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The Current Transcript for June 23, 2020

Host: Matt Galloway

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

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VOICE: Yeah, we just think we're invincible. We want to be outside in the beautiful weather. We've been kind of cooped up for a little while, so maybe that's why we're not taking as much precaution as we should be anymore.

MATT GALLOWAY: Sweet relief. Summer's here, the curve is flattening and the parks, the patios and the beaches are certainly better places to be than the home you've been stuck in for months. As restrictions ease though, areas in Canada and the United States are seeing spikes in COVID-19 cases, especially amongst young people. In 30 minutes, why the message, particularly to this generation, matters. Also this morning, in some parts of the United States, those delivering that message are increasingly the focus of real anger. We'll hear why some public health officials are facing death threats and leaving their posts in the midst of a pandemic. And then.

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VOICE: You know, kelp is a little embarrassing to grow for a fisherman. You know I chase and kill things for a living, and now I'm like an argula farmer.

MG: Is kelp the new kale? Bren Smith farms the seas and he says the future of ocean sustainability isn't to eat more fish, but to eat like fish. He'll explain. We begin with another person in a mental health crisis shot dead by police and questions around why calls for de-escalation can tragically have the opposite result. Good morning. I'm Matt Galloway. This is The Current.

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Family of Ont. man fatally shot by police 'can't wrap our heads' around how wellness check ended in his death

Guests: Hassan Choudhary, Dan Jones, Meenakshi Mannoe

MG: Ejaz Ahmed Choudry family says he lived with schizophrenia. He was 62-years-old. On Saturday night, the family was worried about his safety, and so they called a non-emergency number for help. And now they are a family in mourning. Ejaz was shot dead by a Peel police officer sent to his apartment in Mississauga to help. Hassan Choudhary is Ejaz Choudry's nephew and he joins us now. Hassan, good morning.

HASSAN CHOUDHARY: Good morning, Matt. Thanks for having me on and giving me the opportunity to voice for the entire Choudry family and the community in Malton as well.

MG: I'm sorry for what you've been through. What habe the last 72 hours been like for your family?

HASSAN CHOUDHARY: I don't know, Matt. I don't know how to put it into words. It's been, I believe, 40 hours since I slept. You know, a majority of the family can't even sleep thinking about how our uncle, harmless, was brutally murdered. And we haven't been given any insight in justice. Reading about what the chief had to say, what the Premier Doug Ford had to say, it's saddening. Which is what they're trying to focus on is the investigation itself, but our question is, why did you enter a residence of a man who was supposedly a threat to himself and you murder him?

MG: What happened on Saturday night? Your family calls for help. Why did the family call?

HASSAN CHOUDHARY: The family called for help, not to the police, to non-emergency help line, to get help to take his medication. Not to have the police come to our front doors and threaten him and scare him in that sense. I don't want to speak too much on the investigation because I don't feel that speaking on the investigation itself or the small details is making a big difference. I feel that what the problem is, is the chief, Premier Doug Ford are saying, let's focus on what the SIU has to say, what the SIU is investigating. But there's a clear fact. Constable Sarah stood outside after the killing and she said the police believed that my Uncle Ejaz was a threat to himself. They believed he was a threat to himself. And what they did is because they felt that he was a threat to himself, they broke down his back door and you can clearly see in the viral video that's going everywhere and shot him multiple times.

MG: There are a couple of things that I think it's worth going over. One is, is your sense that police understood that your uncle lived with schizophrenia?

HASSAN CHOUDHARY: I feel that we were they were told again and again by multiple family members that he did live with schizophrenia and he was afraid of the police and he was in the middle of an episode. And I don't feel that he took that into account.

MG: Was he alone in the apartment when the police arrived?

HASSAN CHOUDHARY: He was.

MG: We've heard that your family was asking police at the scene to let one of them go up to talk to him. That this had happened before and that family members felt that they could diffuse the situation.

HASSAN CHOUDHARY: The reason why we were asking for that, my uncles were asking that, my cousins were asking for that, the reasoning behind that is because anybody that's in distress will feel better when they have a loved one, someone who cares for them tell them that everything is OK. Regardless of the situation, if you are in that situation, if you have a loved one come and tell you it's going to be OK, that will de-escalate very quickly.

MG: What did the police do when the family asked for help?

HASSAN CHOUDHARY: They kept denying. Kept denying. Kept saying, no, you can't do that. No. Please step aside. We'll take over peacefully. We put our trust in the police to take over this peacefully and clearly we regret it. We weren't given the opportunity to help de-escalate. There was no de-escalation. I'm reading all these reports and my cousins who were at the scene clearly can explain why. And it's frustrating because it's like we're not being heard. We're not being heard for what we have to say.

MG: Did your uncle speak English?

HASSAN CHOUDHARY: My uncle did not speak English.

MG: And I ask that in part because, again, you mentioned this video that's gone around and what some people can hear are officers who are yelling open the door and there are other comments. And I just wonder whether there was a language barrier between those who were there and your uncle on the other side of that door.

HASSAN CHOUDHARY: A hundred percent. If someone does not understand what you're saying, how will they act upon it? If you come and tell me something in a completely different language that I don't understand, how will I know what to do? How will I know what you're saying? How will I know what you're saying and why you're saying it? Especially when you have a mental illness, you see it again and again.

MG: A spokesperson for the Peel Regional Police told reporters over the weekend that your uncle was in a state of crisis. Police believe that he had access to weapons, that he might have been a danger to himself. And you mentioned Constable Sarah Patton. She said that they made a decision to enter the apartment, in her words, to check on his well-being. What do you make of that explanation in terms of what happened?

HASSAN CHOUDHARY: How would you check on someone's well-being? Would you bust down their back door and put seven shots in them? Shoot multiple times? That's not checking on someone's well-being. Checking on someone's well-being is being there to make them comfortable. No matter how it is, however, that person feels comfortable, you have to try and push that way. Not the way you've been taught. You have to understand the person that is in a crisis, how do you make them feel better? And if you can't understand that, how do you expect to de-escalate a situation? How do you expect to help out? That's the problem. They keep saying he was a threat to himself and they wanted to go and check on his well-being. You can clearly see in the video itself that was not a check on well-being. That was breaking down his back door, scaring into more, already terrified. A harmless, my uncle was harmless. Already terrified, you break down his back door and what do you do? You end up murdering him.

MG: What do you want to happen now?

HASSAN CHOUDHARY: What we want to happen is we want, first of all, a public inquiry. Second of all, the officer that committed the murder, we want him to be fired and tried for what he has done. And the reasoning behind that is not just because the police are saying the investigation has to be done by the SIU and what not? The police themselves have said we believed he was a threat to himself, but there was no way that they were providing help. They believed he was a threat to himself, but what did they do? They went in and they murdered him. How do you help someone who is a threat to themselves by killing them? It makes no sense. We just can't wrap our head around it. We see these police reports, these statements by the constable, by the chief and the premier saying we need to get the investigation completed to get a better insight before we point fingers. It's clear in sight. The Constable Sarah herself said we believed he was a threat to himself. How do you do? How do you understand the situation where someone is a threat to themselves and take it all the way to breaking down their back door and shooting them multiple times? That's what makes no sense. I understand the investigation has to be done to get a better understanding of every little thing, every little detail, but you yourself are saying we believe he was a threat to himself. How do you handle that? You try to stop whatever the issue is, whatever the threat is itself, you try to de-escalate it. Instead of doing that, you break down a back door and you murder someone.

MG: I'm so sorry for what your family has gone through and as as you mentioned, it's been an awful certainly 48, if not 72 hours. I appreciate you talking to us and telling us the story and what you're looking for. Hassan, thank you.

HASSAN CHOUDHARY: I appreciate that as well, Matt. Thank you.

MG: Take care of yourself.

HASSAN CHOUDHARY: You as well. Take care.

MG: Hassan Choudhary is the nephew of Ejaz Choudry, who died on Saturday night, shot by a police officer in Mississauga, Ontario. Ontario's Special Investigations Unit is investigating this death. Police forces across this country respond to people experiencing mental health crisis or emergency all the time, but a CBC investigation in 2018 found that of the 461 people who died in interactions with Canadian police between 2000 and 2017, 42 percent were reported to be mentally distressed. Dan Jones is an inspector with the Edmonton Police Service. He's also a doctoral student in criminology. Dan Jones, good morning to you.

DAN JONES: Good morning.

MG: I know you don't want to comment on this particular case of Ejaz Choudry, but it seems to follow a familiar pattern. There have been three Canadians in the last month who died after the so-called wellness checks were executed, that they were in distress, police were called and suddenly this turns into an investigation into their deaths. What are the principles that police should be following when they're called to a home, when, for example, someone lives with schizophrenia?

DAN JONES: Well principally, principles is that is every single one of these events has to be looked at by the attending members as an individual event. The, one of the things that, you know, we have police and crisis team, we have police and crisis teams in Edmonton that are a mental health worker partnered with a police officer. And there's information that can come from those individuals in the mental health world that help the police form their response better because they have the full understanding of what the individual's diagnosis is and what they're going through. Sometimes those pack teams go themselves, but they also act as a consulting team for members heading to these calls because you don't know what you have. Like you get a call and you get a certain amount of information, but you don't have the whole story. And it's important that police do as much as they can to get that whole story before attending the call and before the interaction with the individual that the call is in relation to.

MG: If you have a team that responds, how in Edmonton has that helped resolve cases in a way that would ensure that the you know, the health of the individual who is being responded to is protected?

DAN JONES: Well, the whole point of the policing crisis teams and Hamilton is to provide that expertise through a mental health worker. It's that blend of, you know, law enforcement and public health together working in a way that we, that the police have the ability to have a greater understanding by having an expert in health with them. And what we've seen in Edmonton is we've seen that, in fact, it's interesting. What we've seen is a reduction in the number of form 10s or arrests for mental health because the mental health workers have the ability to do a much more fulsome, what's the word I'm looking for a much more fulsome.

MG: Evaluation?

DAN JONES: Thank you. Evaluation of the circumstance then and then that results in less, you know, form 10 arrests and it results in you know quicker times at the hospital, less wait times. It's an amazing program.

MG: You often hear the line that police aren't social workers or police aren't psychiatrists and yet police are often called in these moments of crisis. Is your sense, as an inspector with a police service that police are being asked to do something that they're not trained to do? That they're not capable of doing?

DAN JONES: Yes, I would say the overwhelming majority of police calls involved individuals with mental health experiences and limited resources exist to provide police with that training. We do a lot of training here in Edmonton at the beginning. At the recruit level, we do some yearly training in what we call our GDM days, but you you're right. It's a complex, mental health is a complex issue and police are oftentimes the only ones that work 365 days a year, 24 hours a day, seven days a week and as a result of that, get called to a lot of these events as the first responders for them.

MG: You'll often hear though, and certainly that that call has been amplified in the last couple of weeks, calls to defund the police. To take some of that money away from police services and perhaps put it towards organizations that are better equipped to deal with a situation like this. Why are we sending police to these cases in the first place?

DAN JONES: That's a great question. Again, I go back to, the police are the only people that are around 365 days a year in the middle of the night. Oftentimes, there's no quick response for mental health calls from anyone else, but police and E.M.S. or emergency medical services.

MG: If some money was taken from police services, could it be redeployed so that those mobile crisis intervention teams, as they're called here in Toronto and elsewhere across the country, would be available 24/7?

DAN JONES: There's a good case for it in St. Eugene, Oregon, where they took I think it was one or two percent of the police budget 35 years ago and they have a team that does that quite regularly. So that does exist in today's world.

MG: So that is a model? It's interesting, as a police officer, that's a model that you think perhaps could be pursued.

DAN JONES: Yes, if there was a way to and even augmenting the police and crisis teams and having more mental health workers with the police. Right now in New Zealand, they just put I think it was 35, sorry, Victoria, Australia, I think it was, they just put 35 or 36 nurses, mental health nurses working in police precincts so that the police could actually when mental health calls happen, they could actually just grab one of those mental health nurses and take them with them. So you had a rapid response model that was available to the community 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

MG: Dan, it's good to talk to you about this. I appreciate your time this morning. Thank you.

DAN JONES: Thanks. Have a great day.

MG: And you. Dan Jones, an inspector with the Edmonton Police Service. Meenakshi Mannoe is a criminalzation and policing campaigner with Pivot Legal Society. She's in Vancouver and she's been listening in. Meenakshi, good morning to you.

MEENAKSHI MANNOE: Hi. Good morning, Matt.

MG: You're hearing about different tactics and work that's done to better train police officers to deal with these situations of somebody in a mental health crisis. How much faith do you have in that training?

MEENAKSHI MANNOE: I think that when we're looking at the issues around policing of mental health issues, an issue that impacts people across Canada, it's clear that mental health training or specialised training really fails to address the systemic issues with police. And of course, I want to express condolences to the family of Ejax Choudry, but also the families of other folks who have been killed by police, including families in Vancouver, such as the survivors of Tony Du, who were both killed by police who were attending mental health calls.

MG: What are your concerns are and how police approach these calls? Because to Dan's point, I mean, they're the 24/7 response option. That if something happens, people will call the police and it's often the family members themselves that will call the police. What are your concerns about how police respond to those calls?

MEENAKSHI MANNOE: Yeah, and of course, you know, in the wake of incidents like this, family members are impacted by such grief and regret. But I also recognize that right now we have no viable upstream interventions that are available. The only treatment in a really defunded mental health system is crisis treatment. So we're in a situation where the police have effectively become frontline responders to mental health crises, as well as all of the other crises that are involved with that. Whether it's around loss of housing, substance use, trauma, suddenly the police are positioned as the only people who can respond, as you said, 24/7.

MG: As Dan said, the police officers don't know what they are going to be encountering when they arrive. What does that do to complicate the situation?

MEENAKSHI MANNOE: Well, I think that that means that we're dealing with situations where people are going in based on stigmatizing ideas about what someone who's living with a mental illness, is going to behave like. How they're going to respond. You know, the family of Ejaz Choudry shared that they you know, they called the police, as they may have done other times in the past, to support their loved one and the police attend. They attend and they used the lethal amount of force because they're responding to a situation where someone may be acting in self-defence because they're scared, because they're going through crisis and they're afraid. And what would be more appropriate is an empathetic trauma informed, culturally responsive approach, as he does. As Ejaz's nephew shared, his uncle did not speak English as his primary language, so then you have this further intensification of fear, right? When you have people banging on your door, you're afraid of what's happening. And suddenly you might be doing things to protect yourself.

MG: Dr. Javeed Sukhera is a psychiatrist and the chair of the London Police Services Board in Ontario. Have a listen to what he said about what to think about when you're trying to design solutions to issues like this.

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VOICE: If we have 12 men designing a women's bathroom, it's really not going to be designed in a way that's centred to the user? And we do often design things in our system without honouring the lived experience of people who have navigated that system. Having diversity in the groups of people that co-design these systems would be one way to design them in a more inclusive way and in a way that's more sensitive to the vulnerable groups who have always struggled with trust, with things like the health care system.

MG: Meenakshi, in the last minute or so that we have, is there an option and an opportunity there to bring more people into this, to design a better response? If you have people with lived experience, that's going to create a more sympathetic and empathetic response to people in crisis.

MEENAKSHI MANNOE: Absolutely. I think people's lived experience can best inform how to respond to crises, but I also again want to highlight the impacts of a very coercive mental health system that you know functions in alliance with policing to really make people who are experiencing mental health crisis afraid of being institutionalized and receiving non-consensual treatment. And I think that if we're talking about systems that we're going to design, absolutely. We're going to design and defend a way out of the police, but we also need to design a trauma informed responsive mental health system that doesn't just create crisis-based intervention.

MG: Are you optimistic in this moment of crisis that this is a chance to do that? To have a real rethink of this?

MEENAKSHI MANNOE: Absolutely, I think that in the midst of so much fear, grief and loss, it's the only responsible way forward.

MG: Meenakshi, I appreciate your time this morning. Thank you very much. This is important. Thanks, Matt.

MEENAKSHI MANNOE: Thanks Matt.

MG: Meenakshi Mannoe is a criminalization and policing campaigner with Pivot Legal Society. Your thoughts on this? If you have had to call, perhaps you called yourself police in a situation like this where somebody is experiencing a mental health crisis. What are the last few weeks in the stories that you've been hearing made you think about? You can reach us through the website cbc.ca/thecurrent and click on the contact link. We're back in about six minutes time. We'll talk about an increase in COVID-19 cases, particularly amongst young people. I'm Matt Galloway. This is The Current on CBC Radio One.

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U.S. public health officials facing threats to their lives over COVID-19 response, says association

Guests: Steven Jorgensen, Judith Malgrem, Craig Jenne, Theresa Anselmo

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

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MG: Still to come, as this pandemic continues, some U.S. public health officials are getting death threats just for doing their jobs. But first, the impact that young adults are having on the spread of COVID-19.

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MG: COVID-19 cases are on the rise and some Canadian and U.S. cities and it appears to be young people between 20 and 40 years old who are getting sick in greater numbers. This shift from elderly people topping infection rates comes as provinces begin to reopen for business. That's particularly true in Alberta. Young people now account for more than 40 percent of active cases in that province and several Edmonton restaurants and bars that have reopened have now closed again. They had staff or customers test positive for COVID-19. Steven Jorgensen is a millennial, one of the managers at Woodwork, which is a restaurant and bar in that city. It's open. It has not had any cases of COVID-19 identified there. Steven, good morning.

STEVEN JORGENSEN: Good morning.

MG: What do you think about the spike in cases amongst young people in Edmonton? What do you think's going on there?

STEVEN JORGENSEN: It seems like it was probably inevitable with the reopening of the bars and restaurants as that demographic from age 20 to 40, as you said, is kind of the mainstay bread and butter of the industry. So as we've reopened, that's mainly who's been out mostly.

MG: What are you seeing at Woodwork? How busy has your bar been?

STEVEN JORGENSEN: All the demands been quite large. We've been full to our sort of 50 percent capacity most nights. And the demographics have changed a little bit since reopening a few weeks ago. What started out was mostly couples, people you could tell who were isolated together, who are starting to come out. And in past sort of maybe week, we can have it's much more groups now getting together and celebrating.

MG: Celebrating the fact that they're not stuck at home anymore.

STEVEN JORGENSEN: Yeah. Or a lot of like post celebrations for, you know, graduation birthday parties that happened during lockdown.

MG: Obviously, wearing a mask and drinking in a bar is not particularly appropriate. It's not going to work out that well, but are you finding that people are able to. We're still being asked to to distance ourselves, particularly from people we may not be, you know, in our bubble with. Is that possible in a bar like yours?

STEVEN JORGENSEN: As much is as it is, we try to keep all the tables and the parties two metres apart. But I think what you see as especially introducing alcohol, people tend to kind of blur those rules a little bit.

MG: And so as the night gets a bit later, people get a bit closer.

STEVEN JORGENSEN: Yeah, for sure. And they said when we first opened, people were coming in with reservations, was just sort of a specific intent to come in for a quick dinner and go home and now you're seeing people stay out much longer, coming from other restaurants or bars, a little bit more of the bar hopping that we used to see before.

MG: What's your sense as to why younger adults are being a bit less cautious now than before? I mean, part of it in a bar is the alcohol, but what else is going on, do you think, is where, what, 100 and some days into this thing?

STEVEN JORGENSEN: I think a large portion of it is just sort of the the apathy or the the exhaustion that it's carrying. I think my youth demographic millennials were quite active when the cases first started to rise and people were taking it very seriously, but I think as we're seeing now, a few months in, people are starting to feel burnt out on that and feeling justified or that they deserve a little break from that.

MG: Justified.

STEVEN JORGENSEN: In the way of just I think everyone has that sense, like I've done such a good job for so long that it's not going to harm if it's just I do this one time, but of course, everyone doing that at once is the problem.

MG: Are you finding that yourself? I mean, are you changing your own behaviours and letting your guard down a little bit?

STEVEN JORGENSEN: I think you do. Yeah, I've noticed sometimes you once we start to see a little more normalcy, you kind of start falling back into old habits. But I think seeing the cases rise, especially here in Edmonton, has kind of hopefully gotten people sort of back on track again.

MG: I mean, there's a business story to this, but what would it mean psychologically, do you think of a bar like yours had to shut back down?

STEVEN JORGENSEN: It is tough with the public perception of of you want to be transparent and do the correct thing to close, but then you also wonder that there might be some people who who criticise you for possibly opening when you shouldn't have. But I think the interesting thing is it's all of this is allowed under current regulations from AHS, so some of this is just inevitable. I think to be expected.

MG: Do you need, just finally, I guess, clear messaging to people about what still is going on, the fact that we're still in this pandemic? Yes, I mean, people have taken their foot off the gas a little bit, but this is still all around us. Is that what would help in terms of just getting people to understand what really is still underway?

STEVEN JORGENSEN: I think so. I think we just need a bit of a reset to to understand that this is still just as much of a threat as it was in March or in April. And that, you know, even though we are allowed to know to go out and to enjoy these things, we couldn't a couple of months ago, the the procedures such as like you're sanitisation and your mask wearing are more important now than ever.

MG: Steven, it's good to talk to you about this. Good luck and thanks.

STEVEN JORGENSEN: Thank you.

MG: Steven Jorgensen is a manager at Woodwork. It's a bar and restaurant in Edmonton. Edmonton isn't alone here. This is part of a global uptick in infections amongst millennials, a trend that a top official in the World Health Organization has called terrifying. Public health experts are grappling with how to get the message out more effectively, as Steven was talking about to young adults. Judith Malmgren is an epidemiologist at the University of Washington and the author of a study that analysed Washington's COVID-19 age data over the past few months. And Craig Jenne is an infectious disease expert ann Canada Research Chair at the University of Calgary. Good morning to you both.

CRAIG JENNE: Good morning.

JUDITH MALMGREN: Good morning.

MG: Craig, how does Steven Jorgensen's account mesh with your, I guess, bigger picture overview of what's happening Alberta right now? As the province starts to open up, but we're seeing, as I said, this uptick in cases, particularly amongst young people.

CRAIG JENNE: I think his description that really captures that well, we did a good job here, flattening the curve. We got cases down to at some point single digits, and now we're seeing a slow rebound. It's important to keep in mind that this is still a fairly small number of cases compared to where we were during the peak. But, yes, it has definitely shifted now from older people to those 20 somethings.

MG: Judith, what are you seeing in terms of the behaviour of young people? And how that behaviour is changing as the lockdown continues, but some of those quarantine measures are eased somewhat.

JUDITH MALMGREN: Well, we had a shift just post peak in Washington before things opened up. So before we went to phase two or phase 1.5e or whatever, so that people could go out before that time we had the shift occurred or the shift was identified that the majority of cases were in 20 to 30 nine year olds. So with opening, you already had a reservoir of disease. So when you open up and you have people in that age group who are interacting with the public through their work, either essential work in a hospital or essential or non-essential work in a restaurant, you've got the reservoir of disease already there. So when you open up, it doesn't take much. It's extremely contagious disease. This is the most contagious disease we have had. I don't even know if Spanish flu is as contagious as this coronavirus.

MG: And when you talk about, you know, the contagious element of it, what does that mean in terms of people who might be letting their guard down a little bit?

JUDITH MALMGREN: They're going to get sick. A hundred percent. It's a human to human person to person transmission. The coronavirus is in people and when people are together, if they're asymptomatic carriers or if they're presymptomatic carriers, they will spread disease.

MG: I want to bring Craig back here in a moment, but Steven mentioned that idea of people feeling justified and he was talking about his own generation, where you've done a lot of hard work. You been stuck in the house and you've seen things that you value get put onto the shelf, whether it was work or graduation or hanging out with friends or just daily life. And now people feel as though I've done my part and we're into this next phase of things. Do you think that that is accurate, Judith, in terms of describing how people might feel at this moment in this pandemic?

JUDITH MALMGREN: Everybody feels like that. There's no 20 to 39 year old do not have a corner on that market. I'm considerably older and it makes me nuts. But we don't have a choice. We don't have a vaccine. It's person to person transmission. The only things we have are barriers. Barriers are what keep the transmission from going between people and whether it's social distancing or being not out at all. Removing yourself from the situation where disease is transmitted. If you are out, you the potential for you to transmit disease or get disease is very high. If you take your mask off and your well, in Seattle we have bars that spill out into the street and people don't wear masks, there's no mandatory mask in Washington state and if we had mandatory masks and it was observed in like 90 percent of the population, we'd have a much better chance. But masks really need to become a way of life because coronavirus is not packing its bags and going away for the summer. It is absolutely here all the time. In any situation that you go into, there's potential coronavirus.

MG: Craig, given that, why do you think we're seeing more new infections amongst young adults? I mean, Steven sketched out this scene at his bar and Judith's talking a little bit about how we're all behaving. What do you see?

CRAIG JENNE: I think that there's probably a combination of things here, so one is absolutely this need to get out. Need to to shake off the isolation. And that's the unfortunate one. But I think there are a few things that are perhaps more difficult to control. I think in general, without trying to to paint everybody with one brush, but younger people tend to have a little less financial security and there's higher motivation to get back into the workforce, onto doing jobs where they may not be. Office jobs or physical separation is easy. So so they're going back to work. They're going back to work even into the kind of workplace where you can spread the virus. And then adding to that is then the social aspects, if they acquire the virus at work, then they become the these agents of viral spread in the leisure activities later. I think it really boils down to an overall view to that they are indestructible. For the most part, we keep hearing this virus is killing older people and younger people have mild disease and they really tend to forget they are also then the vector that gives the virus to the at-risk population.

MG: So in that, Judith, how do you go about creating a message that's going to speak to that generation that isn't going to sound like, you know, finger wag, don't go out and don't do you know, and blaming and stigmatizing the millennials who get all sorts of heat for, you know, eating avocado toast and, you know, apparently not saving enough money. This is just one more thing that perhaps they could dismiss if the messaging is incorrect. So how do you create a message that's going to resonate with them?

JUDITH MALMGREN: You need to re remove yourself from the wreck from the reservoir of disease to keep it down for everybody. What the other, what everyone is saying here is of the indestructible perception of youth, but the death rate is very low in that age group, bo they figure, well, I mean, these are people I've talked to. I can go out because I'm not going to die. Well, you might not die, but you're going to bring that disease and increase the burden of disease on society as a whole. So the messaging is is difficult when we had constantly on the news, you had sirens and you had people being carried off in stretchers and people going out and body bags out of the hospital. OK everybody's terrified. Now the sun's out, people aren't dying as much because we did a really good job with people 60 and older. They listened to the message. Stay home, wear a mask, be careful, use social distancing. But that was the mistake at the very beginning is that the targeted group for messaging was 60 and older and people with comorbid conditions. Coronavirus is an equal opportunity disease. It does not discriminate. And it does not only affect those that could die. It affects everybody. We have cases in children and they can have very bad outcomes. We have cases in 20 something person got a double lung transplant because their lungs were fried by coronavirus. So it's just real hard when people's cortisol levels have been so high because everybody is freaked out and everybody's terrified. Your body can only handle that so much.

MG: It's like fatigue.

JUDITH MALMGREN: Yes. It creates fatigue and then your body just has cortisol depleted and just says I don't care, I'm going out. So that's where I think messaging is important. But I think we need to be more prudent with our directives and with restrictions where if you're going to be in public, you have to wear a mask. You're not going to hurt anybody. It's not going to be the end of the world for anyone. Everyone wears a mask. Not just people 60 and older. If you are going to go out and you're going to be in the public and potentially get infected. In fact, people, you have to wear a mask.

MG: How do you present that message, Craig, in a way that's going to appeal and resonate with the people that it needs to be targeted toward?

CRAIG JENNE: I think that that is the difficult question. I think part of it has to be this understanding that if we do not control the virus, we are going to have to close things back down. And I think people are doing a fantastic job of this. So although it's voluntary, that that is a very clear message that people who do not follow the rules have triggered an event that has caused their local establishment to be closed. You know, as a follow up to that, I mean, it's those places there that I will be attending when things are safe here in the community because they're responsible that they are playing their role in this. And not just we're allowed to be open. So we're staying open that they're responding to the cases. But I think we need to show people that their behaviour does unfortunately have impact. And that is if the virus count is high in the community, we are going to have to bring in mandatory mask law here in Canada. And we see that in some cities on transit as a preventative measure. And we may need to respond here. Also, just, you know, if we have to begin to close bars back down or limit hours, that will unfortunately send a strong message that we are no longer doing a good enough job and that we have to probably change our behaviour.

JUDITH MALMGREN: Just briefly, what and I'll ask you both this, what worries you most about what we're seeing right now? Part of it is, you know, an economic thing, but it seems like we're not even out of the first wave and people are concerned about a second wave. Is that when you're concerned about Craig?

CRAIG JENNE: I think what I'm really concerned about at this moment is the small number of cases right now unfortunate that the larger cases tend to echo. They tend to take a week, two weeks, and we need to see where these small upticks lead to in a month or two, because remember, that coronavirus back in February started as a single case in Canada and we ended up in a essentially full lockdown. We need to see if these small clusters are held in check and if we maintain control of these, or are the local governments responsive enough when they do need to bring restrictions back in? If that's the case, they do so. And if we hesitate, then we probably once again lose control and end up in a severe situation. So it's hatt fine balance. You know, we already to be open in many aspects here, but we also have to be able to respond to that and I'm nervous watching for that balance.

MG: Judith, in a couple of seconds, what are you most concerned about when you take a look at this trend?

JUDITH MALMGREN: Death and disease from coronavirus. And it won't just be it's not going to stay in one part of the population. We don't have an age segregated society. We interact with other people that have different ages. We all have to care about each other. And it's a global it's not just your town, your city, your barn, wherever it is, everywhere. And we've got places that are sparsely populated, like the Yukon, probably not too much trouble, but where you have people congregating, where you have people getting together, coronavirus, as I said, is a person to person transmission. It lives in humans. When you interact with humans, you're going to have a problem. I am very much in favour of, especially in the cities, everybody needs to wear a mask.

MG: It's good to speak with you both. We'll leave it there, but I appreciate you both joining us this morning. Thank you.

JUDITH MALMGREN: Thank you. Bye bye.

CRAIG JENNE: Take care.

MG: Judith Malmgren is an epidemiologist at the University of Washington. Craig Jenne, infectious disease expert and Canada Research Chair at the University of Calgary.

MG: This is The Current on CBC Radio One. I'm Matt Galloway. And we were talking talking about the message, what about the messengers? During this pandemic? Some of Canada's public health officials have taken on near heroic status. You think of Dr. Bonnie Henry in British Columbia. She has her photo plastered on T-shirts and buttons. There's a folk song about her. In the United States, some public health officials have faced something quite different. Some are facing threats, in some cases extreme cases, threats to their life. Theresa Anselmo is executive director of the Colorado Association of Local Public Health Officials. Theresa Anselmo, good morning to you.

THERESA ANSELMO: Good morning.

MG: What sort of threats are public health officials dealing with in your region?

THERESA ANSELMO: Anything from personal slander and property damage, to starting a civil war with hot shooting guns,.

MG: Starting a civil war with hot shooting guns.

THERESA ANSELMO: Yes.

MG: How many of your staff have been threatened, do you think?

THERESA ANSELMO: So I represent the 53 county health departments in the state of Colorado, and in a poll that we did in mid May, the folks on that call, 80 per cent of them have reported that they themselves, their staff and their health agency or their property had been physically threatened.

MG: What is the effect of that on you and on your staff?

THERESA ANSELMO: I will tell you that it is extremely demoralizing. It is stressful as far as the concern for one's own safety, for the safety of the people that you work with, particularly in the state of Colorado, where two thirds of our counties are either rural or frontier. We like to joke that there are more cows than there are people. When it's your neighbours making these threats, and very publicly making these threats on social media or in public meetings, I can't imagine that the feeling of stress that those individuals experienced simply because they have to go to the grocery store. And their kids may play sports or go to elementary school with these people's children that are making these threats to them.

MG: Why are people being threatened with property damage or starting a civil war because they're delivering information about a public health crisis?

THERESA ANSELMO: I think that we are starting to see the folks really coming out about their civil liberties and their rights to not be told what to do by government. A number of the posts that I've seen or the information that I've received from my members, the folks that are making the claims are actually attributing it to government overreach and that the public health directors don't have the legal authority or aren't elected and don't have the power to make these decisions, but the case is actually the opposite.

MG: You've said that some politicians are, in some ways, pitting public health against freedom.

THERESA ANSELMO: Yes, I would say that is exactly how I would characterize this. Unfortunately, when it comes down to making decisions, public health directors are advisers in these roles that they serve and they are basing their information and their advice on evidence and science, and what we know about a very new disease. And sometimes that is not what people want to hear. And then we have to take into account that the elected officials have a role in decision making, and occasionally those two collide because the public health directors are really interested in preserving the health of the communities that they serve. And elected officials are trying to maintain the economy and other factors within their communities.

MG: What could this mean if these threats continue and I'm assuming if you get threatened enough, eventually you're going to leave your job. What could this mean in terms of the fight against COVID-19 in your community?

THERESA ANSELMO: We have already seen in the state of Colorado alone six individuals leave their posts and one was actually terminated from their post, and we already are strapped. We have been an under-resourced system in this country for decades. And the pool of candidates to fill these very top level director positions is not deep. It's not as if we have a bunch of people waiting to be hired to do these jobs. And I think we will see it more difficult to fill these vacancies because who would want to take a position in which they are going into public service to help their communities, but actually become targets of some very nasty and threatening types of information. So I think we will continue to see the system struggle and challenged to respond to COVID. We know that this is a long term response. We are ramping up for a 24 to 30 month response, and that in and of itself is tiring and to have folks not in these very top positions at the heads of their departments helping hold those teams together will put more strain on an already strained to a breaking point system.

MG: I really appreciate you telling us what you and your teams are up against in the midst of this. It is. I think a lot of people are shaking their heads wondering what's going on there. Theresa, thank you.

THERESA ANSELMO: I appreciate it. Thank you.

MG: Theresa Anselmo, executive director of the Colorado Association of Local Public Health Officials. She was in Denver talking about the public health officials and her teams are up against in talking about COVID-19 to their constituents. I'm Matt Galloway. This is The Current. Stay with us.

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The Fix: Eat like a fish

Guests: Bren Smith

MG: Hi, I'm Matt Galloway. You're listening to The Current. This season as part of our series, The Fix, we have been hearing about potential fixes to pressing problems, big and small. Somewhere off the coast of Connecticut, Newfoundland born fisher, farmer and entrepreneur Bren Smith is growing something special in the ocean. On his regenerative ocean farm, to be exact. Beyond the harvest of kelp and clams and scallops, the process is a promising fix to some of the biggest problems out there today, from the way we eat to the health of our oceans and shorelines, to the loss of industrial jobs and more. Bren Smith is the co-founder of the non-profit GreenWave. And we have reached him at his Thimble Island Ocean Farm. Bren, good morning.

BREN SMITH: Good morning. It's great to be on.

MG: It's great to have you. I have, I think, some sense as to what a regular farmer or somebody who fishes does during the day. What is the day of an ocean farmer look like?

BREN SMITH: Yeah, it's a good question. I tell you, it's a lot more boring than fishing. I still got this, it's more like I feel like an arugala farmer who drinks tea or something, you know? But the it's you know, I wake up early four or five in the morning and head out and it's just maybe a seven minute run out to my my farm in the water. And I got 20 acres out there. And, you know, I spend my day, as, you know, developing a blue thumb and, you know, trying to grow ocean vegetables and shellfish out there the best I can and really cooperate and collaborate with the ocean to grow things that, you know, restore to regenerate our ecosystems.

MG: Describe what you do. You've described this as a 3-D ocean farm. What is that?

BREN SMITH: Yeah, so imagine sort of an underwater garden and you've got anchors at the edges of the farm and then vertical ropes. They go up to the surface to boys and then down below the surface, maybe 10 feet or so. You've got horizontal lines, sort of like a rope scaffolding system underwater. And then from there, you hang your kelp vertically downwards. You grow it from little tiny seed. It grows extremely fast in the winter. Next to that, you have muscles and muscle socks. You got scalps in these lantau nets and then oysters in cages down on the bottom and then clams in the mud. And the idea is really to grow as many species in a small area as possible using that whole water column and use the water column. It becomes a really efficient use of space.

MG: You're very deliberate in using the word farm om describing what you do and describing yourself as a farmer. Why do you use that word?

BREN SMITH: I mean, one is aquaculture, did you know when I was up in the Bering Sea, fishing, cod and crab and then cod stocks crashed in Newfoundland. And out of that, I moved into the aquaculture industry. And in that time, aquaculture did exactly made all the mistakes we'd made on land based farming. Pesticide use, monoculture, you know, waste, all the things we think of as salmon farming. And what it did was grow around existing tastes like people like salmon and tuna. So let's grow salmon and tuna. The trouble is that those are wild harvest flavours. Right. In other things that are meant to be cut. So instead, what we've done is ask the ocean, what does it make sense to grow? Right. What's unique about it is an agricultural space. And when you ask the ocean and it says really easy answer, it says, why don't you grow things that don't swim away and you don't have two feet? And once you flip that, it just becomes is new. We don't. So we've kind of feel like we've we're resetting the relationship of the ocean and move not from sustainability, which aquaculture is really trying and trying well to do. But we started a point of regeneration and really growing things that the ocean wants to provide and then the challenge is shifting markets, which is no easy matter.

MG: So if I went out to your farm, what would I see from the surface? Anything?

BREN SMITH: You'd see almost nothing. Right? I would say I run eco tours and it's the biggest rip off in the business. Right? Because you come out, you pay 400 bucks, you come out and there's nothing to see. And I don't own that water. All I own is the right to grow shell fish and seaweed. So anybody can come by boat, fish, swim on the farm. It's actually a community space. So that lowest aesthetic impact and and the protection of the commons is really important to us.

MG: And your farm is how big?I mean, how many acres would it be?

BREN SMITH: Yeah, it's 20 acres. I used to be 80 acres when I grew, just Rowbottom when I started on oysters and then as I moved vertically, the farm actually shrank its footprint. But I grow more food than I ever did before.

MG: I was going to say hhow much food can you harvest from 20 acres?

Per acre, you can get about 8000 pounds of kelp and about 150,000 pounds of shellfish. Depends on the area. You know, I mean, 150,000 pieces of shellfish. So you can really grow a lot of food. And the good thing is, because it's polyculture, I'm growing something year round. So kelp is in the winter, which is an off season. We call her a shoulder season in the fishing industry and then we moved a mussels and scallops and oysters we like in spring and. And there's just this circular pattern. So there's something I can grow all year round. The other thing is from a small business point of view, this is all zero input crop. So I don't use any fertiliser, any feed, any fresh water, and of course, no land, which makes it the most sustainable form of food production on the planet, right? Zero inputs. But as the prices go up for land based farmers, water of feed, of fertilisers, of land, the price of food is going to go up. Right. But our zero and put food is gonna be affordable and that's going to move it to the centre of the plate.

MG: You've been on the water for a long time. I mentioned you're born and raised in Newfoundland. Tell me a little bit about how you got into this world.

BREN SMITH: I was actually born in Mavics Cove, right next to Petty Harbour there in Newfoundland and dropped out of high school. My parents went to the States to get jobs when I was 14. And I showed up in the States and I just said, no way. So I went right out to the ocean dropping out of school. I headed out to sea. I fish in Gloucester Lynn, lobster, tuna and then I was in Alaska for quite a few years fishing cod and crab. And, you know, I was fishing at the I began in an artisanal fishery, but I ended up in an industrial fishery and things we know like chasing, you know, fewer and fewer fish further and further out to sea. We're tearing up entire ecosystems with our trawls, mostly fish I was catching at the time up in Bering Sea was going to McDonald's for their fish sandwich.

MG: You describe your work as pillaging the ocean?

BREN SMITH: Yeah, I mean, I'd love this job, right? I mean, it was I still miss it so much that there's nothing like the humility of being in 40 foot seas, the months at a time in the belly of a bull with 13 other people and like this incredible pride and helping feed your country. It is just an amazing feeling, but humans get too good at what we do, right? So we got too good at fishing and we, you know, destroyed the oceans. And in the process now, that's where I learnt when the cod stocks crashed, I learnt, hey, I'm not an environmentalist, but there's something that I needed to understand, which was they're going to be no jobs, no food on a dead planet. Like, if I want to die in my boat one day, which is the metric of success for me out in the water, I'm going to have to protect and breathe life back into the ocean as opposed to just extract. And that was the beginning of this journey. And, you know, it was it was long, but I still don't think of myself as an environmentalist. I mean, I don't see climate change as an issue of birds, bears and bees. I see it as a issue of kitchen table issues that they're in. It's going to destroy the economy and no jobs and a dead planet. And that's the wonderful thing. Right. I don't have to be a foodie. I don't have to be an environmentalist to be part of this solution space.

MG: How did you end up at the place where you found the solution was ocean farming?

BREN SMITH: You know, Newfoundland, 30,000 people thrown out of work overnight. Boats beached. Canneries empty and just amazing to see, you know, sort of the fishermen just wandering around it as it goes. And so that was the switch then to figure out how to farm and learn from others. But as I said, well, that wasn't when salmon salmon farming clearly wasn't sustainable. I just wanted to still figure out the ocean as an agricultural space. So I began with oysters and did that for seven years and down here. And it was the beginning of sort of boutique oyster, high end Brooklyn food. And so that was how I built my business on originally, but then I got hit by Hurricane Irene and Hurricane Sandy two years in a row. 90 percent of my crop wiped out. Like one year one thing, but two years in a row, you realise this isn't going to be a slow lobster boil. Like climate change is here and now and so I do adapt. And, you know, that's when I pulled my farm off bottom and I just started thinking of resilient strategies. And one of the interesting things now, like I started by adding different species, but now we're actually thinking of it a fault farms in four quadrants where you harvest food. But like my kelp this year went partially to food and then partially to fertilize our own compost, which is incredible because it brings all these nutrient, allows land based farms and gets the carbon and nitrogen into the soil. And then it also went to bioplastics to make to make seaweed based straws and packaging. And then we also harvest data. So our farms of these data platforms, we have sensors and we can take that data and that has value. So we actually sell it to tech companies and others. So that's what climate resilience looks like now. It's like not only polyculture of crops keeping overhead low, but also a whole polyculture of different income streams. So if your farm is destroyed one year, you have different sort of value propositions that you can offer.

MG: If you aren't running a monoculture or operating in a monoculture, what does that mean for the ocean?

BREN SMITH: You know, Mother Nature, the ocean abhors monoculture. She throws in disease and and all sorts of stuff. And so you really want to do that biomimicry like grow reefs and that's how we think of it. But the species we pick are all regenerative. So kelp, which they call the culinary. Into the electric car, right? It's really the rainforest, the Sukhoi of the sea, it captures five times more carbon. It captures nitrogen and pulls a lot of the water column. We are our firm's function is artificial reef storm surge protectors. And like I said, it's all zero and put food. So that role of the farmer now breathing life back into the ocean. I mean, this is where I disagree somewhat with the conservationist with who want to create global marine parks. And that's wonderful. Like, you know, conservation is wonderful. But unless you have some technologies, which is our farms breathing life back into the ocean, rebuilding reefs, rebuilding fish stocks, then the oceans are going to die. And so so we need to really think of the oceans as a place to search out climate solutions and really help build a better world, not only environmentally, but also economically. Right. We're not going to solve the climate crisis unless we address inequality and social justice. So at Greenway we really try to keep those issues linked and really understand that what we're trying to do is figure out how do we all make a living on living planet and how do we take the oceans as and build something from the bottom up that weaves sort of social justice in the DNA of the ocean economy, doesn't privatise sea, protects the comments like let's do food right this time, let's do agriculture. All right. And I think here in the U.S., we've got a waiting list of 6000 people who want to take our farmer training program and that just shows, I think, the interest that's building.

MG: You've said that in the future we should be thinking about, you know, not eating fish, but eating what fish eat. What do you mean by that?

BREN SMITH: You know, we've got always got to eat some fish. It just has to move to the edge of the plate, has to be this incredible, delicious special moment where we honour the fishermen and it's one of our last wild foods. But it can't be a weekly meal. The oceans just can't can't provide that, especially whale populations rise and it becomes more and more difficult to grow food on land. So we think, OK, let's eat like fish. Like fish, don't make omega 3s and all these different nutrients and vitamins we need, they eat them. So by eating what fish, we get the benefits of those, the proteins, the vitamin Cs, the omega 3s in our seaweeds and shellfish. But at the same time, reduce pressure on fish stocks. And, you know, the challenge is who in the world is going to eat kelp, right?

MG: How do you convince somebody to eat kelp?

BREN SMITH: I mean, you know, like it grosses me out too. Right? I'm not going to like oversell this. And so we have strategies there, but I will say we're on a journey of there are ten thousand ocean plants and there are thousands of kind of ocean vegetables that we can eat. So we're beginning with kelp because we can build an economic model around it. But I think, you know, imagine being a chef and finding out the argulas, kales, spinaches that you've never cooked or eat with before. Like climate cuisine can be this delicious, exciting, creative moment for the chefs who specialize now in taking disgusting things that are environmentally appropriate and making them delicious and beautiful. Take, for example, we've got an incredible collaborator here in New York City, that took our kelp. We turned it into noodles. We just cut it into strips, blanched it, and he made barbecued kelp noodles with parsnips and bread breadcrumbs. Lke no one even, like it doesn't taste like seaweed at all. We desushified it. You got the heat of the barbecue sauce, that roundness, the parsnips, the crunch of the breadcrumbs. Like that's how we create this new climate cuisine over time.

MG: Just finally, we've come out of a certain moment in this pandemic continues. But one of the things that we've we've learnt in that initial moment was a lot about our industrial food system, where the food comes from, who is involved in helping a process that food, how we think of those people and how they're treated. What do you think the lessons are? Based on what you're doing, what are the lessons for how we could have a better relationship with the food that we eat?

BREN SMITH: I think it's a great question. You know, we're going through this stage where I think exactly. COVID exposed all of these structural problems, all these contradictions. You know, here in the U.S., 40 percent of the fish caught in the U.S. was shipped to China, processed and then brought back into the country to be sold. That's I mean, back to the U.S. That's insane, right? The logic of globalisation there just makes no no sense. So I think we've we really see those challenges. The solutions are, I think. How do we build it better? And that's the exploration we're all going on. I am no expert. I don't have the answers. One thing we've been promoting here and here is the government is the biggest purchaser of consumer goods in the country. It's like military food or supposably or whatever. They're a huge actor at the state and federal local level. So let's take their buying power and have them pay the real cost of food. Like what it actually cost to produce. What it actually costs to make sure farmers and workers can make a living and have them play a leading role in shifting markets. And so that's just one small way. And this is a chance to take this crisis and to innovate and really try to restructure and build this system the right way. And that's exciting. Right. This is a painful, awful time, but maybe the next stage is going to be really helpful. And, you know, a good place to live is going to be the new Cayle. No, I don't think so. I used to say that I coined that term. And, you know, count might be the new SOI, but not evil in that we can turn it into bioplastics and fertiliser and feed as well as food. I get all my harvesting this year because a coded and we brought it and dried it in the tobacco barns to avoid some of the processing challenges. And you know, who knows, maybe kelp is the new tobacco. And I'd be as a fisherman, I'd have no problem with that. I'd be happy I could get some chewing it.

MG: Bren, it's great to talk to you about this. Good luck and thank you.

BREN SMITH: Yeah. Thanks so much. Honoured to be on.

MG: Cheers. Take care. Bye bye.

BREN SMITH: Yeah, bye bye.

MG: Bren Smith is a regenerative ocean farmer and co-founder of the NGO GreenWave. He's also the recipient of a James Beard Food Media Award for his book, Eat Like a Fish: My Adventures as a Fisherman Turned Restorative Ocean Farmer.

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Black graduation coaches can help overcome barriers and systemic racism in schools

Guests: Jonatan Fuentes

MG: This is The Current on CBC Radio One. I'm Matt Galloway. Recent shootings by police of black people, Indigenous people and people of colour here in Canada have sparked many calls for change and there has been an intense focus on the role of police, of media and of politicians in perpetuating systemic racism in this country. What about our schools? After research uncovered inequities in the treatment and achievement of black students, a Toronto school board started a pilot project hiring graduation coaches specifically for black students. Jonatan Fuentes is one of them. He's also the co-founder of the anti-racist consulting group Education on Trial. Jonathan, good morning.

JONATAN FUENTES: Hi, Matt. Good morning. Thanks for having me on the show.

MG: Thanks for joining us. What is a graduation coach?

JONATAN FUENTES: Well, graduation, the black student graduation coach pilot program was ceated, as you mentioned, as a response to really over 30 years of research, but most recently the 2017 report towards race equity in education, written by Dr. Carl James with Tanner Turner.This report highlights that because of white supremacy and anti-black racism, policies and practices continue to disproportionately impact black students contributing to unequal outcomes in education. For example, black students are overrepresented in suspensions and expulsions, overrepresented in applied, essential and special ed programmes and underrepresented in graduation quotes. So to answer your question, the role of a graduation coach is to react as a mentor and advisor to black students, working with black students to identify and address individual barriers to engagement, learning and well-being. But importantly, it's also working in collaboration with administrators, teachers, families and about our community to create a circle of caring adults to respond to individual and systemic barriers. And finally, one of the key pieces is creating a, developing a positive school climate and carving out a safe space for black students within the school, where their voices, identities, lived experiences are reflected and validated, but it's also grounded in their Africentric identity and in their roots as well.

MG: You went through the Toronto school system. Right?

JONATAN FUENTES: I grew up in the Toronto school system. That's right.

MG: Tell me a bit about, people talk about the achievement gap and what some of those barriers mean in terms of life for students in schools. What did you see? What did you experience? What are some of those barriers doing to students in the classroom?

JONATAN FUENTES: Right. That's a good question. My experiences in the education system actually are reflective of their experiences of some of the youth that I work with. I grew up in the education system where the curriculum and the teachers did not represent my identity, my reality and my lived experiences. But simutaneously, I also experienced the power of mentorship, the impact of one teacher who looks like you can have a great impact.

MG: Tell me about that. So in your own life, tell me about that. If you have somebody who, as you say, looks like you. What did that uncork in you?

JONATAN FUENTES: Was that motivated me. That provided someone that looked like me that I can look up to and say, look, if they did it, then I can do it. So that's the power of representation.

MG: In your role as a graduation coach, what sort of barriers have you faced in trying to be an advocate for your students in the system, as you've described it?

JONATAN FUENTES: Well I think that the bittery has manifest themselves in different ways. And this is reflected in the absence of student voices in the curriculum, the lack of teachers or black teachers in the schools, and the ways in which students experience the conscious and unconscious prejudices and biases that influence teaching and learning practices. And the reality is that in the GTA, this is often experienced through microaggression. And so Matt, there's a need, I would say, for culture really in responsive teaching and learning, wishing which involves disinterring, colonized knowledges or Western knowledges. They're really centring black cultures and uniquely complex forms of black art and expression, so that students feel welcomed in the school.

MG: And your role in that, your place in that is what with students? And what are you telling them? What are you helping them with?

JONATAN FUENTES: Well, it happened been helping them navigate individual and systemic barriers. I think the question you need to ask ourselves is, what are we going to do differently right now? As I mentioned, reports for more than 30 years have highlighted the achievement gap. And I think that the current protest. Are statements that demand a fundamental restructuring of the system. What I advocate for, I think this is important is that we as a society have still not counted for historical oppression. So within that context and in my work. We I think we need to come to terms with how systemic racism was created, expand our understanding of equity and respond to these historical atrocities and represent the inequities. To speak directly to your question cause I think it's an important one, this includes my work facilitating, for example, bias and prejudice, awareness training. It also includes creating internal and external accounts, accountability measures. So, for example, that work to treat black student parent councils in the schools that men and the black student parent councils work in collaboration with culture, responsive community organisations. And so the grad coaches and other school administrators need to collaborate with these groups to monitor how processes are implemented and create a robust procedure for addressing incidents of anti-black racism when they do occur within the school system.

MG: What do you find most rewarding in the work that you're doing? If you're working with students in a system that research has shown in some ways a setup against them is setup to minimize their opportunities and their outcomes. When it works for you, what do you find the most rewarding?

I think it is important not to acknowledge that black children and youth aree brilliant and there are countless examples of black excellence that are not highlighted enough. And so when I work with students and they communicate to me, thank you. You know, you've been very helpful. I think that look in their eyes when they see that that they can achieve and they have a sense of hope and a sense of belonging within the school system. That's what motivates me and that's my that's my passion.

MG: Give me an example of that. A student that you've worked with where because of the mentorship that you've offered and the support that you've offered, they see themselves and they see their opportunities differently.

JONATAN FUENTES: Well as you may or may not know because of COVID-19, online learning has been very difficult for many students. So I've had to connect with students over the phone really and some of them are meeting for the first time. And so I connected with one student particularly, and I let them know that believe in them, that I'm available as a caring adult for them to contact whenever they need, whenever they need it. And sometimes that's really all they need. They need someone to contact. So I was on the phone with them every day. This student is in line to graduate. And so through daily conversations, motivating them and getting them to complete some of their final assignments to ensure that they are able to successfully pass their credits and pass their courses, the feedback has been incredible, and I think that's really speaks to the importance and the impact of the black student graduation coach position.

MG: We're in this moment now where there are big conversations happening about systemic racism in all forms of parts of our society. I don't want to put you out of a job, but is there a point at which you think that the education system could be resolved and could be reformed in a way that we wouldn't need that extra motivation for black students?

JONATAN FUENTES: Well, I think that certainly there needs to be a restructuring of the education system and I'm always hopeful that it's possible. I think it begins with work on self. You know me, I'm an anti-racist educator. I need to bridge the gap between schools and communities and through an organization that I co-founded. Education on Trial, we provide quality education services in the form of professional development and in this professional development, we asl educators and others to be self reflective practitioners, unpack their privilege and experience and understand the ladder of oppression. So that's how bias prejudice turns prejudice turns to stereotypes and finally leads to discrimination. So if there's a willingness and a commitment to anti-racism, then I definitely think that the education system can change.

MG: Do you see that commitment just in that in the last couple of seconds that we have, do you see the commitment there now?

JONATAN FUENTES: Certainly, I think there's increased attention, but I think, again, accountability, there needs to be accountability and it needs to be in partnership with culturally responsive community organizations and the school board.

MG: It's great to hear about the work that you're doing. It's important. Jonatan, thank you.

JONATAN FUENTES: Thank you.

MG: Jonahan Fuentes is a black graduation coach for a Toronto school board. He's a co-founder as well of Education on Trial. Later on this week, we'll talk about the experiences of black students in the Peel District School Board, just outside of Toronto and what's being done to address systemic racism issues there. These are issues that have existed for a long time, and it's been very difficult for the board to tackle them. We'll hear more about what's been going on. More broadly, last week, we brought you stories of high school and post-secondary graduating classes of 2020. You can find those on the website at cbc.ca/thecurrent. That's The Current for today. I'm Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening. Take care and we'll talk to you tomorrow.

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June 23, 2020 episode transcript

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