The Ben Mulroney Show - Best of the Week Part 1 - Pierre Poilievre and more

Episode Date: May 3, 2025

Best of the Week Part 1 - Pierre Poilievre and more Guests: Pierre Poilievre, Jonathan Martin, Tony Chapman, Livio Di Matteo, Adam Zivo If you enjoyed the podcast, tell a friend! For more of the Ben Mulroney Show, subscribe to the podcast! https://globalnews.ca/national/program/the-ben-mulroney-show Follow Ben on Twitter/X at https://x.com/BenMulroney Enjoy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Ben Mulroney Show Best of the Week podcast. We had so many great discussions this week, including sitting down with Pierre Poliev on election day to discuss what this campaign has meant to him. Enjoy. Welcome back to the Ben Mulroney Show. And before the break, we played you some audio of then candidate Brian Mulroney in 1984 looking into a camera and reminding voters that the Trudeau years were no picnic and the problems that we were experiencing were not because of the Americans, but they were due to bad policies and bad values and a bad vision for the country.

And the voters turned in a mandate for a conservative government. Well, our next guest is hoping to, I guess, bottle that feeling and hopefully lightning will strike twice. Please welcome to the show conservative leader, Pierre Poliev. Pierre, welcome to the show.

Good to be with you, Ben. Thanks for having me. I gotta ask, it's a 35 day campaign. I've been following it very closely. I've been struck by how far you've traveled, how many people you've talked to. What have you learned on this campaign? And aren't the people are ready for a change? Everywhere I go, people say their lives are worse than they were 10 years ago, more dangerous, more costly, that they don't see a path out,

and that the liberals are only offering fear to keep themselves in power for a fourth term. And my message to people is it doesn't have to be this way. We can restore the hope that we had and that you don't work hard, you get a great life, you get a nice house where you can raise kids, you get a nice basket of groceries that are, that doesn't break the bank and that your family is safe in your neighborhood. Those are things we used to take for granted in Canada before the liberals got in a decade ago. And there's things we're going to restore. So I guess the message is hope for a change.

What would Pierre Poliev today tell Pierre Polievio on January 1, because it has been a heck of a roller coaster over the past four months. I would say hold on for the ride. It's gonna be a real adventure. And it has been, you know, there's been so many events that have popped up that we didn't anticipate so many new developments. But I'm really stoic about it. I have a process that the people will do what's right for our country. They know that we can go forward and change things and there's a brighter tomorrow coming,

a brighter future for everybody listening. And so my message to people is get out and vote. This is your chance to make a change. I should let our listeners know that as soon as we're done here today on the show, I'm going to go vote and then I'm getting on a plane and I'm going to be at the Pierre Pugliav headquarters with the global news team to cover the election. And I was wanting to know what's your evening going to be like, Pierre? My family and I are going to gather in a hotel room at the hotel where we will be watching the results and we'll just relax and have a bite to eat and enjoy each

other's company. Thank God the laws are here to help with this. Get them to bed. So we won't have to be changing diapers and wrestling with kids who don't want to go to sleep. And then when the results are known, we're going to walk downstairs and into a big ballroom and hopefully celebrate the change that Canadians will have voted for. There was an emotional moment at your rally in Carleton yesterday between you and Anna. Can you tell us a little bit about what that was all about? Well, Anna has worked so hard. She's been by my side throughout this entire adventure.

And we're very touched by the people we met. You know, I've now done over 181 of these rallies and at most of them we stand and shake hands with every person who wants to meet us. And it's meant so much to us to have these countless numbers of people vest their hopes in us, tell us their stories, their pains, their heartaches, but also aspirations for the future. And we're kind of in awe of the fact that so many people would vest that hope in us. And this was the culmination, last night was the culmination,

it was the climax of the whole event. And I think Anna was overcome with a combination of joy and exhaustion and hopeful excitement. And so it was a really special moment for us to be there. We tried to soak it in because you don't have special days like that every day. Yeah, Pierre, there was a moment, it wasn't even in the election campaign, it was in the lead up to it. I believe you were in a bottling plant

and you were with a young worker inside the bottling plant and he told you he was working two jobs, looking for a third job and he felt like a failure. And I could see that you were trying to console him and let him know that, no and he felt like a failure. And I could see that you were trying to console him and let him know that, no, he's not a failure. It's the Canadian promise was broken. What you were promised has failed you.

And that was one moment that I witnessed and I felt so much in that moment. And you must have heard countless stories like that over the course of the last 35 days. Do you feel the weight of the hope that these people have in you that they want you to get over the finish line? Do you feel the pressure? I do, I feel in awe.

I feel in awe of that responsibility. You know, that guy clearly worked nonstop. He was telling me that his kids wonder where he is all the time and why they can't ever move their tiny apartment into a nicer place. And it's hard for him to explain to them what's going on in our country. And so he said he felt like a personal failure to his kids. Of course, he's not a failure. He's doing everything right. He's doing everything we asked him to do. And I have it on my shoulders and without any complaint, I welcome the burden to change

things so that he can have the life that he's worked for and his kids will grow up and say that my dad is a hero. My dad went out every day into the jungle and he fought for me and he gave me a good life and launched me into an even better one. And so that's one of the reasons I think Anna and I were so emotional yesterday is that we have the hopes of so many million people who just want to earn a good life again in Canada. and I were so emotional yesterday is that we have the hopes of so many millions of people who just want to earn a good life again in Canada. That's my purpose in Canada to bring home that promise for every single person.

And that's why it's so important we get change. Every one of my siblings agrees that the memories that we have on the campaign trail with my parents are priceless. We'll never forget them. We were so glad to have been there on the bus, shaking hands in the hotel rooms, in the rallies. We loved every one of those moments. What, now your kids are younger for sure, but have they enjoyed this experience?

And what's it been like in the quiet moments with them? Well, there really haven't been any quiet moments. To be honest. Even when there's no politics around, there's no peace and quiet with our two munchkins. They handled it very well. They were on the road for about two weeks at the outset. Cruz is very analytical, very inquisitive.

He just enjoys playing his games on his iPad and asking lots of questions and then participating in the little activities at various photo walks and so on. And then Valentina, you know, she has some special needs, but one of them is the advantage. She loves to be in motion. She likes to physically move. Um, and campaigns move. All they do is move vehicles. The wheels on the bus are turning round and round.

The planes are flying. And I think the constant motion was very good for her. She, she was almost, um, felt, um, greater peace than she normally would standing still, but I'm very proud of the two of them. They were very strong. They, they went back to, to be with the in-laws for the rest of the campaign. But I'm so glad that they had that experience and I hope that they're able to remember some of it as they get older. Lastly, Pierre, you know, you've thought about running for prime minister and being prime

minister for quite some time. Has this campaign been everything you thought it would be? Was it? I mean, I know that you you were running a hopeful campaign. Did you feel hopeful during the campaign? I felt hopeful when I was with the people, because I saw it in their eyes. I saw it as I walked down the aisle to shake their hand, like see that intense hope and a little bit of desperation. to shake their hand, like see that intense hope and a little bit of desperation and that you're sort of filled with all these different emotions all at once and it's happening so fast that like it feels like it's just been a tornado for six weeks but yes I, I have felt hope and I do feel more hopeful now than ever. And it has convinced me that this is worth doing. This is worth fighting for.

Pierre, we're going to leave it there. Thank you very much. All the best to you, Pierre Polly, the leader of the Conservative Party of Canada running to be the prime minister. Thank you very much, Ben. Take care. Welcome back to the Ben Mulrooney show. One of the questions I will have for a very long time,

and I will read any book that anybody writes about this in the future. I've been amazed that the Liberal Party has been able to get people not to look at the past 10 years. Don't look in the rear view mirror. Don't look at the damage of the past 10 years. Instead, look at the potential threat in front of us in the form of Donald Trump and his tariffs. And they have convinced enough people that that's where they have to keep their sights, that they could they're there within striking distance of forming government. And the idea that Donald Trump is the issue of this election is surprising to me. But it's not surprising to our next guest, Jonathan Martin, senior political columnist for Politico, who's written a tremendous piece on this very subject.

Jonathan, welcome to the Ben Mulroney Show. Well, that's high praise, Ben, from somebody who knows from Canada politics. Thanks for having me. So talk to me about what you uncovered in Canada versus Donald Trump. Well, look, the sort of view on this side of the border of the race is pretty straightforward. The race was about Justin Trudeau, and then it became about Donald Trump. I think it's a little more complicated than that. Having been in the, in the GTA last week for a few days, I think it is also has to do with, with, with, with Pierre's persona of the enemies he's made in his own parties.

Carney's general inoffensiveness of the classic man in a gray suit, um, who is obviously not as polarizing as Trudeau. And then lastly, you guys have kind of borrowed our two party deeply polarized politics. And at least for a moment you've borrowed it. Because here you have an election in which the block and the NDP have really been marginalized by fears of Donald Trump and Pierre.

So I think that has helped liberals too. So I think it's a little more complex than just Justin's out, Donald's in. One thing that, it doesn't surprise me, but it disappoints me is sort of the knives already being out for Pierre Poglia. I mean, look, he could win. And yet people are treating this like a funeral

and they are lining up to replace him. Yeah, I sat down with Doug Ford last week at Queens Park and literally the first thing he said before we started talking then was that he had just been speaking with Tim Houston, the premier in Nova Scotia, and he was giving Houston a hard time for that video. I'm sure a bunch of your listeners have seen. It's a great video. It's kind of a it's kind of a Nova Scotia tourism piece promoting the premier. And so and so Ford tells me he said, I was just giving him a hard time. I said, can't you wait until the body is cold? Yeah, meaning Pierre's body. So yeah, you've got these two prominent conservative premieres already circling like vultures here before the elections even happened. And it but it's it's it's the difference between the liberal party and the conservative movement because the conservative party, it's a coming together and a breaking apart whenever things go wrong.

Right. It's a more fragile coalition. Yeah. Right. And this is part of Pierre's challenge, too, is look, three fourths of Canadians don't think much of Donald Trump, but the quarter that does like Trump also happens to be the base of the conservative party of Canada. So if you're Pierre, you're kind of in a vice here because you can't go negative on Trump at a full

throated way like Carney has because you risk alienating a bunch of your core voters, especially out West. And you got to have them in every riding in the Western provinces. But if you don't talk tough about Trump, then you're going to lose swing voters in Ontario. So he's kind of in a no win spot. There was a Q&A that occurred today with with Premier of Ontario Doug Ford and I just read you a little bit of it when somebody said somebody told me the two of you guys Have never really met in person. How is that possible talking about Pierre? You're gonna you're gonna have to ask him I think seven years ago I met him once in Ottawa breakfast right after one of my events

But we never really talked there and then you said that's malpractice on his part Why wouldn't he make the effort you're gonna have to ask him? But I think it's common sense when you're in an election, you reach across to as many people as you can, and then you go on. But apparently he doesn't have a relationship with the premier of Nova Scotia either. Yeah, not at all, or local mayors, or anyone. I don't understand it. And he worked in politics, he understands politics. It's his campaign manager, Jenny Byrne, in my opinion, but he's still the boss, right? I mean, this is, this is, the call is coming from within the House. Yeah, it's pretty raw stuff. And I was so struck by that conversation that we ran the thing as a Q&A, if it was confined to Politico today. Yeah,

look, he obviously has a personal history with Pierre, but to me, the fact that you're the conservative leader of Canada and the person who is the progressive conservative premier of the largest province, you gotta have a relationship. You gotta make the call. You gotta have the coffee. Even if you have a beef with him, he still runs the largest province in your country. And I just can't understand why Pierre never did it.

Well, talk to me. What do you make of? This this language that the fact that this is a conversation that Doug Ford had before the election has even been prosecuted Well, it tells me that that then folks are circling and they're already sniffing about what's next Do you mention at the top of the program here, that oftentimes elections are about the future, not the past. Well, this is about the future. I.e., if the conservatives go down today

and they dump Pierre, then what does that mean for the next generation of conservative leaders? Is that Tim Houston? Is it Doug Ford? Who wants that? This to me is about trying to gain an advantage next time around. I don't know that Doug Ford just called an early election because he said it was too important. He needed a mandate to defend Ontario against Donald Trump. I don't understand how he could

argue the need to leave then in order to try, especially if they're in opposition. Obviously, he wants to be in the conversation for whoever is next. Yeah. Wow. Honestly, when I saw that Tim Houston video and now I see this stuff, but again, this is what it's like on the right side of the political spectrum in Canada. As soon as things don't go well, people take their toys and they go home. I mean, the 3% of the People's Party of Canada that Maxime Bernier is polling, if that was in the Conservative camp, we would be having a different conversation about the election today.

But this is not uncommon at the end of campaigns, people start, you know, jockeying for the image about next time around, and they don't wait to borrow Ford's line for the body to get cold. Jonathan Martin, senior political columnist for Politico, thank you very much. It's a heck of a piece. For someone on my side of the political spectrum, it's a little disappointing, but I do appreciate it.

Thanks for having me, Ben. Take care. When I found out my friend got a great deal on a designer dress from Winners, I started wondering, is every fabulous item I see from Winners, like that woman over there with the Italian leather handbag, is that from Winners? Ooh, or that beautiful silk skirt. Did she pay full price?

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Winners find fabulous for less. Hi, I'm Donna Friesen from Global National. Life moves fast these days and we want to make it even easier for you to get the news you need. That's why you can now get Global National every day as a podcast. The biggest stories of the day with analysis from award winning global news journalists. New episodes drop every day. So take this as your personal invitation to join us on the Global National podcast.

You can find it on Apple podcasts, Spotify, Amazon music, and wherever you find your favorite podcasts. I want to welcome to the show as we do every week, Tony Chapman, a great friend of the show, host of the award-winning podcast, Chatter That Matters and founder of Chatter.ai. Tony, welcome to the show. Always a pleasure to be with you. So there's no person I trust more to walk me through the value of a brand and how to build a brand. But talk to me about the danger of putting political opinions out there when you are a brand,

when your business is your brand, and you experienced that firsthand in the past week and a half when you laid out who you were voting for. Well, there's no question to me. It was the biggest decision I had to make because I know I have clients that are very, lean, very liberal, and I have clients that lean very conservative.

And you hope that they're going to separate my vote and what I believe in for Canada versus the business at hand. But it's the risk you take and the second risk you take is you realize that by putting your position out there's a lot of people lurking in the shadows of social media with their slingshots that are just happy to attack you personally. Yeah. And that's something that I haven't experienced in the past, at least not at this level, but that comes with the territory. When I put a lot of posts out about the math, I've only focused on math, deficit, debt, productivity, things that you can't argue.

But when you can't argue them, very often they come back very emotional. And that's what I experienced. And that's just the reality of doing what you believe is right. And I wouldn't take it back for a moment. I absolutely believe we need change in this country. And that's why I've declared my support for the Conservative Party.

It boggles my mind that I can sit opposite a liberal voter who will dress me down and insult me for voting conservative. And when I look at them and I say, but what about the last 10 years? They just poo poo that off. And then they will attack my values and who I am as a person because I'm voting conservative.

It's shocking. I've never seen anything like it before. Well, you gotta give credit to the liberal party, the loyalty of their voters. I mean, they were abandoning the party and then they just changed up the lead singer, even though he was part of the party. And some of the candidates did the same thing. They left and came back once they realized that they could get reelected. And so, you know, I mean, that, that is testament to the voter,

the liberal's ability to strike fear of the unknown, and safety with what you do know, even though it hasn't necessarily worked to your advantage. And I think that's why you get such personal attacks from the liberals, because in some ways, they're, I think that if they really look in the mirror, they can be unsettled with what's going on around them. And yet they're voting for what they hope will be a change in direction. So it's a fantastic political party.

It should be studied for decades to come. If Carney wins, it'll be the greatest comeback in the history and be given the fact that they were talking about the liberals losing official party status. And Sylvester Stallone should be writing the next Rocky script around it. Well listen, I want to be fair because I just leveled an attack on liberal voters. But it comes from all sides. And the most famous meme of this election campaign, the Brantford Boomer, the guy who flipped double birds

to a camera, he says his life's been turned upside down. Listen, I feel sorry for this guy, but to me, often when we're at moments of great change, a photograph, a single photograph defines the mood. I think of Bernie Boston, 1967, when he in a big protest against the Vietnam War, he put flowers inside a soldier's gun barrel and it became the cover of Life magazine or the Tank Man in 1989 in the Tiananmen Square who stood in front of the tank. And I think in some ways this is this photograph.

We're in a very divided nation. There's so much anger. And this was his way of saying, I don't care what you have to say. This is how I'm going to vote. And I think this is indicative of the time social media has created has evaporated the middle ground. You're standing on one side, they're on the other side, and you want to show that you are with your people and you're against those people. And I feel for him because he will go down in history as simply an individual that was expressing I think the fingers up versus elbows up that many

voters feel today when they cast a vote. Let's talk Tesla because Elon Musk's company has been getting battered. The stock has been tumbling, but it went back up when he said he was leaving Doge to go back to Tesla. I think he has to leave Tesla. I don't he is alienated by by all the work he did with Trump. He basically went against everything Tesla drivers believe in Tesla drivers are from bank are from California. You know, they're the ones that they believed in sort of anti-capitalism, electricity, they were the early adopters. He was their front, he was their lead singer, everything. He was going to solve space against the bureaucracy of NASA.

He was going to bore tunnels where our government can't make subways. And all of a sudden, he suddenly sided up with the government. I don't think he can come back to Tesla. He might be the brilliant engineer. He might find the next new mouse trap to make Tesla great. But I think he's so identified with that brand and the Tesla drivers so no longer identify with him. If I was the board, I would ask Ailon Musk to step down. Well, the sports story of the weekend

was former football legend Dion Sanders' son, Shadour Sanders, plummeting in the draft. He was projected to be a top 20 pick in the draft. He fell to the fifth round. And the reason for that, at least the one that's being given publicly, is that people didn't like his attitude. Look, what I find really interesting is that,

people are comparing this to the Archie Manning, Eli Manning moment where Archie said, my son's only gonna play in New York, and that's very similar to what happened here. But a lot of this has to do with, you know, his social media persona, what he's been posting on social media, and kids today need to know that. There's no question. he's been posting on social media and kids today need to know that. There's no question and here's the other thing there's so much talent out there that what people ultimately choose you might be the next Sidney Crosby and I'll put up with whatever attitude you have that because I just want to stand by I

want to I want to play a little bit of Shadour Sanders and the cockiness that he expressed at the NFL combine. If you're trying to change the franchise or the culture, don't get me. So you should know history repeats itself over and over and over. And I've done it over and over and over. So it should be no question why NFL franchise should pick me. You think I'm worried about what critics say or what people gotta say? You know who my dad is?

They hated on him too. So it's almost normal. Without it's like it's almost normal. Without people hating, it's not normal for us. I don't know, Tony. This is a look. Everything that you do on the field is one thing. But the reason you go through the combine and through the draft is to show them who you are as a person. Yeah, here's the inconsistency of sports, though. If he was the number one pick, you would just turn a blind eye and say, we can turn them around. But he's part of a pool of many. And if I have a choice of many, why would I take

someone that you feel is going to be toxic to my culture and my team? Someone that's going to be in the face of the coast. You wouldn't. And that's what's happened. So there's a message that you just gave earlier on, we don't want to lose.

You're going to put yourself out in social media. You're going to talk about who you are, why you think you're the most important person in the universe. You're going to talk about how you part, why you think you're the most important person in the universe. You're going to talk about how you part water. But today, especially with AI, when people are searching for someone to join their organization, their team, their culture, their church, whatever, when somebody's saying, Hey, we're looking for someone to invite in, they're going to look through

AI, your entire social media, and they're going to judge you for, is this somebody I want to be around every day for the rest of my life or every day as we try to win a sports championship. And that's what's happened to him. He thinks he's above all of that. And here's the reality. I wouldn't draft someone like that because I'd say he's going to be, he's going to, it's like Dennis Rodman with the Chicago Bulls.

He was such a great rebounder that put up with him. But if it wasn't for his great rebounding skills, like Dennis Rodman with the Chicago Bulls. He was such a great rebounder that put up with him, but if it wasn't for his great rebounding skills, he never would have played on the bulls. And that's the same thing that's happening here is the fact is you're not that good to think that you are above the culture and the team. And that's the problem today is because of social media, we feel we have this veneer and this Velcro and this armor that we can throw slingshots anywhere. And we're invincible, but this is a great proof when you go from the top 20 to the fifth round, hopefully that's a lesson in humility

for him and he can go back and say to his dad, hey, I just lost several million dollars in my contract. Tony Chapman, thank you so much. Always a pleasure. Chat next week. Welcome back to the Ben Mulroney Show. And look, it's nice to know where our political leaders stand on any and all issues. I think Pierre Poliev has been very clear on the things that matter to him and what he stands for. And by and large, you could say the same thing about Mark Carney, except when it comes to oil and gas.

I have no idea what his position is whatsoever. He says he wants to turn Canada into an energy superpower. He says sometimes he says pipelines, other times he says not necessarily pipelines. In his book he talks about leaving oil and gas in the ground and he says we're going to take it out and we're going to sell it to International Market. So I don't know where he stands. But he has talked about phasing out oil and gas at some point. And the question is, how much would that cost Canada? Here to answer that question is Livio Di Matteo, economist specializing in public policy, health

economics and public finance and a contributor to the hub. And he wrote about this very issue. Welcome to the show, sir. Good morning, Ben. Glad to be here. All right, so yeah, okay. Let's assume for a second that Mark Carney gets his wish, becomes prime minister and decides that he is going to, I don't know, slowly or quickly phase out oil and gas. What are we looking at in that transition?

Well, that's a very good question. The oil and gas sector is part of the resource sector overall, and it's very important to Canada. I mean, resources overall, oil and gas, but also mining, forestry, everything is almost 20% of our GDP through direct, indirect and induced. Now, energy sector alone probably represents about 9% of GDP that would be oil, natural gas, et cetera. It's about 600, 650,000 jobs. So it's a substantial chunk of the economy but it's more important than you think.

You have to think about resources almost like a tree in that the oil and gas sector, mining, all of those sectors are like the trunk of a tree supporting all of these branches that go out, the rest of the economy. So the direct impact may seem small, but indirectly between all the inputs into the industry, all the capital investment, I mean,

natural resource companies traditionally have accounted for over half of our NAR and residential business investment. And a lot of that hasn't been in the oil and gas sector. Natural resources probably account for about two thirds of the products shipped on our rail and marine transport. Again, oil and gas is a substantial component of that. Canadians often have been uncomfortable about natural resources. They have this thing in their head

that if you rely on natural resources, whether it's oil and gas or mining, that we're just simply hewers of wood and drawers of water. But I mean, the resource sector today is very capital intensive. It's very high tech. 60% of the jobs require some type of post secondary education. It's a high value added sector. And it's the energy exports alone are probably responsible about half of our exports to the United States. So it's very important. And what I don't understand also is you could make an argument for the left supporting responsible resource development because it would add so much to our tax revenue,

which could then pay for all the social services that they say are vital and essential to moving Canada towards the fairest version of itself. That's a good point. I mean, the resource revenues from various types of royalties, whether they're for oil, gas or mining, average about 15 billion a year, but some years they're upwards of 30 billion. Yeah, so that is a fair amount of resource revenue. I think in a sense, whether you're on the left or

the right or the middle, I mean sort of responsible stewardship of your natural resources is a legitimate goal. I think the most important thing you can do, I mean I think the resources should be developed, but you also have to plan for the future. I mean I would personally like to see more of the Norwegian model in which a larger chunk of those resource revenues are put into some type of sovereign wealth fund Oh, yeah I remember I remember people talking about that what 15 20 years ago and why we hadn't done it and and had had Alberta been able to do it or Canada been able to do it the amount of the amount of

Capital available to us at this point would just be it would be next level. Oh, absolutely right. And that I think is one of the greatest policy failures of resource development in Canada that we have not done more to create these types of sovereign wealth funds from the various royalties that have come in historically from from all of our resource sector industries. that have come in historically from all of our resource sector industries. Oh my goodness. Well, I want to, I mean,

knowing what you know about what Mark Carney has said when his platform is, how do you think he's going to approach, if he becomes prime minister, how do you think he is going to approach resource development? Well, I think he's going to have to approach resource development. I think that's our comparative advantage. Without

natural resources, I mean, think about it. natural resources contribute altogether almost 20% of our GDP. So if the natural resource sector wasn't there, it's like a 20% national pay cut. Yeah, but but no one in their right mind is going to do that. But no one in the right mind. Well, we have 10 years of the liberals putting up roadblocks for just that.

I mean, there's there has been there's been an ideology at the heart of the liberal party for the last 10 years. A lot of people are hoping that that ideology has has left the party, but we'll have to see.

But for 10 years, they made it practically impossible to do that one thing that we know is so vital to the Canadian economy. Yeah, I agree. But I think whether whoever forms the government, I think they're going to have to develop our resources, I don't think Canada can move forward in the current geopolitical environment, keeping its resources in the ground. We should develop them responsibly. We should do things in terms of environmental stewardship. But in the end, those resources are a source of value added. They're a source of investment potential for the Canadian economy.

And it's just a question of how they're going to be developed and how it's going to be approached. And I think either major party will eventually end up doing that one way or another. There's also a diplomatic lever to the development of those resources as well, because we get to choose who we sell them to. And it adds to sort of the heft that Canada at least used to have as what was called a middle power. We were always told we punched above our weight. but one of the reasons we did that is we had a military, we had strong relations with the Americans, and so we were able to leverage

those things in order to be taken more seriously than a country of our size. And we could do the same thing today if we had a massively developed resource sector? Well, if we want to participate in international affairs, for example, much is being said about developing stronger economic ties with Europe. Well, one of the things that Europe needs is natural gas. it needs energy. And basically, you can't basically foster closer ties with Europe and then not sell the gasoline gas and natural gas. So that is one way of enhancing our importance to other countries in terms of the products we offer them, especially if we're going to under invest in other things like the military. What what do you think? Let's assume assume again that the liberals form government, what do you think a Mark Carney term looks like? Because I've read parts of his book values and I've

heard him talk about net zero. We've heard about the EV mandate. I'm just I'm there. He's so all over the place. I don't know. I don't know what resource development is going to look like under him. I think when push comes to shove, he's going to be more business oriented than we might have expected, given his background. I mean, it's all good and fine to be aspirational in terms of your goals, as you know, the government has been federally for the last decade. But he does have a background in business and world affairs. And the only way you're going to achieve the aspirational goals if you have the ability to pay for them.

And that's going to require resource development. I don't think he's going to have much of a choice. Yeah, I mean, if he wants to pay for all these things that the liberals have been building out for years, yeah, this is the way to do it. This is absolutely the way to do it. For me, it's doing and doing so in a responsible and environmentally sustainable way,

it would be the most Canadian thing we could do. It certainly could be. Livio DiMatteo, thank you so much. The article is called, Mark Carney wants to phase out oil and gas. Just how much would that cost Canada? And you can read it on thehub.ca. Sir, thank you very much.

My pleasure, Ben. Have a great day. Welcome back to the Ben Mulroney Show. And if there was going to be one story that would dislodge the federal election from the top of our minds and certainly in our hearts, it's the story of the tragedy that unfolded on the streets of Vancouver on Saturday night when a man turned his car into a weapon and plowed down 11 people, killing 11 with over a dozen more in hospital with critical injuries at a Filipino street fair. And I've been very careful all day on the show not to make assumptions that there's certain

things I don't know. But there are things that we've heard from the police that can, from which we can infer certain things. When the police chief said that this person was known to police and mental health professionals. From that, I understood that he has had many interactions with them, both probably on the criminal side and on the mental health and mental crisis side. And what to do with that, I don't know.

Is there a watch list he can be put on? I don't know. So let's ask somebody he can be put on? I don't know. So let's ask somebody who knows a lot more about this than I, Adam Zivow, national post columnist and executive director for the Center for Responsible Drug Policy. Adam, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me.

It's a pleasure to be here. So you wrote a piece that said Vancouver car ramming suspects should never have been free in the first place. OK, I'm glad you wrote this, but to our listeners, because I'm trying to get them not to jump to conclusions, where should he have been? So he should have been involuntarily institutionalized because he was suffering from severe mental health issues that seem to be connected to the breakdown of his family. Yeah.

So what I want to stress is that this is not the kind of crazy person that we often talk about, where they have a long history of crime. Provincial databases suggest that he had no criminal record whatsoever. However, the police have confirmed that they had dozens of interactions with them and that most recent interaction was actually

just the day before the car attack and in fact one of his family members call the psychiatric ward of a hospital just hours before the attack trying to get institutionalized because they were so concerned about is deteriorating mental health. Yeah this is you know i am we've been having a conversation on the campaign trail about. We've been having a conversation on the campaign trail about the danger on our streets and public safety and not feeling safe in places we used to feel safe. This at first blush felt like something that you could deposit right into that conversation. This is a slightly different conversation than that though. It is right. So this is not someone who appears to be a habitual violent offender.

And obviously when I heard about the attack, like any regular person, I was outraged and filled with anger towards this individual. But the more I began to read into his history, the more I felt a sense of, I don't know, pity for him and for everyone involved. So the suspect, you know, his brother was murdered in January of 2024. And so he put together a GoFundMe trying to raise money for the funeral costs.

And he got about, you know, more than $9,000 in donations. And he basically said that, you know, he felt burdened with remorse for not spending more time with his brother and that the death left his mother in an indescribable sorrow, but that she was financially strained after taking on significant loans to try to build him a modest tiny home, but that there had been problem with builders. So then fast forward to August,

his mother attempts suicide and was hospitalized for a month. So he wrote that he tried to do another GoFund me. He wrote that she tried to take her own life because of the grief of her son over her son, and that she'd been unemployed for quite some time, and she wasn't able to pay her bills, that she would probably try to commit suicide again and lose her home and he lived with her. So he would have lost it too. And that GoFundMe only got about 175 donations. So here you have someone who was already mentally ill, who's in a position where he's about to lose his housing,

where his brother died, his mom is about to commit suicide and he was obviously very vulnerable, and the system failed him. He should have been put into a hospital, but he wasn't. And so he acted more erratically until he killed all of those people. So you say that involuntary psychiatric treatment is not,

it should be the default setting in a situation like this, but it's not. It's not, and then there's a long history behind us. So, I mean, back in the early part of the 20th century, we had these insane asylums that we used to warehouse the mentally ill and that has its pros and cons. The cons is that these institutions were often really cruel to their patients. They were inhumane. And so as a result, starting in the 1960s,

you had a process known as deinstitutionalization, where these asylums were shut down. And that really picked up speed of the 1980s and 1990s. Now, the belief was that if you move these people into regular communities and provided them with outpatient support that they would be able to thrive. And there was good evidence behind that. But the problem though, is that in Canada, we never actually properly funded those additional supports. So we essentially just discharged mentally ill people onto the streets and left them alone without proper care and without proper housing. And so as a result of this, we now have a status quo where forced institutionalization is used very sparingly. There isn't much capacity for it.

And it's frowned upon as being a violation of someone's human rights. And so in that scenario, people like this suspect do not get, do not experience interventions until it's too late. They're only institutionalized after a crisis. It feels to me, Adam, like you come on the show quite a bit, and whether it be issues of the opioid crisis and the rights of drug addicts or the rights of criminals or now the rights of

someone who is severely mentally ill, we are always, we keep butting up against the charter. we are always, we keep butting up against the charter. And in my life, I've never had this many conversations about the charter and how I feel like it's not being applied right, if that makes sense. I think that makes sense. I think obviously we want to care about individual human rights, but I think that that framework breaks down when you're not considering how these rights sometimes conflict with the rights of other individuals.

And so when we have courts acting as if the rights of drug users of the severely mentally ill are completely sacrosanct, I think that that's a narrow analysis and it leads to really unfortunate situations like this. And I think that given that the Supreme Court has given some really strange rulings over the past few years or decades that using the notwithstanding clause to bring things back to a more happy centrist position would be a good alternative. I mean, you know, we're looking at a judicial system that says that it's cruel and unusual punishment to sentence multiple like mass murderers to life, right? So the charter is important, but I don't think that it's working as well as it could be right now. Is it a question of it being interpreted wrong? Or how many because it's not a question of interpreting the charter. It's a question of applying it.

Uh, you know what? I wish I could answer that, but I'm not going to fair enough. Okay. So if, could, could, could a moment like this be what we need in this country to, uh, revisit, uh, where we stand on this notion of involuntary psychiatric treatment, I think so. And where I think that this incident is particularly useful is that it expands the conversation beyond just crime, right? Because we so often talk about involuntary treatments in the context of people who are severely mentally ill and repeat offenders. But we have to realize that

these aren't the only people who are being left behind. There are people who are severely mentally ill and haven't committed a crime yet. People like this suspect and they deserve proactive involuntary treatments as much as someone who is constantly assaulting people, especially if they become more dangerous in the long term and then eventually do something horrible like this. Adam Ziva, thank you so much for highlighting this. I appreciate it. Thanks for having me on. Thanks for listening to the Ben Mulrady Show podcast. We're live every day nationwide on the Chorus Radio Network,

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