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The Current Transcript for January 13, 2017

Host: Laura Lynch

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

Though we at Fox News cannot confirm CNN's report, it is our observation that its correspondents followed journalistic standards and that neither they, nor any other journalists, should be subjected to belittling and de-legitimizing by the president-elect of the United States.

LAURA LYNCH: What? Fox News defending its arch rival CNN? Donald Trump achieved something remarkable at a news conference earlier this week. The president-elect unified normally competitive media organizations in their condemnation of him and the way he treated a reporter. First up today, we're going to examine what is promising to be a fractious four years between journalists and the new commander-in-chief. After that—

SOUNDCLIP

Prescriptions cost us $23,000 a year. We have had to remortgage our home more than once.

LL: Brenda Poot’s husband Jim takes a cocktail of drugs to keep him alive and relatively well after being diagnosed with brain tumours a little more than a decade ago. But they cost too much. So Jim rations his medicine with sometimes terrible consequences for his health. Advocates for a national pharmacare system say Ottawa needs to provide drugs to all Canadians at a cost they can afford. Others say that will kill choice. And later—

SOUNDCLIP

You’re really made to believe that you're never going to be accepted again. That everyone is going to be saying awful things about you. That you're never going to be successful. The only thing you're good for is being bought for sex.

LL: It's called a hidden crime—girls and young women lured into drugs and prostitution by men promising them love and a better life. Jennifer Richardson lived that nightmare—trafficked from the age of 13 to 16. As Richardson becomes Ontario's point person in the fight against trafficking, she's using her experience and smarts to try to save the lives of those who are most vulnerable. I'm Laura Lynch in Vancouver and you're listening to the Friday edition of The Current.

Donald Trump news conference 'clear attack on the free press'

Guests: Jasmin Mujanović, Susan Delacourt

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: Mr. President-elect.

VOICE 2: Go ahead. Go ahead.

VOICE 1: Since you are attacking our news organizations—

VOICE 2: No, not you. Not you.

VOICE 1: Can you give us a chance?

VOICE 2: Your organization is terrible. Your organization is terrible.

[Crosstalk]

VOICE 1: You are attacking our news organization. Can you give us a chance to ask a question, sir?

VOICE 2: Go ahead. Quiet. Quiet.

VOICE 1: Mr. President-elect.

VOICE 2: Go ahead. She’s asking a question. Don’t be rude.

VOICE 1: Mr. President-elect, can you give us a question? You’re attacking us. Can you give us a question?

VOICE 2: Don’t be rude.

VOICE 1: Can you give us a question?

VOICE 2: No, I’m not going to give you a question.

VOICE 1: Can you state categorically—

VOICE 2: You are fake news. Go ahead.

VOICE 1: Sir. Can you state categorically that nobody—

[Sound: Applause]

VOICE 1: No. Mr. President-elect, that’s not appropriate.

VOICE 2: Go ahead.

LL: That was an exchange between CNN White House correspondent Jim Acosta and Donald Trump on Wednesday at the US president-elect's first press conference in months. Donald Trump's declaration—calling CNN “fake news” and his refusal to take its reporter’s questions—was tied to the network's report on the existence of unverified intelligence documents. The documents suggest Russia has compromising information on the president-elect. It was that exchange that you just heard that has some observers worried that the Donald Trump presidency is already taking on an authoritarian tone. Today as part of our occasional series, Eye on the Media, we ask what the exchange signals about Donald Trump's relationship with the media and we explore how news outlets can best cover the incoming US administration. Jasmin Mujanović is an international relations scholar and policy analyst. He is in Princeton, New Jersey today. And Susan Delacourt is a political columnist for iPolitics and the Toronto Star. She is in Ottawa. Hello to both of you.

SUSAN DELACOURT: Good morning.

JASMIN MUJANOVIC: Hi there.

LL: Jasmin Mujanović, let's start with you. You were tweeting up a storm during President-elect Trump's press conference saying that you were alarmed. What were you alarmed by?

JASMIN MUJANOVIC: I just think that the conduct of the incoming administration or rather the incoming president is really not becoming of someone who purports to be the leader of the free world or at the very least the leader of a democratic republic. Right? This is a clear attack on the free press. It's violating every norm and standard that we have in countries like the United States and Canada. And it's signaling that he intends to—I think as he has done throughout the campaign and since he has been elected—that he is going to fundamentally remake what it means to live in a republic of laws in the United States.

LL: Susan Delacourt, you were watching as well. What stood out to you?

SUSAN DELACOURT: The big thing that stood out to me apart from the, you know, the unbelievable display was the sight or the picture of the other reporters in the room. The camera shot—I wasn't in the room obviously—but when the camera panned to them, you saw them sort of looking down awkward, scribbling, not really knowing what to do. I'm not going to guess what was in their heads but I can probably imagine they were glad that they weren't the target. But it all made me—it reminded me that there are some times when things like this happen, where reporters have to stand up collectively for each other. And as we heard in the intro, some of that has happened afterward but it didn't happen at the time.

LL: Jasmin, you had some criticism for the media organizations and the journalists in the room that day. What were you taking issue with?

JASMIN MUJANOVIC: I mean I think it comes down to the fact that the whole scene was a repetition of what we saw during the campaign, which is that the media was primarily chasing headlines, right? They were kind of egging him on and trying to get him to say something scandalous so that they would have leads for that evening's you know news cycle or the headlines the next morning. And that's not really the responsibility of the media, especially not in times like these. I mean I think we all have to collectively understand that this is not normal nor can we treat it as being normal or normalizing in any shape or form. And so it was kind of a dereliction of duty on the part of the media, I thought. And you know in the end, what it's going to lead to—and I think we've already started seeing that—is that the lives and welfare of individual reporters, as my colleague was just saying, are going to be imperiled by this kind of behaviour.

LL: But to be fair, it doesn't take very much to egg Donald Trump on. What would you have had them do?

JASMIN MUJANOVIC: Well, I think one of the things that we didn't see during the course of the exchanges yesterday was basically follow-up questions, right? Notwithstanding the exchange that happened with the reporter from CNN, we by and large would you know see a reporter pose a question, Mr. Trump would give an answer that was nowhere near addressing the substance of the issue, and then other reporters nor the original asker of the question, no one would actually follow up. Right? And so you would just kind of have this abstract record of what took place without any of the major issues of the day having been discussed. And instead the whole thing becomes this circus. I mean that's ultimately what it was.

LL: Susan, do you take issue with the way those questions were posed as well?

SUSAN DELACOURT: Yes, I do. Yeah. I think you know to anybody looking from outside, it did look surreal. You know we've been reporters for a long time and we know that everybody arrives at press conferences with their own questions to ask, but sometimes there is a moment where the news conference has a life of its own and follow-up questions are important. And certainly I'm not the only one to observe this. There were really good columns in the Columbia Journalism Review—a man named Pete Vernon pointed this out—also in the New York Daily News—that the job of the press conference at that moment, after that moment, was not to normalize it or proceed as normal but to say something like you didn't answer what CNN is asking. Can you answer that or say something to acknowledge the the bizarre interruption in it? It was almost surreal how the press conference carried on as normal and that Trump could do this. And leave aside whether it's Trump, who is a showman and that did look a bit like reality TV. It is the job of reporters to get a story, to get answers. But in a case like this, it makes it far easier for a politician to pick reporters off, to break them off against each other, to play one off each other. We've seen that here in Ottawa at a much lesser degree. But there are times when reporters have to stand together on the face of something like this. And I think they only did it afterward.

LL: Can we switch the focus back to Donald Trump? I said in the introduction to this that some people think it's reflecting a more authoritarian tone. Do either of you see it that way?

SUSAN DELACOURT: I do.

JASMIN MUJANOVIC: Yes.

SUSAN DELACOURT: Yeah.

LL: Why?

JASMIN MUJANOVIC: I mean I would just say that for those of us who have experienced authoritarianism in any shape or form or at the very least have been scholars and you know observers and reporters of authoritarianism, this is sending up all kinds of alarm bells and I don't think it's an accident that some of the most prescient analysis and critique that has come out over the last year, year and a half, has been from people who have studied authoritarianism you know in the Middle East, in Eastern Europe, et cetera. Right, because there's nothing there's nothing new under the sun as it were. And so the way that Donald Trump has normalized fringe extreme movements, how he has staffed his cabinet, how he has just completely you know gas lit—a term that's appeared in the media lately, right—absolutely normalized basically lying on public record as a means of public policy and as a means of governance. I mean these are all incredible blaring red flags and again, I mean I think we need to acknowledge it and speak about it clearly.

LL: Well, not everyone thinks the president-elect's press conference behaviour does reflect that authoritarian attitude. I want to play something that Breitbart columnist John Hayward has to say. Here's the clip.

SOUNDCLIP

Well no, an authoritarian leader would throw them in jail. I mean one of the interesting responses came from the president of Turkey, who basically applauded Trump being rude to the CNN reporter. But in Turkey, the president is much more than rude to media people he doesn't like. He jails them by the scores. He shuts down their media operations. That's authoritarianism. We're nowhere near that watching Trump have an argument with one reporter and even if that one reporter is asked to leave, even if that one news organization is asked to leave. Much as President Obama harped on Fox News incessantly for eight years nonstop, attacking Fox News every chance he got, most recently just a couple of weeks ago, that wasn't authoritarianism. I don't see anyone complaining that that was the heralding of a new dark age and this is really no different. It's just a different network and a different president with a different style.

LL: Susan Delacourt, what do you think of that comparison?

SUSAN DELACOURT: Well, it raises an interesting issue and it reminds me that sometimes these problems arise when we have politicians who don't really see the public service role of the media. They see them as marketing or advertising tools. And I think that's probably—I take issue—I do see the point on all the authoritarianism stuff but I think basically Donald Trump is a marketer. He's a businessman and he thinks that the media is there primarily to help him do his job and when it doesn't, you know you're fired or you're fake news or he can shout them down. The problem is that the line between using the media for that purpose and then just discounting them altogether can be easily breached.

LL: You raise an important question there. I mean one thing that I think we can all agree on is that in in the past, prime ministers and presidents needed the media much more to get their message out. That's not so much the case anymore because of things like Twitter and other social media. How does that play in to how Trump handles the media and how the media should be handling Trump?

SUSAN DELACOURT: Well, look at the fact that we have a president-elect who has not held a press conference in two and something months. The fact that he has communicated almost entirely on Twitter or you know in social media or—well, all the ways in which everybody else has been detouring around the media. You know it's there. We're going to have to accept it. What Trump also knows too, is there are a lot of members of the public who might have been applauding when they saw a member of the media getting knocked down. The media, in lots of cases, is seen is as elite as the politicians. So I think, you know, he's playing to the worst impulses. That's how he won. And I think that's telling us how he's going to govern.

LL: Jasmin Mujanović, how much faith do you have in the media's ability to hold Donald Trump to account?

JASMIN MUJANOVIC: Very little. And I don't want that to be interpreted as an attack on the media. I have colleagues who work in journalism. I just think that the issue is that reporters in the United States and Canada and large parts of Europe really have no first-hand experience with authoritarianism so to them, this is entertainment. This is a circus. This should be understood as reality television and it's not, right? It's clearly a deterioration of the rule of law and constitutional governance in the United States and it's incredibly alarming. And the other aspect that needs to be raised vis-à-vis the clip that you just played from the gentleman from Breitbart News, is that he uses Erdogan as an example, but we have to remember that—

LL: The president of Turkey. Yes.

JASMIN MUJANOVIC: That's right. That's right. The president of Turkey. The president of Turkey, Erdogan, did not start out by throwing journalists in jail. It was only a few years ago that he was considered you know as a secular moderate Democratic wave of change in the Middle East. Right? And then we saw how very quickly that could change. And he's not the only one who's undergone that transformation. So I think this very much needs to inform how we analyze and how we think about what Mr. Trump is already doing in the United States.

LL: Now I don't want to draw a false equivalence, but I do want to remind you that President Obama was not seen as a complete supporter of the press because of his attempts to go after those who had leaked information and reported on it. And he's been criticized by that. Now it's not the same as Donald Trump. So the media are used to an adversary relationship with the president and I think Susan, you'd say, that the media in Ottawa are used to an adversarial relationship with the prime minister. Maybe you could go back in time a little bit to the time of Stephen Harper and tell us how that worked out.

SUSAN DELACOURT: Yeah, again with the same warning as you do, but at the risk of inflaming people that it was a very tough time here in Ottawa for a decade. And the early days—I had a bit of a flashback experience watching that news conference the other day—to one in April 2006 here in Ottawa, where you know things were getting really stormy between the newly elected Stephen Harper government. And there was a press conference to announce the Accountability Act, I believe it was, and reporters had lined up at the microphone, as was the usual practice. And Harper, the new prime minister testing his power, had decided that he was not going to take questions from that lineup at the mic—and it was the CBC's own Julie Van Dusen actually—and tried to throw to somebody else. Harper decided he wanted to control the questioners and when he couldn't, he walked out. And that began a really rocky decade. And I think you know, listeners will remember this, is that Harper limited questions. He stopped holding press conferences altogether. He played reporters off each other. And when I was watching that press conference the other day, I thought you know, I remember when we went through this: seeing reporters singled out, seeing a combative newly elected leader and a power struggle between the media and the politicians. The public sees it that way, but actually some accountability gets lost in the process.

LL: But do you think that Stephen Harper was successful in his strategy? Did it work?

SUSAN DELACOURT: Yeah, he did break the media. There was no united front. I think that's what made me look at the other reporters so closely the other day. He did. He managed to get his message out. He had his own you know 24/7 TV. He was re-elected a couple of times fighting with the media. The public didn't care about it. And the media—I think accountability was the poorer for it but it took a long time for the public to absorb the fact that a prime minister who wanted to not talk to the media might have some problems with accountability altogether.

LL: Jasmin, against this backdrop of the news conference which is so fresh in everyone's mind, we do know that there is some really crackerjack investigative journalism going on right now, looking into Donald Trump's background and his holdings. Do you see any cause for, I guess, for hope that there will be good journalism coming out of Washington in the next four years?

JASMIN MUJANOVIC: I mean I think there has been good journalism throughout. It hasn't been the majority of the news cycle—you know we are in the era of 24-hour news—so it's the impulses to chase the headline and I think we're all poor for it as democratic citizens. That having been said, there have been good investigations by the Washington Post, by the New York Times, even by BuzzFeed, honestly. But you know the sort of the bigger takeaway from this is that it's not just a story about media. It's a story again about governance. Right? So unless there are results, unless there is actual action on the basis of the things that the media already has discovered and no doubt we'll discover in the future about the incoming administration, then—I don't want to say that it will all be for naught—but you will end up in a situation where we have an administration that is surrounded by scandal, that is affiliated itself with the worst authoritarian regimes in the world and yet, it is allowed to govern without any consequence. That's the kind of situation that we're looking at. And if that happens, none of this is going to be okay. None of it.

LL: Susan, what advice would you give to the Washington press corps over the next four years?

SUSAN DELACOURT: Don't allow yourself to be played off each other. Hang together and remember that your job is a public service, that sometimes competition between the media is not as important as the public service, a democratic role of the media.

LL: Have you got anybody calling you up asking you what to do?

SUSAN DELACOURT: No. No. No. We should have written a manual at the time. It was a rough time. I think Canadians are probably forgotten that.

LL: Jasmin Mujanović, what about you? What advice would you give them?

JASMIN MUJANOVIC: I mean with respect to my colleague, I think we need to be a little bit more serious so we need to read from folks who are in Egypt who have survived authoritarian regimes in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. That's where this is going. That's whom this administration lined itself up with. It has attacked core American allies in the European Union and NATO. It does not want to be affiliated with them. It does not want to govern in their fashion. So we need to start looking to places like Egypt. We need to look to places like Poland and the various central Asian states. We need to learn from those experiences and absolutely prepare for the worst. Even if it doesn't end up that way—that's what we're all hoping for—we nevertheless need to prepare for the worst because we have underestimated this man and his movement at every step of the way. And if we continue to do that, it will end badly for all of us.

LL: And Susan, just briefly because we are running out of time—based on the last press conference, what do you think should be done differently next time? I think you've given us some hint of that.

SUSAN DELACOURT: Follow up questions. I think that that is a growing chorus and rather than wait for the press conference to be over to say that they stand united, say it then.

LL: Thank you very much to both of you.

SUSAN DELACOURT: Thank you.

JASMIN MUJANOVIC: Thank you.

LL: Jasmin Mujanović is an international relations scholar policy analyst. He's in Princeton, New Jersey. Susan Delacourt is a political columnist for iPolitics and the Toronto Star. She's in Ottawa. The CBC News is next. Then the story of Canadians being priced out of prescription drugs they so desperately need. The case for national pharmacare after the news. I'm Laura Lynch. You are listening to the Friday edition of The Current.

[Music: Sting]

1 in 10 Canadians can't afford prescriptions: the case for national pharmacare

Guests: Jim Poot, Brenda Poot, Steve Morgan, Yanick Labrie

LL: Hello. I'm Laura Lynch in Vancouver and you're listening to the Friday edition of The Current.

[Music: Theme]

LL: Still to come, Ontario's new anti-human trafficking office is being led by a woman who knows exactly what it's like to be trafficked across the country. In half an hour, I'll speak with Jennifer Richardson about Canada's hidden problem. But first, the pain of paying out of pocket for prescription medication.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: Lights, camera, action. My name is Andrei Marti.

VOICE 2: The doctor looked at him and he says you have type 1 diabetes. And there's never going to be a cure. I knew it could be deadly.

VOICE 1: I started getting needles and then I knew what my life was going to be like.

VOICE 3: Like millions of Canadians, the Marti family can't afford their prescription drugs.

VOICE 2: To be suddenly told that you're spending $500 a month on your son's medical bills, that's huge.

VOICE 3: Canada is the only country that has universal health care but doesn't have a universal prescription drug plan.

VOICE 4: There are millions of people. They don't have private insurance and they don't have access to medicines.

VOICE 3: And Canada's sky high drug costs lead to some tough choices. Why are you not changing your needles?

VOICE 1: Money does not grow on trees. So… it’s hard.

LL: The high cost of medication is a hardship for many Canadians young and old. Tonight, The Fifth Estate is taking a closer look at rising prescription drug costs and how those costs affect Canadians. Jim Poot from Ancaster, Ontario is one of the people featured in the investigation. He was diagnosed with brain tumours in 2005. And the cost of the medication he requires has forced him and his family to make some difficult decisions. Jim and his wife Brenda Poot join us from Hamilton, Ontario. Hello to you both.

BRENDA POOT: Good morning.

JIM POOT: Good morning, Laura.

LL: Jim, can I can I start with you? How many prescriptions do you actually take?

JIM POOT: We’re starting to add them up. There's over 21 that we currently take.

LL: And by we, you mean you take. Okay. [laughs]

JIM POOT: I. Yes. Brenda helps me administer them, how's that?

LL: How important are those drugs to your health?

JIM POOT: They're vital actually. Most of them help me function in a daily capacity. Otherwise, it would be almost impossible to get up and get out of bed, the way my head would be functioning, and particularly my left side—it helps with my left side paralysis. And it helps with the build-up of CSF fluid in my head, which accumulates to, from my understanding, about a litre a day would build up in my head without some of these medications.

LL: So it's contributing to your quality of life and it's also contributing to you staying alive.

JIM POOT: Very much so, yes. Yeah. The staying alive part is definitely a bonus. The quality of life is the essence of the taking of all these pharmaceuticals.

LL: Brenda, can I turn to you? Your family does have drug coverage. How much does it cover the costs of all of these drugs?

BRENDA POOT: Approximately $2,800 a year is covered by our benefit plan. Apparently as of actually this January, it went up to $3,000.

LL: Okay. Compare that then to how much the prescriptions cost you.

BRENDA POOT: The prescriptions cost us over and above the plan: $23,000 dollars a year.

LL: How are you managing to pay for that?

BRENDA POOT: We've cut a lot. But we have had to remortgage our home more than once.

LL: And what else have you had to give up to pay for the drugs?

JIM POOT: I've always been a boater, so we prided ourselves on finally buying the boat of my dreams. Brenda's learned to like it. And unfortunately, that dream has had to go. We had no choice but to liquidate that asset and a few other assets just so that we could try to maintain some semblance of our lifestyle which is not close to what it used to be.

LL: So you're in this position where you've had to, as you say, cut back on significant things in your lifestyle, take out a mortgage on your house and I guess that's still hasn't been enough because you've had to make some decisions about what drugs you take to cut costs. So tell me about that.

JIM POOT: You know these drugs—the costs of these drugs are probably double what our mortgage payment used to be. And having to take—being forced into early retirement means our income also has been cut drastically. So at some point, something has to give. So on a daily basis, depending upon how I feel or what is having a significant impact on my day, basically determines which medicines I'm going to either take or give up on that particular day.

LL: So you judge based on “I don't need this today but I might need that.” And how is that working out for you?

BRENDA POOT: If you had asked him yesterday, he would have said not well.

LL: Why?

BRENDA POOT: He had a really bad day yesterday.

LL: What does a really bad day look like, Brenda?

BRENDA POOT: the headache gets where he loses bilateral coordination. His vision is off. He's violently ill. It's a sacrifice.

JIM POOT: She's not wholeheartedly convinced that I'm making the right decisions, particularly on those days where I'm not a pleasant person to be around.

LL: Then how do you feel about the situation that you're in?

JIM POOT: Extremely frustrating. But as saying that, there are days where we function and you know you live for those better days and for the lifestyle that we have to try to maintain. So it's kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place and you're making the best of a bad situation.

LL: Now Brenda, I can hear it in your voice. It has been hard on both of you. How do you cope?

BRENDA POOT: I take every day is a blessing. Whatever the day gives us, we try and get through it. I guess you just have to try and be as positive as you can with whatever you're dealt that day.

JIM POOT: There are many days where it's overwhelming for both of us. And one day or another, one of us will have our little breakdowns or whatever, but the good thing is that we have a good support system. We have two beautiful daughters and a grandchild now and they are our focus. And that's what we concentrate on, making the best of all the situations so that we can see as many of those days as possible.

LL: So what do you want Canadians to know?

JIM POOT: From my personal prospect, we were pretty well-off middle class people. If it can happen to us, it can happen to anyone. And I think there's a lot of people that are going around that are pretty healthy, like I was, arrogant enough to believe that it won't happen to me. And I think people have to be aware that you're only one stroke away from having a situation like this arise directly or indirectly in your family. And I think people have to be more aware that we live in a very fragile state. The first thing a doctor will do to you is get out the prescription pad. Once they've established that there's something wrong with you and that's great. And I think that that's wonderful that we have a health care system like that. The problem is that once you leave that office, the onus is 100 per cent on you. And somehow you have to try to fill that that prescription.

LL: I know that you both know that there has been lot of advocates who say that what we need is a national pharmacare program where you pay perhaps $10 or $15 to have pretty much most drugs dispensed. Do you think that that's an idea that would work?

JIM POOT: I'd like to think so. I'm also a realist to know that social programs are expensive but I think there definitely needs to be a movement towards something like that, particularly where people are making life-threatening choices. There are some medicines that maybe you can do without. But there are definitely medicines that some people can't do without. I know there's a little young man that’s just starting out in life and he's a severe diabetic and he can't afford medicines. That is heartbreaking. Heartbreaking. And I just can't fathom that a country that's supposed to be as economically sound as Canada can't do something to help those type of individuals.

LL: Well, Jim and Brenda, I thank you so much for sharing your own story with us and I wish you all the best.

JIM POOT: Thank you very much.

BRENDA POOT: Thank you so much. Thank you for having us.

JIM POOT: It’s been our pleasure.

LL: Bye-bye.

JIM POOT: Bye-bye.

LL: Jim and Brenda Poot joined us from Hamilton, Ontario. For a better idea of how a national pharmacare program in Canada might work, I'm joined now by Steve Morgan. He's a professor at the School of Population and Public Health at the University of British Columbia and he's with me here in Vancouver. Hello.

STEVE MORGAN: Good morning.

LL: So what were you thinking when you were listening to the Poots tell their story?

STEVE MORGAN: Well, first of all, I thank you and the CBC for featuring first and foremost the story of a family who needs medicines and is having difficulty arranging the financing to pay for them. This is fundamentally a story about access to the care that Canadians need. And it's an obligation we have as a country. So the story about access and the story about financial hardship is really important. First and foremost, pharmacare is about making sure that Canadians can get the care they need—a high quality care at a cost that's affordable to them and to society as a whole.

LL: How common is a situation like the Poots?

STEVE MORGAN: Remarkably common in Canada. There have been a number of surveys, several of which have been done by Statistics Canada, some international surveys by the Commonwealth Fund based out of the United States. And repeatedly they've shown that about one in 10 Canadians reports that they choose not to fill prescriptions written by their doctors or to not take their medicines as written by doctors because of the cost. Last year, Angus Reid Institute did a survey that showed that this affects about one in five Canadian households and consistent with the story that we were hearing from from Jim in the interview is that many Canadians are concerned about the future. They’re concerned about whether they could afford the medicines that they may need in five years or 10 years from now.

LL: So talk to us, explain how the prescription drug system works now in the country.

STEVE MORGAN: In Canada, we have a relatively patchwork system—an incomplete and arguably uncoordinated system—of public drug coverage for vulnerable populations. And that varies by province, so some provinces focus their public assistance on elderly people and welfare recipients and maybe people with particular diseases. Other provinces like British Columbia where I am, you have universal coverage in some sense, but it's only against costs that are catastrophic relative to your household income. So that would mean if you have to spend three per cent or more of your household income in British Columbia, the government will help you.

LL: And then of course, we have as you say private drug care plans where people pay the premiums and then employee drug plans as well, that cover to some degree or another for other Canadians. But I wanted to ask you how much do Canadians spend on prescription drugs?

STEVE MORGAN: Yeah, so currently in total we spend about $30 billion on prescription drugs in Canada.

LL: A year?

STEVE MORGAN: Per year.

LL: Why are we seeing prescription drug costs increase?

STEVE MORGAN: Well, in the Canadian context, one of the challenges is that we don't have the power of a single payer to negotiate effectively you know competitive prices of the medicines in our market. Countries that we would compare ourselves to, other countries with universal health care—and this includes very many countries—so Europe, it includes the Scandinavian countries that have very similar public health care systems to us, it includes the United Kingdom. All of those countries, one way or another, create a system by which a body—typically comprised of medical and economic experts—looks at the evidence about every drug that comes to market, decides whether it should be available to everybody. And if it should, then they negotiate with the manufacturer and they haggle. And as a consequence, they get typically very good prices relative to what Canada pays. In our system, it's a quite different. The private insurance companies boast quite frankly that they don't restrict any access to medicine, so they essentially boast that they never say no. And advocates for a private insurance for medicines in Canada talk about this, that we don't want to restrict access but of course, that's the equivalent of going into a dealership and saying I've got to buy a car now, I'll take whatever price you're you're asking. It would be foolish economically. So we’re in a different situation. Our governments do negotiate. They try their best within their capacity to lower the cost of drugs for the public programs but they don't have as much power as they would have if they were actually negotiating on behalf of everybody. And if they had you know the legitimate authority to say no when the drug is either not safe enough or not effective enough or where it's just simply priced too high.

LL: Now I want to bring someone else into the conversation. Yanick Labrie is a health economist and a senior fellow at the Fraser Institute. He is in Montreal this morning. Hello.

YANICK LABRIE: Hello. Good morning.

LL: What is your response to what Steve Morgan has to say?

YANICK LABRIE: Well, first I'd like to say a few words about the example that Jim and his wife just presented at the beginning. Well, it's a very sad story. You know I'm totally in favour of having universal coverage for all Canadians and I'm shocked when I'm hearing those stories because you know in Quebec, you have a great model. In Quebec, we have universal drug coverage. We've been having that universal system for about 20 years with great result in terms of health outcomes. No one is left aside and everyone is covered, either by a private drug plan or a public plan. So I've always been very upset and surprised by the fact that other provinces are not following the example of Quebec. That being said, I think that we don't have to have a government monopoly to achieve universal coverage. Quebec is a good example, but elsewhere as well. In other developed countries you have good examples. The Netherlands is a good example, as well as Switzerland, just to name a few.

LL: Well, instead of naming the countries, tell me what it is about their systems that you think would work better.

YANICK LABRIE: Well, actually, they do have multi-payer system with the only private insurers, actually in the Netherlands and they tend to compete with each other to offer, well, to try to have lower prices for one thing. But also they resist the temptation to restrict access to new innovative drugs which is very important because it's very important to have financially access to those drugs but also it's important to have access, to encourage innovation in our system and to have access to those new drugs in a timely fashion.

LL: Okay. We'll get to that. But Steve Morgan says one of the things about a national pharmacare program is that it can actually save the system money, that as a government, the government can negotiate down the price of drugs which are much higher here than they are in many other countries that do have national pharmacare programs such as New Zealand. You don't agree with that.

YANICK LABRIE: I do not actually because—and taking the same example of the Netherlands—in the Netherlands, they are able to negotiate the private insurers with the manufacturers and in the end, if we look at the data, we observe that there are more efficient that than Canada. So again, to repeat myself, a government monopoly is not necessary to achieve universal system and to achieve efficiency. What I'm afraid with the proposal of Steve is that in the end, savings are going to come at a cost. You know the costs would be more rationing and we just don't want that to happen. We want savings of course because in the end, if we have savings we can devote those resources to other healthcare services. But at the same time, I'm afraid that if we ration access to medicine, it's going to be costly in terms of health outcomes for Canadians.

LL: Steve?

STEVE MORGAN: Well, I think you've got to be careful when listening to anecdotes about other countries because it's easy for stakeholders and those of vested interest to cherry pick the facts. The Dutch example is a good one of multi-payer health care system that has managed to coordinate its purchasing of medicines in an effective manner. But it's important to note that the Dutch system of social health insurance is compulsory insurance for all of healthcare, including medicines. The insurance companies that insure you as an individual of the Netherlands must cover your hospital, medical and pharmaceutical care altogether and for pharmaceuticals, they have realized—even though there's four or five fairly dominant Dutch insurers that run the social insurance system—they've realized a couple of things: first of which the profit motive may actually be a problem in the insurance industry. So for the last several years, Dutch legislation has prohibited the insurance companies from making a profit. That would be quite different than Canadian insurance companies, many of whom are for profit corporations. The other thing the Dutch have figured out is that they would be better off with these companies that do run the insurance if they had a single organization that did the health technology assessment and the price negotiations on behalf of the Netherlands. And so in essence, they've created—for their social insurers—they've created what Canada should create on behalf of our provinces, which is a single agency to negotiate. And when you agree to cover a drug for the population, everyone gets it. And when you decide it's not right, nobody gets it. And that's how it works in the Netherlands and that's probably how the provinces can make it work here in Canada.

LL: The other thing I want you to address though, Steve, is something Yanick points out and other critics have pointed out as well. And again, I will point to New Zealand in that, while you may have everyone able to get most drugs for a very small amount of money, when it comes to new drugs—innovative drugs—people can't get them. They can't get them at all and they're not covered. And I think Yanick—if I'm expressing your view correctly—you say that you should be encouraging that innovation and letting people get access to those drugs.

YANICK LABRIE: Exactly.

STEVE MORGAN: I think it's important to understand that when drugs come to market that are truly innovative, like truly addressing unmet health needs in ways that are significantly better than available treatments, countries around the world with universal public systems for covering the medicines do find ways to cover those drugs. Many times that's not the case. Many drugs that come to market are what we would refer to as incremental innovations. But even when the big, big innovations come to market, systems around the world find ways to make them available. And New Zealand, Australia and other countries do provide coverage for those drugs and they find ways to cover them by being tough but fair in their negotiation of what the right price should be for those drugs. I don't think there's any problem in Canada of having a universal public system for drugs of the greatest value for money to our universal and public health care system. If Canadians want to use private money for extra choice, that's fine. They'll oftentimes find that they're not really buying much better than what the public system would provide, but I have no opposition. I don't think many of the supporters of a universal plan would have any opposition for Canadians to have the ability to use their own money to buy things that are brand new but perhaps expensive.

LL: Yanick, what do you say to that?

YANICK LABRIE: Well, first of all, about the international experience. In other countries—let's take the UK or New Zealand—in New Zealand, their patients there had to move. Some people to move to Australia because the drugs that they needed was not covered by the public agency. So I think we should be careful about what we wish for.

LL: I want to put something to both of you because the health minister, Jane Philpott, has just this morning said that she does plan to change Canadian regulations to force drug companies to lower their prices. What she wants to do, the changes, would bring Canadian prices down in line with what we're seeing in countries like New Zealand and the system that's used now by the Canadian price review board is to look at an average of several countries. She complains that the average is skewed because it includes the United States, the only country with higher drug prices than Canada. She wants to take the United States out of the equation and put New Zealand into it, thereby forcing prices down. Yanick, what do you think of that idea?

YANICK LABRIE: Well, I'm afraid it might backfire again. You know you can force prices down but you cannot force pharmaceutical companies to launch their product in Canada. Canada is a small market that can decide either to delay the launch of their products or simply just don't want to market their products in Canada. So in the end, it's going to be costly not necessarily in terms of prices, but in terms of not having access to those important medicines.

LL: Steve?

STEVE MORGAN: Canada would not suffer us some undue loss of market launches in this country as a consequence of bringing prices down a little bit. But I want to go to your question, which is could changing the basket of countries that the Patented Medicine Prices Review Board looks at help us get our prices down in Canada?

LL: Which is Jane Phillpott’s idea.

STEVE MORGAN: Yeah. This would be effective in reducing list prices, which would take some pressure off. But it's an incremental change and what we really need to do is make sure that in the world market for pharmaceuticals—which is increasingly about bargaining and about doing deals and getting rebates—Canada needs a better purchasing strategy.

LL: It seems as though the health minister has made neither one of you happy with her plan this morning but I do thank both of you for coming in and discussing the subject. It’s very important. Thank you.

STEVE MORGAN: Thank you.

YANICK LABRIE: Thanks to you.

LL: Steve Morgan is a professor at the School of Population and Public Health at the University of British Columbia. He was in Vancouver. Yanick Labrie is a health economist and a senior fellow at the Fraser Institute. He was in Montreal. The Fifth Estate airs the “High cost of pharmaceuticals: Canada's drug problem” tonight on CBC Television at 9 p.m., 9:30 p.m. in Newfoundland. And let us know if you struggle to pay for medication. Tweet us @thecurrentCBC or me @lauralynchCBC, post on our Facebook page or e-mail us by clicking on the contact link at www.cbc.ca/thecurrent. Now coming up next, the shadowy, scary world of human trafficking. We go inside Ontario's effort to help those who are exploited and prevent trafficking after the break. And later, the not-so-nice arresting arithmetic of compassion. I'm Laura Lynch in Vancouver and you are listening to the Friday edition of The Current.

[Music: Sting]

Ont.'s anti-human trafficking director knows first-hand about 'hidden' crime

Guests: Jennifer Richardson

LL: Hello. I'm Laura Lynch in Vancouver and you're listening to the Friday edition of The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: You're trained like a robot from these guys. All you know is work, money, eat, sleep. Work, money, eat, sleep. You have to be where they say. You have to listen to them like you're their slave.

VOICE 2: They were in control of everything.

VOICE 3: What I wore, what I ate.

VOICE 2: When I slept and how long I slept for.

VOICE 3: When I showered, when I went to bed, when I woke up.

VOICE 2: What I ate when I ate.

VOICE 3: How much money I could keep on me. Nail colour. Everything.

VOICE 2: I honestly felt like they had a hold on me from the inside. From my mind.

LL: Those are the voices of just some of the women who have survived human trafficking and sexual exploitation in Canada, speaking with the Toronto Star. Ontario is considered a major hub of human trafficking in Canada, accounting for 65 per cent of the cases reported to police nationally. And as part of its new strategy to end human trafficking, Ontario has named Jennifer Richardson the province’s first director of an anti-human trafficking coordination office. As someone who was ensnared and exploited by traffickers herself, Jennifer Richardson brings firsthand insights to her new job. And she joins me from Toronto. Hello.

JENNIFER RICHARDSON: Hi.

LL: Did those sentiments sound familiar to you?

JENNIFER RICHARDSON: Yes, very much so. And I've heard hundreds of women and children say the same thing.

LL: How serious a problem is human trafficking in Ontario today?

JENNIFER RICHARDSON: I think it's fairly serious. You know it's a fairly serious issue in our country as a whole. You know with respect to the police statistics saying 65 per cent of the arrests and convictions are coming into Ontario, that would indicate to me that there's a lot more than people see because trafficking is quite hidden. And for most people that go forward to the police, there's usually a lot more that did not.

LL: You call it hidden. Do you have any sense of how many people are involved who are victims of human trafficking in Canada and focusing on the sex trafficking?

JENNIFER RICHARDSON: You know I've always said—again, as someone who has been involved, as someone who's researched, as someone who has provided clinical treatment to people who have you know experienced trafficking—it's very difficult to have a firm number because again, it's so hidden. And when you do start identifying it, you don't often reach everyone. The Ontario strategy obviously, that's one of the reasons why it was put forward, to better then reach people who have been trafficked and better provide services to them so that they can be helped and escape that.

LL: And I want to get into to all of that, what you're going to be trying to do in Ontario, but you also bring your own firsthand personal experience to the work. I know you're not always wanting to talk about your own history but I think that the fact that you bear witness to the experience is important for people to hear. What happened to you?

JENNIFER RICHARDSON: I was trafficked from 13 to 16 pretty much all over Canada and into parts of the US by a quite organized group of individuals who actually are still known to traffick people today.

LL: But that's what makes you reluctant to say very much.

JENNIFER RICHARDSON: Yeah. I mean my name was changed. You know I was moved so there is a number of things that needed to be put in place for me when I was removed from the trade. I have had investigations with some of the same people—not the same exact men obviously that trafficked me—but the same organization. So yeah, it's not that I am fearful of them anymore, but I think sometimes when I talk too much about myself, I feel like that may draw attention away from the people that need it now.

LL: I understand that, but if I could just ask you a couple more questions about it. How old were you when you got into this? You said 13?

JENNIFER RICHARDSON: Thirteen. Just turned 13.

LL: And how did you end up getting into it?

JENNIFER RICHARDSON: One of my friends are actually had been recruited by one of the men and she had encouraged me to go on a trip for the weekend with them and he was posing as her boyfriend and the other person was posing as wanting to be my boyfriend. Both of them were you know quite a bit older. We knew they were older than us but not as old as they actually were. And the first place they took us to was Calgary.

LL: And I guess that was the end of your childhood.

JENNIFER RICHARDSON: Very much so, yeah. And we moved quite often. I mean we didn't stay in one location for very long. That's definitely a tactic of traffickers, right? It's difficult you know with jurisdictional issues and different provinces, you know communication between service providers, it's harder to find people when you move them around faster and keep moving them.

LL: And they knew that. So the strategy was just keep on the run and they'll never catch up.

JENNIFER RICHARDSON: Yeah, they're very well organized. They actually you know would teach other people how to traffick and recruit.

LL: So how did you eventually get out of it?

JENNIFER RICHARDSON: I was been really badly in Montreal and sent back out to the streets and a police officer saved me.

LL: And he came, grabbed you?

JENNIFER RICHARDSON: Yeah. He came and said I was obviously coming with him. I was a little bit hesitant. I was taken to the hospital and then brought back. But you know there's pieces of my memory that are missing. So I remember being at the hospital, I remember being in a lot of pain that night. I had broken bones So I was in quite a lot of pain. But I don't remember being flown back to Manitoba, which I was because I ended up back in Manitoba and then was placed in a specialized program for children who had been exploited.

LL: Were you back with your family at that point?

JENNIFER RICHARDSON: No, I remained in child welfare.

LL: Okay. How long after that did you come to the realization that this needed to be your life's work?

JENNIFER RICHARDSON: I didn't mean for it to be actually. I wanted to become a lawyer actually. Maybe that's why I like law so much. But I couldn't afford to go to school. I was actually the first person on my mother's side to graduate high school and no one had ever gone to university in my family. And we didn't have the money for me to go to university and so I ended up actually begging someone in Winnipeg at a homeless shelter to give me a job because I figured I could work with street people because I knew street people. And she did give me a job and I worked there for a few years and saved up a little bit of money and went to school and I went into actually social work and I studied addictions. And so I started working with children and women who had been affected by addiction issues and started seeing a lot of exploited people and I could identify them very easily.

LL: How do you identify them?

JENNIFER RICHARDSON: I don't know how to explain that in words. I think there's something that cues. Definitely there's a different language, there's different culture and values and belief systems that occur in the sex trade. And if you've been exploited or trafficked, you would know that. So I think sometimes I can pick those things up.

LL: So you started to see this problem and that's what drew you into trying to do something about it?

JENNIFER RICHARDSON: I’ve seen the problem and I've seen that a lot of those women and children were not successful in completing treatment. And it really made me just you know made me start looking at some of the policies and some of the practices and wanting to look at why that was they weren't being successful and how we can change that.

LL: What have you come up with?

JENNIFER RICHARDSON: Oh, a whole slew of reasons. Treatment often as co-ed and most people don't talk about being trafficked. The other thing they talked about was wait lists are often really long. And they also really talked about not having access to women who had made it out, not having access to people that understood that sometimes it isn't a matter of you know the police rescuing you or the police locating you or a service provider providing services to you one time. That it usually takes you know years to heal and be okay from that experience.

LL: I read that you had been on the frontlines in Manitoba out on the streets trying to track down these young women and these girls. I wondered if you could sort of take us there to a situation where you're trying to talk to one of these young women or girls and trying to tell them that it's time to leave. Given your experience, what's that conversation like? What do you say?

JENNIFER RICHARDSON: I usually tell them that I'm not going away, that I'm going to protect them. And that's what's happening to them is abuse and that they're being harmed and I usually talk about some of the things that are pretty easily identifiable by both of us. So again, it's not really a judgment thing. But you know it may be three in the morning and you know they look hungry and they look tired and you know look like no one is there for them and that you know I want them to be safe. And depending on I think how long someone's been in that situation, their response is much different. So if they're in what I usually term in some of the things I've published as transitioning in or in a very glamourized stage of being trafficked, kind of the you know the recruitment phase, generally the traffickers are really good at making people believe that you know they're the only people in the world that understand them and they're going to be there for them and then the threats and the coercion and the abuse kind of start. And so if someone's experienced the abuse, then generally they come with us and a lot of times kids and some of the women would call us.

LL: I read a police officer saying how heartbreaking it was for him to try to talk one girl into coming with him and she just refused to go. She wanted to stay where she was. And I'm wondering if that's ever happened to you.

JENNIFER RICHARDSON: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. That child welfare system is a little bit different in Manitoba and as a child welfare worker, oftentimes I wouldn't give children the option of staying unless I could ascertain their safety and if they were with someone who was trafficking them, then I couldn’t obviously ascertain their safety and so that option wasn't there for them. But there were times that I knew kids were being exploited and they were safe at that moment and you know negotiated things because everybody wants to have some you know measure of control over their own lives.

LL: But if you had to walk away not knowing what would happen to them, what was that like for you?

JENNIFER RICHARDSON: It's definitely not easy. I don't think any time I ever even took kids back to safe places, I walked away not worrying because I found that the minute you know the authorities are removed, the traffickers are right back there. So you know there was never, I don't think, a time where I could think okay, that child was absolutely 100 per cent safe for good now.

LL: I guess it would be surprising for some people to hear that once they had been taken into care, that they would go back.

JENNIFER RICHARDSON: It's very surprising for people I think. People don't understand the manipulation and the coercion, I think, that is used against victims. You're really made to believe that you're never going to be accepted again. You're never going to be successful. The only thing you're good for is being bought for sex. And oftentimes, they'll use situations, you know well, your family didn't care about you or you know you got kicked out of school or your parents don't understand. And a lot of times I find, especially in the last 10 years, all they do is watch what kids put online to find that out. You know when I was trafficked, they needed to actually meet me and you know be around me to even figure out anything about me, whereas now, they just need to watch online.

LL: That's even scarier.

JENNIFER RICHARDSON: Mhm.

LL: When you look at your new job in Ontario, what needs to change there?

JENNIFER RICHARDSON: Well, I think we're on the right path. I know when I was first brought here, looking at the strategy, I was quite impressed with you know how it encompasses a lot of the needs of our own prevention and intervention in the justice side and you know the coordination side and there was a specific fund for Indigenous people. I would expect to see again more access to services for survivors, police having more resources, hospitals and health care people having more resources, child welfare being better prepared to prevent children from becoming exploited. And so I think that there is going to be changes that happen, but like a lot of large systems and very complex problems, changes don't come overnight.

LL: What are the biggest misconceptions Canadians have about human trafficking?

JENNIFER RICHARDSON: That doesn't happen here. [laughs] I think people think it doesn't help here and it happens here a lot, every day, all day. Because it's hidden, right? It's very hidden and so you know they don't see what it looks like in the movies. Even myself, we’re still doing lots of learning about how to best tackle such a complex issue because it does have systemic roots, you know it has issues that affect communities. It has issues that affect individuals and you really kind of have to tackle all of them at the same time. And it's not just a police issue. If it was just a police issue, we would have solved this a long time ago because police have been you know the primary people dealing with this in Canada for as long as we've had it.

LL: I want to give you a chance now. If you had something to say to girls or women who are either being trafficked right now or who may be vulnerable to that, what do you have to say to them?

JENNIFER RICHARDSON: I would say that you can be successful. You can be happy. You can have good lives. There are people that care about you. I would say to check things out and not believe everything that you're being told because it really does wear on someone when they're told every day, all day that you know they don't mean anything.

LL: And what about the parents? What would you say to them?

JENNIFER RICHARDSON: Parents, I would say, look at what your kids are doing online. Talk to your kids about not engaging with people they don't know online and talk to kids early. You know kids are online so much earlier now.

LL: Ms. Richardson, I wish you nothing but good luck in your new task ahead and I thank you for taking the time.

JENNIFER RICHARDSON: Oh, thank you very much for having me.

LL: Jennifer Richardson is the director of Ontario's anti-human trafficking office and she was in Toronto.

[Music: Bridge]

We're bad at feeling compassion for large groups, says psychology professor

Guests: Paul Slovic

LL: I'm Laura Lynch in Vancouver and this is the Friday edition of The Current. Last week on the show, Anna Maria Tremonti spoke with an author making quite a provocative statement. Paul Bloom is a Yale University psychology professor and he argues that the problem with our world is that there is too much empathy. His new book is called Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion.

SOUNDCLIP

Compassion is when you value other people, when you want them to thrive, when you love them. And without that, we would never do anything. Compassion is necessary to being a good person. But empathy gets you into their heads. You feel what they're feeling. You share their suffering. And unfortunately, if you feel empathy for somebody, among other things, you're likely if you're a helper to be burned out, to be exhausted. It focuses you on the short term rather than the long term. You feel more of it towards people who look like you than who don't look like you.

LL: Making the case for compassion over empathy but according to my next guest, compassion’s got its problems too—specifically when our compassion for one suffering person outweighs our caring for the many. And to explain, I'm joined by Paul Slovic. He's a professor of psychology at the University of Oregon. He's also the president of Decision Research, a non-profit group that researches the psychology of decision making and runs a project called the Arithmetic of Compassion. Paul Slovic is with us from Eugene, Oregon. Hello.

PAUL SLOVIC: Hello, Laura.

LL: Tell me what your project the Arithmetic of Compassion aims to do.

PAUL SLOVIC: This project aims to create awareness in people of the strange ways that our minds deceive us and prevent us from acting in humanitarian ways. That we would really believe we should act that way, but there are certain tricks that our minds play on us that provide obstacles to action and we're trying to get people aware of that so we can overcome those obstacles.

LL: You published a paper this week that looks at how iconic photos can stir us up and specifically we're talking about the well-known photograph of Alan Kurdi, the three-year-old Syrian boy. The photograph’s showing him face down on a beach after he had drowned. What did you find?

PAUL SLOVIC: We found that the statistics over a four or five-year period cumulating to hundreds of thousands of deaths in Syria did not create much interest in the problem of the humanitarian problem in Syria. But this one picture woke the world and suddenly people cared about the problem. They were doing searches on the Internet for Syria, for Syrian refugees, for this little boy's name. And we also found that donations on behalf of the Red Cross to care for Syrian refugees spiked after this picture emerged. And what was interesting, I think, and somewhat troubling is why should it take a photograph to do this and why didn't we get the message from hundreds of thousands of deaths that were periodically being reported as they accumulated? Why are we so numb to the statistics that we had to be awakened by a single photograph?

LL: Did this surge in compassion last?

PAUL SLOVIC: Well, it was relatively short lived. We could tell by watching the search queries on the Internet and also the donation streams that it lasted about a month—in some ways they had longer effects—but it was relatively short lived. And what that meant is that it provided a window of opportunity where suddenly, we were alert to the problem, we cared about it and we wanted to do something. And when there's something that we could readily do, like donate to the Red Cross on behalf of Syrian refugees, we did it. But where the problem was a little tougher of course, then after some time when the emotion of the picture wears off, then we kind of go back to business as usual and we sort of forget about it.

LL: Okay. So why and how do we act differently to the suffering of a single person as opposed to the suffering of large groups of people?

PAUL SLOVIC: Well, it's because we have two ways of thinking about these problems characterized by what Daniel Kahneman has called fast and slow thinking. So fast thinking is kind of our intuitive gut reaction and that's what we usually rely on—that's our default mode of thinking. And this fast system is well designed to help us think about one person—you know ourself or the person right in front of us—you know it’s energized and makes an emotional connection to individuals very powerfully. But what we find is that as the number of people at risk increase, even starting with the number two, we start to lose contact. We start to lose feelings. And so by the time that we're talking about you know large numbers, they're just numbers. They carry no feelings, no emotion and we don't really care about them.

LL: Is that what you mean when you talk about the tricks our brain plays on us?

PAUL SLOVIC: That's one of them. There's two elements here. One is called the singularity effect, which is the strong reaction we have to an individual in distress. And it doesn't have to be a person. It could be an animal. There was a story of a dog that was you know lost at sea on a ship and when people realized that, they ended up spending $300,000 to rescue that single dog. And so you know single lives matter to us and many lives should matter. If we use the slow thinking and we do the multiplication, then we should kind of multiply the importance of protecting lives as their numbers increase. But if we're using our feelings, our feelings are insensitive. They can't scale up. The feeling system can't count. It can't add. It can't multiply. And that's what we talk about when we talk about the arithmetic of compassion. The arithmetic of compassion is a flawed arithmetic. You know it's maximum number one. Two doesn't seem twice as bad as one, in fact, it may even seem less bad as one. At some point, we actually care less as the numbers increase. That's the flawed arithmetic of compassion. That's what the article that we published and related website are trying to communicate to the world to you know hey, think about this. Who are we? Are we the people who care so much about individuals that we’ll risk our life to save an individual in danger? Or are we the people who turn our backs on hundreds of thousands or millions of people who are at risk of death, you know in another country? You know what are our values here?

LL: What is it psychologically that prevents us from trying to tackle these big problems affecting these huge numbers of people? Because you did a study where you showed people a picture of a starving girl with and without statistics beside the photo. What did you find and what does that say about our psychological being that prevents us from trying to tackle these big problems?

PAUL SLOVIC: We thought that when we put the statistics of the larger problem next to the image of a little girl that it would increase people's motivation to donate on behalf of children like the girl. We got the opposite reaction. People donated less. And what's happening there, we learned, is that people see helping the child as a drop in the bucket. You know that is this is just one child and the problem is so big. And it gives us a sense that what we're doing is not effective, when in fact, that drop can be you know someone's life. It's very, very important. So we learned that we can get de-motivated from doing what we can do because of paying attention to what we can’t do. I mean what we can't do, okay. That's not relevant. Do what you can do and don't get deterred from doing what you can do because you can't do it all.

LL: Interesting research and a call to a mission from you. Thank you very much.

PAUL SLOVIC: You're welcome.

LL: Paul Slovic is a professor of psychology at the University of Oregon and the president of Decision Research, a non-profit group that runs a project called the Arithmetic of Compassion. He was in Eugene, Oregon. That is today's edition of The Current. Stay tuned to Radio One for q. Today, host Tom Power speaks with Ambur Braid, who is performing the Canadian Opera Company's upcoming production of The Magic Flute. Ambur Braid is a dramatic coloratura soprano—a rare vocal range which means she has a heavy, powerful voice that can sing fast and high. That's coming up next. And Monday on The Current, Anna Maria Tremonti will be speaking with a science writer behind a growing anti-sugar movement that compares the public health costs of sugar to the ills of tobacco. With that kind of comparison in the zeitgeist, it's no wonder we can't enjoy sugar the way we used to. But since the sweetness of Julie Andrews’ voice remains a guilt-free indulgence, here is “A Spoonful of Sugar”. I'm Laura Lynch in Vancouver. Thank you for listening to the Friday edition of The Current.

[Music: “A Spoonful of Sugar” – Julie Andrews]

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January 13, 2017 full episode transcript

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