Q: You’ve got some really topical episodes coming up in all thirteen episodes.
A: We try! [laughs] We try for topicality, but what we try to do is do the stories that are concerning people about the world that they live in. Whether that’s trying to be topical or not, we try to hit the trigger points for people.
Q: When the show was launched, it came with the tag line of “24 with a conscience.”
A: I’m not actually sure of the origin of that tag line. I think that possibly it was a response to being compared to 24 a lot, more of a reactive tag line because some of our first episodes dealt with terrorism, but from the perspective of rendition, some of the things that were going on that were not very savoury in terms of our response to terrorism. So I guess that’s how that tag line got attached to us. I don’t like it to suggest that we are moralistic in any way, though, we try very hard not to be. The first episode, the pilot, which was about rendition, we had had three or four cases of rendition to Syria here in Canada, and it was written five years ago in a very dark climate, when it seemed that no one was questioning those kinds of practices. No one was questioning rendition, no one was even questioning torture for a while there, and so in that very dark atmosphere, I suppose a bit of trying to do the right thing kind of crept into that pilot, and I’m not sure that it was stronger for it. I think that since that time we’ve tried to be very objective and just tell good stories.
Q: The issues of intelligence and counter-intelligence is something that really never got much pop-culture play in Canada, possibly because you said we’re more of a supporting character on the international stage, and this series is one that’s changing that perspective.
A: One of the things that I really wanted to achieve—we all really wanted to achieve with our show—is to show that the same issues are playing out on the Canadian stage with the same urgency that they are everywhere else. We’re so used to thinking of ourselves as sidelined from these great debates and these great earth-shattering events, and we’re not. And in fact, the more research and the more people I spoke to, the more I discovered just how much we’re not, how in fact all of these things, from child slavery to terrorism, to every kind of international crime imaginable is going on here quite rampantly including espionage—we have something like ten thousand Chinese agents in this country. It’s phenomenal.
Q: And you’re tapping into this now.
A: Exactly! It’s just been waiting for us to start telling stories about. When we first started, we would get a response like [sarcastically] ‘oh, you’re going to have a show about border guards, that sounds exciting,’ but no, we’re telling—I think of it as an exciting police procedural for the global age, because it’s showing where Canada interacts with the rest of the world. On that stage, we are players.
Q: You were mentioning experts you’d talked to—can you tell me a little more about that?
A: We have a connection with CSIS—I don’t think he wants me to tell you his name though—a kind of highly-placed CSIS agent who we speak to. We have a few wonderful ETF and SWAT people that we speak to. We try and pick the brains of people like Misha Glenny, who’s just written a book about the globalisation of crime. I attended a wonder question-and-answer thing with Ahmed Rashid who wrote a book called Descent into Chaos. [Series creator] Peter Raymont, whose documentaries were a sort of jumping-off point, has a myriad of connections through the Canadian government, and as a long-standing documentarian, has a lot of people that he can put us in touch with when we need it. For instance, we’ve just been doing a story on Tamil gangs, and made a lot of use of one of Peter’s sources. It’s not that we try to get it right—we try not to get it wrong, and what we do is we tell stories. They aren’t factual, they aren’t based on any individual case. We know, for instance in the story that you mentioned, we can read books about child soldiers and we all know about international adoptions and celebrity adoptions, but what it comes down to is a good story. It’s not based on any particular story, any particular case, and we try to do it credibly. We don’t make any claims that we are casting light in any detailed way on any of these issues. We’re just kind of opening it up and trying to tell a good story.
Q: But at the same time, telling a story like that is going to bring attention to those kinds of issues.
A: It pushes it into the public forum for sure, and I think that’s what television should do is provide conversation for people who want to discuss the world that they’re living in. It’s a jumping-off point, but that’s not our main goal. Our main goal is to entertain our audience, let them feel that they’ve spent an hour not too wastefully.
Q: And your CSIS contact doesn’t take too unkindly to the fact that CSIS is portrayed a bit more darkly in this series?
A: [laughs] I think that’s one of the reasons he’s so willing to talk to us, because he’s so highly placed, is that he’d like to gently correct our misapprehensions of CSIS. But I have to say that other people that we’ve spoken to in other agencies have consistently told us—and of course Agent Mannering is not based on any individual all, he’s a complete fabrication—but there is someone in CSIS that reminds a lot of people of. [laughs] You’ve seen the one about the stop-loss. One of the odd things that happens to us is that sometimes the headlines seem to follow us around, and in that case, it was the week that we were shooting, and there had been a number obviously—I was just interested because I happened to notice in my neighbourhood that there was a group forming to support American deserters, and I’m old enough to remember American draft dodgers, and this stop-loss thing was a new wrinkle on it because it meant that it was effectively a draft, and while we were shooting, there was the case of Jeremy Hinzman that he was allowed to stay in the country—he was blocked from being deported. I always find it really interesting when we’ve managed to get to a story, to anticipate what’s going to be on people’s lines and then the headlines. And then other times it’s just sheer [luck]. The week that our show about black market organ trafficking hit was the same week that the big black market organ trafficking story with the Canadian connection in India. So sometimes it’s just serendipitous.
Q: And it could also say that you’re on the pulse.
A: That would be nice. [...] One of the things I was thinking about when I was thinking about this “24 with a conscience” thing is that torture is another factor there. In that 24, as we know, has embraced torture to a degree that alarms even the American military where they were actively trying to get them to tone it down because Cadets were embracing Jack Bauer as a model, and in the one episode where we try to deal with torture in episode 108, we try and come at it from a lot of different directions and not make any definitive decisions, but look at where that line is drawn, and how you draw it. We try examine those things instead of pronounce on them, and embrace them.
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