The Paikin Podcast - Everything Political: Did Trudeau Destroy Canada’s Consensus on Immigration?

Episode Date: December 18, 2025

Tony Keller joins the Everything Political panel with former MPs Martha Hall Findlay and Tony Clement to discuss his book “Borderline Chaos: How Canada Got Immigration Right, and Then Wrong,” the historical consensus on immigration, the rise in levels under Trudeau, the temporary foreign workers program, if the Canadian consensus on immigration has been broken, where we are now, and what it will take to recapture that consensus. Follow The Paikin Podcast: YOUTUBE: https://www.youtube.com/@ThePaikinPodcastX: x.com/ThePaikinPodINSTAGRAM: instagram.com/thepaikinpodcastBLUESKY: bsky.app/profile/thepaikinpodcast.bsky.socialEmail us at: [e-mail]

Hello, everybody, and welcome to the MASH unit of the Paken podcast, where we have, at least two of us anyway, dragged our asses out of our bed, separate beds I hasten to add, given that one's in Calgary. Yeah, one's in Calgary, one's in Toronto. Are you coughing already? She's coughing already. I don't listen. I'm absolutely looking forward to the moment in this podcast, Martha, when you huck up such a luggy because you are, you know, and listen, let me look at me. This is, I'm a disgrace right now. I don't have the flu. I have bubonic plague right now. That's how bad I feel right now? Anyway, how are you doing, Martha? I feel very healthy, just I want our audience to know that. You look healthy, too.

I'm coming for you, Tony. Just wait. Actually, I don't know. I'm taking a look at that shirt right now, and it says, all I want for Christmas is no more floor crossing by any conservative MPs. Tony, what do you make of that? Another floor crosser. What do you make of that? How crazy is that?

It was pretty bizarre, I got to say. I mean, the guy was partying it up at the CPC holiday party, and the next night he was dancing up a storm at the Liberal Party. It's so bizarre. I've got the flu. Martha's got the flu. The conservative caucus has the flu. I don't know what we're going to do here.

About the only good thing about having a whack and kind of mixture of Ebola and bubonic plague that I have right now. Is that I could do a pretty good impression of Brian. Mulroney. We will ratify the Meach Lake Constitutional Accord with honor and enthusiasm. Wow. Pretty good. Not bad, eh? Almost James Earl Jones like, too, you know. Duke, I am your father. Okay, I think we're, I think we're totally losing the plot here. Let's talk about everything political. Everything Political, presented by Bruce Power. Delighted, as always, to welcome my friends, former parliamentarians Tony Clement and Martha Hall-Finley to the Paken podcast.

And this week a special guest, Tony Keller is a Globe and Mail columnist, and he has a new book out called Borderline Chaos. Martha, this is where you can hold a book out, because I know you've talked to him about this book already. borderline chaos, how Canada got immigration right and then wrong. I'm going to have to say both names because this is the first time we've ever had two Tonys on the pod. So Tony Keller, great to have you on board for this one. Let's start with this. We've had the longest all-party consensus on immigration in this country for decades.

And it was actually a pretty solid consensus around decent, you might even say, robust levels of immigration. and I want to start with just some of the background around that. What created that consensus in the first place? So really starts with going back to the 1960s. Canada had an immigration system up to the 1960s that controlled who came into the country basically based on race, ethnicity, and nationality. And the early 60s, we changed that and we say, okay, we're going to have a non-discriminatory

immigration system. and we moved to a system of trying to evaluate immigrants, at least the economic stream of immigrants, based on the skills that they bring to the country. And that's the beginning of what we call the point system. And by the late 80s, early 1990s, under Brian Mulroney, we moved to a stable immigration rate of about under Mulroney, around 1% or a little less than 1% a year. And it just kind of stayed there through the Kretchen government, the Martin government, government, the Harper government. And so we have a period of about a quarter century of

immigration numbers being stable, the immigration mix being heavily tilted towards economic immigrants, and those economic immigrants being chosen for the economic attributes they can bring to Canada. And the system objectively worked pretty well. And subjectively, Canadians liked it. And even more than the fact that they liked it, they didn't really have to think about it very much. People just assumed everything was working fairly well. So that's sort of the basis underlying this idea that there was a Canadian immigration consensus. Mostly worked. People mostly liked it. And above all, nobody worried about it and political parties weren't arguing about it and trying to run against one another based on immigration. That is clearly no longer the case. What changed?

Well, what changed is everything that happened under the Trudeau government, some of which it intended, some of which it did but did not intend, some of which was carried out by the provinces themselves, also without fully considering the consequences. And essentially, you put it all together and there is a very big run up in the number of people are coming to Canada and a very serious change in the mix of, of who's coming to Canada. And that begins to change after 2015, and it really explodes after the pandemic starting in in 2021. So the numbers go way up, and they reach their peak in 2023, when Canadian immigration numbers, which through that consensus period had been about a quarter million a year in the 90s and the early 2000s, in 2023, immigration is 1.3 million people.

So, the immigration rate goes up by about fivefold. Most Canadians don't recognize that. And most of that increase, this is where the question of the mix comes in, most of that increase takes place in the temporary immigration streams. And that's temporary foreign workers and visa students and a bunch of other mixes in there, all of which leads to the population increasing by 1.3 million people in one year in 2023, almost as many in 2022, almost as many in 2024, and then this big pullback that the government is now attempting as a result of what happened above all between 2021 and 2024.

Let me get our ex-parliamentarians in on this. And from this particular point of view, Martha Finley, when you were in Parliament, you represented a North Toronto riding. Tony Clement, when you were in provincial parliament in the province of Ontario, you represented a Brampton writing. We know the significance of immigration there. I guess, Martha, I want to find out from you in your kind of typical daily list of stuff to do as an MP, where would immigration find itself and dealing with immigration cases and family requests and so on? Where would that be on the list? Oh, in the constituency office, it was actually pretty high. But it was, I mean, the way Tony just described it. That's exactly how it felt that my writing was Willowdale. We had, at the time,

I think, the largest concentration of Canadian-Korean citizens. We had people from all over the world. I mean, as a Caucasian person, I was absolutely a visible minority in my writing, and certainly Toronto was like that, but it felt great. Like it, there was not the kind of thing that we're hearing now. So the immigration issues that we were getting were really more, you know, people, people being frustrated with the actual federal government bureaucracy. Stuff just wasn't getting done very quickly. And that's, you know, it's unfortunate, but that's, I think, how a lot of constituency offices

end up being helpful because it's almost like an arm of the government. I don't know, Tony, if that was similar to what you found. Tony Clement, Tony, the other. Well, we didn't have a lot of those issues in Paris. Samaskoka, I must say. We were a few here and there, but not really a lot. What I was going to say was, you know, I think Tony Keller is right that there is this great, and Steve, you mentioned this great consensus amongst various political hues that we had gotten immigration right, especially with the point system getting skilled immigrants into the country who could be against that. And it was kind of a badge of honor when I would rub shoulders with conservatives in other countries where there was a lot of pressure, let's say if you're a German conservative or a British conservative, that you were, there was a lot of pressure to have a very stark position on immigration in those countries. And I would

say, yeah, Canadian's pretty cool. You know, we're very welcoming open people. And, you know, we get. So this was never a big issue at the Harper cabinet table, for example, not a lot of grumbling about immigration rates, that kind of thing? No, absolutely not. So, so, and it was a point of pride is what I'm trying to say, but that, that is all dissipated now. I mean, now, now it's a immigration is very much a political issue and, and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future, I would, I would suggest. So Tony Keller, what was this kind of explanation the Trudeau government game gave, excuse me, for opening up the taps so much more widely than they had been opened in the past? Yeah. So as I said, this is partly, what happened was partly intended and partly kind of an accident. So when the Trudeau government comes in in 2015, it makes it very clear that it wants to brand itself and identify itself as more pro-immigration and progressive on immigration than the Harper government. Again, for what it's worth, the Harper government's immigration policy isn't really any different from the previous liberal government's immigration policy. So, but the Trude government wants to brand itself that way.

it wants to say we're going to increase immigration, though at the beginning, it's unclear by exactly how much it wants to increase it. It says things about wanting to make it somewhat easier for people to come to Canada under the temporary immigration streams, but again, it's not clear on exactly what it's going to do. And in the early days of the government, the early years of the government, prior to the pandemic, so the first half of the Trudeau government, it increases permanent immigration, but not by that much. It substantially increases temporary immigration, And it never talks about that and people don't notice it. And it does that under pressure from the business community, which says, hey, Canada has a labor shortage.

I argue in my book, there's no such thing as that. But nevertheless, the business community is saying we have a labor shortage. And by the way, the labor shortage is at the bottom of the market. It has a number of provinces and a number of higher education institutions that are saying, well, we want more, we want to let in more and more and more foreign students. the provinces, in particular Ontario, are very interested in this because it can help fund the higher education system and reduce the need for a government subsidy, particularly in Ontario for the college system. So you've got a bunch of forces pushing, and it's an interesting dynamic where it's one of these rare issues where the left and the business right are actually on the same side. progressive people are saying higher immigration is a value it's a matter of national values we should want higher immigration because and you've got the business community saying we need higher immigration because it will benefit the economy because it will allow us to hire more people because we're currently engaging dealing with labor shortages and you've got provinces agreeing with the business community you've got some higher education institutions agreeing so you've got this interesting agreement of left and right and i think that helps to push the progressive, the Trudeau government to say, wow, we can, you know, we can satisfy the business

community and live out our progressive values all at the same time. What an amazing story. Increasing immigration accomplishes all of our goals politically and the business community is telling us economically as well. Well, they did clearly let it rip. And at some point, and maybe you could tell us what the, I guess, initial signs of evidence there were that they'd open the taps too widely and people started to push back. What did it? So it really comes into focus after the pandemic. You get this one year drop in immigration in 2020. And the true government reacts as if this is an economic crisis and as if all of the economic problems that Canada has dealt with for a very long time could be solved by ramping up immigration and that the more immigration we got,

the better off the country would be. I really think the government kind of became focused on that idea. And that's how in 2021, 2021, 2022, 2023, you see this really significant ramp up in immigration. However, I will say it took people a long time to notice what was going on. And I think it even took the government a long time to notice exactly what was going on because so much of this was happening through the temporary immigration stream. So when the government talked about its immigration targets and it said, well, we're going to increase immigration to 500,000. They would never talk about the temporary stream. And by 2020, the temporary stream.

Which would have represented another, how many people? Pardon me? Which would have represented another how many people beyond the 500,000? So by 2022, the temporary immigration stream is as big as the permanent immigration stream. So by 2023, it's much bigger. So by 2023, you've got a bit fewer than 500,000 permanent immigrants, but you've got more than 800,000 temporary immigrants. And it's important on your skin. the people who are coming under the temporary immigration streams, from what we know and from

the evidence we have, they mostly want to stay in Canada. That's why they're going to some low-level college to do a short program and to work in a low-wage job because they think that's a path to getting to permanent Canadian residency. And they were told that it was. They were pitched on it that way. So that's how the system was both, you know, intentional and accidental. Well, let's get to the politics of it because clearly we started to see signs. And I think I remember it showed up on my radar screen when I would start to hear stories about 15 or 20, you know, university students or college students who would be in on, you know, foreign student visas, that kind of thing, all staying in a two-bedroom apartment or something like

that and that's just that that doesn't feel like it's a a smart thing um in which case like martha we seem to have now reached a really problematic place for immigration where we never had it in the past how much trouble do you think we're in on this right now well i i think the fact that there's so many people who came ostensibly as temporary who either have been able to get permanent status or are staying here illegally, and I think we need to say that word, because if they're not given the legal right to stay, but they're here in the country and they're finding ways to kind of hide away from the system, that's a really, really big problem. And I just, you know, Tony, Tony Keller, you and I spoke a little bit about this.

You know, when I was a kid, I grew up on an apple farm, and we had temporary foreign workers, because locals would not actually, they wanted permanent jobs. And so they were getting permanent jobs. That meant that there wasn't anybody to spend the two to three months working, picking apples. So that was a total win-win. Remember, most of them were from Jamaica. It was because they weren't permanent jobs. But if people are coming here to Canada ostensibly as temporary,

but then staying permanently, I think it's actually a really big problem. and I do highly recommend Tony's book because it really sets it out in significant detail. If I can, I can also just, because I'm at the University of Calgary, the big, the big, you know, the U-15, the big research universities, there was not, for the most part, a surfeit of foreign students, right? Where that became a really big problem was in some of the colleges, I think Tony mentioned Ontario in, in particular, some of the colleges where they had thousands and thousands of these students because they were able to charge, you know, exorbitant tuition fees, that became really problematic. And so, you know, there are a couple of nuances in the, in the description of how

and why and where we are now. Tony Clement, I think we had a situation in Cape Breton where as much as three quarters of the student body were all foreign students in on foreign visas, paying, as Martha calls it, exorbitant tuition rates, which essentially subsidized the provincial government and the rest of the student body that was from that. It became the crack cocaine for funding the post-secondary system. There's no question about it. A couple of things that need to be added to this.

If you're talking to, we want to talk about politics, because this is the program of that, is that, of course, a couple of things tore at the fabric of the consensus of immigration, one of which was this 100 million population idea that came out of the liberal ecosystem, including, by the way, Mark Carney's nominee for the position of ambassador to the USA. And so that created a reaction in the conservative ecosystem that this is all part of a liberal plot to get Canada to 100 million people. At the same time, You ask why this became a political issue.

Well, you know, people, I think correctly, but you could say it was just a conflation. Either way, the reality was our health care system has been degraded. Our housing situation has been degraded at the same time as immigration levels went through the ceiling. So people started to say, you know, I can't get health care, but there's like a million more immigrants here. that's part of the problem. And so that's why these things become political issues. And on top of that, there's always, shall I say, in the conservative ecosystem, a worry or an accusation that liberals are using the immigration system to get more votes for the Liberal Party of Canada. And that has become part of the discussion as well. Tony Keller, pick up on any or all of that if you wouldn't comment.

Yeah, there's a lot to pick up on there and a lot of really good points just made. So Tony number one just referenced the Century Initiative, and the Century Initiative, which, as he said, was co-founded by Mark Wiseman, pushed this idea that Canada needed much higher immigration. It was not particularly well thought through. it really felt like a marketing initiative looking to backfill with ideas. And it is one more thing that pushes the liberals to believe that, hey, we've got this amazing, we've got this new consensus where we can claim that higher immigration, much higher immigration is economically valid and it's living out our progressive values. And it didn't work out that way because, look, a lot of my book is about economics.

and it's about the economic consequences and possibilities of immigration. And if you simply believe that more people make the economy better, you're not looking at the whole equation. More people will make the economy bigger. Canada has a very dynamic economy. But if those people are on average, sort of less educated and lower income than the Canadian baseline, what you're actually doing is bringing down gross domestic product per capita. You're also putting a lot of pressure on social services.

You're bringing in more people who are going to work and pay taxes. Well, those people also use all kinds of public services. And if you're bringing in people who actually are paying slightly lower taxes because they earn slightly lower wages, hang on a second. You're now putting a lot of pressure on public services. So there wasn't a lot of deep thinking about any of this. There was some very superficial thinking about, well, high numbers would be great and it'll benefit the Canadian economy. And I'm sure it'll all work out. There needed to be a lot more thought and a lot more planning for the future.

And I'm hopeful in the years going forward, we can do that. But it is not what happened during the years of the Trudeau government. And it's really not what happened from 2022 to 2021 to 2021 to 2020. Okay, you three take a little pause for a second here because we're going to pay some bills. One of the things, Tony number two, that we get to do on this podcast is do an ad read midway through. because, well, there's other issues that we want to talk about, and we're going to do one on behalf of Bruce Power right now. So here goes. As Ontario's demand for clean, reliable energy continues to grow, bold action is needed to secure our future. At the heart of that future is the Bruce C project.

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with $172 billion flowing into Ontario's economy. It's a strategic investment in energy independence, innovation, and long-term prosperity, learn more about how Bruce Power is powering Ontario's future at this website, brucepower.com. That's brucepower.com. There we go. I didn't know Bruce was the largest nuclear generator in the world. I did. Were they, you did know that, Tony? Sure. I'm in the nuclear industry as part of my gig, you know, so. Is there, have you got a side hustle in the nuclear industry? I do have a side hustle, yes. You got to tell me about these things. I do No, I am the advisory board chair for the small modular reactor forum of Canada.

Oh, okay, okay. All right. Well, you know, Tony, you laid up our life. What can I tell you? Declaring my interest there. There you go. Very good. Let's get back on track with Tony Keller here.

And Tony, I want to ask you, okay, so clearly the numbers of late have been getting too high. There's been this reaction in the country. politicians are starting to hear more and more from their constituents about, holy smokes, things seem to be getting out of control. My question for you, Tony, is how we have reacted to that. In other countries around the world, there's been incredible scapegoating. There has been violence. There has been lots of different ways that people have responded.

In the main, how have we responded in Canada to all of this? I think in the main Canadians have responded pretty well in the sense that polling on immigration has changed. Canadians during the period of immigration consensus mostly said that they were happy with the immigration system. Hardly anybody said they wanted higher immigration, but most people said they were happy with immigration where it was. In the last two years or so, that has abruptly flipped to most people say they want

lower immigration. But I have sort of two reactions to that finding. The first is, I don't think it's illogical. I'm calling for somewhat lower immigration and a return to where things were. So when the facts change, the underlying facts changed, people said, hang on a second, I don't like these underlying facts. I wish you'd change the immigration system back to the way it was. The second thing is, I just don't see a lot of evidence of the mainstream of Canadian politics changing to being against immigrants. So we've kept it in a rational discussion about how many and who, as opposed to immigrants are bad. Whereas in the U.S., I mean, there is a big part of that discourse that has just shifted to immigrants are bad. Immigration itself is a

negative. And in many parts of Europe, that is where the right has gone. So there has been an extreme polarization of this issue in much of the rest of the developed world. I don't see evidence of that yet in Canada, but I do have concerns about where it could go. Tony Clement, what are you seeing on that front? Yeah, I think Tony's analysis is basically correct. I would say that I think that there's a couple of things that are being said by Pierre Polyev and by some others saying, look, we're pro-immigration, but we can't have open borders. That there has to be, there has to be a sane and thorough selection process so that we don't incorporate into our mix people who are dangerous to society as a whole or segments of our society, like Jews, for

instance. And I think this, the Bondi Beach attack is going to actually, in Canada, highlight how well or poorly we have done selection process in this country the last few years. So I think that that that is definitely on the table. The other thing is that I think that, you know, people want to be fair. And again, I think where most people's heads are at are, look, you know, we're an immigrant society. I mean, I myself am an immigrant, of course. So that's just explain that. You don't, you don't look or sound like an immigrant. So you should explain that you were actually not born in Canada. I was born in Manchester, UK, and to a mom from Manchester and a dad from the island of Cyprus, a Greek Cypriot. And then on my mother's side of the family, you know, some other

mixture of immigration for sure. But the point being that I think people want to be, they want to be fair, but the current system they don't think is fair. and they don't think it is actually secure. And I think that the security part of it, actually, I think, is going to be more and more prevalent as we discuss immigration, because there's going to be, God forbid, even without an attack here in Canada, I hope that that remains the case, although I think we've just gotten lucky when it comes to the Jewish population. I think generally because of what's happening around the world, people are saying, well,

what how do we vet people exactly coming to this country? And I think there's going to be lots of examples where people have been unvetted or not vetted, uh, who pose a danger to our society. So that, that I think is going to be a real big part of the discussion moving forward. I should follow up on what you just said really quickly. And then Martha, I'll come to you. I played hockey this morning. Tony Keller's a big hockey player too. I played hockey at eight o'clock this morning. You can imagine the dressing room was filled with people who wanted to talk about the slaughter in Australia the other day and the few Jewish players in this game that I play in and to a person, they were all saying, oh yeah, this is coming to Toronto. There's no question. We're going to see

a, we're going to see a massacre in Toronto at some point. I've never felt less safe to be Jewish in Toronto. And obviously, Tony, I'm with you. Let's hope this never does happen. But whether it's dumb luck or what, it hasn't happened yet. Martha, over to you on this issue of scapegoating. How much are you seeing? How concerned are you, given what we've been talking about? Well, I think actually bringing in the Bondi Beach massacre colors this in a way that I probably would not have colored this issue.

My sense is that most people are upset now about the overload of immigration, not because of the religion of people who are coming, the skin color of people who are coming, but to Tony Keller's point, we've just had a massive influx of people who are not chosen for their ability to contribute to Canada and Canada's economy. And so I think the upset is more economic than anything else.

We can't find, you know, housing's a problem. All sorts of other economic issues. that are, and I think our productivity numbers, which are terrible anyway, but they're going to be worse over the next few years. I think very much because of this, you know, we're talking like millions of people who are not here because they were actively brought to contribute to Canada's economy. You know, flipping burgers, I think, Tony, at one point in your book, you suggest that the business community saying, we had labor shortages,

well, you wouldn't necessarily have had that labor shortage if you were willing to pay enough. That's right. And there's a big difference between, you know, the people working on an apple farm for three months and somebody coming in for a permanent job because, you know, we're not willing to pay them and pay other people enough. And I think that's a really important thing here. But I don't, look, I am very worried as we all are about this. these terrorist attacks, attacks that are based on religion or other forms of racism.

But, you know, we don't know if that's necessarily tied to immigration or not. That's, I think, an awful lot tied to a lot of other things that are happening geopolitically. And I think for this discussion here about immigration, my sense is that Canadians, for the most part, are still of the view that it's not your religion. It's not the color of your skin. It's what you can contribute to this country. And I really think that's where we need to get back to. That's such a great point, Martha. And I think it's worth noting, at least on the video I've seen, that the guy who intervened to stop the shooter in Australia was a Muslim. Yeah. So Ahmed or Ahmed. You know, you couldn't have painted a better heroic scene than that,

could you? Totally. Tony Keller, come on in. let me try to bridge these sort of two points because I think there's actually a lot of connection here. So under both liberals and conservatives in the past, and even through much of the Trudeau government, Canada has always been concerned with controlling who comes to Canada. And one of the things that I argue in my book is that the fact that we had extremely tight border control is what allowed Canada to have a high immigration rate. and high public support for a relatively high immigration rate. Because again, just to be clear, during that consensus period, Canada's immigration rate is actually fairly high by world standards, quarter million people a year, on a population of 30-something million.

So the reason for this is that if you tell people, well, we're just letting anybody in, whoever comes comes, hang on a second, they're going to have some concerns. If you say to people, look, we're vetting everyone who comes to Canada. We're making sure that they're, you know, we're just making sure of who's coming to Canada. not just letting people get on a plane, get off, and stay or get on a plane, get off, and claim refugee status. We're going to make it really hard to come to Canada because we know there are effectively tens of millions and probably hundreds of millions of people in the world who would like to come to Canada. So that control is really important. And the sense of

loss of control really undermines the immigration consensus. And you will notice that the the phrase taking back control actually appears in the Carney government's budget a couple of months ago and the discussion about their attempts to reform the immigration system. They get it, that people are worried that things got out of control. And that is sort of really important. And to Martha's point, the temporary numbers in Canada right now are three, there are three million people by Stats Canada estimates who are temporary residents of Canada. We've never seen. numbers remotely like that. And the Trudeau government in 2024 said they would start to bring that down. And it's, it's barely budged because it's really hard. Some of those people are transitioning

to become permanent residence. Some of those people are leaving Canada, though we do a very poor job of measuring who leaves once their visas expire. That's another issue of concern. So this is something that is going to loom over Canadian politics for some time. We let a lot of people in and it's going to take a long time to process them, whether that means leaving the country or becoming Canadians, permanent residents and citizens. And yet, Tony Keller, I want to follow up with you on this. You point out in the book that during the Biden administration, immigration was the highest in the United States than it had ever been. And at the same time, immigration per capita in Canada at that time was three times bigger than in the United States.

What the United States did was pick Donald Trump to fix that problem, and we are seeing the particularly unique approach he has taken to fixing that problem. We've, you know, we may be upset or not completely pleased with how our situation has managed to get out of control, but we haven't had the kind of reaction up here that they have down there. What do you think? So I think there are a number of happy differences between Canada and the United States. The first was in the United States, these people were all coming on camera. They were walking across the Mexican border into the United States and being released into the United States until they had a refugee hearing, which would be years in the future.

In Canada, almost everybody who arrived in Canada in that same period, 2021 to 2024, came legally. They had a legal visa. They got off the plane legally. they went to an educational institution or a job legally, overwhelmingly, that's the way they write. So no one really noticed how our numbers are, as you say, three times as large as this gigantic U.S. immigration wave. The other thing is, because of that, it didn't get picked up by media and it didn't enter politics in the same. Again, in the U.S., you've got these images, boom, it gets injected into politics. And there may also be something about our politics that are, for the moment, somewhere,

more moderate than U.S. politics, but that is no guarantee that that will continue. And I'll say one final thing. You know, in my book, I lay out how Canada took in 3.1 million net immigrants over a period of just three years. That's a number that has appeared, as far as I know, one time in the Globe and Mail and in my book, and pretty much nowhere else. You can find it in stats can data, but it simply doesn't get discussed or mentioned. Whereas in the U.S., the arrival of all these people in actually smaller numbers than Canada relative to the population. But the arrival of all these people in the U.S. was on the news every single day. It wasn't in Canada.

So people never know all the details. They never know all the numbers, but they see images and they get a sense of things and they react to that. And the story being presented in Canada was somewhat different than what was being presented in the U.S. Even though, in fact, the Canadian situation was just based on sheer numbers three times as long. as the U.S. immigration wave. Okay. Let's go around the horn one more time. And if the immigration consensus that had lasted for so many decades has, in fact, been chipped away at and maybe under considerable stress right now, Martha, let's go to you first.

I'd like some ideas on how you think we can repair that all party coast to coast reasonably bought into immigration consensus of years past. Well, one, I think we need to hold our politicians to account for continuing to not make this a race play. We've seen in the United States that that's a number of politicians, Donald Trump being the most obvious one. But really using a lot of these, in that case, Tony Keller, absolutely the visuals, right? right, of people coming across, but, you know, being labeled, being scapegoated, being, you know, everybody of Latin descent being tarred with the same brush, which is not a good one. I think that, I think that's just been incredibly damaging to the American society.

And I do think that's something that we have in Canada and we have to really, really work hard to maintain. the other thing is I this from a policy nerd perspective it amazes me that Canada has zero knowledge when people leave the country I mean it's not that hard you know if you I think we've all been to countries where sure you you log in but you have to log out when you leave so that people in the bureaucracy can know who's in the country and who has left the country that to me that seems such an obvious policy improvement to how we manage these things in this country. But I think to Tony Keller's point, it's going to take quite a few years because this was such a big lump.

But I'm, I can't stress enough. I really, really hope that we don't allow ourselves to listen to the American media that has turned these concerns into race-based concern. We're better than that. we should be. And that's very much my hope. Tony Clement, recapturing that immigration consensus. What do you like? Well, I think there's a couple of things that should be done or done better. One is, as I mentioned, the vetting to give people confidence that the system is working for everybody to keep us safe, then I'd be prepared to spend tax dollars on better vetting at the border and

at the intake level. So that's number one. Number two, as Tony mentioned, the temporary foreign workers. It's just gotten completely out of control. It still is not in control. And those are jobs that our young people don't have who were born and raised here or even first generation Canadians. You know, I would not listen to the corporate lobby as much as perhaps the government has done.

And I would say, as Martha said, and as I said as an MP, to my own, you know, fast food chains in Muscoca who wanted my office to intervene to get them the temporary foreign worker certificate, I said, you know, why don't you just pay people more? You'll get more people from Perry Sound in Muscoca applying for the jobs if it's actually a decent job with decent pay for crying out loud. So, you know, let's get back to that society where we do look at. after people who are here already, who are young people in particular who need a job to get into the job market and we're failing those people. So I think if you do those two things, I think that that really would restore confidence in the system. Tony Keller. So I think these are both pretty good suggestions from both Martha and Tony. In my book, I talk about the various ways to get the system back on track and actually make it better than before.

for. And I'm hopeful that we can actually do that. I'm hopeful that the Carney government is at least pointing in the right direction. Execution is going to be a challenge. You have to set your immigration rate for permanent residence back to somewhere like where it was in the 90s and the early 2000s, which is around 0.75% of population. That would be a little more than 300,000 a year. you have to take the temporary foreign worker stream and reduce it in numbers and raise it in quality. So make it fairly easy to bring in someone to work a high wage job. Make it impossible to bring in somebody to work a low wage job. The higher education stream, hey, it's wonderful if Canada takes in a large number of students,

if a large number of foreign students go to our universities. And to Martha's point from earlier, Canada's high-quality universities didn't really increase their foreign student enrollment by very much during this period. It was mostly lower-quality institutions, public colleges, a lot of private fly-by-night operators. Those institutions should have really no students at all. We'd actually like to see more students at the top-flight universities because, A, those people pay very high tuition. B, if we want them to stay as future citizens, That's great. They're perfect candidates. And if we don't select them as future citizens, they're going to go home. They're not going to try to stay here illegally or try to make an asylum claim to be able to stay longer. So these are some of the basic things you want to do. And to Tony's point, yes, we have to vet people much more carefully who come to Canada. Historically, Canada did an extremely good job of that. I think we're trying to get back to it. But again, we've got currently, there are 3 million temporary foreign residents. in the country, officially, the actual number may be as high as 4 million. We don't know.

We've got 300,000 people with an asylum claim pending. A couple of decades ago, a bit more than decade ago, that number was 10,000. It's now 300,000 and goes up every single month. So there are a bunch of things we have to do on the selectivity and security side, all with the goal of saying, hey, let's continue to have immigration to Canada. Let's continue to have relatively high immigration. But let's just assure voters, let's assure Canadians that this is being done for the benefit of Canada. And then I think most people will actually return to having a fairly positive attitude about immigration. Good. All right, friends, we've come to the part of the program where we like to give a shout out to something that actually was kind of inspiring,

kind of good, maybe even unexpected. In the world of politics, we call this part of the program good on you. So Martha get us started here. Who gets your good on you this week? Well, I was moderating a panel at a conference a couple weeks ago. And the panel included John Baird and Jason Kenny, both former colleagues of Tony No. 1 here, conservatives. Christy Clark, former liberal premier of British Columbia, but certainly of that sort of blue liberal red, blue liberal red I mean, John Manley, and why this was important was the topic of fiscal prudence, the topic of government spending was a big part of the panel. And John Manley was involved in the federal government in the 1990s, and we talked a little bit about this on the last podcast, but this was

with people who have been involved, right? And he was part of that government when it was really pretty tough. They had to do a lot of cuts. I think Tony, you've said it was also exacerbated by a split in the Conservative Party, but they, you know, continued to get support from the Canadian public. But it was John Baird and Jason Kenney, who both made the point that it was that government that has exhibited probably the most fiscal prudence of the last 25 years. And it was pretty great because those were two conservatives saying something very good, And Christy said the same. Three former politicians saying something very good about a different colored government from the past.

And it was really special because one of the people who was involved was sitting there as part of the panel too. So it was a really nice moment. It was good. Cool. Tony Clement, you're good on you. Yeah, I want to go back to the MOU between Alberta and Canada, which involved obviously Minister Hodgson. and the Prime Minister negotiating with Daniel Smith and so on. Part of it, and this harkens to perhaps our sponsor with Bruce Power,

but part of it did highlight nuclear energy as part of the mix moving forward. And I really think that this is an area where Canada is a world leader. In terms of technology, development, and rollout, as you know, Steve here in Ontario, over 50% of electricity produced in Ontario is by nuclear energy. Yep. And so I think that this could really help create jobs, opportunity, new foreign markets, new domestic markets by highlighting nuclear. And good on both Alberta and the federal government for recognizing that and good on Ontario

for developing our nuclear power capability as well. see tony keller you get in the gist of the thing here right you've got you got martha's example of tory saying nice things about liberals you just had tony clement i know it kills him to do it he actually said something sort of nice about the liberal prime minister of canada so okay come on in here with your good on you what are you going to lay on with us so since i'm here to talk about immigration let me bring in something to do with that so uh tony clement you know mentioned earlier uh that the guy who was the hero in bondi beach who disarmed one of the attackers is himself, an immigrant to Australia, a Muslim immigrant to Australia. And what I found interesting and positive, we'll see how long this lasts, is the number of conservatives and even American conservatives and even Donald Trump who were praising him. And I'm hopeful that, you know, we can get everyone at this point of recognizing that, hey, look, there are good and bad people in immigrants and non-immigrants. There's not some crazy analysis you can do where you can say, well, immigrants are bad and native-born people are good. This is just absurd. And so, again, I'm hopeful this will be a case where people can recognize that these are the positives in immigration. And yeah, I think it's a really interesting case. And I'm hopeful that American conservatives and other conservatives who have got some anti-immigrant views will continue to praise this guy.

in Australia who did a heroic thing that is a lovely ray of light in what has over the last too many months been a very very dark time in the world i want to remind everybody the tony keller's new book is called borderline chaos how canada got immigration right and then wrong you can also read thank you martha for being his publicist here today that's great uh tony you can also read in the globe and mail where he's an excellent columnist i want to thank the three v for uh gathering Martha, in particular, right out of your sickbed. We managed to make it through the whole show without coughing up a lung. And in the meantime, everybody, peace and love.

And we'll see you next time on the Pagan podcast. Thanks all. Great to have you on the show, Tony.