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The Current Transcript for October 20, 2016

Host: Anna Maria Tremonti

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

DONALD TRUMP: I don't know Putin. He said nice things about me. He has no respect for her.

HILLARY CLINTON: Well, that's because he'd rather have a puppet as president of the United States.

DONALD TRUMP: No puppet. No puppet.

HILLARY CLINTON: And it’s pretty clear—

DONALD TRUMP: You’re the puppet.

HILLARY CLINTON: It’s pretty clear you won’t admit—

DONALD TRUMP: No, you’re the puppet.

HILLARY CLINTON: —that the Russians have engaged in cyber-attacks. This is such an unprecedented situation.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: And you thought you might have heard it all, silly rabbit. While Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton were doing their best to mop the floor with each other in the final US presidential debate, many Republicans were keeping their eyes on the potential for collateral damage. And by that I mean their own grand old party. The disdain among Republican voters for their own candidate has the potential to cleave the party. Can a divided Republican Party still stand? That discussion is just moments away. And then the wireless war in a broadband battleground.

SOUNDCLIP

Syria is the most socially mediated conflict that has ever arisen. From the very start, you had all sorts of people with phones that were capable of taking photographic evidence. It's now become a central threat.

AMT: Computers and smartphones are the frontline weapons in a large part of the Syrian war that is playing out in cyberspace. They can empower and enable. They can also implicate with an electronic footprint that could lead to arrest and even execution. In half an hour we take you through the online players in a conflict that's reaching through computer screens, unleashing trolls, threats and even PTSD. Plus, the journalist turns advocate.

SOUNDCLIP

In terms of what I think journalists can do better when it comes to covering disability issues, I think what it comes down to is digging a little deeper.

AMT: Ing Wong-Ward has a lot going on in her life. She's a mother, a partner. She left a long journalism career to take on a leadership role in a major advocacy organization. She also lives with spinal muscular atrophy and uses a wheelchair. She will host a special edition of the Friday Current and focus on the abilities of those with disabilities. You will meet her in an hour as she joins me to sort through your tweets, your posts and your e-mails. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

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'Trump not a Republican': Can a divided GOP still stand?

Guests: Jim Bennett, Ed Goeas, Eric Foner

SOUNDCLIP

HILLARY CLINTON: Donald's unfit and he proves it every time he talks.

DONALD TRUMP: You are the one that’s unfit. And you know Bernie Sanders, he said you have bad judgment. You do.

HILLARY CLINTON: Well, you should ask Bernie Sanders who he's supporting for president and he has said—

DONALD TRUMP: Which is a big mistake.

HILLARY CLINTON: --as he has campaigned for me around the country—you are the most dangerous person to run for president in the modern history of America. I think he's right.

AMT: Well, the longer they debated, the worse it got. The final US presidential debate was set in Las Vegas, the capital of excess, and Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Donald Trump spent the evening indulging, piling on, pivoting, provoking. And then Donald Trump refused to commit to honouring the results of this election.

SOUNDCLIP

DONALD TRUMP: She's guilty of a very, very serious crime. She should not be allowed to run. And just in that respect, I say it's rigged.

CHRIS WALLACE: Are you saying you're not prepared now to commit to that principle?

DONALD TRUMP: What I’m saying is that I will tell you at the time. I'll keep you in suspense. Okay?

HILLARY CLINTON: Well, Chris, let me respond to that because that's horrifying. Every time Donald thinks things are not going in his direction, he claims whatever it is is rigged against him. When he didn't get an Emmy for his TV program three years in a row and he started tweeting that the Emmys were rigged against him.

DONALD TRUMP: Should’ve gotten it.

HILLARY CLINTON: This is a mindset. And it's funny but it's also really troubling.

AMT: Well, to say the 2016 election has been divisive would be an understatement. The rhetoric has reached new lows at times and both Republicans and Democrats have been divided within their own parties. But the GOP seems to be cleaving in ways we perhaps have not seen before. Months of Donald Trump's comments on Mexicans, Muslims, women and the slew of sexual assault and harassment claims has caused many Republicans to abandon him even before last night's debate. Many say they do not recognize what the GOP has become and what it stands for. Jim Bennett is a former member of the Republican Party. His father, Bob Bennett, was a long-time Republican senator in the state of Utah. He passed away earlier this year. Jim Bennett is now working for the Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson. And we have reached Jim Bennett in Salt Lake City. Hello.

JIM BENNETT: Hello. How are you?

AMT: Well, I'm very curious. I want to know what you were thinking. What stood out for you in last night's debate?

JIM BENNETT: Well, I think you focused on it when he talked about how he wouldn't accept the election results. That Donald Trump is trying to make this an illegitimate election, which really is unprecedented and you know we pride ourselves down here on the peaceful transition of power and the fact that he's trying to undermine that—even before the election takes place—is really kind of troubling.

AMT: Now you used to be a Republican. What happened?

JIM BENNETT: Well, I don't really recognize the Republican Party anymore. It's sort of morphed into the party of Trump and the things the party of Trump stands for. Besides the fact that the candidate is a really sort of vulgar buffoon, the things that he stands for really don't have a lot in common with the Republican Party that was near and dear to my heart for most of my adult life. It really began actually, when my father had a stroke that ended up taking his life. And I was in the hospital with him and he turned to me and he said are there any Muslims in this hospital? And I thought that was a very strange thing to say. I thought maybe he was being affected by the stroke. And I said I'm sure there are, Dad. And he said well, I'd like to go up every single one of them and apologize on behalf of the Republican Party for Donald Trump. And you know I don't think he ever used a hashtag in his life, but if he did it would have been #NeverTrump. He was deeply troubled by Donald Trump and by what he was doing to the party. And so I think that was sort of the catalyst for me to reconsider my affiliation with the party and find myself where I am now.

AMT: And just to clarify, you, your father, you’re Mormons.

JIM BENNETT: Yes.

AMT: So the Mormon community was offended by Mr. Trump's comments on Muslims. Why?

JIM BENNETT: Well, culturally the Mormons have a history of being religious outsiders and I think have a tremendous amount of sympathy for those who find themselves in that same kind of situation. And religious freedom is something that is really important to the Mormon community. And to see Donald Trump taking swipes at people simply because of their faith is something that's really anathema to us.

AMT: And what do you think is the biggest issue now facing the Republican Party?

JIM BENNETT: Oh, well, where do you start? I mean I think the Republican Party has all but collapsed as a viable conservative institution. I think that's the biggest problem. I think that's going to have huge problems if they lose which seems likely. But I think they'll have huge problems if they win too. If Donald Trump is the standard bearer going forward, then the Republican Party, defining what the Republican Party is becomes very difficult because now it's the party of protectionism and isolationism and xenophobia and these are not things that have defined the Republican Party up until the days of Trump.

AMT: In fairness, we have seen some of this shift even before Mr. Trump, with the Tea Party for example. In fact, the Tea Party ended up defeating—a Tea Party Republican—ended up defeating your dad. So can you blame Trump for this shift in the Republican Party?

JIM BENNETT: Well, I fully agree with you that the Tea Party has been, you know has been a disaster for the Republicans. But Donald Trump is not really a Tea Partier. In terms of what Donald Trump stands for—the Tea Party, they may be extreme but they are ideologically consistent. Donald Trump is not. There really isn't a lot of ideology there. There's not a lot of Conservatism there. And so when I talk to people about Donald Trump and they say well, he said this ridiculous thing and he's done this awful thing, I respond by saying that people that are supporting Donald Trump really don't care what he stands for. They just want somebody to burn the whole system down. And I think the Tea Party sort of began that process, but they began that process in a much more intellectually consistent way than Donald Trump is finishing that process.

AMT: So what would the Republican Party have to do to regain your support?

JIM BENNETT: Oh, I think they just have to return to conservative principles, to the idea of smaller government to the idea of you know—I don't think it would necessarily be all that difficult if they were able to nominate and support candidates that were consistent with the kinds of things that my father was doing when he was in the Senate. I'd have no problem returning to the fold.

AMT: And to be clear, you're not supporting Donald Trump for president. But are you supporting any Republicans in the 2016 race?

JIM BENNETT: Sure. Well, down-ballot I am, absolutely. We've got a great governor here in Utah. I'm going to be happy to vote, cast my ballot for him. So yeah. The fact that I'm not willing to affiliate with the party officially with my voter registration does not diminish my willingness to support qualified and reasonable Republican candidates down-ballot.

AMT: Okay. Jim Bennett, thanks for your time.

JIM BENNETT: Thank you very much.

AMT: Jim Bennett, former Republican. He now works for Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson and he joined us from Salt Lake City. Well, our next two guests are here to help us understand the fracture in the Republican Party, what it might mean for the future of the GOP. Ed Goeas is the president and CEO of The Tarrance Group. He's a Republican pollster and strategist. He joins us from Alexandria, Virginia. Eric Foner is a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and the DeWitt Clinton professor of history at Columbia University and he joins us from New York. Welcome gentlemen.

ERIC FONER: Good morning.

ED GOEAS: Thank you. Glad to be here.

AMT: Ed Goeas, you just heard Jim Bennett. What are you thinking?

ED GOEAS: Well, I agree with a lot of what he says, that the numbers quite frankly are not bearing up in terms of a connection. One of the things we watch very closely quite frankly is whether there is this connect between the image of the party and the image of Donald Trump. One of the things, we were in the field last week for example, starting on Saturday, the night or the day after the tape came out. And it was the first time I saw in the numbers that there was a connect and that Donald Trump dropped from two points down to 10 points down over the weekend. The generic ballot—are you going to vote Republican or Democrat for Congress—dropped from three points down to 12 points down. But as the week progressed, Donald Trump came down a bit on his deficit. He was down by eight points. But the generic ballot went from 12 down to five down, meaning that last couple of nights we've come back to Earth. Interesting enough, I don't think it was Donald Trump's intent, but his attacking of Republicans for not supporting them actually caused that disconnect much more than Republicans stepping away from him, of various members who withdrew their endorsement. And that's basically what we've seen through this whole campaign. I was in the field this week with 45 different congressional districts, Senate districts. And while Trump is down in terms of the ballot, the Republican senators, the very Republican congressmen that are up for re-election, are not. But they're running on Republican principles, Republican values, Republican solutions, which we're not seeing at the presidential race.

AMT: Okay. So did last night's debate help or hurt the GOP?

ED GOEAS: I don't think it hurt the GOP. I think the thing that is—it is interesting you have a historian on here. This is a—in 42 years of doing this, I've never seen this type of an election. And that normally what you have is about 70 per cent of the electorate fairly evenly split, half of which like one candidate and dislike the other. That's the base of the two parties, about 35 per cent. Normally what you have is about 25 per cent that like both the candidates and that's where the swing vote is. That is where that argument over—especially in an open seat for the presidency—the discussion about the future, what are their solutions and what they will do for the future of the country.

AMT: Okay. Normally you see that. What are you seeing now?

ED GOEAS: That 25 per cent is only two per cent—like both these candidates.

AMT: Hmm. Okay.

ED GOEAS: What you have is 20 per cent that dislike both these candidates. And as much as you focus on Trump, Hillary Clinton also has over 50 per cent and had this entire campaign, over 50 per cent unfavourable towards her. So this is more of a race to the bottom for both candidates and a problem for both parties.

AMT: Okay. Well, let’s bring Eric Foner in here then. First of all, Eric Foner, your thoughts just immediately on the debate before we talk about the parties.

ERIC FONER: I don't think the debate changed anything. It was actually more of a debate than some of the other ones, that you actually got some substantive discussion as well as personal insults. But you know vis-à-vis Mr. Bennett, I think, you know I commend him for trying to think seriously about the party and what's happened to it. But I think it's fair to say that many of the things that Trump represents really have been endemic in the Republican Party for a long time, going back to Nixon and his Southern strategy trying to appeal to white Southerners and then many of—in other parts of the country who resented the gains of the Civil Rights Movement. Xenophobia, hostility to immigrants has been played on by many Republicans, go back to California in the 1990s when the governor there, you know they pushed through anti-immigrant measures. Now that was disastrous for the Republicans. They didn't notice there were a lot of Hispanics who were going to vote in California. So you know and the fact is that the polls show that the very large majority of Republican voters are going to vote for Trump. They recognized something in Trump that appeals to them. Not as many as Clinton—there’s something like 85 per cent of Republicans are going to vote for Trump. Ninety-five per cent of Democrats are going to vote for Clinton. But you know I don't think we can just say Trump is an outlier and you know a bizarre aberration. He gives voice in his own bizarre and you know ego maniacal way to tendencies that have been there in the Republican Party for a long time. That many Republican establishment types just winked at the Tea Party. They didn't agree with the Tea Party but they said hey, you know these guys are getting votes out so you know. And that is now coming back to haunt them. So the Republican Party has to look at itself, not just at Trump, to figure out how they got into the mess they're in now.

AMT: But you know you've been looking at these parties from—how long have these parties been in existence, Eric?

ERIC FONER: Well, my first book was about the creation of the Republican Party and that came in the 1850s. The Republican Party was created as an anti-slavery party in the, you know on the eve of the Civil War, out of the remnants of the Whig party which collapsed. But you know since the 1850s, we've basically had these two major parties. And you know those who are predicting the demise of the Republican Party I think are a little premature. We had a very serious split in the party in 1964 when Goldwater wrested control from the so-called Eastern Establishment. And you know Nelson Rockefeller, the Easterner was booed by the delegates at the San Francisco convention. Lyndon Johnson won a tremendous landslide, four years later Nixon's back in office as a Republican. So I think we can't really write the obituary of the Republican Party quite yet, but what the party will look like going forward is still very much an open question.

AMT: Well, let me ask you because everybody uses the word unprecedented, do you see any precedents in what you’re watching unfold?

ERIC FONER: Trump is a little bit bizarre but there are precedents. You know there's George Wallace, who was a Democrat but ran you know independently, ran in Democratic primaries. That’s in ’68, ’72. Wallace really showed the possibility of appealing to white backlash not only in the South, but in many other—he did very well in Wisconsin primary and Michigan. Then you have Ross Perot in ‘92 who ran as an independent but he was the guy who was the businessman, the outsider, sort of like Trump. You know I can fix things in Washington. But Perot also introduced the trade issue. He was the one who said we're losing our jobs overseas because of these free trade agreements. But those two were rather straight-laced types. For Trump's strange personality and the sexual connotations of his campaign, maybe you've got to go overseas to someone like Berlusconi in Italy who also was sort of a celebrity before he became a politician the way that was the case of Trump also. So he's a sort of combination of a variety of types who have been around for awhile.

AMT: So Ed Goeas, you make the point that you've seen divisions in both parties but we're talking about the Republicans today. Do you see ongoing problems for the party after this election because of the kind of divisions that Republican—prominent Republicans have talked about?

ED GOEAS: I think again, going back to you know as I view it and watching it as a political strategist, the missed opportunity here for Republicans is we were in a situation where yes, a majority of the country— overwhelming majority—felt we're going in the wrong direction. The job approval of the president was upside down. And understanding that what happens cycle to cycle is that the president and the presidential candidate gives an image to the party. It defines the party and that is the danger of Donald Trump because he is not a Republican in what he says, it may represent some. But his position on free trade—diametrically opposed to the Republicans, a variety of these different issues diametrically opposed to the Republicans. And that's where I look to the numbers to see is he in fact defining us? I agree completely with what was said about the Tea Party. My feeling is that if you look at what really happened in this country over the last couple of years when we got control of the House, we slowed down Obama's agenda. When we got control of the Senate, we actually stopped Obama's agenda which is why he went to executive orders. But there was two problems we had over recent years: one is not only the Tea Party—and I would say the Tea Party leadership, not Tea Party voters—and the other is conservative media. That when Obamacare was finished, both the Tea Party leaders to spin money for their power in their organizations and conservative media for trying to keep their audience—use Republican leaders as their red meat that they fed their groups and in doing so, that’s when you began to say the split.

AMT: So they turned on themselves.

ED GOEAS: They turned on themselves. So we have basically, as Republicans, been fighting with one arm tied behind our back for the last six years. And that is where Trump has taken that and made it worse.

AMT: Okay. Just briefly, we're almost out of time. Eric Foner, the whole talk of a rigged election.

ERIC FONER: We have rigged elections in this country.

AMT: The rigged elections are really about border—

[Crosstalk]

ERIC FONER: They tend to take place at the legislative level, the congressional level. Many states, particularly by Republicans I have to say, have been so gerrymandered that it's completely known before the election who is going to win. They've designed the districts so that a particular party always wins. And you know I think what Trump is saying is pretty outrageous and fairly unprecedented. But we should not just throw up our hands and say oh Trump is you know against democracy. Our democracy has flaws, the power of money in it, the rigging through gerrymander, the fact that half the population doesn't even vote. And I think we should not let this deflect us from the fact that we do need to make improvements in American democracy.

AMT: Okay. We have to leave it there. Gentlemen, great to talk to you. Thank you.

ED GOEAS: Thank you.

ERIC FONER: Okay, thank you.

AMT: That’s Ed Goeas, president and CEO of The Tarrance Group, Republican pollster and strategist. He's in Alexandria, Virginia. Eric Foner, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, DeWitt Clinton professor of history at Columbia University. He's in New York City. Let us know what you're thinking because we know you're thinking about this. Tweet us. We are @thecurrentCBC. Find us on Facebook. Go to the website www.cbc.ca/thecurrent. And when we come back, we're talking about the online war with Syria, how it reaches right out across even to Canada. This is The Current.

Back To Top »

The digital front line in Syria's civil war is a click away

Guests: Mariam Hamou, Eva Galperin, Deirdre Collings

AMT: Hello. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current. In half an hour, I'll be joined by Ing Wong-Ward. She's a former CBC producer, who works now with Toronto's Centre for Independent Living. She's also this week's Friday host of The Current, and she'll fill us in on the special program devoted to disability she's preparing. But first, the online frontline. For Mariam Hamou, life changed on the 15th of April of 2011. The London, Ontario woman was holding her newborn for the very first time, when a text message pinged its arrival on her phone. Little did she know then that the text would start her on a five year journey deep into the heart of the Syrian civil war. Mariam Hamou's enthusiasm for the cause drove her to become the North American media director for the Syrian National Coalition. That’s the umbrella group of activists and rebel groups opposed to Bashar al-Assad's regime. But the online threats, harassment and hacking she encountered as a result would ultimately force her to walk away. Mariam Hamou joins us from London, Ontario. Hello! Hi. Tell us first: why did you decide to join and help with the opposition efforts in Syria in the first place?

MARIAM HAMOU: It's a personal story. We've always really been in my family against the current regime in Syria. My father was involved with the previous Assad regime, in which he was actually taken in and tortured. You know we all had these big stars in our eyes going okay, well, Egypt's down, they've got a democratically elected president. We've got Tunisia down, they're going through their elections. And now it's Syria’s turn. So we were really quite revved up for that. We were excited and we were ready to go.

AMT: So what did a typical day look like managing the media for the opposition?

MARIAM HAMOU: Well, it was a lot of getting up in the morning, kind of seeing what the stories of the days were, getting it out on social media, contacting foreign journalists, so in the US, in Canada, around the world, answering questions, trying to secure interviews. We were able to secure interviews with you know people that were being held by ISIS inside of Raqqa at the time.

AMT: And why did you leave in the end?

MARIAM HAMOU: A lot of it had to do with some post-traumatic stress disorder issues, having to see images of you know dead children day in and day out, nothing happening on the international scene, going to the UN presenting our case, going to foreign governments presenting our case and nobody wanting to actually do anything, nobody helping the rebel forces or you know some of the civil groups on the ground. Yeah it was… It wasn't a very coveted job.

AMT: And of course you were also, you mentioned looking at images. What images are you talking about? What were you doing with them? Where were they coming from?

MARIAM HAMOU: So a lot of them were coming from the activists on the ground, people that were just taking photos of kind of the wreckage, you know the scorched earthm the buildings that were being you know taken down, to the point of actually you know body parts, dead children. And of course in North America, you can't put these images out there. We have a very sanitized media. So a lot of what I was doing was sanitizing media for Western consumption.

AMT: So you would literally get like, how many images are we talking about that you'd go through in a day?

MARIAM HAMOU: In a day, sometimes you'd get up to 200 images. And a lot of times I was like no. No. No. No. No. No.

AMT: No, no, no because they were—

MARIAM HAMOU: They were too graphic and bloody.

AMT: So death and destruction, people—

MARIAM HAMOU: Death and destruction.

AMT: But you’d look at them and you’d decide.

MARIAM HAMOU: Yeah.

AMT: So you were essentially absorbing that day in, day out.

MARIAM HAMOU: Yeah. Day in, day out.

AMT: How many hours a day would you spend looking at images that were that graphic?

MARIAM HAMOU: Probably about two to three hours a day at least.

AMT: And you had an infant at the time.

MARIAM HAMOU: I did, and so there was a lot of guilt. A lot of guilt. A lot of tears, a lot of guilt, a lot of frustration.

AMT: Guilt for what, Mariam?

MARIAM HAMOU: Guilt for me having this healthy child, a fridge full of food, a car in my driveway, a safe place for my children to go to school. That was the guilt. I had this guilt where all these people were suffering on the other side of the world and me being absolutely impotent to do anything about it.

AMT: And you were—as you were doing that, you were also hacked. What happened?

MARIAM HAMOU: Well, I had left my cell phone at home. I think my husband was frustrated because I was always working and he said can you please leave your phone at home tonight? And you know let's just go out and have a night where you don't look at your phone and you don't worry about the revolution. I said okay, that's fine. So we went out and I think I was at my uncle's house because I mean the details are murky but I remember getting a phone call or somebody texting my uncle saying you know Mariam, we just got some pretty nasty messages from your email. I was like what? Said, look, you made me leave my phone at home and now I have to go home and get it. And so we get home about 12:30, one o'clock because I think it was around 12:00 a.m. when it started, when the hacking started. And I went home, found out that I was hacked. The message was very nasty. So I had to go through and I had to you know contact the office in Turkey and say I've been hacked, we have to change all of our passwords, we have to double secure everything. So yeah. And then I had to you know shut down my Facebook stuff because you know if they had access to the Facebook—which they did for a little while—you know we had to go through the Facebook headquarters as well. It was a big ordeal.

AMT: Were you able to figure out who was behind it?

MARIAM HAMOU: So we did know it was the Syrian Electronic Army. They sent emails to my parents, to anybody with my last name saying that I had relations with other men and you know that type of thing. Very, very demeaning stuff.

AMT: And what kind of impact did that have on you and the people who knew you?

MARIAM HAMOU: It just embarrassed me really because that's how they work. They try to embarrass you because we're such conservative people. Muslim people are generally more conservative. And you know sex is very taboo. So if I'm going to send something to my dad, it's not going to have any sexual stuff in it. So what they do is they send that stuff out. So I called my dad, luckily he checks his email once every month or something like that. I said Dad, don't read the email. Because you know.

AMT: Okay. So you're living in London, Ontario. You're raising two children, right? They’re how old at this point?

MARIAM HAMOU: They’re eight and five.

AMT: Okay. And you're engaged in trying to be a liaison in this brutal conflict where people are in physical peril. So you're kind of existing in two environments at the same time, I guess?

MARIAM HAMOU: Mhm. Mhm. It is. It messes everything that you have up there, up in your head. You’re living to—it's like a dichotomy of worlds in your head. It's two separate things. It just broke me. Like I was crying all the time, I'd hide in the basement. I didn't want to go out. I didn't want to see people. I actually feared going into a social place because small talk just—I couldn't do small talk.

AMT: How connected to the war in Syria are you now? How much can you, do you follow it?

MARIAM HAMOU: I read every day. You can't but read what's going on every day. I mean I've got a Facebook feed. Right? So all of my friends are always posting things. So of course you've got the two, three stories that come up that you have to read. There's one image that's killing me of some kid that's got blood and you know black stuff all over his face that's coming up on my feed every few hours or so.

AMT: But given that you have PTSD, should you be looking at that stuff?

MARIAM HAMOU: Probably not but I don't know what else to do.

AMT: Mariam, thanks for sharing your story.

MARIAM HAMOU: Thank you.

AMT: Mariam Hamou. She was the North American media director for the Syrian National Coalition. She did that work out of London, Ontario. That's where we reached her. Her individual experience of being hacked and harassed is playing out on a massive scale in the Syrian conflict, often with terrifying results. Eva Galperin is a policy analyst with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. She's been training Syrian activists and writing about the online space since the early days of the conflict. She joins us from San Francisco. Hi.

EVA GALPERIN: Hi there.

AMT: Well, as you listened to Mariam, what were you thinking?

EVA GALPERIN: I think that her story sounds extremely familiar. Not just the hacking but also the sleepless nights and the burnout. This is a story that has played out many, many times all over the world with people who are engaged in supporting various parts of the Syrian conflict.

AMT: We overwhelmingly talk about the ground war in Syria. How important is the online component of this conflict?

EVA GALPERIN: The information war is very important. And during the time when I started covering the Syrian conflict, it was essential because at the time, Assad was not letting any journalists into the country so it was very difficult to report on what was going on the ground. As a result, the only information coming out around 2012 was being sort of gathered and put together by journalists and ordinary citizens who got in touch with journalists who are located outside of Syria and they had to communicate digitally often over Skype or over e-mail or through text messages. And that made it very easy for the Assad regime—which still controlled most of the Internet and infrastructure in Syria at the time—to spy on them, which also made it possible to find out where they were and possibly send them to detention centres where according to Amnesty International and I think Human Rights Watch, torture was taking place.

AMT: So give us an overview of the actors in the Syrian online space.

EVA GALPERIN: Well, it's complicated. When I first started doing my work in Syria in late 2011, early 2012, primarily I was tracking people in the opposition and also Bashir al-Assad, and pro-Assad hackers who may or may not have been linked directly to the Assad government. And at the time, we saw the Syrian Electronic Army which was being sort of praised by Assad but we also saw targeted hacking and the installing of remote access tools also known as RATs. We managed to find two separate groups that were responsible. And in the subsequent two and a half years that I kind of followed their progress, we saw more and more overlap between these groups and the Syrian Electronic Army. So we saw the sort of development of the space. We also saw more nation state actors entering into the space and right around the time that ISIS came onto the scene, the scene became so confusing that I could not be certain when I was doing my job that if I published something, that I would not be helping bad people do bad things.

AMT: Who’s at risk online then?

EVA GALPERIN: I would say that probably right now, almost everybody who is involved in any kind of information gathering, so journalists, activists, people in the opposition. Anybody who you know even supports the Assad regime is a potential target of different kinds of hacking. But the good news is that the compromises all occur in more or less the same way, which is that the compromises are not very sneaky. They usually happen as a result of phishing. So you get some sort of email or a message on a compromised Facebook group or a message through Skype or a WhatsApp or Snapchat. Sometimes these messages can be extremely interactive. Some of the messages that we've seen in the last couple of years involve sort of what we call femme fatale attacks. So actors pretending to be you know beautiful young women who are interested in these people, who would like to send them pictures that turn out to be malware. But in the end, it really comes down to sharing your own credentials or clicking on videos that turn out to covertly install malware or photos that turn out to covertly install malware. Once the malware is installed on your machine, usually it installs what we call a remote access tool, a RAT. And RATs vary in sophistication but they all are capable of doing pretty much the same stuff, which is that they can see everything which is happening on your computers. So that includes controlling the microphones so they can listen to you, controlling the camera if you have a camera so they can look at you, sometimes without turning on a little green light that lets you know that the camera is on. Stealing your log in credentials so they can log into your Facebook or Twitter or WhatsApp or Snapchat account and send out messages pretending to be you which is what happened to I think Mariam. They can gather all kinds of information about what you're doing. They can use the trust that your network has in you to send out more of these messages that will be used to compromise your friends or people in your contact list or they can gather up information which they will later publish—the point of which is to sort of smear your reputation.

AMT: Given how much change and shift you've seen online in the last five years, where do you think this is headed?

EVA GALPERIN: Nowhere good. I think it is very likely that you're going to see this kind of spying and intrusion into people's privacy continue because espionage is really an important part of the ground game in war. But I think it really pales in comparison to the physical danger that people are in right now.

AMT: Okay. Well, Eva Galperin, thanks for speaking with me.

EVA GALPERIN: Thank you so much.

AMT: Eva Galperin is with the Electronic Frontier Foundation and she's in San Francisco. Well, as much as the Internet has become a weapon in the civil war in Syria, it's also become a tool for survival. Deirdre Collings is the executive director of the Ottawa-based group called SecDev Foundation. It works on issues of technology and conflict and it's currently running a variety of programs inside Syria on digital security, education and privacy. Deirdre Collings joins us from Ottawa. Hi.

DEIRDRE COLLINGS: Hi, Anna Maria.

AMT: How important is the Internet for ordinary Syrians?

DEIRDRE COLLINGS: I think the Internet has become absolutely critical to ordinary citizens. From the very start of the conflict, from the very earliest days, the Internet has served as a very critical information channel for political change. It was you know very used by activists across the board to get their message out, to draw attention to their demands and what they were doing. And then we saw a move towards sort of greater importance for citizen journalists, especially as international media was removed from the territory. But as the conflict became more complex and we had a proliferation of actors but also as a Syrian conflict space became more cut off, there has been a huge proliferation of civil actors that are now filling roles that they never dreamed of filling before the war. So you have all sorts of Syrian groups that are now not only human rights defenders, opposition activists, citizen journalists, but also they’ve become humanitarian actors. They are the only people able to function the space. They've become local governance actors, in some cases filling a void where there is no other support. They’re running educational support groups, some of them quite independently and with very little resources. For example, one of the groups that we work with is a small community organization that supports women heads of household. In total they support around I think 2,400 people. And they have only two mobile devices in which they connect to the world. This is the only thing that they have to reach out to get the vaccines that they need, the medicines they need, whatever other kind of support that they are able to garner.

AMT: So tell me a little bit more about the work you're doing with civil society groups.

DEIRDRE COLLINGS: We do a lot of work with respect to digital safety. Another group that we work with are activists that come from Deir ez-Zor—which is an area that's currently under ISIS control—who are still there trying to document and trying to get images out and stories out about what's happening in that area. Recently, we worked with three of their members—women, by the way—to clean their mobile phones.

AMT: Pull all the contacts, pull all the stuff, they've shared.

DEIRDRE COLLINGS: Yes.

AMT: Get it off there.

DEIRDRE COLLINGS: Exactly.

AMT: Okay.

DEIRDRE COLLINGS: Hide it, whatever. And it just so happened that a few weeks after that, all three were detained and we were just so relieved to find out that they were actually let go without being kept because you know that's another way I think that the conflict has changed. The risk threat environment online right now in Syria is variegated. It is very, very different depending on who you are and who's in charge and sort of what their capabilities are. But more than that, because the Internet has come so critical to everybody, everybody's walking around with their devices. It's not just activists. It's absolutely everybody. And those devices, because they are so critical to survival, are awash with information. Awash with information about contacts, about any information that you may have for any kind of work you do, and also perhaps even some information about your opinions on certain things.

AMT: So in other words, those three women who had their mobile phones cleaned—if that stuff had been on them, it’d be over for them.

DEIRDRE COLLINGS: Absolutely. I mean there are all sorts of stories of people being stopped at checkpoints. And the point is, it's not just the checkpoints anymore. It could be random stops anywhere and this happens in regime areas, in ISIS-controlled areas and in other areas where there are militant actors in charge. You can just be stopped, pulled over, you're asked for your cell phone. Usually you're then asked also for your passwords. If you don't give up your passwords, we've heard of summary execution. We've certainly heard of detainment and then torture to get those passwords. One of the things for example that we do in our work is emergency digital response. If somebody gets detained or arrested, we get a call from either a colleague or in one case for example it was their wife. Please close my husband's account. He's been arrested. What we do when that happens is we work actually with a group called Access Now in the United States and they are sort of a clearinghouse for these requests for immediate account closures, then go straight to Facebook or to Google or to get Skype accounts closed or Twitter accounts closed. But that wife would say you know I know that closing this account is not going to help my husband on any level, but at least it's going to protect his contacts and our family members. So please close the account.

AMT: It's so interesting because I would imagine like mobile devices and the messaging you can do on that would also be, even in a neighbourhood to tell people they just put a checkpoint up at the bottom of the street three blocks away. Beware.

DEIRDRE COLLINGS: They do use it to get information about their—their operational—their surrounding environment. Where are the bombs dropping? What checkpoint has come up? You know where can I get access to critical resources? And also with the dispersion of the Syrian population, it's now become a core tool for actually maintaining social cohesion: contact with family, community members that are dispersed everywhere. So it really has become [unintelligible]. But because of that, it is so full of information, people take it everywhere and now it's become a primary threat vector. We've seen almost a change from a very high tech level of, as Eva was talking about, you know the capability to use sophisticated tools to spy, to surveil, to extract information and expose networks, to a very low tech situation where it's a young man standing at a checkpoint or maybe at a cash point who says hand over your mobile phone and starts flipping through it to check to see what kinds of information you have.

AMT: Have we ever seen this in war before?

DEIRDRE COLLINGS: Syria is the most socially mediated conflict that has ever arisen. From the very start, you had all sorts of people with phones that were capable of taking photographic evidence and transmitting images, uploading through the Internet, sending it around. The digital world has you know so connected everything and so empowered average citizens to be actually documenting and participating in the surrounding environment. But at the same time, it's now become a central threat because of its criticality, because of the information that it contains and that it carries.

AMT: Deirdre Collings, there is often a hopelessness that permeates any discussion about Syria. What do people with whom you work inside Syria want us to know?

DEIRDRE COLLINGS: I think they want us to know that there is still a very large number of people who are just trying to survive, who believe in a better future that’s going to come and that through everything they do to survive in those circumstances, demonstrate a degree of resilience and a hope for the future. And I think that that’s something that a lot of the people we work with would like the rest of the world.

AMT: Deirdre Collings, thank you.

DEIRDRE COLLINGS: Thank you.

AMT: Well, that is Deirdre Collings. She's with the SecDev Foundation in Ottawa. If you're interested in learning more about the digital aspect of the Syrian war or if you're engaging with people in insecure places such as Syria and want tips on how to stay safe online, we're recommending a series of articles at the website www.opencanada.org. The series is called The War is Just a Click Away. We're going to have links to it on our website www.cbc.ca/thecurrent. While you're there, you can click on the contact link and let us know what you're thinking as you listen to this story and others. If you're joining us partway through, you can listen there on the site. You can also download the podcast and listen on the podcast. Tweet us. We are @thecurrentCBC. Find us on Facebook as well. And stay with us because in our next half hour, earlier this week we debuted at CBC's first virtual reality documentary. The details of how you can experience Highway of Tears are on our www.cbc.ca/thecurrent. But in a few moments, we're going to be speaking to the director of that VR, Lisa Jackson. She's going to discuss working in VR. This was her first virtual reality shoot as well and she'll tell us what she's learned. But she is a documentary maker, a filmmaker—Lisa Jackson coming up next. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

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Meet Friday host disability advocate Ing Wong-Ward

Guests: Ing Wong-Ward

AMT: Hello. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and this is The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: People who want to uphold the constitution don't stand a chance of winning in a 4.5 electoral system.

VOICE 2: Unfortunately, as an American, I'm embarrassed that the campaign has devolved into this.

VOICE 3: I was actually pretty afraid walking up to the incubator the first time to see her because I was worried that she would look so alien that I wouldn’t recognize her as my daughter.

AMT: Some sounds from the week that was here on The Current. As always, we received lots of feedback from you about the stories we have been covering and here to help me go through some of your emails, tweets and posts is our Friday host, Ing Wong-Ward. She is the associate director of the Centre for Independent Living in Toronto. She's a former long-time CBC producer. This Friday she's hosting a special edition of The Current focused on disability. She's in our studio. Hi, Ing.

ING WONG-WARD: Hi, Anna Maria. How are you?

AMT: I'm well and I guess I should say we're talking about the abilities of those with disabilities as well.

ING WONG-WARD: That's right.

AMT: So what do we know about the scope of disability in Canada?

ING WONG-WARD: Well, I think what most people don't realize is how large the population of people with disabilities is in this country. You know according to Statistics Canada, it's about 15 per cent. And when you think about that actual number, think about the families, the friends, the people who are associated with people with disabilities. And yet you know it's 2016 and we're still dealing with some major systemic issues when it comes to barriers, lack of employment, housing, that kind of thing. So you know hopefully we'll tackle some of those issues tomorrow.

AMT: Well, what are the most pressing issues related to disability in Canada?

ING WONG-WARD: Well, the unfortunate thing is you know most of our population remains poor. Seventy per cent of people with disabilities are unemployed or underemployed. And these are big issues because if you can't participate economically, you're always going to be on the margins. So that is something that—because long before I arrived on the scene had been discussing with all levels of government with the private sector and yet for 30, 40 years that number has not changed and we have to ask ourselves why.

AMT: And in your own experience, how accessible and inclusive is—I want to say the country—but even just you know in your community, in your city?

ING WONG-WARD: I think it really depends. I mean as a person who's grown up with a disability, you learn little tricks, little survival skills like remembering where the accessible washrooms are in public spaces, knowing where the good curb cuts are, that kind of thing. So I think that you know people with disabilities are innovative and are able to be creative when it comes to getting around the city. But the reality is there are many, many parts of Toronto, the city in which we both live, where it's not accessible. There are many, many parts of Toronto that remain out of reach to me simply because retrofits I'm told are difficult. I don't know if that's actually the case or if it's a matter of will. And so you know that remains a great frustration.

AMT: You know the other day in Toronto, I was in rush hour traffic on a very busy street and on the other side of the street there was a man in a motorized wheelchair on the lane going like against traffic because the sidewalk was blocked off for construction. And I was watching him thinking oh my god, if somebody turns right they might not see him. But I also realized he had no choice because he couldn't get through the regular sidewalk.

ING WONG-WARD: Yeah. And I’ve found myself in situations like that. You know a year ago I was in Montreal and there was one side of the street that had no curb cut. So I crossed to the other side of the street and you know there's construction and I could see traffic moving and dusk was falling and I thought oh my goodness, I'm not visible. I'm you know dressed in a gray sweater as I normally am. And I thought you know this could end up really badly. And then I had to swerve around what was a gigantic hole that was fenced off and I thought you know how is it that this occurs in this day and age? And I think what it comes down to is that when people are doing things like planning construction, they're not thinking of people with mobility issues, you know people with visual impairments, people with a wide variety of disabilities and not just us, but other people who have to go around on wheels.

AMT: And motorized—how difficult is it to actually even have access to a motorized wheelchair?

ING WONG-WARD: Well, you know we're fortunate in the province of Ontario that the government does pay 75 per cent for mobility equipment. However, there have been cutbacks in recent months. But that's not consistent. And that's one of the issues that we'll be discussing tomorrow with Carla Qualtrough who's the federal minister responsible for persons with a disability, that you know we have this patchwork across the country where you know in some provinces you don't get wheelchairs paid for, you don't get equipment paid for. Support services are extremely limited. There are lots of people across the country who are trying to get by without the proper support and that's a real challenge. How do you participate in your community, whether it's working or not working, if you're not getting the help that you need?

AMT: What is independent living?

ING WONG-WARD: I'm glad that you asked that question. So I'm, as you mentioned, the associate director of the Centre for Independent Living here in Toronto. We're part of an umbrella of 25 centres across the country and we are members of Independent Living Canada, our national body. Independent living was a movement that was started in the United States about 50 years ago by a man named Ed Roberts who wanted to leave his iron lung and he was a polio survivor and he wanted to go to university. So he applied to the University of Berkeley California and was able to develop attendant support, that is people who help you with day-to-day living who are not nurses because he believed you don't have to have a medical degree to pull someone's socks on and that makes sense. And from there, you know the first Centre for Independent Living was developed. And the notion is that people with disabilities are the experts in their own lives, that we’re able to drive our own lives. And it sounds you know surprising to a lot of people that well, you know of course you seem like a reasonably competent person but you'd be surprised, even in this day and age, how people with disabilities are not considered competent enough to run their own affairs. So our belief is that no matter how disabled you are, no matter what your physical or cognitive limitations may be, you have a voice and that voice just needs some support. So we do things like provide peer support to help people with disabilities solve their own problems rather than having you know a doctor or other experts say this is how you should live your life. So it's a very simple concept but in many ways still radical and very relevant today.

AMT: What does Independent Living look like for you then?

ING WONG-WARD: Well, for me it means you know having choices in my life, you know being able to have things which you know we would call “normal” in society. A generation ago, it would have been I think unthinkable for me to have had the career I did as a journalist here at the CBC. It would have been unthinkable for me to have a marriage. It would have been unthinkable for me to have a child. You know it’s not that long—

AMT: Your daughter’s how old?

ING WONG-WARD: She’s eight and a half now.

AMT: Uh huh.

ING WONG-WARD: So yeah, she's a big girl. So we, you know we are at a stage where yes, some of us can attain these things but we're still the exception not the rule. You know when I think about what independent living means to me, I think about my boss Sandra Carpenter, who grew up an institution and had to fight for every single right, whether it was to access a motorized wheelchair, whether it was to go to high school, whether it was to go to university. And she's now you know she likes to say she's 62 years old and I'm outing her age on national radio, but Sandra is someone who has led and seen the changes of what disability rights looks like in this country and has facilitated independent living not just for herself but for many, many others. And the bottom line is for her, there was the point where she had no choice and no autonomy and now she does as you know as a full person.

AMT: So we're really talking about the abilities of people with disabilities—

ING WONG-WARD: Absolutely.

AMT: —that we have to see the abilities, not solely the disabilities.

ING WONG-WARD: Yes. And I think it's really important for us to acknowledge that disability exists, that it’s very real, that there's no shame in being disabled. But we need to stop stereotyping disabled people as being pitiful or superheroes or you know there is no middle ground, we have to find the sweet spot between you know being a person with a disability who has very real limitations but is also capable of many more things than people realize.

AMT: Okay. Well, Ing Wong-Ward, associate director of the Centre for Independent Living in Toronto is going to be our Friday host tomorrow. She's got a special edition focused on these very issues. But right now, she's staying in studio to help go through all our tweets, posts, emails about the stories of the week. Monday, we broadcast our public forum from Prince George, BC where we were talking about the disturbing number of Indigenous women and girls who have disappeared or been murdered on Highway 16. Some estimates run as high as 50. The so-called Highway of Tears has now come to symbolize the violence and murder perpetrated against Indigenous women and girls across this country.

ING WONG-WARD: A national inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women is now under way. Its launch was a moment of celebration for some but also trepidation. Brenda Wilson was one of our guests at the public forum in Prince George. Her sister Ramona was murdered in 1994.

SOUNDCLIP

The day that the public inquiry was announced, it was a day of overjoyment. I was getting emails and messages from quite a few people. There was joy, you know tears of joy that this was actually happening. And you know as we went through talking more about it, we realized that you know what if it's just something that they're saying to keep us quiet for now? I'm at the point where I'm skeptical about the whole thing. And you know I'm hoping that they'll be able to keep their promises.

AMT: Well, the town hall in Prince George was the first of several we at The Current will be holding across the country on the issue of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. We're continuing to hear lots of feedback from you on this issue.

ING WONG-WARD: Glenda Osnach in Stonewall, BC wrote: “It's time for Canada as a nation to stand up and deal with this issue. Someone asked if any other country had dealt with the issue of colonization in a positive way, but it doesn't matter because we can lead. In fact, we must lead. Canadians like to think that we have no racism here, but that is so far from the truth. We must get our heads out of the sand.”

AMT: Jennifer Matthews was at that public forum in Prince George, and she wrote us afterwards: “What I wanted to say tonight, but didn't want to take space away from the other voices: as a settler living on unceded Lheidli T'enneh territory, is that it is my responsibility to do the hard work of decolonizing myself. The speakers tonight had so much courage and strength. the rest of us need to do our part.”

ING WONG-WARD: On Facebook, Perveen Bajwa commented: “It made me cry a few times thinking about those young girls. I can feel the pain of all those aboriginal moms who lost their loved ones as I'm a mom. I appreciate if government sincerely helps them and actually takes some strong actions.”

AMT: Tahirih McDonnell wrote: “My heart goes out to the families and communities of the missing. Well past time to take a stand of unity; sickened by the racism and prejudices that allow for some communities and peoples to be marginalized.”

ING WONG-WARD: The cornerstone of The Current's public forum in Prince George was the release of CBC's first virtual reality documentary, Highway of Tears. It tells the story of Ramona Wilson's disappearance along the Highway of Tears through her mother, Matilda Wilson.

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Virtual reality powerfully amplifies Indigenous stories, says filmmaker

Guests: Lisa Jackson

SOUNDCLIP

On April 10^th, the RCMP notified me. They said that they had found the remains of Ramona Wilson. It just felt like I couldn’t go on anymore because that was the baby of our family.

AMT: That is Matilda Wilson speaking about her daughter Ramona who went missing along BC's notorious Highway of Tears in 1994. Her body was discovered 10 months later. Her killer has never been found. The Highway of Tears is CBC's first virtual reality documentary. Anishinaabe filmmaker Lisa Jackson is the director of the VR documentary and she joins me here in Toronto. Hello.

LISA JACKSON: Hi.

AMT: You know you haven't yet had the experience that I've had, which is watching people watch this and then be so deeply moved by four short minutes with Matilda and the Highway of Tears. But I'm going ask you anyway. The virtual reality seems to hit people at a whole other level. Why do you think that is?

LISA JACKSON: There's a term used a lot with VR, which is presence. And I think that in a way, as a viewer when you're experiencing VR, you're implicated. You're in the space with the person. So it breaks that fourth wall where we're used to watching you know the story play out in front of us. Well, in fact in VR, we're actually in the space with a person and so we're there in a space and there's a sense of almost a two-way relationship which is—can be quite complicated but it can be a really beautiful experience as well.

AMT: It's interesting. One man said to me he actually put his hand out because he thought he was so close to Matilda. He thought he was in the room with her. So Lisa, tell us how you approached telling this virtual reality story differently than the way you would make a two-dimensional film.

LISA JACKSON: Well, I think that one of the things about virtual reality is as a filmmaker, there are more limitations in a lot of ways. There's a lot of opportunity with the form, but there are certain things that you can and can't do. And one of them is you can't do a lot of cutting and editing, I mean. And so what that means is that you really have to be intentional about what exactly you want to say, what is your perspective and what are you going to show. And so in some respects, it's simplified storytelling but the power of what you do show is amplified. And so I think that it is a story where we wanted to keep the focus on Matilda and her version of the story and it's really important here I think to distinguish between the idea of what might be a more newsy or journalistic sort of rendering of the facts to actually a real human being sharing a very personal story with you. And immediately, it's very subjective. It's not objective like a typical news story. And I think that was the guiding light. And then additionally, visually to give a sense of what the Highway of Tears is about. And that's not just about a highway where these terrible crimes have happened. It is that and it is isolated. And we wanted to convey the experience of what it would have to be like if you were hitchhiking down that highway. Additionally though, it's a gorgeous territory and is the homeland of Matilda’s people and a lot of Indigenous people up there. So the fact that they live in the middle of these gorgeous mountains with beautiful forests and there's one lonely highway that has no public transit is not—well, the public transit part is the problem. It's the systems that are the problem but not necessarily the fact that they're living far away from a large urban centre.

AMT: And what do you think the potential is for this medium to address issues such as missing and murdered Indigenous women?

LISA JACKSON: Well, as a filmmaker and particularly as an Indigenous filmmaker, my entire career has been spent I can say looking at the media form as a way to get behind the headlines of things that we read about all the time and we know there are problems and they seem in some cases insurmountable. How do we deal with this big issue? How do we deal with suicide? How do we deal with the ongoing effects of residential school? But by humanizing that—and that can be done in all sorts of ways through media—it starts to feel like there's a way forward. And the word empathy is used a lot particularly in VR but the idea that it's a universal human experience that the viewer can relate to is something that I've always tried to do in my work and is again a really exciting opportunity with the VR forum.

AMT: The land is so important to so many Indigenous people. How did you see the ability to direct and bring that land to the screen in this way?

LISA JACKSON: Well, I think whenever you're talking about Indigenous anything, the land is there in the background. They're intertwined. And so in terms of VR, the sense of place and the land and in the case of the VR piece with Matilda, the land played a huge role. And it remains to be seen exactly how Indigenous perspectives will inform this heightened sense of place that exists within VR, but I think it offers a lot of very interesting options. Film is very often has to be driven by a character and narrative and even if you have more theoretical ideas, very often they have to be told through a character. I've chafed against that as a filmmaker at times because some films are very character driven but other films are more idea driven and those things you often feel harnessed towards oh, I got to find a human being that will take me through this journey. But in VR, I think we have the option to put people in more of a three-dimensional space and to explore other means of creating a narrative story structure.

AMT: So does VR help you as a filmmaker go to the places you want to go more or to disrupt sort of the traditional narrative and making of documentary films?

LISA JACKSON: What I'm learning about VR and it is truly an evolve—and the fact that the gear now is its more widely available but it’s fairly specialized. So we really are in the beginning stages. Six months from now, a year from now, it’s going to be a very different story. But the ways that VR offers opportunities, there are some challenges, real challenges, and as filmmakers a lot of the things that we get concerned about is like well, we can't tell the viewer where to look. We can't go in for a close up. We can't create a rhythm through editing. But what we can do—and I think this is really particular to Indigenous cinema in an interesting way—is that we can actually mix real documentary worlds with virtual worlds. We could create an interesting sci-fi experience. We could put you in the middle of Toronto and with the beauty of visual effects, have a real human being walking through a space that has been affected in post-production to become a sci-fi post-apocalyptic landscape. So creatively, for Indigenous filmmakers, this is a trajectory that's been going on for a while where there's been very creative use of the film form to up and—sci-fi narratives, the Western. So we have more conventional documentaries and films being made but there's been—I made a residential school musical. So there's been a lot of subversive use of the film form and I feel like that's only going to expand with the opportunities in VR to put people in a place but then to actually alter that space by bringing in a lot of the technical tools.

AMT: So tell me a little bit more about that, in ways VR is used by other indigenous artists in Canada.

LISA JACKSON: We're at the front and the VR artists working in the space. But imagineNATIVE, the film festival that's actually starting in Toronto has become very interested in this, as has TIFF. And so for example, this year at imagineNATIVE there's a digital media arcade and there's several VR pieces that have been created by Indigenous creators in that space. But they also have a very interesting commissioning project which will premiere a year from now. But over the next year they're going to have six Indigenous filmmakers use VR in a project called 2067. So instead of celebrating 150 years of Canada being in existence, which as you can imagine is a little problematic for a lot of Indigenous people, it's a projection into 2067, 150 years from now and an imagination of what Canada might look like through an Indigenous lens using VR. So these are the types of projects that offer a lot of exciting options in terms of where Indigenous filmmakers could take this form.

AMT: So this was your first VR project. It's not your last.

LISA JACKSON: [chuckles] I don't think so.

AMT: Well, it was great to be able to work with you on your first. Thank you.

LISA JACKSON: Thank you very much.

AMT: Lisa Jackson, director of Highway of Tears, CBC's first virtual reality documentary for The Current. And she joined us here in Toronto.

ING WONG-WARD: If you haven't seen it, visit our website to find out how you can view it. That’s www.cbc.ca/thecurrent. And if you missed our broadcast of the public forum, you can listen to that on our website as well. Download the podcast or listen on the CBC Radio App. And the CBC's Connie Walker is launching a new podcast, digging into one specific case on the long list of missing and murdered Indigenous women. The podcast is called Missing & Murdered: Who Killed Alberta Williams? And you can find an introductory episode today on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts.

AMT: Now on to some other stories we've been covering. Thursday we brought you the story of Fadumo Dayib. She was born to displaced Somali parents in Kenya. In her lifetime she's been a refugee, a nurse, a public health expert, an activist, a PhD candidate and a mom. Now Fadumo Dayib is running for president of Somalia, with elections slated for the end of this month.

SOUNDCLIP

I believe that it is a moral duty, it’s a civic duty, it’s a moral obligation for us to help people who are in a weaker position, people who are suffering. Particularly we have the expertise, we have the capacity, the capability. I believe doing nothing means you’re also guilty and you’re part of the problem.

ING WONG-WARD: That was Fadumo Dayib, who is running for president of Somalia. Her interview struck a chord with many of you. Chey Stevenson of Kingston, Ontario, writes: “We need stories of inspiring people like Fadumo Dayib - people of outstanding courage and wisdom who are willing to sacrifice for the good of others. She sounds like a remarkable person of the highest integrity.”

AMT: Also on Facebook, John Scanlon wondered if she was up to the job. He wrote: “I am listening to it now. Her ideas seem to lack detail. I wish her well, but she seems to be very superficial. What Somalia needs is a very strong hand with a very altruistic mindset.”

ING WONG-WARD: We're going to wrap up this morning where the program started: the final US presidential election debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Last Friday on the show, we focused specifically on Donald Trump's attitude towards women after the now-infamous 2005 recording of Mr. Trump surfaced.

SOUNDCLIP

For one thing, we’re having this dialogue and it’s respectful. And while we agree to disagree on certain political issues, I think as a woman, I agree that we do need more work in terms of helping and supporting women who are assault—and men—who are assault survivors.

AMT: That’s Mica Mosbacher, former Republican National committee finance co-chair, Fox News commentator. We heard from many of you after that. On Facebook, Paul Heglund wrote: “There is NOT even one thing about Trump that is noble. His regard for women is one of his least noble attributes. It is bewildering that any woman would support him.

ING WONG-WARD: Linda Bell of Toronto wrote: “I was sexually assaulted at work many years ago. I went home, took a shower and didn't go back. I didn't tell anyone until my daughter was going to university. I got therapy. If this man had appeared on TV and said these things on tape, I would have come forward too. This was forty years ago and I still think about it. I hope all Trump's victims come forward.”

AMT: Stephen Kishewitsch of Toronto writes: “Your guest from Fox said people shouldn't be judging him merely on allegations. Setting aside that there's an increasing number of allegations, this isn't a court proceeding where he might go to jail, it's a political contest where he might become president. And there are people who consider that in this regard, character matters enough that if there's reason to be skeptical about someone's character, that's reason enough not to vote for him.”

ING WONG-WARD: And now it's time to give credit where credit is due. The week that was on The Current was produced by Idella Sturino, Shannon Higgins, Howard Goldenthal, Ines Calabrese, Lara O'Brien, Josh Bloch, Willow Smith.

AMT: Pacinthe Mattar, Sujata Berry, Liz Hoath, Karin Marley, Kristin Nelson, John Chipman and Julian Uzielli. Our intern is Jacqueline McKay.

ING WONG-WARD: The Current's writer is Peter Mitton. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Our technical producer is Gary Francis. Our senior documentary editor is Joan Webber. And special thanks this week to network producers Anne Penman in Vancouver, Michael O'Halloran in Calgary and everyone who helped out with our Prince George remote.

AMT: Yes, a shout-out to our colleagues in Prince George. Our senior producers are Richard Goddard in Toronto, Cathy Simon in Vancouver. The executive producer of The Current is Kathleen Goldhar. Ing Wong-Ward, thanks for helping me with the mail this morning.

ING WONG-WARD: Thank you.

AMT: Ing Wong-Ward is a former long-time producer with CBC Radio. She is currently the Associate Director at the Centre for Independent Living in Toronto and tomorrow, she is the Friday host of The Current. That's our program for today. Stay with Radio One for q. Author Joseph Boyden joins guest host Candy Palmater to talk about his new novella, Wenjack, about a 12-year-old Indigenous boy who ran away from residential school to try to make his way home. Now earlier we mentioned the new CBC podcast by Connie Walker: Missing & Murdered: Who Killed Alberta Williams? The introductory episode is out now on iTunes. We're going to leave you with a bit of that now. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti Ing Wong-Ward is here tomorrow. Thank you for listening to The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: You hear about journalists getting tips from whistleblowers or anonymous sources. Brown paper envelopes filled with secret documents. But the tip that sparked this story just showed up in my email one day. The subject said: “Alberta Williams’ murder.” Intrigued, I clicked it open. All it said was: “She was murdered by [Beep Beep].” The identity of the person named in that email was just as shocking as the identity of the person who sent it. I wrote back right away then picked up the phone.

VOICE 2: When you called me back, I almost didn't even know if I should answer the phone because it was like oh my god, what have I done?

VOICE 1: I'm Connie Walker, an investigative reporter with CBC News. I'll reveal both those names in the upcoming podcast, Missing & Murdered: Who Killed Alberta Williams?

[Music: Ending theme]

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October 20, 2016 full episode transcript

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