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The Current Transcript for June 9, 2020

Host: Matt Galloway

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

[Music: theme]

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: Today, we're introducing an immediate family bubble. That means two immediate family households can come together. You will have to figure out who and you will have to promise that you will be mutually exclusive.

MATT GALLOWAY: Now, I don't mean to pry, but 13 weeks into this pandemic, are you tired of just seeing your immediate family? in 30 minutes, why easing some social distancing restrictions now could help our mental health in the long run. Also this morning, the health reporter Andre Picard on why some parts of Canada's most populous province can get a haircut or a beer on a patio before others and why he believes that keeping families out of long term care homes is tantamount to torture. And later.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: One of the reasons I study history is I like to see how things began so that I can imagine how bad things end.

MG: The best-selling historian Jill Lepore sees the big picture. In an hour, how past pandemics are giving her a sense as to how this one could end. We start though with the police facing protests on the streets and in city council chambers as calls to slash their budgets and redirect that money grow louder. Good morning. I'm Matt Galloway and this is The Current.

[Music: theme]

Two Toronto city councillors join the calls to defund the police

Guests: Kristyn Wong-Tam, Tom StamaTakis, Akwasi Owusu-Bempah

MG: In the wake of the death of George Floyd, the calls to defund police are growing louder. The general idea here is to put less money into policing and more money into community and social programs. Many activists have been calling for this for a while, but it appears to have made a breakthrough in Minneapolis, the city where George Floyd was killed by a police officer. Nine members of Minneapolis City Council announced their intent to defund and dismantle that city's police department. Here is city council president Lisa Bender.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: Our commitment is to do what's necessary to keep every single member of our community safe and to tell the truth that the Minneapolis police are not doing that. Our commitment is to end our city's toxic relationship with the Minneapolis police department, to end policing as we know it, and to recreate systems of public safety that actually keep us safe.

MG: Now, two Toronto councillors are calling for the defunding of that city's police department. Kristyn Wong-Tam is one of them. Councillor, good morning.

KRISTYN WONG-TAM: Good morning, Matt.

MG: How much does policing take up of the city of Toronto's entire operating budget?

KRISTYN WONG-TAM: Well, the entire budget for the city is about $13.5 billion. That's what it takes to run the city for 2020. And out of that is $1.22 billion exclusively for trial police services. And what Councillor Matlow and I are calling for is that the defunding of at least 10 percent, which is $122 million dollars, and then to reallocate and reinvest those funds towards community support.

MG: How did you land on 10 percent?

KRISTYN WONG-TAM: Well, there's been I mean, there's depending on who you ask for and ask this question to there's a wide range of answers, but essentially what we did was we were taking the cry of the community members and the thousands of e-mails that we had received and we actually basically reflected our motion to to their call. And many people were calling for at least a minimum of a 10 percent cut and we thought that that was reasonable.

MG: When you posted this yesterday on Twitter announcing this, there was a response and a number of the responses were in this vein saying I fully support finding efficiencies, but arbitrarily setting a target of 10 percent is mere politics and it's sad how this is how our city operates. So if there needs to be a cut, why 10 percent? Why not 20 percent? Why not 25 percent?

KRISTYN WONG-TAM: Well, I mean, in the past, the mayor and his executive members and those who are allies of the mayor have even baulked at even a one percent cut. So we believe a 10 percent cut is a is reasonable. Obviously, there can be amendments on the floor of council. And I know that councillors across the political spectrum are having the conversation of what is the appropriate response to the thousands of people who've written e-mails to council members, as well as thousands who've taken to the street to ask for police reforms.

MG: Where would that money go instead?

KRISTYN WONG-TAM: Well, I mean, we would like to see those dollars to to be reinvested into community supports and that could look such as housing to build more affordable housing. We can put those dollars into mental health supports, as well as job skill training, community youth programmes. The city of Toronto has over the years adopted a number of programmes and plans and action plans that actually invest in communities, whether it is the poverty reduction strategy, which is still uncompleted and unfunded, or whether it's the youth equity strategy which has been unfunded to a tune about $26 million that goes directly into at risk youth to help divert them to a pathway of education and to perhaps jobs training. All of those things actually give communities a greater sense of safety. And what we are doing and I think what everyone is doing, it doesn't matter who you are asking. The one thing that everyone is asking for is they are saying that we need to reimagine what public safety looks like. And we need to reform the systems and uphold the structures that have left some people behind. And in this case, it's the disproportionate harm that black, indigenous and people of colour communities have been facing.

MG: You mentioned the mayor, John Tory, mayor of Toronto, said, which services would you cut first if you're going to defund part of the police budget? Is it going to be community policing? Is going to be a task force to end careless driving? He says that there are fewer police officers per capita in the city of Toronto than Vancouver or Montreal. So what would you cut first to put money into those programmes?

KRISTYN WONG-TAM: Well, I think the first thing we would need to do is to consult with the indigenous and black community and people of colour who've been affected and the city child does have an anti-black racism unit that's actually built into our bureaucracy. They work directly with the city manager. I know that for them they would most likely say you don't necessarily need to fund pepper spray. Do we need to fund teargas? Do we need to fund armoured vehicles? Face recognition surveillance equipment, as well as, you know, tasers? And there are those who will say that you don't even need to fund firearms. And in the UK, we know that their officers don't have firearms.

MG: Do you think that, do you think that that's an approach that the city of Toronto should take? Looking at disarming police?

KRISTYN WONG-TAM: I think what I'm trying to say is that we are asking the police to do far too much. And right now, the police are coming to all the first calls that they respond to oftentimes are people who are experiencing mental health crisis. They are being called to intervene and to stop domestic violence. There are oftentimes asked to address, you know, homelessness and these are the first responder calls and they go to the police. What I am suggesting or counsellor Matt Lewis suggesting is that we rethink all of that because we know that the police are not equipped to deal with mental health calls. And when you do call the police to deal with someone who is maybe having an episode or a mental health breakdown at that particular moment, they don't really know where to take them. If you bring them to a hospital, one perhaps to carnage, they will tell you it's not our problem. You'll send them back out on the street. So the police are stuck in a very unwinnable situation because we've asked them to do too much. What our motion is suggesting is that instead of asking the police, which is armed intervention, to take to respond to these service calls, we should be sending out mental health support workers. We should be sending out peak community led, alternative designed ways and to actually deal with policing matters from a community perspective. We should be investing in poverty reduction strategy. We should be investing in housing. That's how we keep people safe, not necessarily by just driving every service call to the police, which is what has been happening.

MG: Councillor, good to speak with you about this. I appreciate your time this morning. Thank you.

KRISTYN WONG-TAM: Thank you very much.

MG: Kristyn Wong-Tam is a Toronto city councillor. Those calls to defund police are being heard across the country. Ottawa city councillors have proposed similar cuts and investment. A petition in Regina is calling for a budget freeze for police there. Tom Stamatakis is president of the Canadian Police Association. It represents 60,000 police personnel across this country. Tom Stamatakis, good morning to you.

TOM STAMATAKIS: Good morning.

MG: At a time when police budgets are tipping over a billion dollars and there are protests on the streets and real anger around how policing is done, why shouldn't there be a hard look at how that money is spent?

TOM STAMATAKIS: Oh, I think there should be our hard look. Police budgets should be evaluated on an ongoing basis and and part of the reason for doing that is to ensure that police services right across the country are properly funded. I don't have any quarrel with that, but I do think that the conversation has to be thoughtful and measured so that we're not making decisions that are arbitrary or that could have a significant impact on public safety in communities. And so far, including from this councillor, I haven't heard any initiatives or actions councillors are taking to reduce the demand on the police. And until you find a way to in a meaningful way to reduce that demand then people are still going to call the police and ask for service when other services aren't available.

MG: Isn't that a bit of a chicken and egg scenario? Because you can't fund those services that would reduce the reliance on police because the budget is taken up so much by funding the police.

TOM STAMATAKIS: Well, you know, let me say this, in the last year that we've got complete statistics for, police in Canada responded to 12.8 million calls for service. I mean, to me that says, you know, Canadians, there's a demand by Canadians for police service. And I find it, again, frustrating that elected officials, particularly at the municipal level, focus exclusively on police budgets when in fact, I mean, I think the council you just had on mentioned that the entire police or the entire budget for the city of Toronto is over $13 billion,yet all she wants to talk about is the police budget.

MG: But it's the largest line item in the budget. And so I guess it goes back to that issue of can you fund those services that would cut the reliance on people needing the police, services that would create jobs, better housing, poverty reduction, et cetera. Can you actually fund that if you're funding the police to the tune of in the city of Toronto over a billion dollars?

TOM STAMATAKIS: Well, but the reason why the demand on the on on the police has increased so exponentially over the last number of years is because those other issues haven't been funded. Those are entrenched, systemic challenges that we have in communities right across the country that I agree do need to be properly funded. But I don't think it's an either or proposition. And Toronto is actually a great example of where it hasn't been that long since that's been attempted. And the unfortunate outcome from cutting, the arbitrarily cutting the Toronto police budget has been a rash of shootings, all kinds of concerns around violent crime in the community.

MG: Is there any evidnce?

TOM STAMATAKIS: I don't think the approach is an either or approach.

MG: I was going to say is there any evidence that those two things are connected?

TOM STAMATAKIS: Is there any evidence of those two things are connected? I think that's been a conversation that's been happening in Toronto for the last number of years, how reductions in police staffing and the ability to respond to issues happening in the community have had a direct correlation to increases to crime, the number of shootings, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, you need to have the capacity in the police service to be able to proactively manage the crime issues in your community. Unfortunately, what's happened in Canada and in many other countries is, you know, there have been decisions made with respect to mental health issues, with respect to addiction, without increasing the support for services in those areas, including the things that you've mentioned, housing, access to training, et cetera, et cetera and the default has become the police. So there's no quarrel with saying, look, we have to look at these systemic issues that that thatdrive some of the demands on the police. And, yeah, if we do that properly, working with senior levels of government to resource those areas properly, I don't think there's a police officer in the country that would disagree with, look, if we can find alternate alternative ways to deal with mental health issues in our community, we'd be happy to support that. Now if over the long term that means reducing the demand on the police, then yeah, you need to have a look at, OK, well, what resources do we need to properly fund the police service? And if we don't need to deploy police officers to deal with mental health crises in the community, those funds can go elsewhere.

MG: At the heart of this is about trust. The prime minister said yesterday that many people in this country don't feel protected by police. In fact, they're afraid of them. Why is that so many people in this country and you're seeing it, there are protests across the country. Why is it that people don't feel protected by the police in some communities?

TOM STAMATAKIS: Look, we, you know, we have to pay attention to what citizens in the community are telling us and clearly, you know, over the last couple weeks at least, and and even on an ongoing basis before that, we are hearing that there are issues and we need to work towards how do we address those issues so people who are feeling like they're being marginalized in the community or the relationship they have with the police is not the kind of relationship that where you can build trust and legitimacy.

MG: Why is that the case though? Why is that the people are out protesting on the streets saying that they don't trust the police, that the prime minister himself would acknowledge that.

TOM STAMATAKIS: Well, I think there's you know, you've touched on a few of the issues and we've been talking about them. I mean, we've got all these issues occurring in our in our communities across the country, you know, that have become these sort of systemic concerns around why don't certain people have access to appropriate housing? Why don't we have the right kind of infrastructure in place in rural and remote remote parts of the country so that marginalized people or people in difficult socio economic situations, can have access to health care and education and those kinds of things the same way that you might have in an urban community.

MG: How much of it has to do with policing though? How much of it has to do with what policing looks like and how policing is done in this country right now?

TOM STAMATAKIS: I think, you know, the challenge is that, you know, police are visible in communities. We unfortunately are now the service of first resort. We ultimately are the service, the publicly funded service that respond to some of these crises. And because of that are our interactions with the public are visible and they're out there for everybody to see. And unfortunately, we attract attention. If you look at some of the difficult situations that the police can become involved in compared to many other difficult situations that occur in social and social services across the country or in the medical system across the country where we lose thousands of Canadians every year. Those things are happening. They're not happening in the public domain the same way that interactions between the police and the public occur. And I think because our interactions happen and they're visible to everybody, which I think is a good thing.

MG: But it's also an issue.

TOM STAMATAKIS: Sometimes it attracts a lot more attention.

MG: Just finally, we're almost out of time, but just to a lot of people who are protesting on the streets, this is about race. This is about anti-black racism. And they they pin it on in part the police service. When you hear that and we just have a couple of seconds, but when you hear that does that explain to you that anger that you're seeing on the streets?

TOM STAMATAKIS: Well, I think you've got to look at, you know, the police perform their function in the community based on a very rigid statutory and regulatory framework. And so we need to look at those overarching statutory frameworks and are they contributing to this kind of response from the community? I don't think it's about looking at just a specific police service or just that a specific police officer. We need to look at sort of the broader systems approach that we take in this country and and look at why that's creating some of this frustration.

MG: Tom Stamatakis, we'll have to leave it there, but I appreciate your time this morning. Thank you.

TOM STAMATAKIS: You're welcome.

MG: Tom Stamatakis is president of the Canadian Police Association that represents about 60,000 police personnel across this country. Akwasi Owusu-Bempah is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Toronto. The author of Race, Ethnicity, Crime and Justice. Akwasi, good morning to you.

AKWASI OWUSU-BEMPAH: Good morning, Matt.

MG: What do you make of what you just heard from the Canadian Police Association president?

AKWASI OWUSU-BEMPAH: So I think some sensible point there with respect to an acknowledgement that we've been asking the police over an extended period of time to do more and more and that they're not the appropriate services to be or the appropriate agency to be providing those services. I disagree on a couple of points. I do, you know, strongly think that we need to look at what funds the police are getting that would be better directed to other agencies or organizations or institutions. And I think, of course, given the nature of what associations do there are some protectionism with respect to those funds. But I do really think that if we're going to seriously look at, you know, re-assigning some of the roles and responsibilities that the police currently have and the associated funds to other institutions and organizations, we should be doing a proper audit to see what it is that they're doing that we would rather have someone else doing. And that would involve reviewing calls for service, viewing activity reports. Like we would not do this in a politically reactive matter, but do this based on empirical science.

MG: How did we get to the place where we as a society are asking police to do so much? To Tom's point, I mean, they're out there responding to mental health crises, perhaps not with the training, but it also diverts funds away from other forms of crisis intervention. How did we get to that point?

AKWASI OWUSU-BEMPAH: Yeah, I think, you know, there are a couple of main actors. One being cuts to social welfare and other services that we saw really ramping up in the 1980s and the 1990s that carried on, you know, to an extent through the 2000s. So, you know, kind of neo-liberal policies, cuts to social welfare, cuts to mental health. I think a part of it, as well as the increasing size and complexity of our communities in our cities. You know, we used to have much more informal social control. So parents on the block and and people looking out for one another that becomes less and less feasible as our cities, as I say, become larger and much more complex.

MG: What is the way out of that then? Is there a model where people call for defunding the police. Is there a model where some of that money can be redirected into programs so that's down the line, you wouldn't need to call police?

AKWASI OWUSU-BEMPAH: Absolutely. And I don't think we're ever not going to need to call a police service, right? I think that one of the biggest misconceptions with this conversation around defund the police is confusion with police abolitionism.

MG: But there are calls for abolition as well.

AKWASI OWUSU-BEMPAH: There are calls for that as well. And those are distinct, right? Those are calls for a complete eradication of policing as we know it now. There are calls to dismantle police agencies, as has happened in Compton, as to an extent, happened in Camden, New Jersey, that was rebuilt. This is really, as I said, a reprioritization or reassignment of some of the task and functions of the police and the associated funds. How would we go about doing that? Yes, I think we could identify social programming. So this can be whether it be community programs or just reinvesting some of that money back to the whether it be municipal or provincial bodies and ministries that oversee things like how like public health, like mental health. I think one of the important things to acknowledge, and this wasn't brought up by the head of the police, is we need to think about the negative consequences that come from police response to these issues. Right? Importantly, of course, you know, we're having this conversation in large part because of police violence and the use of force. And so anytime we call the police to respond, rather than another agency, there's a potential for violence, but also for criminalization. So, you know, the police have a limited number of tools in their belt, so to speak and tone of the key ones that they have, of course, is the power to arrest. And so, you know, we've got issues around use of force. We've got issues around criminalization that wouldn't happen if we had either an intermediary service. So there are examples, Whitehorse, for example in Yukon has a First Nation service, which are unarmed individuals and go out and provide a very much a public safety function. So there's that example, but, you know, there could be other points of response specific to mental health and other issues that we can divide.

MG: Akwasi, it's good to speak with you about this. It does feel like this conversation, which has been a long conversation, is at a different point right now. We'll come back to it. In the meantime, thank you.

AKWASI OWUSU-BEMPAH: Thank you very much.

MG: Akwasi Owusu-Bempah is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Toronto and the author of Race, Ethnicity, Crime and Justice. This is The Current on CBC Radio One. I'm Matt Galloway. We're back in six minutes. Stay with us.

[Music]

What strategies may work best in easing COVID-19 restrictions

Guests: Per Block, Andre Picard

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

[Music: theme]

MG: Still to come, the historian Jill Lepore on what polio can teach us about how this pandemic might end. But first, do you want to build a bubble?

[Music: theme]

SOUNDCLIP

[Clip of Karen Rourke-Lessard singing "Will you be my bubble family?"]

MG: If you have kids of a certain age, that earworm may elicit both happiness or deep rage. That is New Brunswicker Karen Rourke-Lessard dressed up as Anna from the movie Frozen, singing about the double bubble. This is when two households are allowed to socialize, so long as they are still physically distancing from the majority of others. New Brunswick has been doing this for weeks. Newfoundland and Nova Scotia have their own versions of it. In Ontario, you can now have social gatherings as large as ten people with physical distancing in place. In Saskatchewan, it's up to 15. Everybody seems to be trying something different as this pandemic drags on. Now, a new study from Oxford University has tested these sorts of strategies against the stricter lockdown alternatives. Per Block is with Oxford's Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science. Per Block, good morning.

PER BLOCK: Good morning.

MG: Tell me why you and your co-authors wanted to do this study and why now in particular?

PER BLOCK: Well, it just came out now, but we started the study actually sometime in mid-March when these lockdowns started and we were, we thought about what if this is a reasonable thing to do in the long run to lock everybody at home and looking at some point when this had to be lifted or at some point when the psychological and social consequences of isolating people at home become more important, what would be ways out of this? And now? Well, it's now two and a half months later, but in fact, we started thinking about this in the very early stages of the lockdown.

MG: Walk us through each of the because you test a number of different strategies for loosening the lockdown. So walk us through each of these different strategies.

PER BLOCK: So one thing that we thought or this strategy has all come from an understanding of how things know through networks are how things how we can transmit things by the context that we have and we basically adapted stuff from other networks signs. So the first thing that we looked at is restricting contact to people that are very close to you in some respect and I think the easiest way is to look at geographical distance. So if you think you only have physical contact with those that live within one or two or three blocks of your home, then for the disease to travel very far, it takes a very long time. So effectively that cuts long range short cuts for for disease transmission. The other thing the second thing we looked at was if we take the normal structure of contacts that people have, we can do something like bubblies. It's not exactly bubbles. But we if I know that I only interact with those people who are part of larger communities, for example, a group of friends or my family. And then even if one of us is infected, this disease will stay within this rather small community of friends for much longer. Rather than percolating through society. And thereby we also are flattening the curve. And the third thing is what is basically known as social bubbles. If we restrict our contacts to a very small number of people or to a relatively small number of people, we can effectively build small and micro communities that put more or less boundaries between these different parts of society, hoping that by that we can curb, effectively curb disease spread.

MG: How did they work in terms of dewpoint curving disease spread in flattening that curve?

PER BLOCK: So they work, if you think that we all have a group of, say, five or 10 friends. If one of us contracted the disease, then we can't most infect the other nine. And it's very hard for any of us to then spread the disease further. So basically. And also, if none of the 10 of us have a disease, it would be very hard to contract it from the outside. So basically, we make little circles around a group of people and it's hard for the disease to get in or out of these circles.

MG: Were they doing any better than the more severe lockdowns that we saw early in this pandemic?

PER BLOCK: So I think in terms of if we only look at disease spread, of course the best thing would be if everybody stayed at home and we have a very severe lockdown. However, this very severe lockdown has a lot of side effects in terms of economic and social and psychological consequences. That might not be tenable in the long run. So this basically is trying to relax this social distancing in a way that enables as much of society life as possible was to keeping the risk as low as possible. So we'll not to better than.

MG: Well, I was just going to say, part of this is also by getting people to buy into this. Right?

PER BLOCK: Yes, it's about getting people to buy into this. It's also about it must be a consistent policy. It doesn't help if you do one thing and I do another thing and the third person decides on a different strategy. We basically have to agree, at least on a local level, one of these things we want to do so that they are effective.

MG: This can be confusing for people, in part because they hear different directives coming from government or health officials. How important is it for governments to communicate clearly about these sorts of things, so we actually understand what we're supposed to do and then perhaps will comply with those directions.

PER BLOCK: I think it's extremely important that these are clear and these are consistent. It doesn't help a lot if you have a federal government that has one thing and then you have a state government that have nothing in the local government that recommends a certain thing because if everybody does something else, none of these strategies or none of these concepts, regardless of how you call them, will work in the long run because they need to be applied uniformly for them to work properly.

MG: If we don't re-evaluate how we are looking at lockdowns, what are the and you talked about this, the psychological effects, the mental health effects. What are the long term effects on us as we continue to be isolated from the people who are normally closest to us?

PER BLOCK: So I think that's a tricky question. I think a lot of different disciplines have had something to say on this. I can only say under high level, psychologically, it's very hard, especially for people that live alone to be isolated because we are used to social contact. I mean, we are a social species that really relies on contact, but also for people that live in specific living arrangements that live in unsafe households. For them, this lockdown is forced to be. Staying inside, of course, has a completely different or has an additional dimension of dangers or problems attached to it.

MG: Is your sense that governments have given mental health the same consideration as physical health?

PER BLOCK: That's difficult to say, I think in the early stages of the pandemic, it was certainly quick reactions were needed and the reactions were mainly there to respond to the physical, to the dangers on physical health. But I feel that at least in public discussions, the mental health aspect was picked up fairly quickly. of course, I can't say anything about internal government debates, how they evaluate these things against one another.

MG: So 13 weeks into this, what are your suggestions around how government should approach the lockdown? Which of these strategies based on on the research that you did, should we be adopting?

PER BLOCK: So I think so, based on the research that we did, I think a bubble concept seems to make a lot of sense. However, all the things that we looked at, we looked at in simulations and we tried to base this on as realistic assumptions as possible. However, to really know in detail to be able to say if this strategy will have that effect and the strategy will relieve our negative consequence by this many percent. For that, we would need to get more into a detailed data analysis, work more with biologists, public health experts, epidemiologists to really be able to pinpoint how much benefit we could get from what. And so far, we are basing it on as simulations where we try to be realistic as possible. But we don't know much more. So I would say this bubble thing seems to be working and seems to be taken up quite well.

MG: Have you heard from any governments that are interested in these findings and to your point want to take it out of the simulation model and actually enact it in real left so that so that it could be studied properly?

PER BLOCK: No, so we haven't been directly in contact. We know that the paper has been part of the UK parliament briefing. We don't know how much other governments are considering this or considering as making this a basis of their policy. But I guess the political decisions are a bit slower than journalism, which is again, but still faster than what's usually happening in science.

MG: You're studying this. You're also living it. Are you finding the lockdown, driving you around the bend these days?

PER BLOCK: Fortunately, I'm in Switzerland and here the lockdown is slowly being lifted, but I was very happy when I could leave my home again. So, yeah, this is some research that has actually affected me personally quite a bit.

MG: Per Block, it's good to speak with you. Thank you.

PER BLOCK: Thank you very much.

MG: Per Block is a research lecturer at the University of Oxford. His new research appears in nature human behaviour. The Globe and Mail's health columnist Andre Picard has been listening in. Andre, good morning.

ANDRE PICARD: Good morning.

MG: Let's talk about this idea of of bubbles and what the effect of the isolation that we're in right now is. When you listen to this research, what do you make of what he's saying? That we need to consider the mental health effects of this in addition to the physical health concerns around keeping people away from the virus.

ANDRE PICARD: Well, I think there's no question it's important. We've talked about this for weeks now, that it's not just about a virus, but it's all about the consequences that come with it. The price of isolation, the economic impact, etc. There's all these other things we have to consider. So this bubble idea makes sense. You know, we've said all along that what you want to do is try and limit your number of contacts or for a while we're locking down. We didn't leave the house, but then was go some places and now we're talking about we'll bring in another family or two families and try and stay within them. So I think this is a logical next step of how to handle this pandemic.

MG: Would it work for everyone though? I mean, presumably there are people you know, if you bubble with one family, you really have to be conscious of where that other family is going, so that everybody is actually able to isolate. Is it actually practical in larger communities?

ANDRE PICARD: I think it's imperfect, but I think it can be practical. I think you just have to be aware. You know, you have to understand that every person you are in contact with, you're in contact with everyone they've been in contact with. So if you keep that in mind, everyone limits the size of their bubble then this can work. But it's never going to be perfect. And again, we've from day one said that the point is not to not have any spread of disease. It's going to happen, but it's great to limit it and keep it you know spreading slowly rather than have these explosions of cases.

MG: Part of this is also about buy-in. And I mean anecdotally, you'll see this in my neighbourhood, you will see people who are having a backyard barbecue and there are, you know, different groups there. They're all spaced out. It's socially distanced, but people will be around. You have to loosen or do you have to loosen the rules a little bit so that people will continue to follow along with the guidelines more broadly?

ANDRE PICARD: Oh I think absolutely you have to adjust to what's socially possible. So you can have the strictest rules in the world, but if people don't follow them, we can't police ourselves out of this. We've never you know, I think that's been unthinkable from the beginning. We have to have that buy in and people have different risk perceptions and that's based on all kinds of things. It's based on. Do they know people were sick or what did the politicians say at their press conferences each day? So I think we are seeing a real notable change. When I was here last night at a park, there were much bigger groups and people have decided, yeah, we can give ourselves a little bit more slack and we have to adjust to that.

MG: Premier of Ontario yesterday announced parts of phase two in that province, some areas able to go and you can get a haircut in Ottawa. You can go and sit on a patio in the greater Toronto area. Those things are not possible yet. Why is it that Toronto and the Greater Toronto Area seems to be still a centre for this virus spread?

ANDRE PICARD: Well, I think it's just got a foothold. It got there and the cases were really high and they're still having trouble controlling it, a lot of it has to do with bureaucratic disorganisation. Were I was listening to the Toronto public health officer, Eileen de Villa, yesterday saying she's using a great euphemism. She said their contract tracing was done in non digital bulk format, which the short version of that is it's done by fact. So we're still living in the 1950s. We're trying to do this high tech contact tracing and it's taking days instead of hours. So I think that's a big part of the problem that until they get their act together on contact tracing, toronto is going to suffer.

MG: There's a piece on the CBC news site today talking about who the premier of Ontario is relying on. He says he relies on experts to determine his COVID-19 plan, but his government won't identify them. Epidemiologists are saying that the decision making suggests that it's not being driven by expertise. How concerned are you about that?

ANDRE PICARD: Well, I think it's a very good piece. Brings up some really important points about who is giving the advice. And the advice seems to be coming largely from a comedian, is very bureaucrat heavy, very lacking in scientists. So I think that that's concerning and that's why we're getting all this mixed messaging and we're getting some odd. There are all kinds of odd decisions in Ontario. You know we're going to open shopping malls if they have food stores, but they're still going to keep playgrounds closed. And things like that don't make sense and I don't think they have any scientific basis. You have to wonder. A lot of it seems to be, butt covering and, you know, being cautious. It's sort of driven by bureaucratic thinking rather than scientific thinking.

MG: It's to your point, I'll use your phrase. If it doesn't make sense, if there's an incoherent message, what is the effect on people if they're trying to figure out how we are going to get out of this?

ANDRE PICARD: Well, I think it's incoherent. People just ignore all the rules. There's a lot of good rules there. But if you do some that are clearly makes no sense, then people say they don't. The whole package. And I think, you know, there's a couple of just some striking examples of that. One of them is this locking out of people of long term care homes, of caregivers. I know I've been on about this for weeks, but I think this is really a travesty of huge proportions. These people who have cared for their loved ones for months, many for years. They're really essential and they've been locked out. They're going on three months now and this is just it's become cruel.

MG: You compare it to solitary confinement and say that it's tantamount to torture.

ANDRE PICARD: Well, it is. You know, I had a father with dementia in a home like this for many years. And I can't imagine what would have happened to him if he hadn't seen anyone for months. He was confused enough as it was, but just being locked away, it makes people so much worse. Their illnesses degenerates so more quickly. Even the health care workers desperately want the family caregivers there. They know that they're essential to their everyday work. So it's a policy that's just unthinkable. And I was happy to see Ontario's health minister, Christine Elliot, yesterday saying she's going to bring in a new policy on this in the coming days, but it should have been done weeks ago.

MG: The other part of this, and you have a piece in the paper today, but this is who is working in these homes? Particularly in Quebec, there are a large number of Haitian asylum seekers employed as orderlies. What's happening there?

ANDRE PICARD: Well, it's very interesting group that's gotten a lot of attention. They've been nicknamed the Guardian Angels in Quebec. So asylum seekers, you know, they took this work. Some of them years ago, a work that no one wants. They've been doing it. They rust. They went to the front lines at the outset of the crisis when Quebec was short, thousands of workers and now people are saying this and this. This kind of selflessness has to be rewarded. So we realize now that the many of them could be deported because they are asylum seekers. They have to go through the process and they could be deported. So there's this movement in Quebec that started saying, listen, let's fast track them to permanent residency. Let's reward them for for sacrifice by doing that.

MG: Is there political support for that? I mean, again, you mentioned the asylum seekers part and that became a political hot potato in elections. Is their political support to fast track that, given the situation we're in now?

ANDRE PICARD: Well, it's interesting. The premier Francois Legault during when he was in opposition, was really used this asylum seeking group. If you remember two years ago, there was a large influx of 37,000 asylum seekers because of a loophole in the law. And he used them, as you know, oh, I'm not going to allow this when I'm premier. So he was very outspoken about this. But now that he's realized they've come literally to the rescue of his government, he's softened quite a bit. But he's still, you know he still hasn't said, yes, they should be granted this permanent residency. He's proposed all kinds of sort of bureaucratic work arounds to to allow them to stay. But people are saying, listen, be straightforward, be honest about this and reward people for doing exceptional work.

MG: And speaks, as we've spoken about before, to who is working in these Long-Term Care Homes. I mean, this has really been one of the learnings, if I can put it that way, over the course of this pandemic.

ANDRE PICARD: Yeah, I think one of the great things that we've learnt in this is who does the heavy lifting in society? Who does really essential work? Personal support workers, the janitors, the people, you know, cleaning up our parks. These are all racialized, often immigrant populations, sometimes asylum seekers, very low paid work, but difficult work. And I think hopefully we've come to appreciate them more and we'll reward them in different ways, not with not just a small group with citizenship, but with better wages, with benefits, etc..

MG: Andre, thank you as always.

ANDRE PICARD: Thank you.

MG: Andre Picard is The Globe and Mail's health columnist. He is a weekly part of our ongoing COVID-19 coverage here at The Current.

CBC Class of 2020 promo

MG: This is indeed The Current. My name's Matt Galloway. It's grad season or at the very least, it's supposed to be grad season. Graduating high school, college, university, middle school, looks quite a bit different in the midst of a pandemic. No big parties, no convocations with hundreds of people. It's just not what those grads imagined this moment might look like and not something that we can fully replace on the radio. But next week, we're gonna try. We're planning a couple of special shows. We will host some virtual class of 2020 grad ceremonies right here on The Current.

[Graduation music]

MG: And that is when we will hear from people like these students and New Westminster, BC.

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VOICE 1: It's been difficult for us to feel like it was our last year and we missed a lot of the things we really wanted to or have looked forward to our whole lives.

VOICE 2: The grad barbecue spirit week, even prom. Like that's a big deal.

VOICE 1: Yearbook signing, any of our formal events. We did kind of have makeup events for them, but they weren't as special as the real deal.

VOICE 2: And even just the grad ceremony, I was really looking forward to that. I was really, really mad at first when I heard about the cancellation of grad and prom and all the big events that were supposed to happen because like, this is a really important year for everyone and it's like something we'll look back at in 10, 20 years.

VOICE 1: I felt really upset and sad and I spent lots of days just feeling really blue and not knowing what to do without going to school and having our ending the way we imagined it. So it'll definitely something to remember and we can remember that oh, we were the grads who didn't really get to graduate because of coronavirus.

VOICE 2: Yeah, like people are going to remember our grade and this year, like I think much more than other years because we were the ones who kind of got scammed a bit. But at the same time, like, it's an experience on its own. And I'm just glad it's getting better now. So we can start like kind of hanging out with people and, like, celebrating om unique ways that we didn't do before.

VOICE 1: I mean, when you look back, you want to remember your graduation. But looking forward into life, it's not the most important thing. And also with everything else going on, you just prefer that everyone else is safe and healthy. So I don't think our grad is as important as we all played it out to be, but overall, still wish we had it.

[Song: "Something Big" by Shawn Mendes]

MG: Emma Gruger and Julia Vellescig, both Grade 12 students at New Westminster Secondary School, one of the biggest high schools in B.C.. Next week, we celebrate this year's graduating high school and post-secondary students on The Current. We'd be interested to hear how you are marking this moment. If you are a grad, if you're the parent of a grad, you can let us know. Drive-by parties, maybe trying to figure out how to socially distance in a park. Let us know on the website cbc.ca/thecurrent. Click on the Contact link. In the meantime, great opportunity for you. If you're a high school grad, cBC is putting together a digital yearbook for the class of 2020. You can be included. Record a video message with your words of wisdom. Rallying call. Best memory. Send it in to cbc.ca/classof2020. That's where you'll get all the specifics and you'll be part of the CBC's class of 2020 National Yearbook. And yes, indeed, your message could end up on the air as well, cbc.ca/classof2020. Coming up in 90 seconds, the historian Jill Lepore on how pandemics of the past have ended and what that means for this one. I'm Matt Galloway. This is The Current. We'll be back in a minute and a half.

[Music]

Polio vaccine set off wave of relief, and a wave of resistance. COVID-19 era may be similar, says Jill Lepore

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

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VOICE 1: The news is on everyone's lips. Polio has been beaten, beaten by the genius of a modest man named Salk and the army of dedicated medical and scientific people, who's one and only ideal, is a world free from disease. In Toronto and the rest of Ontario, the reaction of the people was the same as though the announcement had meant the end of a terrible war.

VOICE 2: I would like to conclude only with a paraphrase of Sir Winston Churchill by saying that on the basis of these data, the future does not seem to be completely veiled in obscurity.

MG: It is the kind of outcome everyone is hoping for as COVID-19 rages on. A new vaccine to stop a deadly disease in its tracks. The development of the Salk vaccine in April of 1955 halted the spread of polio known as the Crippler, because it could cause paralysis amongst its mostly young victims. My next guest says that looking back on that terrifying epidemic and how it ended could shed some light on the pandemic we're all living through now. Jill Lepore is a professor of American history at Harvard University and award-winning author and a staff writer at The New Yorker. She's also the host of a new podcast. It's called The Last Archive. Jill Lepore, good morning.

JILL LEPORE: Good morning.

MG: For people who might not remember, remind us what the 1950s polio epidemic looked like and the devastating impact that it had on people's lives.

JILL LEPORE: Sure, yeah. Polio was terrifying, especially to parents of young children. At first in the U.S., it first showed up really an epidemic proportions in 1916 in New York City and returned relentlessly every spring. It was really far worse in the summer than in any other time of year. And it affected children, especially children under 12. Most of all, children under five. Sometimes people called it the baby plague. You could certainly die of it. More often, you would be crippled by it. So polio hospitals opened up. There were really kind of physical therapy centres. Children were braces. If you lost the use of your lungs, you'd be put in a almost like an iron coffin called an iron lung that would breed for you. Miraculous invention, but a horrible way to live. Well, while hoping for some for some relief. And there was an incredible public health crusade to try to find a vaccine and as we hear all the time, finding vaccines for viruses generally, historically takes decades. One of the worst epidemic years in the history of the virus came in 1952, but that was also the year that there seemed to be a real breakthrough in terms of the vaccine.

MG: Cities like New York were hit really hard by this and were shuttered in a way that seems kind of similar to what's happening now with schools being closed and the swimming pools in the in the heat of the summer being closed. Are there echoes that you see of that time in our life now?

JILL LEPORE: Yeah, it's actually so fascinating to me that these stay at home campaigns that were waged in the 1930s, 40s and early 50s for polio were a routine part of life in many parts of the world.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: This is the season when polio is at its worst and every precaution is being taken to stop the disease from spreading. In the Halifax area, for example, officials have postponed the opening of school as a safeguard. Here's Graham Allen with the details.

VOICE 2: The school ban is one of a series of developments which come quickly in the last few days as it became more and more apparent that this is the most serious polio situation we've had since 1942. City health authorities proclaimed orders banning children under 16 from schools, theatres and churces. The town of Dartmouth across the harbour from Halifax adopted the same rules and suburban communities are following suit.

JILL LEPORE: The best thing to do, the only real way, you know, as with the coronavirus, the only real way to defend against a virus for which no one has any immunity is to just not be exposed to it. And it's really hard to keep kids inside, especially in the summer. And polio happened to be particularly easily transmittable by water. So all summer months, kids want to go down to the creek, they want to go to the lake and jump in a swimming pool and it was it was a real hardship to keep them in. There were all kinds of campaigns, radio campaigns, to keep kids indoors. You know, sort of a different phenomenon than than ours. In some ways, it's an upside down corona virus because it's kids who are the most vulnerable, whereas now it's kids who are best protected from this pandemic.

MG: How did kids and their parents respond to the fear of something that they couldn't see?

JILL LEPORE: You know, it's interesting. I was working on an episode about the polio virus this fall for the podcast and listen to a lot of public health programming, both on the radio and in like these little movies that I remember from, like health class kids to I would they were filmstrips when I was a kid, but there are also films. And they would try to explain to kids what what a virus was and how to avoid them and why you should wash your hands and why you should cover your nose when you sneeze. That's hard for kids. It's hard for grown ups to do that, but it's a lot harder for kids.

MG: How did the epidemic of polio change the way that people understood truth and scientific evidence? Because as you mentioned, there's this wild search to try and find a vaccine. We're seeing this now, but we're also seeing people questioning science, questioning truth. How did that shape what was going on during that time?

JILL LEPORE: Yeah it's this kind of crazy pattern with viruses and their successful defeat. The defeat of smallpox, say, through vaccination programmes, was both celebrated and also highly suspected. So at the beginning of the 20th century, when the first vaccination programs are becoming successful and widespread, a lot of governments require vaccination. State governments and national governments require vaccination, compulsory vaccination. And this leads to the forming of the first anti-vaccination societies. There's an American Anti-Vaccination League and the British Anti-Vaccination Society. And what they're opposed to in some ways, they question the science and the utility of vaccination, but they are also essentially libertarian. They questioned the state's authority to require parents to get their children vaccinated on the grounds that that is authoritarianism. Right? So in the US, the anti-vaccination movement in the early decades of the 20th century is really closely aligned with opposition to national health insurance, which libertarians decry as socialism. So there's this weird tangled up like this is like the 19 teens and, you know, the era of the Bolsheviks revolution like that. It's Bolshevism. That it's Bolshevism to require kids vaccinated. It's Bolshevism to require people to have health insurance. So there's this and that actually is kind of those things have been always tangled up together somehow. And so now where we have already winning a vaccine for coronavirus who are desperately waiting for the thing, but already anti vaccination forces are lining up to oppose it on the grounds that, you know, that it's socialism in the U.S. in particular, where there's such a strong libertarian strain. There's already already people are like ready to fight the battle to defeat compulsory coronavirus vaccination, which is shocking to me, but goes back well over a century.

MG: The vaccine for polio is announced. Its existence is announced on the 12th of April, 1955.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: A New York newspaper, The Royal Telegram and Sun said today in a copyrighted story that it had learned from an unimpeachable medical source that the Salk polio vaccine is 100 percent effective. This reporter has learned from an equally reputable source.

MG: People have compared laws that moment to the end of the Second World War. How big of a moment was it?

JILL LEPORE: Oh God, you know, it's shocking to me to listen to the television coverage of it. The radio coverage of it. Just look at the newspaper headlines. It's almost like commentators, their voices, they're cracking, reporting it. I mean, the Jonas Salk had developed a live virus, a very risky virus. He's sort of the tour to use the hair of the tortoise and the hare race. This guy, Savan, developed a killed virus that replaced the Salk virus pretty soon afterward. But Salk that you know, we can't wait for a safer vaccine. We're going to use a live virus and went into field trials, the biggest public health field trial ever conducted in 1954. So everybody was waiting to 18 months to test this very promising vaccine. And then there was going to be a big announcement at the University of Michigan. Hundreds of reporters show up. There's a, you know, big photocopied set of documents reporting the results of the field trial. There you can see photographs of the reporters just just cramming almost like a stampede of reporters trying to get hold of that press release. Well, a team of doctors, you know, stand on the stage and issue the report that the vaccine works. And then it's just like this cry that goes out across the land vaccine or their vaccine works. There is a vaccine and it's April, right. It's just before the star onset of summer, the warmer weather that's going to expose children and make them much more vulnerable to this virus. So there's this incredible, incredible swell of relief around the world. And Canada, France, Frances Ontario has set up in anticipation of compulsory vaccination programme. The U.S. has not. The new secretary of health, education and welfare in the Eisenhower administration is a highly conservative woman, a vehicle Pobby, and she believes the federal government in the United States should have no role in the distribution of the vaccine. So she has nothing set up through waiting 18 months to find out whether it works. There is plenty of time to set up a plan for the manufacturer and distribution of the vaccine, and she just isn't that socialism to her. So it becomes this huge mess in the United States. This whole problem of of the federal government's failure to act, it's chillingly like this moment.

MG: Eventually, the vaccine is distributed. You did a thing for The New Yorker podcast, The New Yorker Radio Hour, in which you talked about how each generation gets a timestamp. And you talk about the timestamp for those young people in particular, who, as you mentioned, it's April, they're waiting to get the polio vaccine.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: There's a generation of Americans whose most significant early memory is of waiting in line to get the Salk vaccine. I have a colleague who I once asked about this and he said, I can remember the taste of it in my mouth, it was like a sugar drop. It was almost like a lollipop. And my mother said, this will save your life. You will have a life. And I think about that. And I think about the generation of kids who we can only hope will remember the day that they go to get the coronavirus vaccine and it'll be their time stamp.

MG: When you were talking about this on The New Yorker podcast, you got really emotional when you describe this and it was enough the way that you described that moment, I was running and I stopped what I was doing and the hair, kind of stood up on my arm as you were describing this. Why did that moment hit you in the way that it did?

JILL LEPORE: Yeah, it really knocked me down, I have to say. I mean, I had all fall been working on this episode for the podcast about the controversy in the U.S. over the vaccine. And I'd listen to all this radio footage. I'd listen to the announcement that the vaccine works. I'd listen to the stay at home campaigns. I listen to radio interviews from the 40s and 50s with kids who were in iron lungs. I'd been affected by it. I mean, the way that you are good, you know, good sound. But it seemed at such a remove to me like, oh, polio. Thank God that's in the past. And then when I was, you know, editing and working on a story and after the coronavirus came and I listened to that same set of tape every time I fell apart, I just I couldn't believe how much more immediate it was to me and how much more vulnerable, how much more raw, how emotionally exposed, what little emotional stamina I had to contend with the despair of these stories and the exaltation at the wonder of the news. And so when I tried telling that story to the New York radio, our producer, I just couldn't hold it in anymore. It's embarrassing to fall up on the radio on. But it also it's how I felt.

MG: But it speaks to the moment, right? And it speaks to like, what would the timestamp be for this generation under the coronavirus? Where there are different stakes and different things are happening, but people are being affected in incredibly dramatic ways. And the things we keep keep saying is the things that we took for granted six months ago are now on the shelf and nobody knows when they're going to get them back.

JILL LEPORE: Yeah, and the tragedy of it, too, is for something like polio, those generations who suffered through it, who were terrified by it, who had to watch where they went and who they talked to and what time of day they went out of the house and maybe had to stay home and listen to the radio all day. They remembered what that what that area was like, but their children had never heard of polio, didn't know what they you know, I I was born after the polio years. I remember my mother telling me about friends of hers who were felled by polio and it sort of removed from you and for my kids, I don't think they would get that at all. And in a way, that's what makes the resurgence of anti-vaccination possible. Like people haven't seen their children die of measles and so suddenly they're suspicious of the measles. That's crazy. But it is actually a kind of lived experience. It's in your bones. It's in your blood, you know, it's in your heart. You know what that feels like. And kids, now, you know, my kids watching my kids worry about, you know, their grandparents and know people who are really sick and certainly many people who have lost their jobs in the kinds of suffering. I mean, you know, my family is spared and blessed in so many ways, but we know so much about how dreadful this is. This is not a thing they will forget. And what we can hope for them and pray for them is that they will forget some of it. But what they will remember the importance of the public health crusade.

MG: Ida Pinckney is a woman who contracted polio when she was a baby in Brooklyn in 1944. Here she is talking to NPR about the perspective that she has that that experience has given her in terms of what we're in the midst of right now.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: When my parents would take me out of the apartment building that we were in you could hear everybody get silent, you know, and kind of move away, which is very much what it feels like now. I live with hope. I live with the anticipation that we will be on the other side of this. I don't know what that looks like. It doesn't even matter as long as people are not getting sick and people are not dying.

MG: Do you share that hope that a vaccine will be developed quickly? There's been a lot of talk around timelines and things like that.

JILL LEPORE: I don't know how quickly it can be developed and of course, the mitigation and its safety against the speed. But I do very much believe that there will be a vaccine and this time is not a permanent new way of living and I hope that the lessons learnt will have force.

MG: Can I ask you both those lessons? There's a lot of talk now about who we'll be when we come out of this and what we might be and whether people who want to go back to the way things were because the way things were didn't work for a lot of people. How often in history has a crisis served as a catalyst for change?

JILL LEPORE: You know it's very difficult to predict how that would be. I think there's a lot of fantasising on the part of people who are involved in movement politics that this will accelerate reforms that had been stalled or we're going nowhere. And, you know, God bless. Like I have many hopes for a more equitable and just kinder, better world with a greater sense of common wheel. We all, I think, hope for that. But we already see the kind of political disarray, certainly in the United States where, you know, is being very closely observed day today, a kind of decay from a sense of shared purpose and shared suffering. It really it it does require. A great deal of leadership to transition from the crisis to the post crisis with the spirit of common cause intact. I mean, that's where the leadership of FDR during the Great Depression himself, of course, a person who had suffered from polio and had been crippled by it, really mattered during the 1930s. Whose economic dislocations are not unrelated to the long term consequences of the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic. But, you know, it's really interesting when you listen just thinking about the power of the of the human voice. Eleanor Roosevelt always said that FDR's voice changed after he got polio. He was a grown man when he contracted polio. But he was an aristocrat. He'd never really been deprived of anything and he was deprived of his ability to walk. And that you could hear his voice changed and you could hear in his voice that he understood suffering.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: This great nation will endure as it has endured. We'll revive and we'll prosper.

JILL LEPORE: And so in 1933, when he is inaugurated as president and the country's facing the worst economic crisis ever, and he goes on the radio and he tells people, look, I'm gonna have to shut the banks because it's the only thing we can really do. We're gonna have to shut the banks. Let me tell you why and I know you're scared. It's the right thing to do. I know it's the right thing to do because the right thing to do for all of us.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: So, first of all, let me put my firm belief that the only thing we have fear is fear itself. Nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror, which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.

JILL LEPORE: That when people heard his voice, they they trusted him because they knew that know they were suffering, but they they could hear in his voice that he was somebody who understood what it meant to lose something. What it meant to fear that you would lose everything. And it really mattered. It mattered every week that he was on the radio, every time that was on and he was on the radio every moment that he was on the radio. People talk about you could walk down the streets of New York and you could just hear an entire FDR speech without ever having your own radio, because every car had it on every storefront, had loudspeakers out front that had it on. You could walk for miles and you could hear the entirety of an FDR speech. And that is not just because of what he said, but it was because of how he said it. And that had just been slight huskiness in his voice. That slight kind of emotional crackle that spoke to you when you were running. I mean, not to sort of.

MG: Yeah.

JILL LEPORE: Say something about my own voice. But he wasn't faking it. Like he was really worried. And he you know, he knew some people don't like FDR, you know, think the New Deal went too far. All fine. But you cannot question what it meant and what it did for the nation's sense of purpose, that he communicated that in a crisis we stick together and we don't have that right now.

MG: It's hard in the midst of something to see beyond the moment that you're in. People are living through this moment now and they say it's unprecedented and they can't imagine what the next few weeks are going to look like, let alone the next few years. And they may not even be able to remember what the last six months were like as somebody whose job it is to see that sweep of history. What do you think the moment that we're in right now can tell us about the bigger picture or what the bigger picture can tell us about the moment that we're in right now?

JILL LEPORE: Oh, I love the clip that you began the segment with about that sort of vaccine ending an era cloaked in uncertainty or the mystery of uncertainty. And that's one of the lessons here is how our capacity to tolerate the unknown and the uncertain is, I think, quite a bit worse than it used to be. There's a we have a kind of false belief in the certainty because of how highly predictive our world is, like data is predicting everything. Like you look at the latest polls so that you can know exactly what's going to happen next.

MG: You don't get to choose what you're going to watch because Netflix tells you this is what you're going to like.

JILL LEPORE: Exactly. You know what the weather is going to be like tomorrow. There's an app for that. You know what the best route is, because and where there's going to be a traffic problem because there's an app for that. You know what you should watch and what's going to be the right you know that the TV show that's going to be interesting to you because there's an app for that. What book you should read, you're told. I think we actually just have considerably less tolerance for the unpredictable, the unknown and the uncertain and that's why people are obsessed with the curve. I mean, not like the curve is, of course, the curve is an important piece of information. I don't mean to dispute that, it's not like I know nothing about the curve, but just that you open up your newspaper app and there's the curve and, you know, then there's the various projections. Like in scenario one, the curve will go like this and then in scenario two, will go like this. If we open today, it'll look like that. We don't really actually have that kind of control. We certainly need to take responsibility for our own actions, but just our utter impatience with the unknown is, is I think a real liability for having the stamina to deal with this extraordinarily difficult time. I mean, I don't begrudge anybody, their terror of the unknown. Just kind of remarking as a historian, I think there's a kind of shift. Like for most of human history, nobody has any idea what's going to happen next, you know, from the weather to anything else.

MG: When we get out of it then, how do you think we'll look back at it at this time?

JILL LEPORE: Boy, you know, that's a kind of trajectory question. Historians are terrible at making predictions. I I guess I would say that the patterns you see in the past is that there'll be a whole long period of trying to figure out who to blame. That's the nasty version of what will happen next. We're already kind of in that. We're not even over this and just so many people are making so much political hay and a lot of people are, frankly making money over blaming other people. So there's a lot of cause for despair about that. But I think that for most people, what they will carry forward are, you know, the tender moments of compassion that they shared with fellow human beings and where they found strength by being together. Even in this almost impossible situation in which thing you have to fear most is intimacy with other people.

MG: It's a real pleasure to talk to you. Thank you very much.

JILL LEPORE: Thank you so much.

MG: Take care.

JILL LEPORE: Take care.

MG: Jill Lepore is a professor of American history at Harvard University and the author of several books, including This America: The Case for the Nation. She's also the host of a new podcast. It's called The Lost Archive. Speaking of archives, before we go, I want to leave you with this piece of sound from our own CBC Archives. Little known fact about Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who at the age of 39, before he became president, contracted polio while visiting New Brunswick. Had a near brush with death as a result. Went on to establish the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, which supported the work of Dr. Jonas Salk. Here is how a poetic CBC newscast remembered FDR after his death in April of 1945, 10 years before the Salk vaccine was finally developed.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: The subject is one of the best friends we've ever had. That friend's asleep now and he'll never wake up. And tomorrow at this time, he'll rest beneath the soil he loved. The soil of America. He had his preferences though, but really he loved everything that was clean and fresh and good. He loved our country, Canada and he came here often. No, not just as president. He was a tiny boy when he first looked out over that high cliff and down at the tides of Passamaquoddy in New Brunswick, the island of Campobello. Then one day, history, yes, history struck. And when the village doctor looked at him in the big brown bungalow above the cliff, he was writhing in pain. Polio would hit him. Infantile paralysis in Canada. Hospitals were far away. Then started a great family struggle. The United States, his country, and over which he later became president, refused to admit him because of his sickness. Franklin Roosevelt almost died in Canada while his family waited and pulled all the strings. Finally, the United States medical authorities gave in. And as an act of mercy, he was rushed to New York in the nick of time.

MG: Fantastic from the CBC archives there. That is our program for today. If you want to dip into the archives of The Current, you can catch up on anything that you missed through the CBC listen app. Find it wherever you find your apps.

Closing with Tom Power

Guests: Tom Power

MG: Coming up next on CBC Radio one, it's Q. Tom Power is the host. Hello Tom.

TOM POWER: I agree with you, Matt. I mean let me be clear, no disrespect to any of our colleagues who do a great job reporting, but what a wild use of language there.

MG: Yeah, fantastic writing. And back when you were announcer, perhaps wore a tuxedo and stood up to deliver the news in an authoritative way that reflected the tuxedo perhaps.

TOM POWER: Yeah I understand that. Like as opposed to me where I go like, hey, I don't know, guys. Here's some art news. I don't know.

MG: In a Canadian tuxedo.

TOM POWER: Yeah. In the Sam Roberts outfit, in the double jean jacket. Big show today. Pretty excited about this. You're gonna hear me in a second mention the. Steve Earle is gonna be on. But more importantly or not more importantly, as importantly, K-OS is gonna be on the show today. Are you a K-OS fan?

MG: From way back.

TOM POWER: Incredible new music. He just teamed up with Kaytranada. He reflects on making an album before the protest, but making an album that seems to be perfect for the protests and working with Kaytranada, an artist a lot younger than him and so referring to himself as a rap dad.

MG: It makes me sound old. Thank you, Tom.

TOM POWER: See ya, Matt.

MG: Tom Power, host of Q, coming up right after the CBC News. I'm Matt Galloway. That's The Current for today. Take care of yourself. We'll talk to you tomorrow.

[Music: theme]

June 9, 2020 episode transcript

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