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The Current Transcript for June 17, 2016

Host: Piya Chattopadhyay

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Prologue

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ISIS kill list targeting civilians is a game changer in terrorism

Guests: Adrienne Arsenault, Mark Bourrie

PIYA CHATTOPADHYAY: Hi I’m Piya Chattopadhyay and this is the Friday edition of The Current. We'll talk about an unsettling phone call to receive. Police forces across our country say that they've been reaching out to about 150 people. They're calling to inform them that their name and details have shown up on a so-called ISIS kill list. There is no suggestion at this point that any of those 150 people have been harmed, but just learning that your name is contained on the terror group's hit list must come as a shock. CBC News has a copy of that list and Adrienne Arseneault, senior correspondent with The National has been following this story. Adrienne is here now, hi Adrienne.

ADRIENNE ARSENAULT: Hi Piya.

PC: So, first off just tell me what is this kill list?

ADRIENNE ARSENAULT: The name alone is pretty ominous. It feels like it should come with its own soundtrack really, but it is one of 19 such lists that have been put out by a group of pro-ISIS hackers over the last couple years and initially they were very specific lists, they were aimed at military personnel, drone operators in the United States, transit police, some cops. Usually the list was like 70 or 80 people long and then in April, there was a very strange list that surely didn't look targeted. It was 4,000 New York residents, random civilians, and then there was this list which is 8,300 people from all over the world, most of them are Americans. I say 8,300, but when you actually start looking at it, a lot of names are repeated like 30 and 40 times. My math isn't great [laughs], but I think you're probably looking at about 5,000 unique names on here and in terms of Canadians, 319 mentions of Canada but really only 151 unique Canadian names on it.

PC: Okay, I'm going to ask you about who's on this list in a minute specifically, but you said they are pro-ISIS hackers, what does that even mean?

ADRIENNE ARSENAULT: I know. It sounds ridiculous, but there is a series of hackers out there with pretty impressive sounding names, like the Cyber Caliphate Army or the ISIS Hacking Division or the United Cyber Caliphate, so these are three sort of umbrella groups. They all have slightly different personalities to them, the most serious one is the Islamic State Hacking Division which actually was run by an actual ISIS fighter and would issue very targeted kill lists. The Cyber Caliphate Army is a different one, it had a reputation for defacing a lot of websites, particularly American ones. It is the entity that sort of issued a lot of these targeted lists at government workers. And then there's this one which is the United Cyber Caliphate. They call themselves an umbrella group of pro-ISIS hackers, whatever that means. Their affiliation with ISIS is pretty thin, it's hard to know if they're official or unofficial and these days, frankly it doesn't always matter, but they seem to be putting out the random civilian list which would suggest that maybe they are not as skilled as the others.

PC: Could it be like a bunch of kids just doing this? Do we know that this is quote unquote “serious”?

ADRIENNE ARSENAULT: Well I think if your name's on the list—

PC: A kill list.

ADRIENNE ARSENAULT: Then you will probably find it pretty serious, and I know that for law enforcement, particularly in this country, they have no choice but to take it seriously. So if you were specifically named in any sort of specific threat, they have a duty to inform you, so some poor constable has to sit down and try to find out where you actually are and then either pick up the phone or go knock on the door and say, I’m really sorry, it’s probably nothing but—so, they have to take it seriously because God forbid, they knew the name, they didn’t do anything, and then something horrible happened.

PC: So 5,000 approximately. Do we know any of these people? Do any stand out for you? Who are they?

ADRIENNE ARSENAULT: No, none. When I started looking through the list, I started looking for people who I thought, okay, are there people on here who have been very critical of ISIS in the past, you'd expect people like that to be on any sort of list. No, not at all, and in fact a lot of the Canadians on the list make absolutely no sense to me whatsoever. I'm not an analytics person, so I'm sure somebody with an algorithm will figure this out soon enough. We are surely trying. What I see when I look at it, are a lot of women from smaller centres. I'm not talking you know predominately from teeny tiny towns, but it's not predominantly based in Toronto, for example. There is nothing about their profiles that suggest anything other than they are random.

PC: White women? People of colour? No connective tissue.

ADRIENNE ARSENAULT: Wide range. Now there are some sites you can plug email addresses into to find out if you've been hacked, for example. So we sort of one by one went through the email addresses on the list and learned that 71 percent of them have actually been breached at some point. So the most common breaches have been LinkedIN, Adobe, My Space and we see some of that repeating. An educated guess for me, because I'm no expert here, but my spidey sense tells me that there was a hack at one point a couple years ago, which would fit because some of these addresses are old, and the lists from those hacks have been distributed around. Some genius is deciding I'm going to publish this as an ISIS kill list because I know it's going to disrupt the police services who have to drop other things and deal with it, and I know it's going to sow fear in the hearts of people who get the phone call, and they're going to look at their neighbours sideways, which ISIS loves to make happen. They love for communities to be divided and look at each other with suspicion.

PC: So you're no expert, fair enough. Have you talked to experts? I mean how are they sort of approaching this?

ADRIENNE ARSENAULT: We are. The list is quite new. We're trying to figure out a number of things, what sort of text format did it arrive in originally? Now, Memory which is the Middle East Media Research Institute is an entity that says it first discovered this list and it discovered it on the social media platform Telegram, which is kind of like an encrypted social media platform. You don't know how who's following the person you're following, you don't have public access to how many people are looking at it. It's possible that the list is getting pushed around and pushed around a lot. They're watching to see what's happening; they also are very clear to say that their first call was to law enforcement to say, heads up, this is what's out there. They are trying to decipher, as are we, as are a whole bunch of other groups, what's the format this information first arrived in? Does that look like a signature of a particular hacking group because if we can all figure out where this data originally came from, I mean do people go to a home show and sign up for a raffle and then that database was hacked?

PC: Or went to Target or whatever and had a good hacker breach there.

ADRIENNE ARSENAULT: Exactly, and if we can figure that out then maybe they can figure out who did the hacking if they can figure out who did the hacking, maybe they can figure out the ISIS links to it.

PC: I'm not telling you anything that you don't know and that most people don't know that, we have seen this rise in so-called lone wolf attacks, Orlando perhaps being the most recent example of that. So, this list is out there as you say. It's on a social media platform, you can get access to it. What's the likelihood that person working alone who has some sinister ideas and sinister motivations could access this list?

ADRIENNE ARSENAULT: You know, it's hard to say. I don't know that this is all that easily obtainable. You'd have to have some intent initially to go looking for it, and to find it, and then to research it, and then to do it, and these people are random. These people are random. You know, police won't say we're not taking this seriously; they're not going to dismiss this. If you look at the past of all the people on the list, there's no sign that anyone on any of these lists has ever been hurt. Let's hope it stays that way.

ADRIENNE ARSENAULT: As you say, small comfort for people, perhaps. If you're named on that list you are freaking out.

ADRIENNE ARSENAULT: Hopefully you're not freaking out because the police will say, look, just be vigilant, here's our card, if you notice something strange, let us know as always. As always you should just be vigilant.

PC: Thank you very much.

ADRIENNE ARSENAULT: You're very welcome.

PC: Adrienne Arsenault is a senior correspondent with CBC's The National. We did request an interview with the R.C.M.P. which it declined, however in a statement it said we are working with its domestic and international law enforcement and intelligence partners to assess this information and to notify the Canadians identified. That statement from the R.C.M.P. Okay, so what does this all mean, this kill list, in the broader context of the fight against ISIS? Mark Bourrie is a Canadian journalist, he is also the author of the book The Killing Game: Martyrdom, Murder and the lure of ISIS. Mark Bourrie is in Ottawa. Hey, Mark. So, Adrienne just told us it's kind of a random list of people who at first glance have no title or position to make them targets for ISIS. So there have been other lists released before, how significant is this one to those previous ones?

MARK BOURRIE: I think this one sounds, as Adrienne says, a bit more random. I haven't seen the list, so I can't really tell if they're the kind of people that ISIS would really want to go after in Canada. If I was to sit down and make a list of people that I would think ISIS would be after, you know then I think I would be able to say, well this thing is semi legitimate. But with ISIS, there is no sort of real and unreal. There is an awful lot of ISIS material that's just basically virtual, and it's not like we have to look and say well, was this uploaded from a computer in Syria and so it's legit, or was it uploaded from a computer in France or England or somewhere in the States, so it's not legit? ISIS has two things, one it has an army on the ground and another thing it has and the thing I talk about most in book I wrote, is this massive online presence. It has mastered social media and it's also mastered marketing in a way that no other terrorist group has ever done before.

PC: Just briefly, in the past the lists that they have put out, propaganda or otherwise, I mean have they been notable or names that are more familiar to us on them?

MARK BOURRIE: Yeah, but that's not what this list is about. This list was not about a list to kill people. This list is really about us talking about a list right now. Instead of talking about the massive military setbacks that ISIS has, and every time ISIS starts to lose, something bad happens somewhere like in France or in the States, or lists come out, or whatever. So we'll sit here, we'll talk about this list, which will probably almost certainly result in nothing anywhere, but we won't be talking about the fact that 500 ISIS fighters surrendered in Fallujah two days ago in Iraq, or that ISIS has lost half of its territory in Syria in the last couple of weeks, and that's the story that ISIS doesn't want to tell, and this sort of thing is the way that they that they take over the message.

PC: So effectively, you say they're going at marketing, effectively this is good spin and good distraction?

MARK BOURRIE: It's what they do. It's a big part of how they recruit and how they define themselves because the way we think of ISIS, you and I talking about ISIS, we're still talking about, we still seem to be talking about the ISIS of two years ago that was just seemed to be unstoppable that might basically cause disruptions to Saudi Arabia, that might be up against Israel. The ISIS of today is a group that's that is losing fast and it's about to be on the run and it has this much larger group of people all over the world who are supporters and somewhere or other, a lot of them are just ideological with really good computer skills. They know their way around Twitter, they know their way around Telegram, they know the way about My Space, Facebook, and there's a second war of intelligence agencies, of police, of people working for outfits like Twitter to try and dampen the stuff down and you really could literally have kids in basements doing this stuff for the hell of it, or you could have people who are ideologically committed, and then the danger of it as Adrienne touched on, is that there could be people who are not really serious about actually harming anybody but could put a list up there of people who could be harmed by some screwball, like the two that we had in Canada, like the one that shot at my workplace, for instance, who are who sit on the computer all day and they just eat the stuff up—

PC: Inspired by a list, so to speak.

MARK BOURRIE: Yeah, this is just more fodder for them. They could be inspired by it, they could take the list up and maybe threaten people. I doubt that there would be any real harm. Keep in mind too, that ISIS hasn’t targeted assassinations in North America and has very few anywhere else so there's a lot of threat, but there's not a lot of action.

PC: I hear on the one hand yes, random maybe not a quote unquote “big deal”, but I have to say, Mark, probably if your name is on that list, that sounds good but, I'm still going to be nervous.

MARK BOURRIE: It would creep me out. What would bother me the most is and I'm glad you haven't put the list out, because somebody like me, my mom would be horrified, my children would be afraid, and that's the kind of fear like Adrienne said, that they want people to be afraid for themselves, to be afraid for their loved ones, and to be suspicious of everybody around them, no matter what their background. They want to sow disharmony here, keep us sort of on the wrong foot while they try to develop this caliphate, and just basically stir up as much trouble as they can.

PC: And to your point that here we are playing right into ISIS hand talking about this, and then on the other hand you say well we can't really not take this not seriously. Not just as the media, but obviously for police forces.

MARK BOURRIE: For the police force, they have to take it seriously. It's out there, we have enough police I think to handle something like this. It puts us in a tricky spot because we can't move as fast and we can't really know what's going on with ISIS’s sort of propaganda system because we can never be part of it, and I think the thing to do is to talk about this stuff but also try to do as much reporting on the reality of ISIS and what it's doing in the areas it controls. I think the reporting has to be a lot better about it, but I also understand the constraints of the reporting; that reporters simply can't get into the stuff, they can't dig that deeply physically or even technologically into this story.

PC: For the police, you suggest that they have enough resources. They've got to get in touch, and just in our country right now, 151 people and visit them, call them, background check them, whatever they need to do, it's time, it's energy and you suggest that they have the resources. Is this also a strategy on whoever put this list out, which is hey, let's use up valuable policing time in Canada and the US. It’s a distraction for them, so maybe they're not looking at us for other things.

MARK BOURRIE: Sure, but I think that the police can do both, and I also think that it's the investment of time that it takes to put up a list like this sounds like a laundry list practically of people's names compared to the amount of resources that get expended by the police and the media and everything, really makes a good payoff for the people who are doing this kind of stuff.

PC: I want to ask you one more thing. You said look, we're talking about ISIS like it was a few years ago and it's losing in Fallujah and other places and yet we talk about ISIS in 2016 in June as a very big threat, so just parse that out for me a bit more. Where we supposed to be in terms of thinking of ISIS and the threat that it actually is to us?

MARK BOURRIE: Okay, so when I worked in my book last summer, I saw this coming and I hate to sort of brag about it, but I did. I wrote the book and I talked about what would happen, when this happened, when they started to lose because I took a look at them militarily and they just never were big enough to do what they wanted to do. So what happens? They lose and they scatter and there is a lot of face saving that's going on right now in their social media, and one of the things that really worries me is that the foreign fighters who are there, if they get out alive and get back into the countries they came from, are going to cause trouble but there's also going to be this mass disappointment in the movement and the people who support them all over the world who've never gone there. We're entering into a new phase. As ISIS gets wiped out of its territorial gains, we're getting into a new war that's a virtual war of the Internet in terms of propaganda, but we may also be in the situation where we have more of these attacks; lone wolf style attacks, and even if Orlando wasn't an ISIS attack in the sense that the guy who did it was in contact with ISIS, the people who are prone to do this and who are in contact with ISIS realize the huge impact this sort of thing has on Western culture and Western society.

PC: Mark Bourrie, good to talk to you, thank you very much. Mark Bourrie is a Canadian journalist, he is also the author of the book The Killing Game: Martyrdom, Murder and the lure of ISIS. We reached him in Ottawa. If you have things to say about this kill list and maybe you think we shouldn't be covering this, maybe you think we should, maybe your name is on it, we want to hear all kinds of perspective so get in touch with us. You can do that on Twitter if that's your preferred medium @thecurrentcbc, or Facebook or email us cbc.ca/thecurrent. Once there, click on the Contact Us link. I’m Piya Chattopadhyay, you're listening to the Friday edition of The Current.

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Trade barriers between provinces costing us billions, according to new Senate report

Guests: Perrin Beatty, Gerry Harrington, Steve Beauchesne, Trevor Tombe

PIYA CHATTOPADHYAY: Hi, I'm Piya Chattopadhyay, and you're listening to the Friday edition of The Current. Calls for a free trade deal within Canada.

SOUNDCLIP

If you want to sell insect repellant, it can be sold in multi-packs everywhere in Canada, except for Quebec. If you want to sell milk, B.C. tolerates a lower percentage of bacteria in milk than other provinces. There's different content that's required on display signs and packaging at the store level. Labeling requirements are different. So, all of these create a barrier to productivity for retailers.

PC: Well, a Senate committee has listened to complaints like those, and many, many more complaints -- and their considered advice, the Senate's, is to tear down these walls and make trade between provinces easier. You heard Susie Grynol there. She's the Vice-President of Federal Government Relations at the Retail Council of Canada. She was one of the many who testified before the Standing Senate Committee on Banking, Trade and Commerce. This week, that committee released its report into the difficulties of doing business across provinces because of varying rules and regulations. As it stands today, interprovincial trade barriers affect the way we buy a lot of things, from life-saving medications to your favourite beer. And it's not only a matter of inconvenience: barriers to interprovincial trade are costing the Canadian economy billions of dollars every year, according to the new Senate report. Perrin Beatty is the president and CEO of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce. For years, he has been saying that the lingering obstacles to internal trade are one of the top ten barriers to Canadian competitiveness. Perrin Beatty's in Ottawa. Hello.

PERRIN BEATTY: Good morning.

PC: What makes doing business in different provinces across our country so hard?

PERRIN BEATTY: It is government that makes it so hard. It's the incredible number of barriers that are put in place by governments at all levels, which make it difficult both for people to move across the country and practice their occupations, but also for businesses to operate across provincial boundaries.

PC: And when you say governments, you mean which levels?

PERRIN BEATTY: All levels, but particularly at the provincial and local levels where you get, for example, regulations that say you can only bid on a contract with the local government if you're a local business yourself. This is bizarre, because what it does is drives up costs for taxpayers. And every time the government brings in a restriction that prevents people from bidding, I can promise you it is never the person with the best price and the best product who the ones arguing in favor of restricting bidding.

PC: So ground this for me a bit more. Give me an example of a trade barrier that exists between provinces that would just be like, "what? Why, how?"

PERRIN BEATTY: Well, I was in Saint John, New Brunswick yesterday, and stopped in a very good food store that they had downtown. Picked up some local New Brunswick cheese. It was made from unpasteurized milk. I brought it back to Ottawa. I'm hoping the cheese police aren't listening, but you're not allowed to move this across provincial boundaries. The same-- if I were to go from Ottawa to Gatineau on the other side of the bridge, across the Ottawa River, with a bottle of wine, I'd be breaking the law in Canada in doing that. This is simply bizarre.

PC: There are some other ones, I have a list here of some of the things that can't be done. So one that stood out for me is some take types of trucks, this is the trucking industry, can only be driven at night in B.C. but only by day in Alberta.

PERRIN BEATTY: Yes, and you can imagine-- if you want to get a sense of how partitioned we are in Canada, just try driving a big truck across Canada. You'll find different load sizes, different regulations relating to the drivers, what hours they can work, a whole range of other areas. And in many instances, it may be easier to drive through the U.S. than driving through Canada as a consequence.

PC: I said in our introduction, Perrin Beatty, that this is costing the Canadian economy billions each year. How many billions do these trade barriers actually cost us?

PERRIN BEATTY: Nobody knows for sure, because we're talking about business not done and you don't record how much money is lost. But the Senate estimates it's between three and seven percent of our GDP per year. That's between 60 and 130 billion dollars a year, and this is money that isn't being used productively in the economy, but simply disappears into the ether. We've got better uses for that money.

PC: As you said, sometimes it's easier to go the American route. In some cases, easier for international companies, whether they be American or beyond, to do business in Canada than it is for Canadian businesses to do business in Canada.

PERRIN BEATTY: Well, I'll give you an example of that. We've negotiated a trade agreement with Europe, the so-called CETA agreement, which is a free trade agreement. In it, there will be provisions if there's discrimination against European companies operating in Canada. They'll be provisions for those companies be able to challenge that. Once CETA is in place, European companies will be better protected operating across the Atlantic into Canada than Canadian companies operating across provincial boundaries. The economists have a word for this, it's dumb.

PC: The Senate report recommends-- which doesn't use the word the word dumb in its report, but it recommends that if a deal to break down into provincial trade barriers doesn't come soon, that our top court the Supreme Court of Canada, could try to resolve this.

PERRIN BEATTY: It's certainly a possibility. There is section 121 of the Constitution provides for interventional trade, particularly on manufactured goods. There are questions about how that would apply to services and increasingly, services are a key part of our economy. We're convinced the best way if the politicians won't lead, if we continue to find the sort of abdication of leadership that we've seen in the first 148 years of Confederation, then what we need to do is to give to private parties, individuals, and to businesses the ability to take governments to court. Because they will be prepared to act on this and I think the courts would sustain the rights of individuals and of companies who have been subjected to improper, and in some cases, potentially illegal barriers to trade.

PC: Perrin Beatty, thank you for your time.

PERRIN BEATTY: Thank you very much for having me.

PC: Perrin Beatty is the president and CEO of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce. He was in Ottawa. In just a bit, we'll talk about why inter-provincial barriers exist and why provinces may or may not be reluctant to bring them down. But before that, really want to ground this story in real life and what people are having to deal with on a day to day basis. So Gerry Harrington is the Vice President of Policy and Regulatory Affairs at Consumer Health Products Canada. That's a group representing all sorts of companies that manufacture over-the-counter medication and health products. Gerry Harrington is in our Ottawa studio. Hi, Gerry.

GERRY HARRINGTON: Good morning , Piya.

PC: Let's talk about medication. In what ways do interprovincial trade barriers impact your and my ability, depending on where we live, to get the medication that we need?

GERRY HARRINGTON: What people may not know is that many of the over the counter medicines they buy today, you know, pain relievers like Advil or Aleve, their allergy meds like Claritin or Nasacort, actually started out as prescription drugs. So what happens is that Health Canada from time to time receives submissions from manufacturers that seek to establish that the products can, when they're labeled appropriately, be safely and effectively used by Canadians without a doctor's prescription. Now, if Health Canada approves that application and removes the prescription requirement, that's when things get messy. Because then the provinces basically repeat the process and further than decide where the product can be sold. So there's a provincial advisory body that informs that process for all provinces and territories other than Quebec. They do their review, and if they go ahead with that switch to non-prescription status, I think in seven provinces, that product will be made available and it goes ahead. But in a couple of provinces, the decision is reviewed for a third time and the products may not hit the market until two years after the rest of the country.

PC: So is there something that comes to mind, in terms of an over the counter drug where we can get it in seven provinces, and three others you can't?

GERRY HARRINGTON: Sure. The case of Nasacort, you know, it was an analogy medicine that was available in the rest of Canada up until I think year and a half ago, and wasn't made available in one province until just a few months ago.

PC: I want to ask you about another drug, and it's one that we've been hearing a lot about in helping to deal with the opioid issue that we have in this country, and that's a drug called naloxone. Tell me how that fits into this issue.

GERRY HARRINGTON: Yeah. Well, as you know, there's a there's a crisis regarding opioids in Canada, and the death rate has been skyrocketing from overdoses. And naloxone is a drug that actually reverses the effects of an opioid overdose. And it has to be administered when the person is in overdose, but when you do that, it actually saves lives. It reverses the process. So public health advocates, addictions policy folks, we're seeking to make this product more available, and in fact, Health Minister Jane Philpott at the beginning of the year announced that they were going to use an expedited process to remove the prescription requirement. And they slashed the consultation time from nine months to two months, and actually had the product approved by March. But here we are today, and because of this patchwork of rules around the country, and naloxone in most of Canada remains a prescription drug. Only a couple of provinces, Quebec and B.C., were able to take away the prescription requirement, and most of the time savings that the Health Minister used to get this product out in an emergency basis has been used up.

PC: How did our system come to be this way?

GERRY HARRINGTON: Well you know, basically, it's a vestige of laws dating back to the 19th century. In those days, most medicines that Canadians used were compounded or manufactured right in the dispensary of pharmacies. And so because pharmacists are a provincially regulated profession, those were the laws, the pharmacy acts, that determine who could or couldn't sell medicines. Now, of course, in the ensuing hundred years, the medicines Canadians use are by and large manufactured by pharmaceutical companies and that's all regulated under the federal Food and Drugs Act. But we still have these product regulation provisions under the provincial laws that aren't even really designed for that purpose. They're supposed to be about regulating the profession of pharmacy, and that's what creates all the confusion.

PC: And in the broader context of our healthcare system, what kind of burden do these trade barriers cause for that? For the health care system as a whole?

GERRY HARRINGTON: Well the upshot is that these new products generally hit the market seven to nine years later in Canada than they do in the U.S. or the European Union. So that means that you've got seven to nine years where Canadians are needlessly having to go to the doctor to obtain a prescription for these products that they would otherwise be able to pick up just by visiting a pharmacy, and inevitably, they do. So it's not even changing the outcome, it's just creating these delays that cost the system.

PC: Inevitably they do, because they go to the United States and--

GERRY HARRINGTON: No no, I mean, inevitably they do become available on Canada.

PC: Oh, I see.

GERRY HARRINGTON: So it's not like there's a difference in the outcome. It's not like we're taking a different approach in Canada, it's just that our system is so inefficient that it delays the process and we have seven to nine years of needless doctor visits at a time when so many Canadians don't even have access to a family doctor.

PC: Gerry Harrington, good to talk to you as well. Thank you.

GERRY HARRINGTON: My pleasure, thank you.

PC: Gerry Harrington is the Vice President of Policy and Regulatory Affairs at Consumer Health Products Canada. Gerry Harrington was in our Ottawa studio. Let's move from medications and health products to beer, because it is one area that's definitely being affected by provincial trade barriers. Steve Beauchesne is the CEO of Beau's All Natural Brewing Company, it's an independent brewery here in Ontario. It took him eight years of trying to get his product into the Quebec market, even though Quebec is very, very close by. Steve Beauchesne is in Vankleek Hill, Ontario. Hey, Steve.

STEVE BEAUCHESNE: How you doing?

PC: I'm good. I know where you are, at Vankleek Hill, is very close to the Quebec Border.

STEVE BEAUCHESNE: Yeah, it's about 15 kilometres away.

PC: Okay, 15 kilometres. And yet, it took you eight years to be able to sell your beer in Quebec. So 16 kilometres from where you are, even though you're so close to the border.

STEVE BEAUCHESNE: That's right. It was very challenging for us. We tried a number of times and failed, and then when we finally said we're going to go back come hell or high water, it was at least a year of solid work. It took one person's entire dedication for it. And between consultant fees and applications and warehousing and everything else that was required, it cost us well over $100,000 just to get the approvals.

PC: Okay, just to set it up-- I mean, the challenge with beer, a real practical challenge, is different provinces have different regulations about what kinds of bottles that can be sold and what sizes, right?

STEVE BEAUCHESNE: Yeah, that's right. Every province has completely different rules around beer sales, so there's a harmonization issue that hits across everything. But then each province has decided whether or not to treat out of province beer as a foreign import or a domestic product, and most provinces of chosen to see beer that's from out of province as being a foreign import. So it's subjected to higher taxes, completely different rules, and it creates a real disadvantage for breweries trying to move across provinces.

PC: Okay, so you as an Ontario brewer who sells in Quebec, you have a different tax issue.

STEVE BEAUCHESNE: That's right. We have to pay about 25 cents more a bottle in taxes than if we were on the Quebec side of the border.

PC: Which essentially means if I buy your beer in Quebec, I'm probably paying a little bit more for it.

STEVE BEAUCHESNE: Yeah, you are, because that gets marked up by the by the retailer, as well, so it really exacerbates itself and makes it very difficult to be competitive.

PC: So explain to me, you said you tried for years to get into Quebec, it was-- you just couldn't. You put someone on it for a year, you finally get in. When you get in, I mean, what kind of permits did you need to begin selling in Quebec? Give us a sense of what you had to do as a as a small company to have your product in another province.

STEVE BEAUCHESNE: Sure. First, you have to go through an approval process with Recyc-Quebec, which is the recycling agency; then before you're able to submit the application, which is 31 sections long, you need to have a warehouse built and operating and you need to have at least two positions filled in Quebec before you're allowed to apply. The application analysis takes a minimum of six months, so you've got a six month period where you're holding all these warehouse costs, these employees, and that's if everything goes well. If there's anything wrong with your application, then you could be right back at ground zero with it.

PC: And that's your experience with Quebec. Say you were going the other way, say you said, huh, we want to go into Manitoba. Different rules, different applications, different permits, all those things?

STEVE BEAUCHESNE: Completely different, and different provinces have chosen to do one set of tax rates if you're in nearby provinces, and then completely different tax rates if you're in others. There's different label requirements in some provinces. It's incredibly difficult to move across and there's really no province that has really opened their markets. Some are definitely doing better than others, though.

PC: So with all this work, you get into Quebec. I mean, was it worth it? How's it going in Quebec? How Beau's been doing in Quebec?

STEVE BEAUCHESNE: It's amazing. The response in Quebec has been just phenomenal. I think because we are so close to the border, we did have good awareness when we moved in. And within six months, Quebec was about 10 per cent of our sales, and that's great. Despite the ongoing challenges with selling into Quebec, I've talked a lot about sort of the barriers to enter into the Quebec market, but on an ongoing basis, if we make a new beer here, there's a completely different approval process we have to go through in Quebec. We literally have to sell our beer first to the FAQ in Quebec, and then rebuy it back, which delays the process and adds additional cost to us in the process. But the great news is that people in Quebec have the same sort of taste buds as they do in Ontario. [laughs]

PC: Steve Beauchesne, thank you for your time, appreciate it.

STEVE BEAUCHESNE: Fantastic, thank you.

PC: Steve Beauchesne is the CEO of Beau's Brewery in Vankleek Hill, Ontario. Well, there may be a lot of good reasons to tear down these trade barriers, including the free movement of beer, if that's your thing. But actually eliminating interprovincial trade barriers may be much easier said than done. Trevor Tombe is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Calgary. He's in our Calgary studio. Hello.

TREVOR TOMBE: Hello.

PC: So put this all in context: whether it's medication, whether it's beer, whether it's dairy creamers, I mean, how did these internal trade barriers between our provinces come to exist?

TREVOR TOMBE: Well, first it's important to recognize what these barriers are. And your earlier guest highlighted precisely what it is: it's differences in rules and regulations from one province to another. In particular, in business services, lawyers are limited by how much they can practice in one province, how much advice and services they can provide to clients in another. And this is really the result of provinces trying to tackle legitimate public policy issues at different points in time and arriving at slightly different rules.

PC: Give me an example. Like, why would a province want to do this?

TREVOR TOMBE: Well, they don't do it with the deliberate explicit intention of lowering internal trade; they do it because they want to try to ensure that food safety standards are protecting the people in their province, but they arrive at slightly different standards than other places. And examples were provided in the Senate report. They had a list of what they called the ten weirdest barriers to internal trade.

PC: Yeah, I think that's where that trucking one came. You can drive a truck in B.C. at night, but only in Alberta during the day.

TREVOR TOMBE: Exactly. And maple syrup grades differ by province, creamer sizes differ by province, the type of tires that trucks are allowed to use differ by province. And so in order to tackle this and actually liberalize internal trade, it would require provinces either harmonize those rules and regulations or mutually recognise each other's rules and regulations. And so that's a big deal, because it essentially means that each province would either change the way it's approaching these regulatory areas, or accepting that what another province has decided is good enough for them.

PC: So in other words, they would have to streamline rules.

TREVOR TOMBE: Yeah, that's right.

PC: So again, if you can give me an example that that you can think of, what kind of pushback would you expect from a particular province or provinces if they have to streamline rules? Are they going to say yeah, no, not in my province?

TREVOR TOMBE: So Alberta is a good example here, where financial services is a very important part of internal trade. I think in the last year, we had about 33 billion dollars’ worth of financial services traded across provincial boundaries, and national securities regulation is a big part of how we can free up internal trade in finance. But Alberta stands against a national securities regulator, and it stands against it very vocally because it says that it is the province with the expertise to properly regulate capital investment in the energy and oil and gas sectors, for example. And so it would approach this and say, no, we are the ones with the expertise. We want to regulate it ourselves, and it's a difficult argument to have.

PC: So there's kind of different things here at play: there's services, there's expertise and experience, there's professions that that this could affect. There's also products, we just talked about beer and medications. So if you're a regular business, who would want to see, business-wise, trade rules, the interprovincial trade barriers remain as they are?

TREVOR TOMBE: So different businesses will have different views of this. So some firms will be the ones that are enjoying the protection from these barriers. They might be a firm that wouldn't be able to compete in a broader national market; while other firms are being held back because they want to enter other markets. and so like any trade agreement, there is always winners and losers. Some firms won't compete, some firms will. And that's really where as an economist, I would say that's where the gains from trade lie. We want to be able to expand the productive firms, allow them to serve as many customers if they can, and we do want to scale back the unproductive firms. And governments have a role in facilitating that adjustment, but what the barriers do is prevent that adjustment from taking place.

PC: And in every trade deal or talk of one, that word protectionism comes up.

TREVOR TOMBE: Mhm.

PC: There have been attempts to reach a deal between provinces before. They haven't gotten anywhere. How likely is it that an agreement will be reached this time around?

TREVOR TOMBE: So this is an issue that comes up quite a bit. In 1995, the provinces sat down and agreed to what's called an Agreement on Internal Trade. And since then, they've had 14 sub-agreements and amendments to that one. So every other year, it kind of comes up, and a small agreement is made, but nothing that is comprehensive or broad that would actually make a meaningful dent in the problem. And so the Senate has noted that the provinces have been trying to reach a new, broader, comprehensive agreement since 2014, and the Senate has said, well, if you can't get it done by July of 2017, then the federal government needs to explore some legal options.

PC: That's the Supreme Court option.

TREVOR TOMBE: That's right.

PC: That you were talking about earlier. Okay, we aren't the only country of provinces and states. So how do other-- I don't know, I'm thinking maybe Australia. How do other countries do this? And do they do this successfully?

TREVOR TOMBE: I'm thinking of Australia, too, so it's good you brought that up.

PC: Good, good!

TREVOR TOMBE: So they've approached this in a very interesting way, and it's a way that the Senate has recommended we take a pretty hard look at, too. So what they've done is their provinces or their states have agreed to a mutual recognition agreement where any product or safety standards that is okay in one region is okay in all. Any professional certification that is valid in one region is valid in all. And so they don't need to explicitly harmonize their rules and regulations, they just say if it's good enough in one province, it's good enough in all of them. And so that mutual recognition is a route that I think we need to go in, as well. An example of this would be if you move a car between provinces, if you bring in a car into Alberta, for example, from another province, you need a costly out-of-province inspection, even if it's a new car brought in from Ontario. Why would we think that the rules around car safety are so bad in Ontario that we need to have an inspection in Alberta? So mutual recognition would say if it's good enough anywhere, it's good enough here.

PC: Trevor Tombe, thank you.

TREVOR TOMBE: Thank you.

PC: Trevor Tombe is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Calgary. He was in our Calgary studio. I'm Piya Chattopadhyay, you're listening to the Friday edition of The Current.

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First mammal extinction due to human-caused climate change

Guests: Luke Leung, Elizabeth Kolbert

PIYA CHATTOPADHYAY: Hi again I'm Piya Chattopadhyay and this is the Friday edition of The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

[atmospheric music]

In 200 years, people will look back on this particular period and say to themselves. How did those people at that time just allow all these amazing creatures to vanish? If we all lose hope, there is no hope people fall into apathy. There is still a lot that's worth fighting for.

PC: That was the primatologist Jane Goodall, speaking about our collective environmental responsibility; words that took on extra urgency this week. Scientists announced the extinction of a small, brown, furry animal, one that few of us would ever have heard of before. The Bramble Cay melomys only lived on one small island in Australia's Great Barrier Reef, but its extinction is being looked at as a canary in the coal mine moment. It's the first mammal believed to be killed off as a result of man-made climate change, and potentially, the first of very many. Climate change threatens, many believe, to spark a devastation of plant and animal life around the globe setting off what's been described as the sixth extinction. We'll hear more about that in a few minutes from the Pulitzer Prize winning science journalist Elizabeth Kolbert, but first, Luke Leung is a wildlife biologist and senior lecturer in the School of Agriculture and Food Sciences at the University of Queensland. He co-authored a government report on the Bramble Cay melomys's extinction. We've reached Luke Leung in Gatton, Australia. Hello.

LUKE LEUNG: Hello.

PC: So tell us first what is the Bramble Cay melomys?

LUKE LEUNG: That's one of the many small native rodents we have in Australia. There is a number of species of melomys, they occur in New Guinea and in Australia. He is brown on top, is white underneath, and it's got a prehensile tail that will help it to climb so he's kind of semi-arborio. There are not many trees on the island, actually there are no trees on the island, so they may live underground and they feed on mainly vegetarian; they feed on plants.

PC: So it's a small little brown rodent like a rat?

LUKE LEUNG: Yeah, you can call it a rat, but it's got very smooth fur. It's very cute.

PC: It's very cute.

LUKE LEUNG: Yes.

PC: Okay, all right, so it lives on the specific small island in the Great Barrier Reef?

LUKE LEUNG: Yes, this is still part of the Great Barrier Reef, it’s at the very north eastern end of the Great Barrier Reef, very close to New Guinea and it is part of the Great Barrier Reef. Recently, you probably heard about in Australia we have had coral bleaching. When the water is too warm, the coral turns white and then they die. So, this is another impact on the Great Barrier Reef but this time it’s about water. It’s about tidal surges that see water inundate the Coral Cay, the Bramble Cay, and when we arrive on the island surveying for these Bramble Cay memlomys, we noticed there was actually salt water erosion on the island. Some vegetation obviously suffer from salt water invasion and they die off. The areas of vegetation are getting smaller and smaller.

PC: So, before they went extinct, give me a sense how many of these rodents were on this island.

LUKE LEUNG: My friend Daryn Storch started his first survey in 1993 to 1998 and he caught about 42 individuals, so they estimate there were about 93 individuals living on the cay and then in 2002 and 2004, Peter Latch went to the cay and caught 10 and 12 individuals, respectively. In 2011, no more were found but we are not sure whether it was extinct or not, so we repeated our survey in March 2014 and also in September 2014. We were pretty sure that they are no longer there. The cay is very simple, it’s like going to the beach. You can find everything there and it is only 300 metres long, and 100 metres wide, so we were very confident that this species, unfortunately, had become extinct.

PC: The last one that you spotted was in 2011, and five years later you're pretty sure there's none left. Is it possible that any Bramble Cay melomys are living anywhere else?

LUKE LEUNG: Yeah, that's always a possibility. It being so close to Papa New Guinea, perhaps they came to the island by drifting down the Fly River.

PC: And yet we still consider that it's now gone extinct?

LUKE LEUNG: Yes, because we’re pretty sure that in Australia and in Queensland, we declared that it is extinct, but we didn't declare that it's globally extinct because there is a very small, a very small possibility that perhaps a closely related species lives in New Guinea.

PC: Was there no attempt made to save them or to up their numbers?

LUKE LEUNG: Well, apparently some government offices captured some and they tried to set up a colony, but apparently after a few years, there was no more commitment to maintaining it.

PC: We are talking about this little rodent because it is believed to be the first mammal to go extinct because of human causes, so talk to me about that. What were the specific human causes behind this extinction?

LUKE LEUNG: This species had been living on Bramble Cay for a very long time, perhaps tens of thousands of years, and then we observe its decline from 1998 through 2000, and there is finally extinction in 2014. So we think this is really a wake-up call for Australia, and perhaps for the world. If this continues to happen, I think we're going to lose more and more species on low lying islands.

PC: And so those are the wider implications. As you say, this could be the start of something that many people have said it's probably going to happen. I guess my question is, how do you pinpoint that it is the first mammal to become extinct because of human caused climate change? How do you quote unquote “prove” that?

LUKE LEUNG: Yes, it's quite difficult to prove because this is really the first recorded extinction of a mammal caused by climate change. There might be species that went extinct because of climate change but we didn't know. This one has gone extinct and we're pretty confident that is caused by climate change because of evidence we collected on the cay. We saw sea water inundation, killing of vegetation, and this is a vegetarian species so it lost its food base. We are very confident this is the first recorded mammal extinction caused by climate change.

PC: And as you say, this is a wake-up call not only for Australia but for us around the world, that this could be the start of something really really terrible, so to that point, what does Australia and what does the wider world need to do to keep this from happening to other species?

LUKE LEUNG: Well, I think this is a very useful signal for was because often people just look at climate change; they think such a global event, you know, it’s so vague, so incremental, and then you have species come to extinction because of that. This is like somebody can handle or understand what is happening because you can actually see that one species has permanently disappeared from earth. Over this gradual change, you see more and more of these milestones happening, so I think this is an important moment that you are broadcasting this to the audience in your country. We need to tell people. In Canada, you also have tremendous adversity of small mammals and other larger mammals with climate change playing an important role impacting them. I think we share a lot.

PC: Luke Leung, thank you very much.

LIKE LEUNG: Thank you very much for your time. It's my pleasure.

PC: Luke Leung is a wildlife biologist and senior lecturer in the School of Agriculture and Food Sciences at the University of Queensland. He was in Gatton, Australia. The body of research looking at the extent of potential plant and animal loss is long and growing. Luca Santini is a post-doctoral fellow in conservation biology and ecology at the University of Grenoble in France, and in April he published a study showing that 30 percent of mammal species would not be able to disperse. What that means is dispersed to a new environment, and what it means is fast enough to escape the effects of climate change. This would be another factor increasing the risk for extinction.

SOUNDCLIP

This is a problem for several species, for example primates. Primates reproduce quite slowly, they reproduce annually most of them, they have small litter size, and they disperse very short distances. Actually, mammals are less threatened compared to other species in this respect are probably good dispersers compared to many other groups. So the estimates for other vertebrates might be much larger. And I would also like to add that this estimate that we provided is very conservative. 30 percent is very optimistic.

PC: Well the dying off of the Bramble Cay melomys may have us talking about the spectre of a new mass extinction today, but it is a subject that has concerned scientists and science journalists. For many years they've been grappling with this. The New Yorker magazine writer and author Elizabeth Kolbert did a deep dive into the subject for her latest book, her book is called The Sixth Extinction and Unnatural History and it was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction last year. Elizabeth Kolbert is in Williamstown, Massachusetts, hi.

ELIZABETH KOLBERT: Hi.

PC: So we just heard about the Bramble Cay melomys. How significant, put this in context for us, is this loss?

ELIZABETH KOLBERT: Well, it's a very sad loss and another thing that it points to is how vulnerable island species are and islands turn out to be hotbeds of diversity. Animals arrive on an island somehow. Somehow in the distant past, one pair arrived and then they speciated out, this is sort of the story that we get with Darwin and the finches on the Galapagos, so islands are very, very vulnerable and on some level it is not surprising that we're seeing the first extinction that we know about. I think that is an important caveat to add, there may have been many others that we just didn't notice.

PC: The first extinction by human induced climate change, right?

ELIZABETH KOLBERT: Right. Exactly.

PC: Okay, so as I said earlier, people are saying this could be the first of many; that this is a really a signal like, hey wake up people that is sort of the slippery slope, if I can put it that way, to mass extinction. So what am I saying when I say those words mass extinction?

ELIZABETH KOLBERT: A mass extinction is just by definition is a creative event, a period of time, relatively short by geological standards, let alone by human standards, when a great proportion of the world's biodiversity is lost. When we look in the fossil record we can see that there have been, over the last half billion years, five of these, five meet with what thev're called major mass extinctions and at those points, in the last one the one that people will be most familiar with was 66 million years ago when the dinosaurs and lots and lots of other things died off. That is believed to have been caused by an asteroid impact and now we're seeing extinction rates where we have not gotten anywhere near the asteroid fatality toll yet, but we are seeing extinction rates that are very, very high. Once again, if you look through the fossil record, you get a sense of how often species go extinct and the basic rule here is if you are seeing species go extinct in your own lifetime, then something very, very strange is going on because species go extinct very, very rarely. We have sort of become inured to the idea of species going extinct but it's not something that should happen very frequently at all. You should not be able to see, for example, a species of mammal go extinct and we just did.

PC: So a mass extinction is different from an extinction because of the acuteness of time; that it's a shorter time frame, am I right in that?

ELIZABETH KOLBERT: Well, any extinction is one species winking out and that happens at a fairly regular rate throughout the geological record, but very, very rarely, so it is a regular but rare occurrence. Now, during a mass extinction across many different groups of animals, many classes of animals, you see very high extinction rates. The rate of extinction goes up very, very dramatically and we are seeing these very elevated extinction rates right now.

PC: So, that leads me to this question: how long is a normal life cycle for a species just generally?

ELIZABETH KOLBERT: Well that seems, once again when we look at the fossil record, to vary from one group of animals to the next but the sort of general rule certainly for like a mammalian species, would be about a million years.

PC: A million years. That's just generally. Okay, you talk about dinosaurs and asteroids, we're all familiar with that. There have been other mass extinctions and this one that we’re set upon is the sixth. There have been five previous, what caused the other four?

ELIZABETH KOLBERT: Well, some of them are a little bit mysterious to us, but the very first one of this group which occurred a long time ago, 440 million years ago when most of life was still confined to the ocean, so we really didn't have much life on land at that point; the very first plants, maybe. That is believed to have been caused by a fairly sudden glaciation, so a cold event, sort of the opposite of what we're having now which is just a warming event. The third of them which is called the End Permian extinction, occurred about 250 million years ago and was the worst of all of them. It was a very serious extinction. The very alarming thing here is that appears to have been caused by some of the very same things that we're doing now; very large carbon emissions, CO2 emissions that both warm the atmosphere and acidify the oceans. I should add carbon dioxide, the cause of climate change, and our carbon emissions from our factories, and our power plants our cars, are also absorbed by the oceans and change the chemistry of the oceans.

PC: Okay, so that's the past, let's look to the present and the future; the sixth extinction. What do we know at this point about this projected extinction?

ELIZABETH KOLBERT: Well, all we know at this point and what this recent extinction just corroborates is that extinction rates are quite high, so when we look across groups of animals that we monitor very closely, and mammals are probably the prime example there because there are many, many species out there, millions probably that we don't even know exist, then we see what's the extinction rate among mammals. Once again, against this baseline of how often you should see a mammal go extinct, which is very rarely, how often are they going to extinct that we see that the rate is very high right now.

PC: We’re talking mammals fish, insects.

ELIZABETH KOLBERT: Yes and whenever we look at a group that we know well, so we have to know what is in the genometer in order to figure out the rate, we see very elevated extinction. This has been done across different groups and in all cases, as far as I know, we've seen very, very elevated extinction rates.

PC: What have you seen on your own travels in terms of this?

ELIZABETH KOLBERT: I’m an amateur here but even I in my reporting having countered animals that are now-- One animal that I saw for example is down to one known individual living in a tank in Atlanta. So even I, in this relatively brief span of time that I've been reporting on this, will have seen an animal go extinct and as I say, that should not be possible.

PC: We talk about the sixth extinction and the role of us people, humanity, that are playing in it, and just for anyone who might think that we aren’t playing a role in this, how do we know that this isn't just the normal cycle of extinctions?

ELIZABETH KOLBERT: When we look at why species have gone extinct, the known extinctions, then once again that's probably only a fraction of the actual extinctions. In virtually every case, we can trace it back to something that we have done and often it's a combination of things, to be honest. Either deforestation or introduced species or a very, very serious cause of extinction. We're seeing big changes here in Canada and in the US owing to introduced species, introduced pathogens. For example there's a fungus that's moving around the world that's killing frogs. Some your listeners have probably heard about that. It's causing what's being called the amphibian crisis. I know that it is affecting amphibians in Canada. It's certainly affecting amphibians here in the US. We all hear all the time for example about new insects that are coming in that are killing off trees, the fungus that killed off all the chestnuts in North America about 100 years ago, so we keep these waves of very devastating change, and we can’t. When we see a species go extinct, we can always trace it back to something that we did. The idea that we are not the cause of it, I don’t really think there is anyone out there in naturalist or biologist circles, that would say we are not the cause because if you look back at the record, you just shouldn’t see things like that. You don’t see things like that except when there is some precipitating cause.

PC: So there is human created climate change and there are other factors that we humans are doing that are also driving extinction.

ELIZABETH KOLBERT: Absolutely, I mean your point that this animal is the first known instance of a mammal going extinct owing to climate change, we know of many other species that we have driven extinct over the last well, really to be honest starting with the large mega fauna that we drove extinct when we humans arrived in North America. The mastodons, there's a pretty broad consensus these days that those extinctions were already caused by the first people who arrived in North America. Now we've seen many, many hundreds of species go extinct since then and they were not climate change driven, they were driven by introduced species. That's been a very large cause of extinction. When you introduce for example, rats or cats on the islands in particular, you have these, what are called naive species, that have not grown up with that kind of predator, not evolved with that kind of predator and they can go extinct very, very quickly. So there are many cases of that in places like Hawaii, places like New Zealand, places like Australia. We have hunted out animals, we've introduced species, we've introduced pathogens, we've changed totally changed the surface of the planet by cutting down forests, so there are many ways that we are causing extinctions right now and they unfortunately feed on each other and are synergistically related.

PC: Can we survive this sixth mass extinction, can human survive this?

ELIZABETH KOLBERT: I get asked that all the time and I don't claim to be able to see the future any better than anyone else can see it, but I would say if you are betting on a species to survive, then humans who are dispersed all over the world and are very clever and very adaptable, I would say we are a good bet for a species that will survive. It's a lot of other species that probably won't survive, but I would also say that you don't want to be around during a time of mass extinction because a lot of species go extinct and you can't predict exactly what species those are going to be.

PC: Just briefly, Elizabeth Kolbert, what do we need? What can we do now to give as many organisms, animals as possible, a chance to survive? Can we slow down the rates of extinction and if so how?

ELIZABETH KOLBERT: Well, I think that there are many things that we can and should be doing and in the case of climate change the obvious one is we should be very dramatically reducing our carbon emissions. So, that’s an obvious one. Easier said than done, but doable and we are not doing it, but we should be doing it. Now in the case of other causes of extinction, for example, is simply poaching and killing off animals and overfishing and all those things. Each one, unfortunately, has its own set of steps that we need to take, but I think if I were to summarize it, E.O. Wilson, the great biologist recently wrote a book about the importance of putting aside big tracts of land where animals, where evolution, can proceed as best it can. And that also means setting aside the big tracts of land where animals can migrate because one of the points you just mentioned, is that animals need to disperse; they need to be able to move in response to climate change. One of the things that we've done is we've set the climate changing and we've also put up barriers in the way of many of these species dispersing. We need to try to get out of the way and let as many species as possible get through this sort of time of crisis.

PC: Travel and adapt.

ELIZABETH KOLBERT: Exactly.

PC: Elizabeth Kolbert, thank you so very much, I really appreciated talking to you. Elizabeth Kolbert is the author of The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. She was in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Listen, I know a lot of you are going to be thinking about this and have things to say about this so do let us know your thoughts . There are so many ways to get in touch with The Current, you can tweet us @thecurrentcbc, on Twitter my handle is @Piya, on Facebook, cbc.ca/thecurrent. If you missed any of the program today or want to catch up on other episodes or one with something again you can go to our website cbc.ca/the current. I'm Piya Chattopadhyay, thank you so very much for lending us your ear here on the Friday edition of The Current.

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June 17, 2016 episode transcript

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