The Ben Mulroney Show - Library transformations in Toronto and London's landlord homeless problems

Episode Date: September 18, 2025

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When you're with Annex Plathom, you get access to exclusive dining experiences and an annual travel credit. So the best tapas in town might be in a new town altogether. That's the powerful backing of Amex. Terms and conditions apply. Learn more at Amex.ca. Welcome to the Ben Mulroney show. Thank you so much for spending a bit of your Thursday with us.

It's the 18th of September. And we appreciate it. We hope everybody had a great end to their Wednesday. If you were driving home on the 401, let's hope that you did not experience what I think a lot of people saw on their social media feed. Imagine just driving down the road. happy to be on the highway and and uh for at one point you realize oh it's it's not bumper to bumper traffic this is going to be a nice drive home and what you see is uh coming at you're like am i

seeing this right and sure enough what you see coming at the opposite direction is a car in the middle lane which is where you find yourself and this was what happened to somebody driving on near Milton, a 21-year-old Toronto man facing charges after allegedly driving the wrong. I love when we say allegedly. We have to say that even though we can clearly see it happening. The wrong way on the 401 in Milton, side-swiping vehicles, crashing into a light pole and then fleeing on foot. Dash cam footage shows Dark Honda Civic, narrowly avoiding a head-on crash. And it's true, he avoided head-on crash, but he clipped the car with the dash cam video.

This happened on September 7th. The driver was arrested shortly after by Mississauga OPP. He faces charges including dangerous driving, failing to remain, and wrong way driving with sobriety tests pending and possible further charges. This is just, for all I know, this used to happen all the time. We just didn't have the dash cam footage to make it a story that we would talk about. But it is what it is. Now, if by the time you got home safely, you were looking forward to hearing

watching your favorite late-night talk show, Jimmy Kimmel, where you were S-O-L yesterday. He was fired, the show canceled. I might not be using the exact expressions. Put on indefinite. Put on indefinitely. Yeah, hiatus. And it was...

Oh, sorry, can I just be clear? After six seasons, Canadian Idol was put on hiatus, and I'm still waiting to get the call. So, every morning, you're going to see you're looking at your phone. Sometimes a hiatus is more than a hiatus. Yeah. But the show yesterday was canceled when just before they actually started taping, people were in lines. The guests were there and then ABC told them, you're done.

So people are wondering, people are wondering what this all means, what happened, what was the joke that got him fired? Was it just a joke that got him fired? Well, Brian Stelter on CNN, who follows media news very closely. Oh yeah, well, yeah, let's let's let's talk. Let's play the whole joke. We hit some new lows over the weekend with the Maga Gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.

In between the finger pointing, there was grieving. On Friday, the White House flew the flags at half staff, which got some criticism. But on a human level, you can see how hard the president is taking this. My condolences on the loss of your friend, Charlie Kirk. May I ask, sir, personally, how are you holding up over the last day and a half, sir? I think very good. And by the way, right there, you see all the trucks? They've just started construction of the new ballroom for the White House,

which is something they've been trying to get, as you know, for about 150 years. And it's going to be a beauty. Yes. He's at the fourth stage of grief. Construction. Demolition. Construction. This is not how an adult grieves the murder of somebody called a friend.

This is how a four-year-old mourns a goldfish, okay? All right, so we'll talk about my thoughts on that a little bit later. But let's go to Brian Stelter now, who knows a thing or two, about American media. The FCC chairman Brendan Carr went on a far-right webcast and condemned Kimmel and urged ABC to suspend him. He also talked about possible regulatory punishments of Disney because there are lots of different stations that have licenses with the FCC. Within the past hour, we've heard from a big owner of stations that have affiliations with ABC, a company called Nextstar, saying that they were going to suspend Kimmel's show on their stations. So, in other words, about two dozen stations were refusing to air Kimmel's show tonight as a result of this controversy.

And then following word that some of those stations were basically revolting against Kimmel, Disney, the parent company of ABC, decided to yank the show entirely. Okay, so let's go into what he said. He started with sort of the setup for a joke, except it wasn't a set up for a joke. He actually didn't need that. If you'd taken that the key statement that the right wing was working very hard to convince us all that the assassin was one of their own and they were doing so to score political points, if you took that out of the setup, the setup still works. completely. It was an opinion that was presented as fact. And look, I don't pretend to be the determining factor. So what's funny and what's not. But the structure of a joke is important to understand. When you're setting up a joke in order for the punchline

to land, there has to be something rooted in fact that we can all latch on to because it's about misdirection, right? Like, you think he's telling a story and then he gives you something that is so out there, that's what's funny. You need a point of reference. And it's a point of reference that we can all latch on to. That was not a point of reference. That was gaslighting.

That was a lie. I'm an opinion guy, and I deal in news. If I said something like that, I would fully expect to get hauled into somebody's office. Because I said, what are you doing, man? You're out there telling people something that is factually inaccurate. Now, what he said, the joke part with Trump and how he responded, that was funny and that's a joke. But what he said initially, suggesting that this guy was a mega person, we knew on Monday at that point. Everybody knew at that point.

That wasn't true. And that was the issue. That's issue because he's now spreading a falsehood. Yeah, but he's spreading it in a part of the joke that is traditionally supposed to be that part that is kind of sort of factual. If your punchline can be as ridiculous as you want it to be because that's the joke. But the joke only works if you have a reference point that is anchored in truth. And so to me, that's a fundamental problem. And again, not for nothing.

This happened on public airwaves. I don't know yet what the responsibilities are of joke tellers on the public airwaves. but I do know that they are far more stringent rules than they would be worthy to do a cable show. And certainly if he were telling that joke on the internet where you can pretty much do and say what you want. And I said this on an earlier show, it feels to me like all the checks and balances that are required to make sure that what you go to air with is responsible were either blown past or failed. You have a writer's room. You have a code of conduct. there is a lawyer from the from the um of the network that goes over these things where were those

people in this part and finally i'll i'll say two more things about kimmel and then we'll keep going if he actually didn't know that what he was saying was a lie then he's then he's not on top of the news he's and that's that's irresponsible behavior and he's he's too dumb to be making those statements. And if he did know, then he knows the world he's operating. He understands the arena. He understands the politics of the show and his responsibilities on the public airways. And he wasn't considering something that I think we all need to remember today. Jimmy Kimmel will be fine. I'm sure he has multiple homes. I'm sure he'll be able to go do stand-up. I'm sure he'll do a commercial here or there. He may end up with another show at some point.

he'll be fine there are dozens if not hundreds of people who go into that job every day who are tradespeople who are editors uh who are in by no means comfortable but they they love their job and want wanted to keep doing it forever he's responsible for hundreds of people hundreds of jobs are all gone and again yes i'm placing the responsibility on him i think there's something shady going on at the FCC all the more reason to make sure you're checking all the boxes that are put in place to ensure that you can push the line and still keep your job. And he didn't do that. And today there are hundreds of people who are out of a job. So yeah. So it's political interference. It seems like

from Trump on down with the FCC because the federal government controls the FCC. But then it's also the affiliates who said, we're not going to air this because we're getting a lot of complaints and advertisers, and that's where the money comes from, they were dropping out. So is this free speech? Or is it a free market economy? And Dave Portnoy said, with Kimmel getting canned last night, I'm seeing a lot of people talk about the hypocrisy of cancel culture.

To me, cancel culture is when people go out of their way to dig up old tweets, videos, etc., looking for dirt on somebody, they don't like an effort to get them fired. Like if Kimmel got canceled for stuff he did on the man show, which was an old cable show he did, that would be canceled culture. But when a person says something that tons of people find offensive, of rude, dumb in real time, and then that person is punished for it. That's not cancel culture.

It's the consequences of your actions. Much more to talk about on this subject a little bit later. But our next story seems like it comes from the fiction aisle. When it comes to the city of Toronto, apparently no bad idea gets tossed aside. Come on back. Welcome back to the Ben Mulroney show. Yesterday, we received a bunch of messages of a story we did about a dozen Toronto libraries, which will be used and have been used for mental health services for the homeless.

We didn't open up the phone lines, but we're going to do that right now. Just give me a sec, 416, 917, 416 870-6400 or 1-3-8-225 talk. We've got more information for you to digest because we've also learned that if you have drug needles to dispose of, you can go to the library for that. There are, so the following Toronto Public, I'm going to read all of them to you. Yeah. Well, the issue is that are we normalizing drug use?

Well, yes, I know in the city of Toronto we're normalizing drug use. But talk to me, let's talk about the safety for those using the library, you know, to study, to get off, to wait for their parents to pick them up, to read a book. Like, that's a purpose. building, and we're now putting, we're now prioritizing the safe, in these places as de facto safe injection sites. And so that's the question I have for you. Are like, is that it? Is that it for the library? Because we've got, we got a lot of them on this list. How many do we have? One to the, there's 17. There's 17 that we know. That's on, that's on top of the fact that

they're having, they're turning a dozen libraries into front line centers. Yeah. For dealing with, for homeless people in mental health issues. Yeah. And look, the head scratcher for me is this feels like something that the, that should be coming down from on high from the province. I don't know that this is the city's lane. But I have problems with this. I do not have problems with offering resources and offering help for those in our city who need it most. But I don't remember being consulted as a taxpayer as somebody whose kids use the library in my neighborhood, that we were going to be sharing that space.

We share the streets, we share the parks, we share our communities now in terms of being told that in certain neighborhoods, your next door neighbor could be a new shelter, and sorry that we didn't consult you, but we don't have to. And now we're being told that the libraries are going to. And I remember a time that if I,

somebody right of center were to suggest that maybe we close the libraries when they're not being used, I might as well been suggesting that we're burning the books. How dare you take that away from the kids? This is that connection point for the city, for the community. This is where people, where kids feel safe. And but so long as you're doing it from the perspective of the left, I guess that's okay. And this was not, this was not an issue that was brought up in any election campaign that I remember. And yet we are just supposed to accept that this is what's happening. So yet again, our kids, something else is taken away from our kids that you and I are paying

for. And I kind of want to know when it's going to end. It might end at the election next year. We'll have to wait and see. Mike, welcome to the Ben Mulroney show. Thanks so much for calling in. Call it in Happy Thursday. Ben, I'm starting to become a fan depending on the top.

As long as you don't divert back to the TV stuff, we're good. Cheers. I'm hoping to God that doesn't condemn me for saying this. But we take humanity as like we are the best things out there. Once our mind and our soul is gone, we are just a walking shell walking around. And again, I apologize for being so cool. We, the government has shut down asylums a long time ago. time ago and let these people walk around the streets for other people to take care of.

And if we could just centralize the money to put these people in a care facility, a big care facility like we had at one time when I was younger, the stigmatization, forget it, throw it out, it's done, everything is stigmatized, there's a problem with everything. Yeah. But then again, we look at the dollars and cents. And Ben, it all boils down to this. People are getting money for certain causes. Unions are getting money every year or every four years for certain groups.

They don't care. We don't care about these poor souls who are walking around with nothing left. They are zombies. There's nothing left to these people. There's nothing left. And that's, and I hope, I don't. don't get struck down for saying this. No, I don't know. Mike, I take your point. I take your point. I think there's some generalizations

in there. I think it requires a little more nuance than that. I think there are some people for whom they're past a point of returning to a productive life. But that's a confluence of a lot of issues, some of which are not their fault. Every person is different. How and why they got on drugs? What led them to those drugs? What drugs they have been on? same with homelessness same with homelessness really they're not getting help but there is they're not getting they're not they're not getting the help and and look if you get the asylum and put these through to all these people have them in a certain have them group together where they can work on them not stand it all over the city I I I think yeah Mike I've got a lot of people I got to get to

thank you very much for the call Mike I appreciate you teeing us up and we're going to go to Karina now. Karina, thank you so much for calling in. Hey, Ben. How are you? I'm well. I am a member of the New Toronto Initiative. We've spoken before about harm reduction and other little goodies. And the library thing is really fascinating. For years, I thought libraries should be open on Sundays. That's a perfect day to take the family and read, right? But no, they're opening in them now. It's very, very deliberate, right? So first we put the, you know, the Sharp's containers outside the library. I think you cited 16 or 17 locations for

this, right? These are not Little Sharps containers in bathrooms for the odd diabetic bookworm. These are like large full post size, like mailbox size, you know, containers that are going at the entrances. And if you've been to a local library recently that has one of these, you will notice, like there's an increase in people who are using it just to nod off. Now, the second thing about libraries is we always needed to provide an address for our library card. I remember taking my son for his first library card. It was a big deal. But, Olivia Chow has actually removed the sort of the need to put an address with your library card because they want to provide sort of equity to the unhoused.

So you can go in there and get a library card without an address now. And why is that important? Are these people taking out books? Don't think so. It's so that they can access the mental health services. And why are we turning our libraries, which used to be the places where we sent kids for reading time, for story time, for, you know, just a safe, you know, kind of healthy, environmental environment, we're now turning them over to people who need serious help.

Yeah. And I don't think that that's appropriate. We're taking the parks away from the kids. We're taking the libraries away from the kids. Yeah. Chris Moise, I don't know if you saw his thing. He was trying to take Moss Park Arena and open it up to the unhoused while kids' hockey games were going on. Because he said, why shouldn't they enjoy hockey and use the showers?

Oh, love it. Like, where does this end? Well, I'll tell you, Karina, it ends when there's a little bit of pushback on the simple, on the simple, fallacy that you and I having this discussion. You know, Chris Moyes, I haven't met him yet, but I've heard enough of what he asked to say. The intellectual leaps that he takes when dealing with his opponents, he would hear what we have to say, and he would call us ultra-right-wing fascists who hate the homeless. That's what he would say, as opposed to what this actually is, which is a recognition that we all want to help the homeless, but the people who are doing this

are going down the wrong path. It's a problem, it's an issue with policy, not people. And people like you and I far too often do not push back when the intellectual and bad faith leaps that people like he take and force us to defend ourselves as opposed to having these people who are accountable defend themselves for their boneheaded, moronic, destructive ideas that are causing this city to fail.

Which, by the way, people on the left have been proudly saying, we are the people who make cities break. So on that note, Karina, thank you very much. I appreciate it. Nathan, thank you for calling in. Oh, we have no time, Nathan. I apologize. Thank you for the cue, Dave. I appreciate it. Sometimes I get ahead of myself.

All right, next up, how a London city counselor was shunned for suggesting something reasonable. Welcome back to the Ben Mulroney show. And generally speaking, every city has their own plan to help the unhoused in various ways. And certain cities take it upon themselves to offer up apartments where they will, they'll work with landlords and they will bring the unhoused in. And it allows them to hopefully start leading a more productive life. Of course, there's supervision that comes with this. there are check-ins, there are mental health supports, and in an ideal situation, it is the beginning of a better life for that person.

Well, in London, Ontario, there was a couple of news stories that demonstrated that for certain landlords, this has not worked the way it was supposed to. And upon a spot check, it looked like a hoarder had lived there for years with graffiti and waste and drug paraphernalia and it looked like a disaster zone. And a lot of concern has been raised over the entire program itself. This is in London, Ontario. And so we're now speaking with Susan Stevenson, London counselor, whom we've spoken with before, who tried to bring this to city council and was, well, the expression,

the best expression here, rebuffed with extreme prejudice to speak to this point. We're joined now by counselor Stevenson. Thank you so much for coming back to the show. Thank you for having me. Okay. So talk to me about the program and the issues that you see with it. Yeah, well, you outlined the program, right? We connect people with landlords.

We help them with the lease agreement. There's monthly inspections and three times per week minimum check-ins to help people stabilize in their housing and learn how to live on their own. And hopefully this is the end of homelessness for them. Yeah. And they are now permanently housed. Yeah, so it's a great, it's a great idea. Yes.

But the devil is in the details. So talk to me about what has happened on the ground. Yeah. So I saw four apartments, whereas three of them, the outside doors don't lock. There were women living in those apartments. They were completely trashed. The smoke alarms were removed. The doors inside were all damaged.

Some of them you couldn't even walk through. There was evidence of, uh, bug smoking and lighters and foil everywhere, bugs. It was just terrible. The smell, bugs on the floor, bugs in the air. And I was told that oftentimes, when the landlord checks, there'll be six to ten people in there conced out on drugs. Yeah.

Yeah. So, yeah. So essentially the city in those four cases is subsidizing a drug debt. Yep. And drug dealing and all kinds of criminal activity in terms of stolen goods. Yeah. Now, look, so what did you, what did you want to do to address this problem? Well, I wanted to course correct the current policies and contracts so that we get the results that we want,

which is safe permanent housing for people that isn't putting the rest of the community at risk. So I took the video to the mayor and I asked for his support in bringing a motion forward, you know, brought a motion more of my own wording to committee. and I had someone move it. I would have been willing to second it, but I'm not on the committee. And yeah, it was, no one was willing to second it. So there was zero discussion.

None of my colleagues reached out to me prior to the committee meeting. I was quite surprised to see that. So your goal wasn't to shut down the program. Your goal, as you said, was to course correct. We can't fix something if we can't track that thing. And clearly, in these four instances, is something's not working. So you wanted to what, to do a deep dive into the funding

or find out why the checks weren't happening and if the checks were happening, why they let it slide, that sort of thing. Yeah, exactly. Well, I looked at the contracts for two of them and it specifically says in the contract that they're to place high acuity, which is high needs, mental health and addiction issue,

people struggling with those. So they were contracted to place high, high-acuity individuals into housing as quickly as possible. So these are not the highest risk people who are unhoused. These are people with whom, you know, during the interview process, they're like, okay, this person is cognizant and cogent and presents a high degree of potential success. No, the opposite.

Our contract specifically asks these agencies to place the ones with the highest needs in in private housing so in 2023 london middle sex housing corporation which is our social housing came to council the chair of the board came and said please stop putting these people in our building it's causing damages and safety concerns and yet and then in we had this issue in an audit report came to council saying we had a a building a brand new affordable housing building where we placed a hundred percent high needs people in that building and it was very very bad we had murders we had deaths we had you know damages it was just crazy and they said oh we've learned our lesson you know we shouldn't be putting these high needs people into this building and yet we still

have contracts out there with social service agencies saying please put them in private rentals so counselor why aren't your colleagues seeing what you're seeing well i can't speak for them have you have you spoken to them have you spoken to them um i have spoken with the deputy mayor and he has supported a new motion a slightly revised uh motion that we're going to council on tuesday i spoke with another counselor this morning and they are supportive also of the motion so i am hopeful that we will be able to address this issue uh as of council meeting on Tuesday afternoon. It's just the fact that nobody wanted to even talk to you or COSA. What changed between the first motion that was put forth in this? You said it's

slightly different, but in what way? It is quite watered down. I'll be honest. I wanted safety inspections of all of the units and I wanted to look at the contracts and the budgets and see what was happening. Now, what we're going to do is look at contract amendments that can be made and look at the issues that the agencies are having and seeing how we can help solve some of those in some contract amendments. Okay. So they don't want you looking at the contract itself. So there were some people in there who were worried about looking at the contracts themselves. Is that fair to say? Yeah. And there's been a lot of issue on that. Every time I have to file freedom of information

request to get copies of contracts that we've approved in this term. You're an elected city official. You're there representing the people of London and you don't have access to city contracts? No, and I had to pay like out of, you know, I paid hundreds of dollars to get the contracts and most of them come back with the budgets redacted.

What's the justification for that? You are part of the government. Why does a member of the government have to pay out of their own pocket to gain access to the information that she needs to do her job?

Yeah, it's something that I do still want to look into it's not this way in other cities from what I understand and I'm told that it's a private contract with a third party entity and we don't have but it was entered into with taxpayer dollars that that that's a nonsensical defense of of opacity of government which by the way we are supposed to be passed as a society yeah and I think the general public agrees with that. I've found a workaround and I usually put an amendment which has been supported by counsel every time we approve funding that the contract once it's signed will come back to us. Something doesn't smell right here, counselor. I'm learning about this as we're talking,

but my spidey sense is tingling here. They don't want you looking at contracts. When you finally get them through freedom of information, they're redacted. Something doesn't smell right here. And it's Honestly, if everyone's goal is to help those in our society who need it most, then we need a government that is open by default to use our former prime minister's expression. And it seems like you are, I mean, you're swimming upstream here. And there's information that some people have that they don't want you to have. And I am not a conspiracy theorist, but I'm following what you're saying and is leading me to say something like that. yeah i mean i think our city council has put all of our chips on one ideological policy

and anything that's going to show that that is failing um is proving difficult to swallow what what's what's disappointing and we're going to end uh we're going to end it here is that um is that every we all want the same thing we all want the same goal but these people seem obsessed with the process. They seem like they are coveting the process and protecting the process, even if the outcome is not what they want. And that is doing a disservice to the homeless population as well as the taxpaying population. Counselor, thank you so much for sharing the story.

Keep us updated, will you? Thank you. I definitely will because people are crying out to me from inside and all around. I dare you to pay attention. I dare you to speak up. I dare you to try something new. I dare you to challenge what you think you know. I dare you to think differently.

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