The Ben Mulroney Show - Canada will be the last stronghold in the scandal of gender medicine

Episode Date: May 20, 2025

Guests and Topics: -Trump says Russia-Ukraine ceasefire talks will begin immediately following call with Putin with Guest: Adam Zivo, National Post columnist and Executive Director for the Centre For Responsible Drug Policy -Canada will be the last stronghold in the scandal of gender medicine with Guest: Mia Hughes, Senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute. Specializes in researching pediatric gender medicine, psychiatric epidemics, social contagion and the intersection of trans rights and women’s rights 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

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Welcome back to the Ben Mulroney Show. Thank you so much. Today is Tuesday. We weren't here yesterday. So we've got a short week. So let's make it count. And look, I think I'm glad that almost every time we call, he's able to join us because the Russia-Ukraine conflict is, it's an ever evolving, it's an ever evolving shell game, if you will.

Look over here, then look over here. And nobody has his eye on the prize better than our next guest. So please welcome back to the show. Adam Zivo, national post columnist, as well as the executive director for the Center for Responsible Drug Policy. Adam, welcome back. Thanks so much for joining us. It's pleasure to be on the show. Thanks for having me again. So where do we find ourselves today? Last time we talked,

there was hope that Donald Trump was going to be able to get that these two guys together, there was supposed to be a meeting in Turkey that did not happen. Then Donald Trump said, well, of course, Putin wasn't going to show up in Turkey to meet Zelensky because I wasn't there. So where do we find ourselves today? Well, we see ourselves in a quagmire where Russia is proposing peace negotiations that it obviously isn't taking seriously. These are bad faith proposing peace negotiations that it obviously isn't taking seriously. These are bad faith initiatives that are being launched by Russia to essentially obfuscate and delay any Western lens sanctions. And there's been essentially this continuous process over the course of this entire month, where Russia has been trying to prevent the EU from having, you know, further

sanctions. It all goes back to the victory day parade celebration back in May 9. It's a whole thing. Yeah. Well, what, what happened to that meeting that Putin never showed up for? Well, good. So here's what happened. So May 9th, you know, was Victory Day. It's the annual celebration of defeat of Nazi Germany. Uh, Putin proposed a unilateral three day ceasefire that coincided with the parade. Ukraine obviously declined that because that only benefit one side Russia and they counterproposed a unconditional 30-day ceasefire instead which Russia then said no to so the day after victory day on May 10th the leaders of the Coalition of the willing so that's the leaders of Poland Germany France in the UK came to Ukraine came to Kiev and they jointly announced with Zelensky that they were going to impose a 30-day ceasefire

starting from May 12th. And if Putin didn't play along with that, then they would impose serious sanctions. So Putin didn't seem really interested in doing the 30-day ceasefire because he's always maintained that peace negotiations should come first and then a ceasefire.

And essentially what that does is that allows him to push his military advantages to extract the most concessions from Kiev all possible during the peace process. Meanwhile, the West has said that we have to have a ceasefire before we have talks. So Putin ignored this 30 day ceasefire idea and counterproposed talks in Istanbul and Continued to bomb Ukraine the West didn't seem like it was gonna listen but then Trump went on truth social and said that these talks have to happen so the the Coalition the willing canceled its sanctions. Okay, then Zelensky changed the game He said that okay

I'm gonna be at these talks myself and I challenged Putin to come one-on-one. That created a dilemma for Putin because Putin has actually has said for several years that Zelensky is illegitimate. So if he came to these talks and met Zelensky one-on-one, that would legitimize his arch nemesis. So he just didn't show up. And the talks obviously collapsed right away because Russia proposed things that were ridiculous. For example, they wanted Ukraine to cede even more territory and fully give up more provinces that are currently only partially occupied. So I think Donald Trump was under the impression

that once he became president, he was gonna be able to solve this in a matter of days. And that didn't happen. And you and I have talked about that before as to why it wasn't gonna happen. But it does feel to me like this, the fact that the pope has indicated, the new pope has indicated that he is willing to hold mediation of this war at the Vatican. To me, that seems like a wild card that I didn't see coming.

What impact could that have on this dynamic? To be honest, I think the impact will be superficial. So obviously Pope Leo was much more pro-Ukrainian than his predecessor. He is explicitly called out Russian imperialism. He is consistently made positive references to Ukraine. His Twitter feed from before he became Pope obviously shows that he's not a huge fan of the Trump administration.

So one would imagine that if there were any negotiations that were to be mediated by the Vatican, Ukraine would be on friendly territory. But at the same time, the Vatican is a spiritual force, not a military one. And so though these negotiations, with the help of the Vatican, could provide some symbolic victories

and some nice photo ops for Kiev, that's not enough to pressure Putin into making real concessions. And Russia continues to maintain that it can't have peace without full control of these partially occupied Ukrainian provinces and without addressing the root causes of the war, which essentially means the installation of a pro-Moscow government in Ukraine. Were any of those things discussed on the two hour phone call between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin? I mean, we don't know.

We don't know the exact content of the calls. But essentially, it seems like Trump is Trump is he's a naive fool in this context. He just doesn't understand how this game is played. He's being constantly outplayed. And so Trump, by announcing these peace talks without mandating any ceasefire come before this, he's essentially given Putin what he wants, right? Which is another quagmire,

where you have these hollow peace talks preventing the implementation of sanctions while Putin makes incremental advancements on the ground without any real feedback. Adam, what are the intelligence experts within Donald Trump's administration telling him? Why isn't he getting the memo that Vladimir Putin is playing him

or that Vladimir Putin is an expert at misinformation and misdirection, and you're not supposed to take him at his word. What information is he getting from the people he's supposed to be trusting with the intelligence if he keeps coming back and thinking that on the other side of that phone is a good faith operator in Vladimir Putin? Well, the problem is that the White House, the Trump administration right now is composed of sycophants who have no subject matter expertise or people who actually know what they're talking about but are too scared to stand up for their principles and too scared

to tell Trump the truth. And you can see right now in the administration that there are two main factions when it comes to Ukraine's policy. So the first faction, which is led by Kyiv Kellogg, who is the special ambassador to Ukraine, as well as Rubio, Secretary of State, they're very pro Ukrainian and they see the situation with clear eyes. On the other hand, you have this guy, I forget his first name, last name, Witkoff though. So, you know, he's the special envoy. Yeah, there we go.

Anyways, so this guy has no diplomatic background, is essentially just some real estate mogul who's been pulled in to solve the Middle East and solve the conflict with Ukraine, and he has no, he has no understanding of this stuff, of this stuff. He barely seems to even know what some of these provinces where they are. And so I think that when you have Trump relying on his old friend, Witkoff, who has no clue what's happening, then you have a president who is misinformed and doesn't understand the opponent that he's grappling with. Well, Adam's Evo again, always appreciate you giving us a snapshot of

where things are today. I'm sure we'll call you next week because things will change over the course of the next few days, but we appreciate you, my friend. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you for having me. All right. Before we take a break, I do want to play this for you. Mark Carney was asked a pretty simple question about whether he wants housing prices to go down. Let's take a listen to how his brain was operating on this one. No, there. We did hear yes or no from Gregor Robertson, though.

He said no. So where do you stand on that? Well, it's not a, first off, it's not a yes or no question. It's not a yes or no question. It was for him, though. No, well, I'm answering the questions right now if I can. Because it's a question which relates to different time horizons and it relates to different houses. So we are cutting GST on new homes. So that affects the price of new homes. That affects the cost,

is a better way to put it. All in costs for people. It's up to $50,000 savings on the average home price, a little more than that actually if you look at the greater Toronto area. So there's significant savings for people. The measures to reduce development charges over the course of the next five years for the next five years, cut those development charges in half, those lower the cost for those homes that are built over the course of the next five years. Those savings will be passed on to people. The overall level of housing prices, though, is not so that that amount of activity is not enough necessarily to affect the overall level of house price. It does affect those

types of homes and people who can buy those types of homes. Mark Carney is new, and I'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt to get to a certain place where he's got he's got a legacy that we can judge but sometimes you can be too smart for your own good. Just say you want housing costs to go down especially for certain people and we're going to do what we can to ensure that. I don't think that's that's hard to say. Welcome back to the Ben Mulroney show and last week we had what I thought was a really thoughtful conversation about pediatric gender affirming care and how a number of countries that had thrown in on this idea were reversing course in like I said, thoughtful ways because the evidence was mounting against

the efficacy of those protocols. And we asked ourselves the question, will Canada follow suit? And now we find out that Nova Scotia, the province of Nova Scotia, is ignoring this growing evidence against youth gender affirming care. So we welcome back to the show Mia Hughes,, senior fellow at the MacDonald-Laurier Institute, specializing in researching pediatric gender medicine, psychiatric epidemics, social contagion, and the intersection of trans rights and women's rights.

Mia, welcome to the show. I have to say, you know, last week, we had such a great conversation. I did not think that we would be doing it again so soon, but when I read that Nova Scotia, after the conversation we had last week, I read that Nova Scotia, after the conversation we had last week, I read that Nova Scotia is sort of going against the grain. Is that fair to say? I would say very much going against the grain. The analogy that I drew in my National Post article

is very much like the joke where a woman hears on the news that there's a lunatic driving the wrong way down the highway and she calls her husband to say to warn him and he says just one there are hundreds of them that honestly that's Nova Scotia right now it's not just that they are looking the other way and continuing business as usual which would be bad enough, ignoring all of the developments elsewhere. Nova Scotia is going in the wrong direction with their foot to the gas.

And the analogy works perfectly because there are injuries, there are young people being harmed in this crazy mad mission in the wrong direction. Yeah, and you're right. The evidence for the puberty suppression experiment has been shaky from the beginning and the rationale highly questionable. Yet, it went largely unchallenged until 2020

when Finland became the first country to apply the brakes. Sweden soon followed, then Norway, Denmark, England, most recently Brazil, Chile, Queensland, and Alberta have joined the retreat, the US Department of Health and Human Services, which is what we discussed last week just released the most scathing review to date. So what, what has Nova Scotia done that that sort of allowed it to ping on your radar to the point that you wrote about it? It was an article that was published in CBC, and it's they were they're rather proud proud, I think of the expansion of their

pediatric gender services. So they opened a clinic in February, 2024 in Kentville, and this is serving youth age 16 and under. So we are talking the precise cohort that the rest of the world has backtracked and, and switched to psychotherapy. These clinics are specifically offering affirmation, which means the young person self-identifies as transgender and then these clinics will just affirm that

and then offer puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones. They opened another one in March, 2025, March this year in Bridgewater. And now they're looking to open another one in Sydney and I think possibly another one in Sydney and I think possibly another one in Anaganish. So they're just expanding the harm. They are completely ignoring all of the cautious, all of the cautious backtracking that other countries have done, all of the warnings, all of the red flags, they're ignoring all of it and they're just expanding

clinics so that more young people can be sucked into this medical scandal. And the thing that would surprise a lot of people, I think, is to learn that this is happening under the leadership of a progressive conservative government. You would think, you know, this is the type of thing that we saw enthusiastically adopted by sort of the centre left and the left in Canada and elsewhere, but this is being adopted

by a progressive conservative government. What do you make of that? It is surprising, of course, but then I'm in Ontario, as are you, I think. And we also have had the same thing happen under a conservative government. I do think on the one hand, I'm not giving them any, I'm not giving them any excuses. I'm not excusing them at all. But on the one hand,

they're not medical professionals, they're government, they're politicians. And so they don't understand this. And the trans activists and the people pushing this make a lot of noise. And they're very aggressive in their lobbying and they're very aggressive in their activism and they push this as a human rights cause. And I think it's cowardice on the part of politicians on the left on the right wherever they are it's cowardice to just. Not look at what's really happening not look at the medical scandal but just do what the trans activists tell you. And particularly, there's no excuse for it in 2025, when we have so much evidence of harm right now. There is absolutely no excuse to continue listening to these loud activists who are on an ideological quest and they have no respect for science and they have no respect for the

Hippocratic oath. It's odd to me. I've said it before and I believe that you told my producer something very similar that this, if woke politics and I loathe to use it in this way because like I said, I very much enjoy, I think it's important to have a very respectful conversation when we, especially as it relates to sort of the mindset of young people who may be in crisis. And I don't want to make them a political football, but I'm not the one making them a political football. There are people who are agenda-driven who are doing so themselves. I'm simply reacting to it. But, you know, woke politics in this country, this is where, if there's going to be a last stand for a pure unadulterated woke politics, it's going to be Canada.

I didn't necessarily know that this was going to be the file on which Canada was going to be an outlier. But here we are. I do. I agree completely. And part of my fear is right now, I hate to say it, but Trump, President Trump has got this right on gender medicine. He's got this right. And I think that repels Canadians because of the, he's not very popular in Canada. And so unfortunately, because Trump is going in the right direction on gender medicine,

particularly pediatric gender medicine, I fear that's going to push Canada in the wrong direction more towards Nova Scotia and the approach they're taking. I mean, I don't know that that's the right way to ever adopt any policies, be they gender pediatrics or anything, just because you don't like the other guy, you're gonna do the opposite of the other guy because you can dislike someone

and they can be right at the same time. It seems like a very unnuanced view of the world. Yes, I agree. It's definitely misguided. It is. And you and I can chuckle about it, but as you've said, this can cause very real, significant lasting damage to children. For those who did not hear our first conversation last week, can you give us just a little bit of a primer on what those negative outcomes can be for those who are, for young people who are experiencing gender dysmorphia and go through a protocol of gender affirming care? Certainly. So first and foremost,

you have to bear in mind that these are adolescents and we were all adolescents at one time, so we all know how your identity is not completely formed in adolescence. It's a time for experimentation. It's a time to try on different hats. And so these are adolescents who have adopted a transgender identity based on their encountering the messaging of the modern trans rights movement in our culture today. It's so pervasive.

And then they find themselves in gender clinics, in these affirming clinics that don't explore why they've come to the conclusion that they're trans. They just block their puberty thinking that it's a fully reversible pause, which it is not. It actually blocks the maturing and the cognitive development that would help them get over their gender distress if we left them to develop unimpeded from puberty. Puberty blockers can impair bone health. They can cause cognitive issues and then 98 to 100% go into cross sex hormones, which can cause infertility. Mia, we're going to have to leave it there, but thank you very much and we'll talk to you again soon. Okay, thank you.

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