Note: Transcripts may contain errors. If you wish to re-use all, or part of, a transcript, please contact CBC for permission. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print. Copyright © CBC 2018

The Current Transcript for November 26, 2018

Host: Anna Maria Tremonti

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

New investigations reveals implanted medical devices approved in Canada despite risks

Guests: Valerie Ouellet

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: Medical devices are everywhere.

VOICE 2: It's pretty amazing. Tongue depressor.

VOICE 3: Prosthetic limbs.

VOICE 4: Implants.

VOICE 2: Pacemakers.

VOICE 1: Because it's everywhere, we have to be careful.

VOICE 5: After my operation, I started having health issues.

VOICE 6: Back pain. It was debilitating. I could barely walk.

VOICE 7: I was going blind, I was seeing stars.

VOICE 8: It changed the full direction of my life.

VOICE 9: How can you clear something that's been shown to be dangerous.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: Well the Netflix documentary, The Bleeding Edge, which you just heard a part of, takes a deep dive into the medical device industry in the United States and the devastating impact it can have on patients. And here at home, an investigation by CBC Radio Canada, the Toronto Star and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists has found that for thousands of Canadians, the very devices that are often billed as miracle fixes to medical issues, are sometimes too good to be true. Because there are flaws in the way so many of them are approved, how little patients know about what's been put under their skin and the results of using them have been at times debilitating and sometimes fatal. Valerie Ouellet is a senior data journalist with the CBC's investigative unit. She's been working on this investigation for a year and she joins me in our Toronto studio to tell us more. Hello.

VALERIE OUELLET: Hello.

AMT: What did you get your hands on and how much data did you look at?

VO: We obtained an exclusive copy of Health Canada's medical device incidence database. It contains information on every death, injury, complaint, technical issue ever flagged to the health agency in the past 40 years. That amounts to roughly 160,000 reports about medical products like artificial hips, insulin pumps, heart valves, pacemakers, but also everyday objects like wheelchairs and hospital beds, even contact lenses. In the United States, these incidents are all online on a searchable portal, but in Canada they've never been made public and it took CBC more than two years to obtain them, using Access to Information requests. And then it took us several more months to really crunch the numbers, read and really understand what we had found.

AMT: And what did you learn?

VO: We essentially ended up with a database of complaints. Each incident is like a little story. What happened, when it happened, what were the consequences, but we don't really know who it happened to of course because all these details are redacted. Some include very heartbreaking stories though. I remember reading about a woman whose contraceptive device migrated in to her bowel. Another one is a diabetic teenager who was found dead by his parents after a graduation party and then we found another story where a man said he was shocked by his pacemaker while playing golf and in all of these sad stories is one big looming question. Is the device responsible? And it's important to say the data we obtained does not have a definitive answer for each case, but for the first time, we're really getting a big picture. 14,000 injuries and at least 1400 reports of deaths in the past decade and this could very well be the tip of the iceberg. Health Canada itself admits these incidents are under reported, which means that many Canadians could have been hurt by medical products and still be invisible.

AMT: So this is a story about regulation and oversight, but it's ultimately a story about people. Tell me about some of the people you met who've gone through this.

VO: I want to start with Noreen Wideman. She likes to be called Nonie. She's a woman in her 60s, living just outside Fort St. John, B.C.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: I had a flock of 80 sheep. East Friesian dairy sheep. I milked them.

VO: She lives on a farm with sheeps and llamas, all sorts of animals. She's a strong, blunt, honest, very active person. She grew up on a farm. She still runs a farm now. She says she is definitely not the kind of person to run to the doctor when she has a problem, but about 10 years ago she did have a health problem and it got pretty uncomfortable.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: When I had surgery in 2008 for incontinence, I just wanted.to be able to lift something without wetting my pants, to cough without wetting my pants, to sneeze, not be embarrassed about the whole problem that so many women face. I just wanted to have a belly laugh that you know I didn't have to cross my legs and do the stork pose, so I wasn't leaking tears down my legs.

VO: At the time she says her doctor suggested a vaginal Mesh. It's something that's often used to help treat incontinence and doctors told her it would help keep her bladder in control and really sold it to her as almost a miracle fix.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: It with a new Mesh. It was a smaller Mesh. It would change my life. I would be dry. It was minimally invasive. It would be a like a 15 minute procedure. Complications were very rare, so I thought oh okay, this sounds good. This sounds like the answer to my prayers that you know just for once it would be nice to be dry all the time.

AMT: So what happened after Nonie got that Mesh put in?

VO: Well she said the first six months, things were great, but then it became painful for her to have intercourse and then the pain became constant. She describes it like a knife in her crotch all the time. She developed symptoms she also never had her whole life like asthma, chronic anemia. One time she had a cold and she says it lasted months and she ended up in the ER with infected lungs. She was prescribed Oxycodone at one point, but worried she would develop addiction problem, so she steered clear of that and all the while she starts becoming convinced that maybe this is her Mesh.

AMT: So what did she do?

VO: Well to distract herself from the pain, she did what a lot of Canadians do. She turned to Dr. Google. She decided to investigate her own case by going online and then she found several Facebook groups of women with the same product. It's called Gynecare TVT Secur Mesh.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: I started googling my symptoms cause I couldn't believe that there's no explanation for this pain. I can't finding anything and I still wasn't thinking TVT, I wasn't suspecting the Mesh tape at all. I googled my symptoms in to the computer and I came up with a law suit site, with all these symptoms and thought holy, these are all my symptoms and this is related to the TVT Secur tape that's in my body.

AMT: So while she's finding more stories like hers online, doctors are convincing her to keep this in?

VO: Yeah, doctors prescribed her an estrogen cream that would help keep the Mesh in place, but all the while Nonie's feeling like her body is rejecting it and so she makes a really strange unsettling discovery and a warning that some listeners might find this hard to listen to.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: And then in my underwear, in this white cream is these blue fibers, these blue flecks and I looked at it and thought what the heck is this? So then I clued in, it is finally breaking apart and it is coming out in my vagina, in the walls, I can feel it. And you stick your fingers in, you can drag out these little pieces and then you've got sore spots. And it felt like, if you've ever had a canker sore in your mouth, just imagine a four inch one in your vagina that every time you move, it's irritated. Every time anything touches it, you're irritated.

AMT: It's so uncomfortable listen to her. When she finds these flecks, what does she do?

VO: Well she goes full Nancy Drew. So she starts collecting her own urine samples using milk filters that she uses on the farm and then she starts taping these little blue flecks onto white business cards, so she could see them better. And then she walks over to the local elementary school and she borrows a microscope and then she looks inside.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: I couldn't believe my eyes at first, but I thought okay this is blue polypropylene. I looked it up, it's the blue colour, it's then there was suspicious violet coloured fibers. And I thought well am I contaminating the samples? And then I did some more research and the tabs of the Mesh they use a violet colour dye on the stuff so that they can identify the ends when they're inserting it. And I was just. like stunned. I thought, it's not chunks, it's coming out in tiny little slivers and it's this blue lint.

VO: And to Nonie these samples are so important. She showed us so many pictures that she took of what she was seeing under the microscope lens. And it meant so much to her because she finally had proof that something was wrong, that it was not all in her head.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: I took pictures because first the doctors are doubting me and then not listening and I'm thinking maybe I'm crazy, maybe I'm overreacting. Then it became an obsession, almost proof every day that these fibers are still coming out, they're still bothering me. So I have a big bag of filters saved up just to prove to myself I wasn't crazy.

AMT: So she's walking around with this bag of samples that she's collected. How did the doctors react when she showed them?

VO: Well she says she made an appointment with her doctor and her doctor wouldn't even look at it. Meanwhile, it hurts to pee. She says she feels like there was fiberglass in her underwear and this whole time the pain is still there. It's not going away and it really is starting to break her.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: In that appointment he had suggested physical therapy and that's when I burst out into tears in his office and the nurse comforted me. I have this Mesh in me that's gone brittle, it's coming out in slivers and you want a massage therapist to go in there and massage my pelvic floor to reduce my tight muscles that are in spasming because I'm in so much pain. They're clenched so that it's too immobilize you. Your muscles try to immobilize you and you want somebody in there manipulating my pelvic floor and breaking this Mesh apart. I was just, at that point I was so depressed.

AMT: What kind of toll was this taking on the rest of her life, Valerie?

VO: Well she basically retreated from her daily life. She says her husband and her eventually had to move, sell her beloved farm and home and her whole day became planned around when she had to urinate.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: I had so pain messages going up. I couldn't, I would miss the signals and I needed to go to the bathroom. I would get them last second. I would have urging continence. I became socially isolated, I didn't want to go anywhere because I was afraid of having an accident in public. I got tired of explaining, trying to explain why I walked like I had a stick stuck up my butt is because I felt like I had a knife in my crotch and I walked funny. It was painful to walk.

AMT: What did it take for the Mesh to be taken out, where did she go?.

VO: After four years of pain and trying to convince a specialist to help her, finally in December 2011, she hops on a plane and flies across the province to Vancouver. And at this point, Nonie said she had become suicidal and because this had now become a threat to her health and her safety, she was finally able to get a referral to the right specialist. And now she goes under the knife again, except this time it's to take out the Mesh.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: I don't remember anything other than waking up in the recovery room. And it was like somebody had finally taken the saw out of me. It was just like instant relief. Even with surgical pain, it was a relief. That horrible pain was gone, that knife was gone. It was, I couldn't believe it.

AMT: Wow, but that's not even the end of her story. What happened when she tried to get some answers about all of this?

VO: Well once her Mesh was removed, Nonie wanted to understand how this could have ended up inside her in the first place. Why did Health Canada approve this and based on what? So she decided to go back to the beginning. She filed a formal Access to Information request, asking Health Canada for all scientific studies submitted by Ethicon, the maker of her Gynecare TVT Secur Mesh and Health Canada replied. They told her because she was not a scientist or a doctor, she was not considered qualified to see those documents.

AMT: You got to be kidding me. Who else did she try to get answers from?

VO: Well she wrote to the attorney general's office, she wrote to the Ministry of Health, last year she filed a petition to the House of Commons and every time she's told the same thing. It's up to manufacturers to report problems. And Nonie feels like that's like asking a fox to report himself for taking chickens from the hen house. Currently in Canada, it's only mandatory for companies to report problems. Doctors, hospitals, even patients can report, but they don't legally have to. And according to a Canadian study that was published last year, they don't likely report. That study found that a majority of physicians viewed reporting as unnecessary or futile and Nonie also found safety warnings on Mesh on Health Canada's website. She said she even found one warning saying that Health Canada had received several reports of erosion, just like what she went through. But she said she didn't know about any of this.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: Who's going to report to the Mesh manufacturer when you're not given the information on what product is put in your body. I mean my car has parts in it. If there's a recall, if there's a product. in that car that's faulty, you get a message. I've had lots of letters about things in my car, but I didn't get a message about the product that was in my body.

AMT: So what happened here, how was this approved?

VO: Well we spoke to a family doctor and a researcher in Toronto to get a better understanding of how devices are approved in the first place and he says a lot of patients, even doctors, don't know that just because a device is approved by Health Canada, it does not mean it is risk-free.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: I think people assume that there must be a lot of evidence backing a device if it is approved by Health Canada and I think most people would be surprised to find out how limited the evidence often is, both regarding the benefits of these devices and regarding the harms. And so I think it means that everyone needs to be more cautious. So that includes doctors recommending or inserting these devices and patients who are contemplating using them.

VO: He says the fact that Health Canada does not share all the information it can with healthcare providers, information like the incident reports we obtained, can put Canadians at risk.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: It's very difficult to know what these devices are approved based on. We rely to a large extent on information that's posted or provided by the regulator, Health Canada and relatively speaking for devices, there's little information available about the clinical effects, both the benefits and the risks of these devices. I think there's an assumption that if something is approved and recommended or prescribed or inserted by a specialist, that there's no need for concern because why would Health Canada approve it? Why would a specialist use this device, if it didn't work or if it was harmful? So I think yeah there's sometimes maybe not as much scrutiny given to these devices as there should be.

VO: And during our investigation, we also found out about another little known fact about how these devices come to the Canadian market, something that happened for Nonie's device. It's sometimes called grandfathering. Her product was approved in part because it was similar to an earlier generation of Mesh and so the manufacturer of her product could build a case saying it's just like this other one and because they did that, they didn't have to submit as much scientific evidence or any. Health Canada confirmed that this is a procedure in an email.

AMT: So why does it seem so difficult to test these devices? Can't we test medical devices the way we test drugs?

VO: Well for several reasons and a big one being ethics. It's fairly easy to test a drug for a long period of time on a lot of people. You can split your group into two and then give one group a placebo and another group the real drug, but you couldn't really give half a group a placebo hip implant or a placebo pacemaker. And it's also very hard to convince people to undergo painful surgery in the name of science, which means clinical trials for medical devices are often done with smaller groups for smaller periods of time and often done and animals or cadavers and sometimes as we found out in this investigation, not done at all.

AMT: I'm speaking with Valerie Ouellet, a senior data journalist with CBC's investigative unit. She has been working on a yearlong investigation by CBC Radio Canada, the Toronto Star and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, into medical devices that have been tied to thousands of injuries and in some cases deaths in Canada. You can find more about this story and see pictures of Nonie Wideman at cbc.ca/thecurrent. Now we asked Johnson & Johnson how it had tested Nonie's TVT Secur prior to approval. In a statement, the manufacturer said it had conducted, "numerous cadaver labs and animal studies, to evaluate pull out strength and fixation forces and holding ability of the Mesh." It went on to say those studies coupled with the decade long clinical history of two similar devices. "demonstrated the safety and efficacy of TV Secur." So tell me who else you met in your investigation into these medical devices.

VO: Well in this investigation, we wanted to understand how devices ended up inside people, but also find out how difficult it can be to get them taken out when your implant failed and that's how we met Gloria McSherry. She lives in Creemore, Ontario, about a couple hours north of Toronto and she got her hip replaced in 2007. She said even weeks past her surgery, she just knew something was wrong.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: So I made it to a month, post surgery and I went and saw my surgeon and it was not a good interview. Again, I was very upset, I was crying, I said I'm in terrible pain, I can barely move and they're trying to kind of get me to be able to move me around, just hurts like crazy. Things are kind of frozen, it's the best way to describe it. I said to them, I feel like I've been hit by a truck.

AMT: So some pain is to be expected after a surgery like that, but what made her feel like this was different, that something is wrong?

VO: Well it wasn't only that the pain didn't go away, it was that she started to notice all these weird things also happening to her, like how she couldn't go outside when it was cold because her left side would seize up and then sometimes she would also feel like her legs shifted around in the hip socket.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: Every day my leg would be a different length. So some days it would be an inch longer on the operated side, sometimes only an eighth of an inch longer than the other side, but you always felt off kilter. You never felt like you were balanced or even in your hip. Now first, it's quite common apparently to feel "long," but I was, as I said I wasn't making progress. This was something that was happening everyday I wasn't feeling anymore solid on my feet. I felt long all the time.

AMT: What was her doctor saying to her in the meantime?

VO: Well she said the hardest thing about this whole experience wasn't even her long leg or the pain, it was feeling not listened to, after repeatedly asking her doctor for help.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: And because I was crying and begging him to do something. [crying] To do something for me and he said, you know what, I think you're depressed. And I said no, I'm not depressed, I'm in pain.

AMT: Wow, you can really hear how painful it is for her to even talk about now all these years later. What did she do next?

VO: So it's now 2009, more than a year since her surgery, and she decided to see a private doctor in Toronto who recommended she get a second opinion. And she gets a huge shock when she hears back from that private doctor.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: So she arranged to have my surgical notes sent down to Massachusetts General in Boston and they reviewed my notes and came back with an opinion that yeah, everything looks like it should be okay, but by the way, this particular part has been recalled in the United States. That was the first time I heard that the part that I may have was not, was faulty, wasn't performing the way that it should. That people in the U.S. were having to take them out.

AMT: She didn't know any of this?

VO: She says this was the first time she'd ever heard about any safety warning. And we have to go through a quick timeline here to really understand. In 2005, the Durom Cup, the kind of hip replacement she got was approved by Health Canada. Two years later in 2007, Gloria went under the knife for her hip surgery and then in 2008, sales of the device were suspended because bone wouldn't adhere to the cup. In December 2009, a year later, Health Canada issued a warning, but it still allowed it to be sold. And Gloria said she heard about none of this. It's not completely surprising though, court documents later showed that Zimmer was not keeping track of patients like Gloria at all. Instead the U.S. company kept track of how many artificial hips it had sold in Canada and to which hospitals. And so hospital staff had to dig through their own records to identify the patients. It took several months, but to be fair, Zimmer wasn't even legally required to do this in Canada. According to our current law, it's the responsibility of the manufacturer to keep track of the devices and who buys them. And so in Zimmers' eyes, the buyer was the hospital.

AMT: What happened next?

VO: Well Gloria was shocked. She decided to sue Zimmer, the maker of her hip implant and she found out very quickly that in fact she was not the only one in pain, far from that. In 2011, when Health Canada withdrew the device from the market, around 5000 of these hip implants had been put inside Canadians and 1500 injury reports were made to Health Canada. It became one of the biggest legal story in Canada, involving a medical device. Three class action lawsuits were settled in 2016, including Gloria's and she said she sued out of spite, more than anything.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: You feel betrayed. You feel that your trust wasn't warranted. You feel sick. You feel duped. You feel so many things. You feel stupid because you think well I should have done this or if I had asked that, but I would say that you're the person in pain and you're the person who's gone through this bad procedure and it's really not your job to be sorting it out. It's supposed to be professional people that are sorting it out for you. If you can't depend on people when you're ill and in pain to help you, like when can you?

AMT: Wow, you know Valerie these are just two of thousands of stories, what can we take away from this?

VO: Yeah as you say, these are just two stories, two different devices, but the similarities are striking. Both of these devices were approved for sale with limited scientific evidence. Both of these patients say they were not believed by their doctors initially. Both of these devices were recalled months or weeks earlier in other countries and then both of these patients say they found out about important safety alerts through their own research. And to bring it back to our original question, Anna Maria, we need to ask ourselves, how many Glorias and Nonies are there out there, not included in these 160,000 reports we have.

AMT: How does Canada compare to other countries when it comes to reporting on medical device incidents, as they're called?

VO: Well experts say there's still a lot of room for improvement here, but overall Canada is in the top tier and has actually one of the strongest regulations when it comes to this, especially when you consider that only 20 percent of countries even have a structure to be able to monitor problems. That includes other countries like Australia, Japan, the United States, but the fact of the matter is that problems tied to medical devices are not reported as much as they should be and that remains concerning. If a faulty device is not reported here, it could very well be approved and potentially go on to be implanted and hurt other patients in other countries and that makes more invisible victims.

AMT: Is there any sign that there may be changes to our current systems now that stories like these are coming to light?

VO: We asked Health Canada several times for an accountability interview and they declined. In a very long statement, the federal regulator said that it is planning to change federal laws to make it mandatory for hospitals to report and Health Canada says that it's going to help with some of the under reporting problem and it could happen as soon as 2019. The government says it's also planning to implement more tools and programs to help people file reports properly and they also say they are looking into possibly creating an online database so people can search these medical device incidents we obtained. But Health Canada also told us what it will not be doing, is creating a public registry to help track devices in Canadians using them, citing the high cost of doing so.

AMT: So what questions should Canadians be asking of their doctors, if they're offered a medical device?

VO: Well I asked the doctor. He says that what matters most really is informed consent. That means that as a patient you should ask as many questions as you need to feel comfortable before you agree. Other than that, it's probably not a bad idea to ask your physician for the name of the potential device that's offered to you, to also ask your doctor to explain why he or she chose this device for you. Why is it a good fit at all? You can also ask your doctor how many times they've implanted the device and how comfortable they feel with it. And lastly, you can also do your own research, read recalls, law suits, scientific studies.

AMT: What are you going to do with those 160,000 reports you went through, Valerie?

VO: Well those reports, we're making them public. The CBC is making the data obtained available to everyone online. In fact, it is online right now. You can look up any product by their brand name or manufacturer, even by a health complication and see how many times it was mentioned in a report submitted to Health Canada and also read about what happened and what was the problem. Of course, we would recommend that you speak to your doctor if you see any results that are of concern to you.

AMT: So in other words, you can be armed with lots more information.

VO: Start that conversation.

AMT: This is an important story. Thanks for bringing it to us.

VO: You're welcome Anna Maria.

AMT: Valerie Ouellet, senior data journalist with the CBC's investigative unit, with me in our Toronto studio. Just to note here, we asked Zimmers Biomet, the makers of Gloria McSherry's hip replacement for comment. It sent a statement saying that the safety of its patients has always been its top priority and that it "adheres to strict regulatory standards." You can find more about the medical devices investigation by CBC Radio Canada, The Toronto Star and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists on our site. You can see pictures of Nonie Wideman and Gloria McSherry. You can also access that searchable online database of incident reports that Valerie was just talking about. It's all on our website, cbc.ca/thecurrent.

Back To Top »

Vancouver 'using rainbow trout and different baits' to catch koi-killing otter

Guests: Howard Norman

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: We have a situation at the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Gardens. We've got an otter in there, eating the koi. The park board have been trying to trap it.

AMT: Yes indeed, there is a situation in Vancouver. A river otter has found its way into a classical Chinese garden. It is decimating the population of koi fish in the pond there and suffice to say the otter odyssey and the city's attempts to trap it have transfixed Vancouverites. A Twitter account for the otter has sprung up. Humans have been engaging with the semi-aquatic animal there.

SOUNDCLIP

[Music]

VOICE 1: Foolish humans you'll never catch me. I'm not trapped in the park. The fishes are trapped with me.

VOICE 2: Has it occurred to anyone that catching the koi might be easier than catching the water?

VOICE 1: I can attest that catching koi is easier.

VOICE 3: I'm glad to see the Chinatown otter has a robust social media presence. It must be a lot of work to handle that and chasing down delicious koi.

VOICE 1: To be fair catching a large koi in a small pond is pretty easy. A fish in a barrel kind of situation.

VOICE 4: Maybe we need a lifelike robot decoy koi, that will explode when bitten into by the otter.

VOICE 1: There's no way this plan could go horribly wrong.

AMT: And here is the mayor, Kennedy Stewart, on The Early Edition, CBC Vancouver's morning show.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: Well we're all keeping an eye on it at the city. It's not we're having, not having regular briefings or anything, but we are you know we are aware of it at the city, for sure.

VOICE 2: Do we need an otter taskforce?

VOICE 1: I don't. I don't think we need an otter task force. I think that the park board could handle.

AMT: There you go. If there were a task force, that is the mayor speaking to Stephen Quinn. If there was a task force, Howard Norman would be leading it. He is the Director of Parks for the Vancouver Park Board and he joins us from our Vancouver studio. Hello, Howard Norman.

HOWARD NORMAN: Good morning, Anna Maria.

AMT: What's the latest news?

HN: Well the latest news is otter, one, trapper, nothing. As of last night at 7:30, we have not captured the elusive otter.

AMT: How many koi has that otter eaten?

HN: Well the estimate from the garden staff are around 10.

AMT: Wow. So it's unusual, you wouldn't, you should be able to get that little guy.

HN: Well you would think so, wouldn't you? Yeah, I thought it would be easy, it's proven not to be quite so easy. We have employed the services of a wildlife relocation expert through the provincial government and we have six traps in place now, so we're hopeful that possibly this morning we will have that otter.

AMT: As long as the otter's not listening. So tell me about the first sighting of the otter.

HN: Well it came to my attention, a week ago Sunday, where the garden staff sent me a message saying that they have this otter eating the koi. And since then, everybody has come out of the woodwork and brought photos forward. There's a photo I think it was from the Saturday night of the otter crossing Keiffer street. It was spotted at Andy Livingston field, the artificial fields across the street playing around. It's been in several other parts of the neighbourhood and it's all came in throughout the week, little tidbits of information of otter spottings, but it's pretty comfortable at the moment Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Garden.

AMT: And so it's sort of it kind of wanders in and out, as far as you know.

HN: Well I think as of last week, it's taken up permanent residence at the garden. The garden, the classical garden has large walls around it, only a couple of gates to get in. It's not the easiest place for anybody to get in, human or otter.

AMT: OK well tell us a little bit more, for people outside of Vancouver, exactly where the gardens are and what they look like.

HN: Yeah they're on the edge of Chinatown. This is the first classical garden that was built 34 years ago, outside of China and it has again, high walls probably 10 to 15 feet, only two gates that enter into the garden and they're big metal steel gates. It's surrounded by heavy traffic streets Keiffer and Pender. And again, it's not the easiest place to get to for anybody, never mind an otter.

AMT: It's a really, an oasis in the city.

HN: Yeah correct and the pond, you know people, when I heard the little bit before about you know fish in a barrel or a little pool, it's actually a fairly large pond and it has little canals and channels and backwaters and bridges and the rocks that they used all have crevices and nooks and crannies, places for an otter to hide, there's little channels. So it makes it sound easy, the pond is you know four to five feet deep, it's murky and has a mud bottom. So even trying to spot the koi, they are up on the surface in the summertime, but this time of year, they don't always show themselves. So it's not the easiest place to spot the koi this time of year.

AMT: It's a veritable otter paradise, especially if you're the otter. Do we know that it's only one otter?

HN: Actually we don't, but we're not seeing a bunch of otters around. So we spotted the otter several times. It seems to be a single one, but I mean for me, they all look the same, so I'm hoping it's only one.

AMT: Now you had tried baited traps before, but now you brought in an expert trapper. What has this person done differently?

HN: Well not a lot different. I mean we have some staff that have worked on trapping animals that are problematic in the past, but we tried one trap and unfortunately we weren't successful, but the otter did manage to get in there and get our bait. So in the interest of time and of course trying to save the koi, we called the provincial government, minister of environment to recommended a trapper that they use in areas that they have problems with wildlife, particularly otters. So we want to live trap it. We want to make sure it was safe and happy and healthy when it got removed, so this gentleman came in and he set up his traps and he's been using rainbow trout and different baits. He has different scents to try to capture the water, but again with the pond the way it is, it's not like it's a little pathway that the otter is using continuously. This otter is all over the place. So with the six traps, we're hopeful, he's confident that we will get the otter.

AMT: And what will you do with the otter, once the otter's trapped.

HN: Well the lower mainland here, the government actually has a map of areas where there's otters or room for more otters. So they have an area in the Fraser Valley out by the Harrison River that they're talking about, possibly moving that otter to relocate it. I've had some offers from different people about where we should take it, but the government will decide where it goes.

AMT: Do we know if it's a male or a female otter?

HN: We have no idea. I had somebody contact me yesterday from Whistler. They have a pond there that has a koi in it that somebody let go out of their aquarium that have taken off, so they would like to have the otter. Other people have given me different ideas, but I think that this otter will, it's probably a three to four year old male is what they're guessing and it'll end up somewhere out in the Fraser Valley where there's lots of fish and lots of good habitat.

AMT: Okay and we can't lose focus on the fish because the death of, these are prized koi in these ponds are they not?

HN: Yeah, they really are. They're extraordinary koi. The oldest one is estimated to be 54-years-old, that's Madonna. We're not sure if Madonna has been captured by the otter yet or eaten by the otter, but definitely some of the bigger ones have now fallen victim to the otter.

AMT: And you're saying that it's not so easy to even count the koi right now because the waters are a bit murky and they don't hang out on the surface?

HN: Yeah they do come up if the sun comes out. I mean the garden staff has been monitoring it daily on the weekend. There was an attempt made to start to capture some of these koi. So they did manage to capture one and it's been shipped off to the Vancouver Aquarium to hold them. We did this two years ago when we actually drained the pond and realigned it. So there was at that time, 14 large mature koi, large mature koi, were moved to the aquarium and they housed them for us during the renovation of the pond. So we know for sure that there was 14 released back in the pond and we think there were several others as well. So I mean we know there's probably five to six left.

AMT: How many do you think the otter has taken?

HN: Approximately, we're estimating ten.

AMT: And so you're removing these for their own safety?

HN: Correct. But again, we thought it would be easier to trap the otter. And again, we're still going to have the otter there, either way we need to remove the otter. So we have one koi set aside, we'll try to lower the pond level this morning, started this morning and then hopefully that'll help try to get the remaining koi out of there.

AMT: And can they be replaced easily, the lost koi?

HN: That's a good question. I mean I'm sure there's people around here that have a koi. We have some at our conservatory up in the park that we have that are quite large as well, but maybe there's somebody who will either donate or they'll find a place they can purchase some new ones.

AMT: And in the meantime, people are declaring themselves, Team Otter or Team Koi.

HN: Oh it's so much fun. It's not funny that the koi get eaten.

AMT: It's not fun for the koi.

HN: No it's not, but people are having a lot of fun with it. There's all kinds of signs and yes, buttons are being made with otters and koi on them. There's all kinds of things going on.

AMT: And so again, today you start draining a little bit of the pond?

HN: Yeah we're going to try to take it down to about two feet and that'll give us an opportunity to corral the remaining koi to one section of the pond and hopefully collect them and move them off to the aquarium. That's the plan, but again, if you look at, if you just view it on Google for example, you'll see it's a big pond with lots of little arms and back eddies. So it's not quite so easy and it's not clear water either, it's very murky and muddy so. But we're going to try everything we can to save the remaining koi and at the same time capture the otter and move him to a safer facility.

AMT: I'm guessing you didn't think that chasing an otter would be your main issue when you got this job?

HN: I have been with the park board for many, many, many years and this is my first otter attempt to capture.

AMT: Well you know I would wish you luck, but then I'll be seen as taking sides. So I'm just going to just want to know what happens. We'll wait to hear. Howard Norman, thanks for your time.

HN: Oh thank you very much.

AMT: Bye bye.

HN: Bye.

AMT: Howard Norman, Director of Parks for the Vancouver Park Board. He is in Vancouver. You can follow the otter on Twitter @ChinatownOtter. Let us know what you think @TheCurrentCBC.

Back To Top »

Harry Leslie Smith, 95-year-old activist and podcaster, critically ill in hospital

Guests: Harry Leslie Smith

AMT: Hi, I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is a podcast from the November 26th edition of The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: My name is Harry Leslie Smith and I am almost 100 years old. My memories and my voice are my last weapon against the political tides that want to return Britain and the world, to the darkness of my youth. When the ordinary worker crimped for existence, while the one per cent of that day, lived off the fat of our labour like princes during the days of slavery. So welcome to my last act of defiance.

AMT: With those words Harry Leslie Smith launched his first podcast. It's called, Harry's Last Stand. It has attracted tens of thousands of listeners, eager to hear the political views and personal insights of a man with his life story and what a story it is. At 95 years of age, Harry Leslie Smith has survived a lot, extreme poverty in childhood in Britain, the Great Depression, the Second World War and later while living in Canada, the loss of his wife and one of his three sons. The wisdom he has gained along the way has won him a loyal following on both sides of the Atlantic. Now over the past few days, there's been a wave of love and support for Harry Leslie Smith after news that he has been hospitalized. Belleville, Ontario has been his part-time home. He spends the other half of the year in Britain and according to his son, he is now in Belleville General Hospital with a case of pneumonia. His son John has taken to Harry Leslie Smith's Twitter account to provide daily updates about his condition and messages of support have been coming in. British Labour Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, has tweeted his best wishes. He said, "We need him to get well soon, as our National Health Service and our movement needs him." The Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has tweeted, "Harry's journey and courage have inspired so much love and kindness on this site and in the real world too. Thank you for taking us along. We are pulling for you." And here is lawmaker, Niall O Donnghaile, speaking last week in the senate of Ireland.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: I became familiar with him via Twitter because even in his 90s, he was vocal as he could be in relation to the regime of fascism in Europe, also in North America and much late in his 20s, he was still prepared at this stage in his life to take a stand against it now and encourage all of us to take a stand against it as well. The strange thing about it all is that his Twitter name is Harry's Last Stand. I'm sure this isn't Harry's last stand because I think we should all follow his example and take that stance for what he believes in, what he stood for, his principles and his approach to life.

AMT: One of the latest tweets from Harry's son, John, said that last night was the first since he went into hospital, that Harry wasn't able to wish him good night with a kiss on the cheek. I spoke with Harry Leslie Smith a year ago in November of 2017. He joined me at that time from our studio in London, England. Here is that conversation. Hello.

HARRY LESLIE SMITH: Hello. My name is Harry Leslie Smith.

AMT: And you are defiant. [laughs]

HARRY LESLIE SMITH: And I will be to the end.

AMT: You have said that you want your grandchildren and their generation to think about the fact that they must fight against the dying of the light. What do you mean by that?

HARRY LESLIE SMITH: I mean I can see already that retreating back to my past. Life is not good anymore for ordinary people. We realize that when we see the abundance of food banks, people try to survive in a country which has become more selfish. All I see here is rows and rows of people lying the on the sidewalk with a blanket over them or a sleeping bag. And I think what a shame that this is happening to a country which one time it's the greatest country on earth.

AMT: You know you make the point in your first podcast. You know you're almost 100. Why would a man in his 90s marching toward a century be so worried about the future?

HARRY LESLIE SMITH: I worry because I like people. I love people. I know what it's like when people suffer and suffer I mean real suffering. When you go to bed at night with an empty stomach and you get up in the morning with an empty stomach. And all you can feel as a kid it's real and it isn't the center of your stomach where you're charging to school and you don't know what to do to fill that void.

AMT: That's how you grow up isn't?

HARRY LESLIE SMITH: Oh it is.

AMT: You were in Barnsley, Yorkshire am I right?

HARRY LESLIE SMITH: That's right.

AMT: You were very poor. You had a sister named Marion what happened to your sister?

HARRY LESLIE SMITH: Marion was my parents’ first child, actually. She was born in 1915. And my father was a miner. And the people who owned the mines worth the upper crust and they didn't believe in paying good wages so they could barely survive on his income. And the only place where you get to live when Marion was born was rather fetid structure of a house. And we always had a feeling that that was the house where Marion contracted chest problems.

AMT: She got tuberculosis didn't she?

HARRY LESLIE SMITH: Yes.

AMT: And how old was she when she died?

HARRY LESLIE SMITH: About five or six.

AMT: So your family was living in real poverty and you had to go out and find food at times with another sister, Berta.

HARRY LESLIE SMITH: We had no choice. We had to have food. You did everything possible where you thought there might be some [unintelligible] that you could push into your stomach. We used to go behind restaurants and go through the garbage bins in the mornings on our way to school, and hope that maybe some guest had too much on his plate and had been scraped into the bin. Sometimes we were lucky but most times we were not.

AMT: How old were you when you were first sent out to work?

HARRY LESLIE SMITH: I was five, actually.

AMT: What did you do?

HARRY LESLIE SMITH: I was what you call a beer barrow boy. And I pushed a cart with bottles of beer around the neighborhood to give a little Clubfoot to the poor people they could never afford more than one bottle at a time. But they had to have something to raise their spirits and hope I guess.

AMT: But you were just a little kid that must have been hard to push that around.

HARRY LESLIE SMITH: It was. And that cart had big [unintelligible] wheels and if I went down the curb I had to let it down gently then push it across the street and then turn around and pull it up on the next pavement. It was a test of strength.

AMT: I can't imagine. Harry Leslie Smith you also tell a story about a new pair of winter boots.

HARRY LESLIE SMITH: Ye. That was when I was about 13. I was going to a school in Halifax, England. We again were pretty pretty down poor. And we never had new shoes. Everything was old. And when the holes began to appear in the bottom of the shoes, then you would push cardboard into the soles so your foot wouldn't be on the ground. But this particular day I just couldn't find anything to stick into the shoe. So I did not go to school and went I went next day Mr. Doss said “where were you yesterday?” And I lifted up my shoe to show him and they said “see me tomorrow after school.” So the next day I came to school. He pulled out from his desk a new pair of shoes. [Sobbing] I was really really shaken.

AMT: What a lovely story and you still remember it all these years, later.

HARRY LESLIE SMITH: Oh yes.

AMT: You make the point that your dad worked in a coal mine and he lost his job. At one point, he took you and your sister to the gates of Weetabix factory. What was he doing?

HARRY LESLIE SMITH: He was looking for work. Yes. But of course there was nothing for healthy men. And my father, injured in the mine, he had a truss around his stomach to hold his belly button in place and he couldn't have got a job but they had offered it to him you know. So anyway when they said “no I'm sorry,” he would say “you've got any Weetabix that you can let me have for the children?” and said “Sorry mate.”

AMT: So he brought you because he thought they would they would sympathize with him a little bit.

HARRY LESLIE SMITH: Yes. That is right.

AMT: And they didn't.

HARRY LESLIE SMITH: No. No.

AMT: It must have been hard.

HARRY LESLIE SMITH: Oh it's unbelievable. And you know my feeling is it's happening all over again. Today in this time of plenty, our richest people are not paying their share of taxes in order to keep the government's providing for the lower classes who are struggling.

AMT: Well you know in line with your concerns, I'm going to play you a report back from 1945. This is when Clement Attlee became Britain's first Labor prime minister.

SOUNDCLIP

[Music]

The sweeping of victories throughout the country mark an epoch in the political life of this country. I am certain that this election has been one in which the electors have thought deeply on the fundamental questions of the future and they realize that Labor is the party of the future and that Labor's policy is the only policy that can lead us to peace abroad and social justice at home.

AMT: Harry Leslie Smith, what goes through your mind when you hear that and you reflect on those times?

HARRY LESLIE SMITH: I remember the fact that all army groups came together as one and bluntly told the election committee, before the election, that they would only elect a Labor Party that would place in our country a national health service that was free for every man woman and child. It was something which we knew had to be given to people. We had gone forty years right up to the war, without medical attention. Can you imagine? I am sad to say I feel that the government is chipping away at it and hoping that bit by bit they will take that away from today's people.

AMT: Do you think people of this generation understand the struggle of your generation to get those things?

HARRY LESLIE SMITH: They do. You can't understand the deprivation, the sacredness, the hunger was so rife. It's just impossible to describe. Well it wasn't just for a week. It just went on month after month and it became so bad that eventually my mother said to my father “I love you but I can't live with you anymore. I've got to seek a man who has a job and can provide for the children.” And before we knew it my sister Alberta and I found that we had a pig farmer. His job was a pig farmer. Apparently he'd known my mother years ago. He moved in instead of my father.

AMT: So you watched the toll of poverty on your parents, on their relationship, on everything you understood.

HARRY LESLIE SMITH: Yes. I think the only thing that saved me was I discovered the public life libraries [chuckles]. And I spent –with my sister – will be rooting through books in the early days when we were too young. It was mostly fairy stories. But as time went on we started digging deeper and deeper into serious literature.

AMT: There's still a lot of poverty across Britain today. How do you think that is affecting the social fabric?

HARRY LESLIE SMITH: I think you know what it's causing partly is not just there, but in other countries too, is beginning to cause people who feel that they have to do something drastic to show their disapproval of the world as it is. That is the worst possible thing because only ends up with the death of innocent bystanders or friends.

AMT: Along with all of this and your views there, you actually campaigned against Brexit. I'm interested to know how you felt when you learned a majority of Britons had voted to leave the European Union?

HARRY LESLIE SMITH: I think it was such a foolish move. For one thing, who is going to provide the food for Britain? I think we would find that there would be less work than there is now. They've forever pointed out the fact that the immigrants moving into Britain, which is a lie. They never ask how many Brits have gone to live in the EU. They are just not thinking straight. And I think it's not going to end good for them.

AMT: I want to ask you about your own life. After the war, you fell in love with Frieda but she was from the wrong place wasn't she?

HARRY LESLIE SMITH: Yes. She was a German girl.

AMT: As a British member of the Air Force you weren't supposed to be dating someone from the so-called enemy side.

HARRY LESLIE SMITH: Oh God. No. You could be hauled in by military police and put on charges and they will [unintelligible] you.

AMT: And the war was over.

HARRY LESLIE SMITH: Yes. Oh yes.

AMT: So you end up making a life in Canada. You have three boys and then Frieda and your son Peter become ill at around the same time. What happened?

HARRY LESLIE SMITH: Frieda of course contracted rheumatoid arthritis. That was a terrible, painful thing. Peter we knew was schizophrenic and we brought him home to live with us, outside Kohlberg actually. It was really a very difficult period.

AMT: And you became a caregiver to both her and Peter then.

HARRY LESLIE SMITH: Yes that's right. I tried to get Peter, to keep interested, take him out to have a beer, occasionally at the village pub. And also got him interested in woodcarving. I wanted to get him doing something so he felt he wasn't just sleeping and looking at the wall you know. And he became a very good woodcarver. In fact I still have a couple of pieces hanging in my apartment. He became, in later life, a great man who was called by large organizations in Canada to speak out about mental problems and was really well known for his discourse on how to survive you know.

AMT: And the experience of caring for him and your wife and having them both die. What did that do to you?

HARRY LESLIE SMITH: I was just devastated. In fact within a year I'd already decided that I would go back to Germany. I already knew that the apartment block in the country, where my wife lived and where I used to pick her up to go for trips, was still standing. I went back and I would stand across the road looking at the door of her apartment thinking that she was going to walk out of it.

AMT: How did you go from the despair over losing her and your son to the defiance we hear now in your podcast?

HARRY LESLIE SMITH: My son John and I celebrate my wife’s birthdays and my son’s birthday every year.

AMT: It's an important time, huh?

HARRY LESLIE SMITH: It was a [unintelligible] great life, actually.

AMT: And you still travel. You want to visit a refugee camp, refugee hotspots, as well. Like you still want to go and see these things, why?

HARRY LESLIE SMITH: Oh yes. I want to see how they're reacting to what is happening to their world. I want to be able to - from what I read in their faces and in the whatever they say - that by writing a book about their lifestyles, and about the way we treat refugees that hopefully I can change the world’s thinking about refugees, that I can get the world to realize that we are all human beings. Whatever color under the skin, we are the same.

AMT: You know the message you give in your podcasts about treating people equally, about your concerns, about inequality have really struck a nerve with a lot of people especially young people. Are you surprised how many young people are interested in what you have to say?

HARRY LESLIE SMITH: No I'm not. I'm surprised somehow because it became more towards the last three or four years, young people are beginning to take more cogent interest in what is happening around them and they're beginning to realize that they are going nowhere. They don't have permanent jobs. They don't have enough to buy a home. They're in limbo. They have no hope about marrying and having children and a house where they can after work go back and say thank goodness and close the door.

AMT: I was going to ask you if that scares you but I think it makes you angry doesn't it?

HARRY LESLIE SMITH: It does because it's only, it is greed that has driven all these rich 1 percent and 10 percent people. I think it's time that we started becoming, as a nation, more angry.

AMT: Did you think when you were a young man that and things had appeared to change that you would be fighting this again, at this point in your life?

HARRY LESLIE SMITH: I did not actually. I must say this all happened after my wife died. I went to Portugal for the winters. I was there during the banking crash of 09 whether I realized what those bankers did. I felt that it was time that I became interested in governments and banks and what have you. Because not what of those banks that caused mayhem across the world and were the direct result of austerity, they didn't get the punishment they should have got.

AMT: You know I was going to ask you when you're 94 and a lot of people would either want to relax, or frankly couldn't even be able to do what you do because they don't survive as long as you do. But I realize you don't think there's time to relax at 94, that you think that this is important and you need to talk about it as much as you can. Am I right?

HARRY LESLIE SMITH: Oh absolutely, absolutely. I will be doing this until I drop dead. Because I don't think there's any greater challenges than to get people to wake up to a society which is taking advantage of their good nature because ordinary people seem to just sit back and say nothing and do nothing. It's time that they – and it will happen. I don't know where - that there will be a revolution or something.

AMT: Harry Leslie Smith, thank you for speaking with me.

HARRY LESLIE SMITH: It's been my pleasure. Thank you.

AMT: Harry Leslie Smith is an activist and the author of several books including, Don't Let My Past Be Your Future. He spoke to me last November from our studio in London, England. That's the conversation you just heard. He's 95-years-old. He's currently in hospital in Belleville, Ontario and his Twitter feed is being followed by lots of people wishing him well. Let us know what you think of the message that he has been trying to get out since he started that podcast. You can tweet us @TheCurrentCBC. Find us on Facebook. Go to our website cbc.ca/thecurrent.

Back To Top »

Back To Top »

Provide Transcript Feedback

CBC would like to acknowledge the support of the Broadcasting Accessibility Fund.

Nov. 26, 2018 episode transcript

More Stories Like This