The Ben Mulroney Show - Education issues in Alberta/Crime going up/EV headaches to come?

Episode Date: March 12, 2026

GUEST: Professor Dave Snow / Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Guelph Guest: Dr. Eric Kam, Economics Professor at Toronto Metropolitan University 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

This podcast is brought to you by the National Payroll Institute, the leader for the payroll profession in Canada, setting the standard of professional excellence, delivering critical expertise, and providing resources that over 45,000 payroll professionals rely on. All right, here's what we're talking about on the podcast today. The education numbers in Alberta. The complexity of the classroom today is at a point where I just got to shrug my shoulders and say, how do we fix this? How do we help our teachers? How do we support them in their goal of, educating our kids. What do you do when a big chunk of your students don't speak English? What do you do with learning disabilities, with anxiety, with trauma at home? This is the front line of education for a lot of our teachers. And at some point, we got to fix this. And the crime numbers aren't getting any better either. There's a big story out of the McDonald-Loreau Institute. We drill into those numbers. And Eric Cam joins us to talk about what happens when money is mobile. So let's get right into it, the Ben Mulroney Show podcast.

If you left the Olympics feeling that there was a sense of unfinished business with our American friends, as it related to one country versus the other, for all the bragging rights, you feel that somehow we were shortchanged on the ice? Well, there could be a chance for revenge or just. or a sense of taking something that belongs to them as they took something that belongs to us. Congratulations to Canada on advancing in the World Baseball Classic beating Cuba yesterday. For context, in five previous tournaments, Canada has never advanced the elimination rounds. We beat Cuba 7-2 yesterday. And before we talk about what's next,

Fox Sports was very impressed, and I mean very impressed, with some Canadian fans who were watching the game. And I don't know how many people were in this line of Canadians, but the way the video looks is it looks like it's two guys. I suspect it's more. but they took down what my intrepid producer and I tried to count very hard with the perspective and the angle.

But it was at least, and I mean at least 30 cans of beer. That is very impressive work. Yeah, that's all you can say. And by the way, these guys looked sober as a priest. So they were enjoying the game. And look, we've advanced. And you would think that because we advanced, the next game that we would have would be against a lesser competitor. Nope.

Our next, our prize for advancing is playing the United States tomorrow. And who's on that team intrepid producer Mike Drilley? A bunch of Hall of Famers to be. Yeah. Aaron Judge. You know, just a bunch of guys. It's an all-star team. It's an all-star team.

But look, look, they lost to Italy. And granted, it's Americans of Italian extraction. But it's still not the U.S. team. And if they beat them, why can't Canada? Canada has some great, strong players. And we beat Cuba. Cuba, you know, slouch. You know what I think the secret was for Italy?

And we're going to get to this later in the show. They have an espresso machine in the dugout. And they're the guys, you know, you usually have Gatorade and stuff. Well, the Italian players are taking shots of espresso between innings. And they interviewed one of the guys, the guy who hit a couple of home runs the other day. And he goes, oh, yeah, I've had three shots for the game. Well, yeah, we're talking a little bit later in the show about the magic number of cups of coffee to help your mental health. There's a study.

And they say, what happens if you go beyond that, which I do? So it may explain some of my rants on the Ben Mulroney show, but we will delve into that a little bit later. In the meantime, let's focus up on education. I've said many times, and I don't think this is a hot take. I think this is a fair and empathetic and understanding and respectful way to look at our education system and what we as parents and what we as taxpayers expect and want out of the public school system. I think the goal of any public school system in North America should be twofold. the education of our kids and the support of our teachers in furtherance of that first goal.

That's it. Right. That's, and it sounds simple. We talk a lot about all the extra stuff that some activist teachers and activist executives and school boards and trustees try to get away with. And we call them out on this show. Not because we are attacking educators. Frontline educators, absolutely not. the respect that I have and that we have at this show for frontline educators and people who

buy in to that vision that I just told you about have my eternal support and respect. And I will work an endeavor on this show to use this show and this microphone to highlight the great teachers and to also shine a spotlight on where I think the pain points are. And boy do I think we've identified a pain point in the province of Alberta. So there's a and look, and also call a spade a spade and be honest when it's required. Kudos to the CBC for highlighting this story, talking about complexity of the classroom in Alberta. 4,486 Alberta classrooms are officially classified. as high complexity.

That's according to the Alberta Education's database. What does that mean? Well, in the Calgary Board of Education alone, the 27,500 students now have special education needs. I want to pull up this article. I just want to read a little bit of it to you. I don't like reading too much on this show,

but let me just read this. It was two years ago, and this teacher from grade, one had to restrain a child in her arms because he was banging his head on the floor. The side of her mouth swelled from a headbut, but she continued teaching. The substitute assistant didn't know the right way to hold this autistic child, and this teacher had 26 other children in the classroom. She said 10 of them were learning English and two spoke almost no English at all. They had seven different languages between them. There was also a student

with a speech delay. One, she said, described as gifted, but with severe anxiety. And another that she said showed symptoms of ADHD. There was one who recently lost their dad. And another who was removed from their home by the police. This isn't grade one. There are, the vast majority of classrooms in Alberta have inex 29 or more students. Sorry, that's the highest rate. That's not the majority. That's the silo that has the most students in it. So this is what teachers are dealing with today. And, you know, my producer, Mike, was like, what's going to be your conclusion?

My conclusion, and I said, my conclusion is, I don't know how to fix this. This feels like the intersection of so many different problems, of funding issues, and living at a time where we have the medical expertise and the desire to pinpoint in each student if they have a learning disorder, what it's called, but not having the tools then to help them with that learning disorder. Back in the day, there was no ADHD, there was no anxiety,

there was no learning disabilities, there was nothing like that. There was just a classroom full of students that some of them learned and some didn't. And the teacher went at the pace of the curriculum. and if kids fell behind, they fell behind and that was it. Now, I'm not saying, please don't put words in my mouth. I'm not saying that that is the right way to go at all. I'm glad that we can help each student and identify their issues. But if we can't, if we can't, sorry, I'm glad we can identify the issues,

but if we can't then help and figure out a curriculum that makes sense for them, then everyone is going to learn at the speed of the student that learns the slowest. or in this case, in the case of the classroom I just brought up, I mean, is anyone learning anything at all? If you view this as a journey and where the teacher is walking the children down the path of the curriculum, well, in the case of this classroom, I would challenge you to say that they've even taken the first step because she can't corral all of them for everybody to walk in the same direction. And so, yeah, I don't know what to do here. I wish I did.

I would argue that the instinct to say, well, we've got to put more money at it, absolutely more money has to go towards this. But there's no way, no way on God's green earth that that is the end of the solution. I promise you, if you threw more money at this and that's it, absolutely not. I don't know what the solution is, but I can promise you I feel for each and every one of these teachers, each and every one of them. We got a text about that conversation we were having about the complexity of classrooms. We used the Alberta specifically as an example. Before we jump into our next conversation, I want to read to you a text that we got. Classes of 25 to 30 would be a dream.

Many of my classes have 35 plus kids in them. Last year, I had a class of 37 eighth grade math students, and 17 of them were working at a grade 5 level or below. This is grade 8 math. Two things I would say, inclusion doesn't work in most cases. Teaching more than two abilities of students at the same time becomes nearly impossible and leaves you as a teacher feeling like you're doing a crappy job regardless of the effort you put in. The second is our society is so much different. Way less parents attend interviews. Kids don't show up as often as there are so many social problems.

I'm not sure what the solution is, but I'm 10 years from retirement and I don't think I'll make it. Oh my goodness. First of all, thank you for sharing. Thank you for the work that you do. and I hope that you, at the end of a good long day, you take good care of yourself. Wow. Okay, now we're going to move on to a topic that comes up, in my opinion, far more often than we would like on this show. But we follow the bouncing ball.

When the stories are there, we talk about them. And that story is obviously about what we feel is the rising tide of violent crime across this country. So let's bring in Professor Dave Snow, Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Guelph. and he's the co-author of a new report for the McDonnell Laurier Institute that reveals rising crime, falling clearance rates, and a bail system widely seen as broken. Professor, welcome. Thanks for having me.

You know, as I told people in the lead up to this, that your results probably, sadly, won't surprise as many people as it should, but this is the country we've been living in recently. Why don't you tell us what you learned? Yeah, so what we do is there's been four of these report cards over the last 10 years. We've done two in the last three years, my co-author, Richard Audis and I. And we take a pile of data, 27 different metrics, so something like violent crime rate is one metric. Confidence in police survey data, that's another one.

27, mostly from Statistics Canada. We compare all the provinces and all the territories, and we give them a grade on each individual metric. We divided into five categories of the objectives of the criminal justice system, and then we grade the provinces and the territories overall and rank them against each other relative to one another. And what it tells us broadly is two things. First, how the provinces and territories are doing relative to one another. The EI's criminal justice system is performing a lot better than Manitobas. But it also gives us a sense of what the trends have been over the last five and ten years at the provincial and federal level.

And on that way of measuring things, our conclusion is that the criminal justice system is not performing as well as it was even two years ago in our last report card. Okay. So let's clear something up for me because we talk about crime stories as they pop up in the news or as we learn from the police. And then we get accused of rage farming because crime is down across the kind of violent crime is down. Is violent crime down across the country? No. Well, I should say no, up to 2014. So a different study I did drawing from my McDonnell-Lore work just a few weeks ago.

I looked at something that Statistics Canada calls the Violent Crime Severity Index, which doesn't just measure how much violent crime there is. And violent crime has been, you know, rising more or less between 2014 and 2024, which is the last available Statistics Canada data for the whole country. But also we found that violent crime, severity. So the more, you know, for example, in this complicated index, one homicide is worth 306 assaults, you know, it's a more severe the crime, yeah. That that's been increasing considerably over the last 10 years and that in many provinces, it's the highest it's ever being

since Statistics Canada, I should just finish that, I shouldn't say it's ever been since Statistics Canada created this index in 1998. Now, I do, I do think I know why there's sort of this narrative of crime dropping and specific crimes dropping, and we can get to that, but I I assume that's what your next question is going to be asking. What I wanted to know, though, is because, yeah, people feel less safe. And I know that sometimes they'll blame the media. If it bleeds, it leads. But I think it's a little different in the case of Canada.

I think that, as you just said, there's a type of crime and a type of criminal that is emboldened. You know, we're seeing, and also social media helps as well. There's a lot of smash and grabs, public, overt, brazen crime that I don't think we're necessarily used to. People deciding, oh, I'm going to go into that person's house and I'm going to steal what I want. I'm willing to kill to get it. And we're seeing more and more of those, or at least they are presenting and they're publicized more. And I think that's contributing to people feeling like crime is at an all-time high. Absolutely. And so I think first and foremost, all the public opinion data that we're seeing, whether it's Statistics Canada polls or polls from,

you know, more recent polls from polling agencies, shows that can't Canadians are increasingly more concerned about crime and less likely to feel safe in their communities. And we cite a lot of that data in our report. The second is that looking at the numbers for things like property crime and violent crime between 2020 and 24, we see violent crime went up in nine of the 10 provinces. Property crime went up in 8 of the 10. Violent crime severity continues to rise. Now, it is true that there was with violent crime and violent crime severity a little bit of a leveling off between

2003 and 20, sorry, 2020 and 2024. But that just means that the 10-year rise that happened, we've then sort of stayed put at that level for the next year. And of course, it varies depending on provinces, a lot of Western provinces. It's still going up. I do think that what happens sometimes is there are people, you know, and I'll be frank, there are media outlets and individuals and politicians who want to push a narrative of rising crime because it helps. And there are others who want to push narrative of decreasing crime. I'm interested in the data and what they show, and if it shows crime is going down, that's what we'll say in our next report.

But you often hear a lot of times crime is down since 1992 when it was at its highest. That's overall crime. And we said that's true. And then we looked, and it turns out 40% of Canadians weren't more before 1992. I know I'm a lot more concerned with what's happened in my community over the last 10 years than what it was 34 years ago. And a lot of times as well, these organizations and these people, these criminologists who will say crime is down, they talk about overall crime in the abstract.

But when you actually break it down and look at violent crime severity or specific crimes, you've seen a sustained rise from 2014 to 2024, at least. Professor, what about, you know, there's an issue. You say major concerns include indigenous overrepresentation, low public confidence in a revolving door bail system that undermines community safety. Faith in the system, I have to believe, is very low. And this idea that if you do a crime, you're not going to do the time that we would expect you to do. And when it comes to indigenous overrepresentation, how do you square that with, again, this increasing, this rise in stories that we hear of violent criminals who, for reasons of race or culture, are going to get a discount on their term in prison because of where they come from and because of their background.

You know, and there was one today about a black man who, in British Columbia, who murdered his girlfriend, got second degree, second degree murder, but was given a haircut on his time because he, because of the racism that he experienced. And then there was a story last week about a criminal who came from the First Nations who actually boasted that he was going to get his glad you discount. So I'm trying to, like, it seems to me we've put ourselves. in a little bit of a pickle where in an effort to show, you know, show how empathetic we are, we've actually found a way to undermine faith in the system. Yeah, I think that's largely correct. And so I'd say there's sort of two separate things going on here. One is just measuring the overrepresentation of indigenous people in custody and in a criminal justice system.

And so we have a pretty simple formula. We say, what's the indigenous proportion of the population in a province? and then what's the representation in new admissions to custody? And across Canada, it's more than six times. So Ontario is a good example. 3% indigenous, 18% of new custodial admissions are indigenous. You've got a six times over-representation rate because 3 times 6 is 18. And so it is absolutely true and reflects a general sense of, I think,

unfairness in the criminal justice system at the broad level amongst Canadians that, you know, we don't want a criminal justice system that is over-representing any particular. group. And so there is, and so against that, though, there is, there are all these mitigating mechanisms within the criminal justice system in the Criminal Code of Canada and according to Supreme Court jurisprudence. And you mentioned Gladou reports and the ability for sentences to be reduced on the basis of background, particularly for indigenous peoples. And there has been increasing attention in the media to, it's not difficult to find individual cases where people are getting reduced sentences based on Gladue reports or analogous things based on their

demographic characteristics. What we conclude, without delving too much into the debate about, you know, should we have glad you reports, should we have sentencing discounts based on one's racial, ethnic, or indigenous background, we say clearly these were designed to reduce overrepresentation in the criminal justice system. And they're not working. No, they're not working. Most of the numbers show indigenous overrepresentation going up.

So people can have debates on what we ought to do, but it's very clear that this is not achieving the goal that it was supposed to achieve. And it's probably leading to more public dissatisfaction as more and more of these stories come out, particularly for horrific violent crimes. Well, if people want to read the report, which I believe is entitled Rising Crime, eroding trust report on the criminal justice system, volume four. They can go to the McDonald-Lorier Institute website. And one of the co-authors has been speaking with us,

Professor Dave Snow of the University of Guelph. Thank you very much. I really appreciate your time and your insights. Thanks for having me. All right. When we come back, we're going to be talking about what happens when billionaires decide that they're getting tax too much. Well, you can guess what that is. We're going to be joined by Eric Cam of Toronto Metropolitan University to discuss.

Don't go anywhere. Well, coffee seems to be a theme in the show today. The Italian team in the World Baseball Classic seems to be hitting dingers because they have an espresso machine in their law and their locker room. And the dugout. Oh, it's in the dugout. That's awesome. And then later on in the show,

we're going to be talking about how a certain amount of coffee every day is very good for your mental health. And more than that, probably not so much. And now we're talking Starbucks. The former Starbucks CEO, Howard Schultz, who's a billionaire, says that he and his wife are relocating from Seattle to Florida as they enter retirement.

They're noting family reasons, but there's also the issue of the millionaire tax. And so to talk about that and a few other stories, we're joined by our friend Eric Cam, economics professor at Toronto Metropolitan University. Eric, welcome. Benedict, I am deep in the heart of Florida right now, and I have to tell you before we dig in, everybody here in Coconut Creek not only sends their love, but also their thanks for always supporting our community. Well, thank you very much. You send it right back to them, my friend.

All right, so let's talk about this millionaire tax in, is it Seattle or is it in Washington State? It's in Washington State. Of course, Seattle's the biggest city in Washington State. But so what you've got going on here is he can try to sell this as some family commitment thing. And I might buy a little bit of it. But there's a broader economic trend then. Florida has become just a magnet for wealthy individuals and major investors. Thanks, in my opinion, largely to its lack of state income tax. and what is an incredibly business-friendly regulatory environment.

And I think there's five pillars on which that stands. Again, there's no state income tax. There is really business-friendly regulatory environment. Population growth happens, but it's not ridiculous like Toronto has been. And then it's so that's what generates. When you put that all together, this has just become a huge financial hub. And not to mention its location, which is so perfect for trade and tourism. And as you know, as somebody who works in the startup field, wealth tends to fall.

follow wealth. And so this is just, this has just become a positive externality of people who are here to help other people get their companies off the ground. And right now in Florida, it's a perfect storm, the right kind of storm. Well, yeah. And look, meanwhile, the company that Howard Schultz was the CEO of, Starbucks, is opening up a new corporate office in Nashville. They claim it's to support expansion of the, into the central U.S. and the south parts of the northeast. But they say, and they say Seattle's going to remain. It's, you know, it's, you know, it's, global North American headquarters. But like honestly, if if things keep going the way they're going, well, they have a,

they've just, they've built themselves a place to land. You don't jump somewhere unless you know where you're going to land. And Nashville seems to be a nice place for them to land. You know what? I don't believe you become a billionaire by being stupid. And Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, Jeff Bezos, they can't all be wrong, Ben. There's not, there's a reason why they're all locating to Miami. Yeah.

Well, let's just say Florida anyway. And look, the economic implications are huge, right? There's low tax competition between the states, the tax base, luxury real estate is here in droves. And again, I'm going to draw on these multiplier effects that when you spend a dollar, it multiplies through the economy and grows. And nowhere is that happening faster right now than in South Florida. Yeah. And look, the issue in New York City is going to become quite evident if Kathy Hokel, the governor, sticks to her guns and she has been consistent throughout the entire conversation with the new socialist

mayor of New York City. I am not going to raise taxes to help you build your socialist utopia. She said that before the election, during the election and after. And so he says he's going to have to raise taxes. And when he does, the people who can move will move or are more likely to move rather. And those people are the richest ones, the ones who pay out the lion's share of the taxes that pay for the services for everyone. And I believe, as I'm sure you believe, in a robust social safety net, but when you keep saying, using sort of really coded language like the millionaires have to pay their fair share, the richest have to pay their fair share. Implicit in that is they've been getting away with highway robbery. At some point, they're going to say, you know what? You've

taken as much of my flesh as I'm willing to give you. And now I'm going to decamp to a place that respects me and the fact respects the fact that I'm, you know, me as an entrepreneur, I've opened businesses, I have employed people, and now I'm going to take my, I'm going to take my winnings and I'm going to go somewhere that respects that. Well, and that's right. And, you know, we talk about, as economists, we talk about labor mobility and probably luckily the greatest area where labor is mobile is among the very, very wealthy. And so let's just put this in perspective and call a spade a spade, okay?

The mayor of New York is like the mayor of Toronto. They're both idiots. And there's a lot of reasons for that. But the number one reason for that, like the mayor came out this week in Toronto and said, maybe we should start taxing the value of your home. This is what they're doing then. Right now, young people can't find work because there's no job creation. Old people, if they're going to tax the value of their home,

what they're going to say is we're going to take your biggest asset, the thing that turns into your retirement, and we're going to take the equity out of it. So in other words, you can't be young in Canada. You can't be old in Canada. It's like a sports team. You can't win on the road. You can't win at home. Where are you going to play, Ben?

Yeah. Well, I'll tell you, another place that they're moving. If they decide not to move to Florida, a lot of these rich people and their companies are going to be moving to Texas. They've set up a stock exchange down there. And there's going to be a bullet train that goes between the three largest metropolises. It's low tax. business friendly, the temperature is right, you're centrally located where you can go to the East

Coast and the West Coast. And so if it's like I said, it's not Miami, it's going to be Austin or Dallas or Fort Worth. That's right. And so, you know, I gave you those five pillars of why I think that South Florida is doing so well. You can just turn them upside down. And then you have every idea why Canada is failing right now. We don't have any of those things. So of course that people that are progressive, I mean, in a business and entrepreneurial sense, they're going to move to a place that supports that, that gives you some benefit, some research, some development, some competition, and some subsidies for innovation. Why would you move somewhere that doesn't? And right now, ladies and gentlemen, that's Canada. Yeah. Well, meanwhile, let's look at Honda. I mean,

Honda has posted profits every single year for 70 years, but not last year. What happened? Well, you remember when Honda used to make it simple? Now Honda kind of makes it stupid, which is that they went all in on their EV mandate, right? Yeah. And government sometimes supports specific industries, and then again, sometimes they don't, right? And that's what's going on here. The global automotive industry is moving from internal combustion engines to electric vehicles. But to do that, we know we have to influence behavior, Ben.

People respond to incentives. the government has pulled out the incentive to move. So what's going to happen is people, of course, why are they going to buy electric vehicles that we know are more expensive that in Canada we know run poorer in the winter? So for the global auto industry, the message here is clear, Ben, the transition to EVs is going to take a lot longer and cost a lot more than companies and people initially anticipated.

So automakers are now reassessing where should we invest. And a lot of them are shifting their focus now back to faster-growing. markets, faster growing industries, faster growing countries. Yeah. And lastly, I'll just point this out. The story of what happened to Porsche is, they're going to be studying this for years. They, on paper, they slash their operating profit by 98% dropping from $8 billion to just $135 million. And a lot of people are pointing to going all in on EVs and competing with the Chinese, who just do it better and cheaper. Thank you very much, my friend. Enjoy Florian. Florida. Stay healthy, Benedict.

Beed product. Firefighters miss their lives every single day. Fridays on Global. We're going to get you out of here, bud. This is the greatest job in the world. An all new fire country. Firefighter, Leon. I need you to make your own rest of assessment.

We're going in. Deep in the woods behind you, there's a wildfire. We're in game now, boys. Three! TV's hottest show. It's off. Be safe. Keeps getting hotter.

Will you help? Happy to. Fire Country. All new Fridays at 90s, on Global. Stream on Stack TV.