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The Current Transcript for October 31, 2019

Host: Laura Lynch

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

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The fact that you are here today sitting together face to face is, I believe, a powerful sign of hope for Syrians everywhere.

LAURA LYNCH: Hope isn't something Syrians talk about much after years and years of war. But in Geneva, the U.N. envoy for Syria, Geir Peterson, is encouraging all sides to talk peace. We'll check in on that in an hour. Before that, though, grab a coffee and get ready for a brain teaser or two.

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The brain comes up with new ideas, tries out, learns from failure, learns from mistakes. And we have so many different flaws. As you just experienced, memory is not perfect.

LL: Neuroscientist Henning Beck put me to the test and shows why being a scatter brain isn't necessarily a bad thing. Thank goodness. That's in half an hour. Also today, tales from a judge presiding over a special mental health court. But we start today in Washington and a key vote on impeachment. I'm Laura Lynch and this is The Current.

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Road to impeachment inquiry

Guest: John Hudson

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DONALD TRUMP: Breaking news overnight, President Trump personally ordered the suspension of hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid to Ukraine just days before he encouraged their president to investigate his political rival, Joe Biden. This development is fuelling new calls to open impeachment proceedings in the House.

LL: And that is just what happened.

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NANCY PELOSI: The actions of the Trump presidency revealed dishonourable fact of the president's betrayal, of his oath of office, betrayal of our national security and betrayal of the integrity of our elections. Therefore, today I'm announcing the House of Representatives moving forward with an official impeachment inquiry. I'm directing our six committees to proceed with their investigations under that umbrella of impeachment inquiry. The president must be held accountable. No one is above the law.

LL: That is the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives in the U.S., Nancy Pelosi, on September the 24th when she announced a formal impeachment inquiry. It came after months of increasing calls from House Democrats to do just that, calls that Nancy Pelosi resisted. But then a whistleblower revealed that President Donald Trump had asked his Ukrainian counterpart to investigate former U.S. Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden, just days after suspending aid to the country. It's been difficult to keep up with all the twists and turns the story has taken since then. Today, the House will vote on taking the impeachment inquiry public. And to help us understand just why that matters, we've reached John Hudson. He's a national security reporter with The Washington Post and we reached him in Washington, D.C.. Hello.

JOHN HUDSON: Hi.

LL: Now, before you take us back, just let's talk about today. How important is today's vote?

JOHN HUDSON: Today was pretty critical because this launches the process of impeachment. It would formalize the rules. It would turn this into an open process. This has been filled with closed door meetings, depositions of State Department officials and other government officials testifying. This would turn it into a very open and public thing. And so it's the first time that lawmakers are forced to go on record with saying, do you approve or do you oppose the impeachment process.

LL: Now, some House Democrats have actually been resisting the idea of holding a vote. Why would that be?

JOHN HUDSON: Yes. So the Democrats have have said that, you know, there's nothing, there's no necessary need to authorize the impeachment process was a vote. It's not required in the Constitution. Privately, they wanted to make sure and they were a little bit worried that they would have all of the votes that would be necessary to do this. At this point, it looks like there could be some Democratic defections. But Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker, believe that she does have the votes. Now at this time. And so she is ready to move forward. And Democrats have also said it, based on the testimony that they've gathered, they now feel comfortable moving forward with impeachment. And in their view, the information that has come forward about President Trump's Ukraine dealings are damning and worthy of launching the impeachment inquiry, in a formal way.

LL: But why would any Democrat vote against an impeachment inquiry? Well, what's at stake for them?

JOHN HUDSON: Well, President Trump is you know, this is a very polarized century. And President Trump is popular in some parts of the country. And so especially where you have swing districts, slightly more conservative areas where a Democrat managed to get elected. There are some Democrats who are under a lot of pressure to oppose this and even for obviously a Democrat. Democrats are opposed to a Republican president. But in some conservative areas, you can foresee the argument that normal elections are what should decide the status of a president. And, you know, we have a 2020 election that's just around the corner. And that is the appropriate process to vote out a president, not this, you know, very unusual procedure that doesn't happen in the American political system very often.

LL: OK, John, let let's take a step back then. Let's listen to where this inquiry talk started. Back on September 22nd. President Trump was scrubbed by White House reporters about the phone call he had with Ukrainian President Zelenskiy last July.

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DONALD TRUMP: We had a great conversation. The conversation I had was largely congratulatory, was largely corruption, all of the corruption taking place was largely the fact that we don't want our people, like Vice President Biden and his son,creating pretty big corruption already in the Ukraine.

LL: Not that easy to hear, but we can clearly hear President Trump talking about that conversation being a great conversation. John Hudson, what do we know about what was actually said on that call?

JOHN HUDSON: Well, we've got an increasing number of State Department officials testifying to the fact that what would essentially happen and what they viewed as happening was the president's personal attorney orchestrated a sort of shadow foreign policy involving a pressure campaign to push the Ukrainians to investigate the Ukrainian energy company where Joe Biden's son used to work at. And in order to pressure Ukraine to do that, open that investigation, they withheld about 400 million dollars in military assistance and also withheld a meeting, a presidential meeting that was desperately sought by the Ukrainian government. And so what we've seen in the last several weeks is several officials trying to, and in many ways sort of corroborating how this alleged quid pro quo came about.

LL: Okay. And so the Democrats resolved to hold the impeachment inquiry. They'll became more determined when the White House actually released information about that phone call. Let's listen to what Adam Schiff, the head of the House Intelligence Committee, had to say.

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The notes of the call reflect a conversation far more damning than I or many others had imagined. It is shocking at another level that the White House would release these notes and felt that somehow this would help the President's case or cause, because what those notes reflect is a classic mafia like shakedown of a foreign leader.

LL: John, the Democratic leadership had resisted calls to impeach the president since the April release of the verdict at Miller Report. What made this story different?

JOHN HUDSON: That's right. So what made this story different is a much more easier to understand. So with the Mueller investigation, there were a lot of shadowy figures, there were a lot of individuals that were supposed Russian cut-outs. This was much more simple story that some members of the American public could more easily grasp and some members of Congress could easily grasp. The president wants a foreign country to investigate and look into, someone who's probably, you know, very likely to be his political rival in the 2020 election. And in order to do that, he used the powers of the state to withhold security assistance to a country that is fending off Russian backed separatists. So under this alleged scenario that's a pretty damning figure. This is not normal in the U.S. political system to use the full weight of the federal government as president to go after your political opponent. Much more easily understandable and digestible than the Mueller scandal. And so, yes, itdid really tip the balance. Also, some of these things can contribute to each other. If you already had sceptical feeling and you were already upset about how the Mueller investigation, if there's some Democratic leaders said that, you know, they basically reached a tipping point. Obviously, Nancy Pelosi didn't want to do this at the outset. She saw what happened when Bill Clinton, President Bill Clinton was impeached and his popularity later grew and it was worried about something similar happening. But there was an overwhelming push within the Democratic Party and she ultimately relented to those forces.

LL: Now, there is also an extraordinary moment when President Trump, speaking with White House reporters on October the 3rd, appeared to double down on his request to the Ukrainian government and then took it a step further.

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Well, I would think that if they were honest about it, that sort of major investigation into the. It's a very simple answer. They should investigate the Biden's. And by the way, likewise, China just started an investigation into the Bidens because what happened in China is just about as bad as what happened with Ukraine.

LL: What did you make of that?

JOHN HUDSON: Well, I think the President in this case, and no one can fully understand what's in his head, is trying to put this in the open, bysaying, yes, he wants to make Vice President Biden's son the centre of the story. And is it true that there's something unsavoury about the fact that, you know, just having the name of a former vice president gets you a job that pays 50,000 thousand dollars a month, even though you don't have expertise to be on the board of this Ukrainian energy company? There is something that sort of reeks of political insider-ism and benefiting off your family name in a way that isn't American meritocratic. So what we saw there was a strategy by the president to keep Hunter Biden's name in the news. Democrats argued that this is a total false equivalence. And however, you know, potentially unethical or whatever conflicts of interest might have been posed by Vice President Biden having a son on this board, it's not as bad as using the power of the state to investigate your political rivals, but that was Trump putting it out in the open. And, you know, others also criticized him for appearing to infer for literally calling on the Chinese government as well, roping in another government. Of course, there's no indications that he used state resources to pressure China. But, of course, that was just another example of him calling on another government to investigate his political rival.

LL: All right. So then we have the impeachment inquiry beginning behind closed doors. There have been some high profile witnesses, like former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Maria Yovanocitch. What made her testimony so surprising?

JOHN HUDSON: What may be surprising is that we're talking about a career State Department officials. These are the types of people that use very dry and sober language. They talk for a living in very diplomatic terms. But when she got in to this closed door testimony, she really blasted State Department leadership and White House leadership when it comes to foreign policy. She was the subject of a really unsubstantiated smear campaign led by the President's personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, who made all sorts of allegations that she was beholden to the liberal billionaire George Soros, that she was anti Trump, that she was pro Biden. And none of these rumours have any basis in reality that anyone has been able to put forward. And there's a lot of resent inside the U.S. diplomatic community who view her as a very loyal career foreign service officer who was unfairly ousted. And they say the reason that she was ousted was because she wasn't going along with this effort to pressure the Ukrainians into launching these investigations into Biden. And so when she testified, she said she was completely incredulous that she didn't have the support of senior State Department leadership when she was being ousted by people who don't even hold official government titles. Remember, the President's personal attorney is just that. He doesn't hold a position in government. And so that has been the reason he's kind of under such criticism of launching a sort of shadow American foreign policy in Ukraine that is sort of bereft of any sort of official and premature.

LL: Now, the Republicans have been critical of the inquiry process, people like Matt Gates, who is a Republican congressman from Florida.

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It's only reasonable that we would have questions because so far, Adam Schiff's impeachment inquiry has been marked by secret interviews, selective leaks, weird theatrical performances of transcripts that never happened and lies about contacts with a whistleblower.

LL: So so what do Republicans want to see happen with this inquiry?

JOHN HUDSON: Well, a number of Republicans on the Hill have been criticizing this effort because in previous U.S. impeachment proceedings there was a vote earlier and it did establish the rules for are Republicans or are the minority party, is it with is it able to question witnesses? How are transcripts going to be released? For a number of Republicans they feel like the rules are unclear. There was no established rules for a long time over how to, for instance, release these private secret transcripts and for having both sides have it, how are questions asked, who has a due process rights, does the president have due process for it? And so part of it is part of the attacks on the process are political. They're defending the president. They don't like anything. They're not going to like any process. Others are, you know, sort of legitimate procedural complaints about how the process is being carried out.

LL: And even though they're offering now public hearings, the Democrats, the Republicans are finding flaws with that as well. And I'm wondering, as the process continues, who could be the high profile witnesses that are called upon next?

JOHN HUDSON: Yes. So as we said before, Ambassador Yovanovitch, the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, she's going to be what Democrats believe is a star witness. They're looking forward to bring her into the public. They have a very sympathetic story. Another diplomat that they'd like to bring forward is the man who replaced her after she was ousted. He's still in Kiev, by the way. This is the top ranking U.S. official in Ukraine, Bill Taylor. In his testimony, he in great detail, offered recollections of text messages, e-mails and phone calls in which he is hearing from U.S. officials about the White House's intentions that the Ukrainians really need to essentially go on TV and say, we are investigating Joe Biden, we're investigating Hillary Clinton. And unless the Ukrainians do that, they're not going to get the aid. They're not going to get diplomatic support. And so more than any other witness, he really laid out all of the details of what he viewed as a quid pro quo. He didn't use that exact language, but he did lay out his view that this was there was pressure. And the only way for this pressure to be relieved was for these investigations to be launched. And so that testimony is something that the Democrats believe should be made public and would be very favourable for their position for impeachment.

LL: And John Bolton's name now, the former Trump national security adviser, apparently they'd like him to testify next week.

JOHN HUDSON: Yes. And that's a testimony that could really reach into the highest echelons of the White House, the national security adviser would have much more direct contact with President Trump and the ability to say what Trump did. And in a way that is is more direct and more firsthand, more of a primary source. Still very unclear if Ambassador Bolton will say anything that really necessarily damages the president. According to previous testimony, he does have information and sort of a front row seat to this. But he has remained largely loyal to the president since leaving office, he's differed on some policy issues, but still has portrayed himself as a very much a pro Trump Republican.

LL: John, we've got less than 30 seconds left. I just want to quickly ask you for a reality check. Even if this moves through the House of Representatives, the Senate won't pass an impeachment call, will it?

JOHN HUDSON: It's unlikely, so he will likely be impeached by the House. That is the expectation. Then this goes to a Senate which is under Republican control and it is unlikely that he will be removed from office in this process unless an unusual number of GOP defections happened. But right now, the smart money is on that not happening.

LL: All right. John had some. Thank you so much.

JOHN HUDSON: Yes. Great to be here.

LL: John Hudson is a national security reporter with The Washington Post. We reached him in Washington, DC.

SOUNDCLIP

DONALD TRUMP: We're going to keep it better than ever before. And that is why tonight I stand before you to officially launch my campaign for a second term as president of the United States.

[Cheers]

LL: Now, Donald Trump may be heading into a fight over impeachment, but he's already in full re-election mode. And while Trump is looking to hold onto his Republican base and secure a second term, the Democrats are facing a different hurdle.

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VOICE 1: Everything that has made America America is at stake.

VOICE 2: That is why I am running for president.

VOICE 3: To declare that I am a candidate for president of the United States.

VOICE 4: For president of the United States of America.

VOICE 5: The president of the Untited States.

LL: The crowded field in the Democratic race pits moderate party faithful against progressive newcomers. And the countdown to the 2020 election is on Monday. You will hear our special coverage marking one year until Americans go to the polls. We'll speak with Republicans and Democrats about what they hope to achieve in the year ahead and what the obstacles are facing the presidential hopefuls. The CBC News is coming up next. Then, brain glitches, senior moments, mixed up memories. We've all had them. In the next half hour, you'll hear why they're not such a bad thing. I'm Laura Lynch, and you are listening to The Current.

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How our flawed brains make us creative

Guests: Karin Marley, Henning Beck

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

[Music: Theme]

LL: Still to come, after nine years of war, we look at whether the new round of talks can bring Syria any closer to peace. But first, why brain glitches are good for you.

KARIN MARLEY: Hello, Laura.

LL: Hi.

KARIN MARLEY: I have here a piece of paper for you.

LL: So this is our producer, Karin Marley, and she's just given me a piece of paper with a list of words on it. What do you want me to this?

KARIN MARLEY: Well, you might ask. So this is a little brain exercise we're gonna do on air. Listeners, you can do it, too. So listen carefully. Laura, could you read the list of words, please?

LL: Okay. Truck Street. Drive. Key. Garage. SUV, which I know isn't a word. Accelerate and steering wheel.

KARIN MARLEY: All right. There we go. I'll just grab that piece of work. Give it up and no peeking. I'm gonna give this list to our guest.

LL: Okay. And I guess that means I can't look at it again. Why are you giving it to the guest?

KARIN MARLEY: So I will leave our guest to explain because it is his list. So I will duck out of here and let you guys get to it.

LL: All right. And he is neuroscientists Henning Beck. He's here in our Toronto studio. His new book is Scatter Brain: How the Mind's Mistakes Make Humans Creative, Innovative and Successful. Hi.

HENNING BECK: Hi. Thanks for having me.

LL: Thanks for coming in. I'm a little afraid to find out how scattered my brain is. Should I be scared?

HENNING BECK: Not really. No.

LL: Okay. You tell me that. So. Okay. The list of words. What did you want? Me and people who are listening to do with the list?

HENNING BECK: Basically, just try to remember as many words as you can. I mean, it's that simple list. How many words you remember from it?

LL: Okay, some of it was easier because they were related. So truck. Drive. Key. SUV. Stree?

HENNING BECK: Yeah, I think that's right. That's pretty good. You just looked at the list for a couple of seconds and you see, you don't remember everything. Usually you remember like 70 percent or so, but that's how the brain actually works. It defines what is important, what is not important.

LL: How do I rank?

HENNING BECK: You missed some other words, but yes, you did not remember grand or two or three words, but that's pretty good.

LL: You can tell me now or do you want me to remember them again later?

HENNING BECK: Yes, maybe.

LL: Yes. Okay, I won't get ahead of myself. So then that tells me that my brain isn't working what I would consider to be perfectly.

HENNING BECK: Yeah. It is not the case that you store and save information like on a flash drive in a computer and then you put information somewhere and then you can retrieve it when you're needed later. So it's more like the brain starts to organize all the incoming information. As you said, some words are related. So you formed some kind of related concept. And this is how we basically remember information. Memory is not located anywhere in the brain and is constructed all the time you remember it.

LL: All the time. It's working over and over. So then tell me, how flawed is the brain?

HENNING BECK: Well, the brain is does mistakes constantly all the time. The brain is everything but perfect. Many people require the brain to think perfectly, to avoid mistakes, to avoid errors. But this is not where the brain actually does. The brain comes up with new ideas, tries out, learns from failure, learns from mistakes. And we have so many different mistakes and flaws like we are distracted. As you just experienced, memory is not perfect. Right. But on the other hand, all of these flaws and mistakes have some kind of cognitive edge and have some kind of advantage.

LL: Okay. But compare it to artificial intelligence or a computer.

HENNING BECK: Well, artificial intelligence is designed to find patterns and correlations among huge amounts of data and huge amounts of information is organized or structured by these algorithms and tries to avoid mistakes, trying to find correlations as fast and efficient as possible. This is how we define intelligence, right? Intelligence, by definition, means that you find and follow the rules as fast as possible. It does not mean by definition to change rules, to break rules, to go places where nobody has ever been before, set up new rules. And this is why intelligence is not enough. And many, many people say, okay, artificial intelligence will take over eventually. This is never going to happen. You have to be able to break rules to push the human frontier to go places but nobody's ever been before. And this is more than just intelligence.

LL: So that means it's not a bad thing that we're generally not that fantastic at remembering lists.

HENNING BECK: I mean, of course, if you forget some things, that is not good, if you forget a birthday, for instance. But on the other hand, considered the alternative. If you would remember everything, it would take forever to find out what is important and not. It would take forever to remember, because you have so many information on your mind that need to be organized. That is very hard to prioritize them. And this is the reason why the brain filters out information when it's coming in.

LL: Okay, thank you for making me feel better.

HENNING BECK: Yes, that's my job.

LL: There is something else you wanted me to do with the list of words?

HENNING BECK: Yes. Just ask again. What? What words do you remember right now?

LL: Key. SUV. Drive. Street truck.

HENNING BECK: Yes. But some words you're missing.

LL: I don't remember you. I completely do not remember.

HENNING BECK: That's the case. And interesting if I ask you what of these words was originally on the list, car, seat or motorcycle?

LL: Oh. I don't know. Seat?

HENNING BECK: Yes. Good choice, but actually incorrect. None of these were on the original list.

LL: Oh that was a trick.

HENNING BECK: Yes it was a trick. Because if you ask people, if you give people these kind of lists and you ask people try to remember. People make up new births. Almost 80 percent claim that they saw words that never appeared on the original list. And this is how we create false memories. This is how you can trigger people to create false memories.

LL: OK. Would the word lists are pretty simple, but life is complex. How many of our memories are at least, what we think are memories are someone in accurate or, as you said, completely false or really made up.

HENNING BECK: I mean, every memory is incorrect in a way, because it's always created in the moment when you remember. Consider an orchestra. When you look at an orchestra from outside, you have no idea what music this orchestra is able to play. Just with the brain. When you look at the brain from outside, you have no idea what memories are inside this brain. In an orchestra, the music, the melody emerges when the musicians start to play with each other. It's how all the musicians play together. Same with the brain. It is how all these nerve cells interact in the very moment and create this kind of activity pattern, what you call a memory. And sometimes you highlight a specific image. Sometimes you highlight this specific word . Sometimes you make up new words just to fit in to this whole concept. In this case, it was about cars and driving and such. So it's easy to come up with a new word that you have never seen before.

LL: Is there ever a good time for an embellished memory? Well, I can think of lots of bad things. Like in the judicial system if somebody is recalling something. But is there ever a good time to have that?

HENNING BECK: Well, of course, this is a problem for eyewitnesses, for instance. On the other hand, this kind of thinking principle makes your adaptive. The same brain regions that are falsifying your memory, that is distorting your memory of the same brain regions that are able to ask what if questions, that come up with hypotheses, that imagine the future, that set up plants and make good ideas. It's the same principle. You invent new stuff or you falsify your memory or you can come up with a new solution nobody has ever thought of before. It's depending on the task you want to solve. If you want to remember everything perfectly, the brain is not super accurate. But if you want to create something new, the brain is the method of choice.

LL: I think Karin's going come back him because she's got another challenge for us. Karin, you got a pen, paper and a calculator and you've given us two squeaky toys. You're just having fun with me here, toying with me.

KARIN MARLEY: It's a metaphor. Exactly.

LL: Let's go on.

KARIN MARLEY: So I am going to give you a little not exactly fair question here. I have given you the paper and pencil. Henning has a good old fashioned calculator. One of those things that probably you haven't seen since high school.

HENNING BECK: I have never seen this before.

LL: Too young.

KARIN MARLEY: And I'm going to read you guys a maths puzzle. Whoever finishes first. You can just squeak your squeaky toy and we'll see how this plays out.

LL: Can I just say I was bad at maths in high school. That's why I'm a journalist. OK, go ahead.

KARIN MARLEY: And I'm waiting this against you. So the exercise. A pet store truck is driving along a city street when suddenly the back door pops open. 384 squeaky toys followed and 24 dogs start running down the street chasing them. If life were fair and these toys got distributed evenly, how many squeaky toys would each dog get?

LL: Got it. Well, that was unfair. It's 16, I think.

KARIN MARLEY: It is 16.

LL: I just want you to see what I wrote here. I just had three, cause I used the long division now.

KARIN MARLEY: As I said, it wasn't fair.

LL: It wasn't because the computers and the calculators are way faster. But Henning you say that even in maths, they're not a threat to our mental supremacy, which makes me feel odd given what just happened.

HENNING BECK: Well, you know, I'm faster because I have a calculator. But calculators just ask computers. I mean, they're are just dump. They're just as dumb as 50 years ago today. There are maybe dumb been a faster way, but it's not like they understand what they are actually doing. No calculator, no artificial intelligence, no computer is understanding what it's doing. We do that. I mean, you understood that there's something going on. And I understood as well. I type in some numbers into this calculator and then it's coming out with a solution. And I have to interpret it. And this is a difference between calculating and doing maths. I mean, calculation is pretty simple. It is just following the rules. Maths means thinking. Infrastructure's thinking in concepts, thinking in images. And this is how we understand stuff. It is not about finding the solution fastest, but it is how to interpret it. And this is what sets us apart from artificial intelligence calculators, a machine.

LL: That makes me feel better. I'm sure I would have come up with the right answer.

HENNING BECK: Sure. And contrary to a calculator, you know what it actually meas.

LL: Yes. Yes. Exactly. All right. Lucky me. Apparently, Karin has one brain exercise for me. No more toys. I bet you've got a short story.

KARIN MARLEY: I do. So I am just going to read you a little story about a man named Wyatt. Then we'll have a question for you at the end. So the young man named Wyatt grew up on a ranch at the edge of the plains. At a young age he joined the local line dancing club. His rifle collection is legendary. He played slide guitar. His favourite food is barbecued ribs and his favourite football team is the Dallas Cowboys. Last summer, he moved to Austin to pursue his career. Now an easy little comprehension quiz at the end of this. What city in Texas did Wyatt grow up?

LL: Austin?

KARIN MARLEY: Good guess. And I'll let Henning explain.

HENNING BECK: Well, you don't know, but you set up this concept of growing up in Austin. But you don't know exactly. You make up an interpretation right from the beginning. These kind of biases that you interpret or see things that are not actually there. I mean, Europe, of it is a trick question. I mean, you are triggered to think into this bias, but you come up with this solution because it's fitting your expectation. And this is what people constantly do. They give answers that fit into their expectation. And this is important because we are living in times where business models of the largest companies really use that kind of thinking to make money out of that, because we love correlations. We love thinking in our comfort zone. We love thinking what we believe. Actually, we want to be confirmed. And this is how all these apps and social media work.

LL: Is that a good thing?

HENNING BECK: Well, both. I mean, of course, it is important to us to have some kind of safety in your way of thinking your stereotypes in a way, because it's speeding up your thinking. You don't have to reinvent the wheel all the time. When you go into a kitchen, you know how a kitchen works, even if you have never been in this kitchen before. On the other hand, it is important that you provoked yourself from time to time, that you pushing yourself out of this comfort zone thinking, use some kind of media you're not used to, check out a website you're not going through regularly, have a chat with people you disagree with. This is important because this is really spicing up your ideas.

LL: We just wrapped up a federal election and there's been a lot of talk about how people vote emotionally instead of logically.

HENNING BECK: Yes. There is no single decision that is based purely on facts. Every decision is based first and foremost on emotion. And this is because the brain basically sets up the main framework in thinking is getting a reward or avoiding punishment. And then people make decisions very quickly. And interestingly, after they made the decision, they tried to justify them later.

LL: I got to ask you, just based on my own experiences, I voted in many elections and I fought long and hard about who I was going to vote for this time. And I'm not going to tell you who I voted for. But I like to think that I made a rational decision and I waited for a long time before I decided who I was going to vote for. How can you be sure that what I did wasn't a rational decision?

HENNING BECK: I mean, it's always kind of both, but I'm pretty sure that you had some kind of emotional sentiment. I mean, you say, okay, I like this argument. It's that you feel attached to one position more than to the other. And one thing that you can do to overcome this bias, of course, what you did take your time. When you force people to make a decision very fast, they rely more and more on emotion, of course. And on the other hand, if you don't know how to decide, this is very often the case. We call that psychology the over choice effect, that you have so many options that you're not able to pick one because there are so many possibilities. And if this is the case and then put some pressure onto yourself.

LL: I spoke recently to Zoltan Istvan. He's a former American presidential candidate for the Trans Humanist Party. He believes a robot leader would be better than a human one. Just listen to this.

SOUNDCLIP

You know, at some point we're going to create a machine that's better than the human brain. And that machine is going to be better at running the planet and running the world. Almost every single action that a human does, a machine can almost certainly do dramatically better. It's statistically better. And so when you talk about governing for the greatest good, a machine is going to have better algorithms and especially it's going to continue to prove overtime with less personality, idiosyncrasies and things like that. So you really have an opportunity here to maybe get what we can, you know, see as true leadership for the very first time and perhaps everyone's lifetime.

LL: What do you think of that?

LL: Well, there are a couple of things. First, of course, people love to be ruled by a machine. This is what we call them, psychology. The over trust effect you over trust machines more than human beings, because people say, okay, somebody has put some some force into that and then they follow an immigration system and end up in the forest or wherever.

LL: Like G.P.S.

HENNING BECK: Yes, exactly. So, of course, people love that idea because we know that human beings do mistakes. So why not being will buy a machine? Well, there's one problem that is always underestimated in this discussion. And this is energy. We don't know where we get the energy to have that general artificial intelligence. Digital devices needs so many energy and it's increasing exponentially. And we know that in a couple of years we don't have the energy to power all that kind of systems.

LL: You're talking about just the electricity.

HENNING BECK: Yes, exactly. Consider rebuilding a brain. I mean, the brain is running on 20 watts. I mean, you need two pancakes, to run a brain for like two days. This is a pretty efficient system. And thinking about an artificial intelligence or a machine that can do everything, you cannot build so many power plants to to supply all these artificial intelligence, you need to make all these kind of decisions. And on the other hand, it is not only about making the most rational decision. It is also about leading people. And this is something different than telling people what to do. I remember a great quote. A boss says, go. Leader says, let's go. It is about motivating people and leading them. Way more important than just telling what to do.

LL: You don't ever see a time when AI will take over our jobs. Any jobs? I mean, they do some already, of course.

HENNING BECK: And every procedure where you can put the tech efficiency on it. This is what it's going to be replaced by these kind of machines. I don't know what's happening in 200 years, but I guarantee that in our lifetime we will not see these kind of systems taking over in terms of empathy and working together with others, presenting stuff, talking to each other. This is what I think people going to appreciate. I think people will pay for good service in the future. They don't pay for chat bots. They pay for good service. And on the other hand, having good ideas, of course, breaking the rules. This is important. Speaking about presidents, I remember a great quote by Abraham Lincoln who said, I don't like this man. I have to get to know him better. And this is what I call curiosity and try to feed that into a machine.

LL: But if you try to feed that into some of today's current political, you don't hear that from them either.

HENNING BECK: Good point.

LL: I mean, would it be a bad thing if a guy takes over jobs that require efficiency?

HENNING BECK: These are not human friendly jobs. Putting numbers into excel sheets, this is not what a human brain is made for. This is why we are having burnout. Why we having depressions throughout society and business lives. And for a reason, because we force human beings to think like a machine. And then we are surprised when a machine comes around the corner and makes it better and faster and more efficiently. I'm totally calling for let machines take over these kind of jobs and then let human beings do what they can do best; getting your ideas, working in teams, convincing other people. This is what's going to be important.

LL: So I get really hard on myself when I make mistakes and I'm wondering why it is important to know that our brains mistakes are good for us.

HENNING BECK: Well, first of all, it's kind of relieving. It's reducing the stress because I totally see what you mean. People hate mistakes all of the time, especially in Germany. You know, the German engineering; no mistake. Right. But on the other hand, engineering is also about coming up with good inventions and good ideas. And in a perfect world is the end of progress. Right. Because if everything is perfect, where should you proceed to? It is way more important to try out your stuff, fail, fall down and then standing up again. And this is the spirit we need to change the world. Of course, I'm not calling for to do mistakes all the time, but you have to come up with new ideas, without knowing before whether these ideas are good ones or bad ones, correct or incorrect. And this is what the brain is very well are doing that. We can come up with new stuff from that.

LL: Okay. Henning, it's my turn to test you. What were the first five words that I said at the very beginning of this interview?

HENNING BECK: I have no idea. But I remember how you smile. This is what I remember.

LL: Well, I'm just glad it's not only me. I mean, thank you so much. It was a great conversation.

HENNING BECK: Likewise. That was a lot of fun.

LL: It was a lot of fun. Do you want to keep your toy?

HENNING BECK: If you do that very often, this is going to be annoying.

LL: Oh, sure. Yes. Okay. For sure. Do you have any kids? You can give it to one of your kids?

HENNING BECK: Oh, I have a three year old neighbour. He is really inspiring when you write a book. He's really inspiring.

LL: Okay, Henning, thanks a lot.

HENNING BECK: Thanks a lot.

LL: Okay. I think I've recovered Henning Beck is a neuroscientist and the author of Scattered Brain: How the Minds Mistakes Make Humans Creative, Innovative and Successful. He was in our Toronto studio. I'm Laura Lynch and this is The Current on CBC Radio One and Sirius XM.

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Witch hunts

Guest: Mary Beth Norton

LL: Well, earlier in the show, we were discussing the latest developments in Washington with the impeachment hearings against President Donald Trump. His defence has been a familiar one, one with a historical reference, two words he repeats again and again, like a mantra or a spell.

SOUNDCLIP

[Music]

DONALD TRUMP: Well, I respect the move, but the entire thing has been a witch hunt. Two years at a witch hunt. It's the single greatest witch hunt in American history, probably in history, but in American history.

MARY BETH NORTON: I'm Mary Beth Norton but Mary [unintelligible] professor of American History at Cornell University, emerita. And the author of In the Devil's Snare of the Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692. So when President Trump uses the term witch hunt, he clearly wants his listeners to understand that all the charges against him are false, because we know that witches never existed and that what they were accused of doing was basically made up.

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ACTOR: We have found the witch. We found her.

[Loud noises]

ACTRESS: Who knew, she is a witch?

ACTOR: She looks like one.

[Loud noises]

MARY BETH NORTON: In North America, the most important and best known witch hunt was at Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692. What happened was that two little girls began to have [unintelligible]. And when they could not be diagnosed with any known illness, the local doctor said that they were, quote, "under an evil hand", by which he meant that they were bewitched. So local ministers and magistrates began to question them, and eventually they named three local women, all of whom had poor reputations of having bewitched them. And the witch hunt went on from there. In the end, about 150 people were formally accused of being witches, and 19 were convicted and executed, and one was pressed to death by heavy stone because he refused to acknowledge the authority of the court. The accusations in 1692 were not random. Some of them were accused by their neighbours, with whom they had longstanding quarrels. There were some of the prominent men accused in 1692 were also men who were thought to be in league with the Indians. And I would argue they were political accusations. One reason the witch trials remain in public imagination is, in fact, due to Arthur Miller's very powerful play, The Crucible, which he wrote in the 1950s, which used the witch trials of 1692 as a metaphor for the McCarthyism that he was confronting in the 1950s.

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ACTRESS 1: You took a charm to kill his wife.

ACTRESS 2: No Abbey.

ACTRESS 1: You took a charm to kill her [screams]

VOICE 1: Have you ever been a member of the Communist Party? I believe I have the right to be confronted with any evidence which supports this question. I should like to see what you have.

MARY BETH NORTON: Today in American political culture. Trump is the person who is making the term witch hunt important. How effective it is will have to be seen. People who were against Trump before are still against Trump, and people who were for Trump before are still for him.

LL: Mary Beth Norton is emerita professor of history at Cornell and the author of In the Devil's Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692. Well, coming up in our next half hour, why so many people with mental illnesses are winding up behind bars and the judge who wants to change that? I'm Laura Lynch. And you're listening to The Current.

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Push for peace in Syria

Guest: Janine Di Giovanni

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

SOUNDCLIP

[Protestors shouting]

VOICE: The crowds were enormous gathering all across Syria for the first time. Protesters demanded the end of the regime.

VOICE 1: After careful deliberation, I have decided that the United States should take military action against Syrian regime targets.

VOICE 2: There are now more than four million Syrian refugees.

VOICE 3: Syria, Russia and Turkey have declared that a ceasefire will come into effect at midnight.

VOICE 4: Peace talks between Syrian rebel factions and government representatives opened in Kazakhstan, brokered by Russia and Turkey.

DONALD TRUMP: Syria was supposed to be a short term hit. We want to bring our troops back home.

VOICE 5: Syria's leader, Bashar al-Assad, striding confidently today onto land too recently held by rebels.

VOICE 6: A special committee charged with rewriting Syria's constitution after over eight years of civil conflict is meeting in Geneva today.

LL: For more than eight and a half years. The civil war in Syria has raged on. Peace talks. Ceasefires. Broken ceasefires. More talks. More violence. More death. Yesterday in Geneva 150 delegates began a gathering to try to rewrite the constitution of Syria. The U.N. hopes it could eventually lead to successful peace negotiations. Janine de Giovanni has been watching the talks closely. She's a senior fellow at Yale University's Jackson Institute for Global Affairs and the author of The Morning They came for us: Dispatches from Syria. We've reached her today in New York City. Hello.

JANINE DI GIOVANNI: Hello, good morning.

LL: Who are the players at the table for these talks?

JANINE DI GIOVANNI: Well, the players at the table should be solely Syrian under 150 delegates, 50 of them from the regime side of Bashar al Assad, 50 from the opposition and 50 from civil society. But we were surprised to see that the foreign ministers of Russia, Iran and Turkey also arrived. And this is specifically after the UN special envoy, Geir Peterson, who's a Norwegian diplomat, requested that they stay away. What this shows us really is the hope that Russia, particularly Russia, has on the Syrian talks. I mean, in a sense they are not really. U.N. nuclear talks. They're Russian brokers talks.

LL: How much does Bashar al Assad owe his power in Syria's, continuing power, to Russia?

JANINE DI GIOVANNI: A lot. Basically, from 2015 - following President Obama's decision not to get involved after the chemical gassing of Eastern Ghouta and back in 2013 - Russia saw a big opportunity to get into the Middle East, which is what they've always wanted. So from 2015 on, they launched a fierce and vicious attack against civilians, mainly from the skies. They pounded Aleppo. They're now pounding Idlib, which is the last holdout of the opposition in northwestern Syria, where there are three million people trapped inside. One of the most notorious Russian acts is that they bombed hospitals. We now have very clear evidence, forensic evidence, from The New York Times did an extraordinary investigation, which basically has nailed them, nailed their pilots, knowing that they are hitting civilian targets, mainly medical facilities, doctors, hospitals, patients. So Russia has launched a really uneven campaign against civilians and Assad in many ways from very early on called in proxy countries to fight his battle. Iran and Hezbollah fought on the ground. Russia fought from the skies. And, of course, that's what turned the whole tide of the war against the opposition and allowed him to get to the point where he is now, which is basically I think we can say Assad has won.

LL: All right. Well, but then let's turn to the opposition. Reminder who they are, who they started out to be and how things developed.

JANINE DI GIOVANNI: Well, I mean, it's very fractured now. It started at the Free Syrian Army way back in 2011, 2012. The Syrian war started from a revolution, a peaceful revolution, which followed on the heels of the other Arab uprisings, the Arab Spring. Assad took down the protesters with violence and quickly disgruntled officers from the Syrian army, formed the Free Syrian Army. It was then hijacked by various jihadi groups. It became fractured. And this is the kind of propaganda that Russia would use that they were fighting against terrorists. But not all the opposition were terrorist groups. It is true that many became more radicalized as time went on. And for them, it was clear that the West was not going to come in and save them or protect civilians. So they had to take protection into their own hands. And this also involve civil society groups like the White Helmets who had to dig people out of the rubble after Russian and Syrian Arab regime planes bombed them. So right now, the opposition is a very murky group of people. And who is meeting in Geneva today is supposed to be representative of the Syrian of the Syrian people. But in fact, many of the players have lived outside Syria for a long time.

LL: Do they have any power at the negotiating table? I mean, you've already said that Assad has won.

JANINE DI GIOVANNI: No, not really. And I think the leverage right now, the US has no leverage anymore since President Trump pulled out troops at the beginning of the month. I think basically that the future of Syria is going to be decided by Russia and the UN has been pretty toothless in the whole process going back through the past eight years. Despite trying, the former negotiator, Staffan de Mistura, really, really did make huge efforts. And Geir Peterson is a is a fantastic, well respected diplomat. But the fact is that Russia and Assad hold all the cards. So even to the point where in the latest round of fighting between the Kurds and being overrun by the Turks, the Kurds turned to Assad to form an alliance because they felt betrayed and abandoned on the ground. And now, of course, we have Russian troops patrolling that that border zone between Turkey and Syria. So it's a very strange configuration of many, many actors, both state and non-state actors involved in the Syrian war and a part of it with the Syrian people who are really, really suffering. 65 percent of the infrastructure is destroyed in the country. And when you think that in World War Two, 60 percent of Germany's infrastructure was destroyed, tt gives you an idea of how much rebuilding has to be done once the war stops. There are, we estimate about half a million people dead, although the UN stopped counting in 2016 and there are five million refugees, not even counting the number of people been displaced inside the country. So this is an eight, almost nine year war that has taken a horrific cost on civilian life. There will be repercussions of this for years to come, because, of course, we've got a whole generation of kids who haven't been in school or children who were born outside of Syria in refugee camps in Lebanon, Turkey, Iraq, Jordan and elsewhere in the region. So it's really it's been a big mistake for us to turn our back on Syria long ago, back in 2013, when there might have been a chance then to end the war.

LL: Then we're in this position now where Assad is maintaining, has won his hold on power. Do you think that Syria can actually move forward with him still in office?

JANINE DI GIOVANNI: No . This is my personal opinion. I believe a man that has so much blood on his hands. We have documentation of what Bashar al Assad has done in his detention centres, in his gulags, the torture, the rape, the the ethnic cleansing, the systematic destruction of civilians lives and basically society, the way that Aleppo was destroyed, the sieges, the siege mentality, to siege, you know, denied people food, water, the engaging of Russia to take control of the skies. How can you have a man like this in power? More importantly for me is always the issue of transitional justice. So will any of these players ever be brought to the table? Will the victims ever see any kind of compensation or even just see their killers, their rapists, given some kind of justice?

LL: We'll have to leave it there, Janine Giovanni, thank you very much.

JANINE DI GIOVANNI: Thank you. Thank you.

LL: Janine de Giovanni is a former war reporter. She's a senior fellow at Yale University's Jackson Institute for Global Affairs. We reached her in New York City. You're listening to The Current on CBC Radio One in Serious XM. I'm Laura Lynch.

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Justice Richard Schneider

Guest: Richard Schneider

LL: From the outside. Toronto's old city hall is grand and Romanesque with a soaring clock tower and rounded targets. On the inside as a small utilitarian courtroom, the result of a modern renovation. But what happens inside courtroom 102 is increasingly being copied around the world. It's a mental health court with the aim to keep people with mental illnesses, especially those accused of petty crimes out of prison and getting them the help they need when it was launched in 1998. It was one of the first of its kind. My next guest spearheaded its creation and spent years there as a judge, and he's now written an account of his personal experiences on the bench. It's called The Death of a Butterfly. Mental Health Court Diaries. Justice Richard Schneider is with me in our Toronto studio. Hello.

RICHARD SCHNEIDER: Hello.

LL: What was the initial idea behind the creation of mental health courts?

RICHARD SCHNEIDER: Well, the idea or aspiration, at least, was to see if we could find a more efficient way of dealing with individuals who were coming, in ever increasing numbers, into the criminal courts as a result of untreated or under treated mental disorder. These individuals were getting, for lack of a better way of putting it, lost in the system. They were cycling back with repeated charges and they were spending inordinate lengths of time in pre-trial custody, sorting it, preliminary psychiatric issues - the key one of which was fitness to stand trial - all often in respect of relatively minor matters that wouldn't have resulted in any incarceration had they pled guilty at first instance. So the hope was to create a court that would take this population out and into a more efficient environment within the court system.

LL: So then how are the mental health courts different from traditional criminal courts?

RICHARD SCHNEIDER: Well, they're different in many ways. If you were to walk into the mental health court, you'd immediately see that the court is far more relaxed. It's much less adversarial environment. You'll see that defence counsel, crown counsel and the court appear to be triangulating in on the same sort of objective, and that is to figure out some sort of a plan to move the accused in to some alternative civil mental health care situation. At the conclusion of which their charges would be stayed or withdrawn. In respect of others, it would be sorting out the question of fitness to stand trial. And so a major difference between the mental health court and a regular criminal court is that it's staffed by a forensic psychiatrist five days a week, and they're able to do what we call stand down assessments from officers adjoining joining the courtroom rather than the 30 day inpatient assessments that were occurring prior to the creation of the court. The other typical people involved in the court are what we call high court, mental health workers, social workers who act as case managers, who try to put together a plan when we're putting somebody back into the community that will optimize their chances of success. That could involve everything from temporary social assistance to clothing to short term housing, things of that sort that will reduce the probability of them being released and merely reoffending and coming back into the court.

LL: Can you describe for me, then, a typical day at mental health court what kinds of cases you would see?

RICHARD SCHNEIDER: Well, the the range of cases in terms of offences include everything from very minor- and for the most part they are relatively minor to mid-range offences, everything from nuisance offences to causing a disturbance. Things of that sort all the way up to homicides. Most of the individuals who end up before the mental health court suffer from some type of untreated psychosis. The most common diagnosis would certainly be schizophrenia. But they come to the court very rarely with singular problems. It's very rarely the case that they come into the court simply because they have untreated schizophrenia. Inevitably, that's accompanied with some kind of addiction, perhaps a secondary diagnosis. They're homeless and there's a complexity of social difficulties that accompany the main mental disorder.

LL: Let's get some more intimate sense of the kinds of people that you dealt with in the court. There's a woman who goes by the name of Princess Sophia who seems to have had a bit of a of a crush on you. What kinds of trouble did she get into?

RICHARD SCHNEIDER: Well, Princess Sophia was another very unwell. I don't think I'd ever known her to be a well in a clinical sense, but happy individual who was before the court frequently, typically for relatively minor matters. But yes, she did have a habit of bringing gifts to me when I was in the court, bouquets of flowers that I suspect were taken from Nathan Phillips Square. Other tantalizing items like half eaten biscotti and apples with a bite out of them. But she was a very friendly individual who was known to come around the court even when she didn't have a formal appearance on a particular day because she had established such good relationships with the court staff.

LL: The humanity of these people comes through in the book and the way you describe them, you seem to have a real affection for many of the people who came to your court, is that fair to say?

RICHARD SCHNEIDER: I think it is. The court gets to know these individuals very well. They get to know us. And often their experiences with the individuals at the court are the closest human contacts they experience. And I think genuine friendships do emerge as a result of their attendance at the mental health court.

LL: Let's talk about the case that gave the book its title. Who was the Butterfly?

RICHARD SCHNEIDER: Well, the butterfly was an individual who had been appearing in the mental health court on several occasions. And he was dubbed the Butterfly because of the way he would move his wrists and hands and a sort of lilting manner. The Butterfly was before the court sorting out issues of fitness to stand trial. And I think at the stage that he was on remand when he came to a tragic death, we were getting him set up to perhaps consider the matter of judicial interim release. He was at the medical unit or special handling unit for individuals requiring medical or psychiatric assistance at the tribal jail. He picked up another inmate's half eaten bag of potato chips and took them to his cell and consumed them. And that put the offended owner of the potato chips into some kind of a rage and he killed the Butterfly.

LL: It is actually quite disturbing to read the circumstances like that. I don't want to go over that.

RICHARD SCHNEIDER: Yes.

LL: So he's killed in jail while awaiting more dealings with the court. What was he actually initially accused of?

RICHARD SCHNEIDER: If my memory serves me, he was charged with indecent exposure. I think it was alleged that he had his pants down in public. Now, the issue at trial would, of course, have been whether that was for a sexual purpose or whether it was just a product of his generally disorganized state.

LL: So what does the butterfly story tell us about the problems with the way the justice system handles people with mental illnesses?

RICHARD SCHNEIDER: Well, I think it's bigger than just the criminal justice system. It's a terrible situation that's left the criminal justice handling, at least to my mind, just too much of the problem of untreated mental disorder. The science is in that individual suffering from mental illness do very, very poorly in prison. Prisons were never designed to look after individuals with mental illness. They have had to out of necessity. And as the case of the Butterfly describes, bad things can happen. It's a shame that that was the only option that we had for the Butterfly at that time. But we do not have the ability to simply remand someone to hospital while they're awaiting bail.

LL: And why how do we get to this situation, though, where it's sometimes the only way that sick people get the care they need is through the court system?

RICHARD SCHNEIDER: Let me answer this obliquely. Perhaps by way of examples from my private practice, I can tell you that families of the accused I was representing would be actually quite happy that their son or daughter had now been charged with a criminal offence. Because with that came the possibility of getting them a proper assessment which had eluded them with mainstream civil mental health care. And should they, upon the conclusion of that assessment, be deemed unfit to stand trial, then the court could make a treatment order. That involuntary treatment had again eluded the individual and the family. It's been said before that the gold card to mental health care is a criminal information or indictment, because the assessment and services treatments that so many of these individuals require are either not available or they slipped through the cracks somehow in the civil mental health care system.

LL: So what alternatives are there that we could consider? So that you weren't won't be having to deal with these people through the legal system, that they're actually getting the care that they need upfront?

RICHARD SCHNEIDER: Well, I think two fronts could be considered. One has to do with the civil mental health care system. Our current system is dangerousness based. That is in order for someone to be brought in as an involuntary patient they have to be deemed a danger to themselves or others. The other thing I think that most practitioners would agree with me on is that individuals, once they come into mainstream civil mental health care, they're perhaps released too early. They're released as soon as they no longer satisfy the statutory criteria. And while the statutory criteria may be no longer satisfied, their state of mental well-being is far less than robust and typically not sufficient to provide them with the requisite insight that would cause them to continue with treatment medications and keep them out of further difficulties. The other is - and there are examples of this in the province already in Toronto and Hamilton in particular - what we call pre-arrest diversion, and that is where police officers respond to incidents that appear to be involving someone with a mental illness and come up with solutions other than the laying of a criminal charge that might include simply taking the individual out of the situation back home, back to the shelter, back to the hospital they may have eloped from, to a psychiatric emergency. Some solution like that, that would be perhaps a better option than laying a criminal charge that would put them into the criminal justice system and into the mental health court, where as we've just seen, by way of example, with the Butterfly, all too often things can go wrong.

LL: You've been involved in the system for such a long time in varying roles. I wonder what it's like for you to be playing a part in the system that has the kinds of problems that you've described in such detail.

RICHARD SCHNEIDER: I hope I haven't painted too negative a picture. I think lots of good things are happening in the mental health court. For example, I think we improve the lives of most of the people that come through the doors. The data especially, well, most of it is coming from the United States, indicates that individuals who, if you like, graduate from mental health court returned to court parlous frequently. Their recidivism rates are much lower. And when they do reoffend, they tend to be for less serious offences. They tend to maintain employment longer, have fewer mental health contacts, keep their home life stable for a longer period of time. So good things do happen. And then there are remarkable transformations. One of my favourite examples, Miss Shaw, who came through the doors of the mental health court in a profoundly disorganized, decompensated state, very obviously psychotic, unkempt. She'd obviously been in a bad way for a long time. And she, over the course of her time in the mental health court, sorted out the issues of fitness to stand trial, moved on to participate in the diversion program. And over the course of several months, of course, I would notice and not notice people, often there were as many as 80 people on the docket in the mental health court. But one day, and as a judge in any court, you do try to shepherd things. You try to assist younger lawyers who might be a little bashful. The more senior ones are certainly not bashful. And I noticed a young lawyer sitting in the front row. In a lull, I asked. Madam Crown, if we might assist counsel sitting in the front row who'd been sitting there patiently for an hour or two at that point. Duty counsel popped up and said, Oh, your honour, that's not counsel. That's Miss Shaw. And I couldn't believe it. Miss Shaw had been transformed from the individual I just described to someone who was very well turned out well-dressed, well-behaved, and was doing profoundly well. I don't think we've made anyone worse. There are individuals who have elected to drop out of mental health court because, frankly, it's perhaps more work than simply pleading guilty and walking away with a sentence of time served. Yes, there are problems. There are certainly things we could improve. But the system is doing a lot of very, very good work and it's a challenge to improve things inch by inch, day to day. It's challenging but not discouraging.

LL: Well, that seems like a good place to leave it. Thank you. Thank you for your time, for your diaries and for your insight.

RICHARD SCHNEIDER: Thank you very much for having me.

LL: Justice Richard Schneider is the chair of the Ontario Review Review Board, which has jurisdiction over people who have been deemed unfit to stand trial or not criminally responsible. His new book is The Death of a Butterfly: Mental Health Court Diaries. He was in our Toronto studio. That's our program for today. Stay tuned to Radio One for Q. Now, if you are looking for some creepy music for all the ghouls and goblins coming to your door tonight, CBC Music has some special spooky playlists with tracks that include this classic From Screamin Jay Hawkins. We'll give him the last word today. I'm Laura Lynch. Thanks for listening to The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

[Song: I Put a Spell on You by Screamin Jay Hawkins].

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Thursday October 31, 2019 Full Episode Transcript

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