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The Current Transcript for June 25, 2018

Host: Mike Finnerty

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

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VOICE: You don't just walk in the middle of the night with these search warrants rounding up people. You give ordinary people, who are ordinary law abiding, a chance to conform to law before you treat them like the lowest form of life.

MIKE FINNERTY: Canada, 1981, and the Toronto bathhouse raids, a key moment in the gay rights movement, when people began to say enough. As Toronto rouses groggily this morning from the city's massive Pride celebration, the community can celebrate a new law that will mean many people's criminal records are expunged from what was at its essence, the crime of loving someone of the same gender. Many, but not all. Also today, imagine being paralyzed on the operating table, but conscious.

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VOICE: I felt the incision. I felt them moving the instruments around and pushing my organs around as they examined them. I felt everything.

MF: An extreme example, but maybe we remember more than we realize. In half an hour, the author of a new book on anaesthesia who spent more than a decade exploring the mysteries of human consciousness and collecting stories about what she calls the science and the art of anaesthesia. And then, the raw power of water to devastate Canadian communities.

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VOICE: The storm came out of nowhere. It was so intense and it wasn't just that total volume, it was how it fell in the concentrated area that it fell in. It was a weather bomb.

Anna Maria Tremonti's documentary on how one Ontario city got back on its feet and new research on how deep the scarring is in communities across Canada that have lived through flooding. I'm Mike Finnerty. Welcome to the summer edition of The Current.

There's a 'major contradiction' between Trudeau's apology to LGBT Canadians and Bill C-66, prof says

Guests: Ron Rosenes, Gary Kinsman, Randy Boissonnault

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VOICE: I never thought I'd know that feeling to be in love because for us it was a crime. Someone had to respond to tabloids. So I wrote letters challenging every misconception homosexuality.

MF: That clip from the newest Heritage Minute is a short reminder of the long history of struggle that Canada's LGBTQ community has endured. Men and women have lost their jobs, some have been charged, some imprisoned for their sexuality. The fderal government has passed a law, Bill C-66, to expunge some of those convictions, but not all of them. The men who had been arrested in Toronto's bathhouse raids in the 1980s are not included in this law. They had hoped they would be after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had spoken of their experience in his apology last November to LGBTQ public servants who had been mistreated and fired.

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VOICE: Bathhouses were raided, people were entrapped by police. Our laws made private and consensual sex between same sex partners a criminal offense, leading to the unjust arrest, conviction and imprisonment of Canadians. And it is my hope that in talking about these injustices and acting to right these wrongs, we can begin to heal.

MF: Ron Rosenes is the Chair of the Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network. He's a community health advocate and researcher and he was convicted as part of those bathhouse raids. His record will not be expunged under the new legislation. Ron Rosenes is with us in the Toronto studio. Hello.

RON ROSENES: Good morning Mike.

MF: Those bathhouse raids, they really did become a seminal moment in the modern gay rights movement.

RR: They were in a very real sense. I think "Canada's Stonewall," if I can use that analogy. Certainly the community coalesced very quickly around those of us who found ourselves arrested in the 1981 bathhouse raids.

MF: How common was it for gay men to go to bathhouses in the 80s?

RR: Well you know we were feeling our oats in a time when we had begun to self identify as gay. I know I was an out young gay man at the time, early 30s and it was considered perfectly fine and natural and not illegal thing to do, to go to the bathhouses. I was in a very committed relationship at the time, which went on until my partner died 15 years after we had met, sadly of HIV AIDS related causes in 1991. But this was in 1981 and like a number of gay couples then and today, very committed to each other and yet we had a good understanding that if we wanted to "go out and play," we might take ourselves to the bathhouses. So he knew I was there that night. Also, I think it's fair to say that you know I'm a man who came out at a young age in my teenage years, was able to share that with my parents who were supportive, so I grew up in a very loving environment. I had a good education and I think as a result, I was you know in some ways better able to tolerate the very shocking and terrifying things that happened to me that night.

MF: What did happened? Can you give us a picture? Can you recall that moment?

RR: Sure. Oh my gosh. I mean you know it's a long time ago, but recent events have forced me to go back and revisit, which an evening, which was a very, very scary moment in my life. I was alone in my room at the time when we could hear a tremendous racket, which were the police coming into the Roman's steam baths on Bay Street at the time. Soon there was a knocking on my door and my door was bashed in and I was confronted by a police officer. I was completely shocked by that and told to dress and come to the front of the building where we were really herded up in a very disrespectful and harsh fashion. Police were pretty brutal with us.

MF: Did anyone try to sort of push back?

RR: Oh yeah.

MF: What did they do?

RR: Well people said you have no right to do this and this has been going on for years and this is a private place and what right do you have to be in here?

MF: And how did they answer that?

RR: They didn't. They didn't.

MF: So a lot of people were arrested that night?

RR: Yeah. You know over 300 people, if you took into account people working in those facilities. Ironically, interestingly, I was one of only a handful of people who were actually convicted.

MF: Why's that?

RR: My own lawyer, in contrast to the tactic used by other lawyers, decided to put me on the stand, where I incriminated myself by telling the truth and saying yes I was there that night. So I ended up being convicted as found-in a common body house.

MF: That was the offence, a found-in in a body house?

RR: That was the offence.

MF: And now how do you hear others talk about what happened to them?

RR: Very rarely. People became very quiet about it. I describe myself as being a young white man of of certain privilege and it was a much more difficult and trying moment for a lot of other men, different backgrounds, ethnic origins, people from racialized communities. There were even a couple of suicides.

MF: But I guess, I mean that point about it being very rare for people to speak out, speaks to how things like this were hard to get addressed because for all sorts of different reasons people who would have been there, just didn't feel the courage to talk and so it was hard to stand up I imagine.

RR: Well I only stood up years later and because I think I felt surrounded and protected I felt able to do that. But again I reiterate that that is not the case for a great many people, certainly back in the 80s, people who may have been at the baths without their partners' knowledge. Many of whom might have been in heterosexual relationships, but who also had sex with men on the side and they were people who were completely humiliated by this episode. And as I say, a couple even took their own lives.

MF: And yet the Prime Minister, he did mention specifically the bathhouse raids in that apology and obviously and you said it before, it's a key moment in the struggle for gay rights. And yet here you are with your conviction standing.

RR: Now that the bill has just in the last day or so received royal assent, I was quite surprised to learn that the form that you need to fill out to ask for expungement is now online and I'm going to fill it out with the full expectation that I'm going to be refused. But you know, I want to be really clear Mike that this isn't just for me personally, it's really a question of justice and fairness under the law. So it impacts all of the people who are arrested in the bathhouse raids, who are not going to have the possibility of having whatever existing records they may have, having them expunged.

MF: Ron Rosenes thanks very much for speaking to us.

RR: It's my pleasure. Thanks for inviting me.

MF: Ron Rosenes in the Toronto studio. He's the Chair of the Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network, community health advocate and researcher who was convicted as part of the bathhouse raids. Well Gary Kinsman has been listening into our conversation. Gary is professor emeritus of sociology at Laurentian University and the co-author of The Canadian War on Queers: National Security as Sexual Regulation. He is also a member of the We Demand an Apology Network, the group that pushed for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to take action in writing the historical wrongs the Canadian government committed against LGBTQ people in Canada. Gary is with us in our Toronto studio. Gary hello.

GARY KINSMAN: Good morning.

MF: So we know that those bathhouse convictions, the trucks and catacombs raid in Montreal as well, those are not included in Bill C-66. What is included?

GK: Well what's included in Bill C-66 is actually a very narrow range of offenses. So it's gross indecency and then buggery, which becomes anal intercourse in 1988. Those are the only offenses that are covered. So it's an extremely small fraction of the offenses that are historically unjust, in terms of the convictions that people have experienced for being LGBTQ to us in Canada.

MF: We're going speak to a member of the government in a moment, but what was the government's reason not to include bathhouse convictions?

GK: Well I think you really need to ask them, there's a real major glaring contradiction between Justin Trudeau on November 28, 2017, actually mentioning the body house laws and the bathhouse raids in them not being included in this legislation. The legislation also doesn't include lots of other offences, 'Indecent Act,' which has been used against men who have sex with other men for a long period of time was used to put pressure on people to give the names of people in the civil service in the military during the Purge campaigns. That's not included either. There's a whole range of other offences related to trans people related to sex workers that are not included, related to the criminalization of HIV that are not included. Their rationale, I don't know. It seems like they're only willing to deal with the offences that came out of the 1969 criminal code reform, which was a very limited, extremely partial decriminalisation of only two homosexual-related offences or else maybe they're afraid of taking away any offence that the police could still continue to use against our communities.

MF: Well what the Public Safety Minister, Ralph Goodale, has said about that is he wanted to focus initially on the "defunct offences," which you just described, to avoid, "to avoid any delay" that could be caused by including other offences. What do you make of that rationale?

GK: Well it doesn't hold up because if they really wanted to include the bodyhouse laws or indecent act or some of the other offences that were used to criminalise consensual same gender sexual and gender activity, they would be adding them to the new piece of legislation Bill C-75 that they've just introduced into the House, that's been referred to the human rights committee. It does not include getting rid of the bodyhouse laws, indecent acts, vagrancy, any of the offenses that have actually been used against people in a very broad way. So they're not actually setting up a situation that would allow for the body house laws or indecent act to be included at a later point.

MF: So how many actual Canadians will still not have their criminal records expunged under this current regulations?

GK: Thousands of people. We know that there were one thousand three hundred, actually more than 1,300 people who were charged under the body laws between 1968 and 2004. None of them will be able to use this piece of legislation to get justice.

MF: How problematic is that?

GK: That's incredible. I mean a gay activist in Montreal who was involved in the response around trucks and the various police raids on bars and bathhouses in Montreal, basically said this law is meaningless for people in Montreal because most of the people who would actually want to get expungement of the historically unjust convictions aren't covered by it.

MF: Why did it turn out like this? Was there enough consultation with the community to get where we are now?

GK: There was absolutely no consultation. When the We Demand an Apology Network actually raised questions about this, when we had meetings with the government we were told it was the Ministry of Justice that was dealing with this. As far as we know, there were no people consulted by the government at all, who had any historical expertise in terms of the criminalization of same gender eroticism in Canadian society. There might have been one legal person, but that was it. So there was no widespread consultation. There was no ability to even make a submission at the House of Commons ,it was rushed to the House of Commons. in the Senate many of the people who wanted to give submissions and there was an interesting alliance created between LGBT activists and historians and sex workers and AIDS advocates, many of them were actually excluded from being able to give testimony to the Human Rights Commission of the Senate.

MF: Just to be clear, what is it you would like?

GK: We would like for Bill C-66 to include all of these offences that were used to criminalize people in historically unjust ways. In our view, every single offence that was used to criminalize consensual same gender eroticism and gender expression should be no longer on the books and people should be able to get expungement for those convictions.

MF: And you feel that what we have right now in Canada is an opportunity.

GK: It's an opportunity that may last not that long right. I mean these opportunities don't often come, we may have a Tory government next year. Who knows what's going to happen, but we need to move now to actually expand these pieces of legislation. Now it's our hope that Bill C-75, which is the legislation that's been introduced to get rid of anal intercourse, will also now include the bodyhouse laws, indecent act, a whole series of other offences that have been used against consensual same gender eroticism.

MF: Gary Kinsman, thanks very much.

GK: Thank you.

MF: A professor emeritus of sociology at Laurentian University. Co-author of the Canadian War on Queers: National Security as Sexual Regulation. He was in our Toronto studio. Well let's hear some of the government's perspective now with Randy Boissonnault, who's the MP for Edmonton Centre and a special adviser to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on LGBT issues and he is on the phone this morning. Randy Boissonnault, hello.

RANDY BOISSONNAULT: Good morning Mike.

MF: What is your response to the concerns that you heard from both Ron Rosenes and Gary there?

RB: Well look I think Ron's perspective is a completely valid one and you heard the prime minister say so in the apology that you know the bathhouse raids were invasive, they criminalize people who are simply expressing their same sex orientation. And I think what's important is to set some context. So a year ago in June, the Prime Minister when we were raising the Pride flag in Parliament Hill, with Ralph Goodale there and Minister Jody Wilson-Raybold there, promised the community that we would have legislation that would allow people who had same sex criminal convictions that were no longer considered criminal offences to be expunged. And so that process works its way through the drafting stage into the House of Commons and I mean it's interesting when one part of the community says that a process is rushed when we as parliamentarians see a piece of legislation that goes to the House and within two weeks, thanks to unanimous consent, is able to get to the Senate, so that the Senate can deal with it. And then last week, earlier this month, the Senate passed it and then it received royal assent. So what we've done is we've responded to a clear request from the Justice Society Report from Egale, the gross indecency report, which was very clear and said look we need these offences, historical offences that are no longer on the books.

MF: But it's incomplete according to what we just heard and the confusion is partly around the whole question of the Prime Minister having brought up the bathhouse raids, you just did as well in his apology, why bring them up if you weren't going to follow through and expunge them?

RB: It's not a question of not following through Mike, it's a question of.

MF: Well it is to Ron Rosenes.

RB: We have this piece of legislation. So what has been done with the piece of legislation C-66.

MF: It's just too complicated to tackle.

RB: It's not that it's too complicated to tackle, it's we wanted to make sure that we had a piece of legislation that would do what we've done now and I think it's important for listeners to know is that there's no charge to make the application. That it's a straightforward process, that there are three simple tests that you have to have, which is that the adults consented, that they were at least 16-years-old or that they are subject to the close in age test and in the criminal code and then they can have the record expunged. If a family member wants to apply for one of their family members who has passed away that also is in legislation.

MF: Unless you're Ron Rosenes, or any of the more than 10000 Canadians who were caught up in the bathhouse raids or those raids in Montreal and I mean why should someone like Ron Rosenes, who is a strong member of a committee, 70-years-old, he's never had another conviction. Why should he still have a criminal record?

RB: Well I emphasize with Ron and where we can go now as a government is we can continue to listen to Canadians and look at how we might have other schedules attached to this legislation or have companion pieces of legislation. And Gary's correct, I mean I sit on the Justice and Human Rights Committee and we're going to be looking at that C-75 into the fall. So there is an opportunity and the Prime Minister created my role as special adviser on LGBTQ issues and the secretariat in the Privy Council Office to get this kind of work done and so I'm making sure that we work hard with the community and so is our ministers and so is our government. And so we have a win like C-66, the year before we had C-16, which protects transgendered Canadians. The conversations are open, the dialogue is open, I mean we worked with Gary through the apology process, we worked with people on this issue and I think it is definitely those conversations will continue about what else we can add to this.

MF: But he says you dropped the ball on consultation when it came to these specific laws and you didn't hear out the community. Why not?

RB: Well I think that's strong. I mean we have had the report from Egale Canada, we worked with people from across the country. It's simply not true, Mike. We had a national advisory committee of 11 people who were in their communities working and getting not just information, but consulting and reaching out to members of their community. So we're very mindful of these issues. We knew that there would be unhappiness about having this particular piece of legislation focused on the historical injustices and so that piece is where we focus. We got this work done and we're completely prepared to continue to listen and work with the community.

MF: But do you accept that it's not properly finished, this whole dossier?

RB: This work is never done, Mike. I mean we've got 40 to 60 per cent of kids on the street, LGBTQ kids. We've got seniors that are being recloseted because the older seniors don't want to know about it. The work is not done. And when it comes to protecting Canadians' LGBTQ rights, we're going to continue to do that work.

MF: Randy Boissonnault, thanks for speaking to us.

RB: Thanks Mike. All the best.

MF: You as well Randy Boissonnault, who's MP for Edmonton Centre and special adviser to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on LGBTQ issues. And he was on the phone. The CBC News is next and then we're exploring the gift of oblivion and the mystery of consciousness. That's the subtitle to author Kate Cole-Adam's new book about anaesthesia. I'm Mike Finnerty and you're listening to the summer edition of The Current.

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Under the knife and unaware? What happens when we're under anesthesia

Guest: Kate Cole-Adams, Beverly Orser

MF: Hello. I'm Mike Finnerty and you're listening to the summer edition of The Current.

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MF: Still to come, we revisit Anna Maria Tremonti's documentary on one Ontario city's efforts to adapt to climate change. She takes us to Burlington, Ontario where a so-called weather bomb in 2014 left many, many basements flooded and also kicked off citywide efforts to adapt to the new reality of disruptive weather events. First we're going under.

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MF: Modern medicine would not be possible without it. Before anaesthesia, there are stories of people preferring death to surgery or hopping off operating tables and running. Now of course, we can get a general anaesthesia, lying blissfully unaware while we're cut open, but are we truly fully unaware? Or does a part of us retain some memory of what happens when we're under? These are questions my next guest asks in her new book, "Anaesthesia: The Gift of Oblivion and the Mystery of Consciousness." Kate Cole-Adams is a journalist and author. She spent years researching anaesthesia, looking at what happens to us when we're under and she joins us from Melbourne, Australia. Hello.

KATE COLE-ADAMS: Hello.

MF: You researched this book for 13 years. You've observed surgeries, you talked to doctors and patients. You combed the scientific literature, what makes you so fascinated, so curious about anaesthesia?

KCA: Well it is one of the questions that has puzzled me because frankly you know, I'm not, I didn't study science. I failed math. I'm not quite sure, I think the journalist in me, when I first started hearing about it became fascinated at the number of things that I realized we don't know about it.

MF: You were facing your own surgery, right? Tell us about that.

KCA: Yeah, I mean I'd actually been researching anaesthesia for about six years when I discovered that I was going to have to have major surgery of my mine own. which was, it was a sort of mixed blessing really because you know I remember talking to the anaesthetic nurse and saying oh I know too much. And she said, oh that's not good.

MF: That's slightly the danger of this interview as well, as we may be learning about this.

KCA: Yeah. But you know I mean it is one of the things that you know having spent a lot of time with this subject and you know we'll touch on this, but there are some scary stories about things that can go wrong with anaesthetics. You know albeit the same as there are scary stories about things that can go wrong when you step into a plane, but you know my very strong feeling is it is simply extraordinary and fascinating. But also there are things that it's really important that we as patients actually understand before we go under. And one of the things that has struck me so powerfully while researching this whole topic is that there seems to be almost this this mental blank in the collective psyche about the fact that anaesthesia even exists. And you know and what anaesthetics do and normally we don't even meet them or we meet them, but we don't remember them because part of what anaesthetics do is mess with our memories. And so there's this odd kind of not knowing this that happens in our culture around it, anaesthesia.

MF: How does modern anaesthesia work anyway, to give us that sense or to just knock us out, put us under whatever state it is we're in.

KCA: Look, modern and aesthetics they talk about it these days as an anaesthetic cocktail and there are three main ingredients. One is called the hypnotic and that's basically the drug that kind of messes with your consciousness, then there's a powerful analgesic, a powerful painkiller, which hopefully you know kind of suppresses or reduces your body's response to the pain signals it's still getting. And the third and what I've found the most fascinating, is what's rather euphemistically known as a muscle relaxant, but it's basically a drug that completely paralyzes all of the main muscles in our body including the muscles between our ribs, which mean that when we're under we actually not only can't we breathe unaided, we can't move any part of us.

MF: And you say we don't fully understand how that works.

KCA: Well we know how the paralyzing agent works, 5hat's not the complicated part. What we still don't and when I way we, you know the doctors and scientists, don't fully understand is quite how anaesthetics work. What they do in the brain and what our experience as patients might be of that state. So you know they know enough to actually kind of deploy anaesthesia very effectively, but in real sort of scientific and philosophical terms, we actually don't have agreement on what anaesthetics do. And I think part of the thing is that in a sense we've got these amazing magical drugs that take away something that we call consciousness, but there's no agreement on how to define consciousness. So you know, but in the same way there's actually no real agreement on how to define unconsciousness or where that line is between one state and the other or whether indeed as I kind of discovered there's much less the sense of there being you know a switch, a line between the two and more that there is in the middle of that state there is a kind of gray area.

MF: When you're lying on the table, how does a doctor know whether you are under anaesthesia conscious?

KCA: I mean one of the early things that really drew me into this topic was I found something on a Sydney University website, which was from an anaesthetist. He made the point that when the patient is unconscious and paralyzed, it is actually impossible for an anaesthesiologist to know for certain that the patient is unconscious. Which isn't to say that there are all sorts of ways of telling. I mean you know traditionally, doctors look at our blood pressure and heart rate and kind of indicators like that to see if there's kind of distress in the patient. More recently, there's been the development of various EEG monitors that kind of measure the brainwave activity near the near the skull and that kind of gives us a you know a sense of what's going on. There's also another kind of, which is used very commonly is actually looking at the gas that we exhale after during an anaesthetic and that gives us a sense of what's happening in the brain. But all of these are measures of probability and I think that's the thing that's important to know and they’re pretty good measures of probability, but they can't tell you for certain what is happening inside any given patient, at any given moment.

MF: Of course, some people are not fully unconscious and there are cases you document of people waking up in the middle of surgery. Last year, Donna Penner came onto The Current to talk about her experience. It was in 2008 and she went in for exploratory abdominal surgery in a rural Manitoba hospital. And here she is describing the experience with a warning that this story may be disturbing to some:.

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VOICE: I was intubated. So I couldn't, I couldn't say a word. So then I tried to move, you know like to put up my arm or to sit up or something to let them know there was something wrong and I found pretty quickly I couldn't move. I felt everything. I felt the incision. I felt them pushing the instruments through my abdomen and into my organs. I felt them moving the instruments around and pushing my organs around as they examined them. I felt everything.

MF: How common is that kind of awareness during a surgery?

KCA: That's an amazing story. Big studies suggest that around one or two patients in a thousand will have some awareness, will be awake enough during you know some out of a surgery, that if you asked them immediately when they wake if they remember the thing they will. But the incidents, I mean experiences like Donna's are extremely rare, but they do happen. I mean when you consider the millions and millions and millions of general anaesthetics that happen every year, inevitably you know this does happen. I would make the point that these you know from what I can gather, this was much more common in the 80s, 70s and 80s, than it is now and often those experiences were really exacerbated and made worse by the denial of the doctors and the other kind of medical professionals who were dealing with them.

MF: There are doctors who don't believe that a properly anesthetised patient can remember anything consciously or otherwise. Is there a divide in the field around the whole subject?

KCA: Yeah, there probably is, but it's also true that not remembering anything doesn't mean that nothing happened and I think that that's another point. I think there is increasing awareness because there's been quite a lot of publicity over the last 20 years about patients who actually do wake. There have been enough patients who wake, there's you know, there's stories like Donna's. These stories are out there now. I think it's also true though that most doctors think that it happens to other people, whereas statistically you know in a long successful career in anaesthesiology, you know there's a very good likelihood that some of your patients will be waking, even if they're not distressed. Some may be distressed, some may not be.

MF: Can You tell us about Ian Russell and his forearm experiment?

KCA: Oh, Ian Russell is a fascinating guy. He's an anaesthesiologist from Hole in northern England and he did this extraordinary experiment or started a series of experiments in the 90s where he essentially got a device. It's a technique called the isolated forearm technique and basically he kind of puts a blood pressure cuff on the arms of women as they're going under surgery. He mainly does gynaecological surgery. He puts the blood pressure cuff on before the anaesthetic and also including the paralyzing agent goes in, which means that when they're anaesthetized, their right hand remains unparalyzed. And what he would then do would be during the surgery he would say to them, Jenny this is Dr. Russell. Can you hear me? If you can hear me, I want you to squeeze my hand. And then he'd ask you know if they responded to that, he'd then say, if you're in pain I want you to squeeze again or squeeze twice.

MF: And it works?

KCA: The first time he did. Well the first time he did that he actually stopped the experiment before the end because two thirds of those women had squeezed and 40 per cent of them had said that they were in pain or had squeezed in response to his question.

MF: 40 per cent, but they were under.

KCA: Yeah, but to all intents and purposes when you looked at them, they were under. And what was interesting was when they woke up, none of them had any conscious memories of any of this at all. But Ian Russell made the point that he said, well you know we think that we're putting patients under general anaesthesia, but actually perhaps what we're doing is general amnesia. I don't think anyone actually thinks that most of us you know when we go under an anaesthetic are wide awake and can experience everything and just forget it afterwards. But there is something going on there and someone needs to just kind of come up with it you know they say well that state where you can squeeze someone's hand in response to a question, you know they sort of say well it's not consciousness, it may not be um consciousness, but it's not what we would see as consciousness. Ian Russell says look if they're squeezing my hand, they're conscious. You know I should also say that these, the experiments and studies like Ian Russell's they're very small in the greater scheme of things. There's very little money available, there's very little, very few research dollars for this kind of investigation and yet I found these questions really fascinating because well because they are.

MF: What should doctors and patients take away from your book?

KCA: Well I suppose two different things. For doctors, I would say the message is to treat your patients as if they can hear. There is enough to indicate that you know the brain is active doing anaesthesia. Anaesthetic drugs don't work in the fingers or the toes, they work in the brain. We don't really know what's happening and there's absolutely no doubt the patients who've woken and who have heard doctors saying friendly reassuring things, have had much better outcomes than ones who've woken and heard things that terrified them. So I would say respect and tenderness for your patients is incredibly important and I think it's probably an under valued resource. For patients, I would say there are actually a whole lot of things that you can do to improve the quality of your anaesthetic experience. And there are ideas and thoughts and mindsets you can take into an anaesthetic that will actually really significantly improve your outcome when you wake up. So, I mean it's really fascinating.

MF: Kate, thanks very much for speaking to us.

KCA: Thanks very much Mike.

MF: Kate Cole-Adams, she's a journalist and she has a new book called "Anaesthesia: The Gift of Oblivion and the Mystery of Consciousness." And we spoke to her from Melbourne, Australia. Well their job is to suspend temporarily someone's life or at least their mind and for more on exactly how anaesthetists do that, we're joined by Dr. Beverly Orser. She's the Chair of the Department of Anaesthesia in the Faculty of Medicine at University of Toronto. She's an anaesthetist at Sunnybrook hospital and she's with us in our Toronto studio. Dr. Orser, hello.

BEVERLY ORSER: Thank you.

MF: What do you make of what Kate Cole-Adams had to say and you looked at her book too.

BO: Right. Well Kate has a really interesting perspective and I think she did her research and she's really probed a question that is intriguing and as is remains unanswered. How do the drugs work? How did the change brain function? And she highlights some interesting facts and that is that the anaesthetic state really isn't binary, it's not on and off, but rather represents a continuum between being conversive and consciousness to be profoundly unconscious.

MF: And what do you make of the idea that some patients can have hidden memories from their surgeries?

BO: Right. So I think the first thing to highlight and Kate mentions this too is that anaesthesia now is very safe. And the incidence of awareness is low and she quoted, one to two thousand and I think the more current statistics suggest it may be lower than that, but it can occur and we're certainly mindful of that and aware of that. And for that reason, I think we're monitoring as closely as we can the concentration of drugs that are being administered. In some higher risk patients we're using more memory blocking drugs. And I think since the 90s, when we've understood that this problem exists, if patients are at risk for because for example they're too unstable to give a large dose of anaesthetic, we ask just like Kate says, it's quiet. And I think the most important piece is that in the unlikely and rare event it occurs, is that there's an open dialogue about it and the patient's experience is important to know and that they are reassured that that this why this might have happened and so forth. It's not ignored.

MF: So how certain are you in your daily work as an anaesthetist, that your patients are unconscious.

BO: Right. So the vast, vast, vast majority of patients, it's very unlikely that they're going to have a problem. And some patients that are like I said high-risk, say I work at Sunnybrook Health Science Centre, a trauma patient comes in is very unstable and we can't administer as much drug as we're comfortable to do, I ask and circle back and reassure and probe.

MF: What do they say typically?

BO: That they don't remember that, that it's very unlikely that did occur.

MF: And what do you make of that Ian Russell experiment when he put the forearm cuff on and there was a response, even though they were under these women, it's just that at the moment they were for some reason clenched their fists?

BO: Right.

MF: They had no recollection of it after.

BO: That's a fascinating experiment and the reason he put the cuff on was because the patients also received relaxants and he wanted to prevent the drug from getting down to the arm. And so that they could move in response. Again, it's a range of depth and similarly, if we're concerned, we ask the patient to open their eyes or can you squeeze my hands and probe that during the anaesthetic state. It could be, in a large number, there was a surprisingly large number of patients in the experiment that responded to the stimulus, so I don't know what dosing was involved there or you know what the depth of anaesthesia was. But it doesn't occur regularly in an operating room and we ask if we're concerned, squeeze my hand, like I said open your eyes.

MF: How much do we know about what happens to the brain when it's under anaesthesia?

BO: Well it's fascinating. We use these drugs a lot. They are life saving, life transforming, but we don't know enough about how they work. They're used empirically, but we've learned a lot in the last 20 to 30 years. So the short story is that our brain normally functions because of balance between excitation, inhibition, the yin and yang of the brain and most of the drugs we use hijack the receptors or the sensors that mediate the inhibitory chemicals in our brain. And they shut down the activity of the brain cells and neurons and the networks that form memory and consciousness. So in a sense the drugs are hijacking the normal systems that are part of the delicate balance between excitation and inhibition in the brain.

MF: And what don't we know then?

BO: Oh we don't know. There's so much to learn. It's interesting because anaesthetics are a wonderful probe for consciousness, memory, awareness, who are we. And if we really understood how anaesthetics work, we'd understand consciousness and so there is there is much work to do. So they are, the drugs have the ability to perturb a system and so we gain some insights into the basic physiology of who we are.

MF: What are some of the recent developments?

BO: I think the big developments are number one we understand that the drugs target specific receptors in the brain, so very, very specific proteins that mediate these different behaviours. That's the first I think major insight and we've gotten a much better understanding of exactly what receptors are involved in those actions. We've also learned that the different components of the anaesthetic state like consciousness, unconsciousness, lack of memory, pain control are mediated by different populations or receptors, different brain regions. It's not a global neuro-depressive state. It's very much a multi-targeted effect that creates a constellations of behaviours that allow the patients to tolerate surgery. So that's the first thing. The second thing is that when you record EEG or image the patient's brain, what happens during the appropriate level of anaesthesia is that there's dysfunctional rhythms that are set up in the brain that prevent the input from the periphery coming up to the cortex, probably forming consciousness. So you get into these funky rhythms that don't let normal sensory processing occur and the sensory information isn't accessible to the cortex where we would normally process.

MF: But do you actually see those, when you talk about those rhythms, how much of that can you actually monitor?

BO: It's difficult. So there are monitors available commercial or just EEG-based monitors and more and more we're using in the operating room to try and judge depth of anaesthesia, but it's in the precise science. The EEG changes depending on the particular patient characteristics: age, combination of drugs and it's not a particularly reliable tool. If it was things would be easy and we're looking for the right brain tool that allows us to say is the patient conscious? Are they remembering? But right now we used more indirect evidence, sort of a constellation of information that comes in about their obvious state, their blood pressure and so forth.

MF: Kate says there's no agreement on how to define consciousness or unconsciousness. Is that true about anaesthetists in your experience.

BO: It's a hard word.

MF: That's the first time I bumped into that this whole interview.

BO: You're doing a great job.

MF: Is there like a divide I guess in understanding consciousness or the way people see it?

BO: There's no straight line and it varies with the patient, it varies with the depth of or the intensity of the stimulus. And so you are judging minute by minute when you're in the operating room, what is the appropriate dose. For example, the dose that you might need just as the patient goes off to sleep may be very different than when you're in an invasive part of the surgical procedure and things are adjusted accordingly. And that's why people train as long as they do to develop the skills to be able to make those judgments.

MF: People on the operating table are obviously intensely vulnerable, so when you're putting them under, how do you approach them?

BO: Right. So you're absolutely right. You're probably, there's no greater vulnerability than being under anaesthesia.

MF: They're in your heads.

BO: Yes and for that reason certainly anaesthesiologists consider this a tremendous privilege and responsibility to be caring for these patients. I mean they've made the choice to spend their lives relieving pain and suffering and it is a tremendous responsibility to take care of those patients. We're all very mindful of that. There is no such thing as a routine anaesthetic and I think it's the nature of the work that you accept that responsibility and you do the best you can for each and every patient.

MF: And what message do you have for people who are listening and they are going to be people listening who are facing the prospect of surgery and anaesthesia.

BO: Right. I think we're very, very fortunate in Canada to have a fantastic healthcare system and I think the vast majority of patients will have no problem undergoing anaesthesia. If you do have concerns, you can raise them with your anaesthesiologist, your care providers at the time. I think these events intra-operative awareness are rare and they often occur in subpopulations that for whatever reason couldn't get the right amount drug. Again, a very rare situation. If they're concerned, just ask.

MF: Dr. Orser, it's a pleasure to meet you. Thank you very much for coming in.

BO: Thank you very much.

MF: Dr. Beverly Orser is the Chair of the Department of Anaesthesia in the Faculty of Medicine at University of Toronto. She's an anaesthetist at Sunnybrook and she was in the Toronto studio. And coming up in our next half hour, adapting to climate change, not in the rainforest or the Arctic, but in a suburban Ontario city with plenty of wet basements. I'm Mike Finnerty. You're listening to the summer edition of The Current.

[Music: Theme]

Is Canada prepared for climate change? Adaptation is key, say experts

Guest: Blair Feltmate

[Music: Adaptation Theme]

LARRY FREIBURGER: We're not going to climb up on anything. We are not can take anything apart. But I'm going to stay pretty close to your home. So we will start looking at this particular area and…

AMT: Larry Freiburger is skulking around a townhouse with what looks like a taser.

LF: Let's walk over to this window and if you take that moisture meter...

AMT: Well, okay. It's a moist your meter.

LF: And push it against the concrete anywhere, in or around the window. Okay. So you have nothing there…

AMT: Although the only moisture around here today is on his hand.

[Sound: Rattle]

VOICE 1: Okay, so there is a little moisture there.

LF: Not much. Touch my hand with it. Squeeze it.

[Sound: Squeak]

LF: I have just moistened my hand. So that is, if there is a lot of moisture that's what you're going to hear.

CAROL SOLIS: Okay! We are good [laughs].

LF: So you are pretty good. Yes you are good.

AMT: He is here to assess whether Carol Solaces lovely new home is vulnerable to flooding. And he's armed with gadgets and questions.

LF: Do you have your eaves troughs cleaned on a regular basis? You know your cell type by any chance? You don't have any rain barrel, so you look at your foundation. I mean we talked about looking at it to see if there's any cracks or any problems in the foundation.

CS: Well, Larry, no.

LF: Thank you for being honest.

AMT: His biggest concern seems to be a storm drain on the common property, just behind your back fence.

LF: Because if there's a lot of water from a rain event, that has only a certain capacity it normally takes your water but other units water, and if that overflows it comes up and backs in. So, not to frighten you, but something that I'd be concerned about. So, what are your concerns about your basement in terms of flooding?

CS: I actually feel pretty good in this house. Yes. It's the last house that was the house of hell that we had two sewage floods.

AMT: Carol has learned the hard way. You can't be too careful.

CS: So every time it rained when I was in that house my daughter and I would just look at one another with total freight on her face. We'd go run downstairs to the basement to see if everything was okay.

AMT: They moved into that last house in March of 2014. She and her daughter found a house to share with her elderly parents. Two months later the first sewage flood hit.

CS: It was a living hell. It affected my entire family's health and well-being. It affected my business. We moved into this bungalow because my stepfather was not well. My parents sold their condo. I sold my house and I ended up making the basement my space. I had beautiful furniture I had Asian rugs and it turned into a living nightmare.

AMT: And then barely a week after she'd cleaned up from the first time round, an even bigger storm hit Burlington.

[Music]

ANNOUNCER 1: Top story is the clean-up in Burlington after an unprecedented storm hit the city right around this time last night.

AMT: It was August 4th 2014.

ANNOUNCER 2: What a weather forecaster called it a weather bomb.

ANNOUNCER 3: The torrential rain was relentless it left a big section of the city under water and at a standstill.

ANNOUNCER 4: The aftermath, today. Parts of the city look for all the world like disaster zones.

[Music]

[Indistinct chatter]

ANNOUNCER 4: But homeowners inspecting the damage from shoulder high water in their basements.

VOICE 2: We need a new furnace. We need a new water heater. We need a washing machine, dryer. And then on top of that you've got flooring and drywall. I mean… just… I cannot even think. It's overwhelming.

AMT: Within hours, thirty five hundred homes in Burlington. Ten percent of the houses in the city were flooded. The rain fell so fast that it filled up the city's storm water and sewage system. People described sewage spewing up like a fountain from their basement drains.

CS: I lost 80 percent of my whole life belongings. I had the highest claim from that sewage flint, and just in content alone, it would have reached at about $400000. So you're not talking about the repairs of the basement now, you're talking about - Also we have my daughter and I had to move out. We had to live in places. So the claim was over half a million dollars, if you put the two of them together. The loss was just astronomical. But I mean memories, pictures, childhood, toys you name it. And it took me two years to literally get my life, my head, back together to realize the loss and to let it go. Anything that is precious or memories or anything of value do not put it your basement. I can't stress on this more. Now I'm a very strong person but I also have attachments to things that meant a lot to me, and to have lost most of them was devastating. Someone out there may think oh my gosh. Listen to this. I saw a little doll that I had when I was five years old. My father gave it to me. And it was one of these little miniature dolls with long blond hair. And if you had seen the smile I had when I found it and it wasn't ruined, it was just crazy, because it flooded a beautiful memory that I had. Even sitting here talking about it, I did not think it would bring up some emotions but obviously it is [sobs].

AMT: One woman, one house. Now multiply it over the past few years. Windsor, Gatineau, Calgary, High River, Rigaud, Oka, Montreal, Toronto, Mindon Hills. The numbers of municipalities where the water gushes into homes at dizzying speeds is too long to mention here. Carol wanted out of her house when she put it on the market. She disclosed its history as the law requires. When she went to insure her new place, the townhouse where she is now, her insurance company dumped her. Again, one woman one house. Multiply it.

[Music]

BLAIR FELTMATE: There is no Plan B. The plan B is you sell your house at a tremendous discount and then somebody else inherits the problem. There is no way to cheat the system. We've got to get the risk out of the system.

AMT: Blair Feltmate is on a bit of a mission on this front. He's one of the minds behind the home flood assessment that you heard Larry conducting on Carol's house. He is also the head of the Intact Center on Climate Adaptation at the University of Waterloo.

BF: The frequency, duration the intensity of storms is much greater today than it was in the past. People need to understand that the weather of the past is not a good predictor of the weather of the future. The storms that are going to hit us now and going forward are going to be bigger than anything we've experienced in the past. And that is a categorical certainty.

AMT: We're far from the panic of anyone's flood here on this sunny morning with only the buzz of the cicadas in the background. But do not be lulled. How are wet basements, the canary in the coal mine, when it comes to the cost of climate change?

BF: The number one impact in Canada, in reference to climate change extreme weather events in the expression of extreme weather events, is flooding. Too much water…

AMT: The numbers tell the story. A decade ago, total payments for catastrophic losses in Canada averaged hundred million dollars a year. Up to now it's in the billions. The biggest factor in those payouts is wet basements and flooding. And while some political leaders still want to debate whether there even is such a thing as climate change, the insurance companies long ago connected the dots and started calculating.

BF: The insurance industry understands climate change extraordinarily well. I would say probably better than any other industry in the country by far.

AMT: We're talking about the monetary costs of this. Are there other hidden costs to this kind of upheaval?

BF: There is a giant cost associated with this outside of financial, and that is the psychosocial or the mental health costs associated with flooding. And indeed what we're realizing now in communities where there's been, generally speaking repeat of basement flooding, not just a one off but they've had it twice now. The amount of time that people miss from work - lost time from work - They require special medications to help them cope with the stress associated with the loss, because you have to remember for most people, the vast majority of people that own a home, their home is the primary investment vehicle in their life. This is their retirement fund and they're now seeing their retirement fund go almost literally down the drain. Perhaps the water is not going down the drain fast enough. But they're seeing their retirement disappear. So the psycho-social or mental health stress associated with this is enormous. So now the life and health insurers are getting involved in the equation of also seeing it in their best interest to not see large scale flooding occur across the country.

AMT: So when you hear about the Canadian community where there is a lot of flooding, almost like flash flooding where it's a torrential rain storm there's sudden flooding, what do you think of first?

BF: One of the things people have to realize there is no such thing as a safe community, because the actual dynamic of storms have changed now, such that we can have microburst storms with let's say 175 millimeters of rain, over a six hour period. And it's it's almost impossible to predict where those events are going to occur but it is highly predictable that they will occur. Preparedness or adaptation is effectively the gift that keeps on giving. Because once you've prepared every storm that would occur after then, that otherwise might have resulted in flooding in excess of damage, is now not having that impact. So you're far better off to prepare and get ahead of the curve than just keep waiting for these things to happen.

AMT: The mayor of Burlington, Rick Goldring, came into office already understanding the connection and the need to adapt to a new reality.

RICK GOLDRING: I used to think that when you say adaptation you're throwing up the white flag and surrendering to climate change. But the reality is that we know with where we are with regard to increases in temperature and more extreme weather events that we do have to adapt. Because temperatures, even if we reduce carbon dramatically now, the temperatures are still going to climb and we're still going to get more and more and more extreme weather events. So adaptation is as crucial as medication.

AMT: Intellectually he got it. And then it hit him in the gut. That same day in August of 2014, one hundred eighty five millimeters of rain in less than eight hours will do that.

RG: The storm came out of nowhere. It was so intense. It wasn't just that total volume. It was how it fell in the concentrated area that it fell in. One term that our weather expert used was it was a weather bomb.

AMT: The water inundated his house too.

RG: So, this area was flooded.

AMT: On the main floor of Mayor Goldring’s house, he points to where the water level rose above the backyard pool and in through the doors.

RG: The water came in, and this was overland flooding that came in. And if you can see the bend in the ladder there in the pool the actual level of the water was above the bend. So we barricaded this area we took everything out.

AMT: A mixture of storm and sewage water was also gushing in from the basement drain.

RG: And I think - I believe the water was about there.

AMT: So how high is that?

RG: That's about five feet.

AMT: So I mean you wouldn't have been able to even come down. You could just look at it from the stairs. When you first saw it but what did it look like? Was the stuff floating around?

RG: Yes. Stuff was floating around. That picture over there as a last picture of my dad and mom and sister, with my dad alive, before he died a couple of months later at her wedding. And that was floating on a table down here, where we were able to preserve the picture because it was floating on a table.

AMT: Three years later, Burlington is ahead of the curve, when it comes to adaptation to prevent future flooding. The city's tripled its budget for storm water management. It offers homeowners an impressive laundry list of incentives to flood proof their homes.

RG: At the region of Halton, on our website, actually, the region of Halton. You can go in and plug your address in and the website will tell you what programs you're eligible for, as far as flood proofing your home. So one of the programs that we have is a program to disconnect the eavestroughs from the sanitary sewer system, and that's for older homes that were built prior to 1975. It will cover 100% up to $500, will cover 100% of the cost to disconnect the weeping tile and install a sump pump, up to $5000. We will cover 50% of a backflow valve up to $675. And we also cover 50% of the cost of putting a camera through your sanitary sewer lateral up to $2000. So, all told I believe it's eight or nine thousand dollars of funding that is available.

AMT: Burlington also works with the Province of Ontario and the Intact Center to offer a home flood assessment such as the one Carol Solis just got. Rick Goldring, like his constituents, has learned that a few basic changes in every home can change the flooding fate of an entire neighborhood.

RG: Most of the impact, and minimizing flood risk, really is on the homeowners’ property. Yes the city has to have good storm water programs and so on and so forth. But the being able to take control of the issue yourself, as a homeowner, and invest in your home improving flood proofing is absolutely critical. And it's interesting our next door neighbor, on August the 4th of 2014, did not have any water in their basement one bit. The neighbors on either side across the street did, and they may have a little higher elevation but they also had a backflow valve. And it's interesting that I approved a program, as a member of Regional Council, prior to the flood. I put my hand up to support a funding program for a backflow valve, as well as some of the other programs. And I just sort of ignored it personally because we've had this hose for 20 years. We have never had water in the basement before. I didn't think there was any sense of urgency for us to do anything. So I'm a little embarrassed about that but obviously we've improved our house dramatically now.

[Sound: Footsteps]

AIMEE THOMAS: Come on down here.

AMT: A few kilometers from the mayor's house, I'm heading into another suburban basement. This one with Aimee Thomas.

AT: Here is the mess. So this was a fully finished basement. And it had a room here – [Sound: Cat mews] Excuse my cat he is not well.

AMT: That's Molly a fluffy fat cat with her own flood experience.

AT: She was in the basement. Both my cats were in the basement and they climbed up high. We had shelving units and everything. It was really nice down here and she climbed up high to get away. So, my husband had to swim in and get them.

AMT: The basement of her bungalow is split into two levels. Both were underwater in a matter of hours.

AT: It was like a geyser. It was like you know you go to the kids’ water parks and the water comes out. As it rose, our stuff started to float. Like our fridge float. Like it unplugged itself and then went across the basement was floating. Our freezer, we had a freezer too and it did the same thing.

AMT: It left as quickly as it came. But the damage was done. [To Aimee] But this was sewer water what kind of mess did you come back to?

AT: Well we came back to a lot of like feces, as well as other things that can be flushed down toilets, that probably shouldn't be flushed down toilets. And yet it was on everything. It was everywhere. And the smell was so putrid that you… you - It was awful.

AMT: They thought they had planned ahead. They had a rider on the insurance specifically to cover sewage backup, only to discover the fine print left them without replacement costs. They found themselves forced to do their own renos. Her home daycare business was shut down. The Thomas’s, with three kids under six, were out of their house for a month. [To Aimee] So what have you done now? What has changed in your house?

AT: Oh my goodness. What haven't we done? We've put in a backflow valve. We put in a sump pump, and we've put all new plumbing under our house. We had a scope put through with the front, and now we're just making sure that our backyard is graded so that the water isn't coming towards my house. It's going away from my house. So we've also had someone come in and put all new eavestroughing in, a larger eavestrough, and having it point away from our house and we've put double in, so that the water is being drained away.

AMT: How do you feel when there's a torrential rain now?

AT: Not going to lie. You know, you do have that pit of your stomach feel, and right after it happened we would go down and we'd look at the hole continually. Even in the middle of the night, if you heard it you would go down and just take a look. And we had to really, really stop doing that because it was starting to affect, obviously, our children as well because they were like “oh is it going to flood?” And so we had to be positive and tell them that we're good now and we are good. And as time goes by it's much better. We're much better now. But we've made sure that we've done everything we can do so that it doesn't happen again. You know, people need to start putting their money in their house in the proper places. Like I would love to have a granite countertop and all new, you know, a whole new kitchen, but that's just not the best place for the money. The best place for that money is to make sure that you have a sub pump and a backflow valve. Make sure that you have a good roof on your house because you don't want to have issues coming in that way. Sure, yes it costs more money to do that but that's really where your money should be going.

[Music]

SOUNDCLIP

AMT: Well let's face it; a backflow valve isn't as sexy as a marble backsplash. But those people in Burlington will tell you that infrastructure has never been more interesting or important.

MF: That documentary was produced by the Current's Kristin Nelson and it first aired on September the 5th, 2017. And since that documentary first aired Canadians have seen a lot more flooding from New Brunswick to British Columbia and many places in between. A new study shows that Canadians who experience flooding are having a hard time coping long after they've cleaned up the mess left behind. Blair Feltmate and his team conducted that study. He heads the Intact Centre on Climate Adaptation at the University of Waterloo and you just met him at Anna Maria's documentary. And he's back in our Toronto studio to tell us about his new findings. Blair Feltmate. Hello.

BLAIR FELTMATE: Good morning.

MF: In the documentary we hear Amy Thomas describe that pit of the stomach feeling, right. How common is that feeling for people who have experienced that sort of flooding?

BF: It's very common and indeed the study we did really followed on the momentum of hearing those types of stories. We went back to Burlington three years after they experienced this major flood that's just been described and we ran, we presented a questionnaire to people in the community to some people who were flooded, some people who weren't flooded to as a control group and what we found was that for people who had experienced basement flooding that three years later, when they were asked to score the stress they felt when there's a big storm that day, on a scale from zero to five, five being the worst, to score themselves on how much stress do you feel, 48 per cent of them ranked them selves at a 4 or 5 as being highly stressed every time it rains. And this is three years later, three years after they had initially been flooded and they would cite experiences like if there's a big storm that night, my husband and I are up in the middle of the night checking the basement for flood waters or the kids come home from school, the first thing they do is go into the basement to see is there water in the basement. But we found it was 48 per cent of people ranked themselves as highly stressed three years later.

MF: And there are real consequences to that, of course.

BF: Oh absolutely. And now what we're doing is we're tracking the degree to which prescriptions to deal with mental health stress may be realizing elevations in the number of costs of prescriptions issued to cope with this stress.

MF: Have you got any early indication or data on that?

BF: No we have anecdotal data right now, but the first step was simply to see do we actually have quantitative evidence that people are highly stressed? That was step number one and we now have that.

MF: Tell us about how you conducted this study because that's an interesting story isn't it and a bit surprising for you.

BF: Yes, we went door to door in the community of Burlington, on streets that were flooded, others that weren't and we wanted a reasonable sample size of homes that were experienced basement flooding and there was a control group, those who hadn't experienced flooding.

MF: You thought you might get the brush off of it.

BF: Oh exactly. It's about a 15 to 20 minute questionnaire and I thought I'm not even sure this study will work because who's going to spend 20 minutes with us at their door, giving us information and responding to our questions about basement flooding. Well, it turned out that 44 per cent of people, if people were home, 44 per cent of them said yes to the interview and we even had to change the style of the interview. First I had people going out on their own, just a single person. It turned out no, in many, many cases people were being invited into the homes, down into the basement, people wanted to show them where the water watermark was. Then they were booting up their computers to show them pictures of what the basement looked like in flooding, when it was flooded. So we knew right away, when almost 50 per cent of people wanted to vent that we were really onto something as per the stress that they had felt.

MF: I mean what does that indicate to you the fact that they so wanted to spend time with the people coming around and asking these questions?

BF: Well the frustration is real, that's for sure. It was almost that they wanted someone to vent to, a receptive ear. And so now the question is how do we use that information to drive best practices to lower the probability of a basement flooding going forward.

MF: And how do you do that?

BF: Well there's a couple things and by the way one more quick point to mention is that we've also found that the average person who experienced a basement, a flooded basement, they missed seven days from work.

MF: Yeah, which is a considerable amount, having missed seven days, having to take time off of their leave entitlement normally.

BF: That's right. Exactly. So the question is what do you do about it? There are certain things people should be doing. If you own a home, for example, number one today, is call your broker and find out your insurance broker and find out what am I covered for if my basement were to flood. If I had water back up through the sewer system or through the side window of the house into the basement, what am I covered for? What am I not covered for? And do I have adequate coverage? That's point number one. Vast majority of people do not know what they're covered for.

MF: And that's what Amy just said in the documentary too, she got caught by surprised.

BF: Yes absolutely. And number two, as was referenced in the documentary, there's a heck of a lot that people can do around their own home to lower the probability of realizing a flooded basement and indeed if you go to the Intact Centre's website, Intact Centre on Climate Adaptation, you'll come to an icon very quickly on home flood protection that will give you 10 things you can do around the outside of the house, the inside of the house, to lower the probability of realizing a basement flood. And it can be as simple as for example, disconnecting the downspout from eave trough system that goes into the weeping tile system. Cut it off, put an elbow on, direct water away from the foundation. Make sure you have battery backup supply for your sub pump in the basement because the time you need the sub pump is when the big storms hit. The electricity goes out so it doesn't do you any good. Plastic covers over window wells are enormously useful to keep water from filling a window well and subsequently flowing into the basement and something as simple as just contouring around the house to direct water away from the foundation. So there's a lot that can be done that it's not absolute that you can't have a flooded basement by doing these things, but the probability of realizing a flooded basement can be made much lower.

MF: You know what you just described though is such a huge amount of work just listening to the list almost exhausts me. Because you know, so much resources, so much money, so much time, so much stress.

BF: That's right, but it literally, you can do most of the things we're describing here around a house or maybe a Saturday and a Sunday morning without special expertise, for a very small amount of money. And you've got to ask yourself okay was that effort worth it, as compared to going through the horror of a flooded basement.

MF: Blair Feltmate, thank you very much.

BF: Thank you for having me.

MF: Blair is the head of the Intact Centre on Climate Adaptation at University of Waterloo and he was in our Toronto studio. And that is our program for today. Stay tuned though because on Radio One, up next is 19-year-old Canadian pop star, Shawn Mendes. And remember, you can always take The Current with you for wherever you're going in the summer on the CBC Radio app. It's free from the App Store or Google Play. I'm Mike Finnerty. Thanks for listening to the summer edition of The Current.

[Music: Theme]

June 25, 2018 episode transcript

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