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The Current Transcript for March 27, 2018

Host: Anna Maria Tremonti

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: It was a grossly unethical experiment because, you are playing with an entire country, the psychology of an entire country, without their consent or awareness in the context of the democratic process.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: Christopher Wylie’s now very public discomfort with forms of advanced political targeting that he helped develop while with Cambridge Analytica has not only raised endless questions about data breaches at Facebook, it has forced governments to confront the holes in their own privacy laws. And its raised a long list of questions here in Canada on what we know about how our political parties collect and use data. Especially when you consider that political parties are notoriously secretive and that federal parties fall outside of privacy laws. In a moment we're asking how to plug those political privacy holes. Also today, Maria Cioffi was 11-years-old when her world imploded and her central Bosnian city of Doboj became the scene of what has now been documented as a massacre and ethnic cleansing by Serbian fighters. All these years later she remembers one bright spot.

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VOICE 1: Everybody wears the blue berets or the blue helmets. They have the white trucks with the UN. You see the little Canadian flags and you're like: ‘Canadians are something special’. It was kind of cool seeing that as a kid.

AMT: She never forgot the Canadian peacekeepers, many of whom still see their restricted role in that war as a lingering nagging failure. Until The 11-year-old girl, now all grown up and living in Canada, reached out to those same peacekeepers to let them know what they did for her. In half an hour, a meeting decades in the making helps to heal and drug-free prescriptions.

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VOICE 1: I'd like you to imagine for a minute if, when you went to your GP the first question they asked was, "Was it that makes you happy?" Rather than 'What is it I can do for you today? How can I make you better?”

AMT: Health care in the UK is increasingly including social prescribing — swapping out drugs for art or music classes for example. Proponents say its saving money and improving lives. Can it work here? We're asking in an hour. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

Back To Top »

Canada's federal parties aren't covered by privacy laws — is that a threat to democracy?

Guests: Colin Bennett, Scott Brison

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: Social media platforms have a responsibility to ensure the continued protection of our democratic process. The privacy commissioner has already begun an investigation into this matter and we have faith in the officers of parliament and their ability to conduct investigations in the best interest of Canadians.

AMT: In the House of Commons yesterday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was fielding questions about Facebook. Revelations that Cambridge Analytica, a British data firm working to elect Donald Trump president, managed to access 50 million American Facebook users' information, has made for a wake-up call: That democracies, can be hacked and our data is the key. News about a Canadian company, AggregateIQ, analyzing British voter data for the "leave" side in the Brexit campaign, just shows how important data is to campaigns today. Whistleblower Christopher Wylie is testifying today before British lawmakers concerned that Brexit was affected by all of this. In his testimony today Mr. Wylie says that Cambridge Analytica used AggregateIQ, the Canadian company, for "a proxy money laundering vehicle during the British referendum on whether to leave the EU." With Canadians heading to the polls in just more than a year-and-a-half, there are growing questions about how our major parties collect and use our data. Federal parties fall outside the jurisdiction of privacy laws in Canada. And there are calls for that to change. Colin Bennett is a political scientist at the University of Victoria. He authored a 2013 report for the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada on the issue, and has also provided expert analysis to British Columbia's Privacy Commissioner. Colin Bennett joins me now from Victoria. Hello.

COLIN BENNETT: Good morning Anna Maria.

AMT: As you watch the Cambridge Analytica story continue to unfold, what are you thinking about? What's going through your mind about the questions we need to be asking here in Canada?

COLIN BENNETT: Well thank you. The Cambridge Analytica story is really a perfect storm of scandal; different legal issues involved internationally. But it should be raising questions I think and drawing your attention to the larger role that personal data plays in our elections — in Canada and in Western societies. Increasingly elections have become data driven and political parties and candidates have assumed that they can win elections if they just have better data. So there's a complex network of organizations in Canada and elsewhere that's involved in current elections and that serves as intermediaries between the candidates and the electorate, as well as a network of consultants and data scientists, which Christopher Wiley is one, who’ve been all too ready to sell the benefits of the data driven election to candidates and parties around the world. So we need more transparency and so I'm glad we're having this debate.

AMT: So what do we know about how Canadian political parties are collecting and using the personal data of voters now?

COLIN BENNETT: Well we know quite a bit. But we don't know everything because as you mentioned in your lead political parties are not subject to our privacy laws. It's difficult to get politicians to want to regulate themselves and parties also fall between the cracks of our regulatory regime which tends to focus either on government agencies — provincial-federal — or commercial organizations. And parties are a bit of a hybrid so they fall between the cracks. I and others have for several years tried to draw attention to this problem. But what that means in practice is that although the Privacy Commissioner can investigate Facebook and he has in the past and find out what they're doing with Canadians personal data he cannot go to the Liberal Party or the Conservative Party or the NDP and investigate them and we think that's a problem. I personally don't think the issue should be complex or unnecessarily controversial. It's just a question of getting political parties to abide by the same basic privacy principles that apply to our government institutions and to our commercial organizations.

AMT: How is it that the privacy laws don't affect political parties in Canada?

COLIN BENNETT: They fall between the cracks. There are some sort of legal reasons. There are some constitutional reasons. They are covered in British Columbia for historic reasons. But they are covered in British Columbia. So what that means is that our information and privacy commissioner in B.C. can investigate political parties and has done so and is currently engaged in a wide ranging analysis of the way our political parties use personal data. So there are legal reasons. But there's also been I think a sort of reluctance to want to be regulated and so I think the current publicity about Cambridge Analytica is raising these questions and I think parties have got to look at this more seriously now.

AMT: So could a situation like what happened with Cambridge Analytica collecting Facebook data in the U.S. happen here?

COLIN BENNETT: Well hopefully not. Our privacy laws are a lot stronger than they are in the U.S. and so the third party applications that can access widespread personal data should be abiding by our laws. And so when Facebook data is accessed it should only occur with the consent of users. However that said it's quite difficult for users to set their privacy preferences on Facebook to control the circulation of their data. Facebook is under pressure to make their rules more transparent, make them easier to use. So although I want to say “No it couldn't happen here and our privacy laws are a lot stronger,” it depends very much on wider debates about the Facebook platform and how it's used by individuals and how individuals themselves control their personal data.

AMT: So how does Canada compare federally to jurisdictions in terms of what political parties can and cannot do with respect to voter data?

COLIN BENNETT: Well most other democracies in the world political parties are covered by data protection laws or privacy protection laws. That's certainly true in Europe and in most other countries. And that's because those countries just have one massive privacy law for all organizations. It doesn't matter whether you a public, private, non-profit. If you're capturing personally identifiable information then you are obliged to follow cedrtain rules and you have to give the individual certain rights over how their data is used. So along with the United States where parties are not covered at all and where this data is really open season and one or two other jurisdictions we're out alone on this one. And so I think it's obvious that political parties and other democratic countries can abide by privacy laws and so I don't see why it shouldn't be the case in Canada as well. And it's also worth remembering that parties play a very unique and special role in our democracy. We expect them to educate voters. We expect them to mobilize voters. And to a certain extent they need personal data to do that. But we need to have a better balance between those needs as well as the privacy rights of individuals. So I've been calling for more transparency here as well as more harmonization. If you look at the federal political party websites, they will have privacy policies up there but they're frankly all over the map. They say different things. They're not comprehensive. And so I think there is an argument for more harmonization so the parties are saying the same thing more transparently about what personal data they capture, how they use it, how they disclose it.

AMT: Do you think the legislation has to change than? Like enshrine it in law.

COLIN BENNETT: I think ultimately yes. And maybe this is a moment to do this. But in advance of that I think there's a lot that the parties can do themselves, self-analysis, to figure out exactly what information they're capturing, who it's being shared with, and how they're building up their databases which they have on Canadians in order to profile the electorate and prioritize their messaging at election time and at other times as well.

AMT: Even before the Cambridge Analytica story emerged you've been talking about this for years.

COLIN BENNETT: I have yes, and not only myself. As you mentioned we did a report for the Privacy Commissioner several years ago. That was Mr. Therrien’s predecessor Jennifer Stoddart who was receiving some complaints and she couldn't do anything about it. So she asked us to produce a report. And since that time I've been doing academic research on the subject to try and figure out the trends internationally and I think what you're seeing more generally is that you have all these practices developed in the United States, using new technology, using new software, using commercial sources of data in order to profile the electorate and to microtarget messages across different platforms to different segments of voters. And gradually those practices are seeping into other democracies like Canada with implications for privacy, but also with implications for our democracy. The questions are bigger than just the processing of personal data. They have to do with whether we really want our elections to be so driven by data, whether we should allow political parties to shop for votes as Susan Delacourt said in a recent book, whether the logic of the consumer marketplace should also apply to how our public discourse and our elections. So those are larger questions that I and others have been addressing. And so I'm encouraged that the government is taking this seriously and they've started to respond but a lot more needs to happen.

AMT: Colin Bennett thanks for your time today.

COLIN BENNETT: Thank you so much.

AMT: Colin Bennett is a political science professor at the University of Victoria, and a privacy and surveillance researcher and advocate. He has provided expert analysis to the offices of the federal and BC privacy commissioners. Scott Brison has been listening in to our conversation. He is Canada's acting minister of democratic institutions. And he is in Ottawa. Hello Mr. Brison.

SCOTT BRISON: Hello Anna Maria.

AMT: Colin Bennett says there's no regulation over what federal parties do with data. They collect themselves. Does the Liberal government have any plans to change that?

SCOTT BRISON: We're always open to ways that we can strengthen the protection of Canadians personal information. We have a responsibility to protect Canadians personal data. As professor Bennett said our privacy regime in Canada is stronger in many ways than it is for instance in the United States. We expect social media platforms to also be vigilant and responsible in the protection of private data. We also have a responsibility to defend the integrity of our electoral system and Anna Maria it's important that we understand the difference between foreign launched cyber bots [unintelligible] domestic election results and political parties using data responsibly to better engage Canadians. We actually as a government; Minister Gould, as Minister of Democratic Institutions engaged Communications Security Establishment Canada to do an analysis of the 2015 election in terms of cyber threats and to look at the environment in terms of the next election in the future. What CSEC found was that in 2015 election it was not a real issue in Canada but that the global environment for cyber threats to electoral systems has changed.

AMT: Right. Ok so let me...

SCOTT BRISON: We have to be more vigorous today and we are taking this very seriously.

AMT: Ok well and I hear what you're saying about cyber threats but professor Bennett also said we're out alone in this one when it comes to our privacy laws and not affecting federal parties. So we are less than two years away from a new election, you got time to bring a new legislation there if you want.

SCOTT BRISON: Well the Canada Elections Act sets clear guidelines now on how parties can use lists of electors. Major political parties have to have adopted privacy policies that are on their websites setting out really clearly how they collect, retain, use, and share personal information. There are ways we can address this. For instance in 2013 the chief electoral officer put forth privacy principles that we are considering and looking at and ways that we can embrace them. I intend on actually reaching out to professor Bennett to seek his advice on this. I met recently with the Privacy Commissioner again gathering his advice. But let's be clear when a political party or a political leader does a town hall and people at that town hall provide us with information about the issues they're interested in we will keep in touch with them about those issues…

AMT: Sure. But Mr. Brison I mean he did say that Canada is out alone on this and you're talking about guidelines and he just made the point then and political parties have their own things. He says you're all over the map on this and that may be a need some harmonization and some actual legislation.

SCOTT BRISON: Well Procedure and House Affairs Committee of Parliament studied this issue and found that the current system is robust, but we want to engage Procedure and House Affairs Committee of Parliament, we want to engage all political parties. All political parties have a vested interest in protecting the integrity of our electoral system and the personal data of Canadians. And if you look at it going back to the 1970s when direct mail started the whole focus on data and people's interests in particular issues there have been for 40 years of strong use of data in elections. The game changer today is online and the nature of digital. But it's very important that modern political parties engage Canadians where they live and largely today that is online. And for instance when we engage Canadians on issues that are of interest to them it helps us build policies that more reflect their interests. And for instance going up to the last election Canadians told us very clearly that they wanted more support for low-income families with children…

AMT: Right. Ok Mr. Brison I'm going to stop you.

SCOTT BRISON: That's what informed our platform for the last election.

AMT: Well ok. You're talking about surveys and I'm talking about data use and collection. I'd like you to play some tape for you. This is NDP MP Charlie Angus talking in question period yesterday.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: Mr. Speaker the ability of third party actors to distort the Facebook platform to undermine elections has created an international outcry. But the comfy cozy relationship between the liberal party, Facebook and the key players is disturbingly symbiotic. Kevin Chan from Facebook comes from the Liberal war room, Christopher Wylie comes from the liberal war room, not to mention the donations from the head of Facebook to the Prime minister. So to the Prime Minister how can Canadians trust that he's going to put their interest ahead of the interests of his friends at Facebook and the Liberal war room?

AMT: Scott Brison how do you answer that?

SCOTT BRISON: Well the fact is that all political parties engage in data driven exercises and have for about 40 years. Clearly digital is a game changer. The NDP had a contract with a Chicago-based company, 270 Strategies, a digital company, for which they paid $100,000. The Conservatives did a contract with Agility PR Solutions, again, $400,000. The point is all political parties use data. But we should not assume the political parties are using that data for nefarious reasons.

AMT: Ok fair enough. So let me ask you…

SCOTT BRISON: Political parties to engage responsibly with citizens. Digital today is really important. Citizens are living online and they want to be able to engage political parties online.

AMT: Ok well we have to leave it there. Scott Brison thank you for your time.

SCOTT BRISON: Thanks Anna Maria. Have a great day.

AMT: Scott Brison is the acting democratic institutions minister. And he was is Ottawa. Let us know what you think. You can tweet us. We are @TheCurrentCBC or go to our website cbc.ca/thecurrent. Stay with us. The CBC News is next. Then, we're talking about a meeting with a woman who lived through the Bosnian war and peacekeepers who were there.

Back To Top »

25 years after the Bosnian War, a survivor brings solace to the peacekeepers haunted by helplessness

Guests: Hannah Thibedeau

[Music: Theme]

AMT: Still to come, sometimes the best cure to what ails you isn't pills or pills alone. That's why doctors in Britain have taken to prescribing things such as art classes, gardening clubs, and knitting circles. It's known as social prescribing, and in half an hour we'll hear from a British woman who says it saved her life. We'll also ask, if it could or should be taken up here. But first, war and the peacekeepers. As Canadian soldiers prepare for a peacekeeping mission to Mali that the government says should begin in August peacekeepers from another war are still confronting their experiences. In 1992 more than 1,500 Canadian troops were sent to what are now known as the former Yugoslav Republics. At the time, Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina were both in the midst of wars of independence, sometimes fighting each other, or the Serbians. They were vicious wars where the Canadians because their peacekeeping role did not allow them to intervene. They found themselves forced to watch as civilians became victims. More than 25 years later, some soldiers still struggle with deep and lingering feelings of failure around that mission. But thanks to a woman who lived through the start of the Bosnian war as a child, some of those peacekeepers have been offered an unexpected chance to heal. CBC National reporter Hannah Thibedeau is in our Ottawa studio with that story. Hi Hannah.

HANNAH THIBEDEAU: Hi.

AMT: This was a really challenging conflict for soldiers. They were there as peacekeepers. I remember when the first Canadian contingent came to Sarajevo — something like 800 of them coming…

HANNAH THIBEDEAU: That's right Anna Maria. Canadians were part of the United Nations Protection force. It was approved by UN Security Council in 1992. Troops were sent with the job of protecting civilians, securing protected areas like airports, and delivering humanitarian aid. But they had to do all of that as peacekeepers.

AMT: And I should remind everyone because I was there trying to even cover that airport it was a battle zone. It was a frontline battle zone in Sarajevo. This was a time when Sarajevo was newly under siege. The siege had just begun. But it became the longest siege of a capital city in the history of modern warfare and almost every street was a sniper zone. There were mortars and mortar bombs flying through the air. It was a really dangerous city to be in at the time. But there were also horrific stories in the countryside of people being rounded up in villages shot and killed, of women taken to rape camps, and whole areas destroyed. You would drive along these country roads and you'd turn a corner and every house would be destroyed. It was a very traumatic time for the people living there.

HANNAH THIBEDEAU: Right, and for the Canadians, they were peacekeepers in a place there is no peace to keep. It was a full-fledged war zone as you're explaining there. They often felt helpless like they had to sit on their hands when horrific things were happening right in front of their eyes and the reason for that is because the UN's rules of engagement. It meant they couldn't fire unless they were being fired upon. It was hard on the peacekeepers but of course it was also hard for the people who lived there and survived the war. So first off I want to introduce you to two people who experienced the conflict from very different perspectives. First, Maria Cioffi. She grew up in a city a couple of hours from Sarajevo . It’s called Doboj. She recounts a regular childhood until the war broke out. She was 11-years-old when the city came under siege and residents were told to leave.

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VOICE 1: My mom grabbed a few things. And I don't forget this, my mom she looked at the window and the curtains are closed and she says, “My flowers are going to die. The curtains are closed. Should I go in and open them? I said “Mom let's go.” At this point it was 11 o'clock, the deadline for everybody to leave. We got in the car and we drove. By the time we got to the outskirts of the city it had already passed 11 o'clock and there were Serbian soldiers there with guns. There were barricades and they were turning everyone back into the city. So we tried to take a side road, there were land mines so you couldn't drive over, so we turned around and went back to the bridge again. It’s way past 11 o'clock and starting to get nervous. Dad's at the cottage, we're inside, separated. We know what's going to happen because we've seen it happen in the other cities. So my mom gets to the barricade and there's this young Serbian soldier there who recognized my mom because my dad used to teach him, he was a music teacher at his high school...and he just waved my mom through. My mom's telling us to duck down in the back in case they start shooting. And we just booted it out of the city, we were the last people to leave. And within minutes of that we could hear shelling, bombs and everything.

HANNAH THIBEDEAU: They escaped to the cottage which was just outside of Doboj, in a town called Matuzici, and that was the last she saw of her family home.

AMT: It's so extraordinary what they went through to try to get out of there and how frightening. They stayed at that other town? Was that safe?

HANNAH THIBEDEAU: They stayed there for a while. But remember there was no electricity and at a point all they had to eat was bread, butter, and salt. And the war was on their doorstep.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: At that time it's warm, beautiful, you could hear the birds chirping but you can't go outside because there's snipers. So at night we would go, my dad had a makeshift bomb shelter in the basement of our house, so at night we would stay there when the shelling was so heavy and you could hear the bombs falling really close, so we'd go there at night, and in the morning we'd get up and look through the windows at the back of our house and I would see all these homes just destroyed and burning. We kind of lived in a valley and there was a river and across the river there was the outskirts of the city and I remember they had these beautiful cottages there that as a kid I would always look through binoculars, and they were beautiful, and I remember one day getting up and going to look and everything was levelled. You see smoke and everything was destroyed. There's no house left. So I guess that night they had just bombed all of the homes one after the other and burned everything down.

AMT: It's hard to imagine what it would be like as a child to watch that kind of destruction going on around you.

HANNAH THIBEDEAU: I know. 11-years-old but she says she didn't feel scared. I was shocked when she told me that. She said she was more angry and wanted to do something about it. She wanted to stay and fight but she couldn't.

AMT: Well she couldn't fight. And then the peacekeepers arrived, including the Canadians.

HANNAH THIBEDEAU: That's right. But of course the peacekeepers they couldn't fight either.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: At the time I remember the adults saying, “Why aren't they fighting for us? Why aren't they doing this? Why aren't they doing that? But them just being there, the Serbs couldn't invade anymore, it's kind of like the wolves don't come around if they see a sheepdog, right? So they held those lines and we were able to eventually escape because they made sure that the roads would stay open and they would let us through. And, if they weren't there it would have been a lot worse. It would've been a lot worse.

VOICE 2: Did you see Canadian soldiers at that age? Did you identify that these are Canadians helping us?

VOICE 1: I did because my parents said, you know the little flag, they said that's what the Canadian flag looks like. Everybody wears the blue beret, blue helmets, they had the white trucks of the UN so if they're just driving by you don't really know, but when you see the uniforms you see the little Canadian flag and you know, and Canadians are something special. I don't remember why my parents said that but Canadians were always kind of like these are Canadians, it was kind of cool seeing that as a kid.

AMT: Hannah, she mentions they escaped. Where did they go?

HANNAH THIBEDEAU: Ended up in on the Adriatic coast of Croatia. She describes it as being smuggled out. They took backroads. It was a 12 hour journey that usually only takes a few hours. And it was there that her family had a life-changing encounter with a Canadian soldier Her mom was hoping to move the family to Canada and went to a city called Split, there was a makeshift embassy there shared between the U.S. and Canada.

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VOICE 1: She arrived at the gates and there was a soldier, she knows it wasn't a Canadian and he wouldn't let her through. She says I just want an application, and she says there was Canadian peacekeeper there that heard my mom and came over and said what do you need and he went inside and got the application for my mom and brought it down to her. She'll never forget that. She says he was so nice, everybody else was kind of pushing her away. I guess there is a fear there that you don’t really know who this woman is and what she could do. But he just said what do you need, and he went in and got the papers and look now, I’m here, 25 years later.

HANNAH THIBEDEAU: Now she's here. So obviously those papers got filed successfully and Maria moved to Canada with her family in 1995.

AMT: That's extraordinary because it was so hard for people — where do they go? So many refugees we're seeing that play out again today. You said there was another person involved in this story.

HANNAH THIBEDEAU: Yes, a soldier who spent seven months in the former Yugoslavia when Canadian troops were deployed as peacekeepers.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: My name is Scott Casey. I was a Corporal in the Royal Canadian Regiment. I was a platoon commander's driver. I was also a tow missile gunner and a regular infantry soldier.

HANNAH THIBEDEAU: You actually met Scott. He remembers being on the back of a truck when you interviewed him in Croati. This is part of your report for the Journal in June of 1992.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: And though there are constant reminders of the vicious battles and the hatred that lingers in this area, they cannot compare to the rage of Sarajevo.

VOICE 2: Do I want to go there? If it'll get food into the civilians there then yeah, I'll go. It's not that I want to go, but in the aid of other people, I will.

HANNAH THIBEDEAU: And he did end up going to Sarajevo for a month.

AMT: I remember. The soldiers they didn't even originally have the right equipment to be in that kind of place and to know that they could not do anything as peacekeepers was hard for them from the get go.

HANNAH THIBEDEAU: I can't even imagine. And he says and recalls his time there as horrific. Some of the memories still make him grimace.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: It's not normal for women and children to be murdered in the streets. At that moment there was the mother, daughter and a son. And all three of them were shot just for carrying water. There was no tactical importance to what they were doing. They were just surviving. So to witness that, I was enraged, number one. Mortified that somebody could even do this sort of thing to children and non-combatants and I was struggling to try and find a way to try and rectified that issue. I was completely helpless. You never get over that and you work through it but that's definitely the disturbing portion of this is there was innocent civilians that were being butchered on a daily basis for no other reason than their religion or their ethnicity. There was no way to stop the events from happening. No matter what I did, even with the technology I had at my hands, the mission we were on, there was no way to effect change there, in that moment. So that's the hopeless and helpless part right there.

AMT: The reality of what they call the rules of engagement and peacekeeping.

HANNAH THIBEDEAU: Yeah, they were supposed to be keeping the peace and as we said there wasn't any peace to keep. So many of the soldiers left wondering what have they accomplished.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: we didn't feel we had done any good there. I mean there was moments but you Know when you look at the big picture we were definitely of the feeling that we had affected no change, you know the evidence was there saying we hadn't because the war was still raging.

AMT: And I guess we have to remember when Croatia, Bosnia, and then the other former Yugoslav Republics also had wars. Canadians were involved in peacekeeping. So that feeling of helplessness would have been multiplied many times. How has that affected soldiers like Scott Casey.

HANNAH THIBEDEAU: He says he's worked through his own PTSD. But he says many are still haunted by what they saw. And he's been willing to talk about his own experience. He was featured in a documentary called Sector Sarajevo about Canadian troops involvement in Bosnia. And that's where Maria comes back into the story.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: Right around Remembrance Day last year there was a documentary on called Sector Sarajevo

VOICE 2: Sarajevo…

VOICE 1: It just caught my attention because Sarajevo.

VOICE 2: In the summer of 1992 Canadian soldiers came to this Yugoslavian city as peacekeepers. But in Sarajevo there was no peace to keep.

VOICE 1: Basically it followed a group of peacekeepers. They were one of the first to go to Sarajevo.

VOICE 3: We were ok with the fact we were singled out for the mission. It was a sense of pride that we had been chosen for it.

VOICE 1: There was one peacekeeper in particular Scott Casey.

VOICE 3: I just knew from a very young age that I was going to join the army. I wanted to be a sheepdog to make sure that world sheep were taken care of from the wolves.

VOICE 1: He talked about the experience there.

VOICE 3: The carnage is just unreal. People in Canada have no concept of what took place there.

VOICE 1: You see it in his eyes. It affected him so much.

VOICE 3: On the first day actually coming into Sarajevo I witnessed a pregnant woman being shot. She was wearing a long dress and she was on the other side of a large open area. And I just happened to look over in my usual way of scanning the surroundings. And they shot her right in the stomach. And down she went. Welcome to Sarajevo.

VOICE 1: You could tell that he was still suffering 20 years later and I had to find him. I had to contact to let him know that you know don't suffer. You should be happy and look you helped me. Look how much my life has changed. And I just felt I had to reach out to him and make him feel better.

VOICE 3: To do that show I had to relive a lot of stuff and she definitely saw a real pain.

VOICE 1: I know it was bad and we can’t control that but you've helped so many thousands of other people like me. And I thought that maybe if I could find him and just write him a letter that maybe would help him feel better. Corporal Scott Casey I would like to take a moment of your time on this Remembrance Day to thank you for your service and for helping people like me although you probably don't even realize it. My name is Maria and I grew up in a small town not too far from Sarajevo, Bosnia. In 1992 when my hometown of Doboj fell to the Serbian forces, I was 11-years-old. A good part of my life was stolen from me by the terror that soon engulfed everything around me.

VOICE 3: I was overwhelmed actually and I was somewhat taken back. The whole letter was actually very well written and very personal.

VOICE 1: I want to thank you and tell you that it is because of brave men like you that me and my family are alive today. You were our heroes and I know you have your own demons that you carry with you and I'm sorry for that. But don't ever for a second think that you did not make a difference. Don't ever think that we're not grateful. Don't ever think that we will forget what you did for a small nation that no one cared about. We remember.

VOICE 3: The letter was addressed to me. So as I read it I knew right away that this wasn't just written to me. This was written to all of us who had served there and I wanted to make sure that that those men and women that had served in the former Yugoslavia...

VOICE 1: Today I live in Toronto Canada with my husband and our three-old-daughter and the best part is I get to call this great country home. I've been a police officer for the last 14 years. In the end I can only hope that one day I make a difference in someone's life like you did in mine.

VOICE 3: I did appreciate the line where she said that she was now living in Canada and wanted to be able to give back and as soon as I read that I was like ‘Wow’. She doesn't realize that just by writing this letter she's made that step. There are people that are going to benefit from this. She's already saving lives. It takes away that bit of hopelessness that they may have felt for the last 25 years.

VOICE 1: Please extend my thank you to all of those who served alongside with you in Bosnia. Thank you for your service your sacrifice and for believing we were worth saving. I'm forever in your debt. Maria.

AMT: Wow — what an extraordinary letter to receive all those years later.

HANNAH THIBEDEAU: It gives you chills almost listening to that and for Scott he wanted to share that letter and he did. Then other soldiers shared that letter and it spread really quickly through the veteran’s community and the people who read it, they wanted to meet Maria. So last month there was a face to face meeting at the Legion Hall in Brampton, Ontario and more than a dozen veterans showed up to meet Maria.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: Hey guys. I'm Maria. Thank you for everything. I am so glad you came here today.

VOICE 2: I couldn't miss this.

VOICE 1: Thank you so much.

VOICE 2: As soon as I saw your letter I had to come down.

VOICE 1: Hi. I'm Maria.

VOICE 3: Nice to meet you.

VOICE 1: Nice to meet you too. Hopefully I don't bring up any bad memories.

VOICE 3: Nothing but positive could come from this.

VOICE 4: When I went to Bosnia I left my family of three kids at home and I went there and I watched kids die. I couldn't do anything about it because our rules of engagement were very clear. If I wasn't under direct threat I couldn't do anything about it. So we had to watch kids die. We had watch families get shot at. You've got factions that don't want to be friends and you put us in the middle with blue berets and we're going to hold hands and stop you from shooting each other, we couldn’t do that. What was it all for? I said I wish [unintelligible] 20 years ago — maybe I wouldn't be such a mess.

VOICE 5: You know some of the stuff I saw there I'll never be able to forget. I was talking to somebody about this the other day, a graveyard full of children. And all they have is a two foot steel picket with their name on it and that's all the record there is, that they ever existed. Seeing that sort of stuff, I can't let that go and never be able to let that go. But now having met Maria and knowing that something good came out of that even if it was only her and her family it makes that just a little bit easier to bear. It just lightens it a little bit. It's a heavy load.

VOICE 6: We're all very frustrated when we came home, still to this day. Guys always never knew, right? It's just like wish we could have them more. So your letter just even confirmed for one person if you felt that way. And then when we shared it was amazing. We had people far and wide, coast to coast, guys were saying they were in tears and they haven't felt this good in 25 years.

VOICE 1: It's so unbelievable to me. I thought it would have been just one of thousands of letters that the guys would receive and I know how my family feels the same they are grateful and to me it was just the normal thing and I thought, ‘ok he's going to kind of read the letter and think oh thanks and add it to the pile’.

VOICE 6: No. It was a real account. We did help. We did make a difference. And it's the first one I've ever heard in all these years — 24 years — since we've been home. And I know myself I look at it that, hey if I helped one person, we did our job.

VOICE 1: You helped more than one. You helped a lot of us.

VOICE 6: You made a lot of old soldiers extremely happy, and if I may, proud that we finally for the first time. It’s like when you fail at something, you try and you fail. We tried our hardest but we failed.

VOICE 7: The whole letter itself just completely touched me. I read it to my wife again, I had to go, I had to be here because it was something that showed that we did some good. I seen little bits and pieces of it over there at the time but this here confirms, completely confirms, that we did something good.

AMT: Hannah, it's just a reminder — we talk about sending soldiers somewhere from Canada and we don't think about all the years later what stays with them and wow what an emotional meeting.

HANNAH THIBEDEAU: It really was emotional. You can hear it in their voices there. I was there — when you look into their eyes you can see that these veterans are still struggling. And this just made it feel a little bit better for them. Now Scott Casey says from his tour alone on the English side there have been 14 suicides and that's out of his regiment of 250 soldiers.

AMT: So what do Scott and Maria take away from this? What does it mean to them?

HANNAH THIBEDEAU: Well for Scott, he doesn't like the word closure. He made that clear. But for both him and Maria living through war isn't something that just simply goes away. And they both describe the journey using the same metaphor.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: The letter for me assists with another chapter in my life. It definitely finishes a sentence that has been left open for some time.

VOICE 2: I felt like there was this empty void — there's something that needs to be done about what I lived through. I kind of felt like I needed to do something. So doing this helps that and closes that one chapter. I got to thank people. That made me feel good, them too.

VOICE 1: For us that book never ends. We carry every page of that book of the Balkans for the rest of our lives. It ends a sentence rather than closure.

HANNAH THIBEDEAU: I should mention that Scott and Maria still haven't met. Scott wasn’t at that meeting. However Scott lives on the west coast. But he's doing a motorcycle trip across the country this summer and he says the highlight for him will be meeting Maria when he's in Ontario.

AMT: Wow. Thanks for bringing us this story Hannah.

HANNAH THIBEDEAU: It was completely my pleasure.

AMT: Hannah Thibedeau is a national reporter for CBC. She was in our Ottawa studio. For pictures of the people we've been talking about, head to our website cbc.ca/thecurrent.

[Music: Theme]

AMT: Coming up in our next half hour, imagine your doctor prescribing something different: Like joining a gardening club. We'll hear why social prescribing is gaining popularity in Britain and whether Canadian doctors are liable to take up the practice. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current on CBC Radio One, Sirius XM, online on cbc.ca/thecurrent, on podcast, and on your radio app

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UK doctors prescribe art lessons in lieu of pills to treat mental health challenges

Guests: Marie Polley, Gary Bloch

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

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: I had reached crisis point. I'd lost my mum, and having been heavily medicated for a long time, I was told by my psychiatrist that I would always be ill, that I would always be medicated, that I would never work again, and I believed him because he was the expert. And I ended up taking an overdose and being in hospital.

AMT: Thankfully Debs Taylor survived that overdose. But as you heard, her prognosis was far from sunny. Debs had been in treatment for depression and anxiety for nearly her entire life — since she was nine-years-old. But then Debs stumbled upon a different kind of therapy. She became one of the growing number of patients in Britain who are being prescribed activities, rather than pills. It's known as social prescribing. And it Debs' case it took the form of an art class.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: After a couple of months of doing the art class and feeling the best I'd felt in a while, and I didn't want to be with my mum any more, I suddenly wanted to live, I found a purpose, and I found something that I enjoyed. I went back to my psychiatrist and said I want to come off some of the medication, and with his guidance and support, I started to reduce medication. And that was quite a turning point, having been on medication for over 20-odd years, serious, heavy medication. I was on 21 tablets. After about a year, I'd come off all medication. I was a huge financial toll on the system. The art class that I did with creative minds was just over two years, and that two years art class cost less than 1 year of medication alone. I've been off medication for six years, I've been out of services for two and a half years, so if you just count the last two and a half years, they've saved over 30, 000 pounds just on my care alone.

AMT: Debs' case shows why so many in Britain believe social prescribing holds so much promise. Other patients might be prescribed knitting classes or gardening clubs. There’s no cost to the patient for the activities. They're covered by the UK's National Health Service, or NHS. Social prescribing got a big boost last year, when the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, championed the practice in his government's health strategy. And its growing popularity is thanks in large part to Marie Polley. She is a Senior Lecturer in Health Sciences and Research at the University of Westminster, and the co-chair and founder of the Social Prescribing Network, a group of health professionals and other people involved with social prescribing. Marie Polley is in London now. Hello.

MARIE POLLEY: Hi.

AMT: Can you explain exactly how this works?

MARIE POLLEY: Yeah sure. So what we're looking at is non-medical solutions where appropriate for people that can often be more transformative than just giving them medication which doesn't always get to the root of the cause. So essentially what we're saying is what is a person's need and concern and it's not necessarily medical. It might be a social determinant of health. They might have welfare problems. They might need physical activity but [unintelligible] telling them to do that is not going to work. And we want to offer them something that's going to work for them which isn't necessarily pharmaceuticals and within social prescribing it works that you actually ask a person what they would like to do as well so they have some power of choice and equality and buy-in. And so that's in its most basic terms. So within the NHS we have general practitioners who are recognizing that people are coming back to see them over and over and over again and what they're prescribing isn't working. So instead of saying you know come back and see me in a week, you say come and see our link worker, and a link worker who is a person who is not clinically trained but they're great with people. They can come alongside a person in the point of need. They can listen. They can establish trust and empathy. They can pragmatically help to break down some of the barriers to a person moving forward. And the link worker knows the voluntary and community sector in their local area really well. So they'll listen to this person and they'll talk with the person and find out what this person liked doing before they got ill or situations got difficult for them. And they will match this person to an activity and make a referral. The link worker might go to a person's house. They might be in a community setting. They might be within a GP practice. And they may accompany a person to an activity for the first time because nobody likes going in a room full of strangers let alone when you're feeling really vulnerable and unwell.

AMT: What kind of activities are we talking about?

MARIE POLLEY: So a full range of what's offered in the local voluntary community sectors. So it could be something that's activity-based that could be within the natural environment. So it could be walking groups. It could be gardening groups which you know are great for mental health. But it could be actually rambling groups. It could be something where you're going and doing [unintelligible] call it guerrilla gardening. But you're out in the countryside doing countryside management. It could be arts-based groups where your painting or doing some sort of art therapy-based work. It could be creative groups where people are knitting or creating things because it's a way of expressing when words don't work. I came in on the end of your segment of veterans and the veterans you know benefiting from this as well. Or it could be something that looks at social welfare needs. It might be helping a person get their CV up to date and understand how to get back onto the computers and how to effectively apply for jobs so that they can get back into work and have something that brings purpose and meaning to them.

AMT: What kinds of conditions are typically treated by social prescriptions then?

MARIE POLLEY: Oh that's really broad. I think it's fair to say that you know clinicians use their discernment and their professional skills to know when it's right to refer to social prescribing and may also use medication or as an alternative. So low-to-medium mental health is where it all started. So providing something instead of antidepressants and medications such as that when actually what you want to do is try and connect people to other people. A lot that underlies this is loneliness and social isolation so where a person is lonely particularly in the older generations where they may have bereaved and lost their lifelong partner. Getting out isn't the same. So it could be something as simple as that. Sometimes people need practical amendments to their house. So elderly people are at risk of falling, need some handlebars, and they need the front steps jet washed because they're too slippery. So sometimes it's very practical things that need addressing but those practical things are having a negative impact on someone's health. So it may not be a health condition initially if that makes sense.

AMT: And you talk about mental health. Are also other kinds of illnesses that can be addressed through some of these things? Can you give me an example?

MARIE POLLEY: Yeah well the project that started me setting up a network because when I was working on an evaluation of pre-diabetes and type 2 diabetes and we have people that needed to make lifestyle changes around eating and physical activity and obviously no one finds it easy to make food choices that's healthy when they are not in the right mental state to do so. So giving someone [unintelligible] doesn't work. What we did was we had a link worker who sat with patients and said you know tell me what the barriers are and the challenges and let's work through that with you and then let's help you become more physically active and let’s give you some information on how to identify what's in your food and portion sizes and we saw some really interesting reductions in blood sugar level. So 30 per cent of the people that took part went from being at risk of diabetes to not being at risk based on their blood sugar and 30 per cent in type 2 diabetes zone came back down out of that based on their blood sugar. So anything where you want lifestyle changes and physical activity can be really beneficial.

AMT: I was going to ask you how it worked medically and what mechanisms are at work, but you're kind of explaining that to me now. Tell me a little bit more of how medically you can measure some of the benefits that you're seeing.

MARIE POLLEY: Yeah that’s always the million dollar question of how you take something that's not always seen as a normal outcome. And what we're doing across England at the moment is designing a whole outcome framework to put into the system. So there's different ways of looking into it because you're looking at a whole person. So there may be core measures that you can do that are physical or blood profiles or immune systems things like that. But you may be looking at their level of connectedness, you know, how connected they are to people, how much are they getting out. You may be looking at their level of physical activity. So what you choose to measure needs to be dependent on the route that a person is taking and the activities that are happening. But core to all of this is a person's well-being. So if you monitored a person's well-being and well-being is looking at how well we all based on everything that's happening in our lives: our relationships, our work, our practical situations as well as our physical health and our mental and emotional health. So measuring well-being is an overall indicator of change.

AMT: Are there people for whom social prescribing is not going to work?

MARIE POLLEY: Yes. And this is not a panacea for all ills. But this works for a group of people who are able to work with someone to try and make change. If somebody's got a severe mental health situation social prescribing would not be something that we would say go and do because actually they need more complex care. So a lot of social prescribing is working with people that don't need complex medical care on a regular basis if that makes sense.

AMT: And you know we just heard Debs Taylor talking about how the more she did the less medication she took. It takes time. She also told us she faced a 19 month wait to see a psychologist after a suicide attempt and how much of that is an issue in terms of wait times and different ways of dealing with this? Like how does that factor into the wellness of a patient.

MARIE POLLEY: So at the moment as social prescribing picks up speed in all parts of Britain we don't have these massive wait times. And what we're doing is offering somebody something different instead of a wait time. So if you've got a mental health condition and you've got to wait see psychologist there's no reason for a low-to-medium mental health condition, you can have some social prescribing in the meantime. So the projects are not running with really long wait times at all and that's something that's really great at the moment. As it gets busier and more money comes into the system to support this and sustain it then the management will be interesting. But what happens for people that have social prescribing is as Debs described she actually came out of the medical system essentially. She didn't need that continuing care or it might have been a light touch. So what we see is a reduction in people who would frequently have gone to GPs, we see a reduction in that population, and we see a reduction in people going into accident and emergency, and we see a reduction in people ending up in hospital in a way that was not planned. So this is starting to reduce demand on the health service. So ideally come full circle in a few years time we hope to be bringing some of those wait list down.

AMT: I want to play you a clip of Tim Caulfield. He is a Canada Research Chair in Health Law & Policy and professor in the Faculty of Law and School of Public Health at the University of Alberta.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: It's sort of a noble goal but perhaps the evidence isn't quite there yet. So the evidence based support for social prescribing is not very robust. It has intuitive appeal, It makes sense if you think about the problems, social isolation, loneliness, perhaps decreased physical activity, mental health issues, this response seems logical. But the evidence base to date isn't very strong, so traditional health care providers, whether physicians or other health care providers, they're not trained to do this right. They are not trained to assess the social needs of their patients. Intuitively I think this sounds like a great idea but I do think we need better evidence.

AMT: So how do you respond to what he's saying about it's got an intuitive appeal but not real evidence?

MARIE POLLEY: Yeah that's something that’s a fair point. It's an emerging field. We haven't had any call funding anywhere so we haven't had a chance to get the traditional research evidence to the level where you have loads of comparative effectiveness trials. But what we do have is a range of types of evidence from case studies through to regional analysis of medical records and data and outcomes and evaluation and some of that's published in peer reviewed journals and you're continuing to see work being published and some of it are reports that are generated within NHS or the commissioning group. So you know we don't have a magic wand and we can't magic evidence up. But it is continuing to grow. Professionals that are coming in are saying that this is making a difference to their own practice and for them that's really important. And I think we can't keep doing what we are doing in the NHS with the rising number of people that have obesity, diabetes, cancer, mental health. The incidents are rising. I think if you just put money in and do the same thing the same way it’s not going to work. So this is an organic movement from hundreds of people now that have carefully been innovating in a methodical way in collaboration with stakeholders and I think fast forward five or 10 years we would have the evidence that people would expect to be doing this and to make big policy changes. So I think people are doing this from a very pragmatic and careful way. And the evidence is just accruing.

AMT: Ok well Marie Polley thank you for taking us through it. Thank you.

MARIE POLLEY: You're welcome.

AMT: Marie Polley is a Senior Lecturer in Health Sciences and Research at the University of Westminster, and the co-chair and founder of the Social Prescribing Network. She joined us from London, England. Dr. Gary Bloch has been watching the growth of social prescribing in the U-K with interest. He is a family physician with St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto. And his particular clinical interest focuses on what health providers can do to address social threats to health. We should also mention that he's related to one of The Current's producers. Gary Bloch is with me here in our Toronto studio. Hi.

DR. GARY BLOCH: Hello. Good Morning.

AMT: What were you thinking about as you listened to what Debs Taylor was saying about that art class and what Marie Polley has just said?

DR. GARY BLOCH: I mean I think much of the stories around the social prescribing movement in the UK truly feel intuitive to me. It just makes sense that people will respond to being better connected socially as a core part of their healthcare. I mean this is what I talk about with patients every day. People come in and see me and it's very quickly clear to me that as much of their health issues revolve around their social situations, as around the traditional medical situations, I would love to have access to the kinds of supports and networks that they're building in the UK around this.

AMT: So how similar is social prescribing to what you're doing in your practice?

DR. GARY BLOCH: I mean there are similarities and there are differences. I think the similarities rest in the recognition that we have to bring the social into healthcare. We have to truly see healthcare as being holistic, as taking into account people's biological situations, as well as their social situations, and so this certainly the philosophy that we move forward with. I'd say the difference in what we're doing here is that — I guess to use a medical term — it's taken a somewhat more surgical approach to this in the sense of taking out what we think are the highest impact social issues, things like poverty, things like a lack of housing, things like a lack of access to justice or legal supports, and have developed specific programs targeting those particularly high risk social needs for patients. I think part of the difference there is that we then hone in on a somewhat more vulnerable subset of the population — a higher need subset of the population. So we're finding people who have very very high social needs and targeting them first because we feel that this is where these interventions are likely to have the greatest impact. Whereas in the UK I think it's being offered a little more generally.

AMT: So just to understand so while they may be sending people to gardening classes or walking groups you're doing more specific things around patients who might have issues of poverty. You might be helping them with housing. Give me an example.

DR. GARY BLOCH: Sure. I mean for instance we have built into our health team specialists on income security. If I see that someone is living in poverty I refer them over to our income security specialist who does an intensive analysis and intervention specifically around their income. Similarly on the justice front we now work with a legal aid funded lawyer. If I see that someone has legal concerns of any sort and these can be very broad from domestic violence issues to family issues to criminal issues I can refer them straight over to that member of our team or that partner with our team and have those issues dealt with as part of our team function.

AMT: So how would you help someone with low income? How would you be able to help them with money?

DR. GARY BLOCH: Well it's quite shocking actually how much help we're able to provide people. So our income security service sees hundreds of people a year and these are people often living in very extreme poverty. So you know often $700 to a $1,000 dollars a month in income if not less than that. And our income security health promoters will go through a systematic process of helping them access benefits helping them reduce their debts and helping them learn how to manage their finances and we are already finding in preliminary analyses that on average we're raising incomes by over $100 a month which is huge on a percentage basis for people living in that type of extreme poverty.

AMT: Again because people don't necessarily even know what you can apply for. So you're there as the bridge and you send them to the people. But the right within your team doing this.

DR. GARY BLOCH: They're right within our team. They work very closely with me. I will be pulled out into the hallway to talk about things like whether or not someone could apply for a particular disability benefit programs or tax credit programs or access to for instance municipal rent support programs and there are a huge myriad of these programs. We'll also talk about things like helping people access training for employment right. So thinking longer term than just what a government benefit program may be able to provide.

AMT: So in the context of what you do now can you see it expanding to also prescribing social networks and the kinds of things our last guest was talking about?

DR. GARY BLOCH: I can. We do a lot of work with community organizations and I think that's the beauty of the UK social prescribing system is they've really created the bridges, the cross links, between the health world and the social sector, and we started on that path. We've worked with organizations like 211 Canada and 211 Ontario for instance which are organizations that have repositories of community organizations and social supports and really their mandate is to connect people with those organizations. But traditionally they've had very few connections with the health world. So while we're sitting on the frontlines speaking with people often us as family doctors don't know how to hook people into those types of supports. We've been working to create those cross linkages and I think there is a natural potential partnership between the work that we're doing and that type of social connection. I will also say that there's very good evidence that both social inclusion and social isolation or social connection are well recognized as being determinants of health. So we have very good evidence to show that creating better social linkages will improve people's health. So I certainly have an evidence based drive to want to create those types of links. And we are speaking with the folks in the UK about what they're doing actively.

AMT: And so can you see this expanding to GPs in other part — like again you're working in an inner city area with people who are marginalized and trying to help them. Is there a way to work with people who you might who aren't as marginalized who also have health issues who could benefit from some of these? Do you see GPs embracing this down the road?

DR. GARY BLOCH: I do. I mean just to be clear I see what we do as sort of an incubator setting. There's already even spread of our approach and are ideas far beyond just our little bubble and inner city Toronto. So we are seeing interest in this across Ontario, across Canada, and really in all different types of settings. I mean the need to connect the social with health I think crosses socioeconomic classes right. I know for myself if I'm feeling unwell the first thing that I want is someone there with me and I have every resource to bring that in and draw it in for myself. But as we go through the socioeconomic strata I think that need is universal and I think that is very much recognized. I've spoken with thousands of family doctors over the years about this working in every setting and I think the interest is truly universal in finding a way to connect the social with traditional health work… start off as saying this is intuitive and I think it actually is for all of us.

AMT: Ok so the interest is there but we know that in Britain the health service pays for this. Is there political will on this? Are you seeing any of that?

DR. GARY BLOCH: Well yes and no. I think there are small signs of political will. I mean for instance the Ministry of Health here in Ontario funded those income security health promoters for us. The Legal Aid Ontario funded that lawyer for us. There is funding to connect us with a 211 service that I mentioned. But in terms of the really broad based bridging between the health and the social I don't know yet. I think there is good enough suggestion that there would be a strong payback to funding those kinds of linkages. I think the work in the UK has shown that there likely is a strong health payback. You know through things like reductions in emergency visits and reductions in family physician visits. But you know it's going to take a bit a leap of faith for the government to fund this, to trial it, and to see what happens. And it could be seen as a bit of a radical move, again, I think it should be seen as an intuitive one. But it is different to what's been done before.

AMT: Ok well Gary Bloch thanks for coming in.

DR. GARY BLOCH: My pleasure.

AMT: Dr. Gary Bloch is a family physician with St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto. That's our program for today. Stay tuned to Radio One for Q and guest host Laurie Brown. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. Thanks for listening to The Current.

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March 27, 2018 Episode Transcript

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