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The Current Transcript for April 21, 2017

Host: Dave Seglins

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

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STEPHEN COLBERT: It's not that big of a surprise I guess.

VOICE 1: Yeah.

STEPHEN COLBERT: We all saw this coming at us, you know, like an old man coring an intern in the break room.

[Sound: audience laughing]

STEPHEN COLBERT: O’Reilly, O’Reilly has been accused of sexual harassment for years.

DAVE SEGLINS: Stephen Colbert's take on the Fox News firing of Bill O'Reilly, following revelations of a series of alleged cases of sexual harassment. We'll talk to the Canadian woman credited with taking down the controversial host. That story in a moment. And from Fox to France.

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MARINE LE PEN: [French speaking language] [through translator] You’ve been speaking for seven minutes Mr. Macron, and you haven't said a blessed thing. No one knows what you stand for.

DS: French presidential candidate Marine Le Pen ripping into her competition, political newcomer Emmanuel Macron. The people of France hit the polls on Sunday, and with the political establishment already weakened and accusations of Russian meddling, how will yesterday's attack in Paris affect the vote? That story in an hour. Also, the role of theatre with America at a political crossroads.

SOUNDCLIP

Building the Wall is what we’d call speculative fiction. It's a look at conscience, choice, and the political choices that we in America will be facing.

DS: I'll speak with Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Robert Schenken about his new play in half an hour. I'm Dave Seglins and this is the Friday edition of The Current.

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'I had to speak': Wendy Walsh addresses Fox News' Bill O'Reilly allegations

Guests: Wendy Walsh, Paul Farhi

SOUNDCLIP

BILL O’REILLY: There's got to be some downside to having a woman president right? Something. Something that may not fit with that office, correct?

DAVE SEGLINS: Bill O'Reilly, speaking about the concept of a woman in the White House on his cable news show The O'Reilly Factor, back in 2014. Well as of Wednesday, Bill O'Reilly is no longer appearing on Fox News. The network ended its relationship with him following a New York Times report that five women had received payouts totaling about 13 million dollars US from Bill O'Reilly or Fox News in exchange for not speaking out or taking legal action over their allegations of sexual harassment or other inappropriate behaviour. Well, when others could not speak out Canadian Wendy Walsh went public with her own allegations of sexual harassment against the former Fox News host. Wendy Walsh is an Adjunct Professor of Psychology, a radio host and television commentator. And she's in Camarillo, California. Wendy, what were you thinking as you listened to that clip?

WENDY WALSH: I had never heard that clip before. Well, during my business dinner with Mr. O'Reilly back in 2013, he did make a point for some strange reason of telling me very early on in the dinner I hope you're not a feminist because I hate feminists. So now I hear this tape and I think well, I guess he believes women are of less value than men.

DS: How did you feel when you first heard Bill O'Reilly had lost his job?

WENDY WALSH: Well I'm a human being, and I'm a woman and I'm not the kind of personality to dance on somebody’s corporate grave. I had mixed feelings because obviously here's a man who's losing his job, on the other hand, I'm also a woman and I'm a mother whose daughters will be entering the workplace soon, and so I feel also kind of happy. Score one for the girls team.

DS: You allege Bill O'Reilly sexually harassed you four years ago. In your words, what happened?

WENDY WALSH: Well, the compressed version is simply that I believe he targeted me by having a segment producer call me and invite me onto his show and tell me that they were going to create this segment around me. And three weeks into this, I received an email from his executive assistant inviting me to have dinner with Mr. O'Reilly. I assumed it would be so we could talk about my future at Fox as a contributor. I didn't even have to bring it up because in the first few minutes of dinner he mentioned that he was good friends with Roger Ailes, the then chairman and they’d like to make me a contributor. At that point it felt like it was a celebratory dinner. At the end of dinner he simply said the word let's get out of here. We were eating in the restaurant at the Bel-Air Hotel and after we passed the hostess stand I just naturally turned left towards the bar, but he turned right toward the bedrooms. We were about ten feet away from each other when we both kind of turned around to do a where you at? And he caught up with me and said no come back to my suite. And I said I'm sorry I can't do that. And he said why? You think I'm going to attack you? And I said no, I mean, Bill I'm trying to save the relationship and be cordial as all women are expected to do in their workplaces. And I said we're both parents of teenage daughters maybe we should model some good choices for them. So he sighed and we went to the bar where he became hostile, angry and said the words you can forget all the career advice I gave you. And soon after he weaned me from the show.

DS: Now, O'Reilly's defenders have said that look, you appeared on Fox numerous times after that alleged incident, and then in fact he still helped promote your book and that his behaviour towards you didn't change. How do you respond to that?

WENDY WALSH: Well hindsight is 20/20. Now that I know that he paid off five sexual harassment lawsuits, I realize he was an absolute pro at defending from another lawsuit. He didn't want to have to spend more money. So he just got colder and more distant and did a quiet weaning. And then instead of actually firing me, he had a producer say let’s just take a break and we'll do the segment after the summer. But after the summer I was unable to get the segment going again. And I had done it with another psychologist, they brought her back but not me.

DS: Now, Bill O'Reilly has said in a statement after his departure from Fox that quote, “It is tremendously disheartening that we part ways due to completely unfounded claims. But that is the unfortunate reality many of us in the public eye must live with today.” How do you respond?

WENDY WALSH: I take exception to the word unfounded. I made an official claim to the Fox sexual harassment hotline in the last few weeks. They had four scary attorneys grill me for two hours. I provided them with email evidence. They contacted five of my colleagues and friends from 2013, who I told at the time, including my entertainment attorney who I told immediately after. They did their investigation. And rather than saying this is unfounded they said we found that it's time to fire him.

DS: You made official complaints to Fox. Are you taking any legal action of your own against O’Reilly?

WENDY WALSH: Absolutely not. This is what allows me to be free and have a voice. When I found out he had silenced five women with a confidentiality agreement, the mother bear in me came out and I had to speak for them. And far more egregious things happened to them in my opinion. So I, you know, I'm happy to just keep on talking. I don't need any money. I'll do just fine.

DS: Now, I want to state for the record that none of the allegations against Bill O'Reilly have been proven in court. What was your reaction initially when The New York Times contacted you?

WENDY WALSH: My first reaction was do I lie or tell the truth? And then I decided to take the scaredy cat way out and say OK, I went to Ryerson Journalism School by the way, I know about ethics. So if I tell you it's off the record does it really mean off the record? She said yes. So I told her story off the record so that she could go out and find other victims with similar stories.

DS: So what was it that finally made you go on the record?

WENDY WALSH: Two things. One is I started interviewing every single woman in my life and I noticed, I'm asking them should I go on the record or not? And I noticed a generational divide. My daughters and her college age friends were young strong feminists who said of course tell this story. And all the older women had sort of normalized this behaviour. They’d spent a lifetime in the workforce navigating around these kinds of landmines and they mostly shrug their shoulders and said things like eh, worse has happened to me. And it was this generational divide that bothered me because I'm like we're supposed to be leading our daughters, not them us. And secondly, when I found out about the five women who had been silent. It was those two factors that made me decide to be brave and go on the record. And let me tell you, it was terrifying.

DS: So what impact do you think Bill O'Reilly's departure from Fox is going to have on the workplace environment? Both there, but also generally in the media?

WENDY WALSH: I think the fact that we are having this conversation right now, it's not so much about Bill O'Reilly, it's about what this represents to everybody else. Large corporations, medium sized companies, small mom and pop businesses are now starting to ask questions about what is harassment? What is discrimination? And I hope this will benefit anybody in the workplace, including minorities, including people with disabilities, and including gender issues.

DS: Now, you're no stranger to the public spotlight. You're a media personality yourself. But what is it like for you personally to be at the centre of this?

WENDY WALSH: Absolutely weird. It is surreal. I was just telling a news reporter that was here, I'm so used to being on the other side of the camera doing the interviews, I now have great compassion for the interview subject because during something like this you’re just assaulted with so many requests for offers that all your manners go out the window because you're in such a press for time and I feel bad about that. But I will say this, that I was unprepared for the overwhelming amount of positive support that I received online and through social media and specifically support from men. I mean, hundreds of men have emailed me saying thank you for doing this. Thank you for doing this for our wives, for our daughters. We're behind you. Because the good guys in the world also know that these dogs are up there ruining workplace environments for everybody.

DS: You're in the spotlight for now, what's next for you?

WENDY WALSH: Well funny you should ask. I have been, now, I’ve had a, [chuckles] I’ve had a kind of metamorphosis through this, because I realized that the power of a voice can actually create change. You know, an hour after my press conference when Mercedes Benz first pulled out and they were the first advertiser to do so, I had tears in my eyes, writing I didn’t think there’d be real change.. And so I realized that my voice can be used for more than just the teaching and the radio that I do. So I’m actually exploring the idea of running for public office somewhere.

DS: Wendy Walsh, I wish you all the best with your future endeavors and thanks so much for sharing your story today.

WENDY WALSH: Thank you.

DS: Wendy Walsh is an Adjunct Professor of Psychology, a radio host and television commentator. She was in Camarillo, California. Well now that Bill O'Reilly is gone, Fox News is hoping to keep viewers tuned in and bring back advertisers. The network has announced plans to move host Tucker Carlson into its all-important 8:00 PM time slot but it's not clear how Fox will weather the departure of its most popular host. Paul Farhi is a media reporter with The Washington Post, who has been covering this story. We've reached him in Rockville, Maryland. Good morning.

PAUL FARHI: Good morning to you Dave.

DS: We just heard from Wendy Walsh about her experience with Bill O'Reilly. How important has her role been in O'Reilly's departure from the network this week?

PAUL FARHI: Critical and crucial. Bill O'Reilly would not be out of the network now, I believe, if it hadn't been for Wendy Walsh. And the significance of it is something that she mentioned to you just earlier, that she was not one of the women who had been silenced. The other five women who had received payments from Fox and from Bill O'Reilly signed non-disclosure agreements about their settlements. They were bound by this. They couldn't talk to the press. Wendy Walsh never sued and didn't have a settlement. She was free to talk and in fact she did. And that put a face, a voice, and a personality behind these accusations. The media attention was critical in shining the spotlight on Bill O'Reilly after The New York Times came out with their story. I think Fox's calculation was The New York Times will do their story, it will be a one or two day thing and that'll be the end of it because we've got everyone tied up under these nondisclosure agreements. Wendy Walsh was the loose cannon, I guess, she was the one they didn't count on. And she really truly made the story.

DS: Generally speaking, what do we know about the allegations made against Bill O'Reilly from those other women, other than Wendy Walsh?

PAUL FARHI: Well, first of all as you mentioned, Bill O'Reilly has denied he's ever done any of these things. He has said that he settled because he is a big personality and he's a magnet for this kind of lawsuit and this kind of attention. But if you go back over each of the accusations and all the claims against him, they fit a pattern. I was a producer for Bill O'Reilly, we had a relationship, he gave me advice and soon that advice turned to something other than advice. He began harassing me. The most famous of these cases was Andrea Mackris who was a producer for him back in the early 2000s. She ended up receiving the bulk of this 13 million dollars in settlement, she received 9 million dollars. She was a producer on his show and he began engaging in phone sex with her and then, you know, harassing her for something more than just conversation, and allegedly according to her, and then eventually she got tired of it. And this was a very, you know, basically the pattern for all of Bill O'Reilly's harassment allegations. Started off friendly, started off as a working relationship, I'll give you advice and soon the advice turned to something else.

DS: What do you make of Fox News’ handling of this controversy?

PAUL FARHI: Well, I think they have tried very hard to keep it quiet. You know, they didn't want the bad publicity. Bill O'Reilly was their biggest star. They wanted to protect him. And so, you know, they of course they signed these nondisclosure agreements because they didn't want this spilling into the public view. But, you know, with the Roger Ailes controversy of last summer, they had too big a problem on their hands and it couldn't really truly be contained, especially when reporters and others were shining so much attention on them. But, you know, their preference was to let Roger Ailes remain in his job, their preference was to let Bill O'Reilly remain in his job, pay the women and hope the problem goes away.

DS: Until Wendy Walsh.

PAUL FARHI: Until Wendy Walsh. Well, I mean, there was a confluence of events that led up to Wendy Walsh. You had Roger Ailes last summer, a huge scandal. You had Bill O'Reilly again. You know, one on top of the other along with Wendy Walsh, along with advertisers pulling out. It was too much for them to actually withstand. Bill O'Reilly had sort of lost his economic value to Fox when the advertisers were not coming back. They had hoped to ride it out but that wasn't happening as long as there were Wendy Walshs around.

DS: We've heard about the advertisers pulling out, but how successful was O’Reilly and his show on Fox? And what's your sense of whether these allegations were alienating his audience over the last couple of weeks?

PAUL FARHI: The allegations weren't alienating his audience. That's the interesting thing about him. His audience is extremely loyal. In fact, during the first three months of this year he had record ratings. Of course that was before these accusations were around. But even during as the controversy built, this audience stuck with him. They think he is the embodiment of, you know, their grievances, their gripes, he's sticking it to the man. He's nobody's, he's owned by nobody. They love him. And they buy his books and they've kept him as the number one cable news personality for a good 15, 16 years. But it's more than that. You can have a large audience as Bill O'Reilly did, but if you lose your advertising support, if you don't have anyone sponsoring you and you have become an absolute public relations liability for your network, you're not going to have a job.

DS: Will O'Reilly receive any kind of pay out for this?

PAUL FARHI: Yes. He signed a contract with Fox, renewed his contract for three years back in March, just a few weeks before this whole thing blew up. And within that contract, since they had been to the Ailes controversy and through all of these sexual harassment cases, they put in a very interesting clause. The clause was effectively if we have to get rid of you, if we have to fire you before you serve out the contract, we will pay you X amount, and X amount turns out to be about a year's salary, somewhere around 25 million, which is what he will receive. This is why the negotiations over his exit were not protracted and were not particularly hostile. The contract spelled it out quite clearly he would receive this flat sum. So it's up to and as much as 25 million. I don't know that it's exactly 25 million but it's in that ballpark.

DS: So Tucker Carlson's going to take over for Bill O'Reilly in that prime slot, which is going to require a number of other shake ups in their lineup. Do you think Fox's viewership will suffer from this change?

PAUL FARHI: I think it will suffer in the long term and I think eventually it will heal itself. People who watch Fox watch Fox for quite a few hours. In fact, there's some question of whether they come for the Fox programming in general and stepped around for O’Reilly or they came for O'Reilly and stuck around for Fox. So, you know, they watch many hours a day. Tucker Carlson has proved himself to be a pretty popular guy at 9 PM. Of course he benefited from Bill O'Reilly's big lead in audience. But he's proven that he could handle it after Megyn Kelly left to go to NBC earlier this year. So he seems to be a bit of a franchise player. And, you know, in some way glass half full, I think Fox would say Bill O'Reilly was 67, Tucker Carlson is 47 and we have a longer term future with Tucker Carlson than we do with Bill O'Reilly. I don't think they would have wanted it to turn out this way but that seems to be the way it's working out. So I think Tucker Carlson won't do Bill O'Reilly numbers at first. He doesn't have the loyalty, doesn't have the following. But eventually Fox is going to be fine. They hit record audiences, record profits, thanks I think in part to their coverage and the interest in President Trump during this first quarter of the year. They're on a roll. And I don't think this will slow them down.

DS: Paul we've only got a minute left but, you know, there have been two other high profile hosts, both women who have left Fox in recent months. Now you've got this firing over harassment allegations. Do you think this controversy will encourage Fox News to examine or re-examine its workplace culture?

PAUL FARHI: Well, you would think they would have examined it when they got rid of Roger Ailes, their co-founder last summer. Ailes had accusations going back not just to the founding of Fox News in 1996 but going back to the 1960s when he was a television producer in Philadelphia. You know, I guess the cost of doing business is something that gets the attention of the Murdochs. And if sexual harassment causes you to have to pay out 25 million dollars to your biggest star, 20 million dollars to Gretchen Carlson who sued last summer, 40 million dollars to Roger Ailes as severance. I think that they should get a pretty strong message about what they have to do to clean up their workplace.

DS: We have to leave it there. Thank you.

PAUL FARHI: Thank you Dave.

DS: Paul Farhi is a media reporter for The Washington Post. He was in Rockville, Maryland. Now, The Current contacted 21st Century Fox, the parent company of Fox News and Bill O'Reilly for comment on this story. We did not hear back. Well, the CBC News is next. And then Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Robert Schenken joins us to talk about his new play Building the Wall and the responsibility of playwrights in politically volatile times. I'm Dave Seglins and you're listening to the Friday edition of The Current.

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Building the Wall: A theatrical response to the age of Donald Trump

Guest: Robert Schenken

DAVE SEGLINS: Hello, I'm Dave Seglins and you're listening to the Friday edition of The Current.

[Music: Theme]

DS: Still to come, a breakdown of the political establishment in France and an extremist attack yesterday in Paris has cracked the presidential election wide open ahead of Sunday's vote. That story in half an hour. But first, a playwright's thoughts on the role of the theatre in times of political uncertainty.

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DONALD TRUMP: We are going to have a deportation force and you're going to do it humanely and you're going to bring the country, and frankly, the people because you have some excellent wonderful people, some fantastic people that have been here for a long period of time. Don't forget Mika that you have millions of people that are waiting online to come into this country and they're waiting to come in legally. And I always say the wall, we're going to build the wall it's going to be a real deal, it’s going to be a real wall. There was a picture in one of the magazines where they had a wall this tall and they were taking drugs over the wall, they built a ramp over the wall and the truck was going up and down, they were using it like a highway, the wall was like a highway. And that’s not going to happen, it’s going to be a Trump wall, there’s going to be a real wall and it's going to stop people and it's going to be good.

DS: That was Donald Trump back as a Republican presidential candidate making his pitch to build a wall along the Mexican border and to establish a deportation force to target undocumented immigrants. Well, millions of Americans who watched Donald Trump spout anti-immigrant rhetoric on the campaign trail would go on to vote him in as the 45th President of the United States. But as the election campaign reached its final days, my next guest watched worried and then started writing. Robert Schenken is one of America's great playwrights. In 1992 he won the Pulitzer Prize for drama for his play The Kentucky Cycle. 2014 his play All the Way starring Bryan Cranston as President Lyndon Johnson won the Tony Award for Best Play. And today his new work, Building the Wall is raising important questions about the future of the United States. It's being performed around the US and is coming to Canada. It's also out in book form. Robert Schenken joins me from New York. Hello.

ROBERT SCHENKEN: Hi, it’s great to be here.

DS: What is the plot of this play Building the Wall?

ROBERT SCHENKEN: Building the Wall is what we’d call speculative fiction, something on the order of The Handmaid's Tale. It's set in the near future, 2019, and takes place in a meeting room and a maximum security federal penitentiary. There are two characters. Rick, white middle class manager who formerly ran a private prison largely concerned with detaining illegal immigrants. And Gloria, an African-American professor. Rick has been recently convicted of some, we're not sure what, but obviously very serious charges and is awaiting sentencing. And Gloria's the first person that he has given an interview to and she is there to understand what exactly happened. It's a look at conscience and choice and the political choices that we in America will be facing over the next couple of years.

DS: Now, I'm going to say right off the top, there's a risk of a spoiler alert in this. Are you comfortable, can we talk about where this play winds up? Because this escalates from a mystery about what it is that this man who’s being interviewed did to realizing what he did.

ROBERT SCHENKEN: Yes, the consequences are very serious but I don't think that they are outlandish. In fact, I think they are a very logical progression if you were to play out the incendiary rhetoric of President Trump on border security and immigration.

DS: Alright, we're going to get to those consequences in a minute. But tell us when did you start thinking about writing this play?

ROBERT SCHENKEN: I actually wrote this play in late October in the space of a week. I had been increasingly concerned about what I was hearing. It wasn't just the language of then candidate Trump but it was also the way in which politicians and talking heads correspondents, people who should know better were trying to downplay the seriousness of this. They were constantly reassuring the American audience. Well he doesn't really mean it or hey it's just words or well don't worry, should in the unlikely event he become president we will make sure that nothing terrible happens. And, you know, I'm a writer, I take language very seriously. And one should always take seriously what politicians say. And I felt I needed to respond. I thought the election would turn out differently than it did like many people. But I felt that even at that time a week before the election, the United States had already crossed a line and damage had been done and that we were going to be living with the consequences of that for a very long time. And so I wrote this cautionary tale, this kind of electric, very exciting confrontation between these two characters in the near future. And then the election happened. And then everything that has happened since has only spoken to the utter plausibility of this rather extraordinary dramatic work. It's really been kind of shocking.

DS: What were you thinking as you went from pre-election into the election that saw Donald Trump?

ROBERT SCHENKEN: Well, as I say, like so many people I was staggered by the actual election itself. It was not an outcome that I expected. I was nervous about the election, I had been very nervous about the election but it wasn't what I expected. And so my initial response like a great many Hillary supporters was despair, depression, acute anxiety, but very quickly I roused myself from that in the only way in which one can and that is to take action to avoid the oh so easy temptation to simply avoid what has happened or live in denial of it and actually engage. This is my country, these are my values and I'm not giving this up without a fight. And I think it's very important for me to say that I don't see the political crisis right now, and I do believe that we are in the middle of a political crisis, as a struggle between a left or right or liberal or progressive, Republican or Democrat. What we are experiencing is an attack, a concerted attack on fundamental American values, the bedrock values that make our republic what it is. I refer of course to things like the separation of powers, an independent judiciary, freedom of press, free speech, et cetera. These are not liberal issues or conservative issues, these are American issues and these are under attack.

DS: You wrote this play you say in one week. How were you able to write it so quickly?

ROBERT SCHENKEN: You know, it's hard for me to answer that question. I was just so outraged, so concerned and the urgent need as an artist to respond to what I perceived to be an urgent crisis just took over. I had all the material I needed certainly, in terms of just picking up the daily newspaper. But I had also read a book a year earlier, I had just come across this kind of a classic volume and Holocaust literature called Into that Darkness, in which an individual who rose briefly to a position of great power in the Nazi machinery was interviewed at some length, and his family and friends colleagues and some of those who survived his ministrations, and the book had stayed with me. And I know that was also an influence. But by and large, it was just this incredibly personal urge as an artist, as a citizen to respond in the moment to what was happening politically.

DS: OK. You have called it right off the top speculative fiction, so let's get into it. This play is basically a dialogue between a historian and a prison warden who himself is now a prisoner. Why did you keep the conversation the focus and the setting so bare?

ROBERT SCHENKEN: Well it was very important to me to really focus down in a very tight and intimate way on these very large issues. The play is full of course of politics but it is politics grounded absolutely in human need and human nature. And so I didn't want the focus to wander, I wanted it to stay, be very very precise about it. And secondarily, I wanted this play to be extremely portable. I wanted this play to be produced widely, and in order to make that easily accessible I have designed it in such a way that it's very economically viable.

DS: Two actors and a sparse stage. Now, the character the warden Rick, he's a Trump supporter, he seems like an everyday kind of guy. What were you thinking when you came up with his character?

ROBERT SCHENKEN: Well, you know, it's very important for me personally, and I think for people in the United States to understand this very substantial portion of the demographic that voted for Donald Trump. And it's all too easy to dismiss people you disagree with as foolish or not having a grasp of the facts or being prejudiced or bigoted or whatever. That's not helpful. It's not actually true necessarily for everybody. And it was very very important for me in this play that the character of Rick not be a stereotype and not play into liberal or progressive stereotypes about what these people are like or what they want. It's very very important in the United States right now for a genuine dialogue to emerge out of this moment of crisis. And that means we really have to look at each other as fully realized three dimensional human beings and so it was very very important to me that the ordinariness of Rick be very clear. That we understand who this guy is, we understand what motivates him, we understand what he needs and wants and aspire to. What his frustrations are and why ultimately he might act in the way in which he did.

DS: So what did Rick do?

ROBERT SCHENKEN: Rick presided over an increasingly chaotic and ultimately catastrophic event at a private prison housing detained illegal immigrants who are being held prior to deportation. The crimes of which he's committed are among the most serious that you can commit.

DS: And this is a parallel to the Holocaust, in the event that there are incarcerated people who wind up meeting their demise in your final scenario.

ROBERT SCHENKEN: Well, we've certainly, you know, one doesn't need to go back to Germany of the fourties sadly for catalogue instances of this kind of tragedy unfolding. Look at Bosnia, look at Rwanda or look more recently in Syria. Unfortunately, you know, the veneer of civilization is a lot thinner than we would like to believe it is. And in extraordinary circumstances people sometimes make terrible terrible choices.

DS: But the result in your play, and it's set in 2019 as this possible dystopian future, is the deaths of untold hundreds, thousands of people. Do you really think that kind of thing could happen in America?

ROBERT SCHENKEN: I do. I absolutely do. You know, we have come very close in the history of this country to terrible crimes. Certainly one could look at our treatment of Native Americans in this regard absolutely. In World War II the incarceration of Japanese-Americans in concentration camps was an utterly illegal and immoral action for which the United States government has formally apologized. And in individual cases in many cities across the country, we have continued to see, you know, tragic instances of terrible crimes being committed under colour of authority by people in authority, policemen, jailers, wardens. These are not isolated instances. What we're talking about is something that grows into something a little more concerted and even more dire. But I think it's absolutely possible.

DS: In your portrayal of Rick, you drill down into how he gets from, you know, just being responsible for a prison to executing sort of orders on how to deal with detainees. Tell us about him. Do you have sympathy for Rick?

ROBERT SCHENKEN: I do. I absolutely do. I think Rick is a tragic figure. And I think that if the audience doesn't feel sympathy for Rick and compassion for Rick then the play just becomes an ideological rant. And I have no interest in that, that's not at all what I've written. The more we understand Rick, the more we care about Rick, the more we sympathize with Rick's circumstances, the more powerful and ultimately the more tragic are the consequences of the choices that he's made. But it's very important, that’s very important in the play, this notion that we do have free will, we do have free agency, we do make choices and it's extremely important, especially right now the United States, that the choices we make are predicated on the notion of some kind of moral choice, a conscious decision of what is right and wrong, and that we not cede our moral authority to the state. Whenever a country has taken this unfortunate turn down a dark road it has happened because individual citizens have yielded to the state their own moral authority. You know, the current president of the United States is not a Nazi. Not remotely. He’s not even necessarily a Republican or a Democrat. If anything he's an oligarch. But he has definitely taken a page out of the authoritarian playbook and he's done so very adroitly.

DS: How so?

ROBERT SCHENKEN: Well, you know, this is the steps by which one acquires and consolidates and exercises power are very well known. You know, you appeal to people's anxieties and fears, indeed you stoke those anxieties and those fears and us versus them, you demonize your opponents, you select and create exacerbate scapegoats. These are often racial or religious minorities, very frequently these are immigrant groups. And you promise your followers that you are the only one who can save them, can protect them. The appeals are to nativist and racist impulse. And that's exactly what Donald Trump has done and he's been very very successful.

DS: Yet in your play, the character who confesses to overseeing this horrible systemic detention and ultimately some deaths of its so-called illegals is asked the question by the professor, why didn't you quit? Why didn't he quit?

ROBERT SCHENKEN: Well, he has a number of what seemed to him at the time very compelling reasons. Loyalty to his fellow employees of whom he has known, many of whom he has known for years and have followed him into this position. So there's issues of loyalty. There is concern about his own family and their welfare. They're expecting their first child, the pregnancy is not going well. Doesn't he as a husband have a primary responsibility to his immediate family? Shouldn't he be taking care of his wife and child? All the kinds of normal excuses one makes, hey, you know, what difference would it make? Somebody else would just take my place. You know, maybe my staying actually kept it from getting even worse. You know, as human beings we are endlessly inventive in our denial and in our avoidance we are very capable of finding innumerable reasons why we ought to do what we secretly really want to do or why we don't do what we are afraid to do. And I think that's very, becomes very understandable in the course of this encounter.

DS: Some people might look at a play like this Building the Wall and say this is an anti-Trump screed or propaganda. What do you say to that?

ROBERT SCHENKEN: I categorically reject that assertion. Trump doesn't appear in the play and is barely referenced in it. The play is really, the drama is really more about this whole issue of free will and agency and conscience. It's about what people do when they are faced with extraordinary circumstances. Why do they make the choices they do and how should we make the choices that we face in our own lives? You know, there’s a fundamental tension inherent in all democracies whether it’s United States or Canada or Western Europe, this fundamental tension between the conscience of the individual citizen and the collected power of the state. And who is it that decides ultimately what is morally right and morally wrong? That's what the play is about.

DS: But you wrote it in the peak of concern in advance of the election. Now that Trump is president, now that you've seen him for several months, do you feel that he and the country really remain at risk of tipping into this kind of extreme authoritarian state?

ROBERT SCHENKEN: I think even more than I did in October. Everything that Trump has done, every appointment that he's made, every executive order that he's issued has only taken us further down this path. It's been quite extraordinary. Just in the newspaper the last 48 hours for example, front page of The New York Times two days ago, an article talking about how the Trump administration has been quietly issuing orders to de-emphasize certain federal regulations regarding the health and safety of immigrant detainees in federal persons.

DS: Are you hoping to change the minds of Trump supporters with this play?

ROBERT SCHENKEN: What I am hoping to do with this play is to generate conversation. What I am hoping to do with this play is to get all of my audience members, regardless of where they are on the ideological spectrum, to think about what is happening, to look more closely and more clearly at what is happening and not simply accept at face value what they are hearing from their preferred news source.

DS: Now, the play is being performed in Los Angeles. What’s the plan for it now and what’s the audience reaction been?

ROBERT SCHENKEN: The play is having an extraordinary rollout nationwide and in fact internationally. Keep in mind I only wrote this in October. We opened in Los Angeles in February. They have already added additional performances during the week to accommodate the demand and recently extended by another month and they are currently sold out three weeks in advance. The play is enormously successful in Los Angeles. It just opened in Denver a week ago. It opens in Vienna next week. It opens in Washington DC the week after that. And two weeks after that we open in New York. There are already productions licensed in Canada in Ottawa, in Mexico, in Germany. We're in conversations with theatre organizations around the world and around the country. And this is very much what I hoped would happen and very much what I intended to do. I have treated the roll out of this play very differently than any play I have ever written in my life, and we're talking 30, 35 years. My instructions to my agent were license this play now and license it as widely as possible. I don't care where the theatre is, I don't care how big the theatre is. Anyone who wants to do this play can do it.

DS: And so Ottawa. When do we think we'll see it in Canada?

ROBERT SCHENKEN: Ottawa at the Horseshoes & Hand Grenades Theatre, and I believe it's in the fall of this year. I'm not entirely sure of the date but I know that the licensing deal has been negotiated.

DS: It's been a pleasure to meet you on the radio. And I would say this, if the goal was to generate conversation and to provoke critical thought, it's incredibly provocative, and you've been successful, so thank you.

ROBERT SCHENKEN: Thank you. It's a pleasure to talk to you.

DS: Robert Schenken is a Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award winning playwright. His new play is called Building the Wall, and it's also available in book form. He was in New York. Well, coming up in our next half hour, we check in on a decades long battle over charges of polygamy in British Columbia. And then to France where last minute campaigning in the lead up to the first round of voting in the presidential election race was disrupted by what French President François Hollande has called a terrorist attack on Paris’ Champs-Élysées. I’m Dave Seglins and you're listening to the Friday edition of The Current.

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Freedom to practice polygamy in Canada on trial in small B.C. community

Guest: Daphne Bramham

DAVE SEGLINS: Hello, I'm Dave Seglins and you're listening to the Friday edition of The Current. Now to a legal battle that has been brewing in Canada since the early 1990s. Winston Blackmore is accused of having 24 wives. James Oler is accused of having four. Both men are currently on trial in a small courtroom in Cranbrook, British Columbia, each charged with one count of polygamy. Well, evidence this week has included details from a book of records seized from an underground vault in Texas and a history lesson on the evolution of the Mormon Church. Daphne Bramham is a columnist with The Vancouver Sun and the author of The Secret Lives of Saints: Child Brides and Lost Boys in Canada's Polygamous Mormon Sect. And she's covering the trial in Cranbrook. And that's where we've reached her today. Hello.

DAPHNE BRAMHAM: Good morning.

DS: This trial began on Tuesday. How did it open?

DAPHNE BRAMHAM: Well, it opened with of course, the accused arriving. And what's interesting is we don't see them very often, we, Winston Blackmore is quite a gregarious fellow but he is very quiet. In fact, he was so quiet that he didn't even enter a plea. He was asked to plead either guilty or not guilty and he said my lady I stand mute. And later as his lawyer explained, Mr. Blackmore doesn't believe that he is guilty of anything. He believes that he is practicing his religion and the way that it is meant to be practiced and he believes that the laws of God stand above the laws of Canada.

DS: I want to get into the issues and the arguments, but are there family and community members there in the gallery with him?

DAPHNE BRAMHAM: No, quite surprisingly for Mr. Blackmore at least, the first time he appeared in court on these charges he was surrounded by a number of his daughters. But he's come to court every day by himself and Mr. Oler has come to court by himself as well. The difference with Mr. Oler is that he's no longer in the community of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and as we understand it, Mr. Oler is what they call repenting from afar. So he's living and working in Northern Alberta.

DS: What is the significance of this trial?

DAPHNE BRAMHAM: Well, the significance of it is that this is a community that has been practicing polygamy since the mid-1940s. The question in Canada is whether or not the polygamy law really was ever going to be enforceable. And, you know, the British Columbia government declined to press charges a couple of times. And one time they did they did arrest both Mr. Oler and Mr. Blackmore only to have the charges stayed because the attorney general was accused of prosecutor shopping. So as a result of that, the polygamy law went to the BC Supreme Court for a constitutional reference case and that case, the hearings went over a period of a number of months. And then in 2011, the chief justice of the Supreme Court of British Columbia ruled that in fact the polygamy law was valid and that the harms of polygamy overrode the constitutional guarantee of religious freedom.

DS: So now it's being tested in this case, there's a charge of polygamy against each of them. Though Mr. Blackmore has entered a mute, ultimately that puts him before the court, his lawyer says not guilty on his behalf. So they're both--

DAPHNE BRAMHAM: [interposing] The judge. The judge says not guilty on his behalf.

DS: OK. So the judge, they have pleaded not guilty essentially. That's what's being tested. What do you think the defense strategy for Winston Blackmore is going to be? A man who's spoken openly about his polygamist lifestyle.

DAPHNE BRAMHAM: Well it's not clear what his defense is going to be. His lawyer is being very coy about it. But one of the things that we do know is that if you're going to challenge the validity of a law, if you're going to do a constitutional challenge, you actually have to make application to do that and that hasn't been done. I'm sure that the lawyer, his lawyer Blair Suffredine will raise it in an oblique way, will say that he's doing what he should, what he believes he should do under the laws of God. But I'm not sure that the judge or even in fact whether the legal system itself in Canada can accept exceptions to this. I mean, if you have a law that says that this is forbidden, if they prove that it meets the requirements of the law, then I'm not sure that there's room for an exemption. But who knows. The judge may find that there is a reason for that, in which case then the issue of its constitutionality and validity is kind of in play again, and it would be in play then at the Appeal Court level.

DS: Mr. Blackmore has 25 wives.

DAPHNE BRAMHAM: He has more than that. There are 24 listed on his indictment.

DS: Remind us how old they are?

DAPHNE BRAMHAM: Well, how old they are now is quite different than how old they were when they were married. The youngest of them was 15. And about half of the 24 were married before they were 17.

DS: Now, 15, but he's never been charged with any offense alleging sexual exploitation or anything like that?

DAPHNE BRAMHAM: That's right. I mean, one of the problems in the case of Mr. Blackmore is that when he was married, and in Mr. Oler, is when these very young brides were being married, the law in Canada was that the age of sexual consent was 14. So it's very difficult to have charged them with sexual exploitation.

DS: So the charge before the court this week is polygamy. Ultimately is going to be a test of their Charter right to freedom of religion?

DAPHNE BRAMHAM: I'm not sure that it is but, you know, one of the things that I think is important to remember as well is that the reason that this case is important is as much because of Mr. Blackmore himself. As I say, he's probably Canada's best known polygamist. A number of years ago when Larry King was still on CNN, he was on CNN, he was on with Larry King talking about wives and they had a big chuckle about how many wives they’d each had. And so it's because of Mr. Blackmore that all of this attention is focused this week. But the more important trial I think was in November when James Oler was charged along with Winston Blackmore’s brother Brandon James Blackmore, and Brandon Blackmore's wife Gail Blackmore. They were charged with removing children from Canada to be put into marriages in the United States. And the youngest of those girls was 12. And the Blackmore's, Brandon James Blackmore and Gail Blackmore, they were found guilty and Mr. Oler was acquitted. And the sentencing for the Blackmores is coming up soon and Mr. Oler’s acquittal is being appealed. But to me that's the more important thing because that gets to part of the harms that Chief Justice Bauman talked about in the constitutional reference case, because what happens with polygamy is at a certain point when you want to have plural marriages, there are not enough women who are adults and of an age to consent. If you need to have, as the fundamentalist Mormons believe, if you need to have many wives to get into the highest realm of heaven.

DS: Now, there is a long history of the church, the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ Latter Day Saints. We don't have time to explore all of that now, but I mentioned the underground Texas vault. Tell us what that's about and what the witness before the court has brought into this trial.

DAPHNE BRAMHAM: Well, in 2008 the Yearning for Zion Ranch in Texas was raided after a complaint, a phoned in complaint, a distress call from allegedly a girl who had been sexually assaulted. It turned out to be a hoax but by that point the Texas Rangers had already gone into the vault at this at this ranch and found hundreds and hundreds and probably thousands of different documents and among the documents are the marriage records, which are being used in this trial and the marriage records which were used in the previous trial in November as well. And what's important and what the historian is testifying to is that ever since the time of Joseph Smith, even before Joseph Smith had a revelation from God that plural marriage was important and necessary for the highest realm of heaven, what Joseph Smith said is that everything must be documented. And the historian went through a number of the Mormon texts and doctrine and talked about how many times in these texts it says everything has to be written down, everything must be written down. So these marriage records, that 20 of the marriage records that were put into the court record were for the marriages of Winston Blackmore. And five records of marriages went in against James Oler, even though he's only charged with four, there are only four women on his indictment. But what the historian was trying to do for the prosecution was to say this is a true record because the most, as the historian said, without record keeping there is no Mormon Church. Because unlike most other religions, most other Christian religions, where in most other Christian religions the Bible is seen to be the final word. For Mormons what they believe is that their prophets, their presidents, they can have revelations all the time and those revelations continue to update the religion. So the most recent revelation in the Mormon Church was in the 1970s when the prophet of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints had a revelation that it was OK for blacks to become part of the priesthood.

DS: So let me ask you this, why do you think there have never been charges related to marrying minors? If these records from Texas exist, you know, why hasn't there been action from child protection officials?

DAPHNE BRAMHAM: Because it's difficult to get victims is the short answer. The longer answer is that I think for a long time it was this little community, I mean, in the community of Bountiful. Really is only about, you know, a couple of hundred people, maybe as many of 1,500. And I think for most politicians, for most people they were just seen as kind of well, we'll just let them live and let live. And, you know, they're in a remote corner of British Columbia, they didn't go into the town of Creston which is close by. They'd go in occasionally, but because they were always so afraid that their husbands or fathers would be taken away, they always put up a good front. They would always go into town and smile. They never would go into town alone, so they were minded by someone. So for a lot of the people in the community of Creston they were seen to be happy. And so everyone thought well there's no harm being done there. But there were people that knew because there were these multiple babies being born. Sometimes in one case I was told that the same father was there for two different wives and having babies on consecutive days practically. So people did know but they didn't want to make a fuss is the bottom line. And for politicians, if the local people aren't complaining why would they complain? And then you go to the next level, which is this is really difficult stuff to prove. And what I'd been told by prosecutors is that without a victim it's hard to make a case with only records because the evidence that we're expecting to be put into today or early next week are actually birth records from the wives that are listed on the indictments. There are other records, including the birth certificates of many of the wives which should show that they were probably under age when they had their babies.

DS: Mhm. Mhm.

DAPHNE BRAMHAM: Why they haven't done it, I think the law of polygamy seemed to be a stumbling block ever since the 1990s.

DS: Daphne, we have to leave it there. But thank you and thank you for your coverage.

DAPHNE BRAMHAM: My pleasure. Thank you.

DS: That's Daphne Bramham. She's a columnist with The Vancouver Sun and author of The Secret Lives of Saints: Child Brides and Lost Boys in Canada's Polygamous Mormon Sect. She is in Cranbrook, British Columbia.

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Could it soon be President Le Pen? Dissecting French election frontrunners

Guest: Ben Barnier

DAVE SEGLINS: I'm Dave Seglins and you're listening to the Friday edition of The Current.

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VOICE 1: [French speaking language] [through translator] You know, we just don't know what to do. We’re in such a damn mess. I'm being vulgar because we're living in such a crappy democracy when no one trusts anything anymore. But it's our duty to vote. We have to vote.

VOICE 2: I don't vote anymore, explains one gentleman pulling his cap down over his eyes. There’s not a single politician out there who's inspiring, it's all empty promises. And my pension’s never gone up so that's it, I don’t bother voting anymore.

VOICE 3: Yes, I'll be voting out of duty says Cédric. I think it's important that the young get interested in politics but I think most young people would like to see more transparency.

DS: That was BBC reporter Emma Jane Kirby, talking to locals in the northeastern French town of Dole, as they prepare for France's most hotly contested presidential election in recent history. Now, France will go to the polls on Sunday in the first round of national voting. And though there are 11 official candidates, only a handful have captured the attention of voters seeking something new beyond the socialism and conservatism that typically dominate. With the political establishment in disarray, tensions are high going into the election especially as news hit yesterday of a gun attack claimed by ISIS on the Champs-Élysées that left a police officer dead. Ben Barnier is a reporter with the French broadcaster France Info. He is on the road covering the campaign. And we've reached him in Marseille. Hello.

BEN BARNIER: Hello Dave, how are you?

DS: I'm well. How do you think yesterday's attack in Paris is going to affect voting in the lead up to Sunday?

BEN BARNIER: Well it's interesting because I was just talking to people in Marseille, in the southern town of Marseille today and they told me that for those who are already convinced they were going to vote for Marine Le Pen, the far-right candidate, it just reinforced them. And those who did not want to vote for Marine Le Pen, and I spoke to many people of all ages, they were afraid that would reinforce turnout for Marine Le Pen. So this is probably the last thing most people wanted ahead of this election, first and foremost because somebody died and also because there is a chance that it could affect the election and reinforce this idea that France is not safe anymore.

DS: How could it exacerbate anti-immigration tensions in France?

BEN BARNIER: Well, because the attack has been claimed, as you said, by the Islamic State organization ISIS. And there is a perception among several many people in France that some of those terrorists, you know, come from Northern Africa and some of them come from Africa, most of them are Muslims. So some people consider that any Muslim person could be a threat to them. And it's hard, it's hard sometimes for politicians to say no it's not all Muslims. But to some people it's just they don't want to make a difference, they just want to be safe. And that's what they tell you when you talk to them.

DS: Help us understand the field of candidates. Who are the leading candidates and what do they stand for?

BEN BARNIER: Well, you have pretty much five leading candidates among the 11 candidates. The frontrunner according to many polls is, at least for the first round which is coming up this Sunday, is the far-right leader Marine Le Pen. She stands for asking people whether they want to leave the European Union, asking French people during a referendum whether they want to leave the European Union. She stands for defending the French, defending French economy first and foremost. So that's what she's been saying, punching the same lines over and over during the campaign. As for the others, you have Emmanuel Macron. Emmanuel Macron he’s a weird political animal per say. He's never had a turf, he’s never been part of a small community where everybody knows him locally. He's just an incredibly smart person who happened to be working for a private bank Rothschild, before getting into politics. He was a close adviser to the current French President François Hollande and was a finance minister and now is among the frontrunners in this election. Then you Jean-Luc Mélenchon, he is a far-left charismatic candidate. He is quite appealing to a younger public, younger audience. Also with a strong stance against the European Union. You also have Benoît Hamon, who is the Socialist candidate with less charisma. Not that strong candidate even though he's supported by a big party. And you have, not to be forgotten, François Fillon, who was a former prime minister. So someone with a lot of political experience but with a few issues, several scandals that came up during the year. The campaign involving his wife, paying his wife on a state payroll without her being able to prove that she actually did some work for all that money that she got.

DS: Now you've interviewed the presumptive front runner Marine Le Pen. What was your impression?

BEN BARNIER: Well, she reminded me of Hillary Clinton. And I know she stands for very, you know, very different, she's nothing like Hillary Clinton in terms of policy and in terms of, you know, the party she's defending or she is a part of, but in terms of confidence. Because I covered the US election, the last one in November. And when I watched Hillary Clinton during the, you know, on television or during the rallies, she seemed very confident. And Marine Le Pen sort of gave me that impression of I'm the frontrunner, I'm part of that former outsider party which is now the big party in France. And we don't have to shout any more, we don't have to be angry anymore because we're going to win.

DS: It's funny that you choose Clinton because I think a lot of parallels have been made and the shorthand in North America anyway, is that Marine Le Pen is France's Donald Trump.

BEN BARNIER: I know I know. I mean, absolutely. Again, I'm not comparing Clinton and Marine Le Pen in terms of policy, just in terms of the vibe she was giving during that interview I had with Marine Le Pen. Then when you look at the policies, it's so there are many similarities between Marine Le Pen and Donald Trump for sure. And many of the questions I asked her was like do you feel like you are the French Donald Trump? Do you think is Donald Trump an inspiration to you? And she was really annoyed by this because in her mind, in Marine Le Pen's mind, the French don't need to get inspiration from Americans, whether it's Donald Trump or any other American political candidate or politician. So she said no we don't need inspiration. We are the inspiration. We don't need inspiration from the US. But obviously when you look at the what's her pitch, really she wants to reinstate borders within the European Union, she wants to defend the French economy. So there are many similarities with what we saw with Donald Trump going to factories and saying he wanted to make America great again by defending the American economy.

DS: So what makes this election feel different from others in the recent past? What kind of shift is happening in the political landscape?

BEN BARNIER: Well Dave, it's such an open race. I mean, I was, you know, giving you an order when I was naming the main politicians in this race but it's just so hard to tell. I have no idea who is going to win this. I mean, when I talk to people on the campaign trail I see really really strong support for Marine Le Pen. But on the other hand, you have to bear in mind that when you look at the polls, opinion polls for the second round there is a sense that people in the end would vote for Marine Le Pen in the first round but would not elect her president because she's from a far-right party with a history of anti-Semitism, with a history of really harsh comments, sometimes from her sometimes from her father. And very recently she even talked about against Protestants. Bearing in mind that Protestants were, Christian Protestants were persecuted in this country in France. Then you could be saying OK well, so who's next? Well who's next in line for the throne? You can be looking at Emmanuel Macron. But as I was saying it’s really hard to grasp what he stands for. He's not really left-wing even though he was part of François Hollande’s left-wing cabinet. He's not really right-wing but he worked for a private bank so he's, you know, he's sort of pro markets, he's pro Europe as well. Then you have François Fillon, and you could be saying oh with all those scandals he’s never going to get elected but you have people who will never vote for Marie Le Pen because they think she's a racist. And people who will never vote for Emmanuel Macron because he’s too linked to François Hollande and to the European Union. So it's a really open race. And even when you look at Mélenchon, you know, who's singing the Communist anthem during his rallies, I saw him during a rally singing a, you know, international Communist anthem, he's doing well with the young people, especially in Paris and the big towns. So it's still so hard to tell what’s going to happen.

DS: You’ve said this but you covered the US election. You were in the US for that. I wonder what parallels you draw with the French campaign and specifically the kind of attitudes among voters? Do you make any parallel between what's happening in France and the US?

BEN BARNIER: I do and I think a lot of people do. When I came back from the US after Donald Trump got elected, I told my friends, I told people in the newsroom at the France Info newsroom, I said we could see a replay of that election in France in May or in April for a first round because for several reasons. One of them is that a lot of us journalists, it’s true we don't like Marine Le Pen, we don't like what she stands for. We think she is xenophobic, she comes from an anti-Semitic party or a party that had anti-Semitic comments. But I said on the other hand, I got a sense that people were sort of scoring people who wanted to vote for Donald Trump in the US, and I could see the same thing in the US. Whenever we were to interview someone who said they were going to vote for the National Front, we would make fun of them or not give them enough consideration. And the fact that we were maybe biased against Marine Le Pen, maybe for good reasons, made them feel, those voters disenfranchised, like they were not being heard and maybe they had genuine concerns and that nobody was listening to them. So I said we have to be careful and see what happens, really.

DS: Much as in the US there's been speculation about Russian interference in your election. How big a concern is that?

BEN BARNIER: I don't think it's that big. It is a concern but not as big as in the US because, you know, we don't have the same history of Cold War with Russia. It's not as strong. You know, it's not a strong memory, it's not some strong collective memory here in France. But when I interviewed Marine Le Pen, we asked her whether, you know, whether she had ties to Russia, whether, and she said you know what, I do, there are ties with Russia because I need to finance my campaign. And very few people in France are willing to give me money to run for president, so I'm just getting the money where I can. And if it's from a Russian bank or institution or even or Lebanese or somewhere abroad, I will just get the money where I can. So she was quite open about that.

DS: And Ben, in just a word or two, what happens after Sunday's vote?

BEN BARNIER: Well you will have, if someone makes someone gets more than 50 per cent of the vote, well, they become the next president of France. If there's no one with more than 50 per cent of the vote, you will see the two leaders entering into a new phase of the campaign with, you know, strong debate on television and running against each other in May.

DS: Ben, merci beaucoup.

BEN BARNIER: Well, merci à toi.

DS: That's Ben Barnier, he is a reporter with French broadcaster France Info. And we reached him in Marseille, France. Well that's our program for today. I'm Dave Seglins, thank you for listening to the Friday edition of The Current.

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