Ezra Levant critiques Pierre Poilievre’s housing policies, exposing tensions between lowering prices (e.g., $1M+ Toronto/Vancouver homes) and protecting seniors’ savings. Poilievre blames rapid immigration for shortages, citing 3x faster population growth than homes/jobs, while Levant highlights systemic failures like Gregor Robertson’s tax-driven Vancouver price surge and Carney’s exclusion of conservative journalists. Dalhousie’s Sylvain Charlebois reveals Canada’s 14.6% youth unemployment (July 2025), the worst since 2010, with half of young people inactive—linked to shrinking entry-level roles (e.g., food service) and diploma mills flooding low-skilled jobs. Poilievre’s proposed TFW cuts risk destabilizing sectors like family businesses without wage fixes, but Charlebois warns abrupt changes could backfire, favoring gradual reforms over Carney’s likely incremental fixes. [Automatically generated summary]
Tonight, I got a tricky question for Pierre Polyev.
I'll show you how he answers.
It's September 9th, and this is the Ezra Levant Show.
Shame on you, you censorious bug.
Well, hi there.
You know, Pierre Polyev is in the Toronto area a lot these days, or at least in the greater Toronto area.
So I can drive and meet him with an hour or so each way.
And I've had a chance to put a few questions to him.
And I generally want to stay on the topic of his press conference because I want him to keep asking me.
And I suppose if I threw things at him from curveballs, he might not call on me.
I'm not going easy on the guy.
I just want to continue to have this access to him.
My questions are not easy.
I try and ask questions that I don't think others will ask.
I don't know if you saw, I asked him about the Castle Law doctrine the other day and couldn't provinces go ahead and do it.
So today he was in Brampton and he was talking about getting the cost of housing down.
Okay, everyone wants that to happen.
Or do they?
Young people want that to happen.
People trying to buy their first house want that to happen.
People trying to move out of their parents' house and start their life want that to happen.
But what if you're 60 or 70 or 80 and your life savings is tied up in your house and the capital gains, like maybe you bought your home in 1975 for $50,000 and maybe it's worth, well, in Toronto, $1.5 million.
I know that sounds crazy, but the average home in Toronto and Vancouver is over a million dollars now.
So if you were going to cut the price of the average home, let's just say to half a million dollars, which is where it was 10 years ago, that would be good news for young people who could maybe afford to buy a home, but it would cut the savings for boomers and seniors in half.
How do you square that circle?
How do you appeal to young people trying to start in life without panicking older people?
That is a difficult question that requires King Solomon type knowledge and wisdom.
Here's how that went today when I was in Brampton, a suburb of Toronto.
Let me play for you a few highlights of his announcement moments ago.
After a decade of liberal taxes, liberal spending, out-of-control liberal immigration, reckless crime policies, the Canadian promise is really broken.
We see an entire generation priced out of home ownership.
We see rampaging crime in our streets.
We see overcrowded communities as a result of immigration adding people three times faster than we add homes and jobs.
We see job losses.
We see the worst economy in the G7.
That's the promise of Canada broken after a decade of liberals.
Now, Mark Carney promised to be different.
Instead, he's worse than Justin Trudeau.
He said he would spend less, but his first estimates bill has the government spending 8% more with the lion's share going to high-priced consultants and bureaucracy.
But here in the GTA, year over year, it is down 49%.
In Kelowna, it's down 36%.
Pre-sales are down 48%.
And they are 82% below the 10-year average.
You talk to home builders and the GTA today, and they will tell you this is the worst they have ever seen it in generations.
I've talked to homebuilders that have been in this business for 50 years, and they say they have never witnessed this kind of carnage in the housing sector.
What does this mean?
It means that not only will there be a shortage of homes because they're not getting built, but soon there will be mass layoffs.
And we're already seeing it.
The Canadian Home Builders say that 35, Canadian Home Builders Association say that 35% of their members are already laying people off.
The Residential Construction Council says that the sector is already laying off thousands of people.
And that's happening mostly in the Greater Toronto area, where unemployment is already facing near record highs.
We see nationwide 86,000 fewer people working today than when Mr. Carney took office.
And in the summer alone, July and August, we lost 106,000 jobs, a staggering number, to give us the second highest unemployment rate in the G7.
Here's the crisis that is going to unfold.
If these trades workers lose their jobs, we may never get them back.
They will have to move to find work.
They may leave the housing sector altogether.
And then, three years from now, the housing shortage will be even worse than it is right now.
Mr. Carney has accomplished the impossible.
It is a triple crisis, with prices too high for buyers to buy, too low for sellers to sell, and inadequate for builders to build.
How can all those things be true?
How is it that it's too high to buy but too low to bill?
Well, the answer is that most of the money is going to government.
And so today I join with my shadow Minister of Housing, Scott Aikison, to call for the Liberals to immediately reverse the policies that have caused this new housing crisis with a four-point plan.
One, axe the federal sales tax for all homebuyers.
I hear someone over here is giving a round of applause.
She might be buying a home soon.
For all homebuyers, not just first-time homebuyers, and for homes up to $1.3 million.
Two, axe the capital gains tax on any monies reinvested in homebuilding.
So if a business or an individual sells an asset, they enjoy a capital gain, but they reinvest it in homebuilding, there should be no capital gains tax.
This will cause a building boom right across the country.
Three, incentivize municipalities to free up land, speed up permits, and cut their own development charges.
The Prime Minister claimed that he was going to cut development charges nationwide by half.
Since he took office, those charges have actually gone up.
I'm calling for the Prime Minister to put the resources in the budget so that we can incentivize municipalities to cut the taxes they charge on building new homes.
And fourth, get immigration under control.
We can no longer add people three times faster than we add homes.
We're going to continue to have shortages.
These four steps will reverse the Liberal housing hell, the disaster that has destroyed the dream of home ownership over the last 10 years.
We are prepared to work with any party that will adopt these common sense ideas so that we can unleash a real building boom in this country that will mean bigger paychecks for our trades workers.
Our realtors, mortgage brokers, suppliers, all of them will benefit.
The much suffering logging industry will have new demand for its products.
So will the steel and aluminum producers have a new market right here at home?
You know the great thing about home building?
It's trump-proof.
You can't claim that Donald Trump is to blame for housing that happens here because he cannot put tariffs on housing that we keep in our own country.
It is, by definition, a homegrown industry.
So when we're facing a losing trade war with China, with the United States, and with others, why not build more here at home?
Most of the materials that go in these homes are Canadian materials.
We have the land, the labor, and the lumber.
And there's no foreign government that can tariff the construction of a Canadian home.
This should be the number one priority.
Get building here.
Nobody can stop us from doing it.
And that's why we're calling on the government to adopt our plan for a new home building boom right across this country by removing the taxes, the red tape, making this the fastest and easiest place to get approved to build a home that will be a wonderful refuge for young families starting out and that will give big, powerful paychecks for our trades workers across this country.
Those are a variation of a theme.
Some of those points were similar to ones announced earlier by Polyev.
A CBC reporter asked what the difference was, and here's what Polyev said.
Michelle Song, CBC News.
Mr. Polyev, how is what you are saying today different from the legislation you proposed before the last election?
It has a lot in common.
I put forward a bill in the House of Commons called the Build Homes and Not Bureaucracy Act, which would incentivize municipalities to speed up permits, free up land, and cut development charges.
But in addition to that, today I'm proposing to axe the sales tax for all homebuyers, not just first-time homebuyers.
Second, to increase the limit to $1.3 million, because unfortunately, in the GTA today, as amazing as it sounds, you can't get the average house for a million dollars.
I mean, if I had said that to you 10 years ago, you'd have laughed me out of the room.
You would have said it would be so ridiculous to spend a million dollars on a middle-class home, but after a decade of liberal housing inflation, that's the reality we face.
And then we're also calling for axing the federal capital gains tax for anyone who reinvests in home building or any other reinvestment in Canada.
This will cause an incredible boom.
It will be like economic rocket fuel.
You imagine the number of investors who will sell a dormant asset, knowing they won't have to pay tax on it, as long as they put it to work building houses in communities like this one.
That would mean jobs.
And by the way, this will help a lot of people.
You might be surprised it's not just big corporations and extremely wealthy investors.
A lot of our tradespeople, they buy houses, fix them up, and then resell them as an improved product.
They would be able to get out zero capital gains tax as long as they reinvest in another home to add even more supply.
So that is the difference between my original proposal and this new enhanced proposal, because the crisis is much bigger now under Mark Carney than it was under Justin Trudeau.
And we as Conservatives are here to provide solutions to fix that.
Thank you.
It's true.
Housing in Toronto and Vancouver is insane.
The average house is a million dollars.
There's no way that someone out of high school, out of universities can scrape together the down payment unless they have serious financial help from a parent or a relative.
There's just no way to do it.
So what happens is young people, it's not a failure to launch.
They can't launch.
They can't get started with their lives.
If you're living at home, how are you going to get married?
How are you going to have kids?
How are you going to start things?
And it's really delayed marriage and thus delayed childbearing.
And, you know, I think it's really taken an attack at the family unit.
I mean, you cannot have a family if you do not have a home.
And that goes straight to pricing.
Now, one of the things that Pollyv talked about was immigration.
He said that's one of his four ways of tackling the problem, was to reducing immigration numbers.
And that's obviously true.
Simple supply and demand tells us that when you bring one or two million people a year into a country and only have a fraction of that in terms of new housing built, of course housing is going to go up in price.
Not just that, but what was traditionally a one-family home will now have seven mattresses for different international students.
Like it's really the third worldification of Canadian housing.
But I had a question for Polyev.
I was trying to ask something on the subject of home building.
I have another question I want to ask him another day about immigration, but I thought, let's ask him about housing.
Here's the question I put to him, and here's his answer.
Hi there, Ezra Levant from Rebel News.
Thanks for having me.
Thank you.
Back in May, Gregor Robertson, Mark Carney's housing minister, was asked if he wanted the price of housing to come down.
And he said no.
How do you balance reducing the cost of housing for young families, but also protecting what may be the only nest egg for some seniors and boomers?
Where do you draw the balance?
How would you like to see pricing actually look for the average home in Toronto or Vancouver?
So, first of all, I just think we need to acknowledge that it is incredible that Mark Carney would pick Gregor Robertson as his housing minister after that when he was the mayor, Vancouver's housing costs went up by 150%, driven almost entirely by municipal taxes.
So the guy who created the worst housing market in North America, forget Canada, by far the most expensive housing market in North America, more expensive than New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago.
Carney says that's exactly who we need in charge of housing.
Like talk about failing up.
So the first thing that would be different is I would have never named someone like Gregor Robertson.
He is the exact epitome of everything wrong with housing in Canada today.
As for your question about balancing keeping home prices up versus them coming down, look, the money from a home today does not go to the buyer, the seller, or the builder.
It goes to the government.
We have to, you know, it's like today, right now, the housing costs are too low for builders to build and too high for buyers to buy.
And you would say, well, how could it be both of those things?
Well, because the lion's share is going to the government.
It doesn't go to these guys.
The guys who swing the hammers back here, they're not getting the money.
The money is going to government bureaucrats, municipally, provincially, and federally.
And what I'm saying is, let's cut the government cost out of housing.
Get rid of the sales tax, cut the development charges in half, speed up the permits, zero tax on reinvested gains.
If you get the government costs out of building homes, then the buyer, the seller, and the builder will all be winners at the same time.
Affordable Housing Consensus00:12:39
It's true.
Gregor Robertson is just atrocious.
And if you missed it, here's his April statement where he just said, no, I don't want the prices to go down.
Here's what he said.
Affordable housing.
You think the prices need to go down?
No, I think that we need to deliver more supply, make sure the market is stable.
It's a huge part of our economy.
We need to be delivering more affordable housing.
The government of Canada has not been building affordable housing since the 90s, and we've created a huge shortage across Canada.
That's where the big need is right now.
And I'm very encouraged that the Prime Minister and our commitment right now in government is to double construction and focus on the affordable size.
Now, fair enough.
It turns out that he has millions of dollars worth of homes as his personal investment.
He's no dummy.
He's a liberal.
He doesn't want the value of his investments to go down.
But it's a striking thing for the Minister of Housing who has said that increasing housing supply and affordability is his top priority.
It's shocking to hear him say he does not want the prices of housing to come down.
And I don't really understand what he meant there about more affordable housing, but keeping that price up.
I don't even know what that means unless he's thinking of having millions of government homes or something that only poor people can live in.
But if you're just a struggling middle-class person, you're not poor.
He just didn't explain that.
It was so bizarre, but it hit me.
Who voted for Mark Carney and the Liberals?
Well, the boomers did.
I mean, every poll shows that young people, especially young men, are worried about life in Canada economically.
They're worried they can't get a job.
They don't like the foreign competitors with temporary foreign workers and international students.
Young people are the most open to conservatives.
And I remember some polling that young people were actually the most open to Donald Trump's audacious invitation to join America.
And that's got to be for economic reasons.
Whereas if you are 60 or 70 or 80 years old, maybe you've got a bit of a pension, but your real pension is your home.
You bought the home in the 50s or the 60s or the 70s when you could do it on a one, you know, one income family where one parent stayed home.
It was a traditional family.
A guy gets a job at a factory.
It's his job for 30 years.
He retires with a pension, his mortgage paid off, and that's his nest egg.
And so there are millions of Canadians that, and I'm not criticizing.
I'm just saying that's their wealth.
And so on the one hand, I can understand why Gregor Robertson doesn't want to spook the liberal voting base, which is boomers and seniors and say, yeah, we want the value of your home to come down because that would put a number of people in a pickle.
And let's say you just bought a home at the peak of the market and got the maximum mortgage and now prices are starting to come down.
You're underwater.
But at the same time, how can you keep your promise to young Canadians to make life affordable if you're not going to bring it down?
Now, Polyeb's answer to me was interesting, and it took me a while to think about it.
He's basically saying it's possible for both home buyers and home sellers to win if you take up the massive costs that is government.
He asserted several times today that actually the largest part of a home price is not the construction.
It's not the land.
It's the paperwork.
It's the red tape.
It's the government.
It's a bureaucracy.
It's the taxes.
I actually find that a little hard to believe.
And I'm not denying it.
I just, I want to look at those numbers.
How could it be?
Like, I mean, these are nice homes, but they're somewhat modest.
They're not grand.
They're not huge.
They have two-car garages and they're very pretty.
But, you know, I don't know what these cost.
But if it's the average price in the greater Toronto area, these are more than a million bucks.
And I put it to you, if you go on a website like realtor.com and go to some place in Texas like Fort Worth and see what you can get for a million bucks, you will get an enormous acreage with a 5,000 square foot home with all the luxuries.
I mean, I know a lot of politicians do this.
They can compare what you get for a million bucks, or I don't even think you can buy something for a quarter million bucks in Toronto.
It would be like a shoebox.
So is it true that this building, if it's for sale for a million dollars, that half of that is taxes and lawyers and red tape?
It's so staggering.
I have to confirm it before I believe it.
But if we take Pierre Polyev's answer at face value, if you can remove that cost from it, it is true that the price would come down for the buyer, but there would be enough there for the seller to do well.
But I think that only happens go forward.
If you're a senior today and your house is worth a million dollars today, removing taxes and red tape on the construction of your home is not going to help you now because that happened years ago.
I think the only answer is to have a slow deflation in housing prices, slow enough that you're not massacring seniors and their only nest egg, but fast enough that young people can actually find some hope.
And if I had to choose between those two, I would choose the young people.
The whole point of society is to provide for children, to have children have a better life than their generation before them.
And I fear that our generation may be the first where that's no longer true.
Every generation had more hope for the future, that their kids would be wealthier, better educated, happier.
And that really was the case for generations.
I mean, if you look at a typical house, the size of a house that was built in the 30s or 40s compared to the size of a house built in the 60s and 70s, there's no comparison.
Our wealth has shot up.
But I think that it's stagnated.
And as we've mentioned on our show before, we're actually in a recession on an individual basis.
I don't know.
I found today's press conference not as powerful because I think a lot of the ideas were introduced by Polyeb before.
The striking thing I heard was Polyev's assertion that half of the price of each of these, like hundreds of thousands of dollars, is taxes and red tape.
Could be.
I don't know if his answer is enough, though, because I don't know how a senior can sell their home today and still get ahead if the price is going down.
And it's got to go down for young people to get in.
I think the changes he's talking about will take years to take effect.
And they're not all at the federal level.
A lot of the levers he wants to pull are at the municipal level.
I think the only way to solve this problem is what an economist would say: supply and demand.
If you really want housing to become more affordable, don't bring in 2 million strangers to your country, even if they're staying seven to a house on mattresses.
It's going to make everything more expensive.
Are you concerned that the consensus in Canada on immigration is slipping?
And what would you do?
What will you do as a position leader to address this issue?
Thank you.
Very good question.
It is really sad what has happened to the immigration system over the last decade.
Before this Liberal government, there was a consensus.
Canadians welcomed immigrants in generous numbers, but in numbers that we could absorb.
We had enough housing, health care, and jobs for people who came in.
Everyone integrated well, lived in beautiful neighborhoods side by side, all different faces from different places and races getting along in harmony.
It's incredible to think we had the system of immigration that was the envy of the world.
Literally, other countries from all around the world said, how did Canada do it?
10 years of Liberal government, the rest of the world is looking at us and saying, how did the Liberals screw this up so badly?
They've been adding people three times faster than homes and jobs, which has created shortages.
They brought in too many too fast.
They've allowed massive abuses of the international student, temporary foreign worker, and asylum claim system with rampant fraud that happened right under their nose.
And as a result, our youth can't find jobs in their homes.
And so it is very sad that the Liberals have been able to destroy the system so badly in such a short time.
Mark Carney promised to be different.
Instead, he's worse.
He's kept Justin Trudeau's immigration numbers.
He's allowing corporations to bring in a record number of temporary foreign workers this year at a time when youth employment numbers are their worst in three decades.
So while our young people can't find jobs, employers are able to exploit temporary foreign workers by giving them lower wages and terrible working conditions.
Let me be clear.
Immigrants are not to blame for this mess.
They simply followed the rules that the liberals created or the lack of rules.
They just want to have a better life.
And in many cases, they are the victims of a system that abuses and rips them off at the same time as destabilizing our housing, job market, and social services.
So the blame does not rest with immigrants or with the broader Canadian population.
It is 100% the result of reckless and irresponsible liberal decisions.
Our approach will be to end the temporary foreign worker program so that Canadian jobs go to Canadian workers, to bring the numbers down, bring in the right numbers and the right people to fill jobs we actually need to have filled for which there are no Canadians, to keep criminals out of this country by having stronger security standards at our borders, and always and everywhere to put Canada first in all of our immigration decisions.
Anyways, I was glad to be here, and I like the fact that I'm having a chance to put a question.
I'm trying to stay on topic.
There was a question by Canadian press about immigration and how the immigration consensus is being destroyed by the Liberals.
And I thought that was a good question.
But I thought I would focus on the issue of the day, which was home building.
Anyways, I'll keep you posted.
I appreciate coming to these press conferences.
And I also know that Mark Carney refuses to allow conservative-leaning or independent journalists at his press conferences, despite making a promise to that effect to our alumnus, Kian Bexte, who's with Juneau News.
You might recall at the leaders' debate, Becksty asked a question, or him or another person from Juneau News, I can't remember, asked Mark Carney about the independent press.
And do you remember Mark Carney said, oh, you can come to my next press conference.
Remember that?
Your entire campaign does seem to be predicated on putting you in the front and hiding the people that stood in lockstep with Justin Trudeau for the last 10 years.
You're kind of hoping that Canadians won't connect the dots that the people standing behind you in your caucus walked in lockstep with him.
Regardless of what you say right now, Stephen Gobo made the carbon taxes life work.
The man that moved Paul Bernardo from a maximum security prison is now your chief of staff.
I'm wondering how you reconcile this and how you can trust their judgment when they thought those ideas were good ideas.
I'd say a couple of things to that rather odd question.
First is that the candidates in this election for the Liberal Party, I mean, you go and see when I make an announcement.
I don't think I've seen you at any of them, but next time come.
You know, spoiler alert, that was a lie.
Mark Carney does not allow independent journalists to attend.
We can only ask him questions like Hallie's comment once every four years when we get into those leaders' debates.
I get the feeling, though, they'll find a way to block us before the next time.
For Rebel News in Brampton, Ontario, I'm Answer LeBance.
Well, what do you think?
I have other questions I want to put to Pierre Pollier, but I want to stay generally on the themes that he's talking about because I want him to go to me every time.
I should tell you, at some of these press conferences, he declines to take questions from some of the regime media.
And I have a secret delight.
Not that I want other journalists to be cut off, but it's nice for Rebel News to get some questions in.
I say again, I'm not going easy on the fella.
I just want to have my own spin, my own take on questions.
And I think I did that today.
You can let me know what you think.
All right, enough from me.
First Job Excitement Lost00:10:15
Up next, an interview with the food professor.
Well, I learned so much from Twitter, or as it's now known, X. All of a sudden, I've access to experts all around the world.
Now, part of the job is knowing who is a real expert and who is not a real expert, but I believe that our next guest truly is an expert in the matter of food and the economics of food and the security of food and the politics of food, which is much bigger than you might think.
His name is Professor Sylvain Charlebois.
He is a professor at Dalhousie, and he is also a visiting scholar at McGill University.
He joins us now via Zoom.
Professor, welcome back.
It's great to see you again.
Thanks for taking the time.
Well, thank you for having me again.
You know, I think you're also a master of the format of Twitter, which requires you to be concise, which is not every professor has the skill to be concise.
So I congratulate you for that.
I'd like to draw our viewers' attention to a tweet you made the other day on September 6th, where you compared unemployment rates in the G7.
And it was a very simple tweet, but it was quite dramatic.
You ranked unemployment rates in the G7, starting with Japan, with an unbelievable 2.3% unemployment.
Like that's as close to full employment as you could possibly get, I would think.
The U.S. is pretty low at 4.3%.
UK is around that.
But Canada is 7.1% and headed in the wrong direction.
Only France at 7.5% has a higher unemployment rate.
And that may be an outdated statistic because I noticed that it was the second quarter of 2025.
How is it that Canada, with all our resources and all our markets, and even though we're in a trade battle with the states, we still have an excellent access there?
How is it that we have 7.1% unemployment, almost the highest in the G7?
Yeah, that's a good question.
So first of all, of course, I had fun with these numbers because it's hard to compare countries.
And as you know, each country will have a different way of measuring unemployment.
So you have to look at trends.
But I thought it was really a telling picture showing exactly where Canada is heading.
And of course, the other part that you may have missed after posting the first one, I did post a second tweet saying that of all the G7 countries, it is our rate that has gone up the most in the last 12 months.
And that's significant.
It means that really our economy is going in the wrong direction, especially youth employment, of course.
And frankly, I mean, we've had several years of just bad management in Ottawa.
The focus was very much on other things than the economy.
Of course, I don't think the Liberals would argue that.
And of course, a lot of liberals did react to my tweet because I think it was viewed by almost 200,000, maybe more than 200,000 people.
So when it reaches that threshold, typically liberals will react, will post a community note of some sort to basically downgrade the message.
But the message was pretty clear.
Our economy is struggling deeply.
And I think we fail.
Many people are failing to see any really strong solution for our economy moving forward.
You point out youth unemployment, and those jobs aren't just important financially.
I think back to my first real job besides mowing lawns.
It was a job at the local amusement park.
I still remember I'm old enough, the minimum wage was $4.35.
It wasn't the money that made that job so useful to me.
It was learning how to work, show up on time 15 minutes early, show up with a clean uniform.
How do you handle a boss?
How do you handle a customer that's rude?
Those are all lessons far more valuable than the $4.35 an hour.
And by the way, you can't get to a second job until you've had the first job.
And so it's like, if you can't get that first job, it's like the first rung on a ladder.
And so here's something I've heard a lot in the debate about temporary foreign workers, Professor.
I've heard, in fact, just the other day, we had an advocate from the Canadian Federation of Independent Business saying, no one wants those jobs.
No Canadians want those jobs.
No one wants the crummy jobs, the late night jobs.
And I thought, hang on, how do you say that?
Because when I was young, when you were young, actually young people were sort of excited about their first job.
And maybe they make friends.
I made friends because I was working with other 14, I was 14.
I was working with other 14-year-olds.
It was sort of exciting and nerve-wracking.
I want to talk about your essay about temporary foreign workers in a minute because you make some interesting points about agriculture.
But for retail jobs, and this is where the CFIB advocate was really going to bat, she was saying no one wants to work the midnight shift at the McDonald's drive-through in Canada.
And I just don't think that's right.
I don't think she's accurate.
What do you think?
Are Canadians too snobby to take those jobs?
Or is it just that there's this underclass of indentured workers who are undercutting Canadians?
What's your view?
Where do you stand on that one?
No, absolutely.
I mean, again, a lot of people were mentioning, well, you're the food professor.
Why would you care about unemployment?
Well, if you're not employed, it's hard to feed yourself.
That's why it matters a lot.
And to your point about the industry, I mean, youth is a big deal.
Of course, you learn the basics of the labor force when you start at the age of 15, 16, 17.
And I do agree with you that context matters a whole lot.
Perhaps a decade ago, where things were really easy and our unemployment rate was very low, probably kids, young adults weren't all that interested in jobs working at midnight in a fast food restaurant.
But now the job market is very different.
The economy is very different.
And I can tell you that many of our university students have actually struggled to find jobs over the summer just because there's just no opportunities out there.
And you want those opportunities to be basically not only to learn how to have a boss, to learn how to show up on time, but you want a line on your resume to get to the next step and get experience.
And so right now we're seeing this small generation, this meany generation being robbed of some of these opportunities.
And by the way, a decade ago, 25% of Canadians, their first job was either in food service or hospitality.
Right.
25.
So one Canadian out of four, their first job was in the food industry.
But my guess now, 10 years later, that percentage has gone way down because there are few opportunities out there.
Right.
We'll talk more about that in a second.
I just want to quote a very shocking line from your essay in the National Post.
And I'll just read it.
You said, as of July 2025, youth unemployment, ages 15 to 24, sat at 14.6%, the highest level since 2010 outside the pandemic.
But then here's the part that actually really scared me.
And maybe, Professor, you could expand on this.
The youth employment rate.
And I think some of our viewers might need help to define that.
Not the unemployment rate, but the youth employment rate fell to 53.6%, the lowest since 1998 in non-pandemic years.
So that means 46.4% of young people are not even out there trying to get a job.
Unemployment, if I'm not, Professor, correct me if I'm wrong.
Those are people who are trying to find a job who can't.
That's right.
But the unemployment rate is basically, okay, who's even looking?
That's right.
Exactly.
So it's the whole, it's the whole market, basically.
And so it means that one out of two youth are working, basically.
So we have a lot of talent that may have actually given up on the market, basically, and standing on the sideline.
And then they're waiting for things to get better.
And they're staying at home, perhaps with their parents while we're actually going through this storm.
So that's, and that's really just awful for the economy.
You know, I hear a lot of anecdotes about people applying for a job and 200 other people applying for that job.
Now, I was talking, again, I'm referring to this debate.
Our lab, just two months ago, we had one RA position open.
We posted on LinkedIn, I received 334 applicants for a job that really was for 250 hours.
That's it.
It was a contract.
Yeah.
Can you imagine?
Yeah.
Now, I'm sure some of those were not serious applications, but I'm sure out of those 300 plus, there were probably, I don't know, probably 50 very serious contenders.
I mean, I don't know how LinkedIn works.
I think it's easy for people just to click apply, apply.
And actually, when you go on LinkedIn, you basically can program who can apply.
Oh.
So, of course, some of them are very good at going around some of these rules, but generally speaking, you're not wasting your time when you're reviewing a resume on LinkedIn.
So it was a lot of work.
And I was able to interview about six or seven people, and they were incredibly qualified.
Wow.
Wow.
Why We Bleed Jobs00:11:18
Okay.
Well, I've learned something from you.
Thank you for that.
Here's what I learned in my, I was debating the national policy director, the CFIB.
And I invited her on saying, look, I'm a skeptic of the temporary foreign workers.
And she's representing her clients, which are employers.
And obviously, it's in the employers' interest to have lower wages.
And she said something that hit me like a two by four.
She said, Ezra, just because you see a foreign national working at a retail shop, at a drive-thru, at a hospitality industry, doesn't mean they're a temporary foreign worker.
In fact, she said, they could well be an international student because they're allowed to work, I think it's 24 hours a week, which is like such a half time.
So she said, don't blame the temporary foreign workers program when I think there's actually more foreign students working than TFWs.
And I have a lot to learn, but that doesn't make me feel any better, by the way.
Make me feel worse.
But it's true.
It's true.
And of course, I'm of the mind that international students should earn, should be able to earn.
Because before many years ago, international students were only allowed to work on campus.
That changed a few years ago.
They're allowed now to work off campus.
And I'll be honest with you, I did see a lot of internationalists that were incredibly poor and couldn't feed themselves because they were sent overseas by their parents and they were too proud to ask for money.
And so that's the reality for students.
So I think it's actually a good thing.
And of course, you want them to stay in Canada.
And so universities and colleges are great, great agencies to recruit talent from abroad.
And what we saw before the change in policy were students coming in, they got their degrees and then they left.
And now we're seeing more international students staying in Canada.
Now, the problem with the program is that if they're working for Tim Hortons and Burger King, you want them to actually carry on and work in other jobs, qualifying jobs or better qualifying jobs, but it's not necessarily always happening.
That's a big problem there.
Well, I know that some international students, especially in the past, traditionally, they've been the best and the brightest of their home countries.
In fact, sometimes people criticize it when the Harvards and the Yales and the University of Toronto's and the McGills skim the cream off these third world countries and take away the top talent.
Sometimes people have said, hey, you're taking our best and brightest away.
We need that person in Rwanda or Uganda to help build up.
But I don't know if that's the case anymore.
I think there's so many foreign international students, they're not all cream of the crop.
And so many of these so-called diploma bills have popped up that are basically, I think, shell companies for immigration consultants where you pay tuition, but there's really no school, there's no physical school.
It's not like someone's coming to McGill and sitting in your class like a scholar.
I think it's a bit of an immigration trick.
And that's they're working at Tim Hortons because that's their skill level.
These are not budding doctors, engineers, accountants, scientists.
They're people who spent 20 grand on a college to get their footprint into Canada.
It's sort of an immigration trick.
Am I being too harsh, Professor?
No, no.
I think your portrayal of these diploma mills, as they are known, is accurate.
Now, my concern about Canada with the change in policy around international students in the last few years, there's been a lot of changes and frankly, some inconsistencies with the Liberal government.
If you talk to recruiters abroad, their job is to actually recruit the best, the cream of the crop internationally to get them into our schools in Canada because of the liberals' approach to international students.
You know, a few years ago, and I did travel internationally to develop new partnerships with schools in China, in Thailand, in Europe, in the United States, in Brazil.
I was just in Brazil in June.
And Canada used to have a very good name.
Students wanted to come to Canada.
So we were basically at the top of the list of countries that, well, students wanted to go.
They aspired to go to Canada.
Not anymore, because of the inconsistencies that we saw coming from Ottawa.
And now Canada would say, is barely in the top 10, maybe below the top 10.
And other countries are now being preferred.
And that's going to make things, this is going to last for years and years and years.
So to recruit good, talented students, international students, it's going to become more and more difficult for colleges and universities in Canada.
You know what?
Be interesting to see what happens because I think something's going to break.
The numbers are so high, and we've had unemployment increasing a few months in a row.
I feel like the system's understanding.
It's been quick.
It's been quick.
Oh, yeah, very quick.
And I'm not sure if people understand what's happening right now.
I do feel that a lot of Canadians are in denial.
They're saying, well, eventually the U.S. will suffer.
Canada will come back.
Well, let's face it, we still have a highly integrated economy.
And right now, when you look at numbers coming out of the U.S., they're much stronger than in Canada.
The economic foundations in the U.S. are much, much stronger than in Canada.
And that's why we're bleeding jobs right now.
And I don't think it's going to stop, unfortunately.
Well, it's very difficult.
And that's why the Bank of Canada is thinking of reducing its benchmark rate now.
And we weren't hearing that just a few months ago.
Isn't that interesting?
Now, you do, I'll say a word for Mark Carney.
Your essay is entitled On Food Security: Liberals' Temp Foreign Worker Plan is Better.
The Liberal Plan, led by Mark Carney, opts for reform rather than elimination.
And of course, you're coming from the food perspective.
Let me tell you my anecdote that I told the CFIB.
When I was growing up in Calgary, there was a Saskatoon farm in South of Calgary where it was really a family, but once a year, they had to pick all these Saskatoon berries extremely quickly, just for a set period of time.
And they just didn't have the manpower.
So they would bring in a team of Mexican workers that they knew.
And this owner spoke Spanish and they had brought the same.
And it really made sense to me because it was only for a period of time.
Let's call it a month.
I don't know.
And it was a burst like he needed to quintuple his workforce just for a month, though.
And that didn't seem unfair.
That didn't seem like he was taking advantage of either Canadians or Mexicans.
And I compare that to where I see foreign workers now.
And I'll just say Tim Hortons again because it's, I think, the experience most people know.
That's not a specialty job.
That's not a quick season that's over.
That's not in a rural setting where maybe it's hard to find young people because they're all working on their family farms.
That's right.
I think that if you, and by the way, you need some certain skills and physical strength to work in a farm that I don't think you need to work at Tim Hortons.
Tim Hortons is the ultimate entry-level job for a teenager in any city.
And that's what I think people start to feel like things have really moved away from their original purpose.
Talk to me a little bit more about your thinking because obviously you want to preserve the farm aspect, the food aspect here at the farm level.
Take it away.
Tell me your thesis.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
And so the reality of farming really gets farmers to hire international workers.
I think both parties, both the conservatives and liberals, actually recognize that.
I would say that when it comes to articulture, Guatemalans and Mexicans are very good with their hands.
They're known to be very gentle.
And you want gentle but quick, efficient hands to get to strawberries, blueberries, and things like that because you want a marketable product.
They just have that gene, basically.
And so when you hire Mexicans or Guatemalans, you not only get efficient workers, but you get good workers able to really protect the product and make it marketable and sellable.
So that's certainly something that is recognized.
And of course, there are foreign workers working in dairy, poultry, and that's, I think that's a necessity.
I don't think that's going to change.
And both parties have actually decided to do that.
The concern that I have with the conservatives' approach with Mr. Polyev is that his change would be too drastic right now because we do have many sectors.
And I agree with you.
Do we want international workers at Timor's?
Probably not.
But the reality is that we do now, and we have a system dependent on that right now.
If you basically cancel the program, you would probably see a lot of family businesses close because they depend on these workers and low wages.
Because it's like Errol.
We've actually got them addicted to low wages.
And if we want more Canadians, people here working in those jobs, you're going to have to raise salaries.
And that's not necessarily a bad thing.
It's just you need a natural progression to get to a certain place to make these jobs more attractive to a broader audience.
You know, I'm open to, you know, I can imagine there would be lots of adjustments by companies, but I think one of the reasons that so many restaurants, for example, have them is because all their competitors do.
So it's sort of an office race.
So if you took away that and it's hard to blame them.
It's hard to blame them.
But if you're not doing it, then the reverse is true.
If they're all having to hire local, maybe you're paying 25 cents a cup more for coffee, but you know, the local lad is getting a job.
I mean, and by the way, I was at Costco the other day and I went there really because I had heard that Costco does not hire temporary foreign workers.
And you could sort of tell.
I went with my wife and she recognized.
She said, oh, he's always here and he's always here.
Like they really managed to hang on to their staff.
I'm not praising that company in particular.
I'm just saying it's a very successful company.
You would think they would use temporary foreign workers, but they don't.
They're making a go of it.
And they're fiercely loyal staff.
I think it's possible.
I mean, listen, I'm not running grocery stores.
I'm not running restaurants.
But I think that the pendulum has swung too far.
Fierce Loyalty Rally Scheduled00:02:33
Professor, last word to you.
How's this going to end?
You've got Pierre Polyev and the Conservatives going very hard line on this, which is interesting because they didn't talk about it during the election.
And you've got Mark Carney saying, whoa, don't get too carried away.
How's this going to end?
If I am to pick a winner here, my guess is that the liberals will prevail with the support of the bloc.
And I think that's how it's going to last.
I think Mr. Polyev actually did what he did because he wanted to send a clear message about the policy.
It's bad policy right now.
It needed change many years ago.
At least now we have Parliament talking about it, which is a positive.
And we're basically talking about it because of the conservatives.
But I do think that the liberal formula presented by the Liberals will prevail.
Very interesting.
Well, we'll keep our eye on it.
Professor, it's great to catch up with you.
Always interesting.
I love following you on Twitter.
Folks, if you don't already follow him, may I invite you to follow Food Professor?
That's his Twitter handle, or X, as it's now called, Food Professor, Professor Sylvain Charlevoix, the visiting scholar at McGill.
Great to see you.
Thanks for your time.
Take care.
All right.
Bye-bye.
Stay with us.
More ahead.
Well, that's our show for the day.
You know, we are going to the United Kingdom.
Tommy Robinson has a huge rally scheduled for this Saturday.
And as you may know, we've turned it into sort of a free speech mission.
We're bringing a few dozen Tommy fans, Freedom fans, Anglophiles with us for a few days of conferences and speeches.
And of course, we'll be there at the big rally on Saturday ourselves.
I'll be giving a speech, as will our friend Avi Yamini from Down Under.
So that's where I'll be.
But we've got some great TV for you lined up.
I've got a special show tomorrow about the UK.
And while I'm actually in the UK later on this week, we'll have reports from the UK as well.
As, of course, David Menzies and Sheila Gunreed holding the fort up here.
We're going to have lots of news for you.
Oh my gosh, it's going to be a huge rally.
You might remember that Efron and I went down to Sao Paulo for a 200,000-person free speech rally about a year ago when their socialist government was censoring Twitter.
This rally in the UK could be 200,000 people also.