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The Current Transcript for April 5, 2016

Host: Anna Maria Tremonti

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

Who would I like to have a beer with? It's got to be Johnny Cash.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: He drives his Chevy pickup truck home from the legislature, has a soft spot for a country-music legend, and after yesterday's vote, Brad Wall is becoming a bit of a legend himself.

His Saskatchewan party's win, his third consecutive majority, establishes him as a popular and powerful voice of conservatism in Canada.

Under his watch, Saskatchewan's youth reversed a trend and pursued their futures at home, while new residents flocked to the province.

And even with the West facing tougher fiscal realities, Brad Wall has kept his lock on power. In a moment, the importance of being Brad Wall. Also today, robo-farm. New technology is transforming agriculture.

SOUNDCLIP

There's always dirty jobs for kids to do on a farm. Whether the cows get milked by themselves or not, you know, you still need a good work ethic.

AMT: From milking the cows to driving the tractors to picking the lettuce,

robotic technology is changing farms and farm work. In half an hour, Julian Uzielli heads to a dairy farm, where the cows get in line for the robots. And guns are so omnipresent in our society, we don't even talk about them.

SOUNDCLIP

When somebody is beheaded, we really report on the act of beheading - that is a terrible death. But the shooting of somebody in the back of the head is considered just that somebody was shot.

AMT: When Ian Overton started counting the number of guns on the planet, he hit the billion mark. The way of the gun, in an hour. But first, for the majority of Saskatchewan today, the best surprise is no surprise. I’m Anna Maria Tremonti, this is The Current.

Back To Top »

Brad Wall's third majority win signals a changed Saskatchewan

Guests: Raymond Blake, Janice MacKinnon, Jason Markusoff

SOUNDCLIP

My brother Barry is here, and Barry and Belinda and Darren are moving back to Saskatchewan.

[Crowd cheers]

Family from Alberta is moving back to Saskatchewan to be close to their grandkids.

[Crowd laughs]

Oh, Saskatchewan is a different place today. It is a, we have made major changes. We have made changes for the better in this province, not the government, but the people of Saskatchewan have decided on those changes. So let's wake up in the morning with humility and deliberation and determination, keep the promises that to Saskatchewan people in this election, and keep Saskatchewan strong.

[Crowd cheers]

AMT: Saskatchewan’s Brad Wall used his victory speech last night to underline and reaffirm pride of place, an element that is considered key to his enduring popularity. He's been at the helm of the provincial government for nearly 10 years, longer than any of Canada's other current premiers. And now, the leader of the Saskatchewan Party has received another resounding majority election victory, winning 51 seats in the 61-seat legislature. Mr. Wall’s third consecutive majority government puts him on the path to rival another long-serving and much-loved Saskatchewan premier: Tommy Douglas. And while the results of the vote came as a bit of a yawn to residents of The Wheat Province, Canadians outside Saskatchewan may be surprised by the stamp the small "c" conservative premier is making across the prairies and beyond. With the federal Conservative Party in transition, many see Brad Wall as a leading voice for the struggling movement. To talk about the impact Mr. Wall is having, I am joined by three people. Raymond Blake is a Professor of History at the University of Regina. Janice MacKinnon is a former Saskatchewan NDP finance minister, now a professor of fiscal policy at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon. And Jason Markusoff is the Alberta Correspondent for Maclean's, and he's in Calgary. Hi everyone, welcome.

ALL: Good morning.

AMT: Raymond Blake, how significant is last night's election results?

RAYMOND BLAKE: Well you know, Anna Maria, it's very rare for a politician, federal provincial, to be leader of a province and then all of a sudden, eight years later, as popular, probably more popular, than he was when he was first elected in 2007. You know, that's extraordinary in Canadian politics.

AMT: And you know, Tommy Douglas served as premier for seventeen years as the head of Canada's first socialist government. So how did Saskatchewan get from there to Brad Wall?

RAYMOND BLAKE: You know, it took a while. And if you look at Mr. Wall back in 2007, or even two or three years before he became premier, he really changed the Saskatchewan Party, which is really the remnants of the old Liberal Party, the Conservative Party, disillusioned Reformers. And they tried under a different leader, but with Mr. Wall, he took control very much. It was his party. He created a party that was pragmatic, right of centre, certainly, but one that was clearly his from the beginning. And we can't forget that in 2004, he was elected as leader without any opposition. And even today, you know, 10 years, 11 years later, there’s still nobody in the party complaining about Mr. Wall.

AMT: Mhm. Janice MacKinnon, he won handily, but there were criticisms of his campaign. I have a clip here of Saskatchewan NDP leader Cam Broten speaking at the beginning of the campaign.

SOUNDCLIP

When we see the Sask Party happily, happily continuing with their plans to have a whole lot of waste, use some out-of-province consultants, sending contracts out of province time and time again for projects here in Saskatchewan, overlooking Saskatchewan businesses in a huge way and Saskatchewan workers in a huge way -- this all ties into what we'll be talking about in this campaign: about cutting the Sask Party's waste, about putting more money in the pockets of families, and about fixing and enhancing the public services like healthcare and education that we count on.

AMT: Janice MacKinnon, why didn't that message catch on with voters?

JANICE MACKINNON: Well, I think that it was a good message, by the way, I think that the Sask Party did do a lot of spending. I'm not sure, I think they didn't really focus on the biggest item that I would have focused on, settlements with nurses that gave nurses 35 per cent pay increase over four years, which was part of the money they spent on healthcare. Not hard to say who they spent too much on salaries, so they didn’t focus on that. And I thought they made an excellent point about where is the budget? We don't have a budget before an election. I think the voters wanted to re-elect the Wall Government, because I think Brad Wall has an ability to connect with the people of the province, he's an excellent communicator, and he really embodies a lot of the spirit and ambition of Saskatchewan. In his generation, young people who were ambitious had to go elsewhere. He's the guy who stayed behind, and as you saw last night in his victory speech, he has committed to the province, he believes in its prospects, and he's the guy who is taking credit for people coming back to the province. Now he had help, because he governed in very good times. But he also does have that commitment to the province, and I think people see it, and they see him as a strong and capable leader that also represents them really well at the national level.

AMT: Jason Markusoff, you covered the campaign for Maclean's. What did voters tell you about why they like the guy so much?

JASON MARKUSOFF: He's an effective guy who's able to work a room of rural politicians. I saw him at a presentation like that early in the campaign, and they were just eating out of his hand. A big lineup of people wanting to talk to him; not so much about his politics, but about his Dodge muscle car, his son who's making it big in the music business, has family in Swift Current. He had this personal connection there, but he also has a personal connection in boardrooms. I mean, he is very fond of wearing pocket squares with every suit jacket. He’s that rare politician that’s able to bridge those gaps, those divides, so effortlessly. It's remarkable to see his popularity levels. I was looking at the Angus Reid polls, and no other current premier has maintained above 50 percent past their first year. With Brad Wall, he's been up there for eight years.

AMT: How does he compare to the Prime Minister, Jason?

JASON MARKUSOFF: Prime Minister is at 61, 62 per cent right now, so he's there right now. But of course, Justin Trudeau is in the honeymoon period still. Brad Wall's honeymoon, people don't normally give their political leaders this long a honeymoon period.

AMT: And you write in in MacLean’s, do you talk about how he climbs into his pickup truck and drives to Swift Current at the end of, from the legislature, and so he is seen as, that he’s got the popular touch.

JASON MARKUSOFF: And he's very--

AMT: [interposing] Not running into the limo.

JASON MARKUSOFF: No, and he's very, very good at driving that home. He’s in his Dodge every night; in fact, there was an ad during this campaign about the highway improvements they're going to spend on, very modest spending, they didn't have to promise much to win this one. But he, you know, he drives that message home every time. I'm the guy who drives home in my pickup truck if you're one of the few million, few of the million Saskatchewanians that doesn't know that.

AMT: Raymond Blake, what do you think lies at the heart of Brad Wall’s continuing popularity?

RAYMOND BLAKE: Well, you know, if you look at the way that we're watching politics on TV these days; whether it's the American situation with almost a chaotic system, whether it's Mr. Trudeau with his picture in Vogue Magazine and the big spread the day after the election. Brad Wall, I think as Jason said, is very humble. He's really the guy, he would like to sit down with Johnny Cash for a beer. But I think most people in Saskatchewan, or probably across the country, seem to see Mr. Wall as, you know, very likable. Not only is he pragmatic, he has good qualities you want in a leader, but he's a family man. He's very credible, very capable. He seems to get on well with everyone. And you know, that's a rarity in politics today. But one other thing which is important is although he’s very determined in some of his policies, like, for example, on the question of carbon, about oil and gas, seems to be to the defender of that. But you know, he's also the person that everyone seems to be-- he’s proud of Saskatchewan. People seem to be somewhat proud of him. He's likeable, there's not many things that you can say that's negative about Mr. Wall.

AMT: And Janice MacKinnon, he allowed private delivery of some health care procedures in a province that gave birth to government funded health insurance. How did he do that?

JANICE MACKINNON: Well, he also lets people buy M.R.I.s if they want to., and he's going to let them buy C.T. scans. Now, as long as the company provides a free procedure to somebody on the waiting list. It's the way he sold it. He has figured out that in health care, the biggest concern of the average person are the wait times: long wait times for surgery. And up until 2010, Saskatchewan had some of the longest wait times in Canada. So he linked some of these changes to reducing wait times. Now, in the case of the private clinics, people were skeptical, maybe even opposed initially. But people in this province are actually quite pragmatic. What's the end result, did they work? And, in fact, they have worked. People, New Democrats, have gone to them and said, I actually thought they were very effective. Easier to go to than the hospital, I waited, my wait time was less. So he's actually, I think what people don't realize about him, he's actually a moderate politician. Besides, you know, his commitment to health care, the other thing he's done that people would probably not know, he's cut income taxes for low income earners, he's provided significant aid for low income seniors. So he's not really your typical right wing conservative politician. He's a moderate, and he's able to sell policies that seem to be more right of centre because he's able to connect with people. He knew that the waiting lists were the way to sell those clinics.

AMT: And Jason Markusoff, it isn't a coincidence, then, that he learned a lot from former Alberta Premier Peter Lougheed, the late Peter Lougheed, then, is it?

JASON MARKUSOFF: Yeah, there's kind of a shortage, because it's such an NDP province, Saskatchewan, there’s a shortage of right wing heroes in Saskatchewan. Yeah, he’s had to look to Alberta for Peter Lougheed. And as popular as guy, a politician as Peter Lougheed was, he actually never got the 63, 64 per cents of the popular vote that Brad Wall has now gotten.

AMT: But when Lougheed came in, he was seen as a bit of a socialist conservative, right? So it’s interesting that when Brad Wall came in, he was seen as a centrist moderate.

JASON MARKUSOFF: Well, it was a matter of what he was responding to in, we’re going back to ‘71 here, but--

AMT: Uh-huh.

JASON MARKUSOFF: But Peter Lougheed, when he came in, was responding to a very right wing Social Credit Party that was 35 years old, and Peter Lougheed, although it's ironic now, that he was making fun of a long in the tooth party, the Tory leader, he was saying it's time for something moderate, centrist, moving forward, let's not be too, let's not go too crazy. And Brad Wall is taking cues from that. Brad Wall has taken a lot of advice, took a lot of advice over the years from Peter Lougheed, regularly cites him as his mentor. Talks about him as a big booster, as a big decision maker, trying to be moderate, trying to really capture that Zeitgeist and embody the spirit of the province. And I think if Peter Lougheed were looking at this right now, he'd be pretty impressed with how Brad Wall has conducted himself.

AMT: Jason, have Saskatchewan and Alberta traded places on the political spectrum?

JASON MARKUSOFF: Yes. Basically, for now. This really reminded me of an Alberta election coming into last night, where the only questions were, is it going to be an overwhelming majority or a very, very overwhelming majority? And the latter was the case last night. And he's become this new conservative icon. Albertans love Brad Wall right now. I'd love to see a mischievous pollster ask Albertans whether they prefer Brad Wall or Rachel Notley as their premier right now. Conservatives, and there’s a lot of conservatives in Alberta still, despite the government that we have, they look, they’re used to that chest thumping, defending oil, very stoutly way that Brad Wall does, and he's appealing to a whole lot of them right now who are kind of in the wilderness.

AMT: How is he viewed by the oil patch, Jason?

JASON MARKUSOFF: He's speaking their language, he's the guy who says I'm for oil and gas, and they trust him, and he's really arguing it. And I wonder if it's not so much, based on what I was hearing last night from his victory speech, that it's not so much a big play federally, or big play necessarily for, to win over the hearts and minds of Albertans, but it's to win jobs. He's, at heart, he's an economic development officer. That's what he used to do in Swift Current before he entered politics. He really wants to try to do as much he can to promote low tax regime, predictable economic regime, predictable royalties, low regulation, to draw in as many dollars. And if that means taking from Alberta, that's great.

AMT: Raymond Blake, he has certainly spoken out on a lot of national issues, from national carbon tax, which he opposes, to the Liberal campaign promise to bring in 25,000 Syrian refugees to Canada. In November, he urged the government to slow down.

SOUNDCLIP

I don't recall a time when a major refugee intake like this was driven by a deadline, and I think that's the concern. And I think everybody would forgive the Prime Minister if he were to say the campaign promise was about a deadline, let's make it about the refugees, but let's also make sure we get it right in terms of security, and also settlement issues.

AMT: Raymond Blake, how do Saskatchewan voters react when Brad Wall speaks out on the national issues?

RAYMOND BLAKE: Well, I think any province, and here, there's been a long history of very dynamic premiers. You know, if you go back, as you mentioned at the outset, Tommy Douglas, people like Roy Romanow and Allan Blakeney, were central players on the national stage. And certainly, Mr. Wall is following in very big footsteps, but one of the things I think is Janice, and Jason’s already pointed out, he brings his pragmatism and his moderation to those debates. He did speak out against the Syrian refugees, not about the refugees as a concept, but certainly that the process was rushed. And he was very much opposed at the beginning of the First Minister's Conference to the question of carbon. But he didn't walk out of those discussions, he didn't remain entrenched. He spoke his position, once the train left the station and the Syrian refugees were coming, Mr. Wall got on board. He took a very sort of moderate pragmatic approach. Speaks out with determination and firmness, but he's not like Danny Williams was a few years ago, take his marbles and go home. He stays in the game, and that shows really that perhaps he's not any ideologue, and he made that very clear when he became leader of the party in 2004 or five, that he was not ideological. He was going to be a practical, pragmatic politician, and go wherever he needed to go, regardless of the brands that people might attach to him.

AMT: Some people have speculated he might eventually make the jump to federal politics to lead the Conservative Party, what do you think, Raymond?

RAYMOND BLAKE: You know, he was very emphatic last night, but he's a smart politician. He knows history. And he knows political history particularly well. And if you look at Mr. Trudeau right now, he's a very popular prime minister. Does Mr. Wall want to give up what he has here in Saskatchewan and go to Ottawa and sit around for what, eight years, and hope that the tide will change and there will be a return to the Conservative Party nationally? I think Mr. Wall is a little too bright for that.

AMT: Janice MacKinnon, what do you think?

JANICE MACKINNON: Yeah, no, I don't think so. I think he's really committed to the province, and as Jason said, he is extremely popular in the region. When I go to Alberta, I say I'm from Saskatchewan, they say, wow, wish we had your premier. So I think he's committed to the province and the region, and I think he knows that he would probably find himself frustrated in Ottawa. Not just being in opposition, but even being prime minister. So no, I don't think that's going to happen. And as you listen to him last night, his commitment is to develop the economy of the province and to create a better way of life here. And he's got challenges this time waiting for him, the whole course, because he's got deficits and a tougher economy.

AMT: Well, I was going to ask you, to what extent did Saskatchewan’s resource boom help make the politician he is, and to what extent will it haunt him in in this mandate?

JANICE MACKINNON: Well, I think he was lucky. He was lucky because he did govern during a boom, but he did make the most of his opportunities. It's really difficult to say, because after eight years, to all of a sudden pivot to a different, it's quite different, to cut spending and to reduce services than it is to just go out and sell the economy. So it's an open question about how he'll do that. I think he'll probably do it effectively, because I think the other thing that hasn't been mentioned about him that you notice if you watch him, he's a tough administrator. They have, the Sask Party has made mistakes. They had Smart Meters that SaskPower put on houses that started to burn the houses. He acts very quickly when there's a mistake, and he holds people accountable. SaskPower president lost his job. He's put, cabinet ministers have gone to the backbench, because they have not performed effectively. So he'll probably make that transition, but it is a new chapter. This is the toughest fiscal and economic challenge that he's had.

AMT: Jason Markusoff, he really has emerged as, I was going to say an enviable voice of conservatism, but almost the voice of conservatism right now. Has he, not across the country?

JASON MARKUSOFF: That's right, I mean, he's the only voice of that provincial prime minister table, or premiers and prime minister table, that actually is saying things of real right wing band. He's the only conservative standing, unless you sort of count Christie Clark, Liberal of an odd name in B.C., but he could he could get company very soon. In Manitoba in a couple of weeks, there's an election, and the PCs are set to take over a long in the tooth NDP government. So he could become that voice, but clearly, he'll be that senior voice. I mean, he's only 50, he’s one of the youngest premiers, but he's by a long shot, the longest serving now.

AMT: Okay, well, thanks, all of you, for weighing in on this as the Saskatchewan’s Saskatchewan Party celebrates its victory today. I've been speaking with Raymond Blake, he’s a Professor of History at the University of Regina. Janice MacKinnon is a former Saskatchewan NDP finance minister, now a professor of fiscal policy at the University of Saskatchewan. She’s in Saskatoon. And Jason Markusoff is the Alberta Correspondent for Maclean's Magazine. He joined us from Calgary. We hope to talk to Mr. Wall in the near future; we did request an interview with him. I think he was just busy today. We'd like to hear your thoughts on Brad Wall’s latest win. We are on Facebook, you can find us on Twitter @TheCurrentCBC, you can send us an email by going to our website, cbc.ca/thecurrent and click on the contact link. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti, this is The Current.

Back To Top »

Cows that milk themselves? Farmers turn to high-tech for help

Guests: Julian Uzielli

[Tranquil music playing]

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: Ripple Effect. With our season long project Ripple Effect looks at a phenomenon that's changing agriculture, the rise and ramifications of the robo-farm.

[Old timey music playing]

SOUNDCLIP

Patty Garmin lives on a small farm near a large city. She and her dog Ginger are friends of all the animals. Patty’s mother has taught her to feed the chickens and collect the eggs. Here’s one, another,[rooster crows] and another. Look at the fine large eggs in Patty's pail.

AMT: Ah well, a quaint reminder of a bygone era. Let's face it, there aren't that many farmers who still collect eggs in a pail by hand. As agriculture has become increasingly mechanized, little Patty Garmin would hardly recognize many of today's high tech farms. And next year the agriculture industry will reach a new milestone as the world's first robotic farm opens in Japan. Well, The Current`s Julian Uzielli has been looking into the story and he joins me now. Hi.

JULIAN UZIELLI: Hi, Anna Maria.

AMT: So, a robotic farm. What does that actually mean?

JULIAN UZIELLI: Just what it sounds like. Basically, almost all the tasks on this farm are going to be carried out by robots.

AMT: What are we talking about here? Little R2-D2 type robots?

JULIAN UZIELLI: Well not exactly, probably with a bit less personality, but they would be more functional. Think more conveyor belts and robotic arms.

AMT: Okay, tell me more.

JULIAN UZIELLI: So, the company that's doing this is called Spread, and they're based in Kyoto, Japan. And what they're opening is really more of a factory than a farm. It's all indoors and apart from a staff of about 25 people, who will plant the seeds, every other task on this farm will be carried out by robots.

AMT: Like what?

JULIAN UZIELLI: So, that's transplanting the plants into larger containers as they grow, watering them, trimming them, harvesting, and packaging at the end of the process.

AMT: What will they be farming?

JULIAN UZIELLI: Lettuce.

AMT: How much lettuce are we talking about?

JULIAN UZIELLI: The company claims that with this system they'll be able to harvest 30,000 heads of lettuce every day.

AMT: How does that compare to what a typical lettuce farm might do?

JULIAN UZIELLI: Well, this company already has another factory run by humans and that factory is able to produce 21,000 heads of lettuce per day.

AMT: So the thinking is robots can not only work faster, but can work longer hours?

JULIAN UZIELLI: Exactly, and the company insists they'll be able to ramp that production up over time so that 30,000 heads of lettuce is just a starting point. I spoke to the company's global marketing manager about this. His name is J.J. Price, and he said his company believes a robotic farm could start to address some global problems.

SOUNDCLIP

Such as increasing the food supply, improving food distribution, reducing food mileage and just having an overall more effective way to grow produce using less inputs but increasing overall production.

AMT: Help me through this, Julian. I'm trying to get a picture of what this farm will actually look like?

JULIAN UZIELLI: Well, it hasn’t opened yet. I asked J.J. Price to describe what it'll look like once the factory is up and running. Now he wouldn't release too many details, because a lot of this information is proprietary, but he did give me a visual to think about.

AMT: I'm ready.

JULIAN UZIELLI: So, imagine this, the factory is essentially a big warehouse, lined with racks of lettuce stacked four storeys high. They don't actually have to have floors for people to walk on because of course, it's automated. So, instead there are these giant machines that travel up and down the rows of lettuce, tending to the plants as they grow and harvest them when they're ready.

AMT: How wide spread is this technology?

JULIAN UZIELLI: Well, I started looking into that, and while it does seem this lettuce factory is going to be the first robot-run farm, the use of automated technology in agriculture is actually starting to become pretty common.

AMT: And what’s out there already?

JULIAN UZIELLI: Well, it seems there's about as many different kinds of automation as there are different kinds of agriculture because every type of farming is different. So, you've got machines that can tell when berries are ripe and then pick them faster than humans can, there are robots that can prune grape vines at vineyards, there are even attachments for tractors that can determine how much fertilizer individual plants need, then fertilize it in real time.

AMT:[laughs] I clearly need to get out of the city a little more often. How much automation are we seeing in the agricultural industry here in Canada?

JULIAN UZIELLI: Well, it's in its early stages here in Canada. You see a lot of automating of repetitive tasks, things like irrigation and packaging, but not so much in harvesting of produce yet. It’s expensive and like I said, each type of agriculture requires its own specifications. But, what is becoming common in Canada, though, is automation in the dairy sector. So to learn more about that, a couple of weeks ago I took a trip to a farm in southern Ontario.

[machinery whirring in background]

AMT: What am I hearing, Julian?

JULIAN UZIELLI: That is the sound of cows being milked in Wallenstein, Ontario, which is a small community near Kitchener-Waterloo.

SOUNDCLIP

So, we're milking 78 cows, and we have, we call them dry cows, is it 15 dry cows? Stuff that's going to get ready to calve here shortly, eh?

JULIAN UZIELLI: This is Rick Shantz. He's a fourth-generation farmer, and he runs Rickeen Farms with his wife Doreen and son, Brett and we're in his barn.

AMT: Rick and Doreen, Rickeen Farms. And the noise we are hearing there?

JULIAN UZIELLI: That is coming from their two robotic milking machines that the family uses to milk all their cows.

AMT: Milking machines have been around for a long time, so what's different about the machines they use?

JULIAN UZIELLI: They have been around a long time but they're evolving. Traditionally, the farmer has to physically connect the machine to the cow, and then the machine does the rest. But the farmer still has to be there to set everything up, they have to get up before the crack of dawn to start the whole process, but with these machines that Rick and Doreen are using, they don't have to lift a finger. They actually don't even have to be there.

AMT: Really? So what do these things look like?

JULIAN UZIELLI: Basically, there's a stall that the cow walks into and one side is open to the barn, and on the other side is a big machine with a robotic arm attached.

[mechanical whooshing of air]

JULIAN UZIELLI: So, what you're hearing right now is that robotic arm moving in under the cow’s udder and then cleaning each teat individually, before attaching four milking cups, which are connected to hoses which take the milk out of the cow into a big tank.

AMT: And how long does it take to milk the cow?

JULIAN UZIELLI: About six minutes on average and it's all monitored by a computer so the machine knows each cow it is milking at any given time because they all have this unique electronic collar that they wear, so it knows exactly how much milk each cow has already given that day, and how long it's been since she was last milked.

AMT: So, there are two machines for a herd of more than 70 cows, it must take a while to milk them all?

JULIAN UZIELLI: That's true, but like I said the farmer doesn’t actually have to be there since the machines are running 24/7, the cows can go to be milked any time of day they want. They just walk up and get in line.

AMT: They walk up and get in line?

JULIAN UZIELLI: They actually line up. It may not be an orderly line—

AMT:[laughs] It’s a cow line.

JULIAN UZIELLI: [laughs] They are cows, after all. When I was there, at least three cows were waiting their turn. As soon as one cow left the milking stall, another would walk right in. And the family told me the farmer's milk production per cow has actually increased because sometimes the cows want to be milked more than twice a day and now they can do that.

AMT: Who knew? But what if something goes wrong?

JULIAN UZIELLI: The machine will just send a notification to Rick and Doreen's smartphone.

SOUNDCLIP

One time we were down at the ACC, watching the Leaf game, eh, and I remember, did the robot call us? I know we pulled it up on our screen and we just started the robot again, and watched the end of the game and we came home again.

AMT:[laughs] The robot calls them on their phone in Toronto and says I have a problem?

JULIAN UZIELLI: It takes a lot to surprise me with a smartphone app, but I thought that was pretty cool.

AMT: You know, smartphones are handy, but I never knew they would be good for milking cows.

JULIAN UZIELLI: I mean, if we can set our home thermostat from work, it shouldn't be that surprising that we can fix a milking machine from a hockey game, right?

AMT: Of course. I should know that. What about the cows? How have they been affected by the automation?

JULIAN UZIELLI: This may surprise you, but apparently the cows are actually happier than they used to be. And as Rick pointed out that the evidence of this was all around me in the barn.

SOUNDCLIP

JULIAN UZIELLI: This may just be me, that I'm an ignorant city boy, but I don't hear any mooing.

RICK SHANTZ:[Laughs] They're not supposed to be. If cows are mooing—

DOREEN SHANTZ: That means they're content.

RICK SHANTZ: Those are contented cows, eh? Those are cows that are producing milk.

AMT: He thought that was pretty funny. I didn’t know that either, so—

JULIAN UZIELLI: I was embarrassed before I even asked the question.

AMT: So when they’re mooing, they’re not happy?

JULIAN UZIELLI: Apparently not. I have to get out of the city more, too.

AMT: And what about the Shantz family? Are they happy? Are they contented, no more getting up before dawn to milk the cows?

JULIAN UZIELLI: Right. They don’t have to do that anymore, but there are still plenty of other chores to do. A farm is a big operation, there is lots to be done at any given time, so it's not like they can all leave the farm and let it run itself. But, the automation has meant that they've been able to carry on with the farm. Rick's parents used to help with the chores but, they are getting older and they've retired, and their son Brett, his two siblings, they used to help but now they’ve grown up and moved away. But now, because of these machines, Rick, Doreen and Brett can now do the same amount of work with fewer hands which is really important to them because their family has owned this land for over 100 years.

SOUNDCLIP

RICK SHANTZ: So, 1912 is when my great-grandfather would have bought the farm.

JULIAN UZIELLI: And what do you think he would make of all these changes?

RICK SHANTZ: [Laughs] I'm not sure what my grandpa would have thought, but my great-grandpa, sorry, but I know my dad, for him too it was, he never really discouraged me, but he didn't really encourage it. He's wondering, what're you doing, eh? Very skeptical about the whole process of this automated milking and stuff.

JULIAN UZIELLI: And now, a few years in, has he changed his mind?

RICK SHANTZ: Oh, definitely, eh? I think he quite enjoys just walking through and seeing how everything's working.

AMT: So, they can do the same amount of work with fewer people. Does that mean that people are losing jobs, or potential jobs aren't being created because of technology?

JULIAN UZIELLI: Well, that's the big question. The answer is kind of complicated, and it changes depending who you ask. For Rick and Doreen, they said as a family farm they don't want to hire any outside labour if they don't have to, that’s important to them. They say the machines haven't actually deprived anyone of work on their farm.

AMT: But at the same time a farm could hire people rather than buying robots, could it not?

JULIAN UZIELLI: Well, in theory, yes, but the other problem is it's not like there's people lining up for the job getting up before dawn to milk cows day and night. If they don't have a personal stake in the farm--

AMT: Then they are not going to look for that job.

JULIAN UZIELLI: Exactly. Interestingly, just getting back to the robot-run farm in Japan for a second, one of the reasons the company gives for amping up the automation there is Japan’s aging population.

AMT: Which translates to a shrinking workforce.

JULIAN UZIELLI: Yeah. And here at home, there is another problem that farmers have. Take a listen to Matt Reimer. He farms wheat and canola in Killarney, Manitoba.

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MATT REIMER: Harvest time is terribly busy. There's more work than we know what to do with. So basically, farmers at harvest time will hire all the good people they can find. But the trick is it's only six weeks or something, so it's tough to find somebody that is a good operator for that amount of time.

AMT: So, part of the problem, Julian is that it is seasonal work.

JULIAN UZIELLI: Exactly. And I'll come back to the jobs issue in a moment, but first I just want to tell you why I was talking to Matt Reimer.

AMT: Why were you?

JULIAN UZIELLI: Okay. I know you're well aware of all the hype about self-driving cars.

AMT: Well, it's been pretty hard to avoid that one over the past year or so.

JULIAN UZIELLI: Right. But what Matt Reimer did is he's created a self-driving tractor.

AMT: He created his own?

JULIAN UZIELLI: Yes. It looks just like a regular tractor, and in fact it was a regular tractor before he fixed it up, but he ordered some parts that are usually used by hobbyists for remote-control drones, and took an online coding course from MIT, and seven months later his tractor could drive itself.

AMT: Wow, that’s initiative. He just taught himself how to do it, and then did it just like that?

JULIAN UZIELLI: Yes, and he says he's not even a tinkerer, he doesn’t even like computer all that much, he just wanted to see if he can do this. A couple of weeks ago, he happened to be in Toronto so he came into the studio and he showed me a video he made.

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MATT REIMER: Okay, I’m going show you, this is a bit of a promo video I put together. (Music starts) And so basically what we see here is the tractor driving towards the combine, and now it's unloading on the go. And there's no one in this tractor for basically the entire duration of the video. And so the tractor always comes from in front of the combine and turns in like you see it, and the reason that we did that is because there was no safety sensors at all on the tractor this fall, so that way the combine driver could always see it and then if there was something in the way, you don't call it over.

JULIAN UZIELLI: So, what's actually happening here is, Matt's driving his combine down the fields harvesting his grain, and when the grain hopper on the combine is full he pushes a button and that summons the driverless tractor across the field and pull up alongside the combine. Then while it is harvesting, it will offload its grain into the hopper being pulled by the tractor.

AMT: So very clever, but let’s get back to the jobs. That's a job lost there, is there not?

JULIAN UZIELLI: Well, the way Matt sees it is, instead of losing an employee, he's actually making better use of the employees he has.

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MATT REIMER: So, the guy in the grain cart is working for five minutes, and then sitting for 15. And you know, it's actually quite a boring job, and it's really repetitive, so if you can get that guy out of there doing other things, you can really increase your productivity, so that makes a huge difference in fall, because that's when we're really busy. So now the grain cart driver, he can be going for fuel, he can be doing all the other fall work we need to do, so I had the, probably the easiest fall we've ever had. And a lot of that was due to just everything running smoothly because we had that extra help around.

AMT: Okay, but hang on, Julian. He just did this by basically tinkering in his garage and he gets this machine up and running all by itself. Is that legal?

JULIAN UZIELLI: Well, that's a bit of a grey area. I did check and the Manitoba Highway Traffic Act doesn't have any laws about self-driving vehicles one way or the other. But, Matt said he's only driving the tractor on his property, not on public roads, and no one's given him a hard time even though he's gotten a lot of media coverage.

AMT: And what about safety?

JULIAN UZIELLI: Well, the tractor has a blinking light on top and a beeper, and everyone on the farm knows when it is in self-driving mode and everybody else carries a little fob that can stop the tractor remotely if they have to. He says next year he's hoping to install sensors so it can stop automatically in case anything happens.

AMT: And in his estimation, how does it compare to a human driven tractor?

JULIAN UZIELLI: This is how he put it to me.

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MATT REIMER: I mean I grew up on a farm, so I grew up driving tractor. I have as many hours in a tractor as anybody my age and I did hop in the tractor one time and I drove it manually, and I radioed the combine driver afterward and I said, so what did you think of that unload? And he said, you were driving, weren't you? and I said, yeah, and he says, turn the computer back on. [laughs]

AMT: So, he's making this out to be a pretty good thing. Is he trying to market this as well?

JULIAN UZIELLI: Yes, but that wasn't his intention when he began. Originally he didn't even want to sell it, but he got so many inquiries that he set up a small business called Reimer Robotics, and he’ll just help other farmers install this technology on their tractors. It’s still all open source, so he is not charging for the technology, he just charges for the installation. There are also a couple of companies outside Canada that are starting to sell self-driving tractors as well.

AMT: How much would that cost?

JULIAN UZIELLI: Well, Matt charges $35,000 per installation, so it's not cheap.

AMT: Okay. Not cheap.

JULIAN UZIELLI: And there are important questions for farmers here beyond just the financial implications. I spoke to a philosopher about this.

AMT: I like that, a little philosophizing on the robotification of the farm.

JULIAN UZIELLI: [laughs] I thought you would like that.

AMT: Can I say robotification?

JULIAN UZIELLI: Why not? I talked to Jason Millar. He teaches at Carleton University and he actually specializes in the ethics of robots. He told me a story about how in the 1940's a new machine was introduced to harvest tomatoes. It was efficient and the price of tomatoes but he says:

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JASON MILLAR: When you automate in a farming industry, you end up having to shape the tomatoes and the plants and the animals to the machines. So, with the tomato, they end up having to change the style of tomato they were planting, and by all accounts these tomatoes were, they were a little bit tougher, so they had to be able to withstand this kind of mechanized process so they wouldn't get bruised because remember, prior to that you had people hand-picking the ripe tomatoes and putting them in baskets or whatever they did, and sending them off to market. But, in this case now you have to start shaping the tomato to fit the machine.

AMT: In other words, in some cases automation could necessitate changes to the very product itself.

JULIAN UZIELLI: Right, and he also argues automation could in fact, cause changes to the very nature of the industry.

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JASON MILLAR: As soon as you introduce these cost-savings mechanisms through automation, that comes at a cost to the farmer that sometimes isn't entirely obvious, or a cost to other farmers because this equipment locks you into a system where in order to compete with the person who has the automated tomato harvester, you then have to get your own automated tomato harvester and that's not always going to be cost effective for everyone. So, what you end up, this is the interesting job angle I think, is that as soon as you industrialize, you know, industrialization is all about corporations growing bigger and bigger, and pushing competition out so there's this natural trend towards single entities owning larger pieces of the agriculture industry. And we certainly see that in industrialized farming in the cattle industry, and in other farming operations, corn, soybeans, things like this.

AMT: AT the same time, Julian, this has all been happening for a long time in other industries. Automation is both efficient and one of the reasons there have been so many job losses in manufacturing.

JULIAN UZIELLI: Right. Pretty much any job that involves repetitive tasks has the potential to be automated, if that hasn't happened already.

AMT: That’s the old line, robots are going to take all our jobs.

JULIAN UZIELLI: Right, and it's not a new prediction, but there are people now who say we are actually closer to that happening than ever before just because of the stage of technology today.

AMT: So, if they are right, what are the implications?

JULIAN UZIELLI: Well, I talked to several people about this, and they all had a similar answer, which is that we need to re-think the point of jobs themselves.

AMT: What does that mean, what are you telling me?

JULIAN UZIELLI: Well, one of those people I reached out to was Douglas Rushkoff. He's a professor of Media Theory and Digital Economics at the City University of New York, and he's just released a book called Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity.

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DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF: The only reason why such technologies should be threatening, assuming they can really work, and do the things, and do them as well, is if we have an economic system that only lets people eat and enjoy things if they have jobs. If we can start to see human beings beyond their utility value, and say oh, as machines can take over more and more of human labour, what are humans for? Are humans for work, or was work to allow humans to do something else? Are we okay with people actually enjoying the abundance of human productivity?

AMT: Fascinating. He's saying if we can let machines do our work, maybe we should be allowed simply to enjoy life and not worry about work. Of course, there is a fly in that ointment.

JULIAN UZIELLI: Right, which is how are we going to afford to pay for everything and live?? I asked him how he envisions that working and I asked whether he is advocating something known as a guaranteed minimum income.

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DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF: Well, I'm suggesting that if we had a whole bunch of stuff for free, that it's not a bad thing to let people have it. So, if you want to call it guaranteed minimum income, then call it that. I mean, it's just that that term even frightens people, particularly here in America where we're still afraid of communists coming in and taking over the country somehow, or socialists, oh my god. [Laughs]

AMT: Do the farmers you spoke with worry at all about the future of automation and how it might affect people?

JULIAN UZIELLI: Well, yes and no. In fact, it was actually Matt Reimer, the grain farmer, who told me about Douglas Rushkoff because he's reading his book.

AMT: And what does he think of it?

JULIAN UZIELLI: Well, it's made him think more critically about inventions like his self-driving tractor, about how they might impact jobs, but at the same time, he's skeptical that farmers could ever be replaced by robots entirely. And same for the Shantz family, they say despite automation, cows always need a personal touch.

AMT: Well, even if humans aren't totally replaceable on farms, is there any nostalgia for what might get lost with automation?

JULIAN UZIELLI: I did wonder how Rick and Doreen’s son, Brett Shantz felt about that, as the future head of his family farm, so I asked him this.

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JULIAN UZIELLI: You would have grown up milking the cows, I would imagine, right, so if you're going to stay here and have your own kids, your own family, your kids may not have that experience. How does that make you feel?

BRETT SHANTZ: [laughs] Oh, there's always dirty jobs for kids to do on a farm whether the cows get milked by themselves or not. But yeah you know, if it's not chores, there's always something that needs fixed, and there's always cropping and picking stones off the field is a pretty brutal job that as a kid, you don't look forward to doing that. But still, pens need to be cleaned out, and you know, it doesn't matter how your cows are milked, you still need a good work ethic on a dairy farm, and that's important and I hope to pass that on to my own kids someday, and yeah, like I said, whether the cows are milked automatically or not, there's always jobs to do.

AMT: Dairy farmers are really tied to their farms 24/7 usually. This is a bit of a break.

JULIAN UZIELLI: It’s so intense and that’s one of the incentives for them to install these kinds of machines, right?

AMT: And he talks about other jobs to do. The job could be planting lettuce at that Japanese robot-run farm, for one.

JULIAN UZIELLI: For now, yes. That and a few other jobs still exist.

AMT: So interesting. Thank you, Julian.

JULIAN UZIELLI: Thanks, Anna Maria.

AMT: Julian Uzielli is an associate producer with The Current. We want to hear from you. If you have experience farming, what do you think of these changes to the industry? Let us know, you can tweet us @thecurrentcbc, using the hashtag ripplecbc. Comment on this segment on our Facebook page, you can email us by clicking on the contact link cbc.ca/thecurrent.

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Roughly a billion guns in the world, author shares startling facts on firearms

Guests: Ian Overton

AMT: Hello, I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and this is The Current. There are almost a billion guns in the world today. Every year more than 12 billion bullets are produced. That's almost enough to kill every person on earth twice. Worldwide 300,000 people are shot dead every year. Many more, of course, are injured and the numbers involved in the trade are staggering.

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The pistol and revolver trade more than tripled in value around the world between 2003 and 2013. As UN data shows, by 2013 almost 31 million firearms and parts were being traded by 94 countries worldwide. In one year alone, the US imported about 800 million dollars of guns and exported a further 400 million dollars’ worth. This is just exports. US domestic sales add more guns and more millions of dollars. Over 98 million farms were sold by Americans to Americans between 1986 and 2010.

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AMT: As an investigative journalist, Ian Overton saw firsthand the pain and destruction caused by guns. Now he is director of investigations for the London-based charity Action on Armed Violence. He's also the author of The Way of the Gun: A Bloody Journey in the World of Firearms. As part of the season's project Ripple Effect, he joins me to talk about how gun culture in North America has made an impact across the globe. Ian Overton is in London, England. Hello.

IAN OVERTON: Hi.

AMT: One billion guns worldwide - it's kind of hard to get your head around that number.

IAN OVERTON: It is. it's very shocking and I think there are an awful lot of people who lead their lives where they never really see a gun. But then again there are people who live their lives where a gun is an absolute consistent presence in every single thing they do and it not only influences lives but then obviously has a major impact on the likelihood of how they die.

AMT: You're very clear, though, that you are not coming into this investigation as someone who hates the gun. What's your own experience with weapons?

IAN OVERTON: Yeah, not at all. In fact, as a teenager I ran a gun club. I was an Army scholar in the UK in which I was part of the Officer Training Corps at University. I’ve fired lots of guns. I've been a marksman in a number of competitions as well. But, really, the transformation occurred over years as an international journalist. I've reported in over 80 countries around the world, frequently from war zones. But I began to realize that the gun was ever present, but also unremarked upon. It was a remarkable instrument and, yet, it's almost considered quotidian every day in our news reporting. So, for instance, when somebody is beheaded by ISIS, for instance, we really report on the act of beheading. That is a terrible death. But the shooting of somebody in the back of the head is considered just, that somebody was shot. We don't go into the details that surrounds that moment. And the idea of the gun almost becoming just a shadow in all news struck me as quite interesting given that it causes so much harm.

AMT: You've also had guns pointed at you.

IAN OVERTON: Yes. I've been held up at gunpoint three times in Papua New Guinea, in Amsterdam, and in Ecuador. And I've been shot at in the line of reporting a number of times. But the moments when I was held up at gunpoint, these live with me much longer than, I think, the passing by bullets of reporting. Because there's something horribly intimate about being held up at gunpoint. And you are suddenly rendered entirely defenseless in the face of another man's tyranny and it has always been men who have held me up.

AMT: You travel to many countries to explore the role of guns, but let's begin in the US. How would you define the relationship that Americans have to guns?

IAN OVERTON: I think it is summed up by the word unique. There are a very, very few countries where the constitutional right to bear arms is embedded in the political framework. The ownership of guns in the US is unparalleled around the world. It works out around 310 million guns owned by roughly the same number of Americans, so one gun per person. In Canada it’s around 31 guns per 100 people, just to put it in perspective. The numbers of guns, the size of the gun industry, which amounts to around 60 percent of the global gun industry and just the way it dominates the media as well, the proliferation of guns in Hollywood films and in our everyday news items, which we get internationally from the US perspective, means that you can't really write a book without looking at it from the US angle. However, that, to me, was my bugbear. I wanted to show that there are people around the world who don't believe you should have the right to bear arms. There are people who are, I would say, the victims of the Americans love affair with the gun. Given, for instance, 250,000 guns from the United States, either going through or produced in the US, are smuggled south into Mexico every single year. The massive levels of death we see in Central America are largely linked to the availability and the ease of availability of guns in the United States.

AMT: So these are the real ripple effects of a gun industry—

IAN OVERTON: Absolutely.

AMT: --and gun ownership there. I don't know shit there, that they just keep spreading outward.

IAN OVERTON: Yeah. The Second Amendment has, I think, a number of faults in in it, when it comes to the international market. Americans-- I mean, whenever I write an article Americans only read the article from an American perspective, but as any Canadian listener will know that the impact of the Second Amendment has a ripple effect even in Canada. 50 percent of illegal arms seized in Ottawa, for instance, were found to have originated in America. The American right to bear arms not only stimulates the global trading guns - so without the American market there would be less money to market guns, less money to lobby governments, and less money to sell guns at discount rates around the world. Secondly, the right to bear arms in America causes an immense black market trade that impacts crime both in Canada and south of the US border, down into Mexico and Central America. Thirdly, the very, very heavy weight role of the National Rifle Association, the largest gun lobby in the world, has deep and pervasive impact on the international community's attempts to create a proper coherent arms trade treaties and other treaties that would regulate the export and flow of small arms around the world. The United States failed to sign and ratify the arms trade treaty, which means that the largest producer and player in the gun world has completely absenced in themselves from the largest arms trade treaty in the world. Finally, I think, from a Canadian perspective what it does is this, is that the US love affair with the gun and the terrible consequences, with around 10,000 gun homicides a year and 20,000 gun suicides a year, with 30,000 deaths just on Canada's borders and down into the United States – this, I think, also distorts the perspective of Canada when it comes to its own issue of guns.

AMT: I'm going to bring that up because we like to think we're pretty smug that we are not like the US, but you've actually looked at the numbers differently. What did you find?

IAN OVERTON: Well, for instance, there have been in the last ten years – between 2003 and 2012 - over 5,500 Canadians have shot themselves with guns. Now, these are legitimately owned guns, and they're not part of a smuggled network. And it raises a fundamental question - where more than 500 people are shooting themselves every single year and the numbers are almost all men - you've got to raise the question, actually, does Canada have a gun problem?

AMT: You're talking suicide?

IAN OVERTON: This is suicides. Everyone focuses on gun homicides. Now, yes, when you compare Canada to the US, Canada doesn't have a major homicide problem when it comes to guns in comparison. However, when you compare Canada to the wider European economic market you would find that of the 31 countries that make up the economic market, if you add a Canada, so you have 32, you'd find that can address she ranked fourth in terms of gun homicides. So does Canada have a gun problem? Well, if you put it to the people who have had relatives killed by guns in Canada, yeah, I think they’d have to say it does have a problem. Now, I appreciate that the vast majority of gun owners in Canada are legitimate owners. Most people in Canada, for instance, would only have a gun for hunting. They wouldn't have it as they do in the US, for self-defence. But, nonetheless, and this is the problem is that over 500 people shoot themselves every single year and very few of those people would have gone out and bought a rifle to shoot themselves. They’d have bought a rifle to go hunting. And this is the fundamental problem. It’s something that needs to be addressed in the Canadian public debate. Are there problems when it comes to the mental health analysis of gun owners? Should there be more scrutiny by doctors about whether their patients have access to firearms? Because they've shown repeatedly again and again that access to a firearm can turn a moment of despair into a lethal moment. And I would argue that there have probably been many people who have killed themselves, who would not have killed themselves had they not had access to a gun. In fact, one US study analyzed people who survived shooting themselves, and the gun’s very lethality makes it a very, very potent weapon to kill yourself, but the small number of people who survived, they did a study on and they found 40 percent of them had only considered suicide for less than 15 minutes before they pulled the trigger.

AMT: So, the gun availability really does matter.

IAN OVERTON: Absolutely.

AMT: Including in Canada. Let's talk about some of the other places you've visited. Tell us about San Pedro Sula in Honduras.

IAN OVERTON: Yes. We tend, in the global news, to think that the real harm that's coming from armed violence must inherently be Yemen and Syria because this is where, you know, large amounts of bombs are being currently dropped. But the truth of the matter is that when it comes to guns the real problem, it lies not in the Middle East, but actually, in Central America, the very ready availability of firearms, often from the US, combined with the very, very strident battles going on between drug cartels in that part of the world means that deaths are every day. I travelled down to San Pedro Sula and within 15 minutes of my landing, three young women had been shot in a drug-related gang shootout, 20 minutes from the airport. In the next three and a half days I spent there, I saw 17 bodies. It was the most violent place I've ever witnessed and I've been to plenty of war zones, when it comes to casual everyday violence affected by the citizens. And when I was following the police on their round up, they would arrive at a scene where there had been a murder. They would spend five, ten minutes just asking people if they’d seen anything, doing a couple of photos and then the body would be thrown into the back of the morgue truck and driven away - to the point where they sometimes don't even pick up the body parts that were still lying on the ground. There's a casualness to the response of violence because the violence was so ubiquitous. The murder rate in San Pedro Sula is a 171 per 100,000 people a year. You compare that to the UK where it was around 0.2.

AMT: You call it the most violent city that is not in a war zone.

IAN OVERTON: It is, absolutely. There are two places in the world that can repeatedly come up tops. The one is San Pedro Sula in Honduras, which, as I said, is part of this epicentre of drug-related cartels battling it out with each other. And the other place is Ciudad Juárez on the US-Mexican border. And the most outrageous thing, I think, about that is Ciudad Juárez is considered the second most dangerous place in the world, where just across the border is El Paso, which for the last four years has been voted the safest place in the United States. So the difference between heaven and hell, in this case, is literally a border fence.

AMT: And the effect is not lost on you. You actually spend a fair bit of time with people who are selling and making coffins.

IAN OVERTON: Yes.

AMT: There’s a lot of gun-related business, unfortunately.

IAN OVERTON: Well, this is part of the essence of the book, is what I argue is that the gun, ultimately, is transformative. When a gun gets to a certain level in the community it begins to transform the community and it has a capacity to actually transform the economic ecology of a community. So in San Pedro Sula, one of the best jobs in town is to actually work in a mortician's or to work for one of the funeral homes.

AMT: Talk to me a little bit about actual war zones. You say that the Iraq war, above all others, defines your view of the military use of guns. How so?

IAN OVERTON: The American approach to gun ownership, I think, has had an impact on the American military mindset and the troops I've seen out in the US and also the American troops I've seen in Iraq have this go-to approach when it comes to guns. Now, obviously, you can't have a military without guns. That’s self-evident. But the American love affair with guns, when I saw it translated into action in Iraq was absolutely profound. The number of bullets expended by every single American soldier on the ground in Iraq is obscene. I think they worked out that something in the region of 800,000 bullets was expended, in terms of per insurgent killed just for background training. The US government has spent an absolute fortune sending arms to Iraq as well. One of the things that I found around researching the book was the fact that the US regularly buys AK-47s to give to other nations, including the Iraq military. It does so partly because the AK-47 is the go-to weapon of choice for a lot of militaries around the world. But also—

AMT: Yeah, it works well over time, doesn't it? It’s one of those-- it's kind of like the workhorse of a gun.

IAN OVERTON: It is. But also - and this is, I think, the interesting element- as a spy told me that's one of the reasons they do this is because if an AK-47 appears on CBC Evening News in the hands of ISIS, people don't automatically think that's an American-bought gun. If an M16 did, they would. So the lack of transparency we have about the US Department of Defense purchasing of AK-47s destined for Iraq and Afghanistan is a very murky business, but we do know that something in the region around a million guns was sent by the US to Iraq and Afghanistan during the war on terror.

AMT: How many did they lose track of?

IAN OVERTON: Well, to be honest, I don't think they even know how many they sent out there. I really think-- I'm currently in a big debate with the DoD trying to get absolute evidence of how many guns they sent out. But something in the region of 190,000 AK-47s were lost in Iraq and 450,000 AK-47s were lost in Afghanistan.

AMT: And we're talking guns. What about bullets?

IAN OVERTON: Well, I mean, bullets-- There are so many bullets produced. In fact, the US government, when it was producing bullets for the war on terror, reached absolute capacity in terms of its own capabilities, so ended up having to build or give money to large independent corporations - not government entities, but companies - they gave them money to build a bigger armories and big armament factories. And it got to such an extent that the US government has actually asked the Israeli government to give them bullets during the war on terror. They were just using so many of them. I think the firepower or the need for small arms fire power really took the US government by surprise in the war on terror. I think they approached it thinking, as they believed that the Cold War would be fought by battle tanks across large areas, the small arms almost seem vaguely obsolete before the war on terror began, but now it's absolutely integral as house-to-house fighting happened in places like Fallujah. In fact, the importance of the gun in the US actions in Iraq, I think, were really symbolized by the huge popularity of that film American Sniper and it really goes to the heart of the fact that the American right to Bear Arms, the Second Amendment love affair with a gun really infiltrated the military way of thinking as well.

AMT: And it's very difficult to get a handle on the scope of the trade. The industry is very secretive as you discovered.

IAN OVERTON: It is unbelievably secretive. In fact, there's only one large arms trading corporation on the US market that is publicly listed. The vast majority of them are privately owned, which means it's very hard to find out about their profit and loss accounts and who they're doing business with. Luckily, you can get into that to some degree by analyzing the US Department of Defense budgets. And these guys are making very healthy profits, not only from the US Department of Defense, but from sales to police and other enforcement agencies. And it's not just the US, of course, they’re into Canada, the whole of European Union. A lot of guns have been produced in Europe; they get exported around the world. The real challenge, though, is that even when we know that a nation, for instance, like, the Philippines or Jamaica, where extrajudicial killings are commonplace, it's still considered relatively acceptable for a large corporation to go and sell its guns to those police forces. And this happens every day. Governments which we know are guilty of despotic acts and killing civilians without due process, we know that they also get supplied by corporations who have headquarters in Europe or in North America.

AMT: Well, and that points to the fact that it's not solely illicit gun use, it's, quote unquote, “legal gun use,” it's the whole milieu, it's all sides. Is there a solution? What has to happen to stem the flow of guns?

IAN OVERTON: Well, I talked earlier about the hope that more of the large global trading networks in, like, America, and China, and Russia, if they joined organizations or treaties, like the arms trade treaty, that might be one way forward. But I think the likelihood of that happening is quite low. What else could happen? Well, I think we are seeing a bit of a sea change, for instance, in the American gun debate. And I think, ultimately, if we're going to start off somewhere, we might as well start off with world’s so-called largest democracy outside India. But start off with the United States and look at to what degree the Second Amendment can be challenged or to can be modified to becomes a rational part of the law so that isn’t acceptable for somebody to go out the back of somebody else's car after a gun sale, they can buy an AR15 semi-automatic rifle without any background checks. Now, I think most Canadian listeners would think, yeah, that's kind of I wouldn't want that happening in Canada. Well, if that doesn't happen in the US, then I think we're going to see consequences on the international smuggling markets, for instance. But what I also think is an intriguing shift that's happened is that increasingly we're acknowledging that that when a white police officer in the United States shoots an unarmed black man then that has consequences, not only in social media, but also cumulatively we begin to find out things that we hadn't previously known. So we don't know, for instance, how many young black men are killed by American white police officers every year. But people are gradually creating those data sets and once those data sets are in place I think we're going to have very coherent and logical public responses to concerns such as that. And my argument is that if we do find that American law enforcement's are using firearms disproportionately, then maybe we can have an argument that the European Union - which exports things like Glocks to America's police forces - should say that, actually, that trading relationship needs to be questioned. Because, believe me, if we were seeing the same forms of armed violence occurring in Mexico, there certainly would be responses by the European Union to the delivery of weapons to Mexico. In fact, there have been. German companies have been prohibited from selling certain arms to certain states and Mexico. And the question is why do we not apply the same logic the same principles to the United States?

AMT: And what's at stake if what you've observed just continues?

IAN OVERTON: Well, I think the greatest fear is that we see, as we are seeing right now, a situation where the United States enters into a prolonged conflict in the Middle East. In that conflict they dispersed huge quantities of guns. We don't know where many of those guns are now. The US then retreats and the consequence, the logic of that proliferation of firearms has maintained in the Middle East. Death occurs on a regular basis. What we're now seeing is a huge exodus of people from that very region because they're fleeing gun violence. They're fleeing the things that have been sown by American intervention. And they're fleeing into Europe. So, every single day when we pick up the papers in Europe when we read about another 50,000 Syrians arriving on the shores of Greece, what I think is they're fleeing from guns, not just American, but Russian and Chinese as well. And I think ultimately we're getting to a tipping point where we acknowledging that every single day we're seeing headlines where guns are being used in more and more instances where civilians are being affected. And I think there does need to be a stronger putting together. Canada has re-engaged quite forcefully with your new prime minister in this international debate about the protection of civilians. And I think that debate really is the biggest debate at this time. The United Nations has recently celebrated the 70th anniversary. And yet the question is has it really worked? Are civilians more protected than ever before? And my answer is no. And I think one of the constant reasons is, it's not just explosive weapons that they’re fleeing from, but it’s this ready availability of small arms. And I think there needs to be real debates as to who's profiting from this mass sale of arms? Should we be imposing greater controls and greater stigmatization of the Russian production of arms, of the Chinese production of arms? But we do go after America because America is a lot more transparent and the rule of law there is a lot more open towards a voting discussion. It is a true functioning democracy. And that's why I think we should focus on America and ask questions as to whether America's love affair with the gun has influences that are far beyond our current knowing?

AMT: Okay. Well, lots to think about that and keep asking about there. Ian Overton, thank you for your time today.

IAN OVERTON: Thank you.

AMT: Ian Overton is the author of The Way of the Gun: A Bloody Journey into the World of Firearms. He's also the director of investigations for the London based charity Action on Armed Violence. He joined us from London, England. That's our program for today. Earlier today, we heard about robo-farms and how new technology is affecting agriculture. Technology may also be the key to home cooking in the future. As part of last season's Project by Design, we looked at how so-called robo-chefs could be in home kitchens as early as next year. You can hear that entire segment on cbc.ca/thecurrent, but we're going to leave you with a taste of that. We'll give today's last word to Chef Tim Anderson's description of his robo-sous chef. I’m Anna Maria Trementi. Thanks for listening to The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

What we have now is a prototype that only really makes one dish and that's a crab bisque. The way it works is that I have cooked through a recipe wearing motion capture gloves and wristbands with 3D cameras around the room in a studio kitchen. That's then transposed on to some very sophisticated robot arms and hands and they follow my movements exactly. They are refined by robot programmers and technicians so that it cooks the same dish every single time. And the big innovation behind it, because there's been kitchen automation in the past, but what's special about this new Moley Robotics Kitchen is that it uses human-like hands and human-like movements, which allows it the same kind of versatility that a human cook will have. It can do potentially anything, as opposed to just one or two different things.

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There are two robotic arms that come down from the ceiling of the kitchen and the kitchen is designed primarily for human use, but if you want the robots to come in and cook, then it lowers from the ceilings. It's got two very human-like hands attached to these big robot arms and then it hovers above the workstation, basically. The ingredients all have to be laid out in a predetermined coordinates for the robot to find them, ‘cause they have no sense. They cannot see, taste, smell, hear, anything. But in the future, it will have access to the whole kitchen and be able to find things in cupboards and fridges and things like that.

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Apr. 5, 2016 Episode Transcript

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