'A reaffirmation of what we know': Grim UN biodiversity report unsurprising to many scientists, First Nations

Guests: Susan Delacourt, Marie Vastel, Campbell Clark

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: We have seen serious mistakes over and over again from this government and they are almost always attributable to Mr. Trudeau's poor judgment. If this government isn't willing to stand up to China when two Canadians are unlawfully imprisoned and billions of dollars in trade is under attack, it never will.

MG: Well we may not be in federal election campaign mode yet, at least not officially, but that sure sounded like some campaign talk yesterday from Andrew Scheer. The Conservative opposition leader was in Montreal to kick off a series of speeches meant to raise his profile and give Canadians a better sense of where he stands on the issues of the day. Yesterday's topic was foreign affairs and as you heard, much of what he had to say was focused on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's shortcomings on critical files. Mr. Scheer's Conservatives are polling higher than the Liberals right now, but October is of course still five months away. Our Wednesday National Affairs panel is standing by with their thoughts on Mr. Scheer's big speech and plenty more. We're joined this week by the Toronto Star's Ottawa bureau chief and national columnist Susan Delacourt, The Globe and Mail's chief political writer Campbell Clark and Le Devoir's parliamentary correspondent, Marie Vastel. They are all in Ottawa. Hello to you all.

SUSAN DELACOURT: Good morning.

MARIE VASTEL: Good morning.

CAMPBELL CLARK: Good morning.

MG: Before we begin with Andrew Scheer's image building campaign, I want to just start with the news that's coming out this morning. Federal prosecutors have withdrawn a criminal prosecution of the military's former second in command, Vice-Admiral Mark Norman. Susan, just briefly tell us about the breach of trust charge that he was facing?

SD: Oh it's an incredibly complex story, but it has to do with developments really early in this government and Mark Norman who was number two in the Defence Forces was accused of leaking Cabinet information to do with the shipbuilding and procurement deals by this government. I won't go into all the details of it, but this has sort of been dragging out and threatening to once again, just like the SNC-Lavalin scandal, show Canadians the inside or how the sausage was made inside this government. It was going to go to trial I think in in August and we were starting to see the same sort of dynamics. You know you saw Scott Brison who was involved. It was his file as Treasury Board. And Andrew Leslie leaving. You know they were high level figures in this government who were being dragged into it.

MG: And allegations by the defense that the Prime Minister's office was somehow orchestrating this prosecution.

SD: That's right. And this really did have shades of SNC-Lavalin to it. So it in many ways politically it's not surprising. Legally, it's an interesting development and I think that's going to be the dominant story in Ottawa today.

MG: Just do you have any sense as to why the plug would be pulled on this?

SD: Well again, it's a question of legally versus politically. Politically, it makes sense, it was going to do nothin,g but damage the government. Legally, I'm not sure what their case is.

MG: And given the fact that it is an election year, there are tweets out already by MPs, Candice Bergen saying that the Prime Minister needs to be held account for what he's done to Mark Norman. Presumably, this is not going to go anywhere.

SD: Yeah I wouldn't assume so, but I do think the government, in as much as this was a political decision, has ripped off the band-aid in doing this.

CC: If it was a political decision though there's going to be an issue there after all that's happened in the SNC-Lavalin affair for the idea that the government would be asking the Director of Public Prosecutions to move its prosecution one way or another. I think that would be embarrassing to say the least.

MG: Which maybe the subject of some conversation in the House of Commons.

CC: It will be.

MV: Yeah, but there had been musings that the case was weak. So that might be what we hear today in court, well have to see. Or that might be what the Liberals say versus what the Conservatives say.

MG: Let's talk about the Conservatives. Andrew Scheer is on this image building tour. You were in Montreal Campbell Clark to see the speech yesterday. What did you make of it?

CC: Well I thought it was the sort of foreign policy speech you could expect any Conservative leader to give, but almost any. There's a few twists there, notably about China. But I think that the thing here is that it's really Andrew Scheer's first foreign policy speech and in some ways his first policy speech and that's the point of the exercise here is to give him some kind of definition of who is Andrew Scheer? What is Andrew Scheer? What does he stand for? And I think he had to do it now because people are starting to look at him closer and closer.

MG: You called it Conservative classic, not some new flavoucr.

CC: Yeah I mean I saw a lot of things that I could, this speech could have been written by John Baird's foreign policy adviser. I mean it was John Baird, the former Conservative foreign affairs minister under Stephen Harper. It was you know pro-Israel, build up the military, stronger navy, you know retrench our position with China and build a bigger alliance with the United States. These are all kind of you know classical Conservative things. Even quoted Winston Churchill you know, there was it was alliances, not multilaterals. It was all the same kinds of things that you would have expected under Stephen Harper, maybe more Stephen Harper 2006 than Stephen Harper 2015, but it was still Conservative classic I think the one big difference was he's really taking a fairly strong attitude towards China, that would be a big deal for Canadian foreign policy.

MG: Montreal in the spring is a beautiful place to be, but aside from that Marie Vastel, why do you think that Andrew Scheer chose to make this speech in Montreal?

MV: Well he remains very much not well known and I think previous Liberal leaders would tell you that's risky coming up to an election, like Michael Ignatieff or Stephane Dion. He needs to define himself like Campbell said. That being said, I'm surprised by the speech yesterday given that this was sold as a big policy tour. Mr. Scheer didn't really have big different policy proposals during the leadership race two years ago and so he does, it does remain to be seen how he would reshape the Conservative Party post-Stephen Harper. This is the first election we've had in years without Mr. Harper at the helm of that party and that movement. And I wonder if what he offered yesterday was really sufficient to give people a good idea of what he stands for. Now there are four I believe more speeches to be brought forward and Mr. Scheer did say in his speech that you know there will be a platform, there will be more to come, but it seemed a bit underwhelming and I don't see how it really countered the Liberals line of attack because we're already hearing kind of each party's line of attack ahead of the election, right. And the Liberals are branding Mr. Scheer as still Harper's Conservatives, not doing enough for the environment, being against migrants. I don't see how yesterday's foreign policy speech really countered those arguments, given like Campbell said, that it could have been written 10 years ago by any other leader.

MG: I want to talk about his profile in Quebec in just a moment, but Susan to you, what is Andrew Scheer trying to do with these speeches?

SD: Tell the world how he is different or tell Canada at least how he is different. We should keep in mind that foreign policy has not been a big election issue. It did creep into the last campaign. It may be a feature of the fall campaign, but as Marie and Campbell are saying, right now his job is to show how much he is not like Harper. I think he has to put his own face on the party. I'm not sure as Marie said that this was sufficient and let's face it, as as Scheer himself said in the clip you used at the start, the world has changed. The world has changed even since Justin Trudeau came to power. When Justin Trudeau came to power it looked like Canada was going to be part of this big progressive alliance around the world with you know Obama then Clinton, Angela Merkel, Macron in France. That has not worked out that way. And some of us have wondered how Harper would have dealt with a Donald Trump. I'm not, he was portrayed in Scheer's speech, Donald Trump as sort of this temporary blip in the United States. I'm not sure Canadians see it that way. I think that there is a real expectation among Canadians that we have to do a little bit of standing up to Donald Trump and certainly China as well. But I agree he's got more speeches to give. He's got more distinctions to make, not just with Stephen Harper, but also with premiers.

MG: Well I was going to say, I mean the stage is getting crowded right now with Jason Kenney and also Doug Ford. Is part of this about Andrew Scheer saying I'm the leader of the federal Conservative Party?

SD: You know it's interesting in that Maclean's, now famous Maclean's photo of the resistance, Andrew Scheer is the only one seated. The others are standing and it's because he's unelected. He's the only one who's unelected. So while he's talking about what he could do, he's got premiers who are doing things and people are going to be measuring up, whether that alliances and those alliances are assets or liabilities for him too.

MG: Campbell, you wanted to say something.

CC: Well I just think that the first point for Andrew Scheer was to say I'm here. I think about things. I've got some weight here and maybe that feeling that other Conservative premiers or other Conservative leaders is partly because Andrew Scheer hasn't made people feel like he's really got something to say.

MG: I think about things.

CC: I think about things and part of this speech was I think about these things seriously and Justin Trudeau does not. I mean it was a minor part and actually he cut out some of the attacks on Justin Trudeau before he delivered the speech. But part of the first part of the exercise for Andrew Scheer is to say I've got serious ideas. I've thought about these things. I'm not just some guy that worked his way up the ranks of the party.

MG: Marie, what do you see in terms of the Conservatives and their hopes for Quebec? What are the possibilities that the party might have of making some gains in your province?

MV: Well they're definitely hoping for a big blue wave as they've kept saying over the past few months. Quebec isn't the biggest pool of ridings, obviously Ontario has 121, but there's still 78 seats here and the Conservatives only have 11. And they really are hoping to make gains here, as well as in the Maritimes and in Ontario. I would say though and it still falls into Mr. Scheer rebranding and his own offer, the problem is the Conservative seats in Quebec right now, the 11 seats that they hold are their traditional seats. They are places where they traditionally do well, where they have had seats in the past, kind of Quebec City, along those lines. And so if they want new seats in Quebec, they do have to offer a broader option than what they were offering in 2015, if they want to get more people on board. Some would say Quebec conservatives are maybe more progressive conservatives than in other provinces. And I think even more broadly than in Quebec that's definitely their challenge here, but even more broadly, I would say Conservative members Susan was saying Canadians has changed. The world has changed. I would say Conservative members have changed since Mr. Harper came to power over 10 years ago. You saw at their convention a few years ago that you know they voted for decriminalizing marijuana. They voted I remember a young member standing up to the microphone during a debate on the environment saying if we have no plan, we're going to lose and people are going to laugh at us. I think there's also an acknowledgment that needs to be made that this party has also evolved and to go back to Quebec, but also that new kind of face of the Conservative Party, I don't think it's surprising that out of those five speeches, one will be on the environment. Mr. Scheer promised last week or two weeks ago in Quebec to have an environmental plan. He promised that in Quebec and that policy speech will be in Quebec, perhaps because that's where we saw a big preoccupation for the environment in the provincial election when a left wing party called Quebec Solidaire surprisingly got way more seats than people had expected. And so I think that part of their policy speeches should probably be looked at because as we saw in recent elections, provincial or a byelection federally this week, I think the environment will be one of the big issues in the next campaign.

MG: Let's talk about that Susan. There's flooding that's happening across the country. There's a report that comes out suggesting that a million species could be facing obliteration if we don't do something to turn climate change around. Do you think that the environment and climate change will be a big part of the Conservatives campaign platform?

SD: I think they're going to be a big part of everybody's campaign platform. I equate this with sort of the long standing Canadian top of mind concern is health. They always say we don't see elections actually fought on healthcare because everybody is in favour of it in the abstract. It's when it gets to particulars. And I think the environment is is moving thanks to climate and climate change and these floods and we hope not, but potentially forest fires this summer. I think it's moving. The environment is moving from a long term concern of Canadians to a short term one and that makes things get way more particular and puts pressure on politicians to say not that they're just in favour of the environment and doing something sometime, but what they're going to do right now. And we're seeing that here in Ottawa. We've seen that across the country with the floods and I think that may evolve this summer as well.

MG: Campbell?

CC: Yeah I think that for Andrew Scheer, by the way he added a line about climate change being a serious challenge to his foreign policy speech at the last minute there. So that was something a message he decided had to be in a speech in Montreal on foreign policy. I think he's going to, environment is going to be one of the later speeches in this series of five and he's going to deliver his climate change plan. So he's obviously decided that Canadians generally want to see a plan to address climate change. And I think the battle will be about who's got a serious and effective plan to address climate change. For him, Andrew Scheer, I think his gamble is going to be that a plan is what matters and the Liberals will be arguing it's not really a plan. So you know the point is yes, climate change will be an issue and it's important for people to become a necessary issue, but the question is how they calculate the details.

MV: I wonder though also if because Matt you mentioned provincial counterparts of Mr. Scheer, we could think of Doug Ford, we could think of Jason Kenney, I wonder how much speaking of the environment this becomes a delicate dynamic for Andrew Scheer because Jason Kenney with a lot of public support behind him, has strong opinions about the environment and a carbon tax. But Mr. Scheer is a federal leader and if you look at Quebec, if you look at BC, if you look at other provinces, I don't know how long Mr. Scheer can try to avoid discussing other provinces' insistence that a pipeline like Energy East be built and that will be interesting to see how he navigates that. That some leaders who are very popular in their own provinces have positions that might not be as popular federally.

MG: Susan what should we make of the Green Party byelection win in Nanaimo-Ladysmith on Monday. If you're talking about the environment it is interesting, Elizabeth May spent a lot of time speaking yesterday about the NDP and suggesting that you know that party doesn't have a real environmental plan. Is this the beginning of something for the Green Party?

SD: Yeah I'd say it's watch this space. This is not just an isolated development what happened in Ladysmith. We have been seeing this. In Prince Edward Island the Greens are now the official opposition. They came in third in federal byelection in Outremont, Quebec. They have breached the doors of Queen's Park. The Green leader now sits at the legislature there. I think something is moving for the Greens in this country. I think there's a a comfort level with Elizabeth May who's been leader since 2006, in a way we kind of saw with Jack Layton. There are comparisons being made there that it takes a long time to be an instant success.

MG: And is that a real threat to the NDP or to the Liberals?

SD: It's a real threat to the Liberals. It's a real threat everywhere. It introduces a fourth dynamic into a three dimensional chess game to mix metaphors there, but I do think that there's a none of the above part to this as well. Canadians sick and tired of politics as usual, untried leader, an election fought on climate change puts Elizabeth May in a good spot.

MG: Campbell Clark, in the last minute that we have, we're moving through the colour spectrum. It's an orange wave, it's a blue wave. Is there now a green wave on the horizon?

CC: I think there is, but it's probably partly because the orange wave is so weak right now and they have been unable, the NDP, to sort of figure out their position. The thing is you know in a polarized election, which I expect this next federal election to be, maybe they're going to get squeezed out again. They happened in the past. I think a lot of people will be thinking about who will the government be and that's generally not been the best for the Greens and Elizabeth May.

MG: It's great to talk to you all about this. We will convene again next week. Thank you.

MV: Thank you.

CC: Thank you.

SD: Thanks.

MG: Susan Delacourt, the Ottawa bureau chief and national columnist for The Toronto Star. Campbell Clark, chief political writer for The Globe and Mail and Marie Vastel is the parliamentary correspondent for Le Devoir. If you have any thoughts on how this has unfolded, the image building campaign for Andrew Scheer, but also what's that green byelection win means, not just for folks in Nanaimo-Ladysmith, but across this country. Is this the beginning of a green wave? We'd be happy to hear from you. You can tweet us @TheCurrentCBC or reach us through the website. Go to cbc.ca/thecurrent and click on the contact link there. Your CBC News is next and then, when journalists at The New York Times fight the fight for truth. He's the one who's got their back, answering tweets from Donald Trump threatened to continue to publish information in the face of possible lawsuits. David McCraw is one of the paper's top lawyers. He'll join us for a discussion on his work and a new book, Truth in Our Times. My name's Matt Galloway, here for Anna Maria Tremonti. You're listening to The Current.

[Music: Theme]

How the New York Times' top lawyer stands up to Trump's attacks on media

Guests: David McCraw

MG: Hello. I'm Matt Galloway, here for Anna Maria Tremonti. You're listening to The Current.

[Music: Theme]

MG: Still to come, if you've heard the statistics about rates of tuberculosis in Inuit communities in Canada, then you know they're shockingly high. What you may never have heard before though is the real life story behind those stats. In half an hour, Kilikvak Karen Kabloona will join me from Iqaluit to talk about life with TB in Canada's north in 2019. But first, standing behind all the news that's fit to print.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: And I want you all to know that we are fighting the fake news. It's fake. Phony. Fake.

[Applause]

VOICE: A few days ago I called the fake news the enemy of the people and they are. They are the enemy of the people because they have no sources. They just make them up when there are none.

MG: That's US President Donald Trump attacking the press, as he's want to do. Those remarks came in 2017 at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, although they're words that he has repeated time and time again. That one term in particular, the enemy of the people, comes loaded with some ominous historical allusions. It was a favourite of Joseph Stalin's among others. When it comes to what's actually happening to press freedom today, my next guest is about as close as you can get to the front lines. David McCraw is a lawyer for the New York Times. He's the paper's deputy general counsel and a vice president of The Times. He's just published a book about his experiences called, Truth in Our Times: Inside the Fight for Press Freedom in the Age of Alternative Facts. And David McCraw joins me from our New York City studio. Hello.

DAVID MCCRAW: Hello Matt.

MG: Tell me about the first time you heard Donald Trump use those words referring to the media as the enemy of the people.

DM: The first time I recall it was really at the time of that clip you just played that it had come up in that same period where shortly after he had taken office, he had invoked that in a tweet. He took the tweet down for some reason. I guess he wanted to polish it, put it back up with some slight alterations. But the core of it was still there that the press was somehow the enemy of the American people.

MG: How did you react when you heard that? Because he'd attacked the press before, but that term, as I mentioned in the introduction, comes with a lot of baggage.

DM: It was all part of a larger attempt and a continuing attempt to delegitimize the press. As I point out in the book, a press that's disbelieved and discredited is not that different from a controlled press. It doesn't really matter how much press freedom you have, if the press isn't believed, it can't move public opinion, it can't be a check on government. And I see it as part of a whole. Same thing when the president and others talk about fake news, it is designed to win the hearts and minds of people and say "trust us, don't trust the press."

MG: Did you think he would behave differently toward the press once he took the office of the president?

DM: My book is a testament to unfounded optimism. I'm always in the book saying "it's gonna be OK" and you know what, it's never OK.

MG: You described yourself as being, what is it, dangerously naive.

DM: I can't believe I said that about myself. I really thought, that to a certain extent, the attack on the press was, during the campaign, simply politics. It was a winning line. It was winning applause at his rallies. And that when he came into office there would be a return to something that would look like at least the Nixon years. There's never gonna be a love fest between the president and the press, but I felt that the norms of American democracy would be in place. The civil service which tends to be a check, tends to be guardrails on how far things move left or right, would come into play. But what we have is a sort of continuation of the campaign on that front. Over and over again it comes back to that, including this morning.

MG: Well this morning yesterday, this morning, he's reacting to what you published yesterday, another investigation into Donald Trump's finances. The investigation suggests what that he lost more than a billion dollars in business over the course of a decade.

DM: Yeah that's right. The story looked at his taxes from a period roughly 1985 to 1994 and those returns are marked by incredible losses.

MG: When do you get involved in a story like this?

DM: I've been involved in that story for several weeks. Sometimes it has to do with where information may be and if I have ideas about where reporters can go to find it. A story like this which high public interest about very very visible public figures, less of a concern in the United States about libel, much more of a concern about can you help us get it right? Can you help us get the information? Can you help us be another pair of eyes to make sure we have the facts straight?

MG: Why does a story like this matter? I mean you hinted at sort of what it was about in terms of his tax returns. Something that people have been fighting for years. What's really at the heart of the story, do you think?

DM: I think there's a couple of things. One is that everybody in public office owes a duty of transparency to the public. It helps assure that the people we elect that we know something about them that we know what we need to know about them. I think the other thing is given how extensive the president's financial networks have been over years over decades knowing about his business partners who he's been in business with who he's owed money to all of those things are important. It may be that the end of the day people decide you know what. He's just a businessman doing what is yes men do. But the public should have the right to make that decision it shouldn't be something that we have to hear from the president with the implicit tagline trust me.

MG: The story is not based on tax returns, it's based on tax information and as you do, you have to get comment from the president's lawyer, who says that this tax information was demonstrably false. How then do you give a green light to a story when the counsel for the president pushes back and says I'm sorry this isn't correct?

DM: I'm really looking for something more specific than that. If there are errors, if there are things that are particular problems that they want to point to. We have to take those seriously and we did take this seriously. The broad denial doesn't really help us very much. And having worked with these reporters who Craig and and her colleagues it's it's simply incredible the amount of work they did and I could see the labor and I could see their attention to the fact Sue and rescue Beutner did an extraordinary job of pulling this together and I guess what I would say having been in the kitchen, I have no doubt about what's being served.

MG: And so when the president tweets out as he does that this is a highly inaccurate fake news hit job, is that to you just more of the same or I don't know whether you follow him on Twitter or whether somebody tells you what he's been tweeting about you, but do you take his response seriously?

DM: I certainly look at what he has to say but much of what he seem to be saying this morning was not a disagreement with the facts, but a disagreement with the interpretation. He seems to be saying that this is what real estate developers did and he was not alone in that probably so. But this should even be a controversy. It's only a controversy because those tax returns have not been released, which is something other candidates have done and for years. And we shouldn't have to guess. If we got it wrong then let's see what he can show us and then we can go from there.

MG: I ask in part because I mean you have experience with Donald Trump before he was elected president. What were some of the run ins that you had with him prior to him taking that office?

DM: Back when he was simply a real estate developer and reality TV show star the focus was almost always on the question of how much is he worth. And his lawyers would call me whenever we were doing a story about that topic which we came back to on several occasions and there would always be this dispute about where we would say he was worth X and he and his lawyers would say he was worth XXXX and it would get into these absurd discussions for instance we did a story about whether he was as he claimed the biggest real estate developer in New York. I said show me the facts. The lawyer sends over a list of properties and I start to look at the list and we soon are talking about properties in Florida and elsewhere and I said that's not really to be the biggest real estate developer in New York. And we simply end up agreeing to disagree with exchanges of letters. It always played on. There was never any lawsuit over that against the New York Times.

MG: Are you seeing that, are those tactics kind of playing out now in his presidency?

DM: I think that there is on the part of the press the attacks I don't think change how people are reporting. I think people have continued to be resilient and do their job. I do think that it puts a special burden on all of us, wherever we are in the news media, to make sure we get it right. I don't think anybody wants to give an opening for criticism. Look mistakes are made. We have to double down to make sure that those are going to be extremely rare or nonexistent, if we can get there.

MG: What was it like at The Times the night of the election when it became clear that Donald Trump would be the president of the United States?

DM: I think people inside The Times were, like people all around New York and elsewhere, shocked by the result. We certainly had been seen tracking polls would suggest that Hillary Clinton was not only going to win the popular vote but win the Electoral College. I think that there was, in a sense, just a shock of the news but also the people's awareness that the president was going to come into office who had made the press an issue. And I think initially there was some question about well, does that change how we do our job or what we do? I think in the end people went back to exactly what they've been doing before which is let's cover the President aggressively. Let's get it right and it's up to the public to make a decision about what to do with what we're reporting.

MG: Part of this was your job. I mean you had to convene a meeting with journalists there to give them some sense as to what the runway would look like ahead of them.

DM: That was particularly a response to threats that were coming in and unfortunately those have been ramping up over the campaign, it's not stopped. Most of those threats are meaningless thereby cowardly people sitting at home front of their computer screen and simply amusing themselves by threatening people but they don't tell us that we have to take every one of those seriously. And so in the time since the beginning of 19th since the beginning of 2017 we now have barricades outside our offices. We now have a 24/7 threat line and each one of these threats we have to look at and make an assessment. We need our people to be safe. Nobody signed up to be a journalist covering Washington or covering politics thinking that he or she was going to have to put her life, his life and their family life in danger. It's really an unacceptable state of affairs.

MG: You have an interesting job in that people perhaps have an idea of what the job is and they don't know fully what it is that you're involved in and they might get that idea from the movies. Hollywood has taken all sorts of shots at depicting the in-house counsel for media on the big screen. Have a listen to this scene. This is from the movie The Insider. Tells the story of the 60 Minutes report about a scientist who blew the whistle on his employer, the Brown and Williamson Tobacco Company.

SOUNDCLIP

[Scene from The Insider]

VOICE 1: If this holds up and it's very well may not, but if it did and we aired this segment and CBS was sued by Brown and Williamson, I think we could be at grave risk.

VOICE 2: How grave?

VOICE 1: Well at the end of the day because of your segment the Brown and Williamson Tobacco company could own CBS.

VOICE 2: Is CBS corporate telling CBS News do not go to air with this story?

VOICE 1: You're getting ahead of yourself. We're all in this together. We're all CBS. We'll find out soon. Thank you.

MG: That's from The Insider in that film, in films like The Post, other movies, the media lawyer, that would be you, is often portrayed us as somebody who's trying to stop the publication of a story. Giving all sorts of reasons as to why something shouldn't move forward. How different is that Hollywood version from what it is that you're trying to do?

DM: I always love to hear that clip because that sort of captures the Hollywood meme of the lawyer with sweaty palms, worrying a story to death. You can see it in the post as well. As as I point out the book, Lowell Bergman who is the real life person in The Insider, the person who broke that story first CBS, worked for The Times when I first came to The Times, shows up in my office and asked me a question about something inconsequential. Like whether we can record sound on the streets of Alabama and I had seen that movie and I was never going to tell a little no for any reason about anything. Anything he wanted to do I was going to say yes because I certainly didn't want to end up in a movie looking like that. The answer is I think that's a horrible cliche. I'm sure there are lawyers that make nervous decisions or make people nervous, but I look at my job as empowering our reporters to get things on the web and get things in the paper. The U.S. Supreme Court 1964 in Times vs. Sullivan essentially said to the American media, be brave, take chances, the law will protect you. I'm not going to take that away from our people.

MG: But as you said, you don't want things to be incorrect. You don't I mean the whole idea of you know appearing on the corrections page can be a nightmare for the reporters. So how often do you have to put up the green light or the red light versus the green light?

DM: Never put up the red light. I may have a yellow light in my bag. There are times when we need to work through a story, look at the language, maybe add something to give it more balance, more context. But at the end of the day my role is to stand behind our journalism and make sure that we avoid a lawsuit. If we can't, that's kind of the cost of doing business. We shouldn't be in this business if we're not going to take a risk.

MG: You write in the book that a distrusted press is little different from a shackled press. What do you mean by that?

DM: Well the power of the press comes from people believing what was said, understanding that those are the facts, and then acting upon that whether it's in an election or in some other fashion. And when I visit countries that have a controlled press, no one really pays attention to the press because they know the government's lies or the things they're going to see. They don't believe it and they exist in what becomes an information void. The same thing is true when you have a disbelief press. If people are looking at the press and looking at television, newspapers or news websites and saying 'I don't believe that, that's not true.' They're in the same information void. They can't act upon that. And it's a very dangerous situation because it leaves so much power in the hands of a government.

MG: How successful do you think the president has been in delegitimizing the news and calling it fake news, in calling it "the failing New York Times" and essentially saying whatever you publish, it's a lie.

DM: It obviously plays to his base. While I was writing my book I was deeply concerned to see a poll that said 26 per cent of the people asked, thought that the president should have the power to close a news organization that misbehaves. That's an incredible number, one in four. Whatever we think about the press, and the press should be criticized, if we get the facts wrong, we should hear about it and people should be skeptical of the media just as they should be skeptical of any institution. But the idea that 26 percent of the American people think that the president should have the power to close news organizations is such a diversion from how the system is supposed to work. That concerns me.

MG: There are a couple of specific stories that I wanted to talk about that you had to deal with. One is about WikiLeaks. You just had dental surgery. You get a call to come into the office in 2010 because something big was brewing. What did you have in your hands?

DM: Initially bloody gauze because I was taking it out of my mouth after the dental surgery.

MG: That's a bit much, but yes continue.

DM: There's a morning image to start the day with. So when I came in from the oral surgeon, a group of reporters and editors were sitting around a table and they had just learned that Julian Assange and WikiLeaks were going to provide the information received from Private Manning about the Iraq war, the Afghan war and ultimately the state department cables. They were coming to us via The Guardian in London. And it was quite astonishing because we had published leaks, we had published classified information, but they had been done in what I'm going to say is bite size portions. Somebody unhappy with a decision concerned about where the government was going would leak a document or would leak a set of documents. But this time it was a wholesale release of an enormous amount of data and it really gave me pause. The press had never been accused of violating the Espionage Act. I had to wonder is this the one that's going to be the difference.

MG: That's that story with WikiLeaks, then in 2016 there's another WikiLeaks story. The organization began releasing documents stolen from the Democrats by Russian intelligence. This was done in part to help elect Donald Trump. How do you determine what The Times should publish in terms of the motivation of the source of those leaks? Because those are two very different, to your point, those are two very different stories with two very different sources for those leaks. So how do you factor that in?

DM: Yeah. I think the legal calculation the U.S. has been easy and maybe that's changing, but the Espionage Act has been around for more than a hundred years. The press has never been subject to prosecution under that Act. The system has work that leakers can be prosecuted. They can be subject to two criminal actions. But the reporters who receive that information are protected legally as long as they weren't involved in any unlawful activity to get the information. That's been the template for decades. It's worked. Motivation I think is really a question that our journalists need to grapple with. At the end of the day we need to publish information that's of interest to the public and it is important to the public and sometimes the motivation of the leaker is very base. I don't like my boss. I don't like the way I'm being treated. I want it whatever it might be. These leaks that you're talking about though Matt are of a different kind. Where you're talking about something maybe organized by a foreign power. And I think that in the newsroom people feel we need to make that clear to our readers. We may still use the information, but let's try to get to the bottom of how we got it, share that with the readers, let them understand and make some decisions about what they think about that.

MG: Should they be treated differently?

DM: I think ultimately the information has to stand on its own. We can't simply turn a blind eye to information that's true and of value to the public. That said I think that and having talked to our editors, I know this is true, we need to all do a much better job of explaining how information is being weaponized and have people understand that as a concept as a reality of life in modern politics.

MG: The other story just briefly that I wanted to mention is the Harvey Weinstein story. You get a call from Jodi Kantor, one of the journalists behind the story, who tells you that she's hearing, this is what you write, "extraordinary and grotesque things. We were probably going to get sued because it was the kind of story that could destroy Harvey and the Weinstein Company." Do you rub your hands in glee when you hear that or is your hair turning gray as you know that this is coming?

DM: Well fortunately my hair turned gray a while ago, so I can hide that when it happens now. I assumed that it would be the typical push and shove that we have when we do stories about powerful people. They complain their lawyers start raining from the sky onto me and we all get through it. There's rarely lawsuits by public figures of Harvey's stature.

MG: But when there are threats of lawsuits as there often are, how do you respond to those threats?

DM: Well most of the people who write to me are not Harvey Weinstein. Most of the people who end up writing to me, or have their lawyers write to me, have concerns about a story. They may not be legitimate in the sense that they may be wrong, but I want to hear from them. I want to use that as part of our system to make sure we get it right. When it's the Harvey Weinsteins of the world or the Donald Trumps of the world, much of that is an attempt to intimidate and we just have to stand up to it. Much of the time, they will actually go public with it, which is also part of the reality. It's not really legal, it's political. It's designed to move public opinion. And I think our reporters expect me to stand up to that, and I do, I think the public expects us to do that as well.

MG: And to your point this is about getting the story out.

DM: Right. Right. And with the MeToo stories were hard because in many of those cases you're talking about an incident that was witnessed by two people who are telling you drastically different accounts of what happened. And I was very proud of the way the Weinstein story unfolded with Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey because they found a way to try to cut through that. They'd found a way to try to make it not a he said she said, but to try to show that the allegations being made had some basis. They would go to friends, they would go to family. Did the victim complain about this at the time that it happened? Those kinds of things help us know that the story has credibility.

MG: When those calls come in just finally, we just have a few seconds left, there has to be a sense of exhilaration because you know that the story could have impact.

DM: Oh absolutely. I mean there's nothing greater than than to be there while great journalists are being made. That's what I really tried to do in the book. I didn't want it to be homework. I wanted to be a way for people to see journalism, good, bad, sometimes goofy and if they learned something about press freedom along the way, that would be great.

MG: It's a fascinating story. David a pleasure to talk to you. Thank you.

DM: Thanks Matt. I appreciate it.

MG: David McCraw is the deputy general counsel and vice president of The New York Times and the author of a new book, Truth in Our Times: Inside the Fight for Press Freedom in the Age of Alternative Facts. He was in our studio in New York City. Coming up in the next half hour of the program, taking on the stigma around tuberculosis in Inuit communities. A prominent Iqaluit CEO is speaking out about living with TB in Canada in 2019. My name is Matt Galloway, here for Anna Maria Tremonti. You're listening to The Current on CBC Radio One.

[Music: Theme]

'It's not fair that TB is still in Canada': One Nunavut woman on life with the disease

Guests: Kilikvak Karen Kabloona

MG: I'm Matt Galloway, here for Anna Maria Tremonti. You're listening to The Current. In most of Canada, tuberculosis hardly rates as a pressing medical concern, but in Inuit communities in the north, things are different with TB. That disease is nearly 300 times more prevalent among Inuit than among Canadian born non-Inuit. Still we seldom hear what it's like to be Inuit and live with TB. So when Kilikvak Karen Kabloona posted a few paragraphs about that reality on Instagram, it stood out and we needed to talk to her. Kilikvak Karen Kabloona is the CEO of Nunavut Tunngavik Inc. And she is with me from Iqaluit. Hi.

KILIKVAK KAREN KABLOONA: Hi Matt.

MG: I wanted to start by having you read the beginning of your Instagram post for us. Can you do that?

KILIKVAK KAREN KABLOONA: Yes. Last April I found out I had TB. I had just lost a close friend to suicide when I started coughing a deep painful cough. I got the skin test days before his memorial. Weeks later, a doctor diagnosed me with latent TB. Not contagious. The cough was from a cold. The deep pain from grief.

MG: Tell me about what was going on then. It sounds like a really heavy time.

KILIKVAK KAREN KABLOONA: Well a lot of us live with trauma that doesn't exist in the south. In my workplace we had supported a friend who had mental illness and his own trauma. It was, it is hard to work a regular workday sometimes, just helping people get through the mental health system and get treatment is difficult. So we'll do shifts with people at the hospital advocating for them and we did that with this friend. We go to apartments and we go make sure people have safe places to sleep. And we did that for a really long time. A lot of people did. He died after many attempts and a lot of us knew that he struggled. I've also had worked for the community wide screening clinic for tuberculosis. So I worried at that point that I might have contracted TB from working in the community. So that's why I went for the skin test. The pain was in my chest. It was deep. It was different than I had experienced before.

MG: You mentioned the skin test. Tell me about that and the diagnosis.

KILIKVAK KAREN KABLOONA: TB is very difficult to diagnose. So the skin test is useful on people who have not had tuberculosis before. It's also usually the first test. I had a needle inserted under the first layer of skin. If a person has tuberculosis their body has some antibodies and then it creates a hard bump. So anything over 10 millimeters is considered positive TB test. I got up to 14 millimeters with my skin test which is a positive. They still don't know at that point if it's active or latent. So once you have that positive skin test there are subsequent tests. Then I had to do sputum samples and then also X-ray to check my lungs. There's only one physician here in Iqaluit who does tuberculosis work. So three weeks later I had an appointment with her and all this time I knew I was TB positive but didn't know if I was contagious or not. So I didn't go outside. I didn't go have dinners with my family tried to limit contact with people. In any case it came back I did not have active bacteria in my lungs. So from that they can tell that I have latent TB. So it lives in me, but I'm not contagious.

MG: What was it like, I mean what went through your mind when you learned that you had tuberculosis?

KILIKVAK KAREN KABLOONA: I felt like it's not fair. I don't recall ever putting myself in a place where I would catch it. I don't live in the standard I should say nobody deserves it. But given all the risk factors I don't have those I would be considered very normal anywhere else in Canada, but the fact that it is so prevalent here just it's the reason I have it.

MG: Well when you say it's not fair, what do you mean by that? Aside from the conditions, I mean that's a really emotional response to something like this.

KILIKVAK KAREN KABLOONA: It's not fair that TB is still in Canada. It's not fair that TB exists in First Canadians. It persists here because of our overcrowding and our poverty.

MG: You mentioned the difference between the latent TB and the active TB. Latent can turn active can't it? I mean that can progress at some point in time.

KILIKVAK KAREN KABLOONA: Oh yeah absolutely and that's why I wanted to get it treated. I also wanted to know what the treatment was like. Latent TB in most populations will become active in about 10 percent of the people who have it in Nunavut. We think it's higher because of the overcrowding and the poverty. So essentially more bodies are immune compromised here. So it was important for me to get treated for myself at the time I got diagnosed last year it was the only option was a nine or 10 month treatment. So there's a few different kind. Once a week or twice a week there is one that is a daily treatment but all of those treatments require you to stop drinking alcohol for the duration of your treatment. It wasn't something that I was prepared to do for 10 months. I knew that three HP was coming it's a shorter treatment of 12 doses in 16 weeks which I felt like I could do. I don't drink alcohol that much, but I would like to have a glass of wine on a patio in the summer when I go down south, New Year's Eve or my birthday, so there is no real 10 month period where I felt like I wanted to do that. Of course I would for my kids.

MG: Well tell me about the treatment that you ended up taking the 3HP. You write in the post that you dread going for the treatments. What was it like?

KILIKVAK KAREN KABLOONA: It's a one time a week dose of a handful of pills and so on the days that I took my treatments I knew that I would start to get sweaty and a little bit shaky. My third dose made me violently sick and lightheaded I thought that I was going to end up fainting. So the third dose apparently that is typical for women over 40 which I happen to be but I would then a few days later get some bumps on my skin on my face and my arms feeling generally itchy everywhere. I disliked it but the thing that I hate the most about the treatment is the direct observed therapy.

MG: And what is that?

KILIKVAK KAREN KABLOONA: I could not take the medication home and take it on my own. Direct observed therapy is when a medical practitioner watches you swallow every pill and sometimes will check under your tongue to make sure that you swallow them. So TB medication all of them in Canada are direct observed therapy in the United States. This 3 HP is self-administered. You take the medication home and you take it. So this voluntary treatment. This treatment I don't have to take I'm not trust it to take it and I have to go into the clinic and have somebody watch me take it.

MG: What did all this mean for your life? I mean not just having to be there, but also those really nasty side effects with medication. What did that mean for the life that you're leading?

KILIKVAK KAREN KABLOONA: In general for Inuit, it's difficult to plan to be at the clinic because we spend so much time on the land harvesting food. So I know a lot of families that have more food insecurity because they take TB treatments. I travel for work a lot so I had to be back to Iqaluit you know within these specific range of three or four days. The hardest part though is the emotional side. Physically it is difficult but the part that infuriated me the most was the direct observed therapy because tuberculosis came is in Nunavut because of whalers and early settlers. We still have it because of overcrowding and food insecurity even though we are Canadians like everyone else. And the forced treatment of TB amongst our people where people were taken to Southern sanatorium and there's so much history here about tuberculosis. And then to not be trusted to take the medication it is a really difficult thing to agree to.

MG: Could you understand why given the contagious nature of TB and how concerned people might be that this would spread that they would want to make sure that that you're taking their medication? Could you understand that motivation at all?

KILIKVAK KAREN KABLOONA: Well that's not the reason though. They say it is because they need to make sure your liver is functioning. There's other ways that I know that I'm taking it. The medication still has dyes in it. So my tears, sweat and urine all were orange.

MG: Your tears were orange?

KILIKVAK KAREN KABLOONA: Yes.

MG: You write in the post as well about the social effect of taking this medication and you talked about how sick it made you. You write that you skip out on social activities. Tell me more about the effect of that and the cost of that.

KILIKVAK KAREN KABLOONA: Yeah. So the days that I had my treatments I would know that I would feel sick. So I would skip out on any social activities. The hardest one was missing out on a dinner with my sister. We don't see each other that often because we live in different cities. But I knew I couldn't get through a dinner. I also had to create new habits. It's normal everywhere in Canada to have a glass of wine at dinner or to do social activities with alcohol. And I had to create a new social network for myself while I was doing the treatments and not drinking alcohol.

MG: What were you doing instead?

KILIKVAK KAREN KABLOONA: I did some sewing so hand sewing usually I have some friends now and we work out every morning. They quit drinking alcohol with me while I was doing the treatment. And now we're training for a marathon. There were a lot of good things that came out of this new habit. So my family now does family movie night on Friday night and a nice dinner and then Perrier water, sparkling water.

MG: How are you feeling now? This has been a year or so since all of this happened. How are you feeling now?

KILIKVAK KAREN KABLOONA: I'm still navigating the difference between my old habits and my new habits. Trying to figure out where I want to be now that I have all this new I guess I would call them coping mechanisms. So it's still a learning process for me.

MG: Is part of that process speaking about this and posting things up online, posting that long post on Instagram?

KILIKVAK KAREN KABLOONA: Absolutely. That post was also so that other people with latent TB would understand how to get through the treatments.

MG: Is there a stigma that's attached, you mentioned other people with latent TB, is there a stigma that's attached to having latent TB in 2019?

KILIKVAK KAREN KABLOONA: There's a stigma to everything with the health system in Nunavut. Inuit still die with TB or strokes, partly because the health system doesn't have Inuktitut speaking medical practitioners, partly because our communication styles are different and Inuit who go in with medical issues aren't generally sent home undiagnosed untreated.

MG: But you have interesting perspectives on this. One as somebody who's undergone the treatment, but also as somebody who worked for years for the Nunavut government in the health care world. Why is this happening? And you've talked a bit about this, but why is this happening that this disease, which much of the rest of Canada doesn't have to worry about, continues to be such a presence within Inuit communities?

KILIKVAK KAREN KABLOONA: I think tuberculosis will be a cyclical thing in Nunavut until we actually have adequate housing and food security. You know we were forced into communities in the 1950s. That's when residential school started etc. and residential schools started being closed especially in the south because farmers were afraid of the tuberculosis getting out of the school into their communities. The fact that kids were dying wasn't the reason that schools closed. Other Canadians didn't want to catch tuberculosis that was festering in the schools. It's not exactly the same here in Nunavut but it's the same kind of conditions where people were forcibly moved into communities. They were confined into smaller spaces at the beginning. Inadequate sanitation inadequate ventilation heating et cetera. A lot of people still live in those conditions and they were forced into those communities with the promise of housing and a better life. Their dogs were killed so they weren't able to go back out on the land. So this is all within my dad's lifetime. Yeah people still live in those overcrowded conditions in most of our communities. And on top of that we have more food and security than before. So we will continue to see cycles of TB in Nunavut until housing and food security are dealt with.

MG: The Federal Government says it wants to, in its words, eradicate TB by 2030. Are you optimistic that something like that can happen?

KILIKVAK KAREN KABLOONA: Eradicate TB by 2030. So that's 11 years. You know what the DEW line site, the distant early warning, it was built by the American government to check for USSR missiles coming over the Arctic. It's a line of satellites that was built in two years because there was political will and there were no runways, there were no grocery stores, there were no hotels back then.

MG: But they decided they wanted to do it and they did it.

KILIKVAK KAREN KABLOONA: Yeah they built these massive installations across the Arctic in a handful of years. So it's possible if housing were a priority and we had a change in how food security was done in Nunavut. I don't think we'll ever get food security until we actually are developing the Nunavut food economy, based on Nunavut foods. So seal, fish, whale, the things that we have eaten for millennia.

MG: And you see a direct connection between that, the housing issue, overcrowding and something like what you're dealing with now the issue of latent TB.

KILIKVAK KAREN KABLOONA: Absolutely. These things are all connected.

MG: The post that you made was really powerful. And I'm wondering, we had you start by reading the beginning of it, if you could read the last couple of lines of the post. And I should probably just say there's a language warning. There's an explicit word in there.

KILIKVAK KAREN KABLOONA: In the year that passed there have been four deaths by suicide that reopened the wounds. The fact that Inuit live with ancient diseases and lose so many of our loved ones is fucked up. I still wouldn't live anywhere else.

MG: At the memorial for your friend, you told a story about your dad and it was about your dad in a blizzard. Can you tell us that story and then I'm going to ask you about the last line of that post.

KILIKVAK KAREN KABLOONA: My dad was a water surveyor in the 1970s and he worked with somebody from the south, out in the middle of nowhere and they lived in kind of a cabin. Nearby there was a bigger cabin with a cook and better food. So one time they went snowmobiling to that cabin for a special meal like Thanksgiving or something and they could tell that the weather was picking up and it was going to be blizzarding later. So they decided to go back to their cabin, my dad and his co-worker. The co-worker had lit a lantern and hung it in their cabin to be a beacon for their snowmobile back to the cabin. So at the end of the day as the sun's setting, the co-worker's driving the snowmobile back and thinks he's driving towards that lantern that is still lit in the cabin. My dad kept telling him no you're driving towards the sunset. So they end up getting lost because this co-worker didn't want to listen to my dad. My dad could tell from the snowdrifts that they were driving in the wrong direction. They spent the night out on the tundra in the blizzard and the next morning as the blizzard cleared my dad climbed the highest hill and he looked to see where they were. Tried to find the cabin. Eventually he found the cabin. It wasn't easy to find. So when you think you see something, you turn yourself away from it and you look again, just to make sure you're not being deceived by a rock or a tier or your imagination. So he looked away a few times and looked back and and knew it was the cabin. So that action, the going up to the highest hill and reorienting yourself is called [Inuit term]. So he [term] that day and then they got back to the cabin. He tells me that he still feels the cold from that day they had been lying on the ground at the co-worker's insistence and he had frozen to the ground through his clothing. So he still feels the cold in that spot on the days that he is most cold and at the memorial, I asked people to reorient themselves, to resettle and know where we're going and to remember that on bitter cold days we will still feel this grief, but on most days we won't.

MG: Given that and given what you've been through and the way that you describe it at the end of that post, as you say to live with these diseases and to lose our loved ones is effed up, you also say that you still wouldn't live anywhere else. And I'm wondering, I mean home is home and it doesn't matter to people kind of where they are, home is so important. What do you still love about where you live?

KILIKVAK KAREN KABLOONA: The people and the land. People here are so welcoming and the land is where my heart is. I wouldn't, I couldn't live anywhere else. I have, but I wouldn't choose it again.

MG: What's that word again?

KILIKVAK KAREN KABLOONA: [Term]

MG: It's a powerful word and that can apply to any number of circumstances, but especially perhaps for what you're in the midst of right now. It's a real pleasure to talk to you. I appreciate you posting this up, but also speaking to us about this. Thank you so much.

KILIKVAK KAREN KABLOONA: Thank you Matt.

MG: And be well. Thank you.

KILIKVAK KAREN KABLOONA: You too.

MG: Kilikvak Karen Kabloona was diagnosed last year with latent tuberculosis. She's completed the treatment and she is the CEO of the Nunavut Tunngavik Inc. in Iqaluit. Last month we heard from her here on The Current on the 20th anniversary of the creation of her home territory of Nunavut and though the starting point was different, she ended up at the same spot: her love of the land. Here is Kilikvak Karen Kabloona talking about her passion for Nunavut.

SOUNDCLIP

KILIKVAK KAREN KABLOONA: So my dad and I went hunting. We'd go driving for as long as it takes. So this time it was probably an hour and a half. Each of us were driving separate ATVs, so I have lots of time in the sun and thinking and it's beautiful and spend some time in my head just thinking and feeling and then sometimes scoping, looking for animals. So this time on both days we got a caribou. So those are the times where I learn strategy because there's no trees. You can't just drive up to the caribou. You have to be really smart about it and understand how the wind's blowing and how they behave and you can't just rush into things. So I spend a lot of time watching my dad and just loving that. When I see him turn his head I look to see what he's looking at. Both those I shot the caribou and it always happens where I have a brief moment of feeling heaviness about taking a life, but also grateful that it will sustain my life and my culture. I'm going to cry. And so we go through this incredible range of emotions in that moment and you have to feel grateful, otherwise you can't follow through. And then while we're butchering, it's sunny, it's beautiful, the birds are singing, other animals walk by. One day it was a fox, one day swans, both days cranes, geese, caribou. I love the smell of the tundra when you walk on it and it's been warmed by the sun and it smells warm and fresh. It's rolling hills and it looks like folded velvet. We belong here and I tell my kids that. Did I mention that I love it here. I love it in Nunavut.

MG: That's Kilikvak Karen Kabloona talking about her love for Nunavut, which means "our land." That is our program for today. Stay tuned to CBC Radio One for Q. The great singer-songwriter Josh Ritter will be there, not just to talk but to play live in the Q studio. You will definitely want to hear that. In light of our conversation with the New York Times Deputy General Counsel David McCraw, we will end this morning on a musical plea for truth in our times from a slightly different era. From 1971 here's John Lennon. Gimme Some Truth. I'm Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening to The Current.

[Song: "Gimme Some Truth" by John Lennon]

The Current Transcript for May 8, 2019

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

'A reaffirmation of what we know': Grim UN biodiversity report unsurprising to many scientists, First Nations

How the New York Times' top lawyer stands up to Trump's attacks on media

'It's not fair that TB is still in Canada': One Nunavut woman on life with the disease

May 8, 2019 episode transcript

Social Sharing

More from this episode