The Ben Mulroney Show - Canada's political future shows their hand at York U

Episode Date: January 8, 2026

GUEST:  Garnett Genuis / Conservative member of Parliament for the riding of Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan since 2015 If you enjoyed the podcast, tell a friend! For more of the Ben Mulroney Show, subscribe to the podcast! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://link.chtbl.com/bms⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Also, on youtube -- ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@BenMulroneyShow⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow Ben on Twitter/X at https://x.com/BenMulroney Insta: ⁠⁠⁠@benmulroneyshow⁠⁠⁠ Twitter: ⁠⁠⁠@benmulroneyshow⁠⁠⁠ TikTok: ⁠⁠⁠@benmulroneyshow⁠⁠⁠ Executive Producer:  Mike Drolet Reach out to Mike with story ideas or tips at [e-mail] Enjoy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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This is the Ben Mulrooney show. Are you ready to go? All conversation, no cancellation, all across the nation. Welcome to the Ben Mulroney show, and thank you so much for that lovely intro. I don't know, we've got to come up with the name for that guy. Jim Bob Welcome to the show Intrepid producer Mike Jolay

Well thank you very much And I must say You added I put the basics in there And you were like Oh when we had these the lyrics Yeah it's great So you're the lyricist

Thank you very much Joy nice to see you Thank you good to be here And Amy Siegel Nice to see you as well And to our listeners To our viewers I say thank you so much

For sticking with us All the way to this Thursday The 8th of January 2026 yesterday Was a heck of a day and we knew that it was going to be all about following the bouncing ball into today as it continues. Of course, we're talking about what's going on in Minnesota.

If you had told me a week ago, the two of the biggest stories in the news would both come out of Minnesota. I would have said, I would have been shocked. And the fact that yesterday, a woman was shot and killed by an ice agent in Minneapolis. We ended the day with more questions than we had. answers. And despite the fact that people have been saying on social media with absolute certainty that it was one thing or another, we, I hope you've heard yesterday, we were not in that group. We talked about the tragedy of it and how there was a need for far more information than we had. We thought it was odd that the head of the Department of Homeland Security,

Christy Nome, said that it was domestic terrorism within minutes of it happening with no evidence that it was or wasn't. And there were pundits from the left who have been against the very idea of ICE that this was cold-blooded murder, which it may very well have been, but we don't have evidence to support it. However, we are getting a little more information.

And this is important because one of the biggest stories of the past decade happened in Minnesota, and indeed it was a flashpoint that changed how we see each other. It changed how we interoperable. interact with each other, not just in Minnesota, but indeed around the Western world. And I'm talking about the death, the murder of George Floyd.

It led to a movement. It led to DEI. It led to the aggressive expansion of woke policies, woke politicians, an entire new generation of militant members of the left. And I think to our detriment, but that doesn't, but it started with a tragedy. This death of this woman could be something like that again. And the knock-on effect of yesterday was that Minneapolis erupted in protests. And we know what her name is now.

We know she's 37 years old. Her name was Renee Good. And we know that she was a mother. We know that she was a poet, according to her social media. Her social media does not suggest that she was one of these people who was out there protesting ICE or doing anything to stymie whatever work they were doing. It feels now like we're learning that she may have been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Again, I can't say that with complete certainty.

But based on what we're reading about her now, it seems like she was just driving somewhere and found herself in this area and was trying to turn around. The problem with these stories, and as somebody who was a reporter for many years, is that people want to draw conclusions right away. They want to know the answers. Yeah.

If the plane crashes, you want to know why right away. Right away. Why did it happen? Yeah. And look, here is some audio of a neighbor who has their own perspective on this. She was the main car leading the protest, is my understanding. I talked to another guy who was driving behind her. but she was she was very at uh she was very successful in blocking traffic she was doing

what she was she was set out to do and so they wanted to get her the hell out of there um yeah so it looked like she was impeding ice vehicles definitely yeah that was her goal okay so look that's what she's that's what that's what she said that's what this neighbor said that she was acting in a manner that was not permitting the ICE agents to do their duty. She says definitely. She said definitely. However, look, the ex-husband of Renee Nicole Macklin Good, 37-year-old U.S. citizen mother of three, recent transplant to Minnesota, her ex-husband said she had just dropped off

one of her kids at school and happened upon the scene by chance. And while I haven't seen it myself, I have been told by. people at this radio station that there is a video of her trying to do a pull a three point turn, which would line up with this thing that she just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Again, we don't know anything for sure. And I'm getting it's, I had to turn off Twitter because people were speaking with such confidence, breaking it down frame by frame and telling me what it meant. I don't know what it meant. You don't know what it meant. Nobody does until there is an investigation. The Trump administration has painted her as a

domestic terrorist, uh, who attempted to ram federal agents with her car. Look, if I was in the wrong place at the wrong time and cops, masked cops came out and, and took me on, I made, my flight response might, might, might be that freaked out. I don't know. Meanwhile, the Minnesota authorities have been barred from participating in the investigation. That's, that's weird to me. Tim Walls, the governor, is questioning the credibility of whatever investigation and warns that the public trust is at risk. And look, and we're going to get to that in a second here because people are really and rightly upset. Let's play the audio of the conflict in front of the federal building. Get back. Get back. Get back. Get back. Get back. Ice go home. Yeah, we've seen

images of barricades being set up. People are barricades. Neighborhoods. Neighborhoods are are sort of hardening as targets to protect themselves from ice, apparently. There is, there's been a lot of rhetoric. Look, it started with the mayor yesterday, who was, I believe, exceptionally unhelpful. Who, as soon as this happened, called it a murder. Again, it might have been, but we don't know. And he had no business throwing kerosene on the fire like he did. You would think with a little time for him to get a little less,

hot under the collar, he would appeal to his better angels. This is what he said when challenged on did he make matters worse yesterday? I'm so sorry if I offended their Disney princess ears, but here's the thing. If we're talking about what's inflammatory, on the one hand, you got someone who dropped an F-bomb, and on the other hand, you got someone who killed somebody else. F-bomb, killing somebody. I think the more inflammatory action is killing somebody. And so once again, let's be real and just honest and straight up about what's happening here.

This is not okay. Well, it's certainly a tragedy, but, and killing somebody, again, we don't know why this person was killed yet. And I'm just, I don't understand why we have to rush to the conclusion. And to the other side of it, let's listen to somebody who's getting it, I think, wrong at this point as well. J.D. Vance, the vice president. Somebody sent me a photo of a CNN headline about what happened in Minneapolis. And this is the headline. I'm just going to read it. Outrage after ICE officer kills U.S. citizen in Minneapolis. Well, that's one way to put it. And that is the way that many people in the corporate media have put this attack over the last 24 hours. And I say attack very, very intentionally because this was an attack on federal law enforcement. This was an attack on law and order. This was an attack on the American people. The way that the media, by and large, has reported this story has been an absolute disgrace and it puts our law enforcement officers at risk every single day. What that headline leaves out is the fact that that very ice officer nearly had his life ended, dragged by a car six months ago, 33 stitches in his legs.

So you think maybe he's a little bit sensitive about somebody ramming him with an automobile? You know, there is a way to show your support for these ICE agents as the vice president without having to resort to calling her a domestic terrorist when you don't know she is one yet. You could have said, you know, we support the hard work and the dangerous work of our ICE agents as they further, you know, in the furtherance of their duties. And however, we will follow the evidence wherever it goes because paramount to the, beyond the safety of our ICE agents and the work they do, trust in the institution is important and therefore if there is justice that needs to be sought we will find it but only after a fulsome investigation why that is so hard for people to say

I don't know why there is this rush to judgment when all the facts will present themselves in the meantime things are heating up in one of the coldest places in North America and that is a shame hey why would a Canadian member of parliament be barred from speaking at a Canadian University we're going to dig in next Welcome back to the Ben Mulroney show. I want to talk about free speech on campus, college campuses. When I went to university, I loved saying that thing that would spark an outrage in those classes where you did have debate. And I loved hearing people advocate passionately for one position or another.

And I have to say over the past few years, I fear for my kids being outliers, being people who don't subscribe to whatever the group think orthodoxy is. Because what if they say something that runs a foul of whoever the loudest people on campus are, right? And with social media being what it is, I know our show is all about conversation and no cancellation, but that's not necessarily the case on. college campuses. And if we've seen anything over the past few years, as there is a level of intolerance on these campuses, a level of anger. And based on my perception of, for example, say, the Middle East, a lack of knowledge, which I think is stunning for our institutions of higher learning. And we've seen in the United States that sometimes right-wing thought leaders. Sometimes we'll go on campus and speak and we saw what happened to one of them in

particular when Charlie Kirk was assassinated. And so it's top of mind for a lot of people. Well, my next guest has been speaking on college campuses for a while now. He's a Canadian conservative MP. I personally don't think that he's talking about anything too too controversial, but apparently talking about unemployment and jobs as a conservative is a bridge too far for certain universities because he was told thanks but no thanks you can go home. So please welcome to the show, Garnet Janice. Welcome to the show, my friend.

Thanks so much for being here. Well, thanks, Ben. It's a real pleasure to be with you. Thanks for the opportunity. Yeah, so okay, so just set the stage. You have been going around speaking on college campuses. Talk to me about the format. Talk to me about how long you're normally there.

Who do you show up with? what sort of presence do you have? When you show up, what does it look like? Yeah, thank you. So we have framed this tour around the question, are you better or worse off than your parents' generation? Because a lot of young people are struggling with high unemployment, with the out-of-control cost of housing,

and with, I think, just a general concern about whether or not they will be able to have the same opportunities that previous generations have had. So that's the framing question we've been using for starting conversations. And the format is we're in a public area. So we've been working with campus clubs that want to facilitate our presence. We're in a student center or some high traffic area. In some cases, we've had sort of low-level amplification,

but generally not. Generally, it's kind of just to come by and talk and share your thought. And it's been great for me gathering a lot of good feedback, having a lot of good conversations with people to understand. understand the concerns and anxiety facing young people from that I can use that information in Parliament. So, yeah, so it's a fact-finding mission. The most controversial.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's an opportunity for two-way conversation. I'm certainly sharing what conservatives are proposing on these topics. But I would say, yeah, primarily a fact-finding mission. It allows me to be able to go back to parliament and say, this is what students are saying. And as a conservative MP, sometimes you get people who want to know your position on something, something else that it's in the news. I know today at Delhousy, someone asked me my thoughts on Venezuela.

So, I mean, I'm happy to engage students on other topics. But generally speaking, what we're talking about is not actually the most controversial stuff out there. It's the hard nuts and bolts of how these students are going to be able to get ahead. I think students are welcoming that conversation. And so what's interesting thing about their own future. Give me a quick list. You don't have to give me the fulsome list, but give me a quick list of some of the universities where you've had success in this format. Yeah, so right now I'm in Nova Scotia.

We just finished an event at Dalhousie. Days ago, we were at St.F.X. Actually, I'll tell you, we were in the Brian Mulroney building at St.S. Ah, yes, a Brian Mulerney Institute of Government. It's a beautiful building. It's fantastic, yeah. And they've got a replica of his office in there. So great, great spot if you're in Anaganish.

But so just finishing this week, two campuses to Nova Scotia. We've been at Concordia in Montreal, UTM. We're going to be at TMU tomorrow afternoon. We did invent it at the University of Winnipeg. Also, what am I missing? University of Ottawa. Okay, so I want to make sure I don't miss out on asking you all my questions. So these are all great.

So like the fact you did on Concordia boggles my mind because it's been one of the most activist-laden university campuses of the past few years. And yet you did it there. Talk to me about what happened when you got to York University in the greater Toronto area. Yeah, so we were scheduled to do an event at York University tomorrow, and we heard earlier in the week from the partner we were working with on campus that the event had been rejected. The student governing authority is called the York University Student Center that made that decision to reject the event. And they said the reason was is they decided they were not going to allow a external guest speaker to be at an event that it was in a public area, that if I was going to come, I would have to do an event that was in a room, kind of a door closed classroom.

And I think there's value in speaking in classrooms, but what we're trying to do is be in traffic areas to catch that student walking by who may not have an hour to spend listening to a full-length political talk but may want to share their impression. And I do think the format we're using, it's allowed us to engage less politically minded. People that are running between one class and another, but are interested in having able to share their thought in a few minutes. So, Garnett, like, I would love to know, and I don't know if you have this information,

but I'd love to know if that's their policy for everyone. That'd be one thing, if they're, if they had a policy of this, but it doesn't sound like that's what they said to you. They didn't say we as a union rejected because that's our policy. It would be a stupid policy, right? For that to be your general policy would be just a nonsensical. But that would be one thing. Listen, I don't mind.

Stupid policies are stupid policies, but there's still policies, right? This, if this was done exceptionally because they didn't like the cut of your political jib, that's a problem. Because they are publicly funded, which means, I mean, they're getting money from the taxpayer, and I don't think they should have the right to be able to do something like that. Yeah. Yeah. Look, I think it's a limitation on free speech. either way, frankly. Like, even if they're saying, well, we're not, like, what would be the

point in saying we're not, it would be less unfair, but still unreasonable. Yes. To say, we're not going to let any parliamentarian. But, you know, it's, when you have, like, what seems to be a, uh, a new rule or new doctrine that's coming up in response to the desired presence of a conservative person on campus, um, you know, it, it, uh, it, it, it, uh, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, It doesn't really seem to pass the smell test in terms of good faith, good intention. And Garna, what was, may I ask a question? Because you strike me as sort of the next generation of a politician. How old are you?

I'm 38. So, yeah. So you're younger than most, than a lot of people. So you are, you know, these people in university who are making these political decisions, they're going to be the generation after you, right? They're going to be the young ones when you're the elder statesman in the House of Commons. does it say to you that this is this is the political instinct this is the instinct that they have at this age and what do you think it means for the future of sort of political discourse in

Canada well i i will say i think that the next generation of students are actually pushing back against a lot of kind of the woke orthodoxies that have not served them well so there is there was a growing counterpressure among the next generation for who are seeking, yeah, free open conversation who recognize that they have, they have nothing to fear from different ideas. So it's great to see that there are more students that are willing to step up. I think young people are generally more conservative these days. But there still are vestiges of that kind of further,

their last woke power structure that is that is trying to kind of hold on to their to their positions. I think about my kind of own engagement. I was a student at Carlton. It's about about 18 years ago, I think it was that there was, it was an initial push to ban pro-life clubs from campus. And I was on in the University debate society at the time we were involved. But this was, this was sort of early days. And at the time, this was like, uh, hey, Garnett, listen, I, I'm I'm up against the clock. Is there any chance you can stick around for a few more minutes? Because I'd love to end this conversation properly.

Do you have a few more minutes? Yeah, for sure. You're listening to the Ben Mulroney Show. Welcome back to the Ben Mulroney Show. Welcome back to Garnett Jenis. He is the Conservative Member of Parliament for the riding of Sherwood Park, Fort Saskatchewan. He's been in that position since 2015. And he's been touring the country speaking to university students about unemployment, the job market. Are they better off today than their parents' generation? And that's been working fine and dandy until he encountered the absolute woke nonsense at York University. Garnett, welcome back. Thank you so much for sticking around. For context, I don't know if you knew this, but York adopted a year DEI strategy that explicitly includes social justice, anti-racism, intersectionality, and decolonization as guiding principles across teaching, hiring, leadership, training, and campus climate. So that's great. So that might explain the decision to say thanks, but no thanks,

to a duly elected member of Parliament from a publicly funded university. Yeah, well, that's additional context for me. Like I said, I don't mind people disagreeing. We've had lots of great conversations with people who disagree, but we're just talking about young people being able to have jobs and afford homes again. So let's pivot, Garnet, let's pivot to that. What have you been hearing from kids? Yeah, so we start with the question, are you better or worse off than your parents' generation? And almost everybody says no.

And the biggest issue is, you know, number one, can you get a good job with the credential you have? A lot of young people are concerned about sort of credentialed inflation. that they feel like they need to get more degrees and more qualifications order to get jobs that, you know, we previously would have been much easier to access. And then kind of what multiple of salary you would need to be able to afford a home. Certainly, massive difference between what that multiple of an annual salary would be required to buy a home is today compared to what it was previously.

So kind of jobs, homes, and hope are things we've been talking about, and they're things that are coming from these conversations on campus. And then, you know, sometimes we get into, in terms of better off or worse off, concerns about kind of community connectedness, how sort of the hyperdigitization of the world, how that's affecting young people's experience and socialization. So we have some good conversations about other issues, too, but mainly jobs and homes are coming up as key differentiators in terms of where we are today and where things were in past time.

Well, Garnett, thank you so much for sticking around and thanks for sharing that information with us. And before we let you go, I know that the conservative convention is coming up in Calgary at the end of the month. And I want to just generally, what do you think is going to come out of that? Yeah, I mean, I'm really excited about that convention. I mean, a lot of the media attention has been focused on the leadership review component of it, which is a necessary part of the process. but I think Pierre Polyev is going to do extremely well. I'm strongly supportive of him,

and I think we'll see that support from members as well. But there's a lot of other things that happen at conventions, too. We have a chance to discuss the debate policy proposals, review aspects of kind of the Constitution and governance of our party. I can tell you from what I'm hearing also, speaking of young people, there's a lot of young people interested in coming out to the convention. There's a lot of excitement among youth in particular about the constitutional. conservative message. So I think we'll see a real growth in the presence of youth at the

conservative convention. But people across the country and across all age demographics will be there. And there's a lot of different work that happens. So I think it'll be a really exciting event. And I'm looking forward to it. Thank you very much. I really appreciate it and keep up the good work. Thanks so much. Pleasure talking to you. All right. Now we want to hear from you. We want to turn the microphone over to you. Give us a call at 1-3-8-2-25 talk. Should publicly funded universities, have the right to bar people like members of parliament from speaking on campus. I think it's absurd.

I think it's absolute nonsense. This isn't like, you know, when I first heard this, I was like, oh, it's our shades of Ben Shapiro in the United States or, you know, the Turning Point USA, Charlie Kirk stuff, where they talk about abortion, they talk about these hot button issues. I mean, if a conservative politician who's talking about employment and trying to gather information about you know fact finding so that I don't know he he has a he can be a better advocate for you know youth on that file um and he's barred from campus that's a problem for me and that should be a problem for the minister of education and that should be a for the minister of colleges

and universities that's a problem I and I think somebody needs to address it because and more than that it's a problem for the future it's a problem for the idea that these These kids who are in student government don't understand accountability. They don't understand who they are accountable to. They don't understand the rules of engagement as being part of student government in a publicly funded university. You don't have the right to bar people. And the idea that you would default to barring somebody or making it very difficult for them to speak to me is a problem. Hey, let's start the conversation with Brad.

Welcome to this show, Brad. Hey, Ben. I think the key point you said. there was make it difficult for them. Yeah. So they're looking for, you know, ways around what everybody would expect would be normal behavior. And don't you think that's,

don't you think that's, I mean, the fact that they're learning sneaky political tricks already, the cynical stuff, they're not outright banning them. They're just putting, I mean, this is next level dark political arts stuff.

I agree. Now, one thing you were saying that you're worried about the next level of people that are at that university and how they're going to be, wait until they become taxpayers and have to pay bills and their money is being taken from them to pay for woke things and watch how fast that they turn into something different than they are now.

Yeah, that was it. If you're not a socialist when you're in your 20s, you don't have a heart, and if you're not a conservative in your 40s, you don't have a brain. You've got it. Thank you so much. Who are we talking to now? Hey, Louis, welcome to the show.

Lewis. Hey, Ben, you know, I find it, I'm one of those people that leans like, if you should be able to speak about whatever you want, and I find it very hypocritical that the universities will let extreme

Marxists speak about how much they detest or hate Caucasians, but yet someone who wants to talk about economic policy from a conservative branch is labeled a racist. You know, like, and I listen, to be fair, in this case, we're not talking, we're not saying

that that happened. But But this university, if anyone has followed the history of York, it's class warfare all the time. If the teachers aren't on strike, then the students are on strike or the staff is on strike. Everyone's always on strike. And so it's really hard to get an education there. And when you hear what they're all about these days in terms of the DEI and decolonizing education and knowledge, whatever the F that means.

Anyway, I'll only have a little bit of time left. So, Lewis, thanks so much for the call. and let's welcome Colin into the conversation. Hey, in 2004. In Calgary, I took a wrong turn down the street, and I encountered the wonderful men of law enforcement, full-tapped team going on with something, and I saw lights at the end of the alley,

and I did the east room and tried to get away because I had nothing to do with it. I got boxed in. I was ordered to do things. I followed every single order. I disagreed with every one of them because I had no clue it was happening. I threw my keys out the window.

They, you know, gun to the head, rub out in the snow, thrown in the back of a paddy wagon. And you know what? Agree or not, I did what I was told. When it was all said and done, I had some dirty clothes to wash, and I went about my day. Wow. It was hours. I was held for like four hours while they tried to figure out what was happening and why I was there and all that. But ultimately, sadly, in Minnesota or Minneapolis, I watched a video, and when I heard the guy yell, get out of the car.

Yeah. I saw the backup lights come on. Nothing's going to go well. No, it's not fortunate. And justified or not, anyone dying is a terrible thing. A hundred percent. And thank you for adding your voice to that. And look, I think once a cop yells out of the car, get out or stop the engine, get out of the car.

If you don't comply, bad stuff is going to happen. And everything else prior to that doesn't really matter. Again, I don't know yet, but if a cop says get out of the car, get on your knees, stop what you're doing. Show us your hands. You comply. That's the only option. I understand that this poor woman maybe, probably, possibly had her flight response kick in and she panicked. And in that case, that's one that.

See, then it feels to me like the onus flips at that. I don't know. See, I don't know. I don't know. And I wish more people would say they didn't know. Oh, I love doing this show. I love speaking to people in the news. I love helping share stories.

I love moving the ball down the field and hoping to keep the conversation moving in whatever direction it ends up moving in. And one of the people I love talking to so very much on this show is Dr. Eric Cam, economics professor at Toronto Metropolitan University. friend. How are you? Benedict, welcome to afternoons. Yeah, well, thank you very much. But, you know, can I tell you? I was up at five this morning and I got to the office at nine. Yeah, I actually heard that. I heard the guys on the morning show saying, why is he wandering around here? Maybe you forgot what time you said. I have got my bearings yet. But so here's what I'm learning is that we were, you know, we're talking

with Garnet Janus, who's a conservative MP who's been going on such a college campus tour asking college students and university students about how they feel about the job market and whether they think that they're better off today than their parents, a little bit of a fact-finding mission for him so that he can report back and use that in the House of Commons. And he was rebuffed with extreme prejudice by York University, which I hear, and I can't confirm this, but I've heard that they have a plan. They strongly encourage land acknowledgments at the start of every class, meeting and ceremonies and official events.

So that's the frame of mind of that university. Yeah, okay. So disclaimer, I spent 11 years at that university. So it's your fault. Yeah, I had, well, like everything, that's my wife. So I had some wonderful experiences. But York, listen, York was established by two groups of people, people that were far too communist to work at U of T and draft Dodgers from the states. So York University has always been exceptionally left communist socialist insert title here so really none of this is of any great surprise the only thing that makes me upset about this over and a part of the obvious is i heard what

your speaker had to say and and and there's nothing there's no there there the number one question i get from my students in first year is will i be as successful as my parents will i own a home in the GTA. Well, I work in the GTA. So this is the most germane topic right now in economics among young people. And so if we can't discuss that, then you might as well shutter the doors of the school. Well, and Garnet, Genesis, is showing up on your campus, is he not? Yeah. In fact, I have been playing sleuth, and I've been trying to reach out today to anybody who knows anything about this. And maybe I'm going to call it the good news is that nobody's heard anything. And so hopefully that means he'll have a nice, quiet, welcome.

successful day, but you can rest assured that I'm going to salute this and let you know if that's not the case. Okay, I like that. Hey, let's talk about this story that came out of Atlantic Canada. Ubisoft is one of the biggest video game makers in the world, and I guess they had an office there, and the employees unionized, and upon

unionizing, Ubisoft shuttered the company, shuttered the office. Yeah, and this is another wonderful topic for university students. This is what happens when people conflate the ideas of correlation and causation. Just because something happened after something does not mean it happened because of it. And the reality with Ubisoft is, yeah, they shut their Halifax studio and took out a bunch of jobs. But this company has been in hard economic times for a long time. And they have been really close to death

for a while. So the problem here is, is that you have a company that was insolvent that decided to shut its doors at around the same time that people decided, let's bring in a union. But they've got the arrows here all wrong, right? What happened here is people think what happened was let's unionize. Nope, the owner said let's shut it down. Not at all. What happened was, we are going broke. So therefore, let's bring in a union and see if that's any more successful.

It wasn't. And therefore, the company shut. This is not an anti-union or a union busting exercise, but I mean, listen, we have seen that in the past. I mean, we've seen it. I mean, we saw it at Starbucks, right? And coffee shops that decide they're going to unionize and then the next thing you know, everybody is let go. They're like, well, we're done. It's not in our economic, uh, it doesn't make economic sense for us to, to continue, um, in this current location. I remember stories about, you know, unions try to come to McDonald's in, in Montreal. And, uh, they said, no problem.

If you, they would, they would open up. And then the, the, the group would unionize. And then they would shut to that McDonald's and open another one. across the street. And then we just do that until the workers gave up. I mean, it's, and I, it kind of is what it is. It's his back and forth. Now, I want to be clear, I believe there's a very real place and a, of a great value for a lot of different unions and a lot of different spaces. And, and so I'm not, I'm not besmirching the value than the historic value of unions, but I don't believe that they necessarily belong in every single venue and every single employment situation.

Oh, I don't besmirch what historically unions did. What I besmirch is what they're doing today, which is jumping into things like Middle East politics, which, you know, gets me really annoyed. But listen, unionization, here's just a fact then. Unionization mostly occurs, often occurs, in very stressed workplaces. And so workers tend to unionize when they feel insecure,

which can make it look like the union caused the closure, right? Yeah. So, you know, listen, unionization may contribute to closures if you have a firm that's operating on very thin profit margins or the services already in decline or they face global competition, yes, it can lead to the shutting down of a firm. My point is, it doesn't have to. If you have a firm with stable demand, some pricing power, or there's a lot of firms that benefit from low turnover and higher morale, then you can't just come in and say, because there's a union brewing, then they're going to close the doors.

I'm just saying it's not a one-for-one relationship. Eric, what do we do to save our downtown cores? Because even though increasingly people are back to work, the rate of office vacancies in downtowns across this country continues to suffer. Yeah, very much so. And so I think the provincial government here is on to something, but they're not on to everything. They think if we're just going to send everybody back,

things are going to go back to the way they were before the pandemic. The problem is that's not the case. We know that people have been talking about work from home and the changing face of working for a very long time. So I like to think that what happened during the pandemic was they put that argument on steroids. So, yeah, if you increase some in-office work, it's going to boost the downtown economic activity of big cities.

And so, you know, restaurants, retail, shops, transit. That's going to be great. But on the other side, is it going to cure everything? No, because you're going to have some employees that say I have really high commuting cost, child care costs, and that's going to reduce my disposable income to the point where I don't even know if it's worth getting a job in the downtown core. So this is really a case, Ben, like so much of economics, there's no clear answer.

You're going to kind of hope that by bringing people back on a part-time basis two, three days a week, that the winners win more than the losers lose, but it really remains to be seen. Let me tell you, like, I'm an advocate for everyone getting back to the office. I think that's how you optimize work. It's my one man's opinion. That being said, I really do enjoy my commutes on Mondays and Fridays because there's, like, the roads are half as full.

And so I do appreciate for my own personal sanity. I kind of like it that there are fewer people who are commuting to the office, even though macro, I appreciate the need and the restaurants and the shops and the economic activity that comes from having all these people descend into a small, tight area like a downtown core. Well, and one more quick thing, Ben, which is if you look at this, statistics on productivity, and the stay-at-home crowd is not going to appreciate this. People are more productive in the office because there are synergies of working with others and working together and putting your heads together. And so if you're going to do this on a pure

productivity level, then everybody should be back five days a week, eight hours a day. But I just don't think after the pandemic that's happened anymore. I mean, listen, we said it, we said it about education. Our kids suffered. They could not learn as well because they weren't in a classroom setting. And do people think that, you know, collaborative work on Zoom is any different? It's fine. It's the best replacement you can have when you're not allowed being together. But there's no replacement for being together in the same room. When you're on a Zoom call, the call starts.

You get to work and then you just, you drop off. But in a real meeting situation, there's small talk. There's, you know, catching up. And you never know what can happen in those moments. You can have a brainstorm. All of a sudden, there's a light bulb goes off because somebody told a joke or somebody walked by and you remembered something.

None of that happens the second you check out of a Zoom. So I hope we get to a place that makes a little more sense, but right now it's still a little off kilter. Eric, thanks so much for being here. Doc returns this January on Global. My mind is trying to tell me something. With gripping new cases. If it doesn't work, you'll kill him.

It will work. They're going to make you the fall guy for this. I just don't want to fail anyone ever again. As her fight moves forward to recover what was lost. You can't undo what was done. Just let it go. Please. No.

And rebuild her life. whatever it takes. I'm here if you need to be. I know. Doc, all new Wednesday at 9 Eastern 10 Mountain on Global. Stream on Stack TV.