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The Current Transcript for August 20, 2019

Host: Matt Galloway

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

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VOICE: A lot just rolls through your head. You know, what’s the reaction of your friends, your family, your constituents. And at the end of the day, I thought you know what, it’s the right thing to do. I feel comfortable with the decision and I’m glad I did it. But it took me a long time to get there.

MATT GALLOWAY: There is the decision to come out publically at the age of 58 as a gay man. Ottawa mayor Jim Watson spoke openly about his sexuality for the first time in a column in The Ottawa Citizen on Saturday. He says it was a decision 40 years in the making. In his words, “better late than never.” Coming out of the closet is an intensely personal decision, no matter what the age. Many, as Mayor Watson himself wrote, worry about how friends and family will react even in a cosmopolitan country like Canada, even in 2019. First up today, two people who like Jim Watson came out of the closet later in life. Why did it take so long for each of them to get to that place? What changed when they finally arrived there? And then, more than 1900 people have died of the Ebola virus in the Democratic Republic of Congo in what is the second worst outbreak of the disease this world has ever seen. Something is different this time though. Health workers are now armed with a vaccine that could stop the disease. A vaccine developed with the help of a Canadian researcher, a vaccine that was ready for use back in 2003.

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VOICE: We could have prevented these outbreaks if we were able to deploy the vaccine early enough.

MG: Steven Jones joins me to talk about why the vaccine’s deployment was delayed and about the frustration of watching these outbreaks when perhaps they could have been stopped in their tracks. And later we continue with the CBC’s award-winning investigative podcast, Finding Cleo. On today’s episode investigative journalist Connie Walker learns all she can about Cleo’s mother, Lillian.

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VOICE: She told me that she had heard that Cleo had died and she was really hurting. I know that she was a really loving person. And I know she felt bad, she showed that love to her children.

MG: Episode 7 of Finding Cleo in under an hour, but we begin with the weight of the closet door and finally finding the strength to swing it open. My name is Matt Galloway. This is the summer edition of The Current.

'I'm myself now': What it's like to come out as gay later in life

Guest: Ken Rusk, Anne Marie Zanzal

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MG: My name's Matt Galloway. This is the summer edition of The Current.

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VOICE: I've come across incidents for instance when this guy came up and said I hope you're not going on the fag parade, you know making a derogatory comment about the pride parade. And then the last couple of years you know along the parade route, I've had some people say when are you coming out of the closet? You know yell that at me and I pretended not to hear and waved with the music and I thought you know nothing to be ashamed of. Just do it.

MG: Just do it. That was Ottawa mayor Jim Watson explaining why he decided last weekend to tell the world he's gay. The 58-year-old wrote, "I'm gay. There I said it. Those two words took me almost four decades to utter." Jim Watson's story has resonated with many in the LGBTQ community who remain closeted for much of their lives, only coming out when they're well into middle age or beyond. Mr. Watson has received a deluge of support, including from former Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne, Canada's first openly gay premier.

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VOICE: I found it very touching. I called him actually just after I read it and just said how proud I was to be his friend. It took a lot of courage you know and the fact that it took a lot of courage is exactly why it's so important that he did it. You know and I'm not surprised that he said later that you know he feels relieved. He's now able to be open about who he is. I think it's wonderful for him and wonderful for all the people around him.

MG: Another high profile coming out happened last week in Utah with the father of well-known kidnapping survivor and child safety activist Elizabeth Smart. 64-year-old Ed Smart made his coming out announcement on Facebook. Mr. Smart is a Mormon and his church holds a strong position against gay marriage. In his Facebook post, Ed Smart wrote, "As an openly gay man the church is not a place where I can find solace any longer." Well to learn more about what it means to come out later in life, I'm joined by Ken Rusk who came out at the age of 72. He's now 87. Ken Rusk is with me in our studio here in Toronto. Hi.

KEN RUSK: Hi.

MG: What did you think when you heard about Ottawa mayor Jim Watson coming out publicly at the age of 50?

KEN RUSK: Oh wonderful. Just so great to hear that.

MG: Was there something in what he said that you could relate to?

KEN RUSK: Oh yes.

MG: What was that?

KEN RUSK: Oh well the feeling the feeling of release. You know the burden on your shoulders is really gone at that point.

MG: Tell me a bit about the burden. You lived with that burden for 72 years.

KEN RUSK: Yes I did.

MG: So what is that burden?

KEN RUSK: Stress. Having to look over your shoulder all the time. Fearful that someone would out you.

MG: And is that what you're looking over your shoulder for?

KEN RUSK: Yes.

MG: And when you release that stress and when that burden is gone and I can even see in your body language right now, what does that feel like?

KEN RUSK: Oh great. Absolutely. Yeah. I'm myself now.

MG: Knowing what you know, why did you wait until you were 72?

KEN RUSK: I was married. I'm a father of four, grandfather of nine and great grandfather of five. I was really convinced that if I had come out earlier it would have devastated my family and hurt my wife terribly.

MG: What were you worried about?

KEN RUSK: The split up of the family I mean you have to experience family to know what it's like. And I just I just couldn't do it.

MG: What in that split, in devastating your family, were you worried that your family would feel as though they were being blamed for something? What specifically were you so concerned about that you held that inside of you for 72 years?

KEN RUSK: Well well first of all it was being gay was not the way to be. And I knew that you know growing up in the 30s and 40s and married in 1955. I had a destiny that was set upon me really and I didn't have the stamina, the guts, whatever to reject that.

MG: And that destiny was to get married and have children.

KEN RUSK: Yeah, of course.

MG: Have a traditional family or what people looked at then as a traditional family.

KEN RUSK: Yes.

MG: When did you realize that you were gay?

KEN RUSK: Oh gee when I was probably three, four years old. Yes. The thing was I had four sisters. I got along well with them, but it was the men that I really adored. I just had that feeling, which I would now call gaydar. At that age, so help me. You know I could experience something, I couldn't do anything about it, but the feeling I knew was there.

MG: Did you ever consider before the point that you did come out, did you ever consider being your true self? I mean coming out of the closet.

KEN RUSK: Yes. Yes. Three and a half years before I came out, my wife was suffering from ovarian cancer and I was her sole caregiver. So coming out in that period was just out of the question. She was a very private person and as I said, I was her sole caregiver and it probably would have terminated her life if I had come out or if I had been found out.

MG: And you waited until she died?

KEN RUSK: Yes.

MG: Is there any part of you that wishes that knowing the circumstances and again she was ill before, but knowing the circumstances, is there any part of you that wishes that you, that that's something that you could have shared with her?

KEN RUSK: I don't think I could have on my part and hers. We were very much attracted to each other, loved each other, but there was not a relaxing communication available.

MG: When did you first say the words I'm gay?

KEN RUSK: Oh gee. It was in front of 28 people at Grace United Church in Thornbury.

MG: And what was that moment like?

KEN RUSK: Oh what a relief.

MG: Why in front of 28 people? I mean that could've been done in a smaller circle. 28 people is a lot of people to unveil yourself in front of.

KEN RUSK: Well actually from the church pulpit on Christmas Eve, just prior to that, I had a presentation to do and I part of it, most of it was to do with the church's work beyond the walls. And I challenged them to back up a little bit. I had already experienced some time at Metropolitan Community Church of Toronto.

MG: Led by Brett hawks.

KEN RUSK: Yes, yes, yes. And without that experience, it would have been much more difficult. But I actually challenged them at that Christmas Eve service to make themselves more affirming, more inclusive. They already were very much so and a few people read into that here's a guy who's gay. So they asked for an interview with me and the minister who was my crutch throughout all of this, he asked if I would agree to meet with him. So we did one Sunday afternoon and there were 28 people there and the first thing I did I just stood up and said you need to know that I'm gay.

MG: And how did they react?

KEN RUSK: Hugs. Hugs. Some of the guys couldn't hug of course, but they touched. It was incredible.

MG: And from your family? The family that you were so worried about that you might break apart, how did your family react?

KEN RUSK: Well each one of those was pretty traumatic. I didn't do any around the dinner table coming out, but my younger son and his wife, I was visiting with them and I told them and they just got up and hugged me. So that's the way it went with all of my kids.

MG: I want to bring somebody else into this. Anne Marie Zanzal is a graduate of the Yale Divinity School, ordained minister in the United Church of Christ. Provides emotional support and spiritual support for those women who are coming out later on in life. She came out at the age of 52 and she has been listening and joins us from Nashville, Tennessee. Anne Marie. Hi.

ANNE MARIE ZANZAL: Hi. Good morning.

MG: You've been listening to Ken's story. What are you thinking as you hear this?

ANNE MARIE ZANZAL: Oh it sounds so familiar. Yes it sounds a lot like my story as well and hundreds of other stories I've heard about relief and about fulfilling a destiny that was planned for you. So everything he has said has touched a chord in me.

MG: Relief is a really interesting word. Why do you use that?

ANNE MARIE ZANZAL: I think you know everybody's coming out is different. Sometimes people come to the realization in the mid-life. Sometimes people sort of know their whole life. I was a sort of know of and once I was finally able to admit, to accept who I was created to be, a lot of other things went away. So for me I had a lot of restlessness in my life. Married for 27 years, four kids, just like your other guest, but I had a lot of restlessness that I never could put my finger on. And once I tied that to that I was, that I am a lesbian, that recklessness really went away.

MG: Am I right that it took you what three attempts to come out?

ANNE MARIE ZANZAL: Oh yeah. It took me a long time. You know it's not, you know like I think about Edward Smart and you know how long it probably took him as well, but it did take me three, probably three attempts. It was over a 10 year period.

MG: What was the moment, I mean even in that first attempt when you said I'm ready for this. To your point, you've been married for 27 years, you have four kids. There's a lot of life that you've lived, but you decide that this is the moment in which you're going do it. What was that moment?

ANNE MARIE ZANZAL: So for me I was a hospice chaplain for a long time and I had a patient that died a very, very difficult death. And we had become friends over that time. And she had said to me and she wasn't gay or anything, but she had said to me I'd been waiting for something my whole life in the period that we spent before her death. And so when she died it was a little bit traumatic and for me I went to see a therapist to talk about it and she my therapist asked me, what have you been waiting for your whole life Anee Marie? And I said, I think I'm gay. And that was like the probably, that was probably like the tenth time I uttered that to another human being. And at that point I knew that I had to keep going and when I came out to her at that point I said to her, I'm opening a Pandora's box and it really did open the Pandora's box, but I went through it and have come out the other side so much better.

MG: Did you like Ken, worry about how family would react?

ANNE MARIE ZANZAL: Oh of course.

MG: And how did they react?

ANNE MARIE ZANZAL: You know each one of them, I have four kids and I have an ex-husband. Each one of them, my ex-husband had known for a long time. It had been about, he had known for about ten years. My kids are individuals. They reacted to how they are as individuals. So all over the place from pretty accepting to really struggling.

MG: Do you wish you had made that decision earlier?

ANNE MARIE ZANZAL: Yes and no. You know it's a very complicated decision because I have hindsight. You know a very complicated answer, excuse me because if I have hindsight I would never have had my kids the way I had them and there were parts of my life with as a mom and a living a straight life, that as a family person, that I really really loved and enjoyed. But the emotional connect that I needed to have as a lesbian, I always say to people, being gay is not about who you sleep with, it's an emotional, spiritual, physical, intellectual way of being and you know I missed all those things. And so yes, sometimes I do have regrets.

MG: I ask in part because Jim Watson wrote in his column that his reluctance to come out kept him, in his words, from living a full life. Is that something that you feel Ken? That you weren't able to live a full life until you were able to to make that decision to come out?

KEN RUSK: Oh very much so. Yes.

MG: Yeah. What do you feel that you missed out on?

KEN RUSK: Friends. I was terrified of having a male friend. I know that sounds crazy, but it was quite acceptable back then for ladies to have very close personal friends, but for a guy to have a close personal friend I felt might just attract attention to me and I did not want that.

MG: And how is that changed? I mean you talked about the times that you were growing up in the 30s and 40s. It's 2019 now. It's a very different country in many ways. How has that changed?

KEN RUSK: Oh dramatic. Oh yes. Oh yes. And of course I've watched this very carefully.

MG: And so tell me more about how that cultural context kind of is helping to shape who you are now.

KEN RUSK: I'm quite free to express myself. Go where I want to go, be with whoever I want to be without feeling guilty. Not the least bit guilty. There was a lot of guilt in my earlier days.

MG: Part of this is about Anne Marie, figuring out whether there is a community there that will support you and as you get older it can be more difficult to find that community perhaps. How did you find a community that would be there around you as you became open about who you truly were?

ANNE MARIE ZANZAL: You know and that goes back to you of one of your first questions, that's what I did differently the third time I came out is I googled late in life lesbian and.

MG: You just googled it?

ANNE MARIE ZANZAL: I googled it and found a blog and read the blog and at the end of the blog it said if you're looking for additional support, we have a secret online support group. And so I read it and then it took me three months to contact the person because you know it took me forever and when I actually contacted that person and when I joined the group, all of a sudden I was like the 187th member to join and there's over 1600 today. When I joined the group, all of a sudden there were women there that were telling the exact same story that I was telling and your guest was telling, other guests were telling. You know all of a sudden I heard my story in another person's story. And so I agree, community is the number one thing that you need to find and that's what I did. And then eventually you start to get brave and so you start to you know you venture out in more public settings. You go to meetups, you know you meet people that way and then you start to have friends that are gay as well. And you know I had friends that were gay when I was in the straight world, but now I was having friends as a gay person.

MG: What about dating?

ANNE MARIE ZANZAL: I didn't date much. I met somebody pretty quickly and so I didn't have that experience.

MG: Ken is that something, it's a whole other world and a whole other universe. Again, did you start dating Ken?

KEN RUSK: I did. I did cruising of course and yes dating. Nothing seriously has come from that, but one of the things that I'd like to stress is that the helping me to come out and live with this life, if you will, was Metropolitan Community Church of Toronto.

MG: And it's been I mean an icon in the gay community, not just in the city of Toronto, but across the country.

KEN RUSK: Yes.

MG: What did the church offer you?

KEN RUSK: Well just I could see and feel the energy of all those people. And it was only a matter of three or four years I responded to a new email from the 519 community centre looking for someone to take part in a documentary film, Coming Out Late.

MG: And here you are.

KEN RUSK: I did I. Yes.

MG: What advice just finally and briefly, what advice would you give to somebody who might be in your own position who wonders whether they have it in them to come out at this age?

KEN RUSK: Well I would encourage them, but at the same time be careful because you may open something that you're not anticipating. And it may hurt a lot of people. So I think awareness of reading the people around you, the ones that are going to be affected by this.

MG: And Anne Marie, just in a few words, what would you say to older LGBTQ people about coming out later in life?

ANNE MARIE ZANZAL: That I think that it's something you should do. I think you should really worry about you, yourself and your own happiness. And I think finding community is the number one thing that is most important.

MG: It's a delight to talk to you both and I'm glad that you found yourselves in that community. Thank you.

KEN RUSK: Thank you.

ANNE MARIE ZANZAL: Thank you.

MG: Ken Rusk is a gay man. Came out of the age of 72. He was in our studio in Toronto. Anne Marie Zanzal is a graduate of the Yale Divinity School, an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ, who counsels women coming out later on in life. She is in Nashville, Tennessee.

Canadian-made Ebola vaccine could have saved more lives if research was funded earlier, microbiologist says

Guest: Steven Jones

MG: My name's Matt Galloway. This is the summer edition of The Current.

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VOICE: I took care of a patient who had Ebola. That's how I became infected. Ebola has the same symptoms of malaria or typhoid. So we thought she had malaria. We didn't know it was Ebola. Three days later I also started to have the same symptoms. I went to the treatment centre and I tested positive. So for me it was a surprise when I came out healed. A psychologist came to see my family to explain that I can't have the disease again. But some people didn't trust him and they thought I could contaminate them, but now with time, they start to see that I really am cured.

MG: That's Gizelle Mukonzo, a 23-year-old nurse working in Beni in the Democratic Republic of Congo. She's on the frontlines of an ongoing effort to stop the spread of Ebola in the DRC. The first cases in the central African nation were confirmed a little more than a year ago on the first of August 2013. More than 1900 people have died since in what's become the world's second largest outbreak of the deadly virus. In a race to keep that virus from spreading further health workers are now fanning out across the country armed with a new tool, it's a vaccine. It's a vaccine the health industry knew to be effective as early as 2003, when a Canadian first helped develop it. That researcher Steven Jones is now the associate provost for health at the University of Saskatchewan Health Sciences and he is in our Saskatoon studio. Hello.

STEVEN JONES: Hello.

MG: What's been going through your mind knowing what you know as you've watched this latest outbreak of Ebola in the DRC?

STEVEN JONES: That's a great question. Pretty much what was going through my mind during the 2014-05 outbreak, we could have prevented these outbreaks if we were able to deploy the vaccine early enough in 2014 the vaccine could have been ready to deploy, but for all sorts of reasons was not.

MG: It's almost heartbreaking and frustrating all at the same time, plus more. What's the emotion that runs through you knowing that?

STEVEN JONES: It is incredibly frustrating. My first experience the ground with one of these outbreaks was actually with Marburg virus, the sister virus of Ebola in 2005 and at that point we knew we had a vaccine. We believed really strongly that we had a vaccine that would prevent the outbreak and the locals asked for it, but of course this was laboratory grade material. It wasn't ready for use in humans and the proper safety trials hadn't been done, so we could not possibly under any circumstances give it to them.

MG: Tell me about what was happening in your lab in the early 2000s. What were you working on in particular?

STEVEN JONES: So I was part of a team with two other lead scientists, Ute Stroeher and Heinz Feldman, who works now in the US. Ute works in Europe. We had developed this model virus system using a normally relatively harmless virus called VSV. It causes a disease in animals and occasionally causes disease in humans, but it's generally not a serious infection and they completely remove the surface protein in that virus and put the Ebola virus glycoprotein, so you could see what would happen in an infection where a normally harmless virus actually had this apparently dangerous glycoprotein on its surface. And what happened was not very much. The animals who were infected with the virus did perfectly well thank you very much. It turned out that we'd actually created this very effective vaccine, which replicated Ebola virus, but was actually safe to use in animals and then eventually humans.

MG: What was that like that moment of discovery?

STEVEN JONES: I mean it's awesome, but it there's a lot of work between that initial discovery and then genuinely knowing that this really works. But at that point there's elation, but we don't know that we've really got something that will have this sort of impact and will eventually see use.

MG: You mentioned that you were in Angola in 2005 and the Marburg virus, that Sister virus of Ebola, you had the vials of the vaccine with you, but you weren't using them.

STEVEN JONES: What you have to understand is where we were working in a field lab, which was a pretty risky setup. People would bring samples in from the field out there swaps of saliva from people from suspected patients mouths or blood samples and for example on more than one occasion, I'm opening samples in the lab, which was really just an office converted. And there are needles in there. And if you had a needle stick with one of these viruses, you're almost certainly going to die because the infectious dose will be so high and introduced directly into the bloodstream. So we were worried given the safety constraints of working in that environment that we could end up with a needle stick and at that point taking the laboratory great experimental vaccine is better than the inevitable, which would be to die of the Marburg virus.

MG: So you would have taken that vaccine, if you had to?

STEVEN JONES: Without question, yes.

MG: Why wasn't it being used on patients though?

STEVEN JONES: Because there's a long regulatory process, which unfortunately has to be, in this case unfortunately, but for very good and valid reasons, has to be followed in order to prove the vaccine is safe for human use.

MG: And you said I mean that process is important, but as you say that's an unfortunate. Unfortunate because how many people died in that outbreak?

STEVEN JONES: Oh somewhere between three and four hundred and then in the West African outbreak 14,000, 20,000 people got sick.

MG: And so how many people in that initial outbreak back in 2005 do you think could have been saved through the virus that you had in those viles that you weren't able to use?

STEVEN JONES: If that vaccine had been been shown to be safe to use then probably at least half of them. But it's not really that simple because you have to have teams who were prepared and understand how to use it and how to do the right type of tracing and all those other things. There's a whole system which has to exist and tend to be fair. The DRC had used this exactly the same vaccine in a previous outbreak just a month or so before the current outbreak occurred and the whole system worked very nicely. The context in this outbreak of course is very different because it's unsafe.

MG: You knew what you had and you're in the field then, you come back to Canada and you try to get help to move this vaccine along. Who did you turn to?

STEVEN JONES: So in the in the wake of 9/11 and the anthrax attacks the Canadian government had set up a funding department within national defence that funded collaborative projects across government and Canadian industry to solve some of the critical problems around chemical biological radio nuclear terrorism. And we applied to them and eventually we were given funding and the barrier initially was making vaccines is notoriously expensive and difficult. And that was true. And whilst this was without doubt an excellent project and was very highly rated. It was judged it was too much risk to invest in it. And so I think we applied three times before we were finally funded.

MG: Risk to who?

STEVEN JONES: The production process for vaccines is quite long, so you do the initial research proved that they are useful and efficacious and then you have to have the need to clinical grade material, which is a technical designation. And then you have to do toxicology testing to show that there it doesn't cause disease in it of itself. And then you have to do phase one, phase two, phase three clinical trials and this is a recognized problem that the U.S. government coined the term of the Valley of Death, where bright ideas go to die.

MG: The valley of death?

STEVEN JONES: The valley of death for greater good ideas because that process is extremely expensive. Toxicology phase one, phase two, phase three clinical trials is really expensive and that's contributed certainly to the reluctance to invest because OK we asked I think initially for $6 million to develop two vaccines, one for Marburg, one for Ebola and eventually the third time of asking we were given $2 million to develop the Ebola vaccine. But only to the point of having vaccine material, which could potentially be used in clinical trials. We were not funded to do the clinical trials because those start to get more expensive.

MG: What was going on here? I mean what is this really about do you think? When you talk about the reluctance of governments and perhaps pharmaceutical companies to invest in a vaccine like this, what is this really about?

STEVEN JONES: On behalf of the government there are multiple problems, which they're trying to solve and it's a question of which one do we want to invest taxpayers money in. And Ebola at the time had occurred in relatively small outbreaks in relatively remote locations and it wasn't seen as a health risk. In fact the Canadian government, through the Public Health Agency of Canada, supported our work vigorously, but the public health agency as a whole has multiple things which it has to do. And you have to make a decision on where where you're going to put the priority and where you're going to put the majority of the funding and this wasn't considered at the time to be something which needed millions and millions of dollars to be invested in it. At the time I thought the decision was wrong. I still think the decision was wrong, but I understand why it was made.

MG: That's the Public Health Agency. What about from the pharmaceutical industry's side of things?

STEVEN JONES: Well it's a similar sort of situation. The pharmaceutical companies are responsible to their shareholders, unfortunately not to patients or the government. Right? So there is a lot of risk associated with developing a vaccine or indeed an antibiotic. It may turn out to be not particularly safe. And the amount of money that you can make from them is relatively low. These are not particularly profitable things, particularly something which is going to be used in this context. One of the reasons why we had no interest from any pharmaceutical companies other than this one small company in the U.S. in licencing the vaccines and it's one of the reasons why we haven't really seen any new antibiotics developed internationally for a very long time.

MG: You said, these are your words, I used to think of Ebola as a biomedical technical problem, but the reality is this is a problem of political and economic instability and inequality. What do you mean by that?

STEVEN JONES: If these diseases occurred here, the outbreaks would not take off in the way that they do. The African healthcare context where you have poor populations with a low level of relatively low level of education with poor access to facilities with facilities with poor access to drugs and you know infection prevention and control and trained staff. All of those things contribute to making Ebola virus outbreaks happen or any kind of outbreak happen. The in the context of this outbreak the one in the DRC right now the political instability and the violence the civil war which is ongoing in that area makes it very difficult to do the things you need to do in order to control the outbreak. And frankly the populace doesn't really trust what the government says. You heard the nurse at the top of the show say that her family didn't believe what they were being told. It's important that we are able to trust those institutions because when bad things happen like this, we need to be able to believe the advice that we're given.

MG: Do you think that the pharmaceutical companies, as you mentioned they are responding to their shareholders, would they be more responsive if an outbreak like this were happening in the United States or Canada?

STEVEN JONES: Yes I'm sure they would because there's money available to do it and their shareholders probably largely live in Europe and North America. Right?

MG: And so what we're seeing right now in the DRC, do you think that if that vaccine were to have been deployed, this outbreak could have been fully prevented?

STEVEN JONES: In this outbreak in the DRC, no I don't think it could. I think the vaccine has been used, it's been used extensively and has been shown to be very effective. I think 97 percent effective, which is really really good. The problem is the way the vaccine is deployed, you see you find a patient, you work out all of the people who may have been in contact with the patient and then you vaccinate them. So you create a ring of vaccinated people around the patient. That should stop ongoing transmission. The problem is you need to be able to find all the infected people and there is a level of distrust in the community that means they're not reporting that they're sick. And of course there has been a significant amount of disruption because of the the ongoing instability, which meant that operations had to be cancelled multiple times and all of that makes it very difficult to deploy and use these things properly.

MG: What's that the weight that you carry, the personal toll of something like this knowing that this vaccine has been around, that there have been different avenues to try and stop something like this and yet it's unfolding.

STEVEN JONES: That's a really good question. I think in 2005 it was high. I think both Ute and I had worked in the field laboratory doing the diagnostics for the hospitals came back fully committed to getting this vaccine made and we were eventually successful I guess. It just took too long. Now I'm more concerned to be honest, rather than the simple biomedical solution, which is the vaccine, the bigger context is the inequality and the social determinants of health, which mean that these populations of people across the globe continue to be vulnerable to these outbreaks in a way which we are not. But you see that reflected also in our society where the wealthiest tend to do much better because they have better social determinants of health than the people living in poverty.

MG: But the cost of that in this instance is exacerbated given everything else that's going on?

STEVEN JONES: Oh absolutely. The military doctor in Angola who was leading the sort of government's response begged us. He found out that we had an experimental vaccine. He begged us to use it and we had to tell him no. And it was extremely difficult conversation because nothing else had been working. This outbreak, the Angola outbreak to bubble along the public didn't didn't really trust what the government was saying. And in Sierra Leone we had an incident where one of the chiefs of the remote villages, his daughter died and the response team went in and tried to tell him that this was because of Ebola, but they firmly believed that this was because of bad dreams that she'd had. And there was no way you could persuade them that you know to update them on 200 years of Western germ theory and get them to believe what you were trying to tell them.

MG: That's got to be absolutely heartbreaking to watch that unfold.

STEVEN JONES: Yeah I mean the disease is heartbreaking because the people who care for the sick are the next victims and you can see it go through families. In Angola the treatment centres were really there just to support them and make them as comfortable as possible because there were no treatment options. And now the fact that there are things which we can do, antibody therapies and so on, that will increase the number of people who are willing to go to get treatment because they can be treated.

MG: That also speaks to your point about the importance of faith in institutions.

STEVEN JONES: Yeah.

MG: And believing that people have your best interests at heart when they say they have your best interests at heart.

STEVEN JONES: Yes, yes. But you really have to believe it and they have to have your best interests at heart.

MG: It's a fascinating story and a really interesting perspective on something that we're seeing right now and to your point the vaccine now seems to be taking the steps that it should have perhaps been taking years ago, but there are other factors that are at play as well. It's great to speak with you about this. Thank you.

STEVEN JONES: Thank you very much. It was lovely to speak to you too.

MG: Cheers. Bye bye.

STEVEN JONES: Bye bye.

MG: Stephen Jones is the associate provost for health at the University of Saskatchewan Health Sciences. He was in our Saskatoon studio.

Missing & Murdered: Finding Cleo - Episode 7

[Casino ambiance]

[electronic sounds, coins dropping]

Connie: There a few table games, but mostly it's rows and rows of slot machines. We don't know what Sidney Nicotine looks like, but we find Gavin right away.

Connie: Gavin’s been keeping his eye on Sidney and points him out to us.

Gavin: Yep.

Connie: He’s playing at a slot machine.

Connie: Gavin’s given him a heads up that we want to talk to him. But I don’t know how much he’s explained about why we’re here.

Sidney: Oh, hi.

Sidney: Good.

Connie: There are people playing at the machines on either side of Sidney and it’s really cramped. Not an ideal place for this conversation.

Sidney: Yeah.

Connie: After a few minutes, Sidney comes over. He’s tall, I notice that right away. And I think of how everyone else said Cleo was tall, too.

Sidney: Loon Lake.

Sidney: 100 miles.

Connie: So when did you meet Lillian?

Connie: You don't remember?

Connie: How many years did you know her?

Connie: It’s an awkward conversation, to say the least. Sidney seems a little hesitant to talk to us, and I get it. He’s here for a night out. He never expected to be peppered with questions about an ex-girlfriend from long ago, and a daughter that might be his.

Sidney: Cleo. Why?

Sidney: Maybe. I don’t know.

Sidney: That’s what she said, anyway.

Sidney: The girl?

Connie: So it’s kind of hard to hear, and Sidney is a man of few words. But he says that Lillian did tell him that Cleo was his daughter. He doesn’t seem fazed by the news that she died. We find out Sidney is at the casino with his other daughter, Rose, and I show them both a photo of Cleo.

Connie: Yeah, that was Cleo. That’s Cleo too.

Rose: Kind of looks like Winston.

Sidney: My son.

Rose: What he told me is that she was hitchhiking. And that she got hit.

Rose: That was years ago.

Connie: So you knew you had a daughter?

Connie: You heard she died?

Connie: What did you hear?

Connie: Because we’re trying to also figure out how Lillian found out about it.

Connie: I tell them what we know about Cleo’s death and how her other siblings are still looking for answers about why she took her own life.

Sidney: Yeah.

Sidney: Yep.

Connie: We head back to our hotel to print off the forms that Sidney will need. It’s hard to say whether or not the Saskatchewan government will actually give him any of the information they’ve refused to give Cleo’s siblings. I wonder what her ward file would tell us. The more I learn about Cleo’s short life, the more curious I am about her mother Lillian. Johnny’s ward file paints a pretty bleak picture of what Lillian was like as a young mother. But I know there has to be more to it. It’s hard to imagine a mother losing one child, let alone six. I’ve often wondered what her life was like after they left. Her nephew Wayne remembers a time when he went to visit Lillian in Saskatoon.

[childlike music]

Connie: So did it all come in one box?

Connie: [paper thump] That’s a big stack.

Connie: There’s one that says school record.

Connie: Standing in class - fair.

Connie: All of them are quarterly returns, which I think are just attendance records.

Connie: It says Lillian arrived...

Connie: It appears that for six years, Lillian never went home. The residential school had to keep records of every child and how many nights they stayed at the school, so they could be reimbursed by the federal government.

Connie: Lillian Baptiste was always listed as 'in residence' - every Christmas break and all summer long. Maybe her parents were allowed to come and visit, but I’ve heard plenty of stories of children not seeing their parents for years.

Connie: It’s tragic to think that twenty years before Lillian’s children were taken from her, she was taken from her parents. Once again, the government's solution was to remove Indigenous children from their parents, culture, and community. We look into Prince Albert residential school where Lillian grew up. In 1953, the population was 550 students, making it one of the largest schools in the country. The TRC report says the school was known as a “problem establishment,” saying it was overcrowded and nutritionally inadequate. The year after Lillian arrived, two teachers resigned from the school and wrote a letter condemning what they saw.

Female Voice: [reading] The children are maltreated, cussed at...

Connie: The teachers said three boys who tried to run away from the school were put in a makeshift prison. They said the children at Lillian’s school were, quote:

Connie: I can’t imagine how growing up in this environment affected Lillian. Another student who went to the same school gave testimony for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Connie: Roderick King experienced the abuse the teachers described. Like Lillian, he was also from Little Pine and only spoke Cree when he arrived.

Connie: The federal government apologized for its role in residential schools and gave each survivor a lump sum of $10,000.

Connie: If survivors were severely abused, they had to go through a hearing and describe in detail the physical, emotional or sexual abuse they experienced as children. If they were believed by government adjudicators, they could get more money. We learned from her family that in 2014, Lillian also gave testimony about the severe abuse she experienced at the school. It was a private hearing, so we don’t know the details of what she went through.

Connie: I’ve heard time and time again how harmful reliving that trauma was for the survivors. And it must have been for Lillian, too because Christine remembers her mother asking her for support when she was going through it.

Connie: It sounds like it was an intense experience for her.

Connie: A few days after one of her hearings, Lillian died. She was 69 years old.

Connie: Is that part of your quest as well, now, to find more about her and how she lived and what happened?

Connie: After Lillian’s death, her children learned even more about their mother’s trauma. On her funeral card, it said Lillian had another child- a boy named Myles who died as a baby, either not long before or after Johnny was born. Lillian was a mother who lost seven children.

Connie: That was something you saw in your mom?

Connie: But Lillian's children approached their mother in different ways. Mark was one of the first of Lillian’s kids to reconnect with her as an adult in the early 1990s.

Mark: I said, "Why did you do what you did? Why did you give us up?" I was drunk when I did it. I shouldn't have stopped at my mom's house, but I just tied into her. And she told me what happened. We broke down. I sobered up in like less than a half an hour after we started talking. I was pissed at her [dry chuckle] and then after she told me what happened, why she did what she did. And her version of it was, "Well, I couldn't take care of you kids," and that's all I needed to hear.

Mark: There was some shit going on in Little Pine. You know, at that time. Not only is this abuse of me and my siblings but just a lot of bad crap, right? Drinking, lots of drinking. My mom got into it. I'll share a piece of information with you. My mom told me that her friends - one specific man and his buddies raped her. "What?!" And right away I'm mad. I'm like, "Tell me who." I know who, now. And I want to go kick his ass because that man is still alive. I want to make him feel the pain that my mom went through the day him and his buddies raped her.

Christine: And then it … my birth records also indicated that my mother was hospitalized from the time she was pregnant, right? She was hospitalized.

Christine: Pretty much. Because of, then I found out from her it was because of a suicide attempt while she was pregnant with me. Because it was an unwanted pregnancy because she was sexually assaulted. And that's how I came to be. So my mother was institutionalized when she had me. And she was, she even told me herself, she kind of lost it after that. She said she's never been the same. And I understand why. [emotional, crying] So every day, every day I pray with sweetgrass and remind myself I'm supposed to be here. And that I have reasons to stay. But every day I pray with sweetgrass to remind myself.

Connie: After Christine’s birth, Lillian is a mom of six kids under 10 and a few months later is the day that she fails to pick up Johnny and Cleo from the hospital after they got their tonsils out. The kids are taken into care and a year later, after moving in and out of foster homes, all of her children are taken for good. Learning the truth about Lillian’s life is devastating. I realize what a one-sided view Johnny’s ward file painted about her life. Lillian grew up in an institution without her parents. She was forced to speak a foreign language and told her culture was wrong and dirty. She was subjected to abuse without any protection. And then as a young mother, she was a victim of terrible assault and lost all of her children. I know Lillian wasn’t the only residential school survivor to have her children taken. How many other mothers were going through the same thing? We soon find someone who knows firsthand what women like Lillian were up against.

Jennifer: I would really love to learn more from you about what you remember...

Nora: And we used to do a lot of workshops throughout the province of Saskatchewan.

Nora: This woman had a nervous breakdown. She had a breakdown. And she ended up in the North Battleford Institution there. And she seemed to be such a wonderful person and so we decided we want to further find out where her children were.

Nora: Yeah. It could be. Her name was Lillian Semaganis.

Connie: We can’t believe the coincidence. Nora knew Lillian, Cleo’s mother. She says it was Lillian who inspired her to fight against the AIM program. Nora still lives in Saskatoon, so we decide to go for a visit.

Connie: So Jen and I are off to talk to Nora. I'm really excited to actually talk to somebody who knew Lillian as an adult because I don't feel like we've talked to anyone who's actually been able to tell us what Lillian was like. But, you know, Nora is, she's in her 80s, so we'll have to see just how much she remembers.

Nora: Come on in.

Nora: Hi, I'm Nora.

Connie: Turns out Nora probably has a better memory than me. She remembers Lillian well. They were very close after her children were taken away.

Connie: Nora says Lillian used to travel with her to workshops and meetings for Indigenous women in the province. One day, she went to pick up Lillian and when she arrived, Lillian was distraught and holding a newspaper.

Connie: So she was holding a newspaper.

Nora: There were pictures, yeah, it was her children. It was her children.

Nora: AIM ads.

Connie: Nora doesn’t remember which of Lillian’s children was advertised in the paper that day or exactly when it was. But she says seeing them in the paper spurred Lillian into action. She was determined to get her children back.

Connie: What about, like, that day when she came out with a newspaper, like, was she mad? Was she sad?

Nora: We decided we have to stop, this has to stop, and we have to see what we can do to support her to get her children back. I would never say to her that "you're going to get your children, you'll see your children." And I would say, "we're going to help you," because I didn't want to give hope. Because we never knew. I couldn't tell her because Department of Social Services had these children. They were their keepers.

Nora: And so we said, "We're going to do what we can to help you. We're going to fight with you and we're going to stand beside you and we're going to bring the minister in. Are you ready to stand up for this? Are you prepared to come with us?" And she said yes.

Nora: She was with us all.

Nora: She was... fear. But we huddled around her and we kept her very strength-wise. And all she said when she got up to him: “These are my kids. And you took them away from me. And I want them back, I want my kids back. I am their mother.”

Nora: This one really bothered me.

Nora: It says Warren became three years old in August and he is an active boy with dark hair and sparkling brown eyes.

Nora: These remind me of...these adoptions for little puppies and little kittens in the paper. To us it was like, very discriminatory, they're not only our children that were apprehended. It was non-Aboriginal children that would, you’d never see their pictures in the papers, it was only all our brown faces that were in there. And the little stories that were written up. When I look at it now, I think about when you're looking to adopt a pet. They do the write-ups, and this is what this reminds me what we were treated like.

Connie: So we were looking from September of '72 till April of '73. But we think it was probably somewhere around…

Connie: Can you zoom out or in? Not really?

Connie: Jen and I look through weeks and weeks of papers. Every Tuesday, there is an AIM ad.

Jennifer: Look, it’s three kids together.

Connie: Lorna is a chubby little lady with dimples on her fingers, hands, knees, and toes. She has a tiny pug nose, a dainty mouth, and a uniformly shaped head.

Jennifer: Emotional problems and anxieties that often cause less desirable behaviour traits to gain the upper hand. It’s so vague.

Connie: We think the meeting with the minister was in April. We've looked at September, October, November, December, January, February, March.

Connie: Almost finished March. And so this is kind of like the last month. I hope we find something.

[microfiche whirrs]

Aug. 20, 2019 episode transcript

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