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The Current Transcript for October 19, 2017

Host: Anna Maria Tremonti

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

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SOUNDCLIP

I had a poster of Theo Fleury on my wall when I was a kid and I know that we have a great hockey market and the best fans in the world. But we have to put the emotions aside and we have to determine what is the right thing for Calgary.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: Well not a lot of people with influence did put their emotions aside in the re-election campaign that just saw Naheed Nenshi edged back into the mayor's seat. In fact the seeming level of political meddling appeared to have the NHL channeling Russia on U.S. politics as top executives of the Calgary Flames, and the league alternated with insults and threats over the nasty administrations reluctance to put more millions into a new arena. Some say there is a lesson here beyond Calgary for other NHL mayors feeling the pressure especially because of the statistics that show the main beneficiaries of government largesse are team owners, in more than an hour. Also today on the night Donald Trump was elected U.S. president political commentator Van Jones called it a white lash.

SOUNDCLIP

My phone had been just blowing up the whole night. I have friends who were Muslims. They're refugees. They're here because they had to flee where they are from. They were texting me: “Should we leave the country tonight?”

AMT: He may be known for his passionate partisan punditry but Van Jones believes Democrats and Republicans need to find a way to work together with or even without Donald Trump. Van Jones is myguest in half an hour. But first:

SOUNDCLIP

Well, Mark Grant has been found not guilty, and now nearly 33 years after 13 year old Candace Derksen and was killed, her case is once again unsolved.

AMT: The world changed for Wilma Derksen the day her 13 year old disappeared. And yet more than 30 years on, despite two trials and a new not guilty ruling, she has found a way to move out of tragedy and a way of letting go. We are starting with her. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

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'We can live with it': Candace Derksen murder retrial ends in not guilty verdict

Guest: Wilma Derksen

AMT: For more than three decades Wilma Derksen and her family have been on a journey of forgiveness. But yesterday may have been one of their hardest days. Wilma's 13 year old daughter Candace was abducted on her way home from school in November of 1984. It prompted one of the largest missing persons searches in Winnipeg's history. Seven weeks later Candace's body was discovered bound and abandoned in a lumber shed not far from her home. She had died of exposure. In 2011 Mark Grant was found guilty of the crime and sentenced to 25 years in prison. But he was granted a new trial on appeal. And yesterday Winnipeg justice Karen Simonsen found Mark Grant not guilty of second degree murder. The DNA evidence linking him to the murder was deemed flawed. Mark Grant is now free. Wilma Derksen’s latest book is called The Way of Letting Go: One Woman's Walk Toward Forgiveness. And she joins me from our Winnipeg studio. Hello. H

WILMA DERKSEN: Hello.

AMT: It's been less than 24 hours since that decision. How are you feeling about it?

WILMA DERKSEN: Well there is a lot of emotion, a lot of processing going on but on the whole I think I feel good talking to you, Anna, this morning.

AMT: Was there a tipping point in the second trial for you when you thought you knew what the outcome might be?

WILMA DERKSEN: Well I guess we've always been convinced that the Crown was presenting a good case. So there was no tipping point but I think that we realized going into the verdict and the judgment in the trial room that it could go either way and we were prepared. Well we thought we were prepared for both ways but either way would have held a new complexity in the decision. So we were prepared to be in some kind of transition after.

AMT: I guess you can never really be prepared, huh?

WILMA DERKSEN: Well when it comes right down to it, it's a new era it's a new place and you have to kind of look around and say: “Okay, what's going on in this place?”

AMT: I was reading that last night. You lit 33 candles and people came over to see you.

WILMA DERKSEN: Yes. Thank goodness I planned that ahead of time. I try to plan something that will offer me closure because none of this whole system and this whole process has allowed me to feel in control of anything. And so I know that after something like this I need friends I need some kind of symbol. And we had some friends coming over, at lunch time we had friends doing a circle and in the evening we had friends over and we did a circle. And the words and the wisdom of people around us was incredible. And then when they had left to Cliff and I just watched the 33 candles representing the 33 years that we've been in this and, oh, they just fed our souls and it was just beautiful.

AMT: There was an earlier trial of course and in that trial you took court transcripts home and you poured through them to learn about the evidence. Did you do that this time? Did you learn anything new?

WILMA DERKSEN: Yes there were I think two new items in last trial that were new, and fascinating is so fascinating I know that it looks as if the Crown wasn't able to prove their case but neither did the defense prove their case. So it's just kind of had to kind of realize, okay, is just not proven. And in Scotland they actually have a place where you say is guilty or not guilty or not proven. And I think that's kind of where we are and it's just it's we have to live with all of it, in all this complexity.

AMT: Your husband Cliff said that he respected that the judge made the call that she had to make.

WILMA DERKSEN: Yes. And I think she did. And we respect it and we're glad she made the decision she did and I think that we all have to live with the decision she made. And I think we can live with it.

AMT: Have you ever spoken with Mark Grant?

WILMA DERKSEN: No I never have. We can't, we can't. There's a lot of barriers between us that we can't even approach each other.

AMT: What do you think of this verdict in relation to him?

WILMA DERKSEN: Well I think that he's been given a second chance. I think that he's had a long history of sexual assaults and we know that he's a troubled person and that there is reason for concern for him being released. But I think that life has given him a second chance. He's older now and I hope that he has learned as much as we have and takes life in a new way takes on in a new way.

AMT: It's extraordinary to hear you talk with such humanity about someone accused and who walks free you now. Where do you find that in yourself?

WILMA DERKSEN: Well I guess I still believe that every human being is important and valuable and they're here for a reason. And I think over the years I have met many people in prison and have come to understand that there is humanity there. It's always intriguing and always interesting and there's always a story. And I go to that place and try to remain in that place.

AMT: You have said that some of you hope the crown does not appeal this then, why is that?

WILMA DERKSEN: Oh I'm so tired [laughs] of the trial and I guess that you know I just I've seen the disintegration of the second trial. The first trial was was... And I think that it would continue to disintegrate as we become more about words and arguments. And so if it hasn't been proven up to now it probably never will. We don't need to waste any more time on it.

AMT: It takes its own toll, huh?

WILMA DERKSEN: It does. It does on everybody and everything. I mean this is an expensive process. So it's not only our emotional toll and the time that it takes but it's just it just needs to be over.

AMT: Your book you talk about one woman's walk toward forgiveness. That walk as you describe started for you three days after Candace was found and your husband Cliff answered a question from a reporter saying “we forgive.” And you answered “I want to forgive”. What have you discovered about yourself as you've gone through this?

WILMA DERKSEN: I think that is very very indicative of who I am. I'm a processor I'm never arrive. And people say “Have you forgiven?” And I find that very difficult. I said right in the beginning that that's my choice. That's my direction. And I think there's times when I do arrive there at that peak of freedom and perfect love perhaps. But really I'm a processor, I'm a traveler, I'm a journeyer and it's never easy for me.

AMT: On the night Candace's body was found a stranger knocked on your door. Who was he and what did you take away from that encounter?

WILMA DERKSEN: Well he came at 10:00 at night and he said you know “I'm a parent of a murdered child too”. And just that moment I realized I now, was and still am, a parent of a murdered child. So my identity had changed and he said “I've come to tell you what to expect”. And so we invited him to the kitchen table and there for two hours, he talked about his life and he said “this is what I've experienced”. And his daughter had been murdered. And he just explained how it had destroyed his physical health, his mental health, he couldn't work anymore, his emotional health and even the relationships in his family and he had lost even the memory of his daughter, because he was so obsessed by the trials that he had gone through. And he too had landed in a place of they couldn't prove it. And so he was just explaining all of this. We were just looking at him with absolute horror at what we were seeing and the destruction of the aftermath of murder. We thought murder and killing was the worst but we realized that there's a whole stuff full of monsters of destruction and the trauma after. And that just led us to think you know we've got to do it different. We have to find an alternative way to do it. And that's what we've pursued.

AMT: You know the very idea that your daughter would be murdered and in that way, and the very idea that you would have to live through that and then find a way through that, talk to us a little bit more about how you did that. There's so much we can learn from you.

WILMA DERKSEN: Well I guess the main thing that I was obsessed with after that was what is it? What is this [unintelligible]? What are the issues? And so I joined a group called Family Survivors of Homicide, and as we talked over about seven years I kept writing down the issues. This is big. You know and then I'd look at it and I would study and I would research it and I applied it to my own life. And that was the beginning of trying to make sense in organizing it. And then after realizing what the issues were and talking about them with people and presenting it to the criminal justice system even to offenders and realizing that this wasn't just unique to murder. These are issues that could apply to a lot of situations. And then how do we work through the issue and that's where I can resorted to my initial decision, in order for us to get through. We've got to let it go. We've got to use the word forgiveness in our lifestyle. I know forgiveness is often misunderstood and this is why I had to really understand it myself that you know there's a theological forgiveness there's a relation of forgiveness, but there's a lifestyle forgiveness which is a way of dealing with the issues these huge 15 issues that I had identified. And part of that was just letting go but it was really a lot of studying and a lot of talking and exploration. That was the exploration was almost as good as the finding sometimes but that journey was intense.

AMT: And you talk about letting go, you don't let go of her memory, what do you let go of?

WILMA DERKSEN: The negativity. Every issue just has two kinds of you know choices. It has a choice to live in it, to stay in the fragmentation of the story, to stay in the fear, to stay in the anger and the other choice is to just let it go and say no it's not worth it. I have every reason to be afraid. And I have every reason to be angry but I'm not going to go down that path. And it's always a choice. It's always this is the normal way to do it. And this is the way that the higher ground that they call it and just say no I'm not going to do that I'm going to do it differently, because I know the I know that each path leads to a different place.

AMT: And so who do you forgive?

WILMA DERKSEN: Well it's not really about relation of forgiveness that I'm talking about it's more about the issue, of like the first issue. For example this story fragmentation, my story is fragmented and it is even today. You know I can put it I don't have a nice neat ending to this. Another one is unsatisfactory closure like I'm right in the middle of that one right now. And so what can I do, I can demand closure. I can say you know what we've got to convict this man. We've got to find the evidence. Because I know it's there you know and I can just go to the police and I can just vent or I can say you know what I'm not going to get closure here. I don't have any control over that. I'm not going to put my attention there. It is what it is. And that doesn't mean I'm not concerned, and it doesn't mean that I'm not going to continue to look at it and to deal with the processes. But my main attention is going to go to creating my own closure. Like okay I'm going to need 33 candles. I'm going to need my friends and I'm going to concentrate on still stewarding Candace’s story and making something good happen rather than focusing on the negativity.

AMT: How important is your faith in doing this?

WILMA DERKSEN: I think that faith is extremely important because it's faith in whether it's in God or whether it's in whatever. You know in different ways we have to have a hope that good triumphs, good can triumph. And we have to go down that, so faith is about believing that we can make something good out of anything even evil. And so faith is important. I happen to have a faith in God and I believe that God has a way of creating miracles out of what we wish. We have to express our wish that “God I want to do something positive”. And then miraculously it seems God comes through with new ideas and new imaginations of new energy of how to do that. And that's what I'm pursuing.

AMT: And as you went through this journey did you have to forgive yourself on any level Wilma?

WILMA DERKSEN: Oh yeah. And it's the blame, right. It's kind of a blaming, confusion. And blaming is such a negative emotion. We have to have somebody to blame it seems, and it's comes from a very ugly place and. And it wasn't only the offender in fact that was almost the easiest one to forgive. But it was the blaming of the police for not doing everything correctly, it was blaming men, it was blaming and then of course at the end I had to realize wow I was blaming myself if I had only picked Candace up I could have stopped all of this. If I'd only been that perfect mother and not you know been behind my deadlines, I would have picked you up that day and this wouldn't have happened. So there's. And even even though it's not really guilt the perceived guilt is just as… deadly might be too strong a word but just as destructive as real guilt. And either way. but real guilt is also forgivable. You know we have to forgive ourselves for all the mistakes we make. of the other mean things we might have done and move into a new place. So forgiveness isn't about saying it's okay, it's not, you know moving to a lowest common denominator. I think forgiveness is about saying “Okay, that was not good. And I'm going to change and I'm going to be better.” And it demands I think the same of the other person.

AMT: Does it give you permission to be happy again in your life?

WILMA DERKSEN: Yes. And that's an amazing kind of realization that I didn't even believe I could be happy and I should be happy because Candace had been killed. You know there's no happiness after that. And so I had to give myself permission to say yes there is joy. And in fact when we lost somebody we should even realize how important it is to live intensely every day and every moment because it is short. Her life was extremely short but even no matter how long we live it's really just a very short time here. And how are we going to live and we need to live it in new energies all the time. And Candace wasn't allowed to have all her joy in her life. So, I need to live double joy better than double sadness.

AMT: And you have two other children. They were little kids, nine and three, when she was killed. And they're adults now.

WILMA DERKSEN: Yes. And they were with us in the court room and after as we briefed. They're wonderful. Oh my Lord. I have two absolutely wonderful adult children who have married beautiful people and produced gorgeous grandchildren just amazing. I have so much to be happy about.

AMT: And so I'm just wondering you know we know about so many victims of violence who cannot move forward, whose lives are changed in that negative way that you talk about. What then do you share with others then who are victims of violence?

WILMA DERKSEN: Well you know I really respect everyone's choice. It's not easy and it takes time and we don't arrive anywhere very quickly. And it takes a lot of support. So rather than condemning people who are stuck, I think it's more important to... Nobody wants to be stuck. And it takes a lot of love and encouragement to keep moving on this path of life. You know no matter what the path is and everybody's got stuff. And so yesterday we just realized again how important it is to surround ourselves with good people with good words. And so that's what I try to offer people who are fumbling in life to offer the good words and hope.

AMT: Wilma Derksen thank you for sharing your voice on something so very important so very personal.

WILMA DERKSEN: Thank you for this opportunity.

AMT: Wilma Derksen the author of The Way of Letting Go: One Woman's Walk Toward Forgiveness. She joined us from Winnipeg. Yesterday after a second trial, Mark Grant was found not guilty of second degree murder in connection with the death of her daughter Candace in 1984. Stay with us. The news is next. Then we are speaking with Van Jones you may know him from CNN. He's a commentator he's talking about polarization in the U.S. and how to fix it. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

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The 'whitelash' of Trump politics: CNN commentator Van Jones

Guest: Van Jones

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

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AMT: Still to come how many millions of your tax dollars should cities spend on building new sports venues. It's a question cities across North America have debated and it's at the root of the faceoff between Calgary's newly re-elected mayor and the city's beloved NHL team. We will drop the ball in half an hour. But first bringing together a divided America.

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AMT: He's a lawyer and activist and during the last U.S. presidential election he became one of the best known pundits on cable television in the States. I'm talking about Van Jones the CNN commentator. He has a new book called Beyond the Messy Truth: How We Came Apart How We Come Together. And he'll be with me right after this.

SOUNDCLIP

[Song: Purple Rain by Prince]

I never meant to cause you any sorrow

I never meant to cause you any pain

I only wanted to one time to see you laughing

I only wanted to see you

Laughing in the purple rain

Purple rain, purple rain

Purple rain, purple rain

AMT: Hello Van Jones.

VAN JONES: Hey.

AMT: We don't often start a political discussion with Prince but there's a reason for that. What does hearing him bring back to you?

VAN JONES: Things I am missing.

[Sound: Purple Rain in the background]

VAN JONES: Yes, he was one of the five most important people in my life. And you know I left the White House. I'm not sure what I would have done had he not recharged me. I left the White House under fire and I'd worked for the Obama administration for only six months, best six months of my life, followed by the worst six weeks as going on a right wing kind of turned on me and sensationalize a lot of my left wing radical youth activist past. And when you leave the White House you realize you don't have a lot of friends in the world. But Prince was my friend and he was there for me.

AMT: How did you come to meet him?

VAN JONES: Well you know I got a big mouth and I always worked on urban issues especially issues that affect our young people. And he saw me on TV talking about a program to get kids from the inner city trained to install solar panels and he thought that was a really positive solution for both pollution and poverty. And he made a big donation to my charitable organization which is still around, Green for All, not green for some greenforall.org. And we became friends and got to be pretty close over the next five six seven years before he died.

AMT: He sent an anonymous check.

VAN JONES: Uhmm.

AMT: You kept sending it back.

VAN JONES: Yes because that's how he was, that's how I was. He was always you know trying to support causes but he didn't want anybody to know. And so he gave away you know literally tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars. But I wasn't going to accept anonymous money working in Oakland, California. I didn't know, might be or oil companies trying to set me up to say I was on the take from them, or who knows. And so we just Ping-Pong this check back and forth for a while until finally his lawyer called me and said “please take the check. I can't tell you who it's from. But the guy's favorite colors purple”. And I said “Well now you got another problem because now I'm not going to cash the check. I'm going to frame it”. Yeah everybody knew his favorite color was purple. So once he said purple I knew it was Prince. Anyway Prince thought that was so funny that he called me and you know we got a chance to be friends. And being around him I got a chance to really understand how you can, you k now, not be red and not be blue but be purple. You know in United States you know red is for the Republicans, blue for the Democrats. But he was purple. He was above all that stuff and he was able to find solutions and work with me on solutions that really were bridge building solutions. You know Green for All, also we built something together called yeswecode.org. Yes We Code is now becoming one of the biggest scholarship funds to help people from disadvantaged non-traditional backgrounds break into the technology field, and get jobs and get trained in computer science and get apprenticeships in Silicon Valley companies. You know that was the last thing that Prince and I worked on together. But we launched that thing with a 50,000 person concert in New Orleans. He was just that kind of a guy. And when you get a chance to be stage with someone like him, you look out into the audience and what you see is you see every kind of color, every person you know young, old, black, white, brown, the punk rockers, the R&B folks, rappers. Everybody is there to see him because he's somehow been able to strike a note that the whole world can hear and be moved by him. And I think that every person has that capacity to strike a note inside themselves that the whole world can hear. And if you keep that in mind when you're talking to people you know you expect good from people and you look for good people and that's somehow fallen out of American politics. We look for the worse. We expect the worse. The common ground is nothing the battleground is everything. And you can't run a country that way. Prince you know Republicans and Democrats listen to his music at their wedding so he's a pretty good role model for me.

AMT: Again you talk about Yes we Code, that came from a conversation with him about the Death of Trayvon Martin. You were talking, he was raising a question about hoodies. Tell us what he asked.

VAN JONES: Well you know typical for Prince. Everybody else is talking about things in one way and he comes at it completely differently. And he says “why is it that when you see a black kid wearing a hoodie, the media says well there goes a thug. When you see a white kid wearing a hoodie, the media says well there goes Mark Zuckerberg?” Because at that time especially hoodies were kind of like the uniform for the young geeks. And I said well maybe it's because of racism. And parents said well maybe or maybe we haven't created enough black Mark Zuckerberg. And it was a brilliant insight and we decided well let's look into this [unintelligible] thing and sure enough we found there were some gaps that were working through Yes we Code to close.

AMT: You also, because of all of this, you start going to schools and you talk to two young black students and kids who are marginalized and you tell them you don't want them to become the modern day equivalent of cotton pickers. What was your message to those kids?

VAN JONES: Well you know it's important to get people's attention when you're trying to talk to people especially young people. You know I'm trying to get a group of people who have mainly been told that if they want to make it in this world, they've got to become rappers or they've got to become athletes or maybe they can become Barack Obama. But that's basically it. And those are all very hard jobs to figure out how you're going to get. So how do you get this group, it's never been told they could be computer scientists. They could be technologists. It's very tough. And so I developed a little trick where I would just say “how many you guys have one of these?” I hold up my smartphone and they all hold up their smartphone. Then I say “Okay how many of you guys have ever, not only know the exact terminology but what they mean, let me here. Okay. How many of you have ever downloaded an app?” You know they are like: “This old guy is a nut! We've all downloaded apps.” I say: “Okay. Last question, how many of you guys have ever uploaded one?” Total silence. “How many of you ever written your own program? Create your own app and uploaded it? It's not wanted you know why because you're suckers. You are suckers. When you download somebody else's app you're making money for people you don't even know. Every time you move your thumbs around you're making money for people you don't even know. Black people moving their thumbs around making money for people they don't know used to be called picking cotton. You know that's not what I want for you. I don't want it to be digital cotton pickers. I want you guys to be able to be the owners and the builders and the designers of tomorrow and who wouldn't want to be a part of a program like that?” and every hand goes up. You know you have to find ways to get people to think about themselves differently. And that's a big part of why I wrote the book. I think the way that people in the United States are thinking about politics and thinking about themselves is so divisive and nutty and insane that you know even the places where we actually agree, we won't work together.

AMT: Because we can't get past, yes.

VAN JONES: We can't get past the infighting.

AMT: Well you have a friendship with someone else that might surprise many people. How did you and Newt Gingrich become allies?

VAN JONES: Well you know Newt and I had a TV show together called Crossfire. And Newt is obviously a globally famous conservative hard core. And it turned out working on the show together we don't agree on very much, in fact we rarely agree on anything but I came to respect him and admire his brains and his just incredible strategic smarts. And I realize that the one thing we did have in common we both really have concerns about the criminal justice system, and we'd like to see it reformed. And so we wound up working together to get some bills introduced into Congress not passed yet and to just try to change the conversation so that the Republicans and the conservative Christians can work together with progressives and liberals and get something done. We need each other. We can't just get in our little Twitter feeds and attack each other and still have a country.

AMT: That's part of how you can live there now, huh?

VAN JONES: Absolutely.

AMT: You're from near Jackson, Tennessee.

VAN JONES: Yes. I grew up on the edge of Jackson, Tennessee, a little tiny town in between Memphis and Nashville. We had no sewage, no street lights, no sidewalks. My dad had been a cop in the military and he had gotten out going to college and married my mom and they were both school teachers, public school teachers in the south that make a lot of money but have a lot of social prestige. And so I grew up in a house where we didn't have much in terms of money but we had a lot in terms of community support and strength.

AMT: You also grew up in a region of America is that the Right accuses the Democratic lead of being a fly over territory?

VAN JONES: Well, yes. You know it's funny I had occasion on this book tour to meet people who literally have been to seven countries, 12 countries and I've never been to America, the United States. I mean they fly from New York to Los Angeles or to the Bay Area. They go up to Philadelphia or they go into Boston and that's it. They literally have never seen the country. And as a result they have all kinds of prejudices and misperceptions. And they're great people. good people, loving people but you know they talk about you know Red State America, Heartland America with the same kind of clueless contempt that colonizers talk about third world countries. You know these are kind of the backwater regions, these ignorant unwashed masses that if we could only convert them to our enlightened way of thinking you know we can convert them to our MPR religion and force feed them a bunch of kale and bring them up to proper standards and then maybe they wouldn't be so stupid. I mean that's the kind of attitude. And if you grow up in places like that or if you did grow up there, if you still live there. It just is so offensive and it makes it hard to support liberal causes because you begin to think well these people look down on me. They look down on my family. They think they're smarter and better. And so when you're snobby and you're looking down your nose at people they're not going to vote for you. They're going to listen to you and they may vote for Donald Trump.

AMT: Well let's some. Let's look at the vote that night. I have a clip here something you said the night Donald Trump was elected. It kind of ricocheted across the US and Canada and around the world. Let's listen.

SOUNDCLIP

It's hard to be a parent tonight for a lot of us. You tell your kids. Don't be a bully. You tell your kids don't be a bigot. You tell your kids do your homework. And be prepared. And then you have this outcome and you have people putting children to bed night. And they are afraid of breakfast. They're afraid of how do I explain this to my children. This was many things. This was a rebellion against the elites. True. It was a complete reinvention of politics and polls. It's true but it was also something else. This was a whitewash. This was a whitelash against a changing country. It was a white lash against a black president in part and that's the part where the pain comes.

AMT: Van Jones what do you hear as you listen to yourself now?

VAN JONES: You know it was a tough night. You know my phone had been just blowing up the whole night. You know I have friends who are Muslims. They're refugees. They're here because they had to flee where they're from. They were texting: “Should we leave the country tonight?” I had you know friends who are immigrant, Latino immigrant families who were just devastated. And my own children were far from me in California. I'm on the set in D.C. and my wife is texting me wanting me to call home with I could. And so I was - my body was there on the set at CNN but my mind and my heart my soul was with a lot of other people who were really going through stuff. And I realized when it became my turn to speak that I couldn't just talk about the numbers and the variation between the polling and that I was going to have to say something for a whole bunch of people who are hurting that night. And somehow if I found the words and I remember I'd written on a piece of paper ‘parents’ and I written ‘whitelash’ and I just spoke from my heart. And then it became I mean white lashes now in the dictionary which is kind of crazy.

AMT: How do you define whitelash?

VAN JONES: I'm trying to identify a particular phenomenon in the West where parts of the white working class rebels against neo liberal policy, both in terms of the jobs that leave and the people that come. It's a reaction against you know the economics of neo liberalism which can create job loss for white industrial workers, but also against the cultural implications and impacts where people come from other countries. And those two things are together and you go “why are you making about race? Why make it about race?” Well if you just say workers, a bunch of the working class or African-American, Latino, Native American, Asian-American work every day and voted overwhelmingly against Trump. So you can't say well industrial workers are supporting Trump. No it's a white industrial working class that has this particular pattern. And so you've got to deal with it. If you pretend it's not happening then you actually open the door for the bands and neo-Nazis and other people to kind of prey on that and make it worse.

AMT: You know it's interesting, you've written a book about how to come together and you also characterize the Trump presidency as one run by an erratic narcissist.

VAN JONES: Yes.

AMT: Do you see common ground with Donald Trump or do you see the ability to have common ground with Republicans? Help me understand where you think there is a place to move forward.

VAN JONES: I think there's affectively zero common ground with President Trump because even when you identify the common ground it moves. So for half an hour there was common ground on a deal to keep the dreamers in the United States. And then that moved. So you know Trump is here, he'll be gone at some point in four years, eight years, maybe Ivanka runs. You know, then she'll be there for a while. So maybe you have you know 16 years of Trump's. You know the worst possible scenario and that would be over then what are we going to do? You know you still…

AMT: You are taking a long view.

VAN JONES: Yes. Well I am, because tomorrow always comes and we keep this going tweet to tweet. When the pendulum comes back to us, how are we going to govern? How are we going to make a 300 million person democracy with every faith, every gender, every sexuality expression, every kind of human being ever born living in one country, with technology changing everything, with the climate in chaos, with geopolitics changing, how are we going to govern ourselves? Who are we going to be as a country and how are we going to make that work? Not in some Pollyanna terms but really practically, on what basis can we turn to each other and not turn on each other? That's really what I'm beginning to explore with this book to kind of launch a crusade against craziness in both parties and in American society overall.

AMT: Because you make the point very early on that the election of Donald Trump represents failures on the side of the Republicans and the Democrats, that this is a bigger issue than party politics.

VAN JONES: Well I mean you don't get a president as terrible as this when you've got you know two healthy parties. I mean you have to have two really sick parties to have an outcome like this. I mean this guy is completely unqualified to do. You know if he were your son’s you know high school basketball coach you would say “we're going to start playing soccer now because I don't want you around this guy. He's not a good role model for you.” I mean you know this guy would you wouldn't want him to have any position around your daughters. You would want him to be your neighbor. This guy is a terrible person over and over again. So how does he get into office? Because you have two political parties that's so let down the country over such a long period of time that a sizable number of people were literally willing to vote for anything, to try to blow the system up and that's what happened. I mean you know that Democrats and Republicans both signed off on these stupid trade deals that wrecked the industrial heartland and the time they were both saying it's going to be great. And it was not. Bill Clinton Newt Gingrich, both said it was going to be great. It wasn't great. They oversold it. They oversold the worker retraining aspects and it hurt a bunch of people. Both parties said we could build prisons everywhere and make America better. It destroyed black communities from coast to coast. Both political parties said we could deregulate the banks and they crashed the economy. Millions of people lost their homes trillions of dollars were lost. Both these parties said we go in these stupid wars and we'll be fine. And it's been literally a generation now and we still have no way to get out of them. So when you have elite bipartisan failure on an epic scale like this, and you hurt tens of millions of people in ways that are shocking in terms of loss of life and liberty, property, every conceivable way, you are going to have a rebellion on your hands. And in the Democratic Party that rebellion took the form of Bernie Sanders going against the Clinton establishment and then the Republican Party. It was Donald Trump going up against initially the Bush dynasty and then everybody else. And I don't like Donald Trump. I'm against Donald Trump but I understand that hurt people holler. And that's where you get Black Lives Matter because hurt people holler. That's where you get the Sanders voters because hurt people holler. And it's a horrifically bad outcome. And is there any excuse for the kind of bigotry and toxic crap that he's spewing? No. But can you understand how you might wind up in a situation where people are so just desperate and fed up that they might just roll the dice? If he can't understand that you don't understand human beings.

AMT: So you do have a country that's polarized. It's polarized over Donald Trump. It's polarized on everything from gun control, to the environment, to Take a Knee, to the race relations on the other scale. How do you realistically get past that kind of antagonism and work toward coming together? Will it get worse before it gets better?

VAN JONES: It probably will. But the better I can start now. You say we're divided on all these things and it's true. But there are also areas where we actually agree. And the real problem isn't just that we have you know so many bad people doing bad things. The real problem is we have so many good people who don't know what to do at all. There also are things that should bring us together like the opioid painkiller epidemic in the country that's killing people. We've got solutions in the book that would fix that tomorrow, if we would just come together to work on it and when we should. The criminal justice system in this country is a disaster. It would be a joke except that it hurts too many people. So it's a tragedy. And both parties and a lot of Republicans know it. We could be fixing that tomorrow. Everybody in this country knows that the jobs of tomorrow look nothing like the jobs of today. We've got robots and artificial intelligence and driverless cars and all that and we're not training our young people for those jobs. You can begin to fix that tomorrow on a bipartisan basis to get an education program going that will help our young people succeed in the future. I mean there's common ground beyond the battle ground that we have not left it up. You would just think it is hopeless. You know the end of America. No we won that election. We have a bad president. You know go wipe your nose and let's get back to work getting the things done we can get done. And then if you don't want this to happen again - liberals and progressives - you might want to ask what can we do differently going forward? Us just sitting up here freaking out every day about every tweet, we've been doing that for two years. At what point do we actually take a look in the mirror and try to figure out you know this guy is not going to do anything different and he's not going to be impeached. But he might get re-elected if we don't get our act together.

AMT: Van Jones. It's good to hear your ideas. Thank you.

VAN JONES: Thank you.

AMT: Van Jones, author of Beyond The Messy Truth: How We Came Apart How We Come Together. He joined us from Philadelphia. Let us know what you think of what he has to say. You can tweet us. We're @TheCurrentCBC. Find us on Facebook. Go to the website cbc.ca/thecurrent click on the Contact link. In our next half hour newly re-elected mayor of Calgary Naheed Nenshi has won fans and detractors for standing his ground and taking a cautious approach to funding a new arena for the Calgary Flames. We're asking just how much economic benefit there is for cities that invested millions in new shrines to sports. Stay with us I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current on CBC Radio 1, Sirius XM, Online cbc.ca/thecurrent, on podcast and on your radio app.

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Calgary Mayor Nenshi and Flames' faceoff in stadium politics

Guests: Bruce Dowbiggin, Jen Gerson, Moshe Lander

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

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Obviously it's a great night. We feel really good. You know our numbers are showing us that we were doing well from the very very beginning and that's great. I had a good conversation with…

AMT: That's Naheed Nenshi, the mayor of Calgary celebrating his re-election win Monday night. It will be the third term for Mayor Nenshi but not all Calgarians were celebrating when election returns showed the mayor in the lead. Sean Kelso who heads up communications for the NHL Calgary Flames took to his personal Twitter account to vent.

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I can't believe it YYZ. Having Nenshi as mayor is worse than @realDonaldTrump for president. #arrogant #Bracefordisaster #outoftouch.

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AMT: So why the beef between the mayor of Calgary and the city's beloved hockey team? It is Stadium politics Mayor Nenshi is opposed to the city footing too much of the bill for a new stadium to replace the Saddle dome, and the recent flames home game or at the more recent flames home games ads for rival mayoral candidate Bill Smith were on the big screen. The city's CFL team the Stampeders is owned by the same group as the Calgary Flames and its president Gordon Norie weighed in on Twitter on Election Day.

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A great day for change! Cast your vote today for change! @TeamBillSmith

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AMT: Well after his re-election with about 51 percent of the vote mayor Nenshi did respond to those tweets:

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Put it out of text, tweet to send, but you know what, this whole ridiculously dramatic conversation about the arena plopped into the political debate, it was very clear what was going on. If you really want to have some fun check out one of the senior VPs of CSEC’s Twitter feed for the last several weeks. You know nasty personal attacks against me, retweeting weird right wing web sites.

AMT: Okay well clearly Calgary's latest municipal election got as heated at times as flames home games. It has left some Calgarians wondering whether the home team wandered too deeply into the political process. Jen Gerson is a columnist, she's actually Calgary the Calgary correspondent with The National Post and she's with us in our Calgary studio. Hi Jen.

JEN GERSON: Hi thanks for having me.

AMT: Well I'm interested to know what you're thinking. Talk to me about that tweet first of all from the Calgary Flames communication director Sean Kelso. How upset were the Flames that he won that and she won, that Nenshi won?

JEN GERSON: Well all we can get are hints and triples but I think it's telling to say that that tweet was very soon deleted. There was a comment from the Flames that said something to the effect of you know “our employees are right to have a right to their own political opinions” and that was that. But I think it's safe to say that Bill Smith was the guy who they were hoping to be able to negotiate a new arena with. And there was widespread disappointment that Nenshi was going to be the guy going forward.

AMT: How did the relationship get so acrimonious?

JEN GERSON: I think that there are a lot of different reasons for that. I mean the conversation over the arena has been ongoing now for a couple of years. It's been definitely been a back and force. And you know, Nenshi is a feisty passionate. I mean a lot of critics will call him arrogant type of personality. And the Flames, I think they made a mistake in the sense that they've been very aggressive you know., They've come forward with proposals at politically opportune moments right before the playoffs, right before the selections. So, it really hasn't felt like the Flames have been acting as members of the Calgary community who are contributing to the Calgary community which they absolutely do, and then negotiating from a friendly happy place. In fact I have described in my column, is they are going to go back to negotiation with all the grace and goodwill of screaming marmites.

AMT: I read that.

JEN GERSON: That was like an appropriate metaphor that seemed about right. So you know I think there's a there's a lot of bluster on both sides. And I think also the Flames were disappointed that council did not bend over as quickly here as they did in Edmonton.

AMT: Well tell us a little bit more so they were expressing their support for Nenshi’s rival Bill Smith. Why did they support him?

JEN GERSON: That's an interesting question. We don't know exactly why they were supporting him or the extent to which they were supporting him so I will be very cautious here. Bill Smith has yet to release his donors. So the extent to which any person on the flames management staff or their organization has donated to Bill Smith, I honestly have no clue. But I think that the relationship between the Flames management and Nenshi itself had definitely become acrimonious. So it wouldn't surprise me if the Flames just thought that any other guy would do. That said, Bill Smith is a guy with long political history in this city. He was a former Progressive Party president. And I don't think it's a secret to say that power in this city used to be held by a contingent of sort of red Tories in the city of which you know, a lot of the Flames ownership were also a part. I mean I think that there are a lot of these guys are kind of coming from the same place. They're coming with the same history. You know they kind of know each other and they come at politics from a similar ideological perspective.

AMT: You don't actually have to contribute to an election campaign if you're influential enough to get yourself quoted on the media, though, like so many of the NHL officials were.

JEN GERSON: Well yes and that's where Gary Bettman decides to step into this particular arena. So right as the election was unfolding, Gary Bettman gave some calls to Eric Francis and I think Rick Bell and said “you guys should probably be aware of this conversation I had with Naheed Nenshi.” He said, and I am not quoting directly here, he said that if the Flames had to leave Calgary that would just be unfortunate. And you know basically implying that Nenshi would be indifferent to the Flames packing it out. And I think that was a very clear political move. Batmen was trying to put the agenda on the election campaigns radar. So he put the arena on the election campaign radar and doing it in a way that was unsubtle, shall we say. So I think there was a real response against that. I think that the way the Flames played this election obviously didn't work because Nenshi won. And I think now that there is a lot of backlash against the Flames for doing it this way. I mean people can say “oh you know we're torn about Nenshi, torn about the arena”. You know I think that people still are torn about Nenshi that election was still pretty close. But you know I'll tell you, Anna Maria, I've never written a column in my life that had such universally positive feedback as the one I just wrote, where I basically say that Nenshi’s win is a good thing for any NHL city blackmailed by a hockey team. I mean like it's been overwhelmingly positive from people. It's kind of like I've crystallized in a column what everybody else was thinking but didn't want to say. You know the only people who actually complained about that column to me were people who claim to be screaming Marmites who said that marmites didn't scream that they whistled. And I pushed back. I was like “No. I am sorry you scream, I have looked at the videos that is not a whistle.”

AMT: [Laughs] Okay. Well, Jen Gerson we've got somebody else waiting to weigh in here. Sportscaster Bruce Dowbiggin hosts a podcast called The Full Count. He's just outside of Calgary. Hi Bruce.

BRUCE DOWBIGGIN: How are you doing?

AMT: I'm well, just how divisive has this issue been do you think for the city of Calgary?

BRUCE DOWBIGGIN: I'm still trying to get my head around the marmites actually.

AMT:[Laughing] I know I love that image. Yes.

BRUCE DOWBIGGIN: Know what a golfer sounds like, [unintelligible] marmite sounds like. In fact this kind of conflict goes back a lot longer than two years ago. I can remember I had a radio show in the mid 2000s in which Ken King was on my show in 2005. He said we'll be in a new arena by 2014. We have designs etc. We're all set to go. So this has been in the works for a long long time. And the Flames machinations about how to finance this thing have been going on just about as long and of course they ran parallel to what happened up in Edmonton. The Edmonton Oilers got themselves a new arena but it was it was a long and bloody process and I think the Flames wanted to see how it went. They wanted to sit in the back and watch how the Oilers did it, use that template and then build their arena. Unfortunately by the time the Edmonton Oilers got their arena built, there was an NDP government in Edmonton and there was Naheed Nenshi as the mayor of Calgary. And not unlike what Van Jones is talking about in your previous interview about changing cultures and changing countries, the City of Calgary has changed a fair bit too. And the Flames thought that they could negotiate with the city and the province in the way that they always had, which is you know we'll write something up on a napkin and we'll go and have a steak and talk about it. That's the way it's done. Calgary has changed a lot since then.

AMT: So the province kicked in for some of Edmonton, did they not?

BRUCE DOWBIGGIN: Yes. If you look at it, Vancouver Toronto and Montreal all of the arenas there were. And by the way it's an arena not a stadium we're talking about that we're talking about at least at the moment. All of those arenas were built with private money of course it was infrastructure money from the government etc. Edmonton was able to get some provincial some public money that doesn't necessarily have to be paid back. All of the public money involved in a project for the Flames was money that the Flames are going to have to pay back and the Flames ownership is in high dudgeon because they feel like they should get the same deal that Edmonton got. And that's a lot of what's behind it. And you know if you don't think these people are people of principle. Murray Edwards, who is of course the chairman of Canada National Resources who was one of the premier owners of the Flames he was so mad when the NDP got elected he moved all of his business affairs to London, England. So these are guys who were used political stances…

JEN GERSON: Well, well, well. Let's let let's not get into the rumor mill when we discuss that. There were some other factors that may have been in play [laughs].

BRUCE DOWBIGGIN: There were other factors but that was a major factor the NDP and the business climate in Alberta were a major reason why Murray moved.

JEN GERSON: Okay.

AMT: Let's let's just - let's go back to the idea of this arena. Nenshi is not the only one who's played hardball though. Didn't like Alison Redford, Jim Prentice, Stephen Harper they all said.

JEN GERSON: They all play hardball…

AMT: No, did they not…

JEN GERSON: Redford said no. I think there's also something that we should probably be clear about is it the last deal that the city put on the table would have them contribute $130, $30 million in cash to which $30 million worth of land and the $25 million worth of demolishing the current Saddle dome.

AMT: Okay. I love that clip. I want to play for you. This is Eric Francis sports net and post media columnist. Listen to him.

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At the end of the day if this team does not get a new rink it will leave. These owners are very shrewd businessman and they're spearheaded by Murray Edwards who is a notoriously tough negotiator. And I think that at the end of the day he would just see this as an asset. It is not an economically viable team. It's a small market team in a big sea of big fishes. They can't afford to compete with other teams without the ancillary revenue that comes with a new building. So you know, mess with these honors, call their bluff if you want but they will sell this to you and they won't move it. They would sell it. And this city would have to deal with the repercussions. And this mayor would be known as the person who let the Calgary Flames get away.

AMT: What do you think Jen?

JEN GERSON: I agree piffle but I think there's two points one the idea that Calgary has to bend over because Edmonton bend over, what are we, children? No no you don't get.. you got a toy so you get a toy. What are we, like mom here? Come on. Secondly yes I agree piffle. I would think that businessmen who are apparently so excellent at making money should probably be able to make a good profit on hockey in the wealthiest city in Canada. I don't know. If you can't make a profit in Calgary on hockey. I tend to have real question about your business sense. But secondly to move a city and move to move a hockey team isn't cheap. It's not something you can just uproot and do and be gone and in two weeks. You know in order to do so according to some of the people I've spoken to you need approval of 75% of other NHL owners, which means you'd need 24 other owners to sign off on the deal. You'd need another arena place and somewhere else you would need to have broadcasting, advertising, season's season ticket commitments already in place someplace else. And why would they do that when they could all instead of moving a team to another viable market, they could just start a new team and another viable market and make about a half a million dollars in franchise fees right off the hook. Like for the Calgary Flames could move. Absolutely. It could happen but it's not something that they're just going to pick up and do overnight and it's not something they can't do without significant financial repercussions for themselves.

AMT: Okay. Bruce Dowgiggin. You said piffle too. [Laughs]

BRUCE DOWBIGGIN: Well the argument that the mayor would be stigmatized forever as the guy who let the Tlames go. The ownership group I believe is seven people. Those would be the seven people who sold the franchise away. They wouldn't be able to live in this city. This is a smaller city and all of these people are well-known. I mean Eric's argument that it would all go on The Mayor is nonsense. And yes it's a small market but you know what? Even as a small market it's still better than some medium range American markets they're talking about going into. So it's a very viable market at least by the NHL standards. And the idea that they're going anywhere is not is not realistic and it doesn't speak to what's going on in the community. On the other hand as it say The question now is for the election both sides went into it hoping that they would get a knockout. And while Nenshi you managed to squeak in back into the mayorship, you got his nose bloodied a little bit, certainly the Flames got their noses bloodied a little bit. Both sides I think in the public view have been humiliated a little bit. And I think both sides feel like: “Okay you know the election has solved nothing. Now it's time for you guys to get back to it.” And Nenshi's comments the day after are typical of what he does, you know his sarcasm and all that sort of stuff at a time when he should have been taking the high road, there he is “oh I'll read this stuff and read that stuff.” You know that's not helpful. That's that's why people voted against him. He's got to figure that part out from his side and start being a little less high minded about himself.

AMT: Okay, we have to leave it there I'm going to pick up on something you said about how other cities do with these big sports complexes with our next guest. Thank you both.

JEN GERSON: Thank you.

BRUCE DOWBIGGIN: Thank you.

AMT: That's John Gerson, Calgary correspondent with The National Post, sports caster Bruce Dowbiggin hosts the podcast full count the Full Count. And he's just outside of Calgary. The NHL did not want to comment. The Flames have not replied to our request to comment. Now Calgary is hardly the first city in North America where a pro sports stadium has become a political hot potato stadium or an arena. The question for city leaders is whether investing tens or hundreds of millions of dollars will have a worthwhile economic return. Moshe Lander is a professor of economics at Montreal's Concordia University. He studied these issues. He's with us from Montreal. Hello.

MOSHE LANDER: Good morning.

AMT: So have you ever seen this kind of blatant electioneering by a sports club in Canada?

MOSHE LANDER: Blatant, no. Electioneering, yes.

AMT: [Laughs] Well you're in Montreal.

MOSHE LANDER: [Laughs] Yes it's not uncommon that you're going to try and appeal to the citizens who are also going to be the voters in any election. So a sports team is going to try and appeal to their sense of civic pride. It's going to try and appeal to the leaders of the community as well, that having a new stadium is going to bring some sort of honor, or status or you know economic benefits and that's the way that they're going to try and appeal then to the voters as well.

AMT: You talk about something called the winner's curse. What is that?

MOSHE LANDER: So winner's curse is the idea that because you're going to generally tend to take a positive view of the benefits and you're going to understate the costs, then you actually acquire the object of your affections, you're somewhat disappointed because the benefits don't actually materialize the way you thought and the costs tend to come in a little higher than what you thought. So the same thing could be said for getting a new arena. You're going to promise all of these wonderful economic benefits that usually don't materialize.

AMT: What impact can a new arena or a new stadium have on a city?

MOSHE LANDER: So new arena can actually be a good thing. If it's part of an already developing area. So Edmonton will try and show that their new arena is bringing all of these wonderful economic benefits to the downtown area. But there was already a regeneration that was going on in downtown when the arena was built. So it's not the arena itself that causes it but it's part of the engine or accelerator to that. Other cities like Baltimore had a very similar experience building a new baseball park and a football stadium down on the Harbourfront.

AMT: That's Camden Yards?

MOSHE LANDER: Correct.

AMT: Yes. And did that rejuvenate their neighborhood?

MOSHE LANDER: It was already under way. So it was part of a rejuvenation project and it did bring in a lot of kind of trendiness and upscale development. But that was already happening. It wasn't Camden Yards that specifically did it.

AMT: So are there any examples in Canada where a city is transformed by an arena?

MOSHE LANDER: Not really. You know replacing Maple Leaf Gardens with Air Canada Center didn't exactly transform Toronto into a world class city. The Bell Center in Montreal replacing the ageing forum didn't transform Montreal in any way either. It's just it's not usually the exercise. It's part of the development itself.

AMT: So what should a city watch out for when a major sports franchise comes asking for money to build a new facility?

MOSHE LANDER: The usual tactic is going to be that they're going to ask for public funding because they're going to say that the arena will bring economic benefits to the city itself. So Calgary wants to build a new arena I'm sorry the flames want to build a new arena they're going to say to the city of Calgary that if we get a new arena built this will bring you benefits. That's why you should give us money. If that fails to tug at any heartstrings the second threat usually is, in fact the threat. It's “Well, we might leave then” or “we might find somebody else who does want to give us an arena”.

AMT: And so what did the studies actually show? Who benefits the most? Where does the money go?

MOSHE LANDER: It's usually the owners of the franchise that they get the benefit. It's usually not the city itself. The tax revenues are massively over promised and under lived. Because at the end of the day you're usually just displacing economic activity. Replacing Rexall Center in Edmonton with the Rogers Center downtown merely took economic activity from one part of Edmonton and repositioned it elsewhere. The fact is that at least in Canada these arenas are used 40 to 50 times a year for hockey and then add on concert dates perhaps. And you're still talking that maybe two thirds of the year that arena is going to sit empty and unused. So you're not going to see this massive buildup of restaurants and bars and shopping centers. It's not going to happen.

AMT: And so why do you – Jen use the phrase the blackmail. Mayors feel blackmailed by franchises.

MOSHE LANDER: Yes that's the design of any pro sports league. Any pro sports league is going to make sure that there are more markets wanting a franchise than there are franchises available. That's what creates the desire among cities to compete with each other to try and have these teams. So in the NHL for example you have the cities of Seattle and Quebec City that are sitting on the sidelines trying to attract the NHL attention. The NHL likes this because if they need to they can threaten the city of Calgary with “if you don't give us a new arena then maybe Seattle would or there's a brand new arena sitting half on used in Quebec City that's perfectly ready for an NHL franchise”. They can use this as a leverage point to – in Jen’s phrase - blackmailed the city.

AMT: Is there any time when a community should support a private sports venue?

MOSHE LANDER: Only if you can actually show that it's going to bring some sort of economic benefit to the city. If you're not going to bring an economic benefit to the city then to me at least it would seem that the people who use the facility are the ones who should pay for it and that would be the ownership. And if you really wanted to try and extract money from the citizens then you can put it on a ticket tax, where at least the people that go to watch the hockey game are the ones that are paying for the arena.

AMT: Hmm. Because I guess that's part of it to them how much the city would actually get back from what goes on in under those domes.

MOSHE LANDER: Correct.

AMT: And that's probably a tougher negotiation than getting the initial money.

MOSHE LANDER: Correct. It certainly is.

AMT: That's where the real money is.

MOSHE LANDER: Yes I agree.

AMT: Now the sports franchises aren't the only ones looking for. We see all sorts of major corporations looking to come to a city to do stuff. Is there really any difference between the kinds of deals that big corporations want to strike with a municipality, in the name of bringing new jobs and excitement and rejuvenation?

MOSHE LANDER: No I mean really you're talking about the same sort of exercise looking for some sort of tax break or looking for some sort of prime land location or any sort of other benefit is the same idea. The interesting thing with the sports that's not maybe the same for other conventional business industries is that if you take a look at say the Flames for example, with all of their arguments for what they bring to the city, they account for less than 1% of the jobs in the city and they account for less than 1% of the GDP of the city. So it's not a substantial part of the city's background. But the passions that it elicit is way more than say 1% of the city. So it causes a disproportionate amount of passion that say a new Wal-Mart in town wouldn't necessarily generate.

AMT: So that's really where they have them. That's where they can generate that because of fans.

MOSHE LANDER: Exactly and that's it. Fan is short for fanatic.

AMT: [Laughs] Lest we forget.

MOSHE LANDER: Absolutely and it's a status symbol. I mean who doesn't want to be part of a town that has an NHL franchise or who doesn't feel the shame that you're not big enough or important enough to have a professional sports team in your in your town.

AMT: I guess we have to remember a fan may be a fanatic but they're not necessarily a screaming Marmite.

MOSHE LANDER: Exactly.

AMT: Or piffle.

MOSHE LANDER: That's right.

AMT: Okay, thanks for your thoughts today.

MOSHE LANDER: Thank you very much.

AMT: That is Moshe Lander. He's a professor of economics at Montreal Concordia University. He joined us from Montreal. Over to you. Now let us know what you think. How deep Should cities dig into their budgets to find sports stadiums. How important an investment do you think it is. Send us an e-mail by going to our website cbc.ca/thecurrent. Click on the Contact link. We're always on Facebook and on Twitter we are at the current CBC. That's our program for today stay with Radio 1 for q. Canadian actor Sarah gaden drops by to talk about the new CBC-TV adaptation of Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace. Now before we go we want to tell you about a special investigative story coming up tomorrow about what are often called the capital punishment cases of child protection. When a court decides to remove a child from a parent's care forever. A joint CBC Toronto Star investigation is examining how child protection workers relied on drug and alcohol tests conducted by the mother risk lab at Toronto's world renowned hospital for sick children. The results from tests on the hair of children and parents were supposed to be a dependable rock solid pillar that the courts could rely on in a messy subjective world of child protection. Tens of thousands of tests were done across the country over more than two decades and they generated millions in fees for the mother risk lab. And yet the results were anything but dependable. An independent review by a judge found mother drug tests to be quote inadequate and unreliable. The lab was not properly accredited. Its specialists were not properly certified to conduct the tests. The results never should have been used in court. Tomorrow the current talks to parents who lost their children after being labelled drug addicts and liars. So we're going to leave you with the voices of some of those people from what is tainted tests and broken families. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. Thank you for listening to The Current.

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I was now tagged. I now had a tag that I couldn't drop. I'm a cocaine addict. I'm on drugs. I'm a big druggie and I'm a liar. A liar and a drug addict and you can't shake that. You're fighting a losing battle and there's… there's nothing you can do. There was no other test that I could take that… that would make anyone listen.

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