The Ben Mulroney Show - Criminal Immigrants Granted a Pass by Immigration Canada

Episode Date: July 3, 2025

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Terms and conditions apply. Visit bmo.com slash VI Porter to learn more. All right, so I've been fired up all morning and this is another reason to either roll your eyes, throw your hands up or have your head explode. I didn't need any more reasons to believe that under Justin Trudeau, the consensus on Canada's immigration policy system and how we've grown our population and indeed strengthen this nation was broken. I didn't need any more evidence, but oh boy is there a treasure trove of it today and we're about to lay it all out for you. So for context in 2023 there was an audit by the CBSA, the Canadian Border Security Agency, that revealed that from

2014 to 2019, nearly 46% of all the foreign nationals that were flagged with serious offenses, so people that were coming in and they had a criminal record. And by the way, those serious offenses, including war crimes, kind of a biggie, espionage, you know, kind of important, terrorism, were still granted residency in Canada despite CBSA recommending against it. Nearly half of all the people that want to come here with serious offenses, and we don't know what those offenses are, but serious offenses include espionage, terrorism, and war crimes were still let in. Okay, so that's from 2023. Here's Ron Chinzer, who was recently on, just earlier on the Greg

Brady show. Ron Chinzer was a former police officer. He's a contributor here at the radio station. And he was also a candidate for the conservatives in the last election. Here's him saying we need accountability. There needs to be a direct answer to these questions to how did this happen? Why is this okay? What was the process? And who and where are these people? Again, a national security issue for us. And then we look back to the US and you know, how many times do you see them saying, Canada's a security threat and what's Canada's response as from the media as well?

Oh no, everything's fine up here, we're not the problem, you're the problem. This is more evidence to say that there's this just complete neglect for taking responsibility of all the problems that we've had over in our country and just pushing responsibility and saying, well, it's not our fault. Again, unacceptable.

If I've said it once, I've said it a billion times. We are a nation that with serious problems that we do not take seriously. We are unserious about the things that we should be very serious about. And if we don't take war crimes and espionage and terrorism seriously, if we don't defer to the customs, border and security agency when they say, don't let that dude in,

where does the buck stop? How do we fix that? If you are somebody in a position of power within the government that looks to the CBSA and says, oh no, they're warning us against letting that guy in, terrorism, no, no, no, no, no, that's cool, that's cool, we're gonna let that guy in. We can't fix stupid, you cannot fix stupid.

And that is stupid. Okay, so that was 2023. Now this, okay. So in the Globe and Mail, it has been reported that 17th and nearly 20,000 people, foreigners with criminal convictions, so now they're here,

they were granted rehabilitation in Canada over the past 11 years. And so to be eligible for that, that requires at least five years since the conviction or sentence completion. So 17,600 people who came here with criminal convictions had those criminal convictions just disappear

into the ether, doesn't matter. Doesn't matter. Now what they were convicted for, we don't know, but could those things include terrorism, war crimes, violence against women, murder, capital offenses? I don't know. You don't know. Don't you think we should know? We're letting these people into our country. We're allowing them to come here. We're hoping that they will help build Canada into a better place. Do these sound like people who intend to build as part of a community?

I don't know. That's the fundamental thing. We don't know because there's no accountability. Remember when Justin Trudeau promised transparency by default? Does this sound like transparency by default? The government doesn't disclose what types of crimes, serious offenses are decided by the minister of immigration. And so you wonder where this all went off the rails. So let's cast our regard back to a seminal debate

during the 2015 election campaign that led to Justin Trudeau sweeping into power why have we not because of the citizenship of people convicted of terrorist offenses against this country this was a bill because who is himself an immigrant divinder shawry this is not the standards we expect immigrants cadet is all of us who are here expect that we would have a minimum bar that people would not, people who come here would not be guilty of trying to plan terrorist

attacks against this country. The individual in question, Mr. Trudeau, is the individual in question. Mr. Harper, a Canadian is a Canadian. You devalue the citizenship of every Canadian in this place and in this country when you break down and make it conditional for anyone. We all remember that, right? It was, this is, that was a moment that so many people felt their patriotism swell. Yes, a Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian. Meanwhile, our prime minister at the time, Stephen Harper, was explaining chapter and verse

why this immigration policy was important. Now think about the system that we're living in now. Think about the thunderdome that we're living in now. Stephen Harper sounds like the adult in the room, doesn't he? And Justin Trudeau sounds like he's trying to be prime minister by slogan. A Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian. You know what? No.

A Canadian with dual citizenship who was found guilty of terrorism is not as Canadian as I am. Sorry, you go back to where you came from. That's what I want now, certainly what I wanted then. And look, the knock on effects of these of this is is pretty significant. The US is deporting more people than ever before, right? And the US Supreme Court had made a decision that allows deportations to third countries, which means Canada could become a destination for some of the people that are being removed from the US, we could be getting some of the people that are being removed from the US.

We could be getting more of these people because of our permissive position on immigration and on allowing people in with criminal records. And so at 10 o'clock, we're going to be speaking with Chris Alexander. You might ask yourself, why would we be talking to Chris Alexander? Well, because he was immigration minister under Stephen Harper that launched the Strengthening Canadian Citizens Act that Trudeau dismantled in 2015. I wanna take a look at what things were supposed to be under this law and how things got so cockeyed under Justin Trudeau and the liberals.

And so, because frankly, look, our prime minister has a lot to undo from his predecessor and that government that messed a lot of stuff up. This should be top of the list because we are falling further behind from our allies who look at these things and think this is a country run by children. This is a country that wants to live in a world of flowers, rainbows, and unicorns. And, and they don't take things seriously. And if they don't trust us to take our own domestic policies seriously, they're not going to invite us to the table when they discuss stuff that concerns their public safety, their borders, their security. We are going to be on the outside

looking in as serious things are discussed by serious people. And our prime minister, I believe, takes a lot of things seriously. And I implore him to put this at the top of the list. Welcome back to the Ben Mulroney Show. And thank you so much for joining us here. And whether you join us on YouTube or as a podcast, as a radio show, or on a streaming app, we know that your time is valuable to you.

So the fact that you take any of it and join us on this adventure that we are trying to build the Ben Mulroney Show into something, I say thank you, because we can't do it without you. All right, earlier in the show, we were talking about some pretty significant news, just further proof that the consensus on immigration in this country has been broken for decades.

Whether you are conservative, NDP, liberal, everybody agreed that the way we were building this country through immigration was correct, and it was strengthening an already robust country. And it was leading to great things in this country. And then all of a sudden, one day we wake up and that's not the case anymore. And you have people like me who are really angry

that I was one of those people who believed that firmly and with my heart and it was a point of pride. And now I find myself criticizing immigration and the people that were letting in. And I don't like that that's happened to me. I don't like that the powers that be made me into this person. And yet here we are.

And it wasn't always like this. Under the Harper conservatives, there were steps that were taken to strengthen and bolster Canadian identity through immigration. And so now we're going to talk with Chris Alexander. He was Canada's first resident ambassador to Afghanistan. He was elected an MP to Ajax and Pickering in May 2011. He was the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration

from July 2013 until 2015 under Prime Minister Stephen Harper. He's also a distinguished fellow at the McDonald-Laurier Institute. Chris, welcome to the show. Hopefully not for the last time. Thanks for having me, Ben. Okay, so we've got to- We'll talk about these issues.

Yeah, so I wanna ask you about, what was it like around the cabinet table about what were the goals of the Harper government in terms of immigration and like, what were you trying to achieve through immigration? Well, first of all, it was a very busy period for immigration. I think over my two and a half years in cabinet, we had more bills come forward,

more memoranda to cabinet come forward than any other portfolio. So it was an area of focus for the prime minister, for all of us. And it built on momentum that my predecessors had created. Jason Kenney served the longest, but there were others as well. And so first of all, it was busy. Secondly, there was support for growth in immigration, larger scale immigration, as you mentioned, more international students, more permanent residents, more of the skills that we knew we needed in Canada,

from welders to technology startup venture entrepreneurs. And we saw this as a driver of our economic growth. And finally, I guess you'd have to say that it was popular. You know, these were things, there was always discussion, there was always debate about integrity measures, which were hard to make sure the rules were being followed. But there was always support for the larger numbers, for growing Canada, for immigration

as one of the drivers of Canadian growth. And it's sad to see that that really went off the rails in the 10 years that followed. Yeah, well, let's talk about sort of that turning point in the election campaign during the debate where Stephen Harper was, to be fair, given that his government fell, was on his heels defending something that I think today

would be absolutely defensible, which was the idea that if somebody in Canada had another passport and they were convicted of terrorism that we could send them back to where they came from. That today sounds absolutely acceptable, but for some reason, Justin Trudeau's very trite slogan of a Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian grabbed hold in, uh, in the voting public and led to not, well, that was one of a few reasons, I'm sure, but it was significant given what we're dealing with today.

It grabbed hold and was, was something that helped usher in his government. What do you account for that? Yeah, I mean, the way you put it is, is accurate and interesting because what we were trying to do by saying that a dual citizen who was convicted of a very few crimes, high treason, where there hasn't been a conviction in this country in decades, I think, or terrorism could lose their Canadian citizenship. That has been done, the ability to revoke citizenship in similar circumstances has been enacted in almost every major democracy, certainly almost everywhere in Europe, in the United States and so forth. So I think what you saw under Trudeau was kind of lowest common denominator approach to citizenship and immigration, that there weren't really any standards at all, that Canada was the way it was in his view, because we were just nice to everyone.

We looked the other way even when serious crimes were committed. And people bought into that at the time. There were, you know, powerful voices in media and online, social media that amplified that message at the time. Yeah. But we paid a price later. Well, we're paying for it every day. We're paying for it every day, Chris. And there were other distortions in that election. I mean, remember this issue of forced marriage and underage marriage. Then it's unbelievable. But until our time in government, there had been actually at the federal level, no minimum age for marriage in Canada.

So technically that age was set by the common law, which as we know from medieval times, could take the acceptable age for marriage into the early teenage years. So we set it at 16. Some of us thought it should be 18. Because the UN and other organizations were urging us to do this. This was one of the UN sustainable development goals.

And then we were also trying to find out whether there were cases in Canada of forced marriage where parents were literally forcing their children against their will into marriages, which is illegal, has been for a long time in Canada. It was happening. And so we tried to put some measures into the immigration system that would prevent victims

of forced marriage from being re-victimized in Canada. And that would allow police to investigate such cases. But as you saw in the election, it was used against them. It was used against them. The government was, I think, unfairly tarred as draconian, where like today, those positions, I think, would be a respite from the chaos that we are living through. And so now in the Globe and Mail today, there's a report that of nearly 20,000 foreigners

with criminal convictions. So 17,600 foreigners with criminal convictions. They were granted rehabilitation by the immigration refugees and citizenship of Canada over the past 11 years. And when we talk about criminal convictions, we don't know exactly what they were convicted of, but that definition can include terrorism. It can include capital crimes.

The fact that we've become so permissive towards these things and the fact that we've been led in so many people for whom there's no way that somebody with a serious crime in their portfolio is coming here to help build the great Canadian mosaic. It's just not reasonable to assume that. They're coming here to do something bad. And this is where we are.

So as you were trying to build that, assume that they're coming here to do something bad. And this is, this is where we are. So as you were trying to build that, like what you must have a very particular perspective on what we have been experiencing as a country in terms of the downfall of our immigration system. Well, first, it's not beyond repair. I mean, that think- Well, that's good news. That there are steps being taken now that are relatively positive, but it has been a brutal and disappointing 10 years. And as you've been hinting,

by letting things slide down to this lowest common denominator, by letting backlogs grow up, by letting the numbers increase far beyond what the country's capacity to absorb them was. We've lost Canadians, right? It's not just you who questions the system now, who's disappointed by the system.

It's the majority of Canadians, whereas at our time in office, an overwhelming majority supported our immigration program. So I mean, on this, we have to be clear, rehabilitation has always been there. There's always been a pathway to having your case looked at and allowing a person to prove that the conviction they received in the past was unjust or was motivated by politics or was so small, so trivial,

that it should not count against them in the Canadian immigration system. This podcast is sponsored by BetterHelp. If you've been following the news, like really following it, you know how exhausting it can be. Politics, conflict, uncertainty, it's a lot to carry. And for many men, there's this expectation to stay calm, stay in control, and not talk about how it's affecting you.

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to be in conversation with Chris Alexander, our former immigration minister under Stephen Harper, among many other accolades. And Chris, your work built on Jason Kenney's previous work of strengthening the Canadian Citizenship Act, which gave the government power to revoke Canadian citizenship from dual citizens convicted of terrorism, treason, spying for foreign governments. It made language proficiency and citizenship knowledge tests mandatory for certain applicants.

I don't think that's a bridge too far, but the criticisms were leveled that it would allow the government to revoke citizenship without a fair trial. Justin Trudeau opposed the bill and called citizenship a right, not a privilege. And the liberal government repealed many of these provisions in 2017 under Bill C-6. And look, you were very magnanimous before the break saying a lot of good work is being

done to fix these problems. But we've talked a lot on this show that we simply don't have the manpower or the technology or the ability or the budgets to go find anybody that is a problem. People come to this country and in a lot of cases, they just disappear and we can't find them. Even if we wanted or had the ability to get rid of them, we don't have the ability to do that. Yeah, that's what I worry about most of all, Ben.

We used to have a system where you could say, and a country where you could say, hand on heart, there is not a large population of people here are people who are in Canada without status. And we don't know what they're doing. Yeah, now I don't think that's any longer the case. We've had this extraordinary growth in people who are temporary residents, which means they're not citizens, they're not permanent residents. And our system is not designed for that. It's designed for permanent residents who become citizens.

And that's not just our system, that's our ethos, that's our approach to building this country over centuries. So it is worrying, and you're right, the numbers aren't coming down far enough. And they took this lower common denominator, lowest common denominator approach of, to rehabilitation, for example, which was done in a few cases in the past. And they basically opened the flood gates. 17,000 is an extraordinary number.

There is no reason why we should have 280,000 people in the backlog waiting for a hearing for asylum. That can be resolved with resources. The number of temporary residents who have work permits but are not permanent residents has ballooned to a very high number, much more than we've ever had before. Why is that happening? Why are these people not able to Why is that happening? Why are these people not able to come as permanent residents? Why are they not given the same rights and the pathway to citizenship as immigrants have had for generations in the past? Something's gone really wrong. And I agree. I stand by my remarks. Things are being done to turn the corner on this,

but it's not being done fast enough. There isn't enough political will and we have it. So there isn't that new approach that you would have had with a new government. And that's what I've said before. I said, our prime minister is doing a lot to distance himself from the failures of his predecessor and that government.

But if there is one thing that should be taken seriously and taken seriously by way of an indication that the prime minister has put this at the top of his list, I think this should be that thing. But I wanna ask you about sort of the knock-on effect of something like this. If I'm reading this news, if you're reading this news, then our allies are reading this news

and they are seeing these stories about our porous and unserious immigration system and how unseriously we have taken what is a very serious issue. I mean, if we've been this permissive about issues of terrorism, treason, and spying for foreign governments over the course of a decade,

what does that do when we are engaged in bilateral or multilateral conversations about these very issues? Because my sense would be those countries who do take these things seriously would keep us at arm's length. Yeah, I think it's done two things. One, it has harmed our overall reputation as a country that does things well when it

sets its mind to it. Immigration was our calling card. I mean, when I was minister, we had political parties, senior officials, the chancellor and ministers coming to find out from Germany, trying to coming to find out how we did it, how they could do it better. Europe had been behind the curve on immigration policies and other European countries including the Commission were watching us. Now they're not looking to us as an example and then secondly as you rightly say we're paying a price on national security. We are not seen as a

country that has extremism under control, whether it's certain groups from South Asia, certain Islamic extremist groups that are raising money here, that are organizing rallies here on a large scale, that are organizing terrorist attacks from here. We've seen that in the last couple of years, the ones that have been apprehended. And so we've lost a major calling card, a big part of our global reputation, which paid dividends on other fronts.

And we've fallen down the pecking order in terms of national security among the Five Eyes and a wider group of allies. It's a shame. And there's another thing about these stories because there was a story in 2023 when the CBSA was flagging a lot of these people who want to come to Canada as dangerous

and therefore shouldn't be granted access to our country. And in 46% of the cases of these dangerous flagged people, the government said, no, no, it's okay, we're gonna let them in. So when you have that coupled with this, this new story of, of how many people the, the immigration, refugee and citizenship Canada said were of concern that were then let in, what does that tell you about how one hand either doesn't know what the other hand is doing or one hand is ignoring the concerns of the other hand?

It seems to me that the, the base, a basic function of government is everybody the concerns of the other hand. It seems to me that a basic function of government is everybody should be on the same page and rowing in the same direction. And if you're not gonna defer to the experts in those departments, and instead, you're gonna go off and do exactly what you want based on, I don't know, preconceived ideas, ideology or carelessness, it could be a factor.

What does that say about the basic function of government that we had over 10 years? It says that the approach to government over those 10 years, especially in immigration, was not serious. I mean, it is outrageous that CBSA advice would be ignored that often. I could see some cases being questioned, but 46% is off the charts. Moreover, you had a really cavalier, I mean, it also speaks then to arrogance. I mean, really the PMO knows best and is prepared to ignore its national security advisors

on these really important issues in that many cases. There was also a cavalier approach to things like the visa requirement for Mexico, right? We could all see reasons for lifting it, even in my time as minister. Mexicans wanted to come as tourists, Mexicans wanted to come and visit family. There are important partner here in North America. But we got the

advice not to do it because there are cartels in Mexico. And the cartels are not able to get into the United States easily. And by lifting the visa requirement, we let them into Canada for many years on a scale that we still probably don't understand. I hadn't made that link in my head. Chris, I only have about a minute left with you and I want to get to one last question because one thing that Prime Minister Trudeau did was weaken the power of the immigration

minister to revoke citizenship. How important is it for that power to be restored in about a minute, sir? Extremely important. The information can come to light about a person who received citizenship. We have to and it can be very, very alarming and serious. I mean, if someone has participated in genocide in Darfur or some other part of the world, we have to be able to bring that information to bear. And in some cases, that's going to involve revocation of citizenship. I cannot imagine why that power would be taken away.

And we can, at a time when international peace and security is under threat, there are more genocides happening than ever before. There are more bad actors, malign actors. We need to give our ministers the tools they need to keep us safe. Chris Alexander, really a wide ranging conversation. I'm really glad to have gotten you on the record with this today. And I can tell that there's a lot of fun

being had in your house. So we're going to let you get back to it. I hope you had a great Canada day. I hope you enjoy your summer. And I hope you come back to the Ben Mulroney show soon. Thanks very much, Ben. Yeah, sorry about the pitter-patter. No, I love it.

I love it. You go enjoy yourself. Thank you very much, sir. All the best. The all-new 2025 Kicks isn't just a bold new vehicle on the road. It's Nissan's number one selling subcompact SUV. With expressive style and advanced tech, Kicks is number one. Right now, lease the 2025 Kicks for the equivalent of $65 weekly for 48 months. Hurry into your local dealer today. S front wheel drive for 280 monthly with 3,495 down at 3.49%.

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