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The Current Transcript for March 1, 2018

Host: Anna Maria Tremonti

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

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I'm frustrated that so much of what happened to us, people don't view it as something that I did so much as something that I was forced to do. I wasn't forced to go to Afghanistan. Nobody dragged me there.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: Caitlin Coleman insistence that she was not coerced by her husband into taking the backpacking trip into Afghanistan that saw them held hostage for five long years and saw her give birth to three children in captivity. With her husband Joshua Boyle now in jail facing multiple charges, Caitlin Coleman remains in a while with her young children. In a moment, the Fifth State's Habiba Nosheen on what Caitlin Lynn Coleman told her on the observations of other backpackers who crossed their paths. Also today:

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Child sexual abuse is nothing short of the murder of a child or any should be treated as such within society.

AMT: Greg Gilhooly was 15 years old; a promising athlete, a top student, when the man who would sexually abuse him began to groom him offering secret Hockey consultations and seeming trust. Graham James would serve jail sentences for the sexual abuse of other young hockey players but never for Greg. Decades later Greg Gill who has poured some of the pain that has never left into a book. In half an hour, he joins me to talk about the vulnerability of boys and how to help abused people find their voice. And nurses in Quebec are complaining about themselves, so overworked and burned out that they are self-reporting saying they are falling short of their own professional nursing standards.

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We've never seen any of those sort of the order of nurses. Their caught between a rock and a hard place where they're sort of torn apart between the priority's and not being able to meet their professional standards.

AMT: Hear that story in just over an hour. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

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Former hostage Caitlan Coleman says captors forced her to have abortion

Guest: Habiba Nosheen

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My name is Joshua Boyle from Canada. We request our governments to do what is necessary to bring our family together to safety and freedom.

AMT: A plea for help from Joshua Boyle after he and his wife Caitlin Coleman were kidnapped in Afghanistan in 2012. Since their release last fall, after a rescue mission, the world has learned some more about what happened to the couple who had travelled to Afghanistan on a backpacking trip while Caitlin was pregnant. We know that in the five years they were held captive Caitlin went on to have three children. Another child was lost during what she describes as a forced abortion. Since their return to Canada in October, we know their story has taken a dark twist. Joshua Boyle was arrested on a raft of charges including sexual assault, forcible confinement and uttering a death threat. As for Caitlin Coleman, the world has heard little to nothing for her side of the story until now. The CBC is The Fifth Estate has been investigating the case and this week they're bringing us the latest, including a rare interview with Caitlin Coleman. Host Habiba Nosheen joins me to tell us what she's learned. Hi Habiba.

HABIBA NOSHEEN: Hi Anna Maria.

AMT: This is complicated. So let's start at the beginning. One question that keeps coming up is why would this couple ever want to go backpacking in a conflict zone like Afghanistan.

HABIBA NOSHEEN: That's a good question and as you said many people have wondered that, and what Josh has essentially said when he was rescued is that he went there to help the people of Afghanistan. I would note that there are pockets of Afghanistan there are relatively safe, and especially northern Afghanistan, that attracts thousands of tourists a year who are drawn to the country for its hiking trail and its natural beauty.

AMT: I don't think that's common knowledge.

HABIBA NOSHEEN: Yes and we actually tracked down one of the last people to see Josh and Caitlin before they disappeared and interviewed her in our documentary. Her name is Callie Morgigno and she was one such traveller an American backpacker who met Josh and Caitlin in Tajikistan.

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CALLIE MORGIGNO: We crossed the border here at Sher Khan Bandar which is just north of Kunduz and they definitely would have crossed the world there as well because it is the only open border. We crossed the border about two or three days before they did. At least that's what they told us, they were going to come up behind us and then we never heard from them again.

AMT: So Joshua and Caitlin never travelled with this fellow backpacker in Afghanistan.

HABIBA NOSHEEN: No that's correct. They had travelled to other parts of Central Asia together and she said that they were supposed to hear from them which they never did. And Callie went off to the north. And we know that Josh and Caitlin had gone into Kabul and eventually ended up in the Wardak province which is a safe haven for the Taliban. Callie remembers Josh talking about his plans.

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CALLIE MORGIGNO: He seemed a little bit scary even like in terms of just wanting to take risks that I would not want to take, just his idea of going to Afghanistan seemed different. He had briefly mentioned wanting to you know find people that had an interesting story to tell and those people would have been people affiliated with the Taliban or something like this. And I'm not saying at all that he's sided with the Taliban or he shared their beliefs but he definitely thought that they would have a good story.

HABIBA NOSHEEN: Anna Maria, again, for his part Josh when he did return and told the CBC that he was there in Afghanistan to help the people and it is a country that had a tragic romance to it.

AMT: Is there any evidence that he was a Taliban sympathizer?

HABIBA NOSHEEN: I think that's probably the million dollar question that everyone's been wondering. And there is certainly no evidence that Josh was interested in taking up arms or joining the Taliban. I was struck by the fact that every time Josh and Caitlin talked about the Taliban that they spoke about them with a great deal of respect which was interesting just the language that they would choose to use. But Anna Maria, when the official started looking into the disappearance of the couple one of the things that really stood out was Josh's first marriage to Zaynab Khadr.

AMT: The oldest sister of Omar Khadr, of course the Canadian child soldier captured in the U.S. read against the Taliban in Afghanistan, sent to Guantanamo, now living in Canada.

HABIBA NOSHEEN: That's right. Zaynab Khadr is a controversial figure in her own right in the past. She has praised violent jihad and they did have a very short lived marriage. But that did raise suspicion for the authorities.

AMT: But they divorced.

HABIBA NOSHEEN: They did and authorities essentially did say that doesn't seem to be any known link between that marriage and his kidnapping. Another thing that was really strange, Anna Maria, was Josh's odd hobby of editing Wikipedia entries obsessively, over 60,000 of them, and many of them had to do with terrorism. Adam Goldman is reporter for The New York Times and he has been covering this case.

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ADAM GOLDMAN: What did the FBI think? I think they believe he was sympathetic to the Taliban, given his previous association, and what other person takes an eight month pregnant wife to the Taliban heartland to go packing. They are very suspicious of what he was doing and his intentions. Maybe he considered joining the Taliban. Whatever he was doing there, clearly backfired. And the Haqqanis got their hands on them.

AMT: Okay so we're leading up to Caitlin's version of the story. But as Adam Goldman says, there's been a lot of speculation about why they would have ventured into such a dangerous part of the world when she was pregnant.

HABIBA NOSHEEN: Anna Maria, in my conversation with Caitlin one of the things that she was very adamant about was that she was a willing participant.

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CAITLIN BOYLE: I'm frustrated that so much of what happened to us, people. Don't view it as something that I did so much as something that I was forced to do. You know I wasn't forced to go to Afghanistan. Nobody nobody dragged me there.

HABIBA NOSHEEN: But many observers see Joshua as an overbearing, domineering has been and Caitlin as a docile, subservient wife and their fellow backpacker Callie Morgigno called them very old fashion

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CALLIE MORGIGNO: The dynamic of their relationship was definitely shocking to me. It seemed very old fashioned.

HABIBA NOSHEEN: Who gave you that sense?

CALLIE MORGIGNO: The way that they interacted with each other. She cooked every meal and washed all of the dishes. He sort of seemed to make all the decisions for the both of them and she was, I mean demure, really.

HABIBA NOSHEEN: How were they like as people?

CALLIE MORGIGNO: She seemed to really care about him. I mean their dynamic seemed to work for them and maybe that what she was looking for her.

AMT: Interesting observation but she's a fellow backpacker. How well could she've really known them?

HABIBA NOSHEEN: That that's true but you know they did spend intense periods, weeks, travelling together before the kidnapping and she wasn't the only one who commented on the dynamic of their relationship. Adam Goldman from the New York Times told us that in his reporting he heard similar things being said about their relationship.

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ADAM GOLDMAN: People had to deal with the aftermath of her rescue believe Josh has complete mind-control over her.

AMT: And I guess the dynamic of their relationship was reinforced a bit when they returned to Canada. Joshua Boyle did all the interviews. We really only saw Caitlin, we barely heard her. How willing was she to sit down and talk to you, Habiba?

HABIBA NOSHEEN: It did take months of going back and forth and she agreed first to meet with us over three days and she said she was very nervous. And the first day she said I only want to talk about the time in captivity. That seemed to be something she was much more comfortable talking about. It was in the family's new apartment in Ottawa where they have made home now for themselves. They'd clearly just moved in. There were boxes everywhere and I remember she was there with three young kids you know trying to juggle them while she's talking and taking breaks in our conversation to feed the baby. So it was a chaotic meeting. But yes it took quite a while for us to get to the point where Caitlin felt comfortable sitting down.

AMT: So she says she went willingly. Remind us what we know about that kidnapping in Afghanistan.

HABIBA NOSHEEN: Sure. In early October 2012 Caitlin and Joshua withdrew money any team in Kabul. Then, they send an email to their parents telling them that they were in a sketchy part of Afghanistan. And that's it. They vanished deep inside Taliban country and it wasn't until a year later when the first hostage videos were released that anyone heard anything from them. And the Haqqani Network had them. It's a terrorist group operating alongside the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan. But interestingly enough their captors never asked the families for any ransom which was a mystery to me at first. And so we at the Fifth Estate tried to find out what did these kidnappers want. And remember, this is before the rescue mission and that's when I decided to call the Taliban and find out.

AMT: How did you know they were the kidnappers, the people on the other end of the line.

HABIBA NOSHEEN: That's a really good question and that's something we really wanted to know. And we asked them, we said 'how can you prove that you are the people who have access to this family?' And they sent us a photo of the couple that had never publicly been seen before as proof that we were talking to the right people.

AMT: So you spoke to the insurgents who were holding them during the time that they were being held captive.

HABIBA NOSHEEN: Yes. We spoke to them through a translator who was on the ground communicating our questions to them and rolling back the answers.

HABIBA NOSHEEN: What did they tell you?

AMT: A few interesting things. You know. One, they joked about the fact that the couple kept having children. They told us that Caitlin was pregnant again and this is again last summer where this news was not public, which had turned out to be true because when they were rescued they had a newborn baby. I asked questions about why the families had never been called for a ransom demand. And they came back with 'well it's not money that we want'. They didn't want ransom. They wanted a prisoner swap. And the man that they really wanted was Anas Haqqani. He's the brother of the group's leader and he's been held by the Afghan authorities since 2014. And in a hostage video Caitlin looks very frail, says that the captors were deadly serious.

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CAITLIN COLEMAN: They're willing to kill us, willing to kill women, to kill children, to kill whomever in order to get these policies reversed or to take revenge.

AMT: I remember the hostage videos. They were hunting, especially when we see Joshua, Caitlin and those children. Three children. She gave to three children while a hostage.

HABIBA NOSHEEN: Yes two sons and a daughter and she was pregnant for the fourth time she told us and it is my understanding that that ended up in a miscarriage.

AMT: So we heard news reports about that. What did she actually tell you happened?

HABIBA NOSHEEN: Well she said that her captors forced her to have an abortion by putting something in her food.

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CAITLIN BOYLE: The forced abortion left me feeling much more violated and helpless than anything else that I experienced in my life. There is nothing nothing quite like watching the loss of a life that you can't do anything about. And that would have been the worst moment of all of captivity.

HABIBA NOSHEEN: However you know, in an unusual move, the Taliban released a statement refuting Caitlinn's abortion claim saying yes she lost the baby but it was just a natural miscarriage.

AMT: So she was pregnant when they were captured. She became pregnant three more times. Did she want to have children was she was being held captive?

HABIBA NOSHEEN: You know she stressed the fact that no one forced her to have children that she didn't want to have. One of the things I would say, in speaking to her, I really got the sense that this was her life this was five years. And she said 'I really wanted to have children and I did not know when I was, and if I was ever going to get out. And so she decided to continue having children.

AMT: That raised, I am guessing, other questions.

HABIBA NOSHEEN: Yes but you know Anna Maria, that's one of the things that I didn't have a chance to discuss with her in detail. We had been scheduled for three days of interviews but after the first day she called off the rest of the interviews. So there are many lingering questions about her ordeal that I just couldn't ask her and that she has not answered.

AMT: We know their captivity finally ended last fall. Habiba, what do we know about the rescue mission?

HABIBA NOSHEEN: Well Adam Goldman from the New York Times told us that getting the family home was a high priority for the U.S. government. And you have to understand these children were the youngest American hostages and after the hostage videos began to come out with these you know little kids, I can imagine that there was a heightened interest in making sure that American authorities were able to bring these kids home. Then last October the American authorities located the family in Pakistan where they had been moved from Afghanistan. And Adam Goldman told us that Americans essentially said to the Pakistani 'we were going to go in and get them unless you act'. So that's when Pakistani forces on the ground and American intelligence, they were finally rescued. And just days after Josh spoke to Susan Ormiston in CBC News about that rescue.

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JOSHUA BOYLE: We are now being pursued by another armed group that wanted to shoot at the car, and our car wanted to shoot at them. We started praying. Some of my prayers were for myself but to be honest most of my prayers were for my children. At this point the chaos had broken loose when they were screaming 'kill the bandits. Kill the prisoner. Kill the prisoners'. One who wanted to do that was grabbing at the children to pull them outside and kill them. I have never been so overwhelmed with emotion in my life. And so, we were loaded to the police cars, the army trucks from the back. I think I spent about twenty minutes, the entire drive, just praying, kissing my son who was in my lap and crying with the baby.

HABIBA NOSHEEN: And everyone survived.

AMT: That's truly amazing. And that should have been the end of the story or at least the end of the ordeal. It wasn't. What can you tell us about what happened after the family returned to Canada?

HABIBA NOSHEEN: No it hasn't been the end of the story at all. Josh, Caitlin and their children returned to Smith Falls, Ontario to live with Josh's parents after the rescue. They did a flurry of interviews, Joshua mostly. They met with the Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and then as I'm sure you remember Josh was arrested. He's facing charges including assault, sexual assault, unlawful confinement stemming from events that took place in Canada after they returned home.

AMT: Who was the alleged victim or victims?

HABIBA NOSHEEN: So there is a publication ban in place that prevents us from sharing any of the details about the alleged victims. But Josh is currently in custody awaiting trial and he was determined fit to stand trial. However his lawyer has asked for an extensive psychiatric assessment. So he is currently being held in a mental health facility for that.

AMT: And when you met with Caitlin it was after the arrest while he was in custody.

HABIBA NOSHEEN: Yes. You know it was in January and in fact I was on my way to meet with them and it was at the airport when I learned the news that he had been arrested. So I was only able to talk to Caitlin.

AMT: And she's staying in Canada with the children.

HABIBA NOSHEEN: Yes. You know although she's American from a small town in Pennsylvania where her parents still live, when we met in January she was unpacking boxes and really trying to make her apartment her new home. It didn't look like to me that she had any plans to move back to the states. But Caitlin did tell me that her mom had come to visit her in Canada. But you know the relationship between Caitlin and her father is a bit strange. He has spoken publicly and has criticized Josh's choices including taking his pregnant wife to Afghanistan. We did go to their home in Pennsylvania to try to talk to them and her mother answered the door and just said this is simply too painful for her to talk about this.

AMT: Trying imagine how the little children are adjusting.

HABIBA NOSHEEN: Yeah Caitlin describe to me how these kids when they were being held hostage used to use the word 'bandy' to describe themselves. Bandy is the Pashtun word for a prisoner. And in their new life the kids now use the word 'no bandy' to refer to everything post captivity. So she says they've sort of had made this distinction in their heads that everything from the 'bandy' universe was when they were being held hostage, and now everything is 'no bandy'. But you know given everything that these kids have survived Caitlin also says she is actually hopeful for their future.

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CAITLIN COLEMAN: I think it will make things stronger is my hope, in the long run I think it will make them stronger.

AMT: You can hear them there in the background a little bit. It's pretty remarkable. Thank you, Habiba, for bringing us her story.

HABIBA NOSHEEN: Thank you Anna Maria.

AMT: Habiba Nosheen, host of the Fifth Estate. You can catch the documentary The Hostage family: Life after captivity on CBC Television tomorrow night at 09:00, 09:30 in Newfoundland and parts of Labrador. It also goes up online tomorrow on the program's website cbc.ca/slashfifth. Let us know what you think of the story of Caitlin Coleman and Joshua Boyle and more information we're learning. You can tweet us @TheCurrentCBC. Find us on Facebook. Go to our Web site cbc.ca/thecurrent. We have a special edition of The Current coming up tomorrow. Our Friday host Piya Chattopadhyay will bring us the second town hall in our series Facing Race. I hosted the first town hall in Halifax about the legacy of racism against the black community in Nova Scotia. If you missed that you can visit our Web site cbc.ca/thecurrent. Tomorrow's program was recorded with Piya in Vancouver and it focuses on health care. One of the people you'll hear is Tania Dick. She is the president of the Association of Registered Nurses of B.C. She's indigenous. She has seen discrimination both on the job and when her own agent was a patient. Her aunt had fallen at home and hit her head and there were certain assumptions made at the hospital. As a result, her aunt didn't get the treatment she needed and she ended up dying from her head injury.

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We ended up having an inquest and the ER form stated she was under the influence. As we progress and this happened over about 18 hours, it didn't progress progressed to a higher level of care. Her head injury increased and she died as a result of it. I think when we went through the inquest and we looked through every point of care, she was seen by the physicians, the nurses, the care aides, the RCMP, the ambulance crew, back to the RCMP, back to emerge again. It was 17 contacts with health professionals and that incident wasn't cart and every single one of them believed she was under the influence of alcohol.

That's Tania Dick president of the Association of Registered Nurses of B.C. You can hear her and other stories about health and mental health in our special town hall from Vancouver. Facing race tomorrow special Friday edition of The Current with host Piya Chattopadhyay. Stay with us. The news is next. And then, like Theo Fleury and Sheldon Kennedy, Greg Gilhooly suffered abuse at the hands of hockey coach Graham James. In his case the charges were dropped. Now Greg Gilhooly is speaking out on his own about the changes he'd like to see and the way we treat victims. He's my guest after the news. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

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'The murder of a child's soul': Greg Gilhooly confronts sexual abuse in new book

Guest: Greg Gilhooly

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

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AMT: Still to come, nurses in Quebec say they are exhausted and overworked and it's so bad that they're calling in to report on themselves as too run down to provide proper care. We'll hear more about the nursing crisis gripping the province in our next half hour. But first, the long shadow of abuse.

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A notorious hockey coach convicted of abusing some of his former players will be sentenced in a court room in Winnipeg today. Graham James pleaded guilty in December to sexually assaulting two former players.

AMT: Well that was in 2012. Graham James was sentenced to two years that day. The sentence would be extended to five years on appeal. And for two hockey player victims Theo Fleury and Todd Holt there was some kind of justice but not for a third.

SOUNDCLIP

Meanwhile charges involving a third former player were dropped. Greg Gilhooly was hoping to find closure through an apology from James or a conviction in court concerning his case but he knows that will never happen now.

Graham James has never been charged or apologised for the years of sexual abuse that Greg Gilhooly says he suffered. He has written a book about his experience called I am Nobody: Confronting the Sexually Abusive Coach Who Stole my Life. Greg Gilhooly is with me in Toronto, hello.

GREG GILHOOLY: Hi.

AMT: Nobody. Why do you say 'I am nobody'?

GREG GILHOOLY: Well I am in the celebrity world a nobody. If you didn't know about my story from appearing on a radio piece like this, no one would know who I am. But more importantly I think that coming out of the abuse I actually became nobody at all, like in the aftermath.

AMT: Because what he did.

GREG GILHOOLY: Well I think that's right. It's a combination of things. It's a combination of what he did and then what I did to myself afterwards. Coming out of the sexual abuse I lost any sense of self-worth and you cannot function in society when you don't believe you deserve to be a part of society.

AMT: So what was the impact of him not being convicted on charges and not ever apologizing?

GREG GILHOOLY: Well it's interesting because at one time I did think that I would get closure through an apology from Graham or through a conversion but I learned that any sense of closure was going to have to come from within. But when he wasn't convicted, when he in the crown struck their arrangement and the charges with respect to my abuse were stayed, as a lawyer I understood exactly why that happened. As a victim I was absolutely gutted and didn't understand why I had even come forward in the first place.

AMT: Well I want to talk about that because that's really important for what people face today as well. But before we get there let's go back, when did you first meet Graham James?

GREG GILHOOLY: I met Graham in 1979. I knew of Graham before that he was a larger than life Hockey figure in the City of Winnipeg and he coached in the section of Winnipeg that I grew up, in St. James. So I knew of Graham but I didn't meet Graham until 1979 in Minneapolis at a regional hockey tournaments when he was helping a team that played against us in the regional finals.

AMT: And why did you come to his attention?

GREG GILHOOLY: Interestingly enough we didn't win the game and the team that Graham was helping coach won the game. Graham was coaching a team in our area of boys two years older than us and we had viewed Graham as a traitor helping a different region knock our team out of the regional tournament. And so as I came off the ice in a fit of anger I happened to come across Graham and I screamed at him and called him a traitor for having worked against us.

AMT: You say he was larger than life. He was - I think at one point you describe him as a hockey intellectual. He was a winning coach. He was a somebody.

GREG GILHOOLY: He was more than a somebody in Winnipeg hockey circles. He was seen as the guy who was bringing innovative hockey techniques to minor Hockey. He was seen as a man who could make boys into junior hockey players and lead them on the road to professional Hockey.

AMT: So what were your interactions like at first?

GREG GILHOOLY: Well after yelling at Graham I went and apologized to him. Graham said some very nice things about me that made me feel as if I had lost the hockey game but I just found a mentor that was going to lead me to my Hockey dreams. Graham was smart. He took some time, we would get together every two weeks, three weeks or so and talk about hockey and Graham would pump me up. He'd clearly done his research as to who I was as a person. As good a hockey player as I was, I was always a better student. Graham was a substitute teacher at that time and so Graham knew how to play me and it was just a series of conversations where he took his time to get to know me.

AMT: You now know you make the point that he was grooming you.

GREG GILHOOLY: Yes.

AMT: When did the abuse start?

GREG GILHOOLY: Abuse didn't start for months. And if we look back on things, January 1979 is when I first met Graham, Graham was taking me through off ice training drills and we were working on methods to improve my balance and improve my conditioning and my leg strength. We would workout at a field at a school near where he was living. Through that process Graham took me through his analysis of what a hockey players body needed to be given that fundamentally everything came down to two sharp edges of steel. And so we see with our eyes, we have power through the core, that power has to be transfer through strong legs down to the feet that take the power to the two blades. And so he asked me if he could take a look at my feet and he took a look at them and he liked what he saw.

AMT: And you make the point, right then he breaks a physical barrier. So he has groomed you to the point where you trust him and then he actually does something physical that's pretty benign on very many levels but it breaks a barrier.

GREG GILHOOLY: It broke the barrier and he broke the barrier with a question not with a command. It was 'can I take a look at your feet?' Not you know 'take off your shoes and socks'. It was 'can I look at your feet?' And it made perfect sense the way that he had structured it. But yes that was the act of breaking the barrier.

AMT: And how old were you?

GREG GILHOOLY: I would have turned 15.

AMT: You didn't think much of that?

GREG GILHOOLY: No I didn't think anything of it. Here I thought I was dealing with a hockey genius who was looking out for nothing other than my better and best interest.

AMT: And when that turned to sexual abuse, how did you process that?

GREG GILHOOLY: I didn't process it. The act of stepping back and considering how it happened and how he was able to move from touching my feet to accessing more of my body, it's something to this day I really don't understand and I can't accept that I let it happen. I mean this is radio. You can see me but I am six foot seven and I was a six foot five back then, and I was a strong fit athlete. Graham- Graham was no athlete. Graham was no strong man. Graham was a shrinking shlub of a human being. Yet, he was able to get me.

AMT: and we sort of societally in our brains think 15 year old boys are almost like adults but they're more vulnerable than a lot of people realize.

GREG GILHOOLY: Well I think that that's right and I can intellectualize the grooming process and I can say all the right words that I understand that I was groomed but fundamentally I share that societal view of me. Still to this day I don't understand, after years of therapy, how it happened to me. I can say all the right things. I can say that I understand her grooming works but I still can't accept that it happened to me.

AMT: He convinced you that your future relied on his influence.

GREG GILHOOLY: Yes. No matter how successful I was in school or as a hockey player I was living within his world. Not long after we first started having our meetings and I very quickly saw the world through Graham's eyes and Graham's presentation of the world to me to the point where I didn't- It never struck me to apply to universities on my own. It never struck me that I could do anything without Graham's assistance after I fell under his spell. And it does - even on reflection - feel as if I fell under his spell.

AMT: So you applied to the university that he thought you should go to that you thought you would only getting an F because of his pull with you as a hockey player and up, like the potential you had but you needed him to get you.

GREG GILHOOLY: That's right. And at the end of the day I applied to one university and it was Princeton and I got in. The sheer lunacy of even saying that you would apply to one university and it would be Princeton and you would in, even that fed into your my belief that I needed Graham to make something happen.

AMT: How did the abuse end?

GREG GILHOOLY: The abuse just ended. In many ways I think Graham may have thought that he dodged a bullet with me. When it comes to others who Graham has abused - and Graham has admitted not in court but Graham has admitted over time in therapy to having abused 20 young boys - most if not all of the others were boys who were coached by Graham. In my circumstances Graham was simply my mentor and he didn't have me living with him. He wasn't able to exert a direct coaching influence over me and I was living in the community with him. I think that Graham and I both knew we were going to go our separate ways at some point. And Graham was always playing a game of chicken, in many ways, as to whether he would be able to escape or me coming forward.

AMT: So you get accepted to Princeton essentially because not only are you really great hockey player as a kid you were really smart.

GREG GILHOOLY: Yes. I had skipped a grade and so school was always easy for me right from the get go. I loved school. As I said, as much as I love playing hockey, I loved school even more.

AMT: But by the time you get there you don't love you.

GREG GILHOOLY: No. And that's the thing that people who haven't been abused may struggle to understand, that the sexual abuse is about much more than the sexual acts of abuse. The far greater horror in many instances is the self take down that happens afterwards in the aftermath. Because the sexual acts are there and they're horrific and don't get me wrong, they are they are beyond comprehension. No one should have to deal with those memories. But the lack of a sense of self-worth, the inability to accept that it could happen to you, that it did happen to you, the feeling of being a fraud and not worthy of any success, for anything that I was doing I just I didn't believe that I had the right to live.

AMT: I think this is really important. You do talk on a lot about this in your book, the idea that long after the predator is actually not physically near you the predator actually remains- like you remain in their shadow. You couldn't really get away from here even though you were miles away from him.

GREG GILHOOLY: Right from the moment I got the acceptance into Princeton I thought I was going to be able to leave Graham. And there was no need for any tearful goodbye or whatever. It was just it was going to be over and there was going to be an escape and I thought I had an escape route to Princeton. And it was only evident immediately upon getting to Princeton and realizing that things had not just magically gotten better that I realized that this was far worse than I had ever anticipated.

AMT: Your parents had no clue.

GREG GILHOOLY: No clue at all. No. My dad was involved in minor hockey in a minor way. He was, as a parent, very very wise in terms of not wanting to be a force in my hockey life. So he was very much in the background not ever coaching me directly or anything but he knew all of the players who were around there. And that was another factor that Graham put upon me that made sense. You know 'don't tell your coaches because your parents will find out'. 'Don't tell your parents because the coaches will find out' and no one's going to take kindly to outside interference in your hockey progression. So the fact that my dad was a part of the hockey community made it easier for me to buy into Graham's need for there to be utter silence about what was going on.

AMT: And a 15-16 year old can keep a lot of secrets from their parents, more than you think.

GREG GILHOOLY: Yes especially when I was as seemingly successful as I think many from the outside would have looked at me as a dream child, succeeding at school beyond anyone's wildest expectations, having advanced beyond my my age and at hockey. I had no curfew. There was no reason to doubt anything going wrong in my life. I was the golden child.

AMT: So you get to Princeton and they have a hockey team, but you are they are, you're studying, you're an undergrad. How did you cope with the fact that as you got that distance from your abuser you had no distance at all?

GREG GILHOOLY: Well yes. There was distance from Graham but there was no distance from my abuser because I had become my own abuser. And living within a belief structure where I didn't believe that I had the right to live, that I was a complete fraud, that I must have been broken and damaged. I must have liked that. I must have been everything that Graham told me that I was. I didn't like myself and I didn't believe that I deserve success. I was at Princeton but I didn't believe that I deserved to be there. I had some phenomenal grades, early on. I was a highly recruited athlete by other schools let alone Princeton. I went to Princeton and got into their hockey program and immediately set out to self sabotage myself by not wearing proper equipment. I believe that I deserve to hurt when I was on the ice. I wouldn't wear the proper protective equipment and I would come off the ice from practice bruised beyond belief. I needed eyeglasses but I wouldn't get contact lenses and just lied about having them because I believed that I'd deserved to fail at whatever I was doing. I mean I sit here and I say these things and I know how crazy and insane they sound but that was the reality I was living in. I was I was trying to punish myself to take away whatever success I was seemingly having

AMT: And that idea of self-sabotage became so much a part of you that followed you in to law school, in your law career.

GREG GILHOOLY: Yes. It's interesting because it was there. But the real me was still lurking within too. So I had this yin and yang. I wanted to succeed at the highest levels possible, so I go to Princeton and I participate in the hockey program. But while I'm at Princeton I show myself that I can get good grades and then I immediately do things to sabotage that, not show up for lectures or not take an exam, that type of thing and do that at law school as well. I had the ability to show myself that I could succeed and then the moment I could show that success I played varsity hockey at law school for the University of Toronto Varsity Blues. At the same time doing all the same things to self-sabotage my participation in hockey program. Same thing with my grades in law school. I would do whatever it took to get into these most elite programs. I would succeed within those programs and then I would take it away from myself as quickly as I could.

AMT: You were binge-eating, you were substance abusing.

GREG GILHOOLY: Binge eating, abusing substances, doing whatever I could to try to escape. I went for several weeks without attending law school where I holed up in a room in a rooming house. I didn't want to be me anymore. And when you don't want to be yourself it's very difficult to be around other people and you take yourself out of life, and it makes you increasingly want to leave life and it's a very vicious dark circle you find yourself in.

AMT: And this went on for years.

GREG GILHOOLY: For years, for decades.

AMT: Tell me what the lowest point for you?

GREG GILHOOLY: There are a number of lowest points. I guess whenever I would get to my lowest points - plural - I thought seriously and took steps to take my own life. And and I finally got to a point when I was living in Oakville as a lawyer, in a marriage, and spent a night on a bridge and took a look at what made sense and what didn't make sense about me and who I was and my past.

AMT: How did you get off that bridge?

GREG GILHOOLY: I found, lurking within, again a willingness to carry on. I think I just got tired of being tired of living and I was either going to fall off the bridge or I wasn't. And I was too afraid to kill myself. I was too afraid to take the step and fall off the bridge and survive. I was too afraid that I wasn't going to be successful. I believed that I was going to fail at suicide like I'd feel that everything else in my life. And I'd like to say that there was a shining light within that channel through, there was. And that was definitely a part of the dialogue that allowed me to to survive. But I'm not so sure of that it wasn't my fear of not succeeding, my belief that I would fail yet again that kept me around.

AMT: I think it's worth noting, I mean you're talking about that sense of self shame that follows you through. It follows you through adulthood. It follows you into relationships. It follows- Like on the surface you look like you're living your life, you become a corporate lawyer, you're a successful guy, people like you and inside you are a hurricane. Like there is something gone on in there and you can't stop it.

GREG GILHOOLY: Yes. And that is another frustrating aspect of abusing yourself; how could I ever be me when I knew in my heart of hearts that others were seeing someone who wasn't me. And I could play the game, I could present and I could hold it together long enough to be the me who people like and who I truly am, but I had to terror that that away the moment I got out of the social setting and increasingly I would avoid social settings I would put them short and I found it harder and harder and harder to put up that mask and just play along and try to be me. It just became too difficult to be me.

AMT: Why was that so hard for you to come forward and talk about what happened to you for so long?

GREG GILHOOLY: Well I think that I never wanted to confront who I was. I still to this day have a difficult time with mirrors. I have done any number of things during my life to hide myself from me. I have put on weight to run away from society. If you want to hide in society put on weight and no one looks at you. No one wants to deal with you. It's the best way to kill yourself without ever killing yourself. I did all of those things to pull back so that I wouldn't have to deal with anyone. Yet I knew that to survive I was going to have to come forward to a therapist of some sort to start dealing with this or I wasn't going to be able to make it. It was incredibly hard because to revisit the past is in many ways more difficult than it is to go through the past. When the sexual abuse was happening, I can't let my mind wander into any number of different places and hide from the abuse. When I was going to tell a therapist what had happened to me I had to step back in to that moment and describe what had happened to me or try to explain who I was back then and what was going on. And that's not a pleasant space to find yourself in.

AMT: Do you see a particular stigma against men who suffered abuse?

GREG GILHOOLY: Oh absolutely. I think there are a lot of things with respect to sexual abuse and mental health issues generally that stem from sexual abuse and the aftermath. I think a lot of people are able to say the right things and it may just be my own perspective. I don't believe that the stigma isn't- I believe the stigma is still there. I believe that as good as mental health days that we have are, the bell awareness of mental health, men's movements coming forward with respect to sexual assault, people say all the right things but I still have this this feeling and again it may just be because of my experience. But I have this, the sense that there is a stigma.

AMT: It comes down again the idea, like you are a15 year old kid. You are tall. You look strong, athletic. There is that disconnect that we can learn from, right, because well we know you weren't the only one in a case of Graham James, but we also know, statistically, you're far from the only one.

GREG GILHOOLY: Yes and all of that is absolutely right. And the truth is that there should be no stigma and the truth is that anyone- If I could be groomed anyone can be ground. I was the strong successful student athlete. I presented by no means as a weak person walking amongst us. Yet, I was easily groomed by Graham and I know that at an intellectual level and we all know how grooming can work at an intellectual level. Yet there are still that says yes, okay I get it. But how did it happen to me? You know why wasn't I strong enough? How was I able to fall under his spell? Surely there must be some way to prevent that from happening.

AMT: So how do you answer that?

GREG GILHOOLY: Years and years of therapy have yet to open the door to give me an ounce or two that. I try to answer it and to be direct, It depends on the day. Some days I can sit down and I can live the intellectual answers and other days I still look back and I wonder how did it happen.

AMT: You know I was really struck in reading your book. There are times when it's so visceral it just comes through the page. You are an adult in this part and Graham James is in court and you're going to stand there and you're going to look him in the eye. And you are so- I don't know if afraid is the word but you're so knotted up that you don't even want to raise your eyes and look at him.

GREG GILHOOLY: That's the reality, that there is the reality of what it is like to live with in the aftermath of the abuse. I had let the bailiffs in the court room you know that I had been waiting for this moment my entire life. I hadn’t seen Graham since 1982 when I went away to Princeton and I came forward. I wasnt going to release my name to the public. I came forward only when the charges with respect to his abusing me were stayed in as part of that deal. And I wasn't going to let Graham have that final win over me, so I put my name forward and I was even though not formally any more on the legal case, I went to Winnipeg and I was going to see him sentenced for abusing Todd and Theo, if not me. And I was going to make a point of locking him in the eye. Now Graham, the power that he wears was admitted to the court room early in the proceedings. He said upfront with his lawyers and never turned around to look to the audience. During the day Graham left the court room, likely to use the washroom, and was being led back into the court room after a recess. The bailiffs knew that I'd want to look him in the eye and stare him down. This was going to be my chance to look him in the eye and let him know that he hadn't beat me, that I had survived, that I had lived and you know screw him. I was- I was me and Graham was walking back into the room I stuck my head over the edge and look at him walking back. His eyes were looking at the floor. He wasn't looking up, he was looking at before. Just the fact- just- just seeing him again walking towards me, it was as if I was back in the room being abused by him. It wasn't- wasn't one of my better moments.

AMT: It's hard to talk about it even now.

GREG GILHOOLY: It is what it is.

AMT: I want to explore this with you though. What you are describing to me right now, that feeling of wanting to use your voice and you can't, why?

GREG GILHOOLY: Yes. I wish, I wish I knew why I reacted the way I did in his presence. It's also the same reason why I was awake long through the night before coming in here today to talk about it and why I've had many sleepless nights in the lead up to the launch of my book. The book is my chance to get my voice out there and yet I fear Graham to this day. Graham is thousands of miles away from here, thousands of kilometres away from me and he cannot hurt me anymore. But again he can hurt me anymore. I don't know what Graham is going to do in response to this book. Graham never admitted to abusing me in a court of law. Graham never apologized to me despite the fact he apologized to pretty much the rest of the country at a sentencing hearing, he didn't apologize to me and I don't know a going to do. I don't.

AMT: I am asking because I am wondering what you can tell us about how we help other young people find their voice. So many cases of abuse, they continue or people suffering because they want to say something and they cannot. What can we learn from what you have gone through to help another 15-16 year old boy find his voice?

GREG GILHOOLY: I think first and foremost when you see a young person acting out, the first thing it is not to ask what's wrong with that child. The question to ask is what might have happened to that child and dig deeper into what's going on with that child. Because if abuse is happening their child will be struggling as as I struggled to try to be heard. We are never going to be able to stop child abuse, child sexual assault and we're always going to have to deal with children coming out of it and dealing with in the aftermath of that. And so when you come across a victim don't expect the victim to be treated and just get better. You just- You don't, or most people, don't just get over it. It's not like you go to the hospital and you're treated for a broken arm and two months later you're dismissed and your all better. And certainly never tell someone just get over it, you've just got to put it past, you just get over it. Nobody wants to get over it more than a victim. Nobody wants to put it behind them more than a victim.

AMT: Is there something that someone might have been able to ask you in those teen years or even when you were in university that might have opened up a little crack in a door or something that would have helped you? Like is there a language we still need to know how to speak?

GREG GILHOOLY: Look I think that there is and I think that, three almost four decades removed from what I went through, we are getting better at understanding what abuse can do to a child. The child sexual abuse is nothing short of the murder of a child so it should be treated as such within society but unfortunately in Canada it isn't. It's difficult for a victim to believe that he or she will be treated seriously if they turn on the TV and they find out the Graham, for hundreds if not thousands of separate incidences of abuse, goes to jail only for a handful of years. That's just- that's absurd. And I'm not a lock them up and throw them away or throw the key away type. But at some point we have to send stronger messages within our legal system so that victims will understand that what's happened to them is real and it is serious. And I think there is a real disconnect there that I've certainly internalized my own responsibility or my belief that I am responsible for what happened to me. If the legal system doesn't reflect the severity of the crime it's difficult for a victim to understand that he or she may not be responsible.

AMT: So now let me ask you some questions with your lawyer hat on and because this is the conversation that we continue to hear the concerns that sexual abuse, child sexual abuse in our justice system is wanting.

GREG GILHOOLY: I am going to stop you right there and say the notion that there is justice in our system is a myth. We have a legal results system. What happens in our courts plays out long after whatever happened took place, and that's a game played by lawyers to determine whether somebody does or doesn't go to jail. That has nothing to do with whether the victim is ever going to receive justice.

AMT: So how do we change that?

GREG GILHOOLY: Well I think we make the victims a larger part of the process. I think we have to take steps to ensure that sentences reflect the severity of the crime. I think we over incarcerate for so much in our society but we under incarcerate when it really come across monsters. And we have an absolutely properly placed belief that we can rehabilitate criminals and that our society is better when we rehabilitate criminals, but there are monsters amongst us. And people don't like it when I say that but in Graham James you have someone who had self admittedly sexually abused 20 young boys, on a cereal basis, whenever he’s been out of jail. And the fact that he walks freely amongst us does not reflect well upon us in our society.

AMT: What would a greater emphasis on the victim mean then for the system we have?

GREG GILHOOLY: Well I think it goes back to the way that the law is taught. In law school so much of what is taught is the set of precedents that go into building why our legal system is the way that it is and why cases are decided the way that they are. Seldom in the teaching of the law is the human element introduced. Not once is there a look behind the scenes at what happened to this victim, what happened to that family in the aftermath. For example, in my specific circumstance, Graham was sentenced based upon precedent for the assault of young boys, specifically within the hockey community with reference to the Gordon Stuckless case. Graham's lawyer was able to get up in court and talk about how Stuckless and the rest at Maple Leaf Gardens what they did was far worse than what Graham did in terms of scope and severity. What never came out in court was that the victim in the Stuckless case, when faced with an inadequate sentence that was on appeal increased but inadequately, Martin Cruz the day that the Ontario Court of Appeal released its sentence which notionally and directly increased the sentence but in no way took Stuckless off the streets for the rest of his life, Martin Kruze went to the Bloor Viaduct, jumped off and took his own life. That's the human element that sits behind the law that never gets taught. And so decades of lawyers learn the law without learning the story.

AMT: Do you ever think of what might have been if he had never been in your life?

GREG GILHOOLY: No you know I don't- Its funny people ask me if Graham had not been in my life, do I regret that? No. What I regret in my life is having been rude to Graham in the first place that triggered the need for me to get out of my hockey equipment as fast as I can and go to apologise to him. See it still on me in my mind

AMT: I was just going to say. You're putting it on you again.

GREG GILHOOLY: Yes no this is all- It's all my fault in my world.

AMT: But I hear you were this kid who could skate like nobody else. Here you were this kid who could barely look at his school books and get straight A's, becomes a very powerful corporate lawyer. Everything you touched actually turned to gold.

GREG GILHOOLY: I know but I got to stop you there because once if I start thinking like that that makes it even worse, right. What I've lost- All I know is who I am and what I've done. And look yes my life is full of self-sabotage and just the worst of the worst then scenes and nights and places you don't want to experience. But at the same time I'm still here and so this is a success story, right. I didn't kill myself. I haven't killed myself.

AMT: was actually just going to say maybe if you hadn't been back here who was so smart and so athletically talented you wouldn't be here today.

GREG GILHOOLY: Let me kid myself by saying that I choose to look at my past as something that shows that I am stronger than anyone you're ever going to come across because I'm still sitting here. Not that I would have could or should have done anything else but the fact that I'm sitting here is all I need to say about myself. I think that's right. I think that if I hadn't been as strong as I am or hadn't had those traits I would have done something to myself earlier.

AMT: So I just want to go back and ask for your insights on how other adults can maybe help other people who are even they may be adults by the time they need to find your voice. But how do we make space so the people who have a hard time finding their voice- How do we make space so that voice comes out, that it doesn't get drowned out by other things that we actually let people say this happened to me and no more?

GREG GILHOOLY: The more we learn and understand about the aftermath and the effects of sexual assault on the survivors, the people who have gone through it, I think the greater the level of compassion and understanding we will have. I'd like to say that I've got a list of things that people could do to make things better for victims but short of understanding and compassion and simply not turning the other way and saying 'well you know I am not taking a position on what he or she is saying until that guy is convicted in a court of law'. Things like that don't help. It's wonderful that we keep affirming the presumption of innocence in the face of the MeToo movement but you've got to bring more to the table than simply saying I believe in the presumption of innocence. Because you're dealing with two stories out there who deserve the presumption of innocence, right, the presumption of being true. You've got the perpetrator who absolutely is entitled to the presumption of innocence and must be entitled to the presumption of innocence. But you've got the victim coming forward and until proven otherwise that person's story should be equally valid and equally respected in our discourse. And if we could only do that, enforce that belief that that person, that victim needs to be respected through and through the process and as he or she comes forward that would be a massive step forward.

AMT: Because nobody is just a nobody. Everybody is somebody.

GREG GILHOOLY: Oh my goodness I believe that.

AMT: I wish you many good days.

GREG GILHOOLY: Thanks very much.

AMT: Thank you for being here.

GREG GILHOOLY: Thanks for having me.

AMT: Greg Gilooley. His book is called I am Nobody: Confronting the Sexually Abusive Coach Who Stole my Life. It is a very compelling book. If you missed any part of our conversation, if you want to share it we will post it on our website cbc.ca/thecurrent or find it on the CBC Radio app.

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Quebec nurses are self-reporting claiming burnout jeopardizes patient care

Guest: Lucie Tremblay

AMT: You're listening to The Current on CBC Radio One and Sirius XM. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. Now to Quebec where nurses say they are at a breaking point; overworked, understaffed, exhausted.

SOUNDCLIP

I love my job. If I didn't I would just quit. It makes no sense to come home and get hurt like that. It's not a normal life. My loved ones said take time for yourself and I tell them I wanted to make time for myself but I want to go to work, too. I love my job. I love my patients. I love caring for them even if it isn't the care they deserve and the care that I would like to give them to me. My message is to take it all into consideration. It's not just the responsibility that we have to our health care system, but to our patients and to our patients' families. This touches everyone.

AMT: Well that is Nurse Emilie Ricard speaking in translation to Radio Canada about what has become and what is becoming a major issue in the province of Quebec. A social media post of hers showing the nurse in tears as what she called the face of nursing in Quebec went viral in the province, being shared by more than 50,000 people. It led to an outpouring of support for Ms. Ricard and her fellow nurses as well as a press conference by the Order of Quebec Nurses. It says that for the first time in its history nurses have been calling in to report themselves as unfit to give their patients the care they deserve. Lucie Tremblay is the group's president. She will be meeting with Quebec's Health Care Minister Gaetan Barrette today. She joins me from our Montreal studio. Hello.

LUCIE TREMBLAY: Good morning.

AMT: How any nurses have reported themselves saying they cannot uphold the standards of care?

LUCIE TREMBLAY: It's overwhelming the number of calls that were getting. It's something that we've never seen. It's exceptional not only in number but in industries that there are telling us, the intensity of what they're telling us. So one thing for sure we are regulator. It's quite rare that will go and do a press conference like we did but if they're calling us self-reporting themself it's not a question of their competency, it's a question of not having the resources to provide the care the way they are supposed to provide the care. So we could not keep quiet. We wrote to the health minister about a month ago and this week he said it is going to meet with us. Actually he's meeting with us today.

AMT: Okay well let's go back a little bit here. What reasons are they giving you for the fact that they don't feel they're able to do their jobs properly?

LUCIE TREMBLAY: There are many different stories but the stories can be: I am not able to do my follow ups. I am not able to reassess my patient. I am not able to take the time to listen to what they have to say. I am not able to do the teaching before discharging them. There are so many different stories but as well, there seems to be a phenomenon where nurses are forced to do overtime even when they say they're not fit to do it. And in our code of ethics a nurse shouldn't be working if she feels she is not fit to work. So some nurses are telling us 'I was up early in the morning went to work in the afternoon it was unplanned. So I did my shift and at the end of the shift, I was forced to stay there nights. So I was awake for almost 24 hours. So [unintelligible] the shift I felt I was very tired. I need my attention to care properly for the patient and in those condition. I can’t do it'.

AMT: So let me ask you how many nurses are being asked to work like that? You have any numbers?

LUCIE TREMBLAY: Again, it is the numbers that we have and I think that every single time that there is even one situation like that it's one too often.

AMT: Oh no. Fair enough, but you're seeing is a significant number? Is that correct, like a significant number of complaints?

LUCIE TREMBLAY: Well yes definitely. We have a significant number of complaints and what worries us a lot is the fact that they're calling us saying ' am going to self-report myself'.

AMT: So what's the ratio of patient to nurses in some of these situations?

LUCIE TREMBLAY: It varies a lot and in long term care, if we are talking about Emilie Ricard she was caring for 70 patient at night in the long term care facility.

AMT: Seventy? 7 0.

LUCIE TREMBLAY: Yes.

AMT: All by herself.

LUCIE TREMBLAY: With the nursing assistant, 'preposes' or- I don't remember how to see it in English; orderlies.

AMT: How are patients being affected by all of this?

LUCIE TREMBLAY: The public is calling us as well. The public is calling us saying 'I'm not reporting a nurse who is not competent but when we are waiting for them we can see they're busy. They're running around. But there's not enough of them to care for us'. So it doesn't make any sense.

AMT: I want to play you a clip. This is Dr. Isabelle Leblanc, she is part of a group of over 200 doctors who have written an open letter opposing a proposed pay increase for themselves saying it should go to nurses and other frontline employees who need it more. Listen to her.

SOUNDCLIP

The more money we get the less money our patients- Like for services our patients are given, the less money is given to our colleagues and they are not recognized for the type of work they do. And they get. They get cuts in the amount of money they get. They get cuts under working conditions and we get raises. And it does not make sense. They are our colleagues and we are all there to help our patients. And we should be treated as people that have the same value in the healthcare system. If our colleagues are happier, if our patients are getting better care, we will all be winners.

AMT: Lucie Tremblay that seems pretty unusual to me that a group of doctors would say 'don't give us the money put it in the system'.

LUCIE TREMBLAY: Indeed but I think it’s a sign that is something going on. I think doctors, nurses, professionals in general, we want to care for a patient and we see right now that we are at a breaking point. If there are not enough nurses to care for the patient- You know like everywhere else in Canada, there's a growing population of elderly. There are more and more patients with chronic illnesses. The health care problems are more and more complex. So we can staff the units the same way we were staffing them a few years ago. We need to adapt to meet the needs, the growing needs of the clients. But I think also we need to switch from hospital base care to community care.

AMT: What about the number of nurses available? Are there nurses looking for work? Could you hire more nurses?

LUCIE TREMBLAY: Well actually it's a complex situation but presently what we've seen over the last three years it's harder for young grads to find a job after they finish their schooling or when they get their license. It's something that is new from the last three years. So we have a bunch of nurses like that and also we have internationally trained nurses that are waiting to do their internship. There's about 1200 of them. And in October we had a big meeting with the prime minister, with Premier, the Immigration Minister, the health care education, there were a lot of them. We were talking about the integration of new comers to the province and we were trying to find solution. Back then there were 800 nurses waiting for that internship. In December it was 1000. Right now it's 1200. So we need a coordinated response to that and this belongs to the government to make a move to make sure that there are opening. And in the few weeks we can get 1200 new nurses coming to the workforce.

AMT: You could get them that quickly.

LUCIE TREMBLAY: Yes.

AMT: So on one hand you have these nurses who are overworked to the point of feeling they can't do their jobs because they have to do all the overtime. On the other hand you have this cohort of nurses who want to work who aren't being hired.

LUCIE TREMBLAY: And the other thing is new grads get part time jobs. Five years ago, 50 percent of them were getting a full time job. Right now it's 20 percent. So when they're coming to the workforce we only used them - for 20 percent of them - full time. How come we're doing that? Like the need seems to be so high. How come we're not able to provide them with full time job? How come we can't use their full scope of practice? Because as well we have at least two researchers in the province that did studies, one in long term care saying that the nurses are using only 55 percent of their scope of practice. And in acute care another professor reported that they're using 50 percent of their scope of practice. So we're not using the full scope of practice of the nurses because they're doing things that can be done by other people or were not using them where they create value. So it's almost like a vicious circle right now.

AMT: Well we have to leave it there but Lucie Tremblay thank you for outlining the issue to us. We know you are meeting with the minister of health today. So thank you and we'll keep tracking this. Thank you.

LUCIE TREMBLAY: Thank you very much.

AMT: That is Lucie Tremblay president of Quebec's Order of Nurses. She joined us from our Montreal studio. Take a minute now for a word from the team that put the show together this week.

KARIN MARLEY: Hello I'm Karin Marley, one of the producers here at The Current. This week the show was produced by: Alison Masemann, Geoff Turner, Howard Goldenthal, Idella Sturino, Ines Colabrese, John Chipman, Julie Crysler, Kristin Nelson, Liz Hoath, Pacinthe Mattar, Rosa Kim, Samira Mohyeddin, and Yamri Taddese. Special thanks this week to Anne Penman in Vancouver, Suzanne Dufresne in Winnipeg and Laurene Jardin in Montreal. Our intern is Danielle Carr. The Current's writer is Peter Mitton. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Our digital producer is Padraig Moran with help this week from Sarah Claydon. Our documentary editor is Joan Webber. Transcriptions are provided by Rasha Shehata and Nikhil Sharma. Our technical producer is Gary Francis. Our senior producers are Willow Smith in Toronto and Cathy Simon in Vancouver. The executive producer of The Current is Lara O'Brien.

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AMT: That's our program for today. Stay with Radio 1 for Q. Musician Randy Bachman is on the show to perform from his new album By George - By Bachman featuring music from the late Beatle George Harrison. Remember you can take The Current with you to go on the CBC Radio app. It is free from the App Store or Google Play and tune in tomorrow for our special town hall from Vancouver, Facing Race, to hear about the hurdles facing Asian Canadians seeking mental health care as well as the toll of discrimination and health care on indigenous people. The wonderful Piya Chattopadhyay will take you through that. She recorded that show before our live audience in Vancouver and she is our Friday host tomorrow. You will hear Piya with her guests tomorrow. I'm Anna Maria Tremontin. Thank you for listening to The Current.

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Thursday March 1, 2018 Full Text Transcript

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