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The Current Transcript for February 5, 2025

Host: Matt Galloway

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

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SPEAKER: A 100-metre wide asteroid called 2024 YR4 has a 1% chance of smashing into our planet just days before Christmas in 2032.

MATT GALLOWAY: In a week of bad news, you probably didn't need to know that a giant asteroid is hurtling toward Earth. But the good news, as you heard, is that it only has about a 1% chance of hitting us. In an hour, how scientists are tracking this unwanted visitor and why other space watchers have their eyes on another asteroid that might contain clues as to how life arrived here on Earth. Also this morning, in the midst of everything else happening right now, there is a race underway to choose a new Liberal leader. Coming up, Karina Gould on why she's running, how she would negotiate with Donald Trump, and how she's different from an unpopular prime minister whose policies she defended for nine years. Plus.

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RICK STEVES: I was just a green, naive kid with a few bucks in my money belt and going for the end of the rainbow as far as hippies were concerned. And that was Kathmandu.

MG: Rick Steves is a global travel evangelist whose books have helped countless people make their way through Europe and beyond. That journey began in 1978 on the so-called Hippie Trail. In 30 minutes, Rick Steves on the magic of travelling by bus, his first puff of a joint in Afghanistan, and why he says fear of the unknown is driving us apart. But we begin with people grappling with what it means to be Canadian now. Good morning. I'm Matt Galloway, and this is The Current.

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CANADIAN IN THE MOMENT

Guests: Arlene Dickinson, Andrew Potter

MG: From sports fans booing at the sound of the American national anthem to the boycott US made everything and buy Canadian movement, Donald Trump's trade war has inspired nationalist pride here in Canada.

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BOB RAE: And by the way, we're not the 51st state. We're a sovereign, independent country. Our leader deserves to be treated with respect and we deserve to be treated with respect. And that's the way we want to proceed.

MG: Canada's ambassador to the United Nations, Bob Rae, made that case this week on Fox News. He's just one of many Canadian leaders who's been standing up for our country on US media. Here's the premier of Ontario, Doug Ford, on CNN.

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DOUG FORD: We're Canadians. We're strong. We’re resilient. We're proud. And we're going to stand up for what's right. And what's right is making sure that we protect our economy, protect the people, protect the families, and protect the communities right across this great country of ours.

MG: Trump's tariff threats have not only struck a nerve with Canadians, they've also inspired a sudden wave of unity.

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SPEAKER: In this moment, we can be really proud of the fact that we don't take the same aggressive tactics internationally and, you know, we treat our partners as partners. We’re known for being polite, but we can still take a stand. So.

SPEAKER: I feel like this is a good chance for everyone to kind of come together and be on the same page.

SPEAKER: It kind of sucks, but I feel like the nation has never been more together about a certain thing than it is right now, which over the last couple of years, we've been so divided. So this feels kind of good that we can finally take one stand together that we’re going to be Canada first and we're going to make it happen.

SPEAKER: I'm proud to be Canadian for the stuff that we have, the rights and freedoms that we have. There's no place like Canada. Especially when Trump says Canada should become the 51st state, I’m like, hell no.

MG: Something is happening in this country. To talk about this surge of patriotism or what's going on, we have been joined by two proud to be Canadians, Andrew Potter and Arlene Dickinson. Andrew Potter is the author of “On Decline: Stagnation, Nostalgia and Why Every Year Is the Worst One Ever.” He's also a contributor to The Line, a commentary Forum for Canadians. And Arlene Dickinson is an entrepreneur and investor, a member of the federal government's Advisory Council on Canada-US Relations, and of course, a star on Dragon's Den. Good morning to you both.

ANDREW POTTER: Good morning.

ARLENE DICKINSON: Good morning.

MG: There used to be, Andrew, that old CBC morning sideline. It was a contest that Peter Gzowsky ran, as Canadian as. And the answer was as Canadian as possible under the circumstances. What do you think is happening now? What strikes you about the moment that we're in right now?

ANDREW POTTER: Well, it's pretty clear. I mean, Canadians are never more united than when they're facing some kind of external threat. And that's largely a threat or some kind of hostility from the Americans. And so it's not surprising to me that there's been this sort of surge of patriotism. I wish, I wish it didn't have to be the case for a lot of reasons. But also, I'm kind of looking and thinking, okay, this is great. But it's about time because right before Christmas, so right around Christmas, there was this, you know, a triple hit of extremely bad news on the patriotism front or the nationalism front. Angus Reid has a survey that came out saying that only 34% of Canadians are now proud to be Canadian. That's down from 78% in 1985. Nanos had a poll saying that one third of Canadians feel deep anger toward the federal government. And there was a poll saying as many as 40% of Canadians aged 18 to 35 would want to join the United States if they got citizenship and their assets at dollar par. So, you know, this surge of patriotism is great, but there's a lot of rot under the surface that needs to be fixed.

MG: It's interesting. The Angus Reid Institute has put out new data suggesting that that number has jumped since December, up to 44% now of Canadians who feel proud of their country. Arlene, you wrote on Facebook that you love this country. You can't sit by and watch this unfold without speaking up, and that you were speaking out not as a non-partisan, as somebody who believes in our country, not pro Liberal, not pro Conservative, but pro Canada. What do you make of the moment that's happening right now?

ARLENE DICKINSON: I think there's been, Canadians are galvanizing and realizing what we have. And I think there has been a complacency in this country born because things have been relatively, you know, the same, right? We see the same things every day. We feel the same things. We haven't really been pushed into any corners. And because we are so nice, maybe that we haven’t got our elbows up at all as a result. But I think what's happening right now is we are galvanizing. I like to use the word resolve. I think there is a new resolve in the country to doing what's right to protect what we have. And, you know, Matt, that old saying, you don't know what you've got till you start to lose it or till you've lost it is very true at this moment. Canadians are really starting to understand and believe and think that we can't lose what we have. And they recognize that while we have problems, and we do, that we can fix those problems together and we can't let somebody else come in and run our country.

MG: What in particular that you've seen over the last couple of days, Arlene, makes you proud?

ARLENE DICKINSON: What have I seen the last few days that’s made me proud? I've seen this amazing loyalty to Canadian products and services, this resurgence of people who are looking and seeking out Canadian goods and services and thinking about how we can support entrepreneurs in this country, thinking about how we can support businesses in this country, and thinking about how we can choose Canadian as opposed to choosing other products and services. And so I mean, that's been obvious. I mean, everybody's been doing that. And I think people are talking about it more and they're sharing it more. But more importantly, I'm seeing this, and maybe not more importantly, but as importantly, you're seeing people talking about it and being proud of the nation and vocalizing what they feel, which is, you know, we sometimes could be reluctant to do that, Matt. We sometimes can be very scared to voice our opinions in a social media world where people pounce on you and can make you feel like your opinion isn't valid. But what you're seeing now is this pride that is actually shining through in how people are discussing it and talking about it.

MG: Andrew, why do you think it took for Donald Trump to threaten the trade war and gobbling us up into the 51st state for people to rally around the flag in some ways?

ANDREW POTTER: It's a good question. I mean, other than sort of platitudes saying, you know, we're complacent, we're this and that, I think Canadians have over the last decade, you know, sort of I think ultimately, Canada is sort of like a relationship. And, you know, you have to do the work. And you need to put in the time, you need to put in the maintenance. And I think we just simply stopped doing the maintenance on the national identity and the National Unity Front about a decade ago. Leading up to the Canada 150 celebrations, there was some really interesting polling that StatsCan was doing about, you know, asking Canadians what sort of things made them proud to be Canadian and what symbols and so on. And, you know, people ranked at the very top things like the charter, the flag, the anthem, health care and so on. And I think a lot of that stuff has been allowed to either be denigrated or wither away a bit, especially around the charter. You know, you can see how various provinces are undermining it when the flag spends an entire summer at half staff for maybe for good reasons or not, but, you know, that that sort of affects Canadian unity. So there's a lot of things that went on. And then you have, you know, coming out of COVID in particular, a lot of people in a lot of provinces taking a very transactional approach to the country and a very mercenary approach. So there's a lot of unhappiness that's been brewing, and we just haven't been doing the work at either the institutional level or the cultural level to, you know, sustain the country.

MG: What do you mean? What do you mean a transactional relationship with the country?

ANDREW POTTER: I mean, people taking a view that the country, I mean, there's this view that sort of Quebec sort of quasi nationalists have always taking, what they call it, profitable federalism, right? That is, we're staying in Canada only to the extent to which you can get something out of it. And I think that has, that attitude has sort of percolated across the entire federation now where people are looking at Canada and saying, well, what can we get out of it either for our region or what are we giving and what are we getting in return and sort of weighing the pros and cons of it all. And that also came out of the Angus Reid poll where it suggested that it looked at how immigrants were attached to the country. And I think something like over half the immigrants that they surveyed said that they were attached to Canada only to the extent to which it gave them a good standard of living and a good health care and so on, right? There was no fundamental attachment. It was simply very transactional, and that if they could get a better deal somewhere else, they would go somewhere else. That's just not healthy, right? It's not healthy at all that everyone's sort of weighing. You know, if you're in a relationship, right, if you see your relationship that way as sort of what you're putting in versus what you're getting out, it's not going to last.

MG: Can I ask you about just one last piece on this? And this is around the pride in the country. There has been, you mentioned the last decade. There has been a conversation certainly over the last decade. It's gone beyond that as well, where people have been reckoning with the past in this country and talking about the things that have happened in Canada's past that perhaps might not make them feel proud about the country or feel attached to the country. What is the larger impact of that on how we, we broadly think of the idea of Canada?

ANDREW POTTER: I think there was a lot of well overdue reckoning about a lot of things, Indigenous reconciliation in particular. And I think what happened is, quite honestly, I think the Federal Government recognized that that was overdue, but I think leaned too heavily into the negative aspects of it without trying to carry a conversation about how we move forward positively as a country about that. So I think a lot of the negativity sort of got baked into our self-understanding. And it wasn't, there was no shift into a more positive story about how Canada could move forward on this. And I think that's had a very toxic effect on the country.

MG: Arlene, when you see Canadians booing Americans at hockey games, people were saying the last time this happened maybe was during the Gulf War when Canada did not go and fight in the Gulf War. But people can't really remember that, that often, the other example is, you know, the singer's microphone cuts out and Canadians picked up in the rink and continued singing The Star-Spangled Banner for that vocalist. What did you make of that?

ARLENE DICKINSON: I think it's a reflection, again, of people's frustrations and their pride and them trying to articulate it. Just to what Andrew just said, listen, I think that team Canada is a reflection of, you know, the provinces and the territories and, you know, the premiers and, you know, everyday Canadians and business leaders and everybody coming together to do what's right for the country. So in the past, while there has been this division and this desire to protect, you know, what we can do, and it's every Premier's job to protect their provinces in the way that they can, but not at the expense of the country. What you're seeing now is that those things are all starting to merge together. And people are talking about them and coming together to try and do what's best for the nation. And I think that's what's shifted, is this desire for people to express themselves. Back to why are they booing? It's an expression. People are frustrated. People are angry. They're feeling very offended by what's happened. And, you know, they're expressing in the way that they can. I would say also that, you know, Canada is not broken. I hear that too much. Canada is not broken. It's just unfinished. You know, we have a job to do and we need to do it.

MG: What does that mean, that it’s unfinished? Because and not to get too deep into politics, but that's a narrative that has received a lot of attention and perhaps a lot of purchase as well from some Canadians.

ARLENE DICKINSON: Yeah. I mean, I think it's, again, without getting too political because I'm not a pundit, but I would say that it's easy to say that our problems are the fault of one government or another. I mean, I think that that happens. And yes, for sure, leadership matters and policy matters and elections matter. But the truth is we get what we tolerate. We get what we tolerate. At the end of the day, you know, waiting for the next election to fix everything is not going to be what we need to do. We've been quiet for too long. And a great country isn't built on passive frustration. It's built on active engagement. So I think, you know, we need better policies. We need stronger leadership. We need a future that works for all Canadians. This is what I mean when I talk about unfinished. There's work to do. But that work will only happen if Canadians get engaged and not wait for somebody else to fix our problems, not look to the government to always be the solution. And if the government's not doing what we want, we need to be actively engaged to make sure the government here's what we need.

MG: Andrew, how much of Canadian identity is currently shaped by the fact that we're not American?

ANDREW POTTER: Well, most of it, right?

MG: Most of it?

ANDREW POTTER: Well, but I mean, but I don't mean in a straight up, oh, we're not American and it stops there. The problem with Canadians is they don’t understand… the problem with Canadians. The problem with a lot of Canadians is that we don't fully appreciate the extent to which not being American has been baked into what this country's been about since before Confederation. John Ralston Saul used to when people would say, we're a young country, he would say, no, we're not. And he would say, look, if you start with 1791, right, the Constitution Act of 1791, the one that created upper and lower Canada as that sort of founding understanding of what this country was about versus what was going on south of the border in the other British colonies. Canada has the longest, one of the longest constitutional traditions in the world. We're older than virtually every European country in a largely uninterrupted constitutional tradition. And that was very much not what the Americans were doing, right? So when I say our identity is shaped by not being American, it's a refusal from even before 17, before Confederation, starting with the American Revolution, followed by the War of 1812 to say, no, we're not down with your project. We have something else we're doing, right?

MG: Can I ask you about, I mean, there's a symbol of that, and the symbol of that is the flag in many ways. What do you think the Canadian flag means today? There are people who feel as though the flag has been not co-opted in some ways, but linked to protest movements, the Ottawa protests, what have you. You might see it on the back of a truck. And below the flag, you might see a sticker that says F Trudeau on it. What does the flag mean now, do you think?

ANDREW POTTER: Well, so it's a very good question because there was a very important and under noticed shift happened in the last five or six years. So for a very long time, Canadian nationalism was not entirely but largely the protectorate of call it the left, that is. Nationalists in Canada were largely on the left, and left-wing governments got a very, got a lot of traction in sort of portraying Conservatives as sort of pro-American or willing to sell out the country and so on. So which is why Liberals were always wrapping themselves in the flag. Jean Chrétien was just like Canada's the best, Canada's the best, right? He never stopped talking about that. And so the Liberal Party of Canada owned sort of the flag for a very long time. That changed fundamentally. And I'm not trying to get too political about cause and effect, but under the Trudeau government and largely with a lot of the discourse around Canada 150 and reconciliation and so on, Canadians on the left stopped feeling attachment to the country. And that came to a head during the convoy crisis when you saw a lot of flag waving or upside down flag waving or Canadian flags sewn onto American flags being waved by the convoy protesters. But what had happened, I think, was that something there had been an abandonment of nationalism on the left. They simply just sort of stopped having pride in the country. And that created a vacuum that was taken over by the right. And that's a huge problem. You can't be fighting over nationalism on left and right. It can't be the purview of left or right. It needs to be a collective thing that we all believe in.

MG: Arlene, what do you think the flag means now? And I ask you, this is a big country, and you spend a lot of time crisscrossing this country. What does the flag mean to you?

ARLENE DICKINSON: I mean, I'm an immigrant. And so I get relatively, I get emotional about it. I think that the flag represents to me the opportunity that this country afforded my family. And so that has not, I don't think about it as left and right. I don't think about it as belonging to anyone. I think the country is, the flag represents all of us and I think it represents everyday Canadians. I think the middle is getting hollowed out only because of the voices being more vocal on the far left and the far right. And I believe that Canadians are much more middle than we believe them to be and that they do care about social responsibility and they do want fiscal account ability. And, you know, I think people can say, well, that's a very, you know, they can ascribe that to whatever party they want. I just think it is who we are. And so what I think about the flag, I think about this loyalty to a nation that care, that is a mosaic, that does allow people to succeed, that has an opportunity base in it. And so I don't, you know, I think the narrative is too much about painting far left and far right. And they are the most vocal people. And so I think about the flag as representing all of us in the everyday Canadian and not sides, but the collective us. And that might sound too Pollyanna to some, but I actually don't think it is. I think it's actually very true as to who we are, what we represent.

MG: Andrew, we're just about out of time. Is this a moment, do you think, for us to seize on what you say has been missing over the last little while? And whether it's create a narrative, recreate a narrative, build a new narrative about the country, is this an opportunity for Canada to do that?

ANDREW POTTER: It's not just an opportunity. It is an absolutely vital opportunity. I mean, if Canadians miss this moment, we might not get it back. I think this is an extremely opportune time for Canada to, you know, do some deep soul searching about what kind of country they want, if they even want a country and how to move forward on that. It's going to require leadership, but it's going to also require every single Canadian to just lean in.

MG: Arlene, just very briefly, are you confident that Canadians will do that, lean in?

ARLENE DICKINSON: I am. Never squander a good crisis. And, you know, like I'm very confident. I think they do want a country. I do think they want to hold on to Canada and they are going to fight hard for it.

MG: It's great to talk to you both about this. Thank you very much.

ANDREW POTTER: Thanks, Matt. Thanks, Arlene.

ARLENE DICKINSON: Thank you.

MG: Andrew Potter is the author of “On Decline: Stagnation, Nostalgia, and Why Every Year Is the Worst Year Ever.” He was in Montreal. Arlene Dickinson, entrepreneur, investor, member of the federal government's Advisory Council on Canada-US Relations. She was in Toronto. Your thoughts on this, the moment that seems to be unfolding in terms of Canadian pride, how you feel about your Canadianness through this and what will come from this moment. You can email us, thecurrent@cbc.ca. We're going to be talking more about this coming up tomorrow on the program when we broadcast live from Windsor, a city that has very, very close ties to the United States and to people there. We're going to talk about the relationship between Canada and the US on a very personal level. We're going to bring you the program live from a diner near the Stellantis auto plant. That is tomorrow on The Current. Coming up after your CBC news, more travel. The author Rick Steves on why we need to get out in the world to meet other people. That's coming up in six minutes here on The Current. Stay with us.

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RICK STEVES

Guest: Rick Steves

MG: Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and you're listening to The Current. Rick Steves is a public television and radio host. He's the author of many travel guidebooks. His business runs tours across Europe, and his voice is almost as well known as his signature purple shirt. It is a career that Rick Steves never dreamed of. In 1978, he graduated from university, was set to be a piano teacher. But before that, he set off with his pal Gene Openshaw to travel the Hippie Trail, the overland route from Istanbul to Kathmandu. That trip changed the trajectory of his life, and it is the subject of his latest book, “On The Hippie Trail: Istanbul to Kathmandu and the Making of a Travel Writer.” Rick Steves is in Edmonds, Washington. Rick, good morning.

RICK STEVES: Nice to be with you, Matt. Thanks.

MG: It's nice to have you here. This is a new book, but you wrote it back in 1978. It's from your journals, 60,000 words that you wrote in those journals. What's it like to go back and read, I mean, it's like a time machine in some ways to go back and read your writing from back then.

RICK STEVES: It's some kind of freaky anthropological dig into the past of looking at a 23-year-old me. I'm exactly three times that old right now. 69. And when I go back to that, and it was me before I was a travel writer. I was, as you mentioned, a piano teacher. And I was just on vacation in the summer. I have not travelled in such a footloose and fancy freeway since because I've got the burden, the wonderful burden of running my business and updating my guidebooks and leading my tours and making my TV shows. But on that trip, it was purely a chance just to get out there and get to know the world. It was travel with abandon. It was travel celebrating the idea that you can learn more about your home and yourself sometimes by leaving it and looking at it from a distance. And I have all these kind of philosophical approaches to travel now. But back then, there was no philosophy that I knew of. I was just a green, naive kid with a few bucks in my money belt and going for the end of the rainbow as far as hippies were concerned. And that was Kathmandu. And the fun thing about it is I wrote it up in a very serious, hardbound empty book, a 60,000-word journal I came home with. And I photographed it too. And I, you know, kids took cameras along and they just shot pictures of each other. But I really documented the trip with film and then kind of forgot it for 40 years. COVID hit and I had time on my hands, you know, and I read the thing and it was vivid. It was to me, it was honest. It was candid. It was edgy. It was not politically correct. It was just some 23-year-old kid back in the 70s who had the trip of a lifetime. It was 1978, which was the last year of the Hippie Trail. After that, the Shah fell and Ayatollah came in and Iran became a theocracy and the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. So the war broke out and you couldn't travel. It was a storm of weird circumstances that enabled me to have this book, and it's fun to be able to share it.

MG: The Hippie Trail is a route, but it existed beyond that as well. What was it?

RICK STEVES: Yeah, the Hippie Trail was a thing back in the 60s and 70s. You know, the Beatles were going to India to hang out with the Maharishi. And there was a lot of kids that wanted to get away from the comfort and the predictability and the homogeneity of their home lives. And it was freedom, really. It was freedom. And it was sort of, I don't know, it’s kind of like I don't want to romanticize it, but just to be poor, to hang out in a poor part of the world and sleep on the floor and have a lot of diarrhoea and eat a lot of different weird things and to risk getting arrested at a border. It was just, everything was just wild with no safety net. And there was almost no information. That's what I remember. And if I was on a bus for four or five hours, I'd go up and down the bus, and any other Westerner on that bus was another Hippie Trail traveler. And I'd say, do you have any information? Can I just borrow it for an hour and read it? Because I was hungry for information. And of course, that's what I'm all about now. Two years later, I wrote my first real guidebook, “Europe Through the Back Door”, in 1980. When I came home from this trip, I gave away my piano students, and I turned my recital hall into a lecture hall and started a small travel business. To this day, my 100 colleagues and I joke that our mission is to equip and inspire Americans to venture beyond Orlando.

MG: What do you think you were looking for when you went on the trip? Because you write in the journals, when you're about to start, you say I feel like I'm doing something big. What were you looking for, do you think?

RICK STEVES: I wanted to broaden my world. Maybe that’s it. I don't know exactly if I knew what I was looking for at the time, but I realized through my travels that the world is a big and diverse place. I knew there was a billion Muslims and a billion Hindus. I wanted to know what made them tick. You know, I always believed that, you know, people is what kind of carbonates the travel experience. And I wanted to meet people that I wouldn't meet at home. And I certainly did. I wanted to rough up my ethnocentrism. I wanted to rearrange my cultural furniture. I wanted to be humbled. I wanted to be more of a citizen of the planet. And I mean, I didn't think of that explicitly at the time. But when I read the Journal and when I think about why I documented it, you know, as you know, when you read the journal, Matt, we struggled with are we doing the right thing? We could turn around and go back to the Greek islands and hang out with all the kids. That'd be a lot more fun. Would be to hang out in the Greek islands and just party. But we wanted to experience this. And strangely, I had never been to India, but crossing the border into India after going over the Khyber Pass out of Afghanistan, it was like coming home. And I loved it. I just absolutely loved it. And then, of course, getting into the Himalayas and that graceful, gracious, fragrant culture of Nepal, that was just amazing. And augmenting it with marijuana and with hanging out with people that were so interesting and philosophical and poetic and musical from all over the world, it was a dream come true trip. And, you know, it wasn't about smoking pot. It was about freedom. And that was just one small slice of what freedom was all about.

MG: It wasn't easy travelling, though. You're not flying first class. Tell me about the bus. There's a scene where you're crossing into Iran. People are singing La Bamba. There's a long bus ride. What was it like to travel, to travel like that?

RICK STEVES: I like this notion that the road can be a playground, the road can be a school, and the road can be a church or synagogue or mosque. And for me, it's not a right or wrong answer. You just want to mix it up and make sure you're not missing opportunities. And on that long bus, that was an epic sort of bus ride from Istanbul to Tehran. It was in itself an odyssey. And by the end of that ride, anybody that was a Hippie Trail traveler, we were friends. We knew each other. We were all in this together. And, you know, you would see the same. It was a vast trip, but you'd bump into the same people all along the way, and all of us were having similar parallel adventures. It was just the unpredictability of it. I mean, if I went east from Istanbul, as we did, I was entering into a world where not a single soul knew I existed and I didn't know a single soul. We had no Internet, you know, we had no safety net. Our parents couldn't come in and rescue us. We had a few bucks in our money belts and a dream to get to Kathmandu.

MG: Is it different, and you don't want to overromanticize it, but is the travel, do you get something more from the travel when the journey is difficult? You write that you relish the challenge of getting somewhere the hard way.

RICK STEVES: You know, nowadays, most of us fly from capital city to capital city. I really like going across borders. And the closer to the ground you are, the more you experience, the less money you’re spending, the more you experience, the more you're becoming a temporary local. I like this idea of being a cultural chameleon. When I cross a border, I drink and I eat what the locals are drinking and eating. I try to morph. And, you know, back then, we were just trying to survive also. So it's a little different than, you know, this kind of luxury version of the Hippie Trail that a lot of people can find in 2025. But back in 1978, it was just travel with abandon. I mean, when serendipity knocked, you said yes.

MG: Tell me about hashish. And I ask you this for a couple of reasons. One is people know you as a strong advocate of legalizing marijuana. But this was also one of the attractions in getting to Afghanistan. And the first time that you smoked hash was in Afghanistan, right?

RICK STEVES: Yeah. And when I think back on it, I was like a nice kid that didn't just want to throw away his or her virginity. You know, I wanted to do it where it felt good. And I didn't want to smoke pot just because of social pressure at the university. I wanted to smoke it where it felt right culturally. And it felt right culturally for me in Afghanistan, in India, in Nepal. I decided, okay, Gene, let's get high. And that was in Herat, the first city in Afghanistan. And it was just absolutely fantastic.

MG: What do you mean?

RICK STEVES: Everything twinkled. You know, in Herat, if you are a little bit high, all of a sudden, when the sun goes down and the torches come on to the chariots and they go charging by, it comes with more drama. You know, when little kids come up to you and they clasp their hands together and they say, Namaste, I salute your virtues, it's more endearing. And then for the rest of the trip, when I read the Journal, it just seems too far out to be true. Was I high? And I don't know. I honestly don't know if I was high or if it really is that exciting. But, you know, we took a canoe across the lake in Nepal, and we beached it. And then we went hiking up to this herbal essence waterfall. And suddenly, we were surrounded by demonic black leeches, these little black slinkies going head over tail, determined to suck our blood. I remember what a thrilling adventure that was to be in that jungle up in the Himalayas being attacked by leeches. And it amped up the adventure, that's for sure. And the trip wasn't about marijuana. The trip was about freedom. That's important when I think back on it. But the culmination of that trip is Kathmandu. And Kathmandu, I haven't been back to Kathmandu since. I have no idea what it's like now, but back then, it was a city of markets with exotic foods. It was a city of these fantasy temples ringed with erotic art. It was a city of music and people sitting in circles with lantern light flickering on their faces. There was people who checked out with matted hair and almost hoofs for feet. And then, you know, you'd wander there as a traveler. And there was that whole overlay of all the hippies that were there. I mean, one street I remember was nicknamed Freak Street, and it led to a place called Pie and Chai. And Pie and Chai was the original great coffee shop and Pie and Chai chai’s tea. And they were famous for their pie. They had this medieval looking stone pizza oven where they would cook these amazing apple pies, and you'd gather there on these rustic tables and you'd be smoking some beautiful marijuana and they'd be playing perfect classic rock and roll for the occasion. Creedence Clearwater, The Doors, The Stones and so on. And you'd be surrounded by poets and philosophers and musicians in this wonderful gathering of travelers who were curious about the world. And, you know, those are some of the most beautiful, happy, easygoing moments of my life.

MG: I was going to say why hadn't you gone back to Kathmandu? But part of it, I think, is it sounds even better having not gone back. Do you know what I mean? Because your experience of being there lives in your memory.

RICK STEVES: Yeah. You know, I often surprise people who say, what's your favourite country? And they think I'm going to say Italy or France or something because Europe's my beat. And I say India and the Indian subcontinent, you know, Nepal, Sri Lanka, India. And as I mentioned, that's the place that rearranges your cultural furniture. That's the place that reminds us we're not the norm. And in India, they treat time differently in that whole subcontinent. Think about how we treat, we talk about time as if we talk about money. We save it, we bank it, we invest it, we waste it. Time is money. That's a phrase. Well, time is not money in that part of the world. You're just in the moment. And we can be inspired by that. We can learn from that. And we can come home at least understanding that, that there's different ways that we can live our lives and design our priorities. And we should not be as self-assured as we often are. I mean, when I was on this trip, I was a musician. I was a piano teacher. I thought I knew classical music. To me, Indian music was just noisy. But then I realized, wait a minute, it's just as sophisticated as our music. I know Beethoven and I know Mozart, but I don't know these guys. And I know what, you know, metre is. There's cut time, there's 4 4 time, there's waltz time. They didn't have the same concept of metre. I know modes. You want it to be happy, it's major, and you want it to be sad, it's minor. They didn't have the concept of modes that we have, but they have gorgeous music. So it's just a great exercise in realizing that we are not the norm.

MG: You told The New York Times that you were in your glory as a traveler there, and that there are different kinds of travel. You can travel as a tourist, a traveler or a pilgrim. What does it mean to be a traveler? Because I think we know what it means to be a tourist, right?

RICK STEVES: Yeah. A tourist is bucket lists and frequent flyer miles and fun in the sun and just, you know, having a good time going to Disneyland. I like that. There's no problem with that. But that's a lala land kind of. Be a traveler to get out of your comfort zone and to learn. To me, it's an opportunity. And I think given the challenges we're confronted in the world today, I think it's important for us to travel. And I think it's important for us to travel in a way that broadens our perspective. There's two kinds of people, those who want to build walls and those who want to build bridges. And frightened people want to build walls. And travelers know that if you really want to be safe, walls are not the answer. Bridges are the answer. And when we travel, I believe we realize that the world is a good place. It's filled with wonderful people. It's filled with love. And we come home with that notion, and we can then get busy and work on the problems that we need to work on.

MG: This is how you end the book. You talk about how, I mean, and you hinted at this, this was the year that you went on the Hippie Trail was the last year that anybody could do that because of revolution and war, and it changed that part of the world forever. But you say that anyone can still do this. What do you mean by that, that anyone can still do this?

RICK STEVES: Yeah, that's what when I think of this experience, Matt, it's not a 23-year-old Rick Steves in 1978 travelling from Istanbul to Kathmandu. I mean, that's physically what it is. But the Hippie Trail is somebody coming of age and deciding they want to be, they want to have a broad perspective that travel can give you and let that make their life more full and with more colours and with more options and with more depth. You can have your Hippie Trail experience today, in 2025. You can get out there and travel with a youthful spirit, travel with an appetite for serendipity. And when serendipity knocks, you say yes. And I know that you can travel with a Hippie Trail attitude even within the United States. And I know that because I talk to people. I love to talk to young people especially who have had that experience. They've taken a couple of months off and they've gotten out of their comfort zone. They embrace that idea that you can learn about your home by leaving it and looking at it from a distance. And it really just might carbonate your life to get out there and become friends with the world.

MG: One of the reasons why people don't do that is because of something that you hinted at, which is fear. In the book, you talk about how there's so much fear these days, but that fear is for people who don't get out much.

RICK STEVES: Exactly. And I feel very strongly about that because I lament the loss of bon voyage. You know, when I did this trip, people said bon voyage. Now they say have a safe trip. And when somebody tells me have a safe trip, I'm inclined to say, well, you have a safe stay at home. Because where I'm going is statistically, and I know statistics are optional these days, but where I'm going statistically is safer than where you're staying. For me, it's just important to not let your lack of a passport and your worldview shaped by fear mongering commercial TV news to make you a frightened person. You know, the most frightened people in our country I think are the people buried deep in the middle of it with no passports, whose worldview is shaped by the commercial news.

MG: And you really believe that idea that, as you said, the world is a place, a welcoming place filled with joy and love and good people.

RICK STEVES: Oh yeah.

MG: Still.

RICK STEVES: There's eight billion people on this planet. I mean, bad things are happening and there's horrible wars, and we could be doing a lot better. But when I travel, and I mean, how do I know? Well, I've spent 100 days a year overseas hanging out with other people. Basically, people are getting on with their lives and doing the same things we are. They've got loving families. They've got dreams and aspirations. You know, they want to work hard and they'd love to sit down and share a drink. And if we do that, we're contributing to peace. That's what I love about travel, is that we get to know our neighbours. When you travel and meet good people, you want to come home and you want to share that enthusiasm for the planet. That's why I try to inspire people to get out there and see the world to recognize that, yep, there's lala travel and there's reality travel. And it's not a right or wrong thing, but you can mix it up and we can all benefit from a little bit of reality travel. And the Hippie Trail was a great mix of reality travel and just celebrating our freedom.

MG: Let me ask you about what you called the latest adventure in a lifetime of travels, which was being diagnosed with prostate cancer last year. How are you doing?

RICK STEVES: Well, thank you for asking, Matt. And yeah, I got diagnosed with prostate cancer four or five months ago. In October, I had a horrible, if you know prostate cancer, you know, it's all about your PSA number. And my number was through the ceiling. It was 50. And it was clear I just needed to get rid of my prostate. And I had this wonderful robotic laparoscopic surgery. And we've tested the blood and my PSA number is down to essentially zero.

MG: That's great.

RICK STEVES: And my doctor said, yeah, you can consider yourself cancer free. So man, I'm thankful for that. And I'm just so appreciative of so many things. I mean, you know, my feeling coming through this really is thankfulness. And I look at it like a journey. For me, it was a foreign country. It was a language I didn't speak, going into a hospital. I'd never spent a night in a hospital. And it was scary. And it's serious business, you know, but I was aware when I walked down the hall of that hospital that many people there wished they had my problem, you know, And everybody has these challenges ahead of them.

MG: You were really public about this. I mean, you asked personal questions to people broadly just about how you go through this, how you come through some of the complications of the surgery and what have you. Why were you doing that?

RICK STEVES: Well, I feel like my travelers, we’re sort of a community of travelers just, you know, in my world, in my social media and the work that I do. I shared it because I've always felt that it's not good to keep your health challenges secret and to be ashamed of them. I mean, there's a lot of people struggling with a lot of thing. You know, there's a lot of depression out there. There's a lot of cancer out there. There's a lot of need out there. And we need to support each other. We need to compare notes. As a traveler, I love to compare notes. And I wanted to compare notes with people who have gone through the trip I was taking on this prostate cancer journey. And man, I got a lot of support. And but I felt also a need as a person with some celebrity to raise awareness of the importance for men to be in touch with their bodies, just like women should be when it comes to breast cancer. And I was a good example of a reasonably smart person that was too busy with life to even know what my chances with prostate are. And I didn't. I wasn't getting tested. And it turns out my uncle and my grandpa had prostate when they were my age. They both had prostate cancer. Had I known that, I would have been really tuned in. But thank goodness my doctor said, get your blood test. I did. Had he not said that, this would have raged in my body until I couldn't have fixed it. But I fixed it relatively cleanly because I was testing and because I took action and because we've got a wonderful medical industry, even though it’s got some problems that people are frustrated by. I would not be here if it wasn't for a doctor who knew it's important to test and then the ability to get it fixed.

MG: How did it change how you think about time? You talked earlier about freedom and the freedom that that travel on the Hippie Trail kind of sparked in you. And you have a very different life now. I mean, you, as you said, a celebrity. You are busy. You have a thriving industry. I'm sure you're booked minute to minute to minute. How does going through something like this change how you think about what's important and the role that freedom could play in your life now?

RICK STEVES: Well, that you think about things differently when you're confronted with cancer and you're reminded of your mortality. And I could die tomorrow. And I have no complaints. I mean, I've had a beautiful life and I've been so blessed and privileged and fortunate and I've tried to use my blessings to contribute. Now, I've got a lot ahead of me. I'm just feeling great about upcoming travels. But I'm also realistic about I need to use the time I have left thoughtfully and what is most important in my life, in the people, in family and my personal thing. I'm put here, I believe, to write about the Hippie Trail and to share it. And that's what I was doing before I was a travel writer. That was the travel writer in training. And now, I'm a travel writer, and I just love going out there, taking notes, making mistakes, learning from those mistakes and coming home and sharing that. And now, I've got, you know, I've done the journey with the cancer story. I really feel like, you know, it was a journey. It was I was on a big boat. The boat was the hospital and all the technology. The captain was the surgeon. And the sails were filled by all of the prayers and the warm thoughts and wishes that people, whether they were loved ones or colleagues or people I didn't even know that heard about this and cared about me. There's something tangible about that. And it filled the sails and it got me through that storm. And now, I'm in that same boat and it's clear sailing. And I suppose there’ll be more storms ahead, but men, I'm thankful and I'm feeling good. And it's just fun to celebrate life, and I tend to do that through the lens of a traveler.

MG: You're living the dream. It's really great to talk to you about what you have learned in those travels, but also how you still get enthusiastic and excited about getting out on the road. I wish you the best of health and safe travels and good travels. Thank you very much.

RICK STEVES: Thank you.

MG: Bon voyage. That's what we're supposed to say, right? Bon voyage.

RICK STEVES: You got it, man. Bon voyage, and have a good Hippie Trail experience.

MG: Thanks, Rick.

RICK STEVES: Yeah. Bye.

MG: Rick Steves’ new book is called “On The Hippie Trail: Istanbul to Kathmandu and the Making of a Travel Writer.” Have you taken a trip that really changed your worldview? Travel is an amazing thing because, as Rick was saying, you're introduced to people and communities and ideas that perhaps you would not be introduced to if you just stayed home. So tell us about the trip that you've taken that changed maybe your ideas around life or maybe the trajectory of your life. You can email us, thecurrent@cbc.ca. And a tip of the hat to the Canadian author Mark Abley, who also took that Hippie Trail back in 1978 and wrote about it in his recent book called “Strange Bewildering Time.” Well, coming up after your regional update, liberal leadership candidate Karina Gould on why she thinks she should be the next prime minister of Canada. And then.

SOUNDCLIP

SPEAKER: If this thing turned out that it was headed for Earth, one of the options available would be to send up a spacecraft and try to bump it like a billiard ball and change its trajectory so it doesn't go into the pocket, so to speak, and hit our planet.

MG: This thing that could hit our planet is a 100-metre wide asteroid. Astronomers say it could arrive just days before Christmas in 2032. The good news, though, only 1.6% chance it's going to hit us. We'll talk about why we should still be concerned coming up in 90 seconds.

[Music: Theme]

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KARINA GOULD

Guest: Karina Gould

MG: Hello again. I'm Matt Galloway, and you're listening to The Current. In the midst of all the chaos coming from south of the border, you may remember that there is news here in this country as well. One of the news stories that's happening is a liberal leadership race. And one of the people hoping to be the next prime minister is in our studio with me right now. She has been the member of parliament for Burlington, Ontario, since 2015, has held several cabinet posts, including government House leader. Karina Gould is with me now. Good morning.

KARINA GOULD: Good morning, Matt.

MG: Thanks for being here.

KARINA GOULD: Glad to be here.

MG: Why do you want this job?

KARINA GOULD: I want this job because I care so much about this country and I care so much about Canadians, and I want to protect the things that are working and I want to fix the things that aren't.

MG: We'll talk about some of the things that may or may not be working. This is a moment in this country. We were talking earlier about the sense of nationalism, Canadian pride that's unfolding. And it comes because you have the United States and the president of the United States threatening tariffs, but also threatening to take over this country, that we should become the 51st state. Justin Trudeau, the prime minister, has had a couple of long calls with Donald Trump. If you were the leader of the party and the prime minister, how do you picture yourself handling Donald Trump?

KARINA GOULD: Well, so I would say that I have 10 years of experience in parliament working with people with whom I don't necessarily see eye to eye. I am known as a bridge builder. I'm known as somebody who can get things done in parliament and in this country. When I was Minister of Families, I negotiated the childcare agreements with many Conservative provinces, and I am able to both stand up for the values that are important for us as a country, but also to find areas of common ground where we can work together. And so when it comes to Donald Trump, I know that I can stand very strongly for Canada and what matters to us as Canadians, but I can also find ways where we can work together. And that's something that I bring to the table.

MG: You think that's possible? I mean, he's been the president for two weeks. And in addition to threatening tariffs that could clobber the economy, keeps talking about how we would be better off if we were part of the United States. Do you think that you could actually negotiate with somebody like Donald Trump or at the very least, find some common ground?

KARINA GOULD: Yeah, I do. And I think that's really important. I think that what we saw over the past weekend, and you talked about it, Matt, is that, look, he puts out wild things. I mean, that's his negotiating style. He tries to go to the most extreme point. But then ultimately, you know, Canada didn't back down. Canada was very strong. Canadians were extraordinarily strong. And, you know, where we are now is a reprieve, if you will, for 30 days. But there is a huge opportunity for us as a country over these next 30 days to demonstrate to the president that we're not going to back down, but that we can also find ways to work together on the issues that matter to him. And so if this is about the fentanyl crisis, if this is about the border, we can absolutely work together on these things because these are things that matters to Canadians as well. There are too many people in this country who have lost loved ones as a result of the opioid crisis. We care about that as well. There are too many illegal guns coming in from south of the border. We can work on these things together, but we're not going to compromise our sovereignty and we're not going to compromise who we are as Canadians.

MG: In the meantime, there's a leadership vacuum in this country right now while we're facing this crisis from the United States. Should we have parliament actually in place? Should parliament be recalled?

KARINA GOULD: Well, the government has all of the tools necessary to respond in this period of time.

MG: But do you believe that parliament should be recalled so that there can be a robust debate on how those tools are used and some oversight as to how the government is acting?

KARINA GOULD: Well, I think that we are having a robust, robust conversation in Canada about this. But what we need more than anything is unity right now. And what we have seen, maybe with the exception of Pierre Poilievre, but every other leader in this country come together regardless of political stripe. I mean, we saw Danielle Smith originally be offside, but she's even come on board as the Team Canada approach. And Canadians more than anything. I mean, like I'm so proud of how Canadians have put their differences aside and stood together and recognized that this is the time to be united and to show a united front when it comes to Donald Trump and to put Canada first.

MG: So we don't need parliament, so we don't need parliament to be sitting in this moment.

KARINA GOULD: Not in this moment.

MG: Not in this moment. You said that Canadians have lost trust in your party. Where do you see the mistakes that your party has made in terms of that trust evaporating?

KARINA GOULD: Yeah, so I've reflected on this a lot over the past little while. But when I think about the moment where I think that that trust really was broken is at the end of the pandemic when we had come out and had, you know, a really good response to the pandemic. Canada did well despite everything that happened. But when inflation was really starting to get out of control and Canadians were kind of screaming at us as a government saying, hey, like things haven't gone back to normal. We can't afford our groceries. Our mortgage rates are going out of control. Our rent prices are increasing. Like we need additional help. We need you to be there for us. And as a government, we kind of said like, hey, look at how great we did on the pandemic. You should be really happy with what we did. And the reflection that I have is that like after World War Two, when Winston Churchill won the war, he lost the next election because he was focussed on the past and not on the future.

MG: Can I just stop you there? I mean, how is it possible that a government does not realize that people are struggling, that people can't afford to pay their rent, that people can't afford to buy the food that they know? How is that, a government that's been in power for nine years, how is that possible?

KARINA GOULD: Because I think we as a government, and I put this all collectively, were so focussed on the response to the pandemic and maybe a bit exhausted as well by that, like many Canadians, that, you know, and I would also say that the pandemic took people further away from each other.

MG: People said that it's a matter of the government being out of touch, that I mean, you have parliamentarians who aren't worried about rent. They own their homes. They're not worried about, you know, their jobs disappearing because they're in extensively secure jobs. Do you think that the government was out of touch?

KARINA GOULD: I think we were. And I'm not afraid to admit that. And I think that's actually a really important thing to recognize and that eventually, we got there as a government. But I think it took too long. And I think that we needed to do a better job of hearing people. And one of the things that I am different, is different about me is that I'm not afraid to admit when we made a mistake and to say, actually, we need to do better here. And one of the things that I bring to the table is I am a grassroots politician. I'm somebody who listens. I'm somebody who wants to bring those ideas and solutions forward. And when I think about that moment, that's one that I think was really important. And then I also think for listeners here in the GTA, and I feel it and it was certainly something that I was raising in Ottawa, when it comes to things like auto theft or home invasions or gun crime, you know, there is a big responsibility for the provincial government here. But again, as a federal government, I don't think we acted fast enough. And I think there are things that we could have done. So there are few moments, particularly in the past two years, where I just don't think we responded quickly enough. And I think it's fair for Canadians to have said that, you know, they felt like we weren't listening because we were so focussed on kind of what we had already accomplished and not what Canadians were going through in that moment. And that's something that I'm very cognizant of.

MG: Why should that say that you're any different? I mean, you were part of the government for nine years. You stood up and defended the Prime Minister's policies. You were the one who delivered the fall economic statement that Chrystia Freeland resigned over, saying that it was full of costly political gimmicks. Why should people think that you're different?

KARINA GOULD: Well, because I do listen to people. And again, I'm not afraid to admit where we went wrong and to make those changes. And that's something that I think is really important. Look, we've all been in jobs where you have to do things that you don't necessarily agree with.

MG: Is that what it was? It was about kind of doing the job?

KARINA GOULD: Well, part of my job as government House leader was to defend the government. And I'm not going to say that that wasn't my job, right? Like I'm not going to lie to Canadians. I'm going to be honest with them. But and in Cabinet, you have robust discussions. And part of cabinet solidarity is you have those discussions at the cabinet table and then you go out with a unified position. But now, I have an opportunity as a leadership candidate to talk about my vision for the country and to share what I'm hearing from Canadians and to demonstrate to them that I'm listening and willing to make the changes that need to be made.

MG: Can I just ask you one final question on this, which is just about cynicism and how you avoid that, but also whether you worry about it? One of the things when the prime minister talked about why he was resigning, he was asked about his greatest regret, and he said it was electoral reform. There are parts of this country where you could power like a small city on the eye rolls from people when he said that he regretted electoral reform. This was a huge promise that he made, backed off that promise, didn't even come out and say that he was backing out from the promise. You were the one who had to come out and say this government is not moving forward with the thing that we promised on. Do you understand why that could lead to people being cynical about politics? It was called the most cynical, one of the most cynical displays of self-serving politics seen in this country. Do you understand why that could lead to cynicism?

KARINA GOULD: Yeah, I do.

MG: Because that's where the corrosive cynicism, right?

KARINA GOULD: It is. And it is one of the, I think you're bang on in terms of the corrosiveness. And it's actually one of the things that Pierre Poilievre is capitalizing on because he's banking on people being turned off of politics and staying home and not voting because that's how he's going to win the next election.

MG: He's got a lot of people who say that they're going to vote for him.

KARINA GOULD: And so what we as Liberals have to do, and this is where I think it was really important for me to come out and acknowledge the fact that we've lost trust of Canadians, because we have to rebuild that trust and we have to re-earn it. And, you know, part of that for me is I am, you know, I'm an authentic person. I'm going to tell you how it is. And I have an opportunity to do that now. And what I'm really excited about, Matt, is the conversations that I'm having with Canadians across the country who are looking for a hopeful perspective. They're looking for optimism. They're looking for the possibility that we can unleash in this country for the future. And, you know, we have Pierre Poilievre, who's selling his own version of hope, but it's not one that is inclusive. It's not one that is optimistic, and it’s not one that's positive.

MG: And yet, it's one that people are buying.

KARINA GOULD: Because people are frustrated right now, right? And what he's doing is he's taking their frustrations and he's taking their anger and he's holding a mirror and reflecting it back to them. But he's not offering them solutions. What he's offering is actually, and he's not really talking about it because he does have a hidden agenda. And if he were to actually share with Canada…

MG: He has a hidden agenda.

KARINA GOULD: Absolutely.

MG: What evidence is there that there's a hidden agenda?

KARINA GOULD: Well, because what he talks about is how he's going to make massive cuts, how he's going to change who we are as Canadians and the things that we care about. And he doesn't want Canadians to know what that looks like because when he talks about payroll taxes, for example, that's our employment insurance program, that's the Canada pension plan, that's old age security. And those are programs that Canadians rely on. Now, I think that we have to modernize our social benefits program, make it fit for purpose for the 21st century, but we don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. And I'm very concerned about what he's not telling Canadians because what his objective has been, and he told this to Jordan Peterson a couple of weeks ago, is that he hasn't changed his ideas about what he thinks is necessary for Canada since he was 14 years old. And, you know, I don't know about you, but I think it's important for everybody to have their ideas evolve. And the trickle down economics, the ideas of the 80s and 90s, those aren't things that are going to help Canadians in 2025.

MG: You've talked about cutting a point off the GST for a year. You've talked about not scrapping the carbon tax, but looking at kind of how to reform it. What would be the country that you would, if you're worried about what Mr. Poilievre is going to present, what is the vision of the country that you're presenting? What is the place that you see?

KARINA GOULD: I want the same thing for Canadians and their families that I want for my family. I want Canadians to be safe and feel safe in their homes, in their communities. I want them to have a good job where they don't have to worry about paying for bills and groceries, where they can afford their mortgage and afford their rent. I want them to breathe clean air and drink clean water, and I want to ensure that they have access to health care at the time when they need it. I think that Canada is the greatest country in the world, and I think the promise of Canada is what attracts so many people here and what has made this country unique. But we have to make sure that we fulfil that promise of Canada. And so for me, that looks like ensuring that we have a fair and just society where people have the opportunity to succeed and to be prosperous. And it's one that I think is possible, and it's one that I think we should continue to work towards.

MG: Is it possible for the Liberals to deliver that? Do you think, I mean, if you trust public opinion polling, the Conservatives are miles ahead, and that this could be an historic defeat for the Liberal Party.

KARINA GOULD: Yeah, look, I'm an optimist, and I think you have to be optimistic.

MG: But you’re also a realist. You’ve been in politics for a long time.

KARINA GOULD: I’m also a realist. I have. I am. But, you know, you have to be optimistic, I think, to be in this job because you have to believe that it is possible. And I think that this leadership race offers the Liberal Party of Canada a tremendous opportunity to reconnect with Canadians across the country. And one of the things that I believe very strongly is that we have to listen more to our membership. I think that when our Liberal members across the country provide their policy ideas, we have those great debates, they come up with the next big idea for the country. I believe in our democracy. I believe in our citizens’ participation in this. And, you know, we have a chance to really redefine who we are and what Canadians want and demonstrate to them that we're listening. And anything can happen in an election. You know, like when I ran in 2015 for the first time in Burlington, everybody thought that it was a long shot because Burlington is traditionally a Conservative community. But I beat the odds. I knocked on thousands of doors. I listened to people. Through that, I actually became less partisan because I understood where people were coming from. And I think this is the shot that we have right now for Canadians to give us another look and to see that we're a real option and possibility in the next election.

MG: Karina Gould, good to have you here. Thank you very much.

KARINA GOULD: Thanks for having me, Matt.

MG: Karina Gould is a candidate for the leader of the Liberal Party of Canada. We are hoping to speak with all of the leading candidates in that race in the weeks ahead.

[music]

ASTEROID

Guests: Richard Moissl, Danielle Simkus

MG: This is The Current on CBC Radio. My name is Matt Galloway.

SOUNDCLIP

[movie clip]

SPEAKER: What hit us?

SPEAKER: Small asteroid fragments this morning.

SPEAKER: How big were those?

SPEAKER: Those were nothing. The size of basketballs and Volkswagens.

SPEAKER: This new one you're tracking, how big?

SPEAKER: It's the size of Texas, Mr. President.

MG: That doesn't sound good. From the 1998 blockbuster Armageddon. In the film, a massive asteroid is barreling toward Earth. Some brave astronauts are sent into space to plant explosives and blow up said asteroid before it can destroy our planet. It's Hollywood fantasy, but there are asteroids out there that could impact Earth and cause real damage. One of them is currently under close observation by NASA and the European Space Agency. The name of that asteroid is 2024 YR4. Scientists say it has a 1.3 to 1.6% chance of hitting Earth in December of 2032. Richard Moissl is head of the European Space Agency's Planetary Defence Office, and he has been at the International Asteroid Warning Network meetings taking place this week in Vienna. Richard, hello.

RICHARD MOISSL: Hello. Good morning, Matt.

MG: How big is this asteroid that you have been paying close attention to?

RICHARD MOISSL: Our latest estimates are between 40 to 90 metres in diameter.

MG: And so if that thing were to hit us, what kind of damage would it do?

RICHARD MOISSL: Well, first of all, there's a 99.5% approximately chance of it flying by peacefully.

MG: I appreciate you saying that.

RICHARD MOISSL: Exactly. So it's not very likely. And then if it hits Earth, it's mostly likely to hit somewhere in the ocean. If it were to hit Earth in that size range, we would expect the likes of the 1908 Tunguska event, which flattened 2000 square kilometres of forest and sent seismic waves throughout the area and was felt and registered hundreds of kilometres away but luckily had no casualties. Another example of an asteroid in that size range with a different composition. So Tunguska is let's say if you have a loose aggregates of stony material, which we call rubble pile. But if you have a solid chunk of iron 50 metres across, it can create features like the meteor or burns a crater in Arizona, which is about a mile across.

MG: And so, I mean…

RICHARD MOISSL: And those devastated areas.

MG: I mentioned that you have been at these international Asteroid Warning Network meetings. What is the conversation about, if it’s not this one but another one, what we need to be thinking about and how you start to pay attention to all of the other things that are out there in space?

RICHARD MOISSL: We do basically take constant surveillance of everything that we have. We don't only discover and monitor asteroids. We in this case is the planet wide planetary defence community, including every country on earth almost. It's not just us at the European Space Agency, but we monitor closely all the asteroids that are accessible to observations. And then in three centres worldwide, at NASA, at ESA and space ties in Italy, we calculate the orbits for 100 years into the future, including all kinds of potential futures. And if you realize that an asteroid has a non-zero, and by a non-zero, it's any number as small as you can imagine above zero, we call that asteroid a potential risk, and then we list it publicly on our risk list. Currently, we have 1700 of these objects, but they are usually the chances are one in a million or one in several thousands. So 1%, which is one in 100, and it's actually today at one in 62, is quite unusual. It's not a danger yet, but it's so unusual that we take a very close look at this one.

MG: In 2022, people might remember that NASA fired a rocket into an asteroid and was able to alter its trajectory. What did you learn from that?

RICHARD MOISSL: Oh, the Dart spacecraft and the event?

MG: Yeah.

RICHARD MOISSL: That was for us, it was a historic milestone. Before, we were assuming that we understand how to influence the trajectory of an asteroid with a kinetic impactor. That's what it's called when you slam a spacecraft into a spacerock. But from that day on, we know that we can do it. And it was spectacular. The effect was much more than we had predicted. I had predicted that this was about to change potentially on the order of 10 minutes, the orbital period. It was three times as much and the dust cloud was phenomenal. So it was a spectacular bang into a new age of planetary defence.

MG: Planetary defence. I mean, that suggests that, I mean, because we're part of this community of space. And so there are things that are out there that have hit, you know, planets before and have hit perhaps Earth before, that if it's not immediate, then it is inevitable at some point in time that something will hit us.

RICHARD MOISSL: That's correct. Over the centuries and millennia, you integrate up all these little probabilities, and they’re summed up little by little until they reach one for almost any kind of size of asteroid. And this is why we are doing planetary defence efforts now. And we're doing it constantly. We're constantly developing better ways of looking at them, more efficient ways of calculating the trajectories. We learn about asteroids in the ways of science and how to counteract their impact chances and anything. So I see us in a good time. We're not under direct threat. We're not at immediate risk. This is not an alert. This is not a crisis situation. So it's the perfect time to prepare for the day that crisis comes. Might be in 100 years, might be in a thousand years from now.

MG: We will take that good news. Richard Moissl, thank you very much.

RICHARD MOISSL: Thank you for having me.

MG: Richard Moissl heads the Planetary Defence Office at the European Space Agency. So we started with kind of a worst case scenario. There are also some very positive stories coming out about asteroids, thanks in part to samples from one named Bennu that is still out in space. Danielle Simkus is a scientist at NASA. She's Canadian. She's on the team examining the sample from this asteroid. She's in Washington, DC, this morning. Danielle, good morning to you.

DANIELLE SIMKUS: Hi. Good morning.

MG: Tell me about Bennu.

DANIELLE SIMKUS: So Bennu is a pretty special asteroid. It's a rocky body floating around space that we actually kind of consider like a time capsule from the early solar system. The chemistry of Bennu is thought to be representative of the chemistry of the very early stages of solar system formation. And we think that, well, actually, we're seeing now that Bennu contains organic matter. So it contains the prebiotic organic compounds that are required to form life.

MG: You're seeing it because there was a sample of this asteroid that was taken and brought back to Earth.

DANIELLE SIMKUS: That's correct. So this is NASA's first sample return mission to an asteroid. And my lab group at NASA's Goddard is involved in analyzing these samples that were returned to Earth just last year.

MG: Dumb question. What does it look like? What does this sample look like?

DANIELLE SIMKUS: You know, it's… For me, I'm super excited to see the sample in-person. But it's pretty unremarkable when you look at it. It's just very dark and dusty. It's just black. It looks uninteresting. But once you actually obviously do the experiments, it's pretty exciting to see what’s in the entire material.

MG: I heard somebody described it as surprisingly salty in terms of like what is in the sample. Tell me a little bit more about that.

DANIELLE SIMKUS: Yeah, that's right. So we just have been finding that it has some unusually high salts. And that's one of the new findings from the kind of mineralogical aspect of this research. And, you know, we're just trying to understand what that means about Bennu's history and whether that has any impact on the formation of these prebiotic organic compounds that we're interested in.

MG: Why is it that people are saying, and you've hinted at this, but why people are saying that it might contain some of the building blocks of life.

DANIELLE SIMKUS: Well, you know, I should have said that, you know, we know that it contains the building blocks of life. When we were heading towards this asteroid, we were hoping that it did. And then, you know, the excitement last week was the release of our paper that shows that in fact, it does contain these building blocks of life. You know, they're formed by nonbiological reactions in space. So just by chemical reactions not involving life, but these molecules like amino acids, which are the building blocks of protein and nuclear bases, which are the building blocks of DNA. You know, we're finding these in the sample. We know they're not contamination and we know that they could have a role in the formation of life.

MG: What do you hope to learn from the little bit of dust that you got from this asteroid?

DANIELLE SIMKUS: Well, actually, there's a lot of work to be done still. I mean, we just obviously, these are exciting results just to confirm that, you know, all the work that we've been doing over the years on meteorite samples is valid. This is exciting just to confirm that and see all these organic compounds. But there's a lot of work to be done. And we're finding that Bennu, you know, depending on the sample that you're looking at, it can actually look quite different. So it's not necessarily a homogenous asteroid, and different pieces might look different. So there's just like, there's a ton of material left to analyze. I think it's like 70% of the material is actually going to be saved for future generations, including scientists who are not even born yet. So I'm just excited to see, you know, how it differs sample to sample and if we can get some information about these chemical reactions that are involved in forming these really important compounds.

MG: I love how giddy you are about this. I mean, you are over the moon that you have your hands on this substance in some ways.

DANIELLE SIMKUS: Yeah. I mean, it's like… it's this is… I would say this is the highlight of my career so far for sure. And I've been, you know, excited to work in the astrobiology analytical lab at Goddard for over a decade. It was always my ultimate goal. So I just… if you told me that, you know, 10 plus years ago, if you told me that I would be working on Osiris-rex, I probably wouldn't have believed you. So it's just kind of exciting to actually celebrate that we have this data.

MG: It's fantastic. Danielle, thank you very much.

DANIELLE SIMKUS: Thank you.

MG: Danielle Simkus is a scientist at NASA studying, as you heard, the building blocks of life that were detected on an asteroid that they took a sample from and brought back to Earth. That is The Current for this Wednesday. It’s the 5th of February. Q is up next on CBC Radio One. When we finish up here in just a few moments time, I will walk out of the studio and get on a train and head to Windsor, Ontario. The Current will come to you from that city tomorrow from a diner right across the road, across the, yeah, across the road from an auto plant and just across the border from Detroit, Michigan. We're going to talk to people about the relationship that people in that city, and more broadly, that we have with the United States. What is that relationship like now? What is that relationship going to be like in future given the events of this week? The Current coming to you live from Windsor, Ontario, tomorrow right here on CBC Radio One. I'm Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening. I'll talk to you tomorrow. Take care.

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Wednesday, February 5, 2025 Episode Transcript

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