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The Current Transcript for November 23, 2020

Host: Matt Galloway

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

[Music: theme]

SOUNDCLIP

BARACK OBAMA: All good?

MATT GALLOWAY: We ready to roll?

BARACK OBAMA: Can you hear me, Matt?

MATT GALLOWAY: I can.

BARACK OBAMA: It's nice to see you.

MATT GALLOWAY: It's great to see.

BARACK OBAMA: Where are you? Are you in Vancouver? Toronto? Montreal.

MATT GALLOWAY: Home of the NBA champion, Toronto Raptors.

BARACK OBAMA: Fair enough. Fair enough. It's been a while since the Bulls could say that.

MATT GALLOWAY: When Barack Obama ran for and then became president of the United States, the expectations on him were sky high. As the first black holder of that office, someone who ran on a promise of hope and change, he became for many as much a symbol as a leader. In his only Canadian interview following the release of his memoir, A Promised Land, Barack Obama reflects on the weight of those expectations and what happened when he let people down on why he believes his presidency allowed Donald Trump to create a focal point for the racial anxiety stirred up by his time in office and on the current situation in the United States with a man who replaced him refusing to concede an election he lost three weeks ago. Former U.S. President Barack Obama, coming up, right now. Good morning. I'm Matt Galloway. This is The Current.

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Barack Obama reflects on 'outsized' expectations of his presidency, and convincing Michelle he should run

Guests: Barack Obama

MATT GALLOWAY: The book is A Promised Land, and the author? Well, you might have heard of him.

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BARACK OBAMA: My parents shared not only an improbable love, they shared an abiding faith in the possibilities of this nation. They would give me an African name, Barack or Blessed, believing that in a tolerant America, your name is no barrier to success.

MG: In his only Canadian interview, President Barack Obama told me about his time in the White House, the curse of high expectations and what being the first black president meant to him and others. This morning, you'll hear what the former president thinks about his own successes and failures, but also what he makes of the moment we find ourselves in today. These past weeks have been starkly different than four years ago when then President-elect Donald Trump came to the Oval Office.

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BARACK OBAMA: Well, I just had the opportunity to have an excellent conversation with President-elect Trump. It was wide ranging. We talked about some of the organizational issues in setting up the White House. We talked about foreign policy. We talked about domestic policy. And as I said last night, my number one priority in the coming two months is to try to facilitate a transition that ensures our president-elect is successful.

MG: Of course, Donald Trump still hasn't conceded the election to Joe Biden. There has yet to be any sort of transition, rather, the Trump administration continues to undermine the results. We began our conversation with Barack Obama's understanding of this past election in his divided country.

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MG: President Barack Obama, hello.

BARACK OBAMA: Hi, how are you?

MG: It's a real pleasure to have you here. Your book begins with your last day as president. You're literally on the plane flying out of that job. And I wonder, as you watch the current president of the United States refuse to concede, how do you understand the fact that more than 71 million Americans have voted for another four years of Donald Trump?

BARACK OBAMA: Well, look, this is a divided country and it's not unique to America. I think we've seen this kind of right wing populism resurgent in Europe. You see nationalist or, you know, tribal impulses assert themselves in a lot of countries. There are a lot of factors that contribute to that. You know, part of it is responses to globalisation, responses to technology. I've talked a lot about the degree to which the splintering of the media has created, I think, an ecosystem of conservative media that is very hard to penetrate. And so if you are consuming that news, if that's your source of what's happening in the outside world, then you would think that Donald Trump has not only done great work as president, but you would think that he's justified in taking the positions he's taking. So there are a lot of factors involved. It's important, I think, to remember that. Eighty million people rejected an incumbent president, and that's not something that typically happens, it's only happened a handful of times, modern in modern times in the United States. And so how we bridge that gap between those who I think strongly opposed this president and those who still support him is going to be a big challenge for my good friend Joe Biden and Kamala Harris when they come into office.

MG: How important is it, do you think, for Democrats to try to understand why people voted for Donald Trump?

BARACK OBAMA: I always think it's important because it's hard to get big stuff done if the country is this polarised and there are features of the American system that are different than a typical parliamentary system, you can't just, you know, move your platform forward if you've got the majority there. All kinds of ways in which a determined opposition can block everything, not just some things. So so I think Joe is going to have to try to arrive at areas of potential compromise. But I think the issues that are taking place now and I write about these in the book, go deeper than just one election or electoral politics. You've seen growing divisions, some of which are deeply rooted in questions of race and gender and, you know, date back to the founding of this country, some of which are a result of a changing economy in which, for example, metropolitan areas have seen very different rates of growth than rural areas. And that has created frustrations and resentments that can be harnessed and channelled by populist or faux populists like Donald Trump.

MG: Let's talk about your time in that office. You made clear in the book that Michelle was not all that interested in you running for president of the United States.

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VOICE: Every time he would run for something.

MG: She wasn't really that interested in you even running for state senator.

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VOICE: That question that would come. Could he? Should he? Would he.

MG: And said that she couldn't guarantee that you were going to get her vote.

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VOICE: I never wanted to be involved in politics. I had seen politics. I grew up in Chicago, rough and tumble politics. And I knew that Barack was a decent man. You know smart, smart as all get out. But politics was ugly and nasty, and I didn't know that my husband's temperament would mesh with that and I didn't want to see him in that environment.

MG: She asks you, why do you need to be president? What's the answer that you give her?

BARACK OBAMA: In the book, you know, I set the scene. We had gone through the process of evaluation. We had determined that I could win. We had determined that, you know, the family could probably survive it, even if it wasn't Michelle's preference.

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VOICE: The choice for him not to do it would help me and my girls and that felt selfish and small.

BARACK OBAMA: But remaining question was, why are you, Barack, instead of a bunch of other Democrats like Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden, who were also running at that time? And I indicated that there was some sense that at that moment in 2008, the Democratic Party needed the capacity to excite young people, to excite non-traditional voters, and that maybe I spoke a language that some of these other candidates didn't speak.

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VOICE: And I thought, well, what person do I know who has the gifts that this man has? The gifts of decency, first and foremost of empathy, second of high intellectual ability. This man reads and remembers everything, you know, is articulate, had worked in the community. So I had to take off my wife hat and put on my citizen hat and say, how can I stand in the way if I know that this man could do good?

BARACK OBAMA: What I also said was, look, if I win, on the day I take office, then children across America, black and brown kids, kids who don't feel like they're on the inside, they'll think of themselves differently. And as I write, you know, Michelle said it's a good answer. And I I do believe that there was some truth to that, that it's interesting. Now, I'll meet 18 year olds or 20 year olds, not just black, but white or Hispanic or Asian, who tell me, you know, we took for granted that. A black man could be president, the United States, because you were the only president we knew when we were growing up, and that meant that we as Hispanic or black or Asian, felt that that door was open to us, too. And there's real value in that. I also write, though, towards the end of the book about the fact that that symbolism doesn't replace the need for concrete policies, some of which I got done, some of which I fell short in giving every child a good education, alleviating poverty, you know, making sure that they've got decent housing. So I don't want to overstate the symbolic value. I think when you're dealing with issues like, you know, the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow and systemic inequality, symbolism only takes you so far.

MG: When you move into the to the White House, right at the very beginning, one of the butlers who is an older black gentleman says to you, you don't understand what this means to us. As the first black president, a mixed race man in that office, what do you think was expected of you by the black community?

BARACK OBAMA: You know, it was interesting. That scene was representative of the incredible kindness and generosity of the White House staff and as I describe it, what was interesting was that the White House had maintained a tradition that was common in Washington, D.C., back in the 50s, the 40s, the 30s, where the service crews, the staff, the butlers, the waiters were mostly African-American and. You know, that Butler who you spoke of had had started with Richard Nixon. So, you know, he had long memories and and as I described in many ways, was just like one of Michelle's uncles generationally in terms of their experience, their understanding, I think the African-American community was very generous to me in recognizing that. As a first in a tough situation, we were under a different set of pressures, Michelle and I and our girls, that we were going to be scrutinised differently. And as a consequence, I think they were very protective of us. Now, there were exceptions of folks who would challenge my policies and say, what have you done specifically for the African-American community? Or would get frustrated with my insistence that using universal language or pursuing universal programmes rather than targeted programmes, oftentimes, as a practical matter, allowed me to build broader coalitions and get more stuff done, including delivering more for the African-American community. And, you know, that's a debate that I think all of us in the United States and probably around the world are constantly wrestling with, you know, to what extent do you. Aspire to trying to build multiracial coalitions, which means that you then have to compromise and and accommodate interests that are not just unique to the African-American community or the black community or mixed race communities in other parts of the world. And to what extent is it important for you to be a champion specifically for a group that has suffered from historic discrimination? And that's a balance that most of the time I felt I got right, but I'm sure there were times where folks were frustrated that I wasn't championing specific issues as focused away as they would have liked.

MG: I mean, I think that's one of the really interesting themes that runs through the book is, is how you wrestle with expectation. You meet Vaclav Havel, the former Czech president, and he says that you have been coerced with people's high expectations. And you talk about those expectations. You talk about, you know, being heckled, for example.

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[Sounds from demonstrations]

VOICE: Can I just say this, alright. I listened to you, I heard you, I heard you, I heard you. All right. Now I've been respectful. I let you holler.

MG: What do you say to people who invested certain things in you because of those expectations and they felt as though you'd let them down in that position?

BARACK OBAMA: Part of the reason I wrote the book and probably why I go into more detail on some issues than the average reader might prefer is to try to give people a sense of the choices I was confronting as I'm trying to get various things done. So I use the example of the big health care fight to get the Affordable Care Act passed in America, as you know, is as unique amongst advanced Western democracies in not providing universal health care. And as I describe my preference and the preference of a lot of progressives and folks on the left here in the United States, if I were starting from scratch, would be to set up a single payer plan of some sort. It's more efficient. It's easy to administer and understand Medicare, our version for older Americans is essentially a single payer plan, but it's only for people over 65. And the problem is that wasn't possible. We have a legacy of private insurance in this country. And to try to unwind, one sixth of America's economy would have met too much political resistance, even within my own party. And so we come up with this new system. And to this day, there are Democrats who are disappointed that we didn't get everybody covered. We got 20 million people covered. We didn't completely eliminate the private insurance system, but we tried to make it work as best we could and fill some of those gaps. And what I try to do is describe why that is the right choice to have made because it turns out in any political system, you are rarely going to get 100 percent of what you want. You get 30, 50, if you're lucky, 70 percent of what you want, you leave something on the table and then you go to fight another day in the future, and I think that the danger for someone like me who was elected with outsized expectations and a lot of symbolism is that sometimes your supporters feel as if you're going to wave a wand and it's all going to get done.

MG: And that's not possible?

BARACK OBAMA: And it's not possible.

MG: There's a really powerful passage in the book you write, it was as if my very presence in the White House had triggered a deep seated anxiety. The natural order had been disrupted for millions of Americans, spooked by a black man in the White House. Trump promised an elixir for their racial anxiety. Donald Trump was one of the leaders of the birther movement painting you as a foreigner in the office of the president.

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VOICE 1: I want him to show his birth certificate, I want him to show his birth certificate.

VOICE 2: Why?

VOICE 1: There's something on that birth certificate that he doesn't want.

MG: Do you think Donald Trump is a racist?

BARACK OBAMA: I think that Donald Trump I don't know what's in his mind and what's in his heart. What I can say is that his rhetoric. Has oftentimes tapped into. Themes that have been used in this country for years in order to block. Of the full participation of African-Americans in our country's lives, you know, he is more than happy to fan racist sentiments and that from a leader, much from anyone who has a public platform, much less the president of the United States, is a problem. This is the kind of rhetoric that whether he believes it or not or he just thinks it's expedient to get him more attention and more power unleashes, you know, some dark forces and now is turbocharged in the Internet and we've seen an increase in those kinds of attitudes that have rendered them more acceptable.

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VOICE: You had a group on one side that was bad and you had a group on the other side that was also very violent. And nobody wants to say that. There was a group on this side, you can call them the left, you've just called them the left, that came violently attacking the other group.

BARACK OBAMA: I am happy that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are going to come in, I think, and set a different tone. But what is absolutely clear is that we have seen what used to be or had had been relegated to the fringes of Republican Party rhetoric, now moved front and centre, this fear of the other, this suggestion that somehow there's real Americans and then there are people who I guess are fake Americans and somehow the fake Americans tend to look like me.

MG: Former president of the United States Barack Obama. His memoir is titled A Promised Land. The CBC News is next. And then when we return, we'll pick up our conversation about racial tensions and the influence that Donald Trump has had on politics. Plus, we'll get into the relationship between our two countries and more of his personal reflections about his time in office and the thrill of getting basically whatever musician you want to come and play at your home when your home happens to be the White House. I'm Matt Galloway, you're listening to The Current. Stay with us to hear more of our conversation with Barack Obama. Our exclusive Canadian interview continues in six minutes.

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Obama calls Trump era an 'anomaly' in Canada-U.S. relations

Guests: Barack Obama

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

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BARACK OBAMA: The danger for someone like me who was elected with outsized expectations and a lot of symbolism. Is that sometimes your supporters feel as if you're going to wave a wand and it's all going to get done, and that's not possible and it's not possible.

MG: Barack Obama carried the weight of those expectations throughout his presidency. He feels he met some and failed others. We're back with more from the 44th president of the United States.

.[Music: theme]

MG: President Barack Obama's new memoir, A Promised Land, has already sold more than a million copies. It is the first of what will be two books chronicling his time in the White House. We were speaking before the news about racial anxieties in the United States and the expectations placed on him as the first black president. In this next part of our conversation, we speak about Canada's relationship with the U.S. after the Trump administration and how to mend damaged ties. We hear what it's like to have a Beatle sing a love song to your wife and why it's important to tackle hard things. But we start off by hearing how Barack Obama understands Donald Trump's rhetoric and the fear it fosters.

[Music]

BARACK OBAMA: I am happy that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are going to come in, I think, and set a different tone, but what is absolutely clear is that we have seen what used to be or had had been relegated to the fringes of Republican Party rhetoric, now moved front and centre. This fear of the other, this suggestion that somehow there's real Americans and then there are people who I guess are fake Americans and somehow the fake Americans tend to look like me.

MG: Can you unleash that? If you're him, can you unleash that without being a racist? I mean, I know I just wonder whether it matters whether he's identified, whether he's defined as a racist or whether he's just involved.

BARACK OBAMA: I guess that's my point, Matt. It doesn't really matter. Right? I don't, I'm not interested in his motivations. I'm not interested in what's in his heart. I'm interested in what he does. You know, I remark in the book the fact that in my first two years in office, he was actually quite complimentary of me, right, at a time when he perhaps thought that was expedient. Then he decides, well, maybe taking this approach of being a right wing populist and xenophobe is to my advantage and that the impulses that he taps into those existed well before he decided to run for president. You know, as I described, you know, you have a prototype in Sarah Palin.

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VOICE: I was reading today a copy of The New York Times. And I was really interested to read in there about Barack Obama's friends from Chicago. Turns out one of his earliest supporters is a man who, according to The New York Times, was a domestic terrorist and part of a group.

[Crowd boos]

VOICE: Part of a group that, "launched a campaign of bombings that would target the Pentagon and the US Capitol. Man, these are the same guys who think patriotism is paying higher taxes. Remember, that's what Joe Biden said.

BARACK OBAMA: He was not an originator of this. But as I said, whether he cynically riding that wave to achieve his ends or whether it taps into something he actually believes. Here's what I can't say for certain that he does not consider it his job to fight against racist sentiments. He does not consider it to be one of the goals of any leader, American or Canadian or otherwise, to try to tamp down those kinds of darker impulses. And that, to me, is a failure of any leader who is complicit, whether by commission or omission, in the kind of thought processes and actions that lead to racist behaviour discrimination or worse, then they're not doing their job.

MG: You're bruised by this, but as you write about in the book, I mean, Michelle is really affected by some of the stuff that comes out. Why do you think that was?

BARACK OBAMA: Well, Michelle and I temperamentally are different. You know, she is somebody who maybe is naturally inclined to be a little less optimistic about human nature. Our experiences are different. She grew up on the south side of Chicago. I grew up in Hawaii. Hawaii is not a perfect place, but it does temper your cynicism when it's 80 degrees outside and there's a beach five minutes away and you're growing up in a multicultural society that, you know, has its own tensions, but they're very different than the kind that you experienced in Chicago in the 60s and 70s. But, you know, I I think that Michelle and I are in some ways sort of the yin and yang of the African-American experience generally, which historically has been, you know, you go back and forth feeling as if, you know what, there's real progress that's being made and we can get to the promised land and there are times where things look bleak and it looks as if the country is backtracking. And Michelle may articulate certain doubts or frustration or anger or hurt more than I might, but on any given day, I obviously there are times where I'm feeling exactly like she is and and there are times where she's the one who has to pump me up and get me encouraged.

MG: Let's talk about this country. You know Canada very well. And the last four years, I think it's fair to say, have seen the relationship between Ottawa and Washington take a real battering. Peter Navarro, the president's trade adviser, said there's a special place in hell for Justin Trudeau. Why, after the last four years with trade wars, with tariffs being put on aluminium and pointy comments like that, why should Canadians trust the United States?

BARACK OBAMA: Well, look, Canada doesn't really have a choice, just like the United States doesn't have a choice. We share this massive border. We're our biggest each other's biggest trading partners and we have to get along in order to in order for our economies to function. Not to mention the fact that the people to people relations between our two countries are as close as any two countries on Earth. You know, I joke about this because I've had a brother in law who is Canadian. I've got you know, I've got all these friends who I discover 10 years later that they were Canadian all along. Nobody told me.

MG: We're everywhere.

BARACK OBAMA: You guys are sneaking around, hidden amongst us. And so we share so much culturally in terms of our values, in terms of our commerce that we have to get along. And I would say that what we've seen over the last few years is anomalous. When I came into office, Stephen Harper was the Canadian prime minister and Stephen and I had not much in common in terms of our political orientation, our political views and yet we had a very cordial and cooperative relationship. There were big differences, there were times where we had tensions, but overall, there was a recognition that we, our countries are linked and bonded and that we share some basic assumptions about the world. You know, conversely, Justin Trudeau politically is much more aligned with me on most matters.

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VOICE 1: This house gets to see a bromance up close. Thanks for making that possible. Although I still think dudeplomacy is more accurate, but I'll get over it.

VOICE 2: Thank you for this extraordinary welcome, which tempts me to just shut up and leave because it can't get any better than this. So Canada was the very first country that I visited as president. It was in February. There was colder, I was younger. Michelle now refers to my hair as the Great White North. Our only battles take place inside the hockey rink. Even there, there's an uneasy peace that is maintained. Our relationship is so remarkable precisely because it seems so unremarkable, which is why Americans often are surprised when our favourite American actor or singer turns out to be Canadian.

BARACK OBAMA: Yeah, we had our share of tensions around, you know, timber and, you know, tariff issues, but those are the natural frictions that are going to exist amongst any allies, I'm not, I'll be honest with you, on my scale of worries, in the aftermath of the Trump administration, the relationship between the United States and Canada is not at the top of the list. I think that is one that actually can be mended relatively quickly. I think we've got some bigger problems in terms of managing America's role internationally because we ceded a lot of that leadership most recently on how we deal with the pandemic and recovering our credibility around basic things like science and our role in public health around the world. That's going to be a tough one to to dig ourselves out of a hole on.

MG: Just in the last five or six minutes that we have, I wanted to ask you two things. One is on your desk in the Oval Office, you had a plaque and the plaque said hard things are hard. I saw a photo of that years ago and my kids would tell me that I have said that phrase to them far too often. When there's a maths test, when something is up, I say, but hard things are hard. Stop with the hard things are hard thing. What did that phrase mean to you as the president?

BARACK OBAMA: Well, it started as a joke. David Axelrod, one of my top political advisers, we were sitting in the Oval Office, I think it was during the health care fight, but it was on one major issue and Axelrod, we were going around the room and Axelrod wanted to make a point about the political perils of a particular thing that we're trying to do, and he said, you know, hard things, Mr. President, are hard. And I laughed. I said, well, that's a brilliant insight. For my birthday he then gave me that plaque, but it actually turned out to be a useful one to remind yourself, you have to have that mindset as president and probably for a lot of other stuff, which is sometimes stuff, you just have to put elbow grease to it and sometimes you have to recognise that the problems you are addressing are tough. There are not perfect solutions. As I write in in the book, if if a problem is easy, somebody else has solved it. The only problems that landed on my desk as president were problems that nobody else could solve and there are a lot of smart people out there in the federal government. So if it got to my desk, it meant that one way or another there was going to be issues, problems, and you were dealing with probabilities. What you might try might not work, you might fail, but what that plaque reminded me of is, is that you try anyway. You go at it, that's you. You take some maybe perverse pleasure in taking responsibility for doing hard things, understanding that it's not always going to work out exactly the way you want.

MG: Do you think that sentiment has been missing in the last four years?

BARACK OBAMA: I think so, yes.

MG: Yeah. You write that maybe I don't know, aside from the plane, the best perk of being in the White House is being able to invite musicians to come in and perform in your house. And so you have Stevie Wonder and Bob Dylan and Lin-Manuel Miranda and the list goes on and on and on. This book is a lot of things, but in many ways it's a love story between you and Michelle. Tell me about the time that Paul McCartney came in and serenaded Michelle at the White House.

BARACK OBAMA: That was lovely. This was Paul McCartney had been awarded the Gershwin Prize, which each year is given to a renowned composer. And so there was a celebration of McCartney's music, but he was in attendance. And at the end, he then performed several songs. We're sitting on the front row of myself, Michelle, our daughters and my mother in law.

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VOICE: The next thing we like to do is a song I have been itching to do at the White House, and I hope the president will forgive me if I sing this one.

BARACK OBAMA: And he starts singing Michelle.

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[Paul McCartney peforming "Michelle"]

BARACK OBAMA: He's strumming on the guitar and singing this to her and she's blushing a little bit.

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[Performance continued]

BARACK OBAMA: Cause all the attention and eyes are on her, and I, I tried to imagine what her parents would have said when she was born back in 1964. So let's say, you know, she's I don't remember exactly when that song comes out, but it's, she's probably two, three, four years old. And, you know, they're living on the south side and somebody knocked on their door and told them, you know, someday she's going to be the first lady of the United States and one of the Beatles is going to be singing that song to her. You know, they would have called the police.

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[Paul McCartney performing Michelle]

BARACK OBAMA: It was so improbable and I think it was an indication, a lovely indication of where she had travelled and Paul McCartney could not have been more gracious.

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[Performance continued]

VOICE: I could be the first guy ever to be punched out by a president.

BARACK OBAMA: He's since that time become a friend and usually when we get together, he likes performing. He's a natural entertainer.

MG: It's not many people who can say usually when we get together about Paul McCartney. Is there anything about the job you miss?

BARACK OBAMA: I miss the camaraderie. I think I've said that there are rare instances outside of wartime where you are with a collection of people where the stakes are so high and the stresses that great and you forge a bond and that feeling of a team and everybody rowing in the same direction to get hard things done is invaluable. And I paint a lot of portraits of members of my staff who became great friends and who who took courageous steps to help the American people. And and there are times where I do miss the the just the mental. Exercise of figuring out hard policy problems, I joked, somebody asked once, would you have liked to have served a third term if you could have? And I say, you know, I wouldn't have, I wouldn't have wanted to be out front, but if somebody had said, you can sit in your basement in your sweats and there's somebody else who's playing the president with a microphone in his or her ear, and you can just kind of give suggestions and policy then I might have enjoyed doing that, the pomp of the presidency I don't miss. And I do think that there's a benefit of term limits in getting fresh legs in there and because the job is enormously tough. But having a chance to just look at big problems and saying, all right, how do we solve this? How do we apply logic and reason and compassion and imagination to big issues like climate change or inequality? I enjoyed being part of that process.

MG: This is only part of the story. The second volume still to come and I hope we have the chance to talk again when volume two comes out. In the meantime, it's been a real pleasure, President. Thank you.

BARACK OBAMA: Thank you so much.

MG: President Barack Obama's new memoir is A Promised Land. During that performance that Paul McCartney gave at the White House, many other artists joined into the celebration. Jack White, Herbie Hancock, Emmylou Harris, to name a few, all sang versions of Paul McCartney songs. And from that night, here's Stevie Wonder and "We Can Work It Out."

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["We Can Work It Out" performed by Stevie Wonder]

MG: Stevie Wonder there performing at the White House. If you missed any part of our interview with President Barack Obama, you can find it on the CBC Listen app or on our website at cbc.ca/thecurrent. Coming up after your regional update, we return to Portapique. An investigation by the CBC's Fifth Estate has revealed new details of what happened in Nova Scotia seven months ago. In a moment, Gillian Findlay will be here to share what she's learned about that terrible night. I'm Matt Galloway. You're listening to The Current. We're back in 90 seconds. Stay with us.

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The Fifth Estate’s investigation reveals new flaws in the RCMP’s handling of the Portapique case

Guests: Gillian Findlay, Nick Beaton

MG: Hello, I'm Matt Galloway. You're listening to The Current. In April, this country mourned the victims of a deadly rampage in Nova Scotia.

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VOICE 1: To everyone who lost a loved one, Canada is mourning with you. To the communities that are grieving. We are here for you. You are not alone.

VOICE 2: And even though we can't pretend to understand the pain you're in, we are here to try to find a way to help shoulder some of the burden of this grief.

VOICE 3: To my dear Nova Scotia, we are there with you in the deepest of ways. I want to play you a tune for you that I chose because of a beautiful performance I saw a couple of days ago played by one of the victims, Emily Tuck. She was a fiddler. So I thought I would unite myself to her performance and play this tune for all the souls that lost their lives.

[Playing fiddle]

MG: It has been seven months since 22 people were killed in that mass shooting, the deadliest in Canada's history. It started in the small village of Portapique, and the shooter was wearing a police uniform driving a replica of a police car. His rampage went on for more than 13 hours until the RCMP shot and killed him. The general public was, for the most part, kept in the dark. An investigation by the CBC's The Fifth Estate reveals new details of that night and what law enforcement knew. Thirteen Deadly Hours is being presented tonight on the Fifth Estate. Gillian Findlay is a host on that programme. Gillian, good morning.

GILLIAN FINDLAY: Hi. Good morning, Matt.

MG: Let's go back to the night of Saturday, the 18th of April. The RCMP says that they arrived in Portapique around 10:30. What do we know about what they knew at that time?

GILLIAN FINDLAY: You know that it is remarkable seven months later how little we still know about any of that. The police won't even answer the most basic questions. How many officers were deployed that night? What did they do exactly when they got there? When did reinforcements arrive? None of that has been put on the public record by the RCMP. In fact, the very few details we have learnt have come from media organizations like the CBC taking the RCMP to court to actually force disclosures. So it's been very difficult to piece this together. But the one thing I think is on the record is that time as the night of the 18th wore into the morning of the 19th, the Sunday, we do know that the police came to understand that the shooter they were looking for was, in fact, impersonating one of them, as you say, posing as an RCMP officer and driving a mocked up replica RCMP cruiser.

MG: In your investigation, you raised questions about when the RCMP learned that information. What can you tell us?

GILLIAN FINDLAY: Well, from the beginning, the RCMP said that they didn't learn that until early Sunday morning. And they said that they learnt that when the shooter's partner emerged from hiding. You might recall this whole incident seems to have started with the shooter, Gabriel Wortman, assaulting his partner. Earlier in the evening. She managed to escape, hid and then emerged around six o'clock Sunday morning to say she'd been hiding in the woods all night. The RCMP have said there was only that when that when she emerged that they discovered significant details from her a the confirmation of who the shooter was that they were likely looking for. That would be Gabriel Ortman and B, that he was indeed in possession of a fully marked replica cruiser.

MG: So they describe it and it clearly was very critical information that, as I say, that they claim they didn't know till daybreak on Sunday. What we discovered in our investigation is, in fact, eight hours before that, on Saturday night, the RCMP interviewed a witness on the scene who essentially told them the same information.

GILLIAN FINDLAY: Who was the witness?

MG: Well, it's interesting. He's never been identified publicly. And but I can tell you, he was a resident of Portapique who saw the fires that night and went out to see what was going on. It was when he did that he encountered a man that he recognized as his neighbour, Gabriel Wartman. He was shot and injured by him and it was as he was speeding away from the danger that he ran into what appears to be the very first RCMP officer arriving on the scene. Now, this man, this witness wouldn't do an interview with us, but he did speak to a private investigator. And in an audiotape that we obtained of that conversation, he makes it clear what he told that RCMP officer at 10:26 Saturday night, including identifying Gabriel Wartman as the shooter.

MG: We have a little excerpt of that witness. Let's have a listen.

SOUNDCLIP

[Clip of conversation between witness and investigator]

GILLIAN FINDLAY: So that's a little bit hard to make out, but in case you missed it, what he said was he identified the shooter as his neighbour. He called him Gabe, Gabe Watson. And he was said that he was driving what he described as a fully marked replica police car and that what he told the officer, the officer radioed in that that in right away. So the important part of all of this, Matt, is that he's very specific. He says this took place at 10:26 Saturday night.

MG: And so police get this information, what did they do with it then?

GILLIAN FINDLAY: Well, that that's obviously the very important question and one that the RCMP still refuses to answer. It seems they must have taken him seriously because we have seen internal police bulletins that are circulated to police forces throughout Nova Scotia that night. And just after 1:00 o'clock Sunday morning so early, the RCMP did identify Wartman as a possible suspect. And they also said that he was associated with an old white police car. That bulletin was later updated. The information became, in fact, it was a fully marked police car and crucially, they said they didn't know where he was at that point. He could be anywhere in the province is what they told other police officers. That's not what they were telling the public.

MG: What was the RCMP telling the public about what was going on that night?

GILLIAN FINDLAY: The first time the RCMP alerted the public to anything was at 11:32. They sent out a tweet, and this has been a source of much criticism, as I'm sure you remember. But that tweet simply said that they were investigating a firearms complaint in Portapique and warning people in that area to stay inside. It wasn't until eight o'clock Sunday morning that they tweeted again. And then at that point, they simply said their investigation was ongoing. The danger was still confined to Portapique. So when they finally did share the information that the witness that we just heard says he told them at 10:26 Saturday night, that was at 10:17 Sunday morning. So almost a full 12 hours later. And by now, by this point, we know that 19 Nova Scotians were dead. So there's no explanation that we've been able to get for that delay. As you can imagine, knowing this morning, this has not gone down well with the victims families, some of whom are convinced that if the RCMP had shared that information earlier, that their loved ones might still be alive.

MG: You spoke with some of the families who lost loved ones in that period overnight into the morning. Let's take a listen to some of what they told you.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: Would have been after mom was killed, that he posted that he was in Glenholm the home area. It was after she was killed that they posted he was in an RCMP car. It was after. It was all after. I think it would have made a difference for my mother. I think it would have made a difference for Lillian Hyslop and Kristen Beaton, Joey Weber, Gina Goulet. They failed to give the public the information they needed to Stacey. They failed at that.

VOICE 2: I've gone over and over and over again. They didn't release that he was dressed as an officer or a marked cruiser. If the RCMP had armed us with the information of who he was and what they knew by 11 o'clock Saturday night, she wouldn't have even been on the road. She wouldn't have been, she wouldn't left the house. You know, me and many other blue nosers and Nova Scotians were sitting on the front deck with their firearms, protecting their family, and she'd have been behind me. She'd have been safe.

MG: That's from the Fifth Estate's documentary. Darcy Dobson, whose mother, Heather O'Brien, was killed, and Nick Beaton, whose wife, Kristen, was killed. Nick Beaton joins me now. Nick, good morning.

NICK BEATON: How's it going?

MG: How are you doing?

NICK BEATON: Getting by.

MG: How when you listen to this and we heard just a little bit of this, you say that you go over and over and over this moment. I'm sure that you've thought about that morning thousands of times over the last seven months. Your wife was was on her way.

NICK BEATON: I haven't stopped.

MG: Haven't stopped. I mean, she was on her way to see a patient. She was a nurse and she was going to do the work that she that she loved to do to help other people out. Did you have any idea that there was danger out there?

NICK BEATON: I can tell you, without a shadow of a doubt, if I thought that this was even remotely possible that my wife would have been home. She'd have been safe with me where I could have protected her.

MG: You texted her about what was happening as this started to unfold. What did you say in that text?

NICK BEATON: We were texting and talking, trying to figure out what was going on, and right after they released, I won't say his name, the wart, they released the wart and we talked back and forth and they talked on the phone. And I told her I learnt from residents down in Portapique that he quite possibly could have been an old cop car that he was driving. So I told her, I said, if you seen one, like avoid it, stay away from it, do whatever. Like don't know where he is. They might have him. They've been too quiet for him to be on the loose. Like they've said nothing. But I said just to be extra safe, you know, take every preventative measure, don't pull over for anyone. You know, don't stop, you know. Never in God's green earth did I think to tell her not to sit if a cop pulls in, you know. And if, I'm adamant that if they had a released that he was dressed as an officer and in a cruiser, you're dealing with a whole different kind of sick there. There's no way she would have been on the road. I would have made her stay at her clients or I would have went and got her.

MG: And to your point, I mean, you didn't tell her that because you didn't know.

NICK BEATON: Never dreamt.

MG: After you found out that the RCMP had this information that apparently they weren't sharing with the public, I mean, what was going through your mind then, once you learnt that they'd had some information?

NICK BEATON: I'm still pissed off, extremely pissed off. Like my wife and unborn baby's blood is on the hands of the ones that held that information. They are almost as responsible as that piece of garbage. They had the information to protect a whole community, Nova Scotia. This could have went. If Heidi, if Heidi hadn't slowed him down, the hero that she is, you know, Christ knows how far he would have went with that. If het got down in the city like. This is disgusting.

MG: What are the questions that you still have about what happened that weekend?

NICK BEATON: We don't have enough time on this radio show to talk about that. It's like, why didn't you tell us? You knew before 11 o'clock Saturday night, why didn't you tell us? You know, like everyone getting up Sunday morning, you know, going for coffee, going for a drive, going to see somebody, no one would have did any of that. You know, they're right quick to warn us about COVID and stay indoors and avoid this area and this and that. But even so, they tweeted. Like again, I was, I'm on record everywhere saying who uses Twitter? You know, celebrities. There's not many celebrities around, you know, our parts of Nova Scotia.

MG: Do you think that they could have done much more to try and get that information out there?

NICK BEATON: Absolutely. Someone robs a liquor store, they got their picture posted everywhere, do you know this person? It's on social media, Facebook, everywhere, you know.

MG: You're part of this class action lawsuit with other families. And there's an inquiry that is happening now into what happened. What do you hope comes out of all of that?

NICK BEATON: The biggest thing that I hope comes out of it is that the RCMP and anyone involved learned where they made the mistakes to prevent this from happening again because I can't begin to tell you the hell that I'm living, day in and day out. And no one should have to do that. No one should have to live like that. And me and and all the other family members, that's the biggest thing we want is, you know, make changes. See what you did wrong, learn from it. But they still haven't, you know, seven months later and there's no changes. You know, I looked the RCMP right in the eye and asked them, if this happened tonight, would you be ready, more ready than you were April 18th and 19th? I guarantee you, the answer is no, because they still haven't learned from it.

MG: What's helping you get through this? I mean, I know you said it's like living hell and it's a day by day sort of thing. What is helping you?

NICK BEATON: My boy. Sorry, our boy. I can tell you one thing, I'm still laughing. You played Justin Trudeau there at the start and he said you are not alone. Well, I can tell you he hasn't been there for us. I reached out to him on multiple occasions. I reached out to him seven times last week and still haven't heard back from him. And same as Bill Blair, same thing. Reached out to all of these guys, it's not to talk about the inquiry, nothing like that and they don't have the time for you. They don't care. They care when it's convenient for them. They got the cameras stuck in their face. Me and the other family members, we had private conversations and we just, we feel alone, 100 percent alone. Other than the support of, like I say, the Blue Nosers and the Nova Scotians, without them, we'd be locked in a closet. Without them we wouldn't have the inquiry. Like we had to fight, we've had to fight since April 19th. I've been backed into a corner with my son behind me, fighting everything by myself and the other family members.

MG: I'm so sorry for what you've been through, and I really, it's hard to talk about this. It was hard in April and it's hard now, but it's important to hear what you're still looking for. Nick, take care of yourself.

NICK BEATON: Thanks.

MG: Thanks. Bye bye. Nick Beaton's, wife, Kristen, was one of the people killed in Nova Scotia that night in April. Gillian Findlay, there are 22 families that are grieving the death of a loved one. And you can hear what Nick is going through and what what he's still looking for. It's heartbreaking when you think of where he is and the answers that he still doesn't have.

GILLIAN FINDLAY: It's heartbreaking. It's frustrating. It's anger making sure that you could hear all of that in Nick's voice. And that's what we heard again and again and again, that from virtually all of the families who have loved ones who died that weekend. And, you know, I can't speak for the RCMP clearly. I can't even explain the position that the RCMP is taking because it seems so obvious that even just speaking to these people and telling them what they can, though, perhaps they can't tell them everything, but some things they must be able to tell them that would help them piece together, you know, their loved ones last moments and understand more clearly what happened that that conversation doesn't appear to have happened, at least not to the satisfaction of these people. So, you know, so so it's you hear the frustration. It's not easy listening. It's not an easy programme that we're putting to air tonight to watch. And I say that as a warning. But all these people spoke, some of them for the first time because they just feel that, you know, the country needs to understand that the process that should be helping them is not. And something's broken here.

MG: Seven months later, as Nick mentioned, there are so many questions about what the RCMP did that weekend, not just how they communicated. He's very critical and we heard this, you know, in April, very critical of their use of Twitter to get the word out, but also how they responded on the ground. The last time the RCMP conducted a press briefing was on the 4th of June. Here is how Superintendent Darren Campbell described what those first officers did.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: As dictated by their training, their objective was to locate and to stop that threat. This is exactly what those RCMP first responders were working towards.

GILLIAN FINDLAY: Yeah, and the RCMP have been very firm on this right from the beginning. You know, they said that those first responders and we still don't know how many there were, as I said earlier, did everything that their training and policy told them they had to do. And first and foremost, that means they had to go out in pursuit of the threat. But, you know, Matt, we heard questions about that too. We spoke with witnesses who were in Portapique that night who say that other than seeing two or three cruisers that remain parked at the entrance to the area, they saw no evidence of a police presence until more than two hours later. And that's when the emergency response team eventually arrives. They're based out of Halifax. So it took a while for them to get there. You know, but that these people say that they did. If, in fact, those first responders were out pursuing the threat, they didn't see any any evidence of that. We also learnt again from sources that early Sunday morning the RCMP made a really fateful assumption, and that assumption was that Gabriel Wartman was likely dead. His property was on fire. At that point. They thought that they had accounted for all of the vehicles that were registered to him and those included three former police vehicles. They thought those had been accounted for and they didn't know, of course, at that point or they didn't put it together, that there was was indeed a fourth excuse me, a fourth unregistered car. But they assumed the danger was over. And in fact, sources tell us some officers were even sent home that morning at about 5:30 or 6:00. Of course, it was only a couple of hours after that that, again, they started getting reports and calls of other shootings in another part of the province entirely. Gabriel Wartman was very much alive and his killing spree at that point was continuing.

MG: The RCMP has insisted that the gunman's impersonation of an officer did not play any role in any of the 22 deaths. And there are other people who strongly disagree with that. What did you find?

GILLIAN FINDLAY: Well, it's hard. I don't know how the RCMP can say that categorically, because how would they know? You know, the victims are dead. How would they know what the last interactions were between those people and somebody that they assumed, by the way he was dressed in the car he was driving was was a legitimate RCMP officer. You know, we do know that on that Sunday morning you heard about Kristen Beaton. We heard about the woman who spoke prior to Nick was Darcy Dobson. It was her mother, Heather O'Brien, another nurse who was killed on that same road. After that, there were three more victims, all of whom would have seen him, somebody in an RCMP cruiser. Now, did they stop because that's what people do when they see an RCMP cruiser? Did they stop in the case of a man named Joey Webber that you heard somebody mention his name? He was when there was the shooting, the shootout with the other legitimate RCMP officers a little bit later, Heidi Stevenson, the constable, was killed and the vehicles were set on fire. Joey Webber saw fire. He saw an RCMP vehicle and stopped to help and he was killed. So, you know, how can anybody say that it played no role? I don't know.

MG: I guess just finally and we heard this from Nick, the families have been fighting to get a public inquiry. How are they feeling about having to fight to get the answers about what happened?

GILLIAN FINDLAY: I think they're perplexed that they've had to fight, you know, and it was a fight. I mean, if you recall, initially provincial authorities, you know, Bill Blair, the federal government, nobody immediately jumped to the need for a public inquiry. They said that they would do an investigation, but but not something as formal. And, you know, that would be likely to to drill down to real answers as an enquiry. So these people had to demonstrate and they went out and they did. And they were joined by the hundreds and thousands of people in Nova Scotia, people across the country, and eventually they got a promise of enquiry. That enquiry is not going to start for another year. It's going to be at least a year after that, before there's any report. So, you know, it's and in the meantime, the RCMP says, well, because of that inquiry, we know can't answer any of their questions. And then that, frankly, is the same answer we got from the RCMP. It's terribly frustrating for everybody who has been involved. And, you know, I think it is worth noting, this was the worst mass shooting in this country's history and seven months later, we just know so very, very little.

MG: Gilian, thank you.

Thank you.

MG: Gillian Findlay, host of the Fifth Estate. You can watch the full investigation into what happened in Portapique tonight on CBC. We have requested an interview with the commissioner of the RCMP, Brenda Lucki, and we're waiting to hear back. That is The Current for today. Coming up next on CBC Radio One, it's Q. Tom Power, speaking with the Grammy Award winning reggae and dancehall artist, Shaggy, if you missed our conversation with President Barack Obama, you can find it on the CBC Listen app or online at cbc.ca/thecurrent. Just a heads up, later on this week, we're going stargazing. Interest in astronomy is growing during the pandemic. It's difficult to find telescopes and other stargazing equipment. We'll have that story later on this week, but a quick sneak peek. Have a listen in on Lou Vegh and his five-year-old daughter, Julia. Just two of the Canadians taking up this new hobby. I'm Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening to The Current. We'll talk to you tomorrow.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: So look at what this shape is. It's like this, this, this, this, this, this. So what do we remember that is? Look at this shape right here.

VOICE 2: The Big Dipper.

VOICE 1: Yes. So the Big Dipper is part of Ursa Major, which means that some of the stars in the Big Dipper are part of a bigger constellation called Ursa Major. Do you know what Ursa Major is?

VOICE 2: No.

VOICE 1: The big bear.

VOICE 2: Oh, yeah, I remember that story.

VOICE 1: Oh, you remember that one now?

VOICE 2: Yes.

VOICE 1: That's good.

VOICE 2: So what's this one called?

VOICE 1: That one has a different name. 23 Ursae Majoris. That one's not as bright.

VOICE 2: Ooh that one.

VOICE 1: Yes.

[Song: "A Sky Full of Stars" by Coldplay]

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Nov. 23, 2020 episode transcript

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