The post-pandemic wage suppression policy was not just expressed in immigration policy, but also in monetary and fiscal policy. The idea that we must aggressively crush wage growth to tame inflation is a sacred cow from the late 70's. Like most sacred cows, it needs to be slayed.
We had a pandemic where millions were thrown out of work while housing prices exploded. And the big idea is to bring in a million temporary workers, cut spending, and raise interest rates in order to crush wages? On what planet does that logic apply?
The way to accommodate a million new immigrants is through aggressive government spending. Houses and schools and hospitals and roads and power plants need to be built to absorb the influx of newcomers. This provides demand for businesses and workers. This keeps GDP per capita stable and builds out the supports for future growth. This is how Canada absorbed previous large waves of immigration.
Instead, we cut spending and raised interest rates, which suppresses investment and growth. The burden of accommodating immigrants fell upon households and individuals. Wages were held down, housing costs exploded, and hospital ERs filled up. This is what falling GDP per capita looks like. This is ultimately what sunk the Trudeau government. You can't run a pro-impoverishment policy and expect to be rewarded.
Canada can accommodate lots of immigration (as we have in the past), but we have to stop being so fucking cheap. Don't throw current citizens under the bus.
Thank you for the very accurate term "pro-impoverishment policy"; this should be picked up by the mainstream and forever tied to Justin Trudeau as part of his miserable legacy.
Regarding last two sentences, which I think are also good, these tie directly into repealing in their entirety promptly all of the laws and regulations passed by the Trudeau's "Liberal" government, since they result in the pro-impoverishment policies, throwing under the bus both current citizens and immigrants.
Huh.. I was going to correct you and say that it was Stephen Harper who started allowing low skill and unskilled TFWs, but I looked it up to be sure. It was Jean Chretien in 2002. I was wrong.
That said, I did talk to my Conservative MP about this when Mr. Harper was Prime Minister and they did defend unskilled temporary foreign workers as good for Canada.
The TFW makes sense in specific situations where it really is difficult to get a Canadian trained for a specific task. A very specialized engineer or researcher is one thing but there are seasonal roles, such as in agriculture, that fit the program.
What we've seen it turn into is another thing entirely. There is no way that service jobs where the main qualification is communication with the customer should be filled by TFWs.
I think you're right about engineers, but agriculture.. . the purpose there is still wage suppression to avoid paying market rates.
YES... difficult and long training (e.g. engineers) may mean that a TFW is **temporarily** required. TFWs are NOT required in the long term if you avoid suppressing the wages and destroying the incentive to train Canadians. (I wrote a long post here already on this, so I won't repeat it.)
But agriculture? That's the wage suppression purpose of TFWs right there.
Canadians CAN pick fruit. In fact we do sometimes. But agriculture companies and employers want to their employees less than the Canadian market rate for that labour, so they can't find enough people. (Just like if you tried to get someone to work as a tree planter and were offering $6/hour... you won't find anyone.)
Capitalism says agriculture labour in Canada is worth a lot, but employers want to pay less that the market rate. The only "special" thing about agriculture is that some Canadians think that suppressing agricultural worker wages is okay, but suppressing wages for other jobs isn't okay.
We could have a discussion about the merits of those beliefs, but whatever the merits, we do have to admit that wage suppression of agricultural wages **IS** the point of the TFW programme.
Thank you for taking the trouble. In 2000's I lived and worked in BC and I remember this:
1) for summer herding jobs in BC (cattle, sheep, bears, wolves, cougars) the ranchers hired TFW's from Central and South America who could work with horses and herding dogs since there were too few Canadians having both these skills and willingness.
2) for harvesting fruit, vegetables and other agricultural products across Canada TFW's from Central and South America but mostly from the Caribbean were hired since there were too few Canadians willing to take these jobs.
> since there were too few Canadians willing to take these jobs.
And what's the thing about willingness? The reason they're unwilling is by definition because the employer is not offering the market rate because the market rate for labour is by definition whatever it takes to make someone willing to do the work.
What's your labour worth? What's your house worth? It's the same answer...it's whatever it takes for the buyers to convince you to part with it.
Some people have this idea of "intrinsic" value where a thing or a service has some kind of intrinsic value determined by inputs or effort. But that's rubbish. The monetary value of something is determined only by what someone else is willing to pay for it.
People often associate this "intrinsic value of labour" idea most frequently with the left, but TFWs are a great example of it as well. Some people argue TFWs are needed when you can't find people willing to work "for what the job should pay"... but they have an intrinsic value idea of the labour where they just believe that the labour is worth very little.. just because. Well that's not true. The labour is worth whatever it takes to get someone to do it.
In my circles it was the "ethnic vote brokers" who were the most virulent advocates for temporary foreign workers. Elite Canada being the conflict allergic folks they are, we can't say the name of that country, but they predominantly came from that particular place. Both the abused and abusers. In Calgary these folks own the driving schools, trucking firms and even the examiners so they have vertically integrated for instance.
That said, this particular group seem to be the only folks in Canada actually investing in Canada, actually believing in the place, unlike the old stock Bay Street crowd, so there is that.
Even fly by night colleges seem to have hired very politically connected folks to ensure their access to students, and some if not most of these colleges seem to be owned by connected folks.
My point is that Canada imported 3rd world working conditions all to pay off ethnic vote bundlers using 3rd world political organizing tactics.
Jen, you make a point about folks who have been here five or ten years and have followed the rules and that we cannot turn our back on them.
Agreed....... as long as .....
If they have been here that long then they have been renewing properly their immigration status - right? If so, then I absolutely agree with you. If they haven't been renewing that status then they do not have the right to stay here. So, announce clearly that the lack of status is terrifically important and that delinquent paperwork can be cleared up by doing, A, B, etc. then those that have not gotten proper paperwork updated need to be removed from Canada.
The public,people noticed who was now serving us in these fast food establishments. An immediate flip in employees at big box stores,Walmart,Co-op,Canadian Tire ect. And little grasp of our language. We saw and heard how locals,’steady eddies’ were being passed over for supervisor,manager positions. And come on! Skin colour. Homeless,crime,lack of housing,cost of living,inflation. We the people feel and see the effects. How many TFW,work visa holders have left or stayed? That is our concern
This was a solid episode: Tony gives nuanced takes that avoid the over-simplifications we often see. I did have a few comments though:
One thing Jen overlooked when discussing housing costs is the rental market. Yes, the cost of *buying* a home has been an issue long before the population surge, but the real problem was what happened to rents; we basically found a way to fuck over those already locked out of home ownership even more.
Also when discussing needing to pay higher wagers to resolve a worker shortage - I agree, but it's not only wages. It could be better working conditions, training programs, benefits, taking a chance on someone a business wouldn't normally hire, improving productivity, etc. A labour shortage could be a huge opportunity rather than a problem (also why it's particularly disappointing the NDP have been so lost on this issue). This was also my one critique of the Qatar comparison: while *some* Canadian citizens benefit from the exploitative system (especially most retirees), many are not.
One area I think Tony over-simplified was the idea that we wouldn't lose businesses because all are on an even playing field. What he missed is if it costs more to go to restaurants, there will probably be less people going to restaurants, and that will lead to some closures at the margin. But if we lose a few marginal businesses, I think that's a fair tradeoff.
One other interesting side-effect not discussed was the gender imbalance among young adults we're creating. Which is certainly ironic outcome from Canada's "feminist" government (once again showing politics is all about vibes rather than results).
And last thing - I think I mostly agree with the conventional wisdom that our economic immigration should focus on those with high human capital. But I do wonder with Canada's high education levels and currently shitty job market in industries like tech if even this starts to become controversial (we're currently seeing some blow-back to high-skilled streams in the US).
The most difficult problem discussed in the interview, and IMO the most important, is what will happen to the temporary residents who are already here, many of whom will not leave.
We are not going to deport them. Even if we could muster the political will for that, which we 100% could not, there is no way that gets executed in a country that can’t evict a few dozen grumpy truckers from the capital without declaring martial law. All the more so when any hint of overreach — and probably any enforcement whatsoever — would be decried as resembling Trump administration policy.
Unfortunately the most likely alternative is the worst: doing nothing. We could easily reach an equilibrium with a permanent underclass lacking legal status, and a de facto don’t ask don’t tell approach supplemented by pockets of progressive activists in places like Toronto eagerly declaring themselves “sanctuaries” because they are desperate to fight a U.S. culture war. This feeds on itself, because once such a situation gets normalized, more people will overstay visas who in the past might have departed.
There is no good solution, but probably the least bad is to bite the bullet and give them legal status. Ideally this would be done transparently, after a thoughtful debate on the trade offs. So that won’t happen. It might get done incrementally, by stealth, while the government vehemently denies it is doing any such thing and brands claims to the contrary as a conspiracy theory. It seems unlikely that either party will try to escalate it into a wedge issue, the Liberals because immigration and especially illegal immigration is not an obvious winner, and the Conservatives because some of their supporters would want a much tougher policy than they could ever actually deliver. Thus the risk of putting off any clear response indefinitely, which is what we will most likely do.
> We are not going to deport them. Even if we could muster the political will for that, which we 100% could not, there is no way that gets executed in a country that can’t evict a few dozen grumpy truckers from the capital without declaring martial law.
Indeed.
Note also that students who came in on such a programme who commit sexual crimes sometimes have their sentences reduced specifically to do an end-run around the laws which require deportation of potential immigrants who commit crimes.
Just think about that... a man is found guilty of a crime, an appropriate sentence is determined... and then it is lowered by the judge in order to avoid having to obey the law.
For those interested the case its that of an Indian citizen by the name of Sajeevan who is in Canada on a student visa who installed hidden cameras to spy on women in the toilet. The judge found that the correct sentence was at a minimum 6 months and at most a year. This triggers a potential deportation because sex criminals who commit offences serious enough to warrant a 6 month sentence may be subject to deportation. That's the law.
So the judge reduced his sentence to avoid the law. The judge knew *and said* what the appropriate minimum sentence was... and then he handed out a lower sentence because he didn't like the law. He didn't even pretend it was unconstitutional... he just didn't think the legal immigration policy of deporting non-citizens for committing sex crimes was fair.
This is outrageous and I think justice Craig Brannagan should be disbarred or at the very least permanently kicked off the bench.
But it also shows that we have such a broken legal and immigration system filled with at least some bad actors like judge Brannagan that we're not going to succeed with legal deportations in the short or medium term. There's a longer job that has to be done first.
Yes, I am skeptical that any broad deportation could even get to the execution stage, but if it somehow did, one can only imagine what barriers Canada’s courts would impose.
Great interview -- i now finally understand the history of this and the demise of what we were previously proud of. Agricultural workers may be an exception in continuing them-- but absolutely at a living wage. But the students were an absolute scam and if universities/colleges have to shrink or even fold, it wont hurt the quality of education, likely improve it by winnowing out the crap,and better value for tax dollars invested.
Important previous black hole was treatment of physicians and other professionals for whom qualifying and obtaining licensure was an arrogant, insulated nightmare. Finally provincial and federal colleges are creating much improved paths for experienced well trained physicians (all i really know about) from other than the white British/NZ/Aus/US world to join the profession here - in their specialty!!! not as Fam Docs only. We need them!!
While this interview does a great job of breaking down how much Canada fucked itself and created a multitude of unsolvable problems with mass indiscriminate immigration over about a five-year period, it has one issue.
Tony Keller seems to think that nobody in the public or government really knew at the time what was happening or that it could possibly end up this badly. I for one was tearing my hair out all the way, getting a weekly pit of the stomach churning nausea usually reserved for government announcements affecting my firearms collection. This shit was obvious, it was egregious, and it was in all of our faces from 2021 forward.
Nobody said anything because of the Covid-era inter-related "anti-racism" moral panics where anything that looked like criticism of unlimited ethnic diversity and not being "welcoming of newcomers" would get you raked over the coals as a racist. Big corporations took advantage of this situation to screw us all over and the Liberals were enthusiastically along for the ride.
One thing that I thought might have come up in this discussion, but didn't. It's something that has been discussed on The Line in the past, and seems like it might be related to this issue: demographic collapse.
The declining birth rate in Canada. I think I just recently saw a headline that our birth rate has actually reached an all-time low recently. The Line has talked about this, and how in years to come, our population will have more and more elderly retirees, with their increasing medical expenses, supported by fewer and fewer working people. All developed nations are seeing this happening, and all will have to compete to get anyone to come in at all.
One might charitably suggest that perhaps the recent out-of-control immigration was actually a deliberate and planned attempt to get ahead the problem.
I don't really believe that. I'm not convinced that any of our politicians, of any stripe, are capable of planning for anything farther ahead than the next election. But still, I was kind of expecting this to come up in the conversation at some point.
I was wondering the same thing. If there is some small silver lining to this terrible own goal / foot shooting, having a better demographic distribution is very important. But I seriously doubt it was a plan by someone somewhere.
That being said, my intuition is that it wont work like in the past. When my parents fled invading Soviets for Canada in the 50s, it was a VERY different world with respect to international travel. You came here and you stayed. It cost a LOT of money to travel overseas just for a quick visit (even if you were allowed). Not so much now. My co-worker's inlaws who fled the Sandinistas in the 80s go back and forth in the winter and figure they would retire there. There is just not as much friction to keep people here. I fear the same dynamic will apply to the "coveted skilled workers"... We lure them away with a better life, other countries can and will do the same to us...
Not surprised Universities Canada didn't sponsor this podcast.
That business would look to scam the system for profit is no surprise. Business ethics can be boiled down to a one hour lecture, "how to not get caught".
The academy's collusion in this immigration scam is the natural progression of having too many pseudo-academic, post-secondary institutions. Defund them and invest in trade schools, rather than having to import skilled trades.
Your proposed solution is delusional. Gen Z will bear the brunt of this disaster and they will, rightly, not trust the government going forward. You should be more explicit, there is no such thing as a Canadian and there is no Canadian culture (multiculturalism is an unculture).
The blame for the Liberals’ botched immigration policy can’t be laid solely at the feet of the “stakeholders” they consulted. The Liberals were predisposed to hear that message, which aligned with the trendy popular progressive sentiments that informed most areas of Trudeau’s policies. It was much the same with things like deficit spending, increasing the size of the public sector, bail reform, and fixating on social justice issues in trade agreements.
On a different point, I think your guest is incorrect about the effects of turning off the supply of temporary foreign labor. It’s not going to increase real wages across the board, and wouldn’t lead to a 1 for 1 replacement with Canadian workers. Wages would definitely increase with scarcer labor. However, that’s either going to be inflationary or require a push for higher worker productivity. That productivity looks like more automation (e.g. self checkouts at stores and ordering kiosks at restaurants), or fewer workers working harder. You’ll frequently see the latter in high wage countries like Denmark - a busy 20 table restaurant with one server and one cook. Student workers would probably make out better, but the lowest skilled workers probably won’t - they just can’t generate the value to justify higher real wages.
This of course speaks to Canada's low productivity growth over the last several years. Higher investment in automation may well be the result, and I expect inflation to precede and in part prompt that, but I think this situation is a little different than the usual increase in wage vs productivity scenario.
You are right that there would be winners (the most productive) and losers (those left unemployed by automation), but in this case, the losers would be TFWs that don't come in the first place, so the question is really one of relative numbers of TFW not coming vs unemployed/underemployed Canadians entering the workforce as higher productivity workers.
Higher inflation is something that hits everybody, and hits lower income people harder. Likewise, everybody's likely to suffer the effects of a labor shortage. If you lived in Alberta between 2005 and 2014, you'll have an idea of what that's like: poor service and scarce service just about everywhere. People aren't going to be happy about it. The argument against temporary foreign workers has to acknowledge that there'll be some negative effects as well, even if the balance still favors ending the policy.
yeah that part of the conversation sounded somewhat simplistic (Oh its just 17c more per delivery etc)... Some business will just not make economic sense and shut down as they were already marginal with TFWs, some will pay higher wages, some will speed up automation even more....
> as crazy as this sounds, [the goal of our system appeared to have become] keeping wages down at the bottom of the wage scale
Uh no. That doesn't crazy at all. Because it's true.
I've been saying for years that this is exactly what the TFW programme is and I haven't been the only one saying it. As Matt keeps repeating, the Liberals are the kind of people who would never believe that they'd do the thing that they are currently doing.
There's two reasons you can't find labour.
1. It's highly skilled labour and there aren't enough people in Canada with the required training. e.g. Canada suddenly needs RIGHT NOW to hire 10X more paediatric brain surgeons than are currently trained. It doesn't matter how much you offer to pay them, it takes more than 10 minutes to train a paediatric brain surgeon, so you won't find them in Canada.
2. You want to pay less than the market cost of that labour, so the labour does exist, but they won't work for the peanuts you're offering. e.g. An engineering company needs to hire a couple of engineers for their construction of a giant office complex in Toronto and wants to pay them minimum wage $17.60/hour with no benefits. We have the engineers, but they'll refuse the job.
Canada's TFW programme set out to solve the second reason and the reason you KNOW this without a shadow of doubt is that we did it for low skill and unskilled labour.
There are ways to solve for the first problem without affecting the second, but every solution always has to include two things.
1. Use for skilled labour only that requires long training times.
2. Ensure that the cost to the employer is significantly ABOVE the current market rate for that labour *and* the annualized cost of training. You have to this or you suppress naturally rising wages for those jobs and entrench this shortage as permanent by eliminating the incentive to train Canadians.
The post-pandemic wage suppression policy was not just expressed in immigration policy, but also in monetary and fiscal policy. The idea that we must aggressively crush wage growth to tame inflation is a sacred cow from the late 70's. Like most sacred cows, it needs to be slayed.
We had a pandemic where millions were thrown out of work while housing prices exploded. And the big idea is to bring in a million temporary workers, cut spending, and raise interest rates in order to crush wages? On what planet does that logic apply?
The way to accommodate a million new immigrants is through aggressive government spending. Houses and schools and hospitals and roads and power plants need to be built to absorb the influx of newcomers. This provides demand for businesses and workers. This keeps GDP per capita stable and builds out the supports for future growth. This is how Canada absorbed previous large waves of immigration.
Instead, we cut spending and raised interest rates, which suppresses investment and growth. The burden of accommodating immigrants fell upon households and individuals. Wages were held down, housing costs exploded, and hospital ERs filled up. This is what falling GDP per capita looks like. This is ultimately what sunk the Trudeau government. You can't run a pro-impoverishment policy and expect to be rewarded.
Canada can accommodate lots of immigration (as we have in the past), but we have to stop being so fucking cheap. Don't throw current citizens under the bus.
Thank you for the very accurate term "pro-impoverishment policy"; this should be picked up by the mainstream and forever tied to Justin Trudeau as part of his miserable legacy.
Regarding last two sentences, which I think are also good, these tie directly into repealing in their entirety promptly all of the laws and regulations passed by the Trudeau's "Liberal" government, since they result in the pro-impoverishment policies, throwing under the bus both current citizens and immigrants.
To be fair, that's been the policy of many Canadian governments for over the past 30 years.
Yes, but from what I observed mostly "Liberals".
Huh.. I was going to correct you and say that it was Stephen Harper who started allowing low skill and unskilled TFWs, but I looked it up to be sure. It was Jean Chretien in 2002. I was wrong.
That said, I did talk to my Conservative MP about this when Mr. Harper was Prime Minister and they did defend unskilled temporary foreign workers as good for Canada.
The TFW makes sense in specific situations where it really is difficult to get a Canadian trained for a specific task. A very specialized engineer or researcher is one thing but there are seasonal roles, such as in agriculture, that fit the program.
What we've seen it turn into is another thing entirely. There is no way that service jobs where the main qualification is communication with the customer should be filled by TFWs.
I think you're right about engineers, but agriculture.. . the purpose there is still wage suppression to avoid paying market rates.
YES... difficult and long training (e.g. engineers) may mean that a TFW is **temporarily** required. TFWs are NOT required in the long term if you avoid suppressing the wages and destroying the incentive to train Canadians. (I wrote a long post here already on this, so I won't repeat it.)
But agriculture? That's the wage suppression purpose of TFWs right there.
Canadians CAN pick fruit. In fact we do sometimes. But agriculture companies and employers want to their employees less than the Canadian market rate for that labour, so they can't find enough people. (Just like if you tried to get someone to work as a tree planter and were offering $6/hour... you won't find anyone.)
Capitalism says agriculture labour in Canada is worth a lot, but employers want to pay less that the market rate. The only "special" thing about agriculture is that some Canadians think that suppressing agricultural worker wages is okay, but suppressing wages for other jobs isn't okay.
We could have a discussion about the merits of those beliefs, but whatever the merits, we do have to admit that wage suppression of agricultural wages **IS** the point of the TFW programme.
Thank you for taking the trouble. In 2000's I lived and worked in BC and I remember this:
1) for summer herding jobs in BC (cattle, sheep, bears, wolves, cougars) the ranchers hired TFW's from Central and South America who could work with horses and herding dogs since there were too few Canadians having both these skills and willingness.
2) for harvesting fruit, vegetables and other agricultural products across Canada TFW's from Central and South America but mostly from the Caribbean were hired since there were too few Canadians willing to take these jobs.
> having both these skills and willingness.
> since there were too few Canadians willing to take these jobs.
And what's the thing about willingness? The reason they're unwilling is by definition because the employer is not offering the market rate because the market rate for labour is by definition whatever it takes to make someone willing to do the work.
What's your labour worth? What's your house worth? It's the same answer...it's whatever it takes for the buyers to convince you to part with it.
Some people have this idea of "intrinsic" value where a thing or a service has some kind of intrinsic value determined by inputs or effort. But that's rubbish. The monetary value of something is determined only by what someone else is willing to pay for it.
People often associate this "intrinsic value of labour" idea most frequently with the left, but TFWs are a great example of it as well. Some people argue TFWs are needed when you can't find people willing to work "for what the job should pay"... but they have an intrinsic value idea of the labour where they just believe that the labour is worth very little.. just because. Well that's not true. The labour is worth whatever it takes to get someone to do it.
In my circles it was the "ethnic vote brokers" who were the most virulent advocates for temporary foreign workers. Elite Canada being the conflict allergic folks they are, we can't say the name of that country, but they predominantly came from that particular place. Both the abused and abusers. In Calgary these folks own the driving schools, trucking firms and even the examiners so they have vertically integrated for instance.
That said, this particular group seem to be the only folks in Canada actually investing in Canada, actually believing in the place, unlike the old stock Bay Street crowd, so there is that.
Even fly by night colleges seem to have hired very politically connected folks to ensure their access to students, and some if not most of these colleges seem to be owned by connected folks.
My point is that Canada imported 3rd world working conditions all to pay off ethnic vote bundlers using 3rd world political organizing tactics.
Jen, you make a point about folks who have been here five or ten years and have followed the rules and that we cannot turn our back on them.
Agreed....... as long as .....
If they have been here that long then they have been renewing properly their immigration status - right? If so, then I absolutely agree with you. If they haven't been renewing that status then they do not have the right to stay here. So, announce clearly that the lack of status is terrifically important and that delinquent paperwork can be cleared up by doing, A, B, etc. then those that have not gotten proper paperwork updated need to be removed from Canada.
The public,people noticed who was now serving us in these fast food establishments. An immediate flip in employees at big box stores,Walmart,Co-op,Canadian Tire ect. And little grasp of our language. We saw and heard how locals,’steady eddies’ were being passed over for supervisor,manager positions. And come on! Skin colour. Homeless,crime,lack of housing,cost of living,inflation. We the people feel and see the effects. How many TFW,work visa holders have left or stayed? That is our concern
Canada did not break anything, the play actor PM broke immigration.
This was a solid episode: Tony gives nuanced takes that avoid the over-simplifications we often see. I did have a few comments though:
One thing Jen overlooked when discussing housing costs is the rental market. Yes, the cost of *buying* a home has been an issue long before the population surge, but the real problem was what happened to rents; we basically found a way to fuck over those already locked out of home ownership even more.
Also when discussing needing to pay higher wagers to resolve a worker shortage - I agree, but it's not only wages. It could be better working conditions, training programs, benefits, taking a chance on someone a business wouldn't normally hire, improving productivity, etc. A labour shortage could be a huge opportunity rather than a problem (also why it's particularly disappointing the NDP have been so lost on this issue). This was also my one critique of the Qatar comparison: while *some* Canadian citizens benefit from the exploitative system (especially most retirees), many are not.
One area I think Tony over-simplified was the idea that we wouldn't lose businesses because all are on an even playing field. What he missed is if it costs more to go to restaurants, there will probably be less people going to restaurants, and that will lead to some closures at the margin. But if we lose a few marginal businesses, I think that's a fair tradeoff.
One other interesting side-effect not discussed was the gender imbalance among young adults we're creating. Which is certainly ironic outcome from Canada's "feminist" government (once again showing politics is all about vibes rather than results).
And last thing - I think I mostly agree with the conventional wisdom that our economic immigration should focus on those with high human capital. But I do wonder with Canada's high education levels and currently shitty job market in industries like tech if even this starts to become controversial (we're currently seeing some blow-back to high-skilled streams in the US).
The most difficult problem discussed in the interview, and IMO the most important, is what will happen to the temporary residents who are already here, many of whom will not leave.
We are not going to deport them. Even if we could muster the political will for that, which we 100% could not, there is no way that gets executed in a country that can’t evict a few dozen grumpy truckers from the capital without declaring martial law. All the more so when any hint of overreach — and probably any enforcement whatsoever — would be decried as resembling Trump administration policy.
Unfortunately the most likely alternative is the worst: doing nothing. We could easily reach an equilibrium with a permanent underclass lacking legal status, and a de facto don’t ask don’t tell approach supplemented by pockets of progressive activists in places like Toronto eagerly declaring themselves “sanctuaries” because they are desperate to fight a U.S. culture war. This feeds on itself, because once such a situation gets normalized, more people will overstay visas who in the past might have departed.
There is no good solution, but probably the least bad is to bite the bullet and give them legal status. Ideally this would be done transparently, after a thoughtful debate on the trade offs. So that won’t happen. It might get done incrementally, by stealth, while the government vehemently denies it is doing any such thing and brands claims to the contrary as a conspiracy theory. It seems unlikely that either party will try to escalate it into a wedge issue, the Liberals because immigration and especially illegal immigration is not an obvious winner, and the Conservatives because some of their supporters would want a much tougher policy than they could ever actually deliver. Thus the risk of putting off any clear response indefinitely, which is what we will most likely do.
> We are not going to deport them. Even if we could muster the political will for that, which we 100% could not, there is no way that gets executed in a country that can’t evict a few dozen grumpy truckers from the capital without declaring martial law.
Indeed.
Note also that students who came in on such a programme who commit sexual crimes sometimes have their sentences reduced specifically to do an end-run around the laws which require deportation of potential immigrants who commit crimes.
Just think about that... a man is found guilty of a crime, an appropriate sentence is determined... and then it is lowered by the judge in order to avoid having to obey the law.
For those interested the case its that of an Indian citizen by the name of Sajeevan who is in Canada on a student visa who installed hidden cameras to spy on women in the toilet. The judge found that the correct sentence was at a minimum 6 months and at most a year. This triggers a potential deportation because sex criminals who commit offences serious enough to warrant a 6 month sentence may be subject to deportation. That's the law.
So the judge reduced his sentence to avoid the law. The judge knew *and said* what the appropriate minimum sentence was... and then he handed out a lower sentence because he didn't like the law. He didn't even pretend it was unconstitutional... he just didn't think the legal immigration policy of deporting non-citizens for committing sex crimes was fair.
This is outrageous and I think justice Craig Brannagan should be disbarred or at the very least permanently kicked off the bench.
But it also shows that we have such a broken legal and immigration system filled with at least some bad actors like judge Brannagan that we're not going to succeed with legal deportations in the short or medium term. There's a longer job that has to be done first.
Yes, I am skeptical that any broad deportation could even get to the execution stage, but if it somehow did, one can only imagine what barriers Canada’s courts would impose.
Great interview -- i now finally understand the history of this and the demise of what we were previously proud of. Agricultural workers may be an exception in continuing them-- but absolutely at a living wage. But the students were an absolute scam and if universities/colleges have to shrink or even fold, it wont hurt the quality of education, likely improve it by winnowing out the crap,and better value for tax dollars invested.
Important previous black hole was treatment of physicians and other professionals for whom qualifying and obtaining licensure was an arrogant, insulated nightmare. Finally provincial and federal colleges are creating much improved paths for experienced well trained physicians (all i really know about) from other than the white British/NZ/Aus/US world to join the profession here - in their specialty!!! not as Fam Docs only. We need them!!
Maybe make Tony Minister of Immigration??
great episode / discussion about the mess we are in!
While this interview does a great job of breaking down how much Canada fucked itself and created a multitude of unsolvable problems with mass indiscriminate immigration over about a five-year period, it has one issue.
Tony Keller seems to think that nobody in the public or government really knew at the time what was happening or that it could possibly end up this badly. I for one was tearing my hair out all the way, getting a weekly pit of the stomach churning nausea usually reserved for government announcements affecting my firearms collection. This shit was obvious, it was egregious, and it was in all of our faces from 2021 forward.
Nobody said anything because of the Covid-era inter-related "anti-racism" moral panics where anything that looked like criticism of unlimited ethnic diversity and not being "welcoming of newcomers" would get you raked over the coals as a racist. Big corporations took advantage of this situation to screw us all over and the Liberals were enthusiastically along for the ride.
One thing that I thought might have come up in this discussion, but didn't. It's something that has been discussed on The Line in the past, and seems like it might be related to this issue: demographic collapse.
The declining birth rate in Canada. I think I just recently saw a headline that our birth rate has actually reached an all-time low recently. The Line has talked about this, and how in years to come, our population will have more and more elderly retirees, with their increasing medical expenses, supported by fewer and fewer working people. All developed nations are seeing this happening, and all will have to compete to get anyone to come in at all.
One might charitably suggest that perhaps the recent out-of-control immigration was actually a deliberate and planned attempt to get ahead the problem.
I don't really believe that. I'm not convinced that any of our politicians, of any stripe, are capable of planning for anything farther ahead than the next election. But still, I was kind of expecting this to come up in the conversation at some point.
I was wondering the same thing. If there is some small silver lining to this terrible own goal / foot shooting, having a better demographic distribution is very important. But I seriously doubt it was a plan by someone somewhere.
That being said, my intuition is that it wont work like in the past. When my parents fled invading Soviets for Canada in the 50s, it was a VERY different world with respect to international travel. You came here and you stayed. It cost a LOT of money to travel overseas just for a quick visit (even if you were allowed). Not so much now. My co-worker's inlaws who fled the Sandinistas in the 80s go back and forth in the winter and figure they would retire there. There is just not as much friction to keep people here. I fear the same dynamic will apply to the "coveted skilled workers"... We lure them away with a better life, other countries can and will do the same to us...
Not surprised Universities Canada didn't sponsor this podcast.
That business would look to scam the system for profit is no surprise. Business ethics can be boiled down to a one hour lecture, "how to not get caught".
The academy's collusion in this immigration scam is the natural progression of having too many pseudo-academic, post-secondary institutions. Defund them and invest in trade schools, rather than having to import skilled trades.
Your proposed solution is delusional. Gen Z will bear the brunt of this disaster and they will, rightly, not trust the government going forward. You should be more explicit, there is no such thing as a Canadian and there is no Canadian culture (multiculturalism is an unculture).
The blame for the Liberals’ botched immigration policy can’t be laid solely at the feet of the “stakeholders” they consulted. The Liberals were predisposed to hear that message, which aligned with the trendy popular progressive sentiments that informed most areas of Trudeau’s policies. It was much the same with things like deficit spending, increasing the size of the public sector, bail reform, and fixating on social justice issues in trade agreements.
On a different point, I think your guest is incorrect about the effects of turning off the supply of temporary foreign labor. It’s not going to increase real wages across the board, and wouldn’t lead to a 1 for 1 replacement with Canadian workers. Wages would definitely increase with scarcer labor. However, that’s either going to be inflationary or require a push for higher worker productivity. That productivity looks like more automation (e.g. self checkouts at stores and ordering kiosks at restaurants), or fewer workers working harder. You’ll frequently see the latter in high wage countries like Denmark - a busy 20 table restaurant with one server and one cook. Student workers would probably make out better, but the lowest skilled workers probably won’t - they just can’t generate the value to justify higher real wages.
This of course speaks to Canada's low productivity growth over the last several years. Higher investment in automation may well be the result, and I expect inflation to precede and in part prompt that, but I think this situation is a little different than the usual increase in wage vs productivity scenario.
You are right that there would be winners (the most productive) and losers (those left unemployed by automation), but in this case, the losers would be TFWs that don't come in the first place, so the question is really one of relative numbers of TFW not coming vs unemployed/underemployed Canadians entering the workforce as higher productivity workers.
Higher inflation is something that hits everybody, and hits lower income people harder. Likewise, everybody's likely to suffer the effects of a labor shortage. If you lived in Alberta between 2005 and 2014, you'll have an idea of what that's like: poor service and scarce service just about everywhere. People aren't going to be happy about it. The argument against temporary foreign workers has to acknowledge that there'll be some negative effects as well, even if the balance still favors ending the policy.
yeah that part of the conversation sounded somewhat simplistic (Oh its just 17c more per delivery etc)... Some business will just not make economic sense and shut down as they were already marginal with TFWs, some will pay higher wages, some will speed up automation even more....
I found this discussion very interesting.
> as crazy as this sounds, [the goal of our system appeared to have become] keeping wages down at the bottom of the wage scale
Uh no. That doesn't crazy at all. Because it's true.
I've been saying for years that this is exactly what the TFW programme is and I haven't been the only one saying it. As Matt keeps repeating, the Liberals are the kind of people who would never believe that they'd do the thing that they are currently doing.
There's two reasons you can't find labour.
1. It's highly skilled labour and there aren't enough people in Canada with the required training. e.g. Canada suddenly needs RIGHT NOW to hire 10X more paediatric brain surgeons than are currently trained. It doesn't matter how much you offer to pay them, it takes more than 10 minutes to train a paediatric brain surgeon, so you won't find them in Canada.
2. You want to pay less than the market cost of that labour, so the labour does exist, but they won't work for the peanuts you're offering. e.g. An engineering company needs to hire a couple of engineers for their construction of a giant office complex in Toronto and wants to pay them minimum wage $17.60/hour with no benefits. We have the engineers, but they'll refuse the job.
Canada's TFW programme set out to solve the second reason and the reason you KNOW this without a shadow of doubt is that we did it for low skill and unskilled labour.
There are ways to solve for the first problem without affecting the second, but every solution always has to include two things.
1. Use for skilled labour only that requires long training times.
2. Ensure that the cost to the employer is significantly ABOVE the current market rate for that labour *and* the annualized cost of training. You have to this or you suppress naturally rising wages for those jobs and entrench this shortage as permanent by eliminating the incentive to train Canadians.