The Munk Debates Podcast - Trump is stuck in a dangerous spiral feedback loop and Rudyard and Andrew debate Canada's Temporary Foreign Worker program

Episode Date: September 10, 2025

Donald Trump's AI image to threaten "war" on the city of Chicago is further evidence that he is stuck in a spiral feedback loop with his followers, in which he has to get more outrageous to keep generating shock and attention from his supporters and the media. This will lead to a long term deterioration of the standards of public life, legitimizing corruption and cruelty unbound by constraints. Rudyard and Andrew then turn to the upcoming Canadian federal budget. They both agree bold policy changes are needed, including tax and competition reform, to reverse years of slow growth and address the future cost of caring for aging boomers. Andrew offers some new fiscal policy ideas that could help turn things around. In the final moments of the show Rudyard and Andrew debate the backlash to the Temporary Foreign Workers program. What is the difference between bringing in foreign workers and outsourcing production to developing countries? Are we just replacing local labour with cheap, imported labour? And is this program to blame for high unemployment rates among young Canadians?Become a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Every immigrant brings not only two hands, but a mouth. Every immigrant is not only a source of supply, but also of demand. So it's peculiarly short-sighted, it seems to me, to focus on that, rather than the larger economic problem. There's a reason why we have higher unemployment now is because the economy is slowing. The economy is slowing, not because we're bringing people in, but because Donald Trump is throwing a monkey wrench in the works. Roger Griffiths here, the chair of the Monk Debates.

Welcome to this, our continuing conversations with Andrew Coyne, Globe and Mail columnist, and bestselling author of The Crisis of Canadian Democracy. Thank you once again. You are on your toes. A best seller. I didn't notice him did a quiz. One right answer. Andrew,

a lot to talk with you today. I want to go through some of your recent columns, lead up to a big consequential federal budget. Also talk about the foreign temporary workers program here in Canada, which has become a subject of considerable debate, I think going into Parliament. But first, Andrew, I think we just have to touch in as we do each show on the circus that is unfolding in the United States because it is gripping Canadians and it has

significant consequences for us. I want to begin by just picking up on a theme that a lot of our audience has reacted to in our discussions over the last number of weeks, which is the president's mental state and the extent to which we may or may not be seeing some kind of deterioration in his mood, in his ability to constrain and contain himself. And as exhibit number A, I want to go full screen with you and our viewers who are tuning into this on our YouTube channel with this bizarre, I presume, AI-generated tweet that the president set out over the weekend with a quote that said, I love the smell of deportations in the morning. And it is basically a play off Apocalypse Now showing

helicopters over the Chicago skyline and President Trump in the image of the insane commander in Apocalypse Now who led his troops against a Viacong village and a really kind of brutal scene from that iconic movie. What are we to make of this? Is it just spectacle? Does it reveal something else? Well, we should also add it. Also in that tweet is a line about, we'll show Chicago what the Department of War is all about or worse than that effect. So I don't think much of a stretch to say he's threatening Chicago with military force, with war.

There's a tendency, of course, whenever Trump says or does these insane things, which he does half a dozen times a day, to think it's all for show. It's just Trump being a showman, red meat for the rube, who, whatever, except we find a gain and again and a gain that he means it. For example, this whole business about he wants to win the Nobel Peace Prize. Okay, you know, you sort of, again, even I, the mind reflexively goes, oh, it's just a line to puff himself up and to get people talking, except you find behind the scenes he's phoning up people lobbying for it. It really and truly wants it. So I don't think we should, I think we're past the point where we simply say, oh, it's just Trump, it's Trump joking. We've talked about this.

before, I don't see it as being a sudden deterioration. I see it as being a long-term exponential spiral. I do think it's located in severe personality disorders much more than mental deterioration of a 79-year-old man, though that could also be that as well. But I think he's on a spiral, a feedback loop with his public, his followers, with the media, where he has to get more and more outrageous to keep generating outrage. The thing that we find frustrating, we critics of his find frustrating and covering him,

is that everything gets priced in is also a dilemma for him. If he wants to generate the kind of outrage that he feeds on, that his supporters feed on, then he has to keep doing worse and worse and worse things. So I'm certainly open to the possibility that it's also a factor of him degenerating into dementia.

But I think it's enough of a concern that he's so far gone into the needs of his own psyche and his his narcissism, which I'll continue to think is the best description of him as a malignant narcissist, that he has to do these wilder and wilder things to keep himself the center of attention and to keep generating outrage. I think we're seeing the consequence of that, not just in terms of antics or outrageous tweets, but policies. Yeah.

I guess what I struggle with this particular truth social. and there's been many of them, obviously, that have kind of shocked us, either in their crudeness or their breaking of any kind of political conventions, any kind of bounds of normalcy and political debate, is that it's so unbecoming of the presidency. Oh, yeah. So one could understand that maybe Trump doesn't have any limitations about what he thinks the presidency could or should be,

or just simply that it's an extension of itself, But I guess I wonder if you're sitting there as a legislator in the Congress. Arguably, you've run for elected office to be part of the U.S. government. You would surely hold this institution in some kind of standing. And then here is this, I wouldn't even call it kind of childish, you know, artificial image or this playback to a film that was really based on, on Conrad's Heart of Darkness, which is about the exploitations of slavery. And, I mean, again, you bring this back to Chicago, predominantly black-run city with a large black minority population that itself has struggled with the effects of racism over generations.

I don't know. It seems to be, could I say, dare I say, a new low. Yeah, I mean, I think we passed the point of unbecoming, probably on the day he announced for office in 2015, you know, when he first ran. I'm much more concerned with two things. First of all, to the degree that he has himself knocked down any barrier of morality or decency or law or, you know, morality or, you know, any of these basic principles behavior, has he knocked them down just for himself? or is he knocked them down for everybody? What is going to be the consequence for the morality of public life in the United States generally after this?

If nobody feels any more after this, maybe there'll be a counter reaction. Maybe everybody will turn into Jimmy Stewart and Frank Capra. But I doubt it. My worry is this is going to lead to a long-term deterioration of the standards of public life in the United States, ethical or otherwise. It's legitimizing corruption. It's legitimizing a cruelty. It's legitimizing just behaving in any way you feel like,

unbounded by any constraints, whatever. I think that's part of his appeal for his followers, frankly. So there's that concern. The other concern I have is as time goes on and he gets away with more and more and more. And his powers grow greater and greater because fewer and fewer people feel they can get in the way of him. And you see him saying these things nowadays. If I'm the president, I can do whatever I like,

things he would probably not have said quite as baldly in his first term. Well, where does that go in terms of what kinds of actual policies and behavior that he follows, never mind what kinds of crazy things he says? To take Chicago, for example, we have the spectacle of the governor of Illinois having to warn the governors of other states, the Republican states, who might be sympathetic or at least complacent, obedient to Trump's demand for them to send National Guard troops to occupy Chicago. you have the governor of Illinois telling them warning them not to do that. Now, warning them how I don't know. What does that come to? If the courts are no longer the arbiters and deciders of these conflicts, as increasingly seems likely to be the case, where does that go to?

The United States, I think, is headed for really perilous times where you've got the president trying to install effectively military rule in the nation's largest cities. you've got people who object to that. At some point, somebody decides to take a shot at somebody, and where the hell does that go? Yeah. Okay. Well, let's, we'll come back to it, I'm sure, in future programs, because I think as Canadians, we need to try to, as difficult it is, take the temperature of this administration and just

where the fever dream is at, where the patient has reached on the thermometer. And I fear we're pushing kind of north of 102 degrees. at this point. Well, and the key thing I always say is people have to look forward, not just at the problem. We have to, you know, imagine where things will be six months or a year. There's 40 more months of this presidency. Because it's only going to get worse. And so if we're only focused on what's he doing today, rather than where is this headed in the months to come, then I don't think we're doing a new diligence. Yeah. Let's come back to Canada. You wrote an excellent column this week about maybe some bigger, bolder kind of fiscal ideas that the country should be

considering. Before we get to those, though, where do you think this government is at in terms of the budget? I have a sense, Andrew, that we're not hearing a lot pre-budget about some of the basics that one would assume that you would need to, if you were really serious about reviving the Canadian economy, regulatory reform, competition reform, taxation reform. Instead, we're hearing a lot about, you know, national projects. We're hearing almost daily announcements of another industry. another region receiving another tariff payout, even though we're not collecting reciprocal tariffs anymore. Are you concerned at all about kind of how we're going into this budget and the extent to which maybe it seems that we're still stuck in a fairly conventional Ottawa playbook here for the Liberal Party of Canada in terms of how they see the economy and how they see the role of government and reviving the economy? Time will tell. I don't want to jump the gun.

And, you know, it may be this will be revealed in stages. So it's not necessarily the case that this budget will be the be all and all we'll have to see. I would agree with you. A lot of the policies they've been unveiling have been very short-term oriented, aimed at compensating groups that have been really hard hit by the tariffs of the Americans have been imposing. And ordinarily, I would object to these policies if that was the sum total of it. They're a little more defensible when you're dealing with a madman in the White House, and you don't know how long it's going to last,

and you're trying not to make long-term decisions around tariffs that might be only very short-term. So I'm cutting them a little slack in that, but I completely agree with your larger point, which is we don't just have a short-term problem of dealing with Trump. We have a long-term problem that predates Trump, but is made worse by his very erratic and chaotic policies,

which is the problem of growth and productivity growth in this economy, which I'm sure we've talked about before, but it'll just very quickly go over it. We've had slowing growth in this country for decades. We used to grow in the 50s and 60s at 5% after inflation every year. In the 70s, it was 4%. In the 80s and 90s it was 3%. In the early 2000s, it was 2%.

And now it's 1.5%. So there's a long-term decline in our growth rate. But just on that point, Andrew, because other countries have seen that too. Even the United States, there has been a secular. What am I trying to say? Secular. Secular. Thank you, sir.

Decline in productivity across all Western advanced economies. It's worse. It's worse in Canada. We trail the pack in productivity growth. Country after country that used to be poorer than we are is now richer than we are. We're now, you know, if you ask Canadians, I think, until fairly recently a poll, they would probably tell you, oh, we're about fifth or sixth in the world. We're 18th or 20th.

We used to be 50 years ago, fifth or sixth. In terms of productivity growth? In terms of productivity, in terms of per capita incomes, you know, some more or less the same thing. So with this long-term problem, lately, of course, it got a lot of ink because it was actually falling below population growth. And so we had declining per capita GDP. But even if, you know, even if that passes because population is growing slower now, we still have this long-term problem that is made worse, as I say, by the drag of Trump's bad policies. It makes it all the more imperative. And the reason why it's really imperative that we get growth up is not just because we want to keep pace with other other countries, but because we've got this aging of the population.

And the enormous costs that implies now and going forward, with fewer and fewer, relatively speaking, people of working age to pay for it. And the only way we're going to be able to have any chance of funding all that is if we get faster economic growth year after year after year, and we get the compounding effects working for us. So that next generation or two is so much richer than we are that they can afford the costs of paying for us in our dotage. So that's the overarching problem.

And yeah, if you really want to get productivity going to. We've got to think seriously about getting barriers to capital formation down because investment is the key to productivity growth. And the biggest barrier to capital formation remains high tax rates. We've got a lot of room to reform our taxes to spread the tax base more widely and get the rates down. And the other half of it is a really concerted push to get more competition and competitive stimulus. You can give people all the incentives to invest you like. But if they don't have that competitive stimulus, if they're not lying awake at night saying, I've got to make big changes in my company because if I don't, the competition is going to eat my lunch, then people will tend not to make big changes because they're hard and they're difficult and you have to lay people off and all these terrible things.

So tax reform, competitive reform, these are broad areas that really need quite radical policies and I would completely agree with you. So far, we've seen very little of that. I will to give them some credit. There was some story in the paper the other day where they've been finding hundreds of ways to reduce red tape. There's a red tape review going on. Hopefully that will bear some fruit. There was the promise of more sweeping tax reform in the platform coming down the line. We'll see whether that amounts or anything.

So, say, trying not to just totally denounce them at this point because it's still early days. But the budget will certainly be a very important early clue of, are they serious about getting control of spending and restoring some order to our federal finances? And maybe they'll give us some clues to their thinking about the broader issues. of competition and tax reform, that kind of thing. Why do you think, Andrew, we're so stuck on these issues? Because I don't want to just beat up on the liberals. You could go back to the government of Stephen Harper and say there really, in fact,

wasn't that much done on taxation, regulation, and competition. It almost seems as if there's something, I don't know, is it because the Hudson's Bay Company, you know, was at the beginning of Canada? And there's a comfort with this idea of kind of large, incumbent, protected economy where risk is kind of mitigated for both individuals and businesses, and this kind of is the Canadian way, and we don't want to be like the Americans, so we really have to do things that are not competition reform, regulatory reform, and taxation reform, because that kind of just isn't really an expression of Canada.

There's a bit of that. I think there's a bias to the status quo in any political environment. People don't like taking big risks. Brian Morny came to power, you know, not proposing to do much of anything. He was on record as being against free trade. He only got into free trade, which was a big risk and a big policy change, because it looked like the Americans were going to close the doors, sort of similar to today. And similarly, Jean-Cretchen came to power saying, I'm not going to do anything about the deficit, you know,

it'll sell itself. And then when he had no other option, then he made those big changes in the mid-Nanis with those budgets. So the history of this country, I think, is if you want to look in the positive, side when our backs are to the wall and we have no alternative, we seem capable of making big changes, but we seem to always want to wait until... So do you think our backs are to the wall? I mean, we know... We know the threats there, but do we...

We saw some really bad job numbers in the last month, but, you know, we're not facing a financial crisis. We're not yet facing a run on Canadian bonds like we're seeing in France and the United Kingdom. That may come after this budget, if the rumors are true of an, you know, $90 billion, dollar plus deficit. So all those things may come. I guess I wonder what is the impetus right now to sell the public on what really no government has done for a generation, which is an argument that you need to delay gratification in the present for gains in the future. That is an argument that frankly, forget beating up on politicians. That's an argument that Canadians have not wanted

to hear and that they don't really want to evidence in their own political choices and preferences. Yeah, I mean, you know, is there a crisis right now? Are our bonds not being able to sell? We're not there yet. And that's the difficulty is if you wait until the wolf's at the door, it may be too late. You know, it doesn't take a lot of hard math. And people have done the work on this to project some of the provincial fiscal situations into the future and to see that one or more of the provinces 20 years down the line or so could run into default on their bond. Now, that's on a business's usual basis. And it's easy to say, look, a lot can change between then. And that's true. Except if the drivers are things like demographics, which is pretty hard to shift off of, and healthcare, which is really hard to reform,

those long-term projections are maybe a little more salient than they might otherwise be assumed to be. So that's my worry is if you get one of the provinces into difficulty. Sure. A big one. Well, it doesn't even have that big one. Look, think about the European situation. in the Euro crisis 10, 15 years ago.

Why did that start? It started with Greece, which was what? 1%, 2% of European GDP? Absolutely. If one of them gets into difficulty, then everybody starts looking around and saying, well, what's the next one that's in trouble? And we all had a good laugh saying,

oh, Europe, you were so foolish. You set up a common monetary policy without a common fiscal policy. So you had basically let all these individual states run around and borrowing as much as they like in any currency they like. That is Canada. Okay? It works okay as long as people don't blow their brains out, but if one of the provinces

gets into trouble, then everybody is going to be in some kind of trouble. So it's one of those things where if we start working on the productivity question now and we get that compounding working for us, then we don't run into that crisis 25 years from now. If we wait, absolutely. If we don't start doing anything until then. Yeah. So let's talk about some of your bigger kind of fiscal ideas that a courageous government, I think of a yes minister and Sir Humphreys. Sir, Prime Minister, you could consider that proposal for Mr. Coyne, but... Well, there's a couple of things. First of all, you know, we got this business coming out with a letter from the finance minister to his colleagues saying, you've got to cut spending

or look for savings and spending of, I think it was 15%, you know, a cumulative 15% over three years. That sounds like a lot. It sounds something. comparable to the 95 budget. But when you start looking at the fine print, you find out that they've walled off large sections of spending from that 15%. Transfers to individuals, provinces. No transfers to the provinces.

Healthcare. Particular departments, defense, and RCMP, et cetera, are kind of their 2% cuts, if anything like that. And the CD-HOW Institute, when they wrapped it all upset, you're talking about maybe $22 billion in cuts from program spending of over $500 billion. Okay, you're going into this exercise with a budget deficit projected at being something like $90 billion.

You've got long-term increases in defense spending from $50 billion today to three times that much in 10 years. A large middle-class tax break, no tariff revenue that you're collecting through reciprocal tariffs, declining economy, which is we've already saw in the latest GDP reports. Government revenues were down, I think, for, Yeah. So $22 billion, in other words, isn't going to do it. That would be radical five years ago in the situation as is now. And of course, we've got to deteriorating economic growth and possible recession. So I think a couple of things come from that. One is we need to take or put on the table transfers to individuals and transfers to the provinces. Now, that doesn't have to mean just purely cuts. It can mean useful reforms that are needed anyway. For a long time, people have looked at the envelope of, old-age security and guaranteed income supplement and said, why can't we combine those two into one

income-tested thing? What happens right now is the GIS, the guaranteeing income supplement, is phased out quite measurably, but at very low lows of income. And the OAS, on the other hand, doesn't start to get phased out until about $90,000 of income. Why not combine the two into something where it's not as phased out as sharply as the GIS, but it starts at a much lower base than the OAS does? you get a program that makes more sense and coherent and also, by the why, costs less to the treasurer. And there's almost, I believe, something like close to $100 billion of the federal budget is just made up in transfers to seniors.

Yeah. I mean, it's a significant line item in the budget. And it was outrageous that the liberals rolled back even that modest change of moving the OAS date to 67 years rather than 65. It's just, you know, when you're looking at the numbers of old people and the burden, if I can put it that way, that that represents. I just think that was just utterly foolish. And similarly, you know, it's long since been time that we started looking seriously at reform of federal transfers. You know, one of the biggest obstacles to serious reforms of health care is the feds keep buying the provinces off. They keep paying them not to reform their health care systems. Right. The last time you had really serious talk about sensible reforms to health care was in the late 90s, early 2000s. Why? Because the feds had cut off the spigot for a short period of time. And I think there are, There are grand bargains you could think about where the feds get more powers, for example,

over the economic union to strike into provincial trade barriers in exchange for giving, you know, less interference with the provinces on the social file, which is constitutionally provincial responsibility. So some kind of a big deal could be struck there where in place of federal cash transfers, you would transfer that into tax points. And you could be done in a way that also reduce the amount that goes to the provinces because the feds have got the serious problems they've got to deal with. So I think there's some possibility of reform on both the individual transfers level and the provincial transfers. So that's point one. Point two is, and here's where I'm going to be less of a fiscal conservative, arguably, which is when I look at the totality of the

fiscal situation, I'm not at all confident we can get there just by spending cuts alone. Yes. So for once, I think you can make the argument that we need to look at raising tax revenues. And if you're going to raise any tax, the best tax to raise is the GST. So here's another courageous policy that no finance minister is likely to take up. But, you know, the Harper government, I think it was one of its worst decisions was to cut the GST from 7% to 5%. The theory was they were going to starve the beast.

If you sent less money to Ottawa than they would spend less, it didn't work out that way. No, it didn't. Everybody just kept on spending and they added the total to the bill. What it did do was make it virtually impossible to cut income tax rates. You'd so squeeze off the GST thing that there was very little fiscal room left to talk seriously about cutting income tax rates. And so that's my third taboo is if we're looking at the productivity side of the equation. So we've been talking up until now about the fiscal problems, the fiscal crisis, but the productivity crisis is part of solving the fiscal crisis.

It really is true that faster growth in the long run will do it. a lot of benefit for you. It won't necessarily solve all your fiscal problem, but it will certainly help. And so I do think as part of a, we need, as we were talking earlier, radical tax reforming, and one of the taboos that has to get knocked down is this idea that you can never cut the top marginal income tax rate. The top marginal rate is higher now than it was in the 80s. We've been cutting all kinds of other income taxes, but they never want to go near that rate. Well, unfortunately, that's the rate that is germane to most discussions of investment. That's where most investments are being done at that top marginal tax rate.

Now, I understand the political difficulty and indeed the principal question of, you know, at a time of fiscal stringency, do you want to give the rich a lighter load? Okay, again, let's talk tax reform, not just tax cuts. There's a lot of really dumb tax preferences that cost the treasurer a lot of money, happen to benefit the well-to-do disproportionately. And so why not talk about a package of measures where it doesn't seem to be beyond human ingenuity. You could design it such that the total amount the rich are paying as a percentage of their income,

their average tax rate goes up, even as their marginal tax rate, the rate on their next dollar, the next investment, goes down. And that to me would be, I think that would be a saleable, maybe I'm naive, but I think that's a saleable tax package. Yeah, I would love to see, again, talking about courageous politicians and the absence of them, but someone take on the lifetime capital gains exemption on your principal residence. It was created in the 1970s. It was never meant to shelter what is now cases millions of dollars of basically hereditary wealth. Mansions.

That's being passed on, you know, from one generation to the next, creating a kind of Downton Abbey, Canada, where, you know, some people, but just by benefit of their birth, their parents have access to this incredible, appreciated asset with no taxation. If you want to talk about balancing things out. If you're enjoying the Monk Debates podcast, come over to our website at triple W monkdebates.com. That's MUNK DebateswithanS.com and check out our free monk membership.

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Thanks in advance for joining our community. Let's end, Andrew, on the temporary foreign workers program because it kind of fits into this piece that we've been discussing about productivity, about the future of the economy, about an aging society. I want to hear your argument as to why, I don't know, you feel that this program maybe is being maligned or being the subject of unfair criticism. So I'll give you the first word. Well, there's no doubt that it's been mismanaged. In the wake of the pandemic, I think they were

eager to get Canada's economy back on its feet again. And I think they kind of just allowed the controls on the program to kind of run amok. And so I'm not here to say that it's been perfectly managed. more or less acknowledged as much and started to tighten it. And indeed, I also think there are issues surrounding the design of it where workers are stuck with the job that they're admitted under, they can't take another job, that exposes them to exploitation, et cetera. So reforms to the program, I get. But a lot of people, some more sensible than others, seem to have a problem with the whole idea of the program. And so on the less sensible side, you see people blaming it for everything

under the sun. You know, healthcare wait times or, you know, stagnant wages or housing prices. It's all because of either immigration in general or temporary foreign workers. Well, when you look at the actual data on this, health care wait times have been accelerating for the last 30 years, way before the surge in immigration or temporary foreign workers happened. Same thing with housing prices. Housing prices have been an issue for 20, 30 years. And in fact, housing prices have been coming down since 2022, which is when the big surge in immigration happened. So the, the, the, The causality, I think, is really suspect on these things. The more measured criticism sort of starts in this premise that if you allow employers to bring in workers to fill jobs that they can't phone workers for,

that you're subsidizing those employers because they really ought to just raise their wage rates to offer to the locals. And it sounds fine, except you think to yourself, well, actually, in most markets, we don't have that provisive. We don't say the only way you can respond to an excess of demand over supply is to let prices rise. We also allow supply to increase. We allow new entrants in the market. We allow new sources of supply to come onto the market. And we do that, in fact, even in labor markets. If I'm an employer in Alberta, and there's a oil boom going on and I can't find local workers,

I'm allowed to bring in people from Newfoundland. So it's only when we get to international borders that this becomes suddenly this inviolable principle that you cannot add to supply. Let's stop there for a second because you would agree, though, wouldn't you that there's a difference between people who hold citizenship and those that don't? And that people that hold citizenship generally should be preference in a variety of ways over people who don't hold citizenship. They should be extended voting rights. They should be extended other kinds of protections. And I would argue that citizenship has many dimensions and qualities, some of which, as you capsulate in your bestseller, a crisis Canadian democracy, have to do with formalism. responsibilities and duties and rights related to the participation in democracy, but it's also

something bigger than that. It's about a sense of belonging, identity, shared purpose. Surely in the context of an economy that's contracting right now that lost 65,000 jobs in the last month, that bringing non-insignificant numbers, continuing large numbers of foreign temporary workers into the country is both unfair to those workers in a way, because whatever aspects they have to go on for those jobs or something else is in a deteriorating economic environment. And isn't it doubly unfair for the people who are in the country who are now unemployed, who are looking for work and are having to compete against non-citizens who've been brought in, many of whom are working because of the terms of their agreement for close to minimum wage?

And isn't that just very convenient to the employer? Well, how far do you extend that? right now they're also competing with non-citizens in other countries. If it's wrong to locate production with non-fit with foreign workers in Canada, why isn't it wrong to do so when they're in other countries? Why isn't it wrong to outsource production to foreign countries? It's the same idea, right? You've got foreign workers taking Canadian workers' jobs.

And it's not just in the goods producing industries. If I'm a call, if I'm locating a call center, if I locate that call center in Bangladesh, and I'm paying those workers $5 an hour rather than the 20 or 30. Most people, at least on the right, would say I've got no problem with that. That's free trade. But bring those Bangladeshi workers over here and suddenly it's a scandal. I don't actually see the moral difference between that.

If the principle is, if you want to enunciate a principle that we're going to just basically be a protectionist economy for Canadian workers and not allow other foreign workers to compete with them, then have the consistent of your convictions. I don't think it leads to a very rich country. I think the division of labor, comparative advantage, make a lot of sense. So I don't see the fundamental difference between bringing in workers from outside the market into Canada as opposed to outsourcing production to those foreign countries. It seems to me two sides of the same coin, and you're either opposed to both or you're in favor of both.

But the foreign worker program affects communities large and small across Canada, and it allows employers in certain circumstances in smaller communities, often with high-level, of unemployment or high levels of under employment to access cheap labor and replace that local labor with this somewhat indentured labor. Their permission to be in the country is tied to their employment. So unlike a call center where a certain service or a certain product or a certain company in one instance can do that, this is everywhere. It is across the entire economy, from large cities to mid-sized towns to small towns. And I think the reason you're seeing a political backlash to this, unlike call centers, is because it's, it's, the

perception is that it's affecting people and that people feel that this is, young people are facing record levels of unemployment in terms of summer jobs. Their early entry into the workforce over the last few summers has been abysmal. University graduates, the last two years coming out of major universities in Canada are facing unemployment rates of 20 to 25 percent. They can't get their first foot onto the employment ladder. I just, I just think against the backdrop that we face now of a slowing economy, high levels of underemployment across a variety of different demographics and groups in the sector, isn't it a time to calibrate different aspects of our economic policy to our economic reality? And one of those things would be interest rates, another thing

would be government spending, and another thing might be immigration. You might, as peer Trudeau himself in his own immigration policy calibrated the levels of newcomers coming to Canada food, the variety of different streams that we have, according to the realities of the Canadian economy at the time. Well, first of all, immigration is a tiny portion of that. The temporary foreign workers is about 200,000 plus temporary foreign workers in the country as of December 31st, 2024. That's about 1% of the labor force.

So it's not a huge part of the problem. So it's not 200,000. It's 2 million. No, no, of temporary foreign workers. The total number of people who are present in the country on a foreign temporary worker visa is more than 200,000. The specific program of temporary foreign workers is a small fraction of the total, even of the foreign workers program. Okay, sorry. I'm talking about the totality of the foreign workers program.

The much larger portion is the international mobility program. But the temporary foreign workers program, which is the one that Pierre Puehever has vowed to get rid of, is a small part of even that program. Okay? So it's weird that it gets beaten up on. The temporary foreign workers program is the one where you actually have to file a labor market availability certificate.

The international mobility program, you don't even have to do that. So why are we focusing on the TFW for starters? Secondly, if you are in an unemployment problem, you know, one of the things people talk about is demand stimulus. Well, every immigrant brings not only two hands, but a mouth. Every immigrant is not only a source of supply, but also of demand.

So it's peculiarly short-sighted, it seems to me, to focus on that rather than the larger economic problem. There's a reason why we have higher unemployment now. It's because the economy is slowing. The economy is slowing, not because we're bringing people in, but because Donald Trump is throwing a monkey wrench in the works. So I just think we've run that experiment in the past where we tried to deal with our unemployment problems

by tightening immigration. It didn't seem to make much difference. I remember Lloyd Axeworthy tightening us back to like 80,000 people or something. I don't think it was a particularly productive thing. So it's a small part of the overall labor market. The program has been poorly designed. I absolutely agree with your broader point about the plight of the people in the program itself. But that, to me, argues for liberalizing it, for making it easier for them to work at other jobs,

rather than just the job they were admitted for, to switch jobs if they don't like the one they're in, and making it easier for them to move on to permanent status. What better way of preparing people for becoming permanent citizens of Canada than by running a trial run under the temporary foreign workers program? So I just think the single-minded focus on this, the premises that are arrayed around that don't make a lot of sense to me in terms of economics or morals for that matter, and the blaming of it for problems that are just so much larger than this relatively small program in a much larger workforce. I would agree to all those points. I just think we are a capacity-strain society on a bunch of verticals from health care to public transportation. to our education system and elsewhere. So let's fix those capacity concerns.

Yeah, but fixing those capacity problems, you know, is the work of years, possibly, possibly decades, whereas controlling, controlling supply can allow those institutions to breathe, can create capacity to better serve people who are being underserved by these public institutions because we know, Andrew, that they're beyond capacity in many cases, especially the health care system. We had faster population growth in the 50s and 60s, and we never had the same problems with our housing markets, whether, health care, et cetera. Why?

Because we had different structural setups right then. We didn't have the capacity constraints because we didn't have the stupid policies that we've had in the last 20, 30, 40 years. Let's fix the policies. Well, we've made more progress on reforming our housing policies in the last year or two years than we made in 20 or 30 years before then. Why? Because of the crisis of the pressures of immigration. And housing starts are at all-time lows. Exactly.

But the policies are changing. No, but I'm just saying the reality right now is that housing starts are at all-time lows, so we're building absolutely no new housing capacity. That's to do with interest rates and a bubble in real estate that popped. But the consequence is still the same. We're going to be supply constrained for housing for many years to come. Sure, but the long-term problem, the long-term problem in housing isn't short-term things to do with bubbles, etc.

It's the housing, the red tape and the regulations that we've tied up municipal housing. housing markets in. That's why people are focusing on that as the long-term solution. Well, as I say, we would not be making the progress that we are had we not had some of these additional pressures from population pressure. So population pressure can be useful in exposing the costs of bad policies that were previously hidden from us. You've been of good support. I'm going to try one more run at you on the start. Go ahead. Because we're having fun. And it's a cultural question, which is how should we feel about the racialization of swathes of our economy, that there was an idea, I think, in Canada, a more maybe an idea of meritocracy, an idea of some kind of equality that was expressed

in how people worked and what they did. And that you would engage in different parts of the economy and see a reflection of the totality of your society in many of those jobs. And now the reality is that you walk into a majority of service type locations. And it's overwhelmingly South Asian women who are who are serving you and serving me and serving other people in those locations. And I just wonder if you have any concern about that, about what that says about, you know, racializing something that wasn't racialized before. To me, it's, it doesn't speak to maybe what I think is best about Canada, which would be a real diversity.

And people in those jobs working together from different backgrounds because something's happened in our society to bring us all together through this enterprise called work. It's not unusual in our history that different jobs at different points in our time tend to be occupied by different groups as they arrive. It's human nature. When you first get off the boat, you're going to want to seek out people

who've gone through the same experiences as you, look like you, et cetera. And oftentimes that means congregating in particular types of occupations. It's as old as the hills. The groups involved change over the decades. Groups that were previously thought could not fit in, could not assimilate.

It used to be the Irish. Then it was the Germans. Now it's different groups from different parts of the world. I don't see that as being particularly novel or new. I think it resolves itself. What I think is new and different and better is that we are so diverse now. We have, we're about to cross a Rubicon if we haven't already.

But isn't exactly, isn't the lack of, it's the lack of diversity that I'm pointing out. It's, it's, it's a monoculture that's emerged in our, in our, in a lot of our service industry because of these programs, because it's effectively corporations, you know, to some degree, monetizing, Canadian citizenship for their benefit because these people come in under some kind of temporary arrangement as a student or as a worker and there is a pathway to citizenship imperfect that's promised to them and corporations are arbitraging on the value of that citizenship to feather their bottom line. I would suggest to you that's a transitory phenomenon. That will work itself out over time. That is not set in stone. The greed of companies? Well, the greed of companies, but also the sort of bunching up that you're suggesting in different occupations will resolve itself over

time. It always has in the past. I don't see anything different. What I was going to say is what's new and different is we are at some point fairly soon, if we haven't already, we're going to cross a point where more than 50% of the country is either foreign born or the children of foreign born. That's a very different type of society than might have been the past 30, 40, 50 years ago. It's one I think that is, by its nature, much more congenial to newcomers. It's pretty hard to whip up a, you know, a peril of immigration if most people either are immigrants themselves, or work with immigrants or our friends with or related to, et cetera. I think if you look at, when I first moved to Toronto, 40, 50 years ago,

there were serious racism and racial attacks going on in the subways, I remember, for example. You don't hear of that, anything like that today. I think the fact that where you see the most fear of immigration is in places that don't have much immigration, where you have the most comfort with it is places that have a lot of immigration. And particularly as in this country, when they come from immigration, so many different parts of the world and so many different ethnic groups. Where you have problems, I think, is when there's just like two groups kind of staring at each other across a no man's line. But when you have this kind of diversity, I think it really takes the temperature down. It

makes it much easier for people to learn to get along with each other and to get over whatever misgivings they might have had about each other. So I think that kind of social concerns that you're raising, I'm much more sanguine about now than I might have been 40, 50 years ago. If you told anybody that Toronto would be, whatever it is, 50 or 60% foreign-born by the year 2000, 2010, 2020, if you told them that 50-7 years ago, people would have predicted blood in the streets. It hasn't happened. Quite the contrary. Yeah.

Andrew, always appreciate a little debate with you. It is called the Monk Debates. So we have to encourage ourselves to engage in these issues with good spirit. So thank you again for coming on the program today. Enjoyed it as always. Andrew Coyne, Global Mail columnist, commentator here. at The Monk Debates. Check out Andrew's latest book. Crisis of Canadian Democracy will include a link to it in our show notes. I'm Rudyard Griffiths. Chair of the Monk Debates. Thanks for

watching and listening to this edition of Monk Dialogues. Until next time, bye-bye. The Monk debates are a project of the Aurea and Peter and Melanie Monk Charitable Foundations. Rudyard Griffiths and Ricky Gerwitz are the producers. Be sure to download and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and if you like us, feel free to give us a five-star rating. Thank you again for listening.