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The Current Transcript for September 14, 2016

Host: Anna Maria Tremonti

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

I have a ball here with the seal of the president of United States and signed by Texan by the name of George Bush.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: Remember that? Former Prime Minister Jean Chrétien on the witness stand pulling souvenir golf ball after golf ball from his briefcase in an attempt to mock Justice John Gomery, the man presiding over the inquiry into an elaborate kickback scheme that would send the once mighty Liberals into a political wilderness. And now more than a decade after the details outraged the nation, the trial of a key player and close Chrétien ally, Jacques Corriveau, has begun. In an hour we're asking about the legacy of that scandal and how it has shaped the direction of today's governing Liberal Party. Also today—the politics of poor white working-class Americans.

SOUNDCLIP

My grandma would say if someone else calls you a hillbilly, you might need to punch him in the nose. But if we call ourselves hillbillies, it’s a sort of term of endearment.

AMT: JD Vance grew up between the Rust Belt and Appalachia, surrounded by poverty, anger and love—part of a culture that he says is in crisis in America today and that feeds into the politics playing out in this US election year. JD Vance joins me in half an hour. And this is one Calgary dentist frustrated by decay in kids’ teeth.

SOUNDCLIP

Whether it be returning fluoride to the water—which would be my dream—or increasing access to care. Either way, something has to be done.

AMT: Professionals in dental health believe there is a link between tooth decay and Calgary's choice five years ago to pull fluoride out of the water. But the city's elected officials are not interested in the details. We're starting there. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

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Study suggests more tooth decay in Calgary kids after end of water fluoridation

Guests: Denise Kokaram, Jim Stevenson, Paul Allison

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: So do you have any teeth that are bothering you Sean, at all?

VOICE 2: No.

VOICE 1: No?

VOICE 2: This is pretty messed up.

VOICE 1: Messed up? Okay.

VOICE 2: You see?

VOICE 1: Alright. Yeah. You have one tooth. It’s growing in though, so that’s good.

VOICE 2: It’s been there for a long time.

VOICE 1: And we’ll get you to open really big for me. And a little bit wider. Very good. So you’ve had some fillings done, I see. Right?

[Sound: Suction noise]

VOICE 3: Are you alright? You're going to have to slide up on the cushion for us, okay?

[Sound: Dental drill]

VOICE 4: They schedule me here for Sean for this bus first time. We really appreciate for that. It’s a big help for me and for my family. Even for my kids.

VOICE 5: If you didn’t have this free service, what would you do?

VOICE 4: Maybe waiting for insurance or something like that? Because right now, my husband and I—because we’re newly in a company—we need to stay long. That’s why we don’t have insurance right now.

VOICE 5: So this is very important for you, to be able to come to the bus.

VOICE 4: Yeah. Very important to me.

[Sound: Dental drill and suction noise]

VOICE 1: Perfect. Looking good.

AMT: Well, the sounds of the Alex Dental Health Bus—sort of a dentist’s office on wheels—providing free oral health care and smiles to less fortunate families—children especially—in the city of Calgary. Staff at the charitable dental bus have had less to smile about in the past few years. Tooth decay has been on the rise in children in Calgary. A study earlier this year suggests the problem is much worse for Calgary kids than for their counterparts up the road in Edmonton which fluoridates its water. It looked at grade two students and found the magnitude of the increase in primary tooth decay greater in Calgary kids then Edmonton kids. And that's renewed a longstanding debate in Calgary about the fluoridation of water. Calgary stopped adding fluoride to its drinking water in 2011, joining the ranks of many other Canadian cities including Vancouver, Victoria, Waterloo and Montreal that do not put fluoride in their water. Last night, Calgary city council voted against a motion to ask researchers to give them more information. Denise Kokaram is watching the issue closely. She is the Alex Dental Health Bus’ program lead. She's also a dental hygienist and she joins us from our Calgary studio. Hello.

DENISE KOKARAM: Good morning, Anna Maria. Thanks for having me.

AMT: What are you seeing in terms of dental decay since fluoride was removed from Calgary's water?

DENISE KOKARAM: So what we're seeing is definitely an increase in the degree of disease within this population that we provide service to, meaning that the numbers of teeth with decay have gone up.

AMT: And who do you provide service to?

DENISE KOKARAM: So we provide service to identified high needs elementary schools and population—low-socioeconomic populations here within the city.

AMT: Mhm. And when you say low-socio—are you talking about—is this the working poor? Who would come to you?

DENISE KOKARAM: Yes. Originally when we looked at it, we typically deal with the most vulnerable citizens and as we looked at our data coming in, we realized a lot of the population that we deal with is the working poor, working disadvantaged families here.

AMT: So you've always seen tooth decay, but what have you been seeing in the last five years?

DENISE KOKARAM: So we've been seeing the degree of disease increasing, meaning we typically will see about a 50 per cent decay rate within this population. And that decay rate, although it stayed at about 50 per cent, the degree of disease has increased, meaning the number of teeth that individuals have has increased and the severity has increased.

AMT: Are there other factors that could be contributing to that, aside from the removal of fluoride?

DENISE KOKARAM: Absolutely. When we look at decay rates and this type of disease, it's multi-factorial in terms of what we see. We know that we're dealing with not only access to care, but education, proper nutrition, home care, access to dental care and many of these things are barriers to people within this population.

AMT: But those would have been there before. Are you doing a full study? Is this anecdotal? Help me understand what you're seeing in relation to the five year decision.

DENISE KOKARAM: Right. We're not doing a study. We just collect our statistics, our data, with our day-to-day operations. So that's the only data that we have to go off of and anything to compare to. We have nothing to compare it to prior to the water fluoridation being removed. All we can see is that the trend is leading to an increase in decay right now.

AMT: And can you give me an example of the kind of or the degree of decay you're seeing?

DENISE KOKARAM: So within our population, we've definitely been seeing children—some of them seven, eight years of age—with almost full mouth decay, rampant decay present. And that's a concern seeing that here in a city like Calgary, where people are experienced in that kind of disease.

AMT: How does that compare to what you've seen elsewhere?

DENISE KOKARAM: Well, I'll tell you that having done volunteer work overseas with HOPEthiopia in Ethiopia and Rwanda and Kenya, I didn't expect to see that degree of disease here in Calgary.

AMT: So what you're saying, it's as bad as some of those places where they have a lot less?

DENISE KOKARAM: Yes. We definitely are seeing situations where we're seeing things that are as bad or similar to what I've seen overseas.

AMT: So how does this affect a child? Like some of the kids you're seeing with that kind of tooth decay—what are you seeing in terms of how it affects them?

DENISE KOKARAM: Well, there are many effects that it has on children, not just to mention the days of school that's lost, which we know across the country are millions of days. It's the whole effect it has on their self-esteem, on their ability to eat, to enjoy life, their quality of life is decreased quite drastically. Many of these families, the children have rampant decay or you know they're in pain, they've had it for so long. And it's not a good solution to have them having that limited access to care and this degree of disease.

AMT: And so when they come to see you, are some of these kids in pain? What does that mean?

DENISE KOKARAM: It's not unusual for us to see children who have abscesses, decay that's to the point where there's not much left of the tooth, and families where they're saying they're aware that their child has this type of disease and there's nothing they can do about it. They don't feel they're in a position to afford to address the issue.

AMT: Meaning they can't afford private dental care.

DENISE KOKARAM: Correct.

AMT: So what's the solution?

DENISE KOKARAM: It's a very complex solution. I think when we look at something like what water fluoridation, it's because it is such a broad range way of reaching a multitude of people very easily and cost effectively. And when we look at—For me, of course, being a dental hygienist, prevention has always been my big focus because I feel that if we focus on prevention, we have a community that lives in wellness as opposed to dealing with problems after the fact, which is much more costly to the system, and not to mention the fact that these children and youth are living in pain and discomfort and disease.

AMT: Calgary city council voted last night against bringing in, engaging researchers to learn more about this information. How do you react to that?

DENISE KOKARAM: I'm very, very disappointed that that's happened. I think that in places where they don't have community water fluoridation, they have other measures in place that help—from a social aspect—to deal with this problem, especially within our low-income groups. And it's not something that right now here we have good support in place to help with dealing with this problem as it grows.

AMT: Okay. Well, Denise Kokaram, thank you for speaking with me.

DENISE KOKARAM: Thank you for having me.

AMT: That is Denise Kokaram. She is the program leader of the Alex Dental Health Bus. She's also a dental hygienist and she is in our Calgary studio. Well, the debate over having fluoride in the municipal water supply had been raging in Calgary for decades. Councillor Jim Stevenson was one of 10 councillors who voted to get rid of fluoride in 2011 and he joins us now. Hello.

JIM STEVENSON: How are you, Anna Maria?

AMT: I'm fine. How did you vote last night?

JIM STEVENSON: I voted to leave everything as it is.

AMT: And why is that?

JIM STEVENSON: Well, you know this whole thing, Anna Maria, has come up as a result of a study done—the McLaren’s study, they call it—that came out this year. And the media's jumped all over that and across the country they've been saying this shows that Calgary made a mistake, they bent to the pressures of the radicals and removing the fluoride has been detrimental to the health of the teeth of the children especially. That's what they're aiming at. But the facts are, Anna Maria, that during the entire length of the study that they did, both Calgary and Edmonton have had increased cavity rates during that period of time. Edmonton has never stopped fluoridation but they still have a higher rate of both baby teeth and permanent teeth decay. So there's something more than the fluoridation and the thing that I really have a problem with the study is that their starting date was six years before we discontinued the fluoride and two years after. So we don't know whether or not the increase, the trajectory, is exactly the same after the fluoride was taken out as before. We’re not sure of that.

AMT: So because you’re not sure, last night's motion was not to bring fluoride back, it was basically to engage the researchers behind the study to get more information. Why wouldn’t you do that?

JIM STEVENSON: Myself, I've been researching this and studying the research for nearly 30 years. There's nothing changed on this. One of the big problems that I have—and the lady that was speaking before me definitely pointed out that—there's other things that can be done, like better access to care and education. And she's right. There's no good support there and there should be and that should be provincial government support, not city support. The fact is that we've had many—I forget how many— different votes, we've had plebiscites over the years on this and it's always been about 50-50. And my question is: do the 50 per cent of people who want it through water fluoridation have the right to force that medication on the other 50 percent?

AMT: Okay. So let me just ask you a few things. You say you've been researching it. What kind of research have you been studying for 30 years? You doing scientific study or are you reading stuff? What are you doing?

JIM STEVENSON: I’m reading stuff, yeah.

AMT: Okay, because Alberta’s own chief medical officer for Calgary, Dr. Richard Musto, advocates for fluoride. Like the scientists who actually study this stuff say that it's good.

JIM STEVENSON: They do. And there's no question that fluoride—the research shows that fluoride is beneficial on the outside of the teeth—there's nothing that says that fluoride is beneficial for someone to ingest it. In fact, the American Dental Association came out and told people make sure they didn't use fluoride water when they’re mixing Pablum for babies. So the research shows that infants, small children and people with any kind of a compromise in their immune system should not be drinking fluoridated water.

AMT: I think you're making big assumptions there though. Why wouldn’t you have people come for more information? Like real scientific information.

JIM STEVENSON: We've been getting that information on a regular basis. And so when they're going as the basis and part of the motion last night was that they go back to the same people that did this study here—which I think is terribly flawed—to get more input from them and I'm just not prepared to do that. I think we've done what we've done. Instead, we're putting pressure on the province to step up to the plate and help out, you know?

AMT: But you did make your decision in 2011 with no expert panel consultation.

JIM STEVENSON: I'm sorry?

AMT: You made your decision in 2011 with no expert panel consultation.

JIM STEVENSON: No, we did. We just didn't do what they wanted to do at that time to send it out to another expert panel. But we've been going over the research. All of us have been doing that for years. So there's been enough study on this—Anna Maria, just take a look at Europe where they took the fluoride out in the eighties for ethical reasons and there's lower rates in Europe than there is here in North America.

AMT: Okay. So you like that study but you don't like the study that says that the magnitude is greater in Calgary right now between Calgary and Edmonton.

JIM STEVENSON: But that doesn't say that, Anna Maria. It doesn't say it because the research says that they started the research back in 2005—I shouldn’t say they started it—but that was their starting point. 2005.

AMT: Okay. Jim Stevenson, we have to leave it there. But thank you.

JIM STEVENSON: Thank you.

AMT: Jim Stevenson, Calgary city councillor. He joined us from Calgary. He's opposed to fluoride in the water. Advocates for fluoridating the water argue this issue is about equity, since tooth decay disproportionately affects those who cannot afford dental care. Paul Allison is the dean of the faculty of dentistry at McGill University. He is chair of the panel looking into the issue of access to dental care for vulnerable groups in Canada. He's calling for increased public funding of dental care and he joins us from our Montreal studio. Hello, Paul Allison.

PAUL ALLISON: Good morning, Anna Maria.

AMT: What's your response to what you just heard?

PAUL ALLISON: It is very frustrating. The multitude of research across the world sharing the benefits of putting fluoride into the water supply to address exactly as you've described it—the very large inequalities in levels of dental decay in populations—is very strong. Government review panels, expert panels of all sorts in many countries have reviewed this issue and come to the conclusion that fluoride, at the right level, put in the water supply is a very effective measure in reducing dental decay and it's also effective at helping the inequalities in dental health between the poorest and the richest parts of the population. So it’s very frustrating to keep going over this.

AMT: You just heard what Jim Stevenson was saying about safety, how he studied the research for 30 years. When you hear that what do you think?

PAUL ALLISON: Well, of course, I mean nothing is ever black and white. There are clearly—there are studies that will suggest that there are some bad effects of fluoride. But the good effects of fluoride far outweigh the bad effects. And the bad effects, the main effects may be some staining on teeth if it's at high levels. But other than that, the benefits for these poorer populations far outweigh those effects. So again, nothing is black and white in life and it's quite easy to bring up questions about its effects et cetera, but overwhelmingly as I say, government and expert panels across the world say it's a very good thing to be doing.

AMT: And the fluoride issue for some highlights the need for better public funding of dental care. How are they related?

PAUL ALLISON: Well, they're—as it was mentioned by your first interviewee, trying to manage chronic disease like dental decay is complex. It's a complex phenomenon which is multi-factorial. And to try to deal with it, you have to have multiple strategies. So fluoridating the water supply is one strategy, having people use fluoride toothpaste is another strategy. So fluorides of various sorts are good strategies. Another element to this, on the other hand, is enabling people to get to the dentist. And as we've just been discussing, those people who have the highest levels of decay are the poorest people, the most vulnerable people in Canada are at the moment and they are at the same time, the people who have the greatest difficulty accessing dental care. So having a means to improve access to care is very important as another part of the strategy to try and help the most vulnerable groups in Canadian society.

AMT: And how does Canada compare to the rest of the world in terms of providing publicly funded dental care?

PAUL ALLISON: It actually compares very poorly. About five or six per cent of the dental care provided in the country is funded through public money, whereas 95 per cent is in the private sector. Even in the United States, the level of publicly funded dental care is higher at about nine per cent. And if you go to Europe, of course it's much, much higher levels. So Canada is overwhelmingly providing dental care in the private sector, not in the public sector. And while the private sector is a good model of dental care delivery for those of us who can afford it, those of us who have dental insurance, it's certainly not a good model for those vulnerable groups that we're discussing this morning. They cannot afford it. They can't get to the dentist and they again are the ones with the highest levels of disease.

AMT: And what are the implications of that for children then?

PAUL ALLISON: Well, children are clearly a vulnerable group. And if you are a child in a poor family eating a diet which increases your risk for dental decay—as was stated by your first guest—the levels of decay in some of these poor kids can be very high. They suffer enormous levels of pain, sleepless nights. They can't go to school. And then a study recently done in Canada shows that the reason that kids have a general anaesthetic for—the operation that children have a general anaesthetic for that's the highest in Canada is for dental decay. In other words, there are more kids having a general anaesthetic for dental decay than any other health condition in the country.

AMT: Hmm. Okay. Paul Allison, thank you for your perspective on this.

PAUL ALLISON: Thank you very much.

AMT: Paul Allison, dean of the faculty of dentistry at McGill University. He joined us from Montreal. We want to hear your views on this. Do you want fluoride in your waterÉ Are you concerned about dentistry as a—do you want to see it as part of a public health package or publicly funded dental care in Canada? You can tweet us. We are @thecurrentCBC. Find us on Facebook. E-mail us from our website www.cbc.ca/thecurrent. Stay with us. The news is next and then one of today's most powerful electoral voices in America speaks with a collective twang. We're going to be talking about the white working-class poor in America. And the author and self-proclaimed hillbilly JD Vance introduces us to Appalachia. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

[Music: Sting]

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Hillbilly Elegy author JD Vance on white working class and Trump’s appeal

Guests: JD Vance

AMT: Hello, I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current.

[Music: Theme]

AMT: Still to come, today's Liberal government may have a fresh faced leader and a forward looking attitude. But what's back in the news this week is the sponsorship scandal. As one of the key figures in that long ago Liberal scandal finally gets his day in court, we revisit the legacy of sponsorship and ask how it still shapes perceptions of the party today. But first, we head for the hills. Well, just say the name Appalachia and to many Americans, it instantly conjures images of malnourished children and squalor. That is true today just as it was decades ago when CBS News went to Kentucky to film a documentary, Christmas in Appalachia.

SOUNDCLIP

It's going to have to get better because it can't get no worse. If it don’t get better, they just ain’t going to be nothing here for nobody. And it’s not only this place, there’s many more like it.

AMT: That's the voice of Goldie Johnson—a mother of three, a grandmother of one—lamenting the grim reality of Appalachian life and the impact of poverty on the children around her.

SOUNDCLIP

And children—I hope and wish that children could have what they used to have. And if not all they used to have, a part anyway. Because little children, when it comes to children—I always could stand a grown up’s disappointment and downfalls, but children—I don’t think they should have to suffer the way that they do. And the world of [unintelligible].

AMT: Well, the voices of people such as Goldie Johnson and her kin are still heard through the long stretch of the eastern United States known as Appa-lay-sha or Appalachia. There is no shortage today of hardships there to worry about. What's different this year is that these families have emerged from the shadows and taken the political centre stage as the Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump appeals to them for his strength and promises to be their voice. Author JD Vance knows these people and their anger well. He was born in a working-class town in Ohio but home for him was really Jackson, Kentucky where his family has lived for generations. His new book is entitled Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis. JD Vance is in San Francisco. Hello.

JD VANCE: Hello. Thanks for having me.

AMT: So as you listen to what Goldie Johnson had to say about Appalachia in 1965, would that be familiar to people in Appalachia of 2016?

JD VANCE: Well, it would definitely be familiar in a lot of ways. It's still an area that struggles with disproportionate poverty rates and folks who are struggling in a lot of different ways. But it strikes me when I listen to that quote that the biggest problems in Goldie's life in 1965 were economic destitution. And as I write about in the book, the bigger problems that I see in the Appalachia of today and the related areas is that people are desperate in different ways. It's not so much that they're desperate economically, can't put food on the table—that's certainly part of it—it's that you've seen a lot of problems move in that are somewhat related but also somewhat unrelated to the economics like the drug addiction, the family breakdown and other issues.

AMT: And how is that—that is tied in some ways to the economy, the economic situation, is it not?

JD VANCE: It definitely is tied in some ways. It's obviously harder to hold a family together when you don't have a decent wage. It's easier to turn to drugs when you're stressed out about your job. But I do also think that it's a little bit different because the level of material poverty that people are facing—the level of material poverty I faced in my own family—is just much, much less than what folks like what Goldie Johnson were facing, frankly much less than what my grandparents faced in the same era of Appalachia.

AMT: So it's got to do more with the social fabric then.

JD VANCE: Yeah. That's a very good way of putting it. It's this sense that everything around you is sort of falling apart, that the communities, the families—they just don't work as well as they used to. In the sense that even though the economy has been very stressful and it's been very hard in a lot of ways, everything else seems to be not working either.

AMT: In a way, it stood still.

JD VANCE: Yeah, absolutely, in a way that's very unique in some ways. I don't think that the region is quite used to this level of social chaos, even though it's never been a place that's had a whole lot of money.

AMT: Okay. Well, let's look at that more because this is a region where people use the word hillbilly. How would you define a hillbilly?

JD VANCE: Well, I define the hillbilly as somebody who is either from Appalachia or has some family ties to Appalachia but really loves the land and loves its people. It is of course a pejorative term if somebody from the outside uses it. It's the sort of thing where my grandma would say if someone else calls you a hillbilly, you might need to punch them in the nose. But if we call ourselves hillbillies, it's a sort of term of endearment, something that we have co-opted and we'd like to call ourselves as a term of love. So it's really about the people who love this area, who grew up in this area, who have some attachment to it. And I think if you look across the country, that's a pretty broad group of people.

AMT: Well, tell us a little bit more about the history of your family in Kentucky.

JD VANCE: Yeah, so my family has existed in eastern Kentucky for as long as there are records. If you're familiar with the famous Hatfield-McCoy family feud back in the 1860s, 70s and 80s in the United States, my family was an integral part of that. And it's the sort of place that was pretty desperate way back in the 1800s and even today. And so my grandparents in the 1940s were faced with a pretty stark choice whether to stay in eastern Kentucky coal country or to try to move out and find a better life. And like so many other migrants of that era, what they decided to do is move to the Rust Belt economy—what we now call the Rust Belt economies—of the north and try to find a better life for themselves. And of course, in some ways they found it but in a lot of ways they didn't.

AMT: And when they moved to the north, they actually brought the culture with them.

JD VANCE: Yeah, they definitely did. They grew up in Appalachia. They loved the hills and they loved the people there and they had also you know acquired a lot of values that were unique to that area of the world. And they just discard them as soon as they arrived in southern Ohio even though they had a decent middle-class wage. My grandfather was able to earn a pretty good wage. Part of it is that the area where they found themselves in was also filled with a lot of Kentucky transplants. The industrial plants and companies of that era would actually go to places like eastern Kentucky and just wholesale recruit families and neighbourhoods to come and work in their plants. So it wasn't just that my grandparents were sort of outsiders in their new home. They were surrounded by a whole group of outsiders.

AMT: And what did you call your grandmother and grandfather?

JD VANCE: So we called my grandma mamaw and we called my grandpa papaw and that was a pretty common term, though it's unique among Appalachians, I've noticed. Not a whole lot of people outside of the South and Appalachia say mamaw and papaw. But within those regions, it's hard to find somebody who calls their grandparents anything but.

AMT: And they were such an influence in your life. Tell me about them.

JD VANCE: Yeah. They were these incredible people. In some ways, they were built for a different time and place. There was a funeral when I was a kid, a relative I didn't know very well and the preacher told us to bow our heads and pray. And I was four or five years old, so I bowed my head and fell asleep. And my grandma and grandpa, they thought that I had been kidnapped because they couldn't find me when the throng poured out of the church. And so they went and retrieved a couple of revolvers and held up the area, the exit area of the church, so that they could check every single car to try to find who would kidnap me. And so it goes to show, one that they were not willing to conform to every expectation of middle-class Ohio life, but they were also very, very paranoid in some ways. They were very scared of losing their kids, losing their grandkids and also very, very protective and willing to go to great lengths to protect them.

AMT: It was like right is right and wrong is wrong and they knew where the line was.

JD VANCE: Yeah, that's absolutely right. They knew where the line was and they weren't afraid to enforce that line themselves if it came to it. And you know that's a funny story but they were also important and I think much deeper in more important ways. Their own kid, my mom, struggled with addiction and we bounced around a lot from home to home when I was a kid. And of course that's a pretty unstable environment. The statistics show that kids who grow up like that are not supposed to do well. But what my grandparents did was really provide that sense of stability and comfort to me and my sister so that we had some of the opportunities that the statistics tell you kids like me shouldn't have.

AMT: You had a tough childhood. How many times—you list at one point how many stepfathers and how many houses you had in a short period of time. Take me through that.

JD VANCE: Yeah. It was a very just unstable sort of life. So maybe every six months, every nine months, maybe we'd stay in a place for a year. But we were constantly moving when I was a kid and I didn't really understand why. Of course now I recognize. It was that mom had a lot of relationship problems and when we went from one relationship to another, we tended to move along with her boyfriend or along with her new husband. But it wasn't just the instability in where we were living, of course. It’s the instability of the people in our lives. So as my sister once told me, the lesson of our lives is that we couldn't depend on anyone. We couldn't depend on men because as soon as they came into our lives, they were just as soon out of our lives. And so we learned to mistrust people. We learned to think of these people as outsiders and to never really grow attached to them. And the people that we felt that we could grow attached to, of course, were our grandparents. They were the one real constant in our lives no matter who was coming in or out.

AMT: At one point, your mom—you're with your grandma and your mama, mamaw—I’m sorry—and your mom comes into the house and she has to take a urine test. What happens?

JD VANCE: Yeah. So I was 14 or 15 when this happened. And mom needed a jar of clean urine because she had to pass a state mandated urine test but she didn't have clean urine herself. She knew that if she gave her own urine she would fail the test. So she came to me one morning. I was staying with my grandma that night, previous night, and she said you know I need a jar of clean urine. And I reacted pretty strongly. It was another time where my mom I felt like had not met my expectations. She had promised me she wouldn't do drugs anymore but here she was admitting that she was doing it and asking me to bail her out. And I reacted very negatively to that. I told her no, I wouldn't give her that jar of clean urine and my grandma—it was one of these very rare tender moments with my grandma—where she sort of pulled me into the bathroom and said you know JD, maybe if you give it to her this time, maybe if we help her this time, she'll do okay. She'll do better. She'll recognize what she's done. There was a side point which is that I had recently tried drugs for one of the first times—it was marijuana—and I was worried that my own urine wasn't clean. But mamaw, in her characteristic bluntness, told me that I was probably an idiot and hadn't inhaled anyway so I should be assured that I had clean urine. And so we gave mom what she needed, but we also decided that I didn't need to live with mom anymore. At that point, I had been splitting time between mom's house and mamaw’s house. And that was the moment where mamaw said you're going to come and stay with me permanently. It's never going to change. We're going to make a life of this and you need to stop bouncing between one home to the next. You need to get some stability and you need to really focus on your schoolwork and that's what I'm going to give you. And that's what she set out to do. And of course, as I write in the book, I really think that saved me.

AMT: And before this, you’d been in a situation where you were supposed to testify against your mother for assault or abuse and you chose not to.

JD VANCE: Yeah. There was a moment when I was 12 or so, where I was riding in a car with mom and she became very agitated. Something I’d done—I don't remember precisely what—but she sped up the car very, very fast. It felt, when I was a kid, like she was driving over 100 miles per hour. And she kept on saying I'm going to crash this car and kill us both. I'm going to crash this car and kill us both. So I hopped in the backseat, kind of tried to hide, which seemed like it made sense when I was a little kid. And mom pulled the car over and I ran as soon as she pulled the car over. And eventually I found a woman's house and that woman called the police and that set in motion a domestic violence proceeding which invited the state into our lives in a way that it hadn't been before. And eventually it became pretty obvious that whatever the government was trying to do to help us, we just wanted them out of our lives. And so the lawyer told me you know when the judge asks you if your mom did anything bad, you should just tell them—if you want these people to leave you alone—you should just lie to them and tell them that your mom didn't do anything. And so when the judge asked me, I said you know no, nothing happened, I overreacted, and that was the end of the domestic violence proceeding. And of course, that was the end of the state involvement in our life by and large. But it was just—you know there were a combination of reasons why I think I lied then. One is that I wanted those people out of our lives. Two, I viewed the court system as sort of this outsider institution that was affecting the life of my family and it seemed a little foreign. The people who were part of that court system, they wore suits and they talked differently than my family did and differently than I did. And I just really wanted them to stop interacting with our family. So like you said, I lied to the judge and it's ironic that the first time I ever interacted with a courtroom, I lied in the courtroom and now I'm licensed member of the bar.

AMT: And when we talk about poor working-class white people in America, in some ways they've been invisible in the discussion on policy and poverty.

JD VANCE: Yeah, that's definitely right. Part of it is just the really complicated racial history that we have in the United States, so a lot of people when they think of a poor person, when they think of an impoverished person, they automatically think of a black urban ghetto. And that's important obviously to recognize that a lot of black Americans are suffering, but it does also mean that a lot of people don't recognize that there are a lot of white poor folks who are also suffering from a number of problems. And I think that blind spot exists in a couple of ways: one, it exists at the elite policy level where people don't recognize that there are a lot of folks in their own country who are suffering and who are angry and frustrated at the political process because of it. But it also exists along the dimension of working and middle-class white folks like me, who maybe don't think of their own community as suffering from the same sorts of problems as the black community. But if we're really self-reflective and introspective about our own problems, I think what we'd recognize is that a lot of the problems I write about in the book are not exclusive to this other group of people that we don't need to worry about. They're very much a part of our own lives and our own neighbourhoods.

AMT: Well, and that brings us to the politics of the United States right now because Donald Trump apparently has a lot of support in places like Appalachia and the Rust Belt. Speak to me a little bit about what you see the appeal being.

JD VANCE: Yeah. Well, part of it is just what you said earlier, that he speaks to people who feel invisible, who feel neglected by the political process in certain ways. If you look at the data, it's not the extraordinarily impoverished who are voting for Donald Trump. Typically those people don't vote at all. But it’s some of the—you know maybe the people who are doing a little bit better, still aren't doing well, but live in these communities and see the struggle and see the pain in their neighbour’s eyes and feel neglected by the political process. They say look, our lives are falling apart, our communities are falling apart and no one is really talking about it. Donald Trump is the first candidate and in at least the past 20 or 30 years to really go after these voters to say I see your problems, I see you and I recognize that your lives are a bit of a struggle. And when you grow up in that sort of world when you're so hungry for political leadership, for somebody who recognizes your problem, you frankly probably have a pretty low bar after you've been neglected for 20 or 30 years. You don't necessarily need, you don't have your pick of the litter in terms of political candidates. You're willing to go for the first person who really speaks to those concerns. And that's a big part of what Donald Trump has done. The other side of Trump's appeal is that he conducts himself in a way that's very relatable. This is a problem that political scientists in America have talked about for a while, that politicians have become decreasingly relatable. They sound too filtered. They sound like everything that they say was approved by a political consultant. There are many bad things one could say about Donald Trump, but what he definitely is, is off the cuff. He's willing to say things in an unfiltered way. He's willing to say whatever comes to his mind. And if you grow up in an area of the country where that's how people talk about politics around the dinner table, then there's something very relatable about Trump's tone.

AMT: Well, you actually make the point that the dislike of Obama is not necessarily racist. It's got to do with exactly what you're talking about there.

JD VANCE: Yeah, that's a big part of it. I do think obviously that race plays some role in it. And I don't think people in my community do themselves any favours by denying the role that race plays in it. But the bigger part I see is that folks have really lost faith in the American dream. They've lost faith in the American meritocracy. They don't believe that the institutions of work and education are open to them. And because of that, they're growing increasingly resentful of the people for whom the meritocracy does seem to work. So you think of someone like Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton. They are smart. They are polished. They are articulate and they really have figured out how to get ahead in this 21st century economy that we have. And maybe you didn't feel so much resent towards those people 20, 30 years ago when you also felt like you had a fair chance, but now when you feel like the deck is really stacked against you, seeing other people who are so successful, recognizing in them some of the traits that they possess that maybe you don't possess, I really think it stokes this resentment towards the president and this resentment towards political elites, frankly of both parties.

AMT: You write that in places like Appalachia, there's a learned helplessness. What do you mean by that?

JD VANCE: Yeah. Well, learned helplessness is a psychological concept and the basic idea is that a person who experiences so much adverse events, so many times has been kicked to the ground, they start to lose a sense of agency. They start to lose the belief that their own choices can affect their own life. And just to give you a sense, when I was admitted to Yale Law School—which was a really big deal for my family, nothing like that had happened to any of us—somebody asked me if I had pretended to be a Liberal. And there was this sense that your choices didn't matter unless you were willing to play along, unless you were willing to pretend to be something that you really weren't. And so what I really mean by learned helplessness is that these areas have been hurt in a lot of ways. They have not had a fair shake in a lot of ways. We talk about the Goldie from the Christmas in Appalachia segment. You know her life hasn't been easy and the lives of her kids hasn't been easy. But what this breeds is a very self-destructive attitude that you should just give up, that your choices don't really matter anymore, that even though the deck is stacked against you, you shouldn't even try to play the hand that you're dealt. And at the end of the day, I think it's a very understandable attitude but it's ultimately a very destructive attitude because there is still some capacity for people to make their own lives better and to change the hand that they were given. People in my community, people like me, people like my family, have to recognize that we still have a role to play in making our own worlds a little bit better. We have a role to play in making the homes for our children a little bit more safe and stable. Our churches have a role to play in being active members of the community and being part of the lives of poor people.

AMT: And now you are a lawyer with a Silicon Valley investment firm. You've seen the world. You are the author of a book that everyone's talking about. Do you feel yourself separating from your hillbilly roots?

JD VANCE: Yeah, that's a really good question and I always worry that that's happening. At the end of the day, the thing that's most important to me about my identity is that I come from this area of the country. I believe that I'm a hillbilly in my values and in my attitudes and I don't want to lose that. So I think it's possible to maintain a big chunk of that identity so long as you're self-reflective and meaningful about it. I definitely try to get home as much as possible. I definitely try to always see the world through the eyes of someone I grew up around with or some of my family who continue to live back home. But you know you try to hold onto it as much as possible because it is really important to me but I'm also not so naive to think that I'm totally the same as I was when I was an 18 year old kid who grew up in southern Ohio with hillbilly grandparents.

AMT: I'm wondering what your relationship is with your mother and if she's read the book.

JD VANCE: Yeah. So mom has read the book and honestly, it's led to conversations that should have happened 10 or 15 years ago but didn't. And because of the book, they did. And so one of the things the book taught me—and I hope that readers take away from the book—is that mom is not a villain. What mom is, is a kid who grew up in a very, very tough home, a very hardscrabble life. And she's carried around the demons of that life in a similar way to I have, though I think she's carried them a little heavier than I have. And so what mom and I have talked about is one, I think I've gained an appreciation for how tough her life is and was. And mom has gained an appreciation for the way that our childhood affected us and why my sister and I maybe harboured a little bit of anger at her into our teen years and our early twenties. But at the end of the day, the conversations I've had with mom have been very good and have been long overdue. And if nothing else had come from the book, then that would have made it worth it.

AMT: You offer some real insights. Thank you. Thank you for sharing your story.

JD VANCE: Thank you. Nice talking to you.

AMT: That is JD Vance, the author of Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis. He joined us from San Francisco. Stay with us. Coming up next, the story of a personal moment of disruption from a US surgeon who surprised himself in the face of a tragic shooting last summer. And speaking of disruption, what the return of the sponsorship scandal in the news this week means for the returned-to-power Liberal Party. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current on CBC Radio One, Sirius XM and online on www.cbc.ca/thecurrent.

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How Dr. Brian Williams changed his life in a moment

Guests: Dr. Brian Williams

AMT: Hello, I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

[Music: Sci-Fi]

AMT: As part of our season-long project, The Disruptors, we're bringing you stories about moments of disruption that forever changed people's lives. Today, we are hearing from Dr. Brian Williams, who's a trauma surgeon in Dallas, Texas. He was on duty July 7^th, that evening when a gunman ambushed police officers at a Black Lives Matter protest, killing five and wounding 11 others, including two civilians. The shooting took place just days after two high-profile cases of police officers killing black men. Dr. Williams was shaken by the racially charged violence but a split second decision at a news conference changed the course of his life.

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VOICE 1: Five police officers murdered in the deadliest attack on law enforcement since 9/11.

VOICE 2: Five Dallas police officers are dead, seven more wounded as well as two civilians.

VOICE 3: This was a well-planned, well-thought-out evil strategy.

DOCTOR BRIAN WILLIAMS: I did not walk in there preparing to say what I ended up saying.

SOUNDCLIP

DOCTOR BRIAN WILLIAMS: I understand the anger and the frustration and distrust of law enforcement. But they are not the problem. The problem is the lack of open discussions about the impact of race relations in this country.

DOCTOR BRIAN WILLIAMS: I'm Brian Williams. I'm an associate professor of surgery at UT Southwestern Medical Center. I am also a staff trauma surgeon at Parkland Memorial Hospital. So the night of July 7^th, this was a typical night for me at work. This changed when I received the first page that there was an officer shooting and that he was being brought to a hospital. There was a flurry of other pages that there are more patients on the way. So at the time, I was on a different floor of the hospital and went immediately to the trauma centre and arrived at the same time this first patient came through the doors.

[Sound: Ambulance sirens]

DOCTOR BRIAN WILLIAMS: Conceptually, you know I understand that the team, we did everything we could. But that does not lessen the emotional impact on me personally that we cannot save them. Knowing that these were police officers, it was very difficult to accept that they had died when I was working. The press conference was set up by the hospital and the university to discuss the response of the hospital itself to the incident. Initially when we were preparing to do this, I was not going to attend the press conference. I've seen these before and I know how they go and I just was not in the state of mind I felt at the time to go participate in this. I discussed it with my wife and she eventually convinced me that you know you at least have to be at the table. As I'm sitting at the table and the press conference is progressing, there is this internal conflict in my mind going back and forth. One was saying you know there is a much bigger issue that is not being addressed. And for me, that was the lack of discussions about racism in America. In the days prior, we had a death of a black man in police custody in Minnesota and in Baton Rouge. And I was already thinking about those two incidents before I was working that evening because for me, this had been going on for years and was continuing to go on. And I really felt that this would become the norm in this country and that nobody would care. And I certainly did not want people to think that it was okay to kill police officers. The police officers are not the problem. You know as a force, to many they represent a bigger problem but they do not deserve to be targeted. Then there is my experience. As a African-American male growing up in this country, the things that I’ve experienced in my lifetime, add that to being the only black surgeon in my group of trauma surgeons, and now I am working the night of this incident. And the other part of me was saying you know that's fine, Dr. Williams, that may be valid but this is not the place or the forum to discuss that.

SOUNDCLIP

DOCTOR BRIAN WILLIAMS: Again, I’m Brian Williams.

DOCTOR BRIAN WILLIAMS: When it came my turn to speak, I mean I literally opened my mouth with the intent of saying one thing and then all of that just came out.

SOUNDCLIP

DOCTOR BRIAN WILLIAMS: This experience has been very personal for me in a turning point in my life. There is the added dynamic of officers being shot but the preceding days of more black men dying at the hands of police officers affected me. I think the reasons are obvious. I fit that demographic of individuals.

DOCTOR BRIAN WILLIAMS: I never felt that I had to represent anything. I never felt a call to action to speak out about this. I never really felt any obligation to do anything. Really, I sat down at that press conference and I said these things and from that point on, things changed. Once it was said, I couldn't pull it back. At that point, my life changed and now I'm injected into this story. So now is when I feel my obligation begins to participate in what's going on.

AMT: That is Dr. Brian Williams with his personal moment of disruption. He's a trauma surgeon in Dallas, Texas. We do want to hear your own stories about events that have disrupted your life. It could be an accident, a chance encounter, a mistake or a good turn of fortune that changed the course of your life. Contact us with your story through our www.cbc.ca/thecurrent. And you are listening to the current on CBC Radio One, Sirius XM and online on www.cbc.ca/thecurrent. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti.

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Liberal sponsorship scandal trial recalls perception of party entitlement

Guests: Daniel LeBlanc, Chantal Hébert

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VOICE 1: I don't trust any parliamentary royal commissions. I don't trust any committees. I think thousands of Canadians across this country feel the same way. We want to get to the bottom of this. It's enough, Mr. Martin. It is enough. It makes my stomach feel sick.

VOICE 2: I also—I feel that Mr. Jean Chrétien, who you think is such a great man—I think he has stuck it to you.

VOICE 3: When is it that politicians are going to start being held accountable for the mismanagement of taxpayers’ dollars?

AMT: Well, how's that for an angry blast from the past? The year was 2004 and then Prime Minister Paul Martin was on the receiving end of that rage as a guest of CBC Radio's Cross Country Checkup. It was of course the height of the Liberal Party’s so-called sponsorship scandal and as much as that may seem like ancient history to many, this week the sponsorship scandal is back in the news. A central figure, Jacques Corriveau, goes on trial for his involvement in the scandal. The Quebec businessman, Liberal organizer and close personal friend of former Prime Minister Jean Chrétien faces charges of fraud, counterfeiting documents and laundering proceeds. It all comes at a peculiar time for the Liberals. They were only returned to power under Justin Trudeau just about a year ago after being banished to the wilderness for nearly a decade by Canadian voters, thanks in large part to that sponsorship scandal. Today we’re looking at the legacy of that episode and its impact on Canadian politics, as well as how it continues to shape perceptions of the Liberal Party. Daniel LeBlanc is a parliamentary correspondent for The Globe and Mail who's covered the story for years. He joins us from Ottawa. Hello.

DANIEL LEBLANC: Hello.

AMT: Remind us, what did the Liberal sponsorship scandal involve?

DANIEL LEBLANC: Well, it was kind of—officially, it was national unity program to increase the visibility of Canadian symbols, Canadian signs in Quebec. And let's remember, this is after the 1995 referendum which was a squeaker, the “no” side won by about 50,000 votes. And Jean Chrétien, the prime minister of the day wanted to make Canada relevant to Quebecers. It was a very simple idea to put up flags and you know there was hot air balloons in the form, in the shape of maple leaf for example, and a bunch of cultural events and sporting events were sponsored by this program in exchange for putting up Canada banners at their event sites. But ultimately, it became embroiled in scandal. There was the advertising firms that were the intermediaries between the government and the events, some of them kickbacked money to the Liberal Party. There were some fraud and some of the events as well were quite close to the Liberal Party of the day. So it became known as a slush fund scandal and you know it kind of became bigger and bigger as time wore on. And you know it led ultimately to the Gomery inquiry in 2004, 2005, which created massive problems for the Liberal Party, especially in Quebec where they lost most of their seats after, during the 2004 election. So it's kind of a scandal that was about you know more than a decade ago, but it did have a huge impact on Canadian politics of the day.

AMT: Who were the main players?

DANIEL LEBLANC: There was the prime minister's office. Jean Chrétien was very involved in setting up this program which is one of the reasons Mr. Chrétien saying was ultimately blamed by the Gomery inquiry. So this was a program that was administered within public works by Alfonso Gagliano, who was ultimately dispatched to Denmark as an ambassador. There was a bureaucrat named Chuck Guité who was heavily involved, very close to the advertising agencies that were getting commissions to administer the sponsorship program. Jean Pelletier was the chief of staff to Jean Chrétien and he was also involved. But behind all of this was a guy called Jacques Corriveau, who made $8 billion in commissions. Officially, he had no role whatsoever but he was in touch with the advertising firms, the recipients of the sponsorships. And when he helped them get some funding from the government, he took commissions. He was charged three years ago with fraud and forgery and according to the RCMP, he bragged that you know he had some kind of leverage or power in Ottawa over the sponsorship program and that's why he got these commissions. But he was kind of this hidden player in the entire scandal and it took a long time for people to understand who he was because he was not officially a recipient of any sponsorship fund. It was like about $140 billion of money of which he got $8 billion so that was a lot of money went his way.

AMT: Right. And so let me just clarify, he is alleged to have done these things which is why he's on trial. But the Gomery inquiry did point to him.

DANIEL LEBLANC: Yes. The Gomery inquiry, which was not a criminal—this is an entirely different process—but they dubbed him a central figure in an elaborate kickback scheme because he took some of the money. He did give back some of the money to—allegedly—to the Liberal Party or to Liberal officials and kept some portion as well for himself. He lived off this notion that he was a friend of Jean Chrétien and I think it gave him a bit of immunity, a bit of leverage, a bit of influence but also a bit of immunity in playing this role. You know everyone said well, you know he slept at 24 Sussex. Mr. Corriveau was also a music lover and this kind of gave him a bit of a friendship with Aline Chrétien, the prime minister's wife. He’s also someone who’d always back Jean Chrétien in his leadership races. He was one of the rare Quebec liberals who was very close to Jean Chrétien. So he had this influence and ultimately it gave him some kind of role—unofficially—in the sponsorship program.

AMT: How did all of this impact the political legacy of Jean Chrétien?

DANIEL LEBLANC: It's part of his legacy. It's certainly not the only part. It certainly hurt the last few years of Jean Chrétien’s time in power. For a long time, Mr. Chrétien argued that well, these weren't Liberals that got caught. No Liberal Party official got charged with sponsorship, it was a bureaucrat. Some of the advertising firms that got charged, the presidents that got charged were not Liberal officials per se, but Jacques Corriveau was a Liberal. And so it certainly allowed Mr. Chrétien to reform Canada's electoral laws, financing laws, especially by putting a ceiling on contributions which the Tories added to by kind of removing any ability of private companies from giving to political parties and unions. So it's part of the history. It's certainly not the only thing he'll be remembered for, but the sponsorship scandal, the Gomery inquiry, the auditor general's reports. Sheila Fraser famously said that you know the program broke every rule in the book. That was under Mr. Chrétien watch, so it did leave a bad impression when he retired just a few months before the auditor general's report came out into the hands of Paul Martin, his successor, which certainly had a long and hard time dealing with this issue and it hurt him especially hard in Quebec.

AMT: It defined a lot of his time in leadership, did it not?

DANIEL LEBLANC: Yeah. You know as soon as Mr. Martin came to power, he was asked what did you know and he said well, I knew nothing and you know Mr. Martin was never close to the people who were involved in sponsorship scandal. He was not someone who was involved in the prime minister's office, their strategy in Quebec. But it hurt—it affected his brand and his handling of this, by launching the Gomery inquiry, I think he thought that you know you could call the Gomery inquiry, launch an election, win a majority and then have the inquiry dish out you know whatever dirt it could find and then he'd have another mandate. But he ended up with a minority in 2004 and he never managed to quite get out of this rut and by 2006, January 2006, he was out of power.

AMT: And it's interesting because he did call the inquiry thinking that it wouldn't stick to him.

DANIEL LEBLANC: Exactly.

AMT: And it stuck to all the Liberals and the Liberal brand.

DANIEL LEBLANC: And I think the Bloc Québécois, particularly the Conservatives, had this question: how could you not know? You were finance minister. And you know I think that resonated inside the electorate. It gave the sense that you know Mr. Martin had to have a sense because everyone knew that there was something rotten in this. He could never get away from that narrative that he was outside of the loop on such a big issue which was the fight to save Canada after the 1995 referendum.

AMT: Why has it taken so long for these charges particularly to go to trial?

DANIEL LEBLANC: Yeah. So you've got to remember there were trials that came fairly quickly against Chuck Guité, the bureaucrat, against Jean Brault, the head of Groupaction who was found guilty of fraud. Jacques Corriveau was so far out of any official capacity in the sponsorship program. I think it took a number of witnesses, people who could say what Mr. Corriveau role was in the sponsorship program, so it was a bit more complicated than just charging an advertising executive who had signed invoices and received formally sponsorship money.

AMT: And I guess we can expect great complexity in this trial then, if there was so much that they had to sort of weed through.

DANIEL LEBLANC: Yeah. I think you know the judges said there would be about 20 witnesses who would travel four or five weeks that will last. I think it will be indeed complex. It'll be in front of a jury. And you know it will be up to the Crown to prove its case that Mr. Corriveau did not deserve these eight million dollars and that he kind of pretended to have some influence and used that to illegally get some money. It'll be an interesting case. I call him—I wrote a story and I call him the ghost of the Liberal past. I don't think it's going to affect—have any influence on Mr. Trudeau's current popularity. But it does bring back some negative memories about the Liberal Party and the way it did business after the 1995 referendum.

AMT: Well, it will be a lot to watch as it unfolds. Daniel LeBlanc, thank you.

DANIEL LEBLANC: Thank you.

AMT: Daniel LeBlanc, a parliamentary correspondent for The Globe and Mail. He's in Ottawa. We requested a statement from Jacques Corriveau’s lawyer. We did not receive a response. Let's bring in another veteran political analyst now for her thoughts on how the sponsorship scandal has shaped the political landscape in Quebec in particular. Chantal Hébert is a political columnist with the Toronto Star and of course she is a member of the “At Issue” panel on CBC Television’s The National. Chantal Hébert is in Kingston, Ontario today. Hi.

CHANTAL HÉBERT: Good morning.

AMT: Well, so Daniel just called Jacques Corriveau the ghost of the Liberal past. To what degree do the ghosts affect the way Canadians view the Liberal Party of today?

CHANTAL HÉBERT: Canadians or Quebecers, I think, would take from that sentence the word past rather than the wrestling of chains because so much happened to the Liberal Party over the post-sponsorship decade that Justin Trudeau's party—in Quebec in particular—certainly bears little resemblance to the party that Jean Chrétien or even Paul Martin led in so many ways. You know when I think about—in hindsight, because now that all these years have gone by—the sponsorship scandal probably was over time a good thing for the Liberal Party. It forced it to renew itself at the time when it desperately needed to do so. Think of it like a brush fire, a really bad one and what grows after the fire is extinguished. That's literally what just happened to the Liberal party in Quebec and possibly Justin Trudeau's victory in Quebec—he did win the majority of the seats—would not have happened if the Liberal Party had just gone on and on, on the path that it was set when Jean Chrétien retired.

AMT: Well, tell me a little bit more about that, Chantal. What happened to the Liberal Party insiders in Quebec who then were caught up in this scandal? How did they—what happened after the brush fire?

CHANTAL HÉBERT: Okay. So let's first go back to that time when Jean Chrétien leaves and Paul Martin comes. The sponsorship has not yet hit the party in the way that it will hit. And at that point, on this week before the sponsorship report from the auditor general comes out, the polls show the Liberals in Quebec at 55 per cent under Paul Martin and the Liberals have been riding very high on Quebec at the tail end of the [unintelligible] era, on the basis of Chrétien’s last decisions and particularly the decision not to sign up for the war in Iraq. But the internal workings of the party were already broken. This is a party that been ongoing a civil war between two factions: Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin. And if you want to go back even further, between John Turner and Jean Chrétien as of 1984. By the time Paul Martin becomes prime minister, he sets up the Gomery commission thinking that there is distance between him and the sponsorship stuff because there is really two parties, two warring factions within the party and because it's two main characters. Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin are from Quebec. Quebec is a battleground where people are gunning for the other faction and the sponsorship affair takes place in the middle of that and that kind of forces everybody off the ice. Within a couple of years, there is no Liberal left that is elected in ridings where the vast majority of voters are Francophones in Quebec. They are pushed back to the west end of Montreal. After the Orange wave, there is not even a seat left in the [unintelligible] region, which is a highly Federalist region. So by the time Justin Trudeau becomes leader, there is no Liberal party.

AMT: They’ve moved on or they've just lost their heir?

CHANTAL HÉBERT: It’s gone. This is a party that for a long time under Pierre Trudeau had Quebec has its base and fortress and then lost it to Brian Mulroney. But once the Conservatives were decimated in 1993, the Liberals were the only solid Federalist Party standing. And for the entire Chrétien decade, used the “If you’re a Federalist, you must vote for me” because otherwise the Bloc Quebecois and the sovereigntists are coming for you. Over the lost Liberal decade, other federal forces show up in Quebec. Suddenly, Quebec is no longer a one party province, all in for the Bloc, all in for the NDP. In the last election, people from four parties were elected to the House of Commons. So the conservatives establish a presence, the NDP establishes a presence and when all that happens, the debate shifts from the good Federalists and the bad sovereigntists or vice versa to which party do you prefer and what do you have to offer? And Justin Trudeau, by the time he comes onto the scene, has so little to work with that the only way to rebuild is to actually talk about something other than vote for me because I'm the strongest Federalist Party on offer because he does not lead that party anymore.

AMT: And so you mentioned the orange wave. The late Jack Layton plays a key role to them.

CHANTAL HÉBERT: I believe that Justin Trudeau's victory is a continuation of the orange wave. I know people don't see it that way. They say well, Quebecers tried the NDP and then once Jack Layton was gone, they went to the Liberals. But in the same way that I believe Justin Trudeau's campaign strategy and narrative, the funny ways was actually Jack Layton's campaign strategy in 2011. I also think that if you were to look at Quebec’s representation in the House of Commons over the past 30 years, the advent of a new different generation of young Quebecers in the House of Commons comes with the orange wave and these—you could call them kids—who get elected over the course of this sweep that Jack Layton manages to bring about in Quebec. And as of that point, the kind of people who are in the House of Commons to represent Quebec are no longer there just primarily to talk about federalism or to talk about sovereignty. They are there to talk about a whole range of issues. I think that Justin Trudeau actually built on that, offered people a Federalist Party that they could support for the things that it was promising rather than because it was a Federalist Party.

AMT: So are you saying there's no place for the old guard anymore? That's just not—

CHANTAL HÉBERT: Well, if old age—I mean Mr. Corriveau, whom I first met when he was working for Jean Chrétien’s leadership in 1984, is now 83 years old. A lot of the people in on this, I will concede the point to Jean Chrétien when he said these were not liberals, some of the players in the sponsorship scandal. That is not totally false. They were people who gravitated to whatever Federalist Party was in power and kind of became go-betweens for whatever Federalist government was in power to make up for the superior strength of the sovereignty movement on the ground in Quebec. Remember that in 1995, most Francophone ridings—including Jean Chrétien and Jean Charets’s riding, then the leader of the Tory Party—voted yes to sovereignty. So the way that successive Federalist governments tried to make up for their lack of strength was through advertising, through spending money, through giving grants for job creation, to trying to show the flag in Quebec. The debate has changed in Quebec. We are not in a debate over our province’s political future, but at the same time, the fact that big corporations no longer can give money to parties means that parties have to build their finances but also their support on the ground, one vote after another. So in this environment, someone with this strategy from up high, spreading money across Quebec—as previous party leaders used to do—would not have been able to win back Quebec in the way that Justin Trudeau did in the new system.

AMT: So again in your view, I like the brush fire analogy. It changed Quebec politics. It changed Canadian politics.

CHANTAL HÉBERT: It also, I believe, made the Federal Liberal Party a more vibrant force in Quebec than it was since Pierre Trudeau patriated the Constitution.

AMT: Okay. Well, Chantal Hébert, thanks for your perspective.

CHANTAL HÉBERT: Okay.

AMT: That’s Chantal Hébert, national affairs writer and political columnist with the Toronto Star. She appears weekly on CBC Television on the “At Issue” panel on The National. We did request interviews with Paul Martin and Jean Chrétien. Paul Martin is not available. He's traveling overseas. We did not hear back from Jean Chrétien. That's our program for today. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. Thank you for listening to The Current.

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September 14, 2016 full episode transcript

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