About Tony:
I’m a Canadian author and certified peer support worker whose memoir, Phoenix Son, chronicles twenty years in and out of Canada’s federal prison system and a lifelong reckoning with intergenerational trauma. Known primarily as a centrist political commentator with 172,000 TikTok followers, I am currently transitioning my platform toward men’s mental health advocacy, using my lived experience to speak to men who don’t respond to clinical language but will listen to someone who has been where I’ve been. My memoir is the foundation of that work.
What was the major turning point in your recovery?
The turning point was the last bank. I walked out knowing it was over, not because I got caught, but because something in me was done. Before I turned myself in, I went to see my son. I looked at him and I knew what I was about to do and what it was going to cost him.
I pleaded guilty. I went back inside. And then a brutal assault and pepper spray attack became the unlikely catalyst that brought me to BC, specifically to William Head Institution, where, for the first time, I was placed in an environment that demanded I look honestly at myself. Not manage the damage. Not perform rehabilitation. Actually look. That’s where the work began. The last robbery didn’t end my criminal life because I got caught. It ended because I finally chose something different.
What are some things that really helped?
Radical personal responsibility:
- The moment I stopped pointing outward, at my parents, the system, my circumstances, and started asking what my role was in everything that had happened to me, something shifted fundamentally.
- Taking ownership of my story, including the painful parts, gave me my power back. You cannot fix what you refuse to own.
- This wasn’t about blame. It was about agency. The day I accepted that I was the author of what came next was the day things actually started to change.
Therapeutic support at William Head Institution:
- For the first time I was in an environment that refused to let me perform toughness or manage around the wound. A counsellor demanded I look underneath the mask I’d been wearing for decades. The work was terrifying. Looking at where the anger, the running, and the criminality actually came from required more courage than anything I’d done on the street.
- Therapy didn’t fix me, but it gave me a language for what had happened to me and a framework for doing something different with it.
Finding my voice through writing and public speaking:
- At William Head, I began editing Out of Bounds magazine, growing its readership to 5,000 readers coast to coast. That was the first time I used words to build something rather than manipulate or survive.
- I joined Toastmasters inside the institution. My hands shook through my first speech. The room still clapped.
- Discovering that my voice, the same voice I’d used to intimidate and manipulate, could be redirected toward something meaningful was transformative. It became the foundation for everything I’m building now with Phoenix Son.
What advice would you give to other men who are struggling?
The most important thing I can tell you is that looking inward isn’t weakness, it’s the hardest and most courageous thing a man can do. Start by asking yourself one honest question: what am I actually running from? Because most of what drives men into dark places isn’t the thing in front of them; it’s the thing behind them they’ve never turned around to face.
Tony Mac, Langford, BC, Canada 
Tony’s memoir, Phoenix Son: From Survival to Strength: A Story of Identity, Loss, and Rising Again, is available on Amazon.