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The Current Transcript for December 12, 2019

Host: Laura Lynch

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

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Loudspeakers, look, head and shoulders, I don't have to buy shampoo. Oh, yeah. How do you like this one? A whole pack of pens.

LAURA LYNCH: There are bargains to be had, as you heard there. As in free brand new shampoo, stereo speakers and more. But there's a catch. All this new merchandise is sitting in dumpsters. Today we learn more about why so much of it is being tossed and what it says about consumer culture. That's in about an hour. Also today, it is voting day in the U.K.

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The next Labour government will reduce the average full time working week to 32 hours within the next decade.

[Applause]

LL: That's a Labour Party MP promising a four day workweek as part of the campaign. Today, on the fourth day of our work week, we'll toil over the question of whether that is in fact a workable idea. But we're not done yet. We'll talk to British author Robert Harris about dystopian futures and the dysfunctional present in this country. We begin, though, in a classroom in Alberta and a lesson that ended in threats and the cancellation of the Christmas dance. I'm Laura Lynch and this is The current.

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Alberta fight over climate change lesson

Guests: Jason Schilling, Demetrios Nicolalides, Charles Pascal

LL: How do you teach students about climate change and land use in a province where a significant percentage of many people's financial security is connected to the oil and gas industry. In Alberta, the answer is very carefully. Take what happened earlier this month at a school in central Alberta. It started with a social studies lesson in a Grade 4 class. Some parents got mad. Threats were made, serious enough that last week the school cancelled its annual Family Christmas dance to avoid potential confrontations. Our friends at As It Happens, spoke with the school's superintendent, Jason Lovell, yesterday.

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So the teacher taught the lesson that particular day and by the end of the day, a post went up from a parent believing that it was a very biased and one sided approach from the teacher. There was a Facebook forum and then from there, it just took off. An awful lot of very, very strong language that indicated to us that there was a risk to an event that was scheduled last Thursday evening, the Christmas dance. It was at that point that we did contact the RCMP. They decided that some steps would be taken to address one parent in particular who had posted using language about confronting the teacher.

LL: Jason Lovell is the superintendent of the Wolf Creek School Division in Alberta. Jason Schilling is the president of the Alberta Teachers Association. He is currently on leave from his job teaching high school English and drama. And he joins us from our Edmonton studio. Hello. Good morning, Laura. What exactly was the assignment that students were given in that Grade 4 class?

JASON SCHILLING: From what I understand from the reports that I heard in the media, the assignment was looking at the energy sector. And so the teacher had shown a video from one perspective and then a video that was produced by the Alberta government and then ensued a conversation. And this is actually the way that it's listed out in the the guide to education for controversial issues is that you present both sides. You provide multiple viewpoints. You let the students do some thinking about it and then you help them form their own opinions on it. So from what I understand, the lesson was sound and appropriate.

LL: As I understand the other video was a Greenpeace video and it was looking at the oil industry.

JASON SCHILLING: Yes. From what I understand as well. Yes.

LL: And you're saying there's nothing out of ordinary about that lesson plan?

JASON SCHILLING: No, not at all. I mean, the curriculum is put out by the government for teachers to follow. And that's what teachers are hired to do, they're professionals. And so they follow the prescribed curriculum and laid out the controversial issue with the two approaches to it, the viewpoints, and allow the students to make their own opinion based on it.

LL: What do you make of the reaction from some parents and the controversy that's ensued from that?

JASON SCHILLING: Well, I find it a little, I find it disappointing and disturbing because I think that the heat in this situation and around this idea of teaching controversial issues in the classroom really needs to be turned down. It's one of those things where teachers approach controversial issues according to the curriculum, and then try to keep that balanced approach to it and sort of have this reaction. I think that it sort of creates a situation where you kind of are pitting people against one another. And that's not what teachers want in the classroom.

LL: Did this surprise you that this happened?

JASON SCHILLING: A little bit, yes. I think that, you know, there's this division that sort of being created that pits against teachers, against the energy sector. And I find that really bizarre because teachers live and work in their communities. They want to see Alberta prosper as a province just as much as the person next door.

LL: From a teacher's perspective, how difficult is it to examine these kinds of issues, environmental issues, land use issues in the classroom?

JASON SCHILLING: Well, I don't know if it's too difficult because you can go and find the information that is available to use a teacher through resources and, you know, through your university training, through the job that you do, through following the curriculum, the guide to education that's all produced by Alberta education. These are the steps you follow when you cover these issues. And it's laid out really clearly. And so as long as you follow on those aspects, it shouldn't really be that difficult to talk about things. I mean, we want to produce critical thinking, democratic students in our classrooms. We want them to think about the issues that are facing our province today and looking at solutions for moving forward.

LL: Now, we know that the premier of Alberta, Jason Kenney, had had earlier said made accusations that left wing policies were being, quote, "smuggled" into the school curriculum. We know that the education minister, Adrianna La Grange, had tweeted her own criticism of exam questions that she said were biased about the energy industry. What do you say to members of the ruling party that say teachers are being too political when it comes to climate change?

JASON SCHILLING: I don't see that in what I see with teachers in the classroom, I think. The tweet that was put out by the minister of education was taken out of context. Those questions were- when you talk to social studies teachers and they look at that question, they can see that that question is actually a really good one in terms of asking about critical thinking skills, because you're asking students to interpret what they think an author is trying to say. And so that is something I do. My own classroom in my this classroom when we read authors is what does this author trying to say? So you're trying to get the students to really think about what is being presented and then making a choice with that afterwards.

LL: So just for listeners, the question was about valid arguments, multiple choice. What valid arguments are there against oil sands development. The government announced an advisory panel earlier this year to review the province's entire education curriculum. What are you hoping comes out of that?

JASON SCHILLING: Well, the curriculum process was well underway before the election in the spring. And so I'm hoping this process will actually not impede the implementation of this new curriculum, because it's something that teachers have been looking forward to using in the classroom. And I know that we want to be able to make sure that there is a balanced approach within the curriculum that we have going forward in Alberta.

LL: There are no currently employed teachers on the panel. What do you make of that?

JASON SCHILLING: Well, that was a major bone of contention for me when the panel was announced, because the we've had a relationship, a partnership, with the Alberta government to develop curriculum within the province. And that's longstanding. We've had a relationship with the government for a long time. With that, teachers are integral to a developing curriculum in Alberta. So to have this panel announced and not have one active teacher on that panel, it was extremely disappointing. And I myself felt a little bit disrespected as a teacher because we're required to take curriculum that is developed and make it come to life in the classroom and you need the input of teachers to help determine whether or not the curriculum that is being put forth will actually be viable in the classroom.

LL: Have you spoken with the teacher who's been the subject of of the threats?

JASON SCHILLING: No.

LL: Okay. I'm just wondering what you would say to him about what's happened here.

JASON SCHILLING: You know, I say to teachers who get caught in mixed up in things like this to rely on the community, rely on your school family, rely on the fact that he this this teacher did a really good job. They had a balanced approach to their lesson and not to get caught up with this. Like I said, we really need to turn down the heat on this. And I hope that everybody who's involved in the education system can actually work together to sort of tone down the rhetoric that is out there, because pitting teachers against the energy sector is just not good.

LL: Jason Schilling, I thank you for your time.

JASON SCHILLING: Thank you, Laura.

LL: Jason Schilling is the president of the Upper to Teachers Association. He was in our Edmonton studio. Demetrios Nicolaides is Alberta's minister of Advanced Education. He's in Calgary today. Hello.

DEMETRIOS NICOLAIDES: Good morning.

LL: I wonder what you make of what you heard from Mr. Schilling, this idea that the province is politicizing education, that the heat's been turned up too much on this.

DEMETRIOS NICOLAIDES: Well, on the contrary, the province is interested in finding an approach to depoliticize education. I think it's something that we've heard comments from parents and some examples as you had talked about with your previous guests. And our priority and our focus is to ensure that we are able to take the politics out of education. It's not the role and the place of our educational system to be engaging in political discourse. Our focus and our view, of course, is that our educational system is centred around the student and centred around the development of the knowledge, skills and competencies that our students need in order to be successful in the future. That's our primary focus. And we do want to ensure that there's a de-politicisation of our educational system.

LL: Right. So this lesson was about the teachers presentation was supposed to be about critical thinking. And you heard the superintendent, the school district say there was nothing wrong with it. Why do you think it became so heated?

DEMETRIOS NICOLAIDES: Well, I think it became heated because of the current state that our province and our energy sector find itself in. There's, of course, as we know, a coordinated foreign funded campaign that has been very active in seeking to target Alberta's energy sector. That's been quite clearly articulated and clearly documented. Not to mention the challenging economic conditions that we've seen in our energy sector and in our economy more generally over the last year.

LL: But does it help when your own premier says that left wing policies are being smuggled into the school curriculum? That doesn't seem to me to help to tone it down.

DEMETRIOS NICOLAIDES: Well, which is why we've been clear that our intent and objective is to depoliticize and take the politics out of the classroom again. There were some discussion with your previous guest about the curriculum panel that our government has convened. Which has been struck to help ensure that the emphasis is placed on knowledge development, skill development, development of critical thinking skills and foundational skills and competencies that students need in order to be successful in the future.

LL: But do you think that assignment in that Grade four classroom was about critical thinking? Do you accept that?

DEMETRIOS NICOLAIDES: Well, I haven't seen the assignment myself. But again, that needs to be the priority. And we need to always ensure that we're approaching educational delivery from the perspective of students, being very mindful of the changing societal and economic conditions to ensure that our students are well positioned for success in the future.

LL: So you're not sure that this actually was a valid lesson then? I mean, we know that there were two videos showing one from the Alberta government, the other from Greenpeace. They were asked to write about how the province could cope with competing demands for land use. Is that political?

DEMETRIOS NICOLAIDES: Well, you know, I think at the end of the day, it just coming back to the issue, of course. It's important that we always keep the experience of the student and the environment of the teachers at the forefront. And there never any circumstance and there's never any situation that warrants threats and comments and other types of threats that we saw in this particular situation. There's nothing that warrants that kind of behaviour. That's always challenging and obviously has led to the cancellation of the Christmas school dance, which is not a situation that is productive.

LL: But I just trying to get some sense from you of what you think of the lesson itself. I mean, you've been quoted as saying this is in context of universities. It's not a place to shut down discussions or ideas that are unpopular, but to encourage individuals to put forward alternative viewpoints. Do you embrace that for the schools as well?

DEMETRIOS NICOLAIDES: Well, again, with our school curriculum, the focus needs to be on the development of foundational skills. That needs to be on the emphasis of the attainment of needed knowledge and competencies that our students need for for success. And within the context, in my role as minister of advanced education and the topic of free speech on our university campuses, that's a different issue as we're looking at a different environment. I've always been very clear that free speech should never be used as a guide to promote hatred or violence. And it operates with the hands of helping to strengthen critical thinking skills and foundational skill.

LL: Why is the Alberta Teachers Association being kept out of consultations about the future curriculum?

DEMETRIOS NICOLAIDES: What the panel chair, Angus McBeath, has a very long history within Edmonton public school system. He's been an educator there for more than 30 years, has a very deep and robust understanding as an educator for 30 years of the teaching environment and has operated in various roles.

LL: But you heard Mr. Schilling say there should be an active teacher on the on the panel. Why isn't there an active teacher on the panel?

DEMETRIOS NICOLAIDES: Well, and furthermore to that, of course, there's the panel members itself, which as I mentioned, Angus McBeath has an extensive history of more than 30 years of serving as an educator and teaching roles. But further to that, there are a number of curriculum working groups which in total are made up of about 350 teachers that are working to draft and write the new curriculum. And teachers are, of course, critical to the process, which is why their presence on these working committees will be critical to the development of the new curriculum.

LL: Mr. Nicolaides, I thank you for your time.

DEMETRIOS NICOLAIDES: Of course,.

LL: Demetrios Nicolaides says Alberta's minister of advanced education. He is in Calgary. This debate in Alberta raises questions about how teachers should approach hot button topics in the classroom. And that's something my next guests have thought about a lot. Charles Pascal is professor of applied psychology and human development at the Ontario Institute for Studies and Education. He is also a former deputy minister of education in Toronto and he's here with me in our Toronto studio. Hello.

CHARLES PASCAL: Good morning, Laura.

LL: You've been listening in both sides in this discussion. Alberta's teachers and the government say the issue of climate change is being politicized. What do you make of it?

CHARLES PASCAL: Well, just to begin with, the minister's comments very briefly, apart from something like the prince of platitudes, just going back to things that simply are not part of the current debate. He's a minister of advanced education. He talks about the fact that in colleges and universities, critical thinking is actually important. And he talks about the importance of the foundational things to take place in elementary and secondary as though it's not a continuum. And getting to the case at hand, from what I understand, we have a teacher who's trying to deal in the grey zone. This war between the importance of the economic importance of the gas and oil industry in Alberta on the one hand. And issues of climate change on the other. And so critical thinking is about going from the extremes, which seems to be part of the current narrative, not just in Alberta but elsewhere, to the grey zone where students and future citizens need to look at the complex social and economic issues of the day and look at on the one hand, on the other. And this is really a proxy for the problems that social media does in terms of bifurcating issues that require some nuance. So from my point of view, I don't know this teacher, but from what I understand, this teacher and the individual, Jason, who represents teachers in Alberta, they sound like outstanding pedagogs. To understand the kind of complex future in which we're educating kids.

LL: How common is this sort of predicament for Canadian public school teachers?

CHARLES PASCAL: Well, education can be and often is a political football. And so, you know, a new government comes in in Ontario. There's the case of a government that was revising the health curriculum. People will know it. More popular is the sex ed curriculum. Previous government goes about researching with experts and teachers and comes up with a modernized curriculum. A small fringe group talks about things that were wrong with it. A new premier comes in, says he's going to scrap it. We have a year of wasted time and money. And at the end of the day, the parents and students of the province say, you know what? We've got a good new curriculum. Let's tweak it a little bit. So, you know, people come in for ideological reasons. And when the premier of Alberta and his ministers say that they don't want the classroom to be politicized, by overreacting to this case, that's exactly what they're doing. I worry a little bit about a curriculum panel that's going to review the curriculum, because we don't want to ensure that what they're going to do is expunge anything that has to do with the kind of critical thinking and debates that need to happen in our classrooms in Alberta and across Canada.

LL: Now, teachers obviously are trained to do what they do and what are the dangers involved in telling teachers how to teach about certain issues?

CHARLES PASCAL: Well, look, as Jason, who represents teachers, said, there's a curriculum guidelines that all provincial governments put out curriculum guidelines. I'm assuming that there's a curriculum guideline in Alberta that says students will be able to take the current and complex issues of the day and bring to bear all the science and social sciences a rather particular issue and make some sense out of it and be able to explore all the different facets. And so it appears as though this was a case of of actually teaching to that outcome in a way that sounds very creative, showing Greenpeace on the one hand and the government's perspective with a carefully put together video. Both sides talked amongst yourselves. And let's have a conversation that may not be taking place in your respective homes where one teacher, one parent, hears their child coming and saying, we just saw a video on Greenpeace without understanding the full context.

LL: Just briefly then, you were deputy minister of education in Ontario. How did you handle that role when it came to teachers and controversial subjects?

CHARLES PASCAL: Well, look, these things always arise. You know, back when I was deputy minister and it's happened again, there were issues that arose at what you do as you have an adult conversation about it and make sure that all the experts and teachers and others are involved in the conversation.

LL: All right, Charles Pascal, thank you.

CHARLES PASCAL: Thank you.

LL: Charles Pascale is professor of Applied Psychology and human development at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. He was in our Toronto studio. Coming up in our next half hour, a new post apocalyptic novel with echoes of our world today. The thriller writer Robert Harris will be my guest, after the CBC News. I'm Laura Lynch. And you are listening to the current.

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Robert Harris on his dystopian novel Second Sleep

Guest: Robert Harris

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

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LL: Still to come, the treasures you find in the trash. The current goes dumpster diving and what we found might shock you. But first, why a top political journalists decided to write a bit of dystopian fiction.

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Fuel shortages, empty shelves, medicine shortages, widespread public unrest, not a vision from a dystopian Hollywood film, about the British government's own assessments of what a no deal Brexit may look like. The planning scenario, codenamed Operation Yellow Hammer, has now been published by the government weeks after being leaked to a newspaper and after opposition employees forced its publication.

LL: Those fears of a hard Brexit apocalypse have been hanging over the British public for years. And as they go to the polls today, there are a lot of fears out there about what the outcome is, no matter who wins. The uncertainty of the times and fears of dark futures to come has also inspired my next guest. Robert Harris is a former political journalist and the author of several best-selling novels. His latest is called The Second Sleep. He joins me from our London, England studio. Hello.

ROBERT HARRIS: Hi, Laura.

LL: Robert, you hear us, you have a long background of political reporting in Britain. And I'm just wondering, first, do you share an anxiety about the state of democracy and the country's future coming out of this vote?

ROBERT HARRIS: Oh, yes, I think that's a very widespread fear. There's been a terrible breakdown of trust between politicians and voters, and the reputation of that political institutions is at an all time low. And one feels that social media, particular Twitter, has become too powerful for politicians rarely to be able to cope with it.

LL: And I'm wondering, though, what you make of the leaders of the two main parties who are vying to run the United Kingdom?

ROBERT HARRIS: Well, as a sort of choice between [unintelligible] and arsenic for quite a lot of us, which would you prefer. Both represent a kind of the moment extreme. The centre ground of British politics has vaporized. Boris Johnson represents quite an extreme form of Brexit, something which Brexit he has never campaigned, three or four years ago. And of course, Jeremy Corbyn represents a strand of Marxist thinking in the Labour Party, which is quite different to anything we've ever seen before. I mean, I would have thought that Corbyn would have disapproved of every previous Labour prime minister, probably including Clement Atlee.

LL: Do you see a connection then, between these times of such tension and dystopian literature?

ROBERT HARRIS: Well, I think so, yes. So the idea for the novel has been in the back of my mind for five or six years. I'd written novels about ancient Rome and I thought it would be quite interesting, having written about Pompei, to write about archaeologists and scholars trying to piece together an ancient civilization. But to make this civilisation ours, to set the book far in the future and have them on a kind of treasure hunt, trying to looking at remains of our civilisation and trying to work out what sort of people we were and what led to the fall of our society. Because one thing is certain in history, every civilisation thinks it will go on forever and none of them ever does.

LL: It's quite something, though, to imagine what will happen to this one. Can you give me a brief outline of what The Second Sleep is about?

ROBERT HARRIS: Sure. It opens. I'm going to give away the twist here, and there's no other way of talking about it. I'm sorry. Please don't let this put you off.

LL: Okay, spoiler alert everybody. Here you go.

ROBERT HARRIS: The book opens with a young priest on horseback riding across Wessex in the southwest of England on his way to a tiny village. His job is to bury the priest there who's died, and he bends down for the night in this tiny place. And the year, you've been told, is 1468. And everything is candle light, travel on horseback and so on. But there are one or two clues that this isn't quite the 1468 you'd expect. A parakeet in the trees. He smokes a pipe. And then in the old man's study, as he settles down to sleep, he finds various things, plastic things, nappies, straws. What we were recognized as building bricks. And finally, an iPhone, which he says is the great symbol of the ancients hubris and blasphemy, a device with an apple on the back with a bite taken out of it. And you realize that you're actually far in the future and it's an archaeological dig into what happened to our society. It's a sort of adventure story, really. And I think, you know, you played the clip about Brexit. And it's no accident that a novel - that's been in the back of my mind since before the European referendum - suddenly felt far more re-urgent to write when you realized that the government is talking about food and medical shortages and so on. But in my novel, it isn't Brexit, obviously, that brings about this collapse, but rather a failure of the digital world, the cyber world, because we're so wired as a society nowadays that any interruption in that could be a big problem.

LL: So I just want to tell listeners the good news is that that twist is very early on in the novel. So there's a lot more to read about.

ROBERT HARRIS: I'm talking against my own book. This is ridiculous.

LL: I think you've just teased them. So anyway, the cause of the apocalypse, though, is not clear. It's not absolutely crystal clear. Why did you decide to write it that way? There's hints, but there's no clear writing about it.

ROBERT HARRIS: Well, I think that well, this is that a failure on my part, because I thought by the end of the book, in the closing pages, you do realise what exactly happened or something strongly hint to that.

LL: Yes.

ROBERT HARRIS: What the characters do, there's the priest, there's a local kind of mill owner, there's an antiquarian, a bit like John Aubry in Britain and in the 17th century, who collects artefacts and they discover that the priest had found something, and so they go out to this site and they dig. And there are various possibilities they found and documents as to what might have happened. Was it climate change or was it a nuclear exchange? What was it that brought about the collapse of this sophisticated civilization? All of it's left behind are, you know, lumps of concrete, huge structures like Stonehenge. But nobody knows what they were for. And gradually it becomes apparent that really it was the overdependence upon digitalization that caused the problem. And this is something I feel quite strongly. I think we were all sleepwalking into a situation in which certainly in a densely crowded island like Britain, life is unsustainable. If there is any interruption to the just in time supply chain that we have. I mean, I'm speaking to you from London, which is said to be six meals away from starvation because the supermarkets which appear so abundant are actually stocked overnight. All our food, urban food at least, is on the road or in constant resupply. And it's this that has been partly threatened by Brexit, but also would be threatened by a breakdown in the cyber world. And if you think of certainly myself, I would be completely hopeless if something went wrong. To interrupt the electrical supply and so on. We seem to have become a very impractical generation because of the specialization of society.

LL: In the novel, one of your characters says that modern technology drove society mad. And I'm wondering if you believe that that is true of our current society.

ROBERT HARRIS: Well, the novel is a satire, and the purpose of satire is to push things to an extreme. And so I've done that. But I do think that things like social media. I think that they have destabilised individuals, children, young people especially. They've led to a great deal of anxiety. They have fomented conspiracy theories which are now rife all over the world. I mean, the smartest thing that mankind has ever developed has led to the dumbest conversations that have ever been held. This paradox is at the heart of the problem, it seems to me, and the fact that the president of the United States can bypass the cabinet, the State Department, the Pentagon, and simply tweet from his bedroom across the world. Is it just an illustration of the way in which the institutions which have controlled and handled power have been, are collapsing under the instantaneous communication and this has led to this kind of fake news idea. My conspiracy theory is equal to your Nobel prise winning thesis. And I do think that this is a existential threat to a civilization, to be absolutely honest with you.

LL: Yes, of course, yours is not the only dystopian novel to come out recently. There's also Margaret Atwood out with the Testaments. What is the attraction for novelists to imagine dystopian futures for humanity?

ROBERT HARRIS: Well, I think that at the heart of what one does is storytelling. And you're right to have an effect and the you know, the ghost story, the horror story, the thing that makes your hair stand up on the back of your neck, that's a part of the literary tradition. I also think for me as a former political journalist right from the start, from Fatherland, my first novel nearly 30 years ago, I have used the techniques of fiction to write about the political preoccupations that I have, and used the medium of stories and characters to try and bring ideas alive and away.

LL: In your novel, in the second slate, there's a totalitarian clergy that outlaws investigations into the past. Why do totalitarian states fear honest history?

ROBERT HARRIS: Well, the control of knowledge is essential to the control of power. And the control of knowledge is in part to do with the control of language and thought this was Orwell's great insight in 1984 that if you can somehow control the language, then then you can outlaw expressions that threaten the control of the one party state. And in my novel, if you imagine, let's say there is a collapse in five or ten years from now and people flooded out of the towns and very quickly, it might become difficult for us to get our civilization back on track because it doesn't really work anymore without digitalization. If it all fell apart, what would we be left with? The office blocks, the great tower blocks in the city of London would collapse within 100 or 150 years. The motorways would disappear within 30. We would be left there with 37,000 churches which exist in Britain. They are stone built, built to last. Unlike the modern housing around them. And so, in my novel, I imagined that people will congregate in the churches at first for safety, security community, and then in time the church will provide a an explanation for what went wrong with the world of the ancients has become, that they were, as we think of the ancient Romans, that they were somehow godless, decadent, corrupt, and the church will rise again. And a particular radical form in the church. They will outlaw science, just as the Roman Catholic Church did at the time of Galileo, suspicious of of any investigation into the past. And this can be controlled because the language of the King James Bible, which in my book becomes the official lexicon of the country, has no words for science. You know, you would effectively wipe out any route back rebooting of technical civilization.

LL: You mentioned Galileo. This tension has been going on for a long time. Can science and religion ever exist harmoniously?

ROBERT HARRIS: Yes, of course. For a long time they have and indeed the scientific revolution and the industrial revolution and nonconformist home in northern England, Great Britain, which is in many ways where the modern industrial world was born. Yes, science can coexist with religion, but not if religion becomes the dominant, the equivalent, as it whereof the Communist Party or the totalitarian party that controls the state. Once you get to that position, then inevitably groups in power seek to perpetuate their own rule. And then I think there would be a problem.

LL: There's been a fear expressed lately by academics and political pundits that right wing populist movements and governments could bring about these kinds of dystopian illiberal societies. Why do you think that populist message has been so appealing to so many people that were in the West at this moment?

ROBERT HARRIS: I think that the sort of structures that we've had for the last and certainly a century or more, an elitist structure, if you like, of what is acceptable to think the control and access of the media in the hands of a relatively few has had many drawbacks. But it has had a kind of it's given as a sort of collective ground upon which to talk. The advent of social media seems to have removed all that. And now anyone can shout out, and the louder you can shout, the more followers you will have. And it's strange for me, having written novels, a trilogy of novels about Cicero and the forum were where, you know, the power of political action of Rome took place. Twitter is very like the Roman forum people. There are rumours. There are sudden crazes. People stampede from one side of it to another. Someone is lynched. Then they discover they've got the wrong person. Never mind. Let's lynch that person instead. You know, it's terrifying. Robust in many ways. Democratic also. But it's quite highly destructive. And, you know, I think if you want to know what's happening to our society, go onto Twitter, if you dare.

LL: Some days I just don't want to look at it at all.

ROBERT HARRIS: Well, exactly. Don't we all feel like that?

LL: But there's also the role of the media that I'd like you to address in this, because there's a within this there's a lot of distrust of mainstream media. The president calling it the enemy of the people, the president of the US. Can the media then still play an important role in keeping a check on power when it's under so much assault and growing distrust from the public?

LL: Well, I think that is the absolutely key point, or thing that worries me, because I think that people don't really care anymore. I feel that if the Watergate revelations came now, people would just shrug. It wouldn't lead to a president being impeached and forced to resign. That you can get away with almost anything. And this idea that there's a sort of neutral, balanced centre of commonly agreed standards that we would all adhere to norms of behaviour, if you like. If you look across the Western world and the sort of political debate that's going on, you realize that that's no longer the case. I mean, when Trump said I could go out into Fifth Avenue and shoot someone and I'd still get elected, I think he was speaking the truth.

LL: So you don't think then that these current impeachment proceedings will go anywhere, I take it?

ROBERT HARRIS: No, I don't. They probably won't go anywhere because of the Republican majority in the Senate. But above all, they won't go anywhere because they will be seen, the allegations will be seen as fake news by his supporters. This is what has happened. We've moved into silos of sort of 40 to 50 percent on either side and are not willing to believe the truth of the other. And that is completely exemplified in this country today, which as it happens, I'm talking to you on Election Day, and they are just you know, people just aren't hearing one another.

LL: But you live in a country where there is still a robust media society. There are so many newspapers. There is still that very strong public broadcaster and other networks. And I'm wondering, does the media still play an important role there? Does it still keep a check on power or has it also been diminished?

ROBERT HARRIS: I think it's been diminished. I mean, there have been any number of revelations and allegations about a present prime minister, a man who can't actually answer the question how many children he has. It would have been unthinkable even five years ago, I'd have thought. But certainly 20 years ago, for someone like Boris Johnson to become prime minister, rather like the election of Trump or several other people around the European political capitals, we have moved into some different age where the old standards don't count. So, you know, the BBC or The Guardian and everyone can mount their investigations and make their allegations, but they don't seem to count anymore.

LL: You've written about collapsed empires in the past and especially in Rome. Are there any lessons that Western democracies can learn from the end of past empires?

ROBERT HARRIS: You can learn that all civilizations and structures pass away. Nothing is permanent. Nothing lasts forever. I think that you can see in the fall of ancient Rome a pre figuring in some strange way of what's going on now. Why did this sophisticated system of government collapse a form of democracy? Not perfect, but still a form of democracy. It seems to have been a kind of division in the society into almost 50/50 as to what the republic was for and then unscrupulous, really very wealthy, high born politicians directing the anger of the people against a perceived elite in the Senate represented by people like Cicero. When I wrote those novels a decade ago, it never occurred to me that I was writing something which in some strange way would show the seeds of what might happen to us. But maybe that's just what happens with powerful structures in the end. People get bored and they topple over.

LL: So it's rather distressing talking to you.

ROBERT HARRIS: I'm sorry to ruin anyone's morning.

LL: Is there any way that you can see to avoid that fate?

ROBERT HARRIS: Well, I think that there must come a point where we have to just seriously think about social media and think whether it is the unregulated Wild West that will, in the end, if we're not careful, destroy our democratic systems. Whether these immensely powerful, profit driven companies collecting data and standing back and being morally neutral as their platforms are used by people who lie and governments manipulating elections. I mean, we haven't even touched on that, for instance. It may be that we will have to just try. We will have to find some commonly agreed way of policing all of this. I mean, I'm reluctant to go down that route, but at the same time, if things carry on like this, now the dystopia of the second sleep will come true. And one of the reasons for writing these sorts of books, I suppose, is as a kind of warning that something like this might happen.

LL: Again, that you brought in the government's manipulating the vote. That's also a function of technology. How much does that concern you?

ROBERT HARRIS: Very much. The fact of the matter is that you don't, in the old days when print and television and radio were the dominant means of receiving information, you could make a judgment about what you were being told and you knew where it was coming from. You knew the political complexion of the newspaper that you were reading. Now you don't know who is talking to you, who these voices are. Are they indeed people in your country talking about the election or are they actually people in St. Petersburg? Maybe hundreds, thousands of them. Separate accounts that are trying to manipulate what's going into your head. We know that that is going on. And we know that governments are plotting cyber warfare against one another. What worries me is that in this sphere, you know, it's not just now being used for political debates. You know, all our banking is in this sphere. You know, so much of what we carry around a so-called phone but really is a computer. On it is all photo or all our photographs, all our videos, all our correspondents, our memories and so on. You know, we've moved into an era of that seems to me quite perilous, potentially.

LL: Robert Harris, when you wake up tomorrow, what kind of United Kingdom go by way, assuming you do, what kind of United Kingdom do you expect to find?

LL: Well, I live in now and in a profoundly divided country. I know that that's not going to alter whatever the result is tomorrow. We've gone into that ancient Roman business of dividing almost 50/50. And and we're you know, we are in trouble. There's no doubt about it in a way that the country has not been in the whole course of my life before. And it is quite hard to see a way out of it. I mean, by nature, I should say that I'm an optimist and the problems that people create, people can solve. But it's not been a very happy time in this country for the past three years. And I don't see any immediate prospect for that changing.

LL: On that note, we can and I will thank you for coming in today.

ROBERT HARRIS: Been a pleasure. I'm sorry if I've been rather gloomy.

LL: That's all right. You're just telling it like it is. Robert Harris is the author of The Second Sleep. He was in our London, England studio. Coming up in our next half hour, the business case for three day weekends. I'm Laura Lynch and you're listening to The Current.

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'It's pretty staggering': Returned online purchases often sent to landfill, environmental journalist says

Guests: Adria Vasil

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

SOUNDCLIP

[Singing]

MALE VOICE: Let's take a stand. Let's all demand, no more unwanted gifts.

FEMALE VOICE: Just 10 million.

MALE VOICE: Gift sent [overlapping voices]

CHOIR: Something good, something good, something good. So give me something good.

LL: That ad is part of a Dutch banking company's campaign against consumer waste and its singing garbage collectors, one looks very much like Santa, pick up discarded presence. Some of them have festive wrapping paper still clinging to them. And you might be surprised at how true to life that ad is every day. A surprising amount of perfectly good merchandise winds up in the trash. The Current's Ben Jamieson went out with a veteran dumpster diver in search of discarded treasure.

SOUNDCLIP

DUMPSTER DIVER: I've always pulled stuff out of the garbage, throw it on my lawn. Hide grudge sales from stuff I've picked out of the garbage since I was a kid. People are like, just so wasteful right now. Everything could be bought again. You know what I mean? They won't get it fixed. They won't even try to tinker with it to get it fixed. If the button doesn't work on it, it's going out and we're buying a new one. Last week, I found a breast pump for women that just had a baby. And the only thing that was broken with it was the box was a little bit messed up. It didn't look pretty. We're walking behind this gate and the first dumpster is all cardboard. So I like this one because if the truck is gonna come, they get the cardboard first and I know enough to get out. Oh, yeah. I was in a dumpster one time in the garbage truck showed up. You should've saw the guy's face when I came up out of the dumpster is like, holy. Coming in. Sure enough, you lose your keys.

[Sound: Rustling]

DUMPSTER DIVER: [Whispering] Come on down. You want some sea salt chips? There's one, two, three, four. There's like 10 boxes of chips. Can you believe that? Some kid would love to have that? What's the expiry date on him? Oh, November 25th, 2019. They expired last week. I could have a chip party. Sometimes dumpsters are harder to get out than the others. One of our dumpsters that you've got to build a mountain to get out just in case. Let's heck this out.

[Sound: Rustling].

DUMPSTER DIVER: A bin full of potatoes. They're all frozen. But look, they were good at one time. Carrots, shallots. Can you believe that? And people are eating crap every day. They can't afford to eat good food and they're throwing it out. Pretty sad. Yeah. This is my favourite one that we're rolling up to. It's a little messy. Little messy. I've spent like two and a half hours in this dumpster. Because this dumpster is like the best of the best dumpsters. Look at the area. We're in high end area, big mansions down on the lake. I could spend the whole night in there pretty much when it's good. [Laughs] It's about 12 feet tall. See the way I did it? Come on down. Look how amazing this is, a curling one. Yay. Oh, humidifier. We're taking that. Even better, heating pad.

[Sound: Rustling]

DUMPSTER DIVER: Oh yeah. Bingo. This is my kind of dumpster: makeup. Really high end. Like we're talking this little box that's probably 85 dollars. What's this? Probiotics. This expires in 2021. This is my honey hole. I can't even believe that they're throwing that out. I don't even get it. Like, why wouldn't you just put up maybe like on a shelf, you know, maybe at the front of the store and say like big discounted items isn't something better than nothing? For maybe that somebody that can afford it but would really like to have it. So I'm making a package right now for the women's shelter so they'll pick up whatever for me. I got a lot of makeup for them, you know, for a woman. You know, make them feel nice. And I'll give things like the breast pump I got and stuff like that to women's shelter. And I'll just keep on continuing. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. So I always like to kind of like tamper with the system or something [laughs].

LL: And thanks to The Current's Ben Jamieson and that veteran dumpster diver for taking us on a search for discarded treasure. Why would so many perfectly good products wind up in a dumpster? For insight. Adria Vasil is with me in our Toronto studio. She's an environmental journalist and the managing editor of Corporate Knights magazine and the author of the Ecoholic book series. Hi.

ADRIA VASIL: Hey.

LL: What's your reaction to what was found in those dumpsters?

ADRIA VASIL: Oof. I mean, it just makes me think that we are buying so much stuff and manufacturing so much stuff, that we don't need that we end up returning, that is maybe near the expiry date or, you know, with perfectly good boxes of, you know, a curling iron and a breast pump. What not. The box is slightly dented. And people that want to give that away at Christmas. I mean it especially this time of year, Laura, I mean, we're seeing returns escalates through the roof and that contributes to this problem at a massive scale.

LL: Yes. We want to get into that. How is the boom in online shopping influencing how much good product just goes to waste?

ADRIA VASIL: Well, to be honest with you, it's pretty staggering. I mean, the increase of the volume of returns has exploded by 95 per cent over the last five years. And in Canada alone, we are returning $46 billion worth of goods every year. And you think, okay, what's the big deal? What's the problem with that? Well, the problem is that - especially when we're returning online - a lot of these products end up going in landfills.

LL: Why? You're returning something that's new and fine?

ADRIA VASIL: It actually costs a lot of companies more money to put somebody on the product, to visually eyeball it and say, you know, is this up to standard, is it up to code? Is this going to get us sued? Did somebody tamper with this box in some way? And is this returnable? And if it's clothing it has to be re-pressed and put back in a nice packaging, and for a lot of companies, it's just not worth it. So they will literally just incinerate it, or send it to the dumpster.

LL: Do you have an example of something that we might all be doing that could lead to this kind of a waste?

ADRIA VASIL: Have you ever bought any clothes online? I know I have.

LL: Yes, absolutely.

ADRIA VASIL: It's really tricky. We're buying more of our clothing online, but it's actually hard because you don't really know exactly the sizing. So what many of us are doing is called bracketing. We will buy a medium, small and large or, you know, an 8, 10 and 12 ,and try them all on and then return the two that don't fit. Problem is, the two that we return are actually, in many cases, being landfilled. And the brands do not want to deal with those returns. So they'd rather just dump them. So we think that those free returns are great service. So we actually do end up buying more and returning more because we get these containers, you know, free return little packages that come with whatever you bought. And it makes it so convenient, but it is driving an enormous amount of waste. And it's just mind-boggling, really.

LL: And when you think about it, when you're in the store and you try on a few different sizes, the other two that you don't take go back on the shelf.

ADRIA VASIL: They do not get thrown away.

LL: So are there companies that are trying to curb this practice, are there solutions?

ADRIA VASIL: You are actually seeing entire countries acting on this now. France has taken the lead in banning products that are actually returned or being dumped after just, you know, maybe a small amount of damage or just maybe they're at the end of their trend life. We're seeing so many clothing brands, in particular, throwing out or incinerating clothes as Burberry did. They were caught burning billions of dollars of clothes, H&M as well. And it was a scandal, you know, for people in the clothing industry finding out, okay, if you're a shopper knowing that billions of dollars are being burnt because they do not want this ending up on the market, and undervaluing their clothes on shelves this year. It lowers the prices, etc. So we're seeing some brands push back against this. Patagonia has started an online and a physical store for products that are maybe slightly damaged that they have repaired. You're seeing some brands actually do the repairing, encourage the repairing so that they can get packages and goods back on shelves. And France is banning the sale of these goods, of damaged or unused and returned goods- having those go to landfill, that is being banned. And so we're starting to see a shift in attitude. People are actually, I think, really fed up and disgusted by the practice. And so even in Canada, you know, there are companies that you can call to just incinerate or essentially get rid of your last year's goods and make sure your brand doesn't end up, let's say, in a second-hand store and quote unquote, "lowering the value" of your brand. But then you'll see other companies that are actually saying, okay, give us your goods and maybe we'll take your tag off of it. Maybe we'll take your logo off it, but then we'll donate it to people who need it. And that's the great thing that's happening right now.

LL: Why won't companies give the clothes to charities?

ADRIA VASIL: You know, it is because they do not want to, quote unquote, "demean or lower the quality of the brand". It's a horrible kind of classist thing. But it is happening. And they are actually... It's an image thing. They're trying to maintain exclusivity. They're trying to maintain kind of the specialness of their product. But it's really symptomatic of a larger issue with kind of our consumer culture right now.

LL: So what can we do as consumers, especially now that we're doing shopping for holidays?

ADRIA VASIL: I would highly recommend that you do second guess your returns. So think about the product closely and see if there's somebody else who can give it to. If you do not want to return it, can you donate it instead? And you know, purchase second-hand. You know, a lot of us are buying new goods that we don't really need. And there is an increased trend in second-hand shopping right now. And so I would encourage you to partake in it and to look for brands that are actually part of the circular economy. That are like Patagonia repairing, refurbishing and fixing goods at the end of their life so that they can have a second life. And so that we do not end up with so much waste.

LL: And so much dumpster diving for treasure. Thank you, Adria.

ADRIA VASIL: Thank you for having me on.

LL: Adria Vasil is an environmental journalist and the managing editor of Corporate Knights magazine. She was with me in our Toronto studio.

[Music]

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Is it time for a 4-day work week?

Guests: Miriam Marra, Ed Roderiguez

LL: As we mentioned earlier today is election day in the United Kingdom, and while Brexit is the big issue, it's not the only one. Voters will be considering as they mark their ballots. Among Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, many bold proposals is one aimed at improving work life balance. Well, let the Tory leader, though, Boris Johnson, describe it.

SOUNDCLIP

BORIS JOHNSON: A crackpot plan for a four day week, which would add massively, would add massively to the burdens not just to the NHS but to every public service in the country.

VOICE: Okay, Thank you Mr. Johnson. Mr. Corbyn responded to this, this is the proposal for a four day week for workers across the economy within 10 years of Labour government.

BORIS JOHNSON: It is about reducing the working week all across the economy, paid for by productivity increases all across Britain works longer than most well. People need to be aware that actually a shorter working week is probably a good thing for their health and wellbeing, as is [unintelligible] pay.

LL: The four day workweek and its promise of three day weekends may seem like a fantasy, but there's been a surge of interest in it worldwide. Companies like Microsoft and Japan have run pilot programs reporting increased worker productivity. Miriam Marra has studied the economics of the four day workweek. She's a lecturer in finance at the University of Reading in England, and we reached her in Dubai. Hello.

MIRIAM MARRA: Hello, Laura.

LL: In that clip from the British leaders debate, we actually heard the audience laughing out loud when Jeremy Corbyn said the four day week would be paid for by increased productivity. Is that something to laugh about?

MIRIAM MARRA: Not really. Dave idea is to reduce the average full time working week to 32 hours within the next decades with the appreciation also that this cannot be done at the same time and in the same way in every single sector of the economy. But the fact of the increase in productivity is something that we have studied and it makes perfectly sense.

LL: The Labour Party is proposing a 32 hour a week. But is it always about cutting the hours or is it sometimes about working more hours during the course of the four days?

MIRIAM MARRA: Yeah, that's a good question. In fact, in particular for our study, we have surveyed about 500 business leaders, so 500 businesses half of them in the UK to have already tried to implement a four day working week, but not all of them, by reducing hours, some of them compressing the hours. So you could go one way or the other. In the case of Microsoft, Japan, that was just a reduction of hour because essentially they have given a Friday off to each of their 2300 employees for five weeks in the row. So for Demi, was the case just to reduce the amount of working hours?

LL: And what were the results with Microsoft in Japan?

MIRIAM MARRA: What we're trying to do is to maintain productivity high by proposing to their employees to do things in a slightly different way that they used to. For example, they tried to reduce the meeting times by half. For example, instead of running one to one meetings of one hour, they would run meetings of half an hour and encourage their employees to work on online platforms of collaboration rather than just meeting one to one day, have even subsidize some of the employees to actually take family vacations for resting. So they've done different kind of things. And at the end of day trials, at the end of the five weeks they published the results and they found that their productivity level not only stayed the same, but according to their data, had increased by 40 percent, which is about increase.

LL: Wow.

MIRIAM MARRA: Yes, that's quite big. And together with that, they also saw that probably one of the reasons also was that the employees in general took a 25 percent less time off during the trial, less sick leave and, you know, less family leave and so on and so forth. And they also saw some advantages in terms of costs related to electricity consumption that were down 23 percent. Costs related to printing paper pages so that they were down by 59 percent. So there were some good [unintelligible] and particularly employees were very happy. So in their survey, they found that 92 percent of the employees said that they really liked work into shorter week. I think what is interesting is, of course, these results need to be scrutinized and thought a little bit better because of course, this was a one off attempt, one off experimental. One should wonder whether employees would have been so productive if this change was permanent.

LL: Well, the question I have, because if it showed such good results, why didn't they just keep going?

MIRIAM MARRA: Yes, well, I think they had in mind to do a second experiment in this winter. So I don't know if they're starting or this started it, but when we hopefully should find out in next experiments is what is the point of view of the customers and the clients, whether they have seen any change, any decline in services provided of if there's been any complain. This is not something that Microsoft [unintelligible] has said.

LL: So you surveyed a number of businesses that have tried the four day weak, and I wanted to start with what you saw in terms of what it meant for employees, how did it change their lives.

MIRIAM MARRA: So, well, obviously, the overwhelming majority of those employees very happy about it. 70 percent think that that would improve incredibly their mental well-being. I think what is the bottom line of everything is that allowing greater flexibility, should that be through a four day working week on a different arrangement, encourage the autonomy, encourage a sense of control over your own time, a better work life balance, and also a bigger sense of empowerment and sense of purpose in your own job.

LL: And what about employers you surveyed? What do they do for their bottom line?

MIRIAM MARRA: We asked today what we did is basically survey about 500 business leaders from businesses across the UK with different size, small, medium and large in different sectors. And they seemed to have made an estimated cumulative 92 billion pounds savings coming from exactly what I'm talking about. So increased productivity, less sick leaves and less turnover, particularly amongst the younger workers. We've also estimated that for those businesses who haven't yet implemented a four day week day could save around the cumulative 12 billion pounds by moving to one. So that is an additional saving to be made if more businesses are actually joining the club.

LL: So this all sounds great, but the idea has critics who fear it will wreck the economy. I just want to play some tape of journalist Nick Ferrari with his thoughts on the proposed four day week in Britain.

SOUNDCLIP

Utter labour la la land drivel and to support this Marxist madness. Supporters of a shorter wait point to countries such as France, Germany, where some industries have boosted output with this plan. But that ignores the crucial fact that Britain has hordes of [unintelligible] that small and medium sized enterprises. Napoleon was right. We all are a nation of shopkeepers and we should be damn proud of it too. In most instances, they simply couldn't afford this.

LL: Okay, what do you think of those comments?

MIRIAM MARRA: No, it's partially true, what he is saying. So of course I'm not taking here political stand, who's right and who's not. What I'm saying is that now with research, we did acknowledge that there are some challenges in implementing it, in particular for small and medium enterprises. There are challenges also saw in the service industry in particular for those industries where customer demands need to be met to beyond standard office hours. And then also, I think what is really important is to try to understand how you want to implement it. If you decide as a business that you can go for it. For example, who would choose the day off? So Microsoft has decided for everybody that there will be a Friday, but that means that then on Friday, you wouldn't have anyone if you had a customer and you want to talk to someone, you won't find anyone. Again, one size doesn't fit all. That doesn't mean that everybody can do it immediately. It needs to be planned. It needs to be managed.

LL: So much to consider. I thank you for your time to talk about it.

MIRIAM MARRA: Your welcome, it was my pleasure.

LL: Miriam Marra is a lecturer in finance at the University of Reading in England. We reached her in Dubai. If that is you looking for a four day workplace, your options are still rather limited. In Canada, though, you could try sending a resume to Lorne Marr, the director of business development at LSM Insurance in Markham, Ontario.

SOUNDCLIP

We we're looking for a way to kind of bring more value to our team without having to give an increase in salary. Thought this is a great way that lowers commute times, allows, you know, a longer weekend or a day off during the week where you can get a lot of stuff done. So there is a lot of benefit to it. We had very positive feedback.

LL: Marr says that employees who are less stressed are more productive, though there are just five of them at LSM. The workplace software company Citrix recently surveyed 500 Canadian office workers to get a snapshot of how many hours we really work and how many hours we'd really like to work. Ed Rodriguez is the vice president of sales and general manager of Citrix, Canada, and he's with me in our Toronto studio. Hello.

ED RODRIGUEZ: Hey, good morning.

LL: How many hours are Canadian office workers really working?

ED RODRIGUEZ: Well, the poll we had, which was roughly around 500 Canadian workers, showed about 4.5 extra hours per week. So roughly 44.5 hours per week was the average around the Canadian workers that we survey.

LL: And how does that compare to other countries?

ED RODRIGUEZ: It's roughly the same. We found a variances of maybe 30 minutes or so. We did find one variance, which was in Norway that had over eleven hours per week, but those were the outliers.

LL: So why do you think that people are working more overtime?

ED RODRIGUEZ: I think it's a couple of reasons. One primary reason is cultural, right. So what we tend to find is that perception around working those extra hours is one that's going to lead them to career growth. It's going to lead to them getting promoted sooner, being looked at as a harder worker. And so the perception actually is what's driving some of that. And the second thing that we found was really the load of work that's on folks. So if they're being asked to do things that are well beyond what people can traditionally do in a workweek, that was about 25 percent of the folks responded that it's just the workload piece.

LL: Just to get everything done that they need to do.

ED RODRIGUEZ: Everything gone.

LL: Is a four day workweek a popular idea with employees?

ED RODRIGUEZ: You know, it is a popular idea. I think we found over 88 percent of the folks would like to have a four day workweek and enjoy. In fact, anybody you talked to in your daily life would tell you a four day work would be great. You know, I think that the reality of the four day workweek is not applicable to everybody. It's applicable to certain roles in certain companies and certain organizations. For example, if you're in a customer service oriented role or let's say you're in a call centre role, those are five days a week and they need to be operating during business hours. So it really depends on the role within an organization as to whether a 40 hour work week could be something that would be doable.

LL: So Miria, Marra told us it makes economic sense for lots of businesses. Why then do so few Canadian companies seem willing to try it?

ED RODRIGUEZ: I think it comes back to that first piece I mentioned, which is the cultural component first. So, you know, we've been operating under a five day business workweek for a long time and for many good reasons. I don't think the underlying capabilities there were from a technological perspective would allow you to work a four day workweek. A four day workweek, by the way, does not mean less than 40 hours. It doesn't mean that you're working less than somebody who works a five day workweek.

LL: It might mean a longer four days to make up for the last day.

ED RODRIGUEZ: Absolutely. And that's what I think when you saw some of the surveys and some of the previous interviews is a lot about work life balance. And if you're empowering employees to actually perform the work when their time allows, when they have the balance between, you know, working with their kids, picking up people from school, addressing whether they're on vacations and snowstorms, et cetera, you allow them to work from wherever they want to work with the proper processes and technologies, you're going to find them to actually increase their productivity. That's why a lot of the studies are showing.

LL: We asked Lorne Marr, who's been doing the four day week for a decade, why he thinks other Canadian companies haven't taken up the idea. Listen to this.

SOUNDCLIP

A big problem with a lot of companies is they don't have a way to measure results. Ours being, insurance company and marketing company. We have a lot of measures to to track results so we can see if the results are there.

LL: So this idea of productivity being hard to measure, is that why we just end up looking at how many hours people work instead?

ED RODRIGUEZ: I think that's the default and that the fault comes all the way back from the industrial revolutionary days where people at punch clocks and it was all about hours in is really the measure of productivity. And I think that we've seen across all industries there is a change in moving from measures of time to measures of outputs or outcomes. Even if you look at the health care industry, for example, is always about how many patients you could see in a day. Now it's about the outcomes of the patients that you see today, who comes back actually to go back to the hospital to get more help again medically. So I think every industry is moving towards this. And if you focus on outcomes and results and those are the measures of productivity, then you're no longer focussing on the hours.

LL: So this sounds like an issue of workplace culture, which can be difficult to change. Where do you start?

ED RODRIGUEZ: I think you start looking at two things. Three things actually. One is you look at the roles first that could be applicable roles to focus on decoupling work time and work locations from the actual work being done.

LL: What do you mean by that?

ED RODRIGUEZ: So certain roles in the organization would allow you to work remotely, work from home. Because of the type of work you do. It's not necessarily measured on a daily basis. Again, you're not interacting potentially with retail and customers. You're working on projects. You're working on initiatives. Those types of things have outcomes over time frames. And if you meet those outcomes and time frames you are successful. So you look at those types of roles. The second thing is the technology underlying to provide the capability of a workplace in a workspace. And so what the type of technology that Citrix provides as an example, the workspace capabilities allow you to work from anywhere, whether it's applications and data on your desktops, irrespective of your location, irrespective of the device. An endpoint that you're actually using. You can continue to perform work, and a lot of folks are really enjoying that. Reducing their commute times and working from home is probably one of the number one projects we're seeing across Canada within Citrix.

LL: Quick question to close. How many days a week do you work here?

ED RODRIGUEZ: Great question. I don't have a finite set of days that I work. I work towards outcomes and my outcomes is making Canada successful with Citrix.

LL: Ed Rodriguez as the vice president of sales in general manager of Citrix, Canada. He was with me in our Toronto studio. That is our program for today. Stay tuned to Radio One for Q. The American fashion designer Anna Sui is on this show and she'll share her wildest stories from three decades in fashion and designer of rock n roll stars. And if you missed our segment earlier about the fight over how schools in Alberta teach kids about the oil sands, you can catch up anytime. Just download that CBC Listen app. I'm Laura Lynch. Thank you for listening to The Current.

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