Note: Transcripts may contain errors. If you wish to re-use all, or part of, a transcript, please contact CBC for permission. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print. Copyright © CBC 2016

The Current Transcript for April 21, 2016

Host: Anna Maria Tremonti

[Music: Theme]

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

SOUNDCLIP

This is scary. To hear about it in all other places and that you don't expect it in your own community, it shakes things up. Not only that what do you tell your children?

Anna Maria Tremonti: Well, there's emotion and uncertainty in the voices of parents in Chateauguay, sideswiped by news of a name that made headlines two decades ago in Ontario and has never been forgotten across Canada. Karla Homolka served time for her crimes and now news that she's enrolled her young children in a public school in a Montreal suburb has raised hard questions from parents and from those who worry her children will be treated as pariahs. So should the family be left alone and how do the concerns of the community need to be addressed? And what happens to children whose parents are notorious for crimes committed? In a moment we'll try to sort through the confusion. And then, we were already working on our next story when police in Edmonton announced a drug bust yesterday.

SOUNDCLIP

Alert seized four kilograms of an unknown chemical powder as part of a fentanyl investigation. This chemical was in fact, W-18.

AMT: W-18 is a synthetic opioid that has public health officials very nervous. It is far stronger than fentanyl and fentanyl already has a deadly potency. BC has just declared a state of emergency over fentanyl deaths. Opioid abuse is so severe in Canada that more people die of opioid overdoses than in car crashes. And many of those addictions start not with an illicit street purchase, but with a prescription. In half an hour, ideas on how to tackle Canada's overuse of opioids. And Dilma Rousseff comes out swinging.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: It is a coup.

DILMA ROUSSEFF: There is no legal basis for my impeachment.

VOICE 1: It is a coup.

AMT: An update from journalist Stephanie Nolan on Brazil's precarious politics as we check in on the stories we've been following in an hour. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

Back To Top »

Karla Homolka's children exposed to fearful community in Châteauguay, Que.

Guests: Michelle Graham, Dr. Helen Morrison

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: I really feel for her children, you know. Those are the ones who are suffering in the end because everybody's going to be, you know they’re the plague, they’re the plague. It's not their fault.

VOICE 2: I do feel bad for her children. Big time. They don't deserve this but at the same time, I don't deserve to feel uncomfortable sending my children to school knowing that she's at the school yard fence.

VOICE 3: You know what? They do end-of-year picnics and everything at the end of the year and all of the parents go, all the kids go and everything like that. For all I know I was sitting next to her last year.

AMT: Some parents in the Montreal suburb of Chateauguay who can't see their own community the same way again after learning one of their neighbours is one of this country's most notorious killers. Karla Homolka served twelve years in prison for her role in the kidnapping, rape, and murder of teenagers Leslie Mahaffey and Kristen French, as well as the death of her own sister, Tami. This week it was revealed she's living in Chateauguay, Quebec under the name Leanne Teale and that her three children attend a local school. It's hard news to process for local residents who must now strike a balance between their own fears and the need to protect the children of a convicted criminal. Michelle Graham is the residential program manager for Windsor's St. Leonards House, a nonprofit agency which helps parolees reintegrate with into society, hello.

MICHELLE GRAHAM: Hello.

AMT: What do you make of the fear you're hearing in parents' voices?

MICHELLE GRAHAM: Well, I guess the fear is that somehow the children are going to have some kind of similar behaviors, or there is going to be some kind of harm. I mean the whole thing is driven by fear, but certainly a few of the people in your introduction also say that this isn’t their fault, and that's kind of the approach that we take on when we see it probably firsthand at St. Leonard’s. When someone commits a crime, the families are those forgotten victims and often are treated as though they have gone out and done the crime and it's very detrimental to them and often families kind of isolate or feel like they have no one to reach out to or talk to about what they're going through.

AMT: And I want to ask you more about the family members, but first, we also heard fears of people who-- she has been living in that neighbourhood for two years, just fears of being around her.

MICHELLE GRAHAM: I understand that and I mean, obviously it was a very sensational case, a very horrific case, and it's something that people don't forget. But at St. Leonard’ House we deal, it's actually one of our biggest programs there, is we deal with lifers, we deal with people who are serving life sentences, so obviously they've taken a life. But they're very historical as is in her case, and in our justice system people do have an opportunity to get out. She has been living a crime free lifestyle, she has been a contributing, I guess, member to society if you want to look at it that way, and in the end her children have the right to go to school and have the right to live in a neighbourhood and again, they are the innocents, but there is always that fear of what they did, not who they are.

AMT: Well, tell me a little bit more. You do work with people who are the lifers as you call them, how are they received by society after release?

MICHELLE GRAHAM: I was trying, you know I spoke a little bit yesterday with someone from your staff about some examples of cases. Usually if it's a really media attention case, the person won't return to their home community for the very obvious reason that there would be a lot of media attention, so they will often seek outside of their own community to look for a residence once they're getting out. But over the years I've certainly heard stories from some of our residents and they don't really find out a lot of the impact it had on their family until they get back out again and one man in particular, his crime was historical, it was out west, it apparently made a lot of media and it wasn’t until years later that his sister revealed how difficult it was for his younger siblings to have to go to school after it was in the paper. Then it, of course, that trickles into the parents feeling guilty for some reason, even though none of them did the crime. But they all did suffer and that, of course, impacted him greatly knowing that they went through that because of his actions. Sometimes you're not thinking when we say things to people, especially children. I find that a lot of their attitudes change because of what the parents are telling them. Kids don't see anything, they just see another kid to play with but it's the parents that often will put a lot of those fears in the child and not allow them to play with the person, but it's really the families that suffer in the end.

AMT: Have you had any cases like this one where the crime is committed before the children are born?

MICHELLE GRAHAM: That's a really good question.

AMT: These aren't kids who would have known. We don’t know what they know about their mother.

MICHELLE GRAHAM: And that's an even better point because they may not know and they may know now if other people have said things to them but that would be an even more difficult case because again, these children are very innocent. They came into the world long after all of this happened and I can't imagine what it would be like for them to be ostracized like that.

AMT: So, as you work with people who try to reintegrate into society and you do work with their families, how do you balance, as you point out this was a crime the country knew about, it was a heinous crime, it involved torture, it was it was horrific, so how did people try to balance wanting-- they feel for those children and they have their own discomfort being near someone whose history includes a crime like that. What do you say to them?

MICHELLE GRAHAM: I'm not in any way condoning what happened or what she did, but again, she has a right to live wherever she chooses and she is living a crime free life from what we've seen and what we've heard, and I'm sure we would have heard something immediately if she had done anything. She seems to have been living under the radar for many, many years, raising children, having a husband. It seems that she's turned in her life. I'm sure we'd know if something had happened, and it's hard for people to look past the crime to think could this person change? Is there an opportunity for change? When you look back at how historical some of the crimes are, even with the men we work with, they're 25, 30-year old crimes, before they have an opportunity to get out. The hope is you're not the same person, as none of us are when you reach a certain age, and not to be judged by what we did but maybe who we are today. Are we contributing to society? Are we raising our children to be good people? I didn't hear any fears of the children were any different than anyone else.

AMT: There are no legal requirements that she check in with law enforcement or any other authorities now. In fact, there were restrictions at the time of her release and the court chose to drop them a few months after her release. How common is that with the people you work with? Do they have restrictions over the years or are they allowed to go forward without those restrictions?

MICHELLE GRAHAM: Well, in the case of the people we work with, the lifers in particular, they are on parole for the rest of their lives so they will always be under some kind of supervision or some kind of restriction and no, they cannot travel outside of Canada, and even if they were traveling through Canada, they would have to have a travel permit from the parole office. So, they are still supervised in that way, though that is someone serving a life sentence. She completed her sentence so there would be no such order.

AMT: That's right, she was sentenced after being convicted of manslaughter.

MICHELLE GRAHAM: That’s right because a life sentence in Canada, you're on parole till the day you die.

AMT: And the families of people who have served their time and are now out, just give us a little more insight into how that stays with them.

MICHELLE GRAHAM: So, one of the things we did start was a support group for mothers, wives, girlfriends, it's an all woman's group at this time, and there's a lot of shame and guilt associated with the parent; with the child going to prison. So, the group gives them a place where there are other people, other women in this case, who are experiencing what they are, but I find when the offender comes home too, they recognize how much they've missed, how much they haven't contributed to the family, and there can be very a lot of emotions, a lot of dynamics, so there is support through that process, too.

AMT: So, is your view that people should leave Karla Homolka alone now?

MICHELLE GRAHAM: Sometimes I think that we could be doing more harm thinking she is a role model to our children and I always think of that case years ago in Windsor where we had someone who killed a baby and I was watching the news and I see all these people protesting with signs Baby Killer on their front lawn, and they've got their own children standing beside them. I'm not sure those are the right approaches to take. It's a lot of wasted energy sometimes, I think, that we could be you know, modeling something different to our children.

AMT: Michelle Graham, thank you.

MICHELLE GRAHAM: Thank you.

AMT: Michelle Graham is the residential program manager for St. Leonard’s House, she's in Windsor, Ontario. If you're interested in learning more about the program at St. Leonard’s that helps family members of those accused and convicted of crimes, you can listen to our documentary from last year. It's called In Harm's Way, we'll have a link to it on our site.

SOUNDCLIP

And my mom had walked down the stairs and she called us three children and she said I have something important to tell you all, and then she proceeded to say your dad is in jail. Then my brother says, for what? And she said for murder, and we were all in shock. I know for me, my mind went blank. I mean, who imagines their parent murdering someone. It was just overwhelming.

AMT: Overwhelming, hard to fathom discovering your own parent is a serial killer. That is the voice of Melissa Moore, a young American woman whose father raped and murdered eight women in the 1990s. Of course, she is not alone in having to come to terms with learning about a parent's horrific crimes. Dr. Helen Morrison is a forensic psychiatrist who studied how the crimes and notoriety of serial killers affect their families. Helen Morrison joins us from Chicago, hello.

HELEN MORRISON: Hello.

AMT: You were listening in, what do you make of the reactions by parents in that Montreal suburb, Chateauguay, to news that their children have been attending school with those of Karla Homolka?

HELEN MORRISON: I think it is very understandable. Many of these parents are just terrified of any possibility of somebody who could possibly harm their own family. Now, I understand that she has been out, she is not on parole, she doesn't have any reporting requirements, but that doesn't mean that the parents of these children who are in school with her children are going to just accept her as another parent. That history is way too difficult for them to understand.

AMT: You spend a lot of time with families like hers. What effect does it have inside the families after they've been outed in the media?

HELEN MORRISON:[sighs] It's horrendous. It's one of the things that happens that completely upsets the balance of the family. Most of the families are generally very, very unsure of, first of all, it's their family member that's committed these crimes. Many of the people are in denial, they say it can't possibly be him. But then when all the media and the trial gets going, they're bombarded with a lot of questions about why didn't you know; didn't you know anything, how come you didn't know and they become very much aware that they missed something, and many of them second guess, did they not see it? Did they just ignore it? There's a lot of uncertainty in the family at that that point. Then there are the children of the murderer and then there are children of the children of the murderer. And it's that children of the children that become very much concerned about two things. One, is there something in me that could lead me to do this? Two, they carry the same kind of, I guess you could say pariah, that their mothers or families do when they find out that their father was a killer.

AMT: And have you run into cases such as this one? These kids weren't even born and they are young. We don't even know what they might know about their mother's history, right?

HELEN MORRISON: Well the one child is nine years old. I would find it very difficult for him not to know something because he can't ignore the things that are happening to him at school. It doesn't matter whether he was born or not, that mother was the person who committed these crimes. She was an active participant, she wasn't just a poor person who got drawn into this and one of the things that he, he’s a boy, is going to wonder about, why didn't I know? Why didn't my mom tell me? Why did it keep secret?

AMT: There was a statement released yesterday by Karla Komolka lashing out at the media, specifically the English media, and referring to the news reports as a public lynching. What do you make of that?

HELEN MORRISON: Oh, it is. Oh, it is a public lynching. I mean, she is not going to be forgotten. Her crimes are not going to be forgotten. She may want to forget, she may want to say that she spent 12 years for manslaughter, but the public is not going to forget. They will not let her go.

AMT: And so again with the children, when you see kids who are the children of notorious violent offenders, how are they treated by the public?

HELEN MORRISON: Most often they are ignored or, worse, they're vilified. One of the things that happened with Melissa Moore is, you spoke with her yesterday, she felt that all of a sudden all of the friends that she had, all of the people that she knew suddenly withdrew from her. She was not permitted to be with them, she wasn’t allowed to play with them, she wasn’t allowed to see them or talk to them, and so she was isolated in all of the support services that she had before. When her father was declared the Green River Killer, that made her part of the family of the Green River Killer and that's how she was identified.

AMT: What kind of support exists for children who go through that?

HELEN MORRISON: Nothing. There is absolutely nothing. It's really very difficult because most of the people who would be involved with the family of the serial killer will pull away. Very rarely is there any type of intervention for the children at all. They have to do it on their own, they have to be alone in this whole process which is supposedly very, very difficult.

AMT: And so what questions will haunt them?

HELEN MORRISON: Why didn’t I know? Why did my dad do this? Why didn't I know that he did it? How am I going to be okay? That’s going to be the primary question, will I be okay?

AMT: And how does the life experience of children with a parent who's notorious for a crime differ from children whose parents may have committed a crime that receives a big punishment, but that doesn't become notorious?

HELEN MORRISON: Once the media gets hold of the story, they never let it go. They never forget. They never let it go. There are still stories about John Gacy's children who, and this was ages ago, who you know, the family changed their name, the children changed their name, but there will be always that risk that somebody will find out that he was their father and then they will have to deal with the outcome that will be a media storm.

AMT: You started to talk about this where they question themselves; they wonder if there's something in them.

HELEN MORRISON: Yes. Very often. In fact some of the daughters of the serial killers when they become mothers wonder if their children are going to become a serial killer. Do they inherit it, and they don't do that but still it's going to be a fear. It is going to be with them if there's something unusual that the child does, some kind of trouble that they get into, is there going to be a parent who's going to be saying, oh my god is he going to be a serial killer?

AMT: And how does social media affect all of this in what you see now?

HELEN MORRISON:[chuckles] Social media is terrible. You know, social media started out as something that was good, it was a way to keep in contact. Now it's a way to spread rumour and rumour, once it gets started you can't stop it. You can't stop it.

AMT: So, you heard some of those clips there. You know the school has basically said we keep all children safe. What would you say to those who go to school with children; those innocent children?

HELEN MORRISON: Remember that the child is not the parent. He is not responsible for what his parent did. Kids will see another kid, they see a kid, that's all they see. But, when the parent gets involved and starts making comments, then the child becomes much more reluctant to be involved with that child.

AMT: Helen Morrison, thank you for your insights.

HELEN MORRISON: Thank you.

AMT: Dr. Helen Morrison is a forensic psychiatrist she joins us from Chicago. Well, let us know what you think as you listen to this. What do you make of the community reaction and the reaction toward the children? Email us at our website cbc.ca/thecurrent. You can find us on Facebook or tweet us @thecurrentcbc.

Back To Top »

B.C. declares public health emergency after 200 overdose deaths in 2016

Guests: Dr. Perry Kendall, Benedikt Fischer, Debbie Dowell

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: Hello, I'm Anna Maria Tremonti, and you're listening to The Current.

[Music: Theme]

AMT: Still to come, The Netherlands could be leaps and bounds ahead of other countries in populating its highways and byways with electric cars. I'll speak with a Dutch parliamentarian trying to ban gasoline-powered cars by the year 2025. That's in half-an-hour. But first, pain caused by painkillers.

SOUNDCLIP

For most of these folks, all it is is some anonymous white powder. And we’re told it has fentanyl, we’re told there’s this other drug that's another hundred times as strong as fentanyl itself. So nobody actually knows what they're taking down here.

AMT: James Dawes works at Insite, the safe injection site in Vancouver's downtown eastside. He is on the frontline of a crisis. This year so far, there have already been more than 200 overdose deaths in British Columbia related to the synthetic opioid, fentanyl. It's become so bad the province has declared a public health emergency. At Insite, the people who go there to inject drugs say they are well aware of the dangers they face.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: Every day, every day there's somebody I know that overdoses.

VOICE 2: How about yourself? Have you OD’d?

VOICE 1: A few times, yes.

VOICE 2: Do you know what kind of drugs you were using?

VOICE 1: Heroin. Both times it was, yeah, strong heroin and the last time it actually had fentanyl in it, so, yeah.

VOICE 3: People who are used to doing like, a certain amount, go out to a different supplier and do that same amount. But the chemical mix is not the same, and then they end up paying the consequences with an overdose. So I try to stay on top of who I buy from, who I deal with. Loyalty has a lot to play into it. You stick to the same people. Bottom line, it comes down to the source, that's right.

VOICE 4: You tell by the look of it a lot of the time, but a lot of the time, you can’t. And you’re just kind of taking a chance, like, risking your life, you know? So…

AMT: A few of the people who use a Vancouver's Insite injection site speaking with the CBC’s Catherine Rolfsen. If the rate of overdose death continues in B.C., as many as 800 people could die this year. Dr. Perry Kendall is British Columbia's Provincial Health Officer. He's on the line from Victoria. Hello.

DR. PERRY KENDALL: Good morning, Anna Maria.

AMT: Why is this considered a public health emergency?

DR. PERRY KENDALL: Well I think under any scenario where you see increasing numbers of deaths-- the last year we had 476 deaths, in the first three months of this year we had 201 deaths. I think that any scenario, those increasing numbers are a cause for concern and an emergency situation. I decided to declare an emergency because despite what we have been doing in terms of education and outreach and getting Naloxone, a drug which can reverse overdoses, out into the hands of community members and first responders, we still see the numbers going up.

AMT: And how much is fentanyl to blame for what you're seeing?

DR. PERRY KENDALL: Well in 2012, about five per cent of the overdosers had fentanyl, usually with other drugs, but fentanyl was there. That went up to about 32 per cent in 2015, and it's around about 64 of the 201 overdoses this year, had fentanyl detected.

AMT: What makes it so dangerous?

DR. PERRY KENDALL: It's a hundred times more potent than heroin or morphine. So if you are usually, if you have a usual dose of your powder and you put a certain amount of it on the spoon, if it has fentanyl as a contaminant, or even as a constituent, which much of it does, you just get a much larger dose than you’d be expecting. And it takes very little fentanyl, or the amount equivalent to two grains of salt, is enough to cause a serious overdose in an adult.

AMT: Two grains of salt. Wow.

DR. PERRY KENDALL: Yes.

AMT: Where's it coming from?

DR. PERRY KENDALL: We believe, or at least the information from the RCMP, it that it is coming from pharmaceutical laboratories in China, for the most part.

AMT: And who is dying from the use of fentanyl?

DR. PERRY KENDALL: Largely, I would say people who are entrenched in the drug culture. People who have been using opioids and other drugs, perhaps for years, sort of street-oriented people. But we've also seen, weekend recreational users, or people who use it very quite rarely, about once a month, to get a high, are getting the fentanyl and overdosing on that. And then there's possibly people out there who are on prescription opioids. When those prescriptions were reduced, or the oxycontin was removed from the market, they had turned to the illicit market to meet their supply. So one of the reasons we declared an emergency is to get better information, so as we can better target outreach efforts. Because for every fatal overdose, there’s approximately 50 overdoses which people survive from.

AMT: And so has fentanyl been a prescribed, as well?

DR. PERRY KENDALL: Oh, yes. Fentanyl has very legitimate uses in anesthesia and cancer pain, particularly. So not so much in B.C., but in other parts of Canada, we have seen fentanyl patches being diverted from a legitimate market into the street market.

AMT: The RCMP is warning about another even more powerful drug that is showing up in B.C. and Alberta. W-18, what can you tell us about that?

DR. PERRY KENDALL: W-18 is a synthetic opioid. They were synthesized in laboratories in I think Alberta in the 1980s. It’s about a hundred times more potent than fentanyl. So it has no legitimate diagnostic or therapeutic uses, but it is being manufactured alongside fentanyl, I suspect, in the same laboratories or pharmaceutical factories in China. Because of its potency, a very small amount can be used to make thousands of pills. And because it is so potent, you can imagine how easy it is to not be able to control the dosage in the pills, so how dangerous this could be.

AMT: RCMP in Alberta have now said they've had a big seizure of W-18. Multi-kilo seizure is their initial way of describing it. Does that raise any concerns for you?

DR. PERRY KENDALL: Oh, that is extraordinarily alarming, yes. Because I think that makes the risk from illicit street drugs just that much higher. So if it does get into the market, then I’d be extremely concerned. One might hope that at some point, people will realize that this is just too dangerous to do, but we don't seem to have reached that point.

AMT: So when declaring an emergency, what are you actually doing? What does it mean?

DR. PERRY KENDALL: A couple of things: one, it raises attention to it more broadly, which is important; and two, it actually gives me the authority to write an order so that medical health officers who are leading the kind of working with folks who are trying to reduce the overdoses and prevent people from overdosing, to collect information that they have been able to collect to this point in time. So when you're dealing with something like this, [indistinct] outbreak, you really want as much information as you can get on the person, and what's the sex, the age, their habits, their background, where can you find them, where are their hot spots that you could target at the time. Are there particular times of day when we're seeing overdoses happen? So get more information on person, place, and time, particularly from emergency services, first response, and emergency rooms. And we also are working with the coroner to get better data, or more granular data on the individuals who actually died. But as I said, there is fifty overdoses who survive for every death. So there's a lot of information to be collected in a real-time fashion, and use that data to better target our responses.

AMT: And who will you share it with?

DR. PERRY KENDALL: We will share it with the public health officials who are engaged in the outreach program. It’s not being collected for law enforcement purposes.

AMT: Could it also be used to see if there are doctors prescribing opioids in large numbers?

DR. PERRY KENDALL: That information is already available through the College of Physicians and Surgeons. So the College of Physicians and Surgeons are engaged in this, are very concerned about this. And so they are working on, I think they have information through our Triplicate Prescription Program, that they can target physicians with unusually high patterns of prescribing.

AMT: What action would you like to see next, then?

DR. PERRY KENDALL: I would like to see more take-home Naloxone kits out there, more first responders with Naloxone on them. We’d like to see better information to the various communities of drug users who are risk, so tailoring information to younger individuals, to the more street-oriented. Like to see more access to harm reduction in the regions.

AMT: Okay. Well, Perry Kendall, thank you for bringing us up to speed on this.

DR. PERRY KENDALL: Thank you, Anna Maria.

AMT: Dr. Perry Kendall is the British Columbia Provincial Health Officer. He joined us from Victoria. As public health agencies and police now work to contain Canada's opioid crisis, some say the situation we're in could have been predicted and that action should have been taken a long time ago. Benedikt Fischer is a senior scientist at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, CAMH, and a professor of psychiatry at the University of Toronto. We've reached him today just outside of Sao Paulo, Brazil. Hello.

BENEDIKT FISCHER: Hello, Anna Maria.

AMT: What is your reaction when you hear about a public health emergency declared in B.C. over a dramatic rise in overdose deaths?

BENEDIKT FISCHER: Well, the first thing is that it's very good that this very special kind of action is being put on the program. Dr. Kendall sends a strong signal that this is clearly a public health crisis. What concerns me a little bit is that what we're talking about are mainly sort of reactive measures: Naloxone, safe injection, gathering more information. These things are important pieces of an action plan to be done. I think what's gotten lost a little bit in the conversation is that this has been a problem in the making for years. Actually, for more than a decade, and the main driver of this problem, in direct or indirect fashion, is that we in this country have prescribed too many prescription opioids for too long a time. We've exposed a lot of people to these drugs and many are now habituated and they're using a lot of prescription opioids still from the medical system. Plus, now illicit grade prescription opioids, fentanyl, for example. And a lot of them are dying. So what's kind of missing is sort of the long term prevention aspect. We need to rein in the excessive amount of opioids available, and overprescribed, excessively available in this country, especially for long term prevention. Of course this will not help us a great deal with the acute emergency measures, but this is what needs to happen to address this problem in a sustainable fashion.

AMT: Okay, so are you telling me that the problem you have with so much addiction to these opioids begins with a doctor's prescription?

BENEDIKT FISCHER: Well, it typically begins or has begun in Canada, with a drug that was somewhere prescribed in the medical system. Remember that until a couple of years ago, we had no or only very little fentanyl from abroad. Most of the prescription opioids that were misused came from the medical system. We have the second highest rates of prescription opioids in Canada in the world. Actually, in morphine equivalent, it’s the highest rates. We prescribe four times more fentanyl than the United States. So a lot of these drugs, and actually, a lot of the drugs that are implicated in the deaths, still come from the medical system domestically.

AMT: And you have called fentanyl a game changer, what is it about fentanyl that is so dangerous?

BENEDIKT FISCHER: There's two aspects: first of all, it’s as Dr. Kendall has pointed out, its potency and the unpredictability for the user. But then the other thing is that it has added the illicit market component to this problem. It's the first time that a prescription opioid is actually illicitly manufactured and imported into Canada from abroad, which of course, makes it even more difficult to control, before at least we have the theoretical opportunity to intervene with the excessive prescribing from the medical system. That has kind of now been taken out of our hands, but we need to remind ourselves the majority of prescription opioids deaths in this country are still related to drugs coming from the medical system. And that's where we need to effectively intervene.

AMT: And how do we do that?

BENEDIKT FISCHER: Well, we need to tell and instruct the medical system effectively to bring back the prescribing of prescription opioids to levels that are based on evidence. Right now, they prescribe in practices, in many instances, goes far beyond what good evidence suggests. And if you go to the recent CDC guidelines for opioid prescribing in the United States, they make it very clear that opioids should be prescribed only in exceptional cases and in very limited doses.

AMT: We just heard Dr. Kendall say that you can actually track prescriptions. So if, in fact, specific doctors are overprescribing. is there a way to get at that through Colleges of Physicians and Surgeons?

BENEDIKT FISCHER: Yeah. These data are definitely there, the systems vary a little bit from province by province. But again, you know, again there's a tendency to now saddle this on a couple of doctors who may be prescribing excessively. That is definitely part of the problem, but the overall underlying problem around that has fueled and created the prescription opioids crisis in Canada, that across our system, we have used these drugs too liberally. We've prescribed them too generally in too large amounts to too many people. So we've got to addresses this at the systemic, at the system level, and not just, you know, try and find a few bad apples of doctors who may have prescribed too many of these drugs. Of course, it's good to identify those, but this requires systemic action and intervention. And that's been pointed out by many observers for many years, actually, in Canada.

AMT: Well the Federal Minister of Health, Jane Philpott, said this week she's looking at a range of options, including a national surveillance system to monitor the number of opioid overdose deaths on a national scale. What do you make of what she's saying?

BENEDIKT FISCHER: Well, it’s an interesting suggestion from my point of view. Ten years ago, we've made calls in, you know, seminal journals for that to happen because different than the United States, we never had those data. We couldn't even identify exactly in each of the provinces how many deaths there were exactly, where they were, what other drugs were implicated. So this is essential surveillance that should have been in place a long time ago. At the same time, we also always got to ask ourselves, what are we doing with the surveillance data that we're generating? Surveillance alone will not help or fix the problem. So we need to both have better information, but we need a very good action plan to effectively deal with this public health tragedy. And acute emergency measures in the short term are important. At the same time, we need to understand what the driving forces of this problem are, and those need to be addressed, as well. It's like, you know, when you have a house fire, of course you need to give the emergency aid to the victims; but you also need to find the gas leak, metaphorically speaking, that is fueling the fire and will continue to fuel it unless you turn it off.

AMT: And you're hopeful you can do that?

BENEDIKT FISCHER: Well this is not in my hands. This is in the hands of the governments, different jurisdictions are obviously involved, but also in the hands of medical regulators who have been very hesitant to really take concerted, determined action on this front.

AMT: Okay, Benedikt Fischer, thank you for your thoughts on this.

BENEDIKT FISCHER: You're very welcome.

AMT: Benedikt Fischer is a senior scientist at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, CAMH. He’s also a professor of psychiatry at the University of Toronto. Today, we happened to reach him outside of Sao Paulo, Brazil. Now, we did contact the office of Federal Health Minister, Jane Philpott, she was not available today. The Canadian Medical Association did not respond to our request for an interview. The Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada sent us a statement, and it reads, in part: “The Royal College is working with its partners on creating a series of educational resources and processes based on the most up to date...science...to reduce the rates of prescriptions and help (addicted) patients get off opioids and on to more appropriate therapies.” Now, the United States is facing a similar epidemic. More than 40 Americans die every single day from prescription opioid overdoses. In March, the Centres for Disease Control came out with new recommendations on opioid prescriptions. Dr. Debbie Dowell was the lead author of those recommendations. She is the Senior Medical Advisor to the CDC’s Division of Unintentional Injury Prevention. And Debbie Dowell in Atlanta, Georgia. Hello.

DEBBIE DOWELL: Good morning, Anna Maria.

AMT: You've been listening in on how Canada is grappling with this problem with opioids. How familiar does this sound to you?

DEBBIE DOWELL: Everything that Dr. Kendall and Dr. Fischer were saying unfortunately sounded very familiar to me. The United States is the only country in the world that has a worse problem with prescription and illicit opioid overdoses than Canada does.

AMT: And so why did the CDC decide to step in and issue recommendations?

DEBBIE DOWELL: So in the United States, overdoes related to prescription and illicit opioids including heroin, and now, illicit fentanyl, are a public health emergency. More than 28,000 people in the United States lost their lives in the most recent year for which we have data available, which is 2014, to one of these opioids. We, like Dr. Fischer, believe that a main driver for this crisis has been prescription of opioid analgesics the United States, particularly for chronic pain. Since 1999, the amounts of opioids prescribed has quadrupled. It’s no longer used here for just end of life care, cancer care, and acute severe pain, as they were in the early 1990s. Opioids have unfortunately become the first choice for long term chronic pain. And when we went back and looked at the evidence, we realized we’ve never had good evidence for effectiveness of opioids for chronic pain in long term use. So the CDC felt strongly it was time to take a look at the evidence, looking at both the uncertainty of the benefit, as well as accumulating evidence we have for serious risk of these drugs, including addiction and overdose death.

AMT: Are you saying that the expectation that opioids would work then, on chronic pain, should not be as high?

DEBBIE DOWELL: Yes. The hope that these drugs would work as well long term for chronic pain as they did for cancer pain was well intentioned, but got well ahead of the available evidence. And when we go back and look, we realize almost all of the randomized controlled trials, the well-done studies, have lasted six weeks or less. And there are reasons to believe that we can’t just extrapolate these studies to long term use. Opioids tend to be associated with tolerance, meaning patients often find opioids work less well unless we increase the dose, and we really don't have any good evidence that many of the dosages we see prescribed today are safe.

AMT: So what are you actually advising, in terms of how they're prescribed now?

DEBBIE DOWELL: So we're advising that non-opioid treatments are preferred for chronic pain. And there are a whole range of treatments for pain that, in the United States at least, we have used less often. But we know that certain treatments like exercise therapy or physical therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, multi-disciplinary treatments that use these non-pharmacologic modalities; along with when needed, pharmacologic modalities which include many drugs that are not opioids such as NSAIDS, certain antidepressant, certain anticonvulsants. We are recommending that these be preferred for chronic pain. That in those rare cases when opioids are likely to be helpful, that prescribers use the lowest effective dose and that they follow up closely with patients. Don't just prescribe indefinitely without first setting a plan. What do we want to accomplish with these drugs, and how will you know if we're accomplishing it? And a plan to discontinue opioids if the provider and the patient find that the benefits to not continue to outweigh the risks.

AMT: Now, you have faced some opposition to this from pain lobby groups. What do you say to those who rely on these drugs to get through the day?

DEBBIE DOWELL: I would say we found a mixed reaction. Many patients and advocates of people with pain agree that opioids should not be the only approach to pain control, and should be combined with other treatments. We believe that people with pain deserve safe and effective treatment, and that usually non-opioid treatments will accomplish this better than opioids.

AMT: Well, these guidelines are not binding. How far do you think they'll be able to go in actually cutting down on the numbers of deaths in the United States?

DEBBIE DOWELL: You’re right, these guidelines are guidance, they are not laws or regulations. We hope it to go a long way. What we need to do is change the culture of prescribing, and I think that they can go a long way in terms of educating providers and changing the culture. As Dr. Fischer alluded to, we often like to point to a few rogue prescribers who are dramatically over prescribing, and as he said, that's part of the problem. But the overall problem is an over reliance on opioids. I think just making the majority of providers aware can go a long way. Obviously, just having the guidelines out there is not enough, so CDC is working to educate prescribers, working with health systems to integrate these guidelines into clinical practice. And we hope that they will make a difference.

AMT: Dr. Dowell, thank you for giving us the perspective from the U.S..

DEBBIE DOWELL: Thank you.

AMT: Debbie Dowell was the lead author on the new CDC recommendations on prescribing opioids. She joined us from Atlanta, Georgia. We’d be interested to hear from you if you've taken opioids for pain, if you're a physician prescribing opioids. What do you think of this push to cut back the use for pain? Comment on this story on Facebook, tweet us @thecurrentcbc, email from our website, cbc.ca/thecurrent. And while you're there, you'll find a story we brought you last year, about fentanyl deaths in Alberta. I’m Anna Maria Tremonti, this is The Current.

[Music: Sting]

Back To Top »

Brazil President Dilma Rousseff's impeachment divides country

Guests: Stephanie Nolen

AMT: Hello. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

[Music: percussive]

VOICE 1: Able-bodied seems to be, you know, we recognize it as the norm in our society, but for me being disabled is as normal as breathing, it's as normal as being a woman, being an Asian woman, being a mother, being a wife.

VOICE 2: And if they are going to charge-- Some people feel that they are able to get fees for their legal services, they should look at it being a modest charge and not something that they're making a lot of money off of these really vulnerable people.

VOICE 3: What was most comforting was when my husband said, wasn’t it our dream to have a son? Okay. Then let’s receive him the way that god gave him to us. And when he said that, it touched my heart.

VOICE 4: They are amazingly smart. They’re so smart that octopus keepers have an enrichment handbook of ways to keep their intelligence occupied. You've got to keep your octopus busy.

[Music: percussive]

AMT: [Laughs] You've got to keep your octopus busy. What is that? The quote of the week? Okay. That was the week that was on The Current. Our Friday host Piya Chattopadhyay is with me to get some of your feedback. Hi.

PIYA CHATTOPADHYAY: Oh, hi. You’ve got to…

AMT: Have you ever, like, held a little octopus?

PIYA CHATTOPADHYAY: No, I haven't.

AMT: You know, I used to do a lot of diving and I expected that they would be these giant things, which I think they can, be but it was just a tiny little thing.

PIYA CHATTOPADHYAY: A wee little octopus.

AMT: I didn't touch it, of course, because you're not supposed to play with them. But the dive master, actually, just poked around so that it would come out. It was so sweet.

PIYA CHATTOPADHYAY: We’re going to read some of the feedback that we got on Inky the Octopus, because the guest was so engaging. I mean, she was so excited about octopuses, which is my point that I want to make here, because I got a lot of tweets and people saying, It's octopi. It's not octopuses. The plural of octopus is octopuses because it has a Greek etymology, not a Latin one.

AMT: Okay, listen up, people. Piya’s telling you.

PIYA CHATTOPADHYAY: I'm telling is octopuses. Some dictionaries, because people write and tell me this, say that octopi is in the dictionary. It is. It’s accepted by the Merriam-Webster dictionary, but other dictionaries say nope. Octopuses.

AMT: That is a far more interesting discussion than is it referenda or referendums, right? Okay, fine. Let’s get to it. Tuesday on The Current, the CBC's Laura Lynch looked at how the Syrian refugee crisis has been an opportunity for some to profit from refugees desperate to come to Canada. She spoke with a man named Ahmed who was handing money over to a Canadian immigration consultant company.

SOUNDCLIP

LAURA LYNCH: Now, as for Ahmed, he says he transferred 1,000 dollars, non-refundable to him. And then he started getting wary after he said he felt pressured to send her the rest of the cash right away. In February, he stopped sending money, but he did send me a copy of the company's retainer agreement… It is, according to a Canadian lawyer, unethical and violates the federal rules on dealing with refugees.

PIYA CHATTOPADHYAY: Well, we heard from many of you after that story. On Facebook, Lyn Janice commented: “Sadly, there are those among us who put rigid conditions (consciously or not) on our generosity. The refugee must be penniless; with only the clothes on his back when he or she receives both government and non-government assistance. Suggesting some Syrians have ample and untouched bank accounts when they arrive here, fuels that ongoing judgment and criticism of our government and the immigration system.” Noel Potts had this one to say: ”For-profit emigration of refugees should be banned. These people have suffered enough and should not have to be burdened with debt in a new country. Here is where free enterprise fails miserably.

AMT: Cirey Fields from Vancouver had a different perspective, writing: “I just finished listening and boy did you get my blood rising. I find your story a bit biased - taking the clearly unethical practices of a few consultants and applying it to the industry. There are thousands of morally upstanding immigration consultants working around the country with a genuine personal interest in their clients.”

PIYA CHATTOPADHYAY: All right. Let’s move on to another story we covered. For a year, Canadian writer Craig Davidson ferried five kids in a small school bus, each of those kids had special needs. His experience gave way to a deeper understanding about disability and stigma, and a book called Precious Cargo. This week Anna Maria spoke with him, and others, about what so-called able-bodied people can learn when they stop fearing people with disabilities. And one of the guests on our panel was Ing Wong-Ward, the associate director of the Centre for Independent Living in Toronto, who uses a wheelchair.

SOUNDCLIP

ING WONG-WARD: People are uncomfortable with the word disability, in part, because as Craig reflected upon, there's a general discomfort about disability. It is almost like if we don't say the word, we don't have to acknowledge it. So, I refer to myself as a person with a disability, I refer to other people with disabilities as disabled. I don't like ‘the disabled’ because it's objectifying. I don't like terms like ‘confined to a wheelchair.’ I refer to crippled as the C-word because it comes from a medical model around disability that reflects upon a past where disabled people were very much othered.

AMT: Paula Anne Olthuis agreed that the C-word is not the right word. She writes: “Your program hit home. I have cerebral palsy. At the age of four, our minister said, the crippled have sinned. I have had to use handicapped, physically challenged, disabled person, and person with a disability. I walk with two canes and would like to be seen as enabled, taking away the 'dis' in disability.” And on twitter Cheryl D wrote: ”You can never go wrong putting the words 'people' or 'person' first. People w/disabilities, Person who uses a...”

PIYA CHATTOPADHYAY: Luciano Contini emailed these thoughts: “As an advocate and father of a child with special needs, I have struggled with the term ‘disability’ as it suggests that people with special needs are ‘not able.’ This is the opposite of the message advocates among the ‘disabled’ and ‘abled’ populations are trying to send. As my advocacy continues, I struggle to find the appropriate term.”

AMT: Okay. Moving on .

SOUNDCLIP

[Large crowd chanting]

AMT: Protesters in Brasilia, Brazil cheered Sunday night after the lower house of Brazil's congress voted to impeach president Dilma Rousseff. President Rousseff was accused of illegally borrowing money from the state bank to paper over the country's deficit – something like the equivalent of 11 billion dollars. The president denounced the impeachment as a coup and vowed to fight back as supporters of her Worker's Party took to the streets. This political drama is unfolding only months before the country is slated to host the Summer Olympics. For more on the implications of this impeachment process I am joined by Stephanie Nolen. She is the Latin America Bureau Chief for The Globe and Mail and she's in Rio De Janeiro. Hi.

STEPHANIE NOLEN: Good morning.

AMT: Were you in congress on Sunday during that vote?

STEPHANIE NOLEN: I was. I was in congress for a long 11 hours.

AMT: What was it like?

STEPHANIE NOLEN: It was-- It was almost surreal. I mean, it was just hours and hours of yelling and scuffling, and these congress people making these, kind of, crazy speeches, voting in the name of their as yet unborn grandchildren and their late mother, and there were a number of the pro-impeachment, congress people were wearing the national flag as a cape, and they were all posing for cell phone pictures on the floor of the House, four different times they set off confetti cannons. For someone—

AMT: Inside? Inside the parliament?

STEPHANIE NOLEN: [Laughs} Yeah, yeah. So, there was tens of thousands—I never got a really accurate final number, but somewhere in the order of about 50 thousand people protesting outside and I can tell you it was actually crazier inside the house, the chamber of the lower house. The four confetti cannons inside by people voting yes and as it became clear that they were, in fact, going to get the number of votes they needed, 342, to impeach the president, it just became-- You know, there were football chants and singing and swaying and people sort of dashing back and forth. It was very, very weird.

AMT: Boy, it's not your Canadian parliament.

STEPHANIE NOLEN: It really was not Canadian parliament or any other parliament that I have seen anywhere around the world. You know, I guess I would say the other thing that became very striking through, literally, hours of watching this from the gallery up above, was that there was a really palpable shift of power happening. You know, one of the most popular chants of the camp against the president, fora PT - PT is the Portuguese acronym for her party - and it means get out, but it also means gone and as they were chanting it towards the end of the night you really had the sense that the people who, for 13 years have been wanting to wrench power back from the Workers' Party, who are of course not the traditional power base, the traditional political elite of this country at all, that they were just celebratory in the sense that they were back in control.

AMT: And you've reported that she says misogyny is behind this.

STEPHANIE NOLEN: Yeah. So, the president actually invited some of the foreign press to the presidential palace, as they call it, on Tuesday morning and I was there. And I asked her about this because one of the things I was really struck with on Sunday night was the number of deputies in congress holding the signs that say tchau querida, which is like saying, you know, bye bye, baby, or see you later, sweetie. And it comes from what something that was in the recorded tapes that were released a few weeks ago that kind of kicks off all this drama - well, it didn't kick it off, but certainly ramped it up considerably - where former president Lula da Silva was recorded hanging up on a phone conversation with her and saying, tchau querida. So, it's a normal thing to say in the course of a phone conversation. I found it quite extraordinary to see it on placards being held by people voting for her impeachment. You know, ‘see you, sweetie’ seemed like an awfully glib response to me. And so I asked the president, did she think that if she was a man they would be holding signs that said tchau querido, and how much does the fact that she's the country's first female president have to do with this. And she really dug into the question and said she feels like that there has been an expectation from the-- You know, the media keeps portraying her as hysterical and anxious even though she's none of those things-- that she's a fighter and she invoked the poor and rural Brazilian women who are her party's support base who she said fight all the time for their families. She said she certainly feels like she's been targeted, that the coverage of her in a lot of the language that is used in this fight has very sexist overtones, but I think fundamentally she acknowledges that this a fight over- she certainly talks about that at length as well - that this is a fight over power and her argument, of course, the anti-impeachment side is that the political opposition never accepted losing the last election to her and they found a way now to take that power without having to go to the ballot box and that's what they're doing.

STEPHANIE NOLEN: So, what happens, Stephanie, if the senate also agrees to impeach?

STEPHANIE NOLEN: Well, it really looks at this point like they probably will, although it's a dangerous game to make predictions in Brazil these days. But the tide seems to have turned really quite decisively against her. Even former president Lula is saying he thinks the fight in the senate is lost and they should go to the streets instead. So it does look as if within even just a matter of weeks she will be forced out of office. On paper her vice president becomes president, a man named Michel Temer and he's working very hard right now to put together a new administration. There is an impeachment case open against Mr. Temer as well on the argument that he as vice president he was responsible for any of the financial decisions. He was as responsible as President Rousseff is. If you’re going to impeach her, you have to impeach him is the argument.

AMT: Wow.

STEPHANIE NOLEN: That may go ahead. And he's also the subject of a number of different corruption accusations, which President Rousseff is not. And, certainly, her supporters will be looking to advance those pretty quickly. So it's not clear he can stay in office even to finish out the two years of his term and if he goes, the in theory, the speaker of the house, the man who oversaw that whole circus I was describing on Sunday night, a man named Eduardo Cunha, he in theory becomes president. Now, there are many corruption investigations against Mr. Cunha and it's, on some level, a bit hard to imagine him becoming president, but he has masterminded this whole thing so skillfully that that's actually starting to seem increasingly likely.

AMT: I noticed that they lit the torch in Olympia today for the Brazil Olympics, more fire on its way. How is this going to affect the Summer Olympics.

STEPHANIE NOLEN: [sighs; laughs]You know, I think if you could stop 90 out of a hundred Brazilians on the road now and mention the Olympics and they would just look at you blankly. I mean, understandably enough, it is not high on the radar of most people. But I can tell you that here in Rio, actually, weirdly, even as the country falls apart in this political and economic crisis, the venues are mostly ready, the volunteers are being trained, there's definitely a bit of last minute scrambling going on, but things are largely in place. I would say the one thing that hasn't come together is ticket sales. Again, perhaps understandably Brazilians really have not rushed to buy tickets to this event. But other than that, other than the fact that about half the tickets are unsold yet, things are more or less ready and I think, weirdly, that's just going to barrel ahead and happen and I think it would be a really nice couple of weeks of respite for Brazilians if it goes well and if people come and celebrate all the really great things about Rio. It seems as if, weirdly, it's going to just unfold largely unscathed and separate from these crazies.

AMT: Okay. Stephanie Nolen. Thanks for all your insights. Thanks for your work.

STEPHANIE NOLEN: It’s a pleasure. Thanks very much.

AMT: Stephanie Nolen, Latin America Bureau Chief for The Globe and Mail. She’s in Rio De Janeiro, Brazil.

PIYA CHATTOPADHYAY: And the Olympics are on their way there. They’re in the midst of political turmoil. There’s also another big story happening in Brazil and it’s one that we talked about here on the show on Monday with Dr. Brian Goldman, who brought us a documentary from Brazil on the Zika virus. Now, Brian met with mothers who have had babies born with microcephaly.

SOUNDCLIP

BRIAN GOLDMAN: Her greatest fear was not microcephaly, but that he’d stillborn. Then, last December 19, Samuel Amorim Santiago was born by Caesarean section.

ALESSANDRA DE SOUZA AMORIM: [Translated] It was beautiful when I looked into the eyes of my son for the first time. I cannot even describe the happiness I had. Soon after the Caesarean the doctor showed me very quickly, and then took him away to clean him and I slept. Then he went to his dad and when I woke up he was with Samuel and showed me, Look at how beautiful our son is. The happiness was so great that for me, nothing else existed.

PIYA CHATTOPADHYAY: After that story, Rusty Foerger of Edmonton wrote this: “We listened to poor and often single mothers contend with the question of how they will care for their children upon birth, and marvel that they ‘get it’ in ways that the very rich and entitled West do not. A child will be born to these poor Brazilian mothers very likely profoundly disabled, and yet profoundly loved till death. There is real fear with what it will cost emotionally and financially to care for a disabled child. But isn't it more about the fear of worthlessness? The Zika tragedy exposes our understanding of personhood, and we are afraid (or should be) that such a person is no person at all.” And this comment from Gloria Chochla on Facebook: “The documentary on the Zika virus broke my heart. What are we doing to this planet, and to ourselves, and future generations?”

AMT: Well, moving on.

Back To Top »

Dutch politicians push to ban sale of fuel-burning cars by 2025

Guests: Jan Vos

AMT: The future of the electric car.

SOUNDCLIP

[Music]

VOICE 1: Tracking the story.

[Music]

VOICE 2: Well, even with the Tesla there was one leg of my trip where I miscalculated. I was going up to Mount Shasta and I didn't realize how much grade would be involved and I elected not to go with a 100 percent charge, I went with about 65 percent to save time and part way into the trip I realized that I might not make it. And I aborted and turned around. So range anxiety is real and the owners of gas powered cars aren't accustomed to it, but when you drive an electric car you start thinking more about where the power comes from and where you're going to get it next.

AMT: That was The Globe and Mail's Peter Cheney speaking on The Current last week about one of the challenges of driving an electric car. The spectre of so-called "range anxiety" is something more drivers in Europe may soon have to deal with as more countries there consider imposing timelines for phasing out fossil fuel-burning vehicles. The Netherlands has just become the latest country to do that. Monday, the country's lower house passed a motion that would ban the sale of new gas and diesel cars starting in 2025. Jan Vos is a member of the Dutch parliament with the country's Labour Party. He’s the author of that motion. We've reached him in The Hague. Hello.

JAN VOS: Hello.

AMT: So, you would ban sales of fuel burning cars, new cars?

JAN VOS: That's correct. We’ll only allow zero emission cars on the road by 2025, according to the motion that was accepted by a majority of our house.

AMT: And what about the cars that already exist? Do they have to—

JAN VOS: They will be allowed to drive on. And, obviously, at a certain point in time you'll have to phase them out, but just basically regarding the sales of new cars, the registration of new cars in the Netherlands.

AMT: So, this is a motion. It's not a law. What has to happen before this becomes a law?

JAN VOS: Well, obviously, either the government or parliament has to write a law and that law has to pass both houses. But the fact that our parliament or house voted a majority for this motion definitely points to a majority in our political system.

AMT: And so you need to have the motion first and then the legislation follows.

JAN VOS: That's correct.

AMT: Okay. Now, if it does become a law, are you ready to replace all those fuel burning cars with electric cars?

JAN VOS: Well, this basically regards new cars, so all the new cars in ten years’ time will have to be zero emissions. Obviously, there's a number of car makers that are currently producing, already producing electric cars and they will have to scale up their production in order to fulfill demand. But we have a timeframe of almost ten years, so I think it will be feasible.

AMT: What kind of infrastructure do you need for electric vehicles on the road?

JAN VOS: Well, obviously, you need to power them with electricity. But in my country, the Netherlands, there is already a full-fledged, easy electric vehicle charging network. Actually, there are several networks. So, companies are competing. They’re financed privately and sometimes publicly. And, obviously, the Netherlands is a small country, so it's a little bit easier for us here in Europe to move forward on this topic than it probably is in Canada, which is a much larger country.

AMT: And how do you create electricity in your country?

JAN VOS: How we create electricity? Well, obviously, there are still coal-powered plants, although, we closed seven out of ten of our ten coal plants over the past two years. And we also have gas fired plants and there’s solar power. The amount of solar power doubles every year. We're currently executing a brand new wind park on the shore of the Netherlands and it's going to be the largest electricity generating wind park, offshore wind park in the world.

AMT: Okay. And so those coal plants, will they also be phased out by 2025?

JAN VOS: My party, the Labour Party, would like to phase them out by 2025, however, the last three remaining coal plants are brand new and so there’s, obviously, there's a lot of opposition from several political parties.

AMT: You know why I’m asking, right? Because if you're driving a car with no emissions, but the electricity is coming from coal, then, in fact, it's still dirty.

JAN VOS: It's dirty. It's less dirty then it is when you use fossil fuel, but it's still dirty and I totally agree with you. I think we should phase out all coal plants. And as I said before, we closed seven out of ten plants. So I think we are on the right track. And I would like to see to close the other three in the next ten years.

AMT: Okay. Now, your party is part of a coalition government, but some of your coalition partners have said that this plan is unrealistic. What do you say to that?

JAN VOS: Well, I told them to go look on our highways, because you can see electric cars, zero emission cars driving by all the time. And actually I went on holiday in Austria. I'm living in the Netherlands and Austria is like a thousand kilometres away and I saw Dutch electric vehicles driving around in Austria. And I asked one of the owners, I said, how did you do it? Was it okay for you? And he said, sure, it was no problem. There's a really good network of charging points all the way to Austria. And so in Europe, I think, there's more and more-- It's likely we’ll make the change in the next decade. The German Minister of Energy, he also used a 2030 deadline. In Norway, it’s 2025. So, I believe there are a lot of governments really targeting for a zero emission personal vehicle.

AMT: Yeah. And you drive an electric car?

JAN VOS: I just ordered my Tesla 3 three weeks ago. So I made a down payment and I'm waiting for it to be delivered, probably next year.

AMT: Okay. Mr. Vos, thank you for speaking with us.

JAN VOS: You're welcome.

AMT: Jan Vos is a member of the Dutch parliament with the country's Labour party. He’s in The Hague.

PIYA CHATTOPADHYAY: All right. Last, but not least, we have some mail about our story last week on Friday that we did on Inky the Octopus. Inky made news, a lot of it, after escaping from a New Zealand aquarium through a drain pipe. On Friday, we talked to Sy Montgomery - she’s the author of The Soul of an Octopus - about the guile of Inky.

SOUNDCLIP

SY MONTGOMERY: Man, are they strong and if there's a way to get out they're going to find it, because they want to know what’s out there.

PIYA CHATTOPADHYAY: Who blames them, really? I mean, the world’s a big place, right?

SY MONTGOMERY: Inky, you know, he had been kind of beat up when he arrived at the aquarium…he had lost the tips of some of his arms and was kind of beat up. Well, they can regrow their arms in a matter of weeks. So it sounds like he basically got checked into the hospital, got some R and R, and then took things into his own hands - or tentacles - and went home.

AMT: Into his own tentacles. [Laughs]

PIYA CHATTOPADHYAY: She was so passionate about octopuses. She took my breath away in a lot of ways. You know, people are passionate about things and I'm not saying people shouldn’t be passionate about octopuses, but she was just so into octopuses. She had so many great stories. I loved that interview.

AMT: Okay. Well, I love that story too and it touched many of our listeners. On twitter, @TheLastLinda tweeted: “Your segment on Inky & animal intelligence was fascinating and fantastic. Sign that one up for reruns.” On Facebook, Lincoln Taylor wrote what many of us were thinking: “Inky is a hero to us all.”

PIYA CHATTOPADHYAY: Well, @TheLastLinda, forget reruns at this point. It may rerun, but you can listen to it by going to our website, because you can listen to all of our interviews.

AMT: Cbc.ca/thecurrent and you can also download the podcast.

PIYA CHATTOPADHYAY: There you go.

AMT: You can listen to it all you want.

PIYA CHATTOPADHYAY: Listen to Inky. By the way, Anne Newman also wrote in and she said this: “Listening right now to the Inky escape story - such a wonderful interview, Piya - I knew nothing about the octopus before this moment - so incredible to understand their incredible stories and learn about their unique characteristics! Thank you.” Anne, you’re most welcome.

[Music: sting]

AMT: Ah. Time to give credit where credit is due. The week that was on The Current was produced by: Idella Sturino, Shannon Higgins, John Chipman, Karin Marley, Howard Goldenthal, Ines Colabrese, Lara O'Brien, Sarah Grant, Julian Uzielli, Pacinthe Mattar, Sujata Berry, Liz Hoath, Marc Apollonio, Josh Bloch, and intern Paula Last.

PIYA CHATTOPADHYAY: And special thanks to Dr. Brian Goldman for his documentary. As well, thanks to our network producers Anne Penman in Vancouver, Michael O'Halloran in Calgary, Suzanne Dufresne in Winnipeg, and Mathew Kupfer in Ottawa.

AMT: The Current's writer is Peter Mitton. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Our technician is Gary Francis. Our senior documentary editor is Joan Webber. Our senior producers are Richard Goddard in Toronto and Cathy Simon in Vancouver. The executive producer of The Current is Kathleen Goldhar.

PIYA CHATTOPADHYAY: Guess what? Congratulations are again in order, because The Current has now won a Gabriel Award. The Gabriel recognizes outstanding artistic achievement in media that entertains and enriches with a true vision of humanity and a true vision of life. And the Gabriels are presented by the Catholic Academy of Communication Professionals. This show won for an item called Homeless on The Street. It was a story of two people who lived it. Congratulations to producer Ines Colabrese and to you, Anna Maria. That was one of those interviews—I was in my minivan and I stopped on the side of the street and cried. I couldn’t drive anymore. I remember. I think it was raining that day, I couldn’t see, and then the tears in my eyes. Very moving.

AMT: It was about two people who live on the street who came in to talk to us about what their life was like and Ines worked very hard to find them and convince them to come and share their stories.

PIYA CHATTOPADHYAY: Yeah. We talk about people on the streets. We talk about them a lot.

AMT: Yeah.

PIYA CHATTOPADHYAY: But we don’t talk to them. And we walk past them in real life a lot of us, but we also don’t hear their voices in the media as much as we should. So, congrats, congrats.

AMT: Thank you. We’re almost out of time, but to add to anything you hear on The Current, tweet us @TheCurrentCBC, join the conversation about our season long project Ripple Effect, use the hashtag #rippleCBC. You can find all our Ripple Effect stories by going to our website and clicking on Features, cbc.ca/thecurrent.

PIYA CHATTOPADHYAY: Okay. And you can comment on Facebook or email by going to the website, cbc.ca/thecurrent. Subscribe to our podcast as well.

AMT: Piya Chattopadhyay will be here tomorrow. Thanks, Piya.

PIYA CHATTOPADHYAY: À demain.

AMT: Thanks for listening to The Current.

[Music: theme]

Back To Top »

Provide Transcript Feedback

CBC would like to acknowledge the support of the Broadcasting Accessibility Fund.

Apr. 21, 2016 Full Episode Transcript

More Stories Like This