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The Current Transcript for May 6, 2016

Host: Stephen Quinn

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

The people here are devastated. Everyone’s devastated. The community is going to be devastated. This is going to go on. This is going to take us awhile to come back from, but we’ll come back.

STEPHEN QUINN: Fort McMurray Fire Chief Darby Allen is determined and so are the people of Fort Mac determined to rebuild and to come back, but it's a daunting challenge, hard to even think about as the wildfire still burns. First up today, we'll hear from others who have rebuilt in Slave Lake, Alberta and Kelowna, BC. Then...

SOUNDCLIP

The proposed in New York would allow police officers to submit you to a so-called ‘textalyzer test.’

SQ: Yes, the textalyzer, a roadside test for your phone, to see if you've been texting or keeping your eyes on the road. It's just a proposal right now in New York State, but it has people across North America talking. Those who say we need to tackle distracted driving the way we took on drunk driving. And some who say handing over your phone to police means handing over too much privacy. That's in half-an-hour. Also today...

SOUNDCLIP

This is done. We’re done. The monster’s here. It’s over. This is no longer a peaceful haven for me. This is a potential for industrial wasteland, that's what this is.

SQ: The monster he is talking about is a controversial mining project in North Western BC on First Nations territory. The struggle to keep it as a peaceful haven for him and generations to follow, in an hour. I'm Stephen Quinn in Vancouver. This is the Friday Edition of The Current.

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'Be patient': Advice for rebuilding Fort McMurray from wildfire survivors

Guests: Mark Missal, Nicola Ramsey, Ron Mattiussi

SOUNDCLIP

We really love our community. I mean, Fort McMurray gets a reputation around from the people who come and they live there for a week and they leave, but we are very family-oriented community and we are a tightknit group and we really loved our community. [teary] And we really wanted help to go back there and raise our children there.

STEPHEN QUINN: That is Crystal Mercredi, one of the many Fort McMurray residents who want to get back in and rebuild their city. It's going to be a long hard road to rebuild and recover from this devastating wildfire. But it's a road that others have been down before. Today, we're speaking with a few who have done it. Mark Missal is a Slave Lake town councillor and he lost his home when wild fire engulfed that community in 2011. He's the air attack officer where he supervises water bombers for fighting wildfires. Nicola Ramsey is also a Slave Lake resident. She helped to fundraise more than 125,000 dollars for her community following the fire in 2011. And Ron Mattiussi is the city manager for Kelowna, in charge of their emergency operations. He helped rebuild the community after their 2003 fire. Hello and welcome to all of you.

RON MATTIUSSI: Hi, Stephen.

SQ: Mark Missal, to you first, what was your reaction when you first heard about the fires in Fort McMurray, when you first saw those pictures?

MARK MISSAL: There is a lot of empathy. There was a lot of pain, the personal pain. It brought it all back up again. And I'm seeing that throughout town, the way Slave Lakers are reacting, very anxious again and really reaching out and praying for these people up there.

SQ: You would have known exactly what was going through the minds of the people trying to get away from the fire. What did you think about what they must be thinking?

MARK MISSAL: A lot of pain and a lot of sadness, a lot of fear. Eventually, there's going to be a lot of anger, but I'm really hoping they reach through that and have hope.

SQ: Nicola Ramsey, what memories did it bring back for you?

NICOLA RAMSEY: Yeah. Like Mark, there was a lot of empathy there. Like, as soon as we saw the pictures it just brought it all back. It was like it just looked too much like what we had been through. I didn't lose my house but I talked to a friend who had and she said as soon as she saw the pictures she just felt physically ill it was so hard to see. But I think we also, here in Slave Lake, know that the road ahead for these people is going to be very, very rough. But we also know they'll get through it because one of the things that we really saw in our fire was just that whole neighbour-helping-neighbour and people helping each other through it and so I think we really feel confident that they'll pull through. But they will have some dark times ahead.

SQ: Ron Mattiussi, what went through your mind?

RON MATTIUSSI: Well, you know, it's remarkable. It was 13 years, but it was like it was yesterday just watching the coverage. Same thing, you get chills. And then you remember the process. And I think, you know, unfortunately right now, they're not thinking. Right now they're in the middle of it. And that's the tough part because it's chaos and it's fears, as everyone’s talked about. Eventually, that does subside, though, and you start rebuilding.

SQ: Mark Missal, you were fighting that fire in 2011, the fire that claimed your own home. How devastating was that?

MARK MISSAL: Oh, absolutely devastating. I mean, there was personal loss. There is that whole concept of watching my town burn and not being able to do anything other than try to help buy time for people to get out. Yeah. Incredible stress on people and myself.

SQ: Tell me about the efforts to save your home.

MARK MISSAL: Well, decisions by the fire department were to let some houses burn, fight what you can, and in some cases, fire fighters were putting hoses and water on to houses while their own were burning. Tough, tough decisions in a very short period of time.

SQ: You mentioned earlier, you said the anger will come. Where did it come from for you?

MARK MISSAL: It was actually, for me, it was a very personal anger about why couldn't they do more and it took a while to work through that, but in terms of the community people, people are grieving that loss, so they react in a lot of different ways.

SQ: We are seeing pictures out of Fort McMurray of the aftermath. Nicola Ramsey, after the fire in Slave Lake what was it like the first time you went back?

NICOLA RAMSEY: It was kind of unbelievable, because a lot of people have described it as looking like a war zone. It was really hard to get your bearings. A lot of people, when we first came back, walked around the perimeter where the fire had been. It had all been fenced off, but you looked in and you couldn't tell what street you were on. I used to live in a house that burned down in that area. I had no idea which one was my house. So that was really hard and I think, even though I didn't lose my house, I think we all felt like we lost something in the fire because we did lose a large part of our community and a lot of people moved away and didn't come back. And so there was that kind of loss and you just knew for the people like Mark and our other friends that-- You know, people say they're just things that you lost, but it's really more than that because there's so much of your person that's invested in your home, like all of the mementos and the photos and it's part of your history and part of your memories and your future that you planned on living in that house and it's all gone. And every time I would turn the corner from my neighbourhood that looked totally normal into the area where the houses had burned, I thought I would get used to it after a while and I just never did.

SQ: Did you ever consider joining those who are leaving for good?

NICOLA RAMSEY: Very briefly. But I feel like when we got back here we just felt like there was so much to do. There was so much that needed to be done to help support the people who were struggling. But we got involved in a lot of projects in our community, my husband and I, and just every day got up and tried to figure out what he could do to help.

SQ: Returning to Slave Lake, Nicola, standing in the middle of it, could you even imagine rebuilding?

NICOLA RAMSEY: I think in our case there was enough of it still there and there was so much passion amongst the people who returned that we were going to do it that I always felt there was a lot of faith that it was going to come back. So, I mean, like, when you would look at these streets and streets where there was nothing left it was kind of unimaginable to think about what it would be like. But where it is today is a completely different place.

SQ: Ron Mattiussi, let's talk about your efforts to rebuild. Where do you even start after a fire like the one you went through?

RON MATTIUSSI: Well, we started well into the fire while it was still going. And, again, fortunately our fire was in a sector so we were fully functioning. My heart goes out to Fort McMurray. It's just people are scattered. So we had the core, we had our centre. We established a team four days in and their job was to come up with a recovery plan to start planning, first, the re-entry, how they were going to find-- I mean, you walk into these areas and you could have lived there all your life and you're completely disoriented. All the landmarks are gone. There are no homes, there are no trees. It's quite amazing. I mean, I was a city planner and I went into a neighbourhood I knew well and I had no idea where I was. So, just even assessing the damage is not a small task, but you start there. You start trying to figure out what's gone. You start assessing your infrastructure. And we were doing that as the fire moved on and it was safe to send people in and you just start there. You start taking an inventory of what's gone. You start planning for how you're going to disseminate information, how you're going to collect information. People have needs, they have short term needs, they have long term needs, which they don’t even know at this point in time because they may not have any idea of what's left. So, you start now and I think there are a lot of good resources out there, but you start building that team today.

SQ: In Fort McMurray, we've seen, has lost a lot of its infrastructure. How did you rebuild yours differently in Kelowna following the fire?

RON MATTIUSSI: Well, one of the problems we had is, of course, the fire hit one of our hillsides and so we had to take into account that there were no more trees and trees take about 80 per cent of the water - even in Kelowna we get water - when you get rain. So now we knew that when it rained it would come down and have mudslides and those things. So we had to spend a great deal of money taking our storm sewers and all those things and now resizing them to be able to take flows that are 300 to 400 per cent bigger than the volume that they were designed for originally.

SQ: And Mark Missal, tell me about how you went about rebuilding your own home.

MARK MISSAL: Oh, well, it was very much the same experience. One of the early steps for me was dealing with insurance companies. I would have to say my insurance company was exceptional. They were there within the first few hours giving you cheques, don’t worry about it. And then they helped you through the whole process. Different types of reactions from different insurance companies for people. I was just very fortunate and I could get onto a build within five months.

SQ: And in the bigger picture, as a town councillor, what was the biggest challenge in in rebuilding Slave Lake?

MARK MISSAL: Well, it was continuity, trying to provide it. You have to remember we lost our town centre. We lost all our records. Trying to help and make decisions on very short notice and for the operational people, it was kind of, let's give the politicians a task and get them out of the way so we can deal with the fire.

SQ: And here we are five years later. Mark, what is left to do?

MARK MISSAL: I think we’re almost there. We are probably 99 per cent recovered. We have a lot of new and the long term vision for the towns very, very positive. I like to tell people we're open for business.

SQ: Ron Mattiussi , what did you come up against when you were trying to coordinate the rebuilding of Kelowna?

RON MATTIUSSI: We had a number of interesting things that we saw. For instance, there are groups that come in, you know, professional organizations, aid organizations, and they were trying to get what people needed and trying to match with what people had available from the charities and the groups. It wasn't that easy because most had programs - we'll give you this, but we can’t give you that So, we spent a great deal of time trying to make sure that people's needs were met. And we actually had an unmet needs committee that would actually help people try to get those things that maybe didn't quite fit into insurance, didn't quite fit into some charities. We had a gentleman who was a caretaker up in the hills and lived in a trailer and he lost his home. It was a small travel trailer. It was interesting, but we finally twisted some arms and some of the bigger charities who don’t do that, actually did. They kind of said, okay, look we'll buy him a trailer. And so we spent a great deal of time just doing that coordination to try to get mostly people’s unmet needs met in some way or another.

SQ: Nicola, you chronicled the Slave Lake fires in your book The Sky was on Fire: Slave Lake's Story of Disaster, Exodus and New Beginnings. How therapeutic was it to write that all down?

NICOLA RAMSEY: I think it was a very good process. I felt like when people started sharing their stories with us--

SQ: And you are in fact battling fires at the moment. Are you confident that you can keep them at bay?

MARK MISSAL: No, no. We have such a warm condition here, very, very dry and, we're getting winds, and now we're starting to get lightning through. So in terms of what I do, we're getting very challenging fires coming up around the province.

SQ: And what about close to Slave Lake?

MARK MISSAL: No, nothing close to Slave Lake. I mean, there is a very concentrated effort on stopping that. Even in terms of yesterday where we had a hotel in the middle of our town burn down, the response to that by fire department was absolutely amazing.

SQ: I want to ask each of you, given your own experiences in rebuilding after the fire, what is the best advice that you could offer to the people in Fort McMurray right now? Ron?

RON MATTIUSSI: I think start now, but one of the things that struck me as everyone was talking about memories and the reaction, I think one of the things we underestimated was post-traumatic stress. You can rebuild a community, but it's difficult to get through it. So, I would say take that into account as well.

SQ: Nicola, what message would you send?

NICOLA RAMSEY: Well, I think people need to kind of give themselves time to grieve. They feel that, you know, maybe you shouldn't grieve over the loss of a house, but I think that's important. The other thing is to remember that there are people that are out there that are willing to help you. And one thing I really want people to think about is, with their children, we had a study done here by the University of Lethbridge. They say they surveyed a whole bunch of kids here and where parents thought their kids were handling things well, they really weren't. I think a lot of kids were trying to, you know, they knew their parents were under a lot of stress and they didn't want to add to that stress, so they didn't share some of their feelings with them, their fears and so on, and in the weeks and months to follow those fears became more evident. So just pay attention to your kids and make sure they're okay.

SQ: And Mark, your message?

MARK MISSAL: My message is celebrate your successes. Look forward, don't look back anymore. Embrace the challenge, and please be patient. This will take a lot of time, a lot of time to recover.

SQ: And, Nicola, what can the rest of Canada do for the people in Fort McMurray right now?

NICOLA RAMSEY: I think-- One thing that we had a huge problem with here was people donating things that people didn't need. So I think people need to wait and find out what Fort McMurray wants. Ask them what they want. Don't just assume, like, I’ll give them all my old clothes, and these different things. Like, wait and see what they ask for and be willing to share with them. I know we have a group here that started a Facebook page just for advice. Like, if you’re from Fort Mac and you need advice from some somebody who's been through what you went through, contact us. There are hundreds of people here that would love to help you. So just let us know. We'll give you advice.

SQ: Well, thank you, all three of you, so much for your time this morning and for sharing your experiences. We appreciate it.

MARK MISSAL: Thank you.

NICOLA RAMSEY: Thank you.

SQ: You take care. Bye bye now.

RON MATTIUSSI: Bye, Stephen.

SQ: Mark Missal is a town councillor in Slave Lake, Alberta, who lost his home in 2011 after a wildfire engulfed that community. Nicola Ramsey, also a Slave Lake resident who helped fundraise more than 125,000 dollars for her community. And Ron Mattiussi is the City Manager for Kelowna, BC, in charge of emergency operations. We would like to hear from you on this story. You can tweet us, @thecurrentCBC or go to our Facebook page or visit the website, cbc.ca/thecurrent. And tune in for a special edition of The Current on Monday. Anna Maria will be in Alberta and she'll have stories of people coping after they've fled Fort McMurray. She’ll have the latest on the fire fighting efforts as well. I’m Stephen Quinn in Vancouver. You’re listening to the Friday edition of The Current.

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'Textalyzer' device to catch texting and driving prompts privacy concerns

Guests: Ben Lieberman, Andrew Selbst, Karen Bowman

STEPHEN QUINN: Hello, I'm Stephen Quinn in Vancouver and you're listening to the Friday edition of The Current.

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SQ: Still to come, Canadian documentary filmmaker Nettie Wilde is known for taking on politically charged topics from the Zapatista movement in Mexico to Vancouver's downtown eastside. For her latest, she trains her camera on the beauty of north western British Columbia and the tense coexistence of First Nations, nature and the Red Chris Mine. She joins me to talk about Koneline: Our Land Beautiful in about half an hour from now. But first, hand on the wheel everybody. You pull up to a red light, you look to your right and the driver next to you is staring down intently at their crotch. It has become an all too common occurrence for drivers who can't resist their smartphone screens whether stopped at a light, or worse, while moving. Of course in most places in Canada, using your mobile device while you're at the wheel is against the law. It's also banned in many US States. But the more we learn about the danger of distracted driving, the more it seems those laws are not enough. In New York State, lawmakers think they have a solution. They want to authorize police to use a device they call the textalyzer, sort of like how a breathalyzer knows if you've been drinking and driving, this device would scan your phone and know if you had been using it before a crash. The bill is co-sponsored by New York assemblyman Felix Ortiz.

SOUNDCLIP

Today we’re using a breathalyzer to ensure whether or not, in case of a crash, know if the individual was intoxicated. With a textalyzer we will only be able to verify whether or not the cell phone was used at the moment of the crash. Now, this textalyer will not unveil any content of the cell phone, so the privacy will be protected. The only thing that will show is whether or not the cell phone was used at the time of the accident.

SQ: Now the law that Felix Ortiz is co-sponsoring is called Evan's Law and it's named after Evan Lieberman. He was 19-years old when he was killed in a car accident which the family later learned was caused by distracted driving. Evan's father is Ben Lieberman and it was his advocacy that eventually brought the law before a New York State assembly and we have reached Ben Lieberman in New York City. Hello.

BEN LIEBERMAN: Hi, Stephen. Thanks for having me.

SQ: Thank you for taking the time with us. Ben, tell me what happened to your son Evan.

BEN LIEBERMAN: My son Evan was a back seat passenger in a car collision and I got that call that every parent dreads. Evan was transported to a trauma unit and he died 31 days later in front of our eyes. The driver said he fell asleep at the wheel, and it was a crazy road, and it was rush hour. A lot of the story didn't make sense to us, but during our stay in the hospital, our friends asked a lot about texting. Frankly, we didn't really care about the reason because we were kind of taking care of the business at hand which is trying to save Evan's life. But also, we assumed the police would do their job. What we learned was that the police rarely look into the phone at all, and it's not their fault because there's no police protocol in place. We subpoenaed the phone records through a civil lawsuit that had nothing to do with the police and it took us six agonizing months to get the records. We discovered there was texting throughout the drive leading up to the crash. The crash had been in a dead cell zone, so we couldn't really prove what he was doing at the exact moment of the crash and he couldn't prove he wasn't texting either, but I do know that it was an old and daunting road and it's one of the hardest roads to fall asleep on. Anyone texting on the roads is begging for a collision and he was texting on that road and he was in a collision. All that aside, what is amazing to me was what we learned from those phone records was that the phone was sitting in the junkyard for weeks after the collision. It was never examined and that's when I realized how misunderstood this destructive behavior is, and really how little there is in place. We tried to address the issue, and we tried to become part of the solution, and so you know, we also know that privacy is very important so we tried to meticulously respect privacy rights, it's really a foundation of our country is maintaining our privacy. We think we found the balance of interest. We tried to get the legislation and the technology to only deal with usage, you know no content so there's no conversations, no phone numbers, no contact information or pictures. And then we also tried to borrow on successful drunk driving laws that are in place like implied consent. We believe strongly that this is an impairment equal to, if not worse, than drunk driving and to frankly, you know hold people accountable because once people were held accountable for drunk driving issues that's when the problem started getting better.

SQ: Ben, you describe some of the limits that would be placed on the textalyzer, but you haven't told me exactly how the device works, how does it work?

BEN LIEBERMAN: Well, at a crash site, police would be able to plug a phone in in front of the driver, scan the device and it would generate a report that would show usage. Every mobile operating system manages many logs around the activity of the phone. The solution could extract these logs and analyze them to provide a clear indication of whether a phone was in use; rapid tapping on the screen which is like indications of typing or swiping applications like Facebook. It's very important to understand that phone records don't provide a means to detect anything other than phone and texting.

SQ: But how precise would this device be? I mean if someone had sent a text before they got into their car or while they were parked just before they decided to move off and then they crashed a minute later, would the textalyzer determine that they had been texting while driving?

BEN LIEBERMAN: It can detect movement, yeah.

SQ: How much information would the police actually be able to get from a phone if they use this device?

BEN LIEBERMAN: The extracted law contains only meta information for the phone activity, no actual data or contact. An example is if there's an indication that a text message was sent in the log, the content of the message is not saved in that log. This method enables the technology to understand exactly what was performed with the phone without looking into the personal data.

SQ: Do you think the police should need a warrant to be able to scan somebodies phone after an accident?

BEN LIEBERMAN: You know, I understand the desire to get warrants. Imagine getting a warrant for every breathalyzer, it's a very difficult thing and it sounds good in concept but in New York, to get a warrant is to get a police to go to a district attorney and then a judge and then you get it. What happens in the meantime while this is going on? Is everybody supposed to stand there and you know, what’s supposed to happen with the phone at that point? It's just not practical if it’s not getting done right now.

SQ: Ben, one of the companies that would manufacture this device is called Cellebrite. You approached them about this idea initially, did you?

BEN LIEBERMAN: Yes, I approached them because they are a formidable company in phone forensics and they're used by police throughout the country. I knew that they could go into a phone and basically get all the information out of a phone. That's what happens when there's a fatality, like a phone will get bagged and get sent to a lab and a company like Cellebrite uses technology and then they'll scrape the phone and get all the information. So I asked, can you put filters on this? Can you dial it back? Can you can you dumb it down, so to speak? You know, can we protect the privacy? And they were confident they could.

SQ: Ben Lieberman, please stay with us. You certainly suspected that the idea of the textalyzer might stir privacy concerns and you were right. The Supreme Court of the United States ruled in 2014 that police may not search a cell phone without a warrant; that's just one of the concerns about this technology that has been raised by privacy advocates both in and outside of New York and this is the first time the use of a device like the textalyzer has been proposed anywhere in the world. It would set a significant precedent if the bill becomes law. Well, Andrew Selbst is a scholar in residence at the Electronic Privacy Information Centre and he is in Washington, DC. Hello, Andrew.

ANDREW SELBST: Hi, thanks for having me.

SQ: And thanks for taking the time. You have been listening to my conversation with Ben Lieberman, what do you think of what you've heard?

ANDREW SELBST: First I would say to Ben, what happened to your son was certainly a tragedy and the scope of the problem, I don't think anybody denies that there is a huge problem there, but the privacy concerns are maybe a little bit different than you stated. The privacy concerns are not just about how much data the police might be able to pull off of phone. One of the problems with this law is that anybody that gets into an accident with no evidence or even suspicion that they were actually texting and driving will be subject to the same search of their phone; will have to turn over their phone upon penalty of losing their license. That's just not how we do it. Another Supreme Court case besides Riley in 2014 ruled that police need a warrant to search your phone. There is actually a case called McNeely that said in drunk driving cases, police also need a warrant. Ben actually mentioned imagine getting a warrant for every breathalyzer, well that's essentially what the Supreme Court said and Chief Justice Roberts noted that warrants can be obtained in as little as five or 15 minutes. In a lot of cases, in probably most of the cases, we're talking about texting, which the phone records will actually show or subpoenas to email companies can show if there have been emails sent back and forth. And the last thing I'll say is about the tech. We can't know how private it really is until you have the tech available and it can be evaluated by a third party and determined exactly what it is that it's showing. Metadata, as we know from all the Snowden revelations, everything relating to that, is incredibly powerful in terms of what it can actually tell you. And so, merely saying that it's only metadata that’s being given to the police is not incredibly helpful.

SQ: Ben Lieberman, I want to bring you back into the conversation. How do you respond to the concerns that you've just heard?

BEN LIEBERMAN: I understand a lot of the concerns and we try to address them as best we can. There are some things that we can agree on and some that are definitely different and I think that email and social media for taking selfies while you're driving, things like that are just not going to show up on the phone records. I think one of the problems in the information that's going out is to say that a drunk driving, if there's a crash, there are about ten things that are listed as probable cause for drunk driving and it doesn't take a crash. But one of them is a crash. There are different ways to outline probable cause and that's what we're looking for in this. I do disagree that it's a blanket opportunity to do this because it's certainly not what the intention is, and we're not trying to make blanket searches, we're not trying to pry into people, and we understand that is sensitive and we desperately want to get this right.

SQ: Andrew, your response.

ANDREW SELBST: I appreciate the efforts but simply saying that you're not intending for the law to be a blanket search is just directly contradicting the text of the proposed law. Ultimately, you compare it to driving without lights, swerving, things that lead to breathalyzers, but those are all observations about an individual. If you know that the search of a phone were predicated on the kind of probable cause you're talking about for a breathalyzer, such as swerving, that would absolutely alleviate all the individual suspicion problems because there would be individual suspicion. Here, it's just proposing a blanket search and that's just what the law says. Now, there are possibly ways to create a law like this; to create the technology like this, but they do have to rely on some sort of individualized suspicion. That's just the way the criminal investigations work in the US.

SQ: So, Andrew, if not the textalyzer, what should be done instead to curb distracted driving? You began by recognizing that it is a serious issue so how do you curb distracted driving and how do you hold drivers to account when they cause crashes because of distracted driving?

ANDREW SELBST: To be honest, it's a tough question. I would be in favour of the ability to apply some sort of technology that could check the phone, but with additional safeguards, such as a warrant predicated on probable cause, and I think more than just criminal investigations, there is a world of good that can be done by simply talking about the statistics, by raising public awareness, by training police to ask these questions.

SQ: Ben, the name textalyzer obviously does invite that comparison to breathalyzers, so how do you think we can ultimately attach the same cultural taboo to texting that we have applied to drunk driving?

BEN LIEBERMAN: Yeah, you ask a great question there and the truth is it's like drunk driving, and I mentioned this before, drunk driving didn't improve until you understood the problem and people were held accountable. You could throw education at it all you want, but there's just a certain reality of human nature and it's not going to be one-- when I knew somebody that was losing their license or somebody that did damage to somebody because of this, that was the most powerful thing, it wasn’t an urban legend anymore. I can't emphasize that enough. That's the heart of the problem and that's what we're dealing with here is again, when we're talking about blanket searches or not having a blanket search, it's at a collision. It specifically says that in the legislation. It's not swerving, it's not driving with the lights on, it's nothing like that, it's at collisions and that is considered one of the reasons of probable cause for administering a drunk driver. And we're not showing the other—

ANDREW SELBST: Sorry, I have to break in. That's actually not true. As a legal matter, a collision is not itself enough to investigate drunk driving. And that's the problem here. It's still a blanket search even though it's involved in collisions. I mean, collisions are not crimes, they're accidents, so that's not enough to generate probable cause. Yes, in a broad statistical sense, someone who got in an accident is probably more likely texting and driving than someone who didn't get in an accident, but it's not the kind of individual observation that is required under the fourth amendment. And besides which, as a policy matter, you're just adding trauma to what was already a traumatic instance of being in an accident without any particular reason to believe that any criminal activity occurred. Accidents happened before we had cell phones.

BEN LIEBERMAN: And I understand that and I understand that the accidents have increased a lot, and I think that the fact that that to say that you're adding trauma to that poor driver, I'm not going to be as sympathetic to that. I had to see my son in the hospital for 30 days. I had him holding my hand and say, Dad I'm scared, okay? So, I think it's important to remember why we are talking this privacy issue. It's also very, very important to be able to drive from point A to point B without having your life turned upside down. And the last thing I want to do is to be responsible for violating anybody's privacy rights, but I also don't want to bury another child.

SQ: Ben Lieberman, Andrew Selbst, thank you both so much for taking the time, we appreciate it.

GUESTS: Thank you, Stephen.

SQ: Ben Lieberman’s son Evan was killed in a car accident caused by distracted driving in 2011. Andrew Selbst is a scholar in residence at the Electronic Privacy Information Centre, he was in Washington DC. And I should point out that while police may need a warrant to search your phone in the United States, the Supreme Court of Canada has ruled that they do not need a warrant to search your phone in Canada. Also, we did request an interview with Cellebrite about their textalyzer technology, they pointed out that they would not be the only company that might manufacture the so-called textalyzer and they deferred questions to Ben Lieberman. Well, the textalyzer is only being proposed in New York State for now, but distracted driving is a growing problem everywhere. Canada's harshest distracted driving laws are currently in Prince Edward Island where the maximum fine is $1200. That compares to $167 fine in British Columbia, the country's second lowest penalty, but that is expected to change on Monday when BC is set to unveil new tougher penalties. Karen Bowman is the founder and executive director of the BC based Drop it and Drive campaign to end distracted driving. She joins us from Nanaimo, BC. Hello.

KAREN BOWMAN: Good morning, Stephen. Thanks for having me.

SQ: Thank you for taking the time. How does the problem of distracted driving in Canada compare to the US?

KAREN BOWMAN: I'm not even sure there's really much of a comparison. We're halfway through the decade of action for road safety that was declared by the World Health Organization and United Nations because the number of injuries and fatalities caused on roads is just astronomical. So, while there might be differences in terms of how the laws are applied in the number of states vs the number of provinces that have legislation, I think, for me anyways, roads are roads and we're all facing the same challenges whether the distraction is electronic based or it's other forms of cognitive distraction.

SQ: So would you support something like the textalyzer being used here in Canada?

KAREN BOWMAN: I wouldn't want to give a categorical answer to that until I had more information. Obviously I listened to the discussion that just took place and I'm very supportive of innovative ways of tackling this issue because like Ben said, obviously people's privacy is very important, I get that, I respect that, but at the end of the day drivers who are choosing to engage in activities that are impeding their ability to drive safely are putting lives at risk every day on all our roads. You said yourself, you just have to sit at a traffic light and look beside you to see the person staring down at their crotch or people driving along reaching for stuff in the back seat. I think it's important to realize that there is no one answer to distracted driving. It’s not going to be the textalyzer, it's not going to be a high enough fine, it's going to be a lot of different things working together to ultimately bring distracted driving to the same level of social unacceptability as drinking and driving.

SQ: Karen, your daughter was in an accident that was caused by distracted driver. What happened?

KAREN BOWMAN: One thing I'll just gently correct you on. We don't really refer to it as accidents and I heard what the other fellow was saying as well, that you know accidents are not criminal behaviour, they’re just an accident.

SQ: Collisions, crashes.

KAREN BOWMAN: I think when you can’t prevent it, insurance companies refer to them as an act of God like a tree falls on a car. But when you are making a decision behind the wheel, whether it's to speed or to ingest something that chemically affects your ability to focus, or you're distracted because of a phone, then you're not in an accident, you're causing a collision, and I think that's where personal accountability has to come into play. So for Kylie, because we weren't there, she was being driven home from school by a friend, she was eight years old, she was in a booster seat right where she was supposed to be, shoulder and lap belt in place, and they got rear ended by a woman who basically just wasn't doing her job. We don't get to find out whether she was on her phone or not and to be honest, as a mom who got the phone call from that crash scene, which even though it was over five years ago, I will never forget how horrifying that phone call was, I don't care if she was on her phone. I don't care if she was on her phone, I don't care if she was choosing that moment to touch up her lipstick, or reaching for something in the vehicle. It was a clear day, straight road, all she had to do was have her eyes on the road, hands on the wheel, and her mind on task, and she would have realized the vehicle in front of her was only just starting to pull away from a green light and the collision never would have happened. She just needed to do her job.

SQ: How do you get people to take the task of driving more seriously?

KAREN BOWMAN:[sighs] Oh well. [laughs] I honestly wish I knew the answer to that question. I've just finished several weeks of touring all around BC and Alberta delivering different seminars and talking at conferences about this very issue because for me, driving is-- you're essentially driving a potential weapon and it's not taken seriously. There seems to be a lot of focus on the it’s my right to do this. Driving is not a right, it's a privilege and so what seems to be working, I mean we don't have the only approach by any stretch of the imagination, but what Drop it and Drive does is we don't try and raise awareness about how dangerous distracted driving is. I believe people already know that. Where the problem comes in is there's a realisation it's dangerous but people are choosing to do it anyways, and once they understand how is it dangerous, why is it dangerous, and then more importantly, what am I really risking? This isn't about a fine or demerits, this is about can I possibly live with the fact that I have injured or killed somebody else, or somebody within my own family? That seems to be, in our experience, what is changing people's belief systems because I don't think distracted driving is a technology based problem, it's behavioral. Like I said before, society doesn't look at distracted driving with the same disdain that it looks at drunk driving, and that's where we need to get to. I think one of the ways to get there is for people to really understand what makes it dangerous? Why can't our brains juggle all of these things? Why can't we multitask? We've always been told multitasking is great. And then also, like I said, this is what you're really risking. This is about people. This is not about statistics.

SQ: Karen Bowman, it's very good to hear from you. Thank you.

KAREN BOWMAN: You’re welcome. Thanks for having me.

SQ: That is Karen Bowman the founder and executive director of the BC based Drop it and Drive campaign to end distracted driving. She was in Nanaimo, BC. We want to hear from you. Is the so-called textalyzer a good idea to crack down on distracted driving? Send us your thoughts. Our email address is thecurrent@cbc.ca. On Facebook and on Twitter @thecurrentcbc, no text messages please. And visit our website for a link to a previous interview on The Current with the author of a book called A Deadly Wandering about one of the first car accidents known to be the result of distracted driving, an accident that killed two rocket scientists. You can hear that at cbc.ca/thecurrent. I'm Stephen Quinn in Vancouver. You're listening to the Friday edition The Current.

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Filmmaker Nettie Wild finds cinematic poetry in 'polarized' mining debate

Guests: Nettie Wild

STEPHEN QUINN: Hello, I’m Stephen Quinn in Vancouver, and this is the Friday edition of The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

This is done. We are done. The monster is here. It's over. This is no longer a peaceful haven for me. This is a potential for an industrial wasteland, that's what this is. It's over. What I grew up with and what I knew is over. We need the mine, that is the reality.

[Sound: bird call]

I don't know how long I can stay here. I just don't feel that I fit no longer.

SQ: You can hear the frustration in Oscar Dennis's voice, there. The sense of being torn. Pulling him in one direction is the Red Chris Mine, which he referred to. It's a large-scale mining project in an area known as the golden triangle, a copper and gold rich area of northern B.C. Like most resource development projects, the mine is controversial. Especially so because it's located on Tahltan First Nation territory; and that's what's pulling Oscar Dennis, a Tahltan First Nation man, the other way. The First Nation land is set in one of the most stunningly beautiful places on earth.

But the mine represents an economic lifeline. It's that tension, and that beautiful natural backdrop, that's explored in a new documentary film by Canadian filmmaker Nettie Wild. She is known for her work documenting politically fraught stories, from addiction in the downtown east side of Vancouver, to the Zapatista Movement in Mexico. But with this film she says she wanted to create a cinematic poem: one that represents all the people who live and work on the land. Koneline: Our Land Beautiful is screening at the Hot Docs film festival in Toronto, and Nettie Wild joins me from there. Hello!

NETTIE WILD: Good morning.

SQ: Oscar Dennis referred to the land as his peaceful haven. Describe, if you can, the territory where you shot this film.

NETTIE WILD: It's in northwest B.C.; it's one of the last great wildernesses in the country. It is stunningly beautiful. It has so much wildlife running through it that hunters refer to it as the Serengeti of the North. As you mentioned, there's so much copper and gold that's threaded underneath it that it's called the golden triangle by the mining industry and the Tahltan call it home. And this kind of sets the scene for a huge land which is on the cusp of enormous change. It's a place that I’ve had the very real pleasure of getting to know over the last 20 years, often by horseback. So I have a huge passion for the land and the people of the northwest. And it's a corner of B.C. that very, very few people, outside of the people who live there and work there, know about.

SQ: Konaline: Our Land Beautiful, tell me about the significance of that title.

NETTIE WILD: Oscar Dennis is one of our key characters in the film, and he's a linguist. And in following Oscar-- he's also an extraordinary activist. And in following his story, he was explaining to us that the Tahltan language has pronouns. Just like English: he, she, they, it. But it has one extra pronoun which is exclusively for the land, it's the letter k. And when it goes in front of a word, when, if Oscar was standing with his dad and was looking out over a beautiful valley and he said it is beautiful, and he said it Konaline, it only means the land is beautiful. That one pronoun not only means the land, but it also, he explains, is a state of being. And so you have this pronoun that is unique to a certain way of seeing that the Tahltan have of the land, and I thought this is a window in. If I'm out to explore different ways of seeing this land, this is a wonderful window into how the Tahltan embrace the land in everything that they do and see. So our title is Konaline: Our Land Beautiful, which is a literal translation.

SQ: And we see Oscar Dennis trying to preserve his language. He's recording his father speaking Tahltan. Tell me a little bit more about Oscar.

NETTIE WILD: Well, he's an extraordinary individual. His father is struggling with Alzheimer's and is tired and has said he's ready to go. And he said to his father, give me one more year. Because it's a race against time, because people in his village of Iskut and extended family in Telegraph Creek. The elders are dying and they're taking the language with them. And so it's a real race against time for Oscar. Oscar is also somebody who-- and his father and his mother, who have been politically active on the land and trying to not stop development, but trying to put the brakes on it and have some kind of a plan so it isn't kind of pell-mell all around them.

SQ: You have called this a cinematic poem. I think I know what you mean by that, what do you mean by that?

NETTIE WILD: Well here's the deal. When I brought myself to the point where I thought, what are you going to do? Here's this land in northwest B.C. that's.. I'm very passionate about. But there's also this huge debate, this rhetorical roar that's going on, where I find, unfortunately, a lot of people are really, really polarized and there's a lot of rhetoric. And despite all the talk, there's not a coming together. We've got big project in front of us, which just how to manage and save our planet, and we can't leave people out of the conversation. And yet, through all the yelling and screaming, that seems to be exactly what's happening. We're pushing people away. So I thought, alright, Nettie, if you're going to, as a filmmaker, if you're going to approach this area that you love so much but you are an outsider, you're from the south. What can you bring to it? And I thought, how about if I bring another way of storytelling? How about if I bring art? How about if I bring a pursuit of beauty and complexity to every single person who appears in front of our camera? From diamond drillers, linemen who are putting up the transmission line, and to elders. And First Nations people, some of whom are working in the industry, and some of whom are protesting against it. And what about if my objective was simply this: to find the poetry, understanding that poetry can sometimes be harsh. But what about if my project and our team's project was to find the poetry in every single person and what they do in their relationship to this extraordinary land up there. And we ended up throwing out character driven, usual form of documentary storytelling, and coming up, shooting very abstractly, cutting it together in a very associative way, and creating what I hope for the audience is a really visceral, sensual experience of being up north. A poem about an area that I think if people enter into it, they may think differently when they come out of our 96 minutes. We'll have to see. [Laughs]

SQ: I think that's what's so surprising about it, because when you talk about, I mean, and we're used to hearing the rhetoric. You know, we have the Tahltan, we have a mine; the stage is set for confrontation. And yet what we see here is just this beautiful, even-handed treatment of every single subject who is in front of your lens.

NETTIE WILD: Well, one of the things that happened was that I find that you can use words to describe what you're attempting to do. That you know, I would say to that the miners or I’d say to the Tahltan out there, this is an art piece. And you'd see their eyes kind of glaze over, going, what the heck does this person from the south, what the hell is she talking about? But where we found we hit gold, visual gold, is for instance if you take the example, very early on when we were filming the flying in of the northwest transmission line, in this sequence, we have the world's largest helicopter flying 16,000 pound towers that are completely constructed, and flying them over the mountain. And as they clear the mountains, it catches the gleam of the sun and they turn into these kind of flying crosses. And then they land down in this huge backwash that's created, of wind is created by the helicopter blades. And these linemen are struggling to get this huge piece into place. And we shot it with 800 millimeter lens. We shot it in slow motion. And as we were creating it, and later as we were showing it to the linemen afterwards, we all had the same reaction. It was like, holy! We've never seen something this familiar framed in such an unfamiliar way. And it was… it was like looking at choreography. And the linemen said, we've never seen ourselves portrayed that way before. And myself and my DP and our crew, we just looked at each other and we went, bingo. That's where we want to go. If we can frame the familiar in an unfamiliar way, if we can show the poetry in the linemen putting up the transmission line, and that poetry has the works in it: it's got the elegance of engineering, it's got the brawn of the linemen trying to struggle with the tower, and it's got the environmental devastation of the of the clear-cut. You don't need to say anything, it's there.

SQ: It's interesting to me that you refer to yourself as an outsider here, because you know this land well. In fact, you've got what I found to be a fairly surprising connection to it, which is you, in fact, own a mine.

NETTIE WILD: [Laughs] not in northwest B.C., but yeah. In terms of B.C. history, I inherited a mine.

[Both laugh]

SQ: What?

NETTIE WILD: This is the confession of a reluctant miner. Nothing against mining, but I just, you know, I’m a filmmaker, and I ended up with a mine.

SQ: How did that happen?

NETTIE WILD: My grandfather was a dreamer. He was a doctor and he had money, and that meant that the entrepreneurial souls within the mining industry approached him in the '30s. And my grandfather had a wonderful love of the wilderness and anything that glittered in rock. So he was a part of the chase. And he invested, became the controlling shareholder of seven holes in the ground. [Laughs] A tungsten mine, and it was that love of the wilderness and the mine was passed to my mother, and to me.

SQ: I want to play another clip from the film. And this is a clip; this is from a blockade that members of the Tahltan First Nations set up.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: So there are no vehicles allowed to go through. Can we walk through, at least?

VOICE 2: Who are you and what are you doing up here?

VOICE 1: My name is Tim Mearing, and what's your names?

VOICE 2: We are asking you, what is your position up here?

VOICE 1: Mine Operations Superintendent.

VOICE 2: We heard so many things about the tailings pond up here. We are very concerned. Is it the same design as what was used in Mount Polley? No way will that ever happen in our territory.

VOICE 1: Well, I won't get into the technical details of how that dam is being built up there.

VOICE 2: We are not letting this truck by.

VOICE 1: Is this a Tahltan decision?

VOICE 2: That truck is not coming in.

[Sound: Drumming]

SQ: We heard a reference there to Mount Polley, of course, the mine where the tailings pond gave way. Nettie, what kinds of concerns do people have about the mine? Is it the same thing?

NETTIE WILD: Well, one of the things that I heard a lot from the Tahltan community was during the construction of Red Chris, when concerns came up about the tailings pond, as would happen in any community, they were reassured by their company not to worry. Because it was a tried and true model at Mount Polley. And then, of course, Mount Polley happened. And immediately, within very few hours, there was a blockade up against the construction of Red Chris, where the elders were calling for the stop of that construction until that issue was addressed, for obvious reasons. And within a couple of days, the president if Imperial Metals and the minister of mining, Bill Bennett, was at that blockade. Right in the middle of the Mount Polley disaster. So you can imagine what kind of a priority it had for them, while they were dealing with the whole firestorm at Mount Polley. Where were they? They were on an access road. In northwest B.C. into the Red Chris mine, because these people were stopping the construction of what now was going to be the part of Imperial Metals that was going to keep the company solvent. They really needed to open that mine. And they had a blockade on it, and it was a very, very vibrant and vital time on this dusty back road in northwest B.C.

SQ: And what has been, or what will be, the impact of that mine on the landscape?

NETTIE WILD: It's opened now. It's in full operation. It's in a corner of this massive plateau that we feature in the film, the top of Todagin Mountain. It's-- open pit mines grow, so right now it's a shallow dish. It will become much bigger. If it is contained to that area, then it becomes, you know, a portion, I don't know what the percentage is, but it's a smallish portion, a proportion of Todagin Mountain that is now in full operation. Of course, has dug a massive hole into the landscape, but the thing that's interesting about this is that if you take a look at all of Todagin Mountain, it is all staked. The entire mountain, with the exception of a very narrow strip that's been put aside for the breeding grounds of the stone sheep, which the entire mountain is their home. So you can see the ramifications. Now, you know, the mining industry is quick to point out that only one in a thousand projects ever moves to the next stage, so it would be an error to say that all of Todagin is going to be, in the near future, completely developed. But I think this is the kind of issue and the kind of planning that has to be taken into consideration when you think about mining this extraordinary land for materials that we need, which is what Oscar says also in the film.

SQ: Well, and that's the interesting thing. Because not all Tahltan, they don't speak with one voice. They're not necessarily opposed, all of them, to the mine. I want to hear another clip from the film, and this is a young member of the Tahltan First Nation who works at the mine.

SOUNDCLIP

This is our land. This is where our elders grew up. They fought for this land. What they are fighting for I'm drilling on. We have elders against it and we have elders who aren't so much against it. Me, personally, it's putting food on my kids' table, and a roof over their head. I mean, it's tough, I just try to stay out of it because if I say the wrong thing, I won't have a job. And then also, the elders will be mean. [Laughs]

SQ: So what does his story say about the complexity of opinions when it comes to land and development in the region?

NETTIE WILD: Well, I think it kind of wraps it all up in one person. You know, I think it's a real error for those of us in the south to assume that the Tahltan, in this particular case, are going to, for some weird reason, be completely unified in point of view and politics about what to do about the development of the land. I mean, every dinner table in this country is rife with debate over this. We're all debating it, so of course in Tahltan territory where the stakes are even higher, where the actual deposits actually are, people are working for the mine. Enough and in any given family you have people who are working for that mine. In any given family, you have people who are working for that mine -- or Kelly is actually, the clip that you just heard is from somebody who's in assistant diamond drilling, and there's drilling happening throughout the entire territory-- and people who, depending on the project and where it is, protest against it. And sometimes, you have people who are doing both. You know, at one point in their life, they're working for some kind of resource extraction outfit, and another time, they might find themselves protesting. It's really, really complex. People down south talk about it; people in the north live it.

SQ: But do the people who dig minerals out of the ground or lay transmission lines, do they see the land in a different way than members of the Tahltan Nation who are standing at the blockade?

NETTIE WILD: Or members of the Tahltan Nation who are miners and are digging into the ground, right?

SQ: Well yeah exactly, that's what I mean.

NETTIE WILD: So I think-- here here's the deal. When I first started creating Konaline, it didn't matter who I spoke to. When I would ask, why are you doing what you're doing here? And if you were born here, why do you stay here? Every single person-- this is not an exaggeration to make a point. Every single person I spoke to started the conversation in exactly the same way, saying, I really love being in the bush. And so I thought, what about if we took our inquiry from that point?

SQ: How difficult was it to get access to all of the people that are featured in the film? How willing were they?

NETTIE WILD: It was hard. At first, we were totally shut out by the mining industry. Completely. There was a real fear of our camera. And it was only until finally there were a few people who said yes instead of no, and in the mining industry, I owe a huge amount to a guy who's not on camera: a man by the name of Harvey Tremblay, who heads up Hy-Tech Drilling. And his attitude was I'm proud of what I do. Film us. If you have a critique about what I do, talk to me about it. But here's the interesting thing: I also ran into resistance, and this is a window into this polarized debate. There were people within the more kind of militant faction of the Tahltan who were protesting who said if you're not a part of this blockade, you don't have access. And I said to them, you know, I think I’m of more use to you as a filmmaker. [Laughs] And it's really important that I position myself as being open to listening to the mining side of the story. And if I am a part of this blockade, that's not going to happen. And so my access was reduced, I was cut off there. So there I was in this really ironic and difficult position early on, where I didn't have access to the blockades and I didn't have access to the mining community. And then people started to say yes instead of no. And Oscar's mother and his family were the first people within the Tahltan community to say yes. And that one thing led to another.

SQ: And you've screened the film in the communities where it was shot. How did people respond?

NETTIE WILD: When we took it into Telegraph Creek, we have this hunting scene in the film. [Laughs] It is, I have a hunch, probably more controversial than the mining. [Laughs]

SQ: [Laughs] not easy to watch.

NETTIE WILD: For you, Stephen Quinn.

SQ: That's true, you're absolutely right because I have never shot a moose and watched it bleed out.

NETTIE WILD: And gut it and haul it home, right?

SQ: Right, mhm.

NETTIE WILD: You've never gone shopping that way. Right?

SQ: No.

NETTIE WILD: And so what we do is we follow Orville Brown and Elliot Brown, an uncle and his and his nephew, and we are in a scene which goes on for a long time.

SW: A really long time.

NETTIE WILD: [Laughs] Because I wanted people to get past, being in the south, repulsed by it and into the actual rhythm of having to do this extraordinary work and see this live animal turn into meat. Turn into a meal. Turn into, that there's actually a beauty and a poetry. So what happened in Telegraph Creek is that people are, as the scene starts, the laughter starts. They start laughing at Elliot, because he's profane, right? And they start-- it's a laughter of recognition, because they start seeing things that they know really, really well up on the screen. They're laughing at his comments that the film crew. When it was over, one of the elders came up to me, and he said, that hunting scene makes me happy. And I said, why is that? And he said, because it's what we do. And we've been doing it for generations and I’m watching it being passed on to the next generation. And it's being done with élan and skill and humour. When I show it in the south down here at Hot Docs, I always take a look at the audience and you can see people looking through their hands.

[Both laugh]

NETTIE WILD: At the same screen. So there we have it: two different ways of seeing, two different ways of relating to the land.

SQ: You used a phrase a moment ago, which was the roar of rhetoric. Your experience in making this film, in screening this film: what has it taught you about the role that art can play when it comes to addressing these issues, when it comes to getting past that roar of rhetoric?

NETTIE WILD: I think is key. I think there is a role. I think there's a real role for art. What I mean is that we're going to bring our camera into a controversial hot political scene, this extraordinary land which is on the cusp of really huge change. And we're looking for that poetry and that complexity of people's work in front of our camera. And I think what it allows people to do is, it allows people who ordinarily might write off that person to see them in a different way. My favorite review is a friend of mine came up to me and said, you know, I’m really against that transmission line. I hate to admit it, but I found it really beautiful to watch. And I’m going, that's where I want our audience to go. Because I think through watching something that has skill and beauty and texture and light, you're asking people to experience something that they may have in theory written off before. And then see, see what happens to a conversation after that. See if it shifts. See if a stereotype maybe goes crashing to the ground. I think it's really important to do that in these really, really controversial times.

SQ: Nettie Wild, such a pleasure to hear from you. It's just such a beautiful film, thank you.

NETTIE WILD: Thanks, Stephen.

SQ: Nettie Wild, an award winning documentary filmmaker. Her film Koneline: Our Land Beautiful is playing at the Hot Docs film festival in Toronto. That's our program for today. Finally, a special concert took place this week in Palmyra, Syria, after the ancient city's recapture by Russian-backed Syrian forces. We asked Brian Moynahan, the author of Leningrad: Siege and Symphony about the significance and connection between the concert and the 1942 premiere of a Shostakovich symphony in Leningrad. He gets today's last word. I'm Stephen Quinn in Vancouver. Thanks for listening to the Friday Edition of The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

[Music: Orchestral, classical]

BRIAN MOYNAHAN: Now, the reason Putin is closely linked with another great staging of the symphony, which was the staging of the Leningrad symphony by Shostakovich in Leningrad, besieged Leningrad with the Nazis only five miles away from the concert hall. Putin owes his existence, his life, to the siege of Leningrad and the fact that his father posted with a battalion that, in the end, took 100 per cent casualties, and the only ones who survived were those very few, a handful, who were seriously wounded but were able to be evacuated over the ice. So I think Palmyra combines that attitude, that Russia does not stand just for blood and terror and bombing people and bombing children and hospitals, but there is something finer and above that.

[Music continues]

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