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The Current Transcript for June 28, 2017

Host: Mike Finnerty

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

Canada as we talk about it today is a myth that acknowledges only the history of Canadians of European descent. Celebrating Canada 150 is not harmless.

MIKE FINNERTY: Canada Day—it's complicated for many Canadians. And yet a survey this week suggests that many more people this year will answer the call and attend Canada Day events. Coming up—how to toast Canada and acknowledge the country's difficult history. Also today, the North.

SOUNDCLIP

Oh, gorgeous. Beautiful. It's the oldest sea ice in the northern hemisphere. It's up to three and a half, 5,000 years old. They’re now absolutely disappearing. We're down to about 300 square kilometres.

MF: Scientist John England on the majesty of the Canadian North and the breathtaking changes it's undergoing. I’m Mike Finnerty. Welcome to the summer edition of The Current.

Can you celebrate Canada 150 and still respect Indigenous rights?

Guests: Roberta Jamieson, Vikram Vij, Doreen Nicoll

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: Happy birthday, Canada.

VOICE 2: Hundred-fifty years young.

VOICE 3: You don’t turn 150 every year.

VOICE 4: I love you. You have nourished me. I’ve thrived here.

MF: Canada 150. Saturday is the big day and the excitement has been building for months. Canadians are feeling conflicted about all the flag waving and fireworks. Here's what some Manitobans had to say when we asked them if they believed they could celebrate Canada 150 and still respect Indigenous rights and history.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: It certainly is difficult, given that there is a group of people here that were here for thousands of years. And for another group of people to come in and if you will arbitrarily want to celebrate 150 years seems odd.

VOICE 2: My heart is not in there. What I see is a story of disrespect to the First Nations of this country.

VOICE 3: When you look at residential school and the things that happen to them and how their land got taken, they weren't supposed to speak their language. They were abused. So I don't think people should celebrate 150.

VOICE 4: Yes, I do. I'm proud to be Canadian. I grew up in Winnipeg. I had absolutely no idea what was going on. So the fact that I'm proud to be a Canadian doesn't mean that I don't think Canada has made some horrible mistakes in its history. Overall, we're a pretty good country.

MF: We're going to keep that conversation going with three people who have given a lot of thought about how to approach Canada Day this year. Roberta Jamieson is the president and CEO of Indspire— that's an Indigenous-led registered charity that invests in education. And she's in Toronto. Vikram Vij is one of Canada's best known chefs and cookbook authors and the co-owner of Vancouver restaurants Vij’s, Rangoli and My Shanti. He's also a Canada 150 ambassador and he'll be speaking at the official celebration in Ottawa on Saturday. He's in Vancouver. Doreen Nicoll is a social justice activist and freelance writer in Toronto who says she won't be celebrating Canada Day this year. She's also in Toronto. Hello to you all.

MANY VOICES: Good morning.

VIKRAM VIJ: Namaste to all the Indigenous brothers and sisters of First Nations, Inuit people and Metis people.

MF: Roberta, what do you think of the mixed feelings we just heard from Winnipeggers there?

ROBERTA JAMIESON: Well, I think they're very honest feelings and I certainly respect that. We're reading now that a number of First Nations leaders plan to protest. There are people who will sit out the event. There are people who will light birthday candles throughout Canada. And I certainly respect and understand all of these views. That's partly the beauty of the country in my opinion. There's no question that it has been a tragic history that Indigenous peoples have had with Canada. We started on the right path. At the time we met, our people chose—underline chose—to treaty with settlers and then things went terribly wrong. And we went from being a treaty partner to a prime minister of the first Canada calling our ceremonies “debauchery of the worst kind.” Our people were outlawed. Our traditional dancing, our religion, our languages and we went through an extremely dark period and we are living with the legacy of that period today. Having said that, I'm more optimistic in 2017 than I have been in my life. I will celebrate the resilience of First Nations, Metis and Inuit people. I will celebrate the fact that we are still here. I will celebrate that we are willing remarkably to open our hearts and our minds and be still willing to share with other Canadians the gifts the Creator has given us. So I'll celebrate those things heartily.

MF: Vikram, what did you think when you heard the mixed feelings from some Canadians that we spoke to in Winnipeg?

VIKRAM VIJ: No, it really hurts, but acknowledging and admitting to the mistakes that we have made is actually the first road to recovery. You know diversity is independent thinking, but still being together. And so if Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela can forgive and reconcile with the people who so brutally colonized those nations and they can come around, maybe there's a lesson to be learned for us that you know what? Yes, we have made mistakes but now's the time. Now that we have 150 years old, let's make sure that no First Nations person, no Metis, no Inuit, no Muslim, no Hindu, no Jewish person, no person of any religion ever gets discriminated for their belief or their faith from now on. That's the promise we need to make and democracy is a constant work in progress. We must believe in it.

MF: Vikram, why did you accept to become a Canada 150 ambassador?

VIKRAM VIJ: Because I felt humbled and honoured that as a Canadian from India, and an immigrant that came only in 1990 to Canada, was asked to represent. So I'm not just representing Canada. I am the best unappointed ambassador of India in this country and to all the new immigrants that have come here over the past 150 years. So we must celebrate even what they have achieved and we must accept that the mistakes were made, but now's the time to sit down and talk about it and reconcile and make sure that every ceremony everywhere we go, we acknowledge the people of this land. And I respect everybody's opinion and whatever they feel like doing. If they don't want to celebrate, I'll totally respect it as well. But let me celebrate it because I feel really proud to be a Canadian.

MF: Doreen Nicoll, tell us about your decision not to celebrate Canada's day, its 150th anniversary of Confederation.

DOREEN NICOLL: I really can't celebrate all that this makes us. I need Canada to give me something to celebrate. I can't celebrate a sliding scale of who deserves services and who doesn't, who gets help and who doesn't. That infrastructure’s not put in place. I need something to celebrate. It's very well that the government has apologized, but where's the action?

MF: Did you used to celebrate Canada Day?

DOREEN NICOLL: I did. And unfortunately, I hate to admit that I celebrated at Joseph Brant house in Burlington. It should be called Tyandaga.

MF: So when did the change happen where you now feel so differently?

DOREEN NICOLL: I was asked to review Alanis Obomsawin’s film, We Can't Make the Same Mistake Twice. I started watching all of her films. So I have a lineup of films, not just Alanis’ films, but films that will help people understand the history and see that I can't celebrate this day.

MF: And when you listen to Vikram talk about how he has embraced his role as Canada 150 ambassador and how he, in his words, loves the flag, does that resonate at all with you?

DOREEN NICOLL: I respect his right to celebrate and I understand immigrants and refugees have a lot to celebrate. But once we've known this history, we can't put our heads back in the sand and we have to acknowledge that this is wrong.

VIKRAM VIJ: But nobody's not acknowledging. I think the important part is, as you have just said, to keep constantly that pressure on that the water, the air and the land is used sustainably by all and everybody who is Canadian, including people of all faiths and farmers. So when I talked to a farmer in Saskatchewan or when I talked to a fisherman in P.E.I. and they have been toiling the land with respect and fishing the ocean sustainably, they are leaving legacies behind. So let's leave a legacy of compassion and welcoming people and put the pressure on the government to make sure that they perform at what they have promised us to do.

ROBERTA JAMIESON: I want to speak about a couple of things that have been raised now. The intergenerational trauma, the way that our people have been treated in Canada—it is a fact today. Open the newspaper and you will see continue to see young people in our communities taking their lives, water that we cannot drink, homes that we cannot live in. Overcrowded situation. These are all facts. These are all our Canada, folks. But you know, I am not about making people feel guilty. I want people to go into July 1 and beyond, eyes wide open, accepting our reality. But it’s a time to recommit. It’s a time to re-energize. It’s a time to move beyond what the Indigenous people in Australia call “gesture politics” and it’s a time for sustained and serious action. So I think we're all on the action train.

MF: I can hear that. Doreen, hearing Roberta Jamieson, she is going to celebrate—with all the caveats that she just mentioned—she finds a way that she's quite comfortable to celebrate. I wonder what impact that has on you because you've taken—as an ally, you've taken a harder line position even though you're not Indigenous yourself.

DOREEN NICOLL: I have. I really won't be celebrating. I can't find anything to celebrate. In fact, when Trudeau decided to take Cindy Blackstock in the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society back to court, I was devastated. That woman went through nine years in court under Harper. I was hopeful that under Trudeau we were going to see a change. Once he was in breach of the tribunal's findings, I had this sick feeling he was setting them up to take them back to court. And isn't that just what he did. So I don't have anything to celebrate right now.

MF: Doreen, you seem surprised that Roberta has decided that she's going to celebrate Canada Day.

DOREEN NICOLL: I was very surprised that she would celebrate Canada Day.

MF: Why?

DOREEN NICOLL: I didn't think she had anything to celebrate.

MF: How do you answer that, Roberta?

ROBERTA JAMIESON: Well, I am going to be broadcasting for the first time this year, the Indspire Awards for 2017. We're going to be talking about Canada's 150th and we're going to be showcasing the amazing achievements of 13 outstanding First Nations, Inuit and Metis people. We're also launched a campaign to enable Canadians to invest in education for Indigenous students. For every $150 a Canadian contributes to our young people—fastest growing demographic, least likely to get out of high school— one of our donors will double it and the government of Canada will double it again. So it gets quadrupled. So I'm celebrating with action and opportunity and investment and energy—the kind of energy this country needs to move beyond the burden we've been carrying for 150 years. And it starts with working on positive things with Indigenous peoples.

DOREEN NICOLL: And that I can celebrate and that I can contribute to.

MF: Vikram, your embrace of Canada is a full-throated embrace. You talk about loving the flag. How did you get to there?

VIKRAM VIJ: Well, before I answer the question, I mean I love the fact that Doreen and Roberta have this conversation about what needs to be done. And every community, every country needs a Mahatma Gandhi, needs a Nelson Mandela, needs somebody who is going to be a champion and we've had such great leaders, Indigenous leaders of Metis and of Inuit people. And I think what we need to do is that these leaders need to be leaders and push governments even further and make sure that these treaties that they said they were going to do, these things that they were going to do that they haven't followed through.

ROBERTA JAMIESON: Vikram, I'm going to challenge you on that because we're beyond the time when we're going to rely on outspoken Indigenous leaders to carry that burden. It is time for Canadians to be engaged.

VIKRAM VIJ: Of course.

ROBERTA JAMIESON: For Canadians to speak out, for Canadians to ask what is your child learning in school? What is my MP supporting on the calls to action? What is my MPP doing? It is time for Canadians to become active. That's the great opportunity of this country as we build the next 150 years.

VIKRAM VIJ: Correct. But that bridge has to be built and that bridge needs to be constantly pushed by communities that have felt the brunt of lack of water, lack of—

[Crosstalk]

ROBERTA JAMIESON: I’m going to challenge you again Vikram, because the whole country has felt the brunt of this.

VIKRAM VIJ: Correct.

ROBERTA JAMIESON: This country has lost untold resources because our young people are not graduating, because we're filling the jails, because we are not achieving our highest potential. This is impoverished Canada. So we've all born, we’ve all felt the brunt of this relationship. And so together, we've got to be partners in the reconciliation and in the building of the new Canada.

DOREEN NICOLL: And in being allies, I think we need to take the lead from Indigenous people.

VIKRAM VIJ: Of course.

DOREEN NICOLL: It’s not our place to be in the front. It's to stand side by side. We haven't suffered those multiple oppressions and the systemic racism. My kids never had any of that. They had an easy life, even though they won't tell you that. So we need to be led by the people who have the lived experience.

MF: Vikram.

VIKRAM VIJ: I totally agree with that. I'm not denying that at all. And I'm saying is it doesn't have to be one community that takes and goes ahead. I'm saying all of us need to move forward. At this point, the Hindus, the Muslims, the Sikhs, the Jewish people—every community—the abled, the disabled, we all need to work together in making sure and recognizing what was not done right. But still we need to celebrate the fact that we have come into this country. We need to be sustainable with our resources, with our environment. We need to respect that and actually learn from it. I think that's what I'm saying, is we cannot not celebrate because of what has happened. We need to celebrate and move forward because we are now 150 years old and hopefully we are smarter, we are intelligent and we are going to make sure that the next 150 years are such great strides for every Canadian. And never will anybody be stopped from doing something because of the colour of their skin.

MF: Doreen.

DOREEN NICOLL: I think I disagree. I don't think we're willing to share. Those of us in power, we're not willing to share. We're willing to say I'm sorry and please move on and forget what happened over the last 150 years, but you're not getting any of this Crown land, even though we have a lot of it to share. I don't think we've moved that far along. I think what we need to do to be allies, is to speak up and for the rest of the year, I challenge every non-Indigenous Canadian to read, watch or listen to an Indigenous viewpoint each and every week for the rest of the year. And we need to wake up.

VIKRAM VIJ: And I would embrace that in a minute. I am not denying that. And that's part of my celebration and my learning curve in life is that I am here to embrace everything that my Canada now gives to me on my plate. I will eat everything that is on there. I will eat the food that comes from the land, the food that comes from the ocean, the food that comes from the sky. I’ll eat everything that's there because that's what I'm supposed to do as a Canadian. So let's acknowledge it.

ROBERTA JAMIESON: My big worry, frankly, is 2017 will be this year where we're all talking about these issues, and what's going to happen in 2018? This growing awareness, glacial pace though it may be, needs to be nurtured. So I think we need to become more aware of yes, the history, but the history—it's tragic but there are also some gems in that history that need to be brought forward. And our leaders will talk about treaties as an example, but let me say, this time of the year is for my own people, a time of celebration in a different way. And I think it's nice that it coincides with July 1st and Aboriginal Day. This time of year, this is when the Creator gives us strawberries. We celebrate strawberries in my community. Why? Because it's the promise of new life. Another year of bounty coming from creation. And so with that spirit, that gives us promise. This country has promise, but we've got a lot of work to do and I'm willing to work just as hard as the next person in Canada, Indigenous and non-, to realize our full potential.

MF: Roberta Jamieson, Vikram Vij, Doreen Nicoll, thank you all very much.

DOREEN NICOLL: Thank you.

VIKRAM VIJ: Namaste, everybody.

MF: Chef and author Vikram Vij who was in Vancouver; writer and activist Doreen Nicoll and Roberta Jamieson, the president and CEO of Indspire. They were both in Toronto. And be sure to tune into Ideas where Roberta will be featured as part of a special five-part series looking at how five countries—South Africa, Israel, India, Germany and Canada—deal with the realities of a diverse population. It's called “Us and Them: Diversity, Division and a World of Difference” and it's on Ideas this week at 9 p.m. on CBC Radio One. That's 9:30 in Newfoundland and parts of Labrador. And now over to you. Let us know how you'll be approaching Canada 150 celebrations this year, maybe some strawberry recipes. You can find us on Facebook, or Twitter it's @thecurrentCBC and you could send us an email. Just go to our website, www.cbc.ca/thecurrent, and click on the contact link. The CBC News is next. Then, forget 150 years. In Canada's North, there are sheets of ice thousands of years old and they're disappearing. A trip to the north with a veteran adventurer in our next half hour. I'm Mike Finnerty. You're listening to the summer edition of The Current.

ENCORE: Arctic researcher shares 50 years of watching climate change happen

Guests: John England

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

[Music: Theme]

MF: Up next, a lifetime's research and exploration in Canada's North and a warning: Canada's Arctic is on thin ice.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: The whole vast river of ice is on the move—slowly, inexorably toppling into the sea. Given that fact, it's obviously not that great to be actually under that ice front with a broken engine.

VOICE 2: That is an enormous block right at the top. That whole front is going to go at some point.

[Sound: Ice crumbling, water sloshing]

MANY VOICES: [laughing]

VOICE 2: That was amazing. Look at the waves.

MF: How it sounds when an Arctic ice shelf collapses and crashes into the sea and you're lucky enough not to be underneath it. It’s something that most of us may never witness in our lives, but it is happening more frequently in the Canadian Arctic. In January, scientists announced that the Earth had, in 2016 for the third year in a row, reached a record high temperature, which means more and more ice shelves melting. It was a BBC crew that captured that moment we just heard. It may just have easily been John England. He’s been adventuring through the Arctic and studying Arctic ice for half a century. He's a professor emeritus in Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Alberta and he's also the 2016 recipient of the Weston Family Prize for Lifetime Achievement in Northern Research. John England spoke with Anna Maria from Edmonton in January.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: What do you think when you hear the sound of ice collapsing like that?

JOHN ENGLAND: It was almost humourous at the beginning. I was thinking that's how my life starts every morning before a cup of coffee. But it also caught I think the excitement of doing Arctic research and the potential calamities that occur. But in terms of the science, of course, it's a dramatic expression of what's actually going on in both polar environments. The collapse of ice shelves, both those that are attached to land-based glaciers, those have really started to break up and they certainly then accelerate the flow of ice into the ocean and the rise of sea level. That's a big concern. We also have very ancient sea ice, ice shelves in Canada that don't depart quite so dramatically, but are nonetheless signs of the impact of modern global change on high latitudes. My work has been looking at environmental change and the whole idea is that basically our knowledge of climate in the Arctic and in high latitudes is really constrained to weather records back maybe 60 years or so. So how do we reconstruct the natural variability that has occurred over hundreds and thousands of years? So we create mosaics of change based on glaciers and sea ice and permafrost and lake cores, et cetera, almost as time slices and you could almost think of them as individual frames of film. So my work is trying to see the Arctic in time-lapse over very long intervals of time and then I can turn and say here's the natural rollercoaster of change that we've been experiencing prior to the weather records. And so what we're seeing today as was dramatically portrayed in what you played earlier. What are we seeing today? Is it the same old same old or are we really starting to see a new story that is tied to our forcing of climate because of human activity?

AMT: Let's just talk a little bit about what it looks like—an Arctic ice shelf—the Ellesmere Ice Shelf for example. What does it look like?

JOHN ENGLAND: Oh, gorgeous. Beautiful. So if you were to fly over it in a satellite, you'd be looking down at the mountains of northern Ellesmere Island from that coast going northward into the Arctic Ocean. There is a large sheet of ice if you want and it's attached the land, but floating over deep water and it's the oldest sea ice in the northern hemisphere. It's up to three and a half, 5,000 years old. It's like a washboard with these exquisite white bands, narrow ribbons of white, narrow ribbons of blue. The white are the ridges, low ridges and the blue are little melt water troughs. These run for tens of kilometres. These ice shelves, when they break off, produce ponderous blocks of ice. They used to cover about 10,000 square kilometres at the end of the 1800s, beginning of the 1900s. They're now absolutely disappearing. We're down to about 300 square kilometres.

AMT: We do have pictures that you sent us up on our website so that people can look at them. I was looking at them last night. It's like my moment of Zen. It is so beautiful, the white and blue long stripes that you describe. It's breathtaking.

JOHN ENGLAND: The exquisite beauty of the North is something that we underappreciate and this is a heritage that we should be safeguarding and cherishing. And in an increasingly industrialized world, we have a landscape that offers a place of renewal, a place of recharging, a place of something like it's fragments of the original Earth that are still left. The disappearance of the ice shelves, I think are important because they’re our Egyptian pyramids. They’re our California Redwoods. So if the California redwood trees suddenly started to die off, we’d know about it on the national news. It's just something that we ought to know about as Canadians. And I think that is not the fault of the Canadian public. I think we just haven't had opportunities to share so much of the North, its stories and its science, et cetera.

AMT: How difficult is it practically to do research in the Arctic?

JOHN ENGLAND: The difficulty has accelerated enormously over the last 20 or 30 years. Canada has really floundered in its commitment to the North. The commercial aircraft from Edmonton to get me into Resolute Bay where I worked for my entire career out of that base is now six to $8,000 for one airfare. You can go around the world twice for that or go down to Antarctica twice for that. You have to get put out from that base by Twin Otter or a helicopter. And we're talking about Arctic Canada. It’s the size of Europe without roads. So when you start to add up the cost of putting two or three or four people by commercial aircraft, let alone buying food into the high Arctic, you're looking at around $100,000 plus.

AMT: To do research for how many months?

JOHN ENGLAND: So about six weeks. I would go up at the end of June and be there to early August. The grants that we're getting from the federal government are in the order of 25 or $35,000 a year and they don't begin to accommodate the costs. So we're given the responsibility to do the work, but not the resources.

AMT: You get there with an Otter. You fly in. How do you get around once you're there?

JOHN ENGLAND: For the first 20 years of my research, it would have been walking. I did a lot of walking and there were great advantages to that because I looked at the landscape at about four kilometres an hour. But people use ATVs and think the helicopter is obviously of enormous benefit. If you're doing surveys of the terrain or the landscape, you can reach much further than you can on foot.

AMT: When did you make your first trip to the Arctic?

JOHN ENGLAND: 1965. I was like an 18 year old, typical Torontonian or anyone in a big city struggling to move into adulthood and overcome all the mysteries of that. And I went to the Arctic with a small group of researchers to eastern Baffin Island, to the beautiful fiords there. I was just overwhelmed by the beauty, the silence, the timelessness, the integrity of the whole landscape and being utterly removed from blessed Toronto.

AMT: You telling me you fell in love?

JOHN ENGLAND: I did. You first fall in love with the land then you fall in love with science and certainly you also fall in love with the people when you get to meet them and interact.

AMT: Well and I want to talk more about the science, but I also want to talk about some of your adventures doing research in the far north. There was one year that you decided your research crew needed a bigger tent. What happened?

JOHN ENGLAND: Well, that was the time just when I finished my PhD. I didn't have Canadian support and a good colleague at the University of Massachusetts and I applied to the U.S. National Science Foundation, got a good grant and we had always lived like poppers in the Arctic. So we commonly use what's called this Mount Logan Tent. It's like if you looked at a piece of Kleenex hanging from a piece of string that's sort of what looks like. Inside, it's about 8 by 10 at best but the sides slope in and you sit there in two little chairs facing a tin box with a stove on it. There's really no other room than that. So we went to this very famous outdoor store and this big burly fellow said you know oh yeah, this is the best wall tent we have. Nothing will destroy this tent. I could hear the captain of the Titanic, you know nothing can sink the ship. And I wish he didn't say that. Now we had this huge tent. It was like 12 by 14 and we had a table. Can you imagine we had a table do our mapping at?

AMT: You had a house.

JOHN ENGLAND: Yeah, we had a house and suddenly a storm came up. This is where the story gets great because we did everything to save this tent. The storm got so bad that the top two by four ridgepole looked like a bow bending, ready to snap and the grommets were popping out of the canvas. So we decided this is the end. This was like a three-day storm. So we knocked the tent down. We crawled into it and it was complete darkness. It was about 30 inches high and we sat on the floor in the darkness with our legs crossed on the gravel. So we lived in that for a month and we detested it at the start. We loved it by the end because it was the one thing that could withstand the storms that we would experience.

AMT: [Laughs] So much for the roomy tent!

JOHN ENGLAND: Yeah. I mean everybody has war stories of work in the Arctic.

AMT: I want to hear another one. You stumbled on several historical artifacts when you were sledding around. There was a time you were admiring a view over Greenland and something caught your eye.

JOHN ENGLAND: So what happened is we sledded out to an island and then there was this beautiful four metre high cairn built by masons. Beautiful, beautiful cairn. You can look from there directly across to Greenland. It’s spectacular. You see the cliffs like thousand-foot high just disappear over the curvature of the earth. So we're enjoying what you might describe is an incredible scene on a beautiful day, calm sunny, pull out our lunch, our sandwiches. And I noticed something at my heel and I went “What in the world is this?” So I pull it out and it's a beautiful long cylinder, brass cylinder with a screw on top and I unscrewed the top of it and they're written it was the date March the 10th, 1876, Captain Stevenson HMS Discovery.

AMT: It’s extraordinary, extraordinary and no one had seen it. It's so vast. No one had ever stumbled upon it before. How has the relationship between researchers and the Inuit changed over the years you've been traveling there?

JOHN ENGLAND: Dramatically and wonderfully and yet still a long way to go. I went up in ‘65 and the Inuit at that time were in the shadows in their traditional clothing and dog teams and so on. The two solitudes were enormous and the gap between us by language and culture. And it was almost painful, it was certainly palpable to see the transition and to see not only that there's been this great gesture of interaction from the south towards the north, it's the north reaching back to the south as well, that is bringing so many new perspectives. Also in the way we perform and do science. This interaction now is a remarkable transition. But you know to be fair, it's still got a long way to go and we still have to really sharpen our pencils and improve our conduct and our interaction and our interest in each other.

AMT: What did you learn about Arctic ice from the Inuit and their traditional knowledge?

JOHN ENGLAND: Where I really learned from Inuit were taking Inuit students in the western Arctic out on Banks Island and wanting to go with them because they were raised by their grandparents and they were really connected to the land. And I wanted to see how they acted on the land versus how I would perform. And they engaged in my science and contributed to it. And I participated in listening to their stories about being raised on the land and how many changes they had seen. The people of Banks Island would travel out on the sea ice. They would go by sled on July the 1st and have a big community feast there. Now the water is open around Sachs Harbour in May. So I learned a lot from their anecdotal and direct experience on the land. But we’d also sit in the tent and tell stories and that's when it really struck me, how enormously important it is to see science not just as objective facts and details, but the science in the Arctic is the camp, is the storms, is the stories, is the everyday adventures and the human interaction and there's no way you can parse those multiple things apart. That's one and the same.

AMT: What's it like being one of the first scientists witnessing the effects of climate change in the Arctic before climate change was even a term?

JOHN ENGLAND: We were up there probably at the tail end of what it was like when the explorers were there. In the mid-1960s, sea ice diminishment hadn't really progressed. And I was on northern Banks Island in 2008 again with a colleague and we were looking out at the area where McClure had been stuck with the ship The Investigator for two years and had reached the point where he was going to abandon the ship because he couldn't get out. The summer sea ice didn't break up. And I was standing at exactly the same place where he was rescued. And looking out on a vast expanse of the ocean without a fragment of sea ice and the water rolling up languidly on this warm summer day on the beaches nearby, was like I could have been in the Bahamas.

AMT: In the early days, were you convinced of the severity of the problem of climate change?

JOHN ENGLAND: Wasn't even on our mind in the 1960s. And I remember sitting in a little tent with Ray Bradley, one of the leading U.S. paleoclimatologists and so Ray and I were definitely interested in climate change back in the mid-1970s. In fact, our first grant was on climate fluctuations of northernmost North America. So I think we were at the very leading edge.

AMT: How do you react to the tone of the discussion around climate change these days?

JOHN ENGLAND: Well, it's very acrimonious and south of the border, hopelessly lost it seems. I think the evidence is overwhelming. Vast amounts of ice that sit beneath the ground for 12,000 years, remnants of the last glaciation are melting out all over the place and sending sediment into rivers and lakes and turning blue lakes to brown.

AMT: You can see that in the sea ice, huh? Like it leaves a mark, does it?

JOHN ENGLAND: Well, I think it's the satellite imagery that tells you about the changes in the last 40 years that say we can see how rapidly it has diminished by several millions of square kilometres each summer. The ice shelves are interesting because driftwood used to come from Russia and collect on the shores of Ellesmere Island. Until the ice shelves formed, it was like musical chairs. And once the music stopped or once the ice shelves formed, the driftwood no longer got to the coastline. And we can pick up that driftwood and date it and we can see the driftwood was there 9,000, 8,000, 7,000, got in as late as 5,500 years ago, then it's almost like a guillotine drop. So the ice shelves form and there's no more driftwood coming in, to basically post 2000 and that's the record. We can tell it not so much by the marks they left, but by the record of driftwood.

AMT: How would you create a dialogue that actually moves us forward on climate change?

JOHN ENGLAND: I think more exposure to the evidence—so many good stories that the public has paid for and ought to have an opportunity to experience.

AMT: How much do we judge people by their views on climate change now?

JOHN ENGLAND: Oh, I think that's the very unfortunate thing. Each one of us speaks and within three sentences, we've categorized them and we close our ears and I think that's what we have to disarm. We have to disarm that sense of opposition; that we're really here together. Whether you believe it or not, the consequences of global sea level rise are going to displace hundreds of millions of people eventually. If what we see forecasted occurs in the next century, so it’s much more serious than what's going on right now as sad as it is, migration from Syria to Europe. So I think we need to say look, you know, let's sit down and have a dialogue. At least we're going to agree that the consequences are very serious and we have to mitigate this. We have to address this. And you know acrimony and rejection and just outright dismissal of another person's view isn't taking us forward.

AMT: You argue for a Canadian polar policy. What would it entail?

JOHN ENGLAND: Canada does not have a polar policy. And in the absence of a polar policy, every department, every deputy minister can set their own. The Americans looked at us when they decided to pass an act in Congress and said yes, the Canadians have got a great logistical operation which has today, fallen into really an underfunded state. But it's not enough. Let's embed it in educational outreach. Let's really bolster the science. Let's look at the science every five years and reassess where we're going. The Americans in terms of their research are unbridled. It's been enormously successful. In Canada, we do everything piecemeal, ad hoc. There is no central authority. There's no integration of resources. There's no cooperation. Several years ago, a German icebreaker was coming across the ocean with a bunch of Canadian scientists. They were going to go and look at the marine geology in Lancaster Sound, a very important marine ecosystem. The communities were concerned around Lancaster Sound. They brought a court injunction. They stopped the ship in the Atlantic. They had every right to do so because they didn't feel they had been well-enough advised. So the German captain—and bless him—got on the radio and said who do I talk to? I was coming out of the Arctic at that time and I thought good luck. Give the guy a million dollars in cab fares and send him to Ottawa because he doesn't know where to start. We have such a broken front.

AMT: So you're telling me essentially then whatever is going on up there, you know as a scientist, but the people who make our policy, as all of these changes are happening, we're kind of asleep at the wheel as a nation?

JOHN ENGLAND: Yeah. We are. We are asleep at the wheel. You can go back to 1970 and see parliamentary standing committees saying exactly this. We need a policy. We've been saying this to the cows come home. The basic point is that we have limited resources. How does disorganization and unpreparedness help us? The right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing. This is long overdue, that every major northern nation does have such a policy. The United States of America starts off by saying we are a polar nation. They say that triumphantly. If you look at a map, Canada is the polar nation and you know we have to stop this fragmentary—it's like Halloween. I come up to your doorstep with a pillowcase and you throw in some candy because that's how we're doing Arctic research in Canada right now.

AMT: What are Canadians missing in terms of what we know about our own Arctic territory?

JOHN NGLAND: Just a familiarity with the geography and what's happening there. Let’s present to the Canadian public more and more of the beauty and the interest of the Arctic through everybody—from the CBC on, through to our education system. Canada like Dracula, risks the fact that it can stand in front of its own mirror and fail to appear. And I think that the North isn't the only thing that we are as a country, but it's a fundamental component of our identity and it's so sad that so much of the excitement, so much of the discovery that is celebrated in many northern nations. We need to raise the game here in this country and I would say to the prime minister's office: establish a polar policy.

AMT: There are so many Canadians who have never had the opportunity or the joy of visiting the North and they might want to experience the Arctic. Where should they go? What should they think about?

JOHN ENGLAND: Well, you can drive up to Inuvik and now with the new road almost complete, you can probably get certainly by road in a few years to Tuktoyaktuk. You can certainly go through the Yukon up to Dawson and so on. They are beautiful areas that you can reach by road. By train up to Churchill of course, but for the Arctic islands, I mean Baffin Island is still quite accessible. Iqaluit, Pond Inlet, Arctic Bay are beautiful areas with national parks. For the high Arctic, it's very difficult, very expensive. That's a gorgeous area. You know Google it and take a look and find where it's beautiful and serene and remarkable. I do feel that engagement is so important. And if you're looking for an opportunity to shed the barnacles of social impact, I always feel like when I go to the Arctic every year, it's like I'm covered with these barnacles and I'm like a piece of fabric that attracts them. I put them there myself, other people put them there and you go up to the North and it's like this fabulous behavioral bath. They are just swept off—the simplicity, the timeless silence, the emptiness. So I just say to Canadians: just find the opportunity. Find a destination that you feel you can reach. The people are remarkable. You know you go up north and everyone for the most part is accepted. There's just an enormous freedom and openness and warmth and there's so much to garner from just being in the North, both aesthetically in terms of the environment, in terms of the people, or if you're out on the landscape and you're fortunate enough to be beyond all of civilization, then you get to really experience the original Earth and you find really who you are. It's transformative. It's absolutely remarkably revitalizing and you return to what's important. And I've seen it in the eyes of hundreds of students I’ve taken there. They're just overwhelmed and transformed. And you go south and you go: don't let me compromise this. Let me live this. And I think that's important, that it's not just an experience you have up there. Hopefully when you come south, you walk down the street with it.

AMT: John England, it's really great to listen to you talk about this part of Canada. Thank you for your work and thank you for your time.

JOHN ENGLAND: Anna Maria, it's been an honour to speak with you and to the people across this fabulous country.

MF: Anna Maria Tremonti’s conversation with Arctic scientist John England. He's a professor emeritus in Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Alberta and he was the 2016 recipient of the Weston Family Prize for Lifetime Achievement in Northern research. Visit our website to see some of John England's photos of the Arctic. And we'd love to hear from you. Let us know what the Canadian Arctic means to you and send us your photos too. Tweet us—we’re @thecurrentCBC. Go to our Facebook page—just search for “CBC The Current” and you can send us an email via our website. It’s www.cbc.ca/thecurrent and click on contact. That’s our program for today. Stay tuned to Radio One for the summer show, New Fire. From remote reserves to bustling big cities, join Lisa Charleyboy as she introduces you to the next generation of Indigenous voices. Remember you can always take The Current with you when you go out—hang around outside, do your summertime activities. The CBC Radio app lets you browse through past episodes of our show and start listening in just a few seconds. You can search for stories you missed or want to hear again. You can listen live to your local CBC station right from your smartphone or tablet. Hear the day's top stories. Even make your own playlist of your favourite stuff to listen to later. It's free from the App Store or Google Play. I’m Mike Finnerty. Thanks for listening to the summer edition of The Current and we'll see you tomorrow.

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June 28, 2017 full episode transcript

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