Cold open
Wab Kinew: So the leadership candidates, my best piece of advice, win. It’s way better than the alternative.
Catherine Cullen: Some practical advice from Manitoba NDP Premier Wab Kinew. Problem is, the federal NDP hasn’t been winning. Last election was their worst showing ever. On Sunday in Winnipeg, they’ll pick a new leader, one they hope can turn the tide.
I’m Catherine Cullen, and this week on The House, one challenge that leader will have is unity within the NDP. Alberta’s NDP leader doesn’t even have a federal membership. He’s asking the leading contenders not to cause him any trouble. And now, Nahed Nenshi has dropped some pretty pro-pipeline energy policy, just as the federal members meet. Is he spoiling for a fight? We’ll ask him.
Our strategist panel will also break down the race, and that crunchy moment at committee this week with floor-crosser Michael Ma. Has he put the Liberals in hot water over labour standards in China?
And the Supreme Court case that could have big implications for this country. Ontario’s Attorney General is so fired up about it, he went to court himself to argue his province’s case. He joins us a little later.
But we begin in Winnipeg. Is the federal NDP ready to win?
Wab Kinew: We’re stuck with the alternative.
Convention floor, Winnipeg
Armando Melegrano: It’s a really cool time for everyone to get together, because everybody is here. We can all talk about who we’re going to vote for, but in the end, we’re going to have a fantastic leader leading a fantastic party in a fantastic country.
Catherine Cullen: You sound very positive about the future of the NDP.
Armando Melegrano: Yeah. I mean, why not? Why not be positive? I mean, with so much negativity in this world, especially south of the border, it’s time to be… freaking positive.
Catherine Cullen: NDP member Armando Melegrano sounding pretty pumped in Winnipeg, talking to my colleague Marina von Stackelberg. There’s lots of talk of hope, but it’s mixed in with questions about the very survival of the federal New Democrats. Here’s member John Bozzilli.
John Bozzilli: I’m optimistic for the party’s future, and I think we’ll recover. Like, we definitely will. Like, the only way I think NDP ends is if we decide the party needs to end and, like, close the building down completely.
Catherine Cullen: Last election, the party took a major hit, winning just seven seats, not even enough for official status. And now, they’re down another. Earlier this month, Nunavut MP Laurie Idlout crossed the floor to the Liberals.
Still, there are five folks vying to lead the federal New Democrats. Activist and documentary filmmaker Avi Lewis is widely considered the frontrunner.
Avi Lewis: I feel excited. It’s, you know, there’s kind of a jarring disconnect between the amount of energy and momentum at our base and the fact that the country isn’t yet aware of it. And so I think this weekend is our re-coming-out party.
Catherine Cullen: He wants to make some big moves to the left. He’s described his campaign as an anti-capitalist movement, opposes pipeline expansion, and questions the increase in military spending.
His biggest challenger is the race’s one sitting MP, Edmonton’s Heather McPherson. She’s pitched herself as a pragmatist.
Heather McPherson: We’re New Democrats. We believe in a lot of the same things. And, you know, we want to make this country better for all Canadians. And the goal has to be to win, though. The goal has to be to elect more seats. I think that is something that I bring as a member of Parliament, as somebody who has won three elections and is currently sitting in the House of Commons. I think that is something I bring.
Catherine Cullen: Also running, union leader Rob Ashton, farmer Tony McQuaill, and social worker and municipal councillor Tenille Johnston. The winner will be announced Sunday, and they’ll have a big to-do list, which includes healing divisions within the party.
Nahed Nenshi interview
One place where that tension is apparent is with the Alberta NDP. Their leader is Nahed Nenshi. We spoke Friday.
Catherine Cullen: Mr. Nenshi, welcome back to the program.
Nahed Nenshi: Thank you. Always a pleasure to talk to you. Always a pleasure to be on the House.
Catherine Cullen: I admit, I had to laugh a little when I saw that you dropped your new energy policy at the very same time that the federal NDP convention started. You’ve got frontrunner Avi Lewis, who says Canada can’t keep increasing fossil fuel production — no new federal approvals, he says, for pipelines. And here you are saying, let’s increase Trans Mountain capacity by 300,000 barrels a day, work on a West Coast pipeline option, explore new export routes, revisit Energy East. The timing here is clearly no accident. Why is it so important for you to contrast yourself with the federal NDP?
Nahed Nenshi: Well, it’s not so much that, but it is an important contrast for me with the Premier Smith and the UCP government. You know, there is this memorandum of understanding that the Premier has been trumpeting for many, many months. There is a deadline on April 1st next week. We already know that the Premier has signaled she’s going to blow the deadline. It happens to be her birthday, but maybe she’ll have a new birthday present.
But the critical thing here is, despite all the talk, nothing is getting built. And Conservative governments, for all their talk on this, have built precisely zero miles of pipeline to tidewater in many decades. And we just wanted to show Albertans that there is a better way to do this. We built one pipeline to tidewater already when Rachel Notley was the Premier, and we have the chance to do it again.
And as for the federal leadership, yes, it’s going on at the same time. Can’t be a coincidence. Let me tell you that I didn’t vote in that leadership, because I’m not a member of that party. I’m not a member of any federal party. The Alberta New Democrats last year, our membership voted to make party membership in the federal party optional. Thousands of other Alberta New Democrats have chosen to opt out of the federal party. You know, we’re a big tent. We have people who vote for every party federally with us.
And what’s interesting is, we talk a lot about the federal party and where it’s at. But the New Democrats are in government or in opposition — official opposition — in every province from Ontario West. And in Alberta, we come from a long line of pragmatic populist prairie progressives. Oh my goodness, that’s a lot of Ps. From Tommy Douglas to Rachel Notley. And we see ourselves as the government in waiting. So we’re not interested in having conversations that don’t really talk to people about the real issues, which are not just that they know that we’re better on health care, they know we’re better on education. But any prairie New Democrat will tell you the first thing they hear at the door is, but the economy, but money. And it’s really important for us to be able to talk with some authority about how it’s possible to build a better economy while slashing emissions, while building better jobs for people.
Catherine Cullen: OK, this plan is a pretty explicit call for your province to export more oil. So here I want to put to you the words of Avi Lewis, who just today called oil, quote, “the most destabilizing force in the global economy right now” and, quote, “the major contributor to climate breakdown.” He says Canada is addicted and it’s time to get off oil. What do you say to Avi Lewis?
Nahed Nenshi: Well, let’s talk about what’s destabilizing. And what is destabilizing is the fact that we are blessed with a natural resource and we don’t have access to markets for it, markets that are hungry for that energy, who need it. I actually happen to believe that providing folks with safe, clean, reliable energy is one of the most powerful poverty fighting tools we have in the world. And generations of policy decisions have meant it’s really hard for us to get that resource to the world.
We all know that someday, we don’t know when, it could be our grandfathers, our grandchildren, or our grandchildren’s grandchildren who say, wow, you used to burn that stuff. But we also know that at this moment, the world needs safe, clean, reliable, stable — to use Mr. Lewis’s language — energy. And this is a real window of opportunity for us to be able to not just create great jobs now, but to use that to build for the future.
Catherine Cullen: So you’re saying he’s getting it wrong?
Nahed Nenshi: You know, he’s welcome to come to Alberta and see the reality on the ground. But yeah, I do think that. I think that we need to be leaders in the fight against climate change, not bystanders to it. And to sit on our hands while other people supply the fossil fuels that he decries, and we don’t get any benefit from it, nor are we able to use that money to create a more resilient, more sustainable economy, is not the way forward. And as I said, in Alberta, we need to show folks that we’re the government in waiting. We need to show folks that we actually need to speak their language, that we understand the economy. We understand budgeting. Conservative premiers across the country have been tabling these massive deficits. Danielle Smith has five times the resource revenue that Rachel Notley had. And she has a deficit as big or bigger than any of Notley’s deficits. They’re wasting the boom during the boom. They’re not investing in the future. And my argument is we got to live in the real world. And we have to figure out how we monetize what we have to build a better future for everybody.
Catherine Cullen: There’s an interesting contrast emerging here, though. I know you want to talk about the contrast with you and Danielle Smith. But if I look at you — as you say, not a member of the federal party — you called up the three top contenders and essentially said, please don’t cause me any grief in Alberta. Then you look at Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew. He spoke to the NDP convention on Friday. He said, yes, be the conscience of parliament, but you have to win. He’s offering them positive reinforcement. You’re a little bit more focused on contrast. Why be an adversary?
Nahed Nenshi: Oh, no, we’re not adversaries at all. And remember that one of the other front runners for the race happens to share a constituency with me. We both represent Edmonton Strathcona.
Catherine Cullen: But you haven’t endorsed her.
Nahed Nenshi: No, because I’m not a member of the party. Well, why would you want a non-party member to endorse you?
Catherine Cullen: I bet she’d take it.
Nahed Nenshi: She probably would. She probably would. And she is a wonderful human being and a great public servant. As they all are, frankly.
But the point is, it’s not so much that I called them up to be adversarial. It’s more that I called them up to say, look, here’s the reality in Alberta. Alberta is actually a very large portion of the federal party membership. For a time there, we were the vast majority of the federal party membership when I was running for leader. But at the same time, I’m not sure that the folks who are not from Alberta understand what’s really going on. And it’s interesting to me that the three front runners — if there are three front runners — Mr. Lewis, Ms. McPherson, Mr. Ashton, have very different views of what the future of the party is. You know, Mr. Ashton, it’s all about a workers’ party. Heather McPherson is really about a social conscience, thoughtful party. And Mr. Lewis is really about his environmental credentials. And I think that’s a really interesting choice for the federal party members to be able to decide.
At the end of the day, is it about contrast, or is it about just showing who we are to Albertans? That is not necessarily the same as who the federal party is. And certainly Rachel Notley, when she was the premier, didn’t agree with Jagmeet Singh on everything at all, particularly on energy policy. And I think Albertans and Canadians are smart enough to understand that we’re not the same, but we do share a lot of the same values. We’re still the party of public health care. We’re still the party of workers. We’re still the party of jobs-driven growth and of great public services.
Catherine Cullen: Mr. Nenshi, we’ve got like 45 seconds left here. So, in a word or two, what do you want your relationship with the new NDP leader to look like?
Nahed Nenshi: I think it’ll be friendly. I hope it’ll be productive. And I hope whoever the new leader is, they understand that our provincial parties need to show that we can govern, and they can help in that.
Catherine Cullen: Thank you very much for your time today, Mr. Nenshi.
Nahed Nenshi: Thank you.
Catherine Cullen: Nahed Nenshi is the leader of the Alberta NDP.
Strategist panel
So, that’s one take on the NDP. But what happens with the federal party will have ripple effects across Canadian politics. The Conservatives need a stronger NDP to draw votes away from the Liberals and help their own political chances. How are they feeling? Do the Liberals need to start worrying about their own left flank? Let’s ask our backroom experts, our political strategist panel. Marcy Serks is a former senior advisor to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Chief Strategy Officer at Compass Rose. Kate Harrison is a Conservative strategist and Vice Chair at Suma Strategies. And Jordan Leichnitz is an NDP strategist and Canada Director for the Friedrich Ebert Foundation. Marcy, Kate, Jordan, welcome back to the house.
Jordan Leichnitz: Jordan, you are in Winnipeg. So, I want to take a moment here to have you give us the lay of the land. Avi Lewis, he’s raised the most money, sold the most memberships. He seems to be the frontrunner. Is this a done deal or do you think there’s still a chance for one of the other candidates?
Jordan Leichnitz: Well, it’s — yeah, we’re all here in Winterpeg and it’s given us a chilly welcome. And there’s a lot of energy. The convention is just beginning today. They’ve got about 2,000 delegates, which is the largest ever that the party’s had. So, people are turning up and they’re turning out. And yeah, I would say that Avi’s campaign at this point seems to have the most momentum and is definitely going into the weekend as the frontrunner. Heather, I think, still very much has a path, but it would rely on pretty much everything going right for her in terms of how the rank balloting works.
Lewis is someone, in the conversations I’ve had with folks around the NDP, the NDP members have strong, strong feelings about — some people really like him. Some people do not. You know, he has strong communication abilities. He has not successfully won an election campaign yet.
Catherine Cullen: I wonder how divisive you think this race has been for the party.
Jordan Leichnitz: Well, I think it bears saying, all leadership races are inherently pretty divisive for parties. That’s something in there is a bit the nature of the game. I think that Lewis is a polarizing figure. For sure, within the party — particularly because of his past interactions with provincial sections of the party in Alberta and B.C. specifically, where he was really critical of those governments around resource development. So there are those, particularly from the West, who are concerned about that, and especially people who want to make sure to be able to build on the success that those provincial sections have had, that worry that he would struggle to reconcile those things as leader and to really be able to take a national position leading a national party.
Catherine Cullen: So how much is the new leader’s job fixing the party versus growing the party?
Jordan Leichnitz: Well, it’s a rebuilding game at this point for the NDP. There is a real need for the party to get back on its feet financially, organizationally, but almost more importantly, in terms of visibility with Canadians and presence of mind with Canadians. This leadership race has been pretty long — it’s been over six months — and the party hasn’t been very visible during that period. And that’s fairly normal, but it is important. And we’ve seen this as well: Prime Minister Carney is governing sort of largely unopposed from the left, and those voices are not really being heard as loudly in Parliament now because the NDP doesn’t have their place on committees, doesn’t have a regular place in question period.
And so the challenge for the new leader, regardless of who it is, is going to be to make the NDP visible to Canadians, to get into those stories, to get in front of voters, and to show why it’s so important for a strong NDP to be present right now with all of the struggles that we’re going through in Canada.
Catherine Cullen: Marcy, Jordan said they’re largely unopposed from the left for the Liberals. Do the Liberals need to worry about their left flank right now? I mean, you had Steven Guilbault leave Cabinet over pipeline politics. That’s the space that there is to occupy.
Marcy Serks: There’s no question. The NDP faces a long road to rebuild in order to be reelected, and to be that voice of opposition on the left flank. I say that with no hubris. I was part of a party that hit the rock bottom after 2011, and I was there for the rebuild. This happens, and it’s cyclical with parties, and they are probably at the floor, and they need to rebuild. But that process takes time and has to be deliberate.
I think the existential question for the NDP, if it is going to be that voice on the left, is: does it actually want to be the voice of consciousness in the Commons? Is that the goal? Or is it actually trying to become competitive against the Liberals in a meaningful way? And that’s a little bit of a different question in terms of what the strategy is to get from point A to point B. Again, neither of those paths are very fast or quick.
But yeah, that space on the left, centre-left and further left, is wide open right now in a lot of respects. You mentioned the climate issue. I think that’s real. The one I’m watching where I think there’s space for the NDP to take up, if they were able to carry a mantle coming out of this, is with respect to childcare and the caring economy more generally. There are bilateral agreements with all of the provinces and territories that are up for renewal. And we don’t know yet how the Carney government intends to proceed on that file. And that’s something that matters to a lot of families and a lot of working-class Canadians, middle-class families. And that could be a rallying cry for the New Democrats. That’s just one example. But there’s space there.
Catherine Cullen: Super interesting because we have heard him — Mark Carney — sort of touch on those as important values. But finding the money to go along with it. Kate, are the Conservatives watching this going, I hope you guys can get your act together? Like, what is your point of view?
Kate Harrison: I think that there will be a lot of people from the opposition leader’s office and Conservative politics tuning in to what happens this weekend. There’s no question that an underperforming NDP had a massive impact on Conservative electability in the last election.
And I think Marcy’s point around the existential question facing the NDP is really important. Is this a party that wants to govern or wants to have a shot at governing? Or will they be a protest party? And I think the concern with Mr. Lewis is that they will go more in that latter direction as opposed to positioning themselves for electability.
Marcy raised a couple of great points there on climate and on childcare. The space that I think a lot of folks will also be watching is organized labour and labour issues. The federal government has taken a pretty big swing at labour unions. You can talk about that in the nature of back to office policies from the public sector union side as well. And I think that we probably haven’t seen the last of the pursuit of pro-employer legislation from this government. And so there is an opportunity here for the NDP to speak to some of those issues. The question is, are they going to do it from, again, more of a fringe ideological perspective, or are they going to come to the table with some real solutions for Canadians in an attempt to form government.
Michael Ma committee exchange
Catherine Cullen: OK, I want to switch gears and talk about some of the other issues that took place this week. Remarkable moment involving Michael Ma, the floor crosser who joined the Liberals late last year. He was at committee this week questioning a witness, Margaret McQuigge Johnston, who’s been on this program — a professor — about Chinese electric vehicles. And there was this tense exchange over the question of forced labour in China.
[Committee tape]
Michael Ma: So the last question then is, you claim about forced labor in Shenzhen. Have you witnessed this yourself? Have you been there ever?
Margaret McQuigge Johnston: I’ve been to China many times.
Michael Ma: Have you witnessed forced labor in Shenzhen? Have you witnessed forced — just a short answer. Have you witnessed forced labor in Shenzhen? Yes or no?
Margaret McQuigge Johnston: (pause)
Michael Ma: So did you get that from hearsay?
Margaret McQuigge Johnston: I work closely with Human Rights Watch, where researchers did witness it.
Michael Ma: So thank you.
Catherine Cullen: So, CBC asked for a statement from his office, and the first one we received said this: Michael used a quick burst of yes-no questions to move forward with the anti-China EV witness and then to give the floor to the pro-China EV witness. That was the strategy on paper. The office also said he was using tactics he learned from the Conservatives. They later sent out a second statement apologizing. And our colleague, Olivia Stefanovich, did question Mr. Ma as he was leaving Parliament, and he would not say whether forced labor is a problem in China. And writ large, there is plenty of documentation to back that up. He only said it’s an issue all over the world.
Marcy, what is going on here?
Marcy Serks: Well, on the pith and substance of the issue at hand, it’s a little bit difficult to comment not knowing Mr. Ma. I don’t know Mr. Ma or his intentions. It certainly comes across as being a fairly abhorrent position to take with respect to what is widely documented evidence. But I will leave that where it is.
I think from the strategist perspective, as I’m looking at this on its face, the challenge that the Liberal caucus and the prime minister’s office has with this issue is something that you would have with caucus generally. And certainly in an instance where you have a floor crosser who you really don’t necessarily know very well. You have someone who is new to the caucus, just getting settled and getting to know the players. They were vetted for a general election campaign by another party. Every party has a different green light process for candidates, the thoroughness of that vetting that happens in advance. You are sort of taking for granted that another party here has done that work. And I’m not going to question the Conservatives’ processes, but they will differ from Liberal processes. And so you’re kind of stuck with whatever the Conservative process was here as you are learning this member of caucus.
Caucus management at the best of times is a very complicated matter that requires constant and regular diligence and dialogue with the centre, the prime minister’s office. In this case, they don’t know him necessarily well enough yet to know what’s what. And I think —
Catherine Cullen: They knew him well enough to take him on a trip to China with the prime minister.
Marcy Serks: And they are still having to learn what all the various considerations may be around this member of caucus. And I’m not going to sugarcoat that. This is what it is. And this is what happens in floor crossings every which way.
Catherine Cullen: Kate, the Conservatives making hay with this. The point that Marcy raised, the Conservatives are the ones who vetted this guy to say that he could become a member of Parliament. In fact, he was elected as a Conservative. Does that make it harder to criticize him?
Kate Harrison: I think that it certainly raises some good questions in terms of the strength of that vetting process. I think, however, we probably are observing how Liberals would treat the comments that Mr. Ma made versus how Conservatives, I suspect, would have treated the comments that Mr. Ma made.
Catherine Cullen: I don’t quite know what you mean.
Kate Harrison: So I think to have a member of Parliament deny forced labour in China, if he was a member of the Conservative caucus, I have no doubt that there would have been an immediate statement from the leader of the party asking Mr. Ma to retract those comments. And I think that that is what is necessary from the Prime Minister for a couple of reasons. Number one, the comments on their face are atrocious.
I do just want to say that Mr. Ma, part of his second statement of apology said — and I’m just putting this out for informational purposes — To be clear, my line of questioning referred to auto manufacturing in Shenzhen, China, not Xinjiang. And a lot of the documentation that has been seen publicly — I don’t want to get into the finer points of this — but he is, I think, trying to make some kind of distinction there. I think it’s a distinction without a difference, because he ultimately berated and harassed a witness, called into question her qualifications, asked if she had an advanced degree in cybersecurity, and basically trying to, you know, assassinate the character of the witness there.
This is a problem for the Prime Minister, not just for Mr. Ma. We’ve had the government pull back representatives from Taiwan ahead of that trip to China, which Mr. Ma was on. The Prime Minister has spoken about a strategic partnership with China to help us position for the new world order. These are not happy coincidences. And I think especially on the forced labour file, the US has initiated a consultation with allies to harmonize the position on forced labour. How are they interpreting Mr. Ma’s comments? Is this the official government position?
Catherine Cullen: OK, Jordan, I want to bring you in here. And I want to zero in on that first statement I read. His office says he was trying to make more space for the expert he agreed with, essentially.
Jordan Leichnitz: Well, and I want to talk about this for the audience more broadly. Like, do most MPs operate this way? Is he saying the quiet part out loud?
Well, I mean, yeah, there was a staffer in his office who was certainly very honest about what some of the preparation must have been for that committee. And look, I think that this is something that we have most typically seen coming from the Conservatives. You know, you’ll remember back in the day under Stephen Harper, they had committee sort of workbooks about, you know, recommendations about how the MPs could sort of disrupt proceedings at committee and use them to make political points and to sort of turn studies to be a little bit more favourable to their worldview. So this is something that does happen. I would say systematically, we tend to see it more from the Conservatives. And I do think that the problem for the government here is that Mr. Ma, as Marcy explained very well, was brought into caucus with potentially not the same scrutiny in terms of the vetting process that others might have received because of the circumstances of his crossing and the government’s desire to get to their majority.
And then he’s been placed in very close proximity to the prime minister, accompanying him on that China trip. He was sitting beside him in the House of Commons earlier this week. And so in that case, when you’re bringing somebody like that so close to your leader, there’s an extra duty to do due diligence and then also to engage that office and make sure that they are well supervised in what they’re doing. Clearly, in this case, there was a really big failure to do that. And, you know, issues management failures are really only apparent in cases like this when things are happening that they shouldn’t be that are detracting from the story. And for the government, the problem is that this plays right into a lot of the conservative attacks about the government’s opening towards China. And it reinforces, I think, a lot of those lines of argument in a way that’s really unhelpful for the prime minister.
Auditor General report — international students
Catherine Cullen: OK, we are going to squeeze in one more topic. The Auditor General’s report specifically on international students this week, which found the federal government only had the ability to investigate a fraction of the 150,000 potentially non-compliant international students that schools reported to the federal government. Another example: 800 cases the department investigated flagged as either fraudulent documentation or misrepresentation. They didn’t put flags on any of those cases. Most of those people later got immigration status in Canada. Marcy, how does this kind of thing happen?
Marcy Serks: Look, unfortunately, this is not shocking to me in terms of a result of an audit. The Auditor General finds all sorts of mishandlings of files across the entirety of the federal system. The government of Canada is a massive machine. And there are lots of nooks and crannies where things do fall through the cracks. I am not making excuses for this. I actually think this is most damaging to the government because immigration writ large has become a major political issue, as we all know, in the last number of years.
The government has actually used a much sharper tool to handle international students in more recent history in terms of capping them very, very heavily. And so going forward, those numbers are going to be more manageable. You cannot change the past. And again, I’m not making excuses for the shortcomings. That is obviously a systemic failure. It predates Mr. Carney’s time as prime minister. The government is stuck having to clean it up. Hopefully, in terms of how the government has narrowed the field of individuals coming — not that I support not having people coming — but if you cannot handle the volume, it is better to be at scale so that you are properly administering these programs and the right kinds of applicants are coming forward. And you’re not landing yourself in this circumstance.
But it’s not a pretty day for the government because immigration is an issue with a long tail. And the opposition will continue to ride this one for a long while. We all know that immigration is one of the key issues discussed on social media platforms in this country, whether or not it’s part of the mainstream dialogue every day. And we need there to be more of a consensus on immigration. This really renders that more difficult for the government.
Catherine Cullen: The Conservatives are calling not just for the current immigration minister to be fired, but the last two as well. No prime minister is going to fire three members of his cabinet. So I wonder — but the current immigration minister is having trouble. She might be politically vulnerable. Why are the Conservatives asking for something that they’re never going to get?
Kate Harrison: Well, I think, you know, you say “having some trouble” — that’s an understatement. The current immigration minister is extremely challenged and probably should have been relieved from her post some time ago. There needs to be accountability for a program that was evidently woefully neglected and mismanaged. What you saw with the two previous immigration ministers — Minister Miller and Minister Fraser — they’ve remained in cabinet. Sean Fraser’s case, he’s got one of the most important portfolios. Mark Miller got kicked out of cabinet, actually. And then asked back in. At no point in any of the conversations around their respective promotions were their past poor performance in immigration a consideration for the prime minister.
But, you know, the government should be focused, I guess, on what they can do moving forward. I don’t think it’s enough to just accept fewer international students. They should commit to investigating 100 percent of the cases that are deemed potentially fraudulent. We know that the CRA has great enforcement powers. It’s tax season, everybody — I’m sure I don’t need to remind you. They’ll hunt you down for 12 bucks. But we let tens of thousands of people into the country without any plan or understanding of where they were going to go. That deserves some accountability from the government.
Catherine Cullen: OK, we have to leave it there. Great conversation. Thank you very much to the three of you.
Marcy Serks, Kate Harrison, Jordan Leichnitz: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Catherine Cullen: Marcy Serks, Kate Harrison, and Jordan Leichnitz.