Western Standard - How Trudeau broke immigration

00:00:00.000 good day i'm derek phildebrandt publisher of the western standard today we're talking

00:00:17.040 migration mass migration uh we've got a really special guest in today tony keller he is a

00:00:25.140 columnist with the Globe and Mail.

00:00:27.180 Don't hold it against them.

00:00:28.760 He does some really fantastic writing

00:00:31.020 on the topic and

00:00:32.840 has

00:00:33.700 recently published a book

00:00:36.840 that I've read a good deal

00:00:39.060 excerpts from. Not the whole thing yet, but

00:00:40.980 I'm absolutely going to be ordering a copy to get

00:00:43.000 through the whole thing. He's the author of

00:00:44.940 Borderline Chaos, How Canada

00:00:46.940 Got Immigration Right and

00:00:48.940 Then Wrong.

00:00:50.960 Tony, thank you very much

00:00:52.700 for joining us here today.

00:00:54.140 Derek it's good to be here with you um so we'll dive straight into it as I said I didn't read

00:01:00.480 uh I have not read the book yet but I'm absolutely I'm gonna order it actually as soon as I'm done

00:01:04.620 it here I gotta read the whole thing uh we were talking just before we uh started rolling that

00:01:09.780 uh you know two years ago immigration only started to come onto my radar uh I've cared about it in

00:01:16.760 the context of Europe and do a lesser extent at the United States for a long time seeing

00:01:19.960 seeing some maybe some negative things happening in Europe that I have an affinity for and care

00:01:24.540 about but wasn't affecting me it wasn't in my face daily life um uh but it wasn't in my it only

00:01:32.260 started to come on my radar in the last two years as a major issue four years ago I probably wouldn't

00:01:35.960 have rated it in my top 20 as a as an issue I would care about as a Canadian or Albertan voter

00:01:40.960 uh but today it's it's number one it's it's kind of a litmus test issue of candidates I will vote

00:01:48.360 for uh i mean i i would i'm only slightly exaggerating to say it's a litmus test about

00:01:53.080 who i would vote for for school board trustee what are you going to do about immigration um

00:01:59.000 unlike europe and the united states though canada for at least in our modern history as long as

00:02:06.040 i've been alive essentially immigration has not been a major issue of polarized political debate

00:02:13.720 in Canada um but that that has obviously changed uh why do you think that's changed so um to go

00:02:21.960 back to the the subtitle of my book how Canada got immigration right and then wrong let's you

00:02:27.880 got to talk about the right before you talk about the wrong and and what Canada got right

00:02:32.680 and it's quite remarkable is we had this kind of left-right consensus conservatives new democrats

00:02:38.840 liberals all basically were happy with the same immigration policy um canada actually had a fairly

00:02:45.880 high rate of immigration but we also had a fairly high level of border control meaning that people

00:02:52.040 who immigrated to canada were largely chosen by canada canada had a real focus on economic

00:02:58.440 immigrants and on trying to attract and choose immigrants who had high levels of skills high

00:03:05.480 high levels of education, meaning they would benefit Canada when they came here and you put

00:03:10.300 it all together. And so Canada had this kind of magic situation where we actually had much higher

00:03:17.380 levels of immigration than the United States or most European countries. Yet we had no political

00:03:23.020 controversy because Canadians, I believe, largely felt that immigration was a choice. It was a

00:03:30.980 national choice. The level we were getting, the number of people we were getting, the type of

00:03:35.080 people we were getting was all a national choice and Canadians felt like, hey, this is all under

00:03:39.880 control. And in fact, because Canada controls its borders and controls its immigration, we're going

00:03:44.980 to actually have even more immigration than the United States and Europe. And I think the sense

00:03:52.120 of confidence that Canadians had in the system collapsed in sort of 2021, 2022, 2023. And that's,

00:04:02.660 you know, my book is about that, the happy past, but it's mostly about the things that then went

00:04:09.180 wrong over the last few years, um, that really did damage the immigration system and Canadians

00:04:16.580 lost confidence with good reason because the system had been changed in, in, in, in ways that

00:04:23.660 were, that were not good for Canada and that caused Canadians to lose confidence. So, uh,

00:04:29.500 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.

00:04:43.720 about i like this country more than that country you know the people from that part of the world

00:04:48.300 maybe integrate a little bit better than that but on in the broad strokes pretty much was ever

00:04:53.020 everyone was agreed that yeah this we're choosing economic migrants yeah we had family reunification

00:04:58.040 stuff like that that were maybe a little more controversial but they never met it onto the

00:05:01.340 mainstream political debate uh the debates were always on the margins uh on this and that's

00:05:09.600 changed uh so but broadly speaking most people think like yourself we got migration right for

00:05:15.680 a pretty extended period of time and then we changed things pretty radically how did and

00:05:21.920 this began under the trudeau government uh i think in kind of halfway through it uh roughly why what

00:05:29.120 was it they so radically changed and why did they make such radical changes yeah so so a few

00:05:36.880 different things happened um and the the trudeau government came into office kind of wanting to

00:05:45.520 argue i think that that that the conservative party under stephen harper had had somehow been

00:05:54.160 insufficiently generous and insufficiently open to immigration um and and i think there may have

00:06:01.680 have been a fair number of voters who actually believed that. The truth, of course, was that

00:06:06.360 under the Harper government, Canada had basically the same immigration levels that it had had

00:06:11.760 under the Paul Martin government and under the Chrétien government and going all the way back

00:06:15.520 to Mulroney. I don't mean to interrupt, but are you referring to, I remember that 2015 election

00:06:21.180 that was right around the time as the Syrian migration crisis. Germany obviously made some

00:06:27.700 decisions that had big implications for itself and for the rest of Europe. And I remember that

00:06:32.340 became a big topic and it kind of got into a bidding war between the Liberals, the NDP and

00:06:36.400 the Conservatives at that time about who was going to take the most refugees. Is that what you're

00:06:40.300 talking about in terms of perception that the Conservatives were seen as not open enough to

00:06:45.740 migration? I think that was a part of the piece. But there are words in the Liberal platform and

00:06:53.640 And they aren't really backed by any substance, just saying, you know, we're going to be more open.

00:06:58.820 Stephen Harper has run an immigration policy that's not fully Canadian and generous, and we're going to do more.

00:07:05.480 And we're never particularly specific about this.

00:07:08.500 Syrian refugees was part of the piece.

00:07:10.600 And by the way, the Syrian refugee arrival worked really well.

00:07:13.160 And to me, the Syrian refugee arrival was actually an example of how the Canadian immigration system works well.

00:07:19.820 every single one of those people who was brought here as a syrian refugee came from overseas was

00:07:25.740 vetted before they came um the numbers were not excessive and the truth was what the heart what

00:07:31.900 the trudeau government did wasn't that much more than what the harper government would have done

00:07:35.420 it was somewhat more but not that much more but that was actually a fairly small piece of it so

00:07:40.060 there was this rhetorical push um from the trudeau government to say more immigration would be better

00:07:47.020 just vaguely without specifics and as they went on they started to get into it a bit more um and

00:07:53.820 it but it really really exploded during the pandemic so prior to the pandemic there had

00:08:00.780 already been this run-up in the number of temporary foreign workers and foreign students and and

00:08:09.340 what people don't understand is that canada basically went from having

00:08:13.980 one immigration system which is permanent migration you become a permanent resident

00:08:21.980 and you become a citizen canada that was always the core of the canadian immigration system

00:08:25.600 we kind of developed a second system which is people who come here as temporary foreign workers

00:08:31.260 or as students and a large percentage of those students are temporary foreign workers

00:08:36.680 in in disguise because they're they're going to not particularly high quality programs

00:08:42.620 and they're working full-time while they're in school the government's finally scaled that back

00:08:46.300 but they had scaled it up previously so you kind of had these two parallel systems and the temporary

00:08:51.220 system by 2022 had become bigger than the permanent system and by 2023 it was much bigger than the

00:08:59.260 permanent system and that's how you went from having a fairly small number of temporary residents

00:09:04.340 in Canada uh let's say in the year 2000 to today we have three million people in Canada who are

00:09:12.440 temporary residents all of whom came because they want to become permanent residents but the temporary

00:09:18.280 resident number is so much bigger than the number of permanent resident places available each year

00:09:26.040 so there was like some of this stuff is just an incredibly basic failure to count to figure out

00:09:34.280 that if you're going to let a lot of people through a side door who hope to get in through the front

00:09:39.400 door you you kind of have to count you kind of have to say hang on a second there have to be

00:09:45.340 some limits so the government under the trudeau government permanent immigration was doubled

00:09:50.840 but temporary immigration went up far far more than that it was quadrupled or quintupled um

00:09:58.900 that's that and and and the second part the temporary immigration part there were no caps

00:10:04.760 there were no caps on the number of foreign students who could come to canada and there

00:10:08.100 were no caps on the number of temporary foreign workers that businesses could hire and that is

00:10:14.740 sort of the problem that we we went from a system that had a sense of control and limits and

00:10:21.000 targeting high-end immigrants who got educations and skills to an immigration system that became

00:10:27.600 very tilted towards bringing in people who could work low-end jobs in warehouses in fast food

00:10:35.580 um delivering uber eats things like that we actually torqued our system towards filling

00:10:43.160 low-end jobs and the government became convinced um that canada had a massive labor shortage and

00:10:49.860 a labor shortage at the bottom of the labor market uh which i don't think is at all the case

00:10:54.640 but the government momentarily became convinced of that by business so it was a strange marriage

00:10:59.260 of progressive ideas and business lobbying.

00:11:03.820 So I want to go further on that.

00:11:06.920 You know, I think you called it, you know, it was kind of a,

00:11:09.560 I'm paraphrasing you, but it was, you know, it was kind of the

00:11:11.820 liberals, I think, view corporate and business as conservative.

00:11:16.020 I don't think that's necessarily true, but it was, you know,

00:11:18.580 kind of corporate elites wanted this, but at the same time,

00:11:23.540 it fit with kind of a progressivist ideological need

00:11:26.960 to be more multicultural, more

00:11:29.100 multiracial, more multilingual, etc.

00:11:32.020 And so they

00:11:32.780 saw no conflict. But I think

00:11:35.000 the obvious conflict, I don't know why they'd

00:11:36.960 ever said anything, should have been

00:11:39.260 labor.

00:11:41.340 Like, you know, like labor

00:11:42.800 organizations appeared

00:11:45.040 maybe I just missed it, but I

00:11:47.060 watched these guys relatively closely and

00:11:48.800 I didn't see a peep from labor

00:11:50.920 organizations. And it cut

00:11:53.020 the lower

00:11:54.800 rungs kind of out of the labor

00:11:56.900 market, replacing them with, you know, I think of, you know, if I go to Tim Hortons or McDonald's

00:12:02.180 used to be, you know, Canadian, mostly Canadian born kids with their first job, getting a little

00:12:06.900 experience. But if I have to pay them a $15 minimum wage for someone to fill that job, I'd probably

00:12:12.700 rather hire a foreign adult who's like more likely to show up for work on time than a unreliable

00:12:19.200 Canadian kid. And that's why I, that's at least why I think we're just not seeing as many Canadians

00:12:24.760 working these low-end jobs, or Uber Eats, you know, it's not entirely, but mostly, I think,

00:12:31.680 new migrant labor and kind of cut the bottom out of the labor market, especially when you have,

00:12:36.380 you know, fairly high minimum wages. Why was there no pushback from, you know, people or

00:12:44.260 organizations that are kind of supposed to represent that part of the labor market? I get why

00:12:48.780 big business wants to suppress wages at the bottom end, because then you end up suppressing

00:12:54.640 them kind of everywhere else when you suppress them at the bottom end to an extent at least uh

00:12:59.120 i might save you know 25 cents on my uber eats uh and so i guess there's a you know i'm not competing

00:13:06.880 for that labor market so there's a benefit for me as someone who's not at the bottom end so i i

00:13:11.200 benefit maybe a little bit by that uh but people at the lower end don't seem to get any benefit by

00:13:16.320 this why was there no pushback for those people in the canadian labor market who were displaced

00:13:21.520 that to me has always been sort of the the fascinating thing that this was a policy

00:13:28.780 where there was kind of an all stakeholder agreement um you know you have groups like

00:13:37.580 the century initiative so that would be sort of as you put it big business elites saying hey

00:13:42.660 canada does need higher immigration we need more numbers and they they had some details on

00:13:48.580 better immigration but they really focused on more you have all kinds of small businesses it's not

00:13:54.240 just big business you're all your local businesses are saying we want to be able to hire temporary

00:13:59.760 foreign workers um one way or another because the guy down the street has been able to do it so we

00:14:05.600 want to do it so it's not just sort of some people off on a tower in bay street on the 45th floor

00:14:11.780 it's people right down on main street who are saying look i want this opportunity because the

00:14:15.820 business down the street, he's getting the opportunity. You've got colleges and universities

00:14:19.760 lobbying for it, saying, if we can bring in more and more and more foreign students, we can make

00:14:25.160 some money. And some of them were super responsible about that. And a lot of institutions, lower end

00:14:30.760 institutions, were not at all responsible. You have a number of provincial governments who are

00:14:35.780 lobbying the federal government and saying, we want more immigration and we need more temporary

00:14:41.160 migration there's a labor shortage and some governments Ontario in particular saying we want

00:14:47.740 more temporary foreign more students more foreign students lots more foreign students as we think

00:14:52.280 that's going to help finance our higher education sector and again the students tended to go in

00:14:58.040 Ontario to the lowest end institutions not the highest end institutions you've got progressive

00:15:03.420 groups saying immigration is good inherently like it's a value it's not a it's not a practical

00:15:08.440 matter it's a value and if you're saying more immigration that's good and if you're saying

00:15:11.820 same or less that's bad the liberals themselves rhetorically kind of adopted that so there's

00:15:16.740 sort of nobody against it and to me the surprise is that there was not really any pushback from

00:15:23.600 labor um but there there really wasn't uh and yeah that that is kind of a surprise i i will say

00:15:33.200 that you made one point that i think is is quite important which is for someone who's upper middle

00:15:39.860 class like everything in the economy has costs and benefits so for someone who's upper middle class

00:15:44.440 having or middle class upper middle class certain things become cheaper if you have a lot more

00:15:50.920 people arriving to do low-end jobs if you're doing a bit of wage suppression at the bottom end of the

00:15:57.260 market um your burrito is going to be a little cheaper and the delivery of your burrito is going

00:16:03.480 to be a little cheaper and your ability to order something from amazon and have it delivered

00:16:07.060 is going to be a little cheaper um so it's it is about choices like there are so there are benefits

00:16:13.640 to that but what you have to remember is that every person in the canadian economy is you know

00:16:20.500 they're a taxpayer but they're a user of taxpayer services they're they're providing labor but they

00:16:26.660 also need benefits. So if you have a whole lot of people at the bottom end of the labor market

00:16:30.480 earning very low wages, all those people still have to send their kids to school and they still

00:16:37.740 have to use social services. They still have to use healthcare services. So if you're bringing

00:16:42.740 in a lot of people whose wages and hence whose taxes are going to be much lower, someone else

00:16:49.280 is going to have to help subsidize those services. So everything's got costs and benefits and there

00:16:54.740 was just not really a great deal of thought about the costs and there was an enormous focus on look

00:17:00.820 at the benefits and pretending as if there was nothing on the other side of the ledger so yeah

00:17:07.220 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

00:17:14.460 we fix this uh you know further in the interview but you know i saw there was an ad uh or a social

00:17:19.940 media post running as an ad from citizenship and immigration canada uh just uh i saw it just

00:17:26.360 the other week uh where i forget the exact wording of it but i think i've been fair when they said

00:17:31.760 like uh canada has free health care have you considered coming to canada to which i thought

00:17:37.220 that is the most insane advertisement ever like we're saying come to my store so i can give you

00:17:43.260 something for free uh that that's a one-way transaction uh you know that's why we should

00:17:49.840 at least in theory limit uh family unification migration because you know grandma and grandpa

00:17:55.520 coming from from overseas they're not spending their life as taxpayers contributing to the social

00:18:02.460 contract of things and therefore then able to receive the benefits later in life uh no he's

00:18:09.160 just saying come here and you know whatever illness you have we're going to take care of it

00:18:13.860 etc advertising the burden on the canadian taxpayer for it not not the benefit i and that

00:18:21.120 was very recently after things are supposed to have been tamped down um so you know you could

00:18:26.620 address that if you like yeah let's talk quickly about that before i go on to yeah so so i don't

00:18:33.020 want to put um too much weight on that ad because again keep in mind you know government of canada

00:18:37.680 puts out 5 000 web pages a day this was one that sort of got blown up and highlighted uh i forget

00:18:44.320 even which ministry it was in just wanted to say hey look here are the advantages of coming to

00:18:48.560 canada and citizenship and immigration was okay so so for what it's worth they should know yeah

00:18:53.600 but for what it's worth that is actually one of the benefits of coming to canada so so we should

00:18:58.080 try to sell the benefits of canada but we should also be thoughtful about sort of choosing who gets

00:19:05.280 those benefits and listen what I want to say is look my book is a pro-immigration book but it's

00:19:12.540 also a pro-limits and thoughtful sensible behavior around immigration book so I think people of every

00:19:21.200 race every nationality every ethnicity every religion should be able to come to Canada should

00:19:25.480 be able to apply to come to Canada but let's just be thoughtful about who we choose to allow to come

00:19:31.940 to Canada, which is how the system was working for a generation, and how it sort of stopped

00:19:40.200 working over the last few years. That to me is the key. We should try to sell Canada really hard

00:19:47.200 and get the best immigrants possible. And in the past, we had family reunification,

00:19:53.020 but that was around sort of 20% of the system, and it still is. We had refugees, that's sort of 15%

00:19:59.340 of the system and it still is and we had economic migrants sort of 60 something percent of the

00:20:04.060 system but the percentages didn't change that much what really changed was we became much less choosy

00:20:11.740 on the economic immigration side and we dropped standards enormously so to to kind of uh anticipate

00:20:21.660 a follow-up question here that's where we gotta go is be smart on who we're choosing on the economic

00:20:28.620 immigration side so uh i've read i think in excerpts and i've uh watched or listened to

00:20:36.060 some of the interviews you've already done and uh so in it you know you've said you know they

00:20:41.620 the liberals did not change uh uh the immigration policy as necessarily a particularly ideological

00:20:49.200 agenda it was not meant to replace the canadian born population um and i i very much agree that

00:20:58.080 yeah there was big business pushing for things there was this kind of all stakeholder at least

00:21:02.900 the stakeholders they'd listen to all stakeholder consensus and also I think a lot of people like

00:21:07.360 myself were just not paying attention to it because it just hadn't been a major issue here before

00:21:12.240 but historically in the broad strokes migrants have tended to vote liberal or progressive

00:21:19.760 there's been you know the the anomaly to that was 2011 federally where the conservatives had

00:21:26.400 a major breakthrough with new Canadians. But even then, you know, I think essentially mitigated the

00:21:32.320 liberal advantage on it, perhaps. But, you know, they didn't necessarily become a strong conservative

00:21:36.400 cohort, but that was a one-off. Historically speaking, and not just in Canada, but in the

00:21:42.420 Western democracies broadly, migrants have tended more often than not to vote for more progressivist

00:21:49.320 parties that are seen as more open to multiculturalism, etc. That happens in Europe,

00:21:55.000 habits in the states um and at least kind of the the more for it's an abused term but the kind of

00:22:03.600 the woke progressivist wing of the liberal party saw whiteness or westernness as inherently evil

00:22:10.960 and guilt-ridden is there really no partisan was there no uh partisan or ideological aspect of this

00:22:21.160 beyond just kind of the stakeholder consensus to do this because it would be a good in and of itself

00:22:27.780 to change the demographic makeup of Canada? So I'll say two things on that. One is I don't,

00:22:36.160 I have no reason to believe that there was any sort of conscious calculation within the Liberal

00:22:44.520 Party or anybody else to say, aha, we're going to change the demographic makeup of Canada. Again,

00:22:49.940 other people can try to look into this I have no reason to believe that's that's what was going on

00:22:55.240 what I will say is that the liberal party did believe and a lot of progressive people believe

00:23:01.780 that immigration is a is a value and and and and as a result they don't think about immigration

00:23:09.560 in the way I'm thinking of it I'm thinking of it as as a calculus I'm saying okay look we're going

00:23:15.640 to have some we're going to have immigration we should have immigration there are all kinds of

00:23:19.420 positive things about immigration let's try to maximize the positives and let's try to minimize

00:23:24.040 the negatives because every every policy choice has positives and negatives so let's just try to

00:23:28.280 do immigration well rather than doing immigration badly rather than simply saying however much

00:23:32.720 immigration we have we should have more and once we get to that higher level we should have even

00:23:36.900 more because it's up value what i'm saying is it let's try to do this as a rational policy analysis

00:23:42.720 of benefit to canada and benefit to canadians as opposed to just we we must have higher immigration

00:23:48.580 um so i i think that's you know that's a that's how i'm coming at this i i one other thing i want

00:23:59.600 to say is on the issue of how immigrants vote it's complicated um people's votes you know

00:24:08.160 change over time and one of the things that i've found very interesting you brought up the 2011

00:24:14.060 election where the Harper government did very well with, um, non-white and immigrant voters

00:24:20.900 and really was shifting the needle. And you also saw it in the, um, in the most recent federal

00:24:28.220 election where, uh, in Brampton and some other areas, the GTA analysis suggests that a whole

00:24:34.940 lot of immigrant and non-white voters, um, shifted to the conservative party. They were upset about

00:24:41.240 various issues such as crime and they shifted the conservative party so i i think one of the

00:24:47.760 great things about canada is that the conservative party the liberal party the ndp they all want to

00:24:54.300 attract immigrant and non-white voters they are no one's running against immigrants no one's or

00:25:01.480 historically no one has for generations and that's great there's there all the parties have

00:25:08.180 essentially said if you're a canadian voter we would like you to vote for us we're not targeting

00:25:13.420 you except we're trying to we're trying to reach you with our message to me that's that's a pretty

00:25:18.600 good thing because we all have to live together um and you know so i don't subscribe to any theory

00:25:26.620 of controlling immigration or limiting immigration for sort of racial ethnic or cultural reasons

00:25:33.180 Canada is already a multicultural, multiracial, multi-ethnic society. The numbers, you know,

00:25:41.480 Canada has changed a lot in the last generation and we can't turn back the clock on that. We have

00:25:47.200 to figure out how people of different races and ethnicities and faiths and beliefs can all live

00:25:53.160 together and all love Canada. And even as we have disagreements about which political party we vote

00:25:59.540 for and which part we want to have in government. But hopefully those disagreements aren't going to

00:26:03.640 break down on racial lines. They're going to break down on ideological lines, which is fun.

00:26:10.800 So I want to go down this path a bit more. I guess this is the spicy part of the topic.

00:26:17.740 So, you know, you've talked about the economic and labor market impacts. You know, it's, I think

00:26:24.720 where the sector really started to break into the mainstream conversation was around housing. All

00:26:28.240 All of a sudden, you know, housing is actually, it's a multilayered issue.

00:26:31.460 It would be very unfair to place it squarely on the feet of migration.

00:26:35.860 But migration is a major component of it.

00:26:38.780 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 30 years old and I have no chance of ever owning a home.

00:26:48.520 That does make me racist.

00:26:49.780 What's behind this?

00:26:50.880 Oh, OK, migration started to enter the mainstream conversation from there.

00:26:55.140 Social services, we talked about that, you know.

00:26:58.240 how are people going to pay into the system when you've kind of flooded the bottom end of the

00:27:01.880 labor market? But one of the big things that I think has become a more mainstream conversation

00:27:08.700 lately, despite I think the reticence of many to talk about it, is the cultural impact. That

00:27:14.720 it's not just that people look differently in your communities, it's that they're acting

00:27:21.680 differently. That we've taken in so many so fast that there hasn't been an ability to assimilate

00:27:27.200 And 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 basic values, our cultural norms.

00:27:38.980 You might, you know, we're all fine, keep eating, but, you know, the food from where you're from, that's all fine and good.

00:27:43.120 We all, we like all that.

00:27:45.840 But some broad cultural norms that you have to be assimilated into, language, et cetera, we haven't been able to do that.

00:27:55.200 And I think that is where the, uh, the migration conversation is also going.

00:28:01.540 It's beyond the economic, it's beyond the physical, it's beyond the labor

00:28:05.640 market and housing it's in the, what do you think has been the cultural

00:28:11.700 impact of, of this policy and what do you think has been the backlash or

00:28:16.260 where do you think that backlash is going?

00:28:18.000 So this is sort of where I, my, I'm on one side of this line and, and, and

00:28:23.700 you're on the other side of this line. Like I, I want to keep the conversation on, um, economic

00:28:29.460 issues. I want to keep the conversation on how do we benefit Canada in ways that will, you know,

00:28:35.200 benefit the labor market, benefit Canadians, benefit our social services. I, that's where

00:28:39.340 I want to focus. I don't know how to run an immigration system based on kind of, you know,

00:28:48.720 ways of preserving canada's culture the way it is or ways of not changing canadian culture i

00:28:55.240 one i don't know how to do that two i don't want to do that and i don't really think it's possible

00:29:00.220 look my ancestors came to canada um so on my mother's side from the russian empire

00:29:07.560 they practiced a weird religion they didn't speak english and were you mennonites or something or

00:29:15.120 they were jewish um and here i am talking to you in english and you just think i'm a white guy

00:29:21.860 canadian um but i if i show you pictures of them you would think they were weird exotic people and

00:29:26.860 i'm quite and i can tell you i can guarantee you the people who encountered them when they arrived

00:29:31.280 in 1894 thought they were weird exotic people um on my father's side of the family they came here

00:29:37.820 from from germany also jewish also wouldn't have spoken wouldn't have spoken english so and yet

00:29:43.440 somehow you know um canada's canada actually does has historically done an extremely good job

00:29:52.680 of canadians don't like to use the word assimilation um but the truth is we have we

00:29:59.440 you know people come here and they they become canadians and they and they come to love canada

00:30:04.020 and it all works i i can't guarantee you that every single person in every single place but

00:30:08.760 is going to you know it's going to work out but it is it is generally worked out and i don't know

00:30:14.340 how to do things differently and i i honestly don't want to um run this on run the immigration

00:30:25.580 system on on kind of cultural metrics i i think the logical way to do it is to say let's run it

00:30:33.100 on economic metrics.

00:30:34.100 And again, to kind of, and sort of flesh that out a bit, we built a system, an immigration

00:30:38.860 system over the last few years, the Trudeau government with the help of the provinces

00:30:41.680 and businesses built a system that said, we really want a hundred thousand new fast food

00:30:47.860 workers.

00:30:48.860 It would have been nice if they had said, we want 10,000 more doctors.

00:30:53.980 Look, I'm with you on the economic side, but I think, yeah, we perhaps are on different

00:30:59.000 sides of the line on the cultural side, you know, you know, we kind of woke up one day to find

00:31:07.800 crowds of people in our streets, not all migrants, that'd be very unfair to say, but

00:31:12.140 large components being migrants holding anti-Semitic demonstrations. And we're like,

00:31:17.760 oh my God, where did all these anti-Semites come from? And, you know, yeah, it's got the regular

00:31:21.920 blue haired college or university campus types. It's got them in there and, you know, your regular

00:31:28.860 They're crunchy professional protesters, but big components being migrants who come from a part of the world where disproportionately there's a bit of conflict and we're all of a sudden, you know, saying, oh, my God, where did this all come from?

00:31:42.720 And we're all kind of afraid to say it.

00:31:45.860 I'm a little less so.

00:31:47.580 But like that is that's a shocking thing to many people when we see this kind of thing in our streets.

00:31:53.020 And it is not entirely, but in significant measure, an imported issue that we just wouldn't have seen on our streets until that recently. And that's cultural. I don't think necessarily, you know, targeting this, recalibrating to economic issues would necessarily fix that problem. Maybe you disagree. Tell me where I'm wrong.

00:32:21.820 Yeah, so look, I disagree with you on two bases. One, as I said, I don't know how we can run an immigration system based on some kind of a cultural test. Two, honestly, having gone to some of those protests to see who's doing what and who's protesting and chanting from the river to the sea, boy, there are a lot of white people.

00:32:47.400 There are a lot of white progressives who were born in Canada and went to university in Canada. So these are cultural shifts that I think would be happening regardless of the immigration system. Um, and, and so, and I, and again, I don't know how we can talk about this given that Canada is already, um, a multicultural, multiracial, multiethnic society.

00:33:14.820 I just think it would tear society apart if we said there are certain religions, we don't want any more of those people in Canada.

00:33:21.800 They're already in Canada.

00:33:23.680 Canada already has millions of people of different races and different religions.

00:33:28.640 And I don't know, like, there's no turning the clock back.

00:33:32.720 We got to figure out how to make it work with the clock going forward.

00:33:36.460 That is my argument.

00:33:39.280 All right, well, let's look forward about how we fix this.

00:33:42.980 I think you and I will probably see eye to eye on a lot of it.

00:33:46.760 The guy producing this show right now, I won't get into his details.

00:33:52.080 He'll get bashful.

00:33:53.500 But he's a relatively recent migrant.

00:33:57.220 I'm not just blowing smoke up his arse here, but he's a hard worker.

00:34:00.040 He's competent.

00:34:01.900 Despite not being fairly recent, I think fairly assimilated.

00:34:05.340 He's brought some of his interesting food into the office from time to time, and we like it.

00:34:08.780 um you know so even in this wave some great folks have come through but obviously far too many have

00:34:16.700 come through and far too many who are not of the previous caliber we used to expect have come

00:34:22.240 through now you've said that you know the government started to turn down the taps they've

00:34:26.700 not turned off the taps nowhere close to turning off the taps um but you know even if we were to

00:34:33.420 fully turn off the taps. I mean, there's a lot of damage done here on the economic side,

00:34:40.220 the fiscal side, you know, just the actuaries of how this is going to work out for government

00:34:44.360 budgeting, for social services going forward, the housing market. And then, well, you and I might

00:34:50.360 disagree. I would say very much on the cultural side that we have not, we've taken so many so

00:34:54.580 fast that we cannot adequately assimilate people um should we not send like a lot of these folks

00:35:07.060 who are not citizens if you're a citizen that's sick or sanct you're here uh but should we not

00:35:11.460 be sending a lot back um like do we need a moratorium on this to just catch our breath

00:35:19.700 for some time and then you know a decade or whatever it is from now we can say okay

00:35:23.300 We've caught our breath. Labor markets recovered. Housing markets recovered. People have assimilated

00:35:29.420 a bit. Now we could start this up again. How do we fix this?

00:35:36.040 So, yeah, what the government said, what the late Trudeau government said and what now the

00:35:41.860 Carney government has said is, okay, first of all, permanent immigration, we've lowered the

00:35:46.960 numbers a bit. Second of all, we're aiming for considerably lower numbers of new temporary

00:35:53.000 migrants and foreign students um and the assumption is that a lot of the people who are here on

00:36:01.080 temporary visas temporary foreign workers and temporary foreign students um will some of them

00:36:06.700 will become permanent residents and citizens will choose some of those and everybody else is going

00:36:12.380 to have to go home and it's going to be challenging like that is actually going to be the hardest part

00:36:16.640 And this is where this is where we're going to see kind of the fallout in years to come is, you know, the last time I saw some numbers that suggested that about a million people would have their temporary permits expire, I believe, in 2025 and 2026.

00:36:35.100 And that's way more than the number of people who can become permanent residents.

00:36:41.420 We're going to pick fewer than 400,000 permanent residents.

00:36:44.600 Some of them will be refugees.

00:36:46.040 Some will be family reunification.

00:36:47.800 A chunk of them will be economic immigrants chosen from overseas.

00:36:50.800 You have less than 100,000 places left for temporary residents in Canada to become permanent

00:36:57.160 residents.

00:36:57.800 And you have like a million of them who are going to have their visas expire and who in

00:37:01.320 theory are supposed to just get on a plane and go home.

00:37:02.860 and so we're probably going to have a much larger number of people who are in Canada

00:37:08.720 not legally and continuing to work so this is going to be a challenge that we are going to have

00:37:15.500 to work the government's going to have to work through and it isn't going to it isn't going to

00:37:21.820 disappear instantly I think we can we can create a much better system we can choose better we can

00:37:28.900 get the numbers to a more moderate level and again by the way we'd still have higher immigration

00:37:33.520 than most European countries and we still have higher immigration than the United States but

00:37:39.380 we'd be doing a better job of of controlling who we choose and and choosing well as we did

00:37:47.000 pre-20 2015. I want to kind of come back to restate the crux of my last question though

00:37:54.500 about is what you're saying that we should you know refocus on my uh on economic migration

00:38:01.060 and bring the numbers down because i you don't think then that like so much damage has been

00:38:08.540 done here that we should not have like a moratorium for some period you know with some exceptions you

00:38:13.860 know like the extremely high valued economic migrants yeah we got high level doctors high

00:38:19.040 level engineers, okay, fine. We're not saying hermetically seal the border here, but in broad

00:38:24.780 measure, we need to more, I've been of opinion that we need more or less with some reasonable

00:38:30.240 exceptions, a moratorium here. You disagree with that and think we more or less just, we can get

00:38:35.680 away with reverting to where we were before this? I wouldn't put, yeah, I wouldn't put a moratorium

00:38:39.640 on immigration but to put things in perspective okay so in between 2022 and 2024 um net immigration

00:38:49.380 to canada so that's new permanent residents but also all this temporary stream canada took in 3.1

00:38:56.000 million people in the space of 36 months and again just to make that number really clear

00:39:02.140 that includes deducting people who left so temporary migrants who came minus temporary

00:39:08.600 migrants who left, you get 3.1 million. It's an enormous number. So we have to get to a much

00:39:14.520 lower number than that. And that's basically the government's plan. I don't have a problem with the

00:39:21.480 plan so much. I have a problem with the way they're going to execute it because they're basically

00:39:24.460 saying we're going to have around 400,000 or a little bit less than 400,000 permanent immigrants

00:39:30.080 a year. And for several years, the temporary immigration stream is actually going to be

00:39:35.700 negative. There are going to be more temporary immigrants leaving Canada than arriving under

00:39:41.680 the government's plan. And that has to be the case because the numbers were so large

00:39:48.180 over the previous three years. So if you look at the numbers in that way, you'll say, wow,

00:39:55.980 we're lowering immigration a lot to compensate for what happened from 2022 to 2024. But I think

00:40:05.220 it would be, it would make no sense

00:40:07.360 to put any kind of a moratorium

00:40:09.220 on immigration, but effectively, you know, look,

00:40:11.120 on the temporary migration side, what the government

00:40:13.160 has said is, what the Kearney government

00:40:15.200 has said is happening, is we're actually having

00:40:17.140 negative immigration.

00:40:19.220 That's actually their policy goal.

00:40:21.200 I think they're going to have a lot of trouble achieving

00:40:23.100 that, but that actually is their policy

00:40:25.240 goal for a couple years.

00:40:28.900 There was an old general,

00:40:31.100 Von Molka, said, no battle plan

00:40:33.240 survives contact with the enemy.

00:40:35.220 and I can see this on paper being a good plan,

00:40:40.120 but it's going to have contact with reality.

00:40:44.980 Do we really believe, though,

00:40:47.100 that all of these people who came in on a temporary basis

00:40:50.680 and are then here illegally are going to go back?

00:40:54.980 Now, of course, it would never be 100%.

00:40:56.940 That's never going to happen, but in the broad strokes,

00:41:00.360 because in your writings, you said,

00:41:03.220 there was a wink wink nudge nudge uh it was a wink wink agreement to these people that you're

00:41:08.060 going to come here as a phony student and you're going to get to work at uber you know driving an

00:41:12.340 uber or something uh but in the end we're gonna make you a permanent resident and a citizen at

00:41:17.980 some point and that's there's kind of a bait and switch here and uh you know so they i i i'm not

00:41:25.260 blaming the migrants i'm blaming the system as as you do in your book here it's not the fault of

00:41:29.600 people who want to come to a richer, wealthier, more secure country. It's the fault of the people

00:41:34.120 who brought them in on a misleading basis. Or maybe that was actually the intention. It's just

00:41:40.420 no longer the intention. But there's going to be a bunch of people, I think, who do not voluntarily

00:41:46.780 self-deport here. And that I think then leaves us with, broadly speaking, two options. ICE-style

00:41:56.340 raids where we're sending out law enforcement to round up illegal migrants or an amnesty where we

00:42:03.480 reward people for breaking the law uh where do you one i guess how successful do you think it's

00:42:10.780 likely to be in the absence of some kind of ice style enforcement against illegal migrants who

00:42:17.240 have not voluntarily self-deported yeah so how successful do you think that'll be and then two

00:42:22.520 if it's not successful, do we go the route of then that kind of hard law, that kind of hard

00:42:29.400 enforcement, or do we go the route of an amnesty that would reward people for breaking the law?

00:42:35.040 So I want to go back and talk a little bit about history to try to explain this and to do a

00:42:39.340 contrast between the Canada and the United States. So for the last 30, 30, even 40 years,

00:42:45.020 illegal immigration has been a huge issue in the United States. There's an enormous amount of noise

00:42:50.740 around it and there's enormous amount of performative enforcement where um republican

00:42:56.900 governors republican governments make a big noise and and trump is the latest of look at how much

00:43:03.160 we're doing um to address this and canada on the other hand has traditionally had very little

00:43:10.920 illegal immigration and it's because of a whole bunch of subtle bureaucratic measures

00:43:16.400 that used to work and could still work if we use them. So, you know, you can't just get on a plane

00:43:23.400 and come to Canada. It's really hard to get a visa to come to Canada if you're from anything

00:43:29.780 other than a highly developed first world country. It's actually much easier to go to the United

00:43:35.440 States. The reason Roxham Road existed is because people could get on a plane and fly to JFK airport

00:43:40.980 in New York and then get on a bus and come to Canada. People, for example, people from Nigeria

00:43:46.160 were doing this um and they couldn't have flown to canada because canada wouldn't given them a visa

00:43:52.080 but the united states would so canada had all these subtle measures we need to have various

00:43:58.520 subtle measures um at the same time a certain number of people who are temporary residents in

00:44:04.520 canada will be chosen year after year to become permanent residents because they have skills they

00:44:11.360 already have a job they already have an education it makes sense we were going to take in a certain

00:44:15.540 number of people 400 000 ish or a bit less as permanent residents boom they're part of that

00:44:21.140 quota they fit the criteria they're in so it's going to have to be a mix of yes some of these

00:44:29.940 permanent some of these temporary residents are going to become permanent residents and some of

00:44:34.820 these temporary residents are going to be by various subtle ways encouraged to leave because

00:44:41.380 they don't qualify for permanent residency it's going to have to be subtle tools and one of the

00:44:48.020 ones that i recommend in my book and a lot of people will find it harsh but i i think it's

00:44:51.940 sort of necessary is to have a system where employers can only hire people who are legally

00:44:58.180 allowed to work in canada um and that shouldn't be a controversial thing that shouldn't be a

00:45:03.780 controversial thing i don't i really don't think i'm not sure it is anymore actually controversial

00:45:08.340 um but i will say so for example in the united states you may think that that exists in the

00:45:13.700 united states it doesn't like the americans have a system called e-verify but no employer is

00:45:19.940 required to use it so in theory in the united states employers can check the legal status of

00:45:28.100 every potential employee for their company but the law doesn't oblige them to use it because democrats

00:45:33.540 and republicans have historically both agreed they don't want to happen want that to happen

00:45:36.980 One because they're being lobbied by progressives on one side and the other because they're being lobbied by big business on the other side.

00:45:42.660 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, 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.

00:46:03.120 And if you really need to bring in more people, do it legally, not illegally.

00:46:09.300 Find smart ways, above board ways that create confidence among voters that, hey, the government's running things well.

00:46:16.680 They're running things for my benefit.

00:46:18.600 The Americans kind of did the opposite and they ended up with 40 years of of, you know, chaos and conflict and controversy.

00:46:27.000 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.

00:46:42.320 We got to get back to that.

00:46:44.200 Yeah.

00:46:44.620 I, you know, I, I always caution against bipartisanship because very often it's just both parties conspiring to screw the common people together.

00:46:54.220 We've.

00:46:54.820 immigration sometimes but i gotta say sometimes sometimes it's the opposite it's because it's

00:47:01.360 actually you know both parties sort of look at what the average person wants and they're like

00:47:05.800 hey you know what we can run it that way so i i really think that the canadian immigration system

00:47:11.420 pre-2015 was not controversial um and you're right and and and polls said that very few

00:47:19.860 canadians were upset about immigration because it actually was working for canada and for the

00:47:24.300 average person. And therefore Canadians weren't upset. And the reason Canadians are now upset

00:47:29.200 about immigration is not because, you know, as I say in my book, it's not because the entire country

00:47:34.260 caught airborne xenophobia as some kind of disease. It's because circumstances changed.

00:47:40.440 And so Canadians said, hang on a second. I'm, I was happy with the old system,

00:47:44.720 but I'm not happy with the new system. And I wish you would, I wish you would make things more

00:47:50.720 like they were before so let me leave with a final question on this which is both i think

00:47:56.980 retrospective and forward-looking um so yeah the immigration polarization is a new thing to at

00:48:04.300 least modern canada as we've known it today for from my lifetime it's never been a major thing

00:48:09.280 it's been limited largely to cranks uh who maybe in retrospect i i i feel a little bad for shaming

00:48:15.920 But it was really cranks on the fringes, but it's now front and center, major issue.

00:48:22.100 We've joined the conversation with the United States and with Europe.

00:48:26.420 There are different circumstances, you know, Europe also being nation states.

00:48:32.180 They're different than more civic constitutional creations like Canada and the United States, civic nationalism.

00:48:39.400 So they're not exactly apples to apples.

00:48:42.960 But both Europe and the United States have been having the conversation for a long time in different forms. We're new to the conversation, at least in modern Canada. How do you think the immigration debate in Europe and the United States is impacting Canada?

00:49:01.620 And then in reverse, has Canada and our more recent experience with largely uncontrolled mass migration, are we impacting the debate in those places?

00:49:15.600 So I think Canada in the past 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?

00:49:30.440 how come Canada isn't having these immigration controversies? How come immigration isn't tearing

00:49:37.180 up American politics the way it is Canadian politics? But I think they tended to not

00:49:42.060 understand the reason why. The reason Canada looked super liberal to liberal Americans

00:49:50.920 on immigration is because super liberal on immigration Canada was also very conservative.

00:49:56.980 It was both at the same time. Canada said, we're going to have higher immigration than the United

00:50:02.960 States. We're also going to have way more border control and a sense of control over immigration

00:50:08.460 than the United States. Immigration will not be perceived by Canadians as an imposition.

00:50:13.680 It will be perceived by Canadians as a choice. So I think that's the historical thing that

00:50:18.320 Canada got right. And that's what made Canadian immigration politics so different from American

00:50:24.340 immigration politics. And I think to avoid ending up in the place where American immigration

00:50:30.040 politics is now, we have to get back to that. And that to me is that that's the left right

00:50:37.260 coming together. That's the yin yang that a lot of people did not understand about the Canadian

00:50:45.300 system. It was so baked in that the liberals couldn't understand that if you want to be

00:50:51.020 pro-immigration, you better be pro-border control. You better be pro-limits. And if you're pro-limits,

00:50:58.440 then you can actually afford to be pro-immigration because people will understand while you're doing

00:51:02.580 it. Where the US system, things kind of fell apart. I mean, particularly under the Biden

00:51:08.540 administration was the last straw where a whole lot of voters said, Biden doesn't seem to know

00:51:14.040 what to do about these exceptionally large numbers of people coming across the Mexican border um

00:51:22.120 and so like he doesn't seem to have a plan to sort of handle this in a way that's going to be

00:51:27.000 acceptable to Americans and he didn't have a plan because the left essentially said you're not

00:51:31.400 allowed to have a plan um so and that re-elected that is a major contributor to re-electing Donald

00:51:39.040 Trump. It may be the most important contributor to reelecting Donald Trump. So I want Canada to

00:51:45.580 end up in a different place. But I think we have to learn the lessons of our own immigration history

00:51:50.380 and we have to understand how our immigration history has been better and smarter than recent

00:51:56.280 US immigration history and was better and smarter until a number of years ago. And that's really

00:52:03.440 the point of my book. All right. Well, Tony, I greatly appreciate your time. I think I'm with

00:52:11.180 you on a lot of it. Maybe not everything, but I'd say I'm on with you with more than even many of

00:52:16.180 our own columnists on any given controversial topic. I think it's a very insightful work that

00:52:21.620 you've done. I'm going to make sure I read the full thing in detail. I feel a little guilty not

00:52:25.840 doing it before here, but I think I had taken enough in that we were able to have a really

00:52:29.560 great conversation. So thank you for the work you've done here and sharing your time with us

00:52:34.920 today. Thank you very much for having me on. And, you know, like people don't always have to agree

00:52:40.080 about everything. It's good to be able to have conversations with people you don't agree with

00:52:43.740 a hundred percent because nobody should agree with everybody a hundred percent. We should still be

00:52:46.800 able to be civil and have conversations and listen to one another's perspectives, even if we don't

00:52:54.180 A hundred percent agree.

00:52:55.720 Yeah.

00:52:56.220 Well,

00:52:56.940 amen to that.

00:52:58.900 Thank you very much

00:52:59.480 for joining us

00:53:00.120 and best of luck

00:53:01.660 with your next project.

00:53:03.920 Okay.

00:53:04.900 Thanks, Derek.

00:53:05.600 Great to talk to you.

00:53:06.780 All right.

00:53:07.120 Cheers.

00:53:08.840 That was Tony Keller,

00:53:10.620 Globe and Mail columnist

00:53:11.860 and author of

00:53:13.360 Borderline Chaos,

00:53:15.020 How Canada Got Immigration Right

00:53:16.580 and Then Wrong.

00:53:17.680 Thank you for joining us today

00:53:18.860 and God bless.

00:53:24.180 You

Western Standard - October 25, 2025

How Trudeau broke immigration

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