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The Current Transcript for May 4, 2021

Host: Matt Galloway

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

FEMALE VOICE: The system failed the people of Brampton by not providing what it takes to implement the public health measures.

MATT GALLOWAY: For much of this pandemic. We've been told we're all in this together. Few areas challenge that, saying more than Peel Region. The community northwest of Toronto is the logistics hub of Canada. Many of the things you order to allow you to stay home come through there. The area is rich with new and recent immigrants, and many of them are essential workers forced to go into work, often without paid sick days in a community hit disproportionately hard by covid. The stories of those living on the front lines of this crisis and those trying to help is where we begin this morning. Good morning. I'm Matt Galloway and this is The Current.

[Music: Theme]

How the third wave of COVID-19 is battering Brampton, Ont.

Guests: Havnir Bhangu, Gurinder Singh Khehar, Amandeep Kaur, Dr. Brooks Fallis, Fatima Syed

MG: Brampton, Ontario, just northwest of Toronto, is one of this country's worst hot spots with a covid positivity rate over 20 percent. The city is feeling the brunt of the third wave of this pandemic. 700,000 people live in that community. Many of them are South Asian immigrants. Many of them are essential workers. They work in warehouses, manufacturing, grocery stores, meatpacking, every industry that keeps this country running and makes it possible for so many to stay home. The Current spent a day in the Peel region where Brampton is located and heard how the community is coping with covid. Here's our documentary "Breaking Point".

MANVIR BHANGU: Morning, everybody. [Everyone says good morning back] How are you all? These are real heroes to be honest they are here every morning.

MG: The heroes are wearing aprons and hairnets.

MB: Not easy, obviously, like you can see we are only 500. You know, it's not...

MG: Pounding out rotty after rotty. It's only 7:00 a.m. But these three women have been here for a couple of hours already, cutting zucchini, slicing paneer. On the stove the food is simmering in huge pots.

MB: We are at capacity right now. We simply cannot find pots that are bigger than this to cook the food. And you've seen how big the pots are.

MG: This is the Seva Food Bank. It's a professional kitchen tucked away into one of the city's many low rise industrial complexes. Manvir Bhangu is the manager of operations at Punjabi Community Health Services. She runs the Langar on Wheels program.

MB: Over the last year, we've seen a real increase in the demand for food simply because people are getting sick and don't have the means to either go out and get groceries or just cook.

MG: This program has been making meals for seniors for years, but the clientele changed when covid hit.

MB: So we've been serving anybody who is going through covid, who may be isolating, who may be recovering. So our demand has gone up from 20 clients to 100 clients. Generally, the sense has been, oh, this is free like for two weeks and I don't have to pay a single penny. And I think that's like where we know, like we're really doing something that needs to be done right now. I think it's definitely one less thing they have to worry about, especially when we're serving a family, because sometimes we're dropping off six plates for lunch and six plates for dinner for a family. And I know a lot of anxiety comes with getting covid. So that's one less thing that they have to worry about that we can support with. I think people are just generally, you know, very thankful and they're just shocked that somebody would want to do this for them without asking for anything in return.

MG: But it's not easy. Manvir Bhangu grew up here, and for her and so many others, this pandemic is personal.

MB: Like even for someone like me. And I'm not necessarily on the front line, but I think even then, it gets exhausting. Like, how long can we keep going without feeling burnt out ourselves when there's so many people who need help? Right. And we can only help so many and there's so many more people who we may not even be reaching. To watch that and to even see people close to me get covid. And you know, just how you don't know that it's that real until it happens to somebody close to you or somebody that you know. And I think a lot of us in this community have at least one story of someone who we know personally who have had it. It's even worse because, you know, that it could have been prevented. You know that, you know, this person actually didn't have a choice. They had to go to work and they couldn't take that day off. And I think it's been really frustrating. It's been really sad. There are days when it's like, when is this going to end?

MG: Many of those essential workers she's talking about pass through here.

FEMALE VOICE: Yeah, we are at Brampton Gateway Terminal waiting for the bus.

MG: The Brampton Gateway terminal is one of the city's most important transit hubs. The buses pulling in and out of here are mostly full.

MALE VOICE: What I noticed, the number 4 bus is crowded mainly in the evening. So I think that should be addressed.

MALE VOICE 2: Well, each seat has people inside. Sometimes you'll have standees too. You tried to take precaution, but you never know.

MG: It's not just the number 4 that's busy. The lineup for the 511 is long. This route takes people to and from warehouses like Amazon. There's a constant stream of people darting from one bus to the next. Even the drivers have to make a dash for it sometimes, John is on his way to the washroom.

JOHN: We're doing the best we can under the circumstances. If everybody cooperate and be great, I open up my windows in the bus, I wear my mask, I have my protection, and I just hope all the other people would as well.

MG: He's happy to talk about the situation on his bus, but he won't get political and talk about whether Brampton is getting the help that it needs in this pandemic.

JOHN: No comment. No comment on that. I got to go.

MG: John runs inside. There are a lot of people counting on his bus running on time.

FEMALE VOICE: Yeah, I'm working from a previous year, March when covid starts. I'm working as a security guard in banks.

MALE VOICE: I'm just heading towards work, currently I work in an Indian grocery store.

FEMALE VOICE: Yeah, I'm heading to work. I work at Burger Priest. [inaudible]

MALE VOICE: Buses is like a complete circus kind of thing. People from around Brampton or even Mississauga come to this place and we don't actually know, like what exactly are the touching and all those things? There's no sense of security in that.

FEMALE VOICE: Oh, it's really hard. You know, it's a mental stress because we can't go anywhere. It's like we feel unsafe.

FEMALE VOICE 2: We have to take extra precautions. We have to take extra hours with us. And we have sanitisers and everything. We have to make sure we have masks and at work also we have to make sure that people are wearing masks.

MALE VOICE: We have to always be aware of how many people are inside and how to maintain a social distancing. Sometimes it becomes difficult to make people understand, like how this is going to affect all of our lives and even...

FEMALE VOICE: Yeah, it's very scary, but we have to do work for a living, right? We have to earn money. So we have to go daily and we have to wear the shields. And so annoying sometimes to wear the masks and the shields every day, but we have to do it.

MALE VOICE: So far with God's grace, I'm like, this is going great and I hope like this ends soon. But I'm just looking forward to getting the vaccine as soon as possible.

MG: The buses might be crowded and busy. Not so much for the taxis parked nearby in an empty parking lot. They're all far enough apart to be safe, close enough for the drivers to be able to talk to each other through open windows. It can be a long wait for customers these days.

LAKMIR: Our business is more than 50 percent down right now, because it's locked down. We sit for hours, sometimes. I feel sorry for the guys at the airport taxi like you know, they are barely making anything. I know I talk to.... they are doing only one or two calls a day, like not even cover the expenses.

MG: Lakmir can't get away from the effects of covid at work or at home.

LAKMIR: A lot of family. I know. You know, even the immediate family, they had covid, my brother, my sister. We all went through it. I haven't seen my parents for like almost one year. We do the grocery. We just leave it at the front door and we just want to get out of this mess. It's better for everybody, just not for our community, for everybody. I just pray for everybody. You know, we are all in a mess and all the businesses are hurting. Everybody's hurting, right. It's painful for everybody. You feel it too. You know.

MG: It's been particularly painful. One postal code over in L6R. Here the positivity rate has reached over 25 percent, one of the highest in the country.

GURINDER SINGH KHEHRA: You can say that I go through the hell. It's very hard. I see the hell. What is the hell? I see that.

MG: Count Gurinder Singh Khehra in that statistic, he's dressed in sweats and a white turban, a kirpan secured to his waist. A Kara bangle hangs on his thin wrist.

GURINDER SINGH KHEHRA: My doctor says to me already that you are too weak because I lose 35 pounds.

MG: He's still recovering from his bout of covid so he can't walk far.

GURINDER SINGH KHEHRA: I can't walk up to 50 metres. My breath get out of control either. Somebody has to give me a support to go upstairs. There is only five or six steps at my front of my house, I can't do that.

MG: He set up chairs in the garage with the doors wide open so we can record safely.

LARA O'BRIEN: OK, and what I'm just going to do... So, Gurinder do you have your telephone handy, your mobile? Because Matt's going to call you on that. Yeah, that's good.

GURINDER SINGH KHEHRA: Hello.

MG: Hi. This is Matt Galloway in Toronto. How are you?

GURINDER SINGH KHEHRA: I'm good. How are you, Matt?

MG: I'm OK. Thank you for doing this.

GURINDER SINGH KHEHRA: No problem.

MG: Tell me, how did this all start? When did you start to feel sick?

GURINDER SINGH KHEHRA: Actually, my wife got covid from her work. I don't want to mention her work's name. Me and my wife says we will go for a test. Then on the 25th, we got an email that we have covid. My son, my mother in law and my father in law, my wife... my daughter is safe and we are quarantined at home. But on 3rd of March, I feel, no, I gave up, I call the ambulance, they take me to the hospital, Brampton Civic Hospital, I think 5:30 or 6:00 I'm on a ventilator.

MG: Why did you call the ambulance? Why did you feel like you needed to go to the hospital?

GURINDER SINGH KHEHRA: Because my fever is like crazy, it's going up all the time. I'm getting weakness day by day, I'm taking Tylenol and all that stuff, but doesn't work anything. By that night, they moved me to the Etobicoke hospital, sixth or seventh day, I got my conscience back, open my eyes. Then they told me that you are on ventilator for six, seven days. I surprised myself. Even the staff says you are very lucky you're back. Finally, I recover on the 19th I get discharged from Etobicoke Hospital on Friday. On Sunday, I feel tired and as I told my wife, I'm going to rest. She came behind me in the room and she saw that I have a very, very hard time to breath. She's saw for two minutes and that's gone. I'm no more. She cry, my mother in law, run upstairs and she saw that I have no pulse, no heart rate. My daughter called 911, finally an ambulance, come on, time, and they revive me. They take me to the hospital. And my family is crying behind me. Because as the situation they took me, there is no good sign.

MG: You were put back on the ventilator again?

GURINDER SINGH KHEHRA: Yes, they put me back on the ventilator. I have a lungs pneumonia and infection. Both. The doctors don't tell my wife, but they know it's a very bad condition. Sixth or seventh day. I'm back again. I have no memories at that time. I feel I'm not in Canada, I'm in India,

MG: And that's where you thought you were, you thought that you'd woken up in a hospital in India?

GURINDER SINGH KHEHRA: Yeah, because I have no memories that I'm in Canada. I know that the machines are surrounding me, so I'm in the hospital, but I can't figure it out. I can't speak because pipes are in my mouth. And my nose. I have no voice. Finally, there is a guard sitting there, and he saw me, he rushed outside, he called the staff, everyone is surrounding me and they say, you're very lucky.

MG: Very lucky.

GURINDER SINGH KHEHRA: Yeah, very, very lucky.

MG: What is the doctor saying about how long it would be until you are healthy again?

GURINDER SINGH KHEHRA: Five months. He says, if you are really stubborn, then four months.

MG: You mentioned at the beginning of the conversation that it was your wife that first contracted covid. What happened at her workplace, do you think?

GURINDER SINGH KHEHRA: I don't know that, I can't say that might be the cause. People go there and they get a Check-Up, but they don't don't want to disclose. And many people get involved. They shut down the company. And later on, they open it again.

MG: So there was a bad outbreak at the place that your wife works?

GURINDER SINGH KHEHRA: Yeah, yeah. One infected person get infected, everyone.

MG: How was she treated at her job? I mean, does she have sick days or anything like that?

GURINDER SINGH KHEHRA: Yeah, she gets sick days. She goes this week, she's back to work.

MG: And what about for you? What about for your work?

GURINDER SINGH KHEHRA: Actually, I do dispatch and I really appreciate for my work people. They paid me from that day and they pay me. They pay me well.

MG: So you've been paid through this, through all of this?

GURINDER SINGH KHEHRA: Yes.

MG: Yeah. Do you think that the government has done enough to protect workers like yourself and like your wife?

GURINDER SINGH KHEHRA: No, no. I'm very sorry to say that. Our government treated us like a Third World War. If you really see New Zealand, Australia. They are back on their feet. Why don't we shut down every single thing for 15 or 20 days? We will cut the chain. Nobody has to go out. Nobody coming from anywhere. Close the airports, everything.

MG: The doctor said you were lucky. Do you feel like a lucky person having survived this?

GURINDER SINGH KHEHRA: Yes, I heard so many things. People die. One of my known family, their 35 year old son, gone. I'm very lucky.

MG: Gurinder feels lucky to have had his first dose of vaccine. Down the road at the Brampton Civic Hospital, there is a steady stream of people going in and out of the vaccine clinic.

AHAD: My name is Ahad Sharif.

MG: Ahad is excited to talk about his experience. He just got his first shot.

AHAD: I went to the lady and she was very, you know, having a very soft hand. And when she injected the vaccine, I could not feel a single simple pierce. And it was so quick. And then I asked, have you really done it? She said, yes. I was thinking probably I might have some issues, some problems, because, you know, there are many rumours, many other kind of stories regarding vaccines. So that's why I'm excited, because I was not expecting such a wonderful, wonderful experience.

PRADEEPA: My name is Pradeepa.

MG: Pradeepa is also beaming as she steps out of the door.

PRADEEPA: I'm 45+, so I didn't know that I can get the vaccine this early. I thought everyone else is getting in my age group around May 7, May 8. So when I went to the online booking I was able to book for today. So it was a privilege I think. It's a big relief. I think it was in this location especially. I think it's pretty much everything well organized and they are doing their job right. So I recommend to anyone.

MG: Pradeepa works from home and knows her way around computers. So it was easy for her to book online and slip away during the day for her appointment. That is not the case for everyone living here.

AMANDEEP KAUR: I think right now people are talking no access and booking appointment for vaccine is a nightmare.

MG: Amandeep Kaur is petite, her dark hair tied back in a neat bun. Talking to her you get the sense that she gets things done. She's with Punjabi Health Services and has been working in this community for more than 30 years. She says getting vaccines into the arms of essential workers is a challenge and a supply issue.

AK: There is a new system of pop up clinics. That is another nightmare. Are we exposing more people or we are vaccinating people because today we have 500 vaccines and the line is up to 1500 and people waking up five in the morning. And if this is happening in Canada, where we say we have a very nice systems, people are frustrated. They are saying we are paying income tax. I never use the medical care system. Now I need vaccine. I think the frustration is there. Anger is there.

MG: Amardeep says there are all kinds of reasons why this community has been hit so hard and continues to struggle with keeping people safe.

AK: There is the immigration fear. They have that fear of losing their status in Canada. So when they are calling, they need that confidence that the help for covid has nothing to do with your immigration status. And another thing we have noticed that people living in multigenerational homes and they are the essential workers now, they have to go to work. They are paycheque to paycheque. But then one person going out for other, living home, sharing the same washroom, same bedroom, coming home. So you are infected and now you are exposing four or five other members of the household. It's not that they want to live like that. It's that they can't afford living in... who doesn't want to live in a nice place. So there is a fear attached to that. What if somebody finds out, I am exposed or I am positive with covid-19 then my work people say you can't come and I won't get paid. How am I going to pay my rent? And when I say three sick days, is that a guarantee that you will be fine after three days? If you are positive, would you have the strength to go back to work or you will be forced and spread.

MG: She's lost faith in the government and their handling of the pandemic in her city.

AK: You have seen so many trucks driving by while we are standing here so we can see the percentage of people who are contributing in this country for essential services. Here we say everybody contributes equally. But is the healthcare equally treating us? Is that a fair share for everybody? The system failed the people of Brampton.

MG: We've been listening to The Current's documentary Breaking Point, it was produced by Ines Colabrese, Kate Cornick, Joana Draghici, Amanda Grant and Lara O'Brien. The Current documentary editor is Liz Hoath.

MG: The CBC News is next. And after that, we will be back on the front lines in Brampton, Ontario, with a critical care doctor who has been there since the beginning. And we'll hear why what happens in Brampton matters for Ontario and the rest of Canada. I'm Matt Galloway you're listening to The Current on CBC Radio One. We're back in six minutes. Stay with us.

[Music: Theme]

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

[Music: Theme]

MG: Still to come, remember the whole Earth catalogue, 1960s counterculture magazine, that was kind of like the guide to everything, sort of Google before the Internet. The creator Stewart Brand is here to talk about climate change, Steve Jobs and LSD. But first, we continue our look at the front lines of covid-19 in Brampton, Ontario, and its ripple effects around the province and beyond.

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MG: Today, we are taking a closer look at one part of the country that has been amongst the hardest hit during this pandemic and the third wave is no different. The city of Brampton, Ontario, part of the hard hit Peel region, has a covid positivity rate of over 20 percent. The majority of those cases are amongst essential workers and their families, people who work in the factories and warehouses that make and ship the stuff that helps clothe, feed and entertain us. But the city is reaching a breaking point. Dr. Brooks Fallis is a critical care physician at Brampton Civic Hospital.

MG: Doctor, good morning.

BROOKS FALLIS: Good morning.

MG: You are on shift at the hospital right now. Just briefly describe what's happening in your ICU right now.

BF: So essentially, our ICUs have become dependent on transporting patients to our hospital, to other centres in order to be able to really keep the doors open, to bring in new patients the ICUs are constantly under pressure in terms of staffing, in terms of space. And we're seeing really huge volumes of covered patients continuing to come through the doors in spite of the school closures and the stay at home orders. As an example, last week, the William Osler health system of which Brampton Civic is a part transferred out over one hundred acute care patients and over 30 critically ill patients with covid to other centres. And that's just in a seven day period.

MG: Where are they going when patients need to be transferred out because the hospital, the ICU is full. Where are they going?

BF: They're going to other centres around the province who have a little bit more space. So one of the really amazing things about the pandemic response in Ontario is that to a large extent, the Ontario hospital systems have become almost like one hospital with a lot of work from the IMS command table and individual hospitals, as well as the transport system to make this work. But essentially, if you have an open bed in, say, Sudbury or Windsor, you could take a patient from Brampton, put them in an ambulance or a helicopter and take them there. But as you can imagine, if someone is on a ventilator, on medications to support their blood pressure and are really critically ill on high levels of life support, that transport becomes challenging and you need highly skilled people to do that transport.

MG: And Sudbury is nowhere near Brampton. I mean, what does that mean for the family members of those patients that you're transporting?

BF: So I can imagine that emotionally for those family members, it's very challenging to experience not being able to get the care that their loved ones need and deserve within their own community. However, the best care someone can get is to have a proper ICU bed that's properly staffed. And if that can't be provided locally, it's better to get it somewhere else. In addition, a lot of visitation at this point in time. Is video communication and phone communication because of visitor restrictions? So I think once the person is safely settled into the other ICU, that communication probably doesn't change that much. But I'd imagine it feels very, very different.

MG: Who are the patients you're treating?

BF: So as compared to wave one and two we certainly see a lot more younger people. The average age of patients has probably only come down by somewhere between five and 10 years. But that's very significant because it means we're seeing more people in their 20s, 30s, 40s, a lot of people in their 40s and 50s. But overwhelmingly, the people that we see at Brampton are either workers themselves from a high risk setting, as in an indoor workplace, or the family member of that worker who the infection was brought home from work to the household and then spread within the household.

MG: I mentioned in the introduction that the test positivity rate in Brampton is amongst the highest in the country at over 20 percent. I mean, part of this connects to the answer you just gave. Why are so many people in your community getting so sick?

BF: I think it's because of the well, I know it's because of the workplace environment and really any... so when you have such a high level of community spread, so the virus is really everywhere, then any indoor setting is not safe because there's a risk that somebody is coming in and bringing the virus into that environment and spreading it to, in this case, co-workers. So when schools are open, you have the same problem when there's high levels of community transmission, but schools are currently closed and the home environment is much more difficult to modify because people can't avoid going back to their homes to a large extent. So it just happens that Brampton is an incredible concentration of this type of workplace. And really, the whole country relies on Brampton as a place where goods are either made and then shipped out or as a sort of like a waiting station for goods to be moved around and warehoused and things like that. So if we don't acknowledge and directly change workplace safety, this problem is going to continue in Brampton. And it's been really highlighted with the fact that percent positivity in cases remains so high in spite of four weeks of stay at home order and school closure, things haven't really changed in Peel region and particularly in Brampton.

MG: I want to pick up on what you just said, and to do that, I'm going to bring another guest into our conversation. Fatima Seyd is a freelance reporter from Peel Region who's been covering the pandemic response in Peel for the online publication The Local.

MG: Fatima, good morning to you.

FATIMA SYED: Good morning, Matt.

MG: For people in other parts of the country, just briefly describe your region.

FS: It's a sprawling region that is made up of three very different kinds of cities. You know, if you drive from one end to the other, you're likely going to drive by urban centres, industrial area, farmland, forests. It's a very large, very sprawling and very diverse community of people. You know, you've talked on the show already about the makeup of essential workers, but there are a lot of international students here and there are a lot of immigrants here. There are a number of precarious communities here that have not been able to stay at home for various different reasons.

MG: The doctor just said a really powerful phrase, the country, the whole country relies on Brampton. I mean, and you've written about this. How is Peel a gateway to the rest of the country?

FS: I mean, beyond just the fact that the airport in the Toronto area exists in Mississauga, which is in Peel region, you also have just all of the Ontario's economic activity beginning here. You know, the data that I've collected shows that 40 percent of Amazon packages are processed here, 60 percent of trucking services begin here. It is the logistics capital of the province and in many ways the country as well. Because, you know, there would be no goods in Costco if there were no Peel workers in warehouses working right now. There'd be nothing in Wal-Mart without those workers. There'd be nothing arriving on your doorstep without Peel workers. It is essentially driving the activity while all of us have been at home.

MG: How was the health care system in Peel and in Brampton specifically functioning before the pandemic? Fatima?

FS: So Peel region is home to about 1.5 million people based on the last census, and it has grown significantly. And for that many people, there are only three hospitals in the entire region. There's only one in Brampton and Brampton is home to over 600,000 people. Peel was already stretched thin in terms of health care resources. So when the pandemic hit, you can only imagine what that meant. You have one hospital that had that was already seeing patients struggling to find ICU rooms. You know, Doctor Fallis can speak more to this than I can. But a few months before the pandemic, Brampton City Council unanimously declared a state of emergency in health care because people were dying in beds in corridors of that one hospital. So things were already pretty bad and pretty stretched before the pandemic even began. And once covid hit and spread rapidly from workplace, to multigenerational housing, to the community, those hospitals struggled. And at the beginning of the pandemic, we saw a lot of hospitals do what they're still doing now, which is send patients across the region. As far as Kingston, Ontario.

MG: Tell me more about that. What did you see and what did you learn from your reporting about what's changed in that already stretched health care system in the wake of the first and second waves of this pandemic?

FS: To be quite frank, nothing's changed, I think it's just gotten worse and it was already worse to begin with. You know, I've spoken to families who saw loved ones who were receiving critical long term care in these hospitals be moved to places like Kingston and Sudbury, which they've never even been to and didn't know how they would afford to go to visit their relatives under covid guidelines. I've heard from families who were too scared to go to the hospital. We saw that with the death of Emily Viegas, the 13 year old girl in Brampton whose father, you know, took a minute to ask himself if he wanted to take her to the hospital because they might send her far away. And he didn't know how he would take care of her if she was sent to a faraway hospital while his wife was also in the hospital locally. It has led to some very difficult decisions being made not just by doctors, but by the community.

MG: Doctor Fallis, pick up a little bit on what Fatima is talking about there, particularly how stretched thin the health care system was already in peel, given that. Was the crisis that you have been describing in some ways inevitable?

BF: Yes, I mean, the hospital has been stretched thin for years in that regard with patients admitted in the emergency department waiting for beds and particularly, you know, each winter during flu season, we would see the ICU get overloaded and stretched, but never to this extent. But you can see how a hospital that was already on the brink would easily be overwhelmed by something like a pandemic. In particular, if that region is going to become, you know, the worst hit area in that pandemic and not enough be done to try to stop the spread of the virus within that region.

MG: I'll ask you both this question, but I'll start with you, Doctor. Why is that the case? I mean, peel is a growing region. We just described it as in many ways the logistics hub of the country. We know people are coming in from around the world, but also from across the GTA to move there. Why is it that the system itself was so stretched even before the pandemic began?

BF: I think it accumulates over years and years of underfunding and a combination of a health system that maybe is slow to expand and adapt versus a population that's rapidly expanding. And also, in addition, it's a population that doesn't have a lot of financial clout, doesn't have a lot of political clout. So it's easy for such a population to be ignored politically sort of year over year.

MG: Fatima, from your perspective, what's at the root of that systemic and the structural inequity?

FS: You know, I was struck by something Pradeepa said in your documentary just before we started talking that, you know, this largely immigrant community is often afraid to speak up and demand for things because they're scared it's going to disrupt their immigration process or their path to get citizenship. They're scared it would mean losing their jobs. They're scared it would mean hurting their family members in some way. They're not able to organize in the way our political systems organize sometimes to demand for things. That's why this largely diverse region, and it's over 60 percent of the community is a visible minority. It has struggled because they've borne the brunt of just policymaking that hasn't catered to their needs or frankly, hasn't really gone out and understood what those needs are. And we're seeing the impacts of that in the worst possible way this past year.

MG: In the face of that doctor, what support would you like to see from the province of Ontario as this third wave continues its grip on the region?

BF: So the first thing is we really need to acknowledge that what's happening in people in Brampton is not ok. And as a society, we should not accept that a single community can be hit so hard by the rampant spread of covid. You know, last week, Christine Elliot said Brampton’s been treated fairly. I completely disagree with that. I don't think this has been fair at all. You can't just allow one region to be hit so much harder and then take the average of the province and say that we're doing ok. So then if we recognise that it's still uncontrolled spread, then we can do things to improve the situation. And really what we need to do is, as I mentioned, because school closures and stay at home orders are not enough. We need to target workplace safety. And I don't think our current workplace guidelines are adequate. And there's a lot of things that go along with that, including, you know, mandatory rapid testing at the really high risk locations, priority accessible vaccination, improved mask use, the quality of masks that we're distributing and make sure that when people are taking their breaks and eating their lunch and things like that, that they have a safe place to do that and not a crowded lunchroom, for example.

MG: What was your reaction when the minister of health said that Brampton has been given its fair share of support?

MG: [cross talk] Fatima, go ahead. You laughed out loud. Is that what you said?

FS: I did. It was completely laughable that she said that because the day she said that our positivity rate was more than double Ontario's and we were seeing... it was a few days after Emily Viegas died. We were just hearing of all kinds of cases. I personally heard of four cases amongst people I knew. It was just I'm still in disbelief that she was able to go up and say something like that.

MG: Doctor?

BF: Yeah, I felt I think probably a little bit more anger than laughing. But I share those exact same sentiments. Just I think it's essentially misinformation. I mean, there's nothing... as hard as Dr. Loh, I think has fought for a better response. In Peel region and in Brampton, there's been a lack of recognition at the provincial level of how big a problem it is in this area, how much it's impacting the hospital and the people working in the hospital, and how devastating it is for the community, not just today, for the illness that's happening, but for the way this is going to impact this community in the long run.

MG: You mentioned Dr. Loh. Lawrence Loh is the medical officer of Health for peel region. He is somebody who's been calling for paid sick leave so that the people that you've been describing, the people that you're treating, the people that Fatima has been writing about, if they fall ill or they need to get tested or they need to go and get the vaccine, will be able to take time off and not have to worry about paying the bills. The province introduced three paid sick days. Doctor, is that enough?

BF: No, it's definitely not enough. And it's very clear that that's not enough. And I don't think anybody thinks that's enough other than perhaps the provincial government. But I think it is important to point out that paid sick days are vital and it should be at least 10 days and it should be easily accessible and it should be paid out by the employer. So that the worker doesn't have to sort of fight to get access to that money that's so important day to day. But it's also important to recognise that this has become sort of a political battle and flash point. But paid sick days are not a perfect solution to all the workplace problems that exist, because we know that covid spreads pre symptomatically and asymptomatically and in people with very minimal symptoms who might not think it's enough to stay home sick that day. So while it's helpful, it is not going to eliminate workplace transmission. So we need a package of workplace safety that includes 10 days of paid sick leave. But it is not a sort of solution to the entire problem,

MG: I should say. We did request to speak with the minister of health in the province of Ontario, Christine Elliot. She declined to speak with us, but sent a statement saying, amongst other things, that the province is increasing the number of sites for vaccination to over 150 pharmacies, 40 primary care sites, 4 hospitals and a number of mobile vaccination teams. Fatima, you've been writing about vaccinations and the vaccine system, such as it is in Peel Region when it comes to vaccine allotment, the number of vaccines that this hard hit region is getting, how does peel stack up?

FS: Well, until last week, people had 20 percent of covid cases in Ontario and it had 7.5 Percent of its vaccine supply. And while we are seeing a ramp up in that supply, the delivery of it is slow. And unfortunately, it's ineffective because we had our first pop up clinic just last week. And the way that you get an appointment is you have to book yourself online. Peel trying to avoid what we've seen in Toronto and other cities where you set up a clinic and then invite everyone and everyone waits in a long line realising that there are workers in this community who won't be able to do that. So instead, they've taken it online and over the phone. The problem is those involve long waits as well, and they require a lot of your time during the day to book. It's been a chaotic delivery and frankly, it hasn't reached the populations that need it the most, which is, of course, the workers. We only have one on site vaccine clinic in a Maple Lodge Farms built facility in Brampton, but that's just one. We have 164 workplace outbreaks. And until we get vaccine clinics set up for all of those workers, there may be more workplace outbreaks and that's going to lead to more community transmission. And it's just going to worsen the situation in peel. Dr. Fallis is completely right. You can't just throw something like paid sick leave or vaccines as the be all end all solution. If you don't come up with a program that also gets those things to the people that need it the most. And Peel's vulnerable populations are in the warehouses, at the airport, they're in the factories, and no one's going there. I don't recall a single government, a single member of the government pardon me, going to one of these facilities and looking at what's going on there and talking to the workers. And, you know, just last week, Monte MacNaughton, the Labour minister, said that we've always been there for workers. He hasn't. This government hasn't, because if they had, the workers would be protected, right now.

MG: Dr. Fallis, we just have a few minutes left. One of the things you just said is that you're concerned about the long term implications in the community. Tell me more about that.

BF: Well, so there's a number of ways people can be affected by covid, so, I mean, the first is the obvious and most immediate, and that is if you get sick and you die from covid, but if an individual who is a parent or a grandparent who's a caregiver, allowing a parent to go to work to be a primary income earner for a household, if one of those people dies, it really disrupts the structure of that family. And that's going to have long lasting implications for a family. In addition, we tend to look at covid as this sort of like live or die dichotomy where, you know, you survive and therefore you're fine or you die and then your life is lost. But in fact, there's many layers to that. If you get hospitalised with covid, even if you don't land in the ICU on a ventilator, you might be on oxygen for three weeks and have chronic lung issues moving forward. You might be quite debilitated from having been in bed for a number of weeks. Then if you end up in the ICU and critically ill, you may never fully recover your functional status, whether you have some long term cognitive impairment or whether you have physical impairments that make it difficult to go back to your old life. On top of that, there's not been a lot of talk about it in Canada, but there's excellent research in the UK regarding long covid, which is less dependent on how severe your episode of covid was, but leaves you with sort of long term fatigue or chronic joint pain or difficulty sleeping, anyway, difficulty concentrating, things like that, which may also affect. So the more cases you have in a single community, the more of each one of those problems you're going to have. And that's going to impact that community for months and years to come. And on top of that, the health care system has been so stressed that I worry about people wanting to leave their practise, whether it's nurses or doctors or other healthcare practitioners who just feel it's been too much and they want to move on. And that may leave this community with even worse off healthcare system post-pandemic.

MG: Fatima just in the last minute or so that we have. What do you think Canadians and other parts of this country need to understand about why what is happening in peel matters?

MG: I think it's important to know that we don't even know fully the extent of the devastation because we don't even know the names of the workers and their histories and their stories, who have died because their families haven't come forward with it. You know, 10 airport limo drivers died from covid in the first few weeks of the pandemic. We don't know their names and who knows, however many are getting hurt. I really worry about what this means for Ontario moving forward because they're hurting a huge group of people that have contributed so much to the province and the economy at the worst time. And they're hurting in ways that we don't fully understand. And until we help them, we won't know what's going on.

MG: Dr. Fallis, just briefly from you, why does this matter for the rest of the nation?

BF: So it matters to the individual. It matters to the community. It matters to the health care system, but it also should matter to the whole country. First of all, just that we care enough about each other to say we don't want to see single communities like this so devastated by the pandemic and that we, maybe we think about those people who are able to stay at home and have things delivered to their door, realize that there's a whole chain of events that happens to allow those goods to arrive to your door. And it's people in Brampton who are making that happen for the whole country. And, you know, perhaps we need to look at ourselves and what we're doing in the pandemic and think about how much worse it is for people in Brampton and be willing to make some extra sacrifices as a local community and as a country.

MG: Thank you both. Well, thank you both for speaking with us this morning. This has been really important. I really appreciate it. Thank you.

FS: Thanks, Matt.

BF: Thank you.

MG: Dr. Brooks Fallis, is a critical care doctor at Brampton Civic Hospital. Fatima Syed, is a freelance journalist living in and reporting on Peel region for The Local. We did ask to speak with the health minister, Christine Elliott. In addition, requested Ontario's minister of Labour, the solicitor general, and the chief medical officer of health for the province. None were available to speak with us this morning.

MG: Tomorrow on The Current, a closer look at another hot spot in our country. We head to Alberta. I'm Matt Galloway. This is The Current. We're back in 90 seconds. Stick around.

Stewart Brand on his remarkable career, and bringing back the woolly mammoth

Guest: Stewart Brand

MG: Hi, I'm Matt Galloway, you're listening to The Current.

MALE VOICE: Stewart is the intellectual Johnny Appleseed of the counterculture.

MALE VOICE 2: Stewart might be the Zelig or maybe The Da Vinci of Cyber Cultural.

MALE VOICE 3: It's actually a little bit eerie how often Stewart has been at the right place at the right time. And by the time all the rest of us get there, he's gone on to something else more interesting.

MALE VOICE 4: Stewart has this remarkable Forrest Gump superpower to sense where the frontiers are and then be there.

MALE VOICE 5: He's like Kilroy, you know, he shows up in the background of every important thing going on.

FEMALE VOICE: He could see into the future that this technology was going to be a huge part of American culture.

MALE VOICE 6: It isn't so much that he's ahead of it. He's actually creating the future.

MG: That's quite an intro. Those accolades are from the opening of a new documentary about Stewart Brand's remarkable life and work. Stewart Brand has been a key figure in the creation of the 1960s counterculture, the environmental movement, the personal computer revolution, social media. And now he is deep into what might be his most ambitious and perhaps most controversial project to date, bringing back the woolly mammoth. Really. This film is called We Are as Gods. It is screening as part of the Hot Docs Film Festival.

MG: Stewart Brand, good morning.

STEWART BRAND: Good morning.

MG: You have a Forrest Gump superpower?

SB: No, that was part of their sort of preview in the beginning to give a sense of an overview and the Forrest Gump bit. They show Forrest Gump in the movie with John F. Kennedy. And then they cut to a shot of me with John F. Kennedy when I was in the army and a photographer. And that was the reason for that business.

MG: The title of this film comes from something that you wrote in the Whole Earth catalogue in 1968. And I want to get to the Whole Earth catalogue in a moment. But the phrase is "we are as gods, so we might as well get good at it". What does that mean?

SB: The word superpowers wasn't available in 1968 and basically I was referring to my generation and the people who were using the catalogue, was of college age and coming into their powers. And my sense was that they were way greater powers then they had acknowledged and this was sort of an invitation in the catalogue to branch out in all directions and just take over their own lives. And, you know, they were now responsible for moving civilization in new and interesting directions. They were doing it on communes. They were doing it by dropping out and just taking on their own education. And that was reflecting our situation and basically giving a boost.

MG: We are as gods, is quite a remarkable thing to say, though.

SB: I actually stole it from an anthropologist in England who gave it at a lecture where it began with, we basically have the power of ancient Greek gods except immortality. And we're not really acting as if we have both that kind of power and that kind of responsibility. And so as time went by now, I think we're in a situation of where civilisation, the we is gone from individual young people to the whole kind of global civilisation dealing with climate change. We have the powers. We have the power to cause the climate problems, which means we also have the power to fix the climate problems. But we're not behaving as the kind of responsible gods we should. And that's what I think will get figured out in this century.

MG: One of the ways that you're looking at doing that and deploying those powers is through this whole movement towards de-extinction. Tell me why you're trying to bring back the woolly mammoth.

SB: Woolly mammoth is sort of the applied project of the whole process of bringing biotechnology. I was trained as a biologist at Stanford way back when, and I've been a conservationist all my life. And as biotech came into the beginnings of its powers in this century. Conservation needs that. We're using it in agriculture. We're using a lot of it in medicine, it's at the heart of the vaccines that are getting us out of this pandemic now. So I think we're now in a situation with climate that we are [inaudible] has to get good at it.

MG: Why the woolly mammoth?

SB: The woolly mammoth is actually not just a keystone species, but what was referred to as an ecosystem engineer. Elephants used to be everywhere in the world except Antarctica. What they do for every environment is they are the only animal that can really take down trees and likes to take down trees. They do this in Africa, still and somewhat in South Asia, that provides a mosaic landscape, an ecosystem that is much richer when the trees are growing back in some areas and being taken down by the elephants and other areas. They did that as mammoths in the subarctic, what was called the mammoth [inaudible], which were vast grasslands instead of tundra and boreal forest. And if we get them back up there, basically cold adapted elephants, they will help take down the boreal forest, help replace it with grassland and where the tundra is now releasing greenhouse gases, grasslands are super at fixing carbon out of the atmosphere. And so they're part of potentially a multi century program to get climate in a more settled state then the way it's been for most of the last ten thousand years.

MG: How do you actually go about creating a new mammoth?

SB: Thanks to it's called, a discernibility of ancient DNA, DNA that is recoverable from the pretty well preserved carcases of woolly mammoths. That DNA is not functional, but it is readable. And we know enough and are knowing more every day of what genes affect what traits. And so you can identify the genes that the mammoths had that gave them the long furry coats and gave them a better circulation, gave them smaller ears and gave all the things they needed to be cold adapted. And George Church at Harvard has identified those genes and is moving them into Asian elephant cell lines one by one, adding them up. And eventually you will have effectively a mostly woolly mammoth genome that you can then implant into the egg of an asian elephant and ideally get a fairly mammoth like young elephant coming out. And then in Canada, perhaps, or in Siberia, where there's already work of this sort going on, we can start to have really, really cold adapted elephants that can take up their old job as they reproduce and fan out.

MG: Is this such a good idea? This is the question that gets asked a lot of you. Yes, we might be able to do this, but should we do this? And are there unintended consequences in trying to pull something like this off?

SB: Conservation biology has come a long way since the 50s when I first got into it. There's protocols for moving animals around. It's been done thousands of times, almost always successfully. And when it fails, it doesn't cause harm. It just doesn't quite take the way you hope. And so you have famous episodes of bringing beavers back to Scotland and then to England after having been gone for four hundred years. You have wolves being brought back to Yellowstone Park, having been gone for one hundred years. And in each case it worked out well, not only for the species, but for the whole ecosystem. And that kind of knowledgeable practise is what would be applied with moving these elephants back into an area that they used to be a very major part of.

MG: You're described in the film as an evangelical optimist and then following that description, it says, which can be quite dangerous. Do you think you're dangerous in your optimism?

SB: Well, I think it's a fair question. I have moved a lot, been part of moving a lot of things forward. And often at the time, they were thought of as controversial. Oh, my God. Now what and so on. When I was pushing what became personal computers back in the 60s and 70s, on the left, at least computers were regarded and I think rightfully a great suspicion that they were basically a power controlled by the hierarchy would use to keep everybody in check. So there was a resistance to that. There was resistance also against the space program. Where I said, we need a photograph of the whole earth from space? And space will give us that and that will change everything. In both cases, I think personal computers turned out to be hugely empowering and a photograph of Earth from space turned out to be hugely illuminating as well as empowering. And so have I done any harm along the way. And sort of surprising, I think that mostly I'd rather done it in neutral or it's been actually beneficial. So if it's optimistic, it's just based on personal experience.

MG: Let me ask you about the photo of the Earth, the whole earth. I mean, in part, this idea came out of a dream that you had while you were on LSD, is that correct?

SB: It was kind of a low dose LSD. So I wasn't tripping out. I was just being weirdly focussed and had been listening to Buckminster Fuller a lot. And he was saying people treat the earth as if it's infinite and the resources are infinite and so on and so forth. They're incredibly finite and I was a professional photographer at the time. I knew we needed imagery that made finiteness clear to everybody. And so I had this idea, I'm up here, just two stories in the air. What if I was higher? I would see the curve of the horizon and then the entire earth visible at one time. And I kept expanding and I figured, you know, we've been in space for ten years at that point in 1966 and there hadn't been any photographs of the earth from space of any scale.

MG: I mean you had these buttons that were sent around. But tell me about the campaign to try and get this photo taken.

SB: Well I was basically a devil may care artist and so you have an idea and you start on it right away you don't have to ask anybody for permission. So I thought, OK, what would it take to get this photograph? Well, how about goosing NASA and the Soviet space program a little bit? I knew all about buttons. So how about why haven't we seen a photograph of the whole earth yet? Whether it had any real effect on NASA I'm not sure I know that they get people interested.

MG: What did you think when you first saw the photo?

SB: Well, at last. It was different than most people expected. Many of the early images were not a complete circle. They were a crescent or they were a [inaudible] people realise the earth was a sphere, it was like the moon. It was just another planet. And the concept of where we lived as a planet was not taken as the norm. But as soon as those photographs came along and there started to be environmental organisations who call themselves Earth First, Friends of the Earth, we had an Earth Day shortly after that first photograph, and earth became the way that people thought about modern times. And they and the space program perspective and spectacular success basically replaced the atomic bomb and the mushroom cloud, which had been the kind of big, spectacular engineering success of the previous decades, it scared us to death. Scared me to death when I was young and an image of the Earth from space clipped it, from a fearful, paranoid government, overwhelming situation to, we can land somebody on the moon. If we can do that, what else can we do and look at what we look like from that mirror situation of looking back from space and you're off and running when you have that.

MG: It leads to, I mean, a number of things, as you say, including you creating the Whole Earth catalogue for people who don't like they've not flipped through it and they don't know what the actual physical document is. How would you describe what the catalogue was?

SB: Ok Matt, you were what, nine years old when you saw it? How would you describe it?

MG: It was... well people have said. And it's true. People have said that it was like the precursor to the Internet, a compendium of information and things that you could do.

SB: I think it conferred agency. Things you could do is exactly what it did. And I think when people would go in and sometimes looking at something they already know they're interested in and then turn the page and there was something else equally interesting that they didn't even know you could pull off and do it. And so there could be a book about raising goats and a book about how to make a guitar and a book about how to learn to draw really well and, and, and and. It was like walking into a building that had open doors in every direction and a light shining through the doorway of a different colour and a different frequency of vibration or whatever, and you just look around and realise, my God, there's all kinds of stuff I could do. Let's see. And then you start shopping of things you might do with your life. That's pretty cool.

MG: And is that what you meant when you said access to tools? I mean, that it gave people agency, that it gave them the tools to create the future or create what they want to create.

SB: Yeah, that was something I borrowed directly from Bucky Fuller, where he said people keep trying to change human nature to fit some idea they have about how the world is supposed to be. He said you can't change human nature, but what you can change is tools. And they're being changed all the time, approved all the time. Skills are developed and you can follow the skills, you can follow the tools into all kinds of directions. And that's what's empowering. And that's where the godlike super powers come from.

MG: Steve Jobs, I mean, as you well know, has credited in part the Whole Earth catalogue for his approach to Apple and personal computing and seeing the power of personal computing. Do you see that direct link?

SB: Yeah, it was... Steve was sort of the last set of hippies that came through, and I was one of the earlier ones. So I was treated like an elder by people of his age. And we were all in the same area south from San Francisco. So there was a kind of a mutual language and Homebrew Computer Club was just down the street from Whole Earth's catalogue and all that kind of thing. And then LSD was kind of the rite of passage for all of that population. And Steve was greatly moved by events that he had with LSD, as I had. And for some reason, the back of one of the catalogues I had a line with a photograph that looked like it was from a hitchhiker's point of view. It said, stay hungry, stay foolish. Nobody else paid attention to that, that I can tell Steve got it completely and then wound up giving it as a punchline of a talk that he gave at Stanford a commencement address. I think Steve was aware of that as a businessman and wanted to become a wealthy guy that you can get locked in to success and then it gets in your way. And he was using it as a way to make certain that did not happen to him or to his company.

MG: Larry Brilliant was on this program not so long ago, he was talking about the work that you did together with the the Whole Earth electronic link, the Well, which a lot of people, again, see as a precursor to social media and to the way that we are connected now. What were you trying to do with that way back when?

SB: Basically new modes of conversation, kind of group conversation were emerging? The Whole Earth catalogue and a magazine I did called Coevolution Quarterly were intentionally interactive with the readership. And once we got online, because I'd been part of some online conferencing before that and I'd seen the things that were right and that were wrong with it at that point, There were competitors like CompuServe and the Source that were very expensive. But I knew that that interaction should be more like a conversation than like, you know, competing essays or something like that. And so I set up The Well to basically encourage you to stay online and be interactive with people. And then we gave free accounts to active hackers and to people in media like yourself. And the conversation started out on a high level and then got higher and got richer. People were realising sort of in real time how wild and crazy online communication could be. And the crazy part. There were some harmful parts, flame wars and and people being really, really insulting because they were in communication but at a distance and don't feed the troll. Things like that emerged in order to keep the discourse somewhat civilised. [inaudible] on the edge of civilisation and being civilised, and that gave it a lot of vibrancy. That turned out to be a foretaste of what social media has become.

MG: If you go back to that idea of tools and giving people access to tools. Do you worry? And when you say about what social media has become, what people have done with those tools?

SB: I think the enthusiasm comes and goes for these things. Once they become humongously successful and modestly transformative, people rightly find things to worry about because some stuff that is worth worrying about emerges. And then you've got to figure out how to fix it. And that's gradually happening. I think that anonymity is more destructive than it is effective. One of the reasons AOL did pretty well is we had at best, pseudo anonymity. People could always find out who was actually writing and with anonymity, what you get is people pretending to be other people and behaving badly and then bad reputation and distrust flies in all directions. And once you lose trust in that communication environment, you're in trouble. So the mechanisms for re-establishing trust, I think, are what are still being worked out. My sense is that identity is important and that in the world and online and even things like have you actually been vaccinated? And an indication that proves that. That kind of thing is coming more and more and we will lose, quote, privacy, but we may regain more trust. We'll see how this plays out. But it's an indication that it is a new version of a civilisation that has emerged here. And each time that happens, you have to figure out how to make the good parts permanent and the bad part is temporary.

MG: Part of being the subject of a documentary like this is you get the opportunity to look back at a number of the things that you were part of, and there was that quote early on saying, you know, he's somebody who's been at the right place at the right time. When you think of the things that you have been part of, whether it's in creating The Well, whether it's being part of the merry pranksters, the environmental movement, I mean, what do you think your role was in all of that?

SB: I'm a designer and inventor as well as a writer, and I like to be around the invention of genres, not just new things within genres so the extinction is a genre. The Whole Earth catalogue is a way of putting out information which is [inaudible]. And it's great because there aren't rules for new genres yet. And you've got to be an outlaw trying stuff that would not be permitted if it was in academia or some existing institutional framework. That's what I get drawn to because everybody is figuring out who are we now? What do we do now? How do we make this thing that we're falling in love with useful and important and increasingly fun?

MG: Let me ask you just finally about how you see time. I mean, you were talking earlier about the woolly mammoths in the [inaudible], looking at centuries before this might actually come to pass. You're involved in, you know, the long clock project which is this clock that's going to run for 10,000 years. How do you see time and view the kind of arc of time?

SB: I think in time there's a thing we're getting used to that's kind of like the image of the Earth from space, the sense of humanity is part of a very long story in which we're playing a part in a kind of a passing moment. But the moment is where the juice is. And so we're pushing what Brian Eno called the long now. And we gave another dimension to the long now instead of next week and this week and the last week is the next ten thousand years, the last ten thousand years and this week. And then the question is, when you think in those terms, what do you do this week?

MG: It's a real pleasure to talk to you. I mean, you've had an extraordinary life and it feels, you know, that there's much more to come in some ways.

SB: I am working on the book. Beginning in the movie is me writing down the ideas that are going to be in a book about me that I'm writing.

MG: Thank you for your time this morning, Stewart. Thank you.

SB: My pleasure.

MG: Stewart Brand is the creator of the Whole Earth catalogue and co-founder of Revive and Restore, a non-profit dedicated to reviving extinct species. The new documentary about his life and work is called We Are as Gods and its screening as part of the Hot Docs Film Festival, which is taking place online this year.

Last words

MG: That's it for The Current for this Tuesday. Coming up next on your CBC Radio One, of course, it's Q. Tom Power, speaking with Christian Allaire, Vogue fashion and style writer. He has a new book out about growing up on the Nipissing First Nation in Ontario. And you'll hear that conversation coming up in just a few moments on CBC Radio One. I was just speaking with counterculture hero Stewart Brand. Yet another of the things that he is famous for is being one of the founding members of something called the TRIPS Festival. The TRIPS festival had music, but it was not a concert as such, was supposed to be sort of a multisensory experience helped along by a fair amount of drugs. The first TRIPS festival was the first major performance of a band called The Grateful Dead in San Francisco. And so we thought we would leave you with one of their tunes. This is from 1966, The Grateful Dead, "Standing on the corner". I'm Matt Galloway thanks for listening to The Current and we'll talk to you tomorrow.

[Sound Clip: The Grateful Dead: Standing on the Corner]

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