Give COVID-19 vaccine to high-risk people no matter where in the world they live: South Africa doctor

Guests: Andrea Mendelsohn, Natalia Pasternak

CC: As much of Canada hunkers down for a long winter restrictions, many other countries are also continuing to struggle in containing COVID-19. In South Africa, a second wave has hit hard. The country is now recording upwards of 9000 cases and 200 deaths per day, and it's grappling with a new variant of COVID. President Cyril Ramaphosa announced yesterday new tougher coronavirus restrictions after the country became the first in Africa to surpass one million recorded cases.

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VOICE: The stark reality is that every single district in this country has the potential to become a hotspot unless we observe the current preventative measures. We can only weather this storm if we immediately and fundamentally change our behaviour and our mindset.

CC: Dr. Andrea Mendelsohn is a senior medical officer in the Western Cape Department of Health. We reached her in Cape Town. Hello.

ANDREA MENDELSOHN: Hi.

CC: Thank you for being here. Dr. Mendelsohn, I want to ask you about these measures. An extension of the curfew, reimposing a ban on alcohol sales, a lot of other restrictions. What do you make of them?

ANDREA MENDELSOHN: COVID-19 is difficult to contain in any country. It's even more complicated in countries like South Africa, where there's a lot of people who live in highly cramped conditions. And so it makes it more difficult to isolate at home as well as we are struggling with the 30 percent unemployment rate. So I think there was a big push to try to encourage people to distance, but not to enact legal restrictions. However, we've just, the health care system has hit a breaking point. I mean, the hospitals are 100 percent at capacity. And even though the public for the past month has been been encouraged to wear masks and distance, basically to prevent the health care system from crashing, the restrictions were necessary.

CC: Now, you've seen firsthand what it means for a centre to be at capacity, if I understand correctly. That happened to you just last week in your own health care centre. Can you tell us what happened?

ANDREA MENDELSOHN: So last week, Friday, we had, we have a number of covid patients that come every day. We've been having about one hundred patients a day coming in with symptoms. I work in a community health centre, which means that we're a primary health care clinic. People come in off the street. Most patients are mild, as with covid. But if you have over one hundred patients, you're going to get a number of severe patients. And our oxygen delivery that day was delayed. And so we had five oxygen canisters. We were waiting for more. We had five people on oxygen and a sixth person walked in. And I just had this sort of panicked moment, like, what do I do? I mean, people are obviously in South Africa, people are going to die of covid. But South Africa is a middle income country and we normally have good health care capacity. And there's no excuse. Like, no one should die because they don't have access to oxygen. And in that case, last week, it actually turned out to be a good situation. I mean, the patients actually were quite remarkable and understood the situation. One person who wasn't as distressed went off the oxygen while we scrounged for another tank, and they were willing to help the person who was in more need. And then we got extra tanks and a delivery came the next day. So it was fine. But I mean, South Africa and maybe unlike parts of Canada, is already starting to ration resources. If you have a low baseline capabilities or high comorbidities, then you basically will not qualify for ICU care because ICU beds are extremely limited and now hospital beds are extremely limited. I mean, one of the reasons why the restrictions were also put in place, because we that we unfortunately have a high burden of alcohol induced trauma and trauma in general. So so not only are we struggling with the covid epidemic, but the holidays, unfortunately, are generally a peak in trauma season because of interpersonal violence and motor vehicle accidents. And so, I mean, even though it's extreme, but that was one of the reasons why the alcohol then had to go back in place. The ambulances are stretched thin, the hospitals are stretched thin, everyone's stretched thin. And I mean, as I said in the letter, I don't want to practise palliative care on patients who don't need it, who patients who would survive if just given oxygen. No one should die because they can't get a little bit of oxygen.

CC: This is an open letter you've written to people in Cape Town asking them in part to step up and do the right thing when it comes to wearing a mask and distancing and making the right decisions. You also write about what this has been like for you and as you were describing, not being able to get patients into hospital beds or that moment where you have to make the decision about the sixth patient, I wonder about the incredible stress that that must put on you and other people in the health care system.

ANDREA MENDELSOHN: Yeah, I mean, I think that people are fatigued, just like the public's fatigued, the hospital workers are fatigued because we've been doing this sort of on and off for nine months. At the end of the day, we need cases to go down so everyone can sort of relax and have a moment's breather, which is why these. Actions were necessary, but unfortunately, South Africa, unlike maybe Canada or North America, doesn't have a vaccine that's imminently pending. And so this is something that is going to be the restrictions are in place for three weeks just to basically kerb the immediate crisis. But the changes, behavioural changes that I wrote about is something that probably South Africa is going to have to do for the next year or two to prevent a third wave and a fourth wave and to prevent this from keep happening. Because we don't have imminent roll out of vaccines and it's unclear when we will get them. I mean, it's likely South Africa is participating in an initiative called Kovacs, which is funded by the WHO, European Union and France. I know Canada has contributed, but it's still Kovacs even if fully funded, will probably only cover up to 20 percent of the population. But again, it's not just about money, it's about stocks. And right now, all the stocks are being eaten up by the sort of more powerful, higher resource countries, which, you know, you can make a very strong ethical argument whether that's fair. So should Canada be able to vaccinate its entire population before high risk people or health care workers in South Africa get access to vaccine stocks? And I'd say no. But I mean, there's obviously nationalism and politics that play into those decisions.

CATHERINE CULLEN: Well, in fact, Canada has said that it's willing to donate excess doses of vaccine. But what has not been decided, at least from the discussions we're seeing publicly, is when do those donations begin? Is it just after priority populations here in Canada have been vaccinated? Or is it after all Canadians who want a vaccine have been vaccinated? So I wonder what you would say about that is that public debate is going to play out in the coming weeks?

ANDREA MENDELSOHN: My personal feeling would be that obviously I want everyone to be in the whole world to be vaccinated. But from an ethical perspective and also just from a perspective of getting the world back to normality, I mean, one point that covid and showed us is that we're all interconnected and nobody is going to be normal until everyone is stabilised. And I think the way to stabilise the world most quickly is to vaccinate the high risk people everywhere first before you move on to the low risk people. I do think that some stocks should be made available to other countries that are struggling to at least vaccinate health care workers and select high risk people to again stabilise health care systems so that you don't have thousands of people dying while a healthy 20 year old gets vaccinated in a high resource setting. So, yeah, no, I do think it's fantastic and very commendable that Canada is planning to donate its leftover stocks. But I mean, when is a question? Because if donations start in two years' time, a lot of people are going to die until that time, even in one year's time. So I know there is some discussion of South Africa getting access maybe in the second quarter of 2021 to vaccines. It's a little bit unclear. I mean, I'm originally from America, so I am watching very jealously my former colleagues getting their vaccines. And I mean, quite frankly, like the relief is real. And, you know, my community health centre right now, our positivity rate is over 50 percent. So it means that half the people that we walk in and see are have covid. I mean, the amount of exposure is extreme. Fortunately, I have not been infected, but with the new variant that the transmissibility is higher, the number of nurses and doctors and health care workers that have been infected has gone up rapidly, which again further strains the health care system. Because you have people are booked off sick, you have people are booked up in quarantine. And it means that the people who are less are seeing more patients with fewer resources and more likely to be infected. So, I mean, again, if you want to compare the epidemics of which one is worse than where the sort of greatest need is immediately, it's hard to argue that we should only get vaccine six months to a year from now where high resourced countries should get them tomorrow.

CC: Dr. Mendelsohn, we really appreciate your perspective on this. And we wish you and your colleagues all the best dealing with what sounds like an incredibly challenging situation. Thank you.

ANDREA MENDELSOHN: Thanks.

CC: Dr. Andrea Mendelsohn is a senior medical officer in the Western Cape Department of Health in South Africa. Let's move to India now where officials say they're on track to approve the AstraZeneca COVID vaccine from Oxford University. It would be one of the first countries to do so. Here's the CEO of the Serum Institute of India, Adar Poonawalla.

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VOICE: We've got 40 to 50 million doses already made. We're producing more every week. And once we get the regulatory approvals in about, in a few days I would say, it'll be down to the government to decide how much they can take.

CC: AstraZeneca says it's confident the vaccine is effective against the new covid variant. In Brazil, the president apparently has no faith in any vaccine.

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[Bolsonaro speech in Portuguese]

CC: Jair Bolsonaro suggesting that the Pfizer vaccine could turn people into crocodiles or superheroes or make women grow beards. Bolsonaro is known for making outlandish claims about COVID-19, even as his country is in the grips of a key search and hospitals are filling up. Health experts like Natalia Pasternak have spent many hours over the course of the pandemic fighting against the misinformation coming from the government. She's a microbiologist and president of the Question of Science Institute in Sao Paulo. Natalia, good morning.

NATALIA PASTERNAK: Good morning, Catherine. Thank you for having me.

CC: Thank you for being on the program. What goes through your mind when you hear president balseros saying vaccines can turn people into crocodiles?

NATALIA PASTERNAK: Well, actually, the first thing that comes to mind is how the hell did we elect a president that is so disconnected from reality? Because it just keeps getting worse. All through 2020, all throughout this year, he made statements that were unheard of in the history of Brazil. And we had some very weird presidents in the past. But even so, he's the champion.

CC: I'm sure he'd be delighted to hear he's a champion. People laugh in the clips and it's hard to know how to talk about that crocodile bearded lady comment. Did Brazilians take what he was saying seriously or was this perceived as a joke?

NATALIA PASTERNAK: It's perceived as a joke, but it has some implications. For instance, of course, most Brazilians who really understand science and understand the severity of the pandemic are just making fun of his statements. People change their Facebook profiles and Twitter profiles for crocodile pictures, for instance. So that's part of the population that makes fun of him and then doesn't take him seriously. But unfortunately, he still has a lot of support from at least 40 percent of Brazil's population. So even if these 40 percent also make fun, they know, of course, that the vaccine is not going to turn you into a crocodile. But they believe that the vaccine can be dangerous and that you shouldn't get a vaccine and that can make you ill, even if, of course, it doesn't turn you into a crocodile. So it has implications even when people don't take him seriously.

CC: What has it been like for you trying to combat misinformation when President Bolsonaro is considered one of the world's most prominent COVID-19 sleptics?

NATALIA PASTERNAK: I prefer the term denialist because sceptic usually someone who really wants to understand science and wants claimed to be backed by evidence. And a denialist is someone who really denies the evidence even when it's in front of him. And that's what Bolsonaro does. It's been really difficult because when misinformation is institutionalized as it is in Brazil, meaning that it comes directly from the federal government and from the president and from the Ministry of Health, it becomes really difficult to fight it. It's quite a challenge to try to convey to people that the pandemic is real, that it's dangerous, that it's grave, that you really have to adhere to preventive measures, that there are actually people dying when the president himself says the opposite, no, it's just a minor flu. You have to take it like a man. Don't be a sissy. So it becomes really hard to fight. You will fight misinformation that comes from the authorities, from some people who people still believe in the president and in the government. So it's been quite a challenge and I don't see it getting any better.

CC: The official numbers showing that Brazil is creeping up towards 200,000 recorded deaths attributable to COVID. Tell us what it's like in the hospitals right now.

NATALIA PASTERNAK: The hospitals are full, CTIs are full. The public service, well, we are very proud of our national health care service. We have a public health care service in Brazil that caters to 200 million people. It's not usual for a country this big to have a public health care system and we do. And if it weren't for our health care system, we probably would be in a much worse situation. But even so, public hospitals and private hospitals alike are all full now at the end of the year and with the end of the year celebrations coming, we don't know if the system is going to collapse next year. It still hasn't collapsed, but we are not sure that it's not going to collapse next year because people are really tired of the quarantine measures and they are not following the measures anymore. So they have been relaxing preventive measures. We have seen a lot of people without masks and hanging out together in family reunions that look harmless, but we know that they are not. So we expect a rise in the number of cases and hospital and hospitalizations next year and I don't know that we are prepared for that.

CC: At the same time, this is, of course, happening as vaccines are being rolled out in countries across the world. Brazil has struggled in terms of getting that vaccine rollout going. President Bolsonaro saying he won't get vaccinated because he's had COVID before. What are you expecting in terms of vaccine rollout in Brazil?

NATALIA PASTERNAK: We are in a very difficult situation now regarding vaccines because we have two bilateral agreements, national agreements, one with AstraZeneca, and that's going to take some time because they had some issues with their clinical trials and they're probably going to be delayed. And we had another bilateral agreement with CoronaVac, but that's been completely disregarded by the national government. So until last week, when they finally decided to include CoronaVac in the national immunization plan, but we still haven't the results for that as well. So we are waiting for the results of coronavirus, which is probably our best bet in a vaccine for next year. It's probably the one that we will get sooner, maybe by the end of January. AstraZeneca, the Oxford vaccine, should take a while and we adhere to the Kovács program, the World Health Organization program that gives us access to the vaccine portfolio. But we only adhere for 10 percent of the doses that we need for the whole population. So it's a small bit and it's not going to be enough. And then we didn't go after any other bilateral agreements with the othercompanies like Pfizer and Moderna or Johnson. So we are lagging behind in these agreements and we won't, we probably won't have enough doses next year to vaccinate the whole population. We hope that we can at least get the risk groups vaccinated, the priority groups. But it's going to take some effort and it's going to take a lot of organization that we, again, don't see coming from the federal government.

CC: A lot of people have talked about vaccines as being the light at the end of the tunnel. Do you believe that the worst could be behind Brazil? Because the picture you paint certainly doesn't suggest that.

NATALIA PASTERNAK: Vaccines are the light at the end of the tunnel, but it's a long tunnel. We still have a long way to go. It's amazing that vaccines are coming that they and they were developed in such a short time. It's a great a great conquest for science. And as a scientist and I work with vaccine development, so I'm really excited to see all this this quick development of science across the world. It's amazing, but it will take some time to implement that. And and the vaccines that are had already been approved. The RNA vaccines are the ones that Brazil doesn't have access to, at least not yet. So we are in a very gloomy situation and it's going to take us at least one year to start to really get to vaccinate part of the population, probably not the whole population, but at least if we can get a vaccine like CoronaVac, even if it's not such a high efficacy as the other ones, but if it's good enough to prevent severe disease and death, it's going to put us in a much better situation that we can return to partially normal life and restore part of the economy.

CC: I wish you all the best. Thank you for taking the time to talk to us about it today.

NATALIA PASTERNAK: You're most welcome. Thank you for having me.

CC: Natalia Pasternak is a microbiologist and president of the Question of Science Institute in Sao Paulo, Brazil. For some parts of the world, a bit of hope. For example, Italy, one of the worst hit countries in Europe, the doctor who treated Italy's first COVID patient 10 months ago received her first vaccine dose yesterday.

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VOICE: From the 20th of February, it started a nightmare for me. And I think today is the beginning of the end of these terrible pandemia. So I'm very, very happy that I can be here and seeing people doing the vaccine.

CC: That is Annalisa Malara. She's an anaesthetist at Codogno Hospital in northern Italy. Since Malara's discovery of Italy's first COVID case, more than 70,000 Italians have died in the pandemic. The CBC NEws is next. Then, The Globe and Mail's health columnist Andre Picard is here in a moment for how effective the vaccine program is so far. I'm Catherine Cullen and you're listening to The Current.

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Andre Picard on Canada’s vaccine rollout

Guests: Andre Picard

CC: Sure, it is game changing news that we have vaccine options, but it doesn't do much good if people can't get vaccinated. Some critics say we're not getting vaccines into the arms of Canadians fast enough. To talk about it, I'm joined by Andre Picard. He is the health columnist with The Globe and Mail. Good morning, Andre.

ANDRE PICARD: Good morning.

CC: I want to talk particularly about what has been happening in recent days, Ontario coming under fire, particularly from physicians for shutting down its COVID-19 vaccination efforts on December 25th and 26th. What do you think about that decision?

ANDRE PICARD: Well, it's a really bad decision for a couple of reasons. One, we have to get these vaccines into people's arms as quickly as possible. That has to be a prevention priority. And the second part is it is just very bad optics at a time where we've done these massive lockdowns. You've told people this is urgent, you have to stay home. We can't just take days off. You can't allow parts of the system to shut down because it sends the wrong message.

CC: Now, retired General Rick Hillier, who is in charge of Ontario's vaccination campaign, has come out since since the shutdown happened and said, listen, we got it wrong. We're not going to do it again. Is that good enough?

ANDRE PICARD: Well, it's refreshing because Ontario has got a lot wrong and it hasn't admitted a lot of that. So that's good. But it's hard to believe that someone wouldn't figure this out ahead of time. You know, just how bad is that going to look? I just don't know how the decision got made in the first place.

CC: We should say, from from the part of what Mr. Retired General Hillier is saying. He said they believe that it was wrong to ask long term care staff during their downtime to come in and get vaccinated, but he's now acknowledging that that was simply the wrong call.

ANDRE PICARD: Yeah, and, you know, there is a problem of staffing. There's a problem of staff burnout. But as soon as word got out that these clinics were going to shut down, there is a ton of volunteers, other doctors, other nurses saying, let us take up the slack because this is so important. So they had the ability to do it, but just do it a bit differently.

CC: OK, so that's one issue. But there is the broader picture of what's happening with vaccination in Canada. What can you tell us about how many doses Canada has been able to administer so far?

ANDRE PICARD: Well, we've had I looked at the numbers this morning, about 58,818 doses have been administered. So it's a very small number, But, you know, it's not just about numbers, it's about getting the program rolling. It's a perception all these things are important. It's true that Canada has very little vaccine. We probably rushed to get started for political reasons, for optics, and that's OK, but we have to start doing it now because soon we're going to have to be doing 15- 20,000 vaccinations a day. So we've got to get organized.

CC: In terms of how many vaccinations we've done versus the vaccine that we have, what can you tell us about that?

ANDRE PICARD: It's roughly we don't have great data, and that's a perpetual problem in Canada. But it's about a quarter of the vaccines that we know are in the country have been administered and we know they're coming in every day. So it's just a question of you've got to get the movement going a little faster, get them out as quickly as you get them in. You know, it's just getting into people's arms is so essential.

CC: And is that just a question of will in the system? I don't know if it's political will or bureaucratic will, but it is that what that comes down to, do you think?

ANDRE PICARD: I think it's largely an issue of logistics and then it's about political will. It's about politics. You know, we could have easily gotten all these doctors in arms in Toronto. But you want to spread them around the province. You want to spread them around the country. So that complicates things. But I think it it is overall just about the will. You know, there are countries like Israel, they're doing 100,000 doses a day. That's what we have to be able to do. But, of course, you have to have the stock to do that in the first place.

CC: Well, sticking with Rick Hillier for a moment, one of the things that he said in an interview when he was asked to about the comparison between Israel, Bahrain, the UK, which all seem to be well ahead of Canada, he said they've got the vaccines and we do not. But at the same time, we know that there are tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of doses sitting in a freezer. So I wonder what you make of that.

ANDRE PICARD: Well, it's about, he's right. You know, it'd be great if we had more. It would actually be easier to do vaccination if we had more vaccines. But I think the bottom line is there shouldn't be vaccines sitting in a freezer. There was another policy where we were holding back for a second dose. Thankfully, that's been changed in Ontario. It hasn't been changed in Quebec yet. But I think that policy was well intentioned and now it's not appropriate.

CC: You anticipate that that's something that will change across the country in places where it hasn't already?

ANDRE PICARD: I think so. You know, Quebec is the big one that's still holding back the vaccine. And I'm pretty sure they'll change. They'll see that everyone else is changing. And I think Pfizer is saying, don't worry, the stock is going to be there when you need it and that's what's important.

CC: In terms of making this whole process move faster. If we look at international examples, the United Kingdom has said that it's going to recruit thousands of volunteers with health care experience to administer COVID-19 vaccines, because it's such a big job, do you think that a similar campaign in Canada would help?

ANDRE PICARD: Without a doubt. You know, there's a lot of people who are qualified to do this. There's lots of nurses, lots of retired nurses around the country who would be more than happy to do this, pharmacists. Now, there's some technical issues with these vaccines can't be administered just anywhere because of the freezing issues. They're fragile, et cetera. So there are technical issues, but, yes, I think we can learn a lot from other countries. And I think to be fair, there's a lot that's being done to plan, but we're not talking about it enough. You know, we know that Quebec has 21 sites, Ontario has 20, and these are going to be able to ramp up quickly when we make the decision to do it and when we have the stock.

CC: Now, in the backdrop of all of this, there are, of course, other issues around COVID playing out. One of them, these new variants that we're starting to hear about, the U.K. variant, which it now seems is present in Canada. South Africa variant, scientists still gathering data about this, but I wonder what your take is on on the news of these variants and how concerning they might be?

ANDRE PICARD: Well, I think we have to pay attention to them. There's evidence that they spread more readily. So that's really important. That could accelerate the pandemic. There's evidence that they spread more easily to children. So that brings in a lot of questions about schools, etc. So this useless technical biological issues that we should worry about. But I think overall we have to step back and say it's just the same virus. It's a slightly different. And what matters ultimately is people's behaviour. So this spread in exactly the same way for two close together. We don't wear masks were incautious. Those are the reasons it spreads. The variant doesn't ultimately matter that much to the public, it's how we behave.

CC: Yeah, well, and obviously something when we look at the numbers of hospitalizations across the country, something that we need to be preoccupied about nonetheless, regardless of the variant of.

ANDRE PICARD: Yeah, you're right on. We have to pay attention to there's a virus circulating, the genomic details of it don't matter that much.

CC: OK, well, listen, Andre, we always appreciate your insights. Thank you very much for making time for us today.

ANDRE PICARD: Thank you.

CC: Andre Picard is the health columnist for the Globe and Mail.

How 'the dog lady of Mexico' helps find homes for the country's massive stray dog population

Guests: Sandra Gray, Brian Goodger, Alison Sawyer Current

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VOICE: Hi, beautiful.

[Dog barks]

VOICE: Hi Beethoven. Hi baby. Hi. Sugar, Sammy, Izzy, Cookie. A pen full of puppies. All of them. All the puppies.

CC: That pen full of puppies and many more dogs are in Mexico at a dog rescue in the town of Isla Mujeres. One of the puppies there is named from there, I should say his name, Taffy. And Taffy is now living in Windsor, Ontario. Hers tells a bigger story about the fate of wild and street dogs in Mexico and about the people who are trying to save them. Sandra Gray and Brian Goodger are Taffy's humans. Hello.

SANDRA GRAY: Hello.

BRIAN GOODGER: Good morning.

CC: Sandra, I'll start with you. How did you first come to hear about the Isla animals?

SANDRA GRAY: We were vacationing on Isla Mujeres in April of 2019 in the hotel we were staying at. We met different people that really knew the rescue quite well.

CC: And what did you think when you saw it?

SANDRA GRAY: I thought was really cool. The animals were running loose. People could come and visit the animals. You could take them for a walk. Treated very well. I was quite surprised because you see a lot of street dogs in Mexico.

CC: Brian, you have, you and Sandra have that experience, but you go home without a dog from that particular trip. Tell me about the moment where you think we're going to adopt Taffy.

BRIAN GOODGER: My wife had been following these dogs on their website and they were always listing new dogs. And that's going back to like March or April. And she'd seen Taffy and her sister Tootsie. And I think it was pretty much made up in her mind about right then that we were getting the dog.

CC: What about your mind?

BRIAN GOODGER: I wasn't too, too crazy about getting an animal. We like to travel, you know, they'll tie you down. But she worked on me, and I'm so glad that we got her. We're just so happy to have her now.

CC: Was there anything about Taffy in particular that Sandra used to try to sell you?

SANDRA GRAY: The eyes.

BRIAN GOODGER: Lots of pictures and we were in contact with the foster people and they were telling her how nice she was and just an all around happy go lucky good dog. You know, we hope to get when you get a dog, some people will get you no problem dogs that they can't deal with their problems. But she's just been all around Joy.

CC: Sandra, tell me about the process of getting Taffy here. It was no small undertaking.

SANDRA GRAY: It definitely was no small undertaking. I had applied for in April of this year, actually, I put my name on her sister also and another dog, Sulu. But my preference in the end was coffee. I loved her face and when I talked to the foster mom, I just loved her personality. She's a mix of terrier. We're doing the DNA testing on her right now, I'm going to say maybe wire haired Jack Russell in there. There's maybe a bit of snauzer. That's my guess.

CC: Tell me more about the process of trying to get her back to Windsor in the midst of a pandemic.

SANDRA GRAY: Well, we started with the application and then I started pleading for volunteers. With COVID going on a lot of people weren't travelling. So you hope with the process that somebody that's down there might volunteer to bring her back? It's pretty simple to bring a dog back. We just weren't getting the volunteers. I offered to pay for flight back if somebody was willing. And then it hit summer and you can't fly them in the summer. It's too hot in the planes. So we had to wait again for the fall. So then I started bleeding weekly and we had to November first to her back. So Brian volunteered. He went down with the son and they went to the very end. It was really even dicey that last week. But if it's above 85 in Mexico, they won't fly them, and if it's below two in Toronto, they won't fly them. So both ends were right at that temperature. It was pretty hairy, right down to the very last second. And then we thought, well, if we don't get there in November or the October and we have to wait till spring again, but it all worked out in the end, it was able to bring her back. And she's exactly what we were looking for. Great, great girl.

CC: Brian, I love that you were not necessarily so sold on this idea of getting a dog. And in the end, you're the one who flies to Mexico to retrieve her. Would tell me a bit about how she's doing, how she's settling into the Canadian climate.

BRIAN GOODGER: Oh, absolutely loves it. That the first snowfall we probably we got really lucky when we got back. It was chilly coming back in Toronto, no snow or anything. And then we got a break in the weather for the first week. So we more or less just left our patio door open. And she just came and went outside and inside as she wanted. It was nice and dry. We didn't have to worry about what muddy feet and she climatized. And then the cold came. And then Sandy was at work the first morning, when we really got some snow. And she just went right out, like full blast, just loved it, just pranced. I ended up cleaning off the deck, pushing all the snow to the end where we have a small step walkway. And she would just be in there, like digging in there, sticking her nose in there. Just loves it.

CC: And your Mexican dog even has a sweater. Is that right?

BRIAN GOODGER: Yes, she does. And bootys.

CC: Too cute. Listen, well, congratulations to both of you and to Taffy as well for finding a home with you.

SANDRA GRAY: Oh, thank you.

BRIAN GOODGER: She is loving it and we're loving having her.

CC: Lovely.

SANDRA GRAY: We feel the lucky ones.

CC: That's very sweet. Nice to meet you both.

SANDRA GRAY: You too.

BRIAN GOODGER: Thank you.

CC: Brian Goodger and Sandra Gray are the owners of Taffy and they are in Windsor. Well Taffy and thousands of other dogs are alive because of the work of Alison Sawyer Current and her organization Isla Animals in Isla Mujeres Mexico. Alison is originally from Toronto and for 20 years she has been saving wild and street dogs in that Mexican town. She has written about that effort in her book, The Dog Lady of Mexico. Alison Sawyer Current. Good morning.

ALISON SAYWER CURRENT: Good morning. Thanks for having me on.

CC: Well, thank you for being here. Listen, how many stories like the one we just heard about Taffy, is your organization responsible for how many dogs have you sent to Mexico?

ALISON SAYWER CURRENT: You know, I wish sometimes that I had counted. I have no idea, but hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of dogs going into wonderful homes. We have an adoption process and it just makes me grin to think about it. It's just wonderful.

CC: Now, the pandemic, as we just heard for Sandra and Brian, created some challenges in bringing Taffy home. How has it affected your rescue operation overall?

ALISON SAYWER CURRENT: We sort of switched gears. We were worried about people abandoning their animals because they couldn't afford to feed them. So we started the pet food project and we gave free cat and dog food to anybody who asked for it for months and months so that people would at least have food for their animals and keep them in their homes.

CC: Does that mean the adoption efforts themselves, though, have more or less ground to a halt?

ALISON SAYWER CURRENT: Well, a lot slower. And usually it happens, just like Sandra and Brian said, that people come down as tourists and they meet a dog at the rescue and then they want to take it home. And since the tourism has been cut way back by the pandemic, that our adoptions have gone down considerably.

CC: Tell me about the broader efforts of your group to bring down the population of homeless dogs. Adoption is just part of what you do, right?

ALISON SAYWER CURRENT: Absolutely. Adoption is part of what we do. And our main goal is spay and neuter. And we do one big spay and neuter clinic a year. Last year we did seventeen hundred and forty animals in a week. It's an amazing operation. We have vets come from all over the world and people come down to volunteer and work with us.

CC: It certainly speaks to the level of need. And so I wonder if you can tell us a little bit more about the dog situation on Isla Mujeres, when you first encountered it, when you when you were coming up to the point of setting up this organization.

ALISON SAYWER CURRENT: There were dogs everywhere. There were street dogs, which are dogs that you can touch or somebody is feeding, but they're not allowed in a home. There were wild dogs that you couldn't get near. It would be like trying to pet a deer. You know, they were totally wild and they would pack up occasionally on the beach and bite somebody. And there were all dogs, but those dogs weren't allowed in the homes either because the locals had absolutely no access to anything like tick and flea medicines, spay and neuter, nothing like that. And there were puppies coming out of the bushes everywhere. People would have litters of puppies and then they put them in a box and put them in an empty lot. And we'd find one by one the whole litter would show up and there were just dogs and puppies everywhere.

CC: How did the people in the community respond to those wild dogs and those street dogs?

ALISON SAYWER CURRENT: A lot of people were afraid of them. I mean, I remember taking about 17 dogs for a walk one day and an old lady threw a stone at us because they were quite frightened of them and rightfully so. And they trained their children not to go out and pet these animals because you never knew what what you were going to come up with.

CC: Well, and the authorities, if I understand correctly, knew that there was an issue as well, but took some pretty drastic measures to try to bring down the population. What can you tell me about that?

ALISON SAYWER CURRENT: Oh, it was horrible. You know, they would round up dogs and put them down, sometimes electrocute them.

CC: Electrocute them?

ALISON SAYWER CURRENT: Yeah, I was determined to stop that. I mean to I used to follow the truck and when they got out of the truck, I'd let all the dogs out. One time I let all the air out of their tires so they couldn't go around.

CC: You must not have been very popular at that time. So I understand they were you're saying they were electrocuting the dogs as a means of exterminating them?

ALISON SAYWER CURRENT: Absolutely. Absolutely. They don't do it anymore. They don't even put dogs down on the island because we take them. If there's any dogs that need our need help, we take them in.

CC: OK, well, let's talk a little bit about this. And just so our listeners understand, the numbers I've seen suggest that Mexico has the highest number of stray dogs in all of Latin America. So it's a significant problem. But when you decided that you wanted to, I guess, tackle the issue on Isla Mujeres, tell me about what you did.

ALISON SAYWER CURRENT: I started off taking in the puppies because that, you know, they were they were so vulnerable. It was very sad. And I would get them healthy and take care of them and then try to find them homes. And then I started taking in dogs that were wandering around and friendly and I could touch them. So I would take them in and feed them and spay and neuter them and give them any medicine that they need. And at one point I was doing this at my house. At one point I had sixty five animals at my house.

CC: Oh my goodness gracious.

ALISON SAYWER CURRENT: After a while, people started bringing me dogs and I was just thrilled that they they saw me as a solution. I was very flattered. It was very challenging in the beginning. That's why I ended up with so many dogs that there were less tourists, although the tourists did hear about what I was doing and they would come to the house and I did adopt dogs out that way. But it didn't happen the way it happens now where we adopt out a couple of dogs a week.

CC: Have you ever gotten personally attached to some of the dogs?

ALISON SAYWER CURRENT: Oh, absolutely. I had so many favourites and special dogs, and that's what's in my book, is all the stories about the really special dogs.

CC: Tell us about one one that's really stuck with you.

ALISON SAYWER CURRENT: We had one named Napoleon because he was this little white whatever mix, and he was a puppy and he just thought he was king of the world. It was the cutest thing I've ever seen. And my husband's quite tall and he kept following my husband around. And I'm sitting there going, yes, keep following him. I come into my room and that's what he eventually did. And we have these tall stools by the window and he just sat in one of those tall stools and watched the world. He was Napoleon.

CC: I imagine there are plenty of challenges, too, especially if you've got a house with 65 dogs in it at one point. Do you for instance, you've been bitten much.

ALISON SAYWER CURRENT: Oh, I've been bitten quite often, but it's always my fault if I get bitten, I'm not paying attention or I'm not handling an animal properly. One time I got bitten because there was a mother and her puppies in a kennel that we were spraying and she was not happy to be in that kennel. And I put my fingers in to move the kennel and she bit my fingers. So it was my fault I wasn't paying attention. I've never been attacked by any dog and I've never been bitten as an act of sort of surprising aggression.

CC: I wonder, too, I mean, it's so sweet when you tell the stories about the individual dogs. And I can imagine how rewarding it is hearing stories like Taffy. But there must be other challenges and probably a very sad side to this occasionally that you deal with as well.

ALISON SAYWER CURRENT: Oh, there's lots of sad sides. I mean, some of the dogs we get are like nothing I've ever seen. They are skin and bones. Their skin is a mess. They're covered with ticks and fleas. You know, their eyes are infected, their ears are bitten, they have wounds. But my favourite thing on the planet is to turn one of those dogs into a healthy, happy dog. And we've done it over and over again. And it's like nothing you can imagine. It's fabulous.

CC: So it's very rewarding, but it's very challenging, too, it sounds like. And I wonder, the Dog Lady of Mexico becoming the Dog Lady of Mexico, what do you think the cost of that has been for you financially?

ALISON SAYWER CURRENT: The cost has been huge because when we started, we didn't have any support. So we supported the rescue. As far as emotionally, there's been times when it was hard to keep going, when you couldn't save a certain dog or you saw cruelty that broke your heart.

CC: How much longer do you think you're going to keep doing this for?

ALISON SAYWER CURRENT: Well, I have a wonderful woman named Trina and she wants to take over the rescue for me. At the moment, we're working together. I'm 67 years old. I can't do this forever.

CC: But for right now, you're still ready to be the Dog Lady of Mexico for the foreseeable future?

ALISON SAYWER CURRENT: Oh yeah and by the dog lady of Mexico, I'm really referring to all the people that I have met over the years that are also saving animals and doing their part to help. I still love it and when I'm not there, I miss my dogs because they're all my dogs.

CC: Listen, Alison, it was very nice to meet you over the radio. Thank you very much for your time.

ALISON SAYWER CURRENT: Thank you for having me in and spreading the word. I really appreciate it.

CC: Alison Sawyer Current is the founder of Isla Animals in Isla Mujeres, Mexico. Her book is called The Dog Lady of Mexico. Let us know if you've adopted a rescue dog, either a pandemic puppy or before. How is it worked out for you? And of course, we do love puppy pictures. You can tweet us @TheCurrentCBC or send us an email through our website, cbc.ca/thecurrent and click on contact.

Barack Obama on a Biden presidency, racism in the Trump era and what he misses about being president

Guests: Barack Obama

CC: Earlier this fall, Matt Galloway spoke with former U.S. President Barack Obama. His new memoir is called A Promised Land. It sold more than 3.3 million copies. Here's Matt Galloway's conversation with President Obama.

MATT GALLOWAY: President Barack Obama, hello.

BARACK OBAMA: Hi, how are you?

MG: It's a real pleasure to have you here. Your book begins with your last day as president. You're literally on the plane flying out of that job. And I wonder, as you watch the current president of the United States refuse to concede, how do you understand the fact that more than 71 million Americans have voted for another four years of Donald Trump?

BARACK OBAMA: Well, look, this is a divided country and it's not unique to America. I think we've seen this kind of right wing populism resurgent in Europe. You see nationalist or, you know, tribal impulses assert themselves in a lot of countries. There are a lot of factors that contribute to that. You know, part of it is responses to globalisation, responses to technology. I've talked a lot about the degree to which the splintering of the media has created, I think, an ecosystem of conservative media that is very hard to penetrate. And so if you are consuming that news, if that's your source of what's happening in the outside world, then you would think that Donald Trump has not only done great work as president, but you would think that he's justified in taking the positions he's taking. So there are a lot of factors involved. It's important, I think, to remember that. Eighty million people rejected an incumbent president, and that's not something that typically happens, it's only happened a handful of times, modern in modern times in the United States. And so how we bridge that gap between those who I think strongly opposed this president and those who still support him is going to be a big challenge for my good friend Joe Biden and Kamala Harris when they come into office.

MG: How important is it, do you think, for Democrats to try to understand why people voted for Donald Trump?

BARACK OBAMA: I always think it's important because it's hard to get big stuff done if the country is this polarised and there are features of the American system that are different than a typical parliamentary system, you can't just, you know, move your platform forward if you've got the majority there. All kinds of ways in which a determined opposition can block everything, not just some things. So so I think Joe is going to have to try to arrive at areas of potential compromise. But I think the issues that are taking place now and I write about these in the book, go deeper than just one election or electoral politics. You've seen growing divisions, some of which are deeply rooted in questions of race and gender and, you know, date back to the founding of this country, some of which are a result of a changing economy in which, for example, metropolitan areas have seen very different rates of growth than rural areas. And that has created frustrations and resentments that can be harnessed and channelled by populist or faux populists like Donald Trump.

MG: Let's talk about your time in that office. You made clear in the book that Michelle was not all that interested in you running for president of the United States.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: Every time he would run for something.

MG: She wasn't really that interested in you even running for state senator.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: That question that would come. Could he? Should he? Would he.

MG: And said that she couldn't guarantee that you were going to get her vote.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: I never wanted to be involved in politics. I had seen politics. I grew up in Chicago, rough and tumble politics. And I knew that Barack was a decent man. You know smart, smart as all get out. But politics was ugly and nasty, and I didn't know that my husband's temperament would mesh with that and I didn't want to see him in that environment.

MG: She asks you, why do you need to be president? What's the answer that you give her?

BARACK OBAMA: In the book, you know, I set the scene. We had gone through the process of evaluation. We had determined that I could win. We had determined that, you know, the family could probably survive it, even if it wasn't Michelle's preference.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: The choice for him not to do it would help me and my girls and that felt selfish and small.

BARACK OBAMA: But remaining question was, why are you, Barack, instead of a bunch of other Democrats like Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden, who were also running at that time? And I indicated that there was some sense that at that moment in 2008, the Democratic Party needed the capacity to excite young people, to excite non-traditional voters, and that maybe I spoke a language that some of these other candidates didn't speak.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: And I thought, well, what person do I know who has the gifts that this man has? The gifts of decency, first and foremost of empathy, second of high intellectual ability. This man reads and remembers everything, you know, is articulate, had worked in the community. So I had to take off my wife hat and put on my citizen hat and say, how can I stand in the way if I know that this man could do good?

BARACK OBAMA: What I also said was, look, if I win, on the day I take office, then children across America, black and brown kids, kids who don't feel like they're on the inside, they'll think of themselves differently. And as I write, you know, Michelle said it's a good answer. And I I do believe that there was some truth to that, that it's interesting. Now, I'll meet 18 year olds or 20 year olds, not just black, but white or Hispanic or Asian, who tell me, you know, we took for granted that. A black man could be president, the United States, because you were the only president we knew when we were growing up, and that meant that we as Hispanic or black or Asian, felt that that door was open to us, too. And there's real value in that. I also write, though, towards the end of the book about the fact that that symbolism doesn't replace the need for concrete policies, some of which I got done, some of which I fell short in giving every child a good education, alleviating poverty, you know, making sure that they've got decent housing. So I don't want to overstate the symbolic value. I think when you're dealing with issues like, you know, the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow and systemic inequality, symbolism only takes you so far.

MG: When you move into the to the White House, right at the very beginning, one of the butlers who is an older black gentleman says to you, you don't understand what this means to us. As the first black president, a mixed race man in that office, what do you think was expected of you by the black community?

BARACK OBAMA: You know, it was interesting. That scene was representative of the incredible kindness and generosity of the White House staff and as I describe it, what was interesting was that the White House had maintained a tradition that was common in Washington, D.C., back in the 50s, the 40s, the 30s, where the service crews, the staff, the butlers, the waiters were mostly African-American and. You know, that Butler who you spoke of had had started with Richard Nixon. So, you know, he had long memories and and as I described in many ways, was just like one of Michelle's uncles generationally in terms of their experience, their understanding, I think the African-American community was very generous to me in recognizing that. As a first in a tough situation, we were under a different set of pressures, Michelle and I and our girls, that we were going to be scrutinised differently. And as a consequence, I think they were very protective of us. Now, there were exceptions of folks who would challenge my policies and say, what have you done specifically for the African-American community? Or would get frustrated with my insistence that using universal language or pursuing universal programmes rather than targeted programmes, oftentimes, as a practical matter, allowed me to build broader coalitions and get more stuff done, including delivering more for the African-American community. And, you know, that's a debate that I think all of us in the United States and probably around the world are constantly wrestling with, you know, to what extent do you. Aspire to trying to build multiracial coalitions, which means that you then have to compromise and and accommodate interests that are not just unique to the African-American community or the black community or mixed race communities in other parts of the world. And to what extent is it important for you to be a champion specifically for a group that has suffered from historic discrimination? And that's a balance that most of the time I felt I got right, but I'm sure there were times where folks were frustrated that I wasn't championing specific issues as focused away as they would have liked.

MG: I mean, I think that's one of the really interesting themes that runs through the book is, is how you wrestle with expectation. You meet Vaclav Havel, the former Czech president, and he says that you have been coerced with people's high expectations. And you talk about those expectations. You talk about, you know, being heckled, for example.

SOUNDCLIP

[Sounds from demonstrations]

VOICE: Can I just say this, alright. I listened to you, I heard you, I heard you, I heard you. All right. Now I've been respectful. I let you holler.

MG: What do you say to people who invested certain things in you because of those expectations and they felt as though you'd let them down in that position?

BARACK OBAMA: Part of the reason I wrote the book and probably why I go into more detail on some issues than the average reader might prefer is to try to give people a sense of the choices I was confronting as I'm trying to get various things done. So I use the example of the big health care fight to get the Affordable Care Act passed in America, as you know, is as unique amongst advanced Western democracies in not providing universal health care. And as I describe my preference and the preference of a lot of progressives and folks on the left here in the United States, if I were starting from scratch, would be to set up a single payer plan of some sort. It's more efficient. It's easy to administer and understand Medicare, our version for older Americans is essentially a single payer plan, but it's only for people over 65. And the problem is that wasn't possible. We have a legacy of private insurance in this country. And to try to unwind, one sixth of America's economy would have met too much political resistance, even within my own party. And so we come up with this new system. And to this day, there are Democrats who are disappointed that we didn't get everybody covered. We got 20 million people covered. We didn't completely eliminate the private insurance system, but we tried to make it work as best we could and fill some of those gaps. And what I try to do is describe why that is the right choice to have made because it turns out in any political system, you are rarely going to get 100 percent of what you want. You get 30, 50, if you're lucky, 70 percent of what you want, you leave something on the table and then you go to fight another day in the future, and I think that the danger for someone like me who was elected with outsized expectations and a lot of symbolism is that sometimes your supporters feel as if you're going to wave a wand and it's all going to get done.

MG: And that's not possible?

BARACK OBAMA: And it's not possible.

MG: There's a really powerful passage in the book you write, it was as if my very presence in the White House had triggered a deep seated anxiety. The natural order had been disrupted for millions of Americans, spooked by a black man in the White House. Trump promised an elixir for their racial anxiety. Donald Trump was one of the leaders of the birther movement painting you as a foreigner in the office of the president.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: I want him to show his birth certificate, I want him to show his birth certificate.

VOICE 2: Why?

VOICE 1: There's something on that birth certificate that he doesn't want.

MG: Do you think Donald Trump is a racist?

BARACK OBAMA: I think that Donald Trump I don't know what's in his mind and what's in his heart. What I can say is that his rhetoric. Has oftentimes tapped into. Themes that have been used in this country for years in order to block. Of the full participation of African-Americans in our country's lives, you know, he is more than happy to fan racist sentiments and that from a leader, much from anyone who has a public platform, much less the president of the United States, is a problem. This is the kind of rhetoric that whether he believes it or not or he just thinks it's expedient to get him more attention and more power unleashes, you know, some dark forces and now is turbocharged in the Internet and we've seen an increase in those kinds of attitudes that have rendered them more acceptable.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: You had a group on one side that was bad and you had a group on the other side that was also very violent. And nobody wants to say that. There was a group on this side, you can call them the left, you've just called them the left, that came violently attacking the other group.

BARACK OBAMA: I am happy that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are going to come in, I think, and set a different tone. But what is absolutely clear is that we have seen what used to be or had had been relegated to the fringes of Republican Party rhetoric, now moved front and centre, this fear of the other, this suggestion that somehow there's real Americans and then there are people who I guess are fake Americans and somehow the fake Americans tend to look like me.

MG: We hear what it's like to have a Beatle sing a love song to your wife and why it's important to tackle hard things. But we start off by hearing how Barack Obama understands Donald Trump's rhetoric and the fear it fosters.

BARACK OBAMA: I am happy that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are going to come in, I think, and set a different tone, but what is absolutely clear is that we have seen what used to be or had had been relegated to the fringes of Republican Party rhetoric, now moved front and centre. This fear of the other, this suggestion that somehow there's real Americans and then there are people who I guess are fake Americans and somehow the fake Americans tend to look like me.

MG: Can you unleash that? If you're him, can you unleash that without being a racist? I mean, I know I just wonder whether it matters whether he's identified, whether he's defined as a racist or whether he's just involved.

BARACK OBAMA: I guess that's my point, Matt. It doesn't really matter. Right? I don't, I'm not interested in his motivations. I'm not interested in what's in his heart. I'm interested in what he does. You know, I remark in the book the fact that in my first two years in office, he was actually quite complimentary of me, right, at a time when he perhaps thought that was expedient. Then he decides, well, maybe taking this approach of being a right wing populist and xenophobe is to my advantage and that the impulses that he taps into those existed well before he decided to run for president. You know, as I described, you know, you have a prototype in Sarah Palin.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: I was reading today a copy of The New York Times. And I was really interested to read in there about Barack Obama's friends from Chicago. Turns out one of his earliest supporters is a man who, according to The New York Times, was a domestic terrorist and part of a group.

[Crowd boos]

VOICE: Part of a group that, "launched a campaign of bombings that would target the Pentagon and the US Capitol. Man, these are the same guys who think patriotism is paying higher taxes. Remember, that's what Joe Biden said.

BARACK OBAMA: He was not an originator of this. But as I said, whether he cynically riding that wave to achieve his ends or whether it taps into something he actually believes. Here's what I can't say for certain that he does not consider it his job to fight against racist sentiments. He does not consider it to be one of the goals of any leader, American or Canadian or otherwise, to try to tamp down those kinds of darker impulses. And that, to me, is a failure of any leader who is complicit, whether by commission or omission, in the kind of thought processes and actions that lead to racist behaviour discrimination or worse, then they're not doing their job.

MG: You're bruised by this, but as you write about in the book, I mean, Michelle is really affected by some of the stuff that comes out. Why do you think that was?

BARACK OBAMA: Well, Michelle and I temperamentally are different. You know, she is somebody who maybe is naturally inclined to be a little less optimistic about human nature. Our experiences are different. She grew up on the south side of Chicago. I grew up in Hawaii. Hawaii is not a perfect place, but it does temper your cynicism when it's 80 degrees outside and there's a beach five minutes away and you're growing up in a multicultural society that, you know, has its own tensions, but they're very different than the kind that you experienced in Chicago in the 60s and 70s. But, you know, I I think that Michelle and I are in some ways sort of the yin and yang of the African-American experience generally, which historically has been, you know, you go back and forth feeling as if, you know what, there's real progress that's being made and we can get to the promised land and there are times where things look bleak and it looks as if the country is backtracking. And Michelle may articulate certain doubts or frustration or anger or hurt more than I might, but on any given day, I obviously there are times where I'm feeling exactly like she is and and there are times where she's the one who has to pump me up and get me encouraged.

MG: Let's talk about this country. You know Canada very well. And the last four years, I think it's fair to say, have seen the relationship between Ottawa and Washington take a real battering. Peter Navarro, the president's trade adviser, said there's a special place in hell for Justin Trudeau. Why, after the last four years with trade wars, with tariffs being put on aluminium and pointy comments like that, why should Canadians trust the United States?

BARACK OBAMA: Well, look, Canada doesn't really have a choice, just like the United States doesn't have a choice. We share this massive border. We're our biggest each other's biggest trading partners and we have to get along in order to in order for our economies to function. Not to mention the fact that the people to people relations between our two countries are as close as any two countries on Earth. You know, I joke about this because I've had a brother in law who is Canadian. I've got you know, I've got all these friends who I discover 10 years later that they were Canadian all along. Nobody told me.

MG: We're everywhere.

BARACK OBAMA: You guys are sneaking around, hidden amongst us. And so we share so much culturally in terms of our values, in terms of our commerce that we have to get along. And I would say that what we've seen over the last few years is anomalous. When I came into office, Stephen Harper was the Canadian prime minister and Stephen and I had not much in common in terms of our political orientation, our political views and yet we had a very cordial and cooperative relationship. There were big differences, there were times where we had tensions, but overall, there was a recognition that we, our countries are linked and bonded and that we share some basic assumptions about the world. You know, conversely, Justin Trudeau politically is much more aligned with me on most matters.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: This house gets to see a bromance up close. Thanks for making that possible. Although I still think dudeplomacy is more accurate, but I'll get over it.

VOICE 2: Thank you for this extraordinary welcome, which tempts me to just shut up and leave because it can't get any better than this. So Canada was the very first country that I visited as president. It was in February. There was colder, I was younger. Michelle now refers to my hair as the Great White North. Our only battles take place inside the hockey rink. Even there, there's an uneasy peace that is maintained. Our relationship is so remarkable precisely because it seems so unremarkable, which is why Americans often are surprised when our favourite American actor or singer turns out to be Canadian.

BARACK OBAMA: Yeah, we had our share of tensions around, you know, timber and, you know, tariff issues, but those are the natural frictions that are going to exist amongst any allies, I'm not, I'll be honest with you, on my scale of worries, in the aftermath of the Trump administration, the relationship between the United States and Canada is not at the top of the list. I think that is one that actually can be mended relatively quickly. I think we've got some bigger problems in terms of managing America's role internationally because we ceded a lot of that leadership most recently on how we deal with the pandemic and recovering our credibility around basic things like science and our role in public health around the world. That's going to be a tough one to to dig ourselves out of a hole on.

MG: Just in the last five or six minutes that we have, I wanted to ask you two things. One is on your desk in the Oval Office, you had a plaque and the plaque said hard things are hard. I saw a photo of that years ago and my kids would tell me that I have said that phrase to them far too often. When there's a maths test, when something is up, I say, but hard things are hard. Stop with the hard things are hard thing. What did that phrase mean to you as the president?

BARACK OBAMA: Well, it started as a joke. David Axelrod, one of my top political advisers, we were sitting in the Oval Office, I think it was during the health care fight, but it was on one major issue and Axelrod, we were going around the room and Axelrod wanted to make a point about the political perils of a particular thing that we're trying to do, and he said, you know, hard things, Mr. President, are hard. And I laughed. I said, well, that's a brilliant insight. For my birthday he then gave me that plaque, but it actually turned out to be a useful one to remind yourself, you have to have that mindset as president and probably for a lot of other stuff, which is sometimes stuff, you just have to put elbow grease to it and sometimes you have to recognise that the problems you are addressing are tough. There are not perfect solutions. As I write in in the book, if if a problem is easy, somebody else has solved it. The only problems that landed on my desk as president were problems that nobody else could solve and there are a lot of smart people out there in the federal government. So if it got to my desk, it meant that one way or another there was going to be issues, problems, and you were dealing with probabilities. What you might try might not work, you might fail, but what that plaque reminded me of is, is that you try anyway. You go at it, that's you. You take some maybe perverse pleasure in taking responsibility for doing hard things, understanding that it's not always going to work out exactly the way you want.

MG: Do you think that sentiment has been missing in the last four years?

BARACK OBAMA: I think so, yes.

MG: Yeah. You write that maybe I don't know, aside from the plane, the best perk of being in the White House is being able to invite musicians to come in and perform in your house. And so you have Stevie Wonder and Bob Dylan and Lin-Manuel Miranda and the list goes on and on and on. This book is a lot of things, but in many ways it's a love story between you and Michelle. Tell me about the time that Paul McCartney came in and serenaded Michelle at the White House.

BARACK OBAMA: That was lovely. This was Paul McCartney had been awarded the Gershwin Prize, which each year is given to a renowned composer. And so there was a celebration of McCartney's music, but he was in attendance. And at the end, he then performed several songs. We're sitting on the front row of myself, Michelle, our daughters and my mother in law.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: The next thing we like to do is a song I have been itching to do at the White House, and I hope the president will forgive me if I sing this one.

BARACK OBAMA: And he starts singing Michelle.

SOUNDCLIP

[Paul McCartney peforming "Michelle"]

BARACK OBAMA: He's strumming on the guitar and singing this to her and she's blushing a little bit.

SOUNDCLIP

[Performance continued]

BARACK OBAMA: Cause all the attention and eyes are on her, and I, I tried to imagine what her parents would have said when she was born back in 1964. So let's say, you know, she's I don't remember exactly when that song comes out, but it's, she's probably two, three, four years old. And, you know, they're living on the south side and somebody knocked on their door and told them, you know, someday she's going to be the first lady of the United States and one of the Beatles is going to be singing that song to her. You know, they would have called the police.

SOUNDCLIP

[Paul McCartney performing Michelle]

BARACK OBAMA: It was so improbable and I think it was an indication, a lovely indication of where she had travelled and Paul McCartney could not have been more gracious.

SOUNDCLIP

[Performance continued]

VOICE: I could be the first guy ever to be punched out by a president.

BARACK OBAMA: He's since that time become a friend and usually when we get together, he likes performing. He's a natural entertainer.

MG: It's not many people who can say usually when we get together about Paul McCartney. Is there anything about the job you miss?

BARACK OBAMA: I miss the camaraderie. I think I've said that there are rare instances outside of wartime where you are with a collection of people where the stakes are so high and the stresses that great and you forge a bond and that feeling of a team and everybody rowing in the same direction to get hard things done is invaluable. And I paint a lot of portraits of members of my staff who became great friends and who who took courageous steps to help the American people. And and there are times where I do miss the the just the mental. Exercise of figuring out hard policy problems, I joked, somebody asked once, would you have liked to have served a third term if you could have? And I say, you know, I wouldn't have, I wouldn't have wanted to be out front, but if somebody had said, you can sit in your basement in your sweats and there's somebody else who's playing the president with a microphone in his or her ear, and you can just kind of give suggestions and policy then I might have enjoyed doing that, the pomp of the presidency I don't miss. And I do think that there's a benefit of term limits in getting fresh legs in there and because the job is enormously tough. But having a chance to just look at big problems and saying, all right, how do we solve this? How do we apply logic and reason and compassion and imagination to big issues like climate change or inequality? I enjoyed being part of that process.

MG: This is only part of the story. The second volume still to come and I hope we have the chance to talk again when volume two comes out. In the meantime, it's been a real pleasure, President. Thank you.

BARACK OBAMA: Thank you so much.

CC: President Barack Obama's memoir is A Promised Land. He spoke with Matt Galloway earlier this fall. That’s our program for today. Stay tuned for Radio One for Q. Many other artists joined in festivities when Paul McCartney serenaded Michelle Obama. We’ll leave you today with Stevie Wonder performing We can Work It Out live in the White House. I’m Catherine Cullen. Thanks for listening to The Current.

[Song: “We can Work It Out” performed by Stevie Wonder]

The Current Transcript for December 29, 2020

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Prologue

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How 'the dog lady of Mexico' helps find homes for the country's massive stray dog population

Barack Obama on a Biden presidency, racism in the Trump era and what he misses about being president

Dec. 29, 2020 episode transcript

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