:07:02.880 Well, I see that he's laying down a narrative now that this will be an austerity budget.
00:07:08.320 Obviously, he is still committed to delivering a budget in the fall, but it's going to be a tough
00:07:16.880 one. So how tough do you think it could be? I mean, I think that's sort of hilarious because
00:07:23.920 it's not going to be an austerity budget. He's taken all these areas off the table. So
00:07:28.560 he's done this trick where he's going to separate operating and programmatic spending from capital
00:07:33.920 spending, as he calls it. But he's considering capital to be anything that's deemed to be an
00:07:38.960 investment into the future. So any kind of infrastructure, I think he's going to include
00:07:43.040 sort of social infrastructure in that. He's also said he's not going to mess with transfers to the
00:07:47.840 provinces or social programs. So dental, childcare, all these huge new multi-billion dollar programs are,
00:07:55.440 I don't think, being touched. So that really only leaves him with sort of like narrow ministerial
00:08:01.120 program spending. And yes, he's talked a big game about cutting back there, but I think ultimately
00:08:06.640 that's because he'll settle for less. And I think what he knows is that the public right now is not
00:08:11.840 terribly sensitive to big deficits. They will become sensitive to those big deficits as they add to the
00:08:17.520 debt. And eventually we have bond rating agencies expressing great concern with the size of our debt
00:08:26.160 and the cost of servicing it. But for now, because we have decent fundamentals, he can sort of take
00:08:32.480 advantage of that. He could just push off the cost of that to future generations. And I think that's what
00:08:37.360 we'll see. I think you'll see historically high deficit with tons of new spending, some of it on defense,
00:08:45.120 but a lot of it in social programs, a lot of it in infrastructure. And he will say, this is what we need,
00:08:50.640 this is what people wanted. They wanted more defense spending. They wanted more infrastructure spending
00:08:54.720 because people did, I think, want more major projects built. People in Western Canada want to
00:09:00.320 be able to get the product that they sit on to market. I just think that they wanted the private
00:09:06.560 sector to do that. They wanted government to get out of the way. Curry's interpretation seems to be that
00:09:11.920 government's going to go to the table with taxpayer money to get this done. And that's a different
00:09:16.480 that's a different take. And it's going to lead to massive, massive deficits.
00:09:22.800 We can't keep running deficits forever.
00:09:26.080 True. True.
00:09:27.440 True. When does this actually hit the wall?
00:09:33.600 I mean, we saw this. We saw the room that, ultimately, Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin had
00:09:40.160 in the 1990s. And then the premiers, in the years following, had to, the political room,
00:09:45.520 they had to cut back on spending. That was because things got so bad that the public understood it was
00:09:51.840 necessary and that this sort of tough medicine was actually what they wanted from elected officials.
00:09:56.160 I just don't think we're there yet, sadly. I wish we were because it would be easier to
00:09:59.760 deal with it now than it will be whenever this time comes. I think a lot of it comes down to
00:10:05.120 debt to GDP ratio and other markers of the extent to which our economy can handle that level of debt
00:10:11.200 servicing. There is some concern, like you see some initial concern, for instance, in BC, the credit
00:10:17.280 rating agencies are starting to express real concern with the size of their debt and deficit.
00:10:22.400 That will happen eventually at the federal level. It's just that I think Mark Carney's view is,
00:10:27.440 it's not happening to me this year, so I'll get away with what I can get away with.
00:10:32.400 I worry that the chaos that he has inherited gives him an excuse for just about anything that he wants
00:10:40.080 to do. Does the Conservative Party leadership have anxieties that things will just be taken to a
00:10:49.440 different level of chaos and irresponsibility that, frankly, we can never recover from?
00:10:57.840 I think that what happened in the election that helped get Carney elected was there were sort of,
00:11:03.360 I don't want to oversimplify, but there were sort of two types of people. There were people who are in
00:11:07.680 a precarious state due to the challenges related to cost of living. They either couldn't afford to buy
00:11:13.680 a home or if they did have a home, their mortgage was taking up a huge percentage of their take-home pay.
00:11:18.880 In some cases, people were struggling to get food, to fill their car with gas, etc. They were living
00:11:24.000 a life where Canada was just not delivering for them, where they felt like their children would be
00:11:28.800 worse off than they were, that they were worse off than their parents were. And those people voted for
00:11:33.280 Pierre Paliyev and the Conservatives. And there were a lot of them, don't forget. I mean, Paliyev did
00:11:38.160 quite well by historical standards in terms of the size of his voting coalition. There were also a number
00:11:43.200 of people, mostly older, mostly in homes that were bought and paid for, with stocks that fared well in
00:11:51.520 an inflationary environment, who were worried about one thing and one thing only, and that was their
00:11:57.360 distaste for Donald Trump. And those people spent a lot of time watching CNN, watching this man they
00:12:03.680 didn't like at all, and wanting a prime minister who was going to share their distaste for Donald Trump.
00:12:10.480 And those voters voted for Mark Carney. I think those, many of those voters cared about Donald Trump and
00:12:16.880 they also wanted someone they felt was like serious and competent, could do geopolitics. So if those issues remain
00:12:24.560 pressing, and the world seems chaotic from that perspective, that will help Carney, because he is
00:12:29.920 perceived to be branded as someone who can deal with that. If, however, the the microeconomic issues
00:12:36.480 of domestic economic policy become problematic, cost of living gets worse, inflation maybe goes up in
00:12:43.760 some key categories, or worst of all, I think for a government, unemployment starts to really climb,
00:12:49.200 because the economy softens. I think Carney will try to blame that on Trump, because that allows him to
00:12:54.080 then talk about Trump again. But I don't know that Canadians are going to totally buy it. At a certain
00:12:58.960 point, they're going to say, Okay, but what's your plan to fix the economy? You seem to be doing a lot
00:13:03.680 of what the last guy did. And, and I think Pierre Polyev's chance is really to say, I would treat our
00:13:08.320 economy differently. I would get government out of the way, I would deregulate, I would reduce costs,
00:13:16.000 I would lower taxes, and say to Canadians, like, that's how we fix this problem we're in. And so it depends
00:13:22.880 what kind of chaos you're talking about, I guess. And that I think will determine who can be successful.
00:13:28.000 All right. Well, let's move on. Let's talk about Mr. Polyev. He's won his election handily. He's,
00:13:36.320 he must be in good spirits as he heads back to, to Ottawa. What do you think, say,
00:13:43.280 what's it going to be like? Should we all be tuning into question period on the, on the second day of the
00:13:49.920 new parliament? I mean, I think parliament is an area of strength for Mr. Polyev. He likes to debate.
00:13:56.240 He likes the cut and thrust of debate. He likes to put polls and arguments show where his opponents
00:14:02.800 are weak. And question period is the forum for that. And it's important. Canadians, you know,
00:14:09.200 see clips of question period, it, it trickles through into the news that they consume. But it's not
00:14:15.200 everything. I think Polyev needs to keep that in mind. A lot of why he was successful over the last
00:14:21.200 couple of years as he built his popularity, popularity and toward the country was meeting
00:14:27.520 Canadians where they were. He would host rallies, he would hold round tables, he would go into
00:14:32.240 communities and meet with people. And he wouldn't just talk to them, he would also listen. And that
00:14:37.280 gave him this incredible ability to see where problems were arising for people in the moment. All of this
00:14:44.240 was happening at the same time as Justin Trudeau was very stuck in his Ottawa bubble. He just seemed
00:14:49.200 more and more out of touch with regular people. You know, Chrystia Freeland was telling people that
00:14:53.440 they should cancel their Disney Plus subscription if they were suffering from inflation. I think Kearney
00:15:02.400 risks suffering from the same problem. I don't think Mark Kearney likes meeting with regular
00:15:06.480 Canadians all that much. I think he'd rather be touring European capitals or chairing cabinet. And
00:15:14.000 I think that's a huge advantage for Polyev. If he can, yes, handle question period,
00:15:18.960 but also get out there and keep meeting with Canadians, he will get the forefront of where
00:15:24.080 they're suffering. And he can then bring their problems to Parliament Hill and show where the
00:15:28.320 government is totally falling short.
00:15:30.400 Well, certainly he has. He's demonstrated the talent for doing that. Mr. Kearney seems to have,
00:15:36.080 as you say, he's developed a great talent for charming foreign leaders. Is that actually very helpful for
00:15:41.600 him? Does that play well with Canadians?
00:15:42.960 I think it has over the last six to eight months. Donald Trump, I think, really made Canadians care
00:15:52.240 about geopolitics again in a way that they hadn't for a long time because of the urgency of inflation
00:15:58.800 and the challenges of their economy. That might remain important to people or it might not.
00:16:04.880 If they're losing their jobs or cost of living is getting worse, I think, you know, whether
00:16:10.560 Mark Kearney gets along with Emmanuel Macron is just not going to be as important to them.
00:16:15.440 I think not. I mean, factually, you could make the case that when leaders get too popular overseas,
00:16:21.680 then often there's a, it doesn't play so well at home.
00:16:26.000 Uh, there are.
00:16:28.240 Indeed. And, and especially when things are bad at home, you know, when Justin Trudeau
00:16:32.880 was first elected and he was on the cover of Vogue, he was beloved by world leaders. He was kind
00:16:38.960 of a global celebrity. Canada was doing really well at that point. People were excited to legalize
00:16:45.760 marijuana and see Canada have a handsome prime minister. When inflation's up or unemployment's
00:16:53.520 up, I just think those are lower priorities. Yes. Well, that's, that's kind of the way,
00:16:58.960 that's what I thought you would probably say, but it does bear on the, who do you want to be popular
00:17:03.120 with? And that comes up to the leadership review, which is what in January of next year?
00:17:09.200 It is. Yeah. Late January in Calgary. Um, you know, now that, uh, Mr. Polly, I grew up in,
00:17:15.760 Alberta and Calgary. And now that he's an MP from the greater region, I think it makes sense for them
00:17:21.440 to host the convention there. And I think the leadership is something that the party and the
00:17:26.640 leader need to focus on, make sure that they're prepared for, make sure that he's talking to party
00:17:31.680 members a lot over the coming weeks. But I also think it's fairly safe territory for him. Um, don't
00:17:38.720 forget how much he won the leadership race by, uh, and when it very handily was not a close race,
00:17:44.720 really at all. And that's because I think the party membership really likes him. He just,
00:17:49.120 he's in sort of inherently popular with the party membership. He can't take it for granted, but if
00:17:54.240 he is sort of himself and follows his instincts and pursues, granted the same principles that have
00:17:59.840 been driving him since he was 18 years old, I think he will fail well in that review.
00:18:04.560 Well, let's just push that a little further, Junie. I mean, I, I, it's not that I don't understand what
00:18:10.880 you're saying, but the narrative that's been pushed out by the other side is that, well, you know,
00:18:18.080 people don't really like Mr. Poliarvia. There were some young men who were impressed when he
00:18:22.960 took apart a reporter or two, and maybe those reporters deserve to come up. But he did it too
00:18:28.720 much and he seemed to enjoy it too much. And he's really not a very nice guy. So, uh, I'm going to vote
00:18:35.440 for that nice Mr. Carney who seemed so quietly reassuring. And of course, that's what in fact
00:18:39.920 did happen. There was a demographic that just outright, um, rejected, uh, uh, Mr. Poliarvia,
00:18:46.720 even as there was a whole unexpected, one of young blue collar, uh, working class guys who said,
00:18:51.760 Hey, this is the guy. So look, what about it? Is his likability something that he has to
00:19:00.640 deal with? Or, uh, do we just carry on? Um, I think if you focus on likability, personality looks
00:19:10.960 too much, you risk losing what, uh, what, what made you appeal to people in the first place.
00:19:18.240 The reason voters vote for Poliarvia is because of the issues and because he seems like the kind of
00:19:23.280 fighter who will fix those issues for them. And I think that's a great true north for him. He should
00:19:29.200 stick to the issues that, um, speak to people because they're hurting and to show and show them
00:19:34.960 that they, that he's sort of the fighter for them. Now, could he do that in a way that shows that he
00:19:40.320 is both a fighter who can, you know, tear apart a journalist with silly questions, um, and also that
00:19:46.720 he is a good guy? Uh, I think he can. I mean, it's interesting, but people think he's not, not likable.
00:19:54.240 Um, there are a couple, uh, subject matters that he really can't even talk about without,
00:19:58.960 without crying, without breaking out in, um, getting emotional. And I think because he's so
00:20:05.840 sort of laser focused on getting his message out, I don't know that he likes that when that happens.
00:20:11.360 Um, you know, it happened during the English language debate. It happened on a podcast episode
00:20:15.760 he recorded during the campaign. Personally, I think it's great when it happens because Canadians
00:20:20.960 get a little small glimpse into the sort of soft side of him. The, the part of him that is a dad
00:20:27.040 and a husband and, uh, who really is doing this for the right reasons. He's doing it because he
00:20:34.480 cares. And because when he travels the country, he needs people who are suffering and he wants to try
00:20:39.040 to find a way to help them. And I think that, that piece, the sort of what motives, the why,
00:20:43.600 why are you doing this? Not just what are you going to do for me, but why are you doing it at all?
00:20:47.440 That connects with people in a different way. Uh, and with different voters who, and I think there are
00:20:52.080 voters who need to see that side of him so that when they're making a decision, they say maybe
00:20:56.640 they like him on the issues, but, but Mark Carney gives him, gives them some comfort, um, on the
00:21:02.000 personality traits front. I think there's a way for Polyev to give people that comfort on the
00:21:06.400 personality traits from front that is authentic to who he is. And that sticks to the core issues that
00:21:11.680 work for him, like immigration, crime, cost of living. Um, and I, I hope to see more of it. I think we will.
00:21:16.960 I'm going to last question is going to be in a degree disagree one. I'm going to put words in
00:21:24.080 your mouth. I'm going to say that the worst thing, the worst that things get for Canadians as a
00:21:29.920 consequence of the, the economy that the liberals have produced over 10 years and Mr. Carney's inability
00:21:36.240 to do anything substantive about it, the worst things get for Canadians, the better they get for
00:21:42.480 Mr. Polyev. Agree or disagree? Sadly, I think I agree with that.
00:21:47.040 Um, it's unfortunate, but it's the life of an opposition leader.
00:21:49.520 Mark Carney It's a pity it couldn't be won on the grounds of philosophy and that we all have to
00:21:55.200 suffer so much. All right, Jenny, it's always a pleasure to talk to you. And I do thank you for
00:21:59.520 coming on the show at very short notice. Perhaps we'll talk to you again after the, after Parliament
00:22:05.680 resumes. Thank you. For the Western Standard, I'm Nigel Hannaford.
00:22:16.640 Thank you.
00:22:17.520 Thank you.