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The Current Transcript for September 10, 2020

Host: Matt Galloway

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

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A lot of people kind of uses it now and some call black lives matter as a movement. It's not a movement. When you're black. It's not a movement. It's a lifestyle.

MATT GALLOWAY: In a summer of discontent and protests against antiblack racism. Basketball stars like LeBron James have taken a leadership role in demanding action. And for some fans, that's a welcome change. In 30 minutes two sportswriters discuss the complicated business of loving sports when things like racism, sexism and cheating can push you away from the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat. Also this morning, it was Europe's largest refugee camp but after fire sweeps through and encampments on the Greek island of Lesbos, what happens to the almost 13000 desperate people who were stranded there? And later.

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VOICE 1: That's more important to keep law and order in this society than to be worried about weak kneed people who don't like the looks of...

VOICE 2: At any cost? At any cost. How far would you go with that? How far would you extend?

VOICE 1: Just watch me.

MG: It was a definitive moment in the October crisis of 1970. A new CBC podcast explores the events that led up to it with a people who were there on the ground. But after months of staying put. We begin in the currents RV with a virtual road trip down the Mississippi en route to November's U.S. election. Buckle up. Good morning. I'm Matt Galloway. This is The Current.

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Road to November: Minnesota distillery owners rebuilding community after devastating fire

Guests: Chris Montana, Shanelle Montana

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TRUMP: Together, we will make America great again.

[Crowds chanting] Go go go go.

VOICE 1: If you're going to vote by mail. Vote early.

TRUMP: But you don't hear them talking about that. I said hundreds of thousands of lives.

VOICE 2: The only thing you could tear America apart is America itself. And we cannot let that happen.

MG: The U.S. election campaign is in full swing. In less than two months, Americans will head to the polls. And in normal times, The Current would head down to cover this race up close with the pandemic. That is not possible. So we're trying something a little different. And we're setting off on a virtual road trip. And we're following one of America's most iconic routes.

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[Sound: Water]

MG: That is the Mississippi River, to be exact. It's the confluence where its waters merge with the Minnesota River, just south of the Twin Cities. Starting today, we are going to take you down the river, stopping our RV in the cities and communities that that river runs through. And along the way, you'll meet locals, the bartender, the mechanic, the teacher, people whose lives will be shaped by this election. And by voting day, we'll have travelled through the heart of America, winding our way to New Orleans in a series we're calling Road to November. This morning, we begin in Minneapolis, which lately has been the epicentre of a story that's touched people everywhere.

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I can't breathe! I can't breathe! [Screams]

MG: On the 25th of May, George Floyd was killed by police outside a grocery store after he was alleged to have used a counterfeit 20 dollar bill in his final moments. He cried out: I can't breathe. The police officer who held his knee on George Floyd's neck has been charged with murder. What followed that was a global movement calling for racial justice and the defunding of police issues that are at the forefront in this year's U.S. election. Freelance reporter Allison Herrera takes us back to the site where this movement began.

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ALLISON HERRERA: So I'm on Chicago Avenue. I'm going south right now. And I'm headed up to 30th in Chicago, which is the spot where George Floyd was killed on Memorial Day, May 25th. And as I'm walking down Chicago from 37 Street, there's all these names of people who have been killed while in police custody. Their names are written on the street leading up to the intersection of 30th and Chicago, where there's a big memorial set up. There a fist this corner right here. It's been blocked off for the last two months while the city figures out what exactly they're going to do. [To interviewee] Hi, how are you? Can I ask you a couple questions? Tell me your name.

SANAYA: Sanaya.

ALLISON HERRERA: Sanaya. Why are you crying?

SANAYA: This is a lot. It's not fair that we have to die. And we're not doing anything wrong. And then we have to be shot and killed and murdered for the colour of our skin.

ALLISON HERRERA: How old are you?

SANAYA: Fifteen.

ALLISON HERRERA: Fifteen. What did you expect when you came here?

SANAYA: I expected to see a memorial. I didn't expect the whole state to be cut off and everything. It is nice to really know that all these people came to see and pay their respects to George and other people in the process.

MG: After George Floyd died, thousands of protesters flooded the streets of Minneapolis and in the days following. Many businesses were destroyed, some by fire. One of them was Chris Montanas distillery.

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CHRIS MONTANA: Eventually that, you know, get heated up, turn into vapour, travel through these columns, go through about 16 different plates and come out the other end is vodka. All right. Now, if you're to drink it, it kind of tastes like crappy gym socks.

MG: Chris Montana owns Du Nord Craft Spirits, and I'm sure his vodka just not tastes like Jim Socks. Du Nord is the first black owned distillery in the United States. And Chris took us on a tour of the destruction.

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CHRIS MONTANA: Thursday night into Friday morning is when things really exploded in. Those two nights were kind of our darkest nights. And when I got here on that Friday morning, I was standing about where we are right now in the parking lot. The difference is this parking lot had a ton of water in it and I knew it was coming from us because our sprinkler system had been on for about four and a half hours and had filled up this building with about a foot of water. And there is still smoke coming out. You could smell it when you got here. But honestly, it's hard to pick out the smoke from our facility versus the smoke from everything else. There are so many fires burning at that time that everywhere you were in this area was just completely accurate and it was almost like it was snowing in places because of all the ash coming down. We still got some damage here. And you won't see it now because now it's kind of an open empty room. It's hard to remember what was where. But the insurance adjuster, well, they didn't, they wouldn't come in here for a week because it wasn't safe. You got the National Guard and armoured vehicles driving down the street and you've got every other building on fire. I mean, I can understand why they didn't want to come. Over here where we're standing, we would have had pallets on pallets of hand sanitizer. Oddly enough, the it was hand sanitizer that was still on fire. If you think of a gallon jug as it's sitting upright, they basically acted like big candles. And so once they were on fire, they just didn't stop. The good news was that on the far sides on the north side of the building were these thousand litre kind of plastic bottle inside of a cage. And these were filled with ethanol. You think a thousand litres of ethanol at 190 proof and plus. They attempted to turn them into Big Molotov's; tied rags and set the rags on fire on top, thinking it would, you know, the plastic and then ignite the contents inside, which, but for the sprinkler system, if that happens, I mean, this building's gone. There's, there's no way. And we had 27 of these. Right. So it wouldn't have just burned down this building. It would have burned down the buildings next to it. If you ever see like a Rick house fire. It creates these rivers of fire and they just burn whatever they touch. And so anything downstream from us was going to be on fire, too. And there are still people here. They're hiding in the back. There's a bakery attached to the space. Some of the workers at the bakery, because a bake at night and they make [unintelligible] bread, which is an East African bread, they heard everyone come in and they decided that they would hide in the dough proofer. So the dough proofer is a big walk in. I mean, about six foot two, I can walk straight into this thing. It's a big metal box. Well, if the whole place is on fire and you're in a dough proofer, no one's going to hear you and you're not making it out. So our sprinkler system literally saved lives. Those women would have been cooked alive.

MG: Chris Montana and his wife Shanelle join me now. Good morning to you both.

SHANELLE: Good morning.

CHRIS MONTANA: Good morning.

MG: Chris. He gave us that tour a couple of weeks back. How's the cleanup going now?

CHRIS MONTANA: Slow, slower than we thought. There is more damage in that building than we had initially known and so we thought would be a month long process is still dragging on.

MG: What's that like for you, knowing that there's a long road ahead of you here?

CHRIS MONTANA: Well, I suppose the building is the least of my concerns. We have the other half of our distillery was still standing. We're still able to move forward. And and we're thinking much longer term now. I think so, even if it's a few months to get that building back. The real question is, what are we going to do in the next three and four or five years?

MG: Shanelle, you were away at the time of the fire. What was it like seeing the destruction for the first time?

SHANELLE: It was terrifying and it's terrifying thinking of somebody that you loved dearly. Being there and having to think about how to make their own space safe and and protect their space. But then also, you know, what kind of danger they might be in as they're making those hard choices of what to do and what calls to make at that time. So it was very difficult to watch it.

MG: I want to come back to the fire in a moment. But, Chris, walk me through those first days and nights of protest. What were you seeing unfold in your town?

CHRIS MONTANA: So it's one of the- I don't know, I mean, my guess I'll never see anything like it in my life. There's a part of me that hopes I don't at least one side of it, because it was both beautiful and tragic at the same time. When everyone got together Tuesday, because Tuesday was the first real protest at 38 in Chicago. Everybody was there. And it was beautiful in the sense that, you know, I, as a black man in America, I know I can look at any other black person and I don't need to say anything. They already know how I feel about George Floyd or anyone else because they know that we could be next. But that crowd had everyone in it. I mean, everyone. And it was so refreshing to see it. It was depressing because they were chanting the same things that I heard when Rodney King was beat up 29 years before. But it was it was a beautiful thing. And what it, you know, transitioned into as more and more people started to come to the city and as the crowd got angrier and righteously angry, you know, you could see the writing on the wall and it wasn't going to end well. And the response from the city was lacklustre. And then to see the destruction, I mean, I grew up in that area, watched it go from being kind of - I don't want to say a wasteland - but a lot of abandoned buildings and whatnot and and be revitalised largely by the immigrant community come in. And to watch that burn, it was watching 30 years of progress being burned to the ground. And it was, you know, fairly indiscriminate. That was hard.

MG: What did you tell your children, Shanelle, because you're away watching this unfold, how did you explain this to your kids?

SHANELLE: I mean, I was away with our three boys, we have three young children. At that time they were all under six and. We told them they were fires. They could sense, I think, the tenseness between Chris and I. They could sense the fact that, you know, you were constantly looking at the news. You were constantly trying to figure out which were, you know, not the best of moods. But it's difficult. We don't want this to be the introduction necessarily to race relations in America, to the personal conversations we have to have with them. But at the same time, we can't turn a blind eye to it. And so, you know, we told them there were fires. We told them that, you know, obviously dad was gone for a while, but we needed this not to be the introduction to the heavier conversations that we need to have with them.

MG: This is a business that you spend a long time building up the first black owned distillery in the United States. You've called it your second home. Chris, were you angry that it was being torched?

CHRIS MONTANA: Yes, I mean. Yes, I mean, when I first got there, I was angry, I was sad. I was crying. I was, you know, once I finally got in there, I mean, it was still sprinklers are still on. The fires are still going. When I got there, I'd been gone for four and a half hours. I had plenty of time to think about it. I just couldn't go there because there was a curfew. You know, looking as I do, I wasn't going to go out and take on the police, but so, yes, I definitely was angry.

MG: How did you square that with the beauty that you described earlier in terms of people coming together and protesting something in this well and demanding better?

CHRIS MONTANA: Sometimes it's good to you know, you need to take a breath. And I was able to take that breath. And I had friends who showed up and I got to see the good side of my city, the people who came to help me clean up. By the end of that day, most everything had been cleaned out of that space. And, you know, it gives you the space to remember, hey, man, this is just stuff, right? It's just, you know, it's some equipment here. It's some inventory there. And you're part of something that puts you on a programme like this in the morning and has people having this conversation. And so in that sense, once you take that breath and give yourself that space, you realise, you know, this is, one, an opportunity and, two, a privilege. And that's the price we had to pay for things to start to change in our area was just a few fires then so be it, and we're happy to pay that price.

MG: I think a lot of people would find it difficult to get to that point as you're honest about it. Shanelle, was it easy for you to reach that point, to see this, yes, as a really painful moment and a personal moment, but that there is, as Chris said, an opportunity here?

SHANELLE: It was difficult, and I'll be honest, I think it probably was a little bit more difficult for me to see the broader picture than for Chris. And, you know, I got there, but it took a big, deep breath to get there. And I you know, I just think that's a different than our experiences. And Chris thought right away, I mean, he was the one who kept his head up high and was able to see how this could change. And I think once we started to see the community reaction to it and the positivity that came out of it and what Chris said, the fact that we had people who had never talked about race in America, you know, white people who never have thought about it, suddenly coming and saying how I just didn't realise that I wasn't paying attention. I had never thought twice about what your experience might be. Those, that's exactly what we need to have happen. And so those were the types of things that really got me saying, OK, you know, this is what it is. We're going to get through it. We're going to be fine. Now, we have this opportunity to make this somewhat scary, saying until a really positive situation.

MG: As a white woman, is that part of the difficulty, do you think, or is that part of the opportunity here to see that from a different side in some ways?

SHANELLE: There are a lot of people who look at us and say, how could you possibly think this is going to be a positive thing for you? There are you know, we get e-mails and hate mail all the time saying, you know, this this was horrible. How could you possibly justify it? And I do think that there is a difference between who's saying that. You know, I think it is difficult for someone who has never felt oppression to be a bigger picture to see where this could make an impact. But. It was harder for me. Probably, absolutely, because I am a white woman and I wasn't looking at that broader picture and, you know, but I think this showed, this showed possibly the change that could happen and the change that was needed. And people are paying a little bit more attention now.

MG: So in the last few minutes that we have part of this change, people hope is is going to build into something. What that will be, we'll see, I suppose, in early November, perhaps after that. We're starting this road trip in Minneapolis and making our way down to the election in November. What does the election mean to you, Shanelle?

SHANELLE: Oh, so many things. You know, I, one of the things that Chris and I started to know, one of the reasons we did is because we saw this divide between Brohm, Minnesota and Minnesota. And I come from Minnesota. He comes from Minneapolis. And the distillery itself has sort of been emblematic of two things coming together. I feel like this divide between the Republican Party and really the Trump Party and the Democrats has just gotten so wide and so divisive and I need, I want us to come above that. I want us to say racial justice is not a partisan issue. It is something that everybody wants. And I truly believe that. I just think the rhetoric out there is skewing what people actually want. I think it's so divisive that even to think like racial justice and now partisan and that to me it is not good for anyone.

MG: Chris, what are you hopeful for when you think of this election? I mean, it's a couple of months away and already there is a lot of angst and turmoil about what could happen, what might happen after the election. Where's the hope for you?

CHRIS MONTANA: That's a tough question for me to answer most of where my head usually is somewhere five and 10 years down the road. And that's and that's what I'm thinking of. And, you know, I have a I think my father groans every time he hears them say it. But I do subscribe to the idea of democracy. You get what you deserve. And it could be, you know, if there's another Trump presidency - which I would find incredibly unfortunate. But if that were to happen - then it means that that's what the country needs. And the good news about having someone like that is that when an issue like this bubbles up or at least becomes apparent to those for whom it was a latent defect, it forces it into your face. It's not swept under the rug and having someone like Trump is an agitator in this position keeps it in front of your face. And so there may be a silver lining to that. I hope that that this energy can translate into electoral power. But coming from where I come from, and I come from electoral politics, I used to work in Congress. I'm very pro voting. But I also know that you've got whole communities who have been told for decades and generations that if we get out and vote and we just generally support the Democrats, that this stuff will change and we see that it really hasn't. So I don't really know where it's going to go. I hope that that we take a different path in November. But whether we do or we don't, the real question for racial justice in this country is going to be, do we continue the conversation regardless because the election of Joe Biden is not going to suddenly make this better. The only way that that arc of justice bends because people push on it and we need to keep pushing.

MG: I wish you the best of luck in the rebuild. And it's a real pleasure to start our road trip with you this morning. Thanks.

SHANELLE: Thank you.

CHRIS MONTANA: Thanks for having us.

MG: Take care. Chris and Shanelle, Montana, own Du Nord craft spirits in Minneapolis, Minnesota. And that is the first stop in our special series Road to November, following the Mississippi River from Minnesota to Louisiana. The RV is gassed up. We have snacks. And each week we will hear from Americans along the route about what the coming election means to them. The CBC News is next. And then, in recent weeks, we have seen, as we've been talking about, unprecedented acts of protest in solidarity with Black Lives Matter in sports as well. We'll talk about a watershed moment for pro sports and the people who love sports. That's coming up in about six minutes. I'm Matt Galloway. This is The Current on CBC Radio One.

From Black Lives Matter to off court controversies, these sports writers say fans need to confront discomfort

Guests: Jessica Luther, Kavitha Davidson

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

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MG: Still to come, a fire forces thousands of migrants to flee a refugee camp in Greece. But first, a reckoning for pro sport.

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VOICE 1: The Milwaukee Bucks have decided to boycott Game five in protest and in response to what...

VOICE 2: It was supposed to be, the scene of three WNBA games tonight, Washington wearing shirts to honour Jacob Blake, who is the recent the most recent victim of police violence, shot in the back seven times outside of a...

VOICE 3: Eight remaining NHL teams boycotting the ice for two days, standing in solidarity against racism.

MG: Professional athletes are taking a stand like never before in protest of police brutality and racism. And this kind of action was long awaited by many fans. Fans who love sports but are turned off by how some leagues, organisations and even athletes themselves have been unwilling to confront issues of justice and fairness head on.

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VOICE 1: This morning, free agent, quarterback calling Catholic is fighting to get back on the field last season becoming the first NFL player to take a knee during the national anthem.

VOICE 2: Centre fielder Kevin Pillar apologising for an outburst during the Jays game last night. It appears he shouted a homophobic slur at the pitcher for Atlanta.

VOICE 3: ...Over the years has begun to crack. A former competitor testified in this deposition that Armstrong bribed him to throw a race with a million dollar prise.

VOICE 4: What was the offer?

VOICE 5: By now, you have seen the video. If NFL star running back Ray Rice knocking out his fiancée. Well, right now, the NFL remains on the defensive. As questions build over how it handled this domestic abuse.

MG: Some dark moments in professional sports. Kavitha Davidson and Jessica Luther are both sports journalists, and they've wrestled with the good and the bad of sports and athletic competition. Their new book is called Loving Sports When They Don't Love You Back Dilemmas of the Modern Fan. Kavitha and Jessica, good morning.

JESSICA LUTHER: Good morning. Thank you for having us.

MG: Thanks for joining us. At what point, Jessica, in your life did you realise as a sports fan that you loved sports but sports didn't necessarily love you back?

JESSICA LUTHER: I think maybe my whole life is really the answer. I think when you're a woman who loves sports, people are a girl who loves sports. People assume that you don't and they treat you that way. And probably when I played basketball in middle school, certainly watching the way that Serena Williams is treated as a tennis player coming up in her career. And definitely as an adults, like, there was a time when my husband was invited to a fantasy football league and he doesn't do anything with sports. He doesn't care about it at all. And he said, I think my wife should- that that's who you should invite. And they specifically said, no, that I was too feminist and I would make it unfun for them. And these are friends of mine, and I was not never invited to join. So I think there's been a lot of moments in my life where I've been reminded of this.

MG: What about for you? Kavitha?

KAVITHA DAVIDSON: I think it's a similar thing, just being, like Jessica said, a girl or a woman who loves sports. And you're always looked at as this kind of unicorn, whether you're in a bar, who in some kind of social setting. And then inevitably, some dude always wants to test you on how much about sports you actually know. And I remember at my local bar, there was always this one guy who would forget that I was a sportswriter and would find out like it was brand new information and would always say something to the effect of: so you really know a lot about sports, like, you know what a third and long is. And he wasn't even asking me about something difficult to explain. He literally didn't think that I could have any kind of baseline knowledge about sports. So I think that just even when it's not necessarily like a malintent just being made to feel like you were something unique or other than what people think of as sports fans, I think has always carried with me in my life.

MG: I mean, this runs through this book in some ways it could be taken as an argument against why you should like sports, because a sports are this cruel back to you. Why should you, you know, get involved with sports in the first place? But there's a lot to love about sports as well. And I mean, we can talk about some of the things that that come up that would rub people the wrong way in sports. But, Jessica, what do you love about being a sports fan?

JESSICA LUTHER: I just love sports. Like I'm the kind of person that will watch anything that's competitive. Like I make fun of ESPN for showing Cornhole tournament's on other channels, but I also would watch it. So I just love watching people do things that I could never do and to do them so well and so consistently like the way that they can move their body to make things happen. There's just something about that. And I think I just really love people competing. Like I love rooting for and against. I have to admit that sometimes against teams or people, I get a lot out of that. There's a real emotion roller coaster that you get to go on as a sports fan where the stakes are, there almost aren't stakes. And so you can have this great emotional catharsis and not mean anything. But you get to go through all of that every single time you watch a match. And I just find that addictive.

KAVITHA DAVIDSON: Kavitha, for you going to the sports bars and, you know, being questioned, disrespected. I suppose you could win a lot of money in bets because people might not think that you know anything about sports. And it turns out that you know a lot about sports. But what is it that would keep you going back to sports?

KAVITHA DAVIDSON: I mean it we explore this a lot in the book about why sports are so much part of our identities. And it's for me in particular. But what we found in talking to a lot of fans, it's part of who we were and what made us who we are now. We became sports fans during our most formative years. And, you know, for me specifically, you know, I am the daughter of immigrants from India, my parents are not huge sports fans. They moved to America well, before I was born in 1981, and, you know, I think that being a sports fan and naturally just loving these things, I went to my first live sporting event as a class trip when I was seven years old, and it was, you know, a baseball game at Yankee Stadium. And I've never experienced anything like that. And like Jessica says, there was just this, like physical feeling in the pit of your stomach that you can feel the sound of 57000 people rooting for the same thing. And it's this beautiful and addictive feeling, but it's also unifying. It's this community, especially in a place like New York when, you know, you read every language being spoken and every different type of person at the stadium rooting for the same thing. And it made me feel really connected to a community and to my city and frankly, to my country in a way that things nothing like sports can make me feel connected in that way. And the other side of that is that I've definitely had I'd have had readers I've had you know, again, people at sports bars say you can't possibly know anything about sports. You're the daughter of Indian immigrants. You probably only know cricket and that kind of thing. So it does cut both ways. But that thing that keeps me coming back is my connexion to who I am and where I grew up and what made me who I am today.

MG: The place of sports now, in this weird time that we are in, is different. It feels like than what sports meant to us and the role that sports played in our lives in years past. Jessica, we heard a little bit over that off the top in terms of what happened in the way that athletes responded in the wake of Jacob Blake. What did it mean to you to see that the way the pro athletes responded to that?

JESSICA LUTHER: I found it deeply inspirational. I mean, we're in a moment. I mean, Keith and I live in the United States that I think it's not an understatement to say that the we haven't handled COVID-19 very well down here. I feel a lot of despair and sadness. I'm grieving a lot about, you know, the things that we are unable to do at this point. My son just started middle school yesterday and he's sitting out in the kitchen right now doing it. He's missing out on that. So I feel a lot of negative things right now and watching those players do what they did, which is really stand up against very powerful institutions and say enough is enough and we can't do this right now, we shouldn't be asked to. And things have to change. Just I don't know. I just found that so- there's so much hope in that moment. And I was very appreciative of it.

MG: What is different, Jessica, about this moment and the way that sports responded this time to this incident?

JESSICA LUTHER: Well, I think certainly we've never seen anything like the wildcat strike kind of thing that we saw, which was the domino effect. But even the Bucs making them get the attorney general on the phone in the locker room, that is brand new. There's little pieces of it in history, but nothing quite on that scale. And I think it's got to be careful about using the word unprecedented, because often we're just overlooking things that have happened. But it does really feel like nothing like this has happened in sport before. And I the other thing I'll say is that I feel like this moment, we've got to see how important sports are and the way that the NBA is shutting down finally forced everyone, especially in the United States. But I feel like there are ripple effects beyond to take this very seriously. Like people care about what's happening in sport and they take their cues from it.

MG: What about for you? Kavitha? Because, yesterday was the NBA is also the WNBA. It was Naomi Osaka and professional tennis. It was eventually the NHL as well. What did this moment mean for you?

KAVITHA DAVIDSON: I mean, a couple of things. First and foremost, we have seen the value that these players have had and these players have been told how valuable they've been throughout this pandemic. Right. I mean, all that we've heard, all of that they have heard for the last five to six months is how much money these leagues and these teams and these brands that sponsor them stand to lose if we don't bring sports back. So that is showing these players how much power they have individually and collectively beyond what I think anybody ever realised or the players had ever realised themselves. And we didn't even we didn't just see that in the pros. We've seen that in college as well in the United States. And then all of these incidents, whether it's Jacob Blake or George Floyd or Breonna Taylor, you can go down the line, have affected players on a deeply human and individual level in a way that we never like to recognise. We never like to recognise the individual humanity of these players who entertain us for a living and who we pay to play games for our own enjoyment and consumption. But it got to a breaking point where these players were saying, we are black men and women in America and we cannot go on doing our jobs because this is their job. We have to all remember. We cannot go on doing our jobs pretending like what is going on around us in our country is not affecting us. I think that was extremely powerful to see that, you know, the wildcat strikes, the Milwaukee Bucks not coming out of their locker room was this organic thing. And as Jessica mentioned, they got the Wisconsin attorney general and the lieutenant governor of that state on the phone to ask what concrete and tangible things they can ask for. And the Bucs emerged from that locker room with a statement where they called on the Wisconsin state legislature to come back from recess to vote on a police reform bill that had been introduced back in June. These are real things. And they're also realising that they have the power to force their owners who have very great and very real and actualised political and financial power in the country to enact some of this change. And now they're using arenas as polling places and voter and voting sites. That's not a small thing. And they're realising that, you know, if a billionaire owner can ask for hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies from their state for a new stadium, they can probably ask for police reform as well.

MG: It's interesting. LeBron James obviously gets a lot of attention given his role in the NBA. But tell me the story, Jessica, of Tony Smith Thompson. Because, I mean, her story is way, way in the rear-View mirror in some ways, but is a ground breaking story in what she was doing.

JESSICA LUTHER: Yeah. Tony Smith Thompson was at school at Manhattan College, which is a small school. This was back in the early 2000s when that golf war had just started. And one of her parents is black and she identifies as black. And she was on the basketball team and she decided that she could no longer stand there during the national anthem and she started to turn her back. And it wasn't a big deal until one of the school they're playing basically leaked it that this was happening. And she got a lot of pushback. I mean, not even a lot of support on her team. And it was a really difficult time for her. But I mean, she was doing this back in the early 2000s as just a lone player on a women's basketball team at a small school. So, I mean, we've been seeing this for a long, long time.

MG: We heard at the beginning of this interview a little bit of the story of the NFL player, Ray Rice. So you can we can talk about race and we can talk about larger political issues. Part of the story that you talk about in the book is around how sports leagues deal with issues of domestic violence and what fans are willing to take on and what fans are willing to just kind of put out of their mind. And so somebody may have done something that you find reprehensible and you admit this in the Book of Youth, you still drawn to a player like Kobe Bryant, for example. Tell me a little bit about your feelings around Kobe Bryant.

KAVITHA DAVIDSON: Yeah, I mean, I've experienced this dilemma, particularly when it comes to gendered violence so much in the course of my sports fandom. And, you know, we write in the book about Aroldis Chapman, who is closer for the Yankees and the Yankees, as I said, were my first real, my first love in sports. But with Kobe, you know, and we had already had the book set when Kobe died and at the end of January and I called Jessica and our publisher and I said everything that I'm feeling right now about Kobe Bryant I think belongs in the book because it is every dilemma in one that we wrote about. So Kobe, you know, I loved Kobe Bryant growing up. The first time I ever went to Los Angeles was for my birthday in 2003. And we went to Staples Centre to see a Lakers game because I had never seen Kobe play live. And, you know, I he was so much a part of of my being a basketball fan, especially in, you know, the early 2000s. And when Eagle, Colorado happened, I was 14 years old and I didn't really have a conception about the narratives, about how we talk about sexual assault, especially how we talk about sexual assault when it involves a rich and famous person.

MG: Eagle, Colorado, we should just say this is when he was away getting surgery and then was accused of sexual assault and rape.

KAVITHA DAVIDSON: Right. By a woman who worked in the hotel that he was staying at and I remember at the time, again, being a 14 year old who just loved Kobe Bryant, it didn't even occur to me that I didn't want this to be true. I just didn't accept for a fact that it could even possibly be true. And all of the things that run in the playbook that I know of now, of how we deny women who accused people of violence against them ran through my head, definitely ran out of my mouth. You know, she was a cleat chaser. And why was she even in the hotel room in all of these things that we that we bring up to cast doubt on accusers. And now, you know, we're talking 17 years later. I am a sexual assault survivor myself. I've obviously learnt a lot about that. But even if that weren't the case, I'm just, I'm an adult and I've written about these issues. I've interviewed victims and survivors and I've just studied the psychology of how accusations come about and how denials of those accusations come about, so I've kind of come full circle and my own understanding here. But when Kobe died, you know, and I had to, I was living in Los Angeles at the time. I ran down to Staples Centre and did fan interviews. And I just turned my own personal brain off and just went straight into work mode. But at the end of that very, very long day, I got home and I cried because I was mourning him. Right. Like, we lost this incredible player. But I also cried because I didn't know how I was supposed to mourn him, if it was even appropriate to do so. Because, you know, we probably will never know for sure what happened there. But I'm fairly certain that what happened there was not consensual. He admitted as much in the civil suit button. But we also lost the opportunity to have Kobe truly redeem himself. We talk a lot in this book about issues that are fixable. And, you know, whenever people, I think in bad faith bring up cancelled culture or things like that, they never allow room for the fact that we do believe that redemption is possible. And at the same time, you know, how quickly we are to allow men and people who have been accused of these things. Their redemption narrative also casts so much, so much doubt and so much harm to victims and to accusers and not just to the woman who accused him, but to accusers everywhere. And I can say that myself again as a survivor, that whenever I write about a player who's been accused of something and immediately the barrage of fans defending him and talking about the woman who accuses in such disparaging ways makes me feel like I'm being disparaged all over again when I brought my accusations forward. So all of these things kind of came to a head with Kobe. And I still don't you know, I still don't really know how to reconcile those things. And that is a discomfort that I'm always going to live with whenever I think about him and whenever I think about how much pure joy he really did bring me. And living with that discomfort is something that I think that we have we have said to fans since writing this book that that's kind of you know, that's one of the biggest takeaways here, is that there really isn't a black and white, there isn't a yes or no. There's not a right or wrong answer to how to deal with these dilemmas. And sometimes it's just going to be painful and uncomfortable.

MG: Is it discomfort? But also, I mean, there's a line in the book about how denial is key to enjoying sports. So whether it's, you know, watching sports like the Olympics, knowing that the Olympics are really bad for the places that hold the Olympics, whether it's watching NFL football, which is about to start, and the players are ploughing into each other and there are issues around concussions, whether it's knowing that some players might be on performance enhancing drugs but you really want to see them run really fast or hit a bunch of home runs. Jessica, is it a bit about denial as well?

JESSICA LUTHER: Yeah, I think so. I always joke, tennis is my favourite sport. And I know too much about it. And there are times where I just want to be like a three year old and be like la, la, la [unintelligible]. So I do think that is part of it is you just don't want to believe it. And I think we see that a lot of the times and the way that fans respond to knowledge that forces them to be more critical of the thing that they love. And that's hard work. I think Kavita and I have both been through that. As fans figuring out how to take in information about something that you love dearly, that you that your identity is attached to very closely because you feel and maybe you should, but you often feel implicated as a fan and in this thing that is bad about the thing that you love. And so, yes, I think denial is a real defence mechanism for a lot of people when they're faced with these kinds of issues.

MG: So in the last couple of minutes that we have, how are we supposed to love sports if we have all these doubts, if if these are the things that should make us run screaming from sports and find some other thing to distract us. Kavitha, what are we supposed to do?

KAVITHA DAVIDSON: Well, the first thing that, you know, we've been saying whenever we do these interviews, a huge thing that we learnt in writing this book is just to be less judgemental of how fans do deal with this and to be kinder to ourselves also for having these dilemmas, because they mean that we're thinking critically of these things. But we're also human. And it's okay to still have these attachments like I love sports. You brought up the Olympics, Jessica, and I love the Olympics, even though we recognise how terrible they are. And we're going to keep watching them. And I think so the first thing is just to be kinder to ourselves in recognising that there isn't, you know, just a one size fits all solution to all of this. And then, you know, in interviewing so many different fans and so many different experts in these fields, exactly that realisation that whatever works for you is okay. You know, we interviewed one fan who said that he just can't watch football anymore. And he goes upstairs every Sunday when his family has a TV on. And that's how he deals with it. We interviewed another fan who said that, you know, when Aroldis Chapman does come into the game. She donates a dollar or two for every strikeout that he records to a domestic violence charity. And that's her way of feeling, like she's making up for some of the, you know, the dissonance that she needs to allow for in order to continue to enjoy these games. There really isn't a solution. There's not an answer to the how to the book originally was how to love sports when they don't love you back. And then we realised that it would it would be unfair for us to tell fans how they're supposed to handle that. But I think just the awareness in itself and, you know, holding leagues and players and ourselves accountable for some of these issues that we're thinking of. I think that that goes a much longer way than finding one. You know, one solution for everybody.

MG: Jessica. Aside from plugging my ears and going la la, la, la, la, when the game is on, what am I supposed to do?

JESSICA LUTHER: I think you're just going to have to sit in the discomfort. And I think that coming to that realisation is an important one and being okay with that. It's really hard to be uncomfortable. But really, the whole point of the book and why we wanted to write this is we want sports to be more inclusive, have a bigger umbrella. We love sports. We want so many other people to feel loved back by sports. And really, the only way to do that is to just admit that we're all going to have to be uncomfortable with the way that they are now in order to hopefully change them in the future.

KAVITHA DAVIDSON: And I'm also just going to add, you know, for other fans, allowing that other fans might have these discomforts and might have these dilemmas that you might not have individually doesn't make them less of a fan. Like Jessica said, we love these things that we criticize and we just criticise them because we want them to be better. But, you know, a woman watching a player who's been accused of domestic violence is probably going to have a slightly different reaction to that than, you know, a male fan. And sports media has always been catered toward the male fans. So, you know, just allowing for the fact that we do have diversity in how we experience these things and the dilemmas that we have and how we think about them, I think will also go a really long way.

MG: I felt better being a sports fan at the end of this book. I will say in the middle of it I thought maybe that's it for sports and me. But no, there is a lot of space in there, too, to love these pursuits and love these games. It's great to speak with you both about this. Thank you.

KAVITHA DAVIDSON: Thank you.

JESSICA LUTHER: Thank you so much.

MG: Jessica Luther and Kavitha Davidson's new book is called Loving Sports When They Don't Love You Back Dilemmas of the Modern Fan. Coming up after your regional update, thousands of migrants are homeless again after a fire destroys a refugee camp in Greece. What is ahead for the people forced to leave? That's coming up next. My name's Matt Galloway, this is The Current on CBC Radio one. We're back in 90 seconds. Stay with us.

Huge fire at Moria refugee camp on Lesbos, New CBC podcast Recall: How To Start a Revolution

Guests: Katy Fallon, Geoff Turner

MG: I Matt Galloway you're listening to The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

[Sounds: Chatter and wind]

There was nothing left of the. The whole camp.

MG: High winds fanned the devastating flames Tuesday night as a fire tore through the Moria refugee camp on the Greek island of Lesbos. A second fire Wednesday destroyed what was left after that initial fire. It was Europe's most notorious refugee camp at one point 20000 people were living in a space built for just 3000. And now it's burned to the ground. And that has left many who've already lost everything with nothing at all. Yousif Al Showaili is an Iraqi refugee and photographer. He recorded that sound you heard earlier and he describes what he saw that day and why he says the frustration of the migrants led to the fire.

YOUSIF AL SHWAILI: There is an NGO created quarantine area where there is thousands of people, refugees, living outside of the camp and the olive grove. The quarantine area is surrounded by hundreds of tents and was only little fence between the refugees without COVID and refugees with COVID. If you have coronavirus, no doctor will come to see you. There was no any doctors. There is no any medical care. You will not get any medicine. They will give you the food from behind the fence. And this made the refugees pissed off because of the situation. They said they didn't give us masks and soap. We said it's okay, we will protect ourselves. But when we are sick and they want to bring us to the hospital and put us in this place without doctors it's enough for us. That's it. We cannot handle it anymore. The refugees tried to get the people with COVID-19 out of this area to bring them to the hospital. There is some refugees who didn't accept that. They said it too risky to let them walk through the camp to get to the hospital. Then the police came with tear gas. They shot some shotguns in the air. One of the tear gas started the first fire in Moria. Then the refugees thought there's shotguns, there's people with COVID. Lockdown. No good food. No medical care. No masks. No soaps. They said we are dead anyway, we will burn this hell. This night I really saw the hell of Moria.

MG: Katy Fallon is a freelance journalist who focuses on migration issues and Greece and she is on Lesbos. Katy, hello.

KATY FALLON: Hi there.

MG: How many refugees were in this camp when that initial fire began?

KATY FALLON: So the camp had a population of just under 13000 when the fire broke out.

MG: And so where are those refugees now?

KATY FALLON: So most people are on the road, which is the main road between the camp and the main town, Mytilene. Around 400 unaccompanied children were, at least some were flown out last night, but thousands of people, families just camped out on the road and tents or just sleeping literally on the road.

MG: So when you say they're on the road, they're not moving. They're not walking on the road. I mean, the images that I've seen have just been people sleeping essentially on the shoulder of the road. That's kind of where these 13000 people are.

KATY FALLON: Yes, exactly. That just literally sleeping on the side of the road and whatever belongings they managed to grab when the fire broke out. And that being prevented from reaching the main town of Mytilelne. So there's police blockades either side. So they area ll on this sort of stretch of two, three kilometre road.

MG: As I mentioned in the introduction, these are people who were in desperate situations before this fire began and now have been left with nothing or less than nothing. You've been speaking with some of them. What have they told you?

KATY FALLON: I think the word desperation sometimes gets overused or it becomes meaningless. It really does feel like desperation. And there is a loss of hope because there was a hope that, you know, this this is in Europe. Maybe they get moved to the mainland. Things would be better. But they've just witnessed, I mean, it wasn't just one fire. It was many fires that broke out in the camp. And there's just a real sense of- people are just at the lowest I think I've ever spoken to people. And that's really something for morale, which has been called hellenised many times over. So just put that into context, the camp has been under quarantine for a week now since the first COVID case was discovered in the camp last Wednesday and it was under a tighter lockdown. But it had been living under a lockdown for six months anyway because the movement restrictions for refugees had not been lifted. They were lifted for the local populations that made restrictions that everyone living in these refugee camps, kept getting extended an extended, so people had already been living cramped up for months and months and months. And then the news of these cases, which kept increasing. On Tuesday night, I think there were around 35 confirmed cases discovered in the camp.

MG: You wrote a piece about, in part, the contrasts in various populations where there are some people, as you mentioned, the local population has had freedom of movement and they've been out on the beach while refugees have been stuck in these camps. What did that mean in terms of exacerbating the conditions and exacerbating the tensions that are already at play?

KATY FALLON: There is already a sense that there is an inequality between being an asylum seeker and a tourist or a Greek resident citizen. People at least told me that it started to become very apparent as locked down kept getting extended, as you were saying, Greece was being applauded for doing very well in terms of coronavirus. And then it opened up to tourists. And tourism is very, very important to Greece. But you were saying, well, these images of tourists sitting on the beaches and yet people are sitting in Moria camp. Temperatures are very hot in the summer. It's never a nice place to live. And in the past six months, people haven't been able to leave really at all.

MG: Who are the people who are there or who lived there when the camp was still in place?

KATY FALLON: There were families. There were single people. There were unaccompanied children. That was a whole mix of people. If you just walked through Moria camp a few weeks ago, you would see there are so many children in this camp, there are so many families. And there was a lot of joy even when it was a place of extreme pain, you know, though, was you could see the kids running in between all the washing lines, between the tents. There was life in this camp. And the people made a life liveable. But it was all kinds of people. The camps, mainly Afghan but there are people from Syria, there are people from the Democratic Republic of Congo. Its people from all walks of life living together.

MG: We've talked on this programme before about the tensions on the island between locals and the migrants and the NGOs who were there to help the migrants who were being attacked, in some cases by the locals. What is the mood now on Lesbos?

KATY FALLON: Very anxious. Very, very anxious. I'm actually, in fact, sitting right outside a roadblock which has been erected by locals to prevent any construction vehicles heading to the camp to make sure it doesn't get rebuilt. There's a great deal of anger amongst the local population and there's a lot of anxiety amongst everyone working in NGOs and the refugee population because no one really knows what's going to happen next. It's really a big question mark and it's a very worrying time because of the fact that there is also this pandemic happening at the same time as all these other tragedies.

MG: You've also written in the past about how far right groups have used the crisis for their own agenda. How could this play out politically if you have close to 13000 people sleeping on the sides of roads and no sense as to where they're going to go and locals setting up roadblocks at the camp can't be rebuilt?

KATY FALLON: It's very worrying. And the fact that if it is true that people in the camps set the fires, that will certainly be seized upon by far right groups who have this narrative that, you know, the country is being invaded by criminals. They use very extreme language. They are not interested in the truth or they're not interested in facts that just interested in using places like Lesbos for their own means to push their own hatred, essentially. And so there is a real risk that this could happen again.

MG: What role has the European Union played in the conditions of the camp and in trying to find some way out for those who have been living there?

KATY FALLON: I mean, the EU is the main party who is responsible here for the conditions in Moria and for what's happening on Lesbos. The Aegean island camps have been used as this containing centres because of this [unintelligible] that was struck with Turkey in 2016, which meant that everyone arriving had to claim asylum in the camps at that first point before they could reach the mainland, essentially to make sure that people didn't- We didn't see the scenes that we saw in 2015. We saw people walking, taking trains, anything they could do to get to northern Europe, which is often seen as a better place for people. That is the thing on the ground that lots of locals say to us. They feel very abandoned by the European Union. You know, they feel like they have just enough to deal with this problem alone. And it is a big problem for locals. It isn't nice to have a huge refugee camp with horrible conditions right on your doorstep. They feel like that island is being sort of just used as a makeshift prison, essentially, in some ways. That's the words that people have used at points. So Europe, if Europe decides basically what happens next and the European Union has to then take a decision about what's going to happen in these camps. And there's been people raising alarms for years and years and years about the conditions, saying that a fire like this is inevitable. And we just witnessed that this week. It completely burned to the ground. But this is not a surprise.

MG: Just before I let you go, where are these people going to end up? There's 13000 people who have been displaced. And you mentioned some of the children being flown off the island. But these are people who have nothing. Where are they going to go?

KATY FALLON: I mean, that's a really good question. And none of us know and they don't know. And people have asked me like, what's going to happen? Do you know? Do you know? There is such a sense of desperation. And I really, I really don't know what's going to happen. There are talks of boats being coming to accommodate people temporarily. There's a possibility people could be taken to the mainland. I really can't say at this point. But all I can say is that for the past two nights, people have been sleeping on the road and they really don't want to have to keep doing that because they've lost everything and they've let you got the clothes on their back. So the answer to that question, none of us know what's going to happen next. And it's already worrying times on the island.

MG: Katy, I appreciate you telling us what's happening there. Thank you.

KATY FALLON: Thank you.

MG: Katie Fallon is a freelance journalist and she joined me from Lesbos, Greece. This is The Current on CBC Radio one. My name's Matt Galloway.

SOUNDCLIP

[French speech]

He was silent. I looked around and we were on our way to our destiny and we didn't know what our destiny was already written. Difficult. We were all amateurs. It was a mistake.

MG: Oh, that is Cyriaque de Deslisle. And he's describing his part in a tragically botched robbery in Montreal in 1964. The robbery was just one episode in a seven year escalation by the FLQ that culminated in the October crisis of 1970. A new CBC podcast tells the story of the crisis and everything that led up to it. Geoff Turner is the host and producer of Recall How to Start a Revolution. Geoff, good morning.

GEOFF TURNER: Good morning, Matt.

MG: Who is Cyriaque Deslisle?

GEOFF TURNER: Well, I wanted you to hear his voice because he's one of the fascinating real people that we met along the way to creating this. And what he's describing there is this day gone terribly wrong. He was just a mild mannered employee of the Department of Defence. And he gets roped in to being the getaway driver at the last second for a robbery. It was orchestrated by a character named Francois Schirm, who is actually an Austro Hungarian German raised veteran of the French Foreign Legion. And he ropes in Cyriaque Deslisle to this robbery at an arms store, International Firearms in Montreal. Next thing you know, Cyriaque Deslisle is on his way to prison where he would spend nine years for his part in that robbery. And speaking to a guy who's now in his 80s in quiet retirement, you know the extent to which his involvement, which was should have been incidental, shaped his life. It's just a real microcosm of what the FLQ period was like for so many people.

MG: How does his story fit into that bigger picture of the FLQ?

GEOFF TURNER: Well, people should understand if they don't know what the FLQ is or was it was the Front De Liberation Du Quebec, which was a radical separatist, radically political and general movement that started in the early 60s, pushing for a radical social change. And it happened in waves in Montreal. It started with Molotov cocktails being thrown at federal buildings and it escalated over time. They would plant bombs. And this was one of the waves that was orchestrated by a guy named Francois Schirm. He was, what he was trying to do was to create a revolutionary army, which would be an offshoot of the FLQ. And that was the purpose of robbing this gun store. They thought they'd load up a car with semiotic weapons and they'd be on their way to war. And Cyriaque Deslisle just wound up being a part of that plot, which obviously didn't turn out very well.

MG: And these waves culminated in the October crisis.

GEOFF TURNER: Exactly. And that was a big discovery for me. As you know, I do have a history degree. For what for what that's worth. But, to the extent that I understood this story at all, it was that it was about the October crisis, which is really just a very brief culmination of what was actually years and years of escalating violence and tension in Montreal.

MG: The first episode in this series tells the story of a woman named Therese Levay, who is Therese Levay?

GEOFF TURNER: Oh, Therese. I am so fond of her. One of the joys of putting this series together is to have the luxury of doing this really deep research and diving into the old newspapers and, you know, beyond just the history books to actually go into source materials. And in the course of looking through some of those, like old newspapers and documents around coroner's inquest and stuff, I saw this name and it was actually a different name, it was her married name, which was Sirois and I hadn't seen it anywhere else in the books. It was like she had sort of disappeared from history. But it was this person who had been there when a bomb went off at the lagoon at Shoe Factory. And my producer, Francis, who is just a brilliant researcher, managed to figure out that she had reverted to her maiden name and was now living just outside Montreal. And he gets her on the line. She thought it was a joke. She thought somebody was playing a prank because nobody had spoken to her about this in all those decades since 1966. But she invites us into her home. This is back in December and tells us the story of what it's like to be eight and a half months pregnant and to be about two and a half feet away from a dynamite bomb going off a bomb that actually killed her friend and colleague, Therese Morain. And her story unfolds not only in front of us, but in front of her son, who is in her womb at the time, to whom this is all news. It's all coming to him for the first time and you can imagine what that scene was like. And I still get shivers down my neck about what the what the feeling was like being there in that moment, holding the microphone. It was, it's quite extraordinary.

MG: A lot of time has passed from then until now and whether people had spoken to her or not. There is a real freshness to this story. What is it like to sit down and talk to these people, these people who were essentially convicted terrorists?

GEOFF TURNER: Yes, it's a peculiar experience. There's one FLQ member Pier Charrette, who he didn't want to be on tape. He wanted to talk to us, but he wanted it all to be off the record. But his most spectacular incident with regards to the FLQ was when he fled possible charges along with his colleague, Alan Allard and they took off to the states where they were aided by Stokely Carmichael and some Black Panthers and members of the Weather Underground to get a hold of a gun and hijack a plane from the airport in New York. But sitting in his modest apartment with his big collection of classical music CDs, in 2020 is a it's really hard to square these things. And he's gentle and funny and you have to fight really hard as a journalist not to sort of give over to, I think to that feeling that he here's this kindly old man, which he seems to be. But he was also involved in in real terror. So it was sometimes a challenge to square those things.

MG: I think a lot of people might be surprised to learn about those international connexions that they FLQ had, because it's a Quebec story. It's Canadian story. But there were those ties to the states in particular.

GEOFF TURNER: Again, that was one of the most fascinating discoveries to me, that this was not happening in a bubble. I think there's to me anyway, I don't want to project on other people, but I always had this kind of sense of the FLQ and the movement around it is being a bit provincial, if that's the right word. It's all about go back. It's this minor local squabble. But they were, in fact, connected to movements all over the world, to Cuba. Cuba keeps popping up. In fact, the very first FLQ sell was led by a Belgian guy who is inspired by his visit to Cuba, which was inspired by Fidel Castro's visit to Montreal in 1960 at the behest of the Junior Chamber of Commerce, if you can believe it. So there's these wild connexions going on. In fact, I think we have some tape here of Philippe Visamet. I'd like you to hear.

SOUNDCLIP

I was in charge of facilitating communication between these movements and the Quebeqois. I remember that Mario Bachon when he met with Stokely Carmichael. That was a very, very hot meeting. It was a very tense sort of things at the end of which Stokely made his remark. He said this guy is either a [beep] spy, or he's the next [beep] John Brown of North America.

GEOFF TURNER: A very, very hot meeting.

MG: Yes. I just love that.

GEOFF TURNER: So Philippe Visametis a self-described internationalist militant. He has Haitian roots, spent a bit of time in the States, but has lived in Montreal since the 60s. And that meeting that he's describing is part of a Congress of black writers that he helped organise, which was this incredible meeting of minds in Montreal at the time in 1968. And the people, of course, you know who Stokely Carmichael is, the legendary Black Power Black Liberation figure. But Mario Bishan that he's talking about is an FLQ member who showed up at this Congress of Black writers to see where FLQ might fit into all this stuff. And that meeting, I just, I love the sense of these sparks flying with, you know, these upstart FLQ guys who think they have common cause with black Americans and their situation. And it turns out they do, because next thing you know, Stokely Carmichael is sheltering Pierre Charette and Alain Allard in his apartment in Harlem. So it's those Connections are fascinating. Of course, the Cuban connexion where a lot of the FLQ guys wind up fleeing and living in exile, some of them for nearly a decade.

MG: How is all of this resonating in Quebec now? I mean, again, you know, the passage of time means that things in some ways fade into the rear-view mirror. But this is such a prominent story from the not so distant past. What do people in Quebec think of this now?

GEOFF TURNER: I think it's maybe receding a little bit, because I think a lot of what the FLQ was pushing against reflects the [unintelligible] years in Quebec, a period that's known as a Le Grande Noirceur, the great darkness where it felt like back was really backwards socially. The church ran the schools, ran all of the health system, which were way behind the rest of the country. French Canadians felt like second class citizens are worse in their own province. Working class francophones made far less than their Anglo neighbours. So I think the generation that remembers that is getting old now. And there's not as deep a memory, but it's still this stuff can still flare up. I mean, there's a new film from the National Film Board out right now by Felix Rose, who's the son of Paul Rose, who was convicted of the murder of Pierre La Porte. The worst moment of the October crisis. And just a couple of weeks ago, a Quebec solidaire member of the National Assembly was photographed in front the poster at the premiere making the fist that Paul Rose is making on the poster. And that created a a minor scandal in Quebec, because for some people, Paul Rose is a heroic figure, despite his involvement in that death. And he represents something more than just terror. But for some people, that's just toxic. It's radioactive. Don't go near it. So it's still has the power to connect in that way.

MG: How much of this did you know? And you mean hinted this the very beginning of this series. How much of the story did you know?

GEOFF TURNER: It's sadly not nearly as much as I should. And it's interesting in in talking about this. I have two daughters in their early 20s now, and they confessed to not having the foggiest idea what I was talking about when I even mentioned the October crisis, which I think for the sort of previous generations that they at least know that. And so I think this is not generally a chapter yet that's taught in history class. And I think that's sort of what we're trying to do with this series. Like we describe our tagline is that it's history that's still hot to the time where maybe it hasn't quite made it into the history books yet, partly because this is difficult terrain to navigate without sort of stepping in in politically challenging stuff. But beyond that, I mean, I knew the broad strokes, but what I've tried to do, what we have tried to do with this series is to get deeper into the people, to learn the stories of people. And so it's not just a big sweeping historical epic that you hear stories of real people like to Therese Labay, like Cyriaque Deslisle, who were in the centre of this incredibly fraught moment in Canadian history.

MG: It's fascinating. Geoff, thank you.

GEOFF TURNER: Thank you, Matt.

MG: Jeff Turner is a host and producer of the CBC podcast Recall: How to Start a Revolution. The first two episodes are great and they are available now. He can find them at CBC podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. And that is The Current for today. Coming up next on CBC Radio one, it's Q Tom Power hosts that programme. The Toronto International Film Festival kicks off virtually today. And this morning, you will hear the actor Viggo Mortensen talk about his directorial debut. Viggo Mortensen is one of the most interesting people you could ever meet or listen to. And you will hear him coming up on CBC Radio one. Yesterday on the programme. I spoke with marine ecologist and National Geographic's Explorer in residence and Enric Sala about his life's work to protect our natural wildlife. If you missed it, really interesting conversation and you can find it on our Web site or on the podcast. And Enric Sala is not alone in his quest, as it turns out. Filmmaker and naturalist Craig Foster was feeling dragged down by work. So he started swimming in the kelp forests of Cape Town, South Africa. What began as a stress reliever turned into a surprising friendship with the local octopi. Craig is a shared what he learnt from hours spent with the octopus in a new film on Netflix. It's called My Octopus Teacher. He spoke with the BBC about the trust he built and what these animals taught him about his own humanity. Craig, and perhaps the octopus, get the last word today. I'm Matt Galloway thanks for listening to The Current. We'll talk to you tomorrow.

SOUNDCLIP

I've met many, many, many octopus over the years. But there is something about this anima that's different. I just kept visiting her and then finally a trust developed and then she reached out to me and then eventually it came out again and actually they went on hunting expeditions together and she even used me as a decoy for some of her prey and the sort of things. So she lets me into her secret world. That's just incredible. So learning things that I could just, you know, that in no other way. She took me inside a den in there, I discovered a new species of crustacea that were unknown to science, two new species. And she taught me what could be termed the [unintelligible] octopus language, where she distorts her body into these extraordinary shape to fool predators. And they're not sure if she's an octopus or not. I think, you know, she taught me about my own humanity and connection to nature.

Thursday September 10, 2020 Full Transcript

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