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November 28, 2016 full episode transcript

Host: Anna Maria Tremonti

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

[Sound: big blasts and guns blazing]

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: The unmistakable ubiquitous sound of war. This from inside the part of Aleppo controlled by rebels and surrounded by government forces. In the last 24 hours, the Syrian military has announced it has taken control of at least two more districts in rebel held eastern Aleppo. In just a moment, the CBC's Margaret Evans — just out of Aleppo — shares her insights and observations on the many sides of a once vibrant city ripped apart by a conflict that seemingly will not end. Also today, a different kind of political fight.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: Trump himself, now set to take the Oval Office because of this strange system, once blasted it, tweeting in 2012 the day Mitt Romney lost, “the Electoral College is a disaster for democracy.”

AMT: Even before his flurry of tweets yesterday, Donald Trump called the system rigged. Then he won. Everyone else argued against that until he won. Now the US Electoral College, the body that actually decides the presidency, is under new scrutiny for a past that critics say was informed by slave owning policy makers and for a present that has many asking why — with a popular vote that is 2 million and counting higher than Donald Trump's — Hillary Clinton is the loser. We've got that debate in an hour. And..

SOUNDCLIP

JUSTIN TRUDEAU: To fulfill our ambitious plan, we need ideas and solutions brought forward by bright, intelligent thinkers from all walks of life. Together we will lead the way for a better tomorrow.

AMT: The prime minister turned to one disruptor, YouTube, with a message to celebrate other disruptors — startups. In half an hour, our project The Disruptors meets three Canadians whose startups are sending seismic signals into industries as diverse as construction, healthcare and financial services. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti, this is The Current.

[Music: Theme]

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CBC's Margaret Evans shares 'apocalyptic' view of Aleppo

Guests: Margaret Evans

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: Before the Syrian conflict, Aleppo was Syria's largest city, a centre of commercial life. Today it is ground zero of the forces of war tearing the country apart. Eastern Aleppo is rebel held and home to hundreds of thousands of Syrians living under siege and intense bombardment. Last week, government strikes eliminated the last of the hospitals there. Then over the weekend and into today, Syria's state media is saying the government forces have captured at least two eastern Aleppo neighbourhoods. In western Aleppo, the Syrian army continues its offensive to wrest back control of a key part of the city that has been largely destroyed. The CBC's Margaret Evans has just returned from Syria. She was in Aleppo, where she saw what life is like in a deeply divided city. And Margaret Evans joins me now from our London studio. Hello Margaret.

MARGARET EVANS: Hi Anna Maria.

AMT: So before we talk about the actual city, this is a tough place to get here. How did you actually travel through, how did you navigate getting there?

MARGARET EVANS: You have to go over land from Lebanon. So you cross the land border there and that's sort of where your journey begins, that's where your first encounter with Syrian intelligence will be. They know, you know, they knew because we had visas, that we were coming through. So they go through your gear, they take your computers, they take, you know, the identifying numbers and it's the kind of journalistic ritual. You try to get a BGAN satellite phone in and they take it off you and say, you know, very polite, here's your baggage collection ticket, you can get it on your way out. Then you've got to go to Damascus and pay your respects to the Ministry of Information officials there, gather up your permissions and then get ready to hit the road. And it should be about a four hour drive north to Aleppo but because of the war and the detours, it's a seven hour drive and we had plenty of time to count the checkpoints along the way and we went through at least 30 of them. And you see a fair bit of life along that road, you know. We saw a lot of Russian ammunition supply convoys, that sort of stuff, you see the devastation in homes and evidence of the different militias supporting the Syrian government along the way. The Hezbollah from Lebanon and some of the Iraqi Shia militias as well. So, you know, a very interesting drive in and you go through some territory that's divided between ISIS and al-Nusra on the other side, al-Nusra, the latest incarnation of al-Nusra. So, yeah, you get a sense of just how fractured the country is on your way to a very fractured city.

AMT: And as you're driving through, you're with your CBC team.

MARGARET EVANS: Yep. We have, Stephanie Jenzer was our producer and Richard Devey our camera editor.

AMT: And you had a minder?

MARGARET EVANS: We did have a minder, we had layers of government attention, [chuckles] I feel like. The minder we had to pick up in Damascus and drive to Aleppo. We also had a translator who worked for a company which is close to the Ministry of Information so you’re never really quite sure of your translation, so we had it double checked. And yeah, so it expands your group and they basically, without them you can't travel, you can't get through those 30 checkpoints, you couldn't get there if you didn't agree to take this minder with you.

AMT: And so the minder basically listens to everything you do?

MARGARET EVANS: Yes. I mean, they didn't come into, she didn't come into our hotel rooms but they're there. And if you try to strike up a conversation with somebody on your own, privately on the street, you know, the minder will come up and listen. So you can't really ever have a purely free conversation. We did manage in a hospital once to say look, the young man speaks English, he's clearly vulnerable, this is the young man who'd been shot through the stomach by a sniper, and we managed to clear the room, but that's rare. The minder is really with you every step of the way. And, you know, we tried to kind of signal that in all of our reporting, that we're with the government side here and that's why we're getting access.

AMT: Mm. They can sort of be there for who you talk to but of course what you see is available. So tell us what Aleppo looked like as you went in. We know it's divided. Give us some sense of what you could see.

MARGARET EVANS: You know, it just, it's very topsy turvy. The initial drive in is a stretch of road where one of those roads, you know, where the driver is going to beat 60 because it's, you know, it's kind of a front line and you're driving behind these makeshift berms or barriers to, you know, to basically protect the car from gunfire. And, you know, that sort of all of these old oil barrels and gas bottles lined up against each other. You know, there are parts of the city where you're crossing, not driving with, but crossing a main highway, again behind berms. And when you get in there, you're coming into government held territory and it seems deceptively normal. You know, my memories of a lot of young women exiting the university, you know, and life on the streets. We got there the day before the Syrian government started the resumption of its airstrikes. You couldn't get to the east side but we got awfully close to, we walked along the front line and saw the neighbourhoods where there's been so much damaging and I think that's almost the most surprising thing to me. You know, we all see these drone pictures and the footage but it is so much more unimaginable than you think, the level of destruction in that city.

AMT: What's it like to walk down some of those streets, Margaret?

MARGARET EVANS: It's eerie and, you know, the last time I had been to Aleppo was in 2003, so it was a very different city and we had access because we were traveling with some of the Syrian soldiers to the Old City around the Citadel. And, you know, half that citadel is now in government control but behind it is rebel held territory. And it's just, you know, I keep using the word apocalyptic but that's really what it looked like, it was like a moonscape. And, you know, very occasionally signs of life, you know, somebody kind of flitting around a corner or a soldier. And cats, you know, meowing but very very eerie. And the other thing about these frontline neighbourhoods, you know, ones where people are still living, so not in the Old City but another part of the front line. You know, we went up into the building to view kind of the sniper holes from the Syrian government side. So you go behind these big sheets that they hang in the street to shield them from the view of snipers on the other side. So the rebels, the opposition fighters are on the other side, we're looking through this, you know, seemingly abandoned building and thinking, you know, it's just taken over by soldiers and then you see a couple of little girls come out. You know, they've come home for their lunch and they're going back to school with their backpacks on and their hair carefully brushed. You know, and they're living in that building, they're living right there on that front line. And there are all sorts of people living in that precarious state. And when, you know, the whole city can hear the bombs falling, when they're bombing, the whole city shakes.

AMT: You talk about in your reports, you talk about a rolling thunder huh? The bombs.

MARGARET EVANS: Yeah. It just, it just doesn't stop. And it's wave after wave and the really big ones you do feel.

AMT: And so these are the bombs that are, that the Syrians are dropping on or sending over or the Russians are in eastern Aleppo? What bombs are you hearing?

MARGARET EVANS: It’s the Syrian government forces. The Russians denied that they were bombing at this stage, although they did have a very heavy bombing campaign in October and quite often they're flying a bit too high for you to actually see and identify them. But Syrian pro-regime forces, let's say, flying over the eastern part of the city, you hear the planes, you sometimes see them, you see the bombs coming down on the east side. There is shelling back. The rebels, the opposition fighters are shelling the west as well and they are taking hits. When we were there, we visited a hospital and two days later that hospital was hit by a mortar and weirdly the day before that, the director or the administrator of the hospital, whom, you know, showed us around was killed when he was hit by a shell, when he was just walking across the street. So there, you know, the West is taking a hit as well but it's not the same ferocity when you're talking about air power and that air power of course has, you know, changed the direction of the war especially since the Russians have come in.

AMT: Talking about the destruction, there was an area that you went to that has changed hands a couple of times, this district 10 70. What is it?

MARGARET EVANS: It's a housing project and, you know, in the typical, you know, way of the world's ironies, it was originally, well it was a housing project and then the government, there were so many internally displaced people in Syria that a few years back it decided well, here's a good place for refugees to go. And then it was taken over by the rebels and a lot of fighting came this past year or the past couple of years, 2014. So it was rebel held and it's just been taken, we were there just after the government had wrested it back from the rebels and it was a wasteland. And when we were in, they were just allowing some people in to go and to try to see if they could salvage any of their belongings. But again, these are people who now they've been refugees twice and there we met a rather extraordinary young woman who had decided she wanted to go back and live there, she preferred that to the tent on the street. She was with her two kids, her mother, a brother and a niece. And, you know, living in the corner of this bombed out building with nothing left in it and she was kind of prevailing upon her neighbours not to leave saying, you know, if you stay here they'll have to rebuild it. You know, if we stay here they'll have to give us a bus to some shops. You know, it was this kind of desperate desire I think to impose some form of control on her life when every other aspect of it had been taken away.

AMT: I watched that, that you filed on for The National on CBC Television. It's interesting because it's an example of a civilian caught in the middle, you're on the government controlled side, you still have this woman trying to find a way to live with nothing. Like, doesn't matter, I mean, in some ways, I don't want to say it doesn't matter, I don't want to belittle it. But civilians are caught no matter where they are.

MARGARET EVANS: Yeah, I think that's the of course, the great tragedy of the conflict. And it's been going on for so long now, for five years. And, you know, people are blown back and forth by this conflict and in the city itself it's just this terrible rhythm that has become a part of their life. And you're right, they're caught between both sides. And, you know, I still remember that young man in the hospital I was telling you about, who had been shot by the sniper and I just said how do you feel? And he said I feel chilled and I don't want to go back to my home neighbourhood. And then he just said, you know, Syria's tired, Syrians are so tired.

AMT: I have a clip actually, of someone else in the hospital. This is Haithem Kurabi, the head of the emergency department at the university hospital. Let's listen to him.

SOUNDCLIP

[Sound: crowd murmurs]

Aleppo is a big city and a great city, we have great people and we need peace. Really, we need peace. In the west and east of Aleppo, we need peace. The people in the east is our family and our neighbour, are not enemy. We need to shake hand together and to live again.

AMT: Interesting. How easy, likely can that be? Even if you go beyond warring factions to regular people, can that wish for peace. How likely is that soon?

MARGARET EVANS: It's a good question and I was wondering about it while I was thinking of the last time I was in Damascus, which was 2012. And the mood there was very very different, in that there were fewer people on the streets. It was that kind of phase of a war where neighbour is turning on neighbour and, you know, you're starting to be suspicious of the person who lives down the street, sectarianism is starting to come in. And when Dr. Kurabi was saying this, you know, it made me think about that and about this sort of like can they still reach the hand across the other side. I mean, Aleppo is interesting because it's such a densely packed big city and it's sort of like both sides are aware of what's happening to the other. But, you know, in the end there will be a defeated and a victorious party. And, you know, the cost of the war for those who've been fighting it, those who will be on the losing end is so high. You know, if there is a peace or an ease, it will be a forced one to begin with and the notion of reconciliation is, you know, difficult in any conflict.

AMT: You did find a place, a city or a town called Qudsaya, just outside of Damascus, where they say they're trying to reconcile. What's going on there?

MARGARET EVANS: Well, it is kind of, some people would call it a forced reconciliation because it's what's happened or happening in Aleppo as we speak. But in other parts of the country where the rebels had kind of dug in and then found themselves surrounded by the Syrian armed forces or the pro-regime forces and basically starved out. You know, you hear in the news talk about the green buses, oh the green buses are on the street. Those are the buses that the government puts up saying you have, you know, you have to come out, lay down your weapons, you can get on these buses and we'll take you to, you can go to a rebel controlled part of the country and stay there but you must put down your heavy weapons and go. And, you know, for them, for those who do that it is a surrender. But then the town can start to get back to normal, in a sense. So in this particular town, this is what happened. The rebels, they gave up. They left, their family members left with them. Some people would go because they didn't trust the government to give them an amnesty and they would not believe that they could be integrated back into society. But still, you know, this is a town that had been under siege for four straight months, you know, no food getting in, no water, that sort of stuff. And that was happening to them over the years quite regularly, there’d be long periods of siege. And so this was shortly after the reconciliation as they call it. And people were just, it was a very very interesting place to go because they were so welcoming to a foreign news crew. They were so interested in talking to us and sort of offering us oranges and the falafel, the falafel man wanted to give us falafel. And there were smiles and whispers and, you know, I was doing a piece to camera as we call it. And a man came up to tell me afterwards, you know, he said listen, you know, he said he made a point of finding me afterwards and saying, you know, the reconciliation doesn't mean people support the government, it just means that they don't have any choices. And I think that's what's happening in this conflict is that the moderate opposition really has been stripped away and people feel they don't have a choice, they have either, you know, a terrible kind of extremist option or they have a government that, you know, that was so reviled that the whole country rose up against them. Well, not the whole country but a large part of the country rose up against them in 2011. And that's basically, those are their choices and they're choosing, I guess, to live. And, you know, one of my strongest memories of that is a little boy coming up and asking us if he could sing a song for us. You know, and he, you know, kind of smoothed down his hair and called Richard over and he came to film him and he started to sing. And he wasn't really singing he was rapping and we didn't know at the time what the words were. But it was this amazing story about Syria and about how everything was happening to make it worse and that destroyed it ourselves but we promise you we will rebuild it. And it's about mothers crying for their children and their lost sons. And it just, it said so much and especially that he was wanting to offer this up to us. He wanted us to hear this song.

AMT: Mm. How old was he?

MARGARET EVANS: Oh, I guess he was about ten I'd say. He was pretty young.

AMT: So he would have known really, war a long time then?

MARGARET EVANS: Yeah, old enough certainly. And you find that with a lot of the kids, that there is a wisdom there that's kind of sad and heartbreaking to see because with that wisdom there comes a little bit of cynicism. Just I guess, just kind of a hunching, you know, a bracing for what comes next.

AMT: Well, we’ll go out with a little bit of that, Margaret, we've got that sound of that little boy. So we'll end with that. Thank you. Thank you for your time and your work.

MARGARET EVANS: Thanks so much for having me.

AMT: Here's that, here's the song right now. Margaret Evans is CBC foreign correspondent based in London. And this is the Syrian boy with this impromptu little performance he gave to Margaret and her crew.

SOUNDCLIP

Hey.

[Arabic language rapping]

AMT: Well, among the things that he's saying there is that the sounds of explosions have replaced the sounds of birds. Where is our conscience? There are explosions everywhere, fear everywhere, the dead everywhere. Hey, that's Syria. A little bit of rap from a ten-year-old in Syria. Stay with us. The news is next and then we're talking startups in Canada. This is The Current.

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Canadian startup founders on disruptive innovation

Guests: Michael Katchen, Josh Landy, Mallorie Brodie

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

[Music: Theme]

AMT: Still to come, Donald Trump made 12 angry tweets yesterday, claiming the popular vote. He previously called the US Electoral College a disaster for democracy. Of course, that was before the Electoral College was poised to hand him the White House. Since then, others are also questioning the existence of the Electoral College. That story in half an hour. But first, the Uber for snowmobiles, Airbnb for hockey rinks or Tinder for lumberjacks? We’re diving into the exciting world of Canadian startups.

[Music: The Disruptors Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

STEVE JOBS: Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact. And that is everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.

AMT: Well that is the technology visionary and Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. One of the ultimate disruptors and an inspiration to startup entrepreneurs everywhere, including here in Canada. Of course, Silicon Valley may be synonymous with startups. But today, as part of our season long project The Disruptors, we are getting the lay of the startup land here in Canada. It is a far more dynamic scene than many realize. Canada's startup community is having a moment right now. Big successes like Hootsuite and Wattpad have created momentum and attracted attention. And according to Google Canada, outside Silicon Valley the Toronto-Waterloo corridor represents the highest concentration of startups on planet Earth. So today we're talking to disruptors from the business world, the founders of three different Canadian startups. Joshua Landy is an intensive care doctor and the Co-founder and Chief Medical Officer of Figure1. Michael Katchen is the Founder and CEO of Wealthsimple. They are both with me in our Toronto studio. And Mallorie Brodie is the CEO and Co-founder of Bridgit. She is in Kitchener, Ontario. Hello, welcome to you all. Good morning.

JOSHUA LANDY: Good morning.

AMT: OK and there is no, I guess, Tinder from lumberjacks right? We're going to be a little more serious. [laughs]

JOSHUA LANDY: You'd have to ask a lumberjack, I suppose.

AMT: Josh Landy, let's start with you. How would you define a startup?

JOSHUA LANDY: I suppose I’d say that a startup is a company that’s designed for accelerated growth. Both in terms of its staff, its infrastructure and in the population that it's wishing to reach. So things have to move fast and grow fast and at an accelerated pace is usually how I would describe a startup.

AMT: How would you describe Figure1? Tell us about it.

JOSHUA LANDY: [chuckles] Well, Figure1’s a startup company here in Toronto. And we basically make a tool for doctors, nurses and other licensed health care professionals that lets them connect and collaborate around cases by uploading a picture describing what's going on and either asking for help teaching or learning about medicine, in a way that looks a lot like other types of social media that people are already familiar with.

AMT: So almost an Instagram for doctors?

JOSHUA LANDY: I'm not a huge fan of describing us compared to other things, only because even though the layer on top makes it look a lot like social media, we think a lot about the mission of our company trying to help people collaborate on healthcare issues around the world and get help when you need it. So that mission is what drives me, not what the app looks like.

AMT: Fair enough. Where'd you get the idea?

JOSHUA LANDY: Well, it was a behaviour that I saw amongst my colleagues several years ago. We were all using our phones to communicate around cases and that's because it's such an efficient way of communication. And we already have all the habits and behaviours that go along with communication on a mobile phone. When I was at Stanford as a visiting scholar in 2012, I was studying how young physicians are using their smartphones for medical education. What I found and what we found as a group was that people are using their phones to collect cases, describe, document, teach and learn together. And I thought this would be a really great way to continue doing this in real life since we're using our phones all the time anyway. So we built in some privacy protections, we built in ways for people to learn and search and index all those incoming cases. And rather than sinking down to the bottom of people's inboxes, those discussions now can be part of a global conversation about how to treat illness and discover new ways of providing therapy to people who need it.

AMT: And how disruptive has Figure1 been?

JOSHUA LANDY: [chuckles] Well, I think it's been moderately successful so far. Although, I think the thing that we're trying to disrupt is probably one of the bureaucratic layers or administrative layers of healthcare that make it very difficult for information to get where it needs to go from where it is. So if a doctor needs help they can get in touch with a doctor who can give help without needing to go up and down through the layers of the administrative healthcare environment.

AMT: How quickly is your company growing?

JOSHUA LANDY: Well, it's been three years since we started. We now have well over a million health care professionals in over 190 countries. And things continue to grow, so I guess that's the pace that I can describe so far.

AMT: That sounds fast to me. [laughs]

JOSHUA LANDY: [laughs]

AMT: Michael Katchen, what is Wealthsimple?

MICHAEL KATCHEN: Yeah, Wealthsimple is a wealth management service that makes investing easy and accessible. And, you know, unlike a traditional investment adviser, where if you wanted to get started with an account you got to fill out 30 or 50 pages of paperwork, walk it into a bank branch to get started, might take weeks to open the account and fund it. With us you download our app or go to our website. It's five minutes, it’s a really simple experience. And another issue we're solving is access because most financial advisers won't want to work with a client unless they have a million dollars or more. Our clients are typically young professionals that deserve and need access to investment advice and want to get started with investing and we make it so simple for anyone to get started.

AMT: And how is that different from for example going online and e-trading?

MICHAEL KATCHEN: So if you were to invest yourself, that's certainly one option. A lot of young professionals and any one of any age really, don't have the time or interest or wherewithal to manage their own money, that's a huge responsibility. So what we offer is a managed service, so we actually do all the work for you. We give you access to experts and advice whenever you need it to actually get a really great solution and one of the best parts about it, we do it at a really low cost. So the average Canadian pays some of the highest fees in the world when it comes to investment management, the average Canadian pays 2.5 per cent for mutual fund, we charge a half per cent or less. So it's a fundamentally different service at a really low cost. And we've been growing really fast. Also, we're just two years old, so a very new company and we now have 25,000 customers across the country, almost a billion dollars in assets, so we’re growing pretty fast.

AMT: And well, fast enough for The Globe and Mail to call you the 28-year-old CEO terrorizing Bay Street.

MICHAEL KATCHEN: [chuckles]

AMT: So how are you disrupting traditional banking?

MICHAEL KATCHEN: I think, you know, the media often calls this disruptive. I don't really see it that way but if there is one thing that we're disrupting, it's the experience around investing. I think traditionally people think investing is this thing where, you know, you've got to have a personal relationship, it's all built on that relationship and trusted relationship where my adviser may take me to lunch or golfing or, you know, come meet my family to understand my investment goals. The reality of, you know, apps like Figure1 or Uber have changed our expectations about how easy it should be for us to do all the sorts of services that we want or need in life and it's time that investing followed suit. So we make that so simple for people that I think young professionals in particular have just come to appreciate the simplicity, the transparency and ease with which they can actually invest their money.

AMT: Not as intimidating.

MICHAEL KATCHEN: That's exactly right.

AMT: OK. Mallorie Brodie, hello.

MALLORIE BRODIE: Hi there, thanks for having me.

AMT: Well, your company deals with the construction industry. How did you come up with the idea?

MALLORIE BRODIE: Bridgit is a punch list management solution, so for those homeowners out there that have heard of the word construction defect, that's the problem that we're looking to help solve for large scale construction companies. And so essentially the way we came across this idea was my business partner and I walked onto a job site. So we knew that we were going to be building a solution for the construction industry and we said, you know, what better way to figure out, you know, what some of the most pressing problems are for team members on large scale construction sites then going on site and asking what frustrates them, what costs them money. So after doing this about 500 times, we determined that this punch list management process was one of the most costly and frustrating processes on the job site. And then we set out in 2013 to start building a mobile and web application to help solve this for some of the largest builders in Canada and the US.

AMT: What does that mean, the management problem that hamstrings them? What is it, what do they find a problem?

MALLORIE BRODIE: So specifically, it's called deficiency management. And so essentially, it's this process on site where the general contractor, so the person managing a project has to identify different construction defects, assign those problems to the subcontractors and resolve them before the project is done. And you can just imagine a large scale hospital project for instance, there's hundreds of people on the job site, over 50 different stakeholders, there are so many moving parts, it’s an evitable part of the of the process and it's something that currently is being solved mostly through excel spreadsheets, email, handwritten notes, walkie talkies you name it. And this was a process that we needed to streamline in order to help them finish the job faster and ultimately pass off the new bill to whoever the client would be.

AMT: So construction culture and startup culture both have a reputation for being male dominated. You and your partner are women, you're also in your twenties, am I right?

MALLORIE BRODIE: That's right.

AMT: How much of a ground breaker are you then?

MALLORIE BRODIE: [chuckles] You know, it's so interesting because we get asked that all the time and, you know, absolutely, you know, it is somewhat uncommon for two females to be in the startup world or in the construction world but we always kind of looked back at, you know, the education that we had and the family history. So both our grandfathers were in the industry. My business partner Lauren, she's a civil structural engineer, so even before we started the business, she was working on the job site in her summers and I was in the entrepreneurship program at Western and so in all the pieces kind of came together that it didn't end up being this particularly, you know, large jump for us to end up in the space that we're in. But yeah, we're definitely two of the few.

AMT: And you say you did 500 interviews with clients to get the product right?

MALLORIE BRODIE: Absolutely. So we would walk on site every morning before class, as we were finishing up our fourth year at Western University. And, you know, people were a little bit shocked at first I think when we'd show up. At the time it was kind of funny, I had my mom Sebring convertible, so you can just imagine pulling up to some large scale job sites. And we would walk on site and sure enough we knew what we're talking about, we were there to help. And so, you know, people wouldn't just talk to us that first time but they would invite us back to their site meetings, you know, on a weekly basis to continue learning about their process because they felt confident that we would, you know, eventually be able to build something to really solve the pain points that they were experiencing.

AMT: And so how successful have you been? What’s your client list look like?

MALLORIE BRODIE: Yeah, so we're working with many of the largest builders in Canada and within the last year have grown most of our business to actually be in the US. Our team grew from ten people to 30 people this year. So that's of course due to the revenue growth that we've been experiencing. So it's been a good few years for Bridgit.

AMT: Are you going to get rid of cost overruns in the construction business? [laughs]

MALLORIE BRODIE: That’s our goal. [chuckles] It’s definitely an ambitious goal to tackle but, you know, there are so many different processes on the job site that we’ll go after it bit by bit.

AMT: Josh Landy, there's a perception that startups have a real bro culture, in that they're staffed by young men with tech backgrounds. How true or untrue is that?

JOSHUA LANDY: I think it really depends on where that startup is and who started it. I think here in Canada, we're probably in a slightly different situation and I say that only based on the small number of startups that I've visited here in Toronto and across the country. But what I've seen is that a lot of Canadians typically import their own values. And so those values of whatever they are come with the founders of the company. You imprint your cultural DNA on the way people interact at that place. And so what I've been seeing is that people are, in Canadian startups, typically have a focus a lot more on diversity and equality in the workplace, making sure that people have a positive experience working there and work really hard to retain talented engineers and staff. It's in the environment, especially in Toronto, where there's a lot of startups growing, I think it's really important to have positive workplace culture and because of that I think companies like ours have been able to flourish and grow.

AMT: You didn't see that in the States? Positive workplace culture.

JOSHUA LANDY: I did. You know what, I haven't been to too many startups in the States but I guess I'm just comparing them to the classic stereotype.

AMT: Mm. Well, Michael, you moved back to Toronto from San Francisco to start Wealthsimple. Why’d you come home?

MICHAEL KATCHEN: I came home because I saw something really special happening in the Canadian startup ecosystem. When I moved to California, you know, made a huge number of friends from Toronto that were working in the startup environment there. And what fascinated me is in my three years in San Francisco, all of them moved home and all of them started businesses in Toronto. And I saw something happening here and I wanted to move home to be part of it. And, you know, it's been a fascinating experience since coming here because it feels like we're in a watershed moment here in Toronto and Canada in general. There's a huge amount of support for what's happening in the technology sector. Huge amount of support at kind of the government level, you know, at the national, provincial and municipal level for tech and tech talent. And also kind of a coming of age of these Toronto tech companies. And I think Shopify’s been the poster child of this in the last year. But just the huge amount of excitement around it. And I wanted to be a part of that. We wanted to build the next great Canadian tech company coming from Toronto.

AMT: And Josh, how did the startup culture here in Canada help get Figure1 off the ground?

JOSHUA LANDY: Well, I think the ecosystem, especially at the ground level is really positive here right now. And when we were starting out, there was many many supportive places that were offering to house us or provide us with advice and even very early on, investment support. And so I think taking advantage of the resources where they are available makes it really easy to get your feet wet and take that first big step. Of course, you know, after you take the first big step, the next big step is ten times bigger and the next one after that ten times bigger. So--

AMT: We often look at the states because it does have ten times the population and presumably ten times the number of people willing to invest. Do you find the investment culture here in Canada?

JOSHUA LANDY: It’s changing. I would say that, you know, in terms of, you know, to start a business you need a few things right? You need talent, capital and a market. Those are kind of the three key ingredients to building a business. And I'd say we have the talent problem solved really in many ways here in Canada because we have great technology talent coming out of Waterloo and Toronto and great visa programs now and I think increasingly so to bring great foreign talent over. There’s some maybe this agreement around that.

MICHAEL KATCHEN: Yeah, a little bit.

JOSHUA LANDY: But the capital side, you know, huge amounts of new capital investing. The third is the market and I would argue we as Canadians need to be bolder in terms of the businesses we're building. One of my favorite books is Why Mexicans Don’t Drink Molson. I don't know if you know this one. You know, we have all the ingredients here in Canada to be a world leader in all these different industries and the beer industry is one of them. And yet for some reason we don't put those ingredients together to win. And I'd like to see more Canadian companies take a bold vision and go international and try and build these fantastic global champions coming from Canada.

AMT: Mallorie Brodie, what are you thinking? What hurdles do Canadian startups face?

MALLORIE BRODIE: Yeah, I totally second what Mike was just saying. And I think when we first started, the temptation was to, you know, stay local. In the beginning anyways, at least, you know, prove out our market in Canada, in the Toronto area and then it was one investor who said to us, you know, why haven't you gone to the US? And we kind of sat back like oh, I don't know really, we should we should go to the US. And then sure enough within, I think it was three months, over 60 per cent of our revenue was coming from the US. And we just found that, you know, we didn't have to actually be in the US in order to make sales in the US and that totally changed our business. And of course, you know, it's not global yet. You know, we're not, you know, everywhere in the world by any means but I think if startups can take that perspective far earlier on, they’ll set themselves up for growth a lot sooner, and the foundation of their company.

AMT: Are there changes you'd like to see that would help grow the sector Mallorie?

MALLORIE BRODIE: I think the one challenge that Mike also brought up is just around talent. And so that's something that as a Canadian company, you know, we ultimately have not grown as many massive companies as the US has. And so we also don't have a talent that has gone through that rapid growth to the extent that some of the US markets do. And so I think, you know, anything you can do to make recruitment easier, to bring in the talent to Canada, to bring in those individuals that have, you know, rapidly scaled some of the largest companies in the US is something that will really really help companies in the Canadian market accelerate.

AMT: Your colleagues here are nodding. I'm calling you all colleagues because you're all doing this.

JOSHUA LANDY: We feel that way too.

AMT: And now I’m connecting you all. But so what does that mean when you talk about talent? Because we hear that once in awhile. Who do you need to work with that you don't have access to now?

MICHAEL KATCHEN: Sure. So one of the things, for example, our company has been looking for somebody who can help scale our company. Instead of going from, you know, the first customer to the first million, we're looking for somebody who can help us scale it from that post first million to post ten million. And you really need somebody who's done that before because really in this day and age, that still is a is a rare skill. So being able to find somebody who's done that in Canada, there just haven't been as many technology companies who have started out, grown very large and then shed the talented people to start their own things. Whereas in Silicon Valley, there are many many perhaps hundreds of these mini generations that sort of shed their like the decidua of those, being the talented people, who then seed the ground with their own ideas or join young companies to help them grow big.

AMT: So when we hear tech company executives talking about the need for visas to be opened up for foreign workers, that's what we're talking about?

MICHAEL KATCHEN: That's what I'm thinking about.

JOSHUA LANDY: I would say there's a few different things. So I'd say, you know, when you talk about the broad tech community, that's certainly something we feel at this table is scale up talent is a huge barrier. I would argue though for Canada there's another big category, which is if we think about the bets that we as a country need to place to win technology over the next ten years, you know, they are in areas like artificial intelligence and machine learning and quantum computing, you know, in healthcare and sciences. And I think the thing we need to do is say how do we attract the absolute best talent in the world, the experts that are wanting to work on the hardest problems in these fields to do that here in Canada? And I think that's a big program of how do we create the research dollars, the funding for these startups to actually afford that sort of talent. And then the visa programs that actually let them come here and work on those problems in Canada. That's one of the big issues I think facing our country to win globally.

AMT: And you're saying you essentially have to do this with government, you can't do it solely as individual entrepreneurs?

MICHAEL KATCHEN: Yeah.

JOSHUA LANDY: I think you need a government, you know, industry partnership and I'd say, you know, kudos to the governments of all levels because there is a huge appetite to working with the technology community on these problems. Minister Bains has this new innovation agenda and budget that's going to be coming out very soon. You've seen a whole cohort of meetings, you know, across the startup ecosystem about what should go into that budget. It seems like there's a real energy around this and I'm certainly excited about what that could mean.

AMT: Mallorie Brodie, we've called you disruptors. What are some of the common characteristics of startup entrepreneurs?

MALLORIE BRODIE: I think you absolutely have to be relentless. That’s something that definitely comes up very commonly in the startup world. But any entrepreneur that you speak to, you know, even at the size that we're at has gone through enormous challenges, often to kind of get the traction, to get the team together, all the pieces together, the investors, in order to get to the stage that they’re at. And so, you know, as soon as someone says no that should just be the beginning of whatever it is you're going after. So I think relentless is really one common trait that probably all of us possess to an extent.

AMT: Michael Katchen, what makes a good disruptive startup idea?

MICHAEL KATCHEN: I think, you know, the best ideas are when you solve real problems. And I think it's best when you solve a problem you understand. So for us, you know, with Wealthsimple, we sold a business and my friends made a little money and they wanted to figure out well, what should we do with it? So I tried to help them figure out how to invest it in a really smart simple way and it was through that experience I realized there was a gap in the market, where my friends needed a way to invest and there wasn't really a service out there for them — so I decided to build it. And I think that's the best is when, you know, you understand the problem and you can solve it yourself. And then if you can solve it for your friends and people like you, that's a really great way to build a business.

JOSHUA LANDY: Hear hear.

AMT: Josh Landy, do you agree?

JOSHUA LANDY: I couldn't agree more. And I think what Michael points out correctly is that you need to be inside the problem that you're trying to solve so that you can know what you're trying to solve for. People who are trying to change the system from the outside don't always understand what the nuances are. And that was something that we did with Figure1 is design the app so you can use it with one hand because you've got other things to do in the healthcare environment. So it's things like that, taking into account people's workflow or just the flow of their life. And that comes with a certain degree of understanding the people you're serving.

AMT: So as we look to the future, we've had waves of technological disruption, the last two being social and mobile. What's the next disruption, social disruption, any idea?

MICHAEL KATCHEN: I think we're nowhere near the end of the mobile disruption, certainly not in financial services. I think there's just a huge amount of runway left with that and what's to come. But, you know, the big ones that you hear about that I think are really going to start to play a meaningful role are artificial intelligence, machine learning and Canada needs to know these terms because we've got a lead right now. We've got some of the absolute experts in the world working on those problems here. But we're losing some of them to the US competition that are really trying to invest in these spaces. So I think we need to understand that and make sure we protect our lead and build on it.

AMT: Josh Landy, what's the technology most likely to disrupt healthcare?

JOSHUA LANDY: I think it's going to be the mobile device again. I mean, we've done a bit of internal calculation just to find out and it looks like the amount of excess computing power that exists on a smartphone can be up to five times the amount of computing power that's available on the regular computers in the hospital. So if you're looking for spare places to be doing calculations to be doing computers work, we're carrying around devices that are five times more powerful. We carry them with us everywhere and they have way more sensors than they ever did before. I think we're going to start to see not just in apps or websites but in the interconnectivity of devices and the ability to deliver services on the device that you're already carrying around with you all the time anyway.

AMT: Mallorie, what are you thinking? What's the technology most likely to disrupt the construction industry then?

MALLORIE BRODIE: I really have to echo both Josh and Mike on the mobile device. Absolutely. Ever since we started, say you have 50 different stakeholders on the job site. You know, when we started a couple of years ago, the general contractor, they had iPads, they had their own smart phone devices. And then sure enough a year later that came down to the subcontractor level and sure enough it will absolutely come down to the worker level as well and so I think it's just the most powerful way for these large teams to communicate as they're on the go. And so I think we'll just continue to see grow there for a while to come.

AMT: Goodbye walkie talkie. [laughs] Thank you all for being part of this discussion really interesting to hear about the work you're doing. Thank you.

MANY VOICES: Thank you.

AMT: That's Joshua Landy, Dr. Joshua Landy, Co-founder and Chief Medical Officer of Figure1. Michael Katchen is the Founder and CEO of Wealthsimple, they're both with me in our Toronto studio. Mallorie Brodie is the CEO and Co-founder of Bridgit. She joined us from Kitchener, Ontario. If you run a startup, tell us about your experience. Tweet us @TheCurrentCBC, find us on Facebook. Email us from our site cbc.ca/thecurrent. And stay with us. Coming up next, two million and counting is Democrat Hillary Clinton's lead in the popular vote. A lead US President-elect Donald Trump dismisses in his latest series of tweets that went out yesterday. We're looking at calls to reform the US Electoral College, not to mention Canada's own system, in about 90 seconds. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti, this is The Current.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: Hello, I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and this is The Current. Last week, our Friday host Duncan McCue was talking about aliens, not talking to them because that would be quite the coup. But talking about how to communicate with extraterrestrials. We spoke with Douglas Vakoch, who's president of METI International, which is an organization dedicated to messaging extraterrestrial intelligence, hence METI. Here he is describing what he'd like to hear back from aliens.

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What I would most want to hear back is something that would challenge my preconceptions. That is I think the greatest advantage of this whole project. The fact that as we think about what we would want to say, what our hopes and our fears are, we come to better understand ourselves. So if we went on for decades transmitting and never getting a reply back, I think just shifting our focus to a long term perspective would be benefit enough.

AMT: Well, after that interview we received a lot of comments. Tim Baker thought Mr. Vakoch was wrong in wanting to reach out to aliens tweeting, “METI International will rethink that when the aliens start eating us.” Hilary Knight emailed, “given recent events in the state of the planet in general, my message to aliens is give us a wide berth. Ain't no intelligent life here.” And Ross Campbell of Sonora Island, BC wrote this, “your discussion regarding humans contacting extraterrestrial intelligence is frustratingly myopic. Why waste time and energy attempting to contact beings from outer space when we live side by side with cetaceans such as whales, dolphins and porpoises. We swim beside them, feed them, listen to their songs and then ignore them whilst we search the heavens, waiting for some entity to send us a burst of Morse code. Let's crack the communications code with the non-human entities we already live with.” Well if you missed that segment about talking to extraterrestrials, you can find it on our website cbc.ca/thecurrent or download the CBC Radio app and listen there. We always want to communicate with you, send us your thoughts by going to our website cbc.ca/thecurrent, click on the contact link. We're on Facebook and Twitter @TheCurrentCBC. And of course, this is The Current on CBC Radio One. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti.

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Post-U.S. election: How much weight should the popular vote have in the electoral system?

Guests: Mark Weston, Jeff Jacoby, Kady O’Malley

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MICHAEL MOORE: There needs to be a mass uprising against the Electoral College and we need to fight and do whatever we can to see that he does not take office on January 20th. He's an illegitimate president, he does not have the vote of the people.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: Well that is documentary filmmaker and liberal activist Michael Moore giving voice to something many of Hillary Clinton's supporters are feeling right now. How is it that their candidate can lead the national popular vote by more than two million ballots, something like 2.4 million right now, yet still lose the race to Republican Donald Trump? The answer of course is the Electoral College, in the critical votes there Trump leads Clinton 290 to 232. Although the state of Wisconsin has approved Green Party candidate Jill Stein’s request for a recount there, an effort Hillary Clinton's campaign has now joined. And recounts could also be held in the states of Pennsylvania and Michigan. But to Michael Moore and others, it is the system itself that is flawed. They believe the Electoral College contest violates a fundamental democratic tenet, one person one vote, by appearing to give some Americans votes more weight than others depending on the state in which they live. And that comes as no surprise that debates over reforming the system have become especially heated in the past few weeks. We have two guests with two different views on this standing by to weigh in. Mark Weston is the author of The Runner-Up Presidency: The Elections That Defied America's Popular Will (and How Our Democracy Remains in Danger). He's in Miami, Florida. And Jeff Jacoby is an op-ed columnist with The Boston Globe. And he joins us from Boston. Hello everyone, welcome.

MARK WESTON: Good morning.

JEFF JACOBY: Good morning.

AMT: I'm going to start with you, Mark Weston. Hillary Clinton's lead in the popular vote continues to grow. How significant is that?

MARK WESTON: It's tremendously significant. America cannot pretend to be a democracy if the losing candidate becomes president twice in 16 years. Even James Madison wanted direct elections. Electoral votes were a compromise with the slave states. White southerners were afraid that they would be outvoted by northerners and so they wanted their slaves, or at least three fifths of them, allocated in electoral votes or in the vote and electoral votes made this allocation possible and direct elections did not. So electoral votes are a relic of America's original sin of slavery and they're deeply undemocratic.

AMT: Jeff Jacoby, what do you think?

JEFF JACOBY: Well, it may be that James Madison had original qualms but his colleague Alexander Hamilton concluded when he wrote The Federalist that while the Electoral College may not be perfect, it is at least excellent. I think that in more than two centuries of presidential elections, it has proven its value in so many different ways. The fundamental objection to a winner of the popular vote not winning the presidency has never really been the issue. We don't vote as a single unitary popular collection of voters, we vote in this country or states for president. Votes take place within each state and then electors elected in those states meet in their respective state capitals. It's a very different system from the one that many other countries use but it has helped keep stability in this country for an awfully long time. There have been hundreds of proposals over the centuries to abolish or change the Electoral College. None of them has succeeded. And I think the fact that none has been able to meet that bar suggests that there's a real value to it.

AMT: So tell us a little bit more about how the Electoral College works, Mark.

MARK WESTON: Every state has two extra votes more than its population warrants. This was the compromise made with the Southern states. So Wyoming has one congressman but it has three electoral votes. California has 53 congressmen and women, it has 55 electoral votes. The reason why electoral votes have lasted as long as they have is that distortion became balanced by another distortion — winner-take-all. Which was not something that the Founding Fathers envisioned. It was a result from the 1796 election when there were two straight electoral votes in Virginia and North Carolina that tipped the election to Jefferson, excuse me, tipped the election to Adams instead of Jefferson and the Virginians were determined never to let this happen again, so they created winner-take-all. Winner-take-all means that whoever gets the most popular votes in the state gets all of that state’s electoral votes. So if Trump is ahead in Texas by nine percentage points, doesn't matter, he gets 100 per cent of Texas’ electoral votes. Winner-take-all often helps the urban states and the two extra vote distortion often helps the rural states. And usually these distortions balance each other out. That's why you had 112 years between Benjamin Harrison winning with fewer votes in 1888 and George Bush defeating Al Gore with fewer votes in 2000. But that 112 year span that was the fluke. What we're seeing now is more typical, when the parties are close we're more likely to have these electoral vote misfires.

AMT: and you make the reference to a relic of slavery because you're saying that this is why you don't like the Electoral College anymore, you think it needs to change.

MARK WESTON: Absolutely. I mean, direct elections is far more fair and just. The founders didn't endorse it because the Southerners didn't want it. They knew they would get out voted in direct elections, so they insisted on something that would help them out, which was this two extra elector per state distortion. But what happened in 2016 is that Donald Trump not only benefited from the two extra electoral per state distortion, which means that with all the Great Plains and Rocky Mountain states piled up those two extra votes, and that helped Trump. But also, he benefited this year from winner-take-all. I'll give you an example. California and Illinois together have 75 electoral votes. Hillary Clinton's margin in California was almost 4 million votes. Her margin in Illinois was almost 1 million votes. So she lead in those two states by 4.8 million votes but got 75 electoral votes. Donald Trump led Florida, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin by 1 per cent margins. His total vote over Hillary Clinton, his total lead in those four states was 216,000 votes. And yet he got 75 electoral votes, the same number from those four states that Hillary Clinton got from California and Illinois. So one candidate has a lead of nearly five million votes, the other candidate has a lead of 216,000 votes and they get the same number of electoral votes.

AMT: Jeff Jacoby, do you have the same concerns that Mark does?

JEFF JACOBY: No. There are two points, I think, that are worth making here. For better or for worse, the United States Senate has a relatively stable two party system. It would not be impossible to switch to a direct election system for president but doing so would dramatically change the contours of American politics and American presidential politics. Direct election gives any small group with a committed core of voters, no matter whether it can or can't command a majority nationwide an incentive to run for office. If you can get a solid chunk of voters to be with you, you can perhaps be a kingmaker, you can end up having a disproportionate influence. The fact that we have the system that we have and have had for so long has helped direct American political forces into two very broad, big tent parties the Republican Party and the Democratic Party create direct elections. And you would instead have a whole plethora, as there are in many other countries, a whole plethora of small special interest parties that would crop up, they would often be a regional party, parties that have a particular strength in the south or a particular strength in the north east. There would be so much more instability in the system. Whatever problems we have with the existing, the Electoral College system, I think would be overwhelmed by the problems that would be created if we went to a direct election. Beyond that, right now as you mentioned in the introduction, there's talk of recounts taking place in three of the states because Jill Stein and her supporters have put up the money or are trying to raise the money to do that. If we had a direct election, we'd be talking about national recount. We’d be talking about having to have recounts all over the country. When 130 million, what’s the number of people who voted? Something like 130 million voters cast ballots for president, imagine trying to recount all of those. Another advantage then of the Electoral College system is that it breaks it down state by state. You know, Anna Maria, you said earlier that the principle of one person one vote or you quoted Michael Moore talking about one person one vote as being preeminent in the supreme value of democracy. But in fact, that's never been the supreme value in American democracy. Far more undemocratic than the Electoral College is the United States Senate, in which all states get an equal number of votes, which means that all votes, votes cast by individuals are not equal. California has something like 14 or 15 million voters. It only gets two senators. The exact same number as Wyoming, which has about 260,000 voters.

AMT: Hmm.

JEFF JACOBY: Which means that the vote of a Wyoming resident is 50 times more powerful than the vote of a Californian. Yet nobody is suggesting, not even the most ardent critics of the Electoral College, thinks that we should be changing the United States Senate. There are reasons for not having blind majoritarianism. The founders were very aware of the dangers that that kind of majoritarianism could lead to. That's one of the great virtues of the Electoral College.

AMT: So given your argument, what do you make of the tweets of Donald J. Trump on Sunday? That he fell short in the popular vote because millions of people voted illegally. How does that fit into this whole discussion now?

JEFF JACOBY: Well, Donald Trump has a penchant for tweeting and saying and uttering things that are totally disconnected from reality and that have no basis in anything other than conspiracy theories and a popular supposition. You know, I concede freely, openly I didn't support either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump in the election. I actually voted for a third party candidate, even though I knew that the American Electoral College system my third party, I voted for the Libertarian candidate, would have no chance of becoming president. But Donald Trump seems prepared to say things on Monday and then deny saying them on Tuesday and then claim the very opposite on Wednesday. As far as I know, there's nothing backing up his claims and allegations. And it's merely muddying what ought to be a principled debate and encouraging people who support him blindly no matter what he says to now start adding this as one more, you know, one more arrow in their quiver.

AMT: I want to add another view to this conversation. Andrew Gelman has looked at who benefits from the Electoral College. He's a Professor of Statistics and Political Science at Columbia University. Listen to him.

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So the Electoral College gives extra influence to voters in small states and especially voters in swing states. So if you look at who are the voters in swing states, they're disproportionately white. Whereas ethnic minorities are more likely to live in non-swing states like California or New York or Texas. So after running the numbers, we estimate that per voter whites have 16 per cent more power than blacks in the Electoral College, 28 per cent more than Latinos and 57 per cent more power than others. So by magnifying the voting power of whites in the past election, the Electoral College is also giving campaigns the incentive to campaign for whites.

AMT: Jeff Jacoby, do you accept what he's saying?

JEFF JACOBY: It's certainly true that our existing system gives more influence or more attention to swing states, which is why candidates spend so much time in those swing states. Pretty much any system that you could devise would have areas of the country that would draw disproportionate interest by the candidates. But listen, to say that it gives more power to white voters may be true given contemporary residential patterns. But demographics change and where white and black and Hispanic voters changes over time, and in any case this is a country that elected Barack Obama and re-elected him with solid majorities in both the popular and the Electoral College. So that the suggestion, if with what he's making to the suggestion that the Electoral College is somehow biased against blacks or biased in favor of whites, it certainly didn't do what he can to keep Barack Obama to becoming president.

AMT: Mark Weston, how difficult would it be to reform the US presidential system? Election system.

MARK WESTON: Extremely difficult. You need a constitutional amendment, which means you need two thirds of the House, two thirds of the Senate and three fourths of the state legislatures. This is why a proposal called National Popular Vote is beginning to take force. Under National Popular Vote, states agree in advance to give their electoral votes to whoever wins the most popular votes. But the system doesn't begin until all the states on board collectively have 270 electoral votes, a majority. There are now ten states with about 160 electoral votes on board. So you would need another ten states. I also think it's too weak. Just passing a law is not going to make this system enforceable. I think the National Popular Vote needs to be embedded in the state constitutions. But it would be at a certain point, there would be enough states on board, that it would no longer have, the electoral votes would automatically go to the popular vote winner. And then what I would love to see is all the states quickly get on board for a direct election with a runoff if no one wins 50 per cent of the vote. That would eliminate the problem of instability with third parties. Also, about party stability, the party system is no longer stable. One party has had two presidencies that the people didn't vote for, the other party has been screwed. This is not a stable two party system anymore and Republicans need to recognize that.

AMT: So realistically though, do you see the Electoral College being changed then, given those hurdles?

MARK WESTON: Over the course of several years I see National Popular Vote getting more and more force. I also personally would like to see a nationwide pledge among all 64 million voters who voted for Hillary Clinton, that if this should happen a third time and if the Republicans should win a presidency with fewer votes than the Democratic president, that we simply won't pay taxes. No taxation without representation. I'm not saying that Donald Trump is not a legitimate president. I'm talking about how to prevent it next time. And I think that's another thing that should be explored.

AMT: given the polarized nature of the American electorate right now, What do you see happening in the short term, Mark?

MARK WESTON: Well, just this week when Donald Trump has said that millions of people illegally voted for Hillary Clinton, we now should realize that we had a president-elect who does not know truth from falsehood. This is very scary.

AMT: Jeff Jacoby.

JEFF JACOBY: I agree with much of what Mark just said but I point out that the National Voter Compact Notion would be wildly unfair in its own way. It would mean, for example, that if it were operating this year, it would mean that Massachusetts, in which every single county voted by a strong margin for Hillary Clinton but which has nevertheless right to the National Voter Compact, which is one of the ten states that has already done so, we would mean that Massachusetts would have committed itself to giving all of its electoral votes, all of its votes in the Electoral College to Donald Trump. It's hard to see why that is somehow a fairer system than the system we have now, when which when Massachusetts’ electors get together in Boston a few weeks from now, they'll be able to vote for Hillary Clinton. I think it's also worth mentioning, we haven't noted this but I think Mark would agree with me, as this system is setup as it's written in the constitution, the electors actually have pretty much carte blanche to vote for anyone that they like for president. In a sense, the votes in the state, the popular vote, are not much more than advisory. They’re very very influential advisory votes and, you know, centuries of tradition have now established that the electors will almost all overwhelmingly, almost invariably back with what the voters in their states have done. But in terms of strict constitutional power, when the electors gather to cast their votes in their respective state capitals next month, they're free to vote for anyone who meets the constitutional criteria to be president. They don't have to make Donald Trump president. They don't have to vote for Hillary Clinton. Electors are free. There are, you know, some of the states that have imposed obligations on them but those obligations probably couldn't be enforced anyway. But if they wanted to make Paul Ryan or anyone else president of the United States, who meets the constitutional qualifications, under our constitution that would actually be binding.

AMT: We have to leave it there. I guess we'll be watching December 19. Thank you both.

JEFF JACOBY: Thank you so much Anna Maria.

MARK WESTON: Thank you.

AMT: That is Jeff Jacoby, op-ed columnist with The Boston Globe. He is in Boston. Mark Weston is the author of The Runner-up Presidency: The Elections That Defied America's Popular Will. He's in Miami, Florida. Well, in Canada we have heard calls for the popular vote to prevail or at least have more weight. In fact, later this week especially, parliamentary committee looking into the matter is set to report its findings. And that's not the only reform being considered. Last week, the Minister for Democratic Institutions Maryam Monsef tabled Bill C-33, which calls for re-instituting voting rights for Canadians living abroad and repealing other elements of the Harper government's Fair Elections Act. For an update on all things electoral reform here in Canada, I'm joined by Kady O'Malley. She's a reporter with The Ottawa Citizen. Hi Kady.

KADY O'MALLEY: Good morning.

AMT: So do we have parallels to the conversation happening in the US right now?

KADY O'MALLEY: To be honest, it's a pretty hard to transpose the American system onto the Canadian one, simply because we have a parliamentary system. And while we do have a debate over proportional representation, it's basically about allocating seats as opposed to deciding who would be a president. Because as, you know, we don't elect a president directly. So it is really difficult to make the comparisons frankly. The other thing that I think is worth pointing out and one reason why I can see perhaps in the US why this is more of an issue, is that even if your party doesn't win the election in Canada, they don't win the most number of seats, they're still going to have representation in parliament. There isn't such thing as, you know, the official, you know, Her Majesty's loyal presidential opposition. And I do wonder if that's part of the niggling factor in the US is if your candidate loses for president, that's it, that's all. You don't have a voice, you don't have someone who's sort of out there putting your point of view forward, which at least we do have in Canada even in majority government.

AMT: Hmm. So if you look at Canada, the Liberals made a campaign promise that the 2015 election would be the last Federal first-past-the-post election. They got three years left. The minister is making kind of, she's kind of musing about it now. What's going on?

KADY O'MALLEY: Well, the special committee on electoral reform, which was struck back in the spring is supposed to report by Thursday and I suspect that given how difficult it seems to be taking him to put together that report, they will go right to the limit. At that point, they're going to come back with recommendations on how to proceed. That could be anything from laying out a process which could very well include recommendations for a referendum, to sort of suggesting what different options Canadians should consider, should first-past-the-post be on the ballot for instance, what about mixed member proportional representation? What question would you put to Canadians if you were asking about this. So the committee report will probably cover that. After that that goes to cabinet. The government then has to sort of mull this over and come back with some sort of response. Either adopt the committee's recommendations, maybe take some of them and not the others. But either way, they are going to have to take a position, which is something they really strategically avoided doing throughout this entire debate.

AMT: Well, and yesterday the minister gave an interview where she says she hasn't found enough support to change how Canadians elect their MPs and won't move ahead with electoral reform without it.

KADY O'MALLEY: Yeah, she's actually said that many times. She's become sort of a Rorschach talking point because she keeps saying the same things over and over again and because the circumstances change, we interpret them differently. But that's actually a pretty standard thing that she has literally been saying all along, that she's heard sort of impassioned support for both proportional representation and for the first-past-the-post status quo but that as yet, there doesn't seem to be a consensus around either of them. So again, this is a very good example of the Liberals really not taking a position on anything. But again, once that report comes back and once the government has prepared some sort of response, she's going to have to say more than that. She's either going to have to say OK, I don't know if we have the support so here's how we'll go about, you know, finding out through a referendum or saying you know what, it doesn't look like there's enough support to take this to the next step so let's forget about that promise.

AMT: Well, even the prime minister has kind of indicated that now that the Liberals are in office the motivation to change the electoral system is less compelling.

KADY O'MALLEY: Yeah. I think he probably regrets wording it exactly like that simply because the reaction, as you would imagine, was sort of the eyebrows they were raised. That said, it's fair to say I'm going to have proportional representation people going crazy at me for this, but it's fair to say that there has never been a spectacularly strong drive federally to change the electoral system. There are small factions, I would say maybe, you know, five, ten, maybe 15 per cent of the population who will go to town hall meetings and for this is a passionate issue. For most people it's really not. That doesn't mean if you ask them they won't say oh sure I'd like a more representative system but it's not really a driving factor. So I think on that, now I don't think that's actually changed with the Liberals coming in, I think that’s always been the case but I don't think the prime minister is wrong when he suggests that there is not, you know, a deep underlying desire to change.

AMT: OK, well, Kady O'Malley, thanks for your perspective.

KADY O'MALLEY: Thanks. Bye bye.

AMT: Bye bye. That's Kady O'Malley, reporter at The Ottawa Citizen. We've reached her in Ottawa. And that is our program for today. Remember you can take The Current with you on the CBC Radio app. It's free from the App Store, it's available on Google Play. We've been talking about this American Electoral College and calls to reform it, so we're going to give the last word today to an elector from the Electoral College. And as you heard, although the election was called in favour of Donald Trump, it is not actually over until the 538 members of that college vote and that vote takes place on the 19th of December. Michael Baca is a Colorado elector and rather than cast his vote for Mr. Trump, he is trying to convince other electors to choose a different Republican candidate for president. In the past, that has been described as being a faithless elector. Michael Baca says he prefers the term Hamilton elector, after the late American statesman and Founding Father Alexander Hamilton. We're going to leave you with some of what Mr. Baca had to say earlier this month on CNN. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti, thanks for listening to The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

You believe that we're undermining the election? I believe we're trying to reach out and speak to the people who did not have a choice in this election. I've spoken to so many people that have felt Republicans and Democrats, they didn't want to vote for Hillary, they didn't want to vote for Donald Trump. And so by doing this we can reach across the aisle and we can have another candidate that is going to, you know, say more than stop it to the people who are damaging this country. You know, Donald Trump won the Electoral College votes but, you know, Hillary Clinton she won the popular vote. And I think many people, you know, we live under this assumption that we live in a democracy but I believe it's more of a constitutional republic. And so, you know, the final votes are in 34 days. 538 people are going to be casting the ballot for president and when you have a president who is a climate denialist, that affects 7.4 billion people and I think that is what is so important and why we must speak out. And there are fine Republican candidates or fine Republicans who believe that climate is manmade and we just vary on approach on how to get there.

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November 28, 2016 full episode transcript

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