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The Current Transcript for January 28, 2016

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

Host: Anna Maria Tremonti

[Music: theme]

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Two bags of grass, 75 pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: That is Johnny Depp channeling journalist Hunter S. Thompson in the movie version of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Hunter as Thompson's appetite for alcohol and drugs was legendary. His books were bestsellers. His articles in Rolling Stone magazine set the standard for a new kind of journalism. He was a celebrated wild man, larger than life, full of ambition, and anger. Try growing up with all that. In a moment, Juan F. Thompson shares his stories of growing up with Hunter S. Thompson. And let's just stay with journalism shall we, at least what's left of it.

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If you don't buy newspapers or subscribe to newspapers, if you don't support that it, it's not going to last forever, it just canâ€™t.

AMT: That is sports reporter Chris Hofley at the Ottawa Sun just before being laid off on Tuesday. The cuts in jobs in circulation that are dominating the news this week are, we are told, about a business model that isn't working anymore. So should we use public subsidies to save papers? Weâ€™re asking in half an hour. And thenâ€¦

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The practical uses of asbestos are very numerous. At least 18,000 articles are made of it.

AMT: You could be forgiven for thinking asbestos is part of our past, but new statistics show cases asbestos related diseases are climbing. As exposure from decades past, surfaces with a growing number of people. We will tell you more in an hour as we follow up on the stories we've been tracking. Iâ€™m Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

Hunter S. Thompson's son on fearing, loathing and loving the 'gonzo' journalist

Guest: Juan F. Thompson

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AMT: Hunter S. Thompson was a journalistic icon who rose to fame and acclaim in the sixties and seventies by covering politics and culture, in a way that went beyond just colourful prose. It was downright psychedelic. He invented the first person irreverent style of gonzo journalism that inspired generations of writers after him, and he went on to become a celebrity in his own right. But to my first guest, he was always just dad. Juan F. Thompsonâ€™s new memoir is titled, Stories I Tell Myself: Growing up with Hunter S. Thompson. And he's in Denver, Colorado, hello.

JUAN F. THOMPSON: Good morning.

AMT: Your book is pretty candid about the life of Hunter S. Thompson, what do you think will surprise his fans most about him?

JUAN F. THOMPSON: I think for those who will really focus on Hunter the party animal, I think will be most surprising is, well first of all just how serious he was about writing, from when he was a kid. I also think they'll be surprised, disappointed, maybe frightened by the toll that the drugs and the drinking took on him over a 55 year period. Even Hunter Thompson is not invulnerable to those to those drugs. I think some fans will also be surprised at the thoughtful, generous, and tender side of Hunter, and the way he can be very traditional in some respects because that's not at all it comes through in his persona.

AMT: You write about your father's violent temper, when would that come out?

JUAN F. THOMPSON: You never knew just when it would come out and that's part of what made it so scary. It could be something completely trivial, you know, he couldn't find the salt and he might go into a rage and start yelling and maybe throw something. At the same time, something that I would expect to make him furious, I write in the book about the incident with a shotgun and I went out to shoot some birds and I expected him to be in a complete rage and he was quite calm and fair. What made it especially unnerving was its unpredictability.

AMT: Because sometimes he would just shut down on you because of anger and other times he would yell.

JUAN F. THOMPSON: Mostly yell. He was not one to withhold his feelings. [laughing]

AMT: He would threaten to give you a beating and you make the point that he was such a wordsmith that he chose the word, beating, on purpose. What effect did that word?

JUAN F. THOMPSON: Well it's a scary word. Has this connotation of great power, and force, and pain. I am sure that he chose that very deliberately. As I say, he never actually hit me; I think his goal was to make sure I was scared so that I wouldn't do whatever it was he didn't want me to do. And I worked. He was also just a big man; he was like 6â€™3â€, 6â€™4â€, very physical presence. To a small boy, a man like that yelling, it was scary.

AMT: In fact you call him a bastard a number of times.

JUAN F. THOMPSON: [laughing] Yes.

AMT: Do you think he knew or cared how you felt about him at that time?

JUAN F. THOMPSON: I think he was aware that what he was doing was harmful, and a question I've never really been able to resolve for myself is how much control did he have? I think when he you know last temper and said hurtful things, he probably felt ashamed of it later. But he was either unable or unwilling to stop himself and he wasn't very good at apologizing.

AMT: Your dad and mom were both heavy drinkers, you call them out on it at one point. Tell us how they responded.

JUAN F. THOMPSON: I'm sure he knew he was an alcoholic but he really didn't like being called out on it. And my mom, she reacted much differently. She ended up stopping drinking for a long time and now drinks very infrequently. But Hunter, he never acknowledged to me he was an alcoholic. At some point I just accepted that this was who he was, and if I wanted to relationship with him I just had to start from that point of, all right he drinks a lot, he will always drink a lot, he does these drugs, he gets angry, and that's who he is and there's nothing I can do to change it; so now how can I accept that and try to connect with them.

AMT: Of course that was when you were in your late teens, early twenties by then.

JUAN F. THOMPSON: Yes.

AMT: Yeah. So when you were a kit, Juan, your parents were both drinking or both doing drugs, just give us an idea of what kind of stuff was going on in the house when you were a kid.

JUAN F. THOMPSON: So first, just to put in context, this was the seventies. It was Aspen, and there was just a lot of partying by everyone, it wasn't just my parents. A typical evening would include lots of booze, of course. Cocaine was flowing freely. Hunter was a fan of mescaline, Quaaludes were pretty popular the time, maybe some acid, LSD. At a party, all of those substances were being consumed by, you know, some group of everybody there. But to me, I was a kid, I didn't really know any better. I just saw, these are adults, they're acting kind of strange. I tended to just avoid them, go to my room and read.

AMT: Well and at one point your parents are separated and your mom introduces you to acid. Youâ€™re 14 years old, what happened?

JUAN F. THOMPSON: It just wouldn't even occur to me to introduce my son to LSD at age 14 or at all for that matter. But part of it was definitely the time, on one hand I think, well did it do any harm? No. But was it a lapse in parental judgment? Yeah, I think so. An odd side effect of it is that by that time I was like 16 or 17, I was through my experimentation phase, don't care for that stuff, don't care for thatâ€¦ Not big into going to drinking so by the time I started college it was like, Iâ€™m done with all that stuff. [laughing] Iâ€™m here to study, Iâ€™m not here to party.

AMT: You became the rebel the other way.

JUAN F. THOMPSON: Exactly.

AMT: But that first experience, your mom was with a boyfriend and it was almost a ceremonial thing, the taking of LSD. Your mom was your trip master.

JUAN F. THOMPSON: Yes. It sounds so bizarre to hear you say that. [laughing]

AMT: I'm just quoting you! [laughing]

JET: To hear someone else say it, it's like, well that is just crazy. But in retrospect, especially to hear someone else say it, yeah your mom was your trip master, it's like wow that is just not right. [laughing]

AMT: And it was the seventies but this is 2016. Tell us what a trip master is.

JUAN F. THOMPSON: Basically the responsible adult who was not on drugs. In an odd way she was being a responsible parent.

AMT: And in the midst of this you're missing your dad, you're with your mom, your dad's got this place called Owl Farm that your dad bought after his first big success. And you're missing your dad; youâ€™re still a kid who wants his dad's approval.

JUAN F. THOMPSON: In writing this book I just really came to the conclusion that fathers are just so important in a childâ€™s, or son's life. And whoever they are, however they act, there is no way for a child to say, well you know what? My dad's a pain the butt and I just don't want to deal with him. Iâ€™m just going to pretend I don't have a father. That's just not an option. I think is the way weâ€™re wired that we have to work out some kind of relationship and some kind of acceptance. And that's very much where I was, those competing forces, those tensions on one hand I despise him, on the other hand I desperately wanted a connection with him.

AMT: You write, â€œOnce we were separated, I longed to be with him. Though once there, neither he nor I knew what to do.â€

JUAN F. THOMPSON: Weâ€™re such different people. And I grew up in such a different way than he did, a different time, a different kind of man. We just didn't know what to talk about or what to do. That lasted a long time, really into my thirties when my wife and Deb Fuller helped me to understand, he is communicating with you, itâ€™s just not in a way that you're expecting. Once I began to see that, it just changed everything. Say I was up there for the weekend and it's time to go and he says, here, take this. And it's like of a leather duck decoy. Itâ€™s like, well, okay thanks. I'm thinking, why? [laughing] Why is he giving me this leather duck? When I began to see that it was an offering, it was his way of saying, I care about you and I love you. But he can't say it that way; he has to say it in this indirect way.

AMT: It's so extraordinary that the guy who is credited with changing communication with his journalism and how we write and how we tell stories in the modern day, we learn that like there was a real effort to communicate with his boy.

JUAN F. THOMPSON: Yes I really think he just did not know how to communicate with me and nor I with him. It's one thing to be a writer and you're writing for an audience and you have something very specific that you want to say. But it's a completely different world when you're actually talking about, how do I connect with someone who's very important to me and yet we don't seem to share any common language?

AMT: I mean you write your father was a man's man, macho, hard drinking, fast driving, womanizing. And you were shy, spiritual, in your own words a geek. Do you think your relationship would have been closer early on had you been more like him?

JUAN F. THOMPSON: Thatâ€™s a great question. I guess the answer is, yes and no. Had I been more like him, in that I was risk taker, drinking a lot, driving way too fast, I think he would have been appalled really. I think it would've been like, why would you want to imitate me? I can't help it, but for God's sakes don't try to live the way I do. It's dangerous. [laughing] I think on one hand he was relieved that I wasn't the same kind of boy or young man that he was. But certainly it also would have been, you know, if I had really enjoyed sports the way he did or even talk about women, we would have been able to connect but I think he would have been really, really worried about where I might end up.

AMT: He became more vulnerable, very vulnerable with age after so much cocaine and booze?

JUAN F. THOMPSON: Yes, he certainly did. It took two forms, one was the cocaine use and he really used cocaine kind of like a maintenance drug. Balance the sedative effects of alcohol. I really think that that really took its toll over time on his ability to concentrate. It made it very difficult for him to write. Even a thousand word column, much less a long article or book. Then the other part was the alcohol. And what was so interesting about it is that, not that he became a sloppy drunk, it was that the alcohol, he probably started drinking when he was like 14 or something, and by the time he's in his early sixties, the alcohol is like a corrosive and it just starts to dissolve the nerves, the organs, and the brain so that it became very difficult for him to walk. One of the things that was difficult to write about was the incontinence. And these are just the long term effects of alcohol. I am convinced, not that he told me what he was planning to do or why, but I'm convinced that two of those major factors weâ€™re his physical decline and his recognition that this was not reversible. There was no getting a new hip or back surgery was not going to fix this. Combined with his realization that he was not able to write, and for a man who was first and foremost a writer, I think that was just unbearable to him.

AMT: And you say thatâ€™s what you believe the reason for his suicide was?

JUAN F. THOMPSON: Yeah.

AMT: It was shocking when news came out that he had shot himself. You were there that day.

JUAN F. THOMPSON: Yes. On one hand he certainly gave me the warning signals the night before by saying, hey you should take these family heirlooms and take them now, donâ€™t wait, take them now. But I just think it was impossible for me to actually process that and realize, oh okay, he's telling me he's going to kill himself imminently.

AMT: He asked you to claim that gun too, didnâ€™t he? Yes, yes. I think I was just unable or unwilling to put it all together and see what was coming. And yet I knew that he would commit suicide, he had been clear about that for years and years that at some point when it was time, that's how he was going to go out. He was not going to die in a hospital or go to a nursing home. It was so important to him, his independence and freedom, was so important, thereâ€™s no way that he can relinquish that and fade away into alcoholic Alzheimerâ€™s. So I knew that was coming, but at the same time it was such a shock to realize, oh my God it's actually happened. Knowing that this would happen sometime in the future did not prepare me at all for dealing with reality when all of a sudden there it is, he's done it, he's dead.

AMT: Well you ran into the room and found his body.

JUAN F. THOMPSON: Yeah. And what was so odd about it is that, the way he chose to do it, there was very little blood. So when I heard this just long, loud bang I thought he'd thrown something or dropped something. I come out into the kitchen I look him he's slumped forward, looks like heâ€™s fallen asleep in his chair. I call his name, thereâ€™s no response and I start to get a little worried. I think, has he had a seizure? What's happened here? And then as I go over to him, I start to realize, uh oh, I think he's dead. Then I see some blood, I see the gun, I feel his body and then just kind of lost it. I'd say I was panicked, I was trying to think, oh my God what do I do now?

AMT: In fact, you go out in you load a 12-gauge shotgun and shoot it into the air as a salute.

JUAN F. THOMPSON: Yeah and this is one of those spontaneous, irrational things that once I realized what had happened, and I think we called the sheriff by that point, I just felt this urge to somehow mark this moment. It wasnâ€™t something I had planned or that he had asked for, it just seemed necessary.

AMT: I have to tell you, reading that, that's the moment that I thought you really were the son of Hunter S. Thompson.

JUAN F. THOMPSON: [laughing]

AMT: Who does that? That was a Hunter S. Thompson reaction don't you think?

JUAN F. THOMPSON: It really was. And that's interesting, I'd not thought of it that way, but it felt right. I think it was appropriate. Using his 12 gauge, the one that shows up in countless pictures as the nickel plated 12 gauge shotgun, you're right it was fitting. I didnâ€™t even think about it, I didnâ€™t think, well should I do this? I should do something to mark this? No, I got to grab the gun and shoot it in the air, like a cannon.

AMT: Juan Thompson. Thank you for sharing your story.

JUAN F. THOMPSON: It was my pleasure. Thank you very much for having me on your show.

AMT: Juan F. Thompsonâ€™s memoirs entitled, Stories I tell myself: Growing up with Hunter S. Thompson. And he joined us from Denver, Colorado. If you want to hear where the cannon comes into it, stay tuned for one more story from Juan, he will get today's last word with the outrageous dying wish he fulfilled after his father took his own life, with the help of, by the way of Johnny Depp, not taking his own life but the shooting of the cannon. Anyways, stay with us. If you have thoughts on that one, you can tweet us we're @thecurrentCBC. You can find us on Facebook or go to our website www.cbc.ca/thecurrent and click on the Contact Us link. And if you're just joining us, you can find us on a podcast, www.cbc.ca/thecurrent.

After massive layoffs, how can Canadian journalism survive?

Guests: Lorne Gunter, Romayne Smith-Fullerton, Marc Edge

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ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: Stopping the presses.

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[MOVIE]

[ominous music playing]

VOICE 1: I know there are things you cannot tell me but also know there is a story here and I think everybody will hear about it.

VOICE 2: Do you think your paper has the resources to take that on?

VOICE 1: I do.

VOICE 3: We're going to tell this story. We're going to tell it right.

AMT: A bit of the trailer from the Oscar nominated movie Spotlight. The newsroom drama tells the real life story of how the Boston Globe newspaper exposed a child molestation cover up within the Catholic Church and won a Pulitzer Prize for its work. And the film is being held up as testament to the power of the news media to crusade and right wrongs. But right now in Canada, journalism may need a hero of its own. Last week the country's biggest newspaper chain Postmedia announced it was laying off 90 employees and consolidating newsrooms across the country. One of Canada's oldest daily papers The Guelph Mercury in Ontario, made news by announcing it was ending its print publication entirely. And the country's biggest paper, The Toronto Star, announced the week before that it would cut costs by mothballing its printing presses. The financial hardships hitting news media are nothing new but the cuts seem to be getting closer to the bone and some would say endangering the health of our democracy. Today as part of our occasional series, Eye on the Media, weâ€™re asking whether drastic times call for drastic measures, such as more public subsidies for Canadian journalism and Canadian newspapers. We have three guests standing by with their thoughts on all of this. Lorne Gunter is a columnist with The Edmonton Sun. He is in our Edmonton studio. Romayne Smith-Fullerton is an associate professor in the Faculty of Information in Media Studies at Western University, which used to be called the University of Western Ontario. She is in Port Franks, Ontario. And Marc Edge is a professor of Media and Communication at University Canada West in Vancouver. He is in Richmond B.C.. Hi, Everyone. Welcome.

ALL: Good morning.

AMT: Now, before we get into this a little bit of Canadian journalism trivia, Iâ€™m inspired by that clip off the top, of the story of The Boston Globe. Who can tell me which Canadian newspaper first exposed a cover-up of child molestation by the clergy in Canada? Anybody?

LORNE GUNTER: Not I.

ROMAYNE SMITH-FULLERTON: Me either.

MARC EDGE: Got me there.

AMT: Okay. It was March 1989, the paper was The Sunday Express in St. John's, Newfoundland. The Mount Cashel Orphanage run by the Congregation of Christian Brothers. Michael Harris was the publisher. He was working with Mary Lynk who is now a producer, our own producer at CBC in Halifax, but The Sunday Express does not exist anymore. So, let's just think about that and weâ€™ll start there. Lorne Gunter, your newsroom at The Edmonton Sun was really affected by the Postmedia cuts last week. What's it like there right now?

LORNE GUNTER: We're starting to recover but it was a devastating day. It came almost out of nowhere. I mean, we knew that Postmedia had had a particularly difficult quarter. We always assumed that after Postmedia bought The Sun papers that there would be a lot of rationalizing, there would be an awful lot of cutting of duplication. We'd already seen that with the non-journalist departments. Our sales department for example, had been amalgamated with that of The Edmonton Journal. They were running one sales department for two papers already and it was basically a matter of when would the final shoe drop on the journalism side. But, still it came as quite a shock and we had very little notice. About 10:30 in the morning, we got a notice that our very well-respected and much beloved managing editor was leaving the company. We weren't told that she was being let go. We weren't told what was going on and then about 15 minutes later, we all got an e-mail summoning us to The Edmonton Journalâ€™s newsroom. We'd been in the same building for a couple of months and we all went up and we were given the news and it was very brief and it was like a short sharp chop. It just sucked the wind out of people. You could just see people didn't know how to react to it and we're now starting to recover from that, but you know, this was devastating in that we lost lots of friends, and lots of respected colleagues that we had worked with for years. Previous rationalizations in the newsrooms hadn't affected the heart of the newsroom the way this one did.

AMT: Romayne Smith-Fullerton, what do these months, this monthâ€™s cuts across the news industry tell you about the future of journalism?

ROMAYNE SMITH-FULLERTON: I think it's very worrisome. I mean I, personally, I'm really tired about hearing that journalism is just about business. To me, it's about so much more than business. Journalism is the sacred trust and it's a really vital part, a cornerstone if you will, of our democracy. If we don't have a vital, tough, independent set of journalists asking really hard questions to our elected officials, and tough questions to our public institutions, our democracy is in trouble. It's so much more to me than just about big business and just to hit on what Lorne mentioned a moment ago, I think everybody's heart goes out to people who've lost their jobs and that has a lot of resonance when he says it's friends and it's colleagues. But I also want to highlight, because I've heard a lot of chat around the neighborhood, that while lots of businesses are laying off people, why is journalism so special? I think we have to remember that the information that journalism provides is important to all of us. So, it is more than just losing friends and respected colleagues.

AMT: Marc Edge, what's your take on this?

MARC EDGE: Well, I think the problem is-- I think there are two problems. First of all, Postmedia now is by far the largest newspaper company in Canada and it is owned more than 90 percent apparently, by U.S. hedge funds, which are sucking it dry. It made a healthy 17 percent profit in its last quarter so I don't think the problems are entirely financial. The other problems are largely regulatory. We have a body in this country called the Competition Bureau, which is supposed to promote competition and they seem to be doing anything but. When Postmedia took over Sun Media newspapers a little over a year ago, the largest newspaper company in the country taking over the second largest newspaper company in the country, the Competition Bureau rubberstamped it without even the need for holding hearings. You would have thought that they would have at least got them to promise to keep separate newsrooms as happened here in Vancouver in 1957. I don't know what happened to that promise, it seems to have gone by the wayside.

AMT: Well, in fact the newsrooms are now merging and that's why the cuts, right? Marc, you made the point that actually the newspaper business--newspapers make money, it's just that news doesn't bring in money.

MARC EDGE: Well, the problem with newspapers is that their revenues are going down precipitously in the U.S. In the past decade, they've gone down by about two-thirds. In Canada, it hasn't been quite as bad. They've gone down by about a half but it certainly put a crimp in your business model. So, they've been having to throw people overboard just as fast as they can to get their costs below their revenues. Like I say, their costs arenâ€™t comfortably below their revenues. In the case of Postmedia, about 17 percent below.

AMT: Romayne, are there examples of things you see now that indicate the quality of news we get is on the downslide because of the industry decline?

ROMAYNE SMITH-FULLERTON: Oh absolutely. I don't think there is any doubt. There are an awful lot of reports, largely American ones, that talk about the fact that you know, where journalism, serious journalism, and I'm not talking about celebrity news or astrology today, I'm talking about serious news that reports on public institutions and publicly elected officials. We're losing those jobs in Canada. I think in the last seven or eight years, we've lost more than 10,000 journalism jobs and in the United States they're losing about 1,000 journalism jobs a month. I mean even President Obama has commented on the fact that Public Relations positions now far exceed positions of serious journalism and the problem with that is, where are citizens supposed to get genuinely accurate and fair information on which to base their decisions about how to live their lives and who to elect if all of that is coming from propaganda and spin?

AMT: So Romayne, this Friday one of Canada's oldest dailies, The Guelph Mercury, will deliver its last print edition. It will be online but it is ending print.

ROMAYNE SMITH-FULLERTON: Yes.

AMT: That's an example of one community that's been serviced by its very specific newspaper. How do you see that working in smaller Canadian communities?

ROMAYNE SMITH-FULLERTON: I think it's a real problem. I mean, I want to be clear that I'm not harking back to some golden age of printed newspapers just because I like the smell of newsprint, even though clearly I do. But, the point to me is that newspapers here have traditionally done that kind of serious journalism that's so important to democracy and no other medium has stepped up to take over that niche. To come specifically to the question that you ask about smaller communities, it's an incredible problem. I live in an even smaller community than Guelph, so say, for example, if I want to know what's going on at my local town council meeting, I'm going to have to go myself because my local newspaper no longer can afford to send a reporter to listen to that three hour meeting and distill for me, and other people in my community, the essence of what we need to know to go about our daily lives. The same is true about say, school board reports. You know, you have to go to a Facebook page if you're a parent looking for information about what's going on at your school board and you'll have to read through some parentâ€™s, I don't know five, six, seven page written off the top, unprofessional take on this to find the bits of information that might be relevant to you. I think we've come to really take journalism for granted in this country and it's a very sad day. I hope people realize what is at stake here.

AMT: So, let's get to the question. You've made the case for public subsidies for private media companies?

ROMAYNE SMITH-FULLERTON: I absolutely believe that journalism is a public good but it's not that it's not just a commercial product that should be subject to the waxing and waning of the commercial marketplace. I look to other countries to see what they're up to. If we look at places like most of the Scandinavian countries, Sweden for example, has one of the highest newspaper per capita relationships in the world. They have an incredibly high readership penetration. About 85 percent of their population read a daily newspaper, spend almost an hour a day doing that and that's because that they absolutely believe that you need to fight commercialism; that public dissemination of information is a public service to citizens. It's not just a capitalistic enterprise. So, in places like Sweden for example, they have, since about 1970, been subsidizing not just their broadcast media, which I think most people maybe know that model, but they've also been subsidizing their newspapers because they believe so strongly in the diversity of voices. Even smaller voices they say they're absolutely as important. We need to have pluralism.

AMT: Okay. Lorne Gunter, what do you think?

LORNE GUNTER: Never.

AMT: Tell me more.

LORNE GUNTER: Never, never, never. I don't want government involved in deciding how we get our information, who puts that information out. At some point when the government's giving out a subsidy itâ€™s going to make a determination as to who deserves it and who doesn't. That is more dangerous to the democratic role of journalism than the lack of, than the dying of newspapers. The information is out there. You may have to read five or six pages of some parentâ€™s rant from the school board meeting to find out what's going on, but you haven't been able to get much from your school board in any sort of large journalistic outlet for decades, if then. I see that this is the democratic expansion of journalism. Yes, of course Twitter is 140 characters and yes, of course Facebook is someoneâ€™s stream of consciousness rant about things and you have to sort through what's available and what isn't, but the information is this there and I think what we're looking for here is what is the new model, not subsidizing the old model. It's trying to find out what the new model is and if I knew what the new model is going to be, where we content providers, as opposed to the press operators and the editors and the people behind the scenes, where we content providers are going to be able to make money from this, then I'd be the 21st century's first press baron.

AMT:[laughs] Sounds good. Sounds good.

ROMAYNE SMITH-FULLERTON: I absolutely have to interrupt that.

LORNE GUNTER: Well, Iâ€™m sure you do.

ROMAYNE SMITH-FULLERTON: [laughs] That is why weâ€™re on together. You're absolutely playing up this myth that capitalism and democracy are insoluably linked and somehow, if we ask our governments to create some kind of subsidy that this is going to affect the kinds of information weâ€™re getting. In fact, if you look at Reporters Without Borders, has consistently ranked these same Scandinavian countries that I'm talking about in the top five on The World Free Press Index. These placesâ€”

LORNE GUNTER: But Reporters Without Borders have their own biases and so that plays into their rankings.

ROMAYNE SMITH-FULLERTON: Everyone has a bias, Lorne.

LORNE GUNTER: Of course. And the governments that would put out the subsidies have those biases too and that's my problem.

AMT: Okay, let's bring Marc into this. What do you think, Marc?

MARC EDGE: Well, the Scandinavian countries are also ranked very highly for press freedom by Freedom House in New York so I don't think there's any doubt that they do have a free press there. The main thing I think is it is free from corporate control and this is what brings down Canada and the U.S. in the press freedom rankings every year. It's the corporate control, it's not the government control. I think that we have to talk about the elephant in the room here which is digital media. Digital media was supposed to save us but you know, as Romayne says, it's not a business story. It is a business story because digital media donâ€™t make much money. Newspapers still make good money which they should be investing in journalism unfortunately, in the case of Postmedia, mostly going south of the border to the hedge funds.

ROMAYNE SMITH-FULLERTON: Just a correction, I didn't say it wasnâ€™t a business story. I said it's not just a business story.

AMT: Okay, I'm going to bring another voice into this. I have a clip of Jonathan Kay. He is the editor-in-chief of The Walrus magazine which is funded by philanthropy. Listen to what he says.

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JONATHAN KAY: Well, it's basically the same solution that people implemented in regard to broadcast media, such as radio and television, decades ago, which is where you acknowledge that the free market cannot sustain excellent educational media entirely on its own. You need some help either from the government or from philanthropy. So I think that model is going to eventually be extended into the newspaper space. So, the same way for instance, that National Public Radio is funded in the United States, which is that you have well- meaning benefactors who want to support the high end marketplace of ideas and you have some government support too, in many cases. That will be extended to newspapers. There will be enough people who say we need this resource to have an educated population and they will support it on that basis.

AMT: Marc Edge, what do you think of that?

MARC EDGE: Well, I think he's right. You know, I think if philanthropists want to buy newspapers that would be great. This is what we're seeing now in the U.S. People like Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com buying The Washington Post. Of course, the prices of these papers are coming down to the point where geez, almost anyone could afford one.

AMT: [laughs] Is he a philanthropist or a businessman? Did he buy

The Washington Post for philanthropy?

MARC EDGE: In part, I believe. There is John Henry who bought The Boston Globe, Warren Buffett, well he's a businessman, but he bought his hometown paper, I think in large part, because he wanted to see it thrive.

AMT: Can you name another print outlet that's using philanthropy in Canada other than The Walrus?

LORNE GUNTER: No, but you knowâ€”

AMT: Because you are using Americanâ€”

LORNE GUNTER: If you have people who want to keep newspapers alive as a platform for information rather than trying to find where the new platform will be, then let them do that by philanthropy. I have nothing against philanthropists keeping this open, what I have a problem with is tax payers keeping it open because the intermediary in the taxpayer keeping it open is a bureaucratic committee or a set of appointees from the government of the day, and I don't have much faith in that.

AMT: You know we are on the CBC, right? Weâ€™re a public institution.

LORNE GUNTER: Yes, absolutely.

AMT: Youâ€™ve got a problem with us, too.

LORNE GUNTER: I do. I do.

AMT: Because I would argue that CBC News breaks a lot of stories and I mean, we're not in a government pocket. The government never likes us.

ROMAYNE SMITH-FULLERTON: [laughs] No they do not. Theyâ€™ve been cutting you for years.

LORNE GUNTER: Yes, but a lot of taxpayers don't like you either and that's the problemâ€”

AMT: A lot of taxpayers do like us, Lorne. A lot. Itâ€™s a mythâ€”

LORNE GUNTER: Let them pay for the CBC, rather than making everyone pay for the CBC. That's what I'm saying, philanthropy is a much better model. The NPR is a much better model because you have people who want to pay who are paying and the government subsidy portion is much, much smaller.

ROMAYNE SMITH-FULLERTON: I completely disagree.

LORNE GUNTER: I knew you would.

AMT: Go ahead, Romayne.

ROMAYNE SMITH-FULLERTON: I just think that philanthropy is maybe one wing, one possibility. If you want a Canadian example, it's not one that's run on philanthropy but, Canadaland is run by a crowd source funding so that's a kind of you know, if you care about our journalism and you like the kind of work that Jesse Brown does, please give us some money. I think those are possible models and there probably is a definite place for those. But to be an independent, tough minded journalist, you need to have a long term budget and to be able to have some sustainable funding so that you can make plans. That's been part of the problem that CBC has suffered with frankly, for the last 15 or 20 years. I just don't think that relying on the marketplace is going to solve this problem because at the end of the day, the vast majority of people are not dedicated to even voting, or to be informed about their democracy, but that doesn't mean that it isn't vitally important that that information is out there so they have a choice. Otherwise, all they're going to vote for is what is the latest Justin Bieber story or how Celine Dion is doing in this desperate time of her life.

AMT: So Marc Edge, what do Canadians stand to lose if we see a continued consolidation of journalism under one corporation, if we see the shutdown of more and more smaller news outlets?

MARC EDGE: Well, the democracy will continue to be diminished. Canadians will become more and more disconnected from the communities in which they live. Like I say, digital media blogs and citizen journalism they were supposed to pick up the slack and that just hasn't happened.

AMT: Lorne, what about what we stand to lose. Maybe subsidies arenâ€™t the answer. What's at stake here as you look at what is happening even in your own area?

LORNE GUNTER: Well, I mean, I enjoy what I do for a living. I would be happy to see a lot of young people take up the profession and that's going to be lost for some. But it's not as though the information isn't out there. It may not be in the form that we're accustomed to, it may not be by professional journalists and there may be an awful lot more chaffe to winnow in order to get to the wheat, but it is out there. There's an awful lot of people out there and we will at some point market, be able to find a market, for the information that exists and that's the key, trying to find the new model rather than clinging to the old.

AMT: Romayne Smith-Fullerton.

ROMAYNE SMITH-FULLERTON: So even as [unintelligible] looking towards the future, their government has created an inquiry to look into the future to try to figure out ways forward and that report is due out in April of this year, so I'll look there.

AMT: Marc, how do you think about when you look at areas for a business model and digital doesn't work right now, could that change?

MARC EDGE: Well, if the government is going to step in anywhere with subsidies, it should be on the digital side. I never got to vote on subsidies and I have to agree with Lorne, the most self-respecting journalists would not want to see government funding but there are other ways the government can help you know, grease the wheels of capitalism. Unfortunately, we're still in a capitalist system, Romayne and we've got to make it work somehow and it needs a little bit of regulation and I think it is the regulators that are falling down on the job. People like the competitionâ€”

ROMAYNE SMITH-FULLERTON: I agree with you. I absolutely agree with you, Marc and I think it's hard to have this discussion in 10 short, 15 short minutes, but subsidies aren't the only option and government has been subsidizing the press really since both the United States and Canada were founded. Whether we're talking tax exemptions or we're talking stamp tax to help circulate newspapers, we've been doing this a long time. I don't think that's the only way forward but I think that we're really looking at this in a monocular way and we need to have a bigger discussion.

AMT: Lorne, would regulation on competition appeal to you?

LORNE GUNTER: No. It wouldn't because you know, the problem here is that readers have left the newspaper business. They don't buy papers in the numbers that they used to. It's not because the product isn't appealing in the way we're talking about here with democracy in news anymore, in fact, if anything we've tried to become too appealing. It's the fact that this is not the way Canadians, Americans in particular, want to get their news anymore and what we have to find is the way to reach them in the form that they are looking for.

AMT: Okay, we have to leave it there. Thank you all for weighing in on this one. Lorne Gunter, columnist with The Edmonton Sun. He's in our Edmonton studio. Romayne Smith-Fullerton, associate professor in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at Western University, formerly the University of Western Ontario. We reached her in Port Franks, Ontario. Marc Edge is a professor of Media and Communication at University Canada West in Vancouver. He's in Richmond, BC. Stay with us.

Asbestos a potential cancer threat, even 40 to 50 years after exposure

Guests: Stephen Bornstein

AMT: Hello, I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and youâ€™re listening to The Current.

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[percussive music]

VOICE 1: We would only intervene with a firearm if that person was actually then threatening another person, actually was holding them hostage and was going to harem them. And even then we would play it long.

VOICE 2: All that remained of my sister was a blood stain on an under garment in the trailer in which Mr. Pickton lived.

VOICE 3: This is at the point where it's hard to ignore it. It's impossible to ignore it, actually. I keep Twitter open all day as a journalist and to watch this stream of stuff go by my screen, it gets to you. It does.

AMT: 30seconds to sum up the week that was on The Current and our Friday host Piya Chattopadhyay joins me in studio to check in on what you all have to say about it. Hi

PIYA CHATTOPADHYAY: It will take more than 30 seconds to--

AMT: I'm just wound up. I love talking the future of journalism. [both laugh] And you may think I have opinions, I have even more, but we wonâ€™t go there.

PIYA CHATTOPADHYAY: Weâ€™ll talk about it later.

AMT: Letâ€™s get to it. Now that the federal government is launching the long awaited inquiry into missing and murdered indigenous women and girls, there are disturbing statistics about homicides of Indigenous men and boys. Of all Canadaâ€™s Aboriginal murder victims 71 percent are male. Tuesday on The Current we asked whether the inquiry should include men and boys in its scope.

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VOICE 1: People have been thinking that the men and the boys should be included, but it's just now being spoken of. We have a database from our First Nation, the Mikisew Cree, and tragically there's a common theme amongst the families where there's multiple victims of either missing or murdered people. Those numbers include about 30 per cent of our database being men and boys.

VOICE 2: Simply putting the two together, we are going to be losing sight of the issues that are going on, the circumstances, because of the differences in the kinds of homicide, which would ultimately be a disservice to both groups.

PIYA CHATTOPADHYAY: Well, after hearing that, Janet Collins of Kingston, Ontario had this to say: â€œI agree that the two should not be mixed together. The significant issue for women is the sexual use and abuse of women. For boys and men it is simply raw racism. The government should establish a separate investigation of the missing and murdered boys and men, then when both are completed put them together.â€ And Carrie Aston shared this view from Edmonton: â€œThe second men get put on the list, they will draw the money and attention and get things changed for them. Once the men have got what they want, the issue goes away and the women are left with nothing. â€œ

AMT: Well, moving on to another story you might expect is best asbestos-related illnesses to be on the decline, but new figures from Statistics Canada say they are not only on the rise there is no end in sight. Research released last week shows that the number of cases and deaths from mesothelioma has doubled in the last 20 years and it's continuing to go up. And that is only part of the picture. Stephen Bornstein is a professor and director of the Safety Net Research Centre at Memorial University. We've reached him in St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador. Hello.

STEPHEN BORNSTEIN: Good Morning.

AMT: What's your reaction when you hear those figures from Stats Canada?

STEPHEN BORNSTEIN: Well, everybodyâ€™s surprised, but I'm not. There's still an enormous amount of asbestos out in the Canadian marketplace and homes. People are still exposed to asbestos, but, in particular, the reason Iâ€™m not surprised is that asbestos-related diseases, not just mesothelioma, but also asbestosis and lung cancer and other kinds of asbestos-related diseases have what's called a very long latency period. That is the period that needs to pass between your first exposure and when you start getting symptoms. That can be up to 40 or 50 years for mesothelioma and lung cancer and ten to 20years for some of the other diseases like asbestosis. So since there's still a lot of asbestos out there in Canada- weâ€™ve banned it- but since in particular we were very heavy producers and users all the way into the 1980s and nineties, if you add 40 to 50 years to that what you're going to get is a rising curve for the next 20 or 30 years. Also, we're getting better at diagnosing and detecting and recording these diseases, so those numbers are going to go up too.

AMT: Well, let's talk about recording, because you've done research in the Newfoundland town of Baivert which used to be an asbestos mining town. What have you been learning?

STEPHEN BORNSTEIN: Well, we got a contract from the Workers Comp Board to do a registry for all the former workers of that mine and mill who were willing to join. And we got 1,006 workers to register and give us their work history and their health history. And what we found was that almost 200 of them had confirmed cases of asbestos-related diseases.

AMT: Thatâ€™s high.

STEPHEN BORNSTEIN: Yeah, itâ€™s very high. It's up near 20 percent.

AMT: And these were people who had worked for years in the mine?

STEPHEN BORNSTEIN: The average worker worked there for roughly ten years. It was one of the only good employers in the small town. If you got a job there, you stayed there.

AMT: And the mine closed, actually, didn't it?

STEPHEN BORNSTEIN: Yeah, it closed a number of times and then closed finally in 1994.

AMT: Okay. So when it started, like, what kind of exposure are we talking about? Was this the exposure of just of the workers mining without proper equipment? What was the exposure?

STEPHEN BORNSTEIN: Well, the hygiene conditions were very, very poor. There was asbestos in the air, inside the buildings, outside. People were very heavily exposed. But not only were the miners exposed, their family members were exposed, then people in a town were exposed. The workers would go home in their work clothes and their kids and wives would hug them- these are 99 percent men- the women, the wives would wash their clothes, be exposed to asbestos. There was a lot of wind. Newfoundland is a very windy place. The town had a lot of asbestos in the environment. So people told us, when we were in meetings there, that they would go out in the morning to start their cars and have to run the windshiels wipers to get the dust off the windshield.

AMT: Wow. What about-- Would it be on the ground too then? Would it be on the flowers?

STEPHEN BORNSTEIN: We had people who told us that they thought strawberries were white.

AMT: Because there was so much asbestos dust on them?

STEPHEN BORNSTEIN: Yeah.

AMT: So these are the people you're tracking now?

STEPHEN BORNSTEIN: We have tracked them. We have 1,006 in our registry, but we only tracked former employees because this registry was organized by Workers Comp and what they're concerned about is workers.

AMT: Okay, so not their families and you're making the point that families--

STEPHEN BORNSTEIN: No.

AMT: So, whoâ€™s at risk now? We're talking about places where the mines were. What about in places where it was in our walls at one point?

STEPHEN BORNSTEIN: Still in our walls. It's in industrial sites, boilers are wrapped in it, boiler pipes, steam pipes are wrapped in it, car parts often contain it and still do- all brake shoes and brake pads in cars used to be made with asbestos. Now most of them aren't, but we still import some that are. The joint compound that holds plasterboard together often has asbestos in it. Pipes through which water runs are often reinforced with asbestos. Itâ€™s all over the place.

AMT: Well, last summer the federal government revised its position on asbestos and it acknowledged that all forms of asbestos are dangerous. Is there any safe level of exposure?

STEPHEN BORNSTEIN: There's no safe level. Obviously, the more exposed you are the higher your risk, the same as with cigarettes. The more cigarettes you smoke for longer the bigger your risk is of lung cancer. The same is exactly true with asbestos. But there's no level at which you are totally safe.

AMT: How do you know if you're exposed?

STEPHEN BORNSTEIN: You might know if you recognize what asbestos looked like and happened to do some construction or renovation work and bump into white powdery stuff. But the only way to really tell if you have, not only been exposed, but have actually started developing symptoms is to go to your doctor and tell him or her about the possible exposure and ask for an X-Ray or a CT scan.

AMT: But, again, sometimes the symptoms won't show up for decades?

STEPHEN BORNSTEIN: No, but you still might be able to see fibres in your lungs.

AMT: So how worried should people be?

STEPHEN BORNSTEIN: We should be worried. We should ban it. Weâ€™re one of the few developed countries in the world that does not have a total ban on asbestos.

AMT: Okay. Well, Stephen Bornstein, thank you for bringing us up to date.

STEPHEN BORNSTEIN: You're welcome.

AMT: Oh, sobering thoughts there. Stephen Bornstein, professor and director of the SafetyNet Research Centre at Memorial University in St Johnâ€™s.

PIYA CHATTOPADHYAY: All right. Let us move on now to a story from last week.

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VOICE: Drop the knife now!

REPORTER: According to his family, Sammy Yatim wasn't mentally ill, but as he rode the Dundas line late that July night, Yatim was acting very strange, even threatening fellow passengers with a knife. For many people, that still wasn't enough to justify what happened next.

PIYA CHATTOPADHYAY: Well, a Toronto jury found Constable James Forcillo guilty of attempted murder in the death of Sammy Yatime, and not guilty of second degree murder or manslaughter. Here on The Current, before that verdict came in, we explored the subject of lethal encounters between police and people in crisis. Anna Maria Tremonti was joined by filmmaker Helen Slinger to talk about Helen's documentary Hold Your Fire. Here's Helen describing a scene from the film where police in the United Kingdom surround someone who's wielding a machete.

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HELEN SLINGER: What they do is they just keep moving behind their cars. They try and push a garbage bin at him to contain him. That doesn't work. He rages back out. They move back to the cars. You can almost feel them, see them in this video keeping their heart rates down, just staying calm until shield officers arrive. They gently, slowly move in, surround the man, take him down to the ground. He goes off to hospital and he's since been released.

AMT: Well, after that interview, a listener in Ottawa shared this view: â€œI would say police work in public settings falls into two categories - Proactive, meaning establishing and maintaining a calm presence to prevent crime and the opportunity for it. And reactive, meaning dealing with crimes in progress or after the fact. Doing a good job in the first category would reduce the need for the sometimes questionable job being done in the second category.â€ Bruce Brown of Thunder Bay, Ontario wrote: â€œWhy are police so poorly trained, or such bad marksmen, that they killed the people described in your program instead of shooting to stop them from aggressive behaviour? How can these deaths be justified when a non-lethal shot would almost always have the desired effect?â€

PIYA CHATTOPADHYAY: On Twitter, Alex Meyers says: â€œIt's about â€˜command and controlâ€™ for cops. They expect total obedience, especially from people in crisis.â€ And we also got this one from Ron Bos who writes: â€œIt is ludicrous to suggest running around garbage bins, hiding from a machete-wielding crazed man in a downtown urban setting. The reality is crowds gather. Do you put them at risk waiting for a shield? Ridiculous! Cops lives matter too.â€

Attacks on Yemen health facilities flout rules of war, says MSF

AMT: Okay, moving on now. In December we brought you a story about the ongoing war in Yemen and the fact that the United Arab Emirates has brought in mercenary soldiers from Latin America to that conflict. At the time, we spoke with Mark Mazzetti, the national security correspondent for The New York Times.

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MARK MAZZETTI: Countries like UAE and Saudi Arabia, which have for decades resisted getting involved in ground combat, are all of a sudden inserting themselves into wars across the Middle East. They're getting involved against ISIS, theyâ€™re getting involved in Libya, and also Yemen. So, countries without a long history of military service are being stretched thin. So, you would see the, perhaps, appeal for a small country, like the UAE which is trying to flex its muscles across the region, might be looking for troops elsewhere. So there is a pipeline of Latin American troops going into the UAE right now.

AMT: Okay. Well, the war in the poorest country in the Middle East has escalated. It did escalate in March when a Saudi-led coalition launched airstrikes against the Houthi rebels. Yesterday, The Guardian newspaper revealed that a UN expert panel documented 119 violations of international humanitarian law by that coalition. These are related to attacks on civilian targets including medical facilities. The panel also said that Houthi rebels are violating international laws by positioning themselves in residential areas. Montreal nurse CÃ©line Langlois worked as a medical coordinator with MSFâ€™s emergency team in Yemen from July to November of this past year. She joins us from Montreal. Hello.

CÃ‰LINE LANGLOIS: Good morning.

AMT: MÃ©decins Sans FrontiÃ¨res says that three of its health facilities in Yemen have come under attack. What's been happening?

CÃ‰LINE LANGLOIS: Well, actually this is a good question and this is what we are also asking to the international community. We are asking for an investigation on what is happening. The first attack was in October. And then after that we got a second one in December in Taiz. And then the last one was in January.

AMT: What kind of threats were you facing when you were working there?

CÃ‰LINE LANGLOIS: Well, it depends where you are in the Yemen. If you're in Sanaa and mostly in the north, then you would be exposed to air strikes. And this is every day. If you more in the south or if you are at the front line and then this is cross-firing snipers, tanks, shelling. So, it really depends.

AMT: And you were there last year. If I remember correctly, everybody was pulling out. Everybody was pulling their diplomats out and you went in.

CÃ‰LINE LANGLOIS: Yeah, well, this is what we are also seeing in Yemen at the moment in the field itâ€™s mostly MSF that can move and can do activities. Most of the UN are, I would say, stuck in Sanaa. They don't move as much as us. So this is why it's really an important to know and to understand what is happening. Why are we targeting health facilities, because we also want to make sure that we can still work in Yemen.

CÃ‰LINE LANGLOIS: I was the medical coordinator. I was there, actually, to open the Taiz project. Taiz is a city of about one million people living there and then we supported hospitals for the war wounded and we also opened a hospital mothers and children exclusively.

AMT: And how difficult was it to work with these places getting attacked then?

CÃ‰LINE LANGLOIS: Yeah. Taiz is really, itâ€™s a particular place to work in because it's directly at the front line. So, basically we are having a hospital on one side and then other hospitals on the other side. And what we are facing as challenges is to try to bring supplies on both sides. Yeah.

AMT: And could you get supplies in?

CÃ‰LINE LANGLOIS: Well, this is one of the main issues that we are facing at the moment. When I arrived in July there was, you know, we were having a discussion with the authorities, with the Houthis trying to make them understand that we have to bring our supplies on the other side, which is the South. And then, you know, it was difficult. But then we were still able to bring supplies. From August, discussions were getting more and more difficult. We were facing more obstructions and we were not able to bring any supplies for at least five months, which is quite something when you know that there is an active front line and there is a lot of war wounded your hospital. But we were stuck on the other side, not being able to bring any supplies.

AMT: What's that like to be part of a medical facility in the midst of a combat zone and you can't get medical supplies? Like, what doesn't get done? Who doesnâ€™t get help?

CÃ‰LINE LANGLOIS: Yeah, exactly. So, then what is happening in Yemen at the moment is that most of the patients being treated at the moment are war wounded. So if you have any chronic disease, like diabetes, hypertension, you are not getting any medical care at the moment. So, the health system is completely collapsing. And then staff are also fleeing outside of the country or, you know, being displaced. So, then you are getting empty hospital with no staff and no supplies.

AMT: And you had a mother and child centre in there, so what kinds of-- Who are you seeing?

CÃ‰LINE LANGLOIS: Well, actually this is-- Yeah, we are we are quite proud of this. This is a brand new MSF hospital that we opened last November. So it's the only mother and child hospital for the whole Tiaz city and we are getting every woman that wants to deliver, but also, every kid, because, at the moment in Tiaz, if you are mother or child and you don't have any access to healthcare.

AMT: Wow. I'm wondering what the impact was on the civilians you were seeing then. Like, what was it like for them?

CÃ‰LINE LANGLOIS: Well, this war, yeah, is really, I would say, is affecting civilians because thereâ€™s an embargo in the country, so, of course, if you-- Every food in Yemen, 90 percent of the food is being imported. So now it's being stopped. So food, you know, the price has gone up. There is no petrol. Civilians are all being trapped in this war between front lines. You know, they are bombing schools, they are bombing hospitals, so the main victims are the civilians at the moment.

AMT: And you're saying that canâ€™t even get medical help that they really need.

CÃ‰LINE LANGLOIS: They canâ€™t.

AMT: Itâ€™s just not there. So, if somebody has a burn, like, what do you do?

CÃ‰LINE LANGLOIS: Well, we, I mean, we at MSF, we look at what is showing up in our hospitals and are really trying to make the best out of it. Sometimes we will transfer our [indecipherable] patients to another healthcare facility. But, yeah, we are trying to, you know, we have to be very creative in the way that we are practicing medicine at the moment, because we can do as we are used to.

AMT: We're talking about the impact on civilians. What about the impact on you? How tough was this for you to see this kind of thing?

CÃ‰LINE LANGLOIS: Well, of course, if you spend a few months in the in Yemen, there's a high chance of you getting out of it with some kind of post-traumatic stress. I think this is normal and this is happening. But my main concern is the people that have been in Yemen since the beginning of the war, which was March. Now it's almost a year. And these people, they actually cannot get any help for mental health.

AMT: So, youâ€™re saying you do have PTSD?

CÃ‰LINE LANGLOIS: Yes, but this is something that people get out of Yemen with sometimes.

AMT: Youâ€™re so matter of fact. MSF all the way. The UN Food Program this week did get some food into the Tiaz area, but you're saying it's really difficult.

CÃ‰LINE LANGLOIS: Well, this is what we are also seeing when sometimes the UN are sending convoys, it's something to bring something inside Tiaz because in Tiaz we have this enclave. Where we are, we are having problems bringing in supplies. But it's another question to know if this food really reached the target population or if, you know, it got between hands that itâ€™s not supposed to go through.

AMT: Are you going back?

CÃ‰LINE LANGLOIS: Maybe in July, yes.

AMT: Okay. Well, thank you for bringing us up to date and thank you for your work.

CÃ‰LINE LANGLOIS: Thank you.

AMT: That is CÃ©line Langlois. She is a nurse. She's worked as a medical coordinator with the emergency team of MSF, MÃ©decins Sans FrontiÃ¨res/Doctors Without Borders in Yemen from July to November of 2015. And, as you heard, she's going back.

PIYA CHATTOPADHYAY: All right. Let's talk about another story that we covered here yesterday on The Current when you had a discussion about what's being called Canada's first Twitter trial. An Ontario judge found Gregory Alan Elliott not guilty of criminal harassment for his interactions with two women on the social network. And after she tweeted about the case, Buzzfeed Canada social news editor Lauren Strapagiel says she was trolled for days.

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I feel like when we talk about Twitter or Facebook or other platforms and what they can or have done or can do better, we are limiting the conversation because these are global companies and there is a limit to how far they can take that protection. There will come a point where these trolls and these threats cross over into real lives, like they do for me. I get snail mail sent to my work.

AMT: Well, that story definitely filled up our Twitter feed yesterday. And that was Saadia Muzaffar that we heard at the end.

PIYA CHATTOPADHYAY: Yeah, that wasnâ€™t Lauren.

AMT: Yeah, we heard from both, actually, Lauren Strapagiel and Saadia Muzaffar. And it filled up the Twitter feed. Patrick Dion tweets: â€œApplaud Lauren Strapagiel's leadership and determined approach. May support for strong voices never wane.â€

PIYA CHATTOPADHYAY: Lenore Lukasik-Foss tweeted: â€œThe criminal system needs to seriously catch up in dealing with online harassment. â€œ Robert Speirs tweeted a different perspective on the case: â€œTweeting opposing political views, even persistently, is not harassment.â€

AMT: After that segment aired, we also heard from Chris Murphy, the lawyer who defended Gregory Alan Elliott in the Twitter case. He says the judgment should be, quoate, "trumpeted by women on Twitter.â€ He goes on to say, quote, "The people who sent your guest photographs of mutilated corpses should be arrested for uttering a death threat on Twitter. If arrests were made in each such case, the prosecution would have to provide the Court with only one case to obtain a conviction: that would be the judgment in R versus Gregory Alan Elliott." End quote.

[music]

PIYA CHATTOPADHYAY: And it is now time to give credit where credit is due. The week that was here on The Current was produced by Idella Sturino, Shannon Higgins, Howard Goldenthal, Kinsey Clarke, Ines Colabrese, Julian Uzielli, Pacinthe Mattar, Marino Greco, Sujata Berry, Liz Hoath, Marc Apollonio, Catherine Kalbfleisch, John Chipman, Leif Zapf-Gilje and Karin Marley.

AMT: And special thanks to our network producers, Suzanne Dufresne in Winnipeg, Mary Lynk in Halifax, Matthew Kupfer in Ottawa and CBC producer Elaine Chau in Vancouver. The Current's writer is Peter Mitton. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Our technicians are Carole Ito and Jennifer Rowley. Our senior documentary editor is Joan Webber.

PIYA CHATTOPADHYAY: Our senior producers are Richard Goddard here in Toronto and Cathy Simon in Vancouver. And the executive producer of The Current is Kathleen Goldhar.

AMT: To add to anything you hear on The Current, weigh in by tweeting us @TheCurrentCBC. If you want to join the conversation about our season-long project Ripple Effect, make sure to use the hashtag #RippleCBC. You can find all our Ripple Effect stories by going to our website and clicking on Features. That's all at cbc.ca/thecurrent.

PIYA CHATTOPADHYAY: On Facebook, you can do that too. You can also e-mail us from our website cbc.ca/thecurrent. While you're there, subscribe to our podcast or check out the links and all the sorts of information about what we've been up to, cbc.ca/thecurrent is the place to go.

AMT: Piya Chattopadhyay, Friday host of The Current. Now that is our program for today. Now, as promised earlier, we have a last word today from Juan F. Thompson. He was talking about what it was like to grow up with the notorious â€œgonzoâ€ journalists Hunter S. Thompson for a father. If you missed it, download our podcast cbc.ca/thecurrent dot ca. Here is Juan Thompson once more on fulfilling the outrageous dying wish of his dad's with some help from Johnny Depp. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. Thank you for listening to The Current.

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JUAN F. THOMPSON: He'd made it clear for years that he wanted, when he died he wanted to be, his ashes to be shot out of a cannon. So, he wanted it set up on this cliff way behind the house. And heâ€™d actually mentioned it, like, a couple days before he died, that, you know, I want to I want that cannon, you know. It's like, yeah, sure, okay, whatever. And then over a six-month period we came up with this plan. They figured out how to build this giant cannon. And it all came together one night. There was probably four or five hundred people there. I just remember when it finally culminated in the unveiling of the cannon, it was in this gigantic, you know, red cloth shroud. And the lights are shining on it. Itâ€™s night, of course. The lights are shining on it, they pull back the shroud, and then this just beautiful, monstrous, you know, statue/cannon thatâ€™s exposed with a light shining on it. And I remember it was kind of rainy and the clouds were low. And the spot lights are shining on the fist and casting a shadow fist on the low lying clouds. And it was just, it was just breathtaking.

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January 28, 2016 Episode Transcript

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