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The Current Transcript for January 3, 2025

Host: Rebecca Zandbergen

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

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JULIE NYSTROM: How dare you take out our young people? How dare you? This guy was going everywhere, and he didn't care who he took out.

REBECCA ZANDBERGEN: Thousands of Canadians die each year from the toxic drug crisis. At the epicentre, British Columbia. In half an hour, how one renowned dealer is getting drugs into the hands of Vancouver teens and why one BC mom went to extraordinary lengths to try to track him down. That story in our documentary, Everybody Loves Jay. Also this morning, if you thought the fight for women's rights had mostly been won, think again.

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ELIZABETH RENZETTI: Internalized misogyny is a very, very powerful force. And if we could harness it, we would not need fossil fuels.

RZ: Hear my conversation with author Elizabeth Renzetti about all she says is left to do and how to bring women together to do it. That's in an hour. But we begin with stories of progress. Good morning. I'm Rebecca Zandbergen, and this is The Current.

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FIX THE NEWS

Guest: Angus Hervey

RZ: The news headlines sometimes feel relentlessly grim. 2024 was no different. If anything, it may have felt worse. From a war in Gaza that's killed tens of thousands to more floods and storms accelerated by climate change, to the rising tide of authoritarianism and disinformation. It can be difficult to find progress amidst all that. But that is what Angus Hervey does every day. He's the editor of a website, a newsletter called Fix the News. It's just published a recap of the year that was, a collection of 86 stories of progress from the past 12 months. Angus Hervey, good morning.

ANGUS HERVEY: Hi. Thanks for having me.

RZ: I understand the subheadline on your list of these 86 stories of progress from the last year is not everything that happened this year was terrible. Why is it important to remember that?

ANGUS HERVEY: Well, I think for most people, 2024 really did kind of feel terrible. And I think maybe a fun way to make sense of that is to look at some of the words of the year. The Oxford University Press chose brain rot. Australia's Macquarie Dictionary chose enshittification, and the Economist chose kakistocracy, which means governmental rule by the very worst kind of people, which I think says it all. I personally think maybe the word of the year should have been crisis. Crisis in Gaza. Crisis in Ukraine. Climate crisis. Democracy in crisis. Productivity crisis. Immigration crisis. Not to mention the information crisis, the crisis in media, crisis of meaning. And then my favourite, the simultaneous occurrence of several catastrophic events at once, which people are calling the polycrisis. So I think it seemed like last year, that there have never been so many bad things happening in so many places at the same time. But what's really interesting is that if you look at the underlying drivers of progress and big global stories of change, that there are actually a lot of reasons for hope.

RZ: Okay. Tell us, give us an example of some of those, because that's what you spend your career doing now, is looking for these stories of hope. And by the way, not just good news stories, right, stories of progress. What's the difference?

ANGUS HERVEY: Yeah, well, I think that's a pretty important distinction, that there's a world of difference between projects and what we typically call good news, because good news is usually what gets tacked on to the end of the bulletin. You know, the heartwarming story about the lost dog that finds its way home after three years or a community coming together to repaint the elderly neighbour's house. Those stories are supposed to make us feel better, but they always come at the end of 20 minutes of war and crisis and fighting and death and division. And so they often have the opposite effect because they feel small and insignificant because they're presented as the only bright spots in an otherwise seemingly very dark world. Progress is something else very different. It's the story of diseases being eliminated, entire species being brought back from the edge of extinction, or hundreds of millions of people getting access to electricity for the first time. So there are profound transformations that reshape human possibility, but they're harder to report because they happen gradually over years or decades. They don't kind of fit into the news cycle.

RZ: I have an example here of one of those kinds of stories from the world of global health. Have a listen.

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NEWS CLIP: Some good news from the World Health Organization, which has announced that malaria has been completely eradicated in Egypt. That's a goal the country has been trying to achieve for the past century.

RZ: Tell us about this story. Why does it matter?

ANGUS HERVEY: Well, 2024 actually brought a number of extraordinary victories against some of humanity's oldest diseases. So the country of Jordan became the first country ever to eliminate leprosy, yeah, the disease mentioned in the Bible, and India, Vietnam and Pakistan conquered trachoma, a leading infectious cause of infectious blindness. Brazil and Timor-Leste defeated elephantiasis, which is this awful tropical disease that causes a swelling of the limbs. And each of these victories freed the hundreds of thousands of families from diseases that have haunted humanity since ancient times. But I think the big one, which you played in that clip there, was that in the fight against malaria, two nations made history: Egypt, home to 100 million people, and Cabo Verde, the first country in sub-Saharan Africa to eliminate disease in 50 years. Egypt has had malaria I think for at least 8000 years. They found evidence of it in the mummy of Tutankhamen. So the fact that we have now eliminated that after 8000 years is actually extraordinary. And even more significantly, 17 African nations launched their first malaria vaccine programs in 2024, including Nigeria, which has the world's heaviest burden. And in December 2024, the World Health Organization reported that global malaria deaths are finally falling again after the setbacks of the pandemic.

RZ: We've got another story that you're highlighting. I just want to run through a couple here. This is Austria's Environment and Climate Minister. Have a listen to this one.

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LEONORE GEWESSLER: I know I will face opposition in Austria on this, but I'm convinced that this is the time to adopt this law.

RZ: What law is she talking about?

ANGUS HERVEY: Well, 2024 marked this really dramatic turning point in Europe's approach to nature and restoration. And as you heard there, in June, after months of fierce opposition and political drama, that Austrian minister defied her government and helped the EU to pass a new law requiring the restoration of 20% of EU lands and seas by 2030. This represents the most ambitious ecosystem restoration law ever passed by a major economy, and it signals a historic turning point. It's the moment when Europe decided to repair, not just to preserve, its natural world.

RZ: So I'm curious, when you talk about, you know, we need to focus on these stories of progress, who is not doing the focusing? Because we've heard media reports here. So certainly, the media, you know, are doing these stories to some extent.

ANGUS HERVEY: I think that is true, but what often happens is they kind of get lost in just the blizzard of death, disaster and division, which really constitutes the majority of what makes up the news. So, for example, the story of Egypt's eliminating malaria, I think that appeared in the BBC and Al-Jazeera. It certainly didn't make headlines in any Canadian newspapers or The New York Times. And if it does make it into a newspaper, it appears very far down below the line or in sort of the back pages. It doesn't make headline news. And I think the other reason for it is that those stories don't stick. We all remember the stories about someone crashing a vehicle into an innocent crowd of pedestrians. But the story of a country eliminating a horrible tropical disease doesn't have the same kind of resonance in our minds for a very good reason, which is that we're all descended from a long line of scaredy cats. So all of the people who remember the good news stories and didn't pay attention to the bad news ones didn't pass on their genes.

RZ: So who's responsible then if it's important for us to remember these stories of progress and to focus on them as much as we are interested in looking at the bad news? Does the media need to train the audience or does the audience just need to be interested in following these stories more?

ANGUS HERVEY: As always with these things, it's usually a combination of both. I think a lot of people like to blame the news for not reporting more stories of progress. But I think the blame is equally to lie with us as the audience. We have trained media organizations to report good news, sorry, to report bad news because those are the headlines that we click on. And so when we're scrolling through our feeds or, you know, we're discussing the news of the day, by concentrating on the stories of destruction and division, we signal to media organizations that we want more of that. And so I think there is an equal responsibility between both the suppliers and the consumers of that news to try and change the narrative. And that doesn't necessarily mean, you know, singing Kumbaya and holding hands and saying, let's just only talk about the good things that are happening, but at least some kind of balance. I think right now, the balance of bad news to good news, or sorry, bad news to stories of progress is something like 1000 to 1. It’s just overwhelming.

RZ: I mean, part of the responsibility of the media, I would think, is to place good news stories in the context, or stories of progress, rather, in the context of what's happening globally and, you know, the trends that we are seeing. For instance, the UN says, you know, the number of displaced people has increased every year for 12 years. We know violence against women is still on the rise in a number of countries. We see extreme poverty. I know the UN has said that bringing extreme poverty down has been at a near standstill in the last decade. I mean, there are these sorts of bigger stories that persist that are still important to tell, I would argue.

ANGUS HERVEY: I would argue the same, but I also think that they should be placed in context. Let me give you an example. It's a story of what happened in the Amazon forest in 2024, which matters a lot more for the future of humanity than anything Elon Musk does with his rockets. And if you saw anything about the Amazon in 2024, it was probably about the region's record-breaking drought, which turned mighty Rivers to trickles, and we saw the worst fires in almost two decades. But amidst that crisis, something remarkable also happened, which is that deforestation plummeted by 30% from the previous year, dropping to its lowest level in nine years. And under Lula, rates of deforestation in the Amazon have now fallen by more than half in the last two years. And if those trends continue, we're going to see the lowest level of deforestation ever recorded in that region in 2025, and that matters enormously. So while climate change poses growing threats to this vital ecosystem, 2024 proved that strong leadership and governance can still turn the tide. And I think few environmental victories in 2024 mattered more for the planet's future.

RZ: I just want to change gears, because one of the things you have said is that Generation Z is not doomed. Tell us why that merits a separate story on your list.

ANGUS HERVEY: Well, I think it's been a really popular narrative in the past, not just 12 months, but, you know, it's been a popular narrative for a number of years now, this idea that Gen Z is doomed to anxiety and poverty. And the reality is actually far more hopeful. First of all, for a start, when you're talking about Gen Z, we are talking about the world. And in emerging economies where four fifths of young people in the world live, that generation is dramatically better off than their parents, healthier, more educated, more connected. And in rich countries as well, Gen Z is kind of defying the doom. The wages are actually rising faster than older workers. Youth unemployment is at record lows and they're pursuing new kinds of skills. And 2024 I think also marked a turning point in addressing some of their biggest challenges, because 19 US states restricted phones in schools, and here in Australia, we became the first country to ban social media for under 16s. And France announced that starting on the 1st of January this year, there's going to be a nationwide school phone ban. So after years of hand-wringing about smart phones and mental health, it looks like we're finally starting to see real action to protect young people's well-being.

RZ: You are interested in progress, and yet, I know you felt particularly rattled after the US election and wrote about it and said that you were shaken. Tell me a little bit about what you wrote and why you wanted to address it in that way.

ANGUS HERVEY: I was shaken. I think I just was not expecting it. I was not expecting that to happen when the country had had so many years to take the full measure of Donald Trump and to still vote someone with that kind of character and power. It came as a shock to me. But I think what it also reminded me was that good news doesn't just happen automatically, and the moral arc doesn't just bend naturally towards progress. It actually takes good people to fight for years, sometimes decades, to turn those kinds of stories around. And it was a reminder maybe that the bedtime stories aren't true, that, you know, the good guys don't always win and that, you know, the bullies don't always get their comeuppance. But I think now that the dust has settled, it's a reminder that stories of progress happen in many different places in a lot of different ways. And it was a reminder too to try and look beyond the headlines for those kinds of stories over the next four years. I think there are going to be many.

RZ: I should point out, though, I mean, it was a Democratic election, and the majority of those thought this was a story of progress. I mean, if… not everyone subscribes to your same way of thinking too.

ANGUS HERVEY: Absolutely. And I think that comes down to your definition of progress. My political leanings are probably… I describe myself as a liberal. And that's because I believe the world is fundamentally unfair. I think that disadvantaged groups should have more advantage than they're given. But I also think that if you're looking at the bigger story of progress, there are some things that we can agree on. And I think everybody can agree that less deforestation is progress and that disease has been eliminated is progress and that people becoming healthier and wealthier is progress as well, and rights being extended to all groups constitutes progress. And if we disagree about that definition, then it is very difficult to have a conversation where we head in the same direction.

RZ: What do you hope for the media? I mean, if you feel as though there's this wide disparity of stories of progress versus just bad news, which direction would you like to see the media go and how might it achieve that?

ANGUS HERVEY: I think I'd love to just see more professional reporting on what's going right. I think that those stories can be incredibly compelling. There are some incredibly compelling stories about what's going right with climate, about what's going right with school feeding programs around the world. There were some really amazing human rights victories in 2024. And so while the headlines focussed on conflict and catastrophe, all of these remarkable things happened in the background. Solar energy reaching an unprecedented scale, a year when a half a billion children received school meals and breakthrough treatments gave new hope to HIV patients. And I just wonder whether great narrative, excellent journalism and, you know, compelling stories, whether those skills could be applied to those kinds of stories. I think there's a market for it.

RZ: Tell me a little bit more about the things you just mentioned, the efforts we saw in climate change and human rights.

ANGUS HERVEY: Yeah. So climate change is a… this is a really interesting one where you really have to be able to hold two ideas in your head at once that we are not moving fast enough, and yet we are also moving faster than anyone predicted even a few years ago. So 2024 obviously brought sobering reminders of how quickly temperatures are rising and increasing numbers of disasters. But it also showed that we're accelerating solutions faster than anyone predicted. Global solar installations reached an astounding 660GW in 2024. That's up 50% from last year. The pace is staggering now. So what once took a month now happens in just 12 hours. Solar has become not only the cheapest form of new electricity in history, it’s the fastest growing energy technology ever deployed. And 2024 might also be remembered as the year that the energy transitioned the tipping point in China, because it's the world's largest energy consumer and it reached its wind and solar targets six years early. And electric vehicles have now captured more than half the car market, which is a decade ahead of schedule. Those implications are seismic. For the first time, China's oil demand looks like it might be falling now, which forced OPEC to slash the forecasts I think something like five times this year. So the chickens really are finally coming home to roost. The clean energy revolution is happening faster than even its biggest advocates predicted.

RZ: How did you get into this, this line of thinking, this line of work? I mean, is it because you were feeling not hopeful? I mean, does this bring you hope doing this?

ANGUS HERVEY: Well, as a lot of people, as a lot of people end up doing, this is my own form of medicine. I'm a recovering news junkie. I have been a voracious consumer of news I think for as long as I can remember, certainly all the way through high school and into, you know, higher education and up until I was about 30 years old. But what that reading that news did, it just made me incredibly despondent about what was happening in the world. And then about a decade ago, I read Steven Pinker's Better Angels of Our Nature, and it was like a light bulb going off. And I remember thinking to myself, well, if those are the sort of… if that's what the data is saying, then there must be news stories reporting this stuff out there. And as soon as I started to look, I started finding thousands of them. And really, so the last decade has been about improving that practice, getting better at finding those stories. And in 2024, we found not just some of the stories that I mentioned to you here, but hundreds of thousands of stories from all over the world about progress in various different areas. So this continues to be my medicine, and it's given me a much more nuanced view on what's happening in the world. I don't believe we're doomed. I certainly don't believe everything's going to turn out all right, but I feel like something in between, which feels like a much more realistic prognosis than the views that I used to have.

RZ: And just, I mean, aside from Fix the News, your website, where do you turn for these stories and if they do exist out there?

ANGUS HERVEY: Well, as a well-trained elder millennial, as someone who's been reading the Internet for as long as I can remember now, I think what I've done is over the course of the last 10 years, I've discovered some interesting places on the Internet where I can find this kind of news. What's really important is to always have it validated. You know, obviously, in an age where it's difficult to trust what you read online, it's very important that the sources are valid, that they're correct. So we do a lot of work. A lot of work goes into that between myself and my team. But really, a lot of… more and more, a lot of that reporting comes from non-English speaking media, and that's where we're getting a lot of that good news from. So it's a practice that we've developed over the course of the decade.

RZ: Okay. We hope you keep doing it. Angus Hervey, thank you so much for talking to us this morning.

ANGUS HERVEY: Thanks very much for having me.

RZ: Angus Hervey is the editor of Fix the News, a website and newsletter that report on stories of progress. He's also a co-host of their podcast called Hope is a Verb. The CBC News is next, and then.

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SPEAKER: He really made himself seem like he was a very humane person. And like I feel like that kind of blinds you to the fact that he's selling drugs to underage people and children and ruining their lives.

RZ: Many Vancouver teens say they're getting their drugs from a man named Jay. He supplies them with whatever they want, from alcohol and weed to cocaine, ecstasy and Percocets. Coming up in six minutes, a BC mother hires a private eye to follow him in our documentary, Everybody Loves Jay. I'm Rebecca Zandbergen, and you're listening to The Current.

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EVERYBODY LOVES JAY – DOC

RZ: I'm Rebecca Zandbergen, and you're listening to The Current. The province of British Columbia is in its eighth year of a public health emergency. Toxic drugs are the leading cause of death for people between the ages of 10 and 59. And in efforts to combat that crisis, police in the province recently announced they had uncovered the biggest and most sophisticated drug lab in Canadian history. The lab was discovered east of Kamloops. The RCMP said it contained enough fentanyl and precursor chemicals to produce 95 million lethal doses of that drug. What we've heard less about is how these drugs can end up in the hands of teenagers. The Current’s Enza Uda has been speaking with Vancouver teens. Here's her documentary, Everybody Loves Jay. And a warning, this story contains explicit language.

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ENZA UDA: In September of 2023, a mom in British Columbia sets up a secret meeting. It's a crisp fall evening. Julie Nystrom drives into an empty parking lot of a park in the heart of East Vancouver.

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JULIE NYSTROM: Here, it was dark. Just felt a little bit off. You know, felt a little bit clandestine, only because I'd never met police officers in the dark. You know, it was just me.

ENZA UDA: She has crucial information that she needs to share. Her daughter is in trouble.

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JULIE NYSTROM: Honestly, I might have seemed a little bit odd, but I didn't care. I mean, I would have met them on the moon if, you know, if they needed me to meet them in the moon.

ENZA UDA: And as police drive away, she prays that the information she passes on to them is enough to kick start an investigation. This isn't the first time Julie has contacted the police. Her 17-year-old daughter, Beth, is hooked on prescription pills, most likely counterfeit. And Julie has learned something about the grown man who's supplying them. Her daughter is adamant she doesn't want Mom getting involved.

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JULIE NYSTROM: She would threaten me, saying, don't you dare do anything about this. I'll never talk to you again. Because she was terrified.

ENZA UDA: Terrified of what would happen if the man she knows as Jay finds out.

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JULIE NYSTROM: This is a scumbag piece of shit drug dealer. How dare you take out our young people? How dare you? Because this was bigger and more ferocious than I even knew. This guy was going everywhere, and he didn't care who he took out.

ENZA UDA: On that initial call with police, they asked if her daughter would be willing to talk to them. She tells them absolutely not. There's no way she would. But they make it clear they need details.

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JULIE NYSTROM: Give us something. We need something. I said, okay, I'll get you something.

ENZA UDA: Frustrated by what she sees as the police's inaction, Julie would come up with a plan to catch Jay. But first, she would need money, a sleuth and her daughter's help.

[Sound of a telephone ringing]

ENZA UDA: Julie's daughter, Beth, lives here in an old high rise. Beth isn't her real name. We aren't identifying her because she fears speaking out could impact her safety. She's agreed to tell me about Jay and her addiction.

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BETH: I've thought about like why I was like so in deep at a certain point. And I think that a big reason was because how easy it was for me to access them and like how like literally, it was just a contact on my phone and he'd come like two blocks from my house.

ENZA UDA: Over a period of just a couple of years from the time she's 15, he supplies her with whatever she wants.

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BETH: I accessed shrooms, I accessed alcohol, I accessed weed, I accessed vapes, I accessed acid, I accessed Molly, I accessed cocaine, I accessed Percocets.

ENZA UDA: Percocets are painkillers, a combination of oxycodone and acetaminophen, mollies, MDMA, or ecstasy.

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BETH: I accessed Xanax.

ENZA UDA: Xanax is a benzodiazepine used to treat anxiety, also known as bars because of their shape.

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BETH: And I also accessed 2C-B.

ENZA UDA: What's that?

BETH: 2C-B is like, from what he told me, it was like a mix of like Molly and acid, where you, super euphoric, and you can be dancing all night. And like he told me…

ENZA UDA: So she's talking about a designer drug. It's a synthetic psychedelic. 2C-Bs could also be a revolving cocktail of MDMA, ketamine, meth and opioids like fentanyl. It's also known as pink cocaine. You actually don't know what's in it. Part of an increasingly unpredictable and dangerously toxic drug supply. So this dealer, Jay, is telling Beth he's got 2C-Bs on his menu.

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BETH: So when he told us that, we were like, okay. And then he told us the price, and they were $25 a pill, and we were like, okay, no. And then he gave us one for free. So yeah.

ENZA UDA: Beth and other teens I've spoken to say Jay gives them free drugs to try out. You're also rewarded with goody bags for every referral. He'll tape a small brown bag of pills like Molly or Xanax to a pack of cigarettes. And these bars these kids are getting from Jay have the Xanax logo, but they have rough edges like they were pressed in a makeshift lab rather than a pharmaceutical factory. Beth has built a tolerance and is taking up to eight pills a day and feeling sick.

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BETH: When I started realizing, I'm like, okay, this is like getting out of hand, my like, Xanax addiction. I just kind of ghosted him for three weeks. He would text me and be like, hey, I miss you. Like, what's going on? And I'm like, okay, I'm just not going to answer because I just want to give myself a little break.

ENZA UDA: Then one afternoon, she's hanging out at home and her friend wants to buy some weed. So her pal texts Jay, and she gives him a location to drop it off.

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BETH: And because he knew that she was caught in my house because of where she was meeting him, he slipped in four Xanax for free in her bag.

ENZA UDA: A gift for Beth.

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BETH: Yeah. I was like, wow, he's going to like give me more right now for free so I can come back. And that's what I did. I came back.

ENZA UDA: As a kid, Julie says her daughter was a firecracker. She was great at a lot of things, but in baseball, she was phenomenal. In an old video, you see a 12 year old Beth sporting a helmet, green jersey and knee high white socks.

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[bat hitting a ball and cheering]

JULIE NYSTROM: My daughter was a standout. She was absolutely hysterical, funny.

ENZA UDA: But at around 14, she notices changes and suspects Beth is using drugs.

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JULIE NYSTROM: Jeez! You know, like I always smoked a pot of bed in high school too. Like I wasn't too anxious. It was…

ENZA UDA: Julie is wearing a hoodie and jeans. She's in her 50s. She's tough and doesn't suffer fools lightly. So when she finds vapes around the house, she's immediately suspicious.

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JULIE NYSTROM: You know, I said to her, where are you getting the money for vapes? Because they're expensive. She was getting them for free from this guy named Jay. All of us are getting them for free. I'm like, really? So that's when I knew. That's where my gut as a parent understood that this isn't the end. He's not giving these vapes out to anybody for free. There's a reason why you're getting shit for free.

ENZA UDA: Over time, she sees Beth's life unravel.

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JULIE NYSTROM: Not going to school, not waking up, mood swings. Then I started to get really, really afraid.

ENZA UDA: I wanted to know more about the man who's dealing drugs to kids. I've spoken to eight Vancouver area teenagers about Jay. One of them is as young as 13 when she meets him for the first time. We're not identifying them because they fear going public with their names could jeopardize their safety, but they provide a rare window into the secret lives of teenagers. They're recent grads from four different high schools. Same dealer.

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SPEAKER: He was about 5 8 to 5 10. Pretty big guy. Big eyes, very bulging out of his head eyes. Indian. What else?

SPEAKER: South Asian.

SPEAKER: South Asian.

ENZA UDA: They say Jay looks middle-aged, possibly in his 40s, a stocky man with a tightly shaved buzzcut and a visible scar on the side of his head. And they all describe the same kind of personal service: Delivering drugs near their homes and by their schools. A lot of what they tell me isn't a surprise. He catered to a young person in my life too.

ENZA UDA: A few of them have come together to tell me about their experiences.

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SPEAKER: That's crazy. Yeah. That's a year ago now.

ENZA UDA: They pull up text messages, recalling dates and other details.

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SPEAKERS: Everybody loved Jay. Everybody, like, everybody loved Jay. Like completely so. Like I know people in North Van who knew him, West end, New West Surrey, North and South Burnaby, everywhere. Like I've called him and he's been in Chilliwack, so he like got around.

ENZA UDA: When doing his drop offs, Jay often shares details about his life.

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SPEAKERS: He really made himself seem like he was a very humane person and like, I'm sorry, I can't make it today. I got a family barbecue. Like it's Mother's Day. And I feel like that kind of blinds you to the fact that he's selling drugs to underage people and children. And children are ruining their lives.

ENZA UDA: But at this point, he's their plug, their safe source. They're even believing he's looking out for them. He assures them his drugs are clean.

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SPEAKER: He was a really good shepherd, and we were his sheep. That's how it felt because he had so many of us.

ENZA UDA: After more than a year of buying drugs off of Jay, things get scary for Beth, and she decides to confide in her mom.

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BETH: I had a bad high. I was like not feeling good. It was like a school day, and I was just like, yeah, I've been like doing Xanax.

JULIE NYSTROM: It was like being in the centre of a cyclone and not knowing where the off switch was. And, you know, and that experience that she had with the Xanax that she thought she took, and she started going on the nod and throwing up and knew she was in trouble. And then she said 'I phoned him and asked him, did you put anything in this stuff? And of course, he denied it.

INSPECTOR PHIL: Police have seized the items in front of you. This includes 72…

ENZA UDA: Just before Christmas in 2022, the Vancouver police hold a news conference.

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INSPECTOR PHIL: Counterfeit oxycocet, which is a generic version of Percocet.

ENZA UDA: Inspector Phil heard the officer in charge is standing behind bags upon bags of white pills, powder and guns.

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INSPECTOR PHIL: Fentanyl, methamphetamine, MDMA or ecstasy, benzodiazepine.

ENZA UDA: They say the counterfeit Percocets are laced with fentanyl. Drug testing services are also finding traces of fentanyl in some of the Xanax.

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BETH: He would show us like scans and reports saying they were clean. A lot of them weren't, though. A lot of them were fake, or they would be old reports and not the new stuff that he was giving us. But he would show us reports, and when you're that young and don't really know any better, you believe it.

ENZA UDA: And then at the end of the school year, in 2023, word starts to spread about a fatal overdose.

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INSPECTOR PHIL: It was a big thing, and Jay was kind of who they would get their pills off of, at least, at least some of them. But they definitely got their Percocet and their, and their Xanax off of him.

ENZA UDA: He's talking about a young girl in Burnaby, a suburb east of Vancouver.

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INSPECTOR PHIL: We ended up finding out one day at the end of school, like last period before everyone had gotten out, that this girl who used to go to school with everyone had basically been found dead on her floor, overdosing on a shit ton of substances. After that, a lot of people…

ENZA UDA: The BC Coroners Service reports that since 2019, 137 children under the age of 19 have died due to toxic drugs. And in BC, it is the leading cause of accidental death in that age group.

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JULIE NYSTROM: I was terrified all the time, terrified and angry. But then my number one thing is I was scared she was going to die. And I was, you know, I wasn't preparing myself for her death, but I was trying to envision what would happen to us as a family if Beth died. It was really traumatic. But I'm like a walking posse. You don't mess with my family. And I knew I was going to get him one way or the other because I was having dreams of killing him.

ENZA UDA: This is when she makes that phone call to police. But remember, they need details. So in the summer of 2023, Julie borrows $1,000 from her employer.

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JULIE NYSTROM: What I decided to do is I hired a private investigator.

NATHAN HELM: I knew even when I was 10 years old that this is exactly what I wanted to do, and…

ENZA UDA: This is Nathan Helm with a company called Shadow Investigations. It's a family run business. In fact, he trained with his dad. But of all his years as a professional private investigator, he never had a job like this before.

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NATHAN HELM: This one was unique because it was focussed on the drug dealer.

ENZA UDA: But first, Julie has to set up the transaction. That's when she asks Beth for a favour.

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BETH: My mom goes, if I give you some money, can you like get some stuff from your guy? And I was like, sure.

ENZA UDA: She claims it's for her aunt.

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JULIE NYSTROM: So I had a private investigator in the back alley, and I had a private investigator in the front, and we just waited.

NATHAN HELM: She walked about two blocks away, up some lane ways, and then met up with the man briefly along the street.

ENZA UDA: Nathan and his partner watched the transaction go down. At this point, it's getting too dark to get a clear view of the dealer, but they can see his car. Jay hops into a dark grey Hyundai and takes off.

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NATHAN HELM: He was actually a very aggressive driver, so we were following him at excessive speeds. The main objective was to figure out, okay, where does he land at the end of the night?

ENZA UDA: But at the end of the night, they lose him. But they've taken photographs of the car and the license plate. So now, Julie has something and arranges that meeting with the Vancouver police.

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JULIE NYSTROM: This guy puts everything in a brown paper bag. The guy even had his fingerprints on the bag, all the photographs of the car. And I submitted them to the two police officers.

ENZA UDA: And the police do track down a license plate.

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JULIE NYSTROM: It was registered to a Caucasian fellow who refused to answer the door. And that's as far as they went. I said, that's nothing. How could you accept that?

ENZA UDA: The Vancouver police confirms they did open an investigation and identified the registered owner of the vehicle in question. They also say they investigated anyone else who may have had access to that car. But because the information was limited, they weren't able to identify the individual who sold Beth drugs that night.

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JULIE NYSTROM: I really don't know why, but I can tell you it was, it broke my heart. I just couldn't bear the idea that my daughter could be that statistic. So I'm in the car one day and I'm thinking about all this, and all of a sudden, I got this crazy idea. And I said, yeah, this might work.

ENZA UDA: She texts Beth when she's at school.

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JULIE NYSTROM: You need to call me right away in capital letters. Exclamation point, exclamation point.

BETH: And she's like, emergency. I need you to call me now.

JULIE NYSTROM: I said, it's Jay. I said, the police just left our house and they wanted me to identify the young person that has been doing transactions.

BETH: And then she was like, the police have like evidence that they saw you do a transactional meet with Jay, and they're going, they're looking through his chat logs. Any information they get will be subpoenaed. They have to give it to court. And I'm like freaking out.

JULIE NYSTROM: She goes, oh my God. I said, yeah. I said, you could be in a lot of trouble. I said, you need to delete his number out of your phone immediately. I mean, double delete everything, all the digits, all the pictures.

BETH: And it was actually really funny because I was like, she's, she's just trying to get me to quit.

JULIE NYSTROM: And she goes, mom, I don't believe you. And I said, here, here's what the police just showed me. And the pictures that I took for the police, I emailed to her and said, this is the evidence they have, and they've got him.

BETH: And I go, should I tell my friends? She says, tell your friends immediately.

JULIE NYSTROM: So I lied. I did. I lied, and I don't give a shit. I really don't care. From that moment forward, I guess there was a fundamental shift, and she realized that her life is just bonkers.

ENZA UDA: Just across town, 30 minutes away from where Julie's story takes place, there's another family dealing with the chaos that comes with a child's addiction, fuelled in part by a drug dealer by the same name, but with a very different outcome.

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DEBBIE KOENIG: Kids, if Evelina were here today, she would say, don't do drugs. Wake up before it's too late for you too. Evelina…

ENZA UDA: Debbie Koenig reads from a letter she recently wrote. Evelina is the girl who died of a drug overdose in Burnaby. Debbie is her mom. She says writing her thoughts down helps her make sense of it all. Evelina Baldelli died on June 13th of 2023. She was 16 years old. Her parents and friends tell me it was Jay who had been supplying her with Xanax and Percocets.

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DEBBIE KOENIG: I had talked to the police, and they just said he's going to be replaced by 10 other Jays.

ENZA UDA: Whether it was Jay who provided Evelina the drugs that ended her life that last night is unclear. At the time of Evelina's death, the coroner told the family they found high levels of fentanyl in her system, Oxycodone, Xanax and other tranquillizers similar to Xanax. They also found some cocaine, that, in her prescription medication. I have questions for Jay. I found a couple of numbers for him.

[the customer you are calling is unavailable at the moment automated message on phone]

But for now, they'll have to wait. We made multiple requests to the Vancouver police for an interview. They declined, but in an email wrote that although Beth has come forward to the media, she has yet to contact police to provide information that could assist in their investigation. A couple of teens who informed this documentary are now in recovery. The others say they are staying away from hard drugs. Beth is now focusing on staying clean and getting her driver's license. She's finishing up grade 12 while working a new part time job.

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BETH: What's really sad for me is that he was like a huge part of my teenage years. Huge. Other than my friends, of course, but… and my parents. And that's like sad to me. And I think that how I feel about him now, it was a massive injustice on so many people, and my story isn't the craziest one.

JULIE NYSTROM: So I feel like nothing was done. I'm actually flabbergasted personally when there was so much at risk, children's lives at risk, their futures at risk, their deaths at risk. These are the most vulnerable people in the Lower Mainland. We talk about, you know, people down on the downtown Lower East Side being the most vulnerable. Well, our 13-year-olds and our 14-year-olds are our most vulnerable because they will end up there.

RZ: That documentary, Everybody Loves Jay, was produced by The Current's Enza Uda and the CBC audio documentary Unit's Joan Webber. It first aired on The Current in early December. I'm Rebecca Zandbergen, and you're listening to The Current. Matt Galloway is back with you on Monday. And over the course of next week, he'll be speaking with a wide range of new inductees into the Order of Canada. The Order of Canada recognizes the contributions of Canadian trailblazers, and the Governor General made 88 new appointments in December. Vancouver's acoustic fingerstyle guitarist, Donald Alder, is one of them. This is his song, Haunted.

[Song: “Haunted” by Donald Alder]

RZ: Coming up after your regional update.

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ELIZABETH RENZETTI: We do have this sort of idea that, you know, oh, come on, everything is fine now. And to that, I respond, have you looked at the way that women's rights are being rolled back around the world?

RZ: Canadian journalist and author Elizabeth Renzetti has a reality check for anyone who thinks women in the Western world are enjoying gender parity. Coming up, the MeToo movement and the backlash to women's rights and what Taylor Swift represents for so many young women. That's in 90 seconds. I'm Rebecca Zandbergen, and you're listening to The Current.

[song fades up and out]

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ELIZABETH RENZETTI

RZ: I'm Rebecca Zandbergen, and you're listening to The Current. Elizabeth Renzetti was a columnist for The Globe and Mail for more than a decade. Her focus was on women and girls, their struggles and the battles to change systems set against them. When she filed her final regular column in June 2022, this was her parting message: “I know you'll continue the fight, and so will I.” She kept to her promise, continuing to write and advocate for gender equity. Elizabeth Renzetti’s new book is called “What She Said: Conversations About Equality”. I spoke with her in October. Here's our conversation.

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RZ: You start this book with a kind of text exchange with a friend, a kind of funny one. Describe it for us.

ELIZABETH RENZETTI: Yeah. The interesting thing is this friend is a good feminist, and I was heading out to go to the Women's March in 2022, and she texted me and she was like, what are you up to? And I said, just putting on my boots to go to the Women's March. And she said, oh, are we still doing that? And I thought, wow, if even this friend of mine, a good feminist, thinks, you know, that we don't have to do it anymore, you know, what does everybody else think?

RZ: And so was it that she was complacent? She thought we had gotten, we've won the battle?

ELIZABETH RENZETTI: Yeah, exactly. This idea that the playing field is now level for not just men and women, for people of all genders, nonbinary and trans people as well, and that we've achieved some kind of feminist utopia, which, as I think we know and which I talk about in the book, is not the case at all.

RZ: And you spend the rest of the book laying out all of the ways in which women still have things to gain, although we are moving in the right direction. There are many areas in which you highlight where there are still problems, and you learn a lot about women's work. You do a whole section on care work, and you learn a lot about that through your mother. Tell me a little bit about what you learned through watching your mom.

ELIZABETH RENZETTI: My mom, Mildred, was just awesome. She was a nurse. She was a carer in both her professional life and in her personal life. She had four children and eight grandchildren who she loved dearly. She was also in an abusive relationship, and that, I think, coloured her life. And through her, I learned both that caring can be a beautiful, incredibly rewarding thing, which I think all of us will agree that it is, but also so supremely devalued in the eyes of kind of the economic system that we live in, which -- there's a crisis in caregiving right now. And caregiving is a hugely gendered profession. And also, it's hugely gendered in the sort of non-professional areas of caring, which a lot of women do just in their day-to-day lives.

RZ: We learned much more about that during the pandemic.

ELIZABETH RENZETTI: Oh yeah, absolutely. And I talked to, some of the people in my book are nurses and personal support workers who saw the most terrible things during the pandemic. So nurses have traditionally kind of been silenced because it is a profession made up more than 90% of women. As one nurse in the book said to me, we're expected to be nuns silent in the hospital like even to this day." And what happened during the pandemic is that nurses really became outspoken, and they started speaking up not just for their patients and for the health care system, but also for themselves and for better working conditions and, you know, for more autonomy for themselves. And I think that was a hugely sort of powerful movement for them. But also, we're seeing because, you know, these gendered professions are so undervalued, nurses leaving the profession in huge numbers.

RZ: We talked a little bit about complacency. I'm curious if you, having talked and written about this topic for as long as you have, you can get a bit of an eye roll, I'm guessing, when you are still talking about it and some will believe that things have been solved. For instance, my sister messaged me the other day because she was so upset after talking to my dad. Sorry Dad. He'll be listening. But that he didn't believe that there was like a gender pay gap, that it's all fair now and there is no such thing as a pay gap between the genders. And so, I mean, is there still a belief that there is from all sides, not just feminists, but from all sides, that there is still work to be done? And if not everyone's buying in, how do we move further along?

ELIZABETH RENZETTI: Yeah, that is also very interesting. And you will hear this a lot. I will say in response to that, you can measure the pay gap in a variety of different ways. Claudia Goldin won the Nobel Prize in economics a couple of years ago for her work in this field. The Ontario Pay Equity Office, which is hardly a Marxist institution, puts the pay gap right now at 13%. Other people put it higher. The OECD measures differently and puts it higher. So, yes, we do have this sort of idea that, you know, oh, come on, everything is fine now. And to that, I respond, have you looked at the way that women's rights are being rolled back around the world? Have you looked at what's happening in other countries in the world, including what's happening in America, where women have lost, in many parts of America, have not only lost the right to bodily autonomy and to choose their own reproductive destiny, but are in fact dying in some places? It's a glaring example of how inequitable things still are. And you can look in Canada, it's not just pay gaps. There's gaps everywhere. The Globe and Mail did a great series a couple of years ago called The Power Gap. So you just have to look at the tops of everything, the leadership. How many women premiers do we have in this country? How many women leaders of federal political parties? How many women CEOs? CEOs, it's about 5 or 6%. So you really can't tell me that we have achieved parity when we're looking at numbers like that.

RZ: How do you have these conversations? You know, we just came off of Thanksgiving dinner. I'm wondering if you have people in your life who don't believe your life's work or you have to defend it to them.

ELIZABETH RENZETTI: Yes. I now have the hide of a like a very, very old, tough rhinoceros. So things just kind of bounce off me when I get the side eye or the eye roll or things like that. What is really heartening to me is how many people, women, but also men, have since the book has been out, have come up to me and said things like, oh, I thought this, but I didn't know how to articulate it" or "I wasn't sure how to bring it up. And the way I do it, the way I try to do it is through having kind of civil conversations that are funny. You know, we can recognize each other's humanity while also recognizing that we live in an invisible fortress. You know, that's what patriarchy is. We can't see it with our eyes, but we experience it every day. And it's not about individual men or individual women. It's about this system that has been in place for millennia to further and support the rights of one gender over another.

RZ: And in fact, you talk about a little bit in the book, but you're married to Doug Saunders, who is a columnist with The Globe and Mail, and found out actually your husband's salary was more when you were both working at The Globe and Mail. But what was your reaction when you learned that, wow, it's even, it's happening to me in this real way?

ELIZABETH RENZETTI: Yes. We were in London. Doug was the European bureau chief. So he got kind of a bonus for being foreign correspondent. And I got paid pretty much the same salary as I did when we were in Toronto. And Claudia Goldin talks about this in her Nobel-winning research, which is that when you have a partnership of two people, and she sort of looks mainly at heterosexual couples with children, one partner is available to do what she calls the greedy work that the employer wants. So, that is taking clients out for dinner or being available on weekends or being available to fly around the, you know, the world on a minute's notice. And the other person has to pick up the burden of care. And that's whether that's children or your ageing parents or other people you might care for. And in the long run, what happens is that one partner slowly sees their income erode. They might have to take time out of paid work, and then their pension shrinks. And in the end, you have one partner who has accrued a lot more income than the other partner. And because of the way we structure our world in the Western world, the value, the burden of caregiving still falls to women. And so they are the ones who kind of pay the penalty of what greedy, the greedy work that employers demand. And that's kind of where Doug and I found ourselves. But I have to say, because he is the best husband and father imaginable. As I always say, he's probably a better parent than I am. When he's around, he's around 120%. And I think that's the case for a lot of men. They really do want to be more involved. They want to be more hands-on. But we live in a very kind of exploitative economic system that tries to extract as much juice out of every worker as it possibly can. So they're struggling with that too.

RZ: Did you resent that, that he got to do the greedy work, as Claudia Goldin calls it?

ELIZABETH RENZETTI: There were days I was sitting with my children crying on a park bench, I will not lie, you know, because at that time, I was in a city where I didn't really know anybody at that point. And I did kind of feel, I know lots of new mothers feel this too, that I was bereft, and I didn't know what I was supposed to do and was I being a good mother? And what had happened to the career I built for myself? And I went down to part-time and that feeling eventually went away and I didn't resent him. I resented the situation that we were in.

RZ: You mentioned just what's going on in the US and rolling back on women's rights. There will be a lot of people that say, yes, women give up some of these things because they are primarily the first to be the caregivers versus the men, if we're talking about a heterosexual relationship. But some will argue, you know, family first, that the women are gifted with this beautiful opportunity to be those primary caregivers, to raise children. And that sort of is an equitable trade-off, some might argue.

ELIZABETH RENZETTI: Oh, 100%. Either partner should be allowed to remain at the home as the primary caregiver if they choose. I would like to see a world where men took more parental leave, for example, so that employers don't discriminate against women of childbearing age, where men kind of found joy and fulfilment in the home. I mean, I did. What I just said was like, you know, that I had felt resentment about it, and I did. But there's nothing more important in my life than my kids and the work I did to raise them. Nothing has given me more joy. Nothing has given me more satisfaction. So 100%, if you choose that that is going to be your realm and your purpose in life, I think you should be able to do that. The problem arises when the expectation comes that one person is going to do that work. I mean, I talked to a friend the other day about how when our kids were little, you know, and we were organizing birthday parties, there was never a dad on those lists of the phone tree of who you were going to call about, you know, what you needed to do for the birthday party. Hopefully, that's changed a little bit.

RZ: I mean, from my perspective, in my own personal experience, I think it has and those that I know. But again, these are sort of people who have the means to have both parents involved. And you talk a little bit about the experiences of women who may be lower on the socioeconomic ladder, women with disabilities, women of colour, marginalized women. There are lots of different experiences. What have you discovered in how well of a job we're doing in ensuring that everyone is raised to the next level?

ELIZABETH RENZETTI: That was such an important thing for me, and it's a central theme in the book. In all of the areas I looked at, women who have been traditionally marginalized do worse than white women. So we're talking about able-bodied white women, I should say. So we're talking about racialized women, women with disabilities, you know, queer women, trans women. All of these groups have worse outcomes than white women. And, you know, I always think of that old Solomon Burke song "None of us are free till all of us are free." It is absolutely the most fundamental work ahead of us, is to ensure that we bring into the centre of the discussion and that we empower all of the people who have traditionally been pushed to the sides, because otherwise we're not going to have equity, we're not going to have fairness.

RZ: You probably heard Donald Trump, I think it was over the weekend or maybe last week. He said, would you rather a white president or a black woman for president? And he kind of laughed. Of course, you want the white man. What did you make when you heard him say that?

ELIZABETH RENZETTI: Well, I went to Florida in 2016 to do some reporting on the presidential election. Then, we all thought Hillary Clinton was going to be the first woman president of the United States. Ha ha ha. We know how that turned out. And I interviewed some female Trump supporters. And I said to them, you know, so this man that you admire has been credibly accused of sexual abuse by at least two dozen women. What do you say to that? And they said, oh, no, no, no, Donald would never do that. He has Melania at home, and look how beautiful she is. And I was just gobsmacked, I have to say, because internalized misogyny is a very, very powerful force. And if we could harness it, we would not need fossil fuels. So this election coming up, as many people have noted, is probably going to be the most gendered election ever, not just in the way that the electorate is splitting, but in how J.D. Vance and Trump have really set their stake on being kind of alpha males, literally at the expense of women's lives and bodies. Because it was Trump's appointment of Supreme Court justices that led to Roe v Wade being overturned. And now, we see the consequence, the terrible consequences of that throughout the United States. And by the way, the anti-choice movement is global. It's international. It will be emboldened by its success in America. So we can't afford to be complacent here in Canada either.

RZ: You sort of end the book on somebody, something else that's global, and that's Taylor Swift. And, you know, she runs counter to a lot of what Donald Trump says, of course. Just walk us through what Taylor Swift represents to you.

ELIZABETH RENZETTI: So there she is, in many ways, the most famous woman in the world right now, and a force of creativity and independence and ambition. And on the other hand, she is still a woman who lives in a patriarchal culture. So she is the victim of Deepfake pornography and she is a survivor of sexual violence. And she has talked about how she sometimes has a poor body image, and she has talked about how difficult it is to overcome her conditioning to be, quote unquote, "A good girl." So in that way, she really mirrors, I think, back to the young women who love her and follow her. She mirrors their lives back to them. They are kind of trapped in this strange dichotomy of having great freedom on one hand and yet still being held back by these invisible forces. To me, she's really quite fascinating.

RZ: I think people, and you describe this in the book, that people sort of fear her. How much is fear playing into what she represents?

ELIZABETH RENZETTI: When you have the former president of the United States writing, I hate Taylor Swift in all capital letters, I think we know how afraid people are of her and of her power, right? When she endorsed Kamala Harris, she signed her endorsement, Childless Cat Lady, which was, of course, the J.D. Vance insult to women who don't have children. I think they're terrified of her because she represents this world in which women do have true autonomy and true freedom and true liberation. And for some men, not all men, in fact, not the majority of men, that's terrifying.

RZ: Your book runs through a number of areas and has these conversations that you hope people read with an open mind and listen to the ways people talk about where we still need to make strides. And you talk about body autonomy, you talk about sexual assault and how women are still suffering. Have we moved the ground at all in that regard?

ELIZABETH RENZETTI: The one area of the book that I think is the most important and the place we still have so much progress to make is in the realm of violence. So whether it's sexual violence or intimate partner violence, domestic violence, we have no idea how huge the problem even is because it's covered in stigma. It's covered in shame and silence. We know that during the pandemic, rates of domestic violence and intimate partner violence skyrocketed around the world. And yet, we do so little to actually counter that. We invest so little in prevention, and we don't even really understand the scope of the problem. And there are solutions out there. Every time a terrible act of violence happens, a report is written about what we could do better and yet we fail. Those reports gather dust on shelves and all the advocates and researchers who spend their lives working on this kind of end up shaking their heads, like, we know what to do. Why can we not invest more in preventing violence and helping women and children who are going through it?

RZ: Did MeToo, did that move the needle at all?

ELIZABETH RENZETTI: I think it moved the needle in terms of a backlash. I mean, I think that is why we're now seeing the backlash to women's rights than we have in the past, let's say six or seven years. And there's good research to show that young men are becoming more conservative in many ways and kind of more afraid of feminism. And that could be attributed to the gains, not even, which were not even that great, of the MeToo movement. Now, I'm not going to, I think MeToo was fantastic and women found their voices and laws were changed in various places, but we are also seeing this backlash to those gains.

RZ: You really first learned about women being subject to violence early in life.

ELIZABETH RENZETTI: Yes. So my mom herself had been in an abusive marriage and then fled it. And then we ended up living in St. James Town in downtown Toronto. And we would hear these horrible noises from upstairs, you know, like screaming and the sounds of somebody, what sounded like somebody being dragged across the floor. And finally, my mom called the police, and the police went upstairs and talked to the people there. And then they came down to tell us what had happened. And what the police said was that, you know, there was no abuse happening upstairs. The woman was just crying because she had had a fight with her mother. When the police said that to my mother, I saw my mother's face just shut down because she knew that that wasn't what was happening upstairs. And she knew that nobody was going to rescue this woman, probably. And, as no one had rescued her, because these things happened under this terrible cone of silence and shame in which the victims are made to feel shame when it's not their shame to carry. So that was a really pivotal moment in my upbringing.

RZ: It's hard to suggest to someone who's been through an assault such as that to go to police because the rate at which people get convictions in these cases is almost, you know, nonexistent. So, I mean, it sounds as though we've not made many strides since you first heard those noises in the upstairs apartment.

ELIZABETH RENZETTI: I think there are good strides being made. We now recognize, for example, that domestic violence takes many, many, many different forms and can be psychological or sexual or financial or technology-assisted. So I think we have made strides. But on this idea of, you know, why didn't she speak up? You only have to look at the way the criminal justice system retraumatizes people who go through it, people, women who testify, women who, you know, do speak up, who do try to do these things. And especially, you know, it's terrible for racialized women, it's terrible for women from lower economic status to be put through this very dehumanizing and often degrading process. So when people say why don't women speak up? It's because when they do speak up, they often are penalized for it and made to feel lesser and more dehumanized. So I completely understand why some women don't come forward. And it's not the individual women who have to change. It is the system that has to change.

RZ: Before I let you go, you said it was your feminist friend who said, are we really still doing this? Going to two women's marches and still talking about the gains we still need to make? So if you are across from your dad, say, at the dinner table and he doesn't buy all of the complaints and the concerns and everything we've just talked about, what is the best way to approach that conversation to bring them in so they are at least hearing what you're saying?

ELIZABETH RENZETTI: I try to do it, and I do this in the book with humour. The book is actually, although the subject matter is very tough, it's also quite funny, I think. So I do recommend, and I'm not saying, you know, you have to be like, oh, ha ha ha. But if you can have a kind of open-hearted civil conversation with people, it's invaluable. But the other thing I would say is that so many women still censor themselves. Even on sort of the talks I've done so far in this book, the number of women who have said to me, you know, I don't know how to speak up. And when I do speak up at work, I'm called obnoxious and whiny. We have to understand that it's a conversation that we do need to have and that we need to listen. And it would help if men could recognize, first of all, that we do exist in this invisible fortress that has benefited them for years. But again, to have the conversations with some humour and empathy and compassion all around is very useful.

RZ: Elizabeth Renzetti, thank you so much for the conversation.

ELIZABETH RENZETTI: Thank you, Rebecca.

RZ: Elizabeth Renzetti is an author and journalist. Her new book is called “What She Said: Conversations about Equality”. And we spoke this past fall. And that is our program for today. Stay tuned to Radio One for Q. Matt Galloway is back with you on Monday. But before we go, I have to mention the World Juniors Tournament. It was another year of upset for Team Canada. Last night, the team was eliminated from the World Juniors, losing to the Czech Republic in the quarterfinals 4 to 3. It is the first time we have failed to play for a medal in back-to-back years. There will be a lot of national handwringing, finger-pointing and analysis over what went wrong, from the reffing to the coaching to the players. And not to rub it in, but we will leave you with the team's goal song, one we did not hear often enough. I'm Rebecca Zandbergen. Thanks for listening to The Current.

[Song: “Live Is Life” by Opus]

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