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The Current Transcript for August 18, 2021

Host: Anthony Germain

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

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Battling climate change in Canada: Experts examine the major parties' climate plans

Guests: Kathryn Harrison, Chris Ragan

SOUNDCLIP

This is a warning we're the canary in the coal mine. Climate change is happening now. The lesson from this, everything seems the same and seems fine until it changes in an instant and everything's gone.

ANTHONY GERMAIN: For residents of Lytton B.C., like Gordon Murray, climate change has already taken almost everything they had. And he's not alone in feeling that not enough is being done. Climate change is one of the top issues for Canadians as they head to the polls in just a few weeks. This morning, we're going to hear how each party's plan stacks up and how Canada can set the tone for the rest of the world. And then.

SOUNDCLIP

I mean, I was extremely marked by my childhood. And of course, that's why you write a book about it. But I knew that in a strange way, it was not personal.

AG: In her 70s, author Vicki Laveau-Harvie took that difficult childhood and crafted the award winning memoir, The Erratica. In 30 minutes, we'll revisit her conversation with Matt Galloway about her book, her family and being called a fresh new voice in literature. Good morning. I'm Anthony Germain in St. John's, in for Matt Galloway, and you are listening to The Current.

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AG: We are in a crisis that is the clear message from scientists. Climate change is an existential threat that faces humanity. Some impacts may now be irreversible, but the choices made today can still help prevent things from getting worse. Today, we're going to look at what the parties are proposing with two nonpartisan experts. Chris Ragan is an economist and director of the Maxwell School of Public Policy at McGill University and former chair of the Eco Fiscal Commission. And Kathryn Harrison is a professor of political science at the University of British Columbia and she specialises in climate policy. Good morning to you both.

KATHRYN HARRISON: Good morning.

CHRIS RAGAN: Good morning.

AG: So, Katheryn Harrison, let me begin with you and the big picture here. Are any of the parties proposing emission reduction targets that are sufficient to address Canada's role in the climate crisis?

KATHRYN HARRISON: Oh, that's a big question. I think the challenge for Canada is that we fail to live up to our previous commitments from 1990 to date. And so in theory, we should be making the kind of reduction commitments that we're hearing from the European Union in practise. Even meeting a 40 to 50 percent target is going to be a big challenge and one we need to get started on right away if we're going to meet it by 2030.

AG: Well, Chris Ragan, let me stay with the big picture with you as well. Where do you see signs of hope in these plans, if any?

CHRIS RAGAN: Well, it's one thing, first of all, to ask whether the targets are right and the targets are all a little bit different across the parties. But the second question that I think we should actually focus on is whether they actually have policies in place to get to those targets. And here again, you see some differences. I think one thing that is a huge mark of progress from, let's say, 10 or 15 years ago is that all of the parties now are taking this issue seriously. And I think that's very important because it is a very serious issue. So all the parties are taking it seriously. I think they are taking it with different levels of seriousness, if you like. I think the conservatives now have a plan that it is at least in the ballpark of reasonable. And I think that wasn't true up until this election campaign. But I think if you look carefully at the four different plans for different party plans, you can see some important differences. So presumably we can get into that.

AG: OK, we will. And we'll get to the conservatives and how things have changed for the conservative. But first, let's break down some of the key components of the party's climate platform and let's start with carbon price. Chris Ragan, what does your research show about how high carbon prices need to be to actually get people to reduce emissions?

CHRIS RAGAN: Well, the last work that we did at the Eco Fiscal Commission in late 2009 showed that if you had a policy package that was centred around a carbon price that rose to about 200 dollars per tonne, that's increasing the price of gasoline by about 40 cents per litre over the next 10 years, that that would get you to your to the 2030 targets that were in place at the time, which was a 30 percent reduction below 2005 levels. Now, since then, the liberals have introduced a carbon pricing plan that doesn't quite get to 200 dollars, but it gets to 170 dollars per tonne by 2030. And they've introduced a lot of other policies around the edges. But it's it's pretty clear that the carbon price is the centrepiece of their plan. But since that time, the liberals have also said they're now wanting to reduce emissions by between 40 and 45 percent by 2030. So they now have a more aggressive plan than they did even a year ago. And I think it's debateable whether they've got quite enough policy in the window. But the huge advantage of setting up a carbon price the way they have is that if you decide that you want or need more ambitious policies to drive more emissions reductions, you can simply ramp up the carbon price. It can it can get, you know, instead of increasing by 15 dollars per year, as it will beyond 2022, it could increase by eighteen dollars per year or increase by twenty dollars per year, I guess. But more aggressive carbon price will actually reduce emissions more.

AG: Right. And I guess the trick in politics is trying to find that the sweet spot for that. Now, you mentioned putting the right policy in the window. Well, let's start with what the liberals have tried to put in the window, as you put it there. They're running on their record of introducing a price on carbon. This is what Justin Trudeau had to say on day one of the campaign.

SOUNDCLIP

It's a real change. We delivered by pushing hard so that everywhere in the country there is a price on pollution and then standing firm so that in no province is it free to pollute anymore.

AG: Kathryn Harris in the current carbon tax is forty dollars per tonne, and that's set to rise, as we just heard, annually until for the next nine years, until it hits one hundred and seventy dollars a tonne in 2030. How do the other parties compare on this point of what the carbon price should be at the carbon tax?

KATHRYN HARRISON: So that really was a very big and important change in Canadian climate policy. I think it was the first time a government did the hard job. What was actually necessary to deliver emissions reductions? The Conservative Party opposed that liberal carbon pricing strategy in twenty nineteen and they've really come around in twenty twenty one. There's two parts to the federal government's carbon pricing plan, one for large industry and one for households. And the conservatives take a different tack on those. They indicate that they're open to matching that rising price to one hundred and seventy dollars per tonne for the large industrial emitters, although they have a caveat in there that indicates they're only willing to do that if the European Union and the U.S.. Adopt the same price level, so that's not a given because of the different approaches they might take with respect to household. So that's where the conservatives differ and they would freeze the price level at fifty dollars per tonne at the pump, unlike the liberal plan, which would continue to rise. And instead of giving the money back through tax rebates, which is what happens in federal carbon tax provinces, they would establish what they're calling a savings plan, a carbon savings plan, which seems to be a bit of a gimmick and less effective wear like a frequent flyer points. When you fuel up your vehicle, you would accumulate money that could be spent on low carbon investments. So that's a big difference. The NDP indicated they would follow carbon pricing. They don't say the same carbon price as the Liberals, but I assume they would.

AG: And the Greens?

KATHRYN HARRISON: Or the Greens. The Greens haven't provided a lot of detail. There's I'm not finding anything on their website. Some of them press releases indicate that they would continue to increase the carbon price, but they don't say by how much.

AG: All right. Now, Kathryn Harrison and Chris Ragan, you both referred to the conservatives changing, as we recall and have referred in this interview last election. The Conservatives adamantly argued hard against the carbon tax. You've both referred to the fact that now they are proposing a new version of it.

KATHRYN HARRISON: Canada's conservatives will scrap the federal carbon tax back, stop and work with the provinces to implement an innovative and national personal low carbon savings account. This will maintain a consumer price on carbon, but without one penny going to the government.

AG: Chris Regan, I think you heard Kathryn Harrison refer to this as the frequent flyer programme notion of what the conservatives are suggesting. What do you make of the conservatives position?

CHRIS RAGAN: Well, so I agree with Katherine's expression. There's a bit of a gimmick, I guess some gimmicks, maybe work. But but this is a bit of a gimmick. I think there's two things to point out here. And Catherine pointed out both of them. One is that for households, for ordinary people, like all of us, the conservative carbon price will not go beyond 50 dollars per ton, whereas the liberals one is going to go considerably further and therefore will do far more work in terms of reducing emissions. The second thing is that is how you decide to give the money back. So if the liberal the federal backstop takes place in your province because your province doesn't have its own policy, then about 90 percent of the revenue is given back in the form, you know, back to households currently in the form of a tax credit. And I think the form of that give back will change in time. But it's currently giving giving back, whereas the conservatives are saying it's not going to go into the government's hands at all. It'll go into this low carbon savings account, which you then get to spend on green or green ish things, which then opens up the question about how do you establish these accounts, how do you determine what you know are green things and what are not green things? And, you know, is this really just a gimmick? But to me, the bigger concern is that the carbon price itself won't go very high. And I think the conservatives are continuing with their view, which previous conservatives have had it as well, which is trying to draw a distinction between ordinary people who I think they argue shouldn't face the carbon price and the big bad corporate emitters who should face the carbon price. And I think that's unfortunate. And I think I'm not not a political scientist. I'm an economist. But my sense about about the political landscape is that for an issue as important as climate change, I think it's very valuable for all of us to see that we are all kind of facing the same sort of price on carbon, whether you're an individual household or whether you're a big firm. And again, the liberal plan does that.

AG: Katherine Harris, and what do you make of the conservative capping it off at fifty dollars at the top, but saying that they're going to make industry pay more?

KATHRYN HARRISON: Well, carbon taxes are not a popular popular thing politically. I think voters have been told in Canada for 30 years now that we could have our cake and eat it, too, that somebody else is causing this problem. And the thing about carbon taxes is, as Chris was saying, it brings it home that our household is also contributing to climate change. Only about half of Canada's greenhouse gas emissions come from large industrial sources and the rest come from home furnaces and driving vehicles and small businesses and the landfills that take our garbage and farms. And so I do think we need that carbon pricing at the household level as well. But it's not popular. And the conservatives have really made hay with that to date.

AG: Interesting on that point that the NDP has also criticised a Liberal plan essentially for doing the opposite. That is not putting enough burden on industry. This is Jadmeet Singh at a campaign event in Edmonton last week.

SOUNDCLIP

The climate crisis is real. It's impacting people in a serious way. And we are committed to fighting. And we've said to real specific things around that one, we want to take on the big polluters Justin Trudeau putting a price on pollution that exempts the biggest polluters. We want to take on the biggest polluters and we want to make sure we create good jobs.

AG: Well, Kathryn Harrison, if if I take what you said just a moment ago, you don't think that Mr. Singh's critique there is valid?

KATHRYN HARRISON: That's right. I don't see that the federal policies haven't exempted the biggest polluters. There is a kind of complicated, complicated scheme called Output's based allocation, where they only pay the carbon price above a certain level of emissions, but it still gives them the same incentives to reduce their emissions. And it's the equivalent of giving households back money through their tax returns. The policy still works and the big polluters are not being exempted.

AG: So they're not getting a free ride, as Mr. Singh suggests, in your opinion?

KATHRYN HARRISON: No, they're not.

AG: Chris Ragan, what do you make about this whole idea of making industry pay more? Is that just politically, you know, politically popular, say all those big, bad, horrible, dirty polluting companies were to go after them? I mean,

CHRIS RAGAN: it is politically popular. But I think, as I said before, I think it's really important that we all face an incentive to reduce emissions. And the the the complicated output based pricing that Catherine just referred to is indeed complicated. And this is a really important point of distinction, I think, between the Liberal Party plan and both the NDP and the Green plan. Is it the NDP and the Greens tend to oppose this output based pricing because it's viewed, as they often call it, exempting big business, which is not true, but it's often viewed as a as a subsidy to business and as an inappropriate assistance to business. But what I think the NDP and the Greens aren't aren't thinking enough about, in my view, is that if you're going to have a high carbon price in Canada, while our trading partners do not, then one of the things you don't want to do is reduce emissions in Canada by shutting down our business and having that business go across the border. So if you, you know, shut down your cement plants in Canada because of the carbon price, but the cement business just moves across the border to northern Pennsylvania, then the emissions just also migrate. And you haven't done anything globally, but you've borne a huge economic cost domestically. And that is I've probably already lost you with that explanation.

AG: No, not exactly, because I think, you know, if I hear what you're saying, essentially, that to be fair to the conservatives, that's what they're saying. The caveat is right.

CHRIS RAGAN: That's exactly right. So the conservatives, when they say we will consider raising the carbon price on heavy industry to 170, but only if the Americans and the Europeans do the same thing. That's the logic they're using now. The liberal response to that would be, well, we've designed the output based pricing system. So we are taking account of the fact that Americans and Europeans may have a lower carbon price than us. Another one that will get discussed much more in the future, I suspect, is border carbon adjustments. And Joe Biden has already been talking about this. And a broader carbon adjustment is basically a carbon tariff that you place on imported product at the border. Exactly to address the same issue, which is to make sure that, you know, our domestic samant and our domestic steel is not being undercut by foreign samant or foreign steel that comes from jurisdictions without a carbon price or with a lower carbon price.

AG: So I just want to bring you back to a point that you both that you both made with respect to the popularity of these taxes, levies, whatever you want to call them. It's almost as if, you know, we know Canadians don't like them, but if we want to save the planet, we've got to do something now. Chris, you mentioned at the beginning of the interview that you've done some modelling that shows we need to get to, you know, 200 dollars per tonne to to reach our Paris targets. And as you both mentioned, none of the parties are going that far. Can we actually get to where we say we want to be in the absence of a higher tax?

CHRIS RAGAN: Well, you can. So the point of that equal fiscal report was to say you don't need to use a carbon price if you don't want to for some reason. But any other package that doesn't have a carbon price at its core and a carbon price that rises to substantial levels will you can reduce the emissions that you want, but it will be much more costly for the economy. So this is this is the part that the economists tend to focus on, which is not just the effectiveness of the policy in terms of how effective it is at reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but how cost effective is it? And I guess my view and I think the view of most economists is if we have alternative policies in front of us and they can all actually achieve the same emissions reductions, but they have very different costs for the economy, then why would we intentionally use a higher cost policy? So what the liberals have done is they've said that the centrepiece of their policy will be a carbon price. That is a substantial carbon price, and it will rise to that 170 dollar number. But they have some other policies around the edges or the conservatives are going for a lower carbon price, but many more other, more expensive.

AG: Around the edges, I want to get to the Greens in a moment, Katherine Harris and what actually works, what kinds of regulations, incentives actually are most effective for cutting emissions and are the parties proposing them?

KATHRYN HARRISON: I think that carbon pricing works and regulation works. As Chris said, regulation can cost more but can achieve the same goals if you enforce those regulations. And I think that's what the conservatives are trying to do to substitute for the lower carbon price at the pump. They propose a renewable gas mandate that 15 percent of gas sold in Canada by 20 30 would have to be renewable. That's likely to be very costly because that's going to be hard to meet, but it's less visible. So that's an example of a regulatory strategy that could achieve a goal, but at a higher cost. I think zero emission vehicle mandates are ones we're likely to hear about. The conservatives have 30 percent zero emission vehicle mandate by 20 30 in their plan, the liberals have said they would require 100 percent zero emission vehicle sales by 2035.

, which is consistent with the IEA.

AG: So when we get to the environmentalist arguments by someone that we need to get ready for a zero future, I think it's fair to say the Green Party is is the boldest on this front.

Speaker 6: [sc].

The Green Party of Canada does not support the construction of one single new pipeline in Canada, that means no Trans Mountain pipeline. That means no LNG pipeline. That means no LNG facility. We do not support one single new pipeline in Canada.

AG: So the block hamakua also wants limits on fracking and an end to fossil fuel subsidies. So we have that spectrum. How realistic is that, Chris?

CHRIS RAGAN: Well, so here is as Kathryn said earlier, there's not a lot of details on the Green Party platform on online. But you do see that. You see that they're, you know, not in support of pipelines, not in support of fracking. I think this is a good example of of a policy objective that is very aggressive that I think they're trying to get 60 percent emissions reductions by 2030. So it's much more aggressive, actually, than any other party. But their policies, I think, would be very, very costly. So if you're going to deny the building of a pipeline, the evidence that I've seen on this suggests that it will actually have almost no impact on the quantity of oil produced in Canada, but it will actually make it much more costly to ship because right now that oil is being produced and it is being shipped by rail, which is probably environmentally more damaging than the pipeline. And if you're going to deny the construction of LNG, well, that LNG is is a product that would be shipped from B.C. almost certainly to Asia, where it would probably be used to displace coal in coal fired electricity plants globally, therefore reducing emissions so much. You got to take that that kind of global view and the cost effective view, and I would say that their policy is probably much more costly.

AG: There's so much to talk about in this, a very hefty topic. I want to thank you both for your time this morning. Thank you.

CHRIS RAGAN: Thank you for having us.

KATHRYN HARRISON: Your very welcome. Chris Ragan is an economist and director of the Maxwell School of Public Policy at McGill University and former chair of the Eco Fiscal Commission. And Kathryn Harrison is a professor of political science at UBC who specialises in climate policy. CBC News is next. Then, it's not often that the fresh new voice in literature is in her 70s, Vicki Leveau-Harvey took her difficult childhood and crafted the powerful award winning memoir, The Erratics. In a moment, we'll revisit her conversation with Matt Galloway. I'm Anthony Germain, The Current's back in six minutes.

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Vicki Laveau-Harvie on her memoir The Erratics

Guest: Vicki Laveau-Harvie

AG: Hello, I'm Anthony Germain and you're listening to The Current.

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AG: It's not often that a writer bursts onto the publishing scene and wins acclaim as an exciting new voice, when she is in her 70s. But that is precisely what happened to the Canadian-born author Vicki Laveau-Harvie, after her memoir The Erratics won Australia's prestigious Stella Prize in 2019. The book has since been published in North America, winning praise from readers and critics alike. Her memoir is the story of a daughter caring for an ailing father, in the shadow of a narcissistic mother. It's set against the backdrop of Alberta's Rocky Mountain foothills. Vicki Laveau-Harvie spoke with Matt Galloway last year. Here's their conversation.

MG: How does it feel to be a famous writer in your 70s?

VICKI LAVEAU-HARVIE: Well, I think famous is a pretty big word. This has been quite an unexpected development for somebody 10 years past retirement. And on top of that, I'm a bit of a hermit, so this is not the kind of thing that is usually at all on my radar.

MG: What has the experience been like? I mean, I've spoken with a number of writers and they always say, you write the book for yourself in some ways and you have no idea how it's going to be received when it goes out into the universe. And this goes out in the universe and people love it. What has that been like?

VICKI LAVEAU-HARVIE: Well, it's been an absolutely mind boggling and wonderful it's been a wonderful experience. But I didn't write the book thinking that it would go out into the universe because I've always read. But I'm not very good at sending things out into the universe. I love the process of writing. It's my great passion. And I just want to get it right on the page. And I have a lot of trouble seeing beyond that. And I very, very seldom send anything out into the universe. This was a bit of a quirk of fate and look what happened.

MG: Look what happened indeed. Just the title of the book is fascinating and you talk about it right at the very beginning. What is the Erratics mean? I mean, it can be taken a couple of different ways, I suppose.

VICKI LAVEAU-HARVIE: Well, yes, that's what I loved about it. It's actually one meaning is a geological one. It's a very large rock boulder that's been carried down by a glacier at some point. And there is a thing down through Alaska, Alberta into Montana called the Foothills Erratic train and these boulders that are called erratics are kind of scattered every couple of hundred kilometres or so. And they're just marooned there in landscapes where they don't belong. And I thought, what a wonderful metaphor or I mean, because erratic was the correct word from my childhood. And for a lot of the people that I was dealing with, I was driving down one of the roads in Alberta near my father's property. On one of the trips when I'd gone to Canada to try to help my sister with him and and with my mother and there was a big sign that said, Visit the Okotoks Erratic.. And I thought, you betcha.

MG: This memoir begins when you and your sister learnt that your mother has fallen and she shattered her hip and this sets off this chain reaction in your family. What happened?

VICKI LAVEAU-HARVIE: My sister and I had seen almost nothing of our parents for a couple of decades. My mother was very keen not to have us in their lives. And she was never a well person, but as she got older, her condition got worse. And that meant that there was very little contact. And I lived abroad. I lived in France for 25 years. My sister lived quite far from them in Canada. And it just meant that we were strangers, really and it was most unfortunate. But when my mother fell, my sister was contacted by someone outside the family saying, your father is in some strife and then if we could come and help. And we did.

MG: I want to talk about the situation, but you say that you were disowned and disinherited. What do you understand about why that was the case when it comes to your parents?

VICKI LAVEAU-HARVIE: Well, I think my father just wanted to do whatever it took to be able to live in some semblance of peace with his wife. And I think my mother really did not wish us anywhere near them because my mother never recognized my sister and me as separate people from her when we were children. We were kind of the means to an end. She wanted us to get good marks. She wanted us to do a number of things, but those achievements were really hers. She had a personality disorder and it meant her grip on reality was very tenuous. And I think when we grew up, we became teenagers and young adults and she realised that we were separate and that she could not control us as she had when we were small. She really came to feel great disaffection for us, not to use a stronger word and she really did not want, she did not want us around in any way.

MG: You say that in the wake of your mother's fall, you get a call saying that your father was in some distress. Your mother had been starving your father.

VICKI LAVEAU-HARVIE: Well, when we first saw him, when we went that first time, I actually thought he probably was terminally ill. He was extremely thin and he was very foggy. I mean, he he knew we were his children. I believe he recognized us, but I thought he probably had dementia and then he was probably dying. Now he actually wasn't. And his mind cleared once he began to eat properly. And he put on, I think, over 10 kilos in the three and a half weeks or so. We were there the first time. He had just not been eating. And I think it would have been a terrible situation if my mother had not been hospitalized, I shudder to think what would have happened to them.

MG: What else did you learn about the life that they had been living that shocked you well, while you and your sister were disconnected from them?

VICKI LAVEAU-HARVIE: Well, I can't see that lot that we learned shocked us because we were a little bit shockproof by that point. However, there were strange things they had told people. My mother had told people that she had no children or that she'd had one daughter and the daughter had died many years ago and that she was heartbroken. Or at one point she told someone in one of the hospitals where she was that she had had 18 children, but only one boy. And we had to deal on a daily basis with the administration of hospitals and various community service people and who were all just doing their job. They were doing the very best they could. But we had to face up two versions of ourselves, which had been projected by our mother, which had nothing to do with who we actually were. She had told people, including some of the neighbours near the property, that I had disappeared decades before, which was more or less true. I had gone to live in Europe, but I hadn't disappeared. And she told them that I'd gone to South America, that she'd sent Interpol to find me. I don't think you can actually send Interpol as an individual person. I don't believe that's possible. And the neighbours were very, very unwilling to open their door to me when I first went down to introduce myself, because I think they thought I was some kind of drug queen of Colombia and I really am not.

MG: Did she also, she faked her death, is that right?

VICKI LAVEAU-HARVIE: Well, she didn't do anything melodramatic. She'd actually accepted at one point when I was living in France, two teaching positions, one in a Canadian university and one in an American university for the upcoming semester. And she realized that she actually could not do both of them and she had to get out of one of them. So the obvious solution for her seemed to be to write a letter and sign it with my father's name and say that she had died. And the terrible thing was that a friend of mine was on that campus where she had taught the year before and where she had decided not to go back and there was an obituary in the student newspaper. This friend called me and was so upset for me and I had all kinds of trouble convincing her that my mother was most probably still with us, even though I had no means of knowing exactly what was going on.

MG: You write and I want to talk about how how you write these stories in terms of the humour that you managed to find in them, but it must have been incredibly hurtful as you're going through all of this stuff.

VICKI LAVEAU-HARVIE: Well, at the time, the period that I write about in the book, I wouldn't say it was hurtful at that point. This is actually a discussion I've had a number of times with people about what happens when you write a memoir. So many people have said to me, and I think many people with a painful story of their own have said to me, was it cathartic to write this memoir? My answer to that is no. It had nothing to do with catharsis. I don't believe you can write as well as you would like a book of this nature unless you've already found a path to catharsis somewhere else before, I think you have to lay your ghosts before you can actually do the work and you have to with memoir, come to grips with the question of memory and truth. And how do you navigate? Those are difficult waters to sail through and I think if you are gripped by the emotions that overtook you in these traumatic situations, that you're probably not giving your best attention to how to best put that on the page.

MG: Is that what allows you to use humour in telling some of these stories? There are there's points in the book where it mean it is, you know, put it down because you're laughing so hard funny.

VICKI LAVEAU-HARVIE: Well, thank you for saying that. That's a very nice thing for me to hear, because occasionally I would have to stop writing and laugh a little bit myself. And I think this is what attracted me was that even in the dark moments, there's always a chink of light.

MG: Before you became strange, what was your mother like when you were growing up?

VICKI LAVEAU-HARVIE: I think I knew from a very young age that my mother was not like other people's mothers. I think at a young age, I also stopped endeavouring to communicate my distress and some of the situations where I found myself to people outside the family because people could not hear what I was saying. The situation was just too uncommon to be accepted by people when I would try to explain to them what it was that was bothering me.

MG: Was it difficult for you to describe I mean, what was going on?

VICKI LAVEAU-HARVIE: Well, it's funny. I have very big blanks in my memory, which I think has served me well. I suspect there were moments of greater trauma that I've perhaps blanked out. I've done a lot of work on myself to recover a lot of. And to make sure what I actually remember about my childhood. But I do have blanks. My sister seems to have fewer. And I think that is perhaps a more traumatic experience, actually. She remembers perhaps more physical expression of my mother's frustrations and difficulties than I do. I know that happened, but I think it was more the psychological problem of dealing with someone who was completely unpredictable and who made huge demands on you as a child and to feel that you were only acceptable as long as you met the demands.

MG: You describe her as somebody who knows the world is out to get her. And you say that she was, in your words, a kind of flesh and blood pyramid scheme, a human Ponzi.

VICKI LAVEAU-HARVIE: Yes. Yes.

MG: What does that mean?

VICKI LAVEAU-HARVIE: Well, I think if I understand a Ponzi scheme and I'm not a financial person, but I think you invest in something and you believe in it and once you started doing that, you're hooked. You can't actually backtrack because you are knitted into the fabric of that scheme. There's no getting out of it. And I believe that is perhaps the situation my father was in. He loved her very much and she was brilliant. And she was a beautiful woman. And I think he was he remained in thrall to her. And I think he was just. Subsumed by this world she created, she told fantastical stories and she was a consummate storyteller. So you would believe outrageous things when she was saying it.

MG: She also said to you, and I want to get this right. She said, I'll get you and you won't even know I'm doing it. And then you tell the story of when she cut off your ponytail.

VICKI LAVEAU-HARVIE: That's right. I was about 15 or maybe 14 and I had very long hair. And I just said something about how I was thinking maybe I should get my hair cut. And she was sewing. I believe she was doing something with her sewing scissors. And I think this made her angry because she spent a lot of time making sure my hair was the way she wanted it. And she just came up behind me and said. You want short hair? Let's give you short hair, and she just pulled on my ponytail and sheared this off very close to my scalp. And I remember nothing after that moment for quite some time, so I think I must've been very shocked. And I remember up to the point where I heard the scissors close behind my head, close to my scalp. And I don't remember afterwards, I can't remember what happened after that. But that was the kind of unpredictability that I'm talking about. It was quite frightening.

MG: Do you think she loved you?

VICKI LAVEAU-HARVIE: You know, I don't think it was, I don't think that's actually a question I can ask myself. I think she may have. I don't know what kind of feelings she had. I think she may have had affection for me and for my sister as extensions of herself, but I don't think she recognized us for individual people that she could be attached to for who they were. You know, I don't believe that was open to her.

MG: What about for you? I mean, after she dies, you wanted to keep some for China. There's there's a vase that you keep and some other things. Is there I mean, given what you've gone through, you could imagine that you are ,you're on the other side of the world away from her, but was there still some sort of bond that was there, despite everything that you went through and that you were put through?

VICKI LAVEAU-HARVIE: I think the strange thing, Matt, is that I realize that in a strange way, what she visited upon me was not personal in a certain way. I could have been any child that was born into that family and I would have come in for the same treatment. It wasn't because I was me. It was because she was the person she was. And I mean, I was extremely marked by my childhood, of course. That's why you write a book about it. But I knew that in a strange way, it was not personal. It was because any child in that situation with her would have frustrated her so severely and disappointed her so severely that they would have had the same treatment I did. It wasn't because I was a failure as a child. It was because she was the person she was with the handicaps that she was carry. And in some ways, I felt towards the end of her life. Something close to compassion, because I thought. Here I was and here was my sister and we were trying to take this person's freedom from her. And she was resisting this because we knew she could not live in the real world, with hope coming to great harm herself and without bringing great harm to our follow there and I felt a lot of grief for what she would perhaps have been feeling at that point.

MG: When you and this goes back to the idea of what happens when you read a book and it goes out into the universe. It's now out there and people love this book. When you speak with readers about the book and, you know, in the old days, you'd meet them face to face, before this pandemic and now maybe it's virtually, what do they say to you about why they feel connected to what you've read?

VICKI LAVEAU-HARVIE: Well, this is something that flabbergasted me, Matt. And the first people who said to me, who came up to a book signing or an event and said to me, you've written my story. I was so surprised. I was writing my story and I hadn't realized how universal these themes were. And it's ridiculous that I did not realize that because I'm writing about old age, I'm writing about family tensions, I'm writing about mental illness in families, about siblings trying to understand each other, about all sorts of things like this, about finding your way in the world and everybody goes through these things to some degree. And I had a wonderful woman come up to me after a talk I did, and she said to me, both of my parents had narcissistic personality disorder, which is what my mother had and I said boy, you have really got to write a book, girl because you trump what I did. You better write a book and her husband said to me, that's what I've been telling her.

MG: You are far away from the place that you grew up in and I mean, there's a part in the book in which you compare Australia and Canada through the music of AC/DC and Nickelback, which is revealing. Do you want to just briefly explain what the difference is?

VICKI LAVEAU-HARVIE: Well, Nickelback, they're pretty ernest, aren't they?

MG: And AC/DC puts it right into your face.

VICKI LAVEAU-HARVIE: AC/DC aren't.

MG: What do you love about the landscape in the place that you grew up in? There's a line in the book, I have to get this right. You said if Jesus had been born on a ranch, kind of this is where he would have been born and this is what you write as you're driving and you see the Rockies kind of on the horizon. What do you love about that Alberta landscape?

VICKI LAVEAU-HARVIE: I think I love the sky, the space. It's so big, you know? I mean, I now live in sort of subtropical kind of climate and the air is softer and things are not as clear. When you get off the plane in Calgary, the air is sharp and clear. You can see forever. The sky is huge. And there are those wonderful foothills and then the Rockies. And that's the landscape around that part of southern Alberta, south of Calgary, that I saw when I was a very small child until I was about seven. We lived in the little towns on the oil fields in southern Alberta. And that is the landscape I saw. And it's where I would go with my father sometimes because he was a fly fisherman. He loved to fish. And I would see the Sheep River. I would see the foothills and I would see the seasons. And I actually had the feeling that that landscape nurtured me in a way that my family was not able to.

MG: Do you miss it?

VICKI LAVEAU-HARVIE: Oh, yes, of course, of course. I love Australia. I really love living here and this is my home, but I think all of us have a landscape where we were marked by something. There's some beauty that marked our heart at some point when we were still malleable. And when I get off a plane in Calgary and I look west, that's where my heart lives.

MG: This is a wonderful book, and it's a real pleasure to talk to you, Vicki. Thank you.

VICKI LAVEAU-HARVIE: Thank you Matt. Thank you.

AG: Matt Galloway spoke with Vicki Laveau-Harvie in November. Picking up on her love of the foothills, here's The Rural Alberta Advantage with Bad Luck Again.

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AG: That's our program for today. Stay tuned for Unforked, the summer series looking at the culture and politics of food. Today host Samira Mohyeddin asks how do you honour a beloved food tradition that's steeped in the slave trade? I'm Anthony Germain. Thanks for listening to The Current.

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Monday August 23, 2021 Full Transcript

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