Nuanced. - 8. Mark LaLonde: Chief Safety Officer at SFU & Educator

Episode Date: August 12, 2020

Mark LaLonde is the Chief Safety Officer at Simon Fraser University. He also offers a criminology course on risk assessment and management at the University of the Fraser Valley. Mr. LaLonde has previously worked as the Director of International Operations for Xpera. Prior to that, Mark worked as a consultant for the United Nations. Mark LaLonde has also worked as an officer for Vancouver Police Department.In this podcast we discuss Mark's professional background, his course on risk management at UFV, his role as Chief Safety Officer at SFU, COVID-19, earthquakes, volcanoes, news and much more.Mark LaLonde can be found on LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/marklalonde/Mark LaLonde at SFU:https://www.sfu.ca/srs/contact/leadership.htmlMark LaLonde Photography:https://twitter.com/MarkMwlalondeSend us a textSupport the shownuancedmedia.ca

Hello, friends, and thank you for tuning into the show. My guest today is the chief safety officer at Simon Fraser University. He offers a course at the University of the Fraser Valley on risk assessment and mitigation. He has previous experience working for the private sector in risk management. He has acted as a consultant for the United Nations and was an officer for the Vancouver Police Department. He is an incredibly knowledgeable and engaging individual. Please give it up for my guest. Mr. Mark La La Land.

And we're live, Mark La Land, a professor at the University of the Fraser Valley and the chief safety officer at Simon Fraser University. Would you mind giving us a brief introduction? Sure, it's great to be here, and it's wonderful to see you. It's been a while. It has been. Yeah, it's been how many years? Oh, since I graduated and wasn't in your class, I can't have been that long because we did see each other after you switched over to Chief Safety Office. So a couple of years.

Yes. A couple of years. Something like that, yeah. Oh, good. Good to see you doing well. Good to see you in law school. It's fabulous. Thank you very much.

Yeah. So what do you want to know? I would love to hear a little bit of your background just to give people an idea of how you fit into the staple as a role model. So in my view, I know the pressure is real. But for me, taking your course really opened my eyes to a lot of the realities of the world outside of the Fraser Valley. And so I think that your class is incredibly important. And so I'm hoping we could start off with a little bit about that and maybe how you got there.

Sure. Well, thanks for the kind words. It's very flattering. I don't know how many people ever see themselves as actually a role model. Big things to live up to. I'm a sessional instructor at the University of Fraser Valley. I teach one course. I teach the same course a couple of times a year.

I've been doing that for, I think, five years now. And it's a course, it's a fourth year criminology course, a special topics course entitled Threat, Risk, and Human Security. And it came about after I've been taking University of the Fraser Valley Practicum students when I was in the private sector. I've been taking practicum students for probably three years or so. All of them fabulous students. I mean, University of Fraser Valley just supplied just awesome people for us.

And we're giving them an introduction to global threat assessment and risk management in the private sector and looking at large issues that threaten government stabilities, but also the stability of large companies. We were supporting internationally, so mining oil and gas, usually the extractive sector, some in technology. And it became very apparent that great criminology students all in the fourth year, but they had no idea of the issues that we're talking about, and they had no idea of the private sector role in public safety.

The criminology careers have focused on the traditional police courts, corrections, border services, that sort of thing. Very, very narrow, very limited. So I started talking to some of the faculty and department chair at University of the Fraser Valley. We had a number of conversations, and I was challenged in them saying, you know, you're not really preparing students for the larger private sector world of careers or introducing themselves or introducing them to larger issues. And they called me on it and said, okay, fine, create a course. So, oh, scary. So spent a number of months working with them and came up with this. And it's very much an introduction to more macro-level human security issues, whether it's top of mind right now, of course, is pandemic, but we talk about genocide, we talk about climate issues, climate change, transnational organized crime, extremism, and how all of those are placed within systems.

And there's a variety of systems to address them. There's a variety of systems that create them. And how are those addressed on a national and international level? So it challenges them to start reading the news and start paying attention to bigger issues and the complexity of them, but also at the same time, shades of gray. There's rarely black and white. There's lots of shades of gray. There's lots of nuance.

And I challenge their thinking. So we talk a lot about cognitive bias and how we reach decisions or how we process information. The errors we make in our thinking rush to judgment. The classic one is you search something on Google. You only look at the first four or five hits. You don't use other search engines. You don't use more complex search techniques. How do we receive information?

How do we make sense of the world? Absolutely. And I think that that's a growing conversation that we're having because information comes at us so quickly and we're not able to decipher the validity of it, the reliability. So how do you approach those circumstances in comparison to a layperson who might not have expertise like you do in this field? Well, first thing is I try to be aware of my biases. So I'm a huge fan of the New York Times.

Read it online every day. But I know it's got a liberal slant. So when I really want to delve into something, I'll look at a variety of other news sources or long format reporting or start to look at trade journals, government sources, drilling down and trying to make my own sense of it, but also talk to people. If I'm really interesting the topic, I want to find some people who've got a contrary view because that's how I start to check my biases and see it from their point of view. I think that that is becoming more and more.

more rare to look outside of your own ideas and hear from people you don't agree with. Well, we're all inherently lazy. Yeah. So, you know, it's nice to be fat, dumb, and happy and just go along and, you know, have one view and not be open to alternate views, especially in some of my prior work working internationally, working in other cultural contexts. There's so many other ways to view the world or relationships or marriage or government or faith. And they're equally valid. It's not just because I'm a white male in Canada with an education. My worldview is only one view.

I have to be conscious of that. Yeah, I really think that that's important for people to start to grapple with is the value in hearing other perspectives and starting to put your ideas up against theirs and see which one is really the better idea rather than getting comfortable in what you already know and having that lazy approach. I also view your class as more even high. level than a fourth year because of the importance that it instilled in me, because it was a long time ago, but I wrote on rising sea levels. And I didn't just take it from a BC approach. I looked at

how it's going to impact the world and how that impact is going to affect Canada as well. And so that really expanded my mind. But if we could, let's get into your educational background because you attended Simon Fraser University. You've attended one on the island as well. But could you walk us through a little bit of your educational background? Yeah, I went to Simon Fraser and Burnaby right out of high school, spent about a year and a half, two years there, totally unprepared for the university experience, wasn't focused, didn't have a goal and was more interested in pub than classroom. Took a year off, went to Douglas College to start again, did well, enjoyed that, much more focused, had a better sense of what I wanted to do. From there,

I got into Vancouver Police, spent 12 years there, decided to move on for more professional opportunities. Why did you leave Vancouver Police Department? Because I remember some really good stories. I have no regrets being with the police force. It was a fabulous education, some great experiences, great learning. But at the end of the day, we weren't a good fit for each other. I wanted more professional challenge. I wanted more professional growth. I wanted to expand my mind in other ways. And policing was very limited in that regard. I also didn't like how to change my view of the world. In policing, all you deal with. is the negative. You go from one crisis to another. You rarely ever resolve them. You're treating

a symptom of an issue, whether it's domestic violence or addiction or mental health. You're rarely the problem solver in the long term. And that was really frustrating. I was interested more in education, so I went to work at the Justice Institute, spent a dozen years there. And while I was there, I went back to school and got a graduate degree from Royal Roads. Personally and professionally, one of the best things I ever did, especially professionally. It really sharpened my mind to helped me train my mind, open up my eyes to other other opportunities. And while I was there, I got to be close to one of my faculty members who did a huge amount of consulting with the UN.

So that led to probably nine or ten years, I think 10 years, doing contract work internationally with a variety of the UN agencies around justice and human rights, especially for women and children. At about that time, I also started working in the private sector. Again, new challenges, new opportunities. Yeah, so a varied career. And then four years ago, I was extremely fortunate to land the role of Chief Safety Officer at Simon Fraser.

Absolutely the best place I've ever worked in my life. Fabulous, fabulous school, fabulous opportunity. I've got a great, great boss. I've got a superb team, and it's a really diverse, complex role, and it's a fun place to be. Well, let's get into it. Let's talk a little bit about what the role of Chief Safety Officer. officer is and what a day in that life looks like. Every day is different.

You never know what the next phone call is going to bring on the next email, which is what I love. The chief safety officer role, the position is only created about seven or eight years ago. So it's fairly new. And in Canadian universities, it has different titles. It may be chief risk officer,

chief safety officer, safety and risk, those sorts of titles or VP risk. The role's the same. So there's probably about 12 of us nationally that have very similar portfolios. So I have, I've got the great fortune to lead a team of 35 staff and about 90 contract guards. So I have three main portfolios. One is campus security. So it's the traditional security you think of, but they're also responding to a variety of emergencies

and safety issues. I also have responsibility for environmental health and safety. So we're a research intensive university, meaning we've got a lot of labs, everything from chemical to biological to radioactive. So the environmental health and safety team is responsible for all the usual work safe compliance, work safe PC, but also doing all the education and training for lab personnel overseeing the training and overseeing compliance with about, I think, 76 different provincial and federal regulations and international standards, everything from how we dispose of chemicals or radioactive materials to air cleaning systems and labs, and it goes on. So a very complex area. a great team there.

And then the third portfolio I have is entitled, my mind just went blank here. Just starting out with that one, though, is incomprehensible to be working in the field you are and having to know about all these. Well, this is the great thing is I have, I have specialists who know the nuts and bolts. My role is strategy and oversight. So I don't need to know how you make a lab safe. I'm probably the last person you want walking around the lab poking at things. I'd be the idiot that licks the spoon in the lab, you know, put my fingers by it shouldn't be. So we have experts that do that, thank God.

The third portfolio I have is environment, sorry, enterprise risk and resilience. So enterprise risk and resilience, another fabulous team encompasses all the emergency planning, the business continuity. So they're knee-deep in pandemic right now, or actually elbow-deep in pandemic. They're also responsible for all of our insurance. So we have two staff who do nothing but insurance risk management. So we pay a lot of money for different kinds of insurance. We're a $2 billion enterprise. So we've got a lot of risks.

That group is also responsibility for international travel safety. So we have about 1,100 or 1,200 students a year who would leave Canada before the pandemic. Everything from doing a practicum in mainland China, an archaeological dig in Jordan, to participating in a volleyball tournament in Washington State. we have students going all over the world, as well as faculty and staff going all over the world. So we're interested in how we can best manage their safety. That group is also responsible of strategically and operationally for enterprise risk management. So we hold the risk register for the university report to the board of governors twice annual on those key risks.

And at that level, we're looking at the 12 to 15 big things that could derail our strategic plans or challenge our ability to accomplish our strategic plans. So an easy to understand example. We live in the Pacific earthquake zone. It's entirely possible we'll have a catastrophic earthquake in the lower mainland. So we're well prepared for the event. But the enterprise risk is how we recover in a month, six months, five to ten years. So if we have a catastrophic earthquake, we need a five to ten year recovery plan.

So there's there's the big risk. You know, how do we retain students, faculty, and staff? How do we rebuild when every bag of concrete in Western Canada has spoken for? How do we get back to operations? And what does a phased recovery look like? So in some respects, the pandemic is a fabulous dress rehearsal for us. We're learning lots and lots of lessons out of the pandemic. That's amazing.

And so important that I don't think smaller businesses ever get the opportunity to start to ponder these complex issues, but the larger the organization, the more resources they have to allocate to these types of things. And I think us on the ground, we never get to hear about the plans prior to the issue occurring. Obviously, with the pandemic, everybody feels like we were incredibly unprepared, which I think is true. But I don't think we ever think of the earthquake. During the pandemic, I was like, what if an earthquake happened? Like, we would not be able to handle this mentally, psychologically, and emotionally. And nobody was talking about it.

It wasn't in the news, and I think it's important to have people like yourself on who can start to wake us up to the reality that you are the person who prepares for those things and helps prepare those types of ideas. Yeah, we get, we get, we get, we get, we're in a fortunate, fortunate role. We get paid to lie and bed at night and think about the what ifs. Yeah. And not only think about it, but start to prepare for it. Yeah. And so what are the systems, the policies, the resources? How do we, how do we do rehearsals?

How do we do exercises? So three times a year, we actually have the executive of the university involved in some form of emergency exercise at the policy level. And then operationally, multiple times here we're doing training for our emergency operation center of volunteers. So we have faculty and staff from across all of our campuses who volunteer in the EOC. And we're doing lots of work with them. So we were somewhat prepared for the pandemic. I think a lot of large organizations were, especially health, education, large industry, because we've been through SARS. We've been through avian influenza.

So we had a pandemic plan, and we had to live that, certainly not to the extent we are now. And we had other emergency plans. So for this current pandemic, COVID-19, we started actually paying attention to it in mid-December. Because we had, I think, 30 or 40 students, staff and faculty in mainland China at the time, which is routine for us. And so we were starting to pay attention to an outbreak in Wuhan province. So we're monitoring it very closely. And by mid-January, we were doing weekly briefings for our, our executive as this started to escalate and grow. And at the height of the pandemic, as we're

starting to really respond, it's starting to really hit Canada, we're having briefings three times a week with the executive on how we're responding, how we're ensuring safety, and then coming to the decision in mid-March to stop in-class operations or in-class services and all operations on campus and move to remote learning and setting most people home. How does that feel, and you're obviously leading SFU in this, but how does that feel you're obviously leading SFU in this, but How does it feel looking at other universities and their approach? Do you feel like everything was aligned or do you think that other universities caught on later? Well, first of all, I'm not leading the university of this.

We have a senior executive. I'm an advisor. I'd love to take credit, but no, it's very much a large, complex team involved in this. We all have different roles to play, whether it's on the academic side of the house or the research side of the house or the administration and operation side of the house. It's a complex, large organization. So it's very much a large team. and some amazing people doing incredible work and putting in incredible hours.

One of the great things about coming to the university from the private sector was we share. We're not competitors. We might be competitors for faculty or research funding, but in the administration side of the house, I can pick up the phone and call my counterpart at UBC or University of Alberta or University of Ottawa or even Memorial University in Newfoundland and say, hey, I've got this problem. What are you doing about it? Because we've all got the same issues, whether it's aging infrastructure and how to prepare for massive water leaks, the damaged buildings to pandemic. We all have to have plans

and resources in place and we all share. In fact, I have a standing weekly call with several of my Canadian counterparts, a lunchtime call where we just, hey, where are you at now? How are you handling this issue? What are you doing about distributing masks? What's your, what's your phased return to operations plan look like? And we share. Yeah. Large Canadian universities were generally all on the same page. I don't have the time. or resources to talk to the smaller ones or some of the more trades-oriented schools, I'm sure that they were all on the same page as well. Yeah.

This is an interesting topic because a lot of individuals who might have started preparing for the pandemic or, as we call them colloquially preppers, we stick them with the conspiracy side. But what's interesting is that's part of your job is to prepare for worst case scenario and have a comeback plan on what you would do when it's over and how to recover from it. So what are your thoughts on the idea of a prepper in comparison to a large business preparing for the exact same type of hypotheticals? Well, if I had a family in an oversized house, I would make sure that I was prepared

for a catastrophic earthquake or in winter a massive power failure. I think it was only three or four years ago we had the power failure here in the greater Vancouver Valley area that went on for four or five, seven days. Yeah. So I would have food, water. I would consider certainly having a generator. It's the same thing as having a smoke alarm and a carbon monoxide alarm monitor in your home. You need to think about these things.

It boggles my mind when people don't have home insurance. Great, you know, you have a safe home, but here in an apartment, you don't create a fire hazard, but what about your neighbor upstairs who falls asleep drunk smoking? Your apartment might not be damaged by smoke or fire, but the water damage is going to ruin all of your stuff. Are you insured? So I think this is this is common sense. Preppers laying in a year's stockpile of food, some people see the value in that. I would look at least a week or two of food for a family.

In a worst case scenario, emergency services are not going to respond to homes. In a catastrophic earthquake, we fully expect fire and police to go and rescue people in hospitals and schools and public buildings first, large gathering places. As a homeowner or family, you're not. on your own for a week or two possibly. So what does that look like? Do you have cash on hand? If the power goes out, your ATM's not going to work. If your power goes out, you've got no Wi-Fi and your cell phone battery is going to die. How do you, how to prepare for those things? So just not to alarm people or unreasonably over-prepared, but start to think about the

what-if. What does this look like? Well, in my mind, most of human history was spent planning for the what-ifs and trying to save food for the winters and trying to prepare. And I, I feel like as a society, we've really moved away from that. And when we see other people prepping, when we see them buying stuff like toilet paper, we were calling them out, even though we went to the store the next week and went and bought toilet paper and tried to stock up ourselves. And we're getting into this bad habit of each time a catastrophe happens, we act like it's not going to happen again or how could it get any worse?

And it could always get worse. Well, one of the things about the pandemic and people starting to hoard and seeing bare shelves, you start to realize how fragile the systems are. So there was an article, somebody pointed out to me the other day, that Clorox wipes might not be in full stock in stores for another six months to a year. Why is that? Well, it's increased demand. The supply line is only so large. They only will produce so much.

it's not that we have you know Costco is not always going to be full these things have to be produced there's a there's a time lag in production and they have to be shipped so any disruption to any of those can impact our ability to access those goods yeah so when the pandemic really struck and people starting to hoard i wasn't so concerned about toilet papers there was just make sure we've got some dry goods so long as i've got water in my home i can start to prepare other foods i've got some state in the freezer. I've got some protein. I've got alternate protein and some reading material. Just in case the power goes out in your... And I don't have Wi-Fi or TV. Yeah. That's amazing. And so let's get into a little bit of the

policing side, which is going a little bit back in your history, because policing is a huge topic right now. And you have experienced training police officers at the J.I. BC, the judicial, the The Justice Institute, BC. The Justice Institute. And so you can give us a little bit of an insight into what's going on and what are your takes from this. Huge topic. So when I was at the J.I. I actually didn't have a lot to do with police training.

I was developing training programs and arranging programs for a variety of non-police provincial and federal agencies that are involved in investigations, monitoring for compliance or inspections. I've got a lot of experience working with police overseas with the United Nations, with UNICEF, and with UN office and drugs and crime in various parts of Southeast Asia, East Africa, the Middle East, and other locations. This is a fascinating time for police, and they're taking a lot of fire that's for issues that are not always in their control. There's a few structural problems with how we view police.

They're grossly underfunded. My old agency that I worked with Vancouver Police has not grown that much in the 20, 25 years since I left. The city has grown a lot. The population has grown a lot. The complexity of crime, the complexity of investigations as a result of all the court decisions, requiring more diligence and more evidentiary disclosure, greater paperwork. That's all exploded. And yet they don't have enough resources. The resources haven't kept up with demand. At the same time, too, we've deinstitutionalized people with mental illness, put them on the street with few services. So police who are trained to respond to crime are now spending an inordinate amount of time responding to addiction. and mental health issues that they're not really capable of or fully trained, but at three in the morning, who are you going to call? Yeah.

Vancouver police are very, you know, rightfully proud of having a police and social worker car and a police and mental health worker car, but those resources haven't grown in the last 20, 25, 30 years either. They're very small. And most police departments in Canada do not have those resources. So we're expecting the police to respond to things that they shouldn't be. But we have no other system. Government hasn't resourced that.

At the same time, too, not so much in Canada, but if you look south of the border where there's lots and lots of structural problems in policing, police are trained to be warriors, when in fact what we're calling them the three of the morning to be is a social worker. So we spend huge amounts of time on training them how to drill appropriately.

Well, they'll never march unless it's a police funeral, so I don't get the point. We train them a lot in use of physical force and firearms, which are very technical, and they need a lot of training on. High risk, you need good skills. But they also need as much, if not more, training in verbal de-escalation in how to deal with people from other cultures,

how to see the world in shades of gray. One of the other challenges is look at who's attracted to policing, who generally applies, inordinately young males who believe in right and wrong, good and bad, black and white. That's not the world. It's not about enforcement, and it's not about black and white. We need older, more mature people to see the world in shades, of gray and have some lived experience and come from a variety of cultural backgrounds.

So I'm just thrilled to see how Vancouver Police have evolved over the years. Far more women, far more people of color, far more people with different languages. It's fantastic diversity. They're much better able to serve the community of the police than they were before. But as a society, we have to stop and think, do we really value the role of police? If we do, let's fund them appropriately and let's put other resources. place to support people with addiction and mental health issues or domestic violence issues. Setting the police is not going to solve the problem.

Especially because a lot of the individuals who are going into it don't realize all of the difficulties you're going to face. And I think that that's one of the values of having a criminology degree beyond the theory that I think a lot of students complain about is you're forced into the situation where you're starting to hear about the ridiculous hours we expect police officers to work four on, four off, sometimes all night long, those things we don't think about, it's not in the front of our mind when we're watching the news, is what shifts they're working, how, what sleep they're getting. And then as a society, we're getting more and more us versus them. And that's dangerous on the side of the civilian, where we need these people to feel empowered and feel like the community has, is supporting them.

And that's starting to dissipate. Well, so much of our view of the world is shaped by popular television shows or the news, which is, which tragically often gets things wrong or incomplete, because they're rushed to get information out there. So there's challenges in news production. I was, I was sadden to hear the news last night that three Vancouver police officers have now tested positive for COVID-19 as a result of going to a large house party that they had to break up. people don't realize the physical dangers in policing. I'm sure you could get shot. Highly remote. Very rare occurrence in Canada.

It happens, but it's very rare. You're more likely to go to the hospital because you're hurt in a car accident. You're hurt in some minor scuffle. Not a big fight, but a minor scuffle where you twist a joint or a knee or a finger, whatever, and you have a lifelong limp because of it. Or you're exposed to disease. Whether it's hepatitis, tuberculosis, HIV, AIDS, lice, scabies, Fentanyl.

All of those things, yeah. I mean, it's, there's a lot of physical dangers. And then you look at the toll of shift work, having the adrenaline surges at 3 in the morning when suddenly you've got to flip on the lights and siren and go to a critical event when you were sort of in resting mode a moment ago. That takes a toll on your heart. Shift work is not good for you physically, let alone your family life, your relationships. And then you add onto that all the other physical risks of disease or injury.

it takes a toll. It's not an easy job. And then you add on to this, the stress of the public and the media second guessing and everything you do, where you're faced with a split second challenge that may haunt you for life and you may get dragged through the courts and then exonerated years later, but you and your family have to live with that pressure. It's incredibly challenging. I've got the utmost admiration for people who chose policing. The same with firefighting and paramedics. They're doing frontline. work in the middle of the night when we're all safe and bed. Yeah. So Surrey is interested in switching over to municipal policing. Yeah. And I think that that's a really interesting topic to get your thoughts on it, because you did do municipal policing for Vancouver Police Department. One of the complaints I've heard is that it looks like for municipal policing,

typically it's two officers to a car and the RCMP can have one officer to a car. So both questions, I guess, is what are your thoughts on municipal policing in comparison? And what are your thoughts on that critique that there's only one, two officers required? Well, first of all, I have to admit my bias. I was a municipal police officer, so I'm a big fan. I was never in the RCMP. If I had been an RCN member, I may have a different opinion. So there's that bias right up front.

Surrey is the only municipality of its size in Canada that does not have its own police force, the only one. There's been talk of either Surrey or Richmond or some of the large municipality in BC switching to its own force. for many years. So it's not a surprise that it happened. Anybody who's followed policing and problems for years saw this coming. A variety of other municipalities have commissioned a number of studies over the years to look at it, and they eventually backed away for issues of political will and often finance. It is more expensive to have your own police force. The federal government subsidizes in municipalities that have the RCMP,

so Surrey is only paying 90% of the cost. The federal government supplies the other 10%. So it will cost more to have your own police force. It's usually a union agreement that stipulates how many cars are two-person, how many cars are one person. So not all municipal departments have two people in every car. I believe when I was in Vancouver, the requirement was at least 60% of cars had to be two-person. So you're better able to respond to emergencies and cover each other.

It's safer. So there's an added labor cost. What Surrey will see is a change in Surrey. and response, not a change in the quality of the frontline members. There's nothing wrong with the training of the RC&P versus municipal police. They're both fabulous organizations. What the public will see is a police force that serves the community and is responsive to the community. And it's the issue of governance. So Surrey just had its very first inaugural police board meeting last Thursday. Had I known it was happening in advance, I would have booked off time to go watch

because it was a historic day for them. So they have a board. of chaired by the mayor, and I believe six or seven community members who are going to govern the police. So the police chief reports to the board. The board sets the strategic direction and consultation with the chief. The board oversees budget and priorities. The board hires the chief. The police department responds to the board. With the RCMP, under the contract the the RCP have with municipalities, the officer in charge the detachment will consult or listen to the mayor, but they don't have to follow the mayor's direction. There's a complaint process. If an RCP member is alleged to have done something wrong, it's a complex

secret process that the municipality is not engaged in, whereas if there's complaints against municipal police members, the board has oversight of that. So there's greater control greater responsiveness, greater engagement on priority setting and strategy, there's where Surrey's going to see the real change, as well as members that will stay there for their entire career. RCNP members typically move every few years, or are they allowed to move every few years? So you especially see this in smaller or remote areas

where an RCMP officer willing to be there for two years. How do they learn the community? How do they establish ties, and how does the community establish trust? There's going to be some growing pains with Surrey police, no doubt. It's going to cost more. everybody's acknowledged that. Is it going to cost an exorbitantly larger amount? No.

Will they get a better, more responsive public safety service? Certainly. That's awesome. That's a glowing recommendation. How would you set that against the backdrop of what happened a few years ago in Abbotsford, just in terms of there was a little bit of corruption allegations going on through there. And some of the complaints that I had heard was that it was because it was municipal, not

because it was RCMP. I understand that corruption can come from both levels. Yeah, I'm not aware of the corruption allegations. And I have to say that having worked overseas and having followed American policing, proven allegations that are proven of corruption in Canadian policing, especially in Western Canada, extremely rare, extremely aware. And you can't compare Canadian policing to American policing. The average Canadian police officer goes through months, if not years of training before they're fully qualified.

In the states, some police departments require three to four hundred hours. In some states, to be a qualified esthetician or nail salon operator, the training is twice as much as to be a police officer in that state. It's ludicrous. I heard the quote a long time ago that I've always loved. In Canada, policing is a profession. In America, it's a job. The standards around discipline, the standards around training, the standards around vetting

are incredibly different. There's absolutely no comparison. Canadian policing is far more professional than most other countries. Certainly, I would put Canada up there with the UK, Australia, many European countries in terms of professionalism and complexity. At the other end of the spectrum, I certainly worked in countries where the police are the last people you'd call an emergency. You just don't want to see them.

If you're the victim of robbery, when they arrive, they're going to rob anything you've got left. Yeah. The other end of the spectrum. Interesting. Well, let's also move into a little bit of the university because you have operated at both places. You've worked at UFE and you work at SFU. What is that like to have attended a university and then now work there? I'm in awe every day.

Obviously, I'm working remotely now because of a pandemic. But every morning when I drive up Burnaby Mountain, my office is on our main campus in Burney me. We have campuses in Surrey and multiple campuses in Vancouver as well. Every morning when I drive up Burmany Mountain, I'd see the big SFU sign at the traffic lights. I just smile. How cool is this? I get to come and work here. Yeah.

It's an absolute privilege. At the same time, being a sessional instructor at University of the Fraser Valley, very different university, very different in many regards and obviously far smaller. It gives me an appreciation for the complexity of delivering complex services in a smaller environment. So, for example, I've got 35 staff, professional staff, and about 80 or 90 contract guards at SFU. At a university of the size of the University of the Fraser Valley, my staff of 35 would probably be a staff of four or five at a smaller university. So much greater burden on those people, still some of the same challenges, but also much smaller context. But at University of the Fraser Valley, I'm a session instructor, so I don't have any role in administration.

I go to teach a class that's in the evenings. I go once a week. I have office hours. I teach. I go home. So it's a very different relationship from the university. What are you trying to pull out of the students? Let's get a little bit more into 410J, which is the course you offer, and what a student can expect from that type of experience, because I know that I have some listeners who have taken your course and absolutely loved it. But for the people who don't know, what is that course like and what are you trying to instill in the mind of a student? So I have a hidden agenda. And at the very last night, I talk about that. And I say, okay, so what do you think I really wanted you to get out of this course? I want to challenge their thinking. I want to, I want to.

want them to engage with the larger world and consider the larger world. I want them to think in terms of systems and impacts. So how systems operate. I want them to be aware of cognitive bias, and I want them to think of their place in the world differently. So typically, the average university of Fraser Valley student I have is, it's a fourth year, so they're in their early 20s. Some are living outside of the home. Some are still at home. A few have traveled. Most have not. Most have grown up in the Fraser Valley. They don't have a sense of the larger world, the complexity of the world, the fragility of it. They also don't have an appreciation necessarily for how good they have it. We're all like that. People complain about the health care system again.

Oh, my God, it's terrible. Go live overseas. And you come back and recognize, oh, my God, we are so spoiled. Go live overseas and turn the tap on and see the brown water that smells. See the corrupt police, unpaved roads, lack of food, lack of security. So I want them to start to understand those issues. See the world differently. At the same time, I've also got students who are in the mid-20s or even in the 30s. I've had students who are older who've got traveled and got life experience. But it's the younger ones I'm really starting to, I want to challenge them.

That's definitely what I experienced out of that course, because if I'm being honest, the first two years were similar to yours, wasn't very motivated, didn't know what the point of university was. And it was always about just getting enough words down on the paper in order to get through it. but there were a few professors that I'm hoping to have on yourself, Zina Lee, Jonathan Haidt, that really impact your outlook on the realities of the world. And yours was amazing for pick a risk, talk about it, tell us everything you can about this risk and how it interacts with everything. And that really humbles you in terms of not thinking about just Chilliwacknow, just thinking about my house, but expanding your thinking,

because you talk about like the iPhone and the minerals in the iPhone that have to, Could you talk a little bit about that? Because I'm going to butcher it. So a couple of things. Yeah, there's a two-stage paper that I asked dudes to write. They choose the issue. If they want to talk about organized crime, I refuse to let them talk about the Hells Angels or the mafia.

Boring. Everybody's done that. That's one version of organized crime. I want to look at transnational organized crime. Trafficking in rhinoceros horn, trafficking, cocaine from Colombia to Western Africa and then into Europe and all the different groups that are involved, corrupt military.

Marys, corrupt governments. One of the, don't want them to think bigger. So I've had students, I've had a number of students, I've read about female genital mutilation, arms control, illicit trafficking in small arms and light weapons. So, so broadening their views. So that's why I wanted to talk about it. I'm sorry, I forgot the second part of your question. Sorry, you had talked about, specifically about minerals in a phone, and that just blew

my, like, those things blow your mind in terms of you don't even think about it. Yeah, so, so I get to read, you know, I, It's, I think in five years of each, I've had one student that didn't have a smartphone. The ubiquity is amazing now. So I get them to hold up the smartphone. I said, okay, everybody has a phone that vibrates if you put it on silent. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's great.

Yeah, I love that. Okay, well, the minerals that make it vibrate are called rare earth minerals. Some of the, you know, there's about five, five so-called rare earth minerals whose names totally escaping now. They're only found in a few places in the world. Mainland China has a number of them. and then parts of central and western Africa have them. So without those, your phone's not going to vibrate.

Without those, we can't build complex systems in fighter jets or satellites. These rare earth minerals are integral to complex systems and complex technology now. So one of the world's largest suppliers of some of these rare earth minerals that make my iPhone vibrate come from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a country that most students have never heard of. They've never heard of the DRC, can't find it on a map to save their lives. They think Africa is one country. Well, there's 57 or 62 different countries in Africa. It's complex.

But the rare earth minerals mined in the DRC are usually as a result of artisional mining, mining by hand. So I put a picture up of a bunch of people, usually almost always men, wearing a ratty remain of a T-shirt, ripped shorts, bare feet in an open pit, digging by hand to find these little nuggets. So there's collapses, there's injuries. The mines collapse, there's starvation, horrible working conditions. But they're also overseen by men with AK-47s because it's a local warlord that controls that patch of land. And then these rare earth minerals are eventually trafficked to other countries in Africa.

They forge permits, they bribe border control, so they're now legitimately found in another country and then can be sold on to the manufacturers of the pieces that go into phones. So it's a whitewashing system. It's a cleaning system. It's the same thing as blood diamonds. How do we take conflict diamonds and make them appear legitimate? So if I want my phone to vibrate, a whole bunch of people in Africa are working under brutal conditions. And they're going to die early and young and tragically to make my phone work.

And it supports organized crime. It supports warlords. It supports corruption. So getting people to realize that we're all part of this. Where does your chocolate bar come from? from. A huge amount of cocoa that goes into chocolate is actually farmed by kids in Africa who aren't going to school at eight or ten years old. They're squatting in a field with a machete and hacking open cocoa pods by hand. So I can have my chocolate bar. So getting

people start to think, where does all this come from? Where's my role in it? And if I really care, what can I do? How can I lobby? How can I make my voice heard? How can I be a different consumer. That is one thing that I think is one of the reasons I think you are a role model is because that's the cornerstone of the university, in my view, is to open people's eyes to the reality. And the reality is almost never something you want to hear or you want to find in a good book. It's something that's hard to grapple with. It puts more responsibility on the individual to take proper action to try and find ways not to operate that way anymore. But it's also something that concerns me in today's climate is because I think that that's fading away. For my

degree, I can only name a few professors who really instilled that into me and I'm grateful for it, but I think there needs to be more of it because I do think that people who graduate with a degree and then say, well, I majored in English and that wasn't very useful and now I'm just hanging out on my laurels. It's like, but that wasn't what you're supposed to gain from university. What you're supposed to gain is a greater outlook and an ability to grapple with anything. And I think that that's why the criminology section is so strong and so important is because it does instill life is really tough, people are capable of horrible things and you're a person. So you're one of those people who could be like that and how do you start to grapple with that? Because once you realize that you

have like blood diamonds or minerals from abused people on your phone and you're holding the phone looking at it, you know you've taken part and that's something you need to come to terms with and it shouldn't be, well, I'm just going to forget about it. Yeah. So this all goes back to what's the role of university. I went to university like a lot of people right out of high school, 18 years old. I grew up in Port Moody. It was a small town then. No idea of the world. No idea of my place in it. And I wasn't prepared for university. University should challenge your thinking. It should help you develop critical thinking skills. How to seek information, analyze it, make sense of it, and then apply it. Whether it's a liberal arts degree or a sciences degree or, um, math, technology, engineering, we want you to, my ideas, the university should be about critical thinking, growth, personal, personal development. But at the same time, too, universities about research. So if you stopped 10 faculty members in a large university and said, what's the role of

the university, some would say teaching and learning, some would say research, depends on their view, and they're equally valid. So universities also have a role in supporting industry. supporting government and research, whether it's science around crops, science around climate, um, public policy. So we see universities, University of Fraser Valley, SFU, UBC, they're all doing this in various ways touching local industry, local government, national government, international governments, working with different citizen groups, all in different ways from different faculties to support and build communities. Universities are about fostering change, which is an exciting

place to be. I mean, I still pinch myself that, hey, I get to work in a place like that and be a part of that and support those researchers and those educators. What a cool place to be. Right. Well, here's an interesting question for you because looking back on my degrees now, I look at a lot of the professors yourself and think that why wasn't I advertised that as a product as an opportunity? because UFE doesn't advertise each criminology professor or any professors as an individual. But I think that that would be a worthwhile endeavor because often people I talk to who don't choose to go to university do it because they say, why, what am I going to do with a degree? And it's like, well, it's not about the degree.

It's about meeting intelligent people in their fields that they're an expert in or that they're working hard to become an expert in and hearing their thoughts. Do you have any thoughts on marketing of professors, not as like a ploy, but as like a way of bringing and enticing the educational component. Yeah, I don't, I can't speak to why universities don't do more of that or, or how they do it. I know that when I'm talking to people such as yourself thinking about graduate school, I encourage them to look at the faculty and choose a university in part or a program in part

by who the faculty are. And I encourage them to start to approach some of those faculty to be mentors, to be mentors in your development, your professional life, personal life, personal. personal life, who's on the career path or who's doing the work that really interest you and you want to be a part of. So if you're looking to study marine biology, which university has the greatest science program in that area with faculty doing some really cool work and research in those areas that you want to be a part of, no universities are the same.

They're all slightly different. They all have different research focuses, different levels of resources. So at the graduate level, I think it's more important to start to think about who the faculty are. And you've got to do your own research. Most faculty will have their own personal website that has their CV on it, all their publications, links to the kinds of research they're doing. We're consumers. You know, if I'm going to buy a car or get a university degree, it's up to me to start to go and look at what are the differences and what's going to work best for me at this time. Yeah. The prices are often similar. So it's not necessarily the economics, unless you have

to leave town or go overseas, then economics becomes an issue. But what's, what's, what's, you're What's going to work best for you? What's going to be the best fit? Absolutely. I was also going to get your opinion on the setup of university classrooms because I think that that's one that I don't see a lot of conversations in the university occurring. But your approach was really influential to me because you go into the classroom and you would just have a seat with us and start just talking to us.

And I think you have a personality that's very good at enticing people into what you have to say because that's how I felt. I was completely engaged the full three hours, but for other professors, they obviously struggle with that. And then you're in a room with bad lighting, terrible walls. What are your thoughts on the setup? Thanks for the kind words. I love being in the classroom.

That's why I continue to be a sessional. It's, in some ways, it's a fascinating part of the week for me that I look forward to. I very much look forward to the experience. Classrooms typically have furniture you can move. So it's up to the faculty or instructor to move it if they want to. What kind of atmosphere do they want to set up? Do they want to stand behind a podium and lecture at students and talk at them? Or do they want to engage them in different ways?

There's lots of opportunities for faculty to get professional development in those areas. Every university has resources for faculty to learn how to do things differently in classroom. A lot of faculty don't avail themselves to that. A lot of full-time faculty teach the way they were taught 30, 40 years ago. They just don't know any better. And they haven't had the time or inclination or will to learn something different. The pandemic is a great leveler for all of us. One of the things I'm doing in my summer vacation is transitioning my course to online delivery for September.

I've never taught online. So I'm having to find or I'm having to think of ways to make it more engaging. So I'm fascinated by your podcast because I want to do some podcasts for my class. I want to engage them in a variety of different media and find a way to draw them out. So it's a challenging university. We're also challenged by the physical structure of the buildings. Buildings are incredibly expensive, and there's not a lot of money right now to create new buildings. So we're stuck with the physical infrastructure we have.

We're stuck with the size of the classroom. To refurbish classrooms, hard to make the business case to toss that furniture out and get new furniture when we need other resources for students. Why should we buy new chairs and tables when we need more money in health and counseling for students? Faculty are clamoring to get paid better. In many instances, they're not paid all that well. The benefits are not that great for what they do. do. We need new HVAC systems. We need new health and safety system. So it's a challenge in prioritizing funds, but gutting a classroom starting over again, really hard to make that business

case. Yeah. We've got a lot of constituents in the community pushing back on us on how we spend our money. And rightfully so, they should be looking at that. We should be prioritizing the experience for students and researchers and faculty and staff. Yeah. Let's get into a little bit more of your family background, so people get a better idea of who you are and how you've come to be here. So I grew up in Port Moody. My parents are certainly my heroes. My dad was a pressman, worked on the machines that printed the Vancouver son in the province, spent 40 years doing that. My mom was a school teacher. So middle class background, they managed their money well. We always had a summer vacation. It was usually camping when we're kids. So a really good upbringing.

My parents, fortunately, are still alive. I just saw them two days ago, had an hour with It was fabulous under social distancing. I'm currently going through, I guess, play we say as a marital change. And I've got a daughter from prior marriage who's 36, lives on the island with her partner. She's a carpenter. Fabulous woman, great guy she's with. Lovely, wonderful, amazing people. Yeah, it's a bit about my family.

Yeah. So what was it like to have that relationship? Did you gain any experiences from your parents that would be interesting? or instill that onto your children? I think every kid says themselves, when I grew up, I'm going to make my own rules and I'm not going to do what my parents did. Until your child's misbehaving

and suddenly it's your dads or your mom's words coming out of your mouth, he's something like, oh my God, did I just say that? We revert back to what we know. I was incredibly blessed that my daughter's mom, my first wife, I was a fabulous mother and did a phenomenal job of bringing her up. I certainly learned a lot about patience,

to learn a lot about communications. I think parenting, if you're paying attention, you learn a lot about yourself. If I had to do it all over again, certainly there's things I do differently. So at some point, I might be lucky enough to have a grandchild and maybe,

maybe not. And I can do things even better. Yeah. So one of your partner has a child and she started a podcast. And so I'm hoping I can hear a little bit about that so we can also give a shout out to them. Yeah, I'm incredibly,

incredibly lucky that I'm madly in love with an amazing woman. And she has two daughters. One is just entering her third year of Quantland. She's actually in the Wilson School of Design at Quantland. So it's Fashion Studies. It's a four-year degree. And then from there, she plans to move on to Quantland. Sorry, what's the University on the North Shore?

I can never remember the name of it. Kaplanano. She's going to go to Kaplanano for a two-year costume design program after that. Her goal is to work in live theater and in costume design. Yeah. So she's very focused, very driven. She started a podcast a few months ago with two of her classmates. It's available on iTunes and a few other places.

And I can't at all recall the name of the podcast. But they do a weekly podcast or a few times a week about what it's like to be a student in fashion design and starting out in the fashion industry. Yeah. They're having a ball. They've got a number of subscribers. and they're doing the whole thing remotely. So they've had some of their faculty on, but it's three young women from three physical locations

doing the whole thing remotely. Wow, that is a lot of work. I don't think I don't think I could pull that off just because I think part of this podcast is about being in person and connecting and building up role models. It's a different profile or you've got a different format. Yeah, absolutely.

And so I'm hoping to also hear a little bit more about the UN And what was that like? Because regular people have a different look on the UN. Some people think there's a lot of conspiracies with the UN. So I'm hoping you could humanize it a little bit and tell us a little bit about what that experience was. I don't think they're well enough organized to have a conspiracy. I tell people it's the world's most bizarre dysfunctional organization. The fact that they get things done is absolutely amazing.

But the fact they get things done is because of the amazing people they've got. I was blessed for a number of years to be a consultant. So I worked on human security issues, largely with police, some work with prisons, some work with prosecution and some with judges and on legal reform, mostly in a variety of Southeast Asia locations, East Africa and the Middle East, working with police on how to better comply with the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. So how do they better support children who are victims of a crime, witnesses of a crime or in conflict with the law, how to respond to violence against women, how to help prevent violence

against women in relationships. I got into it largely because one of my faculty, my master's program, did that work, and took me under his wing, gave me an opportunity, and it went from there. And once I was in the system, I got referrals to other countries and other projects. So I was blessed to spend a lot of time overseas in developing in low-income countries, post-conflict countries. I spent three years going back and forth to South Sudan after one of the wars had just ended. So there was no infrastructure, no paved roads, no electricity, all of those things, working on prison reform. So I got to see a lot of South Sudan. An amazing privilege to be a part of that. Fabulous experience, fabulous people. I've worked in Myanmar, also known as Burma, when it was

still closed. A lot of time in Vietnam. I've worked in Jordan. Actually, the last U.N. project I worked on was working with the Royal Jordanian police on violence against women in Syrian refugee camps. So I was up on the Syrian border in Zathri refugee camp, which at that time had 130,000 refugees in the desert in a camp and lots of challenges. So phenomenal opportunities to see the world differently, phenomenally fortunate to have the opportunity to make relationships or build relationships with amazing people with other worldviews and in a small way to start to make a difference. What were some of the experiences you had in some of those places?

Oh, wow. Some of surreal experiences. I was in northern Myanmar in Mandalay, which is a really amazing country, former British colony. It's on the crossroads between India and Southeast Asia. So phenomenal, phenomenal culture, amazing food, amazing sites. And as with my UN Fixer, who had been a Supreme Court judge before, we went to the Supreme Court building in Mandalay one day. He said, oh, you know, we've got a bit of time.

I called ahead. They're on a recess. Do you want to meet the judges? So in the Burmese culture, in the Buddhist culture, you take off your shoes when you go inside. So here I'm in bare feet in, in a board room with a bunch of Burmese Supreme Court judges having ice cream and just BSing and shooting the breeze. Yeah.

And I think of around, okay. And it was a closed country at the time. It's a military junta. So a very different work. What is that? It's a military dictatorship. It's the military controls the country. At that time, now they've got a pseudo-democracy.

They've got a figurehead, Aung Song Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace Prize winner. Tragically, the constitution created by the military gives her limited authority. The military has the right to veto anything she does, which is a tragedy. Amazing country. I've been in South Sudan when people are shooting, and I'm the average suburban white kid from Kansas. Oh, were those gunshots? and everybody else has got the nose in the dirt. You know, look at me like, you know, you moron.

Yeah. I spent a bit of time in Kabul, Afghanistan, survived a massive earthquake. What happened there? Well, it woke me up. It, um, of all the threats I thought about in Afghanistan, the earthquake wasn't on the list. Yeah. You know, I was living in a fortified compound with lots of people with guns. There was steel, steel shutters on the windows.

There was 300 pound steel doors at the landing of every floor of the building. So we could seal off in case we're in. There's lots of guns inside, and I'm lining bed thinking, remind me, why am I here? Because this just isn't me. But really what stands out is the friendships. Just some amazing people. I spent a lot of time in a number of countries, but going back to South Sudan, I got to be friends with a fellow named Lakudo, who's a colonel in the South Sudanese National Prison Service. He'd been a soldier in the war.

It makes me look tiny. Just a massive, massive guy. A huge booming voice. When I first met him, he had the mirrored sunglasses, the beret, the uniform of the ribbons, and, you know, it looked like a B-movie villain kind of guy. And I thought, well, you know, that's pretty scary. And then I got to know him just the sweetest, nicest guy. And after one of my trips was just ending, it comes up to me and tugs my sleeve and says,

Mr. Mark, I know you're coming back in another month. Would you bring me something? I think, okay, what's this going to be? And he says, I want to learn about different approaches to dealing with juveniles. Can you bring me some books? Wow. So a month later, I come to Sudan with an extra suitcase. I went to a bunch of faculty at University of Fraser Valley and said, you know,

what textbooks do you have on juvenile justice you're not using? Give them to me. So you meet people like that who really want to make a difference. And I met lots of people like that in many other countries, really challenging countries who are dedicated to doing something better for their children in their country. Yeah. I met that everywhere I worked. I met just amazing people who I got to call friends.

Yeah. Wow, that's amazing to be able to travel and have people with such positive outlooks and then people want to make a legitimate difference and do policy-based approaches. Yeah. And I also was fortunate I got to go to a lot of places that tourists would not be allowed to go to or would not have access to. So I got to see some really cool places, really fortunate places off the beaten track, whether it was the northern part of South America in the jungle or out in the desert in Jordan. Yeah, I'm a huge history buff, huge world politics buff, so they were cool experiences. Got to see lots of parts of Myanmar and Vietnam that Ayrushu would never get to. What stories do you have from being a history buff that you might be able to share? Because I think that's important because I think history is starting to fade away for a lot of people. And we say things like you need to remember World War II and people have a trouble remembering because we're not giving them the, why is that memory important?

Why is it important to comprehend and understand these things? So I have American cousins who had fought in Vietnam with the American military when I was a kid. So I'd always be fascinated by the Vietnam conflict and the Vietnamese history. And one of the amazing visuals that I saw in one of the museums, I believe it was in Hanoi in the north part of Vietnam, I went into one of their war museums. And there's this massive mural along one wall. It actually went across several rooms. The mural was so big.

And it was a 2,000-year time span of the history of Vietnam and conflict. And there was this huge portion of the mural that went over for a thousand years and it was the war with China. They'd always been in conflict with China. So they're a northern neighbor, huge neighbor. And then there was this much smaller segment of the conflict with France because France had colonized Vietnam. So France was there as a colonizing power for, I think, 60 or 80 years. And then there's this tiny little sliver of the conflict with America, which they call the American War. So here in North America, you know, especially with Americans, you think of, you know, the Vietnam War is a huge deal.

And for the Vietnamese, it was a tiny little sliver in time in this larger history of conflict. Yeah. It was a blip in the radar for them. And they won. So it was interesting to start to reframe history. Yeah. Or go to places, be in the desert in Jordan where Lawrence of Arabia, T.E. Lawrence had walked. Who's E. Lawrence? Lawrence of Arabia. Oh, my God. You've got to watch a David Lean movie called Lawrence of Arabia from the 60s.

Okay. You've got to watch that. Okay. British military figure in the First World War and helped create, had a small hand in creating what is now Saudi Arabia. So a huge historical figure. But also to go into former colonies, whether it's in, in South America or East Asia or Africa, and to see the legacy of colonialism. No matter where colonial powers went, if they were French or English or German or Belgium, they built a courthouse, a jail, and a police station, and an officer's club and a tennis court.

He still find remnants of those everywhere you go. Really? And then tried to impose law in parts of the world that always had traditional tribal laws that worked. And now these colonial laws don't work and create conflict and problems. So it was fascinating me on the ground to see the legacy of those issues and those systems. Wow, that is a phenomenal experience. It must have been. Moving to role models, one of them we do have in common, I think Yvonne Dand at the University of the Fraser Valley. Love the man. Very. Love it, love he and his wife, they have fabulous people. Well, let's talk a little bit about them.

So is Yvonne that was one of my faculty in my master's program, was Yvonne that introduced me to international work. I've had the great privilege to work with he and Viv on a number of files overseas. I spent five months on a project in Vienna with the UN because Evah vouched for me and gave me an introduction. I've traveled with Yvonne and Viv in Myanmar. We've worked on similar projects or overlapping projects in Vietnam. South Sudan was a project that he led, and there was a large team of us going back and forth at different stages. So I've got to see the world through them and with them. as well as a lot of travel on my own, and we're still in close touch, less so now with the

pandemic, but yeah, fabulous, fabulous people, yeah. Yeah, another person who really puts you in the circumstance of you decide what the best way forward is. He taught innovations in the criminal justice system, and he just puts a huge problem, an incomprehensible problem in front of you and says, try and figure out how you would go about solving it, and it really humbles you back into, there isn't an easy solution to anything. There isn't one way to fix anything because the solution you have is going to cause problems. So you have to fix the problems it creates and it just goes on and on and on.

Well, it also points out it's very easy for us to sit and complain. You know, we, we bellyache about bad politicians or bad public policy or the state of the world. Well, tell me what you do. Yeah. Because these are tough issues. They're complex issues. And there's no easy solution. And there's rarely a winner or loser. Um, we're all in. in different ways. So there's great people out there trying to do great things, but it takes compromise, it takes time, it takes resources, and it takes bringing a variety of sometimes conflicted stakeholders to the table. Yeah, absolutely. I did, for one of his papers, I still have it, because I did it on, I'm an indigenous person, and so I was interested in the claims

about the overrepresentation of indigenous people, and I went into it with one mindset, and I walked away with a completely different one, because often, what we're fed is that this is just because of systematic racism, but it's way more complicated than that. Because when you say it's systematic racism, it almost sounds like you should just release the people because somebody misunderstood and we just have a racist system, so if we just let them all out, they're fine people. Well, it's not that. Most indigenous people are in federal corrections because of extreme violence, not just regular disagreements, not because of stealing a candy bar. And so we got that wrong. And when I went into it, I went into

with it. I'm sure that indigenous people are overrepresented because of all the reasons I've been told. And it's way more complicated than that. And the solutions are way more complicated than I think we're also being fed, which is what I've heard First Nations court and kind of very good PR type solutions and not real ones that are going to address extreme violence. Yeah. So certainly in Canada, First Nations people, indigenous people are vastly overrepresented in prison. And there is no easy solution to the why. My understanding is that for reserves in British Columbia, the average reserve first nation

community is about 400 to 450 people. So you think about it, of those 400 people, how many your children, how many people are elderly, how many people have health issues, how many people have an education, how, you know, what tiny segment is there that's skilled to help lead that community and be a part of local government or community services. It's not like a large city where you've got lots of applicants for these jobs. You've got very scarce resources. If you've got a healthcare issue, the nearest doctor could be hours or days away. I worked a project some years ago in the Northwest Territories where I got to go to a number of isolated First Nations communities north of the Arctic Circle,

where in wintertime it's the ice road. The clinic could be a day's drive away. In good weather. In summertime, there is no road. It's, it's the river. So access to a pharmacist, access to somebody, an optometrist, you know, a simple thing that we take for granted. You know, we both wear glasses. How many optometrists are there in Abbott's for a chillock? There's a lot. Yeah. But if you're in a remote First Nations community, you need your glasses fixed. Not a simple issue. Absolutely. Buying clothes, getting food, getting fresh food. I mean, it's, it's Staggeringly complex, let alone mental health services, counseling services, a good education, complex issues. I really think that we've done a disservice in Canada and we get into the politics of pipelines and stuff like that.

But just looking at the reserve itself is such a unique thing to Canada and such a complex problem because you do have a whole community filled with the exact same type of people. So it is kind of like segregation, even though the indigenous people are semi-chusing to be in that group. But we don't talk about that. We don't talk about the complexities of the disconnect between cultures because if you're living on reserve and you grow up on reserve, it is very different going to a public school after that experience because it's a different way of being and you're looked at as the other. And that's still occurring today. And I don't think we're doing an apt job of addressing those types of complex issues. Well, and the paternalistic nature of the Indian Act. Yeah.

I think the average Canadian thinks, okay, you know, these Indians live in our reserve get a free house. Well, in many reserves, you're on a wait list for a house for years and years and years and the house you're in could be covered in mold. You could have 12 people in a two-bedroom house with no running water. Or if you have running water for decades, it's not been drinkable, it's not safe. And you don't, the band owns the house, not you. Yeah. So you've got no collateral if you want to go get a bank loan to start a business.

Yeah. There's all sorts of issues like that that the average Canadian is totally blind to. Yeah. That and having the band wants to hire only indigenous people to support jobs in the community, which sounds great. But when nobody is qualified for the job, you run into real problems. And then if you do hire someone who's a qualified person who went to university, who might be Caucasian, that's looked at as a negative thing. And that person is mistreated based on those attributes. And we don't even have those conversations either.

Or, you know, small village politics and the dominance of some families. There's some First Nations that are doing phenomenally well. In Canada, I think they're still a minority. So all this discussion in the media, especially in Canada, around Black Lives Matter, critical issue. Yes, needs to be talked about. We need to look at that. Let's not forget indigenous people in Canada.

Yeah. Let's not forget all the other marginalized people, GLBTQ. We've got a long ways to go yet as a nation. That was one weird thing that I ran into and I've kind of kept my mouth shut about it thus far. Since you bring it up, that's how I took the All Lives Matter movement was when I saw what was going on in the States, I was like, absolutely for them, Black Lives Matter, perfect slogan. But for BC, for Canada, it is All Lives Matter because we're running into our own issues and we'd like to use some of your political momentum to start to address things in BC, but they aren't the same problem as the U.S. So when people were saying All Lives Matter, I was like, perfect, because that can cover and encompass different cultures, different problems around the world. But if we say all lives matter, it dilutes, for me, it dilutes the impact and the importance of other groups.

Absolutely. Certainly every life matters. But we need to focus on the lives that are not valued as much. Yeah. So an aha moment for me recently was in Portland, Oregon with the ongoing protests in the downtown core of Portland. And some of the media coverage of, you know, how the media really caught on when it was a wall of moms. What was a wall of mostly white moms? And suddenly the media is all over this.

And they have, and they had tremendous political clout. The federal government started to back away. Well, what have it been a wall of black moms or Latino moms or indigenous moms? Would they've had the same political clout? I don't think so. So what is it about that level of racism and all of us that we value white lives more? It's, I'm always horrified when, when a child goes missing. And the media really runs with it makes a big deal when it's a really cute, blonde, blue-eyed child.

But a child of color doesn't get the same coverage. Yeah. Yeah, we've got to, you know, it's a fabulous country to live in Canada. There's still lots of work to do around equality and around justice, around equal opportunities, equity, how we celebrate diversity and acknowledge it and embrace it, how we include those people that have traditionally been on the margins. So we've all got a responsibility. I know as a well-employed heterosexual white male, I've got a big responsibility, but we all do. There's more work we can all do. Absolutely.

So moving forward, are there any other faculty that you would like to mention and give a shout out to? Because I think there's a lot of great people at UFE and I'm sure lots of great people at SFU that people could start to understand the university culture better if we were able to demystify some of the people behind the same. scenes who you could be learning from. Well, so you caught me with only one coffee in me so far this morning. And I'm horrible, horrible, horrible with names. I'll focus on where my first loyalty lies in that's SFU. Boy, to list the faculty that really matter, I mean, we've got over 4,000 or 5,000 faculty and staff.

They all matter. Some of the ones I have the most contact with, it's the research and the academic side right now, especially during the pandemic. So our provost, John Driver, who's the VP academic and provost, an amazing man, an amazing leader. Our current VP of research, Dr. Joy Johnson, who's going to be our president starting the first week of September. Another amazing person would have, you know, they both have phenomenal academic pedigrees, both amazing leaders. It's going to be great to see what Joy does in her term as a leader with SFU as the president. Our outgoing president, Andrew Petter, another amazing person who used to be.

the dean of the law school at University of Victoria. Long history in provincial government, NDP politics. I've learned something from all of them. There's just this amazing list of people. And I'm in one of those privileged positions in the university where I get to touch every aspect of the university. And I'm a service. I'm not in conflict with anybody.

I'm there to help solve problems. My role is safety. It's one of those issues that everybody can wrap their arms around. So great relationships with everybody. And also working closely with all the different unions on our camps. campus to make sure their members are safe. And then working closely with the student society, the graduate student society. So it had an interesting innovation about a year and a half ago. We were looking for a new director of campus public safety, which is our term for campus

security. So a new leader for that area. And somebody from the student society reached out and said, well, we want to be on the selection committee. And I'm thinking, hang on, I like control. Why would I have a student on this? And then, you know, I sort of mold this over for a couple of days and then blinding flashed the obvious, you know, the university is about student engagement and, and collaboration. Why wouldn't I have students on the panel? Yeah. So total 180, I embraced it.

So twice now in senior hiring panels for positions that really impact students, I've had a representative from the student society and the graduate student society, and it's been fabulous having them at the table. A little while ago, probably another year and a year and a half ago, we also created a joint university committee that I co-chair with the heads of the student society and the graduate student society looking at campus public safety or looking at campus safety. So we meet once a semester, there's about 17 or 18 of us around the table for a couple of hours, talking about a whole variety of safety issues. They can bring up, we can bring up, we can look at issues

how we can collaborate, shared services, air challenges, and it's all about how do we work together. Yeah. That's amazing because it's so important that people are able to work together. And I think that that's a unique circumstance that you get to experience in comparison to small businesses who are regularly not connecting enough to the community. And so you get to see some really great minds working on some important issues. Best job I've ever had.

Best place I've ever worked. Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely love it. That's awesome. So I was hoping to also get a little bit more on the Xpera side of things. And if you could tell us what Xpera. is and...

Or was. Was. Oh, it still is. So when I left the Justice Institute, I went to the private sector for 10 or 12 years, 11 years. It was a small, it was, well, it was in BC, it was a large PI company in BC that was starting to focus more on, on risk management, risk mitigation for corporate clients. So I went in when it was still only about 70 people. And by the time I left, it was national and international.

And I think we had 1,200 employees. So it was an amazing ride. The number of mergers and acquisitions, and then the owners, I had a minority stake. We sold to an equity group, and then that group then again sold us to another group, and we changed names a number times. And so the company name was XPRA, X-P-E-R-A. It's shrunk since the time I left to be just a PI company, not doing much in the world of risk management anymore.

I was fortunate to be there an exciting time when we're really building our risk. mitigation services for large, medium and large business clients doing work nationally or internationally. Could you tell us a little bit about what risk mitigation looks like? So, if, you know, one easier to understand an example, one of our global mining clients wanted to expand into southwestern Africa, Namibia. So they're looking at a multi-billion dollar investment. So one of our services was to go and look at what are the risks for them? So what are the social, economic, political, environmental risks to them being able to accomplish their mission? How stable is the government?

What's the level of corruption? What does corruption look like? If your mine is 400 kilometers inland and you've got to get your ore to the port for export, what's the road system like? Is there a rainy season when roads are washed out? What's the literacy and education level of workers? Mining is complex. you need illiterate workforce. What are the labor laws like?

What's health and sanitation like? Are there plagues, diseases they need to be worried about? What's the level of health care? How stable is the government? What's their approach to emergency management? How corrupt is the government? What does it take to get a license? Do you have to pay to get a license?

All those factors. So we do a large in-depth analysis for them. At the other end-the-spectrum, working with companies around worker safety and workplace violence issues. What's the threat of violence in, your corporate context and how do we better protect your workers, policies, procedures, physical changes, job design. So it was a whole variety of different challenges. We worked with oil and gas,

mining, technology, communications companies, high tech, manufacturing. How do you gather that type of information? Because that most people don't even think of any of those issues and you were focused on trying to gather information on all of it. Yeah, so it's a whole variety of different sources, open source mostly. Could you tell people what that is? So open source is anything that anybody could collect. So it's a lot more than just a Google search. It's research skills and how to find international NGO publications that could have health data. So looking at World Health Organization, looking at various UN bodies, other civil bodies that might have publications.

So it's pulling a lot of different data from a lot of different sources and doing some analysis and giving our best possible view to the client as one part of their due diligence in their. investment. Wow. And so you did that all, what was your role in all of that information gathering? Some it was oversight. Some of it was doing some of the work. Some of it was doing overseeing researchers. But I was also managing teams working on files in variety of places. Yeah, great, great exciting projects, amazing people to work with, really diverse backgrounds. Yeah, it was fun. Yeah. So I visited you. I was looking to do a practicum with you and you were just leaving as I was just looking for a

practicum so I missed out on it but you had some really crazy technology there and a room that was separated from the rest of the building in terms of I think it was like an air gap or like could you tell us a little bit about what those crazy technology parts were like we were doing also some federal government work so there was there was federal classification standards for how you protect data so computers there are gaped which means the computer is not plugged into the internet how we would store digital and paper data that's secure from fire or intrusion or other staff. So we had levels of control of different kinds of data or different files,

and we would compartmentalize a lot of the works. So other staff would not know what we're working on. They don't need to know. It's not that we don't trust them. We just don't want somebody to make a mistake at a cocktail party or whatever. We would have code names for files. So we could be in a restaurant having lunch and talk about project whatever, and people don't know what we're talking about.

We'd still be very careful about the level of detail, but, yeah, there's a lot of operational controls and the best interests of the client or the best interest of the government we're working for. Wow. And so that was happening all the time. And you also had other aspects of the, of Xpera. I think one of them was you had like a security detail

for certain important people. Yeah. So the company was quite diversified. Their core business was private investigations for companies and for governments. Whether it's an ICBC alleged fraud, you know, some of you really have whiplash. You know, they claim their back injury,

but they're out playing tennis, to large fraud investigations, a whole variety of investigations, that I was not involved in that side. But for risk, for high net worth clients, there would be the provision of executive protection services. What some people would commonly think of as a bodyguard,

these people are anything but. They're more facilitators, and their role is to identify and anticipate risk and prevent the client from getting there or getting to those situations. So whether it was driving, escorting them overseas, protecting their homes, protecting their families, so we would monitor how they're being portrayed on social media,

is there a grievance? We would be involved if there was some form of a threat or possible threat and how do we work with law enforcement to mitigate that risk, some pretty complex work. The people we had doing that work, had a military background, some had a law enforcement or intelligence background, some we trained some people's they had the aptitude and the mindset. Fascinating that the manager we had, the person who became the manager of that area

and was heavily involved in managing teams, his original career was pro snowboard and pro skateboard. Really? And then had his own surf shop and skateboard shop. Yeah. Not what you'd expect, but he had the mindset. He had the drive, he had the vision, he had the aptitude. He's now living in the States for the last few years, full-time, part of a detail with one of the world's wealthiest families.

No way. Yeah. So, yeah, we had some fascinating clients, some fascinating projects. We would typically say no to the showbiz clients, too much drama, too much opportunity for drugs or other behaviors that we don't want to be. be tied to, and some of them would want to spark a confrontation for media, we liked the low profile clients. Yeah. Wow.

So the other part was during that interview, I remember that you were in charge of monitoring protests. And I think that that's a really unique one for people to hear about because there are a lot of protests going on. And we don't think of private businesses keeping an eye on the protest and making sure that they're handled. Sure. It shouldn't be a surprise for people really think about it.

you know, if you're a large industry that's facing public protests, you want to know if they're planning to protest outside your gates tomorrow. You need to prepare. You need to have some extra security in place. You need to message your staff. Hey, don't come to work tomorrow. It's going to be contentious. You need to be aware if there's threats to damaging your business. So, you know, large organizations that face organized protest look to the private sector to monitor and collect information. It's all open source. Whether it's on Facebook or chat rooms or somebody slapped up a poster on a lamp post on commercial drive. The information's out there.

Law enforcement is doing exactly the same thing to a higher level, but private clients don't have the information from law enforcement. They need to know. They need to protect their shareholders. They need to protect their staff. They need to protect their business. That is such a unique industry you're in. And I'm just hoping to get a little bit more about the employer when you're sitting down

with somebody and you're about to tell them about this giant document on all the things going on in Jordan or wherever the place is, what are those conversations like? And what is it like to work with people who are very influential and yet most of us probably have no idea exist? So going back, you know, the country risk assessments, and again, this is all my past life. I'm certainly not involved in monitoring protests now. Clients would come to us off. It was a conversation over time as to what they're looking for. They may not know exactly what they're looking for. So our job sometimes is to educate them on what we need to look at. What are the things that could go bump in the night that they may not have anticipated? At the other hand, we'd have

very sophisticated clients to know exactly what they need. And our job is to provide it and then answer questions on the information to rationalize and justify what we found. And especially if we've made recommendations, how do we rationalize the recommendations? How do we prioritize them? And do we need to attach resources or anticipated costs to those recommendations, knowing that the situation will likely evolve over time. So we all need to be adaptable to that and modify our plans. Yeah. So a lot of communication skills, a lot of critical thinking, a lot of research, and a lot of building strong relationships of trust with clients.

Wow. And so was it common to interact with incredibly important people that we don't ever think of, or? You know, we're not usually dealing with the CEO. We'd be dealing with the vice president of risk. Sometimes somebody involved in corporate social responsibility, different levels of an organization. Yeah. Okay. Wow.

Let's move on a little bit more to role models within your own life because I think that it's important for people to understand where you've come from, some adversity you've faced throughout your life that's brought you there just to humanize you a little bit more. Role models, wow. I'm very conscious, there's a danger to saying, you know, this person is my absolute hero. Yes. They're human. Yes. We've all got feet of clay.

You know, even somebody who is revered as Mahatma Gandhi who helped end colonial rule in India. Now in reports is alleged to have had problems in his past, where either were racist or misogynist or whatever, the allegations. For role models, I look at people who make a difference in their community. People make a difference in other people's lives. Those are behaviors I want to emulate. People who are great communicators, great leaders. It's the behavior and the traits and the way of thinking that I look up to. I'm careful about idolizing the individual.

I agree. We've all got our own foibles. None of us are perfect. We've all got embarrassments, deep dark secrets, what have you. I've certainly been influenced by a variety of people. people over the years at different stages of my life. We talked about Yvonne dendarand. Phenomely important, gave me a lot of opportunity and has become a close friend over

the years and is still a close friend. Other people I've worked with internationally who've helped open my eyes to different issues, people in my personal, private life that are close, deep friends, who I have the utmost respect for. One of the things I've learned over time personally and professionally is the value of having that peer network that you can just let your hair down and bitch about problems. Try to problems. We're all going through the same things personally and professionally and then bounce ideas

off of a trusted person who can keep a secret. Absolutely. And I think that that's one of the important things about this podcast is I'm not saying that any one person is a perfect role model. It's that the outlook I think all the guests have had have been so important for people to be able to start to take the first steps. I think that you're an important role model because you are looking at the broader picture. That's part of your job, but it's also just how you operate.

And people aren't aware to the fact that prepping is okay as long as you're not being ridiculous about it and buying a bunker in Colorado to try and prepare. Let's take reasonable steps. And I think that that's an important point you make and starting to just incorporate some of these really good ideas into our mind of recognizing what's going on with our phone. because one of the other interesting things with the phone is that for some reason nobody ever talks about the fact that we cover up our laptop camera but we don't do that and we don't even think about it with our phone and there isn't even an option to make sure that the camera is absolutely shut off on your phone and those things start to surprise me

that we're not we're not even trying to have the conversation well let alone who's tracking your phone all the apps and games and things you've downloaded that are accessing your information because it was in the fine print of the 37 page waiver. You never read. You just clicked on, yes, I want to download this. Yes, I accept. Yeah. And you've just given away all your images to some of the corporation that now owns them. I can use them as they like. Or they're physically monitoring where you are because your GPS function is turned on. It's all for sales and marketing purposes. But working overseas was also keenly aware that state intelligence and state State security forces may well be monitoring me.

Not as big an issue here, but overseas it certainly is. Yeah, privacy. People that are so concerned about their privacy, I mean, my God, I think we've given up so much of it. Yeah. And being totally unconscious, and we just gave it away. It's, you know, with a bit of training on how to use the internet well, it's amazing what you can find out about people online. I did that. I did that since I didn't get the.

opportunity with you. I went to Paladin and I started off in their investigations department and pretty slow movement in that area. And then they said, well, why don't you do some open source? And it was incredible to realize that people were saying that they were injured and I could go onto their Instagram, which they had public and they had just posted a photo from Hawaii. And so I told the investigator, hey, you don't have to go. They're in Hawaii and they're taking photos, standing up, selfieing, like, we're good to go on this. And that's incomprehensible that those people don't think about what they're putting out there. Oh, God.

So there's a great guy who actually lives in Langley and does amazing international work with police and law enforcement and intelligence agencies, Dave Todington. So Toddington International offers a course for a fee, a course that anybody can take on open source online intelligence collection. There's a much more turbocharged version of that for law enforcement. only. So the firm I came from, like Paladin, we sent a lot of people to the online course on how to do really good solid research online. And I say it is astonishing what you find. Most people I talk to have never Googled themselves, let alone Googled their name

in quotation marks, so they get their full name, and then hit images to see what images are on the internet about them that somebody else took. Or when they do that, they find images of their friends that are somehow linked to them online if they do a little bit of background work. It's all out there. Yeah, here's an interesting thing for you. I was just notified by Facebook that I'm part of a class action suit that started a few years ago about Facebook stories.

And I guess they used one of my photos at some point in time for advertising that they weren't authorized to do in BC. And I'm now just automatically a part of a class action suit against them. And first of all, I didn't know my name or face was. used on Facebook stories. No idea. And second, it shocked me that they were able to email me and they knew before I knew. And so all of these things are so, even though I did open source intelligent gathering, I understand that. I could not have expected that email. Yeah. Well, just by virtue of being online, whether you've got a Gmail account or you're on Facebook or Twitter or

some other social media program, you've got a smartphone, you've already given up privacy issues. Or you've given up control over your own privacy. Yeah, it's people are just largely unconscious. I want that free app. And I don't realize the information is out there about me. Yeah, the weird one that I just was thinking about yesterday was I was doing my bottles. And I was thinking, somebody must be able to calculate exactly how often I'm recycling. Because I go in to save on foods.

I use my card. It scans 12 cans of Coke or whatever it is. And then if I'm taking my bottles in, I do the express one where I just drop the bottles and they count it. That means at some level, if those two organizations were to talk, they would know exactly how often I'm recycling and how many bottles I'm missing because you can calculate how many I'm purchasing using my visa or save on work hard. Which means that save on then targets digital advertising to you based on your buying habits. Yes. The algorithms are so complex. You know, I challenge anybody to research something online they want to buy, whether it's,

a new, you know, a specific pair of shoes, a brand of sunglasses, a new laptop, a car. Do that. And then over the next several weeks, watch in all of your Facebook and other social media feeds how advertisements for that specific product now pop up. Yep. That happened with all of the podcast equipment. Every step of the way it was on my Instagram. And it's like, how often are they advertising the focus for a scarlet 4i4 on Instagram?

They're not. They're doing it because I'm searching it online. Exactly. And they all, they're, your. information is bundled into a data set of tens or hundreds of thousands of other consumers, that data set is a product that's sold from one company to another. They're all buying this. They've all got your profile.

How else can be used? It's a fascinating new world we live in. Yeah. And so do you ever interact with that in your current role or how do you try and mitigate that? I gave up. You gave up? I shop online. Yeah.

And it just amuses me when ads come up for other things. Yeah, it, it just amuses me. So I'm careful what I share online. I know that I can't scrub anything for all the companies that will say they can scrub your social media history, it's bull. Yeah. It's still out there. So I'm just cautious, I'm careful. I'm also fortunate that I'm not that mid-teens to mid-20s risk-taking age group where you'll take pictures of stupid things that are going to haunt you for life.

Yeah. Or do stupid things online, they're going to haunt you for life. Or one of the lessons I learned in part of my grad school program was online. You could tell who'd had a couple of glasses of wine by what they posted. Yeah. So, you know, lesson learned from other people's mistakes. Never post anything online if you're angry or drinking. Yeah.

What seems like a good idea at three in the morning is rarely a good idea at, you know, sober, second thought at eight in the morning. Yeah. Yeah, that was an interesting one that I think I did learn in your course as well, which was that that form of advertising of typing something into Google has actually gotten companies in a lot of trouble because somebody's searching for, I think it was birth control or some sort of child preparation and all of a sudden they start getting flyers in the mail about it and everybody's outraged and the family now knows. Yeah, it's basically anything you do online, it ain't private. That's incomprehensible. Have you noticed that arise in any other areas that are really interesting in terms of us, our level of community? communication? Well, one of the challenges, especially in authoritarian regimes, is when they're buying software, they're buying tools largely supplied by the West to mass public surveillance of social media. So people that speak out against the government or when protests are organized. So now the state authorities know exactly who's home to go to. So protesters are trying to use more private communications, government is often already there or just behind them and learn how to

breach that. Protesters will try to mask themselves so that the army of surveillance cameras can't identify them. Well, they can actually track them. There's enough, you know, in some countries there's enough cameras in public places. They can follow you from where you're throwing a rocket, the police wearing a mask, they can track you through the crowd, back to the subway station when you take your mask off, track you on the subway, see you. where you get off and follow you home and now the police know where to go to get you. So that's a real problem for protesting countries like China, where the state apparatus is so vast, is so well funded and so complex. You can't be anonymous. When the, when the, uh, the

revolution swept northern Africa, uh, or a number of revolutions, um, Cairo was a perfect example, an early example of this where there was so networks of social media influencers that were really contributing the downfall of Hosni Mabarak, the then president, for some 40 years. The government was starting to monitor all the social media to figure out who the ringleaders were. Well, they weren't ringleaders in how we normally picture them. They were simply social media influence. There were people that had a view that other people followed and supported. And many of them were silenced. So there is a concern around how governments can abuse that in a surveillance society. What about the state? Do you have any thought on that?

because that's a really interesting one where almost everybody's information was breached by the government. And for some reason, as serious as I think it was, a lot of people moved on. Yeah, I think people are largely blind to how complex the state apparatus is in the United States in terms of mass public surveillance, whether there's social media or other data sources. Yeah, I remember hearing the story coming out of the states of four or five years ago. where somebody wanted to test how good America wasn't monitoring threats. They were typing into search engines, things like the name of the current president, plus bomb, plus attack, things like that.

They went online to buy large amounts of high ammonium nitrate concentrated fertilizer, which is very explosive, along with diesel fuel, which makes a large bomb. Didn't buy it, but researched all this. And, yeah, sure enough, not too long before the FBI knocked on the door. Wow. Because their algorithms are looking for people who are planning an attack or preparing for an attack. Any state wants to be aware of that. They should be aware of that.

Yeah. Can that be abused, though, where we're not looking at somebody who makes a threat of violence, but poses a political threat or has a different point of view? Yeah. And governments will get concerned about that. And in a democratic society, we want to have controls over that. Absolutely. Let's move into a little bit more.

I know it's outdated because you're no longer in the private sector. But what are your thoughts right now on what's going on with the Wee scandal and Trudeau? And if you have anything to share, I know that it's political gossip, but it's also kind of important. Yeah, I haven't paid too much attention to it. Part of it is driven by an opposing political party wanting to discredit the current political leadership. Yeah, I haven't paid too much attention to it, honestly. Fair enough. Is there anything in Canadian politics that does jump out at you as relevant right now that we should discuss? How we're handling the pandemic? And I've got real concerns about how long this is going to go on and the impacts to our economy.

What that's going to do to our economic stability, employment taxes. But more of a concern for me is the impact of people's lives. The stress everybody's under. Are we putting enough resources into mental health services, into families, into education? How are we supporting teachers going back in the classroom and their safety concerns? These are complex, far-reaching issues. We're all tired of being at home. We're all tired of the fear. The impacts in individuals' lives is something we're going to feel for a long time.

It's going to be fascinating to see how our children grow up, how they will adapt to this and what impacts will have on them. what are their career options? You know, if this really has long-term negative impact to the economy, people have lost their jobs, people have lost their companies and then their homes. How do people pay their rent, their mortgage? That's a tough one because the economics is really interested in, interested me, but it's something that I think that I'm just, I'm not an economics person. I've never, I've never even taken a micro or macro, but from my understanding, one of the

major concerns is that the government is creating money and we don't really have an apparatus to address that issue. And I think the states is doing the same thing where we're printing a lot of money. And as the West, we've never really done that where we've gone all out and just printed a bunch of money hoping to start to address these issues. From my understanding, World War I and World War II, we're actually paid by people having to pay taxes and bonds. And we've gone a different route.

Do you have any thoughts? Yeah, I'm certainly not an economist. I've got opinions about a lot of things, and most of them are uninformed. I'm subconscious of that, we're putting a lot of money into social programs and bailouts and paying people who are unemployed right now. Eventually, that money has to be recouped. So higher sales taxes, property taxes, income taxes, and reduced resources or reduced services from government.

That's inevitable. Municipalities are already struggling. The three biggest concerns of any provincial or municipal government are pipes, people, and pavement. We've got aging infrastructure, pipes, roads. We need to build new roads for new communities and higher volumes of traffic. We have rising costs for health care and social programs and pension programs. Where's that money going to come from? Just the aging infrastructure.

In some parts of Vancouver, there's still wooden water mains that are 100 years old. I didn't know that. Yeah. What does that mean? How do we... Well, nobody has the money to dig it all out at once. So Vancouver, like a lot of older municipalities, a lot's a certain amount of money every year to do a certain percentage of preventative maintenance.

The water mains still work, but they're aging out. So how do we gradually replace those? If you look at any municipal budget, the biggest expense items are police, then fire and probably roads right after, infrastructure costs. Those are huge ticket items that get more expensive every day. Yeah. So now we've got this pandemic that means businesses fail, so they're not paying their property tax.

People are unemployed. They don't pay as much income tax. So the revenue side for government is hurting. Trade is hurting. Yeah, it's going to be challenging times ahead. We're all going to have to tighten our belts, so to speak. I think that that's really interesting because I got interested in the stock market in January, early April.

And I was like, I'm going to start this. I think a recession's coming. So I'm going to get started, start learning some stuff. stuff and the stock market crashed. And I bought in at the perfect time when everything fell. But now things have seemed to recover, but I think it's like a fake recovery because nobody's experienced any of the negative detriments of this pandemic. People haven't been working, but we're all living very close to the same lifestyle as a

community as a whole, not individuals who may have lost their houses, but as a whole, the community seems okay. And I don't think that many people are preparing for what's coming in the next year, two years. What are your thoughts on what we might expect? Well, I don't have a, I don't have any disposable income to play the stock market. There's a great CBC piece on yesterday, an in-depth piece about playing the market. The majority of day traders who are buying and selling lose. The advice seems to be buy wisely and hold on to your stocks for a long time. Yeah. So buy investments and never play with money you can't afford to lose. Yeah. Which is also why I don't go to

You know, no idea how to, no idea how to play the games, but I sure would lose. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know where the economy is going to go. I don't think we've seen the worst of this, especially if we have a significant second wave. If a vaccine that works and is widely distributed is still a couple, three years away, what are the long-term impacts? You know, one of the immediate impacts, I think everybody almost their eyes sees, we're all doing a lot more online shopping. So the mom and pop shops we always went to, they're closing. And those people are losing their homes and people are losing their jobs.

Large department stores really hurting. Some of the big flagships in the states have closed or filed for bankruptcy. A lot of chains are either closing or collapsing the number of stores they have. Our buying patterns are different. How many university students pay their way through university by waiting tables? Well, how many those rest rest rest are still open? Yeah. You know, where are those students getting their money to pay tuition?

There's real impacts to all of us. How does that manifest in your current role as chief safety officer at Simon Fraser and looking at the long-term impact of this pandemic and income and how all of that's going to play out long-term for the university's ability to save? Well, we're certainly, you know, other offices in the university are very, very focused on, in, you know, getting more donors to put more money into student aid. and redirecting resources to greater student aid, student services, mental health services, but those same mental health services for our staff and faculty.

It's starting to anticipate what student enrollments are going to look like. It's still an uncertain picture for the fall, what the impact universities is going to be in Canada. The impacts will be different depending on the size of the university, the nature of the university, how reliant they are in international students, whole variety of factors, how strong the endowment is, you know, how economically viable the university is. We're seeing in the states a number of smaller universities that were already precarious are not going to be able to sustain themselves. Many of the private universities are closing. There's going to be a lot of disruption. What are your thoughts on

Serb and the CESB? Do you think that those were perfectly good, negative? Where is the nuance that we can find? Another one of those things I haven't paid a lot of attention to, but I have friends who are employers who are having a hard time finding workers because people are saying, wait, it's summertime, I can get Serb and stay home. Yeah. So it's impacting employers' ability to operate their businesses. And if those businesses aren't sustained, when Serb ends, those jobs won't be there. Yeah.

So it's a challenge at the same time, I get the reasoning behind it. It's a complex issue and a complex problem. I absolutely agree. It's been hard to watch the CES be the student benefit because I can completely understand. And students saying, why would I risk getting COVID and going to a minimum wage or a low-paying job when I can stay home? But at the same time, it's a better economy and it's trying to make sure that that stays vibrant and we keep working. Do you have any thoughts on the United States opening up? Because that would obviously have a huge impact.

I know that there isn't any plans seemingly to open up. I just, it's like a slow-moving car wreck. I can't keep my eyes off the states. So much of the decision seemed to be politically drawn between. between different parties, the rush to reopen, and yet they've got the highest case and death rate of anywhere in the world, I don't get it. I don't get the opposition to wearing masks in public. I just don't understand the logic. Large sectors of the population, or sectors of the population that are anti-science and anti-logic, anti-reason. I just don't understand. I think it's

tragic. I've gotten many American friends that I'm worried about and concerned for their safety. Part of my original summer vacation plan was to drive down in San Francisco. That ain't happening this year, and I'm in no rush to go down there when the borders do reopen if and when. I think the economic impact is going to be staggering. I think there's seismic shifts coming for the states. Within the coming, I think it's eight to ten years. It's now forecast China will become the world's dominant economic power. Yes.

They're on track, I think, within 20 years to be the world's dominant military power and naval power. America's role as the arbiter of all things public policy is eroding. It was inevitable. I know no one country exerts dominance forever. There's an evident flow. So it's going to be interesting to see how the world order changes when China, who's already exerting phenomenal influence on world politics and world public policy, what that will look like and what trade for Canada will look like with them.

What was your thought on what happened with China and the World Health Organization? organization and the United States. That whole relationship terrified me. Yeah. Politics. Not always in the best interests of the larger world. Yeah. Yeah. So moving forward from that, let's go a little bit more into what you see for your community and things that interest you in terms of growth, development, and how people can do better in their community. Wow. No pressure. Yeah. Big question. question. I've got everything about that. So I have a foot in, I have two feet, two different communities that I've got a foot in. So I work in Burnaby. My office is at the Burnaby campus,

but obviously I've got a lot of contact with the Surrey campus and our Vancouver campuses. So I'm moving around for a bit there prior to the pandemic. I now live in the Wally area of Surrey, but during the pandemic, I'm doing a lot of remote work from the Okanagan. So I've got clothes and stuff in a variety of different places. It's an odd existence right now. It's interesting living in the Okanagan and in Surrey and seeing the differences. I enjoy both. I enjoy downtown Vancouver and the vibrancy. Love the peace and quiet of the Okinawanaugan. Love the lifestyle. It's quieter, it's slower, a lot more relationships that I'm in daily contact with. I see strength in all the diversity of those different communities, different strengths.

You know, the commonalities are families that are embedded, good education systems, good arts programs, lots of diversity in the lower mainland, less stark difference in diversity in the Okinawagin. Almost everybody's white. It's an odd thing. And in parts of the Okinawagon, everybody's older and white. So I fit in. Yeah. In some respects, I miss that vibrancy of the lower mainland and the diversity of it. Yeah.

The Okanagan, I miss good Sashuan restaurants. They've got a couple of good Indian restaurants, but some diversity in dining. Yeah. Yeah. The Okanagan, of course, has the wine industry, which is fabulous. Yeah, there was just a podcast I was listening to. I forget who it was by, but they were talking about the differences between your mindsets, depending on whether or not you're in a city and in a rural area.

And I know that there's lots of research to show that we speak faster in high-paced communities rather than in rural areas. But the one that surprised me is that we are actually physiologically adapted to have a wider vision in more calm areas like the Okanagan or Chilawak and a more narrow,

I think they called it like a cyclone outlook where it's very focused, get things done as next problem, react to it and act. And so I think that that's so interesting to be able to go between both and start to experience the different areas. Yeah, I was in,

I was in the Falls Creek area of Vancouver a couple of nights ago. My sister was staying a couple of nights down there in a friend's apartment and an apartment that overlooks Scravel Island. So it was really cool to drive down there. It's just so vibrant. It's fascinating on the summer's evening. Great views. Lots of stuff going on.

We had dinner outside in Yale town. There's just so much going on. It's so active. It's color and information and noise and sensory overload. And I went back to the Okinawagon where I can walk across the street with my morning coffee and sit on a bench by the beach and soak it all in. It's peaceful and quiet. There's joy in both. Yeah, absolutely. So do you have any advice for people moving forward with your knowledge on risk, with your knowledge on the complexities of things in preparing businesses and SFU for a 10-year plan

after a problem occurs? Is there any way people can move forward in a better direction? Pay attention. Pay attention to the warning signs. Recognize warning signs. Think about what it's something goes wrong. How am I to look after myself? Because depending on the nature of the emergency, there may be no government support there for you. So you're on the catastrophic earthquake, the firefighters are going to rescue people in hospitals and schools first, high rises. The average homeowner, they're not going to get you. They've only got so many people. Vancouver talks with great pride, justified pride, about their light urban search and rescue team. Well, it's about 20 people.

How many people approximately? How many people? About 20. I think it's about 20, maybe 40, 40 people. So how many of those are not on vacation? How many of those are going to get to downtown Vancouver and an earthquake? If they live in Langley and the bridges are out, they're not getting there. If they live in Surrey and the bridges are out, they're not getting to Vancouver to help. So we start to think about who's there to help you. It's very fragile systems. They're going to prioritize their response. So if you're a homeowner with a family, how are you going to look after yourself. Do you have an emergency? I love the advertisements. Advertisance about home fire safety and they advocate, have a plan, rehearse the plan, talk about it with your kids in a non-alarming

way. Make it a gain. If there was a fire, what are the different windows or doors we can use? So we can adapt to the nature of the emergency. Exercise those plans. We do that at the university. We do exercises throughout the year. Our next tabletop exercise that we're just planning right now, we're going to do in mid to late September, is preparing for a resurgence or an outbreak on campus. So what would we do if suddenly we had an outbreak of COVID-19 in our campus community? How would we respond to that? How would you respond to that? Well, that's what we're working on. So we're developing protocols and plans, which are complex, because, you know, how do we protect the safety? But also, how do we collaborate with our partners

like Fraser Health or Vancouver Coastal Health. How do we respect privacy issues in the midst of all this? And how do we have, there's a variety of different stakeholders are going to be involved in the exercise. Student services, health and counseling, facilities, emergency programs. How do we collaborate on this in the best interests of our community? So that's just one example. One of our tabletop exercises, I think last year, the year before,

which people just don't think about. The most common large thing that goes wrong in any large, physical enterprise, pipes burst. If we have an insurance claim over $50,000, almost inevitably, it's because of water damage. You know, pipes burst for any number of reasons, old, faulty, whatever. Or some kid in residence is swinging off the pipe and the ceiling not realizing it's a fire sprinkler and it floods nine floors below them. So we did an exercise around a brown water pipe burst. So there's anybody who's done RVing, there's, you know, clean water stuff we drink, brown water stuff that's come out of the washing machine or the sink,

black waters out of the sewage system. So if we had a black or brown water pipe burst in one of our buildings, especially with it's a black water, there's contamination. So that it's going to take months of remedial physical work to bring that building up to a safe occupancy standard. So if we had a black water pipe burst in one of our science buildings, how do we reschedule classes? How do we move research labs? How do we recover with at least disruption to our faculty, our students, our researchers? So that's an example of the exercise we planned for. That's awesome. I think that the play thing is so important because it's such a good point that we get weird with the word play. And I think an example to show that playing is actually a really good thing for kids to be able to

actually deal with situations is playing house. And if you think about what a kid is doing when their playing house is they're not enacting exactly what their father does. They're not just re-encarding exactly how the father operates. They're taking the things that they believe the father to be and the qualities of a father, whoever it is, and they're trying to reenact that. And they actually do a really good job of that at such an early age. And the same thing can be done with preparing for those circumstances. But we almost, like, I even know for myself, I don't enjoy doing the fire drill. I think that it's nonsense. And I'm standing there going, well, of course I'd run if a fire occurred, but things can be so much more complex when you're

dealing with mass groups of people. And what do you think it is psychologically about people that really, really don't want to prepare and even listen to this podcast, are going to probably listen and go, yeah, I should prepare. And then go about their normal life and never enact the things that we talk about. It's mental preparation and it's that muscle memory. So when I, when I traveled extensively, one of the things I had my toiletry kit was a little flashlight, a very powerful little flash light. I would always put on the bedside table beside me, beside my phone. So if there was an emergency in the night and power was out, I had light. I would always look at the inside door where there's the emergency route map and emergency instructions, and I would walk

the hallway. So I could familiarize to myself. So if I'd get up at three in the morning there's smoke, I have some muscle memory of where the two exits are. Just mental preparation if something went wrong. It's why we do all these exercises. It's to get a group of people together. say, you know, what if? So, you know, we have groups working on logistics, working on safety, working on communications, liaising with first responders. We do all this so we have an understanding of what could go wrong. What's going to happen? What do we need to do? What do we need to prepare for? What are the resources? What are the questions? How do we work with others? So when it does happen, we've got a team that's used to working together and used to solving problems, used to community.

We've got a structure, we've got processes, we've got very specific roles that people are trained in. So when the disaster happens, it's not our first disaster. We've had dozens of simulated disasters of different kinds. We got this. So it also inspires confidence. Absolutely. So for us, it's a form of play. It's very serious, but we have a little bit fun along the way. But we're prepared. And we've, our university community is 40,000 people. 40,000. It's a small town. We've got a responsibility to protect those people and be prepared to step in to ensure their safety if things go wrong. And there's any number of things that could go wrong. We need to look at what reasonably could go wrong. How do we best support them? Well, absolutely. And it's not a matter of if something

goes wrong. It's just a matter of when and whether or not you've done the preparation. But is there any opportunities where you take that into your own life and you have a plan for your home and how you would operate? So community to the Okinawagon and wintertime, I've got a different box of stuff I have in the back of the car for winter. I make sure I've got good winter tires. I've got food, water and light and candles and matches and blankets in the back of the car. I've got emergency flashlight, flares, shovel, all those things. So if I got stranded on the cocahalla for 10 hours because it's closed, I'm not going to freeze and I'm not going to go hungry. It's not going to be fun, but I'll be okay. I make sure when I get on the cocahle, I've got a full tank

of gas. I've got home insurance. I've got, you know, sensitive or important documents backed up digitally somewhere off site. So if my computer crashes or gets stolen, I haven't lost that data. It's just things that, you know, could reasonably go wrong in my life. What, what things do you anticipate in terms of BC and problems we're going to be facing here that people might not have thought about the pandemic is obviously a fairly. Yeah, pandemic, um, drought, fire, you know, increased fire risk with changes in weather patterns and less snowfall. If we get more snowfall, more rain than we anticipate, there's the risk of flood in the lower mainland. And obviously the earthquake, most people living in Lower Man are totally ignorant that Mount Baker is an active volcano.

You know, look at it on a cold, clear morning. You'll see the steam rising from one side of Mount Baker. I didn't even know that. Yes. And it's right beside us. So for the people that remember history, was it Mount Hood? What was the Mount St. Helens? Yes.

Yeah. erupted 30-some years ago, I think. The ash plume alone stopped air travel. The ash plume settled over a massive area. Yeah, okay, so there was a volcano, but, you know, Mount Baker is probably, what, 20, 30 miles from the border, 10 miles from the border, you know. Well, the ash plume is, depending on the wind, it's going to drift this way. And it's fine enough that it's going to destroy your car. It's going to get inside systems in your vehicle that your vehicle may not be operable afterwards or it may not run.

What's going to do for people with respiratory problems, the elderly, children? Is it going to cover farmers' fields so we don't have crops for a few years? So berry crops, corn, agriculture is going to suffer livestock. Think about that. And now I'm terrified because thinking about that, Chilliwack is all agriculture. Yeah. So is it likely? Probably not in our lifetime.

Is it possible? Yeah. So just to think about, you know, if something really did go wrong, how would I survive? How would I support my family? How would we sustain ourselves? I remember one person jokingly said, you know, a number of years ago, their emergency plan was going and kicking in the front door Safeway and looting it. Well, that's kind of funny.

But think about it. Every other knucklehead on your block has the same plan. Yeah. So by the time you get to Safeway, it's already empty. Yeah. So besides the fact that it's criminal, you would need to take some personal responsibility for planning. Well, and you have to wake up to the fact that people do have that mindset.

The second that our, because there was real concerns during the pandemic about whether or not our supply lines would be able to last. And that's a real conversation about how many. how long does it take before people start to act in that manner of I am just going to go lewd, I am just going to go steal because it only takes a few days before you're like, okay, I got to feed my family, and I'm going to go out there and I'm going to take from my neighbor or those things are real risks that I don't think we're thinking about. And it's really concerning that those conversations aren't going on, that people are capable

of terrible things. Yeah, they are. But they're also capable of amazing humanity. Absolutely. I was always fascinating when I worked overseas that when I started to get to know people in different cultures, we all had the same concerns. We all want a better country for our children. We all want health care, stability, a government we can trust and believe in. You know, accessible health care, good education, safe drinking water.

We all want the same things at the core. I was also struck repeatedly wherever I was, how kind people would be and how helpful they would be. Absolutely. So, yeah, there's danger and there's bad things out there. overwhelmingly, though, I'm optimistic about the world. I'm optimistic about people. Absolutely. And I think that that's kind of what this podcast is about, is I want to recognize all the

amazing role models, but I also want to wake people up to the fact that Nazi Germany did happen, and it was horrible, but the people who were Nazis were real people, and some of them were just civilians with really bad ideas ingrained into them, and we can have bad ideas ingrained into us if we're not careful. We have to pay attention and accept nuance as much as possible. or we end up like the states where there's a Republican and there's a Democrat and there's only two sides and to think anything else is arbitrary. Well, we have to be observant and we have to speak up.

We have to do our part. You know, Rwanda was one of the more recent genocides where the Hutus went out and slaughtered some six or 700,000, 500,000 Hutus or Sir Tutsis in the course of a month. And the rest of the country, you know, pretty much stood by. The international community certainly stood by. There's other genocides happening in the world now, the Rohingya in northern Myanmar. We need to be conscious that bad things could happen here. We can't be complacent. We need to think what our role is and step up and speak up and take an active role in your community.

That's a really interesting one because one of the major problems I think with this pandemic is people are done with the news. And I think that traditional media is a real issue because it isn't informing us the way I think we know we can be informed now. As a university student, I know I'm not getting my best information from CNN. And that's fine. But what are your thoughts on those people who are like, I don't want to do the news anymore. I'm good. And, but I want to be informed because that is a very weird area to be in. I would say there's still, there's still a lot of mainstream media that I would look to in respect.

So as I said much earlier, I'm a huge CNN or a huge New York Times fan. I rarely look at CNN. I consider more infotainment. BBC World News, very good. National Post and... Globe and the Globe, different parts of the spectrum, they certainly have their take on things. Could you tell us a bit about the spectrum,

just to give people... Yeah, it's everything... So there's a spectrum of credibility and in-depth, but there's also a spectrum of left-to-right and are there agendas, either by the reporters or by the owners of the news organization? So that's something to be aware of is that. So that's why, as I said much earlier, if I'm really interesting an issue, I'll look at a variety of sources as well as ones I wouldn't normally follow.

I also, I subscribe electronically to the economist, you know, the world's best international affairs and business magazine by far, very well balanced, much more in-depth, much more strategic look at issues. If it's a regional news issue, I'll look at the South China Morning Post, or the Guardian from the UK, Al Jazeera is a phenomenal website, both in Arabic and in English. The English news is some of the best financed and best-resourced international reporting around. They do some good long-form reporting as well. So there's a variety of good sources out there. If you look at something like Fox, well, it's incredibly conservative, incredibly pro-Trump. It's all slanted. To be fair, the New York Times is very liberal, so very prone to to attack Trump, two different sides of the coin.

The truth is somewhere in the middle. It's for the informed consumer to figure out their own truth. Yeah, absolutely. And so do you have any thoughts on the Globe and Mail and the National Post, which are more local to Canada? But in terms of what their slants are, in your view, just to give people a better idea what they're looking for. I think they're more conservative. I love the CBC, not as well resources. as it used to be. So if I'm looking at a news source or a news event, it's often fascinating

to see how the same event is portrayed differently in different media outlets, but also sometimes how it's portrayed the same, because they all got the same information or got the same press release and didn't investigate it. So there's a failure there. Yeah, it's a challenge. If you're not there on the ground, how do you know what really happened? And if you are there on the ground, we have our own filters and unconscious biases we see the world through, may see it differently. Here's someone that's going to seem so obvious to you, but it might be less obvious to listeners, is what's the value in keeping up in news in your view? Because I know it's valuable and I can see the impact, but could you lay out a little bit more on why keeping up with all of this? Why people shouldn't just walk away and say, okay, like I'm tired of hearing about COVID.

I'm just going to stop keeping up with the news. It shapes our world. It shapes how we experience the world. If you're not aware of what's going on, things are going to be done to you. you and you've got no control. You need to be informed about your world to make informed choices. Is this the time to buy stocks? Is this the time to take a vacation? Is this time to buy the shiny new car? Or should I, you know, live with the older car and just maintain it because money's going to be tight? You know, if you're a worker in a factory or in industry and you're not paying

attention to the news, you can be shocked when your factory gets sold and closed and your job gets outsourced. If you're paying attention, you'll see the warning signs and you know it's time to get retrained to re-educated and look for a different job. Or maybe even move towns. Boom and bust in the oil patch. It's the norm. I'm always shocked or not shocked, but I'm disappointed when some person their 20s or 30s moves up to the oil patch decide this is it. I'm going to make huge money and buy all the big toys. It'll be great. Well, it's boom and bust. It's the norm there. So yeah, you're going to get laid off and you're going to have all this debt. How do you service it? Or or with a move to clean technology and clean energy, less demand for oil and the oil prices

have slumped. So now people are stunned by that. Well, paid attention to the news. For me and my role, I've got to pay attention. I mean, this is, I need to be aware of the issues that are going to impact our university. Absolutely. I think that realizing that voting isn't just something you do on the election day, it's something you do when you go to the store and you purchase something or you buy something online,

you're voting for ideas and that really opened my eyes when I was investing because I was like wow I'm a part of this business like I'm technically a shareholder and it feels weird to say and it doesn't feel real in an actual sense because what do I own one share out of like thousands but the idea is that you take a vote when you go to the grocery store and you buy this type of lettuce instead of this type of lettuce and that impacts the lettuce industry and you're doing that all throughout your grocery shop you're doing that when you rent movie and you're buying from Apple instead of Netflix, and you're constantly voting, and you should just connect yourself with that and start to figure out, well, do I agree with what Netflix is

doing? Or do I agree with how Amazon's moving forward? Do I agree with how Google's using my information? Or should I switch over to a different medium? And those types of things, you can enact pretty quickly into your life once you know that your privacy is being taken advantage of and those sorts of issues? What's the human rights record of the company you're buying a product or services from. You know, how green and sustainable are they really. You know, it can become a full-time job to have, you know, to research all that, which is overwhelming and most of us don't do that. But to pay some attention, to make, make consumers a conscious choice. I totally agree. It is a vote every day. And we're not always conscious. You know, it's, you know, if, if I'm a

carnivore, how much do I care about the ethical treatment of animals? Am I consuming something that was raised in humane conditions and slaughtered in humane conditions? What are the preservatives and additives? If I want to live a, you know, more of a green lifestyle, well, it's not always as green as we think. You know, to produce a wind turbine is incredibly carbon intensive. Is it as clean as we think? So there's complexity is around all of those. And it is a conscious choice, but most of us do it unconsciously every day. Do we buy clothes that were produced? in a developing country under less than ideal labor and safety conditions. Yeah.

I think that that's an issue that BC is starting to face is because our standards have become so high that we're starting to push our own selves out of the market because it's hard to keep up with having to pay people so much for things you can pay overseas so little. Well, if you, you know, if you go to the store and you want to buy a new t-shirt, do you buy the one that's $12 and made overseas? you to buy the $40 one that's made by unionized workers in North America. Yeah. Yeah, we are pricing ourselves out of the market and we're driven my cost.

So that's why Walmart does so well. People want cheap stuff. Very little of it's made in North America supporting American jobs. Yeah. I think we've seen a lot of that with the government in just terms of dealing with this pandemic. Because one of the interesting comments I heard from a guy named Peter Schiff, who I don't, I think he's questionable. but one of the points he made was that a way to address a problem like this is typically through

choosing a great charity and trying to make sure that the money that the charity's spending primarily goes to the cause that they're claiming where the government owes you no such claim and they're not if once they take your money it's going to be spent however it's going to be spent it's very hard to get them to rein in and do things cost effectively and so we're not but we're not even having that dialogue most people i've heard about the cesb or serb are just on board or not on board. And I think that that's really interesting because it is so complex in how we want to move forward with these types of issues.

And how much do we really know about the issues we're commenting on or have an opinion on charities are a great example. I rarely, rarely ever give at the door. When somebody knocks on the door and they're raising money for something, I have a couple of charities that I support either as a volunteer or monetarily. And I'm cautious that they're an issue or a cause I believe in. and I've done a little bit of due diligence, not a lot, but I've done a little bit of due diligence to ensure that the bulk of my donation actually goes to the issue, not the overhead of running the charity.

And the people running the charity aren't living a lavish lifestyle. Yeah. So I'm conscious about that. I support the Canadian Cancer Society. I've been a volunteer for the last four years with the MS Society of Canada. I've supported Big Brothers for a number of years. And when I used to work in the downtown East Side, I was a big supporter of the Union Gospel mission. In fact, they used to be in my will when I was a policeman.

Yeah. What were some of those roles like and what was being involved in those types of things like? Well, volunteer for MS Society. I'm a volunteer photographer for them. So I get to use my hobby in a constructive way. It's an excuse to, it's a justifiable reason to go and shoot people rather than landscapes in nature that I normally do. So I'm very shy and, you know, people are not always happy about having the picture taken

in public. But it's a way to leave a lasting item for the MS Society to use in their marketing and fundraising. It's also just a fun time and fun group of other volunteers and great cause to be behind. I've been involved in it not long enough at enough events to see a lot of the same volunteers or other fundraising directly or impacted and see their change over time and see their families. So that's been really cool. That's awesome. And Big Brothers, how have you been involved? I was a volunteer Big Brothers for seven years when I was a policeman.

Really? Yeah. What was that like in the overlap of, because it seems like you set that up perfectly, where police officers see way too much violence, crime, negative situations, and then you're building a positive relationship on the other side? I was working the downtown East Side, knew in my career, and realized that I never got to see people in a positive light and didn't have contact with kids in a positive light.

So I volunteer for big brothers. So I had the same, same little brother for seven years through a lot of my policing career. And it was a great experience. It was an opportunity to give back. It was an opportunity to see the world through a child's eyes and to hopefully have some small impact on his life. That's amazing. And I think that those are ways that we can start getting involved in the community and an immediate go over to your computer right now and type it in. There's, there's so many volunteer opportunities, whether it's, you know, helping with park remediation,

or stream remediation, whether it's, you know, it's a charity to support local arts or a music group or whatever, let alone social causes, medical causes. If you just Google, I think it's Volunteer Vancouver has a portal that links to hundreds of different volunteer opportunities for different charities. That was the weirdest one for me is going through all of my education. I always heard about arts and culture. never understood why we funded it, why we paid for it, and more recently I've started to understand why, and it's because comedians and artists often comment on what we're doing as a society. So they're watching us from abroad, and they're keeping an eye on what are the things we're getting used to, what are some common themes in our lives that we're just not picking up on, like ordering off of Amazon all the time. Those are small themes we don't think of, but we're doing, and it increases, and then artists start to catch it and start to share what we're doing. doing. And then we have a broader understanding of what's going on. And I think that is important for people to be able to start to grapple with. It's also about other ways to express yourself, other ways to explore your artistic side, whether it's music or painting or theater. The arts are

so diverse and enrich a community. People want to explore their culture, their experience, learn about others. Whatever it is, it makes us a richer, stronger, more vibrant community. Absolutely. you think of things like the pyramids and they're beautiful now as they were when they were being built. But I think we have a real tough time with grappling with paying for it in a Canadian context because we don't have the architecture of Europe or the type. Well, it's interesting. I've done a lot of reading and a lot of reflection and a lot of thought in the last couple of years, especially working in the university context around equity, diversity, inclusion, racism.

and with the explosion of the Black Lives movement, starting to look at a lot of experience, but also a lot of history. You know, we celebrate the, you know, you mentioned the pyramids, yeah, built with slave labor. Yeah. A lot of the ancient architecture we see in Europe that we celebrate built under brutal conditions with forced labor sometimes.

Not always. You know, we used to celebrate people like, you know, And in the European culture, North American culture, would celebrate Christopher Columbus. Well, not for your first nations. You know, that was the start of the genocide. Yeah. So we had statues of Christopher Columbus, statues about Winston Churchill, Sir John A. McDonald. Well, in a different cultural lens, you see them entirely differently.

So it's interesting to look at that and reframe that. You know, I was brought up in a time of, you know, the traditional British Empire education. With this global map on the wall and the empire was all pink, never thought about what the people that lived there, how they experienced the empire. Yeah. If they weren't white, English speaking. Yeah, that's a really interesting one because I've leaned on both sides of the issue. I'm indigenous. I understand it from our perspective.

But it goes back to what we were talking about role models, which is nobody's perfect. And if we're holding them to this standard, we're never going to have anyone to live. look up to. And part of our culture needs to be based on that it came from somewhere. And I think examples like the rule of law are so ingrained in us now that if you told someone like, well, what if we didn't have innocent until proven guilty? What if we switched it around? Guilty until proven innocent? Those are important hallmarks of our culture that did come from questionable sources, but they're still important. Yeah. And also, you know, some of the amazing leaders from history, do we judge them by what they accomplished and what they said and the

movements they led? Or do we judge them by the worst five minutes of their lives when they made a mistake? Or Martin Luther King, amazing human being with an amazing impact on the world, and especially on America, especially on race, relations, and equality. Allegedly a serial womanizer. Okay. Does that take away from what he accomplished, though? Like I said earlier, I look to the events and what people did and what people said that I'll celebrate, knowing that everybody's human and nobody's perfect. Yeah. I've got enough experience in life and internationally to have met some people who've done

some monstrous things. Does that make them a monster? I reckon they're multifaceted. Certainly there are monsters, but they're complex people. Absolutely. That's one crazy part about, I think, the social movements that have been going on and a little bit too much push from, I think, the left is that people are good and if they just are taught the right way, that they will

never be bad. And I think that that is a gross mischaracterization of how people are and can be. There are some evil people out there who would really like to watch the world burn. And I think we've stopped grappling with that as much in a BC context. Do you have any thoughts on your worldly experience that might horrify the listeners? So getting back to what my comment just a moment ago, I've met people who've done monstrous things, but I've also seen them in another context. I abhor and shun what the monstrous things they did. Don't excuse it, don't justify it. But I try to understand, you know, why that, you know, what was the rationale for doing that? At the same time, yeah, there are monstrous people that should be locked up. We're all complex. A story I sometimes share, and I've got a souvenir of this out in the car outside, when I was working in Myanmar, Burma. And I say it was closed at the time and it was a military hunter running the country. There's no free speech. I was always under surveillance when I was there. Not hard to

surveil me, you know, tall, heavy-set white guy in a land of much shorter statue or stature Asians. I really stood out. I had a number of meetings with the chief of police of one of the major cities. And it was about the UN work I was doing. But I had a number of meetings with him privately in his office where it was he and I, maybe one other person, we're sitting having tea. We'd talk about the leadership books we're reading. We were reading a lot of the same books at the time. We talked about our children. We talked about golf. We talked about life and our families and our hopes for our families. Some great conversations. And the last time I saw him, he, you know, we weren't, I think we had a couple of meals

together. You know, we weren't friends. We had never been to his home. We never spent social time. We had some great connections and great conversations. The last time I saw him, he was very careful to shake both my hands at the same time. And, you know, you're my friend. I want to see you and he come back, you know, very heartfelt, very sincere. And he slipped onto my wrist a wooden, a wooden-beated Buddhist prayer bracelet around my wrist. This is from me to you. You're my friend. want you to remember me. So I was very touched by that. It sits on the gear shift of my car to this day as a reminder of the complexity of people. But six months or a year after I was last there, he was one of the commanders during the Saffron Revolution, which is when the Buddhist monks

tried to uprise against the military government. He was one of the government security force leaders that gave the order to open fire on Buddhist monks protesting, unarmed Buddhist monks. and the police and the military in many cities opened fire on them. Wow. And I'm really conflicted about trying to make sense of this. You know, this is a man I'd had tea with, which, you know, in the scheme of things, this is a pretty inconsequential act, but somebody I've seen a very human side to and then try to understand why he would do what we would see as a monstrous thing.

But in his context, he's supporting the government that he believes in and trying to maintain status quo. It doesn't justify it, but I try to understand it. You know, why did people not speak up in Nazi Germany, afraid, perhaps, not my issue, not my people? I don't know. I, you know, I wasn't there. But by not saying something or doing something, how complicit are we in the atrocities that happen? Absolutely.

And what would I do in that same situation? I don't know. So I grapple with those things. I find them fascinating. I find them troubling. I've got enough experience in life and policing and world travel to see that, yeah, we're all capable of doing things that. other people would just recoil in horror at. How do we rationalize those things? It's not simple. Having said all that, yeah, I'm still optimistic about the world. I'm still optimistic about world affairs

and people are inherently good at their core. Yeah, I think that you make an excellent point there. And I think that that's where the value of history really comes in is because it wakes you up to the fact that you have to grapple with that every day regardless of your circumstance that really good people can do horrible things and people we think of as horrible people can liberate communities and start to change the direction of what's going on. Well, and history is written by the victors. So when I was a kid, the neighbors next door were German and he had been a soldier in the German army during the second war.

And I was never old enough to hear the stories from him, but he had told my dad some stories, but when he was captured as a German soldier and the incredible physical abuse he received from the Americans who captured him. We never hear those stories. We don't hear much in Canadian history about how we locked up the Japanese during the war. We whitewashed that. We demonized the other. Or Chinese people coming in here to Canada way before you might think, I think I saw a plaque up in hope that was like 1960s or 1860s when they first arrived building our rail system. And then I've seen, I've heard people complaining that, All these immigrants are coming here, and it's like, they were here way before you even could have been tested life.

The Sikhs, the Sikh temple in Abbotsford is over 100 years old. Yeah. And that's not the first one. Yeah. Yeah. It's an incredibly rich, diverse history that we've largely ignored. There's an amazing little museum to the Chinese rail workers and Chinese communities and other. I remember there's Littner, Lillow, it, swam it a couple of years ago.

Yeah, it was imported Chinese labor that built the National Railway. Sikhs were working in agriculture. and the lumber industry over 100 years ago. But we ignore that. When we win a war, we demonize the other. We don't see the history from their perspective. So I'm always interested in traveling, especially to places that had been in conflict, and try to hear from the other side that I didn't normally read about as a kid.

What was their experience of that conflict and what were the impacts? Absolutely. I think one I'd like to get your thoughts on, because it's one that's really woken me up more recently, which is I think most people have a pretty good grasp on hopefully Nazi German. Germany and what happened with the Holocaust and maybe broad understanding. But I don't feel like we have an understanding of what happened in Stalin, Russia, Maoist China, and those types of... The genocide in China, how Stalin purged the country of intellectuals or people he thought could threaten him or threaten the regime. The camps in Siberia.

Yeah, a lot of that's not easily accessible. It's not written in English, more so now than it. than before, but, you know, what do we read about? We read about ourselves. What do you watch on TV? You watch portrayals of your own people. That's so true. Yeah, we're just not attuned to paying attention to that.

You know, I challenge anybody to name more than five countries in Africa. Most people think Africa is a country. We're not tuned to the rest of the world, let alone what's happened there. Yeah. And every one of them has got often a rich cultural tradition, always a rich, rich culture, but often rich literature, Nigeria, huge producer of movies and TV and literature. You know, how many North Americans have read Nigerian literature in English? And there's a lot of it in English now, some great novelists or out of South America.

Yeah, it's a big complex world, we don't always pay attention to it. That's a weird one. I just, this is a weird topic, but I just watched all the Harry Potter's again. And the reason that I thought it was so interesting was because, geez, that kid goes through hell again and again and again. And I don't think we give credit to people who are fans of that type of literature because it is, he's going to war. His family's dying every single day. There's catastrophe everywhere. And that's how you should live your life is despite the pandemic.

How can you make an impact on your community? Well, it's a story about resilience. Yeah. And that's, I think it's one of the common themes around the world is the resilience of people. Whether it's famine or plague, crop failures, drought, genocide, warfare, people survive. And there's, yeah, there's so many amazing stories about that. You come out more hopeful. Do you have any stories about those from other countries that might illuminate of going through resilient times and trying to pull together as a community?

Because I think we're seeing that a lot right now with wanting to support small businesses. I just saw Doug Ford made a comment about the tariffs that Trump is putting on us. to shop local, stick it to Trump by buying local. Is there any? So not about that sort of thing, but one of those resilience stories that stuck with me is I spent eight or nine years going back and forth to Vietnam for UNICEF. I got to work all over the country, got amazing people. One of the many friends I made is a woman who works for UNICEF.

She's born and raised in Hanoi. Got a law degree in Japan, articled in the States, went to Harvard for her master's in public health, went back to Vietnam. She's, she left for school, but always went back. And so she's got a family in Hanoi, just an amazing, chuk, is her name. She's just an amazing human being. We traveled a lot around the country together. She was the UNICEF sponsor, sometimes she was translator, sometimes she was more the project manager, who spent a lot of meals together. And she's told me one time, she told me a number of stories about being a child in Hanoi during the American War and how they had bomb shelters, because Hanoi was a very heavy, frequent target of

American bombing, sometimes low altitude, and often, you know, aerial bombing is often indiscriminate. So they might be going after a target, but they'll drop bombs miles away and hits civilians. So they had all sorts of air raid shelters. So it was a time of privation. It was a time of starvation. And she told me that her father would always read bedtime stories to her. Often in English, often in French. And some of the stories she had read were stories from my childhood, the Three Musketeers, things like that.

What story is that about? Alexander de Maugh. It's a two or three hundred-year-old story of three soldiers who were close in France during the French Empire. But, you know, classic stories I'd heard as a kid or read children's versions of, been read to by her father. So it's just that, you know, the shared humanity, you know, there they are in a time of bombings and war, and a father takes the time to read to his child at night, some of the same stories that I'd heard. Yeah. So there's that shared experience of the family moment, but she's doing this amongst a war and very little food and time of incredible

hardship. And that resilience, he just shines through of just adapting. And I think, think that that's one of the most interesting things about people is that we adapt no matter the circumstance. If we don't, it's going to break us. And some people adapt more than others, whether it's upbringing, environment or who we are, you know, nature or nurture argument. But it's, you know, for most of us, we're going to have multiple careers. How adaptable are you to that?

How are you adaptable are you to learning and retraining? Your job ends. How adaptable are you to moving physically to another town or another country? Yeah. You know, just how resilient are you going to be in very dynamic, complex times? That's so important for people to hear because we often get stuck in this mindset of, I'm at this business and this business is going to go on forever. And even with Xpera, like I had no imagination that it would switch so vastly from where you were to where it is now.

Yeah. Yeah. Things evolve. That's so important. Well, we just did almost three hours. Oh, my God. Yeah. Do you want to leave anything for the listeners?

Be aware of the world around you. During this pandemic, hold your family tight. Tell the people you love that you love them repeatedly. Support your friends, support your family. Look after yourself. These are incredibly trying complex times, and we're going to get through it better if we come together.

Whether it's friendship groups or family groups or community groups, that's what's going to make the difference in our lives. That's so positive. Could you tell people how to find you? I believe you're primarily on LinkedIn. Yeah, LinkedIn is the easiest way to find me. I'm on, of course, our safety and risk services website at SFU, but LinkedIn is the easiest way to find me.

And I do have a Twitter account. It's personal. It's mostly about my photography and more liberal politics. But I am there as well, but it's not, it's certainly not a professional site. And it's not anything that relates to my work. Okay. Well, Mark La Land, I'm honored to have had you on. It's been my privilege.

Thank you. This was an incredibly informative podcast. And I hope people take the action that you've. suggested and taking those important steps. Well, it's wonderful to see you get and reconnect. Thank you. Awesome. Thank you for taking the time.

You know, Thank you.