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The Current Transcript for June 10, 2016

Host: Piya Chattopadhyay

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

Half of official Washington is here to see democracy’s finest show, the filibuster, the right to talk your head off, the American privilege of free speech in its most dramatic form.

PIYA CHATTOPADHYAY: You didn't need to be in the American capital this week to see free speech in its most dramatic form. You just needed to look to St. John's as the drama of a filibuster played out. An unpopular budget and an unpopular Premier are making for difficult political times in Newfoundland and Labrador. In a moment, we'll head to St. John's to see what all the ruckus is about. Also, today:

SOUNDCLIP

[Wolf howling]

PC: The call of a wolf may remind you of the natural wild, but some close encounters with wolves, too close for comfort, have reminded people in Banff of the potential dangers when the animals and humans collide. Later on, we'll head to Alberta to hear about the Bow Valley pack, a brazen bunch of wolves, and the ways people have contributed to their behaviours and we'll discuss whether killing one of the wolves was the right decision.

SOUNDCLIP

What you believe determines who you love. How you live determines your life. If those things come from outside of you and not from your own choice, you're not living your own life.

PC: Well, did that persuade you? From the moment you wake up to the time you go to bed you face the forces of persuasion, so many of them insidious, and that's exactly the way they're designed and it makes James Garvey wonder what's happened to reason. The philosopher will join us today to talk about persuaders and persuasion and how to get a grip on all of it. Hi, I’m Piya Chattopadhyay and this is the Friday edition of The Current.

Newfoundland premier's unpopularity peaks with 4-day filibuster

Guests: Peter Cowan, Roger Grimes, Amanda Bittner

SOUNDCLIP

I know I went off on a little bit of a rant the last time I spoke, but as the Minister of Health said, you're here a long time. I’ve had to punch in an awful lot of hours. I'm tired, crooked as sin. I’m the first to admit it. First to admit it.

PIYA CHATTOPADHYAY: Newfoundland and Labrador MHAs, such as Independent Paul Lane, might be forgiven for being "crooked as sin" – and in case you need translation, it means: very cranky. You see, the provincial politicians were involved in a long filibuster debate this week. It was launched by the Progressive Conservative opposition members as a way to delay the passage of the Liberal budget. It started on Monday night and carried on throughout the week.

SOUNDCLIP

[feet pounding, scattered clapping]

VOICE 1: The Chair recognizes the honourable member for Cape St. Francis.

VOICE 2: Thank you very much, Madame Chair. I went home and lay down and had an hour’s sleep. As people know, we are involved in a filibuster. And I really believe that making a lot of progress. What we’ve done here for the number of days, if 54 libraries in the province can be saved, I think this was great.

PC: That was Progressive Conservative MHA Kevin Parsons speaking not long before the debate wrapped up late yesterday. The CBC's Peter Cowan has been covering the ongoing filibuster and budget woes in Newfoundland and Labrador and he's in St John's. Hello.

PETER COWAN: Good morning, Piya.

PC: You must be as tired as those politicians.

PETER COWAN: [chuckles] Not doing too badly, actually.

PC: Okay. So, the filibuster goes on for four days. It wraps up yesterday. What was it all about?

PETER COWAN: Well, this is really about the opposition wanting to spend some more time to highlight just how bad the provincial budget is. Because this is a budget that really touches absolutely everyone in the province and it has a ton of measures in here that are really unpopular. Because basically it's raising the price for everything you do. We're seeing things like the HST going up two points. There's a huge increase to the gas tax. You've got - as we heard there in the clip - talking about half the libraries being shut down. And so this was an opportunity for them-- Because the opposition can't do anything to actually change the budget. The new Liberal government here has a majority. This was their opportunity to make sure that the public knew just how bad the budget was and can try and do a little more damage to a government that's already been just hammered over this budget.

PC: And beyond trying to do that damage, what was accomplished by the filibuster?

PETER COWAN: Aside from a bit of sort of political theatre, not much, because in the end, late yesterday after four days of filibustering, they all just sort of decided – okay, we've made our point. We're going to give up and go home. So it ended up being a little more of a slumber party in the House of Assembly rather than any sort of big political fight.

PC: And the Premier Dwight Ball, was he in the in the legislature all week for the filibuster?

PETER COWAN: No, he actually was not in the House for most of the time. His office said he had busy and important things that he needed to do. So, he was there for the very end as things wrapped up. And they did break from the filibuster at one point in order to do question period, so he was there for that, but for most of the rest of the time he wasn't doing the speaking. He left that up to some of the backbench MHAs and some of his ministers to do the defending, but mostly the government just sort of sat back and let the opposition have their time and try and punch this one out.

PC: As you said, Peter, there's a lot of things going up in Newfoundland, in terms of taxes and other things, and libraries being shut which we have heard has been very controversial. Overall, what is the mood like in the province right now over this budget?

PETER COWAN: The government has really done a poor job of trying to convince people that this is a budget that is going to be good for them. We saw polling numbers just come out yesterday that show that 75 per cent of the people in Newfoundland and Labrador disapprove of the way the government has been handling things. And it's a remarkable turn because this government was just elected last fall with a big majority. They got more than 50 per cent of the vote. They've got a majority of the seats in the house and even as recently as February 66 per cent of people were saying, yeah, I'd vote Liberal again. You know, I like the job that they're doing. And now they've dropped 40 per cent in just four months in terms of public support. So, that gives you an idea of just how angry people are. And we've seen protests that have gone beyond the usual organized groups, like labour groups or opposition groups. We're seeing just regular citizens getting together on Facebook and saying, I'm really upset about this. I'm going to go up to Confederation building with my signs. Who's going to come and join me?

PC: There have been calls for Premier Ball to resign - to your point about this is going beyond the regular sort of protests that we might see. What can you tell us about that?

PETER COWAN: Yeah, it’s sort of unusual for a premier who's only six months into his mandate to already have people lining up to say he needs to step aside. And one of the forms that we saw this is sort of guerrilla tactic we've seen from some of the groups is signs that have gone up on posts all around St John's with a picture of Premier Dwight Ball and it says ‘resign’ underneath. And to give you an idea of just how badly the government has handled some of this, in the middle of the night after these signs went up, at about 4:00 am, a white van went around town and started pulling down all these signs and it turns out that it was the Department of Transportation and Works had hired a contractor at the cost of about 200 dollars to go around and pull down these signs. So, rather than it being just sort of a small story, all of a sudden this became a big focus of question period for almost an entire session with everyone demanding: Why is the government busy paying money in order to stifle people's free speech? And that's sort of symptomatic of a problem that this government has had where everything they try and do ends up being a much bigger controversy than it really needed to be in the first place.

PC: And on the government's part, on Premier Dwight Ball’s part, he has said that, you know, we've introduced in taxes. They're temporary. Newfoundland and Labrador have some tough financial times facing it right now, that they'll be temporary and then we’ll repeal them. That isn't working, convincing people to support them more so.

PETER COWAN: No. And especially because the full impact of these increases hasn't really been felt yet. For example, we just had the introduction of an extra 17-cent a litre gas tax. So, you can imagine if all of a sudden you go to fill up your car the next day and the prices jumped 17 cents, how angry that will make some people. The increase in the HST is only going to come into effect July 1st, as well as the increases to personal income tax. So, once people actually start getting their paycheque and realizing just how much smaller it is than it used to be, we're going to see some more of that anger. And the government has promised even more bad things to come. They've got another budget in the fall that they're going to introduce. This one's expected to be targeting more on the cut side of things. You've got unions that are in the middle of negotiations for new contracts. The government’s made it clear that they want concessions. So, the bad news really just keeps on coming. It is worth pointing out that the financial situation that the province in is actually horrible. The falling price of oil has taken billions of dollars out of the provincial Treasury. Newfoundland and Labrador is more reliant, or at least was more reliant, on oil money than even Alberta and Saskatchewan. So, there have been some really tough things that the Premier's had to do. And, in fact, the way that they've sort of sold this is, we don't like this budget either. It's much in the way you might sort of convince someone that they need a prostate exam. It's not going to be a good time, but, trust me, you'll be better off in the end if we just do this.

PC: We will leave it on that note. Thank you, Peter.

PETER COWAN: You're very welcome.

PC: That's the CBC's Peter Cowan, who was in our St John's studio. We did put in a request to speak with the Premier of Newfoundland and Labrador, Dwight Ball, but he wasn't available for an interview today. But our next guest understands what it is like to be in the Premier shoes, because Roger Grimes is the former Liberal premier of Newfoundland and Labrador, from 2001 to 2003. He is also in St. John's. Hello.

ROGER GRIMES: Good morning, Piya.

PC: So, Peter just laid out some of the polling numbers. I think at least there's one poll that's showing Premier Ball with an 18 per cent approval rating as of this week. How surprised are you at those numbers?

ROGER GRIMES: Oh, not at all. I think Peter described it very well for you and your listeners in the fact that there's a difficult situation here that was inherited by this new government. You know, a new government always brings a period of hope and so on. And everyone understood that this new government was going to have to make some difficult choices, but then you do have choices to make and they made what 75 per cent of the people feel are some terrible choices. So, the people of this province were expecting to have to make some sacrifices, because you can't run an eight billion-dollar provincial annual budget when you've only got six billion dollars’ worth of revenue coming in. So that's the scope of it, but then again the choices that were made showed some in consistencies. The new one-time taxes - that they thought they were being creative and so on about - have backfired. So, there's been a whole series of problems. And the other thing the complicated it, Piya, is that in the middle of this there were a couple of other controversial issues that arose that have called into question the personal integrity of the Premier himself, so the polling numbers are not at all surprising.

PC: Okay. Bad choices, as you say. There have been many controversies - the shutting of the libraries being one, the gas tax hike, a severance package of 1.4 million dollars for former Nalcor CEO Ed Martin. Bad choices all around?

ROGER GRIMES: It seems like it. That's certainly the view of 75 per cent of the people. And the handling of it--

PC: Are you in that 75 per cent?

ROGER GRIMES: Pardon me?

PC: Are you in that 75 per cent?

ROGER GRIMES: Oh, no doubt about it. I've spoken out openly and publicly about it. And I've tried to get my two cents’ worth through to these colleagues of mine that are in the Liberal Party that I lead and was pleased to be part of in the government for almost 20 years, with Clyde Wells and Brian Tobin, and myself as the Premier. But, again, they've made some decisions. They're sticking with them. They've been inconsistent in their messaging. I've been saying those things publicly. I still think they can rebound and recover if they do a few things moving forward, but right now there shouldn't be any surprise for anybody in Newfoundland and Labrador to see these kinds of negative polling numbers for this new government.

PC: So, we heard Peter talk about, I don't want to say sympathy, but sort of sympathetic to the position that the province finds itself in financially and Premier Ball being in a tough pickle, so to speak, financially in the province right now. As a former premier, how tough is this for Premier Ball just to enter into this dark time financially with oil prices being bad?

ROGER GRIMES: Oh, it was an awful circumstance to inherit. But I think they got pushed off their messaging early. They didn't spend enough time preparing the people of the province and making sure that we all understood how very desperate and bad it is. So when they came with some severe measures in the budget, most people took the view that it was too much too soon, when in fact, Piya, one of the things that's happening here is we're spending and raising through taxes in this budget, in this current fiscal situation, some 500 million dollars in new revenues, but the government is going out this year to borrow three and a half billion, which is seven times as much. So, it's not a matter of saying, well, you should keep on borrowing. The government is borrowing - the most it's ever borrowed in history - and having trouble borrowing it but they can't seem to get that message across to the people here in the province. They've been pushed off their whole messaging initiatives by other controversies that have raised and called into question the personal integrity up to and including even the premier himself. So, everything has sort of snowballed, gotten a little bit out of control and they really have to do a job-- Now that the legislature is closed and they can do a little bit of planning and thinking. They have to really do a job of getting back on track, getting back on message, deciding exactly what the message is and sticking to it, because so far they've been sort of all over the map in the first few months.

PC: Okay. Let's say Premier Ball calls you up today and says, hey, as a guy that's been in my shoes, as my predecessor, give me some advice. What would you tell him to do?

ROGER GRIMES: Oh, well, I’d gladly tell him that he should first and foremost acknowledge that they've made a few mistakes, that they've been a bit naïve, they've been a bit new to this, maybe even admit that they've been a bit overwhelmed by this. And let me give you an example of inconsistency in the messaging. You know, basically, the message is that we're in a dire fiscal financial circumstance. We're practically broke. We're having trouble even getting banks and financial institutions to lend us money, but in the meantime they bring in brand new programs that we've never had before, like full-day kindergarten. And the people of the province don't understand that. They say, if you tell me I'm broke, if you tell me I’ve got no money, then why are you bringing in a program that we've never had in 500 years and we don't really need? It's not urgent that we have it. It's something that might be nice, it might be good, but it's like in your own home. You know, if you're broke, you don't go out and get yourself a new car that you've never had. You don't upgrade your furniture. You tighten your belt. So the message has been mixed. I'm saying admit that they've made a few mistakes. Get back on message. Stay focused. And the other issue that's been big here with the Premier’s personal credibility, Piya, is this idea that the government campaigned on being open, accountable, and transparent, and in issues like this severance sort of a scandal that's going on with the departing CEO of Nalcor, the energy corporation. There's information that's available that other people involved have made public. The premier suggests he’s going to make some information public and then changes his mind. So, you know, the messaging is really mixed. It's really garbled. My advice would be: Decide what your message is, stick with it, and get your legs back under you, and start governing like you should and you can.

PC: Okay, Roger Grimes, thank you for your time.

ROGER GRIMES: My pleasure, Piya. Thanks again.

PC: Bye.

ROGER GRIMES: Bye bye.

PC: Roger Grimes is a former Liberal premier of Newfoundland and Labrador, 2001 to 2003. He was in St. John's. Well, for another perspective of what's going on in the political life of the province, let’s go to Amanda Bittner. She's an associate professor of political science at Memorial University. Hello.

AMANDA BITTNER: Hi there.

PC: What do you want to add – about the anger we're seeing in Newfoundland and Labrador right now?

AMANDA BITTNER: Yeah, we're definitely seeing a lot of anger and I think that the tough times that we're in them right now, tough times are ahead and I think everybody kind of knows that and understands that and is okay with that on a certain level. And I think the big problem that we're seeing here is that people don't seem to really trust that the government knows what it's doing, that it's doing a good job, that it’s competent and things like that. And I think that once you lose that trust, it's going to be really hard to get that back. And so, when we're thinking about the filibuster or thinking about the protests or thinking about severance packages and policy changes and things like that, we're not hearing a lot of clear justification as to why these specific choices. So, yes, there are tough choices to make, but let's talk about why these specific choices. Are there alternatives? Are these choices recommended by research and experts? Have we been really open and honest about what's going on? Have we actually made reports available when they are available? I think that those things are all really important, especially to voters who don't pay attention to politics on a daily basis, but suddenly become a lot more interested in politics when they don't trust government. And so I think that's kind of explaining why we're seeing all these protests.

PC: You echo sort of what the former premier was saying, which is - you know this well as a political scientist - politics is often about choices and communication and on both those fronts this government has had some challenges. It is surprising in that it came to be elected with such popularity and this has happened in such a short time - the big drop in support and opinion polls. I mean, how significant are those numbers in terms of existing for a long time? Or is this just they're getting through a budget, this is a majority government not communicating well, and if they can turn it around, those numbers will change?

AMANDA BITTNER: Well, I think that former Premier Grimes is right on one point in particular, which is that they need to actually acknowledge that they've made some mistakes here. And if they're going to try to turn a corner and if that's going to be successful, they can't just keep pretending that these - whether they're blunders or whether they're something else - that those are okay and those are justifiable. And I think that you can't just pretend that nothing's happened here, and in a world where we're not really explaining our choices. So, for example, why this levee? Do experts actually think that's a good idea? Why does government think it's a good idea? And why, once we've had this little bailout, have we stuck with it even though we've changed it bit? Now it makes even less sense. So things like that I think we're not seeing and until they acknowledge, yes, we've got a problem. Yes, we've made some mistakes. Here’s what we’re going to do. We're going to show you now that we have a vision for the province, that our policies are consistent, that, yes, we're tightening our bootstraps, but our policy changes aren’t going to affect the poorest most, which really makes no sense. I think, until they do that, we're not going to see anything change at all.

PC: There is this argument out there that we inherited some of these economic issues. This isn't all about oil and gas prices jumping. They were brewing well before the Liberals took over office.

AMANDA BITTNER: Yep, absolutely.

PC: And does that work to their advantage at all?

AMANDA BITTNER: So, it's a funny question. I think, no. I think, because we've all known this was a problem for a long time. I mean, you can't base your entire economy on natural resources and high prices of those resources and then at the same time cut taxes massively so that if those resources go down, suddenly you have no tax base. This makes no sense. This makes no sense in terms of having successful programming down the road. If you want things like kindergarten and early child care and stuff like that, those are important policies and those are benefits for the entire population. But if we cut taxes and if we think that revenues are not important, then that makes no sense. So, I think that a lot of people have known for a long time that the economy was in dire straits and, yes, the former government largely put us in that position. They're in opposition now and doing their best to highlight what's being done wrong now. But I think that there is a problem when we start to say that the opposition parties shouldn't be doing their job as opposition parties because they made us, they put us in this mess in the first place. But I do think that the fact that we've known this is a problem for a long time and that the current government, the Liberal Party, was absolutely going to win the election last fall, they could have been a lot tougher in terms of saying, okay, we've got a problem. We're going to take the bull by the horns. We're going to actually do something about this. Here's our plan. Instead, what we saw was a lot of kind of pretending there was no problem and then supposed shock once they entered office and I think that's really not great.

PC: Amanda Bittner, thank you for your time.

AMANDA BITTNER: Thank you.

PC: Amanda Bittner is an associate professor of political science at Memorial University. She too was in St. John's. If you're in the province of Newfoundland and Labrador and have something to say about this or anywhere else across our country, get in touch. You can tweet us @thecurrentCBC. Or get in touch other ways by going to our website, cbc.ca/thecurrent is the place to do that. All right. Coming up next, one philosopher's quest to persuade you to fight the persuaders. I’m Piya Chattopadhyay. You’re listening to the Friday edition of The Current.

[Music: theme]

Persuasion has replaced reasoned argument, says philosopher

Guests: James Garvey

PIYA CHATTOPADHYAY: Hi, I'm Piya Chattopadhyay and you're listening to the Friday edition of The Current.

[Music: Theme]

PC: Still to come, what it's like to be stalked by a wolf in Banff National Park. But first, whose mind is it, anyway?

SOUNDCLIP

STEPHEN HARPER: Let me introduce the Rob family: Ryan, Nicole, Naomi, Ava and Gibson. Under a Liberal government, Ryan and Nicole would lose...

[Sound: Cash register dinging]

STEPHEN HARPER: $3,360 in annual childcare cheques. So let’s quite literally put that money on the table.

[Sound: Cash register dinging continues]

STEPHEN HARPER: That's going to take a while.

[Sound: Crowd laughter]

JUSTIN TRUDEAU: I'm busy, but this morning seemed like an appropriate time to do a little training.

[Sound: Boxing]

JUSTIN TRUDEAU: There will be plenty of time for talking after the debate tonight, thank you very much everyone.

[Sound: Reporter asking indistinct question]

JUSTIN TRUDEAU: I appreciate it this morning.

PC: Some of the sounds from the Canadian campaign trail from last fall. Conservative leader Stephen Harper using one of his favourite props there, the ding of a cash register. And Liberal leader Justin Trudeau inviting reporters to watch him in the boxing ring - and then refusing to answer their questions. These political stunts were designed to persuade Canadians to vote for the various parties. And clearly, it wasn't about rational argument. According to my next guest, persuasion rarely is, these days. Instead, it's about persuaders using what they know about how our minds work to manipulate us. And it's not just about getting our vote. It's also about how we shop, whether we sign up for organ donation, even whether a country goes to war. Philosopher James Garvey worries about the effect this is having on democracy and our happiness. He is the author of The Persuaders: The Hidden Industry That Wants To Change Your Mind. James Garvey joins us from London, in the United Kingdom. Hello.

JAMES GARVEY: Hello.

PC: Okay, so we just heard that tape. What is going on in the type of political positioning that we just heard there from our Canadian politicians?

JAMES GARVEY: Well something, something other than argumentation is driving what's going on there. You're hearing props, and by the way, it's not unintelligent what that is. Those things work. The bit of boxing, I would understand that in terms of something called the halo effect. If you think that somebody is strong and tough, you might also associate a number of other good qualities like truthfulness with them. And I mean, that's a good move when it comes to wanting to persuade somebody, but it isn't an argument, as you say. It's not careful political discourse, it's not persuasion by giving us good reasons; it's persuasion by kind of careful manipulation.

PC: Spin?

JAMES GARVEY: Spin. The thing about spin is it works. [laughs] That's why it's such a popular thing to do. Maybe a few hundred years ago, you might imagine politicians giving us reasons and arguments and proposals, but now, other things work a lot better. For example, understanding what the polls are telling you and leading by dancing backwards and saying the words that we want to hear, words that will get a person elected.

PC: And if I just think of the U.S. election trail right now, lies or untruths seem to be persuasive for some.

JAMES GARVEY: Lies, insults. Something has happened to us, our ability to argue has been somehow undermined and it seems to be something that's happened in the last maybe 50 years. There've been a lot of changes to an understanding of what makes us tick, and those changes are getting used. What Donald Trump's doing is nothing new, it's a kind of old crowd manipulation, a kind of just a strong leader repeating slogans over and over again. And again, I mean, the trouble is, that sort of thing works. Especially on people who aren't trained to argue, aren't trained to spot fallacies.

PC: And as we go along, we'll talk about why it's working on many of us. But it's hard to get away from, and especially in the political sphere. How do you deal with it when politicians are in the news?

JAMES GARVEY: It's going on right now in the United Kingdom, the E.U. referendums is everywhere and I have to admit, one of the things that I've taken to doing is just not listening anymore. And I know I can't keep doing that, I can't keep that up, and I know that's also not a way to be engaged in the world. But otherwise, I just find myself playing political buzzword bingo. I know that they've been told to say a word like freedom or equality, and they're going to say it as many times as they have to.

PC: Or family is another one.

JAMES GARVEY: Or family or whatever, whatever the word merchants tell them. It's tactical phrasing, it's not careful argument, and it's not democracy, either.

PC: So but here's the trouble, and you have this argument your friends, say, you know, James, you can't cover your ears. Because as you say, then I'm just disengaged. And people are like, I can't take it anymore, all the spin, all the persuasion, all the hosing of me. But you're saying at least where you exist right now, there's only two choices: listen or don't.

JAMES GARVEY: Well, I think you can also-- I mean, maybe I was being a little too pessimistic. I think you could also argue back, insist on good reasons. I mean the problem is, I'm just one person, you know, everyone is just a single person and there's a lot of weight on the other end of the lever. It's very difficult to bring about change. But I think it's possible to insist on good reasons, and if enough of us do, numbers can change things. They always do. And if enough of us push against these new kinds of persuasion, push back, maybe we can listen to reason again.

PC: So you mentioned a couple of buzzwords there, or words that politicians have been told and have learned that seem to, again, convince us all to take them seriously, and perhaps cast a vote for them. In the field of political persuasion, those kinds of words fall under something called framing. So just explain that to us.

JAMES GARVEY: It's not really fully understood, but it turns out that if you use certain words, those words emphasize a particular aspect of a concept in your mind. I mean, compare exploring for energy to drilling for oil. If I was in favor of opening up oil fields, I'd talk about exploring for energy, that sounds glorious. [chuckles] Drilling for oil is messy and horrible and destroys the environment. So choosing certain words can change someone's opinion about the very same policy that's in front of you. Talking about-- over here in Europe, people are talking about migrants or refugees or asylum seekers, and each one of these turns of phrase. Some are talking about strengthening borders instead, which is another way of spinning what they want to spin. The thing is, framing effects really do work. There's a fantastic study that was done where crime was described to one group of people as a beast lurking in the city, and crime was described to another group of people as a virus infecting the city. And those who had heard the beast metaphor thought the way to deal with crime was more police, right? Lock it up, it's an animal, put in a cage. And those who heard about it as a virus had different solutions. Twice as many thought that some sort of social remedy might be useful. You know, maybe better education. So you can change policy and you can change whether or not people agree with you by the frames you use and the word you choose.

PC: Words matter.

JAMES GARVEY: A lot, they matter enormously.

PC: Okay, I want to play a clip for you. This is a of a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl ship named Nayirah, she was 15 in this clip. She testifies in front of the U.S. Congressional Human Rights Caucus back in 1990 as the United States is debating at the time whether to go to war after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait.

SOUNDCLIP

[teary] I stayed behind and wanted to do something for my country. The second week after the invasion, I volunteered at the Al-Adan hospital with 12 other women who wanted to help as well. While I was there, I saw the Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital with guns. They took the babies out of the incubators, [sniffs] took the incubators, and left the children to die on the cold floor.

PC: So James Garvey, that's some pretty emotional testimony there. Kuwaiti girl, a victim of a war on her country, testifying in front of a Human Rights Caucus in the United States. We now know her story wasn't genuine. So remind us what eventually came out about her and what was happening.

JAMES GARVEY: Well, she gave her name as Nayirah, saying or implying that she was worried about reprisals for friends and family who were stuck back home. It turns out she was a member of the Kuwaiti royal family, and her father was in the room at the time. It seems as though-- and it's very difficult to tell, because in the nature of public relations, these things are hidden from view. But it seems as though that testimony was arranged by a public relations firm on behalf of the Kuwaiti government. That talk of incubators was brought up again and again in the run up to a Senate vote as to whether or not the U.S. should go to war, it was mentioned by George Bush several times. That vote in the Senate was incredibly close. It was the closest margin since the War of 1812 that put America on a war footing, and it's possible that that testimony and the campaign, the political relations campaign in which was embedded, there were many P.R. firms involved, there was a lot of marketing. There were prayer days organized, there were bumper stickers made, there were t-shirts, "Free Kuwait." But it seems as though a lot of that was just false. The Red Cross, I believe, investigated whether or not they were incubators stolen and whether or not premature babies were killed, and the story just evaporated. It seems to have been an attempt to change American hearts and minds without a single persuasive argument being used.

PC: And I wanted to use that example, because it leads us to this idea of astroturfing, which you talk about. So tell us about astroturfing and where it's used, and how prevalent it is, especially in our online world.

JAMES GARVEY: Well, astroturfing is just a fake grassroots movement, and it goes way back to the father of public relations, which is Edward Bernays. He, instead of engaging a normal press agency to try to push a play that he was supporting, he faded in the shadows and created a sociological committee that promoted the play which consisted just of him. And he got the great in the good of the day to support it. And a similar thing goes on now where fake groups which are organized by a public relations firm or a lobbying firm in support of something, namely their client, is created. And normal, average people are drawn into this, thinking that they're joining the movement when in fact, they're playing into the hands of a public relations team. Just about any kind of online forum you can imagine is in some way being manipulated and used. Wikipedia pages are changed by companies. There are sock puppets out there, people who are deliberately playing a side badly so as to bring it into ill repute. It's incredibly complicated, but it's worth remembering that public relations firms have about three times as much money and as many employees as the media, as newspapers. So their ability to control information out there in the world is enormous.

PC: I just, you know, the word that keeps popping into my head listening to you tell me all these stories, is like, blah.

[Both laugh]

PC: You know, like... I go back, and we were just all getting hosed every which way to Sunday, aren't we?

JAMES GARVEY: Well, I mean, some of it is hilariously bad. So there's a there's a PR firm that set up a front group that's called, I think, Citizens Against Lawsuit Abuse, which is run by a tobacco firm that stops citizens from pressing lawsuits on people who make hazardous products. We are getting hosed a variety of ways, but it's worth just researching it on your own and finding out as much as you can so that you can protect yourself.

PC: Okay, maybe I'm being naive here. I think of a good old, you know, an older time, I don't know when the heck this was, but I feel like there was a time where we had people trying to convince me, you, all of us through reasoned argument. How often do we see that anymore?

JAMES GARVEY: Well, you're right, and human beings have been capable of extraordinary rationality in the past. If you think about the arguments between atheists and theists, now sometimes just insult and slur. Dominican friars in the medieval times thought it was their religious duty to engage the unbeliever with rational arguments to show them the divine light, right? Similarly, you can think of people in an earlier political age in America ratifying the Articles of Confederation with completely different political views. And now, you know, the conservatives and liberals in America can barely speak to each other without anger. We are capable of this. It's not built into us, we're capable of rationality. It's not like hard-wired, but we can do it. We can certainly do better than we're doing now.

PC: The question, of course, is how has this changed? Why have we changed? And you kind of spell it out there about the how the idea of arguing has changed. But researchers, I mean, what have they discovered about how we make decisions that has influenced how people try to persuade us?

JAMES GARVEY: Well, I mean, that's the biggest driver. I think that's one of the biggest reasons for change. When people learned during the First and Second World War that propaganda works, we began studying it in earnest. We began studying how to persuade human beings, what brings about attitude change. And we're really good at it now. The new discipline of behavioral economics, the Daniel Kahneman book Thinking, Fast and Slow, gives a picture of the human brain as a thing that operates with shortcuts and has a lot of biases. And with an understanding of those shortcuts and biases, you can manipulate people on a large scale, if you want. Most governments in the world, or many governments, anyway, are doing just. There's the behavioral insight team in the United Kingdom utilizing insights from behavioral economics to get people to donate more organs. I think that's great. [chuckles] But I'd rather my government wasn't really good at covert persuasion, I'd rather it gave me reasons to do things.

PC: You're a philosopher, and so you think a lot about reason. And you know, you've described: human beings are reasonable beings. Are we actually reasonable?

JAMES GARVEY: [softly] I don't know.

[Both laugh]

JAMES GARVEY: I don't know. I don't-- Okay, I'll tell you. I don't think it's part of our factory specification. I don't think human beings are rational animals, I don't think it's built in. I think it's something we have to learn and work at, and we can lose it. If you treat human beings in a certain way, if you don't give us reasons, if you give us instead money and incentives and you nudge us and use framing language, we turn into manipulable creatures. If you don't cultivate reason, you will buy just about anything in the public sphere. You'll think building a great wall is a great idea without any further information. But if you're a critical thinker, if you've been taught how to spot fallacies and bad arguments, maybe you'll be better suited to be a democratic citizen.

PC: So many of us like to think we're above this, right? Like, you can... this works on everyone else, it doesn't work on me, right. And you bring up some pretty strange examples in your book of what researchers say they've discovered about how we think. And some of these for some people will be like, yeah, I would never fall for that. But let me give you the examples that stuck out for us.

JAMES GARVEY: Okay.

PC: Women equate baking a cake with childbirth, and therefore, they don't like those just add water cake mixes.

JAMES GARVEY: [laughs]

PC: [chuckling] Or that we're more likely to find some convincing if they share our birthday. Okay. The real question I want to ask you is are we really that dumb, but I'll ask you a more appropriate question: does the science of persuasion really work?

JAMES GARVEY: The thing about baking cakes was a suggestion by some Freudians in the '50s. I don't know if I buy that one. But there's a thing called the better than average effect, and human beings are just spectacularly optimistic creatures. We think we're better drivers than most people, right? We think we're not going to get a disease. When people get married, they think that the chances of getting divorce is zero, when it's like 50 per cent or something in the West. They're wildly overconfident. The fact is, all of these mechanisms of persuasion, the things that people discovered about what makes us tick really do work on us. And it is in fact a kind of bias that we have that we think that they don’t. There’s a lot of money and power involved in working out whether or not these things work, and they do, and they're used all the time. There are crazier things than the ones you've mentioned. So my favorite weird fact of persuasion, and this comes from a brilliant paper with the amazing title Birds of a feather flock conjointly, is that is that we're more inclined to believe words that rhyme. So you might think that's dumb, but the fact is that we process things easily, we think they're true. It's easy for us to think about, we think it's true. And this rhyming thing was used, some people say, in the O.J. Simpson court case. You might remember there was a glove, a bloody glove, that didn't quite fit.

PC: Mhm.

JAMES GARVEY: And in the closing arguments, O.J. Simpson's counsel said, "If the glove don't fit, you must acquit."

PC: [laughs]

JAMES GARVEY: And that may be--

PC: [interposing] I remember that, now that you're saying that to me.

JAMES GARVEY: That maybe had an effect.

PC: No!

JAMES GARVEY: Yeah, maybe it did. Maybe it did.

PC: Wow, wow.

JAMES GARVEY: Simple words or more believed than complex ones. Flowery language increases the chances of someone thinking something is valuable, so a really nicely written font that says Mediterranean succulent fish is thought to be tastier if you read that on the menu then the same fish cooked just called fish. We're very easy to control and manipulate, it's bizarre. It's a zoo inside the human mind.

PC: [laughs] I want you to give us one more example, because it's something that we all do, and I think we know we're being marketed to, and this is in the retail world, so to speak. But I want you to talk to it from the persuasion that this all entails. So persuasion techniques when we walk into a store: store design, for example. Store design has persuaded us to spend more.

JAMES GARVEY: The architecture of a shop, if the shop is worth its salt, is not left to chance. So the entrance to a store is called The Gruen transfer. It's named for a designer who had ideas about how malls should look. If you think about the way you move around in a city, say, from the car to the store. You're awake and alert and moving fast; and then it takes you a while to get into browsing mode, right? You move slower, you pick things up and look at them and walk differently, and that's valuable time from the store's point of view. So they want to jump you from alert analytic mode to browsing mode as quickly as they can. But the entrance to a shop is dead space, because you're still moving quick. So they'll try to jar you into breaking out of that analytic mode. So they'll put big flowers or big display, fresh fruits and things like that, to get you to stop. Think about it the next time you walk into a store, look around. When you walk through an aisle, you can only look at one side; but the entrance to an aisle is called the endcap, and that, everyone sees. And endcaps will almost always have something arresting on them, something like a sale or a special item, or something. The music played can have an effect on purchasing. So baby boomers listening to classical rock will buy more wine in a wine shop; but if the music is classical, they'll buy more expensive wine, but fewer bottles. You can control how long people stay in a shop by changing the lighting. It's all carefully studied and nothing is left to chance.

PC: Yeah, I think most of us have heard about the music one, but the flower vase. I'm just thinking, I was just walking to the store the other day I thought, oh, what nice flowers!

JAMES GARVEY: Yeah, well…

PC: You know?

[Both laugh]

PC: Darn!

JAMES GARVEY: It's not your fault. But look at it as an architecture of persuasion. When you walk into a place, nothing is going to be left to chance. The colours, the shapes, everything, is the store's any good.

PC: You know, this is about more than flowers and Coke versus Pepsi or whatever. You see, I'm marketing for them all free right now by even mentioning them.

JAMES GARVEY: [laughs]

PC: I've been persuaded to do that. But the question here is, this is fundamentally changing who we are. It is shifting our society. So how are the forces of persuasion at a real fundamental level shifting our society?

JAMES GARVEY: So I think it's changing us as individuals, and it's changing our society, too. So as individuals, I think as kind of non-rational sorts of persuasion take the place of persuasion by argument, persuasion argument is crowded out, right? And so moral and other sorts of values that we might use to speak to one another get pushed to one side. You can see things like this when British women, for example, are 50 per cent less likely to give blood when offered money, because they had good reasons before that and they think if offered money, those altruistic reasons have been pushed to one side. We become less altruistic. There's also a possible sort of spillover effect. If you use non-rational sorts of ways of persuading people, we turn into robots. We become passive and self-interested and predictable and better manipulable. But I think, I mean, the big worry is the global change. That critical thinkers capable of following arguments and listening to reason will not defer to authority, right, they will not go along with the mob. People who can argue are hard to manipulate, and so those people defend democracy. And when we lose that ability to argue, we lose what that protects. We lose a lot, we lose democracy itself. If you see people arguing, like the food fights on the floor of Congress and that sort of thing, there's a kind of lack of respect that just gets in the way of our ability to move forward politically. Our inability to argue-- and I hate it when some author shows up on the radio and tells you that the topic of his book is exactly what's wrong with the world-- [chuckles] but it really is a big part, the shift in persuasion really is a big part of a lot of other changes that are making the world, I think, making the world and us less pleasant people, and it's a less pleasant world to live in.

PC: I don't hate you so far, just so we have that out there on the record.

JAMES GARVEY: [laughs]

PC: I'm kind of thinking that the PR examples, and maybe I'm picking on people here, maybe I'm not, I don't know. But do we need regulatory or legal changes to fight the forces of persuasion? In other words, if someone deliberately lies or tells an untruth, and you've got a PR machine and a company behind you, do we need regulatory legal change to prevent that from even taking place in the first place?

JAMES GARVEY: Yeah, I would think that if-- so if you think that what somebody does is wrong and may be punishable by prison, if a PR firm enables that person to get on with that work for longer than they should've, I think the PR team in the lobbyist team or whatever is just as culpable for the damage and death, possibly, that that firm or individual has done. So I think if that if that person goes to jail, the PR firm goes jail, too. Definitely, there's no doubt in my mind that beefing up laws around lobbying and PR can only be a good thing for democracy and for equality in a culture.

PC: And just to pick up on that point, I mean, there are some aspects of manipulation that are clearly wrong. That there is right and there is wrong, and you know, to use the example, if a public relations company lies outright. But most of the world is grey, and so what are the fuzzier ethical areas?

JAMES GARVEY: It's not so much lying that's my problem with PR. If you object to a public relations firm and say what you said was a lie, they can always say things, well, I didn't know it was a lie at the time, or at least didn't cause any damage. And you can talk about consequences, you can talk about intentions. That's how we work out whether or not something is wrong, usually. But I mean, the fuzzy questions associated with P.R. re these other things that we've been talking about. About how it undermines democracy, how it makes the world less equal by concentrating power in the hands of corporations and people with the cash to afford the ability to manipulate and manufacture public opinion. So it's the damage done in terms of things like justice and democracy, not lies, that bothers me.

PC: James, I'm imagining you've done a lot of research in writing this book, and that you yourself have learned what works and what doesn't in terms of persuasion. [chuckles] So here's your last question: in a sentence or two, persuade us to care about this.

JAMES GARVEY: There's not much that matters more than what you believe. What you believe determines who you love, how you live, determines your life. If those things come from outside of you and not from your own choice, you're not living your own life and that's an awful way to live.

PC: Convincing.

[Both chuckle]

PC: Thank you and thank you just reminding me to take a second look at those flowers and whiz right by them and not let it influence me. Thank you very much.

JAMES GARVEY: Okay, thank you.

PC: Bye bye.

JAMES GARVEY: Bye.

PC: James Garvey is an officer of the Royal Institute of Philosophy, and author of The Persuaders: The Hidden Industry That Wants To Change Your Mind. He was in London, England. If you want to add your voice to any of the stories you hear here on The Current, do get in touch with us any which way you want. There's lots of ways: you could tweet us @TheCurrentCBC. I'm also on Twitter, my handle is @Piya. You can post on Facebook, facebook.com/cbcthecurrent, or email us through our website, cbc.ca/thecurrent. Click on the Contact Us link. You can try and persuade us through the medium of your choice. I'm Piya Chattopadhyay, you're listening to the Friday edition of The Current. We're back in just a bit.

[Music: Sting]

Saving wolves by teaching fear: Parks Canada's Bill Hunt explains shooting of wolf

Guests: Scott Lilwall, Bill Hunt, Kevin Van Tighem

PIYA CHATTOPADHYAY: Hi, I’m Piya Chattopadhyay and you are listening to the Friday edition of The Current.

[wolves howling]

PC: The Bow Valley pack has developed quite the reputation in Banff Alberta and it isn't a good one. In recent months, five wolves have becoming increasingly immune to the presence of humans. On Tuesday the situation came to a sad, some might say inevitable, conclusion when a female wolf was killed by conservation officials. This action was taken after several interactions between the wolves with people, including one instance where a wolf stole food from a cooler in broad daylight scaring campers and sending them racing for their cars. Scott Lilwall knows what it is like to have an uneasy encounter with a wolf. He joins us in Calgary. Hello.

SCOTT LILWALL: Hello.

PC: So tell me what happened to you while you were out cycling.

SCOTT LILWALL: Well, it was about a month and a half ago and I was taking a little cycling trip down the Bow Valley parkway, which is a stretch of road which is a pretty common place to see animals, and I stopped at Hillside Meadows, which is a meadow on a hillside, really with a little rest area. I had kind of a—the hair on the back of my neck stand up, that bad news feeling, but you’re not quite sure what is going on, and I turned around and in the treeline was a massive wolf that was standing there staring at me.

PC: So you sensed, you literally sensed that there was a wolf nearby and you turn around and there it is.

SCOTT LILWELL: Yes, that general unease feeling of something is going on but I’m not sure what it is.

PC: What goes through your head?

SCOTT LILWELL: AT that point, I just kind of thought, oh well, he must have been coming out of the trees and stumbled across me and I stumbled across him, so I started walking my bike away. I didn’t want to get on and actually ride because you’re not supposed to run because you don’t want to trigger a chase, and as I started walking, I turned away and put my back to it but it would follow. The closest it got was about 60 metres and when it got to that point I would start making myself as big as I could and saying you know, go away Wolf [laughs], which I don't think I need to actually say the words, but I wasn't really thinking clearly at that point and then it would stop and then if I stood there, it would turn around and kind of slink away but it would move around this little hillside and then follow me again. It was trying to seem as if it was going away.

PC: And then what do you do?

SCOTT LILWALL: At that point, we kind of did a little dance for about ten minutes where I would walk a little bit and then he would get too close and I’d turn around and yell at him and at that point I was sort of getting a little concerned because I’m far away from home and I'm not quite sure what I should be doing at this point. Luckily a motorist was coming by and she had stopped and laid on the horn. She pulled the hood of her vehicle quite close to the wolf and just laid on the horn and it didn't react at all. I mean, it noticed she was there but it was pretty intent on me. She then kind of pulled back and drove up and rolled down her window and asked are you doing okay, and I was hey do you think maybe I can bum a ride back to town. I just jumped in her vehicle and kind of threw my bike in a bush so I can go get it later, and then I phoned in the encounter to Parks Canada to let them know about the encounter and then got my Jeep and drove back to pick up my bike. I turned on my radio very loud because I was alone. I didn't see the wolf again but he might still be in the area.

PC: You’re nervous.

SCOTT LILWALL: Quite nervous. There was actually some deer in the bushes not far away and they snapped on a twig or something and made a sound and my heart kind of jumped out of my throat for a second.

PC: I know very little about wolves and I'm hoping to learn this as we move on, but I don't know if they hunt in packs. I mean, were you sure that there was only one wolf or are you like where there's one there could be more?

SCOTT LILWALL: That was my absolute concern. I could see one but like you said, they are pack creature. I assumed that they might have been with other wolves that I couldn't see and that was the scariest part. I could keep that one away from me and if need be I had a bike as a weapon, I had bear spray on me, but if there were ones I could not see, that was a concern.

PC: Have you been by back biking along there?

SCOTT LILWALL: [laughs] I absolutely have not and I don't think I'm going alone again.

PC: I'm curious what you think about as you heard in the introduction there. There are troubles with wolves in Banff right now, but what do you think about the decision to shoot one of the wolves this week?

SCOTT LILWALL: I mean it's one of those things like it wasn’t until I started living in Banff that you get this weird affinity like you love the wildlife but you also understand you are of different worlds, and it's best to keep that way. It's one of those things that it's tragic; nobody wants to see one of the wolves killed but at the same time you know sometimes it's necessary both for our safety and for the safety of the wildlife in the park.

PC: Scott, thank you for sharing your story. I'm glad you're safe.

SCOTT LILWALL: Thank you, goodbye.

PC: Scott Lilwall was in Calgary. Well Bill Hunt helped make the decision on Tuesday to euthanize one of the five wolves in the Bow Valley pack. He is a resource conservation manager for Banff National Park and that is where we have reached him, hello.

BILL HUNT: Hello, Piya.

PC: So you just heard Scott talk about his encounter with a wolf, sound familiar?

BILL HUNT: It does and it's certainly consistent with so many other events we had leading up to the euthanization of the adult female.

PC: So tell us about some of those similar events.

BILL HUNT: Habituation, or being comfortable around people, is one thing, but as soon as animals start approaching people looking for food and showing signs where they're seeing people not as something that they can co-exist with, but something they need to approach to see if they can get a handout, or if someone panics and drops a pack and they can then find a food reward inside the pack, those sorts of things. If these animals have been exposed to a lot of roadside garbage or litter, they then start to associate unnatural food sources with a food reward. And so instead of focusing on deer, elk, and moose, which wolves normally eat, they start looking for pop cans and bottles and bags of stuff that might contain a bit of food that is a novel treat for wildlife. Both bears and wolves are always interested in something that smells different. Their diet is pretty similar and so they will seek out these things and eventually, very quickly it can lead to a food condition situation where the animals are dangerously aggressive and assertive around people. Looking over the case studies and talking with a whole suite of experts throughout North America, which is what we've spent the last five or six days doing before we came to the difficult decision to euthanize this one animal, it was very clear that a lot of incidents involving bites or aggressive encounters with wolves, there were precursors to that where they had shown signs of food conditioning.

PC: So tell me about the one with the cooler because I understand it to be like one of the most brazen attacks; brazen things these wolves did.

BILL HUNT: On May 31^st, late in the evening around 10 or 10:30, they walked into an occupied site. The one wolf walked right up, there were three or four occupants on the site, they were throwing rocks, they were yelling, there was a dog nearby barking. The wolves were completely undeterred by all of that. The occupants then wisely jumped in their vehicle, they tried to use the horn again to deter the wolf and the wolf just accessed one of the, I think it was a Rubbermaid or a cooler that they had on site, took off with the lid, realized that wasn't food and then came back and dug in the box and got a loaf of bread and took off with that. They immediately called our dispatch centre and alerted us to the incident.

PC: That’s what led you to the decision to euthanize one of the wolves on Tuesday.

BILL HUNT: That, and a known history stemming from a known incident on January 21st where they were able to access food garbage out of a trade waste bin at a construction site at Johnson Canyon area, and since that incident we were concerned with that because it does only take a handful of food rewards to develop these behaviours. We've been following very closely two of the wolves in the pack. They are collared for management purposes and research purposes. The Alpha male and one of the male yearlings and so we've been following the pack using telemetry and also relying on sightings and reports from the public.

PC: So the one that you killed on Tuesday, was that one collared? How do you know you got the right wolf?

BILL HUNT: Very carefully. Sorry, no, it wasn’t collared and so we spent the previous four or five days looking carefully through our record of photos. We have our own photo library and we also will get photos from other photographers, and in the instance at Tall Mountain, they were able to take a photo with their cell phone, and so there are some very subtle colour differences in all three. The troublemakers in this case are grey wolves, but the adult female had some colour markings that were unique, and so through some careful work we were able to make sure we did get the right individual.

PC: Could you not have done something else other than kill it?

BILL HUNT: That's a question we get a lot. Again, that was what we were working with other experts on is what's the probability of being able to rehabilitate that adult animal, and what we heard consistently from everybody and from our own experience and from looking at case studies is that there's some chance of doing that with yearlings and that's what we're focused on now, but with an adult female and considering that she's teaching her pups or her or her yearlings those same behaviours, the chances of turning that around when she's that far along the scale of food conditioning was very, very low, and an attempt to do so would put the yearlings in jeopardy as well.

PC: How do the wolves start doing this? Were people actually trying to feed these wolves, is that how they first learned hey, people food, or were they like, let’s go for the food there?

BILL HUNT: Well, the January garbage incident is the first one we know of. It certainly was a key incident in this whole chronology, and then looking at the behaviour of this female, I strongly suspect that she's received food directly from visitors and people roadside, or photographers, that sort of thing. We don't have any evidence of that or you know, we would have laid charges. The one thing we've been discussing there is quite a difference in how you see wolves roadside versus bears. Bears are often sitting in a pile of dandelions in the early spring feeding, or in August they're in a big pile of berries roadside feeding. When people see wolves, they're on the move. They're looking for prey items like elk, moose, deer and so they're trotting alongside the road and it's very tricky to get, not a selfie, but just even a picture, and I think it's very tempting to go, okay wolves can trot at an incredible rate. You know, you can drive alongside the road and they just they look like they're not moving and you look down at your speedometer and they're trotting at 20 or 30 kilometres, it's amazing. So people are tempted to toss out a bit of food to get the wolf to pause long enough for a photo and that kind of behaviour is just an absolute death sentence for that wolf.

PC: As you said, you’re reconditioning the pups and stuff and trying to get them to stay away from people so to speak. What are you telling people to do in the meantime?

BILL HUNT: Well, in the meantime we've got the warning out and I'd like to point out listening to Scott's story, I made a little list here and he did five things absolutely perfect. He got off his bike so that he didn't elicit any kind of chase response and that's important with wolves and especially for things like cougars. He turned and faced the animal to show assertiveness and demonstrate aggressiveness. He tried to look big and yelled, again showing that aggressiveness back to the animal. He was carrying bear spray which we strongly recommend, and then he reported it to us right away which is fantastic as well. All five of those things are key elements if you have a wolf encounter.

PC: When he said Go away, Wolf and I chuckled at that, he was actually doing the right thing. I shouldn’t have chuckled.

BILL HUNT: I would be yelling Bad Dog! as loud as I can.

PC: Bad dog. Okay.

BILL HUNT: Or whatever, don't feel silly. Be assertive, yell at the wolf, wave your arms, throw a stick, throw rocks, gather together with your friends if you have others with you. He hung onto his bike to use it as a way to create space between him and the wolf and those are all appropriate steps and sounds like he did a really good job.

PC: Good work, Scott and Bill, thank you to you. Bill Hunt is a resource conservation manager for Banff National Park and he was in Alberta. Well, warnings to be on the lookout for wolves are becoming increasingly common at some parks across Canada. Todd Windle is a human wildlife conflict specialist at Pacific Rim National Park Reserve on Vancouver Island. It issued an advisory this week following 15 interactions between wolves and people in the past month, everything from wolves watching visitors from a distance to encounters much closer.

SOUNDCLIP

One where a woman went to put her dog outside the tent to get outside and there was actually a wolf standing right there essentially waiting for it, and the dog and the wolf had face to face stand off and on the quick thinking of the owner, she grabbed her small dog and picked it up and took it back to the vehicle in the parking lot and the wolf followed them back there. The second incident that also happened in the campground, a group of campers were having their brunch just a little bit after 11:00 in the morning and a wolf entered the campground and walked up to their occupied site and within about five to seven metres from then and showed some interest in what they are up to as well. That animal did leave as soon as the group stood up and directed their attention towards it, so that was good but definitely a bit concerned that it chose to enter the campground and approach the people.

PC: Well despite the close encounters, Pacific Rim Park has not resorted to killing any of those wolves, but they are trying to keep the wolves away from humans.

SOUNDCLIP

We’re doing extra targeted patrols at the wolves in the morning and in the evenings and trying to teach them not to come near the areas of high human use. We’re having people going out with air horns and paintball guns and if they see the animals come close they make extra noise and time shoot paintball guns at them to help deter them from learning that is okay to come into the campground right next to the visitor centre.

PC: That was that Todd Windle, the human wildlife conflict specialist at Pacific Rim National Park Reserve on Vancouver Island. Kevin Van Tighem knows wolves very well, especially the wolves of Banff National Park. He is a former Banff Park superintendent. He's also the author of the book called The Homeward Wolf and he has worked on the documentary Unnatural Enemies: The War on Wolves. We've reached him in Pincher Creek, Alberta. Kevin Van Tighem, hello. Let me first ask you about the decision to euthanize that wolf in Banff on Tuesday. Was it the right thing to do?

KEVIN VAN TIGHEM: It was the right decision and it was made really professionally. I think that the provinces of Alberta and BC could learn a lot from how Parks Canada deals with wolf problems.

PC: What can they learn?

KEVIN VAN TIGHEM: Well, rather than trying to deal with every wolf as a potential problem, they do everything they do everything they can to keep wolves out of trouble and then when they fail, they humanely and surgically remove the problem animal. So they deal with wolf problems rather than trying to reduce wolf numbers and I say hats off to them. It's not an easy decision. In fact, it's a very hard decision for somebody who makes a living protecting nature to have to actually kill an animal, but in this case I think they did the right and responsible thing and they did it the right way.

PC: So at the Pacific Rim National Park Reserve on Vancouver Island which I just mentioned, they are using paint balls and horns to keep wolves away from people. Is that a good strategy in your opinion?

KEVIN VAN TIGHEM: Well, you know the best strategy is for the people who visit wild places to behave responsibly; to respect the animals that are out there and not put them in harm's way. The joker in the deck is that there's so many of us and we're not all equally responsible or informed, so in cases where there's constant potential for things to go sideways, yeah you probably need to keep reminding wolves that we're a different species, we're not a source of food, and it's better for them to be looking somewhere else for food than close to us, so I think it's a good idea.

PC: So from your experience, is this the wolf behaviour that we’re seeing in Banff or on Vancouver Island, is it unusual?

KEVIN VAN TIGHEM: It's very unusual but I think we're going to see more of it because two things are happening. People are pretty much everywhere now, we recreate everywhere, we live where we want, people aren't just sort of an urban species anymore, we're everywhere and in addition there's an awful lot of prey out there and a lot of that prey take shelter near where we live so we have, in Banff for instance, elk and deer that they figured they were safest in the town site until this wolf pack turned up and started hunting them there. The bottom line is we're stuck with each other. We're in their backyard, they're in our backyard, and when you've got that much contact, you've got more potential for one or the other of us to send the wrong signals to each other.

PC: And just make the comparison. You were the superintendent in Banff when?

KEVIN VAN TIGHEM: Up until 2011.

PC: Okay, it hasn’t been that many years but if you can compare that, what kind of behaviour did you observe during the years that you spent as superintendent, in that short time span, did it change a lot?

KEVIN VAN TIGHEM: Well, I think this pack is quite unique. We've always had a Bow Valley pack, the Bow Valley wolves are usually fairly habituated but they treated us like most wolves treat us. They sometimes curiously quite often just ignore us. We're just scenery to them and they were making their living their own way but what made this pack unique and what makes this pack unique, is that they are very comfortable with people and they hunt right up to the edge of the town. In fact, I believe that two of these wolves actually chased a deer into the town and killed it in town. That's where these wolves are hanging out and so there's a good chance they are going to run into somebody whose behaviour gets them into trouble. That seems to be what happened.

PC: There are the humans and there are the animals involved in this and both are responsible in different extents. Do you see humans trying to feed wolves?

KEVIN VAN TIGHEM: I've been surprised. We really came a long way in the eighties and the nineties in the national parks. I'd say that probably parks led the way in really making it socially unacceptable to feed animals by the roadside. Unfortunately there are private parks and places, I know I’ve seen them, in eastern Canada that actually invite people in to feed captive animals and so they're sending out a different message. I've been surprised at the number of roadside feeding incidents there have been lately. Mostly involving bears, but you know as Bill Hunt said, the temptation is there to feed a wolf just to get it to slow down so you can get your Facebook post, you know. Yes, there have been incidents and it's surprising because it's just so totally unacceptable, it's so offensive in a number of ways that just in terms of you go to nature and then you wreck it, like why would you do that?

PC: Interesting that you know you talk about that the increasing numbers of people, and the encounters with animals, wolves in this case. Parks Canada is trying to get more people to come to their parks, more visitors into their parks, free admission to our national parks next year, so that kind of tips you know, challenges the balance bringing more people in our parks. What do you expect? Are you worried about more animal and human conflict?

KEVIN VAN TIGHEM: That's always the challenge. National parks are really all about getting people into nature, so I mean that's what they do, that's their job and the trick is to get people into nature and then use that contact to educate people and change their understanding on nature just so that they go back better connected than they were when they arrived. I think that's really where Parks Canada has a challenge because when you've got a park with four million visitors a year, you just can't reach them all. They get out ahead of you. I would say the biggest challenge that Parks Canada now faces is coping with its own success. Great, we're getting people into nature, but that’s not good enough. They have to get into nature the right way or they have to learn something from that, and hopefully go back better connected to the nature of their country and it's not just about going out and getting some good photos. I tell you, the camera is a dangerous weapon because it brings out some really strange behaviour in its holder.

PC: Hence those do not feed the animal signs. I guess people ignore them.

KEVIN VAN TIGHEM: Yeah, I think they just don't understand it. Maybe they think it's just about their own safety and they feel smug about taking care of their safety, but it's for every bit as much about safety of the animal itself, as we now saw and also the safety of the next visitor that comes along. Once you get a wolf that associating people with food and hanging around in campgrounds, there's all sorts of little people hanging around those camp grounds that could start to look like food, too. That risk is what started when somebody selfishly decides to do something stupid like throw their garbage out the window rather than at a proper dispenser, or actually throw food to an animal.

PC: I want to ask you about wolves beyond Banff because there is a much larger culling of wolves going on in Alberta. There is a cull of wolves. What is the current situation?

KEVIN VAN TIGHEM: That’s the irony. I used to always laugh every time one wolf dies in Banff, it gets headlines for a week. There were at least 70 wolves killed in the last winter in the [indecipherable] just immediately to the east of Banff National Park, and they were not killed because they were causing problems, they were killed because people would have assumed they were likely to cause problems, and because the province of Alberta—their wolf management philosophy is an ancient one spawned by the biologists back in the seventies. Their whole idea is just keep wolf numbers down. Wolves are hard to kill, they're smart animals, so to keep wolf numbers down, they basically authorized all kinds of unethical, I would say, ways of killing wolves using choking neck snares, using poisons that were banned in the United States, killing because of how cruel a death they cause, and shooting nursing females leaving the pups to starve in the den. Those things are all legal and done constantly in Alberta because of the ongoing war on wolves.

PC: And what the rationale for the culls?

KEVIN VAN TIGHEM: Well, it's always based on the fact that everybody assumes that wolves are going to cause problems and sometimes wolves do cause problems, but by killing wolves randomly, quite often you actually create those problems because you break up the packs, you create these small inefficient hunting use in the units of immature animals, and basically create chaos out there. So, it's based on mostly fear of the potential harm that wolves can cause rather than basically doing as Banff does here, which is trying to keep wolves from causing the problem through preventative measures. Than when they do surgically removing the ones that do cause a problem.

PC: It sounds to me a little bit like we humans, I don't know, have a conflicted attitude toward wolves.

KEVIN VAN TIGHEM: It's very true and I would say that they are probably as conflicted about us. It's a funny relationship. We're nervous around them and we're curious about them, fascinated by them. They're nervous around us and they're curious about us, and sometimes they seem fascinated by us and you know, wolves and dogs have got the same genetic background. Our best friends are wolf descendants and our biggest fears are wolves. Our relationship with wolves is a very strange, complex, and fascinating one. It's actually really cool but it's one that we've never really come to terms with.

PC: Kevin Van Tighem, thank you for your time.

KEVIN VAN TIGHEM: Thank you.

PC: Kevin Van Tighem is a conservationist, author and former superintendent of Banff National Park. He was in Pincher Creek, Alberta. Let us know if you have had a close interaction with a wolf and what happened. Tweet us @thecurrentcbc, find us on Facebook or email us by going to our website cbc.ca/thecurrent. And Kevin was mentioning his criticism of Alberta's wolf cull, well British Columbia has also culled wolves and it's a debate that we have held here on The Current, and if you want to hear more about it go to our web site to find a link to that previous item. I'm Piya Chattopadhyay, thank you for lending us your ear here on the Friday edition of The Current.

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June 10, 2016 full episode transcript

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