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The Current Transcript for October 14, 2021

Host: Matt Galloway

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

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SOUNDCLIP

As soon as our interview was over, we were told by the crew there in China, can silo security had taken their camera cards. Ten days later, we got the cards back half. The interview had been erased.

MATT GALLOWAY: last year as the pandemic took hold, the federal government announced a plan to develop and manufacture a vaccine for COVID 19 here in Canada. It was a partnership with a Chinese company, CanSino, in 30 minutes. The Fifth Estate's Bob McEwen joins us with his investigation on why the vaccine never materialised here. Whether a company with links to the Chinese military was ever a good fit, and how tensions between Canada and China might have doomed the project before it even started. Also this morning, before it became a social media hashtag, the activist Tarana Burke had coined the phrase MeToo as a way to discuss sexual violence and harassment. It was a step she traces back to hearing the voice of Maya Angelou.

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Those kind of women that just became my North Star like I had, there's no roadmap. You just had these women who you know what happened to them and then you see them be successful. But there's no way to get from here to there. Nobody told you what to do.

MATT GALLOWAY: Tarana Burke is here in an hour with her own story of resilience and strength and why she needed to reclaim MeToo on behalf of black women like herself. We start, though, in Canada's north, in a city where water is in short supply and the current crisis may be only a hint of something larger. Good morning. I'm Matt Galloway and this is The Current.

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Iqaluit needs action from all levels of gov't to fix water crisis, says deputy mayor

Guests: Janet Pitisulaaq Brewster, Andrew Medeiros

MG: The city of Iqaluit is in a state of emergency. City staff found evidence of fuel contamination in the water supply, and that means the water is unsafe to drink even if filtered or boiled for at least 10 days. Locals have been complaining that the water smelled of gasoline. It's now a scramble to fly in enough water for a city of over 7000 people. Janet Pitsiulaaq Brewster is the deputy mayor who is on leave. She's also a candidate in the territorial elections that are coming up that you like. Good morning.

JANET PITSIULAAQ BREWSTER: Good morning, Matt, how are you?

MG: I'm well. Yesterday, you were going home to home, dropping off water. Tell me what that was like. And personally, I mean, what you were hearing from some of the families that you spoke with who can't turn on the tap and use the water that would normally be right there for them?

JANET PITSIULAAQ BREWSTER: Yeah, so just to be clear, the water is still flowing. We just have a do not consume order. So I spent I've spent the last day going to the the water booster stations where the the the the trucks full of river water are distributing water to anybody who has buckets and and jugs. And what what I found out is that there are many people in our city that that actually don't even have jugs to to carry water. So what I've been doing is I've been filling those the drugs that I have in the buckets that I have and I've been driving house to house using social media and my cell phone for people to contact me and let me know that they they need water. And so what I've been finding is that there's a huge, huge part of our population that doesn't have access to water today because there's no public transit system. So if people don't have money for cab fare or if it's too far to walk, then they can't come down and get water. There was one lady that that I stopped to help who had a a jug, a juice jug and a handful of water and what she was doing was she was walking about five metres, putting the pan down, going back and getting the jug, walking to that pan, and then she was kind of leapfrogging her water home. So, you know, some of the houses that had seven, eight, nine, 10 people in there, other households had only one person. There were people with mobility issues and everybody, everybody is just grateful that we have access to to take a tank that can bring us water closer to people.

MG: Let me talk just briefly about how you got to this place because we know that people had been smelling petroleum in the water for at least 10 days now, posting on social media, pleading for officials to take action. Why did it take the city until Tuesday to declare the state of emergency?

JANET PITSIULAAQ BREWSTER: So from what I understand, obviously the city tests our our water at different different areas within the city and in different parts of the system on a regular basis, on a daily basis, actually. And so when people started reporting that they smelled fuel the city, amped up their testing, think they didn't find any evidence of fuel or any kind of contaminant and and it took a couple of days or a few days for for the the city working with the government of Nunavut to actually find the source. And I guess what happened is that at some point, somebody from the garden opened up a sealed holding tank that is part of the system that adds chemicals to the treats, the water, the chemicals that treat the water. And so when he opened or when they opened that they smelled the fuel. And it's also been reported to me that that somebody- that when the water was off gassing, that fuel smell would go away. And then a city worker also closed, closed a bottle full full of water and left it overnight and when they opened it in the morning, they could smell the fuel. So there were a combination of things that made it difficult to find and to confirm that there may be hydrocarbons in in the water.

MG: But again, residents were posting. They were trying to fill up the bathtub to bathe their young children and were smelling something in the water. You understand the frustration that people feel like this is the frustration that's being expressed online and beyond.

JANET PITSIULAAQ BREWSTER: Most definitely, and I didn't, and in my neighbourhood, we didn't. None of us have experienced that, but definitely it has to be really, really scary, especially for parents of infants and young children. You want to, you're taking care of them and you want to know that you can bathe them safely. And let's face it, we need to be the kids on a regular basis because they, you know, just because of everything that they get into. And so if we don't have a safe way to bathe for eight thousand people to bathe, let alone drink, then yes, absolutely, people have a full right to be frustrated.

MG: The territorial government put out a statement that reads in part, the government is working closely with the city of Iqaluit to address their issues with the municipal water supply and ensure residents have ongoing access to clean drinking water. This isn't a new issue. The city has been in a water crisis for about five years now. What's the root cause of this? What's going on behind the scenes?

JANET PITSIULAAQ BREWSTER: So there are a combination of things, so we need about $100 million to address the expansion of the water reservoir and to replace that the ageing and crumbling piping systems. We're a mixture of underground piping systems as well as tanks and water tanks and sewage tanks in some homes. And so that crumbling infrastructure, it's kind of a domino effect where we're seeing as every year passes, we're seeing more and more sections of our sewage and water system breaking down. And so we also have the issue of our water reservoirs too small to meet our needs.

MG: And to build more housing in the city itself.

JANET PITSIULAAQ BREWSTER: So we don't have enough water to expand to have more people living in the city. And then we're in a housing crisis. We need at least 14 hundred new houses in order to provide housing for everybody who needs it in a heartbeat. But we can't build new housing because we can't create new lots because we can't add infrastructure to our crumbling infrastructure because the old infrastructure. Doesn't have the capacity to perform if we add new sections. So what we need is to deal with the crumbling infrastructure. As I said, it's at least $100 million and then we need to expand the infrastructure so that we can actually build new homes.

MG: So before I let you go, I mean, where will that funding come from? This is an immediate crisis, but to your point, this is a much larger issue as well. There is the territorial government and you're running for a position in the territorial government. There's also the federal government. So where who should step up to help solve the big crisis here?

JANET PITSIULAAQ BREWSTER: So we don't know what the costs are going to be to deal with the current crisis, the emergency. But what we know is we know we need that $100 million. And it has to come from both the territorial government as well as the federal government. And of course, the city is is able to pay part of that as well. And it has that, these repairs budgeted. But we need all levels of government to come together to solve this crisis. And we need people also to understand that a large part of our population in this country, it is indigenous attenuates and it's the Inuit that live here that are most at risk at suffering due to this water crisis, because our baseline health status and levels of poverty. So we need people to act and we need people to act now.

MG: I wish you and your community the best of luck, Janet Pitsiulaaq. It's good to speak with you. Thank you very much.

JANET PITSIULAAQ BREWSTER: Thank you. Matt, have a great day

MG: And you take care. Pitisiulaaq. Is Iqaluit deputy mayor on leave and an MLA candidate. As we were talking about, even before this current crisis, the city was at an extreme risk of a water shortage, something that my next guest has been warning about for years. Andrew Medeiros is a freshwater ecologist and an assistant professor at Dalhousie University School for Resource and Environmental Studies. Andrew, good morning to you.

ANDREW MEDEIROS: Good morning.

MG: Officials are trying to figure out what's happened here, and tests have been sent south to determine what's going on in the water. What are the questions as somebody who's looked at this, what are the questions that you have?

ANDREW MEDEIROS: You know, there's a lot of systemic problems in Nunavut as a whole. Iqaluit, especially as your previous guest mentioned, these are issues that are due to a mixture of infrastructure, but also capacity of the city, the territory government and the locals, local officials that are in charge of the water supply. You know, there are immediate questions, obviously, with the current incident. But then there are also questions on, you know, these kinds of issues with respect to water are not new. They are going to become more common as infrastructure continues to age. And it's not just Iqaluit. Many of the other communities are under boil water advisories consistently. So, you know, my questions would be why and why it took so long? Why did it take more than a week for the officials to believe that there wasn't a problem beyond just the regular types of issues with chlorination of water? Why is it that the initial tests didn't show any kind of sources of contamination? Are that are the tests actually even looking for hydrocarbons? You know, standard water tests can vary in terms of what parameters they're looking for. And, you know, if there are testing every single day, then depending on the lab and the availability of the lab to actually run the tests, it's normal to have a delay between the samples and the lab, but you also have a delay with respect to getting the samples to the lab, even though they're done in Ottawa at Callaway has one flight a day. If that and so there are a lot of chain of command kind of issues that I would personally like to see looked at to have a better plan in place to address concerns over over water and other issues. But water being that it is consistently an issue is something that you really want to make sure that you've got that kind of response that is a bit faster than 10 days.

MG: What is it that makes this city so vulnerable when it comes to water issues we heard earlier, but. The ageing infrastructure, but beyond that?

ANDREW MEDEIROS: Well, I mean, it's not just Iqaluit, it's any kind of remote community in in the North. Provincially or territorially, these kinds of issues are common in indigenous communities throughout Canada because they rely on a single source of water. In this case, it's Lake Geraldine, as I mentioned to my colleagues, it's i the one thing that I guess is they're lucky about is that they have a flowing river right now. And it's not February in that the community can retrieve a clean source of fresh water within a reasonable distance of of most people not living there. I mean, there's obviously going to be challenge, which people have addressed that you have to be able to get to that location and retrieve water, but that is something that's available. Other communities do not have the same kind of resource right next to the community and in the winter, that is a serious problem.

MG: You've also warned, though, that Lake Geraldine could not be an option, perhaps in future that he could actually run out of water from the lake. How close is that to happening?

ANDREW MEDEIROS: Well, as we reported in 2015 that Lake Geraldine would be an insufficient source of water within five years of that time. In 2018, they declared a water emergency. It's a weekend of winter problem with Lake Geraldine. You only have so much water in your reservoir, which is going to be covered by ice in the winter in Iqaluit. And if demand exceeds whatever is in supply in that reservoir, you will run out. And it wasn't difficult to see that the demand for the end of winter supply in Iqaluit was exceeding the supply. Now there are a lot of factors that will basically show whether or not that's going to happen in any particular year. I mean, it's dependent on how much ice when it melts off, when it when it freezes, how much water is in the reservoir, when it freezes. There's a lot of factors. But those are all issues of water quantity and these kinds of water quantity issues are going to happen. Whenever you have a single source of water that is of a limited supply, it doesn't allow for growth, but it also doesn't allow for demand if your population or other factors warrant that.

MG: So what would that mean for a city of six, seven, 8000 people if the lake were to run dry?

ANDREW MEDEIROS: I mean, Iqaluit has run out of water in the past or have been under severe water restrictions, many communities. I mean, you never run out of water, especially at a household level, when you have tanked water, like many communities do. I mean, some residents in Iqaluit, do you have one tank of water, so you have to kind of manage that at the household level. Well, it's important for the city to also manage that at the utility level or at the piped water system. Level of redundancy in the system is something that we are privileged with in southern communities. And you can then go to the store and you can buy bottled water and you can have all kinds of other sources of water available to you. We don't have that in remote communities in Guinea, but in the stores, they sell water. But it's fifty something dollars for a 24 pack of bottled water, which is a particularly unreasonable price for a family to have to rely on.

MG: So what has to be done then? I mean, the deputy mayor talked about $100 million to address the basic infrastructure needs, but this is larger than this. I mean, in the context of boil water advisories that are affecting First Nations communities across the country and the vulnerability of the North. As you say in particular, what has to happen now to address this?

ANDREW MEDEIROS: There needs to be a comprehensive water strategy for many. Many provinces and territories do have a particularly comprehensive freshwater strategy involved in terms of protection of water, but also a sustainable supply of water. You have a much variable, much more variable climate now than you had in the past, and that can really have implications on both water quantity and quality. Redundancy in the system is something that I've always said it's really particularly a better option than just expansion of a single source. They're reliant on these Sylvia Grinnell River in Iqaluit right now for their fresh water supply. The water trucks for the city are fighting with residents in terms of even gaining access to the river at the moment. And that speaks to the fact that in many societies throughout all of recorded time, there's been a preference for flowing water, river water rather than stagnant water. And so many residents prefer river water on a daily basis regardless. And so if communities have rivers nearby, alternative supply source you know, a pumping station with simple chlorination is a really great way to build redundancy into your system. So for Iqaluit, I am surprised that they hadn't already looked at that. I mean, they're filling up the trucks right now and doing some basic chlorination, but it wasn't really something that had infrastructure that I thought would have been put in by now.

MG: We just have a few seconds left. I mean, if the money is not spent, how much of an existential threat is this to communities like account of it and other communities in the north?

ANDREW MEDEIROS: And water security is a significant issue in a variable climate future, and it's going to be highlighted like many things in the Arctic. You know, they are the canary in the coal mine for many issues with respect to environmental change, and this is just one of them. And this is, water issues are going to be more prominent as as as time progresses. This is not going to be a one off kind of situation, unfortunately.

MG: Andrew, good to speak with you. Thank you very much.

ANDREW MEDEIROS: And thank you.

MG: Andrew Medeiros is a freshwater ecologist assistant professor at Dalhousie University School for Resource and Environmental Studies. You're CBC News is up next. And then.

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About $200 million to develop and produce a made in Canada vaccine. We've got the contract. It was between the National Research Council of Canada and a company called CanSino Biologics based in China.

MG: That was the beginning of the saga of the Made in Canada vaccine that never was. The Fifth Estate's Bob McKeown is here in six minutes to tell us what happened next and what it all has to do with the Chinese military. My name is Matt Galloway. You're listening to The Current on CBC Radio One. Stay with us.

CBC Fifth Estate investigates Canada’s failed vaccine deal with China

Guest: Bob McKeown

MG: Good morning, I'm Matt Galloway. You're listening to The Current.

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MG: Still to come, Tarana Burke's name will be forever tied to two words. Me too. She was the first person to take up that phrase that eventually started a movement bringing sexual abuse and harassment out of the shadows and into the spotlight. But her story is much more than two words, and she'll be here in just under 30 minutes to talk all about it. But first, a vaccine that was supposed to be manufactured in Canada, but never was.

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MG: Soon after the pandemic was officially declared last March, the federal government had a plan to make vaccines here on Canadian soil.

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Today I can announce that we are providing $192 million to directly support vaccine development and production in Canada. We're investing in a long term solution to COVID 19 right here at home.

MG: That investment included a plan to upgrade a federal manufacturing lab. The government signed a deal with a Chinese company to produce a vaccine there, but a year and a half later, Canada hasn't produced a single dose of that vaccine. In their latest investigation, the Fifth Estate's Bob McKeown looks at why some experts say Canada should have never partnered with China to begin with. Bob, good morning.

BOB MCKEOWN: Good morning, Matt.

What was the plan that the prime minister announced in March of 2020?

BOB MCKEOWN: Well, remember this was March 23rd, 2020, so it was just 12 days after the World Health Organisation officially announced the worldwide pandemic. And at the time, it seemed to make sense in a way that a lot of the things we've found out since do not. About $200 million to develop and produce a made in Canada vaccine. At the time, no one knew about COVID vaccines. We didn't know which ones would appear. We didn't know which ones would work, which ones wouldn't. We didn't know if the borders would remain open and south of the border. Donald Trump was threatening to corner the market on all things COVID from PPE to vaccines.

MG: So making something here made sense.

BOB MCKEOWN: Having a vaccine under Canadian control made perfect sense.

MG: What was the agreement with CanSino?

BOB MCKEOWN: Well, at the time, we didn't know the name of the partner. We've got the contract. It was between the National Research Council of Canada, Canada's research scientific research body and a company called CanSino Biologics based in China. Now we're talking about what was referred to as a domestic, Canadian domestic vaccine. Yet our partner is a Chinese company now. Actually, CanSino has it has a lot of a Canadian pedigree. The name itself, the Cannes stands for Canada. Sino for China. A lot of the people were Canadian or Chinese expatriates who were trained in Canada, who have families in Canada, who are Canadian citizens, and who went back to China because they thought the time was right to found a vaccine company. And it turns out that they were right. But in in the contract between the NRC and CanSino, it says this was to fast track vaccine for emergency pandemic use. Again, that makes sense. But there's another clause which may have seemed innocuous at the time, but is telling now. That clause says the agreement had been authorised by the Beijing Institute of Technology. Now we know now that the Beijing Institute of Technology is the scientific research arm of the People's Liberation Army.

MG: The Chinese Army.

BOB MCKEOWN: The Chinese military. So for better or worse, it is clear that when they got into this contract, the government of Canada knew it was getting into business with the Chinese military.

MG: Why would the Canadian government choose to partner with a company that has links to the Chinese military?

BOB MCKEOWN: That's a very good question, especially under the circumstances at the time. There were red flags and warnings galore leading up to that point. A few years earlier, the Harper government had accused Chinese agents of hacking into the NRC computer system, put it down for over a year, might have cost a hundred million dollars. Literally at the NRC, they were using paper and pen at various points. So these warnings had been there. CSIS had directly addressed the Canadian biopharma industry, telling them not to go into joint ventures with Chinese biomedical companies, warning about what they called state sponsored espionage targeting Canada. And and they actually told people to be alert for quote spies in the lab coats. But at that time again, we didn't know who the government was doing business with, and we wouldn't for some time.

MG: But the context, I mean, there was, you know, a worsening relationship. I think it's fair to say between Canada and China at that moment.

BOB MCKEOWN: Yes, there's no question. I think it's fair to say that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau wanted to address that and would have liked to carry the torch his father had handed to him forward into the 21st century, but that has not happened.

MG: So what was supposed to happen in this arrangement?

BOB MCKEOWN: Well, basically it was split into two functions. CanSino was responsible for the formula. And in fact, when the back of the pandemic was announced, they were on the verge within a couple of days of human trials for a COVID 19 vaccine. They have been. In the vaccine business for a while, and in fact, some years before they had bought what is called the NRC cell line, the National Research Council cell line, which is a building block for vaccines everywhere around the world and CanSino, had been using it for years. They were then using it for a COVID 19 vaccine, which was in the stages where it was amongst the fastest in the world.

MG: And again, these are the early days of vaccine development.

BOB MCKEOWN: Yeah, but CanSino, as vaccine was, was an up and comer under those circumstances. So the idea was that CanSino would provide the formula and the NRC presumably would be the manufacturing agent would do the mass production at their facility, Royal Mount in Montreal.

MG: And again, you've hinted at this, but why was it important that Canada, there are other vaccines that are being developed around the world? But why was it important that Canada produce its own vaccine?

BOB MCKEOWN: Yeah, I think just really because of our relationship with the United States and the administration in the U.S. at that point, I think for reasons both substantial and apparent, this is something the Justin Trudeau wanted to do.

MG: What actually happened with this vaccine?

BOB MCKEOWN: Well, in May 2020, the Department of National Health approved human trials for the CanSino vaccine in Canada. And those trials would be overseen by Scott Halperin at Dalhousie University, world renowned vaccinologist who does testing for many, many vaccines. That would require the vaccine to be sent from Tianjin, where the CanSino Biologics plant is, to Toronto, then passed on, it was going to be sent by a Canadian Forces jet on to Halifax. The vaccine got to the airport in Beijing, was was kept in a climate controlled facility and then it waited and it waited. The CanSino said that they had been told by the Chinese government that there were customs issues. Paperwork, perhaps. The shipment remained there. Finally was sent back to CanSino in Tianjin and ultimately the deal between Canada and Ken Sino Woods would collapse.

MG: What do we know about why that happened, why this all fell apart?

BOB MCKEOWN: Well, you mentioned political tensions that were rising between Canada and the U.S. Contemporaneous to all of this. Meng Wanzhou, the CFO of Weiwei, was arrested in Vancouver and was undergoing an extradition procedure there. And the two, Michael Kovrig and Spavor were in arbitrary detention. So the tensions between Canada and China were rising as the vaccine was being kept in in that climate controlled facility at Beijing Airport. So, you know, coming to that conclusion is not very difficult.

MG: I'm speaking with Bob McKeown. He's a host with the CBC's The Fifth Estate. I want to bring somebody else into the conversation. You mentioned Scott Halperin. He's director of the Canadian Centre for Vaccinology at Dalhousie University in Halifax. Scott Halperin, good morning to you.

SCOTT HALPERIN: Good morning.

MG: How did you become involved in this partnership between CanSino and the National Research Council?

SCOTT HALPERIN: Well, our centre does early phase trials with all sorts of manufacturers for all sorts of vaccines, and we're also part of the Canadian Immunisation Research Network, which is a network with the Public Health Agency of Canada set up to have Canada have capability to do rapid clinical trials in the times of outbreaks initially for the H1N1 pandemic in 2009. But also we did a phase one study in early phase study for the Ebola vaccine that use Canada's technology as well. So we would be a natural place since we're one of, you know, two or three sites across Canada that that focus on early phase studies for vaccines.

MG: As a vaccinologist, what would your role be in this partnership?

SCOTT HALPERIN: My role would be to, in collaboration with the other partners, write the protocol, assist with the submission to Health Canada and ultimately to oversee the clinical trial that would enrol participants receiving the new vaccine.

MG: When this vaccine was on the horizon, what to you made CanSino a good company to partner with, as this pandemic is, is really just starting to unfold?

SCOTT HALPERIN: Well, CanSino was one of, you know, within May, they were the first to get their vaccines into clinical trials. I think Pfizer or Moderna started their clinical trial and CanSino started the next day, so they were one of the early companies off the mark with the technology. And as was mentioned, nobody knew what vaccine was going to succeed, and we knew that there were a number of companies, small companies in Canada that were also starting programmes and had been working on programmes. But they were much further behind in terms of getting something into a clinical trial. So partnering with the first company available that was willing to do a study in Canada and manufacture in Canada was a way of making sure that we can assure our Canadian supply of a vaccine.

MG: What did you know about the links between CanSino and the Beijing Institute, which is, as Bob McEwen is suggesting a part of the military research arm of the People's Liberation Army of China?

SCOTT HALPERIN: I was aware that any of the vaccine technology that they were doing was a partnership between that institute and CanSino. And so and that was very much up front. They were listed on as one of the manufacturers or developers of that vaccine in their submission to us.

MG: Why did it make sense to you to to partner with a company that has direct ties to the Chinese military?

SCOTT HALPERIN: Our interest was in developing the vaccine. You know, so and getting a vaccine available to Canadians. The, you know, the pedigree of where that, you know, one of the partners, you know, having those links, certainly in multiple countries, the military has links with the scientific research community as for example, with Ebola, the partner was Walter Reed. And so, you know, military gets involved in multiple countries for research for vaccines because obviously they have an interest of keeping their troops free of disease. So it's not unusual for the military to be involved in this type of research.

MG: Well, you mentioned Walter Reed that's associated with the U.S. armed forces, the U.S. military.

SCOTT HALPERIN: That's right. That's right. It's not unusual

MG: at this time, though. I mean, Bob McKeownn had hinted that this I mean, there were these red flags. There were warning signs around pandemic related espionage from China. CSIS was warning about this. There were other concerns as well. Did that at all raise alarm bells with you?

SCOTT HALPERIN: I mean, we were certainly aware of that, and I have no doubt that that is and was occurring. But in this case, China was sending their technology to us. We weren't sending our technology to them. We were going to be controlling the data and managing the data on behalf of them. So if anything, they would be more concerned that they wouldn't be able to get a hold of their data because I figured it was going to be managed in Canada. So the you know, in the specifics of this collaboration, we're quite different in that we were getting the technology from China as opposed to China, getting the technology from us.

MG: When did you realise that you weren't going to get the technology that the vaccine that was waiting in the climate controlled box at the airport was not going to be shipped to Canada?

SCOTT HALPERIN: Well, at the time went on, and you know, as you mentioned, as the vaccine did not get here and then was sent back to the company. Well, they continue to try to complete paperwork that they were told. We certainly were suspicious that maybe it was being linked to geopolitics. We were assured, you know, a lot of enquiries were made and we were assured that no everybody said that that was not happening. But as has became more and more apparent despite those assurances and the vaccine wasn't coming and we finally realised that this was not happening when the vaccine was shipped to another country. So up until that point, no vaccine had left China. But once it was shipped to another country in order to do a clinical trial and the second time in a different country, then we said, all this is not paperwork in terms of export because they were able to export it to another country. This has got specific to Canada. And our suspicions was that this was probably was linked to politics.

MG: How much of that had do you think was linked to the political tensions, whether it was the detention of Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor or what a lot of people believe is the directly related extradition hearings around Meng Wanzhou?

SCOTT HALPERIN: My personal belief is that it was indeed linked to that event, and just I have no other confirmation other than the timing, though it seems to me too coincidental and we know that there are constant denials of anything being linked. But not just with the vaccine, with the Michaels as well. You know, that was their release wasn't linked to it either. So we're told, right?

MG: Have you ever received the vaccine from CanSino?

SCOTT HALPERIN: No, no vaccine was able to be shipped to Canada, but it became irrelevant because, you know, the purpose was to do a phase one study and things were moving along and that the actual studies that were done elsewhere were already up to phase two and phase three study. So we continue to be involved with CanSino from our centre and have done the phase three study with them. It just wasn't done in Canada, but that the vaccine was clinical. Trial was done in five other countries around the world and was shown to be an effective vaccine in those phase three efficacy studies. And the vaccine is now being used in 10 countries, at least 10 countries around the world.

MG: There are political actors here, members of Parliament, who have said that this episode put Canada back in terms of trying to develop our own vaccine. How far back do you think that put Canada?

SCOTT HALPERIN: I would estimate it put Canada back zero days. Zero.

MG: Why would you why would you say that given the fact that this was the partnership with a company that never ended up sending us the vaccine?

SCOTT HALPERIN: Because there was no company at that point that could have- a partnership could have been made with that would have sent it sooner. So when that deal ultimately fell through, that was not, we were not just working with that company, we were working with multiple other companies in Canada, which we nothing got delayed in terms of our studies with them because they weren't ready yet to be in clinical trials. Once they were ready, we've done those clinical trials with those companies and those were all technology, Canadian technologies that the Canadian government supported. In terms of the facility itself in the manufacturing when that deal fell through, Canada made a agreement to manufacture the Novavax vaccine in Canada. The Novavax vaccine, we're talking about a year and a half ago, we knew which vaccines were going to be successful and how quickly they would be ready to be manufactured. The Novavax vaccine has gone through as efficacy studies, but it still hasn't been approved. So there was no partner, and because the only other vaccines were that far along at that time were Pfizer and Moderna, and they weren't looking to partner with someone to manufacture the vaccine in their country. They had their manufacturing facilities all arranged, and they were looking for additional partners. So well, it's too bad that it failed. What we lost, we didn't lose time. We just lost getting a vaccine earlier, but there was no other partner to get it earlier by then.

MG: I mean, from your perspective as somebody that I mean, this is the work that you do. How important is it that we have domestic vaccine manufacturing capability in this country?

SCOTT HALPERIN: Absolutely important, and not just manufacturing, but the whole process from the beginning, from the basic research right to the very mundane things where they're called fill and finish putting that putting the vaccine into vials. We do not have sufficient facilities, and the government has announced a bio manufacturing strategy and is putting a lot of money into it. So I think they've learnt the lesson and hopefully that lessons phase learnt because oftentimes we forget things once the pandemic goes beyond and it goes into the past and things start getting cut. But it seems like we have learnt that lesson and there is a strategy moving forward, but it is absolutely essential. Well, we talked about, you know, vaccines, you know, China not shipping it to Canada, and the concerns were that under Trump that the U.S. wouldn't ship vaccines to Canada. The Canadian U.S. border has closed in the past with some influenza pandemics in the past, and it just wasn't Trump. It was the vice president's that one things has a lot better reputations in the U.S. so borders during emergencies, borders get very tight. So we need our own capacity here. It's a global market, but we need capacity here to contribute to that growth market, it's essential.

MG: Scott. It's great to talk to you about this. Thank you very much.

SCOTT HALPERIN: My pleasure. Good talk to you.

MG: Scott Halperin is director of the Canadian Centre for Vaccinology at Dalhousie University in Halifax. Bob McKeownn of the Fifth Estate is still with me. We were just talking about that political climate between Canada and China at the time that this was all unfolding. What do we know about how, what sort of role this played?

BOB MCKEOWN: Well, Scott Halperin comes to the conclusion knowing this subject as well as he does and what happened here, as well as he does that that is likely then. I'm with Scott. I'll give you a couple of examples. We have tried. It's a very sensitive topic in Canadian government circles. We've tried for months now to speak with the prime minister, ministers of innovation and industry to talk to the people in power at the National Research Council of Canada. None would agree to appear on camera. We interviewed the CEO of Consignor from his office in in Tianjin. We spoke to him about his relationship with the military. We spoke to him about why the vaccine never, never, never got delivered. He says he doesn't really know, but he's sure it wasn't political. Well, as soon as our interview was over, we were told by the crew there in China that CanSino security had taken their their camera cards, the digital cards on which our material, our interview had been recorded. They promised they'd give it back eventually. Ten days later, we got the cards back, but virtually half of the material, half the interview had been erased. My there are no coincidences, Sense tells me. Yes, this is a big, big deal.

MG: Sensitive for many different governments, clearly.

BOB MCKEOWN: Yes, exactly.

MG: In the meantime, as we said to Scott, I mean, Canada is still not producing a COVID vaccine, what through your research, what have you learnt about plans to change that? He talked a bit about Novavax and the work that is down the road in terms of producing that vaccine.

BOB MCKEOWN: There over the course of this story, Matt. A year ago, the prime minister was saying, as of today, the fall of 2021, we would be at the Royal Mount Nancy facility producing vaccine. They have barely finished construction on that facility. And not long ago, Justin Trudeau made a statement in which he said We used to be able to make vaccine in this country. We I'm paraphrasing. We can't do it anymore. We don't have the capacity to do it, which, given the very distinguished history of vaccines in this country, is a sad statement.

MG: Bob, good to see you. Thank you very much.

BOB MCKEOWN: Thanks, Matt.

MG: Bob McKeown is a host with the Fifth Estate. For more on this investigation. You can tune in to the Fifth Estate tonight on CBC Television at nine p.m. Well, coming up after your regional update.

SOUNDCLIP

In the last four years, I've only been able to tell my story or talk about how MeToo came to fruition in sort of soundbites. I thought it was important to take a step back and tell the whole story.

MG: Tarana Burke founded the MeToo movement back in 2006, a full decade before that phrase went viral on the internet. Now she is setting the record straight and telling her own story from start to finish. My conversation with Tarana Burke coming up in 90 seconds. My name is Matt Galloway. You're listening to The Current.

Tarana Burke couldn't help a young victim of abuse. It inspired her to start the Me Too movement

Guest: Tarana Burke

MG: Hi, I'm Matt Galloway. You're listening to the current. MeToo is a phrase you might have started to hear back when allegations against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein became public in 2017. Women use the hashtag MeToo to publicly share their experiences with rape, sexual abuse and harassment. But that was not the beginning of the movement. Tarana Burke had used that phrase for years. Tarana Burke is an activist who worked with sexual assault and rape survivors in Philadelphia. And when that hashtag went viral, it became bigger than she had ever imagined or intended. She is finally telling her own story in a new memoir. It's called Unbound. Tarana Burke. Good morning!

TARANA BURKE: Good morning.

MG: Thank you for being here.

TARANA BURKE: Thank you for having me.

MG: This is a story that you say in your own words. You kept in a dark place of shame. Why did you want to tell the story now?

TARANA BURKE: Well, you know, I've been. It's been four years, actually, this Friday will make four years since me two went viral and I was sort of thrust into the spotlight almost immediately. And in that in the last four years, I've only been able to tell my story or talk about how MeToo came to fruition in sort of soundbites and short interviews and in articles and things like that. And that's all people really have the space for. I have had this space for and so because of that, it's been misconstrued, not understood, and it's been taken in all kinds of different directions. And that is led us to some problems and led to some real challenges in trying to grow the movement. And I thought it was important to take a step back and tell the whole story.

TARANA BURKE: I want to talk about that moment. And as you say, some of the trouble that came following that moment and a little bit. This is a book that includes many of your own experiences. And so if it's OK, I want to ask you about some of those experiences.

TARANA BURKE: Sure.

MG: The first one happens when you're seven years old and an older boy from your neighbourhood rapes you. How difficult is it to go back over that experience and to write about it now?

TARANA BURKE: Well, it was incredibly, incredibly difficult, it's one of the worst thing that ever happened in my life, but I thought it was important to share for a lot of reasons. One, because, well, one child sexual abuse got lost when MeToo went viral because of the largeness of the Weinstein case and the women who came forward talking about what happened to them. People solely focussed on like sexual harassment in the workplace and adult women who were harassed. A lot of the women who came forward, a lot of the people who came forward, not just women who said MeToo, were talking about being abused as children. Were talking about being raped on college campuses. Were talking about the whole spectrum of sexual violence. And indeed, the work that I started doing when I started the MeToo movement was with young people. And so I really wanted to highlight the real origins of this started with a different kind of abuse and started with my story.

MG: You had another experience at age nine of being molested, and in both cases, you try to figure out what to do afterwards. Whether you tell somebody whether you, in their process of telling somebody what you say, what went into into those decisions? I mean, how did you how did you process that at the time?

TARANA BURKE: Well, you have to remember I was a child, right? And I really wanted to go back and tell the story from the perspective of a child what I was thinking as a seven year old, as a nine year old, a 12 year old. I wasn't just thinking about myself as a seven year old. I was thinking about my family. I was thinking about my father. I was thinking about my community. A lot of times when we hear about sexual violence is painted in one way and one dimensional right. So we hear about people who don't come forward because they don't think people will believe them. I had a different story. I didn't come forward because I thought everybody would believe me. I came from a very tight knit family. I felt very loved as a child. I felt very supported and protected as a child. So much so that I thought if I come forward and tell my father and my mother that somebody hurt me, everything that I have heard up to this point has told me that my family will go into action and will move swiftly to protect me, meaning that my father might kill this person. That's what I've been told, right? If somebody bothers you, tell me I will seek retribution for you. I will seek vengeance for you. And so I don't want my father to do that and want my father to go to jail. And I thought that I'd done something wrong, I thought I was a bad girl, and I don't want my father to pay the price for my bad behaviour. So I didn't tell.

MG: You mentioned your father. Can I ask you about your mother? You say that your mother was the straight shooter that you knew that she was tough as well. Tell me about your mother.

TARANA BURKE: She was my mother was, you know, my father was my stepfather. I call on my father, but because he was the father figure in my life, it was my mother's boyfriend who raised me from three years old. But my mother was my provider, and she was focussed on making sure I had a good life. She was focussed on making sure I was provided for. I had a good education. You know, she was fine and she was. She was loving and she made sure I was well read. She made sure I was polite. I was a good person like that was really important to her. And so I had a lot of rules and I know she did it to support me and I know she did it to make sure I had a good life. But it was because of those rules that I felt that I had done something wrong, that I was a bad girl when when I was the one who was really the victim.

MG: He mentioned education, I mean, when we learn from different people at different times, we learn from family, we learn from our teachers and we learn from the people that our teachers introduce us to.

TARANA BURKE: Yeah, my mother, my mother was a huge reader and my house was filled with albums and books. And so I could read. The people don't believe this, but I could read by three or four years old. I was the kid who did, you know, book reports in the summertime. She, my mother, my mother, was so dedicated to making sure I had a better life that she would get her income tax in January and would pay down to put me in these special summer camps. You know, I was going to camp with these kids who- she just wanted me to be around kids who came from - I don't know what else making me emotional, sorry - My mother sacrificed a lot for me, but she wanted to make sure I had everything, and it didn't show up a lot of times as she wasn't affectionate in the way that, you know, traditionally a lot of moms are but she just worked hard and sacrificed to make sure I had the things that she didn't have.

MG: I want to play something, and this is not something that your mother interjected to, but it's no surprise given how you just described the household that you grew up in surrounded by books, that it's something that that you twig to. That's something that turned your head. Take a listen to this.

SOUNDCLIP

Many people wonder where my secret lies. I'm not cute or built to suit a fashion model size. When I tried to show them, they think I'm telling lies. I say it's in the reach of my arms, the span of my hips, the stride of my step, the curl of my lips. I'm a woman.

MG: Tarana Burke. That is Maya Angelou. Tell me a little bit about that poem. That poem is introduced to you by a high school English teacher. What?

TARANA BURKE: No, he didn't introduce it to me. I knew it before the. It was the first time I heard it. I heard her say it.

MG: It was played to it by a high school English teacher. What did it mean to you?

TARANA BURKE: It was just so Maya Angelou. I know why the Caged Bird Sings, I read because my mom had introduced it to me, though I was one of my mother's books and I just, I just loved her because she was the first person who I read that had experienced what I experienced, she had been molested as a child. She had been raped as a child. And I never I never read anything or knew anybody who had that same experience. And I was just endeared to her. And but I had never heard her, her voice until high school. I never heard a black woman, to be quite frank, speak like that. Everything about her just seemed so regal, and she just seemed so joyous, like she had figured out how to be outwardly. Good for the world, for lack of a better what better way to put it. You know what I mean, like she was, you know, Dr. Maya Angelou or whatever, she just figured it out. And that's what I wanted to do, I wanted to like. Be good for the world. But secretly keep my secrets inside. But when I was listening to her voice in real life. She didn't seem like she was lying. She seemed like she was, she really meant that. She really was a phenomenal woman and she really believed it. So it just confused me like. Well, if you're not faking it, how did you get here? But there was also no way for me to act like her as a teenager. You know what I mean? Like, I couldn't walk around being like my antelope, but I just wanted the next best thing was like Oprah, you know, you know, just, just those women. Those kind of women just became a north star. There was just like- there's no outlet, there's no. There's no roadmap. You just had these women who you know what happens to them and then you see them be successful. But there's no way to get from here to there. Nobody told you what to do. You know, when I started doing this work, I was trying to figure out, how do you get there? How do you, how does this body? I'm one person, how do I get from here to there? And I was slowly trying to figure that out for myself. And while I was trying to figure that out, I was working with all these little black girls in Alabama. This is the Dallas County, and Alabama is one of the poorest in the country. It still is. And I'm looking at these children and nobody was helping them and they were, they were not just experience in sexual violence, they were experience and all kind of violence in their lives political violence, educational violence, gun violence in their community, sexual violence in their homes. And. Nobody was speaking healing into their lives. What's the roadmap that they have to get from here to there?

MG: Let me ask, let me ask you about a couple of those people that you worked with. One is her name is Heaven. You write about her in the book. Tell me a little bit about her.

TARANA BURKE: Heaven's an example, she's a prime example of what I'm talking about. She's a little girl. She was maybe 12, 13, the oldest who came to my camp. I used to run a summer camp and we just bonded because she kind of reminded me of me. She was feisty and, you know...

MG: Bit of trouble?

TARANA BURKE: Yeah, she was a lot of trouble, but she was smart, you know, and probably nobody ever told her that she was smart at that smart mouth was really just because nobody directed that intelligence entered into something. Anyway, eventually, because we were close, she ended up telling me confiding in me that she had been sexually abused by her mother's boyfriend. And I was very young, 22 or 23 at the time when she told me and I just couldn't handle it. And. I sent her away, regrettably. It was just, it was a turning point for me. Because disappointing her and I know, you know, you know, as an adult, when you've disappointed a child, that feeling of disciplining a child is so devastating. I didn't have my shit together to be quite frank enough to be able to say to her, Me too.

MG: How did that shape the work that you did in your following because you think about her all the time?

TARANA BURKE: Well, what it did was is what I had to say to myself in that moment, just thinking about. I said I know that this is the work I'm going to do. Meaning I want to work with black girls like her. This is going to keep happening. If I don't do something about my own stuff, if I don't get serious about my own work, about fixing or what's broken or trying to fix what's broken, this is going to keep happening.

MG: Let me ask you about one of the other young women that you worked with. Her name was Diamond.

TARANA BURKE: Diamond. Yeah, she's still in my life. Yeah. Thank you for asking for her because every interview people ask about Heaven, who I never saw again. But Diamond is still in my life. She still lives in Alabama. And the difference between Heaven and Diamond is that Diamond came along when I was in the work and I was committed to, I had started doing the work. We had the organisation. I had some resources and I was already on the path. And so I could keep coming back to her and I could keep pouring into her. But she was another turning point for me too, because I knew that this had to be bigger than me. You know, I was trying to do this kind of one off, not one off, but like one at a time kind of thing like, Oh, come on, let me take you to my house, you know? Well, come on, I was like, No, that wasn't. If you realise that story around Diamond wasn't really about sexual violence. I was running a leadership programme. But that's what my point in that story is that it kept rearing its head. It just kept rearing its head. The fact that these girls were in sexual violence was so pervasive, kept coming up, kept coming up, and I'm like, No, you have to stop and get focussed on this thing. And it's not that they need leadership development, they need healing. I'm not saying that sexual violence is the root of all problems for all black girls. I'm saying that for me, that kept coming to me and it kept being, I kept finding these young people whose lives were disrupted by sexual violence. And it is indeed very pervasive and a lot of the lives of young girls, and in this community, it was very pervasive. And because my life had been touched by it, I was uniquely situated to respond to it. And so I just had to stop ignoring this assignment.

MG: You picked up a piece of paper and you wrote a phrase, what was the phrase?

TARANA BURKE: Me too.

MG: And in doing that, what power did that have?

TARANA BURKE: Well, first, it was free for me, right? I was really afraid to confront my own story. I was really afraid to confront the reality of what happened to me and not just the reality of what happened to me, but how many times it had happened to me. The most important person for you to tell your story to is yourselves, first and foremost. And I had not done that. I was all or I get these every day, I get an email from a person who says I was sexually assaulted. I want to help people. I want to start a movement or I want to start an organisation, and a lot of that is projecting outward so that they don't have to deal with what's inside. And that's what I was doing, and then when I had that kind of spiritual moment where God was like, No, there's more. And you're not going to be able to do this work well until you get it out, get it out. And I really started having I do some excavation. I'm still excavating, I'm trying to tell survivors that MeToo is first and foremost for us. We look at each other to say. Oh, that happened to you, what happened to me, to empowerment, to empathy is that we empower each other. The power and me recognises the power in you. And then it's a declaration to the world. But before we declare to the world, we declare to each other.

MG: It ended up being declared to the world through social media. You were in Philadelphia.

TARANA BURKE: I was in New York.

MG: You were in New York City. And you wake up one morning and your phone is on fire because people are trying to get in touch with you. How did you react when you found out that this phrase MeToo after Weinstein had gone viral?

TARANA BURKE: Oh, I was I was going out of my mind at first. It was, it was, it was pretty- well, I was all over the place emotionally. You know, I was 44 and I had struggled to try to get this work, to maintain it as a resource, to get people to buy into it. People don't want to talk about sexual violence. I was the person who like setting up tables at festivals and begging people to add me to the agenda. And, you know, and that's in social justice circles. Like, be clear, this is not like I was going to like right wing Republican events trying to fit in where I obviously wouldn't fit in and I was going to the movement events. So when it did go viral on a humbug and it went viral talking about white women in Hollywood, I just felt defeated. I felt like there's no way people are going to think this 44-year-old black woman from the Bronx had already been doing this.

MG: Were you worried that your work was going to be co-opted.

TARANA BURKE: Co-opted. I'd be amazed that the meanings and origins would be separated, that people would never think about little black girls. And quite frankly, that is what happened. But a bigger thing happened too, which is I had a realisation that the same things that Diamond and Heaven needed in Selma, Alabama, in 2005 and 2002, 2006. The same things they needed are the same things that Gweneth Paltrow and Ashley Judd and whoever else needed in 2017 in Hollywood, they needed to be heard. They needed to be seen. They needed to be supported. They needed to find community, right. What survivors need is universal. And. What people think about survivors and people's response to survivors is universal.

MG: How how is that amplified in the black community? Because you said in the book, I mean, the general ranking of sexual violence is minor in the face of things like structural racism. So how is that amplified that lack of listening? How is that amplified within within the community itself?

TARANA BURKE: Oh, it's absolutely different. I also say in the book Sexual violence doesn't discriminate, but the response to it does. In the black community and not just in the black community and communities of colour, the response to sexual violence is at the bottom as a low man on the totem pole. So it's like, Oh, you were raped or you were harassed or you were violent in some way. That's just a violation of your body. You'll recover. You'll be fine because that's something that's going to affect you psychologically. It may leave an emotional wound, but you can get up. You can go to work tomorrow. You can, you know, you can. You're still breathing, you're fine. You're not in jail. You're fine. We are not when you have to rank that from running from police, find working, living, eating. Those fat falls really low.

MG: How do you see that reflected, for example, in the narrative around R. Kelly and the victims of R. Kelly and the fact that his crimes happened in broad daylight, that people knew about them in the community, the music industry for decades? But he got a pass on how how do you? Is that? Is that a through line, do you see?

TARANA BURKE: It's an absolute throughline, and it's even more, I want to say, complicated, but I think it's an illuminating because then you have this other thing around the cult of celebrity, right? There's this complicating factor in the black community, especially because it feels like we have even less heroes. Our men are vilified. And so when you have a rich and famous black man who, by the way, like R. Kelly stayed very close to the hood. He didn't leave. He's a he's a folk hero in Chicago. He becomes legendary. You juxtapose that with all of the weight that we put on black girls to protect themselves. All of the rules that we put on black girls that say that if a black man, a grown man is attracted to you, you are responsible for that, you need to go put on more clothes. When you put all of that stuff together, then you have a situation like R. Kelly, where the girls are fast, not the man is a pervert.

MG: Just before I let you go, because we're just about out of time, how much further? Still has to be travelled before society actually listens to those who say me too.

TARANA BURKE: Well, we have a ways to go. I do think that we have moved further where people hear when people hear me too, when people hear the stories now, they listen a little bit differently. I think there's still a lot of backlash. But I do think that we're seeing we're starting to see the curves. Shift a bit. So now we have more investigation, for instance. Five years ago, we couldn't we wouldn't have seen not just a governor step down like, say, Cuomo stepped down, but we wouldn't. I'm not focussed on the outcomes as much, right? Five years ago, we wouldn't have had an attorney general do a thorough investigation on a sitting governor. Five years ago, we wouldn't have had a jury that would understand the nuances of a case like Weinstein where you have women who were sexually assaulted and still continue to have a relationship with a person. So we are seeing a shift in how people think about sexual violence, how people understand survivorship. That's what's really important. I'm seeing some change in that. And that's really, really, really important.

MG: What would you say to that seven year old girl that we started out talking about?

TARANA BURKE: I would say that you're not a bad girl and you're going to do big, big, big, important things because your life is important and you're really worthy.

MG: It's a real pleasure to talk to you, congratulations on this book and congratulations on the big things that you have done and continue to do. Thank you very much.

TARANA BURKE: Thank you so much. It's a pleasure to meet you, Matt.

MG: Take care.

TARANA BURKE: Thank you.

MG: Tarana Burke's new memoir Is Unbound, My Story of Liberation and the Birth of the MeToo Movement. That's The Current for this Thursday, coming up next on CBC Radio One. It's Q Tom Power speaking with Melissa Etheridge, who stumbled upon some of her own unreleased songs from 20 years ago, decided to rerecord them, and she'll talk to Tom all about that coming up in just a few moments on CBC Radio One. We heard a little bit of the late, great Maya Angelou in my interview with Tarana Burke. A joyful poem told with the unmistakeable swagger of a confident woman. We'll leave you with the full piece performed live by Miss Maya Angelou. I'm Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening to The Current. We'll see you tomorrow.

SOUNDCLIP

Many people wonder where my secret lies.

I'm not cute or built to suit a fashion model size.

When I tried to show them, they think I'm telling lies.

I say it's in the reach of my arms, the span of my hips,.

The stride of my step, the curl of my lips.

I'm a woman. Phenomenally.

I walk into a room just as cool as you please.

And to a man, the fellows stand. I fall down on their knees.

And then they swarm around me a hive of honey bees.

I feel it's the fire in my eyes, the flash of my team,.

The swing in my waist, the joy in my feet.

Men themselves have wondered what they see in me.

They try so much, but they can't touch my inner mystery.

When I try to show them, they say they still can't see.

I say, Oh, it's in the art of my bad.

And now you understand just why my head's not boud.

I don't shout or jump about, I have to talk too loud.

When you see me walking it out to make you cry.

I say it's in the click of my heels. The bend of my hair.

The palm of my hands. The need for my care.

Because I'm a woman. Phenomenally.

Phenomenal woman. That's my mother and all your mothers.

And then my grandmothers and all your grandmothers.

And my great grandmother and your great grandmother.

My Great Great Britain. Your Great Great Great and all your women here and me.

[Applause]

Thursday October 14, 2021 Full Transcript

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