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The Current Transcript for April 25, 2019

Host: Anna Maria Tremonti

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

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SOUNDCLIP

When I hear people today saying it's gentrification, one reaction, an ironic reaction, is if only. It's much deeper than that.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: If you are frustrated by a lack of affordable housing in your city you probably won't find any comfort in learning that people in other major cities worldwide are facing the same sort of thing. But as you heard in that clip people tracking the problem say it isn't about gentrification. It is more complex. They point to major investors and investment companies that trade whole blocks of housing on global markets and distort communities. A Swedish filmmaker has followed the U.N. special rapporteur on adequate housing, Leilani Farha, who just happens to be a Canadian, as she documents this trend. In half an hour we will hear from the two of them also today: And then there were six. Conservative premiers now dominate the political landscape. Some of them at the helm of parties that have been remade, reshaped and reborn and Preston Manning sees promise in all of that.

SOUNDCLIP

That's quite a powerful political force. I think they'll some of it to oppose some of the things about the federal government doing, but my hope is it is some positive and constructive things they can unite to do as well

AMT: Preston Manning has been called the godfather of modern conservatism in Canada, a man whose own father was a popular populist premier. We wanted to know how he sees the resurgence of these parties today. Hear our conversation in an hour. But before we get to any of that, did you know that we Canadians produce more waste per capita than any other nation on the planet?

SOUNDCLIP

[Tractor noise]

AMT: And we don't just trash. We transport it. All of which brings us to the Philippines. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

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'Canada is in the wrong': Environmentalists urge the country to clear out its trash from the Philippines

Guests: Kathleen Ruff, Myra Hird

AMT: The president of the Philippines Rodrigo Duterte is well known for his extreme tactics send extreme rhetoric. He has overseen a bloody war on drugs. He's faced complaints for his actions at the International Criminal Court. His response was to pull this country out of the International Criminal Court, altogether. This week he made news by sounding off over some trash, Canadian trash, that's been languishing in a Manila Port.

SOUNDCLIP

I want people prepared. I'll give a warning to Canada maybe next week that better pull this thing out, or I will set sail, loading the containers to a ship. I will advise Canada that your garbage is on the way. Prepare a grand reception. Eat it if you want to and celebrate because your garbage is coming home.

AMT: Eat it if you want to. Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte may have been serving up his usual bombast there, but the message at the core is one his citizens have called for as well. It's been almost six years since more than 100 shipping containers filled with garbage arrived from Canada. The labels said it was plastic for recycling but customs inspectors found household trash, electronic waste, even soiled diapers. The people of the Philippines have been asking Canada for years to take the garbage back. Canadian environmentalists have taken on the cause too. Kathleen Ruff is the founder of one of those groups; RightOnCanada is a public advocacy campaign focusing on human rights and the environment. Kathleen Rahaf is in Smithers, B.C. Hello.

KATHLEEN RUFF: Hello.

AMT: What was your reaction to those comments from the Philippine president?

KATHLEEN RUFF: Well the fact of the matter is that, on this particular issue, Canada is in the wrong. What he's saying is correct that Canada, under international law, is legally obliged to take back the waste that were illegally dumped in the Philippines. And this is what environmental groups in the Philippines and the port authorities in the Philippines have been requesting the Canadian government for five years; to obey the law, to act responsibly and take back our way. But today as you know Canada has not done anything.

AMT: So the Canadian government basically shipped that stuff back here.

KATHLEEN RUFF: That is what the law requires. Canada has signed the Basel Convention which constitutes international binding law. And the Basel Convention states that the government of a country has the obligation of bringing back waste to make sure that they are brought back to the country from which they were shipped, when the waste were illegally shipped. There's no question about it that the shipment of these waste was illegal. It violated Philippine law. It violated international law. And what is really troubling is that for five years Canada has refused to do the right thing, to fulfill its legal responsibilities which are very clearly stated in the Basel Convention.

AMT: So let me ask you, the basil convention is that about the transport of hazardous waste or all waste?

KATHLEEN RUFF: It's the transport of illegal waste, waste that are illegal. Illegal wastes are defined in the convention as wastes there are fraudulently or incorrectly represented, as these wastes were, and also ways that are illegal in the country to which you want to ship them. They are illegal under the Basel Convention, and in the Philippines the law forbids importing household garbage trash waste.

AMT: Let me just tell you we asked the Environment Minister Catherine McKenna for an interview. She's not available. We got a statement from her office and I'm going to read it in part it says quote: "In 2016 we amended our regulations to ensure this would not happen in the future. Further changes to reinforce legal authority are on the list of proposed amendments to the Canadian Environmental Protection Act. We are working closely with the Philippines to resolve this issue in an environmentally responsible way". End quote. What do you make of that, Kathleen Ruff?

KATHLEEN RUFF: Well I think that's really dodging the issue because for five years the Canadian government has been saying it's working to resolve the issue in a responsible way but it has not done so. We are setting a terrible example to the rest of the world because the purpose of the Basel Convention is to stop western consumer countries - which creates so much of the waste - to stop them using developing countries as dump for our garbage. Canada will be attending the conference next week at the U.N.

AMT: And this is a conference by the Basel Convention?

KATHLEEN RUFF: Yes the conference [unintelligible] is 187 countries who ratified Basel Convention we'll be meeting in Geneva next week. It happens every two years. And so what we are hoping for is that the Canadian government finally will do the right thing and bring back the ways and set an example and send a message of environmental leadership. If we violate the convention, as we are doing, and this is what we communicated to the government, and when the government refused to do anything we got a legal opinion which confirms that Canada's conduct is illegal under international law and that we must bring back the waste if we want to obey the law.

AMT: Let me ask you, the Basel Convention does have some amendments on the table, will they affect this?

KATHLEEN RUFF: Yes some very important amendments on the table next week. One is to amend the convention for make it ban the export of waste, illegal waste, to developing countries. Right now you can export if you get prior informed consent. But that system is being abused because of waste are being mislabelled. And also it encourages countries like Canada just to carry on exporting waste overseas. So the ban needs only two more countries to become law. And Canada is opposing it.

AMT: Okay so let me ask you again. So is it a company that shipped over there? And where does the Canadian governments responsible bill [unintelligible], are they supposed to actually agree that it can be exported? So if a company says they've got recycling material they can send it out, but if it's not it's the Canadian government that's responsible for regulating that and stopping them?

KATHLEEN RUFF: Yes. The Canadian government is supposed to have effective regulations to control the export of waste to make sure that they are legal and they're not violating the Basel Convention or the law of the country to which we're exporting them. So Canada has that responsibility and it has the responsibility to bring the waste back, to make sure they're brought back, either by the company or by the government itself.

AMT: So what does it tell you that that has been sitting there as long? You believe there is a wider consensus that Canada's giving to developing countries.

KATHLEEN RUFF: It is, as the Philippine environmental groups have said, this is not only a legal question, it's a moral question. What we're doing is not only sending a message to the world that we do not intend to comply with our legal obligations under the Basel Convention, but also were acting in an extremely ugly way to developing countries and we're not showing respect. A Philippine court orders that the waste be returned to Canada. In 2016 that order came down. Canada just rejected that order and took no action. The only thing that is hopeful right now is that as of yesterday the government seems to be changing its position and talking about bringing back the waste, which would be a wonderful thing because right before the meeting in Geneva this would mean that finally Canada was doing what Prime Minister Trudeau promised we would do, and that is show environmental leadership to the world.

AMT: Okay Kathleen Ruff, we have to leave it there. Thank you for your time today.

KATHLEEN RUFF: You're very welcome.

AMT: Kathleen Ruff founder of RightOnCanada. She is in Smithers, B.C. We did ask for comment from the Philippines ambassador to Canada. We didn't hear back. Myra Hird has been listening to our discussion. She is a professor of environmental studies at Queens University where she runs a research program called Waste Flow. Today she's in southwestern France where she's currently doing research. Hello.

MYRA HIRD: Hi.

AMT: So, should companies be allowed to sell recycling material overseas for processing?

MYRA HIRD: Well I mean should they, I mean they certainly do. And let's say that most of the time the containers are properly labelled etc and these agreements are made and it's a very big profit. The recycling industry as part of the waste management industry globally is huge multibillion dollar business. So this is how it works.

AMT: And now the issue with the Philippines hinges on the difference between what is recyclable material and basic waste. The Canadian seller I guess characterized it as recyclable. Philippine officials say it's household garbage. In that kind of dispute who gets to decide what it is?

MYRA HIRD: Well that's a complicated question. I mean in this specific case it was a very very very clear violation. But in other cases it's the negotiation between the exporter and the importer. And you know sometimes municipal solid waste can be more hazardous than some forms of mining waste. These categorizations of what's hazardous and what is not hazardous can be become quite complicated depending on what we're talking about. Electronic equipment is an obvious example.

AMT: How big a business is it? Are we selling recyclable material?

MYRA HIRD: Oh yes absolutely absolutely. I mean we're selling them and we're also, as this example clearly illustrates, we're offloading it as well. Let's bear in mind that these shipping containers that carried 2500 some tonnes of our waste from British Columbia, that represents less than a day's production of municipal solid waste in Metro Vancouver alone. I mean this gives you a little bit of a glimpse into how big our waste problem is in Canada.

AMT: How effective is recycling in reducing waste?

MYRA HIRD: Well that's a great question Anna Maria. It's a very complicated question to answer simply. Recycling is what everyone seems to think is a really great idea. In practice it's much more complicated. For instance, in Canada, to take something from what we put out in our waste and then to landfill it - which is what we do in Canada - often requires far less energy than transporting things that we put in recycling to various reprocessing centres that may be in Canada or maybe abroad. So if we're interested in our carbon footprint, for instance, recycling requires far more energy than does landfilling in many instances. It depends also on what it is that we want to recycle. Things that we put in those various bins - that were very diligently trying to sort - don't necessary, just because we put it in the bin, in that in that recycling bin, doesn't mean that it's actually going to be recycled. It completely depends on whether there is a market for it. If the market dips for plastics or whatever, it's not going to be recycled. It's going to be diverted back into the waste stream.

AMT: And when we talk about waste, because Canada we make more waste than any other nation per capita, I was reading.

MYRA HIRD: Yes yes that's right. Municipal solid waste. And let's remember that municipal solid waste and liquid waste in Canada accounts for a maximum of three percent of the waste that were actually producing. Most of the waste by far, 97 or more percent, of the waste that is produced in Canada is produced by industry and mostly the mining industry.

AMT: And where does that waste go?

MYRA HIRD: Oh, well.

AMT: That's a long answer, right.

MYRA HIRD: Well you know most of that waste is - it depends where it's created - but most of our waste stays where it is. So we've got 237 tonnes of arsenic trioxide that has been left at the giant mine. You know we've got mining sites all across Canada, several thousands of which have been abandoned, and by and large the waste stays there in and on the land.

AMT: So let's go back to household waste. When I drop a Styrofoam container in my recycle bin, where does it go?

MYRA HIRD: Well it depends where you live. So I can give you the example of Kingston, Ontario, here I work. So in Kingston, Ontario, where it goes is it gets put on trucks and it gets taken to the Kingston area recycling center where they wait till there's enough volume. Then it is put on to trucks, and using non-renewable fossil fuels, it heads up to North Bay where it is then liquefied so it is made smaller. It's compressed until there's enough volume to put it on to another track that uses non-renewable fossil fuels, which then drives to Montreal where the container is then put on ships. And about 60 percent of it goes to South Korea. 40 percent of it goes to the United States where it's then refashioned using non-renewable fossil fuels and chemical processes into products that are then shipped back to us like picture frames where we're going to use them for a little while and then we're going to put them in the waste. So we're talking about polystyrene we're really talking about a huge amount of energy loss and the production of chemicals which then have to be of course put in a separate hazardous waste stream, that waste that's created from recycling has to be dealt with specifically as hazardous waste. So recycling is not very good for the environment.

AMT: So what are you telling me that sometimes if they just turfed it - I guess you don't want us to turf so many things - but if they do, it actually would save energy just to go right to landfill?

MYRA HIRD: Yes. So the take home message here is that, in that reduce-reuse recycling that my children learn in school, all those songs that they learn and the t-shirts that we are supposed to buy, what we've really forgotten about is the reuse and the reducing. The only thing that keeps allowing us to buy in the frenzied way that Canadians consume is to recycle. The big take on this is that we need to reduce and we need to reuse. We need to restore furbish what we can, not recycle. Recycling is sort of the last thing that in some cases, depending on what material we're talking about, can be environmentally much worse than disposing in landfill.

AMT: Montreal announced yesterday that intends to ban all single use plastic and Styrofoam food packaging, will that make a difference?

MYRA HIRD: Well yeah I mean the more that we make industry responsible for its own packaging, and extended producer responsibility, the better. Right now individual Canadians and households are given very much given the burden of reducing refurbishing and recycling, mainly recycling. The more we make industry responsible and the more the government forces industry to be responsible the better.

AMT: People take so much pride in recycling efforts. Municipalities set ambitious goals to do waste from landfill through recycling. Why is so much emphasis put on that if that's not - as you say - where the majority of waste has been dealt with?

MYRA HIRD: Well I mean I think you're quite right. I think that in some ways people's sense of environmental consciousness is expressed through practices of recycling. People want to be good environmental citizens. They're worried about our planet and they want to do something, and recycling is something that people can do every day and feel good and feel responsible. It's something that municipalities very much encourage because they get financially rewarded for recycling. They don't get rewarded financially for reducing or refurbishment. So municipalities are a bit locked because they get financially rewarded the more they divert and by what they mean diverting from the waste stream, they mean recycling. So it's good for government. It's super good for industry because industry can continue to produce things for which they are not taking responsibility for the waste that comes with, and people feel individually responsible.

AMT: So before I let you go I guess those containers should be brought back to Canada.

MYRA HIRD: Yes I completely agree with Kathleen's comments and I would go further. I would say that at this point the Canadian government should be financially compensating the Philippines' government, who have spent well over 2 million dollars now in storing our waste for us. So not only should we bring it back but I think that we should be compensated in the Philippines.

AMT: So interesting. Myra Hird, thanks for your time today.

MYRA HIRD: Thank you very much.

AMT: That is Myra Hird, she's professor of environmental studies at Queen's University where she runs a research program called Waste Flow. What do you think of what you heard both from her and Kathleen Ruff? Tweet us @TheCurrentCBC. Find us on Facebook, go to our Web sitecbc.ca/thecurrent. And stay with us. The news is next and then what is really behind the global spike in housing prices over the last decade and the affordability crisis that followed. We're going to be talking about that as a documentary filmmaker follows a rapporteur on housing.

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'Like a landlord on speed': Documentary shows how trading homes on the stock market can increase your rent

Guests: Leilani Farha, Fredrik Gertten

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

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AMT: Still to come from Alberta to PEI there seems to be a blue wave of conservative provincial governments sweeping the country. What does the godfather of Canadian conservatism make of the trend and what does Preston Manning think it will mean for the election year ahead. I'll ask him when he joins me in half an hour. But first asking why so many homes are sold over asking.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: The first sign that you're going to have to leave your neighborhood is when vintage clothing shops show up. Then housing values are going to go up and then they're all going to get the push.

VOICE 2: In the Greater Toronto Area the last 30 years, housing prices increased by 425 percent.

VOICE 3: Then we start asking who's going to live in cities? Who are cities for?

VOICE 4: If they want to raise rent up to like 900 dollars each. If it goes to 3400 then I have to make at least 100,000 a year.

VOICE 5: I've seen the whole area change. They're still buying up properties because it's the [unintelligible] investment for them.

VOICE 6: When I hear people today saying it's gentrification one reaction, an ironic reaction is, if only. It's much deeper than that.

VOICE 7: Owning the house is only a means to making money.

AMT: Well a few comments and thoughts about the affordable housing crisis here in Canada and around the world. Those are voices gathered in a new documentary that follows Leilani Farha as she travels the globe trying to answer that simple but very complex question of how housing has become so expensive. Leilani Farha is a Canadian. She's also the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Adequate Housing. She argues that the source of the crisis is much bigger than simple neighborhood gentrification. The documentary Push has its Canadian premiere this week at the Hot Docs festival and Leilani Farha joins us from Copenhagen together with the film's director Fredrik Gertten. Hello to you both.

LEILANI FARHA: Hi there.

FREDRIK GERTTEN: Hello.

AMT: Leilani Farha, I want to start with you as you travel the world talking to people about housing and the costs of housing, what common things, what common threads were you hearing?

LEILANI FARHA: Yes pretty much everywhere I go, Anna Maria, I'm hearing the same story whether it's in the north or the South. And that story is the unaffordability housing and people simply not being able to afford to live in the cities where they're working and where family members are and know where they've been for some time, and really feeling the pressure and in really in fact being pushed out of cities.

AMT: You talk about something called the financialization of housing and I have a clip here of someone in the film who offers some perspective. This is sociologist Saskia Sassen. Listen to her.

SOUNDCLIP

The house, you can buy sell, buy sell. The asset built on that house you can sell it in less that a second. You can sell it 35 times in an hour if you are dealing with high frequency trading.

AMT: 35 times in an hour. Fredrik Gertten what's going on there?

FREDRIK GERTTEN: Well the people with lot of money they try to find new places to park their money so it can grow, and now they've found out that an asset called housing people's home are most rentable assets on the market. When the crash happened there was a lot of foreclosures and then they were looking for where can we buy stuff really sheep that we can then make some money out of. The housing was that. So that was like private houses in the U.S. or in Spain or in Ireland and in other countries of course. And now we can see the same kind of money is looking for poor people's homes in many countries. The poorer, the more undervaluated, the bedroom. And this is this is in my own country, Sweden, I didn't know that this existed. But these companies are also moving in and the idea is to almost like replace the people in those houses with new people, sort of moving, pushing a lot of people out. And they have different methods of doing that very often through some kind of aggression.

AMT: Well tell me a little bit more about what you see in your own city, Fredrik.

FREDRIK GERTTEN: We see all over the world that our salaries are not growing but the cost of living is getting more and more expensive. That goes for Canada. That goes for almost all over the world. So there is this income inequality thing that is really it's a part of this of course. And in my own country we see this hedge funds moving in and they move in would a lot of energy. They have more money than a normal landlord. So it's kind of almost like a landlord on speed. It also means that the landlord is someone who lives very far away from you. So you can't knock on his door and talk to him about your problems because your landlord is now a hedge fund placed somewhere totally different part of the world maybe.

LEILANI FARHA: It's actually a business model that the private equity firms in multibillion dollar asset management firms are using. And the model is, as Fredrik, said they survey landscapes all around the world looking for what they call undervalued properties. When they find them they buy them up with their illiquid capital, backed by banks, and their model is to then refurbish the units and increase the rents forcing people out because these are originally affordable units. People were living there happily, living there, paying their rent maybe struggling but managing to pay their rent. They're affordable units. And they upgrade them with a few fixtures and renovations, new windows, new draperies. They jack up their rent sometimes by 50 percent sometimes by 100 percent. And then that forces people out because they can no longer afford it and in comes their next class of people with more and money.

AMT: And so this is where you make the line between gentrification and financialization. You make the point this is that this is housing being treated as a global commodity the same way your trade gold.

LEILANI FARHA: Exactly exactly. It's the unprecedented amount of wealth that moves this out of gentrification. There's nothing organic about it. Gentrification is not always bad. It can be upgrading in a community, you know, putting in a community park, but this is on a totally different scale. They're buying thousands of units at a time. May 2018 Blackstone goes into Berlin, buys you know 2000 units. Bam. Like that. Same in Copenhagen just recently. You know this isn't gentrification. This is absolutely about creating financial products out of residential real estate.

AMT: So you've actually added things up. How much housing is being traded this way globally? What's the figure?

LEILANI FARHA: Well they say that residential real estate is valued at 163 trillion U.S. dollars. And let's be frank. None of us knows what that is. No one knows what a trillion dollars is, let alone a hundred sixty three trillion dollars. It is a massive amount. It is more than double, almost three times, the entire world's GDP. So this is not just big business. This is the biggest business of all.

AMT: You mentioned Blackstone. Where do they fit into all of this?

LEILANI FARHA: So Blackstone is the private equity firm. They are in fact the largest real estate private equity firm in the world. They are really leading in terms of the business model that I already described and they are looking around the world for these devalued properties and moving right in. I mean it seems to me that everywhere I turn I do see Blackstone there. There are other private equity firms and asset management firms, big ones as well. There are real estate investment trusts which are huge particularly in Canada. So there are a lot of players here but Blackstone certainly is leading the way.

AMT: You tried to talk to Blackstone, what happened?

LEILANI FARHA: Yes so when I realized that Blackstone was a big player in that in fact we should be in conversation because here I am the world's leading expert supposedly on the right to housing and there they are. One of the biggest landlords in the world. Surely we have some common interests. So I reached out to them. Originally they did agree to meet with me at their New York headquarters and I traveled to New York and once I got there I learned that they canceled the meeting. So apparently some clash of schedules. So I tried to reschedule the meeting several times but was unsuccessful.

AMT: I have a clip of a man offering a tour of a neighborhood in London that is affected by the very thing you're talking about. Let's listen to him.

SOUNDCLIP

So our fourth stop on the highlight tour of London kleptocracy properties, these two properties are worth perhaps 20 million pounds each. I believe Mr. Chatterer paid something in the range of 40 or 50 million pounds for it. If you could get a whole one of these it would be 30 or 40 million pounds. And nobody lives here and nothing is happening to this thing. So it's become a dead spot, in London. There was newsagents. There were pubs. There were a couple of restaurants. But the community itself has evaporated.

AMT: Leilani Farha, he's standing in the middle of the street there's no traffic in central London.

LEILANI FARHA: Yes that's right. And that is the effect of this in some communities. I think that Vancouver witnessed some of this, this vacant homes situation. I love, in Push, the film, the graphic that comes up where it's a landscape of London and all these red dots representing foreign ownership and that's shocking enough. And then up comes this fact: 80 percent of those foreign owned properties stand vacant. I mean, really. You know if you're looking as an urban planner, as someone who's invested in a city as an urban dweller, is this what we want our cities to look like? I don't think so.

AMT: And so you make the point that it's not about capitalism. It's about capitalism run amuck. And your connecting the dots between the big investing to the fact that there aren't homes to the fact that there are homes that no one can get to.

LEILANI FARHA: Yes that's great. And I do want to tear down capitalism. I want capitalism to be responsive to human need to human dignity to human rights, and that's what I'm asking governments, different levels of government, is that we make sure - and that they make sure because that's their obligation and their role - that capitalism doesn't run amuck. And the way that they can do that is to use human rights principles to guide how they govern, what laws they pass, what tax benefits they do or don't give, what regulatory systems they put in place.

AMT: How is this playing out in Canada?

LEILANI FARHA: Oh it's really interesting what's happening in Canada. I mean in my own backyard I was shocked to learn about the Heron Gate situation. I was reading the paper one day I saw a 100 households were being evicted know hard work in this neighborhood called Heron Gate. And I saw that it was a lamb or a name but named Timber Creek. So I thought you know where the special rapporteur on the right to housing. I should probably look this up and see what's going on in my own backyard. And I googled Timber Creek and lo and behold they are a multibillion dollar multi-national asset management firm that owns this entire community called Heron Gate. They deemed those homes are unfit for habitation and decided to evict everyone. So that's one small example. Vancouver and Toronto are the are the big hubs, but even cities like Hamilton, you know what we call second cities, are feeling this affordability issue. And Canada has some of the biggest real estate investment trusts in the world where a building or several buildings are owned and put on the stock market, and so everyday people can invest in this housing without even knowing it. And the people living in these places don’t know that their landlord is technically a shareholder and that their unit is on the Toronto Stock Exchange you know.

AMT: You mention investors and shareholders but you also point out that some of the investors in these private factory equity firms and specifically and in some of these big land deals around the world are actually government pension plans.

LEILANI FARHA: You know, as I say in the film, it took me a long time, probably too long to ask the question where are the private equity firms an asset management firms getting their money from? And of course it makes total sense that it would be pension funds because pension funds have so much money. And so we really need to be asking pension funds. Everyday people who are paying into pension funds whether it's public pension fund or private pension fund. We need to be asking where is that money being invested in. You know when I went to South Korea on an official mission I had the opportunity to meet with the third largest pension fund in the world. And they told me the pressure is on them and I understand that. The national government was saying to them that they really need to get a better return on their investments and that alternative assets like residential real estate you know should be something in their purview. And so they were feeling the pressure to go and investing in residential real estate or give their money, I should say, to a private equity firm that would do that on their behalf.

AMT: You make the point several times that housing is a human right. Do governments recognise that?

LEILANI FARHA: Some governments do and certainly I'm finding, at the city level, a lot of mayors are coming stepping forward and saying we believe that housing is a human raid and we have to reclaim it as a human race and push back on the commodification and financialization of housing. Even some national governments are starting to move in that direction. The government of Canada itself is poised to adopt legislation that will attach to a national housing strategy and that legislation should reaffirm the right to housing. So I'm seeing a lot of movement and progress by governments, and I think they're starting to understand that the human rights framework is one that offers the best way forward to address a lot of the housing problems that we're seeing globally.

AMT: Fredrik when you began working on this film did you expect it to take you to so many countries where you could follow the thread from one to the other to the other?

FREDRIK GERTTEN: It is a global story and if you want to make a documentary film it's kind of being poured and not to make good only Northern thing, you know, Europe, Canada, U.S. So I was happy to follow Leilani to Chile, also to South Korea. The gap between your income and the price for a house is the most extreme in the global sales. So it's even they are the ones most affected of these, even of we can think it's cheap maybe but it's still for them it's extreme right now.

AMT: There is a scene in the film, Leilani Farha, where you're speaking about your findings at the U.N. and the camera pans the room. It's no more than about a third full and there are all these people on their phones. There is one guy who looks like he's shopping for watches. Were you aware?

LEILANI FARHA: Well that might have been a poor showing. I have to say within U.N. Human Rights corridors my persistent and constant talk about housing as a human right, and in particular on the issue of financialization, has changed conversations in those corridors. I do hear states taking the floor at the U.N. and talking about housing as a human raid but more importantly saying you know housing is a human right and not a commodity. And when I came into the role in 2014, rest assured they were not using that language and they were saying those things. So though they may appear not to have been paying attention in that forum, that particular forum, I have noticed a big change. And I've even noticed a change within the NGO sector that is a little bit lagging behind on this issue as well. I come from the NGO sector so I feel comfortable critiquing my own people so to speak about it. There has been a little bit of a slowness to get our heads around this issue. And that's not surprising because I never thought that I'd be waking up every morning to read the Financial Times. I never thought that I would be having to understand the way high finance works, that I would be speaking as much to bankers as I am to people living in homelessness. It never dawned on me that that's where I would end up in this role. And so it doesn't surprise me that the sector itself has been a little slow on the uptake so to speak, but I notice a big change there too, certainly a lot of attention on this issue now. When I was in Ireland, for example, the activists there they are totally engaged. They totally understand this issue. They're really pushing. Spain, the same, really amazing work being done by [unintelligible] a political and social movement that Ada Colau as well as was part of. And so what I am seeing a lot of uptake now but we're slower than the big finance financial actors. They were out the gate just after '08. It took them a few years to get the technology in place that enables them to do what they're doing; buying up thousands of properties at one time. So we're a little behind but we're catching up.

AMT: You mentioned Ada Colau, mayor of Barcelona?

LEILANI FARHA: That's correct. She is the mayor of Barcelona and has been a real leader on putting the right to housing. And it's important for cities on the global agenda for sure. She was elected on a right to housing platform, came out of the movement of people protesting foreclosures and people being evicted from their homes as a result of mortgage foreclosure and is a real force. And what I really love about Ada is she's very clear that housing is a human right and that that actually means something. So when she is running the city of Barcelona, she's engaging amateurs like Air B and B and her own national government to say you know what, the business of housing has to be responsive to human rights and that means new laws, new regulations that protect tenants and residents of the city.

AMT: You have started something called the Shift what is that?

LEILANI FARHA: The shift is international global movement that's multistakeholder. So it includes a variety of actors all of whom are committed to reclaiming housing as a human right and changing the paradigm of housing being a commodity. I started it in conjunction with the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. So the highest human rights body within the U.N. system, as well as an international network of cities called United Cities and Local Government. And so what's been so interesting is that cities have really taken the lead in the Shift. You know more than 35 cities have committed to the shift in committing to the shift they're committing to take action to implement the right to housing at the local level. And we're starting to branch out. Of course the NGO sector is engaged and has been engaged from the beginning. National Human Rights Institutions have come on board, the South African National Human Rights Commission in particular and more recently a whole slew of other national human rights institutions have expressed interest. We're starting to reach out to the private sector. And I'm really keen to get some progress private equity firms involved. That's my next challenge I suppose. And I'd love to see architects involved and urban planners and artists etc. etc.. So it's a growing movement. It's relatively new but I see some hope there.

AMT: So we're really talking about at all levels of government actually taking some responsibility for this Shift in how housing is seen now and how it affects regular people.

LEILANI FARHA: Yes absolutely. I mean cities are on the front lines of this crisis. There's no doubt. I mean they have to be involved and frankly under international human rights law all levels of government have human rights obligations, as much as the federal level or the national level.

AMT: Fredrik what do you want us to take away from this film?

FREDRIK GERTTEN: I mean we should understand, first of all, that we are living in some kind of era of crisis. We are at the moment where we have to see what is happening and try to just talk about it in a new way, because there's a lot of people, most young people, are under stress, most middle class people. You talk to your friends. Talk around. You will see that this is like this is a big thing. And the money is still just flowing into it. It's not over yet. So if you want to push back, if you wanted change you probably should start to talk about it now. So I hope with this film now coming to Canada that we can start up this debate.

AMT: Well there are a lot of things that are interconnected that most people would never realise. Thank you for sharing this with us.

FREDRIK GERTTEN: Thank you.

LEILANI FARHA: Thanks Anna Maria, nice talking.

AMT: Leilani Farha is the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Adequate Housing and the subject of Push, a new documentary by Fredrik Gertten. Push screens for the first time in Canada tomorrow as part of the Hot Docs festival in Toronto. And just to know that the community in Ottawa Leilani Farha mentioned, Heron gate, earlier this month former resident launched a human rights complaint against the city of Ottawa and Timber Creek Asset Management over evictions from their homes. Timber Creek will not comment on ongoing litigation but a community development meeting in March - there was community development meaning in March - and a representative of the company told the CBC at that time that it did more to ease the transition for tenants than it was legally required to do. Let us know what you think of what you heard in that discussion. You can tweet us @TheCurrentCBC. Find us on Facebook. Go to our website cbc.ca/thecurrent and click on the Contact link. And stay with us in our next half hour. He has his finger on the pulse of Canadian conservatism, perhaps more than any other politician of his generation. I'm speaking to Preston Manning in our next half hour. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

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Populism can be positive and constructive — even when fuelled by anger, says Preston Manning

Guest: Preston Manning

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

SOUNDCLIP

[Applause and cheers]

We've come a long long way because we're the only third party, the only party outside of traditional parties to ever have made it to being the official Opposition the Parliament of Canada in the century. That's an achievement.

AMT: Well that is election night of 1997 and that was Preston Manning the Reform Party leader with much to celebrate. Decades later Preston Manning still looms large in Canadian conservatism. In fact he's been called the godfather of the movement. He is the founder of not one but two federal parties both of which became the official opposition, and he helped shift Canada's political landscape letting the West in and laying the groundwork for the eventual defeat of the Liberals in 2006. Now the country's conservative movement is again shaking up the political landscape. Conservative premiers run the show in six provinces including the movement's heartland Alberta, following Jason Kenney's decisive victory last week and of course the Prince Edward Island victory this week. Along with federal Conservative Party leader Andrew Scheer, they are taking aim at Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's climate policy among other things and facing tough questions themselves about what they stand for and what kind of future they want to see for Canadians. Preston Manning is reflecting on it all as elder statesman and founder of the Manning center and he joins us from our Calgary studio. Hello.

PRESTON MANNING: Well thank you Anna Maria. That's a very kind introduction. Makes me feel old.

AMT: Well we can just go wise, how's that?

PRESTON MANNING: Okay that's right. That's right, wise.

AMT: How are you feeling about the conservative representation on the Canadian political map right now?

PRESTON MANNING: Well I think it's improving. I think there is a pattern in Canadian politics. The party that forms the national government usually progressively loses the provincial capitals. I think it's the Canadian way of trying to get balance but then it starts to come back at the provincial level and you're seeing that now with the election of these conservative provincial governments. So it's an exciting time I think for the country and for conservatives.

AMT: And just added Prince Edward Island.

PRESTON MANNING: Yes yes yes yes. And I think part of this pattern is that the Conservatives are making progress through what we used to call political realignments, putting components of the conservative movement together in in new combinations. You had that Yukon party that formed government. It was former Progressive Conservatives and reformists at the Saskatchewan Party that had put together some right of center liberals and conservatives and reformers. The united conservative party here in Alberta put together the Wildrose and some federal Conservatives and former provincial concerns and of course the Conservative Party of Canada. These things are products of this political realignment process which seems to have worked well for those parties.

AMT: Why do you think Albertans chose Jason Kenney and the United Conservative Party?

PRESTON MANNING: Well I think there's a sort of the ballot question that you always ask what what's the ballot question then. The NDP tried to say it was about social issues and identity politics and the rank and file in Alberta we've seen these issues about the economy and jobs pipelines, and I think the UCP listened to that better and more so than the government did.

AMT: Some pundits have called Jason Kenney, along with the Ontario Premier Doug Ford, Canada's new leaders of the Official Opposition. Are they on to something?

PRESTON MANNING: Well I think there's a potential coalition among the now six conservative provincial governments, but you had five with 60 percent of the population and I mean that's a quite a powerful political force. I think they'll use some of it to oppose some of the things that the Federal Government's doing, but my hope is - and Jason actually got into this on is in his victory speech - there are some positive constructive things they can unite to do as well. So I think there'll be more than just an opposition. I think they'll offer alternatives on some of the national issues to what the federal Liberals have.

AMT: Where does the federal Conservative Party leader Andrew Scheer fit into that?

PRESTON MANNING: I think one of his greatest strengths is what he is not, that he's not a polarizer. He's the only leader I know that was Speaker of the house for a long time before he became leader and the speaker has to be more ecumenical fellow. He has to get people to work together and I think that's one of his strength. He's an assembler. He's a partner together of things rather than a polarizer and if that talent can be put together with that with some of the more stronger strident advocacy capacities of these provincial parties, I think that would be quite a potent combination. I think that tactical problem for a party is how do you communicate that, particularly in an environment where polarization is a very distinguishing characteristic of the politics on every issue. People go to their corners.

AMT: Now Mr. Kenny and Mr. Ford are both leading the charge against carbon pricing. You once endorsed it. What's the disconnect there?

PRESTON MANNING: Well I think the win government, the Trudeau government, and the certainly the Notley government here in Alberta have so badly bungled this concept of pollution pricing and in this case carbon pricing that that whole concept has been set back 10-15 years. You know I've argued that you've got two choices you want to protect the environment. One, is you can come at it through massive macro and micro regulation with the taxpayers pay and most of the bills. The other approach is to use pricing mechanisms, use market mechanisms so that who's ever causing the pollution ends up paying most of the cost. But if you're going to use carbon pricing or pollution pricing of any kind, it's got to have certain characteristics to work. It's got to be genuinely revenue neutral. It should be subsidy free because subsidies distort markets. It should be accompanied by a reduction in regulation because it's supposed to be a substitute for regulation, and it should be somehow compatible with what your trading partners are doing so you don't disadvantage yourself. And this carbon pricing regime in Alberta was none of those. It was not revenue neutral. It's riddled with subsidies. The bill that they introduce it with was 100 pages long. 95 of those pages were additional regulation in addition to the pricing mechanism. And I think a lot of people here- people that are supportive of environmental protection. Just said that this thing is environmentally ineffective, it's economically disadvantageous to Alberta and it's politically unacceptable and they use UCP and Jason Kenney took great advantages.

AMT: And yet in B.C. It's not an issue.

PRESTON MANNING: Well it's not it's the one that started out actually revenue neutral. It's the one. And now it's not. And people are starting to get their backs up, but at least started out. That was I think under Gordon Campbell, it actually did start out. [Unintelligible] because they're in B.C. there's a willingness to pay a price for environmental protection but none of the other provinces really follow their lead.

AMT: So it's such an emotional and polarizing issue. Why do you think that is?

PRESTON MANNING: Well it's odd I think Anna Maria. Like you know we Canadians used to have the reputation for being in the middle. Why did the Canadian cross the road to get to the middle? You know not middle's that are just meaningless compromises but substantial of center positions. But on this environment it's gone all the way from years ago when I was in the consulting business. We hardly paid any attention to the environmental impacts of economic projects at all till we've gone all the way to the other side where almost all we ever do is do these environmental impact assessments, and somehow we've got to get back to that balance. I think a measure that would do that is that I agree with environmental impact assessments on economic projects including energy projects. But I think we should do economic impact assessments of every major environmental protection measure so then the government can say, okay, here's the economic impacts, here's the environmental impacts and try to find the best balance between the two. And right now we don't we don't have that balance.

AMT: You talked about the polarization of politics. Have you seen an angrier than you've seen in the last year or two?

PRESTON MANNING: Well when we were doing our reform thing in the 80s and late 80s and 90s there was there was anger. I would say even more so than that. Now you had some separatist sentiment very strong in the West as separatist party elected someone to the Alberta Legislature. There was separatists running in this last provincial election. The party advocating that got I think 0.4 of one percent. But there certainly is anger out there. And one of the analogies that I use, it's from the oil patch is that this bottom up sentiment that can end up being destructive too. It's like in the oil patch there's a rogue well that's drilled into a formation. You're not quite sure what's down below when it hits a pocket of oil or gas under enormous pressure. And it blows the drilling platform off the wellhead. It can catch fire and become a very dangerous type of thing. But one of the ways you deal with a rogue well is to drill in a relief well from the side and the angle has to be just right. If it's too shallow it won't take off enough pressure or it's too deep it can turn into a rogue well, but if it's just right it can take off enough pressure that they can start to control the flow and get that energy available for some constructive purpose. And I think that's actually the way you deal with this negative bottom up anger that fuels populist movement, is to get that relief well. The reform was sort of that in the late 80s and 90s. We identified with angers that we were mad too and the West got a bad deal, but rather than tear it apart like the Bloc Quebecois proposing why don't we channel that into and then we had our program Senate reform and democratic reform and balancing the budget and things like that.

AMT: What's the difference between anger and populism?

PRESTON MANNING: Well Populism can be positive. It can be constructive. I argued this in American forums that the Canadian prairie, Western Canada, has had more experience with populism than virtually any other area of North America and a lot of it was positive. The old Progressive Party of Canada and the farmers’ movements, they turned that anger into support for freight rate reform for freer trade and they're the ones that got women to vote. That came up through a populist movement. The first woman member of parliament, well she wasn't a Liberal, she wasn't a conservative. She was a member of the Progressive Party of Canada. First women in the Alberta Legislature all came up through that populist route. And then the Depression parties both of those were populist parties, the CCF which ultimately created the NDP but was responsible for Medicare Social Credit. Now Alberta ran honest administrations during an oil boom which is a rarity in North America. And I would argue the reforms can contribution of course - I'm biased there - but it was constructive, at least with better than having two separatist movements in the country at the same time. So while there is anger and energy there, it can be turned towards positive objectives and I think that should be the objective of any leadership during a populist era.

AMT: You know it's funny you mention the block. I mean with reform in the West you were responsible for the shaking up of Canadian politics around the same time we saw Lucien Bouchard and the Bloc Quebecois. And suddenly as Brian Mulroney will tell you, the conservative politics was never the same and from that we have what we have today.

PRESTON MANNING: You had these bottom up movements both in Quebec and in the West. When we first got to Ottawa we put on a breakfast. We called it a breakfast for the Bloc. And a salute and you bring your people and you bring maple syrup from Quebec and will bring pancakes from the west and we'll have a discussion on it. And so we did and I got up and said we're a bunch of people from the West that are angry at the way the thing is going and we want to change it. We want to reform the way the federation works. And then Lucien got up and said we're a bunch of people from Quebec and we're angry about the way it's going and we want to get out. That's where it was last. And I actually think in the future there is a potential alliance between the Quebec and the West. Jason Kenney actually got on to that in his victory speech that the Quebec and the West both want a more decentralized federation, and if that could be built on I think there's a potential for stronger relationships between Quebec and the West rather than negative ones.

AMT: How do you think voters see the traditional left right center and dividing lines?

PRESTON MANNING: Well that's a great question, Anna Maria. Manning Center did a survey a couple of years ago particularly with millennials and we asked them among a number of things: where do you position yourself on this left center right spectrum? And one of the most frequent answers is we don't like that way of dividing up the political world. We don't think of it that way. And so some of them said that's a flat earth model, that's a one dimensional model. We believe in the world's round. You guys think it's flat. So I think this reinventing the context in which we can duck political discourse is very important, particularly to make it relevant to these younger people.

AMT: And how do you see the concerns that are raised by many about extremist groups coming into some of these parties and even in Alberta. But there's a story by the Organization for the prevention of violence that Alberta is producing a disproportionate number of extremists of varying stripes, both on the traditional - like extreme left and extreme right.

AMT: Well I think that's a mistake. I mean I think every political party every religious group has to worry about the extremists that get somehow identified with them. What's I think even more worrisome than extreme language and people making extreme statements is people actually acting on their extreme convictions. And there you don't need to focus on Alberta. The two biggest cities in this country Toronto and Montreal. What is it about the political culture of those two big cities that produce, not just extremist statements, but like the Danforth murder or are that terrible massacre at the core Polytechnique. These are these are extremists acts not just discussion and they occurred in two of the most sophisticated cities in the country. I think one of the things that can be done is if you're a political leader, or a leader of any of these a religious organization or a political party, you make it clear that those types of statements do not represent you and your group and repeating it over and over again. And I actually think some of the disciplining of these extremists is best done by the people that are closest to them, their own family, the group that they may identify erroneously with. When we were in the political business we always had these big political meetings and we always had question period. And of course the question periods like Russian roulette you'll have some personal get up and make a very extreme statement. So what do you do? And what I used to do was say now this gentleman obviously feels very strongly about this, but what he has just said surely the people in this room do not agree with that. And you couldn't even get that second sentence out before the people in the room would start to clap. In other words they were embarrassed by that extremism and they would show it in that way. And I actually think that had a beneficial effect on the extremists because a lot of these are lone wolf people they don't realize that a lot of other people don't quite agree with you. And they need to have that cincture come from them not from the guy on the platform.

AMT: Well Andrew Scheer faced criticism for being on the platform with white nationalists.

PRESTON MANNING: Oh yes and these people they make a point of trying to infiltrate every organization or at least identify with it.

AMT: Let's talk a bit more about why you think there is an opportunity for positive change on the current political map. What kind of cooperation do you think we might see among the six provinces led by conservatives?

PRESTON MANNING: Well one of the things Jason Kenney referred to and it's in the UCP platform is could they cooperate on getting the federal government to provide these transportation infrastructure corridors from the interior to the Atlantic and Pacific so that Canada can get its resources, particularly energy resources, to tidewater and world markets. And that is something that these various conservative premiers at one stage or another have all said is an important thing. And if they could get together - you've got five provinces, now six provinces, with 60 percent of the population asking the federal government to at least guarantee the rights of wage - they don't have to guarantee a particular pipeline or rail line or transmission line but the right of way there should be a right away so that people can apply for licences to build that kind of infrastructure. I think TransCanada Corridor Coalition would be a very positive development and something that those five, six premiers could certainly push.

AMT: Well there is a federal election coming up in a few months. How how does all of this bode for the government and Justin Trudeau?

PRESTON MANNING: Well I think they're going to have to adjust their position. They should study hard. They've been very strong on this identity politics that identifies particular groups. You can use data mining now to narrow that down to a very specific groups. You then promise them some entitlement or some benefit and then the political message is if you vote for us you'll get it, if you vote for the other people you'll probably lose it. And anybody that criticizes that politics is obviously prejudiced against your fundamental characteristic. I think the federal government goes down that route. That's exactly what the NDP did here and it did not go over particularly when people were worried about the economy. On the positive side the federal government, if it could respond in some kind of positive way to this demand for infrastructure this Trans Mountain pipeline is the easiest one for them just proceed with it.

AMT: They own it now. I guess we do.

PRESTON MANNING: Well that's right. That's right. But I think unless they make some adjustments to what they're doing now that they're in deep difficult. And you're too young to remember this Anna Maria, but Pierre E. Trudeau was more euphoria for him in a 1968 election than there was for Justin in 2015. Four years later he was almost defeated by Bob Standfield who was not exactly a charismatic fellow.

AMT: I actually do remember that Preston Manning.

PRESTON MANNING: You shouldn't confess that. But you know Andrew Scheer has a lot stronger group behind him than Bob Standfield did in those days. So there is a lesson in that.

AMT: You mentioned identity politics more than once, what it that? Why does it concern you so much?

PRESTON MANNING: Well the characteristic is you identify a group by some fundamental characteristic; their gender, their race, their sexual orientation, something like that. And then you grant them - or as a political party you promise them, if you're a government you can actually give them - some kind of entitlement, some sort of rights, some sort of benefit that is dependent on them having that characteristic. And then the political guys take that and said 'if you want to preserve that and keep that you've got to vote for us, if you vote for the other people they're going to take it away from you'. And this type of politics is immune to criticism because if you criticize that approach, you're prejudiced against people oon their race or on their sexual orientation or on their gender. And my worry about that is it divides people into smaller and smaller groups and makes the reconciliation of conflicting interests - which at the end of the day is one of the main jobs of a government - more and more difficult. And the alternative to that, and Kenney got into this little bit, is to say to be accepting and inclusive of people regardless of those fundamental characteristics, rather than because of them. So if you're a human being you are deserving of acceptance and inclusion regardless of what your racial characteristics or your sexual characteristics are. And I think that that unity politics is based on that concept is more conducive to getting people to work together than when you divide them up into these increasingly large numbers of minority groups.

AMT: And yet those who would disagree with you would point out that one of the reasons those rights had to come in was because certain minority groups were actually not getting those rights. And so to say there's a way to defuse that by saying we're not going to take away rights.

PRESTON MANNING: Well but I think you can come at that from this inclusive, this broader definition of inclusiveness, just as well as you can by the by the practice of minority politics. But you don't create this ultimate divisiveness. What I worry is it's the same as we were talking on environmental issues. You get this polarization on this identity question which in the end is not conducive to getting people to work together or in our case even keeping the country together.

AMT: But I'm just struggling with that just because I mean we've seen in this country people who don't get rights. Without that right if you don't have LGBTQ rights you could lose a job. You know we've seen this happen right. People have in the past refused access to someone on their deathbed because of these things. I mean it kind of matters in terms of their daily life.

PRESTON MANNING: But say when you get even this restoration of balance, do you keep working away on that, do you keep pounding away on that even after you've got some restoration of equality? Do you keep pounding away on that so this group is different and they're going to be treated differently in law, they're going to be treated differently in policy? How far and how long do you keep that going? The NDP tried to do that here in Alberta and you know a gay guy in Drayton Valley that's out of work said that that's what I want is a job like everybody else, not another sermon from the NDP the on gay rights. So there's some kind of balance there that got to be achieved. I guess whoever gets it right first will do better.

AMT: You know I introduced just the godfather of the conservative movement. You set the stage for so much I'm wondering do you regret not getting into the PMO?

PRESTON MANNING: No I used to have a little talk to our early reformers. They were like a bunch of people who are storming a castle. And unfortunately if you study the record of people storming the castle the first people to put their ladders up against the wall are the ones that got hot oil toward them. They never got over the wall. In fact the second wave never got over the wall. But usually it was the third wave that got over the oil. And by [unintelligible] in the federal arena it turned out it was the third wave. The reformers were the first ones. The Canadian Alliance was the second. Then the Conservative Party of Canada got over the wall. So I kind of felt our role was to try to get the ball rolling and more capable people would take it over and get over the wall.

AMT: That's an interesting image. I'm going to leave it there.

PRESTON MANNING: I think maybe we should.

AMT: Okay, Preston Manning thanks for your time. It's good to talk to you.

PRESTON MANNING: Thank you Anna Maria.

AMT: Preston Manning was the leader of the Reform Party as well as the Canadian Reform Conservative Alliance. He is also the founder of the Manning Center in Calgary. Let us know what you think of what he had to say, how he's thinking. Tweet us @TheCurrentCBC. Find us on Facebook. Go to our website cbc.ca/thecurrent. Click on the contact link. That is our program for today. Stay with Radio One for Q. Preston Manning may never have won Canada's highest office. But you may have heard the current Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will be making an appearance on The Simpsons this weekend. He's being voiced by a Canadian journalist with a knack for impersonating Canadian celebrities. We will leave you today with some more of Lucas Myers impressions that caught the Simpsons producer's attention when he posted them to YouTube. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti thank you for listening to The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

LUCAS MYERS: [Impersonating Peter Mansbridge] Good evening. I'm Peter Mansbridge and this is The National, a special edition. Our top story, more questions for The Prime Minister today and the ongoing battle over pipelines in this country. Our Terry Milewski has more. Terry.

LUCAS MYERS: [Impersonating Terry Milewski] Peter, the Prime Minister reiterated his dedication to pipelines and the national interest today. But when pressed by reporters about what options he would take to make sure one gets built, he kept his options close to the chest.

LUCAS MYERS: [Impersonating Justin Trudeau] We have said many times that we don't have to sacrifice the economy for the environment. As for the coming days we'll continue to - let me reorder the thoughts- continue to work with our various stakeholders and partners and come to a mutual agreement for projects moving forward.

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