The Ben Mulroney Show - Does Canada need to follow-suit on the U.K's changes in Immigration

Episode Date: May 15, 2025

Guests and Topics: -PM Carney’s new cabinet sending mixed signals on pipelines with Guest: Heather Exner-Pirot, Director of Energy, Natural Resources, and Environment at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute. Also Special Advisor To The Business Council Of Canada -Does Canada need to follow-suit on the U.K's changes in Immigration with Guest: Anthony Koch, Managing Principal at AK Strategies and former National Campaign Spokesperson for Pierre Poilievre If you enjoyed the podcast, tell a friend! For more of the Ben Mulroney Show, subscribe to the podcast! https://globalnews.ca/national/program/the-ben-mulroney-show Follow Ben on Twitter/X at https://x.com/BenMulroney Enjoy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Welcome back to the Ben Mulrooney show. I don't think there is a topic that is more important for us to figure out in this country than that of natural resource development, because it plays a hand in so many other aspects of this country. I mean, if we can find a consensus on building pipelines, I think that makes it easier for us to find a consensus on lowering inter-provincial trade barriers. I think that helps with how we raise taxes, how we build our economy, how we build jobs in this country.

I think it helps us redefine who we are as a nation. So yes, national unity plays a role in this. And so look, you got the prime minister who sits down with CTV news and says one thing. And then the very next day, a minister of his who has no business weighing in on those things says something very, very different. And people like me are saying,

can we just figure out the plan? Well, here to break this down, talk about that comment that we're gonna get to in just a moment, I'm joined by Heather Exner-Perot, Director of Energy, National Resources and Environment at the McDonald-Laurier Institute, also Special Advisor to the Business Council of Canada. Heather, welcome to the show. Delighted to be here. So yeah, I mean, did you feel the whiplash that I felt after hearing the Prime Minister in at least some way say that he was pro-pipeline only to hear his Minister of National Unity

or not that's not the exact title, but Stephen Gilbo say pretty much the opposite. Let's listen to Minister Gilbo. On pipelines, people should remember that we bought a pipeline, Trans Mountain, and that is only used right now, about 40% capacity. So I think before we start talking about building an entire new pipeline, maybe we should maximize the use of existing infrastructure. And the Canadian Energy Regulator, as well as the International Energy Agency are telling us that probably by 2028 2029 demand for oil will peak globally and it will also peak in Canada. So as far as I know, there are no investors right now.

There are no companies that are saying that they want to build an East West pipeline. And as you know, these things are built by by companies. Okay, there are a great many things wrong with what he said, not the least of which is he has no business saying them. He's not even in his lane, but you are the expert here Heather. So break down chapter and verse, everything wrong with what he said. I would love to. And I'll just say, you know, Carney has been saying some good things on the campaign trail. He said some good things at CTV interview. We know there's, you know, over 80% Canadian support for pipeline. So just to hear Gibo come back,

you know, we thought we had seen the back guy, you know, just absolutely triggered us all in the West. But anyways, let me break it down and why it's so frustrating. That first claim that trans amount is only 40% fall is absolutely false. And actually the latest data we have is from March and it's and was reported by the CEO. They had 790,000 barrels going through. Well, the capacity is 900,000 barrels. That's over

about 88%, well over 80% full. And that's within a year. Like it's phenomenal that they filled out that pipeline in here. It's actually a little concerning because we're getting too close to filling it off and we're going to be in a position where we don't have egress anymore. But for Stephen Kibow, who as he said, this is a government that owns a pipeline, they spent $34 billion on it to not have any understanding of where it's at in terms of capacity, what kind of returns it's getting. And he was in a portfolio that he should have known this. And I'll just say like an average person in Calgary would know, you know, what the

Tress Mountain is, how much capacity, how well it's doing, what the differential is doing. For this minister, like he's obviously not even curious at all about the pipeline or about the oil and gas sector. And I don't know where he got this data fact from. I can't even imagine where he pulled it out of, but just absolutely wrong. And we'll get to some more of the things that he said in there that I take issue with in a moment. But to me, the greatest problem with what he said is, he's the minister who's essentially in charge of,

I mean, he's not in charge of national unity, but when you're in charge of heritage and you're in charge of sort of the national identity, the Canadian identity, that is a part of your job. And for you to stand up and say, oh, well, we're gonna have to agree to disagree with Danielle Smith, which is essentially saying, are we ever gonna disagree with Alberta?

You are damaging the job you're supposed to be doing by speaking on a file that isn't yours. But that's another topic. I wanna get to what he was saying about the global appetite for oil and how it's gonna peak in a few years. What do you make of that? Yes, so he pulls out again, IEA and CR,

that's opinion and regulator and their assessments. And I just wanna point out, this is very easily verifiable for your listeners to go look at. Those EIA and CRC are based on scenarios of what would happen, how would we get to 2015 different scenarios if we had, for example, accelerated climate policy

or stated policy. So if we all implemented all the policies, all the countries have announced that we might see a peaking of oil around 2028. But of course, we won't all implement all the policies and the facts since they've made those scenarios, the policies have changed. When you have right-wing governments coming into Germany,

obviously Donald Trump, the United States and the liberals all pulling of the carbon tax. Then all the policies that we had in place last year have already been downgraded. So even just based on that, the IA and CRO have to, using their own methodology, push that data after. But again, those are scenarios, climate policy scenarios, not forecasts. There's lots of real consultancies that do these forecasts, and it's mixed.

No one can predict the future, but usually they'll tend to be from late 2030s until beyond the 2050s. And the US equivalent, the EIA, actually has it beyond 2050. And so beyond 2050. And so Heather, like for example, when we got the news today that the number of EV sales in Canada

dropped nearly 45% last year. Would that, when the government put together their mandate that every EV, that every vehicle sold in Canada by 2030 has to be an electric vehicle, they didn't consider this precipitous drop in purchasing of EVs. So could that number, that number means there will be more cars bought

that are internal combustion in this country possibly leading to yeah so we could see the the the pulling back of that mandate which could then alter that that supposition that that our appetite for oil is going to peak yeah the rate of growth that we had seen in evs in the western world has declined, it's not just Canada, it's obviously the United States, California with democratic, state government with democratic support just removed their EV mandate, downgraded it. In Europe, again, you know, Germany has ran up against fiscal walls and removed all its supports for its EVs. Anyway, so, so the, the, the, you know, looking at the graph, that graph has changed the rate of uptake for EVs has definitely gone down. And lastly, what do you make of his comment that as far as I know, there's, there's no,

there, there's no private business that wants even wants to get into this. It really does sound like the Justin Trudeau line is that there's no business case for this. Well, this is so what's infuriating is because they're the ones that have created a regulatory framework that would make it impossible for anyone to make money. There have been natural gas pipelines proposed in Quebec that they rejected literally two weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine. They rejected a natural gas pipeline in Europe, even Gibo signing that paper saying we reject this on the basis of mostly climate emissions.

And so, of course, no one is going to build a pipeline under these circumstances. And so we do need to see regulatory changes when we talk about the Impact Assessment Act. The emissions cap, who's going to build a pipeline, you know, hundreds of thousands more barrels of oil when you have an emissions cap imposed on you, which means that you cannot grow production. In fact, you'll have to start shutting in production. So, so just to hear that, oh, no one's interested in building oil and gas, well, change the conditions that you yourself impose to make it more attractive to build things

in this country. And that's my fear is that Mark Carney is new to politics. And he's going to be sitting around the cabinet table, he's going to be trusting that the people who are advising him around that cabinet table are giving him the straight goods. And if you're going to get this level of, call it disinformation, call it massaging the truth, call it sort of selective cherry picking of the data. If this is one of the voices around that cabinet table, you know, I don't know what that does for Canada long term in terms of building our natural resources. I'll give you the last word. Yeah, it was so, you know, just as so and not all the do-mer's here. There is, you know, there is optimism about cautious

optimism, I'll say about the Minister of Energy and Natural Resources, that was just appointed Tim Hodgson. And he is at the cabinet table and he's leading the cabinet committee on building Canada. I think of which people is a member, but he knows the straight facts. And I know he has the ear of Carney. So there's some cautious optimism that they'll be adults in the room. And that the facts will be get to the prime minister and that that will sway his here. And I just have to say that Quebec Premier Legault. Yes, he just he just came out. He just said that he may be open to it. That's a that's wonderful news. So that's that's a feather in the cap to build that consensus. Heather, thank you very

much for joining us. My pleasure. This is the Ben Mulroney Show. And thank you so much for spending a little bit of your Thursday with us. The story of UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is an interesting one, right? So after years of inept leadership by the Conservative Party in the UK, Keir Starmer's Labour Party sort of reinvented itself as being a hodgepodge of left and right, specifically they ran to the right of the Conservatives on immigration, bungled immigration, a lot of people believe. And if you see the visuals of the UK these days, you can appreciate what that means.

But, and then he goes through a period of time where he just appeared feckless and useless. Then he comes back and turns it up to 11 on immigration, where he's recently been taking the toughest of tough lines on human migration and immigration to the UK. He recently tweeted, I've already returned over 24,000 people with no right to be here and I won't stop there. I know you're angry about immigration.

I get it. Mark my words. I will take back control of our borders. That means cutting migration, ending the use of asylum hotels and ramping up our efforts to stop small boat crossings. We will smash the people smuggling gangs at source. I mean, these are tough words, and I believe it will be followed and has been followed at least up until this point with tough action. So here to talk about whether Canada should

and does Canada have the capacity and ability to follow suit, because we have our own issues with immigration is Anthony Kosh. Anthony is the managing principal at AK strategies and former national campaign spokesperson for Pierre Poliev. Anthony, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me on. Okay, so I don't think it's a it's, I think it's accurate to say that Keir Starmer is taking a hard line, I think the right line, because things are reaching the red line when it comes to immigration and the issues that come from unchecked immigration

in the UK. 100% but it's just shocking. Like this is the Labour Party. This is a party that is to the left of the Liberals in Canada on most issues and has been for quite some time and has supported this sort of vision of mass migration. And that's the thing that's even more amazing too. It's not even so much the policies that Prime Minister Stammer's taking, it's the rhetoric that he's using around them, right? He says, we're going to end Great Britain's open borders experiment. That's something that you would never have heard from the left,

that probably would have been attacked for everything. You know, he had a tweet that he put out today talking about how he's meeting with officials in Albania to cut down drugs rings at the source. He's going off about, and it's not just legal immigration. He also put out a tweet saying, you know, it's time for common sense. If you want to live in the United Kingdom, you have to speak English, right?

Yeah. That's like, board to board, legal immigration, illegal immigration, illegal immigration. They're cutting down even by the way, on the amount of time that graduates from UK universities have to stay in the United Kingdom before they find a job. Yeah. It used to be 24 months. Now it's 18. Yeah. The most shocking one up until recently, the way it worked in the UK before you got settlement. So basically the equivalent of permanent residency in Canada, you had to live in the UK for five years,

and then they would allow you to apply for citizenship a year after that. He's doubling it. Not five years now. Now he wants 10 years before you get PR. These are kind of things that conservatives couldn't have ever even dreamed of proposing all of six months ago,

and now all of a sudden he's going full pin. It's obvious this is partially a result of the Reform Party surging in the UK, but it's still just incredible to see. So let's take it to our side of the pond. We've got a new government that has the chance to define itself as not the guys from the past. Taking a hard line like this would do a lot of good for Mark Carney on a lot of fronts. First of all, he would appeal to the 41, almost 42 percent of the people that didn't vote for him.

Two, he would solve some real problems that were the creation of his predecessor, demonstrating on a further point that he is not Justin Trudeau. But do you think that this government has it in them to do something like this? I certainly hope so. I think it's possible. You saw there was already some movement in this direction. Actually under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, it was a little bit too little too late to piece me as I argued in my piece. But you saw Mark Miller was openly talking about a couple things like, you know what, we made it too easy for people to just sort of show up and scam the game on international student visas. He even went as far as to say, you know what, we're actually probably taking too many people from the same countries, which is making it more difficult for people to integrate.

Again, stuff that five, six years ago would have been impossible to say. And then you saw there's been some early indication, Mark Carney has said on a number of occasions that we need to have certain immigration caps, that it's clear that our numbers have been too large, that that's resulted in negative. Anthony, like, yes, I've sat in front of this mic for too long and I've talked too often

about a government under this liberal banner. I know it's a different government, but it's this liberal banner. I know it's a different government, but it's this liberal banner. They love talking. They love talking a mean game. And my fear is that we are gonna do the most Canadian thing we do, which is talk a mean game

and then putting a series of half measures that don't do anything. And in some cases, because you haven't gone all the way, you make things worse. Like that, to me, is a very realistic possibility. Correct. And yesterday is a great indication of that, right? Everyone is expecting, like you said, Oh, we've got a new government. And then you've got Gregor Robertson, the former failed mayor of Vancouver, coming out and telling everybody, Oh, actually, we're not doing anything different on housing. Right. You've got Anita and Anne coming out and basically saying, Oh, you thought that Melanesia Lee

leaving as Foreign Affairs was going to result in a different posturing. No, we're not changing that. You had, what's his, uh, Stefan Gui Bo, who's now Minister of Culture, deciding that he wants to opine once again, as if he was Minister of the Environment, and saying, oh, you know how Carney was talking about potentially building pipelines and getting rid of C-69? Yeah, not happening from my perspective. And then you have Sean Fraser saying that he's gonna mail it in and spend more time back at home even though he's attorney general, he's

minister of justice. So you're right. It's weird. We're getting mixed signals. A lot of the stuff is indicating that we're just elected a fourth Trudeau term and nothing's really gonna change. But I'm saying if the liberals want to, not only has Keir Starmer given them some ideological cover, but Mark Carney has also laid some of the groundwork that would justify some of these changes based on his previous rhetoric. But you're right. I mean, we've had 10 years of a government that said a bunch of things and did very little,

or like you said, the things that they did do made things worse. I'm just saying that they've given some opening to themselves that if they do decide to go down this pathway, it wouldn't be coming out of left field. And they would have a lot of people from across the spectrum congratulating them for the tough decision to do the things that need to get done. And in our last couple of minutes,

I want to talk about this riding in Quebec-Turbone, where after a recount, the Liberals beat the Bloc Québécois by one vote and then we find out that a vote that could have gone to the Bloc Québécois was denied because it was a mail-in ballot and the address that was printed by Elections Canada for Elections Canada to be sent to Elections Canada had the wrong postal code and they refused to count it, which would have effectively resulted in a tie. Elections Canada then comes around and says, you know what, we don't care, we're certifying this election. This is a problem. This is a real problem. Correct and it's annoying because at a time when mistrust in

institutions is at an all-time high, Canadian institutions have an obligation even more so than they already do, forget just being by the letter of the law, going above and beyond both in perception and in reality. And it wasn't just have-been. You also had an incident where an Elections Canada worker forgot that they took a ballot box home with them and oh, there was 800 votes that we forgot to count. Now we've got to count them. And it's very similar, by the way, to what happened in British Columbia. Elections BC had a similar thing. Ballot boxes missing because workers brought them home, and then a couple of writings flipped as a result of it. And here's the point.

I'm not here suggesting that there's foul play, but at a time when people are having serious ballot-smoke things, even the appearance of foul play is a problem. This is rookie stuff. Get it done, get it done properly. What's the line? Never ascribe nefarious intent when incompetence is probably the reason behind it. There is incompetence here, right? And simply certifying something and saying, well, this is the way it is. That doesn't give people more faith in your

institution. And despite what the CBC tried to peddle, there isn't, there aren't a whole lot of people in this country that don't have faith in the final result of an election. But stuff like this doesn't help. Correct. It really doesn't. Yep. Anthony, I want to thank you very much for joining us. And honestly, man, the article is the UK is ending open borders, immigration Canada should do the same in the national post. I urge everybody to read it. It's an important conversation. It's a hard conversation, but one that we as a country have to have. Anthony, always great to talk to you and we'll have you back on real soon. Thanks for having me. To celebrate the days of our lives 60th anniversary W Network and StacTV invite you to enter for a chance

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