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The Current Transcript for May 1, 2017

Host: Anna Maria Tremonti

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

If I’m unable to make a fair deal for the United States, meaning a fair deal for our workers and our companies, I will terminate NAFTA. We’re going to give renegotiation a good, strong shot.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: The free-flowing rhetoric around free trade has been blowing across the US border in both a northerly and southerly direction. Since the start of the campaign that put US President Donald Trump in office, from a pledge to rip it up on the election trail to last week's mixed messages of withdrawal and then renegotiation, the administration has begun a whole new dialogue around NAFTA and that has lots of people in Canada rethinking too. Do we need NAFTA? Should Canada pre-empt the US and pull out? In a moment we're asking who actually benefits from the business of free trade. And then the chef who changed the business of eating.

SOUNDCLIP

Jeremiah Tower was the first chef who the customers insisted on seeing in the dining room. And he created around him a new sense of excitement, a scene.

AMT: Jeremiah Tower was a poor little rich boy who grew up to be an influential chef. The man behind the American food movement that celebrated local ingredients, dining out as entertainment and foodie culture. And then one day he just disappeared. Now Anthony Bourdain has brought him back to tell his story. Anthony Bourdain and Jeremiah Tower join me in half an hour. And Parks Canada wants to create a bike trail from Jasper to the Columbia Icefields running parallel to Alberta's Highway 93—one of the most stunning and iconic roots in this country. But it will go right through protected wilderness and wildlife territory, meaning cyclists’ suddenly encounters with grizzly bears are a real possibility. So what the government calls an icefield trail, others have dubbed “Meals on Wheels” for the bears. Hear the environmental and safety concerns in an hour. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

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Should Canada pre-empt the U.S. and pull out of NAFTA?

Guests: David Orchard, Ron Davidson, Armine Yalnizyan

SOUNDCLIP

The North American Free Trade Agreement provides us all with a pathway to prosperity. As Canadians, of course we're also North Americans and proudly so. While geography and the forces of history have made us neighbours, this agreement will make us all partners—partners in opportunity and partners of the economic success that flows inevitably from free and fair trade.

AMT: Well, that was then, the dawn of the NAFTA era in 1993 and then-Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney's rosy forecast for its future. Now however, NAFTA has US President Donald Trump seeing red.

SOUNDCLIP

Well, I was going to terminate NAFTA as of two or three days from now. The president of Mexico called me and also the prime minister of Canada—who I have a very good relationship and I like both of these gentlemen very much—they called me and they said rather than terminating NAFTA, could you please renegotiate? I said I will hold on the termination. Let's see if we can make it a fair deal because NAFTA's been a horrible deal for the United States. It's been very good for Canada. It's been very good for Mexico.

AMT: But what if NAFTA has not been terrific for Canada as Donald Trump likes to suggest? With the decades-old trade pact back in the headlines, some economists and politicians are suggesting Canada should do exactly what the US has threatened and pull out of NAFTA. We have three guests standing by to share their thoughts. David Orchard ran for the leadership of the Progressive Conservative Party before it merged with the Alliance Party. He is the author of The Fight for Canada: Four Centuries of Resistance to American Expansionism. He also ran as a candidate for the federal Liberal Party in 2008. He joins us from Saskatoon. Armine Yalnizyan is a Canadian economist and a CBC business columnist. She's in our Toronto studio. And Ron Davidson is the senior vice president for international trade and public affairs at the Canadian Meat Council. Hello everyone. Welcome.

MANY VOICES: Good morning.

AMT: Let's go around our virtual table here for a minute. David Orchard, I'll start with you. Has NAFTA been good for Canada?

DAVID ORCHARD: No, it has not. It's not good at all. We had better access to the US market before we entered NAFTA, when we traded with the United States under the GATT or the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. It’s now called the World Trade Organization. But we chased the fantasy of secure access to the US market and we signed a deal which has whole sections in it that have nothing to do with trade at all. The heart of the agreement is national treatment. That means we agree to treat American corporations in Canada as if they were Canadian.

AMT: Okay. David Orchard, hold that thought. We're just going to go around the table here. Ron Davidson, has NAFTA been good for Canada?

RON DAVIDSON: NAFTA has been very good for rural Canadians. In the case of the livestock and meat industry, our exports have gone from a billion dollars to over three billion dollars while NAFTA has been in place. NAFTA's a major number one export market for Canadian pork producers and as our number one export market for Canadian beef producers. Without NAFTA, rural Canada would be in a much more difficult situation than it is today.

AMT: Armine Yalnizyan, has it been good for Canada?

ARMINE YALNIZYAN: It's very difficult to tell. We don't have really great data which is kind of surprising when it comes to a trading nation that we do not know what the net impact is of free trade deals or in particular trade. On jobs and wages, we have some idea of what it does to GDP but not whether the net impact of job loss is outweighed by the net impact of job gains of the sort that was just described in rural Canada. So yeah. We don't know is the answer.

AMT: David Orchard, where do you see the biggest vulnerabilities for Canada in NAFTA?

DAVID ORCHARD: Well, we agreed—when I mentioned national treatment, we've given the Americans the right to buy up whatever they want in Canada. We've seen 12,000 Canadian companies taken over by American corporations—everything from Hudson's Bay to Eaton’s. Our two national railways, CN and CP are now major American-owned, Stelco, all of this. I went to a mall the other day. I couldn't find a store that was Canadian. The only one that was Canadian was Rona. It had a sign on it but of course, now Rona has been taken over by an American corporation. So what's going to be left? We have the Canadian Wheat Board which was a success story for Canada. It’s been taken over by American corporations and the energy section of the deal which is what the Americans called the jewel of the agreement—we agreed to give the Americans the same proportion of any energy good that they were taking from Canada even if we face a shortage in Canada. That means they're now taking about 60 per cent of our oil and gas. If and when we face a shortage, they'll have the right to take 60 per cent of our oil in perpetuity.

AMT: Okay, David.

DAVID ORCHARD: And we can never charge Americans more for any good than we charge a Canadian. So we've given away our energy. We've given away our right to pursue our own economy and we're being integrated into that of the United States.

AMT: David, I forgot to mention. You're also a grain farmer, are you not?

DAVID ORCHARD: I’m a grain farmer, that’s right, in the Canadian Wheat Board which sold six billion dollars worth of grain every year on the world market and kept the profits in the pockets of farmers. It’s now been handed over to an American and a Saudi company. So that's what we're seeing. We're seeing this. And of course under NAFTA, we gave the Americans under Chapter 11 the right to sue Canada for any law or regulation in this country that they feel causes them loss or damage.

AMT: Okay. David, Ron Davidson needs to get in here. Ron Davidson in Ottawa representing the Canadian Meat Council, how has NAFTA supported your industry?

RON DAVIDSON: NAFTA has been absolutely critical to our industry because we need to be competitive on an international basis. We’re too small a consumer population in Canada to consume the agricultural products that we produce in this country and through NAFTA we are able to obtain the scale by working with the US and with Mexico to be competitive for all three countries on the international marketplace. We have to compete with South America. We have to compete with Australia and New Zealand. We have to compete with Europe. And NAFTA has given the Canadian agricultural sector—particularly in the meat processing side which is the largest part of Canada's food processing industry—the ability to be internationally competitive.

AMT: How important is the meat industry to the Canadian economy, Ron?

RON DAVIDSON: The meat industry is extremely important to the rural economy. If we look at how the economy functions, we have feed grain farmers who are producing grain. We have livestock farmers 66,000 workers in Canadian meat plants and these plants are sometimes the major, if not the only major supplier or payer of taxes in rural municipalities. It's absolutely critical to rural Canada.

AMT: Do your counterparts in Mexico and the US feel the same way that you do?

RON DAVIDSON: The meat and livestock industry in North America is united on this perspective. We agree and we've told our governments that a continental competitiveness with the rest of the world is very critical to us. We have to sell abroad. We're all export-oriented and the ability to integrate our industries is very important to remaining competitive.

DAVID ORCHARD: You know Mr. Davidson is right, if I could step in here, to say that the meat industry is important for Canada. But what's happened to the meat industry? Before NAFTA, we had big Canadian companies—Canada Packers, Burns and the others processing our meat. Within 10 years after free trade was signed, all of our major industry processes were in US hands. Cargo came in. Now our meat industry is American owned

AMT: Okay. Let's get Ron Davidson to respond to that. The meat industry is mostly American-owned now?

RON DAVIDSON: That's not correct. Actually our largest export is not beef, it is pork. What Mr. Orchard was saying was with respect to the beef industry, in the case of pork, it's Canadian owned. In the case of beef, actually one of those big companies came to Canada because we needed them. The Canadian plant was in trouble.

ARMINE YALNIZYAN: I’d like to say something.

AMT: Let’s let Armine in here. Go ahead.

ARMINE YALNIZYAN: Yeah. I think I would agree with a lot of what Mr. Davidson said but I would like to raise the fact that scale means—the same thing that Mr. Orchard was talking about—which is larger and larger companies and often large multinational American companies buying out, even meat processors as he points out. But scale also means something with respect to jobs and wages for Canadians, which is that we don't have enough Canadians that do this type of work. So we end up seeing the owners of these companies doing well because they now have access to the American market but they need to bring in temporary foreign workers because there aren't enough Canadians that are willing to do the work for the prices, for the wages that make these commodities actually competitive in the US market. And I'd like to raise one other point which is we have had a very long period of time of debate with the American government despite being in a trade agreement, a free trade agreement on country of origin labelling which Mr. Davidson would know better than most, has been a real thorn in the side of our industry. So just because you have a free trade deal doesn't mean you can't sneak in other things that make access to these large markets on which our producers have based how they're growing not guaranteed. And that's the point of a free trade deal is to guarantee access to markets. That's a double edged sword.

AMT: What is country of origin labelling?

ARMINE YALNIZYAN: So it simply means that in the United States where it's very easy for them—well, in fact I will get Mr. Davidson to talk about it—where it's easier for American consumers to know where their product is coming from. If it's not labeled US, they won't necessarily buy it and we don't know where these pigs and cows come from. They go back and forth across the border much like auto parts do. Autos go back and forth across the border six times before they're ultimately sold and producing animals for us to eat is not a dissimilar function.

AMT: Ron Davidson.

DAVID ORCHARD: I'd like to respond to what Mr. Davidson said.

AMT: No, no. Hang on, hang on, David Orchard. I want Ron Davidson to respond to what Armine Yalnizyan is saying.

RON DAVIDSON: Okay. On the two points—

AMT: No. Let’s talk about point of origin labelling. Go there.

RON DAVIDSON: Okay. Country of origin labeling was a major battle between particularly our livestock producers, more than the meat industry because when we supply packaged meat to the United States, it has a Canadian origin on it. But when livestock goes to the United States and gets fed and raised and slaughtered in the US, it becomes a US product. And we went for many years with the livestock industry in international trade courts and because of the international trade rules which are out there, we were able to get that removed. Without the international trade rules, the Americans would have been able to do whatever they wanted.

DAVID ORCHARD: If I could respond—

AMT: Actually David Orchard, I want to keep moving forward. So let me just go—I've got another clip I want you to hear. This is George Gilvesy. He is the chair of the board of the Ontario Greenhouse Vegetable Growers. Listen to him on NAFTA.

SOUNDCLIP

NAFTA is extremely important for our business. We're exporting about 75 per cent of our production out of Ontario into the United States. So the free flow of goods is critical in being a perishable that our cucumbers, tomatoes and peppers are. Any delays at the border can cause the impacts on the quality of the product. We're shipping just shy of $700 million worth of greenhouses vegetables to the United States. Bottom line, it's critical to maintain market access for our producers and also to feed Americans. We've got a dominant position when we're on in that marketplace and we need market access. Bottom line.

AMT: David Orchard, can you speak to that first? The Ontario Growers are comprised of farmers, small business owners. They're saying they benefit, as their businesses can sell their goods quickly into a larger market.

DAVID ORCHARD: We didn't get secure access to the US market at all. The Americans can take action against our exports any time they want and they're talking about it on dairy now. They're talking about it on softwood lumber. They haven't been restricted. They can go ahead with that and they couldn't do that under the World Trade Organization. The head, one of the leading analysts of the Canadian meat industry is I would say that the Canadian meat industry today is really an American industry. So this is what we're seeing across the board is the increased Americanization of our industries. But we didn't get secure access to the US market. And under these NAFTA lawsuits, we've had three dozen lawsuits filed against Canada in which American corporations can sue our country for any law or regulation that they feel causes them loss or damage and they’ve done that in a whole range of areas. So we haven't got the secure access to the US market and by chasing that, we've given up under the multilateral trading system under the WTO. We've got protection in numbers but we are one on one with the United States. We've seen what Mr. Trump has just said he's going to do with dairy and what they've already done with softwood lumber. And that's what they could not do under the World Trade Organization, under which we had better access to the US market, freer access to the American to be able to sell to the United States than we've got right now.

AMT: Armine Yalnizyan.

ARMINE YALNIZYAN: Yeah. You know in 1985 when we were first told we needed to sign a free trade agreement with the United States, we were told it was a leap of faith. And the clip that you had of Brian Loney at the beginning doesn't include that clip where he acknowledges that free trade with the United States was a leap of faith. It still is. It still is when we are told that if we trade with Europe, we are going to be better off. It still is when we're told that now that we know we're not going to get into TPP, we'd be better off. It's true that some people benefit. It's also true that some people lose. We are being pitted against ourselves as consumers for cheap prices with ourselves as workers. It is unclear whether we get better treatment in free trade deals for workers. Investors and producers might do better, but at the end of the day if the workers aren't getting a better deal, there's not as many people shopping and buying stuff. And I just want to point out that we are de facto the 51st state and we have been ever since I guess the end of the Second World War. One of the things that made Canada a powerhouse globally—we’re the 10th largest nation on the surface of the planet with a fraction of the people. One of the reasons that happened is because of the Auto Pact which precedes free trade deals and is managed trade but was designed to make sure that us as consumers could produce some of what we consume. And we actually benefited both as consumers and workers and that's I think the watchword going forward. That's exactly what Mr. Trump is talking about. That's what people in Europe are talking about.

AMT: According to the Canadian government, under NAFTA the combined GDP for Canada, US and Mexico has reached $20.7 trillion US dollars as of 2015. That sounds like economic growth.

ARMINE YALNIZYAN: You can’t eat GDP. So even though you have growth in economy, we have not seen sustained wage increases for Mexican workers. We have seen wage stagnation for Canadian workers and we haven't even seen growth in trade. You know our trade peaked in 2000—33 per cent of our exports went to the United States in 2000 compared to 17 per cent before we signed free trade deals. We're now back at 19 per cent. We're no further ahead.

AMT: Okay. So David Orchard, do you want to see us pull out of NAFTA and what would that look like?

DAVID ORCHARD: Yes, I’d want to see us pull out. We can get out with giving six months’ notice to the United States.

AMT: Okay. What would it look like, David Orchard?

DAVID ORCHARD: We would immediately revert back to the World Trade Organization rules which are rules—we were better off under those rules.

AMT: What would it mean to the average Canadian? What would it mean to wheat farmers?

DAVID ORCHARD: It would mean getting back control of our country. John Turner called it the sale of Canada Act. John A. Macdonald opposed free trade. He said the lion and the lamb will lay down together but the lamb will be inside the lion. So what we would do is regain control of our country and American corporations would not be able to sue our government for any laws or regulations that they don't happen to like. We would get our sovereignty back as a nation. We'd be able to hold our heads high in the world and be a nation that stands on its own two feet and trades around the world and won’t see our economy simply be bought up one company after another until there's nothing left in Canadian hands.

AMT: Okay. Okay. Ron Davidson, should Canada just pull out of NAFTA?

RON DAVIDSON: Canada should not pull out of NAFTA. It's easy to blame NAFTA when we know all the things that have happened. What people don't look at is what would have happened had NAFTA not been in place. Many of these changes in the economy would have happened anyway as the world has become increasingly globalized. Secondly I don't see why giving cheaper products to 36 million Canadian consumers is a negative. The consumers buy by price. They go price shopping. That's a primary driver of consumer habits. The money that they don't spend on one product, they spend on another product or services. So it helps the economy to grow if these consumers are able to buy products at a lower price and as far as secure access, softwood lumber and dairy aren't in the NAFTA. That's part of the problem they're facing. They’re outside the NAFTA.

AMT: Does the Trump administration know that?

RON DAVIDSON: Trump administration—the administration knows it. Whether he knows it I'm not sure but they know it.

AMT: Well, this raises another question. Armine Yalnizyan, how concerned are you about a renegotiation of NAFTA given that there seems to be some confusion about what's even in there from the people who are talking about negotiating.

ARMINE YALNIZYAN: I think we really need to be careful about what it is we're talking about, though it's very difficult to know what we're talking about given who the president is and how actually divided his own administration is about what they're doing. I think the softwood lumber and dairy supply management stories could be negotiated above and beyond the NAFTA. And for the large majority of observers, they would see something being done on NAFTA even though it's not specifically NAFTA. But I just want to raise that in Canada, we are about to dump $160 billion of public spending in Ontario for infrastructure and $180 billion of spending in infrastructure at the federal level over the next decade. And we better renegotiate a way to make sure that that money does double duty for our Canadians instead of simply going to contractors south of the border.

AMT: We have to leave it there. We have to leave it there. We're out of time. No, I'm sorry. We're out of time. David Orchard, thank you. He's the author of The Fight for Canada: Four Centuries of Resistance to American Expansionism. He's also a grain farmer, former candidate for the Progressive Conservative leadership party, also for the Liberal Party. He's in Saskatoon. Armine Yalnizyan, Canadian economist and CBC business columnist. She's in Toronto. Ron Davidson, senior vice president for international trade and public affairs at the Canadian Meat Council. He's in Ottawa. Let us know what you think. Tweet us. We are @thecurrentCBC. Should we be pulling out of NAFTA? Do you want to see it renegotiated? Let us know. Go to our e-mail, www.cbc.ca/thecurrent, click on the contact link to email us. The news is next and then Anthony Bourdain, chef and host of Parts Unknown joins us to talk food. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

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Why Anthony Bourdain wants the world to know about chef Jeremiah Tower

Guests: Anthony Bourdain, Jeremiah Tower

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

[Music: Theme]

AMT: Still to come, we'll hear why a proposed icefield bike path that would cut through Jasper National Park is meeting resistance from environmentalists. That's in half an hour and we'll hear from one of your personal moments of disruption as well. But first, cheers to the chef.

SOUNDCLIP

[Music: The Disruptors theme]

VOICE 1: Most people would not know who Jeremiah Tower is and sadly, he certainly is considered in my book anyway, a father of American cuisine.

VOICE 2: He was the darling, the glamourpuss, the sexy guy, the smart guy and the innovative chef that became something that was what everyone wanted to know about.

VOICE 3: A complete re-evaluation of not just American food and ingredients, but food.

VOICE 4: Jeremiah in many ways defined what a modern American restaurant could be.

VOICE 5: In my view, we should know who changed the world. We should know their names.

AMT: Well, our ongoing project The Disruptors today with high praise for a chef you may not have heard of. We heard Martha Stewart there, chef Mario Batali, food critic Ruth Reichl and chef Anthony Bourdain—all devoted fans of Jeremiah Tower, which may have you asking who is Jeremiah Tower? Devoted foodies know he was an iconic American chef in the seventies and eighties, a man who disrupted the way Americans cooked, ate and dined. And Jeremiah Tower seemed to disappear altogether after his San Francisco restaurant Stars closed in the 1990s. A new documentary film however is finally giving him his due, exploring how he changed American culinary culture. The film is entitled The Last Magnificent and it was produced in part by culinary celebrity Anthony Bourdain. Both Anthony Bourdain and Jeremiah Tower are in our New York studio. Hello, gentlemen.

JEREMIAH TOWER: Thank you very much. Good morning.

ANTHONY BOURDAIN: Hello.

AMT: Jeremiah Tower, your restaurant Stars opened in San Francisco in the 1980s. How would you describe the place and the food?

JEREMIAH TOWER: It was an American brasserie. One of the best things ever said about it was by the late wonderful food journalist Johnny Apple. He said it was the most democratic restaurant in America. The opening slogan was “everything from blue jeans to black tie.” That's the way I think about it. That's the way I designed it. And that's the way I remember it.

AMT: Who ate there?

JEREMIAH TOWER: Anthony Bourdain said to me earlier you know there was everything from drag queens to petty criminals to Danielle Steel to Rudolf Nureyev. I mean it was everybody. Everybody came through Stars.

AMT: Anthony Bourdain, who—

JEREMIAH TOWER: Sometimes they ran through it naked. [laughs]

AMT: Sometimes. Okay. So who was Jeremiah Tower back then, Anthony Bourdain?

JEREMIAH TOWER: Jeremiah Tower was the first chef, professional chef in America who could credibly be called a celebrity. Jeremiah Tower was the first chef who the customers not just wanted, but insisted on seeing in the dining room. Previously the last person of the world you'd want to see in the dining room was the chef or the cooks and the last person whose opinion you wanted was really the chef or the cooks. You were there to be served. The whole power balance changed with Jeremiah. The arrival of a man who was writing menus that really redefined the place of American ingredients and American-sourced products, seasonality, the region—all of these things became supremely important to his menus. And he created around him a new sense of excitement, a scene that's changed the way menus in America look today, the role of the chef, the way the restaurants look and feel that we eat in today. And yet he was there and suddenly he wasn't there and because he wasn't there, to a great extent unfortunately he was written out of history. That's something we have to address in this film.

AMT: And you make that really clear. You say we should know his name because he changed the world. We heard you just say that in that clip.

ANTHONY BOURDAIN: I mean chefs always did. Chefs knew where their influences came from but outside of the industry, particularly among food writers, Jeremiah’s role was shamefully under-represented or misattributed.

AMT: Well, let's go back. Jeremiah Tower, you have talked about your fascination with food and how you studied food because you cared so much about it. Since you were a child—Proust had his madeleine—what foods bring you back to your childhood?

JEREMIAH TOWER: Oh, most definitely anything on the grill because I grew up in Sydney. Tropical fruits because right outside my bedroom in Sydney were passion fruit vine, papaya trees—which we called of course papa—and mangoes. So I'm still enthralled and swoon when I see perfect tropical fruits.

AMT: Where were the kitchens where you observed and learned to cook when you were very young?

JEREMIAH TOWER: The first time I saw a really grand kitchen was on the transatlantic ocean liners, the great Queen Elizabeth and Queen Mary. Since my parents were off dancing and having cocktails, the kitchen adopted me. That's how I learned to slice smoked salmon.

AMT: How old were you?

JEREMIAH TOWER: Thirteen.

AMT: And you would hang out there while your parents socialized.

JEREMIAH TOWER: Yes. I mean there was one wonderful day when I was in bed absolutely ill, exhausted on the Queen Elizabeth and there was a knock on the door. And the dining room waiter came in and he was wheeling a trolley with a great big silver dome on top. And I thought oh God. I nearly vomited on the spot thinking I was going to have to eat. And he lifted the dome and inside was a little tiny green porcelain pot that had water, lamb, potatoes and salt. You know it was Lancashire hotpot and it was like having chicken soup so I ate that and he said the chef has sent this to you because he misses you in the dining room and we need you back there as soon as possible. Well, to a 14 year old, that was like winning the Olympics or something.

AMT: It was wonderful, yeah. Well, you grew up wealthy. What was your family like?

JEREMIAH TOWER: Well, I can't repeat here the word I use to describe my father because this is— [laughs] But he did pay for all that traveling so that was pretty wonderful. And my mother was a great cook and a wonderful artist. She painted and sewed and did all those things—but a roaring alcoholic so it was a colourful and bumpy ride.

AMT: And there were times when I almost forgot about you. You talk about a moment when you go down to a restaurant—I think it's in the Hyde Park Hotel in London—and you see them having dinner and you join them. What happens?

JEREMIAH TOWER: So normally I would just be alone in this vast, fog-filled dining room and I went down one night and they were there. And they said well, what are you doing here? And I said I live here. And you know they looked at each other in complete astonishment. Each thought the other had put me in school.

AMT: We laugh about that now.

JEREMIAH TOWER: It sounds like abuse, but actually I thought it was pretty funny.

AMT: Well, you were almost like a poor little rich boy.

JEREMIAH TOWER: Well, I didn't have any money.

AMT: Yeah, but they did.

JEREMIAH TOWER: Yeah, they did.

AMT: Because Anthony, you say at one point there's a locked room inside of Jeremiah and you say that you haven't been there and you don't think many people have.

ANTHONY BOURDAIN: When you hear Jeremiah talk about his childhood, he talks about wandering the empty hallways of grand hotels alone, forgotten and neglected by his parents as a golden time, surrounded by first class service. And he remembers the food and the menus and the accoutrements, the china, the crystal very fondly. But I mean you know one doesn't have to be even an amateur psychologist to say you know something's going on here and something really terrible is missing. His first food memory takes place on a beach. The incident of what anyone else would call molestation. Jeremiah, I mean he doesn't talk about a childhood that if anyone else writing about him would call almost Dickensian. I mean if Oliver Twist was very comfortably well off and lived in a series of ocean liners and fine hotels, what came out of that experience is a man with an almost magical facility with the menus, who read those menus like some children read fairy tales and adventure novels. And I think the brilliance of Jeremiah’s menus stemmed very much from those experiences I guess, because he's sort of reluctant to tell me. [laughs]

AMT: I was going to say let’s ask him. Jeremiah?

JEREMIAH TOWER: As I listened to that, you know I think of Oliver in the film: “Please sir, can I have some more?”

ANTHONY BOURDAIN: Yes, but in your case it was not gruel. It was a rack of lamb. [laughs]

JEREMIAH TOWER: But you know listening to Tony, I think okay, so obviously I must have gathered up a lot of pissed off-ness from those years and then carried it right in and made it an artistic gesture.

AMT: Well, after graduating from Harvard and you were studying architecture, you land at Chez Panisse, Alice Waters’ famous restaurant in Berkeley, California which then becomes more famous. You hadn't been planning to become a chef.

JEREMIAH TOWER: No. I mean I was on my way to Hawaii to be an underwater architect. And the last thing—as it was made evident to me right away—the last thing the world wanted, needed or even heard about was an underwater architect. So of course I was dead broke. My grandfather had died. My allowance had stopped. I was 30 years old and I needed to get to work. And at the suggestion of my Harvard roommate and his wife, I answered this ad that Chez Panisse had put in the newspaper looking for an executive chef who knew about the philosophy and ethics of Elizabeth David and Fernand Point. I had read all those books already so I thought well, I can do this and went over for an interview. The fact that they hired me showed you how desperate I was and how desperate they were.

AMT: Yeah, but then it was sort of a match made in heaven. Anthony, how did Jeremiah Tower change American cuisine at that restaurant?

ANTHONY BOURDAIN: Well, it really wasn't a match made in heaven. It was an incredible confluence of events because this was almost a commune, a hippie commune serving charming, very rustic. It was like a little Marcel Pagnol bistro. I don't know what the average menu price at the time was.

JEREMIAH TOWER: It was $6.75.

ANTHONY BOURDAIN: Six dollars and seventy-five cents.

JEREMIAH TOWER: For three courses.

AMT: This is the seventies.

ANTHONY BOURDAIN: Yeah.

JEREMIAH TOWER: 1971, ’72.

ANTHONY BOURDAIN: Jeremiah went in with a love of cuisine ancienne, you know first class crazy off the wall ideas. The menu changed every day and he started doing things that were very elaborate or very simple but very exciting and very different. It's sourcing ingredients from local farmers and local producers. He was also cut a striking and glamorous figure. It attracted a lot of attention nationally, even internationally and people started showing up to eat at Chez Panisse who frankly rubbed a lot of the old school people who'd been there from the beginning the wrong way. Suddenly the place, they needed to raise the prices. Rich people were coming in. Different crowd were coming. People were flying private planes out there just to eat at Chez Panisse. And there was some resentment. It was becoming too establishment. It was diverting from the original sort of hippie ethic. So it wasn't necessarily a match made in heaven.

AMT: Fair enough.

ANTHONY BOURDAIN: But it was a magical time.

AMT: And before we talk about the glamour of that, Anthony—that is where he really brought American food to the forefront. You just touched on it. You said sourcing ingredients. Tell me more.

ANTHONY BOURDAIN: Well, look before that, if you did a fancy menu there were French terms and French ingredients—most of which were either frozen or tinned. Jeremiah started developing sources in the area and responding to the seasons, what was available and most importantly, proudly announcing that fact on the menu. This was a big change and had an electrifying effect on menus that persists today.

AMT: And it really did bring Americans to appreciate the food that was growing around them and the wines that were being made around them.

ANTHONY BOURDAIN: Yes.

JEREMIAH TOWER: Yes.

AMT: I have some clips from the documentary that I'll play for you. These are former Town and Country magazine food and wine editor James Villas, food critic Ruth Reichl and restaurant consultant Clark Wolf talking about Chez Panisse. Listen to this.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: My impression of it was it was really nothing but a hippie, drug-ridden explosion in a playpen.

VOICE 2: I just remember thinking, “He's the coolest guy I've ever seen,” and then looking around and realizing that virtually everyone in that room, male or female, wanted to sleep with him. It's like everybody else in the room was grey and he was glowing red. I mean he was just so juicy, sexy and intriguing.

VOICE 3: It was the early seventies and we were a little bit tipsy and a little bit high. You know what I mean? Everybody was really cheery and the restaurant at Chez Panisse was a very sexy place. I mean people were flirting across a crowded prep table.

VOICE 2: A great line is just Alice going, “I can't believe he doesn't like women.” She was not alone. There were a lot of women who couldn't believe he didn't like women.

AMT: Jeremiah Tower, is that what Chez Panisse was really like at the time?

JEREMIAH TOWER: Well, I’m definitely red now listening to that. [laughs] It sounds very glamorous and it was at times. It sounds very sexy but of course as anyone who works in a kitchen knows, there's no time for sex unless it's in the walk in and we didn't have one. So it wasn't that glamorous.

AMT: Why did you leave?

JEREMIAH TOWER: I was oil on the artistic waters of Berkeley. I put the menu up to $7.50 once and there was practically a street riot outside Chez Panisse. But of course we weren’t making any money. We had to make money. We had to fill up the restaurant, both of which I finally did. But then I realized my true ground to till was San Francisco.

AMT: And how did the story of his departure from Chez Panisse play out in the American food world, Anthony?

ANTHONY BOURDAIN: I mean everybody immediately wanted to go to Stars. It became the epicentre. It became the most important restaurant in America. Berkeley was not a place for glamour and Jeremiah was very much about fabulousness and glamour, a wild mix of people. I'm not talking about elitism. I'm talking about this democratic space that would be fabulous and exciting and filled with a diverse group of people who were interesting. And along with that, a new dining model, a new concept of a restaurant that you'd walk down a urine-smelling alley in the middle of nowhere and walk up a flight of stairs and find yourself in this incredible space that felt like the most important place on earth and you’d eat fabulous American food. It was not so much about Jeremiah leaving Chez Panisse as what’s Jeremiah going to do next?

AMT: And Jeremiah, you chose the space for this restaurant. You had to go down sort of a dark alley. You really had some real thoughts about what you wanted to create. Talk to us a little bit about how you envisioned that restaurant as you put it together.

JEREMIAH TOWER: I loved the idea of a speakeasy where you go up to a door and there's no sign outside and they’d open a tiny little window in the door and see who you are. I love that. So I had all these images of the great Parisian brasseries because I'd have lunch there and sitting next to me would be a giant poodle with its companion having lunch and I just thought this is all just too fabulous and I want a restaurant with that kind of ease.

AMT: And you came out of the kitchen a lot. Everyone knew your name. You would stop at all the tables. It was a grand party that you were throwing almost.

JEREMIAH TOWER: Well, it was an open kitchen so everybody could see. Everyone would gesture to come on out, so I'd go out and say hello. It was a perfect theatrical setting because right across in the open kitchen was this enormous bar. So the tension, the happenings between those two spaces were quite wonderful.

AMT: Anthony, in describing that time and Jeremiah’s influence, you have called him the first [expletive] chef.

ANTHONY BOURDAIN: Yes.

JEREMIAH TOWER: Now I’m really turning red.

ANTHONY BOURDAIN: He made things better for all of us in this regard because no one ever thought of the chef before. It was really maybe the first time where people thought wow, the chef is interesting and sexy and I would like to know more about them. Nobody ever wanted to know more about the chef. So that [expletive] quality—first of all, it improved all of our social lives. We could bask in his reflected glory and become glamorous ourselves. But it made people interested in the chef as a living, breathing entity with a face and an opinion. That was a really important change because people before didn't really care what the chef’s specialty was or what the chef felt they loved about food and honestly wanted them to try. That power shift really started there.

JEREMIAH TOWER: When I first started cooking, I could not tell my grandmother. She would have disowned me. And then students would come across from the California Culinary Academy which is a block away from Stars and say to me, “Because of you, my parents are proud that I'm in school.” And I just thought that was a major shift.

AMT: Changed people’s careers.

ANTHONY BOURDAIN: I remember those years also. The last thing you wanted to admit to like if you were interested in someone and their parents, you were introduced to their parents—well, what do you do, young man? You know I'm a cook or I'm a chef. [laughs]

AMT: How much did he influence you, Anthony?

ANTHONY BOURDAIN: Well, I was late to the game. I started to really know about Jeremiah directly—of course I'd heard the name—when I read his memoir years later. But one of the things that was so inspiring and enraging about the memoir was I realized that so many of the things I'd been cooking and the places I'd been cooking them in had come or been inspired directly from Jeremiah. I'd been doing his recipes or eating in restaurants that have been designed to look like Stars. Really that's how I got to know him.

AMT: So for a few years, Stars was one of the top money makers in the American restaurant scene. What happened, Jeremiah?

JEREMIAH TOWER: The earthquake happened. The damage to start, the physical damage was six bottles of vodka and a slightly cracked mirror. But what came afterwards was when they abandoned the Civic Center, which meant that the ballet, the symphony, the opera, the courts, the mayor—everybody left. So we went from an average of 350 lunches a day to an average of probably five.

AMT: The San Francisco earthquake of ’89 you're talking about.

JEREMIAH TOWER: Yes, yes. You know by ‘91 or something, we were in financial trouble that's for sure. We climbed out of it eventually but it was fairly devastating.

AMT: Anthony, what were the conversations circulating around Jeremiah Tower after Stars closed?

ANTHONY BOURDAIN: Where's Jeremiah? What happened to Jeremiah Tower? There were a few figures who are noticeable by their absence, but you know after a while Jeremiah was an inconvenient man suddenly. He disappeared. He was not there to maintain the care and feeding of the food press. He was bad at fame maintenance. He was off at a beach scuba diving. He was off the grid and as a result, year after year, journalists perpetuated an alternate creation myth that every year made him seem less important and less central to the history of American gastronomy until he wasn't included in it at all.

AMT: Well—I’ll just interject here—and then Alice Waters does write a book about Chez Panisse and Jeremiah, you're in the acknowledgments but there's no credit given to you for the menus and what you brought literally to the table at Chez Panisse.

JEREMIAH TOWER: Yes. I said Alice, in a private letter to her, you can't let this stand because you'll be a laughingstock certainly in culinary circles. So this is what you do. And I went through every single item and said just change the language a little bit like this. And at the end of the letter, I said whatever you do, destroy this letter. Do not show it to anyone because that would also ruin your reputation or damage it anyway. But she showed it to the publishers in New York and then sort of all hell broke loose and the newspapers picked up on it. And that's where that so-called feud started.

ANTHONY BOURDAIN: You know when people would hear of or be reminded of this question of authorship, it became inconvenient and annoying. So many writers had invested so much time and credibility already in something they knew to not be true. This is not to take anything away from what Alice Waters created, what she did do and what she continued to do for many, many years after. I mean Chez Panisse is still open, still relevant, still delicious. She's still here and inspiring hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people. But this question of authorship became inconvenient.

AMT: Jeremiah, why did you leave the spotlight?

JEREMIAH TOWER: Well, as a balance. I decided that I'd been doing it for 30, 35 years, you know 80 hours a week. It was time to get a balance for mental health, physical health. And also, it's a bit sad to have somebody as famous as I was hanging around with everybody watching to see well, what's he going to do next? And if the next wasn't bigger than Stars, then it would be sort of pathetic. So I thought a tropical beach was looking pretty good.

AMT: What do you think you learned from that journey, Anthony?

ANTHONY BOURDAIN: What I learned really from this process was I learned about this incredible character. I mean I set out to make the film to address an historical injustice as I saw it. It was very agenda driven. But I learned a lot about people. I heard a lot of voices that were fascinating and charming. I got a glimpse back at an enchanted, once in a lifetime period of American history and I got to know a little bit anyway about the life story and character of a really deeply complex and fascinating artist. And that is always a rare and delightful pleasure.

AMT: And Jeremiah Tower, what have your years in the kitchen taught you about yourself?

JEREMIAH TOWER: Never to do it again. Oh, about myself. Sorry. [laughs] It taught me something that I knew from the beginning and all the way through my career and now that for me, it's all about ingredients. That's where the passion comes from. That's where the inspiration comes from. That ingredients started it all all the way through and ended it all, the final story. And so I was just in Seville last week in Spain and I was looking at a market and I just thought boy, I have to get an apartment here right away that has a kitchen. I must start cooking everything in this market. It was an itch. I just couldn't stop myself. So when somebody asked me yesterday would you open a restaurant again, I said well, of course I wouldn't. But you know I really wanted to after seeing those ingredients.

AMT: You're going to make us all hungry. Jeremiah Tower, thank you for changing the world. And Anthony Bourdain, thank you for telling us about him.

ANTHONY BOURDAIN: Thank you so much.

JEREMIAH TOWER: Thank you very much.

AMT: Jeremiah Tower is a chef and author. Anthony Bourdain is an executive producer of the film, Jeremiah Tower: The Last Magnificent. He's also the host of Parts Unknown on CNN. They joined me from New York. The documentary opens in theatres in Canada on May 5th. Stay with us. Coming up in our next half hour, we're going to hear a personal moment of disruption. Lynn Keane reflects on her son's suicide eight years ago—an event that changed everything. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. You are listening to 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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How Lynn Keane's life changed when her son took his own life

Guests: Lynn Keane

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

[Music: The Disruptors theme]

AMT: Well, as part of our yearlong project, The Disruptors, we're also asking you or the listener to send us your personal moments of disruption. Lynn Keane’s world was turned upside down almost eight years ago exactly when her son Daniel took his own life at the age of 23 in 2009. Lynn Keane is an author. She's now also a suicide educator and this is her story.

SOUNDCLIP

My son Daniel was a vibrant young man, 23 years old. He had a love for doing things outdoors. He was in his happy place when he was in the summer business, you know chopping trees down, kind of just doing anything that would keep him outdoors. He was also kind of the glue that held our family together. He was a fixer so he'd be the first one on the scene to come and help you sort out a problem. I recall in our old house, we always had trouble trying to remember where to put the Christmas lights. So one fall, he took it upon himself to get these bins out and then make a map for us of where all the Christmas lights would go outside. He just was one of those people that he saw a problem and he tried to troubleshoot it.

[Music]

He grew up with asthma and allergies and like a lot of young kids, when you grow up with a chronic health condition, it sort of colours the world a little differently. He became a very sensitive young man. He was the one that would stay up all night listening to a friend talk about a breakup or you know make breakfast for that person. He had his own challenges, but I think he actually felt better when he was in service to others. The time that I really started to notice a change was 2006. That was the first year of university. Daniel had gone away first year like so many young people. I think he had a lot of anxiety around food and the safety of food. But again, he wasn't going to let us deal with it. He was going to try to figure it out on his own and he did. He was also a big wake boarder, snowboarder, just all around loved the boards and potentially would have fallen hard and suffered a concussion or at least several blows to the head. But in hindsight, we recognize that the symptoms that he displayed first year of university were very symptomatic of someone who had suffered a concussion. He lost concentration. He couldn't turn in assignments. He was failing first year but couldn't tell us. So instead of trying to deal with the issue at hand, he began self-medicating with drinking which is something he hadn't done in the past. So that was sort of the first, I guess outright change of behaviour. And then with that came more ups and downs in his moods. When he's home, he's one would say in a mania phase where he was just you know loaded to go and excited and interested and had all the time in the world for conversations. But again, we started to slowly see him have that sadness sort of come over him on a Sunday night or Monday morning when I’d drive him back to school. There was a kind of a vacantness in his eyes. I remember seeing now. I knew it was different but I didn't have words for it. I lived my life as his mom trying to keep him alive, keeping the offending foods away from him. I had no understanding that I should have been also looking at his mental health.

[Music]

Fast forward to 2008, August, September, I could start to see—and you know we started to have conversations—like what is that you want? If you don't want to go back to school, then let's look at that because there's much more to life and not everybody is cut out to go that academic route. But he felt that he just had to kind of continue on this path. So he went back to school. But what we didn't know was while he was in school in the area, in his accommodation, he wasn't actually attending school. He was just trying to hide his life because he was so ashamed of the fact that he couldn't manage school. He really at the core of it was not being able to function at school and the reason he couldn't function was because his brain had changed.

[Music]

He was becoming very isolated from not only us but also his friends. You know had we known he was out of school, that would have been a huge flag. But out of school, he's lost weight. He's not sleeping through the night. Another huge flag. As parents, we were woe to understand how all these symptoms in effect were part and parcel of a catastrophic depression. April, which they say is the cruelest month, which it certainly is for our family, he called me and he said Mom, I was driving up north today and I realized I'm looking forward to the summer. He started to have a litany of names of people he was going to contact for new business and things he wanted to do up there on our property. On face value, he seemed really engaged and that's really all I wanted. In fact I realize now that I lived in denial for a long time because that's all I wanted to see was his happiness. So at about four o'clock, I'd gotten back into my truck. I had been out doing errands and I got back in and see that I have about two missed calls from Daniel. So I get a hold of him and he says hey Mom, what are you going to make? And I said well, you know I’m making burgers and some salad and cut some potatoes up, just a really simple barbecue. He said great, I should be home by whatever time, you know, won't be long. So I said great. Very positive, nothing out of the ordinary. And that was the last time I talked to my son.

[Music]

He didn't show up at six and then he didn't show up at seven. So we went ahead and ate. In the meantime, we had reached out to him and he said he was running late. But in those hours, there was a sense of—there was like a foreshadowing of the worst kind of feeling that I can ever try to describe. After eight o’clock, and we were getting very short messages like “heading west”, “going to Toronto to see a friend”—totally out of anything that had been spoken of. But his very last text when he said “terrible traffic heading west,” I put the phone down and I said this is not Daniel. Something is happening and I don't know what it is but this is not Daniel. Because we were completely uneducated, we couldn't put the pieces together. The morning of the 28th of April 2009, we knew Daniel hadn't come home so Bruce made a plan to go up to the cottage. I left the house immediately. There was a sense that something was wrong. We just didn't know what to do about it. And so I got in the car and just kept driving around town. I started to notice my phone was ringing and it was my husband. I just kept ignoring the calls because as long as I ignored him, I could still pretend that Daniel was with us because I woke up knowing that I'd probably lost my son.

[Music]

So when I finally picked up and Bruce said these words “the news is not good,” I dropped the phone and I just screamed. Because everything that I thought was actually now happening and it's one of the first times in my adult life that I couldn't fix it. I couldn't make it better and I had no control over. I had no idea what was coming next, but I just knew that that moment, I didn't have a son anymore in this world. Had we had any understanding, we would have blown up in those cars and gotten up to the cottage to try to save him. But we didn't know and what we didn't know potentially could have saved our son's life. And I think why immediately I was so very open and honest about our actual experience because it was preventable if I had even an inkling of understanding and knowledge. And also we could have supported Daniel with so much more compassion. Rather than saying get it together, you can do anything, we should have sat down and said we don't have answers. But whatever you're doing, we're okay with. We just need to sort of pull it apart and figure out how to start again. If someone doesn't want to be anywhere, the worst thing to do is tell them to get their life together. So unfortunately for us, we have to face the world without our son, our caretaker, our humour, our best friend. But he left us with gifts. And I think that's what I hold onto, is just the many things he did leave us.

[Music]

I wrote him a letter because I was so angry that he would leave me. I got it all out in that letter and then I felt bad because I thought I don't know your pain. I don't know what you've gone through. Then I just started writing about his skin and his funny big hands and the way he walked on a funny slant in his sandals. And then as I wrote about him, I wanted to actually write more about what had happened. I was desperate to understand how this could happen. And through that digging, I was able to put together a map of Daniel's life and that allowed me to understand and accept to a degree that I had to accept, that his brain had changed. And unless he had professional help and care and medication, we weren't going to change that. I just felt that I had to share the information that I found and humbly I'd become a voice for people who had lost a child to suicide and also speak to young people because I think when we encourage young people to come and speak up and really share and break that stigma, we then have to find appropriate care for them. And so that's also part of my mission is to try to make Canada—one of the few main countries that doesn't have a suicide prevention strategy in place and we shouldn't be surprised that we have a crisis because we're not actively having places for these people to go and to receive help. I don't have that opportunity to watch him have a family or grow into the man that he was becoming. But I do have an opportunity to share his story and I know that it hopefully will touch somebody.

AMT: We've been listening to suicide educator and author Lynn Keane. Her son took his own life in 2009. If you have a story to share of your own personal moment of disruption, please send us an email through our website, www.cbc.ca/thecurrent. And be sure to put moment of disruption in the subject line.

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Environmental group rejects proposed bike path through Jasper National Park

Guests: Alison Ronson

AMT: You are listening to The Current on CBC Radio One. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. We've got a story about a proposed bike trail that is being met with opposition from an unlikely source or seemingly unlikely—the environmentalists. The federal government is reviewing a plan to pave a path along one of Canada's most iconic of highways. Parks Canada is considering building a bike path from Jasper to Lake Louise along the Icefields Parkway or Highway 93. Some fear it could result in all sorts of unintended consequences both for humans and for the environment. Alison Ronson is the executive director in northern Alberta for the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society or CPAWS, and she joins us from Edmonton. Hello, Alison.

ALISON RONSON: Good morning.

AMT: For those who have never driven along the Icefields Parkway, can you describe it?

ALISON RONSON: Yes. Well, it's one of the most beautiful routes in the world. It stretches all the way from the town of Jasper down to Banff and Lake Louise, through the Rocky Mountains and so you go through Alpine areas, valleys past the Columbia Icefields which is full of glaciers, basically seeing the most beautiful scenery you've probably ever seen, mountain scenery in your life.

AMT: And you go right by those icefields, the glaciers. You can see it.

ALISON RONSON: You can, yes.

AMT: How do you react when you first heard about the plan for a bike trail?

ALISON RONSON: Well, it was announced in the federal budget of 2016 as a single-line item for a bike path in Jasper National Park and that was it. There was no other information provided. So you know at first, we were a little bit puzzled about this mysterious item and so we weren't sure how to react, to be honest.

AMT: What are the concerns though?

ALISON RONSON: Well, as we found out more about this bike path, our concerns grew. So it's a three-metre wide paved trail that would stretch from Jasper down to Lake Louise—a total of about 230 kilometres of paved, basically roadway. And so our concerns are first that it's been developed behind closed doors. It's been developed with a non-transparent process. It's going to cost Canadian taxpayers a tremendous amount of money—about $160 million dollars—and it will have significant consequences on the nature in the parks.

AMT: So does it run right alongside the highway?

ALISON RONSON: Well, we've only seen the maps of the northern part, so the first 110 kilometres of this trail. And for the most part, it does run about 20 to 50 metres beside the Icefields Parkway. But there's a significant portion about seven kilometres where it would have to deviate into designated wilderness.

AMT: Okay. And so the first part is from Jasper to the icefields, right?

ALISON RONSON: Yes, to Wilcox Campground near the Columbia Icefields.

AMT: Okay. So it would have to deviate into wilderness. What does that really mean?

ALISON RONSON: So our parks are divided into different classifications, so different areas of the parks are given different status. And the Icefields Parkway for example, goes through an outdoor recreation zone or a development zone. But part of the park and much of the park is designated as wilderness. And these are parts of the park where the minister has formally declared that the natural character of these areas is very important and should remain wilderness for all time.

AMT: And what's the concern that cyclists going through there will change that?

ALISON RONSON: Yes. So even the parts that run within the outdoor recreation zone would have a significant impact on the nature within the parks.

AMT: How many cyclists are actually using that highway now?

ALISON RONSON: Well, I’m not quite sure. I don't know the numbers but it is fairly well used every summer. It's a beautiful pathway. And even so though, it's probably only for elite cyclists who are able to do those mountainous terrains.

AMT: And so where do they ride now? They ride on the shoulder?

ALISON RONSON: Yes.

AMT: And how wide is that?

ALISON RONSON: Well, I have heard that for the most part it's fairly good. There might be some places where it's a little bit narrow and could be widened, but I've heard no complaints about it from cyclists.

AMT: Okay. I have a clip because there are people who look forward to actually having a path like that. Mike Day is the past chair and board member of the Association for Mountain Parks Protection and Enjoyment in Jasper. Listen to what he has to say.

SOUNDCLIP

Cycling in the national parks is an appropriate activity and I think this will increase the opportunity for people to cycle in my opinion, the most spectacular drive in the world. I think that encouraging people to cycle on it instead of driving is a net benefit to the environment, not a negative to the environment.

AMT: So he agrees with you that it's beautiful but he doesn't see the downside to the environment.

ALISON RONSON: Well, so there is an opportunity to cycle the most scenic drive in the world and it's right there on the Icefields Parkway. This trail is essentially twinning that highway right through the habitat of four species that are listed under the Species at Risk Act.

AMT: What are they?

ALISON RONSON: Those are mountain caribou or woodland caribou, but the Southern mountain population, white bark pine trees which are endangered, olive-sided flycatchers and little brown myotis which are a bat. But it also goes through really important grizzly bear habitat and grizzlies are listed as threatened under Alberta’s Wildlife Act.

AMT: So what does that mean? You could come across a grizzly if you were riding a bike along that path?

ALISON RONSON: Definitely. That is one of the major concerns of our organization and many other organizations working in this area as well as cycling organizations who know that frequently, people encounter grizzlies on trails such as this one.

AMT: And it’s three metres wide. Some of your members have called this meals on wheels.

ALISON RONSON: [Chuckles] They have.

AMT: Basically you run into a grizzly on a bike—not very good.

ALISON RONSON: No. The problem comes when you surprise the grizzly bear and that happens when you're going at great speed. And people who are riding the Icefields Parkway typically do it at great speed because they're avid cyclists. They're not people who are out for a Sunday stroll.

AMT: And the park is proposing a 30 kilometre-an-hour speed limit.

ALISON RONSON: Yes, which means that those elite avid cyclists are most likely still going to use the Icefields Parkway, which really has us questioning who is going to use this new trail. Parks Canada is putting forward this idea that it will be used by new Canadians and young families with strollers and rollerbladers and the reality is that the mountainous environment really is not conducive to that type of activity.

AMT: And do they have a plan to deal with the vegetation or like being able to see ahead of you so that if there is a bear on the path, you’d know?

ALISON RONSON: Yes. So their proposal is to cut a wide swath of vegetation on either side of the trail, so between the road and the trail and then on the other side of the trail as well. And they've also proposed the use of herbicides which is really concerning to us in a national park.

AMT: So where is this project in terms of approval right now?

ALISON RONSON: They just concluded the first phase of the public consultation on the environmental assessment. I assume now that they are taking into account the feedback they've received from Canadians as they write the environmental assessment and I'm hoping that they also take those comments and determine whether or not this project should go forward.

AMT: Well, we did receive a statement from Parks Canada saying that it has an ongoing environmental assessment to determine the impact that they'll have on the area. That they have strict development limits to ensure the protection of ecological integrity in the national parks that Canada has. Does that give you any comfort?

ALISON RONSON: You know it should. But unfortunately over the last 10 years, we've seen a trend from Parks Canada, especially in the mountain parks, that these environmental assessments or these detailed impact assessments really don't stop the bad projects from going forward. And in fact, at the public consultations I attended, it was pretty clear that this environmental assessment is only to provide ways that could mitigate the impact and not to determine whether the project is appropriate in the first place.

AMT: I want you to hear Mike Day again of the Association for Mountain Parks Protection and Enjoyment.

SOUNDCLIP

There's no way that we as an organization would support anything that's going to negatively impact the environment or harm animals in any way. I think that there's possibly people making assumptions about Parks Canada’s ability to mitigate some of these situations. I have confidence in Parks Canada as an environmental organization.

AMT: Okay. So he has confidence, you do not. Help me understand what's really at stake here then.

ALISON RONSON: Well, there are many examples of Parks Canada not adhering to its first mandate which is to put nature forward over the last few years. A prime example of that is the recent approval of the massive expansion of the Lake Louise ski resort which actually would increase that ski resort by double its current capacity right into designated wilderness and prime grizzly bear habitat. They also approved the glacier skywalk despite the fact that the environmental assessment showed it would have negative impacts on mountain goats. And they've also conditionally approved more development at Maligne Lake in Jasper which is also a sensitive habitat.

AMT: And your organization has been fighting some of this, has it not?

ALISON RONSON: Well, we have. We actually were created in 1963 as a Parks’ watchdog and so we've been periodically fighting this fight over the last 50 years.

AMT: And so what do you say to those people who are trying to make the parks more accessible to Canadians through activity like cycling?

ALISON RONSON: Well, what we were hoping to see from Parks Canada and what they actually have in the management plans is that they should have put forward options for Canadians for cycling. Instead, they put forward this single proposal and we actually believe there are other options that could have been explored that would have been better for Canadians both in and outside of the parks.

AMT: Okay. Well, thank you for speaking to me today about all of this.

ALISON RONSON: Thank you.

AMT: That is Alison Ronson. She is the executive director in northern Alberta for the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society and she joined us from our Edmonton studio. We have a little bit of time to talk about feedback. As you are no doubt aware, US President Donald Trump has now passed the 100-day mark in the Oval Office. Last week we were in Washington for a special show to mark that milestone. Here are two young Republicans we heard from in Washington—Chris Godbey and Adi Sathi.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: I would say that he's doing an amazing job and would probably give him a strong rating.

VOICE 2: I would give him an A, A plus on how much he’s really pursuing his platform. It’s something we haven’t seen in a long time and it’s a testament to the fact that he’s not a politician. That’s what he campaigned on, so.

VOICE 1: Absolutely.

AMT: Well, our Washington show generated a lot of feedback on both sides of the border. Bob Haberkost of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania writes: “Anna Maria asked some great questions to demonstrate just how deluded and ignorant are this new generation of Republicans. All I can say is that whatever these people bring on themselves, they deserve it. As for me and my family, I am looking for real estate somewhere north of Niagara Falls.” Jorge Lobo tweets: “These young Republicans sound like the Chavez supporters of the early 2000s—blind and brain washed. Scary.” On Facebook, Robin Hardy writes: “These young people are probably not all blind. They've been hoodwinked by an unethical, enabled, dangerous con man who has spent his life ripping people off. Sadly, now he's ripping off the people who voted him President of the United States. They'll eventually wake up, but it could be too late for them.” But Rita Rumbaugh of Silver Springs, Maryland just outside of DC had this to say: "Just more trite comments about our president, more snarky journalists, more stuff one hears daily on CNN, PBS, and reads in the NYT. Why did you come all the way from Canada to repeat what we hear daily from old-style news?” If you have a comment to make about what you hear on our program, find us on Facebook, tweet us @thecurrentcbc, send us an email through our website at www.cbc.ca/thecurrent. That's our program for today. Stay with Radio One for q. Tom Power is joined by comedian Gilbert Gottfried. And remember you can take The Current with you to go with the CBC Radio app. It lets you browse through past episodes of our show. You can start listening in just a few seconds. It is free from the App Store or Google Play. We're leaving you today with one more moment with Anthony Bourdain. During the first season of his food and travel show, Parts Unknown, he visited Canada and here is part of that trip where he supped with Dave McMillan and Fred Morin, proprietors of the Montreal restaurant, Joe Beef. They ate seared foie gras on potato puree that was all served inside an ice shanty. Of course it was. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. Thanks for listening to The Current.

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VOICE 1: We’re in a wooden shack over three feet of ice and 100 feet of water.

VOICE 2: You are hopeless, hopeless romantics, gentlemen. Oh, look at that. Oh. The seared foie is perched atop an ethereal suspension of Joe [unintelligible]-inspired potato puree. Ofcourse.

VOICE 1: This is Cornas from Reynard Vineyard by Thierry Allemand.

VOICE 2: Nice.

[Sound: Glasses clinking]

VOICE 1: That’s wonderful.

VOICE 2: Yes. Yes, it is. Really, is there a billionaire or a despot anywhere on earth who in this precise moment is eating better than us?

VOICE 1: No.

VOICE 2: No. Look at that.

VOICE 1: [Speaking in alternate language]

VOICE 2: Cheese. There must be cheese. In this case, a voluptuously reeking Epoisses, who some less hardy outdoorsmen might call overripe, but not us. Oh, this is awesome.

[Music: Ending theme]

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May 1, 2017 full episode transcript

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