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The Current Transcript for March 7, 2019

Host: Anna Maria Tremonti

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

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SOUNDCLIP

There was an erosion of trust between my office and the former Minister of Justice and Attorney General. I was not aware of that erosion of trust. As prime minister, I should have been.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: The Prime Minister speaking early this morning suggesting a breakdown of trust with one of his most powerful ministers and following the lead of his principal secretary in characterizing the controversy over the SNC Lavalin file as something he and his officials understand differently from how Jody Wilson-Raybould sees it. We're asking about what's been said and what's omitted in all of this in just a moment. Also today, who's watching home?

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We literally have people walking around with pen and paper around town looking for people who are engaged in behaviors that are considered anti-social and docking them points.

AMT: China's social credit system of rewards in punishments was supposed to be an incentive for trustworthy businesses. But critics say it's expanded to a worrisome level of behavioral control with an uneasy mix of surveillance technology and authoritarian goals. Well here are the concerns in half an hour. And from her early childhood Kate Harris wanted to be like the ancient explorers, discovering new frontiers. She had her sights set on Mars but there was no rocket to the unknown so she settled for a bicycle and began paddling along one of the oldest of exotic roots; the Silk Road.

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For me what I got out of the Silk Road was so much of what I was seeking in going to Mars. You know you don't have to go to a new world to feel like you've entered a new world.

It was an excellent adventure that's found a lyrical book and that in turn has won one of Canada's most prestigious nonfiction awards. So in an hour we will revisit a conversation with Kate Harris as she takes us out of bounds on the Silk Road. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

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Trudeau's speech on SNC-Lavalin would have been great — three weeks ago: writer

Guests: Tom Parry, Shannon Proudfoot, Lori Turnbull

SOUNDCLIP

J. WILSON-RAYBOULD: I raised the SNC Lavalin file. But this comment wasn't partisan in nature.

J. TRUDEAU: As parliamentarians, to defend the interests of the communities we were elected to represent. I stress the importance of protecting Canadian jobs and reiterated that this issue was one of significant national importance.

AMT: More drama this morning as the SNC Lavalin controversy continues to swirl in Ottawa. This morning it was the prime minister's turn to weigh in.

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J. TRUDEAU: One of the things central to my leadership is fostering an environment where my ministers, caucus and staff feel comfortable coming to me when they have concerns. Indeed I expect them to do so. In Ms. Wilson-Raybould's case. She did not come to me and I wish she had. That dialogue is crucial on a file as important as Justice.

J. TRUDEAU: Well this comes after yesterday's Justice Committee testimony from Gerard Butts the former principal Secretariat the prime minister. He and other backroom figures like the clerk of the Privy Council had been thrust to centre stage as the drama of the SNC Lavalin file and the former Attorney General Jody Wilson-Raybould has unfolded and persisted. CBC parliamentary reporter Tom Parry was watching the news conference with the Prime Minister this morning. He joins me from Ottawa. Hi Tom.

TOM PARRY: Good morning.

AMT: What stood out for you, first of all?

TOM PARRY: I think a few key points. The Prime Minister talked about this September 17th meeting between himself, the cleric of the Privy Council and Jody Wilson-Raybould the former attorney general. Jody Wilson-Raybould alleged during her testimony before the Crown’s Justice Committee that it was at that meeting that Justin Trudeau said they had to find a solution to this issue of SNC Lavalin whether the company would get a deferred prosecution agreement. It was at that time she said that Justin Trudeau said there’s a Quebec election coming. I'm the MP for Papineau so she took that as being a political statement and she asked the prime minister at that point: are you trying to direct me to make a decision on this matter of SNC Lavalin, to which he said no he was not. Trudeau right after TARP mentioned that he said he did say to Jody Wilson-Raybould that he was the MP for Papineau but he says it was not a partisan statement. He was merely trying to talk to her about the importance of this decision, of the importance of trying to preserve the 9000 jobs that the government believes are at stake at SNC Lavalin and he says following up on that meeting he had staff follow up and he says that he should have done that himself. Another point that he talked about was the erosion of trust between the prime minister's office and specifically the prime minister's former principal secretary general, Butts, so we heard from yesterday, an erosion of trust between that office and the former attorney general. The prime minister saying that he should have seen this erosion of trust was happening but he did not see that. He talked as well, again what we heard from general yesterday, saying that he tries to - through his leadership style - foster in an environment where people can feel comfortable if they have concerns to come to him, The Prime Minister. He says that Jody Wilson-Raybould did not raise concerns with him about this pressure she says she was facing, and he says looking back he wishes that she had raised those concerns. Final thing that stuck out for me was that The Prime Minister said that the government will be seeking outside advice on issues including the dual role of the attorney general and the Minister of Justice. Really one of the key points in this whole affair of the SNC Lavalin, the fact that as a dual role as Minister of Justice and Attorney General in one sense the Minister of Justice is a member of Cabinet, in another sense the attorney general is supposed to be separate from the political process and how do you get one person to wear those two hats. Those are the points that really stuck out.

AMT: Of course there have been times I think that the attorney general could be appointed I guess, but that's a whole other thing that they're looking at. I to go back to the breakdown of trust, because he says that breakdown of trust was between his office and Ms. Wilson-Raybould. Gerald Butts said the big breakdown of trust was between Mr. Trudeau and Ms. Wislon-Raybould.

TOM PARRY: I think the Prime Minister did actually mention that. I am going to have to sort of go through the transcript a little more closely but I think that he did mention Gerald Butts in there but he said I think the key point there was that he should have seen it happening, that he should have been aware of this happening and that he was expressing a degree of regret that he did not. He said that in an issue in a portfolio like justice - which he says is of course very important to him, some very big issues - that it makes a difficult portfolio even more difficult when you've got this breakdown of trust between the attorney general and the centre of government, the Prime Minister's office.

AMT: And of course some of these phraseology we heard yesterday with Butts, so how much is what he has done now, what we saw yesterday with Mr. Butts and the clerk of the Privy Council was really just laying the groundwork for what Mr. Trudeau said today.

TOM PARRY: Well I think that they are obviously singing from the same songbook. Gerald Butts is Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's former right hand man. He was there in the middle of all this. So he did in a sense lay the groundwork for what we're hearing from the Prime Minister today and I think that's why we're hearing from the Prime Minister today. We have now heard from a lot of the key players involved in this issue. We've heard from Michael Warnick, the clerk of the Privy Council. We've heard from Gerald Butts the former principal secretary to Justin Trudeau and we've heard of course from Jody Wilson-Raybould last week that explosive testimony when she alleged that she was under this campaign of pressure to come forward with this deferred prosecution agreement for SNC Lavalin.

AMT: Right, so we've had a lot of questions and a lot of answers. And the real question is there some clarity now? And I'm going to bring in more people in to weigh in on that. Shannon Proudfoot is an Ottawa based writer from McClain's. Lori Turnbull as the actor of the public administration squaller Dalhousie University. They are both in Ottawa. Hello, welcome.

SHANNON PROUDFOOT: Hi.

LORI TURNBULL: Good morning.

AMT: Any more clarity today Shannon Proudfoot?

SHANNON PROUDFOOT: Well what Mr. Trudeau had to say this morning very much was echoing what we heard from Mr. Butts yesterday and there is a couple of obvious themes, one being jobs. And so it's sort of recasting some of the conversations that Jody Wilson-Raybould relayed and from their perspective they're saying all of these discussions were legitimate and the reason we were being so sort of strident or diligent about it is because of all these jobs being in play. And now we're also seeing this very-- a tone that's very conciliatory without there being an outright apology where Mr. Trudeau is saying I understand that there is a breakdown here. I didn't handle things well. But Jody Wilson-Raybould the case she built last week was kind of a composite picture of this campaign of pressure. So we've seen I think Mr. Trudeau and Mr. Butts only engage with and [unintelligible] sort of certain very discreet sections of that and there are still unanswered in a way that's really quite central to Jody Wilson-Raybould's entire kind of message to the public last week.

AMT: Lori Turnbull so we’re watching in real time the curtain pulled back on the inner workings of government. What are you taking away from what you just heard from the Prime Minister?

LORI TURNBULL: Yes I mean I think what we're seeing from him is messaging that they hope to carry them through the rest of this right. Like he is he is hoping that he's going to be able to convince people that instead of being any kind of corruption or any kind of undue pressure, what happened here is a breakdown in communication between people who have been have been positioned as friends who communicate often. And that was part of Mr. Butts' testimony as well. He really paints a picture of he and Jody Wilson-Raybould as people who communicate a lot. They're friends. They go for dinner. They text back and forth. If she had a problem we really wish she had come to us. And so he's trying to put this in a position of 'we made some mistakes on the political side but there's nothing else really going on here' and he will try to rebuild parts of his brand that have been damaged by this story, with respect to reconciliation and with respect to his approach to open government, feminist government, things like that. I mean we heard these types of messages coming from Mr. Butts as well in his testimony.

AMT: And so Tom Parry I'm wondering, in some ways did they just stay on this now? Like what questions do you still have? What are you watching for?

TOM PARRY: Well I think you’re going to hear from the opposition as they’re going to say we want to hear from the people who are, maybe not the central characters in this, but the people who were involved in some of these meetings. Some of these officials from the Prime Minister's office, from the finance minister's office, people who were involved in this to get some of what they have said, what they said to the minister. So I think you could see the opposition sort of going down that road. The prime minister again, I know they're going to want to hear as well from Jody Wilson-Raybould again. That was before the Justice Committee yesterday opposition members saying we've got to hear from the former minister to compare what she said originally to what we've now heard from Michael Warnick, to what we now have from Gerald Butts. So I think there's going to be more questions there. I don't think that what the Prime Minister is appearance at the National Press earlier today will in any way call off the opposition. I think they're going to have many questions about this. So I don't think so.

AMT: Well as we look at, trying to figure out who should be believed. We really lose sight of the fact that this all began because the Liberal Government brought in our law, an amendment to the criminal code that would allow a different kind of dealing with SNC Lavalin. We know SNC was lobbying for it. They brought it in. They buried it in an omnibus bill and it would have allowed a way out for a company that was facing criminal charges to face other charges, but not criminal charges which had greater consequences. And so how central is that to what's going on here now?

TOM PARRY: Well they haven't had put that into the omnibus bill, they hadn't have brought in this law we wouldn't be having this conversation now. There would have been no deferred prosecution agreement for Jody Wilson-Raybould to overrule. So that's a key part of what's happening.

AMT: And that's getting lost in the shuffle here because regardless of the different sides on was there political pressure or not we know they wanted it. We know the PMO wanted it. We know that the clerk of the Privy Council, we know that the finance minister wanted it and we know that Jody Wilson-Raybould, her own Director of Public Prosecutions did not choose to use it and she wasn't going to force her to do that. Shannon Proudfoot that's still the crux of it, right there.

SHANNON PROUDFOOT: It is, and that came up yesterday in Gerald Butt's testimony too because he was at pains to say repeatedly, look, I have no skin in this game. I have no opinion here about whether a deferred prosecution agreement should or should not be offered to this company. But that's a little bit hard to square logically with his other a very strong messaging that this is all about jobs and we felt it was so important to protect these 9000 jobs, these spin off jobs, these families. It's a little bit difficult to understand how he, as the prime minister's top adviser, could have or the prime minister himself could have no particular opinion on an option being available to this company, were implicitly elsewhere in what they've said they are saying this company in all these jobs were at risk if we didn't do this. They're sort of an internal logic there, I think, that we've seen between yesterday and today.

AMT: Lori Turnbull, all of that blew up when Jody Wilson-Raybould became very public about this and suddenly everybody knew that there was this new amendment to the criminal code that sort of went under the radar before that. Moving forward what are the Liberal government's options in dealing with this insidious thing?

LORI TURNBULL: Well I mean that's probably a good question for David Lametti. I think one of the things that came out of Jody Wilson-Raybould's testimony last week was the sense that this is an issue for Lametti and it sounded like it was quite something that maybe is still on the table. But I’m not really sure you know if that’s really possible at this point politically or legally. I'm really not sure. I think if you look at the chronology of this thing, yes, I mean when Butts started yesterday one of the first things he said was that the Prime Minister gave clear direction to PMO and PCO that the job issue here was at the forefront. And so then Butts was supposed to make sure that that directive went through, and the DPA is a significant part of that right. The DPA is sort of where the legal issues and political issues come together and that would have been the tool that would have made it possible to find a solution as they say on the job issue.

AMT: And of course again their question that was asked as well Tom and you kind on touched on that. The Prime Minister was asked about the job issue and how clear that was. That's the real question. What do we know about whether those 9000 jobs really would have been lost?

TOM PARRY: Gerald Butts was asked about this yesterday by Elizabeth May the leader of the Green Party, what evidence do you really have? He said that he'd seen some financial and some reports from Finance Canada, but nothing specific that we could say that if the company doesn't get a deferred prosecution agreement that's going to go under, these 9000 jobs are going to disappear. There is some debate about whether that's in fact the case. Gerald Butts was on the job's thing because this really keeps coming up. And I think that the Prime Minister again talked about that today, when he said well when I said I was the member of a Papineau it wasn't partisan, it was just merely that I was thinking about people working in the province. Gerald Butts yesterday described it as being a public policy issue and not a political issue. And his position yesterday was that all we were saying is that if you're going to make a decision that affects 9000, or potentially affects 9000 people, that you give it more thought, that you make sure that you've got the information that you need. And that really is another kind of division in this story. They're saying are we were trying to do was make sure that Jody Wilson-Raybould had the proper information, that she's given the proper thought, that she was making the right decision and that she knew what the ramifications of that decision might be. She's saying that's pressure. Again, it's a different view of what could be very similar events.

AMT: I want to ask for a little bit more about the messaging, Shannon Proudfoot. Yesterday Gerald Butts went out of his way to try to connect with Lisa Raitt on Cape Breton background. Today we heard the Prime Minister talk about how his father was dedicated to justice and how much he cares about justice. What's the message there?

SHANNON PROUDFOOT: That's been kind of fascinating because so much of this story really does turn on personalities, workplace relationships, subtleties. I mean I think that is in part a strategic decision right now for the government's messaging that it's very good for them if this all comes down to kind of a matter of interpretation. But we have seen over and over major events kind of turn on conversations or perceived slights or frustrations among these players. You know we've seen over and over conversations we cast from one side to the other. One really interesting example from yesterday with Michael Warnick was. He was sort of asked about the conversation Jody Wilson-Raybould had related between herself, the Cleric, and the Prime Minister in which the clerk brought up the Quebec election. And in Jody Wilson-RAybould's telling that was a very partisan almost pseudo threatening sort of remark for her to hear. Like think about our electoral prospects. Come on let's play ball. Michael Warnick yesterday when he was asked about it said no no no this was in the non-partisan context of my job, giving her all the information she needed to have, and in fact what I was telling her is we have a convention of the federal government not meddling or affecting in any way a provincial election, and I just want you to know that if we make a decision that affects this company and maybe affects these jobs basically we could be somehow affecting a Quebec election in a way we don't want to. So we've seen over and over that we kind of get one version of a story through one to you hall into the room, and then a few days later, a week later we get a different version of the same scenario played out from the perspective of a different player in this.

AMT: And then of course there's the perspective of the rule of law and why this matters in this case is because of course Canada was under fire on issues of rule of law when it comes to Huawei.

SHANNON PROUDFOOT: Yes. It's all a big sort of kind of an unfortunate confluence of events I think for the federal government at this moment in time. It just kind of gotten stirred up together and one storyline or one narrative is affecting another massive one in a way that is certainly not advantageous to them.

AMT: Tom Parry.

TOM PARRY: Yes well the Prime Minister said it's been a tough few weeks. I don't think that he was referring to this. I mean you're right. You've got Chinese officials in Beijing saying, well you're saying on one hand you're a rule of law our country, you're not going to get involved in the case of Meng Wanzhou, on the other hand you're accused of interfering in the case of SNC Lavalin. No it hasn't been an easy time. It's not an easy issue for the Prime Minister he spoke up with that in his address this morning and I guess you know it's not just Jody Wislon-Raybould who's quit. He's lost two ministries over there. He's lost his principal secretary. This has been a very bad period for the government and Justin Trudeau is trying to get out of it. He's trying his best to get out of it. Whether it's going to work, whether this message that well there's two ways of looking at this or maybe more, if that's going to fly? I think it's too early to say.

AMT: And of course he ended with the fact that he's on his way to Iqaluit. He's going to apologise to the Inuit people about Canada's treatment of those people with TB. This was planned before. But the fact that he's reminding us he's going there, Tom, there is a message there too.

TOM PARRY: Yes. And I think the message is - and we've heard this from the government before when Jody Wilson-Raybould stepped down and their commitment to reconciliation was questioned. And the line from them was reconciliation is about more than one person, so more than just Canada's first indigenous woman justice minister. So that's what he's trying to do. This has been planned in advance. It's not as if he just decided to go out there and do this now. This has been planned in advance but I think it is on brand and they're trying to repair that brand. It's been damaged. There's no question that these are key elements of Justin Trudeau's brand; gender equality and indigenous reconciliation. And he said that question now about the resignation of a high profile indigenous woman. It's hurt him and he's got to try and fix that. They're trying to do that now but I think we've heard this a little earlier, is that I don't understand why he didn't do this say three weeks ago.

AMT: Okay we have to leave it there. Thank you all of you for your insights.

GUESTS: Thank you.

AMT: Tom Perry CBC parliamentary reporter, Shannon Proudfoot Ottawa based writer for Macleans and Lori Turnbull director of the public administration school at Dalhousie University. They are joining me from Ottawa. Well let us know what you think. Tweet us @TheCurrentCBC. Find us on Facebook or go to our Web site cbc.ca/theurrent. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. The news is next. Stay with us.

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Millions of people blocked from travelling under China's 'social credit' system: report

Guests: Nathan Vanderklippe, Jamie Horsley, Lynette Ong

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

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AMT: Still to come. It was an excellent adventure. Kate Harrison of France cycled more than 10000 kilometres along the ancient Silk Road through 10 different countries and a part of the world that's a world away from their own. Her story of that trip, Lands of Lost Waters, has now won a major Canadian book prize. In about half an hour we will revisit my conversation with Kate Harris. But first how is your social credit rating?

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AMT: If you were to walk your dog without a lead in China today may not get a ticket but in some parts of the country your social standing could take a hit. Since 2014 the Chinese government has been experimenting with a system that rewards and punishes people for their public behaviour through so-called Social Credit Points. The government monitors that behaviour towards vast surveillance apparatus and human rights activists worry about just how much control the government is exercising over citizens. In a few moments we'll hear from someone who says those concerns are overblown. But first Nathan Vanderklippe has been watching the growth of Social Credit in China from his position as the Asia correspondent for The Globe and Mail based in Beijing. We reached him today in Bangladesh. Hello.

NATHAN VANDERKLIPPE: Hi.

AMT: Before we get to the how this Social Credit system works, out what's behind this? Why has China established this system at all?

NATHAN VANDERKLIPPE: The history of this actually longer than you might think. Some of the first sort of scholarship on Social Credit in China dates back to the mid-1990s. This was an idea that apparently was favoured by a Zhu Rongji then Premier of the country and there were signs just that sort of started looking into this in the mid-90s and one of them sort of ruled out that landmark paper for the country 1999, talking about social credit as a tool for building trust in society and moderating trust in society and it's sort of just sat there. It was an idea and not much was done. But then in the last number of years there's been a much much more ambitious attempt to sort of bring this into reality.

AMT: How does it work?

NATHAN VANDERKLIPPE: That's an incredibly complicated question because it's it is a work in progress. It's not an 'it' so much as it's a 'them'. What's happening is you're giving a parallel development of all sorts of different both sort of more financially oriented credit systems as well as social credit systems in China. Some done by governments on governments or at different levels, some done by some of China's biggest tech companies for different reasons. And so you have some that are linked to court documents and credit default documents and that sort of thing. And those have created blacklists with millions of people, millions of people who have not carried through on their obligations - court ordered obligations - to make payments to staff. And then you have also you have quite small scale local Social Credit experiments in which you literally have people walking around with pen and paper around town looking for people who are volunteering and giving them extra points, and then looking for people who are engaged in perhaps behaviour that is considered antisocial and document points. So it's just this vast range of experimentation. Where it ends up sort of at this point, no one knows. Whether China ends up with a centralised system of social credit, possible, a possibility. Or whether you end up with sort of parallel perhaps provincial systems of social credit that have maybe only limited interactivity. All these things are possible. What we know is that tridents pushing for sort of a broader implementation by 2020 but the exact contours of that are clear yet.

AMT: Well that can be pretty scary then. We use the example of somebody working there without a lead. How would you lose points? What would you do? What would somebody see you doing that could get you in trouble that way?

NATHAN VANDERKLIPPE: Well I was on a high speed train about a year ago and I remember one of the announcements that came more and talked about how if you - can't recall - whether smoking or something else, if you broke the rules it could impact your Social Credit. So there's just a horse a variety of sorts of things that can be caught up so you know from sort of not making good on your obligations to sort of help your aging parents. It's just a whole manner of things considered antisocial behaviour.

AMT: And how would you earn points?

NATHAN VANDERKLIPPE: Well you can earn points for example by volunteering, perhaps by donating blood, by doing things that are considered of pro-social.

AMT: And if you are deemed trustworthy what doors would that open for you?

NATHAN VANDERKLIPPE: Well see in some of these social in some of these small scale experiments, you're giving things where you might get crap you might get a lower heating that arm or you might get other certain small scale financial or other advantages in that respect or there might be advantages booking hotels and that sort of thing. So it's just it's really broad based but it had the biggest impact at this point seems to be with regard to access to reserve or government jobs and that sort of thing in the field and if you are if you're a Social Credit is considered low, suddenly there are there are large avenues of employment that are that are closed off to you.

AMT: And you mentioned that there are millions already on black lists. What can they not do because they're on that list?

NATHAN VANDERKLIPPE: If you're on one of these like this you are barred from buying luxury goods on some China's online shopping platforms that you can buy a plane ticket. You can't to get a mortgage and other financial transactions are closed after you. In some places if you are on this black list there's been experiments where the government will automatically change your cellphone ringtone. So if your friends call you, instead of hearing a phone ringing, they get a message saying this person's on the blacklist as a method of public shaming. So there's a variety of things.

AMT: Is there any kind of an appeal process if you end up on a blacklist?

NATHAN VANDERKLIPPE: Not at the moment no. And that's been one of the issues. And there are also issues with regard to notification that people have discovered that they have been blacklisted by trying to book a plane ticket ,or high speed train ticket and being told that you know you can't do this and then they inquire into why and then eventually discover why what happened. So the idea that you can just be placed immediately onto a blacklist without even any notification to you is one of the things that critics have seized upon this.

AMT: And that's and how are the critics; very vocal, are they feeling free to be vocal? I wonder how much support this has inside China.

NATHAN VANDERKLIPPE: It has been my experience and the people that I've spoken with in China that often there is a sense among people that sort of maintaining a sense of social stability is a priority. And of course that that's been what the Communist party has promoted quite heavily from for many many years. So in that sense you could see support building for a system like this.

AMT: And in fact some officials have argued that this is a good counter-terrorism step as well, have they not?

NATHAN VANDERKLIPPE: Oh it could be a good counter-terrorism step. It could even save money in education because it can be so effective that there's no more need to spend resources on sort of patriotic education. There is a belief among the sort of the real boosters for the system that it could be kind of revolutionary for China in sort of healing back some of those social trust fractures.

AMT: Does that mean they feel they might have to spend money in propagandizing their citizens because their citizens will propagandize each other?

NATHAN VANDERKLIPPE: I think you could end up at a conclusion like that if you look at that statement yes.

AMT: You know I remember reading that eight years ago in China there were people who would watch the neighborhood and basically snitch on each other and we've heard about this in other authoritarian countries. Is that what this is just kind of brought forward?

NATHAN VANDERKLIPPE: Yes. I mean there is this sort of this reservoir of documents that there would follow a person, portfolio of documents that follow person. This is an older communist Chinese system called the Dangan system. And some of the critics have suggested that what social credit could end up being is a modern Dangan system which is a system whereby your performance in a variety of measures is mandatory and kept track of that could influence your ability to get jobs and what your ability to shape your own future and that sort of thing. That is one of the concerns that has been raised, that it creates a new and very invasive way sort of for government to force conduct that it considers befitting of its citizens.

AMT: Fascinating stuff, Nathan, thanks for taking us through it.

NATHAN VANDERKLIPPE: Thanks for having me.

AMT: Nathan Vanderklippe the Globe and Mail's Asia correspondent based in Beijing. My next guest has been studying and working on issues of Chinese law governance for more than 40 years. She was working in China when the government first began exploring the idea of a social credit system in the 1990s. Jamie Horsley is now senior fellow and lecturer at Yale Law School Paul Tsai China's Center and she joins us from New Haven, Connecticut. Hello.

JAMIE HORSLEY: Good morning.

AMT: Can you take us back to the China of the mid 90s and tell us what you saw happening when the Social Credit system was first brought in?

JAMIE HORSLEY: Well mid-90s was a period where China really started getting serious about moving or planned economy toward a market economy, and they quickly began to realize that a problem was building trust among strangers to get engaged in market transactions. Those days everything was built around your community or your factory or your village, people knew each other no problem. Now suddenly you're creating a national market - an international market - and you have you know people dealing with enterprisers, companies dealing with each other and they didn't trust each other. And there was very little way to find out good information about how reliable these counter parties might be. And a lot of scams where people would take out loans in Beijing couldn't pay them back. They'd run away. Set up the same thing all over again and there is no information sharing or information following that person that you could clamp down on it. Moreover you have counterfeit food and drugs, all kinds of you know social issues that needed to be addressed.

AMT: So it was brought in to protect more than anything you seem to be saying.

JAMIE HORSLEY: The way I see it what care drives it is the social credit system. It's primarily a regulatory system to help incentivize and control market order. And it really is primarily right now aimed at companies and corporate malfeasance as well as individuals who fail to meet their legal or regulatory obligations for their contract commitments.

AMT: So there's been lots of criticism of the system. Is it misguided criticism?

JAMIE HORSLEY: Well you know in China everything's big and part of the problem with the system it's sprawling. It's not well defined. Clearly it's not well understood. It's created a lot of confusion. You basically have several elements. You know the first one is collecting information either through a regulatory agency or the Supreme People's Court et cetera. And then if people are not complying with their obligations putting them on a blacklist. And then one of the really controversial things about it is the new system of what they call joint punishment. So for example there was first rolled out by the Supreme People's Court which had some seven million people in their judgment database who had a court judgment against them, and who could pay but were not. They simply were just refusing to honor the court judgment. And they came up with the idea of not just listing these people on a blacklist for your public shaming but because they themselves -he courts - don't have much enforcement authority, they got agreement over you know over 40 other government authorities including transportation etc. to cooperate and impose certain inconveniences on these judgment defaulters to make them come in and settle out their judgment. And that was the first one where you read a lot about, they targeted high consumption spending. You know if you were poor and couldn't pay, you're supposed to come in and work out a deal how on you're going to make your payment or fulfill your obligation. But if you were known to have money in your bank then suddenly you find you can't get a first class train ticket or you can't leave the country or you can't enroll your child in a private school. So this was sort of a new idea of getting all these other agencies to use their particular tools to start trying to impose what you call inconveniences on people to make them realize that they better pay up. So that aspect, the joint punishment one, has created a lot of concern over potential abuse. The thing is it's also been very effective. And one thing that never seems to be reported is that people are getting off the black list as well as being put on them. So some things seems to be working.

AMT: I was just going to ask you. Are the right mechanisms in place for people to repair that bad social credit?

JAMIE HORSLEY: There are some general provisions in the main documents governing the national level system that do call for what we would consider due process i.e. you're notified of the intent to put you on the blacklist. You have a chance to file an objection. If there was a mistake, to get that corrected. And then once you're supposed to be taken off the list if you find that you aren't, there supposed to be remedies including going to court. But the system is so huge and involves hundreds of thousands of people and companies, not just at the national level, but also they're somewhat independent systems at the provincial level. So you've got all these different black lists, all these different entities that have information about you, and for someone who's had trouble correcting my credit report in the U.S. where I only have to deal with three credit reporting agencies, just think about it's mind boggling.

AMT: And do you worry as some critics of the Social Credit system say that the system could be used to further quash dissent in the country.

JAMIE HORSLEY: China has many out there at all. You know the police, the Ministry of Public Security has their golden shield thing. They've got much more data on individuals than is in this social credit system. They do have other tool to reach that.

AMT: I don't know how much comfort that would be, that they are surveilling everybody on some of the other levels anyway. I mean human rights watch says the system is chilling. It says it's another technology led surveillance tool being used to control the citizens of China. What do you think of how they characterize it?

JAMIE HORSLEY: I understand why people worry about them because it does seem like a big overreach, collecting these massive amounts of data. It clearly could be abused. I mean we I worry about the privacy issues. When you are collecting that much information on people and China has a huge hacking power. But this system doesn't just sweep in all kinds of information. You know it has to be that there is a fine imposed or a court judgment and information about that specific act to get to put in the system.

AMT: Jamie Horsley, we have to leave it there. Thank you for your insights.

JAMIE HORSLEY: Thank you very much.

AMT: Jamie Horsley is a senior fellow and lecturer at the Yale Law Schools Paul Tsai China. She's in New Haven, Connecticut. Well Lynette Ong has been listening in. She's got another view of this. She's an associate professor of political science at the University of Toronto with a research interest in authoritarian politics. She's got a joint appointment at the Asian Institute and the Monks School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. She's in our Toronto studio. Hi.

LYNETTE ONG: Good morning. Thank you for having me.

AMT: What do you think? How much did Chinese citizens have to worry when it comes to the Social Credit system?

LYNETTE ONG: Right now it is actually [unintelligible] as a piloting fees. I think if fully implemented it could be very powerful and there are many things debt are we, or the Chinese citizens, should be worried about. But as it is now it is a fairly fragmented system like all-- China is a very big country and data is collected by a bunch of agencies, local governments, as well as private corporations. And all of these have to come together and given how things are you usually work in China they may not necessarily come together. So that's one challenge. Second thing is I think our perception or at least in all the stories we read on western media tend to see this as a form of state repression tool surveillance system, but from the Chinese perspective it is not without merit not without justification. They see this as a form of social management. And again China is a big country with 1.4 billion population. You have to think about the systematic way of collating data in order to govern society.

AMT: And that's not a small thing. I mean you're talking to me in a country of 30 plus million people. It's a different world as what you're telling me, when you've got that many people, to make the world run correct.

LYNETTE ONG: Correct. It is also a rapidly developing society with huge movement of people from rural to urban areas in between cities because just how China's development has been. So generally in Chinese society there is very low trust among strangers, much lower than in our society for instance. So I think they see social credit criticism as a way to collect data into a database for people to be discerning of who is actually trustworthy. And this goes beyond credit worthy. It has a collection of indices that credit that one's credit worthiness is only part of our trustworthiness.

AMT: Has there been pushback though from the population?

LYNETTE ONG: So there has been a survey done recently, an academic survey. They surveyed a bunch of people in rural urban areas. So these are the findings: generally poor people in urban areas are more receptive. I mean you can understand why because people are more technology savvy, more educated. Surprisingly, all the people a high income group are more receptive and I think perhaps younger people are more liberal minded. They might worry about privacy issues. Whereas for all the people they just want convenience right. If you pay your bills on time, if you behave in socially good manner. You don't go on the Internet and then post some sort of anti-government post you get rewarded for that sort of socially acceptable behaviour.

AMT: And you make the point, and Jamie made it as well, that you’re dealing with a lot of different jurisdictions. There's a lot of over there. But what if you are someone that the government wants to either target or suddenly wants to thinks is a problem. Can they access all that data? In other words it's not just that oh we've got this we can see who's out there but we want to look at person X. And now we can gather the data because it's already there.

LYNETTE ONG: So that's a great question and I think social credit system allows them to potentially do it more accurately. But right now they are different systems out there. For instance you live in a neighborhood, people know who lives in what neighborhood they can just go to what is equivalent of a neighborhood watch community here, and say what is what has been happening to this person. Has he been behaving in the very odd manner, and what companies or what cooperations or what government agencies does this person work in. Go some and meet the manager and then go look at his dossier, he's [unintelligible] and I think that's right now a more convenient way of targeting people.

AMT: I was just going to ask you so you look at authoritarian governments. You look at repression. On the scale of what else you see in China, is this the one to worry about?

LYNETTE ONG: Ah right now I would put it in the scale of maybe three. If fully implemented, eight or nine. But right now three. I mean I study the state repression tools in China. They would be in the scale of eight and nine.

AMT: What do you see that is much more troubling than this?

LYNETTE ONG: Things like how people are being monitored are on the grid like basis. Like neighborhoods in Beijing and major cities are divided into grids, and every grid is then assigned to a police officers to watch so they could monitor the behaviour of these maybe 20 people living within that grid. So if you've got to protest the government will know who you are almost immediately.

AMT: Okay so they don't need the social credit system to keep a tab on you for dissent.

LYNETTE ONG: Precisely.

AMT: Bu is this a slippery slope, then? If you were to marry that grid system with this [unintelligible] system what fears might you have?

LYNETTE ONG: You are going to have a really really powerful states. So in political science term, a state with really strong infrastructure power. right. That could potentially go out in coerce people in a very effective and efficient manner. Very very scary. But whether or not that could be fully implemented I think remains a question mark. People don't talk about. You know with slowing growth in China, this needs a lot of resources to fully implement this. And where is the money coming from? With mounting level that's in China, I think people are going to question whether it is okay to spend so much money in Social Credit.

AMT: It's good to get your perspective. Thank you.

LYNETTE ONG: Thank you so much.

AMT: That is Lynette Ong associate professor of political science at the University of Toronto. She has a joint appointment at the Asian Institute in the Monk school of global affairs and public policy. She's with me in our Toronto studio. Stay with us. We take a short break and then we're going to talk about cycling along the Silk Road. We first spoke with the Canadian rider Kate Harris last April about her meditation on an epic bike ride. Now she celebrated with one of the country's most prestigious literary prizes. So we're going to revisit that chat in our next half hour. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti this is The Current on CBC Radio One, Sirius XM, online on cbc.ca/thecurrent, on Podcast and on your radio app.

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How a hunger for a wider world led Kate Harris to cycle the Silk Road

Guest: Kate Harrison

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Why bike the Silk Road? Because it's there, sort of, in a historical and metaphorical sense. Because I wanted to seek out the world's wildness and plumb my own in the process.

[Music Theme]

ATM: The allure of the Silk Road has drawn traders, travellers and explorers for centuries... and it continues to do so. In 2006 and 2011 Kate Harris and her friend, Mel Yule, biked thousands of kilometers along the ancient trading route.... from Turkey, through Central Asia, China's Tibetan Autonomous Region and into the soaring heights of Nepal and northern India. Kate Harris has been named one of Canada's top ten adventurers... she was a Rhodes scholar whose academic career was mostly dedicated to studying science. She spent years studying space and at one point was selected to participate in a simulated Mars mission in Utah. And now she has another feather in her hat - The book she wrote inspired by her travels through the Silk Road has just been awarded the 2019 RBC Taylor Prize, recognizing the best in Canadian literary non-fiction. The book is titled, "Lands of Lost Borders: Out of Bounds on the Silk Road." And last April, Kate Harris joined me from Victoria, to tell me about it. Here's our conversation.

KATE HARRIS: Hello.

AMT: You know I just called it an ancient trading route but the Silk Road is so much more than that in people's imagination. How do you describe it?

KATE HARRIS: Yes I mean it really is a stretch of imagination more than anything. You know people didn't even have a word for it as the Silk Road back when it was in its heyday, and it was sort of a historical term applied in retrospect. But really I mean it's the world's oldest superhighway. It's where globalisation first began to happen and is still happening today. And of course you know explorers like Marco Polo are sort of romantically associated with it and it was his account that that made us aware of this vast trading network.

AMT: Part of what drew you to the Silk Road was the sea Siachen glacier. What is it about that glacier you find so compelling?

KATE HARRIS: Yes so this is kind of the world's highest altitude battlefield and that's what compelled me to it initially, the fact that it was one of the most stunning wildernesses as recorded by early explorers nestled in the Himalaya Mountains where the Karakorum in the Himalayan ranges meet in what is now northern India in northern Pakistan. But the glacier became this war zone when India and Pakistan couldn't figure out who actually owned it after partition, sort of an example of this staggering heights of human absurdity you know warring over what is essentially a useless space other than to science into mountaineering. And it just struck me as a example of how bizarre our borders are and our struggles over borders are what we do to wildness in the world in the process of asserting these borders.

AMT: We'll talk more about that glacier later. But why did you want to travel that road by bike?

KATE HARRIS: As a kid I wanted to be an explorer. I grew up sort of idolising Marco Polo and Shackle ton you know these of just slog long distances and then write about it after that that seemed like living the dream to me. And as I got older you know I realised a lot of the more romanticised accounts of explorers really did not touch at all on sort of the repercussions of their explorations, you know the colonial implications. I mean history of exploration is all about naming and claiming and seizing control and Marco Polo I saw him as the epitome of a sort of romantic explorer like driven by curiosity and wonder. And as I got older I realise he was mostly a merchant. I mean he was he was a traitor. That's how he travelled the Silk Road. That's why he was drawn to the Silk Road.

AMT: He was looking for stuff that he could sell.

[Laughter]

KATE HARRIS: Stuff to sell. Yes. And you know all the places he disdained along the Silk Road were what drew me to it. You know the mountains and deserts that were for him just barriers to swift profit and progress.

AMT: And I get a lot of that. But on a bicycle? Like that's a lot of work.

KATE HARRIS: Well I had no experience with camels or caravans so the historic modes of travel and the Silk Road seemed a bit out of reach. But bicycles, you can go you can go anywhere and they're fuelled by you.

AMT: What does that require in terms of sheer stamina?

KATE HARRIS: Well I went with my best buddy Mel from childhood days. You can't really train to bike all day every day for almost a year on and you really have to just set off and do it. So we start to super slowly and just built up distances as our legs could handle.

AMT: .And you did it in chunks so where did the journey begin?

AMT: Well we had one initial trip on the Silk Road that was sort of a summer vacation in a way. We had just finished university. We had four months at her disposal and we decided to retrace Marco Polo's travels through western China. And in the process we snuck through Tibet without permission from the Chinese authorities. And that's really what sparked my interest in borders. And we love that journey so much that we vowed that someday the two of us would finish the whole Silk Road. And so on the second trip we started in Istanbul and Turkey and biked back to Tibet and then on to the glacier.

AMT: And what stood out to you about Turkey and the Black Sea?

KATE HARRIS: Well it was where Marco Polo set off purportedly. So we wanted to kind of as much as possible follow in his footsteps, and Istanbul as a bridge between continents Asia Minor and Europe are the two banks of the Bosphorus which is the strait that divides Istanbul. So it just felt like a fitting place to sort of step out of Europe and step into the beginning of Asia and set off.

AMT: It starts with that allure right and it just keeps on going. Let's talk about Central Asia because it's a somewhat enigmatic part of the world we don't hear much about the places like, what you call them The Stans, such as Tajikistan Kyrgyzstan. What did you learn about Central Asia by biking through The Stans?

KATE HARRIS: Well they don't make it easy for you to visit. That's for sure. Which is which is part of the appeal. These are places still very much off the beaten path. There are places that are still themselves and they're not trying to present a version of themselves to you as the tourist. So that was always compelling. And they're also very young nations. You know they were all part of the former Soviet Union which broke apart and in our lifetime I was really curious how you know identities are forming in the wake of that. You know these were countries almost invented whole cloth and where the borders were drawn between Uzbekistan and Tajikistan do not reflect ethnic identities. So yes all of that and then you know the allure of deserts and the fabled Oxus River and then these training camps in places like Samarkand and Mukura these- Just the names evoke romance and wonder and the cities really do that justice. They're incredible. You know the mosques and domes and madrassas, turquoise tiles everywhere. It's just credible that these places exist.

AMT: You write that travel is one part geography and nine parts imagination.

KATE HARRIS: Yes well I grew up you know longing to see the world. I was you know full of Wanderlust from a really young age for whatever reason. But the way I could travel was through words, through books you know my parents we never went abroad. You know we did car camping vacations and Ontario provincial parks growing up and I was just hungry for the wider world and I got there through books which means you know I was traveling just on my mind, my imagination. And in some ways that's the most vivid way to travel. A lot of actual travels filled with sort of transport and dailiness and logistics and when you read a book you get someone sort of compressed journey you know the most powerful moments, the epiphanies along the way, the wonder and the heartbreak both but sort of everything else. The miles between excised. So yeah I love travelling in the world and I love maybe even more coming home and re-travelling the same places through words and trying to get the experience down on the page.

AMT: And we get a glimpse of all of that. Like the days when you're covered in sunscreen and your clothes are a mess and people are waiting at you and you're done with all those people waving at you just like you got to keep on peddling. I was with you. And it was painful sometimes. But there's a beautiful photo on the cover of your book. It's a lot of sky, a lot of stars and two bicycles and silhouette on one person. What are we looking at? Where were you?

KATE HARRIS: Yes that was in Uzbekistan and we took to riding by night because it was so hot in the desert by day. And so we would sleep or try to sleep during the day in our tent just kind of melting and then we'd get up at dusk and get on our bikes and set off. And there were so many stars. There's just nothing. We were on the Stuart Plateau in Western Uzbekistan and there's very little infrastructure. Villages are few and far between and so the stars were just incredible and the horizon is so flat in all directions that they came right down to earth. It really felt like a form of space travel. We were biking through the stars and in a way I came to know Pakistan and more by its constellations than any sort of landmarks lit up by day.

AMT: Well you do write about the magic of that place. Can you read an excerpt from the book from your time in Uzbekistan?

KATE HARRIS: Yes during those night rides across Uzbekistan I felt like a message in a bottle myself. I tried to make it out but all I could read was the thin scroll of road lit by my headlamp. Something about potholes about grass shooting up in the pavement cracks, something about how there are places you can get to by road and places you can only get to by being on the road. A state of mind you can bring to almost any contacts especially a highway paved and stars in Uzbekistan at least until you're so sleepy you nearly fall off your bike.

AMT: You write that his breakfast stand had a similar effect on you that of being on the moon, for Neil Armstrong.

KATE HARRIS: Yes, well Armstrong sort of famously when he came back from the moon - someone pointed at the moon one day and the sky was like does that make you feel really big, the fact that you walk there. And he said no it made me feel really really small and he could blur out the earth from the moon with his thumb. And you know you don't have to go to the moon to realise how fragile and precious this planet is in the scheme of the cosmos. I mean what we have here on earth is basically the best thing going in the universe. It's the only home we have the only home we need. And I think a bike trip or any kind of travel where you see the world from a different angle than you're used to. You get a different perspective whether that's from a spaceship orbiting the earth or a bicycle in Uzbekistan. You just get a sense of that fragility and how we're all in this together. We're all complicit. We're all connected. This is our shared home.

AMT: It's interesting how you link travel and space exploration because you had a real obsession with Mars.

KATE HARRIS: I really I looked around small town Ontario and figured the age of Exploration was was over except in outer space. You know I saw fences and subdivisions and it didn't seem like the vistas available to Marco Polo were still around. And so I became obsessed with going to space. I really seriously set my sights on Mars and you know emigrating there one day like colonising our neighbouring planet. And not just not just to be the first person on Mars to plant flags and leave footprints but I loved the notion that Mars was once a more Earth like planet, scientists think and you know maybe harboured life at one point or maybe still does. I've always been fascinated by this question of you know are we alone in the universe? Are we like Soul incarnation of of life? Which seems pretty unlikely given how huge the universe is and the idea that Mars could offer some insight into that question was was thrilling to me as a kid and still is thrilling.

AMT: So you set off from Mars and you end up on the Silk Road.

KATE HARRIS: Yes. I mean ultimately when I was on this scientific path I have the fiercest admiration for scientists and what they do in laboratories and that large on a daily basis. But I really found I lacked the patience and diligence to just- you know there's this sort of glamour of science and what it reveals and the ideas it unleashes in the world. Then there's the daily reality of time locked in a laboratory and I just felt a big disconnect between those two. And just frankly it wasn't very good at it. It wasn't good at research. I was too much of a dreamer. Yes and for me what I got out of the Silk Road was so much of what I was seeking in going to Mars. You know you don't have to go to a new world to feel like you've entered a new world.

AMT: D and I want to ask you a little bit more about that because toward the end of your book you write 'It wasn't a different world. I craved any more so much as this world done differently, done better for everyone'. How did your time in the Tibet Autonomy's Region of China influence that perspective?

KATE HARRIS: Biking across Tibet was a pretty heartbreaking endeavour. And we did it twice. So on these two different trips and the first time around in 2006 the sort of Chinese rule over Tibet was fairly relaxed. We could travel there without being bothered even though it wasn't completely legal. And Tibetan culture still seemed from what we could tell pretty alive and well and given freedom of expression. And then the Beijing Olympics really things clamped down in the lead up to that and in the aftermath of that to the point where when we return to Tibet five years later there weren't just checkpoints marking the boundaries of the autonomous region as a whole. But the boundaries of every single village we passed through and on the road to Lhasa, the highway to Lhasa, we were passed by for hours military convoys lasting hours and every Tibetan home has a Chinese flag flapping from it which you know is survival. You know it's a matter of survival for these people. So it was really really heartbreaking and I felt like I was a tourist in an oppressed regime and that felt terrible to you know the fact that Mel and I could just scoot through on our bikes and leave. And this is a place that the year we biked through I believe 11 monks or nuns in Tibet self-immolated. Like they set themselves on fire to protest what is happening there under Chinese rule. So yes very heartbreaking journey and I widening trip compared to the sense of wonder that we felt in the Plateau the first time around and then this was much more of the sort of horror of the world. And you're doing all this with your best friend. What's it like to share such a long and intense journey with someone else like that. What was it like for the two of you. I'm glad for so many reasons I wasn't alone and high among them is having someone in the world that knows what we went through. You know what I went through, what she went through, we were almost like sisters at this point and have just shared so many phases of life. It is kind of a miracle we're still friends after being stuck together in a tent for a year.

[Laughter]

AMT: And it's a kind of a miracle you're still alive to after some of the stuff you did.

KATE HARRIS: Well. I mean she deserves- I don't know if it's credit or blame but she's the trailblazer. I mean there are a few times where I would have backed down that checkpoints and Mel led the way and so I just had to follow.

AMT: Yes like literally crawling under that checkpoint thing like getting rid of all the lights and kind of sneaking across borders in places where people go to jail for that.

KATE HARRIS: Yes.

AMT: I want to ask you about that because travelling the Silk Road meant crossing so many many borders and sneaking across some, how have your travels affected the way you look at maps?

KATE HARRIS: Oh I definitely see maps as very sort of contingent on the maker of the map, and this hit home so many times long Silk Road in contested territories where different countries have different ideas about who owns what. And you know maps are really just stories. They are fictions that we all believe in and abide by the rules for a certain period of time. But if there's any less in the Silk Road hits home it's history and it's that countries are temporary these sort of empires flare up and fade away. And what we think is permanent is really just flux on a slow timescale.

AMT: And I guess you saw that again as some of these former Soviet republics because the people who lived there hadn't changed. They still had the culture that they had had for centuries.

KATE HARRIS: That's right yes. And you know there are a bunch of ethnic Tajiks living in Uzbekistan and they've lived there their families go back many generations and yet suddenly they're Uzbek citizens. So you just see how arbitrary it is how you know there just the rules we have to live by. But that doesn't mean you have to believe in them I guess.

AMT: You know it's interesting you were you were propelled by originally by this this idea of Mars and then you're propelled by this idea of this immense glacier, the Siachen. But what did you learn in the end about travelling?

KATE HARRIS: Well it's interesting I think so much of when I was younger in wanting to be an explorer and feeling like that wasn't a viable career option, anymore on this planet. I was thinking you really you had to be like precedent mattered. You had to be the first there to be the first to figure something out. But if anything- I mean Marco Polo himself you know all he did was travel to lands that were new to him but they were old to everyone who lived along the way. And then he wrote about what he saw. And for me that's the value of travel that's the view of exploration. It's not that you need to be doing something novel or ground-breaking. It's really about expanding your consciousness and your sense of connection with the planet and maybe having a widening neighbourhood that you consider home until maybe it compasses the whole world. So for me that's what I love and travel. That's why I love reading is getting to experience other lives and other worlds for a time and seeing how they're not so different from you and your own world.

AMT: You also seem to be on a constant search for wild places. Why?

KATE HARRIS: I don't know what it is about landscapes and places in which people aren't a huge presence. Maybe it's sort of a reassuring sense of our smallness in the scheme of things which actually perversely makes you feel more precious insignificant. You know when you're a very small being in a very large desert you weirdly get insight not into the desert but into what it means to be human. And I love that sense of smallness. I think that's what I really seek out and in going to "wild" places. But I also think wildness; it's kind of a loaded term. You know we call a lot of places wild where people have been for a long time. And I actually think that's a beautiful expansion of the term. It doesn't have to exclude people. It doesn't have to exclude civilisation or cities even. Gary Snyder the poet and writer he talks about wildness as a process less than a finished state or finished place. And I love that notion. You know in that way we're all wild. We're all living our own stories and adventures and becoming who we are and maybe landscapes that are sort of dictionary definition wild remind us of that.

AMT: That's an interesting way to look at it. What's your life like now?

KATE HARRIS: Well daily life is a bit of an adventure. I live in a tiny cabin with my partner and my dog in northern B.C. on the edge of Alaska and the Yukon. And we live off grid in a space that probably makes the International Space Station look luxurious in terms of size and in a way it's a little bit like living in a spaceship. You know you have to be very aware of like energy coming in to the solar panels and energy you're using up and water coming in water going out. And I just love daily life there. It really feels like an adventure no matter what. We look out on the landscape that there aren't many signs of people. I can see kind of a radio tower in the distance and that's it. Otherwise it's forest and mountains and moose and lynx and I love that daily reminder of that small size talking about it and that wildness. ?

KATE HARRIS: You're not that far from the Juneau ice field are you. That's right yeah. Which is how I initially came to this place. The town I live in is called Atlan. And as a wide eyed undergrad who barely skied before I signed up for this glaciology field course called the Juneau Ice Field research Program which is still running. It's amazing. And you ski from Juneau Alaska to at NBC over about eight weeks. I've never been out west in Canada. I'd never seen a mountain in Canada and Atlan just struck me as the most beautiful place I'd seen in the world and I'd seen a bit of the world at that point. And I kind of vowed that someday I would move there and live in a cabin Thoreau style.

AMT: It's so interesting because you set off on the Silk Road inspired by the Siachen glacier and now you live by another glacier and you've kind of found a place to be home.

KATE HARRIS: Yes that was one of the things that struck me on the Silk Road is you know I had been obsessed with this glacier. I had very little connection with actually other than through what I'd read in northern India and northern Pakistan when there are similar landscapes right here at home in Canada and there similarly vulnerable. You know they might not be the world's highest garbage dump because of armies living up there but the atmosphere, the global climate is impacting Siachen as much as the Juneau Ice Field. It's another reminder of how small and connected the world is.

AMT: Well it is a great journey that you share in this book. Thank you for taking us along.

KATE HARRIS: Thanks so much Anna Maria. Thanks for your interest.

AMT: Kate Harris is the author of Lands of Lost Borders: Out of Bounds on the Silk Road. This week she won the 2019 RBC Taylor Prize, honouring the best in Canadian non-fiction. Kate Harris joined me from Victoria, B.C., last April. That's our program for today. Stay tuned to Radio One for Q. Actor Andrew Rannells, who starred in the Tony-award winning Book of Mormon, is on the program. Finally, we've just been hearing about Kate Harris's journeys on the legendary Silk Road - Let's end with some music from the Silk Road Ensemble. The group grew out of a project initiated by cellist Yo-Yo Ma to promote multicultural, artistic exchange. It's a loose collective of musicians from across Eurasian cultures - Here is the Silk Road Ensemble and Yo-Yo Ma, with the song, "Distant Green Valley." I'm Anna Maria Tremonti.Thanks for listening to The Current.

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[Song]

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