Western Standard - November 06, 2026


Rempel Takes Aim at the Big Immigration Lobby

Alberta’s campus neutrality legislation needs teeth

Episode Stats


Length

2 minutes

Words per minute

180.9

Word count

377

Sentence count

24

Harmful content

Hate speech

5

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 I mean, like, let's talk about big immigration. 0.80
00:00:02.400 So I want this to be a thing. 0.99
00:00:04.340 We have big oil, big tobacco.
00:00:05.840 That's what the left always talks about. 0.94
00:00:07.300 Well, big immigration is the biggest lobby in Canada.
00:00:10.280 It really is, especially when you look at the lobbyist registry.
00:00:12.880 It's corporations that advocate for rule changes to make it easier for them to import labor that is tied to a job and a business so that they can depress wages and not fulfill their part of the social contract.
00:00:30.000 Canada, which is training and providing opportunity for people who are already here, right? And I think
00:00:36.320 that that's disgusting. What I would love to see Canadians reject, and I know you talk about this 1.00
00:00:43.200 a lot, is the concept that immigration is solely an economic policy. Think about that. Think about
00:00:49.600 the dehumanization of that statement. Immigration is an economic policy. Think about the lack of
00:00:55.280 self-determination in that statement. When in fact, there's cultural aspects.
00:01:00.080 Immigration should be a nation-building policy. And part of that is fulfilling
00:01:04.880 the promise to Canadians and to people who come here that if you come to Canada,
00:01:08.780 if you live in Canada, you have the prospect of becoming upwardly socially
00:01:14.540 mobile in the economy, affording a house, raising a family. So, you know, anybody,
00:01:19.380 any of these lobbyists that come in and say, oh, well, if we don't have immigration,
00:01:23.180 you know, the economy is going to collapse. It's like, okay, well, what about labor mobility? What
00:01:28.360 about skills training? What about making life more affordable so that people who are already here can
00:01:33.080 afford to have a family and have more people in Canada? So big immigration is gross. Anytime I 0.99
00:01:40.880 have, it's become like almost a gag and reflexive exercise for me when I have lobbyists in front of
00:01:46.280 committee and they're just literally advocating for more workers just to depress wages without
00:01:51.720 talking about any of those other issues, it's like, no, we're not going to keep tolerating
00:01:55.420 this anymore. And we're going to, we've been calling it out and, and, you know, kudos to
00:01:58.940 other people for doing so across the political spectrum, including labor unions who are starting
00:02:04.100 to do that as well, too.