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The Current Transcript for April 22, 2016

Host: Piya Chattopadhyay

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

This man was begging for a hearing. He got his hearing today before an outstanding judge and you heard what he had to say.

PIYA CHATTOPADHYAY: And what Justice Charles Vaillancourt had to say about Senator Mike Duffy yesterday was that he was a credible witness, a man who had no sinister motive, a man whose actions were honest and reasonable. After 62 days of testimony, Mike Duffy was found not guilty on each and every 31 criminal charges he faced. The ruling was an exoneration of the senator from PEI and an excoriation the Prime Minister's Office under Stephen Harper. What does it all mean for the senator and for the senate? That's up in just a moment. Also today:

SOUNDCLIP

Danny talked about going back into prison and turning as many monsters as he could to send them back out on the streets.

PC: You may not be familiar with the name Danny Wolfe, but you have probably heard of the organization he headed up, the Indian Posse, a notorious, violent criminal gang on the prairies whose leader spent years on the streets stealing and killing, and years in prison doing much of the same. But Danny Wolfe's life story is also about a troubled upbringing and a search for belonging. We'll hear about it in an hour from now. And come sundown around the dinner table Jewish children will be asking questions like this:

SOUNDCLIP

Why on this night, when we remember the oppression and resistance of Jews, we should also think about the lives of people of colour?

PC: And for answers, adults will rely on the Haggadahs on this first night of Passover - the books which tell the ancient story of the exodus from Egypt. But in these modern times there's all kinds of Haggadahs for all kinds of questions, both old and new. We’ll hear about some of the variations on a theme, including the baseball and Black Lives Matter Haggadahs. That’s later on. Hello, I’m Piya Chattopadhyay and this is the Friday edition of The Current.

Mike Duffy cleared of all charges, but was he vindicated?

Guests: Nicholas Kohler

SOUNDCLIP

I would say that Senator Duffy has been subjected for the last two and a half, three years, to more public humiliation that any Canadian in history. And the vindication that he received today from the judge was so resounding that it ought to cause those who rushed to judgment, acted like a political herd in the senate, to the great discredit of the senate, should give real second thought to how they behaved in this.

PC: And that's how it ends - vindication for Senator Mike Duffy as his drawn out legal saga wound to a close yesterday, cleared of all 31 criminal charges – fraud, breach of trust, and bribery - which had once loomed so large, even casting dark shadows on last fall's federal election campaign. The veteran broadcaster chose not to take the microphone himself yesterday leaving the talking to his lawyer Donald Bayne, at least for now. As for the judge's decision, it had damning words for former Prime Minister Stephen Harper's office, calling the PMO conduct, quote, “covert, shocking, unacceptable.” In contrast, the senator from Prince Edward Island was described as reasonable and honest. But after three years of legal limbo and 62 days in court, can the decision be described as a win for Senator Duffy. Nicholas Kohler is a freelance journalist who has been covering this trial for Maclean’s. He's with us now from Ottawa. Nicholas, hello.

NICHOLAS KOHLER: Hi, how are you?

PC: I'm very well. You spent 62 days in court watching this trial unfold. Just first of all, sitting in that courtroom yesterday listening to that ruling, which took many hours to deliver, how did you react?

NICHOLAS KOHLER: I think I and everyone in the courtroom was astonished by what they were hearing, particularly as the judge, Justice Charles Vaillancourt, kind of wound down to the final portion of his ruling which had to do with the three bribery charges that Duffy had faced. And that's when he really sort of laid into the Harper PMO in a big way. I think many of us watching the trial, particularly in August when Nigel Wright, Harper's former Chief of Staff, and other members of the PMO appeared in the witness box. Bayne was allowed a lot of latitude to explore the inner workings of this organization to the degree that, some wondered, what relevance those mechanics had on the charges before the court. Well, we shouldn't have worried because that's exactly what Vaillancourt seized on in his ruling.

PC: And why were you astonished, then, given what you've just said, with yesterday's ruling?

NICHOLAS KOHLER: Because I think many of us thought that Bayne was given too much rope, that he was hanging himself with this kind of conspiracy theory about the PMO, because it didn't appear to have a lot of bearing on these 31 criminal charges. But, again, that's exactly what Vaillancourt got into and in depth and with powerful language. And so to see Bayne’s work, kind of - it worked so well the judge kind of was reading out of the defence playbook and so I think that did surprise - it surprised me. I think it surprised a lot of people.

PC: There's a real dramatic arc to the Mike Duffy story. You know, humble beginnings, rose to prominence in Ottawa, only to fall, and then yesterday, ultimately, to be found not guilty and we heard Bayne say the word ‘vindication,’ which we've heard a lot of since this ruling. Has Mike Duffy been vindicated in your opinion?

NICHOLAS KOHLER: I think that the Canadian public watching this, they were going to have their worries about the senate and about Mike Duffy in particular confirmed one way or the other. Had he been found guilty on all 31 charges they would have said, well, there you go. He perhaps received his just desserts. Now, receiving dismissals on all 31 counts, the Canadian public, I think, is left with the impression with, geez, you can’t get these people no matter what they do, no matter what the evidence. It's politics as usual.

PC: Is that vindication?

NICHOLAS KOHLER: I don't think it is vindication. I think that Duffy now has the opportunity-- I think he can go back to the Senate in a couple of weeks. When they sit he may have this kind of march into the red chamber and that will be an amazing spectacle. He will then have the work to do to, I think, redeem himself. It will be an opportunity for him to do that. But before that happens I think people are still going to see him as tainted by this scandal - the Senate expenses scandal – and I think people are going to want to believe that no matter what the judge's ruling, something was amiss here.

PC: You've written a lot about Mike Duffy and about his ambition, his is tireless work ethic, his loyalty to what the boss wants. To what extent did those qualities betray him in his ongoing relationship with Stephen Harper and the PMO?

NICHOLAS KOHLER: Gee, that's an interesting question. It seems clear that he long wanted to be a senator, even as a broadcaster. He was called by colleagues ‘senator’ as a kind of joke. And eventually he was appointed and he set out to do just what he had done as a broadcaster. He worked extremely hard, it would appear, to fulfill his mandate and that mandate was given to him by Stephen Harper. And it was to, as he called it in the witness box, not so much to fundraise as to ‘friend-raise’ and that means to provide kind of third party of - what was the expression that he used? Friend-raising was to make Harper, who the Canadian voters still viewed with some suspicion, look more, you know, palatable. Duffy was a broadcaster who, a lot of people knew, a lot of people liked, and so he traveled the country, sort of, pounding the drum for Harper. In working as hard as he did, it may be that he lost sight of the business at hand which is parliamentary business.

PC: Mike Duffy has said, you know, he feels betrayed. And beyond, you know, the criminal charge can illustrate for us those who betrayed Mike Duffy the most, in his view.

NICHOLAS KOHLER: I mean, I think he feels betrayed by Harper. There was famously early on in the in the trial a photograph entered as an exhibit which was Duffy with Harper and scrawled in the corner, in the former Prime Minister's hand, was this kind of praise of Duffy, “to the best Senator I've ever appointed.” Well, there was a kind of 180 that took place when the whole issue of Duffy's travel expenses came up in the newspapers and he was dropped. And then when he stopped the help of the PMO, Nigel Wright for example, the former chief of staff for Harper and others, he was led down, in his view and in the view of his lawyer Donald Bayne, this kind of path into accepting this weird scenario where he received 90,000 dollars of Nigel Wright's personal money to pay off these dubious expense claims, which probably he didn't owe anybody. This scenario and the judge actually used this fascinating legal phrase yesterday of officially induced error. That means that he received bum advice from the PMO and from Nigel Wright in accepting this scenario and the judge said that even had to find him guilty on the three bribery charges he would have actually said that this was officially induced error. He accepted this bad advice. I think that kind of speaks to this overall sense of betrayal.

PC: Let me stick with this 90,000-dollar cheque, because that was so much of this story in at least the public realm. A whole cast of characters testified at this trial. One of the most anticipated was Nigel Wright, Harper's former Chief of Staff. At the end of the day, what was the significance of Nigel Wright's testimony to what happened yesterday with the ruling?

NICHOLAS KOHLER: You know, the judge, Justice Vaillancourt, talked about this. He said that seeing Nigel Wright in the witness box and also PMO colleagues like Chris Woodcock, the director of issues management in that PMO, he saw extremely intelligent, hardworking people who fulfilled their mandates with, what he called, ruthless efficiency and I think that when he saw Wright twist and turn in and out of this narrative where he suggested that Duffy had solicited this 90,000 dollars, I think that it strained credulity. Certainly, it was difficult for me to accept given the email evidence that was before the court and that we had access to. These email exchanges between PMO officials and Duffy that really made it clear that there was this scheme being developed by Wright and others in the harper PMO and it was being foisted on Duffy. And so that kind of discrepancy between what Wright said in the witness box and what the email evidence spelled out I think it made it easy for him to come to this ruling.

PC: As you well know, this 90,000-dollar cheque made for a lot of discussion within the Canadian public, but also within the House of Commons. I want to play you a clip. This is - when he was Liberal leader - Justin Trudeau in opposition from Question Period back in May 2013.

SOUNDCLIP

This is what the Prime Minister would have Canadians believe. The chief of staff walks into the PM's office on Wednesday morning, looks him in the eye and says that, unbeknownst to him, he'd secretly paid a sitting legislator 90,000 dollars to obstruct an audit. If that were true, the PM should have fired Nigel Wright on the spot. Instead, he spent five days defending him, and calling him 'honourable.' Has the Prime Minister grown so out of touch that he actually expects Canadians to believe this story?

PC: Nicholas Kohler, what will the ruling of the Mike Duffy trial - how will that affect the way do you think that Canadians think about the Senate.

NICHOLAS KOHLER: Think about the Senate? It's interesting because a lot has changed in the Senate and a lot has changed since the investigation of Duffy led to the charges that were at issue at this trial. I think that Duffy became sort of emblematic of all the things that Canadians dislike about this body and so they were very willing to believe that he was guilty of these 31 charges. I think that the ruling is going to maybe reinforce the suspicions of Canadians about how Senators behave and about how they spend taxpayer money. I don't think that it should, because, as Justice Vaillancourt said in his ruling, he is heartened by some of the things that have happened since the several years that were at issue here. And when Duffy goes back to the Senate, as I believe he will, it's going to be a different place. He's not going to be able to conduct himself as he did. Yeah.

PC: And going back to that clip that you just heard of Justin Trudeau, now that this trial is over, how will this whole story affect the legacy of the Stephen Harper government?

NICHOLAS KOHLER: I think that's really the most interesting thing that came out of this ruling. It would have been one thing had we just had the narrative that Duffy's lawyer Donald Bayne spun before the court where he marshalled really fascinating good evidence for why we should look at the PMO, Harper PMO this way. Now we have a kind of corroboration. We've got the validation of a very experienced judge saying, you know what, given the evidence, I believe, I buy the defence take on the shenanigans, that there actually were shenanigans, that there was scheming, that there was kind of covert black plumbing , all the things that many people, I think, suspected of the Harper PMO. It's now been given this judicial, kind of, stamp. And I think it's going to mean that the Harper legacy reads the way the suspicions that we had of it suggested we should.

PC: And looking back, because this all played out, of course, during last fall's federal election campaign, how much damage do you think this trial did to the Harper government's re-election hopes?

NICHOLAS KOHLER: I think that it really started the campaign off on the wrong foot. The trial was on hiatus when the election was called in the summer and it had kind of grown. The campaign had begun in earnest by the time august rolled around. And when we saw Nigel Wright and Chris Woodcock and Benjamin Perrin, the in-house PMO council, in the witness box it drove the agenda, the way that reporters were covering the campaign. I mean, you can't imagine, I think, the campaign unfolding the way that it did, the election unfolding the way that it did, without the Duffy trial. Did it cause him, Harper, to lose the election? I don't think that that's true, but it certainly was a major contributing factor.

PC: You know, this trial was a trial about the public interest, but far more money was spent on the investigation and the trial than that 90,000-dollar cheque. In the end, Nicholas Kohler, what did the public gain from this trial?

NICHOLAS KOHLER: I mean, I think that they gained a glimpse of the inner workings of the Harper PMO. I mean, I think, as a reporter, that was what fascinated me most. I think it's probably what fascinated readers most. And I think that that is going to be the legacy, the most prominent legacy of this trial.

PC: And from here, do we just move on? This is an indictment of Stephen Harper's PMO? Do we just, you know, pull up stakes, say, oh, the Senate is fine? Where do you see this discussion going from here within the Canadian public?

NICHOLAS KOHLER: Sitting in the courtroom and watching the two crown prosecutors and the lead RCMP investigator in this, you could see them kind of withering in their seats as Justice Vaillancourt delivered this ruling. But I think that—Because it was three years of work kind of evaporated—But I think that they should be heartened by the changes that this case brought in at the Senate and I think that this is going to be a kind of touchstone, the Duffy trial, as we kind of move into reforming this body, which after all has an important role to play. And I think it's going to actually clean up now in a way that perhaps it wouldn't have had the Duffy trial never happened.

PC: Nicholas Kohler, good to talk to you. Thank you.

NICHOLAS KOHLER: Thanks for having me.

PC: Bye-bye.

NICHOLAS KOHLER: Bye-bye.

PC: Nicholas Kohler covered the Mike Duffy trial for Maclean's magazine, and he was in our Ottawa studio. Now, I know that you have thoughts and feelings about the ruling yesterday as you have throughout this story, so let us know about your reaction to the ruling yesterday in the Mike Duffy trial. Did it change your view of him or of the Senate? You can send us an email by going to our website, cbc.ca/thecurrent and once you’re there click on the Contact link. You can post about this story on Facebook or tweet us @thecurrentcbc. And if you want to get in touch via Twitter with me, you can do so by tweeting me at @piya. And if you’ve been following the Duffy story and you think you've got a good handle on it, test what you really know. Tune in to CBC Radio's Because News. Hear former conservative cabinet minister Peter Mackay playing the news quiz on the Duffy decision! Find out how he does and hear his two cents on the Senate scandals. That on Because News on CBC Radio One, download the podcast. I’m Piya Chattopadhyay. You're listening to the Friday edition of The Current.

Finding room for non-traditional Haggadahs at the Passover table

Guests: Sharon Forman, Yossi Sapirman

PIYA CHATTOPADHYAY: Hi, I’m Piya Chattopadhyay and you're listening to the Friday edition of The Current.

[Music: Theme]

PC: Still ahead, the life and times of a modern outlaw. Danny Wolfe's Wild West was the streets of Winnipeg in the late ‘80s. He was just twelve years old when he helped form the notorious Aboriginal gang, The Indian Posse. The Ballad of Danny Wolfe, in half-an-hour. But first, an up-to-the-minute telling of an ancient story.

[Music: Theme]

PC: So tonight marks the first night of Passover, and all over the world Jews will be sitting down to have Seder meals and they’ll be telling the story of the Exodus from Egypt. It is a story that told in books that are called Haggadahs. And it is safe to say that tonight, not everyone will be on exactly the same page. There is more and more variation in Haggadahs today with different texts reflecting numerous social and political causes. At every Seder, the youngest family member reads four questions about Passover. So we asked some kids we know to read from some of the less traditional Haggadahs.

SOUNDCLIP

[Children singing in Hebrew]

VOICE 1: On Passover we ask, why is this night different than all the other nights? [indistinct], we ask the following four questions: why do we eat matzah on this night? Why do we eat bitter herbs on this night? Why do we dip our vegetables twice? Why do we recline on this night? But instead, you can ask these questions from the communist Haggadah: what does a society without money look like? Why are there states? What’s the basis for the gender distinctions? Why don’t we recline on this night?

VOICE 2: Or you can read the questions from the Stonewall Haggadah, celebrating LGBT pride: what is our sacred role? Because we live our lives in many different ways between genders and sexes and varied ways of loving, we stand at the doorway of possibility. And it is from that we derive our sacred role as holy people dedicated to truth and integrity.

VOICE 3: Why on this night when we remember the oppression and resistance of Jews, we should also think about the lives of people of colour.

[Children singing in Hebrew]

PC: Well the last one, you may have guessed, was from the Black Lives Matter Haggadah, just one of the many different Haggadahs that will be consulted tonight, along with the LGBTQ Haggadah, Humanist Haggadah, Communist Haggadah. The Jewish dating service J-Date also has a Haggadah for that someone special. Sharon Forman is a reform rabbi and the author of The Baseball Haggadah: A Festival of Freedom and Springtime in 15 Innings. She is in Scarsdale, New York. And Yossi Sapirman is the senior Rabbi of Toronto's Beth Torah Congregation. He was raised in a rigidly Orthodox environment, but now considers himself more of a human-centered rabbi. He is with me here in Toronto. Chag same'ach.

SHARON FORMAN: Hi, Chag same'ach.

YOSSI SAPIRMAN: Hi, Piya.

PC: Rabbi Forman, let me begin with you. Let's just set the table, as it were. For you, what should a Haggadah be?

SHARON FORMAN: The basic requirement for a Haggadah is a booklet or a text for the Passover Seder that inspires questions. And that helps you relate to the story of the Exodus from Egypt so that all participants feel as though they personally have experienced an exodus from slavery. And also something that helped inspire you to share your bounty with others. We say, “Once we were slaves, now we are free. This is the bread of affliction. Let all who are hungry come and eat.” And I think that once you can satisfy those requirements, then the rest is a bit of commentary.

PC: Okay, I’m a big Jays fan, a Blue Jays fan. I know ball well. I’m wondering what baseball has to do with Moses and the Exodus, though.

SHARON FORMAN: So I’m very glad that you asked. Originally that was not something that I was thinking about so much, until I had my children. We have a daughter and two sons, and my sons are completely baseball obsessed. My husband grew up in Queens near the old Shea Stadium for the New York Mets. And so my children love the Mets, and also they are involved in little league. And about two years ago, my son was looking on the internet trying to find a sports themed Haggadah. As you said, there are many creative versions of the Haggadah, and he said, I just can't find anything. Mom, you should write a baseball one. [laughs] So I said, okay, I’ll give it a try, And then actually, as I tried to piece it together, I realized there was much more in common with baseball and Passover than just a matzah ball and a shank bone that looks like a bat. Because basically, they're both-- baseball is a game that is all about going home, and Passover is a festival that reminds us of the importance of going home. In this case, it’s the Israelites journeying back to the land of Israel, to their home. And that really drives the entire narrative of the holiday.

PC: What's the reaction been?

SHARON FORMAN: So it's somewhat surprising. I actually ended up self-publishing it, just on a whim, because I thought it would be fun to make the Haggadah look very professional and book like. And through the company in which I self-published, they posted it on to Amazon.com. And all of a sudden, it started selling. I was somewhat amazed and shocked and gobsmacked. I couldn't believe it. And there has been such a fun reaction to it, not just from people who enjoy baseball, but from people who really and truly love the Seder, and they wanted something to keep their kids at the table and not underneath the table, misbehaving and being bored.

PC: Rabbi Sapirman, let me bring you in. Let me get your reaction to a baseball Haggadah. Does it sound kosher to you?

YOSSI SAPIRMAN: I was skeptical, but then I saw it this morning, and actually, I really get it. And it wasn't done facetiously; it really does capture the essence, and definitely will create the interest that children need to have to participate in the Haggadah. Mightily impressed, sold out on Amazon. It's very cool.

[Chuckling]

PC: Okay, well, what does a Haggadah mean to you?

YOSSI SAPIRMAN: Haggadah is the telling. It's from the commandment, you shall tell your child, we have an obligation to engage our children. But a Haggadah, in sort of more colloquial terms, is the distance between the start and the hunger until we eat. So somewhere between the beginning and the middle, we have to find something that captivates the attention of the family and children so that they don't starve after two and a half hours of telling the Haggadah. So the Haggadah is that moment, that opportunity, when we reframe everything we do religiously, socially, emotionally, humanly, into the question of who am I? And this is reflected in the matzah, where we get rid of all the hot air, all the bubbles. We talk about who are we essentially, and that's where we talk about our history. I always say to children, you don't have to ask more than two words the night of your Seder. You can say ma nishtana, what is different this year? What has changed, who am I now, as opposed to what I was? And then you ask your parents, what's different for you? What’s different for your grandparents? It could be someone who has come through the exodus of healing from illness, the loss of a loved one, and then you're still in slaves in the emotional web. Or it could be a child saying, I learned how to ride my bike. It could be someone saying, I now understand what it's like to take on responsibility, I’ve had my bar mitzvah. Every child and every human being is consistently and constantly going through some form of enslavement and some form of exodus, and whatever we need to do to talk in the language that people understand, the human language, as opposed to the God language, it is very important that we do that.

PC: Okay. Have you written a Haggadah?

YOSSI SAPIRMAN: I’ve compiled a Haggadah called the Jew-manist Haggadah.

PC: The Jew-manist. Okay, what’s that?

YOSSI SAPIRMAN: It’s not humanist in the way it's used denominationally, it really means talk about the human experience through the eyes of our tradition and blending it with modern stories that we're all familiar with.

PC: Like?

YOSSI SAPIRMAN: Like the refugee story that we had this year. The question of what it's like to be a refugee. What it's like to be gay, what it's like to be someone who's on the outside. The lepers of old, when you were outside the colony. Who are we? When we talk about anti-Semitism, do we really understand that it's not just a slur against me as an individual, but rather a value system? That's the kind of thing we want to engage in. And therefore, it reengages us, but through our own stories. Through grandma's holocaust experience, through our great grandfather's trauma when he immigrated to this country. For all these things are part of the telling, and it's a night in which people should share and not get stuck in the old text. But as I’ve explained, the text is a template. Everybody uses it. And because it's a template, we all know the ebb and flow, and therefore, we can engage our own stories.

PC: Except some would say-- and let me come to Rabbi Forman first, on this, and then I’ll come to you Rabbi Sapirman. You know, some of the things in the Haggadah, in the many versions that are out there, and some which I list off the top, might strike some readers as politically incorrect. For example, when you recount the plagues, you compare the slaying of the first born Egyptian to a line drive back to the pitcher. And some people might say, yeah, that doesn't work for me, that’s not okay to do that. I mean, did you have to think sort of long and hard before extrapolating and making that example?

SHARON FORMAN: Absolutely. I really felt that I didn't want to make a toy out of this Haggadah. I didn't want people to feel that I was mocking, in any way, the ritual of the Passover. It’s so important. But I felt that it was almost, like, it's a poem, in a way. Like a metaphor. So if you look at-- when my child, thank God he doesn't know about plagues and he doesn't know about the slang of a first born child personally. He knows about it from a story. But he does know as a little pitcher that he's really scared of a baseball coming back to him and hurting him in the head. He knows that that could hurt him terribly. And so for him in his world, that is a terrible thing to happen. And so when he sees that that happened to the Egyptians, he can summon some sort of sympathy and even empathy, which is very much a part and parcel of the Seder experience. When we take out wine or grape juice from our cups and we remove ten drops of this sweet liquid that we're enjoying to remember our enemies’ pain and suffering. So in a way, I feel that it really magnifies the feeling for the children by making it something that they can relate to.

PC: Okay. Rabbi Sapirman, let me get your thoughts on this one. The Haggadah, the story of the Exodus at its core. It's about slavery, it's about death, it's about plagues. And I appreciate that you say, you know, we need to put our modern context so people could connect with this. But do you think it's okay to have comedy or triteness, if I can put that to you, as part of that story?

YOSSI SAPIRMAN: Piya, I know it's bothering you. I know.

PC: [laughs] It’s not bothering me, necessarily.

YOSSI SAPIRMAN: The analogy I gave was it's like jumping off a diving board. And if there's water in the pool, then it's great. If there’s none, you're in trouble. I would say number one, Haggadahs are transitory. They’re not meant to be the same one every year, that's why there's so many published. You can move from one experience the other, and like Sharon says, you can engage at this age. But I hope that her children are moving on to the text as they get older, at least they can recontextualize it. If you go to my father’s Seder, there is no deviation from the original text that was established by the rabbis in let’s say, 380 CE. It's the way it is. And they don't need any recontextualizing; for them, the fervor of the story and the seriousness is deep and it's meaningful, and that's great. But what about those who don't engage? What about those who turned off? Or what about those who were tortured with an old guy at the Seder reading the book for 45 minutes while they sat there, you know, listening. It's our duty to re-engage, and if there's one thing that is specially permitted on the eve of the Seder, it's to make sure people engage. We do strange things. We dip, we give out little bits of vegetable, we sing songs, we ask strange questions. It's all designed for someone to say, hey, what's this all about? And the rabbis will tell you that at that moment, the moment a child says why are we doing this, we fulfill their obligation.

PC: You talked about the first Haggadahs.

YOSSI SAPIRMAN: Yes.

PC: You know, dating back. Is Moses, was Moses always the star of the Haggadah?

YOSSI SAPIRMAN: Actually Piya, Moses is not mentioned in the Haggadah. This is one of the great mysteries of time, just like in the book of Esther, God's not mentioned, Moses isn't mentioned in the Haggadah, he's left out. And it's really astonishing. And is it because we don't want to fixate on him, like, turn him into the great hero? Maybe, or is it because Moses offended the sensibility of God and the people? It's possible. Either way, one of the great questions that adults should be asking at the Seder is, hey, what happened to Moses?

PC: Yeah, what-- so I’m going to ask, because I’m an adult. What happened, why has he been left out?

YOSSI SAPIRMAN: Moses-- this is my personal perspective, which leads to why I believe what I believe. Moses and God were the two best friends in the bible, and God had his view, or God's view of the world and what should happen to the Jewish people, and Moses subverted it his entire existence. God calls him the most humble man, but the reality is Moses was God's most difficult nemesis. God said, Moses interpreted. Moses and the story as it's written do not match. The story as it’s written is this great story of God taking the people out, and the triumphalism of survival. Moses was the one who killed the Egyptian because he can't stand the slavery. Moses is the one who challenges God that his people are being hurt. Moses the one who says, God, if you know the people are suffering, why don't you just take them out yourself? What do you need me for? So the Haggadah is really a commentary also on Jewish suffering throughout the years. That if God really loves us and hasn't forgotten us, why don't you just come and redeem us? Why do we need a messiah, why do we need to wait? Just take us out. So this is really the conversation. Moses the person does not really match the Haggadah tory, and it causes a lot of consternation. But it follows my idea, and many others who believe the Haggadah is fundamentally a subversive text. It's designed to make us rethink our expectations of Judaism. The people quoted in the Haggadah, if you look into their backgrounds, you realize they're not the mainstream. These are people from the periphery that are being brought in. Some of the ideas that are mentioned are so silly, in a sense, as to lead you to believe that there are problems with it.

PC: Like what?

YOSSI SAPIRMAN: Well, this huge debate about, how many plagues of the Egyptians really get? Well, if in Egypt they got 10, but you read the text and it has five words, you multiply it by five, so now it's 50. But then at the sea, it says they were doubly plagued, so now it's up to 250, and then you go from 250, multiply it-- and it's a whole conversation about these kinds of things. It doesn't make a lot of sense, and especially not 45 minutes after you are not eating dinner. And many people start after sunset, and plus an hour, which means they're not starting until 9:30, and you're hungry. So you know, rather than have a book that explains everything, we have a book that explains nothing, really. It doesn't answer the question, doesn't really get you where you want to go. So that's why everything about the Haggadah needs interpretation. When Sharon writes a book, a Haggadah, that includes baseball, suddenly we feel like, well, somebody can grasp this. Now maybe not forever, when you're 90 years old, you shouldn't still be thinking that God hit Pharaoh over the head with a bat, right? This wasn't George Bell drop kicking Pharaoh.

PC: Rabbi Forman, let me put this one to you. Lots of Haggadahs, there’s secular Haggadahs. Do you think you can have Passover without mentioning God?

SHARON FORMAN: Very interesting. Well, I think the whole idea of God, obviously, is very complicated. But as the other Rabbi was saying, you know, Moses is not supposed to be the main hero of the Haggadah. God certainly is supposed to be the hero of the Haggadah, but I also look at it as human beings are also supposed to be heroic, here. We are responsible for our own redemption. We have to be able to contribute to the freedom that is found in the world, and the liberation for everyone. So at our Seder, actually, when we say the Hebrew, we talk about God. But we also pass around Elijah’s cup and we add our own grape juice and our own wine to that cup, so that we each contribute by our actions to making the world better. And then we also have a Miriam’s cup filled with water, because of the beautiful stories that the Rabbis created about Miriam. Wherever she went in the wilderness, a beautiful well of fresh water would follow her. She sang, she danced, she added so much. She rescued her brother Moses. So we also add water to Miriam’s cup. We all participate in our own redemption. So yes, of course, there are mysteries about God and the nature of the universe. But ultimately, we have to get our hands dirty and we have to do the hard work of what it takes to make the world

better.

PC: All right. I want to-- I am fascinated by all these different Haggadahs that are there. So I’m going to go through a couple of them, I want you folks to help me understand them. I’m glad you mentioned a cup, Rabbi Forman, because capitalism, it plays a role in at least one Haggadah. There's a Maxwell House Haggadah?

SHARON FORMAN: Yes. That's actually a great one, because they're free. So it's wonderful, I believe the history of it was that there was some confusion many years ago over whether coffee was kosher for Passover, because coffee, of course, comes from a bean. And there was some confusion as to whether you could roast the coffee from the bean and it would be kosher for Passover. Now, of course, the conservative movement just this week issued a statement calming everyone down and making a revolutionary edict that all Jews, not just Jews from Africa and Spanish countries, can eat legumes and beans. Whereas many, many Ashkenazi Jews, Jews of Eastern European descent, do not eat those types of food, in addition to the foods that are prohibited in the Torah. So as a result of this, the marketers for Maxwell House Coffee decided that they would issue a Haggadah. Because if they had a Haggadah, clearly you can drink their coffee after supper.

PC: Like, it comes in the coffee can? Like the tin of coffee you buy?

SHARON FORMAN: At our grocery store, they just hand them out in the checkout line, actually. But I believe it used to be in the tin.

PC: There you go.

YOSSI SAPIRMAN: You should see the pork producer’s Haggadah.

[both laugh]

YOSSI SAPIRMAN: Hasn’t happened yet, but it may.

[both laugh]

PC: How do I even transition to the next question that I want to ask you? I will stop laughing. Rabbi Sapirman, there is a Soviet Haggadah. Tell me about that one.

YOSSI SAPIRMAN: Soviet Haggadah was, when the Soviet Union was first forming, they took out all the references to God and anything spiritual, and they replaced it with the Communist Party. So were it not for the Communist Party, you and your ancestors would still be enslaved to capitalism and you'd still be held to the czar. And therefore, we're grateful for the great party, who has saved us now. And they just took the entire template, which is easy to work with, and they just cut and paste whatever agenda they had. Now, many Haggadahs are like that; they just really are agenda-based Haggadahs. For better or for worse. You can put whatever you want in there. But I will tell you, compliments to Sharon, she didn't do that. She didn’t cut and paste and remake the Haggadah into something that's a mockery of the Haggadah, she actually use the concepts in like, the narrator the announcer. She really broke it down into to its parts. So it's different than the shill Haggadah, which just puts yourself in there, and it's also different than Maxwell House, which has an ad on the back.

PC: Yeah. Marketing. Selling product.

YOSSI SAPIRMAN: Yeah, these are the destructive Haggadahs, so to speak. But, yeah.

PC: Okay. I have to ask you both about politics. There are Jews who are Zionists, and there are those that don't support Israel. And indeed, there is-- I find this one hard to understand, so I need you both to help me understand this-- there's an anti-Zionist Haggadah. So Rabbi Forman, what do you think of that?

SHARON FORMAN: Personally, I find it quite perplexing when, in my mind, the main issue of the Haggadah is telling, it's like a birth story. My kids always want to hear the story of the day they were born. How was I born? What was happening? And I see the Haggadah as that story for the Jewish people. Every year we get together, we eat delicious food, and we tell our birth story of how the Jewish people made it to Israel, what our values are, what happened to us, who was with us. And that's what happens at the Seder. When I hear that there are Haggadahs that tell you that Israel is not a place for the Jews, obviously I feel perplexed and saddened. But I do find that it is within the Jewish tradition to take something that is a piece of learning, and kind of stand it on its head through all sorts of elaborate scholarly methods and interpretation. And there are sects of Jews, even those who live in the land of Israel now today, who do not believe that the state of Israel should be a national entity, and that should wait until the time of the messiah. So there are Jews who really do not believe in a state of Israel in our world as we have it today. And I guess they want to celebrate Passover, too, in their own special way.

YOSSI SAPIRMAN: Okay, so, yeah. And I have a very diverse family, I family members who live in Israel and are anti-Zionist, family members who are azionistic. But my history, if I look at my ancestor’s word, my ancestors emigrated from Europe to then Palestine in 1870, they came because they were lovers of Eretz Yisrael, the Land of Israel. Not political Zionism nor, you know, the new nascent Zionist movement in Europe. There are many people, kind of like Sharon said, but the truth be told, I’ve grown up in that world, in which secular Zionism or political Zionism or the state of Israel has no place in what we're reading in the Haggadah. That is about returning to the land of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and the promise of God, and they`re waiting for God's official promise pronouncement with the messiah to prove that they are entitled to it, so they live in a state of oppression. Even in their own land, they consider themselves to still be living in a ghetto in which they're oppressed by a Zionist state. No different than, they’d say, the Palestinians or Arabs are oppressed. And that's why many of them form Common Cause, because they don't feel that. So it's not surprising that a Haggadah, which deals with the oppressor and identifies who the oppressor was and is, and they sing a song about every generation they stand up to destroy us; in this case, the Zionists are drafting their children into a Zionist army. There you go. The oppressor is still here. And they equate them because they're not following the essence of God's will for the land.

PC: Thank you to you both, chag same'ach. And happy eating after your Haggadahs tonight.

YOSSI SAPIRMAN: Oy, when do we eat?

PC: [laughs] Thank you, Rabbi Forman.

YOSSI SAPIRMAN: Chag same'ach.

PC: And thank you, Rabbi Sapirman.

SHARON FORMAN: Thank you.

YOSSI SAPIRMAN: Thank you, Sharon.

PC: Sharon Forman is a reform rabbi and the author of The Baseball Haggadah: A Festival of Freedom and Springtime in 15 Innings. She was in Scarsdale, New York. And Yossi Sapirman is the senior Rabbi of Toronto's Beth Torah Congregation, and author of the Jew-manist Haggadah. He was with me here in Toronto. I'm Piya Chattopadhyay, you're listening to the Friday Edition of The Current.

Anatomy of a street gang and Indian Posse co-founder Danny Wolfe

Guests: Joe Friesen, Mitch Bourbonniere

PIYA CHATTOPADHYAY: I’m Piya Chattopadhyay and you're listening to the Friday edition of The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

A jailbreak in Regina, Saskatchewan has put police on alert across Canada. Five men are still on the loose, three are awaiting trial for murder.

PC: It was a brazen Saskatchewan jailbreak back in August of 2008 and it wasn't the first time and it wouldn't be the last time that Danny Wolfe generated some frightening headlines. His first brush with the law came when he was four-years old and by the age of 12, Danny Wolfe had helped form a gang. The Indian Posse came together on the streets of Winnipeg in the late 1980s and it was one of the initial sparks behind a violent fire consuming the Prairies and beyond today. Aboriginal street gangs were at one time said, by police, to be one of the fastest growing criminal organizations in our country. The Indian Posse has outlived Danny Wolfe, but his life is the subject of a new book by Globe and Mail journalist Joe Friesen. It is called The Ballad of Danny Wolfe: Life of a Modern Outlaw. Joe Friesen is with me now in our Toronto studio, hi Joe.

JOE FRIESEN: Hello.

PC: I'm going to ask you how that jailbreak ended but first, you're from Winnipeg, you grew up in Winnipeg. Describe for me what was happening in your hometown, in your city the year that The Indian Posse was born.

JOE FRIESEN: This is in 1988 which is really important here in Winnipeg because in March of that year there was a police shooting. An Aboriginal leader named J.J. Harper was on his way home one night and he was stopped by a police officer. The police officer was investigating a crime but Mr. Harper had nothing to do with that and did not want to talk to the police officer. They got into a scuffle and very quickly it escalated and Mr. Harper ended up dead from a police bullet. The next day, the police chief cleared the police officer of any wrongdoing. This created a lot of tension in the city. Aboriginal people were very upset about this. They wanted a thorough investigation and it led to a justice inquiry into the treatment of Aboriginal people in our justice system, and what happened at that moment was that you had a large Aboriginal population that felt that they were the subjects of racism in Winnipeg that were being mistreated, and it was only a few months after that when The Indian Posse was formed by a group of teenagers in a basement.

PC: Including by Danny Wolfe.

JOE FRIESEN: Including Danny Wolfe.

PC: Okay, let me try and understand who Danny was. What was his childhood like?

JOE FRIESEN: Danny was born in Saskatchewan and he moved to Manitoba when he was about two or three years old. He was growing up with his mother and his older brother, Richard in a very poor household. His mother, who was a residential school survivor, she'd been physically and sexually abused in those schools, was very young and these two boys sort of bonded together really closely and used to sneak out at night to get away from the drinking and violence in their house. They would steal vegetables from gardens to find food, they would steal blankets from clothes lines and curl up in a stairwell somewhere to sleep for the night. Basically, they were faced with serious difficulties early on in life that would mark them forever after that.

PC: So how old is Danny at that point where he is doing petty theft, essentially?

JOE FRIESEN: The petty theft probably started around the age of six or seven and eventually escalated to stealing hubcaps, and then car radios, and eventually they got into more serious crimes later on.

PC: How old is he when he is first caught doing criminal things?

JOE FRIESEN: One of the first things that they got caught up in was when they snuck into a department store in downtown Winnipeg. It was around the age of eight, I think, and they stayed after hours hiding among the coats and after the store closed, they sort of ran rampant in this department store and were eventually brought home by police. But that was a very frequent occurrence that police were bringing Danny home to his mother, but there were no criminal consequences of course until he turned 12 years old.

PC: So his mom’s name is Susan Creeley, she helped you with the profile of her son's life for your book. Were you surprised that she wanted to take part?

JOE FRIESEN: Susan was extremely helpful. The first time I met her, I think she was a little reluctant, but I had actually had contact with Danny beforehand. Susan, once she knew that, was really keen to help me as well.

PC: We spoke to her. We spoke to Susan Creeley about her personal situation when her sons were small. I want to play a little bit of what she had to say.

SOUNDCLIP

I wasn't ready to be a parent because I didn't know how to parent. I was raised in residential schools and I never seen my parents, they called us parentless. They never said that I love you to the residents of school, they never said come here, let me hug you, like that and it was really difficult for me to do that to my own kids. My life was in the whirlwind of drugs and alcohol. My kids were there, but I hardly ever see them. My life was just a haze when they were small.

PC: That's Susan Creeley, Danny Wolfe's mom. Joe Friesen, did Danny come to understand the reasons for his mom's despair?

JOE FRIESEN: He did come to understand a little bit. It took him some time though because when he was young he had a lot of questions about what was going on in his household. His brother used to talk about what they saw, the violence in particular, and the drinking and the drugs and they knew that this was not how it was supposed to be but they didn't quite understand why. Somewhat ironically, it was in the prison system that Danny became more exposed to learning about his history and culture. It was through his time speaking with elders that he learned about what other generations had gone through in the residential schools and what I could see through his letter writing, and through some of the relationships that he built later on with his mother, there was nothing more important to him than seeing his mother beat her addictions and to develop a stronger relationship with her. It took some time, but eventually they did get there.

PC: When we come to understand Danny's childhood, you know it explains sort of what factors led him to becoming part of a gang. What other cultural factors influenced the creation of The Indian Posse?

JOE FRIESEN: Well, there were a lot of things going on at that time around street gangs in the popular culture. In music, the hip hop groups at that time were largely influenced by the West Coast culture in LA that was influenced by The Bloods and The Crips. There were movies like Boys in the Hood or New Jack City that kind of glamourized a street gang life and I think Richard and Danny, the two Wolfe brothers, really picked up on that. They saw the identity of being a street gang member as a way of expressing their resistance to a mainstream society that they saw as racist; as somehow having the odds stacked against them. This was a way that they could come together and build something that would give them a sense of family, a sense of purpose, and an identity.

PC: What were the rules about who could join The Indian Posse? Did you have to be Aboriginal?

JOE FRIESEN: In the early days you did have to be Aboriginal and that was a rule that lasted nearly 20 years.

PC: And who else was joining this gang? I mean, where were the recruits from these gangs coming from?

JOE FRIESEN: They had a large pool of people to choose from because they were really recruiting from those who came from broken homes who had nowhere else to turn and were looking for some kind of protection. They told me what they would do is look for the kid who is out late at night, the person who could be asked to run an errand for them, maybe deliver some drugs, and then gradually be brought into the criminal world. It started in the cities, but there was something about the Indian Posse that was so galvanizing for young people at that time that it spread very, very quickly, and soon it was across Manitoba, going to reserves through family connections often, and then across western Canada.

PC: I want to ask you more about that in a second but I want to stick with Danny just for one more minute. You earlier said in the beginning, Danny was involved in robbery and property crime but that progresses. What does it progress into?

JOE FRIESEN: Well, by the time they were teenagers they're moving into drug dealing, which was the best way to make money for them, and not only drug dealing but also prostitution where they were making some significant inroads into a really thriving prostitution trade in Winnipeg. When Danny’s older brother, Richard was put in charge of the gang’s prostitution operations at one point, he talked about making thousands of dollars a week off of this for putting girls on the street. Something that he's not proud of, it's probably the thing he is most ashamed of doing in his life, but along with the car theft, and then armed robbery was a particular specialty, of The Indian Posse.

PC: So the early 1990s in Winnipeg brings more gangs to the streets, the worst violence. What were police and residents seeing at that time?

JOE FRIESEN: It was a really violent time in Winnipeg. There was a new phenomenon called the drive-by shooting which Winnipeg had not seen before, but was imported from the gang wars in the United States. And then there was Danny's own approach to that, which was to say that the drive-by was not sufficiently brave. He preferred to walk-by. So, he would get out of the car with his gun and walk right up to the house that he wanted to target and fire into it. Danny bragged later on in conversations that were caught on wiretaps about doing 14 of these walk-bys in that era.

PC: So, there's The Indian Posse, there's another gang called the Manitoba Warriors, another Aboriginal gang. This growing number of gangs, the number of people going into them, this creates a specific, special situation for First Nations leadership. Why does it do that?

JOE FRIESEN: The gangs were still a relatively small subset of young indigenous people in the city, but they were getting an awful lot of attention because it was becoming a crisis in the media and for political leadership. And so, as often happens, people were turning to First Nations leaders and saying well, what are you doing about this? Now they did happen to be ignoring the fact that the broader society had more or less ignored or exacerbated these social issues for 150 years, but the First Nations leadership also wanted to do something to ameliorate the situation.

PC: And to that point, Ovide Mecredi, who was at that time the national chief of the Assembly of First Nations, he goes and meets with the gang leadership and you describe what he found there, how did he describe what he found?

JOE FRIESEN: It was something of a risky decision for Ovide Mecredi to do that because he was lending some legitimacy to the gang leaders by doing it, but he felt he had to in order to first of all, stop the killing. What he found, or what he described, were real leaders; people who could be significant figures in their own community who could work for good if they were put in the right direction. And so, he was able to negotiate a truce for a time. It didn't hold but his aim was basically kind of a public health approach, let's just stop the killing first.

PC: He got some blowback for that.

JOE FRIESEN: He did, yes. He got a lot of criticism in the press.

PC: And then in the Manitoba leadership at that time, then Grand Chief Phil Fontaine also makes these attempts. It also backfired.

JOE FRIESEN: Yes, Phil Fontaine was trying to create a youth centre for young people to give them a place to go to get them off the street, so you wouldn't be that kid hanging around late at night waiting for the gang to recruit you. But, he did so in partnership with someone who had not entirely left the gang lifestyle, unbeknownst to Phil Fontaine. And so, although he was working with the police leadership at the time to make this happen, what the police didn't tell Mr. Fontaine is that they had overheard his new partner, an ex-gang member who was still arranging drug deals on his telephone, and eventually this person was arrested in a drug bust and Mr. Fontaine’s initiative sort of fell apart after that.

PC: We started our conversation hearing a news story about a jail break in Regina from 2008. That was Danny Wolfe’s escape and I said I was going to ask you how it ended. How did he get out?

JOE FRIESEN: It is an amazing story. It began about four or five months before the escape finally happened and he had a set of nail clippers. With those nail clippers, he was able to unscrew a radiator grille at the base of a wall inside this prison in Regina. This particular radiator was situated just underneath a security camera, so out of sight from the guards who were down the other end of the hallway. Every night he would unscrew this radiator grille and fashion with some bits of metal and other tools that he found inside the prison and would fashion instruments to dig through the wall. He did this night after night for months, never getting discovered by the guards.

PC: And he gets out. How long is he on the lam for, how long is he on the loose for?

JOE FRIESEN: Close to a month before finally getting caught again in Winnipeg.

PC: And as he was in that jail cell using those nail clippers, making a path to get out, the same time the jail is getting these anonymous phone calls saying hey, listen there's going to be a prison break. So the guards didn't know, they didn't see him doing it, but they still got these calls?

JOE FRIESEN: Yeah, the guards had lots of warning about it. More than a month before they were told that the prisoners on Danny's unit were going out and they were going to quote “do it like in the movies”. So, this prison break was drawn right from the pages of The Shawshank Redemption and they were still unable to stop it.

PC: So Danny gets caught and put back in prison, he dies two years after that escape. How does he die? What happened?

JOE FRIESEN: This is right after Danny had been sentenced in a murder case and went to the Saskatchewan penitentiary, a place that he called the house of misery. There were a lot of tensions when he arrived. It was clear that Danny was concerned. Shortly after New Years, Danny went into the lunchroom or to the lunch area with all the other inmates on his unit, and they were a mix of Indian Posse members and another rival gang that was allied to The Indian Posse, and they were all milling around when all of a sudden the attack was on and two Indian Posse members were the targets. Not Danny, but two others. They were being stabbed with homemade knives and Danny rushed to the aid of one of his friends and the person, the attacker, sort of waved at Danny with a kind of a get out of here motion, a glancing blow it looked like, but that blow happened to hit Danny right in a crucial artery. Danny sort of walked away for a moment, he sat down and took off his slippers and sipped his coffee, and then he fell to the floor and never got up again.

PC: He was how old?

JOE FRIESEN: He was 33.

PC: We heard from Susan Creeley, Danny's mom, earlier and we asked her why she wants people to know the story of her son.

SOUNDCLIP

Looking back on him, me being clean and sober now, I could have talked to him and I could have said things to him that would have helped him, you know understand, understand life. Our way of living today is living traditionally and trying to get our language back and trying to be a positive role model in our community and I hope this book is a teaching tool for people out there, especially our young ones and what I went through in life, and what my son went through and that people will learn.

PC: That’s Susan Creeley, Danny Wolfe’s mom. For you, Joe Friesen, what's the significance of you telling us hearing Danny’s story now?

JOE FRIESEN: I think this is a really important Canadian story. What it does is it looks at one family through 100 years and three generations in the residential schools. So, Danny's great-grandfather who served in the military, who went to the residential school and was taken from his own family, you know he passes on some of the teachings as best he can to Susan's father, who was also in the residential schools, who also served in the military, but also struggled with alcoholism and violence in his home. And finally to Susan, who I think probably suffered the most in the residential schools with the physical and sexual abuse. All of those things are the inheritance that Danny is given. And faced with that, with the circumstances he was, he created this gang which was in his mind, a way for indigenous people to strike back as a kind of a form of resistance; a way that they could back bind together to survive in an environment that they saw as hostile to them. Right before he was finally killed, Danny talked about going back into prison and turning out as many monsters as he could to send them back out on the streets. That's obviously a terrible thing for a person to say, but I think we need to understand where Danny is coming from if we are ever going to do something about some of the situations he's created.

PC: Joe Friesen, good work. Thank you for talking to me.

JOE FRIESEN: Thank you.

PC: Joe Friesen is a reporter with The Globe and Mail and his book is called The Ballad of Danny Wolfe: Life of a Modern Outlaw. It's out next week, by the way. Joe Friesen was here in our Toronto studio. Well, let us go to Winnipeg now to learn a bit more about the gang scene there today. Mitch Bourbonniere has been a social worker in the inner city for the past three decades. He has helped many young people leave gang life. Mitch Bourbonniere is in our Winnipeg studio. Hi.

MITCH BOURBONNIERE: Hi Piya, how are you?

PC: I'm okay. Take me back. What do you remember of the formation of The Indian Posse and of Danny Wolfe?

MITCH BOURBONNIERE: Well, actually I was a young man working in a group home at the time in the heart of the north end, and the four boys we had in our home, it was like they woke up. There was a buzz and the youth of the north end were basically mobilizing. It was fascinating and scary all at the same time.

PC: And the north end is where a lot of the gang activity in Winnipeg happens?

MITCH BOURBONNIERE: Yes.

PC: Today, in 2016, when you're working with people trying to help them get out the gangs and transition to a new life, do they still know about Danny Wolfe, and if they do, I mean what do they say about him?

MITCH BOURBONNIERE: Actually it's Danny and Richard, the beginning of the IP, it's almost legendary. It is legendary, where even the young guys today refer back to that time and they refer back to what they call OG, original gangsters.

PC: And are they trying to resurrect that time?

MITCH BOURBONNIERE: I don't know if it's resurrect, I think it's just a continuation. It's a little bit different, you know, 25 years later but to me, it's been a continuation and an evolvement.

PC: And these kids that talk about the OG and continue this gang activity, are the kids like Danny Wolfe? He had a troubled upbringing, had a hard life as a young kid growing up in a troubled home, are there similarities that you see?

MITCH BOURBONNIERE: Absolutely, it's actually heartbreaking. I've been sitting here listening and Joe gets it right and it was really heartbreaking and heartwarming to hear from Susan Creeley, their story, the story of their family, their mom, residential school, poverty, I mean, those stories are still happening. I still have young people that are hungry and need to shoplift their food.

PC: I just want to mention that we did contact the Winnipeg Police Service to ask about the current gang situation in Winnipeg and it declined to comment. But Mitch, what do you think? Give us a sense of gang activity in Winnipeg and on the Prairies because of course, Indian Posse spread its wings, so to speak. What are you seeing these days?

MITCH BOURBONNIERE: Well, gang life and the existence of gangs is alive and well, still. It's not in the media as much as some of the brazen incidences have toned down somewhat, but I think some of the gang leadership has evolved and are doing things a little bit differently in terms of trying to stay off the radar, actually.

PC: What are they doing?

MITCH BOURBONNIERE: I think they are insulating themselves. The leaders and the bigger players are insulating themselves, they’re using young guys to do the dirty work to move drugs, to sell drugs, to perpetrate violence on rivals, that kind of thing.

PC: Not unlike what Joe was talking about what Danny did with the younger people.

MITCH BOURBONNIERE: Exactly. Exactly.

PC: And when we see these gangs, what are we talking about, like is The Indian Posse still around?

MITCH BOURBONNIERE: The Indian Posse is still around. We have some of the older gangs, Manitoba Warriors, Native Syndicate, Indian Posse still around. There's a crew on the south side called the B Side. MOB had emerged a few years back. We had Mad Cows, South African Mafia so, there are lots of different gangs today.

PC: And as someone who works to get people out of that life and out of that lifestyle, tell me about how things are different in that respect. What supports are in place now to help these young guys, not necessarily young but these guys, that weren’t necessarily in place for people like Danny Wolfe years ago?

MITCH BOURBONNIERE: Well, I think services that were around back then have continued and also, other services have emerged, so it's better in terms of what we can offer young people. There is still such a long way to go. We've developed at least three 24-hour safe spaces in our inner city recently and there are people doing the work, but there is still such a long way to go.

PC: What is a safe space?

MITCH BOURBONNIERE: It is a place where youth can come at any time, 24-hour, over the 24-hour period and be safe and get fed and if they're lonely, we'll talk to them, if they're hungry, we'll feed them, and we're just providing an alternative safe space for them.

PC: According to Stats Canada, 2014 saw the lowest number of gang related homicides in almost a decade. What does that say to you? Does that say we're putting a dent in this, or what do you read from that?

MITCH BOURBONNIERE: Well, I'm not sure about that. I mean just prior to that from 2007 to 2012, the IP were implicated in a murder, or murders every year. So, it's still happening, it's still around. Like I said earlier, I think the big players are trying to do it smarter in terms of being a little bit off the radar, and not trying to draw attention to themselves, but certainly kids are at risk. And the exact same description that Joe gave, the vulnerable kid, the kid that's out alone, the kid that is hungry, the kid that is lonely, you know.

PC: And the kid that’s finding a sense of belonging in a gang, as Joe said.

MITCH BOURBONNIERE: Exactly.

PC: Is that what keeps them in? Is that what stops people from leaving a gang?

MITCH BOURBONNIERE: I don't know if it keeps them in, but it certainly draws them in. I think what keeps people in is there can be an addiction to the lifestyle. You're now getting things you never got before; you do feel safer; you do you do feel a sense of protection early on; you do feel that sense of belonging early on, but there are so many negative things that happen in that life that they start to question that life and some of them really reach out and beg to leave, but then there's a fear. There is a fear of the unknown. There are multiple barriers, they don't feel ready to deserve a good life, so it is very complicated.

PC: What’s the most important factor in how you keep people who have left to stay out, instead of going back to quote unquote “home”?

MITCH BOURBONNIERE: The number one solution, and I said this 30 years ago, and I'm still saying it. The number one solution is for every young person that's asking for help to be provided a mentor and beyond 9-to-5 Monday to Friday. So, if someone, a life coach, a mentor, and ideally someone that's lived the life and is now doing really well, almost a sponsorship model and people that are trained are needed. To me, mentorship, life coaching is what's missing for these young people. They need someone to rely on, and they need that beyond business hours.

PC: Mitch Bourbonniere, thank you for your perspective on all this, I appreciate it very much.

MITCH BOURBONNIERE: Thank you, Piya. Bye.

PC: Mitch Bourbonniere is a social worker in Winnipeg who also helps people leaving gang life, and Mitch was in our Winnipeg studio. That is The Current for today. My name is Piya Chattopadhyay. Thank you so very much for lending us your ear on the Friday edition of The Current.

[Music: Prince’s Sign O’ the Times]

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Apr. 22, 2016 Full Episode Transcript

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