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The Current Transcript for June 12, 2018

Host: Connie Walker

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

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VOICE: We can honour the sacrifice of our forefathers by replacing the horrors of battle with the blessings of peace and that's what we're doing and that's what we have done.

CONNIE WALKER: That was U.S. President Donald Trump earlier today, after a historic meeting on denuclearization with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in Singapore. But will his promise of peace result in real change? That's first up today, after that.

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Sound of tranquillizing a cougar.

CW: Tranquillizing a cougar to tag it and track him in Alberta. Just one of the areas across this country and continent where human cougar encounters are on the rise. Usually when they happen they're just close calls, but they can sometimes turn deadly. That story in half an hour. And also today, he's the country's correctional investigator and if you ask Ivan Zinger his biggest concern, he doesn't hesitate to answer.

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VOICE: For me the number one human rights issue in Canada that the incarceration rate for Indigenous people keeps climbing year after year after year unrelentlessly.

CW: Why a Supreme Court decision coming down tomorrow could have a big impact on Indigenous people in the correctional system. I'm Connie Walker sitting in for Anna Maria Tremonti and this is The Current.

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North Korean defector to Trump: 'Don't believe Kim Jong-un'

Guests: Rocky Kim, Tina Park

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VOICE: Most importantly, I want to thank Chairman Kim for taking the first bold step toward a bright new future for his people. Our unprecedented meeting, the first between an American president and a leader of North Korea proves that real change is indeed possible. Chairman Kim and I just signed a joint statement in which he reaffirmed his unwavering commitment to complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. We also agreed to vigorous negotiations to implement the agreement as soon as possible. Today is the beginning of an arduous process. Our eyes are wide open, but peace is always worth the effort.

CW: That was U.S. President Donald Trump speaking in Singapore after his historic summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. The U.S. President was in a buoyant mood at the hour long press conference and apparently with good reason. He said the two leaders made significant progress during their face to face meeting. President Trump said international observers will verify that North Korea follows through on its denuclearization commitment, although there's no mention of monitors in their signed agreement. In return, President Trump said he agreed to end its so-called war games, U.S. and South Koreas joint military exercises. President Trump called them "provocative, inappropriate and tremendously expensive." President Trump said he also brought up North Korea's abysmal human rights record during their talks. Rocky Kim is skeptical that will make much of a difference. He's a North Korean defector who fled to China in 2002, before coming to Canada in 2007. Mr. Kim is the president and founder of the Canada Federation of North Korean Defectors, an organization that helps other defectors and advocates for human rights in North Korea. He's with me in our Toronto studio. Hello.

ROCKY KIM: Thanks so much, I appreciate it.

CW: Rocky what have you been thinking these last 24 hours as this summit has unfolded?

RK: There was a summit and then I didn't sleep last night. However there was nothing new on the table and then it's just a showing. It's just a paint the peace show to the world. It's very ridiculous for me because there was no any specific timeline and processing, also there was no any human rights issue on the table.

CW: So in his press conference, President Donald Trump said that they did discuss human rights issues and that that will be a future topic of discussion. And he claims that 100,000 people in North Korea gulags will be one of the great winners from this summit.

RK: Because I don't believe that even Trump was holding a press conference and then he talked to reporters. I mentioned to Kim Jong-un about human rights issue. However if it's normal processing there should be joint press conference. Only Trump he's on the stage and then he was holding press conference. We didn't listen directly to the Kim Jong-un. He didn't say anything. He didn't say himself to talk about the denuclearization and specifically human rights issue. I believe that Kim Jong-un he never only wish that that someone touch about the violation of human rights in North Korea. That's I believe that because I have experience a lot of life I spent in North Korea, they never going to only risk that.

CW: So Donald Trump in that same press conference called Kim "very smart, very worthy, very hard negotiator." He said, "I learned he's a very talented man and that he loves his country very much." What's your, what is your reaction to that?

RK: Absolutely, Kim Jung-un he's very smart and very intelligent. Yeah. I believe that Trump, he's defeated by Kim Jung-un at the summit. He got nothing. He just support this dictator regime and then he has to show to the world this timeline and then specific processing and then how to resolve the violation of human rights issue in North Korea. But there is no anything, any clue about the processing.

CW: Remind us what kind of human rights abuses are taking place in North Korea.

RK: In North Korea there is no any freedom speech, there is no any freedom of movement. Nothing there is freedom.

CW: You have firsthand experience with some of those human rights abuses. What was your life like before you left North Korea?

RK: I left from, no actually I escaped from the hell fifteen years ago. At that time I was 23 and I was studying university. At that time my daddy passed away from hunger.

CW: In North Korea?

RK: In North Korea. So I quit my study and then I come to home at the time many, many people died from hunger on the street everywhere and many people were executed and then many people were detained. Many people already escaped from North Korea. So I decided by decision I have to leave this country and then I have to se with my mother and then I have to save my soul. So I escaped from North Korea to the China.

CW: You were caught in China and returned to a labour camp in North Korea. What were the conditions like in that labour camp?

RK: Every day, every day, 70, 100, 150 hundred people were sending back to North Korea. And then they tortured a lot very serious violation of human rights was happening there. It's still keep continue now.

CW: If you could, what would you say to President Trump after this meeting?

RK: I want to say to Trump, don't believe Kim Jong-un. He's a murderer and he's a dictator and he's keeping his nation as a slavery. Kim Jong-un he's using his nations, his people using regarding as slavery. So it's continue the three generations. Kim Il-sung, Kim Jong-il, Kim Jong-un. So we have to stop and then we have to destroy this dictator regime. Otherwise I worry about that twenty-five million they're just waiting for starvation in despair.

CW: So Trump said today that this is the first of the negotiations that are just beginning, but that human rights will be higher on the agenda moving forward. How optimistic are you now after this summit that human rights abuses in North Korea will be addressed?

RK: I believe that North Korea government, specifically Kim Jong-un, he knows that if he opens his country and then his people are getting the freedom then the North Korea dictator regime going to be collapsed. He knows clearly about that. So he never going to mention about human rights. Also, as you know that North Korea government they asking until now to the South Korean government, send back to from South Korea. Because people more escaping, escaping, escaping that continue there, the dictator regime gonna be collapsed automatically. So he knows clearly, he worried about that issue. So he never gonna change his mind, also his government too.

CW: Thank you very much for joining us today.

RK: Thank you so much for listening.

CW: Rocky Kim is the president and founder of the Canada Federation of North Korean Defectors. He was with me in our Toronto studio. Now that the summit is over, what's next and what was accomplished? To answer these questions, I'm joined by Tina Park. She is a co-founder and executive director of the Canadian Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, based at the Monk School of Global Affairs. She's an expert on North Korea and joins me in Toronto. Hello.

TINA PARK: Good morning.

CW: So what do you make of the outcome of this meeting between Kim Jong-un and President Trump?

TP: I think it was actually very positive that the two leaders who used to fight a lot over Twitter and two countries that have had a long history of hatred and mistrust, managed to come this far in terms of sitting down together to reach a common ground. I do agree with other experts that the language of the agreement lacks details and it's not as strong as the great framework under the Clinton administration. But what is really important is that North Korea was doing a lot of exercises like a missile test that seemed to be provoking the United States and there was a certain level of tension that we had not seen before. So the fact that we are moving towards a peace agreement and denuclearization on the Korean peninsula, however slow that process might be, is tremendous progress. And I think the two leaders did the right thing by getting together.

CW: Should President Trump have done more to press human rights concerns with Kim Jong-un as our previous guest argued?

TP: Yes, I do believe that human rights situation in North Korea raises concern for all of us because it is true. According to the U.N. Commission of Inquiry by Justice Michael Kirby that the North Korean regime is regularly committing crimes against humanity against its own people, which invokes our collective responsibility to protect. That said, there was only so much time they had and so much that could be discussed and the purpose of this summit was to get the North Koreans to agree on denuclearization. They still have to discuss the logistics of timeline and some of the concessions that would be offered throughout the implementation phase. But we are looking at a long process in terms of changing North Korea's behaviour and our ultimate objective is to bring North Korea out of the hermit kingdom that has been for many decades and makes sure that they abide by international norms, whether it is nuclear non-proliferation or universal human rights. That other countries in the world that hope that North Korea would accept and abide by. So I fear serious about convincing North Korea to change their behaviour. Then I think we have to be patient and we have to be persistent.

CW: Is there a risk of normalizing the North Korean regime by ignoring the human rights abuses or not addressing them more fully in a summit like this?

TP: I think it would have to be discussed eventually and I know that the South Korean government is very much concerned because for 51 million people in South Korea, they have brothers and sisters across the 38th parallel and that 25 million people in North Korea live under a very brutal dictatorship with very little freedom. So it is true that human rights situation will have to be addressed eventually, but I think our pressing concern at this point is to get North Korea to change their course of action on nuclear weapons program, as well as their programs on chemical and biological weapons, intercontinental ballistic missiles, cyber warfare capabilities. So North Korea is a formidable military power, whether we like it or not and we have to find a way of containing them and changing their behaviour.

CW: I mean the language that came out of the communique today seemed quite vague, in terms of getting those commitments. And this is something that you know they have also previously committed to do when meeting with South Korean leaders. What makes today significant in terms of you know are they actually going to make these changes and make these commitments in your view?

TP: First of all, I think it is important that there was a certain degree of personal rapport built between President Trump and Kim Jong-un. Because if you just look at their Twitter messages a few months ago, they were really going after each other. And that wasn't constructive in terms of finding a durable peace on the Korean peninsula. So I think it is important that they met together. And the fact that they signed onto a communique together, again we're looking at two countries with a history of mistrust and the fact that they are now moving towards more summits and more communication on a regular basis is a good thing. And the agreement also gives a lot of credit to the Panmunjom Declaration, which was reached between South Korean president Moon Jae-in and Kim Jong-un when they met earlier this spring. And that's important because I think the inter-Korean relationship has to improve alongside changing dynamics of North Korea and the United States and already between the two Koreas, they're working on joint railway projects, resuming family reunions, working on forestry projects and starting sports games again. So I think if the two Koreas could get together and improve their relations, alongside these political agreements and move towards a peace agreement to formally end the Korean War and find peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula, I think that would be very positive and constructive moving forward.

CW: Did anything surprise you about the meeting today? Did we learn anything new about Kim Jong-un?

TP: It seemed like Kim Jong-un was very comfortable coming out to the world stage. This was only his first time outside of Pyongyang, aside from his visits to China and there were lots of concerns about his security, so he brought a whole team of security agents. And Singapore on its part, did its best to provide security guarantees. And I think this is really the first step in terms of bringing North Korea out. They have been shielded from outside influences and when we discuss the details of denuclearization, they will have to let outside inspectors in for verification purposes and we have to recognize that it is better to negotiate and communicate with the adversary than to just criticize them or to avoid them altogether. So I think more contact is good and more dialogue is also very important.

CW: Do you think Kim Jong-un is satisfied with the outcome of this summit?

TP: For sure because this gave him a chance to be recognized as an equal partner to the United States. This summit is something that his father and grandfather would have really liked. And in fact, North Korea has been asking for a head-to-head meeting with the president of the United States for many decades and for all his faults, I think that President Trump took a very courageous step to sit down with the North Korean dictator and we know that Kim Jong-un has a track record of violating human rights and really going after even his own family members. So there's no doubt that he is a very brutal dictator, but at the same time we do have to work with what we have, rather than wishing that he was different. So the fact that Kim and Trump met together and however vague and unclear the agreement may be, this is only the first step towards the right direction. And I think in due time we will see more detailed agreements and deals coming out of both countries.

CW: What has North Korean state media been saying about the summit and what does that tell us?

TP: So North Korea has been following the summit very closely and it's important to note as well that Kim Jong-un announced his intention to denuclearize with his own domestic population as well. Because that's different than you know if he just made a visit abroad and didn't tell his own people. So there is a certain level of accountability that I think now we have to remember when it comes to the North Korean population and Kim Jong-un. And the North Korean media for many reasons are very excited about this meeting with President Trump because they see their own leader as a very important person and this meeting I think gave more credibility to Kim Jong-un standing with his own people as well.

CW: So in the press conference Donald Trump also spoke about Prime Minister Trudeau and criticized him again for the press conference and on Sunday his chief economic adviser Larry Kudlow explained one of the reasons that the president attacked the Prime Minister on Twitter so aggressively it was after the Prime Minister said he would not be pushed around. Let's just take a listen to what Mr. Kudlow said.

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VOICE 1: He is not going to permit any show of weakness on the trip to negotiate with North Korea, nor should he.

VOICE 2: So this was about North Korea?

VOICE 1: Of course it was in large part.

CW: What do you think of what Larry Kudlow had to say there, do you buy that?

TP: No not at all. I don't think Trump was really thinking about long term strategies when he went after our prime minister and in fact, what President Trump has said about Prime Minister Trudeau is unacceptable and I think we should demand a formal apology. But we also have to remember President Trump as somebody who likes to take unilateral actions, somebody who takes everything personally. So it seems like with Kim he developed a very positive dynamics, but that's not always the case and there's no guarantee that it will last. So we really have to wait and see how the relationship will unfold. And we do have to remember that despite the absent flows between prime minister and president, the history of Canadian-American relations is long and a very rich one and one that I think cannot be shaken by just a Prime Minister getting offended by President Trump's message because we do have vested economic interest. So I think we should demand an apology, but also remember that our relationship is really a special one.

CW: OK. Well thank you very much for joining us this morning, Tina. We appreciate you coming in.

TP: Thank you.

Tina Park is a co-founder and executive director of the Canadian Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, based at the Munk School of Global Affairs. She was in Toronto.

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The CBC News is next. Then cougars are learning to live better with humans as they adapt. In our next half hour, why we need to start learning to adapt to life with cougars. I'm Connie Walker sitting in for Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current.

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Watch out, Alberta — close encounters with cougars are on the rise

Guests: Meghan Beale, Coleen Cassady St. Clair

CW: Hello. I'm Connie Walker sitting in for Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current.

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CW: Still to come, Canadian prisons regularly use risk assessments to help determine things like whether a certain offender should be paroled. But there are questions about the tests used to assess whether they might and whether they may be culturally biased against Indigenous people. The Supreme Court of Canada has been hearing arguments on the question and is expected to release a decision tomorrow. We'll explore the issue in depth, starting in half an hour. But first, encounters of the big cat kind and a warning that some of the tape you're about to hear is graphic and disturbing.

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Tape of 9-1-1 call after cougar attack.

CW: A desperate 9-1-1 call from a man who had just witnessed his friend being attacked by a cougar. Last month the two cyclists were stalked by a cougar, while riding in the Cascade Mountains near Seattle. The cougar ended up killing one and injuring the other. It was only the second cougar attack death in Washington State in 100 years, but news of the attack hit close to home for Laura Frost. Her daughter, Frances, was 30-years-old when she was attacked and killed by a cougar in Banff National Park in 2001.

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VOICE: My husband and I had gone for ski the day before. The Cascade Fire Road was about the only place that we've been to that had decent snow, so we told her that that was a great place to go. As she was skiing out she met Margaret Mozer, then when she got to the junction of the Cascade Fire Road and the Minnewanka access road, she just turned that corner and was attacked by the cougar. And the cougar dragged her into the woods and was in the act of trying to bury her under leaves and everything. When Margaret Mozer passed by, wasn't clear what was happening, but she saw a bit of blood and then a stray skeeball looked into the woods and saw the cougar standing over Frances. She didn't think she could do anything. She was really worried that Franni was still alive, but she decided that she would ski to her car which was only half a kilometer away and report this to the wardens. The wardens came back very quickly with guns. The wardens found the cougar and shot it and I guess she was pretty badly damaged by the cougar. They wouldn't let us see her after she died. He had eaten her leg and her face. I just don't think people understand how incredibly powerful an 80-pound cougar is. You don't have a chance and I think that getting used to having us around, they're a lot less frightened of us.

CW: Frances Frost's death is the only recorded death by cougar in Alberta. There have been six other fatal attacks in Canada in the past 100 years, all in British Columbia, but there have been many more close calls. Trapper Ken Alexander of Hinton, Alberta had his own run in with a cougar last year.

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VOICE: I was out of my trap line, just north of Hinton. We have Marten boxes set in trees and I'd caught a Marten. So I stop my quad, got off my quad, went up to the Marten box, pulled the trap out of the box and was on the ground bent over taking the Marten out of the trap. Suddenly, I was hit from behind and it kind of flung me forward. So I thought it was my dad. So I went to turn around to yell at him and there was a cougar standing there. And I had my brown Carhartt pants, my brown Carhartt jacket and a snow machine helmet on and I smelled pretty good because I was covered in beaver bait. I guess that cougar probably thought it was a pretty good chunk of deer. So we kind of looked at each other for a minute and I've been taught that when you're dealing with cougars or black bears, you fight. So I punched it in the face twice with my left hand and it was kind of backing up, but on the third punch it grabbed my glove, punctured my glove and ripped my glove off. Left me with a bloody finger and it took off. That was fear-fear. That's all that was. I'm like I am not dying today and I just started punching. This one we figure was a female, probably about 185, so she's probably about from tail to tip, probably about eight feet long. I've been stalked on occasion and pretty much the only reason I'm talking to you right now is I had a snowmobile helmet on. When he went to grab me by the back of the neck, instead of being able to open his jaw and put it on my neck. He actually hit the back of the helmet and sent me flying. My dad and myself now pack rifles on the ATV. I mean I've grown up around them, I know they're out there. So when I spoke to Fish and Wildlife about it, they wanted to go out and like destroy the cougar. And I'm like, I told them basically I'd done everything in my power that day to make myself great cougar bait because I looked bent over, I looked like a big deer butt, I smelled awesome so of course it's going to come into me. Like there's just a bunch of stuff that I normally do that I hadn't done. I'd seen cougar signs since the beginning of November. You have a bunch of safeties and track and then you just one day you're like I don't need that. I don't need that.

CW: That was trapper Ken Alexander, recounting his close encounter with a cougar last year, near Hinton, Alberta. Meghan Beale knows that part of Alberta very well. She's the master student at the University of Alberta, studying cougar behaviour in the Hinton area. We've reached her in Edmonton. Hello.

MEGHAN BEALE: Hi.

CW: Wow, that was a terrifying story. What do you make of what Ken Alexander told us about his run in with the cougar?

MB: I think he's probably pretty lucky. I had heard the story passed along through a few people in the Hinton actually. I was just amazed that he only got off with like a small finger injury. I guess not surprised that he was able to fight the cougar off because having been up close with them, depending on how big they are like sometimes they're not much bigger than us, like we've been out and captured female cougars that are 100 pounds. So I suppose if you can fight them off in the right way and they don't want to attack you, then it is possible. They aren't as big as a bear, for instance.

CW: So tell me more about your research. What exactly are you studying?

MB: So I'm studying cougar habitat selection, specifically on a few coal mines and reclaim mines, just south west of Hinton. And we've put GPS collars on seven cougars in order to get an understanding of the habitat they're selecting, where they're selecting their prey and sort of the landscape variables and the landscape factors that may make prey vulnerable in cougar ranges or in cougar habitats.

CW: Have you seen any evidence of cougars hunting closer to the Hinton town site?

MB: Yes we've had one of our cougars that we have a collar on, a female cougar, she made a kill of I believe it was a white-tailed deer off the Beaver Boardwalk. So when I say off the Beaver Boardwalk, it was in the vicinity. I think it was about 300 metres from the boardwalk itself. I've also heard of one other instance of a kill made in the same area, but it was not one of our cougars. There's a couple of our cougars that we have collared that operate north of the Hinton area, just north of Highway 16 and they will sometimes make kills pretty near to different industry sites or junkyards or subdivisions of houses. So normally when that occurs, it's a couple hundred metres to half a kilometer away from these areas. And when we're investigating, we'll normally warn the owners or the people nearby that we're investigating a kill site and explain to them what that means. Explain to them that the cougar is no longer in the area, but that we're going to be investigating the remains of some sort of kill.

CW: So you mentioned a boardwalk, is that in the town site of Hinton?

MB: Yeah, it's pretty much the backyards of, depending on where you live, but for some people it's in their backyards, pretty close to. Like the town is rural, in the sense that you know some people's backyards back right up against a forest and in that forest there are bears and cougars. But it is very close to the town, yes.

CW: So how adaptable are cougars to living in land that was previously used for industrial purposes?

MB: They don't seem to be fazed by it. When we're out tracking cougars, they're using forestry roads, they're using these oil and well pad roads and they're sometimes even walking along them, whereas they generally wouldn't walk along Highway 16 or Highway 40 for instance, as these are much more highly traveled highways, but they are using like occasionally we'll see them walking along a forestry road because there might be one or two trucks using that road in an entire day. They're pretty comfortable also killing close to those areas and it's not that they're trying to target these areas in any way. They just, it seems to me that they if they find prey in that area, they're willing to kill it and as long as they're feeling comfortable enough to consume the prey and they can catch the prey and consume it in a stand of trees that are slightly hidden, then they will.

CW: So you mentioned that part of your research is tracking and taking cougars. We actually have some tape of one of your expeditions, let's listen to a bit of that and then you can explain what's going on after we hear it.

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Sounds of capturing a cougar with a tranquilizer.

So I hear a lot of barking and I presume a tranquilizer dart being fired into the cougar, what was going on there?

MB: Yeah. So at the very beginning, you hear the dogs barking and you hear the male voices are houndsmen, Lorne Hindbo. So he is getting the dogs on the track, getting them excited and it's called, they're striking. So when they can smell the cougar, like the fresh cougar scent in the track in the snow, they strike, they start barking and then he says okay, let them go. So the dogs will follow that track and they will tree the cougar. So then you do hear a dart rifle going off. So that is my field partner, Samantha Widmeyer. She's firing, you hear her say 3.5, she's deciding at that point, based on the distance that the cougar is from her using a range finder, she is assessing the pressure to put in the dart rifle. And then you kind of hear, it's a very quiet shot, it's not at all like you would hear with a gunshot or anything. It's actually a pleasure to shoot this rifle, it's very little recoil and very quiet. So she makes a successful shot and that goes into the right hamstring.

CW: And the cougar is in a tree right now?

MB: Yes. So the cougar is treed and that's how we sort of, that's how we can get to the cougar, when it is stationary. Basically, the only way is the dogs will scare the cougar up a tree. And when we come out to the spot where the cougar is in the tree, the dogs are normally barking at the base of the tree and the cougar's pretty calm up there because it knows the dogs can't climb the tree and get to it. So normally the cougar's just peering down at us. It's a pretty surreal experience, when you first see a cougar up in a tree.

CW: I can imagine. So the dart goes in and then you tag them. What are you learning or hoping to learn from tagging the cougars?

MB: So when we actually get the cougar down on the ground, we put a GPS collar on. So then we're able to I guess "tag it" and then by having the GPS collar on, the biggest piece of information, well two biggest pieces of information that we're learning is, we have the collar set to acquire a location, a GPS location of the cougar every hour and a half, 24 hours a day. Secondly, when we plot this on a map, you can see when a cougar spends a lot of time in one spot, if there's a dot for every GPS location, there may be a lot of dots concentrated in one area of the map. And this essentially will likely be a kill site.

CW: Has anything surprised you about cougars in your research so far?

MB: I think the biggest thing that our field team has noticed and we've talked about this amongst ourselves, is that you almost seem to get to know each of the individual cougars, when you're out visiting their kill sites. So for example, we had one older female cougar, she had one functional canine tooth, she was about eight and a half years old and she was making kills, successful kills of sheep with this one canine tooth, which is just incredible. But she was very unique in that we didn't think she could actually drag her kill and hide it under trees, which is what cougars like to do, to make sure no other animals can scavenge their kills. So she was having to feed on her kills in the middle, like out in the open, where the sheep would have been, where she made the kill. So she was feeding out in the open and she would actually try and catch her kills by kicking snow up onto it. So that was really fun to see, just really interesting use of what she had available to her.

CW: So you're really getting to know some of the cougars that you're tracking.

MB: Yeah it's nothing that you can measure really with math, it's just you have to get out there and see it and you start seeing the patterns that each of them have.

CW: Well thank you Meghan, we're going to have to leave it there.

MB: Yeah, no problem.

CW: Meghan Beale is a masters student studying cougar behaviour at the University of Alberta and she was in our Edmonton studio. As we continue to encroach on cougar territory and the territory of other carnivores, there are growing concerns about dangerous encounters. Wildlife officials say they are noticing a steady rise in human animal encounters. Coleen Cassady St. Clair is a Professor of Biological Sciences at the University of Alberta and she is in Edmonton. Hello.

COLEEN CASSADY ST CLAIR: Good morning, Connie.

CW: So Coleen, what are you seeing as we expand our human footprint onto the territory where cougars live.

CCS: Quite right. They are expanding their ranges. Cougars are being seen fairly frequently now on the edges of large cities, including Edmonton and Calgary. That's believed to be a product of two things: the human footprint is expanding, that's well documented into areas that used to be inhabited by wildlife more completely. But also there's been a change in the management strategy, a society-wide one to reduce persecution of carnivores. And that's been very effective. So the conservation efforts to recover carnivore populations across North America and other parts of the world, are are showing the fruits of those efforts now. Over the last few decades there's been increasing populations in North America, not just of cougars, but grizzly bears, black bears, wolves.

CW: Coyotes.

CCS: And Coyotes.

CW: So not only I guess are cities expanding, but also you know we seem to go to great effort to be closer to nature. We build bike paths through the forest, for example. Is it possible for us to safely coexist with these carnivores, especially as they're growing in numbers.

CCS: Well I think it's possible to be safer than we sometimes have been. The naivety that some people have around large carnivores is something that could be addressed with more targeted education campaigns. Those are usually pretty effective in helping people to avoid inadvertently doing the things that can cause conflict. Most people are familiar with how that's been applied to bears and the need to avoid creating bear attractants, which isn't just things like garbage and open landfills, but things that people don't initially consider as attractants, like fruit trees for example. In cities, for coyotes that would include compost and spilled bird seed.

CW: We've been talking about cougars today. What can people do, just a quick rundown, how to avoid this encounter, this possibly dangerous encounter?

CCS: Cougars are probably like other carnivores in that they're more likely to have these conflicts under maybe three different sets of circumstances or with three contributions. One of them would be the condition of the animal. So desperate animals or hungry animals are more likely to be in conflict. That's true of cougars and other carnivores as well. A second contribution would be experience. Animals that have become used to finding food near people are much more likely to get into conflict with people later. We saw that some years ago in a cougar study, this was led by Aliah Adams Knopff, she found that some people were this unaware of the relationship between cougars and conflict in their food, that they were feeding deer in their yard and then using techniques very similar to Meghan's. When she contacted the landowners, could I come and investigate a kill site, it's quite near your house. In fact, it seems to be under your deck. The homeowners were astounded, completely unaware that by feeding deer in their yard, having up to hundreds of deer in their yard, they were also attracting cougars.

CW: You've been looking at how compost is a big draw for urban carnivores. What have you learned?

CCS: Well that's been an intriguing story because it could be that some of the really abundant food that we make available for carnivores, particularly waste products, is actually really crappy food. And not only would be attracting animals that are already in poor health and can't hunt in conventional ways, but it might also be contributing to the poor health of those animals. In coyotes we found that the animals that were eating compost had assimilated diets, which we measured from stable isotopes, that were lower in protein and higher in carbon or carbohydrates, those animals were also more likely to have mange that's a parasitic skin infection and they were more likely to have intestinal parasites as well. So it seems that even for coyotes, you are what you eat. If you eat crappy food like compost, you're more likely to be sick. And then from there, those mangy animals who are more likely to be using residential areas, they were more likely to be active during the day and they were more likely to be reported by people.

CW: Is there a connection to be made between the sickly animals and the ones that attack or encounter humans?

CCS: Yes, that link has been made for lots of different species of carnivores, including several cats, maybe most notoriously for taggers. So I think, in general, cougars prefer to avoid people and to hunt natural prey. More work by Aliah showed an interesting relationship where humans were scarce on the landscape, cougars elected for human features like roads, but as humans became more abundant, cougars started to avoid the same features and interestingly the same thing was true of people. People liked the idea, in a survey she conducted of having cougars in the landscape, until they were to imagine that they were within 100 meters say of their backyard and then they switched very rapidly to intolerance.

CW: So in the case of the Washington cyclists, one of whom was killed by the cougar last month and Frances Frost in Banff, both of those happened in the middle of the day. What do you make of the fact that you know cougars are known as nocturnal hunters, is it strange that these attacks happened during the day?

CCS: It is a little bit, although an interesting pattern occurs in the attacks by carnivores on people in North America or across several hundred attacks. A majority, two thirds of them, occurred during the day because many of these animals have more nocturnal behavior. That seems surprising, but it could be that it's particular animals that are active during the day. Animals that are already more tolerant of encounters with people. So I would say that's a third contributor to the likelihood of conflict, beyond the problems of condition or past experience would be temperament and those three things can interact. So animals that are initially bold by nature are more likely to explore novel sources of food and they might be more likely to then end up in situations where they would consider humans or their livestock to be food. They might also be animals that are more likely to act defensively or opportunistically when they're surprised by people and that might have played a role in the Washington attack where the cyclists were behind a gate on a road.

CW: Why is the cougar population growing so much?

CCS: Well, there's two big contributors. One is a change in tolerance by society, so just a pre-emptive culling of carnivores is no longer acceptable to most people. Most people would like to see a model of greater coexistence and that's going to require some changes in our behaviour. The other reason would be increasing quality of habitat, which is not just the sort of physical space and the amount of vegetated area for example, but also the availability of prey. So the increase in white-tail deer I think has had a lot to do with the increase in cougar.

CW: It's worth, I think we should point out that cougar attacks and deaths are extremely rare, but it's likely that many people have unknowingly passed a cougar in the wild without ever knowing they were being watched, isn't it?

CCS: Oh absolutely. In a study in Banff, shortly after the tragedy of Frances Frost, a collared cougar had a kill in a tree, near the Vermillion Lakes road. And so by comparing the known location of the cougar and the number of people using that road as a walking or recreational area, comparing that to the number of calls into the warden office of astounded people saying I just saw a cougar in a tree. Biologists were able to estimate how much more frequently cougars see people than people see cougars and it's a few orders of magnitude.

CW: Are you worried? How worried are you or how worried should we be when we're out in the wilderness?

CCS: Well I think that's one of the things that needs to change in human perception. We need to take more care of ourselves, which is what people would have done over millennia and accept that there is no guarantee if we're going to recreate in cougar habitat. We are taking some risk, just as we are when we drive on the road or canoe on whitewater river. We can do things to minimize the likelihood of an attack and I think one of the most important ones is to travel in groups. So all carnivores are documented to be much less likely to attack people if they're facing a group. That's the reason I guess there are several trails in the mountain parks where people are required to hike in groups of four or more to reduce the likelihood of a grizzly bear encounter.

CW: Alright, well thank you very much for joining us Coleen. We'll have to leave it there.

CCS: You're very welcome.

CW: Coleen Cassady St. Clair is a Professor of Biological Sciences at the University of Alberta. She is in Edmonton. If you have encountered a cougar or other wildlife that gave you a scare, tell us your story. Email us from our website cbc.ca/thecurrent or find us on Facebook or Twitter. We're @TheCurrentCBC. Coming up, a Supreme Court decision tomorrow could have a big impact for Indigenous people in the correctional system. Inside the debate around risk assessments and cultural bias, in our next half hour. I'm Connie Walker sitting in for Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current.

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Supreme Court to rule on controversial risk assessment tests accused of bias against Indigenous offenders

Guests: Emily Hill, Mark Olver, Eleanore Sunchild

CW: Hi I'm Connie Walker in for Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current. Indigenous people make up about 5 per cent of the general population in this country, but when you look at the population of prisoners inside our federal penitentiaries, more than a quarter of the men are Indigenous. And for women, it's more than a third. For much of his life, Jeffrey Ewert has been part of those statistics. He's a Metis man serving a life sentence for second degree murder and attempted murder, but tomorrow the highest court in the land will deliver a decision regarding his case. The Supreme Court took up the case of Jeffrey Ewert, not because of the crimes he committed 30 years ago, but because of so called risk assessments, that he and his lawyers say are unfair against Indigenous people in the corrections system. The risk assessments are routine standardized tests that can help determine sentences inmate security levels and they're also used to help inform parole decisions. But Jeffrey Ewert's lawyers argue that the tests are culturally biased. For more on the case and just what's at stake I'm joined now by Emily Hill. She is the Interim Legal Advocacy Director at Aboriginal Legal Services, which was an intervener in the Ewert case. We reached her today from Nottingham, England. Hello.

EMILY HILL: Hi there.

CW: Tell us about Jeffrey Ewert's case before the court. Why is he challenging these assessments?

EH: Well these as you mentioned, these tests are standard tests that are used across the board in the federal correctional system and these kinds of tests can be affected by cross-cultural bias and so they need to be analyzed to determine if bias affects their result. And the correctional service is aware of concerns that these kinds of tests aren't accurate for Aboriginal people and there is in fact one test called the GSIR that is used for other inmates, but not for Aboriginal inmates, for this exact reason. And so because these four tools in question have had a negative impact on him during the time that he'd been in the system and because none of them have ever been analysed for cultural bias, Mr. Ewert brought a case to the federal court saying that this violated the Charter of Rights. And think he can order that the Correctional Service stop using the tests on him and on all Aboriginal people until they were analyzed for cross-cultural bias. The concern is that Aboriginal people for reasons related to how they and how their communities have been treated for generations will score higher on these tests and will be treated as if they pose a higher risk than they actually do.

CW: So you mentioned that the risk assessments have had a negative impact on Mr. Ewert's time as an inmate. How so?

EH: Well the judge hearing the case heard that the results of these tests have a negative effect on many inmates and particularly with regard to Mr. Ewert that they had affected his security rating for many years and his ability to get what are called ETAs or Escorted Temporary Absences. So that's true for all inmates, test results affect decisions about what security level inmates are assigned, minimum, medium or maximum. That affects where they're placed, what kind of programs they can attend, how they can be visited and whether they're able to have escorted visits outside of the institution and that's important because that's a step toward parole. And so the judge who heard this case said that these tests have had a significant impact on Mr. Ewert and therefore it granted the relief that he was looking for.

CW: What kind of evidence was presented about how accurate the tests may be for Indigenous inmates?

EH: Well, really the evidence was about how we just don't know because they haven't really been looked at. The judge in the case heard from two experts about the tools themselves and one witness from the Correctional Service about how the tools are used in the system. And the two experts were both psychologists and they gave evidence about how the tools were developed and about how cross-cultural bias affects them. And the evidence was clear that the four tools, the four psychological tests that are in question in this case, have never been analyzed to determine if they were biased or not. The judge was given some evidence about one small study that purported to say that there weren't concerns about Aboriginal inmates but that was rejected because the study was too small, a sample size was too small and because it failed to consider that one part of that tool had been previously described as junk, as it related to its predictive ability with regard to Aboriginal inmates.

CW: The federal government's lawyer said during the Supreme Court hearings that the standardized assessments like these are actually used around the world including in prison populations with Indigenous offenders in the United States, Australia and New Zealand and that they have proven to be quote reliable predictors of risk. How do you respond to that?

EH: Well, it's true. There was evidence at the first hearing that when other countries have chosen to use these tests they have first tested to make sure that they're reliable for minority communities within those populations. So that was done in Australia and in America and in Great Britain, that when they, before they use these tests, they check to make sure, whether they were affected by cultural bias and if so, to what effect. And so the fact that that hasn't been done in Canada is concerning. In addition, the Supreme Court has said in a case called "Ipeelee" that the circumstances of Aboriginal people are unique in Canada. That there are many people who come before the criminal courts, who may have experienced poverty or may have experienced violence or there may be other factors, but that no one's history is the same as Aboriginal people. And so I think understanding that the Supreme Court has said that you're dealing with a community with a unique history means that these tests have to be considered in that unique context and we can't look to see well what worked in the States or what worked in another country.

CW: What are the potential implications of the Supreme Court decision?

EH: Well I think that the Supreme Court could give some direction to the Correctional Service. That it has to do better when it comes to Aboriginal people and that it can't keep using tools that have not been verified for Aboriginal inmates and that's in fact, contrary to what the correctional services should be doing. That in fact Corrections should be assessing risk based on things that are innmates' control. Because one of the concerns with these tests is that they place too much weight on what can be static factors, which are things that inmate can't change, such as whether they were exposed to violence or substance abuse as a child or didn't do well at school. Rather than looking at things that they can change, like their success in programming or how well they're forming positive relationships. And the result can be that Aboriginal inmates whose lives may have been affected by things like residential school, Sixty's Scoop, the barriers to education on reserve poverty that could lead to lower their scores, no matter what positive steps they should take. So if the Supreme Court said tomorrow that that's not okay that they should be taking a different approach, perhaps the direction would be that, rather than punishing Aboriginal inmates for their traumatic life experiences, instead we should be involving Aboriginal communities in the rehabilitation and reintegration process because that is what will keep communities safer and what will actually lower inmates' risk.

CW: What specific changes would you like to see in terms of how the justice system applies these assessments to Indigenous inmates?

EH: Well as I say, I think that the Supreme Court has said that Aboriginal people face systemic discrimination through the entire justice system, including the correctional system and if we recognize that, that we have to look at doing things differently. Treating people the same doesn't result in actual equality. So I think that a more tailored approach and an approach that considers the unique circumstances of Aboriginal people in Canada as a whole and then the person who's sitting in front of them, rather than these standardized tests, is an important first step. The judge said in this case that these tests become like a brand. They are reported again and again in decision making and they follow the inmate and they're hard to overcome. And so even when inmates may make good progress with their rehabilitation and lowering their risk, these stigmatizing risk assessments can follow them and evidence was given at the trial that despite the suggestion by people at Correctional Services that this is just one smart factor that goes into decision making. That in fact, this can be a very important part of the decisions that appears and every decision that is made, these numbers show up and follow the inmate around. So the change I would look for is one that looks at a more individualized assessment of one that considers the unique experiences of Aboriginal inmates.

CW: Okay thank you very much Emily, we appreciate you joining us.

EH: Thank you.

CW: Emily Hill is the Interim Legal Advocacy Director at Aboriginal Legal Services. We reached her in Nottingham, England. As you've heard, the Supreme Court's decision could have ripple effects for many other Indigenous offenders in Canada. It will help determine whether they will continue to face these risk assessments or whether new tools or techniques might be developed. Mark Olver is a psychology professor at the University of Saskatchewan, who's researched how effective these assessments are and he also administers them within the correctional system. He joins us from Saskatoon. Hello.

MARK OLVER: Hi. Good Morning.

CW: Good morning Mark. So what are these assessments trying to measure?

MO: These instruments are designed to measure risk for future violence or sexual violence or some kind of recidivism outcome and they look at a combination of risk factors. So they could be a static or historical considerations as Emily alluded to like criminal history or one's employment history and that sort of thing, but they also look at dynamic variables as well, such as one's attitude, one's peers, one's family relations, if they have anger problems and so forth. So what they're designed to do is they look at a collection of variables, basically, we call them risk factors and they're designed to arrive at an estimate of somebody's risk for engaging in some kind of behaviour, perhaps how bad or how severe and then they're intended to inform risk management interventions. So whether that be in the context of sentencing, treatment or rehabilitation, conditional release, special conditions and so forth.

CW: So I gather there's some variety in these tools, but can you give us an example of the kinds of questions that are asked to inmates to get that kind of information?

MO: Sure. Sure. I mean somebody could be asked for instance, to take you through the sequence of say an offense that they committed and their thoughts feelings and behaviours before, during and after that offense. They could be asked how they thought maybe the victim was impacted or if they think much about the offense. They could be asked about their future plans. They could be asked about job prospects and goals. They could be asked about their family relationships and the people they hang out with, how they handle their anger, all those sorts of things.

CW: And does every inmate get some sort of risk assessment?

MO: Oh, you bet.

CW: Can you tell us a bit more about the decisions that are made based on how they score?

MO: Well, it really depends on the context in which the assessments are conducted. So if it's conducted at pre-sentence for instance, I mean it's one piece of information that the judge will use in making a sentencing decisions. So that being in addition to things like the severity of the crime, their offense history, victim impact statements and so on and so forth. In the correctional system it can be used to for instance, at the point of intake, to inform what programs people attend and the intensity level and the suite of programs they might need. It can also inform things like certainly security reclassifications or reductions or ETAs and UTAs, but that's also taken in conjunction with the people who've complete programs and they bring down the risk. And it can be made for decisions concerning conditional release. So if somebody, say a release risk they're going out for parole or her, have they not made enough progress on their rehabilitation correctional plan to reduce the risk to be released or if they are released, so there's special conditions or restrictions that should be placed. For instance, should they say not have unsupervised contact around children for instance or should they be required to have a curfew and live in a certain residence to help manage their risk.

CW: So it can be quite comprehensive.

MO: Oh you bet.

CW: How standardized are they, like is there room for interpretation or discretion in how their results are interpreted?

MO: Oh absolutely. I mean they're not all static tools. I mean there are static tools that are made up of criminal history and historical variables and that sort of thing, but there are just as many, if not more, dynamic tools than there are static tools. And so there's discretion that goes in terms of the questions you ask and in terms of how you rate the items and there's discretion in terms of what you do with that information. And so it's not uncommon for people to administer multiple tools and they integrate them through a process called case formulation to arrive at a risk summary and a set of risk management recommendations. So there is a lot of discretion that's involved and the uses of the tools are trained to do that. People using them aren't robots.

CW: So I mean the crux of this is obviously whether or not there's some cultural bias that Indigenous inmates face. In your view how compelling is the evidence that they can be applied equally to Indigenous and non-Indigenous offenders and be just as accurate?

MO: Well I mean I think there's an important empirical question there and the research shows that the instruments do differentiate recidivists from non-recidivists. They do predict recidivism for Indigenous and non-Indigenous offenders and that's just a matter of fact. The research does exist out there to show that. Actually the interesting thing is that there was a comment made about the GSIR earlier, it was actually four federal government reports that have all shown that the GSIR actually does predict recidivism in Indigenous offenders. Now it doesn't get used with that population and that's another policy decision, but there are four documents out there on the World Wide Web that you can just pull up using Google and they all show that it works. So the thing is, is that these tools even those impugned in the Ewert matter, do work and there has been subsequent research conducted since and I've been involved in some of that work investigating their properties and so yeah. What we find is that the prediction is sometimes a little bit lower, sometimes the same, but there can be a lot of things that do account for that. But research does support they work.

CW: I'd like to bring in another guest. Eleanore Sunchild is a lawyer in the Battlefords, on Poundmaker First Nation in Saskatchewan. Her work with clients often involves dealing with the results of risk assessment tests. Eleanore, good morning.

ELEANORE SUNCHILD: Good morning Connie.

CW: What do you think about how reliable these kinds of tools are in predicting an Indigenous offenders' risk level.

ES: I think it's arguable Connie. I mean there are some questions in there that are geared towards bias and so unless you have a person who has no previous bias at all and I think that the correctional service workers who are administering these will have some experiences based on their life and I don't believe that the majority of them are Indigenous, so they will have their own views and if you can put discretion in there, then of course there is going to be a bias one way or the other.

CW: Are there specific questions that you think would end up creating unfair results for Indigenous people?

ES: Well, the questions are geared towards poverty, you know violence, marginalization, alcohol abuse, family discord, the home situation, all of these factors, as an Indigenous person within the criminal justice system, they have experienced the negative side of that due to the colonization in our country. So of course it's going to create a higher risk for those individuals who are incarcerated.

CW: So the CBC did ask Correctional Services of Canada for information about how risk assessments are performed and in a statement, spokesperson Martine Rondeau said that, "CSC relies on due diligence and the adherence to professional standards of the licensed psychologists who worked for the CSC, but also that they are sometimes outsourced to outside contractors and it would be the responsibility of the contractor to meet requisite test administration criteria and or practice within their area of competence." Eleanore what have you seen with your clients? What are your concerns about how the tests are actually administered?

ES: There's a lot of education that needs to be done in our in our country. People need to be educated about the effects of residential schools, about the effects of colonisation and most people, unless they're working on the ground level, don't have that sort of knowledge. They haven't worked with Indigenous offenders to know the issues within our communities and the issues that affect these inmates who are serving time within the correctional system, they're not understood in terms of the whole history of our country. You know, most people who are in the correctional system have either been directly affected by Indian residential school or have a family member who went to Indian Residential school - a mother, a father, a grandparent. And so those cycles, they continue and those have to be understood by the people who are administering the test. And I think that there has to be a lot of education first, before you can say that those issues are understood.

CW: Mark Olver, let's bring you back in here. Do you see any issue with how these tools are administered and if this lack or gap in knowledge can also affect the way that they're interpreted?

MO: I mean I think that people need to be responsible users and consumers of this information, but I guess what I would also submit and this is also from my own personal experience in the process of conducting risk assessment is that, yes a lot of those questions are asked, but we ask a lot of other questions too on top of that. And so the thing is that we'll ask about attitude for instance, we might ask about term mental health diagnoses and dynamics. We might ask about things like emotional regulation controls. We might ask about inappropriate or aberrant sexual interests and so forth. In the process of conducting a risk assessment, like licensed psychologists could quite literally conduct a three hour interview and probably ask like five or six hundred questions and sometimes even multiple interviews. So there's a lot of information that goes into it that gets integrated and I think that there are some really, really key points that are being raised and in that sense and that people need to have sensitivity and be cognizant of these historical and systemic issues. But I will also note though, is that whether these sorts of risk factors they predict across both groups and so if Indigenous people are more likely to score higher on certain types of risk factors, those risk factors do predict recidivism across both groups and I think that it's a concern if Indigenous people do score higher on it. Something does need to be done about, but that also doesn't mean that the risk factors are junk.

CW: Elleanore, from what you've seen with your own clients, what are the ramifications for Indigenous inmates who get high scores on the assessments. How does it affect their journey through the system?

ES: I've seen risk assessments being used before sentencing and also after sentencing. If the client scores higher on a risk assessment, it seems to go against Gladue. The case of Gladue says that based on a high number of Indigenous inmates within the correctional system, the court needs to look at alternatives to incarceration. And the sentencing judge must pay particular attention to the circumstances of Aboriginal offenders because those circumstances are unique and different from those of non-Aboriginal offenders. So basically, the court is supposed to find alternatives to incarceration, but based on a higher score on a risk assessment say done in part of a pre-sentence report, the judge may consider sending that inmate to a period of incarceration to look at deterrence because the offender has scored higher. So there's a contradiction there and I've seen that depending on who you're before or the circumstances of the offender in court. So that's prior to sentencing, but also when these tests are administered within the correctional system and that's the whole point of this court case that's in the Supreme Court of Canada, is the higher he scored on that risk assessment, the less likely he was to obtain certain programs or even look at early release or unescorted visits out of the correctional system. So the risk assessments while they have a purpose, they are limiting the Indigenous inmate or offender in the options available to them.

CW: There has been some idea that it actually, you know there's an argument that risk assessments could actually help identify an offender's needs and address them. Eleanore, what would you say to that?

ES: Well, that's good if they're used for that purpose, but I've also seen them used as a way to keep an inmate in a facility or to sentence them to a facility. So I guess it would depend on who is administering them and what their interpretation of the assessment is at the end.

CW: Mark, data provided to CBC by a correctional investigator, Ivan Zinger's office, shows that Indigenous offenders are less likely to get parole and more likely to spend longer portions of their sentences behind bars. Do you think there's room for improving the way that these tests are carried out and impact the Indigenous inmates who take them?

MO: Well, I think that what you've identified there are two related, but possibly not entirely concordant issues. So I guess the question is there's the use of the instruments and then there's also time and custody and parole decisions. And so I think the thing is that I think probably more can always be done to aid rehabilitation and to aid reintegration. Also these persons don't take the test to per se, they're administered and rated on the basis of a case file and historical and interview information. So I think the thing is as a key issue that's come up with is use. So the issue is even less about these so-called tests themselves and it's about the manner in which they happen to be employed. And so if somebody uses a dynamic measure, which can assess change and they show that somebody's risk has been brought down, that can actually be a ticket to freedom and release for people and I've seen that happen for lots of people, whether they're Indigenous or otherwise. And so I think that probably more can always be done, but I mean a lot of it is based on somebody's progress in the correctional plan, the administration of a dynamic tool, capturing that change they made and then making release recommendations and then ultimately the Parole Board of Canada makes these types of decisions. And a risk instrument is within a larger risk assessment, which is one piece of information that they use in making these types of decisions.

CW: Okay well we're going to have to leave that there, but we will be watching this decision tomorrow. Thank you both for joining us.

MO: You bet. My Pleasure.

ES: Thank you.

CW: Mark Olver is a psychology professor at the University of Saskatchewan. He administers risk assessments to inmates. He was in Saskatoon. And Eleanore Sunchild is a lawyer in the Battlefords, on Poundmaker First Nation in Saskatchewan. The Supreme Court of Canada decision is expected tomorrow on whether the assessments used to predict a criminal's likelihood to reoffend violate the Charter of Rights of Indigenous people. That's our program for today. Stay tuned to Radio One for Q. Humorist David Sedaris is on the show to talk about his new essay collection, "Calypso." And remember you can always take The Current with you to go on the CBC Radio app. It lets you browse through past episodes of the show and start listening in just a few seconds. It's free from the App Store or Google Play. Finally today, we heard about some of the risks involved now that humans and cougars come into increasing contact. We'll end the show with some advice about what to do if you encounter a cougar or a mountain lion. This is part of an informational video from the state of Colorado's Parks and Wildlife Division. I'm Connie Walker sitting in for Anna Maria Tremonti. Thanks for listening to The Current.

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Informational video from the State of Colorado's Parks and Wildlife division.

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June 12, 2018 episode transcript

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