Sometimes, the internet is real life

Media roundup: A deep-dive on immigration with MRG, a feature on Toronto Today with Greg Brady, and a final word on the results of the B.C. Conservative leadership race.

In the political sphere, the arrival of June normally signals the beginning of a “summer slowdown.” And yet, with B.C. having just wrapped its Conservative leadership contest, a continued stream of events and speaking engagements, and with so many key failures across so many key files to continue to litigate, report on, and better communicate to the public, there’s still so much to do, and so little time.

Yesterday, I was pleased to sit down with Michelle Rempel Garner, Conservative Shadow Minister for Immigration, to dismantle the current failed state of Canada’s immigration and labour systems.

In this episode, we tackle some of my reporting on the truth about Tim Hortons’ claims to be suddenly interested in “hiring local,” as well as the continued systemic abuse of the Temporary Foreign Worker Programme (TFWP)—which has locked young Canadians out of entry-level jobs and depressed domestic wages.

The conversation also highlights the urgent need to send the millions on expired and expiring visas home, as well as the simple, common-sense fix the Liberals could choose to enact to expedite the departure of foreign criminal networks.

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I was also happy to join Greg Brady last week on this very topic, expanding on these supposed “10,000 local workers” and Tim Hortons’ questionable claims that they’re suddenly abandoning their temporary foreign worker model. Spoiler: They’re not, they’re merely rebranding it.

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And on the B.C. Conservative leadership election, I have nuanced thoughts, as an insider-y outsider who has watched many in his sphere recently beclown themselves, but who also understands the dynamics that drive frustrations with certain campaigns:

Alexander Brown: The fix was never in

On a Saturday in British Columbia, Twitter became real life. But was the story that was told any more real than the others?

Alexander Brown: The fix was never in

Spend enough time in this line of work and you learn to stop caring about mischaracterisations. Any idea, once you hit send, once you hit post, once it hits a newspaper or the airwaves, it no longer belongs to you; it’s someone else’s to spin, aggregate, and relitigate. The same can be said of a name or the names attached to one’s name.

In the case of the final stretch of the B.C. Conservative leadership race, which wrapped up on a sunny Saturday night at the Rocky Mountaineer in East Vancouver, something funny happened along a road that ultimately ended in a railyard’s event space: the Kerry-Lynne Findlay (KLF) campaign stormed forward from the middle of the pack, unbowed by eleventh-hour scandal, emboldened by a strong organising effort on Vancouver Island, the North, and in the Interior, and unabashed in amassing a veritable Twitter army of independent media, journalists, influencers, and sh*t-posters, many of whom were implying that the fix was in against the ‘grassroots’ of the party.

The win was earned on merit. The result is not in question. That unsanctioned—but not discouraged—communications Potemkin village, hastily assembled on supposed grassroots, leaves something to be desired.

Thank you for your continued support of the Acceptable Views Substack. Conferences and engagements look lighter this month—before a few of us from a Canadian contingent are lucky enough to fly out to ARC in London as guests to end the month—so I’m hoping to join you weekly in your inbox before wheels up.