October 9, 2008

It's Thursday, October 9th.

The Toronto Maple Leafs open their NHL season tonight against the Detroit Red Wings.

Currently, (sigh) oh well, there's always next year.

This is the Current.


Payback


There's an old Chinese proverb that goes, better eight hundred in cash than a thousand in credit, sage advice in these uncertain times. Both Americans and Canadians are struggling with the highest amounts of personal debt ever seen in history.

And as world stock and commodity markets limp along due to the sub prime mortgage crisis in the US many people are seeing what money they DO have - slip away. One person who has been watching all of this unfold is Canadian author Margaret Atwood. She saw this financial catastrophe coming a few years back and decided to explore our relationship with debt in her new book called, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth. It's also the subject of her upcoming CBC Massey Lectures. Margaret Atwood joined Anna Maria in our Toronto studio.

Community Confidential

It's less than a week until voting day and candidates across the country are putting on their final push.In addition to working to GET people's vote, they're working to GET OUT the vote.

Voter turnout can play a big role in who wins and loses, especially in tight races.
According to Elections Canada, fewer and fewer people have been turning out to vote in recent decades. And that's in spite of the fact that the parties have put a big push on to attract new voters especially from new Canadians.

In today's edition of Community Confidential, we look at voter participation in some of Canada's diverse communities. And we'll also look at how big developments in the election might influence how people cast their ballot.

For a snapshot of what's happening in their own communities in Canada we've re-convened our Community Confidential Panel.

Winnie Hwo is the News Director for the Chinese-language network Fairchild TV. She's in Vancouver. Nadia Zouaoui is a documentary maker, and a freelance contributor to Radio Canada. She was in Montreal. And Anis Farooqui is the Editor of Voice Of Toronto.com, an on-line news website that caters to South Asian Canadians.

The Supercommitted

Don Quixote is the errant - and erring - knight featured in Cervantes' classic 17th century novel. Though the foes Don Quixote faced on his quest were mostly imagined, his obsessive committment inspired the characters he met along the way and, in-turn, the readers and scholars who continue to study him today.

This morning we wrap up our series called The Supercommitted with a profile of David Page, an independent candidate in the riding of Ottawa West Nepean. His cause is climate change, and his super-commitment to bring his message to voters is where his quest intersects with that of Don Quixote's.

The Current's producer Dominic Girard brings us this final chapter in our profiles of Canadians engaged in politics. Here is "A Quixotic Candidate."


Letters

Each week during the federal election campaign, our Friday hosts have been highlighting issues important to them and to voters. This week, our Friday host is David Suzuki. He is well known to CBC listeners and viewers as the host of The Nature of Things. He is an award-winning geneticist, author of 43 books and co-founder of the David Suzuki Foundation.

David Suzuki is in Vancouver this morning and joined Anna Maria for a look at our mail.

Questions to Stephen Harper

We had Amir Attaran, professor in the faculties of law and medicine at the University of Ottawa. Rob Rainer, director of the National Anti-poverty Organization in Ottawa, with nother question here on the subject of democratic engagement and transparency director of the National Anti-poverty Organization in Ottawa. And Claire Demerse, senior policy analyst with the Pembina Institute, a sustainable energy think tank, also joined us.

But these questions are just the tip of the iceberg of course we're also wondering about Canada's mission in Afghanistan, the Tories' cuts to the arts, the future of the tar sands, Aboriginal governance, health care, protecting Canada's fresh water resources ... you get the picture. But we left it at that for now..