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The Current Transcript for September 21, 2020

Host: Matt Galloway

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

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SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: It's like being a hockey star. Tonight you scored a goal and you're a hero and tomorrow you let a goal in and you're a bum. And that's politics.

MATT GALLOWAY: A lifetime in public service, Canada's 17th prime minister, a key figure in the decriminalization of homosexuality and abortion. Dancing with Princess Margaret. John Turner died on Friday at the age of 91. In 30 minutes, Peter Mansbridge and Don Newman remember a life well lived. Also this morning.

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VOICE: I think I found myself in the church in some sense. I was incredibly faithful, I was incredibly pious and yet the politics of my church I think started to wear on me and I started to kind of pull away.

MG: The Ghanaian-American novelist Yaa Gyasi struck gold with her first book, Homegoing. Her new novel does likewise, tapping into themes of the moment from the tension between faith and science to addiction and the opioid crisis to life as an immigrant. It is a tremendous book and a feature interview with Yaa Gyasi is coming up in an hour. We begin though with Canada's former chief justice and others on the death of a woman known as the Notorious RBG, her singular achievement in the fight for equality and the fierce battle for her seat on the U.S. Supreme Court. Good morning. I'm Matt Galloway and this is The Current.

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The life and legacy of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Guests: Jill Wine-Banks, Beverly McLachlin

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[Chanting of "honour her wish"]

MG: Over the weekend, thousands of people gathered at the Supreme Court in Washington D.C., mourning the death and honouring the life of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The Supreme Court justice died on Friday evening from pancreatic cancer at the age of 87. Those gathered chanted honour her wish. She reportedly told her granddaughter that her most fervent wish was not to be replaced until a new president was installed. Jill Wine-Banks is a lawyer and legal analyst. She was a colleague of Ruth Bader Ginsburg at Columbia Law School and is the author of The Watergate Girl: My Fight for Truth and Justice Against a Criminal President. Jill Wine-Banks, good morning.

JILL WIINE-BANKS: Good morning, Matt.

MG: What are you thinking is, as you hear mourners on the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court chanting "honour her wish."

JILL WIINE-BANKS: I join them in mourning, her loss in celebrating her life, the issues that she fought for, the power of words that she displayed and worrying about the political impact of her passing at this time when voting has already started in America for the new president.

MG: You tweeted this weekend that her death was the saddest news for justice and democracy. When you heard that she had died on Friday evening, what went through your mind?

JILL WIINE-BANKS: It it was, as I said at first, just the loss of her and her voice on the court and for particularly women's equality, but for equality for all Americans. She often when she was a litigator for the ACLU, American Civil Liberties Union, she had male plaintiffs because in some ways that showed the real discrimination that was going on by showing how gender impacted life in America under the current laws. And she was a powerful advocate and used words in a way that led to real reform and change. She often was the dissenting voice, but it led to, for example, in one case she ended by saying, we can't do anything. It's up to Congress now. And Congress passed legislation called the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act to overcome what the court couldn't do. So she was a powerful person. And right now, we're in a terrible situation where the impact both on the Senate, the court and the outcome of this election may be changed by her passing. And that is something that is of concern to me, because I can't predict whether America's election will be impacted in favour of which party, if it could show the Republicans as, for example, the hypocrites that they are for having denied Obama the right to even have a hearing on his nominee for the Supreme Court in the last year of his presidency. While this is only six weeks before the election and in fact, the election has actually already started. So it's not even before the election, it's during the election. And I think the fact that it shows them to be such hypocrites could play against them. On the other hand, this is an issue that Republicans have been screaming about for so long. It could motivate voters to come out to vote so that Trump has the right to appoint a new nominee. But it could definitely motivate Democratic voters who now see the court and civil liberties in America as under siege in a way that would be unthinkable to me to vote. It could motivate particularly young women who might see their rights being taken away.

MG: And young women who whose lives have been changed dramatically by the rulings that she was involved in. I mean, she's credited with being the reason, for example, why women can have bank accounts without a male co-signer. What are some of the other things that you can trace back to the work that she did?

JILL WIINE-BANKS: Well, it's not just the opinions that she influenced. It's the fact that she had a voice to influence them. It's the fact that she used words in ways that they couldn't and that she set an example as a pioneering woman. She graduated from Columbia Law School, my alma matter, only nine years before I did. But she was a role model. She was a leader. She was someone who showed the way not just for women in law, but for women who wanted professions. And as you said, I mean, silly things like not being able to have your own bank account, not being able to buy property in your own name. It also one of her first cases on the basis of gender was a male plaintiff who wasn't able to get Social Security benefits because they were only allowed to female caregivers. And he wanted to stay home to take care of his child after the death of his wife. And so she showed the hypocrisy of the laws that were based on gender. And so I think it was both in terms of her her opinions and her legal impact, but also just her role model as a woman who could she was a working mother. She was denied jobs. She didn't get a clerkship. She was well qualified for. She was number one in her class at Columbia. One of the top law schools in America. But because she was a woman, she wasn't hired. And unfortunately, even in my generation, that was true. It had been true for Sandra Day O'Connor, who was the first woman on our Supreme Court who started her legal career as a receptionist because no one would hire her, despite her rank in the class and her qualifications.

MG: I want to bring another voice, just stay on the line. I want to bring another voice into this conversation. And that is the voice of Canada's first female Supreme Court Chief Justice, the Right Honourable Beverly McLachlin, now retired. Beverly McLachlin, good morning to you.

BEVERLY MCLACHLIN: Hi. How are you?

MG: I'm well. You've been listening into this and you met Ruth Bader Ginsburg on on a number of occasions. Tell me what, I mean, what sort of impression did she make on you?

BEVERLY MCLACHLIN: She makes, she made a deep impression on, I think, everybody who met her. And certainly on me, I was a little in awe. A little is is the wrong adjective. When I first met her at a legal conference at Cambridge, England, this small, quiet woman who exuded strength and determination in in a very steely, quiet kind of way. It was a bad day for her. She had to rush off to Washington to do something the press had said, but we did have time for a tea in the garden. And she sat at the head and very quietly raised issues about women's rights in Canada and in the United States. I was deeply impressed. Then I had the opportunity to get to know her better through a series of exchanges that we instituted with the Supreme Court of the United States and the Supreme Court of Canada. And so we visited there. They visited here. Along the way we and during those occasions had some deep chats about the law and women's place in our society.

MG: How would you describe her style? And I ask this is somebody who has I mean in the position of the Chief Justice of Canada's Supreme Court, you know, the job beyond simply the personality that she had. How would you describe her style on the bench.

BEVERLY MCLACHLIN: She is very confident in her style. And you see this in her photos where she always is striking image, very simple garb, dark usually, but maybe a striking piece of jewellery. You see it in in in how she dressed and carried herself. You see it in the words she used and how she used them as from a very young age. She had a deep sense of who she was, what her purpose in life was, I think, and what she would do with her life. And I think she achieved a great deal with her life.

MG: What do you think her legacy will be? I mean, there is a generation of women who were inspired by the work that she did and the work that you did. And if you take a look at that in terms of the sweep of history, it's difficult, you know, in some ways to to comment on that while you're in it, but what do you think young women would take away from her accomplishments, but also your accomplishments?

BEVERLY MCLACHLIN: Well, it's always hard to predict what people will think can or 20 or 50 years hence, but I think that it was terribly important as as Jill has already said, that there be seen to be women occupying important influential positions of power and doing it well, because the prevailing presumption, even for my time when I was going to law school, was that the legal world was a man's world. The political world was a man's world. Women were sometimes allowed in by the sufferance of men, but they had to be really, really good. And it wasn't the normal thing. And of course, Ruth Bader Ginsburg didn't believe that was right. I didn't believe that was right. She famously said something along the lines of why couldn't we have nine women on the Supreme Court of the United States? We've had nine men for many, many years, but nobody complained. But if you suggested that we should have nine women, they would be absolutely horrified. And that brings out the attitude. I had a similar experience where I when I was first sworn in to the Supreme Court of Canada, Bertha Wilson, the first woman on that court, had a puckish sense of humour and she leaned over and said three down, six to go. Well, I told that story at a speech in Edmonton a few weeks later and there were was an outrage letter to the editor saying, how can a new judge imagine that we'd have nine men on the court? I tell those stories to talk about how it was then and how women were the outsiders, the exceptions. So to answer your question, having women like Ruth Bader Ginsburg doing what she did, accomplishing what she did, a fought leader, a law leader, really changed the perspective for young women. They said, I can do it. We can be there. We should be there.

MG: Beverly McLachlin, a real pleasure. And thank you very much for this.

BEVERLY MCLACHLIN: Thank you.

MG: The Right Honourable Beverly McLachlin was Canada's first female and longest-serving Supreme Court Chief Justice. Jill Wine-Banks is still with me. She's a lawyer and legal analyst in Chicago. Jill Wine-Banks, the question that is swirling and I mean, it wasn't long before this question started to swirl obviously through the United States and as you're hearing beyond is, what happens now? What do you think happens now when it comes to that open seat?

JILL WIINE-BANKS: Well, as I said, there is a very serious issue as to whether it will bring out more Republican voters or more Democratic voters. It is certainly going to have an impact. People are very devastated. At least Democrats are. People are viewing the Republicans as being unseemly. They only waited hours before saying they were going to replacer. And this is in the face of their prior in 2016 preventing in 10 months before the election, preventing President Obama from even having a hearing on his nominee.

MG: Does the president have the right to replace, if you can call it that, replace or to fill that seat before the election?

JILL WIINE-BANKS: Well, you know, there is an argument that can be made that the president is the president until noon on January 20th when the new president is inaugurated and must be able to fulfil all of the obligations and responsibilities and duties of the job of president. There is a different argument when it comes to the Supreme Court, which is a lifetime appointment and voting has already started. It was absurd for the Republicans to argue that that was a rule that applied 10 months before the election had even started versus while the election was already underway. And it shows them as unprincipled hypocrites in trying to rush through an appointment. Now, there can be no logic to that. And I think that we citizens must stand up and have a huge public outcry rather than let that happen. I'd also like to just mention when when you asked a question about Justice Ginsburg's style, aside from her, her style as a fashionista, she also had a style as a justice, which I think is quite important for two particular things. One is her power of persuasion and how much she fought to make her position, her voice heard and clear. But to listen to the opposition, her best friend on the court was Justice Scalia, who was at the hip. They were polar opposites. I think she. I would be very proud to be followed by a woman, but would be deeply ashamed if it was one of the women that is now being talked about, who, again, is her polar opposite.

MG: Just in the last few minutes that we have, what do you think are the laws that hang in the balance depending on who ends up in that seat?

JILL WIINE-BANKS: Well, there is there are many women's issues. The right of choice would be one that is clearly at issue. But American health care is at issue. The American Health ACA act known as Obamacare to the Republicans, is something that they have been trying to undo. The pre-existing condition clause, for example, is something they say they want to keep, but they are in court trying to get rid of it. And with six conservative justices on the court, a, you know, three appointed by President Trump, that could be the end of health care for millions and millions of Americans. That's as important as the right of choice, either one of which could really should really motivate voters to get out and vote. And those are I'd say the two environmental concerns would be another that is equally at issue. And just general racial equity would be something else that will be affected by court decisions going forward. So those are important things. And she will be deeply missed. I recently, about a year ago, sent her a dissent column that I found at an antique show and received beautiful handwritten note, thank you note from her, which is the type of person she was.

MG: Tell me more about that. I mean, in terms of just before I let you go, the type of person that she was?

JILL WIINE-BANKS: Well, as as you mentioned in my introduction, she and I both taught at Columbia Law School. I was an adjunct and there only one day a week. But on that day, I often saw her in the faculty lounge and occasionally was able to have lunch with her. She was a warm and kind person, her image was intimidating to me. Her, you know, you're meeting an icon of America, but nothing about her in her personal demeanour was that way. And all anyone has to do is watch either the documentary, the Notorious RPG or the feature film On the Basis of Sex to see who she was as a mother, as a wife, as a law student, as an advocate for women's rights and all people's rights and then as a Supreme Court justice. And it's she was an extraordinary person who I'm proud to call a role model, who was a role model for millions of women, I am sure, and who will be long remembered. And I hope that her legacy includes being replaced by someone appointed by the newly elected president, whoever that is. It should not be appointed now and rushed through. There are not even enough days left in the legislative session to allow a vote before the election. That would be unseemly and there wouldn't be enough time for the kind of vetting that a Supreme Court justice needs to have. There needs to be more time than that.

MG: These next few days and weeks and months certainly are going to be fascinating and rocky. And we appreciate your time in helping us set up what will happen, but also in remembering your colleague and friend. Jill Wine-Banks, thank you.

JILL WIINE-BANKS: Thank you.

MG: Jill Wine-Banks is a lawyer, legal analyst and the author of The Watergate Girl: My Fight for Truth and Justice Against a Criminal President. She was in Chicago and was remembering the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died on Friday evening. The CBC News is next. And then, from American politics to Canadian politics, we look at the life and legacy of former Prime Minister John Turner with two people who followed his career closely as journalists, Peter Mansbridge and Don Newman. They join me coming up in six minutes. I'm Matt Galloway. This is The Current on CBC Radio one. Stay with us.

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Veteran broadcasters Don Newman and Peter Mansbridge reflect on covering former Prime Minister John Turner’s long political career

Guests: Don Newman, Peter Mansbridge

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

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MG: Still to come, this pandemic's toll on global famine and humanitarian aid. But first, remembering a Canadian prime minister.

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MG: He was a lawyer, a politician, a track star, prime minister of Canada for 79 days, but had a career on Parliament Hill that lasted decades. He was a Member of Parliament for three different provinces and held four posts in cabinet. John Turner died on Friday at the age of 91. And here to talk about his life and legacy are two people you might know. Don Newman was the senior parliamentary editor for CBC TV News and Peter Mansbridge, the former chief correspondent for CBC News. Good morning to you both.

PETER MANSBRIDGE: Hey, good morning, Matt. Good morning Don.

DON NEWMAN: Good morning. Hey Pete, how are you?

MG: What was your reaction, Don, when you first heard that John Turner had died on Friday?

DON NEWMAN: Well, it was sad. Not surprised, though, he had been in a decline for a number of years and I was not surprised that he had died, but of a sad and that certainly is the end of an era. And but, you know, he had a great impact as he went through life and pretty well, although he had some rough times when he came back into politics. He had a pretty good life as well.

MG: Peter Mansbridge, the tributes have been coming in over the course of this weekend. What have you been thinking about as you've had a look them?

PETER MANSBRIDGE: Well, as Don said, it's the end of an era because he was a very particular kind of politician. I mean, look at John Turner's life. You kind of highlighted it there at the beginning. But here was a guy who, from his earliest days, people looked at and said, he's got it. He's going to make it in whatever he chooses to do. He did very well at school in his private school. He went to Oxford. He was a great athlete. It could have been on the Canadian Olympic team. And I think it was 48. He was one of the fastest track stars in the country, held a Canadian record for a while on a 100 yard, not hundred metre dash. And then he focussed. He wanted to go into politics. He could have gone straight into law. As he got his law degree, could have made a lot of money right away, but nobody wanted to get into politics. He was a young MP and a young cabinet minister focussed always on the long goal, which was to become prime minister someday. Lost it in 68 to Pierre Trudeau, took a kind of time in the wilderness in the mid 70s, came back in the mid 80s and, you know, won the prime ministership. But, you know, you're calling this segment a story of a prime minister. It's a short story. If you just look at those days. But as Don said, there was a lot else about this man's life that had an impact and still has an impact today after his death.

MG: Do you remember the first time you heard the name John Turner, Peter?

PETER MANSBRIDGE: I do. I was there, I was a kid going to high school in Ottawa. I came home my mother seemed to be sitting there in some kind of shock. And I said, what's the matter? And she said, I was just walking on Parliament Hill with my friend and suddenly this man came along the sidewalk and he was the most gorgeous, most attractive man I've ever seen. It was John Turner. That's when I learned about John Turner. And she was right. I mean, this guy I mean, you just have to look at the pictures of him throughout his life. He was incredibly attractive man.

MG: Don, when was the last time that you saw him?

DON NEWMAN: The last time that I saw him was the last time I saw Peter too. We were at the 90th birthday party in Ottawa for John in June of last year, 2019. And in fact, Peter and I each had a speaking party at that speaking mart at that party. John was remarkable in that he was not very mobile. He had to be helped up to the stage. But then he sat and he read almost flawlessly for about 20 minutes, a speech that he had written for the occasion. And then afterwards, we all were talking to him and he was in pretty good spirits. And you can tell that he was going to decline even more, but at the time, he was doing pretty well and he certainly enjoyed that evening.

MG: I want to talk about his life as a politician. But, Peter, just what do you remember about him as a person?

PETER MANSBRIDGE: Well, I was lucky in these last few years, last 10 years, we used to have lunch about once or twice a year after he'd got out of politics. And it was remarkable because he would tell stories about the early days in politics, but he would mostly be trying to impress upon me, as he did with Dawn, this desire and belief that he had, that people have to believe in public service, that if you want democracy, you can't take it for granted, you have to participate. And that was always the thread in his conversations and in his speeches. Don mentioned such speech last year in Ottawa. That was the major thread near the end of it was no participation. So there was there was that main element through him. But, you know, when you talk about his time in politics, listen, this guy, you know, served in some of the biggest portfolios as a cabinet minister for for Trudeau in 1970 was justice minister. Official languages actually called back crisis of the October crisis. Then he was finance minister through a difficult period. And and, you know, there's been different stories as to why he left in the mid 70s. But the way he always expressed it to me was he couldn't believe that he could campaign again, defending wage and price controls after just having attacked them when Robert Stanfield had them in 74 as part of his campaign portfolio.

MG: This is from the House of Commons in 1989, just after John Turner announced that he was stepping down as the leader of the Liberal Party.

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VOICE: This is and remains the forum of the nation, Mr Speaker. This is the highest court in the land. This is the place where finally issues must be decided. And I know from time to time the critics and the members of the media feel that and those who watch Question Period wonder what we're doing here. Yes, it should be a legislative workshop. There is business to be accomplished on behalf of the people of Canada. But the word parliament taken from the Norman was well chosen, parliament. Parlay, debate. This is theatre, this is debate and it's the freest chamber in the free world.

MG: Don Newman, what does that say about John Turner as a politician, but we get a hint of that there, how he viewed parliament?

DON NEWMAN: Well, he viewed it as a much less party oriented, party controlled forum. He thought that MPs should be given a lot more latitude to take positions on issues of the day and whether or not it was the party positions didn't matter. Now, had he been prime minister for a 100 period, he might have modified that view a little because it's certainly hard to run in government if you're going to have half your backbench voting against you. But that was mainly his theory that it was wise people coming together and figuring out where we were going next. And he had a great capacity for friendship and for companionship. And he I think he thought that he could probably convince a lot of people. And, you know, over the years, as Peter points out, he had a lot of big jobs and he did convince a lot of people about his positions. But he he seemed to think that there was should be more of a forum than it actually became. And as it is now, it's basically party line votes and that's it.

MG: I was going to say, Peter, how does that square with what we see now in the House of Commons?

PETER MANSBRIDGE: Well, it's very different. I mean, he was a great believer in the institution of parliament and parliamentarians. As Don said, he reached out. He had friends on in all parties, and that was really important to him. You know, I'll tell you a quick little story. In the early nineteen sixties, when he was just an MP and was in his early thirties. He was with his wife, Jill, in Barbados on a holiday and he was on the beach and he saw this guy struggling in the waters off the beach line. He went out and as he got closer, he realised it was John Diefenbaker who was then the opposition leader, and he was struggling. And Turner basically saved him, brought him ashore. And I you know, I was in one of our lunches, I said, how was that relationship afterwards? And he said, oh we always had a great relationship with Mr. Diefenbaker, he'd called him. But he said that issue never came up. He never spoke about it. I never raised it and it was just sort of part of the past. And we would respect each other moving forward.

MG: He had a long history as a debater, a champion debater, and won some politically and lost some politically. Peter, if you take a look at his role in debates, I mean, whether it's, you know, being attacked for patronage appointments, whether it was the attacking that he did around free trade, what did that say about who he was?

PETER MANSBRIDGE: Well, those were the two greatest debates that I've certainly was witnessed in Canadian politics, 84 and 88. He was passionate about what he believed in and he was willing to to lay it all on the line. He did not do well in 84. Everybody knows that. And it cost him, amongst other things, cost him the election in 88 with most of his party against him and looking like they were about to lose in a huge fashion. Maybe you only have a dozen or 15 seats left. He and some of them actually tried to ask him to step down in the middle of the campaign. He goes into that debate passionate about free trade and hammers Brian Mulroney on the question of whether or not Mulroney was selling out the country. It changed the whole dynamic of that campaign in an instant. Now, Mulroney still won, still won a majority government, but there were moments in that campaign where, you know, if Turner had a second issue, I think he should have played the GST card at that time, but he didn't. He stated just on free trade. But he doubled the seats that the Liberals had in caucus. They were up in the 80s and they were kind of back as a party. He, unfortunately for him, never retained the loyalty of the majority of his caucus and he was gone within a couple of years after that.

MG: I want to bring Don back in in just a moment, but just finally, on sort of who he was, he made gaffes in his career and what's been pointed out over the course of this weekend. One of them is the one involving the Liberal cabinet minister, Iona Campagnolo. How was that viewed at the time? And he touched her on the backside and at the time how was that viewed and how is it viewed now do you think?

PETER MANSBRIDGE: Well, now you look at it and you go, oh, my God, how could that ever happen? We live in a totally different world. But we were in a world that was changing at that point. When he left politics in the mid 70s, in 1975, I'm not saying that would have been acceptable, but it was the kind of thing that happened. But in the 10 years following, everything about politics started to shift, started to change. And by 84, when that happened, along with a number of other things in that campaign that happened to severely damage his reputation. It was just unacceptable.

MG: He ends up as being seen as yesterday's man in some ways.

PETER MANSBRIDGE: Yes. Yeah. Which was the first time in his life that he'd been suddenly put in that position. Remember, this was the guy you'd grown up through all those years and those decades as the next big thing. They called him the prince in waiting. You know that he had the royal jelly on every kind of aspect of political life. And then suddenly, in a matter, literally in a matter of weeks, if not months, all that disappeared and he was on the defensive.

MG: Don, we ran through in the introduction this long list of things. I mean, yes, prime minister for 79 days, but three different positions within different provinces for posts in cabinet. Decades and decades of political life and public service. If you take a look at the sweep of that, what's his impact, do you think, on the country?

DON NEWMAN: Well, I think his impact is partly the justice reforms that came in when he was justice minister. He moved to modernise a lot of the law in Canada and a lot of it we're still living with. I think it in lay it sets the tone and set the groundwork for the Charter of Rights, although I'm not sure that he thought the Charter of Rights was the best thing for the country at the time. He was a parliamentary man and the Charter of Rights to some degree takes away the power of parliament. But I think his impact on that was really probably the main thing. He was also very reluctant, although in the end he did it right in the War Measures Act. He was a minister of justice of the War and its War Measures Act in the 1970s. And I think his idea of justice and this idea of kind of humanity in the law was a very important thing. But he, as Peter says, when he came back, he didn't realise that TV news had gone from covering things on film to covering it on videotape and you can see it almost immediately. And when he reached out to Iona Campagnolo, you know, people saw it all around the country right away. Although in his defence, she made a big deal about it at the time and she was the president of the Liberal Party and she must have known it wasn't going to help him.So I'm not sure really how that should have played out. But anyway, that was that. She wanted to go to the Senate and he wasn't allowed to put her in the Senate during the time, the short time that he was prime minister.

MG: Peter, you hinted at the idea of. Public service. Just briefly, what do you think John Turner's legacy will be in this country?

PETER MANSBRIDGE: Well, his legacy shouldn't be that he blew the opportunity of being prime minister for two months. That during that time, he kind of lost everything and lost the respect of a lot of people. And I think as we've tried to point out and as Don just mentioned in his time as minister of justice, there's a lot of other issues that Turner was a part of that are of help make the country the country it is. In his latter years, it was all about public service and trying to get younger generations to believe in it. You know, they called him the Kennedy, Canada's Kennedy. And in some ways he was, especially in the 60s, as was Trudeau, to a degree. But he had a relationship with Bobby Kennedy. They used to talk and he was involved with Kennedy in that 68 campaign that Bobby Kennedy was running. In fact, he'd just been down to see him in the States and to help him on a speech that he was writing on. But, you know, it was too all about public service. So he's consistent throughout his career on trying to push that idea for especially younger Canadians that, you know, a part of democracy is serving in some fashion, doesn't have to be in politics, could be in any number of different ways, but that you should consider it as part of your obligation to the society in which you live.

MG: Good to have you both here. I appreciate this. Thank you.

PETER MANSBRIDGE: Thanks, Matt. Good to talk to you, Don.

DON NEWMAN: Thanks Matt. And you, Pete.

MG: Two CBC broadcasting legends Don Newman, Peter Mansbridge remembering former Canadian Prime Minister John Turner. He died on Friday at the age of 91.

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UN warns some countries facing first famines of the COVID-19 era

Guests: Mark Lowcock

MG: This is The Current on CBC Radio One. I'm Matt Galloway. Before the COVID-19 pandemic hit people in some of the world's worst conflict zones, places like Syria, South Sudan and Yemen already relied heavily on humanitarian aid for food, shelter and safety. Now, with this pandemic in its seventh month, the U.N. is warning that those conditions are getting even worse and that some countries are now facing the first famines of the COVID era. UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, Mark Lowcock, made a plea at the U.N. Security Council last week asking for wealthier countries to do more and spend more to prevent disaster. Mark Lowcock, good morning.

MARK LOWCOCK: Good morning.

MG: Tell me about the conditions you're seeing in these countries in in Syria and South Sudan and Yemen. What's happening there on the ground?

MARK LOWCOCK: Well, as you said in your introduction, that we started 2020 with, say, highest level of people in need of humanitarian assistance and that kind of countries where starvation is a real threat than we've seen for a very long time. And none of those things have gone away. Those problems are caused by conflict and poverty and poor governance and climate change. The effect of COVID is to amplify very dramatically the impact of those pre-existing problems. So what we're seeing with COVID is, yes, these countries have the virus on a much bigger scale than is being reported in the confirmed cases because there's very little testing. But we know it's everywhere because paradisal forgetting and because we see community transmission. But the bigger effect is the economic contraction, starting with the contracts in the global economy and then down measures and then countries don't like. So we are projecting a doubling compared to what we thought at the beginning of the year, from 135 to 270 million people in acute food insecurity. That means that they are unlikely to survive unless they get help and they are in a much larger number of countries than we're used to dealing with this kind of problem with all at once. In 2017, we had to stave off famines in four countries. A number of countries at risk now is 10, 12, 15, possibly more.

MG: It's hard to imagine a country like Yemen, the situation there getting any worse. I mean, this humanitarian crisis has been unfolding. 100,000 lives lost since 2015. It's difficult. I mean, the way that you're describing it, but it's almost difficult to wrap your head around the fact that things could get worse in a country like that.

MARK LOWCOCK: It is. And Yemen is the worst humanitarian crisis in the world. It has been for several years. And the reason it's so bad is because the war, which has been going on for five years, is totally destroyed the economy and there's still a blockade. There's still a lot of fighting. And 20 million people, which is a very large number of people, obviously are entirely reliant on humanitarian assistance to survive. Now, in 2018 and 2019, we raised a lot of money for our humanitarian response, three billion dollars in 2019. This year we've raised barely a third of what we raised last year. And the reason, the single biggest reason why we've got spikings, starvation and it's really a serious risk now is not just a small famine, but a very large famine is because we've run out of money. So we've been cutting aid to starving people, we've been closing war centres, we've been closing down clinics, which provide lifesaving medical assistance to people.

MG: You made the plea to the U.N. Security Council asking for wealthier countries to do more. Listen to Canada's Minister of International Development, Karina Gould, speaking about her government's approach to international aid right now.

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VOICE: Canada has committed about $500 million to the pandemic response, both for you know emergency food assistance, humanitarian assistance, but also for immediate health response. So we have certainly been very engaged in that. Canada's also very active in the World Bank and the IMF and other regional development banks to encourage them to be more responsive to the needs of developing countries, but also middle income countries who find themselves in a very difficult position right now as well. So in terms of the advocacy, Canada is absolutely at the forefront. And, you know, my message and my view and I believe the prime minister shares this as well, is that in order for us to be safe, in order for us to be healthy, we have to make sure that we're doing our part to fight and defeat COVID everywhere on the planet.

MG: Mark Lowcock, how would you rate Canada and the role the Canada's been playing when it comes to COVID-related aid?

MARK LOWCOCK: Well I work closely with Karina Gould and I think that she set out very well there exactly the rationale for helping, which is that, you know, the problems that are brewing are going to come back to bite everybody. This isn't just helping, isn't just an act of generosity. It's also an act of self-interest, but also the way to help. And Prime Minister Trudeau next week will be chairing a very important big meeting of heads of government around the world to look at how to finance more assistance to these very poorest countries. And one of the interesting things as Karina Gould said there is that compared to the 2008 and 09 crisis, the financial crisis, what's surprising about this time is the world isn't using all the firepower it has, in particular the firepower that's available in the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank and the other banks needs to be put to more effective and ambitious use to protect these countries. And that does not require much additional short term fiscal support from rich countries because they need institutions have got a lot of what they need already. But that does also need to be an increase in humanitarian assistance. You know, today, the world has this shared commitment that every rich country should provide an 0.77% of its national income in foreign assistance. That is a commitment inspired by a Canadian, by Lester Pearson back in 1970. And I think it is important that the Canadian government have said that they want to make faster progress towards that than has been done in the past.

MG: I guess just in the last few seconds that we have, the question is how you make this pitch when countries are in the midst of a global pandemic. The leader of the official opposition in this country, Erin O'Toole, said at the beginning of the pandemic, foreign aid can wait. Right now, the Trudeau government should prioritize Canadians. So how do you get countries to spend more money when they themselves are dealing with economic hardship inside their own borders.

MARK LOWCOCK: Well the rich countries have right to spend 99 per cent of their effort on their own domestic economies, which is what they doing. But they would be not just generous, but smart to spend one per cent on these very poor countries as well, because no one is going to be safe in this world from this virus and from other problems until everybody is safe. So that is, that's the pitch we need to make. It's an argument of moral empathy and generosity, but also self-interest.

MG: That if you want to be protected, everybody needs to be protected?

MARK LOWCOCK: That's the point. The virus respects no borders or no different races or no geography. The virus gets everywhere and no one is safe until everyone's safe.

MG: Mark Lowcock, good to speak with you. I appreciate your time this morning. Thank you.

MARK LOWCOCK: Thank you.

MG: Mark Lowcock is the UN Under-Secretary-General for humanitarian affairs. Coming up after your regional update, the powerful story of a Ghanaian family in Alabama from the renowned author Yaa Gyasi.She has a new novel out. It is fantastic. And she will talk about immigration, about faith, about science, and about another shadow pandemic that many people say is sweeping not just Canada, but many other parts of the world. And that is the opioid crisis. Yaa Gyasi, coming up in 90 seconds. I'm Matt Galloway and this is The Current and CBC Radio One. Stay with us.

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Yaa Gyasi hopes her new book 'champions' the science we need to navigate the pandemic

Guests: Yaa Gyasi

MG: Hi, I'm Matt Galloway. You're listening to The Current. Her best selling debut novel, Homegoing, was a sprawling work of historical fiction, traced the descendants of two sisters from 18th century Ghana to the present day. And it made Yaa Gyasi a rising star in the literary world. Her second book has been eagerly anticipated. That book, Transcendant Kingdom, is finally here and it is extraordinary. It is the story of a Ghanaian family in Alabama wrestling with addiction, depression, grief and faith. Yaa Gyasi joins me now from New York City. Good morning.

YAA GYASI: Good morning.

MG: This novel is set in Huntsville, Alabama, which is one of the places that you grew up in. Tell me a little bit about growing up in in the deep South.

YAA GYASI: Well, it was an interesting experience. My family moved to America when I was two from Ghana and then we lived in Ohio, Illinois, Tennessee and then Alabama, and we moved to Alabama when I was nine. And I think Alabama was the place where we had the fewest gun hands around us. There is only one other family in those early years of living there. So I think it was the first time that I wasn't surrounded by gun a community. I went to a predominantly white church. I attended a predominantly white school, and that was also different from the other places that I had lived. So I think that Alabama was the first place that I kind of gained some awareness of the differences around race and ethnicity and started to feel myself, I think as different from the people around me.

MG: Did you feel welcome in the community?

YAA GYASI: In some places, yes, in other places, no. I found my church to be particularly hostile and surprisingly hostile in some regards, but I did kind of quickly make friends, both at church and at school and within those friendships, I felt welcome. But, you know, I certainly understood that there was something different about my family, that we were being viewed in a different light, whether or not it was made explicit. I was still getting the sense of our difference, our isolation.

MG: The church plays a really important role. Gifty, the protagonist, grows up in this family that is surrounded by the church. And it's a Pentecostal church, which is is the church that you grew up in as well. Tell me a bit more about what the church meant to you.

YAA GYASI: Well, I was really active in the church as a child. My family had always attended, even in those early years in Columbus, Ohio. We were members of the African Christian Church there, which starts almost like a kind of soft landing from immigrating from Ghana. There is the church with half and half Nigerian. And we spent much of our time there at the time. I got to our church and Huntsville again. There were fewer and fewer Ghanians. There were no other black people at the church when we first attended. And then subsequently, there is one family. But I found the church to be a place that that I really kind of I don't know. I think I found myself in the church in some sense. I was incredibly faithful. I was incredibly pious. I had a deep and abiding belief in God. And yet the politics of my church, I think, started to wear on me. And I started to kind of pull away from some of the other beliefs that were being displayed there.

MG: There's a scene in the novel when giftee saved, when she she stands up after much encouragement and she wonders when she's going to do this and stands up and goes to the front of the church. Do you remember that moment in your life?

YAA GYASI: I do. Yeah. And I had a very similar moment to the one that that giftee experiences in the novel there. I was saved quite young. And I remember walking down to the front of the altar. I remember the pastor's hand resting on my head. I remember seeing all of the congregants stretch their hands out and that feeling of warmth and light and acceptance and joy I think I still hold on to. I remember it quite well.

MG: And yet you described earlier on, you described the welcoming in the church in some ways as being hostile. Tell me a bit more about that.

YAA GYASI: Yeah. It's a difficult thing to reconcile because, you know, the feelings that I had about God didn't quite square with the way that I was being treated in the church. I think I often felt like it was a place of alienation for me. I didn't have, especially in those early years before one of my close friends moved to Huntsville and started attending that church. And I was always just very lonely. I would I would bring these books from the library and just kind of sit and read it by myself in the corner. And there is just no there. There didn't seem to be kind of a welcoming spirit for me. And so it was a place where I felt isolated and kind of judged, though I didn't I couldn't put a finger on what where the judgement was coming from at the time. I was so young.

MG: In the novel, Gifty pursues a career in neuroscience and she wrestles with this tension between science and faith and whether there is any shared space at all or whether they are two diametrically opposed kind of forces. What is it that that interests you the most about that tension?

YAA GYASI: Well, I think, you know, Gifty says at some point in the novel that she grew up in a church that was distrustful of science, and that is true of me as well. When I started writing this book, I was thinking about a woman who sees the world through an incredibly kind of intellectual and kind of methodical lens, but who grew up with this value system that feels as though it shouldn't make sense. It shouldn't kind of comply with the with the lens that she has grown to accept. And yet it does. I think both religion and science, at least the science that they giftee practises, are attempting to ask really big transcendent. Questions attempting to kind of reconcile things that seem irreconcilable and and explore the mysteries of the universe. And that's no small thing. And though Gifty has pulled away from the church of her childhood, she still kind of holds on to that desire to uncover these mysteries. And so they felt compatible, narratively compatible.

MG: There's a line in the book which it says at a certain point, science fails. What happens when science fails in the context of that relationship between science and faith?

YAA GYASI: Well, I think when science fails, you have to kind of you just kind of have to relinquish the desire for control, the desire for answers. So we see Gifty who is attempting to uncover answers for these questions that frankly have no answers. She wants to understand her grief. She wants to kind of make sense of all of this senseless things that have happened in her life. And she's hoping that the brain will kind of locate this this grief will locate the answers to these questions. And she says at one point that she realises that the brain can tell her perhaps what or how or where. But it can't tell her why. And I think this is the failure that she's trying to get at. It doesn't satisfy the whys of these questions that she has.

MG: This book appears at a time when people are in the midst of an unprecedented, we overuse that word, but it does feel unprecedented moment. And there is this tension, a real life tension between faith and science during the pandemic. Do you think that people are grappling with this in a different way now, given the stakes that are at play in the world that we're in?

YAA GYASI: Oh, absolutely. I mean, I think here in the States, there has been this kind of long standing tradition of being distrustful of science. We were seeing it with the anti vaccination movement. You're seeing it with, you know, distrust around climate change. And now we are seeing it with that, with the pandemic. A lot of misinformation, a lot of distrust. And I think this book is attempting to grapple with science, rigorous science, slow moving and searching science and science that is attempting to give us answers to big questions. And I hope that after reading it, if there are doubters left to kind of think of science as as, you know, just kind of something that you do in elementary school and then forget about that has no bearing on our on our lives today. But that doubt can be set aside. I hope that it is a book that that champions, again, rigorous, conscientious science as a thing that we all need in order to kind of make sense of this time that we are in. And in order to get answers to these difficult these difficult questions, these difficult problems that we are trying to address right now.

MG: Gify says that the idea of belief can be powerful and it can be intimate and can be transformative. Having grown up in the church, what's your relationship with faith now?

YAA GYASI: I think I, well, I still have a lot of family who are still in the church. And so that feeling that that gift he talks about, there is one that I that I have seen and witnessed firsthand. I know how much faith matters to the people in my life as a way of kind of processing, processing and traumas, as a way of giving them hope, as a way of allowing them to kind of move past difficult circumstances and I respect and honour that as far as how faith works in my life. I'm no longer a believer and yet I can't seem to kind of throw it all away. I still have this kind of, I suppose, interest in in the mysteries of the universe, interest in the idea of God. But I haven't stepped in a church in decades. So I think you know some of it has been lost.

MG: Is there anything that you miss about that? I mean, that's a profound choice in somebody's life.

YAA GYASI: Yes. And there's so much that I miss I miss that feeling that I described of that day when I walked up to the altar. I miss that warmth in that light. I miss that kind of assuredness that there is someone greater than myself looking out for me, you know, kind of guiding my hand, guiding my steps and making sure that things would work out for me. I miss that confidence.

MG: What was it that drove you away?

YAA GYASI: Well, there were a lot of things. But I remember a specific moment when I was probably a freshman in high school. So like 14, when I had gone to this youth service and there was a visiting youth pastor who came and he told us that the night before he had had this vision, two tornadoes coming to destroy the earth and one was homosexuality, and the other was abortion. And at that point, I remember thinking there are so many things that are wrong with this planet, with this country. Those surely those cannot be the two things that are going to destroy the earth. And I just I couldn't stomach it. I remember I went into the office, I called my parents. This was before I had a cell phone, so I had to use the landline in the office. I called my parents and I asked if they could come pick me up and I never went to another youth service again.

MG: You talked about loss and the loss that Gifty experience is. One of the reasons that she turns to neuroscience is that she's trying to understand this issue of addiction, depression as well, but largely the concept of addiction. And this comes after her brother becomes addicted to opioids. He's in a sports injury and it leads him down a path that we've seen play out in Canada and in the United States and around the world, certainly over the last couple of years. Why did you want to write about the opioid crisis?

YAA GYASI: Well, there were several reasons, but I think mostly it was about the fact that around the time that I was writing this novel, I was reading so many really beautifully sensitive and nuanced and complicated and complicating reportage about the opioid crisis. Reportage that that was interested in kind of looking at it as a health care issue as opposed to a criminal issue. You know, articles and essays and documentaries that were following the lives of people who were suffering from opioid use disorder. And and talking about the pharmaceutical industries role and its complicity in it. And I was so moved by all of all of this reporting. But at the same time, I felt like there is a lot of hypocrisy to it because it felt like the shift was occurring just as this epidemic was and was mostly impacting white, rural and suburban people here in the States rather than the longstanding epidemics that mostly affected black people and cities. And so I wanted to write a book that addressed the crisis, but that did so from the standpoint of people who were, in my opinion, getting left behind and the conversation around the opioid epidemic. So Nana is at the centre of this and I wanted to give him as much at that nuanced, careful, humanising attention as I was seeing in the essays around white people who were suffering from opioid use disorder.

MG: And Nana is Gifty's brother, who is a star basketball player who goes through this injury and then becomes addicted to opioids. And in doing the research for this, you sort of hinted at this, but what do you think we don't understand about this crisis?

YAA GYASI: I think there's so much that we don't understand about this crisis. I think that the research that really struck me was that the neuroscience aspect of this, this book and I was lucky enough to have a friend, too, who researches addiction and depression. She researches the neural pathways that reward seeking and kind of just going through it with her and thinking about the fact, you know, we hear it's sad and I don't think it fully resonates always, but that these addictions, they do rewire the brain. And so it's not just a person's inability to stop, to change. It is that there is a brain function that has changed and that makes it really, really impossible just to stop, difficult to stop. Relapse is a part of addiction, and I think we have to kind of change the way that we think about it.

MG: As you mentioned, race plays into this as well. And for Nana. I mean, he's a star basketball player and the people in Huntsville love him when he's a star. When his star begins to dim because of addiction they turn on him in many ways. We're in the midst, in addition to this pandemic, we're in the midst of this reckoning around systemic racism and anti-black racism. What is it like to have a book like this appear in a moment like this.

YAA GYASI: Well, it's you know, an incredibly powerful experience to be able to release a book. I think that is attempting to grapple with just not just, I think, institutionalised racism and the way that kind of forces beyond your control start to direct your path, but also internalised racism where you kind of see the way that that character is kind of take on the messaging, about the about who they are or who they can be. And I think that that is a piece I think that I'm that I'm interested in. And seeing people have conversations around as they read this book and as they grapple with their own relationship to race and racism. And so it's been it's been a challenging time, but also, I think, one that feels for the first time in a while, I think Pam's full of promise, full of the opportunity for real and substantive change to be made.

MG: What's the role of black writers and black storytellers in this moment? One of the things that's happening, it seems, is that people are getting certainly more opportunities, but those narratives that might have been overlooked are now being recognised and being celebrated and being published. What's the role of storytellers like yourself in this moment, do you think?

YAA GYASI: Well, I deeply believe that that books, that literature that any kind of just any kind of writing has the capacity to change people's lives, but I also recognize that that work is slow and often, you know, ineffable, hard to describe, hard to, hard to make, tangible. I think what fiction does is it allows us to kind of think about the lives of these characters, people who are experiencing what Dr. Lauren Michelle Jackson has called the weather, the environment that is racism. So it's not, it's not necessarily this kind of one of those books that is going to tell you what to do, how to kind of change your life and your actions in order to address the ways in which you are implicated in racism. But it's a book that will demonstrate what the lived experience that some of these characters are. And I hope that by seeing that by seeing the lived experiences of those characters who do attempt to kind of be quarraleries to real people that that it will in some way kind of the route itself into the minds of people who are reading. And hopefully the changes can come from there.

MG: Can I ask you about success? Your debut novel comes out and it's a huge success. Homegoing as a book that's read all around the world and people love this book and then they wonder, oh what's she going to do next? What is it like to deal with that kind of success for your first novel?

YAA GYASI: Well, I mean, it's wonderful. It's so much more than than most debut authors get.And I always say you write your first novel in the dark for many years, wondering if it is ever going to see the light of day. So the fact that I'm going saw light and not just any light, but such bright light still astonishes me. But it did, I think, add this added layer of pressure to my life. You know, I was suddenly so much more aware, so keenly aware of the fact that there are people who who want to read the things that I write. And so I felt this kind of this newfound responsibility to write the kind of stories that I could be proud of having my name on. And that that pressure, I think, kind of crept into my thinking, my writing life in a way that it had never before. And so it took me it took me a while, I think, to find my ground, to find my footing with this novel. It took me several false starts to dig into it. But I think once I did, I was able to quiet all of that noise, both good and bad noise around Homegoing's publication and just devote myself to to writing this work. That was completely different and that felt new and fresh and free. And that was a great joy.

MG: There's a lot that's in this novel and one of the things that really stands out is the relationship between Gifty and her mother. And the way that you portray that relationship is is incredibly sensitive. It's very delicate. There's some edge to it as well, just as there would be in any family dynamic. Tell me a little bit more about that and about about crafting that relationship.

YAA GYASI: Sure. And, well, I love reading novels that centre around mother daughter relationships. I find them really fascinating. And these relationships, to be known, is just ripe for exploration. There's a book that came out not that long ago called My name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout that I thought did so beautifully. And so I was hoping to kind of enter into that conversation with this novel. And in it, Gifty and her mother have an incredibly difficult relationship. They are two people who see the world as differently as two people can see the world. And yet they are so similar in ways that they they can't admit to themselves. And so, you know, Gifty's mother, who for most of Gifty's childhood was working really long hours, was not really there for her in the ways that Gifty needed her to be and finds herself in this position suffering from depression and in need of Gifty's care. And so we think that the element that I was really trying to get at is that at some point, you know, if we are all lucky enough to have our parents live to old age. We will have to take care of them. And so what does that that role reversal look like when you find yourself mothering your mother? And so that's that's the point where we meet Gifty. She's mothering her mother and it's hard work, but it is really loving and deeply, deeply intimate work.

MG: The expectation from readers, perhaps, is that given the moment that we're in, the writers that we love, will write about that moment. And it might be immediate, it might be down the line. Can you imagine yourself writing about the time that we're in right now? Or is it something I mean a bit like, you know, reading pandemic and plague books that you would want to flee from and not occupy yourself with at all right now?

YAA GYASI: Yeah, I can see myself writing about this moment at some point in the future, but I can't imagine doing it right now or right away. It feels too close and also I think as we are still within it, I feel like there, I haven't really fully processed it as no one has, I'm sure. And so I think it will take many years for me to understand what this moment has meant to me in a way that allows me to write about it.

MG: We'll wait for that. In the meantime, this is a wonderful novel and it's a real pleasure to speak with you. Thank you again.

YAA GYASI: Thank you.

MG: Yaa Gyasi is the author of Homegoing. Her latest book is called Transcendent Kingdom. That is it for The Current for today. Stay tuned to CBC Radio One for Q.. Tom Power will be speaking with Jude Law, big movie star, about a new film called The Nest, which screened at the Toronto International Film Festival. If you missed any of our program, you can get caught up through the CBC Listen app. It's free. Find it wherever you find your apps. If you were watching television last night, a huge night for Canadian comedy, the CBC sitcom Schitt's Creek swept all seven major comedy categories at the Emmys, the first in the ceremony's 72 year history. Hard to believe there was a time when your public broadcaster was trying to figure out how to say the name of that show on the radio. And those of us who grew up watching SC TV were particularly delighted. It was a glorious night. Here's the father and son team of Dan and Eugene Levy, creative forces behind the show, along with co-owners Catherine O'Hara and Annie Murphy and their acceptance speeches. I'm Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening to The Current. Talk to you tomorrow.

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[Clip of the acceptance speeches from the cast of Schitt's Creek]

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Sept. 21, 2020 episode transcript

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