Western Standard - Once, we did immigration right – and we can do it right again

00:00:00.000 Good evening, Western Standard viewers, and welcome to Hannaford, a weekly politics show

00:00:21.240 of the Western Standard. It is May the 14th. Welcome to the show.

00:00:29.580 If you say there's something wrong with Canada's immigration system or its policies,

00:00:35.900 there will probably be somebody nearby ready to call you a racist. Well, the fact is,

00:00:43.420 whether you're for immigration or against it altogether, we are not as a country doing a

00:00:50.060 very good job of it. With me today is somebody who understands the big picture. That's John

00:00:58.000 Weisenberger. He was Chief of Staff to a Harper-era Minister of Immigration, Diane Finley. Yes,

00:01:06.580 Diane Finley. He has some ideas on what went wrong and how to fix it because he's been there

00:01:13.880 and done that. John, welcome to the program. Thank you, Nigel. Pleasure to be here.

00:01:18.620 Good to have you. John, once Canada selected immigrants primarily on their ability 0.99

00:01:26.700 to contribute financially to the success of the country and upon their ability to

00:01:32.940 fit in, to be culturally appropriate, if you want to call it that. In fact,

00:01:40.460 in a recent article of yours, you referred to a US observer who said that Canada was

00:01:45.820 ruthlessly smart yes can you enlarge on that a little bit and how how that contrasts with the

00:01:52.780 last 10 years when quite clear trudeau government replaced um objective points based merit with

00:02:03.420 some other set of considerations right so the system you're referring to um kind of known

00:02:11.260 colloquially as the point system was brought in in the 1960s and it was meant to be kind of an

00:02:18.700 objective uh way of selecting through the the hundreds of thousands of people who have applied

00:02:28.620 and wanted to come to canada so uh again as you mentioned that was done using a set of criteria

00:02:35.500 that, again, would select for, quote unquote, better suited candidates or applicants.

00:02:46.560 So he had criteria like level of education, language proficiency that would be in French

00:02:52.480 and or English, skills in terms of, you know, what particular occupation they had and how

00:03:02.580 that would match with Canada's economic needs. Now, what the viewers should know is that that

00:03:10.160 only applied to about 50% of the immigrant stream coming in. So that was called the economic stream.

00:03:18.880 Then you had family reunification, so people applying for relatives to come over, people who

00:03:24.440 are already here, and then a smaller refugee stream. But still, the economic stream would be

00:03:30.320 the most significant and the most impactful in terms of the canadian economy well i can certainly

00:03:37.040 speak to that when i applied to come to canada myself um i told them who i was and my professional

00:03:43.600 attributes they weren't that interested and then i said i put me down as a farm laborer

00:03:47.520 i said oh okay you're in uh because they wanted farm laborers you see it's so much for this

00:03:51.760 business being the best and precious yes uh and so i ended up on my uncle's run spent first summer

00:03:57.600 as a cowboy my horse knew more about it than i did but right it was not a bad way to enter canada

00:04:04.400 i think that really has been the um has that not been the experience for so many people that they

00:04:09.760 they come here and they do what they got to do to get started well it's interesting you say that

00:04:14.480 because i i mentioned in the article uh i lead off with actually this story of my father who had a

00:04:19.600 similar experience after the war when he applied the first time he marked down teacher because he

00:04:26.080 had been trained as a teacher prior to the war yes but he was rejected because canada didn't need

00:04:31.120 teachers uh and then the second time around he asked people and they said well you know put down

00:04:36.240 laborer because canada needs laborers uh which apparently was the case with you as well right

00:04:45.120 and when he put down labor he got in okay well yeah so the system sort of worked

00:04:50.960 they got us where but look it's not working now i mean in your article this article i think you

00:04:56.480 published this in c2c but you're putting the you're putting these thoughts out of elsewhere

00:05:00.880 and i think you're going to be running something here in the western standard on this as well

00:05:04.720 so um you know that the trudeau government there was a real change there like we you were with the

00:05:12.640 harper government you did things a certain way what was it that the trudeau government actually

00:05:17.760 changed how quickly did they set about it took them about a year well tackle the first thing

00:05:25.200 first took them about a year and as far as i know they didn't completely abandon the point system

00:05:32.400 so they may have loosened the criteria somewhat and there's evidence they did that specifically

00:05:39.200 in terms of the french-speaking candidates so they loosened that but then they overall expanded the

00:05:46.720 category dramatically from a level of about 250 000 coming in every year to between 400 and 500

00:05:55.120 000 so they almost doubled it so that was really the issue and it wasn't only in that stream uh

00:06:02.960 one area that again that's mentioned in the article and that's been in countless news stories now

00:06:09.120 is the explosion in the number of temporary uh permit holders so that would be both temporary

00:06:15.040 foreign workers foreign students etc and the huge influx of asylum seekers for which we have

00:06:23.280 control it's just never shows up at our border so all of those numbers just interrupt you there

00:06:29.200 when somebody says hey take me i'm being persecuted at home do we actually check up on that i mean a

00:06:35.280 lot of these people apparently are not asylum seekers at all they just want a better job

00:06:40.560 right and and we clamped down on that significantly uh under the harper government for instance we had

00:06:48.160 the situation we had no visa requirements with mexico so we had a lot of mexican citizens in

00:06:54.880 fact entire mexican families coming here claiming asylum status um even though clearly by their

00:07:01.520 appearance, they were not asylum or valid asylum seekers. What our policy was, what we tried to do,

00:07:11.740 because of course there are hundreds of thousands of legitimate refugees living in camps all over

00:07:16.620 the world, is we tried to work with the UN to focus on bringing the most needy people in

00:07:22.180 and not just whomever, whoever happened to come to the Canadian border.

00:07:29.900 So you know that the Trudeau government fast-tracked low-skill workers and students

00:07:35.880 while bypassing point rankings.

00:07:39.680 Was this primarily ideological or was there a deliberate political calculus

00:07:45.680 about future voters or was it just mismanagement?

00:07:50.680 I think it was mismanagement, primarily. Plus, their philosophical view, if there is one, I believe is that more is better.

00:08:04.540 Better for whom and in what way?

00:08:06.580 Well, it's hard to get in the heads of these people, but I mentioned in the article that one of my staffers had a conversation with a UN official, ironically an Israeli fellow, and he basically told her that Canada, in his opinion, had an unlimited capacity to take migrants.

00:08:36.580 So that's the view of a certain type of person.

00:08:41.000 It's quite concerning, in my opinion, that it would be someone with the UN, since we were working with the UN, trying to work with them.

00:08:49.960 But I think that's quite prevalent on the left side of the aisle, is that we should take as many people as we absolutely can take.

00:08:59.680 And economic consequences are secondary.

00:09:03.260 Well, that certainly appears to be what happened.

00:09:06.000 And so there it is.

00:09:09.220 Still, this explosion to 3.2 million, this is your number, I presume you got it from Statscan or generation, but non-permanent residents is central to your critique.

00:09:22.180 Like in this whole argument, you say, well, they took all these people, non-permanent residents.

00:09:28.080 Well, I suppose the theory is they're non-permanent, so if they use their visa, they go home. 0.65

00:09:34.100 Except that's not being tracked.

00:09:36.000 So that's been the other scandalous piece of information that's come out in the last few weeks.

00:09:43.400 I think there was a parliamentary hearing on it just recently where the minister admitted that there were at least 500,000 of those that they essentially didn't know where they were, if they had stayed, if they had gone back, etc.

00:10:01.480 and that they didn't have the capacity to even investigate that.

00:10:06.520 This sounds like an argument for digital ID.

00:10:09.020 It's a huge scandal.

00:10:11.500 Well, it's really good.

00:10:13.060 How many would be the right number?

00:10:15.240 3.2 million who you can't track is too many. 0.55

00:10:19.040 How many that you can track would be about right

00:10:21.440 and sort of keep the McDonald's open?

00:10:24.700 Well, I mean, you'd, I think, need to go back to the numbers we had

00:10:30.260 more than a decade ago as I mentioned we had about 250,000 in the regular immigration stream

00:10:36.520 we had because we were doing much better and more stringent oversight in the asylum area we had

00:10:46.460 only about 16,000 claimants in 2015 whereas that number has gone up almost well almost I'd say

00:10:58.940 five-fold, six-fold. And then on the temporary side, the numbers, I don't have them at my

00:11:08.560 fingertips, but the numbers were quite a bit lower. And there were things like market need

00:11:14.760 assessments that were done that would kind of keep a lid on those numbers. The other thing,

00:11:20.300 of course, they did is they, the Trudeau government, that is, is they failed to put a cap

00:11:26.300 on foreign students. So universities, of course, charge foreign students significantly more for

00:11:34.220 tuition. So they had an incentive to bring in as many as they possibly could. And we've seen 1.00

00:11:40.560 several, again, scandals emerge, how that system was exploited. The most recent one, I think,

00:11:46.800 was in Conestoga College in Ontario. So these things definitely had serious negative consequences.

00:11:54.560 So you talk also about court rulings, expanding citizenship claims, and we're all familiar with, there's a story every week now about so-and-so did a horrible and atrocious thing that should have sent him to jail for a long time, but they try to keep him for less, get a sentence of less than two years in case it interrupts his immigration process.

00:12:21.840 And we're all thinking, well, why would we want this guy?

00:12:24.200 You know, this is what they do.

00:12:26.180 And they're doing it consistently.

00:12:28.180 So do you see the charter or the post-1982 judicial activism that the charter made possible?

00:12:40.800 Like, why would judges have an angle on this?

00:12:44.500 Well, they seem to have an angle on just about everything now.

00:12:47.220 But here, I think it's more the philosophical underpinnings that we touched on a minute ago.

00:12:59.640 You know, I believe it was Prime Minister Trudeau, the junior, who said, you know, a Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian, up to and including known terrorists.

00:13:11.660 And the current immigration minister has also defended the right of known terrorists to remain in Canada.

00:13:19.000 So, again, that gives you an impression of their view that anyone who can come here, anyone can be a Canadian.

00:13:28.160 And that extends, I think, to that judicial ruling that you allude to, where I believe it was an Ontario judge struck down part of our legislation.

00:13:40.600 That was legislation that I and my team worked on that would have restricted Canadian citizenship to the first generation of people born of Canadian citizens abroad.

00:13:58.160 Whereas now that's extended through multiple generations.

00:14:02.240 So you can literally have someone who had Canadian parents born in Paraguay and they have children and they just continue to be Canadian, even though they have no attachment to Canada and they've never been to Canada.

00:14:18.580 Well, who if they've never been to Canada or never coming to Canada, presumably they're not voting in Canadian elections or.

00:14:28.160 maybe they can um there's a potential racket here well um i mean there is the discussion

00:14:36.760 of that happening in the united states i think that would be a whole because of the birthright

00:14:42.360 citizenship uh controversy right so um so yeah that's something i didn't explore in the article

00:14:49.700 but it's it probably is something to be concerned about yeah so you you pointed out um

00:14:57.120 You quoted a subject expert, Garrett Jones, and they made the argument that values, the things we just automatically, you know, trust, frugality, rule of law, or the complete opposites, persist across generations.

00:15:15.280 Yes.

00:15:15.820 And this bears on that, what we were talking about at the start, where we were talking about, will people fit in?

00:15:23.360 Right.

00:15:23.520 That was one of the things.

00:15:24.600 Do they have skills?

00:15:25.500 Will they fit in?

00:15:26.120 And that's the 1967 points model.

00:15:28.680 All right.

00:15:29.840 We talked about people fitting in, but what exactly do we do with this?

00:15:37.600 How explicitly can the reformed points system that you're recommending incorporate cultural compatibility?

00:15:46.940 No, that's a very important question.

00:15:49.300 And interestingly, as you suggest, the point system has a rather objective way of finding potentially the most compatible people.

00:16:03.560 Because first of all, if you select on economic need, on skills, you will have people that can come and work immediately and are placed into a workplace where they'll be fitting in.

00:16:16.640 There's the English language or the language requirement, and there's education.

00:16:22.840 I think what many of the studies, including Professor Jones's study show, is that in the low skilled area, if you have very large numbers of people,

00:16:32.640 They really have a hard time succeeding economically and then kind of integrating into the broader society.

00:16:46.680 And that tends to perpetuate.

00:16:48.900 So the economic component tends to perpetuate.

00:16:53.740 On the value side, I think that's something we understand intuitively.

00:16:58.300 uh you know you look at um just say you know i'm from montreal originally so the italian community

00:17:05.620 in montreal huge followers of of italian football soccer uh right through to the second and third

00:17:12.380 generation so that's something that persists and of course you know there are other community

00:17:17.300 attributes that persist over time right yes um that that's just natural but uh

00:17:24.800 you know, besides some of those positive attributes, there may be, let's say, more

00:17:30.680 challenging attributes, say, if a culture or a country has less trust in government,

00:17:40.840 you touched on that as well, has different views of, I don't know, the banking system

00:17:47.020 or savings, etc. I think it's logical to assume that some of those values will persist

00:17:53.240 and will, you know, take a while to sort out.

00:17:59.600 Okay.

00:18:00.280 We don't have unlimited time, John, unfortunately.

00:18:03.980 There's two questions that I do want to address.

00:18:06.720 So I want to talk about Alberta.

00:18:08.700 Alberta's planned referendum on immigration numbers

00:18:11.300 and benefits access is a key flashpoint here

00:18:14.060 as we have the whole independence debate.

00:18:17.220 How far, based on your federal experience,

00:18:20.420 how far should provinces be allowed to go

00:18:22.700 in setting their own immigration parameters?

00:18:26.920 And what constitutional barriers do you see?

00:18:31.800 Well, right now, Quebec already has those powers.

00:18:36.800 So I think it's reasonable for Alberta to seek more control.

00:18:44.080 Now, the other dimension of this, which is interesting,

00:18:48.860 it's not really discussed, is that once you're in Canada, you can move where you want.

00:18:56.480 So the province, I mean, Quebec, again, they will try to select on language

00:19:02.340 capabilities or abilities. And there, there's more likelihood that a Francophone immigrant 0.97

00:19:12.640 will stay in Quebec. But in terms of Alberta, we can drop down our numbers, but given

00:19:18.780 the fact that we have a vibrant economy, it's more than likely that someone who lands in

00:19:25.200 Toronto or New Brunswick will eventually say, okay, the grass is greener in Alberta and

00:19:31.600 I'll move to Alberta.

00:19:32.560 And we have no control over that.

00:19:33.960 And half of Newfoundland did that one.

00:19:35.940 Yes.

00:19:36.540 Yes, exactly.

00:19:37.520 All right.

00:19:37.940 Well, look, last question, John.

00:19:39.220 This is great.

00:19:40.580 Now, I'm going to read this because I want to get it right. 0.67

00:19:43.060 I mean, you acknowledge in your writings that Canada's sub-replacement birth rate 0.91

00:19:48.780 We're not having enough children and the necessity of immigration.

00:19:52.920 If a future government restored a rigorous point system, but still faced the same global 0.74

00:19:59.500 migration pressures and above all the low domestic fertility rate, what is the realistic

00:20:07.320 right number of annual immigrants and how would you sell sustained selection to a public

00:20:15.020 tired of both open borders

00:20:17.240 and also of the

00:20:19.440 inevitable accusations of xenophobia

00:20:21.660 and racism

00:20:22.420 what's the marketing pitch

00:20:24.500 well that's kind of the punchline of the article

00:20:27.540 because demography is something

00:20:29.420 that I think a lot of

00:20:31.380 people haven't wrapped their heads around

00:20:33.700 and

00:20:35.880 at least

00:20:37.400 superficially it looks like

00:20:39.040 there are competing camps

00:20:41.180 within Canada so Quebec

00:20:43.180 appears to have decided

00:20:44.740 to put the brakes on immigration in order to allow for what phrase would you use,

00:20:53.500 cultural continuity, preservation, whereas several groups,

00:20:58.580 including the Conference Board of Canada, argue for much greater immigration,

00:21:05.080 although interestingly, mainly to support our social programs.

00:21:09.700 So when it comes down to it, at least on the economic argument,

00:21:13.920 It's, okay, are we willing to adjust our social program? 0.94

00:21:21.960 Say you're in favor of lower numbers of newcomers.

00:21:27.780 Are you willing to adjust what types of benefits you get in terms of social support?

00:21:35.280 If you are, then you can bring the numbers down.

00:21:38.580 But because of, you know, that kind of pyramid scheme aspect of the system, you need to keep having, and the Conference Board of Canada report is very explicit in this.

00:21:50.740 They say, okay, you need a certain ratio of people in the labor force versus, you know, people, shall we say, more our demographic or approaching demographic who are not being supported.

00:22:04.380 you know it's never occurred to me until this very moment john that the same people

00:22:09.660 who we are now talking about her basically abused the immigration system for political purposes are

00:22:15.420 also the ones that created the necessity for this supply of new uh feeders into the ponzi scheme

00:22:22.700 in the first place decades ago by by making canada into a welfare state wow yeah where's

00:22:30.060 john burke when you need him yes that's right i'm sorry yes yes uh listen it's been great john

00:22:35.740 very nice to have you in here and show you around the john galt studio and the gang here in the

00:22:40.620 western standard who put out this great product we hope to have some words from you soon on the

00:22:45.820 a little more detail on what we've been talking about in the last half hour

00:22:49.260 thank you so much for coming in thank you it's been a pleasure for the western standard i'm nigel

00:22:55.100 Joel Haniford.

Western Standard - May 15, 2026

Once, we did immigration right – and we can do it right again

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