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The Current Transcript for January 27^th, 2016

Host: Anna Maria Tremonti

IN THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

[Music: theme]

SOUNDCLIP

I had 10 students in my class. One of them died that year. Another girl was murdered a few years later and I know that their lives may have been better had they had proper services.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: She was a teacher on a First Nations reserve observing the reality that the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal has just underscored with a ruling that says generations of children on reserves have faced ongoing discrimination, receiving far less of everything than those off reserve from health care to education to child welfare. In a moment we'll hear from three people who work with an advocate for Aboriginal children on the front line realities they see, and what they hope will now change. Then, Twitter may only be 140 characters, but offensive and threatening tweets stretch into megabytes.

SOUNDCLIP

I have this folder on my computer desktop called, Death threats. It's sad to say that this can be par for the course when you're a woman with an opinion on the internet.

AMT: Stephanie Guthrie is one of two Toronto women whose complaints about incessant Twitter traffic from Gregory Alan Elliott it led to a criminal trial. His acquittal last week was interpreted as encouragement by the trolls. And now, vocal women's rights activists are facing a fresh barrage of offensive and disturbing tweets. Permission to malign online? We look at the fallout from the court case in an hour. And in half an hour, the pig eaters dilemma. Rub their little bellies give them names and thenâ€¦

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: I feel so good buying humane meat knowing none of the animals suffer.

VOICE 2: That's not actually true.

VOICE 1: You mean something bad happened to them?

VOICE 2: Well, they're all pretty much dead.

AMT: We introduce you to a BC pig farmer for whom the ethical raising of livestock is not a cute joke, but a matter of pride. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

Discrimination against children on reserves systemic, tribunal rules

Guests: Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, Cora Morgan, Theresa Stevens

SOUNDCLIP

This is a complete victory for children. It directs away any sensibility that First Nations children are being treated fairly by the government of Canada today.

AMT: Well, a victory for kids who could really use one. That was Cindy Blackstock, Executive Director of the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society, speaking yesterday in Ottawa after the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal ruled it unequivocal agrees with her complaint. The government of Canada discriminates against children on reserves. They don't receive the same level of welfare services as off reserve children do, even though the need is greater. Here is Cindy Blackstock once more.

SOUNDCLIP

One of the documents that really just struck to my heart was a spreadsheet, an Excel spreadsheet, and it counts the number of nights that First Nations children have spent away from their families between 1989 and 2012. Think about it, thatâ€™s the way your kids think about these things, it's not kind of percentages, itâ€™s how many sleeps until I see my mom. And it's over 66 million nights. 187,000 years of childhood.

AMT: Well, those last years of childhood were flagged as a priority in the Truth and Reconciliation Commissionâ€™s final report last year. But this fight dates back much further than that. Cindy Blackstone and the Assembly of First Nations launched their complaint nearly a decade ago, in 2007. But the Conservative government made multiple attempts to have it thrown out. Hearings eventually started in 2013. The country's new Indigenous and Northern Affairs Minister, Carolyn Bennett, promised a new approach yesterday.

SOUNDCLIP

Today, we're here to say we're going to act on this issue and we will. We will, as we have said in the platform and in our mandate letters, reform the system of child welfare and fund it equitably with the other children in Canada.

AMT: Well, I'm joined today by three people who have been actively involved in working with Aboriginal children across the country. Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond is BC's First Representative for Children and Youth, she joins us from Victoria. Cora Morgan is the family advocate for First Nations families dealing with Child and Family Services. She works for the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs. She joins us from Winnipeg. And Theresa Stevens is the Executive Director of the Anishinaabe Abinoojii Family Services, she joins us from Kenora, Ontario. Hello, everyone, welcome.

MARY ELLEN TURPEL-LAFOND: Good morning.

THERESA STEVENS: Morning

CORA MORGAN: Good morning.

AMT: I'd like to first of all, get each of you to tell me your reaction as you heard the findings of the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal yesterday. Theresa Stevens, let's begin with you.

THERESA STEVENS: Well we were overjoyed to say the least. This has been a long battle and we finally have some resolution that looks positive towards the future.

AMT: Cora Morgan.

CORY MORGAN: Oh I was really excited, I couldnâ€™t sleep at night. I was so excited. I didnâ€™t feel like it could come back any other way, but I was really pleased that it came back favourable.

AMT: Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond.

MARY ELLEN TURPEL-LAFOND: See I think I had the same reaction, which is, I was very excited. I mean I was delighted that it was finally at the point of decision. Part of me though, I have to say, was also just a little bit frustrated that it took so long to get here, and to sort of state what was obvious and apparent to all of us for a long period of time. At the same time, we finally got there. And shout out to Cindy Blackstock because without her unwavering commitment to this and her dedication to keeping this going for 10 years, we would actually probably not have got this far. One person really did pull this together for us.

AMT: Now the numbers say a lot, Aboriginal children have received anywhere between 22 and 38 percent fewer services than other Canadian children. Theresa, how do those numbers translate in terms of the day to day reality where you are?

THERESA STEVENS: Well, there are so many services that are nonexistent on reserve in our territory. We don't have any children's mental health on reserve. We don't have, you know, some of the basic services like developmental services, speech language, physiotherapy, occupational therapy. Any of their services that are available in our local community we don't have on reserve and our biggest need is a need for residential resources in the North. We spend two to three million a year sending our children away because we don't have the resources to meet their needs locally and the ministry will not allow us to expend capital expenditures to build a treatment center or developmental dollars to begin a program and thatâ€™s never made sense to us even from a financial perspective.

AMT: And when you talk about different services that aren't available, do you even have anyone diagnosing what's needed?

THERESA STEVENS: We've gone through a number of needs assessments over the years. When I looked at my commentary for press release yesterday, I look back at a speech I wrote 2007 and the message has been the same and consistent about what we don't have and what we need. But we're going through a number, a mapping exercise, to see what services are available, what the gaps are and what the real need is.

AMT: Cora, what's it meant to the children you serve? We hear that phrase, fewer resources, what's that really mean?

CORY MORGAN: I think at the community level we're working with a lot of families right now whoâ€™s children have basic medical needs and because the resources donâ€™t exist or Child Family Services don't believe that parents can adequately take care of children and it leads to apprehension. Weâ€™ve worked with families with celiac disease, and psoriasis, and things as simple as that. The resources don't exist and it winds up in children being removed from their homes. Some of those resources, in Manitoba particularly, there's a lack of resources invested in prevention. Our system is designed to be reactive which means it just apprehends children, places them in care, and has expectations that medical foster homes and other caregivers raise the children. To make the investment within the community and be able to be proactive in and address some of those needs. I think that this has been a significant year. Our office has only been open for seven months and in that time weâ€™ve had the TRC Report, calls to action, an apology to Sixties Scoop survivors, I think it's helpful that there's so much light shed on the issues and the challenges that are faced by our children.

AMT: Cora, I remember when you and I first spoke, when you first took the job, basically you were trying to be the go between with families who were losing their children. But you're suggesting, or you're saying, that some of them lose their kids because of a treatment that, in anywhere else in Canada, it might be a change in diet, it might be a prescription, it might be something topical, and they lose their kids for something like that?

CORY MORGAN: Yes. It's not because of child protection matters, it's because the resources don't exist. One family that I worked with recently, the mother couldn't stabilize the blood sugar levels of her son. He was sent into a foster home and a low and behold, that family couldn't get his sugar levels. However he spent four months out of the home, and cried for his mom every day and couldn't understand why he couldnâ€™t be with his brothers and sisters. And just believing in our families, and empowering them, and allowing them to be involved in in the care of their children and given the resources to do it. I think is what is most important.

AMT: Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, I'm sure you have stories that parallel this and it has been almost a decade since this question was first raised, what's happened to Aboriginal children in that time? Facing these kinds of things?

MARY ELLEN TURPEL-LAFOND: Well I think it's just been too difficult. As your other guests note, I think the same issues apply in British Columbia. In my job as a representative for children and youth, we provide advocacy, we have a very strong focus on working closely with First Nations children and families. But for First Nations leaders and organizations, it's just been too difficult to get those services for kids, they don't exist. As your other guests say, the kids slip through the cracks and they end up coming into care more often, they end up staying in care. And when you work with the kids, Iâ€™m going to talk about the kids more, they drift through foster care. Sometimes they'll have 16, 17 placements and so much damage happens in the sense of not being connected to their family, their siblings, their culture, their identity really takes a terrible toll on them. And they begin to feel worthless and they end up, you know, often homeless. Iâ€™ve got some kids in sort of a tent city thatâ€™s operating right now in British Columbia. They end up on the street, they end up in hotels. The toll over the last decade on those kids is I've seen them go through group homes. I mean some of the kids with the most complex and important needs end up getting the least. And part of it is because they're Aboriginal kids and the system has become so indifferent and so normed to not providing services and sort of decided that they're going to blame and shame them and their families into being unworthy. This human rights decision allows us again to reframe this issue to say, these kids have the right to be connected to their families and kinship placement, and supporting their language or their culture, their identity, in a more positive way to get them out of child welfare as quickly as possible but also to work with their families in a very different way. Stop judging, stop shaming people, and actually start providing the kind of trauma informed services that they need. And when you do that, I know we're going to have huge success. It's been really frustrating to have to deal with the attitudes, opinions, and of course deal with the damage that the kids have experienced. These kids have really, really been hurt by this process.

AMT: You said tent city. Theyâ€™re in a tent city? What's going on there?

MARY ELLEN TURPEL-LAFOND: Oh I mean we have a tent city in Victoria, British Columbia, now homeless tent city. We have about 10 kids in care that, you know, gravitated there, and one in particular tells me she feels more at home in a homeless tent city than she did in child welfare. And again, there's a lot of safety issues, there's vulnerability, that's not where a child should be. But just the fact that we have young people, Aboriginal young people who feel more comfortable in an environment that nobody would really accept. I recently did a report with our Minister for Children and Families on the use of hotels. More than half of the kids that are in hotels, and hotels are used fairly rarely in British Columbia but they are used, more than 131 placements in a year, more than half are Aboriginal children that are in those hotels, and most of them are Aboriginal females. When you look again at these trends and patterns these aren't just numbers, they're not just statistics. For those of us who work with these kids, we lose these kids, they drift away; the attachment to their culture, their language, their family, the people that care about them. This system just severs that and the lack of services controlled and supported by Aboriginal families and Aboriginal communities is really felt on a daily basis in their life. So this decision isn't just a piece of paper to a lot of us, it's a turning point and we really want this turning point to get to a better place.

AMT: And so how does it get to a better place? Cora Morgan, Mary Ellen is just talking about the use of hotels, there have been so many stories in Manitoba about the kids who end up in hotels. How do you move it forward? You've got this decision.

CORY MORGAN: Well I think part of what Mary Ellen is speaking to is that children in the system lose value for life. And that their quality of life is so low that eventually what happens is they don't really have any will or they don't really care what happens to them and it's really unfortunate. I think, you know, we look back, we have the acknowledgement of residential schools, and we have the acknowledgement of the Sixties Scoop survivors. Between all of the decades of children being stolen in different forms, there's never been elements of healing and acknowledge meant of what people have gone through. And when we talk about this announcement, it offers hope to so many families and children that change is going to come. I think it's important now that when we look at that change, that of course, our First Nation communities are involved in designing what needs to happen. For centuries, our people are always dictated what is going to fix them and what is wrong with them, and what needs to happen. I think now, we need to design culturally appropriate programming. We have to invest in families and parents so that you can prevent the apprehension to begin with. And allow for those healthy families and providing those resources. I think Mary Ellen was talking earlier about bringing in the occupational therapists, bringing in mental health specialists into the community levels. Most importantly on and all of that is love, and allowing people to be involved in designing the systems that are going to work for our families. I struggle with the word systems because in the work that we're working to do, weâ€™re trying not to empower the existing system, weâ€™re trying to do things that are outside and that are representative of us. I think that's the direction that Canada has to move towards in allowing our people to take care of our own children and investing in that.

AMT: Theresa I want to ask you as well, we're talking about kids, what effect does this have on the parents?

THERESA STEVENS: Well I think that historically whatâ€™s resulted in our territory is a loss of hope and despair. A lot of our current street people are victims of the former child welfare system that we've inherited. I was gratified to see that the Tribunal heard my testimony when I talked about the pain and suffering that these parents have gone through and the impact that it's had on them and on their communities. And in fact it's the current Aboriginal child welfare system that's inherited that legacy and that's had to try to overcome and put new systems in place as mentioned. In Treaty 3, we practice customary care for 30 years.

AMT: Okay. Treaty 3 is your area, what's customary care? I don't understand.

THERESA STEVENS: Customary care is a form of care where the band has a say in how those children are going to be placed, and that they're placed with family, and extended family, and community members in a placement that acknowledges their culture, and their language, and supports that identity development.

AMT: Is that something that should be or could be used elsewhere, that could be looked at then to move forward?

THERESA STEVENS: I understand that there are other jurisdictions, and in fact Treaty 3 has been asked to go assist in another other province to help them implement the model of customary care.

AMT: And you think that obviously you need more though.

THERESA STEVENS: Oh definitely, customary care is you know one of one of the many models or practices that we want to replace the current system of going to court and parents and communities losing children to adoption.

AMT: You mentioned mental health as well, at the beginning Theresa, what would you like to see in terms of mental health care, change?

THERESA STEVENS: As somebody mentioned, the whole system needs to change. Currently, we have mainstream service providers that have that mandate and resources, it needs to be given over to First Nations organizations and control because we have the ability to provide culturally safe and appropriate services and to provide them on reserve. Currently, the current service providers are not meeting our needs. Our kids sit on waiting lists and the services are minimal, are nonexistent, so that's something that we've been advocating for at least for the past five, six years, to be able to have that mandate. And I think it's about jurisdiction and control.

AMT: We're almost out of time, but Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, we're talking about generations of children. There's an obviously a new generation of children coming up, what do you hope you'll see a difference in in the generation of kids who are coming up now? In the little kids?

MARY ELLEN TURPEL-LAFOND: Well I think I have high hopes and we need to take this reconciliation approach. And those of us who are grownups and have witnessed this and been through this system, we're parents and caregivers and we are members of communities that want to build up and support healthy children. We need to stand together and we need to come from a very positive place, a very strengths based place, not just having to defend the values that indigenous families have, but we need to create the support and the space so that kinship placement, strength around culture, and language, and resilience can be brought into this system. The Minister for Aboriginal or Indigenous Affairs, the Minister of Justice were very powerful in their words accepting the Tribunal decision. The Minister of Justice herself, a prominent Aboriginal leaderâ€¦

AMT: And we have to leave it there I'm going to cut you off because the computers going to cut me off. We have to leave it there. Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, BCâ€™s Representative for Children and Youth, Cora Morgan, family advocate for First Nations families in Winnipeg, and Theresa Stevens, Executive Director of the Anishinaabe Abinoojii Family Services in Kenora, Ontario. This is The Current.

Is 'ethical meat' helping pigs or salving consciences?

[Music: Theme]

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: When it comes to meat, it wasn't so long ago that the biggest moral dilemma it posed was whether to put it on your fork. Eating meat or choosing not to was more or less black and white but for the meat eaters among us it's been getting increasingly gray. Today, that meat on the fork poses some big questions, questions about what kind of life the animal led, how it was treated before reaching your plate. They are questions that omnivores can no longer ignore and they are forcing some producers to draw a line in the sand. The CBCâ€™s Elaine Chau has been biting into these questions for her documentary, The Pig Eaterâ€™s Dilemma beginning in Burnaby, B.C. with farmer Julia Smith. And just a word of warning, what follows contains material some listeners may find disturbing.

[Pigs oinking]

ELAINE CHAU: Julia carries bundles of hay into the barn for her pigs to play in. About 15 of them sidle right up, crowding around her. She gets on her knees and meets them face to snout. Two of them plopped down, one pink the other brown with black spots, offering up their bellies for a rub.

JULIA SMITH: Iâ€™m the best pig rubber in Burnaby.

ELAINE CHAU: As I watch them, I'm pretty sure the one below my feet is actually smiling.

JULIA SMITH: I board probably about 800 pounds and he will still climb up on my lap if I let him. Right?

ELAINE CHAU: Julie bought her first pig a few years ago to help with the weeds on her vegetable farm.

JULIA SMITH: We like the snuggles [pig snorts].

ELAINE CHAU: But there came a time when she had an epiphany of sorts, the moment she decided she would like to be a pig farmer.

JULIA SMITH: Maybe they day I taught Bacon and Chop to sit.

ELAINE CHAU: This is not what I expected.

[Pigs oinking]

JULIA SMITH: They're getting really big and belligerent and I mean, even two pigs can be hard to manage. You know, youâ€™re trying to feed them and so, I thought it would be helpful to be able to give them some commands so that I could move around and you know, get the food into the trough without being trampled. And it literally took about 20 seconds. Just the same way I taught my dog how to sit. You take the treat and you move it back until their bum plunks down and you do that a couple times and I had these two pigs that sat on command and they come when they're called and it was just so much fun.

ELAINE CHAU: You might have thought teaching pigs pet tricks would motivate a person to up her veggie intake, not to begin raising animals for meat. But for Julia, there's no conflict here. Loving the pigs and sending them to slaughter. In part she says, she's a different breed of pig farmer. Julia belongs to a movement of farmers, chefs, and consumers who share the belief that there's a moral imperative to ensure before slaughter. Livestock has the best life possible.

JULIA SMITH: I want my animals to be living in an environment that allows them to do the things that they were built to do, the things that meet their emotional needs, whether it's a chicken being able to scratch in the ground for worms and bugs or a pig being able to root and scratch up against things. It's really important that we respect these animalsâ€™ unique qualities and allow them to express them.

ELAINE CHAU: It's why Julia gives her hogs about 10 times the space recommended by Canada's National Farm Care Council. She insists on providing them with organic food like veggie scraps and worries about her pigsâ€™ emotional well-being, which means offering cuddling time.

[Pig squeals loudly]

JULIA SMITH: Pigs love eating but they also like to play.

ELAINE CHAU: Julia, and others like her, is vowing to up the ethical standards for the meat we eat.

JULIA SMITH: We don't have to wait for legislation and new laws to come around and change the system. We just have to stop buying things that aren't in line with our personal values.

ELAINE CHAU: There are different names for Julia's approach. Slow meat, ethical meat, cruelty-free meat, humanely raised meat, even happy meat. It's not new, but, right now, this desire to put animal rights on the table appears to be at a peak. Butchers, restaurants, farms, and grocers are increasingly providing details regarding where their meat came from, how the animals were treated and what they were fed. Grass fed, free-range, organic, antibiotic-free. There are even apps available to help people with so-called humane eating, an oxymoron to some. For a farmer like Julia, it means satisfying work.

JULIA SMITH: Especially during the summer, we can go out and run around in the fields with them and play with them. It's just really enjoyable.

ELAINE CHAU: And as much as it is about helping her animals have a good life, albeit a short one, it's also obviously about their death. After all, there are limitations for the well-being of livestock. What's crucial, Julia says, is giving the pigs a peaceful death. Something that wasn't that easy the first time when her first two pigs, Bacon and Chop, became bacon and pork chop.

JULIA SMITH: I mean, I'd really prepared myself for it. Like I said, I had taken the time to deal with my own emotional process in a way that didn't impose on the pigs. I had my little cry out in the sunset and you know, I guess I was more just apprehensive. I wasn't feeling sad particularly or guilty. I mean, I was sad that me and my pigs that I've been playing with all summer were going to be gone, but, I mean, let's not kid ourselves. I knew that was going to happen from the very beginning. I had become very attached to them but this was all part of the deal.

ELAINE CHAU: After all D-Day is still D-Day. Julia describes that day with a mix of wistfulness and pride.

JULIA SMITH: That day I was there just for my pigs. It was really important to me that they were having a day like any other day. Took them their favourite breakfast and gave them a good scratch and then it was over. And I mean, it was only hard on the people that knew what was happening. It wasn't hard on the pigs.

TEMPLE GRANDIN: Well, thatâ€™s stockmanship and the scientific research is very clear. Good stockmanship makes a more productive animal.

ELAINE CHAU: That's Temple Grandin, one of the world's leading experts on animal behaviour and a heroic figure for Julia.

TEMPLE GRANDIN: Animals are not things. Pieces of steel and cars are things, but animals are not things, They have a nervous system, they feel pain and they feel fear and we've got to treat them right but animals are not things.

ELAINE CHAU: By tenaciously working for decades with the American meat industry to improve standards, Temple has become so well respected by animal rights activists, farmers and people in the meat industry, she's a bit of a legend, even inspiring books and films.

SOUNDCLIP

[MOVIE]

Mooing. You want to do research and write your Masters on mooing.

[movie dialogue running in background]

ELAINE CHAU: All because back in the day, this woman with autism, a condition she believes helps her to understand how animals think, confronted serious problems inside slaughterhouses.

SOUNDCLIP

[MOVIE]

Miss Grandin, this is a masterpiece.

TEMPLE GRANDIN: Well, the handling of cattle in the seventies, you know, rough cowboy stuff like the electric prods multiple times to get them going as fast as they could run, slamming into gates and you know, just horrible rough handling. Sometimes I just would put my hands on the animals and you could feel that they were scared. I think a lot of people today don't realize how bad things were in the bad old days.

ELAINE CHAU: Temple famously created the serpentine ramp, a curved cattle shoot that allows cows to wander naturally into a slaughterhouse, rather than being pushed through, dramatically lowering stress on the animals. The systems design is used widely in North America. Another design she's proud of is a scoring system she created for the U.S. government, one that tracked things likeâ€”

TEMPLE GRANDIN: How many cattle did you shoot on the first shot? How many cattle fell down during handling? How many pigs fell down during handling? How many animals were squealing in the stunning area? How many animals did you put an electric prod on? And we could put numbers on it and the advantage of putting numbers on it, is then you can tell am I getting better am I getting worse. It worked like magic to have a big customer insisting on standards. The slaughterhouse industry had begun to shift and in 1999 and 2000, I saw more change, more improvement than I had seen in my career for 25 years prior to that.

ELAINE CHAU: In fact, so much has changed that today Temple is confident the industry is slaughtering animals humanely.

TEMPLE GRANDIN: The big companies right now are doing that.

ELAINE CHAU: So, this is where Julia and her hero part ways. Unlike Temple, Julia refuses to me from fast food joints or from any big industry producers. She's fearful of abuses like those alleged last year at a Red Deer, Alberta hog facility.

SOUNDCLIP

Animals who are too sick or injured to walk are often ruthlessly killed.

ELAINE CHAU: Hidden surveillance footage released by the non-profit, Mercy for Animals Canada, showed pigs being beaten and kicked allegedly at the facility

SOUNDCLIP

In plain view of government inspectors.

[animals squealing loudly]

JULIA SMITH: Horrible videos that are released of animals being really badly abused.

ELAINE CHAU: The Canadian Food Inspection Agency launched an investigation after this video surfaced. As of this month, the CFIA has quote â€œregistered a review of the Western hog exchange situation with the agency's Inspection Verification Office and the Office of the Inspector Generalâ€.

JULIA SMITH: It is one thing to point fingers at the guy with the bat that was caught on camera, but we really need to take this back a few steps and wonder what he is doing there in the first place. How did this happen? You know, take it back from the slaughterhouse where the video was shot to the farm where all of these animals were loaded. So many animals loaded up into a truck and taken to this facility where too many animals are being moved through the system and to--why is this farmer raising this many animals in the first place and if you take it back far enough it always comes back to consumer demand for cheap meat.

ELAINE CHAU: Having heard her share of abuse stories on animal farms, Temple Grandin believes it's not fair to blame everything on big industry.

TEMPLE GRANDIN: You get into a whole big-is-bad thing and what's bad is badly managed.

TERESA VAN RAAY: The pictures or the words again on the news are not always the good news stories and if we don't answer back to that then it becomes the assumption that that is the way that we raise our pigs. Iâ€™m Teresa Van Raay, and my husband and our two sons, we pig farm just outside of Dashwood and we've been doing this now for 33 years.

ELAINE CHAU: Teresa's Ontario farm is a big operation. They have thousands of hogs.

TERESA VAN RAAY: You have to raise your pigs properly, with care, with enough space, with good food, good air, otherwise you're not growing a safe product. When you're talking with other farmers it's just a natural thing that you care for the animals. It's in your DNA, I guess [laughs].

ELAINE CHAU: Working with an animal nutritionist, Teresaâ€™s pigs are fed things like corn and soy, a healthy diet, she says.

TERESA VAN RAAY: He's feeding these little guys a special diet because they just arrived last week. When you go into a pen and you see the pigs just scurry around and their skin is healthy, their bodies look-- their ears are perky it's you know that they are happy. Happy, I guess is the word, content and being well cared for.

ELAINE CHAU: Yes, they don't get the same play time or the 80 square feet each that Julia provides, but in a country where Canadians eat an estimated 15 kg of pork per year, Teresa argues providing that kind of one on one time would make the meat too pricey.

TERESA VAN RAAY: With 3,500 pigs well, 6,000 on the farm a time, that would be so labor intensive and what that would do to the cost to our consumer, is not the market that we are going to.

ELAINE CHAU: The point being, an average 500g package of bacon is nearly seven dollars. From Juliaâ€™s farm, that same quantity is 18 bucks.

TERESA VAN RAAY: In one year, we produce 954,000 kg of pork, so that feeds a lot of people and I'm very proud to say that I can guarantee that's healthy, nutritious and really easy to cook, in case you're wondering.

JULIA SMITH: We are enjoying a very, very delicious smoked pork loin chop here, topped with beautiful barbecue sauce.

ELAINE CHAU: Julia knows not all farmers or consumers are prepared to do what she does. And she admits her commitment to how she eats does have consequences.

JULIA SMITH: [laughs] Weâ€™re kind of obnoxious to have over for dinner right? We don't get invited to that many parties anymore. We couldn't do this if we weren't all in and the problem with being all in is you alienate people.

ELAINE CHAU: About a year ago, she was invited to speak at a sustainability conference and as soon as she glanced at the spread of food at the reception, she knew she didn't fit in.

JULIA SMITH: It was so meat-centric. I was surprised because you know, meat is expensive and usually at these things where there's free food, they pad it with a lot of vegetables and bread. And because I don't eat meat if I don't understand its provenance, I started asking questions. It was my turn to speak and I just kind of tossed what I was going to say and yeah, I had to say something, and so I had to say you know, making these choices is difficult and sometimes it's awkward. Like when you're at a sustainability event and it turns out you can't eat any of the food that's provided because it was all produced on factory farms. It just shows how far we still have to come. So, that was a little awkward I probably won't be invited back to speak at that.

JOHN SARNECKI: We are in this moral moment where I think we are expanding our concern.

ELAINE CHAU: John Sarnecki teaches philosophy at the University of Toledo. He studies how humans think, including how we think about animals and the ethics of eating them.

JOHN SARNECKI: Well, we're evolving in a moral sense. In a weird way, we are, as time goes on, we're increasing the circle of beings that we consider capable of moral consideration.

ELAINE CHAU: And the more we empathize with animals he reasons, the more we begin to see them like us and the better the argument gets for vegetarianism. And that's tough because he's a meat eater.

JOHN SARNECKI:[laughs] You know, one of the jokes I have with my students is that in teaching vegetarianism I've created so many vegetarians over the years that karmically, I'm fine. I think that's a pretty bad argument but I'm hanging on to it for the short term.

ELAINE CHAU: For Sarnecki, while the efforts of the so-called ethical meat movement may be morally laudable, it may be in part more about solving one's conscience.

JOHN SARNECKI: I'm sure you know, things like making organic feed is probably not something a pig cares a great deal about. Moreover, it's probably not something that's going to have any impact on the pig, except as meat. These pigs aren't going to live a long time. They're going to die prematurely.

ELAINE CHAU: Having heard all this before, Julia knows she has critics. From those who suggest ethical meat may just be good marketing, the kind of makes people feel less guilty about their meat consumption to those who balk at the price, uneasy with the idea such pork may only be for the well off. And of course, food dubbed happy meat has become fodder for for satire, as in this opposite of the TV show, Portlandia.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: So, here is the chicken you'll be joined with tonight. His name was Colin.

VOICE 2: My friends had other chickens as friends.

ELAINE CHAU: Most of this doesn't bother Julia but there has been criticism that is much darker.

JULIA SMITH: Yeah, it was the first time we got protested. It was about three years ago I guess, and the phone calls just kept coming.

ELAINE CHAU: Messages saying things such asâ€”

JULIA SMITH: You should die the way your animals do.

ELAINE CHAU: She filed a police report after getting four death threats.

JULIA SMITH: It's scary and really frustrating because I really believe in what I'm doing and I work really, really hard to really do right by these animals.

[footsteps]

MIKE DOWNEY: Vishnu. Athena. Iâ€™ve got a good way to bring you out-- with chips, wild onion, and vegan chips. Come on out, guys, and get the good stuff. [pigs oinking] I can appreciate people that suggest that they love their pets, but when they kill them, that's not really love. Itâ€™s not love when you kill anything. Sorry.

ELAINE CHAU: Mike Downey, all six feet of him, broad shoulders and all is squeezed between his two pet pigs on a bed of hay in a backyard shed. Yes, you heard that right, these are pet pigs.

MIKE DOWNEY: These guys were supposed to be no bigger than 40 pounds when I first got them and now I have a beast with tusks.

ELAINE CHAU: Being so committed to these two pigs, Mike has doled out $7,000 worth of renovations to his home to accommodate them, building everything from a piggy urinal inside, to a tunnel outside. Mike is actually fighting for the right to keep Athena and Vishnu in his Victoria home but that's another story. He is, as you might have guessed, a vegan. But his views on so-called ethical meat might surprise you.

MIKE DOWNEY: So I tell them if they're going to eat that then thumbs up from me because obviously they've begun the stages of wanting to better themselves as people and consumers.

ELAINE CHAU: He figures if a consumer buys meat from producers who are as compassionate as they can be for hog farmers, this is the first step down an evolutionary road. Because, he says, the more you empathize with the animals you eat, the tougher it gets to be a carnivore, shades of our philosopher.

MIKE DOWNEY: I think there's been a point in a lot of our lives where weâ€™ve been taught out of feeling empathy and this is something that I had to discover by getting two pets of my own that were considered agriculture animals. And through that, I've regained my empathy and all I'm here to do is try to inspire bringing back that empathy in others.

ELAINE CHAU: Mike used to be a meat eater.

MIKE DOWNEY: Well, I always told myself that one of these days I'm going to stop eating meat, but I was travelling all over the world fighting as a competitive fighter and I was raised to believe that meat consumption was necessary in order for me to achieve my goals in fitness. Three years ago I retired as a Canadian Muay Thai kickboxing champion and I kept thinking to myself what kind of a dog would I want? And then I found a picture on Facebook that said pigs are the fourth smartest animal on the planet. I'm like well, I always wanted the smartest dog, but if pigs are smarter than dogs, Iâ€™ll just get some pigs. Athena, do a figure-8. Yeah, Athena, do a figure-8. Yeah, good girl. [pig oinks] I taught them how to spin around and the first trick took me a day and it was super easy, taught them how to shake a hoof.

ELAINE CHAU: My visit with Mike is a bit surreal as I can't help but note the similarities between his fondness for his pigs and Julia's. Our philosopher, John Sarnecki, acknowledges some farmers might be blurring the lines between pets and livestock and in doing so, neglect one particular perspective.

JOHN SARNECKI: And I think if we sort of take into account what a pig's natural inclinations, to do what they want, what would make a pig happy, it might be very different than what Julia is imagining. I think we really have to treat animals with regard to what the animal wants or what the animal needs, rather than what we think the animal wants or the animal needs. Particularly, if we sort of map on our desires or we anthropomorphize their interests.

MIKE DOWNEY: Okay, what I want you to do is, I want you guys to do synchronize spinning. Heâ€™s spinning, yeah.

ELAINE CHAU: Mike Downey would never consider eating Athena and Vishnu. He can barely contain his enthusiasm for their willingness to do a figure-8.

MIKE DOWNEY: [laughs] And how about a kiss? Ah, come on, you got me.

ELAINE CHAU: Thereâ€™s some licking action there. And as much as he applauds people for considering the welfare of animals they go on to eat, he hopes they will keep empathizing and empathizing and empathizing.

MIKE DOWNEY: There are a lot of people that do want to create change but they don't want to give up their meat. Then I highly suggest going to these farmers that are definitely more respectful to animals, yet I would suggest to them, [whispers] start growing some vegetables [laughs].

[pigs oinking]

JULIA SMITH: This is spent brewery grains. That's what's left after the brewing process.

ELAINE CHAU: Julia doesnâ€™t have any plans to only grow vegetables again. She's an unapologetic pig farmer and in for the long haul.

JULIA SMITH: It's not their most favorite thing, so to sweeten the deal, I will add some whey.

[slop being dumped in trough]

ELAINE CHAU: She dumps the feed in the trough for her pigs and they scurry towards the food.

[chickens squawking]

JULIA SMITH: This is the best trough ever. I'm not trying to change the world. Personally, I think it's probably too late to change the world. This is just how I want to go down and so, if this is how you want to go down too, come over to my farm and join the farm-ily.

ELAINE CHAU: And that farm-ily is expanding. Julia just bought a 21 acre property and hopes to grow 200 pigs for market next year.

JULIA CHAU: I'm just doing things in a way that allows me to sleep really well at night. I mean, I fully accept that what we've done looks a little crazy. You know, giving up everything. You know, we've been living in a 200 square foot trailer for four years to make this work and it is definitely not for everyone. I guess I'd like to think of it as you need a few crazy people like us to keep things moving forward, right?

[pigs snorting and chewing]

AMT: We have been listening to The Pig Eaterâ€™s Dilemma. It was produced by the CBCâ€™s Elaine Chau and The Currentâ€™s documentary editor Joan Webber. In that story you heard a tiny bit from the TV show, Portlandia. If you want to see Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein in the full episode directed by Jonathan Krisel, it is called Farm. We would like to hear from you on this one. What ethical lines do you have when it comes to the food you eat. Tweet us @thecurrentcbc. Send us an email through our website cbc.ca/thecurrent and click on the contact link.

Canada's first Twitter trial highlights need to curb online harassment

Guests: Lauren Strapagiel, Saadia Muzaffar, David Fraser

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

SOUNDCLIP

The Twitter war turned trial for a Toronto man who was arrested for allegedly harassing two women on the social media site. But his lawyer argues the two parties just shared different political opinions. The two women said in court they felt creeped out when Elliot continued to interact with them on Twitter, even when they said they blocked him.

AMT: Well, creeped out, frightened, annoyed or disgusted. Many people on Twitter say they have been made to feel that way. The law around what one can and cannot say on the social media platform has just been tested. Many here in Canada and around the world we're paying attention to the trial mentioned in that RT America report you just heard a bit of. The trial of Gregory Alan Elliot, charged with criminal harassment for his interactions with two women on Twitter, came to a conclusion last Friday. An Ontario judge found him not guilty. That's hardly the end of the story because in the wake of that decision some Twitter users say the so-called trolls have only been emboldened. Lauren Strapagiel is the social news editor at BuzzFeed Canada. She's with me in our Toronto studio. Hello.

LAUREN STRAPAGIEL: Hello.

AMT: So, what's the fallout been since this verdict? What have you been seeing?

LAUREN STRAPAGIEL: Well, so, personally on Friday treated three fairly benign tweets about the verdicts and I was met with 48 to 72 hours of just a deluge of harassing tweets. Some of them are insulting. Some of them were calling me weak pathetic. Some of them were sending pictures of mutilated corpses. And this was, like, for 72 hours straight.

AMT: How do you react to that?

LAUREN STRAPAGIEL: I think, as someone in media, I'm kind of used to it in a way, which I think is sad to say. I'm used to receiving things I would categorize as hate mail, certainly, but this is at the point where it's hard to ignore it. It's impossible ignore it actually. I keep Twitter open all day as a journalist and to watch the stream of stuff go by my screen it gets to you, it does.

AMT: And so you were tweeting out basically, originally, just your response to the verdict and what? Also just some of the details of it?

LAUREN STRAPAGIEL: Not even. My first tweets were-- My very first treat was pointing out a couple of reporters who were actually in the courthouse, like, saying, follow them; they have live updates. Then a subsequent tweet was about the fact that a lot of women I knew were going to be silenced, people were going to try and silence them on Twitter for speaking out about this case.

AMT: And so you say 48 hours, it just kept on going?

LAUREN STRAPAGIEL: Two or three days, yeah.

AMT: Okay, and so what did you do about that?

LAUREN STRAPAGIEL: There's nothing you can do. I mean, they're coming so quickly you can't possibly a block or report them all. I had a job to do I couldn't spend all day on Twitter doing it. There's literally hundreds.

AMT: But part of your job is actually going through Twitter.

LAUREN STRAPAGIEL: I canâ€™t turn it off.

AMT: You canâ€™t just say I'm not going to look for 48 hours.

LAUREN STRAPAGIEL: Yeah, thatâ€™s not an option for me.

AMT: Okay. And so without giving specific Twitter handles, who does this to you?

LAUREN STRAPAGIEL: A lot of these accounts are ones that are new. They're anonymous. There's no identifying information. A lot of them have very few followers. I suspect a lot of them are, what I'd call, burner accounts; they were set up to live for a short while to harass people before they get blocked by Twitter.

AMT: The eggs. They don't give you a picture; they just keep the little egg there.

LAUREN STRAPAGIEL: Yeah, and I'm someone who has my full name and picture on my Twitter page.

AMT: You use your Twitter page professionally.

LAUREN STRAPAGIEL: Yes.

AMT: Do you think this was organized? Coordinated?

LAUREN STRAPAGIEL: I don't think it's organized in the sense that there is a leader somewhere barking out orders to harass certain women on Twitter, but there is certainly these online communities that organize around, sort of, anti-feminist issues. For example, one of my tweets was posted on to Redditt into one of the sections that was part of that community. And that's what spurred on a lot of the tweets that I got.

AMT: And what impact does that have on you?

LAUREN STRAPAGIEL: It's exhausting. It's emotionally exhausting. And I think what was interesting is I was so careful, whenever somebody asked if I was okay, to be, of course, I am fine, I do this every day. It's not a big deal. They don't bother me. Because it's sort of the price you pay for being a woman with opinions on Twitter.

AMT: In fact, you wrote that, right?

LAUREN STRAPAGIEL: I did.

AMT: Iâ€™ve got your tweet here.

Reading:

I kept saying this doesn't bother me because I am a lady on the internet. Who has opinions. And it feels like thatâ€™s just the price.

LAUREN STRAPAGIEL: Yeah. It's a consideration you make whenever there is something like this verdict or, for example, in the middle of â€˜gamergateâ€™ which was a lot to do with social justice issues and women's portrayal in video games. You have to make this balanced option of, am I going to tweet about this and deal with the abuse or am I going to be quiet and have a nice day?

AMT: So in other words you steal yourself before you actually start tweeting? You just expect trouble.

LAUREN STRAPAGIEL: Absolutely. You have to ask yourself, am I prepared to deal with the fallout from this before I tweet it?

AMT: So sometimes do you just kind of like abdicate, like, you just go away from it because you can't deal with it?

LAUREN STRAPAGIEL: I personally refuse to do that. I mean, if I was encountering misogyny offline, I would absolutely not back down. I refuse to do that on Twitter either.

AMT: But it does bother you. It's like, it's the price, but it bothers you.

LAUREN STRAPAGIEL: Of course. I mean, it gets to you. I mean, it was funny, on Saturday, my mother called me with this very grave tone, and I thought my grandma had died or something, and she said, Lauren, I was looking through your Twitter mentions. Are you okay? Because, to her, thereâ€™s no difference between what's happening in my Twitter feed and what could be happening offline.

AMT: Do you think-- This is your experience, but you also cover the stuff you are watching as youâ€™re tracking this. What are you seeing with other people on Twitter and how it's affecting them?

LAUREN STRAPAGIEL: Well, I think it's important to point out that different women experience harassment online differently. I mean, I am a white woman. There's a certain a privilege that comes with that. I did have some tweets that mentioned my sexual orientation, so thatâ€™s something that affected me differently. Other women were getting racial slurs thrown at them. I also think it's important to note that I'm someone who has a verified Twitter account. I have the newsroom, people supporting me who understand what this harassment is like. If you're not in that position and you're facing this kind of harassment, it probably feels much worse.

AMT: And a verified Twitter account, does it allow you to do something that others can't do.

LAUREN STRAPAGIEL: Yes. So, when you haven't verified Twitter account you can sort your mentions to only show from other verified users, which is useless for me because itâ€™s not how I use Twitter. Iâ€™m using it to communicate with people who are sources or who are--I'm looking for ideas for stories. But that is an option that I have that other people do not.

AMT: What do you think the lasting impact of this not guilty verdict will be?

LAUREN STRAPAGIEL: I do think some of these people feel emboldened by it. A lot of the tweets I was seeing are saying, we won, you lost. And I'm afraid that that's going to carry on with that attitude.

AMT: How would you like to see harassment on Twitter and social media regulated?

LAUREN STRAPAGIEL: It's hard to regulate. I think giving users more options for filtering would be useful. As I was saying, a lot of these accounts were new; they had very few followers. If you could filter out those kinds of accounts, I probably wouldn't have seen anything on Friday.

AMT: Because there's a whole issue of free speech, which, of course, came up in this trial, right and itâ€™s--

LAUREN STRAPAGIEL: Sure.

AMT: How do you see that? How do you see you get your head around free speech versus harassment?

LAUREN STRAPAGIEL: Well, I think there's a big difference between people on Twitter who are trying to start a conversation, who are disagreeing with you, who are simply expressing another opinion. And then there's the people who are piling on with the express purpose of silencing you, of intimidating you into never tweeting about this stuff again.

AMT: Okay. Thanks for coming in.

LAUREN STRAPAGIEL: Thanks.

AMT: That is Lauren Strapagiel. She is the social news editor for BuzzFeed Canada and she joined me in our Toronto studio. Well, the subject of harassing tweets may have been new to the courts, but it's not a new problem to people running the platform, even if it's a problem they have yet to solve. In a memo to employees last year, Twitter's then CEO Dick Costolo wrote, quote.

Reading:

We suck at dealing with abuse and trolls. And we've sucked at it for years. It is no secret and the rest of the world talks about it every day. We lose core user after core user by not addressing simple trolling issues that they face every day.

End quote. It's an issue Saadia Muzaffar reckons with both personally and professionally. She is the CEO and founder of TechGirls Canada, which is a hub for Canadian women in science, technology, engineering, and math. And she is with me in our Toronto studio. Hi, welcome.

SAADIA MUZAFFAR: Thank you.

AMT: How does your experience, after this verdict, compare to what we just heard Lauren Strapagiel describing?

SAADIA MUZAFFAR: Much like Lauren, my first few tweets, I think two or three of them, were very benign. I tweeted out the link to the CBC article that broke the news and sad that the system has failed us again in addressing an issue that will have really serious repercussions. And I did not use a hashtag that associated me with what was happening nor any of the handles of the two women who were involved. And for the next three to five days my account was so clogged with abusive, violent tweets that I had no choice but to stay away from it, because I couldn't even use it. There was so much coming in, hundreds and hundreds of very violent and unsettling tweets. And I bring up the fact that I didn't use any hashtags or their handles to say that these people, what they're doing, is very intentional. It required work for them to find me and to see that Iâ€™m tweeting about something that was not easily searchable. So their express purpose was to go after each and every person who was supporting the women who had just been handed a verdict that has serious implications for all of us who have an online presence that plays into our careers.

AMT: Were you able to identify some of these people?

SAADIA MUZAFFAR: Most of these, much like Lauren said, are new accounts, burner accounts and I can't tell. So some of them have the egg that you mentioned, some have pictures of some known misogynists online, and they banded together. So, I noticed you asked Lauren if this was organized. It's not organized in a way like she said, that there is one leader, but there is definitely clusters of people who are drawn to something like this so bizarrely enough and sadly regionally there is a community forming around just harassing women, which, unfortunately, is not new.

AMT: What do you do then when you're faced with this kind of online harassment?

SAADIA MUZAFFAR: I think, for me personally, it's so emotionally taxing at this point because things like this verdict just exacerbated, but this is a constant presence and you have to take breaks. You actually have to go away, which is something that is really difficult even in my line of work because I do advocacy work. I need to understand what's going on in the landscape in order to be able to support women and people of colour and people of varying abilities whose online experience, much like their real life experience, is very different from most of us who have the privilege and the resources to be able to say, I just ignore it.

AMT: Twitter admitted last year, you heard me read out--

SAADIA MUZAFFAR: I did.

AMT: --that it quote-unquote â€œsucks at dealing with this kind of thing.â€ Why do you think they have not been able to tackle this?

SAADIA MUZAFFAR: I think-- So, two things. I think Twitter has done a lot of work in creating tools and filters that could potentially enable a little bit of control on behalf of the users so that they can filter out, as Lauren had mentioned. It's curious to me that theyâ€™ve only doled it verified accounts, as to say that if you are a celebrity or somebody who's recognised, you are entitled to that protection. However, if you are a regular user, you don't have access to that. Which is very bizarre to me that you have developed functionality as a technology company and as a platform, but you choose to not give it to people who would benefit from it, so, that's one thing. The other thing is, I feel like when we talk about Twitter or Facebook or other platforms and what they can or have done or can do better, we are limiting the conversation because these are global companies and there is a limit to how far they can take that protection. There will come a point where these trolls and these threats cross over into real lives, like they do for me. I get snail mail sent to my work, which has nothing to do with my advocacy, et cetera.

AMT: So someone is searching you out and finding you.

SAADIA MUZAFFAR: Yes.

AMT: I want to talk about that in just a minute. I'm going to read you-- We did ask Twitter for an interview. Instead we got a statement and Iâ€™ll read it to you. This is the quote.

Reading:

Firstly, we actively police content on our platform that violates our terms and conditions. This includes content that qualifies as abusive behaviour and/or doesn't comply with our rules of use. Users have an option to report any behaviour they deem abusive. We also proactively monitor for any violations. In cases like the Gregory Elliott trial that become litigious, we also cooperate with law enforcement agencies across the globe to share content on Twitter that violates local or federal laws.

SAADIA MUZAFFAR: Right.

AMT: What do you think?

SAADIA MUZAFFAR: So they're saying--

AMT: I have questions for them, but all they gave me was a statement.

SAADIA MUZAFFAR: Right. As far as statements go it's a very airtight statement because what they're saying is if we're asked for something off of a very public platform, we will cooperate and, you know, show it to them. I don't think that that's what's required here. My point in bringing up the crossover from online to real life is the problem is much more chronic. It's the consistent disbelief in women's testimony of what harassment is. We still have systems built where they have to prove inside laws that are built to take it apart. Harassment is not in the eyes of the harasser, right?

AMT: Right. Okay. So, it's interesting, though. And you make the point, this is another vehicle to harass.

SAADIA MUZAFFAR: Right.

AMT: It's not-- So you're making the point that it's not-- Online harassment isn't different than other harassment, itâ€™s just another way. And then it starts to blur because you're getting e-mail harassment?

SAADIA MUZAFFAR: E-mail all the time. I get very, very disturbing articles sent to me by anonymous e-mails to my work email. So it bleeds into my work life, which is very separate from everything else that I do. But also I get snail mail, so actual paper mail, printouts of my tweets and photocopies from other books that have very disturbing content sent to me--

AMT: Somebody goes to a lot of trouble.

SAADIA MUZAFFAR: A lot of trouble.

AMT: So, how does that make you feel when you walk down the street then?

SAADIA MUZAFFAR: It's very, very concerning. Itâ€™s very unsettling. And I say this as somebody who, like Lauren said, there comes a point where you get so used to the stress that it becomes your normal which is very difficult. It has, on a lot of people that I know, very serious health implications. So I am reluctant to make this trial about Twitter is what I'm getting to. My point is that we-- As somebody who is online and receives his harassment and knows that it's not as bad as other people who receive a lot more of it, where are we supposed to go for help? What is that point where somebody says, you know what, your experience is real enough. If you're fearful for your life walking down the street, that is enough. What do we need to do and which system do we go to? Because each system plays hot potato, right? So, online people say, well, thereâ€™s only so much we can do. Here's how far we can take it, you can block them. And courts, as we saw, say, well, you made it public, so it's kind of their problem.

AMT: They have their own legal threshold to hit.

SAADIA MUZAFFAR: Right.

AMT: But you're saying maybe we need to take another look at that because of the impact these things have.

SAADIA MUZAFFAR: Absolutely. And I think that it's as easy cop out for each side to just be able to say, our jurisdiction stops here. I think our problem is that we don't believe women and I don't think that there is much of a difference between Twitter not being judicious in releasing the functionality that they have that could help people to judges in the legal system not believing women when they say that they are fearful for their life and this is violence that affecting them on a daily basis.

AMT: What about the police investigations into this? Is this also a problem?

SAADIA MUZAFFAR: It's all a problem, right, because we are dealing with a system that does not give credit to our testimony as women, saying that it's something that we should just ignore, where we canâ€™t-- Women are literally are murdered for disagreeing with men. We have cases upon cases of where having an opinion has cost somebody their lives. So these are very real fears. And there's a Margaret Atwood quote where she said, men fear that women will laugh at them and women fear that men will kill them. So, there is a very real difference in how harassment is received depending on where you are on that privilege ladder.

AMT: Saadia Muzaffar, thanks for coming in.

SAADIA MUZAFFAR: Thank you for having me.

AMT: Saadia Muzaffar is CEO and founder of TechGirls Canada. She's in our Toronto studio. Well, the so-called brave new world of online harassment and cyberbullying has not escaped the notice of lawmakers, but sometimes the new laws they craft cannot withstand the constitutional challenge. That was the case for Nova Scotia cyberbullying legislation. David Fraser's a privacy lawyer who led that challenge and weâ€™ve reached him at his Halifax office today. Hello.

DAVID FRASER: Hello. How are you?

AMT: Well, Iâ€™m fine. I'm interested in your view of, well, first of all, what you're hearing about the concerns that there is no place for women who feel very harassed and stalked both online and beyond online, for any recourse

DAVID FRASER: Well, I'm extremely sympathetic. Certainly, it's something that in many ways calls out for a remedy of some sort. I'm an active Twitter user and there's a whole lot of good stuff that happens on Twitter and I think itâ€™s extremely unfortunate that there's a large number of people who are experiencing this sort of, not just negativity, but threats and some really, really vile stuff. And when it comes to the-because I'm a lawyer and when what you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail- thinking about the legal response to it, to me, it's a matter of determining where is the proper place to draw the line. And, certainly, in my experience that one can tend to, where freedom of expression is engaged, legislate too far or set up a law that can be abused. And the reality is that once you do that the law ultimately will be abused. And so we have in this recent Twitter case, of course, all of it really turned on the question of was fearing for her safety, was it reasonable in the circumstances, and the judge said no. And we just heard, very, very articulately, about the challenge of communicating that fear in the in the legal system. But our parliament has decided that that fear for your safety is what constitutes criminal harassment. Harassment in our day to day speech actually means something different, but in order to engage the criminal justice system you have to fear for your safety and I wonder whether there are solutions- and I'm not sure I have all the answers- that engage the legal system for a lower threshold. But we always need to be very concerned about the collateral damage because Twitter, the internet, the world's libraries, street corners should be the place of vigorous conversation, vigorous debate and sometimes people's feelings get hurt and you don't want to shut off legitimate debate, debate that is justifiable in the totality of the circumstances in order to go after just the bad stuff.

AMT: Of course, what we've just heard my last two guests describing is not debate, right, wasn't legitimate debate by any lay person's view, right. If you're barraged for 48 hours by people telling you, like, that that's not a debate.

DAVID FRASER: No and it certainly doesn't sound like a debate. From what I understand, the original, the facts that gave rise to the Twitter case ultimately had to do with debates over these men's rights activists and things like that. So there's a political component to it that you need to be mindful of, but, certainly, malicious, repeated communication that is unwanted, that is thinly veiled threats and things like that I find to be highly problematic. Most of the work that I do it is for victims of legitimate cyberbullying and I've seen some awful things that can take place.

AMT: Right. Can I ask you something? Had this been a civil lawsuit as opposed to a criminal case, might we have seen a different outcome?

DAVID FRASER: We might have. Weâ€™re certainly seeing-- The common law, I think, is actually doing a relatively good job in the civil justice system keeping up with new developments in this area. And so we actually just had out of Ontario a ground-breaking decision related to revenge pornography, where a young victim of such a thing, was awarded $100,000 in damages for that and the judge was pretty clear that this is a case that calls out for a remedy. And what we need to do is we need to reintroduce or introduce into Canadian law this tort of what's called breach of confidence. And so there is some flexibility there that keeps up with changing circumstances.

AMT: Okay. And I want to ask about, specifically, what the cyberbullying case-- Because Nova Scotia tried to legislate stricter restrictions on online harassment and cyberbullying. You lead the constitutional challenge. This law was actually struck down because it didn't meet the Charter threshold, right? It would have violated Charter rights?

SF: That's right. So it defined cyberbullying as anything done electronically that would hurt somebody's feelings. Now, and I'm paraphrasing significantly, it's quite a long definition, but ultimately at its core that's what it's about and so to tweet during the election about our new Prime Ministerâ€™s hairdo might hurt his feelings reasonably and, therefore, that would be cyberbullying and you can get an order and you can actually be sued for that. And so the line in that case was so dramatically, catastrophically off the mark that it was just doomed to fail from the get-go, but maybe what we need to think about is, really, we need to fine tune this. We need to get the right people around the table to determine is there a gap in the law? What is that? Where is that? And how do we figure out what the thresholds are in order to provide proper remedies? And the criminal justice system is an incredibly blunt instrument of the consequences of that as a criminal record and all those horrible consequences. There may be better ways of dealing with it or intermediary steps before you get there. And I'm grateful that you're having this conversation because it's very important to have.

AMT: What about the liability of social media platforms to have abuse done by their members? Does that be toughened? Like, we have libel laws. There are certain things that I can't say on a public broadcast on anything going out and if someone libels someone in an interview with me, I'm going to get dragged into court too.

DAVID FRASER: Yes. So, usually the rules on that depend upon whether the platform operator, the CBC or Twitter or somebody else knew or ought reasonably to have known that it was going on and that can attract liability, so certainly I think a platform operator like Twitter needs to be mindful of that. But I think also in the big picture Twitter needs to- and they've started making moves in this direction- but they need to be even more proactive in order to try to make sure they want it to be a place for interesting variety of opinions and things like that. But they should also be looking at trying to make it a welcoming place and a useful place and not a hostile place for a significant portion of the population who have absolutely valid things to say and should be able to use that platform without repeatedly being subjected to attacks.

AMT: Okay. And how do we deal with the freedom of expression? Because, of course, freedom of expression advocates will always say that even if you're offensive, I have to defend your right to be offensive. So where do you draw the line from between free speech and harassment and, you know, like-- How do you draw that line?

DAVID FRASER: Thatâ€™s the most difficult part of this entire thing is to determine where you are in fact that that line is and so, and we have a pretty mechanical approach under the Charter in terms of determining whether a prohibition or prescription of speech kind of goes too far and has to be in the totality of the circumstances. And so, but the courts have actually done a pretty good job of keeping up with tailoring things. So, our defamation law was significantly revamped a number of years ago by the Supreme Court of Canada recognizing responsible journalism as a defence. We have matters of public interest that are a defence. And so very seldom will you get that perfect case that will come up with that perfect solution. But the arc of the common law bends towards justice, I think, and it does take into account changes in technology. But when it comes to, at least this would be my own view, when it comes to speech that is intended to, has really no other purpose other than to harm somebody directly, thereâ€™s no public interest it and it's not really justifiable in the totality of the circumstances, it's not calling somebody out for their opinion, but it's really an ad hominum attack then I think, certainly, Twitter is justified in booting them off. And if that is repeated, then perhaps there should be a mechanism that you can get something like a peace bond to prevent that continued activity; the violation of that peace bond would actually then engage the criminal justice system.

AMT: And, of course, we can talk about peace bonds and how you know there are a lot of people who say those don't work very well, but we'll leave it there. David Fraser, thank you for your thoughts today.

DAVID FRASER: It's my pleasure. Thank you.

AMT: David Fraser, privacy lawyer at the firm McInnes Cooper. He's in Halifax. Now, over to you. Let us know your own thoughts on the problem of social media harassment, whether you have experiences of your own or thoughts on a solution or how to police the Twittersphere. We are on Twitter, @theCurrentCBC. We're also on Facebook. You can send us an e-mail by going to our website, cbc.ca/thecurrent and click on the Contact link. That is our program for today. I'm an Anna Maria Tremonti. Thank you for listening to The Current.

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The Current Transcript for January 27th, 2016

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Prologue

Discrimination against children on reserves systemic, tribunal rules

Is 'ethical meat' helping pigs or salving consciences?

Canada's first Twitter trial highlights need to curb online harassment

The Current Transcript for January 27^th, 2016

January 27, 2016 Episode Transcript

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