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The Current Transcript for February 12, 2019

Host: Anna Maria Tremonti

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

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VOICE: This is an issue that has been much talked about over the past few days and I think it's extremely important that Canadians can continue to have confidence in our system.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: The scandal engulfing the Trudeau government has more than one critic arguing that confidence in the system is precisely what is at stake. As the number of unanswered questions continues to climb over SNC-Lavalin, the PMO and the Justice Department, beyond bribery allegations relating to Libya, Canada's largest engineering firm has faced suspensions, forced resignations and arrests related to major construction projects at home and abroad. In a moment we're looking at SNC-Lavalin and asking what we can learn and where things go from here. And then artificial intelligence goes to the past.

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VOICE: Using currently available deep learning and machine learning tools we are monitoring the physiological signals and asking the question is the cardiac arrest likely to happen in the next five minutes.

AMT: Toronto's Sick Kids Hospital is merging biomedical informatics and artificial intelligence for everything from diagnoses to predicting heart attacks and while that's changing the medical game, it's also raising new questions related to ethics and choices. We'll take you through that in half an hour. And then, what he saw at the revolutions.

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VOICE: This incredible process without violence. A few brave souls turning out to demonstrate, then more people and more people. It was marvelous. It was marvelous.

AMT: From the overthrow of communism in his home country to 9/11, from wars to disaster and politics, Joe Schlesinger was a journalist who never forgot the power of the news is in the humanity of the individuals caught in the middle. As we mark the death of CBC's and Canada's most respected journalist, we revisit a conversation with Joe Schlesinger about journalism and life. That's in an hour. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

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Companies guilty of wrongdoing should be hit where it hurts — in their pockets, says business prof

Guests: Dave Seglins, Ian Lee, Jennifer Quiad

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VOICE: I have met with Minister Wilson-Raybould a couple of times already since arriving in B.C. yesterday. We spoke about our shared goals for our country and for this government. She confirmed for me a conversation we had this fall where I told her directly that any decisions on matters involving the Director of Public Prosecutions were hers alone. I respect her review that due to privilege she cannot comment or add on matters recently before the media.

AMT: Prime Minister Justin Trudeau yesterday on the controversy sparking so many questions. Now the federal ethics commissioner will be asking questions. There will be an ethics probe into allegations that the prime minister's office put pressure on former Attorney General Jody Wilson-Raybould to intervene in the SNC-Lavalin corruption and fraud court case. If the Quebec based engineering and construction giant wasnt quite yet a household name across the country, it likely is now. Reporter Dave Seglins of the CBC News I unit has been covering SNC-Lavalin for years and he's with me in our studio. Hi Dave.

DAVE SEGLINS: Good morning.

AMT: This whole case is about SNC's activities in Libya. You broke the story. How did it start?

DS: So 2011, Libya's falling apart. The dictatorship of Moammar Gadhafi is falling, international forces, Canada included, enforcing no fly zones and there's this bizarre story right at the end of the year where there was a Canadian woman trapped in Mexico accused in some sort of plot to smuggle one of the Gadhafi sons out of Libya to a life in hiding in Mexico. I was assigned to pick away at that. We did a short story we contacted the woman's family. This was Cynthia Vanier. We put up a story and our emails were on that. Well I received an email in response in late January 2012 and it started this whole ball rolling for me and this was an unbelievable experience in my journalism career. This email was in a bizarre syntax, French-English sent through Google Translate I learned later several times and basically it says I am a senior person within SNC-Lavalin and we have witnessed over the past several years, one of or a number of our senior executives, involved in funneling and laundering hundreds of millions of dollars on behalf of the Gadhafi regime into Swiss bank accounts as part of our patronage with this regime and we are trapped inside. We've tried to notify the board. I've sent a whistleblower a letter. So all these crazy details in this e-mail and then it says, if you would like to learn more, tomorrow you will be on a ski hill in and I'm not going to disclose the location, Quebec, prepared to ski and there will be a gentleman at the midway station that will be dressed in such and such a colour of a Spider ski jacket and you will learn more.

AMT: You gotta be kidding. Do you ski?

DS: Fortunately, I do ski.

AMT: So you went?

DS: We went. Suddenly I'm in a taxi, I'm on a plane, I'm in a rental car, I'm renting skis, I'm at the midway station, out of breath to get there by the noon the next day because I was in Ontario and sure enough we meet a senior person at SNC-Lavalin who begins to tell the tale from the insider's point of view. And through that individual we were introduced to other senior executives who said look, we're trapped in a situation here where we're watching the senior executive in the construction branch and a number of his people runni ng a system, not just through Libya, but elsewhere across Africa, that involves bribery and corruption. Those were their allegations and that is where we started our investigation into this company.

AMT: And so how does that go to the court case. That is, what are they facing now in this court case?

DS: So as this story hit, there is a gentleman, Riadh Ben Aissa, who was the executive vice president, who was based out of Montreal, but also Tunis. He was ultimately shortly thereafter charged in Switzerland and pleaded guilty to actually funneling lots of money, money laundering, fraud, bribery involving the Libyan regime. He's the individual. The RCMP subsequently did a much larger look at SNC's business and they have charged the company itself for crimes in Libya because think about what SNC was doing there. They were building airports. They were building this huge irrigation project 27 km of pipe through the through the desert. They were building a prison. They had, I mean SNC build, that's what they do. They build power plants, absolute megaproject, billions upon billions of dollars and to secure them, by the admission of Riadh Ben Aissa in his guilty plea, bribes were paid, kickbacks, money funneled back to individual members of the dictatorship family.

AMT: This is not the first time SNC-Lavalin and its executives have faced allegations around the awarding of contracts.

DS: Absolutely not. Here at home, the Montreal mega hospital, $52 million mysterious payments. We had some guilty pleas from the former CEO just a few months ago. In Bangladesh, a $3 billion bridge project there, SNC was implicated in paying bribes to rig the bidding there. The World Bank caught wind of it. SNC has been banned from bidding on World Bank projects for 10 years as a result. As we looked at this and there were some prosecutions here at home related to the Bangladesh project, we got to know some of the individuals, some of the low level people. They said look, this is not just one off bad apples. And one of the accused in that case who is no longer charged because that case actually fell apart for a bunch of reasons. He came to us with a briefcase full of records of SNC-Lavalin's procurement and he had copies of cheques and he provided to us cheques for consultancy costs. It was a hidden code for SNC-Lavalin's international branch that was doing projects. So we have evidence of illegitimate payments, payments that SNC-Lavalin, when we asked them about them said, indeed they're illegitimate. Projects in Nigeria, Ghana, Uganda, Zambia, Malawi, Mozambique, Kazakhstan, India, Bangladesh, Cambodia. So this was a widespread practice in how the company was doing business.

AMT: So why has SNC-Lavalin lobbied so hard for deferred prosecution agreement?

DS: Well they're trying to survive. The reality is it's a massive company. It employs thousands upon thousands of people. It has obligations to shareholders to remain alive. The Canadian law, when it was drafted, Canada signed on to this covenant that said look, we're not going to allow this. We stand up for values. We don't want companies undermining democracy, corrupting local officials and developing countries. That's why we should care about this. But when the law was drafted in Canada, it didn't have the escape valve that places like the U.K. or the U.S. had, which are these deferred agreements that say okay you caught us,' but because were a huge corporation, we will pay a huge fine. We will do whatever steps to improve the internal controls and the ethics of the company, but don't destroy us. Canada didn't have that until very recently. And when it went through the system, Canada adopted a little clause that will now allow that to happen. But last October, the prosecution service said sorry, we don't think SNC-Lavalin meets the criteria for that. SNC-Lavalin has issued a statement and said look they remain open. They think the government is wrong. They want to negotiate a deal in the interests of their employees, partners, clients, investors, pensioners and other stakeholders, all innocent parties that have been affected during the last six years.

AMT: Okay and that's where we are now. Dave Seglins, thanks for the back story, really important.

DS: Thank you.

AMT: Dave Seglins, investigative reporter with the CBC News I unit, with me in our Toronto studio. Well my next guest is watching this case closely to see what lessons can be learned. Ian Lee teaches business strategy and public policy at Carleton University Sprott School of Business. We've reached him in Ottawa. Hi.

IAN LEE: Good morning, Anna Maria.

AMT: So first of all, I guess let's pick up where Dave leaves off. If this case proceeds to trial and results in a conviction, what would it mean to SNC-Lavalin's ability to undertake future projects in Canada or around the world?

IL: I think it'll essentially put them out of business. Keep in mind, the world bank banned Lavalin for 10 years as was just noted a moment ago. The press release was very clear in 2013 issued by the World Bank. It was because of a very serious behaviour, illegal behaviour in Bangladesh. So a 10 year ban takes it to 2023 and remember the vast majority of these large infrastructure projects are in the developing world, in the so-called emerging world. There's about, according to the U.N., there's seven and a half billion people in the world. About one billion in the developed or first world of countries. So that means there's about six and a half billion people in emerging markets and that's where most of these opportunities are. You know Bangladesh, Pakistan, Russia, China, you know countries in South America. These are so-called middle income and low income countries as opposed to the high income countries of Canada, United States, West Europe, not to suggest there aren't infrastructure projects there. The vast majority of the projects are international. They're out of that market. So now they're banned from the Canad as well, they're going to be down to a very, very small market and their very existence is in jeopardy. They could be to save themselves, they may have to sell out, be bought out by another company.

AMT: And you use SNC-Lavalin as a case study with your students. What do you tell them?

IL: This is a very delicate subject and I speak truth to power. I'm tenured, I do not consult at all to any corporation anywhere, although I do travel around the world teaching at university programs, Canadian and American, in these developing countries that are partnered with a local university. In three weeks time, I'm getting on a plane to go to China. I've been teaching there since 1997 in an MBA program. I've been teaching in Warsaw, Poland since 1991, almost a third of a century. So I tell my students, both here and abroad, and I'm being very blunt with them. I said look, the rules, the whole paradigm is changing. The whole framework is changing. Ten, fifteen years ago, European companies could deduct legally bribes paid in the developing world. Perfectly legal then. But the whole framework is changing because of the excellent work of the World Bank and even more so at the OACD and the strong support of Canada and the United States. These were the first two countries in the world to pass the, essentially the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which made it extended extraterritoriality so that a Canadian doing business abroad anywhere in the world, is not exempt just because they've left Canadian soil. So to answer your question, Anna Maria, I tell my students you have to be really blunt. Yes you face an existential choice abroad. If I don't pay the bribes, I probably won't get the contract, but the reality is that the prosecution is becoming more and more aggressive in Canada and the United States, so the FCC and in Canada through the Justice Department and you could be convicted under the Criminal Code. As a lot of these people in these projects are engineers or they're lawyers or they're accountants, they will likely lose their professional license. They'll be disbarred, which means they will not be able to work again as professionals. They will have a miserable life going forward. So you'll face very tough choices, you know and I'm certainly not advocating taking the bribe. It is very illegal, including using third party. This is the amendments that were made to the Canadian law a short time ago. So I said you've got to really confront this and this is very risky, very high risk because these countries and these developing countries still remain deeply corrupt. They're typically authoritarian, non rule of law countries. One only has to look at the Transparency International list that ranks all the countries of the world and the top 30, but the bottom 30 or 50 are very interesting.

AMT: So Ian, do you SNC-Lavalin as too big to fail?

IL: I hate to say this, but that phrase is loaded, but you're absolutely right. I think the reality is that a large firm that employs a lot of people, paying so called good jobs, that pay good wages, it is in fact too big to fail. I dont want to immediately qualify that Anna Maria. I'm not suggesting that these companies should get a slap on the wrist and go away. I think we've been approaching, the remedy has been wrong. We've been looking at well you know maybe banning them from business and essentially potentially forcing them into bankruptcy. I don't think we should be looking at that remedy, instead, we should be hitting the shareholders and the executives in their pocketbook with massive fines. I dont mean fines of $10,000 or $10 million. The BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico led to $25 billion with a B fine, that had massive impact on the return on investment, the profitability and remember all these large corporations, their wages, the senior executives wages are tied as a form of profit sharing to the profitability of the company, typically the share price, the profitability, those sorts of metrics.

AMT: So let me ask you, so can you do that with the deferred prosecution agreement? Could you hit them the way that you're saying that they should be hit?

IL: I'm not a corporate lawyer, but my understanding is we don't have that in the legislation yet. I'm thinking of the American model where the FTC now, instead of putting companies out of business, they're going in with very large fines, not just on corruption abroad, but other types of corporate malfeasance. And so I think we should start thinking about the remedy as being a financial fine, but a very, very large in the billions fine for a big multi-billion dollar company. It will hit the shareholders and hit the executives in their pockets in a very significant, meaningful way.

AMT: And just very briefly, if that doesn't happen, what's the message to your business students?

IL: I will say to them, even if Lavalin does get the deferred agreement, I'm going to say look, this is this is evolving. The rules are changing. Do not accept this as a license or a green light to say I can get away with a slap on the wrist. The next time the next company comes up, I will predict with confidence that the next executives will see jail time. I've already seen this in the States.

AMT: Ian Lee, we have to leave it there. Thanks for your time.

IL: My pleasure, Anna Maria. Thank you.

AMT: Ian Lee, associate professor at Carleton University's Sprott School of Business. He's in Ottawa. And Jennifer Quaid is in Ottawa. She's been following this story for more than a year. She's a professor of law at the University of Ottawa. She specializes in corporate criminal liability. Hello Jennifer Quiad.

JENNIFER QUAID: Good morning, Anna Maria.

AMT: So let me ask you first, the deferred prosecution agreement, is it a good legal tool in this particular case?

JQ: Well I think that's open to debate. Deferred prosecution agreements are generally sold at least in part because they're a means of detecting conduct that we wouldn't otherwise discover. So usually the kinds of crimes that are eligible for DPAs are economic crimes that are conducted in secret and without a whistleblower, you're never going to know they happened. So things like bid rigging, price fixing and corruption, but you know another part of it is to say well this is an alternative way of resolving the case that is not put the financial viability of the company on the table and so it's interesting what Professor Lee said because in fact one of the difficulties we've had in criminal enforcement against corporations generally is that judges are very reluctant to impose those big fines on a corporation because they say well then you know it's too much and it's almost like it's very difficult to find that sweet spot between the slap on the wrist and the so-called fatal blow. So I'm not sure that increasing the fines is a realistic option, based on judicial practice and the reluctance to do so.

AMT: I want to also ask you, the prime minister has said that Jody Wilson-Raybould is bound by cabinet confidentiality. Is there a legal way for her to be freed of confidentiality and solicitor-client privilege as well?

JQ: Well solicitor-client privilege belongs to the client. So you know she would have to, the government and it's really the governor general counsel has to release her of that privilege and I think they're studying that question. One of the challenges about the privilege question and the confidentiality is that this is not the traditional lawyer-client relationship, where you know here the client is actually the government and one could argue that unlike a private client who has an interest in making sure that what they discuss in the in the hope of getting good legal advice you know doesn't need to be public here. There is a sort of counter argument that says well know the government is suppose to be acting in the public interest and can't we know. I mean I do think that there are things that are privileged and there's reasons why we keep cabinet confidences you know quiet. So I'm not sure that you can just throw open the doors and say well we need to see everything. But every time you have a sort of overlap of public institution and government questions on a legal matter like this, it's never as straightforward as it appears. So I'm sure they're looking at it, but I don't think that an obvious solution is apparent yet.

AMT: Do Canadians have reason to worry about the integrity of our criminal justice system?

JQ: I don't think we need to worry that the system is going to fall apart. I have every confidence that you know prosecutors make their decisions based on legal principles and their professional obligations and ethics. You know in the vast vast majority of cases, it's only isolated incidents where we've ever had any suggestion of this kind of interference. The problem I think comes from the fact that we're talking about a fairly significant economic actor with a lot of power and clearly a lot of contact with the government. I mean we can characterize it how we wish, certainly as SNC-Lavalin was interested in having its problems you know come to a resolution. But you know this is larger than just the actual case and whether they have access to the agreement. I mean it's now pretty much an open secret that the entire part 22.1 of the criminal code, which the DPA regime, was enacted and rushed through Parliament to get it in place for SNC.

AMT: You spotted that when it happened.

JQ: Oh yeah, but I mean it wasn't on the front burner for most people, but it's astounding to me and you know the regime has already been amended in the second omnibus budget bill in December, which shows you that maybe you know we should take some time to do it right. I think the reasons why you need to have a DPA regime available and there are companies who could qualify, but the challenge is always trying to balance you know having an option to to prevent a catastrophe in economic terms and not essentially providing a free pass because then you have to worry about well where's the incentive to comply if you can negotiate yourself out. It's not as straightforward as the economic models might let you believe. It's tricky and perceptions are important because that's where the public gets its confidence in the system.

AMT: Jennifer, we have to leave it there. Thank you for your time today.

JQ: Thank you, Anna Maria.

AMT: Jennifer Quaid, professor of law at the University of Ottawa. That's where we reached her. We've just learned a few moments ago that Jody Wilson-Raybould has now resigned from cabinet. In a letter to the prime minister she says and I'm quoting here, "With a heavy heart, I am writing to tender my resignation as the Minister of Veterans Affairs and Associate Minister of National Defence. She goes on to say in her letter to Prime Minister Trudeau, I'm aware that many Canadians wish for me to speak on matters that have been in the media over the last week. I am in the process of obtaining advice on the topics that I am legally permitted to discuss in this matter and as such have retained the Honourable Thomas Albert Cromwell C.C. as Counsel. Jody Wilson Raybould goes on in her letter of resignation to say I look forward to continuing to serve as the Member of Parliament for Vancouver-Grandville. Now this is breaking news. It's a breaking story. Our CBC News team in Ottawa is on the story and you will hear more from our CBC News team and its reporters at the top of the clock, coming up in just another couple of minutes in the newscast. Listen to CBC Radio all day as this continues to, as we continue to get updates. Again Jody Wilson-Raybould, Minister of Veterans Affairs and Associate Minister of National Defence, former Attorney General of Canada, she was just moved out of one portfolio and into the other in the middle of January. Jody Wilson-Raybould has now resigned from cabinet. She says she will continue to sit as a Liberal MP for the riding of Vancouver-Grandville. Again breaking news, you will hear more at the top of the clock. You're listening to The Current. Stay with us for that newscast coming up next. And then we are back we're talking about machine learning and medicine. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current on CBC Radio One.

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How Toronto's SickKids hopes to use artificial intelligence to predict cardiac arrests

Guests: Anna Goldenberg, Jennifer Gibson

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

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AMT: Still to come, remembering Joe Schlesinger. As a CBC News foreign correspondent for decades, he brought Canadians world changing events. He did it with a sense of history and by bringing the biggest stories down to a human scale with a heartbeat. He joined me here on The Current for a wide ranging talk about his life and his career a decade ago and we'll revisit that conversation in half an hour. But first, when the heartbeat is data to be crunched.

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AMT: When we think of cardiac arrest, it's almost always something that comes out of the blue, but what if you could have a five minute warning. That could be enough to save a life. And using advances in artificial intelligence, that is becoming increasingly possible. At Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children, some of the vast amount of medical data generated each and every minute is being gathered together and analyzed in an important new way. Anna Goldenberg has helped pioneer this technique using artificial intelligence. She is the first Varma Family Chair of biomedical informatics and artificial intelligence at Sick Kids Hospital and she's with me in Toronto. Hello.

ANNA GOLDENBERG: Hi.

AMT: A computer model for predicting cardiac arrest in infants, explain to me how that works.

AG: We are seeing a lot of signal right now, a lot of physiological signals being measured and recorded and clinicians, doctors and nurses have to kind of monitor it, understand all these multiple signals at the same time to try to see how to react to it. Maybe an intervention is needed and the more data we collect, the harder it is to make instantaneous decisions based on that data because it becomes more and more complex. So that's why we partnered with the critical care unit where we are trying to take the data and make a risk prediction model. So we monitoring this physiological signals, we are moving the window and asking the question is the cardiac arrest likely to happen in the next five minutes and using the currently available deep learning and machine learning tools, we have developed the model that actually is able to do that for 70 percent of the individuals in the data that we have seen so far.

AMT: Okay so normally you would be monitoring their conditions, a doctor would be, and making those decisions, but now you can actually look at that against a whole bunch of other data to help decide, is that right?

AG: Right so we are using more of the historical data to help to make a prediction.

AMT: So in the case of cardiac arrest, you have children like wired up and being monitored and so that data doesn't just disappear then, it goes into something that the algorithm can use and you can figure out long term.

AG: That's correct.

AMT: OK. So how would a doctor with a patient who is in that unit use the information from AI and machine learning to help that individual child?

AG: So this is what we are trying to explore. Right now a lot of research in machine learning just remains in papers. We create a new model, we publish it and we are done. And what we are trying to do at Sick Kids, is trying to bring that power into the hospital. So what kind of information would be most relevant to the clinician at that moment to make a corresponding decision about potentially which intervention to make or just whether to make an intervention.

AMT: And just remind us what difference can that five minute lead time make?

AG: This question is really for the clinicians rather than an AI expert, but from what I understand, in some cases five minutes are enough to make an intervention and interventions could be anywhere from particular medication that is given to specific procedures that they would do to prevent cardiac arrest. In some cases five minutes might not be enough, so we are working on a model that is able to predict even more in advance for some of the individuals, maybe not all of them.

AMT: OK and so that's one of the big projects you're working on. What other ways will you be using AI in medicine at the hospitals with this research chair that you have?

AG: So I'm hoping that we will be using on machine learning is what I do, in a great variety of ways. Right now our emergency department has implemented an AI system, which helps them to streamline and optimize the operation to get the right people at the right times to help speed up the processes in the emergency department. There are other ways where we are trying to use imaging data to predict whether a nodule thyroid nodule is likely to be malignant to help clinicians to make a decision about whether surgery should be done. In every case we are hoping that this will be additional information that the clinicians will use to make their decision, as opposed to making the decision for them. We are not aiming to do that. What we are aiming is to really say we have this wealth of information of the patients that we have observed in the past and based on all of that knowledge, we can deduce some patterns that may be useful for the clinician to make a decision for this specific patient.

AMT: So in the case o thyroid cancers right, then the ability to what spot a malignancy without surgery.

AG: So we can predict the likelihood of it being malignant. So in thyroid cancer unfortunately, the diagnosis itself can only happen upon resection. So there are various tests that are done. Ultrasound is done to estimate some likelihood of it being malignant and then if the chances are high then they do biopsy, but they won't know whether it is really cancer until resection. And of course resection is a very invasive procedure, which affects patients sometimes during their whole life following this procedure. So what we are trying to do is we are trying to say we've seen ultrasounds and we've seen biopsies for a lot of individuals, can we map that information to whether or not the nodule was observed to be malignant for all these other patients and build a system which will be able to detect those patterns and say yes it's likely to be malignant in this case or not.

AMT: OK. How accurate would the predictions be made through AI?

AG: It really depends on a case by case basis. So in some cases we can predict with very high accuracy, in some cases we can predict only with 70 to 80 percent accuracy and all this information will need to be communicated to the clinician to say you know, yes we have a prediction for you, but this is the confidence for this prediction.

AMT: Am I right then in understanding, I mean right now, when it comes to diagnosis, doctors might confer with each other and they use the benefit of their own collected knowledge. What you're really talking about is enhancing that knowledge and collect even more knowledge that would be available then.

AG: That's correct. That's our goal, is to really try to distill a lot of the knowledge that is currently in the records and is not really being used. I would guess a parallel could be drawn to how there's a more junior clinician who gets information from theory, from their studies of the university and much much more senior clinician who has seen a lot of different cases in their life and maybe a lot of them that they weren't learning at school about. But in our case, we would be able to provide both junior and more senior clincians with more information across all the clinicians that have seen patients with these conditions. So it's like having a little bit of an expert on the side.

AMT: So when you're putting all this data in and no one necessarily knows how the AI will interpret for any specific case, right?

AG: So we are working on that. This ties to the black box of AI, kind of, everybody's saying well AI is a black box and we shouldn't be using them because we don't understand how it works. And the reality is a bit more complicated. First of all, there's a grade initiative within AI to interpret models. So that's one of the things. Another thing is that clinicians are currently making decisions, sometimes based on their experience, without really understanding exactly why. So they can post explain why they think they made a decision, but at the moment, they say I think that this is the case. It's also a you know the human intelligence, which is not also not very well interpreted, other than the post factum.

AMT: Your background is in computer science, am I right?

AG: Yes. My mother is a computer scientist so I had all the tools at home to be able to use it easily and in terms of computer science, it's very satisfying because you write a program, you only have to do it once and its fun in the process and you can see some outcome that you would never be able to do yourself. So computer science has always kind of been my passion and math as well. So ever since my undergrad, all my degrees were related to data mining, which is what it was called then and not called anymore, but data mining, machine learning and statistical analysis of data because we can really help make our world better by understanding the historical data that we collect.

AMT: So how did you make the leap from that to medicine?

AG: So I had an opportunity for my post doc to to explore computational biology and I really know anything. I learned biology back in high school, in a different language, in a different country and the more kind of I was immersed in this field of computational biology and computational medicine when I realized just how many challenging problems there are. That there is a lot of complex data, which we don't understand and machine learning can really help to make a difference here. So for me it became a very obvious choice.

AMT: So when you started data mining, the level of AI that we're dealing with now was not even close.

AG: There are several advances, leaps I would say that happened between then and now. There were a lot of very recent advances in machine learning itself, the methodology. It was really helped by the fact that computing power has become a lot more available and accessible and the data that's been collected, which was not necessarily available in such quantities back then. So those three things are coming together to really make this field an exciting place and for the time to be now to be doing this,.

AMT: We called Amar Varma. He is the Toronto engineer who donated $1.75 million to create the Varma Family Chair in biomedical informatics and artificial intelligence. He has high hopes for you. Listen to him.

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VOICE: My hope is that given her background, her experience, her track record of just being able to do really hard things, that we can let her focus and see if she can do something even harder. And what does that mean, it translate a bunch of data points that are floating around patient care and put some sense to them, much more than the human mind can do. So that's the grand hope.

AMT: There you go. A lot of hope in what you're doing.

AG: I think that's reasonable. I think that's exactly what we are trying to do. Amar is an amazing person because first of all, I've just been interacting with him a bit and he's very genuine and very he kind of cares, really cares about what he does and thinks deeply about technology, but also this is exactly what we are trying to do. And of course having help from that industry is something that allows hospitals to move forward. It's very forward thinking of him to have invested in this way.

AMT: And his own son had been at Sick Kids, I understand.

AG: Right.

AMT: So when we think about computer models and data points, not a lot of people immediately picture people in hospital beds. But I guess it's time to change our thinking.

AG: I really think so. It doesn't happen overnight, it doesn't happen very fast because we have to be very very careful about how we do these things to make sure that it's safe, to make sure that the efficacy is at the level where we are definitely improving client care. I think we can do that in a lot of cases and I think clinicians think that they can use AI to improve it because clinicians have come to us to say we've been collecting data, can you see if you can build a system that will detect some of the patterns that we potentially overlooked, more complex patterns. And I think there is a lot of opportunity right now to make that happen and to help at the bedside.

AMT: Talk to me a little bit more about if you have concerns about how artificial intelligence can be used or misused in medicine.

AG: Certainly there are biases in the data that has been collected. There are some biases that are well known and some of them are related to the fact that we don't have the context and not that everything is recorded the medical records. Right now clinicians might say, I can see a patient walking into my room and by the way they walk, I can already start making up my mind. Right now that data is not recorded. So we can only make inferences based on the data that is in the records that is digitally available to algorithms and of course that's limited. Other data might not be stored, maybe useful, but might not be stored. We had a case when we were testing our thyroid nodule prediction system with a clinician and he gave us new data that's been collected since we started building the model and we made predictions and he said for one of them it was one of the individuals it was wrong. And he said I know exactly why it was wrong. It's because the father also had thyroid cancer, which is quite unusual. So they had a family history that somehow was not given to the algorithm. So if the information is not available, the system will make mistakes.

AMT: I want to bring someone else into this conversation who has thought a lot about the ethical side of AI in medicine. Jennifer Gibson is the director of the University of Toronto Joint Center for Bioethics. She's with us in our studio. Hi.

JENNIFER GIBSON: Hi.

AMT: Let's talk a little bit more as we talk about bias and bias means many things, but when we talk about bias in medical AI, what are we talking about and what are your concerns?

JG: So I think Anna's picked up some of the issues that surface related bias. There could be bias in the data in terms of gaps and you were talking some gaps. So you know depending on what data pools you're drawing from, you may be baking in a bias that is inadvertent and unintentional, without malice, but actually starts to move models in a particular direction. Why do we worry about bias? Because if we are moving towards looking for a patterns that might provide prediction, might aid in diagnose, it needs to be reliable and if inadvertently built into that we might be creating bias that could lead to misinformation, potentially even inequities in terms of how we're actually providing this information to clinicians, then the patients are going to be the ones who have to bear that burden.

AMT: So what would a bias be? Give me an example.

JG: One would be, a lot of individuals have complex chronic conditions. You might in order to be able to provide appropriate predictive advice for them to draw from multiple data sets to understand. And so it may be their physiological data, but in fact maybe the social factors around them that really make the difference in terms of their health. A lack of insight into those social factors might lead you down a treatment trajectory that loses sight of what could really be the intervention that would make the difference for them. And I think it's just more of a level of awareness of that possibility. It's the human side of the work we're still doing.

AMT: And as AI in medicine spreads nationally and internationally, are there potential issues of bias in that?

JG: Well that's interesting, yeah. So one of my research assistants did a map for me of where a lot of the investment, academically and financially, is going in terms of AI on a global map and you can see a number of countries that are really prominent in those areas. US is an example, Canada as a leader in the area, China is also a leader in this area, whereas we look at the globe, the rest of the globe, there are health issues across the board that might actually be more urgent, but because of the way in which where the technology is being developed is addressing the needs of particular populations, it may be to the exclusion of others.

AMT: So what do you do about all that?

AG: So I think it will be very hard to make predictions or to have any certainty that the model will generalize to the population that it has not seen before. Population that might have very different predispositions, very different environment, very different context. And right now we are bound by the data that we use and observe. And without that it will be very hard. So we'll need to to try certain models to see if they even apply to the populations in some of the developing countries. Some of the technology though is moving to the developing countries faster than it's been adopted here. I think there was a company out of Stanford that had drones that they wanted to use for medical purposes for delivery and it was too hard to penetrate the regulatory landscape in the U.S. and it's been deployed in Rwanda, where they're delivering blood to remote areas, blood for transfusions, using these drones, already from what I understand. So there are opportunities and different types of tools that AI is developing, that will be useful in some contexts, but might not really translate outside and I think there are a lot of efforts and initiatives that are being right now that are trying to see how we can address that disparity.

AMT: And so when you have the ability with AI to do diagnostics and to work with clinicians, how does that affect those already in these jobs?

JG: So this is a question that we're starting to hear more so in certain areas of medicine. So obviously on the one hand, most of the care that's provided is between two individuals who develop a relationship, short or a long term and it's got a high touch dimension to it. There are some clinical professions, radiology is an example or pathology, where it really draws on the expertise of the pathologist, the radiologist, looking at an image or looking at a screen of cells to discern whether this is an example of a cancer. Now if you are able to take these images and to develop an algorithm that would allow you to better predict whether or not this particular cell sample was cancerous or what stage in cancer, that would certainly be beneficial to patients, but the question that's emerged within medicine, so what does that do for the role and scope of clinical practice. A clinician like a radiologist.

AMT: Hence that little phrase, replacing the radiologist with robots.

JG: Is it replacing? Yeah. And I think that there are a number of clinical professions for which the access to some of the tools that might be available through technologies will augment what they are able to do. And I think there are a few of these subspecialties where it starts to feel like it may be displacement, but then I guess the question might be, so what does it free up? What does it open up as a possibility there, in terms of how we think about training future clinicians, in terms of the scope of their skills and capabilities. So you know we're in this interesting transitional moment I would say within medicine where there is a lot of uncertainty because this is a new set of tools that we haven't had access to. And there's a lot of enthusiasm for them and the potential as Anna's been describing is so tremendous and exciting for patients, but we haven't really figured out how to take advantage of these yet and we don't know what longer term consequences there may be. So that uncertainty is creating this really interesting set of conversations that are happening, where there are a number of folks sitting around the table, who would not traditionally be sitting together. Computer scientists, ethicists, legal experts, clinicians, policymakers, but I think one of the groups we've left out to this point, are members of the public, particularly since we will be encountering AI technologies in our banking activity, in our engagement life insurance companies, in our tools and resources that we have in our home. It's ubiquitous in this sense. We all have a stake in how we manage this, but I think the area in healthcare right now is a really rich place for us to be, really trying to understand this because the human connection is so clear.

AG: I don't think that the public is not at the table. There's a lot of talk about AI in the media. The problem is it's being painted either as really good way too be true or as really bad and really like at Terminator and we have to really worry about it and there are a lot of people making it out as something really bad, which I think is doing a disservice to the public. I think the conversation about the nuances of what this technology can do and what the scientists are really thinking about and how worried all of us are about making that right and that infact it can bring this technology to help a lot of people. I think this information needs to be out there and I am aware that it's starting to happen that there are a lot of trials on a kind of the cusp of ethics and AI, where people go out and ask the public what do you think in this case, what do you think in this case, just to try to assess what the public really thinks for AI in health care.

AMT: Well it does all come down to in the end again, that patient in the case of Sick Kids, the child who's in a hospital bed, who needs medical assistance and I'm wondering Anna Goldenberg, when you think of the work you're doing and the projects you're hoping to accomplish, do you think of any one person? What do you think about when you think of the patients?

AG: There are several cases actually in cardiac arrest. I was told of a story of this boy who is perfectly fine and had a ski accident, broke his leg and a clot formed in his leg and it traveled to his heart and he had a cardiac arrest, which resulted in some brain damage. This happened very, very quickly and maybe while he was in CCU hooked up to these machines we could really think about prevention at that point.

AMT: It all leads again to a living, breathing person who needs help. It's very tangible.

AG: Absolutely.

AMT: Well it's important to hear your views on all of this and hear what you're doing. Thanks for coming in both of you.

JG: Thank you.

AG: Thank you.

AMT: Anna Goldenberg, the first Varma Family Chair of biomedical informatics and artificial intelligence at Sick Kids Hospital in Toronto. Jennifer Gibson is the director of the University of Toronto's Joint Center for Bioethics. Let us know what you're thinking and how you see this issue of AI in medicine and the issues they raised on ethics as well. Tweet us @TheCurrentCBC. Find us on Facebook. Go to our website cbc.ca/thecurrent. Coming up a trip into the archives to spend one more half hour with one of the greats in Canadian journalism. A conversation with Joe Schlesinger in our next half hour from 2009. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

[Music: Theme]

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How veteran reporter Joe Schlesinger found the heartbeat in every story

Guests: Joe Schlesinger

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

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: Joe Schlesinger, CBC News, Ottawa.

VOICE: Joe Schlesinger, CBC News, Prague.

VOICE: Joe Schlesinger, CBC News, Mahmudabad, Iran.

AMT: Just a few of Joe Schlesinger's countless signoffs throughout the decades and around the globe. A longtime CBC foreign correspondent has died at the age of 90. Every reporter who has spent time with Joe will tell you of his generosity of spirit, his kindness to each of us, as he offered us advice and encouragement. Joe, as you're going to hear in a moment, talked to me about the heartbeat of a story. Understanding why a news story matters. Finding that person in that moment that's emblematic of what has gone on and why it should matter to the rest of the world. The producers here at The Current know I'm always asking us here to find that heartbeat in our stories. That comes from Joe. Joe Schlesinger's career kept him on the front lines of history through the latter half of the 20th century, from Vietnam to the Persian Gulf to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism to 9/11. Now he wasn't solely a formidable journalist. He loved the journey, the travel, the meeting people, the seeing the places and he instilled that aspect of the job, that joy for the work in me and in so many others. Joe Schlesinger joined me on The Current for a feature interview back in 2009. By then he had already officially been retired from the CBC for 15 years, but he kept on reporting and he would right up until 2016. From the CBC Archives, here is my conversation with the late Joe Schlesinger, starting with my introduction from then.

SOUNDCLIP

AMT: If you have seen and heard Joe Schlesinger reports over the years, you will know what sets him apart is his story telling, the way he finds what he likes to call the heartbeat of a story. This is one of my favourite examples. In March of 1991, Joe was covering the end of the first Gulf War, specifically the highway between Kuwait and Baghdad, where retreating Iraqi soldiers had been bombed by American forces. It became known as the Highway of Death. Here is part of Joe Schlesinger's report.

JOE SCHLESINGER: Over the battlefield, where the bodies of the dead are being removed, flows the sound of music.

[Music]

JOE SCHLESINGER: The music comes from a greeting card for Eid, a Muslim holiday in April, the card's owner will never see.The news stories of this battle spoke of tanks and weapons destroyed, but among the hulks of war machines there are reminders of the human dimension of the disaster that happened here. That people who died here, they had kids that children may have died here. The jewelry, did it belong to whoever brought it here? More likely it was stolen by an Iraqi soldier from a Kuwaiti.

AMT: That is the CBC's Joe Schlesinger reporting from the so-called Highway of Death in March of 1991. Joe Schlesinger is with me in Toronto. Hello and welcome.

JOE SCHLESINGER: Good to see you again.

AMT: You know that, I can still hear that music I could hear that music forever. What were you thinking as you heard that story again?

JOE SCHLESINGER: I was puzzled at first. I heard this sound and I thought where's it coming from, you know I thought maybe cause there was a radio left on or something and then I saw this card fluttering in the wind and I thought, my God, and around it were all these toys.

AMT: And I mean it really was, you really honed in on the fact that these were people with families.

JOE SCHLESINGER: I know. I mean there were toys strewn all over the place. Possessions, clothes, you don't know whether they were looted or whether they had brought their families with them and were leaving with their families. You couldn't tell.

AMT: That's what you mean when you talk about the heartbeat of a story, isn't it?

JOE SCHLESINGER: You better believe it.

AMT: How do you know when you found the heartbeat of a story?

JOE SCHLESINGER: I don't know, it's sort of, let me tell you the story of an earthquake in Italy. I've covered earthquakes before and then after and what you do is you know you have wide shots of the town, you have medium shots of the ruins and people crying or being dug out etc. and I saw a group of people around one hole in the ground and there was a little boy in there. You could hear his voice. You couldn't see him. So I decided to forgo all the rest of the day and just stay with that little boy. And they had no tools. There was a lot of arguing here, there everywhere etc. you know, Italians can be quite voluable.

AMT: You say pointing to me, okay.

JOE SCHLESINGER: I spent most of the day, they finally managed to extricate this little boy and they lifted him out of that hole like a newborn baby. I mean you that and you stand there and you're transfixed. This kid was born over again.

AMT: And in the story of that one child, you tell the story of an earthquake. If we look back on who and what you've covered, over I see this number on the page I have written here, 61 years. 61 years Joe Schlesinger as a journalist.

JOE SCHLESINGER: Sixty five in three days.

AMT: Okay we lost a few days then, that's a long time.

JOE SCHLESINGER: I was in a boarding school for Czech refugee children in Wales and I used to go down at six o'clock in the morning and listen to BBC broadcasts to his Majesty's ships at sea, at dictation speed and I would take it down, every day, every morning he posted on the noticeboard. And that particular day, I added something. They both spoke of sea and air battles on the channel and I said, it seems the second front had started. And when the kids came down for breakfast they all kidded me, harassed me that I'd been dreaming because there was nothing on the radio. And then two or three hours later, the BBC broke into its programming with the communique signed by some American general named Eisenhower or something like that, saying that a DA landing had started in Normandy. And I had myself a world scoop.

AMT: That's amazing. How did you end up in a boarding school for refugee children?Tell us the story.

JOE SCHLESINGER: I come originally from Czechoslovakia. I was born in 28. So by the time Hitler was becoming a threat, I was what, seven or eight years old. And of course being Jewish, my family's life was obviously in danger and my parents couldn't get out, but they found a way of sending my brother and me out to Britain on the trains organised by an Englishman Nicholas Winton, who saved 669 children.

AMT: When is the last time you saw your parents then, what was the scene?

JOE SCHLESINGER: The last time, well the last time I saw my mother was seeing us off the station in Bratislava in Slovakia. But my father went with us to a station in the German reich, in Hitler's reich and the German station master said we couldn't stay on the platform, we had to go inside, but we couldn't go into the waiting room because in Hitler's Germany Jews were not allowed in the waiting room. So the last time I saw my father, we spent the night beside a smelly dark urinal in the station in Hitler's Germany.

AMT: What did your father say to you as you said goodbye?

JOE SCHLESINGER: I don't know whether he, he certainly must have thought he might never see us again, but I don't think this was kind of definite because I remember my mother saying to a friend, we're sending our boys to England because until it blows over you know. I mean the Holocaust was something that was unimaginable then.

AMT: When did you find out about Nicholas Winton and the role that he played in getting you out of Czechoslovakia?

JOE SCHLESINGER: Not until fifty years later. He never told anybody about it. I mean we had no idea who did it. I mean we knew there was an organization of some sort.

AMT: You were a kid. How old were you when you left?

JOE SCHLESINGER: I was 11 and somewhere in the late 80s, Nicky Winton's wife went through the attic. She was cleaning up the attic and found this suitcase and in this suitcase there were lists with kids names, photographs, telegrams, letters etc. and she said what is this? So he told her and that's how it became public.

AMT: And you met up with him again then, not that long ago?

JOE SCHLESINGER: I last saw him a couple of weeks ago. He was celebrating his hundredth birthday. And quite a party it was.

AMT: The first time you met him, as an adult, after all that time, what was it like?

JOE SCHLESINGER: By that time, he was used to it, but for me it was very emotional. And we've become very close since then, he and I, in part because of what I do.

AMT: You know and it is interesting because you know your obviously life would have been very different if that man Nicky Winton had not done what he did.

JOE SCHLESINGER: I wouldn't have had a life. I mean it would've been over pretty soon.

AMT: And you know so we're talking about how he likes what you do as a journalist and I'm looking at the list you know. Chairman Mao, the Iranian revolution, the Shah, the fall of the Shah, then obviously the coming in of the Ayatollah, Vietnam, Richard Nixon, Mikhail Gorbachev, Ronald Reagan, like you've been on the scene at pretty much every historic event in the last half of the 20th century.

JOE SCHLESINGER: Yes, but I mean really it started as a kid because you know I was aware of Hitler. I was aware, you know I can still name the region of Hungary, the chancellor of Austria and I may not be able to remember what I did this morning, but I remember what happened 70 years ago.

AMT: Well and it's interesting too because you went back to Czechoslovakia to work as a journalist and you had to flee a second time. What happened?

JOE SCHLESINGER: That's right. Well I worked for the AP and the Communists started arresting staffers, so I figured it was time to get out. You're looking at a man who necked his way through the Iron Curtain. We went through a border region and the border there with Austria was a river, which was frozen and we walked up and down along the river sort of necking and then on a count of 1-2-3, ran across the river and when we got to the other side, we noticed that we just managed to get across under a machine tower, which hadn't seen us either.

AMT: Well let's talk about, there's some many things that you've covered, but I want to ask you about the time you spent covering the war in Vietnam and I want to start with a bit of a report of what you filed in 1972, from the road to the town of An Loc. Here it is.

VOICE: An Loc is about a dozen miles up the road there. It's been under siege for about a week. There are 5000 men trapped inside the town. An Loc is the last sizeable on the road to Saigon, 60 miles away. And president Thieu has said that it must be held at all costs. In Saigon they've announced that a relief column has got to within two miles of An Loc. The South Vietnamese say they have 10,000 men on the road and you get the impression of a solid line, but when you get here on the road to An Loc, the reality is somewhat different. This in fact is not a single relief column. It's a series of units, some of them leapfrogged ahead by helicopters, holding pockets along seven miles of road with communist controlled stretches in between them.

AMT: Lot of gunfire in between there. So what was happening in An Loc. You're trying to get in obviously, did you get in?.

JOE SCHLESINGER: Well everybody was trying to get in and we managed to get in, my cameraman and I, we managed to see a South Vietnamese paratrooper colonel who was sending in a chopper full of his soldiers. And we said we'd like to join them and he said you got to be crazy and we persisted. Well he said, if you want to be crazy, go ahead. So we got on this chopper and it was so crowded that I remember the cabin doors were open, you just sat there holding on with your legs hanging out and when we came to An Loc, it was under mortar fire. So this chopper didn't actually land, it just sort of hovered and we jumped off. And it was under fire constantly and by the next morning, the paratroopers we had come with, who had been in a bunker which had a directed hit were dead. We managed to get out because supply choppers came along and one of them actually landed long enough for us to get on the skids and pull ourselves up into a chopper and get out of there. So we had a story that ran all around the world because that was one of the top stories of the time.

AMT: You would have been shooting on film at that time.

JOE SCHLESINGER: That's right.

AMT: How did you file your stories? What would you do with the film?

JOE SCHLESINGER: Well that's just it, you see. In those days there were no labs, film labs in Saigon. You just sent out the raw film.

AMT: And how would you actually get the film back to Toronto?

JOE SCHLESINGER: Every day this was an offensive, so during the height of the battle, a plane would leave Saigon Airport for Hong Kong with film bags from the various networks. And CBS took my film out and developed it and edited it and satellited it to Toronto.

AMT: So in a case of that, would it be like a one day time lag, two day time lag, before the actual.

JOE SCHLESINGER: It would be one day I would imagine, yeah.

AMT: So and you make the point, I mean technology has changed so much from those days. What have we gained from the technology?

JOE SCHLESINGER: We've gained a lot, but you don't need feet on the ground as much. You don't have to go there with a cameraman. Let's take, okay, by the time we got to El Salvador, by that time you had satellites, you had edits suites that you can edit and produce it.

AMT: This would have been in the 70s, right?

JOE SCHLESINGER: In the 70s. But and the networks would have you doing radio on this set and the other and you didn't actually have to go out to where the action was. And a lot of the correspondents would be doing radio back at the hotel in San Salvador. So then they have to do a stand up and at the back of the hotel, there's a swimming pool and then the bar and the bar had a thatched roof and there was a palm tree and the correspondent would stand between the palm tree and the thatched roof.

AMT: You'd never know the pool and bar was there. Joe Schlesinger, say it's not so though, how many correspondents would have done that versus go out in the field, do you think?

JOE SCHLESINGER: Well they would go out in the field sometimes, but sometimes they have other things to do you know.

AMT: And they could screen, but they could look at the pictures is what you're saying, so they caould write to it even without being there.

JOE SCHLESINGER: That's right. And then of course, the penny dropped with executives in Toronto and New York and elsewhere. Why send all these cameramen out there? Why not just have freelancers or have agencies etc. and you could gather all that stuff, put it together and you see nowadays you'll see reports of the American nets of somebody talking about Timbuktu and there's a bus whizzing behind him. They don't even bother to go there anymore because you can get the story, that's just it, the technology allows you to keep track of all those news. You can go on the Internet and browse and find out what's going on there.

AMT: So what have we lost with that technology?

JOE SCHLESINGER: You've lost the feet on the ground. You've lost the people who go out there and cover the primary news. You've lost the people who find the little music cards in the middle of the desert.

AMT: You lost the little boy.

JOE SCHLESINGER: Yeah. Canadian reporters don't go out as much as they used to the places where they can relate to what's happening there to Canadian things. You've lost that connection and that connection has become all the more important because we now have a globalized world.

AMT: You know you talk about by losing feet on the ground, we lost the ability to feel the heartbeat too though.

JOE SCHLESINGER: That's right, exactly. But not only the heartbeat, also the context.

AMT: Let's talk more about feet on the ground because you kept your feet on the ground. You went back to Prague in 1989. It was the time of the Velvet Revolution, the end of the communist regime. I'm going to play a bit of one of the stories you filed from that time.

[Singing]

VOICE: For Czechs this morning, a different celebration. They were celebrating the cannelization of St. Agnes, their 13th century Czech princess. For centuries, legend had it that when Agnes became a saint, good times would come to their country. Today many of the faithful here took the fall of the communist leadership last night as a sign that the legend was turning out to be true. Everyday the demonstrations grow largers and the strength of the opposition is now not just in numbers. The rally was covered live on Czech tv. A sign that the communists had lost control of broadcasting.

AMT: Joe Schlesinger, there you are covering the end of the regime that caused you to flee your country the second time. How did it feel? What sticks out in your mind from that assignment?

JOE SCHLESINGER: Well just coming back 50 years after I left as a refugee from Hitler, 40 years after I left as a refugee from Stalin and it was a kind of a personal vindication. And I was in Berlin for the fall of the wall when I heard about these demonstrations in November in Prague and I knew what it was about. So I got myself to Prague and it was the beginning of this incredible process of a revolution without violence of just the first a few brave souls turning out to demonstrate, then more people and more people and the cops just gave up and it just collapsed. The regime just collapsed from its inner rut and it was marvellous. It was marvellous.

AMT: I don't know if you know, I was in eastern, no I was in Berlin and I covered.

JOE SCHLESINGER: No I never knew.

AMT: No I know you knew that, but I don't know if you know that when we would go to Bratislava, where you were born.

JOE SCHLESINGER: No, I was born in Vienna, actually.

AMT: You were born in Vienna, but you lived in Bratislava. There'd be this little pilgrimage, right, we got to go by Joe's house. I don't know if you ever knew that,.

JOE SCHLESINGER: No I didn't.

AMT: But there'd be a bunch of us in the CBC and if we ended up in Bratislava, we'd do the pilgrimage and go by Joe's house.

JOE SCHLESINGER: Well, Joe's house, which is in the center of town was in ruins when I finally went back to Czechoslovakia in the early 90s after communism fell and it's been redone and it's owned by the city and this private company and it's the heart of tourist land. Up and down the street where I lived, there are now tourist groups you know led by people with flags and two doors down from where I lived, Mozart used to play until they burned out htat house. Across the street was the house where they played. And none of the tourist guides would you believe it say that Joe played here.

AMT: But the CBC people always just talked about, we never even thought about Mozart when we were on that street. Well you know later in your career, you were posted to Berlin and I got the Berlin posting when you left. As a Jew who so narrowly escaped the Holocaust, was it hard for you to be in Berlin?

JOE SCHLESINGER: No it wasn't because it was fascinating to see how things, how Germans, the West Germans had changed and how the whole thing evolved. The West Germans had to bear the brunt of post-war being blamed for the Holocaust etc. These Germans were taught oh it wasn't your fault, it was those capitalist West Germans who did it. The Austrians again they were told after the war that they were the first victims of Nazism, when in fact Hitler was an Austrian. Many of the top Nazis were Austrians. The Austrians greeted the Nazi occupation with cheers. In Vienna you have much more anti-Semitism than you have in Berlin, but it isn't that the Germans are free of anti-Semitism or racism or anything else, I mean they're like all the rest of us, but it was interesting to see the reshaping of the German psyche from what it had been, what I knew from history, what I knewfrom when I was a boy and how Germany had changed.

AMT: Well you know we can talk about all the many things that you have seen in your career, but to see that change, to see the changes of what are now the Czech and Slovak Republics, to see the change in Berlin, to be there with the wall falling and then to cover sort of that new period of time, given your history, it must have been extraordinary for you.

JOE SCHLESINGER: Well listen, I'm ripped and wrinkle.. I go back, never mind Europe, I go back, I was in China during the Cultural Revolution. I was in China for ping pong diplomacy in the early 70s, when everybody wore a Mao uniform and waived the little red book of Mao's thoughts etc.and you go back now and you go to Beijing, where everything was on bicycles and you go there now and there's so many cars. Then I really actually clocked it one time, we were making a left turn on one of the main boulevards, it took 40 minutes to make a left turn.

AMT: What's the lesson there in all of these changes that you've witnessed?

JOE SCHLESINGER: You know we talk about all the crises and all the problems that we have today, the wars and the slaughters that we see etc. and yet when you look at it from my point of view, from where the world was when I was a child, there was great depression in Europe, a great depression of North America, Latin America was stricken by poverty, Central America, Asia people starved by the millions in China and in India and you look at it now and you look at the prosperity in China and Japan, the rise of India, the rise of Brazil, the rise of democracies in Latin America, the prosperity of North America, despite our problems today, the world has progressed. There is progress in humanity. There is progress in democracy. There is progress in social legislation, social welfare measures. So there's hope. There's hope and more you can't hope for more than just hope.

AMT: When I did come to Berlin because you were leaving Berlin, you said two things to me. You said to me, now that you're a foreign correspondent, you better figure out what you're going to be when you're not, which I thought was great advice, but you also talked to me about finding the heartbeat of the story and how important that was for any journalist. That if you can't find the heartbeat of the story, that people you're reporting back home to, aren't going to see it either and they're not going to care as much. And I've always kept that with me as a journalist.

JOE SCHLESINGER: Well first of all you've got to get them into it obviously, but the thing is you have to, to get to their minds, you have to touch their hearts too.

AMT: But it's also the kind of life you've lived, you know in one of the stories you filed, I remember being struck by the way you talked about refugees. You talked about people coming out of villages or communities with all this stuff. They've got it on their backs, they're pulling it all along and you make the point that you know it's trivial stuff in the grand scheme of things. It's their little things, it's a bundle of clothes, but you made the point that it meant so much to them because it was all they had and it represented who they were.

JOE SCHLESINGER: But that too is personal because I remember after the war my parents had perished in the Holocaust and suddenly there was things I didn't even know. There was family silverware. I still have this set of knives and forks and serving things etc. Useless stuff, you know, my parents didn't get out. My mother sent out bedlinen with us to make sure that we had sheets and things.

AMT: So officially you've been retired for 15 years. You're still working. Why do you keep doing what you do?

JOE SCHLESINGER: You know.

AMT: You could go golfing or something.

JOE SCHLESINGER: One of my best friends is a man named Bill Cunningham. Do you know him?

AMT: I do.

JOE SCHLESINGER: Well he's spent a career. I mean we go back to being young reporters in Vancouver in the 50s and he retired a few years ago quite happily. He loves boats. He's got a boat. He's happy with his boat, fixing the GPS, getting rid of the barnacles. Well I don't have a boat. I don't play bridge, I don't, you know I don't have a hobby etc. If I didnt work, I would still be doing the same thing, reading the same thing, watching stuff, travelling here and there trying to find out what's going on. So this way I have an outlet. I don't have to news anymore I don't have to go, well I can't. I don't have to go to wars anymore, so you know more as I sit in a chair and pontificate.

AMT: You got the greatest hobby of all. Curiosity.

JOE SCHLESINGER: Yes the curiosity is still there and it hasn't killed the cat yet.

AMT: Joe Schlesinger, thank you for coming in.

JOE SCHLESINGER: My pleasure and nice seeing you.

AMT: From 2009, my conversation on The Current with Joe Schlesinger. The longtime CBC foreign correspondent has died at the age of 90. That is our program for today. Stay with Radio One for Q. Tom Power will introduce us to Canada Reads panelist Lisa Ray. Finally, one more thought on the late Joe Schlesinger, who in addition to being a great journalist was also a good sport. In February of 2005, he lent his talents to this skit on the Rick Mercer Report. Going to leave you with that. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. Thanks for listening to The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

Skit featuring Joe Schlesinger from the Rick Mercer Report.

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Feb. 12, 2019 episode transcript

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