Front Burner - Politics! Border bill blowback and 'Santa' Carney

Episode Date: June 5, 2025

<p>The Liberals have tabled new legislation that would significantly expand law enforcement powers and tighten immigration of all kinds, including refugee claims, in a move to appease the Trump White House — but critics say it raises major concerns for Canadians' civil liberties.</p><p><br></p><p>Meanwhile, Mark Carney met with Canada's provincial and territorial premiers this week in his first ever first ministers' meeting, and the post-meeting vibes have been extremely positive. There seems to be a general agreement on the idea of building a new east-west pipeline — but almost nothing else about it is clear, including who would actually build it. How long will the honeymoon last?</p><p><br></p><p>The Toronto Star's Althia Raj and CBC Ottawa's Aaron Wherry are on the show to tackle this political doubleheader.</p><p><br></p><p>Fill out or listener survey <a href="https://insightscanada.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_bfIcbmcQYPwjUrk?Podcast=Front%20Burner&Prize=Yes" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">here</a>. We appreciate your input!</p><p><br></p><p>For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts</a></p>

This election campaign was supposed to be a sure thing for Pierre Poliev and the federal conservatives. But Mark Carney's leadership jolted the liberals back to life and to a fourth straight election win. Now the rookie prime minister has to manage a minority parliament and Donald Trump. I'm David Cochran and every weekday on Power and Politics we bring you the day's top political stories. I speak to the people who wield the power and those who seek power. Follow Power and Politics wherever you get your podcasts, including YouTube. This is a CBC Podcast. I described him today as Santa Claus.

He's coming and his sled was full of all sorts of stuff. Now he's taking off back to the North Pole. He's going to sort it out and then he's going to call us. Hi everybody, I'm J.B. Poisson. We've got a Canadian politics episode for you today. We're going to split it into two parts with a guest on each topic. Althea Raj is here, Toronto star, political columnist and at SU panelist. And we're going to discuss a sweeping border bill tabled Tuesday by the Liberals that immediately started raising alarm bells around Canadians' privacy rights and the rights of refugees and asylum seekers.

And then CBC senior parliamentary reporter Erin Wary will be here. We're going to talk about the seemingly very successful meeting between Mark Carney and the premiers earlier this week and the nation building projects that may or may not materialize from that. All right, let's get to it. Althea, thank you so much for coming on. Thanks for having me. This bill is called the Strong Border Act.

It is quite sweeping, 16 parts. The bill updates existing laws to bolster our response to national and economic security threats while enhancing the integrity and fairness of our immigration system. You wrote about it yesterday, and you wrote that it tries to appease the Trump White House and put Canadians' privacy rights and those of asylum seekers on the chopping block. So why don't we pull that apart here?

First, why do you think it tries to appease the Trump White House? Well, I don't think that. We were all told that because the Minister of Public Safety said that this was basically in response to concerns that the White House had expressed. There's elements that will strengthen the relationship with the United States. There are a number of elements in the bill that have been irritant for the US. So we are addressing some of those issues, but it's not exclusively about the United States. It's also about ensuring...

So you're right. It's a sweeping bill. It's 140 pages. And some of the measures deal with giving border enforcement agencies more tools to allow them to do their work, to allow them to crack down on organized crimes. You know, they will argue that they're operating in like a 20th century framework and that the laws need to be updated to allow them to do their work in a more efficient manner. And so that bill does address that. Among some of the key changes are new powers for border officers to examine goods destined for export, to prevent the transport of illegal goods such as stolen vehicles.

Law enforcement and intelligence agencies will also have some new tools to stop the flow of fentanyl and its precursors. But there also were immediate concerns about privacy rights, right? Canadian privacy rights on the chopping block. And just elaborate on that for me. Yeah, there's a number of concerns. So this bill has 16 parts and amends more than a dozen laws. And some of the measures don't seem to be justified.

And I say that because we had a technical briefing with the public servants who drafted this bill for the government, and they could not give a reason as to why they were lowering the threshold, for example, for information sharing with the United States when it comes, I'm gonna give you a specific example, to people who were on the sexual offender registry. So if they go to the United States,

Canadian authorities have lowered the bar for what they can share or willing to share with the Americans. But is there a case that we know of that they needed this information? It's not, that's not clear. I think for everyday Canadians, there are issues about privacy that raise some alarms.

And of course, some people will say, well, if you abide by the law and you're not doing anything wrong, you don't need to worry. But there is, I think, a slippery slope, some would argue, that if you allow the government to act in this way and to amass these powers, then your own charter rights are being infringed. I'll give you a few examples.

So the government is acting on two court cases that found that law enforcement agencies and Canada Post had breached the law, Canadian privacy rights, the charter rights, with regards to opening the mail and sharing IP addresses. So they're changing the law so that Canada Post can open letters. Now in the past letters were kind of considered

like your emails, like you have a right to know and disclose your own information as you choose. Now Canada Post can read your letters. Your IP address can get obtained without a warrant, but in order to get your personal information, the government will still need to get a warrant, but the threshold to obtain that warrant has been lowered. More concerning to me, I would say, is that they're changing the law to allow, let's say, Rogers or Bell or TellisUS to share information that they hold legally about you voluntarily.

And why I say this is concerning is because the telecom industry in Canada is heavily regulated and if the government is saying, well, I could go get a warrant to get this information but you could also just give it to me voluntarily, oh, and in the law, I will protect you from being sued either civilly or criminally if you give it to me voluntarily. Oh, and in the law, I will protect you from being sued either civilly or criminally if you give it to me." That to me is really interesting. And I don't know that a ton of people would be comfortable with that. Nicole Sarris And what are civil liberties groups saying about it?

Ashley Hildreth I spoke to the BC Civil Liberties Association yesterday and the woman I spoke with, Aislinn Jackson said she was alarmed and she's really concerned that people's privacy rights are going to be affected by this bill. The NDP and the Green Party came out and said what concerns, I mean they're alarmed by what's in the bill, but they were also concerned that the government by citing that they're responding to Trump's concerns, and the public safety minister said yesterday that he was actually briefing his counterparts on the content of the bill, that it will create this impetus to rush through the bill quickly, and that it will not get the proper scrutiny that it deserves, because it should be sent to a bunch of different committees to study. It includes big changes to the way asylum seekers and immigrants and plus would be immigrants

to Canada get their cases or the powers that the immigration department and the minister and cabinet are giving themselves. That should go to the immigration committee. The stuff with criminal cases should go to the justice committee. There are measures in the bill that make, to me, absolutely no sense. Why you are creating a law that says that service providers are not just not supposed to tell people about basically security vulnerabilities in their system, but they're not allowed to? It makes me feel like this bill was rushed through so quickly that nobody kind of, like is there a not that should not be there? Yeah, I mean, also, I know neither, neither of us are lawyers.

And I'm sure that there will be more people in the coming days that have more to say about this. But I was kind of under the assumption that a lot of this stuff was already decided in the courts, that the Supreme Court had already kind of come down on stuff like IP addresses. So I am a little bit confused about some of these. I think that you're talking about the case in 2024. This is addressing that. Basically, law enforcement was saying, well, we can't get a warrant because we don't know what the IP address is. So we need to be able to verify the IP address and then I will go get the warrant. So in some ways, there's like housekeeping.

And you can see the government is protecting itself from spending money, like on the CBSA, for example, at the border, they're saying we're allowed to go to the border and we're allowed to check all the containers that are leaving. But also, we're not going to pay the port authority to have CBSA officers at the port. So there's a lot of, I would say, housekeeping measures that are kind of protecting liability and costs from the federal government. On the asylum stuff, can you just explain to me what it is that they're trying to accomplish in this bill, like around refugees and asylum seekers? The biggest change, well, I guess there's two parts that are quite interesting on asylum

seekers. So last year, you'll probably remember that the federal government changed a lot of the ways that permanent residents and students basically could apply to become citizens. And they made it hard, like they closed down an avenue that was being used to get Canadian citizenship. And now the government is saying, if you came as a student, if you're a temporary foreign worker, if you're here and you haven't made a claim within a year, you can no longer make a claim at the immigration refugee board. So a lot of people who came here legally through the channels that they thought might get them permanent residency in Keynes citizenship won't be able anymore to have their case heard

at the IRB. If you come in as an asylum seeker between land crossings, like at Roxham Road, and you've been here for more than 14 days, you can no longer get your case heard at the Immigration Refugee Board. It means that that individual will not be able to plead their case in front of basically a human, and make their case

for why they face persecution if they go back home. The government says in this bill, well, they will be able to apply for a review that basically to determine whether or not they face persecution back home. But the removal order might happen before that case is determined. So they'll probably go to the federal court to say,

can I please stay in Canada longer? And the court is facing a backlog. So it's not clear whether they're actually gonna have that chance. And they won't have a chance to physically plead their case. It'll be like they'll hand over papers and somebody will determine based on the papers that were handed over whether or not they can remain in the

country. So a lot of people who might face persecution back home will probably be deported and face persecution back home. And so that's why refugee and immigration activists are really concerned about that. Right. And I know there are also some concerns that they could push people underground, right? I assume that's what's most likely to happen.

That it would encourage them to stay here without legal papers. Exactly. If you signal that you're here, and if you've made your life here and have been here for like three or four years and you want to stay here, and you're pretty sure that you will be deported back to your home country, you are incentivized to remain here. And so all those concerns that Canadians have voiced about, you know, the housing market and long wait times at the hospital and crunches on social services, that might still happen. But we just won't know exactly where people are so we won't be

able to service them, we won't be able to give them the things that they need and adjust government resources in a way that adjusts for the populations that we're actually counting. I think also this bill, it also is doing some stuff that's similar to what's happening in the US with student visas, right? Yeah, so one of the things that the government is giving itself the ability to do is to kind of suspend, nullify, cancel a whole bunch of immigration documents en masse. So like we have seen in the United States where Donald Trump's administration is trying to cancel student visas, the government is basically giving its ability to do very similar things here. Now, that could be for similar reasons as the United

States, or it could be like, oh, we think there's a fraudulent immigration consultant that has put in all these cases from India, and we're just going to cancel them in a sweep of a hand. But when you give cabinet broad sweeping powers and you don't define what the public interest is, because it's undefined in this legislation, then I think it also raises a bunch of concerns and questions need to be asked. What's going to happen to this bill now? Like, obviously, it's not a, it's not a done deal at the moment. Absolutely not. So the minister actually said on Wednesday that the bill will get a full committee

review. As part of the bill as it goes through the system, as it goes through parliament, as it goes through the committee process, we look forward to perspectives including First Nations, Inuit and Métis perspectives. Their committees have not been struck on Parliament Hill yet, so that probably means that nothing's going to happen for several months, which is probably a really good thing. That being said, the government could find a willing partner, let's say in the Conservative Party, because at the moment there's no NDP in committees. There would only be the bloc and the Conservatives. And then depending on whether or not that party supports some of the things in this bill,

it may not get, you know, the scrutiny that, you know, had the NDP been there, because they're the ones that have voiced a lot of criticism about this bill would be demanding. So I don't know exactly what the scope of review will be, but the government has committed to review. I think they may have been caught a little off guard by some of the comments on the bill. Okay. Elvia, thank you so much for this. Something we definitely are going to keep on top of. Appreciate it. No problem. Thank

you, Jamie. If you feel like people on the other side of the political divide are from Mars, Left, Right and Center helps you understand where they're coming from. I'm David Green. We invite people from the left and right to our show each week. We unpack our political differences, not to smooth them over, but to bring clarity to what's really at stake. I'm excited to bring you our approach

of discussing divisive issues respectfully. You can listen to Left, Right and Center every Friday, wherever you get your podcasts. All right, on to act two. On Monday, Canada's premiers met with Prime Minister Mark Carney in Saskatoon for the first time since he took office. And the vibes from the premiers coming out of the meeting seemed to have been pretty

fantastic. To talk a bit more about that, I am here now with Aaron Wary. Hi, Aaron. Hey, Jamie. By all accounts, this seems to have been a really great meeting. Hey, what do you make of the way we've heard the various premiers talk about the conversations that they had with Mark Carney this week? Yeah, look, it was pretty positive after that meeting.

I think Doug Ford referred to Mark Carney as being like Santa Claus and talked about it being the best meeting the premiers and the Prime Minister had had in 10 years. The best meeting I've had in seven years. There was no expectations that the Prime Minister was going to come out and say, you get that project, you get that project. It was a great discussion. Now we were all talking.

Now it's time to put it into action. All of us are responsible. But I thought it was an incredible meeting. Great communication. A timeframe that may or may not apply to one specific All of us are responsible, but I thought it was an incredible meeting. Great communication. A time frame that may or may not apply to one specific former Prime Minister in particular. And everybody seemed to be on the same page and enthusiastic about the possibilities. So I think that this meeting here today, of the First Ministers representing Canadians from different walks of life,

is an important step forward for us to be able to have that showdown with China, have that showdown with the Trump administration and make sure that you and your jobs come out on top. He's not afraid to mention the word pipeline and in conjunction with oil and gas and all of that is a dramatic improvement over what we what we were witnessing from even just six months ago. I think that there's a record. You know, you don't want to make too much out of it.

It's the first meeting since the election and, you know, prime ministers and premiers tend to get along better at the start of the relationship than necessarily after. But at the same time, it is, you know, I think a couple of things. One, it looks like a victory politically for Mark Carney coming out of it, just that everybody seems positive and encouraged and more or less on the same page. And I think broadly speaking, in a moment of crisis for the country, it's nice to see politicians from different party stripes

agreeing and being able to sit around the same table and get along, which is not something you necessarily see to the south of us. Yeah, I mean, even Danielle Smith, Premier of Alberta, came out with some very pleasant things to say about what went on. I think what we've seen is that he's not afraid to talk about being an energy superpower. He's not afraid to define that as being both conventional as well as new and clean energy. I know that the meeting was really largely about these nation building infrastructure projects that Carney wanted to discuss. That could mean a lot of things, right? You can build lots of things, railways, ports, but in this case, it seemed to specifically mean a pipeline.

You think that's fair? Yeah, look, I think at one point the questions from reporters afterwards kept coming back to pipelines. And at one point, Mark Carney seemed to feel it necessary to point out that there are other kinds of infrastructure under discussion. There is a long list of projects that bring the country together, diversify our markets, make us more resilient, create good jobs and growth, have very good prospects

of indigenous partnerships, and beyond. But a pipeline for decades, really, has been a point of friction. It's always kind of a consistent point of friction. And so discussion sort of naturally gravitates back to, is it going to be possible to build one? How would it be built? Who is going to build it? And, you know, that was the question

that sort of plagued Justin Trudeau at times. And it does seem to be the big question that Mark Carney's going to face. Yeah. Do we have answers or possible answers to any of those questions right now? We have, I think you could say we have sort of broad agreement about the possibility of building a pipeline across the Western provinces, potentially in two directions to the west and then to the east at least as far as James Bay or Churchill in Manitoba. The western premiers and the premiers of the territories met and supported and approach

the western corridor, the western and arctic corridor effectively. I don't know though that we have much in the way of consensus or answers on all of the very specific questions that need to be asked about who will build this thing, how it will be built and under what conditions. And those of course are the big, big questions. And so, you know, is there openness, I guess? Is there an opportunity for a pipeline? Mark Carney seemed to say there was, but that leaves, you know, all of the actual important questions that still have to be answered.

Maybe worth noting, BC Premier David Eby was not actually at the meeting Monday. He's, well, he was on a trade mission in Asia. Do we have any sense of like where he is on this right now? Because I don't, I don't think this has been, uh, a really popular thing for him in the past, right? Yeah. I think we know from, you know, recent and not so recent history that when it comes right down to an actual proposal to build a pipeline, you know, Northern Gateway,

which would have gone, uh, across the Pacific Northwest or, pipeline, you know, Northern Gateway, which would have gone across the Pacific Northwest or the Trans Mountain expansion that went south. When it comes right down to it, BC premiers of all stripes really have not been super enthusiastic about the idea. And so I don't think BC has closed the door on the discussion, but I think we still have to wait to see exactly where they come down on it. Obviously, I know Daniel Smith wants this pipeline. Who else wants this pipeline? I think that is a big question. I think there's sort of this general idea

that more pipeline access for the oil industry would be an economic benefit for them. In the sort of age of Trump, there is an argument that Canada as a country needs to have more economic sovereignty and needs to diversify its trading partners and a pipeline could fit into that argument. But there is no one at this very moment saying, I would like to build a pipeline, in particular, no private investor saying, I would like to build a pipeline and here's what that would look like. And that I think was one of the more interesting moments in the news conference after the meeting

was the idea of the fact that there is no proponent for this pipeline was raised and Danielle Smith said, I mean, it's up to us to find the proponent, I think. I think if there's some certainty that a process is going to be successful in a reasonable period of time, a two-year window, I think that there will be a proponent that will step forward. My view would be that we'll have failed at the assignment if government has to build another pipeline. That will be- I think that sets up a pretty interesting test of like, oh, okay, so let's see what the actual private sector appetite is for this.

She talks about this grand bargain with Ottawa. Is that what she's talking about? Yeah, she sort of she put this phrase on the table. Well, let's call it the grand bargain that we know that there is a group of pipeline of oil sense companies that have been advocating for some time for what they call the Pathways Project that would decarbonize. Basically, the idea being that there is this proposal by a number of major oil companies operating in Alberta called the Pathways Alliance, which is largely premised on the idea that they would use carbon capture utilization and storage technology to essentially capture

or prevent the emissions that would come from the oil sands. And they're willing to build it, though they are asking for a significant amount of public funding. And her argument is a pipeline would, in creating greater capacity to export oil, would make the economics of that project easier for these companies to proceed with. And so the grand bargain in her idea is, you know, this pipeline gets built and

because the pipeline gets built, the Pathways Alliance, this decarbonization project goes ahead. Yeah, I mean, I guess I'll just say that whole thing with carbon capture, no one's really totally figured that out yet. So there's still a real question mark on whether you could even do that. Erin, you wrote this really interesting piece where you compared this meeting and the rhetoric around it to what we saw under the last prime minister under Justin Trudeau. And I just wanted to talk to you about that because there are some pretty interesting parallels.

And can you just give me a bit of a refresher on how Trudeau approached the pipeline question when he took office and also having these sorts of discussions with the provinces. Yeah. So Justin Trudeau, it's funny, I think, to remember because he has been portrayed by his conservative opponents as this sort of anti-oil, zealot, climate radical, that he came into office saying, you know, he supported pipeline development, but he viewed it in terms of social license, that you needed to get social license to build one. And I don't know that he ever used the phrase grand bargain, but that is essentially what

he presented, which was, uh, we're going to get a pipeline built to the west coast, to tidewater, but that is going to come along with a serious climate policy, in particular a price on carbon emissions. And that's, you know And that came to be viewed as his grand bargain. And so I think part of what was interesting this week is, Daniel Smith says, oh, we need a grand bargain on oil and climate policy. And I think a lot of people fairly would look at that and say, I thought we already had a grand bargain on climate and oil policy. What happened to that one?

And my first question would be, what does a grand bargain look like now, and how is it going to be more durable than the last one? So given all that, how long do you think that these positive vibes will continue? Are we really in this kind of new era of intergovernmental relations or is this just kind of a honeymoon phase?

So, I mean, the cynical take would be it's not going to last very long. You know, it is possible that Mark Carney is sitting and talking to these premiers in a way that is reasonable and that they appreciate and he has managed to find points of common interest and he's going to be able to pursue those points of common interest and he'll do it in a way that you know keeps everyone more or less on the same page. So I don't want to completely shut the door on that possibility but the the question becomes I think what happens when actual projects get you know put on the table when When the federal government starts saying,

we want to go forward with these four or five projects. First of all, do some projects get left off the list? And does that frustrate premiers? Does that lead to resentments? And then second of all, what happens when, if he moves forward with a pipeline, any, really any other kind of major project that could raise either environmental or, uh, concerns about indigenous, uh, rights.

What happens when one of those gets put on the table and, and there's backlash, there's, there's, there's, uh, complaints about it. There's, you know, people raising concerns about how it's actually going to work in practice. I think, you know, one of the things we're running up against is, you know, at the end of the Trudeau government's time in office,

there is the, the idea, the argument was, oh, Justin Trudeau is the, is the problem here. Once you remove Justin Trudeau from the equation, a hundred pipelines will, will bloom. And the, the, you know, the evidence, the pre-Trudeau evidence suggests that's just not the case, you know the evidence, the pre Trudeau evidence suggests that's just not the case. You know, part of the reason Trudeau

was pushing social license and, and this sort of grand bargain on, on oil and climate is because it had become so, it had gotten so hard to move forward with pipelines because there were environmental concerns, because there were concerns about indigenous rights. You know, the Northern Gateway, uh, proposal to build a pipeline across the Pacific Northwest heads, it wasn't, didn't seem

like it had much hope of moving forward. Uh, Keystone XL very famously in the United States had stalled out. And so, you know, I think we are potentially going to run up into a bit of a wake up call that actually, you know, Justin Trudeau wasn't the reason pipelines weren't being built. There were a lot of other questions that had to be answered. Right.

And even in this new political climate, even if there's an appetite for more nation building projects, all those underlying issues are very much still present today. Yeah, exactly. A classic case of easier said than done. Exactly. Like, I do think there is, you know, Trump has changed the equation in many ways and there are lots of arguments for going forward with things and there might even be more public buy-in. But, you know, as soon as there's

a pipeline project on the table, the first question is going to be, okay, well, what does that mean for Canada's emissions? You know, what does that mean for Indigenous rights and Indigenous communities across the route? So, you know, these questions didn't disappear and they're not going to disappear unless, you know, they're actually dealt with. Okay. Aaron Wary, thank you very much. Anytime. time.

That is all for today. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you tomorrow.