Mass immigration in Canada has been a contentious topic since 2022, when Justin Trudeau opened the gates to a surge of new arrivals in as the COVID-19 pandemic winded down.

Usually, the attention on the issue is focused on the country's biggest cities: Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal and Calgary to name a few. However, overlooked in this is the Prairie province of Saskatchewan, which has seen its own surge in growth.

On this week's episode of The Gunn Show, Sheila Gunn Reid was joined by a pair of guests — Lise Merle, a Rebel Roundup cohost, and Michael Couros, a political strategist — who both call Saskatchewan home.

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“Healthcare, agriculture and skilled trades will continue to get priority processing as the province tries to address labour shortages in critical sectors,” read a CBC report on the issue the group discussed. “Up to 25 per cent of the new nominations will go toward jobs in trucking, accommodations, food services and retail trade.”

Given growing concerns over trucking in other provinces, Michael said this “really concerned” him due to the stories detailing how “training schools are one day training schools,” leading to “increasingly dangerous” conditions on Canadian roads.

“Nobody knows this more than Saskatchewan, specifically the town of Humboldt,” added Lise, recalling the killing of 16 players and staff with the Humboldt Broncos junior hockey team by an Indian migrant, Jaskirat Singh Sidhu.

“Our schools are absolutely stuffed with kids, we're talking 60 kids in a classroom,” Lise continued. “Our critical health-care infrastructure is bowing under the pressure, because all of the people that come to Canada on a temporary foreign worker visa get access to our health care.”

Immigration, she said, needed to be completely re-evaluated.

“The reason why the Liberals are doing this,” Michael said, was linked to GDP. “If you took the immigration out and compare the GDP numbers to the population that would be here, we would be in such negative territory it would be devastating to the economy.”

Mass importing consumers masks this problem, he said. 

“If they stop immigration — because they've stopped oil and gas, they've stopped pipelines, they've stopped all these industries and ultimately they've tried to replace it with consumerism — we'd be in real trouble here.”