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The Current Transcript for March 24, 2021

Host: Matt Galloway

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

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Prologue

ROSEMARY BARTON: It's been an awfully long time since bison were at home in Canada's Rockies. That's all changing, though. In an hour, we hear how North America's largest land mammal is making a comeback in Banff National Park. Also, this morning, the past 12 months have been taxing, to say the least, and our mental health has suffered over the course of rolling lockdowns and isolation. As Louise Bradley prepares to leave her post as president of the Mental Health Commission of Canada, she shares what this year has been like for her and what she hopes our mental health system can learn from the pandemic. But we begin with a devastating new report on femicide in Canada. I'm Rosemary Barton, sitting in for Matt Galloway. You were listening to "The Current".

[Music: Theme]

Third wave of COVID-19 gathering pace in Canada

Guests: Kashif Pirzada, Alex Wong, Craig Jenne

ELIOT HIGGINS The Navaly assassination, they literally confessed to poisoning his underpants. You still get pretty worried then about what's going to be happening to my underpants when I'm out of my hotel room.

MATT GALLOWAY Not a traveller's typical concern, but Eliot Higgins has reason to worry. The founder of the crowdsourced investigative website Bellingcat helped identify the Russian operatives who poisoned the politician alexei Navalny, figured out who was in the crowd that stormed the Capitol building and revealed Syrian war crimes. In 30 minutes, Eliot Higgins explains how in an era of misinformation, he and his followers use the power of the Internet to seek the truth. Also, this morning, when Deb Haaland was sworn in as the U.S. interior secretary, she became the first Native American to hold a cabinet position. And she wore a bit of Canada on that historic day. In an hour, Saskatchewan-born First Nation seamstress Agnes Woodward on the power of a ribbon skirt. Plus, Dance your cares away. Worries for another day.

[Music: "Fraggle Rock theme"]

GROUP: [singing] Let the music play. It's time to Fraggle Rock.

MATT GALLOWAY Canadians of a certain generation may be singing along. Jim Henson's "Fraggle Rock" was a huge kid's TV hit when it aired on CBC in the 1980s. And just when you needed a lift in the midst of this pandemic, Fraggle Rock is coming back. We'll head into the children's TV time machine a little bit later. But as spring takes hold across this country and the vaccines arrive, a cautionary tale, especially for younger Canadians. Good morning. I'm Matt Galloway. And this is "The Current".

WOMAN: The risk for all of us remains high. We're starting to see younger people who are being affected end up in hospital and needing hospital and ICU care, and that is concerning.

MAN: We are in the third wave. It's just a matter of what kind of wave will it be.

WOMAN#2: Now is not the time to let everything go. You have to be really cautious. This thing can run away from us, given the variants in our midst.

MATT GALLOWAY It is perhaps not what you wanted to hear a year into this pandemic, but Canada is stepping into a third wave of COVID-19. So far, medical officers of health in British Columbia and Ontario have made that clear, and case numbers in Alberta and Saskatchewan are increasing cause for concern. With more older people getting vaccinated, the profile of COVID patients being admitted to ICUs is changing. People in their 20s, 30s and 40s are beginning to fill up critical care beds. Kashif Pirzada is an emergency physician at a Toronto hospital. Alex Wong is an infectious disease doctor in Regina, and Craig Jenne is an infectious disease researcher at the University of Calgary. Good morning to you all.

ALL: Good morning,.

MATT GALLOWAY Dr. Pirzada, what are you seeing in your E.R. right now?

KASHIF PIRZADA: Something changed about two weeks ago. I started seeing really young people, people we didn't see in the last wave coming in with really sick, having lung X-rays that show, you know, they look like X-rays of people much older than them, but full of fluid. These people are struggling to breathe. And, yeah, it was just quite shocking to see at that age, like 30s, like people who should be in the prime of their lives are now still in the ICU. I saw them a week and a half ago, still in our ICU, struggling to breathe.

MATT GALLOWAY Who are they? I mean, if you take a look broadly, aside from the age, is there anything that would link maybe the professions, are the frontline workers?

KASHIF PIRZADA: Yes, actually, one of them was was a teacher. Another one worked at... at a restaurant like a Tim Hortons. So they're public-facing. And so they're at more risk of being exposed to people, lots of people who are from who are probably exposed to lots of other people. So that's who the severe cases that I saw.

MATT GALLOWAY Dr. Wong, does that sound familiar in terms of what you would be seeing in Regina?

ALEX WONG: It does there's been a real significant uptick in the volume and also severity of cases that we've been seeing over half of our ICUs and sort of in our designated COVID facility, are filled now with patients very similar to what Dr. Pirzada just described. Younger individuals, you know, people... again, our youngest is in their late-20s. You know, many people in their sort of early to mid-40s who are sort of my age, for example, no comorbidities, no health risks. And again, very similar demographic to what was just described. People who are front-facing, you know, probably picked up COVID-19 in the workplace and, you know, have been symptomatic for days before coming in. And so not getting tested beforehand, coming in and getting identified. And so they present very dramatically. And so that was really cause for concern for us here in Regina as well.

MATT GALLOWAY Aside from the workplace issue, Dr. Wong, what is your understanding as to what would be causing this surge in cases?

ALEX WONG: So here in Regina, we're sort of unfortunately sort of at the vanguard of leading the country, I think, in terms of the proportion of cases which are caused by variants of concern. So about two weeks ago, we... we found out that when we had screened retrospectively all of our cases back in February and early March, we found that almost 80 per cent of our cases were actually caused by variants of concern, which was a complete shock for us. Because normally in the past, at least with the first couple of waves of the pandemic, we'd sort of kind of been behind all of the big provinces like British Columbia, Ontario and Quebec. And now, we find ourselves sort of at the forefront and kind of leading. So I think if the rest of the country wants to see a bit of a preview of what happened, basically when the proportion of variants becomes much higher in your community, we're at about 90 per cent now here in Regina, you know, you can kind of look to us. And so we've been really trying to activate all of our surge planning and, you know, and be ready for a potential surge. And that's obviously why there were some measures announced yesterday by our chief medical health officer as well as our premier, Scott Moe.

MATT GALLOWAY Craig Jenne, you'll forgive me, but I don't remember the second wave of COVID-19 ending. When did this third wave start?

CRAIG JENNE: No, that is a great point. I think most provinces did see a fairly significant drop in cases following Christmas, and that's largely because most provinces went into very severe restrictions leading in to the Christmas holiday. But that gap was pretty short. Here in Alberta, we saw cases drop for about a month, but then quickly turned around once we began to resume any activities in the community. So as soon as things opened up again, cases matched and began to rise quite quickly here.

MATT GALLOWAY And is what you're hearing from the other provinces, from Ontario and from Saskatchewan, is that sort of, you know, resembling the profile of what would be unfolding in Alberta, right now in terms of those COVID case numbers?

CRAIG JENNE: Yeah, unfortunately, it's pretty much the same story here, so we had an update on Monday from Dr. Hinshaw, who had indicated that the vast majority of our intensive care unit admissions are people under 65. So earlier in the pandemic, we had realized that most of the loss of life was in older Canadians or those with significant underlying conditions. That has dramatically shift. And now, the bulk of our ICU and, in fact, the bulk of hospitalizations are in that demographic under the age of 65, who, for the most part across the country, we're not yet vaccinating. So if we're looking for vaccines to get out of this, that is still further down the road for the people that are currently in hospital and in intensive care unit right now.

MATT GALLOWAY Dr. Pirzada, we... I mean, maybe this was our mistake broadly in terms of how we understood this but a lot of the narrative around COVID over the last year or so was that this affected older populations much more severely. And yes, there were cases of people younger who were hit very hard with this, people who unfortunately died, who were younger because of COVID-19. But why is it that now we're seeing younger people more susceptible to COVID?

KASHIF PIRZADA: I think it has to do with the variants. One of the severe cases I saw was confirmed to be the U.K. variant, and that's rampant in the Toronto area now. So these variants seem to hit harder. They seem to hit faster. These people develop severe illness faster. And it hits younger. So that's what we saw and what our colleague saw in Europe, in England a month ago. And we're seeing it again here. And I think this is something we should have been prepared for. And I think we should really take measures to get this under control because we're looking at Brazil right now, which we're seeing scores of younger people are dying in the ICU. So we really need to get a handle on this.

MATT GALLOWAY Let me ask you about those measures in a moment. But you posted up chest scans of patients diagnosed with covid online. Why did you do that?

KASHIF PIRZADA: Honestly, like we were.... I was working with a bunch of colleagues, and we saw a string of these patients. We were I was just really angry, and so were my colleagues, that this is even happening. You know, this whole third wave shouldn't even be happening because we should have learned from the first two waves and just seeing young people with X-rays that look like they belong to people who are in their 80s or 90s, it just... it just made me furious and that we had to get the word out. The public is still, I think, behaving as if the second wave is over. And we thought this would be the best way to get attention on the issue.

MATT GALLOWAY So in the face of that, Dr. Wong, what should be done? I mean, if this is happening now, and... and all of you in various ways have said that this could be prevented or could have been prevented, what should we do now, Dr. Wong?

ALEX WONG: Well, everyone's tired. And, you know, I think we have to kind of be realistic about the fact that the vast majority of the population is honestly just really tired of all this. And, you know, so we are doing as good of a job as we can in terms of vaccinating as many people as we can. And it is rolling out pretty well across the country. I think the challenge now, and this is kind of what we've been really trying to echo and push here in Saskatchewan, is we just need to buy time. We need this last push of realistically, probably somewhere between six to eight weeks, to try to have the general population follow the public health guidance and really respect the fact that this is real. And, you know, honestly, I've struggled to try to understand the best way psychologically to impact people who I think have largely just kind of written all of this off to a large degree. So there have been new restrictions introduced here in Regina. You know, we're going to be locking down sort of indoor dining and all these other pieces. Household bubbles are extremely tight. And we're going to see whether or not that's going to make a difference or not. But honestly, if anybody's got a better idea in terms of how to better message all this to the public, I think this is really the responsibility of our government people and our policymakers and so forth. And I'm not saying they're not doing a good job, but there's been a lot of, again, at times inconsistency of messaging, which has not necessarily been deliberate. And so all of that various inconsistency of messaging is making things a bit more difficult. But now I think we're hearing all of the various chief medical health officers sound the alarm and say, look, this is real. And this time, we have vaccines. So we just need to push probably a little bit longer to get us through this hump. But, you know, a difference of a few weeks, you make a massive difference.

MATT GALLOWAY Craig Jenne, you see what's happening in Europe right now, where Italy and France are under a lockdown of various sorts. The U.K. is still under a lockdown. Is that what we will need is another period of severe restrictions to, you know, to Dr. Wong's point, to buy some time?

CRAIG JENNE: We hope not. But... but unfortunately, that is very likely going to be needed. In Alberta, for example, we... we've opened things up a little bit. But I think, in general, the public has taken those relaxing of restrictions far further than what is actually permitted. And when we've seen very public defiance of public health orders, there's been a lack of enforcement, and I think that further reinforces the message that these guidelines are... are... can be adhered to loosely, and that's become a significant problem now as cases rise and we're trying to change that course. We can keep restrictions in place. We could even bring in new restrictions. And as pointed out by Dr. Wong, it's difficult to get the public to conform or follow those restrictions. And I think here in Alberta we may have already sort of sowed the seeds of... of, you know, discontent with regards to restrictions and may be very difficult in the coming weeks to... to bring in measures to slow this curb.

MATT GALLOWAY Part of that is about, I mean, you've all hinted at this idea of frustration as well, that people are tired. And in the face of that, and perhaps in the face of warmer weather, spring is starting to take hold. Some of those restrictions are starting to be eased, and people are getting out of the bubbles that they had been living in for the last several months, despite higher cases of COVID over the last several weeks. And again, the presence of these variants. Toronto, for example, open patios this weekend. Take a listen to the city's medical officer of health, Dr. Eileen De Villa, who spoke with "Metro Morning" on CBC Radio last week about why she is moving in that direction.

EILEEN DE VILLA: We have to look at what's happening in terms of mental health and wellbeing, and how that contributes to health. And we've certainly seen reports on how mental health and overall mental wellbeing has suffered over the course of the pandemic. As well, we know we have this opportunity with vaccines on the horizon, and as more and more of us are getting vaccine. And finally, we know as well that we've got warmer weather on the horizon and that outdoor activities that allow for people to have a little more latitude are definitely safer than those that happen within indoor contexts. So I think when you look at this all together, there are some reasons to consider, you know, how do we balance all the health concerns in the current environment in a way that best promotes and protects health overall?

MATT GALLOWAY Dr. Pirzada, what do you make of that? I mean, she talks about further in that interview meeting patients where they are. How do you... how do you work that balance out?

KASHIF PIRZADA: Well, she's right. Like, outdoor activities are very safe. I think outdoor patios, outdoor activities are a good thing as well. But I think overall, people are tired. And telling people to do the same thing they've done for the last year is not going to work. I think we should give people hope. Things are different now. We have vaccines. And if the people stick to the one-shot strategy so far, we should have everyone at least should have, every adult should have a shot by the end of June or soon. So what we can do is we should give people a goal. Like, we've got, like my colleague said, two months. All we need is two months, three months to get everyone vaccinated.

MATT GALLOWAY What would you want to see what would you want to see in those two months or three months?

KASHIF PIRZADA: Let's go for zero this time. The warm weather.... we saw a huge dip in cases last year as well. We could eliminate COVID in our communities. Let's go for that. Let's make sure this lockdown is the last lockdown we ever have to go through. Really screen people at the border, make workplaces safe with rapid tests, make schools safe. Remember, we can vaccinate all the adults, but all of our kids won't be vaccinated because they're not approved. So when they start school in the fall, we're going to look at another wave unless we get rid of COVID from our communities by bringing cases to zero. And now we have the tools to do it. We have the warm weather to do it. And we can give Canadians something to really hope for and to work for. And it's possible because Nova Scotia has done it, Australia has done it, and we can do it, too.

MATT GALLOWAY Alex Wong, is that what we need to do as a society is to go for zero, and to do that, I mean, to Dr. Pirzada's point, is going to require a couple further months of sacrifice.

ALEX WONG: I agree, and I'm trying to, you know, here in Saskatchewan again, I was talking with a colleague and a friend of mine last night about good analogies we could use. And so [Matt and Alex chuckle] we're coming up with stuff like, you know, it's the third period, people. Pull it together. Nobody forfeits the game in overtime. You know, things of this sort. The difference now is that there actually is an end point. You know, a year ago, we didn't know, like, what was going to happen and how long this was going to take. We didn't know whether we're going to be locked down for months or weeks or whatever. So I do think that that is going to have to be the messaging. But as... as has been mentioned, you know, it's getting warmer. We kind of survived, you know, the winter. I mean, we all survived in different degrees. But, yeah, that... that is probably the kind of hopeful but realistic messaging that we will need to kind of have from our policymakers and from our public health officials as we really push this final stretch. And the goal is lives here, and we don't want to trade lives. And so, you know, I think what's happening here in southern Saskatchewan will probably end up being what will happen in the majority of the country in some form or another.

MATT GALLOWAY Where there are stronger restrictions, but there are still some ways to get outside and be social?

ALEX WONG: Absolutely. And again, it's been said, outdoors is... outdoors is way, way, way safer. And again, we've managed to get through the winter, thank goodness. So, you know, being outdoors and being social outdoors is definitely a much more safe and reasonable way to be with one another at a time when we really do need to be with one another for our own mental health and wellbeing.

MATT GALLOWAY Craig Jenne, we have increasing numbers of people who are getting vaccinated, and there is yet to be any public health guidance, really, from the federal health agency on what you can do after you get the shot. What does that do in terms of creating, again, a bit of a muddled message?

CRAIG JENNE: No, absolutely. It feeds the frustration. It does not help with... with the idea of COVID exhaustion either. But in many ways, at least in the social media that I have been following with regard to vaccines, it sows doubt as to whether people believe vaccines will be our safe way out of this problem. If... if vaccine numbers are going up and we're not seeing any talk about how this eases restrictions or gets us closer to normal from public health officials, I think the public starts to lose a little faith in how effective vaccines are. And I think that that is a dangerous message. We need to be conveying that the success these have had in jurisdictions where we are seeing 15, 20 per cent of the population vaccinated.

MATT GALLOWAY What... what... what can you do after you get the vaccine?

CRAIG JENNE: So right now, you have to be careful that if you get the vaccine and you've got both shots, you yourself may be protected from severe disease. So the likelihood of you ending up in the hospital has dropped dramatically. But there is still a chance you can transmit that disease to the non-vaccinated people in your social circles. And until those people have the opportunity to be vaccinated, we have to be very cautious of what activities we are encouraging for vaccinated people. We did see guidance from the U.S. CDC where they were able to increase the number of activities, so face-to-face meetings and dining between two vaccinated people. But right now in Canada, that is a very rare occasion that both people will be fully vaccinated. And we need to have that conversation, but provide that, again, hope that as vaccines come up, this is what we will be able to start doing.

MATT GALLOWAY OK, so I want to end on that. We have a minute and a half left, and I'll split it between the three of you. Give us one thing that we can wrap our arms on if we're looking for some hope. Craig Jenne, briefly?

CRAIG JENNE: We are vaccinating. We're vaccinating at a phenomenal pace. And if you would have asked me six months ago if we'd have four approved vaccines in Canada, I don't think we would have been where we are today.

MATT GALLOWAY Dr. Wong, again, spring has sprung, but this is going to be a bracing message for a lot of people. What should they be looking for when it comes to hope?

ALEX WONG: I'll use one of the cheesy messages I said at the beginning. Nobody really forfeits the game in overtime. And we're in overtime now, and we need to push as hard as we can to win the game. And that is going to require a lot of hard work from a lot of people, a bit of sacrifice. But there is an endpoint. It's going to be a few more weeks. And we're nearly there. So please, everybody, just a few more weeks. Follow the guidance, do the right thing and let's get out of this together.

MATT GALLOWAY Dr. Pirzada?

KASHIF PIRZADA: I think, you know, hold fast. We got two months to go, but really look further and let's try to get rid of this from our communities. Let's let's try to live without fear and live freely and work hard and try to go for zero after this third wave is done.

MATT GALLOWAY And you're optimistic, just really briefly, but you're optimistic that that is possible to get to zero? This has been this kind of mythical kind of conversation in this country for many months.

KASHIF PIRZADA: Yeah. If we... if we work hard, we have a summer to do it. We have to make it safe by the fall for our kids. I think we'll have no choice but to go for zero. We have to we have to try.

MATT GALLOWAY I really appreciate speaking with you all. Again, it's a tough message for a lot of people to hear, but it's important to hear where we're at right now. Thank you very much.

ALL: Thank you.

MATT GALLOWAY Dr. Kashif Pirzada is an emergency physician at a Toronto hospital. Dr. Alex Wong, an infectious disease doctor in Regina. And Craig Jenne, an infectious disease researcher at the University of Calgary. Your CBC News is up next. And then,.

WOMAN: Never been to Syria, doesn't speak a word of Arabic and he conducts his profound research from the comfort of his armchair in his home.

MATT GALLOWAY Eliot Higgins was just one man sitting in his armchair, and he used the Internet to prove that war crimes had been committed. He tells me how we can all do the same without leaving our comfortable armchairs. I'm Matt Galloway. You're listening to "The Current". We're back in six minutes. Stay with us.

[Music: Theme]

Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins on crowdsourced investigations

Guest: Eliot Higgins

MATT GALLOWAY: Good morning. I'm Matt Galloway. And you're listening to "The Current".

[Music: Theme]

MATT GALLOWAY: Still to come, it was the first show that HBO ever commissioned. Before "The Sopranos", there was "Fraggle Rock".

MAN: Jim always said that he wanted to do a show about interconnectivity. He wanted to do a show that was about species having to learn to live together. And then seeing that, we realized how we are connected.

MAN#2: And because it was the Muppets, it was had to be goofy, had to be silly.

MATT GALLOWAY: Just as the Muppets are being dusted off for a reboot, we look back at a show that was ahead of its time. But first, what it means to bell the cat.

[Music: Theme]

MATT GALLOWAY: OK, so you have seen a video on Facebook, and it looks like someone walking down the street in Paris. But how do you know that it's actually Paris? Can you see the Eiffel Tower in the background? Have you ever been to France, or are you just assuming that's what it looks like? Eliot Higgins is the founder of Bellingcat. And being sure of that kind of thing is what he does for a living. He and his team traced the missile that shot down Flight MH17 over Ukraine in July of 2014 back to the Russian military. They also exposed war crimes in Syria. And for the most part, they did this using information that anyone could access. Eliot Higgins' new book is called "We Are Bellingcat". Eliot, good morning.

ELIOT HIGGINS: Hi.

MATT GALLOWAY: What is Bellingcat?

ELIOT HIGGINS: So Bellingcat is a collective of investigators both working full-time and also volunteers that use something called online opensource investigation to look at a range of topics from Syrian chemical weapons use to the downing of a Malaysian Airlines Flight 17.

MATT GALLOWAY: This started for you as somebody who was interested in what was happening during the Arab Spring. And you realize that you could prove that a Twitter video was taken in a specific location by using things like Google Maps. I want to talk about how you do this in a moment, but what to you is most interesting and exciting about that ability?

ELIOT HIGGINS: Well, it really gives you an insight into events that are happening across the world that despite, you know, things like YouTube seeming kind of very, you know, unimportant and you useful become the way that these people in these conflict zones and these situations share what's happening with the world. And they want people to see that. They want people to engage. To say, I want some accountability for what's happening here. And I think I was the first person who kind of really realized that you could do that with these videos. That you could find them and piece them together and analyze them and actually find truth about what... things that were happening miles and miles away in completely different countries, and circumstances that often not even the best journalists could reach safely. So it gave a very unique perspective on these conflicts. And then that kind of led me to discover that it could be used in other areas as well. Stuff that's not conflict-related, the environments, other issues, you know, disinformation, you know, all these different areas. Verification through online opensource investigation can be incredibly valuable.

MATT GALLOWAY: What does the name mean, Bellingcat?

ELIOT HIGGINS: Bellingcat comes from a fable that's... it's about a group of mice who are very scared of a huge cat. And they come up with this idea of putting a bell onto the cat's neck, to bell it so they can be warned. But what they don't think about is they don't actually have a plan to do it. So what we're trying to teach people to do is bell the cat.

MATT GALLOWAY: You've used this phrase opensource intelligence a couple of times. What exactly does that mean?

ELIOT HIGGINS: We use term online opensource investigation, which we try to separate from opensource intelligence. Because with opensource intelligence that's very much about creating an intelligence product. But online opensource investigation isn't always just about that. It could be used for, you know, investigating things in a more kind of journalistic sense, or it could be used to produce documents for courts. Where I saw stuff, I used it to kind of win arguments on the Internet because I was not a professional journalist. I was just some guy on the Internet who, you know, had watched these videos following the conflicts in Egypt and Libya and then Syria, and talked about them online like an ordinary person, which involved usually arguing about them. [chuckling] And I wanted to show where this stuff was actually filmed. And that's what I managed to figure out using publicly-available information.

MATT GALLOWAY: You have a motto of identify, verify and amplify. Walk me through how that works, and we'll start to explain exactly how you're doing what you're doing.

ELIOT HIGGINS: So identify is, you know, looking for information that's online. It's the searching for the information, gathering it up. And that can be done in a whole range of ways. A simple Google search, for example, will bring information to you. Next, we verify the information. We find a YouTube video which shows an airstrike in Syria. But how do we know it's Syria? We use processes like geolocation, which I'll come into later, that could show exactly where stuff was filmed. We use ideas like crono-location, figuring out the exact time something was taken by looking at things like the position of the shadows and other details. So that's the kind of verification process. And then, we have the amplified process. And that amplification could be anything from a straightforward blog post, a, you know, court documents, a podcast, TV program. It could be anything because it's based of evidence that has been verified. And because of that, it can have these multiple kind of impacts. This reach to different audiences for different purposes.

MATT GALLOWAY: So walk us through an example of how that would work. Start with Syria, for example, and chemical weapons in Syria.

ELIOT HIGGINS: In Syria, one thing that I started doing when I started my original blog was... before Bellingcat, was look at the weapons being used in the conflict in Syria. You know, no one knew exactly, for example, what weapons the rebels actually had. Did they have tanks, or did they just have machine guns? I thought that's a question I want to know the answer to because I'm interested in what's going on. Is it feasible they could, you know, actually defeat Assad, or are they just a bunch of guys with a few machine guns? So by watching these videos in Syria, I gathered them all together into playlists, and I could find lots of different weapons being used. And I wrote about that. But when it came to chemical weapons in Syria, the August 21st, 2013 sarin attack was very important because this is where, you know, over a thousand people are believed to have died in a huge attack. It led to international response. Syria joining the Chemical Weapons Convention, giving up its weapons. But there were lots of questions about who was responsible? For example, there were videos that were posted online from where these attacks happened, showed victims, showed, you know, buildings that were damaged. But it also showed the munitions. And these munitions looked very unusual. They looked almost DIY. So some people started saying, well, the rebels did it with their DIY weaponry. But I was one of the only people who had been watching all the videos coming from Syria, you know, as many as possible, and looking at these weapons and had seen them being used before, even in a previous chemical attack that's now actually subject to a French court case earlier in August that used the same missiles seemingly loaded with sarin. And I was the only person who kind of realized this [chuckling] because I was the only person who was watching these videos in a systematic fashion. And that revealed that there was a link between the Syrian government and the chemical attacks that no one else had come across.

MATT GALLOWAY: You raised the issue of geolocation before. Explain what that is for people who don't understand that and how that fits into the work that you're doing?

ELIOT HIGGINS: So to explain my first geolocation is probably a good place to start. I was on the Guardian Middle East Live blog comments, a newspaper in the U.K., arguing about videos coming from Libya about whether they were real or not. And I thought, I know I look at a satellite image. And there's a video from a place called Teji in Libya, or so the rebels said. And it showed a town with a mosque and a dome and a minaret and a wide road. So I went to satellite imagery and found the imagery of Teji, which is anyone could find in five seconds. I looked at the town. I could see there was this thick black road running through the middle. I thought, I'll look there. It was just like the road that was in the video. It had two lanes and it was had a divider in the middle. So I followed that down. And it came to a mosque with a dome and minaret, just like the one in the video. And I watched the video again and looked at the walls and the buildings around it and other details that were smaller, but they were visible in the satellite imagery. Then I looked at things like the shadows cast by utility poles on the satellite imagery and matched those to the poles in the video. And I realized this had to be the location. There was no way this could be anywhere else in the world. And that is really at the heart of geolocation. It's watching videos really carefully, and then playing spot the difference on satellite imagery until you're really sure it's the same location. And anyone can do that.

MATT GALLOWAY: Anyone can do that?

ELIOT HIGGINS: Absolutely. It's.. I mean, we do lots of training workshops. People have taught themselves to do it. I taught myself to do it. And I was just some admin work in an office in Leicester. And there's plenty of people like me, I'm sure. So if I can do it, I'm sure there's lots of people who can do it. And part of Bellingcat is building that community of people who can do it, and they aren't necessarily from professional backgrounds.

MATT GALLOWAY: I mean, anybody can do it if they have the time, or is there a specific skill set that you need to be able to interpret that information?

ELIOT HIGGINS: Time is definitely a factor. So it's perseverance because this involves often digging through a lot of material. But that perseverance often comes because people are genuinely interested in knowing more. They aren't interested in winning arguments about which side is the best in a civil war. They actually want to understand what this actually means. Is this evidence of a war crime? Is this thing actually something that builds your understanding of what's happening? Or is it something that's untrue that you can also discover and share? And you need to want to be part of a community because that's really where the strength of opensource investigation comes from.

MATT GALLOWAY: How many people are part of the Bellingcat community now?

ELIOT HIGGINS: It's a complicated question. I mean, we have 20 staff members. Then we have a few dozen volunteers who are kind of our core volunteers. Then we have kind of broader contributors, which might be a couple of hundreds. Then we have our kind of engaged Internet community, which is thousands. And then we have our just broader Internet community, which is, you know, 300,000 followers.

MATT GALLOWAY: In the book, you try to define what it is that you're doing. Do you consider yourself a journalist, and do you consider the work that you're doing journalism?

ELIOT HIGGINS: Journalism is kind of one of the outcomes of what we sometimes do. I think we're, first, we're investigators. And really, it's then about the amplify stage that I was speaking about earlier, where that could be an act of journalism, it could be a collaboration of journalists, or we might put something together for a court or, you know, those kind of ideas. So for us, it's always about what the evidence says. So wherever we go, it's not what people are telling us. It's not what witnesses are saying. It's what the verifiable evidence can actually say. I think a big part of what we're doing is the accountability. It's the person on the ground who took that video in the first place. Who took that photograph. They didn't do it for fun. They did it because they want accountability. And we, in a sense, have a way to actually make that happen. I mean, we work not just with journalism organizations, but, you know, I'm on the ICC's Technology Advisory Board. They're really interested in how you use this evidence in the criminal cases at the International Criminal Court. I've weirdly, even though I'm an amateur, I found myself kind of at the front of this field. And it's quite a scary place to be because behind you, you've got like the International Criminal Court, the U.N., like New York Times, who really are interested in this stuff as well. And that means we always kind of really have to reach really high standards because in the end, everyone's looking at us to see what's happening next in opensource investigation. And what I want it to be next is that it professionalizes but still engages as many people as possible.

MATT GALLOWAY: They're looking at you, but they're also citing it, which is really interesting. I mean, whether it's MH17 or the Skirpals, those are stories that... that you broke open, but then, traditional if I can put it that way, media outlets end up citing you. Take a listen to this.

REPORTER: Investigators from the website Bellingcat-dot-com claimed to have put together a mass of evidence pinpointing the origins of a specific Russian-made missile launcher, firing a so-called Buk missile that it claims was used to shoot down Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17.

MATT GALLOWAY: So you published the first report about the origins of that missile launcher in November of 2014. And then four years later,.

HEATHER HISCOX Investigators who were looking at the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 back in 2014 say this morning they have definitive proof the airliner was shot down by a Russian army missile system.

MATT GALLOWAY: Given that, what do traditional newsrooms and intelligence services have to learn from the work that you're doing?

ELIOT HIGGINS: So I always say when I'm talking to news organizations that are interested in this is they've got to treat opensource investigation not as an add-on to the journalist, but something that you have to have a team working on. And this can be very difficult for small newsrooms. So there I say, look at people you can collaborate with, like Bellingcat. And I think often there the problem is you say that to them, and they're so used to having scoops and exclusives that they don't even know what that might look like. But we've worked with more and more news organizations directly on opensource investigations, combining it with their more traditional way of doing investigation and also being able to take it to their platform. So for me, if you can afford it, like The New York Times and the BBC have, build your opensource investigation team because they can do really tremendous work.

MATT GALLOWAY: I was going to say, is your sense that that those traditional news sites would see what you're doing as complementary or competition generally?

ELIOT HIGGINS: I mean, the experience we've had is always seen as complementary.

MATT GALLOWAY: You've said a couple of times you're just an amateur. I mean, what do you mean by that, that you're just an amateur?

ELIOT HIGGINS: I'm in the weird position of basically figuring this stuff out for the first time. It's something that's so important it can be used for evidence. It just touch so many different fields that, like journalists and people, are human rights NGOs all treat it as like a slightly different thing. And I just find myself a kind of the centre of that, having grown kind of the first really big online opensource investigation kind of websites. This is unique because we now have a massive online information from social media, from satellite maps. It's just everything you can imagine on the Internet. And I think Bellingcat and kind of my work was the first where that was really turned into a process that could be used, focussed on opensource investigation and really doing the absolute maximum you could do with it. And because of that, I always feel like I'm an amateur because I don't know. I'm always learning. I mean, that's great. I'm always learning some new tricks and a new technique. And it is always new. So I always feel like I can't lecture people [laughing] on what I'm doing because I just figured it out. But, you know, with MH17, I mean, that was a huge catalyst for everything around opensource investigation because we had that official police investigation saying everything Bellingcat has been saying using this ideology is correct. And I think that really brought us to the attention of people who want to take this seriously and use it as evidence in courts for war crimes.

MATT GALLOWAY: I mean, you talk about MH17. You traced responsibility for this all the way back to... to Vladimir Putin himself. So what does something like in that story, or if you're talking about chemical weapons in Syria, what does justice look like? What does... what does accountability look like for you having done the work that you're doing?

ELIOT HIGGINS: It's complicated because, you know, we've worked on a variety of stories, but Syria and Russia and MH17, in particular, have been our biggest stories. And you don't feel like there's much accountability there. It Sometimes seems very slow. I mean, with Syria, it's been years and terrible crimes committed, chemical weapons attacks. But there is some justice slowly happening. There's these prosecutions that are happening in Germany. There's just been someone from the regime jailed in Germany for his crimes. We've seen cases in France with chemical weapon attacks where they're now taking the Syrian government to court, and individuals as well involved with that. So it's a slow process, but that's also why this investigation work is very important and archiving this material has become a kind of bigger part of that. On the other hand, I mean, sometimes you can have victories. We investigated a horrific video that we discovered had come from Cameroon showing soldiers executing two women and two very young children at a roadside. That started with the Cameroonian government saying it was fake news and denying everything. Then that led to with a joint investigation with the BBC, Amnesty International and others to the Cameroon government jailing those people for those murders. And that only happened because we did that investigation. There was no impetus for the Cameroonians to investigate that. And that's real change.

MATT GALLOWAY: Do you worry about the cost of that real change? I mean, you're documenting stories of people who are being poisoned. You're getting the attention of, you know, the ICC, but presumably, you're also getting the attention of those that you are helping to investigate. So do you worry about your own safety?

ELIOT HIGGINS: It's always been an escalation from really about 2015 onwards when we made that first big connection between Russia and Ukraine. It started off first, really kind of with the loyal Russian state media criticizing us, saying, who are these people? They're just amateurs. Then that escalated to a very sophisticated hack trying to get us through Proton Mail that was much more targeted. We identified about t0 targets in that. We've had Russian officials tell all kinds of lies about us. We've had the Russian ambassador to the U.K. saying that we're part of the British establishment working for the pay of the British intelligence services. And then, of course, now with exposing these kind of Russian assassinations like the Skripal case, you know, I'm in contact with the counter-terrorism police who gave me a kind of lecture on my safety and you know, what not to do to avoid being assassinated. And those kind of nice --

MATT GALLOWAY: Do you take that stuff seriously?

ELIOT HIGGINS: Yeah. I mean, you have to. It's like now when I travel, unfortunately for me, I can no longer have any food in hotels because I can't be sure who's been handling that food. And I can't... I avoid restaurants a lot now as well. And, yeah, and I if I go out to eat and stay anywhere, I will have to get food from a local supermarket, like pack a sandwich or something like that, [laughing] and eat it in my hotel room all alone. It's a sad life for me, unfortunately. Now I can't get room service, but I just have to be careful. And when we hear, of course, with the Navalny assassination, you know, they poisoned, you know, we... they literally confessed to poisoning his underpants. You start getting really worried then about what's going to be happening to my underpants when I'm out of my hotel room?

MATT GALLOWAY: Do your own laundry, I suppose! [chuckling].

ELIOT HIGGINS: Yeah, that's the problem.

MATT GALLOWAY: You mentioned the disinformation and some of the heat that you would get from Russian officials. Take a listen to this. This was broadcast on RT, Russian state broadcasting.

REPORTER: Eliot Higgins, who runs the website Bellingcat, [static shock] is a laid-off admin worker who made a name for himself by analyzing weapons used in the Syrian conflict.

WOMAN: We've never been to Syria, doesn't speak a word of Arabic. And he conducts his profound research from the comfort of his armchair in his home.

MATT GALLOWAY: Sitting in your armchair at home, why should the people that are part of Bellingcat be trusted?

ELIOT HIGGINS: I just want to say that was Yasmin Green from Google Ideas. She was actually introducing me at an event. And she actually said some really nice stuff after that. [both laughing] And I always feel terrible when that clip is played. Like, she hates me or something. But I don't want that impression for anyone. We are constantly being questioned about whether or not we're part of the, you know, MI5 or MI6 or the CIA or, you know, whatever it may be. I mean, one thing we can talk to is, for example, the transparency of our process. We aren't saying we've had this information leaked to us, or we've got the secret source who's telling us this thing. We're saying here's the link to the YouTube video. Here's a satellite. Here's the analysis. We're also transparent about how we're governed. You know, we are [an organization] in the Netherlands. That means that we have like a board of directors, we have external audits. We have to say who funds us - publishing those documents online. So we try and be as transparent as possible to our structure as well. And I would just ask those people who say we've been passing information, just click the links in our articles and actually look at the stuff we're posting.

MATT GALLOWAY: You were talking about social media earlier. I mean, we see on social media, this is not, you know, groundbreaking news by any stretch. But I mean, it ends up becoming this vehicle for mass disinformation and misinformation. But it is, as well, I mean, in many ways, the bread and butter of what you do, which is trying to get the truth out or telling the truth. What do you think social media has done when it comes to the state of democracy and the state of people actually knowing what's true and what is a lie?

ELIOT HIGGINS: In a sense, it's not really social media's fault. It's the fault of, I think, how through a loss of faith in mainstream authority, be it the media or politicians or even doctors. People go online, and they look for alternatives, which is fine. It's good to look to alternatives sometimes. But sometimes, they join communities where these alternatives get a bit weird. Like you might be someone who thinks, you know, you're worried about vaccines. You go and join these health, alternative health, communities and they're concerned as well. Some people are concerned because they think vaccines can make you really ill anyway, not just the one that you're worried about with coronavirus. And some say you should never get vaccinated. Some say it's not just the vaccines you have to worry about. It's the microchips Bill Gates is putting in those vaccines. Now, at one point, you might say, naw, this isn't for me, this is a load of rubbish. But there's going to be a number of people who go all the way to the microchips, basically. And they see everyone outside of that as either stupid or the enemy, especially the governments, especially the medias. For me, it's really looking about these systems that may be broken, that may not work, that may disappoint us a lot. You know, even betray us. And I should say, how do we actually make this better? How do we not turn this into just people screaming at each other on the Internet?

MATT GALLOWAY: And are you optimistic then that, I mean, in the face of an avalanche, it seems like daily of disinformation and misinformation, that the work that you're doing could lead to a greater sense of people being able to... to do that legwork on their own, to click on the link and as you say, check the conclusions for themselves?

ELIOT HIGGINS: I think it's something we have to work on. We can't just sit back and think it will happen. I think the forces of kind of disinformation they grow naturally on the Internet because there's all these kind of battle lines that have been drawn. You know, you have the kind of people who say that after the invasion of Iraq in 2003, we can't trust the governments. They're bad, and I'm in opposition to them. That these doctors have let me down - we can't trust them. Those people have drawn those battle lines. And once those battle lines are kind of crossed, it's very hard to pull those people out of those communities. For me, it's working with, for example, 16 to 18-year-olds to show them how to do investigations. Not just just like, oh, here's you qualification in, you know, journalism or whatever we call it. Say as human beings, as people, as a 16-year-old, you have the same power and access to information that I, as Eliot Higgins, have. You can go online and look at these videos and photographs. You can look at stuff in your local area that bothers you, that you care about, that you don't like and say, actually, can I investigate this using the same evidence approach that we use at Bellingcat to investigate all these huge issues? Because this isn't just about, you know, what's happening in Syria or Russia or fighting disinformation. It's about actually making a positive change at all levels of society. And I think if we can actually reach out and work at that level, you then have people who have engaged positively. And they know they engage positively online with other communities they can hopefully affect change instead of going to communities where they're just screaming at you for not agreeing about every single thing they're saying. And I think I'd rather live in a society where that's happening than one where we're just mad at each other all the time on the Internet.

MATT GALLOWAY: Eliot Higgins, it's great to talk to you about the work that you're doing. Thank you very much.

ELIOT HIGGINS: Thank you.

MATT GALLOWAY: A real pleasure. Thanks.

ELIOT HIGGINS: Thanks.

MATT GALLOWAY: Eliot Higgins is the founder of the investigative website Bellingcat, and the author of "We Are Bellingcat". Well, coming up after your regional update.

WOMAN: History is being made yet again.

WOMAN#2: Thank you.

WOMAN: Here we are. Let's take the picture! [chuckling].

MATT GALLOWAY: That picture of the swearing in of Deb Haaland as the first Native American to be in a cabinet position in the United States will go down in American history. But front and centre is a piece of clothing with a compelling Canadian back story. You'll hear about it coming up in 90 seconds. I'm Matt Galloway. And this is "The Current" on CBC Radio One.

Agnes Woodward on the ribbon skirt she created for Deb Haaland, U.S.

Guest: Agnes Woodward

MATT GALLOWAY: Hi. I'm Matt Galloway. And you're listening to "The Current".

KAMALA HARRIS: And that I will well and faithfully.

DEB HAALAND That I will well and faithfully,.

KAMALA HARRIS: Discharge the duties.

DEB HAALAND Discharge the duties.

KAMALA HARRIS: Of the office upon which I am about to enter.

DEB HAALAND The office upon which I am about to enter.

KAMALA HARRIS: So help me God.

DEB HAALAND So help me God.

KAMALA HARRIS: Congratulations.

MATT GALLOWAY: U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris swearing in Deb Haaland as the new secretary of the interior last week. In that moment, Deb Haaland became the first Native American to hold a cabinet position. But it wasn't just her job title that caught people's attention. The traditional Indigenous ribbon skirt that she wore for the occasion also stood out. That skirt was handmade by Saskatchewan-born Agnes Woodward, who is in New Town, North Dakota. Agnes. Good morning.

AGNES WOODWARD: Good morning.

MATT GALLOWAY: This is a neat story. Tell me a little bit about the skirt, describe the ribbon skirt that you created for Secretary Deb Haaland. What does it look like?

AGNES WOODWARD: Well, the ribbon skirt that I created was specifically to what she wanted represented on, you know, her most highest day. And it is a royal blue material. The material I used was a very soft cotton that's almost silky. And it was adorned with layers of ribbons that, you know, mimic the rainbow. I had a few extra colours just to give it more layers of ribbon. And then on the front, there's appliqué design with a cornstalk, two butterflies and a few four-pointed stars.

MATT GALLOWAY: It's beautiful.

AGNES WOODWARD: Thank you.

MATT GALLOWAY: You wrote that, that her wearing that ribbon skirt in that moment made you feel seen. Tell me more about that. Why did you feel seen in that moment?

AGNES WOODWARD: Well, being raised in Saskatchewan, you know, I had a lot of experiences with racism, different forms of discrimination. And as a child, that really affected my self-esteem and who I am. And I was also raised by parents who were, you know, activists that travelled a lot to different areas of the country, that stood with Indigenous people. And growing up, sometimes it felt like no matter how much we as a people fought for our right to be heard, for our right to be at, you know, tables making decisions on our behalf, it felt like we were often not... not heard. And even living in the United States, there's so many issues that I've seen the same outcome, like at Standing Rock. You know, at... the mascot names that it took a long time of people pushing and fighting for... for change, for people to listen to our voice, that certain things don't represent us, let us represent ourselves. Let us tell you how to represent us. So for Deb Haaland to be in, you know, one of the most highest positions in this country, in front of the world, standing in a ribbon skirt, that represents so much for our people. It's definitely a moment that obviously we've been seeing. You know, I was never expecting the media interviews and attention garnered, [matt chuckles] but it definitely shows that, you know, we... we are visible, and she represents all of us.

MATT GALLOWAY: Did you grow up wearing those skirts and Saskatchewan?

AGNES WOODWARD: Yes, I did. I had to wear skirts to, you know, different like ceremonies and round dances. I had to wear them to powwows. But I have an aunt who was really big on that traditional protocol. And so even to graduations, Christmas dinners, family gatherings, I still had to wear... wear the skirts. And I didn't always... like my family jokes about having to wrestle me into a skirt because it's so much. And the only reason I hated it was because I carried so much shame from the racism and the bad experiences. You know, I always felt like if I... if I dress like I was Native more, then I'm asking for negative attention, you know? And that really affected my self-esteem as a child and as a young... a young woman.

MATT GALLOWAY: Given that, when did you start to to make ribbon skirts?

AGNES WOODWARD: So in 2000... and about six and seven, I started attending ceremonies with my husband. And I mean, part of traditional protocol is to wear long skirts. And, of course, that was familiar to me. And then, once I had my sewing machine and I started learning how to sew, I started creating ribbon skirts for myself and my daughters. And there was a time after a ceremony we're about to go into a grocery store, me and my kids, and I was going to take off my ribbon and skirt before I went in. And with my children watching me, you know, in that moment, I really realized, like, what am I doing right now? Am I going to teach my children to carry on being ashamed of, you know, traditional protocols, traditional clothing, things like that? And so it really changed my perspective on how I have to carry myself. And I just started making, you know, more ribbon skirts, putting on my, like Snapchat. And community members where I live would, you know, place orders with me. And it honestly just grew... grew from there. And the more skirts that I've made, the better my skills have become.

MATT GALLOWAY: That's really powerful, though, that moment of standing outside and knowing that if you... if you kind of almost, you know, bought into that shame that you were feeling from... from years before that, that would pass a message along to your kids.

AGNES WOODWARD: Absolutely.

MATT GALLOWAY: You've also used the skirts and the skirts that you have been making to bring more attention to the missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, and two-spirit movement. Tell me more about that and that connection?

AGNES WOODWARD: I have an aunt who was murdered in 1982, which was the year that I was born. And this was on the outskirts of Calgary where she was found. And growing up, you know, I didn't know a whole lot about my family's experience. And I think that was a way of protecting me as a child. And I didn't... I knew that my mom was adopted, but I didn't know anything about the Sixties Scoop. You know, I knew that my last name, Woodward, came from an adopted family, and I had no idea, you know, the details about that until I was an adult. And so, as an adult, I really began my own healing journey and trying to understand so much of my childhood. And a big part of that has been understanding both my father, who was a residential school survivor, and my mother, who was a Sixties Scoop survivor, how difficult their experiences were. And from that, just the questions, you know, came about my family. And I heard all these stories about my aunt. And before the national enquiry, my mother began going to different meetings and roundtable discussions. She was a part of Families for Justice. And afterwards, she would talk with me on the phone and tell me how difficult it was, how heavy it was, how all of her emotions are just sitting, you know, on the top of her chest, in her throat. And it's like a heavy feeling that she couldn't, you know, get rid of. And it just broke my heart. And I started hearing all these stories about my aunt and what really happened. And it was really difficult, you know, it was a lot of family history to learn. And I've always been taught that you do what you can with what you have. And sometimes that's not anything monetary. Sometimes it might just be your kindness or your good words. And so, in my mind, I was living in Indiana. I wasn't able to be with my mom. What I could do was create a skirt for her, a way to empower her and a way to kind of wrap my own comfort around my mother. And so through lots of thought, you know, we came up with a design, you know, in consultation with my mother and we came up with this just design that represents her and her sisters, our family's story. And I sent it to her. And after I posted it, I just had so many women inboxing me asking me for the same design. And with my family's permission, I started making it. And every single time I made one and posted it on my page, reecreeations, I would have, you know, so many more requests for the same skirt. And I've now made like over 300. That skirt has been in front of Congress twice when discussing important laws that affect Indigenous women like Savannah's Act. It's really made a big, big impact. People say it's an iconic statement within.

MATT GALLOWAY: It's really a pleasure to talk to you about the work that you're doing, and the weight that this skirt has, not just in your own life, but in the lives of women and girls, not just here in Canada, but around the world. Agnes, thank you very much. And congratulations. What a story. And I think there'll be a lot of people now who will be inboxing, you trying to get attention, and getting your skirts after the showcase that you have received in the wake of Deb Haaland's swearing in. Thank you very much.

AGNES WOODWARD: Thank you.

MATT GALLOWAY: Agnes Woodward is a Plains Cree dressmaker from the Kawacatoose First Nation in Saskatchewan who now lives in Newtown, North Dakota. This is "The Current" on CBC Radio One. My name is Matt Galloway. If you grew up in this country in the 1980s, you might remember a world of creatures, Fraggles, Doozers, Gorgs, silly creatures. "Fraggle Rock" was a co-production between the CBC in Canada and broadcasters around the world. The fraggles, you may have heard, are getting a reboot. And like the original, the show is being made in Canada. The first series filmed in Toronto. This time, the magic is happening in Calgary. Fraggle Rock featured the Muppets of Jim Henson. And even today, it is considered by some people to be one of the most creative kids programs of all time. So with a new version in the works, we thought we'd take a look back at the original "Fraggle Rock" with some of its creators.

LARRY MIRKIN: I always say as much fun as you would think it would be to produce "Fraggle Rock", it was way more fun than that.

[Music: "Down At Fraggle Rock" ]

LARRY MIRKIN I'm Larry Mirkin. I am the producer of "Fraggle Rock". I came in at Episode 13 and produced the rest of the series up to Episode 96.

[Music: "Down At Fraggle Rock"]

GROUP: [singing] Let the music play. It's time to Fraggle Rock

LARRY MIRKIN Peter Warden ran what was called Henson International Television, which was the distribution arm of... of Henson's, what Peter says to Jim is, you know, we could do a children's show that was puppets, but we could... we could make it really work by having these... the real world in local markets, so that any kid watching it would think that it was happening closer to them.

PUPPET: Look at this, Sprocket. Peach pie, apple pie, blueberry pie. [fades down]

LARRY MIRKIN And you could dub all the puppet voices in different languages, but this is what you could do. Now, this is a business idea. So what does Jim Henson doing with this idea? So he brings these... these other people together with him and he says, do you think we could do a show that would stop war?

PUPPET: What are you doing? You're so against me hitting Schimmelfinney with a pie in the face? You'd... you'd leave me, but you don't even, like, shimmelfinney.

WOMAN: So he takes this distribution idea, this deal idea, and turns it into, yeah, we're stopping war because it's going to be children all over the world. I mean, what else would we do? Hello! [laughing]

MAN: Jim always said that he wanted to do a show about interconnectivity. He wanted to do a show that was about species having to learn to live together. And how that was connected in a way that they probably didn't understand. But we, the audience, would see that. And in seeing that, take that away, and we realized how we are connected.

LARRY MIRKIN And because it was this... this particular group of people and it was the Muppets, it was had to be goofy, had to be silly to do this, you couldn't do this in a serious kind of way. And the idea was then they would create these... these different species wake up in the morning. The Fraggles are just tjoy incarnate, you know? And they're very musical people. They, you know, one of the reasons the songs work so well, I think, is because they naturally burst into song. One of the things with songs and in shows is that you... you know, the audience says, why are they suddenly singing, right. But because the music is built into who they are, it's easy.... it's easy to do. And they play all day. They play all day. You can have as many birthdays as you wanted. You know, any year. You know, they were definitely all about playing.

PUPPET: Do you really enjoy your 30-minute workweek?

PUPPET#2: Oh, yes. Why, sometimes I put in two, maybe three minutes of overtime just for fun.

LARRY MIRKIN: The Doozers, they're an industrious sort. They don't appear to play at all, although they get huge pleasure from what they do. They build, build, build, build all these structures.

PUPPET: It's not all fun and games. Hey, just look at the Doozers.

SEVERAL PUPPETS: Yeah!

PROBABLY A DOOZER: Tedium and drudgery are good for the soul.

LARRY MIRKIN: And then then you had the Gorgs. And the Gorgs were, you know, thought of themselves as the ruler of the universe. Of course, they're the only three people we ever seen in... in their universe. So they don't really seem to have any subjects.

PROBABLY A GORG: Halt! Who goes there?

A GORG QUEEN: What do you mean who goes there?

GORG KING: It's your mother and father, the king and queen.

LARRY MIRKIN The Gorgs appeal to me because they were funny. And I love the sort of pseudo royalty of them, the mockery of monarchy. You know, I'm an immigrant, kid of an immigrant. You know, my parents grew up in the British Raj. You know, I got attitudes about the about royalty.

PROBABLY A GORG: Know the password.

GORG KING: But you said, you knew the password!

PROBABLY A GORG: Oh, you said you knew the password was yesterday's password.

SUGITH VARUGHESE I'm Sugith Varughese, and I wrote every word of every draft of ten episodes of "Fraggle Rock". Jim had been coming to Toronto since the late 60s because all those early Muppet specials like "The Musician Muppets of Breman" and all those shows, they were shot in that studio, which was VTR studios on Scollard Street, downtown Toronto. And so I think when Fraggle Rock happened, you realize that "Fraggle Rock" was the very first TV show that HBO commissioned. Long before "The Sopranos", "Fraggle Rock" was HBO's first TV series. And as part of that deal, Jim went to the CBC and CBC became a coproducer with HBO and Henson, and that was who made the show.

TRISH LEEPER: Henson had come to Toronto before Fraggle many times to do all kinds of little specials. He worked with CBC before. And he loved working in Canada, and knew well the people he wanted on his crew when he came to Toronto to do "Fraggle Rock". My name's Trish Leeper, and I played Ma Gorg on the series "Fraggle Rock".

MA GORG: You know that this is Kissing Rock where your father and I first... a... a.... well.

TRISH LEEPER: It was like a family, like being part of an orchestra. And I tell you, Jim Henson was a wonderful conductor, you know? He just had this very sort of... very similar to what you saw in Kermit the Frog. You know, [doing a Kermit voice] mmm, can we have another puppeteer over here. It was all very kind of calm. We were all having fun. He let us have fun. But there was a kind of underlying you know, when the conductor taps the baton or whatever, we're all picking up our instruments and ready to go. Sometimes you'd go to Henson and say, do you have any notes? And he'd go, hmm, make it better! [chuckle] You know, he didn't have to tell you. You know, there was that wonderful respect. I think that kind of spirit always existed. And I think that was Jim's genius. Some people called him the man with the whim of steel. [laughing].

SUGITH VARUGHESE When we did the table read, if you do a table read now, and I've done them four shows that I'm on, the only people who show up are the cast and the producers and the network. When we did our table reads, every single member of the crew, the gaffe or the lighting, people who don't have to be there on a Monday morning, would show up for the table reads. We had a we had an audience of 50 people hearing the table reads. And... and I always asked, howcome you guys show for this? He says, we wouldn't miss it. We wouldn't miss it. I mean, that was the kind of show we were... we were working on.

JOCELIN STEVENSON: I'm Jocelin Stevenson, and I worked on the original series of "Fraggle Rock" from the very, very beginning as a co-creator and then as a writer. I have my personal favourite, which was Red and The Minstrels. And that's my personal favourite, because you have to understand, I spent much of the first couple series feeling like I probably really wasn't very good at this. But Red and The Minstrels was the first script that I... that I wrote that I felt really said what I wanted to say. And it was about Red finding her song. And also, The Minstrels, the Cantus, was played by Jim Henson.

CANTUS: I fear I'm losing my implacable calm.

RED I've never had a song.

CANTUS: You've always had a song!

JOCELIN STEVENSON: Plus, you know, the endless quest to get really strong female characters who can also be goofy. I mean, the Muppets were often worried about making female characters seem, quote/unquote, stupid because that wouldn't fly, right? But there's... no, she just had her obsessions. She was incredibly... she's incredibly enthusiastic. She absolutely thinks she can do whatever she, you know, I can do, and I can do it on my own. There was one song that was that was her singing I could do it on my own.

[Music: Red's song]

RED [singing] Well, I can paint and I can't sew and I can sweep it clean. I can pop the popcorn, I can peel the pop machine. I can even be the diving queen. I can do it on my own.

GROUP: Do it, do it. On your onw

RED I can do it.

GROUP: Do it, do it. On your own.

JOCELIN STEVENSON: She was a great character. [laughing] So... so it was... my favourite bit about all the about all of that it was... it was just it was such a great collaboration between writer and performer.

TRISH LEEPER: Puppetry can be very challenging, especially when the puppet weighs a lot. Being inside the Ma Gorg costume was not the easiest thing. My head alone I think was about fifteen pounds. I would go to the chiropractor at the end of the week, and I'd lose about an inch in height. She'd sort of have to realign my spine. Seriously, not easy with all that gear. It was not an empty head there, no, no. But hey, we were young and crazy.

SUGITH VARUGHESE We never thought of it as a kid show, by the way. None of us did. Never. Even Jim didn't think of it as a kid show. We... We really thought of it as a, you know, as a... As a show that was... That was for families, perhaps. But... And, in fact, because it was for families, it had to cater to sort of the adult viewer as much as it had to cater to the kids viewer. You know, when I watched that show with kids later on, I realized we could have... We could have had the Fraggles jumping up and down for half an hour and done nothing else, and the kids would watch. But the adults were watching my scenes with the Gorgs, having, you know, sort of flirting with each other and really enjoying that, which went right over the heads of any kids watching.

GORG KING: Ekk gad! what's all this?

A GORG QUEEN: I have to bring my make up. After all, this is our second honeymoon, isn't it, Duckykins!

GORG KING: Oh, bring anything you want.

SUGITH VARUGHESE And I'll tell you a story, like after the first season, the show did get some profile. And we had the demand, in a way, from these big shot educators who are having their conference in Toronto to be able to speak to the writers to explain how to write television for children. Because obviously, we weren't, you know, complying with the proper way. And... and Jim told us that they were going to go, but he didn't want any of the writers to go. So... so Jim played the politics very well. He went, genuflected before these educational pubas and we ignored whatever they had to say.

BOOBER It's not rutabaga. Its doomsday gumbo. I knew it was too good to be true.

GOBO Boober, your soup may have been bad, but it's not going to kill you.

BOOBER I'm telling you, this soup will lead to death and destruction.

LARRY MIRKIN In Canada, at the CBC, we're the national broadcaster. So we're all over the country. And we... we would get about two-and-a-half-million to two-point-seven-million a week. And we were airing opposite "60 Minutes" on Sunday nights, OK? So sometimes, we would beat "60 Minutes", which was a big deal. We didn't always do that, but it was a big deal. And we weren't paying... I sound like I paid a lot of attention to these things, but we really didn't. But why I'm bringing it up is that the what we call the Fragile consciousness was much greater in Canada because of the CBC than it was, you know, in the United States. And so it took a lot longer for that to happen. And subsequent broadcasters got involved with, you know, after HBO finished with the show and all that. But Canadians... and, you nknow, Canadians loved the show. It just was a hit from the beginning.

JOCELIN STEVENSON: We ended up doing what did we do? Ninety-six episodes. And... and we we could have done more. But Jim wanted to stop while we were still, you know, he didn't want it to be a series that had to end because nobody was watching anymore. And so I think it says much more about it that it's 35 years later, or 40 years later now, and we're doing another version. I think that's pretty... I mean, because we didn't know. It could have just died. When we were doing it, we had no idea really how popular it was. I mean, we were, you know, we were doing international versions. And all I remember just... we just had to get through it. [laughing] I don't remeber. And then we were going to keep doing it until they stopped us.

SUGITH VARUGHESE I loved the world that "Fraggle Rock" was because I feel that that show really did change the world, or had the potential to change the world. And 35 years later, it feels like we need that show even more than we did 35 years ago. I mean, the issues that that show tackled, we tackled nuclear war. It tackled racism. It tackled inequality. It tackled so many things in a way that you didn't know they were tackling.

PUPPET: You mean, you shrunk yourself because you wanted to be friends with Fraggles?!

PUPPET#2: No, I did Ivana Tree leaf, and it made me smile so that I could see the universe in a way I never did before.

GORG KING: What balderdash.

SUGITH VARUGHESE And and it felt like the embrace of by the world, really, of the show, was a sign of change and progress. And, you know, we've seen that that change and progress hasn't been sustained, and we're maybe in bigger trouble than we were 35 years ago. And so I I hope the reboot does a little bit towards fixing that. I just know that it was deeper than from the outside in. It was a show that worked from the inside out. And I think if the reboot is going to be successful, it has to have that in place. And I hope it is.

JOCELIN STEVENSON: I think people really want that kind of big vision now. I mean, with everything that's happening in the world, being positive, you know, hopeful vision. I'm, you know, I'm vamping here. But that's what I think. And I think it's also that, you know, the people that are redoing it, they grew up on it. And I mean, there are some major fans. It's hugely important to them. And I can't tell you how much that I means. It's just so meaningful to me that they want this world to live on.

[Music: Down At Fraggle Rock].

MATT GALLOWAY: If there's any justice, that song will be stuck in your head for the rest of the day. The "Fraggle Rock" reboot is filming in Calgary, and back on your screens soon. That is it for "The Current" for this Wednesday morning. Coming up next on CBC Radio One, it's "q". You'll want to stay tuned to hear the musical genius John Batiste, bandleader for "The Late Show With Stephen Colbert". He has a brilliant new album out. It's called "We Are". He talks about wanting to restore our faith in humanity. This is the record, in many ways, that we need right now in this moment. And you'll hear why. John Batiste joins Tom Power, coming up in just a few moments on CBC Radio One. I'm Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening to "The Current". Take care. And we'll talk to you Tomorrow.

[Music: Theme]

March 24, 2021 Episode Transcript

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