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The Current Transcript for November 16, 2016

Host: Anna-Maria Tremonti

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

The explosive device would have caused significant injury and death. The fact that he was out is probably because we couldn't operate the encryptic communications.

ANNA-MARIA TREMONTI: The explosive device he's talking about was a suicide bomb detonated by Aaron Driver in a taxi when police confronted him last summer. But the RCMP say their earlier attempts to track him hit a wall because he would go dark, encrypting his online jihadi activity, leaving them behind in a tangle of legal restrictions. The police have opened their files to CBC News in an effort to show specific cases where they argue they need enhanced online surveillance and interception abilities. But even Canada's top cop acknowledges that's not an easy task. In half an hour, Dave Seglins takes us through the details. Also today, Ana Maria Gordon is in her 80s but she watches the plight of Syrian refugee children with a deep understanding of what it is like to be little and looking for refuge.

SOUNDCLIP

Well the thing is that nobody wants them and nobody wanted us. And now the numbers are even, they’re much much bigger.

AMT: She was four years old on the St. Louis, the ship that carried desperate Jews across the Atlantic looking for refuge only to be turned away, forced back to Europe and into concentration camps in the fourties. Her story, and the novelist who tries to bridge those two worlds, in an hour. And it was just another day on a Toronto streetcar until one man began to insult another passenger and one outraged woman captured it on her smartphone.

SOUNDCLIP

I told him he was a racist. He said yeah, so what? Go Trump. I think I just stared at him with my mouth open.

AMT: amidst multiple reports of racist attacks and expressions of hate, there are concerns that the outcome of the US presidential election there will enable and normalize hate crimes here. I'm Anna-Maria Tremonti, this is The Current.

Trump win gives 'permission' to racists, but hate crimes are nothing new in Canada

Guests: Barbara Perry, Desmond Cole, Bernie Farber

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: You’re a little [expletive], welcome to Canada. You stupid? Are you stupid?

VOICE 2: You didn’t do any of those things at all.

VOICE 1: Are you stupid? Are you stupid? It’s not your [expletive] fault?

VOICE 3: He’s not from around these towns, I can tell by his face.

VOICE 2: Calm down. Calm down.

VOICE 1: You know what it is? These people think they have a right to assault us. I’m the racist?

VOICE 4: These people? It’s not these people.

VOICE 1: I’m the racist? I’m the racist?

VOICE 4: Yeah, you’re the racist.

VOICE 1: Get some. Go back to your f--king country.

ANNA-MARIA TREMONTI: That's an altercation on a Toronto streetcar this week, it made headlines across the country. A white male passenger hurled racist insults at a man who appeared to have brown skin. Other passengers intervened and the abusive man was asked to leave but not before reportedly saying “go Trump”. The incident was caught on video for all to see. It was hardly the only example of hate in recent days or weeks. A school in Kanata, Ontario last week was vandalized with a swastika and KKK graffiti. In Abbotsford BC, this man's racist rant was caught on camera last month after he was issued a parking ticket.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: You a f--king Hindu? All you Hindus should be [expletive] camel riding motherf--kers. You camel rider motherf--ker. Go back to Hindu. White power motherf--ker.

AMT: Well, back in Toronto, Ian Daffern was walking his son to school this week, when he spotted posters promoting the so-called alt-right.

SOUNDCLIP

The thing that triggered me really quick was the words the alt-right. I mean, I'd heard so much about that from the election in the States. I mean, this movement that is using racist politics to get popular support and that this was a racist poster, I want to rip this down because it just makes me so angry to see this kind of thing in my neighbourhood or anywhere in Toronto.

AMT: Well, the amount of hate speech being reported in the media appears to be on the rise and with more than 100 white supremacist groups operating in Canada today, many fear the election of Donald Trump as US President may embolden them all. Especially if what's happening now in the US is any indication. With more than 300 racially charged incidents recorded by the Southern Poverty Law Center since last Tuesday's election. For more of a sense of the Canadian situation, I'm joined by three guests. Desmond Cole is a freelance journalist and activist, Bernie Farber is the Executive Director of the Mosaic Institute. They're both with me in our Toronto studio. Barbara Perry is a Professor in the faculty of Social Science and Humanities at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology. And she joins us from New Orleans today. Hi everyone, welcome.

DESMOND COLE: Good morning.

BERNIE FARBER: Good morning.

BARBARA PERRY: Good morning.

AMT: Barbara Perry, I want to start with you. What do you think when you hear these examples of hate speech and these kinds of incidents in Canada?

BARBARA PERRY: It's really shocking wherever it happens. But I think it's especially notable that it does spill over across the border. The border course is so porous when we're talking about the extension of this sort of rhetoric. I mean, we were following, I think, the elections as closely as many Americans. So not at all surprised that it has infected us in much the same way. And sorry to say, the virulence of the attacks and the language and the emotion that was embedded in that language is just terrifying. I can't imagine the folks that were targeted, how they must have felt.

AMT: Bernie Farber, you've received some threats since this election. What happened to you?

BERNIE FARBER: Well, I'm almost feeling like here we go again. Back in the nineties, when I was with the Canadian Jewish Congress, and that was probably the last peak of neo-Nazi activity in this country with a group called the Heritage Front. For those of us that were battling the neo-Nazis and the Klan and the others, we were targeted. It was more difficult then. People actually had to write a message down on a piece of paper and get an envelope and put it in the envelope and lick it and find a stamp and then go to mail it. Today it's a lot more simple. Just go on to Twitter and find my Twitter handle and send me a death message and it happens. I've got thick skin. You know, it's still a little bit of a jolt, I have to say. And--

AMT: [interposing] But since the US election, you’ve got more?

BERNIE FARBER: Absolutely, and it's happened much more. I’ve received eight or nine such threats since the election and just before the election, because I had been relatively vocal about my feelings of racism and anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, xenophobia that is connected directly to President-elect Trump. And there are people that don't like that. But in terms of what we're seeing poring over into the border, I think we have to have some reference points here. Canada wasn't always the clean cut, you know, cousin of the Americans. We've had our foray with racists and bigots, neo-Nazis and we still have to this day our foray. I think what has happened at this point, sad to say, is that Trump has given permission for the racists and the crumb bums who've been hiding in garbage cans to pop their heads up and say look, wow, fresh air here. Time to get busy, dust themselves off and off they go. So it's not new, it's just a shot of adrenaline for them.

AMT: Desmond Cole, how do you see it?

DESMOND COLE: I think Bernie has just made a really important point because Trump might be giving permission for these things to happen in a maybe more public way now, but we see them all the time. You know, the threshold of what it takes to get on the news is quite high. This incident on the streetcar was videotaped. If it was just a personal account we would never have heard about it. But people experience these things riding to work, going to pick up their children, in conversations with their colleagues people experience this kind of racism every single day. But I think we should also think about things like what happened when Rob Ford was running for election in 2014 and how many candidates, Muslim candidates, particularly women who wear hijab were targeted in their own neighbourhoods. Signs being torn down, volunteers being told to go back to their country. In fact, in one case with Ausma Malik, she had to actually have protection to go to debates because there were people putting up posters in her neighbourhood saying that, you know, she was a part of a terrorist organization and that they were targeting her. This happens in our city all the time. I remember after the attacks in Paris we saw a huge spike in attacks against Muslim people, a Peterborough mosque was firebombed. You know, women going to pick up their children from school were attacked in the city. This is not new, as Bernie says, and it's not simply inspired by what's happening in the United States and then we have some kind of copycat effect here. The same sentiments of white resentment that Donald Trump fed on in order to win his election are present here.

AMT: Barbara Perry, you are tracking white nationalist groups here in Canada. Who are they? How many?

BARBARA PERRY: Well, from the research that we did really in 2013-2014, we were able to identify at that time sort of by triangulating from multiple sources, probably over a hundred active groups and again, that's probably a dramatic under-representation. And, you know, that ranged small cells, if you will, of what some people refer to as three man wrecking crews, up to groups that were, you know, several dozen, into the hundreds as well. And sort of clustered in particular areas, skinhead movement very strong in Montreal, and then more traditional neo-Nazi groups in Western Ontario, southern Alberta and Southern BC as well. And sources close to the ground, if you will, former adherents that we’re in touch with suggest that there has been a bit of an uptick in some of these areas again in the last year or so. And again, whether that's related to Trump or not, I think there--

AMT: [interposing] When you say uptick, does that mean more people are joining these groups? Because I'm wondering how mainstream it is and, you know, not everybody who is going to do what Desmond is describing is going to belong, like, identify as a member of a white supremacist group, ergo they're not so bad. Like, so how do we look at what you're finding?

BARBARA PERRY: Yeah, and that's a really good point because, you know, very very little of the hate crime we see is actually perpetrated by adherents. It's, you know, estimates have it at five, ten per cent at best or at worst perhaps.

AMT: So what are they doing? What are the adherents doing?

BARBARA PERRY: Various kinds of violence. Some of it is just outright criminal violence, some of it is hate motivated. You know, where after typically after a night of drinking, off they go to find someone who is not like them, someone who has brown skin typically, to bash. Or they’ll go, you know, down near a gay club or gay village and bash there. So they are engaging in hate crime, they just don't account for the bulk of it. But, you know, we are absolutely seeing spikes in violence directed towards people who are, especially those perceived to be Muslim or Middle Eastern, as our other two guests have suggested. And very much tied into, you know, the reaction to immigration and especially refugees, reaction to the processes of globalization and how they see that that has resulted in a loss of privilege. And in fact, they would argue a disadvantage for white people. I was looking at the Toronto white people signs and the references there to, you know, loss of those privileges.

AMT: Desmond wants to say something.

DESMOND COLE: It's, I agree. But I think that rather than framing this as privilege, we have to talk about it more as a loss of power and dominance. That's what people are upset about. This idea that they were just born with some imaginary and kind of indescribable privilege is not the truth, they are born with power and the ability to dominate other people because of identity. And that's what's slipping away from them. And, you know, in terms of addressing that, I find it interesting that that poster that was found was calling out directly to white people and saying hey white people, do you feel like this, do you feel like that? And I find that so interesting, particularly because in the responses to that, people are afraid to do the same thing. White people who see this and are horrified by it are nevertheless, I think, very uncomfortable with calling out whiteness and talking to other white people and saying, hey, we as white people need to address this problem. It can't always be folks like myself who are being asked, while we are being targeted with hatred, to then go out and respond and petition and ask for fairness and ask for better. We can't do that. White people who are alarmed by these things need to take these conversations internally and start talking to their peers.

AMT: Bernie, what do you think?

BERNIE FARBER: So I think we need to take a step back. [clears throat] Excuse me. So I just do not believe that there is an organized white racialist movement at this moment in time here in Canada. I believe that there are bigots and there are racists, anti-black activists without question. But let us recall it wasn't all that long ago, and I mentioned it already, the days of the Heritage Front, when there were people, older people like Ernst Zundel and Jim Keegstra and Malcolm Ross and these were the leaders of a movement, George Burdi, these were a people who were gathering young people, sometimes in the hundreds or hate rock concerts. That was a heady time. Today what we're seeing is different. I'm not saying it's more or less dangerous. As a matter of fact, it could be even more dangerous because we're seeing individuals out there, loners out there who are now feeling empowered because of what Trump has been able to do, give them the permission to finally speak. And I think that what we saw on the on the streetcar is a fine example of a person who felt wow, I can say whatever the hell I want to say now. But the good news is the manner in which people reacted. That I think is a kind of a ray, you know, in a dark cloud. Not one, not two but a number of people on that streetcar.

AMT: A whole bunch of people on the streetcar.

BERNIE FARBER: Stood with the victim against the victimizer.

AMT: Ok, so let me ask you. Last month, a national poll by the Angus Reid Institute and the CBC found 68 per cent of Canadians believe minorities should be doing more to fit in with mainstream society, instead of keeping their own customs and languages. When the same question was put to Americans, 53 per cent agreed with that idea. So 68 per cent of Canadians agree with that idea, 53 per cent of Americans. What do you make of that?

BERNIE FARBER: So here's my problem. It's a poll. And I'm not so sure how much I trust polls, certainly since Brexit and certainly since the American elections. I want to know what were the reference points on the polls? What were the follow up questions after that? What were they referring to exactly, when you ask an open ended question and expect a straight up yes or no answer?

AMT: What did they mean by minorities, what do they mean by culture and language?

BERNIE FARBER: Exactly.

AMT: OK, fair enough.

BERNIE FARBER: You know, certainly, I'm a first generation Canadian. My own parents who were refugees wanted me to fit into what Canada was for them. Didn't stop us from practicing our cultural aspects and everything else, so it's a kind of a question that needs focus groups as opposed to polls. And I just trust don't trust that question, I saw it and I just immediately eliminated it.

DESMOND COLE: At the same time though, for those of us who experienced, as I said, these kinds of things all the time, we don't require a poll. I'm astonished at how people want to science this to death, as if my own experience and the experience of hundreds of thousands or millions of Canadians is not science. Like, what kind of proof do people need? The Ottawa police were part of the largest study about race based data recently. For two years they had to document the race of people that they pulled over in traffic stops. Black and Middle Eastern people were far more likely to be pulled over by the police but they were also more likely to have nothing result from the stop. No ticket, no citation, no fine, no nothing. So after that happened, the police chief in Ottawa, the mayor of Ottawa said well, no proof of anything, there's still not enough proof of racism here, we don't call this racism. I really wonder when these white people are going to actually acknowledge the problem. But the answer is that they never will because no matter how much evidence you give them they want to deny it.

AMT: OK, so I want to pick up on that and ask you Barbara, because you're studying white nationalist groups. Are the white nationalist groups really the issue or are the wider, just the wider population? The real issue, and if we talk about white nationalist groups, we can blame them for everything, instead of, and I'm a white person asking this question, instead of blaming ourselves? Instead of actually looking at ourselves and saying OK, how do we fit into this picture, what do we need to change?

BARBARA PERRY: Right. So the groups are, you know, they are marginal and often they are marginalized people as well. So I, you know, as much as I am concerned about them, I am much more concerned about the broader everyday experiences that people have. And I just want to go back to what Bernie said about, you know, not sort of having an organized movement. And I wonder if that's not exactly what the alt-right is trying to do. Is trying to resurrect that movement and to the extent that they can tap into the sorts of sentiments that, you know, we see expressed on the buses, on the streets, in our schools, that sort of thing. I think that there is certainly, you know, there is not even a latent any more, trends there to be tapped into. And I think, you know, it is those, as Desmond has expressed there, I do a lot of work with Muslim communities, LGBTQ communities and they do live with the daily fear that they can be attacked, assaulted, verbally, physically at any moment. And so, and it's not the white power groups that they're afraid of, it’s their neighbour, it's the person that they see on the bus every day, it's the person that they see in the seat beside them in their classroom. And so we do need to worry about everyday racism and not just the extreme racism associated with these groups.

AMT: And so how do we counter this, Desmond? How do we move forward?

DESMOND COLE: Well, I want to pick up on something Barbara just said. Which is that we're talking about white nationalist groups and we're talking about individual behaviour. We also have to look to our institutions.

BARBARA PERRY: Mmhmm.

DESMOND COLE: Because our institutions are advancing racism every single day. And they are not seen as being some, you know, very scary or predatory group that is preying on vulnerable people. I brought up the police just now because, I mean, tomorrow in this city there is a meeting about police carding, the ongoing activity of stopping and documenting, disproportionately black and Indigenous people, homeless people, people who are vulnerable and taking their information. We still have to have arguments about this in the city of Toronto, which is supposed to be the most diverse city in the world, whatever that's worth, because we can't convince ourselves that an institution targeting black and Indigenous and poor and homeless people is doing something wrong. We're still kind of having like I said, that science argument. Maybe there's some science to explain it. So how do we stop this? I think we really have to start by looking at our institutions and the very latent kinds of racism in education, in employment, that they're promoting every single day. This is about the state not just individual actors, not just white nationalist identified groups.

BERNIE FARBER: This is really the crux of the issue and I think Des has hit the nail squarely on the head. We need to understand that racism within institutionalized areas have to be confronted literally on a daily basis. But here's my fear. My fear is it's there, it's continued, people kind of tried to ignore it or push it away. Now we have a Donald Trump in the United States being elected to the highest office--

AMT: [interposing] Highest office, institution, right back to the institutions.

BERNIE FARBER: [crosstalk] Highest office institution. And my fear is that any progress that we have made and it is not great, but we have made some progress, certainly even from ten years ago is going to be impacted. Because people are going to now be able to feel validated on all their fears and all their racial fears and everything that they bundled up inside, boom, it's going to come out again.

AMT: OK. Well, we have to leave it there. I'm sorry Barbara, we're running out of time but that's where we connect the dots today from what's going on in our wider world. We have to leave it there. Thank you all of you.

DESMOND COLE: Thank you.

BERNIE FARBER: Thank you.

BARBARA PERRY: Thank you so much.

AMT: That's Desmond Cole, freelance journalist and activist. Bernie Farber, Executive Director of the Mosaic Institute there in our Toronto studio. Barbara Perry is a Professor in the faculty of Social Science and Humanities at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology. She's in New Orleans today. We want to hear from you. Have you witnessed, have you been the victim of hate speech in Canada? The kinds of things that we are talking about here today. Share your experiences with us, your thoughts on what we're talking about. Tweet us @TheCurrentCBC, find us on Facebook, send us an email by going to our website cbc.ca/thecurrent, click on the contact link. And stay with us. The news is next. And then, the RCMP has given CBC News an unprecedented look into some of its case files. It wants to prove the need for new investigative powers around digital roadblocks. We're going to be looking at that when we return, right after the news. This is The Current.

RCMP commissioner calls for greater police powers online

Guests: Dave Seglins

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

[Music: Theme]

AMT: Still to come. On the eve of the Second World War, a ship full of Jewish refugees from Germany arrived at Canada's shores and was turned away. We will speak with one of the surviving passengers of the MS St. Louis because what happened back then holds some important lessons for now. That's in an hour. But first, making the case for increased police powers.

[Music: Theme]

AMT: Well you know the saying, the Mounties always get their man. But as you may have been hearing on the news, the RCMP says it's struggling these days to track down people suspected of criminal activity online and that includes potential jihadist activity by suspected militants. Police officials say they just don't have the tools to keep up with technologically savvy suspects. But even as the federal government holds public consultations on its national security legislation, privacy and civil liberties advocates say police have yet to make a compelling case for expanding their surveillance powers online. And that is why the RCMP has offered the CBC and The Toronto Star an unprecedented look into some sensitive files, in the hopes of making the case that the new powers are in order. CBC News investigative reporter Dave Seglins is working on these stories and he's with me in our Toronto studio. Hi Dave.

DAVE SEGLINS: Good morning.

AMT: So what tools are the RCMP looking for to help it with investigations online?

DAVE SEGLINS: Well, they're looking at four main policy proposals that they say need to be addressed. But the commissioner of the RCMP Bob Paulson, for him, the top priority is online subscriber information.

AMT: And online subscriber information, remind us with that is.

DAVE SEGLINS: Well, it's called a bunch of things. Basic subscriber information, BSI, is how they talk about it. It's how, it's the real life person behind an IP address. So police get an IP address, they see on the internet and they go to a provider and say who is this? The name and the address behind the IP. And Commissioner Paulson says this is barebones information that's crucial as the first building block to determine, you know, do they need to do a further investigation.

AMT: And can't police already get that type of information. Well it can but they have to get a warrant. And that requirement is what Commissioner Paulson says is slowing down investigations and police don't necessarily have evidence of a crime at the outset. He wants police to have warrantless access to this basic subscriber information. He says it's similar to, you know, a police officer running someone's driver's license. A basic, largely uncontroversial tool of policing.

SOUNDCLIP

BOB PAULSON: The basic subscriber information is not private communications, it's like a phone book, you know, it's like an address. I started my police career in a community doing community policing. Couldn't have done it if there was no numbers on houses, couldn't have done it if there wasn't license plates, right? If everybody walked around with a bag over their head, like, you can't do that, you can't enforce the laws that a society has brought to bear in an anonymous world. You just can't do it.

AMT: OK, but why does it have to be accessed without a warrant?

DAVE SEGLINS: Well, for one thing, police didn't need a warrant until 2014 and that's when the Supreme Court of Canada weighed it in, changed the rules. It was a child pornography case and in it they found that the police had violated the suspect's privacy rights when officers went and requested the subscriber information linked to an IP address. The court ruled that the request actually constitutes a search and it required the warrant because that when Canadians are online, they have a reasonable expectation of privacy. And online we even think of that privacy almost like anonymity. And for some context, I will say that before the decision in 2014, police requests for the subscriber information, they were routine. Officers in fact, in 2013 alone, they made 1.2 million requests.

AMT: Wow. So hasn't the court's decision decided the issue though?

DAVE SEGLINS: Well, privacy advocates would say yeah, the Supreme Court, the highest court in the land has ruled. But the ruling actually leaves the door open slightly and says absent a reasonable law. So that means that the government could write a different law giving police the right to ask for this subscriber information without a warrant, a different system, for what would be considered administrative access. It could be overseen by a senior police officer but not a judge. And that's precisely what Commissioner Paulson is lobbying the prime minister's office to do.

AMT: So as it stands, police can still get subscriber information but they need a warrant. Is this a question of convenience then?

DAVE SEGLINS: Well, Commissioner Paulson says it's more than that. I mean, the judicial warrant comes with a legal threshold. So to get one, police need to prove they have, you know, legitimate reasons to believe, you know, or investigate someone. And it's sort of a chicken and egg dilemma. You need the warrant to find out if there's criminal activity going on, but they need to have reasonable grounds to believe the criminal activity is going on to get the warrant in the first place. Commissioner Paulson told me about one case that struck particularly close to home.

SOUNDCLIP

BOB PAULSON: My niece, young girl about 12, a couple of years ago, my sister called me and said Bob there's some trucker that is talking to my niece or to her daughter online. And it's improper, it seems like he's trying to bring her along, and what do I do? I said well, call the police. What are they going to do? In the olden days if I can use that term, if we had calls on a telephone where someone was calling to say I have a obscene phone call, we'd be able to go and get the information from the phone company, find out who the subscriber is and get an investigation going. In the case that I'm talking about, my niece, there was no basis because the criminal threshold hadn't yet been breached. Nobody could argue there was a reasonable grounds to believe that this trucker who was talking to my 12-year-old niece was doing it for a sexual purpose, although that was certainly the suspicion. We couldn't have gotten the subscriber info on that guy.

AMT: That's a pretty compelling story close to home for him. But what about the trucker's rights?

DAVE SEGLINS: Well, civil libertarians would say that's precisely the issue. And they feel this has already been dealt with by the Supreme Court. Michael Vaughan, she is with the BC Civil Liberties Association, she says the police arguments don't hold up to scrutiny.

SOUNDCLIP

There's a kind of a sucking and blowing at the same time that's going on here. It's impossible to say this information is critical to our ability to catch criminals and yet has no privacy interest that we should be guarding at the usual level. The police are saying it's like a piece of metal on the ground, it doesn't say anything. And the Supreme Court of Canada said hey, no that place of metal on the ground is the key. It’s the key to the door that gets you into the room that tells you everything.

AMT: So that's the debate over police access to basic online subscriber information. What other powers are police pushing for Dave?

DAVE SEGLINS: Well, another major issue has to do with encryption. Police seem to accept that look, encryption’s a good thing. It's used, you know, online banking, corporate security, cyber security all relies on it. So they aren’t looking to build backdoors into encryption as has long been talked about, but instead some police think they have another solution. They want a law that would compel a suspect or a witness to divulge their password on their phone or encryption keys on their computers or any device that they may be using.

AMT: Without a judicial warrant as with the basic online subscriber information?

DAVE SEGLINS: Well, no, actually in this case police would need a warrant. But that added layer hasn't made this proposal any less controversial. Police, they say that it’s essential and they point to the case of homegrown jihadist Aaron Driver.

AMT: OK now, Aaron Driver is the man from Strathroy, Ontario. He blew himself up in August in a taxi when he was confronted by police.

DAVE SEGLINS: That's right. And he first came to police attention almost two years earlier when he was out on social media defending the Parliament Hill shooter Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, that was late 2014. Driver also was posting comments supporting ISIS. Police took his name gave it to foreign intelligence and they started watching for online chatter and they found that Driver was talking with well-known ISIS members and several suspects involved in other terror attacks in Texas and Australia. But all of the content of those messages was encrypted.

AMT: And police couldn't crack that.

DAVE SEGLINS: No they couldn't. And Chief Superintendent Jeff Adam with the RCMP’s technical investigation services describes them as unbreakable.

SOUNDCLIP

I don't know what was in them. It could have been a muffin recipe, it could have been, you know, the plans for a bomb. We have no idea.

DAVE SEGLINS: So police arrested Driver in June of 2015. More than a year before his fatal incident but without hard evidence, they couldn't lay charges, so he was released on a peace bond.

AMT: And then it was the FBI that tipped off the RCMP in August this year that he was planning something in Canada.

DAVE SEGLINS: That's right. The FBI found a video warning of an imminent attack in Canada. Now, the US agents didn't know who the mass jihadist was on the video. The RCMP looked at it, quickly identified him as Driver and then officers intercepted him just as he was leaving home.

AMT: I remember he was in a taxi. He was carrying explosives.

DAVE SEGLINS: That's right. And Chief Superintendent Adams says RCMP believe Driver had called this taxi to take him to a mall and that he was going to try to detonate the explosives there or on public transit. All in nearby London during rush hour.

SOUNDCLIP

The explosive device if it had gone out in a public venue, would have caused significant injury and death to people in the immediate vicinity. It was good police work that caught him before he could detonate it in public if that was his intent. The fact that he was out and available to do that is probably because we couldn't break the encrypted communications and that’s going dark. We couldn’t get the evidence to charge him.

AMT: So if the police believe there's a big risk to public safety does that give them a stronger case for police access to encrypted messages?

DAVE SEGLINS: Well it's interesting, you know, despite the stakes in the Driver case, not everyone in law enforcement is actually convinced that compelling a suspect to give up their password is a good idea.

AMT: Why not?

DAVE SEGLINS: Well, because police in essence would be forcing someone to incriminate themselves. At least that's what the critics say. And one of those critics is RCMP Commissioner Bob Paulson himself.

SOUNDCLIP

BOB PAULSON: It's very troubling. The criminal element, and in that I include the terrorist element, are relying on encryption but so are the average Canadians. Like, the average Canadian doesn't want to have their communications exposed to review by other people, I get that. I don't know. I don't see a state where, you know, the police are ordering people to give up information. It’d be like ordering a statement, I order you to confess to this crime, like, it's fraud.

AMT: Did it surprise you that the head of the RCMP would say that?

DAVE SEGLINS: Yes. I mean, it's an interesting position for Commissioner Paulson to take because not everyone in law enforcement agrees with him. The Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police actually was out passing a resolution just in August calling for this new law. They're fine with it, so I guess it's just an indication that not even police themselves agree on this measure but it is one solution that is being floated to a major problem of encryption. What can police do to deal with it if they seize a suspect's phone, if it's locked or if a suspect is, you know, online using encrypted messaging.

AMT: So in Aaron Driver’s case, how would that have worked?

DAVE SEGLINS: I don't know. I mean, when they arrested him 2015, they had grounds to get a peace bond on the intelligence that he was, you know, chatting with other extremists. He agreed to that peace bond, but police might have been able to threaten him. They might have said, compelled him to, you know, provide access to your computer. I don't know. I mean, but the implication of this kind of proposal is just that, forcing somebody to do it. But I have to tell you, encryption was a big problem in most of the cases that we looked at.

AMT: How so?

DAVE SEGLINS: Well, we got access to ten files and I think in eight of them the police at the end of the day couldn't read much of the evidence because data was encrypted. For instance, I'll give you a case. High-risk travelers in a city in western Canada, they wouldn't tell us, police wouldn't tell us which one, but police believe that they were planning to leave Canada to fight overseas with extremist groups. Police tracked them, they identified more than 30 laptops, cell phones, computers. They got warrants, they were able to intercept two of the devices, they collected tons of data being sent and received, there were images, videos, tiny snippets of messages, emails but a large portion of that was encrypted. Arguably, if police had had this power that is being talked about, a law that would, you know, police could go to a judge say look, this is a serious risk. Get an order to the suspect, turn over your password, provide police access, investigators may have been able to read it, use it as evidence.

AMT: And what happened in that case?

DAVE SEGLINS: Still under investigation. Suspects are still out there.

AMT: Still out. Do we know where out there?

DAVE SEGLINS: We do not, and the police will not go there.

AMT: OK. And well, how did you get security clearance to see these active police files?

DAVE SEGLINS: Well, it was a long and complicated process. A little over a year ago, I was at a conference where police were talking about cyber security. They were complaining the public doesn't understand the problems and the growing problems we're facing. So I stood up and issued a challenge. I said look, you want Canadians to understand, give us a firsthand look. Well, they thought about it. To do that though, they wanted to check us out. There was lots of paperwork, official security forms, background checks, they wanted to make sure that we were trustworthy. And I said well, what's all this about? Well, they also wanted to make sure we don't have enormous debt that might make us susceptible to blackmail or coercion. In the end, the RCMP agreed to give me clearance, top secret clearance, as well as investigative reporter Robert Cribb at The Toronto Star. Now I have to say, they did not give us unfettered access, they withheld names, key identifying details. What they provided were fairly detailed written summaries, we had background briefings to these cases, we can ask questions. So RCMP officials felt that sharing information through these files, and in that way, with the media this controlled fashion, it wouldn't compromise their ongoing investigation, any future court hearing or investigative techniques that are sensitive or any court case in the future that might be compromised.

AMT: Any prosecutions, huh? So why do you think they let you inside to that extent?

DAVE SEGLINS: Well, Commissioner Paulson and the other police officers we've been speaking to, they're pretty transparent about it. They want the public to understand the challenges that investigators are facing and this comes at a time that the federal government is holding public consultations on reviewing Bill C-51, national security legislation it inherited from the Conservative government, and the RCMP wants to make sure that its perspective is being heard.

AMT: OK, you saw 10 files?

DAVE SEGLINS: Yes, ten in total. They illustrate two other major issues that police are facing online and this is the lack of data retention and their inability to be able to intercept online communications. Investigators want the companies themselves, networks, to hold onto their data, so that they can go back and if there's a crime, they can investigate, you know, the online footprint and history of a suspect.

AMT: And aren't the companies doing that already?

DAVE SEGLINS: Some are but not everyone. It can be very expensive. Smaller internet companies will dump their data after a matter of weeks because of some of the huge costs of maintaining it and having storage space. I spoke with Christopher Parsons, he's with Citizen Lab, it's a cyber-research institute at the Munk School of Global Affairs University of Toronto. He says that if data retention was mandated by law it wouldn't be the companies that would pay for it.

SOUNDCLIP

I know that a lot of Canadians don't worry too much about Bell and Rogers and the others, they’re not the most loved companies, but this will have a financial impact on the companies, which will likely have a financial impact on customers. The data retention is going to be paid for either by a Canadian taxpayer because the government would be providing money to the telecommunications companies to subsidize this retention. Or Canadians would be paying for it as consumers because the telcos will probably pass along a data retention tax on the subscribers. So it'll affect Canadians in the pocketbook one way or another.

DAVE SEGLINS: And Chris Parsons adds that, look, increasing data retention would also make internet companies an even larger target for hackers since they’d be holding on to even more valuable customer data.

AMT: Well, how long do police want online data held?

DAVE SEGLINS: Well no one I spoke to would put a time frame around it but they point to Australia as a good model for Canada. Australia currently requires that data be held for two years. But beside the timeframe and financial considerations, Chris Parsons had a more philosophical objection to the idea of data retention.

SOUNDCLIP

It puts every Canadian under the auspice of potential police suspicion and as a result they must track you. I mean, it would be equally very helpful to have a surveillance camera in every room that we were in and police would never access it, except under judicial warrant when they know something has gone wrong. I don't think that many a surveillance camera in every room they’re in because something might go wrong or they might do something wrong. They would expect the police should only be able to monitor them when there is a demonstrated crime that has or is about to be investigated.

AMT: The scenario is really in the realm of a police state. He said police would require a judicial warrant, right?

DAVE SEGLINS: Well, that is what police are proposing and it would be the same protocol that they put in place to address the last obstacle that they're facing online and they say it's their inability to intercept communications. Police officials showed us one particular case that illustrates this problem. RCMP obtained warrants to spy on a group of terrorism suspects in eastern Canada. Investigators wanted to listen in on their communications but none of the cellular networks that the suspects were using had any capabilities to intercept their digital traffic.

AMT: So what did the RCMP do?

DAVE SEGLINS: Well, they had to build their own custom interception equipment. But in the end, it actually didn't help their investigation.

AMT: Why not?

DAVE SEGLINS: Well, they were able to tap in to the cellular data but the data wound up being encrypted and unreadable. They overcame one obstacle and then ran into this even larger one. Police say that that investigation is still ongoing.

AMT: So they were able to intercept the network but the problem was encryption?

DAVE SEGLINS: That's right. But designing this custom intercept program was hugely expensive, time consuming, police spent two months, quarter million dollars on it. What they want is a law that would, look, require all communications service providers to have their own interception systems built into the network. That way investigators could tap into the company's existing infrastructure when they get a warrant and it wouldn't have to waste all his time and money.

AMT: service providers don't already have that capability?

DAVE SEGLINS: Well, it's the same as with data retention. Some do, some don't, depending on the costs. Investigators say the problem is that, look, tech savvy criminals know which companies are the weak links and they exploit them. And that's why police want a law that would require across the board all companies big and small to have the same interception capability.

AMT: And who would pay for that?

DAVE SEGLINS: Well again, same with data retention, probably taxpayers or customers.

AMT: Mm. It's interesting because three of the four proposals police are pushing for would still require judicial warrants. So they'd end up with more investigative powers online but they would need to go to a judge to be able to use those powers.

DAVE SEGLINS: That's right. And I mean, in the police discussions they acknowledge, look, there have to be privacy protections built into it but the warrant system itself is not without its critics. They say judges and justices of the peace, they can be too deferential to the police, I mean, just look at the journalists spying cases in Quebec that broke last month. In one of those cases, the Montreal police got 24 warrants to monitor a journalist’s cell phone and location and the so-called meta data around the communications, even though police admit he wasn't actually suspected of any criminal wrongdoing.

AMT: Yes. Because there were several journalists and they were exposing huge crime links between unions, business, politicians, organized crime and they were being monitored because the police were trying to figure out who inside was leaking.

DAVE SEGLINS: Right. And the threshold, it was all signed off by a lower level justice of the peace. So the warrant system has to have integrity, if, you know, people are going to be confident that there's oversight.

AMT: So this raises lots of questions. How do Canadians feel about giving police more online surveillance and investigative powers?

DAVE SEGLINS: Well, CBC News and The Toronto Star have done two polls on this very issue. One actually before the journalist spying scandal broke in Quebec and then we'd sampled public opinion again afterwards. Now we're not actually releasing the results of those polls until tomorrow. But I think it's fair to say you may be surprised at how open Canadians are to expanding police powers and also about their feelings in general about the right to complete digital privacy.

AMT: Well, we'll be listening for those poll results in the news tomorrow, you'll have that?

DAVE SEGLINS: Indeed.

AMT: OK. Well, thank you.

DAVE SEGLINS: Thank you.

AMT: Dave Seglins, an investigative reporter with CBC News. He joined me in our Toronto studio. What's your view on this? Are the police making their case for you? What do you think? You can tweet us we’re @TheCurrentCBC. You can find us on Facebook or write to us online cbc.ca/the current, just click the contact link.

[Music: ambient xylophone]

ANNA-MARIA TREMONTI: OK, well, if you are at all interested in cooking and being a foodie, you’ve got to hear about a story we've got next week on The Current. The celebrated chef, cookbook author and TV personality Julia Child brought French cuisine into North American homes. In doing so, she didn't just change the way we eat, she changed the way we think about food and we're going to look at her life and legacy next week, as part of our season long project The Disruptors. Julia Child’s kitchen is actually now a popular display at the National Museum of American History in Washington DC. Paula Johnson is the curator of the food history collections there. And when she and her colleagues learned that Julia Child was leaving her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 2001, they asked if they could interview her in that iconic kitchen. Once they arrived, she knew they wanted to ask for more.

SOUNDCLIP

So we went to Cambridge, walked through that door right by the old garland range and immediately the three of us had this sense of oh my gosh, the entire kitchen is the artifact. That it will not do to collect one or two things that are iconic of Julia Child, a whisk or the garland range. That the way that this is arranged, the parts and pieces, how she has put them together, how they have worked for her throughout her life, both at home cooking and also cooking on TV. That this is the object, the complicated object. So we sat around this very table for a couple of hours and talked to Julia about it and, you know, at first she was a little reticent thinking well, what does it mean to donate my kitchen? But when we assured her we would not ruin her house and take the actual walls, she said OK.

AMT: Paula Johnson, who curates the food history collections, which now include Julia Child’s kitchen, at the National Museum of American History in Washington DC. We will be hearing more Julia Child stories next week, as part of our project The Disruptors. And now stay with us. In our next half hour, I'm going to be joined by the survivor of the Holocaust, who was also a survivor of the Voyage Of The Damned. And that was the 1939 ocean crossing of a ship full of German Jewish refugees. They were turned away then, turned away multiple times along the North American coast. Their stories are as pertinent as ever today. So we will hear from Ann Maria Gordon, who now lives in Toronto. She was still a little girl on that ship. I'm Anna-Maria Tremonti, this is The Current on CBC Radio One, Sirius XM and online on cbc.ca/thecurrent.

[Music: Extro]

Holocaust survivor shares lessons from 'voyage of the damned' on MS St. Louis

Guests: Ana Maria Gordon, Armando Lucas Correa

ANNA-MARIA TREMONTI: Hello, I'm Anna-Maria Tremonti, this is The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

[Music: ominous tones]

VOICE 1: A passenger on the St. Louis, Max Lowe, attempted to commit suicide on May the 30th. He slashed his wrists and jumped into the ocean.

VOICE 2: The newspaper headlines played like a melodramatic serial.

VOICE 1: Fears Jews will enter death pact. Refugee liner ignores order to leave Cuba. Dominica offers haven to refugees barred at Havana. Liner carries refugee Jews into Caribbean. Offer respite to wandering Jews on liner.

AMT: Well, that's a clip from when Canada said no, the abandoned Jews of the MS St. Louis. The 1939 crossing would later be known as the Voyage Of The Damned. With the exception of a very few, all of the 900 passengers aboard were Jews fleeing Nazi Germany. But once they'd set sail, the captain soon learned that no country in North America, including Canada, would accept the refugees. It is a story with important resonance today, as thousands and thousands of refugees take to the seas looking for safety but are met by closed borders or death. Journalist Armando Lucas Correa tells the story of the voyage in his new novel The German Girl. He's with me in Toronto. And we're also joined by one of the passengers on the MS St. Louis. Ana Maria Gordon was a young girl then and she lives in Toronto now. Hello to both of you.

ARMANDO LUCAS CORREA: Hi.

ANA MARIA GORDON: Hello.

AMT: Ana Maria Gordon, I want to start with you. How old were you when you were on the St. Louis?

ANA MARIA GORDON: I was four years old.

AMT: And where were you going from? Why were your parents leaving?

ANA MARIA GORDON: My parents were leaving because the political situation was very bad. Jews were persecuted and they tried to go somewhere else and make a new life.

AMT: And you were just, like, a little girl.

ANA MARIA GORDON: Yeah.

AMT: And so how did you and your family come to be on that ship?

ANA MARIA GORDON: It was the only ship available. It was the only escape available. Jews were not allowed to go anywhere.

AMT: And what was the plan once the ship arrived in Cuba, because that's where you were headed first right, Cuba?

ANA MARIA GORDON: Yes. Well, I don't think they had a fixed plan. All I know is that they had a book [chuckles] to learn Spanish on the ship, a German book which was called the thousand words in Spanish and they studied every day.

ARMANDO LUCAS CORREA: But you know what happened? In May 1939 there were no visas, available visas at that moment, for all these German during the Nazi period. The only country that they can find visa at the moment it was Cuba and they charge 150 dollars at the moment it was a fortune.

ANA MARIA GORDON: [crosstalk] Which in those days was--

AMT: [crosstalk] A huge amount of money.

ANA MARIA GORDON: A lot of money.

ARMANDO LUCAS CORREA: Yeah.

AMT: Now, your parents were Czechoslovakian?

ANA MARIA GORDON: Yes.

AMT: OK. And who were they? Like, tell me more about them.

ANA MARIA GORDON: They were middle class people. My father was a representative of a, he traveled, he represented a coffee company and he traveled through Czechoslovakia and sold coffee in wholesale. And my mother was a stay home mother after I was born.

AMT: And so where were they living, were they in Berlin?

ANA MARIA GORDON: In a city called, no, we living in Czechoslovakia, now Slovakia, in a city called Kosice, which was a city of 250,000 at that time. Now it’s much bigger.

AMT: Do you remember being on that ship, do you have any memory of it?

ANA MARIA GORDON: Well, like children memories, you know.

AMT: Mmhmm. Like, what sticks out in your mind?

ANA MARIA GORDON: Well, it was it was nice, it was on the ship, there were a lot of people. It was, you know, it was sunny, it was something that a child just doesn't know what to make of. [chuckles]

AMT: Yeah, yeah for sure. So you just were going on whatever you were going on, a trip, a different kind of thing.

ANA MARIA GORDON: Exactly.

AMT: And because you were so young. But what did your parents tell you about the mood on the ship later when it became clear that they wouldn’t let you dock anywhere?

ANA MARIA GORDON: I don't think they told me much, I think I lived it. I lived the change because people got nervous and people were, you know, talking things that I didn't know what was going on.

AMT: And you remember feeling that even as a child?

ANA MARIA GORDON: Yes.

AMT: Yeah? So what was sort of a lark and maybe an adventure became something else even to you.

ANA MARIA GORDON: Well I think so because people were very restless and nervous and, you know.

AMT: Kids pick up on that kind of thing.

ANA MARIA GORDON: Yes, absolutely.

AMT: OK, well. Armando, let’s just talk a little bit. First of all, how did you meet Ana Maria?

ARMANDO LUCAS CORREA: That's important point. Thank to Facebook and social media sometime is helpful. I remember the last June 2nd I posted a picture of the boat saying that on this day Cuba denied entrance to the St. Louis and they have to left the harbour. And then a friend Silvia Gruner, she's a Mexican artist that I met during the eighties in Cuba. She sent me a message, hi Armando, I think my mother came in that boat with my grandparents and I think my uncle and maybe my aunt too. I said Silvia, send me the last name immediately because I have, you know, the manifesto of the boat with all the names of the refugees. And she took like two days to send me. I wanted to kill her. [chuckles]

AMT: Like, waiting, waiting.

ARMANDO LUCAS CORREA: I want the name. And then I found Carmen, you know the parent’s name of Ana Maria and immediately they found, they said no it was your mother it was your grandmother Cydonia, he was your grandfather, Richard, no?

ANA MARIA GORDON: Yeah.

ARMANDO LUCAS CORREA: And, you know, the aunt and uncle. And I said where your mother is living? She's living in Toronto. I call Ana Maria immediately and she said--

ANA MARIA GORDON: [crosstalk] [chuckles] Three days later.

ARMANDO LUCAS CORREA: You were going to the Rocky Mountain, I remember.

ANA MARIA GORDON: [laughs] That’s right.

ARMANDO LUCAS CORREA: When I found, like, a really old lady, you know.

AMT: [laughs]

ARMANDO LUCAS CORREA: This woman with this energy.

ANA MARIA GORDON: [laughs] Not in our days.

ARMANDO LUCAS CORREA: And then I took a flight the next week and I met Ana Maria and this is like part of my family right now.

AMT: Aww.

ANA MARIA GORDON: It was very funny.

AMT: You thought you were going to find an old lady sitting in a chair not moving.

ARMANDO LUCAS CORREA: I know. [chuckles]

ANA MARIA GORDON: [laughing]

AMT: Ana Maria, how old are you now?

ANA MARIA GORDON: 81.

AMT: OK. Well, there, see.

ARMANDO LUCAS CORREA: Yeah.

AMT: 81’s the new 41, you remember that.

ARMANDO LUCAS CORREA: And then I bring my mother and bring my mother right now to Toronto to meet Ana Maria too, because I found the St. Louis and it’s part of my story too.

ARMANDO LUCAS CORREA: Well, let's talk about your story. Your book is called The German Girl. Give us an idea about the story.

ARMANDO LUCAS CORREA: OK, the story, and it's true. You know, the centre of the book is the tragedy of the St. Louis. But for me, it’s like a love story. It’s the story of Hannah and Leo, they're going to be 12-years-old. And it's a love story, they promise to love until the end of their life. This is the centre of the book. But the St. Louis has been with me since I was a child. I remember during the seventies and eighties in Cuba, I'm Cuban and I left the country in 1991. My grandmother, she's a daughter of a Spanish immigrant, you know, her parents arrived in Cuba at the beginning of the 20th century. And she was pregnant of my mom and she is with me right now in Toronto when the boat arrived. And I remember my grandmother saying when I was a child that Cuba is going to pay for the next 100 years because of what they did to those refugees.

AMT: Because Cuba had actually cut a deal to say that the St. Louis could land, that the passengers could. And so what happened when they got there?

ARMANDO LUCAS CORREA: No one that, when the boat left Hamburg, the President of Cuba, Laredo Bru signed a decree with the name and the number of passengers, decree 937, saying that they were not allowed to disembark in Cuba. And, you know, even Ana Maria has the letters signed by the Director of Immigration of Cuba Manuel Benitez saying they allowed to disembark in Cuba. No work, but you can disembark in Havana if you pay 150 dollars. When the boat arrived, the president required 500 dollars per passenger. That was a fortune, that was impossible to get that kind of money in less than a week.

ANA MARIA GORDON: Nobody had money anymore. [chuckles]

ARMANDO LUCAS CORREA: The boat stayed at the harbour for a week. And then when Laurien Berenson, the guy who was negotiating with the Cuban government to help all these refugees. He came from United States, he required like 23 and 19 cents, a discount from the 500 dollars and Laredo Bru said no and they left the country.

AMT: Why did the Germans allow the St. Louis to sail in the first place? It was full of Jewish refugees.

ARMANDO LUCAS CORREA: That was the part of the mentality of Hitler. And, you know, the message was nobody wants them, why have to keep them?

AMT: So he wanted to, he was actually messaging that they were unwanted.

ARMANDO LUCAS CORREA: [crosstalk] To the world, exactly.

AMT: Because he was going to, I’m going to prove to you you’re not wanted, I know they're all going to turn you away. And that's what happened.

ARMANDO LUCAS CORREA: Exactly, exactly, that’s what happened.

ANA MARIA GORDON: Yeah, and we didn’t know that.

ARMANDO LUCAS CORREA: And they designed the Final Solution after that.

AMT: And so, and what is it about today's refugee crisis that really makes you want to put that in your historical novel? What are you watching, what are you feeling as you see what's going on in the world?

ARMANDO LUCAS CORREA: You have to understand I am a refugee too. I left my country in 1991, I am an American citizen, I'm living in United States but I think, and it’s part of the human being, it’s part of the DNA, when you are afraid or reject the others or people who has different skin colour or people who has accent or people who believe in a different God. We are not prepared to accept others. And I think we need to fight against that. That's the reason you have to read The German Girl.

AMT: Ana Maria, do you see any parallels to what we're seeing today with the refugee crisis with what the Jews faced in the 1930s when they tried to flee Hitler?

ANA MARIA GORDON: Well, the thing is that nobody wants them and nobody wanted us. And now the numbers are even, they’re much much bigger. But now some countries are taking in refugees, at that time nobody would.

AMT: When you see those pictures of people on ships--

ANA MARIA GORDON: Oh. [gasps]

AMT: That go down, what do you think?

ANA MARIA GORDON: Horrendous.

AMT: Yeah.

ANA MARIA GORDON: Very sad, very sad.

ARMANDO LUCAS CORREA: We were seeing a picture together, I remember Ana Maria say oh my God, I think this is my father, this is my mother because these are real people. You know, sometime it's easy to say Hitler killed six million of Jews, nine million of Soviets but, you know, I don't want numbers, I don't want 937 people, I want Hannah Rosenthal who was a little girl, who has a father, a mother, a friend. It’s real people and that's the reason why they are not a book, I had the manifesto of the boat with a sign of all of these refugees, including Carmen.

AMT: You put it right in there. You put all the signatures in there. You reproduced that, yeah. Well, Armando, what eventually happened to the St. Louis? It’s turned away in Cuba, but where does it go?

ARMANDO LUCAS CORREA: They went to Miami. And the funny thing is Herbert Carliner, one of the survivors, he was 13-years-old at the boat, when they arrive in Miami, close to the coast, he said oh my God, I don't want to live in Havana, I want to live in Miami. Right now he's living in Miami, he survived. They both tried to go to Canada, Canada said no because half of the passengers had Canadian visas. And then the boat, in the middle of the Atlantic, they got permit to disembark in Belgium and over 200 refugees, they went to Great Britain, they were the lucky one. Another part went to France, Holland, Ana Maria went to Holland and the less people, I think 100 something went to Belgium.

ANA MARIA GORDON: Yeah.

ARMANDO LUCAS CORREA: And--

AMT: [interposing] The ones who went to Belgium and France, didn't they end up--

ARMANDO LUCAS CORREA: [crosstalk] All of them.

AMT: Weren’t they immediately taken to concentration camps?

ANA MARIA GORDON: Oh yes.

ARMANDO LUCAS CORREA: Holland, Belgium, like Ana Maria, they went to concentration camp. Herbert family they died in Auschwitz and they went to a concentration camp.

ANA MARIA GORDON: I’m lucky to be here.

AMT: So tell me more, tell me more. You go back and you go to Holland?

ANA MARIA GORDON: Yes.

AMT: And so what happens to you and your parents?

ANA MARIA GORDON: Well, in Holland we were first in refugee camps, then I was for some time in the city. I was let out because [chuckles] I was so-called Hungarian because I spoke Hungarian because where I was born sometimes it was Hungary sometimes it was Czechoslovakia in those days. So they let my parents and myself so-called free with a star. And then after the Germans were not allies anymore with the Hungarians, they took us to the concentration camps, they took us to Germany.

ARMANDO LUCAS CORREA: And her father went to Buchenwald.

ANA MARIA GORDON: My father went to Buchenwald, my mother and I went to Ravensbruck. And we were there the last years of the war.

AMT: How old would you have been by this time?

ANA MARIA GORDON: I was like eight.

AMT: You were eight, OK, so you like, you spent half of your life to that point then.

ANA MARIA GORDON: Yeah.

AMT: And you and your mother survived that camp?

ANA MARIA GORDON: We survived. My father survived too. My father was liberated by the Russians and came back to Holland. And we were liberated by the Swedish Red Cross, a little before the war ended. And then we heard that my father was alive and we went back to Holland. But my aunt and uncle were on the ship too.

AMT: What happened to them?

ANA MARIA GORDON: My father’s older brother and his wife. His wife was German non-Jewish. So they did not take them to the concentration camp but they operated on my uncle so he couldn't have any children. And then they let them be in Holland.

AMT: They forced sterilization, because they weren’t--

ANA MARIA GORDON: [interposing] Yep. And when we came back, we came back to their place and we were there until an uncle that I had in Mexico sent us papers and we went to Mexico.

ARMANDO LUCAS CORREA: And the Mexican with the St. Louis, that’s the reason she speak perfectly Spanish. [chuckles]

AMT: What do you remember of the camps?

ANA MARIA GORDON: Oh, very bad things, very bad things.

AMT: Do you talk about it anymore?

ANA MARIA GORDON: It was very scary, very scary, scary and cold and dirty and, you know, the soldiers with the rifles and the dogs, and oh. Awful.

AMT: What do you remember of your mother at the camp?

ANA MARIA GORDON: Hm?

AMT: What do you remember of your mother when you were there with her at the camp?

ANA MARIA GORDON: My mother worked at the camp, she worked at the Siemens factory. I don't know what they did, they did the wires and the electrical stuff, I don't know, she worked there.

AMT: She must have been terrified for you.

ANA MARIA GORDON: Yeah, yeah, well, I'm alive because my mother was always very very resourceful and very, she was always working hard to get ahead. She never was, like, sad, she just tried and tried and tried to make everything better. You know, she used to exchange her bread for a piece of onion for me because that had vitamins, you know, things like that. And she was--

AMT: She was very protective of you.

ANA MARIA GORDON: Very, very.

AMT: When did you realize that that's what she was doing? Did you talk about that after or did you know even as a little girl that she was doing this?

ANA MARIA GORDON: Well, I knew that, I knew that. I wasn't so little anymore, you know, I wasn't four anymore so.

AMT: Yeah, but you were still pretty little but I guess you were forced to grow up, huh?

ANA MARIA GORDON: That's true.

AMT: Yeah. And what was it like to finally, like, live here but know that this was a place that caused so much--

ANA MARIA GORDON: I don't think of that. I never thought of that when I was planning to come here. You know, you look forward, you don't forget the past but you have to go forward.

AMT: Hm. Armando, how many people onboard the St. Louis died in the Holocaust?

ANA MARIA GORDON: Oh, almost all of them, no?

ARMANDO LUCAS CORREA: Yeah. Only for the Great Britain, they survived the war and the rest, most children survived because they went to orphanage, to the non-occupied zone. But they calculate around, they survive, over 200, yeah.

AMT: So, you know, again we're talking about your story all those years ago and your survival. And we look at these pictures of small children with their parents trying to get out of Syria or from a North African or Central African country through Libya, and what do you want us to think about when we see those images? What should we be thinking about?

ANA MARIA GORDON: Think of helping them as much as we can. And to accept as many people as we can and help them to integrate. Because it’s very hard to be a refugee, you know, very hard.

AMT: Armando, what do you think?

ARMANDO LUCAS CORREA: When I wrote the book, I remember I always wrote the book with a point of view of a father. I’m a father of three small children and I put in that situation every time that happened in one of the scene. And even I am not Jewish, I am not related to the story directly but I think my daughter Emma, she's 11-years-old like Hannah in the book, is the voice of the book. And I can see me. One of the most strong scene in the book is in this second part, when the father of Leo have to take a really hard decision for the father. And I remember writing this scene crying, my son calling me from the bathroom because he poo and I was crying, and he said what happened dad? And I said no, don’t worry. But I feel like these stories is going to be related to everybody who is a parent and having the situation. Think of you if you have to leave your country and lost, you know, all your belongings, your buildings, your bank account, your family. And the only hope--

AMT: [interposing] You have nothing.

ARMANDO LUCAS CORREA: And the only hope that you have is Cuba, an island with another language. And then when you arrive, you prepare your luggage and the outside of your cabin and you dress with your best dress at that moment and then they say no, and you have to wait in the middle of the harbour for a week with hope always with hope.

ANA MARIA GORDON: Yeah.

ARMANDO LUCAS CORREA: Without money because Hitler allowed only ten Reichsmark per person. You can't travel with your luggage and dresses and jewelry and Leica. That's the reason there is a lot of pictures of the St. Louis, because everybody bought a Leica--

AMT: [crosstalk] Oh, the camera. The camera.

ARMANDO LUCAS CORREA: Thinking I can start living in the United States, exactly, it was one of the best cameras.

AMT: Oh, OK. But, you know, we’re also talking just as Donald Trump--

ARMANDO LUCAS CORREA: [sighs]

AMT: Is elected to be President of the United States. He has been very clear about immigrants and refugees, he's been, you know, you know all this. How does that relate to what you're talking about here?

ARMANDO LUCAS CORREA: I remember waking up the day of the election and my biggest concern, you know, it was what am I going to say to my children? We were talking about all the time about Trump, and I remember Emma saying why, you know, a crazy guy can be a candidate? I said, well, we live in a democracy, that's the reason. And then for the first time I have been living in the United States for 25 years, and a city like New York is very, you know, we are all immigrant in New York, and for the first time in 25 years I feel excluded, for the first time.

AMT: So what do you say to your daughter?

ARMANDO LUCAS CORREA: I say, you know, I grew up in Cuba. When I was born, Castro was in the power and, you know, until today he's in the power with his brother. I survived Castro. And my daughter, we can survive Trump. She said but you left the country.

ANA MARIA GORDON: [laughs]

ARMANDO LUCAS CORREA: But, you know, it’s going to be only four years. There’s nothing that’s going to long for 100 years like Cuba. In the next four years we’re going to elect another president. Right now he’s the president and, you know, we need to survive and try to our country, because United States, our country has to function. And be respectful and they have to understand that we are all different and we have to respect the difference.

AMT: And how did your daughter react to that?

ARMANDO LUCAS CORREA: You know, we were walking to take the bus to the school and then they talk a lot, you know, at school and they’re worried, they're worried because they are, you know, they are Hispanics. Yeah, they were born in San Diego, California but they're Hispanic. And right now what I feel, I'm living in a country that everybody has to look the same, think the same, believe in the same God, that’s the country that we’re promoting right now. I hope he's going to have a great team. I hope we live in a democracy and the Congress and the Senate, they have to protect our rights because we live in a state of law. I hope, I am very positive.

AMT: So what's the lesson that countries and citizens, people in those countries should learn from the tragedy of the St. Louis?

ARMANDO LUCAS CORREA: It’s simple. We are all different. And we have to respect the differences. The moment when the world on understand that we are human beings but we are different and we have to respect the differences the world is going to be better.

AMT: You've already mentioned how we shouldn't forget the past. You know, they say if you forget the past you are doomed to repeat it. Do you think in many ways we are forgetting the past?

ANA MARIA GORDON: I think so. I think so, because many people don't know about what happened in history, don't know what happened years ago and the children are not taught history. Which is I mean, like, live history. You know, books, they’re very arid, you know, history books. But nobody tells them about what it implies to be an immigrant. And, you know, all the implications of running from something bad and not knowing where you're going to end up.

AMT: It's interesting because our countries are full of people--

ANA MARIA GORDON: Yes.

AMT: Who have done that. We walk down the street every day--

ANA MARIA GORDON: Absolutely, absolutely.

AMT: And we pass each other, and everyone's got that story but we don't actually think to share those stories enough, do we?

ARMANDO LUCAS CORREA: Yeah, but you know why? I think it's easy to say Hitler was responsible to kill 20 million people. But the rest of the world were responsible too. And as a Cuban, as a nation, I feel ashamed.

ANA MARIA GORDON: Yeah.

AMT: The rest of the world looked the other way.

ARMANDO LUCAS CORREA: Mmhmm.

ANA MARIA GORDON: Yeah.

ARMANDO LUCAS CORREA: It's a lesson, we need to learn. Yeah, it’s a process.

ANA MARIA GORDON: [sighs\

AMT: We started with a historical novel and here we are in reality.

ARMANDO LUCAS CORREA: Yeah, exactly.

AMT: Which is the beauty of the novel. [laughs]

ARMANDO LUCAS CORREA: You know, I am a writer, I am a reader. I love to read, and I believe me, because I am a journalist. I think maybe I'm going to do non-fiction, it has to be more factual. But no, right now the book is in the bestseller list here in Canada and people is reading, people are understanding that this is real. This is fiction because, you know, I create the character, but Ana Maria is the real German girl, we have the real German girl here in Canada.

ANA MARIA GORDON: The thing is that it's much easier to grasp history when it's in a novel than in, you know, in a dreary history book. So people somehow get closer to the facts through a novel.

AMT: Thank you both for coming in. It's really important to talk to you.

ARMANDO LUCAS CORREA: Thank you.

ANA MARIA GORDON: Thank you for having us.

ARMANDO LUCAS CORREA: Thank you.

AMT: Armando Lucas Correa, the author of The German Girl. And Ana Maria Gordon, young girl aboard the MS St. Louis. She lives in Toronto. They both joined me in our Toronto studio. That's our program for today. Remember you can always catch anything you missed on The Current or any of your favorite CBC Radio programs with the CBC Radio app. It allows you to listen live to your local CBC Radio stream. Get it for free from the App Store or Google Play. Now, we began today's show with a discussion about hate speech in Canada and whether it may be ratcheted up in the wake of Donald Trump's presidential election victory. In the weeks since that election result, some observers have been criticizing Facebook for its role in spreading fake news stories and misinforming voters. Tomorrow, we're going to hear from Hossein Derakhshan, who has a unique perspective on Facebook. He is a prominent Iranian-Canadian blogger who was sentenced to prison in Iran. After his release, he says he didn't recognize the internet anymore, thanks to Facebook. And we're going to leave you with a bit of what he has to say. I'm on assignment tomorrow, Piya Chattopadhyay will be here. But she'll be speaking to Hossein Derakhshan. I'm Anna-Maria Tremonti, thanks for listening to The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

Facebook is a closed publishing platform. Something like a password protected blog, which I always hated. It is also a very centralized and limiting one. You can't host it on your domain name, you can’t change it, you can't change how it looks like. But soon I discovered many problems with Facebook. I soon discovered that the main problem with Facebook is beyond that. The problem is that it doesn't like hyperlinks. Let's go back a little bit. Hyperlink was the foundation of Tim Berners-Lee’s invention, the World Wide Web. It was what made the web so inherently diverse, open, non-linear and decentralized. It was the biggest achievement of human civilization since the emergence of alphabets, writing and printing press. Blogs best illustrated the potentials of hyperlink. In the era of blogging, we used to read and discuss all the time. We used to exchange, we used to challenge each other. We used to make arguments, provide evidence, investigate and discover. We used to think quite a lot and most of that would have been impossible without hyperlinks. Those days anyone who had more hyperlinks from or to her web page was considered as wealthy. Now on Facebook and increasingly on most social media, instead of links we have likes and instead of thinking we have a reality show.

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November 16, 2016 full episode transcript

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