The Ben Mulroney Show - 274 Convictions, Now Released

Episode Date: October 16, 2026

On today's episode of "The Ben Mulroney Show," Ben welcomes Tristin Hopper, a reporter and columnist for the National Post. They discuss the recent release of prolific B.C. criminal, Aiden Tye, whose crime spree includes a brick attack on a pregnant mother. A provincial court judge once noted that it was “highly likely after being released Tye will commit further offences.” Twitter/X: @TristinHopper If you enjoyed the podcast, tell a friend! For more of the Ben Mulroney Show, subscribe to the podcast! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://link.chtbl.com/bms⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Also, on youtube -- ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@BenMulroneyShow⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow Ben on Twitter/X at https://x.com/BenMulroney Insta: ⁠⁠⁠@benmulroneyshow⁠⁠⁠ Twitter: ⁠⁠⁠@benmulroneyshow⁠⁠⁠ TikTok: ⁠⁠⁠@benmulroneyshow⁠⁠⁠   Executive Producer:  Mike Drolet Reach out to Mike with story ideas or tips at [e-mail] Enjoy   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Standard messaging and data rates may apply. During the last election campaign, I was in a room with Pierre Poliev as he made his pitch to get some votes. And he got my vote in the last election. That wasn't clearly enough. But he got mine. and one of the stories he told was how in almost every town in Canada, there is at least one super criminal, someone who's so good at crime that they do a crime,

they get arrested, they get back on the street in short order, and they rinse and repeat, and they do it over and over and over again. If we could find a way to keep those people in jail, that few number of people, the crime rates in most cities around Canada, would fall precipitously. Well, like he said,

That pitch fell on enough deaf ears that Pierre Poliav was not able to become prime minister. And it looks like the trend is continuing. And Tristan Hopper is a reporter and columnist for the National Post. And he's chronicling just that in a piece called the shockingly small number of men causing all the crime. Tristan, welcome. Thanks for having me. Yeah. So thanks for being here.

It's something that people probably struggle to wrap their heads around. But it is true. There are apex criminals in this country, and they are, they're doing most of the crime. Yeah, yeah. This was, this was motivated by the fact we do have an election happening here in B.C. And the D.C. conservative leader, Lauren Dirkson, he highlighted the case of Aden Tye, and this is Nanaimo's most prolific offenders. So this is, every time Aden Tye is released from prison, there's some new and more flamboyant crime from the last time. I mean, the last time was he chucked a brick at a pregnant woman in a freak out at a cafe.

Goes to prison for, you know, a couple hundred days, gets out, is immediately back to sitting in cafes. So, you know, every cafe in the Nanaimo area, which is slightly north of Victoria here on Vancouver Island, is freaked out because we'll come sit at the cafe, you know, demand to pay just 25 cents. Obviously, some pretty severe mental health issues going. And the last incident was flipped out, starts flipping over tables, starts crapping into his hands, smearing the feces on the windows, throwing patio furniture, everybody scared for their lives, you know, screaming racial episodes and was arrested and was just released again. And so at multiple of these hearings, you have judges saying, yeah, yeah, we know we're going to release Aiden Ty and let's get back to committing more crimes, but we can't keep them in jail forever. So, and if you search, actually, this is all I needed to do to write the story. You just search every BC community or every Canadian community. Just pick your favorite community, Cornwall, Cambridge, and just search most prolific offender.

And someone's going to turn up. And it'll be someone just like this. Goes to prison. 200 days is released at the sentencing hearing. They're saying, well, yeah, all he does is commit crime. That's all he's been doing since his 18th birthday. we'll release him. He's going to hurt someone else, but what are you going to do? Well, what are you going to do? Is there a solution in the offing?

I know that Pierre had his own ideas about jail, not bail, but we have a system and you touch on it in your column where for every day that you spend in pre-trial incarceration, you get like a day and a half's worth on the other side. So if you're in for a day while you awaited your trial, you get, it's the equivalent of had you spent a day and a half in prison afterwards. And if you accumulate enough of them, that could take care of your entire sentence. And you could be out. You could be found guilty. You could be sentenced to X amount of days.

But because you already spent a few days in prison, you could be out immediately. Yeah. I mean, and there are, this is one of those issues where, you know, Paulyab was also proposing three strikes in you're out. And I've heard, I live in Victoria, you know, pretty liberal place, pretty NDP place. And I've heard some pretty lefty people endorse something like that from first principles. Because you only need to own a hippie coffee shop for several months before you're deciding, hey, I can't run a viable business because there's like three guys who keep throwing crap at my customers,

you know, sometimes literally, if you're in a nominal. So, I mean, you can put something in like that. But there's also the simple fact, if you have a large section of the criminal justice system that just doesn't believe in the general principle that there is just a small coterie of people who can't exist in society under any circumstances. And what's interesting with a lot of these prolific offenders is you'll have members of their family coming to court and saying, can you please keep him in jail indefinitely? Because he comes out, like, you know, we've known there was something wrong with him. You know, we've tried our best with him, but he has to be kept in an institution.

And there is no way to do that. So you can put in sort of hard laws to change he's saying. but if you have prosecutors, defense attorneys, and judges who don't believe in those, I mean, they can find any number of ways to bypass it. So, I mean, you could be in a situation where you do put in a three strikes law and you still have judges who are just working around it and aren't imposing it. So there's sort of a deeper, deeper cultural thing that you have a lot of people in the criminal justice system who just don't believe with this idea, which is pretty common sense for the rest of us. But yeah, yeah, there's a very small proportion of men who all they know how to do is hurt people and they just can't be allowed in society. Yeah, and look, there's two types of people, right? They're those who are governed by, you know, mental health issues and those who are just bad seeds.

I'm sure there's a combination of the two, but more or less those are the two buckets. The ones with the mental health issues, that's a special case and that's going to require nuance. But the ones who are just bad seeds, one of two things is going to happen. They're either going to realize, oh, I've got two strikes. I better be on the straight and narrow because I don't want to go to prison forever, or they are going to do that third strike and they will be put away forever. In both cases, we are better off. And these progressives who see, you know, no one is beyond redemption.

They're also the same people that would say in a large enough data set, you're going to find racists and misogynists and rapists and colonialists. So they're willing to accept that there are some bad people who are doing the things, that they think are bad, but they are unwilling to believe that there is a certain type of person who will do the bad thing that we all think is bad. Yeah, which was interesting looking at these most prolific offenders, usually white guys. Well, at least the what I looked at, which I didn't actually expect. So I guess that the, obviously there's disproportionate number of indigenous criminals.

But when it comes to the super prolific offenders, there's a bunch of guys who looked like me, which I didn't expect. So let's find common cause with these progressives. Let's lean into their racism. Let's go. Let's go after Whitey. Let's go after Whitey. That's right.

This is, yeah, these are the simple. If we can't agree on the simple things because of ideology, then the problem isn't necessarily the laws. The problem is the people that we have been populated in the criminal justice system with. Yes. Yeah. It's just a general. And I think a lot of Canadians don't understand this.

That if you have someone who is dangerous, even if they've, you know, You have a heinous crime, and we recently had here in Victoria, two child murderers, people who have murdered children, sometimes random children, were given parole after about 20 years in prison. I don't think that people understand that there is no ability, with the exception of maybe Paul Bernardo, to keep anybody in jail longer than 20 years, even in the most heinous offenses. Like, it doesn't matter what you do, the criminal justice system in Canada is oriented towards getting you back onto the street as quickly as possible. Well, the only way that's going to get fixed is slowly and bit by bit, drip by drip, and your column is one of those drips. And I thank you for being here. And I thank you for highlighting that.

And I'm speaking with Lauren Dirkson in a little bit, so I'll put that question to him. Thank you very much, Tristan Hopper. Thank you, Mr. Mullard. Hi, it's Alan Cross. Here to announce two more legs of my national speaking tour. November will be busy with stops in Halifax, Sydney and Truro Nova Scotia. Then it's Waterloo, Hamilton, St. Catharines, London, Oshawa, and Kingston. In addition to the regular freewheeling audience Q&A,

I'm going to conduct a live performance of my podcast, uncharted crime and mayhem in the music industry. Music and the mob, it's something that we created just for this tour. Tickets at my website, a journal of Musicalthings.com, under the heading Speaking Gigs at the top. But hurry, because some dates are already sold out. Crime and Mayhem and the music industry on the road this fall. Hope to see you soon.