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The Current Transcript for July 28, 2020

Host: Mark Kelley

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

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VOICE: Our mission is simple. We want to raise a generation of socially empowered young people.

MARK KELLEY: Since they were just kids themselves, Craig Kielburger and his older brother Marc have bene trying to make the world a better place. But now, just hours before the Kielburgers testify before the House of Commons finance committee, we’ll look at the ethics of the WE organization and how two brothers grew a mission to end child labour into a global brand. Then.

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VOICE 1: Ban them. Ban them all.

VOICE 2: We’ve been conditioned to think plastic is the only way to go, but there are so many other options

MK: Before the pandemic, cities across the country were starting to ban single use plastics. But now because of COVID-19, take-out has become the life-blood of so many restaurants. Plus later in the show we’ll re-visit Matt Galloway’s conversation with Daniel Levitin about the secrets to successful aging. I, for one, will be taking notes. But first, a look inside WE. Good morning. I’m Mark Kelley and this is The Current.

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WE Charity worker says organization sacrificed ethical integrity to serve as vessel for 'corporate interests'

Guests: Unnamed guest, Vanmala Subramaniam, Duff Conacher

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VOICE: Children in dangerous glass factories. Children in the sugar cane fields. Children physically and verbally abused. Children making the many products, which we import into Canada and use every day without considering their source. Who will help the children, if we don't? Thank you very much.

MK: Back in 1995, an idealistic 12-year-old Craig Kielburger was a kid on a mission. He started the organization Free the Children, with the goal to end child labour around the world. Free the Children is now known as WE Charity. It's raised millions of dollars, and it's a global brand supported by companies, politicians, celebrities all over the world. But now it's neck deep in a growing political controversy. Today, Craig Kielburger and his older brother Marc, will appear before a House of Commons committee investigating the awarding of a contract worth tens of millions of dollars to WE. This morning, we'll look at several sides of the story, beginning with my first guest, who knows the WE Charity from the inside. He worked there for several years. We've agreed not to name him because he signed an agreement preventing him from publicly talking about the organization. Good morning.

GUEST: Hi.

MK: Let's start from the beginning. What was it that drew you to WE in the first place?

GUEST: You know, I've been working for for a number of years and in the charitable sector, primarily abroad in the international development side of things. And when I heard about WE Charity, which was then known as Free the Children, I was really attracted to the work that the organization was doing for youth. So for youth empowerment, so through its service learning program, WE schools and the work that the organisation was doing to encourage youth to work in their communities and to support global communities. So that was my real interest, kind of coming back to Canada after working abroad for a number of years was, you know, to work with the Canadian organization that was really invested in children.

MK: And were you also drawn in by the Kielburgers themselves? I mean did they have sort of an attractive force?

GUEST: I think so. I mean, I was definitely familiar with with Craig, of course, you know. His story was was a story that I was familiar with growing up. And so he was interesting to me. Someone who who was working in this sector at such a young age.

MK: So what what kind of work were you doing for WE?

GUEST: I joined the corporate engagement and grants team initially, and that team was responsible for developing new partnerships with corporations, foundations, governments and high net worth individual donors. So we were a small team that was working directly with the Kielburgers to put together these new partnership proposals.

MK: Well, and that seems to become one of the crowning achievements of WE, were those relationships that they got with corporations and high net donors. I mean, they seemed to be very, very successful in doing that. Were you concerned that line started getting blurry in doing what is typical is fundraising for charities?

GUEST: Yes. So almost immediately, there were concerns that I had, as well as the wider team about, I guess, two things in relation to corporate, on the corporate side of things. The first was about who we were partnering with and what was also in our in our pipeline of potential corporate partners. And the second was, you know, what were the contents of what we were actually proposing. Normally in the sector, you know, when it comes to corporate partnerships, you know, a corporation will provide some funding or a donation and usually what they'll receive in return is the ability for them to say through their own communication channels that, you know, we provided X amount of funding for this initiative. What we saw very early on, it seemed as if WE Charity, its operation seemed to be entirely driven by its donors. For example, with the corporation, we're partnering with a corporation that wanted to do, let's say, an initiative or an education curriculum on financial literacy that kind of then took precedence. We we rarely actually checked in with an operational team about whether that was actually addressing a community need or were in need, identified by youth. It seemed as if the content of the partnership was dictated by what a corporation wanted to partner with us on.

MK: So you're saying that you were serving the needs of the corporation rather than the needs of the community?

GUEST: Certainly. And whenever we we tried to produce the due diligence as a team to, you know, to check with an operational team or do some research, the pressure we got was don't look in,was no uncertain terms, was not to look into this and to just continue with developing an attractive proposal.

MK: Were you also, did you have concerns about partnering with with corporations that you didn't feel really were aligned with the WE mission?

GUEST: Yes, some of the current partnerships that we had at the time with companies like, you know, we had a partnership with Boeing in the United States. So Boeing is known as a manufacturer of aeroplanes, but it's also an arms manufacturer. And so companies like Boeing, we had concerns about we had partnerships with Dow Chemical, which we obviously had concerns about the partnerships that the organisation had with with mining companies for example. It also seemed as if the pipeline of companies that we were pitching to seems that they had either environmental issues, issues in their supply chain, issues with labour. So there were numerous concerns that we raised as a team about the reputation of the companies that we were partnering with or attempting to partner with. And, you know, what we had flagged as a team was this might actually end up being a reputational risk for WE Charity over time, which is that if someone starts to cover that, you know, one of our partners actually has issues in their supply chain with child labour, this is obviously an issue for the organization.

MK: Did you raise this with the Kielburger brothers?

GUEST: We did. We raised it in terms of the team having the independence to to actually have instituted corporate vetting practises and that was shut down by the Kielburgers and a group of directors.

MK: How did that go over for you? I mean, you talk about you signed up for this organization, you hoped you could empower youth, you hoped you could make a difference. What was happening with your career and your perception of WE as time passed?

GUEST: I started to see personally WE Charity as being less the organization than I thought it was and much more an organisation kind of serving as a vessel for corporate and individual interests. Whereas I think initially when it when I started to see these things, I was I was sympathetic because, of course, you know, many charities have had issues in struggling to grow and struggling to survive. And so I initially saw it as, you know, your heroes that have compromises, you know, temporary compromises that the organization is making to keep its funding and grow its funding. But I think over time, based on just the degree of of partnerships that it was having with with companies and with certain high net worth individuals, it seemed to me that that those interests had taken over as a team because we had tried to seek out some independence by being able to know what we were looking to do was and what we'd asked to do was to have some independence in vetting partners, to have some independence, to actually flag problematic partners or partnerships. And to the degree that that was, you know, shut down, you know, of course, this ended up over time resulting in departures from our team.

MK: Of course, but what you're suggesting here, to be clear, there's nothing illegal here. For you, what you just felt unethical?

GUEST: I mean, it depends because, you know, yes, I would call it unethical. But, you know, it depends what people see is, you know what people's threshold is, you know. With corporations to the degree that we were, you know, providing logo recognition for problematic companies on educational, you know, educational materials that were used in schools in Canada and the United States. Yes, that's not illegal, but that to us crossed, you know, an ethical line. And also, to the degree that, you know, we are reporting back to companies about not about the social impacts of their partnership, but on the brand and business impacts of the partnership on youth. Yes, that's not illegal, but that to us felt like it crossed like it significantly crossed an ethical line.

MK: What do you think was driving the Kielburgers in their pursuit of these corporate donations?

GUEST: I think that initially it was a large amount of funding that these corporate donations provide. And and the ability that that gave the organisation to to grow its operations, whether that was, you know, we village's international development side of things or on extending its its domestic service learning programme through through these schools or on, you know, expanding the weekday events that the organisation is running for them. A combination of, you know, these this channel opening up, that possibility of of continued growth. And I think, you know, to a certain extent, it's it may have been a genuine belief in in the value of of kind of so-called conscious capitalism and the value of corporations in the charitable sector.

MK: You had some you know, you heard the alarm bells. You had some concerns about about this organization, but I'm wondering how the prime minister and the Liberal government itself managed to get so enmeshed with this with without somebody sounding the alarm and saying, go slow, pump the brakes with this one.

GUEST: I mean, I think that what I would hypothesize would be that WE Charity through the Kielburgers, the Kielburgers atr very good at being able to develop and nurture relationships with high net worth individuals and with politically connected individuals. And, you know, that was the source of many of the the ends that we had with with corporations and high net worth individuals. So what we know, when I think of what has happened, I think that the Kielburgers initially, you know, reached out to Minister Morneau and Trudeau as individuals. What's unclear to me is, is indeed that from, you know, on the government side, that it would get into a partnership with WE of such magnitude without doing due diligence on the organization, which, of course, information about the organization's activities has been public for for a certain amount of time.

MK: So you feel that the Liberal government should have known better?

GUEST: There is no question because had anyone bothered to look into the organization, so whether that is looking into the charity intelligence reports of the organization or into some of the earliest articles about the organization's practices when it comes to its corporate partnerships, a basic amount of of investigation would have turned up some of these issues. Not to mention the fact that in March of this year, the board had resigned en masse and there'd been a mass firing. So that in itself should have raised flags about the organization.

MK: I mentioned at the outset that you've signed a non-disclosure agreement. I'm just curious to know why you feel compelled to talk out now.

GUEST: It's certainly in the public interest, so I definitely feel compelled to to speak and to give a little bit more detail about the workings of the organization itself. So I do think that that's of value and trust in, you know, for Canadians. I also think it's a value to speak up, because I also think that this controversy has also raised a lot of questions about the Canadian charitable sector itself from the perspective of trying to give my story and to speak about what I think has happened, which I think has been largely individual due to WE Charity and to the decisions of its co-founders. I also hope that giving some of this detail will help to clarify that there are aspects of this controversy that are specific to WE Charity and shouldn't be weaponized to discredit other charities in the sector.

MK: Thanks for speaking with us today. We appreciate this.

GUEST: Thanks so much, Mark. Nice to talk to you.

MK: Well, we asked WE for an interview. No one was available. However, they sent a statement in response to this interview. It says in part, "WE Charity has a long standing policy to carefully review potential corporate funders, engaging select corporate partners to support programming, bring attention to causes and mobilize the community is critical to the efficacy of our work." The now cancelled federal contract with the WE organization has fuelled interest in WE's business ventures. The organization operates as both a charity and a for-profit venture. The Financial Post's Vanmala Subramaniam has looked into WE Charity's latest financial statements and she joins me now. Good morning, Van.

VANMALA SUBRAMANIAM: Good morning, Mark.

MK: Let's start first with this notion that one side of the building, you've got a for-profit venture, the other side of the building, you've got a charity. You know, I was always under the impression years ago that it was just a charity and I get the impression a lot of Canadians probably think it's just a charity as well. How does this sort of the yin and yang of the for-profit charity work together?

VANMALA SUBRAMANIAM: Yeah, it's really interesting. So, you know, the way this organization is set up is extremely complicated. So, you know, you have the charity arm, as you mentioned, WE Charity, and then you have something called ME to WE Social Enterprises Inc. and that exists according to WE to help WE Caritiy. So to provide money to the charity and that's kind of the justification for the setup. But you what is publicly available in terms of understanding where the money flows and the charity is only the financial statement, the balance sheets of we charity. And so really, you don't know how ME to WE, the for profit arm gets its money, how it gets its revenue, what exactly it does, how much it owns and say, you know, assets like real estate, how much donations it gets. And, you know, really that link between ME to WE and WE Charity, there's very little known about that. But the idea here is that, you know, we're setting up this for profit arm because we want to be able to make money in order to funnel it into the charity, to help the charity. So that's kind of what WE says. But one of the things that you notice when you actually kind of start digging into the financials of WE Charity is that very, very little money actually comes from ME to WE to WE Charity. So a lot of charities money comes, like most of the revenue comes from donations and, you know, maybe just two million or so, which is, you know, say two to three percent of its revenue comes from the for profit arm. So then it begs the question, what really is the for profit arm there for?

MK: Well, we do know and you've pointed this out in your journalism that there's money that's been funnelled into real estate. You know, that the here and in Canada, there's some jokingly call them the real estate brothers. So tell us about that, because they think that's interesting how they're buying up property in places like Toronto. What have you discovered about that?

VANMALA SUBRAMANIAM: Yeah, so I started digging into this a couple of weeks ago and what I found was just based on property record up and every entity associated with the WE umbrella, so the WE organization, be it the for profit or the charity, they own about $50 million in real estate spread across maybe 11 buildings. And I just want to be clear that none of these buildings are personally owned by Mark and Craig Kielburger or any of the you know Kielburger family members. And the way in which these buildings were acquired was interesting. So, you know, they all tend to be next to each other. They're rowhouses in Cabbagetown neighbourhood in downtown Toronto. And so almost when you kind of walk on a certain block or intersection in Cabbagetown, you'll notice that, you know, an entire block of real estate is just owned by the WE group. And then when you go up to, you know, a couple of blocks north to Carlton Street, the same thing happens. They own a whole bunch of real estate there. So that's kind of, you know, the the odd thing about this, I guess and again, there's nothing improper, it's just a bit strange is that they have decided that as a charity, they're going to reserve fund, you know, which is kind of a backup plan the charity has in case things go south, their reserve fund is in the form of real estate. So if you actually go onto their website, Mark, you'll see they have a section saying WE's real estate philosophy. So they really, you know, this process of just buying up old buildings, converting them into, you know, either storage centres or offices for WE employees to work out of, it's a deliberate strategy by the charity and they get donors to donate money for this real estate purpose.

MK: And I want to jump in there because we did ask WE for comments. And they said in part, real estate provides financial security for WE Charity, which does not have a formal endowment. Through the purchase of real estate, WE Charity has avoided substantial office leasing or rental costs and enabling it to spend additional funds on projects rather than administrative costs. So that you know the justification for it. Van, we only have about a minute left here. I just want to get your views as we're seeing, you know, sponsors, KPMG, Canada, Virgin Atlantic Airlines, TELUS announced there they're stopping various partnerships with WE Charity. What does this tell you about the financial future of the charity?

VANMALA SUBRAMANIAM: I would say it's bleak. And I'll just say this really quickly. In 2019, $64 million of the revenue, they got $64 million in revenue and $46 million of that came from donations and sponsorships. And that's just the charity. We don't know about ME to WE, the for profit arm. Just $9 million came from private donors. So, you know, the fact that, you know, big organizations like RBC, TELUS, Virgin and KPMG are all kind of reconsidering or pulling out the relationship, you know, with affiliation with WE Charity is, I would say, a problem for the organization.

MK: Yeah. So you'll be watching on seeing, you know, monitoring those financial contributions, both from individuals and from corporations.

VANMALA SUBRAMANIAM: I certainly will.

MK: Yeah. OK. And I'm sure many will, others as well as in especially as we wait to hear from the Kielburgers themselves in Ottawa. Vanmala, great to talk with you this morning. Thanks so much.

VANMALA SUBRAMANIAM: Thanks for having me, Mark.

MK: Vanmala Subramaniam, she's a business reporter with The Financial Post. We spoke to her in Toronto.

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VOICE 1: This was an expense that I was unaware of, that I did not know had it not been paid. And when I found out.

VOICE 2: $41,000 expense? You didn't know about a $41,000 expense? How is that even possible?

VOICE 1: I just have to say that in a review of our records, I understood that there was no charge for these travel expenses or these expenses at the at the WE facilities. And once I found that out, I endeavoured to repay that and of course, it was a mistake on my part, which I take full responsibility for.

MK: Finance Minister Bill Morneau being grilled by conservative Pierre Poilievre last week about his relationship with the WE Charity. On Thursday, the Prime Minister will be in the hot seat. As well, Justin Trudeau, and Morneau are being investigated by the federal ethics commissioner. But that's not enough for Duff Conacher. He's the co-founder of Democracy Watch. Good morning, Duff.

DUFF CONACHER: Good morning,.

MK: Duff, you're looking at this, we see the ethics investigation that is being launched, but you want a criminal investigation to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Finance Minister Bill Morneau's participation relationship here. Why a criminal investigation?

DUFF CONACHER: Well, the section that we're citing with the RCMP is the breach of trust, section 122 of the criminal code. And there are five factors, too, that have to be proven to prove a breach of trust. And the first four are already proven. Both Prime Minister Trudeau and Finance Minister Morneau are public officials. They were acting in an official capacity in participating in the decision. They violated the ethics law by doing so. That's already clear. And the violation is serious. It's a violation. And one of the key rules of not furthering private interests because they're supposed to be upholding the public trust in the public interest. And it's only the fifth factor that really needs to be investigated. Did they have a dishonest or corrupt intent in doing this? And the prime minister's initial statement that WE Charity's the only organisation that could do this, this programme is has been proven to be false. There were other organisations considered by the public service, but WE Charity was one of the few that was even contacted. So how are other organisations even able to have a chance to prove that they could do the programme if they're not even contacted by the government? And then in the case of Minister Morneau, his family received $41,000 in travel expenses covered by WE Charity back in 2017 for two trips that his family took with the charity. And he suddenly discovers these expenses and pays them back, but it raises big questions about whether he knew.

MK: And that's why the Conservatives are jumping all over this one. And they're calling for Morneau's resignation. What do you think? You think that's warranted?

DUFF CONACHER: I'd like to prefer to have investigations take place before you call for resignations. It may be true that, you know, the Morneau family paid $52,000 for those trips and may have not been told by WE Charity that that did not cover all the expenses. We need the full communications records of everyone involved for the Morneaus right back to the trips, right through to the decision being made this spring to hand WE Charity this funding as the sole source funding and for Trudeau as well, and all the ministers involved, all their staff, all the officials, the government is committed to doing the document dump. But the question is whether they'll try and hide anything through claiming that it's a cabinet secret. And if they do, then Canadians can quite justifiably assume that and conclude that the Trudeau government is trying to hide wrongdoing by hiding those documents. So we need the full investigations and then if we see these serious violations, they certainly are violations that should result in resignations.

MK: My question is, whose idea was this program? Looking at the way that this thing is being rolled out. I mean, what have you learnt about that?

DUFF CONACHER: Well, there's a difference between the programme and the idea of WE Charity.

MK: the idea of WE Charity being running this program is what I'm talking about.

DUFF CONACHER: Yeah. And we had some evidence last Thursday that is is not good for Minister Morneau and this came from an assistant deputy minister in his Department of Finance. And she testified that Minister Morneau's office called WE Charity on April 20th, told them, you've submitted a proposal to us for a social entrepreneur program, change it to a youth service volunteer service program. And then two days later, Trudeau announces a youth volunteer service program. And then Morneau's staff are briefed and seemed to be involved from the evidence we have so far, right through to the end of the approval process by cabinet, where he was at the table and Trudeau was at the table. And that looks like Morneau's office saying, hey WE Charity do this for us and you'll get this contract and trying to influence the process in the direction of WE Charity. And that's illegal and could amount to a breach of trust again because of Morneau's family ties. He knows the ethics rules. He knows he's not supposed to be at the table when he has a private interest. It's clear he has a private interest and he deliberately continues to have his staff intervene in this process. And that's where I see a dishonest and possibly corrupt intent on behalf of Minister Morneau that would be enough for a breach of trust charge. But again, it needs to be fully investigated. We need to see all the communications to really know and try and get at the truth of what happened.

MK: And we're going to hear from the Kielburger brothers today. And of course, Thursday is the big day. The prime minister will be testifying. He's apologized about not recusing himself from cabinet discussions about WE Charity. But if you were sitting on that cabinet on that finance committee, what's the one question you would ask the prime minister about this?

DUFF CONACHER: Did anyone, did he or anyone in his office and we know that his chief of staff, Katie Telford, did participate in discussions, we don't know how much and we'll find out. She'll be testifying Thursday as well. But we again need to see the whole communications record to determine whether the prime minister or anyone in his office did the same thing as Minister Morneau's staff, which is push this thing in the direction of WE Charity. Essentially try to rigging of public funding, handing out the public's money to one organization that is their family's, one of their family's favourite charities. And if that's shown, again, I think it's evidence not just of an ethics violation, but actually of a breach of trust. Such a huge violation of the standards of the office for a dishonest intent of unethically, helping one of your family's favourite charities. So that's what we need to get to the bottom of. I think we're just going to hear stories from the prime minister and his chief of staff on Thursday, like we heard stories from Minister Morneau last Thursday. And what we need to get to is the truth by looking at the whole communication records. Who called whom when, what did they say, all the e-mails, all the texts, all the BlackBerry pins, everything has to be out there for everyone to see, especially the Auditor-General, the ethics commissioner and the RCMP.

MK: Just before I let you go, Duff, as you know, this is the third ethics probe the prime minister's facing. He's violated conflict of interest rules twice before. Is there enough recourse for breaking the rules?

DUFF CONACHER: No, no. The law is a sad joke. It actually doesn't apply 99 percent of the time. You know, they were changing the law to flow a bunch of money to WE Charity, but also other charities then the law doesn't even apply, even though they both have a conflict of interest, the prime minister and the finance minister. And the penalty for violating these key rules that the Supreme Court of Canada has said are key to protecting the public's money and our democracy. The penalty is just a report saying you violated them. It should be a huge fine to actually discourage this behaviour because we're seeing it's not being discouraged at the very top rate now by the weak enforcement, the weak rules and the weak penalties.

MK: It will be a busy day in Ottawa, Duff and I know you will be watching. Thanks for your time today.

DUFF CONACHER: Thanks very much, Mark.

MK: Duff Conacher is co-founder of Democracy Watch. We reached him in Toronto.

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COVID-19 has brought back plastics, but the zero waste movement is here to stay

Guests: Linh Truong, Ashley Wallis

MK: I'm Mark Kelley, and you're listening to The Current.

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VOICE: If we want to let our kids be kids, we have to ensure that the environment they're playing in is clean and safe. That's what today is all about. By banning harmful single use plastics as early as 2021 and by making companies responsible for recycling their plastic waste, we're protecting our wildlife and giving our kids and grandkids a cleaner and healthier future.

MK: Well, a year ago, the prime minister had different things to worry about. He stood on the shore of a pristine lake and announced that single use plastics would be banned by 2021. Queue COVID-19. The pandemic has sparked a comeback for single use disposable items. Take the restaurant industry. George Siue is one of the owners of Memphis Blues Barbeque House in Vancouver. And he was doing his best to go green before COVID-19, but he's worried about the impact the pandemic is having.

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VOICE: For restaurants to survive, I mean, a lot of us are doing takeout and a lot of the food is also packed in takeout containers. Now, what we try to do is consolidate them. Even our cutlery pack, they're made with cornstarch or bamboo. However, we're probably going through at least three and a half times than normal and I'm sure when people are taking their food out, whether it's from us or all the other restaurants in the country, there must be a mountain of garbage that goes out.

MK: George Siue isn't alone in his concern. Linh Truong has managed to keep her business zero waste while staying compliant with public health directives, but at a cost. Lynn is the owner of the Soap Dispensary and Kitchen Staples stores in Vancouver, where customers refill products using zero waste containers. Good morning, Linh.

LINH TRUONG: Hi. Good morning.

MK: How has the pandemic of changed your business?

LINH TRUONG: Oh, greatly changed us. It has changed our entire operations. Prior to COVID-19, we were allowing customers to bring in their own containers. And, you know, Saturdays and Sundays, there were line-ups, you know, all day. So it was bustling and people were participating. We were reducing a lot of waste. We are still. We are still reducing a lot of waste, but we're doing it in a completely new way that we didn't anticipate, you know, six, seven months ago.

MK: Yeah. I mean, everybody's been thrown in into that sort of the new reality or the new norm. How do you feel when now you look around, you see, you know, plastic containers take out food. You see that that's really growing after the shift was in the different direction that. What's that doing to your view of this trying to reduce plastics?

LINH TRUONG: It's just made me more resolved. This is you know, we're in a crisis, but we have to remember that the environmental crisis existed before this pandemic and it will exist long after. And I feel like we can tackle both crises simultaneously. And it's just it's definitely a sad time from the environmental perspective. And so we're just more resolved to keep that message strong.

MK: But you've had to adapt in the pandemic making these changes. I mean, did the changes that you made, well tell us about the changes that you made and the cost that you incurred.

LINH TRUONG: Well, the first the the first obvious changes that we are not allowed to handle customer's containers. This is decreed by Vancouver Coastal Health. And so we took the milk bottle, the milk deposit bottle model here in Vancouver. And we have a company where you can buy milk from them in glass bottles. And then when you return the bottles, you get your dollar back. Very simple solution. We adopted that as soon as possible. And so everything that people order is either poured into these reusable jars or in paper bags, which is not as ideal, but at least it's low waste, better than plastic. And so that's allowed us to kind of lend our containers to our customers and keep that single use at a minimum.

MK: And your customers are, you know, cooperating with this, that they've joined the movement with you?

LINH TRUONG: Yeah, I, I think for the most part, yes, they are tolerating it.

MK: Tolerating. Yeah tolerating is not a good, that's not a good relationship you want to have with a customer though.

LINH TRUONG: Well, you know, they are understanding and they know that this is the best that we can do with our hands tied when the government says we're not allowed to reuse their containers. So, you know, they come every week and they're like, are you able to take our containers yet? No. OK, well, we'll just use your deposit jars and all they're doing is they're taking it home, pouring it into their own reusable jars and returning our jars. So it's still love and to buy our products without creating more waste.

MK: Your customers are you know, obviously these are people who are committed to reducing their waste, but what do you say to people who believe the zero waste lifestyle just isn't feasible, at least financially and especially during this pandemic?

Oh, that is such a important question and it's complicated. And we are still trying to get that message and that the main thing is there is a cost, Whether it's upfront and you see it or there are hidden costs that we don't see it with cheap products. You know, there's poor ingredients, poor labour practises, you know, goods made in other countries that are imported here very cheaply or things that are made locally, supporting the local economy. There's lots of there's lots of factories that a consumer would not see when it's on the shelf. And it's true that zero waste movement does have unfortunately for now, an image that it is predominantly a white, educated, middle class preoccupation. But just like we're talking about COVID and how we're concerned about the in the health sectors, but also we have to remember that there are other crises going on. You know, with what we try to do is offer products that we can that speak to different economic backgrounds. So we might have a brand that is locally made, that's a little that's more high end, but then we try to bring in a comparable, more economical option. So I think lots of zero waste businesses are aware of, you know, when you want to buy organic, when you want to buy higher quality products, it comes with the upfront cost of that. And when you buy cheap products.

MK: It comes at a cost.

LINH TRUONG: It comes with a cost that you don't see.

MK: Linh, we're going to leave it there. Good to talk to you this morning.

LINH TRUONG: Thank you so much for having me.

MK: Linh Truong is the owner of the Soap Dispensary and Kitchen Staples in Vancouver. Ashley Wallis has been listening in. She's the plastic's Program Manager with Environmental Defence. She's joining me from Toronto. Good morning, Ashley. Let's talk about the big picture here. You know, there was this momentum to ban single use plastic, single use items. Clearly, that's not the case now during the pandemic. How do you see this setback?

ASHLEY WALLIS: You know, I mean, OK, so the pandemic has obviously brought new challenges as Linh was talking about. Single use plastic youth is up. The International Solid Waste Association estimates that we're using about 250 to 300 percent more single use plastic now than we were before the pandemic. But, you know, Canadians are actually still really supportive of a ban on single use plastics. Recent polling suggests that 86 percent want to see the government move ahead with the ban. So I think, you know, there's a way for us to continue to take action on plastic pollution, but also be conscious of the COVID context.

MK: I read an interesting quote here from Greenpeace saying, the plastic industry seized on the pandemic as an opportunity to try to convince people that single use plastic is necessary to keep us safe and that reusable bags are dirty and dangerous. The fact that either of these things is supported by the best available science was irrelevant. Are you now being faced, is the plastic industry using the pandemic as an opportunity to make a comeback?

ASHLEY WALLIS: I think definitely, yeah. I think, you know, never, never let an opportunity pass you by, seems to be the motto over there. The plastics industry has definitely been pushing this false narrative that single-use plastics are dehygenic option. Less than a week after the pandemic was announced by the World Health Organization, the U.S. Plastics Industry Association was lobbying federal officials to roll back or block expected bans on single-use plastics. But in late June, just a little over a month ago, there was a statement that came out from a number of doctors and scientists and public health professionals that said, you know, reuseables are actually safe to use during the pandemic as long as you're following basic hygiene. And I think one of the things they point out that's really relevant is that disposable items can actually present similar challenges to reusable items. So that means just because something is disposable doesn't mean it hasn't been coughed on or touched by someone. There's no reason to believe that that broccoli had at the grocery store wrapped in cellophane hasn't been touched by other people. And so I think pushing this idea that we need more plastic bags and cups and straws in the fight against COVID has been detrimental. And it's unfortunate that that message came out so early in the pandemic when we were all very sensitive to any information because we were obviously scared.

MK: But there's another level to it. I mean, minute municipalities have brought in bans on single use plastics. Vancouver, for one, has banned foam cups, takeout containers and as of April, plastic straws and disposable cutlery were supposed to be available on only by request. But the city's now said it won't enforce this bylaw during the pandemic. It was concerned about putting extra pressure on businesses, especially restaurants, during the pandemic. So there's also I think an allowance here that there that this is too much of a burden on some of the businesses that are struggling through the pandemic. Is that also an obstacle for you in your pursuit?

ASHLEY WALLIS: I think yeah. I mean, I kind of want to echo something that Linh had actually said earlier. I think there's this idea that doing the environmentally responsible thing is, you know, too expensive or it's something we can do after we deal with other issues. But there is a very clear link between environmental health and human health. And I do not think that we can allow these pandemic, our current public health crisis, to make existing environmental crises worse. The plastic pollution crisis has been growing for decades and it will continue to exist long after we have dealt with the pandemic. And I think that we need to make sure that we're not kind of giving ourselves a free pass to trash the environment while we deal with the pandemic. There are responsible ways to deal with both situations in parallel.

MK: I was struck Ashely this weekend walking on the on the beach in here in Toronto and Lake Ontario and looking down and, you know, often you'll see plastic bottles floating in on the lake. But now I'm seeing latex gloves and masks, PPE, personal protective equipment. It's in the water. I'm seeing it on the sidewalks. I'm seeing it everywhere. What impact is that having? I mean, there's just been such a, you know, mass production of PPE that we'd never seen before. And that's being single use is being thrown out.

ASHLEY WALLIS: Yeah, so that statistic I stated earlier that are simply plastic use has increased about 250 to 300 percent since the pandemic started. That does include PPE as well. I think that, you know, when we talk about needing to ban unnecessary single use plastics, really our focus is on things like bags and cups and plastic items that are not necessary. But I am concerned about the increasing amount of PPE litter that I'm seeing in the street. I have a small child. We go to the park and I'm like, don't touch that disposable mask that's lying on the ground. And so, you know, I'm using a cloth mask right now. My family is using cloth masks, but for folks that are using disposable, I do encourage them to dispose of them correctly and make sure that they are being thrown away.

MK: Because this, you know, the use of PPE, is maybe, we may be seeing this for a long time to come.

ASHLEY WALLIS: Yeah and I mean, I think if we need to make we need to make decisions about where we are using plastic most responsibly. And PPE is definitely a place where you can make more of a case for, you know, plastics being useful or necessary. I think if anything, that should encourage us to move more quickly to greatly restrict the unnecessary plastic items we're using in our lives and to do a better job across the board of collecting and managing these materials that we can't avoid.

MK: Ashley, thanks for talking to us this morning.

ASHLEY WALLIS: Thanks for having me, Mark.

MK: Ashley Wallis is the Plastics Program Manager with Environmental Defence.

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A neuroscientist's tips for helping the brain age well

Guests: Daniel Levitin

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: This is a game called Briscola. You have to make up, it's a hundred points, each of them. So 500 points. You win. And what are you going to do?

MK: I'll set the scene for you. The men are sitting around a table in the entry area of a Toronto recreation centre, this past winter when people could do this sort of thing. They're playing a popular game and the table is too small for the group, so a second row of chairs is behind the first. The men in the back crane their necks to see the cards on the table.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: I coming over here about every day. Yeah because I got all friend from my country, from Italy, Italy people.

VOICE 2: How old I am? 87.

VOICE 3: How often do you come to the community centre?

VOICE 4: He can't be 87.

VOICE 2: 30 years.

VOICE 3: Every day?

VOICE 2: Not every day. When I have time, because I got nothing to do at home. Play card and talk with friends and pas the day. Yeah, I am happy. Really happy. Everything's great? So I can't complain.

MK: You gotta love it. That game of cards and the socialising that goes along with it might be part of the reason that he can't complain. Neuroscientist Daniel Levitin has looked at what it takes to age well. He's the James McGill Professor Emeritus of neuroscience at McGill University in Montreal. At his most recent book is called Successful Aging: A Neuroscientist Explores the Power and Potential of Our Lives. Matt Galloway spoke to him in January. Here's their conversation.

MATT GALLOWAY: Daniel Levitin, good morning.

DANIEL LEVITIN: Morning, Matt.

MG: Those men sound pretty happy. What do you think they're doing right?

DANIEL LEVITIN: The thing that they're on to is that socializing with other people is about the most complicated things that we humans do. It requires all kinds of mental operations, empathy, compassion, turn taking, knowing when it's your turn to talk. Really, social negotiations are difficult and they keep our brains well oiled. So, you know, I think it's less about playing chess or bridge or preschooler. It's more about the social interaction.

MG: Why did you want to write this book now about getting older and about how what happens in our brain as we get older, but also how we can age in a way that ensures that our full potential is realized?

DANIEL LEVITIN: Well, two reasons. One was just curiosity. As a neuroscientist, I had noticed that there are some oldsters at age 99, age 100, and still be as sharp as ever. And then there were other people in their 50s and 60s who seemed to be losing it. That's a puzzle. You know, why are some people doing better than others? My own parents are 85 and 87 now. They're as sharp as ever. They're very much engaged with work. My father is a professor at USC and they just signed a four year contract. So he'll be teaching until he's 91. It's amazing. My mother's been writing plays and staging them and painting ten canvases a month and they come to their son, the neuroscientist, and asked for advice about how to keep going. And so I looked all around for a book to give to them and I couldn't find one.

MG: You talk in the book about three things, three questions that I guess we all should answer as we're looking ahead to old age, what are those three questions that we should be thinking about?

DANIEL LEVITIN: Well, we need to be thinking about our health span. You can think of your lifespan as being divided up into these two parts of the health span and the disease span and a lot of medical research and money goes into extending life. But we don't look very much at quality of life. I'm not sure I want to live to be 200 if I'm going to spend the last hundred and ten years catatonic. Another thing we should be asking ourselves is how we want to spend our time. As we get older, we tend to narrow our focus and want to just keep doing the same things we've done before. And it's important to fight that, to fight the complacency and to experience new people and new ideas and new things. And the third thing that we should ask ourselves is how can I change whatever habits I hold now to maximize my chances for being healthy, not necessarily for living longer.

MG: And if you're living healthier, I mean, whether it's longer or not, you're going to have more of that lifespan is to say, rather than just a longer life. You're going to have a more enjoyable lifespan.

DANIEL LEVITIN: Yeah. Think about the narrative of two people who lived to be 95. Maybe one of them gets sick at 55 or experiences. Cognitive decline has to quit her job. Really, the last 40 years of her life were characterized by depression and sorrow and low activity. Consider somebody else who lives to 95 who maybe gives up her job finally at 90, but continues to volunteer with her church or holds a book club at her house and then dies within a week. At the end, equal lifespan, very different lives.

MG: You also quote a colleague who raises a handful of things. Three things that I guess I mean, if you look at it from the surface, might seem trivial, but are actually really important. It's about ice cream. It's about light bulbs and about lunch. What are those things and why are those three things in particular important?

DANIEL LEVITIN: So those are three questions we could ask ourselves that sort of encapsulate all this. As you age, who is going to change your light bulbs? Now, that may sound like a trivial question, but I don't think I want my 87 year old dad up on a ladder trying to get the recessed bulbs in the ceiling. If he were to fall, it would be catastrophic at 87, whereas falling at 57 is not. So it's about who's going to help you out around the house, who's going to chop your vegetables if your vision is bad or your hands are trembling? Ice cream. Are you living in a place where you can be spontaneous and enjoy the community? Are there places you can go or are you isolated? Although many oldsters enjoy living in. Rural and suburban environments. It can be isolating, particularly as your social circle shrinks and just knowing that you can get up, walk down the street, get an ice cream, coffee, a beer at the local pub. Those are important considerations. And finally, lunch. Who are you going to have lunch with? It's no good to just stay at home no matter how much you like CBC Radio, you got to get out and be with people. Are you living in a place and have you arranged your life in such a way that you have somebody to have lunch with once or twice a week?

MG: How have those questions framed? How you think about aging? Because again, they're all things we're trying to project forward how we want to live our lives as we get older. But do you find that it challenges some of the things that you thought about when it comes to aging? I mean, the idea of how you're going to get ice cream. To your point, there are a lot of people who might want to age in a quieter community, but if you can't walk somewhere, where does that leave you?

DANIEL LEVITIN: Most of what I write about in the book is how to start adopting practices in your 20s and 30s. That will give you a much greater probability of being happy and healthy in your 70s, 80s and 90s. And it's never too late to start adopting these practices. The three questions we asked about ice cream and light bulbs and lunch really apply to people who feel that they're towards the end of their life and trying to figure out what they're going to do with the last five or 10 years or however much time they have left. And it often applies to a decision about whether to stay in your house or to move, you know, when choosing an assisted living facility or a memory care unit or just an adult community. It's important to think about these things. What does the community offer me? My uncle is thinking that it's time for him to move out of his big sprawling house in the middle of 100 acres of rural Northern California. He is quite isolated. He's got a drive, 15 minutes to get a quarter built. And so we went and looked at an assisted living facility together. And it was marvellous. I kind of wanted to move there. It was was kind of like a fun big college dorm. Everybody had their own apartment and they had a dining hall with scheduled meals. But you could order what you wanted. They had a lot of recreation. They had a book group that met twice a week. They had lecturers come in. That's the kind of stimulating environment my uncle, a former attorney and playwright, would gravitate towards.

MG: There isn't a huge industry that exists to tell us what we should be doing about how to live our lives so that as we age, we will live healthier lives and will live more productive lives. If you take a look at the science that exists. How important are things like diet and fitness to aging well?

DANIEL LEVITIN: It's kind of a trick question. Diet and exercise are critically important, but most of what we hear or are told to do by purveyors of different expensive products and gym memberships have no scientific basis at all. There are a thousand different diet books at least, and they all contradict each other. You'd think that if one diet was clearly superior to the others, we'd know it by now. The truth is, with diet, it does matter what you eat. You know the onion rings and french fries diet is not going to help you. The basic advice is eat a variety of foods. You shouldn't cut out carbs completely. You shouldn't cut out animal fat completely. Eat a variety of foods in moderation. You try to avoid fried foods, but you can have them once in a while. You can have ice cream once in a while and eat more plants than you probably you're eating.

MG: What about I mean, that's what you're taking in as food. What about what you're taking is information. We're told that I need to, you know, be doing Sudoku puzzles relentlessly so that my brain will stay sharp as I get older. Is that necessary?

DANIEL LEVITIN: Well, there's a billion dollar industry devoted to brain enhancement and a lot of computer games. There's no evidence that these brain training games actually make you smarter or improve your memory or stave off Alzheimer's. If you do Sudoku puzzles or passwords, all that you get better at is Sudoku puzzles and crosswords and doesn't transfer to anything else. One thing there is though, if you've never done crossword or Sudoku, there is a value in doing something new that oils the neural circuits. It creates new synaptic connections, and that exercise of your brain getting out of your comfort zone is very important to successful aging. Now, the other thing you mentioned was exercise. We've also been sold a bill of goods. I think about the value of exercise. Exercise is important and aerobic exercise in particular is heart healthy. But all that aerobics exercise isn't nearly as important for brain health as simple movement, particularly movement that involves navigation, navigation in open countryside. If you can. I went on a hike last summer in Quebec. We were hiking in this public park on a dirt trail and there were all kinds of tangled roots and things in the middle of the trail. You had to be careful to step over them and not trip. A light went off in my head that connected the research literature on what we called embodied cognition and what was really going on on this walk, which was that I was exercising my hippocampus, the part of the brain that is devoted to navigating and spatial memory. And turns out the hippocampus is the seat of memory, so all of that movement in natural surroundings is very challenging for the brain and it's consistent with how our hippocampus evolved. It didn't evolve to remember the lyrics to songs. Your memory evolved to help you navigate, to remember where you are in space. Standing on a treadmill doesn't do that. Getting out and taking a walk in the country or in the city, if that's what you've got. Very important.

MG: Can I ask you a further question about memory? Just because you've raised it? One of the things that comes up in the book is that you reference something that I think a lot of us have experienced where you go to the grocery store or you go to the closet, you arrive there and you can't remember exactly why you ended up there in the first place. And as you get older, do you think this is a sign of something? And it's a sign of something ominous and I should be concerned about this. Should we be concerned if we have those moments where our memory fails us?

DANIEL LEVITIN: Well, it's interesting, Matt. This is sort of one of the myths of aging. It's true that some people do suffer memory loss as they age, of course, but far less of us are experiencing that than we think at McGill, where I've taught for many years. I see 19 and 20 year olds who are having memory lapses all the time. They raise their hand and I call on them immediately and they forgot what they wanted to ask. The difference between the 20 year old and the 70 year old is the stories we tell ourselves. The 20 year old says, Oh jeez, I drank too much last night or I gotta get more than five hours of sleep. The 70 year old standing in front of the hall closet, not knowing why he's there, says, oh, jeez, this must be Alzheimer's.

MG: That's reassuring to a lot of us, I think, who've had that moment, who wondered whether it was some sort of catastrophic moment as we're standing there not knowing what we're supposed to be doing.

DANIEL LEVITIN: It isn't necessarily. And the other thing is that as we get older, we tend to spend more time in our heads. And so, you know, we've got a lot of thoughts going on in between the bedroom and the hall closet. You're thinking about three or four things and they kind of push out the why do I need to go to the hall closet part?

MG: Briefly, one of the other things that you raise is the issue of sleep, something that's top of mind for those of us who wake up early in the morning to come to work. What do we need to know about sleep and aging and how aging can affect our sleep patterns?

DANIEL LEVITIN: Well, this is another myth, Matt, that old people don't need much sleep. You've probably heard this. That ain't true. They only get five and a half hours of sleep, but they still need eight or nine like the rest of us. The difficulty is that as we age our biological clock in the supercars, MC nucleus and the brain begin to degrade. And we're not getting the neurochemical signals for waking and for sleeping that we ought to be getting. That means we have to be particularly scrupulous about sleep hygiene. When we're young, we can stay up late and we don't really feel it much after about the age of 60. If you stay up maybe just two, three hours later than normal, say, to celebrate New Year's. It can take you a couple of weeks to re synchronize your clock. You have to go to bed at the same time every night and get up at the same time. It often means not doing anything with a screen or a blue light within two hours at bedtime, avoiding alcohol because alcohol disrupts the sleep cycle, although it might help you to fall asleep. Most people have a kind of kickback effect where it wakes them up a few hours later and in the morning, possibly get one of those blue lights, those daylight lamps. And when you first wake up, let it shine on you for half an hour.

MG: Much of this book is about how we need to think differently about aging and how we think about the oldsters as you refer to them. What has to change in terms of society's thinking about aging to ensure not just that we do it well, but that we take advantage of an aging population in the best case scenario.

DANIEL LEVITIN: The society we're living in is agist. It as a narrative that old people are maybe in the way of younger people, that they're unpleasant to be around, that they're cranky. And certainly some old people are cranky. But I'd like to start a new conversation about how to view old age as just another developmental stage. It's certainly marked by its own challenges, as is toddlerhood and adolescence and young adulthood, but it's also marked by some unique strengths. Oldsters are better at a number of things and there a great untapped resource. What do you mean? Old people have more experience? Oldsters are better at solving certain kinds of problems based on pattern matching, which are components of wisdom, particularly good at seeing patterns in things and saying, Oh, I've seen this thing before where a younger person hasn't seen it before. If you have to get an X-ray read, you want to have a 70 year old radiologist read it. Not a 30 year old, 70 year old has had a lot more pattern matching experience. I think corporate boards, even for young start-ups, should have a couple of older adults on them. When I say that oldsters are great untapped resource, they're often forced into retirement when they are still quite productive and useful and can remind us of mistakes that we've made in the past.

MG: And if you force them into retirement, I mean you, again, you tell the story of your father that can have long term effects, not just on that individual, but then on the cost of treating that individual if they suffer from depression or what have you.

DANIEL LEVITIN: Well, that's absolutely right. And, you know, with our Canadian national health care system, this affects us all. A 62 year old or a 67 year old who is maybe not forced to retire. But, you know, it's strongly suggested they should make way if they lose their sense of worth in society. A number of physical ailments start to show up and aches and pains, and maybe they were there all along. But when you're actively engaged and you're feeling valued, they take second chair to your goals and your engagement. And as you say, depression sets in and then you're draining the health care system as opposed to working and contributing to it.

MG: What about for people, though, who they do everything right? They continue to work. They continue to contribute to their society. But then something happens. They break a hip. They become very ill. They get Alzheimers. If you change the attitude or the lifestyle, can any of that change the outcome for those individuals, the individuals who, as I say, do everything right, but things still don't line up their way?

DANIEL LEVITIN: Well, sure, we can't control a number of things like disease and accidents. And there are some people that, despite their best efforts at healthy living, don't achieve that. What we are seeing and this is just preliminary evidence you're talking about advanced Alzheimer's, where a person has lost the sense of where they are. They don't know what year it is. They may not recognize a spouse of 40 or 50 years. Someone like that is tremendously disoriented and isolated and they often become violent and angry. Of course, because they look in the mirror and they don't recognize what they see. They look around and they don't know why they're there or where they are. And we found that music, especially music of their early teen years, can reorient them. It comforts them because that musical memory is one of the last things to go. And it allows the people to connect with themselves. And it's soothing for them as well as for their families and loved ones who get their old grandparent or spouse back again for at least a little bit of time.

MG: Music is a really powerful thread through this book. You I mean and people will know you have written books about music and you're a huge music lover. You make music as well. You reference musicians like Joni Mitchell and Stevie Wonder in this. You've just released a new album yourself. It's called Turnaround. Let's have a listen to one of the tunes with some.

SOUNDCLIP

[Song: "Turnaround" by Daniel Levitin]

MG: Put a line in there, Daniel Levitin, age can masquerade as youth. Tell me a little bit about this album and why at this point in your life, something like this is significant.

DANIEL LEVITIN: I'm 62 now, and when I turned 60, which is kind of a time of reckoning, I thought I need to put myself out of my comfort zone. I need to do things that make me uncomfortable. One of the things I did was I took flying lessons and I got my private pilot's licence and I did that because I'm scared of heights.

MG: Yikes. Not the natural thing that somebody would do.

DANIEL LEVITIN: Well, the research says you have to fight complacency. And look, I believe in science. I believe in art and I believe in science. And the science says push back. Rage against the machine. And the machine in my brain was telling me, stay out of heights. And it was also telling me, stay out of the musical spotlight. I've spent a kind of side career producing records and and playing on records, but always in the background. Whether it was working with Joni Mitchell and Stevie Wonder and Steely Dan. ThesSpotlight was never on me and I found the idea of being front and centre very uncomfortable. Joni Mitchell and I had been friends since 1996. I decided that I should take my songwriting more seriously than I had been. I'd been writing songs since I was a teenager, but I'd write them and then just set him down. And Joni helped me, too. She didn't actually change lines in songs, but she taught me how to think about editing them and revising them. And she said, You gotta record these. I said, I can't do that. It's too uncomfortable. She's not. No, no, you've got to do it. And so.

MG: If Joni says do it, you have to do it.

DANIEL LEVITIN: Exactly. That's why I made the record. I made it to get out of my comfort zone. The other reason is that I found it increasingly hard to find music I wanted to listen to.

MG: Fair enough. That's one example of a change in your life. Having gone through the process of writing this, what's one other thing that you've done differently because of what you've learned in writing this book.

DANIEL LEVITIN: With respect to diet, there's an emerging body of evidence that caloric restriction might be helpful. We mostly know this from animal models. It's too early to say whether it helps with humans. I tend to skip dinner two or three times a week and basically I don't eat if I'm not hungry, which was a revelation to me. I read your book coming from a family with a Jewish mother. You know, eat, eat. Now I eat when I'm hungry. I don't eat when I'm not hungry. That's one thing I've changed. Another is I'm doing resistance training, not to build muscle, but because there's early evidence that resistance training, weightlifting basically exercises different neural circuits than, say, aerobics, exercise or other activities. I think the other thing I do that's different is try to make more time for the people in my life that I care about and to meet new people and put myself in new social situations.

MG: You're 62 now, as you mentioned. If you think of life at 100, what would an ideal life be at age 100?

DANIEL LEVITIN: Nobody's ever asked me that. I think I'd like to be on a bandstand somewhere in Toronto. I'd like to be performing in Massey Hall, songs that I wrote with musicians who I love. Let's see, 62. That's 38 more years. I'd like to have written another 12 books.

MG: Anything is possible. And Massey Hall, we'll be standing there waiting for you to hit the stage. Daniel Levitin, it's great to talk to you. Thank you.

DANIEL LEVITIN: Great to talk to you. Thank you.

MK: Daniel Levitin is the James McGill Professor Emeritus of neuroscience at McGill University and the author of Successful Aging: A Neuroscientist Explores the Power and Potential of Our Lives. He's also a musician, a songwriter, a producer and a chronic underachiever. Matt spoke with him last January. Q with Tom Power is coming up, but before we leave you. This past weekend you may have seen the late congressman and civil rights leader John Lewis made one last crossing over the Edmund Pettus Bridge from Selma to Montgomery. This time Lewis’ casket was pulled behind two black horses, but in 1965 he made history when he, along with Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders marched across that same bridge in protest of voter suppression. John Lewis was beaten by Alabama state troopers that day, but it was all in the name of civil rights and what he would go on to call “Good Trouble.” Now his body will lie in state at the Capitol rotunda in Washington DC until 10pm tonight. It’s the first time a Black lawmaker has received this honour. IN 2014 Hollywood made a film adaptation of the march in Selma. Canadian actor Stephen James portrayed Lewis in the film. The movie won many awards including a Grammy and Oscar for the original song “Glory” by John Legend, featuring Common. And that’s where we’ll leave you today. I’m Mark Kelley. Thanks for listening to The Current.

[Song: “Glory” by John Legend featuring Common]

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July 28, 2020 episode transcript

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