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The Current Transcript for November 7, 2024

Host: Matt Galloway

Prologue

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JUSTIN TRUDEAU: We've been preparing for this. We're looking forward to doing this work, and we're going to make sure that this extraordinary friendship and alliance between Canada and the United States continues.

MATT GALLOWAY: The Prime Minister will have his work cut out for him. A former U.S. Ambassador to this country called the return of Donald Trump the greatest threat to the Canada-U.S. relationship. The president-elect has promised an America First approach to trade with huge tariffs to back it up. In 30 minutes, what that will mean for Canada's economy, and an auto sector joined at the hip to the United States. Also this morning, the movement of people was a key factor in that election and may well be here when our vote rolls around. A new sound project aims to put a human face and voice on those issues.

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STUART FOWKES: Hearing a family being reunited after many years apart, or hearing the ultrasound of a baby's heartbeat recorded in a country thousands of miles from where its mother was born. That tells a very different kind of story about migration.

MATT GALLOWAY: In an hour, the sounds of people moving across borders, finding moments of joy in that journey, and cooking foods of home in a new land, and how all of that can help take the polarisation out of one of the stories of our times. But we begin with the story of the United States in the wake of the election. Good morning. I'm Matt Galloway, and this is The Current.

America’s future

Guests: Carol Anderson, Jill Lepore

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MG: It was not the speech she hoped to give. Kamala Harris conceded the election to Donald Trump yesterday afternoon, promising that the Biden administration would engage in a peaceful transfer of power.

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KAMALA HARRIS: A fundamental principle of American democracy is that when we lose an election, we accept the results. That principle, as much as any other, distinguishes democracy from monarchy or tyranny. And anyone who seeks the public trust must honour it. At the same time, in our nation, we owe loyalty, not to a president or a party, but to the Constitution of the United States.

MG: This historic election says a lot about the state of the United States and its future. Carol Anderson is an historian and the author of "White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide." She's also a professor of African-American Studies at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. And Jill Lepore is an historian at Harvard University, a staff writer at The New Yorker. She's the author of, among other books, "These Truths: A History of the United States." And she also hosted a podcast for the BBC focusing on Elon Musk. She is in Vermont this morning. Good morning to you both.

CAROL ANDERSON & JILL LEPORE: Good morning, hello.

MG: Carol, a former adviser to George W. Bush called this election a CAT scan on the American people. What does this election, do you think, say about your country now?

CAROL ANDERSON: It says that we have a large swath of very angry, angry white men. And, and white women who are aligned with patriarchy, with sexism and with racism. And it says that they are energised. They are afraid of the incredible diversity of this nation. They are afraid of the incredible strength and change that diversity will bring. And they are afraid of becoming a minority. And so, this was their last stand to basically vote in a man who is a convicted felon. A man who is an adjudicated rapist. A man who is a liar, a proven liar. A man who his cabinet officials basically said do not re-elect this man. He is unfit. He is unstable. He has strong fascist tendencies. So, it says that none of that mattered. But what mattered was white supremacy.

MG: I want to come back to that in a moment. Jill, you've had a day or so to digest these results. Your book, These Truths, is in many ways about the myths and the stories that America is built around. What do you think the story this election tells about America is.

JILL LEPORE: Well, I think I have Chief part of this story is the failure of the Democratic Party, really, in the 20th century to deliver policies that relieve the suffering of working-class people in the United States. I think that, you know, Biden actually had some really effective policies and programs. Kamala Harris did not have a policy program for the country that spoke to those voters. And I would disagree to some degree with Professor Anderson's comments. Given the extent of black and Latino support for Trump, really, I think caught the Democrats by surprise. They've taken those voters for granted, black men, Latino men for granted, for decades now. And I think there's a reckoning necessary for the Democratic Party in the aftermath of this loss.

MG: When people say to you and I want to come back to Carol on that, when people say to you in the wake of a result like this, this isn't the United States. How do you respond? Because when that number of people, that scale of people vote for Donald Trump, it is the United States, isn't it?

CAROL ANDERSON: It is the United States. And so part of what we're looking at is the way that we have an information ecosystem that, that just flattened, that, that told a series of lies over and over and over again. That became the truth. So, part of that truth was that the economy was, was teetering. The economy was awful, that people were struggling, except for in a moment where unemployment is really low, where inflation has gone down. But part of what you're hearing and so part of this is the work that the Biden administration had done in order to deal with the catastrophe of the Trump, of the Trump regime. And, and but you got to like a narrative that, that the economy was not working.

MG: And yet, we heard we heard that from people when we were out. People felt that they were struggling. They would go to put gas in their tank and they would be shocked at how much it cost. And to, to Jill's point, I mean, it wasn't just white men and women that voted for Trump that he increased his share of votes among black men, in particular among Latinos. What do you make of that?

CAROL ANDERSON: And remember, so part of what I talked about not only was racism, but misogyny. And so that is part of what we're hearing. What we're hearing is that. So there was a, a pollster who was working with Latino men, and they were like, there is no way a woman can run the country. There is just no way that a woman could run the country. And you're hearing from, from black men that, well, she was a prosecutor and she was just locking up the brothers. She was just locking up the brothers. And that became a narrative that was out there, but it wasn't based on truth. And so, part of what we're looking at is an information biosphere that has separated reality from truth, from fact, from evidence.

MG: Jill Lepore, how much of a role did gender play in this election? We talked on this program and there's been a lot written about, about the gender gap in the vote leading up to, to election day. When you take a look at the results such as they are right now, what does that say to you?

JILL LEPORE: So, the gender gap in American politics between 1920, when women got the vote in the United States and 1980, when Ronald Reagan was elected president, always was a small gap, and it always favoured the Republican Party, which endorsed the Equal Rights Amendment beginning in the 1940s. That changed with Reagan's election. Reagan came to power in 1980 campaigning against the Equal Rights Amendment, which was then defeated in 1982. A lot of people don't realise that the United States doesn't have an equal rights provision in its constitution. And Reagan came to power on the back of a conservative movement led by women, by the brilliant conservative strategist Phyllis Schlafly, to defeat the ERA and also to overturn Roe v Wade, the Supreme Court decision that constitutionalised abortion in 1973. And at that point, the gender gap switched. And so since 1980, women have voted, are more likely to vote for the Democratic candidate than for the Republican candidate. And the expectation, and that's been fine with Republicans who basically have had the idea that they'd gladly take white men and lose white women and fight different fights. And that's largely how it's come to pass. It's been a fairly incremental shift. The expectation with Harris's campaign was that this long gender gap that's now some decades old would become the common gender chasm that the 2022 overturning of Roe v Wade would drive women who had traditionally voted Republican, would finally drive those, those sort of last white women away from, from the Republican Party. And that didn't turn out to be the case. There was a sizeable gender gap, but it was not the gender chasm that was anticipated. And I think that had to do with. There, there are a lot of you know, it had to do with the sort of terrifying approach to talking about women that the Trump-Vance campaign engaged in. But it also had to do with underestimating the power of conservative women in this country and also to do with the way in which, just as the Democratic Party has so long taken for granted black and Latino voters, it has taken women for granted, and the ad campaigns run by the Democratic Party, were unbelievably contemptuous of women.

MG: And taken the working class, some people have said for granted as well. And I mean, this goes back to the issue that you talked about when it came to people feeling let down by the Democratic Party. The exit polls suggest, and this is what you hear from people, is that the economy, whether that's true or not, that the economy was the top of the priority list for many people. Donald Trump is a billionaire. And yet he was able to tell people that he had their backs. How do you think, Jill, he managed to do that?

JILL LEPORE: I think there is a, there's, you do know Trump, I will confess, is, is a horrifying prospect. The prospect of returning him, returning to power is horrifying. He is incredibly dangerous. A political force both in the United States and around the world. There's great deal to be concerned about. But, but I think that the, the chief message to his supporters has been since 2015, you can't possibly be stupid enough to vote for this guy. You don't understand all the ways in which he is dangerous. You don't understand. You know, the economy is just fine. He will make your life. He doesn't actually care about you. He will make your life worse. You know, it's the condescension to the voter that I think, in sort of the worst Trump behaves and he understands this dynamic exquisitely well. The worse he behaves, the more his opponents will say, how can people be so stupid as to vote for this person? And then the more condescended, too, they feel and the less understood they feel by people that, that in fact, you know, Democratic policies do have, have their best interests in mind rather than relative to the Republican Party. So, I think there's this quite vicious circle that works extremely well for Trump, the way in which it bit baffle. It's baffling, I think, to the, to reporters. It's baffling to political commentators, It's baffling to Democrats that people can still support him. But it's that, it's his very outrageousness that contributes to that support.

MG: Carol, how do you understand part of this is about the message that the Democrats put forward on, on Donald Trump being a threat to democracy. Why didn't that stick with, with voters, do you think?

CAROL ANDERSON: I think part of it is the, the history of American exceptionalism, the kind of sense that, that can't happen here. That's an exaggeration. Or if it happens, that it won't affect me. That kind of sense of, of that's somebody, that's going to be somebody else. You know, that's what happened in Nazi Germany, that's not here. And I think that that was part of it. And I think the other part of it is the kind of, of historical amnesia we have. And that historical amnesia doesn't even have to go back 50 years or 100 years. It's that kind of historical amnesia that ignores that in his first administration, in his first presidency term, his first term, that he weakened a lot of the labour laws, OSHA. So the, the standards for what can happen in the workplace. And so you saw workplace deaths go up and you saw the weakening of the access to health insurance happening. So, people were getting injured, but they weren't getting the health insurance that they needed in order to get well. We forget that in the tariff wars that, that he had with China over soybeans, that it almost led to the bankruptcy, the collapse of farmers in Iowa, and they had to be bailed out at $28 billion in order to make up for the loss of Chinese goods, come Chinese, the Chinese buying the soybeans. So, it is, and it is also ignoring or forgetting what happened during COVID, the massive mismanagement of that pandemic that led to hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths. And Jill is right that there is this thing, you know, and it's part, it's, it's psychological. Ruth Ben-Ghiat talks about this with strongmen. Is that what one of the things that happens is that with somebody believes the strongman, believes the lie and then to be told that it's a lie, they doubled down on supporting the strongman because that then means that they had, they had bad judgement. And so to have to own that just does something to the, the sense of self, the sense of identity. And so, it's the doubling down on the really bad decision and staying with that. And I don't think there was condescension, really. I saw the way that organised labour rallied around Harris and, and I saw the way that the Infrastructure Act and all of the building that is happening here is putting folks to work in really good-paying jobs in the way that the CHIPS Act, it has held, has increased manufacturing. And so, people are having great jobs and the way that they were emphasising apprenticeship programs. So, there were policies in place and policies that were proposed that really would address the economic needs of the working class.

MG: And yet people didn't see that they would apply to them, that they, that they would help their lives.

CAROL ANDERSON: Right. Right. Instead, what we got were tariffs. And we got a sense that the tax cuts for the billionaires would continue. And, and we got a sense that what he was providing basically what W.E.B. Du Bois called the wages of whiteness, which is that kind of sense of kind of a racial solidarity, a racial superiority that doesn't provide a lot of the physical needs, the physical conference, but provides the kind of psychological, psychological boost, this kind of psychological drug that makes you feel empowered.

MG: Joe, let me ask you about one of those billionaires. Elon Musk is a key factor in this election. He bet big on Trump. Donald Trump has suggested he could be in his cabinet as the secretary of cost cutting. People have called him the most powerful unelected man ever. You did a podcast about him, The Evening Rocket, to try to in some ways explain Elon Musk. What do you think he stands to gain from, from the win if Donald Trump?

JILL LEPORE: You know, Musk doesn't need anything. Musk is in thrall to himself, and Trump is another way for him to see his power reflected back at him. And, you know, it's exhausting. I really found it fascinating to this series on Musk some years ago before people are really paying attention to Musk. But it's also exhausting. I mean, the man is just a bottomless pit of a kind of desperate need for greater and greater power. And Trump has that same neediness. They have, I think they will surely have a very dramatic, histrionic falling out. We will be asked to be spectac--, spectators to the soap opera of their relationship. But in the meantime, they will together bring about terrible, terrible suffering for the poorest and the weakest among us, of whom they have, in whose interests, they have no concern whatsoever.

MG: Do you think, we've talked about media and you've written about this extensively, I mean, X, Twitter. People have said is in many ways now one of the most powerful venues for conservative thought. Do you think that that will play a role in the country to come?

JILL LEPORE: Yeah, I mean, I wrote a piece for The New Yorker this week called The Artificial State, in which I make a kind of long view, historical argument that we no longer live in the United States in a liberal, democratic state whose purpose is to make citizens. We live in an artificial state whose purpose is to create trolls. That, and the art of, an artificial state is not a conspiracy. It's not some crackpot theory like the deep state. It's really just the reality of the digital infrastructure that is entirely corporate-owned that controls the flow of information. And, you know, to Carol's point about how difficult it is to, to break through the messaging, you know, the insanity of Trump's understanding of the world. And I would say equally the kind of craziness of a highly polarised and charged understanding of the world on the other end of the political spectrum that is all driven by, but by communications infrastructure that's owned by corporations who, as we all know, have, you know, profit from extremism, polarisation. They profit from making people angry. And the, you know, Musk directly has a sort of very clear interest in Trump's ascendancy and supported it with every inch of his power. But I think we would do well to understand that the artificial state has a decades-long history. You know, started in the late 1950s, and Americans have seeded bit by bit. Their capacity to act in civil institutions and civil society to corporate interests. That's happening around the, around the world. Something like the CBC is, you know, one of the last important bastions of a kind of civil society institution that has an independent means of communicating with the public.

MG: So what do you just, we just have a minute or so left. Carol, What do you do about that? I mean, what is there a way for a less polarised America to be on the horizon, given, given everything that you've been talking about?

CAROL ANDERSON: I think it begins basically at the grassroots. It begins in our schools. It begins in our communities. It begins in talking with each other. It begins in working to have an, a society that believes in evidence, that believes in facts, that knows how to make the kinds of discernment about truth and lies. And so, it begins in our, in our civic institutions. It begins in our community institutions. It begins with our neighbours. It's going to, it's going to be at the grassroots where this change has to happen. It can't come from above.

MG: Jill, very briefly, that sounds, I think, to a lot of people, far fetched right now given where we are. The idea of talking [JILL LEPORE: Oh] to people, but also believing in facts.

JILL LEPORE: Yeah, you know, there are, there are a lot of organisations and nonprofits in the U.S. today that bridging organisations that are trying to help bring people together across political divides for democratic deliberation. I think it's a set of skills that, you know, are had in classrooms and K-12 classrooms is public school teachers who are doing the really vital and important work, as Carol says, you know, bring people together to figure out what's true and what's not true and how to disagree with one another. We need a lot more institutions than K to 12 classrooms for that to thrive.

MG: I'm always glad to talk to you both. Thank you very much for being here this morning.

CAROL ANDERSON & JILL LEPORE: Thank you so much.

MG: Carol Anderson is an historian and author of White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide. She's a professor of African-American studies at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Jill Lepore is an historian at Harvard University, staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of, among others, These Truths. Your CBC News is coming up next. And then...

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CHRYSTIA FREELAND: I know that a lot of Canadians are anxious, and I want to say [Music: Theme fading in] with utter sincerity and conviction to Canadians that Canada will be absolutely fine.

MG: We'll talk about that coming up in six minutes, particularly when it comes to the issue of trade, tariffs, immigration and border security. What does our relationship with the United States look like now? We'll discuss that coming up after the news. I'm Matt Galloway. This is The Current. Stay with us.

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U.S.-Canada trade

Guests: Bruce Heyman, Flavio Volpe, Carlo Dade

MG: Hello, I'm Matt Galloway and you're listening to The Current.

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JUSTIN TRUDEAU: I want to congratulate Donald on a decisive victory last night. I look forward to working with President Trump once again to strengthen North American economic opportunities for the middle class, to grow our economies in ways that make us competitive around the world, to protect North America from the many, many challenges that exist around the world.

MG: That's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau speaking yesterday in Ottawa. He said that his government had been preparing for this moment, but given some of Donald Trump's promises on the campaign trail, there could be some very real challenges for Canada over the next four years. Bruce Heyman served as U.S. ambassador to Canada under President Barack Obama. Bruce Heyman, good morning.

BRUCE HEYMAN: Good morning.

MG: During the election campaign, you called the potential return of Donald Trump, these are your words, the greatest threat to the Canada-U.S. relationship. What worries you the most with him as president?

BRUCE HEYMAN: So, in some ways that's accidental because everything he believes and the approach he's taking is, goes to the theme Make America Great Again. It's all about America, America first and last. And so, all of the various policies that he talks about are in that vein. And so, first and foremost is bring manufacturing and jobs back to the U.S. And part of the model that Donald Trump has for that is imposing tariffs on all imported goods around the world. And he found a lane to do that during his last administration, where he did that with steel and aluminium, but he could apply that more broadly. That in and of itself, and that's not the only thing that in and of itself, could damage the bond that we have with a well over 25 years of free trade existing between our two countries. When I say free, we don't trade free. It's not you don't buy something for free, but it's free of tariffs, it's free of tax, and it's losed the ability for us to trade with each other and between each other.

MG: Would that necessarily be that much different then? I mean, the idea of America first is not restricted to Republicans. And during the campaign, there have been several reports warning about protectionist policies coming from both Democrats and Republicans. So, is Trump that much worse for the Canada-U.S. relationship than Kamala Harris would have been?

BRUCE HEYMAN: Extreme. And so, your answer to your question is, you're right. It is a, it is a movement within the United States and they're in both parties. So, placing America first in manufacturing at bringing supply chains. And much of the legislation that the Biden team has passed was focussed on bringing manufacturing back to the U.S., but it also recognised the importance of our North American supply chains. And so, this is much more extreme than that, and tariffs would be applied universally across the board. And so, you're seeing articles popping up all over the news feeds in the last 24 hours about even US companies like Procter and Gamble facing risks of, you know, the, the things that they produce in Mexico. And it's going to affect a lot of things. I do believe, though, he's going to impose those. From everything I hear, that's going to happen. [MG: What about] And that's just the first of many things.

MG: I was going to say. What about trade agreements? The tariffs are one thing, but the Kuzma trade agreement is up for review in 2026. What in the context of what you're talking about, what should Canadians brace for when it comes to that agreement?

BRUCE HEYMAN: Well, a trade agreement is in effect, assuming that we have free trade. And if you put tariffs on everything. In my conversations with large corporations, they'll say, well, everybody's talking about this renegotiation in 2026 or even review. It's not even a renegotiation. But trust me, it will be, if it's even in existence. Because if you impose tariffs, then de facto the trade agreement is non operable and it doesn't, it isn't working. And so what are you going to do, take them to court over it and, you know, use, use the dispute mechanisms in NAFTA or the USMCA or Kuzma to go against Donald Trump? Well, good luck. I mean, he'll say bring it on. So, the reality is this is so highly dangerous to the Canada/U.S. relationship because let's just take it away from that completely, the tariff itself. And if you're a company that you're thinking of putting a plant in Mexico, Canada or the United States, and this is all pending out there, you don't even know how it's going to work out. You don't know how this trade negotiation or review period is going to take place. What would you do if you were to choose? Do I choose Ontario or Michigan for that next plant? And the implications may be if you're at a board of director level or a CEO or chairman level, you say, I don't want to take that risk. Let's just put it in Michigan and we'll you know, it's not that I don't like you, Canada. It's just that the president has now said that this is all in jeopardy and I can't afford to do that to the company.

MG: Danielle Smith, the premier of Alberta, said during the campaign that there was perhaps some hope that a Republican president might be an opportunity to reopen a conversation around, for example, the Keystone XL pipeline. During the campaign, Donald Trump said that on day one, he would, in his words, drill, baby, drill. If you are in the resource sector in this country, do you think there are not threats but opportunities under a Trump administration?

BRUCE HEYMAN: So I think throughout all of this, there are going to be amazing opportunities for Canada, and you're going to have to look for your lane where those opportunities exist and negotiate those out.

MG: Where do you think they might be?

BRUCE HEYMAN: Well, you know, there are places where the U.S. needs, not wants, Canadian resources and goods. And the places where you need them as your leverage point with, you know, if you're trading with somebody or if you're in a negotiation with somebody and somebody wants something you have, it's very different than when they need something you have. And if they need it, you have a much stronger hand in negotiation. And so, I think it's up to Canadians and the Canadian government and businesses to sit down and figure out what is the difference between need and want. And where do you have your leverage point as a country to negotiate with the Trump administration?

MG: Let me just step beyond the economy for a moment. He has said that he will also deport upwards of 11 million undocumented people. The premier of Quebec, Francois Legault, was asked yesterday if he planned to add more resources to protect the border in that province. Take a listen to this.

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FRANCOIS LEGAULT: What I want to do is make sure that Mr. Trudeau, the federal government, take this seriously. And I want to follow up every week about the number of new immigrants we get in Quebec. I want to make sure that we protect the border, the physical borders, that he protect airports. And if need is, I will make sure to have some of our people making sure of that.

MG: Bruce Heyman, is your expectation that in light of that threat to deport 11 million plus undocumented people in the United States, there could be a flood of asylum seekers coming towards the Canada-U.S. border?

BRUCE HEYMAN: I would say expectation is my fear, and I think it's a legitimate fear. And so, you know, we saw what happened when we were talking about sending Haitians back. And, you know, the premier is absolutely right to be concerned because they came up Roxham Road in much larger numbers than I think most people fully appreciate or realised, during the dead of winter. And so I would start actually watching this today, not waiting to when he becomes president, because I think people, you know, who are operating out of fear are going to start moving and maybe moving before January 20th.

MG: Moving toward the border.

BRUCE HEYMAN: Yeah. Or, you know, just moving. Moving. And so there's you know, when you're talking about rounding up 11 to 14 million people and you keep saying that over and over. Just imagine any, all of your listeners, if you were one of them, what would you do with your family if you actually had run from a repressive regime and in Latin America and you made your way through jungles, deserts and contras and loss of life and hunger and you made your way to wherever it is, Milwaukee, Chicago, Detroit. And you're there now. And the president-elect is saying he's going to round you up. And I would anticipate not everybody's just going to be sitting around, waiting to be picked up.

MG: So what do you do? I have to let you go. But what would your advice to Canadian politicians be? I mean, we heard the Prime Minister at the beginning saying that he's looking forward to working with the new administration. The Finance Minister, Deputy Premier, Deputy Prime Minister says that we'll be fine when she's talking about Canada. What do you say to them?

BRUCE HEYMAN: First of all, that's the right language I would use. I think everything they said was completely appropriate. Day one into after a post-election period, and it's the right thing to say to your people. But behind the scenes, you have to start gaming out everything, gaming out the tariffs, gaming out an untold number of people who may, may be approaching your border, gaming out changes in environmental policy, gaming out a squeeze on you for when you're going to hit your 2% target on defence spending. And they're not going to. As Kelly Kraft, former U.S. ambassador to Canada during Trump said just a week or so ago, said that's not working. The numbers you have put forward. So, you know, I think you've got to game everything up. The real issue for Canada this time is that he's been preparing for this for four years. And my guess is it's all going to happen in the first hundred days. And so, it's not just one thing. It's like a swarm of bills and policies that are going to get enacted. And Canada, as well as those of us in the United States, are going to be facing fairly dramatic changes very quickly.

MG: Bruce Heyman, good to speak with you, as always. Thank you very much.

BRUCE HEYMAN: The pleasure, man.

MG: Bruce Heyman served as U.S. ambassador to Canada under President Barack Obama.

MG: Flavio Volpe is president of the Automotive Parts Manufacturers Association. He is with me in studio, and has been listening in. Good morning to you.

FLAVIO VOLPE: Thanks for having me.

MG: Donald Trump said, and the language is a bit salty here, we've been screwed by Mexico and China and by Canada and by the European Union. When a president-elect uses language like that, what goes through your mind?

FLAVIO VOLPE: Well, we've heard this before. It's 2024, not 2016. 2016, we said oh, boy. 2024, we said, okay, look, what do we do in those four years when he was president? It's, it's his negotiating technique and we just have to be prepared for it.

MG: And so, he's promised to bring in tariffs starting at about 10%. You've called those tariffs if they were to be imposed, catastrophic. [FLAVIO VOLPE: Yeah.] Why did you use that word?

FLAVIO VOLPE: Well, what he's really talking about is, first of all, I'm not sure he understands that the consumer pays the tariff. So, catastrophic for inflation and prices in the United States. If we send something for sale there, tariff gets added on to that price. But ultimately, if that consumer decides that they don't want to buy in our case, you know, the companies that I represent, vehicles, it's really going to affect the volumes here. 80% of the cars we make in Canada, which is up to 2 million cars a year, get sold to an American consumer. So, we can't have that.

MG: You can't have that. But he says he's going to impose it. Do you have any, you don't have any sway in this, do you?

FLAVIO VOLPE: We've been here before. So he said the exact same thing in 2016, 17, 18, when we were renegotiating the NAFTA. What happened on some of the stuff that we make and that we used to make on cars, steel and aluminium. He put a tariff. He decided to take national security legislation regulation and put on, on those two items on, on cars and parts. What people don't remember is that in the new Kuzma, there is a side letter that says okay look notwithstanding that I want to put tariffs on there. I'm going to agree that they won't apply until unless we sell 2.6 million cars in Cana--, the US. What it is, is Donald Trump uses a lot of strong early language in negotiation. And then when ultimately when you sit down with the people who are actually negotiating, people that work for him, they understand that there's so much American investment on this side of the border. Half of the cars we make are with American cars. Half of the parts are American. Half of the raw materials are American. Ultimately, the argument of you're going to hurt yourself while we both take on China is not a good move.

MG: That strong language has also been applied to the electric vehicle industry. He has promised to scrap mandated sales targets for electric vehicles, said that he would look to dismantle parts of the Inflation Reduction Act, which have poured money into electrification. Canada has been shovelling money out the door toward the EV sector. Is that still a wise investment?

FLAVIO VOLPE: The Canadian contracts were meant to mirror the American commitment. And in those Canadian contracts, the clauses said, if the Americans won't pay you the production subsidy, if the IRA goes away, so do the Canadian obligations. The companies signed on to that knowingly and willingly, and they think we're past a tipping point on electric vehicles. We are around 10% in this market. We're going to get to regardless around 35% by 2035. He wants to scrap the mandates, which are the obligations for the automakers to make that 100% by 2035 where they can't sell cars.

MG: He's also talking about drill, baby, drill and unleashing, in his words, the power of oil and gas.

FLAVIO VOLPE: Well, imagine what that sounds like in western Canada, that for the last, you know, 8, 9 years has felt outside of the equation with, within this North American project. So, it's not all bad news for all Canadians.

MG: You were leading the auto manu--, Automotive Parts Manufacturers Association the last time he was president. How well do you think that we were this country and able to defend our interests back then? Did we actually? I mean, it's a lot of talk, but were we actually able to stand up to, to what he was proposing?

FLAVIO VOLPE: It was a little easier than it sounded like when you read about it. We sat across from his team and we had in automotive, more or less, the same principles and objectives. So, it is easier to turn around and say, Hey, by the way, don't give us what we want. Pick what you want. But it works for us. What he wanted was higher local content in the cars that are made here. More products from the U.S., more products from Canada worked for us. You know, sometimes you have to ignore the rhetoric and then turn around and really understand what he wants as his principal.

MG: I just wonder, I mean, Bruce Heyman was just on saying don't ignore the rhetoric, that a lot is going to come in the first hundred days. You need to buckle up. Is your seatbelt done up?

FLAVIO VOLPE: Yeah, I think Bruce has got a wider societal look at this. And certainly not a lot of what he said was uplifting. But, but to the point, you know, you're, you're talking to me because we're going to be negotiating terms for Canadian automotive. I'm not as concerned on that, on that pillar. We are very well aligned. We help the Americans compete with the Chinese. And they know that.

MG: Do they know that? Just last point, Do they know that? [FLAVIO VOLPE: They do.] When you say America first, do they know that?

FLAVIO VOLPE: Robert Lighthizer was the chief trade negotiator for Trump and he's been his chief adviser through all of this. He's likely to be back either in that position or secretary of the economy. He knows that, and he's a major trade hawk and he doesn't particularly like us, but he knows that. And sometimes, it's not about making friends. It's a understanding that I can help you with your enemy. And we're in a good spot.

MG: Flavio, thank you. [FLAVIO VOLPE: Thank you.] Flavio Volpe is president of the Automotive Parts Manufacturers Association.

MG: Carlo Dade is director of the Trade and Trade Infrastructure Centre at this Canada West Foundation in Calgary. Carlo, good morning to you.

CARLO DADE: Early. Good morning to you too, Matt.

MG: How do you, if you can, distinguish between rhetoric and bluster when it comes to what Donald Trump says?

CARLO DADE: Well, this time around, as opposed to the first time, we have an administration coming in that's been preparing. Last time, folks found, were surprised to find themselves in cabinet. This time, those folks have been in think tanks, MAGA-affiliated think tanks and other positions, preparing to come back. So, when you see a tweet from President-elect Trump, you can try to trace the idea in the tweet, the initiatives in the tweet back to these MAGA-affiliated think tanks and former administration officials. You mentioned Project 2025. That's one document. Throughout this, American Compass has put out the global tariff proposal. So, you can trace things back, things that you can't trace back. Well, you can probably dismiss those and spend more of your time looking at things that actually have people and paper attached to Donald Trump.

MG: You have argued that the old Canadian message about our trade relationship isn't working anymore. This idea that, that we will boast about being the largest trading partner with the United States. You say that we need a new language to speak to America. What does that language look like? And what's wrong with the language that we've been using up until this point?

CARLO DADE: So, the economic populist framework that persists throughout the range of views within the MAGA policy community has one thing in common, and that's the belief that trade deficits are the cause of the hollowing out of the American middle class, the cause of the Rust Belt, the cause of American decline. Trade was, and I'm channelling the MAGA folks. This is not our position. But trade is responsible for job loss and decline in the US. If you walk in to a room where that's the dominant conversation and say, Hi, we're your largest trade partner, you're walking into trouble. Instead, take the case of oil and gas. When we export oil and gas to the US, we don't export goods. We export jobs to the US. Canadian Gas has 7000 people employed in the US. Canadian Gas allows US workers in the US to process to send abroad. So, because we refuse to process oil and gas in Canada, we've been shipping jobs to the States. So, if the US goes drill, baby, drill, we really need to make a stronger case for Canadian oil and gas. We need to tie it to, we need to tie it to US jobs, which is the one persistent theme throughout the range of views on trade in the MAGA universe.

MG: Couldn't that have blowback here in Canada? I mean, this idea of shipping jobs from this country down south of the border?

CARLO DADE: We've been doing it for ages. Same thing with forestry. Forestry policies in British Columbia, coupled with the American tariffs, have resulted in massive investments by Canadian companies south of the border. So, I won't be, it will be the admission of something that in effect, has been policy or the result of policy in Canada, that we also make ourselves uncompetitive with regulation, lack of productivity, and that ships jobs abroad. So, I know it's a good question, but it's kind of what we've been doing, isn't it?

MG: So, I want to go back to that idea of, of the relationship, a special relationship, a trading relationship between these two countries. 70% of our exports head south of the border. And so if, if that's the number that exists right now, are we over dependent on the United States? Do we need to rethink not just the language, but that concept of, of the United States being our largest trading partner?

CARLO DADE: That was the awakening that we had in August of 1971 when President Nixon imposed a 10% surcharge on all imports into the US. And again, that's different than what's being proposed now. What's being proposed now is not a 10% tariff. It's something completely different. But anyway, 1971, it happened and we've been struggling to diversify ever since. And, you know, the percentage has gone down a little bit since then, but not significantly.

MG: What's different about I mean, it is a 10% tariff, is it not? I mean, isn't that what Donald [CARLO DADE: No.] Trump is proposing?

CARLO DADE: No, absolutely not. It is a charge that starts at 10%, that rises 5% every year. The US runs a trade deficit, but could fall 5% if the US wins a global trade surplus. So, not just the Canada-US, but the global relationship. It's the weaponization of uncertainty. You can figure out whether or not you can survive a 10% tariff, but you can't figure out if you can survive a tariff that could rise or could drop. The goal is to force jobs and production back to the US, not to grant protection for a particular product or to force a change in behaviour. This is something we haven't seen before and this is why I think Ambassador Heyman was saying this is so potentially dangerous. We've seen tariffs, we survive tariffs. This weaponization of uncertainty is sort of a nuclear option in trade.

MG: And so, what do we do finally in the face of the nuclear option? I mean, is there an argument for taking this challenge from the Make America Great Again, America First folks, as a, you know, kick in the pants to reshore our own industries? Canada first, if I can put it that way? Or if it's, if that's not the answer, then what do we do?

CARLO DADE: So, this is what we have to figure out. And this is the mad scramble in the policy community. Our past formulations and frameworks haven't dealt with dealing with things like tariffs or non-tariff barriers. But arguments like we export jobs is one potential area. Trying to forge stronger alliances with trade partners. So, not just diversify, but things like the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, where we come together with like minded countries to establish rules that allow us to trade more with each other and offer a common buffer and negotiating position with the US. These are all rough ideas. We've got to do some real hard thinking because the game hasn't just changed. I mean, we're playing something completely different here than we've seen in the past.

MG: And I mean, just to switch metaphors very briefly, I mean, the ambassador suggests the road ahead is going to be very rough. Is that your sense?

CARLO DADE: There is a potential, a clear potential. But again, there is a range of policy proposals within the MAGA community. You have semi free traders like Vivek Ramaswamy, but then you have the hard core economic nationalists like J.D. Vance. Depending on who wins that fight within the MAGA community, we'll know exactly what we're up against.

MG: Carlo, good to talk to you. I think we'll talk again. Thank you very much.

CARLO DADE: My pleasure, Matt.

MG: Carlo Dade is director of the Trade and Trade Infrastructure Centre at the Canada West Foundation in Calgary. Well, coming up after your regional update.

SOUNDCLIP

STUART FOWKES: Sound can transport us really directly and really vividly into a situation. In this case, it can transport us directly into the lived experiences [Music: Theme fading in] of human migration and drop you right into someone's story. So, you're kind of almost living it alongside them.

MG: From a ship rescuing migrants in the Mediterranean to Filipino expats paying, playing basketball in Dubai. Stuart Fowkes gathered 120 sounds of human migration across 51 countries. We'll talk about what migration sounds like, coming up in 90 seconds here on The Current.

[Music: Theme fading out]

And the sounds of human migration

Guest: Stuart Fowkes

MG: Hello again. I'm Matt Galloway and you're listening to The Current.

[Sound of dogs barking]

MG: In Sisimiut, Greenland, two Greenlanders prepare their dogs to go dog sledding.

[Barking continues]

MG: Thousands of years ago, Inuit migrated from Canada across the ice to Greenland by dog sled and they continue dog sledding today.

[Voice heard]

MG: In Xinjiang, China, nomadic Kazakh herders travel in the deep mountains of Altai, herders and a sheep scramble along a rocky pass. From these traditional trails of migration...

[Sounds of shots]

MG: To Hungary's hard line against migrants. Today, prison inmates feed metal tape through machines to make razor wire. It'll be used to fortify border fences against migrants and refugees. To a migration that embodies freedom in the natural world. In Mexico, monarch butterflies, thousands of them on their long annual migration between Mexico and the United States. These sounds are part of the world's first global collection of sounds of migration. Stuart Fowkes is the lead behind the project. He's also the founder of a global sound project, Cities and Memory. He joins us from Oxford, England. Stuart, hello.

STUART FOWKES: Hello.

MG: You and I spoke about this, the work that you were doing when it came to documenting the sounds of cities and what the sounds can evoke in terms of our memories in those places. Tell me a little bit about, about moving toward the issue of migration and, and what you wanted to do with this collection of sound.

STUART FOWKES: So this is this is a project called Migration Sounds, which we've done in partnership with the Centre on Policy Migration Society at the University of Oxford. So, we're working together to present migration through a different lens, to present it through sound, to give a kind of different angle and different perspective on migration. So, I think we're, we're starting from the basic premise, that migration is one of the most polarised topics in the world. It feels like many of the conversations around migration retread the same old ground. It can sometimes feel like you need to be on one side of the debate, or another conversation cut off and start from quite an adversarial place when we're talking about migration. But so, we're trying here to use sound to encourage people to understand migration in a number of different ways and to use sensors, in this case hearing, to kind of get a different type of knowledge about what's really a complex issue. So, you know, for us, when we were putting the collection of sounds together for this project, hearing a family being reunited after many years apart or hearing the ultrasound of a baby's heartbeat recorded in a country thousands of miles from where, you know, its mother was born. That tells a very different kind of story about migration. And it tells, it tells it in a way that really brings it to life through the stories of people. So, it's kind of about getting away from, from news coverage and cliche around migration and using sound as like a whole new entry point to the conversation and giving us all kinds of new perspectives on these stories.

MG: Tell me a bit more about that. I mean, and you're speaking to somebody who, you know, uses sound for a living and talks for a living and listens for a living. What is it that you think that sound can do that you can't capture in those other, as you said, very heated, very polarised conversations around migration?

STUART FOWKES: Yeah. I mean, and similarly, you know, I work with sound all the time, running the Cities and Memory sound projects. And for me, sound is just an incredible gift. You know, it's as a sense, it's incredibly close to all of us. We can all hear before we can see, we can all here before we're born. It's a sense that I think is very, very close to our daily live--, you know, our daily lives. If I ask you, you know, for example, what, what London looks like, you know, a typical answer might be what it looks like, Buckingham Palace or it looks like whatever, you know, something very visual. If I ask you what London sounds like, you're likely to say what it maybe it's the sound of the metro doors closing or it's the sound of the Bells of Big Ben or something like that. If I use London as an example. So when we talk about sound, we often talk about it in a way that's just much more intimate and closer to us. So more than I think any other sense, you know, except maybe smell, sound can transport us really directly and really vividly into a situation. In this case, it can transport us directly into the lived experiences of human migration and drop you right into someone's story. So, you're kind of almost living it alongside them. I think sound also helps us to ground our experience and it also really helps us. And what's really important for this project is that migrations about the everyday lives, everyday settling of countless millions of people all the way around the world. It is not just about arduous journeys across borders. It's about daily life for countless millions of people all over the world. And everyone's story of migration is different. But migration is just a part of daily life, and I think that's part of what we're trying to bring to life with this project.

MG: I mean, it is one of the, to your point, one of the global issues of our time, the movement of people and how that shakes down. When you take a look at it through that perspective, how vast is this project? I mean, how many sounds, how many countries, who are the people who are contributing those sounds like? Tell me a little bit about putting this thing together.

STUART FOWKES: So the project covers 51 countries. It covers 120 sounds, and they, we've got everything. And, you know, you would, the entire spectrum of migration is effectively covered through sound in this project. So, you've got everything from, you know, stories of, you know, daily life as an immigrant in countries all over the world being told through sound. But you've got the dramatic sounds of like migrant rescues in the Mediterranean. You've got traditional ways of life, you know, So the top of the piece we were listening to nomadic Kazakh herdsmen in China. We will sing in dog sleds in Greenland. So you've got those traditional ways of life. There are migration related protests against, you know, migration laws or police brutality. We've got the sounds of diaspora communities and how different groups, you know, live in different countries and how they come together and build community in a place they're not necessarily from. You've got the sounds of, you know, riots, the sounds of people crossing borders. But I think for me, the sounds that are probably most emotional in the projects are those that are just every day. And it's the story behind the sound that brings it to life. So, for example, there are lots of sounds of traditional cookery or people picking up, you know, a traditional instrument and playing a song in order to kind of calm the worries and to kind of bring a little piece of home with them wherever they are. So, to me, it's, it's really about those, those individual stories that sit behind the sounds that really bring the magic here.

MG: Let's hear some of those sounds. This is from an ocean Viking rescue ship.

[Sounds of people cheering]

MG: So these are asylum seekers from West Africa. They've been rescued crossing the Mediterranean. Describe the scene that we're hearing.

STUART FOWKES: So this is a large group of rescuees, almost all of them, as you say, are from West Africa. They're attempting to reach Europe. They were rescued in the middle of December, about 2:00 in the morning on an overloaded boat in the middle of the Mediterranean. And this on board the ship, the Ocean Viking. This is the rescue ship. They have this period that they on the ship referred to as the golden hour. And what that means is people who have just been rescued, they get the first rest they've had in a very long time. You know, maybe the shock dies down a little bit and they realise that actually physically they are safe for the first time in a long time and they just spontaneously just celebrate having survived the journey. So they, they grab drums that are kept on board the ship, they sing, they dance, they make all of that incredible noise you are just hearing. And it's the sound of just the pure joy of being alive. And that is not something that comes across in the traditional portrayal of migration, particularly in that context in most news media, just to hear the kind of the simple joy of, you know, of being alive and having survived a crossing like that is just it's, it's a really emotional sound to hear.

MG: Having survived is kind of a key point to this. I mean, tell me a little bit about the rescue, because we have seen, again, so many stories of those who are trying to cross the Mediterranean who have not made it or who have found themselves in extraordinarily difficult and precarious circumstances. So what do we know about this rescue, in particular?

Unidentified: [Sounds of people communicating on walkie-talkies].

[Sound of someone asking a question]

STUART FOWKES: Yeah. So this, this sound. These sounds were recorded by a journalist called Frey Lindsay, who submitted them to the project. And, you know, he tells about how almost all of these rescuees have suffered, you know, potentially extensive abuse. And in the countries they came from, there were many children among them. So there were children between the ages of three and nine. There was one infant who's just weeks old. And, you know, they had, they hadn't, you know, had any food or rest for a long time. And that boat was dangerously overcrowded. They were hundreds of kilometres north of, of Libya. And this charity rescue ship, you know, rescued them and eventually disembarked them into northern Italy, where they then entered the asylum system in Italy, you know, almost like from home.

SOUNDCLIP

[Sounds of people cheering on a boat. Crew telling passengers that "You are safe."].

MG: You have audio as well of a migrant named Joseph. And he, he's part of that journey in many ways, fled Nigeria, got to Libya and then like so many eventually got on a boat that was headed to Europe.

SOUNDCLIP

JOSEPH: We passed [inaudible] just because we want better life, just because we want freedom, just because we need our kids. And our [inaudible] and our brothers to be happy. That is why we take this risky journey. It's between life and death. Only God know where we came from. The water is not safe. But we, we have to embark in this journey.

MG: We passed through hell. What do you take from that?

STUART FOWKES: I mean, Joseph's story is just, it's you know, it's an incredible story in which he describes suffering, extortion, robbery, detention, forced labour and all kinds of other abuses during his time in Libya. And, you know, you think about this, this want this, the testimony of this, of this one man. And, and you think about how many countless thousands, hundreds of thousands of other people have similar stories of making journeys like this. But one of the things that Joseph talks, you know, really passionately about is the reason why he's making the journey. You know, as a, you know, to escape hardship, as, you know, as an economic migrant and talking about the difficulties that he's living through the unbearable in the country that he's from and just really, the human side of that story. And, you know, you multiply that by, you know, by many thousands of times and, you know, it just really, I think that the sound that you're hearing, you know, of him telling his story in his own words, combined with those of the sounds of the rescue itself, of children playing with radio equipment on board the boats of the you know, the celebration, the golden hour that we just talked about, it gives you a much richer picture. And it really kind of brings home those individual stories of migration, whether there was a forced migration or whether those are kind of, you know, settled migration.

MG: You mentioned at the very beginning the polarisation around this issue. And I mean, this is something that, that you hear around the world. I mean, whether it's those who are crossing the Mediterranean to Europe. In the United States, I was just down at the Arizona-Mexico border and met people who had travelled from Egypt, from Nepal, from Rwanda, from Mexico, who were searching for a better life. And there is a huge push to turn those people away, to tighten the border, to ensure that they can't cross. And it speaks to that polarisation. I just wonder how you see the pushback to this and how you see the, the tension around this issue.

STUART FOWKES: Yeah, I mean, I think that, you know, the use of sound is around humanising some of these stories. If you, you know, it's subtle things that define the experience of migration. If you know, if you've got, you know, a chart showing annual migration or deportations, that is just, that's just a bulldozer, a figure. That's just a number that, you know, it can be very kind of crude to look at things at the level listening to sounds gives people a deeper, a richer sense of what it actually means to migrate, what it might mean to, to lose one of, you know, loved ones to another place, how it feels to escape danger or how it feels to actually feel at home in a new place for, you know, for the first time. All of these incredible subtleties and intricacies and just this this idea that migration is not just one thing, it is completely individual to every person that experiences it and goes through it, whether you're someone that's migrated yourself or whether you're someone that you know has friends or family members that you know that have migrated or even, you know, migrated and come back. It's individual for everybody. And I think it's easy to lose that and to lose the human side of it in this polarising debate that, you know, very frequently comes up through migration. You know, I think of really it's about the individuality and about the about that, that kind of the personal stories that I think really come through in this project.

MG: All right, let's listen to something else.

Unidentified: [Sounds of people playing basketball]

MG: Probably sounds familiar to a lot of people. That's a basketball game. What is significant about that recording studio?

STUART FOWKES: So this recording is a group of Filipino expats playing basketball in Dubai. So, Filipinos are something like 1 in 4 of the population in Dubai, and most of them come there to work to support families back home. Many of them eventually end up staying, you know, longer than that. And one of the most common activities that the male Filipinos in Dubai take point is basketball. So you'll find the person that submitted this recording was telling us that every public basketball court in the city is just filled with huge groups of enthusiasts every evening without fail. He always enjoys watching them kind of. He watches, watching them play and enjoying the kind of the laughter and energy of, you know, how this has become an important part of Filipino culture and something they take with them wherever they go, including, you know, whether they're, you know, at home or whether they're in a place like Dubai. And I think it's one of those things where you're listening to an activity that a group of people are passionate about and share. And whether they're sharing that, you know, in a country they are originally from or the country that they now call home is something that they take with them. And you see that time and again in this project. So, for example, there's another recording in Chinatown in New York City, where you're here in Columbus Park, this, you know, a huge group of the Chinese community that come together every single weekend to play mah-jong with one another, to play traditional Chinese musical instruments. And it's like a kind of a home away from home. And those, you know, living those traditions and sharing those activities helps to build community in a new place.

[Sounds of people drumming, clapping, and singing]

MG: We're going to keep spinning around the globe as we listen to these sounds. This is, this next recording is from Uganda.

[Drumming, clapping, and singing sounds continue]

MG: What are we hearing there?

STUART FOWKES: So this is a group of people called the Batwa people from Uganda. So for thousands of years, this group of people lived in forest called the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest in the southwest of Uganda. They were the indigenous people there. In 1992, this forest became a national park and a World Heritage site in order to protect the mountain gorillas within its boundaries. The Batwa were evicted from the park. They didn't have titles to the land. They didn't receive any compensation. Today, many of those people have been rehoused on land just outside this national park. So, this is a recordist who went along to visit a group who are living in the countryside, kind of near the park. And this is a welcome song that they, that they sang, you know, to greet the visitors as they came in. But their story is one of, of internal migration, of internal forced migration from one place that they called home to another place. So again, it's just another angle on the migration story being told through, you know, through sound again in a very, very different way. And I think, you know, another illustration of the variety, not just geographically, but also of the different forms of migration that there are.

[Cheering, drumming and singing continues]

MG: One of the neat things that you're doing with this is that there are those sorts of field recordings that the recording just of the event itself, but you also have kind of reimagined or remixed sounds with music and other things. I want to play a little bit of, of one of those. This is My Journey, My Ardas.

SOUNDCLIP

JASPAL SINGH BHOGAL: I was born in India and when I was about seven, my father took me to East Africa you know. I think, at that time it was under the British rule. East Africa means Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, and the small island of Zanzibar.

MG: Stuart, tell me about that and what we're hearing, what's going on in that mix?

STUART FOWKES: So, the second half of the Migration Sounds project is that every single one of these field recordings has been handed to an artist or a sound artist or a musician somewhere in the world, and they have created a composition based on that original recording. So, every single one of those 120 sounds has got a mirror composition where an artist somewhere has made something out of that original recording in order to present another new perspective on the idea of migration. So that particular recording, that particular composition was by an artist called Jaspal Singh Bhogal. And he is reimagining a recording that I myself made inside a Sikh temple in London. So, we were welcomed into a Sikh temple to record some of the prayers there that the, that the Sikh diaspora community in London as part of their daily lives. This sound was chosen by Jaspal as his contribution to the project. And what he's done in that mix is he's taken the prayer as a core element. But he's also sampled his elderly father's recollection of his own personal migration experien--, experience in the piece as well. So you've got this dreamlike, melodic kind of music going on there. The recollections of his elderly father, who is himself has this migration experience blended in with the sounds of the, you know, the prayers from the Sikh community in London. So, you get this, this multiple layering effect of, you know, memory, memory and migration upon migration that's been achieved through these artists getting involved. Many of the artists involved in doing that side of the project are also from a migrant background themselves, and some of them are bringing their own personal experiences and feelings about what it means to live as a migrant, you know, into the compositions and into the ways in which they've worked with these recordings. So, it's a really multi-layered project, looking at the whole concept of migration from many different angles.

[Music keeps playing]

MG: It is interesting because all of those things could stand on their own. But when you bring them together, something else comes out, right?

STUART FOWKES: Exactly. Yeah. You know, you bring, listen to the recordings on their own, gives you a new perspective on migration. But when you also have these compositions and you read the stories behind the compositions and you read the ways in which those sounds have stood out to the artists and the elements they've chosen to reflect on and respond with, then you have this great emotional response to, to the whole concept of migration, and that's the centre of, of migration sounds, this idea that we can hopefully help people to just think about migration a little bit differently through opening themselves up, not just to the sounds, but to the compositions that people have made from them as well.

SOUNDCLIP

JASPAL SINGH BHOGAL: Life was very, very difficult here. It was a big struggle to survive, but I was young. And never gave up, you know? And slowly, I built my life in this country.

MG: Even in this polarised environment, I mean, one of the ways that people will connect with migration at an elemental kind of level is through food, and the food we eat and the food we cook and the food that we share with other people. I'm gonna end with, with one of those sounds from a kitchen and a shared meal.

SOUNDCLIP

[Sounds of Natasha cooking]

NATASHA: [Inaudible] Additional dishes we have from our parents or from our best friends. [Cooking continues] Every woman have a small secret. Yes.

MARIA MARGARONIS: OK. You're going to tell me the secret?

NATASHA: Yes, of course. [Sounds of cooking] Be happy. [Sounds of people cooking, and laughing].

MARIA MARGARONIS: I felt like a master chef. [NATASHA: Yes.] And it's making beautiful sounds.

MG: So, I'm going to read the description of this. This is, these are the sounds of my Ukrainian housemate, Natasha, making borscht. Natasha is a refugee from war in Ukraine, has lived with me for almost two years now. We've become fast friends and learned a lot from each other. Not just about cooking. The percussion of chopping, the melody of bubbling, the laughter of delight. Who is Natasha and who's the woman who's telling the story?

STUART FOWKES: So the story is being told by a recordist called Maria Margaronis. She lives in London. And, you know, as you just read out there, she's describing the fact that she now has a Ukrainian housemate, a refugee from the war, who lives with her. And you know, what amazing friends they've become and the time they spend together. And it's a real reminder of also, you know as well as you've got the, I guess, the pain of separation from Natasha, from being away from home because of conflict. But she also has new friends, new experiences. Maria, as you know, has a new friend as a result. And there is this positivity in that side of daily life as a migrant. And one of the things that actually surprised me with this project is, is the prominence of cookery in some of the sounds. It's really, you know, there were, you know, 4 or 5, six different recordings of people just cooking meals in different circumstances and describing how they used that to, for example, make a soup to feel close to their parents or to, you know, to share a borscht at home with a, you know, Ukrainian housemaid. And for example, when I was recording the cooking of traditional pierogi in a Polish kitchen in London and all these kinds of things that, that cooking and food and traditional dishes are just, they're a huge part of who we all are. And wherever we travel in the world, we kind of we take those experiences with us in, you know, in what we eat as much as what we say, what we do and how we spend our time.

MG: Has doing this changed how you think about migration? I mean, I asked this in part because, as I said, this is one of the big issues of our time and we talk often about numbers and we'll talk about the millions of people who are on the move and where they might be on the move from or to and some of the politics around that. But when you are doing this work in this intimate way through the intimate medium of sound, has that changed how you think about the issue yourself?

STUART FOWKES: Yeah, I think it's, it broadens my broader my conception, I think of, of what migration is, what it means to be a migrant, what migration can mean, what it can become. You know, I always go into these projects, as you know, in as open-minded a way as possible. This is not a an overtly political project in any way. This, this is not a project that has a particular perspective on migration. This is a project that very openly said we are looking to represent the experiences of migration, whatever they might be through sound in order to just open up new ways into the conversation. I think, you know, it really successfully does that. But we didn't go out with a particular agenda and to me thinking, Wow, we've, we've put this project together. We've covered 51 countries. Not only have we managed to, you know, record those sounds of migration like, you know, dramatic rescue boats in the Mediterranean or razor wire being built to, you know, to strengthen border fences. We've also recorded these amazing moments like a family reunion 8000 miles from home, where you've got the very moment that people who hadn't seen each other for three, four, five years kind of come together again for the first time, where you've got housemates from different countries, kind of just relating to one another. To me, it's all about migration is just daily life and the breadth of it is, is astonishing. And I really hope that that's what this project can, can show people and that can just help people to, to just listen to the world a little bit differently.

MG: Migration is daily life. That's a really powerful way of thinking about it.

STUART FOWKES: Yeah, I think so. And I think that that's what I'm kind of taking away from this. And it's one of the things that sound has helped me to understand, you know, is that, if we can just help people to listen to the world a little bit differently through some of these sounds and through some of these competitions, that maybe we can as a, as we using that as a starting point, help people to think about the world a little bit differently as well.

MG: Your work is fascinating and makes us hear the world in different ways. Stuart, thanks again for speaking with us.

STUART FOWKES: Thanks for having me. Thank you very much.

MG: Stuart Fowkes is the founder of the Global Sound Project Cities and Memory. Their latest project, Migration Sounds, can be found on their website Citiesandmemory.com. Such a neat idea, and again a surprise, he says on the radio that hearing things can make you think differently [Music: Theme fading in], perhaps about that subject. That's The Current for this Thursday, the 7th of November. Q is up next on your CBC Radio One. My name is Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening to The Current. We'll see you tomorrow.

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Thursday, November 7, 2024 Full Transcript

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