The Ben Mulroney Show - Canada has a program to attract "premium immigrants." It's a total mess.

Episode Date: August 26, 2025

- Guidy Mamann / Immigration Lawyer - Carmi Levy/Tech Journalist If you enjoyed the podcast, tell a friend! For more of the Ben Mulroney Show, subscribe to the podcast! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://link.chtbl.com/bms⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Also, on youtube -- ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@BenMulroneyShow⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow Ben on Twitter/X at https://x.com/BenMulroney Insta: ⁠@benmulroneyshow⁠ Twitter: ⁠@benmulroneyshow⁠ TikTok: ⁠@benmulroneyshow⁠ Enjoy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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You know the things that I often say. And one of the things I often say is one of the problems with Canada is that on issues that we should take things very seriously, we are a decidedly unserious nation. And one of the things that proves that is how so many government programs don't seem to ever give us the outcomes that we are promised. And if you drill down just below the surface, you see why that is, right? because we don't put the money behind the programs to make sure that they're going to operate the way they're supposed to. We've got another example for you today.

You may not have ever heard of the startup visa program, the SUV program, but essentially it was created to bring the next great entrepreneurs to Canada. come here, start a business, get investment into your business, build your company, become a huge company in the world, and Canada is better for it. That's what was supposed to happen. That's not the reality. And so to discuss that, we're joined by Immigration Lawyer Giddy Mammon. Giddy, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, Brian.

Okay, so the SUV program, the intent was to create, attract innovative entrepreneurs, but the reality is far from that. Why don't you tell us how you see it? Well, mostly, you're right. The key word here is innovation. You have to have a project that's innovative. Now, most immigrants or most people don't have an innovative business. And then they may have a restaurant, not innovative.

They could have a dollar store, not innovative. They could be manufacturing something, not necessarily innovative. and, of course, they're doing that maybe in their country. To come to Canada, you have to provide a plan to build an innovative program. So, of course, people who may not be in the innovation business come here and they have to find an angel investor and get an angel investor to invest in the innovation. Now, that's not where their skill set is necessarily.

The big problem that we're having right now is that if you really want to track people, people you have with money and get them to invest first of all they're coming to a new country so you're asking them to invest in a new country in an economy that they don't know anything about and with a new type of project a new innovation kitty you're also uh you're also asking people to come to a new country where they don't necessarily know anyone which means they don't have a network here they don't have you know it's not like uh you know entrepreneurs who've been spending the last 10, 15 years building companies in Silicon Valley, right? You're a known quantity in Silicon Valley, and you build your relationships and you build

your network with different types of investors. These people are going to come here with a business plan, and they don't know left from right. They don't know where to go. They don't know who to talk to. A thousand percent, and they're vulnerable to all of the experts, all the people who are around them, the lawyers, the consultants, and all of them, the consultants, and all these people who are taking like six-digit fees from these guys.

It's not like $5,000 or $10,000. It's very, very big money that they're putting in. So there's a lot of frustration. On top of that, you're asking for immigration officers to process these applications. So these things are taking forever. I mean, you know, nobody wants to come to Canada waiting five years for permanent residents. How much can you really invest in Canada? How serious can you be?

You know, if you're setting up a business, you're supposed to be setting a business. you're supposed to be setting up a business and you don't even know if you can be here permanently. Yeah. So we've got, there are a lot of problems with it, but the backlog of,

is really quite jarring. The amount of people who are sitting in a queue waiting for their visa to be approved. 18,000 applications. With the average processing time, this is bananas. 52 months. 52 months to get an SUV,

to get into the SUV program. that's it takes less time to apply and get asylum in Canada you're a hundred percent right we're just not serious about this stuff we're just not our immigration department is these are supposed to be the premium immigrants right these are the people who are coming in to provide new innovations in Canada put people to work get money working here and you're you're schlepping them along for you know for five years for four or five years that that does

doesn't work. It's just never going to work. Giddy, talk to me about how someone might be able to game this system. And we hear it all the time. We heard it with student visas. There are ways for people to get here and not be deserving of the visa that they got. They are people who are misrepresenting the truth. There are people who are, you know, trying to, you know, there's 15 people that are able to use the same money to prove that they have money in their bank account to get in here. So I have to assume, like, if immigration agents are good at certain things,

but they're probably not good at determining whether or not a business plan is good and whether or not the business that this person says they're going to start is a good. is a good idea. And I guarantee you, Giddy, with AI these days, you could get ChatGDP to build a pretty good-looking business plan for a fake business that will never get off the ground. Yeah. So, you know, I hate to say it, but you got to believe a big percentage of the people

who are coming here and develop an innovation project through the help of angel investors are not really necessarily looking to actually do that business. And the angel investors know that. And so they're coming up with the ideas, really. There's a consultant in the back. Sometimes it's lawyers.

Sometimes it's consultants who develop an innovation project and hand it to the person. And quite frankly, nobody really cares if this is actually ever going to work, if it's going to make money, if you're going to lose money. And a lot of these people,

People are older people, you know, they've worked all their lives, they've got a business overseas, they've got lots of savings. So they're willing to throw away $3,000, $500,000. So the problem here is that there's a lack of seriousness in many cases because it's not somebody who's coming here. So my God, I got this burning idea. I'm dying to develop this idea in Canada. That's not the group. These are people who are typically older and who just want to live in Canada. need a Canadian passport. Whatever you do, I'll lose some money. It doesn't really matter.

Yeah. So that's the sort of big picture. Now, if we did want to attract those young, talented, you know, world beating entrepreneurs with that once in a generation idea to change the world economy, change how we shop or how we drink, how would you, how would you build that program? And I'm going to tell you what you got at 90 seconds to give me your pitch. The process has to be faster, period. today, everything is moving so quickly. You referred to chat GPT. Everything, every industry right now is being disrupted.

Things are moving fast. Everybody is moving fast except immigration. And if you want to develop, you know, big projects here in Canada, innovative projects, you have to give it priority, period. And our immigration department is not motivated that way. You know, what they consider a priority is not a priority. This is supposed to be a priority program. So would you recommend they shut this program down?

This program has been around for a while. I have not once recommended it to a client. Really? Yeah, every single investor program this government has ever touched has rarely worked out well for investors. That's just the way it is. It's very rare that I recommend something like this. people just lose money all the time

and they don't get what they want ultimately. Right. Well, I want to thank you, Giddy Mammon. Thank you so much for being here. Thanks for helping peel back the curtain to show us that this is a program. My dad used a reference at all the time. This is a spent force. That's what he said.

This is a spent force. It's time to take it. Time to take it behind the woodshed, old yellow this thing and double tap to the back of the head. It's done. Thank you very much, my friend. My pleasure, Brian. All the best. Bank more oncores when you switch to a Scotia Bank banking package. Learn more at ScotiaBank.com slash banking packages.

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For more info, visit bemo.com slash eclipse. Visit us today. Terms and conditions apply. Welcome back to the Ben Mulruni show and welcome to this week in technology with our great friend Carmi Levy. He's a technology analyst and journalist Carmi. Welcome to the show. Good to be with you, Ben. Thanks for having me. All right, so IBM created a computer that could beat everybody at chess. And now they've taken the next step, and we're working with NASA to build a digital twin of the sun. I guess my question is why? Because solar weather is a really big deal.

And if we think about it, you know, the satellites that orbit the Earth, they are very vulnerable, very at risk to solar storms. electromagnetic emissions from the sun. Every time you see, for example, Aurora Borealis in the sky, those are charged particles that are coming at Earth from the sun, and those can wreak absolute havoc with satellites if we don't know that it's coming. And so by predicting, it's almost like predicting how the sun is going to act, by knowing when that next solar storm is happening, when a solar flare happens, when there's a spot on the sun that sort of throws off

emissions toward the Earth, by using data, using technology to better predict that, we can better prepare, protect satellites, protect infrastructure here on Earth so that the internet doesn't go down, so that GPS doesn't go down. This could be a catastrophic event. So what they've done, they call it Syria, and it's a model. Basically, they create a digital twin, a version of the Sun in software, and then they can run all sorts of tests on it. They can model how the Sun behaves in software.

I get all of that, but what little I know of the sun, it doesn't look like it follows any predictable pattern. So it may be a digital twin at the moment they create it, but then the sun's going to do what the sun's going to do. It will, but there is a certain degree of predictability. We know that it works on 11-year cycles, and right now we're sort of near the peak of one of those 11-year cycles. We do understand that when certain events happen, that it's almost like regular weather here on Earth. There's a lot of variability to it, a lot of unpredictability. But the more we throw that data into a model, the more we can perhaps understand it and maybe develop those patterns, sort of figure out this is what's going to happen.

Well, that's all great. But why haven't we done this for Earth so we can predict earthquakes? That's the cool thing about this, is that this Syria model is not just usable with solar data. They're also thinking of applying it to weather patterns. they're thinking of applying it to seismology, to processes under the Earth. Those patterns, those mathematical constructs, they work both in space as well as here on Earth and above Earth. And so they're learning a lot here just from this data set, but they're saying we can apply other sets of data to create other digital models, maybe one of the Earth's crust, maybe one of the Earth's atmosphere, and then use that to better predict behaviors there too.

So it's coming, but that's a lot of data. That's a lot of computational capacity. It takes years to figure it out. Well, our next story is about Chipotle and how they have figured out how to get people what they want faster. This is easily my favorite story. They're calling it Zipotla. And basically, it's drone delivery of that next burrito that, you know,

you have when you're watching football. So they're starting this pilot in a suburb of Dallas, known as Rowlett, uses a technology from a company called Zipline, and it's basically like a drone that has been eating a lot of steroids or maybe eating a lot of burritos. It looks like a kind of a cross between a giant, like a burrito and a giant white whale flies to your neighborhood and then it hovers about 300 feet or just under 100 meters above the ground.

And then it lowers the food in a container down to the ground on a zip line. It winches it down, lands on your front walk very carefully, of course, don't want to blow the burrito up, and then you just pick it up and walk inside. And it sounds kind of silly, but this continues a trend. We've seen a lot of other companies, pizza companies, for example, wanting to deliver food by drone, take vehicles off the road, put them in the air, maybe clear up some traffic. But I've got to assume certain cities have a protected airspace that would make it far more difficult to operate something like this. Yeah, that's certainly problematic. If you're near an airport or, like in my case, I'm not that far from a hospital that has a,

heliport. And so when I look at Transport Canada's drone rules, I'm not allowed to fly a drone in my neighborhood because I'm too close to that. And so obviously, before you pilot these technologies, you've got to work with authorities to understand where the go and no-go zones are, what those air traffic rules are. And in many cases, those rules have not been figured out yet because nobody's been flying drones in cities yet. And so that's why we're only seeing it in select cities largely in the U.S., but there's a company in Canada called Hover that has had a number of pilots, including one in Ottawa as well as in Toronto, for local food delivery. And they've done some small-scale testing as well, but I think it'll be a while before we can log into

the Zipline app and, you know, order a burrito by air anytime soon. But it's definitely coming at some point. The technology is very slowly being kind of worked out. Well, this was predicted a long time ago by the genius that was not appreciated in his time, Les Nesman. Let's listen. The copter seems to be circling the parking area now. I guess it's looking for a place to land. No, something just came out of the back of the helicopter. It's a dark object.

Oh, my God, they're turkey. Oh, Johnny, can you get this? Oh, they're crashing to the earth right in front of my eye. One just went through the windchee of a parked car. Oh, the turkeys running around, pushing each other? Oh, my goodness. Oh, the humanity. The turkeys are hitting the ground like sacks of wet cement.

Wet bags of cement. I couldn't have said it better. Look, when you get a big burrito from Chipotle, it could hit hard if it falls out of that drone. That was my first thought that, you know, what happens if this thing falls and explodes and, like, it's. massive conflagration on my front lawn, although I kind of admit, it would look kind of fun in slow motion. And, of course, bonus points, if Mr. Carlson is standing there saying, as God is my witness, I thought turkeys and maybe even burritos, that's why.

All right, let's go to this next truck. Listen, AI is everywhere, and we know that it's here to stay, but that doesn't mean it's perfect. And there's a bank in Australia that has. had to admit that the chat bots that they've been using for, I guess, customer service are not ready for prime time. Yeah, the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, one of the biggest banks down under, they introduced an AI-powered voice bot and then used that as an excuse to get rid of 45 people saying,

well, you know, the call volumes have been going down, we don't need those people, the technology can handle it. But those people were represented by a union. the union countered saying, well, actually, the data shows that call volumes were going up, and the AI was doing a terrible job of handling those calls. And so now the bank is offering their jobs back. They've scrambled to offer everyone overtime, to bring managers in, to handle all of those extra calls. And this is just another example of the technology being introduced, maybe a little bit too quickly.

It's not AI's fault. It's the fault of managers who seem to think that it can, you know, widespread replace humans without really thinking about the implications, and unfortunately, the bank got caught here. And it's going to happen. There will come a time where AI is robust enough to handle all the questions that a bank might have. It's nice to see that there's still certain jobs that AI can't do. Exactly. And I think that's the thing, is that, you know, like every technology, AI will make obsolete certain roles or will change other roles as we go forward, but you've got to follow the data,

you've got to understand the true capabilities of the technology, and you don't want to pull the trigger too quickly, and in many cases, companies are doing just that. They sort of see the bottom line impact. I can get rid of this many jobs without really asking, is the technology good enough to do that now? It'll get there eventually, but right now we're not quite there yet. It's only a matter of time before somebody builds a Ben Mulrooney avatar,

and the Ben Mulroney show will be hosted by a. Until that day, they've got the very real and not very robust, real intelligence of Ben Mulroney. Carmine Levy, thank you very much. Thanks so much, Human Ben. All right. Well, I got to tell you, man, like the drone thing, you know, I don't need my food that quickly. I don't need my food that quickly. Well, Les Nessman found out the hard way.

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