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The Current Transcript for September 18, 2017

Host: Anna Maria Tremonti

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

NAHEED NENSHI: You know, I feel like thank goodness there's a direct flight from Calgary to Seattle. I expect a lot of people will be using that flight over the next several weeks.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi being coy with reporters on what his city is up to. In what has become the great race to convince e-commerce giant Amazon to place its planned second headquarters, its HQ2, in one of an estimated 100 American or Canadian cities and municipalities that will be bidding with tax and other incentives for a massive Amazon campus and well-paying jobs for 50,000 workers. So why are some people living with Amazon now warning those same cities to be careful what they wish for? We’re asking in an hour. Also today, fun with words.

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This is a word that looks like the number three because it’s round like the number three and this was the word cabbage for example. Or words that was shiny or glowed on the page, like the number five which is a glowing number.

AMT: That is Daniel Tammet. He's an autistic savant with sophisticated mathematical skills and the ability to speak several languages, one of which he learned in a week. So what can we learn from how he sees numbers and words and life? Daniel Tammet joins me in half an hour. But we're starting with the questions raised in Canada when North Korea flexes it’s muscle.

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[Sound: nuclear sirens]

AMT: The sirens over Japan after yet another North Korean missile launch over Japan on Friday. And another volley of words from the US yesterday. Canadians have been reminded that the assumption that the US will protect Canada from such potential future attacks is mistaken. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti, this is The Current.

Should Canada join ballistic missile defence program?

Guests: Murray Brewster, Christian Leuprecht, Peggy Mason

SOUNDCLIP

PIERRE ST-AMAND: I can't comment on the heat of the moment, whether there would be a discussion at the highest level to decide to go contrary to policy or not. But what I'm saying is that it would be entirely a US discussion and a US decision.

COMMITTEE MEMBER: And what defense capability do we have ourselves in that capability?

PIERRE ST-AMAND: Against ballistic missiles?

COMMITTEE MEMBER: Yes.

PIERRE ST-AMAND: We don’t.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: Well that was Canada's top NORAD officer Lieutenant General Pierre St-Amand testifying to a House of Commons defense committee last week. Translation, in the case of a ballistic missile attack that puts Canada in the crosshairs our defense is our problem. The Lieutenant General who is the deputy commander of NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, did not mince words. The US policy, he explained, is not to defend Canada in the event of a missile attack. And with North Korea launching a series of successful missile tests over the summer, missile defense has become a pressing concern. The latest North Korean shot flew over the Japanese island of Hokkaido on Friday. The second time in less than three weeks. Murray Brewster is the parliamentary defense reporter for CBC News. He was at that committee meeting where we heard the lieutenant general speaking. And he joins us from Ottawa. Hello Murray.

MURRAY BREWSTER: Hey Anna Maria.

AMT: So you wrote that the lieutenant general demolished a long held political assumption at that committee meeting. How so?

MURRAY BREWSTER: Well, it is a long held political assumption both implicitly and explicitly. The most recent example I can give you is in the Liberal defense policy. It only makes passing reference to ballistic missile defense, and says Canada is not going to change its policy of exclusion. Now, like implicitly in that suggestion is that should anything go wrong, you know, the US is going to be there to defend us. Now, explicitly we've heard statements and testimony from officials and politicians who say that the US hasn't asked us to join and would prefer Canada to spend its money on conventional forces. Not being obliged to defend Canada. You know, this is a long standing policy for the US. I mean, a few years ago I remember interviewing US Admiral Bill Gortney, who was at the time the head of NORAD. And he laid out the policy in exactly the same terms as General St-Amand did the other day. I have the references in my copy and it’s been you know, different copy and different references and different stories over the years. But, you know, and I guess I want to emphasize here that this is not a Trump era policy. This is something that has been going back at least for a decade perhaps more. Even still you could literally hear the jaws hitting the table among the politicians last week during the testimony.

AMT: Hm. So what is the Liberal government's position when it comes to joining US ballistic missile shield?

MURRAY BREWSTER: Well, the Liberal Government of this day said in its defense policy that it has not changed its approach and that it will look at other mechanisms through which it can, you know, protect Canada against ballistic missile defense. Like perhaps through NORAD modernization, perhaps through modernization of the North warning system. But Canada's opposition to joining ballistic missile defense goes back to the 1980s and, you know, the Reagan era Star Wars initiative. Now that was largely a space based defense system where, you know, orbital weapons platforms would be, you know, attempting to shoot down missiles and, you know, there were concerns among Canadians at the time that it violated a 1960s treaty that outlawed the militarization of space. And it was very much a concept at that time, it wasn't anything that was scientifically proven, so Canada’s declined to participate. You know, fast forward to the early 2000s when the Bush administration resurrected the idea, mostly because of the growing threat of North Korean and perhaps Iranian missiles. And but that system is different. And the system we’re talking about today.

AMT: That’s the THAAD system.

MURRAY BREWSTER: Yes, that’s right.

AMT: That’s the terminal high altitude area defense system, THAAD.

MURRAY BREWSTER: Exactly. And what it does is it uses ground based and sea based interceptors to knock down missiles. And I mean, Canada was asked to join in 2005 and there was a furious political debate at the time. I mean, there were a lot of recycled Star Wars arguments. But also I think that there was a legitimate fear that it could prompt an arms race because what it would do would force China and Russia, which at that time were the ballistic missile powers or the rivals to build more offensive weapons. And so Paul Martin's government decided not to join. Interestingly, the Conservatives who were in opposition at the time were all for joining BMD but then they spent nine years in power and they didn't join.

AMT: So tell me about the politics of this now. Why are the opposition parties jumping this issue now?

MURRAY BREWSTER: Well, the opposition parties are jumping on this because, I mean, the NDP from their point of view says that this strengthens the case for diplomacy where North Korea is concerned. They're talking about this in a very issue specific manner, not necessarily a policy specific manner. The Conservatives have been sort of all over the map. On the one hand they're saying that Canada is vulnerable but on the other hand they're not committing to joining ballistic missile defense. Twice I had the opportunity, and other reporters as well, to ask James Bezan the Conservative defense critic whether or not the Conservatives were in favor of joining BMD now. And a couple of weeks ago what we got was that we'll have to talk about it at the policy convention. And the other day following the hearing what we got was James Bezan saying he's got to go back and talk to caucus about everything that he had heard at the committee. So we're not quite sure where they stand.

AMT: Now, the government was able to free Canadian Pastor Hyeon Soo Lim earlier this summer, he'd been in custody in North Korea. How much diplomatic sway does Canada have with North Korea?

MURRAY BREWSTER: Well if you believe the officials who testified before the committee last week, we have a fair amount of sway. According to officials from foreign affairs when our national security advisor met with senior members of the foreign ministry in North Korea, you know, Canada was seen as a peaceful country, it wasn't seen as an enemy, and it was seen as a country that possibly has the ear of the United States and could be potentially useful to North Korea.

AMT: So how vulnerable is Canada to an attack from North Korea?

MURRAY BREWSTER: Well, you know, I mean, it comes back to the first part of the discussion, you know, that we've had. I mean, you know, will the US defend us? I mean, you heard in the clip at the beginning of our chat here that there is no defense against ballistic missiles and we can't rely on the US to shoot down a North Korean missile. And perhaps a bit of context that was missing from General St-Amand’s comments is that we've been watching one North Korean missile go up at a time. But in a potential wartime scenario what you would see would be multiple missiles being fired, perhaps dozens. Some of them with real warheads some of them with dummy warheads. And in that instance you've got a missile heading down towards Vancouver, you've got another one heading towards LA. Which one do you think the US is going to try and shoot down first?

AMT: And of course then there's the whole issue of does that work well enough to shoot anything down?

MURRAY BREWSTER: Exactly. And that's the other question because, you know, the US has been testing this ballistic missile defense system. And it's being done under very controlled circumstances. They know what the trajectory of the missile is going to be so therefore they know where to shoot at it. So there are real questions about in a scenario where you've got multiple missiles in the air will the system work? And..

AMT: [interposing] Well, I'll quote you from The New York Times, the latest edition and quoting on this issue, which says a former US official said you spend millions putting it in place and then you ask did it work? And the answer comes back maybe.

MURRAY BREWSTER: Yeah. Yeah exactly. And I asked General St-Amand last week about that because we had the former Chief of Defense staff General Tom Lawson on The House, CBC's The House, a couple of weeks back. And he says the consistent military advice in Canada to the government, governments both Conservative and Liberal has been join BMD and I asked General St-Amand last week whether or not does BMD work? And his answer was that his boss General Robinson who is the current head of NORAD, has testified before the US Congress that it does work so therefore he believes his boss.

AMT: OK. Well, we're going to jump off from that with our next two guests. Thank you Murray Brewster.

MURRAY BREWSTER: You're welcome.

AMT: Murray Brewster, parliamentary defense reporter for CBC News. He's in Ottawa. We did request an interview with the Defense Minister Harjit Sajan. He was not available today. So given the heightened threat of intercontinental ballistic missiles making their way toward North America, just how should Canada proceed? Two guests are standing by with differing points of view. Peggy Mason is the president of the Rideau Institute which is an Ottawa think tank. She is the former Canadian Ambassador for disarmament to the UN. Peggy Mason also provided testimony at last week's defense committee hearings. Christian Leuprecht is a Professor of Political Science at the Royal Military College of Canada and Queen's University. We have reached him today in Adelaide, Australia. Hello to you both.

CHRISTIAN LEUPRECHT: Hello.

PEGGY MASON: Good morning.

AMT: Christian, let's start with you. How concerned are you that Canada does not have a ballistic missile defense system of some kind?

CHRISTIAN LEUPRECHT: Well, I think we need to think about this not just in tactical but also in strategic terms because it means if we don't have a way of deterring these types of missiles flying towards the east or the west coast, it means that we leave ourselves open to compromising our sovereignty when it comes to international, foreign or defense policymaking. Because if we make policy decisions that might run contrary to countries that then possess such missile technology and they threaten us with sending a missile over here, if we follow through on those policies and we then withdraw those policies it means that we've effectively abrogated our sovereignty to rogue non-democratic states instead of having our democratically elected government have the ability to make foreign policy decisions that are in the best interest of Canada. At the same time, tactically I mean, the sky is not immediately falling here. The North Koreans have not mastered the controlled re-entry of the missiles into the atmosphere, they've not miniaturized the warhead enough, we're not sure how far along they are on the trigger mechanism. But of course Kim Jong Un has a 50 year perspective on this and the North Koreans will perfect this technology, as well as Murray pointed out, other countries. And so we seriously need to think about, when that technology is perfected is it only at that point that we as Canadians then want to make a decision and perhaps end up deciding to join BMD and the highly sub optimal conditions offered by the United States. Or do we want to make a strategic, have an informed strategic democratic debate about when, whether, and how to join.

AMT: OK. Peggy Mason, you spoke at those hearings. Should Canadians be concerned that we do not have BMD capability?

PEGGY MASON: Well, I think we should recall the testimony. There was one area where there was agreement in terms of the officials that testified, both the officials, the intelligence officers from national defense and also the foreign affairs officials that spoke. And they agreed that there is no direct threat to Canada from North Korea. And I think that's quite possibly because we have no nuclear weapons. We have no intercontinental ballistic missiles. We have no nuclear armed subs, no aircraft carriers, no long range nuclear capable bombers and only six military personnel in South Korea. And I think it's quite reasonable for North Korea not to perceive us as a threat. But I'd just like to jump in on one point from the previous comment by Murray Brewster. We're not talking about THAAD, which is Theater High Altitude Defense, which is relevant for Japan for example. What Canada, what the whole issue, the debate in Canada is about what's called GMD, which is Ground-Based Strategic Missile Defense, which is launched from the Earth. The idea behind GMD is that the US would launch an intercepting missile from Earth but that the aim would be that it would travel out of the atmosphere, and in space it would intercept the incoming missile. So we're talking about strategic ballistic missile defense, which is I raise that because it's extraordinarily difficult but also because the place where the interception is supposed to take place is not over Canada or United States — it's in space.

AMT: And how has the testing gone on that Peggy Mason?

PEGGY MASON: Well, I think the reaction to the latest test, the first ever. I mean, this specific system has been under development since 2002. And the first ever test against an intercontinental ballistic missile took place in May. In other words, all the other tests weren't even against what they're supposed to be defending against, intercontinental ballistic missiles. And the success, and I use that in quotes, was in a highly scripted scenario. In the first part Murray Brewster talked about a realistic scenario. Not only do you not know where they're coming from, when they're coming and what their route is, their trajectory is, there might be more than one and there might be decoys used. So in a very highly scripted scenario of one incoming missile where you know exactly where it's going, the system works about 50 per cent of the time. So to suggest this is a reliable defense and that we should be focusing on this instead of the very urgent need for diplomacy with North Korea without preconditions, is I think, you know, taking us down the wrong track.

AMT: OK. Well I want to just speak a little bit, hear a little bit more about the perceived threat of North Korea. I've got a clip here of John Mecklin, he's the Editor-in-chief of Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Listen to how he sees the perceived threat.

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JOHN MECKLIN: My honest assessment of it is that neither side would ever even think of beginning real military hostilities with the other because the result would be catastrophic for everybody. I have a hard time myself imagining that Canada is going to be one of the first targets of North Korean missiles. There are real questions about whether US missile defenses work. I mean, there are real scientific questions and real policy questions. Even if it works in the abstract, it is so easy to use decoys to make it impossible to shoot a missile down.

AMT: OK. Christian Leuprecht, so many echo his view that a real threat is not credible. There's always a possibility that something could happen inadvertently he goes on to say. Should we be basing policy decisions on the kind of back and forth we're hearing right now and the testing we're seeing now?

CHRISTIAN LEUPRECHT: So look, for the missile program that the North Koreans are running, I mean, they're not even building and developing those missiles themselves, they're basically assembling them or buying them on the black market. Together with the nuclear testing program they're running is the cheapest form of life insurance that the North Korean regime has decided it can buy. They've looked at Libya, they've looked at Iraq and Kim Jong Un has made a strategic decision that he does not want to end up like Saddam Hussein. And in that context we need to remind ourselves that we as the West in general and the Americans in particular have to own some of what's happening in North Korea because of our interventionist zeal in those two particular cases. And so the regime will continue to insist on that weaponry because it sees it as the only way to guarantee its continued existence against the threats that it perceives. The real threat here is that either something goes wrong in the testing program and I think that's what the Chinese are really concerned about because the testing side is less than 100 kilometres from the border. And we saw with Fukushima what can go wrong in those contexts and the fallout. And I imagine something like that happening in North Korea that would accept no help from the outside world. Or that in this very tense context within the region, someone is going to misinterpret military moves made by the other side and that that will then ultimately trigger a confrontation and an unpredictable confrontation. And so it is ideally that against this situation that we need to deter. And I think we all agree that we want to prevent the North Koreans from becoming a nuclear armed state. BMD can play one role in deterring that development. And I would say for the sake of world peace, any reasonable development that can deter the North Koreans from acquiring nuclear weapons, which would then trigger a nuclear weapons arms race within the region, is an important contribution to regional stability and to world peace.

AMT: Peggy Mason, Canada funds some of Europe's BMD. Should Canada with this program, should Canada not consider actually putting its own money in something for Canada?

PEGGY MASON: I'd like to come back, I have to come back to this point about ballistic missile defense being a way to deter North Korea. It has in fact the opposite effect. Which is why the Soviet Union and the United States agreed to the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 1970s. The way you defeat the missile, as we heard described from Murray Brewster, the way you defeat missile defenses is by building more offensive missiles. So ballistic missile defense plays no role whatsoever in deterring North Korea. And in fact, you know, quite possibly spurs them on. But coming to the important question of NATO, because there's been some confusion over this. Oh well we're not participating in the NATO program but we're spending money on it, so it doesn't make sense that we're not anticipating in the North American. The European program is, again, it's not a strategic system, it's the intermediate short range, tactical and intermediate range systems which the Europeans have decided that they want to have. And so that's a completely different debate. And I think it's a worthwhile one but it has nothing whatever to do with the one we're having now. And I’d come back to the fact that the strategic system, you're trying to intercept the missiles in space. Which means it's a bit of a moot point about whether or not the United States is going to defend Canada or not. Constitutionally they cannot guarantee to defend Canada. But if they detect a missile in space heading towards North America and they have a capacity to shoot it down, I suggest they're going to try to shoot it down. The real problem is they don't have the capacity to do that right now.

AMT: OK. We have to leave it there. Thank you both for your thoughts on this today.

PEGGY MASON: You're quite welcome.

CHRISTIAN LEUPRECHT: My pleasure.

AMT: I've been speaking with Peggy Mason, President of the Rideau Institute, an Ottawa-based think tank. And Christian Leuprecht, a Professor of Political Science at the Royal Military College of Canada and Queen's University. We reached him in Adelaide, Australia today. Well stay with us, the CBC News is next. And then we're engaging with a very special mind.

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DANIEL TAMMET: Language is visual in fact. The visual cortex in the brain is incredibly active. And I guess in my case it's just a little bit more active than most other people.

AMT: That is the author and savant Daniel Tammet. We will hear how his extraordinarily active mind has adapted to and thrived inside our ordinary world. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti, this is The Current on CBC Radio One, Sirius XM, online on CBC.ca/TheCurrent and on your radio app.

[Music: Extro]

Numbers 'were my mother tongue': How autistic savant Daniel Tammet sees language

Guest: Daniel Tammet

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: Hello, I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current.

[Music: Theme]

AMT: Still to come, Amazon is looking for a new HQ and across Canada some city mayors think that sounds like the deal of the century. But could it all add up to something more than they’re bargaining for? We’ll hear from the mayor of Halifax who’s making a bid, as well as a former Amazon manager who has some sobering views about Canada’s chances, and what the reality of hosting Amazon may be really like. That's coming up in about half an hour. But first, looking at words and the world from a different perspective.

[Music: Adaptation Theme]

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ANNOUNCER: Off to Reykjavik, Iceland where Tammet touches down with a final challenge, to learn Icelandic, perhaps the most impenetrable language on Earth. After just seven days of studying, has he cracked the code?

DANIEL TAMMET: [whispering]

ANNOUNCER: Tammet appeared on Icelandic TV. A live talk show.

DANIEL TAMMET: [speaking Icelandic]

ANNOUNCER: Holy cow, he nailed it.

AMT: Well that's from the TV newsmagazine 20/20 reporting on the incredible life and the remarkable brain of Daniel Tammet. He is a high functioning autistic savant. He’s well known to mathematicians around the world for a remarkable feat, memorizing the figure of pi to more than 22,500 digits. But as that 2010 report showed, Daniel Tammet has a gift for language as well. He speaks many other languages besides Icelandic, and he’s adept at getting it on the page with bestselling books including titles such as Thinking in Numbers and Born on a Blue Day. Daniel Tammet has an extraordinary mind but that doesn't necessarily make everyday life easy. As someone who sees the world differently from virtually everyone else, every step in Daniel Tammet’s life has been an adaptation. His new book is called Every Word is a Bird We Teach To Sing. And he’s with me from our Ottawa studio. Hello.

DANIEL TAMMET: Hello. Thank you for having me.

AMT: How did you manage to learn Icelandic in one week?

DANIEL TAMMET: I just fell in love with this language filled with images. It’s a very image rich language, if you want to say idea for example, you say hugmynd, hug means mind and mynd means picture. And if you want to say computer you say tölva, which is a word derived from the word in Icelandic for number and the word for witch or sorceress. And so it’s an incredibly poetic language full of images and it seemed to suit my way of thinking very well.

AMT: Now you say that you felt you never belonged to the English language. Why is that?

DANIEL TAMMET: I'm what people call today high functioning autistic. I was born with different connections in my brain. I saw words and numbers in particular as shapes and colours and textures. Numbers were words for me growing up, I would see them as people see calligraphy. I see numbers with textures and shapes and they form meanings. So for example when I thought of myself as somebody who was shy, I wouldn’t use the word shy, an English word, I would use the number, which is four, the number four in my mind is a pointy shape, it’s a blue colour, and for some reason I associate these qualities with the meaning of shyness. And so I was growing up feeling very different from my peers at school, from even my family. I didn’t feel like I belonged, English was the language in which I felt foreign, in which I felt I didn’t fit in. And so numbers in a way were my mother tongue. They were the language that I thought and felt and sometimes even dreamed in.

AMT: What you’re describing is called synesthesia, is it not?

DANIEL TAMMET: Yes, that’s correct.

AMT: And that is? Just tell us a little bit more about how that works.

DANIEL TAMMET: Synesthesia is a neurological phenomenon. It occurs in autism but it occurs also in people who aren’t necessarily on the spectrum. It’s where the brain is sending information to regions that don’t normally talk together. So that the region that usually is involved in how we perceive colour or how we perceive faces or emotions or language. All these regions that are normally kept separate, the talk between them doesn’t happen in an ordinary brain, in my brain they talk together. And so when I'm looking at words, I'm also perceiving colours, when I'm looking at numbers, I’m also experiencing meanings as if it’s a language in its own right.

AMT: Can you give me some more examples of that?

DANIEL TAMMET: Yes. For example, when I was growing up an emotion that I had very often but which I could find no word for in English was the emotion 757. Now 757 is a shape in my mind, it’s a shape that I can only compare to ginger root. It's a lumpy round shape. And this meaning, 757, evokes an emotion which is very complex. At the same time feeling incredibly lonely and at the same time having a commensurate desire to reach out to other people, to learn how to relate to them. I think it's a feeling that is incredibly common for those who live on the autistic spectrum.

AMT: The word lollipop had a special meaning for you as well.

DANIEL TAMMET: Yes.

AMT: The way you saw that. Tell us about lollipop.

DANIEL TAMMET: I was always reading as a child, my relationship to language for a long time was, to the English language was visual. I would read and read and read in the library, which was close to my parent’s home. And one day I fell on a book which was a children's book of course and the word lollipop. And I just jumped I was so happy because I read it as 1,011 e pop. l-o-l-l as in 1 0 1 1, 1,011. And this is a number that you can divide by 3, which is a round number in my language of numbers. And so it felt perfect, the shape of the number relating to the shape of a lollipop. And so I said to myself, well this is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. Half number and half word.

AMT: It's a beautiful image actually. [laughs]

DANIEL TAMMET: [laughs]

AMT: I never thought of it that way. But I really like it. I understand what you're telling me, that you see words, you see numbers and colours as words. But how does that allow you to absorb a language so quickly and be able to use it? What’s the rest of that process?

DANIEL TAMMET: This is what I'm doing with my mind for numbers because numbers are processed as words. But words themselves also have colours and textures. While I would read lollipop or any other word, it would glow and shimmer on the page, it would take on its own life in my mind. And when I’m learning a new language, the words obviously in my mind have colours and textures and very often, not always of course, but very often I can find a way of using those colours and textures to relate to the meanings behind the words. So that for example when I was learning Icelandic, I discovered just by chance that words that began with a particular sound, H-N, [Icelandic pronunciation], you use your word to pronounce this particular sound. It felt like a round word and I found in fact that many of the words, almost all of the words that began with this particular sound in Icelandic would describe round objects. So it would be either knuckle or a nut or the globe or even the shape that a cat makes when it's curling itself up in front of a fireplace. The Icelandic language has a word for this particular shape. And they all begin with this sound. And when I said this to the lady who was teaching me Icelandic, a native speaker, she said you’re right and I’ve never noticed this before. And it’s this ability to hone in on these connections and to make them intuitively between words and their meanings, which I guess gives me my head start.

AMT: And what was it like for you then as a boy, as a teen in school seeing the world so differently from the way classmates and others would see it?

DANIEL TAMMET: Today of course I look back and I see it as an enormous chance, an opportunity, an enormous piece of luck, good luck to have been able to experience the world in a way that is enriching and very today gives me my career and the opportunity to speak to people around the world. At the time growing up in the East end of London with working class parents and no knowledge in fact at the time of what high functioning autism was, the word itself didn’t exist, Asperger's syndrome wasn't yet a diagnosis. It was very difficult. And the children at school didn't understand me, I didn't understand them. We spoke in English but it was different Englishes. My English came from books, I would read most of the time and so the sentences I was reading were not the sentences that the children were speaking in the playground, in class, at the family table. So it was very difficult. And one way that I would try to work my way into their understanding and use their language was to read and to use novels and to use dialogue in novels, and the way that in novels you can read inside characters minds everything is transparent and I would try to use this information to learn empathy basically, to understand what was going on in another person's head, another person's skin. And to use this information of course it always at the beginning didn’t work, people don't speak like they speak in novels, but as I got older I would learn to read between the lines a little bit more and what seemed to me only as bad novels to start with because I was always getting it wrong, I realized no the novels are not bad it’s just there were two kinds of language. There’s written language, there’s spoken language, I’m very good at one and I have to learn, and I just have to practice at getting better and better in the language that people use every day.

AMT: And before you understood that Daniel, what was it like when they bullied you? What would you do?

DANIEL TAMMET: I would retreat into my world of numbers, into the grammar of numbers. I would see the numbers as shapes and textures that would reassure me, would comfort me and I would almost as somebody might recite a favourite poem to calm themselves down, I would look into my head into the numbers and certain numbers would rhyme in my head, the shapes would rhyme. Anyone who has an experience of sign language and a way that there is rhyme, visual rhyme in sign language might relate to this. So that the number 11 for example, is a particular kind of roundness, the number 49 is a different kind of roundness and the meanings to different 11 means beautiful, it can also be a sort of gratitude as well. For some reason I associate those two concepts in my language of numbers. 49 is a sort of immensity but for some reason these concepts and the shapes of these numbers rhyme in my mind, the visual rhyme. And I would play with these rhymes, I would create numerical poems and I would use these to calm myself down, I would recite these so to speak in my mind.

AMT: And how would you shut yourself out from how they were treating you? Would you close your eyes? What would you do?

DANIEL TAMMET: I would close my eyes. I had repetitive actions I guess that were very common. That are very common for children on the autistic spectrum. My hands would be fluttering like butterflies beneath my chin, I would be sometimes walking in circles. And my parent’s home was very close to the schools, at times I would literally take myself back home to my bedroom close the door and just spend the time I needed by myself in this poetry of numbers to calm myself down and to feel comfortable. My family didn't have a lot of education but they had an immense amount of love. And we were nine children growing up, I'm the oldest of nine, so that it was a school in itself. I needed school but I also had the school of my family to teach me how to relate to others and also how to calm myself down, how to work out things that I found so difficult that most people found intuitive.

AMT: It’s a reminder how heartbreaking it could be for people who weren’t diagnosed and people treated them as if they were nothing.

DANIEL TAMMET: Absolutely. Absolutely.

AMT: Generations of people.

DANIEL TAMMET: Generations of people. And you go right back and you imagine as scientists do today, you look at this condition and the whole how wide the spectrum goes, how broad and how rich it is. And to imagine that maybe somebody like Lewis Carroll or Hans Christian Andersen perhaps would have been diagnosed had they live today with high functioning autism. And it shows, it goes to show as well that people living with autism can be incredibly creative, have minds that are different, have grown different connections in the brain but have their own beauty and their own poetry. And that's something that I'm not a spokesman as such, but I’m very happy to show that this is true and that even ten years ago when I was starting out as a writer and people were saying can this exist? Can you be autistic and a writer? And of course you can. You can be an autistic painter, an autistic sculptor, an autistic musician. I’ve met all of those and each is wonderful in their own right, in their career. And writing is it’s own discipline, has its own demands of course on the mind, but it’s something that high functioning people on the autistic spectrum can do just as well as anybody else if only society allows them their voice.

AMT: How are you able to train yourself to adapt to the people and the environment around you?

DANIEL TAMMET: I had a lot of time with my family. They taught me enormously. Games, social games, I learnt enormously from them the importance of the social aspect of language. That for me is the focus of my books, language as a living phenomenon. And the fact that what we say is only really the surface of what is going in our language. And so every time that I would be hearing gossip or I would be listening to the back and forth of a conversation between my mom and my grandmother for example, or between my parents or between a neighbour and my parents, I would not be grasping all of this of course, but I would know that there was so much I was missing and it would give me the appetite to keep teaching myself. Going back to the library, going back to the books, to the novels and to the biographies and to the dictionaries and learning what words meant and what they might mean in different contexts. And how we use language and all kinds of creative and intuitive and counterintuitive ways. And just learning from my mistakes, making so many mistakes but just picking myself up after every mistake and going on and on and on.

AMT: Well I want to talk more about words then and literature. You have written some well-received books and you have said that all literature amounts to an act of translation.

DANIEL TAMMET: Mm.

AMT: What do you mean?

DANIEL TAMMET: I mean by that, it's writing I realize is what I have been doing from the time I was very small. English was like a foreign language to me, I'd be translating it into my mind every time I heard a sentence into other words, simpler words or different words so that I could understand and grasp exactly what the person was meaning. Or I would sometimes go even further and translate them into mental images, the images of my language of numbers. And writers, whether it be Tolstoy or Hans Christian Andersen or Amy Tan or any other wonderful writer, they're doing something very similar in fact. When they're writing, they have images, they have feelings, emotions, ideas, experiences and these come across to them as pictures in their mind. A sort of mental imagery of their own, a language of their own made up of these images. And they're having to convey almost by a sort of synesthesia, creating a sort of synesthesia in the mind of the reader, whereby they translate these images and these experiences and emotions into words that the reader can take in and translate into their own private language of mental meanings and emotions ideas. And this is an incredible act of alchemy, of a sort of synesthesia, mental chemistry, which is really unique and it is what makes literature what it is, so beautiful and so personal as well.

AMT: That’s such a beautiful way to describe it. It's I often think that when we listen to radio, we don’t hear words, we see images.

DANIEL TAMMET: Yes, yes, absolutely. So much of what we do when we talk about language is visual in fact. The visual cortex in the brain is incredibly active. And I guess in my case it’s a little bit more active than most other peoples.

AMT: Mm. [laughs] But you have a lovely phrase that you also use and you use it for the title of your book. Every word is a bird we teach to sing. Why did you choose that phrase? What are you telling us?

DANIEL TAMMET: I guess for me words are not only squiggles of ink, they have meanings of course. And each meaning can be universal but it can also have a meaning which is private to the individual. Certain words because of a memory, a particular idea, a song, have particular meanings to us. And so these words, they have a life of their own, they’re something that we can animate with our imagination at any moment in our lives. And so I wanted to make this clear, that language is so much more than ink or script or school or syntax. It’s our lives, it's our memories, it's what makes us human. It's one of the reasons that computers, which are getting so quick now and so fast and so smart at so many things like chess for example, they can beat even Garry Kasparov in a game of chess. But they can't have a conversation. They don't know how to chat, how to chit chat, how to gossip. And it seems that language really is in a certain sense robot proof. It's what makes us essentially human.

AMT: And what makes a word special for you? Can you give me a word and tell me how you think of it and see it?

DANIEL TAMMET: Um, let me see. So for example, when I was a child I would be given words to take home with me to learn on pieces of paper. And in those days we could even be given the words in a tobacco tin, a repurposed tobacco tin. I think that would be unthinkable in these days.

AMT: [laughs]

DANIEL TAMMET: And I would take them home and look at them. And I realized that the words had shapes and the shapes were like the shapes of my numerical language. And I would say well this is a word that looks like the number three because it’s round like the number three, and this was the word cabbage for example. Which is also a round object of course. Or I would say this is a pointy word, like the number four which is also a pointy shape, it’s a shy word. And this would be a word like wife, for example, which in my mind for whatever reason is pointy, it’s like the number four. Or words that were shiny or glowed on the page, like the number five, which is a glowing number. And these were words like shoemaker or king or surrounded. And every word would have its own shape and its own colour and its own texture. And I’ve been told since that there are other writers, Nabokov when he wrote Lolita, also saw words in colours. And he chose the word Lolita for the title of his most famous book, his most famous novel because the word had the same colours as a particular kind of butterfly. And he was an enormous fan of butterflies, in his spare time he was I think almost an expert in the field of butterflies. And he named Lolita for the colours, and I think it was white and blue. In my mind Lolita is blue, that he saw in the wings of a butterfly.

AMT: And so what would you say to teachers who teach language? What advice would you give them about getting their students to love learning language and embrace it in that same way?

DANIEL TAMMET: I would say of course language is part syntax, it’s part grammar. You can't completely get away from that. But at the same time, this is really the heart of language, it’s about stories. It’s about the social, relating to people, wanting to talk to people, wanting to tell them something that is important to you. It might be an idea, it might be a memory, it might be an experience. And finding ways of using stories to teach language because that is what, you know, makes language worth learning of course, that you want to have something to say in that language. You don't just want to be able to recite a table of conjugated verbs. You don't just want to know the difference between two kinds of verb that have similar functions in Spanish for example but you use them in different ways depending on a sentence. You want to be able to say you love something or that you’ve read a book or you've seen a film, or your mom came from this particular part of the world and that requires stories. So I would say the teachers put the textbooks to one side or use them only, you know, really when you have to, to get the nuts and bolts of grammar across. And focus more on short stories and children's books and ways of making language alive because every language is a living phenomenon and if you put it in a cage the bird won't sing.

AMT: What a lovely thought to end on. Thank you for making language colourful. [laughs]

DANIEL TAMMET: [laughs] My pleasure. Thank you so much.

AMT: Daniel TAMMET, his new book is called Every Word is a Bird We Teach to Sing: Encounters With the Mysteries and the Meanings of Language. He joined us from our Ottawa studio. You can find more stories from our season long project Adaptation on our website at cbc.ca/thecurrent. Stay with us, in our next half hour a handful of Canadian cities hope to wind up in Amazon's shopping cart. We are asking about the odds of landing the company's new headquarters and whether it would really be worth the price. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti, this is The Current.

[Music: Extro]

Amazon's 2nd headquarters in Halifax? Mayor says city's worthy contender

Guests: Mike Savage, Gregory Scruggs, James Thomson

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: Hello, I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current. Earlier this month, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos put out the call, he's in the market for a new city. Someplace with a million or more people, a major airport, good transit, education, talented workers, and willing to throw in a few tax cuts and subsidies. And with that the race was on.

SOUNDCLIP

[Music: trumpets and horns]

NEWS ANCHOR: Amazon is looking to build a second headquarters in the US and Wisconsin is in.

VOICE 1: This is a game changer for Baltimore.

VOICE 2: Boston is clearly in the running. And Mayor Marty Walsh called it a no brainer for the city to make a big.

VOICE 3: We are ideally situated.

VOICE 4: We check a lot of boxes.

NEWS ANCHOR 2: Amazon is one of the hottest companies out there and Pittsburgh is hoping to make the short list of potential locations.

VOICE 5: Experts are calling this a potential game changer for the city of Vancouver if we were to land the bid.

VOICE 6: The beauty of Mississauga too is that we have two thirds of our population has a post-secondary degree, so we know we have the talent.

VOICE 7: I don't say this lightly. I think we have a genuinely compelling pitch to make and I think we’ll be a genuine contender.

AMT: Well across the US cities from Denver to Cincinnati have expressed their willingness to roll out the red carpet for Amazon and play host to the company's second headquarters. There are a number of Canadian cities reportedly interested as well and that includes Winnipeg, Toronto, Vancouver and Calgary. And in one’s case it's no surprise why, Amazon says its second HQ will come with an investment of five billion US dollars and 50,000 new high paying jobs. Halifax is one more Canadian city that likes the idea of welcoming Amazon. Halifax Mayor Mike Savage joins me from our Halifax studio. Hello.

MIKE SAVAGE: Good morning Anna Maria how are you?

AMT: I'm well. I'm curious what would having Amazon's new headquarters in Halifax do for your city?

MIKE SAVAGE: Well I think all mayors of any city that consider themselves to be tech hubs would love to have a company like Amazon. That's just a fact of life. It would bring energy and a lot of people, it would certainly achieve growth and it gets attention. And all of those things I think are enviable for any city.

AMT: And so when you heard Amazon was looking for a new second home what did you start thinking?

MIKE SAVAGE: Well as soon as I saw it I thought you know what we should check this out and see if there's interest in the community. And as we started to talk to people about it people said yeah, you know, maybe this isn't something we would have even thought about five years ago but with the growth as a tech centre and the growth of the city, our educated workforce, our high quality of life, you know, this is something that we absolutely should go for. And there's no question that, you know, we are a long shot but a long shot is better than a no shot.

AMT: And the company has said it's looking for a city of at least one million people, doesn't that put you out of the running?

MIKE SAVAGE: Yeah, the city of Halifax is not a million, the province of Nova Scotia is about a million. I think as much as anything for us it's a bit of a regional play but there isn't any city that ticks every single box that Amazon is looking for. And I think our strength is the fact that we've grown in recent years with the addition of companies like IBM and RBC choosing Halifax as a centre because of our tech talent, because of the number of young people we have who are educated and willing to work, and the high quality of life that we have here in Halifax which I think rivals any city in North America.

AMT: You make the point of universities. Tell us a little bit more about what Halifax does have to offer?

MIKE SAVAGE: Sure. Well, we have, you know, six universities in Halifax, we have a very strong college, Nova Scotia community college. You know, we have a creative destruction lab at Dalhousie, we have an amazing startup hub called Volta Labs, which has just been growing in leaps and bounds. We have tons of companies that have started, sort of picked up an idea, companies in Halifax like Kinduct, and Proposify, Lixar, REDspace, T4G. Halifax has now become one of the tech hubs in Canada, which didn't seem likely probably five to seven years ago.

AMT: And so give us an idea of how hard you're working on this particular bid than?

MIKE SAVAGE: Sure. In Halifax our economic development agency is called the Halifax Partnership. They’re very focused on, you know, what we can do to grow our sectors here in Halifax. And tech has been one of the key ones along with, you know, ocean science and some others. So, you know, we're working with the provincial government and their economic development agency, we're working with a ton of companies, university community colleges, a lot of folks coming together and, you know, initially we expected some skepticism and, you know, there is always some skepticism. But people have come together and have been calling up to say what can we do to help, how do we get involved in this? So been really a tremendous working group is coming together and it's growing all the time and we only have a short time to put together a bit but we all do. All the cities are in the same boat. This has to come together pretty quickly, there's a lot of moving parts. It's been really encouraging to see people come together on this.

AMT: What's the deadline for the bid?

MIKE SAVAGE: October 19th.

AMT: What kind of financial incentives are you willing to offer Amazon to get it to come to Halifax?

MIKE SAVAGE: Well I don't think we're going to talk about those until we do it as part of the bid. That's obviously a provincial government responsibility. The city doesn't give financial incentives, if there’s things that we can do other than that to help we obviously will. I'll say this, we will not have the best financial incentives I don't think but we don't often have the best financial incentives. Our value proposition is a little bit different. We call it TLC, talent location and cost. And we put that together in a package that has as I mentioned earlier attracted some very large companies to Halifax but has also encouraged the growth and development of midsize and small tech companies who have found this not only a great place to come and find talent but very affordable compared to other major cities in Canada, both from a company point of view, a corporate point of view but also the fact that you can buy a pretty nice house in Halifax, you know, for 300,000 dollars, you can't do that in a lot of other cities and as Halifax grows I expect those prices will go up. Right now it's a bargain.

AMT: And that's one of the things it says it's looking for. Something that's affordable and livable.

MIKE SAVAGE: And they also put a high quality on the actual quality of life that cities can offer. So in Halifax you can be in a very vibrant downtown with, you know, tons of culture and a pretty vibrant bar and restaurant scene and theater and music and all the stuff you think of in maritime Canada. But, you know, prime a, grade a office space at a very reasonable cost and very close to beaches and wilderness areas, which we find is really attractive to millennials.

AMT: What do you think overall of the way Amazon is hunting for its second headquarters? Gathering bids, getting cities everywhere to bid and fight for it?

MIKE SAVAGE: Well, there's good and bad to it but I think the good on this is that it's a very public kind of a process. You know, you throw something out online that says, you know, we're interested and what do you think? You know, and there are some parameters but as I said, I don't know there's any city that hits them all. And we all have to decide what our strengths and what our weaknesses are. And so I think it's kind of an interesting thing, it's a new age way of identifying opportunities for expansion and it's certainly got a lot of people thinking and I know a lot of cities will be looking at this the way we are, which is we'd like to win this bid but we also would like to go through this process. It's a capacity building process in a city like ours. We get to see what we have, what's on offer, and it helps us with foreign direct investment in other opportunities as well. So overall it's, I think it's a really good process for us to go through.

AMT: Have you had any negative pushback to your mission to bring Amazon headquarters to Halifax?

MIKE SAVAGE: Of course. Yeah. In the age of Twitter, you know, you will always have people who have negative views. That's fine that's part of life. And there are some people that think that it's crazy that a city like Halifax would bid on this. But, you know, I would say to them that it would have been crazy five years ago to think that Halifax would be a tech hub in Canada. It would have been crazy to think that we'd be one of the fastest growing city economies in the country the last couple of years. So, you know, what somebody sees as crazy somebody else sees as possible and somebody else says let's try it.

AMT: And that's really what Amazon started. That's what they said about it too. And look where it is.

MIKE SAVAGE: Right. So Amazon started in 1994. Seattle at the time was a city of 500,000 people. Today it's I don’t know 700,000. So in many ways Halifax's population 425,000 is closer to Seattle as a heart of Seattle than many of the largest cities. And we also have another great connection. We have the grunge connection, the music connection between Halifax and Seattle, which goes back to about the time of Amazon's start in Seattle. So there are some commonalities between their headquarters and their new headquarters in Halifax.

AMT: I can hear the passion in your voice Mayor Savage.

MIKE SAVAGE: Well, why not? A city whose reach doesn't exceed its immediate grasp is not a city that's aiming high enough, so we're going to give it a shot.

AMT: OK. Well thanks for speaking to me today.

MIKE SAVAGE: Anytime. Thank you very much.

AMT: Mike Savage, Mayor of Halifax. So from Halifax to Vancouver there are a number of Canadian cities hoping to catch Amazon's attention with their bids. But for a company that is synonymous with American e-commerce, planting its second headquarters north of the border could be a bold move. For a sense of just how likely that may be, we've reached James Thomson. He's Canadian, he's also a former head of Amazon services. He has coauthored a book about the company entitled The Amazon Marketplace Dilemma. And James Thomson joins us from Seattle, Washington. Hello.

JAMES THOMSON: Good morning Anna Maria.

AMT: How realistic are the ambitions of Halifax Mayor Michael Savage to snag the Amazon headquarters do you think?

JAMES THOMSON: I think certainly the concept of being in Canada for some folks might be viewed as potentially a negative, but I do think there's an awful lot of interesting things that were discussed in your discussion with Mr. Savage. Things I'd like to highlight, number one the concept of a regional bid, the concept of different groups having to come together. When I look at the bidding process right now I think the single biggest issue that any bid is going to face is figuring out where to come up with technology talent. We're not talking about talent in general, we're talking about technology talent. Right now there are about 9,000 job openings at headquarters in Seattle, about 3,000 of them are for computer engineers. 3,000 computer engineers, I don't know where these people are going to come from. Today Amazon recruits from a couple dozen countries around the world to try to find this talent. And realistically in the current political environment in the US, it's hard to get these folks into the United States and know that you're going to get enough visas to be able to support them. So first you have to find them and then you have to get them to the United States. One of the interesting aspects about any Canadian bid is that you don't have to worry about those visa issues. You can recruit talent into Canada, keep them in Canada and potentially be able to build a substantial technology hub using the talent that you're able to locate in a Canadian bid.

AMT: So a city like Halifax with that many universities also works in favour? If you’re training that many students.

JAMES THOMSON: It certainly does. Specifically if you're training technology folks. So in the United States as I said, we have quite a problem when it comes to not only finding enough technology talent but being able to then hire them given the current visa situation. So--

AMT: OK so that's a mark in Canadian favour. Do you see limitations for Canada in this race?

JAMES THOMSON: There are some cities in Canada that are certainly known for being more union focused or more higher tax based. These are two characteristics that Amazon has shown a long history of trying to shy away from. So depending on what a particular Canadian city looks like when it comes to unions and taxes, those will certainly be characteristics that any bid is carefully reviewed for when we look at Canadian bids.

AMT: And I guess regulations overall in Canada versus the US? Tax and otherwise.

JAMES THOMSON: I mean there are certainly regulatory issues in any city. The reason I highlight unions so much is that Amazon's gotten a lot of bad press over the years, specifically with how they handle workers. And, you know, being a Canadian I understand certainly the need for unions. Amazon has not responded well to unions and this is going to be one of those issues where how do you convince Amazon that if you happen to be in a city or region that does have strong unions, how is that perceived as potentially a very positive partnership opportunity?

AMT: Mhm. Well what is Amazon really looking for in this second headquarter home?

JAMES THOMSON: I keep coming back to the issue of talent because realistically most cities have available land for putting large buildings together. They have certain types of talent, they have certain types of culture, they have certain types of opportunity to provide cheaper living than what we have here today in Seattle. I really think that the key issue here for Amazon is finding a different source for talent. Amazon has grown so quickly just in the last ten years that the prospects of bringing in another 50,000 people into Seattle, I don't know where you put these people and I don't know how you do it without creating quite frankly, a lot of resentment within the city. In the ten years that Amazon has been growing at this ridiculous rate, we've seen residential real estate prices go up practically two fold, commercial real estate has gone up almost threefold. Seattle’s had more cranes building buildings each of the last two years than any other city in the United States. You have a situation where there's literally nowhere to grow. And so you've got to find somewhere else you're going to go do the growth. So I don't think it's a so much just we need to go find some other city, it's a matter of Amazon has basically outgrown its ability to keep growing at the same rate that it needs to here in Seattle.

AMT: And so what impact do you think that we would see here if the company did expand to a Canadian city?

JAMES THOMSON: If Amazon got what it wanted out of this opportunity they'll continue to grow their business. They'll take certain portions of their business and they will locate them in whatever this winning city’s location is and the race will continue. I mean, Amazon is a company growing as fast as they can with the available talent they have. If they could find enough talent to be able to fill so many of these open roles, whatever city is fortunate enough to have the winning bid, will find not only that they have a huge number of Amazon folks moving in but there will be auxilliary companies that also decide to set up shop in the area so as to be able to support the Amazon company.

AMT: Mm. So you're really again you're talking about a place that would be livable and attractive for new people coming in, affordable, all of that stuff to get that talent to show up.

JAMES THOMSON: You need the talent show up. And again, I don't want to sound critical but most cities are going to find a way to communicate that they have affordable living, that they have talent, that they have available space for a large headquarters. But in many ways most cities are all going to be the same on that front. It's more about how do we actually find a way to get access to that much more talent that today isn't for some reason being tapped by Amazon.

AMT: What does it tell you that so many cities want this?

JAMES THOMSON: Everybody wants a Silicon Valley in their backyard. And the question that I think everybody has to ask is, is this a matter of holding the winning lotto ticket or funding the winning lotto ticket? Unfortunately you've got a situation in some cities where every mayor would like to be able to say listen I brought 50,000 high paying jobs to my city. But will all of the incumbent businesses in that city also be excited to have Amazon showing up, because quite frankly a lot of these companies are going to get their employee base raided by Amazon or as soon as Amazon shows up. They can afford to pay more, they're in a situation where they're a world renowned brand. And so I ask the question if I were a business in Halifax for example, that had a large number of technology employees, how would I go about supporting an Amazon bid and doing it in a way where I'm excited to have another technology company there. Without being in a situation where it becomes that much harder for me to recruit my own employees knowing full well that there is a huge gorilla in the room called Amazon that's going to attract more than its fair share of talent.

AMT: OK well something to think about. James Thompson thanks for your thoughts on that.

JAMES THOMSON: Thank you Anna Maria.

AMT: James Thompson, former head of Amazon Services, co-author of the Amazon Marketplace Dilemma. He joined us from Seattle. Let's stay in Seattle because if there's one city that knows a thing or two about hosting Amazon headquarters it is Seattle. The northwestern US city has been home to the company's global corporate headquarters for nearly a quarter of a century. You heard earlier Jeff Bezos founded it there in 1994. Through the years Amazon has altered the city's landscape in more ways than one. Gregory Scruggs writes about cities and global trends for Citiscope, an online news publication. He's in Seattle. Hello.

GREGORY SCRUGGS: Good morning.

AMT: Can you describe Amazon's physical presence in Seattle?

GREGORY SCRUGGS: Yes. In the last several years they've transformed a neighbourhood adjacent to downtown called South Lake Union that used to be largely warehouses and light manufacturing, mostly low slung buildings into an extension of our downtown. I can almost look out my window and see, as your previous guest mentioned, more cranes on the skyline than any city in the US, building an endless it seems number of high rise glassy office buildings with a voracious appetite for real estate. They've already consumed 20 per cent of the prime commercial real estate in Seattle, about 8 million square feet, and intend to go up to 12 million square feet. So they’ve pretty much doubled the size of our downtown and with it that's created a whole new demand for high end apartment buildings and fancy places to eat, that sort of thing.

AMT: How does that compare with other companies like the office space?

GREGORY SCRUGGS: So they have as much real estate, commercial real estate as the next 43 companies in Seattle combined. And Seattle is not exactly a economic small fish. We have major companies here like Nordstrom the clothing retailer, Weyerhauser the timber and lumber products company, branch offices of Microsoft which is headquartered in the suburbs. But they've just gobbled up more real estate than anybody could quite fathom.

AMT: And what about transit. Does it have a good mass transit system?

GREGORY SCRUGGS: No we don't and that one I don't blame Amazon for, I blame the voters of Seattle past that rejected a mass transit system on the ballot twice in the late sixties and early seventies with fears that we would become a Manhattan, as I understand from speaking to old timers. And we're paying the price for that now as we have, you know, pretty crippling traffic given the lack of alternatives to get to places like Amazon.

AMT: And so they're talking about getting eventually 50,000 people would be working in well-paying jobs. They're talking like 100,000 dollar roughly a year jobs. So what about where everyone will live? What have you seen in Seattle? You started to talk about the growth of the city. Tell me more about the growth of housing.

GREGORY SCRUGGS: Yeah, your previous guest mentioned that our housing prices have gone up at a tremendous rate. Both the cost of purchasing a home and rents have on average gone up about 10 per cent per year, which if you have a six figure starting salary is perhaps something that you can manage but for everybody else in Seattle it's created a huge game of competitive bidding wars to purchase or finding your rents going up year after year in a city with no rent control. And, you know, a number of our friends, as well as my wife and myself, have felt the squeeze on that front. And Seattle used to be known as a very affordable city, gets increasingly joining the ranks of the Vancouvers and San Francisco's’ and New York's.

AMT: OK so your neighbourhood has changed.

GREGORY SCRUGGS: Absolutely. I mean, I have a number of Amazon employees living in my apartment building just below me as I speak to you this morning, because where I live is actually within a reasonable walk of the downtown campus. And the way that Amazon can, the influx of these highly paid employees can flip a neighbourhood has created a lot of angst. I have to give credit to a local columnist here Danny Westneat at the Seattle Times who described the effect as detonating a prosperity bomb. Yes, you will have an influx of dollars and that could do a lot of good things for your tax base and supporting local businesses. But it can also change your civic culture in the flip of a switch.

AMT: Let's talk a little bit more about tax base because a big name in Seattle used to be Boeing. What impact did it have when it moved to Chicago?

GREGORY SCRUGGS: That was before my time living here so I can't speak to the on the ground sense of it. My understanding is that it was a corporate move in 2001 and something that was a blow to the regional psyche as much as to the original economy. We had thought ourselves as a Boeing company town and they had already slashed a bunch of manufacturing jobs in the 1970s. There's actually a famous photo of a billboard that said “Would the last person to leave Seattle please turn out the lights?” From the late 1970s when the city was losing population after the Boeing cuts. And now that seems like a fiction, as we're the fastest growing city in the US. But as far as Boeing's corporate move I don't think that affected quite as many jobs as their manufacturing hits did a few decades prior.

AMT: And what kind of money has Amazon out into the economy in Seattle?

GREGORY SCRUGGS: I don't have exact figures on hand but we, you know, one of our problems is that we don't have a state income tax in Washington. It's actually against the law under our Constitution. So while certainly our ten per cent sales taxes meant that a lot of Amazonians are spending a lot of money locally and that's going into our our tax coffers. The fact that we don't have an income tax means that a lot of this money is not equitably being shared, a lot of this is prosperity. And the city actually passed an income tax against the wishes of our state legislators and that's now going to be in court. And many have speculated that the income tax, I think it was two, two or two and a half per cent on incomes over 250,000 US dollars was one of the precipitating reasons for Amazon's announcement of a second headquarters, so that their highly paid executives would have a choice to relocate somewhere perhaps with a more favorable tax climate.

AMT: OK that's interesting. And, you know, I've got to note here that said that Washington state, Washington set a national record in 2013 with an 8.7 billion dollar subsidy to Boeing as a company when it was considering it cites to build this 777X airplane. I mean what kind of tax breaks, subsidies is Amazon going to want from any municipality and jurisdiction surrounding that municipality?

GREGORY SCRUGGS: Well I'll just note by the way that after those Boeing tax breaks while we did get the Triple 7 manufacturing facility just north of Seattle, another manufacturing or airplane plant was created in South Carolina. So even, which is kind of a kick in the gut, even when you give these kinds of subsidies that doesn't always buy you loyalty. As for what Amazon's looking for specifically, they're talking about this big, almost certainly urban campus of up to eight million square feet. So they'll certainly be looking for subsidized access to the available land. They will anticipate that this site have mass transit ready or be a mass transit ready site, which again, sadly their choice adjacent to downtown Seattle was not. And anticipate that if the mass transit isn't already there the city will build it, which is, you know, public transit is a public investment so taxpayers will be footing at least some part of that bill. And I suspect they'll be. at the more corporate level, looking for some kind of tax breaks whether that's something for not heavily taxing the income of their employees or not heavily taxing the business that they're generating. Those kinds of subsidies that have become in my opinion a race to the bottom for cities and states across the US as we try to win this beauty pageant for corporate tenants.

AMT: So it's complicated huh? As this goes forward as the deadline looms.

GREGORY SCRUGGS: I think it's complicated if you're in a city that doesn't, that isn't ready or can't adequately plan for what will come when Amazon arrives. If you are a really big city 50,000 new employees probably isn't going to change the look and feel of your city overnight. If you have already affordable housing, then maybe you have some room for house prices to go up without squeezing out your middle class. And if you already have a robust mass transit system then your traffic, your streets won't necessarily feel the impact of all these new employees coming to work.

AMT: Gregory, I have to leave it there. Thanks for your thoughts.

GREGORY SCRUGGS: By all means, thanks for calling.

AMT: Gregory Scruggs writes for Citiscope, an online media outlets covering global trends in cities. He joined us from Seattle. We did try to reach Amazon, we have not heard back so far. We'd like to know what you think. Would you like to see an Amazon headquarters in your Canadian city? Why? Why not? Let us know. Send us an email from our website cbc.ca/thecurrent, click on the contact link. Let us know what you think of this kind of thing bidding for a company to show up. Find us on Facebook, send us a tweet @TheCurrentCBC. That's it for today for The Current. Stay with Radio One for q. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti thanks for listening.

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September 18, 2017 Full Episode Transcript

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