>> Nam: "The Agenda" this week looked for insights on the future of policing after the
Ottawa convoy; asked if municipal politicians needed greater oversight; and learned
why the war in Ukraine means trouble for global food security.
"The Agenda's" week in review begins with what waste water signals suggest about a sixth
wave of Covid-19.
>> it's been really a spectrum.
There's been some public that have been extremely supportive and progressive and have looked
at the data and say we're going to use it for what it's worth and use it as a complementary
tool to all of the other information we've had.
While other public health units -- and understandably so -- have looked at the data
and said there's no real provincial guidelines or script to follow in terms of how to
interpret this data.
That's completely understandable.
You see a spectrum across the province.
Possibly at this point we alluded to this and talked about it.
Without the real kind of critical mass of clinical data that we're able to see, I think
the waste water now is being more and more positioned as an important metric for us to
really understand what's going on in our communities.
>> Steve: Claire, let me ask you about that.
Robert says it's understandable that some public health units want to be sort of stingy with
that information but do you think it's understandable that they're not as open as they
could be or perhaps should be?
>> I think that, you know, waste water surveillance data is -- it's tricky data to work with.
It can be variable from day-to-day and that's just, I think, the nature of how the
samples are collected and the analyses.
And I think that, like Dr. DELLA TOLLA alluded to, very close links in
communication between the research teams doing the analysis and the public health
unit is critical for interpreting the data and to see through some of that
variability.
So I can understand if those relationships don't get formed early on, then there could maybe
be some trouble, you know, fully using the data.
First for the specific health unit.
But in our experience in the City of Toronto we've had an excellent relationship with
Toronto public health and we really work with them as a cohesive unit to interpret the
data that our lab is putting out.
>> Steve: Why do you think they've chosen to be particularly forthcoming when
others have not been?
>> I think they see the value in the data.
They see the value of it as a complementary tool.
In the City of Toronto, in particular, in the data that's come out of our lab, we sampled
a lot of facilities as well such as long-term care homes and homeless shelters.
And I know that they've found that data very valuable.
We've been able to catch outbreaks just before the clinical testing did.
So, you know, the value of that scale became very clear to the public health unit early on.
>> Steve: Gustavo, let me follow up with you in this regard: More and more businesses in
Ontario are opening up, of course.
And I wonder if you are concerned that those businesses that do reopen more with the
potential for more information coming from them, will that some how skew the data across the
province?
What's your view on that?
>> well, if you remember that this is a statistic.
I think we kind of modify our parameters in order to take into account this situation.
>> Steve: And, Claire, are there other sort of tricky things that you've got to be watching for as
we sort of reopen the province more and more, day by day?
>> well, I think maybe what your question alludes to is the fact that people are becoming more
and more mobile.
And their contribution to the waste water samples that we're collecting may be coming from
different places.
And so that might be something that we need to take into consideration if we're trying to
assign a certain level or trend to a specific area.
And there is mobility data that you can use and that you are contributing to a sample outside
your home area.
>> Steve: Got it.
Robert, is it expensive to do this?
>> when you're comparing the cost associated with waste water surveillance versus, you know,
testing clinically, testing like we did throughout the pandemic, a large number of people in the
population, it's really, really not.
I think that's one of the benefits of waste water surveillance.
An example is Ottawa is 1 million people.
Throughout the pandemic 5,400 people were tested daily.
We collected one water sample every day.
Not to say that it's equivalent but that also gave us an indication of whether there was
spread, transmissibility within the province.
So cost-effectiveness, the economic aspect is a benefit of waste water surveillance.
>> this has handle, many times before.
There's been a protest of convoys before.
They've come to town.
They've done their protest and then they've left.
And that was the expectation, I think, for the most part as to what was going to happen this
time.
I personally got a sense of a huge shift that occurred -- and I would agree -- I don't think
the individual officer's actions were nearly as important as some people would like to make it
out.
What I saw was a really ground swelling shift is when the money -- the millions of dollars
started rolling in through the Go-fund-me, the give-send-go and ultimately bitcoin.
Protesters that would otherwise have been expected to leave town suddenly were offered financial
assistance to stay in town.
They didn't have to worry about paying tickets.
They didn't have to worry about buying gas for their vehicles.
They didn't have to worry about accommodation or losing their trucks if their trucks were
seized.
It changed, in my view, the relationship between the police and the demonstrators and the
city.
And I know that, as a board, one of the questions I asked was -- and one of the things I never
understood is why were trucks allowed to re-enter the city after they had left the
demonstration.
And then we saw trucks that were re-entering.
And that made no sense to me.
And that is one of the questions, as a board, our role is to ask questions, to have a
robust mechanism to ask questions and we asked why are these trucks being allowed to
re-enter.
The answer we were given is that the protesters had a Charter right to bring their vehicles
downtown.
That made no sense to me.
But this, in part, is part of the difficulty the board has.
We don't have the resources to challenge the powers that be.
The chief, the senior executive.
These knowledgeable people, they have their legal counsel present, the city's legal
counsel is present.
So when we're given an answer like that as a board we don't have the ability to challenge
it.
But it didn't make sense.
And I think it was something that allowed the protest to go on longer.
But in addition, there were other issues -- >> Steve: Don't get to the other
issues yet.
We've got a lawyer here and I want to pursue that idea that they had a Charter right to
protest, to assemble, to have those trucks in the shadow of Parliament Hill.
Okay, Caryna, you're a lawyer does that make sense to you?
>> it does not make sense to me.
There are Charter rights that protect political expression and right to assembly and so on and
so forth but there is nothing specifically that allows for the use of commercial vehicles as a
tool of protest.
Especially where there is ample evidence that these vehicles were detrimental.
Whether it was through the honking, through the idling and the noise pollution.
The fumes coming out.
The Charter is right there in section one there are limits that can be imposed.
It's something that would be litigated after the fact.
But I don't see that using a truck is something that the Charter protects.
>> Steve: No, I appreciate that there are limits on all of our fundamental freedoms in this
country.
Having said that, it's right there in black and white in the Charter: We do have the freedom
to assemble and that's what they were doing.
They were assembling.
Now, obviously, you know, they had trucks they had horns, et cetera, et cetera.
Could they reasonably conclude that they were in compliance with the Charter?
>> I believe that many thought that they were in compliance with the Charter.
And the way that it was enforced gave them reason to think that.
But the logistics of this type of operation preventing the actual truck does not mean that
you are preventing an individual from protesting.
And so the truck and the person are not inseparable.
>> Steve: John, just because your metaphors are so fantastic I want to put a follow-up
question to you if I can here and that it does focus on the Ottawa example and councillor
Chiarelli who has gotten himself into a great deal of trouble over the past years.
Apparently all council could do was dock his pay for 15 months.
Do you think we need a change in procedures in Ontario whereby, if somebody behaves egregiously
his or her colleagues can say, you know what?
We're impeaching you and kicking you out of your seat because you've gone beyond the pale.
What's your view on that?
>> that's a really tough one.
You see such terrible behaviour in some municipalities that you say hey, that should be the
result.
The problem with that, Steve, is that most places, most assemblies do not allow their
own members to kick out a fellow member.
Because that would be the tyranny of the majority, right?
They would be perhaps not liking the maverick views of a particular member of whether
it's the councilor the assembly.
And all of a sudden feel that it's appropriate for them to remove them.
Now, the province is looking at things like this.
There was a huge consultation commenced last year by the Ministry of municipal affairs
and housing to look at what to do with members.
Alberta passed recall legislation not only for local members but also for members of
the legislative assembly and for school boards.
So there are afoot -- at play, certain initiatives to bring forward greater penalties.
But your point is well taken.
There are only two penalties that are authorized under the Municipal Act for a breach of a
code of conduct.
One is a reprimand which is a slap on the wrist.
We don't think you're doing very well.
We're going to denounce that.
And the other one is the suspension of pay for up to 90 days of course.
Rick Chiarelli had six separate or five.
>> five.
>> separate instances.
Thank you, Joanne.
Five separate instances so 90 times 5 is 450 days which is over a year of free work by this
council member which some council members would say hey, he shouldn't be there at all.
I think I agree with him.
>> Steve: I want Joanne to pick up on that.
We should stress councillor Chiarelli defends his interest in all these matters but how
much appetite among fellow councillors was to have him thrown off council all together
even though that wasn't an option.
>> after the second report came out, the integrity commissioner brought it forward and council
voted on it they immediately and unanimously passed a motion asking him to resign.
Minister Steven Clark.
He is the minister of the municipal affairs and housing personally also asked him to
resign which is unheard of and he has said no.
He is still on council.
So getting his pay again as of late last year.
Even while he was unpaid he was collecting his pension.
And it is amazing every time I talk about this story we've done a lot of coverage of it here on
CBC, on the air.
I get letters all the time asking why is he still here, when is he leaving.
Is it was interesting the public was not aware that there is no mechanism for removing someone
from office.
And it's pretty interesting.
Because there are mechanisms if you breach a financial role.
For example, there was the case of Jim KARYGIANIS in Toronto spent too much money on his
celebration party after the 2018 election.
He broke some financing rules and he is literally no longer a councillor.
But someone who has broken behavioural rules, codes of conduct to a quite shocking
degree, there's really no way to remove them from their elected seats.
And people were shocked by that.
There's a huge move in Ottawa to change the rules.
>> Steve: I'm going to start our discussion just by reading an excerpt from the New York times.
This from last week.
It goes like this: For the global food market there are few worse countries to be in
conflict than Russia and Ukraine.
Over the past five years they have together accounted for nearly 30% of the exports of the
world's wheat.
17% of corn.
32% of barley.
A crucial source of animal feed and 75% of sun flower seed oil -- an important cooking oil
in some parts of the world.
David M. Beasley, the executive director of the United Nations world food program says Ukraine
has only compounded a catastrophe on top of a catastrophe.
There is no precedent even close to this since World War II.
I wonder having heard what David Beasley had to say about this, I wonder how you would
characterize the pressure now being felt on the global food supply.
>> David's absolutely right.
This is a looming -- as the secretary general has said -- hurricane on the horizon.
I was serving as the U.S.
ambassador for food and agriculture in the aftermath of the 2007-08 food crisis and
during the 2011 high food price hunger crisis.
And what we saw then was that was when hunger spiked around the world to about 1 billion
people.
And we know that today as we are speaking there are 811 million people who are food insecure.
And that number includes by about almost 100 million as a result of COVID.
And there's an expectation that this situation -- and this is just a tipping point of
challenges that had already begun.
Because of lack of fertilizer, high gas prices, the spike in wheat futures.
And then you have the availability challenge that results from the lack of export
from Russia and Ukraine.
And so that number of 811 million, some are speculating could, again, increase to over 1
billion people.
And the number of those who are critically -- acutely -- hungry could increase from the 276
million today to another 100 to 150 to over 350 million people who are acutely hungry.
And that means without assistance there will be famine.
>> Steve: Evan you just heard me read that quote from David Beasley from the world food
program.
Calling this a catastrophe on top of a catastrophe.
Is that being overly dramatic?
>> I agree with ambassador cousins.
Any one of the problems that ambassador cousins just listed on their own wouldn't
necessarily trigger a global crisis.
But when you already have high food price inflation, supply chain bottle necks, low food
stocks.
This is another thing.
The United Nations tracked something called the supply to use ratio which is a fancy way
of saying how much food we've got to how much.
And the supply use ratio is at its lowest point since 2015 or 2016.
You put all these things and you do have layers of catastrophe, a rippling effect.
That when you take Russia and Ukraine that are among the top five wheat importers this year,
wheat importing countries such as Egypt, north frequent, and the Middle East will be in
desperately troubled situations and then the looming spectre of famine and sky rocketing hunger
around the planet.
It's a terrifying moment.
>> Steve: If you are a farmer in Ukraine you obviously can't do what you want to do when there
are bombs dropping all around you.
What's not happening right now that should be happening?
>> yes, well, obviously in Ukraine, we're seeing total disruption of the farming cycle
for the most part.
It's a long-held historic truth that war is particularly hard on farmers.
But I think I have to stress, as my colleagues mentioned, it's the waves of disruption flowing
out from that that are particularly damaging.
And I don't know that we've entirely mentioned yet the disruption of fertilizer flow
from Russia and Ukraine is also critical.
And that's impacting South America and Africa among the entire world as well.
And as it has been mentioned as well, it's on top of three years of basic, constant disruption.
Climate change, pandemic, and I'm usually an optimist and I usually say one off situation
the food system is really good at being resilient.
This time there's fatigue.
There is disaster fatigue one could say.
>> Nam: That's just some of what we covered this week.
You can find the full conversations on our website tvo.org.
Our Youtube channel at youtube.com/theagenda.
Or our twitter feed, twitter.com/TheAgenda.