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The Current Transcript for June 15, 2016

Host: Anna Maria Tremonti

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

I used to play with the boys, you know, all stereotypical games, I was a tom boy, never interested in dolls. The only doll I had, I burned it.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: He remembers always seeing himself as a boy, but as an intersex child, the doctors had other plans. They performed surgery to make a girl, even created a vagina for him. Now, like a growing number of people who are intersex- people whose reproductive or sexual anatomy doesn't fit the norm- he is opposed to surgical intervention on intersex babies and young children. This issue is at the heart of a court case underway in the U.S., and Canadian intersex individuals say its impact here could be profound. We will tell you more in half an hour. And later, a rising tide lifts all boasts.

SOUNDCLIP

160 billion tons of water flow through the Bay of Fundy in every tidal cycle. That's more than then combined flow of all the rivers in the world.

AMT: At the end point of Nova Scotia's Bay of Fundy in the Minas Basin, the tides can rise as high as 15 metres. The rush of water so rapid that the fish are sometimes shoved along sideways. Those hoping to harness that energy want to put giant turbines on the sea bed, but one very vocal lobster fisherman is already delaying the plan. We'll hear from him in an hour. And remember this?

SOUNDCLIP

So as we set out to defeat the divisive forces that would take freedom away, I want to say those fighting words, 'From My Cold Dead Hands!'

[loud applause]

AMT: That defiant statement from the late actor Charlton Heston came to embody the National Rifle Association's fight against gun control and its steely grip on U.S. lawmakers. Now, new research suggests the NRA is losing its grip to changing demographics. We're starting there. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti, this is The Current.

NRA's political influence on the wane, says gun control advocate

Guests: Timothy Johnson, John Lott, A.J. Somerset

SOUNDCLIP

I just came from a meeting today, in the situation room, in which I’ve got people who we know have been on ISIL websites, living here in the United States, U.S. citizens, and we're allowed to put them on the no-fly list when it comes to airlines, but because of the National Rifle Association, I cannot prohibit those people from buying a gun.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: Well, that is U.S. President Obama, at an Indiana town hall meeting earlier this month. Ten days later...

SOUNDCLIP

We were having the time of our lives. Three girls on their first night out on vacation, and we started hearing the gunshots. The gunman entered the bathroom and was shooting his machine gun. The bullet had shattered my femur bone in my right leg and a bullet had went through my left leg, and I'm still here.

AMT: That's Patience Carter, she survived the Orlando nightclub attack on the weekend. The shooter, Omar Mateen, had twice been investigated for suspected terrorist sympathies. But he was armed with an assault rifle and a handgun, and was able to kill 49 people before he was killed. The gun control debate that has followed this week has been familiar in many ways. The U.S. gun rights lobby, the National Rifle Association, has come out arguing that stronger gun laws won't deter terrorists. But in a changing country frustrated with an unending string of deadly mass shootings, that frustration with the NRA that you heard in President Obama's voice may be catching on -- and the NRA's influence may be beginning to slip. Timothy Johnson is the Guns and Public Safety Program Director for Media Matters, a media watchdog. He joins us from Washington, DC. Hello!

TIMOTHY JOHNSON: Hello, good morning. Thanks for having me on.

AMT: Well, you have been a gun control advocate for years. What was your reaction when you heard about the massacre in Orlando?

TIMOTHY JOHNSON: Well you know, I was shocked, even though I shouldn't be with, you know, how many of these terrible, terrible shooting we've had. I don't know how many times I've woken up to a text message, did you see what happened today? And the personal reaction is just, how can people be so cruel in this world? And then just seeing the number of victims, you think, why do we let people so easily access weaponry that can kill dozens of people in a mere matter of minutes?

AMT: And so the NRA has long been viewed as having an unshakable grip on U.S. politics, and you're arguing its influence is waning. Why do you say that?

TIMOTHY JOHNSON: Well, there's a couple reasons for this. I think the most prominent issue that the NRA faces is a demographics issue. So I'm sure I'm sure everyone has heard reports the United States over the past few years of huge booming gun sales, and I think that's probably true. But if you look at surveys of how many people own guns, you know, how many people personally own a gun, or what's household gun ownership, that's actually been declining for decades. So there may be a phenomenon where a smaller group of people are buying more and more guns personally, but overall, the NRA's demographic is going away: it's aging, it's mostly white. And so what they've done in recent years is they've done a number of efforts to reach out to women, young people, minorities. And the problem that faces them in this regard is that number one, those are all groups much less likely to own guns, but number two, the NRA has been demonizing these groups and attacking them, you know, saying horrible things about women, minorities, you know, for years. So they're facing a big problem, and I guess they're going to make a choice about what to do, but they don't really have any easy choices.

AMT: So you're saying as the demographics continue to shift, it will continue to lose members?

TIMOTHY JOHNSON: Yeah, I think so. And here's one example of it, so the NRA has done a lot of outreach to minorities lately. At the same time, on their board of directors is this guy named Ted Nugent who uses the n-word, who is involved in half a dozen racial controversies every year. This is the guy who very infamously called our president, President Obama, a subhuman mongrel. And the NRA will do nothing to condemn him, because he's so popular with their very activist base. So they want to use him for that regard, but then they also want to reach out to minorities, but it doesn't work because people will look at the NRA and see it as an organization that's willing to tolerate racism.

AMT: Well, at the same time, how much of a role does the NRA play in getting people elected to congress?

TIMOTHY JOHNSON: Right, that's another interesting issue. So I think it is very true that the NRA holds a lot of sway in congress. You saw that after Sandy Hook, they were basically able to step in and block a very modest proposal to expand background checks following the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. And the question that is raised is, well, is there influence proportionate? And increasingly, there's been a lot of data-driven research that's looked at this, they've analyzed recent federal election cycles and they found that the NRA doesn't really swing many races. Basically, a lot of times, they pick safe races in terms of endorsements, so they're not really swinging things one way or the other there. In terms of spending, they spread their money out too much. So I think politicians and the general public are becoming increasingly aware that this notion that we see a lot, kind of conventional wisdom that isn't true, that if you oppose the NRA's agenda, next election cycle, you're getting voted out. Well, I think more people are becoming aware that that is not the case.

AMT: And just briefly, how do you know what they have coming in, in terms of money? And what they have coming in?

TIMOTHY JOHNSON: So it's an organization with a budget of hundreds of millions of dollars per year, so they're still getting a lot of revenue, but in their most recent tax forms, it did come out that their revenue is going down in the tens of millions of dollars from one year to the next. So I think they're still going to be a very well-funded organization, but I'm sure that's something that they're seriously looking at, also. Actually, for the first time in years, they raised their dues this year, which could be a sign that they don't feel like they have enough money to do the type of political operations that they would like to do.

AMT: Timothy Johnson, stay with us, I want to hear from someone else has been listening in. John Lott is the founder and president of the Crime Prevention Research Center. It is a research and education organization that looks at guns and crime. He is the author of several books including More Guns, Less Crime and The Bias Against Guns. John Lott joins us from Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. Hello.

JOHN LOTT: Hi, thanks for having me on.

AMT: Well, what would you say to the argument that the NRA's influence is waning?

JOHN LOTT: Well, I mean, you just take the selective survey data that he was talking about. There's the general social science survey, which has shown a drop in gun ownership from 50 per cent down to about 32 percent over the last several decades, but there are other polls by Gallup, CNN, ABC, Washington Post, which show that gun ownership has been fairly flat. And if you look at things like concealed carry permits, those have ballooned from about 4.6 million in 2007 to about 13 million last year. If you look at things like FOID cards in states like Illinois, for example, that's about doubled in the last ten years. So there's actually evidence that these surveys may be understating the growth in gun ownership.

AMT: What about--

JOHN LOTT: But the big--

AMT: Go ahead.

JOHN LOTT: I mean, the biggest growth on things like concealed carry permits have been-- I mean, these are hard numbers here, we're not relying on surveys-- have been among blacks and among women. Those have been the two biggest groups in terms of growth. The growth in women having concealed carry permits has been about twice that for men over the last ten years.

AMT: What battles have gun rights activists won in recent years?

JOHN LOTT: Well, I mean, they've won quite a few, and it's not just the NRA. I mean, you have about 130 million Americans that own guns. And so you look at concealed carry now, every state in the country allows people to be able to go and carry permit concealed handguns, even Washington D.C. allows that now. You have 11 states where you don't even need a permit to be able to go and carry, other states have made it easier, in terms of reducing things like the fees that you have to pay in order to do

that. So I mean, it's not obvious to me why he says that they've been losing momentum on this, in terms of-- Look, there's two groups of people who benefit the most from owning guns: you basically have poor minorities, particularly blacks who live in high-crime urban areas, that people most likely to be victims of violent crime benefit the most from having the option to be able to go and protect themselves. The police are important, but the police almost always arrive on the crime scene after the crime has already been committed. The second group of people that benefit the most are people who are relatively weak or physically, women and the elderly. There's a lot of academic research that indicates that a woman having a gun benefits much more than a man does, because you have a larger strength differential between a male attacking a female victim and a male attacking a male victim.

AMT: Of course, there's also research that shows women are actually more vulnerable, not on the streets where they need a gun, but at home where the perpetrator calls them honey.

JOHN LOTT: Yeah but that's-- right. Well…

AMT: Domestic violence.

JOHN LOTT: The problem with, you know, well, that's not peer-reviewed research, that's by Bloomberg's group, okay? So if you look at peer-reviewed, actually academic research, that's not the case. And the reason why-- there's a problem when you look at what we call purely cross-sectional data, just looking at different places at the same point in time. I'll give you a simple example: a lot of people will say, look, the U.K. has a relatively low homicide rate, they have strict gun control, low gun ownership compared to the United States, so it must be the strict gun ownership gun control rules that causes the lower homicide rate. In fact, before they had these regulations, they had an even lower homicide rate relative to the United States, when they had the handgun ban in 1997.

AMT: Okay, John Lott, we're almost out of time.

JOHN LOTT: Their homicide rate went up by 50 per cent.

AMT: Okay, we're almost out of time. I'm interested, briefly, in your view on what should happen in the U.S. in response to Orlando.

JOHN LOTT: Well, I hope finally we get rid of these gun free zones. I mean, since 1950, with just three exceptions, every single mass public shooting has occurred were general citizens aren't allowed to have guns for protection. And that's happened again this last time in Orlando. I mean just a couple months ago, we had what would have been a mass public shooting in Detroit: a father had been concerned about his son's involvement in ISIS, had contacted the FBI, and the FBI recorded his telephone conversations. And he was planning on attacking one of the largest churches in the Detroit area. His main reason for doing it was twofold: one, there are a lot of people there; and two, he had checked and realized that the people there weren't able to have permitted concealed handguns. Whether you look at the Charleston case last year, where his first target was actually going to be Charleston College until he checked and realized the armed security that they had there, or the diary that came out for the Batman movie theatre shooter, where his original target was going to be an airport until he realized about the security that was there. There's seven movie theaters within a 20-minute drive of the killer's apartment.

AMT: Okay--

JOHN LOTT: The one he attacked was the only one that didn't allow people to protect themselves, time after time. And in Canada, too.

AMT: Okay, but John Lott, we're going to--

JOHN LOTT: The New Brunswick shooter had Facebook comics up about gun free zones.

AMT: Well, the Canadian laws are completely different, but we're going to leave it there now, John Lott. Thank you for your time. John Lott is the founder and president of the Crime Prevention Research Center. He was in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. We're going to go back to Timothy Johnson, the Guns and Public Safety Program Director for Media Matters. Timothy Johnson, briefly what's your response?

TIMOTHY JOHNSON: Respond to a couple of those points. You know, Mr. Lott is very good at throwing out a lot of claims during a short amount of time, but I think that often, they're not substantiated. And just for example, Mr. Lott just claimed that research showing that gun ownership poses a special danger to women, or that guns in the home are special risk to women, Mr. Lott claimed that that data comes from gun control groups, there's no peer-reviewed analysis. Well, I'm looking right now at a peer-reviewed analysis in the Annals of Internal Medicine about the accessibility of firearms, the risk for suicide and homicide victimization among household members. And according to that meta-analysis, when you have firearms in a home, it increases the danger that women will be murdered. So--

AMT: Okay, Timothy Johnson, I want you to speak to-- he says that your view that the NRA is losing its grip is flawed. Can you speak to that?

TIMOTHY JOHNSON: Sure. I think you have to look at perhaps what they would call the political high ground. I think that has shifted a lot against the NRA, particularly in the last 20 years or so. In the '90s and even into the 2000s, you had even what we would call blue dog Democrats in the United States, were strong NRA supporters, and that was very critical for the NRA either to block gun safety legislation, or to put forward their own agenda. And I think more and more, you're seeing that politicians are recognizing that the political high ground is on something with background checks. There's a lot of survey data, around 90 per cent of Americans support background checks; even when you poll gun owners and NRA members, they support background checks by strong majorities. So I think you have something where kind of the big debate about background checks, the NRA is very out of touch, and I think you see someone like Representative Bob Dold, a Republican, yesterday speaking on the floor of the house that we need some restrictions on firearms, I think you're going to see kind of a course correction where at some point, congress is going to be forced to come in line with the public opinion. And that leaves the NRA out.

AMT: Okay, we have to leave it there. Timothy Johnson, thanks for your time.

TIMOTHY JOHNSON: All right, thanks so much.

AMT: Timothy Johnson is the Guns and Public Safety Program Director for Media Matters, which is a media watchdog. He's in Washington, DC. We did ask the NRA to participate in our discussion today, it did not make anyone available. Whenever gun control flares up is an issue in the U.S., it soon becomes apparent just how far the two sides are from seeing eye to eye. A.J. Somerset is an author and gun owner who studied the issue from both sides for his book, Arms: The Culture and Credo of the Gun. He brings a Canadian perspective to the debate, he's in London, Ontario. Hello.

A.J. SOMERSET: Good morning.

AMT: Well, as you're listening, what are you thinking?

A.J. SOMERSET: Well, the same-old, same-old. You know, the debate in the United States is very polarized. And John Lott, for example, has been saying the same things for, well, since about 1998. And his story never changes, even after there have been serious questions raised about his fundamental honesty, nothing changes.

AMT: And so the gun control debate, as you point out, it's very polarized. In your view, do you think it's in the NRA's interest to keep it that way?

A.J. SOMERSET: It is absolutely in the NRA's interests to keep it that way. One of the unfortunate things that we've seen in the days since the Orlando shooting, if you look at Twitter, for example, you'll see an awful lot of people talking about their outrage and so on, and an awful lot of people essentially doing little more than to declare their allegiance to one side or the other, and we see very few people who are really focused on solutions.

AMT: And it's interesting, because I was just reading something, and I'll even quote it, from the New York Times yesterday that looks at a study that says after a mass shooting, the number of laws passed to loosen gun restrictions rose by 75 per cent. Now, they did take a-- it's over several years, from '89 to 2014, but the places where mass shootings happen lead to legislative changes in favor of guns being more easily available. How do you explain that?

A.J. SOMERSET: That's one of those strange and sort of perverse results we see. It could be that, you know, there's two competing narratives about mass shootings. We have most people, I think, see a mass shooting and they say, this is terrible, we must do something to stop it; but then you have other people who again, as John Lott was just saying, who say, well, we must be able to defend ourselves, we must stop gun free zones, and so on. And for some reason-- and I think partially related to the fact the United States is under us this threat of terror attack-- this has empowered that side of the debate. It has created momentum behind the idea of being armed to defend yourself. So it's almost as if in the minds of many Americans, they live day to day on a war footing.

AMT: And so just briefly before I let you go, what do you make of the news today in Canada, where there's a push to have the AR-15 made legal for hunting and more available?

A.J. SOMERSET: Well, it's not a surprise that the Liberal government has turned around and said they're not going to move on that petition. I think anybody would have predicted that from the get go. I've been aware of that petition for a long time. The timing, of course, I'd be a little bit cynical here and suggest that if I was Justin Trudeau looking at that petition being presented in Parliament, I would just sit and wait for the next mass shooting and then I'd, you know, have all the political capital I needed to shoot it down without so much as a peep of opposition. And that is more or less what has happened.

AMT: Okay, we have to leave it there. A.J. Somerset, thank you.

A.J. SOMERSET: All right, thank you.

AMT: A.J. Somerset, author of Arms: The Culture and Credo of the Gun. He's in London, Ontario. We want to hear from you: do you believe the NRA's clout could be diminishing in the U.S.? What are your thoughts on the gun control debate there? What about the push to make the AR-15 more easily available in Canada? Head to our website, cbc.ca/thecurrent. Click on the contact link to get in touch. Or you can tweet us ,we are @TheCurrentCBC. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti, this is The Current.

Stop gender assignment surgery on intersex children, says advocate

Guests: Morgan Holmes, Vic (not his real name)

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

[Music: Intro]

AMT: Still to come there is an awful lot of power in the Bay of Fundy tides but harnessing that power is proving to be controversial. We'll hear about the latest efforts to strike a balance between clean energy production and environmental protection in half an hour. But first, calls to and medical intervention on the bodies of intersex children and a heads up to anyone with younger listeners nearby we will be discussing the human body in this half hour.

SOUNDCLIP

Being intersex gives me a whole different perspective on life, so any different variation from the norm can do that, but it’s definitely something that I'm proud of. I wouldn't change it for anything.

AMT: That's Emily Quinn, a 26-year-old intersex woman in Salt Lake City, Utah. She was born with no uterus or ovaries. She has internal testes, she has XY chromosomes typical of most men, but in most other ways she is built like any other woman. Intersex people are those born with reproductive or sexual anatomies that don't fit the norm. Many hide the fact, afraid how others will react. And many have been subjected to medical interventions to alter their anatomy, often at a very young age. The interventions can involve years of repeated surgeries and hormonal therapies and they can result in long lasting physical and psychological trauma. Now a lawsuit in the state of South Carolina hopes to bring an end to such interventions on children. Intersex advocates on this side of the border are watching closely and they say the trial’s outcome will affect the lives in intersex infants here in Canada. Morgan Holmes is a professor of sociology at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario. She is an expert on how the medical community treats people who are intersex. She too, is intersex. Morgan Holmes joins us from Kitchener, hello.

MORGAN HOLMES: Good morning.

AMT: I want to talk about your story, but first can you pick up on that brief explanation I gave? What does it mean to be born intersex?

MORGAN HOLMES: It's fairly complicated, it isn't one thing. Intersex is a blanket term that is applied to infants and children who are apprehended usually before the age of puberty, or at the latest, around then because their bodies either combine, visually, features that we would associate at a common level with either male or female, or because they don't develop at puberty the characteristics that we would expect to align with the visual presentation of the child.

AMT: How common is it for children to be born intersex?

MORGAN HOLMES: That's always the million dollar question. Estimates vary anywhere from one to four percent of the population with a condition. The medical community tends to estimate lower and qualifies only those with a visual difference as truly intersex.

AMT: What typically happens when it's discovered that a baby or a child is intersex?

MORGAN HOLMES: Typically the medical community around that child panics, then the next step is to try to explain to the parents why they're panicking. In the early 1990s, a scholar Susan Kessler at SUNY Purchase did a very in-depth ethnography that demonstrated that the parents actually had to be taught with concerted effort to see their children as problematic; that they couldn't actually see what the issue was, and so they had to be persuaded to change their children's appearance.

AMT: You're telling me that this becomes the agenda of the medical community, not necessarily the parents.

MORGAN HOLMES: That's correct.

AMT: From what you've learned, how common is it then for intersex children to get a surgical intervention?

MORGAN HOLMES: It depends which historical period we're talking about and which geographical location. So, prior to the mid-twentieth century, surgeries simply didn't exist for this to be possible. The Second World War brought with it many cosmetic interventions and the post-war period really saw these interventions take off. The allowable difference for anatomy has really shrunk since the 1950s and typically what happens is that if an infant is born with a phallus that is anywhere between, the estimates go from nine millimeters in length to 2.5 centimeters in length, then that's not this or that as far as the medical community perceives it and so diagnostics go in, what are the cells, what is the chromosome profile of the child, then they label it biologically, and then they remove the tissue if they think it's not going to function adequately as male, which means to eventually be able to penetrate a woman's body, that's the sine qua non. If they can't do that then they assign female and they make sure that that phallus is less than nine millimeters in length.

AMT: That brings us to the lawsuit in South Carolina. The parents of an intersex boy are suing the hospitals and social services involved in his gender assignment intervention. Tell us a bit more about this case. What happened and why are they suing?

MORGAN HOLMES: This is a very interesting case and as you noted we are watching around the world. A little boy was born as a twin in South Carolina in 2006. Yes, he's now ten. The other twin passed away. The little boy went into state custody, the parents were not capable of caring for him, and while in state custody was diagnosed with an intersex condition that involves having a combination of a variant tissue and testicular tissue. So they determined that the phallus was not going to be adequate if he were to be assigned male, and so they removed that phallic structure, made it appropriately feminine and you need to see the scare quotes in my hands as I say that, built external appearing genitals, removed the testes from the sort of ovarian position, left the apparent ovary in place, and then sent the child off to be adopted at about age of 16 months, shortly after the surgery. But when the child began to be able to express linguistically who they were, they declared themselves male from extremely early on. For whatever fortunate circumstance, these parents said we respect this child and the surgeons blew it, and the hospital blew it and the state blew it.

AMT: So essentially because this was a child who could not give informed consent, obviously, at a very young age and they made this child physically a girl even though this child is a boy, essentially.

MORGAN HOLMES: The child had a bi-potential biology and could have chosen later to be female, or could have chosen later to be male—

AMT: But there was no choice. There was no choice allowed.

MORGAN HOLMES: The choice was removed. The choice was removed from them in infancy and that's what this really hinges on, is that the right to develop as oneself that most people enjoy and take for granted is removed from these children and the thing is that the surgery is irreversible. And obviously it wouldn't have been necessary for this child to have had surgical intervention even if they wanted to declare themselves female later because as a little child, you don't need to be presenting your genitals to people in order to say, you know I'm a girl. It could have happened when the child was able to say, yes I would like to have this effected in order to solidify this identity for myself. What they did, they cannot undo surgically.

AMT: Do you think the outcome of this case could have implications then for medical practitioners in Canada?

MORGAN HOLMES: Absolutely. I think everyone is on notice. The surgical procedures that are carried out here are often carried out by people who have trained in the United States, they've done their residencies, certainly the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Medical Association, the obstetrics and gynecology worlds, they all set this sort of standard of care and if it's determined that the standard of care in this case shows that it's actually very abusive, and this is been argument for the last quarter century, that it is abusive, that it interferes with what's called a developing autonomy, that it violates the child's right to bodily integrity, then those surgical fields the endocrinological fields, and the psych fields are going to have to take a step back in the entire Western world that uses the same standards and say you know what, we need to hold off on things that cannot be reversed and that are interfering with these children's integrity.

AMT: Well tell us about your own experience. What were you like physically when you were born?

MORGAN HOLMES: I was a two pound, three ounce premature infant. My father said I was the ugliest thing he'd ever seen because of being able to see right through your skin to your organs [laughs]. The priority was keeping me alive for the first three years, so I wasn't apprehended as problematic in my early infancy. When I was three, I had a nanny who came to my father and said to him, he was a single parent, I don't think that your little girl looks like other little girls that I've taken care of, and so off we went to the pediatrician who had never noted anything before. The pediatrician looked at me, looked at my medical files and said, right, okay, so we gave the mother progesterone while she was pregnant to try and prevent this early birth, and what they have done is “masculinized” in quotations, you were a little girl and so there's this somewhat enlarged clitoris. He said it's not a big deal, let's just leave it alone. But that meant active watching. As a little child, what that meant was going and having pelvic exams regularly to be actively watched. When I was just shy of seven, we moved to Ontario and my father was very concerned that I have a very good pediatrician and I fell into the wrong hands. I like to say that these people treat us like hockey cards; we get traded around in the medical records, so thank you for referring this you know, super-interesting case to me.

AMT: Is that what it said in your case?

MORGAN HOLMES: Yes. Yes, there were photographs taken, my photographs are missing from my medical file but they take crotch shots and they pass them around for clinical purposes, of course. It's fascinating that those photos disappeared from my clinical file, they're just written about. I constituted a fascinating case and I was then referred to a surgeon who was making a name for himself in this area at the Hospital for Sick Children, and he felt that he could intervene on my seven-year-old body and get rid of the offending appendage that they told my father would mean I couldn't wear pants because you know maybe it would become erect when I was older. I said to my dad, you know by that logic, men should never wear pants ever [laughs], and he kind of said, yeah you're right.

AMT: But there wasn’t logic.

MORGAN HOLMES: Yeah. The clitoris at the time of my surgery when I was seven was listed as being about two-and-a-half centimeters in length if they yanked on it, and they removed one-point-five centimeters from the middle and then they sewed the end back on to the stump and they wrote up in my report that they had produced a very pleasing cosmetic effect.

AMT: That must have hurt.

MORGAN HOLMES: It did. Not only you know, physically did it hurt, but I put together very quickly that this wasn't happening to my peers. They weren't disappearing for three weeks at a time off to hospital, and so I knew that I was somehow unusual in a way that I had not understood before, but my father said that his main motivation for allowing the surgery was because I had started to have temper tantrums about going for those active-watching pelvic exams and I had been freaking out more and more. Fundamentally, I experienced those as assaultive. Imagine being four, five, six, seven-years-old, and a group of men come in and they perform pelvic exams and they bring their friends in to have a look, and they poke around, and John Money, who is notorious for the terrible sort of protocols that he built around this, he said oh these little girls they report this is being like sexual assault, but you know they're not reliable witnesses.

AMT: Wow, so you're having quote unquote “temper tantrums” because you are being traumatized and they convinced your dad that that was part of your quote unquote “condition”, and that would improve with your surgery.

MORGAN HOLMES: That's correct.

AMT: How long did it take you to feel comfortable with yourself?

MORGAN HOLMES: My son was born when I was not quite 25, and it was only by being able to hold this tiny person in my arms who said to me, it's okay, I love you, that I had the courage to open those files and look at them and then it gave me the strength of you know, 10,000. That was in 1983, and I took on the world along with a very small number of activists out of the United States, and I've been sort of going at it ever since.

AMT: So when you say we would like to see the elimination of these surgeries on children, you speak from experience.

MORGAN HOLMES: I do.

AMT: I'm talking to Morgan Holmes who is in Kitchener, Ontario. Morgan, I have someone in the studio with me who's listening. Vic is an intersex sex man from Toronto. We're calling him Vic, it's not his real name. We agreed to withhold his name. Hello, Vic. He's listening. You were born outside of Canada, we're not going to name the country because your request for privacy, but talk to us a little bit about what it was like when you were born. What were you like?

VIC: I was basically just a regular kid, I guess. They assigned me as a girl on my birth certificate. They grew me as a girl, my parents brought me up as a girl. Doctors insisted on re-directing me which is like removing part of the clitoris. It was too big for them, and the doctor said now you can grow a girl. Until 15, I was basically a tomboy, never interested in dolls. I used to play with the boys so played all the stereotypical games with the boys and at the age of 15, they realized that the previous diagnosis was wrong. They gave the proper diagnosis which is Partial Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome. So, I had this undescended testes, I had XY chromosome, in practice I was a boy and I didn't have any periods, I didn't have breast development and I was prescribed estrogens to remove the testicles, remove everything and created, this is called column vagina, which is like if you don't have a vagina, you can get one out of your piece of your intestine. It's really bad. I didn't want to have the surgery. It was painful. So then I came here and when I figured out already at home, I had started my riots against my parents. I said, what the heck have you done? I pretty much lost all my youth. It’s gone. I don’t look that old, but still.

AMT: How old are you?

VIC: Right how I’m over 30.

AMT: You look much, much younger, but that's because of all of the surgeries you’ve had.

VIC: Yeah, well not the surgeries, it’s hormonal aspect of it.

AMT: So let me just understand. They decided you were a girl when you were young, they did that first operation to reduce the phallus and make it a clitoris, and then they created a vagina for you when you were in your mid-teens, and removed your testicles. They made a mistake, then. Then they compounded it.

VIC: Yes, so they didn’t want to change it. They didn’t want to admit it.

AMT: Do you identify as male now? How do you identify?

VIC: Yes, I identify as a male but if I had any other choice, I would identify that. By this binary system we have right now, we are just lying to ourselves.

AMT: Have you been able to have, or is there surgery available that you would choose to have now to change something or to reverse? I don’t know if you can reverse anything. It sounds like from what Morgan was saying, you can’t.

VIC: When I came here, actually last year, I had surgery to remove whatever had been done before. They call it vaginaplasty. It was hurtful, it was, you know I feel relieved right. I just done have to go like every hour to the washroom, it was ridiculous. I’m really thankful for the doctors and the social worker I found just by accident.

AMT: Morgan, as you listen to Vic, what are you thinking?

MORGAN HOLMES: I am having many, many thoughts. One is that while yes of course, it's possible to do these invasive surgeries like the building of a neo-vagina and thank goodness for that, there are things that I hear Vic telling us that simply cannot be undone because it really isn't only the surgery. It's the things that are written about us, it's the ways that we are perceived, it's the ways that the bodies are subject to interventions that other children simply do not have to endure, and you can’t undo that. You cannot assault somebody and then take it back, and this is what the E.U. has determined, is that these are forms of torture carried out on some children because society around them is intolerant of their appearance. I need to stress that their appearance is not hideous, their appearance unsettles certain assumptions about how easy it is to be either male or female and it's the only biological possibility. This is what we're taught in high school, this is what we're taught in health, and so it unsettles those things. I need to stress that when you pick up an intersex infant, those children are beautiful. They're every bit as beautiful as anybody else's child and sometimes the surgeries go wrong and they die, and sometimes what happens is that bits and pieces of our souls, for lack of a better word, our hearts, are turned into crystallized bits that you know, I say they fall off and rattle around my torso like bits of glass inside a cage and you can't fix that with a later surgery. I found that even a person who loves me dearly, I've been with my spouse for 28 years, he can't fix it either. There is nothing that he can do to undo the lesson that you are so hideous that you cannot be loved.

AMT: Vic, do you want to add to that?

VIC: I just want whatever was with me when I was born, and I want to die like when I was born, you know, untouched.

AMT: You want you want what you had when you were born. You don't want—

VIC: --any extra. I don't want normal. I’m not normal, like what's normal, right?

AMT: I was just going to say, what’s normal? Also what you're telling me is you went through all of this pain because somebody decided it would be easier to “accept” quote unquote, but in fact it would have been far better for you to accept yourself had they left you alone.

VIC: Exactly.

AMT: What would you tell a parent, or parents of an intersex baby? What do you want them to know to think about?

VIC: Just listen to your kids, you know. Don't do disorders, that's—don’t do disorders.

AMT: Morgan?

AMT: It's funny you should ask that. I know that we were hoping to be joined today by young woman that I've known since she was a tiny baby, and her mother phoned me and she said what do I do? The physicians are scaring me and I said, what you do is you love this baby, and she said if I let my little girl play with trucks, is it going to be okay? And I said sure, it's going to be okay, and she wrote me an email and she said you know, she sleeps with her truck, and she sleeps with her dolls and she's beautiful. Now she's 19-years-old and she has never had to doubt the love of her mother who protected her from so much interference. She's strong and she has integrity. She has incredible belief in herself and that's what I tell parents is, look, you have a beautiful kid. Love them. If the child at 14-15 years old says you know I'm interested in having an intimate life and I'm not comfortable with this anatomy, then you start to explore what the possibilities are for that child. You don't push, you don't pull, you listen.

AMT: Thank you both for sharing your stories and your ideas and your passion. Morgan Holmes is a professor of sociology at Wilfred Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario. She has published two books on intersex medicine and the law, including Intersex: A Perilous Difference, she joined us from our studio in Kitchener, Ontario. Vic lives and works in Toronto. Vic is not his real name, we're using a different name in order to protect his privacy. Both guests are intersex. Now, we did ask the Canadian Medical Association, the Canadian Pediatric Society, and the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada about policies and protocols regarding intersex births. We have yet to hear back. We will report when we do. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti, this is The Current on CBC Radio One, Sirius XM and online on cbc.ca/thecurrent.

[Music: Extro]

Bay of Fundy tidal turbines on hold over environmental concerns

Guests: Colin Sproul, Graham Daborn, Trevor Avery

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

SOUNDCLIP

The Bay of Fundy is the best tidal power energy site in the world, both because of the amount of water and how fast it goes. 160 billion tons of water flow through the Bay of Fundy on every tidal cycle. That’s more than the combined flow of all the rivers in the world. If we're able to harness all of the power, just within the Minas Passage alone, it is enough to power all of the homes in Nova Scotia.

AMT: Well, powerful stuff indeed, but it's proving complicated to harness. What you just heard is from a video made by The Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency, touting the promise of tidal power in the Bay of Fundy. With all that promise there have been efforts made already. In 2009, a ten million dollar turbine was placed in the area only to have its blades ripped off by the powerful current, and now a company called Cape Sharp Tidal Venture Incorporated has made two even larger turbines for the site. Each resembles a massive jet engine, five stories tall, weighing 300 tons. Together they can generate enough hydro power for about 1,000 homes. The company hopes to have several more on the site by 2019, but the project is proving controversial as some fishermen and scientists are concerned about the impact the turbines can have on an important diverse marine ecosystem. Earlier this month, just days before the first turbine was about to be installed on the ocean floor, the company and the provincial government put the installation on hold due to the negative response. One of those speaking out against the project is Colin Sproul. He speaks for the Bay of Fundy Inshore Fishermen's Association and joins us from our studio in Halifax. Hi, Mr. Sproul.

COLIN SPROUL: Hi, Anna Maria, thank you for having me on.

AMT: Now, you're a fifth generation lobster fisherman, am I right?

COLIN SPROUL: Yes, yes you are right.

AMT: Okay, and why is the Minas Basin so important to you and other fisherman?

COLIN SPROUL: Well, it relates to its potential as the largest spawning ground for American lobster in the world, as well as many other commercially valuable species. It's also a critical migration route to spawning grounds for many species at risk.

AMT: And just for those who aren't really familiar with the Nova Scotia landscape, just explain where the Minas Basin is.

COLIN SPROUL: It is at the upper extremity of the Bay of Fundy and the water there is six degrees warmer than anywhere else on the Eastern Seaboard north of Chesapeake Bay. That's the reason for the spawning animals to be drawn there from thousands of kilometers away.

AMT: When the animals spawn there, where do they end up later? The tide pulls them back out?

COLIN SPROUL: Well the larva and zooplankton that they spawn rises in the water column and exits the Minas Basin through the Minas Passage and populates the entire Gulf of Maine with its riches.

AMT: And that area has some of the highest tides. I was looking at last night and it's like 15 metres the tide can go.

COLIN SPROUL: Yes, they're the highest in the world. It's similar to a hurricane four times a day.

AMT: Because it's going to really narrow place, right by Cape Split? How wide is that space that the tide goes through; that rushes through?

COLIN SPROUL: It's kilometers wide, but the topography underneath the water forces the majority of the water flow and thus the majority of marine life into a tiny spot on the north side of the Minas Passage. It's exactly into this area that FORCE and Cape Sharp Tidal intend to install these turbines. The small percentage of this cross-section that these machines are proposed for is the most important cross-section of the entire Bay of Fundy. FORCE has completely missed our point. There is no higher concentration of marine life in Canada's oceans. We need to start thinking in terms of the life present, and not only of dollars to be extracted from the Passage.

AMT: And FORCE is the Fundy Ocean Research for Energy. What kind of marine life is in there? Give me a rundown.

COLIN SPROUL: Many species at risk, including the harbour porpoise, striped bass, American eel, Mud pittock, white shark and countless others.

AMT: And so when this began, the researchers said the fish would be able to avoid the turbines the same way they avoid rocks and other obstacles.

COLIN SPROUL: Well, the extreme turbidity and low visibility in the Minas Passage precludes any notion of avoidance of these machines by animals. FORCE has put forth the extreme level of noise generated by the turbines as a method to help fish avoid them, but when you dig into the research you realize that the Doppler effect concentrates the noise downstream from the turbine, so species receive little auditory warning.

AMT: When the Federal Department of Fisheries, the DFO, has said that putting those turbines in the Minas Passage won't result, I’m quoting here “will not result in serious harm to fish”. Why do you say otherwise?

COLIN SPROUL: Well, the responsibility of the DFO on this issue is to provide oversight and advice to the provincial department of the environment. DFO we're the ones who originally cited all of these problems. They found them so grave, and the environmental monitoring policy so lacking, that they sent those policies to the Canadian Science Advisory Secretariat for review and they've issued a scathing review on behalf of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. DFO bureaucrats here in Nova Scotia have still reserved their judgment on this issue.

AMT: And you've also raised concerns about marine mammals, whales in particular, what are your concerns?

COLIN SPROUL: The protocols used to study marine mammals in the Minas Passage were cited by the Canadian Science Advisory Secretariat as being substandard. They were designed for sea bird studies and not marine mammals. Even using the sub-optimal protocols, researchers cited 42 individual whales in a 300 metre radius of the turbine site in one tidal cycle. This represents one of the highest concentrations of whales ever observed in Canadian waters where they intend to install a completely unshielded turbine.

AMT: So, what are you saying? The whales will get caught in the turbines?

COLIN SPROUL: Certainly. I've seen FORCE’s methods proposed to study the effects on the porpoise herd and the only method they've devised to study the effects are to count carcasses post installation.

AMT: So, in other words, if they want to know how bad it is, they just wait to see what turns up dead and chopped up?

COLIN SPROUL: Yes, that appears to be the case.

AMT: Okay, so what are you asking for?

COLIN SPROUL: We're asking for an independent baseline study of the Minas Passage with oversight from the Department of Fisheries and Oceans and oversight from affected historical stakeholders.

AMT: And when you say a baseline study, what do you want to know?

COLIN SPROUL: FORCE’s method to manage the effects of this turbine is to accurately measure the baseline, what the ecology is in the Minas Passage, then put in a machine and assess the effects of this machine on the ecology. Yet the Canadian Science Advisory Secretariat has identified their baseline as grossly inadequate. Without this accurate baseline, there will be no way in the future to gauge what effects have happened, or to mitigate them.

AMT: So you actually don't know what's in there, so you can't tell if it starts to diminish.

COLIN SPROUL: We, as fishermen, know precisely what is in the Minas Passage. We have generations of the historical record to tell us that. We know, without the Canadian Science Advisory Secretariat telling us that the Minas Passage is abundant with marine life and that is in complete opposition to what FORCE found there with their science.

AMT: You’re a lobster fisherman, do you actually fish right by the Minas Basin, or do you fish further down?

COLIN SPROUL: Myself, I fish further west of the Minas Passage, but my license, as well as all of the other fishermen who are licensed to fish in our area, allows us legal access to that area and we were never consulted. The reason for our involvement is to preserve our way of life and our culture. The Bay has sustained us for 400 years. My family has five generations of involvement in this industry and we will not see it washed away by corporate efficiency and greed. I want to pass this legacy on to my son and my nephews. There is a certain percentage of the population that may perceive our opposition to this interest as self-serving as our members take their living from the sea, but this isn't the about money for us, it's about heritage and our future. It's about money for Cape Sharp and Emera.

AMT: And you fish American lobster, am I right? Is that the name of the lobster you fish?

COLIN SPROUL: Yes, we fish American lobster and also halibut.

AMT: Okay, and the American lobster, if it spawns there, where can you find it?

COLIN SPROUL: American lobsters are routinely caught in the upper Bay of Fundy which have been tagged on the coast of New England. They travel for hundreds, if not thousands of kilometers.

AMT: And what else then? What else are people fishing? You say halibut, what else would come from the Minas Basin?

COLIN SPROUL: Halibut, cod, herring, gaspereau, haddock, sea scallops, clams, all of these things have tremendous commercial value. In the Bay of Fundy alone, last year over 500 million dollars’ worth of lobster were extracted at the wharf side and this would grow into the two billion dollar range with export values.

AMT: So the project is on hold now while more consultation is done. Are you optimistic?

COLIN SPROUL: I am optimistic. I feel that the provinces recognize the extreme dangers involved to this ecosystem, and I trust that the Minister of the Environment will seek out more substantial information before she makes her decision.

AMT: Have you appeared before any of the people holding hearings in the past?

COLIN SPROUL: I have actually. Last week I gave testimony at the Standing Committee on Resources, and I also have had two meetings with the Premier, and one with the Minister of the Environment.

AMT: And do you think turbines for tidal power could ever have a place in the Bay of Fundy and right around the Minas Basin, the Minas Passage?

COLIN SPROUL: One point really like to make clear is that my association, and the fishermen that we represent, are not anti-tidal energy. On the macro scale we see global warming and the associated acidification of the seas as a huge threat to our industry, particularly the shellfish industry. I believe that when technology is advanced to the proper point that tidal energy can be safely extracted from the Bay of Fundy and it is a necessary part of renewable energy in Nova Scotia, but it has to have a net benefit for the environment and a net benefit for the economy.

AMT: Okay, Colin Sproul, thanks for your time.

COLIN SPROUL: Thank you very much.

AMT: Colin Sproul is with the Bay of Fundy Inshore Fishermen's Association. He's in our Halifax studio. We requested an interview with a representative from Cape Sharp Tidal Venture Incorporated, which is a European-Canadian business partnership behind the project. No one was made available. You're listening to The Current on CBC Radio One, and online on cbc.ca/thecurrent. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. Graham Daborn has been studying tidal energy for four decades. He is a professor emeritus of biology at Acadia University. He is a member with the Acadia Tidal Energy Institute, and he sits on the environmental monitoring committee as a volunteer with the organization known as FORCE, Fundy Ocean Research Center for Energy. It is a non-governmental organization overseeing the turbine testing site in the Bay of Fundy. Graham Daborn is in Wolfville, Nova Scotia. Hello.

GRAHAM DABORN: Hello there.

AMT: You've been listening to my conversation with Colin Sproul, what do you think of what you just heard?

GRAHAM DABORN: Well, I have to say that once again, Mr. Sproul seems to get carried away in his own rhetoric. I want to go back, I guess, to start with, there are so many things that are stated in those statements which are either a misrepresentation or actually untrue. But I do want to endorse what he said right at the end, which was, you know, the purpose for even looking at this is in order to enable Nova Scotia to get off our dependence on fossil fuels. We've known for a hundred years that the tides were there, we've been thinking about trying to develop tidal power for a hundred years, and we've been conducting research over that period of time, particularly in the last 30 or 40. And we do, of course, have a tidal generating station in place, but the research related to that on that development convinced us that that was not the right way to try and develop tidal power.

AMT: So what do you think is inaccurate in what he said?

GRAHAM DABORN: Well, in the first place, I don't believe that all there is any evidence that the concentration of life in the narrow area which is the FORCE tidal site is anything like his description. We've been doing extensive work both in Minas space and Minas Passage and outside in the Bay of Fundy over the last many years, and although we know less about the Minas Passage exactly in that location, we know what goes through it. We also know a good deal about the plankton as well as the fish in that area. It is an extremely rich area, but so is the outer part of the Bay. The impression that Mr. Sproul tries to give is that the Minas Basin itself, and sometimes he misstates himself and says the Minas Passage, but the Minas Basin itself feeds the whole of the Bay of Fundy and the Gulf of Maine. It's an important part of it, but there are many other parts where, for example, lobster spawn. There are huge areas where birds, fish, and mammals feed, both in the outer part of the Bay and the upper part of Bay. So it's an important component and we would certainly not want to risk any of those resources, but it's nowhere near the kind of El dorado which he seems to imply.

AMT: Why not do a baseline study to know for sure?

GRAHAM DABORN: Well, we've been trying to do that for a long time. It's an extremely difficult, the passage area, which is where the turbines are planned to be placed, is an extremely difficult area to work in. Much of the technology that we use for surveying and monitoring, which is successful in other areas, including the outer part of the Bay, doesn't work very well in those high flow environments. So we've had to learn how to do that. The technology is rapidly advancing in terms of monitoring, so it's improving all the time, but it's part of the reason why we haven't after eight, even nine years here, moved further along than we would hope to have been, in terms of background information.

AMT: Why do you think it's time to test these turbines in the Minas Passage in the Bay of Fundy now?

GRAHAM DABORN: Well, because the technology that has come along with these turbines, which is so much less-- has so much less of an impact on the environment than does the old tidal power technology that we have in Annapolis, those technologies do offer the opportunity for us to get a substantial benefit out of the tides, f we can do it safely. And I want to emphasize that there's nobody that I know of in this enterprise, whether they're in academia, government, or the industry, who is interested in compromising an existing resource such as any of the fisheries in order to get that power. But there is a strong conviction from the experience that's building with these turbines that they are, in fact, able to generate power successfully, and that they will do so with a relatively modest impact upon important resources like fish.

AMT: How fast does the water flow right there, at high tide, low tide?

GRAHAM DABORN: At its maximum speed, it's somewhere over six metres per second, which is about 11 or 12 knots. The average speed is considerably less than that, but it's an extremely high flow through there and that's pretty well true across the whole of the passage, which is nearly five kilometres across.

AMT: How fast do the turbines spin?

GRAHAM DABORN: The ones that being put in, or proposed to put in now, turn at about six to eight times per minute. So it's a very slow-- it's like the big windmills: the bigger the device, the slower those blades move. And so it's only six or eight RPM.

AMT: Anybody else using the same turbine somewhere else?

GRAHAM DABORN: Oh yeah, there are two of these that have now been established in the north of France, again, as a test. The same general design has been put in for several years now in Scotland. So this particular design is one of the more advanced of those that are available. There are others that more resemble wind turbines, for example, very large wind turbines, and one of those has been a site of special scientific interest in Northern Ireland for the last five years. It has been extensively monitored in terms of its impact upon fish and mammals, and so far with any of these deployments, there has been not a single indication that a fish has have interacted with those blades and with those turbines.

AMT: Okay, well, stay with me, Graham Daborn. I have someone else waiting in the wings to join us. Trevor Avery is a marine biologist at Acadia University. He is in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, as well. Hello!

TREVOR AVERY: Hello, Anna Maria. Thanks for having me on.

AMT: Well, you're listening to, you heard Mr. Sproul, and now you hear Graham Deborn. As you listen to what Professor Deborn is saying, what are you thinking?

TREVOR AVERY: I think there's a lot of information missing. I think Colin's hit some of the nails on the head in that general statement. The baseline information is inadequate in order to determine any effects in this different area. Certainly there are other studies on other turbines in other places in the world that show different effects or maybe some avoidance of organisms, but we're dealing with a very unique area that everybody says is a very unique area and agrees on that. And it's a very, very important area in this Bay. The baseline studies that have been done to date have been thoroughly trounced by DFO, as Colin has pointed out, as being insufficient in order to determine if there's going to be any effect with the methodologies that are proposed in the environmental effects monitoring plan. I think that's a massive gap that needs to be filled before these turbines go in.

AMT: And so what are you saying will happen if the turbines go in?

TREVOR AVERY: I think the little scenario here is probably worthwhile. If the turbines go in and we don't measure, there's no effect on say, fisheries, that could be fish or invertebrates, noted, that's going to be a tacit checkmark and it's going to be full steam ahead. Cape Sharp Tidal and the government, as well, are very interested in harnessing a lot of this energy. This test site is certainly a test site at this time, but make no mistake: they want to put a hundred of these things or more in in that passage. If you can't detect any changes with a few of them in there and you say everything's fine, then that sort of gives the go ahead to say let's put more in until you can detect a change. So the monitoring protocols, the statistical analyses that are proposed to look at these turbines, are completely inadequate in order to note any change.

AMT: If you had the information you're looking for, would you support the testing of these turbines?

TREVOR AVERY: I'd support testing of turbines if you had proper baseline information and proper protocols in place for monitoring. You can't simply throw one of these things in there, and as it's quoted in a number of news articles, and see what happens. The Frank matter of it is you can't see what happens and that needs to be rectified.

AMT: Graham Deborn, what do you think?

GRAHAM DABORN: I disagree with Trevor on a number of aspects there, but particularly I want to emphasize that we've been looking at the potential environmental effects now for a number of years, and we have done our best to try to get the background information that's there. What remains are precisely the questions that we cannot answer until we get turbines in the water, and that is: how do fish behave or how to mammals behave in front of a turbine? We know-- I don't actually believe that Mr. Sproul is correct when he says that the fishermen know exactly what's moving in there and how much there is, but we do know a lot about the fish that are moving through that passage. We know something about their distribution, we know something about the timeframe that they're there during the year. But we cannot answer the question of whether a turbine will have any-- direct represent a direct threat to a fish population, a rare or endangered species, or just an individual, until eventually got to mines in the water and they're being monitored. The new turbines are being fitted with the state of the art monitoring equipment in order to provide answers which haven't yet been obtained anywhere in the world.

AMT: Like what? What are you going to be able to tell from that state of the art monitoring equipment?

GRAHAM DABORN: Well, we're particularly hoping to find out just how the fish will behave, and focus on the fish, but the same applies to mammals. How fish will behave as they approach the turbine, because it's very clear from other sites that have been monitored in the United States in Scotland and Ireland and even in Western Canada, that fish manage to avoid turbines that are actually spinning. They cluster around when the turbines stop spinning. We don't know why or how they detect that turbine represents a threat when it's operating. We need to know that, and that means we need a turbine in the water where there are fish. We need devices which sit on that turbine which will image the fish in a way that we can actually monitor how they behave as they approach it. If we find that they cannot avoid it for one reason or another, and there are a number of times during the year when that may be the case, then we have a better understanding of how to calculate the risk to those stocks.

AMT: Trevor Avery, at that speed will the fish be able to avoid it> At the speed of a tide?

TREVOR AVERY: Part of it is not to do with the speed of the tide, but there's certainly speculation here on how fish move through those areas at high speed. Whether they're using it as a high speed corridor and using those currents, whether they're tumbling through there, whether they're avoiding that area when the speeds get high enough. The work that's been done so far on the fish, on different fish species, has been done through acoustic tagging studies, and they've noted, you know, striped bass and Atlantic salmon, American eel, Atlantic sturgeon, all use that area to move through the passage. So although there are a few studies now on fish showing that they are in that area, there's 50 other species at least that use that corridor that basically, we know nothing about. So I disagree with Graham saying that we know a lot about how the fish move through there and species move through that corridor. I think there's a little bit of information there. I still say that unless this technology which Graham proposes is up to snuff right now, as of a couple of weeks ago it didn't even exist, is going to be able to tell the species of fish that are going through there. Certainly you can tell with some of these devices like a sonar device that you have something moving through the area, but are you going to be able to tell the specific species? I doubt it.

AMT: Graeme Deborn, right now the project is on hold. Will it go ahead, do you think?

GRAHAM DABORN: Well, that's a political decision. [laughs] But I suspect it will because I think the safeguards are in place. Remember that this is a test site. The license to put a turbine down on one of these sites is a time limited one with all sorts of restrictions.

TREVOR AVERY: Time limit is five years. That's an incredibly long period of time. Five years is the time limit to put one of these things down.

GRAHAM DABORN: They can be pulled out at any time that it is determined that their effects are unacceptable.

TREVOR AVERY: And if you can't measure those effects, then there's no way that you're going to be able to say-- let's flip this on its head. The burden of proof right now to put these in is quite speculative in a lot of cases--

AMT: Okay--

TREVOR AVERY: To say that they're not going to have an effect, and you're going to flip the bird to the Fisheries and Oceans, who's one of the bodies that's an empowered to look at these, and you're going to say, you told us when there's an effect, and if you can show us that effect, then we'll put them out. I don't think that's correct.

AMT: Trevor Avery and Graham Deborn, we are out of time. Clearly, this is still a great debate among even scientists who care about this region. We'll have to leave it there, we will be watching to see what is decided. Thank you both.

TREVOR AVERY: Thank you very much.

GRAHAM DABORN: You're welcome, Anna Maria.

AMT: That is Graham Daborn, professor emeritus of biology at Acadia University, and Trevor Avery, professor of marine biology, also at Acadia University. They were both in Wolfville, Nova Scotia. What do you think? Let us know, you can tweet us @TheCurrentCBC. Find us online, cbc.ca/thecurrent. Click on the contact link. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti, thank you for listening to The Current.

[Music: Sting]

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June 15, 2016 episode transcript

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