The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - A Resounding "NO" From You On Reopening The Border

Episode Date: June 16, 2020

I asked you to write in and you did. No one shy here. Plus the latest on COVID-19 prevention research.

and hello there peter mansbridge here with the latest episode of the bridge daily here we are on a tuesday and well well, are you not a bunch of isolationists? And why do I say that? Well, I say that because yesterday we talked about this whole issue of whether or not the border restrictions between Canada and the U.S. should be relaxed a bit. Some of the restrictions pulled off. Let there be more back and forth traffic. Not just essential traffic like trade traffic that goes on right now.

And I encourage you to write. Send me a letter. Send me an email to themansbridgepodcast at gmail.com. Did you ever? Did you ever? Did you ever? Dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens of emails have been pouring in. They're still pouring in as I'm speaking now. And how do you feel? You feel isolationist. You don't want that border opened by a rather wide margin I'd say the last count was around 13 or 14 to 1 against the idea of the border opening and I think the first 40 or 50 were don't touch that border before some open the border notes started trickling in.

And it seems the ones that are suggesting, hey, it's time to open are people who live very close to the border. Had a couple from Sarnia, both of whom wrote about how they often cross the border, and that's just part of their day, which they can't do anymore, and they want that again. I had one from southern Saskatchewan, same kind of thing, and southern Manitoba. Open the border.

But the overwhelming majority were just, no, keep it closed. Wait till there's some sense that the Americans have things under control as well as we seem to have things under control. One of the more unique ideas was, hey, maybe we do this a little bit at a time and we only start opening the border in provinces

that are beside states where both have the virus under control. That was an interesting idea. But overwhelmingly, the answer is no, don't touch the border. And I'm assuming Justin Trudeau must have been tapped into your numbers. And, you know, quite likely he's tapped into his own pollsters' numbers on how Canadians feel about this. Because he announced today, the government announced today, another 30 days

before the next time we consider whether or not we're going to open the border. So that puts it into mid to late July. All right. So your voice has been heard. The Mansbridge podcast at gmail.com, it shuttered the nation, and the decision came down.

No border opening. Thank you for all of you who took part in that, both the nays and yays on that issue of the border. And I am assuming that some of you are going to keep writing, so I will keep reading. If the vote tally changes, that ratio changes, I'll make sure you know about it. But at the moment, it doesn't look like it's going to.

A couple of other issues to talk about here. Still on the COVID-19 front. We had a big announcement today, right, from Oxford University. So no slouch in the university. You know, Oxford is Oxford. It's the big deal. So you have, I'm reading off the wires here, a common steroid drug that's been used for decades to treat conditions from altitude sickness to eye inflammation,

has been shown to reduce deaths by a third in the sickest patients in the hospital with COVID-19, British scientists say. This is the first time the researchers say that a drug has been shown to have an effect on death rates of the virus that's killed more than 110,000 people in the U.S. alone. Researchers at the University of Oxford in the U.K. compared outcomes of 2,104 hospitalized patients who received the steroid called dexamethasone with 4,321 patients who did not. According to the researchers, deaths were reduced by about a third in those patients who were sick enough to require mechanical ventilation, and by about 20 percent

among patients who had trouble breathing but had not been put on a ventilator. Dexamethasone did not appear to help patients who did not require oxygen. All right, so this is a very specific area, right? But those are encouraging results if we're to buy it, you know, if we're to believe it. Now, it's Oxford, and that's the best thing this has got going for it in terms of a study. But have we been disappointed before in this, you know, race to find, whether it's a cure or a treatment for COVID-19? Yes, we absolutely have been.

You've had the President of the United States standing at a podium, you know, flogging hydroxychloroquine. And even some doctors saying yes, initially, that maybe this was something that could help treatment. And there have been other ones as well. And yet they have, after time, were told no. and there have been other ones as well. And yet they have, after time, we're told, no, they don't work.

In fact, they could be harmful. Now, let's hope the Oxford one is encouraging because it certainly would be encouraging to those third of the patients that were treated on it who lived, who may well have died if they hadn't had it. Now here's something else that kind of dovetails with this, and this came out on Bloomberg News. Bloomberg's reporting on a growing grim realism in the vaccine industry, okay?

The vaccine industry, it's big, it's across the world. It's involving, you know, well over a hundred different research groups trying to determine and find a vaccine for COVID-19. So a grim realism in the vaccine industry that a vaccine that manages the symptoms might happen sooner than a knockout blow against the virus vaccine, though that remains the primary goal of all those who are trying to come up with a vaccine, right? So grim realism maybe sounds like too dark, but what it's saying is that the vaccine they may come up with is not going to be the knockout blow. It might manage the symptoms.

So in other words, make the issue less dramatic, less, you know, potentially fatal. But not the knockout blow that people are looking for. Anyway, that's just one view, and it kind of dovetails with that study out of Oxford today. And the Guardian reminds us that the FDA, the Food and Drug Administration, revoked the emergency authorization for malaria drugs encouraged by Donald Trump for

COVID-19. That's the hydroxychloroquine. Amid growing evidence they don't work and could cause serious side effects and separately the FDA also warned doctors against prescribing the drugs in combination with remdesivir, the lone drug until today currently shown to help patients with COVID-19. So there's your latest update on the issues surrounding the use of certain drugs and the issues surrounding the attempts to come up with a vaccine for COVID-19. Now, here's your last point on COVID-19 for today. And this is about my favorite industry, the airline industry. Go figure.

Mansbridge is talking about the airlines again. Reuters reporting today that the airline industry's main lobby group announced on Monday that U.S. airline passengers, okay, this is just in the U.S., I think we're already basically doing this, but they announced that U.S. airline passengers who refuse to wear face coverings during the novel coronavirus pandemic could be banned from flying. Carriers with the stricter policy include Alaska Airlines,

American Airlines, Delta Airlines, Hawaiian Airlines, JetBlue Airways, Southwest Airlines, and United Airlines. That's a lot of airlines in the States. Masks. Wear them, they're saying. Well, you pretty much got gotta right now on airplanes. You pretty much gotta in airports. As soon as you arrive, they want you in masks.

They want you in masks when you check in your bags. They want you in bags, or in bags. They want you in masks when you check in at the counter. And they want you in masks as you get on the plane. And now they are saying, you don't wear a mask on the plane, you're out of here. You're banned from flying with us. So masks are, you know, are taking over.

You know, I kind of harped away at it the last couple of weeks, and a lot of you wrote in said, keep harping away at it. There are too many people out there who are not wearing masks when they should, whether it's in stores. And when I say should, talking about the sort of moral imperative to wear a mask, not the legal imperative, because in very few places is it a legal requirement. But it is, say a lot of people, if you care about others and if you care about yourself, wear a mask, right? And that's what the airlines in the U.S. are saying. And as you know, Air Canada is already saying you've got to wear a mask,

but you get increasing numbers of pictures in social media. Saw my friend Corey Tanik last week. He was on a flight, I think, from Toronto to Ottawa or Ottawa to Toronto. He took a selfie. He's wearing a mask. You're going to see the whole plane behind him. Nobody on it. There's still not a lot of people flying. And it could be quite some time before we do see them flying. Although I did see a piece today based on what's happening in France. Emmanuel Macron has lifted most of France's lockdown restrictions. He's going to focus on the economy,

and part of the economy is getting people moving again, whether it's to bars or restaurants or on airplanes. And the early indication is that people are starting to fly again in Europe. So that's interesting. They're taking flights across Europe, and they're taking long-distance international flights as well. No evidence yet of what percentage we're talking about, but nevertheless, more than a few.

It's still very low here in North America. Certainly very low in Canada. All right, here's our point today on the racism question that has been such a dominant part of the discussion around the world over these last three weeks. It was three weeks ago last night that George Floyd was murdered on a street in Minneapolis. And ever since then, there have been protest marches. They continue. They still exist today. Early on, they were kind of hurt by the looting and burning that took place. Not so much anymore.

It's basically well-organized, safely run protest marches in cities, towns, across the United States and more than a few in Canada and more than a few in different parts of the world as well. So three weeks and it's still marching on. Now, here's the point I was going to make. Based on a piece that was in The Guardian by Jessica Crispin.

She writes an opinion piece in The Guardian where she argues that it's not realistic to think that one can defeat racism with reading lists, as feminists have already been down this road before with multiple lists of suggested readings and movies and notable voices to follow on Twitter. Now, she's writing this because, as you know, a lot of well-meaning people have suggested over these last heavy week

or 10 days of discussions about how to combat racism, is that you've got to start from a base of knowledge, and you form that base of knowledge by reading about the issue. Okay, I may well have said that myself. You've got to read. You've got to read about it. My other argument is you've got to look at yourself and you've got to be blunt with yourself

about how you react to certain issues that form the basis of racism. Anyway, Jessica Christman is saying, no, no, no, reading is not the answer. If you want to defeat racism, you won't do it with reading lists. She writes that actually paying attention is more important than subscribing to information overload, even if it's the right information, and that there is no replacement for actual physical encounter between humans to create a shared perspective. which is why protests, Jessica Crispin argues,

is why protests are powerful in that they prompt human encounters in person. Here's a side observation on this issue as well. As you've probably witnessed, a lot of big corporations and chief executive officers are trying to involve their companies and themselves in this issue. They're trying to put their companies on the right track, on the right path

to helping be a solution instead of a bystander on this issue. So the Seattle Times has a call for CEOs to act by a local CEO going back to the purposes of a corporation, saying a truly responsible CEO has equal responsibility to employees, to shareholders, to customers, to communities, and to the nation. All right? So it's not a matter of just sitting there and saying to the HR department, will you come up with a statement that we can issue as a corporation that's going to address this issue and put us on the right path to doing that?

Now, arguably, part of that is kind of a PR position to try and look good on this issue, which is so damaging to a lot of people and to the country. And part of it is clearly sincere. But is it enough? Well, this piece in the Seattle Times argues it's not enough

for a CEO simply to do that. The responsibility of a CEO goes beyond her or his employees, her or his shareholders, his or her customers, communities, and the nation. It goes to all of them. And that's what they need to be doing. So every day we're looking at different ways

of trying to deal with this issue and put it in front of the public in a way that's actually going to make a difference. A lot of things are happening. Where it all ends up. Well, we don't know where it all ends up, but we are, most of us anyway, are hoping that this time,

this time there really will be a difference. That this won't be like the other issues of the past few years, whether it was on racism, whether it was on guns, no matter what the big issue was, we'd get into the heart of it. There would be protests. There would be demands. There would be, you know, attempts at action by the states, the Congress, Canada, by the Parliament. And yet it would still kind of, you know, after a few days,

it would kind of drift away, some other issue would come along, and it would be forgotten. Is this going to be one of those times? I think we all hope it is not going to be one of those times. That this time, things will be different. Things will change. And each day, we hear different ways of forcing that change. So there were a few of them today.

All right, as always, your views are more than welcome to hear on any of the things we touched on today. All right, as always, your views are more than welcome to hear on any of the things we touched on today. You know how to get hold of me, the Mansbridge Podcast at gmail.com. For past episodes of The Bridge Daily, you can always go to my website at thepetermansbridge.com. It'll also tell you about the book that Mark Bulgich and I have coming out

later this year called Extraordinary Canadians. We're anxiously looking forward to it. It won't come out until the fall, but there are a few blurbs there on it. And if you want to order, it's on there as well. Simon & Schuster is the publisher, and we're looking forward to working with them. All right. That kind of wraps up the Bridge Daily for this Tuesday.

I'm Peter Mansbridge. Thank you so much for listening, and as you know, we'll be back in 24 hours