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The Current Transcript for June 4, 2018

Host: Anna Maria Tremonti

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

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VOICE: The dye in my hair dripped down my face onto my chest and clothes and I didn't think of it as something strange. That was one of the things that is probably most terrifying to me.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: She went on a run with hair dye dripping down her face. An episode she will tell you when she had lost her mind. She descended into what she called madness, living an alternate reality, oblivious to stares and concerns. All of it related to treatment in a clinical trial for brain tumors that should have killed her. Barbara Lipska is incredibly lucky she survived. She regained her sanity and now she's using what she learned as only someone with her training can because Barbara Lipska is a neuroscientist. She studies brains, dissects them and what she learned from her own brain has taught her something unexpected. Hear her, in half an hour. Also today, all aboard the Kleptocrat tour.

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VOICE: If I tried to take out a mobile phone right now to take pictures of one of these buildings, a guard - there he is - will run immediately asking me to delete whatever material I've taken of a photograph.

AMT: Roman Borisovich is Russian. A former investment banker, turned anti-corruption crusader who gives tours pointing out the lavish London homes of Russian oligarchs. The arrival of the super-rich from Russia has been a fascination for almost 20 years. Men whose fabulous wealth grew seemingly magically when communism fell. Now the British government is wary of that wealth trying to find its sources, suspicious it's linked to the Kremlin's ambitions, which appears to be why one of the best known Roman Abramovich, owner of the powerful Chelsea soccer team, had sudden visa problems. We're looking at all of that in an hour. But first:

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VOICE: Imposition of tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminium is going to hurt Americans first and foremost. All of those American companies that need Canadian steel and aluminium and will now face higher prices and will therefore be less competitive.

AMT: But not everyone agrees that we have to have NAFTA. We're starting there. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

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Should Canada ditch Mexico and go it alone with U.S. on new trade agreement?

Guests: Diane Francis, Colin Robertson

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VOICE: One of the things that I have to admit I'm having a lot of trouble getting around is the idea that this entire thing is coming about because the president and the administration have decided that Canada, Canadian steel aluminium is a national security threat to the United States.

AMT: The brewing trade dispute between the United States and Canada continued to heat up over the weekend. That was Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in an interview yesterday with NBC's Meet the Press. Thursday, President Donald Trump announced a 25 per cent tariff on imported steel and a 10 percent tariff on imported aluminum from U.S. allies including Canada, Mexico and the European Union. Prime Minister Trudeau had some tough talk about the move.

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AMT: First of all, the idea that our soldiers, who had fought and died together on the beaches of World War II, on the mountains of Afghanistan and have stood shoulder to shoulder in some of the most difficult places in the world, that are always there for each other, this is insulting to them. The idea that the Canadian steel that's in military vehicles in the United States, the Canadian aluminum that makes your fighter jets is somehow now a threat. The idea that we are somehow a national security threat to the United States is quite frankly insulting and unacceptable.

AMT: The Trudeau government has promised retaliatory tariffs of its own on a wide range of American made products including yogurt, sailboats, toffee, even tablecloths and serviettes, unless the U.S. cancels the tariffs. But White House officials say Canada is overreacting. This is what White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow told Fox News on Sunday.

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VOICE: In the communique, in the announcement from the White House, it said very clearly that we still welcome good faith negotiations and that's why I regard this as more of the family quarrel. This is a trade dispute, if you will, it can be solved if people work together.

AMT: Nonetheless, these trade tensions are the backdrop against which Canada will host the annual G7 summit later this week in Quebec. The escalating barbs have also called into question the future of NAFTA and the U.S. and Canada's historically good relationship. Today we're asking where it all stands and where to go from here. Diane Francis is editor-at-large at the National Post, she's with me in our Toronto studio. Hi.

DIANE FRANCIS: Hello. Good morning.

AMT: So how dire would you say this trade dispute between Canada and the US is as it stands right now?

DF: It is and it isn't dire. It's dire because I think the whole construct of a trilateral agreement was flawed and has been flawed for 25 years. It is very clear that it was we entered into it reluctantly after joining with the United States in a two-way deal. Mexico knocked on America's door and said hey we're going bankrupt. Let us in. We want some of that and so we all agreed to sit down and talk about it. At that point, six months after that deal was signed in '94, Mexico went spectacularly bankrupt. We had to bail them out with the Americans to the tune of 65 billion dollars, which they paid back. The point was it was a bootstrapping exercise to help the neighbor to the south get better living standards, higher wages and get their act together because they weren't a democracy and they didn't have the rule of law. Well guess what? They haven't moved the dial at all. The country is in more turmoil. It has less democracy. The wages are actually slightly down in real terms and so now they're carving out and hollowing out even more of the industrial base of the United States and Canada. We're victims. And so I think that it's very important that and I completely agree with the prime minister to push back and say hey come on guys on the steel and the aluminum, but on the other hand you know Mexico is a big big problem. And I've always been in favor of three bilateral agreements, not one trilateral.

AMT: So in other words you think Canada should cut Mexico loose on this?

DF: I think Canada should look after Canada. Look, we have nothing to be sorry about. We have the most harmonious trading relationship, maybe in the world, we're almost level in terms of goods and services. If you count services, we buy a lot more services from the Americans than they buy from us and would they buy more goods from us, but it actually works out to almost equal. So you've got, you know they're looking at horrific trade deficits all over the world and Mexico is one of their problems, as is Germany, as is Japan, as is China. And they're picking them off, one at another. Why would we get in the crossfire? Why didn't we in the negotiations understand that the Americans were, the target was Mexico not Canada and side with them to get Mexico to come around more or to agree to leave and do a different deal.

AMT: In what ways do you see NAFTA actually harming Canadian interests then?

DF: Oh my goodness. I interviewed Buzz Hargrove recently at a trade conference in Cleveland. He actually said where was Trump when we needed him in 1993?

AMT: Of course, he was running the CAW right.

DF: Canadian Auto Workers. Sorry yeah. So he has a vested interest, that's fine. But what he basically said was we've lost 300,000 manufacturing jobs to Mexico and also to the U.S. to a certain extent, but mostly to Mexico. There has not been in the last five years, one dollar invested in the auto sector, parts or assembly plants in Canada because it's all the money is going down to building plants in Mexico. Because they're paying people nothing they're paying people two to three dollars. They're not able to organize down there. It's lawless. I mean it's just I think the Americans are not incorrect. I don't like that they sideswipe us and I think we need a lot more comforting words and I think we should have been exempted from aluminum and steel. But as far as Mexico goes it's a similar problem for Canada.

AMT: So are you talking specifically the auto pact then or like the auto deal of it. What about the rest of the agreement, do you see problems there as well? Does it always come down to Mexican labor and their costs?

DF: Mexican labor is the number one issue for Canada, it should be for Canada as well as the United States and the job losses that that's resulted in. Agriculture is always thorny. They have protectionism, we have protections. We're going to maybe have to give up our dairy system and they have to give something an alternative. But in a bilateral way it's fine. I think bilaterally we have so few irritants between each other, but you introduce the Mexican issue and a claim to a trilateral agreement with one partner that's clearly got a huge advantage and is really not bootstrapped itself in a generation and probably won't. Let me put it to you this way, Europe did the same thing. Germany and the Northern European countries did the same thing in bringing Italy, Greece, Spain, Portugal in. Their labor rates though have come up to nearly there and they are now developed countries with the rule of law and so on. Yes they're still problematic, but you can have an asymmetrical trade system, which is what NAFTA was, but the other guy's got to come up to snuff or else you have got a real problem. And now nearly 25 years later, there's a problem. And you know by the way, when you say to an American, NAFTA, they think Mexico, they don't even think about Canada being a problem. Canada is not a problem, we have a special relationship. So the name calling and back and forth, is politics on both sides. I think it's fine. And I think that it'll work itself out, but I really think that we need to reorient ourselves and get in the same space to a certain extent as the Americans are Mexico.

AMT: What would you say to those who say that Canada is also very interested in more Latin American trade and this will send the wrong message.

DF: It doesn't send the wrong message. NAFTA, so you do a bilateral with Mexico. You do a bilateral with the United States, just like we had before and then you do a bilateral with Mexico. We have I think something like it with Chile. We can go anywhere we want. We have we have more trade agreements than anybody else in the world and yet who do we trade mostly with, the United States because it's easy and it's compatible. We don't have to worry about the rule of law there, we use their courts all the time. Canadians you know we intermarry and so on. I mean you know the socioeconomic merger has really gone an advanced way and it's not going to end up in one country. Maybe someday, who knows that. But the point is that we have this huge advantage and I just think we've got to remember that.

AMT: What do you say to the idea that if Canada and Mexico have to stick together, otherwise we play into President Trump's hands.

DF: Yeah. OK that's great. So the two of us represent 7 percent of the combined GDP. That's the elephant and mouse again. And now we're aligned with another mouse who's toxic and it actually is kind of toxic to us. I like Mexicans. Believe me, we can do a bilateral, but you know this is this is crazy. You look at the dozens and dozens of factories that are down in Mexico and exploiting people that are being paid very little money at our expense.

AMT: So if Canada were to do that, how do you see that affecting Canadian trade, Canadian jobs. How do you see that changing the landscape back in Canada, if we were to do that?

DF: Very little. I mean if you carve out the fact, say just look at everything other than autos, where we have completely surrendered all of our future growth to the Mexican economy and much of the United States too, has done the same. If you take that out, we're pretty harmonious. I mean we sell.

AMT: But will we have more growth? If we do that, if Canada cuts out Mexico, will it solve some of Canada's own problems with labor?

DF: Trade deals don't solve problems. I mean we have to get our act together. Look this is nothing compared to the problem in Alberta and that pipeline. This is nothing. This as an economic issue is nothing. You know if NAFTA is reneged altogether, we will do some kind of bilateral deal with the United States because of the huge trade you know combination and the amount of business, of course we do. But that's the one to watch and that's the one we have to worry about.

AMT: OK. Diane Francis, thanks for coming in.

DF: Thank you.

AMT: Diane Francis is editor-at-large at the National Post. She's with me in our Toronto studio. My next guest has a different view on this trade dispute and what Canada should do about it. Colin Robertson is a former Canadian diplomat. He was part of the team that negotiated the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement and later, NAFTA. He is now vice president and fellow at Canadian Global Affairs Institute and we've reached him in Ottawa. Hello Colin Robertson.

COLIN ROBERTSON: Good to be with you.

AMT: So what do you think, should we cut out Mexico. Cut Mexico loose?

CR: No, it would be a strategic blunder that would put us at a disadvantage with both the United States and any effort we wanted to have to expand trading ties with especially within the Americas, which we're trying to do now. And I think other countries would look at us and think Canada how reliable are you.

AMT: But you're saying that we need to stay in so that we can get deals with other Latin American countries?

CR: I'm saying we need to stay in with Mexico and the United States to try and renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement and our best ally in doing so is Mexico. We've now completed 10 of the 33 chapters that we hoped to negotiate. We've got the tough ones ahead and having Mexico with us when we deal with what some Americans have called the "poison pills," particularly as it relates to government procurement, which we'd like to get access to and especially to dispute settlement, which is absolutely vital to Canada and Mexico. We don't trust the U.S. court system, that's why we got into the original Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement, indeed walked out and indeed had to stop the clock at the last moment to persuade the Americans to give us some form of recourse from their court system because we thought it did not work for us and we were engaged as we are still today in disputes on for example steel and softwood lumber.

AMT: But help me understand, our last guest makes the point that Mexico is not the player that Canada is, why wouldn't Canada get further just working with the United States?

CR: Well I think we have so many similar interests. We both have roughly the same trade, Canada about 75 per cent of our exports to the U.S., Mexico almost 80 per cent. We both have significant American investments as we also each have a significant investment in the United States. And when we work together on disputes, which have come up. It's just natural that such a big relationship, take for example recently with the country of origin labeling, this was a dispute about the Americans keeping out Canadian beef and Mexican beef. We went through the NAFTA, we went through the World Trade Organization and together we came up with a retaliatory list and we basically targeted the same things, it's similar to what Canada is going to do with the Europeans now on steel and aluminum. And we were able to persuade Congress, the senate agriculture committee to back down because they realized it was going to have a tough effect on the American economy. And those interests in the U.S. that were being targeted by Canada and Mexico said you know this makes no sense. So working together is a far better approach. To play into Mr. Trump's hands, you know "The Art of the Deal" was all about divide and conquer and it would make no sense for us to separate from Mexico when together we have a much better chance of getting a good agreement.

AMT: What do you say though to those who point to the fact that Mexico's wages are nothing close to Canadian wages and that creates a big problem that Mexico's own financial problems that Mexico's only own development as a country, is not the same as Canada and the U.S.

CR: Well I'd say that NAFTA has been a great success for Canada, for the United States and for Mexico. As was pointed out, part of the effort to bring Mexico into the NAFTA was to bring it from a fairly desperate stage. They'd had 70 years of one party, it really was a bit of an autocracy. But since then, they've had a true fair elections, they're in the midst of another election right now, which is likely to see a change in government. Again, democratically done. There's now a middle class in Mexico of some 40 million, that's bigger than Canada. For Canada, Mexico when we went into the North American Free Trade Agreement, it was about number 13 or 14 in the list of our trading partners. It's been the hidden success story in NAFTA for Canada. It's now our third largest trading partner. We've got big investments in mining and banking and manufacturing. Two million Canadians go down. After the United States, it's our most popular tourist destination. It's also going to be the entree for us into the rest of the Americas. We're negotiating right now at another high level agreement of which Mexico is a key member in that specific alliance with Chile, Colombia and Peru. We're also trying to get into another bloc called Mercosur, which has Brazil, Argentina, Peru and Uruguay. And to treat Mexico badly, we'd have no hope of getting into these other agreements. This is a time, particularly with Donald Trump, when constructive middle powers like Canada and Mexico, we have to stick together if we're going to keep the international rules-based system of which we have so much invested together, to keep it intact. We are going to have to be working together constructively to sustain that.

AMT: Is Mexico part of Mercosur as well?

CR: No, it's not, but I think there'd be a certain temptation on the part of Latinos if we were to throw Mexico under the bus, then they would think how reliable is this further gringo to the north? You know recently.

AMT: But they don't, they haven't brought Mexico into the bus.

CR: No, it's a lower level of trade agreement. In fact, Mexico and Peru and Chile would would like to see eventually they enter the Pacific Alliance. You know there's various types of trade agreements around the world, this is one of the highest level trade agreements, the Pacific Alliance. So we're now an associate member, but we're trying to get preferred status, even more than we have today.

AMT: Now all of this is happening as the G7 leaders prepare to meet at Quebec's Charlevoix region, beginning Friday. What kind of response are you going to be watching for?

CR: Well I think that the finance ministers and central bankers have already given us some sense that trade will be on the agenda. They communicated, that Mr. Munro said that they all were in agreement, that it really is six plus one. That is the six and actually include the European Union that, versus the United States when it comes to protectionism. So this will certainly be a topic for lively discussion. Much of the rest of it has already been accomplished, whether we're talking gender or talking on oceans. This in a sense precooked because this is the end of a quite a long process, but the whole point of Charlevoix and the G7, is for the leaders to get together. They're just by themselves or with one and have the frank discussions that are necessary.

AMT: And so where do you see this going? We've seen that the tariffs now put on Canada. How does this, how does Canada get a deal?

CR: How does it play out? Well I suspect these tariffs stay on for now, but that to me it just underlines the importance. What is important in all of this, is that the Americans are still at the table in the North American free trade negotiations. And I think that will now move at a slower tempo because Congress has set for the president's certain legislative milestones and for it to be considered this year, those have essentially passed, so I think we'll move to a more reasonable tempo. Trade agreements normally take two three years to do. The original candidate U.S. was about three years, four years. NAFTA took us about three years.

AMT: So do you expect these tariffs to stay on for two or three years till there's a deal or do you think that something will happen to get them rid?

CR: Well I think it is possible. I think the effort that the Prime Minister is making and other leaders, remember this is an all of Canada effort in the U.S. now and other countries doing the same thing to persuade the Americans that this is not in their interest, I think that there will be some diversion of our purchasing. But I think the Americans will wait and see in a couple of months, to see what the effect is on the Canadian aluminum steel industry. We are the biggest suppliers to the United States, the Americans have limited capacity. I think we may see a situation like what we see on lumber. Is they'll continue to buy our lumber, they'll just pay a higher price to it, pass on to the consumers. Let's wait and see what the effect is on steel and aluminum. For our part, cause we put these tariffs on, we'll probably be buying more from Europe and Asia and other places.

AMT: OK. Colin Robertson, thanks for your insights.

CR: Thank you Anna Maria.

AMT: Colin Robertson, former Canadian diplomat, part of the team that negotiated the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement and NAFTA. He's now vice president and a fellow at the Canadian Global Affairs Institute. He spoke to us from Ottawa. Let us know what you think. You can tweet us @TheCurrentCBC. Find us on Facebook. Go to our website cbc.ca/thecurrent. NAFTA or a separate trade agreement, bilaterals with each, let us know your opinions. And stay with us, the news is next. For her entire career, Barbara Lipska had studied what made people lose their minds and then it happened to her. She joins me with her remarkable story, right after the news. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

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How brain cancer gave a neuroscientist insight into mental illness

Guests: Barbara Lipska

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

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AMT: Still to come, from Buckingham Palace to St. Paul's Cathedral, London, England is home to some impressive real estate and more and more of it it seems is being bought up by super wealthy expats from Russia. In fact, some have taken to calling the British capital, Londongrad. The impact Russian wealth has had on Britain in half an hour, but first a mind, lost and found.

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VOICE: I'm running and running and running. For hours I've been running. I want to get home, but I have no idea where that is, even though I've lived in this neighborhood for 20 years. So I keep running. I've jogged this route hundreds of times over the past two decades. I should recognize each maple tree and camellia bush on each street corner and every gash in a curb where teenaged driver took a corner too fast. They should be landmarks as familiar to me as anything in my life. But today it's as if I've never seen them before.

AMT: That is Barbara K. Lipska recalling what she describes as her descent into madness. It was the day in 2015, when her world suddenly and horrifyingly fell to pieces. And while it's the kind of experience that would be terrifying for anyone, Barbara Lipska was in a sense well equipped for what was happening to her. She is a neuroscientist and her life before that day was defined by her demanding fulfilling career at the U.S. National Institute for Mental Health. Despite two bouts with cancer in preceding years, she was in peak physical health as a seasoned triathlete. Her personal life was rich and full. She had emigrated to the U.S. from Poland in 1989 and built a prosperous fulfilling life with a beloved husband and two accomplished grown children. But then one day at work she noticed something was wrong with her sight. It was the beginning of a break with reality that would last two months. Barbara Lipska has written about it in a new book called, "The Neuroscientist Who Lost Her Mind: My Tale of Madness and Recovery." And she joins me from Washington D.C. Hello.

BARBARA LIPSKA: Hello.

AMT: What did you notice that day at work?

BL: I came to work after a workout. After a swim. I sat in my office at my desk, put my hands on the keyboard and I started working, but strangely, frighteningly my hand disappeared. My right hand when I put it in the lower right quadrant of my visual field disappeared, as if caught off at the wrist.

AMT: And how did you respond?

BL: I tried to bring it back, so I was repeating this movement to the left to the right. And when I moved it to the left, I could see it and when I moved it to the right, I couldn't. My first thought was a brain tumor. But I tried to dispel this thought from my brain and it was effective for a minute maybe less than a minute. I put my head on my desk and I was terrified. And then I tried to come up with some other explanations and I, an antibiotic side effect, I was taking an antibiotic at the time. I spent several hours in the conference room with people who just visited from a different institution and I try to not think about it, but it was too hard because I couldn't see part of their faces or part of the screen.

AMT: So you knew. You were kind of in denial. You knew something. What was the diagnosis?

BL: Yes. So the next day, I had a brain scans and it was found that I had 3 brain tumors. One was bleeding and the bleeding one was in the left visual cortex. This was the reason why I couldn't see my right hand. So what followed was surgery, brain surgery. They removed that tumor. I also got radiation, but we all knew it is a death sentence to have melanoma, to have melanoma tumors in the brain. At that time meant that I'll die in a matter of months.

AMT: Let's back up because the melanoma showed up in your brain. When were your two other cancer diagnoses?

BL: I had breast cancer in 2009 and melanoma on the skin of my neck in 2011 and this incident with the disappearing hand happened in 2015. So three years, almost four years later.

AMT: And this was melanoma metastasized to the brain. Your first husband in Poland died after your divorce from that exact cancer, melanoma metastasized to the brain. How did you process that coincidence?

BL: I was scared of melanoma as long as I can remember. My grandma also died of melanoma in 1972 and then he died in 1985. So I was at the dermatologist office all the time and that dermatologist didn't notice my melanoma behind the ear. I was terrified. I knew I will die. I had no doubt about it. It was just a matter of few months.

AMT: So after surgery and radiation failed to stop this, you get treatment options, they tell you have very little time, but you gain entry into clinical immunotherapy trial. Tell me a little bit more about what that was.

BL: It was I believed, it was the only possibility that something can be done because it was obvious that neither radiation would cure melanoma in the brain nor anything else. Immunotherapy was very new at the time and it was not applied to people who had tumors in the brain, active tumors in the brain and I did have them. So I was one of the first patients in this clinical trial and the facts of immunotherapy were scary.

AMT: Can you explain, first of all, how immunotherapy works?

BL: So immunotherapy drugs are given by infusion. These are monoclonal antibodies that rev up patients own immune system. In other words they are meant to tell immune system that it should fight melanoma cells, proliferating cells, which are alien to the body. So it should indirectly kill melanoma cells.

AMT: So this is the clinical trial you're going to take part in and we'll get to the side effects in a minute, but you have to have another MRI. You make what turns out to be a critical decision concerning the findings. What does the MRI just before these trials start tell you?

BL: Yeah, so clinical trial was meant not, this clinical trial was meant not for patients with active melanoma tumors in the brain. Active meaning they were not radiated and right before my enrollment in the trial, I was sent to get the last scan of my brain and what was found were three tiny tumors. It's hard to say if these are tumors or something else on the brain scan, but it was very likely that these were tumors and they were not radiated. So I was devastated. I thought I don't qualify for the trial, which means I will die because there is nothing else left.

AMT: That had to be frightening. You of all people understood.

BL: Yes. And I had to make a decision. Do I go ahead, despite the fact that I have tumors in the brain and we don't know what will happen, whether immunotherapy will hurt me, I may die or it'll help me. But the choice was between trying something new or dying. So I chose to try something new, even though I was completely aware that I may die during this try.

AMT: So you begin immunotherapy and at some point your mind starts to turn on you. What happens to you?

BL: So I never thought about this, that during this immunotherapy trial, I considered dying, but I never thought that I lose my mind and this is what started happening. Somewhere in the middle of the trial, so maybe a month and a half into the trial, I started behaving very strangely. First my family and everybody around me thought that I'm very stressed out and it was not that strange that I was stressed out. Everybody was stressed out in my family. I was very irritated all the time. Then I started to be really angry. I was lashing out at everybody around me, my loving husband, my loving son and daughter and what was the most curious, at my beloved grandsons, whom I never, never yelled at. But even stranger things started happening.

AMT: There were other episodes that you describe, episodes of madness, which ones standout out for you looking back?

BL: The most hurtful I think, was that I lost emotion and empathy. I didn't see that my husband had tears in his eyes when he looked at me and talked to me and I didn't connect with him. I was absent. I looked past him. I was not his loving wife. I changed, dramatically. And I also lost memory. I was getting lost in the neighborhood, when I ran on familiar streets in our neighborhood. I didn't remember things that happened several minutes before.

AMT: You, in the reading just before we began our conversation, you are talking about that episode, that run through your neighborhood. Tell me more about how that unfolded, you weren't simply running and running, you were, what did you look like, what did you look like that day?

BL: That morning before the run, I decided to color my hair, which was strange. I would have never done it in normal situation. So I put a hair dye into my hair and I put also a plastic cap on top of it and I started running for hours. It was hot, the dye and my hair dried out, but before dry out, it dripped down my face, down my neck, onto my chest and clothes. I looked like a monster really, with this blackish hair dye running down my body. And I didn't think of it as something strange or inappropriate. I just kept running.

AMT: You were just unaware, it sounds.

BL: Yeah I even saw it. When I came back home and I looked in the mirror, I remember seeing the image of myself with these black stuff covering me, but I didn't think it was strange or weird. I lost insight. That was one of the things that is probably most terrifying to me, that I had no awareness how I behaved, what I was doing and that was abnormal in many many aspects.

AMT: So you weren't aware, but were you aware or do you only realize this in in after the fact. Like when you were actually going through this, what did it feel like?

BL: It felt completely normal. It's hard to explain. But I remember the facts. I remember my image in the mirror. I remember running, but I don't remember that I was either worried or that I felt that I was acting differently than before. Actually what I thought was that everybody else around me changed. I didn't know, I didn't understand why my husband is making a big deal out of it. He's looking at me and saying, did you run like this? And I was responding, yeah of course, why not. I had no awareness.

AMT: That's about the different realities.

BL: Yeah.

AMT: You had episodes of paranoia as well, during this period.

BL: That's right. So one day afternoon, we got the visit from the pest control service guy. I opened the door and I didn't recognize him. So that was one thing. And then I started quizzing him why he's coming. And I was absolutely convinced that he comes to poison us with his bug sprays. I mean we paid for this service for many, many years and it was the usual thing that was happening, but I didn't recognize it at all. I thought he came specifically to kill us. I fired him. My husband rescued him, but I didn't know about it at all. So he did it when I was not there. Another very strange incident happened when we ordered pizza and I was convinced that it was stuffed with plastic. So again, that someone wanted to poison us.

AMT: And you were still getting behind the wheel of a car during this period to too?

BL: That's right. That's another. Yeah. This was worrisome, but not at the time when it was happening. I crashed my car. I dented my car. I couldn't get out of the parking, I couldn't navigate a narrow driveway in the parking garage where I parked my car for years. I got lost driving. I was weaving in and out of the lane. I have to say, I was lucky not to be killed or kill someone else.

AMT: And again like you talk about this now, but at the time, you were oblivious.

BL: Completely.

AMT: To all of these at very least, strange behaviors, dangerous behaviors. What part of your brain was malfunctioning?

BL: After the fact, when I got a brain scan and new tumors were found in my brain and dramatic swelling and inflammation, frontal cortex and parietal cortex, so basically one third of my cortex behind my forehead, down to or up to the top of my head was very swollen and dysfunctional. It's hard to say which of these behaviors are due to which parts of the brain not working, but frontal cortex is the most evolved part of the human brain, of the human cortex and is responsible is a thoughtful of these higher cognitive functions, like emotion, empathy. It also is involved in working memory and insight and inhibition. I had no inhibition. I thought nothing of not being properly dressed in a rather conservative neighborhood where I was running.

AMT: And you were still working at the time. How did you function at work?

BL: I don't know to tell you the truth, that's very worrisome. But as I could run, as I could drive, somehow I can pull all this focus and energy into going there and doing something. I was at work every day during my immunotherapy. I couldn't drive afterwards. So when my condition was diagnosed by the doctor that I had brain swelling, I was sitting at home and teleconferencing, but I was still working.

AMT: How did you return to sanity?

BL: It was a slow process. It was as if through my broken brain, the lights started getting in. It took a while. I would say probably two months and when I realized what I was doing during the time, I remember the facts. I didn't remember the emotions associated with these facts. I have to say, I don't remember them still. They were explained to me and reminded to me by my family, but it was terrifying to realize how I was hurting my family and everybody around me.

AMT: And how much your brain was doing something you couldn't control.

BL: Yes. And how it can happen in such a short time and it can happen basically to anyone.

AMT: What you went through gets to the heart of what it means to be ourselves. How fragile are our personalities to mental illness?

BL: Yes, very fragile. And I've been studying mental illness throughout my professional life. And I should have known it. I knew it, at the level of you know theoretical level. I also saw patients, but something else to actually live through this and realize that a brain tumor or mental illness, which is of course not caused by brain tumors, but by physical changes in the brain that we don't still understand fully, how it can change the brain.

AMT: How has this changed how you view mental illness?

BL: I compare it to reading about the foreign country and living in it and understanding it. You can read as much as you want and you will never understand it fully. I do now. I know how terrifying it is to the patients, but also and probably mainly to the family and the loved ones. To observe a person depart with the mind, but physical body being still there, it's frightening.

AMT: What does your family tell you about that time now?

BL: They are still in a trauma. They don't want to talk about very much. Everybody's terrified that it will return and it might return. I'm not cured. I'm in remission. There's no cure for melanoma. I hope it will last, but we don't know.

AMT: That's frightening on so many levels. I would imagine.

BL: Yes, but I live my life to the fullest, as I always did. I draw satisfaction from every day lived and work. I work full time and I feel that even more urgency to come up with some findings and be able to cure mental illness.

AMT: You have called what you've gone through, a gift. Why?

BL: There is no better way to understand something than to visit it and live through it. And I would have never had this opportunity, if I didn't experience what I did. I'm grateful that I survived. I could have died. But I came out on the other side with a gift of knowing how it feels. So one of my messages is to demystify mental illness, to let people know that is an illness like any other illness, like heart disease. It's just, it's in the organ that is way more complicated than the heart. That's why we don't understand the mechanism of it yet and to destigmatize it, to remove this taboo that mental illness is something not to talk about and not to share with others. That's why I wrote the book because I wanted to share this knowledge.

AMT: Are you the same person you were before this happened?

BL: Probably not. My mind came back, but of course I changed. I aged. So I am a different person, but I aged and I went through this horrific illness. I think I am richer in many aspects. I understand more. I am more tolerant. I am more empathic, which I consider great gifts.

AMT: And you're more alive than you expected to be at this point.

BL: That's right.

AMT: That in itself is extraordinary, that you got a death sentence and that you wrote a book about it.

BL: I call it a miracle. A scientific miracle.

AMT: Barbara Lipska, thank you for sharing your story and it's good that you were here to tell me about it.

BL: Thank you so much for having me.

AMT: Barbara K. Lipska is the author of, "The Neuroscientist Who Lost Her Mind: My Tale of Madness and Recovery." She joined us from Washington D.C. Let us know what you think of her story. You can tweet us @TheCurrentCBC. Find us on Facebook. Go to our website cbc.ca/thecurrent. And stay with us. Coming up, London has always been a cosmopolitan city, welcoming people and their money from around the world, but as Russian rubles or actually converted rubles, pour into the city, there are mounting concerns over where the money comes from and its influence on the UK. We are exploring what they call Londongrad in our next half hour. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

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U.K. cracks down on Russian oligarchs bringing wealth into country

Guests: Mark Hollingsworth, Roman Borisovich, Tom Keatinge

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

SOUNDCLIP

Song by Russian rapper Timati.

AMT: Well that is the the Russian rapper Timati with a song about living large as a wealthy Russian in London. The British capital has become a magnet for Russian expatriates in recent years, especially the extremely well-heeled. And while in the song, the rapper boasts "that we are reckless and wild, we are kings of the night," things may be becoming a little less free and easy for Russian billionaires in the UK. A report from a British Commons committee has recommended sweeping measures to restrict the influence of Russian money in the UK. The report is called, Moscow's Gold: Russian Corruption in the UK and it concludes that, "The use of London as a base for the corrupt assets of Kremlin-connected individuals is now clearly linked to a wider Russian strategy and has implications for our national security." National security meaning UK's national security. For more on how so much Russian wealth has made its way to London and how its influenced the city, I'm joined by Mark Hollingsworth. He is the co-author of "Londongrad: From Russia With Cash." He's in London. Hi Mark Hollingsworth.

MARK HOLLINGSWORTH: Hi. Good morning. Hello.

AMT: So we know the British government has been reviewing 700 visas granted to wealthy Russians right now. That's a result of this committee, is it?

MH: As a result of what, I'm sorry.

AMT: Of this committee report.

MH: Not necessarily. I think, I'm pretty sure the policy was introduced before the committee report. What the government seems to be doing is as a sort of alternative form of punishment or alternative to the sanction policy against Russian oligarchs, is to not expire on their visas to work in the United Kingdom and to let the visas expire almost naturally. And so they've been looking at a whole range of measures to make Russian oligarchs accountable and put pressure on them as a way of either punishing Putin or just saying that look we're going to make sure that you're accountable for your operation.

AMT: So just remind us who the Russian oligarchs are. How did they get their money.

MH: Well most of the Russian oligarchs made their money in the 1990s, when President Yeltsin was in power and the Russian state needed to sell off a lot of the state-owned industries in oil, energy, aluminium, commodities and so what happened was a very small number of Russian businessmen manipulated and corrupted, in some cases President Yeltsin in the 1990s, to persuade the Russian state to sell off these very valuable assets at a very cheap rate. And so they acquired a very valuable state-owned companies in oil and energy mainly and aluminium for perhaps 10 per cent of their real value. So that's how they became very rich, very quickly, by basically manipulating the government at that time.

AMT: How many of them now have assets in Britain, do we know?

MH: I would, well virtually every Russian oligarch certainly has a very expensive luxury property in London and they have assets here, bank accounts, investments, but they don't necessarily live here. They park their money in London and that's what the whole purpose of the exercise is they're not necessarily living in London, but they're moving they're holding their money and parking their money in London on the basis that it's relatively secure, until recently. And also it's safe from prosecution because the judges in the United Kingdom will not extradite oligarchs from the UK back to Russia because there's no rule of law in Russia and the judges here argue that because there's no rule of law in Russia, they will not get a fair trial, even if they're criminals. It doesn't matter how bad the oligarchs are, they're safe in London because they want the extradited back to Russia.

AMT: So how has the presence of these oligarchs been felt in the business and cultural life of London?

MH: Well for the first few years, when they moved here from 2003 onwards, people were just a bit scared and nervous and concerned about them in terms of who they were, where the money came from. But then after former Russian intelligence agent, Alexander Litvinenko was murdered in 2006 and then we had a whole series of incidents of Russian businessmen being murdered and poisoned in the UK, people got very frightened and very scared about their presence. And that's just a security issue and then secondly, the issue of dirty Russian money coming into London and the UK, where it affects relatively ordinary British people in the property markets because they bought a lot of property in London. The very high price, the high rate, which has distorted the property market and increased prices for the rest of us living in London.

AMT: And that's so pronounced that it's become an issue then.

MH: It has because it sort of hit people in terms of their basic livelihood because what has been happening is that the oligarchs will buy property in London for huge, very high prices. They don't really care how much they cost and that's made the property market very expensive and that's trickled down in terms of prices generally. Basically, the top end prices have gone up, hugely in the last 15 years and that's in London. So in terms of trickling down, it's just increased prices for everyone. So that's where because the Russians buy property in London, they don't do it for financial reasons, yhey don't care how much they're paying, they do it because it's basically to hide their money, hide their assets and secure them. And they never, they don't buy a house and then try and sell it. They just leave the money in the property, as a sort of security and as an insurance in case they get into trouble, which they inevitably always will.

AMT: You mentioned the poisoning of Litvinenko with radioactive polonium and then of course in March, we saw the former Russian agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia, poisoned with nerve agents. How has that played into this discussion?

MH: Well it's played into the discussion in terms of how to retaliate against Putin and in terms of how to bring him to account because obviously they're not going to be able to prove or prosecute the agents who did this poisoning. I think that's just not realistic. And so they're looking at other measures to hit back against the Kremlin and the Russian state. One of the ways of doing it is to clean up all the dirty Russian oligarch money that's been coming into London in the UK. But the problem with that is that if the oligarchs move out of London and they go back to Russia they're not necessarily going to go to Putin and say we're being punished for your sins. They're just not going to do that because Putin won't just ignore them. So the irony of acting against the oligarchs in London, as a revenge or consequence of the poisoning is that it actually helps Putin because it makes the oligarchs more dependent on Putin if they move their money back to Russia, you see what I mean?

AMT: Yeah. And one of these things is playing out right now with Roman Abramovich, the owner of Chelsea FC. He suddenly had visa issues and now he's pulled his visa application. I was just reading.

MH: It looks like it, yes and he's moved to the Israel and it appears that he is moving out of the UK and the development of the Chelsea football stadium in London, Stamford Bridge has been canceled. And the speculation here is that he will probably sell Chelsea Football Club and basically get out of the UK. Get out of London and move to Israel and register his assets in different jurisdictions and basically pull out. So people claim that this is going to have a damaging effect on London. But I'm not sure that it will, it will damage Chelsea, but that's about it really.

AMT: Will it damage Putin?

MH: I don't think so. I mean that's the irony of this is that you know he acted against the oligarchs when he first came to power. And he resented the fact that the oligarchs moved their money out of Russia into the UK and other offshore locations. Now if they're moving their money back into Russia, if they have to move back to Russia, then I think that's going to help him. I think that's it's not going to hurt Putin, it gives him more power over them, particularly as many of the oligarchs and their assets and commercial interests depend on the state, they have to go back to Russia then. I can't see how Putin is going to be damaged by that. I think it plays into his hands actually, that's the irony of all this. On the other hand, the oligarchs have got away with a lot over the years, but I think it's significant that Abramovich move to Israel because in Israel if you're Jewish and you're Israeli citizen or resident, then they will never extradite you from Israel. You're protected there as well. Israel and London are the two places where a lot of Russian oligarchs like to hide as it were.

AMT: OK. Well Mark Hollingsworth, thanks for some perspective on this.

MH: OK. Thank You.

AMT: Mark Hollingsworth, journalist and co-author of, "Londongrad: From Russia With Cash." He joined us from London. My next guest says the British government is long overdue for a crackdown on the people he calls, Russian Kleptocrats. Roman Borisovich is a former investment banker turned anti-corruption campaigner. He's the founder of ClampK, which stands for the Committee for Legislation Against Money Laundering and Properties by Kleptocrats. And we've reached Roman Borisovich in Luxembourg City, Luxembourg. Hello.

ROMAN BORISOVICH: Good morning.

AMT: I want to play a clip before we begin. You have a project called Kleptocracy Tours, bus tours around London highlighting the homes of some of its wealthiest residents. This a little bit of sound from your tour in 2016.

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Sound from Kleptocracy Tour in 2016.

AMT: Well OK, Roman Borisovich, what are you showing people when you take them on those tours?

RB: We show them properties primarily owned by global kleptocrats, Nigerians and Russians, the Kazakhi and Indonesians that are linked to or allegedly linked to embezzlements that happened in the countries of their origin.

AMT: And let's look at the Russians in particular. First of all, how many Russian oligarchs basically have homes there.

RB: Well I think Mark was pretty accurate saying all of them.

AMT: And how many are we talking about?

RB: All of them have some sort of property in London.

AMT: Yeah and so are we talking 20 people, are we talking 50 people?

RB: The original oligarchs, going back to the country, the origin of the concept, there were seven of them. Now rich people, Russian tycoons in London, I think you're measuring that in hundreds.

AMT: OK and why do you consider their presence a national security concern?

RB: Well because they're ultimately an extension of Kremlin's power into the world of business and finance. These people, the common theme to all of them, is that they made their money in dealings with the Russian government. They're not self-made businessmen, in the American-style sense of this word. They're not Sergey Brins or Mark Zuckerbergs. They have either bought something for pennies from the Russian government that was worth billions later on or sold something for billions to the Russian government, like Abramovich did, selling his oil company Sibneft for 14 billion dollars. But either way, the money came from the Russian government and in the process of creating their wealth, they have crossed the line, in the way that it would have been criminal, unethical, unprofessional in the Western sense of the word, if it happened in any other country other than Russia. But the reason they're getting away, again because they dealt with the government and the government covers up for them. So by default they become they own the regime and they become the instruments of its influence.

AMT: Tell me a little bit more about owing the regime. Somewhere around the year 2000 between 2000-2004, there were there was a bit of a power struggle with them and Vladimir Putin, was there not?

RB: Yes, but since then the power struggle has resulted in a complete victory for Vladimir Putin. The last remaining oligarchs who were in opposition to him Berezovsky, Gusinsky were ousted out of the country, soon bankrupted or never heard of after that. So since then, he has only a loyal or oligarchs from the 90s, from the Yeltsin era, but on top of them there's a whole constellation of his own oligarchs. His close friends from St. Petersburg, they came to power and become immensely rich by abusing the state, the Russian government.

AMT: So the concern is that they do what Mr. Putin wants them to do?

RB: Of course, not only they do everything he wants them to do and do his chores and give him presents and gifts and yachts and palaces, but they would actually fund ultra-right think tanks and anti-EU political parties. They will fund meddling in democracies around the globe for him. That's the problem.

AMT: And in January now, the British government adopted something called "unexplained wealth orders" as a measure against money laundering and corruption. Can you explain the connection to that and what you're talking about.

RB: Absolutely unexplained wealth orders is a part of criminal finances bill that we've been campaigning for and advising the government on for the last two years. Finally, we see it in action. Unexplained wealth order system gives UK law enforcement ability to shift the onus on the owners of the suspected criminally obtained property. In a way that an order, a UK judge will issue an order, requiring that the owner, the ultimate beneficial owner to explain the origin of the money and the creation of wealth then will be judged in a UK courtroom, according to UK laws. So that is where the burden of proof is turned on to the beneficial owner to say how was the money obtained.

AMT: I guess that part of the confusion though is they have taken the money they got through the privatisation, like the very quickly rapid wealth that they had and then they've invested it into legitimate businesses like football clubs and properties, right? Like they continue to grow their money with legitimate businesses.

RB: Exactly, but the beauty of unexplained wealth order is that as opposed to other criminal clauses, they don't have the statute of limitations because they are not being judged. The sentence is not being passed on the for the crimes committed 15 years ago, but if the origin of money is deemed to be illegal, the judge can arrest the assets.

AMT: So how much do you think things will change in London with these efforts?

RB: Hugely. Well obviously there is a hope in that, but we know already that the National Crime Agency is investigating 130 cases of which they unwillingly admit majority of Russians or former Soviet Union citizens and in all of these cases they will use unexplained wealth orders.

AMT: OK, well Roman Borisovich, we have to leave it there, but thank you for your perspective on all of this.

RB: Thanks for having me.

AMT: That's Roman Borisovich, former investment banker turned anti-corruption campaigner. He's in Luxembourg City, Luxembourg. Tom Keatinge has been listening in. He's a former investment banker who directs the Centre for Financial Crime and Security Studies at the Royal United Services Institute. That's a think tank on international defense. He's got another perspective again on this issue. Hello.

TOM KEATINGE: Hi. Good morning.

AMT: So what are you thinking as you listen to this. Are they a threat?

TK: Well I gave evidence to the Foreign Affairs Committee, the report that you referred to. Are they a threat to UK national security? Well certainly, the government thinks so, given the statements they make. Do they approach them as a threat to national security in terms of the resources they spend on trying to identify this wealth in London, I'm not so sure.

AMT: Well I have a clip here. This is Dr. Mark Galeotti, who's an expert on Russian security and organized crime, who has concerns about the oligarchs in Britain. Listen to what he has posted on YouTube:

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VOICE: The logic of Putin's approach having creating this kind of mobilization regime for his geopolitical struggle against the West, in which essentially any institution, any individual, can be pressed into service as an instrument of state power. Whether we're talking about a businessperson here or a journalist there or indeed a gangster in the middle, which not that means is that while not every Russian course, indeed a fraction of them is involved in some kind of hostile active measure by the Kremlin. Almost any of them could become one, could be used as or when the circumstances seem to require. Because let's be honest when the Kremlin expects you to do something, it's a very, very brave and or foolhardy individual who says no.

AMT: What do you think Tom Keatinge?

TK: Well, it's certainly the case that the people that we're talking about, enjoy the wealth at the pleasure of President Putin. There's no doubt about that. I think the bigger issue here is that this whole saga has highlighted the fact that the UK has welcomed money from all over the world for decades. You know, most recently the last 20-25 years from Russia, but the UK has made a point of being what successive governments have called, "light touch regulation." David Cameron said that the UK benefits from overregulation elsewhere in the world. So it's been a policy of the UK to accept money from around the world for a great many years.

AMT: And in fact our last guest said that his "kleptocracy tour" includes the homes of people from countries other than Russia. Transparency International says it has found 4.4 billion pounds worth of UK property, that's about 7.6 billion Canadian dollars that is owned with suspicious wealth, one fifth of it by Russian individuals. So who are the others?

TK: Well Transparency International make a good point and I look forward to Roman inviting me on his tour one day, but there's a great amount of opacity around who owns properties in the UK. You can own a property in the UK through an opaque offshore company, nobody knows who owns that that property. So from anywhere around the world, if you have funds that you're trying to keep beyond the reach of your home government, the UK is a great place to invest it. It's a stable asset market, you can own it through an opaque country. What's not to like about that package?

AMT: Do you think some of the reason a lot of this is in discussion now is because of what happened to the Skripals?

TK: There's been a drumbeat in the UK over the last two or three years, really since the Anti-Corruption Summit of David Cameron 2016, that the country has to clean up its act. The UK is known as the money laundering capital of the world, I always say if you are a money launderer and you go to the money laundering superstore, you always head for the aisle marked UK. We've got all the tools you could need here, offshore territories, great lawyers, English law, you know everything you need to launder your funds. So there's been a drumbeat over the last two or three years about cleaning up the UK. We've had new laws. Roman mentioned the Criminal Finances Act and unexplained wealth orders and what happened in March in Salisbury, my hometown, in a way brought to the fore, brought into the open, the fact that we've got to do something about dirty money in the UK. It's not purely aimed at Russians, it's aimed at all those who own illegal property and other illicit assets in the UK.

AMT: And do you see that as more than of a financial issue, like do you connect the dots to security?

TK: I think it's a policy issue of the UK. You can argue that you know there are security, as a security angle to it, but fundamentally it's a policy issue for the UK and let's not forget the UK has a very big policy issue to deal with these days, which is Brexit. How are we going to trade with countries around the world that we haven't historically traded with, who perhaps are the source of this kind of illicit wealth? So I think the UK has got a real tussle on its hands here, to decide do we continue to be a country that welcomes money from around the world or do we actually try and be a beacon as some would say for for clean money, but that might mean that some of these trade deals we want to do around the world become more difficult. Because on the one hand we're negotiating with a country like Azerbaijan to do trade and on the other hand we're trying to address illicit Azeri money, for example, in the UK.

AMT: And so how do you see all of this affecting London? Its wealth and how its been bought up by this wealth.

TK: I mean that's an interesting question, I mean the UK has benefited immensely from being a magnet for financial investment from around the world over the last 20-25 years. So I spent 20 odd years as an investment banker and the trading floor I worked on contained every possible language you could imagine. Those people have been attracted to London not because it's a place to launder dirty funds, they're all totally upstanding people, I'm absolutely sure. So London has benefited from becoming a global magnet. I personally think that driving dirty money out of London is less of a threat to the future of London than something like Brexit, which might drive talented smart people out of the city.

AMT: And you saw the visa issue with Mr. Abramovich. He's pulled his visa application. He's apparently moving to Israel. The very oligarchs that people are pointing to can merely just shift, can they not?

TK: Yes so the issue of investor visas is another of those issues where the UK perhaps chose to turn a blind eye. The system was tightened up in 2014-2015. These visas last for three years, so 2018 we can imagine a lot of people who perhaps got visas in the easy days will find that they're being asked tough questions over the next year or two. So yes you know, people can move elsewhere, they can move their money elsewhere. I don't think that's a problem for the UK.

AMT: OK. Tom Keatinge, thanks for your thoughts.

TK: Thank you.

AMT: Tom Keatinge, director of the Centre for Financial Crime and Security Studies at the think tank, the Royal United Services Institute. He's also in London. That's our program for today. Stay with Radio One for Q. Remember you can always take The Current with you to go on the CBC Radio app, free from the App Store or Google Play. We're going to leave you with a bit of that Russian rapper, Timati's ode to the wealthy Russian life in London earlier. Here he is with, "London." I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. Thanks for listening to The Current.

[Song: "London" by Timati]

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June 4, 2018 episode transcript

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