The Ben Mulroney Show - Transit systems shouldn’t operate as shelters for the unhoused and mentally ill

Episode Date: March 19, 2025

Guests and Topics: -Transit systems shouldn’t operate as shelters for the unhoused and mentally ill with Guest: André Picard, Health reporter and columnist for The Globe and Mail -What was the Big Maple Leaf Heist with Guest: Craig Baird, Host of Canadian History Ehx -The grief of losing your entire family at once with Guest: Dr. Oren Amitay, Psychologist 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

This is Carry the Fire. I'm your host, Lisa Laflamme. Carry the Fire, a podcast by the Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation featuring inspiring personal stories about what happens when world leading doctors, nurses, researchers, and their patients come together to ignite breakthroughs. Carry the Fire launches Monday, January 27th, wherever you get your podcasts. If you are a resident of one of Canada's big cities,

think of Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary, Ottawa, then you know that during this affordability crisis, during this crisis of homelessness and mental health crisis that we're living with and trying to get through, then you know that places like hospitals and transit hubs, subway stations, metro stations, LRT stations, bus stations, are becoming a place where our most vulnerable are congregating, especially in the winter months where they had to go somewhere to stay warm. And my next guest has shown a spotlight on this problem

because it feels like because this is a place for them to take shelter, it's almost giving cover to the cities themselves to not actually deal with the problem, not just the cities, all levels of government. And so here to talk about is André Picard, health reporter and columnist for the Globe and Mail. Andre, welcome to the Ben Mulroney show. Hi. Over the course of the winter, I saw a lot of social media videos, especially in

Toronto of, you know, the homeless, the mentally ill people with drug addiction issues, who were finding shelter in say, the lobbies or the atriums of Toronto's hospitals. And I know that that's repeating itself underground in the subway station. Your piece references specifically the metro in Montreal. But this is a nationwide issue, isn't it? Oh, yes. Nationwide across the US, parts of Europe, this is an issue that exists everywhere. The congregation of people who are unhoused or drug users, transit hubs or just convenient places. And your contention is

this shouldn't be happening. And the point of a transit system is to move people from point A to point B as quickly and efficiently and cheaply as possible. And for them for this to be almost like a and cheaply as possible. And for them, for this to be almost like a MacGyvering of the situation, like I said, I believe it sort of gives an out at least a temporary one to those on whom it should be incumbent to solve the problem. Exactly. The MacGyvering suggests it's working and it's not working. So it's worse than that. It's just a passing of the buck. So people should not be congregated in in the metro stations or subway stations but we should be caring for them but we have to find the appropriate way and it's it's unfair to the transit systems it's unfair to transit riders to

to have to wade through this it's not not a appropriate place for people to live and it's a it's a negative feedback loop on the transit system itself. Let's take the homeless out of it for a moment. If you're a city in this country, then you want to up the ridership as much as possible. You want to make paying fares as possible so that you can then pay for the system itself. And if there's extra money, you can pay for other services.

But with these places becoming congregation points for the mentally ill and for drug abuse and for all sorts of other problems that should be addressed elsewhere, it's making it so that people who would ordinarily ride the Metro or ride the subway or take the bus are not anymore, thereby taking funds out of the system.

Exactly, it's undermining funds out of the system. Exactly, it's undermining the purpose of the transit, mass transit to move people around because it makes it unpleasant. It's also very costly. Montreal, I was reading about the Société de Tassepard de Montgale, they spend $51 million a year on security just trying to move homeless people along.

And they can barely meet their bottom line, it is. So this is costly in many ways. Every big city has to have good transit to operate. And it's not heartless for a transit system to say, we can't have them here, you have to move out. This is not, I mean, a transit system is purpose built. And this is not the purpose it was built for. Exactly, I don't think it's heartless. And I don't think it's compassionate when people say, well,

they have nowhere else to go. That's not compassion. That's all that's giving up. Yeah, I think people should be saying, let's find the appropriate way to to deal with these issues of the toxic drug crisis of homelessness. These are important issues to society as well. But again, it shouldn't fall on a transit authority. Yeah, and I have to imagine you've spoken with people in these transit authorities. What are they telling you about telling you about the pressures that they're feeling? And are there discussions between them and say cities who are like, what's the city saying? What are what are the cities saying about? Well, are they putting their hands up and they're saying,

well, there's nothing we can do, and at least they got a place to go. Yeah there's a little bit of that the cities are saying you know it just gets passed along the line cities are saying we understand we need more warming centers we need more drug treatment but we're not getting enough money from the province and the province says well we're not getting enough money from the feds it's kind of the the typical Canadian dance no one takes responsibility. And what they should be doing honestly, sitting down together and let's figure out how to do this. What's the role of transitedness?

I find our transitors have been bending over backwards to try and accommodate people and not in a way that's helpful to the general public. Well, I wanna thank you for highlighting this. It was really refreshing to look at these problems through the lens that you applied to it because otherwise a lot of people would in fact do what we said, just throw your hands up and say,

well, at least they have a place to go and not only does it not address the problem, but probably in certain ways makes it worse. So, Henri Picard, thank you so much for joining us today on the Ben Mulroney Show. Thanks, pleasure. All right, Mark Carney, he's making a lot of announcements and I'm not I'm not going to have a reflexive knee jerk opposition to all of them. Sometimes he says something that makes sense to me.

But he was recently in front of a podium where he says that Canada will be taking a long term approach to handling the US tariff threat while focusing on strengthening Canada's economy and sovereignty. I don't know that any politician or any Canadian should disagree with that. That's a pretty innocuous position to take. But at the beginning of his pronouncement, he just threw out a whole bunch of slogans. Let's listen. We are focused on building this economy. Today's announcement is, of course, about sovereignty.

It's about protection. But it's also about building the economy here in Nunavut. We are going to build Canada. Canada is strong, and it's going to get stronger. We can give ourselves more than anything that President Trump or other trade partner can take away. That's a basic point. and that if there is a misconception of that in the United States, I'm not saying the president has that misconception, but if there's a misconception of that, we are going to disabuse that misconception.

We're going to grow this economy because that's good for Canadians, good for a better for a future and we can do it and we're going to do it. The Prime Minister spoke for 41 seconds and didn't offer a single fact in support of the slogans that he threw out there. Canada is strong. We're going to make ourselves stronger. What does that mean? Because the counterpoint to that is Pierre Poliev's announcement today of unleashing the potential of Ontario's ring of fire. And he explained methodically how he's gonna make that happen within six months of taking power.

On one hand, and the gaslighting going on at the federal level is incredible. Mark Carney suggesting that Pierre Poliev is all about slogans and in 41 seconds gave us nothing but slogans. There is nothing in the words that you just heard that contains actionable information to actually build our economy. Saying something doesn't make it so.

You need to put meat on the bone and you need to start explaining how you're going to do this. A few days ago, Mark Carney said that it's not up to him to be a leader on pipelines for liquefied natural gas. He said, that's up to the provinces and the people with the projects and the first nations. He sort of said, eh, not me. Okay, so that's off the table.

And now he said, we're gonna build the economy. How, with what? What is the plan, Mr. Carney? But he did offer an insight that Trump's administration has signaled. They have an issue with NAFTA 2.0. There are a series of trade initiatives from the U.S. such that they've called into question the validity of USMCA, since you're in New York Times, how you would refer to it, USMCA.

And that means that we should have a broader conversation, a broader conversation about our commercial relationship, which also involves a conversation about our security relationship with the United States. So I'm less interested in reacting to every initiative, putting on the table that we want to have that broader conversation.

It won't happen overnight. There's no magic one meeting that is going to unlock things. And so, and of course we have regular conversations. Again, I'm not getting anything from this guy that says I'm the guy. I'm not getting it. Now it's time for the educational portion of the show, which also happens to be highly entertaining. And to learn something new this morning or this afternoon

or this evening, we are joined now by Craig Baird, the host of Canadian History X. Craig, welcome back to the show. Oh, thanks for having me. So 40 years ago yesterday, there was a summit that went down in Quebec City that was pretty seminal and also given the toxic relationship between Canada and the United States these days, pretty important. And I think a lot of people miss what it represented. Why don't you tell us about the Shamrock Summit?

Yeah. So the Shamrock Summit was kind of a very unique period in our history. And it was seen as a way to really mend the relationship between the United States and Canada because during the Trudeau years, we didn't always have the best relationship, especially when Nixon and Reagan were presidents. But with the Shamrock Summit, your father, Brian Mulrooney, and then Ronald Reagan came together and really hashed out some important things. And one of the, I think one of the more important

things was the fact that they looked at controlling acid rain. I mean, you probably remember growing up just like I do. Oh yeah. All we heard about was acid rain and how bad acid rain is. And now it's not really an issue.

And a big reason for that was your father, who really pushed this and was, you know, a very environmentally conscious prime minister. And I think a lot of people forget that, but the Shamrock Summit was a big part of that, of getting this acid rain treaty in place. But the thing is everybody, what they remember of the Shamrock Summit is everybody singing when Irish eyes are smiling during the televised gala. That kind of overshadows everything to do with the, this Shamrock Summit itself. That's right. There were a lot of protesters who wanted action on acid rain,

and this summit was sort of a catalyst to help shepherd that forward. But there were plenty, plenty of people in the press who had it in for my dad's on day one. And despite what is now viewed as two great leaders coming together in friendship, which is something sorely lacking today, is now viewed as two great leaders coming together in friendship, which is something sorely lacking today. It was, he was a bootlicker, he was a kiss ass,

he was demeaning to Canada. It was a pretty, it was a hot take and it was a take that did not age well. No, absolutely. And I think these days what we actually see is the fact that he was using this strong friendship that he had with Ronald Reagan in the United States to get a lot of things put into place that were important to him that, you know, might not have been able to happen without having that relationship. And this was all part of it. And that's why we had things like the acid rain treaty or the Montreal Protocol to deal with the ozone layer along with a variety of other things. I want to talk, I want to learn something new. I love when you come on the show and you teach me

about a historical figure who's important to Canadian history that I had never heard of. So tell me about Peter Fiddler. Peter Fiddler is a really interesting figure. He's been more well known where I am out in Alberta because we have a couple statues of him. But he was a fur trader who really did a lot to map the West and explore the West. And he spent his entire life with the Hudson's Bay Company, or at least his working life with the Hudson's Bay Company, and traveled from Hudson Bay all the way to Lake Athabasca and was a really important individual. He helped to settle Southern on Manitoba that eventually became the Red River area. But he's always kind of overshadowed by David Thompson, who was somebody who was also working at that time and, you know, is much more well known today

than Peter Fiddler. But in St., in Elk Point, there's a, about an eight meter tall statue of Peter Fiddler that is very impressive. It's all carved by chainsaw and it's really quite beautiful, but he just is not as well known as he should be. You know, I'm so glad that you've now told me sort of a second story about someone who settled the West. I mean, in a previous conversation we had, we talked about this, I can't remember, the guy from Britain who came over and tried to settle,

oh, I can't remember where it was, but anyway, but these are stories that we don't tell each other. We have this, we stop short and we say, okay, well they built the railroad. First they sent in the Northwestern Mounted Police and then they sent in the railroad. That's sort of all we really hear or learn about settling Canada's West,

but there are people involved and there was sacrifice and it was hard and those people deserve to be remembered. Oh absolutely and somebody like Peter Fiddler definitely needs to be remembered and one really unique thing about him is that when he died in his will he actually left money to the direct descendant of his firstborn son and it was supposed to be given to that person in 1969 so 200 years after his birth so in in 1969, all these people who are descended from him are expecting this huge fortune because of, you know, 160 years of interest accumulating. And then they found out that it was all gone. It was like 10 years after he died,

that his children had actually been able to access the will and the estate and took all the money. So there was no money in 1969 for his descendants, unfortunately. I'm talking with Craig Baird, the host of Canadian History X. And Craig, we're currently living in a time of renewed Canadian pride, renewed Canadian optimism in our country and our identity. And so I think this next story is perfect to talk about

because it's the most Canadian thing we could possibly talk about. Tell me about the Big Maple Leaf Heist. Well, the Big Maple Leaf Heist is a really cool story, because what happened was the Royal Canadian Mint had made this million dollar gold coin. It weighed 100 kilograms. It was just massive.

It was about the size of a car tire. And it was the largest gold coin ever minted to that point. And it was the purest, too. And I think it still is. It was 99.999% pure. So it's valued at four million dollars and five were made. They went to a variety of places. A Saudi prince actually bought one and turned it into a coffee table. So that's like a three million dollar coffee table. But one wound up in a museum in Berlin and in 2017 it was actually stolen.

Did they find the guy? They did arrest the people who were involved with it. It was a kind of an organized crime syndicate that was there, but they never did find the coin. They never found the coin? We're very sure it was melted down. Oh my god. It's long, long gone.

Okay, let's listen to a snippet of the big Maple Leaf heist. The men climbed down into the employee locker room, took a skateboard, and you'll see why soon, and then quickly reached the door to the museum. They jammed the door to keep it open and then hurried to the coin room. The thieves walked past priceless coins from human history, and they only had one target in their sights. The big maple leaf. The gold coin was protected by a glass case, but the thieves weren't worried. They had a plan for that too.

Glass cutting equipment? No. A fancy laser cutter so they could easily grab the coin and escape? No. One thief brought out an axe and he swung it like Paul Bunyan straight into the glass case. The thick glass case shattered into several pieces. And some pieces were so heavy that they left gouges on the floor which can still be seen to this day. The men then grabbed the 100 kilogram coin

and put it on a skateboard they brought with them. The guard was still in another part of the building and the thieves hadn't been heard so they made their way back to the locker room. And as they did the hefty cargo bumped into walls leaving deep cuts in the plaster and the coin was so heavy that it flattened the tires leaving marks on the floor. In the locker room the four men lifted the coin up towards the window. No pulley system needed. And with one final push they shoved it out the window.

The coin worth a fortune fell to the ground with a dull thud. Craig, this is amazing for so many reasons, but I just assumed when I heard that this was a heist, that it was going to be an Ocean's Eleven sophisticated style heist. And now to hear that it was a bunch of guys with an axe and a skateboard. And like this, this sounds like the type of heist that would have made more sense in say the 1920s, a simpler time where we trusted people more. But the fact that happened in 2017 at a museum in Berlin, where was the security? There really wasn't much security. They'd actually come a few days earlier and they had attempted to get in through a window and they actually were trying to open the

window and it cracked the window. So they fled and then security came by and saw that you know there was these tools and everything. It didn't really think anything of it. That window had no alarm on it. It was supposed to, but it hadn't worked since 2013 and nobody really thought anything of it either. And yeah, it was, it was an organized crime,

but it really feels like it was just people trying to, you know, break into a brewery and steal a bunch of cases of beer. Like it doesn't really fit with the, how valued this coin was. Yeah. And you know, they had things on their phone and everything like that, that made it very easy to convict them.

Kind of felt like they deserve to get away with it, with this, how lax the security was. Craig, real quick, how can people find the show? You can find the show on the Course Radio Network every weekend, just check your local listings. And you can find Canadian History X on all podcast platforms and that's EHX. Craig Baird, thanks so much. We'll talk to you next week. Thanks, talk to you again. Welcome back to the Ben Mulroney Show.

I want to put away the political outrage for this segment and I want to focus on empathy and loss and grief. and I want to focus on empathy and loss and grief. There is a story that is one of the most heartbreaking things I have ever heard. A gentleman by the name of Joseph Breska lost his entire family, his wife and his two daughters in a house fire. When the first responders showed up, they found him with injuries because he was trying to save them. And he's in hospital recovering from his injuries. And while they believe that physically he will recover emotionally and mentally, he is devastated.

Now he has a brother who has been talking to the media saying that his brother is trying to find a way, find a reason to keep going. He's lost everything. And so I want to have a conversation about what do you do? Who do you lean on? And if you lose a child, you still have your wife to lean on. He lost everyone. And I want to talk about the impact of such a devastating loss. Look, I talk about it all the time. I lost my dad. He died. He was an

elderly gentleman. I can make peace with that. He lived a full life. This is not that. So let's welcome psychologist Dr. Orin Amate to the Ben Mulroney show and let's dig in. Doctor, thank you for being here. Thank you for having me, Ben. This is, I mean, I'm struggling to appreciate the level of loss that somebody like this gentleman has endured. I'm sure in your practice,

you have met people in similar situations. I have. And you know, I mean, tragedy, it doesn't even do justice to what he's going through. And what I'm going to say, my shock some listeners, but when I'm dealing with patients in these terrible situations, what I say is, I say, to really show empathy, I say, you're walking in here with a plastic bag over your head. And no matter what I say, the best I can do is maybe poke a few tiny pinpricks so that you can breathe a bit. And it resonates with people because that really captures what they're going through because anyone trying to make them feel better with whether techniques or trite words or

anything like that, you know, it just, worsens it. Yeah. Because you can't do justice to what they're going through. So a few years ago, there was another story that captured the country when a family was devastated by a drunk driver and the Marco Muzo case. And I was trying to compare the two in my head and from my non-expert opinion, the conclusion I came to that made sense to me and feel free to tell me I'm wrong or tell me or we can build on it. But in a case like that, at the very least, you have anger directed at somebody that can keep you warm, that can fuel you, versus what I have to assume is a feeling of emptiness in this man who has, I mean, you can't be mad at a fire,

right, you can't scream at a fire, but you can move forward with the anger in your heart that somebody, that person that you can identify took your family from you. Tell me why, make sense of what I just told you. Or tell me why I'm wrong. Tell me if I'm right. Well, ironically, you're right and wrong. Okay, because there's some people that anger it does fuel them. It gives them purpose. It gives them a meaning. Maybe they're going

to, you know, join mad or they're going to do campaigns to help, you know, educate, right? Exactly. Yeah, right. They have a place to fuel, you know, they have a place to direct their anger, as you said, but for others, it can consume them. It feels like that nothing will ever be good enough as far as justice, and they'll feel that this person got away with it because he's living his life and they continue. So it can go either way. But you are correct that when it's something like this, where it's a fire, the problem is not only is it, there's no one to direct the anger toward, but it's likely, and I don't want to speak for him, but it's likely that he's

questioning what if I had gotten up earlier, what if I had noticed something? And he's going to, I hope he can get help so that he doesn't keep replaying the horror in his mind and distorting it thinking there's something he could have done. There's something he could have done. Is there, is there, is there, is this a case where survivors guilt would come into the equation? I was just going to say that. I literally want to say that it's survivors guilt. And interestingly, though, even with the case with the Muzo family, there are probably members of the family saying, if only we had told them to do this or to do like, you know, right?

Because when it comes to survivor's guilt, it's such a distortion where people feel, you know, disproportionately or completely irrationally responsible for what happens to the people in the tragedy. I'm talking with Dr. Orin Amite about what a person does, how a person moves forward when they lose everyone in their family to a tragedy like a house fire. What does he do? I mean, what are the steps? How does someone go from, I have nothing left, to moving into the light?

Again, these are only words. And so, I hope that, you know, if he ever hears this, or someone communicates the same words that you'll find solace in them, understanding that they start with words, and then you try to make them into a reality, try to internalize them, which is basically saying something like, there's no way that his family would have wanted him to also lose his life, because if he can't move forward, that's what he's doing. They've lost their life tragically, and it would be a further tragedy for him to, again, to, you know, let's say consciously lose his life if he's not able to, you know, move forward. So that's one thing that the narrative he has to create. The second thing

is, you know, finding support. You have to find the people, the right people around you, not people who are going to give you platitudes, but people who are just there for you, who will give you the support that you need, whether it's bringing you food, whether it's just being there as, you know, a shoulder to cry on, whatever it is, you need that support, you need that connection. Because again, he lost the most important connections to himself. And the final point is finding some kind of meaning and purpose, whether it's related to the fire or just in general, direct, you know, just commit your life to, you know, to finding fulfillment, meaning, purpose,

because that's what we're here for. And, you know, just telling himself that that's what his family would have wanted. Well, he does have, you know, he has his brother, as it was indicated in the article, I have to assume that as a good man, he also had other people who could act as a support system. If I'm someone in that support network for somebody who's lost their family in a tragedy like this, what should I be looking out for? So that I know, because he's not in a good place, he would not be in a good place. But some point there could be some behavior that could take him

into an even darker place what what should a support network be looking for to make sure that they do everything they can but but obviously you got to you have to let him grieve well that's it and so I always tell people there's no one right way to grieve everyone has their own grieving process and there's no one way to support. But there's lots of wrong ways and the wrong way is to project your own self into that situation. Here's what I would want. You don't know what he would want. So, you know, you just let him direct and as you alluded to, you look for any changes in behavior. Is he starting to drink more is he going

places alone where you're worried is he going to do something but isn't that a doctor isn't that the tricky part isn't that you know listen if I lost everyone I would at least to start I would drink a lot and isn't that part of the process of coming out of it I mean there's there has to be some leniency for changes of behavior initially, because your entire life has been thrown asunder. Well, sure. But if that becomes the daily pattern, if he's drinking every single day, it becomes harder to pull himself out of it. So, right, again, you're, you're, you're trying to walk that line. It's very hard to balance giving space, but also

making sure you're close enough to make sure that he doesn't spiral into a place that he can't pull himself out from. Yeah, it's honestly, I just don't like I was saying before if I tragically lost a family member I would have all these other family members on whom to lean and we could share in that pain and that grief I cannot imagine how isolating and how alone he feels right now. No, it really is unimaginable and that's why I hope if anyone around him is playing that supportive role, they don't try to tell him, you know, things will get better or, you know, again, I said the word earlier platitudes. No, let him be angry.

Let him struggle. Let him just be there for him, help you contain what he's going through and then when he's ready, you try to help him, you know, pull him up. Dr. Orinamite, thank you so much for this conversation. Thank you. Survivor has been calling me for a long time. These 18 strangers have answered the call for the adventure of a lifetime. My parents would always say, you're going to be the first one set home. I can do this. I'm physically fit. I'm mentally fit.

They must learn to adapt or they'll be voted out. Being a physicist, playing men's hockey, this does not scare me at all. When my kids watch this, I want them to look at me and say, I'm proud of him. Survivor, new season Wednesdays on Global. Stream on StackTV.