Nuanced. - 73. Yvon Dandurand: Youth Crime Prevention, Organized Crime & Corruption

Episode Date: September 5, 2022

Aaron speaks with criminologist Yvon Dandurand to discuss his latest book Youth Crime Prevention & Sports. Aaron also raises the topic of corruption. Specifically, he raises the challenges Darryl Plecas faced when he pointed out corruption, and the current allegations against of Brenda Lucki, the current commissioner with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP). The two also discuss organized crime, human trafficking, and cancel culture in universities.  Yvon Dandurand is a criminologist at the University of the Fraser Valley, British Columbia (Canada), and a Fellow and Senior Associate of the International Centre for Criminal Law Reform and Criminal Justice Policy, a Vancouver-based research institute affiliated with the United Nations Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice Programme. His long career in teaching, research and policy development in the fields of crime prevention and criminal justice has led him to specialize in comparative research. He has been involved in numerous criminal justice reform and capacity building projects in Canada and abroad, including several projects and studies in the areas of organized crime, human trafficking, witness protection, corruption, crime prevention, policing, and corrections.Pre-order his book Youth Crime Prevention & Sports: https://bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/youth-crime-prevention-and-sports?fbclid=IwAR12J3njmLzFQrYxXYLK8SQgJ7Cu_z9-j6sd9eutKVUkgIWa9JZ6E1BWeSESend us a textThe "What's Going On?" PodcastThink casual, relatable discussions like you'd overhear in a barbershop....Listen on: Apple Podcasts   SpotifySupport the shownuancedmedia.ca

That dark side is with me every day all the time. So one example in particular that really gets to me is when I do human trafficking work and talk to victims or deal with victims of human trafficking and I'm in disbelief about what people will do to others for greed. Would you mind introducing yourself your name, your background, in the work you do? You have a cue card. I don't remember my name. No pressure.

I'm Yvonne d'Anjol. I'm a criminologist. I'm a professor emeritus at the University of the Fraser Valley. And also a senior associate and fellow at the International Center for Criminal Law Reform and Criminal Justice Policy. Yes, and you just wrote a really interesting book. Can you introduce that, how it kind of came about, what the book is about, and some of the research findings? Okay, the book is not out yet. It's just about to come out. It's called Youth Crime Prevention and Sports. And that came about because about three years ago, the United Nations was following up on the World Congress and looked at different methods of crime prevention. And one of them that was being supported by Qatar during the Congress, was sports, and people make all kinds of claims about sports good for social development,

prevention of terrorism, peace building, crime prevention, all of those things. But very few of those claims are verified. So basically, the UN organized a meeting of experts in Bangkok about three years ago, and they asked me to prepare a discussion document to help people focus. and to help facilitate the discussion. So we met for three or four days, I forget now, in Bangkok, and guess what? Everyone thought that there was potential,

but no one really had any really evidence. The other thing that I noticed is that I knew that there's a lot of work done in what we called positive youth development. This is basically developmental psychology and positive youth development or PYD and sport is a whole area which criminologists really never consulted. So I was talking to my colleague John Haidt and we decided that it was worth looking at that literature. And then we did a project in this province for the BC crime reduction program of the Ministry of Public Safety. And we dug deeper and deeper, talk to more people, and at some point, we thought, well, there are things that can be done. Sports in itself, participation in sport is not going to prevent crime.

Sometimes it does the exact opposite. However, sports is a good way to get the attention of youth, bring them somewhere, get their attention, do something with them, engage them in other things. Engagement in sport is not preventing crime, but if you bring the kids together, particularly those who might be, be at risk or be on the verge of getting in trouble, then you get a chance to do something else with them. So at some point, John and I said, we got a lot of stuff here that practitioners are not aware of. There are hundreds of millions of dollars spent, believe it or not, on sports and crime

prevention, millions in this province and all kinds of money everywhere. Olympic Committee, the big corporations, Adidas, name it. They all put money into sports and peace and sports and crime prevention. So we wrote this for practitioners, mostly, but of course we needed to back it up with the research. Part of the book is, what is it that we really know about the impact of sport, and then what are some of the lessons learned in terms of making the most out of our investments in sports from the point of view of crime prevention. And I think it'd be interested to know that also,

I think it's on November 26th, the UFV is organizing a forum on that topic, and it will be open to the public. So the day before, we have experts from across the country looking at our research and theirs and exchanging notes, and the next day on the Saturday, we invite practitioners, crime prevention, police, anyone who's interested, to come to ULV

and meet those researchers and get a sense of, you know, what they think they know or what they know about what works and how to make the best out of our investments. Interesting, because you think about, like, sending someone to your sports or whatever they're doing, and you don't really think about the negative influences that could be there. They could be introduced to a new bully or somebody who's using drugs, and then they're expanding their community,

but not necessarily in the way you want them to. And so you have to be intentional about how it's set up. Is there tools that are recommended in the book and how people can try and make sure that it's a positive environment that's yielding more fruitful results than just, oh, we set up a soccer team, we didn't really vet any of the people participating? How do you go about making sure you move in the right direction? You've touched upon many things. So the first one is make it safe for kids to participate. So vet the participant, vet the coaches and all this because you've heard like me on the media, like there's a lot of abuses. bad stuff happening on kids, unsuspecting kids who think they're participating in sport and somehow

they're being exploited. So make it safe, one. The second thing, you mentioned a really important word there, which is intentionality. If you mentioned intention, but, you know, intentionality is the concept that is being used. And that simply means if you're doing this to prevent crime, well, figure out how this is going to prevent crime. Kicking a ball around is not going to prevent crime. So what is it that you think is going to prevent crime? Is it acquiring new skills? Is it learning leadership? Is it meeting different friends? Is it staying off the street? Like, what is it, right? And be very intentional, like be clear about how you're going to use sports in order to prevent crime. So that's the first lesson. The second one is people all say, well, they're going

to develop self-confidence and they're going to develop leadership skills. Well, leadership skills can be used by a gang member, right? So having leadership skills does not ensure that you're using your leadership skill for the right reasons. Right. So what's the next thing? Other people say, and there's truth in that, there's evidence, that when you practice sports, you learn skills, all kinds of skills, including working in a team, communicating, persevering, all kinds of things. the big question for researchers is those skills that you learn in sports

are they transferable to other parts of your life? I can give you an example. You can't succeed in sport unless you practice, unless you persevere, unless you deal with adversity and bad experience. Well, the same is true in school, right? You need to persevere, you need to practice or study all of those other things.

Well, youth don't necessarily take the skills, they have learned in sport and transferred them in school or transfer them at work or transfer them in their family. But they can if you help them. So that's where some of the positive youth development research, a psychologist mostly, and kinesiologists and others, develop is they develop programs, methodologies to help youth transfer the skills to other parts of their life. and they found, sorry, is another little secret, they found that it works better if the parents are also involved because, you know, the coach is not going to go with you at home.

It's not going to go with you in school, although some of the coaches are in school because it's school-based sports. So basically you need to engage other people, friends, family, big brother, parents, in making sure that what the children, and youth learning the sports is also transferred practice in other spheres of activities. That's fascinating because you do think of people who kind of fall in love with soccer, they want that to be their definition. They want to be measured only on their soccer skills and then they go,

yeah, I'm not going to be a mathematician, so who cares? Rather than taking, wow, I'm really good at overcoming adversity and I'm willing to push myself and really put my energy into this. Maybe I'll take that and apply it to my math. class, people don't do that because there is a huge differentiation between what's physical and what's mental and the adversity you face when you run a really long time and you go, wow, like, I ran way farther than I thought I could. It doesn't always transfer into, wow, I'm really stuck on this question in math class, but if I really focus and keep pushing just like I do in running,

then I don't get the same result. Like, people don't really do that. Yeah. Or ask for help. Ask for advice. If you don't know how to do it, ask. But in sport, you can go and ask a teammate, you can go and ask a coach, right? And then you improve that way. You can look at, you can find people are good at it and try to imitate. All those things can be done at home. I can be done at school. All of these things are transferable, but we cannot assume that the transfer happens automatically. It doesn't. We know that from all kinds of research. So you need to assist. And think, for instance, there's hundreds of examples, but you know, a kid in school who

fails an exam and he thought he was going to succeed and he had studied better than usual and all this well the parent, the coach, whatever facing that and seeing that the youth is discouraged. Well listen the other day in sport you know when you fell down and people thought it was game over for you

you picked yourself up and you went and do the same now do better than next time. Oh, same thing. Sports my life. Pick yourself up, adversity happens on both. So you help them process that cognitively and emotionally so that they recognize the analogies between the two.

And in the process, they develop confidence in their ability to deal with life, whether it's success or the success can also be an issue, right, or failure or anything, right? So it's a very nice, it's a medium. It's a wonderful place to teach things. It's not for all youth. Many youth are not sport or physical activity oriented. And the approaches is slightly different for girls and boys because their connection with sport is different and the type of sport is different.

But it's a wonderful place. The researchers refer to that as sports as a hook. So you hook in the youth and get his attention. and then work with them to try to make sure that whatever skills or lessons that he learns there is transferred to other parts. There's other elements of that, you know, encouragement and motivation. And then we did interviews with coaches here in B.C., and some of them did not have a clue, but many of them really, no, literally, you know, it's like it was just a technical thing. I teach them out to kick the ball, yeah, okay, and how was that a crime prevention program? Well, not my problem.

But other coaches were totally, they understood that. They shared with us some of their own strategies, right, and tricks, if you want, to work with youth. And, of course, you can't generalize, because everyone finds a way to do it that agrees with themselves, their milieu, their environment, and there's cultural stuff. So, for instance, some of the programs that we've reviewed and interviewed, not reviewed in a scientific way, but looked at and interviewed some of the organizers and coaches were for indigenous kids. And, of course, it had to be around something that was meaningful to them. So one of the big ones was outdoors, canoes, you know, this kind of sport. Yeah.

Or could be hunting. It could be anything, you know, different sports. So, you know, and again, the sport was adapted to the youth they were trying to reach, right? So in England, it's boxing, and I visited a program in Thailand, and it was a ping pong. It's a big thing for them, right? So you go to another program in Japan, there's a lot of martial arts, and sometimes you might be worried about teaching martial arts to youth, who might have a violent disposition, but they see it as teaching discipline and teaching self-control and all of those other things. So the type of sport doesn't seem to matter

a lot, but how you use the sport and how you work with the youth during that, during their engagement is what matters. One of the guys, one of the most successful program is in the Netherlands. And it's a basketball type of program. But the main coach there, the kind responsible for the program, basically was telling us, has nothing to do with basketball. It's about the food we eat afterwards. It's the meal we have after the competition or the practice or the whatever. This is where the real work happens. The rest is kids playing, having fun, winning or not winning, whatever. That's not the real work. The real work. is around that you know yeah it takes something to be able to kind of come together burn off some

energy and then be able to have a conversation i think the statistics are like people with their children only spend like 14 minutes of like quality time of like really there's no distractions there's no making dinner really direct one-on-one let's have a long-form conversation it's like 14 minutes and then people miss out on that that connection of explaining when the bully was unfair to them or when they had a question that made them feel stupid or whatever the challenges in their life are, when you don't have the space to share that, it's hard to integrate yourself as a person and figure out when something is making you angry. Because a lot of the time, kids just act out. They don't explain. Well, like, well, these were the four things that were

going on in my personal life that made me decide to want to like have a temper tantrum or whatever it is. You need to create that space for them. And it sounds like that community is what you're talking about is key. An example, one coach gave me in BC was, well, one point is that very often you have to talk to the kid when they're ready. So yeah, it will happen during the pizza afterwards or something, but it may be two days later. So some of the coaches give their personal phone number. Now, there's issues with that and you need to control that and all of this. but the idea from their point of view was when the kid is ready I signal to them I'm prepared to talk to you about this

or refer you to someone else or whatever but basically the youth contact them when they're ready now of course you've got if you are prepared to do this then you need to put boundaries around this and all kinds of things but it's totally totally feasible an example the coach gave me in this province was a youth who happens to comes into the practice late twice so traditional coach hey you know da-da-da you're late

doesn't that happen again you know you're letting the other team members down all this and this may need to happen you know as a sports coach for team purposes and all that but at the same time the coach was saying you've got to know that it's the second time maybe you should find out why you late. Well, my bus is now, you know, we've moved. My bus is taking a route. Now it's much longer. It takes longer. I'm just trying to figure it out. Oh, why did it move? Without trying to much, you know, how come you moved? Well, in the example I was given, my dad's in prison, right? Well, that's a significant event in the life of that youth. Up until then, you would not have disclosed that. Maybe he has nothing to say about it. That's it. Thanks. Maybe he has something to say.

How do you feel about it? Well, you know, da-da-da. So use those opportunities, and it's, in a sense, a bit like, exaggerate a bit here, but it's a bit like a therapist. You know, people give you polls or basically a sign that they're looking for someone to talk and you're looking for support, they're looking for advice, whatever. So coaches can do that. Of course, you have to decide how far you want the coaches to go.

know that they know their limits, and also they can't do it alone. So typically those programs, it's not just coaches who've been trained in coaching, it's teams with facilitators and others who play different roles, right? Sometimes psychologists and social workers, whatever it is. While you've got the youth's attention, then see what you can do to help. And there's no magical wand there. Each youth is different, and you don't know in a little. That's what problem they'll come up with.

Yeah. Did it frustrate you at all to have some of the coaches not have that mindset of understanding what their role is? Because to a certain extent, we can say, like, well, not everybody's going to know. And fair enough, but you have, like, this role in society. You're helping the next generation in whatever way you can. Take it seriously. Like, understand why you're there and the impact that you're having on these young people.

Like, this is something we should always try and. be intentional, but we always talk about like, well, these are the next generation. And in indigenous culture, we talk about thinking seven generations ahead. So there's this important key element that you've kind of highlighted, which is like being intentional, being aware of the impact. Was it, did it, does it bug you? Does it just not surprise you? Because you deal with so many people from so many walks of life, when people go like, I'm just here to teach them to kick a ball. It's like, that's not the tools we're hoping that you instill in the person. No, I wouldn't say that that is the part that frustrated me

because oftentimes those coaches don't know better. No one told them they're supposed to do crime prevention. They're recruited to teach soccer or football or whatever, right? So they don't see that as part of their role, and they say, I didn't sign up for this. I say, well, you're in a program that was funded for crime prevention. I didn't know that. The part that upsets me a little bit is that

it's not a big upset, but the part that upsets me is a lot of those programs are not serious about crime prevention. They say it's crime prevention because there's crime prevention dollars to be had. So they put crime prevention label on the program and this is it. If you said it's mental health, boom, we got a mental health program here. It's sports. Now, so there's a lot of that. And in the extreme, I've seen an owner.

of a dairy, dairy manufactured kind of thing, you know, producing milk and other product, pushing the idea that part of the problem with youth crime is that they don't get proper nutrition at home and having milk in the morning at school will prevent crime and some politician buys that. And then the next thing you know, they're selling milk. They're using crime prevention dollars to sell milk. I don't have a problem with giving milk to kids in school. Actually, maybe we should because many kids do not have right nutrition. I don't have problems with sport just for the benefit of sports.

You know, just go and have fun. I don't have a problem with any of those things, but it's when you begin to present them falsely as crime prevention initiatives. This is where we get the wires crossed. because most of the things you can do for crime prevention amount to doing the right thing for kids. Good schools, good teachers, parents who are involved. You're in the living, involved, like all those things.

You can't be against virtue, right? You know, these are all wonderful things. All kids should have access to that. Is that going to prevent crime? In itself, no, right? It's not sufficient to prevent crime. You've got a lot of privileged people, went to law school, maybe Harvard Law School,

and are in jail today for embezzlement and all kinds of very bad crimes if it's not serial rape or whatever, right? So it's not that having all of those opportunities is going to prevent crime. So this is the part that I sometimes find a little upsetting, not that much because I understand human beings. And clearly, you know, people are trying to support a sports program.

They chase the money. So they'll call it whatever. The onus on that is more on the funders. So the people who dispense those funds to be clear about what the programs are expected to do for that crime prevention money, to be more, let's say, intentional, as we've discussed, to measure the impact that they have, to be transparent about what they do, all of those things. So to me, that's the part that matters the more. I don't blame the coaches who say, no, I like sports, I like being with kids.

I do it because sometimes here's what we got. Why are you a coach? I'm talking about the non-the-professional coaches, like community-based. Well, I love the sport tool to practice it. Some coaches gave me a break when I was young and I wanted to do the same thing. I want to help others, kids.

My son is playing football, so that's one way to be with my son. You know, we share that. So basically, they get engaged for their own reasons. And if you engage them in a crime prevention program, while you should have the honesty of telling them, one, and second, training them so that what they do contributes to crime prevention in addition to other benefits of sports. Because no one is challenging the idea that sports generally are good for your health and are good for your mental health. Now, there's exceptions to that because people get seriously damaged in sports physically and mentally and all of that. but, you know, generally speaking, sports are good for you.

Yeah, absolutely. I'm curious, there's a level of analysis you've brought, which is around the idea that there are limits we need to put on coaches, there are dangers. You, with your background in criminology, you're able to bring this heavy lens to things, which is, what if things go off the tracks, how bad can things get,

and looking at the literature of how bad things have gotten in other circumstances. That's a heavy, we like to live in a world of butterflies and rainbows and everything's treated fairly and people are going to generally do the right thing. But that when you talk about psychology has done the research on the benefits of sports, but they haven't brought that criminological lens. One side is making sure that there are supports and things are intentional around making sure youth develop and have those skills transfer.

But the other one is making sure that coaches don't cross lines. it's a heavy topic because when we think of in Chilliwack, we have priests or pastors who've crossed lines. This is our most vulnerable population, and it is something where it's an awkward topic for so many to think about how do we put the safeguards in place to prevent things going the wrong direction. Is that heavy? Is that an aspect of the book that is difficult to write, or is there a certain level of pragmatism that you're able to bring to? it where it's not as heavy because it's a dark thought to think of the abuses that took place maybe at Indian residential school as an example that impact people for the rest of their lives. And so as good as something can be, we take on a certain amount of societal risk

and the children don't get a vote. And so we need to be intentional and careful and thoughtful on how we do these things. I'm just interested in what it's like to bring that criminological lens to things. Well, I think John and I, when we were writing this, were pragmatists in a sense, but also we wanted to be helpful, right? Not just criticize, oh, this goes wrong, that goes wrong, you know, just makes no sense.

It's easy to do that. And what we wanted to do is, so yeah, there's lots of issues with sports use for crime prevention, but all can we contribute to making the most out of it? And some of it, as I said, it starts with making it safe, right,

for the youth to participate. And by safety, it don't mean just safety against bad guys. It's also physically safe, transportation safe. You know, you hear from time to time, you know, kids who die in a bus accident because the team is moving them in an old bus that should not be on the road, you know, all of those other things. So safe, I mean, in the larger sense of the word. So we try to be as positive as we can be because our goal is to help people who are involved in that area

not to make them feel bad about what they're doing. Now, I don't think it's that heavy because if you think of it, yeah, there's a heavy past. But if you think of it, we've made progress, same thing with teachers, right? We select teachers, we make sure that certain people cannot teach. We have control over what they do. Not perfect, but we're doing this. Sports has been a little slow in following this. And I don't have to tell you about the scandals.

There's all kinds of scandals all the time here and in the U.S. and in Europe. in around gymnasts, football players, hockey Canada, right? So the other aspect of that is that there's a lot of money involved in sports, which means that there's a lot of cover-up. You know, people who are involved in organized sports are really worried about their image. So covering up the abuses, the issues is the worst thing you can do. It may only be one person out of 50 or 100, but if you're not addressing that issue

and letting that guy to go from one team to the next and continue the abuse and all of that, then basically you're doing a great disservice. So covering up is also a big issue, and I think people who follow sports a little bit, I've heard some of that with Hockey Canada and the federal government suspending its funding because of all they dealt with cases of sexual assaults.

Actually, those cases apparently happen outside the sports activity. And that's another important distinction. You know, there's safety within the sport, but there's also safety outside the sport. A lot of the problems that you see with team sports is not so much what the crazy things they do on the ice or on the pitch or whatever. It's what they do afterwards, right? You know, the party time afterwards, the drinking afterwards, the sort of the attitude they develop that we're entitled, you know, we're bulletproof, no one's going to stop us kind of thing, encouraging each other to dare to try things that, you know, are not legal or dangerous or criminal.

So sports bring youth together, and once they come together, well, who knows what happens afterwards. So it has to go beyond just what happens during the sport, as to extend to what happens afterwards. I'll give you an example if you're interested. that when I travel in the rest of the country, mostly outside of BC, in the winter, oftentimes in hotels, I'm talking three-stars hotel more or less, or a little better sometimes in a small town. Guess what, in the winter, after rooms, most of the night and weekends are occupied by sports teams, mostly hockey and all of this.

I don't know if you've ever had the experience, but it's not always pleasant. The kids are yelling and screaming in the corridor. They're throwing balls and things to each other in the lobby, all of those things. And you can tell that they are not well supervised. So that's not what's happening on the ice. It's what's happening afterwards and all of those other things. And one of the things that comes out a lot is that very often, that parents' own behavior is problematic.

So on the sidelines, the parent who are yelling abuse at the members of the other team and encouraging their own children to be violent and all of that, and that happens a whole lot more than you would think. And it's hard to control that because these are citizens, right? And you can't take it on the kid. It's not his fault. It's the boy's fault of the father is going to be abusive or, you know, doing crazy things.

So that's another aspect. It's the behavior of parents. And that is a big issue for coaches. When we say that to coaches, well, involved the parents, usually within the first five minutes, they'll say, yeah, but you get all kinds of parents. And some of them are really a lot of trouble. You know, we're trying not to get them involved,

because when they get involved, it's all about winning and, you know, destroy the other guy and, you know, that kind of thing. And that's not what we want to instill in our youth. Yeah, that's a huge challenge around the level of involvement a parent wants with their child. My partner, Rebecca, talks about how her mom specifically wasn't, she didn't attend games. She'd show up to drop off and pick up and wouldn't really understand the games wasn't interested. And so there was a feeling of disconnect.

After you've done your game, that you're sitting in the car kind of going, okay, like, are you. you curious? Are you wondering what happened? And then that parent misses out and maybe something terrible could have happened. And you haven't created a space for them to talk. And then there's a helicopter parent that's way too involved trying to live vicariously through the child. It's a common TV trope to have the parent way too involved and then somebody try and teach them, hey, this is this kid maybe isn't even interested in soccer yet you're forcing them into this because you loved soccer and you wish you were a soccer player and you never took that path. And so you get this kind of vast experience.

Is it better that we kind of put some light on that and have the parents kind of show, oh, this parent didn't show up because to Rebecca's benefit, she had somebody in her life who did get involved in a coach who was kind of like, hey, let's do everything together then at school. And let's get involved in all the sports. And then you don't have to kind of wait around for your mom to pay attention to you. You can just go have fun. Is that, does that shedding light help?

or just does it just depend? Well, it's hard to generalize clearly, but one way, not all parents have the luxury of accompanying their children in the sport. You know, they're hardworking and don't have time, can't take time off and work, all those things. But they have an alternative. They can try to find someone else that goes. They certainly can show interest afterwards,

even though they were not there. They can communicate that interest all the time. They can inquire. they can do things they can when they have time they can show their interests in other ways watching the sport together with the youth

shopping for equipment you know doing there's so many other things around sport that a parent can do if the parent is not capable for good reasons right now of course there's also parents with five kids you know like where do you go you know there's all of those possibilities

so don't stop the matter of judging the parents who don't actually attend the games and participate. It's more helping parents engage in a way that's possible for them. And also importantly, explain to the youth why they cannot do more or why they cannot do certain things. So if you just don't show up, that's one thing. If you don't show up at a game and explain to the youth why, right? You didn't go and express that your interest, but, you know, I just could not go.

I have to work or whatever, that's a different impact. But if you simply show this interest, don't even know the name of the team that your son is playing it or your daughter is playing in. Well, obviously, it has impact, right? Now, it's a different thing. Also, coaches have to negotiate the next part, which is when those kids become adolescent, they don't want their dad or their mom to hold their hand when they go into a game, right? it's a different kind of thing. Sometimes for those youth, that's a safe place, a safe place away from parents. So coaches have to be able to negotiate all those things. And you can trust

them to do their best. Many of them are parents themselves, obviously, and have learned as parents, you know, what matters. But you certainly can equip them to make the best possible decisions. And you can't teach them everything that they need to know because you don't know what situation they will encounter. Yeah, as a parent, do you think it's a challenge because you want to expose your child to stress and challenge and adversity for their benefit? So they grow character and strength and a sense of confidence. But it's often the challenge that parents have, which is they want to have their children

have an easier life than they did and remove challenge and adversity in certain regards. It's often like parents who have immigrated from a difficult country. They want their children to have all the opportunities and none of the suffering or challenge or the stress they went through. Yet there's something to be said for being forged in fire and that a lot of people benefit from that kind of adversity, yet you don't want too much and you don't want too little. Do you think that's a challenge in sports kind of helps us mediate that? It's a challenge in all parts of life, schools, whatever, you know, finding the right balance between being there for your child and letting him walk on his own or her own. What you can do in sports, and it's not done often, but I have seen it done a couple of times, is have a discussion with parents either individually or as a group, right, at the beginning. What is this about?

What's your role? And there's some youth, younger teams, where they even have a brochure, right? This is your role, the coach is that, this is where you, with whom you communicate, is there issues. Don't forget to encourage your child, don't, you know, a few tips and all that. That's not enough, but it certainly moves parents, helps parents, become conscious of what is their role and what they can do. A lot of parents, meanwhile, they just don't know better, but a lot of parents know better, they just can't do it. You know, and you can't be too harsh on them because a lot of parents, particularly when you're talking about children and youth who come from disadvantaged environments, you mentioned immigrants earlier, whatever, it doesn't matter why you're disadvantaged or living in a difficult situation.

the parents rarely have the freedom and the means to do a whole lot with their kids afterwards, right? So I think it's more a matter of doing as much as they can and giving them tips. Most of them respond well. You know, I found that. Maybe we talk about that later, but, you know, a lot of people are discouraged when they talk about changing police behavior. And, you know, I've worked with police around the world, and usually my experience, of course, you have to exclude blatant corruption and all that, but usually in my experience, if you show them a better way of doing things, they'll take it, they'll do it, right? There might be exceptions to that, because, of course, if they're corrupt, they don't care how well they do their job. But if it's a matter of not knowing better, it's a matter of having done it always in a certain way, or working in an individual.

environment where the pressure is to keep doing things in a certain way, even though that way is not good. So I take the more positive view as a show people how they can try to show them how they can improve it and then trust them to do as much as they can. It doesn't always work, but it seems to me that that's the best way I can try to help. I'm going to go around the world telling police officers are to do their job. Guess what kind of reception I'm going to get. Yeah. Yeah, it has to be an open dialogue.

You are one of the most popular professors at UFE in the criminology department. You're well known. I admire you greatly. A lot of your students, Mark La Land, Daryl Plessas, all speak very highly of you. And the impact you've made, the energy that you bring to certain topics is very accessible. You make complex topics seem so simple in how you, What is your origin story? Where did this all start from?

What is your background? When did criminology come into your radar? Tell us that background. Okay. Well, I'm about to celebrate 50 years of engagement in criminology, in education, so with a few breaks in there. So there's a whole bunch of things there. But I started teaching very early, and here's a little story that people may like.

When I went back to teaching at university, I went back to, after studies, to the same university he had started with. And one of my fellow professors, now fellow professors, former professor was there. And really, I had nothing but contempt for that guy. He treated, mistreated the students, I don't mean physically, but, you know, in terms of disrespect and all of that. And he was not even competent. He had given up trying to stay competent. Of course, won't mention his name.

So after a while, you know, we're colleagues now, right? So staff meeting and sometimes lunch, group, lunches can't avoid him. He's right there. So at some point, he stopped me and he said, I know why you hate me. And I could tell you why you have contempt from me as a professor. He said, I fully deserve it. I know why. I'm too advanced in my career.

He was in his 70s. He said, I'm too advanced in my career to change things. But he said, I know when I took the wrong turn. And he said, I'll give you a little gift. And remember, this is not a guy I trust or like, right? So he said, just put a little bell in the back of your head. and when you catch yourself, and that day will come, where you feel contempt for the students or disinterest in your student,

and you're telling yourself, how life would be so wonderful without students kind of thing, he said the little bell will ring. And then you've got a choice. Either you change your attitude or you leave. Okay? About eight years later, I'm still teaching. one day and I got tenure, life is good, right?

The bell rings because I catch myself thinking, Fing students, da, da, da. So right that minute, I left. I put all my books in the corridor with a sign on it, please help yourself, and I left the university, sent a, put a letter of resignation in the mailbox, you know, the physical thing at the time, no email, right? Where was this?

University of Ottawa. Okay. So I thought, okay, I'm not going, I'm not going to change. I don't know how to change, but I'm not going to impose that on students, right? I'm not going to be like that guy. So I left. Many years later, several years later, I rediscovered my interest in teaching. I rediscovered why I wanted to be with students, why I thought I could make.

a difference in their lives. And then I came back. So I made a conscious choice at one point to say, if it's not all based on respect for the students and wanting the best for the students and devoting yourself to student learning, then go and find yourself another profession. There's plenty of things to do. You're a talented guy. You can do other things, right? So I actually left and eventually came back. So the point of my story, you know, a little colorful, obviously. But the point of this story is it starts with being

genuinely engaged in trying to help students learn in their own way. I fail as often as I succeed. I'm not saying that I have a perfect recipe for teaching, but I always try to put myself in the shoes

of a student. One second, I don't focus only on the bright students, I focus on those who seem to have harder time. So that's why when you were my students, I didn't focus at all on you, because I knew you're going to make it. I was about to put myself in the second category. No, no.

You were in the... So, you know, that's one thing, because everyone likes to teach a student who gets it the first time and is promising is going to be your successor in academia. Well, it's a lot harder to deal with the students who are struggling for all kinds of. kinds of reasons, you know, personal and background, all kinds of language, culture, all

of those things. So that's where I have been. And I always say, when my colleagues ask, I basically say, make it fun and try to explain as much as you can how it is relevant to each student. Like, why should you want to know that? Like, why should you listen? Right. So the why, why, why question needs to come back all the time. And that works with students who are very well. The students are struggling, students who have attention, you know, lose attention and all that. Sometimes the brighter students say, hey, I'm tired of listening to you saying the same thing, but I'll repeat it until everyone in my classroom's got it, right?

So this is just my style, and I quite often, I mean, honestly tell you, it works some of the time, Not all the time, but that's the best way of trying that I know of. You and Daryl share this immense respect for other people, this no nonsense, no wasting people's time, no patting yourself on the back kind of attitude. I was just trying to refresh and prepare you and Daryl are close, so I was re-listening to that interview, specifically the part on how he approaches students, because you have a similar ethos when you look at people, And it might seem obvious to some people, but this idea that you show respect for them, you try and encourage them, you listen to them and you treat everyone despite limitations in one area or like they're not the best writer, but maybe they're a great speaker. Treating everyone equally and not looking like other people, like the janitor is less than you. That's something that I think a lot of people feel around academics is there's this sense of like, once you, you understand how a nuclei works well if you don't get that then you're not on my level um i have all this deep knowledge it happens a lot in law where we go oh you don't understand the gladu decision well you just

don't understand the world then and we get kind of high on our own horse and individuals like you and darrell and john work very hard to to build students up um and not look at anyone like they're less than because they didn't get an a on the paper where does that come from for you is this i asked darrell this and he said it's been since he was in grade one it was just always how you look at the world is this something you have to sort of practice you mentioned that you started to feel that and then you said hey i know i need to step back because i'm not going to respect the students that kind of value to an ethic is not always common some people as you saw the professor doesn't do that so where does that come from for you where you say i'm going to draw that line there i don't want to

be that person i'm not exactly sure where it comes from but you know there's a little part of my a short period where I worked also as a parole officer, as a helper, helping profession kind of thing. And I tried to mix the two because everyone needs help in one way or the other, and students only need help her learning. And I always start from the premise that I'm not going to do the learning for you. You do the learning, I will try to help, right? I don't even think the lecture is the most important thing. I never thought that.

Sometimes students hate it when I get them to work because more work, more group work, another paper or another this and other that. But I always think that's the best way for them to learn. In terms of practical tricks, I'm going to return the ball to Daryl because when I arrive at UIV, I had never been teaching at the undergraduate level.

Well, I had, but in a very short period of time, in Quebec. And when I started at UIV, my pitch was more graduates, student, master's, that kind of thing. And I observed Darrell and shamefully copied things. And Darrell, you know, was very generous guy. I said, oh, this is what I use. You take it, right? Or I've got three examples.

You want them? You know, it was exactly like that. So I learned a lot of tricks from him. But we started from the same place. We started from our job is to teach, to help students learn, take them where they're at, and try to find the talent in every one of them and motivate them. Because a lot of them arrive after they've been kicked around in the education system, and their self-confidence as learners is pretty low.

They may hide it, they may pretend that they know it all and all this, but their sense of self-efficacy as students is low. Once you have a few years of experience, you recognize those students really quickly. And so you find ways to engage them, to motivate them, to get them, you know, repair the damage that was done. And I mean that literally because certainly in Europe, at UIV, a lot of the students we get in first year,

I've had a pretty rough ride in the high school level. Now, in some big universities, that's not a problem because they only take those who succeeded at the undergraduate, at the high school level, you know, the top 10 or whatever. At UV, it's an open access university. Very difficult to not be accepted at UV if you want to go, right? So you get all kinds of people to come and maybe pressure of the parents or They have a dream, but they don't know, and very little confidence and very little tools. They haven't learned to learn.

So you've got to take them where they're at. Daryl and I had another thing in common, which was distinguishes sometimes from other professor, which is we just love catching students in the first year, right? Help them, this is where you help them get on a path that's going to be productive for them. It's harder when you catch them in year four when they're about to leave, right? So we always put a lot of our efforts in the first year. That is so interesting because when you described that student who had a terrible high school experience, one of the things I try and highlight is, like, I was not succeeding in high school.

I had one teacher who accused in like a parent teacher conference thing of me having narcissistic personality disorder to my mom, saying that I was on a bad track, just a lot of big. a lot of in middle school, a lot of teachers saying I wasn't going to graduate. And so my whole experience in high school and middle school was, I am not intelligent. I need to pretend that I know something or I'm not going to survive this. And so entering that first year at UFE was very much like, I am going to pretend I know what everybody's talking about, nod my head and agree and say sassy comments where I can to kind of hide the fact that I don't know, that I don't have all the answers.

that this is all very new. The idea of actually studying and doing my homework was like the first time I had really done that was in university with tests that were coming up and going like, I'm literally going to fail this test if I do not study. Like, I do not know anything about this. And so recognizing that students are coming from different places at UFE is so fascinating because I identify with the person you described, which was like pretending to know things, not really knowing what's going on.

And it's individuals like yourself, Daryl, and John. that really pushed me to say like, okay, it doesn't matter if you don't know, just figure out where you're at and then move forward from there. And then you see individuals blossom. But your approach is so encouraging. And it seems like it always has been, at least from everybody I've spoken to, which is you're always calling your students bright and intelligent and supporting them when they do something. And for me personally, I remember not even thinking I could ever do a research project. and you were like, hey, why don't we do some preliminary research into First Nations court? That was like a huge, like, I couldn't do that. I'm not that person.

Other people, the hardworking diligence students, that's their thing. I just get by on the test and then skirt out of here. And so what is that like to see people in their first year completely kind of in a container of self-doubt? And you can kind of see where they're pretending to know things and acting like a know-it-all, but they're not. and then see them sort of flourish over time because it even sounds like you did that with Mark. Well, I won't mention other people about the way I feel is very proud. I'm very proud of the students to succeed.

And I'm even prouder of those who had to conquer more difficult obstacles. And there have been many of those. And the obstacles are different for everyone, you know. So I'm proud of them. I am in touch with many, many students that I've had, mostly they're in touch with me, but nevertheless, you know, I'm still interested in what they do if they care to tell me. And so I'm proud of them, and it's a personal pride as well, because it gives me a sense of accomplishment. I didn't waste all my time with them, right? I got a paycheck, but on top of the paycheck, you know, guess what?

I had an impact. Now, when I interviewed students, we used to have a system in criminology where we interview every student to apply to come into criminology. And guess what? One of the first question was, why do you join criminology? What do you want to do? And invariably, invariably, nine out of ten students would say, I want to be of service, I want to have an impact.

I want my life to matter, right? Well, I'm not like them, right? now is my life mattering? Well, if I decide to teach, it better matter in the way I teach. If I decide to go and dig holes, it better matter in the way I dig holes, right? To me, it doesn't matter whether you decide to teach or do something else. And as you know, a lot of my work is not teaching. It's research. It's helping develop law reform. It's evaluating programs. It's assisting countries in improving the justice.

the system. So very practical work outside. If I can involve students, I do, and I have many times in my career. So it's not the only thing I do, but when I'm teaching, I want to be 100% teaching. In other words, it's what the coach would tell you if you played soccer or hockey, give it your 100%. But it's the same thing. But it depends on how you define the 100%. So people have different views of what their role is in education. and for me it's the issue of help it's not an issue it's the goal is help everyone succeed if they can give you an example sometimes administrators and university administrators you know ask questions when your your class average is too high you know like oh my god you've got 80% of your students have got an A or or an A-minus or something. How is that possible?

It's not possible. You should have a bell curve, you know, da-da-da. That's absolute bullshit. That's not true. If you put in the time and if you have enough time and if the students are motivated, you can make sure that they all get an A. Right?

To me, the goal is you all get an A. You'll earn it. I'm not giving it to you, but if you want to earn it, I will work with you for as long as it takes. And I've, And most students say, I don't want an A. I just want to feel that I've done something with an A or I got a B or something.

But for me, there's always been, make it possible for everyone to succeed. And I fought administration saying, no, every one of my said, you want to check my marking. They all have earned an A or an A minus or a B plus or whatever the issue was. because the idea is if you work with the students, even those who are not particularly gifted or start from way back there, they have baggage or whatever, if you work with them long enough, they'll succeed.

They will succeed. There's no reason why they should not. It's not as if what we're teaching is rocket science, right? It's fairly simple, and everyone can find a way to be brilliant in doing it, their own way of being brilliant. doing it. Does administrative

overload concern you at all? It seems like it's a growing conversation particularly in the US, but the feeling that we have so many sessional instructors and not professors and that there are great educators that I met in UFE

and they were like, well, if they renew my contract and it's like, you are exactly what this place needs, but they're not willing to give you that long-term commitment and a lot of the kind of argument for it is often the growing size of administrations. As you've been able to step back and kind of see, Darrell on the podcast talked about how he would ask for like approval later. He would make a deal with like the police department, have a plan around research and then

go to the administrator and say, hey, this is what we got. And then he said over time, it became more and more, you need it beforehand. We need this document beforehand. We need this information beforehand, so we have all our ducks in a row. And of course, there's a place for policy. As someone who writes a lot of policy and helps advise on policy, you recognize the importance, but it seems like we're in this dangerous time where we could end up pushing our universities to be more based on the administrators who are getting mad at you, rather than the professors who are building up our future leaders, our future politicians, our future lawyers, our future, everybody who's going to play a meaningful role in society

that we could end up pushing out the people who are going to inspire them. Well, it's a big question. As you know, I have been also an administrator. And the trend that you explain, that you trace, is something I lived. When I became dean, the first time I became dean, which is quite a few years ago, they added the chair at senior management

and that was chair number nine, right? So there were nine of us managing the whole university, from the parking lots to finance to every program. Well, today, if you brought all the equivalent of that, you'd have like 60 people in the room or more, right? Now, of course, part of it is because the university has become bigger. It has become a university, because when I joined it was a university college, and I went through, as an administrator, I went through that transition to university.

So there's that. There's also sometimes I think faculty members in particular have to forgive the expression, but grow balls, right? You know, you have to sometimes speak to power and affirm your position for things that you believe in. And I don't think that that always happens. For all kinds of reasons, some of them are intimidated, some of them are too busy, whatever. There's all kinds of reasons. I'm not judging so much as I'm saying, well, it's a two-way street, right?

You know, the administrator is if you leave a vacuum, you're not engaged, you're not vocal, you're not doing things. Guess what? The administrators are there full-time, all the time, even when you're on all the days, and they'll take over, right? So that's the way it goes. There's also, of course, there were requirements. So what Darrell describes for research, not so much for teaching, I was the first dean of research. So I had to start putting rules because before me, it's like, whatever, you do research, whatever, you're on your own, right? Good luck, you know. So all of a sudden we put funding, we gave course releases, we developed policies, we develop policies, we develop formal policies for research ethics.

Not that the researchers were not conducting research ethically, but you have to have a formal process to qualify for funding and to train people and all of those things. So that added the burden and sometimes, you know, and I try to keep the burden as little as possible. And sometimes I would have pretty tough conversation with Daryl or people like Daryl to say, oh, well, I used to be able to do that. Yeah, well, you know, you can't do that now. Look, there's a broader picture, right? And when you do this or when your colleague, another colleague does that and it goes south, guess what, we're all in trouble.

So some level of bureaucratization needed to happen. And in research, I was part of that at the beginning, but I was trying to tread lightly all the time. You know, don't do more than I need to do. Don't be overzealous, putting new rules and policies and all this. Just make sure that we have a structure and a process and funds so that we support good research. And my other commitment, which was abandoned with time, unfortunately, was if your research doesn't involve students, I'm not supporting you. And I'd say that to all faculty members.

You know, you want support, you want a release, tell me how is that engaging students? We're primarily at teaching university. I know when you were somewhere else, there was another, it was another world. At UV, we're primarily teaching. So one of the main reasons for doing research, in addition to advancing knowledge and all of that, is to create opportunities for students to get engaged in research and learn through that mechanism, right? So that was my style at the time. Of course, at some point I had to leave.

I could have stayed, but I spent 10 years in that position. So at some point I left, and then it bureaucratized much faster from that point. on. I'm not blaming, again, anyone. I'm sure they have their own reasons, but the bureaucratization of research and bureaucratization of teaching has discouraged a lot of people from doing the kind of research, which I thought was more important, community engagement type of research, research that involves students, practical research that advance the fields that work. we work in, so it's easier for professions like criminology, social

work, psychology, because there's always a practical side. It's harder when you're dealing with nuclear physics, but even then there are possibilities, right, to engage students. So, the vision changed, and

that was predictable. I could I tried to manage that process and then after that, well, other people took over. And I'm not sure, I'm not saying it's bad, but it's part of what Daryl was describing, that at some point it becomes so complicated that, you know, it's not toward the effort. And you said, look, why am I doing this? You know, no personal advantage in fighting Citi all, so to speak, right?

So I recently, I spent, I turned down a social science research council grant for a study that a grant that was a grant that was, given to myself and two faculty members at SFU. And we were doing the study together. So when we went to our research ethics, that's the way that you go. You go to the research ethics board. You produce your research plan and they authorize it and all that. You get a certificate.

But then we had two universities. And the universities were, well, UVV was good in this, but the two universities were fighting over how many copies of what and at what time and at what, you know. So basically, I said, return the grant, I'm not doing this. I'm not interested in that kind of bureaucracy around a very simple study. And the study was, interestingly enough, the study was a replication of a study I'd done 20 years ago. So when I did it 20 years ago, it was like a breeze. You do that, no big issue, no ethical issues.

You know, everything went fine. I tried to do the same study with more money and very good colleagues 20 years later, and it becomes a nightmare. So I thought, well, I'm getting too old for this. I'm not doing it. Luckily, one of my colleagues continued with the study, so it's not all lost. But I think it's the point that Daryl was making. At some point, you just strangled the enthusiasm and the motivation of faculty members,

because when you have a teaching load of seven courses a year, or six or whatever, depending on the faculty. If you're going to do research, you have to sacrifice some evenings and some weekends and a bit of your holidays because it's not going to happen as you're dealing with a whole group of students and managing all of those courses that you're teaching

and all that. So you can only do so much when you're teaching in a university like UAV, which is primarily dedicated to education, right, to teaching, as opposed to research. Yeah, I find grades is like, it's an area when you're in it, when you're in school, you have an immense amount of stress around the grades that you're going to get, how it's going to shape opportunities in the future, what doors it's going to close if you get a C-minus on this exam, whatever it is.

And then on the other hand, it's like 20 years down the road, who remembers what grade you had? And I'm just interested in your philosophical thoughts on what is an A? Is an A somebody who went from, they couldn't form the sentences properly, they couldn't explain in a thoughtful way, the points that they were trying to make, have a proper introduction to say, this is what I'd like to discuss. Over the next couple of sentences, I'm going to talk about A, B, and C. A, B, and C relate because of this reason. And then they go, A, this is what A is and how it functions and how it relates, B.

This is how it functions. And then the conclusion, this is why this information matters. This is how A, B, and C fit into everything. And hopefully you have a better understanding. Like, taking somebody who can't do that, who's all over the place, and they've got a part of an introduction, and then they're explaining this third point that they're trying to make, and nothing makes any sense.

But then taking that person, and then in the first kind of part of the course, they do that. And then at the end, they're forming a proper essay. That seems like an A to me, because wow, look at your professional development, your ability to communicate clearly, but often it ends up being whoever checked Xbox is the A person, and then you can pretty consistently get an A throughout, but you're not challenging yourself in the same way because maybe you have a really, like, Mark Lelon's paper that he made me do, it was like 15 pages, and it's like, I've never thought 15 pages of things ever in my life. And so having that first kind of experience was a real challenge because it's like, I have to do so much research in order to be able to have 15 pages worth of thoughts that that's going to take a long time. And so in that process, I learned how to research the kind of the basics of how to find a reliable source, how to synthesize the information. In your first year, you're super guilty of reading the intro of the paper and then going, oh, I understand the paper because they'll just take what the intro said it was about and then apply that. over courses that teach you about

how to read statistics, you start to look at the methodology and go, did they have a good methodology? What does that look like? And so I'm just interested in your thoughts on what progress is, what is an A? Because so many people think of an A as, I checked all the professor's boxes. But if your personal

improvement takes you from an incoherent paper to a coherent paper, that seems like an A. And I'm just, it seems like we don't talk about that enough. Wow. Hard to unpack all of that. You've got good stuff there. But one of them is this is not about learning out to write papers. If you're in criminology, I'm trying to prepare you for functioning out there as a professional. Writing papers is only part of it. That's

one. Second, whether you get an A or B is not totally in my view, Whether you write according to some fixed standards, of course, it has to be logical and supported by evidence and that kind of thing, some basic things. But there's different ways to do this. And when you've published, like I have, you know, there's 25 ways to present these things and the formal essay is just one way, right? Now, not all students click on the formal essay and, you know, the logic of the presentation. For me, the A is different depending on the course and depending on their learning objectives. So I bring everything back to what are the learning outcomes that I'm helping the student achieve. So if my learning outcome is the student will understand that there are different solutions to problem A, right?

I'm going to Mark to figure out, have you figured out that there's different solutions, or are you trying to convince me there's only one, right? Now, if you're telling me about three solutions, can you explain them to me? Do you really understand how they're different from each other? Oh, can you also go to the next step and tell me why, on base of whatever evidence you have? One of those options are way, what solutions is better than the others, and why? and what basis do you tell me that? Because that's my learning outcome.

In the end, if you do that, you're not perfect with the APA style, well, I may take you a few marks off. And if you don't have the perfect structure, well, that's okay. I'm willing to forgive you. But I'm going to check you on this is what you were supposed to achieve, right?

Did you achieve it through your paper or not? So that's, to me, the most important thing. Sometimes students, some of the brightest students who first year, they figured out an essay, boom, they can put an essay together in no time flat, right? And then you say, no, this is not about how great your little essay is and how many quotes you have and all of this. I want to know whether you figure that out. I'm measuring you on your thinking, right? So that's one. The other thing for me, and I know that you know because you've been around me, but.

If a student comes with a C minus and say, I don't know why I got a C minus, I don't know how to get a C plus or a B or whatever, I'll sit with a student and I'll teach and I'll work with him until they can do it to a B. Not only that, but I will erase the C minus and say, let's work together until you get an extension and work until you get it. Do you know how many students take me up on that? Not very many. Not very many. Because many of them just want to coast through, right? As a teacher, you respect that. Okay, that's all you want from me.

Well, I'm not going to force you. But always be alert for the student to say, no, I want to be better. And the word gets around, like for some of the instructors you've mentioned and others, I've had students many times coming saying, you know, I had a paper with professors so-and-so or an exercise with professor so-and-so, and I got an A. So, well, that's good, good for you. Like, you know, congratulations. No, there's no feedback.

He did not tell me how to improve it, how to take that to an A-plus. I don't know whether I just got lucky or whether I got the right thing, which part was right, which part was wrong, right? The feedback is not a letter grade. The feedback is engaging with the student product and saying, this is the good part, this is the less convincing part. This is not exactly what I asked you to do. Can you do it? Oftentimes, I would ask the student say, well, yeah, the whole thing, but, you know, that part is really, really wait, do you want to rewrite those three pages before I mark it again?

Again, many students took me up on it, but many, many said, oh, no, it's okay, I'll settle for a C-minus. I'm good. That's so funny. One of the biggest experiences I had from going to UF.E and being in the criminology department wasn't any one class. It was the criminology room. It was a room where we would go in with our assumptions, our presuppositions, our presuppositions, about how the world should be, what it is, you'd learn about a problem like the overrepresentation of indigenous people, and then we'd sit down and we'd start trying to figure out what the right answer to address it is. That is where I feel like so much of my learning took place, how to

disagree with a person, how to make articulate points, how not to have that ruin a friendship, how to navigate disagreements because they're legitimate disagreements about how do we improve what's going on. And I find that that has somewhat, and this is going to be a bold statement to a researcher, immunized a lot of my peer group who was a part of that from polarization because we get really deeply how complicated people are. You'd be sitting and talking to someone about the proposed solutions and they just couldn't disagree with you more. But then you go have lunch after and you recognize that it's about this. It's very much like the Bugs Bunny you go to work you disagree and then afterwards you're fair and you're reasonable but it's

about the issues and we learned through that I think unconsciously that we are not our thoughts these are perspectives we have lived experiences where we feel a certain way about an issue when we think that it should be addressed this way because it would make us and our childhood experience is better but through that environment it felt like we just had an opportunity to disagree in a healthy way. Seems like that could be lacking in some regards. I'm interested because I'd see you, you'd walk through, you'd hear the spirited kind of debates going on,

and you'd always walk away with a smile. I'm just interested, what are your thoughts on that? What are your thoughts on the role that that plays in people's ability to communicate and where we are? I think that's probably the most important part is the students that, the work that students do on their own are with each other. And with each other is better because what, you know, people are more or less at the same level, same age, same experience of life, you know, all of those other things. So that work is really important.

It's where most of the learning takes place. Most of my courses involve group work and a lot of it because, and not just old big paper at the end work in the group because that doesn't do anything. One person takes to lead, the other ones go for breakfast, right? it's forcing people to have that kind of interaction, engage, fight, da-da, present it in class, not just one guy, you know, the star person presenting it on behalf of the group, but all of them. And then pointing out to them sometimes that, oh, you're not saying the same thing, did you not discuss that, right, that kind of thing. So the learning in groups is amazing.

And also, particularly if the learning in group then returns to the class as a whole, either virtually or in person. And then you have that discussion and a clash of ideas and all of those other things. I think this is important. The caveat is that a lot of students haven't learned to work in groups

in high school. And of course it's an age group that can be awkward in terms of connecting with other youth and there's other subtext happening there in their classroom at that age group. So a lot of students resist working in groups and hate it. I know students who

told me afterwards, oh, I didn't take that class with you because I knew that you were going to force us to work in group or to present the other nightmares. You're going to force us to present my ideas in class. Well, I'm not comfortable doing that, right? And I'll joke, but it's true. One day we explained to the class, but actually held the student by the hand as she was presenting. And I said, okay, I'm going to be in front between you and the class. Look at me as you present. Just you gave me an excellent presentation.

Now there's no reason you can't repeat it in class. So just pretend there's nobody else there. Talk to me while I'm there. That was extreme, right? But many, many students have this difficulty working in groups. Their experience has not been so good. They like the self-confidence. They know that there's some superstar in the group that will take.

over all of those things that you will deal with in your life, you know, in your professional life. So it's important for them to break those walls, right, and learn not to do it. And you cannot be complacent. You can't just listen to them. And so, oh, no, you don't want to present. That's okay. Do something else.

No, no, no, just the, the, the, you have to challenge them to do it and accompany them as they do it, right? You know, now say, oh, why not you jump from the nine meter high jump, you know, no, no, no, let's start from the side of the swimming pool first, and then we go how far we go. So again, it's accompanying the students, and then, but I say those two things, says it's a bit of a caveat. You can't really force, you can't take the horse to the lake, can't force it to drink. So a lot of students are not yet at a point where group work, works for them, teamwork,

that kind of things, and presentation before at last, even writing, you know, some of them still write painfully. They don't like to share their written text. They don't have a choice to give it to the instructor, but you say, can I share it with your colleagues? The answer is, no, this is my text. You know why? It's because they don't feel

confident, right? So, working with this is part of teaching. This is, okay, you don't feel confident. What would it take for you to be confident? Do you trust my opinion? I'll tell you, what's wrong, what's not strong? You know, work with that. Yeah.

That's so interesting because you see all different people's dynamics kind of taking place and the challenges people have. It seems like confidence is so lacking. But have you seen from your perspective a growth in polarization? As someone who's used to disagreeing on very important topics, like some of the topics I hope we can dive into is like cannabis, the challenges with human trafficking, organized crime, like not small issues, yet it seems like we have trouble right now as a population disagreeing on on silly things. It seems like we can't even get on to the substantive topics right now because we're getting stuck on trivial issues rather than the substantial challenges facing us today.

Have you seen an increase in that or what are you seeing? Well, I have to guard against the angry old man syndrome that, you know, in the good old days, none of that happened. That's not true. There was a lot of that crap happening, polarization and all this. But I think it's taken a different turn today, and you see it also in the classroom because of the social media. People enter their bubble and stay in there.

So part of the role of the university, the classroom and all that is to force people to think outside their bubble. And I'll take that as a segue to another point of T's. for me, which is sometimes I wish I would teach something different like nuclear physics. Why? Because when I teach youth crime, organized crime, sentencing, whatever, everyone enters a classroom with an opinion. They know what's wrong, right? So part of my work is to challenge that. I call that shaking the atoms loose. You know, make room in the brains of the student to think about this differently. differently, you know, if they're going to stick to their opinion, and I don't want them to

accept my opinion, I just say, oh, it's not that I know more, but, you know, open your mind to different possibilities, let's talk about those, right? Or let's consider the facts, or let's consider the evidence and all that. So very often, students in criminology, particularly, enter the classroom with views of what the problem is. Too much of this, not enough of that, whatever. And it's hard to get them to let go of that, create room for new ideas, for a different perspective, for approaching the issue from a different place.

So one of the ways to do that, of course, is to try to persuade them. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. In other ways to use the group, because other people in the group will come with different biases, different views, so let them work it out, right? Give them a challenge to try to find common grounds and that kind of thing. Now, again, sometimes that works. Sometimes that doesn't work.

But it's really a matter of, when you talk about the polarization, I sense now, and I don't know if I mentioned before, but at this point I'm not teaching anymore. and I sense that the positions that students adopt, ideological and others, are really far more rigid, far more difficult to challenge and to, therefore it's more difficult to create a space where the frank discussions can happen. The other thing I'm afraid is that because the situation is polarized. There's a lot of self-censorship among educators. You know, I'm not going to talk about this because someone's going to call me racist or call me this or call me that, you know. So

there's a lot of faculty, and I, again, I don't name names, and it's not particular, peculiar to UV, who basically have retreated into a safe space. You know, I'm not going to challenge students on anything because I don't want to be canceled. I don't want, you know, my opinion, my view may not be that what is currently in trend, trending on social media. So I feel also that not only is there the polarization, but there's less of a tendency for professors, instructors, practicum supervisors, everyone involved in education, less of a tendency to challenge those things because they don't feel safe doing it.

And I don't mean imposing the authority. I know better, I've got three PhDs, I know better. This is not what I'm talking about. It's like, let's have a discussion openly. Like, tell me what your facts are, tell me what your evidence is, tell me why you think that, right? You know, let's have that discussion.

I feel that it's a little more difficult for faculty members to do that. And whether it is or not, I can confirm because I talk to many faculty members that they think it's more difficult. I don't know if it's more difficult because how do I know. But I know that they think it's more difficult, and therefore many of them don't dare push the envelope because why? You know, like, who's asking me to push the envelope? Like, why am I all of a sudden being in charge of challenging the students?

The main thing now is that the students believe what they want to believe, right? So that's, to me, that is a concern more than polarization. There's always some polarization, but perhaps one can argue, and I think it would be fair to say that polarization is getting worse because of social media and because people basically enter a bubble that, without even knowing they're in the bubble, most of them, and can't find a way out. It seems like it's tougher right now to fall forwards. Like, you're going to make mistakes.

You're going to, I'm certain that I had positions in my undergrad that were incorrect. And if I looked back on them now, or if somebody said, hey, you said this thing five years ago, seven years ago, what are your thoughts? I'd be like, ah, I was wrong. And it wouldn't be something that would devastate me. but when you have it seems like we've kind of evolved because from my understanding

when like John Height and people were in school you were intimidated by the professor my goodness to go into office hours by John's kind of story it was what are you doing here who gave you the right to just walk into my office like it was a very

that the professor is at the top of the hierarchy you don't bother them you don't waste their time and then we have this golden period where come ask questions, learn. Let's have an open dialogue. Let's challenge preconceived notions. Let's dive into all of it. This is what I'm here for. This is what the hour and a half office hours is here for. Let's do this. And now it seems like we're in a time where people are really concerned about offending people, miscommunicating, being wrong on an issue. One of the best moments between you and I, and this goes to like an issue that could be perceived as political, is the overrepresentation. of indigenous people. Because when I brought you my paper, I was like, it doesn't see, like, the culture in my peer group was very much like, they're overrepresented. Well, we should just release them so they represent their exact amount. And when I brought this to you, I was

like, but it's violent crimes. It's not petty crimes. It's not they stole a candy bar. It's that they absolutely abused someone to the point where, like, their face was unrecognom. Like, this is a, this is a problem. You don't want this person just walking down the road. What would that due to the victim. And so, and you were like, yeah, this is, this is a problem. Like, this is, there's not a correct answer right now that we can just use to fix the problem. And so, but within the peer group, it was like, no, we should just release them. And this information, when I brought it forward was very uncomfortable because it's like, well, then what do we do? How do we fix it? And there is a guilt, I think a lot of people feel right now who are outside of the indigenous

community who want better. They want this not to be a problem anymore. in the best sense. They're empathetic. They understand and they want to see change. And it's like the change in regards to like indigenous people in the criminal justice system is going to take years to address if we're going to re-educate a community, help them have the tools to do better and not commit these crimes. As a native court work, I work with people who have sexual interference with minors, serious crimes and assaults on domestic assaults against their wife. Like, these are not, the crimes that I'm dealing with are not simple. They're not easy to resolve.

They're not going to be fixed by just having them leave that day because they're going to be charged with it again. If we don't address the underlying factors, which brings life to gilladoo. But it's a complex problem with water. And I feel comfortable, I don't know if I'd feel comfortable talking about this if I wasn't indigenous, but the water problem around indigenous communities. Some indigenous communities don't have clean water. One of the challenges is around being able to have clean water plants run by the community. If you're going to bring in a water treatment facility, it's going to be tens of millions of dollars, but then you have to have the people to run it.

And as I spoke to somebody about, they said the long-term cost of maintaining a building is way more than the upfront cost of just building it. And so having the staff to manage it, well, if your community isn't wealthy, if you're not a community that's got a ton of economic development, who are you going to hire to run this building? okay well you need to bring in people because your community doesn't have the information well now you have to pay them even more to move say you're in bc you need to bring someone in from Alberta now you have to pay them more to make that trip worth it they have to relocate from their family now it's an even bigger cost my understanding was in Saskatchewan they tried to just build a water treatment facility and then they went oh no one's going to run it and now it's just an

empty building that's not used because they didn't think that long term and it frustrates me when I hear the leader of the federal NDP say we just need to pay more and it's like this is a problem because indigenous communities want their community members having those great jobs so we have to build the community outwards to have a long-term solution

but again clean water seems like a topic it's hard for people to approach because people will just sit there across their arms and go well they should just have clean water and it's like this is this is a complex issue and it seems like we're struggling right now to embrace the complexity of problems and yet that is something

to me, you've always done a good job on, is just sort of embracing that complexity. So I'm just interested in your thoughts on that. Well, people are always looking for simple solutions, and unfortunately, the world is, are the ever that simple, right? And when it comes to helping communities, and I'll move away for a minute from the indigenous community, and I've worked with at least 100 different countries,

many of them developing countries. And it's always the same thing. You know, like some expert from somewhere else is going to tell you the best solution is X, and most of the time it simply doesn't work in that context. So it's not translated into something that makes sense for that community because of level of technology, level of development, whatever. I'll give you an example.

In South Sudan, where we've worked for seven years, developing, doing justice reform and correctional reform, the Americans who were funding the project kept wanting to give us computers to give to the prison authorities to keep track of inmates. It didn't matter how many times I told them they don't have electricity, so no point, right?

What they need is a letter-bound book that is of a certain quality of paper because they have a lot of insects there that feed on paper, right, and a safe place to put it, a dry place. That's what they need for them to keep track of their prisoner, which is a very important thing, right, including end of sentence. Some inmates were not being released because people lost track of when it was they were supposed to be released, literally, right?

So don't give me a computer. Well, we give you a generator to do the computers. Yeah, and where do they get the gas for the jet? Like it goes on and on, right? Don't give them something they don't need. The solution that is almost perfect doesn't work there. Another example of this, I know it's going away from your water thing, but similar kind of things that people think that the solutions can be parachuted from elsewhere.

So we're working in some Caribbean countries, and they were developing safe houses for battered women and women who were in a threat situation domestically or otherwise some of them have been traffic so in Canada what you try to do in the US is you try to find a place

that no one knows about and you hide them somewhere right for a short period of time and that becomes a safe place well where do you hide someone in a small island state you know there's no way like anywhere people will know

where you are what you're doing there's no way to hide in a community what was the solution they found? Build it right next to the police station with an adjoining wall if you can, right? And then you say to the cops, you make sure that no one gets in there, right? So it's a safe house of a totally different variety

than what we think here, but we could have given them advice on how to build a safe house, you know, in a safe little place that no one knows about and it would never have worked, right? So oftentimes, of course, the communities don't have all the solutions, they're saying, well, return to the community, tell them to find their own solution. Well, that's, that's a dream. Most communities don't have that wherewithal to develop their own solutions. They're not there, right? It's also a question of development.

So what are you got? You need different experts who go there and say, I don't know what your solution is, but can I help you find it, right? Now, here's a solution. It works in Wisconsin and in Edmonton, so why not you try that? It's the same thing with the water situation. Now, at some point, there are technologies that can help those communities, and of course, they may not be aware of them. How do they know all these new technologies and means and all that? So, yeah, they need expertise. They need people who will come and give them opportunities and give them options and inform them about some of the different things that they could consider. But in the end, it really has to be helping people solve their own problems.

And I told you earlier, it's helping students do their own learning. And if we talk about my work in international criminal justice reform, that's lesson number one. You're not going there to tell them how to do it. You're going to help them figure out how they want to do it. and I don't know how many times in my career I would say hey listen guys it's your system you figure it out you know I'm not going to make decisions for you it's not my system I'm not going to live with it I'm leaving my plane is next Monday right

you know you figure it out now let me tell you how I can help you know and if you know other ways I could help well tell me right and you'd be surprised how few people in the justice reform world, international world, have that approach. Basically, I've got it all figured out, I'll come and tell you, and then I'm leading, right? Yeah, that ego becomes huge, and it seems like something that you're very good at managing, where it probably catches people off guard to a certain extent of, like, hold on, like, I thought, because people are used to having someone drop the books on the table and go,

the five things you need to do to fix the problem is this and once you do these things you have a flourishing economy and I think it's like we often reference other countries around drug reform and how can we deal with drugs properly and it's like well we're not that country and so we have to figure out what's going to work for our country and it's like that doesn't seem always well known or understood or that it seems like you just go in with humility which is just so refreshing to hear yeah well I guess humility a solution with it, but that's not my main virtue. On the contrary, I've got a big ego. But I figured out that one of the ways to really help is to help people help themselves. It's not to give them the

solutions. Because as soon as you're gone, either the problem comes back or another problem comes back. And they depend always on outside help and outside people to tell them what to do, then you're enabling some form of, you know, disempowerment. That's not the goal. The goal is to help them. The other thing is they will have to live with the results afterwards. You don't. As an expert, you know, you fly out, you leave, you go to the next community. So it's important to recognize that the choices that they make are going to affect their lives, not yours. And therefore, they belong to them totally.

And very often, of course, where does the money come from for doing that work? It comes from the UN, from countries, Canada, U.S., whatever, giving money to help, right? Well, those funding agencies do not always have that approach to it. It says, oh, you go out there and give them the five steps to success and, you know, get out of there in three weeks, right? And you say, well, it's a little more complicated than that. Then all of a sudden they say, well, maybe we can find another consultant who is not so complicated. It's just going to tell them, one, two, three, right? and nothing is ever that simple.

One of the things that I take pride of is that with all the communities that I've worked, I say I, but there's other people with me, like I don't do that alone. But in all the communities we've worked, it's never happened that we've not been asked again, right? Never, not a single time. Eventually, sometimes it's many years later, but they say, you know what you did, You know, that was really helpful. Can you come back? You know, can you help us again with this?

Because they appreciate the approach of empowering as opposed to trying to resolve the problem for them. Yeah. That makes sense. What did you mean by you have an ego? What, what, because it seems like you're very humble in how you approach things when it comes to students of getting out of your own way and letting them focus on your own education. So what did you mean by that? It's all BS. Yeah. No, I have an ego, but it's, you know,

So as I told you earlier, I take pride in what I do. So, of course, I give myself credit for a lot of that, right? I'm proud of what I do. It requires effort. I'm prepared to make the effort. But the limit, really, is that I remind myself that in the end, success depends on other people, not just me. So I try to empower people, but then I respect the fact

that it's their learning, their system, their responsibility, all of that. And it's an amazing opportunity to be an educator, really. It's an amazing thing that we can get paid to do that. And then the other thing is the work that I do in justice reforms with the International Center and other organizations. It's basically the same, but at the state level, at the institutional level, but you're basically teaching still, right? It's a form of teaching.

Of course, in order to teach you, they have to do research and you have to write policy briefs and all those things. Now, the tools are a little different, but it's still helping people learn and figure out things for themselves. When did you choose criminology? When did that come onto your radar as the path that you wanted to take? Yeah, well, that's another long story, but I'll try to make it short.

first I when I was about 8 year old I was coming back from the beach with my parents driving and we drove by what was then St. Vincent Paul Penitentiary north of Montreal big federal penitentiary

and then they stopped all the cars because Trigandmates had escaped and they you know inspected every car and I were like 80 year old or something so they inspect every car they check for weapons and they tell my parents, be very careful because these guys are very dangerous and they're possibly armed

and da-da-da don't give a right to anyone and all those things. I'm very young, I'm thinking, what is the right, or I didn't use the word right, but you know, what makes people put other people in that big place, that prison, you know? And the thinking for me was always like, who decides what's right and wrong and, like, how do you end up being there? It's not, I don't know what's right and wrong, but who makes the decision exactly? And do I believe these people that they say that these guys are bad guys, you know? Now, these thoughts were not formed the same way that I'm explaining them today because I was very young.

But I was totally intrigued. And I was looking, wow, they put people behind that? Like, why would they do that? You know, like, that's a weird thing to do. And so I was obsessed. with that. Then I went into philosophy and looked at ethics and all that. Oh, that's interesting, but it doesn't answer my

question. Now I thought, okay, I'm going to go to psychology because maybe someone has got answered. And I applied in psychology, got admitted. Everything was piggity-boo. I was top of the list. Everything was fine. Where were you going to school? I was going to go in psychology

at Ottawa U. And so life is good. And then two weeks before this, I got a, in a car accident, which was not serious, but it cost me money, so I did not have money to pay tuition, right? I thought, I'll just wait for a semester, no big deal. And then to make a story short, then I meet this guy who said, from Ottawa. And at that time, I'm in Montreal, and he said, oh, you're coming to Ottawa next week, or, you know, in September or something. I said,

well, no, I'll skip a year because I don't have money. And I said, well, I thought it didn't have money. Since then, I got the money, but it's too late. I missed the boat. you know, I can't go. So he said, oh, no big deal. You can come to the same university, but in criminology. You made the dean's list in philosophy. You're great, you know, we want you. So I said, oh, sure, but criminology, I never, I didn't, that's the first time I heard the word.

Right. So, so, well, why would I go to criminology? He said, it's in the same faculty, psychology at the time. And most of our courses are credited towards the master's in, psychology, so you just switched in December or January and Bob's your uncle. So I thought, oh, that works. I went to criminology, and then there was no taking me out of that. After that first semester, I had the bug. I just wanted to study that. I knew this was my calling. What was the hook? What was the thing that stood out to you that put the nail on the coffin?

It was a practical problem. Like, how do we deal with that social? issue. Also, I had good professors and a few that I could that I remember that were convincing and showed me that there was something worth doing there. Like

I've never been interested in knowledge for the sake of knowledge. I wanted to always do that like, okay, once I got that knowledge, what I do with it? Like, how does that make a difference? Criminology is an applied science, right? So it's always what do I do with this?

What do I do with this? So that attracted me a lot. And the same thing might have been true in psychology, but, you know, once you get into this, you start biting into it. I would have been probably just as happy in psychology or whatever. But I entered up in criminology, and I just going to let go. Like, tell me more, right?

That was my reaction. What about the darkness? What about the dark things you learn about people in terms of, Like, we have so many FBI, CIA, CSI type shows, and it seems like that very much speaks to the person who loves criminology. A lot of my peer group, they enjoyed the, I think it's Dexter where they're like the guy also likes carving up people and stuff. But it appeals because you have to have a certain trait in order to kind of stomach learning that some serial killers seduce their people before. they murder them and butcher them to pieces. You have to have a stomach for the John Wayne Gacy's,

the people who show up at your kid's birthday party as a clown, and then slaughter people. And there has to be a stomach for that in criminology in a way that you can get through an English degree without ever having to face that or think about the darkness of human beings. Is there a time you realize that? Is that something, that original moment

where you saw the jail where you thought about that? Because that is the interesting thing I find about criminology students is we have a sick, twisted sense of humor of like, we're not shocked when you talk about the dark things going on in society or things going too far in certain regards. That doesn't make us run out of the room. But when other people sometimes hear it, they go, I can't hear that. That's too much. That makes me uncomfortable. Like, I can't continue any farther. Yeah, for most of our class, it was like, that's just another Tuesday.

So when did that arise for you? Yeah, I'm not totally sure. That dark side is with me every day all the time. So one example in particular that really gets to me is when I do human trafficking work and talk to victims or deal with victims of human trafficking. And I am in disbelief about what people will do to others for greed. Can you describe human trafficking for people who might? not really understand the topic.

Well, basically, it's convincing people through coercion or deception to do things that work or do things that it would not normally do. So what work in dangerous places, prostitution, work without pay, all of those other things, basically because they are coerced into doing it. So it's a form of slavery. It's oftentimes described like that. It has many, many aspects. But what I see in there is like

I'm in disbelief about what human beings do to others. That kind of, and this is not like one day they enrage, you know, builds, beat someone up or shoot someone. This goes on for months, years, all of that, right? And they do that in cold blood. They know exactly what they're doing and not to one person, do a whole bunch of them. So there are many other things.

But that's one of them. That's a big dark side for me. The only way I found to deal with that, sometimes I leave the topic. So for a couple of years, when people ask me if I want to deal with this, I'll say, no, thanks. I can't do that. I need space. I need time to reconnect with my faith in humans. Because I tell you, when I see some of that, it really affects my belief in humanity, you know, to see that. And even so, even more so, because oftentimes the people who exploit others in human trafficking are people of the same group, same nationality, family members, all this, like, how can you do that to someone who is basically a member of your group, someone you should care for and be supporting, and there you go exploiting them in these

evil ways, right? And then gets worse because some of the human trafficking is with children. So like let's not even talk about that. It's awful what people do. But in any event, so the dark side is part of the job. I didn't come into criminology totally naive because I had worked for several years in nightclubs and bars in Montreal. I had seen a few things. So I, you know, wasn't really a...

I had seen a few things. So I wasn't totally naive about that. But clearly, I remember to this day, my first visit to Philippinell Institute, which was a psychiatric institute for dangerous criminals serving sentences or being assessed, evaluated. And you had everything there, like serial killers, the worst kinds, the dark side. And I remember that day, and I remember the fear, the being intimidated, the weird, reaction I had because I thought some of them are pretty nice guys, you know, like, you know, he's got a good sense of humor, you know, it looks like an ordinary guy, you know, like, why would I not want to help him, you know? And in that first visit, they had, the psychiatrist who had organized it, had made sure that we would not know, we met a lot of inmates, but they ensured that we would not know what these guys were guilty of. So we're going there talking to all these guys.

guys, we know their first name or whatever, and thinking, oh, well, some of them are, you know, what are they doing here? They're not that crazy and all of that. And then you get out, you go to a meeting room and they say, okay, well, Norman there, let me tell you about Norman, and let me tell you about it. So there's that dissonance. It says, well, on the one end, I see a person who's just another human being. On the other end, I hear that this person is an awful person because he did things.

that are unspeakable, right, and hard to understand or even harder to accept. So you learn to cope with that, but I don't, I think, if it doesn't affect you, if it's not still a matter that troubles you from time to time, you're not awake. You're not doing your job. You know, you need to be aware of this without necessarily becoming so hard. that you can't be open to dealing with those individuals in a, from a human to human point of view. You always stay on your yards. You know, these guys' trick is to manipulate and do all those things. So you're not stupid. You're not naive. But that doesn't mean that you can't

understand and remember that this is a human being in front of you with is our own fears and all of that. That is the heavy part of being a native court worker because the people who are always the easiest to deal with, the people who are going ahead, getting enrolled in programming, connecting with counseling resources are often

the people accused of harming children. And that's a heavy thing to see the charm that they're willing to bring, the persuasive, hey, how's it been? Like, how's your day going? Oh, like, just so you know, I got

this done here's my certificate i'm really trying to fix things and it's like a lot of everything you're doing right now is exactly what brought you to the original charge to begin with the persuasive calm cool collected smooth talking person is exactly why you're here today and so on the one hand good glad you got counseling on the other hand how much can i trust that this has impacted you because this has been a tool that you've used in other circumstances that bring you, like the role of the native court workers to help address the underlying factors of the charge that brings them before the court that day. That charm, that persuasive element is exactly what helped bring them here, yet it is what allows them to have a good relationship with their counselor, have a good

relationship with me. So there's a certain level of hesitation, skepticism, fear, that I don't want that to persuade me and I do my best to put them into a you're in your own separate category of people I work with and drawing those distinct boundaries with those individuals is key to me because, and I think my criminology degree helped me process that circumstance because walking in their blind or not understanding the complexities of human beings, I don't think I would have been ready to deal with those type of people because they are the most likely to hypothetically charm a judge,

charm their defense counsel, charm everybody in the room while committing terrible crimes. And that's, it's been a hard issue to square for me because it's so dark that you see that and you go like, oh,

it's so easy to deal with and then you have to return them to their box of like, yeah, and that's part of the problem. That's part of the danger of that person is that they are so persuasive and charming. Yep. I could tell you stories until tomorrow of this, and it's a trap. So early in my career, I was lucky to be with a seasoned criminologist, parole officers, and others who might sit with me and interview and all that and say, you know, afterwards, I think, okay, what do you make of that, right? And then they show me how I misunderstood, misunderstood, misinterpreted, got charmed, all of those things, gave me that feedback.

Some of it is learning as you do it. Hopefully, if you get good supervisors or colleagues who can help you with this, it goes better. But early in my years, I was probation aftercare for youth at some point in Ontario, in Toronto. And I remember in juvenile court, it wasn't called that then, but the equivalent of a juvenile court. There's two kids back-to-back appearing before the judge, and one of them, none of them is mine. I'm waiting for the next case. So the first one is a kid whose father is a long-distance truck driver. The kid doesn't know when he's coming back because it could be today, could be tomorrow.

The kid stole socks at a department store called Woolworth because he was hitchhiking to see his mom. and his feet started smelling, so he went to the store, he couldn't, he checked a ride, and the driver told him to get out because he smelled too bad. So he basically went, stole a pair of socks, washed his father, his feet in a fountain, with a plan of washing his feet in his fountain, but he got caught. So he goes before the judge, and he stutters, he has no self-confidence, It's the first time that he gets to court has no idea. The judge asks him about his parents as well.

I don't know how to reach my mom. There's no phone or anything at the time, cell phone. And I don't know when my dad will come. And the dad, of course, is not present in court. The kid stutters can't come up with an explanation. It doesn't explain why he stole the socks. The judge sends him to then training school two years. The next kid, that's a different system then, right?

The next hit comes, cute blonde air kid, really smooth, charming, very intelligent, smile all the time, really smooth, explains to the judge that, you know, it was a mistake and all of that. This kid does seven prior conviction. The cops have presented evidence that he's actually leading a ring of youth who are doing break and enters, and it's seven conviction. The judge gave him a warning. So the charm plays, right? You know, it's not just charm, but, you know, some kids really don't have things on their side. And you learn really quickly not to be totally taken by those outward signs. You know, like do your research, understand what was happening, challenge the individual, find out, you know, check their stories, all of those things.

Eventually, you know, you get to a better understanding of whom to trust and not. And you said as a native court worker, it's not as if I'm a bartender and I trust you to pay me at the end of the evening, right? You know, it's me, maybe I'll lose 50 bucks, you know, because you walk out without paying. But as a native court worker, as a probation officer, as an officer of the court, you're making that decision on behalf of us all, right? You know, you're recommending decisions to the judge. You're doing all those things. So it's not just whether you trust it. It's, do you trust that person on behalf of the rest of us?

You know, you have a professional responsibility other than simply your personal doubts about whether to trust someone or not. So that's a heavier thing on your shoulder. And in the end, you know, the judges don't have time to get to know the offenders you do as a court worker or as a probation officer or whatever. So your opinion matters. It's not that the judge will always agree with you, but it matters what you tell the judge are in your pre-sentence report or in your recommendations. Yeah, it's a huge challenge because you see all the complexities of a human being, some of which are the person who's accused of maybe domestic assault against their wife,

horrible circumstance to be in, that person needs counseling to work through, why do you treat people like this? how does alcohol maybe play in role in the decision making you have the more complex problem I have personally philosophically that I've asked a few people and I'll ask you is this person is guilty of their flaws and their mistakes so is the person who stole the candy bar but where do we put the white collar crime where do we put the person as Daryl Plexis decide who gets rich for no good reason, who has no excuse to do so, who takes from taxpayers with no sense of remorse. 2008, there were plenty of people who committed financial crimes, never prosecuted under

a criminal law. Corruption is a huge challenge because we don't remember the people who are involved in 2008 specifically. Even if you go specifically to BC or Canada, we can't name those people the way we can name Robert Pickton. Robert Pickton's crimes? Horrible. Over 50 women. I think he says 49, but I think that's disputed. But the point is we can name that person, know what they did, and think that's a bad person. But we can't do the same with 2008. We can't do that with a lot of different issues around financial crimes because it's so broad. To me, it impacts more people. And it frustrates me when I see a homeless, impoverished, indigenous person make the front page of the news. for stealing from Save On Foods in comparison to the people who committed those crimes

that's where I feel like I struggle I can't seem to square the issues because for some reason we kind of go that's politics that's operating at scale like these are the problems that are good that's just business like we just kind of put it in a category where we don't have to figure it out

you're a person who's interested in corruption I'm just interested in your thoughts on trying to square these challenges It's not just corruption. It's corruption, financial crimes, all kinds of electoral fraud. That's also important. You know, when you're undermining the democratic process, all those things. There's many, many very serious crimes, a crime against the environment, all those things. So we're worried about the impoverished individual who breaks into your car to steal change on the old days, a couple of CDs, whatever. And I have no problem putting him on probation or in James. for 30 days or 40 days, but the guy runs away with your pension fund, while it's a private matter, why not you sue the guy? So clearly our system is not focusing on the greatest threats. That's true throughout the system. It's even true when it comes to organized crime. The only time that you get attention from the police really is when there is public pressure

and public pressure normally comes when there's violence. So currently in BC, another spike of violence and fights and killings between gangs. The focus of the police is, oh, on those guys to do this, but these guys, between killings, what do you think they're doing? They're still committing horrendous crimes, trafficking and stealing and extortion and stealing businesses, all those things. almost nothing happens to them, right? We only pay attention to the gangs when they start shooting each other,

or by coincidence, we bump into a car that's full of drugs and say, oh, we stop drugs. So throughout the system, the focus is oftentimes on the less serious threats. Now, why? I don't know why, but I can tell you some of the reasons. One of them is, of course, politicians and chiefs of police and Johnson, people respond to public pressure and people get we worried when the gang starts shooting in public places. If they were shooting each other in the middle of

the forest, people would say good riddance, you know, some of them are dead, we don't have to worry about them. So obviously the system is focusing on what the population sees as a greater threat or an immediate threat. Violence is one of them and there's many other things. Also, the system is limited in means. So corruption, financial crimes, all those things require specialized investigation that take a long time and cost a lot of money. Many of them happen across borders, so even more money, because you have to do your investigation in New York or London or Bangkok or somewhere else. So most of those things don't get a lot of investigation.

We're led to believe that all this is happening, but when you lift the veil there, very little investigation happening, you know, in those areas. And so the whole system is sort of geared towards a certain type of crime, and unfortunately, it lacks some of the most serious crimes. Crime against the environment, you know, polluting a dozen lakes that will take a thousand years to recover, would that be worse than pickpocketing? you think, you know, obviously, but I don't know how to change that. My solution, quote-unquote solution, it's not really a solution, but where I look for that

is different governance. Who tells the police what to do? Who governs the judges? Who govern? I don't mean direct or manage. I mean govern. Who sets the priorities? Who holds them accountable?

That kind of thing. So I'm interested in things like civilian oversight of policing. I'm interested in police boards and their roles. Of course, there's many issues with the way police boards currently function, but they could do more because someone's got to tell the cops what we want them to do. Can I ask, did you watch the Brenda Lucky thing? Did you observe that at all? Do you have any thoughts on that?

Can you help us think about that issue better? Because normal people are going to have their positions. They're not going to have your expertise. I'm just interested. Can you help us think about that issue in a better way? Well, I'm not sure about a better way, but I can't tell you about my own reaction. I understood her point of view, basically saying, well, it takes time I'm doing this. But when I read between the lines, my own personal view was, well, it's been a year and a half.

And you haven't taken any action? What took you so long? Like, all can you justify not taking action? And her answer was, it's a process, it will take years and all of that. Well, I don't buy that. I think there's a whole bunch of things that could be done immediately. First and foremost, she could have made sure that the, and she could still make sure that the resourcing of the positions in that province

takes place. So to leave positions empty for months and then to replace them with temporary people for a few months and all that. That's no way to run a circus, right? And so she's accountable for that. She could say, well, you know, I'm not, I don't do human resources. I got three guys doing that in an army, but in the end, she's accountable. So I was disappointed with her response. I understand, however, a point about, well, I could have an immediate response, but I'm working on the more fundamental reforms of attitude and culture and all of this. But I think a good leader, should do both at the same time.

But, you know, we're not in her shoes. We don't know what she was dealing with. But I felt that their response to that, you know, talking about Nova Scotia was weak and disappointing. And I don't think that people in the province were convinced for one minute that there was someone there at the helm who understood what they were going through. Can you add a little bit of context? So from my understanding, I think it was the Halifax Observer.

wrote a long, kind of scathing indictment of her working with Trudeau to try and have a horrible atrocity in Canada painted around kind of gun control. And that was how the Halifax Observer kind of explained it. I think that article goes into far more detail about the pressure that maybe she felt. And then she's more recently come out and said, we're trying to improve things. We're trying to fix the system, and this is what we were doing, is trying to fix the system, and so you caught us trying to fix the system, and that's kind of how it felt like it was portrayed from my perspective. Well, no doubt that she and politicians, I mean, the commissioner of the RCNP is a bit of a politician by definition, but you need to deal with public

opinion. So no doubt that there's a lot of spin and their answers, and whether or spinning agrees with the prime minister or not is really irrelevant. In the end, they all know where the wind blows and they all go in that direction. But when she says, well, I don't read the media. She said that during your testimony before the commission of inquiry. She said, I don't read the media. I don't follow the media. Why not? You know, I don't know she meant that literally, because probably people give her media summaries and stuff like this, but basically you're saying, well, I don't know what people are saying about it. That's not my job. Well, no. it is your job in my view right yeah it might have to do with gun control but you can't blame everything on guns

there were definitely mistakes made on the ground and everyone by now understands them or most of them some of them she did not tell us what she was prepared to do or as had done already other than abroad you know over many years we'll get there we'll change attitude you know that kind of thing So I found that was disappointing as a leader. I was expecting more. Of course, always easy to criticize. I'm not in her shoes. I don't know what she was actually dealing with.

Maybe there's resistance within this whole thing. I know she was also dealing with the emerging union. You know, there's so many dimensions of this. But clearly, you know, go back. to your studying days, and I'm sure before that, there's been all kinds of commissions of inquiry and special reports on the RCNP and the problem with leadership and poor planning, poor strategy, all of those things. And, you know, every two years or three years, there's a new report that tells us what's wrong with the leadership and the RCNP, and three years later

we get another report. I oftentimes get a sense that not a lot has improved. on the other end I want to believe that something has improved that it just takes time so the commissioner was saying oh things have improved I hope she's right I hope she's not spinning it

but when you look at the number of commissions and special reports that says there are fundamental systemic issues in how the RCS is being led and managed and you've got to think well there's got to be a better way

to do this you know after all we're talking about 35,000 people it's not a small organization to manage over a big country like Canada but you know that's an excuse in the end she's in charge she's the one who is accountable for all of that corruption always has a few pieces

politicians often involved I don't want to get lost in specifically Trudeau because I don't think that that's always fair it is so easy to judge people based on their mistakes or misunderstandings or what we hear in the news, nobody wants to be judged based on that. Nobody wants, at the end of your life, to have in your obituary all the things you did

wrong. We all want the best of ourselves to kind of be remembered. So I don't want to get lost on Trudeau. But one of the challenges is he's been accused of influencing this issue. He's been accused of influencing Jody Wilson and Rabald and pressuring her. Do you think that that type of, when speaking in corrupt, Do you think that that's a concern when a leader, not just Trudeau, when a leader is accused of being involved in those issues? Because to steal man the other position, a leader should be involved.

A leader should be trying to get their hands involved in things to the best of their ability to guide things in the right direction. If you're overstepping sometimes a policy rule, but you're doing it with the best of intent, that's not always something to forsake someone for. So I'm just interested, how do we best think about his involvement or people's involvement in issues where there may be overstepping and maybe with the best of intent, but in terms of something like corruption? Well, overstepping is a matter of definition, you know, even in the case of former minister Abel, not everyone agreed on whether it was overstepping, not overstepping, if it was overstepping when it happened, all those things. So, leaving that aside, who knows exactly? Yeah, leaders have to walk a fine line all the time. When is it they intervene? What is it that they don't?

What's the consequence if they do? If they have delegated, you know, so it goes on. And there are also hard lines set in law of certain things that you cannot do, right? You cannot influence certain processes and so on. So leaving Trudeau aside, you know, I'm sure he's made mistakes. that at some point is going to tell us, well, I wish I didn't do this and that one and this other thing. But, you know, at the end, you want to judge the whole administration.

The corruption slope is, to me, that's not a huge issue. Obviously, there might be mistakes there. There might be overreaching. There might be small abuse of powers, not necessarily, but, you know, abuse of authority to some extent. or mistaken use of authority, I don't really know, don't have all the facts. But, you know, there's far worse problem than this in terms of managing. So are there other signs of corruption?

Now, in the case of, I forget the name of the big international construction firm involved in the Rehbolt case, but... SNC Label. Yes, and CLABELA, exactly. Well, we know. they had been found, they were being convicted of corruption and all of this, was there more behind the scene that we don't know? Well, who knows? I don't really know. I also, and I'm going here on dangerous grounds, but, you know, for many years, for seven years, I was a senior guy

at Justice Canada. And I'm quite familiar with the way you advise the minister and where central agencies like Prime Minister's office or these things work and in that particular case I found that one of the things that seemed to be happening is that

the minister was not taking a hint from people who were paid to advise her and people who know more about her job than she did. Now that's my personal judgment but based on my own experience when you're a minister of Attorney General of Canada,

Minister of Justice, you're in a very lonely place and there's so many thousands of ways you can screw up, right? And the only way that you avoid screwing up is by relying on people around you who know more than you do. Now, we've had all kinds of testimonies that in that particular case, the advice was not received. Now, I can't pass judgment on that, because maybe the minister was right in not accepting the advice.

Who knows? We don't know exactly what the advice was. But seeing from where I was, I was thinking, well, listen, these are people who really knew what they were doing. They knew these particular aspects of the law far better than the minister possibly could. So did people give her the wrong advice? Did she not listen to the advice? what were her decisions?

And at some point, you have to think, well, why did the prime minister or his office felt that they had to intervene? Was it for corrupted motives? You know, they were standing political motives, corrupted motives. Maybe they were earning something out of this, who knows? Or was it because all of a sudden they were not sure that the person responsible for those decision was taking advice and understood what needed to happen. I don't know the answer is any one of those three and perhaps there's a fourth and a fifth reason, but I know that it's more

complex than that. And, you know, that kind of decision is made every day many times by a Minister of Justice. You have no idea about any decisions. Even I, when I was there, I couldn't fathom what they needed to decide on, right? And guess what? They had to rely on other people. At some point, not a minister, but a deputy minister of justice, a former deputy that I won't name, was in a public event, and people ask him, like, wow, you know, as a deputy minister of justice, you serve for many years and you got out of there, Scott Free, no one has ever accused you of making a wrong decision or corruption or anything. Like, what was your secret? Like, how come you avoided all that crap that other deputies and ministers get? involved in. And no hesitation, turn around, name a few people in the audience who were there who had worked with him before and said, because of these people. They gave me the right advice.

I trusted them, and they had my back. They made sure I made good decisions all the time. Now, of course, in politics, well, who do you trust? What advice do you think? I'm not blaming the former minister. I'm not blaming anyone. I was saying, it's all. or more complex than that. And in the end, did we really get a good understanding of what it was? Not really. And also, this new disposition of the code allowing some kind of agreement between the prosecution and the accused, in this case, Sinclair, was a brand new disposition of the law, right? So no one exactly knew how it would work, including the minister.

because no one knew. Not no one was a brand new disposition. Like you could say, well, in England and in this other country, this is all it works, but how is it supposed to work here? And who makes the decision? And so it was also new grounds, and maybe that's part of the answer. Like, everyone was on new grounds with a big, huge mega shipbowl of a case, right? You know, that was not an easy thing, the SNC-Leveling, right?

How did Daryl's interaction with corruption, watching as someone who knows him, watching some of the preparatory interviews that he had done to prepare for my interview with him? It was astonishing how much of Daryl as a human being was missing from the interviews, for me personally. I would watch a four-minute clip of them outside of the speaker's room, and they're like, how could you make this decision? And to me, context is everything. And knowing that Daryl has a background trying to understand corruption, trying to address in other countries, it's like you're going to accuse him of misunderstanding this. It seemed short-sighted. It was why I'm so grateful to have this platform to hear him long form. I didn't dive into the BC liberals and any of that

to begin with. I wanted to show this is a human being. This is someone who cares about his students, who cares about his community, who cares about self-improvement and developing yourself in a positive way, then let's talk about what happened and where shit hit the fan. It seemed like, first of all, like context was lacking from a lot of those interviews, but as a bystander who knew him, who knows where his heart is, for better or worse, what was it like watching that? And what did you think of some of the things he was trying to uncover? Because I've heard even people who've listen to it, been like, it was never that big of a deal. And I've heard obviously from him saying this is terrible and every dollar misspent is a tragedy for people to have confidence in the

government. And we need confidence in government. Interviewing people, I don't know if you've heard of Joel Backin. He made the film the corporation and the new corporation. He's a professor to Hallard sat down with him. He talked about the World Economic Forum genuinely believes democracy isn't the move. Corporations can fix a lot of our problems for us and we should just get out of their way and let them fix some of the problems. And then we see the challenges with our democracy

when corruption allegations arise and then people who are in the world economic form would go, this is just proof of what we're saying. How did you think about what happened with Daryl, knowing him as a person? How did you kind of watch all of that play out? Well, I try to support him, But, and I'm not going to reveal what he shared with me in terms of his emotions.

But you can't imagine he was concerned, right? You know, this was not a small deal for him. And you saw the kind of vicious attack he was subjected to. So that was awful. But did that surprise me? No. Because, look, the person who came out with the scandal with Enron and the old financial crime there, she's still looking for a job.

No one is going to hire her again. right so a lot is at stake people who actually reveal cases of corruption bribery all of those things election tampering they do that at great cost they are typically not protected the media even you know typically don't give them the benefit of the doubt so you get all this world against you very few people in your corner so guess why most people don't report do you think that this thing that Daryl reported, and I'm not divulging anything Daryl told me, but do you and I think that this started with the day Daryl arrived? No.

Oh, do you think it's the only thing that was happening in the legislature? Not even a little bit? Not a little bit. And on and on. So it took someone with courage, or some people might say naivity, to say, no, I don't, this, I'm not part of that. I don't do this. and I think the facts are that they try to bring him in

into this fold of one that you accept a little perks here and there that way they're trying to compromise him they didn't succeed but apparently there were attempts to do that so guess what you know this is a guy who has enough integrity to say no I'm not going to be part of that and I'm going to denounce it like you can say whatever you want about Darrell and he may not have been the greatest politician, I don't know, but integrity is important to him, right? He wasn't going to sell his soul for, you know, a few thousand bucks or

for a little promotion or whatever. I don't think he's ever considered that in his whole career and he wasn't about to do it in politics. Now, there's a big complex story there, but in the end, what's the lesson I brought? Basically, unless you have people of integrity who are willing to stand up and say, no, this doesn't work. This is not good enough. Nothing will happen. But the second thing is, you need to protect those people. Do we have a whistleblower protection system in Canada that really supports these people? No. Do we have concrete ways to help these people defend themselves in court? At some point, you start denouncing people. Next thing you know, you're in court with people who've got 16 lawyers and you're alone with your

you know, your friend who gives you a little bit of pro bono time kind of thing, right? So who wants to face those odds, right? So most people, you know, just shut up and we're lucky that we have a friend who did not, and British Columbians should be lucky, but do you think he's getting the recognition? No. That's what's blown my mind the most, is to someone, to looking at him when I was trying to have him on, admiring him for the first time I saw him

come into a classroom and just explain to us why we should all be drug dealers like that was such a daryl move to come in and be like well uh-huh because we were he was like do you believe drugs are bad and then everybody was like of course we believe drugs are bad and then he goes why

what if you have a mother in the hospital and she needs help why why not just sell some drugs and make sure she gets the resources she needs and then just having so that was my first interaction with him to seeing what he went through the challenges of standing up to voices throughout a system that had been so good at stamping people out to see what he went through and then to see the unceremonious

leaving it was probably the hardest for me to see was you didn't get the red carpet rolled out for you you didn't get the love of the people saying like thank goodness you went and fought and stood up to things and raised light like sit there and being like, you made a difference. You stood up for what you believed in. Whether other people agree with you or not does matter. You did what you thought was best. And there's no parade. There's no reception from the people. It's completely, now you're back in regular life. No warm kind of sense. No kumbaya moment. To do that, it's just just, it's a wild thing to do and it evokes awe for me that somebody's willing to do that that kind of okay you're you're in

a different league because you were willing to do something like that that's a crazy thing to do because there was no upside there was no benefit to doing what you did personally in terms of like i opened all these doors it's like very few doors opened for you that were beneficial and so yeah i have a lot of admiration for for what he was willing to do just for the betterment of our society and it's it sucks that there isn't more opportunities to kind of build those people up and build a statute or something. Yeah, well, I don't think Darrell ever wanted the statute and he didn't do it to get recognition.

And he's a tough guy, so he'll survive, don't worry about him. He's good. To me, the greater concern is the public side. You know, for instance, the media went after, some people in the media went after him viciously with lies and all kinds of things threatening. you know, questioning his mental health and all of this. And when the facts were established and the person was convicted and all that,

do you think that these media came with a retraction and said, well, sorry, we got that wrong, right? Basically, whatever damage they did is, oh, water under the bridge, here's a three-line, call it a three-column line thing on the outcome and move on. This is yesterday's news. The real damage is on people out there who feel, feel that they know things and they are still trying to think whether they have the courage to do it, to denounce it. Also, not just the courage, but the impact on their family, right?

I don't know what the impact on Darrell's family was, but I'm sure they weren't going to a picnic. You know, seeing this and seeing how Darrell was treated and all of this has to be hard in the family. But they'll financially survive. You know, you've got paid,

he does this thing and everything is fine. But there's a lot of people who, when they do something like this, they put their

whole family, their kids, college, fund, everything in peril. Just, it's not just courage. It's also

thinking of your responsibility towards the people who depend on you. So it's not personal courage. It's like, oh my goodness,

if I do this, what will be the impact on my children? Do they have to go to a different school? Do they have, well, I have money to send them to college, you know, on and on and on, right? Because in cases like this, I forget Daryl and the legislature for now, but in cases like that, very often the consequences are direct also on relatives, right? You can't get a job, you're harassed in school, like all of those other things, you're, you know, you're isolated,

you're harassed by people who believe that you should have kept your mouth shut. And oftentimes that's a lot of people. Like if you go, if people denounce a company that is secretly polluting a river and there's a, you know, 500 job depending on it, well, if you release the data on the river pollution and whistleblow on that, guess what, you've made yourself 500 enemies of people who will suffer and their family because the factory is being closed. And that's a real consideration.

People who whistleblow like this, they know that, you know, they're not stupid. They know there'll be consequences for them and people around. So the odds are very against, very much against people who know coming out and saying it. And that's why we know so little about a lot of those things, crime against the environment, financial crime, money laundering, all those things. You know, secretaries and the law firm, like, name it.

You know, there's hundreds and hundreds of people who have access to compromising information who keep their mouth shut. Sometimes without benefit, that's another thing. You know, it's like, well, people say, why, you're complacent, you didn't say anything? Well, not necessarily. You know, oftentimes you don't say anything

because first you don't think you're going to be believed. Second, the consequences are terrible. Third, there's going to be an army of people fighting you and you're alone, right? Yeah, one of the interesting areas is, like, that I've developed on is trying to understand the role of journalism deeper, not just you read an article in the newspaper and that's news. It's trying to understand the function of journalism

because it seems like that's an area we need to make sure we take care of. And I've interviewed individuals from a new organization called Overstory Media. They run the Fraser Valley Current here. They're focused on writing long newsletters. They go in detail. They highlight other like Abbotsford News and stuff. but their goal is to write longer, more detailed pieces that actually break something down in a meaningful way rather than, oh, just so you know this is happening.

It's like they want to develop more, and I think I'm just interested in your thoughts on the dangers of journalism because you've got to see firsthand journalism fail. Like often people go, why didn't you just go to the media? Why didn't you just tell someone? And then for Darrell's circumstance, he goes through very clearly that none of those doors were open. All of those people knew that there would be consequences on none. if they spoke up, their nice offices would be impacted.

And so they made small decisions that had a big impact on him. Because for them, it's like, do we write the story? Do we not write the story? And it seems so easy. We'll just avoid this story, or we'll just write it in this way. And then it has a cascading consequence for society. And I think journalism is one of those areas. Like, we care about our doctors.

We care about our police officers. We care about how our politicians are acting. we seem to put less focus on our journalists and the role they play in keeping us informed, holding our politicians accountable, all of these kind of duties that they have that are so implicit that we haven't really talked about them. What was it like seeing those attacks, knowing Daryl as a person, did that surprise you about the journalism industry in BC or was this something you suspected? I'm just, for me, it was like an eye opening, oh, this is in BC. like this is a problem in PC you hear about it on Fox News or CNN you don't think of it as so personally as the local news organizations you've recognized so what was that like well start to generalize I mean we have some courageous journalists in BC Canada if you're thinking organized crime think Kim Boland you know she her life was threatened and all that right you know she's sorry could you say a little bit more on that for people who might not know okay well Kim Boland is a journalist she's worked for different media, different newspaper, but for the last, I don't know, 15 years, maybe more, 20 years, I don't know exactly how long. She's been reporting on organized crime groups and criticizing

the response of government and reporting on all things related to gangs and organized crime, oftentimes at great risk to herself. And at some point, she was herself threatened and she needed special protection and all of this. So there's some very courageous journalist, and she's not given up. Not everyone likes her, and everyone thinks she's always, no one thinks she's perfect, but no one's going to say she doesn't, she's not courageous. And she's talking about things that are really problematic, you know, gangs and organized crime and potential corruption linked to that and insufficient response by law enforcement and justice.

So there's some courageous journalists. They also need a platform. So that's one big caveat. You know, do they work in a place where they will be allowed to be great journalists, right? The other thing is there's fewer and fewer journalists with the written media in particular. So they have like 20 minutes to do a story and then move on to the next. And I've spent a lot of time in the last 15, 20 years working with journalists trying to be their backup. I don't have a position.

I'm just selling them a position, but I'll help them understand what's happening. Sometimes on the air, sometimes in background, you know, making sure that many of them don't have the resources to do background research. Now, for a lot of those issues, I don't need to do background research. I've done it already, right? So basically I can send that to them or I can give them 20 minutes or half an hour, brief them and all that. Or I can do an interview, which I do a lot. But that's one of the issue. They don't have the backup to do more in-depth kind of analysis.

The other thing is, at this point, everyone's a journalist with the social media. So, you know, if you are imposing upon themselves all those journalistic criteria of, you know, checking your sources and not saying more than what you actually know and all those things, which is professional journalism and you're competing with some person who basically has a blog or God knows what and pumps out whatever version of the facts that they think is relevant.

It makes it difficult for journalists to come up with good material that is read, that is believed, and all of those things. So there's a whole thing that I'm sure you're aware of, but we used to trust journalists to be the mediator between us and what was happening out there.

But right now, there's less trust in journalists, for one thing. Maybe the journalists are not as good. I don't really know that for a fact, but that's possible. And then, of course, they are competing with all kinds of improvised journalists, right? You basically can post information on social media, web, whatever, at the speed of light without any research, without anyone imposing any standard on what they do. And so it's a very, very different environment for them to work in. And, but there's some really interesting journalists that are coming up, the next generation.

And I don't know enough about it, but I'm encouraged by that. They don't, they're not necessarily CBC or global or whatever. They're into more mixed media. they're finding a space in between the social media and the official media and all this and trying to impose upon themselves some very high standards of journalism so you see them from time to time coming out very few of them spend much time on crime because crime for journalists is like you know chasing dogs and that kind of thing it's not a big big issue and therefore few of them deal with

crime, organized crime, or all of those, you know, other issues. One of the organizations I belong to or work with is the local initiative on organized crime and based in Geneva. And one of the things they do is they train journalists on how to analyze, understand, research, organized crime, illicit market issues, because otherwise they rely on police press releases and, you know, what's immediately available. and of course these are people, you know, spinning the system the way they wish. So there's a role, there's an importance for that.

And here's another little pet peeve of mine. A lot, because of the fear that I mentioned earlier in the self-censorship and all of that, a lot of academics have moved away from interacting with the media. And I've always believed that that goes with the responsibility of being a university professor. You have a responsibility to participate in those debates, not just to take side, but to help people understand the debates and the issues and the options and all of that. And a lot of my colleagues, young and old, I've withdrawn completely from this because, well, it's messy. And the media don't really report exactly what you said. And of course, if they report something wrong, then you're being canceled.

or they take three words out of what you've said and you look like an idiot. So a lot of people have withdrawn from that, and I think it's a great pity because if people who have the training, the education, the research to support those discussions, social discussions and debates, don't participate, well, you're leaving it open to people

who are going to make it up, right, then people who push their own little legend. And so I don't know if it's fair of me to generalize, but from my perspective, when I looked at my colleagues, I find that fewer of them are willing to engage with the media. They feel that the reward are small and the risk are high. So they move out. They leave that to others. I know because even at our university at Fraser Valley, people in media, relation. I've organized forum discussions with faculty members. Sometimes I participated

to try to encourage people and say, well, if you need training, we'll help you. And if, you know, we'll do all those things to support you if you do it. But they have very few takers. You know, people say, not in my contract. I don't have to do this and it's too risky. I don't blame them. When I was preparing to start this podcast, one of the first few people I had on was Zena Lee, John Haidt, and one of my feelings while preparing and trying to read articles they were involved in was like, you get a sentence. You're there, maybe you do a 30-minute interview, maybe a 45-minute interview, you get one sentence of like raw, this person exactly said this one thing. And from my perspective, it was like, why not just sit down with you?

Like an individual like yourself, like, we have barely scratched the surface of all the things you know. Like, we're just about to start talking about the United Nations. And it's like, That is a huge piece of things you know a lot about, but we're already two hours and 45 minutes in. Like, we're, there's a lot of information to cover of things you know. And so giving you one sentence to me seems like criminal. Like, we need to create the space where you can talk and you won't be edited. I won't be looking for a sound bite of the worst thing you said in the interview or something like that. Like people that do that, they're missing kind of the beauty of the person.

And you're so focused on getting that one bite for this article that you miss out on the brilliant of the individual in front of you. And that was part of why I enjoyed long-form interviews where we're not trying to cut this down to give me 10 minutes of information on this topic. It's like, let's just talk. Let's just see what your thoughts are on things. So speaking of the United Nations,

this may seem silly to you because you know their inner workings. I have friends, I have people that I care about who think that United Nations is a cabal of individuals who are working to the words globalization and the destruction of our planet. I genuinely have people who think the worst of the United Nations for whatever their reasons. I'm just interested, can you tell us from your perspective working with them? What is it meant to you to work with the United Nations?

What good work do they do? What are your overall perspectives of partnering with them to try and address crime prevention in the world? Oh, that's a big one. Well, first, people need to understand that the United Nations is a club of nations, so it's a political process, right? It's whatever states agree to do together. It's not some other organization on the moon. And, of course, therefore, whatever the UN does

has got to be supported by member states financially, politically, all of that, and try to get 200 people, 200 countries, to agree on anything, right? First thing. Second, of course, I'll give you a cliche, but if the United Nations did not exist, you have to invent it. Why? Because there needs to be a place where people talk to each other, even if they hate each other. Remember, you made the point earlier, that's one of the things students have to learn, right? You know, we may not be in agreement, we may not be friends, but we can listen to each other and try to understand each other's point of view. So that's a very important function. The other thing is there's no big ill intent because UN is so disorganized. There's no way they could possibly get themselves, you know, the old images, when I was working on firearms control,

the NRA had several years ago for the UN. The NRA had those pictures of the black helicopters coming in the U.S. to take over and seize firearms and all that. Well, first, they don't have helicopters, and if they did, they wouldn't know

what to fly them. You know, that is not the U.N. is not that effective. You know, it's a big, big, big bureaucracy that does not function that efficiently. But it's better. and nothing. It also is a forum where countries can explore with each other, things that they can do with each other. So not everything needs to happen at the multilateral UN, everything,

but at the UN, it's possible for countries to find areas where they want to work bilaterally or regionally or in different formations. So there's an ocean of things happening behind the UN that you may not know. I should also tell you mostly for listeners that my experience of the UN is basically in three areas. So the UN is way bigger than that. But the three areas are human rights, crime prevention and criminal justice, which includes drug control. And the third one, which is post-conflict institution building, justice institution building. So it's all around justice and crime. So that's a narrow focus. Justice and crime in the UN is a tiny little slice of the whole organization. Now, having said this, I think it does good work. If I did not,

I would not waste my time doing it. I find it frustrating. Everyone who works there finds it frustrating. It's a big, huge elephant. It doesn't turn fast. It doesn't do anything fast. It spends a lot of time to do small things and a lot of money to do small things. So it's very frustrating. But if you ask yourself, okay, if we didn't do that, what else would happen? The answer is probably nothing. So it's always the same thing for me. One of the yards they I use is, do you want to light a candle or curse darkness? Right. So, well, UN is a low candle. And the Secretary General, the current one, said recently, we need more multilateralism. He means U.N. rather than less in spite of what people say. But what we're seeing, and I publish on that,

but basically is a real weakening of the whole rule-based order, social order with the UN, contend for the rule of law internationally, a breaking down of international institution, or at least another breaking down a fragmentation. And to me, that's a big source of concern in other areas, health, environment, all those things about which I know little, because I'm not, this is not my expertise. I read newspaper like everyone else, and I know we're in trouble. Someone needs to do something, but it can't be me because I don't know much about it. But in my field of interest, organized crime, corruption, counterterrorism,

We were making some progress in the last four or five years we're going down at speed of light. The UN is becoming less effective. Countries are withdrawing their support. International cooperation at all levels is getting weaker all the time. And one of your colleagues, I think you know, are Jessica Jan and I wrote a couple of a report and then a put chapter on basically the demise of international cooperation in criminal matters. And it's getting a lot of good reception. Why?

Because people who also have eyes, you know, it's not as if I'm so bright, I figure that out, right? No, we just took the time to write it down and try to develop what might be ways out of that. You know, what are potential scenarios to fix that. But basically, I've presented that, published it, so did Jessica. Everyone agrees, you know, we're in trouble. This is falling apart around criminal justice, around fighting organized crime, illicit markets, crime against the environment, cybercrime. UN has been unable to this point to come up with proper tools to fight cybercrime. we don't have any. We've been discussing for 10, 15 years that we need a new convention,

a new instrument, new mechanism. We're just starting to have a discussion about whether or not we're going to have a discussion, right? So we're not there yet. Well, so that sounds very negative, but what's your alternative if you don't like that? Well, at some point, don't blame the UN. If discussions have not taken place on cybercrime and the best way to deal with that at the multilateral level. It's not because of the UN. It's because of the member states, right, who do not want to reopen that,

who do not want to make concessions, who have different worldviews and how to control cybercrime and control cyberspace in general, right, and control how people use the Internet and all those things. So the world is divided into two big polarized camps with Russia, Brazil, China, and a few other India on one side, basically saying, well, let's control people,

you know, use the Internet, and the rest of the world, not the rest of the world, but the Western world, including Canada, US, New Zealand, Europe, most of Europe saying, no, we got people who got rights. Remember human rights? You know, that applies also to cyberspace, and now we control cyberspace. So as a result of that, we've wasted it. 15 years. Now, what's the alternative? Well, I called it wasted 15 years. People were saying, well, those 15 years were important to try to get to a point where countries one day maybe will accept to work together. There are other things. I don't want to say that multilateralism is the only thing because there's also the Budapest Convention in Europe, which other countries like Canada can join. We have. So there's other ways to tackle it. But, you know, everyone agrees that we need a global instrument to tackle cybercrime.

And countries have not even agreed to go to the table until very, very recently. And when I have a chance to attend some of those discussions and participate sometimes, And I tell you, like, it's a circus, you know, you have our time believing that these are adults sitting around the table sometimes, but, you know, it's so politicized and polarized that, you know, you don't get the sense that they're making progress. Now, the optimist in me wants to say, well, I'm sure we're making progress. It's just it takes longer.

But at some point, we need to deal with cybercrime. You know, there's no way around that. You know, the real, it goes back to the issue of corruption and financial crime and all this. Where do you think this happens? It happens in cyberspace most of the time. Where is the money in cyberspace? In cryptocurrency, all of those other things. Like this is not yesterday's problem.

It's not even tomorrow's problem. It's today's problem. The UN is letting us down. You saw people think that the UN was not less than perfect in helping us deal with COVID around international cooperation. at the World Health Organization and so on. So there's definitely a need for a new UN. And there's a new panel. The Secretary General has created a new panel of experts

to try to advise him within a year on the future of UN international cooperation, you know, where to go next. Sort of a big picture international, sorry, transnational cooperation on everything concerning with the UN. And countries have agreed that it's necessary. So clearly it's not just me saying we got a problem. No, we got a problem.

Houston, we're in deep trouble. You know, this is not happening the way it should be. But, you know, when some of the main members of the UN sitting on security council are basically at war with each other in Ukraine, well, don't expect them to be all friendly the next day in a negotiation of a new convention. Yeah, so you're saying there's a potential, for people who don't know, there was once a leak of nations that failed. And so the United Nations followed after, that there could be a 3.0 sort of imagination of where things could be, how do we do this differently?

The Internet is a fascinating thing, because as much as we've all kind of gotten used to it, our laws, our policies, our relationships with other countries have not kept up. What relationship are we supposed to have? Even if you think of an individual, are you supposed to be friends with your colleagues on Facebook? Is that the community for that? Some people say no. Some people say this is only for family, close friends. Other people say, yeah, why not? Everybody can be my friend on Facebook. There's different approaches. And so on a personal level, we're reconsidering it. But the challenges of cybercrime of elderly people agreeing to send over money to help a family member and losing everything over that decision catfishing we've seen new problems arise that have drastic impacts on individuals but are challenging to conceptualize to

personalize to us because when you hear of the grandmother sending that money you go well what was she thinking what a silly person but even personally my mother um was once just right in front of me and she got a call and she answered it and the person was pretending to be me and while looking at me she started getting emotional because the person was pretending that I was in danger and in harm's way. And she started crying, thinking that it was me, even though she could see me. And so the problem isn't just as simple as, oh, these are stupid people and these are smart people. It's like the emotional pull that individuals can do on you, whether it's online, whether it's over the phone, can be so devastating. The fear to try and maybe use Daryl Plex's circumstances, the BC legislature is a

a small fish. As you grow in size to the federal government and then to the United Nations, that corruption, it grows. It doesn't get less as you get bigger. Is that a concern at all from your perspective? Well, I know it was painful and probably a symptom of much wider corruption, but what Darrell got it caught in is a tiny, tiny little bit of corruption. Corruption, when we were talking about SMC leveling earlier, we're talking about hundreds of millions and all this in different countries like this is getting big, right? Another example of this was, you probably know Dr. Marta Dow, also a faculty member at UAV. Yes, she was a past guest as well.

Yes, yes, I think I remember that. She, her and I did a study for the UN on corruption in, major sports event. So the Olympics, the World Cup, all of those other things. And guess what? Now, this is the picnic, right? So hundreds of millions, billions sometimes are spent on getting ready for the Olympics, building an arena, buying land, all those things, commonwealth games, naming, all of those things. This is a major, major feeding ground for corrupt people. Everyone has got their hands in there to try to get money. So, and it happens on immense scales. like the Russian games, you know, Olympic games, winter games were awful.

The India Commonwealth Games were like beyond imagination, the level of corruption that there was there. The Beijing Games had huge corruption, but they did it. It was, they were hiding it at an early stage of the process so that it looked totally clean afterwards, but the corruption had taken place early in the process so that no one could find it. So there's a lot of that corruption.

that's just Olympic Games or just like major events. Think of all the major construction projects everywhere in the world, bridges, dams, all those things. Money disappears. I was working on an anti-corruption and anti-financing of terrorism policy for the African Development Bank in Tunisia. And their board of governors thought that on a good day, only 40% of the money that they give to countries makes it. 60% disappears. Now, that was the board. So if the board thinks, you know, we lose 60%, well, I'm prepared to think it's a little more than that, right?

Guess what? There's no audit, no physical audit. So someone sends you a bunch of receipt showing that concrete was poor. to build the dam. You don't ask for a picture of the dam or you don't send one of your officers to see whether there's an electric dam there. Basically, oh, got the receipts, check, check, check.

It adds up to $60 million. You're good to go. No physical audit. No one going to the country and saying, where is the dam exactly? There's no dam here, right? Same thing with bridges, all kinds of things. So hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars

were going out. and the board knew that that was the case but felt that really they couldn't do much to change that because the corruption happened in countries what they could control didn't do well but could control is what all the bank managed its funds what they could not control so well is the politics in each country

where the money was going who was in the take all of those other things and a lot of times well, that involves presidents of countries and, you know, not small fish, right? So the size of that is hallucinating. But on the other end, the systems in place to prevent that are pretty weak everywhere in the world. There's a new, well, not so a new, but 2003 Convention Against Corruption that the UN has adopted, and I've worked helping in some countries implemented.

But basically it's a corruption that is geared towards helping a country who mean to do something to cooperate. But it doesn't do anything for countries that don't want to address the issue, right? You know, you call and they want to answer. That's as simple as that. Yeah. Do you have a country that stands out to you that you've worked with over the years where they're being innovative, they're being open-minded, They're trying to fix the problems, just a country that stood out to you that you admire based on their willingness to want to do more? Yeah, I have several, but the one that stands out for most analysts of corruption is Singapore.

And I'll admit to a bit of a bias because my wife is originally from, she's Canadian, but originally from Singapore. But Singapore went from basically a third world country to one of the top first world country in less than. 40 years, right? And one of the first things they address is corruption. And they were, they meant business, right? They actually put in place the mechanism to prevent corruption. They also paid their civil servants extremely well. So they brought down the demand for extra money or all of that, and took all kinds of measures. Training can't go into detail. So that's one country that made a difference. Is it perfect? Absolutely not. But if you want an example of what works, go and see there.

The same thing with corruptions within prison. Same thing with corruptions within law enforcement. They took drastic measures. And it's not just controlled and putting people in jail. Like it's all kinds of things, changing of attitude, training, the right process in place, the right checks and balances, you know, a whole range of issues. And they've done that in part because it's a small country. easy enough to do. They had great leadership in Lee Kuan Yew many years ago,

who had identified that as one of the main challenges. So basically it goes to, corruption is part of governance. And having good governance is really a precondition for development. And that is true at whatever level you want to look at it. Good governance is important for university. It's important for indigenous community. You won't have real development or whatever unless you've got good governance. And then good governance means integrity, measures to prevent corruption, misconduct, all of those things.

And it works all the way to countries. And I think we're amazingly lucky in Canada. If you look at the kind of corruption we have to deal with, and I'll grant you that there's probably much more. more than we know. But as compared to some of the countries I go in and worked in, it's nothing. You know, we're doing, we're lucky, we're doing better than others. Now, that's not to say stop and there's no problem. There are many issues with corruption here. And one of them is, we don't even know how much corruption there is because there's almost no investigation of

corruption in Canada. We don't have an independent authority to investigate corruption in public service, officially it's the RCMP. And if you look at what they have in place to investigate corruption, it's tiny. So whereas other countries sometimes have, not sometimes, oftentimes have specialized institution with specialized prosecutors and law enforcement and investigators and all of that. We don't have that currently. There's a proposal to have a, more than a proposal, it's in the letter of appointment of the Minister of Justice and the Minister of Public Safety federally to create a brand new agency on financial crime. So, financial crime agency, which may, to some extent, also include corruption to the extent that there's

a financial part to it. No one really knows because it's just a plan at this point. It's not, we don't have an actual concrete description of what that is. agency would do. But in any event, having said all of this, our problems of corruption are nothing as compared to what you see in other countries. And the big, big thing that corruption that people don't understand is that corruption will defeat, vitiate everything else you try to do. You try to develop, you try to train, you try to invest, you try to do. All of that turns to nothing because of corruption. And there are many countries that are at that level. level. No matter what they try to do, how much resources they throw at problems. The problems don't get addressed because the resources get siphoned off all the time by corrupted elite. It's not the people at the bottom of the scale. They may take little bribe. People talk about India and Kenya and places where you can't do anything without a cop asking you for rupees or shillings or whatever. And that's all true. But the real problem is not the cop who's

asking you for a few rupees, although that's annoying as hell, you know, and it's symptomatic of other issues, but, you know, there's corruption on scales that really paralyze a country, defeats basically everything else that people try to do to improve their situation, to improve their systems, their institutions, all of that. Corruption, I'm going to steal it and move in a little bit of a different direction, but corruption is something that happens within the person. It's decisions you make small or big that impact your integrity. One of the areas we've sort of talked about is the hesitation to want to speak up,

whether it's to media, whether it's to students, in universities right now. I know you're not a professor practicing right now, but what advice would you provide for professors in this circumstance right now? What, based on your experiences, it seems like one of your thoughts would be make sure you speak up and stand up for whatever you believe in, whether everybody agrees with you or not, that is, you have to, you can't corrupt yourself. You can't let yourself fold and fold, and that's kind of the, the spiel with tenure, is that some professors, they fold, they fold, all I want to do is get tenure,

then I'll stand up for myself. I had Scott Sheffield on, and he felt like he was pressured into choosing a different lens to view the world through, because military history isn't that popular in universities. So he was like, oh, I was told to, like, kind of put on a cloak of invisibility. And then by the time I get tenure, go, oh, now I'm interested in military history and kind of, and he said, I don't want to corrupt myself. I'm going to find a way to do what I love, and I'm not going to let that take away from myself. What advice do you have for professors? Okay, well, you gave the advice already, so ditto, I agree.

I would add one more thing, which is trues your battles. You'll just exhaust yourself if you're taking every battle, fighting every, windmill that comes your way you'll turn it some kind of don quixote but you know the world won't change so choose your battles i would add to that but i i will share with you and your listeners are a little story before we come we bring this to an end because we don't have all night but the it's a story i tell my students particularly when we're talking about system changing the justice system and all of that and it's i borrowed that from someone else it's called the Clark Kent syndrome.

And the idea that, you know, at this point it's not safe, so I'm keeping my Clark Kent suit. And I'm not going to let the world know that I'm Superman, right? So right now I'm playing it safe. I'm waiting until I have tenure. I'm waiting until there's a right time. I'm waiting until there's a new minister. I'm waiting, I'm waiting,

justifying all the time that you're not doing anything. And one day you say, okay, now I've got my chance. Boom, Clark can't suit. They go to your phone booth to take their clock. I can suit out. Guess what? There's no Superman behind. You know why?

Because Superman grew in all the, would have grown in all those years where you took battles one after the other and learned how to do it and how to fail and how to succeed. You can't postpone that for 20 years, 25 years and say, oh, one day I'll have my moment and I'll be Superman, I'll change the world.

It doesn't happen this way. But a lot of people use exactly that excuse to justify to themselves their own inaction, their own lack of courage. Now, remember I said, chose your battles. You can't go after every windmill and you can't fight everything all the time with everyone.

You have to be strategic in terms of what you do. You have to know what your limits are and you have to know what things you're willing to tolerate and not tolerate. So know yourself is the beginning, right? Good teacher, right? Know yourself. That's where it starts.

But the other thing is, don't postpone. I mean, the idea that one day you'll be all-powerful, that's not true. You learn how to challenge the system, to rally people behind you, to lead, change, do all those things by a little bit of courage every day, not by waiting for 20 years where you get in the exact position, you've got a title, right? Oh, I'm now chief, or I'm now this or that. It doesn't happen. When you're chief, you're being the same coward you've been for 20 years. You won't do anything. I really appreciate being able to do this

to have you as a teacher, to have you as an educator, to be one of the people who helped shape me, to be able to sit down with you today. It's just been such a blast. Exactly what I hoped it would be. You're incredibly knowledgeable and share such insights. Again, seemingly so simple, like it's all obvious to you. But I think you create that space for people to want to consider university. Many of the listeners that I've spoken to

talk about how the professors always intimidate them. But for individuals like yourself, it's not intimidating. It's encouraging. And that's always how you've been to me. Mark LeVon, in our conversation, talked about how you inspired him. Countless other people I know

personally who've been inspired, and that's not to count all the other people you've impacted over your career. So thank you so much for being willing to come on. That's flattering. But before we bring this to an end, I want to your listeners to know something about you. So you mentioned that at some point you did a little research project with me on First Nations court, right? And you also mentioned that how important it was for you to learn to challenge ideas and have your own and all this.

Well, and I shared with you that sometimes I take real pride when my students challenge ideas come up with their own things. you may remember that about a year ago, which was several years after we worked together, you sent me an email and you said, you know what I thought was right and what you were telling me about the First Nations Court? I've had that experience now and I know better, and this is what I really think, and da-da-da-da.

And I went, yes, you know, this guy's still thinking, he doesn't care what the authority is on these things. He's making his own opinion. And by the way, I agree with him, right? you know, that's a good idea, but it didn't matter whether I agree with you. What for me was really fun was that years later, you remembered, hey, this guy was giving me that way of thinking about it, and now I'm approaching it differently, and I think otherwise,

and intimidating or not, you send me an email and saying, guess what? You know, I thought that. Now I think differently. Well, think about what it means for an educator to see that kind of feedback. I take it personally. I said, Aaron, that's my guy. You know, look at what he's doing. That's what I was hoping you would do.

I always believe he would, but now I get confirmation. Look at Aaron, he's doing it. And I get that confirmation from many others, right? Sometimes in ways I did not expect. Not always perfect, but, you know, confirmation that, like, they develop things and skills and ways of thinking that may not be mine, but that is theirs. and I take a little credit than that. You know, you do your own successes,

but I take a little credit every time I see my students succeed. You do, and that's where I think referencing gets underestimated. Like, often students will go, I don't want a reference, but to be able to, when I'm telling a story, be able to reference someone like yourself, I've referenced you several times on that topic and go, this is when I realized that the world is far more complicated. Like, that milestone for me was that interaction with you,

where you were like, you're right, as an authority figure as someone I was looking to to go like, hey, I have this thought, like, is this right? And you being like, yeah, we don't have all the answers. Forever now, I go, we probably don't have all the answers. And that's a humble moment. With John Haidt, it was him saying, you could be so much better and you're not, and it's a pity. And so you need to figure that out. And it was like, it was harsh in that moment.

I was like, how could you say something like that? And maybe in today's culture, not something popular for people to. to hear, but I swallowed it, I sat there with it, and I went, why aren't I? And then that's, and that's why I wanted to sit down with him and say, hey, this was the impact you had on me. Years later, I still go to that moment as like, why am I like this? Why can't I be better? Why am I stuck in a high school mentality, in a university? How do I let go of that? And so individuals like yourself, I think it's important for the people experiencing the benefit, to appreciate, to recognize and to take that time to go, hey, you really helped shape my view.

point because then we have that as a milestone in our professional development, personal development to kind of grow. Yeah. Important. And I'll make one last loop. You know what you said John did with you? I've done with others. Many professors have done that.

And, you know, it really challenges students. I know you can do better. That's not, you know, that's not up to your standard. You can do better. Today, I was talking about faculty who are nervous about that. What if you had turned around and say, oh, you're saying that because I'm indigenous? And the next student is, well, yeah, sure, if I was in Brown, you wouldn't say that. If I was the same religion as you, you know, if I was not, you know.

So you took it. So John took a chance on you and you prove him right. But there's always a risk that someone doesn't take it or fights you back or turns that into something really oddly. So what I said about professors, yeah, I understand their concern and their fear, but they're not imaginary. Like today, every time you take those bold moves with students and tell them the truth and try to push them as far as they can and all that, you take a risk. But I don't think there was ever a time where being a good educator or good anything and professional was riskless. There's always a risk, right? So the question is, can we create an environment where the risk for educators, given the polarization

and everything else that we talked about, is that so great that you risk your whole career because you told a student, hey, I know you can do better than that. Yeah, giving people the benefit of the doubt is probably more important now than it has ever been to give people that trust because I had that. There's a certain mentality, there's the look of, oh, you said something about me, that offends me so how do I disprove it and there's the mindset of like how do I take the best of what you said and learn from that and I think that that's something it takes a conscious effort to build up and it can create so many opportunities I don't think I'd be the person I am today if it wasn't

for my my undergrad in criminology with individuals like yourself John Darrell and countless other amazing professors that help mold you help encourage you and help you think differently about because there's oftentimes where I think of the things I could pull on as being a victim that I choose not to but it's because I want to be represented for the best of the things I do not for anything that stood in my way I want to be able to raise those things as like hey I overcame these things you could too but never as I had these barriers and everybody hates me that can be very discouraging to people and make it like an abyss that you can't really get out of and people like yourself have always encouraged students to think of themselves as bigger than they are.

And I think that the benefits of that are hard to calibrate. And as you've said, have impacted many people's lives. So it's just, it's been such an honor to sit down with you. And you prove at three hours and 18 minutes how important it is to do long-form interviews. Okay. And thank you for inviting me. That was fun. Thank you.

Thank you.