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The Current Transcript for November 01, 2024

Host: Susan Ormiston

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

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CUBAN VOICE: These last few days have been really bad. This system doesn't work. There is too many power cuts and not enough food.

SUSAN ORMISTON: Cubans are hungry and in darkness. October saw the worst blackouts in recent history in that country, and there's a scarcity of water. Coming up in 30 minutes, we speak to a journalist who lives in Havana with his family about the spiralling crisis and why the island nation is struggling to climb out of it. And then...

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KATE NEVILLE: Idleness has been percolating for me as this kind of concept that holds incredible political power, even as it's so denigrated, even as we have this kind of move towards the need for constant productivity.

SUSAN ORMISTON: We're all so busy working or surviving or striving to be somehow better. But Kate Neville tells us to chill. It's good for the soul, she says, and can even help productivity. Coming up in an hour, the author, Kate Neville, makes the case for going to seed. But we begin with need a doubling in demand over five years would be celebrated in most businesses. But for food banks, it's a crisis. Good morning. I'm Susan Ormiston sitting in for Matt Galloway, and this is The Current.

Food bank usage skyrockets

Guests: Jesse Rosenberg, Mike Von Massow

[Music: Theme]

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FOOD BANK VOICE 1: It's not easy. It's not easy to ask for something so basic as food.

SO: More Canadians than ever are having to turn to a food bank.

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FOOD BANK VOICE 2: I'm really grateful for it because our salary, it's not enough to, to buy our food right from the stores. I work in landscaping. My wife. It's also struggling. She works in a kitchen. We hope that next year can be better.

FOOD BANK VOICE 3: We are struggling to pay our rent and we don't have enough funds to buy food for, as a family. That's why we are using the food bank. But we are doing our best to find better job, to find more job, additional job.

FOOD BANK VOICE 4: I was on long term disability. That's why I'm here, because I have three young kids that's been really, really great and like help out.

SO: These people in Richmond, B.C. are part of a record breaking number of food bank users across our country. In its annual report, Food Banks Canada says the number of Canadians using food banks has doubled in the past five years. And this March alone, there were more than 2 million visits to food banks in the country. Kirstin Beardsley is the CEO of Food Banks Canada.

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KIRSTIN BEARDSLEY: I can't stress this enough. We need to see food bank use come down. One of the shocking findings in the report is that 30% of food banks in the last year reported running out of food before the demand was met. The food bank system was not built for this level of demand. We were never meant to see this amount of need in the country and our system won't be able to accommodate it. And it really is going to be government policy at all levels that helps reduce the needs.

SO: Food Banks Canada is calling on governments to introduce new measures like rent assistance and a monthly payment to low income groups in order to help offset the skyrocketing cost of living. Jesse Rosenberg is the director of policy for the Wellesley Institute, a non-profit that proposes policy solutions on health and health equity related issues. Jesse, good morning.

JESSE ROSENBERG: Good morning.

SO: When you hear people talk about going to food banks and that twice as many rely on them now, what do you think of?

JESSE ROSENBERG: So, the first thing that I think of is how shocking it is and how difficult and how dark it is that we're not finding ways to solve this problem. And the second thing I think about is because of what we work on is around their health. So this is, you know, going to cause short-term health problems and also long-term problems with their health and health equity over their whole lifespan when they can't get healthy food, on top of the stress and the difficulty of having to go through that.

SO: It does suggest that current policies are failing. They're not helping enough to allow people to cope with higher food prices.

JESSE ROSENBERG: I think that it does. I think Food Banks Canada is absolutely right around their emphasis on income security and housing affordability, which I'm sure you've covered before on your show. We think those are, those are huge parts of this problem. But we have another idea, too.

SO: And I want to hear about that. It involves the National nutritious food basket. Just remind us again what that food basket is.

JESSE ROSENBERG: Sure. So, the nutritious food basket is a list of healthy foods. It's maintained by Health Canada, and it's what Statistics Canada uses when they determine what the market basket measure of poverty is. So, it's the federal government already realises that, that you know, nutritious food basket, that list of healthy foods is something that everybody needs to be able to afford.

SO: So, what are you suggesting? How differently to treat food prices in that food basket, for example?

JESSE ROSENBERG: And so, what we're suggesting is we're trying to start a conversation around having grocers be required to make those, that list. So, one of each kind of item on that list available at a price that everybody in their region could afford. So, when you go into your regular grocery store, there would be an egg, a brown flour, an apple, one type of each of those things that would be set at a really affordable price. So, the grocers would still be able to set prices for almost everything in their store. We don't think we need to regulate the cost of imported cheese or the cost of chocolate or anything like that. But we do think that it is part of the cost of doing business. And as part of their social responsibility, you know, we should be able to know that everybody can buy at least those healthy goods to, you know, help them with some of the problems that this report highlights.

SO: So, putting a maximum price on certain foods, I mean, how would you just decide what brand?

JESSE ROSENBERG: So, we think we can leave that up to them. We think that that would be absolutely fine. I mean, you could presumably deal with that down the road if there were, you know, real problems being created. But the idea would be that, you know, there's a bunch of apples when you walk into your grocery store. There's, you've got lots of choices. The idea would be that they would make one of those would have to be available at a price that we would know everybody could afford.

SO: It's interesting. Have you had any response from grocers about it?

JESSE ROSENBERG: Sure, we have. So, I think the first response and I think it's understandable with the way, you know, some public discourse is ongoing is this isn't our fault. Don't blame u-- for, don't blame us for this. We didn't, we didn't do this. We don't control the whole system. But I think it's gone over reasonably well when we agree and we do understand that this is a problem for everybody to solve together. We think it'd be great to see government take a leadership role on bringing grocers, producers, suppliers, distributors all together to, you know, try to solve this problem.

SO: Is this being tried in other places? I mean, it sounds complicated. It does sound like a solution in part, but surely there's problems with it, too. Where else has it been tried?

JESSE ROSENBERG: So we haven't seen this in this. Exactly. Tried. So France has stepped in in a way that we're not used to into foods. And I mean, as you know, food is already heavily regulated. We have, you know, food safety rules. We have a lot of things around that. France, what they've done is they have started to look at pricing. And they've started negotiating with grocers to make sure that price increases reflect, you know, what they would call the grocers' actual inputs, what the costs are to the grocers. So that's, you know, that's related. It's a little bit different. It's not targeted specifically at health, and it's not about setting a price that's affordable for some goods. It's about making sure that, you know, it's sort of reasonable. And I think the other international example we're seeing that we're excited to hear more about in the future is from south of the border where Vice President Harris is talking about capping the cost to households of things like prescription drugs and child care. So, it's looking at we have to figure out how to make sure everybody can get the things that they need in a way that's affordable for them. And so, we think both of those are related to what we're talking about today.

SO: Jesse, price controls has a controversial history. We've seen it tried in a number of places, notably in the 1970s under U.S. President Richard Nixon, which ended up driving up prices of gasoline, for example. I saw one figure up 47%. How, how would your plan be different from those experiences?

JESSE ROSENBERG: So for one thing, we think it's smaller. We're just looking at a specific list of healthy foods. And we also think that the thing to do is for government to bring everybody together through the supply chain to figure out how they can make this work for this, you know, small number of types of food. And as we discussed earlier, one specific thing, you know, from that list to make sure that something is affordable, not every apple, not every egg, not every brown flower. But everybody's got to be able to afford those things [SO: Is this...] to be healthy.

SO: Yeah. Is this moving the government's responsibility or the government's solution out of the equation? Is that part of this?

JESSE ROSENBERG: No, I don't think so, because I think we'd expect them to have to show some leadership here and probably to have to regulate. We'd love it if the industry wanted to come together and figure this out itself. I think that this is part of their social responsibility. They make and move and produce and sell food. And they need to make sure that everybody can actually afford enough of it to be healthy and to survive. But, you know, we don't think that that's necessarily where that's going. So, we think there still would be a role. And then the government still absolutely has a role on the other areas that, you know, Food Banks Canada has identified around income security and housing.

SO: Yeah, I mean, I assume that you can, the government is used to regulating, you know, government income supplements and things like that, partly based on food.

JESSE ROSENBERG: Yeah, they are. So that is in the market basket measure, which is not related, but I think it is hopefully considered in, you know, lots of those measures. You know, in Ontario there is a special diet allowance when you have special needs and things like that. So, they are, they're certainly, you know, aware of it. But this is a different, this is a different approach. This would be them. You know, they're very involved in the market. They set the rules for the market, but this would be them adding a new rule around making sure everybody can afford nutritious food.

SO: Jesse, what's at stake if the need for food banks continues to grow in our country?

JESSE ROSENBERG: Well, I think we're hearing from food banks that they're have their own crisis. They don't just have the crisis they're raising here for their clients. They're starting to really struggle to keep up. But the long-term concern here has to be health. You know, we're seeing the return around the world in wealthy countries of scurvy, of other diseases that can just as, that are about nutrition. This exacerbates other health problems. You know, this is a huge health and a huge health equity issue. And people who can't get healthy food are going to get sick more. They're going to cost us more in our health care system down the line and they're going to die younger. And that's not acceptable. That's not fair. And we need to move to address this crisis.

SO: Jesse, thank you for stirring the conversation for us.

JESSE ROSENBERG: Thank you.

SO: Jesse Rosenberg is the director of policy for the Wellesley Institute, an independent think tank that researches and proposes policy solutions on health and health equity-related issues.

SO: Mike Von Massow is a food economist and professor at the University of Guelph. Good morning, Mike.

MIKE VON MASSOW: Good morning, Susan.

SO: So you've been listening to Jess's proposal to regulate affordable prices on certain foods. What do you think?

MIKE VON MASSOW: Well, I think, let me start by saying I agree 100% that we are having an affordability crisis in this country, and particularly for people that are at the low end of the income scale. I'm just not sure that regulating prices is practical, especially in the short run. You know, Jesse talked about getting the whole supply chain involved, but this isn't just a Canadian supply chain. You know, broccoli, peas, although they're frozen on the list, our items that are on the list. Cucumbers are on the list. So, there are things that aren't even coming from Canada that get more expensive in the winter anyway. And so, who, who is supposed to bear the, the cost? You know, when Russia invades Ukraine and wheat prices go up, are the grocers supposed to absorb that? Do we go further back the supply chain and make everyone contribute? I think it's, I think it's a good idea. I think if we do it for everybody, then we diminish the, we diminish the value of it. Clearly, I'm in a position while I've felt the pinch of higher food prices and I've changed my behaviour. I'm probably not the one who needs the support here and this sort of price initiative would give everyone that benefit. How do we regulate it? How much do they have to have on hand? You know, one, one type of apple when they run out, do they...? Which we've seen in store. So, I think it's not practical. I think also that it spreads the benefit beyond people perhaps who need it. And so, while I think we need to do some things like income support, food security is an income issue in this country. There's lots of food available that perhaps income support and everyone, that perhaps income support would be a better approach to this than trying to fix prices.

SO: Just on one more note on that. Is there a role at all for any kind of price controls on certain grocery items as they continue to go up?

MIKE VON MASSOW: Well, I think if you look at what France did, France has not said, "Here's what prices are." They've asked grocers and, and other members of the supply chain to justify those price increases. And so what that, what they're saying is: Can we look at, at a basket of goods and, and say that those prices are reaso--, reasonable is a subjective term, that those price increases are reflective of changes in the prices. It changes in the costs for those things. [SO: Yeah.] And I think, I think, yeah, we could look at that. You know, we've seen people point a lot of fingers at the grocers. And, and while I think the grocers are not perfect corporate citizens, I think there's lots of evidence that they haven't contributed to these price increases. And, and perhaps they could pay a share of decreasing for some things. But the truth is we... The prices are going up because costs are going up across the system. So, climate change is another one. Extreme weather has been a significant contributor.

SO: And will be. You know, just to put some detail to what you just mentioned, Loblaws, Galen Weston was put in the spotlight recently with accusations that they're contributing to food inflation. But he, he was testifying, we heard it, that, you know, they only make a dollar in profit on a $25 grocery bill. Is there any rule that big grocers have to make a dent in food affordability?

MIKE VON MASSOW: Well, I think, I think, you know, we, grocers do play a role in food of affordability. We see that there are even for the same products, there are a variety of places. We're also seeing some of the big grocers introduce more discount lines as a way for prices to be cheaper for people who go to those stores. Now, we have access issues. We have some neighbourhoods that have only got access to one type of grocery. So, I think grocers are working hard, increasing their line, increasing the budget lines that they have, increasing the, the cheaper stores which offer less variety as a way to reduce costs. So, I think we all have a role to play. I think pointing the fingers exclusively at the grocers and saying you guys have to offer things cheaper maybe isn't the best way to do it and is going to be tough to do practically.

SO: The CEO of Food Banks Canada has another idea of how the federal government could help a change in the GST rebate. Here's Kirstin Beardsley.

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KIRSTIN BEARDSLEY: We're suggesting that it be adapted to be a monthly payment and that it be increased so that folks who are living on low incomes can pay for their essentials.

SO: Do you think that could go some way towards helping people be able to buy groceries?

MIKE VON MASSOW: Yeah. I mean, notwithstanding the issue of affordability for the government, I think that that is a much more practical way of addressing the affordability crisis we have. Well, we've seen in some centres, rents come down. It's not just food that is, that is affecting them. And, and the proposal by Food Banks Canada also targets it at those with the greatest need. People on fixed incomes who aren't getting adjustments for cost of living. People who are on minimum wage who we haven't seen adjust to, that we haven't seen adjustments to, to these inflationary pressures. That sort of approach would directly affect the people who need it the most and give them, give them the ability to, to stretch their budget across the things that they're choosing: Food, utilities and those sorts of things. So, I think it's a much more workable solution.

SO: Are there other things that you think the government could do that would be effective to help make food prices affordable?

MIKE VON MASSOW: Well, I think it's very difficult, if we look at what's causing these food price increases. Even the Bank of Canada says it's not the grocers. You know, the war in Ukraine, government can't do a lot of that, extreme weather. So, I think looking at ways to build the resilience and diversify our supply, I think it's a great thing to increase local production. But if we have a crop failure due to a, due to a drought or extreme, other extreme weather, then we could see shortages. So, diversifying and increasing the resilience of the supply chain so that we have multiple, multiple sources of foods when we have, when we have extreme weather, I think is, is important. I think also food literacy is profoundly important. I'm going to sound like a grumpy old guy here, but, you know, when I was in high school, we got basic food preparation skills. And so in the winter, when broccoli is more expensive, you know, maybe we could shift to root vegetables. And we know Canadians are very much creatures of habit. Not everyone has the skills to provide themselves resilience when, when prices, when prices disproportionately go up for some things, as they do seasonally, too. So I think food literacy is a profoundly important thing in curriculums. And, and also, as I said, the direct payments.

SO: Just in the minute we have left, those are long term, big picture. You're an economist. We need to hear these things. But what about the short term? What do food banks do, and what do the Canadians who can't afford a food basket do?

MIKE VON MASSOW: Well, I empathise and I think, as we saw last year, the ability of the government to, to augment a program that already exists, the GST tax credit. Now, clearly there are some people who are unhoused and who might not have access, but, but it provides a mechanism that we could institute right now to provide a price, to provide income relief to those that need it most.

SO: All right, Mike, thank you so much for your thoughts.

MIKE VON MASSOW: Well, thank you for having me, Susan. Have a great day.

SO: You, too. Mike Von Massow is a food economist and professor at the University of Guelph.

SO: The CBC News is next. Then [Music: Theme fading in], power has been restored in most of Cuba after an island-wide blackout that spanned several days and left more than 10 million Cubans without electricity. The grid failure is stirring up fear about the nation's failings and its future. That's coming up in six minutes. I'm Susan Ormiston, and you're listening to The Current.

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Deeper issues reflected by Cuba’s repeated power outages

Guest: Ruaridh Nicoll

SO: I'm Susan Ormiston and you're listening to The Current. Cuba has been dealing with a series of countrywide blackouts in recent weeks. And the longer people were left without power, well, the harder life got. Some took to the streets in protest.

[Cubans protesting on the streets]

SO: And you can hear that woman saying that the food in her fridge is going bad, and they have no cold water and her children are struggling. It took more than four attempts to restart the country's generators and keep the power on. Ruaridh Nicoll is a Cuba correspondent with The Guardian newspaper. He's in Havana. Ruaridh, good morning.

RUARIDH NICOLL: Hi, how are you?

SO: I'm good. Ruaridh, what's behind these islandwide blackouts?

RUARIDH NICOLL: Well, the first thing that's behind it is many, many years of lack of investment. We're looking at very, very antiquated machinery that's working to its limit. And for years now, it hasn't provided enough electricity to cover the whole island anyway. That was, to that was added to some bad weather that stopped fuel coming in and a general lack of fuel because the Cuban government is running out of money.

SO: What are people forced to do? I mean, describe what these blackouts feel like. What, what stops and how do they manage?

RUARIDH NICOLL: Well, it's interesting because in truth, when it first happened, I was surprised that the world got so interested because people here in certain parts of Cuba have been enduring up to 20 hours of blackout a day anyway. There's been scheduled blackouts. There's been unscheduled blackouts. If you remember, in July 2021, there was, there were protests on the street. It shocked the country because such protests are very, very unusual. Those were due to blackouts. So, people are very used to blackouts. But what I discovered quite quickly is there's a very, very marked difference between 20 or even 20 hours of blackouts and 24 hours of blackout. It's unsettling in the extreme to lose power for that long. And more to the point, if you live in the Caribbean country where the, you know, the heat is on all the time, you can lose your food, you can't sleep at night. And the water systems break down as well, which oddly and personally I find more disconcerting not having water than not having electricity.

SO: Indeed, in this latest one, the worst. How did you and your family adapt?

RUARIDH NICOLL: Oh, yes. This is by far and away the worst. This was terrible. My family, we adopted, I you know, I'm Scottish, so I'm [SO: Tough] not suggesting that, you know, I'm Scottish, so I found it very, very unsettling. I'm not used to this, but however, I live a very privileged life here. You know, I have outside money. I do live with a Cuban family. I live, my wife is Cuban. I live a privileged life. I could cope. I find it very, very unsettling. But for the people that don't have outside money, who are the people that live on state salaries here? It's terrifying.

SO: Just explain to me what happened to the water.

RUARIDH NICOLL: So, the water system is equally antiquated. So what happens is if you're trying to restart an electricity grid, it's a very, I, I've only just discovered this, but it's a very, very complicated process. You require enormous amounts of power just to get one of these things going on at these big electricity plants going. So, there are surges in the system. This, this causes pumps, the antiquated pumps to break down, surges in water supply that break antiquated pipe, pipes. And this meant that water supplies pretty much, or we didn't get the water back till about four days after we got the electricity back. [SO: Gosh.] And as I was saying in an, in a diary I wrote for a British publication, I actually went, I'm personal. I'm friends with the British ambassador. And I phoned him up at one stage and said: Could I come and charge my computer at the British residence? Which is a very, very fancy, beautiful colonial building with this wonderful swimming pool that was designed by a banker in the 1890s to the, to the, along the lines of a temple to Aphrodite. And he told me his generator broke and had blown up the day it started as well, and that he was, that meant he couldn't pump water from the well and that meant that they were flushing the loos with water from this beautifully fancy swimming pool, which I have to say, I enjoyed that bit of news enough that it actually got me through the weekend. But [SO: It's] I'm laughing. For most Cubans, this is not in any way funny.

SO: No. And not seemingly solvable at this time. I mean, tell us about the economy in Cuba. The power and water problems are a symptom of that.

RUARIDH NICOLL: Yes. I mean, this is, this is due to years and years, as I said, of years and years of underinvestment. The problem is that Cuba is basically bankrupt now. It can't afford to feed its own people. It doesn't have the foreign earnings that allows it to buy the food for its and import the food for its own people now. Depending on who you talk to, there are various reasons for that. But this is one of the world's last. I mean, I have to hesitate because obviously I'm talking to you as Canadians, and the Canadians know more about Cuba than almost anyone else, because every time I meet a Canadian, they've usually been here for sort of 20 times on holiday. But this is obviously a central, centrally organised, centrally planned communist state, one of the very last that exist. That meant that when they wanted to buy food, no private individual could do that. The state would buy the food, it would import it, it would put it in things called bodegas where people could get their rations of meat, of rice, of beans. That is all breaking down. And they haven't been able to afford to import these things that bodegas are beginning to empty. So, they have in the last two years allowed small private businesses, those small private businesses and they're importing. But that food is very, very expensive. At the same time, you have inflation. The inflation means that people's state salaries, most people are employed here by the state because it's a communist state. The state salaries are now have dropped to about the worth is about 5 CAD a month pension, slightly less than that. You cannot afford to buy anything in these private shops, so you are relying on the little bit you can get from the bodega or you're relying from outside money. So, you're...

SO: Wow. $5 a month?

RUARIDH NICOLL: Yes. So you, if you manage to get a little bit of meat, sometimes the bodegas of a little bit of meat for people that are in vulnerable positions, say if you get a little bit that meat, you put it in your refrigerator and then you have a 20, 40, 60 hour power cut, that meat is spoiled, that is gone. And that is a disaster.

SO: Yeah, that's a good analogy. A good anecdote about the reality of living in Cuba right now. We spoke to an associate professor of history at the University of Miami. Have a listen to Michael Bustamante.

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MICHAEL BUSTAMANTE: There have been times when the Cuban economy has been doing better than it is now. Why was not more effort made to sort of bring about investments in upgrading the electric grid when it's been kind of a rolling disaster for, for a long time? The Cuban government has gotten a lot of flack by continuing to invest in hotel development. So, you know, what I see is a sort of a lot of finger pointing. You know, the government, sort of pointing to outside factors as solely responsible. But internal responsibility matters, too. And I think Cuban citizens would like to see their government take more responsibility.

SOUNDCLIP

SO: You know, for decades, Cuba had been controlled by the Castro's. Who is running the country now?

RUARIDH NICOLL: Well, now, there's a question. Who's running Cuba? It's a very, very good question. I've spent my life, I'm getting on a bit and I've spent my life as a foreign correspondent and other things. And I have travelled to countries and tried to. My job has been to understand countries quickly and on the hoof. And I have to say, having lived here for eight years, I have found this the most opaque country I have ever come across. If you speak to diplomats, if you speak to academics, if you speak to journalists and they tell you they know what's going on at the top of this government, they're lying to you. It is very, very difficult to tell. I can tell you what the official thing is. The official thing is that Miguel Diaz-Canel is, is president. He's been president since 2018, he's been the head of the Communist Party since 2021. He's working two terms. He has been voted in by a national assembly and that he is at the head of a politburo that runs the country and the council of ministers that actually runs the country day to day. That is officially who's running the country. It is very difficult to know who, where the power is, who controls the money and what's actually happening. The army is a huge part of Cuban life. Who runs, the Army has a section called GAESA that runs the finances of the army, allows it to be self-supporting. They control a lot of the hotels. So, power is a very difficult thing to judge. Who actually controls the country is very, very difficult to judge. But on paper, it's Miguel Diaz-Canel.

SO: And you talked about the protests back in 2021 after those blackouts. Has there been much protests this time? And if not, why not?

RUARIDH NICOLL: No, there's been incredibly little, actually. Incredibly little. There's a bit of banging pots and pans on the streets. The issue now is that people have left. There's been a huge exodus of mainly the young with at least 10% of the population. That's over a million people. It's very difficult to know what the current population of Cuba is, but it used to be 11 million. Now, the lowest estimates have it at 8.5 million. Most people think it's between 9 and 10. So those people have left and they're sort of encouraged to go because it's a release valve. It's a release valve that has been used by the Cuban state over many years to seal off any potential protests.

SO: You know, Ruaridh, we're facing another election in the U.S. in days. And, of course, presidents influence what happens in Cuba. President Obama tried to normalise relations. President Trump pushed that back. Biden didn't do either, really, in most people's estimation. So, do you think anything would change if someone new takes the White House, as in Donald Trump?

RUARIDH NICOLL: Yes. Yes, probably. That now, Reuters did ask both candidates what their plans were, and both said that they were going to continue to be hard on the Cuban government. So, it would be a matter of degrees. Donald Trump really did change things. He did two main things. He really hammered down on the 60-plus year embargo that the United States has held Cuba under. But he sort of stopped the cruise ships coming. He made it much more difficult to do any banking here for foreign companies. He really, he really did sort of harden things up here. The second thing he did was that he put Cuba back on the list of state sponsors of terror, which I try not to express my opinion too much here because I'm a foreigner and Cubans should speak for themselves. But that was frankly ludicrous. The government can't afford to feed its own people, let alone sponsor any terror. But it did have a profound chilling effect on tourism because it meant that anyone other than Canadians and Americans couldn't, who could use the ESTA system in the U.S. can't come to Cuba and then go to the States without having a visa. You cannot use the visa at the ESTA system to go to the States if you've been to one of those countries on that list. That has pretty much killed European tourism to this country. And that was one of the biggest foreign earners. So, depending on how Trump's feels and he's. He is not difficult to. He's a very, extremely difficult to read. He has the capacity to make things much more difficult. He could stop all the flights to Cuba, for example.

SO: Russia and China have historically been allies of Cuba. Are they still, and what are they doing to help the people of Cuba in this situation?

RUARIDH NICOLL: The historic allies? Well, Venezuela, Russia, China. Up to a point, Mexico. Mexico has a ship of oil coming at the moment, I believe. China is still doing business with Cuba up to a point. I believe there's a deal where a Chinese company will get more access to Cuba's nickel deposits in return for solar power equipment. But a European diplomat said to me the other day that this is like trying to keep a leaking ship afloat with corks. And it's that, there's not, there's not enough will out there. Venezuela's got, is now enjoying selling its oil on the open market to the US and therefore is less willing to send it for much less money to Cuba. Russia has all its own problems, which are well known, and the help that comes is, is not enough to keep things bubbling away here.

SO: So if Cuba can't fix its own problems, even with some help, how far away do you think the country is from being a failed state?

RUARIDH NICOLL: Well, there's a question. It has had the capacity to keep going for a very long time. It got, obviously with the fall of the Soviet Union, it went through extraordinarily difficult times in the early 90's, difficulties that still mark the people in profound ways. I watch people eat and how they eat. Those people that experience that eat in a way of people that experience proper hunger, the way that they thought they require on the table, what they, they, how they eat. It, these are people who have been through very, very bad times. And it still, it goes on. I know lots of foreigners that have invested in property here for 20 years ago on the basis Cuba will change and I'll make a fortune. And those people have not made fortunes. In fact, they've lost money. And if they put that money in New York or London or Montreal, they would have made an absolute fortune. How long it will last, I don't know. What I will say, though, and this is me repeating a Cuban academic speaking to me: What does America, what does the US want? Because if this place becomes a failed state and we are beginning to see a slow but this is one of the safest countries I've ever been in, that we're seeing a slow uptick in violence now. If this, if violence takes off here, just street violence say, what does that mean for the US? It's 1000km long and it runs along the southern borders of the US, at points close, as close as 125km off shore. At the moment, drugs don't go through Cuba. What if they do? It's difficult to understand what happens if it does become a failed state. And there are examples. Next door is Haiti. Just over there is Venezuela. It seems a baffling policy on that basis because it's difficult to see now which other direction it goes in.

SO: Well, we'll have to end it there. A rather pessimistic final note.

RUARIDH NICOLL: Well, one last thing. The hotels had their lights on for the whole time during the blackout. So, for any, for any Canadians wanting to come on holiday that they shouldn't worry that there's not going to be any electricity. I can't vouch for the quality of the food, but there will be electricity. They all have their own generators.

SO: All right. Thank you very much.

RUARIDH NICOLL: Okay. My pleasure.

SO: Ruaridh Nicoll is a Cuba correspondent with The Guardian newspaper, and we reached him in Havana.

SO: In 1996, an unlikely group of veteran Cuban music--, musicians came together at a Havana studio, and the plan was to record a session with musicians from Mali. But that group, they didn't show up because they didn't get their visas on time and they had to cancel. So since the studio was already booked, the bandleader decided to go ahead and record with the group they had, and they called themselves the Buena Vista Social Club and their debut album, well, it sold millions of records around the world, making them one of the most celebrated Cuban music projects of all time. Their trumpeter, Manuel Guajira Mirabal, died earlier this week. He was 91 and he was one of the band's last remaining members. He played the trumpet for over 70 years. So in his honour, here is the Buena Vista Social Club with Candela.

[Music: Candela by Buena Vista Social Club]

SO: Well, that's sure to get your weekend going. I hope you were dancing. That was the Cuban band Buena Vista Social Club with Candela. Coming up after your regional update, it's Friday. The weekend is upon us. So I'm asking, will you hold space for unstructured time to just putter around or do you struggle with the feeling you always need to be doing something guilty?

SOUNDCLIP

KATE NEVILLE: It's easier in lots of ways to think about idleness when we have [Music: Theme fading in] vacation, when we have a holiday, a time away. But these ideas are maybe most essential when we're caught up in the flurry of life that is so quick, that is so urgent.

SO: The benefits of being idle with Canadian author Kate Neville. That's coming up. I'm Susan Ormiston. You're listening to The Current.

[Music: Theme]

And benefits of being idle

Guest: Kate Neville

SO: Hello again, I'm Susan Ormiston and you're listening to The Current. If you tell someone that they're going to seed, well, that may not go over particularly well. The phrase can mean they're becoming less productive. They're deteriorating, maybe even heading for death. For gardeners and farmers, though, going to seed has a very different meaning. It's when the seed is getting ready to grow, meaning a renewal of life, not an end of life. Kate Neville is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science and the School of the Environment at the University of Toronto, and she's author of a book called "Going to Seed: Essays on Idleness, Nature and Sustainable Work." She spoke with Matt Galloway in September. Here's their conversation.

SOUNDCLIP

MATT GALLOWAY: What does that phrase mean to you? Going to seed.

KATE NEVILLE: Oh, it is such a rich phrase that as your kind of brief note at the beginning here suggests has so many layers to it really, depending on the angle that you're looking at it. And to me, I think it's this real productive question of, what is it that we're looking at when we think about these seeds? What is it that we're thinking about the possibility of and the future of? Whose futures are kind of held in these seeds that are heading out? And this is a time, you know, here in the north, in Whitehorse, where we're seeing a lot of these plants going to seed kind of pollen in the air and on the water, these seeds kind of making their way into the world for their own futures. And so, out of our own control.

MATT GALLOWAY: The book has that subtitle which is: Essays on Idleness, Nature, and Sustainable Work. And I mean, a bit like the phrase 'going to seed,' idleness, if you describe somebody being idle, that can be seen as a slight, not as something that perhaps people want to strive toward. How do you define what idleness is?

KATE NEVILLE: It's a slippery term to me. And I should say that the book started really with idleness, and it didn't start with seeds. That kind of question of seeds came later, when I was speaking to a gardener friend about these ideas and had kind of thought about going to seed, and in that more colloquial way that it's kind of the end, the deterioration. And she was aghast and said, no, no, it's that productive time. Nothing about the garden is idle in these moments. But really, that question of idleness came out of a lot of different sources of reading and thinking. And in particular, the writer mark Slouka has this essay from 2004 that was published in Harper's Magazine, that really was about the kind of trap of constant busyness and how in order to be good political citizens, good social members of a community, to have undirected time and space, to think about how we want the world to be and to imagine other futures. And it sort of put in contrast with the kind of busyness, the work that we're always tied up with. And so, I think idleness has been percolating for me as this kind of concept that holds incredible political power even as it's so denigrated, even as we have this kind of move towards the need for constant productivity. And so, I think I've been really troubled with it for a long time.

MATT GALLOWAY: Undirected time.

KATE NEVILLE: Yeah, yeah. This kind of idea that there's not always an end goal in sight, there's not always a kind of structure under which we're headed towards the goals that we know we have. A time where creative possibilities are maybe more open. And so, many people don't have this in their lives. Not very much of it, anyway. Sort of are bound by the necessities of life, to the demands of others. And so, I think there's kind of a real question of freedom and autonomy that comes into that, where it's not always something put upon us in order to make ends meet or live up to expectations, but to sort of imagine something different.

MATT GALLOWAY: So, I read this book in the spring, and then sat with it and ended up taking a little bit of time off in the summer, and it was time that was, and I like to talk about, you know, going fallow, where you don't really have goals or you don't have a specific thing that you want to do, and that's hard to do. But I find it really rewarding sometimes. And I was thinking a lot about the book as I was doing that, which is kind of doing, you know, a whole lot of nothing. But thinking about that idea of idleness, not as something that is in opposition to work, but as something that we should strive toward. How were you idle this summer? What has your summer been like? And I ask you that in part because, I mean, you're in Whitehorse and the location has something to do with your attempt to be idle.

KATE NEVILLE: Yeah, it's a lucky thing in so many ways, this split life that I both spend time in the North, I actually live on the unceded territory of the Taku River Tlingit first Nation in a small town in northern B.C., just on the southern side of the Yukon border in Atlin. And I lived there before I got a job in Toronto at the University of Toronto. And so, for just under ten years, I've kind of split this life between the North and the South, between this kind of more rural, kind of off-grid cabin life, small town life with a lot of kind of self-reliance of the community and community reliance in particular. And then downtown Toronto, which, Matt, you know so well, the sort of buzz of urban life and the sort of densely populated Ontario urban landscape. And so, really thinking about what the contrast between these periods of time both requires and enables and the different kinds of work that really becomes apparent in these different places. And so, part of life for me in Atlin in an off grid cabin is thinking about water, thinking about heat from a woodstove. Thinking really about sort of, what does it take to sustain a life that is more connected to the non-human world? And then what does that mean in Toronto? And what does it mean to try to do both? To stay connected to an urban kind of landscape while being in a place where those rhythms, those time frames don't really match up that tidily? So, I think for me, there's a lot of that kind of reflection on the tensions and the contradictions between those two.

MATT GALLOWAY: What have you learned about stillness and being idle from the natural world?

KATE NEVILLE: Yeah, and I really appreciate that question, because I think so many of the books that I've read about leisure and idleness and work and the future of work are very, very human focused and necessarily so. It's sort of this question about social inequalities. Who has the ability to work, who has the opportunity to do work that is meaningful? And I've learned a lot from the kind of thinking about these social dynamics. But what happens when we look alongside our human endeavours to the work of the world that sustains us? And so, I really wanted to think about idleness and pausing of our human work as not just going inward, but also a chance to look outward at what we often ignore, what often goes unseen in our daily life. And maybe especially when we're embedded in very human structures.

MATT GALLOWAY: How have you seen that in your own life? The book starts with you in the cabin and with the inhabitants that might be there that you're trying to pretend aren't there, whatever is burrowing away.

KATE NEVILLE: Yeah. So, as you say, the book starts with a story about mice moving in to a kind of structure that's attached to the cabin that I live in, in spite of constant efforts to usher them outwards. The kind of constant return of these mice through the cracks and gaps in the logs and sort of thinking, you know, my work against the work of the mice, and they're working hard to build their home to have their young to be warm and in winter. And I'm working very hard to try to clear them out. And sort of that tension between the work that we do and the work that others do, that sometimes is at odds with each other. And I tell a story later to about this kind of battle that often happens with beavers that sort of block culverts or flooded farmland and roads. But the flipside, too, is I think that I'm humbled by the way that I am so dependent on the work of the world. I mean, the trees that we burn in our woodstove grew for so many years, you know, converting sunlight into what then produces warmth. And kind of this sense that that we're so intertwined with the work of other beings.

MATT GALLOWAY: Where do you think that the denigration of idleness comes from? You say that it's often positioned against work and that things like leisure and play, people will see some value in that. But idleness is, you know, of dubious value. Where does that come from, do you think?

KATE NEVILLE: Yeah. Matt, I'm not a historian, but I learned a lot from a historian in particular, Cara Daggett. She sort of traces Scottish Presbyterian ideas, embedding themselves into a kind of the theories of physics that emerged and sort of embedded their ways into how we understand the very nature of energy and sort of the religious tenets that came about to tell us what the value of work was, and the kind of dangers of idle hands that could be used for no end of trouble. But that's not the only tradition that I came across that has this kind of idea about the value of work. And I think that there's kind of a piece of it that is the importance of doing work to sustain ourselves, to be active citizens in our communities, to tend to the world around us. But there's also this sort of fear of not working that we won't be seen as valuable, and we won't be seen as important members of society. And I think that these things are often in tension. And idleness gets collapsed, maybe, a little bit. That sort of variety of ways that we can, not be productive in a certain sense ends up sort of narrowed when we talk about idleness. And I, one of the things I want to do and in these essays is sort of expand how we think about different forms of idleness at different moments, and that they're not necessarily opposites, that it's not just work versus idleness, but this incredible relationship between moments of different forms of work, and moments of different forms of idleness.

MATT GALLOWAY: I mean, in the face of that construct, you say that idleness can be a form of responsibility. You say that it's a crucial emancipatory project. What do you mean by that?

KATE NEVILLE: Yeah. And this goes back, in many ways, to Mark Slouka, thinking about sort of the need to pause. Constant distraction, constant busyness in order to collectively imagine a different kind of world. And he says that idleness is not just a psychological necessity, a requisite to the construction of a complete human being. It constitutes, as well a kind of political space, a space as necessary to the workings of an actual democracy as, say, a free press. And, you know, I'm speaking on a public radio here. It's sort of, it feels really powerful to think about freedom of press and democratic processes and the need to be able to have that undirected time we talked about and that that's sort of a way to imagine what flourishing could look like that isn't just what we've been assuming are handed down. And so, I do think that there's something sort of, you know, anarchy, anarchism is often really denigrated as a sort of chaotic negative force, but it's really about non-hierarchical elements of organization, something that's not just handed down by authorities on high.

MATT GALLOWAY: What do you mean? What does that actually look like, practically?

KATE NEVILLE: Yeah. And you know, I'm not sure I know. It's a really good question. You know, maybe really directly I see it in this town of Atlin where I live, where it's an unincorporated municipality, and things run through the First Nations government and through the British Columbia government. But so much happens through community organization, through volunteer organization, through people recognizing the needs of others and responding in these generous ways. And I think those kinds of moments of experimentation at these different scales might give us insights into what it could look like. I definitely don't have kind of a big answer to that, as much as sort of the sense that we need to experiment, we need to imagine really widely in these different contexts.

MATT GALLOWAY: Can you imagine a different form of work or rethinking what work is? And, you know, a way that work could be, I mean, more sustainable? And the catch phrase, and you kind of pick at this a little bit, this idea of a work life balance or what have you, is not the answer. But a way that work is not just, shouldn't you be doing something? And that if you're not doing something, you're seen as kind of burning time when you should be, you know, a more productive member of society. Can you rethink work in that way?

KATE NEVILLE: So, I think what I've been discovering through this writing is that we already do a lot of that in our language. We name a lot of things as work that are very different from one another. So, we talk about, you know, the work that is done in an administrative or bureaucratic kind of institution. And we talk about parenting as work, childcare work or caretaking work. We talk about creative work often, that sort of language that's very familiar. We talk about schoolwork, but studying is different from taking care of children is different from tending the ill is different from painting in so many different ways. And yet we sort of shorthand them all to work. And so, I think in some ways, rather than reimagining work, I think we need to reimagine how we value different forms of activity. And what does that look like in society? And there have been lots of different experiments and Matt, you know so much about this from your conversations with so many people, but things like universal basic income as one way of thinking about supporting people through necessities. Mutual aid is sort of something that came up often during the pandemic as sort of a return to these kind of caregiving to one another, to imagine different periods of time in people's lives where they're pulled very strongly in certain directions or have more space and time to kind of pause and step back.

MATT GALLOWAY: Do you think we learned much from the pandemic? Particularly when it comes to the idea of slowness. There was a moment where not everybody, certainly, but some people, many people were able to slow themselves down, maybe able to rethink what their relationship with work looked like. And then in the years that followed, a lot of that went back out the window. Did we learn much, do you think, from that time about, yeah, the value of slowness?

KATE NEVILLE: It's an important question. And I think that there's a maybe a very different set of answers from what various communities or individuals learned, versus whether the structures of society have changed to allow us to put that knowledge into practice. And I think that in lots of ways, the sort of knowledge that people had about the challenges and the value of slowing down and staying home in different ways hasn't really been translated into changes in these structures of institutions that we have that are constantly speeding up. So, I think that that's still something where there is a lot of kind of change that is needed. And maybe this is too, Matt, as you say, not everyone in the pandemic had those opportunities, right? Lots of people who were on the front lines, and especially those who were underpaid, who are under compensated, who have very little control over their own work lives. People, you know, doing that caregiving work, doing that sort of provision of services were not the ones who had the opportunity to stay home. They were bound up as much during the pandemic as before, or maybe even more so in those sort of really quick structures that they had to continue racing to meet.

MATT GALLOWAY: That's not even back then. I mean, one of the arguments against this idea of idleness that you should try and find time to be idle, is that, at its heart, that idea can be exploitative. That idle time is only possible for some people because of the labour of others. That it's a luxury and that luxury depends on somebody else being squeezed so that you can be idle. What do you make of that?

KATE NEVILLE: Yeah, Matt, I'm glad that you brought that up because this isn't new, right? These are longstanding strategies for those who benefit from the work of others to maintain those systems of power. And I think that sort of interrogating idleness, interrogating these ideas of morality associated with certain forms of work, allows us to step back and think about who's benefiting from these and what is that perpetuating. There's sort of stories from mythology, stories from history that reinforce these kinds of ideas of what constitutes the good life and for whom, that I think we really need to pull apart. And, you know, the Greek poet Hesiod, I think maybe is one of the ones who sort of talks about when you work, you'll be much better loved by the gods. And that was in the eighth century BCE. And sort of thinking, you know, who is it who is being loved in these particular ways? And why is this so important to reinforce?

MATT GALLOWAY: So, how can we go about thinking of idleness as something that is good for all of us? To make sure that your gain doesn't come at the expense of somebody else?

KATE NEVILLE: Yeah. I think maybe broadening the question to sort of within human relationships, but also beyond them is a big part of that, which is, you know, we see the consequences of our constant activity, our constant production that so often comes from extraction. And I think that's a key piece of why it's good for all of us to think about stepping back, is the consequences of an ever accelerating kind of economy, and ever accelerating production takes its toll on the systems of non-human life on which we depend that the whole planet requires. And so, we see that when there's wildfires, we see that when there's droughts, we see that when there's floods. These sort of incredibly hot record-breaking hot days that we're seeing around the world really reinforce why it's so important, why it's so good for all of us to think about stepping back. And particularly those who have the control over these systems, right? Who are in positions that benefit from the work of others and from these kind of systems of production.

MATT GALLOWAY: But how do you think of progress in the face of that? You said that the, you know, the book is not a self-care book, but it's also not an anti-technology book. You're not saying that we completely distance ourselves or disconnect from those systems that allow us to be able to go up to a cabin in the woods or to disappear off the grid for a while. So, how do you square that?

KATE NEVILLE: Yeah. So, Matt, I'm skeptical of the term progress. I really am, in the sense of, sort of, what are we progressing towards? And I think that's the big question that kind of the term progress doesn't itself answer. It's not, in itself, a thing. It's sort of, what is that end, what is that kind of possible future that allows for the freedom and the autonomy of more beings, more people, more nonhumans? And the botanist and writer Robin Wall Kimmerer has this beautiful essay in Emergence Magazine, where she talks about economies of abundance and these relationships of reciprocity. And I think maybe that's where I see kind of the promise of progress, of sort of thinking, what does it look like to recognize ourselves within this kind of thriving, ever changing, mutually sustaining world? And what role do we play in kind of bringing out that beauty and that kind of potential, even just in a moment balance? Like, what does it look like to contribute to that versus to move too quickly? You know, I read recently in an article about wildfires that, you know, the boreal forest depends on fires, right? These black spruce need fire to regenerate, but if they burn too often, they can't continue. They can't reproduce. And so, it's not sort of work or no work. Idleness or not idleness. You know, fire or not fire. It sort of, where is that balance that allows that regeneration, that allows that future. And I think that's sort of these questions of where does progress fit into that, and where do our technologies fit into that?

MATT GALLOWAY: Let me ask you two final things before I let you go. One is, do you feel like, is there really the opportunity to get people to think differently about this? And I ask this because we are in a world that's filled with, you know, life hacks. How to squeeze more into your day. You should listen to your podcast at two times the speed rather than one, so that you can listen to more podcasts rather than actually just listen to the thing at the speed that it was recorded at. Do you think that what you are saying in this book of essays is going to find an audience that is receptive, that is ready for something like that?

KATE NEVILLE: I think everyone is hungry for a way of doing things differently that feels, you know, more grounded, more connected. So, I think it's sort of adding to a conversation that's already loud and fast and vibrant and slow at the same time. I think there's so much happening in this space that I'm maybe just excited to be part of that conversation, as opposed to thinking I'm leading something brand new. You know, I'll say that this book was the product of this writing prize that was put together by the Sowell Family Collection in Literature Community in the Natural World with terrain.org and with Texas Tech University Press. And I think about this huge literary community that's already thinking about place and our relationships with it and with community and culture. And so, I really think that this is happening. This is a live, vibrant conversation.

MATT GALLOWAY: Just finally, people might have had a moment to catch their breath in the summer. And what you're saying, and that dichotomy between being idle and being productive and how people look at them differently, they're thinking, you know what? I wish there was a way for me to keep idleness in mind while I get back into the machine. What would you say to them?

KATE NEVILLE: That I think that's exactly right. You know, it's easier in lots of ways to think about idleness when we have vacation, when we have a holiday, a time away. But these ideas are maybe most essential when we're caught up in the flurry of life that is so quick, that is so urgent. And maybe I'll say, too, we often want to respond to urgency with more urgency, with more speed. And sometimes the kind of answer to a moment of crisis or a moment of urgency is to pause, to take that deep breath, to reflect on how you want to respond to it and be present in it. And so, I would say that it's sort of back into these kind of rhythms of the fall. And, you know, that's maybe the most urgent time to think about carving out space to imagine, why are we doing this? What are we doing this for? At what point can we really do this deliberately, which might look like a lot of work at certain moments, but it might not look like responding as though everything's a crisis, even when it is.

MATT GALLOWAY: You're able to do that when you're not at your cabin, but when you are in the belly of the beast in the centre of, of downtown Toronto?

KATE NEVILLE: Oh, I think it's an aspiration and a pursuit rather than an end. I think it's something that I don't know that I'll ever achieve as much as strive for. And I'm thinking about that cycle, when is the pausing most necessary? But I'll try, I’ll try

MATT GALLOWAY: Okay. Thank you very much.

KATE NEVILLE: Matt, thank you so much.

SO: Kate Neville is the author of "Going to Seed: Essays on Idleness, Nature and Sustainable Work." She's also an associate professor in the Department of Political Science and the School of the Environment at the University of Toronto. Matt Galloway spoke with her in September.

SO: That is our program for today. Stay tuned to Radio One for Q. I hope you all carve out some time for idleness this weekend, and to help you bid farewell to the workweek, here's Watching The Wheels by John Lennon. I'm Susan Ormiston. Matt will be back with you on Monday. Thanks for listening to The Current and happy Friday.

[Music: Watching The Wheels by John Lennon]

Friday, November 1, 2024 Full Transcript

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