Lost on Arrival is a stunning departure in storytelling for a reporter who spent 30 years behind a cool conservative professional mask. “Curt Petrovich, CBC News” takes the mask off precisely because he is a consummate journalist: if the story focuses on PTSD, he must reveal himself. While doing so, Petrovich also brings to light the remarkable story of what happened to four Mounties whose lives were also lost on arrival at YVR. Arguably among the most reviled men in Canada, the four Mounties who were involved that night at YVR have never been interviewed on camera, until now. Alongside Curt Petrovich’s analysis of the justice system, seeing these men speak for themselves is a revelation.

While the number of police-involved shootings per capita remained fairly static between 2004-2014, the percentage of those cases involving people in mental crisis grew – now accounting for about 40% of civilian shooting deaths at the hands of police. The average frontline police officer in North America faces more interactions with people in crisis than ever before. As the number of interactions skyrockets, police services struggle to deal with an ever-growing population of emotionally disturbed individuals who often lack adequate social supports.

The numbers are different but the story is the same across the country. In 2014, Toronto police answered 20,000 interactions with people in crisis. Vancouver police say they respond to nearly 30,000 calls each year involving mental illness The growth in numbers can be attributed to three factors: better statistics; economic crisis driving more people into emotional crisis; and our society’s failure to keep up with the demand for community mental health resources – a demand partly created by the movement to deinstitutionalize mental illness. Police have become de facto frontline mental health workers.

But the numbers are the background noise, the radio static behind the gunshots. While police are kept hopping with calls involving mental illness, the tragedies often have little to do with lack of social support and much more to do with decades of North American police training that taught officers to go in fast and big. This approach is absolutely counterproductive when dealing with someone in the throes of an emotional crisis, someone who may, for instance, be hearing voices. Couple this traditional command-and-control response with edged weapons training and the result can be lethal. Edged weapons training teaches officers to consider any situation involving a knife or scissors or a bicycle chain as automatically a firearms situation. And as U.K. Assistant Chief Constable Paul Netherton says, “Once you’ve deployed the weapon, actually are you creating a situation where someone being shot is what’s going to happen?”

Dozens of Canadian families have lost a loved one in a police shooting. Hold Your Fire reveals who some of these people really were, aside from their illness, and the tragedy that ended their lives.

Mike barely survived his last trip to rock bottom. He’d been a successful therapist helping others battle addiction, for two decades before succumbing to one himself. He lost everything and ended up homeless on Vancouver’s notorious downtown eastside. For two years before he got clean, Pond bounced between the streets and rundown recovery homes. The only treatment: Alcoholics Anonymous.

But Mike could not get sober in the program. And he’s not alone. In fact, AA does not work for the majority who try it, leaving many to feel like failures. Remarkably, most doctors still believe it’s the only effective treatment for addiction, insisting their patients attend meetings instead of offering them proven evidence-based alternatives.

In Wasted Mike and Maureen reveal a revolution in addiction research and treatment, making a powerful case for an expanded tool kit to treat our number one public health care problem.

From 18 to 80, Canadian women reject outdated, sexist and simply wrong-headed ideas about female desire. Ideas like: Women don’t like sex as much as men. Women over 50 are done with sex. Women are afraid of casual sex. Married women don’t care about sex anymore. Women are reluctant to engage in edgy sex play. All wrong, as The Truth About Female Desire powerfully demonstrates.

For millennia, female sexuality was something to be controlled (chastity belts), punished (female adulterers burned at the stake), or labeled as insane (highly sexual women locked in asylums). Things finally began to change in the mid-20th century as the advent of birth control and feminism ushered in the sexual revolution. University of Washington sexuality expert Dr. Pepper Schwartz: “Women discover themselves now because they’re not going to get stoned to death, they’re not going to lose their jobs, they’re not going to have their kids taken away from them because they’ve had an affair. That changes the whole equation.”

Now it’s the digital revolution that’s putting the power to choose directly in women’s hands. From young women hooking up on Tinder, to senior women finding lovers on craigslist, Canadian women unabashedly pursue their desire.

Canadian women are getting more playful in the bedroom. Sex toy sales have exploded. “Fifty Shades of Grey was the game changer,” says Carlyle Jansen, owner of Good For Her, the Toronto women’s sex store.

In a 2014 Canadian Living Magazine sex survey, 56 percent of respondents reported a one-night stand, almost 1/3 revealed they’d watched a sexual encounter, and more than 1/3 of respondents admitted to trying bondage. On her Divorced Not Dead blog, Delaine Moore revealed she’d met a man online who turned her on to dominance and submission play – and she loves it: “Just that primal (feeling of) being pinned against the wall. Actually allowing myself to accept that that’s a part of me and it is something that I want to enjoy, that was a huge step.”

“With the movie Fifty Shades of Grey slated to open in North America this Valentine’s Day, we thought there was a great opportunity to add an important dimension to last year’s volatile debate about consent,” says The Truth About Female Desire director Maureen Palmer.

“The freedom to say a confident yes to sex is arguably as important a conversation as that surrounding a firm no. It’s truly the other side of the coin that is the acceptance of women’s sexual rights. Women are caught in a catch-22. We are urged to provide enthusiastic consent, yet women who do so are often still considered sluts, vilified online and in real life. Women, unlike men, are still shamed for their sexual behaviour. Our film introduces viewers to a variety of trailblazers, courageous women who put their face and name to their need to be sexual, women who want to slay the sexual double standard, once and for all.”

This February, love in a cold climate gets very very hot – as Canadian women tell The Truth About Female Desire.

The Interventions

Triple P – Positive Parenting Program, available to all Canadian families. Three families allow our cameras to follow them through the multi-week Triple P program as they master tools to teach their kids self-control. Three-year-old Jilliane pitches frequent and uncontrollable temper tantrums. Three-year-old Jackson hits and kicks his mother when she asks him to do a simple task. And five-year-old Luke’s back talk and acting out has pushed his mom to her limits. By the end of the documentary, the changes in each child’s behaviour are astonishing. The skills learned in Triple P prevent the development of the worst behaviour problem: conduct disorder. Preventing conduct disorder in just one child through early intervention results in a lifetime savings of $280,000.

The PAX Good Behaviour Game is a deceptively simple – and cheap – program available to children in Manitoba elementary schools as part of the regular curriculum. It makes learning self-control a game that children love to play, and the results are astounding: PAX is proven to affect rates of high school graduation, adult criminality, and suicide.
The Abecedarian Program is operating for the first time in Canada in Lord Selkirk Park, a poor, predominantly First Nations neighbourhood in Winnipeg. Developed in the 1970s to change the future for primarily black, very poor children in North Carolina, the program is built on intense one-on-one learning, embedding language skills into everything. By age 30, the original North Carolina Abecedarian children were four times more likely to be university graduates, 50% more likely to be employed full time, and 84% less likely to receive social assistance. With Canada’s First Nations population rapidly expanding, these are vital statistics.

Across the community, every dollar spent on early childhood intervention saves as many as $17 down the road. Yet it’s always problematic convincing governments, seeking re-election, to spend now in order to save later. But there’s another statistic worth keeping top of mind for governments and voters – children who go to juvenile detention are close to 40 times more likely to become adult criminals. By the time a child lands in juvie it’s often too late. But a decade earlier, we can make a huge difference. We now have the power to stop many future criminals – in kindergarten.

The Condo Game examines the forces at play behind the fastest-moving condo market in North America – Toronto – and discovers that the glittering glass hides a sea of troubles. The first startling revelation for many people will be how very much the condo market is focused on investor profit, not affordable housing. One expert says that it’s really not a housing market but a commodities play. And that means that average Canadians, looking for a primary residence, are inadvertently joining a game for which they don’t have the rule book.

Although the documentary focuses primarily on Toronto, as it unfolds, warning bells will be ringing loud and clear for cities and condo owners across Canada. With its population exploding, Toronto placed a big bet on condo towers. Their number has doubled in the last decade. But in the summer of 2011, when faulty panes of glass repeatedly fell from brand new condos onto busy city streets, people began questioning whether the tall towers were a safe bet – for individual homeowners and for the city.

During boom times, Toronto circa 2011 for example, developers race to take advantage of the market, and the quality of construction can suffer. Deficiencies are common and some experts actually tell buyers to plan on spending thousands more than the purchase price to fix up their brand new condo. Then, as tall towers age, maintenance issues can become a nightmare. Imagine sharing financial responsible for the damage done by a leak 20 floors above you

From divorced couples with shared custody of their dog to folks who regularly check in on their precious pup at doggy day care via webcam, dog owners go to extremes – treating their dogs like children, insisting on their dog’s right to, well, have rights.

Non-dog owners incensed by dogs and their indulgent humans are fighting back. And ground zero in this battle is often poop. You might say it’s the fertile ground in which much canine conflict takes root. Canadian dogs deposit some 797 tons of waste daily in our parks and on our sidewalks. Steaming messes leave non-dog owners steaming mad. So much so they’ll pick up poop and deposit it on the steps of city hall, or create the doggy-do wall of shame, where photos of owners who don’t pick up are displayed for all to see.

The dog people aren’t taking it lying down. Rather, they’re rising up to fight for off leash rights. Dogs may not be able to vote but they certainly have created their own powerful political lobby.

None of this is actually the dog’s fault, according to Alexandra Horowitz, whose nuanced interpretation of dog behaviour resulted in the New York Times bestseller, Inside of a Dog. Horowitz and Broadway show dog trainer Bill Berloni believe so much conflict over dogs would be resolved if owners took time to understand their dog’s wiring and to pick the right pooch for their lifestyle. Both reveal their common-sense solutions in Dog Dazed, gently reminding us that perhaps it’s time humans learned to adapt too.

To underscore just how inane humans can be, cartoonist Cordell Barker unleashes his inspired comedic genius, capturing the conflict as only he can do. This is a return engagement for the Oscar-nominated cartoonist. (The Cat Came Back, Strange Invaders) whose work in our previous Doc Zone, Cat Crazed offered a hilarious take on humans’ feline obsession.

The Gangster Next Door has stooped to new lows to win increasingly brazen gang battles, targeting previously off-limits gangster girlfriends and wives and shattering the lives of true innocents, like the four-year-old left alive in the backseat of a Cadillac, his mother shot dead at the wheel. At stake: billions in illicit drug money.

Part police action film, part in-depth analysis, all deeply-human storytelling, The Gangster Next Door introduces characters rarely willing to step out of the shadows – a founding member of a notorious and violent gang, the mother of a gangster girlfriend, and the shattered mother of an innocent victim, a woman whose all-consuming grief fuels an anti-gang crusade.

The world awoke to Vancouver’s gang problem in the winter of 2008-09 during a period of time on the streets of the Lower Mainland when there was a targeted hit every six days. The gunfights became increasingly audacious and public – robbing the community of its sense of safety. The collateral damage from the gang problem spreads out in waves from every horrific incident – staining the lives of parents and grandparents, children and old friends, bystanders and the community itself. Nobody’s immune.
Perhaps most disturbing – the baffling new profile of these greedy young gangsters who are willing to kill over drug profits: among recent gang murders or people named on arrest warrants are the sons of a teacher, a banker, a therapist, even a policeman. The new breed of gangster is quite likely middle-class – a young man with a world of options open to him who is still somehow drawn to the dark side.

The Gangster Next Door explores this emerging social phenomenon – the deadliest gangster could be anybody’s next-door neighbour.

Cat Crazed celebrates our love affair with felines and encourages a new relationship where all cats are loved and none are abandoned. A series of animations by Cordell Barker is interwoven into the film. In Cat Crazed, the Oscar-nominated Barker channels the mythic cat personality captured in his classic 1987 film The Cat Came Back.

She was host to a phalanx of inner children who fought to protect Hilary’s core self from memories of horrific childhood abuse. It would be the job of therapist Cheryl Malmo to convince each of these alters that the abuse is in the past: it is safe to give up their memories to Hilary and, finally, to merge their personality with hers. Many of the therapy sessions were videotaped to train therapists in the treatment of Dissociative Identity Disorder (formerly known as Multiple Personality Disorder). Remarkably, Hilary gave Bountiful Films permission to use these videotaped therapy sessions to create When the Devil Knocks.

A month after a truly triumphant appearance at the Vancouver International Film Festival in October 2010, Hilary died in a car accident in Mexico. Director Helen Slinger, and the crew of Bountiful Films, came to care deeply for Hilary during the production of When the Devil Knocks. We are honoured to have known her and feel privileged to have been entrusted with the telling of her remarkable story.

Woven into the big picture – and sometimes colliding with it – are the very human stories of young recruits still willing to step into a force under heavy fire. During some of the RCMP’s darkest days, documentary filmmaker Helen Slinger and Bountiful Films were granted unprecedented access to Depot, the fabled RCMP training academy in Regina. There, Slinger followed a troop of idealistic new recruits during their six months of basic training. The camera’s remarkable access doesn’t end at Depot. From top brass to beat cop, Bountiful Films captures a force in the throes of painful self-examination, struggling to get back to its core values.

Three courageous Canadian couples end their marriages on camera using three different low-conflict methods. Carolyn and Roland take the “do it yourself divorce” approach, Lionel and Sally choose a collaborative divorce and Mike and Melissa engage in mediation. All struggle to keep the needs of their children front and centre.

It’s also a hard look at the nature of forgiveness, and at our human need to judge even this most “divine” of acts. If someone killed your husband, the father of your children – would you forgive? What could possibly compel a widow to embrace her husband’s killer?

Alexandra’s Echo followed Morton through a desperate season of gathering evidence to prove that industrial aquaculture harms wild salmon.  A decade later, her evidence survived scientific scrutiny and Morton became a key witness at the Cohen Commission,   the federal panel studying the collapse of the Fraser River sockeye. Indefatigable, Morton believes we can bring the wild salmon back, “we just have to get out of the way.”

Leaving Bountiful is the story of systemic sexual abuse tolerated in the name of religious freedom. It is the story of a woman, raised from a tiny child inside this perverted value system, who still somehow finds the courage – and the clarity – to break free. Leaving Bountiful follows Debbie Palmer’s life growing up in Bountiful, British Columbia, her growing disenchantment with a life of blind obedience and endless breeding, climaxing in a final act of desperation. Debbie sets her house on fire and flees with her seven children in tow. From the ashes, she must build a whole new world.

The Bully’s Mark promises a disturbing look at a problem that all the anti-bullying programs on the planet have been unable to solve. Why are some kids bullies? Why are some kids targets? And why are so many of us silent bystanders? Erin’s journey also captures the dawn of cyber-bullying and its devastating consequences. If you’re in junior high today or if you escaped 20 years ago, you’ll want to watch…as the bully’s mark – all grown up – goes back home to ask every target’s question – why me?

Among his friends, several powerful politicians, a couple of multi-billionaires and at least one rock star – yet you very likely don’t know his face. McTaggart preferred to work from the shadows, manipulating people and events without having to step out into the light. Made possible by his friendship with director Helen Slinger, Shadow Warrior is an intimate biography of this powerful and elusive environmental champion.