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The Current Transcript for September 4, 2019

Host: Laura Lynch

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

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VOICE: This is probably the most sad and worst day of my life to address the Bahamian people. As a physician I've been trained to withstand many things, but never anything like this.

LAURA LYNCH: The people of the Bahamas and their Prime Minister Hubert Minnis are facing unprecedented devastation from Hurricane Dorian. First up toda, we'll head to the islands, as they struggle to save lives and survive. After that a CBC News investigation uncovers just how much harder it is for women to win in federal politics. In fact, the data suggests many are set up to fail. And in an hour.

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VOICE 1: I think my favourite one is like the upside down smiley face.

VOICE 2: I always use that one when I'm like low key mad about something, but I'm like It's fine. It's cool. I wouldn't have it any other way.

LL: Do you speak emojis? Smartphones are changing how we communicate and it's not just about smiley faces. A linguist says that's a good thing. We'll find out why. I'm Laura Lynch and this is The Current.

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'Incredibly frightening': What one woman faced when she decided to stay in the Bahamas during Dorian

Guests: Crystal deGregory, Gaston Browne, Michael Taylor

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[Sounds of Hurricane Dorian]

VOICE: Strong winds. No power. Getting sandblasted.

LL: The images coming out of the Bahamas are harrowing. The winds in this one are battering the beach, bending trees sideways. Gusts were measured at up to 350 kilometres an hour. Kim Mullings experienced it from her home in Freeport.

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VOICE 1: Scary, especially what's going on at night. You know so I can imagine we've had two nights of this. I really don't know how to describe it. This one is like no other. And we're used to having hurricanes at night, but not this one. The sound of the wind it was howling of course. And the word that I've been using to describe it is taunting. This seems to be like a three part storm. You have wind, you have flooding as a result of rain and then you literally have the ocean. There's the ocean in people's homes.

VOICE 2: Is destroyed what is up to basically everything is just in ruins.

LL: The storm has now weakened as it moves towards the U.S. east coast. It's now considered a Category 2 hurricane. But the extent of the devastation it's left behind in the Bahamas is still being assessed. Prime Minister Hubert Minnis said that complete towns are wiped out and the still rising seawater is making recovery and rescue difficult. Crystal deGregory is a Bahamian and U.S. resident. She was visiting her family in the Bahamas and instead of leaving before the storm, she chose to stay and ride it out. And we reached her today in Freeport, Bahamas. Hello.

CRYSTAL deGREGORY: Good morning.

LL: Crystal, can you give me some sense of the scene in and around Freeport? What does it look like?

CRYSTAL deGREGORY: It's pretty devastating. The toll on the island from the winds and the storm surge is really unprecedented. There are quite frankly some communities that were graciously spared, but far too many of them that were not. And so there are professional personnel added to by kind of deputized citizens in boats, on jet skis, who are venturing into residential communities that were vulnerable.

LL: Can you take us through the last 72 hours? What did you experience?

CRYSTAL deGREGORY: You know yesterday I asked several times, what day was it, because I just really didn't know, as the rest of the world now knows, how Dorian just kind of you know walking if you will across the landmass.

LL: Can you describe, for those of us who have never been through something like this, what you saw, what you heard, as it, as you say, walked across the island?

CRYSTAL deGREGORY: Yeah, if you've ever been on a big big jet, essentially that is what it sounded like. So you have the combination of sound and the wind and the howling and you know the pressure that comes, especially with enduring those qualities of Mother Nature at night, when you can't, you know you can't see. It was very terrifying.

LL: Yeah, I was just going to say that must have been freightening.

CRYSTAL deGREGORY: Yeah it is incredibly frightening. I mean even during the day it is, but during the night, so much more because there's really nothing that anyone can do. So it's you know it's very frightening to know that if someone is in distress, it is likely that they will have to find a will and the way to hold out until daybreak.

LL: And is there anyone you haven't been able to reach?

CRYSTAL deGREGORY: So many people. And in my instance I've had the good fortune of being able to reach and then falling out of reach and so I'm a little bit more fortunate. But there are tons of pages on Facebook, there are tons of tweets that refer to thousands and thousands of people who are looking for their loved ones and friends. You know, we're without power, we're without water, we've long been without those "essentials of life." And telephone service of course has been compromised. And so it is our hope that there are people who are indeed well, we just haven't had an opportunity to connect the ""lost," with those who are seeking to find them.

LL: You could have left before Dorian hit, but yet you decided to stay. Why?

CRYSTAL deGREGORY: Two words: mo-ther. (laughs)

LL: I understand. How old is your mom?

CRYSTAL deGREGORY: I don't know if she'll kill me for this, but 58.

LL: Are you having any conversations with her about maybe just leaving for good?

CRYSTAL deGREGORY: No. When you ask people to leave a place that they've known and that they love and tiy jbiw opt for some place else -- when everywhere has its share of problems -- that is a part of what is just so important about the conversation around natural disasters. Whether or not climate change is contributory, and all of us are vulnerable to Mother Nature. And so these people are strong. They are brave. They are resilient. Today, yesterday and tomorrow, they will find cause to smile, and to laugh, and to go on.

LL: Alright. Crystal please, you and your mother both take care as you go through the next few days. Thank you.

CRYSTAL deGREGORY: Thank you.

LAURA LYNCH: Bye bye.

CRYSTAL deGREGORY: Bye bye.

LL: Crystal deGregory is a Bahamian and U.S. resident who is with her family in Freeport in the Bahamas. Well Dorian is the fifth Atlantic hurricane to reach the highest category, Category five, in the last four years. Hurricane Irma was also Category 5 and it made landfall on the island of Barbuda in 2017 causing utter devastation. Gaston Browne is the prime minister of Antigua and Barbuda and he is in St. John's, Antigua. Hello.

GASTON BROWNE: Good morning Laura and good morning to all of your listeners.

LL: As you watch what's been happening to your neighbours as hurricane Dorian sweeps through, what goes through your mind?

GASTON BROWNE: Well it's a reminder of what happened in Barbuda approximately two years ago. Just a few days shy from two years ago and you know Irma devastated Barbuda and it left Barbuda as a mangled wreck. In fact the recovery has been relatively slow because of the magnitude of the damages. We're making steady progress, but there's some financial constraints. We have not been able to fully recover Barbuda.

LL: And I want to get into that more, but I just I understand you've been in contact with the prime minister of the Bahamas, Hubert Minnis. What kind of conversations are you having with him?

GASTON BROWNE: Well I've been in touch with him prior to the storm. You know extending them good wishes and I hoped that the storm would have spared them any damage whatsoever and unfortunately you know parts of the Bahamas were actually devastated and decimated. So since then I've been in touch with him and he himself is obviously going through a very traumatic experience. I think he has described it as the most traumatic experience of his life. So we're standing in solidarity with him. The level of the oasis level, we're mobilizing resources, financial and technical resources in order to assist with the relief efforts.

LL: Prime Minister Minnis says he'll be talking to the Canadian prime minister, our prime minister, today about assistance. What do you think Canada should provide?

GASTON BROWNE: Well you know Canada assisted us with the recovery efforts after Barbuda. One of the problems though that we have had with the recovery support is that it's too slow. It needs to be more timely, but I imagine at this point the key issue is the relief supplies that are required. My understanding is that water is needed and they probably need some financial support as well. So it would be good if my dear friend. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau could move quickly and to provide some assistance to the people of the Bahamas.

LL: Just to remind people of what happened. You talked a little bit about the impact on Barbuda of Irma. Can you tell me exactly what you saw when you first visited Barbuda after Irma swept through?

GASTON BROWNE: You know I happen to have been the first individual along with a helicopter and pilot to see the devastation. So for me it was heart wrenching. In fact the people on the island at the time did not even understand the magnitude of the damage. And from that experience I would have observed that at least 95 percent of the properties were either damaged or destroyed. In fact Barbuda was practically a mangled wreck. And when I look at the pictures emanating from Bahamas in particular, I have to admit that it's a similar situation and it shows very clearly that climate change is real. I mean these storms are more frequent, more ferocious. And I think that you know we have to heighten our response to climate change and ensure that every single country comes on board including the United States because at the end of the day it is the most significant threat facing the planet. We know that there are many fires taking place all around the world. I mean the Amazon for example has thousands of fires and you have all these freakin hurricanes. In fact there's several storms right now buried within the Atlantic. So we've got to do something about climate change. We have to reduce our emissions. We have to keep our emissions below 1.5 Degrees Celsius, feeling which will destroy the planet.

LL: And we will be talking to a climate scientist after you, but I wonder if you can give us a sense of how Barbuda is doing now. I understand only half the population has actually even been able to return.

GASTON BROWNE: That's correct because we have not been able to rebuild all of the homes. Barbuda had a very unfortunate situation in which the properties all of the properties were uninsured. And that risk was transferred to the government, so we have had to raise resources to rebuild those properties. Of the 1200 properties that were partially damaged or totally destroyed, we have rebuilt about half of them and we still have another 600 to go. So we still have internally displaced persons living on Antigua, Barbudans living in Antigua because they don't have any any accommodation in Barbuda. So you know it has been a very slow process even though we're making progress and it is primarily due to the resource constraints. And even though there was a donor conference, the amounts pledged was less than 10 percent of the recovery costs and the total recovery costs equated to one year's annual income for the entire country of Antigua and Barbuda. So you know these are very daunting issues that we have to deal with time and time again. You know we are the worst effected by the effects of climate change. And that is why we continue to press for the industrialized countries to reduce their emissions and also to assist these countries in the Caribbean to deal with the issue of adaptation and mitigation are very important.

LL: I suppose though that I hear your plea for four industrialized countries to do more on climate change, I suppose though the more immediate and perhaps uncomfortable question is whether people just need to stop living on Caribbean islands?

GASTON BROWNE: You can't and just go uproot people's civilization that would have existed for thousands of years. And you know you have to respect the fact that these islands are our home and we're not going to give up those islands. What is required is for some level of responsibility. In fact you have to understand that in the United States, they have a number of coast of communities. They have a number of areas that are literally below sea level. I mean Florida is an example is very susceptible to the effects of climate change to include hurricanes. So if it is that we have to give up our home, the question is in the industrialized countries that have these areas below sea level, are they going to give up those areas as well?

LL: Questions that need answers. Prime Minister, I thank you for your time.

GASTON BROWNE: Thank you.

LL: Gaston Browne is the prime minister of Antigua and Barbuda and the chair of the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States. And we reached him in St. John's, Antigua. The storm sweeping through the Caribbean are posing a threat to the very way of life for residents there and that's something that my next guest is deeply concerned about as a scientist, but also as someone who actually lives there. Michael Taylor is a climate scientist and dean of the faculty in science and technology at the University of the West Indies. And we reached him in Mona, Jamaica. Hello.

MICHAEL TAYLOR: Hi. Good morning Laura.

LL: How many other Caribbean islands are at risk of the kind of devastation we're seeing now in the Bahamas and two years ago in Barbuda?

MICHAEL TAYLOR: Well if we're talking about the risk for example from extreme events like like Dorian, it's the entire Caribbean because the entire Caribbean really is the pathway for the systems that develop into hurricanes and the kind of extreme climate events that we're seeing. I should have just said you know that I do want to express that my thoughts are with the people of Bahamas, especially your guest that you interviewed earlier. But what climate change is doing is certainly changing you know how we live and our way of life and our existence and our standard of living and in particular through extreme events like this where the Caribbean is seeing more and more of the most intense storms. And that's the climate change impacts there. The intensity of the storms and know the frequency of the most intense storms. But it's the entire Caribbean region that's vulnerable.

LL: Why? What is it about the Caribbean that makes it so vulnerable?

MICHAEL TAYLOR: Well I must say that one of the things about the Caribbean is that we are extremely climate sensitive and for a number of reasons. One, I think you've touched on it. We're a small island and being small island, it means that everything that takes place in life happens to be in a very narrow area. Never more than a few kilometres from the shoreline. So you think about all the major towns, you think about our road infrastructure, you think about our electricity grid, you think about commerce, everything is a coastal way of life. And where the islands are not completely flat they have a hilly interior and that to brings a traditional climate challenge and so life literally takes place in the context of our sensitivity to climate. And then if you think about the fact that the things that we depend on for economies, so things like agriculture, things like tourism and fisheries, all of these have this strong sensitivity to climate. And so the island life, which is very attractive, especially to visitors is really a very sensitive life to climate. And once the climate begins to change, as we have seen, it means that all of life begins to change. So we become really highly vulnerable region, perhaps the most vulnerable region to climate in the world.

LL: It's quite striking. Many people who come to visit the islands do you think that they're visiting paradise, but I'm wondering at what point some of these smaller islands in the Caribbean are actually at risk of becoming uninhabitable?

MICHAEL TAYLOR: Well I think the risk is definitely heightening with climate change and I think I heard Prime Minister Browne speaking to that because one of the things that is happening, especially from the science perspective and I do the climate science of small Island, is that certainly we're moving into what I call a new era of unfamiliar climate and because we have this sensitivity to climate, we really rely on the climate to be familiar for our development, for our standard of living, for our quality of life. And for me that doesn't necessarily mean good, it just means that even when it's going to be bad, it's within the bounds of bad that we have previously known. But climate change is ushering in this new era of unfamiliarity and perhaps even more frightening, when you look at the projections of climate change for the Caribbean, you would see an era that is really unprecedented like we have never seen before. And these kinds of Category 5 hurricanes seem to be handlebar early onset of that kind of unprecedented. So you're dealing with unfamiliar while trying to deal with unprecedented. It makes life in the Caribbean and on small islands like those in the Bahamas really difficult. And the challenge is really really there. But as Prime Minister Browne says, these islands are home. This is where I live. This is where my family lives. This is where our culture and our history and our heritage is. You know whether the call is really an urgent action to deal with climate change.

LL: Right. And that's what I wanted to ask you about next. We heard the prime minister's plea. How does the Caribbean, which is such a small geographical area, actually get its voice heard in the climate change debate?

MICHAEL TAYLOR: Well one of the things I think very recently the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, put out a report on one and a half degrees. And I think Prime Minister Browne referred to it. The Caribbean has been an advocate that we cannot warm more than one and a half degrees by the end of the century as a world, as a globe. And we have already seen one degree. So the Caribbean is saying no more than half a degree more warming by the end of the century. The science has been done at the global level, including the science of the Caribbean which makes the case that one and a half degrees is still possible, though that's not the trajectory we are on. But it requires global action. The Caribbean has to maintain its voice at that level and say we are not asking for these just for asking, the science says that life in places, which are not viable would be on one point five degrees. But the science also says that one and a half degrees is possible, but time is running out. We must have a global action now, especially with respect to greenhouse gas emissions. And that's where I think the Caribbean warns or must keep pressing its case and calling for action on the part of the entire world.

LL: We've got about 45 seconds left and I just wondered on a personal level, what it's been like for you watching the changes to the climate unfold in real time?

MICHAEL TAYLOR: It's I must say it's a little distressing. We do the sciences and we hope that you know our science in a sense will warn, but almost never come true. We almost hope that you will never see the worst of what the science projects, but in fact we are beginning to see that. And this is even outside of the storms we see it in the drought conditions. Ten of the last five years, the Caribbean region has had significant drought conditions and what has been a challenge and we see it in other ways. It's distressing for me to see the science play out, but even more distressing to see the science play out without significant action that needs to be taken.

LL: I'm going to have to get out of it here. I'm sorry Mr. Taylor. Thank you.

MICHAEL TAYLOR: Sure.

LL: Michael Taylor is a climate scientist, dean of the Faculty of Science and Technology at the University of the West Indies. We reached him in Mona, Jamaica. CBC News is next and then we'll talk about why women are not getting ahead in federal politics as much as they should. The data behind it, next. I'm Laura Lynch and you're listening to The Current.

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Set up to fail: Why women still don't win elections as often as men in Canada

Guests: Valerie Ouellet

LL: Hello. I'm Laura Lynch and you're listening to The Current.

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LL: Still to come, if you've ever texted with a teenager, you know the language can sometimes be confusing. Take the abbreviation LOL or lol, short for laugh out loud of course, but it can apparently mean many different things.

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VOICE: So if you say to someone, I hate you lol, that doesn't mean I hate you and I'm laughing about it. That means I'm joking about hating you.

LL: OK. Luckily the author of a book decoding the new internet language will be my guest in half an hour. But first, setting women up to fail.

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LL: It's been a century since Canadian women won the right to run in federal elections, but even with a prime minister who calls himself a feminist and advances in women's rights in many workplaces, a new CBC Radio Canada investigation has found that hundreds of women who will soon be vying for a seat in Ottawa will likely be running against the odds. A sweeping data analysis of nearly 4000 candidates who ran in the last three federal elections has found some significant gender disparities and a political system that still favours men over women. The CBC's senior data journalist Valerie Ouellet led this investigation. It's called "Set up to fail: Why women still don't win elections as often as men in Canada." And she's here with me in our Toronto studio. Hello.

VALERIE OUELLET: Hello.

LL: Valerie, set this up for me. What drew you to want to look in to this in the first place?

VALERIE OUELLET: Well as you know a lot has happened since the last big general election in 2015. We've had Canada's first cabinet with equal numbers of men and women. We've had Canada's first overtly feminist prime minister, but we've also had damage to movement and the SNC-Lavalin scandal with Jodi Wilson-Raybould and Jane Philpott kind of questioning the support that women MPs really get on the Hill. And it looks like women and their place in politics will really again be front and centre this election. So we wanted to know all this progressive feminist talk, is that reflected in deep cold hard facts, the numbers? What has happened and potentially will happen to women who run for office this time around?

LL: Alright, the numbers. Where did you start looking for answers?

VALERIE OUELLET: Well I teamed up with Radio Canada's data reporter and Nael Shiab and we went on the parliament's website and downloaded election results for the past hundred years.

LL: Hundred years?

VALERIE OUELLET: That was a lot of data. And then we crunched the numbers to see where a party stood on women's representation. So we focussed on the five big political parties, the ones who elected at least one MP in the past decade. So that's the Liberals, the Conservatives, the NDP, the Greens and the Bloc Quebecois. And we looked at how many women were recruited versus how many women were elected and then we looked at where these women were running.

LL: Okay so one hundred years worth of numbers. I can't even believe that exists. What did you find.?

VALERIE OUELLET: So the first thing that we found is that for all the recent talk we've heard about gender equality, not one political party has ever recruited 50 percent or more of women nominees. The NDP was the closest to parity with 39 percent of their candidates being women and the Conservatives had the lowest number with 20 percent women nominees and the other parties were kind of sandwiched in the middle somewhere between 20 and 39 percent. And then we looked into how many of these women nominees actually became MPs and what we found was a persistent gender gap. In the past decade and that's for all parties across Canada,18 percent of all women who ran were elected versus 26 percent of all men who ran became MPs.

LL: Okay so that's the last decade. Did you break it down across the parties?

VALERIE OUELLET: Well we found the same gap across certain parties, namely the Conservatives and the Liberals. So for the Conservatives, 34 percent of all women who ran were elected versus 45 percent of men. And then for the Liberals, 24 percent of all women who ran were elected versus 34 percent of men. For the Bloc Quebecois and the NDP, we found that candidates had nearly even odds, but that could also be because these two parties typically aren't as popular in Canada.

LL: Okay so we've been talking about a lot of numbers, but there are actual people behind these numbers. So tell me about the women you spoke to.

VALERIE OUELLET: The women behind the numbers. So we spoke to women from all parties women who've run in the past and women who are getting ready to run this coming election and even women who were the first ever to win a riding in their provinces decades ago. So we went far back and we found that women who were defeated recently, well several of them had very similar stories. You know it's never fun to lose, but they said they really did not feel supported by their parties. That's the case with April Bourgeois. She was a candidate for the NDP in 2015. She really felt like she had a responsibility to put herself forward to run.

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VOICE: Well I've always felt we needed more women in politics and I've always felt like you need to be the change.

LL: Well why did April Bourgeois even want to run for office?

VALERIE OUELLET: Well at the time she was 51. She said she'd always wanted to run for office at some point in her life and now her kids were all grown up and she felt she finally had enough life experiences to really be ready to run. She said that she knew her party wasn't strong in the province, but she wanted to build a base, so that eventually when the man who was currently MP would leave, maybe voters would pick her.

LL: Okay. Good intentions. What happened when she ran?

VALERIE OUELLET: Well it wasn't at all what she expected. She said it quickly became clear to her that her party had done its math and there was one riding in the province where they had a shot at winning and it wasn't hers. So she says her party manager started being pulled more and more in that other riding and so she was left with less and less resources and help to basically prepare herself for her first ever political debate. To fundraise and to start doing doorknocking, which with what she says were very few volunteers, so it was challenging. She says she felt completely disheartened and isolated and really unsupported by her party and also very conflicted about running again.

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VOICE: Well there's only so many times you will take one for the team and in order to do that I would want to feel like there was a team behind me, supporting me. A party that was behind me supporting me and I didn't feel that and I don't feel that now.

LL: Valerie I mean the fact is that it happens to men, male candidates too. So what does her story tell you?

VALERIE OUELLET: And that's true. The reality is that regardless of your gender, winning an election is really hard. In 2015 for example, there were 1400 candidates and three quarters of them lost. However the reason why this is really interesting to us is that it doesn't seem to be as hard for everyone. University of Toronto political scientist Sylvia Bashevkin says politics is actually one of the last few fields where these differences between genders are really present and persistent. She says this is a long running problem and it won't fix itself.

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VOICE: Well I think one of the surprising findings really is that in 2019 that we would still see phenomena that would have been notable when I was a graduate student the 1970s and early 1980s. You know one of the assumptions was that these were patterns that were likely to disappear. The assumption was as more women entered the paid workforce, as more women achieved post-secondary degrees and graduate degrees, of professional accomplishments in fields like law and business, that you would see more women in the pipeline and all of these patterns would disappear. Even if you have lots of women in those pipelines, it doesn't necessarily mean that the odds of success are going to be the same for women.

LL: So the gender gap is there in the numbers, but did you find out why?

VALERIE OUELLET: Well what I didn't tell you about April Bourgeois is where she was running. So she ran in Regina-Wascana. That's Ralph Goodale's riding. He is Canada's Minister of Public Safety. He's kept the same seat for decades. I mean he's a landmark in Saskatchewan and the prairies at large. So picture this, her first ever debate I was telling you about, it was against a super seasoned politician and there was no way she could have won against him, even objectively by any stretch. And she knew this. But that would be the case for any candidate, regardless of their gender. Well what we found is that a lot more women than men end up in those harder to win ridings. Using the historical data I mentioned, we looked at all ridings in Canada and we identified which ones were safe and which ones were harder to win. So we decided that safe ridings were ridings where the same party had won twice before with a really good margin of votes. And then we looked at who was running in the safe or sometimes called stronghold ridings that are easier to win and what we found is that in the past three general elections, 79 percent of candidates who ran in stronghold ridings were men, compared to 21 percent of women. Now that's four times more men in stronghold ridings. Places where the party has won historically before and they have a really good chance of becoming MPs and we even broke it down by party. And what we found is for the Conservatives, 14 percent of women were in strongholds. For the Liberals, 22 percent of women in strongholds. And for the NDP a third of women in these ridings.

LL: That is really striking.

VALERIE OUELLET: They're not encouraging numbers. And we showed them to Melanie Thomas. She's a political scientist from the University of Calgary and she specializes in this very issue, gender and politics. In 2013, she published a study looking at women and competitive ridings and she calls these women placed in harder to win ridings, women like April sacrificial lambs. Here's how she explains it.

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VOICE: A sacrificial lamb is a candidate who's nominated for party in a riding where that party doesn't stand a chance of winning. Not even a little bit. And so that means that they're the proverbial sacrificial lamb where they're doing this important service for the party and they're not going to see the benefit of actually getting elected. Like getting elected is not the goal, the goal is just that they're going to run with no chance of actually winning the election. I would say that that shows systemic gender bias in the system that disproportionately favours men and disproportionately hampers the participation of women in our electoral politics.

LL: You said you spoke to other women how did April's experience compare to their.

VALERIE OUELLET: Well it's a really tough thing to have a reporter cold call you and ask you why you failed. And then to ask you whether you thought you were a sacrificial lamb. So these were difficult conversations, but we did have them. We spoke with a dozen women of all parties across the country, all former candidates and they were all conflicted because they were still loyal to their party values and rightfully so and they still very much valued public service, but some of them told us that this was politics and they didn't really see their defeat as a gender issue. But many of them had stories that were very similar to April's in a lot of ways. One Liberal candidate told us that she was even called a sacrificial lamb by volunteers while she ran. We also heard stories about flyers never getting distributed, party leaders not showing up for support in certain ridings and all these women day told me that they had this nagging feeling that it was harder for them, but they figured maybe this is just politics. And when we showed them the numbers, none of them were surprised and they were having very similar reactions saying that's me. That's my experience. Wow, I'm not alone. I'm the woman behind the numbers and these challenges that I thought were in my head, they were real.

LL: Let's talk about the country then. How does the pattern play out in different regions?

VALERIE OUELLET: Well when we dug into this data we found that not all provinces are equal. There's some regions in Canada where it appears it is much harder for women to win. Fewer women elected in the Maritime Provinces and Alberta than anywhere else in the country. In Alberta, one out of every ten women was elected, versus roughly a third of men who became MPs. Now that's a big difference. Next there's Saskatchewan and Ontario between 19 and 24 percent of women elected and then there comes Newfoundland and Labrador, British Columbia, Quebec and Manitoba, where roughly a third of all women who ran for parties became MPs.

LL: I'm curious about the Maritimes though. Is there any explanation for that?

VALERIE OUELLET: Well we also shared those numbers with our experts and Sylvia Bashevkin pointed out there's a difference between running in an urban or a rural context.

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VOICE: This phenomenon that I've called wilderness candidacies where women are kind of out there in the wilderness as candidates and unlikely to win. It's harder to push back against a party organization I think in a smaller community than in a large one because there's less anonymity. It's simply obvious that you know person X, a woman is is dissatisfied or a group of women are dissatisfied with the way the party is operating and their lives can be made much more difficult I think in smaller communities than in larger ones. So there may be reasons why historically we find lots of our women MPs have come from major parties that have nominated a very vigorous way, large numbers of women candidates in cities like Montreal or Toronto or Vancouver where pressure on parties may be particularly intense and the ability for the parties to push back against those women in terms of personal cost that they would have to pay would be perhaps somewhat less than in a small community in Atlantic Canada.

LL: Interesting explanations. So pulling back to the national picture again, are all the parties discriminating against their women candidates?

VALERIE OUELLET: Well I put that question to our experts and they told me that this is what's widely called an unconscious bias, meaning parties don't realize they're doing it, but the system is just set up that way. Here's how political scientist Melanie Thomas explains it.

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VOICE: In failing to deliberately look at the gender distribution and the racial distribution of candidates and in the absence of actually taking action on this, it's a tacit bias that all the parties just accept. Which means that you're effectively endorsing the bias.

LL: But what about voters? Don't they play a role in the gender gap?

VALERIE OUELLET: What we found and other studies have found that in fact surprisingly perhaps they don't. I'm not saying there isn't a single sexist person left in Canada here, but when we compared election results for the past three general federal election, as a group we found that voters chose men and women in the same plurality. So that means when men won, they won with roughly 24,000 votes. And when women won, they won with roughly 23,500 votes. And then when they lost, again the numbers were very similar, we're talking seventy 7500 for men versus 7400 for women. And again both of the experts we consulted agree with these findings. Studies show that once they're in the voting booth, Canadian voters pick a party, not a person.

LL: So what are the solutions?

VALERIE OUELLET: One solution I've heard a few times is having longer nomination periods. We spoke with a former strategist for the Conservative Party and he said it took him more time to recruit women than men because women had often a lot of questions for him before committing. They wanted to meet several times, while men very often he said accepted an offer on the spot and then came back with questions later. So more time would mean more time for these women to organize and decide. And experts also say that we need to make sure nominations are competitive. In other words, don't nominate the first volunteer who shows up because it is more likely that this person will be a white man of a certain class. And finally study after study has shown that you are more likely to recruit people who look like you. So if there were more women in diversity in party organizations at large, it might be easier to find and recruit more women and diverse candidates. But for all these changes to happen, party leaders need to take a stand. Here is Melanie Thomas again.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: A feminist leader would ask for a parity slate of candidates with parity in terms of where those candidates are in terms of competitiveness, right. They would ask that their candidates look like Canadians in their full diversity, which means that I mean it's good to have a parity cabinet. It's good to identify one solves, like to talk about feminism and it's good to talk about diversity is our strength, but that also needs to be mirrored in candidate nominations.

LL: And we haven't even talked about diversity within this, but coming back to April, what is she up to now? I mean it sounds to me like she just wouldn't want to give us another shot.

VALERIE OUELLET: Sell she surprised us. She said she hadn't entirely given up on politics. After all this she still ran this year for a nomination in another riding and she lost and now she says she's considering running again. Even though she might lose again, she really is convinced that it is her duty.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: I really feel very strongly that we need more women in politics and that means even women being seen to be in politics. So it's even important that I'm a woman and I'm the one going to schools, going to these debates and representing women. Women need to represent right and it doesn't happen magically. It only happens when we get our hands dirty, when we dive in and when we go for it.

LL: And we have to acknowledge that a lot of women have dived in and have been successful, even high profile. I mean Rona Ambrose for the Conservatives, Chrystia Freeland for the Liberals, Elizabeth May for the Green Party and we could go on. Did you speak to women who actually had positive experiences?

VALERIE OUELLET: Well we spoke to a number of women who said they had an overall positive experience in politics. Bobby Sparrow for example. She was the first woman elected in Alberta as a federal MP. Now she was a trailblazer in her province in the 80s and 90s and I really expected her to talk about how hard it was to be the first woman to do all these things, but she didn't. She said that gender did not matter at all for her. That she was a businesswoman and she was used to being in a male dominated field and she made it work for herself. We also spoke with Karen Vecchio, who's a Conservative MP in Ontario. Now she's told us that she's been welcomed and mentored by women in her party and that even though they were small, they were a mighty group. But Karen Vecchio was also the head of the Status of Women's Committee and that committee put out a report last April that acknowledged that there were still significant challenges for women on the Hill. A report that recommended that parties and riding associations even set quotas on women candidates. So what I'm saying is the findings of our analysis deal with equality in numbers, not personal experiences, however good or bad they may be. And what we see when we take a bird's eye view of the whole nomination and elections process is that there is not equality in numbers. Women do not have equal chances to win and we even found a possible explanation in what I was telling you, this majority of women being placed in writings where they can't win and now it's up to the parties to decide how they'll respond to this new information that's come to light.

LL: Okay. So we're looking at this election and the slate of candidates here. What do you see?

VALERIE OUELLET: Well we will be running the same data analysis on all party figures for the 2019 elections. We don't have figures right now because we're still waiting for every party to complete the recruitment, but we will be looking again at the number of women recruited, the number of women elected and especially looking at where these women are running. And no doubt I'll be back to tell you about it very soon.

LL: I'm looking forward to that. Very interesting. Thank you Valerie.

VALERIE OUELLET: You're welcome.

LL: That is the CBC's senior data journalist Valerie Ouellet. She led the investigation, Set up to fail: Why women still don't win elections as often as men in Canada. She was with me in our Toronto studio and we will put up a link to the online interactive part of her investigation on our website cbc.ca/thecurrent. There you can put in your own postal code to look at how female candidates in your own riding have done in the past. And if you're a woman who has run for office, we want to hear from you. Whether you won or lost, tell us what it was like to throw your hat into the political ring. Tweet us. We're @TheCurrentCBC or me @LauraLynchCBC or go to our website cbc.ca/thecurrent and click on the contact link. Now three parties responded to CBC findings by touting what they say will be historic highs for female recruitment in this coming election. And Current producer Karin Marley joins me now to share what they had to say. Hi Karin.

KARIN MARLEY: Hey Laura. So we did hear back from the Conservative Party in an email to CBC spokesperson wrote, "We're proud to be fielding the most female candidates in our party's history. The Conservative Party became the first party to reach a full slate of candidates Monday with one 105 confirmed female candidates on the ballot.".

LL: The Liberal Party also told the CBC it has already changed its nomination rules so that riding associations must "conduct a thorough search for women candidates and other candidates who reflect the demographics of the community before a nomination can proceed." The Liberal Party says it's already seeing results. 52 percent of its new candidates are women and overall 39 percent of all of its candidates for this coming election are women, including incumbents.

KARIN MARLEY: The NDP sent the statement which reads in part, "In 2015 we had the most amount of women ever running for a political party and this year we're on track to break that record by achieving gender equity and running women candidates in more than 50 percent of our ridings." The Green Party and Bloc Quebecois have not responded to CBC's request for comment.

LL: Oh okay. Thanks Karin. And speaking of politics, the real campaigning has only just begun.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: The Conservatives like to say they're for the people, but then they cut taxes for the wealthy and cut services for everybody else. In October, we've got a choice to make.

VOICE 2: I have a plan to lower the cost of living, to make life more affordable, to leave more money in the pockets of Canadians because it's time for you to get ahead.

VOICE 3: I ask you, consider the Green Party, to get to know us. We're running strong candidates to be strong MPs because we want to work for you.

VOICE 4: Imagine instead a government in Ottawa that actually works for you. The NDP's new deal for people will tackle the health care crisis, starting with pharmacare for all and expanding to dental care.

VOICE 5: [French dialogue]

VOICE 6: Here it is. The People's Party of Canada. PPC. 49 percent of Canadians are saying that there's too much immigration in Canada. 49 percent of Canadians are saying that. So I think we must, I want to have this debate.

LL: So here's what's coming up on The Current for the federal election this fall. Our regular national affairs panel will be back next week and every Wednesday after that. We'll feature regular appearances from the CBC's disinformation unit and we will hear from voters about what matters most in this election. The economy, climate change, immigration. And we are taking the show on the road. It's promising to be an interesting couple of months here on The Current. So stay tuned. OK. Let's see if I can tell you what's coming up in the next half hour. Let me get out my keyboard here and I'm going to speak in internet language lol. That is lowercase of course, no period. New line. I will be microphone emoji, someone who will help us decode the new way of communicating online. She says one hundred emoji. We need two thumbs up emoji, this new way of communicating. Smiley face. I'm Laura Lynch... and you are listening to The Current. BRB.

[Music: Theme]

Back To Top »

In the '80s, this Calgary man invented one of the most common words in internet-speak

Guests: Gretchen McCulloch

LL: I'm Laura Lynch and you're listening to The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

[Music]

VOICE 1: My mom gives me like the emoji with like the hearts and the smiley thing. I use the microphone emoji a lot. I think it's funny. The poo emoji.

VOICE 2: What about the crying face, the laughing crying face?

VOICE 1: Yes, that one's funny.

VOICE 3: I think I've always liked the dancing lady. She's like excited. So I use her when I'm excited. I use the fire emoji when I think something is cool. Sometimes if I don't know how to reply to someone I'll just use the hundred emoji a bunch of times and just end the conversation.

LL: Well love them or hate them emojis are now an important part of how people communicate online. They're just one of the ways that language is changing, thanks to the Internet and social media. And don't get me started on all of those abbreviations. Anyway, some people embrace the change. They're the ones who know for example that a little squiggle mark next to a word means you're being sarcastic, something I've just learned. Others resist, insisting that language is degraded by pictures, instead of words, short forms and a distinct lack of punctuation. Gretchen McCulloch has been tracking this evolution. She's an Internet linguist and the author of a new book, Because Internet: Understanding The New Rules of Language. She joins me from Montreal. Hello.

GRETCHEN MCCULLOCH: Hello.

LL: Now we know language is always changing, but I'm wondering has the Internet made it change more quickly?

GRETCHEN MCCULLOCH: It's an interesting kind of yes and no to that because on the one hand, you know with the Internet a word can go viral, a word or phrase can go viral the same way that a funny video can go viral. So something can spread a lot faster, but on the other hand the tools that we use to interact with our devices that aim to help us write things, do that by predicting words that are already in their lists and that can make things more conservative as well.

LL: OK. So why is it interesting for a linguist to be tracking the way language is used online?

GRETCHEN MCCULLOCH: One thing that's ireally interesting about the Internet is that it's this vast increase in how much writing an ordinary person does on an ordinary day. If you think about 50 years ago, the average person once you left school, if your job wasn't being a writer, you didn't necessarily do a lot of writing on a daily basis. You know the most you might have written might have been a grocery list or a postcard or something. Unless you kept a diary, you didn't necessarily have a reason to write. Whereas now we can barely organize a birthday party without writing.

VOICE 1: And what does that do for you as a linguist?

GRETCHEN MCCULLOCH: So it's very exciting because linguists are interested in the subconscious patterns that we do in language without even thinking about it. And traditionally that's meant studying speech or sign because those come out without an editor or a filter or something that's interfering with those unconscious patterns. Whereas if you have an editor coming in and changing what you're doing, then that's got multiple hands in the pot and it's not as interesting linguistically. But with informal writing, when you again, don't have an editor and you're doing things just to communicate, you have that access in a greater way to the sort of unconscious, unfiltered type of communication, which is the most interesting in terms of trying understand how language works in the human mind.

LL: And it seems to me the research theatre for you in this respect is enormous.

GRETCHEN MCCULLOCH: It's huge because analyzing audio is a real pain. You know trying to create an audio transcript, doing, getting people into a lab to do a high quality recording is a lot of work and being able to say oh well we've got this information already in text, it's already searchable. You can find bigger you know statistical patterns in many cases.

LL: So I'm curious to know how you go about doing the research then. Are you are you creeping people online? How are you getting your material?

GRETCHEN MCCULLOCH: Hopefully not creeping them too hard online. There is one vein of Internet linguistic research, which does look at sort of massive levels of data at like, so a certain percentage of people who use platforms like Twitter, will add a geotag to their tweets. They'll add the geographic location to that and you can download all of those tweets with their locations and make a map of where people are saying particular words here and there. So at a very large level it is kind of creeping people's data ,but you're not reading the individual tweets, so much as you're saying people in this area tend to say you know pop versus soda.

LL: That's interesting. So you are doing that. You're seeing the way people talk in certain areas on Twitter.

GRETCHEN MCCULLOCH: So I don't do that type of research myself specifically, but it's enjoyable to cite those types of studies that do that.

LL: OK. So in order to help us understand the language of the internet, you've developed a bit of a breakdown of what you call Internet people, depending on the stage they became active on the Internet. What is it and why did you do that?

GRETCHEN MCCULLOCH: One of the things that I was really interested in is that people seem to have different sets of expectations and different beliefs about what an unmarked way of talking online is and there are some age effects, but it doesn't seem to be only an age effect. Because if you take somebody who's say 40, 45 at the moment, they might have a very different experience of the Internet, depending on whether they were an early adopter, you know in the early 90s or whether they came on interest in the past five years, they finally started getting online more.

LL: So set out the categories for me then. What are they?

GRETCHEN MCCULLOCH: So I talk about old internet people as the people who came online in this first wave before the Internet was mainstream. They came online to talk to strangers and they often were very open to adopting Internet terms. And then in this wave of Internet mainstreamization, you have kind of the older cohort in there and the younger cohort in there, which I call full and semi internet people and the full Internet people came online to talk to their friends because they wanted to connect to people they already knew. Some internet people came online to do tasks. You know to do online banking or you know buy airplane tickets or check the weather, check the news and not so much to communicate with people ibecause they already had friends offline that they were used to communicating with that way. And then you have this last wave of people that came online, which is in the most recent years, which are either you know the kids who just grew up, teenagers who just grew up with the Internet and totally take it for granted or people who are on the older end of the spectrum who were real resistors for decades and they're finally kind of gotten dragged kicking and screaming onto the Internet.

LL: All right well let's hear from an old internet person. We have some tape of one person from Calgary, Alberta and who is credited with inventing the expression lol as a teenager in the 1980s. Here is what Wayne Pearson told us about how that happened.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: I'm sitting in my kitchen in my house. PC on the kitchen table just chatting away on a BBS, it's a bulletin board system and this was one of the first multi-line BBS is where instead of just posting messages, you could actually have multiple people on and so you'd have a chat room where people were live typing to eachother. A friend of mine was on there and you know chatting back and forth and he had said something so funny, that it just made me burst out laughing. It wasn't just enough to type hahaha into the chat to let him know I thought that was funny, which is what we would do if we cracked a smile or something when someone wrote something out. So I basically instead of trying to type out really quickly that made me laugh out loud, I just sort of typed lol. That of course he said well what does this mean, you know and so I told him and it just went from there and got adopted by the others in the chat room and in that system all around Calgary.

LL: And beyond Calgary as well. LOL is an interesting case study in how internet language evolves. Tell me about it.

GRETCHEN MCCULLOCH: Yeah LOL is really interesting because as you hear, we have you know Wayne Pearson in the 1980s saying I was actually laughing out loud, I needed a way to express this. But by as early as 2001, you have an Internet researcher, David Crystal, writing in his book, it's unclear how often people are actually laughing out loud when they type LOL. And so it became instead of being I am literally laughing out loud, a sort of aspirational laughter. I acknowledge this as funny. Maybe I wish I was laughing out loud or I would be laughing out loud, but I'm not actually doing so.

LL: And how are people using it now?

GRETCHEN MCCULLOCH: You've got one step further, which is younger people especially are often using it as a marker of irony or softening. So not even just you know to indicate that something is a joke or to indicate something isn't to be taken seriously. So if you say to someone I hate you lol, that doesn't mean I hate you and I'm laughing about it. That means I'm joking about hating you.

LL: So am I supposed to be saying lul or lol.

GRETCHEN MCCULLOCH: So this is another thing is that younger speakers often say lul for the expression and write it in all lowercase. I recorded my own audiobook for Because Internet ,which was a very interesting challenge to convey all of this punctuation and emoji and so on in audio form and what I ended up doing convention-wise for the audio book was when I had written it in all caps, I pronounced it LOL and when I had written it in lowercase I pronounced it lul because that was a kind of efficient way of doing that for the audio medium. Although I don't know if I commit to it more broadly than that.

LL: Okay well why is it important for younger people to use lowercase?

GRETCHEN MCCULLOCH: All of the Internet acronyms, you know omg, wtf, btw, lol, all of those acronyms get written in lowercase by younger people. And that's been true for a couple decades at this point, partly because all caps has this other Internet meaning that is familiar to a lot of people of indicating shouting. So if you're going to write omg in all caps, it means that you're saying more emphatically and so you're indicating that you're shouting. And so if you're not shouting you need to write it in all lowercase.

LL: It also it just reminds me that some people thought LOL meant lots of love too, which starts to give you an idea along with what you said of the confusion this can cause. I'm wondering how problematic it is that people may not have a shared understanding about what something like LOL means.

GRETCHEN MCCULLOCH: It can create problems. One of things that I was hoping to do by writing a book about the Internet and how we speak on it is encourage some more of these meta conversations because it's okay for different people to talk differently. It doesn't have to be one right way of doing it. You know just because I'm saying oh younger people tend to do this, doesn't mean if you're an older person you have to adopt that. But it also doesn't make people who do things differently from you wrong. It just means there are different things and it can be useful to have these meta conversations about what makes sense to you? Is this thing that you're saying, am I interpreting it the way you're intending it?

LL: So LOL, that's just one way to express irony or sarcasm and I'm wondering what are some other interesting examples of how we've adapted language to convey emotion online.

GRETCHEN MCCULLOCH: There are a whole bunch even just within the irony domain. So some typographical signals of irony play with existing conventions for authority. So if you make something in capital letters you can indicate that it's a very important concept, even if you're only doing so ironically. You can hear I've had to develop ways of doing this in speech as well.

LL: But you'd hope you were always able to do that with speech.

GRETCHEN MCCULLOCH: Well yeah so speech we've made a lot of tools to convey irony in speech. You know scare quotes is another one that plays with the symbol of authority to you know add a note of irony to something. Another one that I particularly like is the sarcasm tillday. So this is the little squiggly symbol that's up by the one on your keyboard and this can use to convey especially a particular vocal inflection. So if you say something is so cool, that so, which you can do in the voice, you can convey sometimes by putting it before the word or around the word.

LL: Now one of the things I like about the book is I'm learning things I did not know about the sarcasm. I also did not know that punctuation at the end of a text may mean or lack of it, may mean things I don't mean it to mean. So talk to me about that.

GRETCHEN MCCULLOCH: The issue of the period at the end of the sentence is really captured people's imagination at this point. So we have to take a step back and think about how you put a break between each of your utterances by default. So if you send someone hey how's it going, do you, you know, do you want to chat sometime maybe Tuesday? You have a couple different utterances there and you can break them up by putting each of them in a new line or each of them in a new message, which tends to be preferred by younger people. You can break them up by putting a period between them or a dot dot dot or a dash between them, which tends to be preferred by older people and any of these conventions would be fine. The dot dot dot and the dash and the period tend to be preferred by people who's learned their first writing conventions in a paper context because they're more space efficient on paper, whereas starting a new line is not very efficient when it comes to paper, but it's perfectly fine on a screen because you can scroll.

LL: It's so interesting because it just opens the door to generational misunderstandings and is that common?

GRETCHEN MCCULLOCH: Right. So what happens is not that either of these systems are bad, but when they come in conflict with each other to this younger generation that uses line breaks or message breaks, the period or the dot dot dot takes on this additional connotation of finality or something left unsaid.

LL: Now we heard a bit off the top of this segment about one form of internet language and that is emojis. Here's a little more of what our producer Danielle Carr heard from people in downtown Toronto about their relationship with the little pictures and graphics.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: I can have an entire conversation using like only emojis.

VOICE 2: Like for flirting, the sad flace emoji. The tongue emoji.

VOICE 3: I think my favourite one is like the upside down smiley face.

VOICE 2: Yeah that one's funny.

VOICE 1: It can mean like so many things. It's like haha, screw you.

VOICE 3: I always use that one when I'm like low key mad about something, but I'm like It's fine. It's cool. I wouldn't have it any other way.

VOICE 4: What do you call them?

VOICE 5: Emojis.

VOICE 4: Emoji. And what is that?

VOICE 5: It's like you know the little graphics that people send in text messages, like a smiley face or a heart.

VOICE 4: Oh yeah.

VOICE 5: Do you use them?

VOICE 6: No we like writing. Oh no, no, no.

VOICE 4: We still like to write.

VOICE 7: We're from a different generation.

VOICE 8: Oh the poop one. It's like my all time mood because you could use it anytime.

VOICE 9: I don't really use emojis.

VOICE 10: Yeah I don't really use them either.

VOICE 9: Whatever kind of community. If you're in the community that uses a lot of them then you probably will use them more. Like if your friends use them then you'll probably use them more.

LL: I'm wondering what goes through your mind when you hear that bit of tape from what people had to say.

GRETCHEN MCCULLOCH: The analogy that I like to use when talking about emoji is in terms of gesture. So there's a lot of ink spilled about oh emojis are going to replace language or something like this, but when you look at the data for how people actually use them, people tend to use emoji alongside of their words to add additional context to the words that they're saying. So if you say to someone good job and you accompany that with a thumbs up, whether that's a thumbs up gesture or a thumbs up emoji, you know that's reinforces the positive message. But if you say to someone good job and you company that with a middle finger, now suddenly you're doing something very different.

LL: Those are literal gestures.

GRETCHEN MCCULLOCH: Those are literal gestures, but I think it's not a coincidence that the most popular emoji are the hands and faces and hearts, which are often very literal gestures. But even some of the ones that aren't, don't represent specific gestures, you know the upside down smiley face. No one's standing on their heads you know smiling, that's not what that stands for, but it can have a similar role in communication as certain kinds of gestures. You know this kind of awkward smile or fake smile or pseudo smile or smile, but also you're rolling your eyes at the same time.

LL: And those who criticize emojis, they say well this is replacing language, but in fact there are historical roots for emojis. They've been around in one form or another for a long time.

GRETCHEN MCCULLOCH: Some sort of way of representing this kind of information has been around for a while, so the emoticon has its roots as far back as the 1980s. I looked at a number of vintage postcards when I was writing Because Internet and I noticed a lot of people wrote little doodles on their postcards. You know they wrote happy faces. They wrote, they drew flowers, they drew hearts.

LL: In medieval manuscripts too?

GRETCHEN MCCULLOCH: So yeah medieval manuscripts had illumination on the big capital letters in front of them. It's really a printing press idea that gives us the notion that we shouldn't have pictures alongside words. You know wait why not have pictures alongside words? As long as the technology permits it, you know there's no inherent reason why a wall of text is superior.

LL: Well let's move on from emojis then. There's another internet language you're tackling in the book and that is the language of memes and here's where some of us may completely just say OK I don't get it. First off, can you explain what makes a meme.

GRETCHEN MCCULLOCH: That's an interesting question. I talk about a meme as a unit of Internet culture. So it's something that spreads through viral replication. People make their own versions of a meme. People make their own riffs on a meme. People share it with their friends and beyond their friend groups and the most classic sort of example of visual means are things like lolcats, which are of these pictures of cats that have these weird looking captions on them. But and you know later generations of other pictures of animals that have other types of captions on them. You can have video memes that are you know people recreate versions of the same video. There's a you know a dance or something, you can recreate that. You could have text based memes where people say you know here's this funny sentence or paragraph or poem that I'm going to rewrite to be about a particular topic. So there's memes in all sorts of different formats.

LL: How big a divide is there though between people who get memes and the people who don't?

GRETCHEN MCCULLOCH: It's an interesting question because there is a variety of ways of getting means. You know I don't know if there's anybody at this stage of the internet who gets all memes ever. It's more that there are a whole bunch of different niche subgroups that get certain sets of memes and not necessarily all of them. You know every successive generation of younger people claims that they're the ones who truly understand the memes, which is why I think of them as a unit of Internet culture or popular culture because every successive generation of young people also says that they're the ones who truly understand what it is to be cool. Who truly understand which music is actually good music now.

LL: This too has an evolution. You to explain the evolution of memes by telling a story of something called blinking lights. Can you explain that?

GRETCHEN MCCULLOCH: Yeah. So what was fascinating to me when I was doing meme research is finding that there was a history of memes or what we would now think of as a memes that goes back before the internet at all. And this goes back to a thing called photocopy lore or fax lore, which was people sending viral images to each other. You know comic strips, you know political cartoons, sketches, jokes about you know political leaders and sort of what you think of as classic jokes. You know knock knock jokes or you know like three people walk into a bar with different professions, this kinds of jokes and these got passed around using photocopiers, using fax machines, often between workplaces. They would get like you know stapled to bulletin boards because people thought they were funny. They would get passed from workplace to workplace. Blinking lights is a particular example of an early meme that was forwarded to me as a chain email and it's a mock German warning sign that's written in kind of, it's like a fake german english hybrid that's like this machine with the blinking lights is not for you know poking and prodding. I'm not going to be able do the fake german, but.

LL: I was looking forward to that.

GRETCHEN MCCULLOCH: I need to have it in front of me. But you know you can't poke and prod it and you know just relax and watch the blinking lights, you know. And I came across blinking lights as a forward that I found very funny as a linguist. I was like ooh it's German. This is very funny to me. In the 90s, as an e-mail forward, but when I started of tracing it back historically, apparently there are traces of it that go all the way back to allied machine shops during the Second World War and it was posted above other kinds of fancy machines in World War 2.

LL: But we're on the cusp of a federal election in Canada and I'm wondering how powerful have political memes become?

GRETCHEN MCCULLOCH: I think political memes are really interesting because you can also put them into a context of other types of you know political imagery, if we talk about you know facts lore and photocopy lore, political memes are a new version of the political cartoon. You know you in both cases you're trying to summarize a political issue, sometimes productively, sometimes to advance your own particular agenda, but you're trying to do that in a visual form where people can immediately grasp an issue and maybe agree with you or disagree with you, but they have this sort of concise visual version of an argument.

LL: So we've been talking in a fairly light-hearted way through about this use of language on the Internet and this may move beyond the scope of linguistics a bit, but when we talk about internet communication, I'm curious to find out how you feel about communication and language that has been so highly weaponized online. How it's used to spread information, how it's used to spread hate.

GRETCHEN MCCULLOCH: Yeah I think that's a question for a political scientist. I don't think that's a phenomenon that's unique to the internet either. You know you think about use of propaganda or rhetoric or you know use of language to convince people to do things, whether those things are good or whether those things are extremely terrible, that's you know the Internet is again the kind of the latest incarnation of that, but it doesn't necessarily mean it's unique in terms of history giving you know speeches that rouse people into doing things, whether those things are good or bad is still something that people use language for.

LL: Your book describes all these ways that people come up with to convey emotion and intention online and I'm wondering what your reaction is when you hear people complaining about how the Internet has degraded the written word or use of our language or face to face communication.

GRETCHEN MCCULLOCH: I just don't think there is such a thing as like the English language going to the dogs. That's a overblown worry that has never been true and is not going to become true. You know there's you can just live so much better of a life by being relaxed and curious and interested in how other people use language differently from you and you don't need to be the guardian of English purity and the things that we now find annoying or find repetitive or find you know find new, in another couple hundred years people are going to look back and be really excited about those entering the language. Because when we look back a couple hundred years ago and we say oh that was really interesting, all these words, you know entered English from Shakespeare or from the Norman conquest. Like that was neat. You know here are all these cool things that we have now, which are great or here all these old words we don't use anymore, but like wouldn't they be cool? We have that attitude when we look back at the past, but we could also have that attitude in the present. There's nothing stopping us but ourselves in being delighted by language as it is now.

LL: So ultimately how do you think that the Internet has changed how we think about what language actually is?

GRETCHEN MCCULLOCH: What I hope that the Internet can do is give us a new metaphor for language because for a long time we thought of the English language as some sort of book, you know sufficiently contained in some sort of book. And the problem with the book and I say this in full recognition of the irony that I just wrote a book, is that it's a single authoritative text. And if you go scribbling in the margins, that can be perceived as degrading the book or changing the book or debasing the book. But what's more accurate to say is that language is more like a network. Language is more like the Internet itself and a network is constantly changing and that's a strength. A network doesn't stay the same if you step away from it. If you go off line for a week, it doesn't mean the Internet stops changing. And if you you know stop using English or if you go to sleep for 10 years and and wake up to English, English is going to be different because it's in the minds of living breathing people and that's what makes it interesting. And I think we can get really excited about that.

LL: Well it's certainly a book worth reading, so you can learn about things that certainly I didn't know about and think about what language is. Thank you for your time.

GRETCHEN MCCULLOCH: Thank you for having me.

LL: Gretchen McCulloch is an Internet linguist and the author of a new book, Because Internet: Understanding The New Rules of Language. She was in Montreal. That is our program for today. Stay tuned to Radio One for Q. Today Graham Nash of Crosby, Stills and Nash will sit down with Tom Power to share songs and stories from his more than 50 year career in music. OMG it's the end of the show already. But enough with all the abbreviations that kids are using. How about something for us older folk. Ellen DeGeneres had some ideas after the Oxford English Dictionary made some additions to its lexicon. I'm Laura Lynch. Thanks for listening to The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: The new words this year in the dictionary are OMG and LOL. I thought WTF. I mean where's the futon is what I thought. I thought kids have so much power. They come up with all these abbreviations, so we don't know what they're talking about and I think we need to make up our own abbreviations, so that kids don't know what we're talking about. And I've come up with a few. So if anybody wants to join me with this, from now on when I text my friends TCB, kids will never know that I'm saying, take a couple Boniva. Yeah, they won't know. Or it's helpful to shorten phrases that I say all the time, like when I say wdiotr, it's short for why did I open the refrigerator. If I'm partying with Justin Bieber, I shout on PAW and it means pulled a hammy.

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Sept 4. 2019 episode transcript

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