Satire

It's Thursday November 10th...

Christmas has come early for reluctant voters. Jack Layton says he plans to table a motion demanding the Liberal government hold an election in February. That means no campaiging over the holidays.

Currently, Paul Martin's reaction was..." Ya, February, that's kinda what I was going to do"

To which Jack Layton replied..."Ya but I'm like weeks ahead of you"

Then Paul was all..."Ya whatever.."

And Jack was like "You got SO burnt!"

And then Paul was like "Talk to the hand"

And then I was all, This is the Current.

RCMP Public Complaints Commission

If you've been listening to the Current the past few weeks, then these three names will be familiar to you: Maher Arar, Abdullah Almalki, and Ahmad El Maati. All three are Canadian citizens. Before and after 9-11, all three were considered security threats by the RCMP. All three were intercepted abroad for different reasons. All three were detained in foreign countries where they were jailed, beaten and tortured. All three were eventually released without charges.

An added mystery: the interrogations each was subjected to--whether they were in Syria or Eygpt---were often peppered with information that the men say could have only come from Canadian security officials. After their cases came to light, The Current invited Public Security Minister Anne McLellan to explain the Canadian government's involvement, if any. She declined. Instead she said the men were welcome to make their case to the RCMP Public Complaints Commission.

But the three men at the centre of this drama---Maher Arar, Abdullah Almalki, and Ahmad El Maati---say the RCMP Public Complaints Commission may not have enough power to tackle their cases. That Commission now has a new boss.

Paul Kennedy has worked as a lawyer for CSIS and as a senior bureaucrat in the Justice and Solicitor General's ministries under Anne McLellan. Now he's acting chair of the RCMP Public Complaints Commission. He was in our Ottawa studio.

RCMP Follow

Giving the RCMP Public Complaints Commission more muscle to get the job done might not sound like such a bad thing. But some human rights organizations say that won't solve the bigger problem--which is that there are a variety of law enforcement organizations operating in Canada...each with their own form of oversight and no way to co-ordinate accountability between them.

To talk about these concerns we were joined by Paul Copeland, lawyer for one of the complainants, Abdullah Almalki. He was in our Toronto studio. And Alex Neve, secretary general of Amnesty International in Canada, and he was in Ottawa.

Listen to The Current: Part 1

(Due to various rights issues some segments may be edited for internet use)

The Current: Part 2

Letters

Our Friday host, Francine Pelletier joined Anna Maria Tremonti from Montreal for a look at the mail.

WHO Polio Expert

Probably the last time you heard someone talking about catching polio, the person speaking was over sixty---or new to Canada. That's because on this continent the virus has long been considered dead---its extinction a testament to the success of a universal vaccination program.

But now, fifty years after that campaign began, the disease has re-appeared in the US. The first victim is an 8-month-old from an isolated Amish community in Minnesota. But it has since spread to neighbouring farms infecting four other children.

Bruce Aylward is the coordinator for the World Health Organizations global polio eradication initiative. He's been paying close attention to this new outburst. He joined us from Geneva, Switzerland.

Listen to The Current: Part 2

(Due to various rights issues some segments may be edited for internet use)

The Current: Part 3

Simon Winchester

He may be a geologist by training, but Simon Winchester stacks up as the Master of Disaster in non-fiction writing. But the timing of his last couple of books has been just a little unsettling. In 2003, he published Krakatoa: The Day The World Exploded, which chronicled the mammoth 1883 eruption of that eponymous Indonesian volcano--which was followed by a horrific 10-storey-high tsunami. Then about a year-and-a-half after the book came out---and not far from Krakatoa---we witnessed a modern-day tsunami. And we saw the unbelievable devastation it left behind.

Now, Winchester's new book was released just 16 days before the earthquake in Kashmir killed tens of thousands of people. It's called A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906. And it deals, of course, with our restless earth and what we can learn from past disasters. Simon Winchester joined us from our New York studio.

Last Word: Edmund FG

An angry Mother Nature was also responsible for sinking the SS Edmund Fitzgerald 30 years ago today. While the ship was making her final shipping run of the season, a freshwater hurricane exploded over Lake Superior. Without warning, the ship disappeared off the radar, and the waters of that Great Lake swallowed her up.

So it's a day that always gets us humming "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald", that glorious, and on this day, ubiquitous, Gordon Lightfoot song. No doubt you've heard it, and no, we're not going to play it. Instead, we ended the show with this snippet from a Minneapolis radio program. The host is T.D. Mischke, and here he is with an Edmund Fitzgerald expert a few years ago---using an interviewing style that kind of made us seasick ourselves.

Music

Artist: Gordon Lightfoot
CD: “Summer Dream”
Cut: CD 2, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”
Label: Warner Bros. Records
Spine: 2246-2

Listen to The Current: Part 3

(Due to various rights issues some segments may be edited for internet use)

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