Inside Policy Talks

For years Canada seemed to be the more peaceful part of North America. But that narrative is changing.

Recently a Toronto police officer was shot while investigating a series of shootings in the city, including one that took place at the city’s US Consulate. The death of Constable Marc Pinizzotto is a tragedy. But it is also a warning.

The lines between organized crime, foreign interference, terrorist financing, money laundering, gang violence, and hostile state activity are becoming increasingly blurred.

For decades, Canadians have tended to view these challenges as separate issues. But what happens when criminal organizations, foreign states, financial networks, and violent proxies all begin operating in the same ecosystem?

What are these converging threats? Why do they matter? And is Canada ready to confront them? 

To answer these questions Inside Policy Talks welcomes Garry Clement, former national director of the RCMP’s proceeds of crime program. He’s also the author of several books, including “Under Cover: Inside the Shady World of Organized Crime and the R.C.M.P.”. 

For young men, there used to be “a ton of societal pressure on you to make something of yourself.” That’s one of many positive culture norms that we’ve now lost, says author Rob Henderson.

Today, “some guys are going to be ambitious and hardworking regardless of what people tell them,” Henderson says. But for many others, “if there's no judgment, no norm, no expectation,” they will sink into a state of inertia or pursue “hedonistic pleasure” and “short-term, fleeting gratification.”

He says this is one of many examples of how the loss of cultural norms has impacted human flourishing.

To discuss this, Henderson joins Inside Policy Talks. Henderson is a psychologist and US Air Force veteran who is best known for coining the term “luxury beliefs.” He is the author of Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class.

On the podcast, he tells Peter Copeland, acting director of domestic policy at MLI, that in past generations cultural norms served to promote healthy lifestyle choices while actively stigmatizing poor ones – like drugs and gambling. That stigma was serving a useful function.

But Henderson says there are strategies individuals can use to overcome the lack of guidance today’s culture provides about how to live a good life. He suggests that a wise place to start is by actively seeking out peer groups that promote positive norms.

Canada’s judges have become “completely divorced from reality” in the reasoning they use to bat down mandatory minimum sentences for serious crimes, says Christine Van Geyn, interim executive director of the Canadian Constitution Foundation.

Tension around this issue reached a breaking point in October 2025 when the Supreme Court of Canada issued its ruling in the Senneville case. The court struck down the one-year mandatory minimum sentence that Parliament had passed for possession of child sexual abuse material. The judges’ reasoning was not that the men before the court didn’t deserve serious punishment, but that a hypothetical teenager sharing a sexting image might theoretically fall under the same provision. Public outrage followed.

But this pattern of the court using these imagined scenarios goes back decades. It’s the topic of a recent MLI commentary – “(Un)reasonable hypotheticals” – by Van Geyn and Lakehead University law professor Ryan Alford. To discuss these issues, they join Inside Policy Talks.

On the episode, they tell host Mark Mancini, a Thompson Rivers University law professor and MLI senior fellow, that a particularly outlandish “reasonable hypothetical” used by the Supreme Court in its 2015 Nur ruling served as an inflection point.

It moved Canada into the “world of speculation” when it comes to concocting these hypotheticals, says Van Geyn. The court imagined a situation where a responsible firearms owner who stores an unloaded gun and ammunition in close proximity could face the three-year mandatory minimum sentence for a serious firearms offence.

“The scenario they picked shows us exactly how unhinged from reality they became” she says.

Alford observed that the court’s trajectory on these rulings raises some bigger issues.

“They're now saying, ‘Okay, well, let's treat the accused as if they are essentially members of an equity-seeking group,’” says Alford. “The reasonable hypothetical offender is in this pool now of people who we're supposed to think about and have sympathy for.”

“Even more problematically,” adds Alford, “it's the notion that (the courts) now have this freewheeling basis to say the Constitution means whatever they say it means.”

Some of the boldest predictions about Artificial Intelligence have forecast that white-collar workers are soon to become obsolete.

This comes as rapidly advancing AI appears more and more in our day-to-day lives — reshaping classrooms, the workplace, and how we interact with each other.

But we’ve seen these transformations before. As with major past major technological upheavals—like the Industrial Revolution of the 19th Century—AI is causing a disruption, presenting new opportunities even as it upends old ones.

Today we ask: What can past technological revolutions teach us about AI? Will AI replace workers, augment them, or force us to reimagine entire industries? And how can Canada use AI to raise living standards and lift us up out of our present economic doldrums without allowing it hollow out human judgment and interpersonal connection—perhaps one of the most worrying prospects raised by this new technology.

Our guest today is Joel Blit. Joel is a University of Waterloo economics professor and co-founder of the Canadian AI Adoption Initiative. His recent work focuses on AI and the future of work.

Liberalism is clearly on the ropes.

To many, the threats originate from what they consider the outside: populism, authoritarianism, misinformation, and polarization.

But to others, the wounds appear self-inflicted: arising from tensions within liberalism itself.

For decades, liberal societies promised a host of goods: most notably, individual freedom. But many now look around and see loneliness and social decay. Families are breaking down and the culture is fragmenting. Institutional mistrust is on the rise amid a politics that seems unable to unite.

Many of the institutions that once gave liberal societies their coherence—and, in fact, preceded them—like churches, families, local associations, stable communities and shared moral norms—are now shadows of their former selves.

These issues are at the heart of Michael Bonner’s new book, The Crisis of Liberalism: The Origin and Destiny of Freedom. Bonner argues that liberal societies are like orphans, who have either forgotten or do not know their parentage. They have severed the moral, philosophical and theological foundations that made their societies’ account of freedom intelligible.

Bonner is a historian, writer, and political adviser. He holds a doctorate from Oxford and has written widely on history, religion, politics and the modern West.

We are in a moment of heightened focus on Canadian national identity.

Ever since Donald Trump threatened to annex Canada, many Canadians have responded with the assertion that Canadian identity is unique from the United States.

But this national mood comes only a few years after a campaign of tearing down statues of Canada’s seminal historic figures, and then-prime minister Justin Trudeau calling Canada a “post-national state.” Most recently, a so-called prank show with funding from the CBC targeted Canadians who have defended the legacy of Canada’s founding prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald.

So, is the wave of Canadian patriotism that’s played out over the past year grounded in a firm understanding of the history – both good and bad – that has shaped the country? This a moment when Canadians would benefit from knowing the historic roots of their democracy and the stories of figures like Macdonald who helped build a nation on the northern half of the continent.

One voice who has consistently stood up for the idea that Canadians should have a robust and balanced view of their past is Trent University history professor Christopher Dummitt.

Dummitt joins Inside Policy Talks to discuss his efforts to reach beyond the classroom with his new Canadian history YouTube channel – titled Well... That Didn't Suck! – and share his views on the current state of Canadians’ relationship with their history.

On the podcast, he tells Ian Campbell, digital editor at MLI, that one source of Canada’s amnesia about its cultural and democratic roots is the deliberate erasure of Canadian national symbols that took place in the 1960s. This was most famously exemplified by the new Canadian flag created by the Pearson government, devoid of any reference to Canada’s British heritage – the very roots that gave Canada its parliamentary democracy.

Dummitt says the toppling of historic statues that has taken place in the 2020s is “in a sense just a continuation of what happened in the 1960s and 1970s.”

Part of the solution, says Dummitt, is to restore provincial history curriculums that teach a cohesive Canadian national story.

This week, we present a special bonus episode: a live conversation between author Rob Henderson, who famously coined the term luxury beliefs, and MLI Managing Director Brian Lee Crowley.

The event was recorded in April 2026 before a live audience in Vancouver, as part of MLI's Voices That Inspire speaker series.

In their conversation, Crowley and Henderson discuss the formative childhood experiences that led the author to his ideas about elite hypocrisy, Crowley asks whether discrediting the value of intact families is an example of a luxury belief, and Henderson reveals his views on the future of reading.

The West offers the “ideal environment” for an organization like the Muslim Brotherhood to carry out its operations “because we are extremely tolerant,” says Lorenzo Vidino, an expert on the Islamist organization.

The Muslim Brotherhood has inspired or spawned some of the world's most dangerous terrorist organizations. Yet its goals, strategy, structure, and financing remain poorly understood – even by many of the world's leading national security and intelligence agencies.

The Brotherhood’s long-term goal is the Islamification of society. The West’s tolerance offers fertile grounds for its activities to remain unchecked – creating a national security blind spot within Western democracies.

One of the world’s leading experts on the Brotherhood, Vidino is director of the Program on Extremism at The George Washington University. He joins Inside Policy Talks to share his research on the Brotherhood conducted over the past 25 years.

“In the West, they could operate freely,” explains Vidino. “They can fundraise, they can open mosques, they can disseminate the propaganda, they can carry out all the social, religious, and political activities and fundraising activities.”

On the podcast, he explains in detail to Casey Babb, director of The Promised Land at MLI, how the Brotherhood carries out activities like raising revenues.

He says this involves a combination of receiving money from the Middle East, conducting ventures like real estate businesses in the West, and obtaining funds directly from unsuspecting Western governments.

“It's the ability of Brotherhood networks to receive grants, donations from governments at all levels,” says Vidino.

“It's not like the applicant would be an organization called Muslim Brotherhood of Montreal. It would be some group with a nice sounding name about integration and friendship and interfaith,” he says. “With a bit of naïveté in most cases … policymakers – often second-tier bureaucrats – would give the funding.”

Courts have become central players in some of Canada’s biggest political and moral debates – especially since the advent of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

That’s raised hard questions about their role, what accountability mechanisms exist, and how Canadians understand the place of the judicial branch within their system of government.

Like any other institution, courts depend on public trust which must be earned and sustained.

McMaster University political science professor Andrea Lawlor has been tracking how Canadians perceive this institution. She joins Inside Policy Talks to discuss her findings.

Lawlor’s research, conducted with Acadia University’s Erin Crandall, finds that Canadians still generally trust the courts, but this confidence has shown signs of decline, and it appears attitudes are becoming more politicized.

On the podcast, Lawlor tells Peter Copeland, deputy director of domestic policy at MLI, that her research found little shift in how Canadians on the political left perceive the courts. However, she has observed a moderate decline in support from those on the right – particularly tied to court decisions on moral issues like medical assistance in dying.

However, Lawlor says there is one type of court ruling that tends to register a public reaction across the political spectrum: criminal sentencing.

“Those tend to uniformly push public opinion,” says Lawlor. “I think there was some consensus across the political spectrum that Canadians were dissatisfied … and they certainly wanted the legislature to step in.”

Our culture tells parents that “you can do it all” – but that's “a very dangerous narrative” and “a narcissistic trope,” says social worker and parenting coach Erica Komisar.

Is it time for our culture to grapple with a hard truth: life requires setting priorities and making trade-offs between items like career and family, rather than trying to have it all at once?

Modern societies invest a great deal of resources into children. But often it comes in the form of trends like helicopter parenting, bulldozer parenting, or intensive parenting. Are these short bursts of anxious, structured engagement what children really need? Or do we use these to paper over the gaps our modern culture has left in traditional family and social structures?

Our economies and social norms prize autonomy, flexibility, and paid work. Meanwhile, many parents feel more stretched and isolated than ever, and the social networks they inhabit feel thin.

To discuss these challenges, Komisar joins Inside Policy Talks. Komisar is a clinical social worker trained in psychology, and an author whose work argues that the first years of childhood are foundational for attachment, mental health, and later resilience.

On the podcast, she tells Peter Copeland, deputy director of domestic policy at MLI, that “it's a narcissistic trope that you can do it all, that you don't have to take anything off the plate, that you don't have to sacrifice anything, that you can have everything and do everything all at the same time.”

She says that messaging sets up internal conflict for parents, especially mothers, when they face choices around whether to stay home with their toddlers or return to work. She says deep down many mothers would rather stay home, and the pressure to return to a career sets up internal conflicts leading to health problems or even resentment towards the child. For example, she points to the growing trend of women posting online that they regret becoming mothers.

“When you reject your own children and mothering, we know that we've taken a turn in society,” says Komisar.