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The Current Transcript for March 23, 2017

Host: Anna Maria Tremonti

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

Today we wish to announce that two major Italian-based organized crime cells were dismantled in Montreal. The individual faced many charges, including conspiracy to smuggle drugs, money and cell phones in jail.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: The RCMP was pretty proud of its police work three years ago when it announced sweeping arrests of the Montreal Mafia and their associates in what it called Project Clemenza, boasting of intercepting a million private cell phone messages. But Tuesday, charges against most of the accused were dropped and the Crown was curiously cryptic. The move appears to be related to those intercepted cell phone messages and the fear that secret surveillance techniques will be exposed. And that raises all sorts of questions we're asking in a moment. Also today, from no news to leading the news—they forced their stories onto a national news agenda that was ignoring them.

SOUNDCLIP

With social media, people of colour, marginalized people don't have to wait for someone else's permission and they don't have to wait for someone else to decide if their stories and their issues are newsworthy. They can just do it themselves.

AMT: From #BlackLivesMatter to #DressCodePM, the people behind the hashtags disrupted, established mainstream media thinking. In half an hour, Dalia Thamin tracks the changes. And sunny ways.

SOUNDCLIP

As Canadians come together to celebrate Canada 150, we proudly reflect on the generations that built a country on the belief that with hope and hard work, they can deliver a better future for themselves and for their children and for their grandchildren.

AMT: Or rainy days. Finance Minister Bill Morneau explains the message in his budget in an hour. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

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Why were charges against 35 Mafia associates in Montreal stayed?

Guests: Paul Cherry, Christopher Parsons

SOUNDCLIP

We made a decision to stay the proceedings against certain people and to continue against others. There are questions. There are issues that have been raised concerning, among other things, the techniques that were used by the RCMP in the course of their investigation.

AMT: Well, that is Crown Attorney Sabrina Delli Fraine talking about the big one that got away. Tuesday, the Crown tried to explain to reporters why it's decided to state charges in a major prosecution of 35 organized crime suspects in Montreal. They'd all been arrested in 2014 as part of a much trumpeted RCMP operation against Mafia activity. So why let such high profile arrests walk? Prosecutors have been somewhat vague about that. They cited last year's Supreme Court directive that cases be treated more speedily, but RCMP surveillance tactics involved in building the case also appear to be playing a big part. At the time of the arrest, the RCMP boasted that more than a billion BlackBerry messages had been intercepted in their investigation. There is speculation the RCMP would have to reveal exactly how they did that in court if the case were to proceed, potentially compromising ongoing investigations. Now of course yesterday's attacks in London, England are just the latest reminder of why police and intelligence agency may want to guard their secret surveillance techniques. Paul Cherry is a crime reporter with the Montreal Gazette. He's on the line from Montreal. Hello.

PAUL CHERRY: Good morning.

AMT: So 35 people had their charges stayed this week. Who were they?

PAUL CHERRY: Oh, it's a wide variety, from one man who's considered a leader currently in the Montreal mafia, to what I would consider to be very small players, people on the fringes of the conspiracy to smuggle cocaine or to distribute cocaine in Quebec.

AMT: And so what were they charged with overall?

PAUL CHERRY: It's quite a variety of charges. When the initial arrests were made, light was shed on a lot of things that had been intriguing people for months, while the Rizzuto organization was under attack. For example, the police had uncovered explosives and like 14 firearms including I think eight fully automatic firearms in a building in Montreal, right in the heart of Montreal. And nothing was being said about it for years, literally. Everyone was wondering when is someone going to be arrested in connection with that stash of weapons? And then all of sudden in 2014, voila. I think four or five guys were arrested in that. And then you start to see oh, it made sense. It was people who were rivals of the Rizzuto organization. So there's a little light shed there. There was an incredible kidnapping, a man who allegedly owed two million dollars in drug debt to two brothers who are alleged in 2014 to be leaders of a cell that was broken up in this. And eight people were charged in that and all of those people walked away free and clear on Tuesday. And there's also drug trafficking and I believe marijuana trafficking as well, mixed in there.

AMT: It was two Mafia families essentially. Mafia groups.

PAUL CHERRY: That’s right. Within the Montreal Mafia, they have certain cells that are allowed to act very independently of each other. But they used to all work together in unison while the Rizzuto organization was in Montreal. But that has since broken up and you have a lot of clashes happening.

AMT: Okay. So Paul, at the time of the arrest, the RCMP talked about intercepting about a million messages between BlackBerry users as part of the investigation. How did they intercept those messages?

PAUL CHERRY: That is what defence lawyers want to know and they have wanted to know even before these arrests were made in 2014 because there's a related investigation where this issue first came up. And so that has been asked for since early in 2012, I would say, and the RCMP and the Crown wants to keep a tight lid on it. It was much debated in 2015 in a related case, a very long and complicated and even redacted. When the decision came out, it was redacted. A court decision on the issue came out in November 2015 where the judge clearly told the Crown, the RCMP: you've got to turn over certain things. Because police often argue—to give you an example—if they're doing surveillance on a suspect and the person is charged in drug trafficking let's say, and the person has their trial, often defence lawyers would say, we want to know how you did that surveillance. How did you follow that person? There's a standard in Canadian law where the police aren't required to explain exactly how they managed to follow a guy for three days straight. They don't really have to say how that works. In this case, the RCMP were saying we believe what happened, how we intercepted those Blackberry messages fall under the same protection. But to a certain degree, the judge in November 2015 disagreed and said there are certain things you have to do. You have to disclose to defence lawyers.

AMT: And that's what they’re afraid of.

PAUL CHERRY: And part of it apparently, like I mentioned, the interesting part seemed to be redacted but it appears that the defence lawyers want to know this device that they're using to intercept the messages. Does that affect other BlackBerrys in the area when you're doing this? The questions that were raised in the judgment. Does it block a BlackBerry from making you know an emergency phone call if a person has to?

AMT: Well, before we go there, what is the device? What do you call it? What are they doing?

PAUL CHERRY: I've heard it's called a stingray—mobile device indicator or something like that. Sorry, you kind of caught me off guard. It’s a MDI.

AMT: Okay. Yeah. Okay. MDI. But it's something they use, they move around and they kind of what, they replicate a cell tower and they just snuffle up everything around it?

PAUL CHERRY: That sounds like a good description.

AMT: A very lay description obviously.

PAUL CHERRY: I don’t even think the debates on this in the unrelated case I mentioned were even accessible to the public. I believe they did what's called a [unintelligible] on that. So any information has not been coming out through this case.

AMT: Okay. And clearly the defence wants to know as much as they can about it. But let's go back to the idea that 35 charges have been stayed. Essentially those guys just walk. What's the fallout?

PAUL CHERRY: Well, to me, the most interesting, the most intriguing is a man named Liborio Cuntrera, who was arrested last year in this because there were three stages of this investigation or three stages of arrest, and Liborio Cuntrera was arrested last year. That to me was one of the biggest fish caught in this net and quite surprisingly, all the charges are stayed this week. He walks away a free man. His name that might not be instantly recognizable to him to most Canadians, but he's the second generation of a family of some of the wealthiest drug smugglers in the world. They were nicknamed the Rothschilds of the mafia. In the 1990s, they owned real estate all over the world. He's the son of a very influential mafioso from Montreal called Agostino Cuntrera who was killed in 2010 apparently because he was loyal to Vito Rizzuto. He was reported to be part of a six-member committee that ran the mafia in Montreal after Vito Rizzuto died of natural causes in 2013. That six-member committee was hit pretty hard by arrests. One man was murdered. But now Liborio Cuntrera walks away. No longer any conditions imposed on him while his case is pending. He can meet with whoever he wants now and there's a sort of street cred that comes out from that. Wow, he got away with it so he kind of builds up his credibility.

AMT: Right, and of course nothing has been proven in court so it just continues.

PAUL CHERRY: Mhm.

AMT: Okay. Paul Cherry, thanks for speaking with me today.

PAUL CHERRY: Thank you.

AMT: Paul Cherry, crime reporter with the Montreal Gazette. He is in Montreal. Let's go to someone who can shed some light on the RCMP surveillance techniques and what the RCMP may be trying to protect in this case. Christopher Parsons is a security expert and research associate at the Munk School of Global Affairs Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto. He is in our Toronto studio. Hello.

CHRISTOPHER PARSONS: Hello. Thanks for having me.

AMT: Okay. So it’s a stingray device. It’s also called, is that IMSI catcher? What's the word?

CHRISTOPHER PARSONS: Yeah, there's a number of different framings and acronyms—stingray, Kingfisher, IMSI-catcher, in Canada we’ve technically called them mobile device identifiers, MDIs. Functionally what these do is they fake cell phone towers. So when your mobile phone is normally operating, you're connected to a Telus, Bell or a Rogers tower. When one of these devices goes on, your cell phone will connect to it on the basis that it has a stronger signal. And when that happens, one of two things can occur. On the one hand, the authorities or whoever’s operating one of these devices may only be looking for their identification and your phone. So it's called an IMSI-catcher because when you put your SIM card in—the card you get from your provider to activate your phone—that has what's called an IMSI number on it that the provider can then identify if the police come with that number. There's also an equipment identifier in your phone that they can collect and they can also send what's called a silent text. So this is they send you a text message—you never see it because your phone will never display it—but it will respond, and in doing so will provide your phone number. The other way that this is principally used is normally when they collect those identifiers, they get them and they put you back on your cell tower. So you can use a Rogers tower right after. In other cases, they hold on to you. So in those situations, the flow pattern is your mobile phone, the device operated by the police to your cell tower which means they can capture the content of the communications. So your telephone calls, your text messages they might be able to listen to or read in real time. Whereas other kinds of communications that are encrypted, so if you're going to Google or using WhatsApp or iMessage or something, there's still that level of encryption there. So the police would have to have the decryption keys to get that.

AMT: Except in the case of these people charged in what was called like a mafia sweep, they were getting their BlackBerry texts and they thought they were encrypted.

CHRISTOPHER PARSONS: Certainly the individuals who were using them believed that their BlackBerry messages were encrypted. Several years ago, our signals intelligence agency, CSE, actually put out a brief to government that's since been taken down from the web, stating that they didn't regard consumer BlackBerrys—the ones that you and I buy from Rogers and are connected to our businesses— that encryption is at best scrambled and shouldn't be relied on for any significant or important communications.

AMT: Okay. So why would the RCMP be reluctant to reveal information about these devices in court?

CHRISTOPHER PARSONS: It could be a range of different reasons. So one of them may be that these devices were initially developed really for intelligence gathering purposes and so when you're engaged in intelligence gathering, you don't have to go to court necessarily and prove how we know for certain that this person is for sure a Russian spy.

AMT: You can do this without a warrant? Is that what you’re telling me?

CHRISTOPHER PARSONS: No, it’s when you're doing it for intelligence gathering purposes.

AMT: Okay.

CHRISTOPHER PARSONS: It’s when you don't have to introduce it into a court, so it's just a different rationale for collecting the information. In the police's case of course, they do have to potentially introduce evidence into court. So it has to be high forensic standards. Documents that we've seen that have been leaked from—actually the IMSI-catcher provider shows that like any other piece of software, there are bugs. And so there is a period of time as an example, where this company's devices were unable to capture the communications of iPhone 5Cs. That was fixed in a later firmware patch. But what does that indicate? Well, it raises doubt as to the overall guaranteed effectiveness of the tool. And so the models that the RCMP have been using at the time may have received softer updates, patches. As your previous guest mentioned, there have been problems where individuals have been unable to dial 911, even though they're supposed to when these devices are in use. So there are older devices that were used. They had technical problems and a defence attorney might raise real questions about their overall efficacy as a result.

AMT: Okay. And so maybe use that as the reason to get their client off. But they could also learn more about how they work. And so who else in Canada might be using this surveillance?

CHRISTOPHER PARSONS: So other parties that we would expect to use them would be those involved in policing and security. So there are cases in Toronto where they've been used. There have been efforts to determine if they're being in use in Vancouver. These are tools that organizations such as CBSA, the Canadian Border Services Agency might use, although there’s no evidence that they necessarily are. CSIS could be using them as well for their human intelligence operations. So really, parties that have a law enforcement function and are involved in physical human surveillance could potentially be involved in using these.

AMT: And would local police organizations be able to use them as well or would it have to be more at Intel at the level of the federal police, the RCMP?

CHRISTOPHER PARSONS: So what I understand right now is there is an interest by local police to gain access and use these devices independently. Historically what's happened is let's say the Toronto police wanted to use them for an investigation or Peel Region or something like that. They would actually be assigned a device from the RCMP and there would be someone from the RCMP that would be providing training and some sort of oversight or guidance. But that obviously has a fairly significant burden on the RCMP and a debate has been ongoing. Unfortunately it's sort of hard to pierce the murk and figure out where it is right now.

AMT: Is it possible there are other surveillance devices and techniques that the RCMP is using that it's trying to keep off the radar keep secret?

CHRISTOPHER PARSONS: Oh, absolutely. I mean probably the most prominent right now is their use of malware. So malware, we install virus scanners to try and stop this from getting on our computers. And in Canada, the warranting schema of it is used for IMSI-catchers. They’re called general warrants. It's the same kind of warranting schema used to get malware and then serve that to either our devices or TVs perhaps or servers or wherever else is being targeted.

AMT: Some of this has come out in a WikiLeaks that says the CIA is using malware.

CHRISTOPHER PARSONS: Yes, it does. And in the United States we know that the FBI uses. They have a delightful acronym called NIT—network investigative techniques—which is how they frame the use of malware. So the RCMP and perhaps other police agencies but the RCMP certainly has used this in some situations.

AMT: And so like in everything from like what, TVs to covert listening? There was a story about covert listening through televisions.

CHRISTOPHER PARSONS: Yeah. The full range of what exactly is being used and what they're targeting and how, that unfortunately I have not been able to divine just yet. It's been a couple of years to figure out that they're even using it. But that's an ongoing area of research at the Citizen Lab.

AMTY: Now clearly, we saw an attack yesterday in Britain that the police labeled right away a terror attack. Intelligence officials would argue they need this surveillance for national security. What's the argument on the other side?

CHRISTOPHER PARSONS: So a colleague of mine and I, Tamir Israel at the University of Ottawa wrote a report on IMSI-catchers and we do not call for their ban. Rather what we argue is they should be used in very specific, delimited serious cases and there should be a public policy outlining how they're used. We're not arguing that you know we should know the make model, the number of people that can be connected. That is arguably something that doesn't need to be known. But the privacy implications, the warranting schema, learning their efficacy, how often are they used, how useful are they. This is public information that I think the public has a right to know. These intrude not on one person's life, but they actually collect the information of all persons around a cell phone catcher. So that means that this isn't a targeted tool. It's a mass surveillance tool and the public has a right to understand no, when, how and why their private lives are being intruded by the government.

AMT: Is there any country where they actually do go public that are using this?

CHRISTOPHER PARSONS: Yes. In Germany there are annual reporting statistics as to how often these are used. So it can be done. Germany has been doing this for about a decade or more and they haven't stopped using the device. And in Canada, just to put it in context, the 1970s you know we passed legislation requiring governments to declare how often they engage in interceptions of communications. And even though they're not used terribly frequently, we still use them today. Their efficacy has not gone away simply because we report on them. It does mean that the public has a better understanding as to how those sorts of powers in the criminal code are used.

AMT: And so we go back to a case in Montreal where it appears this kind of surveillance was used and the Crown is willing to walk away from 35 cases in order to keep us—keep I don't know who exactly—but we stay in the dark because they walk away from this case.

CHRISTOPHER PARSONS: That is the case. I mean fortunately there are ongoing efforts to learn more and more about what's going on. And we are in a situation today where we know a great deal more than we did three years ago. When I started doing research down this, it was firing accessed information requests into the blind and the RCMP saying we've never heard of what you're talking about. And now at least they have to admit, well, we know what you're talking about. We're just not going to provide you with anything regardless.

AMT: They’re watching you now. But who do we need to ask questions of in terms of accountability then at the federal level? Which minister would you like to ask about this?

CHRISTOPHER PARSONS: I think that this falls squarely within public safety or justice, one of the two. We have annual reporting systems for interceptions. There's no reason why we can't overhaul a 40 plus year old piece of legislation so that all of the surveillance techniques that are used today are captured. I mean that's the only kind of surveillance they have to report on. We're not just using IMSI-catchers. We’re not just using malware. There's tools from 20 or 30 years ago that we're using and even those we don't know anything about.

AMT: Chris Parsons, thanks for coming in.

CHRISTOPHER PARSONS: Thank you very much.

AMT: Christopher Parsons, research associate with the Munk School of Global Affairs Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto. We reached out to the office of Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale for comment on the Crown’s stay of proceedings as well as the surveillance techniques used by the RCMP. His office told us they cannot comment on our particular investigation or matters before the courts. Of course, the whole point is the matter is not before the courts right now. We also requested an interview with the RCMP. We did not hear back. Stay with us. The news is next and then Trayvon Martin, Mike Brown, Eric Garner—three well known cases of black American men whose deaths were forced onto the mainstream media agenda due to what is called Black Twitter. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

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How 'Black Twitter' and BlackLivesMatter hashtag gave voice to marginalized groups

Guests: Dalia Thamin

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

[Music: Theme]

AMT: Still to come, the finance minister had the floor in the House of Commons yesterday to present the government's new budget. He will be my guest in about half an hour. But first, hashtag empowering.

SOUNDCLIP

This is a tragedy. I can only imagine what these parents are going through. You know if I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon and I think they are right to expect that all of us as Americans are going to take this with the seriousness it deserves and that we're going to get to the bottom of exactly what happened.

AMT: It has been five years since Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old African-American was shot and killed. The teenager was just walking home from the store with a bag of Skittles and a can of juice wearing a hoodie. But when Trayvon Martin was first killed, it didn't make the national news. His family and a growing community of activists fought to spread the story, fighting especially hard on the social media platform, Twitter. And within a month, even then-President Barack Obama was speaking out about the case. From that process of raising awareness, a new movement was born. Black Lives Matter harnessed the power of social media to disrupt the way much of mainstream media covered the loss of black lives and it is a disruption still being felt today. As part of our project, The Disruptors, we're digging into the way so-called “#Activism” has changed the narrative and brought important stories that might otherwise be ignored into mainstream news. The CBC's Dalia Thamin joins us now from Calgary. Hello.

DALIA THAMIN: Hello, Anna Maria.

AMT: Take us back five years ago to the night of February 26, 2012 when Trayvon Martin was killed by George Zimmerman. Remind us of the circumstances of his death.

DALIA THAMIN: Trayvon Martin was a high school student and he was talking to his girlfriend on the phone and walking back to his father's home early in the evening just after a stop at a convenience store. George Zimmerman was a neighbourhood watch volunteer for the gated community which he lived in and he was driving through the community and he spotted Trayvon and called police.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: Hey, we’ve had some break-ins in my neighbourhood and there’s a real suspicious guy. This guy looks like he’s up to no good or he’s on drugs or something. It’s raining and he’s just walking around looking about.

VOICE 2: Okay. And this guy, is he white, black or Hispanic?

VOICE 1: He looks black.

VOICE 2: Yeah, we got them on the way. Just let me know if this guy does anything else.

VOICE 1: These [expletive]. They always get away.

DALIA THAMIN: Anna Maria, after Zimmerman hangs up, the details get murky. But there was some sort of struggle between the two and Zimmerman shot Trayvon dead. Police were already on their way, didn't arrest Zimmerman and that's because Florida has a stand your ground law. And under that law, you can use deadly force in self-defence.

AMT: And how was that story covered in the media at the time?

DALIA THAMIN: Well, at first Trayvon Martin's story didn't get any national media coverage at all in the US. And even locally in Sanford, Florida where the incident took place, there was only one local TV story the next day and then two other local print stories over the next five days. And it was basically covered like a local crime story, so a fight between two guys in an area that sometimes see violence and there were no details in the stories about the underlying race issues or how the police let Zimmerman go under the controversial stand your ground law.

AMT: And how then did Trayvon Martin's death end up becoming a big story on national news in the US?

DALIA THAMIN: Well, part of what happened is that a publicist agreed to work pro bono for Trayvon Martin's parents and he managed to get CBS and Reuters to run stories about what happened. But this is only one small piece of the puzzle. I spoke to someone who spent a lot of time thinking about this question. Erhardt Graeff is a PhD researcher at the Center for Civic Media at MIT Media Lab and he's the lead author of the study: The Battle for Trayvon Martin: Mapping a Media Controversy Online and Offline.

SOUNDCLIP

What we see with Trayvon Martin's story is really that moment where social media becomes incredibly important to the way that we make stories. We call this kind of networked gatekeeping. That's what we saw here. We saw the publicist working to get a particular angle, put into the national dialogue and then activists within the civil rights movement, within African-American communities working on actualities that the news media could continue to cover. And then these things get amplified by social media. Social media is working with mainstream media in order to create and spin up a larger story than otherwise would exist.

AMT: Well, we saw media pay attention to social media before this in Iran in 2009 during the Arab Spring, during Occupy Wall Street. What was significant about Trayvon Martin's case?

DALIA THAMIN: Well, this is one of the earliest major examples of African-Americans using social media to bring this scale of media and public attention to race relations in America. And one of the reasons they were able to do that is because of Black Twitter.

AMT: And what is Black Twitter?

DALIA THAMIN: So Black Twitter is this network of mainly African-American Twitter users and it's responsible for cultural and political hashtags like #OscarsSoWhite and #SayHerName and part of its power is in its size. So in 2012, a Pew Research shows that disproportionately a large number of African-Americans use Twitter. I spoke to Sherri Williams. She's a faculty member at the communication department at Wake Forest University in North Carolina and also a freelance journalist. And I asked her about the popularity of Twitter with African-Americans.

SOUNDCLIP

What African-Americans have seen is that this is a way for them to amplify their voices and amplify their messages without being distorted and framed in the way that traditional media has done for decades. And there is real power in that. So when traditional media does not pick up stories, activists on social media do and they circulate those stories and amplify them. We know too, just from being journalists that every story that comes into the newsroom doesn't exactly end up on the air. Some of those reasons do have to do with power relations and the social power that groups do and don't have. But with social media, people of colour, marginalized people don't have to wait for someone else's permission and they don't have to wait for someone else to decide if their stories and their issues are newsworthy. They can just do it themselves.

AMT: So in 2012, when Trayvon Martin was killed, you have journalists and editors starting to pay attention to black Twitter and what African-Americans are saying in their tweets.

DALIA THAMIN: Exactly and there are a lot of tweets circulating about Trayvon Martin's case. Trayvon Martin was mentioned on Twitter more than 600,000 times in the first three weeks after his death. And Anna Maria, in the same time period, this story went from a local crime story to a top national news story and Black Twitter kept challenging media comments about Trayvon, like this one from Geraldo Rivera on Fox News.

SOUNDCLIP

I think the hoodie is as much responsible for Trayvon Martin's death as George Zimmerman was. You have to recognize that this whole stylizing yourself as a gangster—you're going to be a gangsta wannabe—well, people are going to perceive you as a menace.

DALIA THAMIN: After he said that, black Twitter users responded by posting their pictures wearing a hoodie including celebrities like NBA stars LeBron James and Dwayne Wade along with hashtags like #JusticeforTrayvon.

AMT: And what effect did the social media response to Trayvon Martin's case have on the way the media covered other stories of African-Americans being killed?

DALIA THAMIN: One of the most significant developments was the first use of the hashtag, #BlackLivesMatter and that was in 2013 after George Zimmerman was acquitted. Here is Erhardt Graeff.

SOUNDCLIP

Black Lives Matter has created a hashtag that allows for a lot of different isolated incidents to be seen as a connected arc, to see it all as part of the same problem. And so the power of framing things in terms of a single movement has been the evolution from Trayvon Martin into Black Lives Matter, where now we see a pattern and we can communicate that pattern to the folks that are consuming media and say this is a real issue. Like look at all of these cases, Michael Brown's death. You know that allows for a stronger overall narrative that is I think key to one way in which media activism can succeed.

AMT: Okay. So he's saying that the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter connected the dots between what would have been seen as individual unrelated cases, disparate cases—a black man and woman being killed in the US—and suddenly you can see the pattern.

DALIA THAMIN: Exactly. And they saw Trayvon Martin's death as part of a bigger issue—the disproportionate number of unarmed African-Americans killed in the US, especially by authorities and the way these incidents are reported. So let's fast forward to 2014.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: Michael Brown's body is still in the middle of the street. After that 18 year old was shot by a police officer, it was there for hours uncovered. And a crowd—you’ll see them.

VOICE 2: They say he had his hands up and everything. They still shot him. He fell on the ground, they stood over him and shot him. Now they just got him laying in the street, dead as [expletive]. Just got him laying.

VOICE 3: A Sunday night candlelight vigil turns violent as residents of Ferguson, Missouri take to the streets protesting the death of 18-year-old Michael Brown.

DALIA THAMIN: Anna Maria, as you remember, Michael Brown was the teen in Ferguson, Missouri who was killed by a police officer in a predominantly black community and protests lasted for weeks in Ferguson following his death. A grand jury later decided not to charge the police officer and he was also cleared from civil rights violation.

AMT: And Dalia, what role did social media play in the way his story was told?

DALIA THAMIN: First of all, the reaction on social media was much quicker compared to Trayvon Martin's case two years earlier. People in Ferguson were posting photos and videos of Michael Brown's body lying on the street right after he was shot and blood was still streaming from his head. But in this case, we saw social media interact with mainstream media in another interesting way. So Anna Maria, although the media picked up the story within hours of Michael Brown, their depiction of Michael Brown and the photos they chose to use caused backlash online. CJ Lawrence was at the centre of that backlash. He's a criminal defence lawyer in Jackson, Mississippi.

SOUNDCLIP

Initially I saw one photo of him smiling. And after that image was initially shown and you know people were talking about him with his hands up and him being innocent, I began to see another photo being shown. It was a little more ominous. It was a picture pretty much of him in a jersey and he had two fingers to the side doing what many of us recognize as the peace sign. But a lot of the detractors if you will, were describing it as a gang sign and the headlines essentially characterized it as a physical altercation between Darryl Wilson, the officer and Michael Brown. And there was nothing based on any of the eyewitness accounts that indicated that there was in fact a hand-to-hand altercation. Keep in mind that this was early on. I thought that it was a shame that a young black man like Mike Brown could have his body assassinated and that subsequently follow immediately with the beginning of a character assassination.

DALIA THAMIN: After CJ Lawrence saw the media coverage, he tweeted two photos of himself: one taken at his college commencement and the other at a Halloween party with the hashtag, #IfTheyGunnedMeDown.

SOUNDCLIP

It was a very simple juxtaposition of two pictures, both of me. And the question being asked: if they gunned me down, which of these photos would the media use and would it be justified no matter which one of these people was in this picture? But I thought about Trayvon Martin's case, how he was talked about, how he was depicted. And so I didn’t want to see the same thing happen again. I didn't want a hoodie to be a justification for a death. I didn't want a jersey or a peace sign to simply be a death sentence for a young black man in America. And so it was my desire to challenge the media.

AMT: And what was the response to that tweet?

DALIA THAMIN: Black Twitter turned the hashtag into a meme. Other users also posted two photographs of themselves which could perhaps give different impressions about them, just based on what they were doing or wearing. And the hashtag, #IfTheyGunnedMeDown, was used more than 100,000 times in the first 24 hours. And it also spread internationally.

AMT: Dalia, what do we know about the effect that had on the way the media was covering this case or other cases of African-Americans shot by police?

DALIA THAMIN: Actually, NBC stopped using the picture altogether and some major outlets including CNN, New York Times and The Washington Post picked up on the hashtag as a new story in itself. Sherri Williams, the media expert we just heard from earlier says one hashtag isn't going to change the historic patterns of covering black victims in the US. But she says #IfTheyGunnedMeDown allowed black communities to talk back to the media.

SOUNDCLIP

The #IfTheyGunnedMeDown hashtag took a mirror and held it up to mainstream media newsrooms and showed them that the ways in which they are portraying black victims of crime is unfair. And I think that was really important because people in newsrooms don't always know how the images that they are producing have an impact on the public, but #IfTheyGunnedMeDown was an accountability check that showed them that what they're doing is inequitable and it is also another form of violence against black victims.

DALIA THAMIN: The other development that came out of Brown's death was the growth of the Black Lives Matter hashtag. According to the Pew Institute, following George Zimmerman's acquittal, the hashtag was used around 5,000 times over the summer of 2013. But in the three weeks following the decision to clear the officer that killed Michael Brown, the hashtag was used 1.7 million times.

AMT: Wow. And after the protests in Ferguson, we did see media paying attention to a number of other cases of African-Americans killed by police—the Tamir Rice case, Freddie Gray, Walter Scott.

DALIA THAMIN: Yeah and many more. And Anna Maria, other marginalized communities were paying attention to the way African-American social media activists were able to disrupt the media coverage around these incidents. So let's move ahead to 2015.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: I just need to know what is going on. It’s been hours.

VOICE 2: A distressed father pleads for information.

VOICE 1: Tell me how my son is. What’s the situation? If he’s dead, tell me he’s dead.

He was the father of 23-year-old Deah Barakat. He was one of the three young American Muslims who were shot in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Deah, along with his wife Yusor Abu-Salha and her sister, Razan were shot dead in their apartment. Deah was a second-year dental student and Yusor was accepted to join him in dentistry school. The gunman was actually their neighbour and the autopsy confirmed that Deah was shot first after opening his apartment door. The gunman then held a gun to Yusor’s and Razan's heads and shot them at close range. And on his way back, the gunman then shot Deah again, but this time in his mouth. Deah was shot a total of eight times. I spoke to Suzanne Barakat, Deah’s sister, and her father called her at work to tell her there's been a shooting in the area where her brother lives. And here is what happens next.

SOUNDCLIP

I went to Google “Chapel Hill shooting” and there was just one result and it said that three people were killed and shot in the back of the head. Confirmed dead on the scene. And that was information that no one else had shared with us quite yet. But that article remained the only article for the subsequent 24 hours or so. And overnight, social media had completely lit up and the American-Muslim community is relatively tight-knit and word spreads. Social media really started pushing for media coverage because no one was covering this story. Not even the local news was really doing it justice.

AMT: And did that change things?

DALIA THAMIN: It was really hard to ignore the story at this point, Anna Maria. #ChapelHillShooting was used close to one million times in the first 24 hours. And #MuslimLivesMatter also trended nationwide following the shooting. And the tweets at first were directed at the media and they were shaming them for not covering the story. But once the media picked it up, Suzanne and her family were shocked how the story was portrayed as a shooting over a parking dispute while the family believes it was a hate crime.

SOUNDCLIP

The murderer had turned himself in and the story that he shared was that it was a parking dispute and therefore the police took that story without having to confirm anything. And as you can imagine, knowing that they had this neighbour that had a history of flashing his gun at my family members, telling Yusor and her mom that he didn't like the way that they looked as they both were visibly Muslim and wore the hijab. We knew that there was more to it and yet we have this double standard in media coverage. We have this white man who killed three young American Muslim students in cold blood, execution-style in their home, and we were so quick to call it a parking dispute when that wasn't even the case. I had no words. I was already trying to just process this horrific loss that just didn't make any sense. And on top of that, to spread an untrue narrative, it was traumatic.

AMT: You can hear how distressed she is about this even now.

DALIA THAMIN: Yeah. And judging by how that conversation continued in social media, it really struck a chord with many Muslim Americans. The gunman was charged with three counts of first-degree murder and the case hasn't gotten to trial yet.

AMT: What are the connections between this case and the media coverage following Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown's killings?

DALIA THAMIN: Well, the swift response to the shooting on social media and how quickly the hashtag #MuslimLivesMatter spread suggests that the Muslim community recognized the success of Black Lives Matter hashtag and I asked media expert Sherri Williams where she sees the connection.

SOUNDCLIP

This is another time in which people of colour have found that their stories have not been told in a way that is complete and with context. So they didn't allow the mainstream media to continue to set the agenda. In my classes, we study this term called ultimate attribution error which basically says that in media when a person is a member of the group and they commit a crime or they do something wrong, they're often portrayed as someone who did something but this behaviour was just in a blip. You know we saw that in this case too. This was a white man who basically committed a hate crime. But it wasn't really framed that way. And then on the social media end, we saw people dispute that.

DALIA THAMIN: Again, we see that social media gives people or groups of people an opportunity to talk back to the media when they disagree with the way a story is being told. I want to look at one more story. This one in Canada about how social media has changed media coverage of marginalized groups here.

SOUNDCLIP

Why would Canadians, contrary to our own values, embrace a practice at that time that is not transparent, that is not open and frankly is rooted in a culture that is anti-women?

AMT: Well, that's the voice of former Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

DALIA THAMIN: Yeah. He was speaking in the House of Commons in 2015 answering a question about the government's niqab ban in citizenship ceremonies and many women were offended that the leader of the country was telling them how to dress. And the next day the hashtag, #DressCodePM trended nationwide and continued to trend for two days. Amna Qureshi was one of the women tweeting this hashtag. She's a criminal defence lawyer now based in Edmonton.

SOUNDCLIP

The tweet that I put out there was essentially: Stephen Harper, forgive me for I have sinned. I dressed without your consent this morning. And the picture shows me wearing my hijab as well as my suit that I was on my way to court essentially. So my expression shows that the tone of that tweet was very sarcastic. My eyebrow was raised kind of in a mocking tone.

AMT: Well, we talked about #DressCodePM on this program so the hashtag got our attention.

DALIA THAMIN: Yeah, and not just on CBC. #DressCodePM tweets were featured on Global, CTV, National Post and really most of the Canadian media outlets. Amna says Muslim women's voices were heard on national media through this hashtag.

SOUNDCLIP

They had our tweets in their news articles and that to me was so surprising and valuable. I was told by many people that my tweet had appeared on CBC's The National At Issue and I thought that that was very empowering because it told me that minorities’ voices can be heard on this national scale now. For me it was kind of reinvigorating, this type of visibility for historically I think under-represented voices in the media.

DALIA THAMIN: Anna Maria, just to give you a sense of how this affected the media coverage—a University of Alberta study found that in 2011 and the three weeks after the niqab ban was introduced in citizenship ceremonies, only one woman wearing a niqab was interviewed and she was quoted in three out of 80 online and print stories. And we know now that in the weeks that followed the hashtag, there were five women who were quoted.

AMT: Hmm. Interesting. And now of course in the United States, there is a president who also uses Twitter to try and shape the media agenda and to reach the public beyond the media. What is the connection between what President Trump is doing and what we've been talking about?

DALIA THAMIN: I asked Erdhardt Graeff, the MIT researcher about this.

SOUNDCLIP

What is so fascinating to me about the way Trump uses social media, he is using Twitter in the way an activist would. He's often framing himself as the marginalized group. He sees himself as the minority that’s being oppressed or attacked by other elites, these being the elites in Washington or media elites and the so-called leftist media. And by using that framing, when he talks on Twitter he's able to suggest that he needs a solidarity group in the same way that Black Lives Matter is trying to work for African-Americans who are marginalized in a number of contexts. He's saying that within American politics, he is marginalized and that for all of you out there that also feel marginalized like him, he's going to be your champion. And so he's able to marshal all of this attention on his issues by using a lot of the same media activism tactics that we see amongst marginalized groups.

AMT: So interesting, huh? So the social media tool that was basically able to give marginalized people a voice is now being used to give more of a voice to a man who's arguably one of the most powerful people in the world.

DALIA THAMIN: Yeah. This is this is what's happening right now.

AMT: Fascinating. Dalia, thank you for bringing us the story.

DALIA THAMIN: Thank you.

AMT: That is Dalia Thamin. She's a CBC producer based in Calgary and The Current’s documentary editor is Josh Bloch. Let us know what you think of what she's saying about this and how she's connecting the dots. You can reach us on Twitter. We are @thecurrentCBC. Find us on Facebook or go to our website, www.cbc.ca/thecurrent, and click on the contact link. Stay with us. Coming up next, we're going to be breaking down yesterday's federal budget. The finance minister, Bill Morneau, joins me in just a moment. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current on CBC Radio One, Sirius XM, online on www.cbc.ca/thecurrent and on your radio app.

[Music: Sting]

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'It's very much about laying out a long-term vision': Finance Minister Bill Morneau addresses budget concerns

Guests: Bill Morneau

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

SOUNDCLIP

Over the last two decades, the middle class and those working hard to join it have fallen behind. Everyday folks who work hard to provide for their families are worried about the future. They're worried that rapid technological change, the seemingly never-ending need for new skills and growing demands on our time mean that their kids won't have the same opportunities that they have.

AMT: Finance Minister Bill Morneau in the House of Commons yesterday as he tabled the Liberal government's second budget. He also talked about the hope and optimism that it helped build Canada in previous generations. And while helping today's middle class regain hope may have been front and centre in his budget statements, for his critics, the numbers do not add up. The Liberals committed to a $5.7 billion in new spending over the next six years compared to $26.5 billion in the first budget and multi-billion dollar deficits are now projected for at least five years with no clear path back into the black. The opposition on both sides was quick to criticize the budget as ineffective for average Canadians.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: I think it’s fair to say when you look at this budget, that the rich are getting what they want. Ordinary Canadians are not getting what they need.

VOICE 2: It clearly demonstrates that the prime minister is completely out of step with the challenges that regular ordinary people have when they’re trying to pay the cost of living. The federal government does not have a revenue problem. They clearly have a spending problem. And this is a budget that spends billions more dollars on things that regular working people are not going to be able to take advantage of.

AMT: Well, the voices there of the interim conservative leader Rona Ambrose and before her, NDP leader Tom Mulcair. Finance Minister Bill Morneau joins us from our studio in Ottawa. Hello. Good morning.

BILL MORNEAU: Good morning, Anna Maria. It's great to be on your show this morning.

AMT: It's nice to have you with us. Has Donald Trump got you afraid to move forward on your own agenda, Mr. Morneau?

BILL MORNEAU: No, not at all. I mean as you can imagine we are engaged with the new US administration because that's what we need to do to protect Canadians’ interests. My talk yesterday and our ongoing plan are very much about how we can make sure that Canada is a strong and resilient country; make sure we're making a difference for all those Canadians who are looking towards opportunities for the future. And you know that's what we're demonstrating with the kinds of measures we are taking.

AMT: And yet you've earmarked about a quarter of what you talked about in your last budget and there are noises coming from your own department that you are concerned about some very specific things that Mr. Trump may do that that Canada will have to answer for financially down the road. Can you talk to us a little bit about what you need to know that you don't know yet about what Trump can do?

BILL MORNEAU: Well, as I said, we are going to pay attention to what's going on in the United States. We always pay attention to what's going on globally. The most important thing from our perspective is that we do the things that can make a real impact on Canadians lives in Canada. So our plan which we started from day one was thinking about how we could deal with middle-class anxiety, the things we can do here in our country and clearly we've taken measures that are making a difference. So reducing taxes on middle-class Canadians, that's a Canadian effort that we started off with. Changing the Canada child benefits so that families who need it can get more money to raise their children—again a Canadian measure that restores confidence, helps people to see more opportunities. In this budget, it's very much about laying out a long-term vision. It's saying that this is a next step and in identifying where can Canada be a world-beater? What sectors are we already great at and how do we continue to invest there so that we'll be successful going forward? You know that sort of activity will make our country resilient in the face of any challenge.

AMT: Okay. And I want to ask a little bit more about your long-term vision and let's start with some of the years that you've earmarked. Seven billion dollars in child care spending is stretched out over 10 years, housing over 11. Child care spending starts next year. Defence equipment spending has been pushed to 2035. That's 18 years from now. Are you planning to be in government in 18 years?

BILL MORNEAU: Well, one can only hope.

AMT: But why the delay? Why would you do that?

BILL MORNEAU: Let me just break those down. You actually identified three separate areas. First of all, you talked about child care. We, in this budget, had a real focus on how we could empower women and we know that early learning in childcare is a critical way to make a difference there. We're going to set upon right after the budget. So starting today, we'll be working with the provinces to make sure that we actually generate the spaces—the 40,000 spaces that we estimate—that we can find in early learning and childcare spaces that will make a real difference. That will take a little bit of time but we're getting on it right now. Affordable housing—you're correct that we are going to make significant investments. It's the biggest single item in our budget that yes, we're doing it over a period of years because that's the prudent way to do it. We need to make sure that we're working together with our partners in provinces and municipalities. We want to be responsible along the way. We can't put money out and not have the way to appropriately use it because that could be wasteful. So what we'll do is we will get to agreements on how we're going to do it. We'll be renovating spaces that exist. We'll be creating new spaces and that will be a measured approach to making a real difference on affordable housing.

AMT: How many jurisdictions do you have to work with on affordable housing?

BILL MORNEAU: On affordable housing, we'll be working with all 10 provinces and three territories. And of course, the municipalities have an important role there as well in working together with the provinces. So that's a very important issue. It's one that requires collaboration. Of course the cities and the places where people live, they understand the need. So working together with them is critical. The third thing you mentioned was defence. We’ve gone through a very significant review of our defence policy since we've been in office. That defence policy review is coming out in the next couple of months. That will inform our agenda going forward. We know how important it is. When you look at where we think the spending will happen, the reality in defence is you want to make sure that the defence area has the opportunity to make the investments at the time that makes sense. So you put in place long- term plans around ships, long-term plans around the kinds of equipment we need and all you're seeing in our timeline is when we think those investments will be made.

AMT: No, fair enough. But arguably the control in 2035 will be someone else's. So would you not plan and start spending now and then plan it out to 2035?

BILL MORNEAU: Well, remember that we are continuing to have a strong military on a year-by-year basis so that planning is in fact going on right now. The consideration for what you're actually going to invest in takes time. You want to do that wisely. That effort continues. And then the significant expenditures that might happen when a ship actually gets delivered show up after the planning has gone on, after so much of the work's gone on for so many years. So I guess the message, Anna Maria, is that you know we've taken a look at where we can make a real difference in people's lives. We've said that there are things that we need to do today. We've done those. They're starting to have an impact by the way.

AMT: Give me an example.

BILL MORNEAU: Well, you know what happened when we came into office as we said we're going to deal with middle-class anxiety. We lowered taxes in the middle class. So for an average Canadian family, they received $540 or they paid $540 less in taxes last year. For the average nine out of 10 families that got the candidate child benefit, they getting roughly $2,300 more after tax each year. You know I used an example—you want a specific example—I used an example in my speech yesterday. I was in a taxi cab in Toronto coming home from a dinner about four months ago and the cab driver, he looked back and he recognized me and we got to talking and he said you know you're making a real difference in my family's life. And he actually put his wife on the phone and he had her go to look at their cheque book to see what the money coming in and the money going out was, and he explained to me that they were getting $300 more per month for their family. Now for them with three kids that were pretty young, an enormous difference and now at the same time, my family because I'm not in the income zone that needs that child benefit anymore, I don't get it anymore. So that money went into the economy. What we're seeing now is a real impact from that. We've seen that unemployment has gone down over the course of the time we've been in office. It was 7.1 per cent when we came in and it’s 6.6 per cent now. So when you think of those numbers, it's important to realize what's actually happening. That's a significant number of people who have good jobs now that didn't have them a year ago. And what that does is that helps our economy to do better. So you start to see the impact with the reduction in unemployment with more people working and you start to see then the opportunities for the economy to continue growing. That's the sort of confidence we're working on.

AMT: This is the first federal budget to use gender-based analysis. What is that?

BILL MORNEAU: Well, we know that the measures that we put in any budget they impact people differently. And specifically, we know that women aren't doing as well as we'd like to see in our country. We have lower workforce participation for women. We have women that don't earn as much for the same job as men. So you know someone like yourself, you know very successful, I'm delighted that my daughters who can look at you and see an example of someone successful and their friends can see that. But I know that there's obstacles to them being successful. We need to think about how we remove those obstacles. In this budget, we've taken a look at every measure and said how does it impact women? Is it going to improve women's ability to be successful?

AMT: How do you do that? What can you give me an example of how that would be done as you go through a budget?

BILL MORNEAU: Absolutely. You'll look at a measure and saying, is this specifically helping one subset against another subset? So let's take the example of venture capital investments. We've made significant venture capital investments in this budget. We put $400 million against an increase in our approach to getting venture capital for small businesses. But we recognize at the same time that women are under-represented in their success getting venture capital. So we put in a specific measure to give access to venture capital funds for women entrepreneurs. So what's that going to do? It's going to make you know friends of my daughters and girls and young women across the country see that well, I can get access to capital so I can start a small business and that means I'm going to be able to be as successful as the other person that was able to get it beforehand. So over time, we're going to get better at this. We've made a really good start around looking at the gender impact of the measures in our budget. Knowing that women are central to our economy, this is actually going to improve all of our economic outcomes over time. It'll get better and better and I expect this will be a permanent feature of budgeting in this country thinking about how it impacts both gender.

AMT: Okay. So let me use another example. If you're using gender-based analysis, when you look at for example funding for something like Corrections Canada, do you look at the treatment of women in prisons? Do you look at the number of women in prisons and who they are?

BILL MORNEAU: Well, you know Anna Maria, that's an excellent question. I have to admit that I did not personally do every single bit of the analysis myself, so I don't feel equipped to adequately answer that question. What we're definitely going to do is look at every measure in a budget. So as we think about investing in as you say correctional institutions, are we doing it in the right places? Is it having the desired impact? Does it allow people to get you know rehabilitated in a way that we hope and are there differences for women versus men? Those will be the questions we'll ask and as we get better at it, I think the impact will be greater and greater.

AMT: I want to ask you about job training. It is a very big issue in this country and I know you want to speak to job training and I'd like you to hear first a clip. This is Dave Brown in Winnipeg to talk about his own job struggles with training and retraining. Here's his clip.

SOUNDCLIP

I’d worked for 15 years in the computer industry. Suddenly I was downsized out of my job and at age of 49, I had to do something completely different. So I found a government sponsored carpentry course and I did the retraining. It took about eight years. I had some decent steady work but in the last two or three years, I've not been able to find anything. So at the age of 60, I'm looking for more retraining, either that or sell my house. But right now, I do not know where to go.

AMT: Mr. Morneau, how will this budget help someone like Dave Brown?

BILL MORNEAU: Well, you know we hear these stories and all of us recognize that we're facing a dynamic economy, one that's changing quickly because the globe is moving fast. He identified a few things in that clip that I think we need to think about. You know first of all, he talked about the industry that he came from, the computer industry that's moving fast. We've identified some sectors where we think we can be really successful as a nation. One of them is digital technology. It requires investments so that we can have the ability to be world le aders with great universities, great research institutes and leading companies. We're going to focus on building those clusters so there are more jobs around those really exciting companies and places where people build skills. But we recognize that as we do that, we're going to need to help people with training to be in those places, you know for young people more co-op programs and universities for example. That's a focus that will help people to be successful there. There will be people though like Dave, that that's not the right angle for them or the right place for them at a certain stage in their career. So we're going to work to give them better information about where the next role could be. So part of what we've identified here is the need for the federal government to step in to make sure that Dave or people like him are training for the next job that makes sense. He chose carpentry. I guess that didn't work for him for the long term so we need to be there to help him say what do you go to next and what are the transitional supports that you require? We put money into the employment insurance system to help for training as people transition. And I guess the final way I would answer your question, Anna Maria, about Dave's situation or the people that are maybe 20 years younger that are thinking about being in Dave's situation, we've created a situation where now because of what we've done together with the provinces, we've enhanced the Canada Pension Plan so that as Dave at that age and stage of his career is thinking about you know how long he wants to continue working, he knows that he's got the long term confidence that as he hits the age that he's going to retire, there’ll be the ability for him to retire in dignity. So we need to work to create those exciting jobs in those exciting sectors, give people support so they can get into those jobs, remember that not everyone is going to want those jobs and think about how we give people information for other roles that will be interesting and we're going to do that. And finally make sure that our society helps people to take care of themselves in a way that will, as I said, early on in their lives when they have young children, they'll be able to have the child benefits that will help them in that time of their life, later in life that they will have saved and accumulated enough through the Canada Pension Plan and their own means so that they can actually feel secure at that stage.

AMT: Okay. I also want to ask you about innovation. I spoke yesterday with Michael Katchen. He's the founder and chief executive of Wealthsimple, the digital investment management firm. He had raised some concerns that the government would spread innovation investment a little too thin. Listen to what his concerns are and then maybe you can speak to them.

SOUNDCLIP

You know the rumblings we hear even about the budget and how it will be allocated is a competition to see how many different innovation centres it might support. The reality of Canada is, we don't really have all that many innovation centres to support if we really want to win. And I think that's the key is, is you know what are we trying to do here? Are we trying to truly transition to an innovation-based economy and build a prosperous innovation economy that works for everyone?

AMT: Okay, Mr. Morneau. Because you're talking about clusters, are you spreading the money that you want to give to innovation too thin?

BILL MORNEAU: Well, first of all I've heard about the firm Wealthsimple and I've heard positive things about it but I just may be more optimistic than that fellow. I guess my view is that what we need to do is we need to look at the sectors where we already have a great deal of success. Those sectors and we've identified six where we think Canada can be at the front of the pack in the world. We've said you know natural resource sector—we've got core strengths. We've got great engineering capability. We can continue to be leading the world. We said in the clean technology sector, that emerging sector where some of the skill sets from the natural resource sector will help us there. But also we can make a difference in a hugely growing part of the economy. We said in agriculture. Obviously we have a huge capacity for agriculture across our country. We said in digital technology, how important that is for the future. We've got great strengths in Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal. We know that we're already a world-beater. We know that you know Silicon Valley hires more of their people from University of Waterloo for example than anywhere else in the world. We then look at the health bio sciences. We know that Canada's health care system has produced really wonderful researchers across our country. We can be a world beater in that sector and we'll be able to focus there. And finally, in advanced manufacturing. We've been very successful as a manufacturing country. We've got great areas of strength. So those are six sectors where we see that we have a differential advantage. We believe that by focusing on those sectors, thinking about how universities, research institutes, strong organizations, firms and the cluster of firms around those firms will create really positive outcomes. We've seen it across the country already by taking a focused long-term approach. We know that we can do better. And you know I'm convinced that organizations like the one you're talking about, by investing in those sectors for their clientele, they'll actually see great returns which will create the sort of virtuous circle of success for this country.

AMT: Okay. And just before I let you go then, I want to go back to Mr. Trump. There is concern about the reopening of NAFTA, about border taxes, about infrastructure spending in the states that will be so high that it will lead to a greater inflation. How concerned are you about all of that moving forward between now and the fall?

BILL MORNEAU: Well, let me start by dealing with the last thing that you said. So greater inflation normally happens when economies do well. So if the US economy does well, typically the Canadian economy also does well. That provides opportunities for us. What I can tell you about our strategy—our strategy is one to make the Canadian economy as successful as it can possibly be, so that we can be resilient in dealing with whatever challenges we have. We started with a plan to help make sure that people are feeling confident and optimistic about the future and we're seeing the benefits of that happening with reduced unemployment. We're now talking about where do we invest and how do we make sure that people have the training to take on those great jobs in the places that we invest? It's a long term plan. So this year you're seeing you know act two in a in a play that's got at least four acts in our first term and we hope to have more acts in our second term. The idea is to make sure that we have a long-term vision that will really create an advantage for our country so that Canadians can be proud and see that there's opportunities for their children and grandchildren.

AMT: Mr. Morneau, thank you for speaking with me today.

BILL MORNEAU: Thank you very much, Anna Maria. Nice to be here.

AMT: Bill Morneau. He’s Canada's federal finance minister. He joined us from our Ottawa studio. Let us know what you think of what he's saying. Tweet us. We are @thecurrentCBC. Find us on Facebook. Go to our website, www.cbc.ca/thecurrent. That is today's edition of The Current. Stay with Radio One for q. Tom Power speaks with Adam Garnet Jones and Sarah Kolasky, the directors and star of the film, Great Great Great. A reminder you can take The Current with you with the CBC Radio app. It is free at the App Store or Google Play. Now one more financial note after my conversation with the federal finance minister. We're going to finish with a conversation I had with a different kind of financial expert or a tax expert or someone who pretended to be one. The Canada Revenue Agency is actually warning Canadians that scam calls from people pretending to be with the CRA are on the rise, especially now as we are approaching tax time. These scam calls come in many varieties. The callers will often tell you that you must pay them or go to jail or that the police are on their way to arrest you. That's what happened to me. Someone called claiming to be from the CRA and left a message. So I called back and we were recording. We'll leave you with that. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. Thank you for listening to The Current.

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'We know this is a scam': The Current's Anna Maria Tremonti calls Canada Revenue Agency fraudster

[Sound: Phone ringing]

CALLER: Thank you for calling Canada Revenue Agency. You’re speaking to Officer Jonathan Lawford. How may I help you?

AMT: Hi. I just got a call saying I had a legal problem. I needed to call this number?

CALLER: Well, let me just verify the details for you. Could you help me with your name, first of all?

AMT: Sure. My name is Anna Maria Tremonti.

CALLER: Alright. I have retrieved the information. I can see yes, it is indeed correct. Canada Revenue conducted a confidential audit on your taxes for the years 2012 till 2015 and we found out that your taxes were not filed correctly. There were miscalculations in your taxes and there shows a standing amount of $3,429.88. And within two hours, the arrest warrant will be released against your name and the RCMP units will arrive to take you under federal custody.

AMT: Well, but what do I do to pay that back? How do I pay that? Can I do that before they arrest me?

CALLER: What we could do is we could arrange for an officer from CRA to visit you by tomorrow and they would be able to collect the payment from you. Does that sound fair to you?

AMT: Yeah. I would give them a cheque? What would I do?

CALLER: The security deposit that you would have to verify would be $1,371. Is that something you have available?

AMT: One thousand three hundred seventy one dollars. How would I get it to you?

CALLER: What we would use is, we use a specific mode of payment that is called a EFTPS—that is Electronic Federal Tax Payment System. [inaudible] registered government store. From there, you’ll purchase EFTPS vouchers or in short, tax payment vouchers for the amount and you will keep the tax vouchers with you. Tomorrow when the officer arrives at your place, he will collect the tax payment vouchers from you and handle the documentation and also help you with the mode of payment to clear out the back taxes. Remember, the amount of $1,371 is not a payment that you're making. It is a security deposit that will be refunded to you within four working days.

AMT: Okay. But can I come to you because tomorrow gets problematic. I have appointments and I'm afraid I'll miss them and I really want to pay this. So can I come to you?

CALLER: I am located in Ottawa, Ontario. I’m talking to you from the head office. So if you wish to come down to the head office, you would be more than welcome to do that. We would not mind that, Anna. But unfortunately, the arrest warrant will be pursued in the next 45 to 50 minutes.

AMT: My name is Anna Maria Tremonti. I'm a journalist with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and we've been recording you because we know the CRA doesn't do this. So we know this is a scam.

CALLER: Okay. Any more information that you would like from my end?

AMT: We know this is a scam. We know this is a scam.

CALLER: So since you are claiming that this is a scam, since this call is being recorded, we will definitely go ahead and use this in the courthouse again you, since you refuse to cooperate with the CRA to resolve this dispute.

AMT: Well, I’m recording you as well.

CALLER: Well, I am aware about that. That is not a problem from our end. We are also recording this conversation from our end. In case we find out that this is actually a prank call from your end, Canada Revenue will take legal action against you. Any more information that I can help you with today, Anna?

AMT: I will be giving this tape over. Thank you. Have a good day.

[Sound: Call end, dial tone]

[Music: Ending theme]

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March 23, 2017 full episode transcript

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