Uncover - S13: "White Hot Hate" E1: 'Save Your Race, Join The Base'

Episode Date: December 31, 2021

When recruitment posters for a white supremacist network start appearing around town, Winnipeg Free Press journalist Ryan Thorpe decides to go undercover and infiltrate the group. For transcripts of this series, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/podcastnews/white-hot-hate-transcripts-listen-1.6226840

Hi, I'm Caitlin Prest, and I am here in your ear to tell you about a very incredible show called Asking For It. Asking For It is a darkly comedic series that follows a queer femme singer whose herstory of violence finds her no matter how many times she runs away. It has an original soundtrack, and it'll make you laugh, cry, and feel a little bit less alone. Asking for it. Subscribe now. This is a CBC Podcast. The following episode contains coarse language and descriptions of violence. Please take care when listening. Voice memo.

I'm going to try and get up with everything I can remember. I've popped my head. Something just ended and I didn't record it. It's the summer of 2019, and this is Ryan Thorpe, a reporter for the Winnipeg Free Press. He's just had what could be the biggest interview of his career, but he couldn't take notes. So he's jogging home, fast, recording on his phone everything he can remember. He's about 5'10". Lives in Beaujour.

Has for a couple of years. Grew up in the country. Used to live in Winnipeg fuck we spoke for like an hour and a half there was so much he ranted with

homophobic and racist language. He's anti-Semitic. He likes to talk. He talked about fomenting a race war. He talked about derailing a train that we were nearby,

sabotaging train tracks. That we were nearby, sabotaging a train track. He is a violent extremist. The man Ryan just met, basically, he described himself as a neo-Nazi. He talked about derailing a train and fomenting a race war. Ryan didn't know the man's identity, and the man did not know that Ryan was a journalist. He talked about the importance of keeping information siloed, and that there is no discussion in the main chat room of any upcoming training camps until after they happen. But there's no discussion of them prior to the events themselves

because they're worried that there might be a journalist infiltrating the group. I could have recorded the whole fucking conversation. He wouldn't have even known. I'm Michelle Shepard, and this is White Hot Hate. Episode 1, Save Your Race, Join the base. Have you heard of the term accelerationism? It's not widely known.

But in recent years, the ideology has taken root among white supremacists. Basically, an accelerationist is someone who revels in chaos. They want governments and society to collapse, and one way they believe they will is if they accelerate it through acts of violence. Here's their thinking. Neo-Nazi accelerationists believe the white race is at risk of extinction, and the government is largely corrupt and will not stand up for their rights, so they can't win through ballot boxes.

But they think violence can set off a series of reactions that will sow political discord. Those in the political center, who they call fence-sitters, will be forced to pick sides, sparking a kind of Lord of the Flies survival of the fittest frenzy. Action is what is needed most in these trying times, and that action must be driven towards our white revolution. A race war will begin, and the whites will triumph. No one embrace the chaos, and from its ashes,

a new world shall arise, beautiful and pure, to victory, white man! If you haven't been following this, their mission sounds a bit far-fetched, I know. But this violent faction of the far-right has been busy spewing hate and organizing on social media and in private chat groups. And those who share the ideology have been carrying out deadly attacks. At least 49 people have been killed in two mosques in Christchurch. In El Paso, Texas, 20 people were gunned down inside a Walmart. In Charleston, South Carolina, nine people were killed in a shooting at a historic African-American church.

We are following a developing story out of Quebec City. Police confirm multiple deaths inside a mosque. Dozens of others are wounded. Many are in critical condition. Police are now searching for a white male suspect thought to be in his early 20s. in his early 20s. I've been tracking terrorism since the September 11th attacks. But the vast majority

of the violence I covered was outside of North America and perpetrated by Al-Qaeda and its affiliates and then by ISIS. But there was one devastating terrorist attack by a right-wing extremist

that I covered in my travels. Today, the usually peaceful nation of Norway is coming to terms with horrific acts of violence. A large bomb went off outside Norwegian government offices in the capital, Oslo, this afternoon, killing at least seven people and injuring many more. When I got on a plane in Toronto to fly to Norway, all I knew was that a bomb had gone off in Oslo and there were early reports of children being killed on the nearby island of Utoya. In the end, there were 77 victims, most of them teenagers. The survivors were heartbreakingly composed. I can still picture Caroline Bank telling me how her arm was cramping

as she pressed a shredded T-shirt into her friend's bullet wounds. And that she was trying to camouflage her friend's purple hoodie with sticks and dirt because the murderer, Anders Bering Breivik, was still out there. I read Breivik's terrorist manifesto, all 1,518 pages of it. He didn't use the term accelerationist back then, but that's what he was. This is what he wrote. We are in the very beginning of a very bloody cultural war, a war between nationalism and internationalism, and we intend to win it.

He wanted to start a race war. Others are still trying today. And that's what we're investigating in this podcast, this overt and covert accelerationist movement, this push by a small but determined and violent faction of the far right. And that's the story journalist Ryan Thorpe found in the city of Winnipeg, smack dab in the middle of North America. Ryan was working as a general assignment reporter at the Winnipeg Free Press. Affectionately known as the Freep, it's the paper of record in this city on the Canadian prairies. So anytime that there was violent crime or homicide or something like that in Winnipeg,

I was usually the person asked to cover it. And then when I wasn't working on stuff like that, just anything that might need to be covered in a day, they would kick over to me. So it was pretty varied. One day in the summer of 2019, Ryan's editor asked him to follow up on a tip. Someone had been putting up posters around Winnipeg with the words, Learn, Train, Fight. There was a sketch of a jacked-up Grim Reaper

in a skull mask, cradling an assault-style rifle. And the call to arms? Save your race, join the base. So what's your next move then, now that you have this poster? What do you do to try and figure out what's going on? My first step is just to begin doing kind of an internet dive into this organization called The Base. I had never heard of them before. I didn't know anything about them. And I come across this 2018 expose done by Vice, which...

In late 2018, Vice journalists Ben Makou and Mac Lamoureux wrote the first big piece on The Base under the headline, Neo-Nazis are organizing secretive paramilitary training across America. And aside from this kind of single news article, I couldn't find anything about this organization, which probably explained by virtue of the fact that this group was fairly new, that according to Vice, they had been formed in 2018. And I knew that they'd been formed in the United States,

and now all of a sudden we've got recruitment posters turning up here in Winnipeg. So Ryan considered his options. I walk down the newsroom and go back to my editor and essentially say, look, this is what I've found out so far. There are two different ways you could approach the story. One is that I could write something for tomorrow's paper. I would just get some interviews with academics. I would contact the Winnipeg Police Service, ask if they're aware of these posters and tracking them

at all. Maybe I would go to one of the kind of anti-fascist organizers that I know and get a quote from them. It'd be pretty straightforward. It would be quick to turn around. The other approach, I said, would be to create a fake name and just reach out to them and ask for more information about them, pretend to be a white nationalist that's potentially interested in joining up. So that's what Ryan does. He goes by the alias of Mark, a 26-year-old university student who has been flirting with white nationalist ideology. And he emails the contact on the poster, asking for more information. I got a response the next day.

The first thing they wanted to know was where I had seen their posters. And so I described the area of St. James where I knew one of these posters had come up. And after that, they sent me a questionnaire that they asked me to fill out, which wanted to know, you know, my name, my age, my physical fitness level, my ethnicity, my sex. They wanted to know if I had firearms training, if I had military experience at all, if I had background in chemistry or engineering. They wanted me to describe my political worldview. And so I filled out that questionnaire and sent it back to them. This fact strikes me as so funny and familiar, too. The bureaucracy of extremist groups is just surreal. I remember in 2016 getting my hands on a database of 4,000 ISIS recruits, it contained all the answers those applicants had to supply.

Date of birth and nationality, education, employment, and would you like to be a fighter, security guard, administrator, or martyr? Ryan answered the base's questionnaire carefully. I didn't want to inflate my credentials or like lie about my background to make myself seem like a more attractive recruit to them. So when it came to like questions of military training or a background in chemistry and engineering, in real life I have neither and so I didn't pretend to have those things. So I gave them my real age. You know, when it came to do you have any firearms trainings? I just said that, like, I grew up in a rural area of the Canadian prairies,

and, like, all of my family were hunters, and my dad taught me to shoot guns from a young age, which was all accurate. The form worked. For the next few days, there were emails back and forth. Eventually, the person I was communicating with told me to download an app. Ryan signed up as Mark, and he started communicating with someone with the handle Roman Wolf. The texting continued, and then Roman said it was time to talk on the phone. I can remember, you know, being in the newsroom all day and kind of going about, you know, my regular GA duties.

And then it was eight or nine at night when I had set up this phone call. I had printed out all my correspondence with these people and then kind of wrote a list of all the key details that I've been telling them about myself. Just to make sure that I didn't screw up or say something that contradicted a piece of information I had previously given them. If I couldn't think of a way to answer a question off the top of my head, I could just look down at the page and then very quickly riff. Ryan spread the cheat sheets out in front of him. But from the get-go, there was something he hadn't expected.

About 10 to 15 minutes prior to when this call is scheduled for, I get a message from the guy that I've been talking to, and he says, actually, there's going to be about, like, five to six other members of the base listening in, which I found unnerving because, one, it just caught me off guard, and two, here I was thinking I only had to convince one person, and now I had to be convincing two, six, or seven. This is the man calling himself Roman Wolf.

And while there were supposedly others joining in, it's only Roman talking. It sounds like he's in charge. We're assuming that some degree of power vacuum will emerge, and we want to be able to fill that power vacuum. So our preparation, our training is geared towards that. He tells Ryan, a.k.a. Mark, the university student, that the base is a survivalist self-defense network, and its members do not believe there is a political solution to the oppression of the white race. So? We're hoping for a collapse of the current system.

He says, we're hoping for a collapse of the current system. And Ryan is playing right along. I would agree with that. I think I've just reached a point where it's like, I no longer want my political views to just be some private, personal thing that doesn't translate into how I operate or act in the world, which is how, admittedly, how it's been for me the past couple of years. But that's something that I want to change.

Not only do I think that a collapse is coming and is inevitable, I also hold the view that we've already entered into something approximating a kind of very low-intensity civil war. You're going to be stepping into, you know, probably the most, like, extreme group of, you know, pro-white people that you can probably come across. You know, they're close to it. The most extreme group of pro-white people

you'll probably come across. Ryan kept his cool, didn't flinch. It seemed like he had built some kind of rapport with this Roman wolf. But as the call was winding down, a totally new voice pops up. have been me. So that person who's active, so to speak, in her area may or may not be me. You'll notice that. Okay, sounds good.

But yeah. Basically, now Ryan knows. Okay, he's got the guy who's been putting up the posters in Winnipeg. The call ends with Roman Wolf saying he and the others would discuss Ryan's application and get back to him in 24 hours. The next day, I'm in the newsroom working on a different story, and I see a notification pop up on my work cell phone, and it was Roman Wolf. And he said, you did good last night.

The next step is to meet our local guy in person. person. In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news. So I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner, and I'm back with season three of On Drugs. And this time, it's going to get personal. I don't know who Sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy. On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. Ryan's investigation was moving surprisingly fast.

It had only been about two weeks since he'd first reached out. And now all of a sudden I'm going to be meeting up with the person who is responsible for putting these posters up, right? And so that felt good from a journalistic standpoint. It's like, oh, I actually got to the bottom of this one. The same time, by this point, I'd learned a lot about this organization. I had learned that this wasn't the type of far-right groups that I had done coverage on in the past, that this was something far more serious, far more militarized, and potentially violent. And so, you know, I was worried. Am I going to be convincing enough?

You know, it's one thing to kind of convince them over text messages and emails and even a phone call, right? Where if something had went wrong, I'm still physically separated from these people. So the consequences aren't that bad. This time around, if I screw up and blow my cover, I'm going to be face to face with this guy. And what might he do? At that point, a face to face meeting, I'm essentially acting. You know, I don't have any chops as an actor or background in drama. So I was being put to the test in a way that I hadn't been before.

Ryan didn't have much time to prep for the meeting. We've set up this meeting for 8 p.m. at Whittier Park in Winnipeg, which was a park that I had chosen due to its location. I wanted to keep things central, and I didn't want to meet him, you know, out of town or in some, like, very secluded area. So I go into work that day, and I can't remember what I was covering. You know, I had a daily deadline, and so I didn't really think about the meeting a lot. I honestly didn't have the time to. But when he gets home...

Kind of as I'm walking through the door, it's like three hours out, and it hits me, you know, what I'm about to do. So that's when the nerves really start getting to me. You know, I'm thinking through various things that could happen at that meeting that might blow my cover. I can't have my audio recorder in my pocket.

What if he pats me down, right? Like that's obviously a red flag. You know, I thought, well, maybe I can just run an audio recorder on my cell phone. But, you know, I was just worried that if for whatever reason he saw the screen, maybe I check the time at some point and he sees that little recording bar at the top of the screen that I just figured it wasn't worth the risk. Then I get worried that he might ask to see my driver's license or my ID. And then all it takes is one Google search of my name and he would see that I'm a reporter at the

Winnipeg Free Press. But then Ryan thinks, OK, but it's also weird not to carry your wallet. Is that going to be a red flag in and of itself? So I essentially come up with this story where I message him a couple hours before a meeting. And I say, look, I usually go jogging a few times a week. And normally on Wednesdays, which was the day of the week it was, I go jogging. But I was so busy today that I couldn't. So I'm going to jog from my place to the park. You know, I'm six feet tall. I'm thin. I'm going to jog from my place to the park. You know, I'm six feet tall,

I'm thin, I'm going to be wearing jogging clothes, and I have a shaved head. He says, yeah, that's fine, that's good. As a young white dude with a shaved head, Ryan's about as central casting as you can get for neo-Nazis. But Winnipeg's not a huge city, and the free press is the main paper. Quebec's not a huge city, and the free press is the main paper. And Ryan had covered a couple far-right stories. So ostensibly, if you were into this stuff, you may have read him. And his headshot accompanies his articles. And so I have a mustache in that photo, and I had a mustache at the time. So I go into my bathroom and I shave off all my

facial hair. And then the final thing was that, you know, I was wearing a t-shirt and shorts, but some of my tattoos were visible. And so I put on kind of like a long sleeve exercise shirt and kind of athletic, like long john type things underneath the shorts and t-shirt just so that my entire body was covered. And so he wouldn't see any of my tattoos. I have one tattoo which is the M-30 tattoo which is associated with journalism that reporters would put at the end of their copy to signal the end of the story for a long time. There's only one other person I know who has that inside baseball journalism tattoo. Me. I got it 18 years ago on my 30th birthday as a joke. Dash, 30 dash, the end. Mine's on my lower back. I thought it was pretty original. Ryan's is on his

arm. It's not his only tattoo. And essentially on the insides of my arms, I have these two circles with these little flowers. One's a black rose, one's like a sunflower. Ryan's a vegan. Apparently, the sunflower is a symbol of veganism. Yeah, I just think that's probably not the type of tattoo that some hardcore macho neo-Nazi would probably have, so I figured it best to

cover those up. So, the cleanly shorn, long-sleeved jogger runs off to Whittier Park and goes to the baseball diamond, where there's a game underway. And waits. Pretty soon, another man arrives and makes a beeline for Ryan. He has blonde hair, longish on top, with short sides. His build is stocky, and he looks like he's in pretty good shape.

It's him. It's him. And pretty quickly, he says, well, you know, we're going to be working with each other a lot moving forward. And so if you'd like, we can just drop the pseudonyms. And I think about it for a split second. And I'm like, yes, let's do that. And so he says, my name's Patrick. And I say, my name's Ryan.

The meeting spot is loud and crowded, so Patrick tells Ryan he wants to go further into the park. And they walk into a wooded area. And so he takes off this big backpack that he had on, and he unzips it, he starts pulling stuff out, and he also pulls out some of the posters he had been putting up. And then he pulls out two jackets that are, like, military camouflage style. He pulls out two masks, face masks, that have a skull printed on the front of them, which are popular in certain neo-Nazi circles. And then he pulls out two hats and he says, you know, we have to take a picture together and then send it back to Roman to prove that we've met and that this meeting actually happened. And Ryan thinks, uh-oh.

You know, I was uncomfortable with it. Like, I don't want to help create propaganda for this, like, horrific group. But it was something that I had to do. So there was actually this funny moment where we're in this, like, secluded area, and it's, like, all woods. It's down by the river. And we start putting on the military jackets and uh and the face masks and as we're pretty much like done getting dressed up all of a sudden a guy rips down on a bicycle on like this little path in the woods and like looks

at us and then just like keeps going and i'm like oh shit like that's not, that's not good. The cyclist spooks Patrick, so they try a new location. So we cross the field and we go to the opposite end of the park where, again, there's more woods. And I can remember walking up this kind of like steep embankment. And at the top, there was a rail line that ran all along the park. As soon as he sees the rail line, he thinks, this is where I want to take this photo. And then he keeps trying to set up his phone so that it can, like, take a photo, because obviously there's no one there to take the picture of us. And so he has to, like, put a timer on his phone and set it up in such a place. And in the end, he's struggling with it for so long. And in the

end, he, like, takes out a roll of tape that he had been using for, like, to put up these posters. And he, like, tapes his phone to his phone to like a I think it was like a pole that had like a sign from the rail company on it or something and anyway so he tapes up his phone he hits the timer and then we kind of run down onto the middle of the train tracks and we both stand there with our arms crossed and the the photo gets taken and then as we are leaving that area we know we take off the clothes and we're leaving, kind of going back out into a different area of the park. And that's where he makes this comment to me where he's, you know, he's talking more about being a combat engineer and his military

experience. The first time Ryan spoke to Patrick during that vetting call, he got the impression a little bit of trouble. But that's okay. Whatever. Still. No, yeah, yeah, it's quite truly not. So Ryan knew now was the time he had to drill down. What is a combat engineer, and what do they do? He's saying things like, oh, they're responsible for surveying the field of battle and trying to find different things that could be used to the military's advantage. And then he says, as an example, that rail line there, he's like, even if you didn't

want to make that go boom, you could do X, Y, and Z. And he starts talking about how you could go about pulling up one of the sides of the rail line to derail a train. So it sounds like this man who is actively recruiting for the base, a neo-Nazi accelerationist group, actually has the know-how to carry out a terrorist attack on a train.

Ryan tried to wrap up the meeting. At this point, we've been talking for quite a while and we've kind of been walking around, you know, these various areas of the park. You know, the lights fading from the sky a little bit. It's getting darker, temperatures dropping a little bit. And so we kind of walk back towards where we first met. And so now the baseball game is done.

There's less people around and we're kind of standing at the edge of the ball diamond talking. And at this point, he starts telling me about his past relationship. And he reveals to me that his ex was a person of color, was a black woman. And the sense I get when he's opening up to me about this is like he's confessing something or he's like unburdening himself a little bit. this is like he's confessing something or he's like unburdening himself a little bit and then he tells me this horrific anecdote where he says he says yeah like towards the end of the relationship there was a pregnancy scare or and he might have even said that she had lied about being pregnant or

something so for a while Patrick thought he was going to have a child with this woman and then he tells me he says um the only problem is the child only would have been half human which was you know just a disgusting comment and then I remember he he added yeah having a mulatto child would have been a fucking nightmare and so again it's just like, this is the level of racism that this guy has fallen into. These are kind of the depths of his bigotry where he was in a relationship with this person. But if he had had a child with them, he thinks that only, you know, only half of it would have been human. So he looks at his ex as subhuman in some sense.

I'm so amazed that you were able to keep your composure because, I mean, even you telling me that now, you should see my face. And it's not, you know, it's not that often. Obviously, you've read lots of hateful comments. We see this sort of stuff on TV, but it's pretty rare that you have someone telling you that to your face,

thinking that, you know, you're this comrade in arms, you're going to understand it. How did you, I that, you know, you're this comrade in arms, you're going to understand it. How did you, I mean, were you biting your cheek? Or I mean, how did you maintain your composure as he's saying this to you? Yeah, it was a pretty shocking comment. And I think I tried to just like not address it throughout the entirety of the reporting process that was undercover in this group. Like I didn't use any sort of, like, racial epithets or anything like that. That wasn't something I was comfortable doing. And I didn't engage in the overt racism that everyone else was.

That was something where it's like, if I had had to actually directly respond to that comment, I don't know what I would have said. But he just moved on at that point. Yes. Yeah. Patrick didn't label himself an accelerationist during the meeting, but he seemed to be quoting from the playbook. He was certainly presenting a political worldview that was consistent with accelerationism. He's kind of going on about the local anti-fascist presence in Winnipeg. And he says, you know, in a well-ordered society, these people would be dragged out of their homes and strung up. At one point, he's going on and on about like the political situation in America, the political situation in Canada.

And he goes on this little rant where he says, I want the Liberal Party of Canada to get five terms in office. I want them to push multiculturalism down people's throats. I want Black Lives Matter in every white neighborhood. You know, I want things so bad that white people start picking up guns. And he also makes clear to me what I'll be expected, what we'll be up to together as the kind of two people in this Manitoba cell of the base. A tight cell. And they wouldn't be just keyboard warriors. They'd be out in the real world carrying out their mission. Ryan's face-to-face with Patrick had taken far longer than he'd expected. At the end of our meeting, we're standing at the park, kind of closer towards the entrance.

The parking lot is within view. And so I was trying to get out of there, and he's just kind of going on and on. Ryan was thinking his editor would be freaking out at the lack of a safety update. And then eventually a cruiser car for the Winnipeg Police Service pulls into the parking lot. And they are kind of just like slowly driving through the parking lot.

I think they're just kind of pulling in to check out the park, keep an eye on things. You know, I didn't get the sense that anyone had called them there, but that spooked Patrick. And I also jumped on that as an excuse for us to wrap this up and leave. And he went back into the parking lot and he got into this red pickup truck, this large red pickup truck, and I didn't get a license plate, but I saw that the front driver's side door had a big dent in it. I made a mental note of and thought might be important down the line. Ryan ran home, making that recording on his phone,

trying to regurgitate every single detail he could remember. Voice memo. I am leaving the meeting with a boost. When he stepped through the door, he emailed his editor and a friend to assure them he was fine. And then he also messaged Patrick to assure them he was fine. And then he also messaged Patrick to assure him he was fine. Ryan says he can't exactly remember what he did next, but he thinks he may have cracked a beer. The next day I was in the newsroom and I get a message from Roman Wolf saying,

you did well last night. If you still want in, you're welcome to join. And I say yes. And then they add me to this kind of centralized group chat with all the other members where everyone keeps in communication with each other. And so now I'm behind the scenes, and I have greater access to what this group is discussing than I've ever had. I wanted to stay in the organization so I could keep documenting their internal communications for as long as possible. But then Patrick insisted he and Ryan meet again. For our second in-person meeting, Patrick wanted to commence paramilitary training.

And at that point, I push things as far as I'm willing to go, right? Like meeting this guy in a park is one thing, but I'm not running off into the bush with guns. Ryan stalled as long as he could. He couldn't yet confirm the identity of the man in the park, but he knew he had enough for a story. On Friday, August 16, 2019, at 7 p.m., the Winnipeg Free Press published Ryan's story online

under the headline, Homegrown Hate. It was a huge scoop. And I went to a bar with a couple of friends, and I remember one of my colleagues being like, oh, this was such good work, we have to celebrate. And I was like, I want to go to my apartment and, like, close the blinds and lock the door. That was Friday.

The next day, Ryan was checking Twitter and saw a surprising reply from an anonymous account. It read, I think I know who Patrick is. Coming up on White Hot Hate. We are not a place for sick hobbyists to practice their vile ideology. And we won't stand for it. We will react. The abandoned truck was found on a rural property in the RM of Piney off Highway 12.

Now that's right near the American border. You know, you can think of them as like Tim McVeigh's children or Tim McVeigh's little cousins. The time for words has ended. The time for podcasts has ended. Derail some fucking trains, kill some people, and poison some water supplies. I think it was a Nazi flag. I think it was a swastika. I think. I just figured he was going through a little phase.

It wouldn't be right for my son to have been a victim of such a terrible crime and to allow this to potentially happen to other people too. The danger that is posed by extreme hate. White Hot Hate was written and produced by Ashley Mack and me, Michelle Shepard. Our associate producer is Kim Kasher with production support from Sarah Melton. Additional reporting by Ryan Thorpe.

Mixing and sound design by Danelle Cloutier, Evan Kelly, and Julia Whitman. With technical assistance from Laura Antonelli. Emily Connell is our digital producer. Fact-checking by Emily Mathieu, and legal advice from Sean Moorman. Original music by Quiet Type. And a special thanks to the Winnipeg Free Press.

For CBC Podcasts, our senior producer is Chris Oak and our executive producer is Arif Noorani. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.