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The Current Transcript for May 7, 2020

Host: Matt Gallaway

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

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SOUNDCLIP

You can't walk past them without stepping onto the road, which is full of potentially dangerously speeding drivers. So there's something in here, I think that really needs to change.

MATT GALLOWAY: What will be different when we come out of this moment in time? It's a question a lot of us are asking. One thing many people are hoping will change is the relationship we have with our public spaces. In 30 minutes, how physical distancing could force us to rethink everything from how wide our sidewalks are to who gets priority on our streets. Certainly one change people around the world are demanding is how we house and care our elders. Later, what we've learned about how to best run long term care homes and why those best practices aren't already being employed. Also this morning, are you talking to your neighbours more as this lockdown continues?

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Everyone's a little bit friendlier. We ask about each other and we're learning, you know, far more about each other than we ever would have.

MG: A Montreal artist is using this time at home to interview those around her. Plus, the Tesla CEO, Elon Musk, and his partner, the Canadian singer Grimes, have a new baby. Congratulations to them. His unpronounceable name includes an Elvish letter and looks more like a password than a traditional handle. Hmm. We will discuss. We begin, though, in the United States where ready or not, and increasingly it looks like not the great reopening is underway. Good morning. I'm Matt Galloway. And this is an extended edition of The Current.

U.S. communities hit hardest by COVID-19

Guests: Amber Nez, Benita Matthews, Chris Bradshaw

MG: Andrew Cuomo is the governor of New York, and here he is posing a philosophical question.

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Decisions we make on reopening are really profound. And the fundamental question which we're not articulating is how much do we think a human life is worth? There's a cost of staying closed. No doubt. Economic cost, the personal cost. There's also a cost of reopening quickly. Either option has a cost.

MG: And as restrictions are loosened in many parts of the United States, people all over the country are asking themselves about those costs, about the risks, the rewards and the realities of moving back to normal. A grim new forecast from the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation Projects 135,000 COVID deaths by August. Because even as restrictions are being eased, the virus is spreading fast across the United States. Now rural America is starting to feel the worst effects of this pandemic. Amber Nez is a member of the Navajo Nation. It's the largest native reservation in the United States and the site of a major outbreak. She's in Gallup, New Mexico, a town just on the border of the Navajo Nation. Amber, good morning.

AMBER NEZ: Good morning.

MG: Tell us a bit about how COVID-19 has affected where you live. Are there? Do you know how many cases there are around you right now?

AMBER NEZ: In McKinley County alone, there, just over maybe 700 cases. It's really been keeping up with it much just since this whole lockdown thing. You know, I've been kind of prioritising myself with children.

MG: Fair enough. Yes.

AMBER NEZ: But, you know, it's a major outbreak here. It's a huge, huge outbreak.

MG: That lockdown situation is one that has escalated in part because of the relationship between the city, that you're in, Gallup, and the Navajo Nation. We're kind of back and forth is there between those two areas.

AMBER NEZ: In between Gallup and all the surrounding areas, you know, we still get a high volume of traffic. You know, mostly just because it's right in the middle, you know, to get onto I-44 chuckers to go, you know, east or west to hit Albuquerque or head down towards Flagstaff. But, you know, mainly just because a lot of people have been trying to come to Gallup to do, you know, shopping. It's it's a big city. So there's a lot of people that come in from all around the Navajo Nation. And now with Gallup being locked down, you know, it's been really quiet around here. There hasn't been much traffic. There hasn't been many people.

MG: The lockdown came after the governor of New Mexico put in this this riot law. There are checkpoints, there are soldiers who are closing the road. What is it like on the streets?

AMBER NEZ: It is quiet. Gallup residents can move around freely. Basically we're we're not on lockdown, you know, but the mayor of Gallup does the shelter in place. He does urge residents to stay inside, unless you have to go out. But it's really quiet around here. Just last week, on Wednesday, the day of the lockdown. It was really, really busy. There were people calling and messaging me that were from out of town like, is this really happening? What's going on? And me, out of curiosity, I got up and I started looking around, driving around Gallup to see what it was like. And they started putting up barricades to block off the off ramps of I-40. They started getting ready to walk off the road just north of Gallup on Highway 4, 91. And they were already putting up the roadblocks like at eleven o'clock and letting people know once you go in. You know, you guys and come out, you guys are not allowed back in.

MG: Why do you think people in the Navajo Nation are particularly being hit hard by COVID-19?

AMBER NEZ: Honestly, because the Navajo Nation, you know, is big, you know, not many people know that a lot of people live without water. There's a lot of people that still live in big families like big, big families. There's not much housing out here. If you go deeper into the Navajo Nation, there are a lot of people, elders still, that still live without electricity, that still go without water. And with their kids living with them, you know, and then their older kids having kids of their own. It's just like family all getting big in one small house.

MG: You're a member of that nation. It's just 11 percent of the state's population. But what, 53 percent of the COVID cases are in that community.

AMBER NEZ: Yes. It's a big deal. It started out in church in Buttle, Arizona, and the Navajo Nation president put them on lockdown. But, I just really think it's a big deal with us not wanting people, just not wanting to stay home. People just not wanting to be in one place for so long. And I really think that has a major impact on how the spread is getting bigger and bigger and bigger.

MG: Are there are there health care facilities that are sufficient to handle an outbreak in the nation?

AMBER NEZ: Yes, we have really good health care systems. But we don't have enough doctors here. You know, just watching and read news about people coming from New York and coming from California to help with this outbreak. It's amazing. It's heart touching. They went as far as making school into temporary shelters. You know, for COVID-19 patients to help them recover. As of yesterday, I seen this, a lady you seeing that there was no room at JIMC for her son. You know, I had to go up there yesterday to go pick up my inhalers because I have asthma. And my oldest daughter has asthma. And we didn't have any more of our inhaler. So I had to go up there and, you know, seen her very yelling and screaming outside and crying because her son was so, so sick. And they said that he was basically put to the side because they have no room for him. And that just goes to show how small our health care facilities are up here.

MG: Amber, take care of yourself. I mean, I know you have three kids. You are a fourth on the way. You mentioned you have you have asthma as well. This is a really serious situation. So take care of yourself.

AMBER NEZ: And really, it really is. You know, it's something that, you know, I don't want to be scared of. We have our own tradition of, you know, prayers of profane burning fever, you know, jinxing sages, cleansing ourselves that way. And you know that that's what we rely on. We, a lot of us Native Americans, really rely on our own prayers, our own way of fighting this off and that that's what we do. You know, us as a family, we help. And we pray for the Navajo Nation. There are people that are really stubborn that don't want this that, you know, are so against it. But then in my personal opinion this needs to happen just because there are people like me out there. We don't have big voices to say, yeah, we are scared because, you know, pregnant women are high risk.

MG: Take care of yourself. I know that it's a really difficult situation. I appreciate you talking to us. There's a lot going on there. So thank you.

AMBER NEZ: You're welcome.

MG: Amber Nez is a member of the Navajo Nation. She's in Gallup, New Mexico, talking about the outbreak in that community. There are hotspots across the United States in New Mexico, Green Bay, Wisconsin, another one largely due to outbreaks in the meatpacking industry. This is Raquel Sanchez Avaro.

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I work on American Foods. I've been sick for the past three weeks. I can tell you that this has impacted my so extremely well. My five year old want me to hug him and I can't.

MG: Benita Matthew has been reporting on the outbreak. She's with the Green Bay Press Gazette in Wisconsin. Benita, good morning to you.

BENITA MATTHEW: Good morning.

MATT GALLOWAY: Tell us what's happening with those meat plants and the outbreaks that are happening in Green Bay.

BENITA MATTHEW: Yes. So Broward County has been kind of lower on the list. But over the past couple weeks, we've seen a little bit of a spike because of several points here, have seen an outbreak of the coronavirus. And so right now we're up to about 640 cases.

MG: 640 cases, and one of the things we're hearing is that workers. And again, your phone lines are breaking up. So I just hope that we can we can hear you because it's important that a lot of the workers there are concerned about going back to work. You've been talking to them. What did they tell you?

BENITA MATTHEW: Yeah. So a lot of the workers are, you know, they're scared because a lot of the workers are from vulnerable populations, they are refugees or people of colour. So they are just really worried because a lot of them are the single earner in their household. And so they're ready to go back to work. You know, they want to support their families. But the question, too, is just regarding whether companies are doing what they can to keep them safe.

MG: Have they told you anything about what those companies are doing? The president ordered meat processing and slaughtering plants to reopen, saying that these are essential industries. What if the workers told you but what it's like inside in terms of physical distancing, for example?

BENITA MATTHEW: So originally when we were talking to workers, a large part of the problem was that they were saying that the companies were really slow to respond to the outbreaks. Once people sort of testing positive. So the CDC did come here and they took a tour of the facilities. And they did say, according to our county health officials, that the companies were starting to implement different partitions, making sure the workers are standing six feet apart like they should be and kind of making sure the sanitation is available for them.

MG: But those workers still don't feel safe.

BENITA MATTHEW: It's just making sure that, yes, that they are kind of doing that, holding up continuously as the facility does reopen.

MG: There is a push across the United States and it comes from the president, but we're seeing it in various states as well to reopen the economy. What are you hearing from people in Wisconsin about that desire to get things back to normal?

BENITA MATTHEW: I would say that manufacturing and just different food processing facilities and businesses are a big part of the pride and just a big part of the economy in Green Bay. So people are nervous. There's a lot of small businesses who have had to kind of struggle as we were in a lockdown. So they are kind of a little bit eager to get started, able to get their business back open. But the question that they're asking is whether that is the proper thing to do to make sure that other customers are safe.

MG: Have there been those protests that we've seen elsewhere across the United States with people demanding that the lockdown be rolled back?

BENITA MATTHEW: So those purchases have actually been going on a little bit more in the metropolitan areas of Wisconsin and we haven't seen too many in Green Bay. But there have been people like the state capital.

MG: The Wisconsin Supreme Court has been hearing arguments from Republican lawmakers who are opposing these stay at home measures. What are those lawmakers arguing?

BENITA MATTHEW: The Republican lawmakers essentially filed a lawsuit against our Governor Ivar's and his health secretary because he originally put in place the lockdown and then it was supposed to expire at the end of April. But the health secretary extended it to continue until May 26. So they're basically alleging there was an abuse of power done by the secretary by expanding it. And so they're kind of arguing that the lawmakers would need to be part of the conversation when developing the new order. And so is the Supreme Court has been holding arguments yesterday. And so depending on whatever their decision is, lawmakers would probably have to work with the governor to come up with a new thing in place. And they are hoping to put in a more regional approach to reopening the state and so doing a whole statewide one.

MG: Benita, good to speak with you about what's happening in your state. Thank you.

BENITA MATTHEW: Yes. Thank you.

MG: Benita Matthew is a reporter with the Green Bay Press Gazette. She was in Green Bay, Wisconsin. The death rate from COVID-19, in the United States has revealed a troubling truth. African-Americans are being disproportionately devastated by this virus. In Washington, D.C., the data shows that 79 percent of the people who have died from the coronavirus there are black. They make up less than half of the population. Chris Bradshaw is executive director of Dreaming Out Loud. It's a non-profit that's been providing emergency food aid to people during this pandemic. He is in Washington, D.C.. Chris, good morning to you.

CHRIS BRADSHAW: Good morning. How are you?

MG: I'm okay. Tell me a little bit about that disparity. Again, in D.C., the population is under half-black and yet 79 percent of the people who have died from this coronavirus there are African-American. What do you make of that?

CHRIS BRADSHAW: Yes. Well, the problem is that the coronavirus death follow on to historical issues related to wealth and health that tracked back to America's history of chattel slavery, denial of access to resources, to education levels that would allow for higher income levels and family wealth. And so you have situations where there aren't enough grocery stores and there's not enough access to fresh produce. There's not enough access to hospital care or the jobs. And so what we see is that the virus tracks right behind those social disparities and it leaves black communities more vulnerable than others.

MG: What have you seen on the ground in the work that you're doing and helping people in the midst of this pandemic?

CHRIS BRADSHAW: On the ground, I've seen a lot of beautiful things. I've seen a lot of people come together and support one another through mutual aid groups on the ground communities finding solutions to get food to and seniors. But that very real challenge of how to stay safe while doing that, how to stay mentally well, while you know that your neighbours, that your cousins, that your friends may be suffering, that may have the virus, may have lost someone to the virus. But what we've seen is resiliency, and that's what we choose to lift up. But we don't want to drop the fact that these disparities are connected to the racial wealth gap and the historical injustices that have been perpetrated against African-American community.

MG: Do you worry that this could be exacerbated, those historical injustices, as you say, because these communities are being hit particularly hard and the long tail effect of that could be an economic one in addition to a health crisis?

CHRIS BRADSHAW: Well, we exist in perpetual economic crisis. And so for us, it's just how much will it deepen in Ward seven and Ward eight where we work primarily? We see double digit unemployment in the best of times. Our unemployment rates are always double that of the white Americans. And so when we are heading into a deep, deep economic crisis, a recession, and some say - hopefully not - a depression, we're going to see the worst of that as well. And so what we want to do is to make sure that progressive policies are put forward and that are protecting vulnerable communities and those who have been left behind are actually lifted up in these times.

MG: How do you square what you are seeing with the push coming from your federal government, which is also in Washington, D.C., to accelerate the reopening across the country?

CHRIS BRADSHAW: I believe that the federal government is a white supremacist government.

MG: It is pretty strong language.

CHRIS BRADSHAW: Part and parcel of a white supremacist party, in that effect. Part of the reason why they don't care about who is going to damage when they reopen is because of who it's killing.

MG: So you believe that the government is willing to open the the economy despite the fact that marginalized disadvantaged communities, whether it's yours, whether it's the one we're talking about the Navajo Nation or the refugee workers at the meatpacking plant, that they are going to be disproportionately affected, but that you believe that that doesn't in some ways matter to the decision of the federal government.

CHRIS BRADSHAW: It does not. And if you look at a lot of the governors who have followed the federal intransigents about what is happening with the coronavirus. It's often in the southern states and states that have a deep, deep historical legacy of oppressing and, you know, murdering and lynching black folks and continuing to perpetrate the social injustices that we speak of.

MG: That's a harsh reality to face in the midst of a crisis like this.

CHRIS BRADSHAW: It is. And it's unfortunate that here we are in 2020. Generations after the civil rights movement, generations after the red summer and and many generations, a couple of generations after slavery that we're talking about the same things that have just reformed in new ways and put forward with new energy in this day in time.

MG: Chris, good luck in the work that you're doing. It's important in D.C. and I appreciate you talking to us. Thank you.

CHRIS BRADSHAW: Thank you.

MG: Chris Bradshaw, executive director of Dreaming Out Loud, it's a non-profit based in Washington, D.C. The CBC News is up next. Following that, the city after the coronavirus. Why this could be an opportunity to change urban areas for the better. We'll talk about how to implement that change and how to make it stick. That's coming in six minutes. I'm Matt Galloway. This is The Current on CBC Radio One. Stay with us.

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The future of public space

Guests: Brent Toderian, Mike Lydon

MG: Good morning. I'm Matt Galloway. You're listening to The Current.

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Still to come, he's awaiting trial and he wants out of jail. Our documentary, An Urgent Matter, coming up in half an hour. But first, the future of Cities after COVID-19.

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MG: It may turn out to be the virus that changes everything from the way we work to the way we learn, play, how we function as a society. As part of our series, season long series, The Fix, we are looking at weaknesses exposed by this pandemic and asking how to build a better future. In the wake of what we are all going through today, we begin in the middle of the street in a city typically swimming with cars.

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I'm standing at the corner of Clarkson, Varick and Carmine. It's hard to believe, but about a year and a half ago, it was just a sea of traffic, a total traffic sewer. And today, because so much is shut down, we're barely think any cars go through. Just a handful each lights up. You can hear birds chirping. It's actually pleasant over here, which is not something you would usually use to describe this particular intersection.

MG: You can kind of view the shock in his voice over the honking of the heart and cars. That's Doug Gordon. He's the host of the podcast War on Cars on the Streets of New York City. He can barely recognise his own city and that transformation is happening right around the world. Brent Toderian is an urban planning consultant, also the former chief planner for the city of Vancouver. Brent, good morning.

BRENT TODERIAN: Good morning, Matt.

MG: Take a look at the the city itself from a big picture, what do you see as the role of a city in an event like the one we're currently in the midst of right now?

BRENT TODERIAN: Well, the first role and goal of all cities and all leaders is to keep us safe and healthy, certainly beyond that, to facilitate all the successful elements of city life, commerce, creativity, etc. So, you know, the nature of cities is to bring people together. And then the nature of physical distancing is to keep people somewhat separate from each other while still being together. So there's a tension in cities that doesn't normally exist. All the definitions of success for great cities are about lively, packed streets, public spaces, even packed. Public transit is an indication of success for cities because those people are getting around and interacting with our economy without driving cars. So all of our definitions of success are kind of being turned on their head during this pandemic. And it's been a learning opportunity, if we're willing to, to really observe closely all the details of city making, both large and small, and that probably don't work as well as we want, even in the best of circumstances and certainly aren't working like we'd like them to work now. So if we're willing to learn from this, it can be transformative. But I'm not necessarily convinced that all cities are really learning.

MG: Let's talk about what cities in this country are doing. How do you think Canadian cities have met the challenges they're facing because of the coronavirus?

MG: Well, I think Canadian cities, tracking this over the last eight weeks or so, Canadian cities, we're ahead of the game early, well, some of the earliest cities to have some level of action to transform their streets, transform their public spaces, the life between buildings, to make more room for people, more people recreating, getting exercise, mental rest spent, getting to work, especially our central services are just getting to groceries, doing all that in a healthy way, in a safe way while physical distancing. Canadian cities came out relatively early, not as early as the Latin American cities, which frankly were the fastest, but cities like - surprising cities - cities that are normally known for their cars, like Winnipeg and Calgary, where some of the first to come out with pilots on on a few streets or roads, closing them down to cars, opening them up to people of Vancouver with a closing of the roads within Stanley Park to cars and Beach Avenue leading up to Stanley Park, which was a pinch point for the seawall. Montreal in the Plateau neighbourhood, closing down a major boulevard to cars and opening it up to people. So Canadian cities were certainly ahead of American cities in quick action. But then Canadian cities stopped, didn't go further. And what's interesting has been to observe some of the American cities outdo Canadian cities by doing much more significant and dramatic moves while Canadian cities sort of stopped with their initial moves. And then, of course, there are some Canadian cities that haven't done much at all.

MG: Obviously, it will not go unnoticed that you didn't mention the city that I'm sitting in, which is Toronto. Right.

BRENT TODERIAN: And there's been as you know, there's been some recent announcements that that there is a plan to do more or a timeframe to do more. But Toronto and Ottawa have been the notable outliers, the cities that not only haven't done anything, but we're very adamant in their statement that nothing needed to be that which is kind of what New York started with as a position. Weeks and weeks ago, starting off saying nothing needed to be done. Then they did a pilot that was almost designed for failure and indeed was a failure. They emphasized policing and enforcement far too much. They did just a few streets that had the potential to become destinations instead of taking a hyper local approach. They made a lot of mistakes, proclaimed it a failure, said they don't need to do anything now and then. Only within the last week or so have done some big dramatic moves, mainly because the mayor was positioned in an almost embarrassed to do so by city council, another leaders.

MG: Well, let's talk about New York in a minute. But first, let's get into why some cities like Toronto, perhaps, and Ottawa would be reluctant to make these big moves. Have a listen to Matti Siemiatycki Music. He's the interim director for the School of Cities at the University of Toronto.

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This has the potential to be a once in a generation opportunity to start reshaping cities, to make them more walkable, to create space for cycling. But that's by no means guaranteed, especially in our suburban communities where the majority of Canadians live, where the car is for many people the main way of getting around, the only way of getting around and where land uses are very spread out, which we're also in a moment where we're talking a lot about social distancing. That poses challenges for the viability of. Public transit of the transit needs people to be close together in the vehicles. And already we've seen parts of the transit vehicles being blocked off and challenges around implementing open streets and cycling measures.

MG: Couple of things there, Brent Toderian to talk about. One is just the idea that some areas the car culture is an entrenched culture and a dominant culture. How much of a barrier is that in thinking about what the city could be in future?

BRENT TODERIAN: Well, we tend to call it car culture, like it's just culture that is standing in the way. And in some cases, that's part of the problem. But car dependency is more than just culture. It's- we've literally created scenario's suburban environments, particularly where the car is the only option because we designed it that way very deliberately. So I'm almost hesitant to refer to it as culture. It's like we're locked in and have no other choice. Even if culture change, the physical environment is keeping people from making other choices. So in that particularly the suburban areas where walking, biking and public transit isn't really a viable option to get to work, for example, if you're an essential service person, then you have a lot fewer choices. Those places are less resilient to nimble. They can't adapt as quickly as some of the urban places. On the other hand, in the urban places, as as the speaker was saying, because we've got other choices like walking, biking and transit. But transit in particular has had to change because of the need for physical distancing. And thankfully, the numbers have been significantly reduced because we needed that reduction during the pandemic. But the big question, of course, is whether there will be lasting impact on public transit ridership. Because if that's the case in the really negative and bad thing for the future of cities.

MG: But would cities like Toronto and I mean, again, to your point, there have been signals in the last 24 hours or so the trend is going to move or Ottawa. Why would they be reluctant and resistant to adapt to a reality where there are fewer cars on the road? There are more people who are walking. Sidewalks are narrow and they're looking for places to go.

BRENT TODERIAN: Well, it's actually relatively simple, I think there's two things happening. First of all, the cities that already had a culture for making immediate and quick changes, particularly in how streets are used. Cities that already were doing that, they were the first to react. They were the best in how they reacted. That's why Latin American cities did particularly well. They were already used to transforming. In the case of Bogota, Colombia, for example, about 117 kilometres up their city. Every single Sunday. Transforming it into a space for people andwalking and on bikes through their [unintleleigble] program. One of the first things the mayors did that the mayor did eight weeks ago in Bogota was just to make that program all week long. And then they came just days later and added in another hundred and seventeen kilometres of transformed car lane into walking and biking his base. So they already had a culture, they had a skill set. They were used to it. They already knew that the street and understood that the street could be transformed as a place for people. So they had a head start ideologically, culturally and from a skill set perspective. I think the city said I've been really hesitant in Canada, Ottawa, in Toronto. They have a leadership that was very focussed on the movement of the car. It does really come down to leadership ideology. There was a great reluctance and resistance to even admitting there was a problem with regard to speeding of cars, which has been a real problem during this pandemic. There's fewer cars out on the road, but they're going faster. And that's actually more dangerous for drivers and for pedestrians and cyclists on the road. So there was a reluctance to admit that there was a problem and an ideological barrier, in my opinion, an observation, that has kept them from reconsidering that car space. And when they do, we consider it. It's very reluctantly. And if that's the case, you can easily do the wrong things or make mistakes in how you do it.

MG: Just very briefly, an example of this you talked about on Twitter. Is the button that you will often see when you try to cross the road. It's referred to as the beg button and you push the button because you want the light to change so that you can cross. If you don't push the button, then perhaps the light doesn't change and the cars will continue to go against you. Why did you want to see the big button removed.

BRENT TODERIAN: With such a small detail when there are much bigger issues going on in the functioning of cities. But it's indicative of this issue of ideology at the best of times, the beg button, the putting of pedestrians into a second class citizen kind of position in the efficient operation of intersections for the movement of cars. They've always been problematic. They've always been something that is kind of an indicator species for the wrong attitude, the wrong ideology when it comes to cars and people. But particularly a bad idea when they can contribute to viral spread. So a lot of cities quickly, smartly, even Calgary, which is a city that isn't known for reconsidering the role of the car, necessarily did a pilot and turned off their big buttons and made their intersections automated, which helped put pedestrians function better without viral spread. A small detail, but indicative that if your hesitant to have any impact on on the perceived efficiency of cars, you're going to not want to make these kind of moves. And indeed, a lot of cities when they were asked, there's been motions of council interviews from media, when they're asked why haven't you turned off your beg buttons? The responses in many cities have been, well, we don't need it to turn it off because there's not very many pedestrians. But that's kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy. You've designed it in a way where pedestrians aren't really welcome and sure enough, they don't come. Secondly, there's this immediate answer that says, well, it could affect the smooth the smooth efficiency of car movement, because that's always the priority in certain cities. So it's I use it as an indicator species of the wrong perspective, the wrong mindset when it comes to pedestrians versus car movements, et cetera.

MG: Brent Toderian you've been talking about New York City. I want to bring in another voice. Michael Lydon is the founder and principal of Street Plants, one of the urban planners behind a movement known as Tactical Urbanism. He is in New York City. Mike, good morning to you.

MIKE LYDON: Good morning, Matt.

MG: What's tactical urbanism?

MIKE LYDON: Tactical urbanism, the use of short term and low cost materials to transform city streets and public spaces. The whole idea to test things out, learn what works and what doesn't. And then you invest in the things that do work well. So it's really a we called test before you invest. Methodology can be really effective in showing people with an actual experience on the street how things can change for a positive nature.

MG: How's that been applied to the streets of New York in the midst of this pandemic?

MIKE LYDON: Well, we've seen temporary bike lanes be installed using just, you know, traffic barrels and cones. It's a very common technique around the globe, actually. And recently, as Brent pointed out, we're seeing now open streets or share to slow streets where just police barricades and signage is being used to divert traffic or do, you know, filter traffic out. It's only essential trips on a given block. And that's opening up that space for people to have physical activity or just to be outside for mental respite, Brent also mentioned. So that's starting to be rolled out. We should have about 100 miles of that in the coming weeks. Right now, we have got nine miles that are open to people.

MG: And how those nine miles changed the way that you experience your city.

MIKE LYDON: Well, it doesn't actually that because we've got 6000 miles of streets in New York. So unless you happen to live very close to one of these locations, it's not a huge benefit for you. Yes. I think it's the scale of 100 miles. They'll start to, you know, distribute across the city to a lot of different neighbourhoods where it can be really helpful. And, you know, there's more to this than just closing, you know, street to cars, open it for people. You have to think about where to do that, you know. And so these early closures in New York have been adjacent to very large parks, which seems a little bit redundant. So really has to think about where people don't have access to a lot of open space. Start there and then spread the network to reach, you know, more, more communities and form a way that you can not just come to a place, but move around the city safely and at a safe physical distance.

MG: Is your sense, just finally, that these changes could be permanent in New York City, that you could see a rebalancing of the streets, more equitable streets in that city?

MIKE LYDON: Absolutely. I mean, I think, you know, the longer this goes on and the more these streets are open to people, the more demand there's going to be for them to remain that way. It's a really pleasant environment when you don't have to contend with a car in the street all the time, everywhere. You know, certain streets, I think can be made relatively the same in forming their transportation function to a degree. But a lot of these should local residential streets, there's no reason they have to be dominated by motor vehicles.

MG: Mike, good to speak with you. Thank you.

MIKE LYDON: Thanks.

MG: Michael Lydon is the founder and principal of ST Plans. He was in New York City. Brent Toderian, do you share the optimism that Mike had? One of the arguments that's often made in terms of going against changing the nature of the streets is that if you give people an inch, they'll take a mile and that a pilot project can suddenly turn permanent. Is that a possibility and is that a good thing?

BRENT TODERIAN: Well, I've been tracking the excuses that various cities have been giving for not doing this, and perhaps the most cynical one is this the idea that people might like it and may actually pressure politicians and leaders to to keep some of it. It's almost ironic that you don't want some cities don't want to provide evidence that this might actually make the city better. And then I'm saying that's somewhat tongue in cheek. But it's also an indication of this ideological challenge that many cities have. To be overly simplistic on separating cities into two categories. And I've actually suggested that in 10 years we'll be talking about this pandemic as a turning point where there's sort of two categories of cities, the cities that show creativity and a lack of car focussed ideology in this moment and used this as an opportunity for cities to work better, both within pandemics and aside from pandemics. And the cities that sort of double down on the status quo thinking and haven't learned and experimented and actually facilitated their skill sets and their culture around experimentation and rethinking cars. So you're going to see that same ideology being the main barrier to conversations about making things permanent, just like it made some cities reluctant to do anything temporarily. It's going to make those same cities reluctant to consider permanent learning, permanent change as a result of this.

MG: One city that would seem to be doing things in a progressive way, a way that it's looking ahead to change is Vilnius in Lithuania? Have a listen to the mayor of that city, Remigijus Simasius.

SOUNDCLIP

We have calculated that in order to have at least two meters distance between people sitting by different tables, we have to provide more space to open cafes. So we basically introduced an open air cafes, which covers all the Vilnus and offered all the squares and parks and the places to affairs. And I must say, roosts very interestingly, very well, because of course we have less density of people sitting by different tables, but almost the same amount. And we have some squares which are empty, all covered by pedestrians now covered by tables at a logical or at least two meters distance. So it's works quite well.

MG: Brent, what do you make of what Vilnius is doing?

BRENT TODERIAN: Well, it's illustrative of how European cities have a better track record of learning from crises, of course, in the 1970s. They transformed many cities around better mobility after the oil crisis in the 70s and they made permanent change. They learned. They observe. They made permanent change. Where North America was not particularly good at that. Back then, I think cities like Vilnius are showing that if you, not only if you want people to be able to move safely and interact with the city safely, but if you want to reactivate the economy through things like restaurants, which are a critical part of making a downtown or centre city function as an ecosystem, you've got to give it more space. It's the only way it works. It's this observation we've had that we will never be able to not see again is how tight the life between buildings actually is after the amount of space that we've surrendered to the cars. And I don't say that ideologically. I say that practical pragmatically about geometry. When you're giving so much space over to cars, everything else is fighting for space, pedestrians, moving bikes, trying to move safely, patios and outdoor seating for restaurants, all fighting for the leftover space, on the best of times and the best of conditions. This is something we've been talking about in cities for forever. But when especially heightened in the context of this pandemic, I honestly don't think we'll ever quite look at the width of sidewalks, the amount of space we have for public life the same way again.

MG: We're talking to you as part of our series The Fix, where we take on these big, you know, sticky issues and try to figure out what the way out of them is there. There are a lot of people who were very concerned about the health of cities coming out of this pandemic. And it's about the economy. It's about people not riding transit, perhaps, it's about what's happening on the main streets and and the things that make cities. I was talking with the mayor of Montreal earlier this week. The things that make cities great, which is you go and there are people jammed up next to each other at a bar or at a cafe or in a square or a festival in the last couple of minutes that we have, are you hopeful for the future, given those concerns that that city's face around the world?

BRENT TODERIAN: Hopeful is the wrong word for me, I'm a city planner by by definition, I'm not reactive. I'm proactive. What I am is determined. Let's be really clear. If we just let things play out the way that they might play out, our cities have a great chance of getting much worse and our future has a chance of getting much worse, because if we double down on car dependency and car use and urban sprawl and suburban sprawl because of the fear that that will go away. But it won't go away if we end up changing our our funding mechanisms are incentives, economic and convenience space for why we choose how to get around the city in the way that we choose it. If we end up doubling down towards the car because of fear of this pandemic, our cities will get worse and we'll be putting our foot on the gas towards the worst consequences of climate change. Ironically, not the least of which are more and future pandemics, which is one of the consequences of climate change. So hopeful is the wrong word. What I am is determined to speak out, to fight, to make sure that the best learnings and opportunities and observations we've had during this pandemic are acted on. And the biggest risks, the biggest threats to the future of our cities, including threats to public transit, which is an essential system in the functioning of our cities and our chance to mitigate climate change, that those effects are temporary at best and don't stick. They don't become permanent, because if they do, our response to this pandemic will lead to things that are actually worse than this pandemic itself. How we react to this pandemic is the greatest threat or opportunity that cities have.

MG: And so it may be, okay, if hope isn't the right word, then in a couple of seconds, are you confident that that opportunity will be seised on by those who control who run the cities across this country?

BRENT TODERIAN: To be honest, I think it will vary by city, will vary by the leadership. It will vary by the culture and ideology around learning and and thinking outside the box. There are forces out there that are already going starting to try to convince us that sprawl is better and safer, which it's not. There's forces out there trying to convince us that cars are safer, even though the stats don't show that. So we will have to be, those of us who are fighting for the future of cities and know that cities have to succeed coming out of this, has to be equally blunt, equally persuasive, and frankly make the case compellingly that we can't afford for our cities to get weaker because of this pandemic. We need our cities to be more nimble, resilient, stronger, be able to react to future crises. Because let's remember, this is a dress rehearsal for worst things to come if we're not smart.

MG: Brent, good to speak with you. I appreciate it. Thank you.

BRENT TODERIAN: My pleasure.

MG: Brent Horton is an urban planner and consultant. He was in Vancouver. Any thoughts on this in terms of where cities could go and some of the changes that you'd like to see and how they could be embraced? You can let us know through our Web site. cbc.ca/thecurrent. Click on the contact link. Coming up, trying to get out of jail free from the threat of coronavirus. You'll hear that in 90 seconds. I'm Matt Galloway. This is the current CBC Radio One.

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Documentary - An Urgent Matter: In prison during the pandemic; Alisa Palmer

Guests: Leora Smith, T, Hillary Dudding, Alisa Palmer

MG: Hello, I'm Matt Galloway. You're listening to The Current. Early on in this pandemic. People began warning of the threats that cCOVID-19 would pose for Canada's prisons and jails. Nearly two months in, there have been serious outbreaks of the virus at institutions across this country. Some prisoners serving sentences have been released early. Others temporarily. In Ontario, jails typically hold more people presumed innocent than those found guilty of a crime. That, according to the auditor general, accused, or waiting trial over the past month. Our colleagues at the CBC Doc Project have been following a pre-trial detainee and his lawyer and their attempts to get him out. Leora Smith has a lawyer turned freelance journalist, and this is her documentary, An Urgent Matter.

SOUNDCLIP

LEORA SMITH: Are you comfortable using your name?

T: I prefer an initial, to be honest with you.

LEORA SMITH: T grew up in Toronto.

LEORA SMITH: How old are you?

T: I'm 21.

LEORA SMITH: He was arrested in March on charges related to drugs and possessing a weapon, but he doesn't want to talk much about it.

T: I prefer just not to make anybody know certain things, right due to my own insecurity, everything.

LEORA SMITH: I'll stress this a few times, but it's important to understand that T hasn't been convicted of anything. He's in jail waiting for his trial. He's presumed innocent.

[Music]

LEORA SMITH: When T he was arrested, he was placed in the Toronto East Detention Centre. It's where a lot of people arrested on the east side of Toronto wait for their trials. From the outside the east, looks like a big brown box broken up by barred windows. On the other side of the windows are hundreds prisoners. There's no real outdoor space in Toronto East Detention Centre. There's a place called a yard, but it's got cement walls. T says when you look up, you can see the sky through barbed wire. The East was built to fit 340 people, but the province now says its capacity is closer to 370, which really just means they've added more beds into the cells. Sometimes cells which were really built for to squeeze three people inside. Judges have used a lot of words to describe conditions in Toronto's detention centres; oppressive, unacceptable and quote, "consistently failing to meet minimum standards established by the United Nations". But T has his own description.

T: It's a place for animals.

LEORA SMITH: Back in March, when he first went into Toronto East, he remembers less than 50 people in Ontario had confirmed cases of COVID-19. But as the days went on, he had clues that things were getting worse. First, on March 13th, the jails ended all in-person visits. A few days later, the Superior Court of Justice suspended everything but urgent matters, saying it was no longer safe to come to court in person. T remembers a sergeant walking down his row of cells. It's called a range. Announcing the changes.

T: She told us that courts are cancelled. Everything video, no visit, no nothing. It's really hard because the loved ones they love, they won't be able to see you. And then court cases, things like that, people get pushed back and and it's not fair for the inmates that are sitting in that position.

LEORA SMITH: When the courts closed, pre-trial detention became purgatory. Some people had already been waiting inside for months for their trials, some for over a year. Some had trials coming up in April or May, and all of them were cancelled. No one had new dates. T had no idea how long he'd have to wait for his trial.

T: So the ones that are awaiting their trial are sitting there waiting, waiting, waiting.

LEORA SMITH: T cell faced a common area where a TV blasted the 24 hour news channel on the news. He saw the numbers of COVID cases outside going up. The men watched together as politicians called for social distancing. Then looked around their small common area, their tiny cells.

T: It could be quickly easy to be caught, especially if a guard were to bring it in. That's the most important part, because then the jail would be screwed.

LEORA SMITH: Listening to the news, people inside started to panic. A guard told T that now was the time. Don't stay in here until your trial. Find a way to make bail.

T: You could try and go for it. Go for. Who knows how bad it's gonna get how fast.

LEORA SMITH: T took the advice. He called his lawyer and asked her to do whatever she could to get him out.

HILLARY DUDDING: Yes, it's been it's been one of the busiest and most stressful insta real times of my whole career.

LEORA SMITH: This is Hillary Dudding T's lawyer.

HILLARY DUDDING: And I'm a criminal defence lawyer, so I defend people who were charged with crimes.

LEORA SMITH: Hillary says as soon as the schools closed, it hit her how serious this virus would be. But it was the news about cruise's that made her really worried.

HILLARY DUDDING: Because you're confined and in such a closed space with other people. To me that if the reason that things got so out of control on cruise ships was because of those factors, they were going to be doubly a problem for people in jail.

LEORA SMITH: It's March and I'm talking to Hillary over Skype. While the superior court closed, the Ontario Court of Justice, which does most bail hearings, stayed open, but only for urgent matters.

HILLARY DUDDING: I spent a weekend looking at a list of all of my clients who are in custody and trying to assess whether I thought there was any way in which they could access bail.

LEORA SMITH: She told me everybody's looking for bail. To understand this story, I need to pause a minute to talk about bail. In the movies. It goes like this. You get arrested, you go to court, the judge sets your bail. Maybe it's $500. Maybe it's $10000. Maybe if you're Harvey Weinstein, it's a million dollars. You pay the bail and you go home to wait for your trial. Or if you can't pay your bail, you go to jail and wait there. That's not how it works in Canada. When you're arrested in Canada. The police might let you go straight away or they might keep you in jail. If they keep you in jail you go to a courthouse where a defence lawyer and a prosecutor, who we call a crown, look over your record and your charges. Then the crown makes you an offer. Best case scenario, the crown just agrees to your release. You promise to come back for your court dates and then you go home. No money, no conditions, easy, but you might not get that offer. Instead, the crown might say, okay, I'll agree to your release, but only on certain conditions. Maybe the condition is you can't talk to certain people or maybe that you can't have a gun. There are all kinds of things a crown might ask for. A lot of the time part of the deal is a surety that someone to keep track of you while you're waiting for your court date. One defence attorney told me she heard a justice of the peace call a surety, quote, "your community jailer". So those were two options. The Crown agrees to release with no conditions or release with some conditions and maybe a surety. But there's also a third option. The Crown might not agree to your release at all. That's what happened in T's case. If the Crown doesn't want you out, that's when you get a contested bail hearing.

HILLARY DUDDING: What was obvious was that anybody who could get out of jail, we should be trying to get to the jail. The jails are already at a crisis point now without COVID.

LEORA SMITH: Judges have been extremely critical of conditions in Ontario's jails. This January, a judge called conditions in Toronto South Detention Centre, quote, "deliberate state misconduct", finding one man had been locked in his cell for nearly half of his two and a half year pre-trial detention and that he'd been given clothes, towels and sheets stained with blood, urine and faeces. Ontario jails don't look like jails on TV. In Toronto East. There's no wall of bars across each cell. Instead, each cell has a heavy door that shut every night. Closing everyone inside during lockdowns, which happen when there is staff shortages or violent incidents, those heavy doors can stay closed for a full day. Sometimes more. Food gets passed in through a hatch on the door. Now take all that and add a pandemic.

T: There's a lot of lockdowns going into process because of the virus happening. So a lot of workers were coming into work and things like that. If there's not enough staff, you won't be allowed out.

LEORA SMITH: As for hygeine, he says the correctional officers deliver a pile of toiletries every week, you might get some, but then again, you might not.

T: Everybody has the device to everybody on the range. So some people take more than what they need or what they have to believe leaves a lot of people out of luck.

LEORA SMITH: According to T, access to hand sanitizer is unpredictable, too. Most jails won't let prisoners have hand sanitizer at all because of the alcohol content. But he says the guards in Toronto east keep large bottles of it in the hallways between the cells and the yard. People inside figured out if you buy something from the canteen like a small bottle of shampoo, you can save the bottle and fill it up with hand sanitizer as you walk by.

LEORA SMITH: If they saw you filling up a bottle is that fine?

T: For some you would be fine. But for others they would make a complaint about it.

LEORA SMITH: The solicitor general oversees the management of Ontario's prisons. I reached out asking them what safety measures have been put in place in the wake of COVID. In a written statement, they said: We have implemented a number of measures at all of our institutions to keep our staff and those in our custody safe. This includes proactive work to address overcrowding in our institutions with the objective to decrease the risk to public health while ensuring public safety. They said that the prison population has been reduced by 32 percent. Some people released temporarily, some permanently, but they couldn't say how many pre-trial detainees had been released. In reference to lockdowns, they said that, quote: "Lockdowns are not used to prevent the spread of communicable diseases and there is no blanket lockdown in response to COVID-19". But what feels certain for T is that no matter how careful he is, as long as he's inside, he can't really keep himself safe.

T: A lot of people are scared because they don't know who would be the next one to come in that has it. It's a mind game [unintelligible].

LEORA SMITH: So this is what Hillary is fighting to get T away from. It's already late March when Hillary starts trying to get T out of jail, preparing for a complicated bail hearing can take weeks. She has a plan ready in days. Hillary and T have found assurity.

T: My mum.

HILLARY DUDDING: Can you say at her house?

T: Yes, I did.

LEORA SMITH: T is also offering to wear an ankle monitor to increase his chance of getting bail. If he gets out, he'll pay a few hundred dollars a month for it. Basically, Hilary and T need to convince a judge that whatever risk the Crown thinks T might pose can be managed, that letting him go home while he waits for his trial is okay. There are only three reasons why a court can keep someone in jail while they wait for their trial. One, to make sure the person attends their trial.

HILLARY DUDDING: Are they going to flee or are they going to show up.

LEORA SMITH: Two, to protect public safety.

HILLARY DUDDING: The likelihood of the person re-offending in a way that puts the public in danger.

LEORA SMITH: And then there's the third one. And this one is a bit more complicated.

HILLARY DUDDING: And it's called the tertiary ground. And it concerns itself with whether or not the public confidence in the administration of justice would be diminished if a person was detained or released.

LEORA SMITH: That's a bit of lawyer speak. But basically, even if the court has faith, a person will show up for their trial and even if the court thinks their risk can be managed, the court might order them detained anyways, because they also think about how the public would feel if this person is released. It's a public safety decision, but also a public opinion one. Hillary calls this grounds the, quote, "send a message grounds", and she says she often sees it used to detain people on charges related to guns or [unintelliglbe]or assaults. These are people accused of these charges, not convicted of anything.

HILLARY DUDDING: To me, I think that's where the rubber has to hit the road in COVID, because this isn't the time for symbolic gestures. Right. This is the time for us to say, look, there's a pandemic coming.

LEORA SMITH: Now, maybe for the first time, courts are using the tertiary grounds, public opinion to think about prisoners conditions. How will the public feel if this person is detained in what could be a tinderbox of a pandemic, according to Hillary T charges fall this send a message ground. He's one of the first cases where she's going to make COVID-19 a part of the argument to get him out.

[Music]

LEORA SMITH: On the day of the hearing, T's supposed to call in. But something's wrong with the system in the jail. He has to go in person. A correctional officer handcuffs T. Then he's handed off between a whole series of officers. They put him in a paddy wagon with four other prisoners. They drive him to the courtroom where justices of the peace, judges, crown lawyers and court staff still work. Then another guard removes T's handcuffs. No one offers T hand sanitizer. He tries not to touch his face. Meanwhile, Hillary is in her office. So Hillary dials into the court and the bail hearing starts.

RECORDED: Welcome to the Ontario Public Service audio conferencing system...

[Music]

LEORA SMITH: Now, because of a publication ban, I can't really tell you a lot of specifics about T's hearing. But here's what I can tell you about how cases like T's are unfolding. Bail hearings across Ontario are becoming debating grounds about COVID-19 and the threat it poses. Defence lawyers are arguing that every single prisoner is at risk of getting sick, that detaining them increases that risk. Crown attorneys say they know that COVID in the jails is a public safety issue. But if they agree to a release and that person hurts somebody, that's a public safety issue to. Some are also asking for proof of each prisoners individual risks. They're saying COVID It's not a jailbreak. If you think it should contribute to your release, you need to tell us why. So defence attorneys are gathering health documents, presenting arguments about clients, diabetes, asthma, heart murmurs, cancer. And then when both sides are done, a judge or a justice of the peace, a person appointed for his or her legal, not medical expertise makes a decision. T sits in the defendant's box and listens to the arguments. He doesn't talk at all during the hearing. At the end, the justice of the peace says he needs to think about it. Mull it over for a night. Hillary hangs up the phone. T goes back to jail.

[Music]

LEORA SMITH: The next day, T is back in court. His mum is sitting in her car outside the courtroom waiting for the decision. If T gets out, he'll be under house arrest at her place and she'll need to go inside and sign some papers. She stares at her phone, waiting for a text from Hillary. An hour goes by. And then finally, her phone lights up. T is going home. I asked t how he feels in that moment.

T: Happy. It's unexplainable.

LEORA SMITH: I ask him how his mum feels.

T: Oh, she. She's excited, more connected to me, to be honest with you.

LEORA SMITH: Right after T's day in court, the Ontario Court of Justice stops holding in-person hearings. Hillary still has a whole case load of bail hearings. Even with good faith on both sides, it took two weeks for T to work out his release plan to find a assurity to argue his case. Now multiply that by a few thousand people. For years, prison advocates, academics, judges and politicians have been talking about our broken bail system, saying too many people were in jail while presumed innocent, saying jails were overcrowded, that conditions were inhumane. For years, advocates have wondered what would it take to knock our broken system out of its loop and to truly reckon with the conditions in Ontario's prisons. It turns out the answer might have been a pandemic.

HILLARY DUDDING: I think everything is going to be shaken up by this and where that lands for incarcerated people in Ontario, I don't know.

[Music]

MG: We've been listening to an urgent matter. It was produced by our CBC colleagues at the Dock Project reported by Leora Smith, produced by Acey Rowe and edited by Julia Pagel. And a note in recent weeks, the inmate population in Ontario jails has decreased by several thousand from about eight to six thousand. If you missed any of this story or you want to hear it again. Head to the website cbc.ca/docproject. This is The Current on CBC Radio One. I've Matt Galloway. We've talked quite a bit already on this program about how the world of theatre in particular has been turned upside down by this pandemic. Mr. Tom Powers here to tell us how all of this is affecting students at the National Theatre School. Hello, Tom.

TOM POWER: Matt, how are you? I mean, you're not wrong by the way. You know, everything sort of has changed in the world of theatre. I'm excited to tell you about this. Two months ago, the graduating class of the National Theatre School was starting rehearsals of two original productions. Since then, they've had to completely re-imagine these plays, moving them to what we call it in the biz, the digital sphere. But here's the interesting thing about this, is that in graduating from theatre school in order to graduate, they ended up changing the medium entirely forever. Take a listen to this.

SOUNDCLIP

TP: Hi, Alisa. How are you?

ALISA PALMER: Hi, Tom. Everything's okay. Healthy and well.

T: Great. So take me back to when things first started shutting down in March. How far along were you guys in terms of production?

ALISA PALMER: The playwriting students begin their projects in second year. So by the time March came around, they had done a series of workshops for the directors and the professional dramaturge. The designs had been essentially completed. They were poised to start rehearsal within a week.

TP: So tell me about the moment where you had to make the change.

ALISA PALMER: Oh, gosh, yeah. Everybody has those 'remember when', 'where were you'. We were at school and we were hanging on by our fingernails thinking, well, what will happen next? And when we finally had to make a decision to do the same thing, which was to shut everything down, all the students, they stayed in the building as long as they could to try to finish as much work as they could. And the realisation that we wouldn't be able to go into rehearsal for these productions kind of dawned on us over the days after we shut the building. But we proposed to our two directing students who are graduating this year to see if they could reimagine translating the play. Rather than just stopping in our tracks and rather than just kind of imitating what a play might be online, we invited them to see if they could reinvented. And fortunately for us, as part of their training, they have a program called Directing at a Distance. They had done that back off a few months prior. And at that point, that kind of training was for, you know, quote unquote, theatre of the future. Well, the future was now in front of us. And these young artists took it upon themselves to start applying the things they had been learning to transpose the live plays on to digital platforms.

TP: I love that you said that you taught them a little bit about how to adapt theatre for the future. And quickly, the future became now as they started to have to figure out how to make theatre without an actual theatre. So over the weekend, the first play, The Game, premiered. Can you just give me a quick summary of the game?

ALISA PALMER: So the game is a story of a sister and a brother. They're adults and they've had a very close relationship. And the brother is about to get married. He's having a bachelor party. The sister is not invited. And that is a moment in her life where they have to reckon with how far will you go for someone you love. How do you accept change in a family dynamic. It's in the format of a video game.

TP: So let's play a little clip of how that looked in, how that sounded when it premiered.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: Keep your camera on. You've watched Free Willy.

VOICE 2: It's so good.

VOICE 1: It's like the best movie ever made. Oh, sorry, Henry. Not tonight. Whoa. Wow. We got rid of so many people just through that one. Holy cow. Okay, it's okay. Keep your camera on. If you've played Super Smash Brothers.

VOICE 3: Yeah.

VOICE 1: Okay. Keep your camera on. If you had a best friend growing up.

TP: So this is a little bit of how this show, The Game, ended up looking on a Zune call our on online instead of in the theatre. Tell us a little bit about what we just heard.

ALISA PALMER: There was a section in the play which is interactive, so people sign up to come to that quote unquote, virtual theatre. And then part of the original concept of the game, when it would have been in the theatre is that these group of guys on a bachelor party have these games that they bond over and some of them would be audience participation. So when they did the translation, when Angelica Schwartz and Gillian Clark, who are the director and playwright, when they did the transposition, they found a way to have the participants in the Zoom room actually click on, click off, click off their video basically disappear themselves when the criteria didn't respond to them. They narrowed the field until they had a quote unquote winner.

TP: This is really incredible to me. I mean, what I find interesting about this is that you were presented with a challenge. And not only did you kind of meet that challenge, but you found new ways of making theatre in the meantime. I want to play a clip that exemplifies that a little bit more. So this is Murdoc Shawn, the director of the other graduating play I Am Entitled to Rest, describing how they incorporated things like green screen merging technology into their production. Take a listen.

SOUNDCLIP

The technology has been frustrating at times, but also it's been really amazing to see the kind of things that people dream up in watching all the tutorials online about people going like he has this cool thing you can do with Zoom or like 10 tips to make your zoom cocktail party work like we learned about breakout rooms like that. And that's how we recorded it. So I think that there is a whole new language that we're developing.

That is Murdoc Shawn, the director of one of the graduating plays from the National Theatre School. I Am Entitled to Rest. And Alisa Palmer is the director of the National Theatre School's English section. She joins me now. So, Alisa, when the pandemic hits, did you have any idea that not only would they sort of rise to meet this occasion, but they'd find other ways of doing theatre that they had never done before?

ALISA PALMER: Well, at the beginning, there was a lot of loss like reckoning with you don't get to do the things you love so much. And these people have trained and committed themselves to three years of intense work and two years to the directing students. So at first there's just loss and shock because you can't replace it. You can't imitate it being together for a live performance. The graduation event, you know, all of those things. And then you go through that to opportunity. Right. It's worth remembering also that the students in the English section come from all over the country. So you have kind of a vulnerable community of young people who are suddenly in quarantine in their respective apartments without any of their family or support groups around. And very little financial resilience, you might say. So for us, it was an invitation for them to go a step further and we didn't know what they would do. But in retrospect, when I think of their responses, it makes perfect sense, because that's what you have to do as an artist. And that's kind of your modus operandi is to dig deep and imagine think outside the box.

TP: It's what I love about the story is that, you know, at a time when things could have been worse than ever, they found a way to make something beautiful, which I think is in some ways the story I like to think is the story of this COVID-19 pandemic is that we're somehow creating against all odds, really amazing things. And I want to talk about one more thing you're planning at the theatre school in Montreal around COVID-9, your faculty is going to be doing free online classes. Is that right?

ALISA PALMER: Yes, that's right. It's part of art, a part which is a which is something that we introduced almost as soon as the cove it hit. We looked at our communities. You know, I just described our students are vulnerable. There are artists across the country who are training in places other than the NTS that are suddenly vulnerable and cut off. So we made a program where we could inject some money quickly to young artists in training and they could share the work that got interrupted along the way. And then we thought of another vulnerable community, which is our teachers at the National Theatre School where unique in the country, in that we don't have tenured professors or very many full time staff. We worked with professional artists who are on short contracts to come and lead the students. They were suddenly out of work. So we created a platform where we could find some financial support for them and also support all the people out there who want to deepen their craft and are kind of at loose ends. So we have online training and all the different theatre disciplines.

TP: It's a really amazing story. Thanks so much for dropping by and telling us about it and stay safe.

ALISA PALMER: Thank you so much. Thomas, great talking with you and thanks for putting attention to this is much appreciated.

That's Tom Power in conversation with Lisa Palmer. She is artistic director of the National Theatre School in Montreal. The CBC News is next and then inside the COVID-19 time warp, why this pandemic has twisted our sense of days, weeks, hours, minutes. I'm Matt Galloway The Current is back in six minutes or so. But really, who's counting?

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How we perceive time in lockdown; Cruise ship crews stranded at sea

Guests: Anne Wilson, Steve Joordens, Michelle Joly

MG: Good morning. I'm Matt Galloway. You're listening to an extended edition of The Current.

[Music: Theme]

MG: Still to come, the Montreal artist Marites Carino, she is fighting loneliness with a microphone on a broom. It's a bit of a secret weapon. We'll tell you more. Coming up in half an hour. But first, I have an important question for you. Are you ready? What day is it? I'm proud to say that it's Thursday and I know that because I put my garbage out last night. Remember when the days of the week used to mean something when Thursday is felt like Thursdays, whatever Thursdays felt like Wednesday was hump day. We said thank goodness for Friday. One of the more unsettling effects of our new abnormal lives is that ever since the world was locked down for COVID-19 time as we knew, it seems to have been walked out of shape. We've brought together a couple of people who've been spending quite a lot of time thinking about this. Anne Wilson is a professor of social psychology, Wilfrid Laurier University. Steve Joordens is a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, Scarborough. They're both with us now. Good morning to you both.

STEVE JOORDENS: Good morning.

ANNE WILSON: Good morning.

MG: And the phrase that we've been using on the program is that time feels as though it's been flattened out a little bit. Are you experiencing slow days and fast weeks and flat in time like so many of us are now?

ANNE WILSON: Yes, I think at the very beginning of this, I didn't because my time actually got busier rather than less filled. But I'm starting to notice that now. So sometimes days I'll go on and on. But then when I look back at the course of a week, it feels like it went by in a flash.

MG: And the are the days of the week losing the meaning that they had, as I was suggesting in the introduction, where we kind of, you know, Wednesday was Wednesday. And that meant that you could almost see the weekend and perhaps, you know, Friday was a day that you'd begin to celebrate. Now it's it's every day is every day.

ANNE WILSON: Yes, that's right. In fact, sometimes when I book meetings with students, I usually try to protect weekends a few times. So actually, you know what? Saturday, Sunday, that's fine when does time really even mean anymore.

MG: Steve, what about for you? How are you experiencing the passage of time over the last few weeks?

STEVE JOORDENS: Yes. I mean, there's no don't things feel very different when we get all unplugged from our normal routine or when I like to sometimes describe it as are the rituals that we went through every day in our past life that, you know, when those rituals are taken away, it kind of like our clock, to some extent. And so it just feels like we are timeless, you know, more than slow or fast. It's just like it's just not moving.

MG: Tell me more about those rituals. What are you talking about there?

STEVE JOORDENS: Well, I mean, we think we take this all for granted, but your normal day, you know, you get up and maybe you have a shower or maybe a breakfast, wash the dog, hop in the car, drive to work. You have things you do around, you know, maybe mid of the morning, maybe you go for a coffee with somebody, lunch or somewhere. All of these things kind of marches through the day and they kind of tell us where we are in the day, too. They are kind of our our clock and we can talk about it on a daily level. But just as you were talking about it, it also occurs on a weekly level where we you know, weekends especially kind of are critical. That's like when the clock bongs at the hour, so to speak. And so we've kind of lost that that bong, too. So we're just kind of drifting along and it feels- it can feel very strange.

MG: So what happens if the rituals - I want to get back to and in a moment - but if those rituals disappear and you wake up and you don't need to have shower, maybe you're not going anywhere and you don't even, you know, get out your pyjamas because you're working from home or you're not working at all. What happens to us in our minds about the passage of time?

STEVE JOORDENS: I mean, one of the things is it feels uncomfortable. We feel adrift. So it's it's kind of like a boat that's not going anywhere. It's just kind of floating around. And in fact, one of the things I would recommend is not to allow that to continue too long, to have some sort of ritual to make a five day Monday through Friday, to get up at the same time, go to bed at the same time, and to try to populate your day with certain activities that give you something to do, something to think about going into it, and something to feel like you've accomplished something on the other side. So I think, you know, for to feel really kind of comfortable and balanced in this period, we should be creating new rituals for ourselves for the Monday through Friday periods.

MG: I want to come back to that in a moment. Anne, for you, what what can you tell us about why it is that so many people would say the time feels different right now?

ANNE WILSON: Part of the reason that it happens is because our mental tracking of time doesn't really work the same way that a clock or a calendar works. So one of the ways that we tend to track time psychologically is by those daily rituals and routines, temporal landmarks that happen that helped us situate us in the course of a day or a week. So it could be that baseball is on Wednesday and book club is on Thursday and so on. And to the extent that those are gone, we don't have that kind of those kinds of markers anymore. So and that actually does something different to our experience of duration. So a lot of people find that they they're dragging on in part because we don't have many activities set up and we don't really spend our time focussing so much on all of these interesting and distinctive activities which tend to make days go faster. So the old adage that time flies when you're having fun is true. And if we have fewer distinctive, pleasant activities or engaging activities to be doing, that it actually seems like time is dragging on. What happens retrospectively, though, is a little bit different. So when people look back on a time period rather than again looking at the mental calendar, they tend to track how many distinctive events have happened. And if a time period has lots of distinctive events and it feels like it stretches out further than a time period that doesn't have very many of those kinds of things in them. So because we aren't doing as many distinctive things that stand out perhaps in our temporal landscape, when we look back on the same period of time, it seems a lot shorter as though hardly any time has passed at all.

MG: If those days are dragging and where could that lead us? I mean, can it creates sadness, can create anxiety, unease, depression. What are some of the things that could contribute to.

ANNE WILSON: So time and emotion are pretty closely linked. And an interestingly there by directionally linked. So if we're having a sad day or feeling depressed, time will feel like it's dragging by more slowly. But interestingly, it's also the case that if a day feels like it's dragging by for some other reason, it'll be a signal to us that perhaps we're not having such a good time. So sometimes just the experience itself of times feeling like it's going on longer can make us feel like the time is less enjoyable.

MG: It's interesting how quickly your concept of time shifts and just how quickly, even in the absence of those rituals, a couple of days gone, your time can just kind of flatten itself out that this isn't a long process. It just takes a few days for the drift to begin.

STEVE JOORDENS: Yes, there's another component to it. Several things that we lost with that. The other thing I like to point out to people is we have this concept in psychology called the reflected self, which suggests that every time you're interacting with another human being, the way they respond to you tells you a lot about what they think about you. Whether they think you're funny or trustworthy or hard worker, etc. And so in our normal rituals, we're continually interacting with other people. And as we do so, we're kind of having this sense of ourself. And often in that case, it's our professional self. Let's see if it was in a work environment. Now with those rituals gone, we've lost those interactions as well. And to some extent, it's like we've lost both our clock and our mirror. We're just kind of living in this situation where we feel a little adrift in terms of time. But we also feel a little drift in terms of who we are and what we're about and sort of our goals. And so I think those two things coming together is what can make us all just feel strange if we don't take steps to kind of say, oh, you know, I'm going to try to normalise the situation.

MG: You and I spoke, Steve, several weeks ago and I say several because I actually have no idea how many weeks ago it was. We talked about this online course that you had in terms of dealing with anxiety through the pandemic. If our sense of time gets warped, what does that do to our anxiety?

STEVE JOORDENS: Well, I mean, generally speaking, the brain wants to be able to predict things. It likes things to kind of unfold in a way that we know and that we've seen before. And when all of that happens, it kind of is telling us, like, okay, we have a good map of the grey world. We have a good understanding and we feel sort of level of control now that all of that's gone. You know, we can't predict almost anything at any level in the future. And, you know, we don't even sort of know where we are in time and who we are. That's just all of that ambiguity, all that unpredictability certainly enhances the anxiety. It makes us feel like we're not so much in control. And that feeling that we'll call that internal locus of control is very important to the mental health. So one of the things I do talk about that course, which, by the way, is free, it's available on Coursera at no charge, is talking about ways you can kind of bring back that sense of control so that you feel a little more grounded.

MG: And I was looking at the calendar that hangs on my wall last night and realised there's nothing on it. They have nothing planned. I have I've nothing lined up. There's nothing I need to worry about or start to to become concerned about. Is there anything positive that could come out of this different sense of time that we have?

ANNE WILSON: Yes, there are a couple of ways that you could think about a potentially positive outcome of this. So one thing that many people have reflected on is that they've realised how busy their day to day lives were prior to this forced slowdown. And we know from, actually from quite a bit of research, that there's an idea called time affluence or time poverty. So basically the idea that if you feel like you have enough times for yourself and do the things you want to be doing, that's time affluence. And that's a really quite strongly connected to well-being. And in fact, it's it's after you get to a certain level of material wealth, money doesn't really add a lot to well-being. But our additional feeling of having enough time does tend to add to well-being. So for me personally, this has actually been a time to really reflect on that and to think about the ways in which my time was filled that were sustaining and positive and the ways that perhaps it was filmed that were not so great. And to think about ways to structure my days now that are a little bit more intentional, that add the kinds of things that I know sustain well-being on a daily basis, and then potentially try to to bring that forward into a future?

MG: Like what?

ANNE WILSON: Well, some of the things that we often think about when we think about well-being, we're often thinking about the next big event or whether know when we can achieve our next big goal. And those are all very feature oriented. But we often tend to lose sight of how much small daily activities still make a difference to well-being. So we know, for example, that spending time engaging in hobbies, nurturing social connections, helping others, stopping to appreciate and savour small pleasures and physical activity are really important. And almost all of those things are still things we can be doing on a regular basis. So for me personally, I'm spending more time cooking, especially with my kids and savouring good food, but also spending more time doing physical activity and exercise than those two things really tend to enhance my well-being, even at times like that.

MG: Steve Joorden's you talked about the idea of new rituals, what would some of those new rituals be if the old ones like getting dressed to go to work or getting dressed at all, are at the window?

STEVE JOORDENS: Yes. I mean, some of them would be exactly the kinds of things that Anne had just highlighted, like having a imagining a day and having a chunk of time in that day when you were going to spend doing some sort of Arabic activity, which we know is very good for mental health. Also maybe, you know, one of the things that's sort of good and bad out there now is accomplish something, do something. There are many sort of online courses like Coursera and ADX and all these platforms, you, Demi, where you could potentially use this time to invest in yourself. So invest that time now into developing yourself. As long as that's not adding more anxiety to your life, as long as it's a fun distraction, something you want to do, then, you know, having a chunk of time and, okay, this is the time in the day that I spend working on that course and learning that. You know, we want some news in our day, but we don't want too much news. We want enough to get the information we want. But news causes anxiety. So after we watch the news, it would be great if we could get involved in singing. So I would you know, one of the great psychological medicines - and I mentioned this especially to those with older people in your family where you might be worried about their mental state. If you can find the songs they listen to when they were adolescents, the songs that were popular and create a playlist and put that on for them, that will literally take them out of today, bring them back to where they were. You will see them smile. And if they're singing and enjoying it, that is some of the best therapy that any of us can have. So, you know, I would recommend scheduling sometime every day to get involved in just singing, enjoying music, something, you know well, Beatles, if you want, you know, etc., that sort of thing. So you can find these things to schedule in there. Some of us are still working. We schedule ahead in there as well. And that will just kind of make the days go better. And when it's Friday, you'll feel like, oh, Saturday, I don't have all these scheduled things. And, you know, that's what makes a weekend great.

MG: And it's well worth mentioning that there are a lot of people who don't have any more free time. They probably have less free time. And whether they're working on the frontlines as doctors, nurses, you know, stocking store shelves, maybe they're working from home and they're trying to juggle working from home with a couple of kids and the demands of all of that, how should they be processing the lack of time or at least how they change and how they perceive time, Anne?

ANNE WILSON: I think that's really important to highlight. So in some of those cases, rather than feeling like they have extra time, they may feel like they really their time is eaten up even more than usual. Well, that's certainly the case for me much of the time. And so, you know, finding ways to still have a little bit of time for self-care would be important for folks who are really on the frontlines, especially. And the you know, I think that that many of the kinds of principles that we're talking about here may not apply in the same sorts of way for people who are really engaged in that day to day. One other thing that tends to affect people's sense of time is feelings of how much time, how much has changed over time period. So for a lot of people who are really seeing how much is really changing day to day, it might also really feel like the past prior to all of this is really disconnected from the present. And it might also really emphasize how how distinctly or how how uncertain the future feels.

MG: Part of this is just also in the first few weeks of this pandemic, it felt like the story changed every five minutes. And now we're just in this. And it part of it is not knowing, I guess, Steve, when we're when we get out of it, that affects how we think of our time as well.

STEVE JOORDENS: Yes, yes, exactly. It's just this sense we're in the beginning, I think we all thought, okay, we'll do this for a week or we'll do this for two weeks. Then we'll hear them say, oh, it will be the end of the month and then it'll be, you know, end of May or whatever. And I think a lot of us do feel a little trapped. It's definitely got that Groundhog Day movie vibe going where you wake up and it's like, okay, we're still here. When will this end? I mean, we are seeing some obviously glimmers of an ending. I do worry that that's just going to bring us to the next stage of anxiety, which is the sort of economic impact this is all had that's been kind of hidden until this time. But yes, I think, you know, we do we are craving some sort of change of the sort Anne described, where we want this. We want to feel like we're moving forward and going someplace temporally rather than just sort of stuck in some sort of time warp, which is what it sometimes feels like.

MG: It does indeed. It's good to speak with you both. Thank you for taking some time to talk to us. Thank you.

ANNE WILSON: Thank you.

STEVE JOORDENS: Thank you.

MG: Anne Wilson, professor of social psychology at Wilfrid Laurier University. She was in Waterloo, Ontario. Steve Joordens is professor of psychology at the University of Toronto Scarborough campus. He was in Toronto. This is The Current on CBC Radio One. My name's Matt Galloway at this time. Cruise ships are anchored around the world, but the floating cities are not empty. Even though passengers left many weeks ago, crew members are still onboard. The Guardian newspaper estimates that more than 100,000 workers are stranded on dozens of ships. And it turns out more than 300 of them are Canadian. Michelle Joly is a singer from Vancouver, one of those cruise ship workers currently stranded at sea. She's on the Emerald Princess Michelle. Good morning.

MICHELLE JOLY: Good morning, Matt. How are you?

MG: I'm okay, where in the world are you right now? Do you know?

MICHELLE JOLY: Well, I do kind of we're anchored at sea, not actually docked, but we are close to Freeport, Bahamas, which is called the Great Isaac Anchorage. So there's a lot of ships anchored out here right now.

MG: You thought that you were going to go home on Tuesday. That didn't happen. Do you know why you weren't able to get off that ship?

MICHELLE JOLY: Yes. Apparently, the Bahamian government was advised by the health officials that Bahamian health officials do not allow us off. Even though we have been in isolation for over 35 days, we have been practicing social distancing, wearing masks, washing our hands, using hand sanitizer, and nobody's been sick. We've been doing temperature checks twice a day and still, for whatever reason, we were denied.

MG: How are you holding up and how did you react when you heard that having been on the ship as long as you have been, you couldn't get off?

MICHELLE JOLY: I was really frustrated and sad. I made a Facebook post at that moment because I thought, well, maybe there's somebody out there that can help us because we're so close, because there was no real plan for us after that. And we had spent two weeks, you know, hoping and praying that we were going to come back home and now it's kind of like there is no real, real plan now. And it can be so frustrating because, you know, I just want to be home with my family, as does everybody else.

MG: You've been locked down essentially since March. Just briefly describe what your day to day is like. What do you do on this giant ship?

MICHELLE JOLY: Yes, well, everything's closed. So there's no pools, there's no like pizza and burger stand, there's no movies or anything like this. So basically I wake up, like this morning, I got up. I went for breakfast, then I did some emailing. I watched part of a movie. Now I'm on a phone call with you. At 10:30, I'm gonna go do a temperature check. Now we have to come directly back to our cabin. We're not allowed to roam around or anything. And then at one o'clock, I'll go for lunch and we only get 30 minutes to eat. So I'll come back. I'm going to do some laundry today, and then I will go back and do another temperature check at 5:30 and come back to the cabin, maybe watching a movie and then go for dinner at 8:00 and then come back to the cabin, maybe finish watching my movies.

MG: What you doing to not lose your mind off of this?

MG: Well, I do have a ukulele and a guitar, so I have been singing and I have been actually doing a lot of face time with also people on the ship. We do have like big WhatsApp group chats and we're trying to keep everybody informed, like all the Canadians talking about what they know, the Americans. And so, I mean, for the most part, I do like- I started learning Spanish. I'm doing like [uninntelligible] learn Spanish and I'm reading a book on success. So there's a few things, you know, maybe, do like small workouts in the cabin. The cabin is quite small. And today I noticed there's some sun on the balcony, so maybe I'll get some sun after that.

MG: How many people are on the ship with you?

MICHELLE JOLY: There is, I think, there is about 820 people right now when I know that they're trying to get 100 hundred people off in Fort Lauderdale on May 9th. But then we're getting 500 more people.

MG: Do you have any idea as to when you're gonna get off this thing?

MICHELLE JOLY: So there is a plan. I have been talking to the commissioner. I mean, the consulate of Canada and the high commissioner of Canada. Because the plan is to get the Canadians and the North Americans off May nineth. So I have a little bit of trouble travelling through the U.S., so I've been in direct contact with them. So to see if I can actually get on that plane, I will get into the details there. But yes. So it's looking like they're doing what they can to get us on a plane on May nineth. But there is no real guarantee, I'm sure, if you talk to other crew members. You know, you can be denied at the last minute.

MG: There's also the possibility that the ship could set sail for India. Is this correct?

MICHELLE JOLY: Well, the plan is, yes, there is something like almost 900 Indians that are going to be on the ship. So the plan is to go there. There's some people from South Africa and some from Brazil. So they're going to have to make a few stops along the way. I was told the voyage is going to be 39 plus days. And in that time, if I have to stay on the ship, I don't know where I will be allowed out boat. They could try to get me off a plane in Brazil. They could try to get me a flight in South Africa. But as the regulations keep changing for all of the different countries, borders and ports, I don't really know when over how I'm going to get off the ship.

MG: We asked Global Affairs Canada for information. They said that they're tracking the ships with Canadians onboard. They'd advise people in your situation to contact the nearest embassy or global affairs directly. In the meantime, can you ever imagine going back on a cruise ship, this is your job, would you ever go back on a ship after something like this?

MICHELLE JOLY: I would, yes, because I don't think- I think this is a very kind of one off situation. You know, cruise ships have been doing this for years and they've never seen anything like this. So I definitely would. I definitely like travelling around the world and singing on cruise ships. It really great life. I enjoy it. So I would come back.

MG: I hope you get home soon. And I hope you don't have to travel all the way around the world to be able to get home. Michelle, good luck and stay well and thank you.

MICHELLE JOLY: Thanks so much, Matt.

MG: Michelle Joly is a singer and guitarist who lives in Vancouver when she's not performing as a soloist on the Princess Cruises. We did request comment for Princess Cruises, but did not hear back. This is The Current on CBC Radio One. My name is Matt Galloway. We're back in 90 seconds. Stick around.

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Elon Musk and Grimes' newborn name X Æ A-12 'fails at the basic job of being a name,' says author; Marites Carino

Guests: Marites Carino, Laura Wattenberg, Karin Marley

MG: Hello, I'm Matt Galloway. You're listening to The Current. She cuts an unusual figure, a woman on a balcony holding out a microphone taped to the end of a broomstick, interviewing passers by from her second floor. Marites Carino is a Montreal filmmaker and this is just a taste of her latest episode of interviews from a balcony.

SOUNDCLIP

MARITES CARINO: It's kind of been a unique way of meeting my neighbours because I've interviewed people over the past months. And now when people walk by, they say hi.

VOICE: Everyone's a little bit friendlier in the neighbourhood. I've lived here about two years. When I go on my back balcony, I can see, you know, my neighbours, if they're on their back balcony. In the past, they think we would have just waved and nodded to each other. But now everyone's a little lonely and we're all sharing the strange experience. So I've started talking to my back neighbours, you know, we ask about each other and we're learning, you know, far more about each other than we ever would have otherwise.

MG: And it turns out they are learning a lot. Here's another resident being interviewed by Marites.

SOUNDCLIP

MARITES CARINO: I met a musician [unintelligible] clavering on your street. And I also just met him two blocks over. Every Saturday night, they're dancing on their balconies like a little clubbing party. They started a dance club Saturday evening dance club from your balcony. So I just had a little dance session with some of your neighbours.

MG: The artist and filmmaker Marites Carino joins me now from Montreal. Marites, good morning.

MARITES CARINO: Hi, Matt. How are you?

MG: I'm well, thanks. What a neat little idea. What's the best thing about interviewing your neighbours from a microphone at the end of a long broomstick?

MARITES CARINO: Well, it's the appropriate distance.

MG: It sure is. What else are you learning?

MARITES CARINO: Well, it gives me a reason to get out of my PJs, that's for sure. And I don't know. I think in this strange time, if you've been cooped up with a person, a couple people, I think you're just hungry to talk to a stranger.

MG: I was watching some of these this morning for people who haven't seen this, we heard a little bit of it, but just describe how this works. You're on a balcony. You have the microphone at the end of the broomstick. And then what, you lean down so that people on the street can reach the microphone?

MARITES CARINO: Yes. Actually, my friend's son, he made me this little sign with a rainbow. I don't know if you see know if you seen those [unintelligible]. And then he also made me a sign that says interviews from a balcony. So I kind of stand there and I feel like it's a daily scavenger hunt to see who will come and talk to me. And I basically, if people look up, I say, hey. And I just start talking to them and they see the sign. They ask questions. And usually you can tell if people are interested in continuing talking to you.

MG: What sort of questions are you asking people.

MARITES CARINO: Like for this project, I thought like one of my motivating things was that I wanted to create, you know, feel good content during these feel bad times. So I've been asking, specifically asking, questions that have some kind of positive spin to them. So like some could include what's something unexpected that you learned about yourself? Are there any habits that you've picked up that you think you'll keep up with after? What are some positive things that have happened throughout this for you? You know, things like that.

MG: We heard one of your interviewees say that people are being friendlier. Is that your sense as well, that that we're being nicer to each other now because of this thing that we're in?

MARITES CARINO: Yes, I think so. It's funny just seeing people walking on the street and, you know, people will kind of give me a thumbs up sometimes and talk to me. I think because it's this collective thing that we're going through. People are more sensitive to everyone and knowing that everyone's kind of having a hard time in their own ways.

MG: How about you? I mean, that collective thing, how is that affecting you? Because we're all in this. We're all experiencing this thing all at the same time in real time. How is that affecting you?

MARITES CARINO: Yeah, I think like one of the reasons that I started this project is because I live alone and my house is usually the house where people stop by and hang out. So I've just been feeling the effects of this and I think there's something special about living through something with someone. Like I think back to the ice storm and I had a roommate then. We had neighbours. We are sitting out in the hallway in the dark without power and with candles. So I think, yes, that's probably one of the hardest things about going through this alone, not having someone to bounce ideas off while you're doing while you're going through this then. Yes. I thought I don't know how exactly I came up with this idea, but it was one of my motivations.

MG: I guess we all lead really busy lives, even if if they don't seem busy at the moment when suddenly everything is taken out. We're just talking about the passage of time. It seems like you kind of reflect back on that business. And in the business will often not take the time to meet the people who are around us. Do you know a lot of your neighbours are the people who are on your street?

MARITES CARINO: Yes, I do actually. Like I am lucky I live in a building. There's like six of us in one part and we know each other. So that's really great. You know, I speak to my one neighbour directly across from me. She's Spanish and she's in her 80s. So I just check in on her. But like, I do that anyway before. But I don't know. It's just created a stronger connection between us, I would say and like. And plus now through this project, I've been meeting a lot of my neighbours. So now it's funny if I'm walking on the street and I run into them, it's weird to see them eye to eye.

MG: Instead of peering down from them from my balcony. This project came to be because you weren't able to continue working on something else. Tell me about Handshack.

MARITES CARINO: Well, actually, Handshack was an interactive installation that I did [unintelliglbe] at the Raimy Modern Intel cartoon. And basically it's an installation where I invited two strangers to get to know each other through blind touch. So for me back then, just that crisis of touch, like we're losing touch in our day to day culture, like because we're touching screens, most of our conversations, our meetings are virtual. We don't have that opportunity for face to face interaction as much. And so I started thinking about that. And at the time when I came up with a project, I had this skin condition, eczema, and I had it all over my hands. And it was kind of embarrassing shaking hands with people. And so I remember one time just thinking because people think, oh, is this contagious? No. Anyway, so then I thought, oh, I wish I could just disappear at the other end of my hand. And that was one of the starting points. And I remember like one time going to the dentist and it was after a Break-Up and the dentist just cut my face. And I remember almost like bawling in the dentist's chair because I felt like, wow, nobody has touched my face like that in so long. And I think a lot of those ideas fed into this project and because we're such a visually driven society. I started thinking about, wow, I wonder what it would be like to meet somebody through touch. And so that's how the project started. And, you know, I had a residency set up in Europe and it was that [unintelliglbe] Blanche. And so I was really excited to get my project out there into the world because I had such a great reaction to it. And so I guess during this time, I've just been kind of dealing with like navigating my grief over this project, because this project is it's basically the last thing that people are going to want to do right now, touching wiwtwhout fear.

MG: You made a little film about this. Like let's have a listen to a little bit of a Handshack.

SOUNDCLIP

I didn't expect to feel disconnected or to feel like it's an actual conversation.

[Indistinct speec]

[Laughter]

MARITES CARINO: So basically for the film, I actually did a film first called Hands On and I basically curated 20 different people. I maybe knew about three or four of them. And I wanted to find people that had a special relationship with touch. So I had someone who did Reiki. I had a palm reader. I had someone who did massage in palliative care. And I had a teenager. I just wanted to get a really eclectic mix of people. And so we built this mini set at a gallery. [Unintelligible], I had a residency and I basically paired them up. We filmed them and they were all wearing headphones and there was a movement kind of instructor guiding them with movements, talking live. And she would just say, okay, so reach out and, you know, do a gesture that is part of your childhood memories, because I have a background in dance and normally I make dance film, but for me, I love teasing out choreography from everyday movements. So for me, these hand interactions became like a tactile choreography between two strangers.

MG: It seems so far removed from the place that we're in right now where we can't go and touch people. You can't give somebody a hug. You can't, you know, give somebody a pat on the shoulder if they're feeling bad or they're feeling great. What are you most excited about doing when this is all over and when we get back to a place where people perhaps feel comfortable with touch.

MARITES CARINO: Actually with the balcony project, one of the things I start is that people are allowed to ask me a question. And so somebody asked me about the other day and I said, what I'd really love is to have a thai foot massage.

MG: Just because it feels great.

MARITES CARINO: Yes. Yes. It's just that physical touch and just, you know, just having people in my life again and being able to hug. It's really weird doing these air hugs when you run into people on the street.

MG: It's not the same.

MARITES CARINO: No, no.

MG: That'll come again. I don't know when, but at some point in time we'll be able to do that and you'll be able to get your foot massage as well. Marites it's great to talk to you. Thank you.

MARITES CARINO: Thanks so much.

MG: That's the artist and filmmaker Marites Carino. You can find her interviews from a balcony project on Facebook and Instagram. She was in Montreal.

MG: This is The Current on CBC Radio One. My name is Matt Galloway. It's a baby name so unusual. I can't even pronounce it for you. And I won't try because I would have no idea how to do this. The billionaire tech entrepreneur Elon Musk and his partner, the Canadian singer Grimes, welcomed their first child on Monday. I'll tell you how the boy's name appears on paper. It's the letter X, then an Elvish letter. Then the letter, A hyphen 12. It's not, I'm assuming, a name that runs in the family tree, it's a bit out there, but in some ways does follow a trend as more parents opt for more unusual, less common names. Laura Wattenberg is the founder of Namerology.com and the author of The Baby Name Wizard. She's in Boston. Laura, good morning.

LAURA WATTENBERG: Good morning, Matt.

MG: What do you make of this name that Elon Musk and Grimes have given their first child? It's wonderful they had a child. The name is a bit, well, it stands out.

LAURA WATTENBERG: It it does. And assuming it's not all an elaborate prank, they've really crossed a line with this one. I think people are a little too ready, a little too eager, honestly, to criticize celebrity baby names in general. It's usually just a matter of taste. But what they've come up here with here is more of a glyph. It's something that not only that no one spell or pronounce it. You can't even type it. And it's literally not a legal name. The state of California is never gonna allow a name with a letter. They call it [uninelliglbe]. It's just a letter from Danish and old English. It's like an A and E squished together. But numerals are not allowed. This just doesn't function as a name.

MG: To your point, I mean, people are very quick to criticize anyone for anything. That's the culture in some ways that we live in or lived in before things went sideways. But you say that this crosses a line.

LAURA WATTENBERG: I think it does, because it fails at the basic job of being a name, it doesn't do any of the things either socially and practically, legally that we need a name to do.

MG: Okay. Let me stop you there. What is the job of a name?

LAURA WATTENBERG: The job of a name is to be the stand in for a person and a signifier that presents us to others, either in a social context or in a in a legal identification context. If you can't say it, if you can't spell it, if you can't write it, it's not functioning as a name. And that means that parents who choose something like that aren't really thinking about naming their baby in the way we classically imagined it. And so not thinking from the baby's perspective.

MG: What does X Elvish letter a hyphen 12 then say to you?

LAURA WATTENBERG: It says to me that either it's a rather amusing prank or that the parents were trying to make some sort of statement that's different from the very deep and loving impulse that usually comes with a name and that impulse comes from a very deep place. Whether you named after your grandfather or you name after Kylo Ren from Star Wars, it's still a very heartfelt choice.

MG: Do you think maybe they're just trolling us?

LAURA WATTENBERG: Oh, it's certainly possible. I believe that the new father also published a picture of his baby with Photoshop tattoo this all over his face. So it wouldn't surprise me because there's no way that the state of California is going to let them register this name.

MG: Michael Varnum is an associate professor of psychology at Arizona State University, and he has done some research on naming. Have a listen to the professor.

SOUNDCLIP

There's a few reasons why it might not be that shocking that somebody like Elon Musk or somebody in this day and age might choose a name like that. So in some earlier work, I looked at sort of patterns of names across regions of the U.S. and also across regions of Canada. And I found that newer parts of the country, places that were more recently, Frontier, Wild West, California included, people tend to pick relatively less popular or conventional names for their kids. Maybe link to something about sort of the frontier ethos of rugged individualism and uniqueness. And also more generally, we see that over the past century or so in the United States there's been a dramatic decline in the percentage of people giving their kids one of the top 10 or 50 names.

MG: Laura Wattenberg is there. There's something to that that Elon Musk, tech entrepreneur living in California, might embrace the frontier ethos of Silicon Valley and decide that a standard name, perhaps a more recognisable name, is not the name for their child.

LAURA WATTENBERG: Honestly, I don't believe in that result. I think there are some other huge factors that distinguish the so-called frontier states from other parts of the country, including religious differences. But I will say that that what is absolutely true is that around the world and certainly in every English speaking country, we are naming in a whole different way from past generations. There's been an absolute revolution in parents switching from choosing a name that fits in to one that stands out.

MG: And what's behind that?

LAURA WATTENBERG: The shift happened in two phases. It started in the 1960s with the rise of individualism as a virtue versus the more conformist 50s. And then in the 1990s, everything kind of burst wide open. You went from three TV networks to 200 cable channels and the Internet arrived telling us that a username is something completely unique in the world system. And beyond that, parents would go to the Internet, type in a full name that they were considering for their baby and say, oh, no, it's taken. Whereas in the past, there might be a baby in the next town over with that same name and you'd never know. Then to make matters even worse, countries started publishing baby name popularity statistics and that created a kind of reverse armist race where no one wants to be number one. There's a competitiveness to be unique.

MG: What about also the idea that maybe it's not just being unique, but creating a name, using a name that reflects who you are, that it's not just about who the baby perhaps is and what the baby embodies, but also the culture that the baby will grow up in, the culture that the baby will live in.

LAURA WATTENBERG: I think as soon as you abandon the classic names that ruled English naming for centuries, the Johns and Marys and Williams and Katharine's, the new names have to come from somewhere. And inevitably, in a diverse creative naming culture, we are all sending a lot of signals about ourselves as parents, not about our children, but about ourselves as parents. And there's a positive side to that in the creative expression. There's also a negative side that people are very quick, very good at reading the signals that we send with names and in some cases responding negatively if they think that that cultural signal is not something positive.

MG: We've seen that in an employment that people will be discriminated against based on the name that they have.

LAURA WATTENBERG: We do see it. We see it in employment and we see it in subtler ways throughout the culture. You can see that not just someone's ethnic background might be signalled, but details in the name and this creative naming culture. For instance, there was one study that compared African-American children who were given names with specific markers suggesting a low socioeconomic status and compared to their own siblings who had the same background in the same ethnic makeup. Teachers were more likely to leave those children back a grade in school, less likely to recommend them for gifted programs because they were probably subconsciously reading signals from the names.

MG: Grimes has said that they plan to raise their baby in a gender neutral way. Can you see a scenario where people opt out of names that don't fit our idea of what names should be in order to avoid the gender connotations of those names?

LAURA WATTENBERG: I think there's a very small, small sector of society that is actively looking for gender neutral names with the idea that they're not setting expectations. But if you look at where androgynous or unisex names are used, it's actually a little counterintuitive that the more culturally conservative part of the country is, the more unisex names they use. And the reason is that they're not choosing them to be unisex. They're choosing them to be new and creative. Younger parents to me more creatively, just as they as younger people dress more creatively. So you end up with that kind of reversal where values predict the opposite of names.

MG: Just a couple of seconds left. Do you think that X Elvish letter a 12 will lead to a trend in even more unusual names?

LAURA WATTENBERG: I think parents might try, but I think the legal system will push back.

MG: Laura, good to speak with you. Thank you.

LAURA WATTENBERG: Pleasure. Thanks.

MG: Laura Wattenberg, founder of Numerology.com. She was in Boston The Current on CBC Radio One. You might have caught our segment yesterday on travelling. We were talking about cancelling trips because of COVID-19. We asked for your stories. We got a number of them. Senior producer Karin Marley is here to sift through the mailbag. Good morning.

KARIN MARLEY: Good morning. Yes, my family was lucky enough to do a big trip last summer. And boy, am I thankful that happened.

MG: Same thing, yes.

KARIN MARLEY: That's our first letter is from Joanne Du Gay from Bathurst, New Brunswick. She writes: I was supposed to take a hike to the Portuguese Camino in September with three friends. That is out of the question now. Instead, I'm going to do a three day hike on our beautiful Nepisiguit, Mi'gMaq trail that runs from Bathurst in New Brunswick to Mount Karlson Provincial Park. We will hike 40 to 50 km section of the trail. I've also bought a book by Nicholas Cotard titled Waterfalls of New Brunswick. My beautiful province apparently has a thousand waterfalls, so I will be visiting as many of these waterfalls as I can.

MG: That sounds lovely. Adrian David of Ottawa writes: In the last two years, I have had less and less desire to travel by air. Too many dangers and negatives from over tourism, including destroying the environment. I decided that I live in Ottawa. I have more than enough to discover within walking, biking, driving or train distance.

KARIN MARLEY: Gloria Thompson of Osaka Beach, Ontario, wrote: We need a reset on tourism. There are so many people travelling cheaply that popular destinations are begging people to stay away. The Italian Tourist Board is asking the tour operators to take the hordes on their tours to smaller cities. Barcelona, Amsterdam and Iceland are overwhelmed with crowds. As a devoted travel agent and traveller. Travel has become a nightmare, mostly due to the pressures of mass tourism.

MG: And this letter from Rebecca McTaggart from Toronto. Today, the 6th of May, which was actually yesterday, but she sent it yesterday. I was scheduled to be in Reme, France, as part of a three week journey of discovery, research and pilgrimage about my great grandparents. The project has evolved over years. My great grandfather was killed in action on the 23rd of July, 1918. I knew little about him until I began researching his life as part of a trip that I had planned a visit to the Vimy Memorial and his gravesite if it could be located. When I asked my mother what his given names were, she did not know, thus began the research and discovery. I've continued that research into my family's history and this trip would have included a visit on the 9th of May to the Ring of Remembrance. This new memorial lists the 580,000 names of First World War soldiers. And my dream was to find my great grandfather's name etched in one of the panels. I'm hoping I'll still be able to undertake this trip in the spring of 2021, but even that might be overly optimistic. Although some research can be done virtually, I cannot replicate the experience of standing in front of the plaque with the name of my great grandfather among most 580,000 other names etched in the medal. And that experience is what makes history personal. Thanks for all your letters on travel. If you have anything you want to comment on, get in touch. You can reach us through the web site at cbc.ca/thecurrent and click on the contact link. We'd like you to get in touch because next week we're going to be talking about e-learning. We know there are thousands of teachers, parents and kids across this country trying to figure out how to do schooling at home. Right now we want to hear from the kids. How is the e-learning going? If you're a student, record a message or get your parents to send it to us. Maybe you can show them how to send it to us. Maybe you're the tech wizard in the home. We'll use some of your messages on the air for our discussion next week. But we need to hear from you soon. Like today or first thing tomorrow. So that's your assignment. This is your home lesson. Record your thoughts on what it's like to be learning from home and send your message to us. Go to the Web site, cbc.ca/thecurrent and click on the contact link. In the meantime, this suggestion of music comes from Nicholas Tjelios. We're talking about music that perhaps eases your anxiety during this pandemic. Nicholas writes, My positive energy COVID-19 song Choice has to be Dr. John's Let's Make a Better World. Let's have a listen.

SOUNDCLIP

[Song: Let's Make a Better World].

MG: The music from the good doctor, Dr. John. Thank you, Nicholas, for that suggestion. You can reach us to the Web site, cbc.ca/thecurrent. Click on the contact link. And again, kids. We want to hear from you. What is that home learning thing? Looking like doing the homework, not doing the homework. Do you need help? How are your parents helping you? Let us know. cbc.ca/thecurrent. Click on the contact link. We're back in six minutes. Hi Matt Galloway. This is The Current.

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Long-term care facilities and COVID-19

Guests: Natalie Stake-Doucet, Michael Schwandt, Nathan Stall

MG: Good morning. I'm Matt Galloway. You're listening to an extended edition of The Current.

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MG: Still to come, he played Dwight on The Office. Tom Powers interview with Rainn Wilson in just under an hour. But first, finding a better way for long term care.

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[Music]

MG: It's an intimate performance from Romeo Boudreau. He's 97 years old, has no need for a piano bench from the seat of his wheelchair. He plays for the people he lives with fellow residents at his care home in Cap-de-la Madeleine, Quebec. After weeks of lockdown, the province says it will allow visitors soon. Advocates, meanwhile, say now is the time to reflect. Somewhere around 80 percent of Canada's COVID-19 deaths have happened in long term care. And to my next guests, this is both unacceptable and entirely avoidable. Dr. Michael Schwandt is a medical health officer with Vancouver Coastal Health. Nathalie Stake-Doucet is a nurse and the president of the Quebec Nurses Association. And Dr. Nathan Stall is a geriatrician at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto and a research fellow at Women's College Research Institute. They join us now. Good morning to you all.

GUESTS: Good morning.

MG: Dr. Michael Schwandt let's start with you. Earlier this week, you put out a tweet around COVID outbreaks in long term care homes. You said if someone tells you that this was inevitable, tell them otherwise. Why did you tweet that?

MICHAEL SCHWANDT: Well, having worked closely with colleagues on a major outbreak at Lynn Valley Care Centre in British Columbia, where this was our first outbreak and our largest to date, we did see that there was a lot of fear and sometimes loss of hope, in fact, among the staff at the facility, public health supports that were involved and even the residents and families themselves. And I think that here in Vancouver, coastal health, we have reached some measures that we feel are preventing isolated cases from turning into outbreaks and preventing small outbreaks from becoming larger outbreaks. And I felt very motivated to share that with the with the field more broadly.

MG: What's the situation at Lynn Valley today?

MICHAEL SCHWANDT: Well, Lynn Valley, I'm pleased to say that we recently declared the outbreak at Lynn Valley over quite unfortunately, a large number of people in the facility were infected with COVID-19, and there were a number of deaths related to that. In the meantime, one half of- the facility has two wings. One half of the facility was almost entirely spared. And we credit the staff of this facility for their best work and really implementing some effective measures to do so.

MG: When I get into the specifics in a moment. But before we get to Natalie, just briefly, tell us what Vancouver Coastal Health has done to control the spread of outbreaks. What how have you managed to get ahead?

MICHAEL SCHWANDT: Well, a lot of what we're doing comes back to the fundamentals of outbreak management. You may have been hearing a lot about. So testing for new cases, tracing and identifying their contacts and in turn, isolating those cases and contacts. At Vancouver Coastal Health, you feel we've played almost a radical precaution to all of these steps, though, especially testing. In terms of testing, one of our motto has become to test early and test broadly. The symptoms that we've seen in older adults can be extremely varied, often mild and often atypical. So as well as cough and fever, the well-known symptoms of COVID-19, we've also seen a bit of fatigue, confusion, really subtle changes that maybe only the nurses used to patients or the residents every day would really notice. I've had patients sitting up in bed saying, I can't believe I'm infected, doctor, having very mild illness. But there was something that told the nurses something wasn't quite right and they went ahead and tested and identified a case potentially leading to onward transmission to the person in the next room who might have much worse health outcomes, unfortunately.

MG: Radical caution.

MICHAEL SCHWANDT: Yes, we really think so. Early on, I think that the looking at the experience of facilities in Washington State, which is in our backyard here in Vancouver, we learned that there was a lot of potential pre symptomatic or even asymptomatic transmission and they very mild symptoms, a different array of symptoms in the older adult population that there might be in the more well-characterized younger adult population.

MG: We'll come back to that. Well, we'll come back to the issue of testing, because it's fascinating. And in many ways it's at the heart of what is or isn't happening across the country. Natalie Stake-Doucet Not least a case to set you. It turns out, are actually recovering from COVID-19 after working in a long term care home in Quebec. How are you feeling?

NATALIE STAKE-DOUCET: I'm feeling much better now. The first week was quite painful, but now it's manageable.

MG: You're working on your PhD and then you volunteered to work in that home. Why?

NATALIE STAKE-DOUCET: I mean, I've been a nurse for almost 10 years. I feel like I'm a pretty good nurse, so I was able bodied and capable of going back to work. So given the situation, I wanted to help out.

MG: And so when you arrived at that home, what were the conditions like?

NATALIE STAKE-DOUCET: It's hard to articulate even now. It's you know, I study the health care system as a whole and, you know, nursing work and this is beyond anything they could have imagined. We were one of the worst hit places. But I mean, there's so many in Quebec right now that are terribly affected. And that just the amount of people dying on a daily basis was just staggering. The lack of staff when I got there, one of my colleagues told me that half the staff was sick with COVIVD. So obviously, it was, you know, thrown on a unit with no orientation, no codes that, you know, open the medical card and stuff like that. It was quite the baptism by fire. But it's not- I mean, at that point, it wasn't anybody's fault. There just wasn't enough staff to give me a proper orientation. So it was just, please, do whatever you can.

MG: Just do whatever you can.

NATALIE STAKE-DOUCET: Yes, exactly. That's what I was told.

MG: We'll come back because I can't imagine what that would be like and how you would begin to cope with that. Dr. Nathan Stall, you were part of the SWAT team in Toronto that's now working with a long term care home that is experiencing an outbreak. What was the SWAT team?

NATHAN STALL: Yes. So on April 22nd, the ministry gave a directive to partner hospitals with nursing homes, recognising sort of the extraordinary conditions that Natalie has just described. And this was to provide additional staffing, infection prevention and control expertise, operational support and clinical support to nursing homes, recognising the extreme state of crisis they were in. And so are our hospital partnered with this home. And really, it's been an amazing experience. We've, you know, full credit to Dr. Schwandt to what they've been doing in British Columbia. It's been sort of the tale of two provinces, so to speak, or a tale of two countries with west versus east. But so we were dealing with this sort of much farther down the line in terms of how advanced this outbreak was. But a few things. I mean, sort of like Natalie has described, the initial phase of our intervention was focussed really on sort of military style triage of just figuring out who was dying and who was not. And the individuals who are dying, it was either providing intense palliative care to them and or intense medical care to them. And it's really like nothing I have also ever seen in my career.

MG: How bleak. I mean, Natalie described what the conditions were like there. Was it similar in terms of when you arrived, what you saw?

NATHAN STALL: Yeah, I think there is- there were certainly phases of that. I think, you know, as we'll speak to, hopefully the whole sector was just totally unprepared. So, you know, something as basic as they didn't even have intravenous poles to hang bags of the normal saline, which we would infuse the patients. So they were actually using coat hangers. I mean, so we're talking about conditions that are unbelievable to think about in Canada.

MG: How did we get to that point in this is, again, we'll talk about some of the other interventions, but how do you think we got to a point as a society where those basic things weren't present?

NATHAN STALL: You know, I think when we sort of saw what was happening in Asia and Europe. And I think of a health care system we were very, very, very focussed on acute. And critical care and all the talk, if you remember early on, was how are you going to procure enough ventilators, how we're going to make more intensive care unit beds? How are you going to re-deploy more health care workers to the acute and critical care setting? And I think it was almost at the complete neglect of other sectors like this. Like the long term care sector. And I would lump into that other congregate settings like retirement homes, shelters, group homes, which now have become, unfortunately, ground zero for COVID-19.

MG: Natalie, does that sound familiar that the planning and the focus was essentially on a different part of the sector?

NATALIE STAKE-DOUCET: Absolutely. With what Dan Nathan just said is exactly what happened in Quebec. We completely focussed on hospitals. I mean, in fact, one of the most outrageous thing was personal protective equipment, what we called PPE, was actually taken out of Long-Term Care Homes to be brought to hospital in some instances. And staff was actually forbidden to wear even surgical masks unless they had symptoms. So we really, we really got the ball on long term care in Quebec.

MG: Michael, Nathan describe this is in some ways a tale of two provinces are a tale of two countries. There were things that have happened to your point in in Vancouver and in British Columbia that have not been replicated across the country, or at least not at the speed and the efficacy that you have managed to accomplish. Tell us about some of the rules that Vancouver Coastal Health put in to stop a breaks, particularly on staff. Because that's one of the issues that we've seen. We've talked about it here in Ontario, but also in Quebec and elsewhere.

MICHAEL SCHWANDT: Absolutely, Matt. One of the things that we found out early on was that staff who were infected with COVID-19 in some cases, on careful history taking, turned out to be working in two or three or even more different facilities. And of course, that's a risk for onward transmission to the other staff and to residents of those facilities. So pretty early in this process, on March 17th, Vancouver Coastal Health put in a single site order requiring staff to choose a site and to work at that site only to mitigate the risk of that network of transmission. This was closely followed by our own provincial health officer, John Henry, placing a provincial order. So that was one thing that we hope prevented some of these spread of infections and the creation of new outbreaks. And as well as that, we had a policy very early on for use of personal protective equipment, specifically a mask and eye protection for any instance of resident care in long term care homes. Just because once there was a case, knowing that that firewall was in place with that PPE between staff and the residents really helped to prevent the onward transmission. And that made these outbreak investigations more straightforward and much smaller, I should say. So those policies, I think, from an early stage did help. And I think the approach that we took to the facilities, we really tried to take a supportive and organised approach to them, making sure that the resources they have, our presence, the managing an outbreak takes staff and it takes personal protective equipment in amounts not previously seen to most facilities. So being with them every day, finding out what they needed to implement, the directions that we were providing and doing so quickly was something that we've tried to implement to really work alongside the facilities as public health.

MG: Nathan Stall We've spoken with people who work in Long-Term Care Facilities and they'll say that they often need to work in a couple of different ones to make ends meet. What can be done if that's the case? What can be done to limit the risks so that the virus isn't spread from home to home?

NATHAN STALL: Well, I think what British Columbia did in terms of, you know, a lot of the talk has been how can we prevent people from working at multiple homes? And I think the more appropriate language is, how can we enable them to work at one home? Most of the these individuals who are working as personal support workers in Long-Term Care Homes, as you've highlighted, are paid part time. They don't have sick benefits. So to work, to make ends meet, this is something they've had to do. And when we live in a province like Ontario, where we've taken away mandatory paid sick leave, we haven't enabled them to work in one home. We've sort of created the situation to set up to set ourselves up for this disaster. So I think, you know, they did in Ontario - it's only been a couple of weeks now - did you try to enable people to work only at one home but it's not something you can roll out overnight, especially when many of these nursing homes are experiencing critical staffing shortages. So, again, I think what British Columbia did in terms of enabling them to work one home was very forward thinking. And they did that at a time that with much earlier in the pandemic.

MG: Is this what you saw in Quebec, Natalie?

NATALIE STAKE-DOUCET: I wish we would have seen what happened in B.C. That's definitely the example to follow being correct. We came into this pandemic much weakened by the last health care reform and then the ones before that with, you know, high levels of mobility, with staff people working in two, three different areas. And because of the critical shortage, a lot of staffing agency. So staffing agencies to basically send orderlies, nurses, licenced practical nurses to different places. And in fact, at the beginning of a pandemic, some of the agencies actually would pay a premium for their staff to work on COVID units. So, you know, somebody could work one week in a hot zone and then be sent to a Long-Term Care home that wasn't infected at all. So that mobility. The fact that staff are working in a bunch of different places definitely was problematic.

MG: Michael Schwandt was talking about testing at the beginning of our conversation. Nathan Stall, we had comments coming from the Ontario premier earlier this week. Doug Ford was criticizing some public health units for not doing enough testing in long term care home, said that people needed to pull up their socks and ensure that that testing was done. What did you make of that and what has to happen to ensure that the testing that is happening in the province of Ontario is meeting the need?

MICHAEL SCHWANDT: So first, I thought it was actually exceedingly unhelpful and probably inappropriate to be criticizing our public health officials who you know, there are many sort of barriers to having testing done. And it's not just the will of public health officials. It requires physical swabs. It requires health, human resources to actually go in and swab individuals. And it requires laboratory capacity to run all the swabs. So simply saying get it done is not that a simple thing for all these public health units. I do think, and to Michael's point, there were a couple of things where I think we could have done better in Ontario. The first is that our swabbing and our testing strategy focussed in the long term care setting, like everywhere else, on identifying individuals who had the quote unquote typical symptoms of COVID-19, the cough and the fever. And Michael, it highlighted and this is something we see time and time again in frail older adults. They don't often present with infections with these typical symptoms. It might be confusion, it might be falls and might be that they're simply off their baseline. And I think we had ought to expand testing to include more of those atypical symptoms a little bit earlier on. The second thing is, and Michael has highlighted this as well, is that for Washington state that we had good data showing that when they actually swab nursing home residents during an outbreak, about half of the individuals who swabbed positive on the day of testing actually had no symptoms on that day. So people are shedding a lot of virus before they actually go on to develop symptoms. So I think broadening testing within nursing homes, we also came to that a little bit too late in the pandemic.

MG: There were facilities that were very successful and jurisdictions that have been very successful in helping to reduce the spread of this virus. And people have heard perhaps of the situation in Kingston, Ontario. Kathy Zaba is the CEO of Providence Care. It's an organisation in Kingston, operates a long care home, and she - have a listen to her - says that there are some best practices that can stop outbreaks.

SOUNDCLIP

Our staff determined that the residents that tested positive, which was a weak positive, had been more mobile than other patients. The requirements at the time were that we catch anyone who came in close contact with the resident. We chose to test those people and go beyond that to 20 residents on an adjacent floor. And the staff that worked on that adjacent floor as well, 57 or 58 in total, were tested.

MG: Michael Schwandt. What do you make of the success in Kingston, what they've been able to accomplish there?

MICHAEL SCHWANDT: Well, that's the description absolutely rings a bell related to our experience in Vancouver coastal health. What we've found is often even very brief contact, so helping a resident to change stockings or two staff sitting side by side in a lunchroom, I think that might not have necessarily been seen as close contact historically. We're coming to understand that those can lead to transmission. So in many cases, when there's been a widespread exposure through a facility, potentially somebody working for a shift with some symptoms or residents who had lingering symptoms for some time, we might actually test the entire floor of a facility, the entire building in some cases or the entire cadre of the staff. And that we have actually had results in those cases finding people who didn't have symptoms that had been previously declared and being able to successfully isolate them and prevent transmission. Absolutely agree with that approach.

MG: I think it would be helpful in part because we started out talking about how this crisis was in some ways preventable based on best practices to talk about how to move forward. So, Natalie, in part, I mean, through your work as a PhD student, you're looking at the shape of the health care system. If you are redesigning long term care right now based on the work that you've done and what you know, where would you start?

NATALIE STAKE-DOUCET: Well, there's a lot of demands that have been, you know, been called out by the unions, by various health care associations, firm, you know, many years now that would would have actually helped in this particular instance. Had we implemented them earlier. For example, personal mobility. That's one thing that a lot of health care workers would much rather work in only one place, having a stable team, learning the routine and a specific measure, learning, getting to know your patients, etc.. So that's definitely part of the basic things that the Nurses Association, but also with other groups. We've been calling for that just in terms of helping to retain personnel because we've been in and critical staff shortage for years now. So we look at the way work is organised. It's been very sort of fragmented in the last few years for the last several health care reforms where basically people do various tasks and they can they're basically treated as interchangeable. That anybody who works in health care and who hope that really can't be good for [unintelligible] quality care. So obviously, you know, building strong, stable teams in this particular case would have helped. And, you know, having a pandemic plan that, the Kingston Long-Term Care home that we've been talking about had a pandemic plan as well. You know, experts have been talking about pandemics for years. We knew one was coming. So there are things that could have been done. You know, here we do a lot of, you know, code orange practices every year. Pretend there's been a big disaster and there's a bunch of patients coming in. But why don't we do practices for pandemics? That was you know, there was there was a much higher likelihood of a pandemic than a massive code orange because of the earthquake or whatever. So definitely to be able to take what we know, what our best practices and actually just implement them. That's a lot of the best practices aren't always put in place, especially in long term care. It seems to be an area of care that has been long neglected by successive governments. You know, now we have this manmade disaster where many people died and probably could have been saved had we been a bit more careful.

MG: Nathan Stall, you call this a humanitarian crisis?

NATHAN STALL: Yes. I mean, listen, we think it's totally unacceptable. And I think every Canadian would feel so. To have this, what we've what we've observed happening in places like Dorval, the nursing home where people are coming across older adults who are all already vulnerable and frail, being totally neglected. Calling out for water, being soiled for days on the floor. Sort of found on their last breaths. So even, you know, most horrifically being found dead in their bed and knowing that, you know, at the end of their life, no one was tending to them because, one, there's restricted visitor visitation policies, which are, you know, appropriate because of the situation. But not only that, we didn't increase the staffing to provide these people with dignity at the end of their lives, let alone prevent this from happening.

MG: I want to end this just where we started, Michael, which is that you said this was preventable, that if somebody says it's inevitable, it's not. It seems as though we're coming out of this. People who said that this is going to be a reckoning in terms of how we treat our elders and how we house our elders. Are you confident that we can do better? We know how to do better. But are you confident that we will do better?

MICHAEL SCHWANDT: I think that we can. I think that although this is a new virus and a new pandemic, we've applied, tried and true principles and been able to learn and develop the technical know how to combat these outbreaks. It does take the underlying systems to make that possible. Supporting staff to stay off of work when they're when they're sick, supporting them to work at one site and to focus their work on the residents at that site are very important. So I think that to some extent there's a question of will and whether we go ahead to implement what we've learned from this some situation.

MG: Also, a question of money. Will is one thing, but you have to be willing to spend the money to make it better too, Michael.

MICHAEL SCHWANDT: Absolutely.

MG: Are you confident with that?

MICHAEL SCHWANDT: Well, I think the experience that we've had in British Columbia is that when we're working with these facilities, we've let us know that they're having staffing concerns or that they're having issues with personal protective equipment needed to combat an outbreak. We've been able to say to them with confidence that if they come to the regional health authority, let us know of those needs. We've found creative ways to get it done and we haven't let resources constrain us from the outbreak response.

MG: This is a conversation that so many people are having in their own families because of what we're seeing across this country. I appreciate all of your perspectives on this. Thanks for the work that you're doing. And stay well.

NATHAN STALL: Thank you for having us.

NATALIE STAKE-DOUCET: Thank you.

Dr. Michael Schwandt is the medical health officer with Vancouver Coastal Health. Natalie Stake-Doucet is a nurse. And the president of the Quebec Nurses Association, she is pursuing her Phd in nursing. She was in Montreal. And Dr. Nathan Stall is a geriatrician at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto and a research fellow at Women's College Research Institute. As I say, this is one of the conversations of our times. We'd be happy to hear from you on this. What should that reckoning look like? And how could we come out of that reckoning thinking differently about how we care for our elders? Let us know through the web site. cbc.ca/thecurrent. Click on the contact link. It's time to say goodbye to our listeners in Newfoundland and Labrador. Cross-talk is up next for you, for everyone else. We're back in 90 seconds. We're The Current Matt Galloway. Stay with us.

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Rainn Wilson

Guests: Rainn Wilson

MG: This is The Current on CBC Radio One. I'm Matt Galloway. Extended edition of the program. Tom Power is back with us, host of Q. Hello, Tom.

TP: Matt, I got a story for you.

MG: Oh, yes.

TP: I had a friend of mine. He told me I had to stop pretending to be a flamingo.

MG: Why was that?

TP: So I put my foot down.

MG: You know, he has a big book of bad jokes. You could hear him flipping through its page 62 of bad jokes.

TP: I am scrambling to try to get these everyday for you.

MG: I don't they are scrambling at all. I think you're delighted to do that.

TP: I really do love it. I'm actually here to talk to you about, do you watch the U.S. version of The Office?

MG: Yes. Initially, reluctantly. And then with great joy, because I love the British version. And then I fell in love with the American one.

TP: I love this show so much. I probably have watched it like 75 times. And I'm not kidding. It's just kind of always on at my house. And I got to talk to Rainn Wilson. He played Dwight Schrute on the show. Dwight, of course. Right. Not very sociable, right?

MG: No.

TP: Kind of unlikable?

MG: Somewhat. Yes.

TP: Rainn Wilson could not be any more different than his character. Kind, generous, wonderful. And wants to spread a message of positivity all around the world. He's doing it through a new daily Web series called Hey Human. If you're expecting Dwight Schrute, this is not what you're going to get. Here's our conversation.

SOUNDCLIP

TP: Hi, Rainn.

RAINN WILSON: Hey, how you doing?

TP: I'm not doing too bad. Thanks for asking. How are you doing?

RAINN WILSON: I'm I'm doing okay, all things considered.

TP: It's a very strange time. I mean, when we were setting up this call, you said you have a couple of guinea pigs keeping you company.

RAINN WILSON: Yes. In the background, you may hear them scrambling, squeaking, begging for carrots and frantically trying to get water out of their water dispensers. So don't let that throw you.

TP: I won't. I'll try and keep steely eyed ahead, even though is it lemon and shogun?

RAINN WILSON: Very good memory. Yes. Lemon and Shogun. Yes.

TP: So I'm glad they're giving you some comfort more than my cat who's just, you know, cost me a lot in vet bills and cat food right now.

RAINN WILSON: I don't know that they're comforting me very much. They just kind of sit there and eat and poop. And that's pretty much it.

TP: In this Instagram live series, you talk about being a human being in inhuman times. I mean, I think the question we're all asking ourselves right now is how do we do that?

RAINN WILSON: Well, so we're having a shared human experience, which is that we have no idea what the F is going on all over the world. And it is an anxiety provoking time. Certainly, you know, with our physical health and also the economic health of our countries, respectively, the US and Canada and globally. So with all of this difficulty going on. There is this silver lining of our shared human experience. And that's really what I'm interested in exploring in this little show.

TP: What have you noticed?

RAINN WILSON: I've noticed that people are more grateful. I've noticed that people are more grateful for connection, that we take connection one with each other for granted a lot of times. And now, like when you can Zoom cocktails with someone or call an old friend on the phone or pass a dog walker, a fellow dog walker with a friendly wave. Like we miss hugging, we miss high-fiving, we miss being together. So we're relishing the connection that we can maintain.

TP: Let's talk about the project you're doing, Hey There, Human, if people tuned in, what can they expect?

RAINN WILSON: Well, I do a live Instagram show, which is new to me, by the way, and I interview random humans from the Internet. So I choose random humans and you can share screens with them and bring them onboard your interview. And it's been amazing.

TP: Tell me about someone you've been met who you weren't expecting to meet the are truly random that is particularly memorable. Someone who kind of maybe blow your mind a little bit.

RAINN WILSON: There's been so many people. There was a kid in India who was a big office fan and a big Dwight Schrute fan. And he'd stayed up to 4:00 in the morning or 5:00 in the morning to watch the show. And I had him give me a tour of his Indian house and it had him wake up his little brother, who was asleep on the couch. That was a pretty fun interaction. There was a young woman in Poland who was a French horn player, and she played us the French horn again in the middle of the night from Poland. That's not something you see every day.

TP: Is it remarkable to you that that this is happening now at a time when we're supposed to be ultimately hopeless, like when we're still inside with a pandemic? I think if you told me this was gonna happen, I would have thought it would've been a time where we would be quite sad or pessimistic. Not to say that people aren't feeling that way. Not to say that people aren't justified in feeling that way. But it sounds like you're getting some hope from these random interactions.

RAINN WILSON: Well, I think that it seems this in this crazy time, it seems like there is so much to be hopeless about men, yet there is so much to be hopeful about. And this is a really interesting philosophical conundrum that we're all in. And the world seems to be falling apart. And yet there are things that give us great hope and connection and unity. It's really difficult to hold both of these things in the mind at the same time that we're we're in a process of integration and we're in the process of disintegration at the exact same time. And so one of the things I talk to our viewers about is to make sure you're holding onto that process of integration. That's where you volunteer and you donate money or whatever, whatever it takes with those forces that are providing hope and integration.

TP: Rainn, I don't have to tell you that. You know, your show, the office and its characters have been creating a really comforting space for viewers long before this pandemic. You know, I had your co-star, Jon Kwasniewski in here, and I told him that when I lost my father, I was so sad. But I watched the office, you know, hours and hours a day. And it gave me some kind of comfort. You know, I wonder what it means to you. I'm sure mine is not the only story you've heard like that. You know what it what it means to you that this this television show, the sitcom, can provide so much comfort to people during a time like this.

RAINN WILSON: I tell you, I'm blown away by the response to The Office on so many different levels. I was talking to Steve Gorell the other day and I said, Steve, if someone had gone into a coma five years ago and woke up right now and they were like less and less popular TV show going on these days, we'd like The Office. They'd be like, wait, wait, the office from 2008, 2009, that that show. But its popularity is kind of ridiculous. We always knew we were doing something really special. We knew that we had a lot of comedy and just enough heart to keep people coming back. And the fact that it's touching people, affecting people, besides being funny as hell show it. It's amazing.

TP: Rainn, thank you so much for your time.

RAINN WILSON: Thanks for having me.

MG: That's Tom Power speaking with the actor Rainn Wilson. Maybe that's the plan for the rest of this pandemic day is to watch The Office on repeat. That is it for The Current for today. I'm Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening. Take care of yourself. We'll talk to you tomorrow.

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Thursday May 7, 2020 Full Transcript

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