The Ben Mulroney Show - Are the Carney Liberals all show, no go? The evidence is building up.

Episode Date: August 27, 2025

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And in other check your local listings. Welcome back to the show. It is Wednesday, August 27th. Thank you so much for spending a little bit of your day with us. this next segment has a little bit of a theme to it because the stories that we're talking about might have the patina of old stories. You might think you've heard these stories before.

And so let's dive into the first one. The first story is that sanity seems to be returning to our different levels of government on the issue of the bureaucracy going back to work seven days a week. Last week in the city of Toronto, it was announced by the Doug Ford government by way of my sister, the head of the Treasury Board, that right now they have to be at the office three days a week.

They're going to move that to four until January, I believe, and at which point they are back at work five days a week. So that was provincially in Ontario. Now the feds are essentially doing the same thing. And the part of this that is familiar, all too familiar, is the bureaucracy and the civil service does not like this. Not one bit. There were massive protests last summer in Ottawa, people protesting the fact that they would have to go back to work. And to me, it's like, you know what, welcome, welcome to the world.

Welcome to the world. I've been in an office through COVID. We put you at home because COVID was going to kill you. That's why you were at home. COVID's not going to kill you anymore, so you're coming back to the office. And if you don't like that, well, it's sort of a condition of your employment. So do it or get another job. I don't know what to tell you.

I don't know what to tell you. And of course, there are people who are lining up to say, oh, there's going to be so much more congestion on the streets because you have all these people. Okay, well, so plan ahead. Plan ahead. And then there's a, I saw something in the news, and you know that it was planted by the people who don't like this,

that because you're going back to work, you're going to have to eat in a restaurant, or you might have to buy a bag of chips, or you're going to buy gas. And, of course, you've got the lost opportunity costs of being in a car sometimes for an hour at a time. which means everyone who's now going to have to go back to work is earning less money than they did before.

And again, I will say what I just said. Welcome to the world. None of these things rise to the level of me giving a flying flip. Okay? I just don't. And I said it during the pandemic that one of the things that we lost, we always talk about microaggressions, which I think are funnier than they are dangerous.

but what we lost were micro affirmations because a Zoom call starts and you get to work and then the Zoom call ends and what you don't have is the minute or two before the meeting starts or seeing your friend at the water cooler or talking about a project that you're working on and somebody overhears it and says that's a great idea I got something that you can have for that all that is gone during the pandemic and we're going to get out all those things back that's special sauce

that's royal jelly where brains come together and they pump out something that no one on their own could pump out. So yeah, you're going back to work and I'm not, I'm not here for the complaining. I'm just not. And you will see that you'll probably do, you'll probably do better work. And that's, so that's the first one. The second story is another, this is from our friends that black locks reporter have found this out through freedom of information another big liberal promise that they didn't follow through on we talked about that yesterday they love a photo op and they don't really know how to follow through a federal subsidy program that gave away more than a hundred and thirty million dollars that's your money that's my money uh on a promise

of promoting business startups and creating jobs achieved neither. So they didn't do anything. They gave $130 million away. And to who? We don't know yet. But about 300 people got money. But from what we understand, none of that money turned into businesses. You remember on this show yesterday?

We talked about a visa program for entrepreneurs that isn't helping those people. It didn't help anyone build any businesses in Canada. We love putting a program together at least so it looks good from the front. And then when push comes to shove, we don't build it so that we get the outcomes we want. This is another example of that. Now, apparently MPs can request the information about who approved at a house tabling. What will it reveal? It'll reveal that this program like so many others that came from the mind of the brain trust

that was the liberal government under Justin Trudeau. You'll see that they're really good at announcing, not so good at organizing afterwards. And this one is something we have been hitting our heads against the wall day in and day out every time we hear a story of somebody here in Canada on a visa who commits a crime and is then given a lesser sentence because it would upset his immigration status.

Sorry, I lost it there for a second. And so if I were to commit that crime, I would get four years. There's a guy in, I think it's Alberta here, and he, J. Juan Lee, stabbed a man outside of Surrey Social Housing Complex, so British Columbia. He pleaded guilty and was given a conditional sentence of two years less a day instead of prison because it would have jeopardized his chance to stay in Canada. If I had done that, I would have gotten four years.

Same crime, same victim, but because I don't have to worry about my immigration status, they would just stick me in prison. Well, a little bit of sanity returning to our justice system because the appeal. appeals court told them, told the first court that the ruling was demonstrably unfit and replaced it with a 42-month prison term, saying the lower court wrongly prioritized immigration concerns over proportionality. My producer made a very good point. Why would we even want this guy in Canada? He's literally giving you the perfect excuse to kick him out. But instead, we are thrown ourselves at, we want people to see how, how woke our heart is that we don't care

that he's a criminal. A Canadian is a Canadian, is a Canadian. And we want, why would we want him here? He's a criminal who had committed a crime before as well. This is not a good dude. Don't give him. Don't reward him. This. And so, um, I, I'm not. I don't even know what to do. We talk about our issues with the Canadian justice system. And fundamentally, what we're witnessing because of these stories,

and there's lots of them, lots of people here who are here on visas, work visas or whatever, and they get in trouble with the law rather than do what we should do, which is send them packing immediately, we're making their lives easier so that they don't have any problems

when they ultimately want to become a Canadian. Why would we want them to be a Canadian? He failed the test. What's the test? Living amongst us without breaking the law. Canada promised caps on temporary foreign workers, but the visas keep piling up. That's next on the Ben Wilmer Rini show.

My mic wasn't working. Now it's working. Okay, there we go. Welcome back to the show. And please welcome, Michelle Remple-Garner, conservative MP for Calgary Nose Hill. Sorry about that. Thanks for having. Yes, thank you. You also wondered what was

going on there. I was doing a pantomime. Okay, so before we get into what we're going to be talking about today, I want to go back to what I was finishing up with at the end of the last segment where a case made its way through the courts and a guy had stabbed somebody, but

he had a precarious immigration status and the judge in the case decided to be lenient on him so as not to jeopardize his status. I said, if I had done that, I would be in jail for, I'd be in prison for four years.

He got less than that. And then, but fortunately, the appeals court overturned that and said that it was, it was, they were, the judge was wrong on, on the law and he was wrong on what his duty was.

So that's nice to hear, but you and the conservative party want to make things a little more definitive, don't you? Absolutely, because that's not the first time this has happened. It's happened a lot. It seems like,

there's a case every week, right? So we're going to introduce a bill in the fall that amends the criminal code to very simply say that judges can't consider immigration status when they're sentencing somebody who's been convicted of a serious crime who's a non-citizen. Yeah, it's not... I mean, that's pretty common sense, right? And to me, this is not...

There will be people who will choose this as a hill to die on have at it, you know? Not me. No, not me. Not me. All right, let's get into the numbers are slowly coming out. We were promised that the liberals had learned their lesson. They really messed up on all the different pathways for people who are not from Canada to get into Canada. So temporary foreign workers, student visas, immigration writ large.

Every one of those things had been screwed up by Justin Trudeau and his team. And they saw the light. They saw the light. They realized they were wrong. and just leave it to the liberals, they are going to fix this. Well, the numbers are coming out, not so much. Temporary foreign workers, we were promised a cap of 82,000. They've so far issued in eight months, 105,000.

International Mobility Program, which lets the employer hire a temporary worker without a labor market impact assessment. So we were promised a cap at 285,000. They admitted 302,000 in six months. And these numbers are on top of, the regular immigration numbers, which are expected to hit 400,000 this year. Look, we were both on the losing side of that last election. But this is, this to me is, this is more of the same from this same liberal party.

Well, and it's a huge problem, right? Like, when you talk about the numbers, you have to talk about the impacts. And the liberals are allowing way more people into the country. And the country has housing, health care, and jobs to absorb. And that's not fair to anybody. I don't blame people who want to come to Canada to build a better life. But, you know, anybody who spent time in an ER who has tried to rent an apartment in the last several years understands that the immigration numbers are too high. Yeah.

How about people? How about the youth who want jobs? We have a skyrocketing youth unemployment. And they can't even get a job at Tim's. Well, I've been actually this morning, I was highlighting the fact that there's a Tim Horton. in Calgary that is posting a job for a temporary foreign worker at $36 an hour. And this Tim Hortons is like right across the street from a high school. What?

You know, like, it's out of, I'm serious. Yeah. Like, it's out of control. There's no check and balance on this program. It's rife with abuse. And it's suppressing wages for young Canadians. So, yeah, you're absolutely right. It's got, these numbers have to be lowered.

But it's also, things are going to get worse, aren't they? Because, you know, there's a scenario that could work itself out that could take this crisis situation, make an even bigger crisis. And that's, you know, what happens with these students who were here on student visas and they were hoping that they could. That's right. Yeah, they were they hoped that something was going to happen and they could stay in Canada. And they were told, no, you got to go home.

And so they're going to stick or what are they going to do? I think they're going to apply for asylum. Yeah, you're right. You're 100% right. The other thing, too, Ben, is that with a temporary foreign student program, there's something called the postgraduate work permit program which now functions almost like an auto extension after somebody graduates in Canada for them to be able to stay in Canada and work and again it's another temporary sort of program so there's all these streams of temporary labor at a time

when you're absolutely right huge youth job crisis but also you know we're seeing disruptions in the economy through new technologies like artificial intelligence where you're seeing less of those traditional first jobs for students. So why are they juicing these foreign worker numbers? It's absolutely ludicrous. Yeah. It's crazy. And we saw the poorest nature of our border and our ability to keep our eyes on these

people that we need to be keeping an eye on prior to the election where CBSA announced there were half a million, I think it was half a million. People who were supposed to self-deport, we don't know where they are. And even if we did know where they were, we don't have. the manpower to go get them. So you put all of the... Let's at least half a million. Yeah.

So you put all this... I'm just going to say we don't know. Yeah. We're going to put all this together. Let's assume good faith and let's assume that Mark Carney does and the liberals have a plan to address this. If they did, how long would it take, Michelle, you know that levers of government. You know how quickly government can work.

How long before we could get back to a place where we could start rebuilding the consensus on immigration that govern this country for the better part of its same? existence. Well, that's the question. What a great question. And sorry for interrupting you there. It's just the number you cited like 500,000, Ben, we're not even sure because they don't track departures in any systemic way. So how do we get back? Well, this fall, we're going to be rolling out a conservative plan to restore sanity in the immigration system. I've been spending the summer with a lot of policy folks working on some really serious policy measures. Our party leader, Pierre Pollyev is excited about these things, but we need to restore that balance quickly.

Because for everything we talked about, health care, jobs, housing, and just that sort of intangible thing, that consensus for immigration that the liberals have broken, we have to restore these things. And clearly, the liberals are not capable of that. So they need some accountability. That's what you guys are there for. What is it? Propose and oppose?

I think that's the line that I've been hearing a lot. And I think that makes sense. Propose and oppose. Yeah. Perfect. Yeah. So have you spoken with Pierre? I had him on the show here as well.

I think a lot of people are asking themselves. Is there, some people think that they're going to walk in, we're going to look at the first day in the House of Commons and people are going to see a brand new man, someone completely different. I don't know that that is needed and I don't know that that is what will happen. But what do you know? Well, you know what it's like. to live through a federal election campaign, right? And the toll that it takes on somebody. And yet he's been able to, he didn't have, you know,

the few weeks to sort of rejuivinate himself that everybody else did. He went right into a by-election. And, you know, I think that when you have an experience like that where you have to show resiliency and persistence and then you come out on top, that changes you in a good way. Not saying that peer needed to be changed, but I think he's got a lot of jam that is going to be on display in the house. in the fall and I'm looking forward to it. I mean, I'm chomping at the bit. I want to get back

in there today. Like, let's go. Yeah, let's let's go. Well, this was, I mean, Michelle, this was the crisis of our lifetime, so much so that the house wasn't sitting so that you couldn't pass legislation required to deal with said crisis. But I never let the truth get in the way of a great story, right? You got it. But are you, you know that, go ahead. I was going to say, Did you know that this is, the house has sat for the least amount of days since 1937 this year, thanks to the liberals. Yeah. Well, yeah. I mean, we had to, we had to enjoy the, the soap opera that was the end of the government and then the next soap opera that was their leadership review.

Because, of course, we had to do that. So, Michelle, thank you so much for being here. When does the house sit again? When does the house sit again? September 15th, not soon enough. There we go. Good luck. propose and opposed

I think that's what a lot of Canadians want Michelle Remple Garner Thank you so much and we'll talk to you soon Thanks Ben Freddy You know the abominable snowman Yeah I'm real

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