Ideas - How an IDEAS episode on traffic changed a doctor's practice

Episode Date: December 1, 2025

Not many people like to think about traffic but Joanna Oda says this very topic on IDEAS in 2005 inspired her as an ER doctor. "It helped me understand how things that make sense for you as an individual contribute to a collective problem." And she adds, she often finds herself quoting the episode to others: "fixing traffic congestion with bigger roads is like fixing obesity with bigger pants. It might feel better in that moment but we actually haven't solved the root of the problem."This episode is part of a week-long celebration to mark our 60th anniversary. IDEAS is giving the mic to listeners like Oda to share their stories on how our show led to life-altering moments. 

This program is brought to you in part by Spex Savers. Every day, your eyes go through a lot. Squinting at screens, driving into the bright sun, reading in dim light, even late-night drives. That's why regular eye exams are so important. At Spec Savers, every standard eye exam includes an advanced OCT 3D eye scan, technology that helps independent optometrists detect eye and health conditions at their earliest stages. Take care of your eyes. Book your eye exam at Specsavers today from just $99, including an OCT scan.

Book at specksavers.cavers.caps are provided by independent optometrists. Prices may vary by location. Visit specksavers.cavers.cai to learn more. This is a CBC podcast. Ah, now, when did I first become aware of ideas? It's been around for so long that it's simply part of what I listen to. It's astonishing to say these words out loud. But ideas has been on the air now for 60 years. I actually think 60 years sounds really young, considering what a timeless aura ideas has. I hear 60 years, and I think this is just the beginning. You're just getting your groove on. Our groove began in 1965, a pivotal year for Canada and Canadian identity.

Under this flag, may our youth find new inspiration for loyalty to Canada. Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson introduces the new Canadian flag in February, 1965. God bless Canada. With its new flag flying, the country was also primed to hear something new. Ideas, scientific ideas. Literary ideas. Ideas from the social sciences. Ideas from the fine arts. Good ideas?

The best ideas you'll hear tonight. CBC Radio's The Best Ideas You'll Hear Tonight went to air in late October, 1965. Soon after, the name was shortened to what it's been known as ever since. Ideas. There really hasn't been a subject. I haven't heard ideas cover. Sometimes it'll be on technology,

sometimes it'll be on sociology, sometimes it'll be on music, sometimes it'll be on books, and this gives you a full hour to really delve down into a concept. And I think that's what I love about it. To celebrate our six decades, we're presenting a special series of programs featuring listeners whose lives have been shaped in some profound way by ideas. I wonder, you know, what my life would have been like if I hadn't heard that first episode in early January 1994. It's so profoundly shifted my thinking that if I had, had not heard it, I think my career and my life would have taken a completely different turn.

We'll also feature Massey Lecturers from the past 10 years. My first impression of the program was that it was extremely intelligent because the people who spoke on it were so articulate and so knowledgeable about such extraordinary things. I never even dreamt of being one of them. I just admired them. The current media landscape where there's such pressure to respond quickly, I think is a very dangerous one because there are lots of things that really need. to be thought about, considered, talked about, debated, and cannot be solved in a 30-second sound clip. We live in confusing, tumultuous times. Providing a space to zoom out and consider the

bigger picture is really valuable. Let's take a breath. Let's think about how we got here, what ideas are circulating in this moment, and why. It's so important to have a space to do that. And CBC Ideas does that. Right from the outset, Ideas was aimed at listeners who, to use the promotional language from the 60s, just enjoyed thinking. Tomorrow, literary night on ideas, a new series, novels and morals, and follows up with samples of some other ideas that were current around 1749. Ideas looks back two centuries, 23 hours from now. Over the years, Ideas has had various hosts, and each one of them was in their own. own way, definitive.

This is Ken Haslam, your host for Ideas from CBC, Toronto. Tonight, the second Tuesday... Ken Haslam was the host of ideas for its first 10 years. Are we living in a runaway world? But first, stress and science. Then, in the mid-70s, listeners began hearing a new voice at the start of each episode. Good evening. I'm Russ Germain, and this is Ideas.

And in 1983, new era began. Good evening, I'm Lister Sinclair, and this is Ideas on the Rebellions of 1837. Host Lister Sinclair marked a new phase in the program's evolution when documentaries became its signature format. Louis-Joseph Papineau is addressing a rally in the village of Saint-Scholestique. The British Parliament has stolen your land. Then, in 1999, a longtime contributor to to the show became its next host. I'm Paul Kennedy. Welcome to Ideas.

Paul Kennedy produced countless more documentaries for ideas and was the host of the show for 20 years until 2019. I came up to Fort Providence in July of 1977 to make my first ideas show. And what better time for me to introduce myself. I'm Nala Ayyad, and I couldn't be prouder to welcome you to ideas. and to the first in a series of special episodes marking 60 years of mind-expanding, head-turning, and award-winning programming.

So when I heard that Ideas was celebrating its 60th anniversary, I knew I had to write into the show. When we put out the call asking for stories about how the program has touched your lives, the response was as diverse and eclectic as ideas itself. Greetings ideas. When I got my first smartphone in 2017 on the capacity to listen to World Radio, I tuned into CBC where I heard ideas and was hugely impressed.

For me, ideas has always been a form of education and entertainment all in one. I've been a consistent listener for 30 years. Listening to ideas became really important to me during the pandemic when I moved into a place where I was living on my own. And ideas brought such interesting voices, concepts that it really took me out of this tiny little bachelor and connected me to a much bigger conversation. Ideas. Challenges me, excites me, confronts me, but it's always there with something new and different

and leaving me scratching my head often with thoughts and questions. Even when I don't expect it to be something that will interest me, I read about them like, ah, that's not going to do it for me. And then it's fascinating. It exposes me to all sorts of things that I would never have thought of to come across on my own. As we say in Ireland, Gomorrah two on Cade, may you live to be a hundred. Connection, curiosity. These are a few of the reasons why our listeners listen, listen, even if it hasn't always been easy for them.

I grew up in a CBC dead zone in Dundas, Ontario. The rest of Dundas could get CBC radio, but for some reason, in my house, if we turned on the radio, we would just get fuzz. If you parked the car and listen to the car radio, you could actually listen to CBC fine. So I had never heard CBC radio until I went to university at McMaster and was living out of that little dead zone. And I had about a 20 to 40 minute commute, depending on the traffic. And often I was driving home around 9 o'clock, and I would turn on CBC, and that's, I would just, you know, serendipitously hear whatever Ideas episode was on. Ideas producer Dave Riddell steers through some ways of understanding why traffic.

My name is Joanna Oda. I'm an associate medical officer of health in Halton region, which means I'm a public health physician. And the ideas episode that still resonates with me the most is Traffic Jam from 2005. One study for the greater Toronto area says that traffic congestion... It influenced my career choice in public health by neatly describing how traffic congestion is a product of individually rational choices that are collectively self-defeating. And that episode in particular, I still quote it to people. It helped me understand how things that make sense for you as an individual contribute to a collective problem. it helped me see this normal phenomenon of traffic as, you know, when you're driving down the highway, you can't see all the cars behind you. You only see the cars whizzing past you in that moment. But every time you hit a break, somebody else has got to hit a break behind you and then the person behind you hits the break behind you and so on and so forth. And it echoes behind us and we have no idea that 300 meters behind us 15 minutes later, there's going to be a traffic jam. And this episode,

introduced me to this idea that me and my little car could have a bigger impact. The one quote from Traffic Jam that I quote to people is fixing traffic congestion with bigger roads is like fixing obesity with bigger pants. There are other examples of apparently benevolent intervention backfiring. One is adding capacity by building more roads. It might relieve congestion initially. In 2005, Dave Riddell produced that document. on the still timely and still aggravating topic, traffic.

And it's said that coping with traffic by building more roads is like battling the obesity epidemic by issuing everyone bigger pants. The biggest flaw in classic 1950s, 1960s era traffic management planning is a tendency to think in parametric terms, that is to assume that all variables are fixed. This is Joe Heath of the University of Toronto. The way people drive, the number of vehicles on the road, the behavior of drivers, that all of that is sort of,

fixed by some immutable law, and therefore think about what's going to happen if, oh, we put a traffic light here or move this intersection or do something like that, assuming all variables are constant. But in fact, traffic is highly, highly dynamic, which, of course, traffic managers now understand this quite clearly, but it took a long time coming. And in particular, the most dynamic variable in the system is the individual driver, because the individual driver is playing a game and is highly adaptive and highly responsive to circumstances. People are really clever in traffic.

You know, people who commute the same trip every single day of their lives have an enormous amount of time to think about how best and how fast, you know, how to get home faster and so forth. And so they have an amazing ability to kind of exploit any kind of loophole that's there in the system. So people are highly adaptive. And that often sort of defeats the purpose of benevolent interventions in traffic planning. The example that I, that strikes me most clearly is when I move from Montreal to Toronto, one of the first things I noticed is that in Montreal at an intersection, when one, when your light turns, red, the other people going the other direction, instantly their light becomes green. So the reason you don't run red lights in Montreal is you're going to get clipped. And when I moved to Toronto, what I discovered is that there's this little pause,

and I've been told that a lot of Canadian cities are like this, where your light turns red, and the other people's light also stays red for a while. So there's a little three, four second pause where all the lights are red. This is presumably designed to reduce accidents. But I think it's had exactly the opposite effect, namely that every single driver in Toronto knows that yellow doesn't really mean yellow anymore because you've also got the pause on red. You've got a few seconds.

So, you know, they may teach you officially that, you know, if you're waiting to turn left, as soon as the light goes yellow, proceed. If you do that in Toronto, you're dead because everybody runs yellow. Because they know that, you know, yellow doesn't really mean yellow. You've got an extra couple seconds.

And as a result, you get more people running red lights and you get left-hand-turning drivers cannot turn left until the light actually turns red. So you get an erosion in respect for the red light. Ideas listener, Dr. Joanna Oda. I remember listening to that clip, and it was one of these sort of realizations where nobody should have to tell you this, but somebody does. The people in the other cars are people. They aren't just cars.

They aren't just trucks or buses. There are people in there who are making choices and decisions. The car is not a private space. The car is actually a public space. And when you're on the road, you're in a very public space. And so when I'm trying to get home, when I'm sort of, you know, why aren't you moving when I think you should move, I don't know what's going on in that person's head. Like they might see something that I can't see, they might see a pedestrian or, you know, somebody else who's trying to make a turn that I can't see. But there's a person there and they're trying to get home.

And I remember after this episode, you know, when I was doing that commute from my work back home and, you know, wondering where was everybody going? Are they coming home from a late shift? Are they going somewhere to visit a sick relative? It gave me a lot more sympathy for the people in there. And the other thing, again, that I love about this clip is the idea of benevolent planning. One of the principles of public health is to design the world in a way that makes the healthy choice, the easy choice. So you might make your water dispenser free and easily available. It's on each floor, whereas the pop machine is only in one location and you have to pay for the pop.

things like that. And I think this was a really, again, sort of eye-opening of like you can design the world in a lot of different ways, thinking you've thought of everything. But you're still dealing with people. And people will make individual choices and they're very clever and they don't necessarily share the same goal as your benevolent planning. And so you're constantly wrestling with that. And be prepared to be surprised by the impact of what you thought your benevolent design was going to achieve. So here's an example from that episode of what I was just talking about. Traffic is a window on to society. It tells us about our economic geography, the shape of our cities, what kind of housing we value, how we organize our education and commerce and recreation and just about anything else we do. I'm Peter Roth. I'm an assistant professor in the Department of Public Health. Sciences and a researcher at the Alberta Center of Injury Control and Research at the University

of Alberta in Edmonton. I almost had a heart attack looking in my rear view mirror. I saw myself the next car back, looking in the rear view mirror, about to have a heart attack. I said, damn, this traffic jam, how I hate to be late. What we do in traffic is really who we are, and that is when we drive, we take with us all the various features of our lives. Our mode of interaction reflects what we think of other people, the kind of responsibility that we have of ourselves and of other people.

And that is a reflection of how we interact in the community. You're driving along and somebody aggressively swings out into the parking lane next to you, guns it and then cuts it in front of you. And 10 seconds later you're at the next stoplight. And there's the person who did it, sitting bumper to bumper right in front of you. And so you have to be zan about traffic in general simply because you can't beat the system.

So you might as well just relax and be courteous to other drivers. In other words, it's cooperative. Now, I used to think that I was cool running around on fossil fuel until I saw what I was doing was driving down the road to ruin. The concepts that were raised in this episode

influenced my choice of specialty. So when I was in medical school and seeing patients in the clinic or in the ER or wherever I happened to be, the first question that popped into my head is like, why are you here? Like, what could we have done so that you were not here right now? And the best example I can think of this was I saw a little girl with an asthma attack and being a diligent medical student. I read everything that was in the system at the time. And according to a respirologist, you know, her asthma is actually not that bad. it's just that her mother smokes, her father smokes, and her grandmother smokes. And so when my preceptor, the doctor in charge, asked me, so what should we do for this little girl who's having an asthma attack?

I said, oh, well, we need to get a smoking cessation program for all of the adults in her life. We really got to get them off cigarettes. And they're like, yes, but what do we need to do for her right now? And I was like, well, we can treat her as much as we want, but she's going to be right back here next month if we don't get her parents. And they're like, Joanna, you need to treat her right now. So, you know, she needs puffers and she was getting all those. I wasn't ignoring. But it did traffic jammed help me realize that, you know, when we think we see an immediate problem,

there's too much traffic on the street. It takes too long to get from point A to point B. Maybe the obvious solution, bigger roads, faster speed limits, those obvious solutions probably are just going to mean more cars and more traffic. And it might work in the first few weeks, but then more people are going to come. And, you know, really the better solution is how can we get people moving in a different way? And so when I think about societal challenges like, you know, overcrowded ERs or people who can't find a family doctor, the solution, you know, there's a part of it that is, you know, more doctors. There's a part of it that is more ERs, but actually some of it is like, how do we get people from needing an ER in the first place? and are there ways that we could go upstream to prevent that from happening?

And Traffic Jam really helped me see that because, again, traffic is something that I experienced every day and never really thought about. And this made me think about it. Hello and welcome to Notions. The program with topics not good enough to be ideas. Time now to take a quick trip back to the fall of 1990. I'm your host, Abendigo Winkler, and today I'm wearing edible argyle socks. That's when another program on CBC Radio decided to get in on our action. Tonight on notions, a special report on a rather mysterious, unexplained phenomenon

observed on the prairies. Strange circular rings have appeared in farmer's fields. There is no known explanation for these rings. Notions Investigates. The Royal Canadian Air Farse developed a light-hearted version of ideas called Notions. One of the most publicized sites of the unusual concentric rings is a farm near Tweedsmuir, Saskatchewan. Comedian Don Ferguson took on the role of then-host Lister Sinclair. I'm standing on the front porch now of the main house of the lazy, doily farm. Let's ring the doorbell.

Yes? Oh my goodness! As I live and breathe, look who it is! Leander! Leander! Come and see who's given us a ring! Honestly, Gilbert, I'm right in the middle of a cinnamon stick and... Oh, it's him!

Oh, we've seen you on the radio. That's right. I'm not really sure what they were... I'm not really sure what they were doing, but they were... I think it was a satire. When I listened to the Lister Sinclair, was very serious. I mean, his voice was serious, the ideas were very serious.

I saw it as a take-off on some of the seriousness. It was more light-hearted approach to thoughts, I guess. Tell me about the rings. The rings. The rings are in the wheat field. Yes, they're always in the wheat field. You know, never in the barley. Are they never, never in the flax or the canola or the hay? And heaven forbid if they ever showed up in my gladiola. Okay, my name is John Tibbitts. I've been the president of Connoissell College. 1987 and I am present living in Kitchener, Ontario. It's too bad they didn't appear in the onion field, isn't it? Why is that?

Then we'd have onion rings. Oh! In the end, you're such a tease. Yes, yes. Wouldn't have to go to the ANW anymore. My first time I had listened to the Royal Canadian Air Fire, it was a program called Notions, thoughts that are not quite ideas. At first, I thought it was a bit ridiculous, but I became bemused over time and thought this is very interesting.

I thought it was a very interesting way to look at ideas, especially from a management point of view in my new job as President of Conno Suga College. Do you think these rings have been caused by spaceships? Oh, there's no doubt in my mind. Everywhere, everywhere. How can you be sure? Well, you know, there was an unidentified flying object the last time that Mr. Mulroney chap visited here. He's the prime minister, you know. In fact, I saw it on the television news.

Just as Mr. Mulrooney's plane landed in Saskatoon, he was surrounded by hundreds of people, and they were all shouting, you, F.O. Well, this is... I mean, it's funny how this happened. Honestly, this just intuitively, in one meeting, you know, I'm 43 years of age, and I'm in this meeting,

I'm surrounded by these people, and I brought this out, and they just looked at me, you know. And then a couple of them started to smile, And then next thing, you know, wow, okay, let's do this. I started off at Connistoga as the president. I'd never been a CEO. I was in an institution that didn't have a big reputation.

It had a lot of potential. Some people were calling it Coconut College. It had 2,000 students. And the board hired me because they wanted me to move the place ahead and a whole number of fronts, academic, administrative. But I found when I went in there, there were a lot of employees who were older than me and more experienced than me, and it was hard to move things ahead. You know, I'll give you an example of one.

Like, we had declining enrollments in engineering programs, and we had declining applications. You know, I remember some of the old guys, well, you know, we've got to market. We just have to market this. We've got to do a better job. but marketing, and then I said, well, maybe, let's just throw out some notions. And people just looked at me, and then I started explaining it. And it lightened the mood. And it allowed some of the people, because in any group, it doesn't matter,

management, whatever, there's always dominant players. And people that are less dominant have a tendency to back away. I said, look, let's just throw out some notions. These aren't really ideas. What are some of the notions you have? And I saw a change in the atmosphere. right away. And people started throwing out, well, thoughts that weren't quite ideas, I guess. But we moved to a solution. And it turned out, we developed a foundation program, a one-year

program, and then we raised the admission standards for the three years. And it became a big thing. We eventually end up with engineering degrees. We have an undergraduate engineering school. But it started from that. People felt at ease because they weren't really going to get beaten up on a notion. It wasn't really an idea. So I don't sound silly, but it changed the culture in the institution. At first, I mean, I'm sure some of the older long-serving employees thought I was, perhaps out to lunch, but over time, I think people realized that this was a way to allow everyone to try to put out their ideas. Does that make sense? And I think, especially with the environment we have,

it becomes more and more important to be able to explore notions and take risks in your thinking. I mean, I look at what's going on in some countries. I won't mention any, but, I mean, you can't disagree. I do it now, even in personal situations, because my wife died about four years ago, and if I was dating someone,

I might say, I have some notions about where we might go for dinner. What do you think? That's a better way to operate. Because you might be allowed to go to another dinner sometime if you do that. Here's a notion. You're listening to Ideas and to the first of a series of special programs to mark our 60th anniversary. I'm Nala Ayyid. This program is brought to you in part by Speck Savers.

Every day, your eyes go through a lot. Squinting at screens, driving into the bright sun, reading in dim light, even late-night drives. That's why regular eyes. eye exams are so important. At Specsavers, every standard eye exam includes an advanced OCT 3D eye scan, technology that helps independent optometrists detect eye and health conditions at their earliest stages. Take care of your eyes. Book your eye exam at Specsavers today from just $99, including an OCT scan. Book at Spexsavers.com.cairists. Prices are provided by independent optometrists. Prices may vary by location. Visit specksavers.caver's to learn more.

I'm Suresh Das. I've spent my career writing about the local favorites that make Canada's food scene truly unique. into a chili. Woo! Yeah, don't get you. From vibrant street food to comforting traditional dishes. The most important ingredients in geloff rice, low. To innovative, personal twists.

Butter chicken lasagna. Butter chicken lasagna. That's what made it all happen. I believe every bite tells a story. Now, I want to share those stories with you. New series, Locals Welcome, with Suresh Das. Watch free on CBC Gem. Ideas has covered a vast range of topics over the past six decades.

From Darwin to Dante to Dungeons and Dragons, we pride ourselves on the breadth and depth of the discussions and documentaries we produce. And in the middle of all these ideas and notions, we never know, we can't actually know, when any one particular episode will stop a listener in their tracks and change the course of their life completely. But it does happen. The ideas program that really changed my view of the world aired in early January 1994. And I can remember it like it was yesterday. I was attending a meeting with a group of borrowers. I was working for a not-for-profit based in Lockport, Nova Scotia. I lived in Liverpool, and I was coming back after a meeting with this group of self-employed people

who were trying to get access to some credit. And I was driving back and started listening to a program produced by David Cayley called community on its counterfeits featuring the ideas of John McKnight. Contemporary Western societies have been characterized until recently by a relentless growth in social services. Demands for such services now far exceed the capacities of public budgets, resulting in what is widely recognized as the crisis of the welfare state. But the typical response has been a policy debate

that focuses on setting ceilings or streamlining services. The fact that social services monopolize the definition of welfare is still not questioned. My name is Gord Cunningham. I live in Antigna in Nova Scotia, and I remember just being so locked in as I was driving that when I got home to Liverpool from Lockport, I pulled into the driveway, and there must have been 30 minutes left in the episode, and they ended up staying in the driveway, you know, for the rest, and that was it for me. This idea series is about someone who has questioned that definition of welfare.

someone who claims that beyond a certain intensity, the professionalization of care, counsel, and consolation turned citizens into clients. Someone who insists that paid services degrade and often destroy abilities which already exist within the community. His name is John McKnight. He believes that a service economy, based on needs, hides a very different landscape,

in which gifts and capacities are what. count. Whatever will happen here will happen because of us. And that means a new call to their capacity through association to understand what the assets are that they have, what potential they have for productivity, and that the heart of their possibility is there with them in that place. I listened to the next two weeks in a row on that same time. I made sure I was available. I wrote away for the transcripts, and that then launched a whole different direction for my career. In June of 1993, Ideas, writer, broadcaster, David Cayley, recorded a series of interviews with John McKnight, a pioneer in the field of community development at his home in Illinois.

It was broadcast in three parts early the following year. The audience reaction was so enthusiastic, McNight collected some of his best papers and published them as the careless society, community, and its counterfeits. We don't have much experience in terms of knowing how a neighborhood that has become dependent on big institutions, right, as most did, he depended on the steel mills and the hospitals and the big city schools as they become abandoned, just the way the cargo planes stopped. We don't have a lot of experience with how you reinvent community. And by that we mean a place populated not with consumers,

but with people who are citizens with the capacity to produce. Even today, more than three decades later, McNight's visionary approach continues to resonate. I'm recently retired, but for more than 30 years, I worked in the field of community economic development. first in the field of microfinance and later in the field of asset-based community development largely as a result of being inspired by what I heard on ideas. What is the meaning of your life?

Who are you? Are you a client or are you a citizen? And the social worker is out looking for clients and making clients and needs clients. And the organizer is out looking for citizens and you can't make a citizen. You can allow a citizen, but you can make a client. It really shifted the way I looked at people and communities. And I guess what really stuck in my mind the most was the analogy of glass of water. You know, and the question is, is it half full or half empty?

And of course, the answer is it's both. But when we think of communities and people as that glass, we tend, and I had tended to look at the half-empty part. I was in the field of social science, you know, microfinance, Internet, community development, and it was all about trying to find out what was wrong in the community and how to fix it. And what the ideas of John McKnight really shifted for me was the glasses also half full. And every person, every community has needs, deficiencies, problems, but they also have strengths, assets, talents. And in the case of community, stories of success, leaders, and so on. And if we look at only at the half-empty part, we tend to create a kind of sense of

despair among people and that the only help that can come can come from outside. Whereas if we ourselves look at what exists in the community, what people are doing for themselves, what they're passionate about, how they organize, who's organizing. It gives you a whole different picture and it leads to communities retaining ownership and what they're doing, you being able to find ways to support and invest what they're doing rather than you coming in from outside with your preconceived solutions to their problems. And it just literally changed my whole perspective. I have seen my life as a continuing journey with people who act as citizens in a place at a time. And you come to recognize in some profound way that this is all about something in

particular and hardly ever about anything in general. I'm listening in my car and my mind is racing and I'm thinking, oh my goodness, everything I've been doing is all wrong. We know. We know. that if one surrounds any individual with messages and experiences that are always saying to them, what's important about you is what's wrong with you, that that will have a powerful, powerful, depressing, disillusioning, and degrading effect upon that person. We say to a kid who gets up every morning, you know, watch, you're no damn good.

Well, what will happen to the kid? So the first cost is the necessary degradation of the individual's self-concept by the messages of deficiency, wrongness, brokenness, and need that the helper brings. I need to shift the way that I look at, the communities I'm working in, and really need to try to find what it is that people are doing, they're passionate about, that they're really excited about. I need to listen to the stories in these communities about what they have done and what they're proud of. And then I'll find ways to kind of engage so that I can support what they're wanting to do. And that's what I started doing. I left that organization and went to an organization at St. Francis Xavier University called the Cody Institute that was doing work internationally and in Canada,

community development. But very quickly, I shifted to helping create an area based on the ideas of John McKnight and based on the ideas that I heard in that program in early January, 1994. And some people and some groups who believe this thing is possible, whether or not that vision will become prevalent or manifest, I don't know, but I have been around efforts at change by citizens and communities long enough now that I have seen over and over again ventures that I thought didn't have a chance at all come to be the way.

A few years later, I was now working at the Cody Institute in Annenish, Nova Scotia, and I drove with two colleagues three hours to Moncton, New Brunswick, to hear him speak. And after his talk, I buttonholed him, He actually agreed to come and visit the Cody Institute and meet my colleagues, which was wonderful. And that led to a long body of work that, particularly my colleague Allison Matthew and I worked on together, first of all, trying to replicate the kind of research that Magnite had done in communities around the U.S.,

where he had studied communities that had been really successful, that had driven their own development, sustained that positive change over, in many cases, a couple of decades at least. I saw a group of straggly-haired young people stop a war. I saw a group of defeated, degraded public housing residents rise up and throw the managers out and say, this is our home. We will take this over and we will run it. And we will come to own it.

And I've seen a group of neighborhood people come to understand that they had the tools in power to control their health and that the hospital was a great illusion as a health source. It's John McKnight's opinion that social policy should enable individuals and communities to attain their own ends in their own ways, just as the GI Bill enabled veterans to get an education without specifying how or where they should do it, What frequently happens instead, he feels, is that systems of social service replace the community rather than fostering it.

When we tried to apply the ideas of Ignite in an international setting, one of the first places that we did some work was in Ethiopia. And I'll never forget, it was Oxfam Canada's partners, had three partner organizations spread out across the country in Ethiopia, and they brought their field staff in. And we actually went through a bit of a training about how to maybe look at communities differently. know, how to actually not look at the half-empty part, but look at the half-full part of the glass with communities. And these field staff came back. And they said, I've been working in this community for years. I didn't know that many years ago they'd actually had an irrigation system where they'd

diverted water coming off the mountain into this pasture land and created vegetable gardens. And they'd monitor. They'd actually regulated and monitored the water use. And in discussions with them, they said, well, let's try to do this again. And so they did. My life has been blessed with a continuing set of surprises. And those surprises have almost always been the result of a group of citizens in association

who had a vision and made it come true. And you know, the other thing, if you've been in community organizing for a long time, is that in the end, it isn't the neighborhood as a place that is the measure. In the end, the measure is what happened in the lives of people when they acted together as citizens. I wonder what my life would have been like

if I hadn't heard that first episode in early January 1994, It so profoundly shifted my thinking that if I had not heard it, I think my career and my life would have taken a completely different turn. And I'm not so concerned about the career, but I just think that once you start seeing communities and people differently, when you start to see them for what they have and what they can contribute and what they're proud of, you just can't unsee it. The value of seeing something more than their own self-interest,

The value of having their gifts recognized, seeing the common good, the value of having their gifts shared, the value of believing that they are not alone and that they are not a victim, the value of seeing change, however small. That citizen experience, that experience in the lives of the people I've known over the years, is, I think, the greatest jewel in life's crown. This next story features a 12-year-old girl and her life-altering experience that began when she attended a CBCI Diaz-Massie lecture about gender equality. The story of women is absolutely the longest revolution in history. So many times change was in the wind,

so many times the finish line blurred, and so many times hope soared. But from Toronto to Timbuktu, half the world's population was still being left behind. Equality was eluding the women. So this was my first time attending a big, lecture like this and my first time I had to listen for that long actually and the first memory I have was walking into the space and I remember the huge crowd of adults and I guess at the time

important looking people and I remember feeling a little bit scared and intimidated and kind of like I wasn't supposed to be there but there's been a power shift a power shift that I have been watching and I can tell you that there has never been a better time to be a woman You see, despite the blowback from misguided politicians and leftover chauvinists and those hyper-masculine misogynists, women are closer to gaining equality than ever before. So why now, you ask? Why didn't it happen when the suffragettes were... My name is Sally Armstrong. I'm a journalist. I was the Massey Lecture in 2019, and my lecture was called Power Shift, the longest revolution. My name is Gwendolyn Allen. I just started my first year at York University in Toronto.

And my first experience with CBC Ideas was back in November 2019. And it was when my grandmothers took me to the Kerner Lecture Hall to listen to Sally Armstrong's Massey Lecture, The Power Shift. And the journey ahead is found to be epic. It's going to affect everything. But then as soon as I sat down, I remember feeling I'm supposed to be here, especially when Sally started talking. You know, I'm often asked why my journalistic work

concentrates only on girls. With all this pressure to advance girls, what's to become of the boys, they ask me. Shifting power is about women and girls walking beside men and boys. It's time for the men to speak up and up. I was sitting, so I was looking down at the crowd of people. And normally I wasn't a big fan of being in big crowds like that, But I remember when I saw that crowd of people, I realized that that was the amount of people that cared as much as I did about what Sally was talking about.

And that actually gave me comfort. And I loved sitting in that space. It's time for women to disrupt old mores. You see, when ideas shift from the fringes to the mainstream, they seemed to be a lot. My interest in standing up for equal rights honestly started with a very specific experience I had in grade four. and I still remember the name of the guy who said this to me. His name was Matthew. And he said that I would always be worse at him at science because I was a girl. And then I remember he asked me to name 10 female scientists. And at the time, because I was in grade four, I couldn't name 10 female scientists. And from then on, I remember I just felt like I needed to have more knowledge about that topic at first to stand up for myself. And then that morphed into, in order to stay. end up for other people, specifically for women and for girls my age, because I felt like I felt lesser then in that moment, and I didn't want to feel like that ever again.

We need to invite the men to stand with us and to write the wrongs. It's time for men to speak out and walk with the women. And I call on the bosses and the jocks and the preachers and the teachers and the teachers and the politicians and the dads to put your truth to the test at the barricades. Your girlfriends, your sisters, your wives, and your mothers, and your daughters are lined up there waiting for you. It was perfect timing because I had a presentation on sexism that was a couple weeks after that lecture. It was a perfect opportunity for me to learn how to capture a crowd's attention when it came to that, even though obviously the crowd of the Massey lecture is very different from a grade 7 class, but I still felt like it would be a really amazing opportunity for me to learn more about it to better my presentation.

The power shift came from goddesses and priestesses, seers, diviners, nuns, healers, writers, reformers, activists, suffragettes, and feminists who took on the prophets and the kings, the orators and the philosophers, the politicians and the bullies to find justice, fairness, and equality for all. It has indeed been the longest revolution. Thank you. I remember at the end of the lecture, she said that people were allowed to go down and ask questions. And I remember thinking, if anyone knows how to make men listen to presentations about feminism, it's Sally Armstrong.

Because I remember looking at that crowd and seeing men, I remember being surprised when I first saw that too, and how they were equally as attentive as the women. So I was like, this is the person that I need to ask on how to do that. One thing happened at the very end of the lecture in Toronto when a young girl, she posed actually the last question. She was in grade seven, and she was talking about her project at school when she was going to speak of sexism.

So I remember walking down the steps and walking up to the mic, and I was so scared. I remember repeating the question over and over and over again in my head to make sure I didn't mess it up. And then when I started speaking and I saw the way that she was looking at me and the way she was listening to me, I wasn't nervous anymore because I just knew that she wanted to hear what I had to say and she wasn't going to look down on me

and she was going to give me the exact answer that I needed. I was dazzled. Everybody was interested in this young girl. And you could hear a pin drop in the room. I really admire your work and I'm actually doing a presentation on sexism in my class and I've noticed that when I bring up the topic around a group of boys they often

kind of shrug and sigh and get angry that I talk about it a lot so I was just wondering how in my presentation I could maybe catch their attention just me not in that way who first of all I want to come to your class.

I want to watch this. You're doing what people older than you didn't dare do. You're doing what we wished we could have done. And you're doing it with grace and with knowledge. And I really, really admire you. And you know how to get the boys' attention? Just keep telling them how equality is good for everybody. That it's not their job to take care of the whole world.

women are here to take care of the whole world too. And together, we know from everywhere we've been that you get a better job done, that people are better. They're healthier, they're happier, they're richer if women and men work together. So good for you. Afterwards, tell me where your school is.

I want to come. The first feeling I remember initially was when she said she wanted to come to my school, that burst of excitement that I felt And then after when she said she admired me, I, that feeling is honestly indescribable unless you've experienced it yourself being told by someone that you admire and that you look up to, that they admire you, it makes you feel so important and that you can make a change, especially because I was so young at the time, I was 12 years old and she was talking to me like I was an adult and like I knew what I was talking about because I specifically remember her saying that I was doing something with grace and with knowledge. And that just felt amazing. That felt surreal. And it motivated me so much more to deliver the most impactful presentation I possibly could

because I thought if Sally Armstrong thinks that I have the potential to make a change in the world just by speaking to people, then what's to stop me from doing that? And I dare say this is what the Massey Lectures do. It is such a community of minds across the whole country. That was a very special moment at the very end of my last lecture. After attending the Massey Lectures, I had a few weeks to prepare my presentation. I took a lot from the notes that I took during the lecture. And overall, that was what helped me create my speech that I gave to my grade seven students.

A few weeks later, Sally Armstrong made good on her promise. She traveled to Wellington Public School in Aurora, just north of Toronto, to hear Gwen's presentation on sexism. Even the young boys of today are indirectly taught to think that men and women have different roles and ways they are supposed to act. To prove this furthermore, I did a little experiment on my 10-year-old brother.

I told him to write a story about a firefighter and a police officer, and I did not specify the gender. He instantly corrected me to police man and fireman, and in his story, both the firefighter and the police officer were males, and the receptionist in his story, in his story was a female. I asked him why, and he seemed to believe that that was how it was supposed to be. And it's not his fault. It's societies. And this is the point I'm trying to get across. Let's get past this fear of the world not being the way it's supposed to be. Let's call out

those stereotypes, and don't let someone say it must be one way or another. Most of this class is brothers and sisters. So tell them about this too, and why it's so good for society. Use the internet. Spread the word using your social media platforms. This is what I think about inequality, and this is why we need to change it. Thank you. What a terrific presentation, and what a great audience you are listening to Gwen. You have to stay up here. Because you're going to answer the questions. Here comes the hard part. Okay. Listening back on what I said, it just shows me how inspired I was by what Sally said, because the fact that I was even able to write that presentation at that time and to

say those things to my classmates just shows me how impactful she really was. And the biggest lesson I learned from Sally Armstrong, I would say I actually learned two lessons. And the first one would definitely be that I am important and that everyone is important. And everyone can make a change if they put enough effort into it. Doesn't matter your age, your background, and your race. You can always make a change if you're inspired enough. And another lesson I learned from her was that we need to have uncomfortable conversations in order to make change because she didn't sugarcoat anything in her lecture. She didn't sugarcoat anything when she was talking to me

and answering my question. And that is what gets people to take a stand and to fight for what they believe in. Look at young people across the world, across Canada, who are picking up causes and doing something about them and, believe it or not, listening to ideas or going to the masses, finding things that support their kind of thinking. and running away with it.

If it weren't for CBC ideas in the Massey Lecture series, I never would have experienced someone I admired and looked up to so much saying that she admired me, A, and B, I wouldn't be able to experience talking about something that I believed was so important and that I was so passionate about and teaching it to other people and seeing other people's eyes light up right in front of me and help motivate those people to make a change. like I wanted to make a change. So overall, I think that that experience was such a defining

moment in my life because it helped define other people's lives as well. I see young people today picking up the torch to have equality, fair pay, decent laws, treatment, the same that men had. I saw a group of young women in Afghanistan. They call themselves young women for change. And they were determined they were going to change. Can you imagine a bunch of young women thinking they were going to change Afghanistan? But they had posters, they had programs, they marched in the street. They even had billboards about it. But when I went to meet with them, there were as many young men in the room as there were young women. And I said, what's with the guys? What are you doing? And they said, we'll never get to the finish

line unless we walk together. And I saw the same thing at Tahrir Square in Egypt, and I see the same thing in Canada, that young people today are better able to say it takes both of us. And it's time for the men to speak out and the women to speak with them, and together you go forward. And as for my little brother, who initially said that the policemen would be men and that the firefighter would be men and the secretary was a woman, he's now so much more educated

on feminism and sexism and he's become a much more well-rounded and knowledgeable individual and has grown a lot since that moment. And that just proves how when you speak about something like that and when you teach it to other people, it sticks with them and it helps them grow.

Thank you for joining us for this first in a special series celebrating the 60th anniversary of ideas. This series is produced by Karen Chickalach, technical production by Emily Kiervezio, Danielle Duval, Sam McNulty, Austin Pomeroy, and Will Yarr, as well as the technical teams in CBC Kitchener and Winnipeg. And of course, to our listener contributors, Dr. Joanna Oda, John Tibitz, Gord Cunnington. and Gwendolyn Allen, as well as Massey Lecturer Sally Armstrong, Thompson Highway, Margaret McMillan, and Astra Taylor. The web producer of Ideas is Lisa Ayuso, our senior producer Nicola Luxchich. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of ideas, and I'm Nala Ayyad. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.ca.com. Thank you.