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The Current Transcript for September 22, 2017

Host: Susan Ormiston

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

Just off the west coast of Vancouver Island a 500 kilometre stretch of the Juan de Fuca oceanic plate has slid under the North American plate resulting in a 9.1 magnitude earthquake.

SUSAN ORMISTON: That was a dramatization of what it might sound like or almost certainly will sound like when the big one hits the west coast of BC someday, perhaps someday soon. Now as Mexico reels from its latest devastating quake and as the world held its breath through search and rescue efforts at a Mexico City school, we'll turn our attention to schools in BC. How safe are school kids in the event of the quake? And what more needs to be done? We're starting there today. Then, more than a hundred million Americans had their private information hacked in an attack on credit rating agency Equifax, including this man.

SOUNDCLIP

There are strangers out there that know who I am. They know my birthday, they know my social security number and they know specifically where I live. That scares me.

SO: That attack affected at least 100,000 Canadians too. And is another reminder of how at risk our vital personal information can be. Coming up in half an hour, we're getting the latest on how safe or not your information is here in Canada. Then across the globe to northern Iraq, where a referendum for Kurdish independence is slated to take place on Monday.

SOUNDCLIP

AYUB NURI: I worry about violence. I've seen so much violence. I hope that the referendum goes ahead peacefully. The idea of the referendum is for Kurdistan to be a force for good.

SO: Canadian Kurdish journalist Ayub Nuri is my guest in an hour. I'm Susan Ormiston and this is the Friday edition of The Current.

'High-risk' B.C. schools not ready for an earthquake, says parent

Guests: Patti Bacchus, John Cassidy

SOUNDCLIP

[Sound: screaming]

[Spanish speaking language]

VOICE 1: We work with our heart and with our will to recover this babies.

SUSAN ORMISTON: Grief and desperation in Mexico City as rescuers dug through the rubble of an elementary school in search of survivors. At least 19 children died at that school along with six adults in the wake of Tuesday's earthquake. Here in Canada the scene of the collapsed school has been a visceral reminder of an all too real threat as well. Because experts say that it's not a matter of if a catastrophe and an earthquake will strike British Columbia, but when. Katie Rodgers is the mother of twin six-year-old boys in North Vancouver. Her children's school asks parents to send an emergency preparedness comfort kit for their kids. A granola bar, some mittens, a family photo, and a letter that a teacher can read to their child.

SOUNDCLIP

KATIE RODGERS: I think if you are reading this letter that maybe something has happened like a big storm. It's keeping me and daddy from getting to see you right away. We're thinking about you and trying our hardest to get to see you as soon as possible because we love you very much. Maybe you could make some of the other kids smile by showing them your funny faces. You and your brother should stay together. And if you're scared you can hold hands and give each other a big hug. I know the teachers will take good care of you until we can get there. You are a smart, funny, and brave boy and I will see you very soon. I love you so much. And daddy loves you so much too. Love mommy and daddy.

SO: Well as many as 350 schools in BC are high risk. And that means that if an earthquake hits they are likely to collapse, killing and injuring students and staff. The province has been making seismic upgrades to these schools but in the wake of Mexico's deadly earthquake, many parents are calling for those upgrades to move faster. Patti Bacchus is a long time parent advocate for seismic upgrades in Vancouver schools. She's also a former Vancouver school board chair and trustee. And she's in Vancouver. Good morning.

PATTI BACCHUS: Good morning.

SO: What were you thinking Patti, as you watch the footage from Mexico this week?

PATTI BACCHUS: Well it was pretty horrific and pretty frightening. And it's, you know, I got interested in this issue 15 years ago when there was an earthquake in the Molise region of Italy, where there was a classroom of students who were killed during an earthquake in their school. And I thought of the many school collapses that I've heard of around the world since then as a result of earthquakes. And how even though we know this and we've known this in BC for many years now, we still have thousands of students in BC who spend their school days in buildings that have been assessed by engineers to be at high risk of significant structural failure or even collapse in even a moderate earthquake. So it's pretty terrifying and it's absolutely heartbreaking to see what those families must be going through right now in Mexico.

SO: So you say they're at risk. How prepared are those schools in BC if an earthquake hits?

PATTI BACCHUS: Well we have back in 2005 our provincial government responded to really public outcry and a parent lobby group called Families for School Seismic Safety, and I was one of those parents, had been pleading with government really to have a seismic upgrade program. At that point they really had no plan in place to upgrade at risk schools and they didn't really know the extent of how dangerous they were. They agreed at that point and committed to upgrading all of BCs high risk schools and there were hundreds of them. And one of the challenges is that the schools here in many cases are built of probably the worst kind of construction for earthquakes. They're often old, unreinforced masonry buildings that are brittle and heavy, sometimes over 100 years old and they have no ability to respond with any flexibility to an earthquake. They crumble and they are filled with asbestos and lead paint and all kinds of very dangerous materials. They are much more likely to fail in an earthquake than your typical wood frame house would. So we have some of our most dangerous buildings and earthquakes are our schools and that's where our children are.

SO: So Patti, what did the Liberal government do? You talked about 2005, that's a long time ago. Were there upgrades made and are they done?

PATTI BACCHUS: There were many upgrades made. They committed to having them all done by 2020. They're not even probably half way there. There are still over 150 schools in BC that have no funding in place and more that have something in place but have yet to be constructed. So they have been funding them, but it's been one project at a time and a very slow pace and very frustrating for school boards. So there really wasn't an implementation plan. They really downloaded it to school boards and said come to us with funding proposals and set out some criteria for funding. But those have been changing over the years. They’ve become more and more difficult to access that funding. And some, I would say some politicization of the process. So battles between school boards and the government about whether they would close schools or upgrade them. So it’s been very slow.

SO: Yes and you have a new NDP government in BC now. So we reached out to them, the province’s Ministry of Education. I just want to say what they wrote to us when we inquired. They said quote, “while no new timelines have been set yet, we're working towards seismically upgrading all high risk schools in Vancouver as fast as possible. The ministry has committed 522 million dollars for seismic mitigation projects over the next three years. More than 200 million dollars worth of the same projects are underway in Vancouver and we are going to deliver more,” end quote. So what do you make of that response from this new government?

PATTI BACCHUS: Well I think there's a lot of optimism that this new government will take this more seriously than the previous government did. But it is expensive and it does take time to plan and deliver on these projects. We haven't seen any commitments in terms of timelines and there weren't any commitments made during the election campaign last spring. But I think there's a hope that they will come forward with a more efficient plan on getting these rolled out as opposed to what we saw under the previous governments. But until we see that I think for parents who are sending their kids each day to schools that aren't safe it's a pretty frightening situation, and it's going to take years to get these finished.

SO: What is that like? I mean, if you're in one of those at risk school, you likely know that you may not. But it must be nerve wracking. Especially when we see these earthquakes happen in other places.

PATTI BACCHUS: Well it really is. And my children went to one of these high risk schools back when they were young. And I started asking questions about the safety of the building because it was one of those lovely old brick buildings. They're very pretty but I had seen on the news the earthquake in Italy and the similar types of construction. And when I discovered it was also a high risk building and started becoming more active and getting that upgraded. Well my kids were I think about seven and eight years old at the time and they're now in their twenties, and that school has just been completed this year. So it's a very long process. You know, you send your child to school, you take other safety precautions. We use seat belts and child safety seats for our younger children, we put helmets on them and sunscreen. And you take all of those precautions as a parent, and then you know each day you're sending your child into school. And all you can really do is just hope and cross your fingers that the earthquake doesn't come and try not to think too hard about it. Now we have more schools that are upgraded. And I know some parents tried to get their kids into those schools, even if they're not in their neighbourhood. But it's a very frightening situation for parents for sure.

SO: What can they do?

PATTI BACCHUS: Well they can certainly do what many do, is lobby government to hurry up and get these upgraded. They do some seismic upgrade, or earthquake preparedness drills at school. So teaching kids about getting under desks and things like that. But that doesn't, you know, that's not a lot of comfort in the case if the school could collapse. And so for parents, you know, they want assurance that those schools will be made safe. That's the only answer really.

SO: Patti in the end, why has it taken so long? Obviously it is expensive but there hasn't been an earthquake in the time that you've been advocating for this. Is that part of it? That people are sort of playing the time game here?

PATTI BACCHUS: Well I think that's absolutely it. And it becomes a, you know, shifting priorities. When the former government committed in 2005 that they would get these done, since then there have been a number of other priorities that have come up. Even we had the Olympics here in 2010, and for several years leading up to that it seemed that all efforts and resources were shifted to getting ready for the Olympics. I wish they'd put that kind of urgency on getting schools upgraded. The problem is we don't know when the deadline is. If we knew there was an earthquake coming on a certain date we'd probably get it done. But people just put it off thinking well it probably won't happen. The odds are hopeful that that it won't happen, but we'll hear from the experts that we are overdue for a serious earthquake in BC. So it's a risk. it's also politically not as rewarding when you get into doing these upgrades year after year, politicians don't maybe get a lot of credit for it, and it's not as splashy perhaps as some other big new infrastructure project that they could be cutting ribbons on. But I think it needs to be treated as an urgent public health issue that needs to be dealt with right at the front of the line. This is the safety of kids. We know how to do it. It's not, you know, it's not a terribly difficult task, it just takes a real political will to get it done.

SO: Indeed. Alright Patti, thank you so much.

PATTI BACCHUS: Thank you.

SO: Patti Bacchus is a long time parent advocate for seismic upgrades in Vancouver schools and a former Vancouver school board trustee and chair. We reached her this morning in Vancouver. So we wondered what would really happen inside a BC schoolroom if an earthquake like the 2011 Japanese quake struck. And researchers at the University of British Columbia are figuring that out today with a model school room and something they call the shake table.

SOUNDCLIP

RESEARCHER 1: We have a full scale model of a public school block, what we call a school block. And it is a wood frame retrofitted school. Built the structure in such a way so that we will see anticipated damage to specific earthquakes and then we have engineers come in after the test and do the inspections the way that they're going to have to do after we have the real event here in BC.

[Sound: machine and crashing sounds]

RESEARCHER 2: What we've seen here today is we pushed it harder beyond what the code is requiring and it did very well. So there's a huge benefit in upgrading buildings.

SO: John Cassidy is an earthquake seismologist with Natural Resources Canada. He joins us from Victoria. John, what is the likelihood now that BC will experience a major earthquake such as the one in Mexico this week?

JOHN CASSIDY: Well this is an active earthquake zone here in Southwestern British Columbia. We record small earthquakes each and every day around Victoria, Vancouver. These are small earthquakes that people aren't feeling. Earthquakes large enough to cause damage on average occur every few decades in this region. And we know that some of the world's largest earthquakes occur just off the coast of Vancouver Island, and those are centuries apart. So if we look at all of these types of earthquakes, and we look at the earthquake history of the region, we can say that the likelihood, the probability of a damaging earthquake in Victoria, Vancouver for example, is about 30 per cent probability of that happening in the next 50 years.

SO: Oh that's quite high. Why is this area, Vancouver Island and Vancouver prone to ground moving and earthquakes?

JOHN CASSIDY: Well this is what we call an active subduction zone. We have just offshore of Vancouver Island, Washington and Oregon, we have an ocean plate that is moving towards us. It's moving towards us at about 4-5 centimetres each year, that's roughly how fast your fingernails grow. It's exactly the same type of tectonic or plate tectonic setting as Mexico as Japan as Chile and Alaska, where in those regions ocean plates are also moving towards the continents. And then what happens when that ocean plate, in our case, hits North America, it locks, it’s stuck but it is being pushed from the west. And so it's storing energy, it's causing North America, the region right along the coast, to bend and buckle and store energy, which we can record with GPS instruments. And so it’s storing energy today for a future earthquake. And there are different types of earthquakes. It’s actually a very complicated setting in Mexico and here in Southwest British Columbia, where there are different types of earthquakes. There are earthquakes that occur close to the surface within the North American plate. There are earthquakes that occur within that ocean plate as it sinks beneath us. And that ocean plate is about 50 kilometres beneath Victoria and about 70 kilometres beneath Vancouver. And we also have the very large earthquakes that occur when that ocean plate slips.

SO: Wow.

JOHN CASSIDY: And that happens hundreds of years apart.

SO: So how do seismologists determine when a seismic event will happen? I mean, how much warning? We've seen so much about hurricanes, we plot them, plot their path. What it like for earthquakes?

JOHN CASSIDY: Exactly, and that's a very good question. It's a very different situation for earthquakes, so we can't see them coming. There's no way at this time to be able to predict earthquakes. So the work that we do is to really understand the likelihood where earthquakes are more likely to occur, how often, how the ground will shake. And we do that by studying both our local earthquakes and by studying these large earthquakes around the world that are similar to what we know will happen here in the future. So a lot of really important science looking at these large earthquakes in Japan and Chile in Mexico, and then there's a lot that we can learn from these recent earthquakes. So we can't predict when earthquakes occur, but what we do is to generate earthquake hazard maps that tell us which areas are more likely to experience an earthquake, what type of shaking, and that information is fed into our building codes and our bridge codes. And that's the information that engineers like our colleagues at UBC use when they are retrofitting buildings or designing structures.

SO: John, Mexico City had the benefit of an early warning system. Does BC have that and should they?

JOHN CASSIDY: Well, that's underway currently. So the early warning system that's being developed here and also being developed in Washington and Oregon, all through the region, will provide warning depending on exactly where the earthquake is. So for offshore earthquakes, we could be looking at warning times of 30 seconds or 60 seconds.

SO: Wow.

JOHN CASSIDY: For earthquakes that are closer to you, a nearby earthquake, it may only be a few seconds of warning. So it's not a lot of time but it is enough time for you to move underneath a table away from a window or away from things that may fall over, to stop elevators so that people can get off the elevators, to open doors automatically at fire halls so that trucks can get out before the strong shaking. So it is possible with having enough instruments on the ground and having rapid communications and automated systems, to have the earthquake early warning that will provide seconds to perhaps a minute or more of warning before strong shaking hits.

SO: Would you advocate that's where we should be investing?

JOHN CASSIDY: Well it's one tool in our toolbox. So the very best way that we can protect ourselves from earthquakes is to have modern building codes. We've seen that in recent earthquakes all around the world. That's where most of our effort, our research effort is going, is to improve our understanding of earthquakes that we know will happen in the future. Improve the building codes, improve the bridge codes. Another very important tool is public education. If people know what to expect, they can be prepared. They can prepare their homes, their family. So having an earthquake kit, having an earthquake plan and of course the shakeout exercise that we do each year in October is a really important part of that. The drills that take place in British Columbia schools every month or every few months, that's an important part of it. So knowing what to expect so that individuals and communities and emergency managers can have good plans of how to respond to those earthquakes that we know will happen in the future.

SO: All good ideas John. Thank you very much.

JOHN CASSIDY: You're most welcome. Thank you for this opportunity.

SO: OK. John Cassidy is a seismologist with Natural Resources Canada. He was in Victoria, British Columbia joining us this morning. The CBC News is next. And then you may have some questions about how a big credit rating agency Equifax was hacked. We've got some answers about the scope of the threat and what companies can do to protect your valuable information in our next half hour. I'm Susan Ormiston, and you are listening to the Friday edition of The Current.

[Music: Extro]

Equifax hack: How safe is your personal information?

Guests: Matthew Braga, Ann Cavoukian, Katherine Thompson, David Shipley

SUSAN ORMISTON: Hello, I'm Susan Ormiston and you're listening to the Friday edition of The Current.

[Music: Theme]

SO: Still to come, Turkey, Iran, Iraq, the United States and the UN Security Council, all those are urging Iraqi Kurds not to go ahead with a referendum on independence this Monday. But the vote appears to be happening nonetheless. Kurdish-Canadian journalist Ayub Nuri grew up in northern Iraq and he joins me in half an hour to talk about what's at stake in the long history running up to an independence vote. But first, how safe is your information after a big credit hack attack?

SOUNDCLIP

RICK SMITH: On July 29th of this year we discovered that attackers had gained unauthorized access to certain Equifax data files. We acted immediately to stop intrusion. We probably engaged a leading cyber security firm, which has been conducting a comprehensive forensic review to determine the scope of the intrusion.

SO: Equifax CEO Rick Smith's calm delivery may have masked the truly massive scope of the hack that his credit rating company suffered. 143 million Americans had some of their most sensitive personal information exposed. And here in Canada, it's believed that 100,000 people had their information breached. The hack happened in May. Equifax says it only discovered it two months later and then first went public with the news just two weeks ago. And it appears there have been more questions than answers together with a great deal of frustration since. Here's CBC senior technology reporter Matt Braga with what you need to know.

[Music]

MATT BRAGA: Now, of course there's a lot of unanswered questions here. One of them being why it took over a month for Equifax to actually publicly acknowledge that a breach had even taken place. And you might have some questions of your own around sort of what exactly is Equifax and what they do? You know, basically they are a credit monitoring agency. They collect information about consumers, about how they use their credit and their financial accounts. How they pay their bills, whether they pay them on time and they share that information with, you know, your financial institution when you go to apply for a credit card, let's say, or open up a bank account to kind of see how trustworthy you are.

[Music]

MATT BRAGA: As you might imagine, all of the information that sort of describes you and your life is sort of tracked by this company right? So your social security number or your social insurance number, your birth date, your address, your email, all sorts of stuff that kind of hits that biographical core. And, you know, they're getting that information from your retailers, where you shop, credit card companies, banks, and they build up that history over time.

[Music]

MATT BRAGA: And this is what makes it such a big deal when a company like Equifax gets breached, when they get hacked, is that all of that information potentially, if not sort of stored and secured correctly can be up for grabs.

[Music]

MATT BRAGA: In the days after this breach was disclosed people noticed that three of the company's executives sold almost 1.8 million dollars US in shares. Raising questions around was their insider trading involved? Did they trade on that news? And Equifax has denied that the executives knew of the breach when they sold the shares.

[Music]

MATT BRAGA: There's lots of investigations now being spawned by this particular breach. So there's the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Federal Trade Commission are investigating, the Department of Justice is getting involved on insider trading investigations. The FBI is involved. And of course here in Canada we also have the privacy commissioner who is looking into this particular case in the Canadian context.

[Music]

SO: That was the CBC's senior technology reporter Matthew Braga. We've asked Equifax for comment. We've had no reply. But the breach does raise serious questions about how safe our personal information is in Canada. We have our guests that can shed some light on this situation. Ann Cavoukian is a former and three term privacy commissioner for the province of Ontario. She's currently the distinguished expert in residence at Ryerson University, leading the Privacy by Design Centre of Excellence. She's in Toronto. David Shipley is the CEO of Beauceron Security specializing in cyber security. He's in Fredericton, New Brunswick this morning. And with me in our Toronto studio is Katherine Thompson, chair of the Cyber Council at the private sector tech advocacy group Canadian Advanced Technology Alliance. Good morning to all of you.

MANY VOICES: Good morning.

SO: Let's start with a quick go round. David Shipley, what do you think of Equifax’s response?

DAVID SHIPLEY: Well I think the only thing worse than the breach that they've done has been their response to the public. And one journalist that I follow described it as a burning dumpster fire. And possibly the example every company should look at of what not to do with how to timely, accurately communicate something of this severity to customers.

SO: Katherine are you surprised at this, that it could have happened?

KATHERINE THOMPSON: Yes and No. You can't avoid the irony of it in terms of in a lot of cases of a data breach, one of the services that an organization will off route is credit monitoring through an entity like Equifax. So, you know, that hasn't been lost on the industry in that way. I think I agree with David in terms of just the sheer stupidity of how this thing has been managed. From the communication, in the actions of executive, it's been quite concerning to see.

SO: Ann what have you been thinking about in the wake of this breach? How it was handled?

ANN CAVOUKIAN: You know what is most disappointing to me is that this could have been largely avoided. The patch, the Apache Struts security bug was discovered and by the end of that day Apache had released the fix for it. That they could have put the patch in and fix the security bug immediately. And I'm not suggesting this is an easy thing to do but they could have, if they acted immediately, they could have certainly reduced this dramatically. But it took, from what I understand, something like nine weeks before Equifax actually implemented the security patch. And during that time, that's when all of the data leaked out, leaked out, was hacked out of course. But the point is this could have been averted and that's the problem. When you don't act proactively right up front to address the security problems, and you allow them to linger at all. That's when all the damage will accrue.

SO: David Shipley, what do we know about why it took so long? I mean it does seem extraordinary.

DAVID SHIPLEY: Well, what's really interesting is there's a contrasting story. So if you look at the Canada Revenue Agency, which also had similar very complex applications built on Apache Struts. They did that amazing rapid shutdown over a weekend during tax season, patched their stuff and got things back up and running. And that's exactly to Ann’s point, proactively moving, getting things resolved and avoiding disasters. But in the case of Equifax they didn't. And there may be some legitimate reasons in their mind for not doing that. Now, if we think of complex software like Lego blocks and each block is built on top of another block, sometimes if you make changes, and these are incredibly complex things, you can create instabilities and bring the whole system down. Now I'm not saying that's a reason not to patch, but it takes timely and thoughtful analysis of risk. And in this case and in many cases for organizations around the world, companies simply roll the dice on your personal privacy in kind of a digital privacy roulette. And because they don't value privacy appropriately, because in North America the fines are either nonexistent or just not important to these companies, they just keep on doing business as usual. Which is why we have 5.8 billion records have been stolen and publicly disclosed since 2013.

SO: I'm going to get to the fines and the repercussions in a minute. But Katherine Thompson, how should the company have handled the breach following and reassuring consumers and people that it affected? How are they doing on that score?

KATHERINE THOMPSON: Well, not very well. And, you know, it's again, it goes back to the fact that Equifax has been very prominent in the industry in terms of cyber security discussions. And I've had representatives from the Equifax company in Canada, actually part of those. What it displays, and it's kind of shocking for a company of that size and magnitude, is that they didn't have a crisis management plan in place. And, you know, which is not unfortunately not uncommon in the marketplace right now. I mean, I have clients and partners who, you know, they have plans in place for an IT shut down or even for a nuclear attack if you can believe it or not. But they don't have a crisis management plan that speaks specifically to the critical minutes, hours and days following a breach. That's very evident from what you saw.

SO: Ann, there's always room in these situations for scammers to step in. What do we know now about, in the aftermath, what consumers can find out about what was breached or how it was and prevent it?

ANN CAVOUKIAN: [sighs] Oh, you know, when you have a breach of this magnitude, the harm can be enormous in terms of cases of identity theft that will invariably take place. And what I would tell individuals is make sure, if you have any dealings in the United States especially, I'm thinking of people who travel to the states. And make sure you review all of your statements, your credit card statements do not respond to text messages that you get. I've heard from a number of people they've been getting these weird text messages saying that they have a credit and just click here in order to get this credit. You have to be on guard. Unfortunately this has massive ramifications and people have to really be vigilant in terms of reviewing their materials to see if they've been caught in any way.

SO: David Shipley, of course if you were a client of Equifax and you were breached in Canada, your social insurance number is vulnerable. Is that what hackers or scammers are going after or what do they want here?

DAVID SHIPLEY: Well there's a couple of different ways that they monetize this. The first is we now know that 200,000 of the credit cards that were numbers that were stored in systems have now been leaked into the wild and abuse. So Visa and MasterCard have notified that. That's relatively low value to the criminals because it’s about a dollar a credit card on the black market. Your SIN is the gold mine. It's second only in value to health records as terms of being able to be monetized in the criminal black market, because it's part of the digital keys that are required to open up your entire digital financial life and you can't change it. It's not a really secure unique digital identifier and we've abused how what it was originally designed for. So now you're facing potential identity theft and, you know, when someone goes through this, it's emotionally traumatic, it can cost up to 4000 dollars on average to clean up. And if we stop and think about the scope of it, you're talking over 143 million people and if they all experience this, we're talking hundreds of billions of dollars in economic damage that's about to be caused over the next decade or more.

SO: Hm. Ann, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner has launched its own investigation. There are many as we heard now into this breach. But what can the Privacy Commissioner do in Canada?

ANN CAVOUKIAN: He's investigating this to determine where the fault lies et cetera, which is I think clear. But I think one of the things he may be calling for, and I don't know this I'm just thinking, in the States for example, they have the Sarbanes-Oxley requirement, which requires certification in terms of control over financial reporting. It may be that now they may introduce legislation where CEOs will be required to disclose any material data breach upon discovery and personally certify the effectiveness of the internal controls over data security. And if they do something like that, everyone will take note that you've got to get in front of this. You can't allow these securities to lapse and then just take care of it after the fact. And if I can just add one more thing Susan, the reason for the effectiveness of hackers is that they write their code in a formal computer language and architecture of all targeted hosts that have been designed to speak that same language. Malware is written to exploit that architecture. What we're trying to do, that I'm trying to do in my department, is develop some kind of new architectural system that is not a formal language CPU based system but a nonlinear dynamical system which will represent recurrent neural networks that are taking place now. So we're looking to the future to develop new systems that can avoid this.

SO: Very briefly Ann, how much don't we know about how often this happens and what CEOs do know and don't report?

ANN CAVOUKIAN: Oh I'm sure this is the tip of the iceberg. Obviously CEOs want to avoid any of this going public because it's very damaging of course to their companies, et cetera. So I'm guessing that there is so much of that takes place that we are not aware of. And that's why we need to develop new proactive systems that will address these issues up front instead of just learning the tip of the iceberg ones that actually make it to the public. We have to get in front of this. Otherwise it's going to grow dramatically.

SO: Katherine, what plans, changes are in the works that would require companies to explain and divulge when they've had a hack?

KATHERINE THOMPSON: Well, as it turns out the government quietly announced a couple of weeks ago that they will be making changes to PIPEDA, our Personal Information Protection Electronic Documents Act. So that's a step in the right direction and it's been a long time coming. And really the Canadian marketplace is really following suit, what we're seeing in the US and in Europe and legislative changes need to come. So what that's going to require or how that's going to change the marketplace, it means that private sector companies irregardless of size, whether you're three employees or 3,000 employees, in the incident of a cyber attack or a breach they have to mandatorily disclose to the office of the Privacy Commissioner going forward. They also have to notify any and all people that have been impacted by this in a certain period of time. There's going to be specific fines levied, up to 100,000 dollars per offense. So what that does, so an impact standpoint, you know, it'll have I'm not going to say very little, but it won't have a significant impact to say a big five bank because these guys are already spending millions, hundreds of millions of dollars each year on cyber security. They're very cyber mature. Where the impact is going to be really felt is on the small to medium sized business that, you know, maybe has a firewall. But, you know, most small medium sized enterprises, if you ask them if they're doing quarterly pen tests, probably the answer is no. So that is where the, I guess, the biggest impact is going to be felt. So for small to medium sized enterprises in Canada, data breach is no longer a security risk it's a risk to revenue.

SO: David Shipley, those kinds of penalties 100,000 for no matter what size company, is that enough do you think?

DAVID SHIPLEY: It isn't. I just want to build on something to Ann's point, just to add to the scope of this. We know that as many as 50,000 organizations of various sizes have the exact same flaw as Equifax. And so that gives you a scope to Ann's point about how common these architectures are and how often these things don't get patched, and it's just a massive monumental problem. And that ties into my next point with respect to the fines. A proportional fine is what's required and we don't have to reinvent the wheel. We have to look at Europe's model for what they call the General Data Protection Regulations. And they have fines that actually get the CEO's attention. These fines can be 30 million dollars Canadian or four per cent of revenues. Now in the case of Equifax for example, under the new digital privacy act that Katherine referenced, they get 100,000 dollar fine. This is a company that had 3.14 billion dollars in revenues last year. 100,000 dollars isn't even on their radar. And in fact, they teach cyber security professionals to look at the risks of patching not patching and fines all in the same thing, and so this wouldn't even get to their attention. But if you look at four per cent of their revenues, which would be about 125 million dollars, that gets their attention. And by doing this we’re properly signaling to CEOs who are struggling on how to properly price doing the right thing, here's your price. And it scales down to small medium sized businesses so they're not being hit unfairly with disproportionate fines.

SO: So in that scope then Ann, what could companies do to protect Canadians?

ANN CAVOUKIAN: If I can just add one more point building on David's point. What I would want to do in terms of getting the CEO's attention, boards of directors, they should know that at last count there's already 23 class action lawsuits that have been filed. And one of those lawsuits is seeking damages in excess of 70 billion dollars, billion with a B. So this is what should be getting everybody, every company's attention, and they should immediately get rid of the silos. Everyone has to talk to each other. You got to sit down with your IT people and find out what level of security are we offering here? I would say privacy subsumes a much broader set of protections and security of loan. But if you don't have a strong base of security, cyber security in this day and age of daily attacks, end to end, you will have nothing in place. So if I was the CEO, I would immediately meet with my IT people and say we have to ramp up security. We have to make sure that we have the kind of security measures that will prevent these harms from arising, as opposed to just letting the breaches take place and then we offer some remedies after the fact. Because otherwise it's going to tank us. This will impact companies reputation in such a way that it may be irreparable. The damage is huge.

SO: OK. But what can Canadians do Katherine? How do we protect ourselves?

KATHERINE THOMPSON: Well, to that point and I’ll kind of expand what Ann’s comments were around getting the IT folks into a room. I think where we kind of miss the point is that, you know, the biggest single year after year cause of data breaches is human error. So to look at a data breach or cyber security as just an IT issue is very a siloed approach. You need to understand that it is a multifaceted people issue, so they need to be involved in it. There's a lot of awareness that needs to take place in Canada. We talk about this a lot with [unintelligible] about elevating level of awareness. Canadians have really grasped and embraced the whole digital economy, and we're certainly avid users of it, but with the rewards of that digital economy come significant risks. And we need to educate Canadians about what the risks are.

SO: OK David, what can I do? What can I do if I don't want Equifax to happen to me or the number of other digital footprints I have?

DAVID SHIPLEY: The reality is you can't do anything proactively. Everything in place is all reactive, given even what I recommend to clients of ours getting credit monitoring in place, which is doubly ironic when you're talking about Equifax, is reacting to once someone's starting to access your credit and mess with your life and you're just going to have to spend money and deal with this. The reality is is that we have built a house on sand with respect to the digital economy and we didn't properly architect how we do digital identity and digital signing and proof of who I am online and now we're paying for it. And it's adding up in staggering numbers and this costs real jobs and it's costing people real stress in their lives. So and to Katherine's point, this is absolutely people, process, culture, and technology. When we help companies we help them look at their whole risk and we work on patching their people not just patching their systems.

SO: OK. So protection lies in the hands of the companies that we deal with. Ann, is there anything, I'm looking for a lifesaver here. Is there anything that we can do?

ANN CAVOUKIAN: The only thing you can do right now as David said, is after the fact. But review all of your financial statements that you get. You know, your Visa or MasterCard etc, things of that nature. Be vigilant about any charges that may appear that aren't yours and pursue that with the financial institutions. Review, as I said, I've had a number of people tell me they're getting weird text messages from companies they don't know about credit they're getting. Do not respond. The most important thing is do not click on any kind of web site or any message like that that you're not familiar with. Just ignore it, delete it. Do not respond. You have to be vigilant. Unfortunately it's an after the fact response and all you can do is keep your eyes open and report any problems that you have.

SO: Katherine, wrapping this up. How much of a wakeup call was Equifax? We've seen lots of hacks before but this seems both ironic and huge.

KATHERINE THOMPSON: I think it is. It'll definitely have an impact in the marketplace. From a business perspective I think, you know, it certainly it has been a topic of conversation. You see it all over the media and I don't think it's going away anytime soon. But is it going to change the landscape overall? We'll have to see. You know, for one thing that we keep repeatedly saying with the changes in the legislation and this incident as an example, I think Canadians and consumers need to actually be a little more proactive going forward in terms of understanding when they disclose information to whatever the provider is, whether it's your bank or your telecommunications company. Is asking the questions of like how are you going to manage my information? How do you store my information?

ANN CAVOUKIAN: And how much do you need?

KATHERINE THOMPSON: Yes. How much do you truly need?

SO: Alright. Great. Well we're going to leave it at that. Lots to chew on there. Katherine, Ann and David thank you so much.

KATHERINE THOMPSON: You're very welcome. Thank you.

ANN CAVOUKIAN: Pleasure.

SO: David Shipley is the CEO of Beauceron Security in Fredericton, New Brunswick. Ann Cavoukian is a former Ontario Privacy Commissioner, she currently leads the Privacy by Design Centre of Excellence at Ryerson University in Toronto. And Katherine Thompson is chair of the Cyber-Council at the Canadian Advanced Technology Alliance. She was with me in our Toronto studio.

[Music: Extro]

SO: And coming up in our next half hour, a long history of conflicts and a controversial vote for independence looming next week. Canadian-Kurdish journalist Ayub Nuri has lived it and he brings us his personal insights into the Kurdish people of northern Iraq. I'm Susan Ormiston and you are listening to the Friday edition of The Current.

Iraqi Kurds set to vote on independence referendum

Guest: Ayub Nuri

SUSAN ORMISTON: Hello, I'm Susan Ormiston and you're listening to the Friday edition of The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

AYUB NURI: And so a few minutes ago this area was no man's land, that separated ISIS militants from Peshmerga soldiers. And now these forces we see gathered with their weapons and machine guns and sniper fire.

[Sound: gunshots]

AYUB NURI: They are gathered here because they cannot enter the village. The village still has a number of ISIS militants and they also fear suicide bombers. A few minutes ago ISIS militants targeted the Peshmerga with three car bombs.

SO: That is the Kurdish-Canadian journalist Ayub Nuri reporting from the frontlines of the fight against ISIS in Iraq. He spent the past year and a half reporting there. But he’s really had a close up view of the conflict in region long before he became a journalist, because Ayub Nuri grew up in Iraq during the rule of Saddam Hussein. Independence has long since been a dream of the region's Kurdish people. And this coming Monday, Kurds in the autonomous region of Iraq are set to vote in a referendum on independence and that vote is controversial. There are strong objections to it from the Iraqi central government, the United States, the UN Security Council and beyond. We’re putting all that in context today with Ayub Nuri, whose new memoir is titled Being Kurdish in a Hostile World. He joins me in our Toronto studio. Hello.

AYUB NURI: Hello.

SO: Ayub, how would you describe reporting over the last year and a half on ISIS? What was that like?

AYUB NURI: First of all, I would describe ISIS as the most brutal and violent group I think the world has ever seen or the Middle East has seen or I have seen as a reporter. And the war against ISIS was the most brutal on both sides. Because it involved car bombs, roadside bombs, sniper fire, suicide bombers, that I saw all with my own eyes on the ground. And there was violence and death and fear everywhere in every village on every road in every town, sometimes in every house that I entered in Mosul.

SO: How would you describe then the state of ISIS now? Can it be defeated?

AYUB NURI: The state of ISIS now militarily I think it has been largely defeated in Iraq at least. It has been pushed back, it has lost most of the territories that it once controlled in 2014 and 15. It still holds some areas in Iraq. But I don't think the ideology and the idea and the circumstances that led to the rise of ISIS will be defeated or disappear any time soon. Iraqi politicians, Iraqi leaders, the Iraqi army, people involved basically in running the country are acting in a way that does not address or tackle the root causes of what led to ISIS in the first place.

SO: Many people have said that it will slip away from the front lines but continue to operate as a very viable and brutal insurgency.

AYUB NURI: That's true. I think that's very likely. Once a group is defeated on the frontline, and they have already been acting that way, when you defeat them in Mosul in other areas, they we all know that ISIS was controlling Mosul for almost three years. And when I went to Mosul, into the city proper, I did not come across any ISIS. And one would wonder what happened to all these militants? I entered house to house, street after street and I saw their signs, I saw their food left on the table, I saw their tea still warm in the cup. But what happened to the militants themselves? That's the question and that's the fear that they will come back in other ways which means targeting crowds and markets with explosions and car bombs in different Iraqi cities.

SO: So given that landscape, many people are wondering why, why a referendum at this time if it's still unstable and the potential for violence is still high?

AYUB NURI: Well, the Kurdish answer for that is that being part of Iraq, the Kurds did not gain anything other than persecution and hardship and suffering and also being dragged into Iraq's endless cycle of violence. The Kurdish area is stable. The Kurdish area is doing well. The Kurdish area has escaped much of the sectarian violence and bombings that has been gripping Iraq for the last 13 or 14 years since the American invasion. And the referendum is not an opportunistic attempt by the Kurds. They’re saying Iraq is unstable, let's separate. It has been in the making for many years, for almost a hundred years. In 2018 it has been 100 years since Iraq was created and Kurds were attached to Iraq against the will of the people. So what's happening next week on September 25th is just something that Kurds have been trying and hoping to do for 100 years.

SO: Sure. But there still is this idea that ISIS is perhaps being defeated in parts. Seems like this is getting more success. Why now? Why not wait?

AYUB NURI: Again, the argument is that the war with ISIS is an Iraqi problem, it's everyone's problem in the first place. ISIS poses a threat to people even in Canada and Japan and everywhere in the world, it’s a global terrorist organization. But the Kurdish answer is that ISIS is only one of the problems of Iraq. Before then there was the al-Qaeda and Sunni-Shia war and sectarian violence. So Kurdistan does not want to be part of it, by having its own state and declared borders and living in peace basically.

SO: Ayub do you worry? And would you accept responsibility if there was more violence? We've already seen violence in Kirkuk on Monday. People are saying that they will use this referendum, opposition to it to stir up trouble.

AYUB NURI: Of course, there is in the Middle East and Iraq and especially there's always worry. I worry about violence. I've seen so much violence as a reporter and I don't want any more war, any more killings and death. But I hope the referendum goes ahead smoothly and peacefully. The idea of the referendum is for Kurdistan to be a force for good. And we hope that it will go without any bloodshed, and people who are against it will realize sooner or later that it might be better for everyone.

SO: What would it mean if it were canceled?

AYUB NURI: If it were canceled I think it will be one of the biggest betrayals that the world is doing to the Kurds. Because everyone around the world admits that the Kurds are the biggest nation without a country of their own. And how they were betrayed throughout century by the British by the French by the Americans, and now that we have come to this point of being ready to declare a state it would be a big betrayal to say no. Basically to force the Kurds to cancel it would be really sad to millions of Kurds.

SO: Ayub, I want to take you back because you have such a unique and interesting history. You grew up in Iraq. You were a boy there, your hometown was a place called Halabja. Halabja has a place in history, now, sadly. What was that like?

AYUB NURI: Yes. Growing up in Halabja when I was a kid was not easy because it's right on the border with Iran, it's between Iran and Iraq. And for eight years Iran and Iraq had a bloody war. When I was one-year-old it started and it lasted eight years. It bore the brunt of that war, my town. There was bombings every day. Almost everyone I know or my family knows has lost a family member or their home or a loved one. I lost my own grandmother when I was four-years-old to a bomb and my own right knee also I lost in the same bomb, that target.

SO: How did that happen?

AYUB NURI: We were, it was it was summer of 1983 and we were out in our summer farm. So both countries were bombing each other, one of the shells landed near our home. It hit my grandmother in the head and she died a few months later and hit me in the right knee. So I was just one victim of that relentless bombing that happened every day throughout the 1980s when I was growing up.

SO: How's your knee now?

AYUB NURI: My knee has a limited life span. It will expire I think in the next year or two. And I will have to find, I've been through many operations and surgeries in the past and each one has helped me move for another decade or so. But I think at some point I will have to find a more permanent solution, because I have half any at the moment which cannot function as a proper knee.

SO: Now, when you were young in that Iran-Iraq war you describe, your family left. You were refugees in Iran. What prompted that? What happened?

AYUB NURI: In 1987 my father got into trouble with the Iraqi regime by possessing an illegal weapon in the house. And the punishment for anyone who had a weapon was the destruction of the entire neighbourhood, the block, that was the regime's punishment. And the person with the gun will be executed or imprisoned for life. My father had one and one day in broad daylight he tried to shoot down an Iraqi army helicopter.

SO: Why?

AYUB NURI: I think he was very frustrated, he was angry, and the regime was brutalizing the entire society and he thought he couldn't handle it anymore. My mom and the entire neighbourhood went to him, they begged him please don't do that, you know what it means. He tried for a few minutes firing at helicopters, which he did. And later we got word through someone he knew in the secret police that unless we left in the next 24 hours the whole family would vanish by the regime. That's why we crossed the border on mountains and went to a refugee camp in Iran in 1987.

SO: Such a risky move by your dad.

AYUB NURI: My dad risked his life and my family's life without consulting us. We did not want to leave. My mother was crying all the time and my 17-year-old sister, she had just been wedded I think a few days earlier. And we did not see her after that. We had to leave and we were separated for a couple of years.

SO: In a way though you escaped the worst atrocity on your hometown in 1988. You were in Iran, escaped meaning you weren’t there. Tell me about what happened in Halabja in 1988 when Saddam Hussein's forces launched a chemical attack.

AYUB NURI: That's true. When we escaped in 1987, somehow it saved our lives because a year later Saddam Hussein's army attacked my city, Halabja, with chemical weapons. Because the Iranian army with Kurdish rebels had taken control of the city and Saddam's regime found it too humiliating and too big of a defeat to let go. So they responded with chemical weapons. And within hours 5,000 people, civilians all of them, died in my city from the chemical weapons. One of the major reasons was that they had taken shelter inside their home bunkers and basements and they had no escape when the nerve agents and gases seeped into the basement. But still my father, one of my brothers and one of my sisters, were in the town that day and my father came home trekking across the mountains for hours and we lost hope that we would ever see my sister and my brother again. But because they had collapsed along the road, my sister by a river which she could not cross, and my brother had collapsed from exhaustion, and they were both picked up by Iranian soldiers and brought across the border into Iran.

SO: But the chemical agents didn't kill them?

AYUB NURI: The chemical agent did not kill them. My sister lived in a small village on the outskirts of town and we thought they were dead. We really thought they were dead until we found our sister in a refugee camp. And my brother knocked on the door one day after a week.

SO: Wow. So much contamination there. You stayed away for a long time, what, four years. What was that town like when you returned?

AYUB NURI: For me it was happy because I was 12-years-old, I did not have any responsibilities and it was like a jungle. I was exploring it, all these empty homes, hundreds and hundreds of homes were empty, because after the chemical attack it was turned into a no man's land between Iraq and Iran. So when we came back weeds had grown everywhere, the trees were not cared for for years and there were birds had nested on the ground in our living rooms. But the most deadly thing let's say, I call it a poisonous legacy. When we came back so many animals had taken over the city, especially snakes. Many people died of venomous snakes. One of our neighbours, my father's own cousin, and I can name a number of people who died of poisonous snakes who had basically turned the city into their own nest. And the doctors--

SO: Ah, strange.

AYUB NURI: Yeah it was very strange because we had never had so many snakes in the city, and the doctors interpretation was that they had fed on the dead bodies of so many people who had died from the gas attack they were especially venomous.

SO: Wow.

AYUB NURI: So that's what this city was like. But slowly we rebuilt it, slowly we took care of the weeds and pruned the trees and cleaned the houses. But it took a number of years for it to look like a city again because many people had dispersed, some in refugee camps in Iran, some had gone to southern Iraq, unwilling to come home or fearful or uncertain. It took more than a decade for people to feel good about coming back to the city with so much tragedy.

SO: But that incident left a seed in many people, including you I'm sure, of resentment, anger.

AYUB NURI: Yes. I think that chemical attack on Halabja was one of the many crimes that Saddam Hussein's regime perpetrated against the Kurds. And before and after the chemical attack on Halabja, they had a massive genocide campaign called the Anfal campaign, launched by the army against the villagers of Kurdistan. More than 100,000 people were taken in army trucks and killed and disappeared for good in the southern deserts of Iraq. So that the genocide campaign, the gas attack, secret prisons, everything else, a long series of attempts by the Iraqi regime to either annihilate the Kurds or silence them forever.

SO: So I want to take another leap forward in time in history to 2002, when the US led invasion of Iraq occurred. What did you think of it then? Were you welcoming it? Was it a means to an end for you?

AYUB NURI: Yes, I as well as millions of Kurds, welcomed the US invasion of Iraq. Because no matter how many times the Kurds tried through armed rebellion, through militia groups, it was impossible to topple Saddam Hussein's regime. And we did not want to topple him, we just wanted to liberate the Kurdish provinces of northern Iraq and live peacefully without the fear of his regime. Impossible. The retaliation was the chemical weapon attack that I just mentioned. So when a superpower like the United States said they were going after Saddam Hussein, I welcomed it. And I remember the protesters in London and Washington and elsewhere, they were saying Iraq does not possess weapons of mass destruction, the US should not launch an illegal war. In 2002, the BBC World Service interviewed me back then and they say what do you think? I said Saddam Hussein does not need to have nuclear weapons in order to have weapons of mass destruction. With whatever weapons it has possessed, it has killed hundreds of thousands of people. Even with a simple Kalashnikov it could annihilate an entire nation. So that is his intention is mass destruction not his weapons.

SO: But how long did you have that optimism and remain hopeful that the US invasion could make your country better or Iraq better?

AYUB NURI: I was hopeful for the first year because the regime was gone. Then I was in Baghdad, I covered the US invasion of Iraq. I was going along the army until I reached Baghdad. And everyone was happy all Iraqis. I'm sure there were unhappy people but the majority, combining the Kurds and the Shias, were happy that this regime was gone. People were starting to learn English, switching careers and it was going to be a new country for all. But in less than a year after the regime overthrow, there was a bloody sectarian war between Shias and Sunnis, they were settling old scores. And on top of that there was a rebellion or resistance against the US invasion. Then in Abu Ghraib, in Fallujah and Ramadi, everywhere, I saw so much destruction. I went to Mosul even back then. So I have been covering Mosul for 14 years nonstop and every day, every year, it has gotten worse than the year before. That made me lose hope for the country. I still did not blame the Americans for coming and removing Saddam Hussein because I knew they removed him but they did not tell Iraqis go and sit on each other's throats and kill each other. But it made me really pessimistic about Iraq.

SO: You write in your book that a lawyer friend of yours said dictatorship was deeply rooted in Baghdad and it didn't die with the dictator. I thought that was such an interesting comment.

AYUB NURI: That's true. That's true. And Iraqis began saying OK we had one dictator. Now we have multiple dictators. We had one man and his family killing us, now we have many militia groups, many Saddam Hussein's in the country. So that's true. What my friend meant was that Saddam Hussein's ideology and dictatorial attitude exists.

SO: You were living in Baghdad at the time for a number of years but you ultimately left. Why did you leave?

AYUB NURI: I did not really want to leave. I was enjoying my work as a reporter in Baghdad and the rest of Iraq, even though it involved a lot of risks and dangers and I missed being killed many times on by car bombs and explosions. But I still wanted to stay. I enjoyed the job and I was telling the world what was happening. And many times I spoke in 2003 and four and five with CBC Radio from Iraq. But I had to leave because I think insurgents, those days they were kidnapping journalists or translators or who ever worked for any Western organization. Three times unknown gunmen came into my apartment to get to me. And I was so lucky that none of those times I was home. Each time they missed me by a few minutes.

SO: Were you tipped off?

AYUB NURI: I think I was tipped off the doorman was telling me. The first day I came home one day I was away for a few minutes preparing for a live interview. He said your friends came to see you and you were not home. And I immediately knew my friends never came--

SO: Your friends. [chuckles]

AYUB NURI: My friends, exactly. My friends never came without calling me ahead. And then he said they waited for ten minutes and they were asking about you, what time you leave the house in the morning, what time do you come home every evening. And I said they are definitely not my friends. The second time they came back I was not there. They even had entered my apartment and I knew they were not thieves or petty criminals because they had not touched anything. They did not steal anything. I just saw the chairs moved where they had sat down waiting for me, three times. That's when I packed up and left my apartment in Baghdad but I still went back to Baghdad every now and then. I don't know what I was thinking. I emptied my apartment went back to Kurdistan. And every now and then I would still go to Baghdad and elsewhere to do my reporting.

SO: And ultimately you came to Canada.

AYUB NURI: Yes, ultimately. It became too dangerous and became too risky. And journalists are not a welcome face or presence in Iraq or anywhere else. And I found the safety that I needed in Canada.

SO: So now as we approach perhaps a referendum. How do you see the role that the US and other Western countries have played in shaping Iraq today and Kurdistan as well?

AYUB NURI: What I don't understand is that Iraq is a failed state, in reality. If you go to Iraq there is so much resentment and alienation and marginalization of people and so many people have lost their homes and family members. It is a failed state. People have no respect for the state or state institutions or anything. So I don't understand why the United States or the world community tries to throw the only part of Iraq that is functioning and stable and peaceful, which is the Kurdish part, into that fire again. So you cannot for sure fix Iraq for many more decades. It would take many more years. So I wish that the United States and the UN and others had a more positive and supportive role for the Kurdish parts of Iraq, which could become a role model for the rest of Iraq.

SO: You describe the Kurdish independence vote in Kurdistan as a very unified place but it isn't. There are divisions within there as well, some are accusing Kurds of discriminating against minorities today.

AYUB NURI: There are those accusations. But if you go to Kurdistan you will see. And I've seen it on the, I don't say this as a Kurd but as a reporter, I've been to all the minority communities especially where the places where the fighting was happening against ISIS. Kurdistan has housed or sheltered more than 1.8 million refugees most of them are non-Kurds. They are either Arabs, they are Sunnis, Shias, Christians, Yazidis, Shabaks, all kinds of communities have found shelter. And it's not true to now it’s not a Kurdish selling point, historically there is a deep and organic a respect in the Kurdistan region for other communities and minorities. And the Kurdish leadership says now in the referendum any minority group or any village any area that is not voluntarily and 100 per cent willing to join the Kurdistan region they are absolutely free to stay with Iraq or form their own region. Because we know that we have suffered so much from conflict, it would not be a good idea to forcefully join someone like a minority group with the Kurdistan region. It will only mean problem in the future.

SO: Ayub, you intend to be in Kurdistan for the referendum. Many people don't understand what this means. It won't mean that there will be borders immediately, a new country. It's a long process. So how hopeful are you that there will be an independent state and it will be peaceful?

AYUB NURI: I hope there will be an independent state and I hope it will be peaceful. And I have written many articles saying to Kurdish leaders make it an example of the best state in the region by respecting everyone and being neutral and not being part of any conflict. But as you said, yes, the referendum does not mean the next day or within 24 hours there will be a new state. After the referendum the Kurdish leadership would say to the international community and to the government in Baghdad, this is what my people want, to separate from Iraq. It's a reality. Let's sit down on the negotiation table and negotiate our disputes, mark the borders and most importantly, be two good neighbours to each other. So it's a long process but the Kurdish leaders say it’s not open ended.

SO: From what you've seen as a person and as a journalist, how can you be optimistic anymore? You've seen so much violence so much division.

AYUB NURI: That's true. I'm mostly pessimistic about Iraq. I have really lost hope about many things. But I think you cannot live without hope, it will only make it worse. I see bad things every single day in my life as a journalist on the ground. And then I think I need a little bit of hope in order to survive.

SO: It's a good antidote for many things.

AYUB NURI: Ah yes yes.

SO: Thank you so much.

AYUB NURI: Thank you very much. Thanks for this opportunity.

SO: Ayub Nuri is a Kurdish-Canadian journalist. He was in our Toronto studio. Well that's our program for today. Finally today, earlier we talked about the real threat of a major earthquake on the West Coast to BC. And last fall CBC meteorologist and seismology expert Johanna Wagstaffe released a special podcast series about what such an earthquake would really be like. And you can still find this series called Faultlines on the CBC Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. So we'll end today's show with a moment from the first episode of Faultlines when Johanna describes some of what could happen after the earth stops shaking. I'm Susan Ormiston, thanks for listening to the Friday edition of The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

JOHANNA WAGSTAFFE: Finally it stops. The earth is still again. For now.

[Sound: sirens]

JOHANNA WAGSTAFFE: That's when the tsunami warning sirens begin to wail in Tofino. Some people know right away this means to get to higher ground, but where is higher ground? Tofino Mayor Josie Osborne says making sure people know that can be a challenge when so much of the population is transient.

JOSIE OSBORNE: The very first thing you should do is simply get to safe ground. So it's not about what building you end up in or near, it's just about the fact that you're out of the inundation zone and that you're not going to be affected by the tsunami immediately. After that, there needs to be a way for people to understand where to go. If you're staying at a resort on the beach you're not going to be able to go back there, for example. Though we do have an evacuation center downtown which is our community centre, we have an alternate site. The hospital has an alternate site, everybody's got a backup plan. But really what we need to remember in those immediate hours right afterwards is that this is about saving your own life first and then second, this is about assisting those who the casualties that need help to survive.

[Sound: dog barking]

JOHANNA WAGSTAFFE: Tourists are panicked. The water along Chesterman beach begins to disappear as it draws back into the ocean. A massive tsunami is coming.

[Sound: waves crashing]

[Music: Extro]

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