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The Current Transcript for September 22, 2016

Host: Anna Maria Tremonti

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

The fact is Canada has extraordinarily high standards for extradition treaties and those will always be upheld with anyone around the world.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: The prime minister is on the defensive amidst a barrage of criticism, wariness and incredulity. Within days of the release of a jailed Canadian missionary in China and in line with a state visit from the Chinese premier, Canada is working on an extradition treaty with China. The critics say there will be no way to monitor compliance in a country with torture and a death penalty. Supporters say new extradition and trade treaties are far better than the status quo. We will hear those very differing views in just a moment. Also today, Bryan Stevenson goes to work every day on a mission to get black men off of Alabama's death row. His office in Montgomery is in a converted warehouse built by land that once housed regular slave auctions.

SOUNDCLIP

A nation that enslaved isn’t just an enslaving nation. A nation that lynched isn’t just a lynching nation. But we have to own up to the things we have done.

AMT: Well, during a week when two more US cities have erupted in anger over police shootings of black men, Bryan Stevenson identifies a history of disturbing patterns in the treatment of African Americans that he says it is time to disrupt. Hear him in half an hour. And last week, we heard from more than one lawyer who said some of the biggest challenges they face are to do with race rather than the law.

SOUNDCLIP

I believe as a visibly Indigenous person in a place where there are no Indigenous lawyers that it’s inconceivable to court staff that I’m appearing as counsel. Indigenous and lawyer are mutually exclusive categories.

AMT: A follow-up on the discrimination that non-white lawyers face in our justice system in an hour as we update the stories we've been tracking. I’m Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

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Extradition treaty with China signals troubling trade-offs, say critics

Guests: Charles Burton, Wenran Jiang

SOUNDCLIP

The Chinese government has orchestrated thousands of cyber-attacks against Canada, and according to CSIS and the RCMP, has sent foreign agents into Canada without our permission. Canadians expect the prime minister to act in our national interest. So what possible benefit to Canada would an extradition treaty with China provide us?

[Applause]

AMT: Tough questioning for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his government since it emerged that Canada is in talks about an extradition agreement with China. That was the interim Conservative leader you just heard, Rona Ambrose, in Parliament yesterday. Human rights organizations across the country have similar questions of their own. Only a handful of countries have inked extradition treaties with China, including Spain and France. A treaty with Australia has been agreed, it is not yet ratified. But the prospect of a deal for Canada raises serious concerns for human rights advocates, such as Alex Neve, of Amnesty International Canada.

SOUNDCLIP

There are so many human rights concerns that would be implicated in any extradition process between our two countries. China uses the death penalty extensively. We have consistently said that they execute more people than the rest of the world combined. But it is a process cloaked in secrecy. We don’t even anymore propose what our best guess is as to how many people are being put to death because it’s so impossible to know.

AMT: And now the BC Civil Liberties Association is also adding its voice to those concerns. For more on the concerns around this potential agreement, I’m joined by Charles Burton. He is a former Canadian diplomat who served twice in China. He is also an associate professor of political science at Brock University and we have reached him in St. Catharines, Ontario. Hello.

CHARLES BURTON: Good morning, Anna Maria.

AMT: Last month, the Immigration Minister John MacCallum rejected negotiating an extradition treaty with China as long as they had a death penalty. How surprised are you of news that Canada is now starting negotiations?

CHARLES BURTON: Well, I am surprised. I mean certainly when Mr. Trudeau announced at the end of his visit to China last time that we would be establishing a Canada-China high-ground national security and rule of law dialogue, I think a lot of us recognize that what this really about is the Chinese government want us to dialogue with them about how we will return a large number of Chinese nationals, currently in Canada, that the Chinese regime would like repatriated back to China. But in terms of extradition, it’s clear. Even if the Chinese government is able to give us satisfactory assurances that no one extradited from Canada to China would be subject to the death penalty, there are other issues, such as we can’t trust what the Chinese tell us is the reason for the person being requested back to face trial to ensure that—because we can’t trust it, we can’t be sure that it’s consistent with violation of Canadian law, which would be a precedent for sending someone back. And then there’s the due process of law, rule of evidence are not the same. And of course, the pervasive concerns that Alex Neve just alluded to: that people who are returned to China are mistreated in incarceration and often subject to torture and interrogation. Despite China having ratified the convention against torture of the UN, we know that that is consistently going on. So even if we had a treaty, it’s unlikely that our judiciary would allow people to be sent back to China to face charges. So on the one hand, we made a commitment to China to negotiate a treaty and in good faith. If we make such a commitment, the expectation is you will fulfill it. But on the other hand, even if we get the treaty, it’s unlikely that we would be returning anybody to China, regardless of what the government wants.

AMT: Okay. So there are critics who say you can’t trust China if they sign the deal but you’re saying even if we sign a deal, nothing actually necessarily moves forward if they don’t change what they do.

CHARLES BURTON: Yes. I mean we sent back a famous Chinese smuggler in 2012 after a 12 year process of his appealing through the international refugee board. We got an assurance that he would not be subject to the death penalty and we also got an assurance that Mr. Lai Changxing could be monitored by us in the prison. In other words, the Canadian officials would be allowed to meet him in incarceration to ensure that he was well-treated. We had ample evidence that Mr. Lai in fact had committed those crimes. But in the case of the large numbers that China wants now, we don’t have enough evidence to know exactly what’s going on. The Chinese are not giving us a lot of evidence because we suspect one of the reasons they’re being requested to go back is political and we can’t send people back to face political persecution. And secondly, we’d have no means to monitor a large number of people in jails all across China. You know we just don’t have the capacity to keep on top of them in perpetuity. And whether the Chinese government could assure that local prisons and local officials would in fact be treating Canadian returnees differently than the people who are arrested inside China in the normal way is quite doubtful and questionable.

AMT: Well, last year, International Business Times reported Canada ranks second when it comes to harbouring what China considers its top 100 economic fugitives: 26 apparently here, compared to 40 in the US. It’s looking for white-collar criminals? Is that correct?

CHARLES BURTON: I think that China is looking primarily—

AMT: Alleged, I should say. Keep going.

CHARLES BURTON: Yeah. Alleged is—I think is the key word here. I think that China is looking for people in Canada who have large amounts of unexplained wealth. But you know they’re—based on my personal knowledge even—there are a lot more than 26 of those living in northern Toronto and Vancouver and Calgary and other parts of Canada. So the question is why those people and not some of the others? And our suspicion is that it’s based on political factors, not entirely because of the fact that they have embezzled serious amounts of money out of China. But I would say that you know of course Canada does not want to be a place where people who have embezzled money from the Chinese state come to safe haven and are unaccountable for their crimes. Particularly as in China, there’s still a significant proportion of the population—perhaps numbers heading up to 100,000,000 people—who are living in absolute poverty, who have to worry about getting enough food to sustain their health and getting enough fuel and clothing to keep their bodies warm. And so you know it’s a serious issue, but on the other hand, it seems it’s impossible to send people back to China under the current Chinese regime.

AMT: What does Canada stand to gain from such a negotiation?

CHARLES BURTON: Well, explicitly from the extradition treaty, not very much. The Chinese, under their extradition law, will not send Chinese nationals back to Canada to face trial. And we have had cases in the past—two of them that I’m aware of—where Chinese nationals have committed murder, alleged to have committed murder in Canada, have got to China before the police arrested them. We request the China government that they be sent back so that we can have a legal process and this has been refused. So I think in terms of our own benefit from extradition, we don’t really have much to gain from it in the extradition treaty aspect. I think the deal is that if Canada fulfills basically four conditions, China will promise to open up its markets to our goods and services to a larger extent than they are open now. So they would remove some of the non-tariff barriers so that Canada could get better access to Chinese market. But those four factors are entering into the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank, which we did, which allows China to expand its geo-political reach in the Asian region by using the money from the bank to do things they want to do.

AMT: So you’re saying it’s a bargaining chip.

CHARLES BURTON: Yes.

AMT: For more trade access.

CHARLES BURTON: And the other ones are the oil pipeline from the oil sands of the coast and the others, the removal of the restrictions on Chinese state investment and allowing China to bring in Chinese workers to work the mines and infrastructure that would be there. So the idea is that we show friendship and goodwill towards China by giving them what they want and in return, although not very clearly specified, they will give us what we want. And I mean the first thing that apparently happened after this was the release of Kevin Garratt, who should never have been arrested in the first place. So it wasn’t much of a concession in the sense that if Mr. Garratt had in fact been a spy and had been caught in the act of spying, returning him would be a concession. But the fact they shouldn’t have taken him in the first place suggests that it wasn’t a concession.

AMT: Very briefly, does this at all play into China’s relationship with the US? Is there something else going on here?

CHARLES BURTON: I think that certainly China would like to remove Canada’s dependence on the US economy and bring us more into the Chinese orbit because they see international relations as a zero-sum game. So if they’re able to reduce US’ influence in Canada and it goes over to China, that that’s good for them in terms of the overall China-US rivalry in the world impacting on the South China sea, North Korea and all those other things where China and US have conflict.

AMT: We did request an interview with the Minister of Foreign Affairs Stéphane Dion. He’s not available. We did get a statement from his press secretary which reads in part: “The promotion and protection of human rights is an integral part of Canadian foreign policy and a key priority in our relationship with China." Do you think it’s possible for Canada to protect human rights when it enters into a treaty like this?

CHARLES BURTON: That’s a very interesting statement because he’s quoting from an amendment to the Chinese constitution which also says that China will promote and protect human rights. So it strikes me that you know that sending a signal to the Chinese that we’re basically prepared to accept what they’re doing with regard to human rights. You know this whole interaction between Canada and China seems to involve the government on the one hand, giving Canadians assurances that the human rights and environment issues will be addressed—because they’re a great concern to us—but on the other hand, our primary interest in the relationship is opening up the Chinese market to promote Canadian prosperity and get the Canadian economy going again. And between those two, there seems to be an awful lot of political posturing back and forth.

AMT: Okay. Well, I’ve got another guest waiting to speak to that as well. Charles Burton, thank you.

CHARLES BURTON: Thank you very much.

AMT: Charles Burton, former Canadian diplomat, teaches political science at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario and that’s where we reached him. For a different perspective on this, I’m joined by Wenran Jiang. He is the director of the Canada-China Energy and Environment Forum. He’s also an associate professor of political science at the University of Alberta. He joins us from Edmonton. Hello.

WENRAN JIANG: Hi. Morning.

AMT: What do you make of Charles Burton’s argument?

WENRAN JIANG: Charles is an old friend and he is a long-term China observer and also in diplomacy, in practice, I respect him a lot. But I must respectfully disagree with his assessment of the situation on overall Canada-China relations and specifically on this extradition treaty. And I think the problem with many Western observers, academics, about China, even the well-educated, well-versed China experts tend to see things in black and white terms. What China is today: China means a lot of things. China means a contradiction. So you say China is this and that is actually taking the complexity out of the many, many of the great issues and we need to think a little bit out of the box here.

AMT: So where do you think China is being misunderstood? What’s in the grey area that we’re missing?

WENRAN JIANG: We keep talking about China needs to establish the rule of law. And China has been in fact—with all its limitations and problems—have been doing it for past several decades. And when Premier Li Keqiang and I entered the Peking University in spring of 1978, he was in the law department, I was in the history department. He was the first true generation—new generation of the law—students. And that generation built China from almost no laws at all to have thousands of legislations and laws in every area. Of course, they’ve got problems of implementation, they’ve got problems of a one-party state that inferring, but the Chinese are fiercely debating them instead of saying whether the party—which is in the dominant position should be above the law. If we really care about China’s legal development, rule of law, we should do everything to help China in the cases of extradition of criminals from Canada back to China. Help them to establish Western standards like what we do and at the same time solve the problems of the cross-border [unintelligible] crimes.

AMT: And yet at the same time, we have seen cases in China where someone is—something happens, someone’s accused, they’re executed in record time. Human rights organizations in this country have real concerns about that.

WENRAN JIANG: That is not—we should not defend those actions at all. I only wanted to emphasize: with all the problems China have in this human rights records, we cannot take a simplistic, static and ahistorical view. China is constantly moving. I can tell you, when I was in China growing up, when Pierre Trudeau recognized the PRC and visited China, there was a totalitarian state. There was no law. And today, there are many, many laws. We have to put things in perspective and say China is not perfect, China has tremendous problems. And we need to help them to move in the right direction in our limited you know influence as we have. Take the United States. Huge neighbour. Does United States respect all the international law with all the treaties? Torture, violation of [unintelligible] nationals. Treaties happen on a regular basis. We live with it. We try to change it. The same should be with the Chinese as well.

AMT: The debate is often framed as a trade-off between trade interests and the protection of human rights. You don’t see it that way then.

WENRAN JIANG: I don’t see it that way. It shouldn’t be a trade-off. I called it a false dichotomy. We should not confronting and treating them as objective, opposing objectives. Justin Trudeau, the new prime minister, made it clear that he doesn’t want to use the balancing of the word. I think that’s right approach. We can aggressively pursue both and they’re complimentary. For example, on the extradition treaty, we can do this instead of the status quo. And people seem to point out other countries: US, Australia, New Zealand, do not have extradition treaties. But France, Italy, Spain, Portuguese all have it. Germans are negotiating years on and off. Australia have it but has not approved it.

AMT: What about the US?

WENRAN JIANG: US is working with China on many, many fronts. They have not called an extradition treaty, but in the judicial corporation is being very active. So therefore, my approach, my suggestion to people who are taking it in such a black and white term, view this as a human rights dialogue construction of helping China moving in the right direction. And also treat this as an educating process for the Chinese to move into the international law arena. And we should talk to the Aussies, to the Germans, to the Italians, the France who are having Western democracy standards and yet they all [unintelligible] sign those extradition treaties. On the other hand, Canada also have extradition treaties with countries like Cuba, Liberia, Panama, Guatemala. So how do we say we can’t do this with China because they’ve got human rights problems? Are they more or less worse than Cuba?

AMT: Well, how does this fit into the wider set of negotiations going on? Canada, in terms of pipelines or natural gas or oil going to China, and also this thing that Charles Burton touched on, which is labour—Chinese foreign labour coming to work in Canada at companies where China has a stake in the company.

WENRAN JIANG: Well, that’s just another area we have so many misperceptions and biased opinions here. Well, with all respect, I have done a lot of these promotions through the Canada-China Energy and Environment Forum on the bilateral economic changes from here, from Alberta. And my observation with the Chinese in recent years, investing tens of billions of dollars in our energy and resource sectors—they have followed our laws, they have followed our rules. You can remove all the restrictions on foreign SOE investment in Canada and Chinese today will not come into our energy sector in any big way. You know why? Many, many of their large investments in the past five, six years have lost some of them, 80 to 90 per cent. They’re looking at the market where they can have returns and there’s absolutely no way that actually they’re coming to us to do all this, importing the labour—that’s being not in the talk, even. Canola case is not a leverage. The idea that China needs some kind of economic things [unintelligible] from Canada so dearly that they would use all these other political things as leverage. Well, I’m sorry to say, Canada is not that important in the Chinese scale of the international economic relations. We barely had 1.5 of China’s foreign trade share and everybody else is rushing to approach the Chinese. So the question for Canada is: do we do pipelines? Do we—[unintelligible] attract investment from China? Do we do [unintelligible]? Do we promote exports? Is it good for us, for Canada? The answer is yes, of course. It’s not what the Chinese wanted, it is what we should wanted.

AMT: Okay. Wenran Jiang, thank you for your perspective on this.

WENRAN JIANG: Thanks for having me.

AMT: That is Wenran Jiang, he’s the director of the Canada-China Energy and Environment Forum. He’s also an associate professor of political science at the University of Alberta and he joined us from Edmonton. Let us know what you think of this. You can tweet us. We’re @thecurrentCBC. Find us on Facebook or go to our site www.cbc.ca/thecurrent. Stay with us. The news is next and then it’s another tragic week for race relations and law enforcement in the US.

[Music: Sting]

AMT: Oklahoma right now. Tulsa, Oklahoma, Charlotte, North Carolina. We’re going to speak to Bryan Stevenson about a legacy of slavery and lynching and how that plays into what we’re seeing now. I’m Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

Back To Top »

'Very clear line' between lynching and death penalty: Alabama lawyer

Guests: Bryan Stevenson

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

[Music: Theme]

AMT: Still to come, we're checking in on some of the stories we've been following, specifically the trove of RCMP e-mails related to the torture of Canadians in Syria after 9/11. We'll hear from a law professor who says the information CBC News told us about this week could form the basis of a criminal investigation into the RCMP. But first, history repeats itself until it gets disrupted.

SOUNDCLIP

[Music: Sci-Fi]

VOICE 1: The disruptors.

VOICE 2: They had every intention of executing me for something I didn’t do. But for all y’all that are snapping the cameras, I want you to know there is a God.

MANY VOICES: Amen.

VOICE 2: He sit high but he looks low. He will destroy but yet he will defend. And he defend me. And I just want to thank Him. I’m not ashamed to let you know that he sent me not just a lawyer, but the best lawyer. The best lawyer. And I couldn’t have made it without them.

AMT: That's Anthony Ray Hinton on the day he was released from a jail cell on death row. He'd been in prison thirty years, for murders he did not commit. And the lawyer he was thanking the Lord for was Bryan Stevenson. As a co-founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, Mr. Stevenson is a disruptor of chronic injustices and he is the focus today of our season-long project, The Disruptors. He fights for the lives of prisoners on Alabama's death row and his team has stopped the execution of 125 of them. And when he looks at the injustices of the present, he sees acutely how the wrongs of the past—the legacy of slavery and lynching—continue to reverberate today in US race relations, in the justice system and in the frequent police shootings of black men. And we’re having this conversation as we see more anger erupting in Tulsa, Oklahoma and of course, Charlotte, North Carolina in the news today. It's a situation that can sometimes seem intractable, which is why a disruptor such as Bryan Stevenson is such an important figure. Bryan Stevenson is the author of Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption and he joins us from Montgomery, Alabama. Hello.

BRYAN STEVENSON: Hello. It's good to be with you.

AMT: It's nice to have you with us. Listening to that clip, after years of working to get Anthony Ray Hinton out of prison, what was it like for you to see him finally walk free?

BRYAN STEVENSON: Oh, it's always a very gratifying experience because unlike other cases of wrongful convictions, he wasn't just in prison, he was on death row. He was facing execution. During the 30 years he was on death row, 55 people were executed in the state of Alabama. And when you're locked into a five by seven cell and you're watching people be executed on a regular basis, it's harrowing. It's torturous. And you know these kinds of cases keep me up late at night because it was so clear that he was innocent and we just couldn't get the state to acknowledge his innocence through a simple test that they refused to conduct. And so when we finally prevailed, there is no feeling in the world quite as gratifying and affirming as seeing someone who's been wrongly condemned, you know walk into the sunshine a free person. It's just tragic that it happened so often in the United States. We've now had 156 people exonerated after being sentenced to death. That means that for every 10 people who've been executed in the United States, we've identified one innocent person on the row, which is a really shameful rate of error that in any other area would mean that we would stop doing the thing that puts us at risk. I'm still persuaded that we have a criminal justice system in the US that treats you better if you're rich and guilty than if you're poor and innocent.

AMT: Well, I want to explore that with you. But let's start by talking about another one of your clients, Jimmy Dill. What can you tell me about him?

BRYAN STEVENSON: Mr. Dill was someone who faced execution. He didn't have a lawyer. I got involved in the case, a few days, a few weeks before the scheduled execution and it was clear that he suffered from intellectual disability. And our courts have actually banned the execution of people with intellectual disability in a case called Atkins vs. Virginia. The court said you cannot execute people who suffer from mental retardation. But when we tried to raise that issue close to the time of his execution, the trial court said too late. The state court said too late. The appeals court said too late. The federal court said too late. And one of the challenges in our system is that we have a system that seems to be more concerned with finality than fairness. If you read these death penalty cases, they frequently are all about proceduralism. Procedures, barriers, contemporary objections, et cetera. And that's unfortunately what happened in this Dill case and we went to the US Supreme Court and they denied the motion for a stay, essentially saying too late. And it was a heartbreaking case because of this man's disability. He had another challenge in addition to being intellectually disabled. When he got worried, when he got anxious, he also had a very severe speech impediment and he would begin to stutter. And on the night of the execution, I called him an hour before the execution and said Mr. Dill, I'm so sorry. I can't stop this execution. And he began to cry. And then he began to sob. And he said Mr. Stevenson, please don't hang up until I tell you what I have to tell you. And then this man tried to say something to me but he couldn't. He began to stutter terribly and it was one of those heartbreaking situations where he was using his last few minutes to say something to me which just was overwhelming. I remember holding the phone, you know with tears running down my face as this man tried to communicate with me and finally, he got out his last words. He said Mr. Stevenson, I want to thank you for representing me. And then he said I want to thank you for fighting for me. And the last thing he said was Mr. Stevenson, I love you for trying to save my life. The man was pulled away, strapped to a gurney and executed. I hung up the phone and just felt like there is something so painfully unconscionable about what we are doing to people in this country. I don't think anybody who understood the perversity of taking otherwise healthy human beings and execute them would really be as enthusiastic as we sometimes pretend to be. And one of the challenges with the death penalty—as with mass incarceration—it's hidden. We don't really understand the cruelty and the torture and the inhumanity of what we are doing. And it's that distance that I think has to be overcome if we're going to make more informed and better decisions about how our policy should be implemented.

AMT: Why was he on death row?

BRYAN STEVENSON: He was accused of shooting a drug dealer. They had a drug deal, it went bad and he shot this man in a car. The man actually didn't die from the gunshot wound. He recovered. Mr. Dill was arrested. He was actually in a jail cell awaiting prosecution for aggravated assault. The woman who was taking care of the man who was shot, after several months left him and because she left him, he didn't get the help he needed and he died a couple of months later. The victim didn't die until nine months after the shooting. And I think a skilled attorney would have been able to show that the proximate cause of death was this neglect, was this abandonment, was this not pursuing. You know this was not a case of a clear intentional homicide where it's no question about what killed the victim. So that was the other part of the tragedy is—I'm still persuaded that Mr. Dill was not even guilty of capital murder. That's the most extreme kind of killing you can do. And I don't think the facts supported that in this case.

AMT: When he was put to death, what did that do to you personally?

BRYAN STEVENSON: The heartache of hearing this man trying to talk and all of that, I kept thinking about how broken he was when I hung up the phone. And the question I had in my mind was why do we want to kill all the broken people in this country? What is it about us that we see brokenness, we want to crush it? We want to hurt it. We want to kill it. And then I just started thinking well, maybe I don't want to do this anymore. It was just that devastating. I mean I've been in other cases where we've lost clients. We've certainly had a lot of victories. But there are times when you do get pushed into a space where you just feel completely destroyed by what you're seeing, what you're doing, what you're experiencing. And that's happened to me on the night of that execution and I just started thinking about the fact that all of my clients are broken people. I represent the broken. My clients are people who have been broken by disability, broken by racism, broken by poverty, broken by despair, broken by a range of issues. And then I realized I work in a broken system. I work with people who are unwilling, oftentimes the people with power to get proximate to the clients we serve. They have lost their hope. They're not willing to do the uncomfortable things that justice requires. And I was having one of those moments where I just didn't want to do it anymore. And I started you know doing that conversation you do when you're trying to make a big decision. Asking myself why do I do what I do? And I thought about it and all of a sudden, I had this new insight and I realized something I never realized before. And what I realized is that I don't do what I do because it's important. I don't do what I do because someone has to do it. I don't do what I do because I've been trained to do it. I don't do what I do because if I don't do it, no one will. I realize that night that I do what I do because I'm broken too. And the truth is is that if you get proximate those who suffer, you'll get nicked, you'll get cut, you'll get broken by that. But I also realized that there's power in brokenness. It's really the broken who understand the way compassion is supposed to work. It's the broken who have an insight into justice. It's the broken who have some appreciation for what it means to be restored, redeemed, rehabilitated, recovered. And in many ways, it's our community and standing with the broken that will get us closer to justice.

AMT: You're telling me that you weren't broken before or was there a piece of you that was always broken?

BRYAN STEVENSON: Oh, I think anybody—

AMT: That attracted you?

BRYAN STEVENSON: Yeah. No, I think it’s always been there. I mean I just—you know I started my education in a coloured school. I came from a poor community that was marginalized and excluded. I'm the great-grandson of people who were enslaved. There is a legacy and a history of racial inequality, you know that creates challenges and cuts and bruises and scars. When you deal with segregation, you're dealing with constant humiliation and indignation. My parents were humiliated everyday of their lives when they would see those signs that say white and coloured. They weren't just directions, they were assaults. And you can't come from where I've come, you can't see what I've seen, without it creating injuries. And so no. I think brokenness is the condition in which too many people are born into and have to live through. But I don't think it's what defines you. It's what sometimes creates you know the spark, the motivation, the understanding to do the work that must be done if we really want to see change, if we want to see transformation. You know I think in many ways, the world changes when people who have been told to sit down, stand up. The world changes when people have been told to be quiet, speak. And to have an understanding of your capacity to do that means getting past the things that have broken and threatened and menaced and pushed and excluded you. And that's what happens when you do this kind of work I think.

AMT: Well, you draw a line from—you just talk about your own family and your own history. You draw a very clear line from the treatment of black Americans in the days of slavery to what you face in the courts now. The United States is one of the last Western countries still to even have the death penalty. Why does it persist?

BRYAN STEVENSON: Well, I think we've been corrupted by the politics of fear and anger. In the 1970s, our elected officials began demonizing people who were accused of crimes. We declared a misguided war on drugs, people got behind that. We had politicians from both political parties competing with each other over who could be the toughest on crime. And toughness became a requirement for leading, for political office, for policymaking roles. And in a culture shaped by fear and anger, you will tolerate things that are abusive, that are unjust. I mean I think fear and anger are the essential ingredients in any system or structure or space where there's oppression or abuse or tyranny and you just don't pay attention to the rule of law. You don't pay attention to fairness and equity and all those other things. If you can lock into a narrative of fear and anger—and that's what I think has sustained the death penalty in this country. But I also think it is sustained and created by our history of racial inequality and these narratives of racial difference that we've allowed to justify abuse of other people who are different. And it's not just African-Americans. I actually think it begins with Native people who were on this continent in Canada and the United States before white settlers came and what we did to Native people was a genocide. I mean we killed millions of people through famine and war and disease and we tried to ignore that genocide by talking about the difference between the white settlers and those Native peoples, that they're a different race, they're different. And this narrative of racial difference is what we relied on to create patterns of behaviour that were abusive and destructive. That's what led to slavery. And in my view, the great evil of American slavery wasn't involuntary servitude or forced labour. It was this narrative of racial difference, this ideology of white supremacy that we made up to legitimate slavery. And because in the US we never dealt with that, when we passed our 13th Amendment—which nominally prohibits slavery—we didn't talk about narratives of racial difference or ideologies of white supremacy. We only talked about involuntary servitude and forced labour. I don't think slavery ended in the US in 1865. I think it just evolved. We had decades of terrorism and lynching followed by decades of segregation and apartheid. And now, this crisis of mass incarceration and excessive punishment where one in three black male babies is expected to go to jail or prison in this country and no one's talking about it. It's not an issue shaping the presidential debate, sort of conversation.

AMT: You talk about lynching and the legacy of lynching in the United States is not coincidental to the treatment of prisoners then and executions, official state sanctioned execution in the United States. Draw the line for me. Connect the dots.

BRYAN STEVENSON: Well, at the end of the Civil War, emancipated African-Americans were promised all kinds of things. They were promised property and land and opportunities but white Southerners did not want them to have that. They had created a narrative where black people were not full human beings. They were not the same as white people. And to give them the vote and access to property and all these other things would undermine their whole world view. And so there was a quick and violent repudiation of that. Reconstruction failed. White southerners through violence blocked black people from voting, forced black people into a role of subordination, excluded people of colour, marginalized people of colour and basically re-enslaved them through a system of economic oppression which was sharecropping and tenant farming. The only way you could enforce a system like that is if you did violent things. It's through violence. And lynchings became the violent tactic of enforcing racial subordination. And people did these lynchings with impunity. It wasn't the Klan. It wasn't people wearing masks late at night. It would be on the courthouse lawn, sometimes surrounded by law enforcement, the judges, the teachers, the bankers, the ministers, the entire community celebrating these acts of violence and terror. And that took place and existed for decades. From 1877 to 1950, we've documented over 4,000 lynchings in the states of the American South. It was so devastating that millions of African-Americans fled the South. And the demographic geography of the United States today is shaped by this era of terror. And so you can't understand what's going on in Chicago or Cleveland or Detroit or Los Angeles or Oakland without recognizing that the black people who went to those communities in the first half of the 20th century went to those communities as refugees and exiles from terror in the American South. And in the global context, we realized that refugees have special needs that have to be addressed which we of course we never did in the US. And now what we do is we police and we menace and we threaten and we incarcerate. And that's the connection in my mind is that until we deal with this history of racial inequality, we're not going to make the progress that I think we need to make on issues of racial justice.

AMT: And you've made the point that essentially when the lynching stopped, that's when the death penalty started.

BRYAN STEVENSON: Well, effectively in the forties and late thirties, the federal government was being increasingly humiliated by these lynchings. It did not seem like this country was a country governed by the rule of law when on a regular occasion, black people were being murdered or killed or hung or burned to death in the courthouse square. And so they were increasingly feeling pressure to intervene. And it was the threat of another federal intervention—troops coming back to the South—that pushed the Southern states to move away from these public lynchings. And they essentially moved the lynchings indoors and that's when you see a great increase in the number of death sentences being imposed. And you see trials—in a lot of ways—replicating the same presumption of guilt and dangerousness except inside instead of outside. The community was promised swift and sure justice executions within a matter of hours after the arrest. But that was the strategy used to end the problem of these lawless lynchings by ostensibly more “ lawful executions” and so there is yes, this very clear line between our history of lynching and the modern death penalty. We are going to build a memorial to victims of lynching. It will be a national memorial. And what we're going to have in the memorial are columns that represent every county in America where lynching took place and we want to name the lynching victims that were terrorized in the communities where that terror took place between 1877 and 1950. We're hoping it will be a structure that sobers people, that challenges people, that inspires people to do more to confront that history. It will be a space where you sink down and the columns rise and you will [unintelligible], standing under these suspended six foot columns that represent the bodies of so many people who were lynched and killed. But we also have this idea of having a replica of every county column outside the memorial in a field and we're going to be asking people all across the country to organize in their counties and come and get the column that belongs in their county and to take it back. We want this memorial to be dynamic. We want it to be a place that is situated in Montgomery but exists all over America where lynchings took place. And in that kind of activism we think can hopefully inspire conversations that are designed to get us to deal more honestly with our past. And one of the ways we're facilitating the local work is that we get community volunteers to go to lynching sites, we collect soil, we put the soil in jars with the names of the victims and we now have an exhibit at our office that represents—in a tangible way, a visible way—this legacy of lynching. And for me, it's been really wonderful to see community volunteers do this work because it's been really powerful.

AMT: And now we see the rise of Black Lives Matter and a vigorous conversation going on in the US about the use of lethal force by police against African-Americans. Do you think that conversation can be maintained in the coming years?

BRYAN STEVENSON: Well, I think it has to be. And I do think that for outsiders, the narrative is a little bit different than for those of us who have been living with these issues for a long time. The epidemic of police violence that has sparked some protests and activism has been going on for decades. It is not a new issue in the African-American community. With social media, you can now document and detail things that have long been known to be true in the African-American community. And so in some ways, the protests, the activism is response to the indifference of the rest of society. It's an indictment of the media and policy makers and leaders who have gotten comfortable with these routine shootings and never seen fit to make it a priority for reform or change. And I think a lot of young courageous activists have said we've got to create something that disrupts the norm in order for people to take seriously this kind of harm and victimization. And so until the problems are addressed, I'm hoping that there will be a response that pushes policy makers and decision makers to see the enormous threat that is created when you have police officers that are targeting and menacing people of colour as a part of the culture of policing. That's a very serious problem in a democratic society.

AMT: Bryan Stevenson, thank you for speaking with me and sharing your ideas.

BRYAN STEVENSON: I'm so happy I had the chance. Thank you.

AMT: That is Bryan Stevenson. He is the co-founder of the Equal Justice Initiative in the United States. They're based in Montgomery, Alabama. He's also the author of Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption. Let us know what you think of what he's saying, where he connects the dots to what is happening today and the US history of slavery and lynching. You can tweet us. We are @thecurrentCBC. Find us on Facebook or go to our www.cbc.ca/thecurrent and let us know what you think of what he is saying. A disruptor, Bryan Stevenson. Stay with us. In our next half hour, The Current’s Friday host Laura Lynch joins me to go through your feedback on some of the stories we've been following, from killer whales to crushing loneliness to the future of GMOs in a post-Monsanto world. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

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Law Society report suggests ways to end systemic racism in legal professions

Guests: Janet Leiper

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

[Music]

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VOICE 1: When Moby Doll was taken, the argument was not between whale watching and whale catching. It was between whale catching and whale killing. What bringing them into captivity did is it enabled people to develop a sort of respect and empathy and understanding for this as you know a complex animal.

VOICE 2: Everyone wanted Monsanto to disappear. Monsanto most of all. Monsanto became a target.

VOICE 3: When a person is lonely for a long period of time, there are all kinds of consequences in terms of the feelings that a person has about himself and the feeling that he's not worthy.

AMT: That was a taste of the week that was on The Current. Now it's time to hear a bit of what you had to say about those stories and more. To help me go through your tweets, your posts, your e-mails. I'm joined by CBC national reporter Laura Lynch, our Friday host this week. Hello. Welcome back.

LAURA LYNCH: Hi Anna Maria.

AMT: The story of Moby Doll, did you know that story?

LAURA LYNCH: No and I'm from Vancouver as you know. I listened very closely because I grew up knowing about Skana and Skana was brought to the Vancouver Aquarium. I was fascinated by the whales and in fact, when I was in my twenties, did my own little expedition to see the whales in the wild in Juan de Fuca Strait. So I’d never heard about this before.

AMT: It's so interesting, huh? Let's just remind people as part of our project The Disruptors, we met Moby Doll, perhaps the only aquatic disruptor we'll profile this season. Then again, maybe not. Moby Doll was a killer whale, an orca, captured off the BC coast in 1964 and put on public display. After three months in captivity, Moby Doll died. In that short time, he changed the way the public thought of what were then called killer whales. They thought of them as monsters. And I spoke with Mark Leiren-Young, the author of The Killer Whale Who Changed the World.

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Naming the whale Moby Doll really changed everything. Instead of envisioning Moby Dick, who was the stuff of nightmares and horror movies, you were picturing Moby Doll who was this cute, cuddly creature. And I think when Murray Newman chose the name Moby Doll for the whale, he really shifted everything. If you want a disruptor moment, it was naming that whale Moby Doll.

VOICE 2: There's all kinds of killer whales all around the world. First of all, you couldn't have them in captivity because they were too dangerous. Once we got over that hump, then aquariums around the world began to house them and learn about killer whales. Then it became politically incorrect to have them in captivity. So now learning about killer whales has become arrested.

LAURA LYNCH: Now that last voice was Pat McGeer who was one of the scientists who worked with Moby Doll. Interestingly, he was also a politician and a cabinet minister in BC at one point. He is now a professor emeritus at the University of British Columbia. And before that, author Mark Leiren-Young and then we heard from you. On Facebook, Mark Alan Perry wrote: “When I was 17, I snuck onto what was then a military base at Jericho Beach to catch a glimpse of Moby Doll. Little did I know then that I would later spend five years as a whale trainer working with Skana and other orcas. I feel Dr. McGeer is totally incorrect when he assumes interest in orcas will fade. Arguably, they are as much or more in the limelight now than they were 50 years ago. And Ashok Bhowmick added: “Moby Doll is still referred to as a ‘killer’ while the humans who killed him are called ‘civilized.’”

AMT: Touché. Julie Chamberlain from Toronto wrote to say, “The story of Moby Doll strikes me as a tragedy. The capacity we have as humans to destroy animals in order to meet our own needs including our need to understand them should give us real pause. North American thinking may have been disrupted by meeting Moby Doll but he suffered and died in captivity just like many would after him.

LAURA LYNCH: And John Mathieson of Gabriola, British Columbia wrote this: “As a 15 year old deckhand on my uncle's 40 foot troller, I was told that orcas were the scourge of the salmon fishing industry. If an orca was spotted, we were to shoot at it. I bought a .22 caliber rifle with part of my share from our first trip. How our understanding has changed since then. Better for us, better for all the whales.”

AMT: Fascinating stuff, huh? Let's move on to another story.

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I believe as a visibly Indigenous person in a place where there are no Indigenous lawyers that it's inconceivable to court staff that I'm appearing as counsel, which is troubling on a lot of levels. It doesn't particularly disturb me as a litigator. I don't—you know I can brush it off, but what impact does that have on the accused people, on the community members, the Indigenous people who appear, that the court, the institution has that perception of them—that Indigenous and lawyer are mutually exclusive categories.

AMT: Katherine Hensel is a lawyer from the Shuswap nation. She joined us for a panel discussion last week and told us how that at least five times in the past few years she was told by court staff to get out of the line reserved for lawyers in the courtroom. We were focusing on the experience of discrimination that non-white lawyers can face in our justice system. It is an issue the Law Society of Upper Canada has been studying for four years. Today, the society's working group on the challenges faced by racialized lawyers will be presenting its final report and recommendations to its board. Janet Leiper is the co-chair of the working group called The Challenges Faced by Racialized Licensees Working Group. She's with us in our Toronto studio. Hello.

KATHERINE HENSEL: Good morning.

AMT: After your research, did Katherine Hensel’s experiences in the courtroom sound familiar to you?

JANET LEIPER: Sure. Part of the reason that we engaged in the study was we were hearing anecdotally stories, just like Ms. Hensel’s, all the time from members of the bar. So we set about to study it and we surveyed the profession. We met with lawyers and remarkable consistency across racialized lawyers and paralegals—that's what we mean when we say licencee—so it includes lawyers and paralegal members of the bar. But completely consistent with that experience. It's an everyday part of life if you're racialized.

AMT: And so you were hearing it and you started the study. Were you surprised as the study went on that so many had said they were the target of racism?

JANET LEIPER: We unfortunately weren't surprised because it was consistent with the experience of many of us. Not myself, I'm white. But there are many people in our working group from a racialized background who are able to say to us, “We could have written this report before you did the study.” But we felt it was important to find out exactly what the extent was as a springboard to bringing these recommendations that we're now going to talk about in front of our board.

AMT: And so what are some of the racial barriers that kept coming up in the course of this research?

JANET LEIPER: We heard that racialization is a factor at every stage of a lawyer or a paralegal’s career. Beginning with law school feeling different, beginning with trying to get articles which is the working that you have to do before you can become licensed and through a person's career, including advancement, trying to make partner and all the way up through the profession. Much of it, I will say, linking back to factors such as unconscious bias but nevertheless it doesn't really matter why. We have to address it.

AMT: Oh. So we did hear one of our—the lawyers on last week talking about how they felt expected to perform to a higher standard. So you saw that as well. As they tried to advance in their careers.

JANET LEIPER: We heard that over and over. You have to do better to be considered as good as people who are not seen as racialized. And if I can come back to what Ms. Hensel said last week. She said the issue goes to the heart of the justice system and I think that's the very foundation for this report. How do you do justice if you yourselves are not just?

AMT: So the report looks at racism. Does gender play a role at all in how racialized lawyers are treated?

JANET LEIPER: We heard from many that there are intersections between different personal characteristics. So racialized women often have an even greater burden to bear. These recommendations and our mandate were to focus on issues of racialization, however, we feel that a lot of what we're recommending will of course serve to assist in other areas of personal background. We hope so.

AMT: The report says many participants stated they would not file a discrimination complaint with the Law Society for various reasons, including fear of losing their job, fear of being labelled a troublemaker and other reprisal-related concerns. How much responsibility does the Law Society of Upper Canada bear for the perception that is there?

JANET LEIPER: Well, it's certainly something that we heard during our consultations and it makes sense. If the problem is a profession wide problem, it's the responsibility of the whole profession to correct it, not an individual on a case by case basis to have to be the standard bearer for a problem that is clearly systemic. So a systemic issue needs a systemic response. Having said that, for those who do wish to bring forward complaints and we do have a discrimination harassment council who is available as a resource, we're going to look at that person's mandate, try to make sure that there's better outreach, there's a better understanding of the supports that exist for individual cases because there are a range of things people can do beyond bringing a public complaint. There have been very creative things done in other places. For example in Nova Scotia, an anonymous postcard campaign was done to allow people to identify acts of discrimination to let their bar society know what's going on at a given time and sort of take a measure of the range of the problem.

AMT: And now there are 13 recommendations in the report to deal with racism in the legal profession. What are the most important?

JANET LEIPER: I think the most important set of recommendations are those that seek to accelerate the culture shifts that we're seeing in some parts of the profession already. Making sure that firms all the way down to small to mid-sized firms up to large firms have policies, are aware of how they're doing and feedback and publish how firms are doing in terms of creating legal workplaces that are inclusive.

AMT: Don't they have to do that already under labour law?

JANET LEIPER: They don't have to do that in the way that we are putting this forward. Many firms are voluntarily starting to look at what their makeup is and of course they have human rights obligations and that's also part of our rules of professional conduct. But this is about a very concerted effort to talk to the profession and to continue the conversation that began when we started talking about the issue to say how are we doing as a profession?

AMT: And some of the other stuff we heard from our panel last week that it even goes to other people working in the courtroom. How do you tackle that? They're not lawyers, they're not paralegals. They could be the clerks of the court. They could be other people.

AMT: I think part of what we're trying to accomplish here is to create a supportive culture among lawyers and paralegals so that even if I'm there with co-counsel and I see something happening, I'm going to speak up because we have this unique role and responsibility to make sure that if we see injustice happening and it involves our colleagues, don't make that person be the one to always have to fight the battle. Speak up and help. It's an educational process. We see it as a developmental process and hopefully it will permeate through the whole justice system because that's where many of us do our work. Right there in court every day.

AMT: And of course, we're talking about Ontario. Do you know if other law societies in Canada will adopt some of the recommendations?

JANET LEIPER: Well, we do know that the Barreau du Quebec has already begun a project, Project Panorama, where they are looking at assisting firms in developing policies and templates to allow them to look at this issue. And I would expect the law societies meet regularly under the umbrella of the federation that this will be a topic that others will look at. Nova Scotia, as I mentioned had done their postcard campaign. So it's something that's definitely got to be on the radar across Canada.

AMT: And so you've found evidence of systemic racism in the legal profession in Ontario. Will these recommendations lead to substantive change? How do you monitor? How do you—how much teeth do you have?

JANET LEIPER: Well, okay, so two questions. The first, how do we monitor? When we began, we retained a group that set about to survey and meet with people. So part of our recommendations are every four years to ask the same set of questions so that we can monitor any improvement. We hope improvement. Does it have teeth? Yes, we're a regulator. So part of the recommendations is to develop progressive measures to make sure that people who will not comply or firms that will not comply can start with a regulatory conversation but with all of the tools that a regulator has to enforce this.

AMT: Okay. Janet Leiper, thank you for coming in.

JANET LEIPER: Thank you very much.

AMT: That is Janet Leiper. She's the co-chair of The Challenges Faced by Racialized Licensees Working Group. Its report: Working Together for Change: Strategies to Address Issues of Systemic Racism in the Legal Profession will be presented today at a meeting of the Law Society of Upper Canada. The Law Society of Upper Canada governs lawyers and paralegals in Ontario. Janet Leiper joined us in our Toronto studio.

LAURA LYNCH: Okay. Moving onto some of your thoughts on another story we've been covering. The agricultural giant Monsanto struck a deal last week to be taken over by Bayer. We had a discussion on the show about what it might mean if the corporate name Monsanto disappeared. The company first pioneered GMO seeds some two decades ago and its name today is synonymous with genetically modified organisms.

AMT: We asked if a name change could lead, would lead to a change in the conversation around GMOs. Lucy Sharratt, a coordinator for the Canadian biotechnology action network thought the problem went deeper than one brand.

LUCY SHARRATT: I think there are two major concerns that the public has named when they give this short form of Monsanto. One is concern over genetically modified foods and the other is concern over corporate control in seeds and pesticides.

LAURA LYNCH: After that, we heard from many of you here just a couple of your responses on Facebook. Wayne James writes I'm a reformed chemical farmer. I now Farm Organic. What I do, grow life, has nothing to do with money. A profound point that is never acknowledged and never discussed. If I approach farming as a monetary enterprise, I begin to compromise cut corners and exploit for immediate gain. Once I went into organic production I began to think deeply on the nature of the seeds that I was working with as a responsibility that has roots planted in the soil of time. Penny coon sees things different. She writes: “It doesn't bother me that some foods are GMO. We need to produce more and more food. As the world is producing more and more people, in order to get maximum production per acre, you need seed that is resistant to insects and fungus.”

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Canadians tortured in Syria: Lawyer calls for investigation into RCMP

Guests: Amir Attaran

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[Music: Beats]

VOICE 1: Tracking the story.

VOICE 2: The RCMP emails from that time leave no doubt what the [unintelligible] was expecting for him. Here's the quote: “He will be arrested and interrogated (Syrian style).”

AMT: That chilling e-mail was part of a trove of documents obtained by CBC News about the case of Canadian Ahmad al- Mahdi. The CBC's Terence McKenna, who you just heard there, joined me Monday to share what he learned about the RCMP and CSIS involvement in the treatment of Mr. al-Mahdi and two other citizens who were arrested and interrogated in Syria and Egypt as terrorism suspects. Not one was ever charged with a crime. The documents shed new light on just how closely the RCMP, RCIS and the Department of Foreign Affairs worked with Syria and Egypt. Based on the e-mail we heard Terence McKenna reading, my next guest believes there may be grounds for a criminal investigation of the RCMP. Amir Attaran is a law professor at the University of Ottawa and he joins us from our Ottawa studio. Hello.

AMIR ATTARAN: Good morning.

AMT: The RCMP email that Terence McKenna just mentioned references Syrian style interrogation that he will be interrogated and interrogated in quotes and then Syrian style in brackets. What do you take that to mean?

AMIR ATTARAN: It's an interesting question, isn't it? I mean to me it sounds as though the RCMP was fully aware that Mr. al-Mahdi would be interrogated using methods that aren't typically Canadian and a little bit rougher. Syria is a rough place as you know. Now someone else could read a different meaning into those words. I don't think it's easy to do. I mean someone might argue that Syrian style interrogation means being asked questions while sitting cross-legged on the Persian rug and sipping tea. I very much doubt that's a tenable interpretation. The reason we need a criminal investigation is to find out what it meant and what the RCMP understood it to mean.

AMT: And just for clarification, that e-mail where that phrase occurs, they're trying to figure out how the diplomats, how [unintelligible] found out that Mr. al-Mahdi was arrested. And they talk about you know that they're worried the diplomats will uncover the RCMP operation and that one RCMP official writes. You know essentially he's saying if the consular people ask about him in Damascus, you can guarantee he will be arrested and interrogated Syrian style. So again, there's that phrase you know. Most of us know that Syria tortures. Would not the RCMP know that? Wouldn’t you have to know that?

AMIR ATTARAN: Yes. Of course they know that. I mean they are plugged in to the federal government's intelligence and the intelligence on Syria's use of torture is abundant. In fact, you don't even need secret intelligence. You can look on the website of any major human rights organization or the United Nations and the use of torture in Syria is well-documented. So of course they knew that Syrian style interrogation wasn't as gentle as Canadian style and did make use of severe pain and suffering which is the hallmark of torture.

AMT: So this e-mail was written by an RCMP officer—his name has not been publicly released—as opposed to a CSIS agent. Is that significant?

AMIR ATTARAN: It is significant because you now have a problem if there is to be a criminal investigation, who's going to do the investigating? You can't very well have the RCMP investigating the RCMP for obvious reasons. So the way this has been handled in Canada in the past when RCMP members have done illegal things is to call in an outside police force to investigate. And that's clearly what needs to be done here. I think it's shocking that these e-mails have been sitting in the RCMP’s hands for many years and they haven't done that. They haven't gone to another police force and said would you please look at whether we committed any crimes?

AMT: They were also sitting in the inquiry. Right? The Iacobucci inquiry into Mr. El Maati, Mr. Almalki and Mr. Nureddin.

AMIR ATTARAN: That’s right.

AMT: So they have been there. Officials have seen them.

AMIR ATTARAN: Yes. There has been a judicial inquiry into this that did find that Mr. al-Mahdi was not treated appropriately in Syrian hands and that you know Syrian style did not mean normal interrogation. It meant something very much darker. The RCMP knows this. And to me, it's inexcusable that the senior RCMP staff have not already asked for an outside police force to investigate whether any crimes were committed.

AMT: What are the chances that the Crown would actually charge an RCMP officer?

AMIR ATTARAN: You can't really say until the investigation takes place. But what's fundamental is: do the investigation. And if the RCMP is really preferring to bury this—clearly they have—then it's on the minister. The minister needs to insist on perhaps the Ontario Provincial Police, perhaps another provincial police force, leading that investigation. That's what we do in Canada. When the RCMP appears to be touched by illegality, we bring in another police force to investigate.

AMT: Now, Canada is a signatory to various international treaties and bodies the United Nations Convention Against Torture, the International Criminal Court. We see documents that suggest the RCMP is not only aware that Syria tortures but they're sending them questions for interrogation. Is there a possibility that RCMP officers involved could face in some kind of international charges brought by someone else outside Canada?

AMIR ATTARAN: I don't see that happening. This is our mess to clean up. And you're right, Anna Maria. The RCMP did provide questions that the Syrian interrogators could use. So there was clearly a common intention between the RCMP and the Syrian interrogators to carry out an unlawful interrogation by Canadian standards. It was Syrian style. It wasn't Canadian style. When that's the case, then the RCMP personnel who participated in that common intention can be equally guilty as the people doing the torture. Our law makes that equally prosecutable. You can call it aiding, you can call it abetting the crime, you can call it forming a common intention to carry out an unlawful purpose. All of those terms are used in our Criminal Code and they do seem to apply here.

AMT: And just briefly: how likely do you think a criminal investigation of the RCMP over its role in these cases is?

AMIR ATTARAN: It's entirely with the federal government and the minister because obviously the RCMP has done its best to sweep this under the rug. And if this is a country that is against torture, if this is a country that believes in the rule of law, if this is a country that holds police officers accountable, there will be a criminal investigation and the minister surely knows there should be.

AMT: Amir Attaran, thank you for your time.

AMIR ATTARAN: Thank you.

AMT: Amir Attaran, a law professor at the University of Ottawa. He joined us from our studio in Ottawa. Yesterday, we asked public safety minister Ralph Goodale—who oversees the RCMP—if he felt a criminal investigation of the RCMP was warranted. This is what he had to say.

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The issue of oversight and scrutiny and review—those are issues that were clearly raised by Mr. Justice O'Connor in his inquiry and certainly referred to by Mr. Justice Iacobucci in his inquiry. We have already taken one very important step, which is coming forward with Bill C-22, the proposed new committee of parliamentarians to examine every dimension of national security framework and activity. This will be the first time that that kind of a review mechanism has been in place in Canada. In addition to that, we have to look at the existing review mechanisms, how they relate to each other and how they will relate to this new parliamentary committee, committee of parliamentarians. There are some clear gaps in the in the review mechanisms that presently exist.

AMT: Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale speaking yesterday afternoon on Parliament Hill. He said no to our requests to come on this program and discuss the issue of a potential criminal investigation in greater detail.

LAURA LYNCH: Alright, let's move on to one more story.

SOUNDCLIP

Many of them have lost friends and it's hard to rebuild social networks. So one of the ways we are trying to reduce loneliness of people who've had these kind of losses is to build new relationships. For some people, the best kind of relationships are with others who've been on the same kind of life path that they have and who would tend to be similar ages. For some, the vitality of connections with young people really gives them a boost and can be quite important.

LAURA LYNCH: That's Norah Keating, a professor of social gerontology at the University of Alberta. Earlier this week, we heard about research showing that Canada's elderly population is growing increasingly lonely and isolated. This topic resonated with many of our listeners. Alison Parker from Thunder Bay wrote: “I started to cry from the beginning and stiffened up the lip only to burst into tears again throughout. I'm only 54 but lost my second husband in March of 2015. Everything described fit like a glove. I previously had a failed marriage of 18 years then remarried, only to have him pass away suddenly and prematurely three provinces away from me. Wow. Your show definitely touched a nerve.”

AMT: June Barrett of Kingston, Ontario told us about her experience: “At age 60, I don't count as a senior. However, I've just checked my journal to look up the last time I spoke with another person. April 3rd. I have no neighbours. I do not own a car nor do I have bus fare. There are times I read of something interesting to attend but I do not have the registration fee nor the means of getting there. Subsisting on $545.64 a month, my late husband's CPP, there's nothing extra for coffee dates. It gets very depressing. Thank you for the program. It’s so true.”

LAURA LYNCH: Joanne Copeland from Sydney, BC writes: “Back in 1978, I enrolled my two-year-old daughter in a daycare centre in Winnipeg on the main floor of a senior's building. With the young and the elderly having daily contact with each other, it was a wonderful arrangement. It prevented the elderly from feeling lonely and the youngsters of course loved the attention.”

[Music]

AMT: Some of those letters are going to make me cry.

LAURA LYNCH: I know.

AMT: It's time to give credit where credit is due. This week on The Current has been produced by Idella Sturino, Howard Goldenthal, Ines Colabrese, Kristin Nelson, Lara O’Brien, Julian Uzielli, Shannon Higgins.

LAURA LYNCH: As well as Pacinthe Mattar, Sujata Berry, Liz Hoath, John Chipman, Karin Marley and Willow Smith. Our intern is Jacqueline McKay.

AMT: The Current’s writer is Peter Mitton. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Our technical producer is Gary Francis. Our documentary editor is Josh Bloch. Senior producers are Richard Goddard in Toronto, Cathy Simon in Vancouver. Our executive producer of The Current is Kathleen Goldhar.

LAURA LYNCH: And thanks this week as well to our network producers Michael O'Halloran, Susan McKenzie and Suzanne Dufresne.

AMT: We want to hear from you at The Current. Tweet us @thecurrentCBC, find us on Facebook. E-mail us from our website. If you missed anything, you can find the podcasts on the site www.cbc.ca/thecurrent or on the CBC Radio mobile app. You are here tomorrow. You came in with your arm in a sling.

LAURA LYNCH: Yeah. Bicycling in Toronto will do that to you. [laughs]

AMT: Okay. So Laura Lynch, you cover conflict, you go around the world and it's a bicycle that gets you in Toronto. Your own. Okay. Take care of yourself.

LAURA LYNCH: Laura Lynch is here tomorrow. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. Thank you for listening to The Current.

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September 22, 2016 full episode transcript

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