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The Current Transcript for April 2, 2019

Host: Anna Maria Tremonti

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

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VOICE: You're a Canadian Armed Forces veteran. Your mission is to get healthy, find work, go back to school, maybe retire. At Veterans Affairs Canada, our mission is to support you.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: The new online video makes it appear seamless, but critics say the government's so-called Pension for Life for Canadian Armed Forces veterans tears at the very fabric of the medical protections they need after being at war, especially when it comes to diagnosing and treating PTSD. At the last official count, there were more than 20000 veterans and RCMP members on benefits for PTSD. There are fears changes in the system will make new diagnoses tougher and that those medical pensions for life will have a finite lifespan. We'll hear the concerns in a moment. Also today, just over a week ago the Calgary Inferno took the Canadian Women's Hockey League championship and now in a few more weeks, there will be no league.

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VOICE: Shocked sadness that what we have created 12 years ago was no longer considered viable, without too many answers given.

AMT: They have been told it is not economically sustainable, but is this about profit or value of women's sports? We've got that discussion in half an hour. And then we're taking a look at the people who are changing your life.

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VOICE: We know when they built subway systems in the late 19th and early 20th century, it architected the way the city was going to grow and code now architects the way that society changes.

AMT: They create the apps that are now entwined in our daily routines. Obsessed with efficiency and novelty, their creations not only enable our lives, they can disrupt our societies. In an hour, we are looking at coders, the most powerful people you've never heard of. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

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Changes to veterans' disability claims could cause PTSD rather than treat it, advocate warns

Guests: Kris Rose, Barry Westholm

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VOICE: Today I am proud to announce that we've significantly expanded the benefits that are available to individuals with service-related illness or injury. They'll have more choice in how they receive their benefits and will have an expanded set of options to help them in their transition to life after service.

AMT: The Liberal Government's new medical benefits system for veterans came into effect yesterday. You heard in that clip the then minister of Veterans Affairs Seamus O'Regan announcing the changes in December of 2017. The new system has been branded a medical pension for life and it is designed to provide lifelong financial support for veterans with physical or mental injuries stemming from their service. The so-called pension for life, not to be confused with a regular pension, replaces lump sum medical benefits, a system that was brought in by the Conservative government under Stephen Harper. The change was a Liberal campaign promise. Kris Rose is a clinical psychologist. He's warning that fewer veterans may ultimately be eligible for the benefits they need because of changes the government has made to how post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD, is assessed under these changes. Kris Rose is with us from our Calgary studio. Hello.

KRIS ROSE: Good morning, Anna Maria.

AMT: So how are psychological assessments of veterans made in Canada?

KR: Well they're really quite a comprehensive exam. It's a matter of having people come in and evaluate all types of symptoms including post-traumatic stress disorder, things like depression, alcohol use, other anxiety problems. And so for four years and I've been completing these forms for about 11 or 12 years now Veterans Affairs Canada requires a medical professional that needs to be a physician a psychiatrist or a like me a registered psychologist to fill out one of these questionnaires in which to evaluate the types of military and police injuries we often see once we submit those forms of Veterans Affairs Canada. There's an adjudication made on behalf of the claimant to determine whether or not they meet criteria for an award and those awards are then given out to those members if if the claim is successful.

AMT: And you make the point it's military and police. So the RCMP are part of this as well.

KR: Yeah, thank you for raising that. It's often overlooked, absolutely. It's all of the three federal programs, so it's the military members, military veterans and active service RCMP members, as well as retired RCMP members are all eligible to put in a claim for a post stress disorder or any other psychiatric or psychological condition as is what's the questionnaires is deemed to be.

AMT: So these questionnaires determine all of that like in terms of the injury?

KR: They are usually pretty comprehensive. You know for years, in terms of psychological or psychiatric diagnosis, these questionnaires have largely aligned with our diagnostic system called the DSM, the Diagnostic and Statistical manual of mental disorders. So in our earlier version of that there were three symptom clusters for PTSD. PTSD is not a simple one question item, there are up to 20 different symptoms of which most people qualify for six more and more. So for years the medical questionnaires have always aligned with diagnostic standards including the most recent version being the DSM 5, which the medical questionnaires have always assessed the four main symptom clusters and that was until the most recent questionnaire has been revised and came out in December.

AMT: And so what's changed on that questionnaire?

KR: Well there's really not very much on this questionnaire any longer. In terms of the symptoms that most characterize military and police populations in terms of psychological injury, what is really left are a lot of low probability or atypical symptoms things like psychotic disorders hallucinations and delusions. Things like obsessive compulsive symptoms with life interference well you can get those certainly but it's rare. Panic attacks are more concious in civilian populations more rare in military and policing populations so you then look at the PTSD symptoms. They've gone from a cluster of four different types of symptoms down to one vaguely worded item on page four of the questionnaire of eight, it used to be a 16 page questionnaire and that one question simply says re-experiencing traumatic events? Yes or no? So that symptom in and of itself is really the only one that may or may not be characteristic of PTSD on this entire questionnaire that used to be a whole page dedicated to evaluating all four groups of those symptoms and I've really got concerns in terms of re-experiencing traumatic events is going to mean to those medical professionals filling them out. These can be filled out by family doctors, again physicians, psychiatrists, psychologists, who are not necessarily going to be familiar with what these symptoms are and simply saying re-experiencing traumatic events may not capture enough.

AMT: So what are you saying, that you cannot properly diagnose PTSD, whether they'll go undiagnosed?

KR: PTSD is not on the questionnaire any longer. It always had been as far as I've been doing these things since 2012 and over more than one hundred of these questionnaires. Based on the information on this questionnaire, PTSD does not exist.

AMT: And what's the implication of that?

KR: Well I mean it's so widespread. I mean starting from the beginning you've got to recognize that a lot of people Anna Maria, they come in the first time to their physician or to their psychiatrist or with a psychologist, having had these symptoms for years. I know of members that are you know there are still members from Bosnia back in the 90s, there's still early Afghanistan members. I had World War II veterans coming in after 50 and 60 years of having symptoms and first reporting these things. So if they're coming to their trusted professional to describe the symptoms they have and the symptoms aren't even evaluated, where does it go from there?

AMT: Well where does it go? Does that mean they won't be diagnozed or does that mean Veterans Affairs gets to diagnose them and is that mean there's a problem?

KR: That's a good question. I mean there's no questions on here that evaluate the diagnosis. Is the diagnosis going to be overlooked? A lot of people really are not understanding of what PTSD is and so if there's not any sort of guideline on these questionnaires to guide those at making the evaluations, how do you know? It's like if I you know if I had fallen and I thought I've broken my leg and I went in for an x-ray to the local hospital and instead of x-raying my leg, they decide they're going to x-ray my arm. That's what this questionnaire ends up being. It ends up being an examination of one's arm, rather then of where the injury actually exists.

AMT: So we did ask for an interview with the Veterans Affairs Department or the minister. The minister is Lawrence MacAulay. He was not available. Veterans Affairs sent us a statement and it reads in part and I'll quote here, "The shorter medical questionnaire is to streamline and increase efficiency of the process while ensuring that our veterans are better cared for and that veterans in need get access to their treatments faster." What do you say to that?

KR: Well in terms of their own policy statements, in terms of entitlement, they put in those statements the information gathered to complete these questionnaires must be as comprehensive as possible. So I'm not sure that that's streamlining the process in terms of evaluation is really going to lead to improved or or less burden on those that evaluate and submit these questionnaires.

AMT: Does this mean that the people you see, who you believe are suffering from PTSD, you will not be able to actually like actually express that in your assessments so that they can move forward to get the benefits they need to get the help they need?

KR: Again, a great question. What do you do with a questionnaire that doesn't evaluate the symptoms that are most characteristic of those people you're assessing? You know do I do I send in the order form, which then has all of those symptoms on it or do they submit addendum, but again Veterans Affairs Canada relies really on their presence in frequency of symptoms, so in making their decisions. So if symptoms are not present, how are they going to make adjudication decisions on symptoms that simply just don't exist?

AMT: And we look at Veterans Affairs on statistics. 10 percent of war zone veterans, including war service and peacekeeping forces, will go on to experience chronic PTSD. From March to December of 2018, tthere were over 21,000 veterans with PTSD and that includes RCMP with a PTSD diagnosis receiving disability benefits. What do those numbers tell you?

KR: Well they tell me not only, PTSD ends up being sort of the flagship of the Traumatic Stress Disorders, but there's a whole group of symptoms, they call them sub-syndrome or PTSD or sub-threshold PTSD and there are entitlements and awards for those as well and those would also make up a larger group, above and beyond post-traumatic stress in and of itself. So if you meet a large number of the symptoms, but don't meet the threshold, you can still be diagnosed with a psychological traumatic stress related disorder and those symptoms are no longer again those are part of those larger three symptom clusters that have been all but removed from the questionnaire. So it's not just PTSD that's removed, it's all of the symptoms within the category called trauma and stress related disorders of which there are about four or five.

AMT: Okay Kris Rose, thanks for taking us through that.

KR: Thank you Anna Maria. I appreciate it.

AMT: Kris Rose is a clinical psychologist. He joined us from our Calgary studio. Barry Westholm is listening into this. He's a retired Sgt. Maj. and Master Warrant Officer with the Canadian Armed Forces. He developed PTSD during a UN mission to Haiti in 1995. He wasn't diagnosed for another 12 years. In the Canadian Forces, Barry Westholm once served with the Joint Personnel Support Unit, which assists soldiers transitioning out of the military. He quit that in protest six years ago because he felt the military was failing its veterans. Barry Westholm has been a vocal advocate for veterans since that time and he joins me from our Ottawa studio. Hello.

BARRY WESTHOLM: Hi Anna Maria.

AMT: So how are you reacting to these changes?

BW: Well when I first saw the documents supplied by Murray Brewster actually, I was quite shocked by it. I actually lost sleep when I saw how they've condensed it into a really useless document. And I heard you mentioned about the streamlining of the documentation through VAC. What they're supposed to be doing for years now after going back almost a decade, was to be streamlining the VAC documentation.

AMT: VAC is Veterans Affairs Canada?

BW: Yes.

AMT: Okay go ahead.

BW: For the person applying for benefits. It's infamous they have these overly complex benefit applications that stymie the soldier who's injured and trying to get benefits and when I heard what they're doing, I think they streamlined the wrong end of it. I never ever heard of the doctors having an issue filling out those forms, only on the soldier's side.

AMT: Okay so you don't really know what that actually is going to mean for those may be coming forward now who may have PTSD and need to fill out that questionnaire?

BW: Well this questionnaire that the Dr. Rose is referring to is a medical thing that the doctors do. The ones that the injured person have to do, there was a report done back in 2012 that said that the complexity of these forms were most suited to a person with a post-secondary education and that goes back about 10 years and they decided we got to make it better, we have to streamline this and make it more user friendly. So we flash forward to 2019 and there's a great article by Murray Brewster from the Parliamentary Budget Officer Eve Greuel who has a masters in economics and his current view of the present paperwork is a "myself having a tax background, I find this more difficult than the income tax system." So it might be oversight or may be intentional. I have no idea.

AMT: And Murray Brewster of course is with CBC's Ottawa bureau and we heard his story on the news this morning. So the Veterans Affairs says the new questionnaire decreases the average wait time for certain conditions from 36 weeks to 26 weeks. So they shaved 10 weeks of wait time off with this new questionnaire. Are you seeing that? Well I guess it's kicking in today.

BW: Well once again the questionnaire we're referring to as the one the doctors have to fill out to diagnose the injury.

AMT: Before there's any wait time, before you get on the list? Yeah okay.

BW: Yeah of course and what I've seen from Dr. Rose is if they submit the new form with that very basic amount of information, I can only see that the person will have to go back and go back again to get more and more detail that used to be available on the former sheet.

AMT: OK so this dovetails with the new pension for life, the medical pension for life, the medical benefits for veterans that went into effect yesterday and it replaces the lump sum payment that was implemented under the Harper government. What do you think of that? That was supposed to get you back to something that wasn't lump sum that keeps paying out.

BW: Well when the Liberals were going in for election, they promised to reinstate the pension, the military pension and the military pension falls under an act. What they didn't do was reinstate the military pension and they came up with their own version of a pension, which as I understand it because it's all very complex, they take the lump sum and they cut it up into little monthly payments. So basically it's the same thing over time.

AMT: Okay and that's the medical pension?

BW: Correct.

AMT: Again we're not confusing that with a regular military pension.

BW: That's correct.

AMT: This is instead of getting benefits in a lump sum. Okay I'm going to play another clip from the minister of Veterans Affairs Seamus O'Regan from the announcement. Listen to him.

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VOICE: We've done a lot to simplify supports and benefits available to veterans who've had service related illness or injury, but that doesn't mean that the system isn't complex. It would be foolish of me to stand up here pretend that I could give you a comprehensive briefing on this subject in six minutes. So we're undertaking a focused campaign to educate both clients of Veterans Affairs and serving members of the Canadian Armed Forces, so that everyone will have the information that they need to make the best decisions for their wellbeing.

AMT: So from a veterans perspective Barry Westholm, how well is Veterans Affairs during that?

BW: A terrible job. Aagain I'd point again to the Parliamentary Budget Officer who's got a masters in economics who says he finds it very very complex. So if a masters in economics finds it very very complex, an injured private will find it over at the top. You know this paperwork that they put on us actually cause PTSD and stress. They're so complicated and people have to go for help all the time with them. They're just -- they're too complicated.

AMT: So we're talking about the bureaucracy and the logistics around actually getting the benefits and how the benefits are basically aparcelled out. What about the actual amount and how long it lasts? What do you know about that in terms of how adequate it is and how long lasting it is?

BW: Well there's lots, it's sort of a benefits sweep, there's all sorts of different benefits that you can get depending on your injury. So it depends on the member and I'll say that from from my perspective it's a pretty good system all around when it comes to the actual amount that people get. It's just that a lot of people can get them. If the path is so complicated and so confusing so my my goal as an advocate was to try to get people who were injured in the Canadian Forces to veterans affairs without them dying along the way because the transition model was just a wreck. So now a Veterans Affairs and now they've got to contend with all these incredibly complex documents which add a lot more stress to these people and I guess my point again to that matter of economic theory that says it's a very very complex, so they've got a lot of work to do to really streamline it.

AMT: And in terms of a pension for life, a medical pension for life, you're saying it doesn't fall under regular pensions, so what it doesn't, it's not guaranteed? It could change under another government?

BW: Well as I understand it like I say it's so complex that I've got the basics of it but changing it pretty regularly now they're calling it different names as we go along where before prior to 2006 it was it was a pension and it was solid and you could count on it and that was the end of it. So you know you're going to get a monthly stipend no matter what. Now it's sort of up in the air and they change you know like what goes on over here and they pulled over there in the council when they start another it's really something special.

AMT: Veterans Affairs has had five ministers in three and a half years since Mr. Trudeau became the prime minister. Is the turnover at the top of the ministry a concern for veterans?

BW: Oh absolutely nda another concern is they're not putting a veteran in that seat. You know they've got military veterans available to them, but they're putting in people who don't have experience.

AMT: So what can be done to make this work better?

BW: Well a bureaucracy, there's something to contend with. Really they have to look at, they have to put somebody in charge that knows what they're doing. And that person has to have one foot on Veterans Affairs Canada and one foot on the Canadian Armed Forces. And he's got to be the bridge to make sure that anybody in the Canadian Forces go through him, her and when they come out the other side of Veterans Affairs, it's all done. Right now I think there's two smokestacks. Nobody in between, which is one of the reasons I quit the armed forces as well. Everybody had their own thing in doing their own directions and all that, but there was no teamwork and communication was terrible.

AMT: So what are all these changes mean for people who are maybe just trying to seek help now?

BW: Well they're going to have to go through the gauntlet and try to get it. There's a phrase that comes out lately called deny, delay and die. And they go to VAC and they say the original claim will be denied, which is true. I think 25 percent of the claims are denied. And then there's a delay for the appeal of the claim. So time goes on into years, and then die is, of course, people die while they're waiting. And that seems to be the way again and it seems to have crept over into the medical end of it with Dr. Rose's submission about the new paperwork.

AMT: Okay well Barry Westholm, thanks for taking us through this.

BW: Oh pleasure.

AMT: Barry Westholm is a retired Sgt. Maj. and Master Warrant Officer with the Canadian Armed Forces. He joined us from our Ottawa studio. Let us know what you think of this as you listen. You can tweet us @TheCurrentCBC. Find us on Facebook. Go to our website cbc.ca/thecurrent. And stay with us, the CBC News is next. And then women's pro hockey suffered a major blow over the weekend. What is next for the game and for the athletes after the demise of the Canadian Women's Hockey League? They've got one month and then they will be dissolved. 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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'Lack of investment in women's sports' to blame for demise of Canadian Women's Hockey League

Guests: Liz Knox, Courtney Szto, Kirsten Wheln

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

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AMT: Still to come, we are living in a digital world, yet how often have you stopped to think about the software code that shapes so much of our life today or the people who are actually writing it? Canadian technology journalist Clive Thompson joins me in half an hour with his take on the tribe of coders and how their biases are pervading our lives. We'll also get a preview of the new CBC true crime podcast. But first a league of their own on ice.

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Commentary from 2018 Clarkson Cup.

AMT: The sound of the Markham Thunder winning the Clarkson Cup in overtime last year. This year the Calgary Inferno took home the Canadian Women's Hockey League trophy, bringing in a record number of viewers as they faced off against Montreal's Les Cannadiennes. But little did the players know that their March 24th championship would be the league's last. This past weekend the CWHL announced it is ceasing operations as of May 1st, citing an economically unsustainable business model. The league is made up of six teams, from Canada the U.S. and China. It's operated as a non-profit since its founding in 2007. Liz Knox is a goaltender with the Markham Thunder. She's also the co-chair of the CWHL Players Association and she's with me in our Toronto studio. Hi.

LIZ KNOX: Hey. Thanks for having me.

AMT: I was watching your face listening to that. You remember that night.

LK: Oh gosh do I remember it. You know it honestly it gives me chills. It's a memory I'll never forget and hearing it you know even without the visual you know you just snap right back there. So ery mixed emotions obviously hearing that today.

AMT: And so how are you dealing with the news that you no longer have a league to play in?

LK: It's honestly been such a whirlwind. I mean how I'm dealing with it right now is just trying to get all the moving parts kind of in one place and settle the consensus of the players and know that you know there is a brighter future ahead of us and we're going to work hard to ensure that. But I honestly haven't had a chance personally to kind of sit down and kind of really realize what this means for myself and for my teammates, my friends that have played in the league for so long.

AMT: Did you find out when the rest of us found out?

LK: Unfortunately yeah. So we had a call with just the players association, GMS and coaches at 9:30 a.m. on Sunday and then the rest league was invited to join the call at 10 a.m. So it was very quick and you know it was a scripted kind of just you know using operations so it happened so fast and then we're on to the next goal then that call ended and then the league went straight to the media. So it was a very short amount time to kind of process things.

AMT: So what are you hearing from your fellow players since this announcement?

LK: There's obviously a growing concern I mean at the end of the day the players just want to play hockey and that's kind of what we've always lived off of and you know try to settle all those emotions and just say you know there will be something. It may not come up in the next month, it may not come up in the next six months. We don't know, but what we do know is that this is an opportunity for us to really you know shape our destiny and push for more and we hope that instead of just rushing back to the ice we can use this as an opportunity to basically build something bigger.

AMT: And I'm going to ask more about that in a minute, but what are you hearing from the fans?

LK: Oh the fans are disappointed. You know there's a lot of heartbreak from them as well. But largely they've been very supportive of us as players and I've had a number of fans reached out to me via social and. And you know they feel for us and largely their concern comes from you know their young daughters. We have fans that have young sons that watch the game as well and their heart breaks for us. But the consensus once again is they believe in us. They see how hard we work and how hard hard we've always had to work to play. Well we've known as professional hockey and you know they know that the game is in good hands. It's going to go somewhere positive.

AMT: Liz Knox I want to bring in two more people. Kirsten Wheln reports on women's hockey for the Victory Press. She's in our Montreal studio. And Courtney Szto is an assistant professor of kinesiology and health studies at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario. Hello to you both.

COURTNEY SZTO: Good morning.

KIRSTEN WHELN: Good morning.

AMT: Courtney Szto, what does this mean, not only for players, but also the fans and the wider hockey community?

CS: I mean as a fan myself, it's a real kick in the teeth Sunday morning. It's been very hard to grapple with, but it's hard because women women athletes have always been resilient because they have had to be the history of women's sports. Is women making space for themselves when no one else would give them the time of day. So as Liz says, I'm sure that something will come of this, but I hope that we're not making decisions out of desperation because we lose a lot of bargaining power in that and it's very easy to be devalued in that position of desperation. So hopefully I know something will come. It's just are we going to have this conversation again in 10 years?

AMT: Kirsten Wheln had you been hearing anything in the course of your reporting to suggest this was coming?

KW: Absolutely not. I was aware that there was an announcement being made on Sunday morning about coming out of Clarkson Cup weekend you know less than 10 days ago, everything, every indication that I had seen from players from management from the league itself was very optimistic leading into next season. There is nothing to indicate that this was remotely close to being on the horizon.

AMT: And Kirsten remind us how successful has the Canadian Women's Hockey League been?

KW: It's definitely been a growth process and I think for some people maybe that growth has been slower than they'd like to be, but at the same time this year then there was more attention than there has been in a long time. The Clarkson Cup final itself was aired on television live on three different channels across Canada and the United States in both English and French and that's the first time that has ever happened. So it seemed like there was just a lot of positive momentum coming out of this year where there is just a lot more focus on the league in mainstream media as well and that there was a lot of positive development really on all sides of the game.

AMT: Now the league says the decision is because of an economically unsustainable business model. Kirsten, what do they mean by that? Did they elaborate?

KW: They have not really elaborated. I think there's sort of a question as to whether this is really just based on not wanting to continue in the model other not for profit which is what the CWHL is or whether it's really a question of imminent financial troubles. I think there's been a little bit of mixed messaging with what the chair of the board in particular has been saying in the media but it's not really clear because the press release really did put the emphasis on the structure as a horse or whether this is really just a lack of belief in the structure or whether this was entirely impossible to continue on for even another season.

AMT: Courtney Szto, do you buy that reasoning, the economically unsustainable business model?

CS: So I mean I'm not familiar with the financial specifically, but if they're talking about the fact that it's a non profit model then I find that a little harder to believe because if we look at things like the International Olympic Committee, the International Soccer Federation and the NCAA, those are all non-profit models and they're all billion dollar non-profits. So to say that the model itself is the issue is a flawed take because you can make lots of revenue in that system. It is certainly possible. So I don't think that that's in and of itself the whole issue.

AMT: They get a lot of corporate buy in. Is there a parallel there, Courtney?

CS: Do you mean that the..

AMT: Yeah the organisations you mentioned, like what are you seeing with the Canadian Women's Hockey League?

CS: What I see is a lack of investment in women's sports across the board and this is for sure an issue with the CWHL is that we are as a society willing to risk something for the potential success of men's sport. We've been very unwilling to take that risk for women's sports. So as an example or the Florida Panthers received $86 million in public funds a few years ago as a bail out to avoid bankruptcy and the Phoenix/Arizona Coyotes have been bailed out I believe a couple of times in the last 10 or 15 years. So to say that you automatically lose money in women's sports, well, not all sports investments are good ones, but we're just not willing to give women's hockey the resources that it needs to be successful. You need money to make money and we've been expecting the CWA child to come into the NHL basically with one hundred dollars right. Being exaggerating, but they've been given very little and asked to do great things with that and we need to see more legitimate investment or legitimate risks to be taken here.

AMT: And Liz Knox is in the studio with me nodding her head. Liz what do you think as a player when you heard that you know unsustainable business model?

LK: Yeah I mean I'd have to agree with kind of both Kirsten and Courtney, you know. The not for profit model has been proven to be successful, but I know and I'm in the same boat. I don't get to see financials as a players association member so this is somewhat speculation, but I do know you know in terms of the players it feels like her sponsorship is like a charitable donation and you know they're seeing us as oh you know we'll give you a bucket of parks and that's our way of contributing to the game is just we're not getting enough. And now more than ever women's hockey is taking this leap forward. You know that we had Ross featured an age All-Star game and we have leagues and major corporations saying while this is the women's movement invest in these girls but that's the problem is that investment in those individuals and the three years in between the Olympics they play with us. So at some point that transition has to come over and say okay if we want to develop our national team players let's invest in what grows them three years in between, not just get on board and jump on the bandwagon at the Olympics.

AMT: And really what youre telling me is that the real investment is coming from you the players. Like you guys have day jobs.

LK: Absolutely. You know for the girls those of us that aren't on the national team we do have day jobs we have people that are full time teachers and you know working in offices full time so our national team players are so appreciative of what we sacrifice to play and to help them out but at the end of the day thats the problem is that we know that right now we dont have a future in game and that's a sad reality for us to face as players. Our national team girls do but their future is not has not been in the leagues that we play and it's always in the next Olympics they're always looking for years ahead. So I would love to see a league come in were you know that is the goal. You've reached the pinnacle of your sport and there is an investment made there, you can make some money. You know certainly it's not going to happen overnight. We're very realistic on that. But you know you look at the CFL model and these guys have some part time jobs and they make somewhat of a living wage. Like that would be to me you know an attainable goal in the next five years.

AMT: In October Danny Reiland who left the CWHL to establish the National Women's Hockey League said she was working toward having one league. Is the decision to shutter the CWHL setting the stage for that, do you think Liz?

LK: I can't speak on behalf of business strategies but I know those players you know we've lost everything. So were starting from ground zero and I think consensus of our players is that while we recognise that there is opportunity that will be a challenge and we're willing to hero you know what that opportunity looks like a little bit apprehensive as I said earlier we're not rushing to jump on the ace because we don't want to be stepping sideways right now and if this is our chance to gain the media attention and gain the attention that our game deserves to push for more we're going to take that opportunity and we're going to be you know well thought out as we move forward and in some ways I do think that the end of your child while they do have you know things that work in dont work for them I do see it somewhat as a sidestep.

AMT: Kirsten, just give us just a little bit of shorthand on the NWHL versus the CWHL. Do you think that that's what's going on here?

KW: I don't think so sort of as of saying it doesn't seem clear that this was any intentional strategic thing theres no real indication of that. And the NWHL for one thing has never operated in Canada and it's Canada right now that currently has no professional women's hockey teams. And so even just the potential that itself is pretty precarious fledgling league and so its not clear that that would be a sustainable future for the game in Canada either.

AMT: Courtney, what do you think?

CS: Yeah I think its a difficult position that we're in right now to see what's going to happen. I know there is a lot of hesitation as to hand over the keys to the NHL as well. It would be nice if the women get to self determine what that league looks like, but yeah it's purely speculation at this point.

AMT: Hasn't the NHL said that they would be more supportive if there was one league as opposed to two?

LK: Well they started out saying that they're saying if there's no league they would be happy to start. And so it leaves us as were saying in a very precarious situation where you know the players and can at least we've already lost the lost so for us there is no league for us to play and so I don't know where they fit in just yet.

AMT: Well let's talk a little bit more about the fans. Liz, tell us a little bit more about who your fanbase is.

LK: So for me personally in Markham, our team in Markham. You know we've grown relationships exponentially with the young boys in the Markham Islanders. So we've seen their teams come out. We certainly have the Markham Silver Stars. Basically any of the GTA girls hockey teams walk will come to our games and I kind of joked on the radio the other day. Like in my first year in 2011 I probably could have named everybody sitting in the stands cheering for Markham and cheering for Toronto, well we were Brampton at the time, but you know we could have I could have named everybody and now we're consistently seeing turn out of five seven hundred and that's just on a regular season game. So in seven years seven years we've seen that much growth and then when you put them on a larger stage with the investment of marketing teams and we see in our class and cup final and our All-Star game you know we can draw in the thousands of crowds. So you know it's grown crazy and the fans really are you know the heartbeat that's keeping us go on here.

AMT: Kirsten what kind of support for the teams and games were seeing in big markets like Montreal and Calgary?

KW: Montreal is definitely sort of the pinnacle of why a crowd has like in this country and has been for a long time. So the support of Montreal has really been phenomenal and you're seeing sold out games I'll be in venues that are probably smaller than the capacity that team could have played for just based on the availability of venues. But there are also a few games that were in the multiple thousands just regular season games this season in Montreal and the fan base is not just girls teams one of the big success as they think is marketing beyond just the future of the game. So has to be again also just having a fan base of adults who have that money to invest in the game as well and that's really important. At the same time you haven't seen the same situation across the league so I think there's been a lot of growth in in the Greater Toronto Area in the past year especially in Calgary for instance the phenomenal team obviously they just won the Clarkson Cup last week, but they're really not seeing the same level of support and that's really unfortunate.

AMT: We talked to people on the streets of Vancouver about the story and I want you to hear some of their thoughts.

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VOICE 1: I don't actually think I've ever really watched women's hockey to be honest.

VOICE 2: The only time I've ever seen women's hockey is during Olympics. So I've never seen Hockey Night in Canada profile any women hockey leagues at all.

VOICE 1: Yeah in my opinion, it's all perception like because of the popularity of men's sports, people are like you know there's no where women's sports could ever become like that.

VOICE 3: Are they right?

VOICE 1: I don't think so. I think that if there was that drive for it, I think that it could be just as exciting as men's sports is.

VOICE 2: The question is how many women find themselves interested in sports and how many men would give themselves permission to be comfortable cheering for women in sports.

AMT: Courtney Szto, how do you react to those thoughts?

CS: So many thoughts. So as somebody who grew up in Vancouver, I certainly understand the disconnect because the CWHL really just doesn't affect us out in Vancouver, so my move to Ontario in the last in the last year has made me a full fledged CWHL fan because I could experience the games firsthan,d but so this is the flipside of the investment issue is that if no one's going to invest in you, if you don't have visibility as a product. There needs to be consistent television coverage and a TV deal. I think for me is part one of this next plan you need it because if you have a plan in place other pieces tend to fall in a lot easier. Media creates new worship the world juniors is a perfect example in Canada in the early 90s the games were outlined. There are dozens of fans in the stands. It just wasn't a big thing for TSM but somebody saw something in it and they devoted more time and money to it and it has become a juggernaut for TSM. So they did that in about 10 15 years. ESPN has done the same thing with the X Games. The BBC did the same thing with daat. So where was all of this media attention when the lead was operational. People have been saying on Twitter includingthe Le Cannadiennes media team. Where was all of this attention before, right? It's like vultures have come over the carcass at this point and I'm going through a little shade at CBC here, as a public broadcaster, it has a duty to not only show what is marketable, but what is culturally relevant and to tell a comprehensive national story. So where was as an example those CBC cameras when these women needed them every Saturday and Sunday?

AMT: So really this is an issue of broadcast executives.

CS: Absolutely.

AMT: This is about women's sports versus men the way we cover all levels of men's sports. These are decisions made by people in executive suites.

CS: Absolutely yes. I mean if you're determing a budget, you have a lot of power. You're determining who gets shown, who gets downplayed and who gets dismissed from the national narrative and women's hockey unfortunately has been a large part of that.

AMT: So when we talk about something that is economically unsustainable, it's not about economics at all. It's about gender.

CS: From my perspective, yes.

AMT: What do you think Liz?

LK: Again so many thoughts.

AMT: Go for it.

LK: It is and I'll go back to you know what I was saying about the women's movement. It's amazing. It's amazing what these companies have decided to do and inspire a generation of young girls to chase their dreams. That's our that's our headline message. Chase your dreams. They don't see us. And they don't see us because we're not on TV and they don't see us because 90 percent of the time, they don't even know we exist. And that's a problem and it's something that as players we've taken the responsibility of. So we go into the community and we volunteer our time. You would never find Sidney Crosby getting an email saying will you come to my kid's birthday party, but we do and we go and we're happy to go because we know that if we don't, they won't buy into us. They won't believe in us.

AMT: We're going to end it right there on that though. Thank you all three of you for weighing in today. Liz Knox is a goaltender with the Markham Thunder. She's the co-chair of the CWHL Players Association. She's in Toronto. Kirsten Wheln reports on women's hockey for the Victory Press. She's in Montreal. Courtney Szto is an assistant professor of kinesiology and health studies at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario. Efforts to raise the profile of women's hockey may seem like recent history, but it turns up the struggle stretches back almost 90 years. The early roots of that struggle are getting dramatic treatment on stages across Canada. We caught up with a writer for her thoughts on women history and hockey in Canada.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: I'm Tracey Power. I am the playwright and choreographer of Glory, which is the story of four friends who are a part of a team called the Preston Rubylettes and they were a team in the 1930s, women's hockey team and it's the story of their struggle to become a team, their fight to be honoured as a team and recognised as female hockey players. The play is actually inspired by two sets of sisters, one in particular are the sisters. Hilda was like the Hayley Wickenheiser of her time and many thought that she should have been playing for the NHL at that time and she's an incredible incredible stick handler and skater. They went on to be the most successful women's hockey team ever and their win loss record was incredible and they were the team to beat. They were so good that often teams didn't want to play them because they knew they were going to lose, which is too bad, but they definitely challenged other teams to be better and the league to be better. And they were just an incredible group of players.So there's more women in the play, the two sets of sisters and then they have a coach and there's also another kind of character in the play, there's the announcer or the play by play guy. I actually had no idea there was a women's hockey league at that time and I think that was the biggest surprise to me is to find out that there wasn't just a league, there was a few leagues and that they played right across the country. When I read the news it was pretty heartbreaking and I felt like there was part of the play that I was reliving yesterday morning and how it would have felt for those girls to hear that news. So yeah I guess I can only hope and I actually truly believe that there will be something next and there will be something that will come out of this and people will step up and it's our job as Canadians to make sure that women and young girls have a place to play and can still be inspired to play. So I don't believe that this is an end, I believe that this is going to be a new beginning and something great will come out of this. I think we all have to fight for that.

AMT: Canadian playwright Tracey Power. Her play, Glory, is running at the Gateway Theatre in Richmond, B.C. from April 4th this Thursday, April 4th to the 19th. Stay with us. Coming up in our next half hour, the secret lives of software coders. Journalist Clive Thompson on the way legions of programmers are remaking our world in their image. And I'll be joined by Justin Ling a little later of the new CBC podcast, The Village. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

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Digital technology is reshaping our world — and coders are deciding how, says author

Guests: Clive Thompson, Justin Ling

AMT: Hello. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current. In the space of a decade or so, digital technology has become such an integral part of our daily lives that it's getting hard to imagine life without our smartphones or social media or Uber or AirBNB and like the proverbial fish that doesn't know that it's actually swimming in water, it's also easy for us to lose sight of the fact that so much of the way we live today is mediated through software and code. Software engineers have truly changed the world in some surprising and occasionally in some troubling ways. Canadian technology journalist Clive Thompson has been investigating that. His new book is called, Coders. It's a sort of anthropological exploration of the kind of people who are drawn to programming and the ways their personalities and biases are changing our world. Clive Thompson joins me from New York City. Hi Clive.

CLIVE THOMPSON: Hi.

AMT: What kind of person is drawn to become a software programmer?

CT: Well it's a type of person who is really logically minded and you know kind of good at puzzles and finds that sort of puzzle solving very intriguing and satisfying. They're often extremely meticulous to their they have to be really detail oriented people and you know not always but they tend to be a little more introverted you know them they're more at home sitting around the keyboard than hanging out with a lot of people. And I think one of the one of the big things is they're just someone who gets this enormous thrill. From the moment the machine comes to life and does exactly what they say there is this what they call the hella world moment. You know it's like when someone discovers programming for the first time and one of the first things you do is you just type you know a little command that makes the computer go hello world and talk back to you that has this kind of you know electric thrill of creation that gets its hooks into the type of person that likes coding and they will chase that thrill over and over again for the rest of their lives. And here's the other thing it's like the thing that I think unifies a lot of coders is that they all loved the idea of optimizing things and making them efficient and faster. Right. You know taking something that's being done very slowly and making it run really quickly and opening up new abilities.

AMT: Well I've got some clip, I'd like you to hear. Our producer Julie Crysler went out to speak to a coder. He's starting up a company called Bags Away. It's like AirBNB for short term luggage storage. His name is Eugene. Let's see what you make of this.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: I love coding. It's you need to be 12 hours a day focused on it. You just can't get up and eat or drink. Because if you move away from the computer, you're going to lose where you were, where your thought was and if you comment on your code you're going to come back and say what did I mean by this comment. You're going to lose your train of thought. And that train of thought continues for hours. If I didn't need to sleep, I'd work 24 hours.

AMT: What is it about coding that makes it so compelling that they'd rather do it than sleep?

CT: That's a really good question. Every coder talked about exactly that with me the fact that they would find coding more engrossing more intense than many other activities. It has to do with a couple things. One is that coding is something that requires deep immersion to do well right. If you're reading something of any complexity its got this very complicated flow and its kind of like having to assemble this Crystal Palace in your head to get anything complicated done. So it really only works if you can dive in there and stay there for a long time. And what happens once you are in there is is that classic what they call flow state right where youre operating at the edge of your abilities and youre being incredibly intellectually challenged. And if the end of it is this incredible reward which is that the machine comes to life and does what youve been striving to get it to do that is and Ive done enough of that to know just what a weird thrill that is because most of the time when you know were at our jobs most of the time your winds are partial but with coding if you finish that dive and you get that function that piece of code working there is a finality to it as sort of a binary transit from nothing was happening to something is happening to watching machine cling to life that is just like a quite a thrill. And so that long deep immersion ends with this burst of absolute joy. And I think that is what makes coddlers go back to that experience over and over and over again.

AMT: What kinds of things were coders willing to give up besides sleep to do that kind of work?

CT: Oh my goodness. Everything. You know hobbies, advancement at work, there are coders who you know have said no I don't want to move up the organizational ladder because I won't be able to code anymore or wonderful coder right now, Sarah who was working on a piece of code. She's a javascript frontend coder and she was trying to do something really complicated and her boyfriend came to her and said you know hey we we agreed we go for this walk. You ready to leave. She was like no no give me five minutes. He came back in five minutes gimme five more minutes. This went on for like a long time. Finally he's like okay you promised me to go for this walk, let's go. They went off and he proposed marriage basically. So she nearly coded her way through like a marriage proposal basically.

AMT: It's interesting because like you can you can point to workaholics, but you also point to the fact that like that's why Soilent came along, the food, that you just mix up right. That's why they wear, like you talk about people with the same outfit because then they don't have to waste time thinking about dressing. Like it goes down to that kind of efficiency.

CT: It really does. I mean like people would tell me that they stopped buying different types of clothing so they could just wear the exact same pants and t shirt every day. So to remove you know any sort of decision from that to they get optimizer and lives. They yeah they would you know they would ring silent at the start up so that they could just sit there at their desk in a trance coding and just drinking this right. Or they would get really obsessed with you know regarding their body as a system to make more efficient Hauk quantified self thing that really grew up in Silicon Valley where you measuring every step and you try and optimize your movements you get the maximum amount of energy usage. It's really hard to turn off rate like it. You start seeing the world around you as a as a bunch of things being done inefficiently and it just bugs you when you see them you know like this woman at Trulia which is a real estate company said she would stand at the corner watching people cross the street and they were doing it in the optimum way. So she was like yelling at them you know like no you're crossing the street the wrong way. She's like this is how crazy I am now right you know like I see the world around me as a bunch of problems that I need to solve. I can't stop doing that.

AMT: It's so interesting because you make the case that they're obsessed with creating efficiency, but that's got even bigger implications on what they choose to make efficient.

CT: Sure. Because one of the problems that I think a lot of developers struggle with and they would tell me this is that they would approach things where efficiency isn't the goal. Right. Like you know a lot of our social lives are inherently inefficient. You know we go through a lot of this little chit chat with each other hey has a go on this sort of you know little little phatic conversations as linguists would call them. They're part of you know being a normal human but often a lot of developers would tell me they just found that stuff kind of annoying because it was slow it was slowing them down or it felt wasteful and so they would do these. They would write little little subroutines to like send text messages to their partners in an automated fashion so they wouldn't have to do it themselves right which is you know sort of nuts when you think about it. You know like there are remaining even the emotional aspects of their lives and you even kind of see that a little bit with a lot of social media companies where these attempts by these engineers to like speed up and make more efficient the act of socially contacting other people sometimes that's great but sometimes it seems a little crazy right. You know why would you want to take something that's inherently or supposed to be organically a little slow paced and an absolute sprint and a journey exactly. And emotional to and fro people and just sort of speed it up into a marathon.

AMT: Well and hold that thought because before we get to that because that's got so many tentacles, we're going to go here. I want to play something else from Eugene. This is what he said about creating efficiency.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: Steve Jobs said it right. He said I want to hire lazy people for programmers because lazy, I want to program to automate stuff. I don't want to be doing it. Perfect example, I need to download some data to an Excel sheet, do something with and then give it to my box. That should take a week. So I got really tired of it. So I programmed like a small Excel visual basic, just very simple code to automatically do this.So I turned a week in to maybe an hour. And that's like great I'm done.

AMT: We're not convinced Steve Jobs actually said that, but I think you get his point. Did the coders you talk to tell you similar stories about streamlining their own jobs?

CT: Absolutely. In fact many of them got into coding because they weren't coders, but they were doing some job that had this repetitive task to it, they learned just enough scripting to speed it up and they began to realize oh my God this act of automation is more fun than what my job was right. And I've done and I've experienced this myself too. Right. Like I learned just enough coding while I was reading this book that I began to start automating different chunks of my job.

AMT: You did something like this for your son, right?

CT: Yeah my son was coming home from school and he would want to try and get his homework done right away because he wanted to get it out of the way so he could have fun with the rest of the day. But the teacher would often spend quite a bit of time you know delaying before she posted the homework on the class blog. So he'd sit there at the browser hitting refresh over and over again waiting for the homework to post and he would sometimes sit there for like you know half an hour, 45 minutes. So finally I said look you know what I can automate this. And so I wrote again old or robotic scraper that would just pay attention to that page over and over again wait for something new to crop up and then send a text message to him saying the homework is there. And so I made this little homework but and it you know it freed up half an hour to 45 minutes a day for him. So these are these weirdly fun things to do that really do become kind of addictive. I mean I sometimes have trouble turning that urge off myself.

AMT: But you connect the dots between that and the tools coders create that now dominate the social internet space and beyond.

CT: Yeah. When you think about Facebook what they really did and what Mark Zuckerberg set out to do was to accelerate the speed at which we pay attention to each other. If you think about Facebook in the first couple of years it was a very slow experience. You know you had to like go and look at someone's Facebook page on the off chance that they maybe change something. And so Mark Zuckerberg said this has to slow. I want to create a new way of paying attention to people. So he envisioned a news feed which would just be this constant stream of updates whenever anyone changed anything their robotic system would immediately send it to you in this just non-stop Bawler of activity. And that is to a large extent the gift and the curse of the news feed has been for society it has dramatically increased the amount of information that we get from people that we care about and sort of random strangers. And that's often terrific. But also you know crazy conspiracy theories have this new accurate spread really really quickly then people become really quite addicted to it because it's hard to look away from social information. Right. What were social creatures and he neatly hacked our systems by creating this high speed high throughput social information spread.

AMT: Well we just saw the shootings in New Zealand that were uploaded live streamed on Facebook.

CT: Exactly exactly. That's a downside once you start a system that's moving at incredibly high speed you run into the problem that you get. TMI too much information and you get situations where it's very easy to hijack that and put stuff out there that is dangerous or harmful or civically corrosive.

AMT: And of course Facebook is not the only massive change created by a coder's desire for efficiency. Let's talk about Uber.

CT: Sure. Uber was a classic efficiency play that designers who designed Uber originally were looking at car hailing and saying this is incredibly inefficient. You have drivers who dont know where their customers are and customers who dont know where the drivers are. And so they said because everyone has a phone in their pocket and we have satellites that give us location and maps we can solve that algorithmically. We can automatically find the nearest driver and read them to you. And thats a absolutely classic coder efficiency ploy. It worked really well. It has enormous upside for riders because now you can find rides really quickly but over time society began to realize that it has all sorts of negative side effects because we made it so easy to become a driver. They flooded the roads with tens of thousands and more drivers and they made it very hard now to make a living off being a driver which has very significant implications particularly for immigrant communities in cities who for decades had used driving full time as a route to the middle class in a new country.

AMT: So we're talking about public policy for whole communities, whole societies influenced by someone who's obsessed with coding. Like that's the massive change, our public policy is being controlled by coders?

CT: Well I dont know if it's being controlled by coders, it's being deeply influenced by coding often in very visible ways. I mean several years ago said software is eating the world and what it really meant is that all these types of things that used to have no software involved are now broken by software. Our shopping is increasingly determined by algorithm as to which things we see to buy how we get them everything from like voting systems are becoming algorithmically determined over and over again we see activities that used to be analogue now becoming digital which means they are now run by code. And so the design decisions that are made by the coder is and the designers and the UI engineers change the way we live in the same way that we know when they built subway systems in the late 19th and early 20th century, it architected the way a city was going to grow.

AMT: And of course the other side of this as well is most coders are young western white men, am I right?

CT: Certainly in in North America, it has actually become younger and more or more male over time. Right. It didn't used to be that way back in the 60s, but that has big implications right because you know I've been a young guy in his 20s. I know what it's like. You don't always have a very wide view of society and so yeah this is a real problem I think the demographic model culture of software. It limits the scope, the scale and I think the ambition of what software should be aiming for.

AMT: Well you pointed to a quote by Clara Jeffrey, the editor in chief of Mother Jones who has said that so many Silicon Valley start ups are dudes wanting to replicate mom.

CT: Right exactly.

AMT: They want to be driven around.

CT: You know rather than create like a new piece of software that does something ambitious and hard, you know it's like well I'm going to create a service that you know picks up my laundry and drops it off when it's done or you know marginally improves the speed of pizza delivery right. Fair enough, it's a little problem. It's maybe worth doing, you can get money for it. But yeah it's like Clara said, these are these are small war problems faced by kids who just left the door and are trying to replicate that existence. I feel like society has a lot of really big problems and it would it would be more fun to watch engineers really tackling those.

AMT: But most of us don't realize that.

CT: Sure, I mean that's partly because code is really invisible. The average person they get the idea that software is eating the world, but they don't know anything about how it's made or who's making it. And so I really wanted to try and demystify some of that with this book.

AMT: Throughout this latest revolution in technology we've seen a lot of software being built quickly, as you're talking about and then we only discover the implications as millions of people start using them. Should we, could we be trying to slow coders down?

CT: Yeah. I think there is a lot of interesting upside in teaching computer science and you know perhaps developing you know standards across the industry that basically say, hey guys the goal is not always to speed things up. Maybe sometimes you should be trying to actively preserve or even create new inefficiencies right. And here's a good example of this. So next door is the start up that's been around for several years and what they do is they create little social networks for individual physical neighborhoods. So you could start a next door or a community for your local neighborhood. Anyone who physically lived there could join a lot of neighborhoods all around the US around the world started creating next door social networks and they would you know talk about things like you know you know who's got a drill I can borrow you can you know have these really interesting fun interactions with your neighbors. But next are also had a way to report crime like a neighborhood watch thing where if you saw something suspicious you could alert your neighbors. And what started happening across the United States was that a lot of really racist reports started coming in. People would say oh I saw you know a black guy walking around and that's all they would say and it was just straightforwardly racist reactions. And eventually this got to be so common in this in this crime reporting tool that even the CEO was like we have a problem on our hands. And so they sat down and they spent months they hired a designer a former Amazon designer and they decided the trick was to slow people down. They created a new form that said if you want to report a crime you have to now list a few pieces of information. What was a person's estimated height. What were they wearing described their activities essentially forcing the person who is making this you know this get racist reaction to say well what do you really know about the situation. Did you notice anything. And sure enough once they put this little piece of friction in the system the amount of racist reports went down by 75 percent because it turned out to be valuable not to speed people up, but to slow them down and force them to think.

AMT: So you know most of us aren't coders, but we live in the world of the coder now. What should we be most conscious of? What should we be worried about?

CT: I think it's very useful for average citizens to be aware and thinking about what are the things they don't like about how they see the world being affected by these companies and they should be taking that as something that they're taking into account when they make their political decisions about who to support. Because I think it's clear now that because these companies are so big and have so much influence the only force that can really impel them to affect or change or rein in is the equally powerful force of the government you know merely quitting Facebook doesn't do much right know that Facebook isn't going to notice that but Facebook does notice when they get hold it in front of commissioners to explain what they're doing. They do pay attention to a large political pressure cut. You know companies like AirBNB you know work very hard just to roll into a city and trying just flatten any political regulations as quickly as possible. And one of the only things I can push back against that are you know local city councils right. So I would argue that people should start thinking politically about what suffer means in their lives and if there's something they see happening they don't like to make it part of their political conversation.

AMT: Because you're making the point that it may start off as a coder's personal obsession, but in fact the end result is political. It has huge influence on the way we live in our society and the way our society moves forward.

CT: Absolutely.

AMT: Clive Thompson, you're making us think. Thank you for that.

CT: Glad to be here.

AMT: Clive Thompson's new book is called, Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World. He joined me from our studio in New York City.

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AMT: You are listening to The Current on CBC Radio One. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: He was definitely into an older gentlemen type. He had a name for them. He was called Silver Daddies. That was his thing. He was very intrigued and attracted to them and everyone that I ever met was fine, except for one and that person was very, very jealous and very, very obsessive and controlling.

JUSTIN LING: And who was that?

VOICE 1: That was Bruce McArthur.

AMT: The arrest and convictions of Bruce McArthur for the grisly murders of eight men shocked the country. It made headlines around the world, but for the LGBTQ community it also confirmed a dark fear. For years there had been rumors that a serial killer was stalking Toronto's gay village. Queer men of colour were disappearing one after another. And since Bruce McArthur's convictions, questions about how police handled the investigation and other crimes against gay men have persisted. Those questions are the subject of the new season of the CBC podcast, Uncover. It is called The Village. The host is Justin Ling and he joins me now. Hi.

JUSTIN LING: Hey, good morning.

AMT: You started looking into the disappearance of gay men of colour in Toronto, long before we knew Bruce McArthur's name.

JL: Yeah I started looking into the three missing men from the village around 2015. I had followed the story when it kind of first came out in 2013 and it had frustrated me that attention was sort of had dissipated. That people were no longer talking about these missing persons cases. That police were no longer investigating them. You know I got the strong sense that there likely was a serial killer and you know in cases where you know that is the likely scenario, you know the worst thing you can do is take your eye off of it. And that's exactly what happened.

AMT: And there were fears in the community that a serial killer might be at work. What did you make of that at the time?

JL: I think it was a pretty reasonable assumption and I know that sounds surprising to people, but you know I tried to get an explanation for what may have happened to these missing men. At the time there was three missing men and the explanations I heard all kind of fell around this idea that they had taken off. That some of them had gone back to Afghanistan or that one of them maybe had overdosed or had run away and it just seemed to be so incredibly unlikely that three men in the same sort of social circle, all three who look incredibly similar around the same age, all disappeared without a trace, all without any bank statements, without their passport, without anything, without taking money out of the bank, nothing. That just seemed so unlikely. It seemed you know strangely more likely to me that a serial killer was operating than there was three completely unconnected, unrelated reasons for their disappearance and unfortunately that's exactly what had happened.

AMT: How chilling that that hunch that you had was so true. After the arrest of Bruce McArthur, people began wondering if he might have been responsible for an even earlier wave of killings linked to Toronto's gay village. You looked into that as well.

JL: That's right that's the majority of this of the podcast. We wanted to you know use this case as a reason to go back to those unsolved homicides they go back all the way to 1975 and in my thought process was you know the Bruce McArthur case and his victims have garnered a lot of attention in these cases going back to the 70s have been largely forgotten. You know for decades they had no news coverage no new attention police had not reopen the cases now because of a McArthur police have gone back to try to see if he could potentially be responsible for them. But my thought process was I want to go back and see if there's anything we can learn about them in terms of who may have committed these murders. There is a fear back then that a serial killer was stalking in the village back then as well and to see if there's any sort of you know lessons we can learn in terms of policing in terms of community in terms of how to deal with marginalised communities. I think there is a lot to learn there and I think the horses in this fascinating you know are things I was learning in this season that I knew nothing about and I came away with it with a much richer understanding of queer history in the country but also in terms of what policing can and should look like and you know ylessons we may not have learned.

AMT: So you really follow those threads. With some people specifically like you end up in Detroit at one point trying to put some pieces of the puzzle together.

JUSTIN LING: Yeah. I mean it really took us to some places that we never expected to go. You know our season largely looks at a rash of about 14 killings of queer people from 75 to about 79, right into the bathhouse raids in 81 and kind of this moment when the community kind of stands up and pushes back. But you know it took us to some very, some places we didn't even expect. I mean you know there's a mysterious fire you know we investigate whether arson was at play, you know the murder of a prominent club owner who is also involved in the gay rights scene in the early days. Another man who's never been included in this list of unsolved killings from Toronto, but who was murdered in Detroit some years after. There's a lot of stuff here that I just never thought we'd end up at. And it is looking at unsolved murders, but it's also looking at ways to avoid them to solve them and to improve those relations, which I think is really the important takeaway here. We didn't set out to make a true crime podcast. We set out to make a podcast about policing, about community, about marginalization and I think it does that.

AMT: It drops today, first and second episodes.

JUSTIN LING: That's right.

AMT: Okay. Justin Ling, thank you.

JL: Absolutely.

AMT: I want to hear it all. Justin Ling is the host of Season 3 of the CBC podcast, Uncover. It's called The Village. You can find it on cbc.ca/podcasting or any place you find your podcasts. That's our program for today. Stay with Radio One for Q. This week marks the 25th anniversary of the death of musician Kurt Cobain and Tom Power is speaking with his former manager, former manager of Nirvana. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. Thanks for listening to The Current.

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Apr. 2, 2019 episode transcript

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