What's at stake as Trudeau takes on Modi? How would assisted dying change Britain? And are we running out of water? Olly Mann and The Week delve behind the headlines and debate what really matters from the past seven days. With Julia Macfarlane, Leaf Arbuthnot and Arion McNicoll
Note: this episode includes references to suicide. The Samaritans offer support to people having suicidal thoughts. You can call them free on 116 123.
Image credit: Drbouz / Getty Images
The Week Unwrapped - with Olly Mann
402. India vs. Canada, assisted dying and wasted water
It's the weekending Friday, the 18th of October, and this is the Week Unwrapped. In the past seven days, we've seen one direction star Liam Payne fall into his death from a balcony in Buenos Aires. The US suggesting military aid to Israel is at risk in a letter demanding more aid for Gaza and the death of former S&P leader Alex Salmon at the age of 69. You can read all you need to know about everything that matters in the Week magazine, but we're here to bring you some stories that passed under the radar this week. Big news not making headlines right now, but with repercussions for all our lives. I'm Oli Mann, and let's unwrap the Week. And joining me today from the Week's digital team is Aaron McNichol from the Week magazine. It's Leaf, our Buffknot, and we welcome back freelance journalist and host of the one decision podcast, Julia McFarland, and Julia, you're up first, what do you think this week should be remembered for? No thing to see here, India denies its top diplomat is part of a vast criminal network. We chose to continue to work behind the scenes to try and get India to cooperate with us. Their asks of us was, well, how much do you know? Give us the evidence you have on this. And our response was, well, it's within your security agencies, you should be looking into how much they know you should be engaging us. Oh, no, no, tell us what you know, show us the evidence. And at that point, it was primarily intelligence, not hard, evidentiary proof. Justin Trudeau, Canada's Prime Minister, testifying at a foreign interference commission on Wednesday. Julia, what's the story? So what's happened this week is that Canada has expelled India's top diplomat in the country and five of his colleagues, and they made this extraordinary claim that these diplomats were part of a quote, vast criminal network, carrying out criminal activity, including extortion, intimidation, coercion, harassment. And the Indians responded with expelling the same number of diplomats from India. But this all goes back to the 2023 murder of this Sikh activist, Hardeep Najah Singh. He was a naturalized Canadian citizen, and he was shot dead outside a Sikh temple in Vancouver. And not long after that, the Canadian government said publicly that they had found credible allegations that linked his death with agents of the Indian government. Right. So in addition to that long list of crimes that you listed that Canada have alleged India have done here, you could add homicide? Yeah, I mean, what's so interesting and what's so crazy about this story is it was obviously a hugely striking flammable accusation to make of a state-sponsored killing of a Canadian citizen on Canadian soil. And needless to say, this has caused total deterioration between the relations between the two countries, and it's important because Canada has the largest population of Sikhs outside of India. In India, Sikhs make up about 2% of the country, and the biggest diaspora is in Canada. I didn't know that. Did you know that, Lee? The largest Sikh community outside of India is in Canada? No, I didn't. And I looked a bit into the history of immigration from India to Canada. And basically some Indians started moving to Canada in the early 20th century. But then the bulk of the movement, which led to about 770,000 Sikhs now living in Canada today, happened during the 1950s, 60s and 70s when tens of thousands of people moved. And so now they make up something like 2% of Canada's population. It's thought that only a small proportion of those Sikhs have the separatist views that Modi and other Indians find so troubling. So it's worth saying that the vast majority of Sikhs in Canada are not advocating the creation of a kind of separate state. Yeah, that's what this is all about, isn't it, Arian? And it's maybe not surprising, I mean, once you know that there's a large community of Sikhs in Canada to think that the Sikhs that have left India are the very ones who would be more likely to be secessionist. I mean, they've left their home country, maybe that's one of the reasons. Yeah, definitely. And I think that there has been this growing sense of support for what's known as the Palestine movement more among the diaspora than necessarily the Sikh community within India. But, you know, the history of the difficulty of relations between India and Canada does go back a good while. There was a moment in 1974 when India shocked the world by detonating its first nuclear device, which drew outrage in particular from Canada, which accused India of having extracted polonium from a Canadian reactor, which was a gift that had been intended solely for peaceful use. And from that moment, relations between the two nations called considerably and Canada suspended support for India's nuclear atomic energy program. It's unsurprising in a funny way, given what they've just experienced, but neither expelled their top diplomats like they did on Monday this week. So that's a real measure of how significant this moment has been. Yeah. How unprecedented is that, Julia? I mean, you follow this kind of story a lot for tit-for-tat expulsion of diplomats. You usually look at countries like Russia and China. You're not necessarily expecting it from allies like Canada and India. No. And I think it's interesting because a lot of the more recent deterioration in relations has come with Prime Minister Modi, and Prime Minister Modi, he is a Hindu nationalist. His ruling party have been accused of stoking sectarianism. India has a lot of religious minorities, Muslims, Sikhs, Buddhists, and others. I mean, Canada has form for speaking out against what it sees as human rights violations. I mean, in the last few years, they caused a huge booboo with the Saudis, after the Saudis had incarcerated human rights activists who were Canadian citizens, Saddam Badawi. There was bizarrely this Twitter spat when the Canadians condemned Saudi Arabia's human rights record, and then Saudi Arabia decided to all of a sudden cut off all diplomatic ties and cease trade immediately. And so, I mean, the Canadians have form for speaking out against its allies, particularly allies like Saudi Arabia like India, which are being sort of ravenously courted by the rest of the world, who want strong partners in the region, partners in the Middle East or against China. But I think the story is so interesting because what the Canadians are accusing the Indian government of being involved in sounds like something straight out of a Hollywood movie. I mean, among the allegations that have been made by Canadian police is that the Indian government agents had collaborated with a criminal syndicate run by this mobster called Lawrence Bishnoy to carry out assassinations. Lawrence Bishnoy, he's basically the Simeon Mogolevich of India. The Simeon Mogolevich is a notorious Russian gangster. He was on the FBI's number one most wanted list of people around the world and then eventually taken off because they realized they would never get him, but hugely notorious gangster in India. But he is in jail and has been since 2015, but he's accused of still overseeing a huge criminal empire, and he's been implicated in a lot of high-profile killings, including most recently the shooting of a politician in Mumbai, which has prompted fears that Mumbai is returning to its sort of gangster past. And so the Canadians have said that they believe that there might be involvement with this criminal syndicate. They say that the top diplomat, the High Commissioner to Canada, has been involved. And the Indians are being very boisterous about this, and the Indian media in particular has latched onto the fact that, as we heard in the top of this discussion, that Trudeau said, what they have is largely intelligence-based, there's no smoking gun. But intelligence, anyone who deals with intelligence officials, know that intelligence is basically gossip. It's why you get spies giving tips to journalists all the time, and we can't print it, we need a smoking gun. And so they say that they haven't yet had any concrete proof of what the Canadians are trying to claim here. Yeah, well, from that point of view, Leaf, if you take away a suggestion that the Indian diplomats in Canada were personally involved in a conspiracy to an assassination, at the level of intelligence gathering, I mean, that is actually the kind of thing you'd expect your diplomats to do, isn't it? I mean, Britain has diplomats in all kinds of countries all over the world. One of the things they do is collect information on the ground to verify to their home country what it's like there, what the mood is, who might be involved. If there was a country that was determined to separate a part of Britain, you know, if they were Welsh nationalists living in another country or Gibraltarians or something, then you'd expect UK diplomats to explain that to the British government. That's kind of part of their job, isn't it? Yeah, I just think that the idea that all this would accumulate in an assassination, that's obviously taking things way too far. This man who was killed was wanted under India's terrorist act for various cases, such as a cinema bombing in Punjab in 2007 that killed, I think, six people, and also an assassination in 2009 of a Sikh Indian politician. So India considered this man a terrorist, and so I'm sure that it would have felt justified in getting him abroad if they couldn't get him when he was in India, because he presumably wouldn't have been allowed there or wouldn't have been safe there. But I do think it's worth bearing in mind that historically we haven't considered India a kind of rogue actor in the way that, say, Russia will happily assassinate people abroad. It's happened in Germany, obviously it happened in England with the Salisbury poisonings. So the idea that India under Modi seems to be warming up to that kind of, you know, behavior, is quite concerning. And although I agree that intelligence can just be gossip, I think it's worth emphasizing that we don't really know what this intelligence is or was, and there's lots that could come out about it. So it might be that the evidence for this murder having been a kind of state job is firmer than it looks right now. I mean, that's the trend that's fascinating, isn't it, Arin? You know, foreign states assassinating people overseas. I mean, we're seeing just increasing amounts of it from Russia, I suppose, more sad as well. Do you think that the relatively weak reaction to this in terms of condemnation? I mean, Canada has come out. I haven't seen anyone else saying how outrageous it is. I mean, we'll see more of this sort of activity. Maybe, or maybe it's because other states are waiting for Canada to present this evidence that they say that they're sitting on, that they haven't yet shown to anyone. And I think it's worth considering what India said it thinks is going on here. The statement from the Indian Foreign Ministry on Monday said that this later step follows interactions that have, again, witnessed assertions without any facts. This leaves little doubt that on the pretext of an investigation, there's a deliberate strategy of smearing India for political gains. And basically what India is saying is that these Canadian allegations have come at a time where Justin Trudeau appears to be battling for his own political future at home with barely a year away until the next elections. And a new poll by Ipsos reveals that only 28% overall of the Canadian population think that Trudeau deserves re-election and only 26% would vote for him at the next election. So, you know, India's foreign ministry, in these really bruising remarks, was basically saying that this was all about Trudeau trying to win this big bank of votes, basically because there are so many Sikhs in Canada. And true enough, he does count Sikhs as among his firmest allies. In 2016, Trudeau told reporters that he had more Sikhs for, in his cabinet, than Prime Minister Narendra Modi had in India. And meanwhile, Sikhs exert quite a lot of influence in Canadian politics. They occupy 15 Sikhs in the House of Commons over 4% when, as Leif said, they represent only 2% of the population. But many of the Sikhs who are there exist in key battleground states, and so they're important to Trudeau. I think that, though, that what's happening here is that there is this kind of fundamental disconnect between the two sides. Plenty of observers have basically said that it's unlikely that Trudeau is trying to win votes here, but actually what's going on is just that this issue of pro-Calistani advocacy, this idea that the Sikhs should have their own state called "Calistan," is in India's view, it's like this really dangerous threat, whereas Canada sees it merely as activism and a dissent that should be protected by free speech, and neither side is willing to make a major concession. So I think there is just that fundamental misunderstanding from both sides about the significance of these kinds of detractors and what sort of a threat that presents to India or lack thereof. It's a compelling theory, Julia, if it really is all about courting votes from Sikhs. But if I was a Canadian Sikh, I'm not sure a story like this would make me feel any more safe. No, and Hadip Singh's relatives had told the media that apparently Canadian intelligence had spoken to him before warning him that he was potentially at risk before this assassination, which was carried out in a very professional manner. He was sort of blocked by a white van from accessing his car, and then all of a sudden another vehicle came out and two men with automatic guns sprayed him with bullets, and it was the way that the assassination was carried out really did make it look like it was if not organised crime, then certainly something bigger than your lone hitman knocking you off with a pistol at point blank range. But I think Arians got really important context there with the background of not just the two countries, but perhaps the two men involved in this, Justin Trudeau and Narendra Modi. Allow me to throw in a cat amongst the pigeons because recently the Canadian accusations were bolstered last year because there was a US investigation which was filed in Manhattan, this federal indictment which charged an Indian national with an attempted although unsuccessful assassination plot which they say was organised by an Indian government official who was also involved in this alleged plot against Hadip Singh Najah. And in the New York case, this Indian national, a man called Nikhil Gupta, he apparently tried to arrange an unsuccessful killing of a prominent American Sikh who was also a supporter of this separatist movement in New York. And according to the indictment, this was at the Indian government's direction. Now what's very interesting is that the Indian government's reaction to this New York, American allegation is that they would form a high level committee to look into all the relevant aspects of the matter quite different to how they reacted to the allegations from Canada. Thanks for that. Cat amongst the pigeons indeed. Cat amongst the geese surely if we're in Canada. Up next, a story that might impact not just the way you live, but the way you die as after this. OK, Leaf, it's your turn. What do you think this week should be remembered for? Could we soon get the right to die? Everything changed ten months before he died. That's when it spread to his spine from the beginning of that December and he died mid-October. He died in agony, proper agony. If there had been a way that I could have helped that was legal, we definitely would have done that. We did talk about ways that weren't legal and we had a plan, but the gentleman that he was wouldn't ask. Jenny, a widow speaking to Channel 4 News on Wednesday about the death of her husband. Leaf, what's she campaigning for? So Jenny is campaigning for the right for people who have terminal illnesses to be allowed to end their own lives. Jenny herself has a cancer that is terminal and she expects to also die in incredible pain. So the story is essentially that a bill has been introduced to the House of Commons by an MP called Kim Leadbeater and it's trying to pave the way for terminally ill people to be allowed to end their own lives with assistance. We don't actually know the full details of the bill yet because it's not actually we've got the title of it and preliminary details but we don't know exactly what's going to be in it, although there are lots of likelihoods about what will be in it and it's going to be debated next month with potential for being introduced sometime next year or the year after. And if you like that's the big story that people probably have heard that this is going to be debated, assisted dying in the House of Commons for the first time since 2015. What's the bit that we maybe have not considered? Well I really responded to an article in The Times about Canada's introduction of similar legislation in 2016. I think in Canada it was generally expected that the law to allow people to end their own lives would be kind of very used by a small number of people but it seems to have been just ballooning. So last year more than 15,000 Canadians chose to be helped to end their own lives and there are concerns that although this bill which we haven't seen the contents of but it looks like it will be reserved basically for people who have a terminal diagnosis of about six months, potentially 12 months. There is concern that we will go the way of Canada and that more and more people with conditions that many would argue can be triumphed over so for instance with certain mental health issues that sometimes people recover from. The concern is that a lot of people will end up taking their own lives with assistance and will lead to a kind of sense of some people wanting to end their own lives early in order to ease the burden on say the NHS or on their relatives. So this slippery slope argument has kind of caught my imagination even though my ideas about assisted dying kind of rack it all over the place, it's quite difficult for me to find a settled position on it and I'd be interested to hear what other people's views about it are. Yeah I mean it's a hugely emotive subject isn't it Aaron and people inevitably start looking into their own personal experiences, my own grandmother died in the hospice this time last year and she was literally crying out for someone to end her life and they weren't able to do that for her and she was 96 and completely complimented and that's what she wanted because her body was veiling that's influenced what I think about it but you've got to acknowledge it's a really complex issue and there are going to be people with different experiences who are saying I would feel under pressure to die were this the law? Yeah absolutely I think complex and emotive really sum up the kind of prevailing feeling in the community about this very very difficult issue and yet it's staggering that like legalizing assisted dying is supported by up to two thirds of Britain's according to a 2023 Ipsos-Moorie poll and it does have these really high profile supporters including Kia Stama and the broadcaster Esther Ranson more recently she is also fighting a terminal illness but that whole shifting public mood can be seen globally as well a move towards broad support for assisted dying you know in recent years Australia, Canada and New Zealand and some US states have all legalized assisted dying under certain circumstances. So you're in Australia what's the experience there and we'll talk about the lessons from Canada? Yeah it's all very new but it has been legalized I think in most states it's still about to come into force I think next year is when the legislation will finally allow people to go through with an assisted death. Of course you know there are some states where it's rather less new Switzerland has had it since 1942 and the Netherlands since 2002 but you know also in Britain if you look at the situation here as recently as 2015 British MPs voted 330 to 118 against the second reading of proposed legislation to legalize assisted dying so it has been shot down comparatively recently but some of Britain's biggest social reforms have actually come about as a result of what are known as these private members bills that are submitted to Parliament by an individual MP such as lead beta and they've led to really radical changes including for example the abolition of the death penalty the legalization of abortion and the decriminalization of homosexuality in the 1960s and Starmer has said on this vote in particular that all politicians will be able to well within his party at least will be able to vote with their consciences on the matter rather than a long party line so it is one that even he acknowledges is as emotive as to require a necessary sensitivity to allow people to really think through what they as individuals think and I think it'll be even though a private members bill faces huge procedural challenges I think it'll be really interesting to see how far it gets and experts tend to think that even though there are these extra hurdles that private members bills tend to face it is likely that this one could well and truly pass over the next couple of years well it's very clear where the momentum is isn't it Julia and then that's why it's back in the House of Commons isn't it after nine years that the public perception has changed and when you think about those other issues that Ariane mentioned there I mean I guess abortion has had more than a hurdle in the United States recently but generally international opinion on all of those things has moved in a certain direction and same with this like we're going to get it whether we like it or not eventually aren't we yeah and I mean recent polls do show that the public is in line with lead beaters arguments I mean there was a recent opinion poll by opinion which showed that every single constituency in the UK bar one there was a majority in support for making it lawful for someone to see consisted dying in the UK or be it with caveats and I think that's an important part of it there is a lot of nervousness I think a lot of people understand the slippery slope the thin edge of the wedge argument I think a real issue with this particular bill is that MPs are likely to only see the details of it two weeks before the debate and there is a lot of nervousness in Westminster that this is something that will introduce huge social change and is an argument that is being rushed and I think it's so important to understand that no matter where you sit on this argument until something happens to you where you become directly implicated in it such as your story of your of your grandmother Ollie you could always change your mind or feel differently it's very hard to make legislation on these big emotive rather sort of conceptual topics about the weight of how we feel certain things should be the moral weight of this and so legislating that will have all kinds of ramifications that we can't yet predict I mean a lot of people are raising the issue with okay if we say that we are in principle of the concept of allowing people to end their suffering if they are suffering from painful terminal illness how do we do that how does the NHS do it does the NHS get involved and how does that impact the Hippocratic oath that all doctors take you know do no harm and how you know how do private sectors you know respond to this the arguments that that leaf raises about you know people feeling a pressure to die because they don't want to inconvenience their families I mean a lot of people have hit back against the Roman Catholic Church which is obviously weighed in with this all of the churches in England last Sunday heard in the homily a letter from Cardinal Nichols where it was interesting he actually the religious argument for the sanctity of life was only the last part of his letter but he did argue that once you change the circumstances of permitting a life being taken that the parameters are widened and widened and that is something that I think a lot of people who aren't religious are also be concerned about and when there's not really much in this legislation on the guardrails of that I think it's understandable that people can feel feel nervous about this was treating the health secretary himself he spoke about this recently and he said that while he wasn't against suicide assisted suicide in principle he raised what I think is a really important aspect of this which is that palliative care in this country is not good enough and that is something that needs to be worked on possibly before we start deciding on on irreversible legislation like I'm glad you said that Julia that perspective because you mentioned guardrails and leaf that is the thing isn't it that people keep coming back to what are the safeguards and in this case it's expected that the safeguards will be similar to those in Canada you have to wait 90 days between the decision and your death two physicians have to sign off on the death before it happens but it's not just about that is it if there are concerns that people are a burden on their family to use that phrase that people use if people are opting for this decision because they feel lonely or because there isn't support out there there are simpler ways of remedying those things which should be happening at the same time like improving the lives of people who feel desperate like ensuring that palliative care isn't just funded by charities yeah I mean I don't I wouldn't say that any of those things are simple the silent witness actress Liz Carr who's disabled has been campaigning very persuasively on this point that we should be caring for people rather than killing them well we should be doing both shouldn't we isn't that where most people are well yes but I think if you actually like look at the expense of caring for people in an adequate way in this country we've been struggling successive governments have failed to do this and so I would I would hit back at the idea that you know oh it's just a question of you know improving end-of-life care end-of-life care is like one of the biggest issues that the UK is facing particularly as we as our population ages what Julia's comments made me think about kind of zoom forward to when my generation I'm 32 is is old and I suspect along with maybe many of my my friends seem to agree with us that our kind of pension system will be basically non-existent will be allowed to retire when we're about 80 perhaps and given sort of odd crumbs from the state if it will even still exist and so my sense is that many people in sort of 40 years time will be choosing to end their lives because they're too poor to carry on living it might be that by the time I get there you know I'm so impoverished that you know I kind of would rather die and I would possibly like to be allowed to make that choice but I also think that the way that the kind of demographics will shake out in the UK makes it almost fairly you know to me likely that people will be choosing to end their lives because of economic concerns about their own lives you know nothing to do with terminal illness at all Aaron I still think though that this concern about the slippery slope that takes us from opening the door to a very restricted form of assisted dying to just someone who feels a bit depressed on a given day being able to take their own life I think there's such a big gulf between those two things and for me the difficulties that exist at the fringes of a law don't undermine the importance of having a law that's overwhelmingly considered a good idea by most people for example we might all agree that there should be a cut-off in a john who can vote or drink or have sex but putting a hard and fast or run for president thank you on it you know putting a hard and fast number on that might not account for plenty of people's preferences but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't have any laws on drinking or voting or the age of consent and the simple truth is that assisted dying is something that most people in the UK think is a good idea of course that the idea that someone might be pressured into taking their own life against their will is horrific but there are plenty of more clear cut cases where someone wants to avoid the pain of a terrible illness and have a dignified end of their own choosing so for me the slippery slope argument in this instance would be holding back a law that most Britons just think makes an awful lot of sense i mean it's not just pressure necessarily Julia is it it's the very light kind of um backed concept you know you just imagine the GP kind of sympathetically handing you a leaflet have you considered this yeah i mean it's this there's a reason why we have been arguing about euthanasia assisted dying for years and it's not an argument that has been solved because there are pros and and there are cons and i think leaf raises the really important context that caring for our elderly is only going to be more and more costly to the extent where i i mean i completely sympathize with the idea that we are going to be absolutely run into the ground when when we're older you just need to look at what's happening in japan and south korea where you have janitors working in their 90s and there are more adult nappies sold every year than baby nappies you know we are not headed for a bright and positive future in our elderly age and when you are running a health care system if you have an elderly very expensive patient who's costing the state so much money wouldn't it be easier to say well you could always take the easy way out particularly if you're uncomfortable and i think that i'm not saying that's going to happen but that is what people are worried about and that is the kind of thing that not just guardrails with this specific framework of the legislation now but how do you place guardrails on that slippery slope argument how do we stop the the cases from rising and rising and we we see you know in the EU they've got a case in i think Belgium and the Netherlands where there are people who have got mental health issues who are applying for assisted dying at a young age in their 20s and her 30s and so when you have only two weeks really to debate on the actual legislation of this i can understand why it's making a lot of people nervous yeah okay up next is it time for australia to turn off the taps that's after this harry and you're finishing the show what do you think this week should be remembered for water water everywhere but soon there may not be any job to drink how does water get to your place who delivers it where does it come from where does it come from oh the fresh water systems Sydney water where does your water come from where do you think your water comes from i'm from Adelaide and i think it's come from Adelaide Reserve does water get to your house oh i've got rainwater collection systems so that's maybe a bit different to most but via Sydney water issue yeah environmental activist and aussie tv personality costa georgiardis chatting to members of the public in Sydney in september you can watch more on the instagram account of water conservancy what's the story are you yeah so this week that Australian charity the water conservancy released a report on water usage in australia ahead of its annual water night next week when households are encouraged to turn off their non-essential taps for five hours of the evening on thursday oh that's a that's a badly named night surely water night is when you have lots of water yeah it's like dry night to dry night exactly okay anyway the report shows basically that Australians know that sensible water use is an important environmental issue that that understanding just isn't translating into action for the majority of people and also that there's a significant disconnect between people's perceived water use and their actual water use with most aussies radically underestimating how much water they use every day and this is important because of all the earth's continents only antarctica gets less precipitation than Australia so saving water here is a matter of some significance but all of this comes in context of this absolutely massive report that dropped on thursday from an organization called the global commission on the economics of water which found that humanity has thrown the global water cycle itself off balance for the first time they said in human history which the reports authors said will wreak havoc on economies as well as food production and ultimately lives worldwide so between the time that i pitched historian today what looked on the face of it like a gentle little turn your taps off story is that actually ended up becoming intertwined with some rather massive and still comparatively underreported breaking news about the health of the planet yeah but hold on i mean the health of the planet but that's not because people are using their hose pipes is it that that's because of climate change and a whole range of other issues yes definitely there's a domestic use thing that is what's going on in australia and that's the thing that the water conservancy wants to talk about but the sort of broader question is about how we waste water in general plus that you know that this this massive report from the global commission on the economics of water it's all about the impacts of climate change on the whole water cycle system yeah i mean i'm nodding sagely julia you know i like to think i'm someone who doesn't waste water i donate to water braids when i'm given a choice of charity and yet i enjoy a hot bath i flush the toilet every time i go i mean i'm not sure what i do to conserve water really i don't think about it to be honest i am absolutely appalling i take i take nightly baths when it's really cold in the winter i like to be clean i keep trying to drink two liters of water a day i prefer doing the washing up rather than sticking things in the dishwasher it's awful but there's bad news for you and me ollie because we live in london and hopefully if we're both still alive in 2050 we might see the day day zero where london runs out of drinking water and there are studies that show that we are facing here in the uk a shortage of 1.2 billion liters of water per day which means how how how i know there's been mismanagement but we are an island and it does rain a lot we are an island but would it surprise you ollie to hear that we have only one desalination plant on this entire country and it's not even turned on every day and when it is turned on it can only supply 10 million liters a day now just remember that shortage is more than a billion per day that we will need now that plant opened in 2010 with plans to supply up to a million people during emergencies and a report last year in the telegraph said that that plant remains out of action because it quote lacks the key chemicals needed to run the facility the difficulties with water is that we have a finite amount of it in the water cycle in in our earth systems and although we can technically make water by smashing hydrogen and oxygen particles together that process is very very very expensive so really desalination plants and proper irrigation is the only real way for us to get water on a big scale and we've just not been paying attention to our needs and you only have to look up you know the water wars on the internet a lot of people fear that there are fault lines across the world where other countries have similar problem you know India versus Pakistan Ethiopia versus Egypt Brazil versus Paraguay China versus any of the countries downstream from the Himalayas these could all be flashpoints in the future because it will not be oil that we will need more than anything else in the world it will be water leaf do you know how much water you use i imagine i use about 150 to 200 liters a day which is about average i can't even imagine a hundred of liter measurements i know i'm changing my goldfish water it's really oh that's just my tea count for the day um i i have a bath every single day which uses a lot but then i i usually share it so like we're not the same time but it's usually it's usually used twice as bath water is it is that your husband yes it is yes i'm curious but do you get to go first every time because i generally get to go first yeah no i do i do generally because i use i kind of usually run it and i i don't know i always justify it to myself that i deserve it more now than he does uh which is really unfair on him but yeah and definitely things i'm dirtier that is the reason yeah i'm also extremely anal about having the dishwasher very full when i when i put it on and also the washing machine although my husband actually he's got different dishwasher kind of etiquette to me and think so if it's too full it doesn't wash well anyway so yeah i i mean i use quite a lot of water but i think that faith in the kind of water system in the uk has been so undermined that it's quite difficult to actually persuade people to you know save water because often they're being persuaded by i don't know water companies or the water regulator that they kind of hate and have reason to hate and so um it's quite difficult trying to persuade people to change their habits oh you mean because of all of the scandals we've seen around water leaking and all the rest of it in corruption and payments they're like ah this is um i'm having it out on the big guy here yeah well why should i why shouldn't you know you've not upheld your kind of end of the bargain so why should i kind of conserve water if you haven't built enough i don't know reservoirs if you're not actually fixing the leaks in my area i think that's quite a fairly childish way of seeing things because of course water is it's in in some senses a public good and we shouldn't just be sort of wasteful with it for sort of deeper reasons than just you know having one over the companies but yeah i mean i think we've got lots of reason to be very furious about about how water is managed in the uk and so you know why not just spend spend spend as it can be the attitude i suppose in your country arian as well there's the fact that so many people live in cities right so i imagine this is something that in rural areas is much more readily appreciated but that's not where most people are yeah that's definitely the case and you know in australia the business of the importance of securing its water future is being driven by the twin challenges of declining water supply on the one hand and growing demand on the other hand because australia has actually stepped up its efforts to try to do something about this and australia is improving water efficiency alongside increasing supply and many homes have got the message they're using lots of water saving features like efficient shower heads and dishwashers and over a quarter of aziz collect rainwater particularly out in the countryside and that contributes 177 billion liters annually and meanwhile the federal government is trying to support farm improvements such as more efficient drip irrigation lining ditches to reduce water loss and switching production to less thirsty crops and all of this together has cut water use by about a third in the past two decades but like arguably australia's most important change in water policy has been the broad acceptance that environmental sustainability is a crucial goal of water management itself and now individuals just need to learn a little bit more about how much water they use to start to bring it down like in general people appreciate that it is a massive issue but they just don't know like all of us are saying here today we don't know how much we use we don't know if that's excessive or insufficient even though as in Julia's case she suspects that it is all excessive but i think that that's that's the the business of why a moment like next week's water night or dry night as you've rebranded it ollie are important because it's it's a moment where we can reflect on how much we use and whether that's too much and what we can do about it and all become more water literate that's the thing that they want us to be isn't it that's not a phrase that i've encountered before water literacy Julie do you think there's a water literacy campaign that should happen here in the UK too i think there is i think there are you know in in many ways there can be powerful action taken by the consumer to try and tread more likely on the earth's resources but the the real issue is that with with water we need industrial national infrastructure overhaul because this is a big problem and you only have to look at places like South Africa which you know in a few years ago Cape Town had a one in a 400 year drought which took four million residents up to day zero there were people queuing up with armed guards guarding wells for the the luxury of being able to fill a few plastic bottles of water to take back to their house Chenai in 2019 reached day zero massive Indian city of millions of residents they ran out of water this kind of thing is going to happen more and more often you know the the way we have built our cities the way we have bent the world's natural hydrology and climate change exacerbating all these things means that water is a resource that is going to go more scarce and it may happen that that we will run out of water sooner than we have changed our infrastructure and adapted to this threat before day zero arrives at more and more cities affecting more and more people's lives okay well in my efforts to personally cut down on waste i'm going to wrap up this edition now my thanks to you Julia and to leave and to Ariane you can follow this show for free you can get every episode as soon as it's released just search for the week unwrapped wherever you get your podcasts and then tap follow you can also get six free issues of the week magazine with the trial subscription go to the week dot com slash subscriptions to get your hands on that in the meantime i've been ollie man our music is by top more be the producer ollie pete at rethink audio and until we meet again to unwrap next week bye bye [BLANK_AUDIO]