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The Current Transcript for November 30, 2018

Host: Michelle Shepherd

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

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I had this idea we've got to record and we've got to make a professional recording so they can finally hear exactly what this music sounded like.

MICHELLE SHEPHERD: That's music Professor Patricia Hall and the music that she helped bring to life came from one of the most unlikely places, Auschwitz, where somehow, amid that horror, musicians wrote about falling in love. That story in half an hour. Also:

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I've bailed out the auto sector, on my 50th birthday. You know I wrote a multibillion dollar cheque to the biggest, what have been some of the richest companies in Canada. Why did I do it? I did it because I had it.

MS: Former Prime Minister Stephen Harper said he had to do it a decade ago. That was him speaking earlier this month before this week standing near that GM will close its Oshawa plan next year. Asking now what role, if any, should governments play in helping Canada's auto sector. We'll debate that question in an hour. But first:

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It sounds like something out of a science fiction movie; nosebleeds, ringing ears, headaches, symptoms of a concussion without actually having experience the concussion itself.

MS: It may sound like sci fi but there is an all too real investigation going on now into mysterious sounds, symptoms and speculation about invisible weapons. I'm Michelle Shepard and this is the Friday edition of The Current.

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Are energy weapons behind mystery injuries in Cuba? Unlikely, but they do exist: author

Guests: Shawn Marshall, Sharon Weinberger

MS: It's an international mystery that has been making headlines and it's reportedly all caused by a high pitched cricket like sound heard by embassy workers and family members in Cuba. They're calling it the Havana syndrome and it's been affecting both Americans and Canadians in the country. Now that a 13th Canadian diplomat has been diagnosed with a mysterious ailment, Global Affairs Canada says it's reviewing its diplomatic presence in Cuba. The mystery is what's behind the syndrome and whether an unusual weapon, producing an unusual tone, could be responsible. Shawn Marshall Is the medical director of Ottawa Hospitals Acquired Brain Injury Rehabilitation Program, and he has treated some of the Canadian diplomats who have been affected by the Havana syndrome. He is in our Ottawa studio. Hi Dr. Marshall.

SHAWN MARSHALL: Good morning.

MS: When did you start treating the diplomats?

SHAWN MARSHALL: We starting seeing these patients in our outpatient clinic, probably around the fall of 2017.

MS: What did you think when you first heard about these brain injuries?

SHAWN MARSHALL: When you first heard about these brain injuries, it was interesting to see them in our outpatient clinic, because typically the brain injury the ideology or the cause is pretty clear. We are seeing these patients because the symptoms are similar to what people experience following a concussion with persisting symptoms. But we didn't have a cause.

MS: And how many patients have you now treated with these symptoms?

SHAWN MARSHALL: In our opinion clinic we've seen upward of nine of these patients.

MS: And we've heard in the in the introduction that it's been called the Havana syndrome. Can you describe where that term came from and how it's being used?

SHAWN MARSHALL: Well my understanding, from a clinical perspective, is that the common feature of the presentation is that these were Canadian diplomats who were positioned in Havana, Cuba. And that's where they had onset of their symptoms and where things started. So that seems to be the common denominator.

MS: So you say that it is similar to concussion to patients. Can you describe a little bit more what the symptoms are? What were they complaining of when they came in to see you?

SHAWN MARSHALL: Well they have a constellation of symptoms that affects different systems. After a concussion people often have complaints of things like physical symptoms like balance problems, problems with dizziness, vision difficulties and they also thinking problems, or problems with concentration, focus and short term memory. And they further have some difficulties with sleep and irritability, and these are symptoms that were common to the patients presenting.

MS: Can you describe how serious they are, on sort of a scale of 1 to 10, where do they present?

SHAWN MARSHALL: That's hard to define. Well, from a scale of 1 to 10 I can say that it affects their function. So this was affecting the multiple different levels. So when you look at kind of you know how people can participate and do the things they need to do. So for instance these patients, in some instances, were having difficulties maintaining their own needs independently within the home. So for instance managing their day to day activities. Work, for these people, was not possible. While they were able to show up at work in many instances, they were unable to complete the complicated work that they needed to get done. So it certainly affected them to a great deal.

MS: And as you said in the introduction, this has been making headlines first for some time now. It's such an incredibly mysterious case. We're talking about it again this week because there's been a 13th patient. And I know you have confidentiality issues with the patient, but can you just can you just talk in general terms about how similar all 13 are?

SHAWN MARSHALL: The patients are similar and are in their presentation. So I can say that they do present it with similar onset of symptoms.

SHAWN MARSHALL: I think that these symptoms involved so often with which happens with patients with a concussion, you have an immediate onset. I think there is no immediate reason there suddenly when you go back and look at it, I think I heard the introduction, and certainly from the patients, that there are certainly similar things that occurred and then symptoms were linked to this but not directly. Which actually isn't uncommon with concussions. So people often have a concussion and they're not as their symptoms later and identify that this is affecting them. The common [unintelligible] of the symptoms that people are experiencing were certainly difficulties with balance, ringing in the ears, vision difficulties, problems with focus attention concentration, fatigue and certainly irritability were things that were coming up with this patient group.

MS: So the big question of course is, why do you think is causing these brain injuries?

SHAWN MARSHALL: Well I think that's a question that all of us would ask and certainly the patients would ask, too. This is certainly I can see that this can be frustrating. Many things can cause brain injury. So for instance it isn't always just trauma or an external force. However the only commonality that we have is that these patients were located in a similar location. I don't know and I can't really speculate further on that because I don't have the ideology. I certainly have heard speculation as to what might be causing, and I have to leave that to others. I do believe that these patients appear to have had their brain injured in a way that their function is affected. And that's similar to patients who've had concussion.

MS: You mentioned that it's a question that of course the diplomats are asking themselves. That must be really hard, or an added hardship for them, not knowing why this is happening to them.

SHAWN MARSHALL: I think that this is an extremely important theme for them. You know there is a lot of distress around not understanding what causes it. At least with the concussion, or a known condition, one can have a sense of what the expectations or the prognosis around this. You know does one recover is a continuation of this. My impression is that this can cause a lot of stress. I think that as time progresses we can see that hopefully that things are improving. They've been removed from the environment that's both stressful and maybe because of it. So I think that this has added to the complexity of their presentation, because they're worried about themselves or others in their future.

MS: Now you did mention that concussions aren't always caused by blunt force or trauma, that sometimes it's not even an external force. What else could it be that would cause these types of symptoms?

SHAWN MARSHALL: So a concussion is a brain injury and when there is injury, there can be other causes of that. And so for instance a stroke is a brain injury. So there is a vascular problem in the brain. Other things can could infection, effects of tumour and the effects of toxins.

MS: But are you seeing symptoms of any of those present in these 13?

SHAWN MARSHALL: Not really. It does appear to be more of a kind of diffuse type presentation consistent with concussion. There are other examples of this, for instance, blast injury don't necessarily even need to have direct striking of the head to cause symptoms of concussion. And busting [unintelligible] with wave forces would be an example of that. But they do appear to look like patients who have had trauma to their brain. I just can explain it.

MS: What do you think about the suggestion that it could be some form of microwave weapon?

SHAWN MARSHALL: So I think that's something outside my area of expertise. I think the microwave weapon is just an external force or mechanism of energy applied to the brain that could be plausible. But I can't comment more on that. I think it goes well beyond my skills.

MS: And how are your patients doing today? You talked about the frustration of not knowing what's happening to them. There was a recent Globe and Mail article by Doug Sanders that talked about their frustration perhaps that the government not doing enough. Without wading into that, how are your patients doing today physically?

SHAWN MARSHALL: I think that the key thing is to even our approach with concussion patients is to identify the symptoms that they're having and get them proper therapy and intervention to help address some of these symptoms. And I think that some of the patients are responding to this and improving. I don't think that there's necessarily 100 percent recovery at this stage as we try and progressed this, which is common for patients with no lingering symptoms following concussion who have had them for some time, that have resolve almost immediately. But I think that there is improvement and ongoing as we follow them up.

MS: Well we'll leave it there for today. Thanks so much for joining me Shawn.

SHAWN MARSHALL: You're welcome.

MS: Shawn Marshall is the medical director of the Ottawa Hospitals Acquired Brain Injury Rehabilitation Program. He was in our studio. While the cause of the injuries is unknown, we do know that the military researchers have been trying for decades to weaponize microwaves and other invisible forces. Joining me to talk about this is Sharon Weinberger. She is the D.C. bureau chief for Yahoo News. She's also the author of The Emagineers of War: The Untold Story of DARPA, the Pentagon Agency That Changed the World. We've reached her in Washington. Hi Sharon.

SHARON WEINBERGER: Hi.

MS: You were listening in to Dr. Marshall's thinking about what's causing this so called Havana Syndrome, or not wanting to speculate on what's causing it. What are some of the theories that are out there?

SHARON WEINBERGER: So both doctors and scientists have been engaged by the Pentagon and State Department in other parts of the national security community, have come up with sort of a way of explanations all of which seem to be that the underlying assumption is that this was some sort of attack. I think one of the common degrees, as you suggested, is that this is possibly some sort of microwave weapon attack. Other related theories are that it might be some sort of other directed energy type weapon. Maybe it's ultrasound. It's a sonic weapon. I'll be very honest. I've been a skeptic of a lot of these theories that this is some sort of an exotic weapon that's being used to cause the injuries to the diplomats and intelligence officials involved.

MS: And you've made a really interesting comparison of this case to a case of something that happened in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow in the 1960s. Can you tell me about that?

MS: Absolutely. What we're talking about now is up and called the Havana syndrome. And it has great parallels to an ongoing issue in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow that started in the latter part of the 1950s and went on for well over a decade. It was called The Moscow Signal. And what happened was, starting in the late 1950s, the Soviet Union was beaming pulse microwave radiation into the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. I think around the early 1960s or so that the U.S. intelligence community picked it up and they realized there was a signal coming in. And this was a time it coincided with a real proliferation of interest in the biological effects in microwaves in the 1960s. And one of the theories at the times was low level microwaves might be all the higher some sort of neurological changes or had behavioral effects on human beings, effects that would be caused by non-ionizing radiation, meaning microwave energy that wasn't burning you not heating you up but causing some sort of behavioral acts. So this prompted the intelligence community and the Defense Department to launch a top secret program called Project Pandora, which was trying to seek basically to put it bluntly: could microwaves be used as some sort of mind control weapon? And it turned out that the Moscow Signal was not actually a microwave weapon in that case. But the U.S. has tried for decades to develop one. What kinds of things have they tried over the years?

SHARON WEINBERGER: So they have tried a host of things. Going back to that hot secret program, they tried to see can you use microwaves to modify behavior, to control the human mind. They've looked at very exotic things whether microwaves - particularly pulse microwaves - can they create the sensation of sound or even perhaps voices in your head, which goes back to something called the microwave auditory effect. They have tried to use microwaves to see if you could kill people, which of course at high enough energy levels you can. And then the one that has had the most sort of public face is something called the Active Denial System, which was a microwave weapon that would cause intense burning sensation, intense pain without actually in theory causing physical damage. The idea was this would be a non-lethal weapon. You could use it at checkpoints. You could use it, I mean they do it using it in prisons. Police could use it in theory. And that's the one that actually was developed into a actual working weapon, although it's never been deployed.

MS: It such a relying title in, the Active Denial System. I understand that it was developed for crowd control and we actually spoke earlier to Spencer Akerman his senior national security correspondent for The Daily Beast. And back in 2012, when he was writing for Wired magazine, he decided, for journalistic purposes, to get blasted with this Active Denial system that I think is also known as the Pain Ray. Here he is describing what happened to him during a demonstration organized by the U.S. military.

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This is like a really big truck that has what looks like a basketball back board mounted on top of it. And it's been a while but from the best of my recollection they had it set out from like 700 yards of the Active Denial System. They kind of went you know verbally that in a couple of seconds that this thing is going to shoot you. There is no light. There is no warning. There is no sound. Just suddenly you feel from your chest, I guess sort of the bottom of your chin, an immense amount of heat very quickly. Not something that scales up, but something it feels like you've just been hit by the heat equivalent of a projectile. One minute you feel nothing and then suddenly you got like furnace level heat in a very concentrated area on your body. And instinct takes over and your nervous system makes you jump out of the way.

Sharon, I understand that you have also experienced this weapon. How does your experience line up for Spenser's?

SHARON WEINBERGER: Spenser's description is really accurate and really good on two levels. So what's interesting is the year that they did a number of demonstrations for journalists. I think I took part in either. I think the year before Spencer did where it was raining that day. And so the demonstration went absolutely haywire because moisture attenuates this weapon makes it less effective. And so this immediate burning sensation was more like a worm heat that day. But what's important about Spencer is just in I think really good is you need a massive truck for this thing. That's why I'm skeptical of some of the theories that had been put forward on Havana Syndrome. So you the U.S. government dumped tens of millions of dollars into this weapon and it's never actually been deployed because of all the problems with it. Is this entire [unintelligible] it takes hours to power at each and you have to have a clear line of sight to see who you're targeting. So now try to imagine - and this would of course been a different hey take away your weapon, in theory that would be used in Cuba - but try to imagine when you've seen some of the descriptions of the over dozen people affected on multi story. Where are you going to put the truck? It just doesn't work out. It's not logical.

MS: Well it doesn't seem right to call an invisible weapon anymore, obviously, in that sense.

SHARON WEINBERGER: Well no. I mean the ray itself, the energy being beamed at you is invisible. It is very possible that microwaves or some sort of directed energy are causing some of these symptoms. But the idea that it's a purposeful weapon being beamed at people - I mean anything is possible - but I find it unlikely.

MS: Why does the U.S. continue to, in your opinion, to pour as you say millions, billions of dollars into developing these weapons when for, as much as we know, there hasn't been a successful deployment of one?

SHARON WEINBERGER: You know, honestly, I think we've all seen you know too many movies. It sounds wonderful. There's a reason why guns in all of their incarnations have been used by the military for so many years, and that we don't have star treck phasers or Star Wars weapons. It's wonderful to worry about these very exotic weapons. Oh great! We could have a non-lethal weapon and just shoot people. But the truth is that the technology is unwieldy. It's still very big. It doesn't work consistently. It has a lot of problems. So if you take this out why logically, where the U.S. has spent so much money on this and decades in the cold war. Russia also invested at one point in time. And to say that somehow in Cuba they have perfected these weapons that we ourselves have never been able to perfect, or that Russia who has not invested nearly as much in the past few decades in this work, gifted Cuba, or somehow got this technology to Cuba. It just starts to seem not very likely or logical. I think we're spinning up theories that sound exotic because they're kind of interesting to discuss. It is good to consider every possibility but it's also good to be skeptical.

MS: So Global Affairs Canada released a statement this week saying that a delegation of Canadian government officials will travel to Cuba next week to review the operations and assess how to reduce the risks. They're trying to figure out like everybody is what's causing the Havana syndrome. What's your theory?

SHARON WEINBERGER: So my theory which of course could be wrong, like all theories because I base it simply on what I've read and from the people I've spoken to, some of which have been involved in looking at the evidence. You know what do you usually do to diplomats and particularly intelligence officers, which appear to be at least from the U.S. side, I don’t know about Canada the majority of those who've been affected: you survaille them. You want to know who they are and what they are doing. So just as the Moscow Signal in the 1950s and 1960s, it turned out that the Soviets were activating listening devices in the embassy wall, which is a much more logical explanation than mind control. If I had to take a guess, really I could be wrong, that there were some sort of surveillance or surveillance devices directed at the intelligence officers and diplomats affected in Havana. And that somehow has caused this event which doesn't exclude microwaves, and doesn't exclude ultrasound. And but to me is a much more logical explanation.

MS: Sharon thanks so much. We can leave it there for today.

SHARON WEINBERGER: Thank you.

Sharon Weinberger is the D.C. bureau chief for Yahoo News. She's also the author of The Emagineers of War: The Untold Story of DARPA the Pentagon Agency That Changed the World. And we reached her in Washington D.C. CBC News is next then bringing music back to life from one of history's darkest chapters. Why an ensemble in Michigan will perform a piece tonight that was last played by the inmates in Auschwitz. I'm Michelle Shepherd. And you're listening to the Friday edition of The Current.

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Why a piece of music last played in Auschwitz is being brought back to life

Guest: Patricia Hall, Joshua Pilzer

MS: Hi I'm Michelle Shepherd and you're listening to the Friday edition of The Current.

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MS: Still to come in the depths of the financial crisis a decade ago, both Canada and the United States, reached deep into their pockets to bail out the auto industry. GM in particular but after the auto makers moved to shutter factories including a major player in Oshawa, Ontario. We're looking back on that decision and asking whether it was the right move at the time. But first, an encore performance that might never have been heard.

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[Music]

MS: The last time this music was performed, it was likely within the wrought iron fences of the concentration camp Auschwitz 1 in the early 1940s. The foxtrot you're hearing is called Die Schonste Zeit des Lebens, or, the Most Beautiful Time of Life. It hasn't been recorded or performed publicly since the Second World War, but later today it will be brought back to life in a concert at the University of Michigan. My next guest had something to do with that. Patricia Hall came across a handwritten manuscript of this piece, two summers ago, when she was visiting a memorial of the camp in Poland. She is a music theory professor at the University of Michigan. And we've reached her in Ann Arbor. Hi Patricia.

PATRICIA HALL: Hi.

MS: First of all how did you find this music?

PATRICIA HALL: I would even say somewhat by chance. I heard corresponded with a musicologist who works at the Auschwitz Memorial Museum and asked if there were manuscripts there. And he mentioned it was possible that there were like handwritten annotations under printed music that they have in the archive. So I decided, why not. I'll just go to the archive and take a look and see what's there. So I went and the first thing they did was give me a stack of cards, which was their card catalog. I started looking through it and I was - surprised is a understatement - by some of the titles of the part of the signing so I was seeing in German, and one of them was The Most Beautiful Time of Life, Die Schonste Zeit des Lebens.

MS: And that's the one we just heard an excerpt from.

PATRICIA HALL: That's right. And something absolutely drew me to that piece. Even not knowing what it would sound like, but just the title alone. I couldn't think of anything more ironic than that title in the context of Auschwitz-Birkenau.

MS: Absolutely. I mean it it's an incredible title and what it's about. It's pretty incredible too.

PATRICIA HALL: Absolutely absolutely, falling in love in the month of May.

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[Music]

PATRICIA HALL: Is absolutely euphoric lyrics. It talks about the fragrance in the air and how we don't want to waste our time, because that's so precious. You know things like that that of course have a very different meaning in the context of Auschwitz-Birkenau. And it's actually a popular German song by the film composer France Grothe was composed in 1941 and then arranged in this foxtrot arrangement that the prisoners started with.

MS: Do you know how the song was played in the camps? Where within them? Or at which time it would be played?

PATRICIA HALL: When I actually saw the manuscript I could see exactly what the instrumentation was and I could also see that the manuscript was complete. And as you can tell it has a very unusual instrumentation for instruments in the camp, including a two burner trombone and two clarinets and nine violins.

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[Music]

PATRICIA HALL: It's true there were camp orchestras that were stationed at many gates in the Auschwitch-Birkenau complex. And their function primarily was to play march music or sometimes they did play foxtrots for prisoners who were marching out and then back in on work details. However, based on the instrumentation of this foxtrot, The Most Beautiful Time of Life, it doesn't have the percussion, it has too many violins, it's got the wrong combination of instruments for one of these work orchestras. And so, based on testimonial of some of the prisoners and research done by other scholars, it's been determined that there was actually a dance band at the main camp. And so they would play Sunday concerts in front of commandant Hoess's villa. They would be playing for at least one hour, these dance arrangements, so that soldiers SS could dance.

MS: Did they get any special privileges, or were they treated any differently, the musicians, than the rest of the prisoners?

PATRICIA HALL: Yes and no. So the advantage for these musicians, and specifically the ones that were in the orchestra in Auschwitz 1 that played this foxtrot, was they weren't sent out on work details, doing heavy labor outside of the camp. So that in itself was lifesaving for them. But they did have worked deals inside the camp and it could be something as mundane as being in the potato peeling commando. But then again if you're around food you have more chance of getting something else to eat. At the same time, these prisoners caught typhus in epidemics, just like any of the other prisoners. And the Polish political prisoners, which these performers and arrangers were, had about a 50 percent fatality rate.

MS: Did these three musicians [unintelligible] three that arranged the peace that we just heard from today, did you learn anything else about them? Are they still living? Their names? Who they were?

PATRICIA HALL: Yes I did. I mean one thing that was very fortunate for me, looking at the manuscript, was two of these prisoners had signed parts with their prisoner numbers. And so with the data at Auschwitz-Birkenau that they have on prisoners, it's possible then to find out who they were. And I was told that only 5 percent of the documents from at Auschwitz-Birkenau have survived. But occasionally, you can even see a photograph of someone that wasn't burned at the end of the war.

MS: Did you get photographs of these men?

PATRICIA HALL: Yes I got photographs of Anthony [unintelligible] who is number 5665 and he did survive Auschwitz and he survived the war. I was supplied a portrait, a drawn portrait, that was done inside the camp of the other prisoner who signed his number 5131 that was Maximillian Pivat, another Polish political prisoner, and he was transferred out of the camp to a German concentration camp. But he also survived and he was a professional musician, a bassoonist of all things, and he played in professional orchestras after the war.

MS: Obviously doing any research into Auschwitch is absolutely an emotional experience. But what was it like when you could put names and faces to these men?

PATRICIA HALL: I think that was one of the high points and sometimes it happened very dramatically. For instance we would find some evidence while I was working in the archive, and I would give the number to the director of the archive to put in this photograph with [unintelligible] coming out of a copying machine, and so the transformation of going from a number to the face of this person was a very dramatic experience for me.

MS: And are they alive today those two that you identified?

PATRICIA HALL: No they're not. Unfortunately.

MS: When did you get the idea to resurrect this music and to bring it back to life?

PATRICIA HALL: It came to me in a kind of strange way. I worked all day in the archive and the archive opens at 7 a.m. I went back to my hotel took a nap and when I woke up from their nap I had this idea. We've got to record this and we've got to make a professional recording for the archives so they can finally hear exactly what this music sounded like. And at that time, I thought, well, you know I teach in a very large school of music and there is talented musicians all over the place. I could just see what students were interested in this project and maybe get it going myself. I had no idea when I go back to U of M how enthusiastic and helpful everybody would be on that. So it's been an incredibly positive experience for me in terms of the team effort. The fact that it was, the foxtrot, was performed by the contemporary direction's ensemble, beautifully interpreted and shaped by the director [unintelligible]. So it has been a positive experience my whole time.

MS: And what is that process like, taking these old manuscripts and making them playable?

PATRICIA HALL: Yes it's not as easy as it sounds. Originally I guess being a theorist I had the naive idea that I could Xerox these manuscripts, and put them on the music stand in front of the musicians, and kind of simulate the experience that musicians in Auschwitz-Birkenau had of reading of these manuscripts when they were performing. And then the more I thought of it, talking to other musicians, I realized even though these manuscripts are extremely neat and they're written in ink and the whole thing, they are no eligible enough for a recording session and a performance. And there are also errors in these manuscripts. So you could imagine working under these conditions. Of course errors are going to creep in. And so another wonderful opportunity that I had I was working with a graduate student in the Department of Music Theory Joshua Dufrese. I asked him to initially transcribe these manuscripts in printed notation, so it would be clear for the performers. And in the process of doing that, and also of course consulting with Oreal the director, we found as many errors as we possibly could in these manuscripts, so that were giving the best performance possible but at the same time it's historically accurate.

MS: And Patricia you mentioned that when you discovered these manuscripts you just found the titles and the upbeat so ironic. Did you or anybody who worked on this at any time feel discomforted, or have any mixed emotions about the fact that your bring to life music that was clearly played under duress in a concentration camp?

PATRICIA HALL: Yes absolutely and I think everybody who works with us is very conscious of that and thinks about that. And I've heard various adjectives used to describe this foxtrot even like twisted, given the situation that it was performed and created in. End. I have played the recording in a scholarly situation in which I was giving a paper, and I noticed everybody had their arms kind of clenched around their bodies while they were listening. And then I asked them about that and they mentioned that everybody feels a bit uncomfortable, given the background, just again, the irony is more than most people are used to dealing with.

MS: Do you think that that discomfort can be channeled into something positive with today's performance of this piece?

PATRICIA HALL: Yeah I've been thinking about it lot, watching reactions of the senses like that and the comments I've been hearing in kind of working through that whole thing myself. And what's finally resolved to some degree, for me I think, is the fact that given the worst conditions possible, many of which we can't even appreciate, that these men still manage to create this joyful, beautiful music.

MS: And is there is there a historical element too that you're hoping - I understand they're going to be recorded and used in the Auschwitz State Museum as well.

PATRICIA HALL: Yes. I mean just having a historical record of not only you what this piece sounded like, but giving them an idea of what other arrangements sound like as well. And there are other pieces in the archive that have the same hand writing of these prisoners. And you know who knows where it will go. I mean maybe we'll give another concert or I hope the archive will be able to use them in some significant way as well.

MS: And you mention there's other pieces. Tell me a little there about those.

PATRICIA HALL: These other pieces are also arrangements are popular songs and I feel quite sure they were used for the same purpose in terms of a dance band kind of ensemble. And some of them, I have to say, even more ironic titles. You know: Sing a Song When You're Sad or Love Letters That Never Arrived, things like that. Or here's even a tango and it's called Traume auf Haiti or Dream on Haiti.

MS: And do you hope to bring that to life, too, those manuscripts?

PATRICIA HALL: I'm thinking about it and I'm giving myself a little time to process this experience and see how people react. And yes it's possible I will do that.

MS: And you said that there's this positive message that you take from the music, this idea of being able to overcome such horrific times. Are there any other messages that you draw are you hope others will from hearing this music?

PATRICIA HALL: I also been thinking about the idea, and again, I am still processing this, but I always react very strongly when I listen to this foxtrot. I mean I hear the joy and the euphoria and it makes me think about the fact of how universal that message is, that it doesn't matter, especially now we're thinking about things that are happening these days. It doesn't matter what your religion is. It doesn't matter what your race is, how old you are, we all react the same way to music like this.

MS: Patricia I think that's a good place to leave on. Thank you so much for joining us today.

MS: Thank you. It's a pleasure.

PATRICIA HALL: Patricia Hall is a music theory professor at the University of Michigan. To see pictures of musicians who arranged this piece go to our Web site cbc.ca/thecurrent. Will leave you now with more of the most beautiful time of life.

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[Music]

MS: That's the music that's managed to survive from inside the Auschwitz concentration camp during the Second World War. Halfway around the world, in East Asia, tens of thousands of women were enslaved by the Japanese military during the same period. Mostly Korean, they were known as comfort women. And for those women music was a way to cope with the agony they were made to endure.

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[Women vocalizing]

MS: That's from a recording made by Joshua Pilzer this so called comfort women. He studied the music created and is the author of the book titled Hearts of Pine: Songs in the Lives of Three Korean Survivors of the Japanese Comfort Women. Jashua Pilzer is in Toronto. Hi Jashua.

JOSHUA PILZER: Hi. Thanks for having me.

MS: Thanks for coming on. Well what comes to mind for you as you listened to my last guest and the music she brought back to life?

JOSHUA PILZER: What comes to mind to me is it relates to the example that we just heard which were which I recorded, is highly ambivalent place of music in these situations of atrocity and war and confinement and so on. And the example that you just heard, for instance, is a song from a Japanese produced movie from Shanghai in 1941 in Japanese occupied Shanghai are called fulfilments car bomb. The film is called China Night. The song, as well as the size of the movie, the whole story, it's a story of a kind of a Japanese officer who falls in love with the kind of untamed exotic Chinese woman. And that story is a kind of metaphor for the kind of the virtue, the justice of Japanese war effort in China, to bring this kind of lawless country and it's tragic flowers under some kind of disciplined cultivation you know. And that song is like that. And so this exotic picture of what other East Asian colonial women were like. And this song was really part of the matrix, the means by which soldiers, Japanese people were convinced of the rightness of what was being done.

MS: And how important to these women was this music? Was it a type of escapism? What was the significance of it to them?

JOSHUA PILZER: I think in during the war time, a song like this is- So the comfort women were sexual slaves of the Japanese military, were kept in things called comfort stations these are euphemisms. And in some others comfort stations which were ramshackle basically sex camps, women were made to perform for soldiers as well. And this would be one of those kinds of songs popular at the time and also fulfilling that that stereotype of the exotic you know Korean or Chinese or whoever woman So that song is a kind of, for one thing is this performance of a kind of submission really. But at the same time it gave women the opportunity to leverage this kind of power of that of that figure. And to some women actually by being good singers, cultivated the factions of officers, won themselves releases, in very rather rare instances of that. So it was a kind of means of survival but it wasn't a means of survival or because it gave people hope or something like that. It was very ambivalent means by which some people survived while many others didn't. And most of the women who didn't survive, there were some kind of musical means. I think this is true for the Holocaust as well, aren't particularly proud of it. They just feel themselves to be kind of the getting the long end of the stick as it were in terms of fate how fate handed out talent and so on and so forth.

MS: So this music wasn't a comfort to it in any way. Its performance and [unintelligible] way to survive.

JOSHUA PILZER: Yes I think so. I mean you can find some instances of people saying Well I sang the song and it may make me feel better or something like that. But those are so rare. And those are also the stories that people really want to hear nowadays, when they look at historical instances of suffering and oppression. And so on the kind of feel good stories about music. I think if you want the feel good stories about music you have to dig a little bit deeper and a look a little bit further. Look to what happens to these women beyond those initial instances of traumatic experience how they survive in the post war and so on.

MS: And I wish we had more time Joshua, but before I let you go in a moment, we're going to play some music that you recorded in Korea. A song in particular called A Faithless Child Cries by Mun Pilgi. Tell us briefly where we're about to hear.

JOSHUA PILZER: This is a song by another survivor whom I worked with. It's a song about someone regretting the death, mourning the death of their mother. And the original lyrics, it's the pop song from the 30s, are all about all the terrible things I've done to my mother and so on. And Mun Plgi over the course of her long life she had a very difficult relationship with her mother. She was taken away and sent into Manchuria. She felt very much the faith of child and she will gradually over the course of many years of singing the song, she took out all that stuff. She took all the stuff about how faithless she was. And she just mourn the death of her mother. It's always aware of her as a way for her to sort of repair a social relationship and that's what people do in post-traumatic situations, traumatizes social relationships. And here you see an instance of somebody trying to put themselves and their life back together using music. So there we get to the feel good story.

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[Singing in indistinct language]

MS: Thanks so much Joshua. I appreciate you coming on.

JOSHUA PILZER: Thanks for having me.

Joshua Pilzer an associate professor of ethnomusicology in the Faculty of Music at the University of Toronto. I'm Michellele Shepherd. And you're listening to the Friday edition of The Current.

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[Singing in indistinct language]

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GM cuts an 'old-style, greed-driven' decision, argues former Unifor economist

Guests: James Moore, Jim Stanford

MS: I'm Michelle Shepherd and you're listening to the Friday edition of The Current. Things weren't looking good for the overall North American economy back in 2008. The US subprime mortgage crisis triggered a worldwide financial crisis which hobbled stock markets and things were looking very scary for the auto industry. And that's when governments got involved.

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VOICE 1: In the news tonight, a big thank you for a multi-billion dollar bailout for Canada's auto sector.

VOICE 2: For recognizing the importance of the auto industry to Canada, and the 400,000 workers that are tied into the auto industry in one way or another.

MS: That was almost 10 years ago in December of 2008. The federal Conservative government, under Prime Minister Stephen Harper, together with the Ontario Liberal Government offered an emergency lifeline to the auto industry amounting to four billion dollars. It came after a similar plan was announced in the United States and that kicked off a sequence of events over the next year or so, as automakers struggled to stay afloat and negotiated with unions and governments.

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[Music]

VOICE 1: We are doing this, I believe the American government is in the same position, we are doing this on the assumption that we cannot afford either in the United States or Canada a catastrophic short term collapse.

VOICE 2: General Motors and Chrysler are releasing restructuring plans designed to save the struggling automakers in the U.S. The two Detroit automakers have to let Washington know how they're going to change their operations, as part of a multi-billion dollar bailout.

VOICE 3: Gives you a lot of anxiety and blood pressure peaks high, thinking about it just makes your stomach turn.

VOICE 4: Not happy. For the second time in less than three months CAW members had to give, not get.

VOICE 5: We didn't want to do this. Nobody wants to go through this process.

VOICE 4: President Ken Lewenza didn't say it but the union's back was against the wall, especially after its big American cousin, the UAW, reached a major giveback agreement with General Motors.

VOICE 5: Government support comes with a price. For us the price was a series of escalating demands for concessions.

MS: Even after all that, by June of next year GM in the U.S. filed for bankruptcy protection, prompting a huge investment in GM here in Canada from the federal and Ontario provincial governments.

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VOICE 1: Without even going out to kick the tires Canadians now own a share of the world's number two car company. Ottawa and Ontario are putting up 10 and a half billion dollars to save General Motors. Though, when you head out to talk to taxpayers, not everyone wants to go along for the ride.

VOICE 2: Wish we had to invest their money in something more profitable. GM is a dying company and the product that they sell is outdated.

VOICE 3: I wish there were an alternative but the alternative to what we are doing today would be vastly more costly and more risky. Clearly taxpayers will get some money back when the day comes that we begin to sell our equity share, but to be frank we are not counting on that. We are not factoring that into our budgetary plans.

VOICE 1: Harper says this is it for GM that when it comes to assistance from Canada Ottawa is done cutting checks.

MS: As we heard the Harper government promised that it would eventually sell its shares in GM, which it did in 2015. In the end, both levels of government lost billions of dollars on the various bailouts and investments. Now with GM's announcement that it's closing its Oshawa, Ontario plant, people are asking just what we got in return for all that government money. And with Unifor leader, Jerry Dias, Carling and Justin Trudeau and Doug Ford to help stop the closure of the plant that leads to more questions about what role, if any, government should play in the manufacturing industry. Joining me to talk about this is someone who has wrestled with those questions for years. James Moore served as the Minister of Industry under Stephen Harper from 2013 to 2015. He joins us from Vancouver. Hi James.

JAMES MOORE: Hi.

MS: When you first saw the news about the GM plant closure what was your initial reaction?

JAMES MOORE: You know real disappointment and I suppose frustration in some ways. I', certainly not in government anymore. I didn't run in the last campaign, but I know the file very well. As Minister of Industry chaired the clean automotive Partnership Council. The North American auto sector. It has been a challenged industry for Canada for a very long time. But to back up the importance of the sector for Canada, just to put it in perspective for those who are kind of refreshing themselves to that is the outer sector because of the Oshawa news. One in three people live in the province of Ontario but Ontario represents about 42 percent of the Canadian economy. The backbone of the Ontario economy is the manufacturing sector and the backbone of that sector is the auto sector. So this is an existential threat to the health of the clean economy, the manufacturing and other sectors combined. But back when I was industry minister you know we were I was reminded that there in North America there are effectively four automotive sectors. There's Canadian automotive sector. There is the rust belt sort of trip typical stereotypical, as people sort of envision it, industrial Midwest auto sector. There's the right to work southern U.S. state auto sector. And then there’s the Mexican auto sector. And over the past 20 years, slowly through a whole bunch of reasons, Canada has increasingly become less and less competitive environment. We have attracted less and less investment in the auto sector and so the news out of Oshawa, devastating locally, frustrating nationally, but really I suppose in some ways not a surprise given the lack of competitiveness that we are increasingly seeing in this sector and in the Canadian economy.

MS: But as you stated, just such an important plant to have and that’s something obviously recognized when you were with the federal government and part of the bailout in 2009. Given the news this week, does that bailout still seem like the right decision?

JAMES MOORE: It does. But I think these are two issues in isolation. You know the reality of the bailout in 2009 is a result of the global recession that hit in the third quarter of 2008 and the reaction to it. You know look we were in Canada effectively put into a corner because, at that time, newly elected President Barack Obama and the auto sector, they'd come as was just mentioned in the clips. They effectively rushed to and came forward with the bailout package and basically they turned to Canada and they said we're putting forward a package, and Canada, if you're going to still continue to be part of this footprint of the North American supply chain and the automotive sector, then you're going to have to empty up your share and so we did. And the reality is the lion's share of those loans and those bails have been paid back. The governor of Canada secured the other sector for more effectively a decade. And Chrysler remains, GM largely remains, even though they've been receding over the past few years. But look I think people are right. The other workers and those in Oshawa in the immediate area who were impacted by this are right to feel frustrated and betrayed. You know it's a natural instinct to feel that way as a consequence of this. I feel that. I feel very annoyed and frustrated by FM. And that sentiment of betrayal that tax payers were there for you when times are tough, and times are tough for GM by the way. In the last quarter GM had more than two billion dollar profit but when GM was making strategic decisions they seem very quick to turn their backs on Canada and throw all workers under the bus. And Canadian tax payers sort of insult them by retreating on the Canadian commitment.

MS: Do you think that the government handled the bailout properly? Were there any mistakes made?

JAMES MOORE: I don't think so. You know look I think there is cross partisan support for the substance of what we did at the time. It was April 2009 and when you have NDP Liberal, Conservative, everybody in alignment and understanding the corner that we were in effectively as Canadians, and our obligation to stand up and defend this sector. I think there's broad consensus that it was the right thing to do. I really do think you have to substantively divorce the decision to bail out the sector in 2009 from the realities of what GM is choosing to do today. The global recession of 2008-2009 was an opportunity for companies to cut loose from their commitments to Canada and to use that crisis as an excuse to walk away from Canada because we did the bailout. They haven't done that. GM still operates in Canada. Yes they are walking away from their Oshawa footprint but they still have investments in Canada and they still have a presence in Canada. They're still going to have an ongoing presence in Canada. Chrysler has just invested heavily into Canada. Ford, which wasn't part of the bailout package, but they see value in the Canadian footprint as well. So because we did the bailout we actually secured all lot of long term investments that still remain. And this specific dynamic of Oshawa is not a consequence of the bailout. As a matter of fact, had we not done the bailout Oshawa could well have, probably likely would have closed up a long time ago.

MS: When you were speaking with GM executives, at that time, what sense did they give you about their level of commitment to keep the Oshawa plant open?

AMES MOORE: Look is the truth. Canada is an increasingly difficult place to do business. There's a reason why there's capital flight going out of this country. We see it regularly in in all kinds of industries, not only the oil and gas sector. We see it in the auto sector. You know we see it in the aerospace sector as well that we are not attracting capital to Canada because we are not economically efficient. When I was industry minister I used to be very proud of making the case for the Canadian automotive sector saying we had a thirteen point lower corporate tax rate on average, because the corporate tax rate carries a blend of the federal provincial. But in the province of Ontario, we had a 13 point lower corporate tax rate in Ontario than what was offered in the United States. We had a truly devalued Canadian dollar, at about 80 cents a dollar, but at about 83 cents a dollar in Canada compared to the United States. That's when the cost of labor in Canada flattens compared to what's offered in the United States. So we had that advantage. We also the advantage of supply chains in the parts sector in Canada which is a massive part of the automotive sector. So we had that efficiency plus we were twinning the Detroit Windsor border crossing now with the Gordie Howe Bridge. So the supply chain and getting product north and south across the border was becoming more and more efficient. So you add all these things up plus a very productive workforce and so on, you add all these things together in Canada was a very compelling place in which to invest in the auto sector. In very short order, elections matter. In very short order in the past few years, almost all those energies have gone away. The cost of energy under Kathleen Wynne has gone to the roof. Property taxes have gone up. The corporate taxes of energy has been raised and frankly Unifor, the union, has become so belligerent and aggressive that they're making their relationship with the auto sector increasingly taxing. So a lot of things happen in short order to make this relationship very difficult.

MS: James in 2015 the government's sold its last remaining stake in General Motors. Why was it important to get out?

JAMES MOORE: Well it was part of the agreement. The government of Canada Canadian taxpayers shouldn't be in the business of owning private sector companies. We should stand arm's length and not be engaged in that way. And that was part of the agreement and we sold the shares and it was the you know the right thing to do. Get out of the business of trying to micromanage individual firms.

MS: But some would say, steel workers among them, that by selling those shares the Canadian government essentially lost any leverage it had it to keep the GM jobs in Canada.

JAMES MOORE: Well it was joke at the time that GM shouldn't be called General Motors. It should be called Government Motors. And I think frankly a bunch of bureaucrats and hardware have the kind of expertise to try to micromanage the private sector dealings and decisions of an automotive company, and to try to put a thumb on the scale to force them to do this and do that. That's not the business of government.

MS: But when are the answers. I mean this is what everybody is struggling with now.

JAMES MOORE: Well sure I mean look it’s to take a step back and look at Canada's overall competitiveness. And I think there are real warning signs and concerns of the Canadian economy. You know the Bank of Canada has signaled pretty clearly and so has the Federal Reserve and United States to expect that there were ratio overdue for a recession right in the business cycle of things. And most are expecting a recession sometime in 2020. And so our ability to be effective and to be competitive in the marketplace of chasing investment into Canada, is a serious problem. And you add to that the energy costs in Canada. You add to that rising property taxes. You add to that the carbon tax that is coming that does impact people's ability to do business in a competitive way relative to the United States. We are making candidates slowly and collectively an unattractive place for people to invest their money, to create businesses and create jobs. And it is a real problem. There is no sense of sobriety about that reality in the fall economic update by ministrant Morneau and we'll see what they do in the federal budget in 2019 in the spring. But there's a real reckoning coming for Canada's lack of competitive economic environment.

MS: Let's talk briefly about some other major forces that are transforming the auto industry today: climate change, electric cars, and ridesharing. What should Canada be doing to help manufacturers and the workers make that transition?

JAMES MOORE: What I mean give one complement to the fall economic update which I just took a shot at you know which was that the accelerated capital cost allowance and trying to lower the cost of people investing in Canada. I think that's a good thing because specifically with the auto sector, it's going to be tough on a go forward basis, because with rising - well, I should say rising always - but for the most part rising fuel prices, people's appetites. And also there's a whole new generation of Canadians who come up but I know The Current has talked about this in the past. There's a whole new generation of Canadians who are coming up who are not even bothering to get a driver’s license still 18, 19, 20 years of age, ride sharing public transit urbanization the use of public transit broadly, particularly here in Vancouver where I am right now. The lure of the ownership of an automobile is not what it used to be. Right. So the ability for car manufacturers - this is part of the thing that I think GM has to be fair with - they're wrestling with this trend. You know that the job of a CEO and a board of directors is to try to see the horizon, try to see three and four moves down the chessboard to try to make sure the company is viable, not just today, but with what the products are offering in the future. Jerry Dias you for are sort of saying that to GM that, look, if you were planning on shifting your product, we have a phenomenal facility with talented workers in Oshawa who would be more than willing to be prepared to receive that product in that mandate, and to build the vehicle of the future as you see it. But let's work together on this.

MS: James we’re going to have to leave it there. Thanks so much for joining me today.

JAMES MOORE: Thank you for your time.

MS: James Moore served as the Minister of Industry under Stephen Harper. He is in Vancouver. My next guest was a key player in the bailout negotiations back in 2009. Jim Stanford is a former economist at Unifor, or the Canadian Auto Workers Union, as it was known back in 2009. He's now the Herald Innis professor of economics at McMaster University. And he splits his time between Canada and Australia where he's the director of the Center for Future Work. He joins me now in our Toronto studio. Hi Jim.

JIM STANFORD: Good morning Michelle.

JIM STANFORD: First I want to ask you what your initial reaction was when you heard about this week's news.

JIM STANFORD: Oh it was a kick in the gut I got to tell you. I mean everyone involved in the auto industry has been working, praying, hoping, building relationships, making business cases to keep the whole issue out operation going. For years of course, we've known that it was vulnerable. But I don't think anyone was expecting the announcement that came out on Monday and I don't think there's any particular reason for it now either.

MS: Well that was going to be my next question. Why was everybody caught so off guard?

JIM STANFORD: GM is doing very well. GM is very profitable. Its North American vehicle operations are incredibly profitable. They make a 10 percent profit margin on every vehicle that they sell in North America, which once upon a time was unheard of. Yet, I guess for the executives in Detroit, and more importantly the financial analysts and hedge fund people in Wall Street, that's still not enough. And that's why they've launched this kind of pre-emptive attack. They talk about pivoting to a new economy and throwing all this jargon about electric vehicles. It's got nothing to do with that. Make no mistake. This is old style greed driven cost cutting so they can squeeze a bit more money out of an operation that's already quite profitable.

MS: So you don't buy anything that they're saying as a reason for why this happened.

JIM STANFORD: Well look they talk about the future and electric vehicles and autonomous vehicles, and for sure we should be investing in this, but they cancelled the electric vehicle they make; the GM Volt. And they're going to produce the same vehicles that they weren't making. They're just going to do a lot more of them in Mexico and less of them in Canada and the United States.

MS: So let's go back to those negotiations in 2009. At that time, it was certainly desperate times as well.

JIM STANFORD: Do or die, no doubt about it.

MS: How do you compare that to where we are at now?

JIM STANFORD: Very different. GM as an organization was on the ropes because of this financial crisis. You know by and large it wasn't the company's fault. You know this was a whole meltdown that happened because of the mortgage lending and the unethical practices in finance. But the auto industry was hit hard by it because autos are very sick local industry. You know when the economy sneezes the auto industry catches pneumonia. That's what we used to say. And GM was not in great shape to start with. So it was clear that GM and Chrysler were going to collapse without some kind of urgent rescue. And so as Mr. Moore just described quite accurately, the Canadian and Ontario governments had to be part of the solution along with the American governments. And I think, as he says, they came up with a very effective and pragmatic response to that crisis. Today's a very different situation. GM's a very profitable company. There's no question of it going under. This is just a question of who is GM accountable to, and right now they are accountable only to these shareholders in Wall Street who've received enormous payouts of dividends and share buybacks and other cash. But the financiers still think GM share price is a dog. They look at Amazon and they look at Apple and they say why GM? You know the share price is going nowhere, even though the company is profitable and it makes good cars and it employs hundreds of thousands of people.

MS: Do you think that the government made any mistakes in terms of the bailout, what they did subsequently to it?

JIM STANFORD: I think their actions in 2009 were very good, very creative, very timely and very effective and they did certainly help GM and Chrysler stay in business. They also helped hundreds of other companies stay in business. The companies that depend on those auto plants being there. They helped turn that whole crisis which could have been much worse. It could have been another depression if those real employers had collapsed along with the financial meltdown that was happening. They turned that around and turned it around very quickly. I think the mistakes in government policy came afterword. Once the initial rescue had been done and the industry was back on its feet, that's when we got back to the old style of thinking, which Mr. Moore also just stated, that government shouldn't be involved in this sort of business. And that's an ironical thing to say, two years after government saved their bacon, to now say governments are going to get out of the way. You know that doesn't make any sense and because they both sold off their equity interests in GM and Chrysler too early, they shouldn't have sold them. They'd have a seat at the table today if they'd kept them. And also they abandoned the principle that by helping GM, GM had to help Canada. GM and Chrysler had to maintain a proportionate footprint of other operations in Canada. That was a brilliant move that they put in place in 2009, but it was time limited. That commitment expired in 2017 and that's what's allowing GM now, thanks a lot Canada. I don't have that constraint anymore. Now I'm off to Mexico.

MS: And I'm going to return to that and that question of what governments can do today. First though I want to go back to the 2009 negotiations. And I want to play a clip for you from Steven Rattner. He was the Wall Street financier who was appointed head of the Barack Obama's auto task force in 2009. Here's what he said about the bailout deal.

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One of the other principles that we established early on was that the government was going to get in and get out as quickly as possible is going to be kind of the opposite of Vietnam. We didn't want to be mired in the car business. We really did not want to set a precedent for the government intervening in the private sector. None of us like the idea that the next group and the next group were the next group that any industry could come in and say 'do for us what you did for the car companies and get government money'. We hated that idea just the way we hated - my Vietnam analogy - just the way we hated the idea of having a long term ownership position in these companies, which was part of why GM went public so quickly, was for the government to be able to sell.

MS: What you make of what he had to say in that the U.S. Canada relationship?

JIM STANFORD: Well I think you're seeing there Michelle the discomfort that sort of pro-business free enterprise politicians felt at the moment. And I think that discomfort was shared by Mr. Moore and his governments, certainly Stephen Harper, remember, didn't come to Ottawa with the idea of nationalizing a car company. That wasn't in his playbook, but he was forced by circumstances to do that. And it didn't sit easily with his rhetoric in this kind of free market philosophy. So right from the get go in his case, and certainly in the American government's case, they were trying to pretend that this was just a temporary short term measure and we'd get back to capitalism as usual, as soon as possible because of that seeming contradiction. The reality is government's been involved in decisions like this from the beginning of the auto industry in all kinds of ways. And this idea that the industry, or any industry for that matter, is a sort of a free market nirvana and it works best when governments are of the way it is nonsense. Government everywhere plays a crucial role in setting the framework for auto investments and other expensive capital intensive long run investments in all kinds of ways, including direct subsidies, indirect provision of infrastructure, investment in equity of various kinds. There's many automakers around the world where governments maintain an equity share as a normal state of affairs and an ongoing thing. So there's this pretense that normal capitalism doesn't have government and this is just a short measure, was fast from the beginning. And by allowing that etiological idea to dominate their actions after the recovery, they've set the stage for a company like GM making squads of money, here in Canada as well, to thumb their nose at us and walk away.

MS: Well what about the idea of nationalizing GM? You raise that and I don't know if you read David Olive had a rather provocative comment that in the Toronto Star. What do you think about that?

JIM STANFORD: Well I mean nationalization is obviously a word that you know conjures up all kinds of drama, but the fact is we'd owned part of GM. The governments of Canada and Ontario owned 10 percent of GM. The U.S. government and the majority of the rest. And as I mentioned, Michelle, there there's are makers around the world; Volkswagen, a very successful company has a core equity \stake owned by the state government in Germany in the part of Germany where their headquarter. Renault in France has a public equity, their sovereign wealth funds that have public equity in all kinds of auto makers. In Japan and Korea, they've used the state investment banks to help ensure that those auto makers remain loyal to their home countries. So you know it doesn't have to be a giant takeover. I think if governments were creative and thoughtful about it they could have thought of ways to leverage the mine already stake that they had and have a seat at the table, so that when the CEO of GM starts making decisions it's not just the latest hostile hedge fund owner from Wall Street who calls the shots. Right now, that is exactly who is calling the shots. The GM's actions are absolutely a pre-emptive strike to protect themselves against yet another activist shareholder attack on management. They've already weathered three or four of them in the last few years from investors who think the share price is too low, and they want some kind of quick return. And instead of balancing those interests against the interest of the thousands of families and communities who depend on GM real business, never mind shares and dividends and paper, the real business of producing cars and generating income. We have allowed GM to be beholden purely to those financial pressures.

MS: You mentioned some of the European examples. You have interesting perspective now going between here and Australia. Briefly before we go, can you tell us what happened there and how that's not [cross talking]?

JIM STANFORD: In Australia, oh, ouch! Well that’s a lesson in what you don't want to do. There you also had a conservative government in power at the time. You had GM Ford and Toyota with the three big companies there. The Australian industry was facing challenges as well and the government kind of followed, drank its own free market medicine and said 'we don't need you. If you're going to go, go'. So guess what? They went. And so Australia has no auto industry anymore and that's a case study in what not to do. If we want an auto industry and the jobs that come with it, we have to view active government partnership and the whole thing and set up rules to hold those companies to account, to give them some responsibility as well as some incentives. That's how you keep an auto industry a long term.

MS: Some say we pay attention too much to the auto industry.

JIM STANFORD: Well I think in relative terms the auto industry has clearly shrunk, relative to the economy, but it's still an enormous industry. It still accounts in Canada for probably half a million jobs direct and indirect. So we ignore it at our peril and it can certainly modernize, or we could be producing electric vehicles and autonomous vehicles and all that stuff here. Absolutely.

MS: Jim I want to thank you for joining me today. Appreciate it.

JIM STANFORD: Thank you Michelle.

MS: Jim Stanford is a former economist at Unifor. He's now the Herald Innis professor of economics at McMaster University and he splits his time between Canada and Australia, where he's the director of the Center for Future Work. And Jim Stanford was in our Toronto studio. And that's our program for today. Stay tuned to Radio 1 for Q. Charlotte Cardin will stop by to perform a song from her latest release Double's Shifts and the weekly music panel will discuss the biggest news releases and most interesting news of the week. I'm Michelle Shepherd. Thanks for listening to the Friday edition of The Current.

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