Differing views on the Ontario teachers strike

Guests: Robynn Jones, Sachin Maharaj

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[Sounds from teachers protests in Ontario].

MG: Ontario teachers are hitting the picket lines once again this week. Rolling strikes by Catholic and public school teachers are affecting hundreds of thousands of students. And this has some teachers worried about how their jobs will be perceived. Amber Bowen is a former elementary teacher in Toronto and a union rep.

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VOICE: Sometimes during strike action, the actual pieces of what teachers really fundamentally stand for when they're in contract negotiations get lost in arguments about salary and pensions and those kind of things. But really the intrinsic value that teachers try to uphold in classrooms, teaching curriculum, but still, you know, teaching students how to be good people, how to share, how to care, how to get along in society. Sometimes people forget that we do as our job.

MG: Some parents, as you can imagine, are divided in their support for teachers unions. Scott Baker's child goes to school in Timmins, Ontario.

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VOICE: I'm not against teachers specifically. I just don't really agree with the union. The union had its time and its place. I think the union is just a big money grab. They don't really do anything.

MG: There are parents who are more sympathetic to the place the teachers find themselves in. Robynn Jones is a mother of four, lives in the Niagara region. Robynn, good morning.

ROBYNN JONES: Good morning.

MG: What impact has this dispute and it's an ongoing one, what does that had on your family?

ROBYNN JONES: The disruption in school I'm able to accommodate luckily, because I work from home. However, inside the schools, I don't see too much disruption. The teachers have done an amazing job at the DSPN, keeping the kids calm and not letting it affect their classroom teaching. So I have seen friends and family scrambling for childcare arrangements, but in our community everybody's really reached out and offered to take on kids if they can to help them out to help parents in a situation where they don't have childcare.

MG: What are you hearing from other parents because you're running a bit of a childcare out of your home, you talk with other parents as well. What do the parents say about what's happening? We'll talk about what's going on inside the classroom in a moment, but what a parent saying about that disruption?

ROBYNN JONES: This time around, as opposed to earlier in the year when there were some disputes, it's actually much smoother because we're getting the warning that the strike, the rotating strike day is coming. We're getting about five days warning. So parents are able to find care and accommodate, so they're less stressed and I feel they're actually more supportive of the teachers because they've been able to, it's been less of an inconvenience to them.

MG: There are some things that are happening within the classroom that are affecting, some people say what they know about what's going on in the class. Teachers, for example, aren't filling out report cards this term. There aren't parent teacher interviews in some boards as well. How do you feel about that?

ROBYNN JONES: So I myself did not get a report card for any of my three children in school. Parent interviews also didn't ensue, however my children's teachers and the staff at their school have always been very proactive in making sure that if there is a concern that I've been known well before report cards. So if there is a concern or your child's excelling, I feel if you're, if you can be involved or if your teacher is good with the communication, which most of them are, then you know, ahead of time. So report card is really just a check. But you would already know how your children are doing, so it really doesn't affect me that much.

MG: It's an important check though, isn't it? I mean, for parents who may not have that contact with with teachers that's the thing that you get that I mean, allows you to get a sense as to where your child is, how your child is doing in the classroom. Isn't it important to get those report cards?

ROBYNN JONES: It is and those marks are still there. They're not being released at this time. And like our teachers at our school board issued, they all reach out that if we have a concern or need to speak to the teachers, that we can reach out and speak to them and they will let us know how our kids are doing or any of those concerns or if there's an area we need help. I personally have a child that is struggling in some areas as it is right now and the teacher has been on a weekly, sometimes daily correspondence with me to make sure that he doesn't fall behind while we're waiting for a report card to come, that we're addressing it in the moment.

MG: This dispute is a rolling one. There are strikes that will happen in your area on Thursday and Friday of this week. We're hearing that there will be a couple of days per week that teachers will be out of the classroom. What's at the root of your support of teachers in this dispute?

ROBYNN JONES: I firmly believe that teachers are there because they want to be there and they are there to provide our children with the necessary skills they need to be independent, productive members of society. So I feel protecting their fair classroom size and making sure the teachers have a manageable workload. I feel that important. It's more important and I don't feel we put enough emphasis on protecting them as they have one of the most important jobs in our society.

MG: And the class size thing, that's a huge issue within this dispute. That's an important issue for you as well?

ROBYNN JONES: Yes.

MG: When it comes to the cap on how many students could be in the classroom, why is that so important?

ROBYNN JONES: Because you have 30 students sometimes in a class. Most of my kids range around 25 students, but you have 25 students in a classroom all trying for one person's attention. They all need to learn the lesson or whatever is being taught. They don't all have the same learning skills so that the teacher has to divide their time between the needs of 20 plus students. Putting a larger cap just means that each child gets less attention, less help, and the teacher has more workload, more burden, more stress. And in a situation where there's behavioural issues or a learning disability, it hinders the student and it also creates a dangerous environment for the kids and the teacher.

MG: We heard from a parent who didn't want us to use his name because he's worried about a reprisal or reprisals against his child. We've spoken to the number of parents who have different feelings on what's going on in the classroom and how this strike is and these strikes are affecting their kids. Have a listen to to what this one parent told us.

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VOICE: They claim it's all about the kids. Well if it's all about the kids, do your negotiating when you're off in the summer. They only do it when it's going to affect everybody and that's the union way. People are fed up seeing the amount of money they make. The pensions and everything else and the people in the private sector aren't making that kind of money all the time and they can't just walk off the job and demand more money. If they're professionals, you can't add a couple kids to a class? We all grew up and we looked back on our yearbooks and you see 30, 35 kids with one teacher. They don't have the extra help or anything else. And now you hear the kids' teachers crying, oh it's a different story. Well, you're still a professional, making lots of money. You can add a couple kids to your class.

MG: Robynn, when you hear that, what goes through your mind?

ROBYNN JONES: I definitely understand that. There's another point of view. The way I view it is unfortunately, they tried the negotiations. They tried talking. It's conflict resolution and it didn't work, so this is a last ditch effort. So I don't think anybody, union or teachers, went out to intentionally strike or put anyone in this position. Unfortunately, the only leverage they have is to disrupt people, to make people notice what's going on and make sure they're heard. So I feel that it was a last resort and unfortunately, that's why they can't do it in the summer because nobody would pay attention if it's not affecting them.

MG: How have you been talking to your kids about what's happening in school right now?

ROBYNN JONES: I have explained to them, we had to explain in a couple months earlier. We have family on the school board that negotiated a couple months ago. And I just explained to them it's two sides to the government as I call it and the teachers, and they can't come to an agreement. The teachers want smaller class sizes and the government wants other things. I said so right now they can't talk and they can't come to an agreement. So unfortunately, this is the way they're working it out. And then I've had to tell them, as hopeful as they are, school will not be cancelled.

MG: As hopeful as they are. They sound like just about every child in school. Robynn, it's great to talk to you about this. Thank you and good luck as this continues.

ROBYNN JONES: Okay. Thank you.

MG: Robynn Jones is a mother of four in Ontario's Niagara region. Sachin Maharaj has been studying how these sorts of labour disputes influenced the public's perception of teachers and why that matters in a public education system. He has a Ph.D. in educational policy, is a lecturer at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. Also used to be a high school teacher in Toronto, and he's with me now. Good morning.

SACHIN MAHARAJ: Good morning.

MG: What do you make of how differently Robynn Jones and perhaps other parents that we heard from see this dispute? There are parents who are very supportive of what's happening. There are other parents and we heard from one there, saying that you know, this is an example of their kids being held hostage and that's the language that they would use. How do you interpret that?

SACHIN MAHARAJ: I think anytime there are teacher strikes, especially on this large of a scale, teachers recognize that this absolutely does cause disruptions in the lives of students and their families. And so they don't do this lightly. We haven't seen such a large scale labour disruption here in Ontario for the last two decades, not since the Mike Harris government. So it's not something they do lightly, however teachers are the ones that are most closely in touch with the teaching and learning conditions in schools. And when those conditions are threatened, sometimes these things are necessary. So I think it's very natural for parents to have these different reactions. The public polling data on this though, has shown that while about one third of parents are kind of on the government side in this dispute, about half to two thirds of parents support the teachers.

MG: What do you make of the fact that I mean, one of the parents we spoke with, a number of parents, wouldn't put their names to their comments because they're worried about reprisals against their kids in the classroom.

SACHIN MAHARAJ: I mean, I think that's unfortunate. I don't really think there is a need for that, but I can understand maybe some of the fear around that. But I think parents should be free to express their concerns and teachers and teacher unions should be out front addressing those concerns.

MG: How much do conflicts like this shape the public opinion about teachers?

SACHIN MAHARAJ: It really depends on what the conflict is about, primarily. So in the past when we've seen disputes in Canada that centre primarily around teacher salaries and benefits. I think a lot of people might be less supportive of the teachers, especially when we see growing income inequality across the country. A lot of parents might say, well, you know, teachers, they're paid pretty well. They may get summers off and, you know, maybe I'm struggling to get ahead, so why are my taxes going towards supporting this? Although I think that's maybe a shortsighted view because part of the reason teachers have good paying working conditions is because of this unionized environment and we've seen declines in unionization in the private sector. But leaving that aside, the current dispute is really not about that. I mean, teachers in Ontario are only asking for a cost of living increase in salaries and I think most people think that that's reasonable. Really, it's around issues of class size, e-learning, kindergarten. And I think most parents and members of the public are in support of those issues.

MG: Stephen Lecce is the minister of education in the province of Ontario. Have a listen to what he said after the talks broke off last week with the Elementary Teachers Federation of Ontario.

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VOICE: Over the past days, we've been negotiating with a single focus on getting a deal that keeps your child in class. I've always said that the issue at the table continues to be a contrast of priorities. For this government, it's about investing in students. It's about maintaining the smallest classrooms in the nation for their earliest years. For the union, it is increasingly about compensation, about higher pay and benefits. The contrast could not be more clear in this negotiation, but for the government, we're going to continue to work hard to be reasonable to keep kids in class where they belong after months of needless escalation by teachers union that happens far too often in this province.

MG: How does the government directly pointing the finger not at teachers, but at the unions that represent those teachers, influence perceptions of teachers?

SACHIN MAHARAJ: Well, again, governments across the world tried to paint this divide between teachers and their unions, but it's important to point out that teacher unions are democratically elected by their members, and so they're the legitimate representation and voice of teachers. And so the teacher unions aren't doing anything that their members don't want them to do. And again, you see in that clip that you played, it's positioned around issues of salary. But again, cost of living increase. I think most people think that's reasonable. You don't really see the government talking about the issues of class size. You learn in kindergarten and minister lecture. I made that point that we're focussed on committed keeping students in schools. But I think the public needs to ask themselves if the unions don't sort of push back against this, what type of schools would those be? So schools with larger class sizes, schools where kids have to do mandatory e-learning, schools where the full day kindergarten program is different.

MG: All things that the union says are on the table.

SACHIN MAHARAJ: Right. Are these the schools we want for our kids?

MG: OISE, the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, has done studies looking at the attitudes towards public education. What are those attitudes tell you about how parents think of teachers broadly?

SACHIN MAHARAJ: In general, OISE does this survey every three years and parental views on the quality of teaching and their satisfaction with teaching has tended to be relatively high in about the 70 percent range. In the most recent survey that came out in 2018, it decreased into the 50s. So 53 to 58 percent divide between the public and the parent.

MG: What does that tell you? What do you think is behind that?

SACHIN MAHARAJ: Nobody knows for sure. I mean, I think there's a couple things that could play into it. I think one of the major things could be the discourse around the teaching of maths in schools. So we've seen in recent years there's been all this alarm that schools aren't really doing a good job of teaching maths.

MG: People look at standardized tests and they see test scores falling and say that there's a crisis when it comes to how we're teaching them.

SACHIN MAHARAJ: But what's interesting about that is that's only on Ontario's internal tests. Internationally, we tend to score pretty well in maths. The most recent results of the OECD's PISA test, which came out in December, showed Ontario basically 13th in the world in maths, and three of those jurisdictions ahead of us are basically different parts in China. So we're still scoring relatively well in maths, but for years we've seen that discourse around lower quality of maths teaching.

MG: How could a conflict like this are conflicts like this because it's a number of different unions all kind of involved at the same time, play into those public opinions around teachers? We were speaking earlier with Robynn about report cards. Report cards aren't going to be coming home this term. Parent teacher interviews aren't happening. Extracurriculars, a big part of enjoying life at school, those have been cancelled as well. Could that shape public opinion around teachers?

SACHIN MAHARAJ: It could. I mean, if labour disruptions become too frequent within the school system, there is a risk of parents and the public sort of getting fed up. And so the teachers have been without a contract since last summer. By the time this gets sorted out, who knows that maybe later this year and then these agreements are usually four years. So then three years from now, we could be in the same situation and there can be a fatigue if there are too many labour disruptions. But again, I'd point the issue back, it really depends on what the issues are.

MG: What's at stake here, do you think? I mean the implications for education and for children if there is an erosion in teachers and trust in teachers?

SACHIN MAHARAJ: Well, I would point to the situation south of the border. So in the U.S., where in most states, teachers aren't legally allowed to strike, you see there's much worse public perception of teachers and the education system. So recent polling done in 2018 showed that most teachers themselves would not want their own children to follow them into the profession because of low pay and underfunding of the school system.

MG: Could you also see an exodus from the public school system toward a private system? I mean, again, obviously not everybody can afford private education, but there are options for people who can.

SACHIN MAHARAJ: Yeah, you do see that. I mean, that's one of the things that played out in British Columbia, which is one of the disputes I studied that happened 20 years ago, is you saw increased enrolments from the public system into the private system. So that definitely is a possibility. But there's also a risk too, of people not wanting to go into teaching. And we've seen that actually here in Ontario recently where applications to teacher education programs are down pretty significantly in the last few years.

MG: This weekend, there was a weird story that appeared. Toronto newspapers, three of them saw these ads that were run, full page ads from a group called Vaughn Working Families. They're very critical of teachers. Nobody seems to know who this group is. It has no website. There's no spokesperson. The ads say teachers unions leaders are risking student success. Children are not pawns. Minister of Education says, I don't know anything about this, but everyone's trying to figure out what's going on. What do you think is happening here?

SACHIN MAHARAJ: Again, I think it's important to recognize there are parents that support the government's position on this. The polling shows about one third of parents do. For an ad like this though, I mean to get a full page ads in all the major news outlets is pretty expensive.

MG: It's not cheap.

SACHIN MAHARAJ: It's tens of thousands of dollars. So I'd question whether this really is a grassroots movement of parents or whether it's a much more organized, well-funded opposition effort.

MG: You talked about British Columbia. Alberta hasn't had a teacher province dispute since 2002, has the highest teacher salaries in the country. Are teachers there seen differently compared to how they're seen elsewhere in the country?

SACHIN MAHARAJ: I think a lot of it has to do with the orientation of the province and the teachers union there. So the Alberta Teachers Association, the way they've positioned themselves publicly, are much more along the lines of a proactive professional association. It's important to point out in the Alberta Teachers Association, administrators, principals and vice principals are also part of the union. And so that changes the way that the union functions. But they're much more proactive in putting out and forward thinking education policies. They've had partnerships with Finland in the past. They do a lot of things that traditional unions don't really do and I think that influences how the public views them and teachers as a result.

MG: Just briefly, before I let you go, you were a teacher as well.

SACHIN MAHARAJ: That's right.

MG: Do you worry about public impressions of teachers based on on your own experience in the classroom?

SACHIN MAHARAJ: I do. I mean, one of the funny things, when I was in my undergraduate years, I had pretty, pretty high marks. And then when I told people that I was going to teacher's college to become a teacher, a lot of people were like, what? What why are you doing that? Why don't you go to medical school? Why don't you go to law school? And so teaching is still not viewed as a profession the same way some of these other industries are, but I think that's the way it should be. I mean most people's lives are probably affected way more by the teachers they have throughout their lives than, say, lawyers or doctors. And so I think that's where the priority should be.

MG: Great to have you here. Thank you.

SACHIN MAHARAJ: You're welcome.

MG: Sachin Maharaj is a PhD in educational policy lecturer at OISE. Love to hear from you. You can e-mail us at thecurrent@cbc.ca Or tweet us @TheCurrentCBC or cbc.ca/thecurrent. If you head to that website, you'll learn about something that we're doing next week. Vancouver, we are coming for you. I'm heading to Vancouver to focus on some stories in that part of the country. Monday night I'm hosting a forum. It's called Vancouver's Changing Chinatown. It's about the changing nature of Chinatown. We would love to see you next Monday night if you're in Vancouver. I'll be at the Floata Restaurant, at the heart of Chinatown, for a forum exploring the changing nature of that part of the community. Come on out. See the miracle of radio. Say hi. Eat some food. Talk about the changing nature of that part of the city. Starts at 7:00 p.m. next Monday night. Tickets are free. You can find out information at cbc.ca/thecurrent in Vancouver. We'll see you next week. And we're back in six minutes. This is The Current. I'm Matt Galloway.

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App failure causes chaos in Iowa caucus

Guests: Susan Ormiston

MG: Good morning, I'm Matt Galloway. You're listening to The Current.

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MG: Still to come, many of us are drowning in stuff, boxes and boxes of stuff that often end up being donated. But then what happens? Where do all those clothes, electronics, knickknacks, where do they actually end up? The author and journalist Adam Minter's quest to find out took him right around the world. He's my next guest coming up in about half an hour's time. But first, what's going on in Iowa?

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MG: We're going to be hearing from experts on whether the new coronavirus is on its way to becoming a global pandemic. This is a discussion that's happening right around the world right now. But first, we thought we'd bring you an update on a story that we brought you yesterday.

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VOICE 1: Thank you Iowa. Thank you so much. So listen, it is too close to call, so I'm just going to tell you what I do know.

VOICE 2: You won.

[Crowd cheers]

MG: Maybe not so quick. Last night's Iowa caucus supposed to give us an indication of which Democratic candidate is taking the early lead to becoming the party's 2020 candidate in the presidential election. Instead, the night ended in confusion, chaos and no results yet in sight. CBC's senior correspondent Susan Ormiston is in Des Moines, Iowa. Susan, good morning.

SUSAN ORMISTON: Good morning.

MG: When last we spoke, this was meant to be the beginning of the race. People were going to find out they would wake up this morning and know who had the early lead in, as I say, that run into a challenged Donald Trump in the presidential election. What happened?

SUSAN ORMISTON: I can't overestimate what a debacle this is for the Iowa State Democratic Party. You know, we don't have any results yet. Nothing. No counting, no winner. We talk about the Iowa surprise politically, Matt, in this state, well, it was a surprise that no one expected. Essentially, there were inconsistencies in the reporting of those results and they could not stand by what the numbers would be, so they threw their hands in there and they said, we're not reporting anything tonight. Mass confusion.

MG: What does that mean? Inconsistencies in the reporting, what went sideways?

SUSAN ORMISTON: So they were trying a new system, this time with three different sets of results. It's complicated, really not that important. But an app was developed, a new app, so the precinct captains would send in their numbers through the app. The app failed. We're hearing this morning now some reports that that app was developed too quickly, rapidly, wasn't tested, stress tested statewide and that it failed. The second thing is there was an emergency hotline, a phone number, call this in case you can't use the app. Well guess what? No one answered the phone. We heard reports from a few county chairmen saying we were trying to call into the headquarters to get these results in after hand counting them and we couldn't talk to anybody. It was dead on the other end.

MG: There was an initial concern, and you can imagine why there might be something nefarious behind this. Is there any evidence that the system was hacked, that things outside of the control of what was going on in Iowa were to blame for what we're seeing right now?

SUSAN ORMISTON: Well, according to party officials, no, nothing suspicious. This was an old fashioned, we blew it.

MG: How did people react where you were?

SUSAN ORMISTON: Oh, Matt, it was crazy. I mean, you have people expecting results after an hour from the caucuses opening. You had 2000 media, over 2000 descending on Des Moines from all over the world to get an indication of who the Democrats might anoint as their leader. And nothing for hours, for three hours or more. People were looking around saying what's happening? Then there were suspicions the Democratic Party wasn't giving any good information. They called the campaign leaders together that their officials and had a short, terse phone call. Inconsistencies. We don't have any results, kind of deal with it. So who gets the prise for the best strategic trophy of the night? Amy Klobuchar running about fifth going into this caucus. She said, to heck with it, I'm going to give my speech anyway. She went up at the podium. All the networks turned to her, gave her full attention because they had nothing else to report. And then the other candidates tripped over themselves to get on the podium and give their so-called victory speeches. And now what do we have this morning? Well, late last night, in the middle of the night, Bernie Sanders started saying, look, we have our own results from 40 percent of the precincts. And we won. This morning in New Hampshire already. Pete Buttigieg, the mayor, Pete, he did the same thing, saying, according to our people in those caucuses, we won. So still confusion.

MG: What a mess. U.S. President Donald Trump, his campaign put out a tweet saying in strong language, as one would imagine, "this is the sloppiest train wreck in history." What does this do for the Democrats at the start of this race? This is the very first leg of this race.

SUSAN ORMISTON: Yes. This was supposed to be an indication of the resurgence of the Democratic Party. They'd been in the shadows because of the impeachment trial and the drama going in Washington. This was their moment in the sun to kick off the 2020 election. And the president's tweet last night was withering. It often is, but this was withering. He went on to say, and they want to run a health care system and then reminded that the Republican caucuses were also on last night and they were executed flawlessly. And the president came out the winner. So it's very, very devastating for the democratic system and also puts a question on the Iowa caucus itself. Can Iowa continue to be proud of being the first test, the stress test of the Democratic nominee when this voting system didn't work?

MG: What happens now?

SUSAN ORMISTON: Well, most of the top tier of delegates and the candidates got on their planes last night and flew overnight to New Hampshire because that test is a little over a week away. It's a primary, not a caucus. So it won't use this system. But Matt, Nevada, which comes in a few weeks, was supposed to use this app. They'll seriously be rethinking their options there. We do expect to get some results later today, but it does have a cloud of uncertainty over the veracity of those results.

MG: A night of very little sleep with no winner at the end. Susan, thank you.

SUSAN ORMISTON: You're welcome.

MG: CBC senior correspondent, Susan Ormiston, she's in Des Moines, Iowa.

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Blue Dot founder using AI to track the coronavirus

Guests: Dan Werb, Kamran Khan

MG: This is The Current on CBC Radio One. My name is Matt Galloway.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: I'm declaring a public health emergency of international concern over the global outbreak of novel coronavirus. Our greatest concern is deportation for the virus to spread to countries with weaker health systems and which are ill prepared to deal with it.

MG: A public health emergency of international concern. Countries around the world are scrambling to contain the novel Corona virus. There are now more than 20000 confirmed cases in China. More than 400 people have died, including 64 in China just yesterday and one man in Hong Kong. The second death outside of mainland China. For epidemiologists who are in many ways the detectives of the medical world, the question now is whether this disease will become a global pandemic. Dan Werb is an epidemiologist and assistant professor in the Division of Infectious Diseases and Global Public Health at the University of California, San Diego. Dan Werb, good morning.

DAN WERB: Good morning, thanks for having me.

MG: Thanks for joining us. When you're trying to figure out how bad an infectious disease will get, where do you start that investigative work?

DAN WERB: So epidemics are an incredibly complicated natural phenomena, but Abbott epidemiologists break them down into basically three related components. There's an agent, which is the pathogen, the infectious thing that's infecting people. There's the host, which is the organism being infected, which is in this case, humans. And then there's the environment in which everything is sort of playing out. So epidemics always start by a shift in the relationship by at least one or two of those components. So we're really looking at what has shifted between the agent, the host and the environment to understand how an epidemic is is accelerating and whether it's going to keep expanding.

MG: This is what you call the epidemic triangle.

DAN WERB: Exactly. Yes.

MG: And you say it's essentially an equation that you can use to see through, I mean, just about any kind of epidemic, right? I mean that's the lens that you look through.

DAN WERB: Exactly. So, you know, epidemics are varied. There's infectious disease epidemics. There's behavioural epidemics. But in every single case, you can break it down into the epidemic triangle.

MG: So I should just say that the World Health Organization this morning had said that what's happening right now with this novel coronavirus is not a pandemic. What would it take to make it a pandemic?

DAN WERB: Pandemic is essentially a global epidemic. So at this point, yeah, we've seen cases outside of China and a number of countries, but this hasn't reached the level of say the global influenza pandemic, where flu is essentially ubiquitous all across the world.

MG: Let's talk about this triangle then and again and in ways that people can understand. Take a look at the first part of it. The pathogen. What if you take a look at the coronavirus right now, what strikes me about that based on what we know so far?

DAN WERB: So, yes, this is I think obviously the key situation here is that there is a new virus that has emerged. And what we know about it so far and it's actually remarkable how quickly scientists mapped the the genome of this virus. In the case of SARS, it took four or five, six months to map in the case of the coronavirus after the initial outbreak, it was 10 days. So we've got lots of information about it. What we do know is that it's around 73 percent similar to SARS. It's in the same family as SARS. There are also other much more benign viruses in that coronavirus family like viruses that cause some forms of the common cold. The fact that it's related to SARS, similar in some ways, but different means that it's likely less deadly than SARS, which is a good thing.

MG: Second part of the triangle the people who are infected. What do we know thus far above them?

DAN WERB: Right. So. So we're always looking for is there a shift in the the vulnerability of the host? Right. And what we know so far is that people who are getting really sick and dying all appear to be people who are immune compromised already or much older. So that suggests that at least now barring some new information, that this is not going to be an epidemic that's going to affect all, you know, all humans in the same way that we're going to see some vulnerable populations be at greater risk. And that is consistent with what we see with the flu and other viruses.

MG: And again, you're looking for a shift in some part of this triangle. The third part of it is the environment. What changes are you seeing there?

DAN WERB: Yeah. And, you know, this is where I think for me at least, things get really interesting because while we feel like you know, we're in the same world as we were with SARS in 2003, things have actually shifted quite a lot.

MG: Like what?

DAN WERB: Well, China's role in the world. China has been an emerging economic superpower for quite some time. But it's really in the past 10, 15 years that it has that its ascent has really accelerated. So compared to, you know, the years of SARS 2003, there are over three times as many international flights in and out of China now than there were then. The volume of passengers that are travelling within China in and out of China has just skyrocket.

MG: And that matters, I mean, it sounds obvious, but that matters because?

DAN WERB: It matters because it's much more. There are many more pathways by which the virus can spread outside of China and into the world. And we've seen this right. We see the virus popping up in a number of different countries, sort of regardless of of how close or how far away they are from China. And because of that increased international traffic, it's much more difficult to predict where this epidemic is going to move and whether it's going to accelerate into a pandemic.

MG: You'll see, I mean it's all around us. The sense of fear around this, this new coronavirus. But you'll also hear scientists say that we actually don't know whether what's happening is is more deadly than the common cold. People will point out that exponentially more people have died thus far this year because of the seasonal flu. Why is there so much uncertainty still around this?

DAN WERB: Well, what we know so far is that this virus is reproducing faster than the flu, the common flu. And it's also more deadly than the common flu. But I would want to point out that it is much, much less deadly so far than SARS. So SARS had a fatality rate of between 10 and 15 percent. At present, the early fatality rate associated with the novel coronavirus is 3 percent. I suspect that that's going to go down as we realized that there was actually a larger reservoir of cases that weren't early, weren't detected early. So that fatality rate is likely to move down. For comparison, the flu's fatality rate is around .1 percent. So that means that, you know, there there's an exponentially higher risk with the novel coronavirus. But at the same time, I mean, you're right. We see so many tens of thousands of deaths from the common, from the flu every year. And I think the struggle here is just trying to contain this novel coronavirus so that it doesn't become as ubiquitous as as the flu.

MG: What's the one question you still want answered this at this stage of this?

DAN WERB: Well, I'm not a virologist, but, you know, my question is, is why are we seeing these new, why is this family of corona viruses emerging and becoming more deadly in all these different ways? We've seen SARS 2003 then we saw MERS, Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, which had a case fatality rate and still does of 35 percent or so. And now we're seeing this novelcorona virus. So this family of viruses appears to be quite pliable, you know, and easily reproducible and prone to mutation. So I'm curious about why that is.

MG: This work is fascinating. Dan, thank you.

DAN WERB: Thanks very much.

MG: Dan Werb is an epidemiologist, assistant professor in the Division of Infectious Diseases and Global Public Health at the University of California, San Diego. Also the author of City of Omens: A Search for the Missing Women of the Borderlands. How do you try and figure out where something like the coronavirus is going to end up next? Blue Dot is an early warning system of sorts, using artificial intelligence to detect and track outbreaks of infectious disease. Dr. Kamran Khan is the founder and CEO, also professor of medicine and public health at the University of Toronto. Good morning to you.

KAMRAN KHAN: Good morning.

MG: When did Blue Dot first notice that something was happening, particularly in Wuhan, China?

KAMRAN KHAN: So we picked up information in Chinese on December 31st, early morning December 31st, that had recognized that there was an outbreak of pneumonia, of unclear origin. And then it seemed to be associated with a market where live animals were sold. So for us immediately, there was a recognition that there were some parallels to the SARS outbreak.

MG: When you say we picked up information in Chinese, what do you mean? How did you do that?

KAMRAN KHAN: So at Blue Dot we have been building what we call a global early warning system for infectious diseases for the last six and a half years. There's a few different pillars to this system. One component is early detection of infectious disease outbreaks. The other is an anticipation of how they may spread across the world. And finally, the third is how do we communicate this information to organizations that need to know. So with respect to our surveillance system, one of the things we learned during the SARS outbreak is that if we rely on government agencies to report information about outbreaks, that information may not always be coming as quickly as we'd like. So increasingly, we've recognized that the Internet is an important medium for surveillance of infectious diseases, but it's a vast medium, and so we've built an engine. Our data scientists and our clinicians have built an engine that reads over 100,000 different articles online every single day in 65 languages looking for outbreaks, over 100 different diseases. And this is happening every 15 minutes around the clock. And so that engine picked up some early information about a pneumonia that was occurring in Wuhan back on New Year's Eve day.

MG: What do you read, are you reading, I mean is it news articles, is it scholarly publications? What specifically are you looking for?

KAMRAN KHAN: Well, it's a combination of a number of things. It's official information being reported by government health organizations, but it's also forums and blogs where health officials are, whether they're health care providers or people in the public health community are contributing information. But it's also just mass media. A local journalist may be reporting information that is not coming through the government bodies coming through this unofficial channel.

MG: Do you use social media?

KAMRAN KHAN: We don't currently use social media. I think it's particularly noisy from the perspective of a surveillance tool, but it can be useful to understand the sentiment of a population.

MG: I mean, I guess it's important in part because with this story we're hearing that there's so much misinformation, some of that's being disseminated through social media, some through other channels as well. How do you trust what you're getting? How do you figure out what's noise and what is actually something worth paying attention to?

KAMRAN KHAN: Well, there's always a trade-off. So official channels and information coming from official sources usually is pretty rigorous. It's been validated and checked, but it may not be timely. On the other hand, information that comes through unofficial sources may not be verified, may not be reported through the official channels, but it is far more timely. So we have to actually look at all this information in context and recognize that, you know, we have to look through all these articles and this is where human intelligence becomes really important to gauge whether or not this seems like this is a plausible threat or not.

MG: But the A.I., the artificial intelligence, allows you to sort through that information at scale, perhaps humans wouldn't be able to do. And then when you, when the machine spits out some sort of response, human eyes are able to kind of go through that and make sure that it's legit?

KAMRAN KHAN: That's exactly correct. I mean, if we had to do this with people, we need probably a hundred or more people working, you know, 24 hours a day. We do this and we have a veterinarian and three physicians and an epidemiologist that are supervising this. But it's basically finding the needles in the haystack for us.

MG: And in doing that, you were able to predict where the coronavirus would show up after Wuhan.

KAMRAN KHAN: So our system is not just about picking up news of outbreaks. We're really building an integrated system. So we now connect that data to the entire world airline flight information. It's all anonymized, but we have over 4 billion ticket sales that are purchased around the world every year. And we instantaneously now we can do this in about a second. It's used to take us a few weeks to do a few years back, but now in the fraction of a second, we can analyze the movements of people across the planet.

MG: These are all the flights going out of Wuhan on this day in and around this time, what have you.

KAMRAN KHAN: These are the passengers and their final destinations again anonymized,.

MG: It's probably worth stressing so that people don't freak out and feel that they're being watched by Big Brother.

KAMRAN KHAN: We're not observing any individuals, but we're understanding the movements of populations across the entire planet. Flights don't necessarily, there aren't any flights coming into Canada from Wuhan, but we need to understand how people may be connecting and where they may be entering into the country.

MG: You were at St. Michael's Hospital here in Toronto during the SARS crisis. Is that where the idea for this came from, in terms of I remember being at St. Mike's during SARS and I remember how stressful it was and also all of the different parts trying to work together to figure out in real time what was going on. Is that where this idea came from?

KAMRAN KHAN: That's exactly where it came from. You know, I'm from Toronto originally. I was finishing my training in infectious diseases and public health in New York and came back to Toronto. And shortly after I got here, you know, SARS arrived in the city. It caused an outbreak that went on for four months. So this was an incredibly disruptive outbreak. And I think, you know, the recognition was we'd never seen anything like this before, but I knew at that time this wouldn't be the last type of outbreak that we would encounter.

MG: And so what are you able to do now that you weren't able to do during SARS or that we weren't able to understand during SARS?

KAMRAN KHAN: Well, remember during SARS, you know, we didn't even know what it was until it showed up in our hospitals and our cities. What we're able to do now is to be scanning the Internet for early detection of infectious disease threats, whether they're from Mother Nature or possibly even from deliberate acts. We are able to connect that information to the movements of populations around the entire planet. And we're really now actively involved in building systems that going back to the previous speaker that really think about the impact of these diseases in the sense that, well, what if a traveller with this particular disease shows up in city, country, in a certain country is that particular traveller in the right medium between the population and the attributes of the pathogen and the environment to contribute to an outbreak? Or will this be one case of a disease in a traveller? Full stop. That is an incredibly complex endeavour, but it's something that we are very actively engaged in at Blue Dot. We think about the epidemic triangle every single day.

MG: Just a couple of quick questions before I let you go. One is who's using this information?

KAMRAN KHAN: So a number of different organizations, governments around the world. We are currently also working with hospitals and health care systems as, you know, infectious disease physician myself, it's really important that we get this information to the front line.

MG: And that you have it correct as well.

KAMRAN KHAN: And we have it correct.

MG: I mean, misinformation coming out of an organization or, you know, a program like this could be could be devastating.

KAMRAN KHAN: It is very important that the information is accurate and is consumable. But let's keep in mind that a person with a dangerous infectious disease is not going to go to the public health department. They're going to go to the emergency department. So the question for us is and the difference between one case and a traveller and an outbreak that could cripple a city is the astute clinician. It's the clinician that recognizes that this is something that I need to be aware of. This is how I need to manage it so that one case doesn't become 10 cases or a hundred cases.

MG: What's next for you? Just briefly, where would you want to see this go?

KAMRAN KHAN: Well, we are currently working with again, I want to stress anonymized data on about 400 million mobile devices worldwide to really anticipate how this disease might spread, not only from where it is out of Wuhan, but really across the planet over the weeks and months ahead.

MG: This is fascinating. More on this certainly as this story continues. Thank you.

KAMRAN KHAN: Thank you.

MG: Dr. Kamran Khan, professor of medicine and public health at the University of Toronto and founder and CEO of Blue Dot, uses artificial intelligence, as you heard, to detect and track outbreaks of infectious disease. Coming up in about 90 seconds time, we're going to talk about your stuff. Adam Minter's journey into the world of used goods, started with a set of China, his mother's. He was donating it to Goodwill. Where did it go after that? He went digging. And you'll hear his story coming up after the break. I'm Matt Galloway. This is The Current. Stick around.

[Music]

Let kids' car seats into secondhand market to help poorer families, urges author

Guests: Adam Minter

MG: Good morning. I'm Matt Galloway. You're listening to The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: Can I get that for you. Oh, my goodness.

VOICE 2: It's nothing special. What did I bring today? Children's book, some old stuff out of the basement. Yeah, that's one of my old soccer trophies.

VOICE 3: It's a coffee maker. So we bought a new coffee. This one just somebody else can use it.

VOICE 4: Children's stuff that they've grown out of, costumes.

VOICE 5: Some linen, some clothes. They always say that sometimes your decluttering is someone's new treasure, you know, so they can enjoy.

MG: Steady stream of donations at a Goodwill store in Oakville, Ontario. You might think of that drop off point as the final destination for your stuff, once you no longer need it or want it. In many ways though, it's just the beginning of a journey through the secondhand economy or, as Adam Minter puts it, the new global garage sale. In his latest book called Second Hand, the American journalist set out to follow our stuff's, often surprising second life. We reached Adam in Petaling Jaya, Malaysia. Adam, hello.

ADAM MINTER: How are you?

MG: I'm well, thanks. That last woman that we heard at that Goodwill store in Oakville gave a variation on a line that you must have heard over and over and over again, that idea that one person's trash is another person's treasure. Is that a common sentiment? Is that a true sentiment in these times?

ADAM MINTER: It is, and it's a growing sentiment. And I think what's so interesting about it is that it takes us away from this idea that everybody has the same definition of waste. You know, what you may look at as waste in your garage is going to be somebody else's definition of a commodity or inventory. And that goes from your garage all the way around the world. You know, you may not find anybody in Toronto who thinks the stuff in your garage is a treasure, but I'm sure I can find somebody, say in Accra, Ghana, or, you know, in Benin or here in Petaling Jaya, Malaysia, who might think that way. So yes, it's very much a global garage sale and it's something that kind of value as something that people are chasing.

MG: Where did all that stuff come from and why do we have so much more stuff now it seems like, than we had in past?

ADAM MINTER: Right. Well, if you just look at North America, I mean, since the post-war period, North Americans have gone through a historic sort of consumption pattern. And that's because of this extraordinary affluence that faults in the United States and Canada enjoyed in the post-war period. So it wasn't just rising incomes and the ability to buy more stuff, but it was also the ability to fill bigger and bigger houses, both in Canada and the United States. You know, houses have more than doubled in size on average over the last 60 years. And so as people, you know, build bigger houses, they have more room for their stuff and they're less inclined to get rid of that stuff. And so you reach a point where there's this sort of surplus of stuff that, as you know, if we had smaller quarters, if, you know, in North America, we had homes the size they have in Japan, a lot of that stuff would have been gotten rid of a long time ago, recycled or landfill or incinerated. But because of this extraordinary wealth of space that we have, we've really accumulated an enormous amount of stuff. And because both populations in the United States and in Canada are aging, a lot of that stuff is now suddenly being set free as people downsize and declutter.

MG: And I want to talk about setting it free, but that can be a gradual process. It's hard to keep all your stuff. And so you end up, if it's not in your house or your apartment, you end up, you know, outsourcing it and putting it somewhere else in a space that you pay for. Tell me about the self-storage industry and how much money that self-storage industry makes.

ADAM MINTER: Right well, two years ago, the self-storage industry actually made more money, generated more revenues than Hollywood did on films. It has enough space in the United States alone to cover all of Palm Springs, California, golf courses included. And the amazing thing about the self-storage industry and there's about 50,000 plus self-storage parks, if you will, in North America, the amazing thing about it is, depending on where they are, the rent in those self-storage spaces, whether by the square foot or square meter, can be more expensive than the rent paid for residential units, you know, in the same city. So in a sense, we're spending more time housing our stuff than we are housing ourselves.

MG: Is your sense that when people put something into the self-storage space, they ever have any intention of getting it back or does it just go into some sort of black hole and disappear?

ADAM MINTER: Right. Well, I think, you know, I think everybody says the same thing. I'm just gonna have this in here for six months, you know and of course, you know, it ends up being six years. And then you forget you have it and you've got it, you know, on the auto renew on your credit card. And it just keeps going. So it's an incredibly lucrative industry. I mean, real estate investors love buying self-storage units because it's the steadiest revenue you can get in the entire real estate world.

MG: When I did clutter and I haul out of my basement the bags of old clothes or the kids toys or the old coffeemaker that I don't want anymore, and I take it to Goodwill, where does it go after that?

ADAM MINTER: On average and again, this is an average on average, about one third of the stuff that goes out onto the shelves at your average Goodwill or thrift store in North America actually sells.

MG: Wow.

ADAM MINTER: Yeah. The rest of it, sells in the retail outlet. The stuff that doesn't sell is cycled, isn't thrown away. It's cycled back into the warehouse. And there's it depends on the Goodwill. I mean, there are different Goodwill federations in North America. I believe it's about 140 of them and they all do things their own way. But many of them have what are called outlets. And at the outlets the stuff is discounted to sell at a dollar a pound and they will move quite a bit of stuff that way. The stuff that doesn't move at a dollar a pound, if it's textiles, clothing, oftentimes bedsheets, that stuff will then go really in a couple of directions. One is it may go to be made into rags if it's a low quality garment or textile that is cut up and literally made into rags to wipe things down, countertops, cars at car washes. And then the other, the other textiles will, you know, more often than not, be exported outside of North America into markets like Africa or Southeast Asia, where they are sold for people who are interested in second hand clothes.

MG: There's a fascinating scene in the book. You hang out at a Goodwill near the Mexican border. What goes on there when it comes to that cross-border economy and the second hand economy, particularly in Mexico?

ADAM MINTER: Yeah, it was one of the reasons I wanted to write this book is I wanted to show people just how how important global markets are to moving your second hand stuff. And so I spent time in Tucson with a guy who in the book I call Shoe Guy. That's what he asked me to call him. He didn't want his real name identified. And what he does is he drives around Goodwills every day, buying stuff out of the Goodwills, which he then conveys, you know, 90 minutes south to Nogales, Mexico. And he sells that stuff to wholesalers who then convey it further into Mexico into used good outlets all over Mexico. By some accountings there, 90 percent of the stuff that's being sold at Goodwill in Tucson is flowing south of the border. So you can imagine if that border was closed off, the people of Tucson would really have a problem with what to do with all their excess stuff.

MG: And what kind of stuff heads south of the border?

ADAM MINTER: Everything. Clothing, furniture, appliances, you know, bowling balls. You know, I keep pulling balls, but I was astounded that there is a second hand trade in bowling balls. You know, Mexicans just like, you know, folks in Tucson want to have their place in this material consumption based economy we have in North America and used goods are the way they access it because it's a low cost means of doing so.

MG: One of the most interesting parts of this book is about something that's happening literally down the road from where I'm sitting right now that I had no idea about. And that is that in Mississauga, Ontario, just outside of Toronto, is apparently a global hub in the world of the second hand textile trade in particular. What happens in Mississauga?

ADAM MINTER: Yeah, it's fascinating. So this came as a complete surprise to me. As I reported this book, I kept hearing people say they're shipping their clothes, meaning charities, telling me they're shipping their clothes to Mississauga and graders in Mississauga. And so I wondered, why on earth are they shipping, you know, to Mississauga? You know, in the 1970s, 1980s in particular, a lot of folks from South Asia and a lot of folks from Africa immigrated into the area, as we know, the Toronto area and Canada in general is a very immigrant friendly city. Well, South Asians, you know, folks from Pakistan and India have been involved in the used clothing trade around the world for a 100 years. And they actually have set up businesses in Africa, India and Pakistan to process and sort these clothes. And folks in Africa, Africans themselves are the world's largest consumers of second hand clothes. And so when you had these two communities moving into Mississauga and the Greater Toronto area, you know, in the 70s and 80s, you sort of had a match made in heaven. And nobody knows who started the trade, who was the first South Asian trader to sell a load of second hand clothes to Africans, but it happened at some point there. And there was a couple of advantages to Mississauga. One, there's a good rail link there. So you can ship stuff from all over North America into Mississauga. Taxes were low. There's a lot of low cost immigrant labour. And the biggest advantages, really short summers. So if you think about where second hand clothes go around the world, they mostly go the biggest demand is from warm weather. Places in Canada has very short summers. Toronto has very short summers. So this stuff is very lightly worn and so because of that, it's in good condition and there's huge demand for it around the world. And that gives the clothing graders and there's about 20 of these businesses in Mississauga, it gives them a huge advantage buying clothes around North America, which they then bring to Mississauga, sort and send all over the world.

MG: What are those clothing graders do? You go into, you meet some of the people who are who are involved in this. What do the graders do?

ADAM MINTER: Well, these grading warehouses can be huge. You can have 300 employees in some of these and they will process 200,000 pounds of clothing a day.

MG: What?

ADAM MINTER: And the clothes. 200,000 pounds of clothes a day, the very biggest ones. It's extraordinary and what this means is they will bring in trailer loads, container loads of clothes from around North America. And you will have trained employees who will open up these trailers. and the clothes usually arrive in bales, big bales, 200-300 pound bales of hay bales. They take them apart and literally start sorting the clothes by different grades. You know, what kind of condition is it in? Is it soiled? You know, is this a medical, like a medical smock? You know, can this be, you know, and they and they'll start sorting them and you'll have a pile of medical smocks, you know, surgical gowns in one area. You'll have, you know, a pile of shoes and another area will have baby clothes in another area. And it's an extremely sophisticated process. And as the stuff gets sorted, it becomes a commodity. It becomes something that you can sell anywhere in the world so long as you have the markets to sell it into and these clothing graders do. And so once they have enough of a load for whatever customer it is, a customer in Benin, a customer in India, a customer wherever, they then ship it out. And that's how they make their money with these very sophisticated sorting operations, of which they're about 20, all of which are based in Mississauga. And they handle, you know, millions of pounds of clothes per year.

MG: And they're making a lot of money. I mean, there's a lot of this is a huge business.

ADAM MINTER: This is a huge business. I mean, all you have to, you know, know is that, you know, these biggest companies, the ones that can turn over 200,000 pounds of clothing in a day, they can turn over in the range of 20 million dollars in a month. So this is a really big business, employs thousands of people. But, you know, if you drive through Mississauga, if you don't know it's there, you don't know it's there.

MG: One of the things you learn in reading about this is that the folks who are sorting through those bales of clothing can see a change in the quality of the clothes that they're sorting through. And the change isn't for good. What's happening with the clothes that we're donating?

ADAM MINTER: Yeah, well, it's just as you said, you know, if you spend time in a Goodwill sorting room anywhere in North America, the sorters there will tell you that over the last two to three years in particular, they've seen the quality of the fabrics, the quality of the stitching declined precipitously. And their measuring stick really is brands. You know, at a Goodwill, one of the ways they sort clothes is just to say, you know, this is a brand that we price at 2.99. And what they kept telling me in the sorting rooms at Goodwill is a 2.99, you know, version of Brand X is no longer worth 2.99, it's worth a 1.99. And that's a real problem for someone like Goodwill because if a garment is less durable, it's something that is less likely to sell on the sales floor. And then that means that they're going to incur costs of selling it to a rag maker or shipping it off to Mississauga or whatever it may be. And this also repeats in Mississauga in these giant grading warehouses. Again, you know, folks in Africa, folks and Southeast Asia, folks in South Asia don't want clothes that, you know, wear out after two or three washes any more than than most North American consumers do. And so that lowers the price of the clothes. It makes it less possible to recycle them. And that raises the possibility that these clothes are going to end up in landfills and incinerators because there's simply no market for them. And, you know, this is a long term process. I mean, 200 years ago, you know, families around the world. You know, pre-industrial revolution thought of clothes as wealth. There was a lot of money involved in a lot of labour involved in making a shirt. You know, it wasn't something that you let go of easily, but, you know, now we have disposable clothing. And when it ends up at the Goodwills, when it ends up at the clothing graders, wherever they may be, you know, it's essentially a disposable product and it's becoming increasingly difficult for these recycling operations, these reuse operations to recycle and reuse.

MG: And is that the same thing with with furniture? I mean, I remember, you know, as the young starving student and we'd go to Goodwill and buy a couch or buy a bookshelf and it weighed a thousand pounds and you'd haul at home on the bus or the subway or something. And, you know, it had been around for a long time because it was heavy and durable. Is that the same now that we've seen a decline in the quality of those hard goods?

ADAM MINTER: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the example that I often use is IKEA. You know, there is some good quality stuff made at IKEA, but I think we also, you know, anybody who's ever bought the, you know, the famous Billy bookshelf, which I think is the most manufactured and purchased piece of furniture in the history of the world, knows that's not a durable piece of furniture. You can build it once. It's flat packed. You put it together in your dorm room, say, but moving that thing down a stairwell, much less putting it in the back of a moving truck is essentially, you know, murdering that Billy bookshelf. It will fall apart. It will crack and it will not last to the next location, and that's to some extent what's happened with furniture in general over the last 50 years is it's become cheaper, it's become harder to move and as it becomes disposable, it's something that's difficult to sell at a Goodwill. And if, you know, you would think it would actually make it more popular to buy the heavier oak furniture that, you know, we all used to break our backs on moving stuff in and out of dorm rooms. But that stuff is kind of out of fashion. People want those clean lines of an IKEA design. You know, that really thin, flat packed furniture. It looks great, but it doesn't hold up. And because of that, we're seeing more and more furniture flowing into the landfills than it was ever the case in the history of consumption.

MG: The other backbreaking thing we used to haul around were televisions. You have those giant TV's that weighed a ton. They're huge, boxy things now, of course, replaced by flat screens. But the big boxy TV's, they didn't end up in the landfill. A lot of them went to Africa.

ADAM MINTER: Yeah. A lot of them went to Africa. And it's amazing. I spent time for this book, quite a bit of time in Ghana and especially in northern Ghana. And if you go into any, you know, home in to Tamale, which is a town in northern Ghana, I spent quite a bit of time and population of 300,000. You're still going to see a lot of these they're tube televisions. They're called CRT televisions. They were big and heavy. They were durable and they will last forever. I recount in the book visiting with a television repairman and Tamale, who at the time I visited him, was working on a TV that was about 35 years old. It had gone through three, four owners. Had that television not been exported to Ghana, you know, it probably wouldn't have lasted 35 years. And that's the really interesting thing about it, is, you know, one of the best ways we have to sort of extend the lives of these goods that we don't want in, you know, more affluent societies is to export them to people who are guaranteed to use them longer. And so that's one of the things you still see in Ghana, is you will still see these heavy, boxy TV still in use, especially in the less affluent parts of Ghana, which is saying something. They will continue to repair them for years to come.

MG: How does planned obsolescence impact to the second hand economy, whether it be technology and the fact that the phone that I have in front of me, while it was up to date and brand new a couple of years ago, is on the verge of being out of date and won't work with the software that's coming out in the years ahead. How does that change the second hand economy?

ADAM MINTER: Sure. Well, it means, you know, anytime you have a product that's not as, you know, not durable, that's only designed to last for a short period of time. That's a strike against the second hand economy. I mean, if we want second hand economies, we have to have stuff that's going to last for a long time, not just two or three years. And so as we see more planned obsolescence, the idea that these, you know, especially electronic objects are designed, you know, if not to fail after a short period of time to be very difficult to repair and upgrade after a short period of time. It generates more waste in it. It's less stuff for Goodwill to sell or any other thrift store. So it's a real, it's a real strike against them. And it's not just electronics. I mean, we see it in other consumer goods as well. One of the products that I talk about in the book that I found very interesting is child safety seats, car seats. You know, as if as any parent knows, I'm a parent, you know, a lot of these have expiration dates on the bottom of it. You know, expires at six years. And, you know, I thought that was always very curious. I went looking for the studies to show me why a car seat expires after six years. And the best I've been able to find and many other researchers have been able to find is that there are no such studies. These are fairly randomly put onto the car seats. Now, whether they're put on there to keep the car seat manufacturers from some kind of liability or there's, you know, a conspiracy basically to to get these things to the recycler so that people will buy more second hand car seats, I don't know. But overall, it's bad for the second hand economy if people can't reuse these devices, if they're sort of being almost taunted into disposing of them.

MG: And I mean, we're told, car seats in particular, you have to cut the straps so that people can't use them again. In addition to that second hand economy, you're also perhaps depriving people who might not be able to afford a new car seat from getting a second hand one.

MG: Well, exactly. So I'm talking to you from Malaysia, which just this year passed a law requiring families to have car seats. Now, you know, from a Canadian, you know, from a U.S. European standpoint, that that must sound really archaic. But they have large families here and families struggle to own a car. And so if you start asking a family here to spend, you know, you know, 50 dollars, 100 dollars on car seats, they're not going to be able to do it. And they haven't been able to do it. And and for me, what what's so frustrating is I know that there are a lot of good used car seats in North America in particular that are not damaged, that may or may not be expired, whatever expired means in terms of a car seat. And the manufacturers refused to tell me. But they're being destroyed when they. Be used here and given, you know, and giving you give access to families that can't afford safety equipment, low cost access to that equipment, even, you know, the fact of the matter is a used car seat is better than no car seat. And right now we're taking those car seats out of circulation.

MG: There is more attention being paid to the environmental cost of fast fashion, as you're talking about, and the fact that clothes that might in years past have lasted longer now last, you know, for a few washes and then they end up in the landfill. How does that dovetail, that environmental concern with the second hand market?

ADAM MINTER: Well, it's igood for it. I mean, in so far as consumers are interested in moving away from disposable, you know, short term products and buying products that are more durable, that aren't fast fashion stuff, that will last for multiple washes, stuff that can be handed down, sold at garage sales. It's good for the environment and it's good for these businesses and charities that depend upon secondhand. I mean, one thing we know about products of any kind, you know you know, it could be an IKEA bookshelf, it could be a book, it could be a laptop is, you know, in terms of the environmental impact, the carbon emissions, the water pollution, most of the environmental impact of any product happens during the manufacturing phase. You know, the use phase is, you know, usually number two. And then actually the lowest environmental impact tends to come during the waste phase when something is recycled or disposed of. You know, via incineration or landfill, you know, we spent so much of our time focussed on what happens when stuff is thrown away. But we should really be focussing on the manufacturing. If you're worried about that, the best thing you can do is just make sure your stuff lasts a really long time and you're not encouraging people to manufacture more.

MG: What about the stuff that we inherit? You start this book and talking about your mom and what happened after your mom died and how you and your sister had to go and sort through your mom's belongings. This is the story I think that a lot of us are facing or are going to be facing as our parents age and maybe they downsized out of the place that they're in or maybe eventually when they die and we inherit that stuff, what should our attitude be around that kind of stuff?

ADAM MINTER: Yeah, I mean, that was kind of the journey that I went on with this book. I mean, my sister and I were left with the responsibility of figuring out what to do with my mom's stuff. And, you know, some of it was really easy to figure out what to do with. But you reach a point in one of these clean outs where you say and with us, it was one of the moments I was looking at my mom's China and saying, you know, this meant a great deal to her. You know, she had a lot of emotions invested in it, for you and me, referring to my sister, it didn't mean that much to us. And so, you know, we had to ask ourselves, do we hold on to something because it meant something to mom, you know? Are we doing her some kind of tribute by leaving it in the closet for an extended period of time? And we ultimately said no. I mean, you know, mom was more than just the accumulation of her stuff, but that's a big leap to make in sort of contemporary consumer societies. And in North America, Europe, Japan, you know, China, we tend to build our identities via stuff in many ways. And this accumulation of things that we have, whether it's our libraries or our music collections, our whatever the hobby is, it's us. And, you know, being able to let go of sort of that outlook is really hard. And what I found is it's even harder when you're sort of letting go of somebody else's material identity. But you know, at some point, you know, if we're going to sort of get out of this in saying, you know, consumption cycle that we're in, not just in North America, but around the world, you know, we're going to have to stop, you know, building these identities around that stuff. And so that was the journey I went on and, you know, for me to let go to a very large extent, it was a matter of me having to see just how much access there is out there in places like India and places like Ghana. Not to mention the access in North American, going to home cleanouts in North America. It was at that point that I said, you know, I think I can let go. My mom meant more to me than just the accumulation of stuff and her China.

MG: Well said. It's a really interesting book and it's so real in terms of how people will relate to the things around them and how they think perhaps those things to find them. Adam, thank you so much.

ADAM MINTER: Thank you.

MG: Adam Minter's new book is called Second Hand :Travels in the New Global Garage Sale. About those car seats. Transport Canada's website advises us not to use child car seats after the expiry date, not to give them away, not to sell them second hand. So we asked Transport Canada if that advice is based on any independent research and they replied that the recommendation is based on and this is a quotation, "the manufacturer's own risk assessment." They add that, "expiry dates are not required by regulation and are therefore not based on requirements set out by Transport Canada." That is The Current for today. A reminder, next Monday, I will be in Vancouver. The Current is coming to you Vancouver, on Monday, the 10th of February, hosting an event in the heart of Chinatown, talking about the future of that neighbourhood, a neighbourhood that's facing pressure from developments, soaring rents, gentrification. What is the future? This is a story that's playing out across the country. What is the story of Chinatown and the future of Chinatown, particularly in Vancouver? If you're there, we'd love to see you. We'll be taping the show. You can come and say hi after. It's all happening at the Floata Restaurant. Tickets are free, but you need to register in advance. And to reserve your seata and for more information, head to the website cbc.ca/thecurrent and Vancouver, we will see you next Monday, the 10th of February. We were just talking about stuff, the mountains and mountains of stuff that has accumulated, then purged and where it ends up around the world. We'll end this morning with this. A bit of Delbert McClinton, Too Much Stuff. I'm Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening to The Current. We'll talk to you tomorrow.

[Song: "Too Much Stuff" by Delbert McClinton]

The Current Transcript for February 4, 2020

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

Differing views on the Ontario teachers strike

App failure causes chaos in Iowa caucus

Blue Dot founder using AI to track the coronavirus

Let kids' car seats into secondhand market to help poorer families, urges author

The Current Transcript for February 4, 2020

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

Differing views on the Ontario teachers strike​​​​​​​

App failure causes chaos in Iowa caucus

Blue Dot founder using AI to track the coronavirus

Let kids' car seats into secondhand market to help poorer families, urges author

Differing views on the Ontario teachers strike

Feb. 4, 2020 episode transcript

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