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The Current Transcript for May 9, 2025

Host: Matt Galloway

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

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SPEAKER: As Pope Francis has reminded us many times, a bishop is called to serve. His authority is service. And so to look for different ways in which a bishop can serve in any given society, in any given church, I think is very important.

MATT GALLOWAY: After just over 24 hours in seclusion, cardinals elected Robert Prevost the next leader of the Catholic Church. Leo XIV will be the first American pope. In 30 minutes, how he will lead a divided church, and whether his social media rebuke as a cardinal of US Vice President JD Vance offers some clues. Also this morning, high tariffs and empty ports. How supply chain experts worry Donald Trump's economic fight with China could soon lead to sparse shelves and higher prices in the United States, and what that might mean here in Canada. Plus, the world-famous Gopher Hole Museum. Yes, you heard me right.

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LURAL KURTA: The idea is that you're walking into a gopher tunnel, and you are staring into the secret lives of gophers which just happen to mimic the people up above.

MG: In central Alberta, there is a tourist attraction so special it attracted condemnation from Paul McCartney and nearly, nearly made it onto our bucket list of the top places to see in Canada. We had to visit. And so in an hour, yes indeed, the secret lives of gophers. But we begin with the three men who will determine the course of the war in Ukraine. Good morning. I'm Matt Galloway, and this is The Current.

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UKRAINE

Guests: Luke Harding, Simon Shuster

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DONALD TRUMP: So I'm going to begin by just adding that we just concluded the rare-earth deal with Ukraine. That's been fully ratified and approved by their legislative branches. And so we appreciate that, and I'll be speaking with the president in a little while, a little bit later. And we appreciate that, but the deal is all now signed up and ratified. And we have access to a massive amount of very, very high-quality rare earth.

MG: The Ukrainian Parliament has indeed ratified that controversial minerals deal with the United States. It comes as a three-day ceasefire Russia promised has been breached repeatedly, starting hours after that ceasefire began. After three years of grinding war, hopes for an end to the violence hinge in large part on three leaders: Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin of Russia and US President Donald Trump. I'm joined now by two journalists with deep insight into the personalities and motivations of these three leaders. Simon Shuster is a senior correspondent at Time Magazine, and for his book, “The Showman”, he had extraordinary access to the president of Ukraine as Russia's invasion unfolded. Luke Harding is a senior international correspondent for The Guardian and the author of “Invasion: The Inside Story of Russia's Bloody War and Ukraine's Fight for Survival.” Good morning to you both.

BOTH GUESTS: Good morning.

MG: Simon, this deal, such as it is, came after that explosive meeting that Zelensky had with Donald Trump and JD Vance in the Oval Office. As you understand it, what's in the deal, but who benefits the most from this arrangement?

SIMON SHUSTER: I think Ukraine has a lot to gain from this arrangement, certainly, if you compare it to the deal that was initially presented to President Zelensky in the middle of February by Secretary Scott Bessent, the Secretary of Treasury, who initially came to Kyiv and handed Zelensky a deal and basically urged him to sign it. That deal was very onerous. It was something that Zelensky could not accept. It essentially gave the US control of a great deal or most of Ukraine's natural resources in perpetuity. And there was a lot of back and forth, often very tense meetings even before the blow up in the Oval Office. But the deal that they ended up signing actually removed many of the most onerous terms. And I think now, it basically gives Trump a reason to continue US support. It gives him an argument to say to the American people, look, we have a deal with the Ukrainians now, we're investing in Ukraine, we’re going to be profiting from this relationship, and we're not just pumping money into a black hole. That's a useful political argument for Trump, and hopefully it's enough to restore at least some, if not all of the US support that has been kind of waning or declining under Trump so far.

MG: Does it give Zelensky and Ukraine the security guarantees that he and that nation were looking for?

SIMON SHUSTER: No, absolutely not. And that was a key concession that President Zelensky made over the course of these negotiations. He fought hard for security guarantees of some kind to be included in the deal, but the Americans dug in and refused to do that. And ultimately, Zelensky said, well, you know, we'll take what we can get. The only kinds of security guarantees are essentially that, look, if there are American companies working on the ground to extract minerals or invest in other projects in Ukraine, then the American government, and potentially military will be also on board to protect those companies and the country where they're working. That's kind of a loose security guarantee, but it's the best Zelensky could get.

MG: Luke, I want to ask you about these mineral sites. You've been to one of them. But before that, I mean, Donald Trump talked about this deal giving him and the United States some degree of leverage over Russia in peace negotiations, and it would help compensate the United States for the aid that it had been providing. Does it get Trump that, do you think?

LUKE HARDING: I don't think so. I mean, I'm just back from Ukraine. And what I can tell you is that the Russians are bombing and hitting Ukrainian towns and cities every night with drones, with ballistic missiles killing families, killing kids, also launching attacks right across the frontline, a thousand kilometres long. And really, despite the negotiations we've seen, you know, brokered by the Trump administration over the past couple of months, the Russians haven't stopped. And, you know, they've sort of played along. They've given the impression they're interested in peace. But the reality is that their strategy, I think, is to take as many concessions as they can from the White House and just carry on. I mean, their strategic goal is to subjugate Ukraine, to overrun Ukraine, to eventually take Kyiv. Something they tried and failed to do in 2022 are unchanged. And, you know, the interesting question for me is at what point does Trump wake up and realize he's being played? Now, the mineral and steel, I mean, I agree with Simon. I mean, it's a kind of interesting first step. I mean, I don't think it's hugely significant, to be honest. I mean, you mentioned I went around a minerals mine. It was a sort of field, actually, with a lot of lithium under it, which in theory can be turned into car batteries. But the manager of this mine, who was showing me around, was saying, well, look, it's going to be five, eight, 10 years before we can extract this stuff. It'll cost in the region of $300 billion. And this is the thing, is that for sure, I mean, it’s good for America, it's good for Ukraine, but it's going to be a very long time before profits from these joint ventures are going to happen. And I think in Trump's head, you put a spade in the ground and you get gold out and that's it. The reality is there's a huge amount of time and effort before anything is going to be produced.

MG: Simon, what's interesting about this is Donald Trump has talked about victory or peace or some degree of ending these hostilities with a clock ticking. He said that he could end the war, when he was campaigning to be president, he could end the war on day one of his presidency. Then the belief was he could end this within the first hundred days. Both of those timers have gone off. The war continues. But how has that ticking clock shaped negotiations, do you think?

SIMON SHUSTER: I think it's dramatically weakened the American negotiating position. One of Trump's envoys, General Keith Kellogg, described it as being on Trump time, by which he meant that the US president is in a hurry. And if you're in a hurry heading into negotiations and your counterpart knows that, you're in a fundamentally weaker position because the other side can just wait you out. And if you're in a hurry to make a deal... That means you're more likely to grant concessions and step away from demands that you've made. And that is consistently what we've seen the Americans do, both in their talks with the Russians and in their talks with the Ukrainians.

MG: Luke, you talked about the idea of Donald Trump being played. What does Trump time mean for Vladimir Putin?

LUKE HARDING: Well, I mean, that works perfectly well for Vladimir Putin. I mean, he's quite happy to drag negotiations out forever, actually, and as I said, you know, take whatever concessions he can get. I mean, his view all along with this conflict, and let's remember that the war started in 2014 with the takeover and annexation of Crimea and this kind of covert invasion of the east of the country by Russian forces. He thinks that Russia can outlast the West, that the Western leaders are ephemeral, weak, divided. And, you know, you have to ask yourself, with Donald Trump, he occasionally sort of threatens Vladimir Putin. But so far, all of the pressure we've seen since he came back as president has been on the Ukrainians. I mean, he's called Zelensky a dictator. He's bawled him out and humiliated him in the Oval Office. He's cut off intelligence. The flow of American weapons to Ukraine has more or less stopped. I mean, I saw that on my way out via this airport in Poland, which used to be full of American soldiers, now completely empty and deserted. And so I think Putin wants to go long, and he will just stall, really, forever.

MG: What is he willing to sacrifice if he's going to go long? What is, not just acceptable victory, but what is he willing to accept in terms of loss, do you think, Luke?

LUKE HARDING: Well, I mean, what we know is he's really willing to accept huge Russian casualties. I mean, more Russians have died so far than Americans in Vietnam and or indeed, Soviet soldiers in the war in Afghanistan in the 1980s, and Putin's okay with that. I mean, what he's not prepared to sacrifice there is sort of maximalist war goals, which means getting rid of Zelensky, getting rid of Zelensky's pro-Western government, and the territory he claims is already annexed, which, you know, four regions plus Crimea, including areas he doesn't control. So his demands for land are as big as ever. And I think he thinks actually, you know, he's got America in quite a good place. I mean, will Trump ever criticize Vladimir Putin and do something that hurts Russia economically or politically? I don't think so.

MG: Is that about, I mean, I'm not asking you to put him on the couch, but is that about ego? Is it about legacy? What is that about?

LUKE HARDING: Well, I wrote a whole book about this. It's a New York Times bestseller called “Collusion”, how Russia helped, you know, Donald Trump win the White House in 2016. And really, I think there are three things in play. One is ideological. There's quite an overlap between conservatives, you know, on the right or far right of the Republican Party and who admire Russia, see it as this white, orthodox, Christian, anti-gay, anti-feminist civilization. There's also the strongman theory that Trump likes fellow strongmen. He wants to be Putin. He likes the freedom that autocrats have to get what they want, to make the law what they say it is. And then, of course, the third thing, the most contested thing is Trump's whole kind of backstory with Russia going back to the 1980s when the KGB had him over to Moscow to look at real estate deals. And, you know, what we don't know is we don't know what Putin is saying privately to Trump. And in terms of whether Trump is a Russian asset or not, I mean, probably that question is unanswerable, but certainly, the way he's behaved, his behaviour over the last few weeks and months has been the behaviour of a Russian asset.

MG: Simon, you have spent more time with Zelensky than many, many journalists. How do you think he was changed by that very public eruption in the Oval Office? I spoke with a former Trump advisor who, she said these sorts of things happen behind the scenes all the time, but she couldn't quite believe that it had happened in front of the cameras. How do you think that impacted and affected him?

SIMON SHUSTER: I don't think it changed him dramatically.

MG: Really? Being publicly humiliated didn't change him dramatically?

SIMON SHUSTER: I think he was very clear-eyed about Trump and JD Vance and who he was going in there to talk to. You know, I talked to President Zelensky three weeks after the Oval Office blow-up. He said he had no regrets about it. And honestly, when I saw the footage of that meeting in the Oval Office, to me, it looked like a classic Zelensky, the Zelensky I know and studied for my book. He held his head high, and as he put it to me in our interview in March, about three weeks after that incident, he said he was defending the dignity of Ukraine. And if you look at the poll numbers in Ukraine in support of Zelensky, they shot up by more than 10 percentage points after that meeting. So if Vance and Trump wanted to help Zelensky's popularity, they certainly did a good job. So I don't think it changed his position dramatically, but it made him redouble his efforts to win Trump over. And the meeting we saw in the Vatican, I think, was a real turning point in that, where Zelensky finally got his chance to have the meeting with Trump that he wanted, one-on-one, to look him in the eye, without JD Vance there to interrupt, without the media there to throw questions at them, without all these distractions. So I think he has pursued pretty consistently his strategy in trying to win Trump over. Despite Trump's consistent sympathies toward Putin and toward the Russians, Zelensky still believes that over time, he can convince Trump that Putin cannot be trusted, and that Ukraine is the real partner to the United States, not Russia.

MG: How much do you think he's willing to concede as the war goes on? I mean, are there red lines that he will not cross to end this conflict?

SIMON SHUSTER: There are definitely red lines. One of them is acknowledging legally that Russia will forever possess the lands it has occupied, any of the lands it has occupied in Ukraine, including Crimea. Zelensky will never and can never do that politically, but he has shown an incredible willingness to grant concessions, to back away from demands that he was making earlier in the peace process, including, as we mentioned a little earlier, the question of security guarantees. You know, he accepted that the Americans are just not going to go there, and he backed away from those demands and mostly stopped talking about security guarantees in this peace process. So he's given a lot of ground. I think he's also demonstrated that, look, the Russians are not giving any ground. Indeed, the Russian's even throughout this peace process have continued these horrific bombings against civilians, killing women and children, and honestly making a fool of Donald Trump, because Donald Trump is saying he wants to pursue a peace process, He's working with the Russians, and at the same time, the Russians are continuing these horrific bombing attacks.

MG: He has been at the centre of this story, I mean, right from the very beginning, recording that video when everybody thought he was going to leave and we are here, you know, standing on the street corner, to now. What impact do you think his presence is having on how this might end, Simon?

SIMON SHUSTER: I mean, I think his stubbornness is one of the qualities that certainly defines his character and dates back to well before he was president, back to his days as a comedian and a producer and a filmmaker. He doesn't do well with being pressured. He definitely gets his back up and pushes back when pressured. So I think that has allowed Ukraine to resist diplomatic pressure from the West, from Trump, and also to resist the invasion from the Russians. I think he's been very instrumental in that. You know, the final judgement of history is yet to be made, but I think already, a lot of Ukrainians are quite proud of the job he's done in representing their country abroad and being a wartime leader and diplomat.

MG: Luke, what did you glean about how the Ukrainian people see Zelensky? You were there on the frontlines in Kharkiv, you were in Kyiv when it was being under bombardment as well. What did you learn about how people there, and those on the frontlines in particular, see Zelensky this far into the war?

LUKE HARDING: Well, yeah, it's an interesting question. I mean, listening to Simon, I was in Kyiv when the Oval Office kind of blowout happened. And it was definitely true that the people who didn't vote for him back in 2019 when he won a landslide as a comedian turned president, they were saying, look, he's our guy. I mean, one person said to me, he's got balls. And I think, you know, people admire his courage, his steeliness, his resolve, his stubbornness, as Simon put it. And, you know, there are questions as to, you know, how long he will stay, about elections if there's a peace deal, about other political candidates. But for now, I think most Ukrainians see him as indispensable. And also, I mean, he released this extraordinary video to mark Victory Day, where he's walking down the street, speaking into his iPhone, waving at people as he goes along, basically saying that Ukraine's sacrifice is an important thing and sort of criticizing the kind of Russian narrative of the Second World War. And he still has it. He still has that common touch. He still has a sprinkling of stardust. And he gives the impression always that he's not above everyone else, that he's the same as everyone else, sharing the same burdens as everyone else, a kind of citizen rather than a king. And I think that's kind of incredibly important and really explains why he's still, you know, not with everybody, but with most people, is still pretty popular.

MG: Do you think, just finally, I mean, we're talking about three men who are instrumental in trying to figure out what happens in how Ukraine and how the world gets out of this situation. Do you think it's possible, and I'll start with you, Luke, to get to a place where there's not just a ceasefire that is violated almost immediately, but a lasting peace? Is it possible to get there with these three leaders still in charge, given everything that we've talked about, and the role of ego and legacy that's playing into all of this?

LUKE HARDING: I mean, the answer is no. I mean, I think Zelensky would like a deal. I think ultimately, he would probably accept the current frontline de facto with peacekeepers from Britain, France and so on patrolling a sort of 30-kilometre DMZ like in South and North Korea. He would accept that. And Trump I think doesn't really care about the detail. The problem is Putin, is that this is essentially his war. And my feeling is that so long as Putin is there, so long as he's alive and in the Kremlin, then this war will continue. And I fear that we have, it's certainly not going to finish this year, but I really think we could have a very long period of conflict until finally, a bit like, you know, Brezhnev or Stalin, you know, Putin exits the Kremlin horizontally, and then perhaps, there will be a pause. But when that happens, if that happens, you know, we just don't know.

MG: Simon?

SIMON SHUSTER: Yeah, I totally agree with Luke on this. You know, I think for Zelensky, when I talked to him about six weeks ago, he sees his legacy as the peace deal, as achieving a peace deal that the Ukrainian people can live with, that does not amount to capitulation, and that secures their country from another invasion, from a repeat of what Russia has done. That's a very difficult task, but he's very single-mindedly focused on this now and sees it as the legacy he wants to leave as a capstone to his presidency. And, you know, Putin is the exact opposite. He sees his legacy building as one of imperial conquest and militarism. So with those two personalities, you know, I don't see how they're reconcilable while Putin is in power. Trump does however have a lot of influence. And I think, you know, also, Zelensky pointed this out, that Putin is scared of Trump. And if Trump really uses the influence he has, the power he has of the US government, he can force Putin into a corner economically and diplomatically. But we have yet to see any sign that Trump is really willing to do that. That's the big question here.

MG: It's really interesting to hear your insights on this. Again, people talk about the possibility of a ceasefire immediately violated, wondering what that would lead to and whether peace is on the horizon. Your insights into these three men at the centre of this story are really valuable. Thank you all for being here.

SIMON SHUSTER: Thank you.

LUKE HARDING: Thank you.

MG: Simon Shuster is a senior correspondent at Time Magazine. For his book, “The Showman”, he had great access to the president of Ukraine as the invasion by Russia unfolded. Luke Harding is a senior international correspondent for The Guardian and the author of “Invasion: The Inside Story of Russia's Bloody War and Ukraine's Fight for Survival.” Your CBC news is next, and then Cardinal Robert Prevost is the new Bishop of Rome, now known as Pope Leo XIV. He is the first American ever to be pope. We will talk about the significance of that, the fact that yesterday, in his unveiling in Rome, he didn't speak English, did not speak about the United States either. We'll talk about who he is and the direction he might lead the Catholic Church in. That's coming up in six minutes here on The Current. My name is Matt Galloway. Stay with us.

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POPE LEO

Guest: Father Sam Sawyer

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

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[Pope Leo speaks Italian, crowd cheers]

MG: Peace be with you all. The newly elected pope addressing the crowd yesterday in St. Peter's Square. Robert Francis Prevost, an American from Chicago, now known as Pope Leo XIV, will lead the world's 1.4 billion Catholics. It is the first time an American has filled this role. Today, Leo XIV held his first mass as pope in the Sistine Chapel in front of the cardinals who chose him, and he started with a few words in English.

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POPE LEO: Through the ministry of Peter, you have called me to carry that cross and to be blessed with that mission. And I know I can rely on each and every one of you to walk with me as we continue as a church, as a community, as friends of Jesus, as believers, to announce the good news, to announce the gospel.

MG: Father Sam Sawyer is a Jesuit priest, editor-in-chief of the Catholic publication America Magazine. He is in Rome. Father Sawyer, good morning. Sam Sawyer, are you there? Oh, we had Father Sam Sawyer on the line.

FATHER SAM SAWYER: Yeah, no, I’m here.

MG: Oh, are you there now?

FATHER SAM SAWYER: I am here, yes.

MG: There you are. Good to hear you, and good to have you back on our program. Thank you for joining us.

FATHER SAM SAWYER: Thank you very much.

MG: One of the things I read this morning was somebody saying that the idea of an American pope for generations was unimaginable to some people. Were you surprised to see a pope pick from the United States?

FATHER SAM SAWYER: I was very surprised. But on the other hand, I'm a Jesuit. In 2013, I would have told you a Jesuit pope was impossible. 24 hours ago, I would've told you a pope from the United States was impossible. So apparently, I'm just terrible at predicting conclaves.

MG: Why was that a surprise to you? Again, one of the other things I had read was that the idea of nationality and geography And the power of the United States prevented people from thinking that a pope from that country Would be appropriate, but would fit in some ways. So what was at the root of your surprise?

FATHER SAM SAWYER: So I think there's a sense in the global church and just in places that aren't the United States generally that the US already has an outsized economic, political, military influence on the world. So, you know, one more bit of influence in an American pope would be seen as too much or not appropriate for the church, not helpful for the Church. But really, you know, Cardinal Prevost, now Pope Leo XIV, I think has the kind of profile that made it possible to look past geography, because although from the United States, he has spent almost 20 years in Peru in a couple of different stints. He's actually also a Peruvian citizen. He naturalized when he was named a bishop there. And he's also had this global profile in his work, first as the superior general, the prior general for the Augustinian Order, and then in his role at the Vatican as the head of the Office for Bishops. So really, you know, an American, but belongs to the global church more than he belongs to the US Catholic Church in a lot of sense.

MG: It was interesting yesterday, as he was unveiled, he did not speak English, and he didn't actually reference the United States as well. To your point, he spoke Spanish, he spoke Italian, and there are many people who see him as a choice from Latin America because of the time that he spent as a missionary in Peru.

FATHER SAM SAWYER: Yeah. And certainly, you know, from what we're hearing, the Latin American cardinals feel like he's one of their own. He was, in addition to his role at the head of the Office for Bishops in the Vatican, he's also the president of the Vatican's Commission for Latin America. So strongly identified that way as well. We actually, we did have to wait until this morning to hear him speak in his native English. He gave a little brief intro to his homily at the Mass in the Sistine Chapel this morning in English before switching to Italian for the full homily.

MG: This was a swift conclave just over 24 hours before he was elected. Why do you think it happened so quickly and why was he chosen?

FATHER SAM SAWYER: So why it happened so quickly, that is a great question, and I will be fascinated if we ever learn the answer to that. But yeah, four ballots, it’s, you know, it took, I think it was five ballots to elect Francis, four ballots to elect Benedict in the conclave before that. So it is a surprisingly swift conclave, particularly to get to someone who was not, you know, seen as one of the most obvious choices as they were going into conclave. So, but I think it suggests that, you know, that whatever happened during those general congregation meetings that the cardinals had between Francis's death and going into conclave, they actually did manage to sort something out because they achieved very significant unity and consensus getting to, you know, he got at least 89 votes during the conclave, and from a group of men from all over the world who didn't really know each other all that terribly well before they got here just, you know, a week and a half ago or so.

MG: He's been referred to as a dignified middle of the road in some ways. Do you think that, part of this is picking up on what we were talking about before the conclave began, that this would be a referendum in some ways on Pope Francis. Is being a dignified middle of the road, is that helpful in this moment?

FATHER SAM SAWYER: I think it's very helpful. So I mean, I think we saw two things in his first blessing when he came out on the loggia yesterday. One was if you noticed the way that he was dressed, he wore that, it's called the mozzetta, that red cape with the stall over it that Francis had not worn in 2013. So that's a nod to continuity with the tradition and the style of popes before Francis and I think an indication that he's not trying to copy Francis one for one. But at the same time, in what he said, he thanked Francis twice, to great applause from the square both times. And he also referred to synodality, Francis's signature initiative. So very clearly an indication that he intends to continue with the processes that Francis set in motion for the church.

MG: There are many people who are sifting through, and because of the world we live in now, sifting through communications, social media posts and what have you to get a sense as to who he is and how he might lead. As a cardinal, Robert Prevost had a documented history of critiquing, for example, US immigration policies, including sharing an article titled JD Vance is wrong, Jesus doesn't ask us to rank our love for others. What do you make of that?

FATHER SAM SAWYER: Well, I was surprised by it myself, in part because in the post right after the one you just referenced, he actually shared an article I wrote about…

MG: He did indeed.

FATHER SAM SAWYER: About the open letter Francis wrote to the US bishops about the Trump administration's deportation program. So no, I think he's, you know, look, the Catholic Church has a very clear teaching on the dignity of migrants and the need for governments to respect that. And I think he's clearly fully aligned with that and isn't afraid to speak that truth to his own government, which is a wonderful thing to see. Yeah, so, you know, I also find it striking, you know, he’s clearly, even though he was in Rome while all that was happening, he was, you know, in his job at the Vatican and hadn't been living in the US for a long time by that point, he's still keeping track of what's happening in the US and in the way that the US affects the global stage. Certainly coming from Latin America, the concerns about how the US deals with migration, he's going to understand that very well from the perspective of his people in Peru.

MG: Do you think that criticism perhaps will continue of what's happening in the United States in his role now as Pope?

FATHER SAM SAWYER: I mean, I expect, I certainly don't expect him to continue retweeting things that I've written. That would surprise the heck out of me.

MG: Never say never.

FATHER SAM SAWYER: Never say never. But I do think, I mean, I think, so I think it will be in a more careful diplomatic register, you know, because as pope, anything, anything he does in engagement with the United States will, you know, have the involvement of the Vatican secretariat of state and the other diplomatic apparatus around the Vatican. But I think it will definitely continue. I don't think he's going to shy back from bearing witness to the gospel on contentious political issues.

MG: He is, as a cardinal, like many members of the clergy, has also drawn criticism over his dealings with priests accused of sexual abuse. When he was a Bishop in Peru, there were two priests accused of molesting young girls. There were some accusers who claimed that the cardinal covered this up. The diocese has denied this, but there are allegations that the diocese paid something like $150,000 to these girls to silence them. What do you think this election says to the critics of the Catholic Church when it comes to how the church over time, the sweep of time, has failed victims of abuse?

FATHER SAM SAWYER: So a couple things here. First, I would say, so I'm, I don't think we know the full set of facts in the case in Peru that's being brought up right now. And I'm sure that’ll be, that'll be reported on over the course of the coming weeks. But I would have expected anyone who the cardinals elected, anyone who's been a bishop for, you know, more than two days, basically, and most of these men have been bishops for at least 10 years or more. Anyone who's been a bishop is going to have, there's going to be some concerns, frustrations, some allegations about how they've mishandled or not responded sufficiently to allegations of abuse and to the way the Church deals with abuse, because the Church is still in the middle of figuring out how to respond fully to abuse. And I think one of the, you know, one of the things that Francis certainly worked on but also did not complete was, there's this legislation that goes under the name Vos Estis, about how to hold bishops accountable for their governance of their dioceses and the people who report to them with regard to how they treat survivors and how they treat abuse allegations. So we have legislation for that that's new, but it hasn't really been fully implemented and road tested yet. And so I think we're going to see that continue to happen. But honestly, I would have expected some kind of concern about, did he deal with abuse properly for literally anyone that the cardinals could have elected.

MG: Let me ask you about one other issue that has been raised, and this is reporting from the New York Times talking about when addressing bishops in 2012, Cardinal Prevost expressed disapproval of the LGBTQ community. He said that popular culture had created sympathy for, in his words, beliefs and practices that are out of odds with the gospel, including, in His words, a homosexual lifestyle. Do we know where he stands? And this is important in part because it to a lot of people strikes a contrast to what Francis said, of course, in the famous, almost off-the-cuff line, who am I to judge?

FATHER SAM SAWYER: So the answer is we don't know really where he stands on that. So I'd point out, of course, that's 13 years old. You know, as you said, it's from 2012. It's before Francis’s famous who am I to judge? The other thing, so the real answer is we don't know. But what I would say is, so my colleague, Father James Martin, who works with us at American Media, and also is the founder of the Outreach Ministry, which tries to work with the LGBTQ community and build bridges with the Catholic Church there. Father Martin sat with then Cardinal Prevost at the same table during the Synod on Synodality last October and has nothing but good things to say about him. Really respects him, found him a generous, kind, very, just a man he really loves and respects and was thrilled to see was elected as pope. So, you know, I think, I think it's a wait and see. Certainly, he's going to hold to the church's traditional teaching. I don't expect him to suddenly start innovating on the church is moral teaching there. But I think the tone he takes, how he decides to talk about engagement with LGBT people and how to listen to them, I think that remains to be seen as pope because we haven't seen anything from him that's been documented any later than 2012 on that question.

MG: I'm going to let you go, but just very, very briefly, when you say wait and see, what else will you be waiting to see in terms of how he will lead your church?

FATHER SAM SAWYER: Oh my gosh, nearly everything. But a couple of big things that are ahead for me, you know, he's got to sort of establish what effectively we might call his cabinet, his administration. So he'll need to appoint Vatican officials, all of whom technically lost their roles or most of whom technically lost their roles at the death of Pope Francis. So what set of appointments he makes there will be interesting. It'll be particularly interesting who he appoints to his own old role as head of the Bishop's Office. I'm also very interested to see, you know, there was supposed to be around the end of May Pope Francis travelling to Nicaea to celebrate this major ecumenical anniversary of the Council of Nicaea, the 1700th anniversary. I'll be interested to see what his first international trip is and whether or not that stays on his schedule as was supposed to be on Pope Francis’s.

MG: Or whether he heads home to Chicago, for example.

FATHER SAM SAWYER: Yeah, thank you for the reminder, but yeah, when is he going to make his first trip to the United States? I'll certainly be waiting to hear about that.

MG: It's great to speak with you again. I appreciate your time this morning. Father Sam Sawyer, thank you.

FATHER SAM SAWYER: Thank you so much.

MG: Father Sam Sawyer is a Jesuit priest and editor-in-chief of the Catholic publication America Magazine. He was in Rome.

[Music]

US SUPPLY CHAIN

Guest: Jason Miller

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

SOUNDCLIP

DONALD TRUMP: Maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls, you know? And maybe the two dolls will cost a couple of bucks more than they would normally.

MG: Not exactly the American dream. It's only the 9th of May, and yet retailers are already thinking about Christmas. That is because of what is happening when it comes to the supply chain and concerns that store shelves might not be as full as people are used to seven months down the line. The head of LA Ports, America's busiest, is warning that tariffs have led to a 35% decrease in cargo, slowdown mainly driven by the 145% tariffs the US has put on goods coming from China. Larry Gold is the owner of Aldik. It's a store in Los Angeles, and most of their products come from China.

SOUNDCLIP

LARRY GOLD: We sell very, very high-end Christmas trees. They already have lights on them, and they're very realistic. And we'll sell a seven and a half foot Christmas tree for about a thousand dollars. With 145% duty, we'll be selling that tree for about 2200, and nobody's going to buy that.

MG: So here's the math in dollars.

SOUNDCLIP

LARRY GOLD: We bought $600,000 worth of Christmas trees, and that was our order in January. When that comes in, I'm going to have to write a check for $600000 to the factory, and I'm also going to have to write an additional check for almost a million dollars to customs.

MG: This business has been in Larry's family for 70 years. This has him worried about the future.

SOUNDCLIP

LARRY GOLD: If 90% of our revenue is affected by tariffs and we're not going to have any product to sell, we're not going to be able to survive. The hard part is we've been out on a long time. We have a second generation working for us whose parents worked and retired, and it's a shame to see this all go away for no particular good reason.

MG: Jason Miller is a professor of supply chain management at Michigan State University's Eli Broad College of Business. Jason, good morning.

JASON MILLER: Good morning.

MG: It is strange to be thinking about what may or may not be under a Christmas tree, a Christmas tree that might be on a boat many, many months down the line, but that's what people are thinking about. How widespread is Larry Gold's example of what businesses in the United States are facing right now?

JASON MILLER: So it's very widespread. Once the 145% tariffs were put in place, we've seen a large scale pausing by many importers of orders from China. We just recently had the CEO of Maersk, which is the second largest containership operator in the world, say they've seen a 30 to 40% decrease in bookings from China to the United States.

MG: Put that into perspective. What does that mean? What does that look like?

JASON MILLER: So what that looks like is certainly, a few months from now, for various categories of goods where the US relies extensively on Chinese imports, small electrical appliances like mixers, blenders, microwaves, baby strollers and car seats, you know, little plastic things for your bathrooms, certainly, the product variety that the consumer is used to will decrease substantially. And we could see if this stays, you know, stays pat, some more significant shortages emerging by, let's say August or September.

MG: I was going to say, how long until you start to see those things come around? People are talking about Christmas, but also, you have parents and parents-to-be who are thinking about, in the United States, you hear them thinking about whether they should buy cribs now, for example, whether they should buy a car seat in advance because it may not be available. You're looking at sometime this summer when things really start to hit?

JASON MILLER: Yeah. So you can figure most of the inventory on the shelf now was ordered a couple of months ago. And so you've got a little bit of lead time, which is why we're so closely watching to see if the administration starts to exempt certain items like strollers and car seats. Reuters reported recently that that was being considered.

MG: Larry said the 145% tariffs on Chinese goods could force him to close his business. How much longer do you think this could go on before you see some businesses having to pull the plug?

JASON MILLER: So especially for items with the holidays, orders must be placed with suppliers in China at absolute latest by the end of June. And that is assuming those suppliers are going to work overtime to get those products here. So if you are sitting in August and these, you know, companies have not decided to import, that means they're not going to have the product to sell on the holiday season, and they'll be essentially either laying people off or they certainly will be not planning to hire folks in that November, December season.

MG: I think this is surprising to some people, not to you because you study supply chains, but people may not know how supply chains work, and they would be surprised to hear that you need to order things that far in advance. So how does a slowdown in what is being shipped and what is arriving in the ports ripple through that entire supply chain? Just briefly walk me through that.

JASON MILLER: Yeah. So you can start thinking that means you need less truck drivers at the ports to move that freight. So you would expect to see lower employment there. You may see less workers in the warehouses around the ports that are processing freight, and so you need fewer workers there. You have less freight moving inland, so you need fewer, you know, long distance truck drivers to move some of that. And then also at the same time, US exports to China have plunged tremendously, which means you need less, you know, workers in factories that are producing the goods that China does buy from us, like high-end optical scanners, semiconductor machinery, and things of that sort.

MG: I mean, we saw this during the pandemic. People suddenly realized that we live in this just-in-time sort of society, right? It's not as though there are giant warehouses that are stockpiling car seats for months and months to come, that these things arrive as they're needed.

JASON MILLER: No, exactly. And it's because inventory costs a lot to hold. And so we typically have, you know, decent amounts of what we call safety stock to deal with uncertainty of demand and, you know, length of lead time from a supplier to us. But we don't anticipate, you know, pausing orders for, let's say months. That's not something that is taken into consideration.

MG: The US President Donald Trump was asked about this slowdown yesterday. Have a listen to what he had to say.

SOUNDCLIP

DONALD TRUMP: When I see that, that means we lose less money. Look, China was making, you know, different numbers from 500 billion to a trillion or a trillion, I think it was 1.1 trillion. And frankly, if we didn't do business, we would have been better off, okay? You understand that. So when you say it's slowed down, that's a good thing, not a bad thing.

MG: What do you make of that? It's a good thing, not a bad thing that things have slowed down.

JASON MILLER: Complete lack of understanding about how modern supply chains work.

MG: He said, tell me more about this, because he has said in some ways, it's a good idea, it's a good thing. This is what he wants. It's a good thing that the United States isn't doing as much business with China as it was in the past.

JASON MILLER: Yeah. So that's one that the trade economists don't look at, you know, bilateral trade deficits. I mean, China is actually a major export destination for US goods. It seems, it seems to be a, it's a mentality and understanding that none of us can really grasp. The fact that we source a lot from China has made prices lower for Americans over the years. And in many ways, you know, we, the extent that there have been negative consequences from trade liberalization with China that showed up in the original academic research has largely been overwritten by subsequent work. And so I really don't even know what to make of it because I cannot process this mentality that somehow, running a trade deficit with a country means that we're being taken advantage of.

MG: He also said, when he was asked about the rising cost of toys before Christmas, the kids would just have to do with two dolls, not 30, that you'll have fewer pencils. You don't need 500 pencils. You just have a few pencils. How do you think that goes over? I mean, you can make an argument that maybe we consume too much stuff, but how do you think that idea that, well, you'll just have fewer dolls under the tree and they'll cost you more, how does that go over with Americans?

JASON MILLER: Well, it doesn't go over well, and it ignores the job implications. Simple example, there's only 5600 individuals in the United States employed making dolls, toys and games in factories, but there's over 128,000 individuals employed in retail stores that sell games and toys and hobby items. And so if you have Americans buying less, that means you need far fewer workers in these retail sectors, which means you end up having job loss, which is consistent with the initial clip you were playing, you know, from the person talking about the Christmas trees.

MG: What would you say to Canadians about what to expect? We're talking about what's happening in the United States, and there are various negotiations and deals being crafted apparently between various countries. But in this country, what should we be thinking about?

JASON MILLER: So I think the biggest thing is going to be the realization of the need to diversify export markets from the United States. Now, looking at Canadian trade data that came, you know, Canadian exports to the US that came in in March, fortunately, Canada was actually spared the worst of, you know, the tariffs. For example, the average tariff rate for Canadian goods was just 1.9% for all imports. So far, far, far less, for example, than China where that figure is in the double digits now. And so in a lot of ways, it does seem that Canada has been spared the worst. And we're seeing evidence now from the, to even call what was discussed with the UK a deal is generous. But essentially for, it seems outside of Canada and Mexico, pretty much double digit, you know, 10% baseline tariff is going to be the name of the game moving forward at least. But the key thing is it's going to be diversify export markets. So.

MG: Jason, it's really helpful to have you walk us through this. I mean, it’s fascinating and I think really alarming to people, but also just your insight in this, in something that people perhaps don't understand a lot about, they get the things at the end of the supply chain, they may not be part of the whole process, is really helpful. Thank you very much.

JASON MILLER: Thank you for having me.

MG: Jason Miller is a professor of supply chain management at Michigan State University's Eli Broad College of Business. Coming up after your regional update, we're going to take you to a great Canadian place. It is one of the best places to visit. It is the world-famous Gopher Hole Museum. What is that? Well, you'll find out in 90 seconds. Stay with us.

[Music: Theme]

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GOPHER MUSEUM

Guest: Allison Dempster

MG: Hello again. I'm Matt Galloway, and you're listening to The Current. Last week, with great fanfare and trumpets and drum rolls and Rick Mercer, we announced The Current's Canadian travel bucket list. It has, on that list, beautiful places that are big because we're a big country. But we are also an equal opportunity public broadcaster. We do not want to neglect attractions that perhaps are on the smaller side of things. And it doesn't get that much smaller than the world-famous Gopher Hole Museum in Torrington, Alberta. The CBC's Allison Dempster dug into, see what I did there, dug into the story for us. Allison, good morning.

ALLISON DEMPSTER: Good morning, Matt.

MG: So this comes from a listener who wrote to us to say that this place, this world-famous Gopher Hole Museum is a must-see. And so you made the trip to Torrington to check it out. Do you think this is bucket list worthy?

ALLISON DEMPSTER: Matt, it is charmingly absurd and Canadiana to the core.

MG: Excellent.

ALLISON DEMPSTER: Yes, yes. So if that’s your jam or, you know, if you just happen to be into taxidermy and elaborate dioramas, this is the place for you. And you might laugh at what I'm about to say, Matt, and you'd be forgiven. But I want to tell you, it was surprisingly moving.

MG: Allison Dempster, hard-bitten journalist. I did not expect you to be choked up by the museum of taxidermied rodents.

ALLISON DEMPSTER: Yeah, me neither, but stay with me on this one.

MG: All right. So take us to the Gopher Hole Museum.

ALLISON DEMPSTER: Okay. So Torrington, it's a bit out of the way. It's a blink-and-you'll-miss-it hamlet surrounded by farmland northeast of Calgary. The museum is about the size of an RV. It's seasonal operation, so it doesn't open until the May long weekend. But Laural Kurta, the curator, gave me a sneak peek.

SOUNDCLIP

LAURAL KURTA: So you're coming into the museum. Now, they designed the boxes originally to make them look like they were televisions. But the idea is it's dark in here. So the light that you get is from the dioramas themselves. And that's, first of all, to highlight the dioramas. But the idea is that you're walking into a gopher tunnel, and you are staring into the secret lives of gophers which just happen to mimic the people up above. So I will often say that, you know, people think that they're looking at a bunch of funny stuffed dressed gophers wearing tutus and such, and 100% you are. Clearly, that's what you're doing. But this is also the history of this community. So each one of these boxes does tell something about the history of this area, what used to be here.

MG: The secret lives of gophers. This is exciting. Tell me about the dioramas.

ALLISON DEMPSTER: Yeah, there are more than 40 of them, and there are gophers at a grain elevator, a curling rink, a fishing hole, using real flies, of course. There's also an angelic gopher floating in a church diorama playing a harp, which, you know, you can buy a prayer candle with that image on it in the gift shop, by the way.

MG: Excellent.

ALLISON DEMPSTER: And one of the new firefighters, one of the new exhibits, Matt, is a firefighter. It's a woodland firefighter gopher, and that's just opening this year.

MG: A gopher firefighter.

ALLISON DEMPSTER: Yeah, yeah. Laural wanted to pay tribute to what fire crews do every summer, especially after the Jasper wildfire last year. And so for this new diorama, she sourced the material for the gopher's uniform from a firefighter. So the outfit is authentic. He's wearing a little yellow coat, and he's got a little shovel in his paws. So there is a lot of attention to detail at the Gopher Hole Museum.

MG: And Laural does this all herself.

ALLISON DEMPSTER: Yeah, yeah, it's her passion project. Her Parents used to run the museum, so she kind of inherited it. She and her husband have learned taxidermy together. She jokes that it's their date night activity. So she has a great sense of humour about it all, as you can probably hear. But jokes aside, the museum means a lot to her and to the community.

MG: Where did the idea for a museum like this come from?

ALLISON DEMPSTER: The idea came when Torrington was going through some tough times.

SOUNDCLIP

LAURAL KURTA: This used to be a very prosperous, busy little community. We moved here from Calgary when I was in grade one. And at that time, it had many stores and services, community events. In the early 1990s, the CPR decided to pull up the railway lines. When they did that, the grain elevators fell, and they took all their business with them to other centres that still had rail, which was very unfortunate. Businesses here started to shutter. We eventually lost the school. And that's not unique to us. That happened to small communities right across the country. So there's all kinds of little towns that used to be something that suddenly were nothing. And in our case, there were just concerned community members. They got together, they threw out ideas, trying to find something that would draw in people to the community. One lady eventually just tired and frustrated said, well, why don't we stuff gophers? We've got enough of them. Everybody laughed. Of course, that's ridiculous. And then that's exactly what they did.

ALLISON DEMPSTER: So Matt, some people in the village learned how to taxidermy. Some made costumes, others made props for the dioramas. It was a real community effort all meant to boost, be a boost for local businesses.

MG: They were trying to get people, I mean, to stop in the communities to buy gas and buy supplies and that sort of thing.

ALLISON DEMPSTER: Yeah, exactly. But I have to tell you, it was a bumpy road to getting the museum open.

MG: Oh.

ALLISON DEMPSTER: When word got out about these stuffed gophers, animal rights activists didn't like the sounds of it. CBC national news covered the controversy in 1995.

SOUNDCLIP

SPEAKER: You see, the American animal rights group PETA has launched an international letter writing campaign against Torrington's proposal, charging cruelty to animals. Protest letters are coming from as far away as Japan. The public thinks gophers might become extinct.

ALLISON DEMPSTER: This was no small campaign, Matt. Paul McCartney even wrote to say he disapproved.

MG: Excuse me, Paul McCartney wrote to say that he disapproved of this museum.

ALLISON DEMPSTER: Exactly.

MG: Is the letter that he sent, is that still around? Did you see that letter?

ALLISON DEMPSTER: Oh, I really wanted to see it. And it used to be on display, but sadly, someone stole it.

MG: Oh, perhaps another story.

ALLISON DEMPSTER: Yes.

MG: What was the response to the protest?

ALLISON DEMPSTER: Well, museum organizers had some choice words for PETA. They sent a postcard telling the group to get stuffed. So the fur really flew. But the PETA activists were ill informed in a way you might not expect, Matt, because the thing about the world-famous Gopher Hole Museum is that there are no gophers in it.

MG: If I had, you know that record scratching sound effect, that's what I would play right now. The world-famous Gopher Hole Museum has no gophers.

ALLISON DEMPSTER: Yeah, the story really takes a turn here.

MG: Indeed.

ALLISON DEMPSTER: The species of rodent used to make the dioramas is in fact the Richardson's ground squirrel. So lots of people in Alberta refer to Richardson's ground squirrels as gophers, but it's a misnomer.

MG: Okay.

SOUNDCLIP

LAURAL KURTA: So what happened is that back when colonists first came over to the new world, they saw something fuzzy and brown pop out of the ground. They called it a gopher because that's what they called it back home, and the name stuck. It's a colloquialism. So everybody calls these gophers. If you look up anywhere on the internet, gopher, you will see Richardson ground squirrels, and not actual gophers. Actual gophers are, they're not cute. These guys are, these guys are kind of cute.

MG: So the gophers at the museum aren't actually gophers. And I guess the good news for the gophers is that they're not cute enough to be stuffed and put into a museum. How are the actual stars of said dioramas sourced? Where do they come from?

ALLISON DEMPSTER: Well, Laural told me the Richardson's ground squirrels come from farmers and veterinarians in the area, the result of nature taking its course, and they are plentiful, not endangered. But all that controversy with PETA turned out to be quite helpful. Laural says it made the world-famous Gopher Hole Museum, well, world famous.

SOUNDCLIP

LAURAL KURTA: As strange as this seems to be protesting this ridiculous little museum, it probably propelled it into the stratosphere with millions of dollars of free advertising that it couldn't afford it on its own. So it really likely is responsible for its first five years of being alive.

ALLISON DEMPSTER: And now, the museum is heading into its 30th year. Now, naturally, the PETA protest is captured in a diorama, Matt. It shows a hippie gopher with long hair and a rich gopher wearing a top hat in front of the Torrington Village office. They're in a tug of war with a small gopher stretched between them. And there's one little speech bubble that says, we need this for the museum, and another sign that says, gophers against getting stuffed.

MG: I'm just looking at the photo right now of the hippie gopher with the headband and everything. They have attitude at the Gopher Museum.

ALLISON DEMPSTER: That one is a fan favourite. Yeah, some of these dioramas really pack a satirical punch.

MG: We have been hearing from Canadians coast to coast to coast planning to spend their tourist dollars closer to home. They don't want to go to the United States, they want to stay here, they want to wrap their arms around what we have in this country. Does the Gopher Hole Museum expect to benefit from that?

ALLISON DEMPSTER: Absolutely. Yeah, Laural is bracing for a busy tourist season. They get roughly 12,000 visitors a season. She's already warning folks to brace for lineups.

SOUNDCLIP

LAURAL KURTA: I have people tell me that they drove from, believe it or not, Victoria, Regina, Jasper, Medicine Hat, and they're coming. What are you guys doing while you're out here? We came for this. I don't know what's wrong with people.

ALLISON DEMPSTER: What do you think it is? What do you think it is?

LAURAL KURTA: Actually, it's really special. So I've seen some really special things in here that I wasn't expecting. It really means a lot to a lot of people. And one story that I'm going to highlight, we had one fellow, I think it was two falls ago, we’re just getting ready to close and it's pretty slow in here. And this fellow and his friend came in, and I'm talking to them in the museum, why are you here? And he said, well, I'm on my way to the Calgary Cancer Centre. And he told me, my grandparents brought me here when I was a little kid, and I love that memory. I've come here with my parents, and we laughed, and I love that memory, and I cherish that. And I’ve brought my own children here, and I cherish that. And these are the memories I want to go into my next experience with. And yeah, I don't, again, I don’t understand it, but I don’t have to. It means a lot to these people, and I love that we’re able to keep it open for them every time.

[laughter]

MG: You weren't joking when you said it was surprisingly moving.

ALLISON DEMPSTER: No, no. We hit a real moment, yeah.

MG: Well, and it's neat because these little small town attractions, I mean, they aren't small. They mean a lot to people.

ALLISON DEMPSTER: Yeah, yeah. And if you're lucky enough to catch Laural Kurta at the museum this summer, she can tell you all about it. It kind of makes me think of the old Vinyl Café motto, Matt, for Stuart McLean's fans. We may not be big, but we're small.

MG: Perfect.

ALLISON DEMPSTER: Yeah, yeah. And the world-famous Gopher Hall Museum is small, but it contains multitudes.

MG: Allison, this is the best thing I've heard all day. What a great story. Thank you very much.

ALLISON DEMPSTER: My pleasure.

MG: Allison Dempster is our producer in Calgary. And now, for your entertainment, while you think about how and when you're going to get to the Gopher Hole Museum, here's Torrington-born songwriter and musician Dennis Oster and friends and his tribute to the museum. This is “The Gopher Song.”

[Song: “The Gopher Song” by Dennis Oster and friends]

MG: This is “The Gopher Song”, the kind of thing you see when you're on a road trip. There have to be these sorts of places all across this country, little small town gems that make the town. You can let us know about them. Email us, thecurrent@cbc.ca.

ICE CORE

Guest: Alison Criscitiello

MG: This is The Current. My name is Matt Galloway. Axel Heiberg Island is on the western edge of the Arctic Ocean. It is usually an uninhabited sheet of ice, but lately, this island has been getting a flurry of excited visitors. Since April, a small group of Canadian and Danish scientists have been drilling deep into the ice cap, some 600 metres down. Two, pardon me, 20,000 years into our past is how they are trying to get into what is in that ice. And part of this is about understanding the past, but part of it is also about trying to protect this planet and the things that make it special. Alison Criscitiello is an ice core scientist, director of the Ice Core Lab at the University of Alberta, and she is on Axel Heiberg Island this morning. Alison, good morning.

ALISON CRISCITIELLO: Good morning. Thanks for having me.

MG: Thanks for being here. Can you describe where you are? Place us on a map.

ALISON CRISCITIELLO: Pretty far north. We're almost exactly at 80 degrees north in the Canadian high Arctic on a little island.

MG: What does it look like where you are?

ALISON CRISCITIELLO: Well, you know, there's actually more terrain than there often is at ice core camps. We can see, we can see some beautiful peaks in the distance. But other than that, it's just, it's a bit of flat white nothing. It’s beautiful.

MG: And so aside from being in a beautiful place of flat white nothing, why are you there? I had said that you're drilling into the ice cap. Tell me more about why you're there.

ALISON CRISCITIELLO: Well, there are a few science goals with this project, but the main one is to drill what we think will be about a 600-metre deep ice core containing 10 to 20,000 years of Arctic climate history. And it's a really, really special spot because Axel Heiberg, where we are, is it's kind of right up against the Arctic Ocean. So it has the power to contain really important and new information about Arctic ocean variability in the past and things we may not know about Arctic climate variability in this, this part of the high Arctic over long time periods. But there's some other, there's some other goals as well, but that's kind of the main one.

MG: How does this work? You are drilling samples. The plan is to go, as I said, 600 metres down. It's taller than the CN Tower, taller than many, many buildings in this country. Tell me about how you go about doing this.

ALISON CRISCITIELLO: Well, we have, there's a Danish drill here, Dr. Dorthe Dahl-Jensen from Copenhagen and University of Manitoba. It's their drill. And this drill is a drill that drills about two metres at a time, and it's big. We sort of, we build a big tent around it so we can work in all weather, and we drill two metres at a time until we're done. And I guess to give you an idea, I've been here for maybe a month and a week now, and we're at 465 metres today, trying to get to 600 before the end of this month when there'll be some surface melt and conditions on the surface that make it difficult or impossible to land planes to demobilize us. So it's, yeah, and in the drill, we keep it running all hours except midnight to 8 a.m. And we run on shifts, and it takes a lot of people, yeah, to do something like this, working really hard in the cold. And yeah, the shift work piece is just to get it done as efficiently as possible so we can do the whole thing in two months, basically.

MG: And in doing this, I mean, part of this is about like going back in time, right? Like the things, what you are reaching are deposits and evidence of things that happened hundreds of years ago. So when you're 400 metres or so down, where are you in kind of the vast sweep of time?

ALISON CRISCITIELLO: Oh, that's a good question, and I don't have the answer. We have, we have, we've actually identified using electrical conductivity in the field, we have identified some volcanic eruptions, which let us know certain ages in the ice. But outside of that, right now, the age scale is a guess. So, so 465 metres, I mean, we could make a bit of a guess, but that's what it would be at the moment. And the other piece that's you kind of just touched on, actually, is that time isn't linear with an ice core like this. So as you go farther down in the ice and you're going farther back in time, each metre of ice contains more and more time as you go down because it's more and more compressed. And you can get vast amounts of time in very short depth ranges as you get really deep. So it's hard to, until we're there and we use a lot of different methods to date it, we don't actually know how old it is in the field.

MG: Once you have the samples, what happens next? You have to get them out and then figure out how to study them?

ALISON CRISCITIELLO: Yeah. Well, the next step is there's a bit of an involved cold chain to get them back to Edmonton. But from where we are here, they get loaded into, so six metres of ice, which is about a hundred pounds, get loaded into these ice core boxes. And then the ice core boxes go on a small fixed-wing plane to Eureka, and then to Yellowknife. And so I think we've flown over 7200 pounds of ice out already on sort of flights of opportunity that have been anywhere near our camp up here on the ice cap, have gotten ice out to Eureka, and then on to Yellowknife. And from there, it goes in a freezer truck, like on the surface, from Yellowknife to the Canadian Ice Core Lab at University of Alberta.

MG: And what are you hoping to learn from these samples? I mean, I'd said in some ways, this is about learning about the past, but also trying to figure out ways that we can safeguard our future. Tell me about what you're trying to learn from these samples.

ALISON CRISCITIELLO: Well, that's hard to answer in just a couple of minutes, but I think, you know, kind of broadly stepping back, understanding how the ocean and atmosphere and sea ice and glaciers and different compartments of our Earth system. And how they interact is incredibly important for understanding and predicting future change. And we have very little knowledge of how, you know, small ice caps like this have interacted with those other parts of the climate system in the past over these really long thousands of years, you know, time periods. But yeah, I would say one aspect that really is quite unique about this core and this location is that it should provide really unique insight into how Arctic ocean sea ice has varied in the passed over these long time periods and how that is related to how climate and glaciers have changed in the Arctic in the past. And again, of course, this is really to help us understand the modern changes we're seeing with Arctic sea ice decline and things like this. But yeah, I wanted to mention too there, we actually have duelling drills at the moment. There's a second drill that’s maybe 200 metres away. And the reason that we're simultaneously now in the month of May drilling these other shorter cores, they're about 70 metres, and they go back to about 1860, is to also simultaneously look at environmental contaminants that get atmospherically transported to the far north. And those require a lot of sample volume. And there are things that we kind of look at annually so we can understand, yeah, both the transport mechanisms of contaminants that are, you know, sourced and produced very far from here, but get transported to pristine places like this and then can impact, you know, remote communities and ecosystems and animals very far away. So that's another kind of big goal and hope scientifically that we glean out of some of these cores.

MG: Just before I let you go, I mean, this is, and you're describing it. This is hard work in a remote area, in unforgiving, often, conditions. But the way that you talk about it, you have this sense of enthusiasm and wonder about it. What do you love about the work that you do?

ALISON CRISCITIELLO: I'm glad I still have that after this month. It has been particularly cold. I'm like a high-altitude mountaineer by trade, I guess, and I think there's something about that aspect, at least for me, that, yeah, that's part of the answer to that question. I just love being in places that are harsh, I think, because they reduce your whole world down to simple things that matter and allow you to stay very focused where you are and really present. You know, and like all I've done today is turn snow into water so I can drink water and make sure my tent is dug out. And I think I like the simple part of it. And it's really quite a cool thing when that's combined with a big science goal. And I work with incredible people. Generally, generally, it's in the end, despite what I just said, it's really the people that, that make the place.

MG: But you're also doing, I mean, I've read this, I mean, you're a mom as well. And so you're doing this, you think about your kids in the work that you're doing there as well and what kind of future, what kind of world they will inherit.

ALISON CRISCITIELLO: Yeah. Well, you're saying all the important things. Yeah, I mean, that's probably the hardest aspect, I would say, is being separated, yeah, from my family. I have two little girls and a wife and gone from them a lot of the time. And I find it both really difficult and incredibly motivating, yeah, because we're talking about what we're handing the next generation.

MG: This work is fascinating. And I mean, I don't know whether lucky is the right word, but it feels like you're really lucky to be there in that place and doing this work and seeing something that most of us will never, ever, ever get a chance to see. I'm glad to talk to you about it. Good luck with it, and stay, I was going to say stay warm, but I don't know if that's possible. Stay as warm as possible, Alison, and thanks for talking to us.

ALISON CRISCITIELLO: Thank you so much.

MG: Alison Criscitiello is the director of the Ice Core Lab at the University of Alberta, and we reached her as she and her team, as you heard, are getting samples from deep, deep, deep in the ice on Axel Heiberg Island in Canada's High Arctic. I want to tell you before we go about something that we will be bringing you Monday on the program, and we need your help with this. We were just talking about supply chains and what's happening with the broader economy. You know that the economy is very much in flux. There are worries about job losses. People are whispering about the possibility of a recession. We're going to try to get you some answers, but we want your questions. What are the things that are concerning you right now about the state of our economy, when it comes to tariffs, when it comes to our relationship with the United States, when it comes to just the broader, as I say, uncertainty that's going on right now? We're going to have a personal finance expert and an economist on the program on Monday to answer your questions. So what are your questions? And they can be about job losses, they can be about real estate, they can be about inflation, they can be about, as I say, tariffs and the broader economy and how all of this impacts you. No question too big, no question too small, but what we want to know are your questions that we can put to an economist and a personal finance expert about this economic moment that we're in. So if you have a question about how this might impact you in future or how it's impacting you right now, let us know. You can email us, thecurrent@cbc.ca, or send us a voice note on your phone. Just record a voice note, and then email us the memo with your question, the current@cbc.ca, and we'll try and get you some answers on Monday. That is The Current for this Friday. It's the 9th of May. Q is up next on CBC Radio One. We're going to leave you this morning with some more music from the north. This is the Inuk singer, Riit, and her cover of Dua Lipa's hit, “Levitating”, sung in Inuktitut. I'm Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening to The Current. Have a great weekend. We'll see you on Monday.

[Song: “Ikiaqqik [Levitating]” by Riit]

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Friday, May 9, 2025 Episode Transcript

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