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The Current Transcript for January 10, 2025

Host: Matt Galloway

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

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GEOFF TURNER: Maybe I would have been better off if I was real sloppy obvious drunk, because then, the problem is so obvious that everybody sees it and I'm forced to a reckoning sooner.

MATT GALLOWAY: In his 40-year relationship with alcohol, Geoff Turner had a ton of fun. He never missed a day of work with a hangover. He took dry January off and generally felt in control of his drinking. In the deeply personal new season of the podcast, On Drugs, he explores what he was missing in that time and the impact of how we treat booze differently than other drugs. In 30 minutes, Geoff is here to talk about the tragedy that led him to think differently about alcohol, why he thinks a sober month or two hurt more than it helped, and the work of figuring out who he is now that he has stopped drinking completely. Also this morning, this week, we have been celebrating exceptional Canadians whose work has been recognized with the Order of Canada. Former CBC radio producer Karen Levine is among them, honoured in part for her documentary, Hana's Suitcase.

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GEORGE BRADY: The Writing on the Suitcase is definitely Not My Sister's because she would have never written herself waisenkind or orphan. We were always a family, and we always thought that when the war ends, that we will all get together again.

MG: The documentary, which became a bestselling book, tells the tale of Hana Brady, born in Czechoslovakia, deported, then murdered in Auschwitz, and the battered suitcase that brought her story to the world. In an hour, we will rebroadcast Hana's Suitcase. But we begin with the cost of prorogation, the government plans that died when parliament went on hiatus, and the people who fought for those changes for years. Good morning. I'm Matt Galloway, and this is The Current.

[Music: Theme]

DYING BILLS

Guests: Carl Burke, Linda Debassige

MG: When Prime Minister Justin Trudeau stepped out of Rideau Cottage on Monday to announce his resignation, he also shut down Parliament.

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JUSTIN TRUDEAU: I advised the Governor-General that we need a new session of Parliament. She has granted this request, and the House will now be prorogued until March 24th.

MG: Proroguing Parliament means dozens of bills will now likely die, proposed legislation that could have changed people's lives. One of those bills is Bill C-63, known as the Online Harms Act. It was one of the Liberals’ flagship pieces of legislation aimed at addressing content, harmful content in particular, on social media platforms, from online bullying to child pornography. Carl Burke is among the many parents who supported that bill last year. His son, Harry, was a victim of sexual extortion, and Harry later died by suicide. Carl Burke is on P.E.I. this morning. Carl, good morning.

CARL BURKE: Morning, Matt. How are you?

MG: I'm okay. You've been through a lot. How are you doing?

CARL BURKE: Oh, not too bad, Matt. It’s certainly a strain on myself, my family, my wife, my daughters, my older son as well. It's a surreal experience. And you really don't have any idea until you lose a child about, you know, what it feels like. It just hurts every day.

MG: I can't imagine it. Can you tell me a little bit about Harry and who he was?

CARL BURKE: Yeah. Harry was a very exceptional young man. He was. He was. Well, he was handsome. And I mean, I know parents feel that way about their children. You know, I was never one to talk about my kids. I just didn't figure anybody really wanted to listen. But yeah, no, Harry was very handsome. Everybody knew Harry. He wasn't a secret in the community. He was out there, everybody seeing him. He communicated well with everyone. And when you did talk to Harry, he listened. He absorbed everything that he took in, and he was very respectful of everyone as well. We still have kids coming to us today who say Harry helped me. Like one young lady, for example, who moved into our community and was having trouble fitting in, Harry had taking her under his wing so that she did fit in, and she did end up having friends and it changed her.

MG: If you don't mind me asking, and I know this is hard.

CARL BURKE: Yeah.

MG: What happened with him?

CARL BURKE: Harry died in 2023, on April the 25^th. The evening before, Harry had come to me. He’d received communication all day with an individual posing to be a girl around his age, saying that she was from Nova Scotia. Harry communicated with her all day, and they ended up developing a trust and they shared intimate images. After sharing the intimate images and Harry started to be extorted for money, we didn't know anything about extortion at the time. I was in the bedroom reading and Harry came to me and he said, dad, I screwed up. And I said, what do you mean? What happened? And then he proceeded to tell me about the day's events and the intimate images. And we’d talked to our children about this many times. It wasn't new. We didn't endorse sharing of anything like this. Of course, we knew it was against the law and just not appropriate. The kids had a good understanding of it, but Harry was tricked. He was fooled. And this person was looking for money and they said, if you didn't send any money, then the images would be sent around to all your family, your friends. Harry was a patriot. He was in the cadets for a number of years and then joined the Reserves at 16 with the hopes that he would end up in Kingston, Ontario, at the Royal Military College. So he had a commanding officer, and the threat was also made that it will be sent to his commanding officer, at which point it would ruin his career. And they'd actually even sent a message to Harry's mother, if you can believe it, saying that we're going to ruin your son's life. As a result, we sat at the table here at the family and came up with a plan that we would be talking with the RCMP in the morning. But as far as we know, this individual kept poking at Harry most of the evening. As a result, Harry felt that his life was over, his career was over, and that meant everything to him. At some point during the night, Harry took his own life, and I found him the next morning in the garage.

MG: I'm sorry.

CARL BURKE: Thank you.

MG: What did you want this bill to do, the Online Harms Act, so that other kids would not be put in that awful position that Harry found himself in?

CARL BURKE: Well, we had all had hopes that the bill would create some accountability for the social media platforms so that… like presently, in my opinion, it's a bit of a Wild West situation with the social media platforms. It seems like anything goes and anything is allowed. There are no rules or regulations. So my hopes and our hopes, I hope all parents’ hopes were that it would hold these individuals accountable so that maybe a child would be saved. If anything, by having the bill out there, it would create more education, more awareness for everybody, because like I said, in our situation, we had never heard about the term sextortion or the extent of it. We really, really, really hope that some way, this would be a start to make things different, to see some changes take place.

MG: And so now, knowing that with Parliament being prorogued, the bill as it stands is unlikely to go forward, what's your reaction?

CARL BURKE: Well, our reaction is one of disappointment. Sometimes, like to be honest, I'm angry about it because we're playing a game of politics here. And the game of politics. We're playing is with children's lives. I'm not sure if the government realize that or if they care. They had ample opportunity to have this bill put in to more development and to be passed, to be discussed. I think at a time like this is when all the governments should sit together. Like whether you're red, whether you're green, whether you're blue, whatever colour, that doesn't matter to me and it shouldn't matter to anybody else. It's a time for unity. It’s a time for the governments to work together. If you don't like what I put down for a bill, maybe we can talk about what we should add to it, subtract to, whatever. But we need to make it work. I can't have another family go through what we're going through right now because it will affect your life. It'll change your life forever. It will never be the same. And it's a difficult thing to get people to realize that in the positions that can make changes.

MG: What do you make of the controversy around this bill that, I mean, there are people, including some conservative lawmakers, who have said that this threatens freedom of expression, for example. What do you make of that?

CARL BURKE: Well, I think freedom of speech, I think the definition needs to be looked at. I'm not sure how many people are actually aware of what freedom of speech actually means. I'm not an expert on freedom of speech. I know there's probably things in the bill that could have been done better. But again, that's the unity thing of talking about it. I believe in free speech, of course. I live in Canada. I'm very proud to be here. However, it's a different thing altogether. A separation of the bill into sections two and three and keeping them together I think was the right thing to do because it focuses more on the children. But I did not see this bill in any way taking free speech away from anyone.

MG: What would you say to Pierre Poilievre, for example? He, if you believe the polls, could very well be the next prime minister. He has expressed some of those concerns around this. And part of this is around the cost, but also, he says that the bill, such as it is, he would not reintroduce it and go forward the way that it was presented. What would you say to Pierre Poilievre based on what you've gone through?

CARL BURKE: Well, it's not a nice thing. And like I said, until you've gone through it, you have no idea. Go home and look at your children and pick one that you don't want to see or you're not going to see for the rest of your life.

MG: Oh my goodness.

CARL BURKE: Because that's all it is. You will never see that child again for the rest of your life. So maybe he doesn't support the bill the way it is or was, but I pray that he can come up with another bill that's going to do similar or the same things. And I also pray that it's not political and that there's nothing that's going to be involved with money where people make decisions based on money, because all too often, it's the corporations that seem to run our countries and make decisions for us. It's not the people. A child is a beautiful thing. You have your hopes. You have your dreams attached to that child. You watch them grow up. My wife carried Harry for nine months. My only job in this world was to protect my son, and I couldn't do it because of social media platforms and the lack of control and accountability around them. So if anybody can look me in the face and say that's a good thing to take away a bill that might protect a child, I'm sorry for you.

MG: Your family has been through so much. And this is not easy to talk about, but I really do appreciate you being willing to speak with us. I wish you the very best.

CARL BURKE: Well, thank you, Matt. It was a pleasure to talk to you, and I appreciated the opportunity to be on your program.

MG: Take care of yourself and your family.

CARL BURKE: You as well.

MG: Carl Burke has been advocating for the Online Harms Act. His son, Harry, died by suicide after being sexually extorted. Another bill in jeopardy because of prorogation is Bill C-61. This is the First Nations Clean Water Act. It is a law that indigenous leaders have been pushing forward for years. In December, Chief Chris Moonias of the Neskantaga First Nation in northern Ontario confronted the Prime Minister about the lack of clean water in his community.

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CHRIS MOONIAS: 2018, You stood here promising us that we're going to get clean drinking water. We're on 10,900 days. That’s 29 years, 10 months and four days of our boil water advisory, the longest in Canada. We are the poster boys and people of long-term drinking water. We don't see an end in sight.

MG: The 1st of February will mark 30 years that that boil water advisory in Neskantaga has been in place. Linda Debassige is the Grand Council Chief of the Anishinabek Nation, which represents 39 first Nations in Ontario. She helped lead the negotiations on Bill C-61. Grand Chief, good morning to you.

LINDA DEBASSIGE: Good morning, Matt.

MG: When you hear Chief Moonias speak about living without clean water for decades, what do you want people to understand about what that's like?

LINDA DEBASSIGE: Well, Chief Moonias and I go back a long time. For the average Canadian, it may be hard to fathom not being able to pour a glass of water over the tap, to not be able to bathe your infant child in water, to not be able to brush your teeth from the infrastructure you have in your home and having to go out daily, multiple times to go and fill up a jug of water to bring to your home to carry out a daily life activity. It's an embarrassment to this country.

MG: What was so significant about this bill in particular? Because as I mentioned, you led the co-negotiations on this for the AFN, the Assembly of First Nations. What was it about this piece of legislation that you found would have made a real difference?

LINDA DEBASSIGE: There are several pieces. Former national chief and I were asked to help in December of 2022, and we were able to, along with our colleagues, work through a process to look at what the elements of a bill would be. And we were supporting the national chief to advocate for an expanded mandate at that time. So this particular bill, you know, it's not perfect. However, you know, one of the biggest fundamental things is having the government actually recognize the basic human right to clean and safe drinking water for First Nations.

MG: Who do you blame for the death of the bill?

LINDA DEBASSIGE: I blame the government as a whole. I mean, you know, similar to your previous guest, this is something that should not be the subject of any political games that are being played out in the house, which is what we've seen. You know, it's absolutely frustrating considering the state of our First Nations. So I blame all parties because this bill could have went efficiently through the House of Parliament’s processes. But instead, it was stall that essentially every turn.

MG: Patty Hajdu, the Minister of Indigenous Services, sent us a statement that reads in part, Members of Parliament had a critical opportunity to write an historic wrong by supporting Bill C-61 during a critical moment to do what was right. The NDP and the Conservatives unfortunately blocked the bill moving forward. Do you think she's right to just put the responsibility on the opposition here?

LINDA DEBASSIGE: In part, I absolutely agree. I also believe that the shenanigans that we've seen played out in the House over the last several months were a direct result of the current Party as well and their inability to work with others.

MG: Chief Moonias, we played a little bit of his comments earlier. He was at a recent AFN meeting in Ottawa and spoke to Minister Hajdu and the Prime Minister. Have a listen to some of Justin Trudeau's response.

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JUSTIN TRUDEAU: There is a lot of work to do, we recognize that, on boil water advisories. When we came into office, there were 109 boil water advisories, long-term boil water advisories across the country. We lifted 140 or so. We have stopped lots of short-term advisories from becoming long-term advisories. And on the 30 or so left, there is a plan and funding for all of them.

MG: This is a government that when it came into power, promised in 2015 the boil water advisories on First Nations would be eliminated by 2023, 2024. As of now, 147 have been lifted since 2015, but 31 are still in effect, including that one in Neskantaga for decades. How do you assess the progress that the Liberals have made on this?

LINDA DEBASSIGE: I believe the progress has been substantial, to be honest with you. Seven out of eight of my communities that I serve have been lifted. But it's not lost on me that when the liberals came into government, there was a definite lack of support for on reserve drinking water and wastewater infrastructure by the government previous. And what we saw coming in was a direct result of decades of underfunding.

MG: Do you see that as, I mean, it goes back to what I asked you at the beginning, which is what people don't know. Do you think that the politicians who are making these decisions understand what's at stake here? Do they understand what it's like to live without drinking water?

LINDA DEBASSIGE: I don’t believe they do. I mean, they take water for granted themselves. I mean, they're all the elite of our country. And, you know, they have no problem, you know, pouring water out of the tap. They live excellent, you know, lives that are not consistent with poverty. The issue with First Nations drinking water has only ever been a policy. It's never been legislated to ensure sustainability and ensuring reliable funding for that, which is a fiduciary obligation of Canada.

MG: Do I have this right that you have a background in civil engineering?

LINDA DEBASSIGE: Civil engineering technology. Yes.

MG: Civil engineering. So you understand some of this. I mean, I guess in part, people are trying to understand why this is so difficult. These are hard problems and there has been progress that's been made. But why? Is it about will or is it about something else that is preventing this issue from being solved in this country?

LINDA DEBASSIGE: It's, you know, continuous, predictable, stable funding. It's the government's failure in ensuring that, you know, minimum standards, even minimum standards across this country are met. And, you know, oftentimes, they’ve, you know, alleged to support First Nations by band aid solutions which don't ever work, and we come to the same situation where we see boil water advisories in our communities. And so, you know, a lot of people will, you know, share that it's just a government problem. However, there are also contractors at fault who have, you know, provided this service to many of our communities through, you know, contractual arrangements. And so there are many complexities involved, especially when you're looking at details around infrastructure, engineering, source water. And, you know, this bill as well would have also provided source water protection and the ability for First Nations to, you know, be a part of that.

MG: I have to let you go, but very, very briefly, what would you say to people on the Neskantaga First Nation who've been waiting for that water for decades now?

LINDA DEBASSIGE: My sympathies and condolences, first, for the trauma and losses that the community has been inflicted with. But know and understand there are many leaders like me who continue to support this work so that communities like Neskantaga can have access to clean, safe drinking water.

MG: Grand Chief, I'm glad to talk to you. Thank you very much.

LINDA DEBASSIGE: Thank you.

MG: Linda Debassige is the Grand Council Chief of the Anishinabek Nation, which represents 39 First Nations in the province of Ontario. Your CBC News is next. And then, the CBC producer Geoff Turner hosts a podcast about drugs, their history, what they mean in pop culture, what they do to human lives. This year, the human life in question is Geoff’s own, and the drug of choice is alcohol. We'll talk about his relationship with alcohol coming up in six minutes here on The Current.

[Music: Theme]

ON DRUGS

Guest: Geoff Turner

MG: Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and you're listening to The Current. After a few years away, the CBC podcast On Drugs is back. The series has looked at the history and pop culture role of drugs. And this season's first episode dives into one drug in particular that gets special treatment, one drug that stands alone, and that's alcohol.

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GEOFF TURNER: The first time I ever really tried alcohol, I was 14. I don't remember exactly how the evening came to be, but I was with my best friend Mike, and we somehow got invited to hang out with some of my older sister’s friends. One of them, Jane, lived a few blocks away and her parents were out of town. And she and Sue had bought a big bottle of white wine, and did we want to come over and listen to records? Well, of course, we did.

MG: That's Geoff Turner, host of On Drugs. He's examining his own relationship with alcohol. Geoff Turner joins us from our Vancouver studio. Geoff, good morning.

GEOFF TURNER: Hi, Matt.

MG: Alcohol is the most popular recreational drug in the world, I think it's fair to say. Why do you think it took until now for you to do an episode all about alcohol?

GEOFF TURNER: I guess the way I put it in the show is that it seemed like maybe it was a little too big and a little too present in my own life to address really directly. I'd always wanted to. I'm fascinated by drug culture of all kinds, but this was the one, I guess that. And maybe in the back of my mind, I don't think I was thinking of it really consciously, but maybe the realization that if I was going to dive into it seriously as a journalist and a storyteller, I was going to have to address some things about my own relationship with alcohol really directly, and maybe I just wasn't ready for that.

MG: I'm going to get to that in a moment. But there is, I mean, society looks at alcohol in a different way, right? As you say in the podcast, it's alcohol and other drugs that we talk about.

GEOFF TURNER: Yeah, it's really peculiar, isn't it, that we kind of set it off as a separate category. And there's sort of, it's like the way I heard one person put it, it's the one drug in our culture where the social pressure is the opposite. It's like, what, you're not going to have a drink? You know, we're all going out. We're all having fun. Are you going to be a wet blanket? And we treat it, you know, if you talked about crack cocaine or heroin the same way, you'd sure get a funny looking at. So yeah, it just occupies a huge and very distinct place in our culture.

MG: You have had a relationship, if I can put it that way, with alcohol for some 40 years. Go back to that night in 1983. What happened then?

GEOFF TURNER: Yeah, you heard a little bit of it there in the intro. And I think that it was probably completely unremarkable to a lot of Canadians to hear how I was introduced to alcohol. It was just like so many of us, you know, just a situation where alcohol was available and we were having fun. But I just loved it. You know, there's just no other way of putting it. I absolutely love alcohol. I love the way it makes me feel up to a very clear point. And from that moment, I've always wanted it to be part of fun in my life and it was always. And for a lot of my life, you know, it's not all dark. I still have really fond remembrances of amazing times in my life that involved a lot of alcohol. But then there came a tipping point.

MG: How would you, I mean, when you take a look at that evolution, it's not just, you know, the wine that you had in 83. I mean, how would you describe the way that your relationship with alcohol evolved over time?

GEOFF TURNER: I guess I would say that certainly by the measures. I think it was probably a big eye opener for a lot of people when a couple of years ago, the Health Canada released those new guidelines that said that really safely, you can't drink more than a couple of drinks a week, literally two drinks a week. Well, let me tell you, Matt, I've been drinking more than two drinks a week pretty much since that day in 1983. It's really hard to sort of categorize yourself as a drinker, but when I drink, I like to drink a lot. And for many, many years, that was largely contained to weekends. But over time, it crept across the week. And I think the thing maybe that made it really feel obviously problematic to me was over the course of the pandemic, and I think a lot of people had this experience where I realized that it wasn't about celebration or fun anymore and it probably hadn't been for a lot of years. It was about deadening feelings.

MG: And we gave ourselves permission to do that, right, culturally. The pandemic Martini, crantini, whatever.

GEOFF TURNER: Absolutely.

MG: I mean, people did all sorts of things in that weird time to make it okay to drink too much.

GEOFF TURNER: Oh, I still remember the excitement that you could get beer delivered in Vancouver. I was getting my favourite beer delivered to my doorstep, and oh, what a treat and how cute that is, yeah, and all the cute memes. And we were really, I think as a culture, supporting each other. And, you know, obviously, people were figuring out what to do in a new and troubling time, and we were finding healthy and unhealthy ways to respond to that. But one of the ways I found, well, it wasn't a new discovery either, I'll be clear about that, but it was over that time that I realized that, you know, I'm not drinking for joy. I'm trying to erase feelings that I have about the world and feelings I have that I'm not addressing, instead, I'm just obliterating them.

MG: One of the things that you do in this episode of the podcast is you speak with a psychologist. Tell me about Catharine Fairbairn. What does she do?

GEOFF TURNER: Well, I'll tell you something really interesting. I had a complete lengthy interview with Catharine Fairbairn where I was, I turned to her as an expert because she's a clinical psychologist at the University of Illinois in Champaign. She runs an alcohol lab, which not very long ago in my life, I would have been knocking on the door to sign up as a volunteer for their experiments, because they literally get people a bit drunk and see what happens. But I did a complete interview with her and treating her as an expert on the subject of alcohol and all the fascinating updates. And by the time I almost had the episode completely finished and I realized this just sounds so fake and so far removed from what's going on in my life and the feelings and the relationship that I have with alcohol, I have to do it all over again. And so I called her up kind of sheepishly and said, hey, do you mind doing this interview again? Except this time, I'm going to put myself on the couch and you're going to be my counsellor. And luckily for me, because she is a brilliant but also a very kind person, she did that. And we were able to sort of talk through things. And I don't want to make it sound like it's one big therapy session. There's still some journalism going on there, but I realized I had to approach it differently.

MG: One of the things that you do is you work through this checklist for alcohol and drug use and dependency. This is in the DSM, the Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. And there are a bunch of questions that people can ask themselves that might reveal something about their alcohol use. What did going through that list reveal to you?

GEOFF TURNER: I found that really revelatory. Again, it's this funny thing, Matt, where I knew I had a problem, but I actually found it really helpful. It seems like it might be the most obvious thing in the world, but like, first of all, for listeners out there, as far as psychologists and psychiatrists go, alcoholism is not a term. Nobody talks about alcoholism. It’s alcohol use disorder, and it's a spectrum. And by answering these 11 questions, you can figure out where, if anywhere, you belong on that spectrum. And some of the questions are things that might be really obvious, you know, have you missed work because of alcohol? But some of them are things like do you think about drinking a lot? And I'll tell you that that's a really clear one for me that even when I wasn't drinking, I was thinking about opportunities. When's the next opportunity to have alcohol in my system? And by answering these questions, you can figure out where you belong on the spectrum. And I am firmly in the moderate alcohol abuse disorder category, but creeping towards the more serious end of things.

MG: And yet, I mean, you just said, like, I knew I had a problem. But the way that that manifests is not, as you said, somebody who misses work because of a hangover, somebody who has wrapped their car on the telephone pole or what have you. What is grey area drinking? Because this comes out of this conversation with Catharine.

GEOFF TURNER: Again, this is not a technical term, but it's something that I found really useful. I first heard it actually in a hockey dressing room. Somebody mentioned the term. And it's this idea, I think it's probably something we used to call functional alcoholic, where like I say to people, I've never been a pee your pants, wrap your car around a telephone pole type of drunk. I've got a huge tolerance for alcohol. And interestingly, tolerance of alcohol is one of the biggest predictors for alcohol use disorder.

MG: What do you mean?

GEOFF TURNER: I think that might sound really counterintuitive, but people who can take a lot more alcohol in without obvious, with sort of the obvious falling down, slurring speech, obvious outward signs of alcohol are more likely to develop alcohol use disorder. And I think that's a little bit counterintuitive because I think… I sometimes say to people, like it almost would have been easier for me if I was a really sloppy drunk. You know, if people see Matt Galloway at the party and he's got the lampshade on his head and he's falling down the stairs.

MG: They’re going to say, well, he's got a problem. We should talk to him.

GEOFF TURNER: Yeah, that guy's got a problem, and it needs to be addressed. Some people close to me saw what was going on, but it wasn't necessarily obvious to the world. And I think maybe it would have been to my benefit. And that's why I call it, why people call it the grey area, because it's just not obvious.

MG: What's anxiety? Because that's connected in some ways, right?

GEOFF TURNER: Yeah, I think… my experience… that's a term, I think it's the Gen Z folks popularized term.

MG: Much younger than me.

GEOFF TURNER: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I always used to think of hangovers as predominantly like a physical experience, the experience of, you know, nausea and raging headache. But over time, I think the much more pernicious part of a hangover for me was that anxiety, the feeling of just deep, deep regret, anxiety, depression and of course, the cycle with the alcohol. The quickest, simplest fix for anxiety is more alcohol, and then you're into that awful cycle. So it's like, you know, I can absolutely keep myself together. For all appearances, I look like I've got it together, but inside, like, I'm just I've got this raging anxiety and regret and shame about what I did the night before.

MG: One of the ways that people perhaps deal with that, and I mean, I'm talking to you in January, is by going on, as we say, the wagon on dry January, that you're going to stop drinking, that this will give you the illusion, as you say, of some control over that. And you're somebody who practiced dry January for many years. What do you make of it now?

GEOFF TURNER: Yeah, like I consider myself kind of OG dry January guy. I was doing it a long time ago, like 20 years ago, before people called it that. And I think there came to be a realization for me that it was a trick that I was playing on myself where probably by New Year's Eve, I would almost certainly have been drinking every single day for the previous 20 and escalating amounts. And so, you know, it gave me a bit of a reset and an opportunity to say to myself and to say to the world, yeah, you see, I can quit any time I like. I'm in the driver's seat.

MG: You're not my master, alcohol.

GEOFF TURNER: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And then, of course, sometimes, I'd go longer than January too. Sometimes, I'd go several months. But the trouble is when I'd be back, it would be really pedal to the metal, like almost like catching up on lost opportunities to drink. And so I think for me, again, people's relationship with drugs, their experience with drugs is so particular and so individualized. Like I'd never, I would never say to anybody, I'd never lecture anybody, don’t do that.

MG: And that's not what the podcast is at all.

GEOFF TURNER: No, no. I'm just saying that for me, I think maybe I should have converted dry January into a dry lifetime a long, long time ago.

MG: Can I go back to the why of why you wanted to do this? You've hinted at this, and one of the things that you say in the podcast is as long as I've been drinking, I have seen the toll of alcohol around me. This is a really personal episode not just because you're talking about yourself, but also because of the why you were having this conversation in the first place. Do you mind just talking a little bit about your cousin Stephen?

GEOFF TURNER: Yeah. So I guess it's two years ago now. Stephen was a year younger than me. He and his brother and me and my brother, we kind of felt like we were all brothers together. We, you know, we got on like a house on fire. I remember Epic Dungeons and Dragons sessions, all night Atari craziness in the woods with slingshots, sort of all that old time Gen X childhood. And Stephen was an amazing guy, just incredibly funny, sharp acid humour. And he also had a really serious drinking problem that he struggled with and battled back with varying degrees with help of 12 step programs. And then again, I think the pandemic was a real exacerbating factor for him because it created an additional level of isolation in his life. He was back to drinking. And drinking, sorry, it gets really difficult here. He was basically holed up in his apartment getting alcohol delivered to his place until he finally had enough and he killed himself.

MG: I'm sorry.

GEOFF TURNER: I was asked to help clear out his belongings from his place, and on his bedside table, there was a stack of various self-help books of all kinds, how to, you know, how to succeed in relationships. And in the middle of the pile, there was the big book from Alcoholics Anonymous, and it was just this stark, devastating reminder of what he had been dealing with. And it was a year later, I guess, that that really, well, it was a really painful experience, and I think that might have been the final piece of recognition for me about making a decision about alcohol in my life.

MG: And the decision was that you were going to stop drinking.

GEOFF TURNER: Yeah.

MG: How comfortable are you, and you talk about this in the episode as well, about the stigma in some ways of admitting that you need to make a decision that you need to do something. For you, talking about this, you could have told this story without inserting yourself in it. You could have told this story without it being, in many ways, such a personal story. But you have done that, and that makes it even more powerful. I just wonder how difficult it was for you to do that and how comfortable you are in talking about that.

GEOFF TURNER: I think I might yet live to regret this approach, but I guess like I said, I tried to do it a different way, and it felt so unnatural and so false that I just thought that if I was going to do it at all, the only way that I could do it and be true to myself was to talk about my own experience. I think especially partly because of the way I drink, that I think there are people who have had much, including Stephen, who had much more devastating issues with alcohol to the point that it was absolutely, that it's devastating to personal health and things like that. And I wasn't really there, but I was, I had a serious problem with it. And I think there might be a lot of people out there like me who don't have the obvious problem but need to address it and maybe need a little bit of help in getting to that realization.

MG: This comes to the point that runs through this whole, not just this season, but all of On Drugs, which is that when we think of a drug user, maybe in our minds, we have this idea of who a typical drug user is. But a lot of what you're trying to do is interrogate and dismantle that concept, right?

GEOFF TURNER: Yeah. And I think I've tried to do that. I tried to do that in previous seasons too where it's kind of human first. Like the reason that I set out to do a series about drugs in the very first place is I always say that drug taking is might be the most definitively human activity there is. I think we're aware of other animals that maybe deliberately seek out fermented apples or what have you, but human culture, drugs are a huge part of what it is to be a human.

MG: That we look for intoxication.

GEOFF TURNER: Not just intoxication. We look for ways to reduce obesity, to treat diabetes, to knock us out for surgery. And anything that's so distinctively human is going to be associated with some incredibly human stories. And that's always been my motive. That's my secret with the show, is it's just a, it's a framework that lets me get to really human stories. And I find that as long as I put the human first, then you start to recognize what you have in common with the person who's been using heroin every day for 30 years and that maybe they're not the scary alien that you thought they were.

MG: So now that you're the human at the centre of this, and again, this is not a finger wagging, you should stop drinking, you should look at it sober, curious, lifestyle kind of approach. That's not what it is at all. But now that you're at the centre of this, what do you want audiences to think about as they listen to this?

GEOFF TURNER: I guess just that, about think about, reflect on where drugs belong in your own life, for better or for worse. And a lot of it you might find is for better. And I try to be really upfront about that because I'm not, I'm definitely not going to be a finger wagger. I remember being really angry when I was a teenager seeing Lou Reed on an anti-drugs ad.

MG: Lou Reed of all people.

GEOFF TURNER: Yeah, I just thought, you fraud, man. You had your 30, 40 years of fun with drugs, and now you're going to lecture me about it? I never want to be that, but I think, I guess it's a matter of sort of being intentional and conscious about things in your life. And that was maybe the big realization for me, is that you actually can do a cost benefit analysis of these things. And when I forced myself to do that, I was able to look at it and say, you know what? It's not doing the thing that I think it's doing, or it's not doing enough of it to warrant the cost. And I think if you think about that with drugs in your life generally, like we've got a fascinating episode about Ozempic, where the journalist Johann Hari takes us on his own really complicated journey with Ozempic and where he just barely comes out on the side of using Ozempic for weight loss, or wegovy in his case. And I think there's a lot to be learned in just taking the time to actually walk yourself through the cost benefits.

MG: It's so well done. And it's just, brave is an overused word, but it is brave of you to put yourself in the frame to tell this story, because I think a lot of people will relate with where you're coming from and what you went through. Geoff, thank you very much.

GEOFF TURNER: Thank you, Matt.

MG: Geoff Turner is the host of On Drugs from CBC Podcast. The first episode of season three is out now. You can listen wherever you get your podcasts. We'd love to hear your thoughts on this, particularly how you think about your relationship with alcohol and that issue of sobriety. It's dry January, a lot of people doing dry January as a way to, as Geoff was saying, you know, exert some sort of control perhaps, or just take a break from drinking. What about that idea of grey area drinking? What does that mean to you? And is that something that sounds familiar? We had a conversation earlier this week with Maureen Palmer and Mike Pond about that idea of being mostly sober and how sobriety, total sobriety and abstinence hasn't worked for Mike Pond. As you think about those issues, we would love to hear your thoughts on that relationship with alcohol and perhaps how you're rethinking that relationship. You can email us, thecurrent@cbc.ca. Your regional update is next. And then, we're going to continue listening to conversations and thinking about those who have been nominated to the Order of Canada, great Canadians. We will celebrate former CBC producer Karen Levine and hear her powerful CBC Radio documentary, Hana’s Suitcase. That’s coming up in 90 seconds.

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HANA’S SUITCASE

MG: Hello again. I'm Matt Galloway, and you're listening to The Current. This week, we've been paying tribute to some of the new members of the Order of Canada. And this morning, we shine a spotlight on our former CBC colleague, Karen Levine. Karen is being recognized for her four-decade long career at CBC Radio, where the Governor Generals citation says, her program leadership, groundbreaking documentaries and amplification of women's Voices made an unmistakable and much heralded impact. She's also been honoured for her book, “Hana's Suitcase”. That book began as a powerful CBC Radio documentary that Karen Levine produced in 2001. It tells the story of a suitcase that belonged to Hana Brady, born in Czechoslovakia in 1931, deported in 1942 and killed at Auschwitz in 1944. She was just 13 years old. The Children's Holocaust Education Centre in Tokyo acquired that suitcase in the year 2000. No further information about Hana came with it. The director of the centre at that time, Fumiko Ishioka, made it her mission to scour the world to find out more about Hana's story, and her search brought her to Toronto and George Brady. George Brady was Hana's older brother, the only member of their immediate family to survive the Holocaust. Here, told by Fumiko Ishioka and George Brady, is the astonishing story of Hana's Suitcase.

SOUNDCLIP

FUMIKO ISHIOKA: This suitcase, it looks really old, but maybe the material's very nice. And it's still, maybe you can use it still as a suitcase. But the key is broken. And if you open it, you see these nice coloured paper lining inside. Of course, it doesn't have anything in it. It's an empty suitcase.

GEORGE BRADY: The first time I heard about the suitcase was from some friends who went to Auschwitz, and it was displayed in the museum in Auschwitz on the pile of other suitcases. So I took my 14-year-old daughter and we went together. And when we got to the museum, so we looked for the suitcase and couldn't find it. Then I wrote to Auschwitz, and about two months later, I got a photograph of the suitcase. That's what I got from Auschwitz about two years ago.

FUMIKO ISHIOKA: It's quite big. The size is about 60 and 40 centimetres. The colour is brown. And on the one side of suitcase, there's the owner's name, Hana Brady. And then there's also her birthday, May 16th, 1931. And there's also a German word, waisenkind, meaning often. That's all the information inscribed on the suitcase.

GEORGE BRADY: The writing on the suitcase is definitely not my sister's because she would have never written herself waisenkind or orphan. We were always a family, and we always thought that when the war ends, we will all get together again.

FUMIKO ISHIOKA: It had this name and a birthday. So I looked at her birth date and then found out that she was 13 that time. So was a little girl. So I really wanted to find out about her, what kind of girl she was, where she was born, what kind of family she had. And I knew that she died in Auschwitz. So I just wanted to find out what kind of girl she was before, before the Holocaust.

GEORGE BRADY: So I was born in 1928 and my sister was born three years later. We lived in a small town in Moravia. There were only two Jewish families. I was the only boy and my sister was the only Jewish girl in town. So we all our friends were Christian. We were very integrated. My father was a volunteer fireman. He was a football player. He became the chairman of the football team. There was a lot of skiing in our town. It was very famous for cross-country skiing racers. He was the announcer, and he played in the local theatre. And my mother was a very vivacious lady, and she laughed a lot very loud always. We liked that. And we had a lot of people coming to our house, artists, painters, and which my father, the younger ones he supported, and then poets and writers, because they always knew there was a good talk and good food. At the same time, there were some poor people living behind town and my mother was always sending them some clothes or some food. And Hana was the deliverer, and she loved to do it and kept bugging my mother if she can bring some more stuff to these people. So we were, I would say, a very loving family. I remember my parents worked very hard. They both worked six days a week. We had a store, but on the seventh day was always on a Sunday. We climbed into the bed with mother and father. I was always with mother and my little sister was with my father. Hana was a strong girl, and I know it because when we’re fighting, she wouldn't always lose. And she was, she had a blonde hair, blue eyes, and I think a pretty, very pretty round face. And we used to play a lot together. We had a big garden, and through the garden was going a creek. So we always play the navy. In winter, we again built winter forts out of snow, and she was a good sports person. She skied. We skied cross-country. She was skating. Once, I remember she got a beautiful skating outfit. It was red and it had fur on the end of it, on the end of the sleeves. And she was learning how to become an expert skater. And although she was only eight or nine years old, she was pretty good at it, and we all admired her. She learned the turning around and, I don’t know, pirouettes, whatever. I don't know the terms for these things, but she certainly enjoyed it, and we all enjoyed watching her. We had a lot of a lot of fun.

FUMIKO ISHIOKA: Our centre targets young people in Japan, so we organized this travelling exhibition, The Holocaust Seen Through Children's Eyes. We wanted these artefacts that used to belong to children, and I went to Auschwitz in 1999 November, asked for a loan of some children's materials, children's items. Actually, I specifically asked a shoe, this little shoe. And I remember I asked for a suitcase because suitcase, that really tells you a story of how these children who used to live happily with their family were transported and then again transported again and were allowed to take only one suitcase. So it shows these journey. So I thought an object like a suitcase would be a very important item to really let children in Japan learn what happened to children in the Holocaust.

GEORGE BRADY: We had a very happy time until suddenly, the Nazis appeared on the horizon, first in Germany, then in Austria, then the Sudetenland, and then took over the rest of Czechoslovakia. From then on, one restriction after the other came into effect. First, we were allowed to shop only in certain stores. We were allowed to shop only at certain time. We are not allowed to go to movies. In 1940, I was 12. My sister was nine. We were not allowed to go to school anymore. And eventually, we had to wear a yellow star. Then my mother was arrested in the spring of 41. My father was then arrested in the fall of 41. And we lucky enough had an uncle who was Christian living in the same town, so he was very brave to really take us in, and we stayed with him until we were called to report the 14th of May, 1942, to go to Theresienstadt. On the 16th of May, this is two days later, when we were in this building waiting for to be deported, my sister celebrated her 11th birthday.

FUMIKO ISHIOKA: First, I got this suitcase from Auschwitz, so I wrote to them again and asked for any information they have. But they said that they couldn't help me in any way. And then I tried other big Holocaust museums, one in Israel, Yad Vashem. And I tried the other huge Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C, and they couldn't give me anything. But this Museum of Auschwitz told me that she was transported from Terezín in Czechoslovakia. I was lucky to find that. I knew that the girls, little girls who were at Terezín, I knew that they drew paintings. So I thought that Hana must be one of those girls and she must have left drawings. So I wrote to the Terezín Ghetto Museum. I was so excited when they sent me these four pieces of Hana's drawings. These drawings had her name. It was really, really so exciting. But when we opened the exhibition with the suitcase, it was last year in July, that was all we had.

GEORGE BRADY: In Theresienstadt, we stayed for over two years. My sister lived in this girls home and I lived in the boys home, and we saw each other as much as we could. I always felt responsible for her, so I tried to tell her what to do. And she at one point got really sick. She got encephalitis, and I got really worried because that could leave a damaged brain. And I just was horrified that I would bring her home and she wouldn't be in top shape. As it turned out, she recovered. And as I found out through Japan lately, that she was even painting, secretly being taught. And her teacher was one of the famous German artists. Her name was Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, one of the member of the Bauhaus. And Gropius said about this lady, would she have lived, she would have been one of the greatest female artists of the century. I found out through the suitcase which end up in Japan that they have four of her paintings. I never knew that any of these paintings existed, so I asked them to send me a copy of it, which they did. And then I asked for the original copy from the museum in Prague, which I just got about three weeks ago.

FUMIKO ISHIOKA: I was desperate to get the photo of her, so I thought that if somebody has information on her, that has to be the Terezín Museum. So I wrote to people there again, but the answer was the same. So I decided that I’d just go to see if there's anything I can find out.

GEORGE BRADY: We were in Terezín for two years, and the war seemed to be turning against Germany. And they decided to send 10 transport out east, as it turned out, to Auschwitz. I was called in the first transport, which was in September of 44, and my sister was in the one next to the last one. I was fortunate enough to pass the test because at that time, they needed workers. So I looked strong enough and I just said that I am healthy, so I passed the selection and went to work. My sister went in the next to the last transport, and that was on the 23rd of October 1944. And since she was too small for work, so she was killed the next day. Before my sister went, just the day before the transport, she asked my cousin to do her hairdo because she wanted to, she wanted to look nice when she will meet me. Instead, when she got to Auschwitz, they cut her hair and then they killed her. I had no idea what happened to my sister after I left Terezín. So only when after the war, when I got home to my uncle and aunt, my aunt, who was in Terezín too, came back and explained that Hana went to the house, which I was still hoping that somehow somewhere, she will appear. But once I met a friend of hers, and she just said point blank, [speaks German], which I just nearly fainted. And that's how I found out.

FUMIKO ISHIOKA: When I got there, I was really lucky to be able to meet with this one lady at the museum. She was trying to help me in any way, and we were both looking at this list of names of people who were transported from Terezín to somewhere else. And there, I found the name of Hana. And right next to it, we found another Brady. So I asked, could this be her family? And then we looked at the birthdays and it was that there was three years difference. So they told me that usually, the families are listed together. So she was sure that he must be her brother. And I asked them, do you have any idea where and I mean, what he's doing? Because from the list, you can tell that he survived. Hana had a little check to show that she died, but he didn't have that mark. So I asked her if there's any way I can find out about him. And she looked really sad because she knew that I was so desperate. But then she went back into her desk, and she showed me another document which had names of Mr. Josh Brady and his brother with the name of his bunkmate. They shared the bed in the Terezín camp, and she knew Mr. Brady's bunkmate. She knew that Mr. Brady's bunkmate is living in Prague. I was supposed to leave the next day, but I ran back to Prague and ran into this Jewish museum in Prague. And there was this woman who had been helping me find Hana’s drawings, so she made a few phone calls to find out Mr. Brady's friend. And then he came over to see me at this office. We had only half an hour, but from him, I was able to get Mr. Brady's address in Canada.

GEORGE BRADY: And suddenly, last September, I got a letter from Japan, a big envelope. I was wondering who would write to me from Japan. And when I opened it, I couldn't believe it. I just was stunned. You know, I just couldn't, couldn't believe it. It's to the credit and incredible perseverance of Fumiko Ishioka, the director of the museum, that she decided to find who the owner was. And she went through a lot of problems and challenges to find it, but she did manage.

FUMIKO ISHIOKA: Right after I went home, I wrote to Mr. Brady. But still, at that time, I wasn't sure if I could get any response from him. This might remind him of bitter memories, and he might not want to hear such a thing anymore. But a few weeks later, I got a nice letter from him and also these beautiful photos of Hana. And I just screamed at that time, and my hands were shaking as I read the letter. But the thing is that I was, of course, really excited to finally find Hana and find out what kind of girl she was when she was in Happy Days and what she liked to do. It was unbelievable. But what really excited me is that Hana’s brother survived, and he now has such a beautiful family. I was so happy about that.

GEORGE BRADY: Last week, Fumiko Ishioka arrived, and I invited her to stay with us in our house. She brought me paintings from kids there and a video again addressed to me and Hana. And I couldn't believe how involved these children were, how taken they were by this, this story, Hana and her suitcase. It was a very, very moving experience from an absolutely unexpected part of the world.

FUMIKO ISHIOKA: In Japan, the Holocaust is so far away. Some people don't see any connection whatsoever. But when they look at the suitcase, these children were really shocked that she was my age. And that really helped them a lot to really focus on this one little life that was lost, and they could really relate her to themselves and really try to think about why such thing happened to a girl like her and why to Jewish people and why children. They then realized that there were one and a half million children like Hana.

GEORGE BRADY: Because of the suitcase, it is very strange to me that nearly 60 years ago, this tragedy happened, and now suddenly, it appears in part of the world that I would have, that would be the last place on the earth that I would have expected that it would appear. And it certainly changed a lot of my life and my family, because everybody is affected by it. And we have a young daughter who’s 17 years old, and she's got a lot of Hana, and she is actually going with me to Japan in March of this year because we would like to meet some of these kids to help them to find a way of changing their world into a better world.

FUMIKO ISHIOKA: We have a group of children called Small Wings, my centre. They are aged from seven to 18. Even though they didn't know anything about Hana, they were so attracted to the suitcase, and they wanted to write a story on her. They invited their friends, and they did a little performance using the suitcase. This one girl, 18-year-old girl, read the story they wrote:

Reading:

FUMIKO ISHIOKA: Hana Brady, 13 years old, the owner of this suitcase. 54 years ago, May 18th, 1942. It was two days after Hana's 11th birthday. She was taken to Terezín in Czechoslovakia. October 23rd, 1944, crammed into the freight train, she was sent to Auschwitz. She was taken to the gas chamber right after. People were allowed to take only one suitcase with them. I wonder what Hana put in her suitcase. Hana would have been 69 years old now, but her life stopped when she was 13. I wonder what kind of girl she was. A few drawings she made at Terezín. These are the only things she left for us. What do these drawings tell us? Happy memories of her family? Her dream and hope for the future? Why was she killed? There was one reason, she was born Jewish. Name, Hana Brady. Date of birth, May 16th, 1931. Orphan.

GEORGE BRADY: Actually, when our little daughter was born, I wanted her to be called Hana. But my wife decided, said that nobody should live somebody else's life. She should live her own life. And now, I’m very grateful that she suggested that. So we called her Lara Hana. And Lara Hana knows a lot about the fate of Hana and my fate and our family. And when we went to Auschwitz, it was a very emotional visit. And we somehow felt better that we lit three candles for these three, my mother, father and Hana. I always feel that I'm a well-adjusted person and I got over the war reasonably well. But there is one thing I cannot get over, and that is my sister Hana. And with this suitcase, it flared up again much more not only with me, but with the rest of the family, because suddenly, we have a lot to remember and a lot to talk about. And suddenly, their aunt, to my sons, is somebody very close, close to them. And we will never forget her.

Reading:

FUMIKO ISHIOKA: We Small Wings will tell every child in Japan what happened to Hana. We Small Wings will never forget what happened to one and a half million Jewish children. We children can make a difference to build peace in the world so the Holocaust will never happen again. By Small Wings. December 2000, Tokyo, Japan.

MG: That's Fumiko Ishioka. George Brady died in 2019. He was 90 years old. Hana’s Suitcase was produced in 2001 by then CBC Radio producer, Karen Levine, who's just been honoured with the Order of Canada. Congratulations, Karen. That is The Current for this Friday, the 10th of January. Q is up next on CBC Radio One. I'm Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening to The Current. Have a great weekend. See you on Monday.

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Friday, January 10, 2025 Episode Transcript

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