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The AIH Transcript for July 9, 2020

Hosts: Nil Koksal and Chris Howden

Prologue

NIL KOKSAL: Hello. I'm Nil Koksal, sitting in for Carol Off.

CHRIS HOWDEN: Good evening. I'm Chris Howden. This is As It Happens.

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CH: Tonight:

NK: We are family. The prime minister says he wanted to inspire young Canadians to contribute. But Conservative MP Michael Cooper says handing a big contract to a charity that paid speaking fees to Mr. Trudeau's mother and brother was not an inspired choice.

CH: Rare bears. And eco-tourism guide turned researcher tells us how he discovered that B.C.'s elusive spirit bear is even rarer than previously thought, and what that means for the efforts to preserve it.

NK: Herd mentality. Many health care workers have long believed unresponsive patients can still hear the voices of loved ones. But proving it was another matter. New research suggests they may be right.

CH: Contact tracing. After combing through the DNA of both Polynesians and Native Americans, our guest says the two groups made contact 800 years ago after an epic ocean voyage.

NK: Stalled. We reached Canada's leading public toilet-ologist about what the pandemic reveals about just how far we have to go to get public washrooms right.

CH: And to kill To Kill a Mockingbird. Some libraries have an overdue message for borrowers "We disinfect the books ourselves, so please don't put them in the microwave." As It Happens. The Thursday Edition. Radio that warns it might seem like a good idea, but it produces diminishing returns.

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Part 1: Trudeau WE Payments

Trudeau WE Payments

Guest: Michael Cooper

CH: For Justin Trudeau, charity began at home, especially the We Charity. "We" is the organization that Mr. Trudeau's government hired to administer its student grants program worth close to a billion dollars. That deal was ditched after questions were raised about his and Sophie Gregoire Trudeau's links to We, including longstanding roles as spokespeople. The cancellation of the contract hasn't stopped opposition MPs and the ethics commissioner from launching investigations. And now our colleagues at the CBC's Parliamentary Bureau are reporting that the charity paid speaking fees to Justin Trudeau's mother and to his brother -- fees that totaled more than a quarter of a million dollars. The We Charity reached out to CBC after it was contacted by the website Canadaland with questions about the fees paid. Michael Cooper is a Conservative MP. We reached him in St. Albert, Alberta.

NK: Mr. Cooper, let's start with this latest reporting from CBC News, our colleague, Janyce McGregor. What do these new details suggests to you?

MICHAEL COOPER: Well, they're very concerning. Indeed, the more we learn, the more troubling this arrangement appears to be. The fact is, is that it was at the outset suspicious that the We organization received a sole source contract worth nearly a billion dollars, an organization that has close ties to the prime minister and his family. And now we learn that it's more than that, that the prime minister's family has received somewhere in the range of 300,000 dollars from We. So it underscores the need to get answers.

NK: Mr. Trudeau's office said in a statement, quote, "The prime minister's relatives engaged with a variety of organizations and support many personal causes on their own accord. The Canada Student Service Grant program is about giving young people opportunities to contribute to their community, it is not about benefits to anyone else." Do you have evidence, Mr. Cooper, that anyone profited unfairly?

MC: Well, there are serious questions about whether or not the prime minister [inaudible] the Conflict of Interest Act. The Conflict of Interest Act under Section Six prohibits any lawmaker or public official to further their private interests or the private interests of a family member or that of another person. In this case, we know that the prime minister and his family have benefited politically, socially, and now financially from the We organization. It's why the ethics commissioner has undertaken an investigation. It's why the Finance Committee is now proceeding with an investigation because Canadians deserve answers.

NK: You yourself said right at the outset of the pandemic that COVID support programs, the money wasn't coming quickly enough. So in the haste and the good intentions potentially to get that money flowing, do you think that that might have caused these problems?

MC: Well, let's be clear, this is an organization that has close ties to the prime minister. And it raises questions. It raises questions that Canadians are entitled to know, including what other organizations could have delivered the program. The government said there was no other organization that could deliver the program. The government said that the civil service was unable to deliver the program. Well, as soon as some of the details about this arrangement with We came forward, the government was very quick to backtrack, and I believe for good reason because it stinks.

NK: Mr. Trudeau says his focus was on giving young people a chance to contribute. How would you and your party have done that? What would you have done differently?

MC: Let's be clear, what we need are answers from the prime minister in terms of how this arrangement was set up. Why did we get a sole source contract? What other organizations were considered? And that really is the heart of the issue. We have a prime minister who has a history of breaching the Conflict of Interest Act.

NK: But what I asked, sir, was what you and your party would have done differently?

MC: Well, one can look at the merits of this program, but that's an entirely separate question from the one that is of interest to me and one that is in of interest to the ethics commissioner, which is to determine whether or not the prime minister contravened the Conflict of Interest Act. And certainly, based upon the information that is available, there is evidence to indicate that he contravened several sections of the Conflict of Interests Act. And it's about ethics and integrity and accountability. And the prime minister has famously stated that sunshine is the best disinfectant. Well, the prime minister should let the sun shine in by answering some basic questions, questions he hasn't answered up until this point. And what's troubling is that the more we learn, the more serious it gets. But the prime minister refuses to answer those questions. I mean, the prime minister has stated repeatedly that this was a decision that was entirely made by the non-partisan civil service. Now, we learned that there are questions about whether or not there were communications between the prime minister's office and We. And we learned today that it was cabinet that made the final decision and that the prime minister didn't recuse himself.

NK: If he had recused himself from the cabinet approval process, would that have alleviated your concerns?

MC: Not necessarily, but it certainly would have -- it's certainly something he should have done. The fact that he didn't recuse himself is tantamount to him to admitting to contravening the Conflict of Interest Act.

NK: Asked earlier, your party had said that there's no need to push for an election. The contract was cancelled. That's enough. Where do things stand now?

MC: Well, things stand with the ethics commissioner undertaking an investigation. The Finance Committee proceeding with hearings. But what is important in order, for example, for the ethics commissioner to do the job that is required is for the prime minister to now waive cabinet confidentiality on all communications concerning the sole source contract to We. The question has been put to the government. It was put to the prime ministry yesterday. He has refused to do so. It's important that he does. If, in fact, he is committed to seeing that all answers are provided and if there really is nothing to see here, then the prime minister should welcome the ethics commissioner's investigation and he should do what he said he would do, which is to cooperate. And part of that cooperation involves waiving all cabinet confidentiality.

NK: Mr. Cooper, I thank you very much for your time. More to come on the story certainly.

MC: Right. Thank you.

CH: Michael Cooper is a Conservative MP. We reached him in St. Albert, Alberta.

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Polynesia People Study

Guest: Alexander Ioannidis

CH: It's well known that Polynesians were masters of navigation. 800 years ago, they were traveling the Pacific in double hulled canoes using the wind waves and stars to find their way and settling islands thousands of kilometres away. But there's long been debate about whether they went the extra mile, so to speak, and reached South America. And a new study published this week in the journal Nature suggests they did. The researchers focused on DNA analysis and sweet potatoes. Alexander Ioannidis is the lead author of the study and a computational geneticist at Stanford University. We reached him in Palo Alto, California.

NK: Mr. Ioannidis, why is it so significant that Polynesians and South Americans made contact and made babies 800 years ago?

ALEXANDER IOANNIDIS: Well, it's interesting just that we can determine the sort of history using genetics. But it's also very interesting from a historical and cultural perspective, there have long been theories that there might have been contact based on some crops and other similarities, cultural similarities. And now we know it's true. And we can start thinking about what effect that might have had on both cultures.

NK: We're talking about sometime around the year 1200. What have you learned about why people would have made that kind of trip?

AI: 1200 which in Europe would have been the time period of the Middle Ages. It's a very interesting period in the Pacific. So this is the time that archeologists estimate Pacific Islanders, Polynesians, were making their longest voyages of exploration, discovery, finding the most remote remaining Polynesian islands. So that's very interesting because it raises the possibility that the Polynesians in sailing across thousands of kilometres of open ocean, which we know they did, may have reached finally not an island, but a continent, South America. And having arrived there, may have had a brief period of small settlement or something, interacted with Native Americans and brought back some DNA from that interaction and also brought back the sweet potato, which is one of those crops I mentioned that has been found in Pacific Islands. And it is Carbon-14 dated long before the Europeans arrived. But it's a new world crop. So it's all been a question of how it got there.

NK: And now you have that answer. We're also talking about a distance of about 6,800 kilometres. So tell me what that trip would have been like.

AI: So what we know of the Polynesian sailing expeditions, they would embark in these -- they're called double hulled sailing canoes. And so you can envision this as sort of like a catamaran. And using these vessels, the Polynesians would pile in all sorts of supplies and they would also take crops and animals with them so that if they found a new island, they would have everything they needed to start a new town and a new village. So they would bring chickens. They would bring, once they had it, the sweet potato and a number of other crops that are found throughout the Polynesian islands. And we know this happened because this is how islands like Easter Island, which are, you know, thousands of kilometres from the nearest inhabited Polynesian islands today, were settled. And we know, for example, Easter Island is around the longitude of Alberta. So we know that the Polynesian have made it that far east. But now down in the southern hemisphere, of course. So why they couldn't have made it the extra leg to the continent, there's really no reason that couldn't have happened.

NK: And you're suggesting that the Polynesians would have travelled east to South America. What makes you think definitively that it wasn't the other way around that South Americans didn't travel west to Polynesians instead?

AI: It's a good question, and it's actually quite a controversy. And we can't say which happened. All we can say is that the Polynesians and Native Americans did reach each other and then they got together and there's combined ancestry. It's possible, although the technology was not the same, there wasn't a culture of long distance voyaging, you know, to discovered lands in the Native American coastal regions. There were boats and Native Americans from Colombia, Ecuador region were sailing up along the coast towards Mesoamerica, Central American in order to trade metals from the Andes, which were very important to Mesoamerican civilizations. So if one of those boats had gotten adrift and had gone out to sea, the currents and the winds would have taken it into exactly the region of Polynesia where we believe this contact occurred -- French Polynesian islands. It's possible that it could have occurred that way too.

NK: You mentioned the sweet potato, humble but very tasty root vegetable. Apart from the fact that it helps answer that question, how did it get there, is there a deeper significance?

AI: There's actually another interesting connection, which is linguistics. So the word for the sweet potato in Polynesian languages is Kumara. It is very closely related to the word used by many Native American groups in northwestern South America and Central America, which is, again, where we found the contact source for the Native American ancestry came from. And this is something using some new computational methods that we designed just for the study, we're able to locate exactly where in the Native American spectrum of the Americas did that come from. So it looks like the story is that, you know, a group of Columbia or Native American Ecuadorian individuals interacted with the Polynesians. They contributed the sweet potato, their word for it, which the Polynesians weren't familiar with so they needed a word. And some of their DNA.

NK: Something else of the many things that are so fascinating about this, the research suggests that it seems to be a single episode of contact. So what makes you confident that it was so limited?

AI: Right. So we see the same Native American source ancestry on these several quite widely separated eastern Polynesian islands. This comes from the same place in South America, the Columbia, Ecuador region. It comes at the same time around 1200. And we can even identify that DNA segments came from some of the same ancestors. That really indicates to us as a single contact event occurred, and then the ancestry from that was spread when probably the last of those islands were settled.

NK: The 800 people whose DNA was tested for this research across the Polynesian islands and in South America, what has this study and the results meant for them?

AI: For the Easter Island natives, the Rapa Nui, we actually went back to Easter Island after the original collection and presented personal results to each of them and explained the ancestry we found for each of them, all before this was published. So it was not a surprise or anything. The community seemed to be very interested and very engaged. Of course, people are interested in learning about their history. And this is an unwritten history. And so it's untold. So we hear that you know a lot about European history and about rulers who recorded their history. But there's incredible things which were done by the rest of humanity and which we weren't able to tell before because they weren't recorded, but now because they are recorded in our own DNA, we are able to tell those stories. And I think that's really exciting.

NK: We're all made better by knowing more about our personal history. But also, I think about the connections we have all around the world. So thank you for this Mr. Ioannidis. It's lovely to speak with you.

AI: Thank you.

CH: Alexander Ioannidis is the lead author of a study published yesterday in the journal Nature. He's a computational geneticist at Stanford University. And we reached him in Palo Alto, California.

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Covid Public Toilets

Guest: Lezlie Lowe

CH: By now, we're all similarly devoted to making sure we follow good hygiene practices, which include washing your hands repeatedly and lengthily. But with the shuttering of malls, libraries and other public spaces, communities across Canada lost many of their publicly accessible bathrooms. That is a major problem for those who now have nowhere to go. Lezlie Lowe is a journalist and the author of No Place to Go: How Public Toilets Fail Our Private Needs. She recently wrote a piece in The Walrus about public toilets in Canada during the pandemic. We reached Ms. Lowe in Halifax.

NK: Ms. Lowe if you left the building that you're in right now in Halifax, how far would you have to walk to find a public bathroom?

LEZLIE LOWE: Oh, my gracious. [Chuckles] I don't even actually know how far I would have to walk. Quite a distance I think. There may be bathrooms that are open in cafes and restaurants close by. But in terms of municipally available washrooms, I'd have to check the online map because I can't think of one right off the top of my head.

NK: That's the issue right across this country, not just in Halifax. Certainly it was already a problem. But then the pandemic hit. So how much more has this pandemic revealed about the issue of public bathrooms in this country?

LL: What we've seen during the pandemic all across the country is that in Canada, we really have a culture of relying on publicly accessible toilets, which is to say toilets that are in private businesses or even in libraries, but basically bathrooms that are inside other places rather than public bathrooms which are bathrooms that would be on streets, paid for by taxes, and just considered part of the kind of basket of goods that we know we need to use our cities safely, like stop signs and sidewalks and benches and trash cans. We know we need all those things. We don't really question paying for those things out of our municipal tax dollars. But bathrooms have really been left out of that in Canada and other parts of North America. And what we've seen with COVID is there's been this really big shut down. And so not only have the few public bathrooms that are in many cities closed, but we've seen all these publicly accessible bathrooms closed. And all of a sudden people are like, "wait a minute, wait a minute" -- who really actually had pretty good access before. And now they're feeling what it's like to have diminished access.

NK: So you're saying it's more necessity than luxury for people right across this country? You've also written that bathrooms are about mobility. Elaborate on that.

LL: Yeah. So cities talk about walkability. They talk about livability. They talk about being pedestrian friendly and cyclist friendly and a lot of talk about people aging in place. None of those things are possible without a reasonable, accessible grid of public bathrooms because bathrooms are needed by everybody. And what we see in cities is you can go farther and you can stay out longer when you have access to that grid of public bathrooms.

NK: What's the holdup then here do you think? You know, in Paris I've seen automated toilets. In Istanbul you can go to a mosque. Or WC's you know, you pay if you a few cents right across Europe, there are all of those examples. What's the hold up here?

LL: We have a really different attitude toward bathrooms. When we're kids we're taught that bathrooms are places where you do private things, which they are. They're also kind of a joke. You know, I wrote a book about public bathroom access. There's only two responses: people are either like "Eww that's gross" or they're kind of like, "ha ha ha." And what happens is when we become adults, we sort of lack the capacity for talking about the basic need to go to the bathroom in a serious way. And I think that is actually born out in the policy decisions of cities. We have these publicly accessible bathrooms that most of us, but not all of us can use in malls and cafes and restaurants. Everybody pretty much makes do. And the people who don't make do, and I interview people in my book who had really, I mean, very profoundly stopped leaving the house because they did not have reliable access to bathrooms, you don't hear from those people anymore, right. Nobody is going to be out in the street screaming that they don't have a toilet. People just make choices to stay home. And I think that municipal leaders and planners don't really do a very good job of listening to people's needs or asking the right questions or even bringing those topics up themselves.

NK: And on the issue of COVID, I suspect some municipal leaders might say, you know, we just can't keep up, you have to clean these facilities, they wouldn't be safe, especially during a pandemic. But in your most recent article about this in The Walrus, you say public bathrooms aren't really riskier than any other high touch public spaces.

LL: So public bathrooms are not particularly high risk. Yes, they can get really dirty, but so can other spaces. Public bathrooms are not a high risk yet for COVID for a couple of reasons. One is that COVID is a respiratory illness. And so what we know is that we need to stay out of small spaces with shared air, with strangers. That's the same as an elevator. Nobody is talking about closing every elevator in every high rise because they're too risky. We're just putting mitigation factors in place. The other issue is high touch surfaces. Yes, there are high touch surfaces in bathrooms, but there are also high touch surfaces entering, you know, malls and public libraries and restaurants. So, yeah, there needs to be enhanced cleaning. The one thing that I would say sets public bathrooms apart when we're talking about COVID is ironically, the fact that we practice hand hygiene in public bathrooms. So that sort of puts I would say a greater onus on cities to do those reasonable control of access and sanitizing solutions, but also keeping bathrooms open because people need to wash their hands more than ever when it comes to this virus.

NK: Do you think the pandemic, as you wrote, will be a tipping point? I find myself asking that question a lot for a lot of the interviews we have done because COVID has laid so many things bare. But will it bring change on this issue do you think?

LL: I hope so. I really really hope so. I can say that, you know, as the person who wrote the book on public toilets, I have never talked about public toilets so much as I have in the last four months. And I think that's fantastic. I think people are really paying attention. They've had their eyes open to the real profound lack of access. And I also think that hygiene has become more important. I think people are understanding the real profound need to wash their hands. And I hope that what goes along with that is a recognition that public bathrooms are really important spaces.

NK: I'll say it again: necessity, not luxury. Lezlie Lowe, thank you so much for this.

LL: Thanks. Anytime.

CH: Lezlie Lowe is the author of No Place to Go: How Public Toilets Fail Our Private Needs. We reached her in Halifax.

[Music]

Burn Book

CH: You take off the plastic cover, you put it in the microwave, you press start, and you immediately forget it's in there until you hear the popping sounds slow down and you smell that distinctive scorched smell. You did it again. Now your whole house reeks of a burned copy of The Da Vinci Code. The only smell worse as a microwave Fifty Shades book. The thing is, don't microwave books. Usually that goes without saying. But now is not usual. Before the pandemic, a borrowed crime novel seemed like a fun escape. Now every library whodunit is a who's sneezed on it, so it makes sense to be a little wary. Better safe than sorry, except sorry books aren't microwave safe. After a number of incidents, libraries in the U.S. are asking their borrowers to please not nuke them. For one thing, as the Largo Public Library in Florida reminded people last week, that is not how microwaves work. For another, library books now contain RFID chips. These chips contain metal. So if you chuck it in the microwave, that copy of Little Fires Everywhere will become a little fire in there. Most important, the libraries are already insuring the books are disinfected. There's no need to steam your steamy erotic thriller or pot boil your potboiler. And there's definitely no need to microwave a book. And if you're afraid to handle what you've taken out, well, don't nuke it till you've tried it.

[Music]

Part 2: B.C.'s revered spirit bear is rarer than anyone thought, says First Nations-led study

Spirit Bear Genetics

Guest: Douglas Neasloss

CH: When Douglas Neasloss first started asking questions about Spirit Bears, he often had a hard time finding answers. It turned out frank conversations about the elusive white coated black bears were almost as rare as the bears themselves. But now Mr. Neasloss is leading a new conversation about spirit bears and how to protect them. And in a study published this week, he's helped to shine a light on the true scarcity of the spirit bear genome. Douglas Neasloss is the resource stewardship director of the Kitasoo/Xai'xais First Nation. We reached him in Klemtu, B.C..

NK: Mr. Neasloss, just how rare is the gene that gives spirit bears their distinctive snow white coats?

DOUGLAS NEASLOSS: Yeah, I would say the spirit bear is extremely rare. I would say it's probably one of the rarest bears on the planet. And through our latest research, we found out it's a lot more rare than we thought. And I think, you know, in the past, there used to be guesstimates about 400. But this new study shows that there are probably fewer than that.

NK: How did you go about finding that out? What did you do exactly?

DN: Well, we launched a bear study probably 8 years ago now. And we set up these non-invasive snags where basically what we do is we put a big stem pile on the middle, a bunch of sticks, and we put a bunch of barb wire around that stem pile. All the bears would come in, go underneath the barb wire, and they would basically leave a tuft of their hair. And then we would send that hair into the lab and analyze. We could find out whether in that piece of fur, whether that bear carried the recessive gene in older produced spirit bears.

NK: What did that smell like?

DN: The scent is...is not the most pleasant smelling. Some of it could smell like fish. It is a mix of different things, but extremely stinky.

NK: How many spirit bears have you seen in your time as eco-tourism guide in B.C.?

DN: That's hard. It varies every year. Probably my best year I saw 11 in one year. And some seasons, sometimes you'll see zero. So they're extremely rare. And right place, right time. And so it varies.

NK: Was there a time that you doubted their existence?

DN: Yes. Yeah. When I first started guiding, I remember it was my very first tourism trip in early 2000s. And I remember the guy I was working with at the time said, Go off and look for the spirit bear. I had a bunch of clients with me, our first tourism trip. And I just thought he was making up stories. I had never heard about it in my community. My community never really talked about it. And I thought they were just pulling my leg. And so I was out there kind of walking in the forest. I just thought, they are pulling my leg. And so I went off and just went for a walk in the woods. And and a few minutes into the trek, I basically almost came face to face with a spirit bear. There he was walking across the forest with a salmon in his mouth. And he later laid down about 50 feet in front of me and started eating the salmon. And yes, I'll never never forget that moment. I just never heard stories of it. And so when it came in front of me and it laid down, it was so neat because the sun came out. And there's the spirit bear, pure white coat and he was just eating the salmon. And you can see all the blood on his face in the sun. That was certainly a very magical moment and kind of helped me sticking with tourism. And for me, it was that unforgettable moment.

NK: Yeah, it's clearly seared onto your brain every moment and it seems quite magical. And I understand that you've actually had an experience in terms of seeing a bear hunted and what was left when you were out with a tour group.

DN: Yeah, and that's what really propelled me. You know, as I started tourism, I started tourism in the late 90s, and my job was to kind of help build an eco-tourism operation. And we had plants from all over the world. And I remember my first day there, we were walking and I saw this dead bear. We saw something in the river. We walked over and looked and sure enough, there was a grizzly bear. He had his head chopped off and its fur was gone and the paws were gone. And so someone had just taken it for a trophy. They left the rest of the bear there. And it also really kind of inspired me to get more involved and start doing more work and started speaking for these animals that unfortunately don't have a voice.

NK: For people who don't know, what is the significance of these bears to your own Kitasoo/Xai'xais, First Nation, but also other local Indigenous people?

DN: Yeah. The spirit bear is very important in our part of the region. There's a few communities that revere it as a very sacred animal. We use it as part of our culture, part of our song and dance group. We have our Spirit Bear group, that's named after it. And also, I would say it's not just important culturally, but also in terms of economics. I mean, we've built a tourism lodge and this is one of the only places in the world that you can come and view spirit bears because -- Klemtu and our neighbouring community. And so, yeah, we take guests from all around the world to go and view the spirit bears.

NK: That significance, though, and how special spirit bears are -- was there a reluctance because of that to speak about them and to look into them?

DN: Well, you know, in the past, I mean I remember after I had my first encounter with the spirit bear. And I remember I came back to Klemtu and I talked to the elders and asked them to tell me a bit more about the spirit bear. I asked them why. And everybody talked about it. And so the eldest said they were worried at the time of the fur trade -- you know, they're very worried that people would haunt them. And so they never really spoke of it and didn't want people to know about it. So it was kind of a big secret. Up until, you know, kind of the late 90s, nobody really knew what was the spirit bear. But today's day and age, you know, I think we are starting to shift our focus and tend to be a bit more vocal with it, because I think the bears -- they are under a number of threats. There's still issues around the forest [inaudible], major decline in salmon and they're still trophy hunting and resident hunting of black bears which contribute to recessive gene that produces these bear, global warming. So there's been a lot of different changes. And obviously we want to make sure that we protect them.

NK: So is your sense of that this research that you've done will actually help protect the spirit bears better?

DN: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I just think that there's a lot to find that's out there and there's a lot of people that make decisions on how many bears can hunt, forestry issues, commercial fishing. And they're facing so many threats. And, you know, there's not a lot of science, there's no gum boots on the ground when it comes to government science are here so we thought we would drive the science ourselves. We would do the science -- it is all peer reviewed science. But we also merged our science with First Nations knowledge and hopefully are able to provide some strong information to decision makers so we can do more to protect them. And so hopefully it reaches up to the policies or the Wildlife Act. And hopefully we can make better decisions.

NK: So what's the next step for you now that this research is done?

DN: Well, until today, science is just information. I mean, we're still going to have to take this back to the government tables and we want to push for stronger protections. So we want to look at new protected areas in protecting spirit bears, whether that's Indigenous protected areas, it could be stewardship areas, it could be a conservancy. But, you know, I still think we are in the early stages. I think we're going to take the science and go and hopefully talk about new protected areas.

NK: Mr. Neasloss thank you for sharing some of the secrets of the spirit bears with us. I really appreciate your time.

DN: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

CH: Douglas Neasloss is the elected chief councillor of the Kitasoo/Xai'Xais First Nation. We reached him in Klemtu, B.C.. And to see some photos of spirit bears, you can visit our website: cbc.ca/aih.

[Music]

Gerry O’Neil

CH: Stanley Park in Vancouver has a traffic problem. And at least one regular user worries that if it's not fixed, somebody is going to get hurt. Gerry O'Neil runs a business taking people on park tours in a horse drawn carriage. For several months during the pandemic, the roads in the park were open only to cyclists. But recently, Mr. O'Neil was able to return with his carriage, along with other vehicles. The carriage and the cars share a lane. Cyclists are in the other. Gerry O'Neil explained the chaos that has caused to Gloria Macarenko, host of CBC Vancouver's On the Coast.

GERRY O'NEIL: So now that we're back in business, since last Saturday, it's been a huge eye-opener. We have lineups, people waiting behind us. So it's frustrating to tell you the truth.

GLORIA MACARENKO: Well, tell me more. So lineups of people in vehicles behind you -- you mean behind the carriage?

GERRY O'NEIL: Correct. We basically have four places that we could pull over during our tour. And one was taken away for no reason. So they decided that because it was on the right side of the road, you know, they didn't really do an opening for us to pull over there. So we have three paces. So generally speaking, on an average, people have got to wait about 10 to 15 minutes behind us. So the traffic, the speed limit used to be 30 km in the park. Now, where we are, it's 5 km because when people get stuck behind us, I mean, that's the only way they have to do is to either wait or take over the bike lane, which we've seen this happen quite a bit, which makes it very dangerous for the cyclists.

GLORIA MACARENKO: Well, how dangerous is it for your horses?

GERRY O'NEIL: Well, the horses -- I shouldn't really say I'm not concerned about the horses -- the horses pull the carriage. So to have an accident, which is just one waiting to happen, it's most likely the cyclist that will be taken over because when vehicular traffic merge or take over the cones or move into the bike lane, the first one to go probably will be the cyclists. I mean, what happens if somebody is stuck behind us on a Saturday afternoon and the ambulance is trying to get to the totem poles and somebody is having a heart attack? How are they going to deal with this? I mean, are they going to go on the grass? Which, you know, it's where they are going to get stuck or they're going to take over the bike lane. I mean, the whole thing hasn't really been thought out. So I think it's time right now to scrap what they were doing, sit down together and trying to work something more, I would say, palatable for all. Not just for me, for everybody.

CH: Gerry O'Neil, the owner of Stanley Park Horse Drawn Tours, speaking to CBC Vancouver host Gloria Macarenko.

[Music]

Unresponsive Patient Study

Guest: Elizabeth Blunden

CH: In the final moments before a loved one dies, there's so much you might want to say. And now new research suggests that if you use that time to share those last words, they'll be heard even if the person is unresponsive. A newly published study by UBC looked at patients who were near the end of their lives and were unresponsive. Elizabeth Blunden is the lead researcher. She recently graduated from UBC with a PhD in psychology. We reached her in Halifax.

NK: Ms. Blunden, what made you want to look into whether unresponsive patients can actually hear what's being said to them?

ELIZABETH BLUNDEN: The research interest comes from many years of health care workers who've worked with dying patients, who've noticed that their patients seem to be comforted by the sounds or words of their loved ones, even when they are no longer able to communicate with them. This has generated this belief that, quote unquote, "hearing is the last to go." And so we had a hospice palliative care physician approach us trying to actually understand or wanted to know if there's any neuroscience to support that belief. So that's where the study comes from.

NK: What kinds of things were they noticing? How were they getting the sense that these patients were comforted?

EB: I think there'd be like subtle physical changes to the patients, just this subtle appearance of calm, nothing over or super clear that they were actually like understanding or engaging it with what was being said to them.

NK: How did you carry out the study?

EB: So the task was, first we collected data from a bunch of young, healthy participants and we played them sequences of tones. They were patterns of tones. And we asked participants indicate every time they heard a change in the pattern. And what we did is look at all of the brain signals that were generated by the young, healthy controlled participants and picked out which ones almost all of the participants generated in response to the changes in the tone. And then we played the exact same sequences to hospice patients, both when they were responsive and again, when they became unresponsive. This was done so that we could be reasonably sure if we saw any of these signals that we saw amongst the controlled participants that would indicate normal functioning, normal brain functions among the unresponsive hospice patients.

NK: If they could hear, do you think they can also understand?

EB: No, we cannot confirm that hearing implies understanding in this case. The data that we collected showed us that the hospice patients all appear to generate at least some of the brain signals that we observed among the controlled participants. However, not all of them were measured among the unresponsive hospice patients. And there are some signals that we know from the literature are really good indications of awareness. And we didn't see really clear representation of those signals among the hospice patients. However, there were some potential glimmers of it among the hospice patients. So it's tough to say, given the data that we collected. Keep in mind, this sample is very very small. So there's only five hospice patients, unresponsive hospice patients, in the study. And so it's tough to know anything definitively about awareness. But there is some potential that some hospice patients may be able to understand. But we just can't confirm that, given the data that we have.

NK: How will you try to get at that? How could you measure that?

EB: So currently, there's no clear unified theory of how the brain produces consciousness. However, we can use certain electrophysiological or certain brain signals that are reasonable proxies for awareness like attention signals -- that's mostly what I work with. And also, some of the research that I'm hoping to do in the future would help to figure out if even if some of the signals that we did measure among the hospice patients, they may actually be able to indicate awareness. That question is still out there. We haven't answered that question yet. So there's a few ways that we could potentially do that.

NK: What do you think family members should take from your study?

EB: I think they should be really encouraged that the brain during this transition period from life to death is still processing sound. While I can't make any definitive claims about awareness, I think it's really encouraging that sound is still being registered by the brain in some capacity. And I think it's also pretty encouraging because, you know, we were able to identify this in individual subjects, which I think is a good sign that for the most part, these cortical functions, these auditory processing functions are still active, even if maybe in a limited capacity. So I think family members should continue to be encouraged to communicate with their loved ones at the bedside for as long as possible, even when they're no longer able to respond to them. And this can include in-person conversation, on the phone, playing their favourite piece of music. Anything like that to provide support and comfort.

NK: There are such difficult moments, especially now with COVID-19, with so many people not being able to be close to their loved ones. You mentioned the phone, but this will help people, I think. So thank you. Thank you for your time Ms. Blunden.

EB: Well, thank you so much for having me. It's really exciting.

CH: Elizabeth Blunden is the lead researcher on a study that suggests patients at the end of life may still be able to hear. It's published in Scientific Reports. We reached Elizabeth Blunden in Halifax.

[Music]

Jasper

VOICE: [SOUNDCLIP: Oh Jaspy boy! Unbelievable Jaspy! Eh!]

CH: That's what it sounded like on Sunday when a B.C. couple was reunited with their dog Jasper after a day's long search. The 140 pound Great Pyrenees went missing from Mary Hummel's home in Castlegar last week. After which she put out a plea for help on social media. Jasper is not a small dog. So Ms. Hummel was hoping someone would spot him. And on Friday, someone did. Jasper was more than 10 kilometres away from his owner's home on the other side of the Columbia River. And throughout the weekend, people kept on spotting Jasper on both sides of the river because he kept swimming back and forth across it. Mary Hummel spoke to the CBC about how she felt on Sunday when she was beginning to give up hope that she would find her dog.

MARY HUMMEL: Long story short, we had so many sightings, so many calling and, you know, all to no avail. And then finally, somebody asked if he could drone it. And we're like, yeah sweet. So we went back and was she was trying to drone through this rugged forest. And like during the day, we had no sightings. This was Sunday. So this is the third day. And I remember looking at this river and just crying my eyes out because I was like this, there's no way this dog can swim this river again because it's just so awful. And then we got some calls later on in the day, and this guy with the drone went out but that was still unsuccessful. And at that time, my husband, we both thought that he had probably died and both of us were just like, you know, just praying and crying. And he is like, you know, God, we need a miracle. This place that he is at is so incredibly dense and so scary. And he's probably going to do the river again and he's going to die. And we need a miracle where he just comes right in the middle of the road. And so anyway, so the drone thing -- we weren't able to find him by a drone. But we were there right at that time. And we were driving down the road and we had a guy with us who had to take the coordinates for the drone to try to find the dog. And my husband just said, you know what? This isn't Hollywood. It's not like this dog is going to just walk in the middle of the road and run towards us. And 60 seconds later, [chuckles] right there on the road there was Jasper.

CHRIS WALKER: And when you got out of the car and called him, then what happened?

MARY HUMMEL: Then he ran towards us. But he didn't run fast because in between his toes were -- you know, he was in pretty rough shape. But he ran towards us. That was a miracle. It was a miracle.

CH: That was Mary Hummel speaking today with the CBC's Chris Walker, the host of Daybreak South in Kelowna.

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July 9, 2020 Episode Transcript

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