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The AIH Transcript for July 16, 2018

Hosts: Laura Lynch and Karen Gordon

Prologue

LAURA LYNCH: Hello, I'm Laura Lynch, sitting in for Carol Off.

KAREN GORDON: Good evening, I'm Karen Gordon, sitting in for Jeff Douglas. This is As It Happens.

[Music: Theme]

KG: Tonight…

LL: Zero sum game. Donald Trump thinks his meeting with Vladimir Putin was useful. But we hear from a former U.S. presidential adviser whose question is ‘Useful to whom?’

KG: Sub-rude reaction. Elon Musk's trash talk about one of the Thai soccer players’ saviors has our guest suggesting that the Tesla billionaire might need to learn when it's time to pull the plug.

LL: Trick or treat? A McGill researcher offers some advice on how to distinguish between the two when it comes to medical advice — and he's turned it into a video that has gone viral.

KG: simply radiant. A California surfer finds a car crash survivor who spent a week living only on the water She could suck up through her destroyed vehicles radiator hose.

LL: Listening to their nay-sayers Part one. French scientists make up two groups of horses in an effort to finally find out what our equestrian friends are feeling when they snort.

KG: And…Listening to their naysayers Part two. The owner horse farm outside of Ottawa has fourfresh fresh hooves on her hand after a moose named Bruce starts cantering around with the herd. As It Happens: The Monday Edition. Radio that's pretty confident their Bruce will come to his senses and vamoose.

[Music: Theme]

Part 1: Trump/Putin: Helsinki Meeting, Elon Musk Comments, California Crash Survivor

Trump/Putin: Helsinki Meeting

Guest: Kenneth Adelman

KG: U.S. President Donald Trump was happy to tell reporters just how productive his meeting was with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki today. But he was less willing to confirm whether Russia meddled in the 2016 election. Here's a question from Associate Press reporter Jonathan Lemire.

SOUNDCLIP

JONATHAN LEMIRE: Just now President Putin denied having anything to do with the election interference in 2016. Every U.S. intelligence agency has concluded that Russia did. My first question for you sir is, who do you believe? My second question is, would you now, with the whole world watching, tell President Putin would you denounce what happened in 2016 and would you want him to never do it again?

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: My people came to me, Dan Coats, came to me and some others, they said they think it's Russia. President Putin, he just said it's not Russia. I will say this, I don't see any reason why it would be, but I really do want to see the server. What happened to Hillary Clinton's e-mails? 33,000 e-mails gone. I think in Russia they wouldn't be gone so easily. I think it's a disgrace that we can't get Hillary Clinton's 33,000 e-mails. I have great confidence in my intelligence people, but President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today.

KG: President Trump answering a question from a reporter today in Helsinki. Kenneth Adelman knows about high profile meetings between the Americans and Russians. He was Ronald Reagan's arms control director and he helped organize the landmark 1986 summit in Reykjavik, between that president and Mikhail Gorbachev. We reached Ambassador Edelman in Aspen, Colorado.

LL: Hello, Ambassador Adelman.

KENNETH ADELMAN: Hello, Laura.

LL: When you listen to that clip we just played of President Donald Trump refusing to blame Russia for election meddling, how do you react to that?

KA: Well, it makes me sick, to tell you the truth.

LL: Why?

KA: Because a president should stand up for American values and American interests. And to believe the Russians — or Putin who we know is a killer and a poisoner abroad and a liar — rather than, you know, the thousands of dedicated Americans who work for the intelligence agencies in the United States government, to equate the two, even remotely, is outrageous.

LL: Now that was the one point of the news conference that most people are focusing on. But overall, President Trump called today's meeting the President Vladimir Putin deeply productive. How would you describe it?

KA: It's ridiculous. I don't know what's productive about it when you don't have an agenda, when you don't have any issues that you're trying to get him to change his behaviour about. It seems to me when I was with President Reagan on his superpower summits with Mikhail Gorbachev, even the historic and quite wonderful Reykjavik summit in October of 1986, we had very clear things we wanted to accomplish over that weekend, and we knew we wouldn't get them all but we work on these. And President Reagan cared, yes, that he got along okay with Mikhail Gorbachev. He wasn't looking for any new friends, he had enough friends in life, but he was looking to advance American interests. I don't see that Putin or her Trump are advancing American interests at all.

LL: Today's meeting also comes on the heels of the new indictments against 12 Russian intelligence officers that were announced last Friday. I'm wondering how you think that that played into today's meeting in Helsinki, if at all?

KA: No, unfortunately it didn't play into it at all. I wish it had played in because it was quite clear that these 12 individuals worked for Putin and wouldn't say anything without his OK, tried to influence the American elections. And let me just say, if as seems absolutely clear right now that Russia really did want to downplay Hillary Clinton and help Donald Trump become president, then they've gotten their money's worth. Why is that? Because what are Putin's main objectives: To separate the United States from Canada and its allies. Trump has been very good at that over the last month. To delegitimize democratic process and democratic institutions, the rule of law, the free press, intelligence agencies — to delegitimize truth. Someone said that both Putin and Trump have truth decay. Last thing, that Putin would want an American president who adores him, and in Trump he has that in spades.

LL: But isn't it an advantage, a good thing, to have better relations between the United States and Russia?

KA: What you want to do is have nice relations, but what you want to do is advance your interests and your values and that's what you're trying to do. You can always agree with the other guy on everything, but that's not going after truth, that's not promoting freedom, that's not basically going after western, and promoting, Western values and upholding western values.

LL: Putin also offered in the news conference — reiterated that he was willing to cooperate with the U.S. investigation to interrogate these agents that were charged. What do you make of that?

KA: You know, it's something to say. The fact is if you read the indictment, it's online you can read it pretty easily. It tells you the date, it shows you what these people did — it tells you everything. So to interrogate them, 12 of them when we have exactly the goods on what happened with these twelve, would be, in my mind, kind of useless.

LL: Now Donald Trump has wanted this summit for a long time. Why is that? What was he hoping to get out of this today?

KA: I think there are several reasons. Number one: he really wants Putin to like him because he likes having strongman dictators like him because he kind of envies them. That's the Chinese, the North Korean and Russian. And secondly, what Donald Trump wanted to do is to erase the idea that Russia really helped him get the presidency. And I think that's indisputable now after the indictments. He is plagued by the idea that he didn't win a majority of Americans. He was three million people, which a lot of people, short of that, that's why he brings up Hillary Clinton every time he mentions the weather or a baseball score he brings up Hillary Clinton. And he thinks that you know that all this Russian business delegitimizes its presidency, and tell you the truth, I think so, too.

LL: With President Trumps rather warm embrace of President Putin today there's the suggestion that the U.S. might have gone soft on Russia, but outside of the meetings they the U.S. government hasn't been doing that. They expelled 60 Russian diplomats from the U.S. earlier this year. They sent missiles to Ukraine to defend against Russia-backed separatists. They've charged these people in Russia. Don't these actions count for something?

KA: They do count for something and they count by showing the thousands of men and women of the United States government who are standing up for American interests and American values. And you have to say good for them. It's just wonderful. It's just too bad they don't have a president who agrees with those values or those interests. And ideas have consequences, it's very important what a president keeps saying, people listen to that. And Trump is an apology for the Kremlin and for Putin. So it's a gold mine for Putin. Like I say, if Putin did expend a lot of money to break into our election and throw the election, or at least influence the election to help Trump, he got his money's worth. He just comes up with three cherries, it's just a bonanza for him.

LL: Ambassador, thank you.

KA: You're welcome Laura.

LL: Bye, bye.

KA: Bye.

KG: Kenneth Adelman was Arms Control Director for U.S. President Ronald Reagan. He was in Aspen, Colorado. Right after today's summit in Helsinki the U.S. Justice Department announced another indictment, Russian operative Maria Butina faces espionage charges for trying to broker secret meetings between President Trump and President Putin during the 2016 presidential campaign.

[Music: Hip Hop]

Elon Musk Comments

Guest: Molly Roberts

KG: As divers raced to rescue the soccer team trapped in that cave in northern Thailand, you may have heard that a certain billionaire wanted to help out. Tesla CEO Elon Musk had a mini submarine that he thought might aid in the rescue — it didn't. And in an interview this weekend a diver who was a key part of the rescue called it a PR stunt. Vern Unsworth’s comments didn't appear to sit well with Mr. Musk. In a now deleted tweet the billionaire referred to the British expat as a paedophile. Here's what Mr. Unsworth said to reporters today in response.

SOUNDCLIP

VERN UNSWORTH: I'm not going to make any further comment about him but I think people realize what sort of guy he is.

REPORTER: Would you consider taking legal action against him?

VU: Yes, it's not finished.

KG: It's not the first time Elon Musk's activity on Twitter has attracted controversy. And today, following his latest incident, his company's shares dropped. Molly Roberts is an opinion writer with The Washington Post who has followed Elon Musk and the story of the Thai cave rescue. She's in Washington, D.C.

LL: Ms. Roberts, just a few months ago you wrote quote “Elon Musk has lost his cool.” How would you characterize him now after this incident with the British diver?

MOLLY ROBERTS: Pretty much the same. I think this is another example that supports the statement that Elon Musk has officially lost his cool and is no longer a media darling or really a darling to any impartial observer.

LL: He has over 22 million followers on Twitter. How worrying is it to you that he's been throwing around a word like pedo without anything to back it up?

MR: Very worrying to me, I think not only because of the number of his followers but because of the passion a lot of them have for him and everything he does. I think you see the way he behaves on Twitter and the attitude he takes toward anyone who criticizes him or his company and you'll often see his followers piling on when he does that. So he's certainly not modeling good behaviour for them or really for anyone who hopes that our online discourse would maybe take a higher tone.

LL: This didn't come out of the blue, this comment. He was responding to something that the British diver Vernon Unsworth said on the weekend. Let's listen to the comments that seemed to spark all of this. Here is Mr. Unsworth speaking with CNN.

SOUNDCLIP

VO: Stick his submarine where it hurts. It just had absolutely no chance of working. He had no conception of what the cave passage was like. The submarine I believe was about five-foot six long, rigid, it wouldn't have gotten around corners or around any obstacles. It wouldn't have made the first 50 metres into the cave from the dive start point — just a PR stunt.

LL: Okay, so he has some things to say that are not very nice, he did tell him to stick his submarine where it hurts. Don't you think Mr. Musk has a right to respond?

MR: I'm sure Mr. Musk cause a right to respond. On the other hand, the way he responded reads to me, and I can't claim expertise on it, but reads to me kind of like textbook defamation, as far as we know there's nothing to back this up.

LL: When you were following the Thailand cave rescue and you heard that Elon Musk had showed up, what did you make of his offer to help? Do you agree with Mr. Unsworth that it was a PR stunt?

MR: I think that, yes, that was my knee jerk reaction based on what I know and have seen of Elon Musk, much the same way that last week his tweet offering to help Flint out with its clean water crisis read like a PR stunt. It's not that I think there aren't any good motivations there, it wouldn't be very nice as me to say ‘Oh anybody who wants to help with this Thai cave thing is just doing it for public attention.’ But I think in both cases you kind of see that he Musk did not have that much knowledge of the situation. He doesn't go to the people who do have that expertise and say ‘How can I be most helpful?’ He decides that he is going to offer to help without consulting them, assuming that he knows best. And in a way that is kind of a very grand gesture, which is very Silicon Valley. The general idea is we can engineer around these massive societal problems and we're going to do it our way because we're brilliant and we can use the same techniques across disciplines even when we don't know anything in particular about those disciplines.

LL: Today Tesla stocks are dropping and he's been criticised all over Twitter. I imagine he must have a big PR team or be able to afford one. Why doesn't someone stop him from sending out tweets like this?

MR: Why don’t they, right? Why doesn’t someone stop President Trump from sending out the tweets he sends out? I think that you see people like this who have big egos and a lot of power and are the top dogs in their various enterprises and they can't necessarily be constrained because they are in charge. I imagine that Elon Musk has a PR team that's not thrilled with what he's doing right now, but short of yanking his phone out of his hand and, you know, setting a password on his Twitter account he doesn't know, there's really not much that can be done.

LL: What price do you think he might pay for this?

MR: It's a really good question. I think a lot of it hinges — if we're talking in the long term for Elon Musk — I'm not really sure that any of these controversies are going to be make-or-break for him. I think what's going to be make-or-break is what happens with this Model 3 and basically what he's saying is he's betting the company on this. And if he does manage to mass produce these cars, which will have a huge impact on carbon emissions, then I think he'll be hailed as a hero despite all of this, of course, if that crashes and burns and you take that together with the way he's behaved himself on Twitter, I don't think anybody is going to give him the benefit of the doubt.

LL: Do you think the incident then and the outcry will prompt him to change his ways?

MR: Well, he said, I believe earlier this week or late last, that he was going to try to be less combative on Twitter because at least one shareholder had expressed distress at the way he was acting — and then he went out and called this guy a pedo. So I think maybe he'll have learned from this. Then again, he's done this in the past, received criticism and hasn't learned from that. So it's very hard to say.

LL: Ms. Roberts, thank you very much for your time.

MR: Yeah, thanks so much for having me.

LL: Bye, bye.

MR: Bye.

KG: Molly Roberts is with The Washington Post. We reached her in Washington, D.C.

California Crash Survivor

Guest: Chad Moore

KG: It's a miracle she survived. Angela Hernandez was driving from her home in Portland, Oregon to visit family in Southern California. Then on July 6th she drove her car off a 200 foot cliff in Big Sur. Not only did Ms. Hernandez survive that crash, she managed to live for an entire week. That's how long it took before Chad Moore and his wife Chelsea discovered Angela and her demolished car. We reached Chad Moore in San Luis Obispo, California.

LL: Mr. Moore, when you first saw this car at the bottom of the cliff what did you think?

CHAD MOORE: First thing I thought that after seeing the Jeep at the bottom of the cliff, I was expecting to find a body or a couple bodies. And so I asked my wife Chelsea to stay back while I take a closer look at the scene.

LL: What kind of shape was the Jeep in?

CM: The Jeep was demolished. It had no hood, the hood was like 20 yards away in the rocks and the roof of the car was ripped off like a tin can, the tires were knocked off of it, like an axle on up on the hill on the beach, there's no glass, all the airbags we're deployed. The engine was right in the front seat of the passenger seat. I was just thinking there was no way anyone survived that thing. And I looked up the hill on the cliff up above it and realized this car must have driven off that cliff.

LL: So if no one survived it, you didn't see any bodies right?

CM: No, we didn't see any bodies — not until the walk back.

LL: And what kind of shape was Angela in when you found her?

CM: Her eyes — like the blood vessels burst in her eyes. She had black eyes on top of that, very, very sunburned. Her face was super dehydrated symptoms. She had a broken clavicle, which we thought was like a broken shoulder at the time. She complained that her ribs were hurting really bad. She was wearing what was left of a pair of socks, which was just like threads, her toes are sticking through, her heels or sticking through. She had a pair of pants that were completely ripped. She's been sleeping in the sand by herself since the sixth, we found her on the 13^th.

LL: How did she keep going?

CM: Where we found her on the rocks, I looked around that area just to see what she had. The only thing that she had was this little piece of radiator hose from the car crash. She was using it to drink water off the cliff, dripping off the moss.

LL: Okay, so that's physically how she stayed alive. Mentally, what kept her going?

CM: Yes, she kept saying how she can't wait to call her mom and dad and talk to her family and her sisters. She just can't wait to tell them that she is alive.

LL: What does she remember about the actual crash?

CM: She said she remembers swerving for like a bunny, and then she was flying and she doesn't remember after that until she woke up in her car and water was coming in and she had to break the window to get out.

LL: You sent Chelsea away to go on call for help, right, because she was a fast runner. You stayed to try to help Angela. And I'm wondering, you must have been just shocked yourself that you were probably trying to sort of keep that hidden from her?

CM: Oh, yeah. I was definitely in shock when it is just Angela and I on the beach. Here's the thing though, I'm pretty, I'm experienced and I wasn't afraid of anything else. I was just shocked. I knew we found a girl who needs help. And I knew we were gonna get her off that beach that night. I promised Angela ‘You're getting off this beach tonight.’ She was really, really happy about that. From the moment we found her she was happy and she had the best attitude. She told Chelsea and I that she woke up and knew that it was going to be a good day. It's tough to feel that way or think that way in a situation like that I'm sure, but she actually felt that it was going to be a good day.

LL: Because she'd been trying and hoping that someone would see her for days. I'm wondering how it was that you and your wife Chelsea were there in the first place?

CM: Absolute luck and timing. When we go up there we go up there to surf and be at the beach and fish. And we we're going to be surfing down the beach like 10 miles but it wasn't very good. So we pulled the plug on that attempt and came back to the campsite and decided to go. And plan B if the surf bad is go fishing. So we weren't actually fishing when we found the car but we were looking for a spot to fish the next day — it was just luck. The trail down, my wife did not want to go down that trail, it’s not even a trail, it’s super dangerous. And I was like ‘Come on. I've done it before it's not bad.’ And I had to twist her arm like ‘Trust me, we could do it,’ and we certainly did. We went down the goat trail with ropes and — it's crazy.

LL: I guess that explains why Angela wasn't actually able to get out of the area herself.

CM: There's no way she could have by herself, not with her shoulder and ribs like that. She also didn’t know where she was and you can't see the trails that are there just overgrown with poison oak and huge rocks. You need your hands to crawl and pull yourself up the cliff — it's a cliff.

LL: She was really lucky that it was you and Chelsea who found her. Have you been in touch with Angela since the rescue on Friday?

CM: Just for a few minutes last night, we actually talked to her while she is in the hospital. She still has the same great personality as she did on the beach. She was able to crack a couple of jokes and laugh. She said that it hurts to laugh. She definitely has a lot of healing still to do, mentally and physically but yeah she's just in great spirits and so thankful that she made it and that she's with her family again recovering.

LL: Did she thank you?

CM: Yeah, she gave us a nice thank you — we're going to be friends forever, that's for sure. No matter what we're always going to think of each other. She Chelsea and I’s life forever, changed her life forever and her family's life forever. Today is Monday, so it’s day three, Chelsea and I haven't been able to sleep at all. Pretty much any time it's quiet, any time we close our eyes we think of her. And Angela is probably resting pretty well because she's eating food again and in a bed. Pretty, pretty powerful though.

LL: Mr. Moore, I think it's wonderful news that you manage to allow Angela to survive. Good on you for what you and Chelsea did and I wish you the best. Thank you.

CM: Thanks for your time today. Have a good rest of the day.

LL: You too. Bye, bye.

CM: Bye, bye.

KG: Chad Moore and his wife Chelsea helped rescue Angela Hernandez on Friday. Ms. Hernandez was missing for a week after her car went off a cliff in Big Sur, California. For more on the story, if you want to hear that interview again or any other story on the show, please go to our website: www.cbc.ca/aih.

[Music: 80s Pop]

Horse Snorting

KG: Oh excuse me, I’m cat sitting for Carol Off while she's away. As you can hear the little guy is quite content curled up here next to my microphone — so cute. Now, you know, I'm no scientist, I've had my own cats. I know when a cat purrs like this it's pretty safe to say they're in a good mood. But what about a horse? That’s the sound of a horse snorting, which, thanks to a new study, we now know might be the closest thing they have to purring. Researchers at the University of Rennes in France studied 48 horses and exposed them to different living conditions. One group of horses was free to roam open pastures. The other group was confined to more stressful conditions, riding schools and their stalls and then only given limited time to graze. The assumption was that horses only snorted for practical unsavoury reasons like quote “clearing phlegm flies or other irritants.” But after studying the two groups the researchers blew the lid off that strictly mechanical-based theory, and may have discovered an emotional reason for all the nose blowing. After recording a total of 560 snorts, snorers or blows, the team found that horses in the relaxed environments had produced more snorts. The team concluded that quote “It's clear that snorts cannot be merely considered as having a simple hygienic function of clearing the nostrils.” And furthermore the team said the snorts indicated quote “a relaxation phase associated with positive emotions of low intensity,” unquote. So I guess that's about the long and snort of it, straight from the horse's mouth.

Part 2: Cancer Viral Video, Lost Stanley Kubrick Script

Cancer Viral Video

Guest: Jonathan Jarry

KG: It has all the elements you'd expect — headshots of esteemed looking researchers, flashy stock animations of DNA and the human body, claims that pharmaceutical companies and the FDA are suppressing potentially life-saving research — and, of course, blue pigment being injected into a beaker. But Jonathan Jarry’s viral YouTube video titled ‘This NATURAL TRICK can CURE YOUR CANCER,’ is just that — a trick. We reached Mr. Jarry at LaGuardia Airport in New York City.

LL: Mr. Jarry, what prompted you to make this video?

JONATHAN JARRY: A former co-worker of mine sent me a very similar looking video that had six million views, which purported to show a cancer cure that had been discovered about 80 years ago having to do with radio waves. And she was asking me ‘Is there any truth to this?’ And you know this is the kind of work that we do at the office is to try to separate sense from nonsense, demystify science from pseudo-science, and there was no truth to this. And so it became a bit frustrating because there are so many of these videos online that espouse this sort of conspiracy mindset. And so I decided ‘Well what if we try to make a video that looked like one of these videos that had a different message at its core?’

LL: Now of all the possible hoaxes you decided to go with the big one — the cure for cancer. How come?

JJ: Well, I mean, it’s the one that I’m most familiar with, I suppose. I worked in cancer research and cancer diagnostics for many years. So this is something that is close to my heart and the video that I had seen was about a cancer cure. So it was kind of the easy the — low hanging fruit if you will.

LL: Okay. Now tell me what the video had in it?

JJ: So essentially it was a video that showed you that in the early 1800s here was a man Dr. Johan R. Tarjany, who discovered that a particular moth that was growing in his hometown and that had fascinated him as a boy, had this active ingredient in it that could selectively alter the double helix of cancer cells and destroy them without harming the healthy cells. But as soon as this stated in the video the narration sort of walks back those claims and shows you that actually this is all fake, everything that you've seen up until this point has been fake. The moth that was described does not exist, the man that was described does not exist, in fact, he's an anagram of my name. And fact to be the man that you saw earlier, there were two different men from two different eras but you probably didn't notice that there were two different men from two different pictures. And the reminder is that, you know, you can do anything with these kinds of videos. You can manipulate people in so many different ways and show them whatever you want to show them. And so always be vigilant, be skeptical and ask questions because it's just too easy for misinformation to spread online.

LL: So your video drops little clues along the way but you're assuming people don't pick up on it. It takes about 40 seconds to get to the point where you actually say this is a lie. Are you are you concerned that people might not make it that far?

JJ: Not really. I think the people who leave early are the people who are naturally skeptically minded and who are seeing these kinds of videos before — and I don't need to reach these people. And the people who are interested in these sorts of alternative treatments and who will Google the name of the moth will figure out that it doesn't exist. And there were so many comments on this video of ‘Aha! You didn't watch until the end.’ And I think it became a sort of a rite of passage for people to go through the video, realize what was actually happening and then wanting to share it with their friends to see how they would react and if they would fall for it or not.

LL: Did anyone get angry with you for dangling this sense that there was a cure?

JJ: A few people, but I mean this is already happening far and wide all over the Internet. And I think that it was worth making a video that was a bit of a Trojan horse because the message that we're trying to convey is so important, especially in this day and age.

LL: And how does the response to this video compare to the kind of response you'd normally see to the videos that you put up online?

JJ: It does not compare. It is so outside the range of views that we usually get. I mean, for the kinds of videos that I make I have a show called Cracked Signs on YouTube, I mean, you know, we get between 100 and 2,000 views, and, you know, we're happy with that. But, of course, we never get the kind of reach of these sorts of viral videos get. So the video actually reached 10 million views. And the reason for that is that we have spread it over many different accounts. We recruited a number of people to share it first because we didn't want to name McGill's to be linked to it on social media. So this is definitely much, much higher than we could have hoped or imagined.

LL: Has it given you any sense that you might want to produce more of these kinds of videos in order to teach people to be more skeptical about what they're watching?

JJ: For sure. I don't think this is something that we can pull off on a weekly basis, but I think there will be more of these sort of subversive videos in the future coming out of our office.

LL: OK, we will leave it there. Jonathan Jarry, thank you very much.

JJ: Well, thank you.

KG: Jonathan Jarry is a science communicator in the McGill University Office for Science and Society in Montreal. We reached him today in New York City.

[Music: Ambient Strings and Drums]

House of Commons Emergency Meeting

KG: We don't usually see many MPs on Parliament Hill in mid-July. But today the House of Commons Citizenship and Immigration Committee held an emergency meeting. At issue are the numbers of asylum seekers crossing into Canada from the U.S. Conservative immigration critic Michelle Rempel has called the situation a ‘border crisis.’ She wants the committee to conduct a study. Today she called on her Liberal counterparts to develop a long-term permanent plan to deal with the influx of irregular border crossers. Then she spoke to reporters outside.

SOUNDCLIP

MICHELLE REMPEL: I want to step back and say I don't see this as a partisan issue, I think we have political stripes of different governments at provincial levels across the country, but I think everyone is asking the same question and that is: How do we sustain this over time? And that is a core question related to the immigration file writ large. Immigration should — our levels should be matched on the humanitarian side with our ability across governments, be it federal, municipal, provincial to provide integration support — we need to budget for that. And then on the economic side, making sure that when people are entering the country that they are matched to regions with specific labour needs and we just, we haven't seen that happen. And frankly, I don't think any of you standing here would be able to make a strong business case that the government has put forward a fully costed plan that tells us the number of people that they expect to come in via this method, how they planned to integrate these people into the Canadian economy over time, how they plan to fix the issue with the IRB and how they plan to pay for the eventual removal orders associated with this mass influx of people from the United States. So how I would characterize the Immigration Minister's response right now is a very desperate attempt to spin away from his responsibility to deliver a plan, and I don't think Canadians are buying it either.

KG: That was federal Conservative immigration critic Michelle Rempel speaking today after an emergency meeting of the House of Commons Immigration Committee.

[Music: Acoustic Guitar]

Lost Stanley Kubrick Script

Guest: Nathan Abrams

KG: The late filmmaker Stanley Kubrick may have one more surprise for his fans. A previously unseen script by Mr. Kubrick has come to light more than 60 years after it was written. Kubrick and the novelist Calder Willingham adapted Burning Secret from a 1913 novel. Some say the project never made it to the screen because of its risque subject matter. The script was thought to have been lost forever. Then there it was Nathan Abrams’ hands. Nathan Abrams is a film studies professor at Bangor University, and that's where we reached him.

LL: Professor Abrams, how did you come to find this script after all these years?

PROFESSOR NATHAN ABRAMS: Well, I just published my book Stanley Kubrick: New York Jewish Intellectual and a chap reached out to me and offered to show me a copy of the script. And this person is the son of a former collaborator of Stanley Kubrick and the script came into his possession because his father was going to be asked to work on the film.

LL: And how did you feel the first time you had it in your hands?

NA: Oh it’s just fantastic. I mean this has been documented, he was working on it back in 1956. But no one ever knew if he’d completed it and what state the script was in. And now here it is, we've got a full draft and it tells us a lot.

LL: Well what kind of assurance though, do you have that it is the real deal and not something that someone who was an overzealous fan just made up?

NA: You know, I ask this question about every document I look at. I mean, I'm in the archive every day and there are scribblings on the Kubrick manuscripts. How do I know someone didn't get in before me and scribble on them and we attribute this to Stanley Kubrick? We have to act on good faith, but we triangulate it with the other information that we have at hand — the dates, you know, who's on the cover of the scripts — you know, all this extra information. The other thing is, this is over a 100-page script, this will take a lot of fabrication to produce something this extensive, I think.

LL: Well tell us what the story is a Burning Secret .

NA: Burning Secret is a novella by Stefan Zweig, which was published in 1913. It's about a suave Baron at a holiday resort who spies an attractive Jewish woman who's married and when she rejects his advances he decides the best route to her is to befriend her young son. And Stanley's taken the kernel of this story and translated it into a contemporary American idiom in mid-1950s America.

LL: You noted that this was a Jewish woman, including making them non-Jewish.

NA: Yes, so another way that this fits Stanley Kubrick's working pattern is that the Jewishness of the source text he adapted is erased. And we can see this certainly in his previous film The Killing and we see it in all of his films after that, apart from 2001 and The Shining where there weren't any Jewish characters.

LL: Do you know what his motivation would be for doing that?

NA: The easy answer is self-hatred —I dont agree. The more complex answer is firstly, there’s an economic motivation. In mid 50s America, he correctly calculates that people don't want to watch Jews on screen. Remember this is the period of the Hollywood moguls putting Jews on the screen, but not as Jews. You know as the era of Kirk Douglas or Tony Curtis and others where they've changed their names. The deeper answer is that I think Stanley has an ambivalent relationship with his Jewish identity. Because, you know, what he did in his films is he took the Jewishness out explicitly and reinserted it under the surface for those who can read the codes, and we can see that and that's what I argue in my book multiple times. And that was through things like casting decisions and other factors. And the other thing is it bears a lot of relationship to Eyes Wide Shut.

LL: It does, how?

NA: Well, firstly, Eyes Wide Shut is as an example of him taking an Austrian Jewish novella. And then secondly, the themes of marriage, fidelity, adultery, a love triangle as it were, which we also see in Lolita and we also see that family triangle in The Shining. And, you know, some of the dialogue seems eerily reminiscent as well of Eyes Wide Shut as well.

LL: How far did Kubrick get in making this film at the time he actually sat down and co-wrote the script?

NA: That was as far as he got. He sat down and co-wrote the script but MGM nixed the project before it got any further. I don't think any other work was done on it.

LL: Do you know why it wasn't produced?

NA: Reading between the lines, I think there was no great enthusiasm in the studio for making it. He had a backer there who got fired, so he had no one internal to turn to. His producing partner wasn't particularly keen on doing it. Maybe the studio — and this is pure speculation — already sense that the young Stanley would be a difficult person to work with.

LL: Could it possibly have been the subject matter that was a bit too sensitive for a 1950s audience?

NA: Possibly, although they did submitted the Production Code Administration. I've seen the letters and they said ‘Well, we have no particular problem this story, as long as it doesn't focus on X Y Z.’ There's no suggestion of anything untoward between the man and the son.

LL: What do you think the chances are that it will now be made into a film?

NA: If someone options a script it’s high. I don't think it should be made into a Kubrick film. It's a Kubrick script but it's not a Kubrick film. And with no direction on there, or was very little direction, there's no way we could have known what he would have done with that, who he would have cast.

LL: Well, having read the script yourself can you think of anybody who you think would be the right people to direct and star in it?

NA: Well, it's a tricky one because this will be a period piece, you know, we're now looking back 60 years. So someone asked me this already, I suggested Darren Aronofsky, who some people think is the closest kind of heir to Stanley Kubrick. Others who might have been considered close to Kubrick are Christopher Nolan or Jonathan Glazer. I tongue-in-cheek suggested Adrian Lyne who did the remake of Lolita in ‘97.

LL: Is there any sense that there might be other hidden Kubrick scripts somewhere out there?

NA: Yeah, I mean, work’s been done on the films that he never made. What would make me suspicious is if someone came out with a film title that you we never heard of, that we didn't even know that he'd been interested in. But there are a bunch of projects he was interested in, lots of possibility things might turn up. I suspect if they do they'll be from the early years because those are the ones scholars dealt with less.

LL: OK. We will leave it there. Professor Abrams, thank you very much.

NA: Thank you.

KG: Nathan Abrams is a film studies professor at Bangor University and the author of Stanley Kubrick: New York Jewish intellectual. We reached him in Bangor, Wales. For more on this or any other story you've heard on today's show go to our website: www.cbc.ca/aih.

[Music: Trance]

Ray Emery Obit

KG: Friends and former teammates have been sharing their memories of Ray Emery today. The former NHL goalkeeper drowned in Hamilton Harbour on Sunday. Police have confirmed that they recovered Mr. Emery's body yesterday afternoon. They describe his death as a case of misadventure. Mr. Emery earned his nickname ‘Razor’ for his fearless style of play, a style that took the Ottawa Senators on a 2007 run all the way to the Stanley Cup Finals. Here's long time sports commentator, and former CFL player Ken Evraire on CBC’s Ottawa Morning.

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KEN EVRAIRE: There was so much to Ray Emery, more than just the hockey player. He was fashionable, he was outspoken, he was smart, he was opinionated. He was able to stay in his own lane at a time in a sport where the mandate has always been to stay in the one lane, the team lane, and he refused to a certain degree. And it's just a significant loss because I always felt that he'd be better served, as much as we love to here in Ottawa, and were fortunate to have him, I wish he would have played in Philadelphia. I wish he played in Florida or New York or somewhere where when he left the rink he was just another person walking down the street, not living under the eye, the microscope of being an Ottawa Senator and being the goalie and the guy who was in net during that Stanley Cup Final.

KG: Sports commentator Ken Evraire speaking about former hockey player Ray Emery on CBC’s Ottawa Morning. Mr. Emery drowned in Hamilton Harbour yesterday. He was 35.

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