Western Standard - October 28, 2025


How Canada’s immigration success story turned into a numbers game

Mentioned
Trudeau Stephen Harper Paul Martin Uber Eats Chrétien Mulroney
MAID violations widespread, ethicist says You Can’t Say That in Canada Anymore — Unless You’re Ben Bankas

Episode Stats


Length

6 minutes

Words per minute

176.13

Word count

1,156

Sentence count

67

Harmful content

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, we discuss the Canadian immigration system and how it has changed since its founding in 1867. We talk about the origins of the system, the changes under the Trudeau government, and the impact of the Syrian refugee crisis.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 So, let's talk about that. I think, I can't find anything to disagree with what you're saying. I mean, pretty hardcore conservatives were maybe a little more skeptical of migration. They'd say, well, let's maybe be a bit more picky and choosy about, I like this country more than that country. People from that part of the world maybe integrate a little bit better than that.
00:00:21.380 But in the broad strokes, pretty much everyone was agreed that, yeah, we're choosing economic migrants. 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. The debates were always on the margins on this. That's changed.
00:00:41.360 So, but broadly speaking, most people think, like yourself, we got migration right for a pretty extended period of time. And then we changed things pretty radically. How did, and this began under the Trudeau government, I think in kind of halfway through it, roughly. Why, what was it they so radically changed and why did they make such radical changes?
00:01:05.420 Yeah. So, so a few different things happened. And the Trudeau government came into office kind of wanting to argue, I think, that the, that the conservative party under Stephen Harper had, had somehow been insufficiently generous and insufficiently open to immigration.
00:01:29.920 Um, and, 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 Chrétien government and going all the way back to Mulroney.
00:01:47.740 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 issues.
00:01:59.920 implications for itself and for the rest of Europe. And 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. Is that what you're talking about in terms of perception that the conservatives were seen as, uh, not open enough to migration?
00:02:17.800 I think that was, I think that was a, that was a part of the piece. 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. Um, Stephen Harper has run an immigration policy. That's, that's not fully Canadian and generous and we're going to do more. And we're never particularly specific about this. Um, Syrian refugees was part of the piece. And by the way, the Syrian refugee arrival worked really well. And to me, the Syrian refugee arrival was actually
00:02:22.800 an example of how the Canadian immigration system works works well. Every single one of those people, the Syrian refugee arrival worked really well. And to me, the Syrian refugee arrival was actually an example of how the Canadian immigration
00:02:52.800 people who was brought here as a Syrian refugee came from overseas was vetted before they came. Um, the numbers were not excessive. 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. It was somewhat more, but not that much more, but that was actually a fairly small piece of it. So there was this rhetorical push, um, from the Trudeau government to say more immigration would be better just vaguely without specifics. And as they went on, they started,
00:03:22.800 to get into it to get into it a bit more. Um, and it, but it really, really exploded during the pandemic. So prior to the pandemic, there had already been this run up in the number of temporary foreign workers and foreign students. And, and what people don't understand is that Canada basically went from having one immigration system, which is permanent migration.
00:03:51.800 You become a permanent resident and you become a citizen of Canada. That was always the core of the Canadian immigration system. We kind of developed a second system, which is people who come here as temporary foreign workers or as students. And a large percentage of those students are temporary foreign workers in, in disguise because they're, they're going to not particularly high quality programs.
00:04:13.800 And they're working full-time while they're in school. The government's finally scaled that back, but they had scaled it up previously. So we kind of had these two parallel systems and the temporary system by 2022 had become bigger than the permanent system. And by 2023, it was much bigger than the permanent system. And that's how you went from having a fairly small number of temporary residents in Canada.
00:04:36.800 Canada. 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. But the temporary resident number is so much bigger than the number of permanent resident places available each year. So there was like, some of this stuff is just an incredibly basic failure to count.
00:05:04.800 To figure out that if you're going 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. You kind of have to say, hang on a second. There have to be some limits. So the government under the Trudeau government, permanent immigration was doubled, but temporary immigration went up far, far more than that. It was quadrupled or quintupled.
00:05:28.800 Um, that's that. And, 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.
00:05:38.800 come to Canada. And there were no caps on the number of temporary foreign workers that businesses could hire. 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. 0.64
00:05:54.800 immigrants who got 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.
00:06:09.800 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, uh, which I don't think is at all the case, but the government momentarily became convinced of that by business.
00:06:28.800 So it was a strange marriage of progressive ideas and, and, and business lobbying.