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The Current Transcript for October 2, 2024

Host: Matt Galloway

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

TIM WALZ: Did he lose the 2020 election?

J.D. VANCE: Tim, I'm focused on the future. Did Kamala Harris censor Americans from speaking their mind in the wake of the 2020 COVID situation?

TIM WALZ: That is-- that is a damning non-answer.

MATT GALLOWAY: Just over a month before Americans vote, the candidates for vice president squared off last night. In a moment, what, if anything, exchanges like that will mean in a race for the White House that many say is too close to call. Also this morning, almost 200 ballistic missiles fired at Israel by Iran. Israel and the United States promised retaliation. In an hour, what might happen next in a region already engulfed in war and the role of Iran in particular in that. Plus:

SOUNDCLIP

MALCOM GLADWELL: You have to keep reminding yourself and your audience that you're telling a story in midstream and there is a chance that the way you're making sense of things today will not be the way you make sense of it tomorrow.

MG: Twenty-five years ago, Malcolm Gladwell published his first book, The Tipping Point. It was a sensation looking at the moments when trends tip into something larger. Now, the Canadian writer and podcaster is going back to those theories, revising them for a different, less optimistic time. In 30 minutes, Malcolm Gladwell on the weirdness of Miami, the power of a compelling narrative, what he got wrong 25 years ago and whether he regrets a theory that helped shape policing in cities around the world. But we begin with a surprisingly civil debate. Good morning. I'm Matt Galloway and this is The Current.

[Music: Theme]

Walz and Vance trade barbs — politely

Guests: Craig Varoga, John Fund

SOUNDCLIP

J.D. VANCE: If you notice what Governor Waltz just did, is he said, First of all, Donald Trump has to listen to the experts. And then when he acknowledged that the experts screwed up, he said, Well, Donald Trump didn't do nearly as good of a job as the--.

TIM WALZ: No, that's a false generalization.

J.D. VANCE: So, what Tim Walz is doing-- and I, honestly, Tim, I think you've got a tough job here because you've got to play Whac-A-Mole. You've got to pretend that Donald Trump didn't deliver rising take home pay, which of course, he did. And then you've simultaneously got to defend Kamala Harris's atrocious economic record, which has made gas, groceries and housing unaffordable for American citizens.

MG: Vice presidential candidates J.D. Vance and Tim Walz traded barbs politely for over an hour in the CBS debate in New York City last night. But there was a different energy to what we saw in the presidential debate.

SOUNDCLIP

TIM WALZ: Well, I've enjoyed tonight's debate, and I think there was a lot of commonality here. And I'm sympathetic to misspeaking on things that I think I might have with the senator.

J.D. VANCE: Me too, man.

MG: For one, both said multiple times they actually agreed with each other. On top of that, there was a moment on stage afterwards where the two candidates and their spouses shared a short, by all accounts, cordial chat. For more on this debate, the candidates, and what the last month of this race will hold, I'm joined by John Fund, columnist with the National Review and Democratic strategist Craig Varoga. Good morning to you both.

CRAIG VAROGA: Hey, good morning.

JOHN FUND: Thank you.

MG: John, the phrase is that these men are a heartbeat away from the Oval Office. What did J.D. Vance need to do last night and did he do it?

JOHN FUND: Well, he proved that you can have a midwest nice debate, and he also humanised himself. He introduced people to his blue collar background in his hardscrabble biography, and he showed that as an Ivy League graduate, he also knows how to conduct a smooth and impressive presentation.

MG: Craig, There were no childless cat lady comments from J.D. Vance. What did you make of his performance?

CRAIG VAROGA: You know, I think stylistically he did a pretty good job throughout most of the debate. I think, however, you know, from a Democratic point of view, the final exchange about January 6th is the thing that, you know, the Democrats are going to remember and use, because he did refuse to answer the question. But I think up until then, stylistically, he, you know, as John said, he did a pretty good job.

MG: What about Tim Walz? What did Tim Walz need to do, Craig, and did he do it?

CRAIG VAROGA: Well, I think both of them, you know, the mandate for any vice presidential candidate in the debate is to do no harm. We went into that debate with Harris-Walz ahead by two or two and a half points, but, you know, basically tied in all the seven battleground states. I think that's where we come out of this thing. I don't think that this thing changed things in one way or another. But if you're the Harris campaign or, you know, Kamala Harris, I think you have to be pleased with how Walz did on January 6th, on abortion, on health care and on guns.

MG: John, what do you make of Tim Walz's performance?

JOHN FUND: Well, Kamala Harris's first executive decision was to decide who she would pick as her vice presidential running mate. And in the end, she had two choices. She had Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania and she had Tim Walz. Shapiro went in and said, I want to be your partner. I want to know how you want to use the vice president to help you. I want to be a full participant in the administration. And Tim Walz came in and said, basically, I'll be your lap dog. And Kamala Harris picked the lap dog. Tim Walz's performance, I think, convinced Democrats that, yes, luckily vice presidential debates normally don't matter. But if they did matter, Tim Walz put in a very halting nervous performance. And frankly, the only thing that saved him was that the only fact checks during the debate were of Vance, the Republican. Waltz, the Democrat, even though he had some real whoppers in his presentation, didn't get a single fact checked.

MG: Why did Donald Trump-- I mean, if you're talking about who picked who-- remind us what Donald Trump was trying to achieve when he picked J.D. Vance as his running mate?

JOHN FUND: I think he wanted a mini me. I think he wanted someone who would take on the MAGA mantle after he leaves office if he's elected in four years and pursue his policies, his strategies and his approach to the Republican Party. And Vance has certainly got that. Each candidate got what they wanted when they picked their vice president.

MG: I mean, two parts of that. One is there is an observation being made this morning that in some ways J.D. Vance made the arguments that Republicans were hoping that Donald Trump would make in the presidential debate a few weeks ago, that this was Trumpism in a more palatable form. Do you buy that?

JOHN FUND: I think it's fair to say that if you walk through Donald Trump's deepest articulation, you wouldn't get your ankles wet. He is not...

MG: That's quite a turn of phrase. I'll let you continue, though.

JOHN FUND: He's not a consistent performer when it comes to debates. In fact, he prides himself on not preparing for them, it often shows. I would say that J.D. Vance is a 40 year old updated super eight version of Donald Trump.

MG: And is he positioning himself for the 2028 race?

JOHN FUND: Win or lose, he will be in the race to run for the Republican nomination in 2028. Not the frontrunner, but he certainly vaulted himself into contention for that last night.

MG: Craig, Tim Walz is seen to have potential to appeal to those centre right Republicans perhaps, who aren't comfortable in voting for Donald Trump this time around. Do you think that performance last night was effective in bringing those voters, such as they might be, into the Harris camp?

CRAIG VAROGA: Well, I-- look, when I look at the polls this morning, or at least the one poll that I've seen that was a 50/50 draw, I don't think that, you know, many moderate-- I don't think many Republicans are going to be swayed either way, you know, by that debate. I think they're going to be pleased with how Vance did. I don't think they're going to be swayed by Walz. But, you know, among independent voters and the one poll that I've seen this morning is that Walz, you know, did better than Vance did. So, you know, as a Democrat, I find that encouraging. But I, you know, again, I go back to like, structurally, I mean, you know, overwhelmingly voters thought that Harris won the presidential debate. And afterwards, you know, maybe the polls improved by maybe two point I mean, point two per cent for her overall. I don't think we're going to see much effect, you know, based on this debate either way.

MG: Let's talk about the issues that were discussed. Immigration, one of the top issues last night. Here's J.D. Vance.

SOUNDCLIP

J.D. VANCE: You've got to re-implement Donald Trump's border policies, build the wall, re-implement deportations. And that gets me to your point, Margaret, about what do we actually do? So we've got 20, 25 million illegal aliens who are here in the country. What do we do with them? I think the first thing that we do is we start with the criminal migrants. About a million of those people have committed some form of crime in addition to crossing the border illegally. I think you start with deportations on those folks and then I think you make it harder for illegal aliens to undercut the wages of American workers. A lot of people will go home if they can't work for less than minimum wage in our own country.

MG: John Fund, that was a question in part about Donald Trump's plan for mass deportations, the largest deportation effort in U.S. history. What was J.D. Vance's job last night on the issue of immigration, do you think?

JOHN FUND: I think it was to point out that Kamala Harris was the border tsar, even though she claimed she wasn't. She was put in charge of the border. And sure enough, we had a flood of people coming in. It was chaotic. She can't be blamed for all of the decisions on that. But she said nothing and did nothing. And I think that Vance prosecuted that case. He did not, I think, explain what the question actually was about, which was how in the world would you physically deport that many people? And frankly, that's just logistically and physically impossible. And everybody knows that that wouldn't happen.

MG: Craig, what did you make of that? Because Vance in many ways turned every question, whether it was health care, jobs, housing, back to immigration. Was Tim Walz effective in fending off these attacks and defending, not his own record, but the record of the presidential candidate Kamala Harris, on immigration?

CRAIG VAROGA: I think he did a pretty good job of undercutting some of the non-factual things that Vance did. I mean, this is such an emotionally charged topic and there's, you know, I think that, you know, in the final analysis, you know, we really need to, I mean, agree on the facts, which, you know, right now neither party does.

MG: Where does that leave the issue then?

CRAIG VAROGA: Well, I think that as you know, John suggested, you know, whether it's logistics or, you know, I think in terms of the public debate, we're not likely to face any kind of, you know, I mean, you know, coherent policy, you know, in the future. I do think that, you know, it should be pointed out that, you know, recently in the last year or so, the border is much more stable, the crossings are down. And the Biden administration has done a much better job in the last year than anybody is giving it credit, including, in some cases, the Biden administration itself.

MG: Do you think-- I mean, part of this is about Vance tying Tim Walz directly to Kamala Harris and the Biden administration. And it's not so much what I would do, it's this is what Joe Biden has done over his time and Kamala Harris is directly related to that. Do you think that Walz was able to distinguish his vision, but also the vision for for Kamala Harris from what Joe Biden has done? Or are they inextricably linked?

CRAIG VAROGA: I mean, on immigration?

MG: On immigration in particular, yeah.

CRAIG VAROGA: You know, look, I think that, you know, again, I think that he did a pretty good job in terms of fact checking Vance and talking about the fact that, you know, many of the things he says are inaccurate factually. And I think that, you know, that is, I mean, if we really want to come to terms, you know, with one, the border and two, immigration, you know, we need to just, you know, we really need to have a conversation in which we agree on facts. And I don't think that that's going to happen at any time soon. I also think that, you know, for Democrats, this is a, you know, I mean, you know, there was an opportunity to pass a bipartisan bill in the last 12 months, and it didn't happen because Donald Trump ordered Republicans in Congress to disavow that effort because he did not want that resolved under the Biden administration. And I mean, that-- in terms of the border, you know, that's, I mean, that's on Donald Trump, even though, you know, we've seen this thing, you know, this issue go back and forth, you know, for years. I mean, we've been talking about it for more than 30 years and nobody has really resolved it.

MG: John, it seems-- just the last point on this-- like a crazy question to ask, but on something that is as consequential as immigration and the border, do facts matter in this or is it just about emotion?

JOHN FUND: Well, the fact of the matter is that, you know, Donald Trump had a different approach to immigration. Joe Biden reversed that approach. And we had a chaotic situation at the border, which didn't do the asylum seekers, the migrants, the economy or anyone any good. So, yes, the Biden administration has course corrected in the last few months. The question remains, would Kamala Harris continue that or would she bow to the political pressure from her party's base and go back to some of the old approaches? So, how the candidates have reacted to this issue does matter. And the facts? Well, people don't have facts, but they do have opinions. And the opinions are, we have an immigration policy that is completely broken.

MG: Craig, you've hinted at this issue a couple of times. It came up right at the end of the debate. This is about the future of democracy, ensuring a peaceful transfer of power. Have a listen to a little bit of that part of the debate.

SOUNDCLIP

TIM WALZ: He lost the election. This is not a debate. It's not-- it's not anything anywhere other than in Donald Trump's world. Because, look, when Mike Pence made that decision to certify that election, that's why Mike Pence isn't on this stage. What I'm concerned about is, where is the firewall with Donald Trump? Where is the firewall if he knows he could do anything, including taking an election and his vice president's not going to stand to it? That's what we're asking you, America. Will you stand up? Will you keep your oath of office even if the president doesn't? And I think Kamala Harris would agree. She wouldn't have picked me if she didn't think I would do that.

MG: John Fund, J.D. Vance would not say that Donald Trump lost in 2020 and Tim Walz went after him for that. The Democrats now say they're going to turn this into an ad. Does that worry you? J.D. Vance's non-answer.

JOHN FUND: It shows that J.D. Vance is willing to knuckle under to political reality. He knows that Donald Trump wants them to say certain things about 2020, and he said them. I think it's unfortunate, but sometimes political reality takes hold. I do think that he had an effective parry, which he said, look, both Republicans and Democrats have challenged the election results in the past, and there are certainly examples of that in 2016. Several Democrats challenged the electoral vote and accuracy, and there was, of course, the Russiagate debate. So, he did say both Republicans and Democrats have messed this up. And I agree. What I think Vance did do effectively was point out that Mark Zuckerberg has said the Biden administration tried to censor Facebook, put pressure on Facebook over COVID 19 posts. And he said, look, that's not the only threat to democracy that we have, is a debate over January 6th. What about the Biden administration's censorship efforts? Which, by the way, the media in the United States has almost not covered at all.

MG: But he literally wouldn't say that Donald Trump lost in 2020. And I just wonder what the impact of that is in 2024?

JOHN FUND: Well, polls show voters are worried about a lot of things. Inflation, health care, a whole bunch of things. It may just pain me and it may pain others, but January 6th is not listed as one of the issues they care about.

MG: Craig?

CRAIG VAROGA: Look, I think that January 6th and what Donald Trump did four years ago is one of the darkest moments in American history. It is a disgrace to Donald Trump. It is a disgrace to J.D. Vance that he wouldn't say that Donald Trump lost. That's not bowing to political reality. That's bowing to somebody who wants to be an authoritarian president and who didn't want to leave office four years ago after losing. That's bowing to somebody who sent a mob to the U.S. Capitol to kill his own vice president if necessary, in order to overturn the election. That is disgraceful. It is a dark moment in American history and that is not just a comment about a political tactic or about a poll.

MG: How worried are you about history repeating itself given how close this election is? I mean, polls are polls, but the suggestion is, in the battleground states, this is within a whisker.

CRAIG VAROGA: Look, I think we should all be very concerned. I just don't think in the United States, I think that, you know, it shouldn't be-- this should not be a partisan issue. Twenty years ago, Donald Trump would be in disgrace in Mar-a-Lago and nobody would be talking to him. For whatever reason, you know, he has been, you know, rehabilitated, at least within his own party. And if he loses again, he's again going to say he didn't lose. And J.D. Vance last night said essentially, that if Donald Trump and he lose, you know, he is going to go along with what Donald Trump says, which is Donald Trump again, will lie and again will try to mobilize mobs to overturn the election.

MG: John Fund, just in the last couple of minutes that we have, we've been speaking with undecided voters, people who say that they are still waiting for more information to make up their mind. They haven't figured out whether they're going to vote at all for president, let alone who they would vote for. In the remaining weeks until this vote, what are you watching for?

JOHN FUND: I'll end on a bipartisan note. The National Association of Secretaries of State, which is half Democrat, half Republican, has issued a stern warning that our postal service in the United States is collapsing. Mail-in ballots are not being delivered. Mail-in ballots are not being returned on time. We have had primaries in America, in Utah and in Kansas, where two per cent of the mail-in ballots never made it back in time to be counted. If that is replicated in the November election, we are going to see a dispute and uproar and a confrontation like would made 2020 look like a tea party. And I fear that that's a bipartisan threat. And frankly, the real threat to this election is the bureaucracy cannot handle the shift that we have made from in-person voting to mail-in voting. And so far, the results are not promising.

MG: Craig Varoga, what are you worried about? I mean, you can pick up on what John said, but also just, what are you watching for in the month ahead?

CRAIG VAROGA: Well, look, let me talk about, you know, mail-in ballots and the Postal Service. The U.S. Postal, I mean, you know, the Postmaster General of the United States was appointed by Donald Trump. He was a political appointee. He is still running the mail service in this country. What I'm worried about is the fact that, you know, I mean, because of Donald Trump's consistent record of lying about the election, that we have 35 to 40 per cent of the country, you know, who will believe him when he says that he won the election even though he lost. He will say that he won the election before all the votes were counted. That, I think is something that we can all go to the bank on. That is something that should concern all of us. I also think that, you know, when you get down into the specific states, there are going to be, you know, very, you know, very specific things in each of the states that affect the election. For instance, in Arizona, you know, they recently passed a law saying that proof of citizenship was required. You know, what we're finding right now, or the early indications are, that is disproportionately affecting older Republicans among that electorate. That is a really good example of the theory of unintended consequences. But we're going to see things in each of the seven states that, you know, Donald Trump is going to seize on and he's going to say it's proof that he's won the election and there was fraud.

MG: Buckle up. This will be a bumpy ride as we head to the landing. Thank you both for being here this morning.

CRAIG VAROGA: Okay. Thank you so much.

JOHN FUND: Thank you.

MG: John Fund is a columnist with the National Review. Craig Varoga is a Democratic strategist based in Washington, D.C. The Current will be in a couple of those battleground states. We're heading to Arizona and we're heading to Michigan as well. That's in the next couple of weeks. Stay tuned for that. Your CBC News is next. And then:

SOUNDCLIP

MALCOM GLADWELL: If you've been writing, as I have for 40 years, you've been schooled in how often you've been wrong and you've learned that the best thing you can do is to say, this is what I think now. If we tacked that phrase onto every expression of an idea or belief, we would be doing a lot better.

[Music: Theme]

MG: People are looking for tipping points in the election. Malcolm Gladwell has been writing about tipping points for 25 years. He'll go back to his original book coming up on The Current.

[Music: Fades up]

Malcolm Gladwell on what The Tipping Point got wrong

Guests: Malcom Gladwell

MG: Hello, I'm Matt Galloway and you're listening to The Current. In the year 2000, the Canadian journalist, author and podcaster Malcolm Gladwell published his first book, The Tipping Point. It looked at what drives social change when an idea, trend or behaviour gets to a certain threshold and then tips into something much bigger. The book seemed to reach its own tipping point. It ended up on the New York Times bestseller list for an astonishing eight years. And wherever you turned, it seemed like people were talking about tipping points.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE ONE: It happened in Detroit 67', happened in the Harlem riots. This when people get to a point to that tipping point, they can't take it anymore.

VOICE TWO: Tjhis could be one of those stories from the past four years that maybe in some ways represented a tipping point, as Malcolm Gladwell might say, where you thought, geez, you know, we're on to something.

VOICE THREE: It could become a thing of the past, apparently GPs are at a tipping point when it comes to staffing levels and more patience, etc..

VOICE FOUR: I mean, the question is, what's the tipping point here that would make Khadafi go once and for all? They're going to continue to tighten the screws. They're going to continue the bombing campaign.

MG: Almost 25 years on, Malcolm Gladwell is revisiting his idea in a new book called Revenge of the Tipping Point, which appropriately for the times that we are in now, takes a closer look at the dark side of contagious social phenomena. Malcolm Gladwell, good morning.

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Good morning.

MG: You don't seem to be somebody who is short of ideas and obsessions. Why in the face of that, would you want to go back 25 years and look at this book?

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Well, our original idea was that we would just reissue The Tipping Point and I would update it. And then I started on that project and realized I didn't want to update it, I wanted to write a whole new book. I just thought, so much has happened. You know, I wrote the first book before the Internet, before COVID, before we had a really good understanding of a lot of kind of contagious phenomena. I mean, this whole field has exploded and I've changed. I mean, I was 36 or 37 when I wrote that book, and I don't resemble my 36 year old self, that's for sure.

MG: What was the experience like of rereading the book? I don't know whether you go back and reread what you've written.

MALCOLM GLADWELL: I never do. I have never reread any of my other books. So, I went back and re-read it and it was, you know, there were chapters that were like rediscovering an old friend who you hadn't seen in many years. There were chapters where I just said, what was I-- why would I, why did I read an entire chapter on Sesame Street and Blue's Clues? It just, in retrospect, seems weird. And then there are other chapters where I was just horrified. I was like, I wrote that? It was sort of like looking at a photo album and looking at your high school yearbook. It was exactly that emotional experience.

MG: What do you think you got wrong in that book? I mean, I remember listening to an episode of your podcast in which it's not so much about getting wrong, but it's about failure. And what's interesting about failure when you kind of missed the mark. What do you think you got wrong in that book?

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Well, I've done a whole episode of my podcast, Revisionist History, that will come out next week or the week after, on the crime chapter. You know, I had a chapter on why did New York City's crime fall so dramatically in the 90s? And I had a theory, I was very interested in the broken windows idea. But I realize in retrospect that I misinterpreted what broken windows was.

MG: This is this idea that if you tackle small kind of visible signs of disorder, like a broken window or graffiti, that that can help deter or be an intervention to more serious crime.

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Exactly. And what I misunderstood was there is nothing wrong, in fact, I think it is important to maintain some degree of civility in society. But that's not what causes murder rates to drop. So, there are two separate questions. The line that was being peddled by the New York City Police Department and Rudy Giuliani, who was the mayor of New York in those years, was that there was a direct connection between stopping people from, you know, urinating on the streets and running red lights and the murder rate. And we subsequently learned that that was not true. And I sort of wrote my book too soon. Had I written The Tipping Point in 2010 or 2015, I would have told a completely different story about crime. And it's a very instructive lesson for journalists that you have to keep reminding yourself and your audience that you're telling a story in midstream. And there is a chance that the way you're making sense of things today will not be the way you make sense of it tomorrow.

MG: What do you make of the fact that some of the ideas that were floated in that chapter in particular and the concept of broken windows were used by police forces? I mean, it led-- people see a direct line between that and stop and frisk and carding and civic violations. Because the belief was, well, we could, if we're interrupting what we think is a flow of crime, we're going to stop, you know, more serious crimes. The impact of that was particularly Black men were being stopped and frisked on the streets, not just of New York, but elsewhere. And people will draw a line between that action and what you wrote about in the book. How do you see that now?

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Well, we learned I mean, this is the thing that I get into in the kind of mea culpa I did on my podcast. They stopped stop and frisk in 2012, there was a lawsuit. And it was effectively went from stopping hundreds of thousands of young people to almost zero. And everyone, you know, even opponents of stop and frisk, assumed the crime would go back up. And the opposite happened. The biggest drop came after they stopped stop and frisk. By 2019, the New York City crime rate is the same as Paris's. So, you're-- not only do we realize that stop and frisk was deeply problematic for a kind of moral and social reasons, we realize that it had nothing to do with curtailing violent crime. It was a complete misdirection. So in retrospect, I'm, you know, I am mortified. I mean, that's... there's no other way to.

MG: Do you regret writing that chapter?

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Oh, 100 per cent. I don't regret asking the question, and I don't regret trying to explore answers. But I, in retrospect, of course, if you're a writer or anyone and you get something wrong, I think you have to hold yourself accountable and say, you know, I fundamentally misinterpreted and many other people do, too, but I fundamentally misinterpreted what that was about.

MG: In this new book, one of the things that comes up is that social change or some social change seems to take place in some areas, but not in others. And one of the places that you focus on is Miami. And the issue in particular of of Medicare fraud in Miami. Florida is a fascinating place for any number of reasons. What's going on in Miami that caught your eye?

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Well, I got very interested in this idea that is very well described in the medical literature. It's called small area variation, which is that doctors don't behave the same way across the country. Weird-- for reasons we don't entirely understand. The way you get treated for heart disease in one town can be totally different from the town down the road. And there is something incredibly local about the way health care is provided. And I love this idea because it's suggested to me clearly there's a-- one, there's a contagious phenomenon that causes doctors in a given community to behave the same way. But that contagion stops at the border. And we're used to the idea of a virus as something that spreads easily everywhere. But this was a virus that didn't spread. And so, I got fascinated by this idea that there must be, you know, what's the weirdest city in North America then? And turns out Miami is. And the one I chose to look at was Medicare fraud, which is the biggest criminal activity in United States, by far.

MG: The biggest criminal activity in the United States.

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Well, actually, let me take a step back. It depends how you define the illegal drug market, if you define it as one big market, really bigger. Yeah, Medicare fraud is, we're talking tens of billions of dollars a year. But it turns out that Miami is so far in terms of how much Medicare fraud goes on, it's on a planet by itself. I took this tour of Miami with these guys, these investigators, federal investigators, part of the strike force that investigates Medicare fraud. And we went to this office building, normal looking office building in the middle of Miami. You walk in the front door and you realize it has hundreds of offices each the size of a broom closet in which there's one desk. Typically, there's a phone that's not connected and a computer that's not plugged in. And on the door there's a nameplate which says, you know, Miami Medical Centre and they're all fronts because to get money for Medicare you need a mailing address. So, my chapter was all about a guy who moves from, kind of upstanding citizen who ran a nursing home chain in Chicago, moves to Miami and gets involved in one of the biggest Medicare frauds in history, billions of dollars of fraud. And the argument his rabbi at his sentencing hearing said, you know, my friend Phillip, who's been accused of this crime, he was a great guy in Chicago.

MG: Fine, outstanding citizen. Miami ruined him.

MALCOLM GLADWELL: And I was like, you know, I think there's something to that.

MG: So, what is it about Miami?

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Well, so many things. There's a theory from a guy named Griffin who writes his great book about Miami, who says that-- it's 1979. So, Miami is this sleepy dying, not very successful, kind of forgotten southern city in the 70s. The tourists have all gone elsewhere. Miami Beach is just a broken down series of hotels that are largely abandoned. And what happens in the late 1970s is there's three things happen within a space of a couple of months-- is Griffin's argument-- that dramatically transformed the city. One is the Mariel boatlift. So, hundreds of thousands of Cuban migrants land in Miami. And then there's a dramatic sudden rise of the cocaine trade, where billions of dollars are flooding into Miami overnight. And then there's a race riot. A very, very big, serious race riot that causes an enormous number of sort of middle class Miamians to leave the city. This all happens in a concentrated period of a couple of months, and it shakes the city's institutions to the core. I don't know that there's a single explanation for why Miami is so strange, but I think that's as good as we can get it. And I talk in the book about this idea called the overstory, that communities have these kind of shared set of beliefs and values that have an influence on those who live there. Remember Toronto in the 70s when Mayor Crombie was the mayor and it was Toronto, the good.

MG: New York run by the Swiss?

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Yes, exactly. That's an overstory. The idea was that Toronto was clean and tidy and well-behaved and polite, and everyone loved the mayor. And, you know, it was everything worked. You know, you could find an equivalent American City in the 70s that was the same size that was just as wealthy, that had the same industries, and it did not have the same overstory. Well, this same thing happens in Miami. And I think you get a feeling that sort of anything goes. In the 70s in Miami during the height of the cocaine trade, drug dealers were taking suitcases full of cash and they were wheeling them into banks on a daily basis, pulling up every day, and the bank guard would come out and help the drug dealers move their cash into the bank vault every day. Now, if you see that, that has to matter, right? Those kinds of symbols of disorder. And I think that infects the city. And then you have like-- do you remember Miami Vice, the television show? It's a television show that says, this is the most corrupt city in the country, that police officers are driving Lamborghinis. Now, that's not a red flag? And it's fantastic. Right? That's-- as opposed to every other TV show would say, and it's a terrible thing, Miami Vice said, no, no, no. This is why it's a great city to live in and you should go there.

MG: You say, I mean, when it comes to overstories, maybe Miami Vice is an example of that, that storytelling can change the overstory. This is very different. And it's one of the most powerful chapters in this book. What is it that the Holocaust could tell us about overstories and about tipping points?

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Yeah, there are times when you write something where you know a little bit of the story and then what you're doing is you're filling in the blanks. And there are times when you, everything you learn is a surprise. And the Holocaust story is one of that I, a chapter I have in the book, is one of those things where I didn't know any of it. And no one I knew knew any of it. Basically, if you look at history textbooks of the sort that you would read in your first year college university history class, you're studying the Second World War in the 70s, right? So, I went back and they found the big textbooks, if you read them and you come to the account of the Second World War, you will find almost no discussion of the Holocaust. It won't be called the Holocaust, first of all. It would just say that the Nazis had concentration camps where they interned gypsies, Communists and Jews, and they'll be a paragraph that'll describe this and then they'll move on. Now, this sounds totally unbelievable, but I did this with countless textbooks. There's one textbook written by two of the most prominent historians in the United States about the Second World War. And they talk about Anna Frank, a German whose, you know, sad story moves audiences when they, you know, they call her German. They get her name wrong. She's German, but she's Jewish. That's the whole point of the story of Anne Frank, right? They don't even mention that. Like, it's weird. And then you realize that there is only one Holocaust Museum or memorial in the entire North America until the early 80s. Nothing except there's a little one I talk about, the one in L.A., starts in the 1960s, which is really just a bunch of Holocaust survivors in L.A. wanted a place to put their stuff that they couldn't bear to keep in their home, but realized they couldn't throw out. Their, you know, the uniforms they had to wear in Auschwitz, the identity card they were given, you know, that kind of stuff. They didn't talk about it to their kids or they didn't talk about it. They thought that they weren't supposed to. And then I, so the more you dig into it, you realize there is a kind of, it's not denial of the Holocaust. Everyone knows it exists, but no one wants to talk about it for any number of reasons. They don't know how to talk about it. It's too much. The survivors want to move on with their lives. And the dam breaks in the late 1970s, after a television show airs called Holocaust, which is a miniseries that ran on NBC, and 50 per cent of the television viewership of the United States tuned in to watch that show. And almost overnight, people, they start to give what happened in Germany a name, the Holocaust, that was a word that just had not been used to describe what happened. And then you start to get, by the hundreds, you start to get Holocaust memorials and museums springing up around the world.

MG: How do we know that it's the TV show that does that?

MALCOLM GLADWELL: So, many historians have written about this and there is no one who doesn't give the television show central billing.

MG: But just because of how many people watched it.

MALCOLM GLADWELL: How many people watched it. But it's important to say that the reason the television show happens is that the ground is shifting. You have a number of things happening in the 70s where the Jewish community for the first time is starting to open up and to talk about what happened and to feel more secure. You have the big immigration from Russia in the late 70s. You know, a whole series of things happened that make the Jewish community in North America feel like finally they have a, they're in a position to talk openly about what happened. So, I think that the ground is shifting, but it's the big catalyst is this multi-part miniseries which exposes Americans, many of them, for the first time, to the, to what happened in Germany during the war.

MG: It speaks to I mean, in the first book, in The Tipping Point, there's that idea of stickiness. And it speaks in some ways to that idea of stickiness. Can you-- I mean, it's impossible to imagine 50 per cent of anyone of any population watching anything now. Can you have that concept of stickiness at a time when we're drowning in information and people are just trying to keep up, let alone be gathered around the same source of information?

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Yeah, because I have two chapters in the book that talk about the power of television shows in the kind of era of network dominance. And the implicit lesson of both of those is it really can't happen anymore. You know, when you have three or two or whatever major networks that people are watching, and when even ordinary television shows are commanding massive audiences, it's possible to have a common narrative in society. And what happened, what we did in the Internet age, in the digital age, is we said there's a way to make better television, and that's to have many more voices and many more platforms and many more-- and that was absolutely true. Television is way better today than it was in the 70s. But what we gave up was power. So, we traded power for quality.

MG: Writing about epidemics is different than living through one. We all just lived through or perhaps are still living through this pandemic. And I'm wondering, in doing this, you write about the surprising things that you learned about how COVID spreads. What did you take from that? People are constantly concerned about how what we lived through may inform the next pandemic. How could that influence how we deal with whatever's coming down the road that we don't know about? Whatever gnarly, awful thing is going to approach us?

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Well, the thing that-- I wrote a chapter on COVID and it's all about a superspreader event that happened in Boston. And in the course of that, I talk about this thing that we learned late in the epidemic, but which I think many people still don't realize or have taken to heart, which is we learned that there was a very, very small number of super spreaders who represent a tiny fraction of the population who had the, who really kind of did all the work in spreading the virus. So, you look at a room of 100 people and they're all infected with COVID, 95 of them are not going to spread the virus very far out of too many people. Five of those people will. They will, for any number of complicated genetic reasons, they are capable of in the way that they breathe and talk, they produce way more viral particles inside little aerosols than the rest of us. And I say way more, I'm talking about orders of magnitude more. And what that means for the next time we have a respiratory virus that behaves like COVID does, we're going to figure out who those people are, and I don't know what we'll do with that.

MG: I was gonna say, if we know who those five people are, what do we do then?

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Well, in the worst case scenario, we lock them up or we discriminate against them, or we refuse to let them go out of their house. Or we won't sit next to them on a bus or... I mean, that's the worst case scenario. The best case scenario is we find them, help them keep close tabs on them, make sure they're not stigmatized, but realize it's a route towards having a much healthier society. I don't have a lot of confidence we'll do the good version, but I do, it's one of those things that, you know, epidemiologists I think have been shy about talking about the implications of this because they are rightly concerned about what we'll do with that knowledge. It's a little bit worrisome.

MG: How good do you think we are? I mean, part of what you do, and this kicked off with The Tipping Point 25 years ago, is kind of translating social science ideas to a mass audience. How good are we at accepting uncertainty, do you think?

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Well... Bad.

MG: To put it politely.

MALCOLM GLADWELL: But I think, you know, and I think people-- journalists, we share a good deal of the blame for this. And I put myself in this camp. I mean, this is... one of the reasons why I wanted to return to this book, The Tipping Point after 25 Years, is that one of the things I have, I think I have a good deal more humility in the way that I write about ideas today than I did 25 years ago and it's, I have a firmer grasp on unanswered and the uncertainty of what we know. And it's because I'm older. I mean, I think one of the few good things that come out of getting older, if you've been writing as I have for 40 years, you've been schooled in how often you've been wrong. And you learned that, like I said before, knowledge is a fluid thing and we never know anything for certain. And the best thing you can do is to say this is the best case for what we know now. This is what I think now. If we tacked that phrase on to every expression of an idea or belief, we will be doing a lot better.

MG: I said in the introduction that this book comes appropriately, given the dark times that we're in right now. There was an optimism that ran through The Tipping Point 25 years ago, and one of the things that's different from 25 years ago is you have kids now, you have two young kids. And I just wonder, is it hard for you to find-- I mean, kids are like the definition of optimism. You see little kids and there's no cynicism. They're full of joy and wonder and delight. Is it hard for you now to find that optimism or how do you find that optimism?

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Well, I'm always-- I mean, I'm a fairly optimistic person, so... And I would say that kids teach you optimism, but they mostly teach you humility. They teach you that, I've been keeping track of what percentage of requests I make of my toddler are accepted or denied. And I'm batting about, you know, 30 per cent right now. So, and I see no route to getting that higher. It's only going to go down, right? Now, I can see as well that, you know, you're giving them, you're feeding them lots of stuff because you're the one who's feeding them most. You have more power than many other people. But I'm also aware of like, you know, they're their own person and they make up their own mind. Which is kind of to me, that's the root for optimism. I'm glad they're not just clones of me. They need to kind of figure out their own way. Their kind of indifference to my authority makes me very optimistic about their prospects.

MG: Malcolm, it's great to talk to you, as always. What are you-- I always ask you at the end of our conversations, what are you obsessed with now? What's the thing, aside from trying to get your kids to maybe do what you want them to do, what is your current obsession right now?

MALCOLM GLADWELL: My current obsession is well, getting through the book tour in one piece. That would be a... You know, I'm right now I have a stress fracture and I can't run. And all I want to do is get healthy again. So, I'm trying to get home.

MG: Soon enough. Thanks again.

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Thank you, Matt. That was wonderful.

MG: Malcolm Gladwell's new book is called Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders and the Rise of Social Engineering. Well, coming up after your regional update, what we know about Iran's ballistic missile attack against Israel and what could come next as the conflict in the Middle East creeps dangerously closer to an all out war. And then: Canada's fertility rate is at an all time low again. Why a growing number of Canadians are putting off parenthood and what that means for all of us. We'll talk about that coming up as well. We're back in 90 seconds. My name is Matt Galloway and this is The Current. Stick around.

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After Iran’s strike on Israel, what happens next?

Guests: Dahlia Scheindlin, Alex Vatanka

MG: Hello again, I'm Matt Galloway and you're listening to The Current. Israelis took shelter yesterday as sirens blared to warn that Iran was firing waves of ballistic missiles toward their country. It was the latest escalation of fighting, upping the threat of an all out war in the Middle East. The Israeli military says air defences intercepted a large number of an estimated 180 missiles and that it is assessing the damage caused by the handful that did land in the centre and southern parts of that country. There were no reports of casualties from the attack in Israel, but one Palestinian was killed in the West Bank. And this attack by Iran came less than 24 hours after Israel launched a ground incursion into Lebanon. Dahlia Scheindlin is a political analyst and columnist in Tel Aviv. Dahlia, hello.

DAHLIA SCHEINDLIN: Hi. Thanks for having me on the show.

MG: Thank you for being back on the program. As at least seven people in Tel Aviv were killed after two Palestinian gunmen opened fire, according to Israeli authorities, in the wake of everything that's happened over the course of the last 12, 24 hours, what is the mood like in that city today?

DAHLIA SCHEINDLIN: Well, extremely tense. I mean, the attack on the early evening of Tuesday in Jaffa was devastating. It was a shooting attack. It was directed against civilians, apparently. Four women have been killed out of the seven total at this point. And so, there is a very, very difficult mood because, of course, the minister of national security is an extreme nationalist who immediately came to Jaffa and began threatening essentially the Arab or Palestinian citizens of Israel who live there and essentially raising tensions even further. Of course, the gunmen were from Hebron in the West Bank. So, it came also exactly as Israelis were preparing for the Iranian missile attacks, which we knew about from just an hour or so before roughly as the information was sort of spreading around the country. So everybody's on edge. And in fact, there is, of course, the likelihood of a further escalation and a wider war.

MG: And so, how are Israelis reacting to the war hitting home? I mean, you do a number of things, including, you know, analysis of the political mood in your country, so what is that mood right now?

DAHLIA SCHEINDLIN: The mood is tense. On the one hand, Israelis, especially those who have been evacuated and displaced from the north, some 60 or 70,000 civilians who have been, you know, living in other parts of the country and displaced from their homes over the last number of years are, on some level, there's a sense of catharsis and relief that the government has taken the initiative to do what they think is the only thing to do in order to remove the threat of Hezbollah from south of the Litani River in Lebanon, from which they had taken up positions over the last year and fired constantly on the Israeli north. But I think that there is a great trepidation. I don't think anybody really has illusions that the wider war will affect the entire country and puts everybody at risk, including the possibility of strikes, long range missiles from Hezbollah, possibly further escalations like the one we saw from Iran and hitting, you know, Israeli civilian infrastructure, which could happen. At the same time, Israel has begun its ground operation in Lebanon, which was the subject of great uncertainty over the last, over the previous few days after Israel assassinated Hassan Nasrallah, the head of Hezbollah. The ground operation began a couple of days ago. And by contrast to any expectation that Israelis are thrilled and belligerent and euphoric, that's not quite the case. In fact, polls show that Israelis are deeply divided over the ground operation because they know from collective experience and historic experience that a ground operation in Lebanon could end within a few weeks, as it did in 2006. But it could also have a momentum of its own, carry casualties that essentially prompt more extensive Israeli responses and then lead to a longer occupation. I need not remind anybody that from 1982 to the year 2000, 18 years, Israel was occupying southern Lebanon. It was devastating for Lebanon, and it wasn't good for Israelis. And, you know, people died throughout that time. And so, there is of great trepidation of where this is all going. And I think a very severe sense that the government doesn't have a clear strategy for what it's really planning to achieve with these escalations.

MG: You said that the two sides, being Israel and Iran, could still dial things down, but that Israel in some ways has a free hand. What did you mean by that?

DAHLIA SCHEINDLIN: I think that Israel has become emboldened over the course of the year. I mean, there's no minimising the attacks from Hezbollah that have been coming through to Israel's north over the entire year. Hezbollah joined this fight on October 8th, and Israel has not really found a great way to, you know, de-escalate the north because it refuses to link the Hezbollah attacks to a ceasefire in Gaza, which is what Hezbollah has been demanding. Instead, Israel has been letting the American negotiation process kind of drag along. But the Americans have not actually put any muscle, so to speak, behind those negotiations. They have, apparently not significant leverage on Hezbollah and not used any leverage on Israel. And as a result, I think that America ultimately has accepted, you know, Israel's perspective of delinking a Gaza ceasefire, which Israel refuses to reach with any sort of de-escalation in Lebanon, which it cannot accomplish between Israel and Hezbollah, because there is no pressure, not significant pressure for Israel to reach a ceasefire in Gaza. With America accepting those terms, you know, there is not any real reason for Israel to stop. And America has been ultimately trying to de-escalate the region over the course of the year by moving major military and naval forces into the region. And it has stepped up their backing in recent weeks. And this may have helped the de-escalate over the course of the year. But at this point, it makes Israel feel like it has a blank check from its best ally, which happens to be the most powerful country in the world, to continue with a very, very escalatory policy right now. And again, Israelis know that the big aim is to try to calm things down enough in the north so that citizens can go back. But the actual specifics of how to get there, how this de-escalates without causing a war that engulfs everybody in the region is not clear, even to Israelis.

MG: Just before I let you go, you said even to Israelis. What sort of position is Benjamin Netanyahu in? Hostages are still being held. There were these enormous protests that have continued over the course of this year, over the course of this wider war. What kind of position is he in?

DAHLIA SCHEINDLIN: Well, I think that he is in a grave position in the sense that he knows that he needs his government to stay together. He has tied his fate to the most ultranationalist extremist partners in his coalition who are demanding that the war continue and escalate and that Israel strike Iran even harder and not reach a ceasefire in Gaza and forget about the hostages. He's tied his fate to those political partners, partly because he doesn't want his government to fall apart and he wants to stay in power, but also because he essentially, I think the party he leads has become indistinguishable ideologically from those extremist coalition partners. And they essentially speak in one voice. Netanyahu himself can be inscrutable, but it hardly matters. He has cultivated those forces. He put them into his government. He has consistently chosen their demands over what the Israeli public wants, which is the hostage release for a ceasefire, or what the American government and all of Israel's allies want, and which ultimately, you know, there's not going to be an end to this war until those things happen. There needs to be a hostage release and a ceasefire, Netanyahu has not wanted to get there for all of those reasons, both strategic and ideological. And I think that the Israeli public is of mixed feelings, because with the wider regional war, there is a sense of rallying. Netanyahu's poll ratings have gotten a little bit better in recent months, and he's back up to where he was before the war. But at the very same time, he still couldn't win an election if it were held today. He has not regained the majority that he won in the 2022 elections. And there are still in recent months, 70 per cent who want him to resign either immediately or after the war. So, there are contradictory attitudes in the Israeli public. But a great, I would say a majority in all surveys who believe that Netanyahu is making his decisions for personal political reasons, not for the good of the country. And that even crosses into supporters of the coalition.

MG: Dahlia, it's great to speak with you, as always. Thank you very much.

DAHLIA SCHEINDLIN: Thank you for having me.

MG: Dahlia Scheindllin is a political analyst and columnist in Tel Aviv. Alex Vatanka is the founding director of the Iran program at the Middle East Institute. It's a think tank based in Washington, D.C. Alex, good morning to you.

ALEX VATANKA: Good morning.

MG: What message do you think Iran is sending to Israel with this attack in particular?

ALEX VATANKA: Look, frankly, I don't think the Iranian regime wanted to do this. They felt they had to do something. If you go back to the assassination of Hamas leader in Tehran, end of July, Ismail Haniyeh, in over a month, there was no Iranian, you know, response as such. But they felt that they had to do something. If you will, I mean, we're a few days away from the anniversary of the Hamas attack on Israel last year, last October. Over the course of the last year, one could make the argument that Iran felt that Israel essentially was pursuing a policy of escalating to de-escalate, if you will. But over the last few weeks, with the assassination of Haniyeh and in last week's assassination of Iran's most dear proxy leader, Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah in Beirut, I think the Iranian position changed that they felt that Israel isn't escalating to de-escalate. Israel was going for the jugular, that Israel was going for the ultimate price, which is regime change in Tehran. Now, that might seem a bit outlandish for me to say so, but that is, I think, how the Iranian regime are sort of looking at the calculations of Prime Minister Netanyahu. And by the way, he did give a video, he released a video just a few days ago, where the Israeli prime minister said, Iran will be free from the Islamist, you know, ruling elite sooner than people think. Again, if you're sitting in Tehran, if you're Ali Hosseini Khameneh, the supreme leader, I think he felt that if he didn't do anything, that the Israeli kind of pressure on him would just only mount and he had to do something.

MG: How united do you think Iran's leadership is in this?

ALEX VATANKA: Before I answer that question, Matt, let's just accept one basic reality which are obviously widely accepted in Iran. The regime is badly infiltrated. So, the Israeli intelligence services and other partner intelligence services are inside the Iranian regime in ways that we can only imagine.

MG: Which is how people knew that this attack was going to happen yesterday.

ALEX VATANKA: That and the fact that, you know, Israel was able to assassinate the Hamas leader in Tehran or get Hassan Nasrallah-- not only the Iranian regime, but in the axis of resistance across the region has been infiltrated. That complicates also their calculations in terms of what they want to do next. But no, I think fundamentally, the regime felt over the last few months with the coming of this new Iranian president, Massoud Pezeshkian, that maybe they could tone things down, that they were hoping that they could go in the direction of perhaps a new nuclear deal. We had the Iranian president at U.N., talking about, you know, if Israel disarms, we're disarmed, so forth. But reality is this Iranian regime has invested so much in its anti-Israel position going back to 1979. For them to undo almost half a century of this sort of rhetoric against Israel not accepting Israel's right to exist, all the rest of it, it's not easy to peel yourself away from that. And that's where the regime is at in terms of its strategic messaging. But to your point, I think there are divisions inside the regime that are arguing, listen, this fight against Israel is essentially a war we've chosen for ideological reasons. The reality is Iran doesn't have a national interest at stake in this fight against Israel. The fight is between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Iran is 500 miles away. The Iranians could choose not to be part of this fight. They've chosen to be this part of this fight for ideological reasons, and they're paying a big price for it maybe going forward.

MG: And yet they are deep sponsors of Hezbollah, of the Houthis in Yemen, of Hamas as well. The question that people want to know, I guess, is how far is Iran prepared to go? Iran said the attack is over, but it vowed to go further if Israel, in its words, 'Invites further retaliation.' So, what happens next in this?

ALEX VATANKA: Look, if we have the April attack and counterattack to go by, you had the last Iranian, you know, missile, the drone strikes against Israel. Israel retaliated. It was relatively minor. We're now hearing from Israeli sources in the media that this time is going to be a massive escalation. Oil refineries, other strategic sites in Israel will be targeted. If that happened, I'm sure the Iranians would retaliate again because they have no choice, really. I mean, the whole regime's survival could arguably be at stake. The question of how much the United States gets involved is a key factor here. Israel's not going to be able to do this on its own. It needs the U.S.. We are in an election cycle in Washington. The idea of a war in the Middle East, the price of gas going up in this country. There are lots of different moving parts to this. So, you know, but we haven't been here before, so we have never been this close to something that looks like a actual shooting war. And we passed that line up between Iran and Israel. Well, here you are. The question is, can anybody essentially come in and pull these two sides apart one more time?

MG: Would Iran get any backing from other Arab countries if a regional, a full scale war were to break out?

ALEX VATANKA: Well, this is the sort of irony for the Islamic Republic. Before I answer the question in terms of foreign partners, that might help, which, by the way, let me answer that question. No. Answer to that is, no. Russia is not going to come to Iran's aid. China is not going to come to Iran's aid. The Arab world will not come to your Iran's aid. Most of the Arab countries are quietly actually happy to see the likes of Hezbollah and Hamas been weakened. And by the way, the Iranian public is against what Iran is doing in the region. So, that's probably the elephant in the room. The Iranian public opinion is not right now, you know, in a nationalist mood saying, let's go to war with Israel. They're saying this is a war that Iran is bringing to the homeland because he has made these wrong ideological choices.

MG: Alex, we'll leave it there. Thank you very much.

ALEX VATANKA: Thank you.

MG: Alex Vatanka is the founding director of the Iran program at the Middle East Institute.

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What’s at stake with Canada’s low birth rate?

Guests: Armine Yalnizyan

MG: This is The Current on CBC Radio and the CBC Listen app. My name is Matt Galloway. A growing number of Canadians in their 20s and 30s are delaying parenthood or choosing not to have kids at all. And for a second year in a row, Canada's fertility rate is at an all time low. According to Statistics Canada, there's now only one point two six children being born for every woman, which puts us in a small club of countries with very low birth rates. Places like Italy, Japan and South Korea, which have faced prolonged demographic declines. While Canada's population continues to grow thanks to a 50 year high in immigration, economists are warning that this dynamic presents a unique set of challenges. Here to talk about those challenges and how we might address them is Armine Yalnizyan. She's a Canadian economist and columnist with the Toronto Star, also the Atkinson fellow on the Future of Workers. Armine, good morning.

ARMINE YALNIZYAN: Good morning, Matt.

MG: What do we know about why the Canadian fertility rate continues to decline?

ARMINE YALNIZYAN: It's declining for the same reasons it's declining all over the world. More women are working harder to help their households meet costs. This is about a 40 year phenomenon. So, women are quite as significant workers in the labour market as men, but getting very close to it. And about 50 per cent of the employed workforce is female. And the other thing that has happened since the pandemic is housing costs have soared. And it is very difficult to have a family formation where you can afford both childcare and mortgages. But even rents are out of reach. So, with these costs rising and women deferring having children for other reasons that are also economic in nature and with very poor leave provisions and childcare provisions, access to affordable childcare provisions, people are just choosing to take a pass on the opportunity to have children.

MG: What does this mean for a country like Canada? It was interesting, the OECD put out a report not so long ago and it said, "Declining fertility rates put the prosperity of future generations at risk." That sounds serious.

ARMINE YALNIZYAN: Yeah. I mean, you know, we've probably been talking about the debt that we're passing on to our kids that has been financial and governmental in nature. This is the real debt and it is being handed off to a whole new generation of people that are having a lot of difficulty just doing the things that being humans should be because we're not supporting each other enough. But I have to say that even in nations where these policies are really generous, we're seeing falling fertility rates. It is a social experiment that is playing out right now, and it's happening all over the world. And I'm not sure it's a terrible thing, but it is certainly going to be a challenging thing and it's going to upend a logic that we have had in the economy, which is that we have surplus labour and that has been the case for 40 years. We're now moving into a prolonged period of time when workers are actually going to be very valuable resources because you can't put money to work without workers.

MG: One of the things that that report from the OECD said is that, "The shrinking working populations could lead to ageing societies that place significant social and economic pressures on governments, notably to increase expenditures on pension and health services." So, for our economy, I mean, tell me a bit more about this. What do you see is the impact of this?

ARMINE YALNIZYAN: Yeah. We're going to be spending more on the care economy. When you've got the smallest working age cohort we've had in 60 years and actually turning around and saying more of these people are going to need more help, did you know the fastest growing element of the population is those aged 80 years of age and older? Not all of them need care, but a growing number of a growing number will need care. And so, you know, we've got about seven million people that are currently aged 50 to 65. They're going to, in the next 15 years, they're going to age into the category of being a senior. Most seniors don't work. Some do, but they don't work when they're 80, by and large. So, the math doesn't work. We're going to need more immigration. But we're-- and this is happening in countries throughout the global north. Wherever there was a baby boom after the Second World War, this is the story that's playing out as the boomers age out. And yes, we have more immigration, but that is causing another cascade of political problems as we're seeing right now.

MG: I was going to say, the government...

ARMINE YALNIZYAN: So we've got really fractious times ahead politically and difficult times economically coming up.

MG: Now, as was going to say, that the government I mean, in this country, you're seeing the political impacts of it right now where we're dialling down the numbers of temporary foreign workers. There is great political pressure to do that, in part because of housing issues and other issues that are raised. What do you make of the gaps in the economy that that might create if we are going to be facing those pressures because of a declining birthrate?

ARMINE YALNIZYAN: Yeah, it's going to be really difficult for us to get our heads around it. Look, as I said before, we have had 40 years of effectively labour surpluses. People's consciousness don't turn around in a matter of a few years. And we had this extraordinary event of closing an economy and then reopening it while the backdrop was this tightening labour market because of accelerating retirements. And yes, we were taking in more temporary foreign workers, three times as many as the immigrants we brought in. So, this is a very weird way to build the economy in this society of the future on the backs of the permanently temporary. Yes, we are walking that back, but it's mostly performance art right now. We are still super reliant on the permanently temporary. And so, we've got some very heavy duty kind of ethical and meta, you know, what is the society for? What is the economy for? Questions to grapple with because the last 40 years are not predictors of the next 40 years. And we are in uncharted waters.

MG: Elon Musk says that, "Birth declines are one of the biggest risks to civilisation." He himself has at least 11 children. He says that, I mean, he's one of the people who supports this idea of being a pro-natalist. I mean, we should all have lots of kids and that that will help save the economy. What do you make of that?

ARMINE YALNIZYAN: Well, you can't have lots of kids without having very generous supports. You can't have lots of kids without having affordable housing so that everybody doesn't have to work to live per household. We've gone from one person in the household being the major bread earner to a minimum of two to get anywhere close to a comfortable standard of living. And I'm not talking about affluent, I'm just talking not going hungry and not worrying about where are you going to live next. And you know, it's terrific to be a natalist. But even in those places where countries do provide generous parental leave policies, do provide generous supports so that the working age population isn't spending all of its time providing unpaid care for those who are too young, too old and too sick to work-- even in those countries, we're seeing birth rates fall. And I think it's got something to do with the fact that we're asking women to be just like men, but we don't want them to be just like men. We're asking them to be just like men in the economy, but we want them to keep doing what they've always been doing else wise. And it's just-- the math doesn't work. The most precious resource we have is time. And we have not figured out yet how to allocate it between the things that drive the economy and the things we need to do as humans.

MG: So, people have I mean, any number of reasons when they decide whether or not they're going to have kids, whether they're going to have a family, whether they're going to have more than one child. What is it, just finally, I guess-- you see these programs, I mean, baby bonuses and what have you. But there is also a push for greater childcare, more affordable housing, etc.. What would move the needle, do you think?

ARMINE YALNIZYAN: Well, I'm not sure we need to move the needle. What we need to do is treat people as if they're important. You know, like when you've got the smallest working age cohort you've seen in 60 years, but less than half the pace of economic growth is a background, you're asking this smallest working age cohort to pay the bills for all the care that's needed, plus do more unpaid care. We're going to have to ask ourselves, how do we wish to help these people so that our economies don't shrink, much less grow? And I'm not sure that the child part of it... Like, I want to have grandchildren. I want my kids to feel like they have kids. Don't get me wrong. But I'm not sure that this unbelievable focus on having women making more babies is the right strategy in an era where the richest countries in the world are dealing with shrinking labour forces and more antipathy towards bringing in newcomers who are not like the original, the native residents. And I say that with air quotes because I'm sure the Indigenous population listening are kind of rolling their eyes. My point here is that we need to do better by one another and we have to start treating each other as the precious resource we are, which is unlike money and we've been chasing money, not people, for the last 40 years. It's going to take a while to change our minds about what is valuable.

MG: That's a philosophical way to end. Armine, thank you very much.

ARMINE YALNIZYAN: My great pleasure to be with you. Thanks.

MG: Armine Yalnizyan is a Canadian economist and columnist with The Toronto Star. She is also an Atkinson fellow on the future of workers. What do you make of what she was saying in terms of how we address this? And there are a couple of different streams of the issue, as she's put it forth. But, I mean, the reality is, according to StatsCan, Canada's fertility rate is at an all time low. Why is that? And what do we do about it? Your thoughts welcome. You can email us: thecurrent@cbc.ca. We did a documentary about this a while ago in terms of why-- and this is about the cost of living, but also just around other pressures that people face in terms of why they would or wouldn't have children. We could put that up for you to hear as well, again. But again, any thoughts on this-- email us. Thecurrent@cbc.ca. That is The Current for this Wednesday, the 2nd of October. Q is up next on CBC Radio One. Tomorrow on the program, a conversation with Idris Elba. You know him of course for his acting in The Wire, Hijack, The Office. He's also a musician and a DJ, and we will talk tomorrow about how the music industry has treated Black musicians and about his own music, too. Here is Idris Elba and some of his own music. A tune called La Trumpeta. I'm Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening to The Current. I'll see you tomorrow.

[Music: 'La Trumpeta' by Idris Elba]

Wednesday October 2, 2024 Full Transcript

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