The Ben Mulroney Show - Ben's back! Jays, Hallo-weenies, consumption site activists dirty tricks

Episode Date: October 29, 2025

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This podcast is brought to you by the National Payroll Institute, the leader for the payroll profession in Canada, setting the standard of professional excellence, delivering critical expertise, and providing resources that over 45,000 payroll professionals rely on. This podcast is brought to you by Wise, the app for international people using money around the globe. With Wise, you can send, spend, and receive up to 40 currencies with only a few simple taps. Plus, Wise won't add hidden fees to your transfer. Whether you're buying souvenirs with pesos and price, you're buying souvenirs with pesos and price. or sending euros to a loved one in Paris, you know you're getting a fair exchange rate with no extra markups. Be smart. Join the 15 million customers who choose Wise. Download the Wise app today or visit Wise.com. Tees and Cs apply. Welcome to the Ben Mulroney show. It is Wednesday, October 29. Thank you so much for spending a little bit of your day with us.

I wasn't in yesterday and I came in and the place wasn't burnt to the ground. Thank you very much, Brad Smith for sitting in. I believe he acquitted himself well. And I do appreciate him sitting in and entertaining the troops and communicating and keeping that conversation going with the people who choose to spend time with us here at the Ben Mulroney show. Who is the Ben Mulroney show? Well, there is the aforementioned host, Ben Mulroney. Of course, we have my intrepid producer, Mike Droulet, who's chosen a different position to sit at today.

Well, I've been told I had to sit over here because of our camera angles and stuff. And also because of the clock. You sit in the corner, sir. You sit in the corner. Well, it's because the glare of the lights bounces off of your dome and it's blinding. It's the glasses. It's because he refuses to lower his computer. Yeah.

I can't lower the computer. It's locked in. You can't see him on the camera. Yeah, yeah. We've got our... Can you imagine somebody who's normal height? There you go.

Oh, please. My God. Oh, I'm too tall. The world balance. Bends to my... The world's not built for us. Oh, yeah. World's not built for lefties.

And I am a left-handed person. I am too. Yes, exactly. That explains a lot. Yes. Our video producer, Amy Siegel is with us today. Hello there, Amy. Hi.

Yes, and Dave Spargal, our technical producer. How are you, sir? Getting through it. I'm sick, so I'm trying to get through it. I'm good. I'm good. Jay's won yesterday, so I'm feeling better. Yes, indeed.

You know, I choose, when people ask me, because sometimes people ask, how are you? And they really don't care. They're just trying, I'm genuinely asking. Thank you, thank you. Is it a head thing? Is it a throat thing? Is it a chest thing?

It's everything. It's an everything. It's an everything. Just me sick. Cute. Yeah. So why wasn't I here yesterday? Well, my dad, in the final years of his life,

wanted to leave something behind for the next generation of, of politically minded Canadians. And so he founded the Brian Mulroney Institute of Government at his alma mater, St. Francis Xavier University in Antiginna Nova Scotia. It is a non-partisan school. It is not trying to train the next right-wing politicians. It doesn't matter what you believe,

so long as you believe something, and they'll help you become the best version of that. And a lot goes into building one of these schools. You have to have, obviously, the building and the connection, all of it. But one of the things that they want to do as a way to keep the school interesting for all sorts of people and the community itself is they want it to be a place where big thinkers with big ideas will be attracted to spread those ideas. And one of the companies that my dad used to work with was Barrick Gold, one of the biggest mining companies in the world. It's because of his connection there that I got a job for summer and I worked in a gold mine.

I've told you that story. But anyway, so the barrack company is sponsoring an annual speaker series that launched yesterday. And yesterday was the speaker was the Nobel Prize winner for economics, James Robinson, who wrote the book, Why Nations Fail. And he came and gave a talk yesterday. They live streamed it. I'm pretty sure if you go to, if you Google Brian Mulroney Institute of Government and, and, uh, and, uh, Google James Robinson, I'm sure if you're of, if you're interested in it, you'll be able to hear, see his talk. But the thing is, to get to anti-condition Nova Scotia for the day. Not easy. It's not easy. And look, when I was growing up, my dad was in politics. We,

the government had a private plane. It was the challenger, right? And we would fly all over the place. And it was just par for the course. That's what you did. And I used some, always tell people, they say, oh, what was it like growing up with a dad in politics? So, well, when you don't have a point of reference, it's normal, right? It's just like your life, because to me, that, that was it. I do appreciate that it was different. I definitely do. But in terms of being a kid, it was just being a kid.

It was just being a kid in my environment, just as you were a kid in yours. And I do appreciate our listeners who chime in and they say, you know, thank you for highlighting the things that matter to us. The things that seem to matter to you, Ben, matter to us. And when you take umbrage with an issue, we feel like you're speaking for us. And that is never lost on me. That doesn't mean I still, I don't have outlier experiences that are just a little different. And so in order to get to Andy Ganesh yesterday and get back last night, we were privileged enough to fly on a corporate jet.

That's a special thing. That's a special thing. This is not part of my life. It is in any way, shape, or form. And so I wanted to express how I felt by using a quote from, I think, one of the great bards of all time. Ferris Bueller. Now, Ferris Bueller in this clip is referring to driving a Ferrari. Replace driving with flying on, and you have how I felt yesterday.

And I must be honest here, I love driving it. It is so choice. if you have the means I highly recommend picking one up Okay, I don't have the means I doubt I've driven a Ferrari before No, I've never been in a Ferrari Nor have I

No, I've never been in a Ferrari I've had the opportunity to test drive some kind of some cool cars I'm not a car guy Are you a car person? I'm not a car person But I am a private jet person You are a private jet person

No no but here's the thing Everyone is a private jet person Like if you can Of course you're going to try it. And it was lovely and the people were great. And it's very handy to do exactly what we did yesterday. It's special. It is.

I went on Beyonce's private jet. What? Whoa, whoa, whoa. Well, flag on the play. You went on Beyonce's private jet? I think it was her. I mean, I think it was her. She wasn't on it.

She was not on it. There was, my friend was in a commercial. They flew him private. He didn't want to fly by himself on a private jet. so he invited me. That might, yeah, that would be boring. Yeah. You want to, you want to flex in front of your friends a little bit.

For sure. And there's nothing wrong with that. There's nothing wrong with. But I want to thank those who flew us there. It was without, honestly, without that, I wouldn't have been able to go yesterday. And to be honest, like going to see my dad's, all of his, all the things that he gifted to the school. His entire career is there in his pictures.

I haven't seen in a long time. Are you going to speak? Am I going to speak at this thing? Yeah. This guy's a Nobel laureate. Oh, okay. Yeah, I want to see that. That's the barrier to entry.

Right. Fair. I think I won a free large fries at McDonald's a little while ago. That's the extent of the awards that I get. Okay. So, but anyway, it was really wonderful. It's really nice to see so much buy-in from so many other people who want to keep my dad's idea alive. And I think it's a wonderful.

Yeah. Hey, Dave Chappelle's on stage. go on right after him and tell some jokes. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Sorry, I didn't know. We do want to talk about the game a little bit yesterday. A couple of my takeaways.

No anthem controversy this time, and it wasn't seven hours long. So a plus plus. Oh, and there was the win, right? Yeah, that was very, very good. I haven't had a chance to chime in on the anthem issue. I think Greg Brady said it best. It's not your anthem, man. It's not your song.

write it. Nobody's there to hear your take on things. It's our song. It belongs to us. And you did a disservice to the country by being so cavalier with the lyrics for you to think that you could speak on behalf of every. And by the way, a lot of us would have fewer problems or at least less of a moral high ground if you'd actually hit the notes. Like that's, that's it. You come correct before you start messing with anything. And I actually highlighted this guy to you guys a while ago. Yeah, yeah. I sent you to tell him.

This guy's actually pretty significant because he was being so honest about how hard it was to be a recording artist that he had to cancel his tour. And then he got a lot of positive reaction to that, including from the Jonas Brothers who brought him up on stage when he was, when they were performing here. And I was like, I kind of like this guy's attitude. Yeah. I should have done a little more of a deep dive on his social media to see, ah, he's the, he, it's the thing about the, it's the self-righteous, man, the self-righteous feeling.

that certain rules don't apply to them because their mission is so pure and it's so important that they need to be able to break some eggs to make the omelet. Nobody asked you to make an omelet, man. They asked you to sing the freaking song. And in that moment,

if you didn't believe that the honor that was bestowed on you was greater than some perceived obligation you had to interpret history and I think you interpreted it wrong, then you're the wrong guy for the job, wrong guy for the job. But you also can't be that way. You can't act that way when you clearly need autotune.

Yeah, but that's my point. Yeah. Like, unless you're note perfect. Pretty obvious. And what's his background? Is he... He's a ginger. But is he first, is he for his nations? No. No, he said ginger. And we know what Mike Drolet thinks about gingers. Oh. Stuff that we can't say on the radio. No, they're fine. They're fine. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding.

Some of my best friends are gingers. Okay. We're going to, we're going to take a break. We didn't even get to the ratings, which are significant. Congratulations. I just love that the entire country has eaten this up. All right, when we come back, we're going to talk about Halloween and why in the city of Toronto. We just can't have nice things. Welcome back to the Ben Mulroney store. Ray Parker Jr., Ghostbusters.

I think I've been a little running show. told this story before, but Ray Parker Jr. was asked, for Ghostbusters, they wanted Huey Lewis to do the song, and he was too busy, so they went to Ray Parker Jr. and said, we want you to do the song, but we want it to sound like a Huey Lewis song,

because Huey Lewis was all the rage. And so he literally did exactly what they wanted and copied Huey Lewis to the point that Huey Lewis sued. Oh, really? Huey Lewis sued, and he was given the rights, he had to share I don't know what the split was, but

he got a big chunk of it, but it was under the condition that he would never talk about it. And then Huey Lewis was on a VH1 behind the music one day and talked about it and had to give all the money back. So he spoke to the news? Is that what you're saying? Hewis spoke to the news. The damn news. Anyway, yeah. And I never noticed the similarities to the song

because I was so caught up in the Ghostbusters of it and less about like the structure of the song. But structurally it's a Huey Lewis song. Anyway, so that sets the tone for Halloween. and there are a few stories out there that remind us why we can't have nice things. The TTC, TTC, oh yeah, Mr. Well, I don't like the sound of your voice. Gee whiz. Canceled its annual Halloween fest at Bay Lower Station. I'm not aware of Halloween fest with the TTC.

I've never looked to the TTC for Halloween guidance, but apparently it's a thing and has been a thing. Well, they've canceled it after determining that the event could not be held safely or inclusively this year for attendees and volunteers. And I cringed when I read that and said inclusively, I was like, what does that mean? Accessibility issues were the main reason, as the only entry is a narrow, steep staircase with no working escalators making the venue unsuitable for people with mobility needs. Now, Bay Lower Station is the abandoned subway station that, as some people say, is haunted. I took a tour years ago with some TTC executives. who were showing me the ins and outs

and what makes the TTC of the TTC and it's a really cool piece of Toronto history. It's specific to us. They've used it in all sorts of movies. It's cool as hell. This is exactly where a Halloween fest should be held.

And it has been held in the past. To suggest that it can't be there now is to suggest it every year, since prior to this year, we've been doing something wrong. We have been denying accessibility. We have been marginalizing people, excluding people.

That's nonsense. And again, to stop this event because certain people can't get in is, as I've said before, but what happened with the guy in the beer at the Rogers Center, where you're legislating to the lowest common denominator. Okay, let's find all the barriers to entry. and if we can't accommodate this one group, then we can't do it for any groups. And that's nonsense.

You can't accomplish things that way. However, I do have a solution if you want useless purpose-built subway stations or TTC stations that aren't in use and you want to make sure that everyone can access them. Well, then you can choose any or all of the cross-town LRT-Eglinton stations from one side to the other.

They are essentially abandoned. There's shrubbery growing everywhere, never been used, ghosts everywhere. They are terrifying, looking. They are terrifying, and they haven't been used, and they're all above ground. So use those. Use those.

Solution. See, I'm a solutions-oriented guy, and all these ideas, by the way, they're all up in the ether. I'm just grabbing at them. right? I'm grabbing at them as I see them and I'm handing them to the TTC. There you go. Solution for you there. Now, this one, this next story could have been an is it BS or is it real. A Burlington homeowner, Brock McEwen. And right there, Brock McEwen, sounds like a name, a Canadian name right out of central casting.

Brock McEwen, which I would have thought he's lying to me. He made that up. Brock McEwen was threatened with a fine of up to five grand after the city deemed his Halloween decorations a quote, nuisance under the local nuisance and noise control bylaw. The issue centered on bright or moving lights that allegedly disturbed neighbors, though McEwen said the display runs only two hours nightly and is carefully timed. Let's listen to a little bit of Brock McEwen talking about Halloween decorations. I was just very surprised because I try to be respectful with it. I have a timer that sets these things to turn off at 8.30 p.m., seven days a week.

and given the fact it gets dark maybe 630 we have about a maximum of two hours that these things are lit in the night time and apparently that's offensive to some people I'm just I'm just a bit in shock thank you to our friends at CHCHH for providing that clip the dispute highlights tensions over holiday displays and by law enforcement residents were joking

that the real scare this year the real frightening thing is from city officials, not from ghosts. And this is, ah, this is, this is people getting in their own way. This is, this is city bylaw officers making work for themselves to show how useful they are. I looked at the video of this and could not understand what the heck was the problem. Yeah. It doesn't look any different from any other display. It really doesn't. It's just, they're blowups, these giant blowups, and they have little lights in them.

My friend Glenn Zuhyev is, I talk about him all the time. He's a guy I went to see. the notebook with. And apparently, I've reminded him of it, apparently we both cried. Apparently, I forgot about that part. But Glenn loves how, and his wife and his kids love Halloween so much. They don't send out holiday cards. They send out Halloween cards every year. And his house is, it looks, he's got these crazy inflatables that make it look like his home has been consumed by a kraken with tentacles coming out on every, and it's lit and it's incredible. And if you cannot appreciate how important, how special something like that is in your neighborhood for your kids, for your neighborhood kids, knowing that it's gone on the, on the first of November.

It's done. We're right into Remembrance Day. What a, what a gear shift it is. You cannot appreciate how special it is when somebody takes an initiative like this in your neighborhood. I appreciate that if you cried when you went to see the notebook with your buddy that the Ben Mulroney's shriek would be unbelievable when you saw this display. Listen, I don't know why you had to make it personal like that.

That was below the belt. I'm stunned that this notebook thing is something that I didn't know before. It's not something I lead with. It was a situation that begged for the story. And I want the listeners and viewers of the Ben Mulroney show to know me better. And the good, the bad, and the notebook. All right? And so take me as I am.

What do I always say? Take the world as it is, not as I want it to be. I don't want to live in a world where I cried at the notebook with my best friend. I don't understand why we did that. But we did it and I own it. So yeah, that's that story. Way to take us off track, man. I was trying to weave a story together.

And you just derailed the whole thing. I think I'd rather listen to J.D. Sacks sings the anthem than watch the notebook. Oh, my God. I mean, listen, I do not think I could have done the anthem. I know I can't. Unless our anthem was New York, New York, which I can sing, by the way. Yeah, because you're just basically speaking. No, no.

New York, New York. That's not, again, it's as if you don't know me. And it's as if you don't know music. You think New York, New York is speak singing? It's the Tony Bennett sort of thing. It's Frank Sinatra. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm gobsmacked.

My jaws on the floor that you would just, you would be so cavalier with. That's a hell of a song. And it's got that. Go listen to last 30 seconds of that song and tell me that Frank doesn't belt it out at the end. Tell me that speaks. Speak singing. Just ludicrous. Yeah, listen, if you don't appreciate how important it is for these things to happen in your community, then I can't help you. But again, I suspect this is a lot of busy work by bylaw officers. The bigger an organization, as I found, because I've worked for some pretty big corporations, the bigger an organization, the more people are, at the center of those organizations. And their job is to slow things down. Their job is to put things on pause. Take a beat. We'll circle back to this.

That's their job. They're the circle back people. And if you're able to do that, if they're able to do that, then they did their job. These people are circle back people. That's what it is. And shame on them. And you keep, Brock McHughan, you keep doing your thing, buddy. Up next, were Parkdale residents opposed to consumption sites where they doxed?

Welcome back to the Ben Mulroney show. We've had a lot of fun thus far this morning, but we do have to talk about a few important things, pressing issues facing the city of Toronto. Save consumption sites, big issue. A lot of people living close to them feel that their lives have become diminished and worsened because of them. And they feel that when they bring the questions,

and issues that they have with these decisions to the proper authorities. They are either marginalized. They're called NIMBY's or they are otherwise managed. And we are a little victory for that side. Little victory. There's a pretty big victory. Parkdale safe consumption site closed down after the province pulled $1.1 million in funding. It was a very dirty fight for the residents, but they came out on top.

That doesn't mean the battle is. done. And joining us to discuss the lay of the land, the state of play, is Derek Finkel. He's a National Post columnist, and he chronicled the fight against safe injection sites and the gas lighting that happens against residents in the National Post. Derek, thanks so much for joining us. Hey, good morning, Ben. Nice to be here.

Is the closing down to the Parkdale safe injection site a victory? Yeah, I think it's really interesting. it's a really interesting case study for this particular issue in the sense that they I mean the problems with this site aren't new there's been some effort to frame them as you know that the problems began when the other four sites in the city including the one I live across street from shut down in March that you know people that these problems started after that because people were flocking to this site in Parkdale that stayed open but the truth is is the problems with this site have been going on for years, and the residents have been

expressing concerns for years and getting nowhere. So before you continue, what are some of those issues that residents were concerned with? Well, it's like a mirror in some ways of what happened here in Leslieville in the sense that there's a parquet that kind of abuts the community health center in Parkdale, sort of like we had here. of course here after this you know and that parquet basically became an open air drug market so all of the drug dealing open use people prostrate on the ground most months of the year except for when it's really cold needles all over the place sometimes filled with blood you know

people um having psychoses you know brought on by fentanyl use um you know violence children having things thrown at them, people being yelled at fights, lewd acts, that kind of thing. So, yeah, it's a melange of criminal and non-criminal disorder. Yeah, so, Derek, like, any good faith broker would hear those concerns, see the actual evidence with their eyes and hear it with their ears, and they would take issue. They would say, all right, these people have real concerns. We need to address them. But, you know, earlier this morning, I was listening to an interview that Greg Brady had

with Anwar Knight, the former broadcaster who's now created an organization that wants to hold school boards accountable across this province. And he said one of the reasons he started that organization was because he came to the realization that school boards view parents as an issue that needs to be managed, not as the ultimate decider for what's right and wrong for their kids. And it feels to me like we're dealing with something parallel here, where activists on once, and they show. shouldn't be on one side. They should be, you know, if you're, if you're running one of these safe consumption sites, that should be your job. It should not be your identity. And they view the residents as a problem to be managed, not as vital parts of an ecosystem that needs attention. Right. And so if you want to take that management back to the very beginning, when they proposed these sites in Blaislyville or Parkdale in the first place back in 2016, of course, people, parents,

came to meetings and said, hey, what happens if we have drug dealers? What happens if we have people starting to use drugs? And so their response was, well, we'll have a zero tolerance drug dealing. They put it in writing and they said, we will not allow this. Now, of course, in the sort of activist ideological naivete that persists, the drug dealers did end up being a problem. And here in Leslieville, the drug dealers that shot Carolina Huebner MacGrat two years ago, they were commuting here from Scarborough. These weren't Leslieville drug dealers. And a lot of the drug users weren't from Leslieville either.

But that's another story. But what's interesting about, you know, as soon as people started complaining about drug dealing and so on and so forth, the people in Parkdale were trying to, just as we did in the beginning, go to these meetings, these community engagement meetings and express their concerns. And what the directors of these sites quickly started doing was, you know, basically setting up these meetings to fail by having activists show up, by coordinating the meetings in such a way that the community members were not really able to express their concerns properly. There's a whole playbook. Yeah. And that's why I want to take issue with one word that you used before about the so the naivete on that side.

It's not naivete. I believe that there are great many people. Listen, I'm sure there's some young, wide-eyed, bright-eyed, bushy-tailed people who truly believe in the most progressive version of utopia that they can do. But most of them are activists with an agenda, and it's quite cynical. And I'll tell you the other thing that's quite cynical is, so you have this meeting, and residents come out, and they express their issues. They find a way around the activists who are trying to drown them out at these communities,

engagement meetings. And then there's a tweet here that if you want to know why the Parkdale injection site in West Toronto was defunded, start by asking how activists got the home addresses of nearby residents who'd sent emails about violent drug activity to the consumption site executive director Angela Robertson. And then those people who had sent those emails woke up to paint. On the day of the meeting. On the day of the meeting, there is a, there's a photo of somebody who had spray painted nimbie neighborhood with an arrow point towards. somebody's house right on the sidewalk. This is, there is something, there's something quite corrupt about a system that allows

for people's private information to be leveraged against them and to do so in a public space to put a target on their back. I mean, if there's a, if there's a drug addict out there who's angry and they see this, I don't know, maybe they break a window. Yeah, it's intimidation. It was a form of intimidation. These are like mop feels, so type tactics. And they did it basically to tell the people who were planning to come to the meeting,

hey, you know, you're going to be targeted and this isn't going to be pleasant for you. And so don't come or don't speak. Yeah, exactly. And so look, yeah. So what happens now? So this is closed and that's, I think, a net positive. But what do residents want to see now? Well, in Parkdale, I think what they want to see is what happened here, which is, and what they want to see is the people who are managing the health center start to take some responsibility for what goes on around their site.

I mean, what the residents did after realizing these meetings were going to fail as they started doing what we did here in Lesbyville. They started documenting what was going on around the site with video and with. photographs. They were very persistent. They started sending these emails to the people who oversee these sites and fund them like the government and the health minister and the federal and health Canada's exemption division, which gives these sites, their federal drug law exemptions. And they started basically, you know, basically persistently communicating their concerns. They went over the site's head. And that's what led to this gave, it gave the, The province, the ammunition, if you will, to shut the site down.

And what's really interesting, Ben, is that you might remember. I think we even talked about this a few months ago. Earlier this year, the Kensington Market Site in Toronto, the injection site, filed a charter challenge late last year. And it was heard in court saying that shutting the sites near schools and daycares down in March violated the charter rights of drug users. So you remember this. Yes, I do. It's one of the most offensive things I've ever had to report on.

Yeah. And in court, one of the pro bono lawyers for the Kensington site argued that the province was being too random or too wide sweeping in its law by targeting all sites near schools and daycares. And what they really should have done was target sites that were problematic instead. Like instead of just wiping them all out, why not deal with them on a case by case basis? So that's what the province did here. So they basically had a bunch of residents giving them evidence about the fact that the director of the site wouldn't even admit to calling the police when they saw drug dealing. Hey, Derek, do you mind sticking around? I'd love to keep chatting with you. Maybe we'll take some calls after the break. Sure. All right, so don't go anywhere.

We're going to keep talking about the war zones that a lot of Torontoians are living through. What to do next in this battle for our neighborhoods. Don't go anywhere. The Ben Mullerney show continues. Welcome back to the Ben Mulroney show, and we're going to continue our conversation with National Post columnist Derek Finkel. He chronicled the fall of the Parkdale safe consumption site. It was closed down after the province pulled $1.1 million in fighting, a very dirty fight that led residents to have to take matters into their own hands. Once they saw the dirty tricks being used by their opponents in this.

this battle. They got smarter. They got wiser. They got more mobilized and more organized. And they saw this consumption site closed down. It's now on to the next battle in this war. And that is at Kensington Market. Welcome back to the show. Derek. Thanks so much for being here. A question for you where closing these things down is step one. But that doesn't address the underlying problem that we have people who are wrestling with the demon of drug addiction. In your estimation, What do you think is a solution that would satisfy residents that would help these people and make their streets and communities safer? Yeah. And I think, yeah, I think that is the next step. And that is kind of certainly my focus, you know, as a journalist and moving forward. And I think it's interesting. They're grappling with this in British Columbia. We have some signs of what's next here.

So, for example, actually in Parkdale a year ago, the University Health Network, along with the United Way of Greater Toronto and the Fred Victor folks opened up a facility at 90 Dunn Avenue, which has 51 rent geared to income, supportive homes. And the premise of this facility, which has health care, you know, it has like hospital-like. supports it's part of the hospital network. Yeah. They had, you know, the premise of it is that, you know, all of these people who are homeless with these, you know, vulnerable population, they were constantly in the hospital all the time and using up resources in the hospital network. And, you know, just to give you one stat that's kind of alarming that came out earlier this

year, between 2018 and 2022, 33% of all people in Ontario who died of overdose had been been in a hospital either emergency ward or in some sort of inpatient program within a week of their death, within a week. So hospitals, forget injection sites, hospitals were not capable of properly connecting people to this kind of care. So what I believe, just generally speaking, is that we need way more of these kind of 90-done avenue-type facilities, and they need to be on a spectrum. At one end of the spectrum, you probably need some form of involuntary care like they have.

Yeah. They just opened an 18-bed involuntary care facility in Vancouver. There's probably also a huge need because the truth is probably half of people who use fentanyl for any period of time have irreversible brain damage. Well, yeah. Most mayors of most cities know that these people are going to require complex long-term care in most cases for the rest of their lives. We don't really have that. And at the far other end of the spectrum, they probably need a type of a facility for people who are close to being self-sufficient or they need job training or co-op, some sort of co-op. So it's not like one size.

Sure. It's like a pathway, right? We talked with the mayor of Barry last week, who declared that state of emergency about eight weeks ago now in an effort to marshal more resources towards the issue of getting. people out of encampments and getting them into some form of stable housing with a goal over the course of recognizing that that's not the answer. That's the beginning of the answer. He views it as a two, two and a half year process by which you get someone into the system. And it's only after many, many months, if not years of work with them with various touchpoints of people throughout the support staff who can help get them from that entry point all the way

to being self-sufficient and on their own. own now. I recognize that the issues of homelessness and the issues of drug addiction are not necessarily the same, but they do overlap in a lot of ways. And so I love that you brought that up, and I want to thank you so much for your attention to this. Keep up the good work. Happy Halloween and go Jay's Go, my friend. Yeah, I agree on all counts. Okay, take care. I want to hear from you 4168-6400 or 1-3-8-225 talk. Is this a good first step? Honestly, closing this down, shuddering it. I think it was a net negative for everyone in the

area. Now it's on to Chris Moyes' neighborhood and the Kensington Market Safe Injection site. Happy that the battle is being brought to his backyard. But we need to fill the void with something. I think Dunhouse is a good idea.

And not for nothing, but he mentioned, our guest Derek Finkel mentioned, that in a lot of cases where people have been so caught up in the grips of drug addiction and specifically mind-altering drugs like fentanyl. They are going to require long-term mental health cares probably for the rest of their lives. So we were, Karina Lemke, a good friend of the show, who's been chronicling these issues and helping us see what she sees from the front lines, talk to us and sent us

some information about a community engagement meeting, a town hall where significantly addicted people were asked to take the microphone. And in a lot of cases, their drug addiction has been left with no help, with no support, with no push to get them off of drugs for so long than in a lot of cases when they took to the mic, the only thing they wanted and claiming the only thing they needed. was more drugs. That is, we have failed those people. We as a city, and specifically by way of our government officials

who have been so ideologically hell-bent on doubling down, on safe supply, that a lot of these people who may have been salvageable in terms of their mental health and their belief in themselves and their belief that one day things could be better, that's gone. That's been extinguished and it's been replaced by an undemned, uncontrollable and never-ending need for more drugs. We've got a lot of people on the line. Let's start with Mark.

Mark, welcome to the show. Hey, Ben, how are you doing? I'm doing well, thank you. Good. I have some experience, you know, trying to fight off the city and some of the powers that be regarding a development in poor credit and another one at Clarkson in Mississauga. My experience is that, you know, these organizations that do the safe and manage the safe injections and whatnot, you know, they're,

embedded with the city and they almost run in parallel, you go to these meetings and you're getting attacked not only from the organization, but the city. The city officials are attacking. And it's crazy. They, you know, they don't listen to residents. They railroad you. They kind of sneak around. They buy these sites to develop these buildings. Yeah. And then they tell you after the fact that they're, you know, they've greenlit the site plan approvals and, you know, all the jazz and they don't follow the proper zoning bylaws. Yeah. And look, look, I love the, I love the shell game that is played by the, uh, ideologues on that

side. First, so, so British Columbia says, oh, the science is sound and we're going to do this. And we are going to give, uh, we're going to give out drugs and it's going to make life better for everybody. And then you got people on this side of the country saying, all right, we're going to follow British Columbia's model. We're going to follow the science. The science is sound.

then Chris Eby, the David Eby, I'm sorry, the premier of British Columbia comes out and says, we were wrong, we screwed up, British Columbia is now a hellscape. The people on this side still say they're following the science, even though the people who started that lie admitted it was a fiction. And so at some point, we all have to start reading from the same hymn book. And I appreciate your call. Thank you, my friend. Mike, welcome to the show.

Thanks for calling in. Good morning, Ben. Yeah, you got about three. 30 seconds, my friend. Okay, so I'm a homeowner and calling with my whole life. And what I don't know is how can the city decide to just arbitrarily choose real estate to create a safe injection site that draws all of this negativity into it? There's no way it didn't devalue the properties around the area.

How do they feel they have the right to affect their citizens, number one, to devalue their properties, and also to compromise their tax base because of less valuable property is going to bring in less taxes for them to, you know? Well, thank you for the call. I appreciate it. We got, nah, you got to take a, Mark, real quick. Give me your idea in five seconds. Well, we had a homeless shelter shoved down our throat here in Welland, Ontario.

Basically, no consultation to the public. It was announced it's happening. It's all approved. They open up a meeting for the public. Get a ton of backlog. You got to get, you got it. Mark, thank you. I'm sorry to cut you off.

I wish I couldn't, I didn't have to. You got to get mobilized, my friend. That's the only way we're going to beat these people. I run to the chaos, and Survivor is chaos. When stays on global. As a mother of a four-year-old, this is vacation. Canada's number one reality show is back. This is when Survivor turns into a horror movie.

It's trial by Earth, wind, water. in fire. Go! Survivor feels like a culmination of my entire life. Everything has led to this moment. Who will have what it takes? Survivor, new season Wednesdays on Global. Stream on Stack TV.