The Ben Mulroney Show - Montreal man died of aneurysm after waiting 6 hours in the Emergency Room

Episode Date: December 17, 2024

Guests and Topics on Today's Show -Montreal man died of aneurysm after waiting 6 hours in ER with Guest: Dr. Brett Belchetz, ER Physician, CEO of getmaple.ca -It may be ‘decades’ before we know the long-term effects of vaping, research suggests with Guest: Sanja Stanojevic, PhD, Associate Professor at Dalhousie University -Wisconsin school shooter identified as 15-year-old girl, police say with Guest: Dr. Oren Amitay, Psychologist -Listener whose son was jumped at Eaton Centre by men in Ski with Guest: Peter If you enjoyed the podcast, tell a friend! For more of the Ben Mulroney Show, subscribe to the podcast! https://globalnews.ca/national/program/the-ben-mulroney-show Follow Ben on Twitter/X at https://x.com/BenMulroney Enjoy

Hey, it's Ben Mulrooney. We had a packed show today, including a man's six-hour wait in the emergency room led to his death. We don't know the long-term effects of vaping and why it's so rare to hear about a young female shooter. Enjoy. This next story is one that we absolutely want to talk about. Yesterday, it's paramount that we talk about it, so we made sure we brought it back today. The story of a Montreal man who died of an aneurysm after spending six hours in an emergency room before giving up and going home. He showed up on December 5th, said he had a health scare,

had chest pain on his left side, nausea, clammy skin, hard time breathing. He went to the hospital. I believe he was triaged, waited six hours, didn't get any further medical assistance. And according to sources, he died the next day. Now, at first blush, this feels like a condemnation of a failing healthcare system.

But I saw on social media that somebody pointed out that he was accurately and appropriately triaged. He didn't have an imminent threat to his death, to his life. And had he waited, he would have been seen and he would have lived. I'm not saying that that's what happened. I'm just saying that that was a hot take I saw on social media. And rather than sit here and hum and ha and figure it out for myself, I figured let's go to somebody who knows a heck of a lot more about this and let's get some answers. We're joined by Brett Belchett, Dr. Brett Belchett, ER physician and CEO of get maple.ca. Doctor, oh, thank you so much for joining us on the Ben Mulroney show.

Good morning. So based on what you know about this case, how do you feel? This is a tragedy on so many levels. And I think lots of people are looking for fingers to point to figure out what exactly is the cause of this. And was this a preventable death? And I think there's fingers to honestly point in every direction. The wait time is too long. Nobody should ever wait six hours to be seen by a doctor in emergency. Emergency generally means things should be seen quicker. This is a really difficult diagnosis. So there is a good chance, even if he had been seen immediately, it could have been missed.

I mean, aneurysms like what he had typically don't occur that frequently in men of his age. And I've seen lots of cases like this where it was missed even when seen by a doctor. And, you know, there is some finger pointing, which is, you know, I would say to anybody out there, if you have chest pain, you don't leave the emergency room until you've seen a doctor. Chest pain is a deadly thing, and there's so many bad causes of it. So, lots of blame to go around, overall terrible tragedy. And, you know, last week on this show, we did a story about sort of a surprisingly high number of people who go to the emergency room for non-emergency reasons. And so there are a whole bunch of people that are clogging up the emergency room that shouldn't be there because they have a

cut or a sprain or their shoulder hurts. And so we already have an overstressed healthcare system specifically in the ER. And somebody like this who probably needed attention far quicker was deprived of it for a number of reasons. So I gave one reason why an ER wait would be six hours. What are some of the other ones? So that is one of the reasons. It's probably not the biggest reason. I would say one of the biggest reasons why waits can be so bad is a lack of staff. And often that isn't actually a lack of physician staff.

It's often a lack of nursing staff. So a doctor in the emergency room is only able to see patients as quickly as there are staff able to support them to see patients. So there's many times in the emergency room where I've actually been sitting idle despite a packed waiting room because we just don't have enough nurses to process the patients that I would be seeing to take the lab tests, to carry out the medication orders, et cetera, et cetera. One of the other big issues is just a lack of physical space. So what often happens is the hospital fills up and almost every single one of our hospitals right now is operating at 100% or more of its capacity upstairs on the wards, which means that when somebody like this, for instance, comes in and they're really sick,

and we see them and we say, yep, you're really sick, you need to be admitted to hospital, there's nowhere upstairs to move them to. It means they stay and emerge, which means there's no longer any beds left to see new patients in the emerge. So we're sitting with a massive wait time just to open up a stretcher to examine somebody and to treat somebody. And so, you know, I'd say overall, this is a symptom of a system that is over capacity in every possible way and understaffed at every possible level. So if you could raise a magic wand and change one factor that could immediately improve the situation so that we didn't have this specific outcome. What's the one change that can make the biggest benefit? I think we need to open up the flow in our hospitals.

It's probably one of the number one problems. And so what we see in the hospitals is it is very, very difficult to discharge lots of patients because we just don't have safe resources for people at home in the community. Oh, wait, hold on. Hold on. Let's talk about that. That's a surprising thing. I didn't expect you to say that. So the discharge, I'm always thinking of getting people in, but I didn't actually think about

getting people out to free up the space. So where is the choke point in getting people discharged? So there are so many patients we see in our hospitals that are old, that are frail, that have complex medical issues that make it unsafe for us to send them home alone. And many of these people do live alone. They have no supports or maybe they have an elderly partner who's equally frail to them. And we have not set up our system in a manner where we have lower step-down levels of care, where we can easily and safely send people home from hospital where they don't need a $3,000 a day acute care medical bed. They just need a supportive bed. And we haven't

built those facilities. We haven't invested in that. So instead, we continue to invest in very, very expensive solutions that actually aren't probably the best places to put our very scarce healthcare dollars. So are you suggesting that we have some sort of, I mean, it's the wrong word, but halfway house where people could go? I mean, if you're a elderly or frail, but you, you do not need attention in a hospital anymore, there could be a place until somebody comes from out of town to take care of that former patient. They could rest their head for a day or two. Yeah, absolutely. There's lots of names. There's things called step-down facilities. There's what's called respite care. There's lots of names for these kinds of facilities, but that is what we

really need to be investing in. If we had a ton more of those, we could get a lot more people out of hospital very quickly once their acute medical care was over. And then we could actually have flow in from the emergency room and flow in from the waiting room into the emergency room. But we just unfortunately have not been investing enough in this particular area of the system okay well let's talk about this case specifically this man from montreal who who died of an aneurysm so he he got an electrocardiogram uh he complained of chest pain on his left side nausea clammy skin and a hard time breathing. Had he been, had somebody with these symptoms presented before you, what would you have done?

So, you know, I always hate to judge the care that is provided at another institution, you know, given that I wasn't there. Well, this is a hypothetical. A guy walks in and these are the facts that are present before you. Yeah, so absolutely. So first of all, in the hospitals where I have worked, we recognize that sometimes there are wait times to see a doctor. So we don't make a lot of testing wait for the doctor,

particularly around chest pain. So had he shown up to any of the emergency rooms where I have worked, not only would he have had an ECG, he also would have had a full set of blood tests ordered to check his heart and other things. He would have had an x-ray ordered, meaning that while he was waiting there for the six hours, other testing would have occurred so that by the time the doctor was there, they wouldn't have had to start from scratch.

They would have had all the results that were required. Had all of that been done, there is a chance that this could have been picked up by the doctor once they'd seen them. Also, had all of that been done, there might have been worrisome things that would have actually popped up in the blood work or on the x-ray that would have alerted triage staff to say to a doctor, don't let this guy wait any longer. This is actually a true emergency. So that's number one.

The testing up front, in my opinion, had this been my case, is quite inadequate. There was much more that should have been done up front. That being said, there are cases, again, like this, where everything is normal. The blood work is normal. The ECG is normal. The chest x-ray is normal. And then it is a very, very difficult diagnosis to make. And, you know, I can see lots of clinicians doing all the right things here and still

sending this patient home, unfortunately, and still having a tragic outcome the next day. Now, I'm reading in an article that this Montreal man died of a, quote quote aneurysm, but do we know where that aneurysm was? So I believe I did read somewhere that this was in his thoracic aorta. So what that means is, is the aorta is the biggest blood vessel in your body. It's the huge artery that comes out of your heart. So every time your heart pumps, it is ejecting blood up into the aorta for, and then from there it goes everywhere in your body. So if anything goes wrong with the aorta, this can kill you very quickly because there's such a huge amount of blood flow there. And what an aneurysm means is basically it means that there's a

weakening of the wall of the aorta. And lots of things can go wrong, but usually that leads to either the wall coming apart or rupturing in some way, and that leads to massive blood loss. And once it ruptures, typically there's almost no way to save somebody. So the key with these are detect them early, treat them before they rupture. And so if this is what happened, and thoracic means it's the top part of the aorta, right where it comes out of the heart, this is something that is very deadly, very quick, and rarely happens in this age range. Doc, thank you so much for joining us. We appreciate it. My pleasure. Thank you for having me. Doug Ford gets it done for developers.

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This message has been approved by Kidsplain. A message from the Ontario English Catholic Teachers Association. A little bit about me. During the pandemic, I lost my sense of smell. And I have never gotten it back. And I've gone to, I can't smell anything, nothing. And it's annoying,

but I can still taste everything, but I can't smell anything. It's serves me well in a house with teenagers and a dog, but it is what it is. I've gone to see doctors and they say, we, we don't have enough data because COVID is so recent. We don't have enough data to know what's wrong with you or if your smell is ever going to come back.

We can make some guesses. We can compare it to other things. But by and large, we kind of just have to wait and see. It is what it is because it's so new. And some new research suggests that something similar, we may have to wait in a similar fashion for to understand the impacts of e-cigarettes and vaping on people who adopted it as they felt a safer alternative to smoking because it is such a new technology. So we're joined now by someone intimately involved with this research. I want to say hi to Sanya Stanojevic, PhD, Associate Professor at Dow, Department of Community Health and Epidemiology.

Thank you so much for being here. Thanks so much for having me, Ben. So when you look at the research, where does vaping begin in society? How old is it? Yeah, good question. So we have some national surveys that ask young people at what age they started using e-cigarettes. And it varies across the country. Most teenagers that we've heard of start when they join high school. So when we've talked to communities and people and anecdotally, we're hearing that children as young as 10 years of age are starting to use e-cigarettes.

10 years old. I fell off my chair when I heard that too. How are they getting them? Well, that's a good question. So in many parts of the country, there's a legal age to buy e-cigarettes. And what we're finding is that they're getting it through older siblings, they're getting it through networks at schools.

And it's really because we have so little information out there. And because this product is so new, we're really just learning about how big of a problem this is, how many people are using it and who's using these products. And what do we know already? I mean, if you're going to inhale some foreign substance, it can't be good for you. So we know immediately that there are going to be some negative knock-on effects. Are there things that we are comfortable saying already without without i mean look we've got years and years and decades of cigarette smoke to look at so we know that they cause cancer what are we comfortable saying about e-cigarettes today yeah well depends what type of data or evidence that you look at. So when we look at studies conducted in laboratories, either with cells collected from the lungs or in animal studies,

there's some pretty convincing evidence that exposure to e-cigarette vapes damages those cells. What we don't have a lot of evidence of is how that translates to humans. The lungs are very resilient organs they're purposely designed to help us filter out everything that we breathe um and to ensure that that the oxygen that we get into our blood is filtered from all of those things yeah i want to point out my dad was a heavy smoker for years it started when he was very very young on the quebec north shore of the saint lawrence river and he gave it it up once very early on in his political career and was never smoked again. And he went for a lung test at one point, I don't know, in his 50s or 60s.

And they said that his lungs had more or less completely repaired themselves. So I appreciate what you say, that they are resilient. Absolutely. And so what we were trying to do in our research is try to see what are the breathing tests that we can do that really give us some early indication of if there is any lung damage and how much do people need to use these cigarettes before we see the damage. As you said in your introduction for tobacco cigarette smoke, it takes 20, 30, 40 years before we start to see some of the measurable effects like cancers or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. And as somebody interested in the lungs, I thought we can't wait 40 years before we

have this kind of evidence. So let's be creative about the types of breathing tests that are available to us and whether or not we can use the data and the evidence from the cellular studies and animal studies to then go and measure lung function in people to try to see if there are differences or if we can see if there's any damage happening to the lungs. And what do you, so I'm sure there is damage that you're able to record? Yeah, well, this is one of the surprising things in that we use the test that measures the small airways. So if you think healthy lung, when you take a breath in, the air should go everywhere in the lung, should distribute evenly.

And the test that we looked at was testing just that. In people who use e-cigarettes compared to otherwise healthy individuals? Does the air go everywhere in the lung? Is it evenly distributed? And we found that individuals who use e-cigarettes daily, now these are people who never smoked, so we use e-cigarettes daily, who we call them heavy users. They were five or more puffs per hour. One of our participants said their e-cigarette or their e-pen was like an appendage attached to them, that group had the worst lung function. So these levels aren't still what we see in tobacco cigarette smokers. They're not what we see in like a clinical diagnosis of lung disease. But on a group level, when you compare them,

we saw a clear signal where those heavy users had worse lung function compared to those that didn't. And that test that we used suggests that there's damage in the very small airways where we mechanistically or when we think about how e-cigarettes work and the size of the vapor particles, that's where we would expect them to deposit and where we would expect to see the damage first. So you do this research. What do you do with it besides putting it into the public?

Do you submit it to Health Canada? Well, so we submitted it to peer review. So it's been reviewed by others in the scientific community and it's out there in a scientific journal. But one of the next things is what do we do with this information? So talking to people like you and your show and getting this information out there to the general public. You know, it's just one study, just one piece of information, and people need to use all of the information they have to make informed choices about what they do.

But we certainly are looking to meet with public health officers and to have more of these conversations in terms of how do we design studies better? I can tell you that studying other lung diseases is much more easier than cigarette use because it's changing so rapidly. And the devices that are available, the liquids that are being used, the way people use them from when we started to when we finished to change. And so what we want to do is inform how other people can do these studies so we can get information to Canadians faster. Sanya Stanojevich, thank you so much. Keep up the good work, and I hope you have a happy holiday season.

Thanks so much for having me. Take care. It is really a sad state of affairs when school shootings in the United States don't rise to the level of national and international attention. And by and large, there have been so many that, in a lot of cases, were numb to them. But there was one recently that has got all of our attention for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that most recently in Wisconsin, a 15-year-old shooter took a gun into her school, killed a number of people, injured even more, and that shooter was a female.

That is not something we're used to seeing. And a lot of us are asking, what happened? What's different? What made this girl do something that girls don't typically do? So we're joined now by psychologist, Dr. Oren Amite, to drill down. Doctor, thank you so much for being here. Thank you for having me, Ben. So, you know, I don't know a lot about the psychology of shooters, but every time I read something, it's about what goes in one ear, what does the brain do with that information, and why does it churn out the outcome of

violence? And by and large, it seems like male psychology fits the pattern of whatever's going in one ear translates to violence coming out the other side. But with girls, I just assumed it was different. Well, you know, people don't like to talk about this, but there are, in fact, biological, neurological, evolutionary differences between males and females. And one of the most, let's say, solid differences that research has repeatedly shown is the aggression. Males and females demonstrate aggression very differently. And that helps explain why we see, you know, as you say, mass shootings, for example, are often done by males. Only, I think, about 4% are committed by females.

So, you know, that's one of the examples. And females, usually, if there's, let's say, let's say trauma, if there's self-loathing, if there's anger at the world, females tend to internalize it, while males Males externalize it. That's like one of the biggest. Yeah. We've heard so many tragic stories of young girls who've been bullied, who then sadly take their own lives. That is more of a script I'm familiar with.

This is not, this is an outlier. It is an outlier. And if you read the manifesto, the alleged manifesto of this young girl, you can see her. She is externalizing that blame. She's saying, you know, I hate everyone. I want to take out the world. You suck. I mean, this is the kind of stuff that you normally see males, let's say, express.

Females may feel the same way. But again, that process of internalization, of that self-loathing, of that self-blame, that's what we normally see. But she, again, did the opposite, which, you know, there's a number of factors that can explain it. And I would say, we don't know much about her, obviously, and I saw so much false information at the beginning. But one thing that we do know is a big difference between males and females, and every individual will have their own differences, is testosterone. Males have so much more, and that is, we know, very highly correlated with aggression. So perhaps she may have an excessive amount.

We don't know what kind of medications she was on. She may have been on SSRIs, which we know may be correlated with some types of, you know, this kind of outrageous behavior, outrageous for lack of a better word. So, and also we don't know, like she obviously felt horrible within her family. I think she felt like the unwanted child or unloved child. So, again, we don't know who she was modeling. We know what she was interested in. I'm sure we'll talk about her fascination with school shooters and mass murderers. But again, is it possible, and we talked about this in a previous discussion,

that this confluence of factors just hit the sweet spot, so to speak, and we found the right person, well, wrong person, in which it all interacted and came out in this horrific way. Yeah, it's got to be a confluence of nature and nurture, right? If the exact same circumstances on another girl wouldn't translate into this level of violence. Exactly. It's just, should we be paying more attention now?

If we used to think that this was borderline the exclusive domain of boys, of the male gender. But should we now be looking at this problem as far more holistically? Well, over the last number of years, we're seeing more and more young girls or women engaging in the types of violent behavior that normally was associated with males, whether it was like this getting into extreme fights, carrying knives to school, groups of them fighting each other. And in certain pockets of society, usually it was, let's say, disadvantaged or marginalized individuals. They were more likely to do it, but we didn't really see it

because we didn't have this plethora of phones. That's what I was going to ask, Doctor. I just assumed that these videos that I was seeing were a result of more cameras out there. I didn't know that it might be because there is actually a spike in violence amongst girls. Well, some people have claimed that there hasn't so much been a spike. And so it's hard to get the actual research on this. So the research might suggest otherwise.

I would say anecdotally, from what I'm seeing, I do think there is an increase, which would make sense because, again, with more, let's say, displays of this, with more opportunities for people to see this and for it to become normalized. And that's the whole thing, the normalization of it. Before, the normalization was males. Males do this, we see it, and more males would engage in it. Now, with more and more females being shown, there's a much higher chance that females will see this and think, well, hey, this is the norm, and they would be more engaged in it as well. Doctor, I'm also seeing in movies and TV shows, I'm seeing women

assuming roles that used to go to men, like the action star or the assassin. And I wonder whether popular culture is helping to normalize this notion of violence within the female archetype. It's very possible. And the thing is, when we do see violence, let's say in the movies or with video games, for the average person, it's not going to have much of an impact. In normal childhood, right?

But we do know, and this has been shown for years and years, that there is a small percentage of people who have that proclivity toward violence or that possibility. And then they see this, and that might them more to make them more likely to do it as well. Well, look, if you believe as I do, that representation matters in media,

then you have to accept that there could be a negative side to the notion of you can't be what you can't see. You know, if, if, if you don't put, you know, people of different cultural communities in, in, in certain roles then they're not going to see themselves in those roles. And so the flip side has to be true as well. If you put girls in positions of violence on the screen, then they might say, hey, if I see it on the screen, then maybe I could be that in real life. Well, yes, and there's one more narrative that's being inculcated in our youth, which is not just the violence, but this idea that your generation is, pardon the language, screwed. Everyone's out to get you.

You have no chance. And only a few brave people, only a few righteous ones are going to rise up and fight back against the ills of the society. And, you know, children, you know, you and I talk about this, they are being encouraged by our educators from the youngest of ages to be that person. And if you read her manifesto, you see that. She's saying this. between what we saw in New York with the healthcare shooter and this girl. But there could be a trend out there of glorifying those who take matters into their own hands, glorifying the vigilante. And vigilantism, one of the reasons it's so dangerous is because it's up to the individual with the gun to determine who the bad guy is. Well, exactly. And, you know, just I think the other day there was some concert,

and they were glorifying that shooter and people were cheering. And the three words that were engraved on the bullets, those are being now spray painted or tagged everywhere. So, yes, this is happening. And so will the average person do it? No. But will one out of a thousand or ten thousand or one hundred be inclined to maybe act when they wouldn't have before, there is an increased risk. Dr. Orin Amitai, thank you so much for joining us on the Ben Mulroney Show. Thank you for having me again.

Every now and then you write in, and we were compelled after reading the email that we received from one of our listeners to reach out for a conversation. So Peter is a listener who wrote in about a story about his son who was jumped at the Eaton center by men in ski masks.

He said, I'm a long time six 40 listener want to share my recent experience in the hopes that it may be something to discuss. My son was jumped in the Eaton center this weekend. It happened in the H and M around 7. PM. While people were Christmas shopping, the assailants were wearing ski masks,

obscuring their identities. They surrounded him, stole his jacket, hoodie, and phone. Fortunately, he wasn't seriously harmed. I'm hopeful you can help me to discuss this topic in the hopes of bringing a ski mask ban in public spaces. I've already emailed my counselor, the mayor, the premier about this topic. This type of behavior is clearly not acceptable.

And by allowing people to walk around in public spaces with masks covering their faces, not only intimidating, but clearly only worn to protect their identity. I'm sure that the majority of the people feel the way I do. So I'm joined now by Peter. Welcome to the show, Peter. Thank you so much for joining us. Hey, Ben, how are you? I'm good. Let's start at the beginning. How's your son doing? He's good. I'm surprised, actually. I thought he was going to be more shaken up. I think he was just more surprised that something like that could happen because we've been down in that part of the city many times and it's always been a good experience.

Now, you've referenced that you've reached out to various levels of government. Have you been in happened, the police were involved. They called us, called my wife at home and told us what had happened, that he was OK. And we went made our way down to go pick them up. He was with his friends. And, you know, they took a police report. And fortunately, because they were there and they kind of, you know, made him feel much more comfortable after the fact. OK, well, I'm glad to hear that. I assume you won't be going to Eaton Center anytime soon? No, I'd like to actually go back again because I think that it's one of those things that I don't want it to be something that he associates with that. That shouldn't be the memory that he has about that space. Bad things happen and to me I'm the type of person that I think you know bad things happen and you to me i'm the type of person that i think you have to go back and and and own it and deal with it yeah take control yeah yeah

appropriate it absolutely well i'm glad to hear it i think you've got the right frame of mind as does your son i am sorry it happened to you uh so in anticipation of this conversation i went online to see exactly what what the law is about wearing in public. And wearing masks in public is not in and of itself contravening the criminal code of Canada. It's when you wear a mask with the intent to do a crime, intimidate, cause violence. And so it's sort of an after the fact thing. People can be walking around wearing masks in Canada,

according to the criminal code, based on my interpretation. But it's when they cross the line into criminal behavior that it becomes illegal. And I wonder what your thoughts are on that, Peter. So I looked into it as well, because after it happened, I'm saying to myself, how can somebody be walking around with a mask on and nobody says anything to them? Like if you're outside on a ski hill, we ski and that's normal. And it's minus 30 outside, you're walking down the street, fine. But you're inside of a ski hill, we ski and that's normal. And it's minus 30 outside, you're walking down the street, fine. But you're inside of a mall, it's a closed area.

If you're having a mask on your face, the only intention you have is bad things because you don't want people to see what you're up to and who you are. And to me, that should be struck down right away. There's no reason for you to walk in public with your face covered. Were they wearing ski masks and hoodies? Yeah. Then Peter, the reason I ask is because I have watched enough videos online of smash and grabs and violent acts that take place in Canada, in Toronto, around the GTA, where it's almost like the uniform of the criminal. They wear dark hoodies over their heads, some sort of mask, sweatpants and running shoes. And,

and most more often than not gloves like that's the uniform. And I have no, like you go, you take the path of least resistance. When I see somebody dressed like that. And by the way, Peter, I saw somebody dressed just like that in the vestibule of the ATM machine by my work. I was going to go in there and get some money

two days ago. And I saw this guy and I said, there's no way I'm going in there. And I walked away. This guy's indicating to me that he, if he's not going to do a crime, he's dressed up like people who, who, who do crimes every single day. Yeah. yeah. And that's the part that bothered me because they walked into the mall, followed them, so they approached him first. As soon as they walked into the mall, they went up to him and they said,

hey, nice jacket. And he's like, right away, the, you know, red, he's like, oh my gosh, this isn't good. So he's like, all right, yeah, thanks. And they said, okay, let's go to the store. He was with his friends. They said, we'll go into the store thinking that would be

safe there. There's a lot of people and their security guard there. And seconds later, they walk in the store, they surrounded him and they just demanded the stuff. And you know, no one said anything. No one, I didn't expect anybody. And the security guard didn't do anything? Nothing. And, and the thing that was, that bothered me the most was nobody even stuck around to say, Hey, listen, I witnessed what happened. You know,

if you guys are calling the cops, I'll be a witness to say, this is what happened. But to be fair, Peter, what, what, what,

what description can they possibly give of the criminal, which is, and they're in is, is, is the, the place where I want this conversation to go as we move forward with the show today is that had these people been walking into the mall with their faces fully exposed where they could be caught by camera where somebody might have been

able to pull out a phone i guarantee you peter they would not have been emboldened to do what they did this wasn't in a back alley this was in the middle of night this wasn't in the middle of nowhere this was in a busy mall at christmas time they were invisible to accountability because they are permitted to dress in such a fashion and that's my hope the reason i wrote it because i wanted you to exactly say that to me i don't see any benefit as to who you're protecting by allowing that to be the case i don't think that should be allowed in any public space i i completely agree i've seen it at protests where people can break the law with impunity because we don't know what they look like.

The only reason the shooter in New York got caught was because he pulled down his mask to flirt with a barista. Had he not done that, the police officer's job would have been harder. And I don't know how you feel about this, Peter, but I don't think the police's job would have been harder. And I don't know how you feel about this, Peter, but I don't think the police's job should be made harder because the criminal has found a workaround.

And that's what it is. That's a loophole. And when I was talking to the constable, that's exactly what he said. He said, they took the time while we were there. I have to commend the police in Toronto. They do a fantastic job. They reassured the boys to make them feel safe. And they went commend the police in Toronto. They do a fantastic job. They did. They reassured

the boys to make them feel safe. And they went through security footage right away. They were able to identify how many kids they were, some brief description based on what they could see from their eyes, you know, color of skin and all that kind of stuff and where they went. And so to me, I said, you know, if they were able to see their full face, like you said, they would have been much easier to identify. But they wouldn't have done it in the first place. I don't believe they would have been brave enough to do it. They're cowards. They are cowards and thugs and criminals.

And had they shown their face, they would have stayed home in their mom's basement. That's what they would have done. Peter, I'm going to leave it there with you. But I'm glad to hear that you're going to take, you know, arrest control from these criminals and you're going to go own that Eaton center as you should. And I hope you and your family and specifically your son have a very happy Christmas. Well, thank you very much. I appreciate you getting back to me so quickly. I didn't, I wasn't sure if I was going to get a call and, uh, you guys were, were fed. No, pleased to do it. Thank you so much. Thanks so much for

listening to the podcast. We hope you enjoyed it and you'll join us tomorrow for another loaded edition of the Ben Mulroney show.