The Ben Mulroney Show - Another terrible day in harm reduction news for Canadian cities

Episode Date: March 3, 2026

GUEST:  Tina Olivero /   Founder of National Non-Profit and Charity Guardians Of Recovery 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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until the international soccer tournament known as the FIFA World Cup kicks off. And a big, big fanfare, big public event happening in Toronto to celebrate that. Still a lot of work that has to be done in this city

to get ready. And I'm kind of excited about that. Now, the person who was mayor at the time when it was announced that we would be participating in, in this huge global event was John Tory. And it is now being reported that John Tory will not seek the election for mayor. And in his own words, he said that I feel I cannot put my family and the people I care about

through the inevitable attacks on me and my personal life that we've started to see before I've even announced my intentions. He's a good man. He was a good mayor. He made some mistakes. but who doesn't? You put enough miles on your political career and you're bound to make a decision that you don't get the bounces you wanted.

And I have a lot of time for Mr. Tori. I have a lot of respect for him. And I didn't know about these attacks on his family. And if that's what he was seeing, it's disappointing that that would be the reason that he wouldn't run because people deserve, better than that. And so we'll be drilling down a little more into that later. But that man has

my eternal respect. He's been a good friend to myself and as well as to my family. And he's been somebody I have reached out to for advice and he's always been there for me. And to him, tip of the hat to John Torrey. And we'll revisit that with your calls at the bottom of the hour. but first, here's something that John Tori wrote about the drug crisis in this city. We need a safe city where regardless of statistics, people actually feel safe, a city where open-air drug use on our streets and encampments in our parks are not normalized and just accepted. Now, here are some stories that caught our attention about how homelessness and addiction issues are worsening. I do not care what people say about following the science.

or pointing to a data point that lets them feel good about helping unleash this scourge on our city. And let me be very clear. When I say scourge, I'm not talking about homeless people and I'm not talking about people with drug addiction. They are not the scourge. The scourge is the conditions that have forced them to be in the situation that they are in. Let's look at Ottawa, for example. Student Transportation Authority in that city is expanding busing for about 60 students, at five downtown schools after declaring that certain walking routes are community hazard zones.

Walking home from school is so bad that they are putting people in buses to insure their safety. In Toronto, overdoses have increased. Toronto saw 350 non-fatal opioid overdoses in 2026. That's a 47% increase from last year. don't tell me things are getting better. I won't believe you. And the drugs are getting worse, and they're easier to get.

There's apparently this new synthetic opioid that's 43 times stronger than fentanyl. Yes, and you know what? I could keep going on this, but rather than do that, let's invite into the conversation, Tina O'Leverro. She's the founder of national nonprofit

and charity called Guardians of, a charity called Guardians of Recovery. Tina, welcome to the show. Hi, Ben. Thank you so much for having me. It's an important topic. It is. And before we start, just let me say, you're doing great work, but I know it was born

of sadness and tragedy as you lost your son to fentanyl two and a half years ago. I'm sorry for your loss. But thankful that you have turned that into being such a force for, you know, sober. sober choices and and looking at the problems in front of us with clear eyes. Thank you so much. My son, his name was Ben, so I have a great affinity for your name. And I also knew your dad as well. He was a wonderful human being.

Yes, he was. Yeah, I think when my son, Ben passed away, I decided that every loophole that he fell through, which led to his death, I was going to fix. And that was a huge undertaking, but I was led by, I think, just something much bigger than myself, this crisis. It was, I just could not look away from it and in good conscience. So, yeah, we've been working day and night 24-7 to help people who are in addiction

and also their families, the families of addicted loved ones are decimated as well. Tina, I was speaking with Michelle Ferreira, former MP, last week about drug addiction. And she said in this country, what we've done is we've created a pathway of addiction where there are plenty of on-ramps, plenty of ways to get addicted, very few off-ramps. We were promised off-ramps.

We were promised that those who were in the throes of addiction would have the mental health supports and the funding required for them to detox, get off drugs, and slowly but surely move their way back into being productive and healthy members of society. And we have broken that promise to those people. Well, it's not rocket science. It's pretty simple. It's early diagnostics, detox, rehab, long-term, sober living, homes in a linear path.

But instead, we have Canada is a sick care system. So we're managing symptoms. We're managing sickness. And we're actually keeping people in sickness. Like imagine someone who is drowning in a river. And we just, you know, instead of pulling them out, we're sending them a snorkel. Yeah. Well, Canada is drowning.

And we're providing people with snorting pipes and crack pipes and clean needles. And we're justifying that and saying that this sick care is health care. It's not health care because people are not healthy. This is crisis management, sick care management. And the thing that really, you know, hurts us is that people say that's enough. Sick care is enough. We're doing grace. It's like a bunch of first responders, you know, on the bank saying to the drowning guy,

you know, here's your lifesaver. Hope you do well. Meanwhile, he drowns. And, you know, the fact that we think that harm reduction is a solution is insanity. And there has to be an underlying reason because no matter what happens in business, economy, if things don't change at the level that they haven't changed, over 53,000 people have died. Canada is a graveyard of a... overdose deaths. If things don't change at that level, people are keeping it that way.

Well, we're going to take a quick break, Tina. But when we come back, I want to double back on some of these stories and get your take. Because if we stay on this path, and this path includes drugs that are easier to get, and they are so much stronger that in some cases they require eight doses of naloxone, I don't know what we do as a country. So we're going to be discussing that and more with our guests when we come back right here on the Ben Mulroney show. One man's opinion, if you hear somebody who works for this city or somebody who works in public health tell you that everything's fine, they are a liar. The state of our streets as it relates to homelessness, the mental health crisis, and the drug crisis is there's a reason we're using the word crisis because we are at crisis levels. and I don't care if a data point tells you that things are better, they are not better, things are getting worse.

And here to discuss that, still in conversation with us, we're joined by the founder of Guardians of Recovery. The website is guardiansofrecovery. The website is guardiansof recovery.com. Thank you so much for sticking around, Tina. Yes, Ben, happy to talk about this subject. It's just decimating our country. We have to do something about it. Well, if you don't mind, Tina, I'd love to just talk about your personal.

story a little bit because I think I think parents would love to know you know what should they be paying attention to what signs that maybe you wish you would known about you know three years ago yeah what what is what is specific to to a child who all of a sudden just runs a foul of of drugs for ben Ben had cannabis use disorder and as we know cannabis now is so much stronger five times stronger than it used to be it's also synthetically genetically modified and so we have fought four times for psychosis as a direct result we have a lot of people um getting addicted to weed and how old was he at that time when he when he started smoking marijuana you 15 15 the the teenager's brain is not nearly fully formed which means the the impact can be even more

significant and long lasting exactly and if you have a predisposition for bipolar schizophrenia, which we do in our family genetically, that we just unlocks mental illness and it's immediate. And that is happening to, you know, five, six, one in five, one and six kids out there right now. So that number is massive when you think about that. And when that happens, the frontal cortex of the brain is hijacked. So cause and effect disappears.

Risky behavior exemplified. Ben went from weed to shatter to shatter to coke, coked, cracks. Wait, what's shatter? Oh, shatter is the synthetic marijuana, right? Yeah. And so, you know, what the brain will always seek to get the next highest thing because it adjust quickly. So if you're smoking weed on a regular basis, next thing you're going to go to Shatter.

Next thing, it's going to go to Coke, from Coke to Crack. And this is why we keep, you know, coming up with new and stronger strains. Like right now, strains of the drugs that are out there like the Nidazine family and Trank, these are so strong that if you haven't built up a tolerance, one dose and you're a goner. Yeah. So, and that's what's happening. And they're mixing nitazines and trank into pills. Yeah.

They press them. They look like Xanax. They look like dilated. And our kids are taking them. We've just lost two 14-year-olds and a 17-year-old recently. I mean, these are very young kids. And I talk to two, three parents a day. So I'm always working with the parents on what the kids are taking and what's happening.

They're ordering them off the internet. Well, Tina, that's what I want to ask you about. The National Post, the National Post has a series of opinion pieces over the next few days about what we've lost as a country over the past 10 or 15 years. And I don't know if it was today or yesterday, but they had a piece on, one thing that we've lost is stigma. And they say, you know, like there are absolutely negative things about stigma. You want to take the stigma off of talking about the issues of mental health. but we have completely normalized drug use that for us, listen, there's a certain type of person,

they're never going to touch the stuff ever. It doesn't matter if it's normalized or not. But there is the type of person for whom a stigma and the shame of what could happen is what keeps them off of it in the first place. And I wonder what you think about that. Well, addiction thrives in the dark, right? a lot of this anonymity that we've had in the past has really allowed addiction to grow. But then we got into the era where alcohol consumption went down and drugs were normalized. And that's the era that we're currently in.

And if you think way back when cigarettes came in, cigarettes were the, it was the coolest thing. You could do it in your office. You could smoke out of an airplane. Well, that's where we are with drugs right now. We haven't gotten to the point where in society, historically, we see just how damaging it is. We're watching it happen on the streets. We're watching people overdose,

but it hasn't hit us at the level where we're willing to make that change and to change our societal cultural discourse as a result. So based on that, how do we manage ourselves in the midst of a crisis? I mean, when you think about 53,000 people who have died from this, Canada is a graveyard, But we've normalized it. Why? Why have we done that? Well, I remember there was a ruling maybe a year ago that said that you couldn't move drug addicts out of a park if it's because it would violate their charter rights.

And when I see learned judges so disconnected from the reality of the people that they are supposedly in service of, that's when I think that we're, we've lost the plot to a to a lethal level. There's something very, very wrong with the fact that people are looking away from this. Like, who do you have to be to turn away and look away from this? Whether it's a judge, whether, like right now, we're giving harm reduction supplies to people in jail. That in itself. Well, I learned that last week, Tina. I learned last week that there are entire wings of jails where people are consuming.

I mean, it's an open-air drug bazaar. I thought when you go to jail, there's no booze, there's increasingly no cigarettes, and there's no drugs. And now I'm being told, absolutely, this makes no sense to me. So how do you, how do you rehabilitate? But here's the thing. These instructions are coming from our top doctors in Canada. So you have to look there first. What's happening?

Who's making those decisions at those, the level of our top doctors? doctors and why are we following through on that. Someone, someone has to put their foot down here. Let the leaders, our political leaders, have to look at this and say, this is insanity. We are investing. I don't want my tax dollars to pay for sick care. I want my tax dollars to pay for health care recovery. That was what was supposed to happen.

If this is cancer, we're not going to give a cancer patient fentanyl and say good luck to you. We're going to say, here's your diagnostics, here's your treatment, here's your recovery, and we're going to ring a bell once you get better. Yeah. That's not what we're doing here. Why? Because people are getting paid off. Who's getting paid off?

That's the question. You know what? You're echoing again what the conversation I had with Michelle Ferreira, which she said, follow the money. If you want to know why we are where we are, follow the money. And I want to issue a correction that Shatter is not a synthetic drug. It's a highly concentrated form of natural. natural marijuana.

And it's solid and brittle and often looks like honey or glass. My guess is that's where the name comes from. Yeah, and it's stronger. Tina, thank you for being here. Thank you for sharing your story. And I do hope you come back. This is a conversation that we have a lot on the Ben Mulroney show. And I think people would really appreciate the position that you come from,

the insights that you've gleaned from the tragedy that you've experienced. And I'll remind people, Guardians of Recovery. dot foundation is the website. Tino Levero, thank you so very much and all the best to you. Yes, to you as well.

Bye bye. Bye bye. Oh, I mean, you know, it's wonderful to hear that somebody can do that when they have tragedy. They don't recoil and live in a whole.

But instead, they try to turn that tragedy into something positive. But it feels, Mike, that she is screaming into a hurricane. I think we all are. I think we all are, and a lot of our listeners are as well.

The text we get, the messages we get from people saying, you know, you always say, help me understand and make this make sense. Make this make this make sense. And it really just doesn't. No, no. And simply saying I follow the science, as I saw Chris Moyes do, counselor Chris Moyes, well, I follow the science. And then somebody opened the windows of that community meeting they were having to show a tent city outside the wind

where there was no doubt open-air drug use with impunity. And like I said, if you believe Michelle Ferreira, there are a lot of on-ramps onto drug addiction, but we have not created the off-ramps, then there's only one destination, and it's death. It's certain death. And the people in this city deserve so much more. We always say, you know, you can tell a lot about a city

by how you treat those who need the most help. These are the people who need the most help. throwing drugs at them is the opposite of compassion. And I guess I think this one, the one story just to come back to it, the last thing I want to say here is that in Ottawa, where the fact that they are kids walking to school, they're actually saying in some of these neighborhoods that they're community danger zones, hazard zones,

that they're putting them on buses now because it's no longer safe. Yeah. So that's the state of play today. We can fix it. That's what elections are for. but it's about knowing who your candidates are, asking them the questions that are important to you and making a decision based on their answers

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