Inside Policy Talks is the premier video podcast of the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, Ottawa's most influential public policy think tank. The Macdonald-Laurier Institute exists to make bad public policy unacceptable in our nations capital.
Heather Mason: I was incarcerated with male sex offenders
Allowing male prisoners into what used to be female-only spaces has fundamentally “changed the landscape of women's prisons,” says Heather Mason, a former federal inmate turned advocate for women’s sex-based rights.
Mason’s time in correctional institutions has given her first-hand knowledge of a jarring reality: that biological males in Canada are allowed to self-identify as women and then serve their time in women’s prisons – even when these men are convicted sex offenders who have not undergone any surgical changes related to the female identity they claim.
Mason knows from experience why this poses such a grave danger to the women incarcerated in these institutions. Female inmates are an exceptionally vulnerable population. Many have histories of experiencing domestic violence, sexual abuse, and coercive control at the hands of men.
That’s why an organization that Mason helped to co-found, Canadian Women’s Sex-Based Rights (CAWSBAR), is pushing back. The group has launched a federal court case challenging the policy that gives male inmates free rein to enter women’s prisons based solely on self-identification.
To share her first-hand experience and discuss the coming legal battle, Mason joins Inside Policy Talks.
On the podcast, she tells Peter Copeland, acting director of domestic policy at MLI, that for as long as the current policy continues, female inmates in Canada will be retraumatized and revictimized when they are incarcerated alongside men.
2 Oct 2026
Jerome Gessaroli: Solving Canada’s competitiveness problem with investment
Canada has been “using subsidies as a substitute to help solve our competitiveness problem,” says economist Jerome Gessaroli.
He called this approach “wrong,” “inefficient,” and “expensive.”
Gessaroli offered his observations as he reflected on the state of investment in Canada, in the wake of the recent high-profile investment summit the federal government hosted in Toronto. He said the summit was a good idea, but its impact will depend on whether it actually helps advance some projects that might otherwise not have made it across the finish line.
For years, business investment in Canada has been weak, productivity growth has lagged, and affordability has suffered as a result. So, what’s been holding investment back?
To unpack this question, Gessaroli, an MLI senior fellow and former professor of economics at the BC Institute of Technology, joins Inside Policy Talks.
He tells Peter Copeland, acting director of domestic policy at MLI, that in recent years Ottawa has been too quick to use taxpayer money to paper over Canada’s issues with attracting capital for key projects.
“What government often classifies as a market failure is not a market failure. It's a policy failure,” says Gessaroli.
17 Sept 2026
Mark Mancini and Asher Honickman: How judges became policymakers
In 1985, a Supreme Court of Canada decision (B.C. Motor Vehicles) about driving with a suspended licence helped transform Section 7 of Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms into a powerful tool of judicial review. But did the Court decision go too far?
Section 7 protects life, liberty, and security of the person, but says these rights may only be limited in accordance with the “principles of fundamental justice.” In B.C. Motor Vehicles, the Supreme Court expanded the meaning of those principles beyond procedural fairness, opening the door to greater judicial scrutiny of the substance of legislation itself.
Since then, Section 7 has played a central role in cases involving prostitution, assisted suicide and euthanasia, supervised drug consumption, and more recently, disputes over homeless encampments and bike lanes. What began as a relatively narrow Charter provision has become an important source of judicial power over public policy.
This week, Mark Mancini, assistant professor of law at Thompson Rivers University and a Senior Fellow at MLI, and Asher Honickman, a civil, constitutional, and public law litigator in Toronto, join MLI's Deputy Director of Domestic Policy, Peter Copeland, on Inside Policy Talks to discuss the landmark case and its lasting impact on Canadian constitutional law.
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