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The Current Transcript for January 19, 2017

Host: Anna Maria Tremonti

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

JOHN ENGLAND: The disappearance of the ice shelves are important because their our Egyptian pyramids, their our California Redwoods. So if the California redwood trees suddenly started to die off. We’d know about it on the national news.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: We take a lot of pride in the idea of the great white north emblematic of a Canada that has a vast breathtaking landscape. But John England says the very thing that makes our country a geographic wonder is disappearing and neither we nor our government officials are paying attention. John England has spent decades researching Arctic ice and ice shelves and in the process developed a deep appreciation and love for a part of the country that so few of us see. He wants us to appreciate it before it's gone. John England joins me in half an hour.

AMT: Also today when you're a kid or an adult with nut allergies there's no wiggle room.

SOUNDCLIP

GUEST: You can’t have anything with nuts in it, so on Halloween you have to throw out about half of your candy because they all those Reese’s peanut butter cups.

GUEST TWO: Snickers and Butter Fingers.

AMT: Which is why those with nut allergies or those who care for someone with them are angered and bewildered by a decision by McDonald's to now add nuts to some of its food on a menu. For lots of parents. McDonald's had been one kid-friendly fast food restaurant where they knew they wouldn't be likely to need the epi pen in an hour we'll hear the concerns.

AMT: And.

SOUNDCLIP

GUEST: I'm marching to ensure that our rights and our voices are heard early on. And to let this next incoming administration know that we will be here advocating for our issues.

AMT: But whose issues are they as women from across North America converge on Washington for a massive protest demonstration meant to send a message to the incoming Trump administration. They're also sending messages to each other. We're starting there. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

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From the Women’s March and the state of feminism in the Trump age

Guests: Thanu Yakupitiyage, Sally Kohn, Lauren Duca

SOUNDCLIP

SINGER: He is my guy.

DONALD TRUMP: I respect women incredibly.

SINGER: I don’t care what he does.

DONALD TRUMP: I just start kissing it's like a magnet when you're a star they let you do it.

SINGER: My Guy.

DONALD TRUMP: I've said that if Ivanka weren’t my daughter perhaps I'd be dating her.

DONALD TRUMP: If I were to interview her, I’d fire Rosie. I mean I'd look right in that fat ugly face of hers and say Rosie, you're fired.

AMT: Some of the many well-documented remarks about women that Donald. J Trump has uttered over the years the former Miss Universe pageant owner becomes the leader of the free world tomorrow when he is sworn in as the next U.S. president. His election has brought uncertainty and anxiety to many around the world and perhaps to none more so than American women. Hundreds of thousands of women will be marching in protests this Saturday, one day after the inauguration and events that started being organized just hours after Mr. Trump upset Hillary Clinton's bid to be the first female U.S. president. I'm joined now by three women each of whom will be marching Saturday. Thanu Yakupitiyage is a senior communications manager at the New York Immigration Coalition a partner organization of the women's march. She joins us from New York City. Lauren Duca is a freelance journalist and contributing editor for Teen Vogue. She is also in New York. And Sally Kohn is a CNN political commentator. She joins us from Tampa Florida. Hello to you all.

THANU YAKUPITIYGE: Hi.

LAUREN DUCA: Hello.

SALLY KOHN: Thanks for having me.

AMT: Sally Kohn, let's start with you. What do you think Donald Trump will do to women's rights in the United States?

SALLY KOHN: How much time do we have? You know there's two things here. First of all what's important is what Donald Trump has already done which is make clear that for all the advancements both politically and socially in the United States. Which have never been perfect it has always been halting and incremental, but still we had reason to be grateful for basic liberties and freedoms and culture change that moved our country in the right direction. The most important thing that Trump has already done is signal a desire to backslide in both politically and culturally already in his own behavior and in the condoning of that behavior and language of misogyny and rhetoric that came on the part of just under half the voters. So that's already happened. What he is going to do unfortunately like everything else we can only guess and take cues from who he is putting or who he wants to put in positions of power starting with his deeply anti-choice and anti-women’s rights Vice President Mike Pence and running up and down the line. It’s unfortunately a wait and see attitude. But with this tinge of you know knowing that he is that he himself that President-elect Trump himself is seems to be the candidate of misogyny and in a way that we've never really seen before.

AMT: Thanu Yakupitiyge, why are you going to the march what issues are important you?

THANU YAKUPITIYGE: For me it really is an intersection of issues. I'm an immigrant rights organizer. I'm a woman, I'm queer, I am an immigrant. I came to this country when I was 18 and I really do believe that people are converging on the women's march to really affirm our shared humanity as women and as people in intersecting movements and so for me Saturday is really about pushing many issues from you know sexism to immigrant rights to really addressing sexual assault and the lack of the ability of our leaders and our quote unquote “leader Donald Trump” who has a current sexual assault case against him, multiple cases in fact. It really is about affirming that all women and women of color Indigenous women are he and others are really here together enough for the long haul and in a…. I'm sorry, it's so super early. Like for the rights of all of us together.

AMT: I'm talking to you as we go to our Atlantic region in Canada we do go in five and a half time zones in this country. So yes it is early. Thanu Yakupitiyge, some white women have said they are not going to the march because they feel excluded by conversations over a decision to highlight issues faced by racial minority groups. How do you react to that?

THANU YAKUPITIYGE: You know I think that one of the things that really made me feel good about the Women's March was really reading the guiding vision and definition of principles that they set out. That was really all encompassing of all women. When we talk about women's rights and human rights. It is not for only one particular set of women it is for all of us and for the women's march to go ahead and push for this principle of unity that includes black women, Native women, poor women, immigrant women, disabled woman Muslim women you know trans women. It really is about showing that we're all part of a broader movement. And so I would say to those women that like to join us though this isn't about some of us it's about all of us. How inclusive should feminism be?

THANU YAKUPITIYGE: Feminism should is all inclusive it's a movement that includes all of us. It's a movement for human rights. And so there is no exclusion or limitation to feminism.

AMT: Lauren Duca, you wrote an article in Teen Vogue that went viral entitled Donald Trump is Gaslighting America. How much do young women identify as feminists?

LAUREN DUCA: It seems to be an overwhelmingly progressive sentiment among younger people. I am I am hoping that there's less of this feeling and that feelings of carving out sort of personalized feminism is part of the problem. When you have 53 per cent of white women being part of the reason why Donald Trump is elected I think that more of what you know we talking kind of wholesale about issues and feminism pegged to the Women's March. Those things are less are reflected of the way movement maybe is not communicating adequately or failing to communicate to women in general that this is not a person that a woman should ever be able to vote for with a full set of information. So I almost feel I'm hopeful that a younger generation is becoming more aware sooner. I mean I'm even seeing a lot of… I hear from a lot of young women who proudly tell me they're feminists at 14, 15, 16 and you know I didn't have full access to that word and ownership of my own feminism until later in college. And I hope that that gives them time to process it for themselves and think about what it means to them and how they want to live a politically active life. Driven by feminism.

AMT: And so Lauren Duca is Ivanka Trump a feminist?

LAUREN DUCA: I don't think that's possible given the way that she uses women's empowerment and sort of masquerades around with women in the workplace as though it's her defining cause. I think that she is a strong woman and a smart woman and a powerful woman and it's all very complex. I think that I hope that we treat her more critically and with more intellectual rigor. And it seems that often she's written off on the right by people who are pretending to be protecting her and saying you know he's her dad as though that's an excuse to excuse somebody being a political adviser and having a major role in a president who has more conflicts of interests than anyone. You know we've seen incoming in history as a role in his business. It's there's so many elements to it where just the way that she's being written off by many sentiments on the right is anti-feminist. So I think it's more of a question of how do we address her? How can we talk about Ivanka and encounter sort of the problem of Ivanka as a surrogate for her father from a feminist perspective?

AMT: This gets into the whole issue of who defines who is a feminist. Sally Kohn, 53 per cent of white women as you say or voted for Donald Trump can those women be feminists?

SALLY KOHN: You know the issue… the interesting thing about feminism is like so many things in our country we get stuck on the words and not on the meaning. So you know. Yes. It warms my heart when all women young and young and old of all races and backgrounds use the word and claim the word feminism. What’s infinitely more important to me is that they believe in the ideas and values that the word feminism evokes and they do. So it is also early for me so I don't remember the numbers, but when you ask women do they believe in equal opportunity that boys and girls should have the same chances to do things and can do things equally well? When you ask them these questions all women and by the way men resoundingly agree. So I think that's far more important than a word. The challenge and I think this is the challenge for the feminist movement and then social movements more broadly that the march has taken up very well is to say OK, well what does it mean to believe that and put that into action. And part of the reason I'm very proud of the Women's March from Washington and the leaders is that their making clear that they want to do more than just march. That it's not you know as important as it is to show numbers and in solidarity it's not just showing up on a cold day holding some signs and walking down the street that makes change. What makes change is taking political action every single day and also taking action in a maybe different way that that lives out and shows the connection between those issues. So I think the march leaders in their principles and in the way that they've designed the everything around the march are pushing women of all kinds and men to think not just about their own perspective on feminism and on equality, but to understand how everything truly is connected and it is not just a statement but a matter of fact that until everyone is free. No one is free and we have we're going to have a lot to do in the coming months and years under a Trump administration to really put our belief in those principles to test who show up not just at a march, but actually live that out.

AMT: Thanu Yakupitiyge, what do you think of that?

THANU YAKUPITIYGE: Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. I think that when we think about you know the Women's Marth on Saturday for me it really is the beginning of something greater. It's not just that we're showing up on Saturday and that we go away and this really is to hold this new administration accountable. Donald Trump did not win by the popular vote. There are millions of people in this country whose civil liberties are at risk at this current moment. And we really need to fight harder than we've ever fought before in order to preserve them. And you know for me the Women's March is really about demonstrating that our liberation is bound to each other and that you know as Dr. King said we cannot walk alone. We have to really to work together to really push forward all of our issues when in regards to feminism, feminism is about political and social equity and therefore we need to cross movements.

AMT: And do you believe that all of the all of the women coming together understand the political and social equity that you're talking about?

THANU YAKUPITIYGE: You know I think that it's also a process of really teaching each other and talking to each other. I don't necessarily think that you know people are coming to the Women's March with the same understanding. But the fact that the Women's March has put together a really broad platform is really a good place to start to have those conversations and so I'm going to the Women's March with a real open heart in order to talk to people who are different than me. And in order to grow this movement because that's what we really need right now is more unity and understanding and ability for people to learn from each other's differences and really see where it is that we all meet towards a common goal.

AMT: Well I'm asking because the pro-life group was initially a partner in the women's march and the march organizers have since called that a mistake. They've since declared the march pro-choice.

SALLY KOHN: Can I clarify just on that point? It wasn't just any pro-life organization it's not to suggest that you can't be a pro-life feminist that you can't disagree with some of those principles that the march put forward and not put it in the march. But it's very important understand that that particular organization was tied to a right wing anti-choice sting group. Of the James O'Keefe edditied sting video of the variety that was intentionally trying to take down and misrepresent the march. So that's why that group wasn't allowed.

AMT: OK. And Thanu, you have said that we are we are in a third wave of feminism, but we need to be in a fourth wave?

THANU YAKUPITIYGE: Yeah, I think that there is a real need for the Women's March to be intersectional and really all-encompassing of all genders races and cultures. And you know we need to for example be particularly supportive of Trans women in this march. And so I think that's part of that's part of what I mean when I say we need to move our politics forward. We need to really be radically envisioning what we want for women in this country and across the world. And so we need to move away from the idea that feminism is just for white women or feminism is just about a particular set of women moving forward it's about all of us.

AMT: When you say intersectional can you define that?

THANU YAKUPITIYGE: Yeah, when I say intersectional I mean a movement that really encompasses many different movements. So whether it's Black Lives Matter whether it's an Indigenous movement whether it's a queer movement. It's all of these people together working towards the goal of equity and that equity means self-determination for all of us.

AMT: Lauren Duca, what are you thinking as you listen to your colleagues?

LAUREN DUCA: Yeah, I think I am on the same page on all of those points and something that I would like to emphasize is that you know you can absolutely be pro-life and pro-choice. And I just I don't think that this might be too in-depth of a conversation for this early and especially in our attached.

AMT: It's not going too in-depth for us, our listeners are with you. Keep going.

LAUREN DUCA: Sure. OK, well I mean I think you know Sally made an important point that this was this specific group that is being left out for a specific reason. But I think overall that achieving that social equity requires a right to choose. It requires reproductive rights. So I'm happy to be inclusive when we're talking about women who are pro-life, but I think that they have to understand that they can make a pro-life choice for themselves and believe morally and ethically whatever in a pro-life choice, but on a political level on a practical level without the right to choose. We cannot possibly achieve women's equality. So I do think that is the fundamental issue.

AMT: And I am well and further to that, you talk about gaslighting if you have all these supporters of Donald Trump and the include women and he does have a lot of supporters then. Then you're not solely fighting the man at the top of the heap you're also are you do have to get into the weeds here with other women do you not?

LAUREN DUCA: I think that often it's not about getting into the weeds with other women. That’s a strange way to think about it. It's about it's about fighting for the issues that are required for equality. And perhaps it's about educating. I like the way we talk about it when we're talking about teaching one another. I don't want to think about it as battling. I want to think about it as helping to explain to women who maybe don't understand why certain things that they are encountering are oppressive and sexist and that could mean things in the workplace or things in terms of not understanding that an overarching call for reproductive rights is in the best interest of women overall. So I mean I like to think of it less as battling women and men more of working through these issues and helping to broaden out the ideas of feminism in terms of also explaining to maybe those 53 per cent of women on some level what they maybe need to be engaging with more critically when they're voting for the misogynist candidate of our generation.

AMT: Well and I've …

SALLY KOHN: Can I wanted to piggyback on that I also think though that one of the challenges when we think about the women and men who voted for Trump as quote unquote “the problem”. First of all you know apart from actually understanding the legitimate reasons that they made that choice not demonizing people et cetera. The other danger in that and again I think this is something that the march organizers have been very savvy in thinking about it. The danger is that we don't realize that we, the people who didn't vote for Donald Trump the people who voted for Hillary Clinton or maybe voted for another candidate are also part of the problem that substance. Just pick one issue the way that you know a lot of liberal white women in this country silently resent affirmative action and ignore the kind of resentment of other you know diversity and inclusion issues that feeds the kind of broader racial resentment on which Donald Trump's candidacy prayed.

AMT: Right. OK. And you know what I hear what you're saying, but we are now out of time. So that we could have gone further, but we've got to go now so thank you all of you. I'm speaking with : Thanu Yakupitiyge, senior communications manager at the New York Immigration Coalition. Lauren duca, a freelance journalist and contributing editor to teen vogue. And Sally Kohn, CNN political commentator. While the march is on Saturday let us know what you think about all of this and stay with us. The news is next. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti, this is The Current.

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John England on half a century of exploring the arctic

Guests: John England

AMT: Hello. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current.

[Music: Theme]

AMT: Still to come, a menu change at a ubiquitous fast food restaurant has families with kids who suffer from nut allergies saying nuts! Because there's one last place now for those families to eat worry free. We'll talk about that in half an hour. We're also talking about Barack Obama's last minute move to commute Chelsea Manning sentence and why a fellow leaker Edward Snowden is not on that clemency list. But first enjoying the splendor of the Arctic before it's too late.

SOUNDCLIP

SPEAKER: The whole vast river of ice is on the move. Slowly, inexorably toppling into the sea. Given that fact, it's obviously not that great to be actually under that ice front with a broken engine. That is an enormous block right at the top. The whole front is going to go at some point.

[Sound: Ice crumbling]

SPEAKER: That was amazing.

AMT: Hello. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current.

AMT: Still to come, a menu change at a ubiquitous fast food restaurant has families with kids who suffer from nut allergies saying nuts! Because there's one last place now for those families to eat worry free. We'll talk about that in half an hour. We're also talking about Barack Obama's last minute move to commute Chelsea Manning sentence and why a fellow leaker Edward Snowden is not on that clemency list. But first enjoying the splendor of the Arctic before it's too late.

JOHN ENGLAND: The whole vast river of ice is on the move. Slowly, inexorably toppling into the sea. Given that fact, it's obviously not that great to be actually under that ice front with a broken engine. That is an enormous block right at the top. The whole front is going to go at some point.

[Sound: Ice crumbling]

SPEAKER: That was amazing.

AMT: That is how it sounds when an Arctic ice shelf collapses and crashes into the sea and you're lucky enough not to be underneath it. It is something that most of us may never witness in our lives, but it's happening more frequently in the Canadian Arctic. Just yesterday scientists announced that the earth had for the third year in a row reached a record high temperature in 2016, which means more and more ice shelves melting. It was a BBC crew that captured that moment. We just heard but it may have easily been my next guest there to witness it. John England has been adventuring through the Arctic and studying Arctic ice for half a century. He's professor emeritus in Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Alberta and he's also the 2016 recipient of the Weston Family Prize for Lifetime Achievement in Northern Research. John England is with us in our Edmonton studio.

AMT: Hello.

JOHN ENGLAND: Good morning, Anna Maria.

AMT: What do you think when you hear the sound of ice collapsing like that?

JOHN ENGLAND: It was almost humorous at the beginning and I was thinking that's how my life starts every morning before a cup of coffee. But it also caught I think the excitement of doing Arctic Research and the potential calamities that occur. But in terms of the science, of course, it's a dramatic expression of what's actually going on in both polar environments. The collapse of ice shelves both those that are attached to land-based glaciers those have really started to break up and they certainly then accelerate the flow of ice into the ocean and the rise of sea level that's a big concern. We also have very ancient sea ice, ice shelves in Canada that don't depart quite so dramatically, but nonetheless signs of the impact of modern global change on high latitudes. My work has been looking at environmental change and the whole idea is that basically our knowledge of climate in the Arctic and in high latitudes is really constrained to weather records back maybe 60 years or so. So how do we reconstruct the natural variability that has occurred over hundreds and thousands of years? So we create mosaics of change based on glaciers and sea ice and permafrost and lake cores etc. almost as time slices and you could almost think of them as individual frames of film. So my work is trying to see the Arctic in timelapse over very long intervals of time and then I can turn and say here's the natural rollercoaster of change that we've been experiencing prior to the weather records. And so what we're seeing today as was dramatically portrayed in what you played earlier. What are we seeing today? Is it the same old same old or are we really starting to see a new story that is tied to our forcing of climate because of human activity.

AMT: Let's just talk a little bit about what it looks like - an Arctic ice shelf - the Elsmere ice shelf for example. What does it look like?

JOHN ENGLAND: Oh, gorgeous. Beautiful. So if you were to fly over it in a satellite you'd be looking down at the mountains of northern Ellesmere Island from that coast going northward into the Arctic Ocean. There is a large sheet of ice if you want and it's attached the land, but floating over deep water and it's the all the sea ice in the northern hemisphere. It's up to 3500-5000 years old. It's like a washboard with these exquisite white bands narrow ribbons of white narrow ribbons of blue. The whiter the ridges low ridges and the bluer little melt water troughs these run for tens of kilometers. These ice shelves when they break off produce ponderous blocks of ice. They used to cover about 10,000 square kilometers at the end of the 1800’s beginning of the 1900’s. They're now absolutely disappearing and we're down to about 300 square kilometers.

AMT: We do have pictures that you sent us up on our website: www.cbc.ca/thecurrent so people can look at them. I was looking at them last night. It's like my moment of Zen. It is so beautiful that white and blue long stripes that you describe it's breathtaking.

JOHN ENGLAND: The exquisite beauty of the North is something that we under appreciate and this is a heritage that we should be safeguarding and cherishing and in an increasingly industrialized world. We have a landscape that offers a place of renewal a place of recharging a place of something like it's fragments of the original Earth that are still left. The disappearance of the ice shelves I think are important because their our Egyptian pyramids. Their our California Redwoods. So if the California redwood trees suddenly started to die off. We’d know about it on the national news. It's just something that we ought to know about as Canadians. And I think that is not the fault of the Canadian public. I think we just haven't had opportunities to share so much of the north its stories and it's science et cetra.

AMT: How difficult is it practically to do research in the Arctic.

JOHN ENGLAND: The difficulty has accelerated enormously over the last 20 or 30 years. Canada has really floundered in its commitment to the North. The commercial aircraft from Edmonton to get me into Resolute Bay where I worked for my entire career out of that base is now six to eight thousand dollars for one airfare. You can go around the world twice for that or go down to Antarctica twice for that you have to get put out from that base by twin otter or a helicopter. And we're talking about Arctic Canada, it’s the size of Europe without roads. So when you start to add up the cost of putting two or three or four people by commercial aircraft let alone buying food into the high Arctic. You're looking at around $100,000 plus.

AMT: To do research for how many months?

JOHN ENGLAND: So about six weeks. I would go up at the end of June and be there to early August. The grants that we're getting from the federal government are in the order of twenty five or thirty five thousand dollars a year. And they don't begin to accommodate the costs. So we're given the responsibility to do the work, but not the resources.

AMT: You get there with an otter. You fly in. How do you get around once you're there?

JOHN ENGLAND: for the first 20 years in my research it would have been walking. I did a lot of walking and there were great advantages to that because I looked at the landscape at about four kilometers an hour. but people have started to use ATVs and think the helicopter is obviously of enormous benefit if you're doing surveys of the terrain or the landscape. You can reach much further than you can on foot.

AMT: When did you make your first trip to the Arctic?

JOHN ENGLAND: 1965, I was like you know an 18-year-old typical Torontonian or anyone in a big city struggling to move into adulthood and overcome all the mysteries of that. And I went to the Arctic with a small group of researchers to eastern Baffin Island to the beautiful fiords there. I was just overwhelmed by the beauty, the silence, the timelessness, the integrity of the whole landscape and being utterly removed from blessed Toronto.

AMT: And you telling me you fell in love?

JOHN ENGLAND: I did. You first fall in love with the land then you fall in love with science and certainly you also fall in love with the people when you get to meet them and interact.

AMT: Well and I want to talk more about the science, but I also want to talk about some of your adventures doing research in the far north. There was one year that you decided your research crew needed a bigger tent. What happened?

JOHN ENGLAND: Well, that was the time just when I finished my Ph.D. I didn't have Canadian support and a good colleague at the University of Massachusetts and I applied to the U.S. National Science Foundation, got a good grant and we had always lived like poppers in the Arctic. So we commonly use what's called this Mount Logan Tent. It's like if you looked at a piece of Kleenex hanging from a piece of string that's sort of what looks like an inside. It's about 8 by 10 at best but the sides slope in and you sit there and two little chairs facing a tin box with a stove on it. There's really no other room than that. So we went to this very famous outdoor store and this big burly fellow said you know oh yeah this is the best wall tent we have. Nothing will destroy this tent. I could hear the captain of the Titanic you know nothing can sink the ship. And I wish he didn't say that. Now we had this huge tent. It was like 12 by 14 and we had a table. Can you imagine we have a table do our mapping at?

AMT: You had a house.

JOHN ENGLAND: Yeah, we had a house and suddenly a storm came up. This is where the story gets gray because we did everything to save this tent. The storm got so bad that top 2 by 4 ridgepole looked like a bow bending ready to snap and the grommets were popping out of the canvas. So we decided this is the end. This is like a three day storm. So we knocked the tent down. We crawled into it and it was complete darkness. It was about 30 inches high and we sat on the floor in the darkness with our legs crossed on the gravel. So we lived in that for a month and we detested it at the start. We loved it by the end it was the one thing that could withstand the storms that we would experience.

AMT: So much for the roomy tent!

JOHN ENGLAND: Yeah. I mean everybody has water stories of work in the Arctic.

AMT: I want to hear another one you stumbled on several historical artifacts when you were sledding around. There was a time you were admiring a view over Greenland and something caught your eye.

JOHN ENGLAND: So what happened is we sledded out to an island and then there was this beautiful 4 metre high karen built by Masons. Beautiful beautiful Karen. You can look from there directly across to green that is spectacular. You see the cliffs like thousand foot high just disappear over the curvature of the earth. So we're enjoying what you might describe is an incredible scene on a beautiful day, calm sunny, pull out our lunch sandwiches. And I noticed something at my heel and I went, “What in the world is this?” So I pull it out and it's a beautiful long cylinder - brass cylinder with a screw on top and I unscrewed the top of it and they're written it was you know the date March the 10^th, 1876 Captain Stevenson HMS Discovery.

AMT: It’s extraordinary and no one had seen it. It's so vast. No one had ever stumbled upon it before. How has the relationship between researchers and the Inuit changed over the years you've been traveling there?

JOHN ENGLAND: Dramatically and wonderfully and yet still a long way to go. I went up in ‘65 and the Inuit at that time were in the shadows in their traditional clothing and dog teams and so on. The two solitudes were enormous and the gap between us by language and culture. And it was almost painful it was certainly palpable to see the transition and to see not only that you know that there's been this great gesture of interaction from the south towards the north it's the north reaching back to the south as well that is bringing so many new perspectives. Also in the way we perform and do science. This interaction now is a remarkable transition. But you know to be fair it's still got a long way to go and we still have to really sharpen or pencils and improve our conduct in our interaction and our interest in each other.

AMT: What did you learn about arctic ice from the Inuit and their traditional knowledge?

JOHN ENGLAND: where I really learned from Inuit was taking a Inuit students in the western Arctic go to on Banks Island and wanting to go with them because they were raised by their grandparents and they were really connected to the land. And I wanted to see how they acted on the land versus how I would perform. And they engaged in my science and contributed to it. And I participated in listening to their stories about being raised on the land and how many changes they had seen. The people of Banks Island would travel out on the sea ice. They would go by sled on July the 1st and have a big community feast there. Now the water is open around the harbor in May. So I learned a lot from their anecdotal and direct experience on the land. But we`d also sit in the tent and tell stories and that's when it really struck me how enormously important it is to see science not just as objective facts and details, but the science in the Arctic is the camp, is the storms, is the stories. The everyday adventures and the human interaction and there's no way you can parse those multiple things apart. That's one and the same.

AMT: What's it like being one of the first scientists witnessing the effects of climate change in the Arctic before climate change was even a term?

JOHN ENGLAND: We were up there probably at the tail end of what it was like when the explorers were there. In the mid-1960’s sea ice diminishment hadn't really progressed. And I was on northern Banks Island in 2008 again with a colleague and we were looking out at the area where McClure had been stuck with the ship “The Investigator” for two years and had reached the point where he was going to abandon the ship because he couldn't get out the summer sea ice didn't break up. And I was standing at exactly the same place where he was rescued and looking out on a vast expanse of the ocean without a fragment of sea ice and the water rolling up languidly on this warm summer day on the beaches nearby which like I could have been in the Bahamas.

AMT: In the early days were you convinced of the severity of the problem of climate change?

JOHN ENGLAND: Wasn't even on our mind in the 1960’s. And I remember sitting in a little tent with Ray Bradley, one of the leading U.S. paleoclimatologists and so Ray and I were definitely interested in climate change back in the mid-1970s. In fact our our first grant was on climate fluctuations of northern most North America. So I think we are at the very leading edge.

AMT: How do you react to the tone of the discussion around climate change these days?

JOHN ENGLAND: Well, it's very acrimonious and south of the border hopelessly lost that seems. I think the evidence is overwhelming vast amounts of ice that sit beneath the ground for 12,000 years remnants of the last glaciation are melting out all over the place and sending sediment into rivers and lakes and turning blue lakes to brown.

AMT: You can see that in the sea ice on it you can easily like it leaves a mark does it?

JOHN ENGLAND: Well, I think it's the satellite imagery that tells you about the changes in the last 40 years that say we can see how rapidly it has diminished by several millions of square kilometers each summer the ice shelves are interesting because driftwood used to come from Russia and collect on the shores of Ellesmere Island until the ice shelves formed. It was like musical chairs. And once the music stopped once or once the ice shelves formed the driftwood no longer got to the coastline. And we can pick up that driftwood and date it and we can see the drift we was there nine thousand, eight thousand, seven thousand got in as late as five thousand five hundred years ago. then it's almost like a guillotine drop. So the ice shelves form and there's no more driftwood coming in. To basically post 2000 and that's the record we can tell it not so much by the marks, but by the record of driftwood.

AMT: How would you create a dialogue that actually moves us forward on climate change?

JOHN ENGLAND: I think more exposure to the evidence so many good stories that the public has paid for and ought to have an opportunity to experience.

AMT: How much do we judge people by their views on climate change now?

JOHN ENGLANDL Oh, I think that's the very unfortunate thing. Each one of us speaks and within three sentences we've categorized them and we close our ears and I think that's what we have to disarm. We have to disarm that sense of opposition that we're really here together. Whether you believe it or not the consequences of global sea level rise are going to displace hundreds of millions of people eventually. If what we see forecasted occurs in the next century, so that is much more serious than what's going on right now as sad as it is and migration from Syria to Europe. So I think we need to say look you know let's sit down and have a dialogue. At least we're going to agree that the consequences are very serious and we have to mitigate this we have to we have to address this. And you know acrimony and rejection and just outright dismissal of another person's view isn't taking us forward.

AMT: You argue for a Canadian polar policy. What would it entail?

JOHN ENGLAND: Canada does not have a polar policy. And in the absence of a polar policy every department - every deputy minister can set their own. The Americans looked at us when they decided to pass an Act in Congress and said yes the Canadians got a great logistical operation which is today falling into really an underfunded state. But it's not enough let's embedded in educational outreach. Let's really bolster the science let's look at the science every five years and reassess where we're going. The Americans in terms of their research are unbridled. It's been enormously successful. In Canada we do everything piecemeal ad hoc. There is no central authority there's no integration of resources there's no cooperation. Several years ago a German icebreaker was coming across the ocean with a bunch of Canadian scientists who were going to go and look at the marine geology in Lancaster Sound, a very important marine ecosystem. The communities were concerned around Lancaster Sound. They brought a court injunction. They stopped the ship in the Atlantic. They had every right to do so because they didn't feel they had been well enough advised. So the German captain, bless him, got on the radio and said who do I talk to? I was coming out of the Arctic at that time and I thought good luck you know? Give the guy a million dollars in cab fares and send him to Ottawa because he doesn't know where to start. We have such a broken front.

AMT: So you're telling me essentially then whatever is going on up there you know as a scientist, but the people who make our policy as all of these changes are happening we're kind of asleep at the wheel as a nation?

JOHN ENGLAND: Yeah. We are asleep at the wheel. You can go back to 1970 and see parliamentary standing committees saying exactly this we need a policy. We've been saying this to the cows come home. The basic point is that we have limited resources. How does disorganization and unpreparedness help us? The right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing. This is long overdue that every major northern nation does have such a policy. The United States of America starts off by saying we are a polar nation. They say that triumphantly. If you look at a map Canada is the polar nation and you know we have to stop this fragmentary. It's like Halloween, I come up to your doorstep with a pillowcase and you throw in some candy because that's how we're doing Arctic Research in Canada right now.

AMT: What are Canadians missing in terms of what we know about our own Arctic territory?

JOHN NGLAND: Just a familiarity with the geography and what's happening there. Let’s present to the Canadian public more and more of the beauty and the interest of the Arctic through everybody from the CBC on through to our education system, Canada like Dracula, risks the fact that it can stand in front of its own mirror and fail to appear. And I think that the north isn't the only thing that we are as a country, but it's a fundamental component of our identity and it's so sad that so much of the excitement so much of the discovery that is celebrated in many northern nations. We need to raise the game here in this country and I would say to the Prime Minister's office establish a polar policy.

AMT: There are so many Canadians who have never had the opportunity or the joy of visiting the north and they might want to experience the Arctic. where should they go what should they think about?

JOHN ENGLAND: Well you can drive up to Inuvik and now with the new road almost it you can probably get certainly by Road in a few years to tuktoyaktuk. You can certainly go through the Yukon up to Dawson and so on. There are beautiful areas that you can reach by road. By train up to Churchill of course, but for the Arctic islands I mean Baffin Island is still quite accessible, Iqaluit, Pond Inlet, Arctic Bay are beautiful areas with national parks. For the high Arctic you know it's very difficult very expensive. That's a gorgeous area. You know Google it and take a look and find where it's beautiful and serene and remarkable. I do feel that engagement is so important. And if you're looking for an opportunity to shed the barnacles of social impact I always feel like when I go to the Arctic every year it's like I'm covered with these barnacles and I'm like a piece of fabric that attracts them. I put them there myself, other people put them there and you go up to the north and it's like this fabulous behavioral bath. They are just swept off the simplicity the timeless silence the emptiness. So I just say to Canadians just find the opportunity find a destination that you feel you can reach. The people are remarkable you know you go up north and you know everyone for the most part is accepted. There's just an enormous freedom and openness and warmth and there's so much to garner from just being in the north both aesthetically and terms of the environment in terms of the people or if you're out on the landscape and you're fortunate enough to be beyond all of civilization then you get to really experience the original Earth and you find really who you are. It's transformative it's absolutely remarkably revitalising and you return to what's important. And I've seen it in the eyes of hundreds of students I’ve taken there. They're just overwhelmed and transformed. And you go south and you go don't let me compromise this. Let me live this. And I think that's important that it's not just an experience you have up there. Hopefully when you come south you walk down the street with it.

AMT: John England, it's really great to listen to you talk about this part of Canada. Thank you for your work and thank you for your time.

JOHN ENGLAND: Anna Maria it's been an honor to speak with you and to the people across this fabulous country.

AMT: a man who clearly loves his job. John England, professor emeritus in Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Alberta. He is the 2016 recipient of the Weston Family Prize for Lifetime Achievement in Northern Research and he joined us from our Edmonton studio. If you want to see what he's talking about you can go to our website: www.cbc.ca/thecurrent you'll see some of his photos of the Arctic it just could be your moment of Zen today, so take a look www.cbc.ca/thecurrent. And we want to hear from you let us know what the Canadian Arctic means to you. Send us your photos if you have some, you can post on our page you can tweet us @thecurrentcbc, send us an email via our website www.cbc.c/thecurrent and click on “contact”. And stay with us because coming up in our next half hour why Chelsea Manning had her sentence commuted. But Barack Obama will not consider clemency for Edward Snowden. A study in contrasts between two high profile leakers. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti, this is The Current.

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Why was Chelsea Manning’s sentence commuted but no pardon for Snowden?

Guests: Mark Hosenball

AMT: Hello You're listening to The Current, I'm Anna Maria Tremonti.

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BARACK OBAMA: She took responsibility for her crime. The sentence that she received was very disproportionate relative to what other leakers had received. It made sense to commute and not pardon her sins.

AMT: Well for more on the very different treatments Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden have received I'm joined by Mark Hosenball. He is a national security correspondent with Reuters in Washington, D.C. hello.

MARK HOSENBALL: Hello. How are you doing?

AMT: I'm well. So what made Chelsea Manning a candidate for clemency?

MARK HOSENBALL: Well, I mean two or three things. Number one she was in fact suffering rather badly in prison. She was emotionally disturbed in the first place which was one of the reasons why from the sounds of thing she leaked this material when she was operating in Iraq which is a difficult kind of environments for anybody. Also in this particular case as I think you mentioned a minute ago or Obama himself said, you know there's an issue of proportion here. This former CIA director and Iraq war commander - Afghan war commander General David Petraeus leaked rather extensive and as I understand it more highly classified material to his mistress, who was writing a book about him. And he was brought up on charges and take it to court, but he managed to do a plea bargain where he got no prison time at all. So there is an issue as I think Obama himself said that the clipping that you played of the proportionality that the former commander leaks highly classified material to his mistress and gets no jail time, although he did get convicted of a misdemeanor not even a felony. Whereas this you know Private Bradley Manning, who leaked a bunch of stuff to Wikileaks which was not of the same high classification as the stuff that Petraeus leaked to his mistress. He gets 30 years, so it did look very good and plus it did seem to be a pretty sad case.

AMT: What kinds of security impacts were there from the leaks from Chelsea Manning?

MARK HOSENBALL: Well again, it depends upon who you listen to. But my own reporting suggested and we did sort of publish stories saying this on Reuters some time ago that the leaks were not terribly devastating. Some people at the State Department or Chelsea Manning leaked something like 250,000 State Department diplomatic cables and some of the State Department people claim that this disrupted U.S. diplomatic relations is exposed to U.S. contacts abroad which I guess it did. But insofar as I heard you know there were no huge diplomatic problems or nobody got into trouble it was certainly alleged also that the terms of Afghanistan where Manning leaked a bunch of military reports. Apparently some names of informants were exposed. Maybe people did get into very bad trouble there, although again there's no proof that anybody was killed or injured as a result of Manning’s disclosures.

AMT: So let's look at Snowden then.

MARK HOSENBALL: Well that is an entirely different case by according to U.S. officials. Snowden leaked some of the most highly classified documents imaginable out of the U.S. government. Snowden was working for the National Security Agency the code breaking and surveillance agency which is the most secretive intelligence agency which operates in partnership with other intelligence agencies from English speaking countries including Canada’s own communications security establishment and what they do is extremely sensitive. There's no question that amongst the materials that Snowden acquired and leaked to journalists were some were highly technical operational materials from both the National Security Agency and GCHQ of England, I don’t remember any stuff from Canada particularly, but I did see a bunch of this stuff.

AMT: So let me ask you though. So the argument is that his revelations had an impact on international efforts to investigate terrorism?

MARK HOSENBALL: Yes that's correct. And the operations of intelligence agencies absolutely.

AMT: Right. And so can you tell us more about how that impact has played out?

MARK HOSENBALL: Well, certainly the government has alleged and I think there is at least some truth to this. That since as a result of Snowden’s revelations terrorist groups and other bad people have learned new ways to communicate with each other in ways that the government can't monitor. So you know the government had these massive nets out to monitor communications and if people don't use the nets or communicate in ways that allow them to get into the nets the government can find out what they're up to. By the same token we now know thanks to Snowden that the government arguably massively the U.S. government arguably massively overreached in its collection of some kinds of information including basic medidata they call it about the telephone calls of basically all Americans. And because of Snowden’s revelations about the collection of data of the telephone calls of all Americans, Obama issued orders saying you can't do that anymore. But they’re not going to thank Snowden for doing that.

AMT: What happens to Snowden now do you think? I know Russia is extended his right to stay?

MARK HOSENBALL: I mean I don't think anybody really knows. I mean like if he comes back to the United States I don’t see how anybody including Donald Trump or any President will not prosecute him.

AMT: Where does Julian Assange fit in all of this?

MARK HOSENBALL: Julian Assange to my mind is sort of a parasite who made himself famous as a result of feeding off Manning’s leaks. Julian Assange curiously enough in so far as I am aware of Edward Snowden has never given anything directly to Julian Assange at all because if he did WikiLeaks would just print the stuff without redacting it as the journalist did to whom Snowden gave his materials. So you know Julian Assange is somebody who promoted himself very aggressively off leaks that other people took all kinds of risks to give to him. And then when he got into trouble for you know for sexually molesting people in Sweden.

AMT: Allegedly.

MARK HOSENBALL: he took off for the Ecuadorian embassy. So I don't have much sympathy with him at all.

AMT: OK, well we have to leave it there, but Mark Hosenball, thanks for your time.

MARK HOSENBALL: OK thank you.

AMT: And that's Mark Hosenball, he is a national security correspondent with Reuters in Washington, D.C.

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Canadians with nut allergies aren’t loving McDonald’s new McFlurry flavour

Guests: Sheila Rusnell-Newton, Laurie Harada, Monica LaBardge

AMT: You're listening to The Current on CBC Radio One and Sirius XM. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti.

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MICHAEL KEATON: I know what you're thinking. How the heck does a 52-year-old over the hill milk shake machine salesman build a fast food empire with 1,600 restaurants and an annual revenue of seven hundred million dollars? One word: persistence.

AMT: A bit of the trailer for “The Founder” the new Michael Keaton movie opening in theaters tomorrow it shows how McDonald's conquered America. But the fast food restaurant is in the news in Canada now for a very different reason. As of this week McDonald's restaurants in Canada no longer guarantee a nut free dining experience for people with allergies. For years McDonald's had packaged nuts separately to guarantee no cross-contamination and that made the “Golden Arches” a refuge for families of children with serious allergies to nuts. Does that mean there will be no more “Happy Meals” for them? Sheila Rusnell-Newton is a mother of a 15-year-old who has a severe peanut and tree nut allergy. In 2004 she wrote The Peanut Allergy Handbook. She joins us from our Calgary studio. Hello.

SHEILA RUSNELL-NEWTON: Hi there.

AMT: Did this take you by surprise?

SHEILA RUSNELL-NEWTON: It did. I was shocked because I always felt that McDonald's was a bit of a pioneer in the whole allergy market and I felt that they knew what a refuge they were for families all across Canada that you know had children with anaphylactic allergies or adults that had anaphylactic allergies for that matter.

AMT: So why was McDonald's an important restaurant for your son and your family?

SHEILA RUSNELL-NEWTON: Well, for us particularly it was that we do a lot of traveling. So whether it's a baseball tournament, basketball tournament we have three boys. Going to Saskatoon to visit family going to B.C. to visit family. We always knew that we could stop along the way and have a safe meal. And now with this change we know we can't go to a mom and pop restaurant. They don't source their ingredients from the same places all the time. They can't guarantee where all their products have come from and that they haven't been in contact with nuts. A company like McDonald's always sources from the same places and it became a place where you could count on. As a 15-year-old, my son can go out with his buddies not have to go and ask for the manager. He doesn't have to go and ask to read the allergy binder. He knows he's safe in that environment and he can save a little bit of face. You know he's 15-years-old he doesn't want to be losing face in front of his friends.

AMT: So you're not you're not advocating for the fast food restaurant experience, except that as a point it is part of the life of a teen.

SHEILA RUSNELL-NEWTON: Exactly. I mean these kids can't afford to go to Boston Pizza or The Keg or somebody who has a really strong allergy policy in place. They go out with their buddies they grab a hamburger or some French fries you know that's the life of a teen and they've kind of taken away a little bit of a safe haven for him.

AMT: People who don't live with a serious and life threatening allergy probably don't realize how this preoccupies you. Give us an give us more of an idea of how life has been?

SHEILA RUSNELL-NEWTON: well, how life has been I mean the biggest thing I notice is how specifically these kids lack a sense of freedom. They have such a real sense of mortality on a day to day basis. He can't walk out the front door without at least one or two Epi pens on his body. You know first of all kids shouldn't have to live under that sense of doom. And second of all unless you know what it feels like to have every meal that you put into your body put you at risk to some degree it's really difficult for him. And you know as a family week go out to different restaurants. We have been turned away numerous times when we've just said OK look our son has anaphylactic allergies. Are you comfortable feeding him? We've had to get up and leave different restaurants because they're not comfortable.

AMT: And it's cross-contamination, but it's also some of it's not like necessarily nuts that you can spot. Right? It's other stuff in the in the oils. What do you have to be wary of?

SHIELA RUSNELL-NEWTON: Well, I mean it's all of that. It's the oils. It's the just a trace an absolute trace. I mean at one point the statistic was one 90-thousandth of a peanut would be enough to cause anaphylactic shock that's a minute trace. And so something as simple as the Skor McFlurry that McDonald's is introducing. You know they take a scoop with the spoon, put it into the McFlurry, stir it up. That spoon is cross-contaminated now they touch the drink that they're handing the person in the drive through. You know what I mean there's just no end to how fast these traces can spread, especially in a very high volume restaurant like McDonald's where everybody has a job there. You know people through the drive through they got to get them through quick. The people in the restaurant they got to get them through quick. It's just there's just no way to control it in that instance. Where when they had the prepackaged items that was packaged offsite there was no chance of cross-contamination behind the counter. Of course, you can't control cross-contamination in the world itself, but you can certainly mitigate the risk.

AMT: All right. When's the last time your son had to use an Epipen?

SHEILA RUSNELL-NEWTON Oh, thankfully not for a while, grade two. And we don't actually know what he came in contact with. The school phoned me and said you know we think something's going on and thankfully I was very close. I went in and you know and we use that Epipen and it's terrible, it's horrible, you sit there watching your kid essentially dying in front of you. It's not pretty.

AMT: And so I'm guessing you're not going to be Donald's anymore?

SHEILA RUSNELL-NEWTON: No. My son went there on the morning of the 16th him and I went for breakfast and he went there with his older brother that evening for dinner.

AMT: That’s the last supper.

SHEILA RUSNELL-NEWTON: That's exactly what he said. This is my last supper at McDonald's and you know in a world where we would have unlimited choice would we frequent? Probably not. He might because at his age that's where his friends go. But where he's already crippled with choice and safe environments that he can go to then that becomes a very real choice for him.

ATW: There was this a little bit of normalcy. All right. Sheila Rusnell-Newton, thank you for speaking with me.

SHIELA RUSNELL-NEWTON: You're very welcome.

AMT: That is Sheila Rusnell-Newton, she has a 15-year-old son who has severe peanut and tree nut allergies. She wrote The Peanut Allergy Handbook. She joined us from our Calgary studio. Laurie Harada is the executive director of Food Allergy Canada, it educates and advocates for Canadians with allergies. She's in our Toronto studio. Hello.

LAURIE HARADA: Good morning.

AMT: Well, we just heard one mother is that view typical of what you're hearing post McDonald's decision here?

LAURIE HARADA: Absolutely and I think what she's very aptly described is this community feels extremely let down and there are people that we've heard from too that did go for the last time because they feel like it's no longer safe because of this allergen policy which is coming across as a big may contain for peanuts, tree nuts and any other allergen for anything in that restaurant. So the families like hers are up in arms because it was one of the few places that they felt they could take their kids.

AMT: And this is because they're introducing a Skor McFlurry. They've got peanuts in that?

LAURIE HARADA: Tree nuts, but what's different and Shelly talked about having packaged peanut product. Which is very different, but it is their business decision. We’re happy to see that they are still willing to talk to us. And what we’d like to do is sit down with the CEO John Betts. This is very similar to a situation that happened many years ago, I don't know if you recall with Nestle's.

AMT: What did they do remind us?

LAURIE HARADA: Well, Nestle's had four chocolate bars on the market. Four candy bars on the market which were safe for kids that had peanut and tree nut allergies because it didn't contain those ingredients. So that was the equivalent of the safe haven for them. They made a decision because they were manufacturing to switch them and it would add a may contain label. So being a customer-friendly company like McDonald's consumers responded to their announcement and there was huge uproar because something was taken away. That's what this community feels. They're not saying don't create products with these things in it. But remember us, it's a big market. And McDonald's actually switched their decision. They had already made that decision and because of the consumer response they went back and what they had was a huge win win for both.

AMT Nestle’s you mean made the decision.

LAURIE HARADA: Yes and my point here is McDonald's has made a decision, but hopefully their senior management are going to respond to this huge public outcry where they've got consumers saying we're not going to dine there anymore and neither our friends or our families. That's a lost opportunity and you know that's a big part of business that people underestimate.

AMT: How many people with allergies are there in Canada who can be affected by this?

LAURIE HARADA It's about two and a half million people that have reported at least one allergy. So you think about that and it sounds like. Well it's two and a half million people, but when you dine out like Shelly's family and you walk out or my family, I have got a son with allergies you know your dining bills for a family of four if you dining out with your whole soccer team. You know that's the bill that's the that's the opportunity for companies like McDonald's.

AMT: that's where the team will go then. They're not going to go to a higher end restaurant?

LAURIE HARADA: No. And that's what we're hearing from consumers and especially now with hockey season and people traveling in teams. They`re looking for a quick place to stop and it's part of the social aspect to is people eat out. We want our kids to eat out we want them to have these options and learn how to dine out safely because it's part of living.

AMT: So McDonald's you know they're a giant in the food industry and they were kind of ahead of the… they were actually a standout in the field on this.

LAURIE HARADA: Yes.

AMT: What kind of impact do you think this will have on other restaurants?

LAURIE HARADA: Well, we're hoping that others will not go this way. In fact, you know this is this is a food safety matter and one of the things we'd like to see is universal training and as part of that is good communications about what it means and if there is a risk of cross-contamination to be very specific about what that means. So that you're not closing doors on every single food or menu item in your restaurant. We are hoping that the other food service operators will see the opportunity of continuing to provide what the general population wants without food allergies and still keeping in mind this two and a half million plus that have food allergies.

AMT: Thank you for coming in. And that is Laurie Harada, she is the executive director of Food Allergy Canada and she joined me in our Toronto studio. Monica LaBarge is an assistant professor of marketing at the Smith School of Business at Queens University. She's in Kingston, Ontario. Hello.

MONICA LABARGE: Hi.

AMT: What do you make of the decision from a marketing point of view?

MONICA LABARGE: Well Anne Maria, I'm not sure I can describe it as anything other than totally perplexing. I mean I think that Sheila and Laurie really talked about the way that this decision impacts a fairly substantial group of customers and it's a real a real concern for these people it impacts. You know Sheila talks pretty poignantly about the effect that it has on her family and the fear that they go through on a daily basis with respect to fears about cross-contamination. It seems like a relatively unimportant decision from McDonald's in terms of expanding its menu items, but it's very important for this group of customers who really has come to believe in McDonald's as a as a safe place for them and to really be loyal and valued customers. So for McDonald's to do this to them I can see why they feel betrayed and frustrated and disappointed.

AMT: Do you think that that the corporation itself understood the pushback they might get or the like the implications of this?

MONICA LABARGE: I can't imagine they did. You know to me it seems like the only reason they could have come up with this and you know I'm just trying to forecast like what would have led to this is that they had some sort of focus group or some sort of research or somebody said, “Well, I'd like to see more nuts and some products.” And they thought well that sounds like a good idea. That's not too hard for us to implement without really thinking through what is that actually going to mean for this pretty substantial group of customers who really needs an environment like this in order to be able to live a normal life and be able to go out and do the things that we take for granted if we don't have these kinds of food allergies.

AMT: So what impact do you think this decision can have on their business?

MONICA LABARGE: I mean I think it's a terrible decision frankly. McDonald's is already under fire on enough fronts. Certainly we you know we all know about fast food nation and they're sort of coming back from that. Jamie Oliver has been pretty vocal about the quality of their meat and we see in the marketplace A&W has positioned itself fairly clearly in opposition do that policy by talking about the quality of their meat. So they're trying to make inroads on that front. This seems to me like the number of products that they could sell at McDonald's that would contain nuts couldn't possibly make up for the number of people who now are not going to be able to go and buy anything at McDonald's. And you know I think Laurie was talking about that the size of a bill for a family of four. Even though only one person might have the food allergy, you'd have to be selling a whole heck of a lot of Skor McFlurry's in order to make up for that.

AMT: So given that negative publicity they're getting. Did they just think that will blow over what do you think?

MONICA LABARGE: You know I think I hope that they decide to change their mind. This wouldn't be something that would be difficult to walk back. They already have their processes in place in terms of prepackaging the nuts. It's you know when you look at their menu it's hard to imagine what are the numbers of the things that they could add nuts to right? They're not going to add nuts to hamburgers and french fries and you know the core of their business. Maybe some of their baked goods maybe some of their dairy products or a salad, but those aren't the core of their business and so it seems really hard to understand why they'd be willing to jeopardize this really large and loyal group of customers just for a couple of product line extensions. It's you know without any further information from them and I do wish they had commented because that can help clarify for a lot of people or a very confused and frustrated as to what their reasoning is. Without you know any more information it's really hard to see what the upside of this is to them. But there's a pretty significant downside to them in terms of losing customers, but also for their customers and you know I think that's important to think about what your customers want and how they do feel betrayed by the company in a really legitimate way.

AMT: Do you think they had a social responsibility to their customers and that they're shirking responsibility?

MONICA LABARDGE: That is my bias. I do think that companies have a social responsibility generally, but certainly to your customers. You know this is a real consumer well-being issue and you know I think again Sheila talked really clearly about the ways that it impacts her family and her son. And it's hard to imagine that anybody would say you know I don't want to mix my own peanuts into my sundae. I want them to be done for me at the counter if you really knew that this is what the impact was going to be on other people. So I think that maybe they didn't appreciate the fact that it was going to be so consequential a decision with respect to a certain group of customers. And you need to ask your current customers do you really care if you have nuts in your muffin or nuts in your McFlurry if it's really putting other people at risk? And I think as Canadians generally and as you know people we would probably say no I can do that myself if it's something I really want.

AMT: Now we know that Wendy's and A&W package their nuts separately as McDonald's was doing before. Do you think this will just send more customers there? How will that play out in the fast food wars?

MONICA LABARGE: I would be gleeful if I were Wendy's and A&W because if you're already doing it there's no extra cost. And if you're not the leader in the market we know McDonald's tends to be the number one brand. They've just handed you an opportunity for you know if Laurie says that the market in Canada is two and a half million people, you've sent that many people somewhere else. Because you know a lot of these fast food restaurants are co-located it's not a big decision in terms of do I get off it. You know exit to or exit 23? In terms of finding another restaurant that's going to suit your needs. So I hope that they do continue. I think that they should and you know McDonald's will decide one way or another at their peril.

AMT: OK. Monica LeBarge, thanks.

MONICA LABARGE: Thanks a lot.

AMT: Monica LaBarge, an assistant professor of marketing at the Smith School of Business at Queens University in Kingston. Let us know what you think about restaurants and their sensitivities to allergies whether you live with an allergy or not. Tweet us @thecurrentcbc, find us on Facebook. E-mail us www.cbc.ca/thecurrent. That is our program for today stay with Radio One for q. East coast singer songwriter Rose Cousins performs from her new record “Natural Conclusion”. And after that discussion on McDonald's we're going to leave you with some comedy this is Jim Gaffigan. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti, thank you for listening to The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

JIM GAFFIGAN: I reference McDonald's a lot because I go to McDonald's. I love the silence that follows that statement. Like I just admitted to support dog fighting or something. How could you? McDonald's! It is fun telling people you go to McDonald’s There will give me that look like oh I didn't know I was better than you! No one admits going to McDonald's, they sell 6 billion hamburgers a day. There's only 300 million people in this country. So I'm not a calculus teacher, but I think everyone's lying. You ever been at McDonald's and you see a friend? For a second you're like oh crap. Eventually you’re like hey hey hey, what’s going on? They’re like I'm just here for the 99 cent ATM. What do you do in here Jim? I’m just meeting a hooker.

[Music: Ending theme]

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Jan, 19, 2017 episode transcript

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