Inside Policy Talks

 As birth rates fall and family formation grows increasingly fragile across the developed world, understanding the forces driving these trends has never been more urgent. In this episode of Inside Policy Talks, we explore the complex interplay of policy, culture, and economics shaping family life in Canada and the United States.

Patrick T. Brown, Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington and a leading voice on family policy, joins host Peter Copeland, Deputy Director of Domestic Policy at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute to discuss why marriage and fertility rates are declining, how tax and welfare systems affect families, and what lessons can be drawn from experiences on both sides of the border.

Brown shares insights and offers recommendations for policymakers seeking to support families and reverse demographic decline. He also addresses cultural shifts, economic pressures, and housing challenges influencing family decisions today. 

The importance of the Arctic is increasing, both for Canada and for our allies. That means it's critical to better understanding it.

While Canadians sense that the Arctic is part of their identity, few are deeply familiar with the region — its environment, its vastness, its diversity, or its challenges.

In that context, understanding the Russian Arctic — which is very different from the Canadian Arctic — is particularly important, given Russia's role as a destabilizing geopolitical actor and NATO’s principal adversary.

To unpack this, MLI Senior Fellow Alex Dalziel joins Inside Policy Talks. Dalziel is an Arctic expert who spent 20 years working in Canada’s national security, intelligence, and foreign policy communities. Dalziel has recently published two papers with MLI regarding Russia's approach to the Arctic: Polar Power: The Northern Sea Route in Russia’s strategic calculus and Frozen Assets: Russia’s ambitions to exploit the Arctic Ocean seabed. Three more papers in the series will follow later this year.

On the podcast, Dalziel tells Christopher Coates, director of foreign policy, national defence, and national security at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, that Russia is trying to set itself up "to be the gateway to the arctic," and that Canada must view Russia as its primary challenge in the region.

Free speech was once considered a bedrock democratic value. Now it's become one of the most contested issues in our culture-shaping institutions. Over the past decade, debates about what can and can’t be said have intensified across universities, schools, newsrooms, and corporate boardrooms. In many Western democracies, including Canada, speech codes, cancel campaigns, and ideological conformity have become flashpoints in a deeper cultural and political struggle. It's a similar story on the other side of the Atlantic. The United Kingdom has moved from a beacon of free expression to one of the most censorious countries in the western world – with people now being arrested for what are known as “non-crime hate incidents.” To unpack this, Toby Young, founder and director of the Free Speech Union, joins Inside Policy Talks. A well-known journalist, commentator, and author, Toby has been at the forefront of the UK’s free speech movement—defending individuals facing ideological persecution, advocating for legislative reform, and helping shape the public debate. He tells Peter Copeland, deputy director of domestic policy at MLI, that he believes rising attempts to restrict expression are driven by political and cultural elites who have “lost their faith” in liberal ideology and its associated policies, like mass immigration. “They don’t want to be forced to defend it,” says Young, because they “wouldn’t really know how to go about defending it in the pubic square.” Instead, he suggests, they want to “pretend that their particular political position doesn’t require a political defence.”

Science is often seen as the gold standard in policymaking – objective, rigorous, and self-correcting. But what happens when the science itself is uncertain, contradictory, or unreproducible?

Over the past two decades, concerns about replication, statistical misuse, and institutional bias have shaken public confidence in science – from medicine to psychology to public health. On the other hand, institutional confidence in science seems unshakeable, defensive, and resistant to change. And with rising polarization and decreasing trust in institutions, the need for both epistemic humility and stronger standards of evidence has never been clearer.

To discuss this, Dr. John Ioannidis, one of the world’s most cited scientific voices confronting these challenges, joins Inside Policy Talks. Dr. Ioannidis, a professor of medicine, epidemiology and population health at Stanford University, is the author of a landmark 2005 paper, Why Most Published Research Findings Are False, which helped spark the understanding of science's replication crisis.

On the podcast, he tells Peter Copeland, director of domestic policy at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, that when the term “evidence-based policy” arose in the 1980s, it was initially “seen as kind of a revolution” because it was pushing for “rigorous, unbiased, systematically assessed scientific evidence, instead of just expert opinion.” However, says Ioannidis, the term's popularity soon led to it being adopted by political actors as “an alibi” to sway the public towards positions not grounded in evidence.

On this episode, we tackle one of the most contested—and consequential—issues in public life: the rise of gender ideology and the erasure of biological sex. Over the past decade, the idea that gender is self-declared and disconnected from biology has reshaped our laws, schools, medical systems, and public discourse. But there’s growing pushback. In the United Kingdom, we’ve seen a remarkable reversal against this institutional capture. The shift has come through court challenges, investigative journalism, and public inquiry. To unpack this, Helen Joyce—journalist, editor, and author of Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality—joins the podcast. Joyce is currently the Director of Advocacy for Sex Matters, a U.K.-based organization that promotes clarity about sex in law and policy. Helen has been at the forefront of efforts in the U.K. to reinstate biological reality in public policy—and she’s helped shape the international conversation.

Across the Western world, we’re seeing a crisis in youth mental health, a collapse in family formation, and growing confusion about sex and gender. At the same time, more young people than ever report feeling lonely, directionless, and disconnected. In this episode of Inside Policy Talks, Dr. Leonard Sax—a family physician, psychologist, and best-selling author of The Collapse of Parenting—joins MLI's Peter Copeland. Sax is a leading voice on how sex differences, parenting styles, and educational environments shape childhood development—and what happens when we ignore the hard truths about human nature. He tells Copeland that, in order to raise health children, parents must embrace their authority, restrict screens and social media, and most importantly, foster strong bonds across generations—because this is the purpose of childhood.

In this episode, Peter Copeland, deputy director of the Macdonald-Laurier Institute's Domestic Policy Program, speaks with Cameron Field, a Toronto Police veteran and financial crimes expert. Field explains that there are three types of mortgage fraud in Canada. First, there's fraud for shelter, whereby some homebuyers committ fraud to obtain a mortgage. Next, there's fraud for profit, in which actors in the mortgage industry act fraudulently in order to complete a sale. Finally, there's fraud committed by organized crime, which sees mortgages used as a way to launder money. Field describes how these types of fraud work, and their impact on the Canadian housing market and public safety. Be sure to like, share, and subscribe to Inside Policy Talks for more thought-provoking analysis on key issues facing Canada!

Ken Coates, director of the Macdonald-Laurier Institute's Indigenous Affairs Program, is joined by journalist and economist Edgardo Sepulveda, an expert data storyteller. Sepulveda's new study for MLI analyzed data for church arsons in Canada and around the world. He found that following reports in 2021 of unmarked graves at residential schools, Canada saw a spike in church arsons compared to other Anglosphere countries, suggesting a correlation to news of the unmarked graves. He says the lack of serious policy response puts reconciliation at risk. Please like, share, and subscribe to Inside Policy Talks for thought-provoking analysis on the key issues facing Canada!