What impact do private jets and celebrity lifestyles have on the fight against climate change?

Guests: Steve Varsano, Stefan Gossling

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VOICE: This is not a time for pessimism. This is a time for optimism. To embrace the possibilities of tomorrow, we must reject the perennial prophets of doom and their predictions of the apocalypse.

MG: At least one of those so-called prophets of doom was in the audience as Donald Trump gave that speech in Davos, Switzerland. The Swedish teen activist, Greta Thunberg. She gave a speech of her own yesterday calling for emissions to stop completely. Climate change is high on the agenda at the World Economic Forum, but there is also no escaping the fact that many billionaires and world leaders who travelled there, got to Switzerland aboard their own private jets. Even as climate warnings multiply, the private aviation business is booming. A recent forecast predicts sales continue to rise by about 7 percent this year. If you happen to be in the market for your own plane, you might want to pay a visit to the Jet Business. It's a showroom on Upper Crust Park Lane, one of the most desirable streets in London. Freelance producer Dave Dodd got a tour from founder Steve Varsano.

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VOICE 1: So as you first come in, come up these three steps and you have the couch with a backgammon board for people who want to try, when they want something else to do. We have a pop up TV. We have the chairs. And then if you go a little deeper in, we have these doors that separate the dining room, slash conference room, and in here, all the chairs are done in a carbon fibre and leather.

VOICE 2: Is this for when a deal is done?

VOICE 1: Yeah, we have a cabinet with the champagne and fine wines. This is what we call a trading floor. And as you can see, each desk is a replica of a cockpit from one of the corporate jets. So where normally a corporate jet has a co-pilot in the pilot's seat, but this is basically a single seat with the triple screens, which is basically what you see today in a corporate jet.

VOICE 2: And they got a nice covering on them.

VOICE 1: Yeah, it's actually the leather is sort of like a Bentley kid glove leather. And then on as you walk past the trading floor, on the right side, you have this humongous video wall, which is about 40 feet wide and 10 feet high. And this screen is where we show our video, ourapp. And it's a process where you can actually take a client from not knowing anything and fully educate them on the whole market. Why you should buy a certain kind of an airplane. We've had a lot of times where you get people say, you know, I really want this my interior to be wow. And I try to convince them, you don't want wow. Here you sit on airplanes sometimes for 10 to 12 hours. You don't want to be in a place that's like that. It is an environment to work in and relax in and if it's too, I don't want to use the word obnoxious, but if it's too loud or if it's too defining, it sometimes it doesn't let you go to that space.

MG: Steve Varsano, good morning.

STEVE VARSANO: Good morning.

MG: Davos World Economic Forum is underway right now. How many of those people flying into Davos this week do you think bought their jets through you?

STEVE VARSANO: I don't know. I don't know everybody that's going to be there, but I did read something that there's about 100 billionaires that are going to be at Davos. And in the last two years, we've had about 97 billionaires in our showrooms. So there's probably a few of them that are there that have definitely been to our office.

MG: You're talking to somebody who usually ends up on a plane kind of at the back in steerage, I think. What is it like to fly in a private jet?

STEVE VARSANO: It is yeah definitely different. It is really a business tool. It's a time machine. There are so many benefits. Of course, people want to related to a luxury item, which it is, of course. But the reason people do acquire airplanes is really to manufacture time. You have flexibility in your schedule. You have security. You have confidentiality. So there's a lot of things that you benefit from from being in a corporate jet, besides just the pure fact of being in a more luxurious atmosphere.

MG: And when you describe it as a time machine, what do you mean by that?

STEVE VARSANO: Well, we've done analysis where a corporate executive, let's say, who flies about 400 hours a year, which is about the best use of a corporate jet. That would give a corporate executive an additional 60 business days a year compared to if he had to fly on a commercial airline. So if you look at a company who has hundreds of thousands of employees and they can take a chairman or president, CEO, whatever, and add another 20 percent of his year to be using to develop the company, there's no value you can put to that, you know, in a dollar term.

MG: You have a storefront and usually you associate store fronts with, you know, I'm going to walk in and I'm going to buy stationery or I'm going to walk in, maybe car dealerships have a store front and I might go and I might test drive a car. Do people walk in off the street and buy a jet?

STEVE VARSANO: Well, you know, they don't just walk in and say, here's my credit card, I want to buy something. That doesn't happen. I wish it did. But that being said, we do have people who walk in off the street unannounced and sign mandates with us to actually represent them to buy or sell an airplane. First time. Never met us before. After they go through the whole presentation, we have, it does happen.

MG: Who's buying your planes?

STEVE VARSANO: 60 percent of the people are Americans and you got about 15, 20 percent of Europeans. You have 5 percent in Asia, 5 percent in Africa. That's the mix of where the corporate jets are around the world. And that's about the mix of our client base.

MG: Who has bought a plane from you? Can you give us a name or two?

STEVE VARSANO: A lot of people don't like to be told who they are. But one person who doesn't mind it who's very well known around North America is Tony Robbins, motivational speaker person. I'm sure you know who he is. He's very well known and he just considers that he's changed a lot of people's lives, but he actually thinks that this airplane acquisition changed his life.

MG: How much does Tony Robbins spend on a private jet?

STEVE VARSANO: Well that I don't think he wants me to tell anybody.

MG: OK, so if you take the names off of it, how much money are people spending on the planes that you sell?

STEVE VARSANO: It really has a really wide range, but the majority of airplanes, I'd say in the longer range airplanes go from 10 to 30 million dollars.

MG: And so for 30 million dollars, what do I get?

STEVE VARSANO: You get a 14 passenger aeroplane that could fly let's say 12-14 hours. So let's say from Los Angeles to London in a cabin that you can stand up and walk around. Not exactly a Boeing, but they stand up six foot one cabin.

MG: And we heard in the tour. I mean, you can also have it, you know, kitted out and redesigned in any way that you want. So 30 million dollars is sort of the base price? It's like I'm buying a car and it doesn't come with some of the extra features. I would need to spend more if I want those extra features and I want the extra interior design?

STEVE VARSANO: Well I'm talking about preowned aircrafts. So that, the new aeroplanes are much more expensive. A brand new Boeing like or an Airbus like the one that was the tour given yesterday, that's about a hundred million dollars.

MG: A hundred million dollars?

STEVE VARSANO: Yes, sir.

MG: How many people are spending a hundred million dollars on a plane?

STEVE VARSANO: Well, that kind of an airplane, there's about 250 of those in the world, half of which are owned by heads of state. So you're talking about in the corporate world, there's only about 120 that are in throughout the whole world.

MG: And are they people who have cashed in on something? Are they companies that are doing well and they want the best for their CEO or for the president? I mean, who ends up spending that kind of money on a plane?

STEVE VARSANO: Well, it's not, it's really not having the best for the CEO or chairman. It actually is a big corporate asset tool. Airplanes, for a lot of corporations, are necessary business tools.

MG: But there are people who buy the jets. I mean, it may not be for corporate use. They might buy for personal use as well. Right?

STEVE VARSANO: It's very, very rare. I am telling you that nobody really buys a corporate jet for only personal use. Nobody really buys a plane for just a toy. It just doesn't happen.

MG: How much swagger is involved in this in terms of what people want? I mean, there is the corporate need, as you say, if you can figure out how to justify that. But it's also a luxury item. I mean, it's like an ultra luxury luxury luxury item. How much swagger is involved in showing off what you have and how you've earned it?

STEVE VARSANO: Well, there is a factor that I guess you call I buy because I can. And most of the time people do buy something way above what their absolute need is, but there's 21,000 jets in the whole world and of the 21000, 15,000 are what they consider small or medium sized jets, a medium sized jet is basically the size of a minivan. It's really a transportation piece.

MG: How often does the issue of carbon emissions come up with your clients?

STEVE VARSANO: It's starting to come up more and more now and people are becoming more conscious of it and they do want to do something about it. There are some companies and programs that you can easily buy carbon footprint offsets. And it's not that expensive, believe it or not. The whole airline industry contributes about 2 percent of the carbon footprint problem around the world. And the corporate jet market is actually 2 percent of that 2 percent. So it's only point 0 4 percent of the whole carbon footprint issue. It's not a big deal that we're contributing and in fact, in the last 15 years, they've reduced their carbon footprint by about 60 percent.

MG: But do any of your clients feel a disconnect between I mean, if they're interested in carbon offsets, the fact that they might want to purchase carbon offsets, but they're purchasing a private jet.

STEVE VARSANO: Yeah, but they still have to conduct their business. I mean, we are still living in the 21st century and people do have to understand that. I mean, we're not in the Stone Age. And as much as we people want to be able to save the earth, you still have to survive. You have to live and you have to produce revenue for your shareholders and you just can't do that under some of these restrictions.

MG: As you're doing, this is business and the business has been good, but in the process of that business, does your head ever get scrambled with the fact that somebody wants to spend 30, 40, 50, 100 million dollars on a plane?

STEVE VARSANO: I'm a street guy from New Jersey, and I've had to work for everything in my life. Nobody's given me a thing. And, you know, I still look at the value of a dollar every time I spend the penny and I deal with the who's who around the world. I can't say that it's mind boggling because obviously I've become used to it a little bit over the years. But these people, the industries that they're running and the values of the companies and the number of people they employ and what they're adding to the world economies, it's a pittance to exchange, a purchase something like that in order to produce a business that they're producing.

MG: Steve Varsano, it's great to talk to you about this. This is fascinating. Thank you.

STEVE VARSANO: Thank you very much.

MG: Steve Varsano is the founder and CEO of the Jet Business, and he helps clients buy and sell private jets. As he mentioned, you do hear plenty of celebrities and business executives, the very ones who are using those private jets, talking about their concerns when it comes to climate change. And this is something that Joaquin Phoenix called out recently at the Golden Globes.

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VOICE: It's really nice that so many people have come up and sent their well wishes to Australia. But sometimes we have to take that responsibility on ourselves and make changes and sacrifices in our own lives. We don't have to take private jets to Palm Springs for the awards sometimes or back. Please. And I'll try to do better and I hope you will too. Thank you so much.

MG: Stefan Gossling has been looking into the impact that private jets have on climate change and how the habits of the super rich shape our attitudes about flying. He's a professor of tourism at Linnaeus University in Sweden. Stefan, good morning.

STEFAN GOSSLING: Good morning.

MG: We heard Steve Varsano there saying that the private jet business is not a big deal when it comes to the contributions it makes to greenhouse gases and the whole carbon emission issue. How much do we know definitively about the role that private jet travel would play in emissions?

STEFAN GOSSLING: Well, I think it's a question of perspective. If you want, London is just .001 percent of global emissions, Paris is just .001 percent of emissions. So in some sense, all of them are irrelevant. One could argue, but I think you have to take it the other way round. The question is how does each and every individual in the world contribute to climate change? And that should be the point of measurement.

MG: How does that compare? If you're flying in a private jet, how does it compare to flying commercial?

STEFAN GOSSLING: Well, that really depends on the jet itself. There can be an order of magnitude or more in terms of impact that is added to what it would cause if you flew in a regular jet just to say this. If you fly economy or first class is already affected too. In other words, if you fly first class, you will emit twice as much as somebody flying economy class. So whenever you use a private jet, the emissions will be huge in comparison.

MG: The World Economic Forum is underway right now and a lot of the people, as we mentioned, who are there have flown in on private jets. The forum is talking a lot about climate change and the climate crisis and announced that private jets that are flying into the airport in Zurich will be able to use what's known as sustainable aviation fuel. It produces apparently fewer emissions. They'll also be offering the chance for participants to buy carbon offsets for their private jet travel. Are those measures useful in dealing with emissions?

STEFAN GOSSLING: Well, first out, there is no sustainable jet fuel. So it might be a future proposition, but nobody is actually producing anything that is even less carbon, not speak of zero carbon fuel. If you wanted that major, major investment would have to be made in order to even produce a tiny amount over the next years. So all of this to me is very much green rhetorics. It's not really the kind of action I would like to see.

MG: So when somebody buys carbon offsets to assuage their guilt, that's about it. It's not really doing anything meaningful, you say?

STEFAN GOSSLING: Well, most of the carbon offsets you can buy on the market and that are actually bought at large scale by the aviation industry is forest projects. Look at Australia. Look at California. I think everybody would realize that it's not a really safe way of storing carbon. We need something that goes beyond this.

MG: You did this research paper tracking the private jet habits of celebrities in particular. What did you find in that work?

STEFAN GOSSLING: Well, we found that the average celebrity that we looked into would caused emissions 10,000 times greater than the average human being.

MG: 10000 times?

STEFAN GOSSLING: 10,000 times. Yes. That does not even consider the CO2 effects. When you fly, you cause additional global warming compared to surface borne traffic. That is because flight attitudes and the emissions that you're causing have different impacts on the climate. And that obviously means that whenever people fly, that has a very significant impact on the atmosphere.

MG: Who are the super emitters when it comes to those celebrities?

STEFAN GOSSLING: Well, we only looked into 10 people really. And the most pronounced flier was Bill Gates in this case. We do know that these people are not perhaps even sticking out in terms of emissions caused by individuals because there's larger aircraft possibly used. We just heard that in the interview before that there's Boeing's being used as private aircraft, obviously there is much larger emissions associated with that. We also know that people fly lots a lot more than those people we studied and in our case that was up to 77 flights per year. But we know from studies that people fly up to 300 times per year. So I would say these people are not even sticking out when it comes to emissions.

MG: Bill Gates is interesting because obviously he founded Microsoft. Microsoft just announced that it wants to be carbon negative by 2030. He's also somebody who has been a vocal supporter of carbon capture technology. How do we square that with the fact that he uses a private jet to get around?

STEFAN GOSSLING: Well, obviously, any action in any direction of climate change mitigation is welcome. So I'm not anyone who would like to point a finger at Bill Gates who certainly has done great things. But the other thing is that we need to see action that actually makes a difference. We have talked the talk for all too long, for decades, really, and it's too late at this stage to still continue with that. So I'll be happy when people like him make a difference through investments through actual change and when we see those new technologies, that will be great. But for the moment, I think it needs a lot more pressure on these people to actually make them act on what they are saying.

MG: In part because as your research shows, it's about what they do, but it's also how we model what they do. Tell me a bit about that, about how what the influence is that those celebrity super emitters would have on the rest of us.

STEFAN GOSSLING: Well, the issue with the celebrities we studied in our paper is that they are obviously famous people who live specific lifestyles that they are admired for. And if you think about someone like Jennifer Lopez with perhaps 110 million Twitter followers, you can imagine that whatever these people tell others about their lifestyle is about what is admirable and desirable. And many people will try to imitate, copy, live up to that kind of model. So whenever you see this kind of image that is posted on some social media channel of someone taking another dip in some maybe Caribbean kind of pool, another sandy beach that is visited, that automatically becomes the role model that most people would love to follow. And that then becomes something that is problematic because we need the opposite. We need a social norm change towards people being more critical about flying and travel.

MG: And yet we heard, you know, Joaquin Phoenix's comments, which went all around the world, the comments he made at the Golden Globes. In the remaining seconds that we have, does that idea of flight shaming actually work to get people to think differently about their habits?

STEFAN GOSSLING: It does. We see that in Sweden. We see that in Germany. People have started to fly less. Mostly evident from domestic air travel numbers that have been plummeting over the last month in the last year.

MG: So Joaquin Phoenix's comments could actually do some good to get people perhaps to think differently about that, if he wants to be an influencer.

STEFAN GOSSLING: Definitely. I'm very happy he took this up and he's the first to actually deviate from the social norm by telling people that they have to change too.

MG: I don't know whether he flew coach or flew commercial back from the Golden Globes in Palm Springs or not, but his comments certainly got a lot of attention. Stefan, it's good to speak with you. Thank you.

STEFAN GOSSLING: Thank you Matt.

MG: Stefan Gossling is a professor of tourism at Linnaeus University in Sweden. He's currently based in Freiburg, Germany. Your thoughts on this welcome in the issue of flight shaming. Something that a lot of people are talking about, celebrities and otherwise. You can reach us at cbc.ca/thecurrent or on Twitter. The CBC News is next. Later on in the program, The Fix for the open concept office, something people love to hate. That's coming up as well. After a few momentous weeks, parliament is set to return. The Liberals are keen to get back to their agenda.

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VOICE: Moving forward means finding common ground, listening to people's concerns and working together to build a better Canada for all Canadians.

MG: Where will that common ground be found? We will explore that with our national affairs panel. They're coming up after the break. That's in about six minutes time. Stick around, won't you? My name is Matt Galloway and this is The Current on CBC Radio One.

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PM winds up cabinet retreat and looks ahead to next week’s resumption of Parliament

Guests: Niigaan Sinclair, Susan Delacourt, Marie Vastel

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

[Music: Theme]

MG: Still to come, how to fix the open concept office. Our new series about solving problems, big and small, takes on a much hated interior design. But first, parliamentary preview.

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VOICE: Our first order of business as a re-elected government to once again cut taxes for the middle class. When the House returns next week, we will also move forward immediately on ratifying the new NAFTA.

MG: That's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, as he wrapped up a cabinet retreat in Winnipeg yesterday. Over the winter break, the government has been grappling with a natural disaster and a national tragedy. But as MPs returned to parliament, the Liberals are hoping to get back to their agenda. There is a lot to discuss. Our national affairs panellists are here to help us sort through all of it. Niigaan Sinclair is a columnist with the Winnipeg Free Press. Marie Vastel, parliamentary correspondent for Le Devoir. Susan Delacourt, national columnist and Ottawa bureau chief for The Toronto Star. Good morning to you all.

SUSAN DELACOURT: Good morning.

MARIE VASTEL: Good morning.

NIIGAAN SINCLAIR: Good morning.

MG: Susan, we'll start with you. The prime minister, we heard a little bit of it there has a bit of a laundry list of priorities for when the House returns. This is, of course, a minority government, though. And how co-operative do you think the opposition will be in helping the prime minister move through that list?

SUSAN DELACOURT: Just a guess. Not at all.

MG: Well, that's a good start.

SUSAN DELACOURT: We're already hearing that. I'm glad you emphasized in the intro their agenda versus other agenda. I think that there's a feeling that this government spent a lot of time reacting to unexpected things in its first mandate and didn't actually push the things it wanted to do. And we're seeing it. It was interesting yesterday when he came out of cabinet to distinguish between those things they've got to do now after the new trade deal with United States. They do have to do something on assisted dying because the courts have told them that. But they do really have to do things that they talked about during the election as well. And I guess that's what I'm going to be watching for, but I'm also, all the signs we got yesterday was that the opposition is going to want to talk a lot. So I hope the Liberals like meetings because they're going to be in a lot of them.

MG: Marie, I guess one of the reasons why people might think that there would be maybe a different tone, a more collegial tone in the house is because of what this country has been through, certainly in the last couple of weeks after the tragedy of the Ukrainian airlines flight. And the prime minister and the Liberals have received, I think, fairly good reviews in terms of how they've handled that tragedy and the way that they have pressed Iran. Would that at all lead to a different tone in the house?

MARIE VASTEL: Well, it's always some surprising how quickly they set aside partisanship when there's tragedy. We've seen, unfortunately, a few deaths on the Hill in the past few years. And and in a moment of instant, when the news breaks, they all, you know, become collegial and supportive of each other. It's also surprising how quickly, though, that goes back to partisanship the day after or even sometimes a few hours after. So, yes, the prime minister has been recognised for his efforts to show empathy to the families, to try and get answers to push Iran for answers. But I don't think that will prevent in any way the opposition from defending their own agenda, which they do have, especially if they're looking for an early election, earlier rather than later, given that it's a minority government. And we've already seen that this week with the parties really reuniting in different caucus meetings. We had the block yesterday in Montreal. The NDP is reuniting today. Liberals and Conservatives later this week. And we're already seeing lines of fracture, if I may say, on namely that this new NAFTA deal, it's unclear the prime minister said yesterday he wants to table a bill next Wednesday and get it first thing done when the House resumes. It's unclear if he'll actually get support from opposition parties. And it'll be one of his first tests where he has to convince at least one of the parties to be onboard. And none of them so far have said they will vote yes and two of them, the Bloc and the Conservatives, have said they will try and delay it as much as they can. At the very least, to prove that point and show their voters or their supporters that they are defending their own agenda and their own priorities.

MG: Niigaan Sinclair, do you see any room for optimism or will there be, as Marie says, a lot of point proving.

NIIGAAN SINCLAIR: No, you're only going to see just the ongoing continuance of a minority government, as long as the other parties are kind of in disarray. The Conservative Party, of course, going under a leadership process. And so, you know, they'll continue to stall and continue to allow things to go with the NDP in an identity crisis in terms of what to do with climate change and what to do with carbon tax. And and, of course, the bloc will continue to try to instigate discussions involving Kobach in various different ways. And really, the only reason that you're going to see a great deal of delay and the meetings that we're talking about is because the other parties are in such disarray.

MG: Prime Minister put out that list and we heard a little bit of it and he was speaking at the end of this cabinet retreat. After kind of in and around that there was this conversation the prime minister had with the premier of Manitoba, Brian Pallister. Says he wants to strike a deal with Ottawa on climate change and the climate change plan. Have a listen.

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VOICE: We deserve to be respected for a green record. We do not deserve to be called climate change deniers by anybody. We're prepared to be measured on our green planet. I raised this with the prime minister today, the dialogue will move forward and we'll see where it goes from here.

MG: Niigaan Sinclair, it seems as though Brian Pallister has changed his tune a little bit on the issue of a carbon tax. What's going on there?

NIIGAAN SINCLAIR: Well, I don't know if anyone remembers, but the the oddest couple have ever happened, ashort while ago with Doug Ford and and Justin Trudeau coming out together and being the buddies and the weirdest situation ever happens in minority governments. And this is a similar weird situation. This kind of situation, I think you're going to see over and over again with Conservative premiers who need public support and need to move a little bit towards the middle and then you're seeing a prime minister who also needs to appeal to the West. And so in a situation like this, what you need is you have two people, two politicians, who kind of sorely need the support of each other and coming together on issues like this. However, the ongoing struggles and the carbon tax issue between Western premiers who desperately need to support a major environmental economic projects that involve great issues such as the Trans Mountain extension and the expansion of the oil patch out in northern Alberta and of course, the issue involving with the States out in BC, these ongoing issues are going to bring them together for a short period amount of time and then the true colours will emerge.

MG: Is their strategy behind choosing Winnipeg for the cabinet retreat? I'm sure there is. What do you make of that strategy?

NIIGAAN SINCLAIR: Undoubtedly. I mean, of course, Winnipeg's in the midst of donut gate over here and talking about the situation involving where do we buy donuts in the country and the ethics around doughnuts. But the real issue involving Winnipeg here is this is the probably the softest landing that the prime minister can have in the West. But you're also seeing, Chris. It's a it's a rather large shore of support as the gateway to the west treat here in Winnipeg. It's a safer place to be. But more importantly, you've got spokespeople here who can speak on behalf of the prime minister said the prime minister is not be the face of federal policy. And so you've got him. You know, Jim Carr is being the most obvious example, Chrystia Freeland and and and please people that are generally well accepted here. There's not a lot of demonstration that's going to happen here. And so it's not just an issue of donuts here in Winnipeg. It's an issue of trying to get a message across and try to get an inroads onto the West.

MG: I'd be happy to talk about donuts, but Susan, to Niigaan's point, it seems as though maybe some of the tensions that the prime minister had with other premiers have cooled off a little bit. And it's not just in Manitoba, but also yes in Ontario with Doug Ford. What's going on?

SUSAN DELACOURT: So I thought there was a very interesting moment yesterday when Chrystia Freeland was talking, and unfortunately, she didn't complete her sentence. She started talking about she's now met with all the premiers. She was talking very optimistically and more or less what she was saying was, she said, I told my cabinet colleagues this and then she never really told us what she told her cabinet.

MG: What do you think she told her cabinet colleagues?

SUSAN DELACOURT: I divined from that that she was saying that the premier's bark is is worse than their bite. And that she's been getting generally encouraging or at least cordial meetings with all of them. And it does look like some of that has gone out of it. I don't I don't think we can discount the role of the Australian fires in all of this. Over the last few weeks. I think it has focussed many people's minds on climate change. And I would imagine that premiers do not want to be seen as the Australian politicians and government has been seen as climate deniers. That is definitely not a good look for 2020.

MG: Marie?

MARIE VASTEL: Yeah, I agree. And I think maybe not so much in Alberta or Saskatchewan, but I think in Ontario and Manitoba, in New Brunswick, where there are Conservative premiers. Conservative members and voters also recognise that they they would like to have some sort of an environmental policy. And that's just opposing non-stop faederal carbon tax or a federal carbon pricing is not necessarily the best solution. Susan's right because of Australian wildfires, but we've seen instances here as well with wildfires as well or floodings. And I think there's a recognition we're even seeing it on the federal stage with the federal Conservative leadership race that you can't necessarily have no environmental policy at all in 2020 in Canada. And I think also they also probably these premiers recognise that they have their own their own agenda to defend. And, you know, I think Mr Kenney maybe lately had been getting some flack for decisions that he took back home and perhaps he wanted to refocus on his own electorate rather than fighting with the federal Liberals.

MG: Niigaan, you mentioned what's. In British Columbia and the tensions that are escalating, it seems, between the premier there, John Horgan, and the hereditary chiefs in northern B.C. opposed to the coastal gas link pipeline. Just briefly, what does what's happening there tell you about what we might see in the year ahead when it comes to relations between indigenous and non-indigenous folks in this country?

NIIGAAN SINCLAIR: Well, just to add to what we've previous had said just a second ago, I don't think it can be downplayed the impact of the role of the NDP here in Manitoba, just to emphasize that, but I think Brian Pallister comes to the table a lot because of the resurgence of the NDP here in Manitoba. But in terms of B.C., I think what you're seeing here is you're seeing what's going to be the indication of three different projects throughout Canada in kind of in a stance where the Trudeau Liberals are faced with major environmental decisions, economic projects and the expansion of the oil sands in northern Alberta. That's the situation involving the gas pipeline, which involves the with and of course, in the Trans Mountain Exchange expansion. Both of those. All three of those projects are indicative of a real choice that the Trudeau liberals have in terms of relationships with indigenous peoples going forward. And for the over this next year, I would say actually for the entire term of this minority government by because they're not going to be solved anytime in the future. But as the pressures of the West go onto the federal liberals, indigenous peoples always caught in the middle, it is historically indigenous peoples have always failed and always have been left behind and have always and I wouldn't say indigenous peoples have failed. Canada has failed, indigenous peoples ongoing over and over and over again. And I think this situation involving BMO, for example, that's happened in Vancouver, involving the handcuffing of a grandfather and a granddaughter.

MG: Who were trying to open a bank account.

NIIGAAN SINCLAIR: Trying to open a bank account is a perfect example of a situation, you know, that happens all across the country, just because we're hearing about it more is in Vancouver, in Toronto. But this situation involving indigenous peoples in the treatment of indigenous peoples is there's a lot more public awareness than there ever has been before. And so these situations, which historically would have been just steamrolled over by the federal government, are the occupation, for example, of offices by young indigenous people yesterday in support in the West and you're hearing about it more and as a result, there's a national interest of it more and therefore, the momentum that indigenous peoples are having isn't just at the Supreme Court, which is it's been for three decades, it's now also in the public opinion. And that's having a lot of impact on the federal government.

MG: You want to talk about choices the government has to make, one of those choices, Susan, is about what's the relationship between Canada and China looks like in 2020. There is a new parliamentary committee that's been struck to examine this issue. What can you tell us about that?

SUSAN DELACOURT: I think the most interesting part of that committee meeting for its inaugural session yesterday was the note that the minister Champagne, foreign affairs minister, sent to the committee minding them about tone. It was really interesting. I and Marie would remember this as well before the election even, you didn't see many opposition questions on Canada, China or the the hostages, as we are now calling them, probably rightly, the two Michaels. And I think that was because Conservatives were in government. They understand that you don't want to turn this into a political football and you don't want to turn those two men's fates into a political football. And this is a fraught and interconnected situation.

MG: And yet, ultimately, I mean, this is a political issue. I spoke with Robert Malley on Monday. He's the president and CEO of the International Crisis Group. That's where Michael Kovrig, one of those Michaels works. Have a listen to what Robert Malley had to say about Canada's options when it comes to China.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: I think ultimately there's not much of a choice because China is a growing power and Canada and other countries are going to have to build a strong relationship or a productive relationship with China, but China has to make that job easier. One step it could take would be to release those that it's arbitrarily detained.

MG: No shortage of opinions on this. In terms of what Canada should do. Marie Vastel, Mwhat do you make of what the prime minister said yesterday, rejecting this concept of what people have framed a prisoner exchange to secure the release of Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor?

MARIE VASTEL: I mean, I don't think it's surprising. Minister Freeland or Vice Prime Minister Freeland had been saying the same thing. Minister Champagne, foreign affairs had been saying the same thing. And experts actually saying the same thing, whether it be security experts or ex ambassadors of Canada to China like David Mulroney, who all say you can't give in to China's, "hostage taking policies," because then it would I guess what they say is legitimise that way of doing diplomatic relations. And it's not as simple as saying we will drop an extradition request from the U.S. because then you is essentially put into question your entire legal system and its bases. And so I don't think it was surprising. I think there is a recognition by the government and Susan's right by consider the Conservative Party as well, then there there is not much that they can do. They definitely have the small end of the stick in this important economic relationship and Canada's sort of stuck between the U.S. and China and this collateral damage of of Donald Trump wanting to get and Ms. Meng Wanzhou extradited to the U.S.

MG: So essentially they keep their heads down on this. Is that what you're saying?

MARIE VASTEL: Well, I think they have to as much as they did with dealing with Donald Trump. You don't want to poke the bear and make things worse for two people who are in jail in abhorrent conditions. And so you kind of have to wait and see and try and get support. But unfortunately for the prime minister, the support that he tried to get from other countries, from allies and from Donald Trump in trying to convince China to let these two Michaels go has been not not received, or at least it didn't translate into anything concrete because the prime minister said before Christmas he asked Donald Trump not to sign a trade deal with China as long as the two Michaels were in jail. Well, that deal got signed and no one really defended those two Michaels, did they?

SUSAN DELACOURT: It's interesting too. Yet another cryptic statement from Chrystia Freeland this week was that more is being done behind the scenes than you know. And this is very, very Trudeau government approach like is to to activate activate a bunch of networks and a bunch of people to talk to China. And I think that might have been what she was referring to, but she did hold out some hope that things were going on that we weren't seeing.

MG: Let's spend, sorry you were about to say Niigaan.

NIIGAAN SINCLAIR: Yeah. I think the backdrop of this I mean, I totally agree with everything that's being said. But the backdrop of this is we've got a corona virus, which is now coming out of China. It's going to impact the situation of all the United States and I think that's going to force China and Canada to have to have a conversation, when it likely arrives here.

MG: I just want to spend the remaining few minutes that we have on what's happening with the federal Conservatives. We learned yesterday that Jean Charest, former Quebec premier, is not going to seek the party's leadership. Are you surprised by that Marie?

MARIE VASTEL: I'm surprised in the sense that everyone knew that it was his first and foremost dream to be prime minister of Canada. He never hid it. People here were saying that he would still send Christmas cards to Conservative MPs or senators as kind of making sure that he was still in their good books for the day he would want to come back. But I'm not necessarily surprised, given that the accumulation of signs that we had been getting for the past few weeks where he was said to be mulling over a run for the conservative leadership, but also said it wasn't the party that he used to know. Well, that. But I think it's the echo that he got back. Right. So there's Mr. Harper saying he didn't want him to come or not saying, but behind closed doors, perhaps saying he didn't want him, Mr. Charest, to come and lead his party because he would make it to, quote, unquote, liberal. And we've heard that this will of conservatives that say they want their party to be more progressive again. But I think that Mr. Charest's decision puts into question how much they're willing to be more progressive. Again, because Mr. Charest mentioned it himself, heis pro-carbon pricing. He is pro-gun control. He took a lot of decisions when he was premier of Quebec that would not have been popular with Conservative members and it seemed like an admission that perhaps the party is not willing to go as progressive as he had hoped, as the one he had known in the late 90s. And ex-Senator Michael Fortier, who is a senator and a minister, he also, mulled around at the leadership and he also gave up a few weeks ago saying the same thing.

MG: Speaks to what you've been writing about Susan, which is the old divides in the Conservative Party resurfacing.

SUSAN DELACOURT: Yeah, I was very struck by the images at John Crosby's funeral last Thursday, pardon me, late in the week when you really saw, you know, Brian Mulroney doing the eulogy. Peter Mackay was there as well. But it did feel like that was a party from another era. And Jean Charest's decision, Jean Charest, who was also there at that funeral, does sort of seal the idea that the party now does belong to Harper and him saying it's a different party now too. As Marie is talking about, I think some of those progressive conservatives went liberal. You know, you talked to Liberals, they've got a lot of support from people who used to vote for Brian Mulroney or Bill Davis in Ontario. So Peter Mackay, I think it leaves the field clear for him. He's the only one who can claim, I think right now to have been a progressive conservative. It does leave, Charest's decision leaves the field clear for him to reclaim that, but like Marie, I'm suspicious of whether that party still exists.

MG: Just Niigaan, quickly to run us out.

NIIGAAN SINCLAIR: Absolutely. I agree with Marie and Susan on a whole bunch of different things involving the end of the you know, the one hundredth announcement of the end of the old Conservative Party, the end of Joe Clark conservatism yet again, small c conservatives. But the influence of Jason Kenney, the influence of Pierre Poilievre, the increasing influence of Stephen Harper. I mean, the shadows are very, very long here.

MG: We will watch those shadows as this race continues. It's only the beginning. In the meantime, thank you all once again.

MARIE VASTEL: Thank you.

SUSAN DELACOURT: Thanks Matt.

NIIGAAN SINCLAIR: Thank you.

MG: Niigaan Sinclair is a columnist at the Winnipeg Free Press. Marie Vastel, parliamentary correspondent for Le Devoir. Susan Delacourt, national columnist and Ottawa bureau chief for the Toronto Star. The snow is still deep in Newfoundland and people in St. John's just had a few hours yesterday to get the food and medication they needed. That's when the city temporarily allowed some stores to open up, so that people could stock up. Most businesses ordered closed since early Friday. You may have seen some of the pictures online of the line-ups at grocery stores all the way through the parking lot and out onto the street, even down city streets. The CBC's Terry Roberts was in the midst of it all.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: If anybody needs to go just to the pharmacy, you can let me know.

VOICE 2: I do.

VOICE 1: Just to the pharmacy?

VOICE 2: No I have to get two more things.

VOICE 1: It's just, it's only for the pharmacy only, my life. Lik unless it's emergency.

VOICE 3: Welcome to Blackmarsh. It's been crazy busy here, but we're glad to be able to help out the community in a time of great need.

VOICE 4: And how have people been behaving?

VOICE 3: Excellent. Excellent. Couldn't ask for better and better customers.

VOICE 4: And the mood here today?

VOICE 3: Good. Good. Excellent.

VOICE 4: How well stocked was the store?

VOICE 3: Very well stocked.

VOICE 5: Well, we kind of divided and conquered. Austin got all the frozen food and then he got all the dairy. Sarah got all the chips and then I got all the like vegetables and mac and cheese. I think we were successful.

VOICE 6: Everybody's looking for the rations. Milk ran out pretty quick. There's, I would say there's a little bit of tension in the store, yeah. I heard a lot of swearing.

VOICE 7: Well, it was like madness when we came into the parking lot. There was people lined up on both sides everywhere and trying to get down to the meat coolers to get meat. It was like nothing else. I mean, you just had stayed or you couldn't push people, you couldn't move people. You had stayed behind and wait until you got your turn to get your hands into the cooler to pull out something, right. So, I mean, basically, I think you just grab and go. Like whatever you can get or whatever you can grab, just get back in line as quick as you can and get out the door.

VOICE 8: I would take the car and she would run and grab stuff and just put it in the car and then we got in the one line up. We thought it was the one line up, but it was just for one cash and never dispersed. We're good.

VOICE 4: Did you get everything you need?

VOICE 8: Yes. Yes. Everything we needed today.

VOICE 4: And what's your state of mind?

VOICE 8: I'm so tired. I just need to go home and go to sleep.

VOICE 4: And how have you been coping?

VOICE 9: You don't want to know. I'm just coping. I got my fur babies and were pretty comfortable.

VOICE 4: What about your food? Do you have enough food now to keep it going?

VOICE 9: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Got enough food. Make sure I don't get in lineup anymore. I want to get out of line now as quickly as possible.

MG: All you hear in the background is that beep, beep, beep, beep, beep. The constant beep of the scanner there. Some of the voices of shoppers trying to stock up after the storm in St. John's. We have some photos from the grocery stores, as well as a wild time lapse of a very, very long line. You can find that on Twitter @TheCurrentCBC. Coming up in about 90 seconds, in our new series, The Fix, we take on open concept offices. There are plenty of workers, maybe you're one of them, who hate those open concept offices. They actually decrease face to face interactions, despite the fact that there aren't any walls between you and the person sitting next to you. In our ongoing quest to solve problems, big and small in this world, we bring you the people on a mission to fix the modern open concept office. That's on its way in 90 seconds. Stick around. I'm Matt Galloway and this is The Current.

[Music]

The Fix: Open Concepts

Guests: Annie Bergeron, Ethan Bernstein

MG: Good morning, I'm Matt Galloway. You're listening to The Current. It is the busiest train station in Canada, with more than 200,000 passengers passing through daily, more than 900 trains. One of the biggest changes in the history of Toronto's Union Station is on its way. It's a modernization that passengers may never actually notice, but it's set to usher in a whole new era behind the scenes. Here's our producer, Peter Mitton with more.

SOUNDCLIP

PETER MITTON: Take the train into union from the west and you may notice an old two story brick building just off the tracks by the CN Tower and the Rogers Centre.

VOICE: John Street.

PETER MITTON: This is the John Street Tower and from the outside, it looks like it may have been abandoned, but inside, there's plenty of life.

RYAN D: 24 hours a day, seven days a week. We don't sleep. We barely get to eat.

PETER MITTON: This tower and a couple others like it have controlled all the train traffic in and out of union for nearly a century. And believe it or not, the technology they're using to do that has hardly changed at all in that time.

RYAN D: Oh, my name is Ryan D. and I'm a train movement director. The first time that I saw this, I was a bit amazed that the technology, while old, built in the 1929, commissioned in 1929. It's very old, almost a hundred years, but the people who built it were very skilled. And the technology is terrible, it's rugged and it needs a lot of maintenance, but it works.

PETER MITTON: As trains get closer to Union, sensors on the tracks trigger a bank of transistors from the 1930s and 40s on the first floor of the tower. Ryan's working a bank of more than 150 pulleys and levers, sending signals back out to the trains and directing them onto the right platform by switching the tracks.

RYAN D: Air traffic control is three dimension. I would say it's similar in terms of organization, planning, thinking ahead. Once you line a train down a specific route, it's hard to reverse it. So you need to be thinking ahead to make sure that it's the correct move. And sometimes you've got to think two or three moves ahead because a train may come in. He may depart one way. He may turn around to come back another way. So you've got to be, you've got to know what the train is doing, two, three moves ahead just so you don't get, you don't back yourself into a corner essentially. We have a train on track 2. There's a Kitchener train on the inbound. I've just lined him in. I gave him the 150AGN, which is a eastbound signal. So they'll be coming into the Bathurst plant, across the Bathurst plant and he'll show up on our board here at John Street and then we're going to line him across A1 into track 2 depot.

PETER MITTON: It's a system that's worked for nearly a century now, but it's at capacity and unable to take on more traffic. And so a computerized system is on its way.

RYAN D: So the idea is yeah, the idea is that they're going to have to upgrade the system. I know that other cities such as New York, Chicago, they've once had inner lockers, the same as very similar to this, but they've since upgraded to newer systems. I mean, I welcome the change. It would help and I hope it helps speed up trains and I hope we're able to service more customers.

PETER MITTON: But the interlocker will be missed.

RYAN D: Well, this is predictable. It's very predictable. You know what to expect and when it comes to fixing it, it's the parts need to be fabricated because we don't have them anymore. But once you fabricate it, it's very predictable. You put a part in, you know what it's gonna do. Computer systems can crash, viruses, glitches. We don't have glithces with the interlocker. Sometimes when we work on the interlocker, if you look at your hands after, there's a black residue from the oil, that keeps all the parts moving. Having your hands on a piece of history, it's empowering in a way to know that I'm standing in the busiest tower in North America. It makes me feel good about it.

[Music]

MG: It's like a snapshot from another time. Our producer, Peter Mitton, brought us that from the John Street Tower at Toronto's Union Station. The Metrolinx agency that manages public transportation in the Greater Toronto area says that the new computerized interlock system is now in the design phase, but there is no date yet for when the final lever will be pulled.

[Music]

MG: The news cycle, as you know, can be overwhelming. Conflict in the Middle East, stories about climate change and you don't have to tell me that it all can be frankly depressing, but it's not the whole story. There are people, many, many people, it turns out, who are working on solutions to the problems facing Canada and the world. Our series, The Fix, focuses on the people who are quietly working on ways to improve life for everyone on solutions to problems big and small. Today in The Fix, we focus on the open concept office. That's right, cubicle land.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: Working in an open office means never having a private conversation.

VOICE 2: Yes, I got a habit of guess eavesdropping occasionally. You get to learn things about your colleagues that you might not want to know.

VOICE 3: You know that that one person is going to pull out three ribs of celery at 10:30 and start crunching down on them.

VOICE 4: Your deadlines are different than their deadlines. It just magnifies everything and I get irritated when you hear conversations going on around you and it's like, oh, just shut up for a minute. Please, I gotta think.

MG: Sound familiar? Some office workers in Winnipeg with some common, but oddly specific complaints about the open concept office. They are far from alone. As many as 70 percent of officers are now at least partly open plan. Democratic presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg even says it's time to bring the open plan to the White House. He tweeted that he would turn the East Room into an open office plan, an idea that was roundly mocked because people love to hate the idea of the open concept office. What if open concept offices though, could actually be fixed? Annie Bergeron is the design director at the Toronto offices of Gensler. It's a global architecture and design firm. She's been designing open plan offices and took our producer, Alison Masemann, on a tour of her own office space.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: So we've just enter, actually entered in our large work cafe. We know that the work doesn't happen exclusively at one's desk anymore. And if it did, Starbucks would be empty. We have soft seating, loungier and it's for more casual types of meetings and then we have some boost along the window. People love actually these environments. They're semi private, they're really nice and intimate lunch zones, but they also serve almost as individual workstations during the day or as small meeting spaces. What we're seeing here is an open office area on one side, which has a sit stand workstations, probably 25 workstations, 30 maybe. On the left hand side what we're seeing is actually enclosed spaces indirect proximity to the open spaces and the two are meant to work in concert with each other. For a properly working office you need both.

MG: So how can we fix the open office? Annie Bergeron has come from her office to our studio to talk about this. And Ethan Bernstein is in his office in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is the Edward W. Conard Associate Professor of Leadership and Organizational Behaviour at Harvard Business School. Good morning to you both.

ANNIE BERGERON: Good morning.

ETHAN BERNSTEIN: Good morning.

MG: Annie, we heard that little tour of your office. How would you define what an open office is?

ANNIE BERGERON: I find that actually a little bit of a misnomer because when we design office environments or if you will, workplace ecosystems, the open plan areas are sometimes a part of it, but the most important thing in modern workplaces really table to offer people a choice. You can have open office environments and that's great, but if there are not complemented by other types of environments, such as we describe the large cafe where some of our people like to go and work or some some more enclosed environments either to hold meetings or to be able to go in and do focussed work, then the these open pockets in the plan don't work themselves either. So as long as you give people a lot of choice of where and when to use these spaces and you combine that with first of all, a culture that empowers them to use their these spaces. So the behaviour based right away. Is it okay for you to be somewhere else, then you are destined to work. And also, I think the most important thing is technology. So the technology that you have in your office needs to be the enabler of choice, so that technology needs to be able to move with you and you need to be able to go and use these spaces all over.

MG: What did you call them though? Workplace ecosystems?

ANNIE BERGERON: Yeah, sure.

MG: Why that instead of an open office?

ANNIE BERGERON: Because I think open office is terribly reductive. The picture that's painted is does say, you know, row upon row of workstations and sometimes it's unassigned and, you know, it's noisy and so on. And of course, we heard the acoustic comments in the intro. And I would posit that it would be equally nightmarish, because if if people say that that's what's wrong with offices, I think equally dystopian would be OK. So what about then? Row upon row of enclosed cubes and with a door with perfect acoustics where you are assigned to every single day and you have to go into the door. Well, it's almost as extreme as an example and it equally doesn't work.

MG: What is it that those open offices can do better than those traditional offices, as you mentioned, have the walls in the doors or you're in a cubicle farm and it's just a floor of people with their half wall.

ANNIE BERGERON: What's great about them, for example, for us, so we practice what we preach. It's because we work in studio, in a studio environment, we work in team, we generate content. So we have really rapid access to team-mates and co-workers so we can have just Justin Time collaboration with people by just, you know, turning our heads and discussing with them or turning our chair around. We can also overhear each other, which in the type of work that we do is actually really important because there's a lot of institutional knowledge that get passed with these overheard conversations.

MG: Ethan, how well do you think most open offices are working?

ETHAN BERNSTEIN: Well, it starts with the question of what is an open office, which is what you started. And I loved the technical answer that Annie provided from an architect perspective. That said, I think if you asked the peggers, you know, what is an open office and for that matter, why we use the term open versus closed. If I can see across it, if I can hear across it, if I have to put headphones on to focus in it, then it's an open office, as compared to the closed office. And that may not be a useful set of terminology for design, but that is, I think many times the way employees experience it. And so employees then walk in, hoping that they will achieve better things in these so-called open rather than closed spaces. And one of the things they're hoping for is collaboration. Another thing you're looking for is, is just colleague ship. And then, of course, the organization is thinking about cost as well. And open offices had promised all of these things so far, at least in my research. The open office doesn't deliver on half of those things, so it delivers on cost. But in terms of collaboration, in terms of the interactions we're hoping for, at least our research suggests that you move people from a more closed space to a more open space and you actually have a decline in face to face interactions replaced by electronic communication. That may be good, that may be bad, but that's not been the promise of so-called open spaces where if I can see it and I can hear it, then I'll engage with it face to face.

MG: We heard about the person who at 10:30 every morning brings out the three ribs of celery and crunch, crunch, crunch and drives the person who's sitting next to you around the bend. What are the big complaints that you hear about open offices?

ETHAN BERNSTEIN: Oh, my gosh. Well, so you heard many of the terms already mentioned. So lack of intimacy, lack of privacy. That person who opens the tuna can for lunch, we all get to smell it and you name it. I think I've heard it in terms of complaints. And certainly there has been an awfully interesting, let's say, dialogue online off line about all the ways in which if we could just set norms differently, then I wouldn't have to be subject to the smells, the sounds, the conversations, the looks, the stairs, et cetera, that I get from others. But but most of it you could anticipate if it's a smell I don't want if it's a sound I don't want if it's a sight I don't want if it's someone's interrupting me at a time when it's not productive for me, then it's not serving my needs. And then we get to the question, as any has already suggested, we go the question of these hybrid spaces and does that solve, does that fix the problem?

MG: What is, I mean, the things that people are complaining about, whether it's, you know, the noise or somebody talking to you, or maybe you're distracted because you don't like the smell of the tin of tuna. What does that do to productivity? What have you learned about what open offices have done to productivity? Because there was a promise there.

ETHAN BERNSTEIN: There is a lot of research, not my own research, but research by colleagues here and elsewhere that we don't as human beings do a particular job multitasking and that we, when we subject to interruptions, oftentimes take a long time to get back to the work we were doing. So focus time is important. That's why you're, as Andy suggests, these semi private space to provide intimacy and privacy. Give us what we need to do our work. That's why people will say the best day of the week, the one I get, the day of the week that I get the most work done. That's when I work from home. And so that's what we need. We need the chance to close it off. And the question is, can an open office actually provide that or is it by definition, by nature incapable of doing so.

If you're in a room where you can't hear yourself think, people will just put headphones on Ethan, won't they? And just kind of block themselves out from the rest of the community around them.

ETHAN BERNSTEIN: Norms are powerful. We form norms in every environment in which we work. If you're on the Toronto subway, you're surrounded by a lot of people, but you're probably not talking to many of them or any of them. And so how we form our interactions with others will not just be determined by the architectural space, it's also determined by how we act. And so in that sense, yes, we can put up 4th walls. Dieter called it the fourth wall in an on the stage. We pretend as if the audience isn't there. We have a lot of people out there in the offices that they worked in pretending that to be the case as well. Around the. And it is it just with headphones or what else are people doing? There are curtains. There are there's even apparently out of Japan, they're producing this device that comes around like horse blinders. That covers me. Yes. Narrows your eyes. I'm waiting for my. Actually waiting for my pair to be delivered. But that kind of innovation is actually great. And I think Annie would agree. I'd also like to sort of agree with her. Gensler is the gold standard on this. The this, though, is let's take and understand people's perceptions of the worst face around them. Let's understand their perceptions of what it takes to engage them in how engaged they are. But that's all based on people's perceptions of the space around them. We now live in a world with analytics where we can measure actual interactions. And so I'm not going to disagree with anything. And he just said I'm just simply going to say the interactions don't seem to happen. And whether that's because we don't have the right spaces or we don't have the right norms, I think it's where we try to address the fix to this.

MG: One of the new ways that officers can be laid out is through something called hot desking. What is hot desking Annie?

ANNIE BERGERON: Hot desking pertains to whether or not the space is assigned or not. So do you have a desk that you can go to every day and that's the exact same desk or you know, it? Could you get to go in the office and then go see whatever is open that day and then use that as a workstation?

MG: And so you essentially, you don't have an assigned space. You come to work and you might have sat over here before, but now you're going to sit over here because it's an empty space.

ANNIE BERGERON: Sure. The best way I could describe this is thing back. And when you when you were in university, you went to school. So you might have gone to different classes. You didn't have an assigned desk anywhere. You went where you needed to learn. If you needed to do a heads down work, you went to the library. If you were going to be in social mode, wanted to hang out with friends, you'd go to the cafe.

MG: What's the benefit of that in a workplace?

ANNIE BERGERON: Some worker types do that very, very well. They don't need to be really tethered to a desk necessarily. And but for some other people, this doesn't work at all. So this is not we would never prescribe that as a one size fits all. You actually have to really carefully consider who this works for. This being untethered is actually really freeing for certain types of worker. But at the base of it, we're all human. And a big part of being human is a certain territoriality. And there's a certain enjoyment of things of, you know, either having a physical objects or pictures and so on.

MG: Ethan, how important is that for people to have not just a sense of ownership over the place that they're in, but the ability to put up, you know, a picture of friends or family or have, you know, their favourite collection of whatever they want to have at their space where they work?

ETHAN BERNSTEIN: Or even sit in the seat that they're used to. If we're talking about behaviours, not the behaviours we wish people had, because it would be awfully convenient if we could create a space that was higher utilization and cheaper, which is, by the way, I think the real reason why people do hot testing. But if we think about the behaviours that people naturally fall into, whether it's territoriality, whether it's the ability to put up something that makes you feel at home when you're at work, whether it's any one of a number of reasons why you might like a particular seat or even not want to think about where you're heading when you walk into the office in the morning. Instead, think about the work you have to do and the idea that people will learn to be happy with hot asking. I don't know, give me a hot desk and I'll just work from Starbucks. It would be more pleasant for me probably and closer to home.

ANNIE BERGERON: Or work in the work cafe your work environment that provides you one.

ETHAN BERNSTEIN: Exactly. And so I'll say one more thing about hot desking. This is what most concerns me. I think we're all aligned in wanting to create spaces at work where a diversity of individual will come together and interact in a way that produces better performance, more innovation, greater conversations, conversations, interactions that wouldn't otherwise happen, make us better for joining that organization and being in that space that we would be otherwise. And when you create spaces where people choose where they go, they're going to choose based on their own preferences. And the likelihood is that the other people who choose that same space are people who are more like them, not people who are dissimilar from them. And so to some extent, any kind of choice, hot desking, even hybrid spaces, disenable diversity and inclusion and belongingness rather than enabling it.

MG: You said conversation and that's interesting because we heard those office workers off the top, they were in Winnipeg talking about eavesdropping and how you will never have a private conversation because somebody else in your open space is going to be listening into what you say. How much privacy, Ethan, do you think that workers should feel entitled to at the workplace?

ETHAN BERNSTEIN: So let's define privacy for a moment, or rather, I'm going to add an adjective to that. People want individual privacy for focus work. They want group privacy for teamwork, and then they want access to everyone. But organizational privacy so that they don't want to go beyond the borders of the organization for organizational work. They want all of those things at different times of the day. And the challenge here isn't that we need a certain amount more or a certain amount less or there's a right amount of privacy in the workplace, but rather that we have, say, a thousand individuals each having different needs at different times for individual group and organizational privacy and unless we find some way of making that happen collectively, it doesn't.

ANNIE BERGERON: I just wanted to pick up on one thing that Ethan said where he's convinced that companies are doing this for cost cutting measures, which I will challenge. So we find that when we give a balanced work environment to workers , it's actually not necessarily a reduction in square footage because we have to provide a variety of environments, open and closed and that at the end of the day the square footage per person doesn't necessarily get reduced. And if it does somewhat get reduced, often the amenities that we put in place actually cost more to build.

MG: Ethan, let's end where we began. We started with the sound of people complaining about the open office that they're in and all of the annoyances in being in that space. What's the fix for the open office?

ETHAN BERNSTEIN: Well, I mean I, Annie d may have a huge trust in human nature, I trust data. And when I look out there, I see on aggregate we're getting more and more dense space. We're pushing people tighter and tighter into their spaces. And if Gensler's clients are a first for occupant comfort, somehow occupant comfort is relating to utilization of space and density, which doesn't make sense to me based on what I see out there. I think companies don't hire architectural firms. People do. Very oftentimes the real estate manager is the one who's responsible for that relationship. I'd like to see a lot more HR involved in that senior level conversation and the final decision, not the first one to change space because on the one hand, we can design spaces top down that work for the budget and then use change management to try and make everybody happy in the new space and work well. But I don't see that working well. We have a startup here, there are lots of startups in creating small cubicles or phone booths in spaces, but room for example, you can go out and buy a room for your office without being a real estate manager and it's like a phone booth. If you buy it for $3500, you put it in, it appears one day and the next day everybody wants one. And so I don't see that as a bad thing. That means that our current spaces are unnatural for the work we do and we need to make them natural. And so the fixes rather than doing it top down, let's use these flexible spaces that Annie is providing to experiment. Let's actually give the people the chance to change them around and see where they end up. Because if all these complaints are out there, let's turn that into action rather than trying to change people's minds and behaviours from the top to make them believe that the space we created is actually the best space for them.

MG: Annie Bergeron what's the fix for the open office space?

ANNIE BERGERON: We actually, we do that, Ethan, with a lot of our clients will opt to do pilot spaces. Right, with different mixes. So we'll experiment with different mixes and different types of environments and people report back on what they preferred and so on, so forth. Typically what we'll see though, is that you'll get a group perhaps who favours heads down work, so finance or whatever, and they'll come back and say, oh, you know, I'd like to have more of this type of environment to let him, but more of and close space and so on. And then you'll come back and you'll get the marketing group that was in there is like, this is awesome. So again, we when we go in and we design a we it's very important that we pay attention to who the end user is going to be and try to balance the environment, give people choice, balance an appropriate amount of focus. I think listening, I agree again with Ethan and Ethan, hopefully you'll be heartened to hear this, but HR is actually a big component of, we used to deal with real estate really as the main people that we dealt with when as architects and designers. More and more we're seeing that actually that the teams that we deal with internally on the client side are made up of HR, of operations, of IT, very much IT because of technology. And I would also like to say that, like Ethan, we also believe in data and we are helping our clients do intelligence.Aactually our office in New York is fully wired so that we can understand who uses which spaces when. So that because we're very big again on always containing, always in being beta mode. We've designed an environment where testing it out on ourselves and we're gathering the data and we're seeing which spaces actually are working really well for our employees and which spaces are not working so well. So we're big believers in data too. Absolutely.

MG: We'll hear from listeners about their office space and whether the open office is working for them or not. In meantime, Annie, thank you.

ANNIE BERGERON: Thank you.

MG: And Ethan. Thank you so much.

ETHAN BERNSTEIN: Thank you. It was a pleasure to be with you both.

ANNIE BERGERON: Thanks, Ethan.

MG: Annie Bergeron is the design director at the Toronto offices of Gensler. It's a global architecture and design firm. Ethan Bernstein is the Edward W. Conard Associate Professor of Leadership and Organizational Behavior at Harvard Business School. What do you make of the open office plan? Is it working for you? Do you actually find that there's the opportunity for more collaboration or as Ethan was suggesting, are people just heads down with the headphones on, so that they don't hear the tuna can opening up or the celery chomping next to them? If you have horror stories or stories of good collaboration coming out of your open office, we'd love to hear from you. You can email us at thecurrent@cbc.ca, tweet us @TheCurrentCBC or head to our website cbc.ca/thecurrent and hit the Contact button. This is all part of our series, The Fix. And so while you're there, we'd love to hear from you about your ideas for The Fix. These are people working on solutions for problems big and small. What should we focus on? What should we try to fix? Let us know. Again, go to cbc.ca/thecurrent. That's The Current for today. Stay tuned to CBC Radio One. Q is up next. Canada Reads is back. You can meet the panellists. Find out what books they're defending. That's coming up after the news. If you missed anything on the program, a lot of people talking about our interview yesterday with John Mighton when we were talking about math. You can hear that again or anything that we've done through the CBC Listen app. Download it wherever you find your apps. My name's Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening to The Current. We'll talk to you tomorrow.

[Music: Theme]

The Current Transcript for January 22, 2020

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