The Ben Mulroney Show - How is drug treatment a colonial concept? And why are the best new Canadians leaving?

Episode Date: November 19, 2025

GUEST:  Tristan Hopper/National Post columnist & author of the book Don't Be Canada: How One Country Did Everything Wrong All at Once GUEST:  Daniel Bernhard / Institute for Canadian Citizenship 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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listening to the Ben Mulroney show. Welcome. Thank you so much for being here. We appreciate your time. We appreciate you joining us and building this show and helping us turn the Ben Mulroney show into the best version of itself. I'm so happy to have with us now. A journalist I have a lot of respect for, he's funny, he's insightful, and he's got his finger on the pulse of things that we as Canadians should be paying very close attention to. He's also the author of a a book called Don't Be Canada, how one country did everything wrong all at once. He actually came on the show to talk about that book back in the day. Tristan Hopper of the National Post, welcome.

Thanks for having me. Hello. How are things going with the book, by the way? Canadian publishing is weird. I'll get an email saying like, oh, it's a smash hit. You've sold like a thousand copies. You know, that is successful. people have read it, but it's allowed me. I've gotten a lot more speaking engagements now because before I was just like, you're some jagoff national post reporter. But now it's, you know,

here's a published author. Oh, there we go. You've got the gravitas now. You've got the gravitas of being an author. I like that. I like that. All right. So the past few months, Tristan, I've been sort of worried about like what's going on with judges, you know, the judges, the judges, in this country that seem to be making decisions that end up making everybody's life harder. It makes it harder for politicians to do their jobs. It makes it harder for citizens to live their lives. Specifically, the Supreme Court of British Columbia's

couch and tribe decision. We saw what happened at the Canadian Supreme Court with no mandatory minimums for possession of child porn. And now there's not necessarily a judge, but certainly somebody who sits in judgment. the BC Human Rights Commissioner has put a, was it a ruling or was it a statement? It was a statement. And I will, yeah, I'll correct.

You might be getting her mixed up with the BC Human Rights Tribunal. So that's the one you usually hear about when it's like, oh, someone didn't use pronouns and now has to pay $50,000 in restitution. So they used to be the same thing, but this is different. This is just the BC Human Rights Office of the BC Human Rights Commissioner. So she can intervene in sort of legal things. So she doesn't have a judicial authority. I'm not going to pretend she's any less crazy than the BC Human Rights Tribunal.

So a lot of sort of overlap between the two. But yeah, she's just sort of a bureaucrat that rules on human rightsy things. Yeah. And it feels like she's putting herself in opposition to the government of British Columbia's late stage sort of evolution. on the issue of drug use and drug policy. Yeah, so she put out a statement, essentially saying, it was just a 25-paid statement saying, just in the context of this is BC is starting to dial back the extremes of harm reduction.

I mean, we're still BC, even our conservative governments are still going to be a little left-wing in some ways. And we have a BC-NDP government right now. And in the last three years, we have gone harder on harm reduction than anywhere else in the world. You know, I can get into details, but we're short on time. But recently, you've had BC Premier David E.B. saying, okay, we've gone too far. DeCriminalization was a mistake. Safer supply went too far. And you know what?

Some people, they're so addicted, there's so much a risk to themselves. They have to be involuntarily confined. So within that context of the most extreme harm reduction government on Earth saying, eh, not a great idea. You have the Office of the BC Human Rights Commissioner puts out a statement saying, Oh, all of this is wrong. It all has, we just need more harm reduction. What's interesting about this report is the language in it.

And you can read some of the language in the National Post. You know, it's colonialist, racist. All the buzzwords. Law enforcement. All of that stuff. This is pretty standard language. I mean, you can read this from any number of public health bodies or sort of legal advocacy groups. I mean, the reason you get low barrier shelters filled with people just, you know, being paid to do drugs

for eternity is because of these underlying ideologies. But I guess what's unique about this is it's 2025. We've tried all of these things. We've leaned harder into these ideas than anyone on earth. It is almost entirely failed. And you still have a high-level bureaucrat, one of the highest paid bureaucrats in the BC government saying, you know what?

The last 10 years didn't happen. You just do it harder than we've been doing before. Yeah, don't look at the negative knock-on effects of this policy. Don't look at any of that. Don't look at that, how harmful it's been to the drug addict themselves. Instead, we're just going to look at this from an ideological perspective in a vacuum. Yeah. And BC is sort of a weird scenario because, I mean, I can personally see any number of lefties who 10 years ago totally would have signed on with like, you know, let's do safe injection.

That's sort of a route to treatment. Let us try this as hard as we can and then spread the model. A lot of those people just, you know, they've noted. transit. They've noticed the downtown. They've noticed civic life has actively deteriorated because of drug use. So I've seen any number of people. Norman Krog, the mayor of Nanaimo being a good example. And there's any number of other. Yeah, we had we had him on the show a little while ago. Yeah. Yeah. Just realizing, you know, I am progressive in my sentiments, but you know, something is not working here. So this this stands out just because of the context.

that none of that has been learned and it's just, you know, the last 10 years of failed buzz where it's put into a very, very expensive report. This office doesn't do very much and it costs $8 million. And Tristan, does this statement, does this report have any forces, have any influences, have any sway or is it just, is it just words that somebody said and put into a report? The good news is no, but I guess, you know, the warning would be, If you can have people at higher a echelons, I mean, the B.C. Human Rights Commissioner isn't the BC Human Rights Tribunal or any number of judicial conferences. So it's sort of a window into what elite thought can look like and how detached from reality it can be. I mean, you mentioned judges at the beginning. I'll see Normies on Facebook saying, like, how could they possibly make a decision like this? I mean, it's not cruel and unusual punishment to put a pedophile in jail for more than a year. And, you know, you, Sometimes the explanation is you have a person who can write a 22-page report saying that any stigmatization of drugs is a colonialist racist imposition, which is just bonkers.

It's bonkers, and it feels like it was written. It's like it's the perspective of a first year left-leaning college student, right? Who has it? I've been reading a lot of government reports from just 10, 15 years ago, and I'll get the Ben's. with how much sort of text is deteriorated. I mean, a great example, the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, fantastic report, lots of new evidence, well written, it's meant to be accessible. You read that and you're like, this was written by grown-ups.

Yeah. And to read your standard government report now, just like you said, indistinguishable from sort of a first-year undergrad. Yeah, but this speaks to a larger problem that at some point we're going to have to deal with in this country, which is, you know, I know this person is not necessarily part of the judiciary, but it's somebody who is a learned person whose opinion is, I'm sure, in certain circles taken seriously. But by and large, it feels like our judiciary is increasingly detached from the reality that we are all living in.

And a lot of these decisions that are coming down are making it harder to get through the day, either as a politician or as a person on the street. Oh, yeah, yeah, I can get into, which is, I've been looking into sort of the origins of this, the debate over the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. And interestingly, you look at the three premiers who were very much opposed to the Charter of Rights because they assumed it would give, it was essentially, they were exactly right. It would enshrine an elite class of judges deciding what is right and wrong for everybody else who couldn't stop them. And the most compelling character was the Saskatchewan Premier at the time, Alan Blakeney, of Manitoba Premier. And he was an old school lefty. He was an Andy Peer.

And his argument was, if you put judges in charge, you know, I'm an old socialist. I don't trust the, I don't trust the elites. And there's nothing more elite than a judge. So we really shouldn't be putting them in charge of these things. So it's weird to see that discourse from the early 1980s. And they're 100% right. Are you going to be writing on that? Oh, hopefully.

Someone will ask me to do that. I think you should. I want to see. There actually is a podcast episode. I don't want to veer people away from this great podcast. But there is a national post podcast coming out about that exact subject. Fantastic. Tristan Hopper, always love having you on the show.

Thank you so much. Don't be a stranger. Anytime. Thank you. All right. Coming up, a major red flag for the immigration system that Ottawa should take a good, long, hard look at. Stick around. All right.

We've been talking about immigration. for as long as I've been doing the Ben Mulroney show and the consensus has been that we used to have a great system. We had a system that was envied around the world. It was a model for other countries to emulate where we found ways to bring and attract the smartest and best people from all points in the world to come here and marshal their talents and their resources

to help build Canada into the best version of itself. That system does not exist anymore. And it's going to be a long road back to getting back to the place where we could be proud of it, but it didn't matter whether you were left, right, up, or down. Everybody agreed that that was the way to build this country by way of immigration. Well, there's a new report from the Institute for Canadian Citizenship and the Conference Board of Canada.

It's called the Leaky Bucket, 2025. Retention challenges in highly skilled immigrants and in-demand occupations. It finds that immigrants continue to leave Canada at near-record rates. and the most alarming part is which immigrants are leaving. So to talk about this, please welcome to the show, Daniel Bernhardt of the Institute for Canadian Citizenship. Daniel, thank you so much for being here. That's great to talk to you again, Ben. All right, so let's talk about this.

One in five immigrants leave Canada within 25 years of landing, and a lot of those people are the highly educated immigrants. That's concerning. Yeah, it's absolutely concerning. And I think, you know, you alluded to this earlier, there's a lot of talk about it. immigration right now. There are a lot of Canadians who are uneasy about the immigration system and who want there to be less immigration. I don't always agree with some of these arguments, but I understand where they're coming from. And the prevailing narrative seems to be, all right, let's refocus on quality over quantity. That's, I think, what I'm hearing a lot of people say.

And what this report shows us is, well, you know, we're having a lot of trouble retaining the highest quality people. So people with PhDs, for example, leave at twice the rate as in immigrants with a bachelor's degree. We have huge shortages in the health care system. Six and a half million of us don't have a family doctor. Twenty-eight thousand people died last year in Canada while awaiting medical care. But immigrant healthcare professionals leave at 36% above the average for all immigrants. So this is a real question about who loses. And we talk about immigration as charity a lot. Like we're doing people a favor. How many can we permit? How many can we afford to let in.

But I actually think we should look at our own self-interest here. Who loses when these healthcare professionals leave? It's you and me who are waiting longer in the hospital. So for our own self-interest, we need to not just attract but retain these people. Canada's strong when the most talented people from around the world want to play for our team. They want to be here. That's a problem for us. So, Daniel, give us some context.

How does this flight from Canada by these highly skilled immigrants? How does it compare to, you know, different eras in our past? Because I have to assume this was not always the case. Well, it has been a slow and steady upward trend for about 40 years. And part of the challenge is that no one knew this because no one bothered to check. So three years ago, we started publishing this report because I personally was asking, all right, we're talking so much about how many people are coming, but how many are staying? And nobody knew.

The government didn't know. The think tanks didn't know. Wait, wait, wait, hold on. Hold on, Daniel, you're telling me that the government let all the people in, but wasn't really paying attention to those who were leaving? Yeah, nobody, nobody had bothered to check. And the media didn't check. It was like we had not contemplated the possibility that anybody might ever want to leave.

Who would ever want to leave Canada? Well, it turns out some of the people who just got here. Yeah, so we published this data. We're like, hey, guys, this has actually been on the slow and steady rise for 40 years, but it's gotten significantly worse in recent years. This report now shows four years in a row of rising rates of onward migration, and there's a bit of a delay in the data. So once we actually catch up to the present day in a couple of years' time,

it's likely going to be a lot worse. So this is a real challenge for us. And when we talk about our goals, you know, the prime minister has said, for example, that Canada should double its non-U.S. trade exports in the next 10 years. I happen to think that's a decent idea. but that gets a hell of a lot harder when experienced executives with global rolodexes that are tied into these, you know, commercial networks in the countries we want to

reach, they're leaving the country at a hundred and ninety three percent above the average for all immigrants. So this is really a story of avoidable self-defeat. Yeah. And we need to make sure that, you know, we're careful what we wish for. We say, oh, well, if they're gone, so what, bye-bye, you know, we can't afford to have you here. Well, I think actually we can't afford not to have them. Yeah, well, that's, that's right. It's so much harder for Canada to achieve its goals.

Daniel, has any study been done into asking these people who are leaving why they want to leave? Yes, we've done this at the Institute for Canadian Citizenship, why they want to leave, and actually also for the ones who don't leave, why they want to stay. And these are, they look a little different. So asking people why they want to leave, we get, you know, pretty obvious answers. you know, housing's expensive, haven't you heard? The health care system has challenges in it. People are, in some cases, unsatisfied with the rigor of the education their kids are getting. You know, the usual complaints that all of us in Canada experience, but many immigrants have a choice.

They have a country of origin to go back to, or if you're a nurse, you can basically go like anywhere else in the developed world because they are all competing for this talent against Canada. So people have these options. But when we ask them why they want to stay, this actually gets really, really interesting. Immigrants are patient. They're not greedy. They're not looking to make a gazillion dollars right away.

They don't have unrealistic expectations. But they say, I need a credible hope that tomorrow will be better than today. And more than that, the number two factor keeping people in Canada is a sense of Canadian identity and belonging. Do my kids have friends? Do they play road hockey? Do we get invited to the barbecue every now and then? Do my coworkers take me out for lunch? Do I feel like Canada will do the right thing as a country of integrity?

When people feel attached to this country, they'll stay even if the professional stuff and the money stuff isn't working out right away. But Daniel, I'm sorry. Canada is the first post-national state. We don't have any of those things that bind us together. You didn't know that? Well, there's a politician who's now retired who made that claim, whether or not he was right. It remains a matter of some debate. He absolutely was not right. And I'm going to beat that drum until I've been.

until I can't beat it anymore until my hands are bloody because that was one of the... Because he said it doesn't make it true. And I think we've seen now in the response to the tariffs, a great degree of Canadian pride. When the World Cup comes up, we're going to see a lot of flag waving. Canadians are proud to be Canadian. And many immigrants are very proud to be Canadian. And we have so many different examples of that. So let me ask before, we only have a couple, we only have a few minutes left.

and I want to take it to try to be productive. Like we've identified the problem. How do we solve it? There's got to be sort of a quick fix to keep those who might want to leave. How do we keep them here? And then how do we change the system so we don't have to worry about this in the future? Well, it'll be a slow, you're setting your setup. It'll be a long road.

I agree with that. The first thing is just recognizing it's a problem and trying to solve it. The federal government right now, to my count, has zero people in the, immigration ministry responsible for retention. There's nobody. I'm sorry, we got to stop. Again, I've got to stop you there. There's nobody working in immigration

whose focus is making sure that the people we've brought here stay here. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, that's right. I mean, we have other ministries, et cetera, but there is no retention mandate. There's no associate deputy minister for retention or anything like that. So I think that's definitely, yeah, that's definitely got a change.

and that's true at the provincial level. That's been true amongst liberal and conservative governments. Like this is not a recent thing that they demolish the retention department or something like that. It's been a longstanding fact of... But for the longest time, we didn't really have to worry about retention because people were staying more or less. Is that fair to say? Well, they've been staying less and less. We're like the frog in the pot and we haven't really noticed it until now we've shone a light on it.

And people say, actually, you know what? We're not so happy about this. So that's the first thing. I think the second thing is what would that retention team do? And in my mind, one of the things that they would do is start to invest in services that are not just geared towards the most vulnerable people in desperate circumstances. So most of our settlement services help people learn English or French. They help them make a CV or something like that, really basic stuff.

And if you're a refugee and you fled some horrible situation, I'm glad that those services are available for you. But for most immigrants, if you're a PhD from, I don't know, the University of Melbourne or something, and you've come to work here at an aerospace company to build the defense industry of the future, you don't need someone to help you write a CV. You don't need to learn English. We need to be convincing you that your decision to move to Canada was the right one. There we go. And that's the service that we, I think, need to start moving towards the mindset shift that we could all undertake.

Daniel Bernhardt, thank you so much for being here. a really important report that you guys have put out. I appreciate it. Thank you so much for being here. Dr. again, soon, Ben. Thank you. Tell you all about it next.