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The Current Transcript for April 5, 2018

Host: Anna Maria Tremonti

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

MAN: You want me, you come take me.

REPORTER: I don't want you I want you to just calm down and relax. This is just a fender bender.

MAN: [Unintelligible] in front of me.

REPORTER: I believe you. I believe you. Just relax. Let's just talk this through.

OFFICER: Better do something quick.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: It sounds like a crisis situation escalating quickly as what starts as a fender bender turns violent. What you just heard was a simulation of video-game style interaction used to train police. But as CBC reporter Katie Nicholson learned when she gave it a try if you don't know how to, can not or think you cannot deescalate, reaching for a firearm can quickly become a cop's last line of defence. And that becomes even more complicated and deadly when mental health or substance abuse issues are involved. In a moment police involved deaths by the numbers and what those numbers tell us about policing in Canada. Also today want to fight jihadists and extremist recruiters? Take a page from their playbook.

SOUNDCLIP

Extremists, jihadists like ISIS, they treat young men like they need them because they do. So we're making young men feel like we don't care how they feel. There are other people who are going to compete for their future.

AMT: Jamil Jivani once also felt the pull of violence and rage and it terrified him. In an hour he offers his insights into how to enable young men to find a fulfilling future and fight the poverty of imagination. Also today when a landfill looks like a salad bar something's wrong

SOUNDCLIP

We've got a whole load pretty much of loose organic lettuce. We got some kale here. We got broccoli in the back as well. We have plenty of produce to make a salad here.

AMT: We waste so much food in Canada. Researchers say it's like tossing a quarter of your groceries away every time you leave the supermarket. Hear ideas on how to whittle down that waste in half an hour. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current

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As police-involved deaths climb in Canada, mother of man shot by police says little has changed

Guest: Katie Nicholson

SOUNDCLIP

[Sound: Dispatcher]

AMT: On February 3rd 2012 Michael Eligon walked out of a Toronto hospital clad only in his hospital gown. Hours later a dashboard camera would capture his death as he ran toward police with scissors in his hands

SOUNDCLIP

[Sounds: Dispatcher - Sirens – Gunshots]

AMT: Michael Eligon is just one of hundreds of people who are struggling with mental health issues killed by police since 2000. In fact a new comprehensive CBC News analysis of more than 460 police involved fatalities in Canada, has found that almost three quarters of those killed in interactions with police suffered from mental health or substance abuse problems. CBC reporter Katie Nicholson joins me from our Winnipeg studio to dig into this first of its kind database compiled by a team of CBC researchers. Hi Katie.

KATIE NICHOLSON: Hello.

AMT: So police involved deaths sound like important pieces of information to track. How is it that this hasn't been tracked by Statistics Canada or of Federal Government department.

KATIE NICHOLSON: Believe it or not it isn't tracked by any official body and both police and policymakers say because of that there is a significant knowledge gap here. The sort of information we've gathered can help decision makers look at the issue, figure out where resources and training should be directed to prevent these kinds of outcomes where someone dies

AMT: So how did you compile the data?

KATIE NICHOLSON: Well we pulled every police involved fatality between 2000 and 2017 and we did that by looking at media reports, police and investigation reports and coroner's inquest reports. And what we ended up with was 461 police involved deaths which we've been able to breakdown by cause of death, race, mental state of the victim, geography, police force- I mean for example nationally the numbers tell us that the vast majority of victims of police shootings are Caucasian.

AMT: So does that mean race wasn't an issue in most of the police shootings?

KATIE NICHOLSON: No. And overall most victims were Caucasian. But when we zoomed in on a few specific regions you start to see something different. Two distinct groups emerged that were overwhelmingly over-represented black and indigenous people. So one of those regions is Toronto where black people in Toronto make up on average about eight point three percent of the population but they represent nearly 37 percent of the victims. And where I am here in Winnipeg indigenous people represent on average about 10 percent of the population over that 17 year period that we looked at. But they account for nearly two thirds of the victims in this database.

AMT: Ok so when you start to look at the numbers it changes. So you found some disturbing statistics around mental health issues as well.

KATIE NICHOLSON: Yes we did. When we looked at the details of these 461 deaths at least 70 percent of them involved people who struggled with either mental health issues or substance abuse or both. And when we break down that number 42 percent of those who died had mental health symptoms or were in mental distress, while 45 percent were under the influence of drugs or alcohol and of course there is some overlap there between the two groups.

AMT: Okay so these are very troubling numbers and we know anecdotally, we've heard for some time, that people facing mental distress often end up in the cross-hairs of police. What do police say about the numbers?

KATIE NICHOLSON: We shared our findings with law enforcement and criminologists and you know everyone on the frontlines, people who study police fatalities, all suspected this was the case. And Anna Maria this represents just the fatalities we confirmed. There may be many others that were unaware of. So it's important to be aware that this database might be low balling the actual numbers. And many of the people we shared our findings with were disappointed especially by the fact that the number of police fatalities in Canada is trending upward, including the number of people with mental illness who die in these interactions.

AMT: I can imagine that's particularly difficult for the families of some of the victims in the database to hear. What's their reaction been like?

KATIE NICHOLSON: Oh it has been hard for them to swallow and take Jackie Cristopher. Her son. O'Brien Christopher Reid was killed by Toronto police in 2004. He was smart, enrolled in chemical engineering at Ryerson when he started to develop paranoid delusions.

SOUNDCLIP

I remember having a conversation with him once on the phone and he told me 'Mom they are watching me', and he thinks you went to a dentist and they put something in his mouth. And so he started telling me these things and I knew something was off right away when he told me that.

KATIE NICHOLSON: Now that was the beginning of Brian's mental health struggles.

AMT: So what did his parents do?

KATIE NICHOLSON: Well everything they could. They tried to support him in any way they could. They stayed in close contact. But one day in June of 2004 police were called to a Toronto park after reports of a man walking around shirtless with a knife. And when the officers confronted him he ran. They used pepper spray. And when that didn't work they used their guns. Brien was shot in the back in the side. His mother believes the officer’s approach was just too aggressive, that they should have talked to him calmly and explained why they were there.

SOUNDCLIP

Those cops should have been smart enough to know that [unintelligible] it's someone who was isn't mentally healthy here. Whether it was drug induced or not is beside the point. The point is that they were supposed to go there to help, tell him why they wanted to talk to him. It is not an animal. They should have picked up the mental health.

AMT: Katie was there an inquest into O'Brien Christopher Reid's death?

KATIE NICHOLSON: There was a degree with Jackie Christopher recommended that Toronto police train its officers better in de-escalation techniques for people in distress. But that was in 2007. In 10 years after that another 17 people in mental distress died during or after interactions with Toronto Police.

AMT: So police in Toronto have not introduced any mental health training or de-escalation techniques for the officers despite all that?

KATIE NICHOLSON: Well and that's a difficult question to answer. We've been trying to get Toronto police to respond to our findings for two weeks. We shared the database with them. So far no success. What we do know is that Toronto has introduced mobile crisis intervention teams which have sort of integrated mental health workers into their response unit.

AMT: That sounds like a positive thing.

KATIE NICHOLSON: It does but the police service hasn't really given us any more information about how many units they have or how they work exactly. We don't know how many officers have received specialised training for dealing with people in mental distress. Jackie Christopher feels this still isn't enough and the proof, she says, is that people with mental health problems are still dying after altercations with police, people like Sammy Yatim.

AMT: Sammy Yatim of course was shot by Turana a police officer on a street car a couple of years ago.

KATIE NICHOLSON: Yes. He was 18 years old, clearly in mental distress. Everybody remembers the footage. He started waving a knife around in that street car. Now he was shot multiple times and tasered and the officer who shot him was sentenced to six years in prison for the killing. Now it's because of cases like that that Ms. Christopher isn't convinced anyone in law enforcement is taking mental health and de-escalation training seriously.

SOUNDCLIP

They have done inquest upon inquest upon inquest upon inquest with the same results every frickin time. Nothing's going to happen. It's a waste of time and you know what? If Brien's death had caused some change, it would have been easier to live with. But when I saw some that young man who died years after Brien and the same behaviour from the police department.

AMT: And we can hear that great frustration in her voice, huh? You mentioned that it was difficult getting information from the Toronto Police Department. What do other police officials have to say about this issue?

KATIE NICHOLSON: Well we did talk with officers from other forces as well as Tom Stamatakis who's the president of the Canadian Police Association. Now he says this collision between police and those who suffer from mental illness, it's been a long time coming in Canada.

SOUNDCLIP

We're interacting with people suffering from mental health issues every day multiple times a day. And it's a function of unfortunately public policy decisions that have been made to institutionalise people suffering from mental health issues, reintegrate them into the community which is I think a very noble objective. But the same governments didn't ensure that the right supports were also established for people who need assistance managing their mental health issue. And unfortunately were the 24/7 public service that's available all the time and so by default it's been left to us.

AMT: Are there any police forces tackling this issue in creative ways?

KATIE NICHOLSON: Yes. You don't actually have to go far from Toronto to find a police force that's won awards for the way it's tailored its policies to better serve people in crisis.

SOUNDCLIP

[Sound: Beep]

DISPATCHER: Romeo one, are you available for a person in crisis call?

OFFICER: Yes [unintelligible].

KATIE NICHOLSON: That's one of the Hamilton Police Services Crisis Response units heading out on its daily shift and officials there call the units a game changer. They're modelled after the crisis intervention training that was invented by the Memphis Police back in the 1980s. Now a man who was clearly struggling with mental health issues was gunned down by police there in 1987 and the city erupted in disgust. And the police force working with other community and academic groups created what is now known as the Memphis model. It's a multi-pronged approach to deescalating situations dealing with people in crisis either because of mental health issues or substance abuse. And Memphis police have trained hundreds of police forces around the world in their technique. Now Hamilton adopted the Memphis model, baby steps at first but it's evolved into a highly effective system that connects people in crisis with mental health services.

AMT: And what are they actually doing?

KATIE NICHOLSON: Well like in Toronto they work with mental health workers who are embedded in the units to assist in calls. Sergeant Steve Holmes is the supervisor of the Hamilton Police Service crisis response unit.

SOUNDCLIP

: It's about dialogue. It's about slowing down the situation, deescalating the situation. And really we have all the time in the day to come to a healthy and safe conclusion for this individual and for our teams involved.

KATIE NICHOLSON: Now in our data Hamilton Police has just six fatalities from 2000 to 2017 which really isn't enough to draw any conclusions from, but overnight Tuesday and despite these steps a 19 year old man was fatally shot by Hamilton police and we're still waiting for more details on that. Still the police service believes the steps it's taken are working and its own data has shown that since it started its mobile crisis rapid response program the number of apprehensions of people in crisis has dropped by 75 percent in one year.

AMT: That sounds like a lot, like a significant improvement.

KATIE NICHOLSON: Mental health worker Monty Dinally says he and the other officers often hear from people that they've helped.

SOUNDCLIP

We've had people that have approached our car and said 'Thank you for saving my life. I'm doing very well thank you'.

AMT: Wow that's really something. That must mean a lot to the officers. I'm wondering as you go through this what about our largest police force? What about the RCMP?

KATIE NICHOLSON: Well the database found that the RCMP was involved in 118 of the police involved deaths. So that is almost a quarter. I wanted to find out how it was training its officers. So I went to the RCMP training academy in Regina.

SOUNDCLIP

Oh we have our basic set up that we have for simulating someone driving a police car and responding to a call.

KATIE NICHOLSON: And that's Corporal Rob King. He's an instructor with the simulator training unit walking me through the weapons at my disposal.

AMT: So what's the simulator like?

KATIE NICHOLSON: Well picture a hyper real Wii interface but it's filmed using real people and pre-programmed for multiple outcomes. There's a character who's posing a threat, sometimes more than one, and if you shoot them they're going to fall. If you pepper spray them they'll cough. Spray them enough and they go down. Cadets are given a pistol, a pepper spray and a baton and the idea is that you interact with the simulated hostile situation. Now we know from our database that the vast majority of people who ended up being fatally shot by police were armed, 94 percent of them were carrying some kind of weapon. But just because someone's armed doesn't mean that they're going to use that weapon. And that's why they train officers in these scenarios to talk and figure out timing when is the best time to use non-lethal methods of force.

AMT: Did you get to try it out?

KATIE NICHOLSON: I did. And to be honest it's very stressful. They ran me through a scenario that starts out as a fender bender. But one of the men involved gets very angry, starts breaking things, takes a heavy chain out of his truck.

SOUNDCLIP

KATIE NICHOLSON: I don't want you I want you to just calm down and relax. This is just a fender bender.

CHARACTER: I did not do nothing wrong.

KATIE NICHOLSON: This is a fender bender. I believe you.

CHARACTER: [Unintelligible] In front of me.

KATIE NICHOLSON: Just relax. Let's just talk this through.

CHARACTER: [Shouting].

OFFICER: Better do something quick. What is your physical capabilities versus that guy's physical capabilities?

KATIE NICHOLSON: He's very muscular and tall and he's angry. So I don't like my chances.

OFFICER: All right. So there's all these things you have to think about and get turning in your brain before you take the [unintelligible]. And all those things change second to second to second. It is a constant reassessment. It doesn't stop. Make sense?

AMT: How did you do?

KATIE NICHOLSON: I got killed a lot. I tried to talk him down and in this scenario talk wasn't enough.

AMT: He killed you with the chain?

KATIE NICHOLSON: Yes. It is a very heavy chain. So the idea is that he incapacitates you and the second you're down he would have access to your weapons.

AMT: So your only option was lethal force?

KATIE NICHOLSON: No my only option was force and that's a very important distinction. The reality is that in many of the scenarios officers are not going to be able to simply talk a person down. But there are also a lot of non-lethal options at their disposal. So in this case there was a small window where he could have used the pepper spray to subdue him but it closed in a matter of seconds and it just happens so fast. And then my only option was lethal force because he was coming toward me waving this chain. And recognising that small window where I could have used non-lethal outcome was the point of the scenario.

AMT: So that's really interesting, one of the other things I take away from that is of course that being a police officer is a dangerous job. But but when you did that you're not a trained cop.

KATIE NICHOLSON: No I'm not. I felt like a deer in the headlights. I'm not trained to be able to deal with this kind of an aggressive situation I'm trying to cover it. So the danger kind of definitely came across was in the simulator and I actually froze up a little bit. I wasn't entirely sure what I should or could do.

AMT: But you just heard the guys in Hamilton say you got all day.

KATIE NICHOLSON: So that wasn't the point of this scenario. This scenario is an American program and the trainers told me they aren't really a big fan of it because it doesn't really reflect the realities of RCMP officers in the field. So the RCMP started creating their own scenarios using this technology and they showed me some of them.

AMT: And what were they like?

KATIE NICHOLSON: Well I agreed not to divulge the specific details of the programs that I saw. They cost thousands of dollars to produce and they say they aren't much good for training if they're publicly available. But I can tell you there is an emphasis on talking, finding the earliest point to use non-lethal force but it still puts cadets in difficult situations. You have to take a violent criminal down who is unarmed but very dangerous and the point at which it goes from pepper spray to the pistol can change in milliseconds. But the other focus on their training is specific to mental health. Corporal Rob Bell told me just last year the RCMP introduced a new module into its police academy that just focuses on mental health.

SOUNDCLIP

In the academic program - as part of the module that's dedicated to mental health issues - the cadets are being exposed to people who suffer from mental health issues and experienced interactions with the police while they were in the middle of a crisis, and it gives them an entirely new perspective on how it feels on the other side of that interaction.

KATIE NICHOLSON: Now that said, despite the efforts of the Hamilton Police the numbers show that police involved deaths continue to climb in this country. But few end up in the courts. Of the 461 deaths that we looked at we could only find 18 cases where criminal charges were laid against an officer. And of those cases there have been two convictions and that's one of the reasons grieving mothers like Jackie Christopher believe the system is broken.

SOUNDCLIP

It is increasing. Every time I listen I figure nothing's changed. Nothing's changed. Why bother with the inquests? Why bother with the recommendations? Why bother?

AMT: I mean what we're really hearing from her is that this really hasn't been resolved in her mind and she's not alone, is she.

KATIE NICHOLSON: No I mean she and many of the families we spoke with are still waiting for concrete action to be taken to better protect people in these contacts with police.

AMT: Okay, Katie, thank you for this.

KATIE NICHOLSON: You're welcome.

AMT: Katie Nicholson senior reporter with CBC's investigative unit based in Winnipeg. If you want to learn more about the data CBC's investigative team has collected and analysed, we are posting link on our website cc.ca/thecurrent. Let us know what you're thinking as you listen to this about the issue of de-escalation and the training for police and the numbers that CBC has presented. You can tweet us @TheCurrentCBC. Find us on Facebook. Go to our website cbc.ca/thecurrent. And we're still talking about police next Monday on The Current. We'll be talking about police reform with Aluk Mukherjee. He is the former civilian chair of the Toronto Police Services Board and he's the co-author of a new book it's called Excessive Force. In his book he outlines some provocative ideas about how to fix policing in Canada, including disarming officers.

SOUNDCLIP

More and more police are doing things that are not conventional policing and yet we are using the same uniformed police officers to deal with people who are not engaged in crime, who are in distress. I would like our police boards, our municipalities to do minute analysis of the work that police do today and ask themselves which of those tasks required the presence of a police officer. And ask themselves what other resources they could be using to respond to people in crisis, to youth bullying, to the needs of the elderly. That's one change would absolutely ask police sector to think of.

AMT: You can hear my conversation with Aluk Mukherjee former chair of the Toronto Police Services Board, Monday on The Current.

[Music: Theme]

AMT: The CBC News is next. And then turning food waste into soap. Even beer. Just a couple of novel ideas we'll hear about from Holland where they're taking a proactive approach to the food waste problem and what a problem it is in Canada. We will have the latest jaw dropping figure on just how much food waste each and every Canadian is responsible for every year. In our next half hour. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current on CBC Radio One.

Back To Top »

Canada one of the worst wasters of food in the world, report finds

Guests: Tamara Shulman, Pieter Goudswaard, Monica Labarge

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

[Music: Theme]

AMT: Still to come from street gangs to terrorist cells why so many young disaffected men around the world Jamil Jivani has been studying since he stepped off the path to life in a street gang and made his way to Yale Law School. Now the author and activist is sharing his research and experience in a new book called Why Young Men. Jamil Jivani is my guest in half an hour. But first we are what we eat and what we throw away, too.

[Music: Theme]

AMT: Those of us living in affluent countries such as Canada. Know that food waste is a serious problem but like the long forgotten contents of the Tupperware container at the back of the fridge it's the kind of problem most of us would rather not think about - out of sight out of mind. Now hard to ignore figure brings a problem of food waste into light. The numbers are this: 396 kilos that is 873 pounds and that is how much food each and every Canadian wastes every year. That makes us some of the very worst food wasters anywhere on earth. The Commission for Environmental Cooperation - which is an environmental agency set up under the North American Free Trade Agreement - released its report late last week. We're going to focus today on what we can do to get that figure down. But first more on just what the report says. Tamara Shulman is one of the authors and we've reached her in Vancouver hello.

TAMARA SHULMAN: Hello there.

AMT: Eight hundred seventy three pounds of food waste, each?

TAMARA SHULMAN: That's quite a bit. To further qualify that, that's not just what we throw out from the science experiments in the back of the fridge. That encompasses the food supply chain from the farm all the way through processing distribution and food service retail, the whole food supply chain.

AMT: And is that number going higher?

TAMARA SHULMAN: At this point it's fairly static. These are numbers that are quite difficult to measure in an ongoing way. So we worked from international numbers to as well as local to be able to produce that estimate.

AMT: So you focused on waste in the middle of the food supply, the people who process and sell food. How much waste is happening right there?

TAMARA SHULMAN: Correct. So we're looking at 52 million tonnes per year in Canada and that again is post harvest food production. So once the food is set all the way through processing distribution and into the consumer facing businesses such as food service and retail. So it's a significant amount.

AMT: So that would be like grocery stores and restaurants, things like that, that is throwing our food?

TAMARA SHULMAN: Correct and further up too. At the distribution level we can have different types of issues related to spoilage and interruption in the cold chain management and other issues that cause food waste as well.

AMT: And so why is it happening at that at that level?

TAMARA SHULMAN: That's a good question. I think businesses work hard to build efficiencies and find ways to avoid these issues. Some of it is awareness. This is an issue that is growing quickly and emerging. The U.N. has recognised it and looked at globally a third of our food is being wasted. They've set targets of getting 50 percent food waste reduction. A lot of times it's because of there's overproduction and surplus that is challenging to manage. There can be product damage. Again I'd mentioned the cold chain infrastructure and challenges around that. And also there's issues sometimes with food grading specifications where something doesn't fit a certain size is automatically tossed and that could be dealt with through policy change and through procedures and practices shifting, and customer demand also vary. So those are a few.

AMT: So part of your work involves consulting with food businesses to help reduce waste. What do you tell them and how do you make the case to them that it's worth the effort?

TAMARA SHULMAN: Good question. When Tetra Tech engaged in doing this research we interviewed almost 170 different stakeholders across the supply chain and we learned about a lot of the practices that people are doing really well, and there's an opportunity to continue to spread those positive practices across to other businesses. At the restaurant level reducing portion size is that something that often comes up. We get extra food. We get extra bread. We can opt in for some of those [unintelligible] items we can - restaurants can have quick 6 items to add into buffets so that they're not overproducing as much. And it really comes down to having those efficient practices in place. Further up the food chain as it relates to the post harvest production and processing there's ways to expand value added processing. So if you think about having a tomato that ripe and ready for market that goes directly as a whole tomato. If there are slight blemishes or if not at the right food grade it can go to make tomato sauce. Again, businesses do a lot of those practices already because even more opportunities to find those secondary markets and be creative about how some of those surpluses can be handled through source reduction, which again has some cost savings for businesses as well as food rescue which is another component of the study we looked at where some of that surplus can be can be donated to service providers and food banks.

AMT: You mentioned Tetra Pak. They had you do this research? They're behind it.

TAMARA SHULMAN: Tetra Tech is the engineering and sciences company that I work with and we've done food waste prevention and direct measurement and research in this area. So we were engaged. And again the study encompasses Canada, the U.S. and Mexico. So we had teams in all three countries that were doing research.

AMT: And how do we rate among those three countries?

TAMARA SHULMAN: Were comparable to the U.S. in several ways as it relates to the amount of waste we generate per capita. Mexico is less in in terms of that total [unintelligible]. There is a little less the wastage further down the supply chain. There are more challenges further up the supply chain as it relates to things like coating management. So some differences and some similarities.

AMT: So you look at waste in the food business what about consumers? How much are we responsible for?

TAMARA SHULMAN: So this study didn't deal specifically with consumers. But that said, there's definitely a significant portion of the food waste that's generated at the consumer level. And in terms of our influence I think we can work on our own practices and there's a lot of great information out there around how to manage our own households and food. Because when you walk out of a grocery store if you've got four bags of groceries you may as well just drop one in the parking lot. You know consumers waste up to 40 percent. That said as it relates to the business side we can influence those consumer facing businesses. We can ask for imperfect produce programs. We're fighting to buy some of those products that don't look perfect but that are perfectly edible. We can support the businesses that have some of those best practices in place and vote with our dollar.

AMT: Well and we're going to talk to our next guest about how we can do some of that too but what's at stake? Why should we actually be worried about this?

TAMARA SHULMAN: That's a great point. The significant environmental and socio economic impacts to the amount of food loss and waste that we have in North America, for example as it relates to greenhouse gas emissions resulting from the life cycle of wasted food, we're talking about 193 million tons of greenhouse gas. That's the equivalent of the greenhouse gas emissions generated by forty one million cars driven on the road continuously for a year. Just to give you a sense of scale. There's also other resource use related to water, cropland production, [unintelligible] used and some of our other natural resources that we need to consider. It ties into the socio economic side given that we do have significant food insecurity in our country. There are folks that don't know where their next meal is coming from. And so the more we have efficiency across that food supply chain the better prepared we are to manage some of those issues as well.

AMT: Okay well. Tamara Shulmann thanks for sharing your research with us.

TAMARA SHULMAN: Thank you for having me.

AMT: Tamara Shulman, managing consultant for the Commission on Environmental Cooperation’s food waste research study. She's in Vancouver. Now if Canada is lagging behind in the efforts to reduce food waste France is at the forefront. Since early 2016 there's been a law in France that says supermarkets are prohibited from throwing out unused food. Stores of a certain size have to donate it to charities and food banks or they'll face a fine. In Italy the government has been trying to stigmatise the doggy bags, something frowned upon there, to make it socially acceptable for people to bring home leftovers from restaurants. Last month in the Netherlands a grocery store started selling a range of products all made of food that would have otherwise been destined for the garbage dump. It's part of an initiative which roughly translates into 'waste is delicious' and Pieter Goudswaard is one of the project's coordinators we've reached him in the city of Helvoirt. Hello

PIETER GOUDSWAARD: Good day there.

AMT: What kind of products can you buy in the supermarket, thanks to 'Waste is Delicious'?

PIETER GOUDSWAARD: It's a range. It ranges from soups made from crooked cucumbers, zucchini, stuff like that to soap made from - which is a perfect script by the way - coffee grounds. There is a [unintelligible] which is type of a specific type of preparation for meat of geese which are pest in the Netherlands. They are short and they are not eaten but now there are sold. Gems, beers from potato, beers from bread, cider from apples, too many things to just mention in one sentence. But it's a whole range of products.

AMT: And so the raw materials for those products, the carrots and cucumbers that don't quite look right or the coffee grounds for the soap,where's that stuff actually coming from?

PIETER GOUDSWAARD: The coffee grounds basically it waste. It's not food anymore but it doesn't have a useful use for it until they started this. We really use plastic for scrub up which is not necessarily because you can use coffee grounds. But it comes from [unintelligible] partners that don't throw it away but together it. There are fruits and veggies. And they're actually coming from the supply chain from many producers. They are now a stream that's worthless. They can sell it to retail because it doesn't meet the visible quality requirements that are there. And often it's not worthwhile financially to create a second stream that doesn't pay enough. So they just through it away. And some of the entrepreneurs that are participating in this initiative, they are organising this stream and they are giving it value and they're giving money back to the producers. In some cases they have specific requirements that the money be used to make production more sustainable etc. but not all [unintelligible] in their approach. So people that use their entrepreneurial skills to improve the world and reduce waste.

AMT: So have you tried the soup or the soap or the cider?

PIETER GOUDSWAARD: Yes yes of course. They call it their deformation. But yes I tried everything. And the interesting thing is these are young entrepreneurs and they are totally into what's hip and happening. So it's good brands, the taste is good and that's why the term delicious it's the translation from that is the term we have in the Netherlands. What we try to do is it's also a campaign. All the activities we do as a campaign. It's not waste. It's useless. No waste is delicious, you can do beautiful things with it. And we have all kinds of other awareness building and opportunities for consumers and companies to start acting against waste that we offer. So in a way we try to be the positive example on how things can be done different.

AMT: And how are the consumers responding?

PIETER GOUDSWAARD: It's a long initiative specifically in the supermarket which is a fairly direct interaction between consumers and one of the most direct you can have, really positive. It's amazing how much we sell. There's also an experiment going on normally in the supermarkets where the grocery stores we sell straight cucumbers and we've placed next to destroyed cucumbers, cucumbers normally not meeting the requirements, the curved or wonky shaped ones and they sell as well as the straight ones which kind of takes away one of the prejudices that you can't sell curved cucumbers. Yes you can.

AMT: Right. So it's got to do with the aesthetic of a vegetable, what it looks like. Yes. So you're selling in one store. Do you see this project expanding further?

PIETER GOUDSWAARD: Yes actually there's already three stores lined up to follow the example. It's not necessarily are our ambition to have the shelf in, let's say, 100 grocery stores or supermarkets but it's our ambition to learn from what we do in these stores and the best practices, what really works to what consumers and the best learnings that show that we're doing things in a way which is- like with the cucumbers it's not necessary not to sell these current ones because people like them. These learnings we are expanding to all grocery stores in the land. The retail entrepreneurs that we are working with, we agree with them that we are allowed to share everything we learn. It's not just for them. It's meant to for everyone to copy in a way.

AMT: Okay well maybe there's something we can learn from you. Thanks for your time today.

PIETER GOUDSWAARD: Thanks for your time and have a good day.

AMT: You too. That is Pieter Goudswaard, one of the coordinators of a project in the Netherlands which translates roughly to 'Waste is Delicious'. OK so we have one example of how companies are trying to reuse and repurpose food that would otherwise be thrown out, food that doesn't meet the aesthetic or freshness standards of a supermarket. As we've heard food waste from supermarkets and restaurants isn't even our biggest problem the average Canadian consumer throws out 170 kilos of food a year. We asked people on the streets of Vancouver if they are part of the food waste problem.

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VOICE 1: Honestly yes. Maybe you just forgot you bought something and leave it in the fridge and then you're picking up something else extra. Maybe we need an app for that. What's in the fridge.

VOICE 2: I mean if I do waste food I give it to my dog. So I mean it's not all totally going to waste. But there definitely is like especially the veggies and stuff, you put them in your fridge thinking you're going to make it one day but you never actually do.

VOICE 3: We're not as frugal as we used to be I guess because today we have more than what our kids have and we want our kids to have more these days. It's kind of unfortunate because we should really be stepping back to going the way our parents would: This is what you have. This is what you're eating.

VOICE 4: It gets to a point where like you go into the fridge and you're like 'Okay what's about to go bad. Let's make it like a stew or something out of it'. But yeah there's times where we just overhaul the fridge and throw everything out.

VOICE 5: Not really because being from Africa we don't throw anything out. So I always think you are right. It is lot of waste here. That's why I always have the shade eating food coming from a country where we did sometimes we did not have much.

AMT: Well despite years of education campaigns and all our best intentions food waste remains very real. Monica Labarge has been working on the question of why we can't seem to solve the problem. She's an assistant professor of marketing at Queen's University. She focuses on consumer behaviour. Monica Labarge's is in Kingston Ontario. Hi.

MONICA LABARGE: Hi Anna Maria.

AMT: You traced something called the squanders sequence. What is that?

MONICA LABARGE: Well what we did in this paper that- There is quite a few others on it so I'll be talking about some of the research as we go - But what we really wanted to do was unpack what is happening at the consumer level because as you identified consumers are responsible for a lot of those ways. And we don't believe that consumers are buying food with the objective of wasting it. So we wanted to move away from the word waste which sort of has a negative connotation to the idea of squander, that we have this food and we're sort of squandering the opportunity to use it. We wanted to unpack a little bit what were some of the psychological reasons that are driving this behaviour. Because like I said nobody intends to throw out the food. So that suggests to us that there's something unconscious at a variety of levels that are happening. We want it to sort of use what we know about consumer behaviour more broadly in consumer psychology to try and apply it to this idea of squandering food, and try and figure out what are some of the factors that might be driving this wasting of food at the consumer level, to see if we can identify some research question to look at that further.

MONICA LABARGE: So let's look at the grocery store. How do we start? Like what we buy that we maybe end up just squandering?

MONICA LABARGE: So some of the things might be - Some of your readers may be familiar with the idea of your heuristics and biases which Daniel Kahneman got a Nobel Prize for looking at that. So we if started looking at some of these biases that we have which could be things such as believing that you're going to have the time to make something, so let's say a butternut squash you think 'Okay well I'll have time to make that you know Wednesday night' and then you get home and you realise it takes 45 minutes to roast it. And so you just never get around to doing it. So that would be what we called the planning fallacy or the optimism bias, which is I'm going to take this new food that I've never cooked before like fennel and I'm going to figure out how to use in a recipe. But then when it comes down to it you never actually get around to looking up a recipe to do that. So using these kinds of ideas about what we already know about how people behave in other domains to try and explain why we might be buying things in the store. Another one would be something like by three limes for a dollar. Well maybe you're really only actually going to use one. And so we know that consumers tend to buy things in this bulk if you cue them to do that. So you're buying the three limes because it feels like just getting one of them is leaving money on the table when in reality you're only going to use one of them. So trying to help consumers recognise some of these biases and heuristics that they have that they're using on a daily basis when in reality if they thought about how they actually consume food that they might not buy as much as they would otherwise.

AMT: So in other words we mean well and it just falls off.

MONICA LABARGE: Yes I mean I think it was really interesting the examples that you talked about that you had the intercepts on the street in Vancouver. One of them mentioned the idea that we have a lot of that we buy a lot of food for our kids because we want to make sure that they have a lot of choices. Well that's one of those things that we call the good mother or the good provider syndrome, that you make a lot of food because you want to feel like you're giving your children a lot of choice, a lot of healthy options. And the reality they one week they like bananas and the next week they don't. And now you have all these bananas sitting on the table and maybe you might freeze them think you're going to make banana bread but then you look at them in the freezer and they don't look appetising at all. So you have good intentions but when it comes down to actual consumption you can't necessarily control what other people in your household are doing. And you also want to provide those kinds of things. Some of your other the other speakers talked about this idea that 'I plan to use it but I didn't'. And so those all of those things that everybody talked about in those intercepts we actually suggested in our paper that those were things that were driving this food waste.

AMT: So how do we break our habits?

MONICA LABARGE: I think somebody said maybe there's an app for that. There is actually. There are actually apps out there to help you plan better figure out what it is that you might want to use, also to help you recognise what's in your refrigerator and maybe when you should use it. So if you are into apps you can actually go and try and find things like that to help you. But I think also stepping back and making a specific list like 'I need one of these' or 'I need three of these'. And also getting over some of these heuristics we have like more is better. So you buy these really large packages of things when in reality you're not going to use as much.

AMT: And I'm going to ask you something else because we don't have a lot of time here. The best before dates. People toss stuff out because they look at the date on the package and they go 'I can't serve this to my kids'.

MONICA LABARGE: I think that that's something that regulations really should be looking at. And so that's sort of a governmental producer and education of consumers issue because I think there's a lot of confusion around what does best before mean, what to sell by mean, what is used by mean. I mean I've a high tolerance for my own consumption but I also have a baby I'm not going to feed him food that's past the best before dates. So some better communication of what those things actually mean, when should it be thrown out versus when is it sort of fresh before. I think it's something that we could all work on together at various different levels.

AMT: And how difficult is it - I'm asking you because you research all sorts of aspects of consumer behaviour. How difficult is it to change the way we buy and consume?

MONICA LABARGE: Well you should ask the public health people about that.

AMT: I guess the answer is very.

MONICA LABARGE: Very. Yes. Right. So it's not like everybody doesn't know that an apple is better for you than potato chips or that we should exercise 150 minutes a week. It is a sort of long term education process. But I think if you are committed to the idea of food waste, the same way reducing your food waste, same way you might be committed to environmental friendliness. If you sit back and think about how is it that I actually use food and then you purchase with those things in mind that you're certainly setting yourself up for being more aware of how you consume food. And then that is probably going to help reduce your food waste substantially.

AMT: Monica we have to leave it there. Thanks for your time.

MONICA LABARGE: Thanks a lot Anna Maria.

AMT: That is Monica Labarge assistant professor of marketing at the Smith School of Business at Queen's University. She's in Kingston Ontario. Well weigh in on this one. Tweet us @TheCurrentCBC, find us on Facebook, go to the website cbc.ca/thecurrent. Are you a Food waster? Have you figured out how to curb your waste? Let us know. Coming up in our next half hour Why Young Men. Author and activist Jamil Jivani has travelled the world asking why so many young men are drawn to violence and extremism. He'll share what he's found and the lessons for all of us when we return. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

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We're competing with extremists for our young people's futures, says author who escaped gang culture

Guest: Jamil Juvani

AMT: Hi I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

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I went through a period of six years of radicalisation into extremism. When I was a teenager after a period of travel to Taliban controlled areas due to an identity conflict, poisonous ideology from other teens and a search for meaning and belonging. It was only after the terrorist attacks of 9/11 that I turned away from that way of thinking. I ended up studying Islam properly and went through a period of de-radicalisation.

AMT: Well that is Mubin Shaikh speaking at the United Nations last October. You may remember Mubin Shaikh for something he did after his de-de-radicalisation.. He played a major role in disrupting a terror plot in Toronto. In 2006 Mr. Shaikh worked as an undercover operative for CSIS. He helped break up a group of young disillusioned Muslim men known as the Toronto 18. Some men in that groups served jail time after they had talked about blowing up major Canadian landmarks and even killing then Prime Minister Stephen Harper. As for Mr. Shaikh's story of radicalisation and radicalisation it's a familiar one to my next guest. As a young man Jamil Jivani also felt the pull of violence and the gangster life. Instead he went on to graduate from Yale Law School. Today he is a community activist studying why so many young men are drawn to extremist ideology. He's the author of a new book it is called Why Young Men: Rage, Race and the Crisis of Identity. Jamil Jivani is with me in our Toronto studio. Hello.

JAMIL JIVANI: Great to be here.

AMT: So you're a graduate of Yale Law School and yet when you were 16 teachers at your school thought you were far from a high achieving student. Why?

JAMIL JIVANI: Well I had failed the literacy test in grade 10 which all Ontario students have to take, less because I couldn't actually read and write and more because I was so disengaged as a student that I didn't try and show what I was actually capable of. But that day in grade 11 I had to return back to school and none of my friends had to go to school because it was only people who are in grade 10 had to write the tests. It was probably the most down period I've ever experienced in my life. I felt stupid and useless and I was almost like a broken person. And I feel like I start my book with that moment because I feel like with the right or wrong influences around me I could have been turned into anything. I was a set of pieces that were waiting to be put back together and it took me years to put them back together in a way that was actually healthy and positive. Instead I wasted years trying to put my pieces together in ways that were negative and angry and hateful and resentful of the world and consequently vulnerable to a lot of harmful ways of thinking about myself and other people.

AMT: What was your family life like growing up?

JAMIL JIVANI: I was kind of almost without guidance when it came to kind of what you could think of as searching for an identity or belonging or understanding yourself, developing a culture, a set of morals. I was kind of treading water on my own in that regard and lacking the guidance and support of a father to help me through that.

AMT: Well tell me a little bit more about your relationship with your dad because you do see the importance of a father in one's life.

JAMIL JIVANI: Yes absolutely important. So there are a few moments that stick out to me where he was around. One for instance when I was eight and he was stopped by police officers in Brampton and he was harassed and made to sit on the curb like a criminal and yelled at and belittled in front of me. And moments like that had such an impact on me because there were so few and far between. I didn't get to see him much and so when I did see him and things like that happened it hit me so hard and it made me think 'well I guess when I grow up to be a man that's what I'm going to have to experience to'. It almost made it normal and my expectations for what life was going to be like. But in his absence it also left me without kind of a first line of defense for the different ways I learned men could exist in the world. I didn't have someone at home to show me the simple things men do like having to take care of your family and have emotional conversations with your wife and be a supportive partner. Take care of my sisters. Instead the only images of men I had were the stuff that you see on TV so rappers and gangsters in movies. Or it would be other peers of mine in school or in the neighbourhood that were equally as confused and trying to figure life out as I was. And so I didn't have that foundational piece at home that could be a compass and help me kind of work through the process of coming of age. And I think that was a big part of why I spent so much of my time growing up just searching for meaning and belonging and a way to make sense of the world.

AMT: So in terms of determining your life choices you believe that would have been easier had your dad been at home.

JAMIL JIVANI: I do. I mean there were moments for example where my mom and I just couldn't communicate. And I think in part you know my mom is a white you know Irish Scottish Canadian Protestant who had life experiences that were very different than mine. For instance I would get into fights at school and she couldn't understand why it was so important for me to be a tough guy. I would deliberately disobey teachers and principals and get myself suspended and she would just sit there thinking 'Why don't you listen to the teachers? Why are you being such so anti authority?' And I would try to explain to her that it mattered more for me to be seen as tough than someone who would be a snitch or a loyal to what the principals wanted me to do. And that's the kind of stuff that - through stories I've heard about my father - I know he got into fights and he was a kid too and I think he would understand that kind of macho tough guy bravado that a lot of young men deal with. But without him in my life it was just me and my mom as two ships passing. We couldn't communicate with each other. And so there were moments like that where I know that having a person in my life who could show me that masculinity was more complex than just conflict or the sensational things that you see on television or online. And instead it was about kind of the everyday taking responsibility of a family and a community that would have I think been very powerful for me to know and understand as a kid

AMT: Your father was originally from Kenya.

JAMIL JIVANI: He was yes.

AMT: And so being stopped by police and being berated was an experience many young black kids would see happen to their dad.

JAMIL JIVANI: Absolutely. And seeing police officers in that light has such an incredible impact I think on how a young person sees the rest of the world. I think we often look at it as well, maybe you're just being harassed or you're having a bad day or you know it's just a bad experience. But it's bigger than that because police officers and other adults will be put in the lives of children like teachers and social workers, they are people who are representative of our society. They represent our laws our values they show our kids what we believe to be good in the world. And when that is seen as corrupt because you see a child learns that it's unfair how a police officers going to treat you, or that you're going to go to an inadequate school because people don't care enough about what you might need to learn. That sends a message that the world isn't here for you. It's not here to make your life better. And that losing faith in our society is remarkably powerful for emboldening alternative ways of looking at the world that we don't want our kids to be exposed to.

AMT: In fact you write that everyone in uniform even bus drivers made me anxious and uncomfortable as if they were part of some conspiracy to make me feel unaccepted in my own country

JAMIL JIVANI: The feeling of people looking at you as the problem in your community is so difficult to accept. People that are there to serve the community, that are there to make people safe look at you with suspicion as if you are the actual problem. There's no way to feel welcome in a community when that's the way you're being perceived.

AMT: So keep going with me on that one. What does it do then to young people of colour when there is that gap and it continues to grow between themselves and crucial public institutions like law enforcement, like the schools, like all of those institutions?

JAMIL JIVANI: So many of the problems that young people face come from a rejection of the world we create that's supposed to support them. So we put them in a school. We have parents in their lives. We have adults that are there to look out for them and serve them and empower them and mentor them. And when they're angry that, when they reject that, when they say this is a corrupt world I don't want to be part of they're looking for something else. They're looking for their meaning and their belonging elsewhere and they're going to find it with people who more passionately pursue them. In a neighbourhood where you have a lot of crime for example, gangs treat young men like they need them because they do. In a place like I was in Molenbeek in Belgium, extremists, jihadists like ISIS they treat young men like they need them because they do. So we're making young men feel like we don't care how they feel. We don't care what they experience. We're going to treat them like they're not needed. There are other people who are going to compete for their future. There are other people out there who are going to compete to influence them and pull them through whatever identity crises they experience. I think we're retreating from the battlefield far too often and losing by default a lot of these young men because we're not treating them as important as many cases, the worst elements of our society are.

AMT: And you did a lot of work in Belgium and I want to get to that but long before you got there, when you were still in school here, you came close to becoming what you call a gangster. What stopped you?

JAMIL JIVANI: Well there is a moment where I asked a friend who I knew could get me a gun if he could get one for me. And he quoted me a price and he told me just let me know when you want it. And I went home and I cried. I remember so vividly because I just remember thinking like ow like I had the chance to be the tough guy that I fantasied I would want to be when I listen to rap or watch movies. And I almost had my and my bluff called'. I cried I think for two main reasons. One was the only good thing I had in my life at that point was my mother. And I really felt like I might cross a line if I had a gun where she might give up on me. And I didn't want to lose her love. And I didn't realise how much her love mattered to me until I was in those moments where I thought I could lose it. The second reason was I knew if I had a gun I would basically becoming the thing I was angry at cops for accusing me of that. When I was stopped on my way home from the bus or if I was at the mall and people followed me around I would essentially be telling them yes you're right, you should, because I have a weapon and I might hurt somebody. And the idea of doing that and validating that unfairness and almost endorsing the rage that I felt, felt something like something I can't do. I couldn't I couldn't do that especially because I knew that it would be validating it for potentially other people like who are associated with my identity. So that's why I kind of gave up on that and that was another moment where I felt like I could become whatever the influences around me made me because I lost my identity. I no longer was a wannabe gangster. I didn't know what to be anymore.

AMT: But you didn't get that gun

JAMIL JIVANI: I didn't yes.

AMT: Because the guy who asked for the gun he almost forgot about it and you let it go, right?

JAMIL JIVANI: Well I look back on moments like that and I always wonder too how much my friends or the people I knew that wasn't right for me, because he didn't come back to me and push it on me. And I know he was a guy who would have done that but maybe he knew that wasn't something I shouldn't be doing. And I've had other friends along the way who are in and out of jail and if they wanted to push me to doing the things they did they could have but they didn't. And it makes me feel very lucky in a way that I had people who didn't want me to make the same mistakes that they made.

AMT: Well and the idea that you cried because you understood that you would be crossing the line. Do you think you're unusual? Or do you think maybe other young kids, like teenagers who are right at that point where you were and they get ready to cross the line, actually might regret it as much but don't know what to do to stop themselves?

JAMIL JIVANI: That is exactly what I think. So there's an idea I write about in the book called capacity to aspire and what that means is you can think of it as the various paths that exist in front of a young person. So a when young man is in a moment where he might want to change his ways or he might want to get a legal job or he might want to take care of his children or he might want to you know embrace a healthy lifestyle, a healthy way of looking at himself, if he doesn't have pals in front of him that would present an alternative even if he has the desire he might not know how to do it. And I was really lucky that I was always in school. I never dropped out. So there was always an option for me to do something different. I could try. I could try in school. And thankfully that option existed when I was able to give my effort to school and I did well. But I had friends like one of my best friends, Lucas, I write in the book about, who wasn't in school, wasn't able to get a well-paying job and so he never had other pals in front of. And there were moments he would come out of jail and I knew he wanted to make a difference in his life. He wanted to change for his son for his family but he couldn't do it. He just didn't know how. And there's so many young men like that that I think their moral compass sometimes pushes them in a new direction.

AMT: You also say I wasn't materially poor but I was poor in imagination. And that's what changed for you right?

JAMIL JIVANI: Yes. Absolutely.

AMT: You started to think maybe think bigger, to think of a future. You actually saw a future for yourself.

JAMIL JIVANI: Yes. And it is really hard to explain to someone for instance when you say 'Well when I was 15 in careers class and they asked me what I wanted to be I thought I wanted to be Shogun Knight, a gangster who managed a record label' and people will think why would that be the thing you thought you could do. Why couldn't you imagine being anything else, you couldn't imagine being a lawyer or a teacher or a doctor. But my imagination really was constrained. It was so limited I couldn't even see myself doing anything different than something - like it's so unrealistic to think you'd be Shogun and it's far more likely you'd be a lawyer. And yet that's how I really looked at the world. And I think it's t's important for us to understand that a lot of the young men who make mistakes, their imagination is limited and doing the work as a society to provide them with an understanding of the diversity of things that they're capable of is so important. But it's not easy and it's something we have to work really hard at being able to do.

AMT: Because essentially you kind of make the argument - correct me if I'm wrong - that if you don't help people have imagination something else will step in and give them that imagination. And that's how we get to the fact that at one point you're attracted to online radical organisations. So if there is that place where they're vulnerable and whatever steps in, how does the distrust in mainstream media become a recruitment tool?

JAMIL JIVANI: Yes well I would think of news media often as I've described the police so far which is that is an institution that a lot of people look at as a source of stereotyping and prejudice and unfair characterisations of a community. So if you are used to seeing cameras in your neighbourhood or people write online about your community in ways that are unfair or you think are incomplete, it's very easy to then say well everything they say is not right. They're telling me my neighbourhood is full of criminals but I know how beautiful the people I live with are. Or they are telling me that it's one community's fault that we have terrorism or hate in our society but we actually know there's far deeper reasons we have these problems that a lot of us are in some ways able to identify with and solve. So if that's how you perceive news media then you're looking online for other ways, what I call guardians of truth. They're looking for other people who are going to tell you what reality is and often you're looking for people to affirm the anger you feel toward news media and other institutions in your society. That is what's so effective about what a lot of our young men are reading online. Whether it's the alt right preaching white nationalism or it's jihadists preaching a conflict between the West and Islam, you have a lot of worldviews that are essentially wrapping around young men, propaganda and conspiracies that affirm one way of looking at the World. News media can be effective in disrupting that but it has to have credibility with young people in the first place. And I think one dimensional representations of our world, of neighbourhoods, of racial groups, of religious groups allow for young people to reject what should be seen as legitimate reporting about the facts of what's happening in the world.

AMT: What about mainstream religions? Because obviously very structured radical groups that say they operate in the name of religion can pull young people in but mainstream religions don't. What's the difference?

JAMIL JIVANI: Well I think a lot of mainstream religions of all stripes have almost assumed to a fault that young people don't want to hear about morals. I've seen so often in the conversations I've had with faith leaders the idea that because of the music young people listen to, or their sex lives, or other you know habits and behaviours, the entertainment they enjoy that they are somehow are not people interested in rigid morality. But the truth is there are a lot of young people are looking for answers and convictions and things they can fight for and stand behind. And extremists know that and they offer that very clearly to young people. So it's another example of us kind of positive influences or potentially positive influences losing by default by not competing for our young people's future to begin with. They're not online. They're not reaching out to young people. They're not youth friendly in their message. They've given up on them.

AMT: It's like you say about gangs and another sort of strata that that these groups treat young men like they need them. They make them feel wanted.

JAMIL JIVANI: Exactly. It's a matter of putting young people in a position where they feel like they are key to the future of humanity. And the more you can make young people feel that level of responsibility and feel that level of leadership, the more I think you can get greatness out of them. But when people are doing that to get the worst forms of rage and violence out of them we've seen that it works. It works when you convince young people they can be the centre of the universe. You can get them to I things or you can get them to do good things. And if we're not out there trying to get them to the good things then we're essentially leaving them vulnerable for some of the worst influences.

AMT: We've seen a growth in violent white supremacist organisations. Are young white men joining those organisations for the same reasons that young Muslim men might join jihadist groups?

JAMIL JIVANI: These are ideologies that are saying to young men 'The world is unfair. You can attach yourself to some conflict that can help fix the personal unfairness that you experience. If you're unhappy at home at school, you don't have a girlfriend, you don't have as much money as you wish you had. It's not your fault. It's the world's fault because it doesn't care enough about you. So now let's go fight somebody and fix that world'. That's where they're very identical. It's very hard I know for some people to accept that a young white man might feel disenfranchised or treated unfairly and people have debates about how legitimate that feeling might be. But the reality is do you want to understand the world as it is and how that young man sees it or do you want to fight with him? Because I want to help him get out of that way of thinking. I want him to stop seeing like a jihadist does that the world is just a competition between competing religions and races and instead the world might be a place where exercising empathy and working with other people based on ideas and values is what's actually important. So I catch heat sometimes when I go out of my way to explain that I'm not giving up on a young white man just because I think that white people have more advantages in society than somebody else. That's not the conversation I want to have. What I want to have is what does he think the world is like and how do we help him think about the world differently.

AMT: After the attacks by ISIS in Paris in November of 2015, you went to the Molenbeek district of Brussels. Why did you go there?

JAMIL JIVANI: Well in the Paris attacks I had a moment where I saw that as a tragic expression of rage. And when I read about the young men involved in the neighbourhood they come from in Brussels, I thought the roots of that rage seemed familiar to me. I think I might know why they're angry. I don't know if I could understand why their anger would turn into a terror attack but I think I knew why they were angry and I wanted to go and figure that out. Because if their anger is rooted in some of the same experiences that I've seen in other parts of the world then maybe they're not the monsters we can't understand that we often see them as. Maybe there's some human experience they have that we could tap into and prevent other young men from making the same mistakes.

AMT: If they were monsters who would have been able to spot them, huh?

JAMIL JIVANI: Exactly. And you know when you look into the backgrounds of the people who make these tragic news headlines you often find that they seem like everyday people until they aren't.

AMT: And you've also got your own challenges. You've come in here you're wearing a neck brace. Why?

JAMIL JIVANI: Yes. So about a month and a half ago I was diagnosed with lymphoma cancer stage 4, non Hodgkin's lymphoma, and it totally sideswiped me. I was looking forward to my book coming out and looking past the month of March altogether. And then I went to the hospital for what I thought was something pretty simple. You know the antibiotics could fix and wound up getting this diagnosis. I wear this around my neck because it's grown into my spine and I've got some fractures now that need to be healed. It's made this experience of the book a lot more meaningful and I think it would have otherwise because I appreciate so much more of the opportunity you have told my story. I mean when you face your own mortality abruptly and you think wow I might not live as long as I thought I would, the opportunity to tell people what you learned while you're here all of a sudden you're a lot more grateful for it I think. And you hope that whatever might happen to me I might not make it to 35 even and you know I hope I do and I pray that I do. But I don't know if I will but I do know that my book will be around in five years. And that has been so helpful to just dealing with the anxiety and the stress of this situation that the young man I grew up, with the young men I've known, the things I've learned from them that is now on paper and I don't have to worry about that being lost whatever happens to me.

AMT: So what do you want young men to learn from your experience?

JAMIL JIVANI: What I like to say to young men is you don't know the best version of yourself yet. You don't know what you're capable of. And there are moments in your life you can give up on yourself or other people are going to tell you what you can be or what you should be because of your skin colour or your faith or your parents come from but you don't know yet. And you should always remember that because the possibility for change is not only some that can help you get through the toughest times but it's also something that will remind you of the strength that you have as an individual. People are going to want to put you into groups and make you look at the world through as a member of a group and not as an individual person. And the more you remember that you as an individual have the power to change, not just your circumstances but others, the more you can resist a world that is increasingly trying to get us to fight with each other.

AMT: And what would you want those of us who aren't those young men but who come in contact with them in various ways. How do we help give them or set the scene for their ability to have a capacity to aspire to have the imagination that you found?

JAMIL JIVANI: So one thing is don't give up on them. They're going to make mistakes and you might think you're never getting through them because you talked to them about something let's say like trying harder in school to improve your grades or getting a better job or wanting something better for your life. You might say for years try to make an effort to encourage them and feel like it never goes anywhere. But there will be a moment where there's a potential breakthrough and if you're not there your impact could be lost. So not giving up on them is really really important. Then the second thing I would say is just understand this is a competition for our young men's futures. And what I mean by that is you have to be actively involved in their life, be passionate about supporting them and empowering them. Show them that they matter. Show them that you care what they're reading when they're by themselves on the Internet. Show them you care who their friends are. Show them you care how they imagine their future or what they are capable of. If you can show that you care it goes a long way even sometimes when it seems like it doesn't. And bringing passion to that to that competition to influence our young people. They'll see that passion and they need it.

AMT: Thank you for sharing all this. Thanks for coming in.

JAMIL JIVANI: Thank you for having me.

AMT: Jamil Juvani. His new book is Why Young Men: Rage, Race and the Crisis of Identity. Here with me in our Toronto studio. Let us know what you think of his ideas and what he's saying about the poverty of imagination and the capacity to aspire. Tweet us @TheCurrentCBC. Find us on Facebook go to our website cbc.ca/tjecurrent and click on the contact link. Now a word from the team that made the program this week.

SAMIRA MOHYEDDIN: Hello I'm Samira Mohyeddin, one of the producers here at The Current. This week the show was produced by: Alison Masemann, Howard Goldenthal, Pacinthe Mattar, Idella Sturino, Julie Crysler, Exan Auyoung, Ines Colabrese, Kristin Nelson, Liz Hoath, John Chipman, Karin Marley, Geoff Turner, and Danielle Carr. Special thanks to Anne Penman in Vancouver, Laurene Jardin in Montreal, Mary-Catherine McIntosh in Halifax, and Suzanne Dufresne in Winnipeg. The Current's intern is Bethlehem Mariam. The Current's writer is Peter Mitton. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso and our digital producer is Padraig Moran. 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 acting executive producer of The Current is Alison Broddle.

AMT: That is our program for today. Stay with radio 1 for Q. Tom Power welcomes John Carter Cash son of Johnny Cash. He's put out a new record featuring some of his father's previously unheard songs. Gillian Finlay is your Friday host tomorrow I'm Anna Maria Tremonti thank you for listening to The Current.

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Thursday April 5, 2018 Full Episode Transcript

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