The Ben Mulroney Show - Canada's new ambassador to the US -- a "wise" move with Wiseman?

Episode Date: December 23, 2025

Guest: Carmi Levy – Technology Analyst Guest: Tony Chapman, Host of the award winning podcast Chatter that Matters, Founding Partner of Chatter AI Guest: TRISTAN HOPPER/national post columnist 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 Executive Producer:  Mike Drolet Reach out to Mike with story ideas or tips at [e-mail] Enjoy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Tools that make it possible to go from tax question to client comms in minutes. Get better answers to tough questions. BlueJ. AI for tax experts. Well, hey there, everybody. Happy holidays. Happy Christmas. Merry Christmas. Getting ready for a great 2026. Thank you so much for joining us on the Ben Mulroney Show. Today is the 23rd. It's Tuesday, the 23rd of December, 2025. And if you are someone who celebrates Christmas, I hope that it is ramping up in the most peaceful way possible. God knows there's a lot of stress this time of year, a lot of pressure, a lot of financial issues.

So I'm hoping we can stick a pin in that and just enjoy the holiday season for what it is. uh kirsten hillman our ambassador to uh washington uh has decided after i believe acquitting herself with great honor during a very turbulent time has decided to step aside as our ambassador vacating that a very important diplomatic post and it is incumbent upon our prime minister to uh select a successor somebody who will will stick handle a great many aspects of our diplomatic and turbulent relationship with washington he could pick any anybody. There's a, listen, if the prime minister calls and asks you to be the ambassador to Washington, you'd have to have a really good reason to say no, right? A really good reason to say

no, which means he could pick anybody. And he has, he has picked a gentleman by the name of Mark Wiseman. Now, I was just doing some reading on Mark Wiseman. There's a lot to like about him. Canadian financier, businessman, he was formerly the chair of the Alberta Investment Management Corporation, worked at Black Rock. He was the CEO of the Canadian Pension Plan Investment Board. And he was born in Niagara Falls, raised in Burlington. His mom was a physiotherapist. His dad was a plumber and a pipe fitter.

You know, hearkens back to my grandfather, who worked as an electrician at the, as an electrician at the Quebec North Shore Paper Company. He went to Queens. he got his law degree, got a master's at Yale. He's a Fulbright scholar. Not for nothing. He's Jewish. I mean, there's a lot of box that he's ticking here.

But he's also the founder and creator of the co-founder of the Century Initiative, which seeks to increase Canada's population to 100 million in the next 75 years solely through immigration. I don't want to hang my head entirely on that because like I just told you, a lot to like about him and I just listed it all. But this is a really interesting thing. Let's listen to his perspective on Canada hitting 100 million people.

Century Initiative is still perceived by some as only focusing on the goal of growing the population to 100 million by 2100. Let me be clear. I still believe in the viability of that goal. I remember my dad didn't think it was a bad idea. Because I'm sure some people go back and find his quotes as if I'm married to everything my dad ever said. But also, let's not forget, if my dad said anything about it was, he didn't say it in 2025 because he hasn't been around.

You know, five years ago, that might have been a good idea or it might have been a better idea than it is today. Because the circumstances on the ground, in terms of the irresponsible nature of our immigration, would beg. the question, what sorts of, what sort of immigration are you going to use to raise our population to 100 million? Because if it's the Trudeau version of immigration, I think a lot of people would say, as we say in French, Jean-Pas, no thank you. And so let's listen to Mark Wiseman, again, in his own words about, you know, how would you get there? And, you know, a lot of the screening and other stuff that we do, frankly, is just bureaucracy. It's a waste of time.

Let's let people in, by and large, and if we have to do the screening ex post, that's fine. I can tell you, bad guys and bad women probably find their way into this country through means other than applying through permanent residency. What? So this is not even an open borders thing. This is a no borders thing. This is a belief that Canada's borders are largely irrelevant. And if you want to come here, we're just going to let you come here.

Because the bad guys are going to find a way to get here anyway. Now, given the fact that our American counterpart, Donald Trump, and his acolytes in his administration, believe that strong fences make good neighbors. Oh, so do they believe the exact opposite? They believe the exact opposite. Not only that, they believe that we are a. joke when it comes to protecting our own borders. And that that informs a lot of of the relationship. Like when we want to talk about trade, they want to bring the border into it.

They want to talk about fentanyl. They want to talk about heroin. They want to talk about illegal immigrants. They want to talk about illegal weapons. They want to talk about cartels, right? And the point person we're sending into the White House is saying, just open it all up. Just open it all up. Now look, again, I don't want to make it all about that because as a diplomat, his job is to further Canada's diplomatic goals. And if Mark Carney decides that your ideas around 100 million people through unchecked immigration is a bad idea, then you've got to park your opinion on that. You're not there because people want you to be shepherding forward your own ideas.

You are there because you have the ear of the prime minister and you are there to help him conduct his diplomatic goals. And so I'm not, I don't think that disqualifies him. I don't think that means that everything else that I listed, all of his accomplishments are lit up in flames. I do think, however, that if you had your pick of anybody, anybody, because like I said, this is the premier post in Canadian diplomacy, you'd have to be, you'd have to have a really, really, really good reason not to want to do it.

Everybody would say yes. Jason Kenney would say yes. Liberals would say yes. Conservatives would say yes to this. The fact that you would pick this guy, again, you know, you got upset. The prime minister got upset because of the commercial that Doug Ford put out there. This feels like a similar thing. Donald Trump has a very thin skin.

And if you pick somebody who says, borders don't matter, and we're just going to let anybody in, he's going to do his research. His people are going to do their research. He's not going to like this. And I'm not saying we've got to do everything we want to do and check with the president of the United States, but you got to know who your counterpoint is. You negotiate against the man, right? When you play poker, you don't play the cards, you play the man.

We're playing poker here with the man. And the man is going to take issue with this guy. Remember how he didn't like Christopher Freeland? Remember that? Remember how that? He just threatened to shut everything down because he didn't like her. She's a terrible, mean, woman, bad, bad woman, terrible negotiator. I disagree with that.

I bet you she was a tremendous negotiator, but he didn't like her. And so that was a problem. Do you think he's going to like this guy? He's going to like this guy's perspectives? Even if he gets down there and completely parks all talk of unchecked immigration, it's out there. I just don't know that he's done himself a service on this very, important front. I may be making a mountain out of a molehill. Mike, what do you think?

I agree with you. I think that it's something that they should have taken a lot closer look at. This is, when his name was floated, a lot of people flagged it as something that was going to be problematic. And he's made some interesting decisions recently that, you know, even some conservatives that said, okay, those are decent. I like that. I like the way you're moving. But this, I think, drags him back. I think a little bit. I think a little bit. It could be wrong.

Like, they could come out of the gate strong and this guy could, listen, he's a really smart guy. He's a really smart guy. He knows a lot about a lot. And so maybe this, maybe he has a great relationship with Mark Carney and that working relationship is going to be the thing that gets us, gets us forward. I hope. I absolutely do hope.

But it would be, it would be foolish not to think that this won't come up by the Donald Trump and his administration. Would this have hurt his nominations for Newsmaker of the Year for the Canadian Press? Well, look, listen, I don't think you can find anybody who would disagree that Mark Carney deserved Newsmaker of the Year. Whether you like it or not. Whether you like it. But yeah, but take that out of it. The fact is this man came out of nowhere, relatively came out of nowhere, and took what was supposed to be a spent force, a toxic political brand for at least a generation.

And he brought them back to relevance in a heartbeat, taking what was supposed to be an assured majority, super majority by the conservatives, and gave them what they sadly have gotten used to, which is opposition. I don't know a single other person who could do this, and he did it with zero experience in the House of Commons. So congratulations to him on that front. Hey, is Uber hiring violent felons to drive on its platform? That's next. Welcome back to the Ben Mulroney's show and let's welcome for the final time this year to the conversation.

Our very good friend is we love to talk tech and there's no better person to do so with than Carmi Levy. Carmie, welcome to the show. Oh, it's so great to be of you, Ben. Thanks for having me on. Okay, so this first story, Carmi, it feels like a flashback to so.

many years ago where people were downloading music illegally online and ultimately a lot of them had to pay the piper because they were running afoul of the law and they were breaking the law and they had to pay for it. So talk to me about what these activists are doing to Spotify. Yeah, so there's this group. They're called, they call themselves Anna's Archive. They're a non-profit project and their mission according to them is to preserve all of humanity's culture and and knowledge. So they've been going to, you know, open, it's an open source site. They've been going online and scraping up things like books, magazines, academic papers, and then pulling them into online libraries and making them available by peer to peer services like Torrance. And so now they're turning their attention to music and they targeted Spotify. They basically scraped Spotify's website. 300 terabytes of data, 256 million tracks they got the metadata for, audio data for 86 million of them and they say they're going to make them available for download

online for anyone to access. They're saying they're doing humanity a favor but really what they're doing is they're ripping off people's content. Well, yeah, I mean, this is not an illegal site. Spotify is a completely legitimate business that has contracts with all of their all of the singers and performers that are on that platform. And you can take issue with the contracts

themselves and are they paying out fairly to these guys? But the one thing is for sure, if you give it away for free, then Spotify's not making any money, but certainly the artists are not going to make money. And so I struggle to understand the value in this. This is stuff that is readily available. It's not going anywhere. There are billions of copies of these songs floating around everywhere. No one's worried about losing Taylor Swift's music forever. So it feels like that they're justifying piracy. They absolutely are. This puts us right back in the era of Napster or Limewire, you know, when piracy was absolutely rampant before streaming came along and essentially solved it, at least we thought it was.

And this is really a thinly veiled excuse for justifying piracy, large-scale piracy, in fact. I mean, if you wanted to access Spotify for free, you absolutely could. So it's not like this, you're right. It's not like this music is disappearing. And I think this serves as a reminder that, you know, sites like this and its archive kind of masquerading as trying to help humanity, really what they're doing is making a very thin excuse for highly illegal activity. And I think it shines the light yet again on why intellectual property rights need to be respected online, even in a streaming era. And organizations like this should not

be allowed to change the narrative. Well, let's warn people. Like if someone says, oh my gosh, I can get all this music for free, have access to it, own it completely, what sort of problems could they come up against? I mean, you know, first of all, those who own the content to begin with, they have certain copyright rights under intellectual property law here in Canada and elsewhere. They can launch a claim. And so it's uncertain. It's only a matter of time. And up until now, Anna's archive has been focusing on a content that is already in the public domain, content that is not subject to intellectual property law or copyright law. And so what they're doing now is they're crossing a line because those musicians whose content has been ripped off, they should be calling

their lawyers now and initiating legal action. I think it's only a matter of time before we basically have Napster 2.0. The courts are going to be clogged with cases like this, as they should be. I think we kind of forgot just how close we came to losing the value of copyright back, you know, 20 years ago. This could very well ignite that again and it needs to be stopped before it gets worse. All right. Let's talk about Uber. You know, when Uber came into a city like like Toronto. They came in like the white night that was going to democratize transit and they were going to make it easier for anybody to get from point to point and it was so much more fair. And they also touted how safe it was to take an Uber. One of the reasons, one of the things

they looked to is like, hey, look, there's always a record of where you're going. You can share your, you can share your trip with other people. So you'll always know, and you're going to know who's driving your car. And because of that, you could always be safe that when you're in an Uber, you're going to get to your destination safely. And now we're seeing, according to the New York Times, that some of those background checks and safety procedures for its drivers are spotty at best. Yeah. I mean, according to their terms of service, you know, when they, when they approve someone

to drive on the platform, if they've been convicted of murder, sexual assault, kidnapping, or terrorism, they're not eligible. But there are a number of other. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I kind of hope that, you know, someone who's like, you know, a terrorist would probably not want to be, I wouldn't want them driving me. However, other kinds of serious crimes, child abuse, assault, and stalking, those are apparently okay if the convictions are at least

seven years old. So, so that's a part of it. Their terms of service allow a lot of very serious criminals to slip through the cracks. But the New York Times also looked in 35 states in the U.S. and I think we can assume that a lot of that data translates nicely over to Canada as well. It's probably happening here too, is that in many cases, those, those, you know, those, those Those checks weren't even picking up those convictions. And as a result, large numbers of cases of sexual assault, rapes were being reported, involving individuals whose background checks did not disclose that they, in fact, had been convicted of a serious crime in the past, which essentially means, you know, you don't know who you're

getting into the car with, and Uber isn't doing enough to do that due diligence. Yeah, and, you know, in a few years, Uber is going to be competing directly with Waymo and robotaxy in cities like Toronto and around North America with each passing day that that becomes more less of a possibility more of an inevitability and I don't know what to tell them like if if information like this is dropping you're making the case for the safety of these driverless cars because a driverless car has never stalked anybody and a driverless car has never murdered anybody at least not not intentionally and so while they have their own problems this ain't one of them yeah exactly i'd be okay you know it in frankly the occasional fender vendor in a driverless

car scares me a lot less than the possibility of a serious convicted criminal driving either me or my 20-something daughter who is concerned about this very story lives in toronto and is worried about taking ubers for exactly this reason this is something the canadian authorities might want to consider before they decide whether over in fact has the right to drive in their city look and uber uber wants you to look at it and say, who do you trust? A driver who knows the roads or a driverless car that could be glitchy? Now, that's, that is a choice they want you to make, but that is not increasingly a fair and accurate choice to make. The question is, do you want a driver who now we're learning may have a criminal conviction on their, on their record, or a driverless

car that's getting better every day? Now all of a sudden, now all of a sudden the risk profile of getting into a Waymo or Robotaxie is different. It does. And I think what sickens me even more about this particular case is that the New York Times has reviewed internal documents from Uber that showed that executives were talking about sort of what kinds of background checks they needed to do. They were concerned that that process was too expensive so that they would spend less on background checks, but still be able to reduce the incidence of sexual assault in their vehicle. So basically, they knew they had a problem, but they didn't want to spend the money to

make the problem go away to protect people who would take rides in these vehicles, which essentially means they're guilty. They have the knowledge, they fail to act on it, which to me unconscionable, I would rather walk than take an Uber at this point. All right, I only have about a minute left for you. So I'm just going to tee you up. Talk to you about this shifting priorities for the Trump administration, shifting to the moon rather than Mars. So they have a new administrator, Jared Isaacman, who has already been to space twice on SpaceX rockets, was a good friend of Elon Musk paid him to go to space. So he was, he remember

originally he was nominated earlier this year. That got sort of scratched when Elon Musk and Trump had a fight. Now Isaac Man is back in the fold and he is saying despite the Trump administration's previous policy statements that Mars first, then the moon, now Jared Isaacman, big fan of getting

back to the moon. Trump administration is now saying that's exactly where we're going back by 2028 landing and they will have a base on the moon by 2030. Coincidentally, evidently, China wants to have humans on the moon by 2030. We have ourselves a new space race. Space race 2.0, and the Trump administration is putting its money where its mouth is.

Yeah, I thought the point was get to the moon first and then use that to speed up access to Mars. But anyway, we're going to have to wait and see. Thank you very much, my friend. Happy New Year. Appreciate it, Ben, you as well. Hey, is Timothy Shelomay, a marketing genius? What the heck is he up to? Welcome back to the Ben Mulrini show. And it feels like we're doing a send-off to the end of the year saying goodbye to some of our favorite guests, our favorite experts who join us.

We just spoke with Carmi Levy about tech. And now we're saying goodbye for the last time this year, but certainly hello back in 2026 when we get there to Tony Chapman, the host of the award-winning podcast, Chatter That Matters. He's also a founding partner of Chatter AI. welcome to the show one last time this year. What a great year it's been. I appreciate you having me on. Absolutely. Okay.

We've been talking about Timothy Shalame, whose star has been rising in Hollywood for a very, very long time since I think he was introduced to us in that film where I think he was nominated for an Oscar for Call Me, Call Me By Your Name. And ever since then, he has just been a force in everything he's done, whether he's hysterically funny on S&L, or he is carrying the incredible trilogy Dune on his diminutive shoulders. It seems like he can do no wrong.

And now he's got a movie coming out called Marty Supreme, which should be an art house movie. Like it looks like an art house movie about, I think, a Jewish ping pong player and a few generations back. But the way he has been promoting it has just been, I mean, it's either off the wall or it's genius. I mean, I've seen, I saw what looked like a ridiculous Zoom call where he was promoting these, these PR stunts that could have gotten him arrested, or showing up on the top of the sphere in Las Vegas, or, you know, unleashing a rap video. What is up with this guy? Is he a genius? I think he is an absolute genius. It almost brings me back, and this will date a lot of your listeners, but when Paul McCartney was deemed to be.

dead by the Beatles. And you had to buy all these albums to get these clues. And it seems so silly afterwards, but it caught a whole culture within it. And I think what he's doing is the same. The difference is he's no longer relying on radio or hoping that it gets caught up in the news. He understands the power of social media currency. And he's playing it in a way that encourages people to get involved, to share it, to debate, to validate. And I think for all of those reasons and more, this guy just understands. It's no longer about press junkets and hoping that a celebrity interview interviews you. He's absolutely in control of the narrative.

And he's doing it in a brilliant way. And full kudos, whether it's him or the team behind him, he knows how to stand for and stand out in a very crowded space. Yeah. And look, the movie comes out on Christmas Day. It's going up against Avatar and Zootopia, and God knows what else is coming out. If it's able to do a fraction of what these guys are doing, because there's no way the budget of Marty Supreme was anything close to those movies. If it can come out and make its money back and then some in a crowded Christmas field, you know he will be viewed as a marketing success for sure on this film.

Without question, I did a lot of work with Senateplex in my agency years. There's a, you know, Christmas Day was a day that many Jewish people go to the theater because they don't celebrate Christmas. And what a perfect time to release this film. And if it gets great word of mouth, once again, he's taking advantage of the fact that you can amplify what you're doing on the backs of other people endorsing it. So I think the guy, he just, he's playing a three-dimensional chess game. People should follow him because this is really what the future is all about. You can no longer shout your way to be heard because there's just so much noise out of there. have to find a way to tease and get people that share beams and question and everything

else he's doing is just a toolbox of the future in terms of getting noticed. All right. Let's move on to another marketing attempt. And I don't know whether this one's good or not. It doesn't feel to me particularly unique. But Petro Canada's Silent Grime stunt. So the story is that Petro Canada launched what they feel is a cheeky seasonal campaign called Silent Grime, I guess like Silent Night, which uses carolers to see.

odes to filthy cars. Is this relatable? Is this lazy? Is this dated? What do you think of it? Yes, to all three. You know, I'm so tired of people that are using

twice a night before Christmas and turning it into their own rhyme or Christmas carols to kind of get noticed. I think there's a better way to get your message across. To me, this is something that's really not even going to register in people.

Yeah. It's not even a lazy smile. out of it. It just seems to be so disconnected. Yeah, it feels like something that maybe somebody came up with in the 80s or 90s and they pulled it out of an old Manila folder and say, oh, let's try this one. Yeah. I would have rather

seen a campaign where people, you remember when you have a dirty windshield and somebody would write on it and wash me? Yeah. Yeah, and you go along and you kind of laugh that this car has been sitting there so long as somebody actually writes washing in the window and it stills days. That kind of thing would have been funny because it's kind of based on human behavior.

You keep walking by this dirty car, but the Carroll thing to me just didn't click, didn't work. And spent a lot of money on it. And, you know, back to the drawing board. Okay, so what about, what sort of grade do you give to Montreal-based Purdy's chocolates? Because they're running a holiday campaign, apologizing for ruining other chocolates.

Apparently, their chocolate's too good. Yeah, I mean, it's, you know, they're trying to play to scarcity, again, trying to stand for and stand out once again in this world where there's too much and too many chasing a finite amount of time nothing's ever changed we have 24 hours a day to consume content today we're spending more of our time creating content than consuming this kind of campaign to me is not going to register it's not working hard enough yeah uh you know if they had a pop-up store where the shells were bare and apologize maybe that would work as a campaign it's just not

that's actually really funny um and i i right look i i don't know, I don't have a personal experience with Purdy's chocolates. They may very well be the best chocolates. They may go head to head, toe to toe to with any chocolate out there. I don't know that personally. And so this, to me, doesn't give me a reference point that allows me to lead into it. Well, you just said, what you just said would immediately on the drawing board, I'd say, we need to sample Purdy's chocolate. Yeah. The salted caramel milk chocolate to me is one of the best. We've got to get it into your mouth. Yeah. Have you talk about it and say, hey, that's a great chocolate.

Then all of a sudden, this campaign has relevance. So without, as you said, context, it really gets lost in translation. My God, we're giving a masterclass in marketing today, aren't we? At the end of the year, we should just, you and I should get on the road to these universities. Okay, well, what about this final story we're talking about? People are wondering if we're losing the magic of holiday shopping to algorithms because people are using essentially AI as holiday shopping agents. Yeah, this is the future where the world's going to commoditize.

It may same way bookings.com, the best way to explain is when these consolidators came in and shopped all the hotels for you and you could get the best price, what are your AI agents going to do is start looking at other generative AI websites and they're going to auction off your dollars and say, who's willing to give me the best combination of whatever I'm looking for? Maybe the time to delivery, might be speed of delivery, might be the price point. but the whole magic of shopping, comparing, treasure hunting, finding that Picasso in the attic is going to give away to these bots, just going out and doing the work for you. And with that, you're going to see such a compression and margin and such a, it's going to be very difficult for anyone to compete in this world unless you happen to be the low-cost producer. So it's the beginning of the sign of the times.

But if I, if I'm able to go to some sort of AI Christmas agent and say, listen, I got to buy a present for my sister. And we have capped our Secret Santa at $175. And here are the things I bought for her in the past. And these are the types of things I think she likes. Find me something that fits that requirement. Give me three options. And if it gave me three options and one of them really popped for me,

that would be it for me. Like that to me is what I want. I want to feel like I achieve my goal and I bought her something. I know she's going to like. not a waste of my money, and it's not something that she's going to have to smirk and say thank you and then put away in a closet. So if an agent gets me there faster and more effectively, I don't think that takes away from the Christmas, sort of that, that magic of hunting for that perfect thing. If it helps me find. Well, you just described Amazon on steroids. So that's what Amazon

did. They said, we're going to make convenience the most important part of the consideration of shopping. You don't have to go out and search for it. We have it. It's convenience with the end result that I want, right it's not oh i just need a present i'm going to do it real fast it's i'm going to get the perfect present really fast yeah i'm going to get perfect present so i don't have to go out i don't have to have traffic they don't have to battle i don't have to see people so the reality is that what's left standing out there is retailer going that we'd become a ghost town yeah same thing's happening in restaurants skip the dishes is ghost kitchens most more often than not you're ordering meals not from a restaurant that you would sit at but just a kitchen hidden into a industrial

part. We got to leave it there, my friend. Hey, thank you very much. Have a beautiful, beautiful Christmas buddy, and we'll see you next year. Yes, indeed. Hey, another edition of what are we spending taxpayer dollars on that's going to drive you nuts. Don't go anywhere. Yes, you are. Thank you so much for making it to almost the end of the year with us. It is the third of December. Tomorrow's the 24th, obviously, day after that Christmas. And so we wanted to end this part of the year with some of our favorite guests. And so happy to have back on the show National Post columnist Tristan Hopper. Tristan, welcome to the show. Merry Christmas. Hello. Okay, so a lot of people are out there positing that our prime minister is governing like a

progressive conservative. But when I hear stories about the one you're highlighting, I think to myself, yeah, no, he's a centrist. And a centrist just means he's not going to fly too far in anyone direction. But when it comes to the size of government, the importance of government, the value of government and what the government spends money on, your story shows me he is decidedly not a progressive conservative. Yeah. I mean, I think there's a general perception that all the woke stuff is over. But what's happened is you're just not hearing the woke stuff from the prime minister's office. Right. But all of the sort of policy is still very much in place. So what's the example that you have for us from Vancouver?

This was something I found. This was a federally funded study. So this is one of, you know, more than billions of dollars are handed out in academic grants. So this was one that came across my radar. This was a Vancouver area researcher at Quantlin University that was given, Quantlin Polytechnic University. This is essentially a new Canada research chair. So, you know, here's an entire federally funded academic position at Quantland Polytechnic University. And it is to study, What the heck did it was the actual name? Culturally preferred. Yes, the Canada Research Chair in Race, Food, and Health. And this is Kelly Velazquez, and she is in charge of, she is part of a multi-year project, $600,000 for these multi-years to study the cultural, social, economic, and environmental factors of whether African immigrants to the greater Vancouver area can access culturally preferred food. It's just, I mean, look, okay, all right, sure. So $600,000 to study culturally preferred African and Caribbean foods in Canadian cities. And, I mean, there's so many ways to attack this.

One of them is, I mean, the kicker that you point out is Metro Vancouver has a relatively small black population. If we were going to do this, why wouldn't you do it in places like Montreal or Toronto that actually have a ton of people moving here from those places? That's true. I'm sure every immigrant listener is just screaming at the radio right now, that they're like, well, when I came here, you know, I found culturally preferred food via, you know, my own channels. I didn't. Because basically, if you read the literature of this project, their ideas that there should be an

increased government role in ensuring that if you move here, moved to Vancouver and you can't find Casava. Yeah. It doesn't really grow well here. There should be an increased government role in ensuring you could, so there's a whole integration thing there. And that's, by the way, that's what I'm talking about. That's the issue that I have. It's the vision that this group of people that are running the federal government have that they believe that there is no problem too small or too insignificant or too irrelevant

to the government that the government can't have a hand in solving. Yes. Yeah. Even if, again, you're talking about a population of like a few hundred African immigrants in the greater And this, there is no shortage of African food. There's actually about six to eight African grocery stores in the Vancouver area, which is a fair amount. Well, given the fact that the population is in the tens of thousands. Yeah, it seems sufficient. So, I mean, when you look at the literature for this project, they're like, well, you know, but it's in one place. So, you know, if you live in Kittsulano, you're going to drive there, take the subway to go get your culturally preferred food.

And, you know, that's kind of a, that's a systemic, systemically racist barrier when you really think about it. Oh, of course. And so the problem you're looking at a problem that doesn't really exist. You could argue it shouldn't even be considered at all as a problem. And you have a full-time academic staff are looking into it. But again, look, in the best of times, you would, in my opinion, you'd have to make a really good argument to spend Canadian taxpayer money on something like this. In the best of times, we are currently living what a lot of people are experiencing as

the worst times in their life. And to hear that this is one of God knows how many programs that would total in the hundreds of millions in just a few departments. If you looked writ large across the government, you're talking billions of dollars that are made because of choices by people who view this sort of thing as important. We could be saving billions of dollars a year over. Look, we can revisit this stuff when we're in the black again. But the rules should be when we're in the red, this stuff is the first to go.

And it's the last to go. Actually, if you look at the last federal budget, most departments were given sort of a 10%, 15% target to cut. But this is research funding, and this is part of research funding, it was conspicuously left untouched. I think the federal budget said, you know, we need science to sort of advance us. If we're not doing the important research about because of the grocery stores in the Vancouver area, we'll be left behind. This isn't science.

This is social science with a gear. This is a social engineering project. And look, again, this speaks to a completely different vision. Like, one of the big problems that I think from my perspective that we have is we're losing an entire generation and we're losing it at the hands of a very aggressively political, academic space in this country. And so throwing more money at the very people who are taking our next generation and

turning them into openly hostile to Canadian values and Canada as an idea is not a recipe for success long term for this country. I don't know that we need any of this. In fact, I'm kind of one of the people who thinks at this point, just a level set with everybody. Like, you know, you got to know where your bread is buttered, and it's buttered by the federal government. We got a lot of money, but we are proud to be, we are proud to be Canadian. And if you're not going to get on that page with us, you're going to lose your funding for stupid programs like this. Yes, it wasn't too long ago that I would look at sort of a

granting program. This is a major program. You'd be trying to find edge cases. You know, you're doing a year-end story. You're like, let's find the dumb research that's funded. And you, for every crazy one, you'd have one that you're like, well, okay, maybe I like this particular research. That seems important. But it is an increasingly common experience for me that I'll just track open a granting program

and I'll be like, oh, we could do it with all of these. Everything here is either making the country worth, you know, you're telling newcomers to Canada that actually you shouldn't integrate to Canadian food. It's our job to make sure that your diet doesn't change your diet doesn't change. And on

top of that, we recognize the systemic failure of Canada by not allowing you to access that food in a timely and proximate distance from where you live and anything short of that is proof of our systemic racism and we will do better. Yes, which, you know, they're not children, you know, we have a long history in this country of people coming here and finding ways to, you know, secure food that they find familiar and even thriving and doing it. So it's weird that after 150 years of that, we've decided that actually Africans can't do that.

They are useless. They need our help. Yeah, Tristan, all it takes is an entrepreneur from that community to say, you know what I've noticed? Which is what is exactly happening. That actually some of the most thriving African businesses in the Metro Vancouver area are in the grocery trade. Yeah. So it's all, it's being done for food security. And take note of that term.

Yeah. Because it used to be, you'd be like, well, let's let's let's. at, you know, hunger among poor communities, hunger among immigrant communities. And they realize that actually nobody is hungry. Everybody's getting a pretty good amount of food in Canada. So you just changed the term to food security, which is a catch-all for anything. That means, you know, you're well-fed. However, you kind of wish having Ugali for dinner and not having it immediately available

without driving. That is a violation of your food security. When you think about it. Oh, Jesus. Oh, God. Listen, I thank you for highlighting this story, but it's also one that just makes me shake my head to realize so many people in key positions have just lost the plot.

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