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The Current Transcript for April 9, 2019

Host: Anna Maria Tremonti

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

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VOICE: They're tired. They're fed up. No satisfaction at work. This is really right now a [French phrase]. People are just screaming. It has to change.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: They say they're exhausted, demoralized, burned out and not only are they at risk, the people they care for are too. So today, nurses in Quebec are going to work and while they're there, they are going on strike. No overtime. No extra hours. A regular day. Right now their union says that the mandatory overtime worked by its nurses costs the province an extra $270 million dollars a year. In a moment we're looking at nurses' OT in Quebec and across the country. Also today, Notice of Motion.

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VOICE: This is a blatant attempt to use threats of legal action to stop me from fulfilling my constitutional duty to hold the government of the day to account on behalf of all Canadians.

AMT: After the prime minister serves notice that he plans to sue him for libel, Conservative leader Andrew Scheer says, bring it on. One party leader suing another in an election year, how's that going to go? We're asking in half an hour. We're also talking to Brent Beardsley In half an hour. 25 years ago he saw the Rwandan genocide take place before his eyes. As military executive assistant to General Romeo Dallaire, he remembers how the world's leaders turned away. And with all the talk of the rule of law these days, we're going back to the 1920s, when Canada was looking for a way to assert its sovereignty over the Arctic and the Innuit. The government of the day chose to use the judicial system, making two Inuit men the target of a show trial in the far north.

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VOICE: Before the trial has even begun, the hangman, the rope and the wood needed to hang them is put on the train along with the judge.

AMT: What was done in the name of Canadians then still raises troubling questions today. That story in an hour. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

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Mother whose 9-year-old daughter died of asthma welcomes London's new low-emission zones

Guests: Rosamund Kiss-Debrah, Annabelle Timsit, Michael Brauer

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VOICE 1: Pollution can go for your lungs and make you feel sick and you can like maybe go to the hospital.

VOICE 2: You can't tell it because it's invisible, but air pollution basically it's dirty as it could cause asthma and it can like make you really ill.

AMT: Schoolchildren in London, England speaking with the BBC about air pollution in their city. As of yesterday anyone driving an older vehicle with relatively high emissions will have to pay a fee, the equivalent of about 20 Canadian dollars to drive into central London's new ultra low emissions zone. It is the first city in the world to enforce that kind of zone, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The goal is to reduce harmful nitrogen oxide from vehicles, which increases the risk of asthma, cancer, dementia and premature death. The new policy has been championed by the major Sadiq Khan and it was inspired in part by one south London girl. Ella Kissi-Debrah suffered over two years of seizures and more than 27 hospital visits for asthma attacks before she died six years ago at the age of nine. Her mother has since been fighting to have air pollution recognised as a contributory factor of Ella's death and for politicians to do more to control air pollution in her city. Rosamund Kissi-Debrah is Ella's mother and we've reached her in London. Hello.

ROSAMUND KISSI-DEBRAH: Hello. Thank you very much for having me.

AMT: Can you tell me about Ella and when her health problems began?

RKD: Ella's health problems started in October 2010. She was six years and 10 months. Up until that point, she was an extremely healthy and lively child. She was into sports, dance, all sorts of things. There was never -- there was no chance that we would ever have thought she would have died prematurely and suffered so horrendously.

AMT: And what were her health complications?

RKD: She continued to have a cough. It sounded more like a smoker's cough, but she was almost seven at that time.

AMT: So she developed a severe case of asthma and it just kept getting worse?

RKD: She did. When she had the first inquest, the pathologist said it was one of the worst cases ever of asthma ever recorded in the U.K. Her lungs kept on shutting down with mucus all the time. They kept re-inflating, shutting down, and she was constantly choking and constantly fighting to breathe.

AMT: And when she died, what was it?

RKD: It was asthma. But we have since found out that where we lived, the whole area, literally, the levels of air pollution were illegal. Throughout all her life she was breathing in toxic air.

AMT: So what is the area like where you live? What's happening around there to do that to the air quality?

RKD: We have an extremely busy road, whereby not just cars, but lots of lorries to drive through. This is the issue. The size of the lorry, and it's day at night, basically, they start in the early hours of the morning and even sometimes at midnight, you can hear the lorries driving through.

AMT: You can actually measure spikes in the air pollution depending on the time of day?

RKD: You can. We have monitors, although we do need more. But may I stress that my daughter isn't the only one affected. Last year, this borough had the second highest hospital admissions for children with asthma to hospital. So it continues and that's why the mayor, Sadiq Khan, has literally had no choice, he has had to introduce it because something has to be done.

AMT: There was an inquest into Ella's death. What did it say?

ROSAMUND KISSI-DEBRAH: It said obviously, the thing which killed her was asthma, but it also, at that time, recognized that her triggers were due to something in the air and we have spent the last five years finding out what those triggers were and we now have a leading expert who put all the information together and in his opinion, there was a causal link between air pollution and her death.

AMT: And you want a second inquest?

RKD: Absolutely. Obviously she suffered greatly. So I think it is only right that the real cause of her death should go on her death certificate, but also she won't be the only one. Between 2010 and 2016, 130 children, up to the age of 14 have also died in this country and we have one of the highest rates of asthma in the world.

AMT: How has Ella's story influenced the discussion on air pollution in London?

RKD: It has brought it to the ordinary people you know because up until now we've all heard about the impact, but up until you know I decided to come forward, there's been no face really. So what she has done is made it more human, I actually hope. And also, to show people that you can be very well one moment and this is how deadly nanoparticles are. Ella was in the top 10 percent of healthy children in this country. She was incredibly fit. And she died suddently just over two years. It's just absolutely shocking and devastating still.

AMT: What do you think of the mayor's decision to bring in the new ultra low emissions down in London?

RKD: It's a start. I don't think he has any choice. He recognises the health impact himself. It's not going to be everything. We have, for those of your listeners that have been in London, they would know, we have a lot of cars, but at least the most polluting ones. If I had my way, diesel would be banned immediately. One diesel taxi in London is an equivalent of 30 petrol cars. So that shows you the scale of the devastation of diesel.

AMT: It's unimaginable.

RKD: It is. You can not have one in ten children in a capital city on medication or fighting to breathe. This isn't what childhood should be about. Children should be happy, children should be playing, not you know in hospital on nebulizers and things like that. It's unacceptable. I call it a public health crisis.

AMT: Rosamund, thank you for speaking with me.

RKD: Thank you for having me.

AMT: Rosamund Kiss-Debrah's daughter Ella died in 2013. She was nine-years-old. Rosamund Kissi-Debrah lives in London. Earlier this year, the attorney general in the UK granted her permission to go to the high court to request a new inquest into the cause of Ella's death. There are more than two million people, including 400,000 children, who live in areas of London where the air quality breaks the legal limits for nitrogen oxide. In another world capital, the situation is drastically worse. Ulaanbaatar in Mongolia is now considered the world's most polluted capital city. Thanks to all the coal burning that goes on there to provide heat through cold winters. For children who live in Ulaanbaatar simply going outside is sometimes too risky. In fact, the government actually extended school winter holidays to encourage parents to keep their kids indoors. Annabelle Timsit has looked into the pollution problems in Ulaanbataar and the effects on children in particular. She's a reporter with the news website Quartz and she joins us from London, England. Hello.

ANNABELLE TIMSIT: Hi. Thanks for having me.

AMT: What's the one image that stands out in your mind from your reporting in Mongolia to illustrate how bad the air pollution is there?

AT: One of the first family is that I visited, the mom had three kids and she had just had a baby who was six months old. And since the day that she had brought him back from the hospital, she had never taken him outside. The fact that a newborn child could have been born into a world that he had yet never to see and whose world was confined to the inside of his home really brought home for me the impact of this problem.

AMT: And you actually were breathing that same air, so you got a sense of it. What it was like?

AT: It's a horrible feeling not to be able to breathe properly and you really take it for granted when you live in a place where you don't have to think about breathing, it's just something that you do. But when you get breath or when the air that you're breathing hurts your lungs, that's just all you can think about.

AMT: Well talk to me more about schoolchildren. How vulnerable are they?

AT: They're extremely vulnerable. Kids who step outside to go to school are exposed to some of the highest levels of fine particulate matter in the world. And it's not even a question of whether they exceed legal limits. They're not even anywhere near legal limits there. They're you know 100, 200 times the legal limit. And so for those kids walking to school even if it takes them five to 10 minutes is toxic. Even being in school is toxic. I was walking around with an air pollution monitor and I spent you know a lot of time in two preschools and I could see that in every single classroom. The air pollution levels were way too high and so constantly all day these kids are exposed to toxic levels of fine particulate matter.

AMT: What kind of health problems are emerging because of this?

AT: So you know some of the same problems that your previous guests brought up, obviously extremely high incidents of asthma and the key here is not just that asthma are more prevalent, but cases of asthma are more serious. So kids are more likely to die from asthma in Mongolia than they are when they have asthma elsewhere, but also exposure to those particles for pregnant women has been linked to kids being born premature or with low birth or with impaired cognitive development. With all the implications that that has and kids are likely to get bronchitis are more likely to have a reduced lung function of chronic respiratory conditions. And there has even been some studies that have found an association between exposure to a particular matter and nitrogen de oxide and incidence of autism.

AMT: So what are parents doing to try to protect their kids?

AT: The situation in Mongolia is such that not everyone is aware of how bad this is. Everyone is aware that they live in a city that's very polluted, but I think many parents think that you know as long as they keep their kids in most of the time they're fine but that's not the case because indoor air pollution in Ulaanbaatar, just like in many cities in the world, can sometimes actually be worse than the air pollution outside. And so I think you know a lot of the efforts of international organizations and the government there has been centred around awareness raising and you're starting to see some results. Last year there was a large scale kind of protest in the city of parents who were demanding change on this. There's been an activist group that has formed but it's still very much at the at the very beginnings and I think that not everyone is aware yet of how bad it is.

AMT: And this is because of the fact that they're burning coal mostly in an area where they're living, am I right?

AT: Yes. So there's one neighborhood in the city where people have settled there instead of living in kind of the concrete homes that we imagine many live in what's known as a gur, which is kind of a traditional nomadic yurt. The only way to heat those homes is through a stove in the middle of the home, which burns unrefined coal. And so those specific neighborhoods are hot pockets of pollution just like the ones that you were mentioning earlier in London, but the pollution is bad everywhere in the city. There's not really any area that has safe levels of particulate matter.

AMT: And so what can the rest of the world learn from what's happening there?

AT: So I think the rest of the world has a lot to learn more and better. Some of the things that the government has done in response to this problem are to ban unrefined coal burning in the city and they've laid out this kind of sustainable vision for how they can get their city back on track to being a healthy place for kids to live. But so far they've really fallen short of the standards that they've set for themselves. And so I think you know looking at how bad it gets in Ulaanbaatar should really serve as an incentive for other cities in the world that are maybe struggling with how much they should be doing to solve this crisis. I think when you see how bad it can get, you are more likely to want to take action.

AMT: Okay Annabelle, thanks for your time and your work.

AT: Thanks for having me.

AMT: Annabelle Timsit is a reporter with the news website, Quartz and she joined us from London, England. My next guest has been studying air pollution and its effects on our health for almost 30 years. Michael Brauer is a professor at the UBC School of Population and Public Health. He's also a contributor to this State of Global Air report, which was released just last week. And he's in Seattle Washington. Hello.

MICHAEL BRAUER: Hi.

AMT: I didn't think I realized how localized air pollution can be.

MB: Yeah. So what we've been finding recently, sort of within cities, if you happen to live alongside of a major road for example and you just walk a block away, the levels of air pollution can actually drop down by half or even two thirds. So there's really an opportunity there to actually separate people from one of the sources, at least as an interim step.

AMT: And so what's it like in Canadian cities?

MB: So fortunately, Canadian cities are amongst the cleanest in the world. Compared for example to by far the bubbles that we would see in most is probably 10, 20 maybe even even 30 times lower than you would see there, but we also can measure quite pronounced health impacts in Canadian cities. Many Canadians are also occasionally now experiencing some very severe air quality as a result of wildfire smoke and many of our major cities have been impacted for one to two weeks in the summer time.

AMT: Now the global state of air report for the first time included a breakdown of air pollutions effect on life expectancy. What can you tell us? How significant is that?

MB: So again for Canada it's really the impacts are not that severe. We're looking at perhaps a loss of three months or so in life expectancy. But for some of the more polluted parts of the world, that could be around one and a half even up to two years loss of life expectancy. And globally the average is a loss of one year on average and of course that's an average and so we basically considered that being spread across the whole population. As you heard earlier, there are some people whose lives will really be cut short so in infancy or much earlier than they normally would.

AMT: Yeah that's the thing to remember when we talk about that right. It's not just losing a year off of old age, it's losing a life.

MB: Yeah absolutely. And even though these these numbers a year, a year off of old age, that's quite pronounced compared to other things. Compared for example to many of the common cancners, that's a greater impact on life expectancy than we would see. So and the other aspect of air pollution is it's really an equal opportunity risk, meaning that pretty much everybody in the population is impacted. It doesn't really matter what your choices are, what your behaviours are, what your lifestyle is. If you happen to live in a place that has polluted air, you're impacted in some way or another. The flipside of that though is that it's really actually a very effective way to improve health. If we can clean up the air in a particular location, everybody benefits, whether you like it or not. So it's essentially an opportunity that we see to actually improve health around the world.

AMT: And what are the health effects of air pollution?

MB: So as you heard earlier from Ulaanbaatar, these effects span the life course. It starts from pregnancy. We see impacts on low birth weight babies and we have seen those in Canadian cities as well as cities around the world, premature birth and then in childhood, perhaps impacts on cognitive development, development of their lungs, lungs of children who grow up in more polluted cities will actually be smaller than children who grow up in cleaner areas. And then especially at the other end of the life course, people will die from heart attacks, strokes, chronic lung disease and we're even seeing impacts on diseases like Alzheimer's disease, dementia, so cognitive declines as well. So it's been quite remarkable to have been studying this and we see really the effects really have no bounds. We're seen effects on many many organ systems due to air pollution exposure.

AMT: And we talked about localized, but how much are Canada and developed world countries in general responsible for the air quality worldwide?

MB: Yeah, so we did an analysis a few years ago trying to look at sort of what we would call the outsourcing of air pollution. So as listeners may appreciate, we don't manufacture a lot of the goods that we actually consume in Canada. Those are manufactured elsewhere and in some cases places with quite high levels of air pollution. So on average across the globe, we estimated about 20 percent of the deaths due to air pollution were due to pollution from goods that were consumed elsewhere. So that sort of outsourcing of polltuion. And in Canada what we estimated is that of all the deaths that occurred in Canada due to the pollution, there's an equal number of deaths that occur elsewhere in the world due to goods that we're importing for consumption in Canada. So even though we may actually not see the problem in our own air or in our own skies, we're actually contributing to it due to consumption of goods produced and cause pollution elsewhere in the world/

AMT: Michael Brauer, it's important to hear what you have to say. Thanks for your time today.

MB: My pleasure.

AMT: Michael Brauer, professor at the UBC School of Population and Public Health. He's a contributor to the Sate of Global Air report released last week. He's in Seattle, Washington. Let us know what you think. Tweet us @TheCurrentCBC. Find us on Facebook. Go to our website cbc.ca/thecurrent and click on the contact link. Are you worried about air pollution in your area? What's it doing to you and your family? This is The Current. We're talking about Arctic sovereignty when we're back. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti.

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Climate change opening up new resources in the Arctic, and a new fight to claim them

Guests: John McKay, Rob Hubert, Danita Catherine Burke

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

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AMT: Still to come, after a tough day at work, do you ever want to just kick back, maybe jump into a pit of colourful balls? That's the idea behind a new playground for adults in Toronto. We will take the plunge in half an hour and ask whether we should all be doing more to get in touch with our inner child or whether we're actually too much in touch already. But first, North Pole position.

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VOICE 1: That's Russia's antiaircraft system, specially modified for Arctic conditions.

VOICE 2: Our division is here to keep radar control of airspace and to control the northern sea routes.

AMT: That's a report from Sky News. Last week Russia invited journalists to one of its newest military bases in the Arctic and the sound of the anti-aircraft gun is just the latest sign that in the race to lay greater claim to the Arctic, one country appears to be edging out the U.S., Canada, China, Norway and Denmark. Here's more from Sky News.

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VOICE: We're heading with Russia's Ministry of Defense to Kotelny Island, a closed military zone in the New Siberian Islands range off Russia's Arctic coastline. Northern Clover it's called, windswept, bleak and combat ready.

AMT: Russia may insist it is simply focused on defending its Arctic assets, but increased military presence is raising concerns. Last month the U.S. commander of NORAD, Air Force General Terrence O'Shaughnessy, called on both the U.S. and Canadian policymakers to think about whether they're doing enough to counter Russian threats in the far north.

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VOICE: We are at risk in ways we haven't been in decades. We must ask if our current efforts are enough in today's changing security. We haven't seen this sort of systematic and methodic increase in threat since the Cold War.

AMT: Well Liberal MP John McKay has been examining the militarization of the north. He says Canada needs to act now or risk losing its hold on its Arctic territory. He is the Canadian co-chair of the Permanent Joint Board on Defense with the US, which is looking at this. John McKay joins us from our Ottawa studio. Hi.

JOHN MCKAY: Good morning.

AMT: What are your concerns for Canada as Russia increases its military presence in the north?

JM: Well ultimately the issue is you use it or you lose it. We have a significant sovereignty issue up in the north and if we don't assert our sovereignty, others will assert theirs and we will not end up in the happy end of that equation.

AMT: When you say use it or lose, how should we be using it?

JM: Well I think one of the major ways of using it is to assert our presence much more forcefully up there. It's clear that the Russians have made a significant decision to open up Arctic command and foreign brigades up there and 14 new operational airfields and 16 deep waterboards, plus icebreakers and they have made a clear strategic decision and if we don't counter that decision, along with our American allies then we will have even greater challenges in the future.

AMT: So all of the improvements that you've just mentioned, this is all Russian territory in the Arctic Circle.

JM: That's correct.

AMT: And so what do you see as specific areas that dispute, the potential?

JM: Well a lot of our issues of dispute have been literally frozen and they are no longer frozen. So the first area of dispute will be jurisdictional and so the Northwest Passage is the one that's most obvious for us. Is it a domestic waterway or is it an international waterway? Most regard it as an international waterway, we regard it as domestic waterway. If it is domestic then we can assert ourselves with respect to resource extraction and environmental protection and transit. That will be the flash point for us, but we also have disputes with the Americans coming out of Alaska and Yukon border. You draw the line one way as Americans do or draw the line the other way as we do. There's about 21,000 square kilometers of disputed territory. So these are disputes that have literally been frozen in time, are no longer frozen and we need to have a robust presence there and be able to assert our sovereignty.

AMT: It's interesting because this is about climate change has changed the game.

JM: It's changed everything.

AMT: It's so interesting because for so long so many people said climate change wasn't a factor, but they were all like scheming for the Arctic Circle.

JM: Well the irony is and you saw the report that came out earlier in the week about how climate change is affecting Canada. Apply that times two in the Arctic and you literally have immense military and security challenges in simple things like siting a base or siting a fuel depot or siting a runway. You know you build a warf and a few years later the warf is under water or it's stranded in land. These are just immense challenges that have a 40 year time horizon and we need to really be paying attention.

AMT: You mentioned the U.S. as well. President Trump has talked about opening up drilling in the Arctic just recently.

JM: That's kind of a discouraging aspect. The real issue I think is that President Trump doesn't seem to really be interested in the aggression of the Russians in places like Syria or Venezuela or the Philippines or the Arctic and it puts, it imperils all of our security. I think we need to look at ourselves in the mirror and say well if we don't do it, nobody else is going to do it for us.

AMT: So talk to me a little bit more about how the change, literally the change in around the Arctic Circle is driving defense capabilities.

JM: Well first and foremost response has been the development of the Arctic offshore patrol vesselm, which is pretty well operational, 5 onstream. They will have the capacity to go where no Canadian ship now has capacity to go except with the presence or with the assistance of an icebreaker. So that's the first and foremost response. We've also been conducting significant military exercises up there. These are challenges in and of themselves. I had the good fortune to be on HMC Charlottetown to accompany some of our troops up there for their exercises. We were going to Greenland and we had to, military people had to abandon the operation because of CI setting in. So these are the kinds of day to day challenges that face our military.

AMT: Your government says it is working on a new arctic policy framework. What can you tell us about it?

JM: I can't tell you much at all because it is being worked on. I do believe that there's a lot of goodwill and good intentionality on the part of our military and our government. It must be robust and it must be accompanied by significant resources and I'll just give you a little illustration. The early warning system has to be replaced. The technological challenges of trying to create a new awareness system, whether you site it in land or sited by satellite or combinations thereof is an enormous technological challenge and because it's an enormous technological challenge, it is deucedly expensive.

AMT: Why is this coming up so late in the mandate though? Carolyn Bennett, the Minister for Crowd-Indigenous relations says it won't even be ready until June.

JM: I don't really have a good answer to that. I think there has been some work. I think the ministers engaged in strong secure and engaged that policy framework. I'd be happier if this whole timeline had been moved forward.

AMT: Arctic sovereignty was a key priority for the Conservative government under Stephen Harper. How much of a priority is it for Prime Minister Trudeau?

JM: I wouldn't say anything less than a high priority. I just point to the fact that in the 10 years of a Conservative regime, there was a lot of talk and a lot of photo-ops, but the budget for the military was actually diminished.

AMT: OK. John McKay thank you for your time today.

JM: Appreciate that, Anna Maria.

AMT: John McKay is the Liberal MP for Scarborough-Guildwood. He is the Canadian co-chair of the Permanent Joint Board on Defence with the US. He joined us from our Ottawa studio. My next guest says we should pay close attention to Russia's moves in the arctic, especially what it means for the world's other superpower, China and the U.S. Rob Hubert is a professor of political science in the Department of Political Science at the University of Calgary. He joins us from Calgary. Hi.

ROB HUBERT: Hi. How you doing, Anna Maria?

AMT: I'm well I'm curious to know what you know. So first of all, how strategic is the Arctic right now?

RH: It has become completely strategic and the worst part about all of this, all the surprise about the strength of the Russian capability, is Putin told us he was going to do this as early as 2007. And all that we are actually seeing is the direct result of the Russian effort to basically become the major military power in the Arctic region.

AMT: OK so follow that through for me. What are the implications of that?

RH: Well the major ramifications are that it's not about some of the sovereignty issues or fighting over the continental shelf or many of the other issues where people say look we're not going to have a fight over the Arctic. What has happened is in the last 10 years that we've seen we are chip become one of the most critically important geopolitical locations. Anything that's going to happen between the Americans Russians and increasingly the Chinese is going to be about the forces that are in fact placed in there in the Arctic region. So therefore something that may happen in Ukraine, Georgia, south China sea, what's going in inevitably have to happen is that these strategic forces that the Russians and increasingly the Americans and Chinese have will become involved in one way or the other.

AMT: Okay now how does China factor into this? This goes beyond who's actually circling the Arctic Circle then.

RH: Well the Chinese of course call themselves a near Arctic state in what we've seen since 2015 is that the Chinese have been taking increasing efforts to allow their navy and one presumes their air forces to engage in more and more northern operations. They've sent forces into the Bering Sea. They now on a regular basis will send into the European Arctic side, surface vessels and it's becoming increasingly clear that as they become a competitor to the Americans, that in fact that they will probably be outfitting their submarines to be able go into Arctic waters, which of course then totally complicates the picture in terms of any interaction from submarine forces.

AMT: Do Canada's submarines do that?

RH: No we only have conventional power that you need to have. First and most, you need to have nuclear powered submarines and you also have to have a special under ice condition. We haven't seen that under ice capabilities yet for the Chinese forces, but there are starting to be some suggestions that they're doing the mapping through the sending of their icebreakers through the various waters and that are in the long term preparing for that eventuality.

AMT: How many in terms of icebreakers how do they rate versus what Canada has?

RH: Well they've got a more modern fleet. They've got one civilian vessel, one large civilian vessel and our icebreakers are more capable than what their particular ice breaker is. They just announced that they will be building another one. They've announced that they will be building a nuclear powered sub or ice breaker, which will of course be more capable than what we have and on a very much more quieter basis their navy has started building icebreakers that are roughly the same size as what our offshore patrol vessels are. So they're at this point in time, they've got a smaller icebreaking fleet, but they've got a much more robust capital investment in icebreaking capabilities than what we do.

AMT: Okay and so against that backdrop, Russia brings journalists to tour the Northern Clover Arctic military base. What what are you reading into that?

RH: Oh what they're basically doing, by allowing these media force people into this location, is this is a clear signal, the Russians have invested immense resources to redevelop the bases that everybody had thought were closed down at the end of the Cold War. And this is a very clear signaling to the international community of exactly what their capabilities are. And so they're able to show the world by having these media individuals just exactly what they've done in terms of their air forces in northern capabilities, in terms of their naval forces. You just heard from Mr. McKay talking about how difficult it is in fact to have far northern operations for anyone's military. Well the Russians are trying to show to everybody that in fact this is easy, so that when there's a crisis, when the ongoing Ukrainian crisis of course flares up, they are then able to utilize these forces to intimidate their neighbors. So we're seeing increasing overflights, we're seeing increasing naval operations in and near the Norwegians, the Danes, the British, our airspaces and basically the type of sort of positioning that most people thought was long gone and over is reappearing and this media trip is just one example of that.

AMT: You know a whole bunch of us see the Arctic as a place of peace and neutrality.

RH: Yes that's the problem because everybody is always wishing that it could be you know in academic sense, we talk about Arctic exceptionalism, the way that somehow the geopolitics don't touch it. But if you look at the geography of Russia, if you look at where they are placing their most modern forces, where their Air Forces, Navy, submarines are being placed, their nuclear weapons, which are at the center of their military capabilities. It's along the peninsula in the northern regions and that then of course means any time they have an issue with the Americans, the Americans have to respond and in fact, as you pointed out, the Americans are increasing their northern capabilities as a direct response to what the Russians are doing. We're back into this horrible dynamic that we haven't seen since the Cold War.

AMT: I got a question I want to play for you. Canada's military presence in the north is largely represented by Canadian Rangers and they come from northern communities. It's part of Canada's Army Reserve Program. This is a clip of Lieutenant Colonel, commanding officer of the 1st Canadian Rangers Patrol Group in Yellowknife. He says Canadian Rangers presence in the north is crucial. Roughly 4 percent of the population of the north is directly or indirectly connected to those rangers.

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VOICE: When we talk conducting and providing support to sovereignty operations, that's all our northern training, all our regular patrolling. So the navigable season when the Northwest Passages open up in the north, I look to have a presence to make sure I provide that overt presence in the north, so that when cruise ships come by or foreign vessels come by, there's some guy on red on a hill waving at them as they go by. I would say they are far more than symbolic.

AMT: What do you think Rob Hubert?

RH: Well the Rangers are are critically important in terms of that the boots on the ground and their is amazing for the the resources that they have. The big issue in this is the one that of course both the Conservatives and liberals may talk about. But I haven't quite figured out how to do is with the new weapons systems that the Russians are bringing into the Arctic region and that the China will have a capability of doing is of course we have to have surveillance capabilities that look way beyond where where we stand right now. There was a international treaty between the Americans and the Russians that limited the range of cruise missiles and intermediate nuclear tipped missiles. Well that treaty is now over which means that we need to have the ranges of no question whatsoever in terms of everything that the good colonel says about them. But the re re modernization of the North warning system under no threat has to be negotiated. We also have to have a capability of responding and that means new fighter is something. Of course we know that both the Liberals and Conservatives seem capable of being able to to to deal with. So you know as much as the Rangers are important it's the sharper edge of that were really hurting and you have to throw into that that we now have an American administration who we used to be able to count and put through the special relationship where we could sort of get a wink and a nod in terms of a Northwest Passage. We have an American secretary of Navy who has repeatedly stated this year that the Americans are thinking about doing a freedom of navigation exercise possibly through the Northwest Passage. So the old days of counting answer of American acceptance of some of our positions and working with us may be coming to an end.

AMT: Rob Hubert, we have to leave it there. I'm going to pick up on that with my next guest, but thank you.

RH: My pleasure.

AMT: Rob Hubert, professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Calgary. We reached him in Calgary. Well my next guest is a Canadian Arctic researcher. She's traveled extensively in the Arctic states. Danita Catherine Burke is a researcher at the Center for War Studies at the University of Southern Denmark and she is in Odense, Denmark. Hello.

DANITA CATHERINE BURKE: Hello.

AMT: Do you share these concerns about what's going on militarily in the Arctic?

DCB: I do to an extent, but I think part of the problem we have when we start conceptualizing the security challenges in the Arctic region is that we often conflate military to security and the security challenges arising in the Arctic region are much broader than just the military. Now we should also broaden our understanding of the role that militaries in the various Arctic states play in the protection and security of the arctic regions.

AMT: So the concerns of what Russia is doing. Like who needs to broaden their understanding of it? Is it us in Canada or is it all of the nations who circle it?

DCB: Well I think it's a combination of the two. In this regard, in terms of the article and the concern coming out of the permanent joint board on defense, representatives co-chair John McKay, the focus is very much on the militarization. And while that is certainly something that is a point of concern to which we should always pay attention to, we should also talk about the role that the military perhaps plays in Russia's own plans for the protection and the wider protection that it has and its concerns in its Arctic region and its concerns are not solely focused on what the North Americans or what the Western states are doing. And as Professor Hubert rightly points out, there are increasing concerns about the increased role of China in the Arctic region and Russia as the largest Arctic state with the most likely area, the northern sea route to develop into a shipping road and also as a border state with China, has a rather vested interest in making sure that it has its own back protected as the region opens up.

AMT: And so it is some of this some more about trade than security do you think?

DCB: Well they're interrelated because trade needs to be secure in order for us to be able to rely on international markets. So if Russia is going to put itself in a position where it's going to increasingly market the northern route, which it has been doing as of late as an area for increased shipping and as a alternative to other shipping routes in the world, then it also needs to be in a place where it can ensure that any ships passing through both respect its territory and sovereignty as well have no fear that they might be at risk of any sort of pirating type problems.

AMT: So what you want to see happen was Canadian Arctic policy?

DCB: Well I think that it's important that we dont repeat the history that we have in the 60s we talked about getting submarines and we didn't follow through with it. We talked about it again in the 80s with the resurgence of the Cold War and the Morony era. We still didn't do it. There was a lot of concern in 2007 around the time when Russia planted the titanium flag on the North Pole. Particularly Harper was very much also using the terms use it or lose it. He mentioned it when he was up in Resolute Bay in 2007, but the follow through isn't quite there and I think in order to help encourage a broader follow through on the role that the military and other assets play in our broader security within the Canadian Arctic we need to both include in the Indigenous and non-Indigenous people who live throughout our nort and we need to broaden our understanding about what it is that we can do in order to invest in a wider security concerns and investments.

AMT: Okay Danita Catherine Burke, thanks for your thoughts on this today.

DCB: You're welcome.

AMT: Danita Catherine Burke is a researcher at the Centre for War Studies at the University of Southern Denmark. She is an Odense, Denmark. Well the defense of Canada's northern frontier is not a new concern. Fear of a Soviet nuclear attack or invasion from the north prompted the creation of the distant early warning line, the DEW line. A series of radar outposts designed to detect an Arctic threat. In 1959, a CBC radio special looked into the life of one of the DEW line outposts.

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VOICE: It's an ordinary day on the day line. At Cape Town on Baffin Island, the temperature outside is around 30 below. Across these icy mountains over on the other side of the island on Fox Basin, it's often 65 below at this time of the year. For the radar station, the DEW line main site known as Diamane is high on a 2300 foot block overlooking the Davis Straits, which divides Baffin Island from Greenland. There is nothing to stop the winds blowing down from the North Pole. Over the frozen sea where the locked in icebergs look like so many fantastic ruins of white castles on white plains, there is nothing to stop the wind blowing at Diamane and how they blow. Many of the men on the DEW line don't see the light of day at this time of year. They didn't even see the gloomy twilight of the Arctic winter. About 100 men are courted in Diamane, each in his own cabin with its bed and spring mattresses and sheets, the interior of the module trains is like the interior of a ship, a stationary prefabricated ship of the polar seas. It's an artificial life, without families, without feminine company. Stranded in the oppressive isolation of the Arctic, but it's as comfortable as modern materials and mechanisms can make it. The food is excellent. The eggs and meat and vegetables are fresh and only the milk is canned. There is a well stocked library. Movies three times or more a week.

AMT: There you go. From 1959, CBC reporter, Peter Stursberg reporting on a recently opened distant early warning station from the DEW line. Stay with us. Coming up in our next half hour, the science and ethics of nudging citizens into better behaviours, such as donating organs. Plus blowing off some steam at Toronto's new adult playground. That's a playground for people who are older. That is not an x-rated playground by the way. This is The Current.

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Adult playgrounds 'reignite' childhood joy, but is that a good thing?

Guests: Julie Crysler

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

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VOICE: We have our swimming pool. Thirty thousand balls.

AMT: Well that is what 30,000 balls in a giant ball pit sounds like. Lee Davis has just jumped in. He is a 23-year-old entrepreneur, straight out of university. One of the co-founders of HideSeek, a new indoor playground for grown ups in the west end of Toronto.

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VOICE: It's a really hard feeling to describe atually being immersed in these balls and what's fun is that the pit is supposed to represent a pool, but really even being in a ball pit, just takes us back to our childhood.

AMT: And that is the whole point of this new indoor playground taking adults back to childhood. Our producer Julie Crysler went to check it out and she's with me in our studio. Hi Julie.

JULIE CRYSLER: Hey Anna Maria.

AMT: Did you jump into the ball pit?

JC: Well I did not, but I did get in there. Here's a little bit of what it sounded like.

SOUNDCLIP

[Sound of jumping into a ball pit]

AMT: Is that you?

JC: It's not me, there are a couple of other young women who are a lot braver.

AMT: It is the size of a pool. What else is going on in this playground? Well there's a lot going on there. The space was divided up into a series of colourful rooms, each on a different theme. One was full of giant silver beachballs, another with rainbow slinkys. And you know those circular Velcro paddles and balls you played with as a kid?

JC: Yeah.

JC: And they stick. You know there was a room where the walls and ceiling were all covered with the paddles and then there were buckets of balls to throw all.

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[Throwing velcro balls]

JC: So Instagram worthy was how a lot of people described the space to me. People were taking a lot of pictures.

AMT: I can imagine. I would too. So who was there?

JC: Most people were in their 20s or 30s, couples, young families, a few kids. Lots of young women in pairs and small groups, but there were two people who really caught my eye. Joyce Lam and Tom Chin. They were older than the rest. They're both 60.

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VOICE 1: She's a cougar though. She's six months older than me, but we've known each other since we were 10 years old.

VOICE 2: So we actually had recess together.

VOICE 1: But she says that I didn't play with her during recess.

VOICE 2: He plays with me now.

VOICE 1: Recess today. I have the same level of maturity I think.

AMT: They're having a lot of fun.

JC: They were having a blast. Some of the people there were a bit tentative about playing like me, but Joyce and Tom were just completely letting loose.

[sc].

VOICE: Grow up. It's my back, it's so stiff. There go my dentures.

AMT: I'm having fun just listening to him. There go his dentures. So is this just all about fun or is there a bigger purpose here?

JC: This is a business. Lee Davis had all the buzz words about social media marketing strategy and customer experience, but he told me the inspiration for HideSeek was really personal too.

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VOICE: I remember coming home and we would just be playing outside, street hockey, mini sticks, basketball for hours and that was really I think some times as an adult is we do forget to play sometimes and I think we need to remind ourself it's okay and that's something we're trying to do here. We want to remind people you know what it's okay to jump in a shopping cart and have fun and that's what we're really trying to reignite and hopefully you can bring that style back into your everyday life.

AMT: Are adult playgrounds a common thing now?

JC: They seem to be growing in popularity for sure. There are a number of them across North America and ball pits in particular are really big on Instagram. You may have seen the stories last year out of the UK about the bouncy castle for adults. There were sellout crowds when it toured the country.

AMT: What's the point of bringing this kind of play back into our lives as adults?

JC: This is something I asked Jane Clapp about. She's really excited about this trend. She's a movement coach in Toronto. She uses physicality to help people who were living with trauma and chronic illness and she says they can really help.

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VOICE: I feel like Mr. Rogers. There's so many things put away that you can't see.

JC: Her studio is in the West End of Toronto. It's a warehouse space with high ceilings, bright white walls and lots of stuff to play with.

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VOICE: I have a trampoline, a rebounder. I've got tonnes of balls, all different colour balls put in there. I have oh my gosh I even have a SkipIt. Do you know what, I'm going to go and grab it. This is the thing that people used to do when they were kids, where they hook something around their ankle and then they swing it around and jump over it with the other foot. I'm going to see if I can do it. It's so hard. So I'm flipping this SkipIt around and it's swinging around my ankle and then I have a ball on a string that jumping over with the other foot.

JC: So do you remember playing with a SkipIt, Anna Maria?

AMT: I do and I can hear it. Like as she does it, I can remember it, yeah. But how does playing with a SkipIt or jumping on a rebounder help people who are dealing with trauma?

JC: Well number one, to do it without tripping, you really have to pay attention to what you're doing. So it forces you to stay focused on the present moment rather than the pain of the past or fear of the future. And you can hear it's fun too, right and it also goes deeper than that.

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VOICE: I had one psychotherapist in one of my certification programs, call me in for trauma. Who jumped on a rebounder for the first time and cried. She's like I can't believe how much I was missing this feeling of joy and play in my body. It was like heartbreaking because I feel like so much of the suffering and stress and mental health issues that people are experiencing have to do with like not being able to access that in their bodies. Joy isn't a mental thing right. It's what we feel on the inside and it's just like I see this shift in people's faces of they have a break from what feels like what's weighing them down and I don't know how we survive if we don't get those breaks.

AMT: She's talking about finding that joy and letting go the way kids do. The way they can.

JC: Yeah and it was it was quite moving to talk with her to too, right. She seems so compassionate and the people she works with are dealing with a lot.

AMT: And is that what we need to be encouraging in adults to be more like kids?

JC: There are people who are worried about that. Who think that in some ways we're too much like kids already in our society and one of them is Simon. He's a sociologist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He points to things like superhero movies, which are really popular with adults or the way that advertising often uses cute cartoon characters even for things like insurance or toilet paper. But what really worries him the most is technology and he thinks that computers and smartphones are encouraging us to act like babies.

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VOICE: So we are the centre of our own little universe. And whenever we touch on the key, there's an immediate answer. So I think we're getting used to a terminal life, a terminal environment, where every one of our impulse or instincts have to have an immediate answer and it is also infantilizing, right. So it seems to me that in every society and in every period of history, every child has always had to learn the basic lesson that in order to grow up, you will have to learn to postpone. But I think that we are increasingly taught, there is no reason to postpone. That's the new slogan of Amazon: whatever you want, right now.

VOICE: And whatever we want right now, what is wrong with that?

JC: Well on one level it's amazing right, but the irony is when we all act like that expecting immediate responses to our Amazon orders or e-mail or social media, it just contributes to the kind of stress that people end up wanting to go to indoor playgrounds to escape.

AMT: So it's a vicious circle.

JC: Right. And Simon is also worried that we're losing our ability to deal with big problems. We're outsourcing our memory. We're losing our ability to navigate without GPS. We're relying on technology to think for us and we're becoming more and more distracted.

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VOICE: We are facing such complex situations. We can barely manage our affairs at the national level and as we all know not ours, every society is connected to every other society. So if something happens in Tokyo right now, we are affected immediately. Not only do we need to wrap our minds around the global system and on top of it, try to manage that as impossible as it is, and on top of it we have to also deal with the threat of imminent ecological collapse. So of course I mean what could be more tempting than to winthrdaw into the machine where we are the centre of the universe and everything that we want is available right here, right now at just the touch of a finger.

AMT: So we start off talking about playing and now we're talking ecological collapse, Julie?

JC: You don't see the connection Anna Maria? Let me take you back to the playground. Remember Joycem, the 60-year-old who was having the time of her life?

AMT: Yes.

JC: Well she had a little bit of a moment in the ball pit, one that might remind us of the value of embracing our inner child.

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VOICE: Can you get suffocated in here? Okay inner child. Inner child. It's kind of scary. I don't think I could get up. It's like help, I'm falling, I don't think I can get up. Can you give me a hand. Okay now I'm panicking. Tom pull me up.

AMT: That's bad.

JC: For a moment there, before Tom helped her up, Joyce really did look genuinely scared. Her eyes were big and I think you can hear it in her voice, even as she's joking.

AMT: I heard it a little bit, Tom pull me up now, kind of thing.

JC: Yeah, but when I spoke to her as she was leaving the playground, she told me the ball pit was her favorite part.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: It was really scary, but once you do it and you feel so accomplished, It's less scary. So you feel really good about yourself. So I think that's what kids learn when they play. So if you're a little bit scared and you do it and then you realize you can do it, it's amazing what it does to self-confidence.

AMT: So she's talking about tapping into that, reminding yourself what you learned and using that again.

JC: Yeah.You know it's a small problem right, getting over your fear of a ball pit, but in a way it also speaks to the kind of courage and creativity that we might need to solve those bigger ones. So maybe there are good reasons to take inspiration from kids as long as we're focusing on the right qualities.

AMT: Thanks Julie.

JC: Thank you, Anna Maria.

AMT: Julie Crysler, one of our producers here at The Current.

Nova Scotia’s new opt-out organ donation system example of political “nudging”

Guests: Tim Harford

AMT: You are listening to The Current on CBC Radio One. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: In this new model everybody is presumed to be a donor. If you've not indicated that you want to opt out, if you will. The system is going to assume that donation can occur. It's sort of flipping the approach, if you will. We're still going to absolutely discuss with the family and incorporate their wishes, but the default becomes let's make this happen.

AMT: That is Dr. Stephen Beed explaining Nova Scotia's new presumed consent system on CBC Radio's As It Happens last week. It's the first of its kind for organ donations in North America, but the idea behind it, nudging citizens into better choices is part of a global trend steeped in behavioral science. My next guest says we should approach nudges with caution. Tim Harford writes The Undercover Economist column for The Financial Times. He is host of the BBC podcast, 50 Things That Made the Modern Economy. And he joins me from Oxford, England. Hello.

TIM HARFORD: Hello, Anna Maria. I should say by the way I think by the way that they're very powerful and they're not always dangerous, so that they have some wonderful uses, but they can be dangerous. I'm happy to discuss that.

AMT: Let's talk about it all, but let's just so I understand, can you explain briefly the behavioral science behind the nudge.

TH: Well the the idea behind the nudge is simply we can shape your choices perhaps by providing you information perhaps by making one choice or another a default without actually taking away your freedom. So the most famous example of a nudge is to say rather than have a pension fund which you can contribute to if you want will have a pension fund which you will automatically contribute to it unless you tell us that you you dont want to. You still have the same freedom of choice you can still contribute or not contribute. But what we assume youre going to do if you tell us nothing changes according to the nudge and we know that these nudges can have a very big effect on what people actually end up doing.

AMT: So this presumed consent, how effective is like presumed consent nudge with organ donation?

TH: It depends what you mean by effective. It's very effective at getting people on the register to be organ donors. That is not necessarily what you want. What we found is being on the register and actually donating an organ are not the same thing because for example the family will be consulted about their wishes for a deceased person's organs. So what will happen is after a motorbike accident a young person's killed in a motorbike accident it's a tragedy all their organs of course in perfect working order. They're an ideal candidate to be an organ donor. What will happen is immediately a specialised professional or a nurse or doctor will be having this very difficult conversation with their family about whether they want the organs to be donated or not and whether the person was actually on the organ donor register or not is actually doesn't make such a huge difference to whether they end up donating their organs or not. We dont know what they would do anyway in this case. I think in many cases we like with a pension we have a pretty good idea that most people want a pension but I dont think that we can presume that most people want to be on the Organ Donation Register so there is another option. You could have a situation for example and this is this has been done in various places have been done in someU.S. states it's been done in theU.K. you have a situation where when you apply for a driving licence they say well we'll give you a driving licence but before we give you the driving licence you have to tell us do you want to be on the register or not. We're not going to presume anything. We're just not going to give you a driving licence until you make an active decision and this is called forced choice and this I think is is a clever nudge a better nudge because then when you have that terribly difficult conversation with the family the nurse the doctor can talk to the family and say no this person made an active choice. They were asked to make a choice when they applied for a driving licence and they actively chose to be on the donor register, rather than just be being opted in without ever having that conversation.

AMT: And their relatives of course would, their loved ones would know that and that would help inform what they say when they're asked again in the case of death. So there's much more guidance.

TH: Exactly. It's a reminder that these nudges they are very powerful and Im all in favor of using them in the right way. But we we do need to think about exactly what how it is that we're trying to shape behavior rather than just going oh more people on the register, that would be good.

VOICE: Well let's tackle a little bit more about the things that rhyme with nudge because not all causes are as altruistic as organ donation. What is a slude?

TH: So a slude is kind of an anti-nudge. The classic nudge is you want people to do something. So you make it easy you want them to be organ donors you make it easy to be an organ donor you want them to have a pension you make it easy to have a pension you want them to pay their taxes you make it easy to pay taxes. Well a sludge is you want people to not do something and so you make it difficult. Now sometimes sludgy sludge is just the result of incompetence. So sometimes official forms can be terribly difficult to fill in just because they're badly designed. Other times sludge is very deliberate. So if you've ever for example tried to cancel a magazine subscription or switch your phone provider sometimes the process is just designed to be very difficult because it's in the interest of those providers that you actually do find it hard to quit often very easy just sign up and very hard to get out again mail in rebates are another example. Why wouldn't you just offer 50 dollars off at the checkout rather than say oh you mail in the rebate will give you fifty dollars off later it's because they know people over estimate their chances of actually completing the form we say oh yeah well we'll get the rebate for sure, but actually most of us are not that organized.

AMT: So I've got some tape I want you hear. Last fall, weeks before the US midterm elections, voter ID laws in North Dakota were changed to require street address on ID to prove residency. Now that's not a big deal for most people in North Dakota, except for First Nations people. And because the majority of them have PO boxes. This is a clip of Margaret Landon, a Native American voting rights advocate in North Dakota speaking on CNN.

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VOICE: It is a very complicated problem because we've don't. Some reservations, they don't have street addresses. The majority of them don't have house numbers. It's discriminating and disenfranchising to our people to not allow them to vote and it's discouraging on top of that.

AMT: So Tim Harford, how does the behavioral science of a sludge come into play in voter ID laws where critics say are really actually voter suppression.

TH: Yeah. And listeners will come to their own conclusions as to whether these people are disenfranchised by accident through oversight because somebody didn't think how easy it would be for them to fill in this form or whether it was done deliberately because somebody calculated that there would be an electoral advantage in that. You have to suspect that there's malice aforethought there rather than this just being an accident.

AMT: And that brings us to the third variation of the nudge. You've identified something called a grudge. What is that?

TH: Yes so a nudge is to make it easy to do something, a sludge to make it difficult to do something. So grudge is my little phrase for making it easy for people to get angry. And this is something we see now in the social media age. Many social media experts know that if you want engagement you want clicks you want things to be shared. You need to get people either laughing or furious. And so lots of social media is designed in order to provoke extreme and emotional reactions in us. And this is why social media can be so polarizing and can be so can have so much heat and so little light. And of course this can be used to to engineer advertising dollars but it can also be used for political advantage. Now we know for example that when people have tried to work with the Russians for example tried to interfere in the US presidential election campaign which is well understood that they did regardless of who they may have been coordinating with one of the ways they did so is to try to get Democrats angry at other Democrats, Republicans angry at other Republicans, Republicans and Democrats angry at each other and so I call this grudge as a kind of nudge towards anger, nudge towards division.

AMT: And we have an example of a grudge. Listen to this.

SOUNDCLIP

[Sounds from protest in Houston]

AMT: So we have the sounds of a street protest in May of 2016 outside the Islamic Center in Houston, Texas.

TH: Oh a Houston protest.

AMT: Yeah so on one side, you got protesters chanting Entenmann's some slogans at a rally organized by a Facebook group calling itself Heart of Texas and across the street a counter protest organized by a different Facebook group called Save Islamic Knowledge drew a competing crowd. Local reporters found it odd that they couldn't find thd organizers at either event and of course there was a reason for that. This is how Richard Byrd, chair of the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee put it.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: It's hard to attend an event in Houston, Texas, when you're trolling from a site in Russia, but neither could have known is that Russian trolls were encouraging both sides to battle in the streets and create division between real Americans.

AMT: Okay he says that Russian trolls organized both protests? That's grudge on steroids? What is that?

TH: Seems to have been exactly what happened. The Chinese by the way use the reverse tactic with their own internal political discourse. A great research paper on this that finds that on very sensitive days in China for example the anniversary of a Tiananmen Square paid sort of anti trolls will show up and talk about the weather, talk about sports, just change the subject, just happy to talk about how cool everything is and just constantly try to calm everybody down and crowd out any sensitive or emotional political discussion. So I mean some there are people who are getting very very good at getting us to feel certain things and I think as as individuals we know now I think we're being manipulated we're being manipulated by politicians being manipulated by foreign actors were just being manipulated by social media companies and the companies that use them merely for advertising dollars. They want us to look at our phones. They want us to spend more time on Facebook on Twitter on Instagram. And really the only way to fight back here is just to take a step back and be very deliberate about how we use our phones how we use social media. What we share what we dont and maybe just pause a little bit and ask ourselves how does this make me feel before I share it, before I retweet it and is this actually what I really want to do?

AMT: Its interesting and you say the anti-grudge, is it a smudge? We need another word. But this is all based on behavioral science. This is all based on what we might have like a predisposed kind of willingness to do and how it can be used either again in an altruistic way or in a way to benefit someone else.

TH: Absolutely we don't behave like text book economic agents. We are influenced by our emotions. We can be short sighted. We can be distracted by paperwork we can be provoked into emotional reactions. Any marketing expert has known this for a very long time. It's only recently come into mainstream economic thinking. But of course these things were important. These things shape our behavior and of course they can be used for good to get us to save more towards our pensions or to eat more healthfully. They can be used for evil to make us spend more money or to suppress our votes and they can often often just be just be selfishly by companies who do you know who want us to reach into our pockets and spend and there's no foolproof way to get around it because we're all human. But of course the more we think and make deliberate choices, the less we are likely to be nudged against our will.

AMT: So it's a really good time to be talking about this now because Canadian politicians have been warning about foreign interference in our federal election that's coming this fall. What can be done to counteract that kind of social manipulation in sort of in that environment?

TH: From a public policy point of view, I think it's easy to be stampeded into draconian measures, really damaging people's rights to free speech. We need to be careful that the cure isn't worse than the disease, but one thing that would be great to see for example is a lot more transparency about who is paying for posts on Facebook, who is paying for political advertising because at the moment in many jurisdictions, it's very easy for anybody to pay to advertise anything to do an end run around campaign finance laws and a new social media as a channel. And just to have claims being made that are not publicly examinable. You know, if somebody puts a claim on a billboard or on TV advertising and it's a false claim, that can be challenged, but if that claim is circulating on social media, it's very hard for us to know who is being shown exactly what. And it is possible to have much more transparency about that and I think that's something we need urgently.

AMT: And we should be looking for that if we do start reading things or a whole trail that sort of makes our blood boil, we should think about why is that happening.

TH: Who's paying to show this to me? Why am I seeing this and do I really want to tell all my friends about it? Either because I'm furious about it or because I agree. Do I really want to tell my friends about it before I've gone one more click and just checked.

AMT: Making us think a lot there. Thank you for your time today.

TH: It's my pleasure. Lovely to talk to you Anna Maria.

AMT: Tim Harford is a journalist and author. He writes The Undercover Economist column for The Financial Times. He is the host of the BBC podcast 50 Things That Made the Modern Economy. And he joined us from Oxford, England. That's our program for today. Stay with Radio 1 for Q. Tom Power is speaking to comedy greats Steve Martin and Martin Short today about the show they have on tour together. Remember you can always take The Current with you to go on the CBC Radio app, free from the App Store or Google Play. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. Thank you for listening to The Current.

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Apr. 9, 2019 episode transcript

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