The Ben Mulroney Show - The Inner Details of the Conclave and how the next Pope is selected

Episode Date: May 8, 2025

Guests and Topics: -The Inner Details of the Conclave and how the next Pope is selected with Guest: Michael Higgins, Author of The Jesuit Disruptor: A Personal Portrait of Pope Francis -Student info stolen in PowerSchool data breach not deleted despite ransom being paid with Guest: Francis Syms, Associate Dean in the Faculty of Applied Sciences & Technology at Humber Polytechnic 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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome back to the Ben Mulroney Show. Thank you for spending a little bit of your Thursday with us. We really appreciate it. And look, for the 1.4 billion Catholics around the world, this conclave to select a new pope is something that is being covered very, very closely and paid very close attention to. But for a lot of us, we're really

unsure as to what the process is, what's going on behind those closed doors, and how we get from there to a new pope. And I'm joined now by the author of The Jesuit Disruptor, a personal portrait of Pope Francis, Michael Higgins. Michael, welcome to the show. And this is, I'm not the only Mulroney you've talked to in recent days. Yes, that's right, Ben.

I was privileged enough to receive an honorary doctorate from St. Francis Abbey University where, as you know, your mother is the chancellor. So she bestowed the degree on me and during the lunch and dinner afterwards she asked me who was going to be the new pope and I said, well, the best source would be the Ben Mulroney show. I hope she's listening. Thank you, Michael. And congratulations on the honor. Thank you.

Okay, so explain to me and to our listeners, generally the process of Conclave. How does one, if you're, if you're part of it, if you're one of the, one of the people on the inside, how, how does someone put forth their ambition? Is there a nominating process? Well, the first thing that happens actually, Ben, is you have to disengage from or disengage yourself in any way from any demonstration of partisanship or self-promotion. An old Italian phrase that a cardinal who goes into a conclave of Pope will exit a cardinal. And that's proven to be true.

If you're involved in any kind of lobbying or advancement or self-promotion, it's the case of death. So first of all, they have to demonstrate the requisite humility that they don't want the job, but they're not campaigning for it. Secondly, there will be various ways in which the cardinals, particularly as the conclave unfolds and as you see fluctuation in the voting, will form off the cuff, in the Hall, Soto Voce, alliances in which they say, okay, who's the best candidate on the group that we have that could best serve the church at this time in its history?

But we have to remember, and we've been surprised by this in the past, that very often there's a dark horse. So right now there are several candidates that are we the Vaticanisti, the experts on the Vatican, talk about as the lead runners. And they would be Cardinal Taglia of Manila and Cardinal Peralin, who's the Secretary of State, the number two in the Vatican. But then there were a whole group of others, so that we pretty well have a composite of somewhere between 12 and 18 that we anticipate they will draw on. But we're always surprised by somebody who comes up for the

middle or somebody who perhaps even could come from outside the College of Cardinals, although that's fairly rare in recent centuries. So, Michael, so the people who are on the vote, the cardinals who are on the ballot, so to speak, they cannot show that they want this job in any way. But I'm assuming that there are groups that form around them who are what? When a vote is done and it fails, and they have not selected, do those groups then try to bring more people into the fold? Yeah, there is a kind of unrecognized or below the surface realignment. Yeah. So if the cardinal electors are looking and we're in the middle of a ballot right now actually because they're six hours ahead of us and they went in at 345 and so that they're in the process right

now of actually going to that next ballot. So what they'll do because they know it's not secret, they'll know who the names are and they will know how many are voting for this particular candidate so they will sit down and they'll think all right well this candidate that seems to be moving up the scale he's worth my vote or alternatively there may be significant opposition for particular candidate and others will form a again quiet unofficial alliance and say well we really don't we want to stop this candidacy because I'm happy with it so

there's just a fair bit of politicking that goes on they just don't like to call it politics. Michael Hagans where do all of these Cardinals sleep? What happens when a day of voting is over? Where do they turn in? That's a very good question, Ben, because people often wonder where they go. They have to be pretty well sequestered. So when they finished their balloting session at in the Sistine Chapel, they're then transported to the Casa San Marta, Santa Marta, which is a residence, basically a guest house that was built by John Plunk II. And that's where the Cardinals are housed. So they stay in that building, and then they're transported either by bus,

or they take a route behind, in the Vatican itself, but behind the walls, that is not available to the press. And depending upon their mobility, there are 133 cardinals that are voting in this election. There are 135 that are eligible. Two of them are ill and were unable to attend. But if any of the cardinals who are in Rome right now are unable because of sickness or any

other reason to attend, then their vote is also secured through what are called the infamari, the kind of infirm infamarians, or cardinals who are dispatched to deal with the vote of an ill cardinal. You know, a cardinal is not just a figurehead. They have responsibilities to their flock wherever they're from. Who's tending to those flocks while they're in conclave? Oh, that's a good administrative question. Many of the cardinals, if they're in charge of a large archdiocese, they're called metropolitan.

And so they're cardinal archbishops. As a consequence, they would have a significant number of auxiliary or assistant bishops that would assume responsibility for management while they were away. The cardinals who are in Rome are called curio or dicasterio cardinals. They live in Rome. They have no immediate responsibility for the flock, as it were, although they have titular churches. So their responsibility for while they're away would be minimal because they're resident in Rome and they work in Rome. So there are residential cardinals and then there are cardinals who are responsible for curial operations and they both provide appropriate alternative

governance in their absence. Michael, is there a historical or religious significance to the different colored smoke that we're seeing? Not really. The chemicals are used actually because in the past there's been some confusion. The white smoke indicates that the Pope has been elected, the black smoke, that the vote has failed. But sometimes it comes out grey or a mix of things. Everybody gets confused. The 4,000 journalists, yes, 4,000 journalists that are credited to the Vatican for this event, they're all scurrying about. So in order to ensure that indeed there's clarity, they provide chemicals to the burning ballots.

And so it's clear now whether it's white or black. I've got one last question, and I hope you can answer this in about one minute. But once the vote is done and someone wins, does that person immediately become pope? Or is there a process whereby they become the pope at a later date? No, as soon as the cardinal dean or his designate approaches the, which would be Cardinal Peroline in this case, approaches the candidate and asks him if he accepts as soon as he says either yes

or no. If he says yes, then he's Pope. Right then, at that very moment, he becomes the Bishop of Rome. That to me is fascinating. I would have thought that that there would be just more pomp and circumstance and mechanisms by which other things have to happen. It's actually refreshing to hear that despite all of this, like I said, pageantry, if you will, once that vote's done, it's official. It's a very binary thing.

Michael Higgins, author of The Jesuit Disruptor, The Personal Portrait of Pope Francis, I want to thank you so much for joining us and answering all of these questions. It gives us a lot more context so we know what we're looking for. I hope you're well listening to this, Ben. I do indeed as well.

Thank you, sir. Hi, I'm Donna Friesen from Global National. Life moves fast these days, and we want to make it even easier for you to get the news you need. That's why you can now get global national every day as a podcast, the biggest stories of the day with analysis from award winning global news journalists, new episodes drop every day. So take this as your personal invitation to join us on the global national

podcast. You can find it on Apple podcasts, Spotify, Amazon music, and wherever you find your favorite podcasts. Welcome to The Ben Mulroney Show. Thank you so much for spending a little bit of this Thursday with us. We know that you can do anything with your time, whether you're in the car or at home or you're listening at the gym, you could be listening to anything and you choose to spend time with us and it means a great deal. You know, we're having a lot of conversations in this country about separatist movements. The conversation these days has been steered towards Western alienation, specifically in Saskatchewan and in Alberta,

where the premier of Alberta, Danielle Smith, recently changed the legislation, changed essentially the number of people required to trigger a citizen-led referendum and she has been very clear that she is a is a Federalist and she believes in Canada, but she was asked by Vashi Kapilos About her stance on one of these citizen triggered referendum. What if the topic is separation? What will she do as the leader of Alberta?

Will she respect it or not? If the vote is yes, would you pursue separation as premier? I have always said that I do not support separation. I support Alberta sovereignty within a united Canada. That's what our party supports as well. It's in our statement of principles. It's what my caucus supports. And that's my marching orders, is to do what we can to make sure that our autonomy is respected,

the Constitution is respected, some of these damaging policies are removed. And I think we can end up with a deal that works not only for Alberta, but for the entire country. So do I take that that even if the vote is yes yes that you would not pursue separation in your capacity as premier? My job is to make sure it doesn't get to yes. My job is to make sure that the temperature is brought down so much that there isn't even a need for a citizen initiated referenda. And so I think that the Prime Minister has a window here in the next six months to be able to to meaningfully address the issues that we've put on the

table and if he does I think we can have a really constructive conversation about in the next six months to be able to meaningfully address the issues that we've put on the table. And if he does, I think we can have a really constructive conversation about making the entire country an economic powerhouse, finding new markets, tearing down internal trade barriers. That's what I'm gonna be focused on in the next six months. I mean, look, I got a lot of time for Danielle Smith. I think this is a dangerous game,

but I also see what she's doing. She is playing the best hand she can possibly have. You know, how many times has Alberta asked for a better deal from Ottawa only to be told you're going to take what we give you. And for 10 years, that's how it is felt if you've lived in Alberta. And now with this threat of separation, that strengthens the Alberta position. Say, listen, Mark Carney, this is on you.

She's essentially making it easier for the separatist movement to grow, but she's saying it will only grow if you continue to treat us the way your predecessor did. So I get it. I don't like it, but I get it. And meanwhile, if you go back to sort of the OG in the separatist conversations in Canada, Quebec, here's what Bloc Québécois leader Yves-François Blanchet said in terms of advice for Alberta separatists. Therefore, it requires a culture of their own. And I am not certain that oil and gas qualify to define a culture.

But it's theirs to decide if they want to re-vindicate the right to self-determination, would never interfere in that. It belongs to them. I would like us to be the first to do so. Yeah, I mean, look, if you don't know anything about Alberta, you will say that it is defined by oil and gas. There's far more nuance to what it means

to be a Western Canadian. And the identity of a Western Canadian, if you ask them, I don't know that oil and gas is necessarily how they would define themselves. And if you don't know anything about Quebec, you would say, Poutine and the Canadians. Like if you're not curious enough to learn about a place, you can stereotype it pretty quickly.

And culture is relative, and it's in the eye of the beholder, and it's specific to the people of that area. I would also suggest that there are many paths and many reasons that people would feel alienated from the Canadian identity. And it's not just because you believe that you are a nation unto yourself. It can be economic.

You can have economic gripes that lead to an anger that pushes you to say, I don't feel Canadian. And so I think it's a rather simple view that the only way to go is following the path of Quebec, especially because Quebec's been following that path for about 50 years. And as he just said, he knows what not to do because they've tried a few times and have mercifully and miraculously failed. Meanwhile, you've got Doug Ford, the Premier of Ontario. You'll remember over the past few days he's had some choice words for the Premier of Alberta in what he feels is a dangerous game that she's been playing by supercharging, if you will, the possibility that enough people could get together and

demand a referendum on separation. Well, he seems to have softened that tone. Here he is praising the West. So I was pretty blunt. I said, you know, it's time that your government starts showing some love to Saskatchewan and Alberta because, as I said, the last Prime Minister showed no love, matter of fact, to the

contrary. So it's nice that we're heading out there to Saskatchewan for an FMN meeting. I think it's on June 1 and June 2, which is a good olive branch and had

a good discussion. So I'm a big believer of pipelines, big believer of getting rid of CIDs and getting rid of which is a good olive branch and had a good discussion. So I'm a big believer of pipelines, big believer of getting rid of C-69 and we need to unite this country. And the way we're gonna unite this country, as I mentioned to the prime minister

in front of the premiers, show some love to the people of Alberta and Saskatchewan. Now, if I were somebody who believed that Doug Ford had his eyes on the leadership of the Conservative Party of Canada, if I were that person, and I'm not saying I am, if I were that person, I would say, this makes sense. Because if you want to be the leader,

a federal leader in Canada, especially of the Conservative Party, you need Alberta and Saskatchewan behind you you and you don't get there by telling the leaders of very popular leadership of those two provinces that they are behaving in a way that is anathema to being Canadian. So this olive branch, if I were somebody who believed that he wanted to be leader of the Conservative Party, this behavior make could get him closer to that. I think he'd have to do a lot more of this,

but putting water in his wine as it relates to making nice with the Albertans and Saskatchewans, Saskatchewans, right? I think it's Saskatchewans, Saskatchewans? I'm pretty sure that's it. That seems like something you gotta do. And something that should have happened a long time ago, but better late than never, was following his election loss, conservative leader Pierre Poliev, finally reached out to Ontario Premier Doug Ford. They had their office, his office called to arrange a call between the two

in an apparent bid to ease the tension between the two party leaders. And look, I've said this before, somebody, one of them was gonna have to blink, right? This tit for tat nonsense of, well, you didn't support me, so I'm not gonna support you, or you didn't support me, so I'm not going to support you, or you

didn't support me, so I'm not going to let my people come out and support you, and you know, you didn't do anything to help me get elected, so I'm not going to do anything to help you get elected. That was going to have to stop, because what you're doing is you're cutting yourself off at your knees, you're not allowing the parties federally and provincially to work together, to march in lockstep and to benefit from each other's manpower, boots on the ground, information, databases and so on. And so if it was ever going to get fixed,

one of these men was going to have to bury their pride and say, let's talk, let's build something together beyond politics, let's build a relationship. And the same should be said about Tim Houston and Pierre Poliev in a bid to maintain his leadership, I think needs to go across the country and find those conservative leaders and find common cause with them,

break bread and turn them into either from people who are disinterested into interested invested partners in his success. We'll have to see if that bears fruit. Oh and oh it's Saskatchewanians. It's Saskatchewanians. I do apologize. One of the stories that is becoming increasingly commonplace in places like like Canada, North America and across the West are data breaches and cyber attacks, ransomware attacks. And one of them happened very close to home at the Toronto District School Board, where

students and staff personal information was stolen during a cyber attack. And that happened four months ago. But even though the ransom was paid, they didn't get it back. It wasn't destroyed. And they found out about that after a separate ransom demand was made in exchange for the stolen data. This brings up all sorts of questions. And so here to walk us through this really complex notion

that a lot of people aren't super aware of is Francis Sims. He's the associate director in the Faculty of Applied Sciences and Technology at Humber Polytechnic. Francis, welcome to the show. Hey, Ben, thanks for having me again. Okay, so these things happen all the time.

Is it always a question of an organization not having robust enough security, or are these guys just always going to be one step ahead of whatever the security protocol is? Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, ultimately it comes down to trust. So when the school boards like the TDSBPO, you know, this impacted over 80 school boards in Canada, right?

All the way from Cape Breton through to Calgary. So it's a massive breach. And you know, what happens is you buy the software. It's no different than you buy software to put in your computer and you assume that the company you're buying it from is legit. It has great security and you can trust it. But in some situations like the Ticketmaster breach over a year ago, it was because somebody didn't have multi-factor authentication turned on, an administrator. They were able to get in and they were able to do lots of crazy things. We don't exactly know what happened here,

except that during the month of December last year, for nine days, the hackers got into the network for Power School. Now, Power School is a company based out of, I think California, Folsom, and they were in and they just started taking as much data as they could. And they didn't do the typical ransomware attack where they encrypt you know, they

encrypted the data. They just said, I'm going to take your data and I want you to pay a ransom in order for me to delete it. And they never did. And they paid it the TDSP paid it, but they didn't the data wasn't deleted. He had the power power school paid it. Oh, power school. Okay, pay the bad guys that you can't trust and lo and behold, and they report it like the on the internet says maybe millions of dollars the company didn't disclose

how much what it was right but it wasn't cheap and then they just started knocking on doors all across the country in Canada and the TDSP was one of them and said okay I want you to pay up again yeah but it's hard it's hard for school boards to know how do you when you buy the software that's used all around the world yeah how do you know if you can trust it or not? That was gonna be my next question. Like a school board has one job, right? It's to administer and keep the schools afloat

and make sure that the kids that are going through it learn something, right? They are not experts in cybersecurity. So they must be taking their, they must have to take their marching orders from someone. And I have to assume that someone is the federal government. No, wouldn't wouldn't there be directives from the federal government on how these organizations should

be protecting themselves? Yeah, no education, though, it's managed, I think, at the provincial. Okay, all right. So I don't know, but there is definitely a role. I agree 100%. There's a role at the federal level here. I mean, I think at the federal level, really, what it comes down to is data sovereignty, right? This is what I always say is, you know, the data that we create in Canada should be intellectual property. Should be protected in Canada.

Canada, right? We shouldn't be outsourcing our students data to some US tech firm. We do enough of that with TikTok and China and Instagram and all these things, but that's super personal. We wouldn't do the same thing with our tax records. Allow our tax records to be still, hopefully, I mean, maybe they are. My RS database down there, right? So that's the way I feel is that the federal government should be saying, okay, if you buy the software, here are the grand rules, right? We need to make sure that you have this type of security plan. Yeah. Right. And we need to audit it, vet it, because a school board, like maybe that TDSP has great cybersecurity staff. I'm sure they do. I don't really know. But like a small school board, like where I come from in Cape Breton, they may not have that stuff.

And that's not that that's not their specialty. Like even if they've got a few cyber cyber geeks working for them, their job is education. Yeah. And I think that's where the government I mean, you know, we talk about whether we want, you know, government oversight or regulation, you know, you can argue that but in this is one area where they could help, I think, because by putting a policy in place, by saying, if you want to do business in Canada, we hear that from our friend down south all the time, here are the ground rules, we can put some ground rules in place. And that means that any vendor that comes in has to do A, B and C has to make sure that the data stays here and has to make sure that they're secure. And here are the steps that they're gonna prove it.

Francis, you know, the conversation around AI in our lives, it's omnipresent, it's ubiquitous. And I often say, technology is neither good nor bad. It's how you use it, right? It can either be a shield or it can be, it uses a shield or a hammer, right? You can either build or destroy. But as AI played a role in making these cyber attacks more sophisticated?

100%. Give the listeners an example, like a practical example of how that would happen. Yeah, so I always say now AI is no longer just in the classroom, it's in the attack, right? That happens. So what happens here is that, when I was, if I was a bad actor, I've never been a bad actor, they're trying to steal money from you, Ben, and I might say,

okay, Ben is only worth 100 bucks and it's going to take me two hours to write up an email to try to convince him to do something. Well, I may say it's not worth my time, right? Because the two hours of my time, it's not worth 100 bucks. No, you're worth a lot more than a hundred bucks, I know. But if you were an AI tool, it would just happen all automatically in one second in the background. And so that hundred dollars is valuable because you didn't put any investment in to get that hundred dollars, right? And so that's what AI does is it automates and it makes it hyper personalized because when it steals all this data, so now what happens is maybe you'll get some attack that says, oh, I know your daughter had an allergy, right? We had this food allergy and we're just the medical clinic following up. We just need to get a little bit of personal information from you. Well, you're going to automatically

assume, yeah, how are they going to know that my daughter had an allergy if they're not the doctor's office? That's what AI is going to do. It's going to highlight what the right vector is, how you go after somebody in sort of a really easy way. So it reduces the amount of time and investment for these actors to get the money out of you. So what are the steps forward, Francis, in order to mitigate these issues? I mean, they're never going to fully go away, but I assume it's a multi step plan. And we've outlined a few of them, you know, finding Canadian companies to work with, vetting them properly. What are some of the steps that the Toronto District School Board could take so that they do not fall prey to a problem like

this in the future? Yeah, number one is to require all student data or or staff data to be stored in Canada. And which means that it's under the jurisdiction of Canadian privacy laws. Okay, so that that dictates how it can be shared and what the penalties are if you breach that. Because right now gets stored in the United States and the United States, all the laws are state driven. There's not really a federal legislation around how the data can be shared. So once it goes across the border, it's gone. Right. So that's step number one. You buy a system, you make sure it's in Canada, the data is in Canada, and then have mandatory

cybersecurity standards, right? And I think school boards can work with the provincial governments, the federal governments, doing a lot of work here in Ontario, I know, and other provinces around that, to say, here are the minimum thresholds. You need to make sure that anybody that has access to the system, I know who those people are, right? This is the steps for them to get in. I can audit it anytime. Basic things like that, right? It's like if you go buy a car at the car dealership, you're going to look

under the hood, you're going to take it for a dress drive, maybe you're going to get it over to your own mechanic to make sure that it's okay before you buy it. So that kind of stuff we want to do. And I think the third thing is that we need to start thinking about Canadian built digital infrastructure for schools, for hospitals, for our data, right? Because no longer can we rely on, you know, servers coming out of the United States, right? Yeah. A lot of great companies down there, but we can't rely on that to support our digital identity. And so I think that's a bigger conversation and school boards can't do that. But that's

more of a government thought process. And I know Premier Ford in Ontario here is talking about it and others are thinking about it. But I think those are three areas of focus. And it just feels to me like we're always prepared for the attack that just happened, not for the attack that's imminent, right? Because these guys are always one step ahead. And it does feel, Francis, that what you're suggesting, while could be inspiring and could build an entire new industry in Canada, I mean, this just feels like a multi, multi

billion dollar effort that's going to take years and years before it gets actualized. But I want to thank you for joining us, for walking us through this, you know, that people's data should be safe and we've got to take the steps to do so. But I appreciate your time today, sir. My pleasure. Thanks, Dad.