The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Bruce, Chantal and Me -- Just Like The Old Days. The Race Next Door (#20)

Episode Date: November 6, 2020

You want talk about how the media covered the US election? You got it right here, right now.

Ah, Hail to the Chief. Boy, we've been listening to that for a couple of months now, and it finally looks like we're getting around to determining who that chief is. And as a result, it'll be who the next Chief is. Sworn in on inauguration, if all goes well, on January 20th. We're assuming it's going to be Joe Biden. But today we're going to talk about the media and how the media has covered this story in any number of different ways over the last couple of months. And we have

with us, of course, Bruce Anderson joins us from Ottawa in the worldwide studios of the Bridge Daily and the Race Next Door. He's in his little home studio. And special guest, mentioned this yesterday, and the lines have been just lighting up ever since. Chantal Hebert. Just burning up. Burning up. She's with us from Montreal, and Chantal Hebert. Just burning up. Burning up.

She's with us from Montreal. And Chantal, of course, political columnist, political commentator, just about wherever you look. Because everybody wants to know what Chantal thinks. And we're not alone in that. And, of course, the three of us have worked together many times before and mainly on the at-issue panel at the CBC. So Chantal, welcome.

It's great to have you with us. Great to talk to you again. Thank you. Now that you've put a little pressure on me, I'm kind of revisiting that decision. You've always responded to pressure. So here's what I want to start off talking about in a specific way, as opposed to we'll go general in a minute. But I found yesterday's decision on the part of a number of broadcast news organizations, really interesting. You have the

President of the United States responding in detail to the situation in terms of the counting that was going on and the races that were still undecided. And he announces he's having news conference at whatever, around 6.30 Washington time in the White House, in the press room. And all news organizations are sort of ready to broadcast it, it starts and a number of news organizations bail out right away saying that what he's saying isn't true and we're not going to run it. Now, keep in mind, this is like the President of the United States in the middle of the biggest story going in the world right now, making his argument

as to how he feels about the situation that was unfolding in front of everybody. And news organizations, some, not all, some decide we're not going to run that. We're just not going to run it. Others chose to run it and ran what we call in the television business a crawl at the bottom of the screen saying that's not true, that's not true, and claimed that that was responsible journalism, while others claimed responsible journalism was not putting it on at all. So imagine yourself as someone who is running a news organization

and has to make that decision. And we'll let Chantel think about it for a moment because we don't want to put undue pressure. And we'll let Bruce start. What would you do, Bruce? You're the director of the Imaginary News Network, and you've got to decide what to do. Well, I think, Peter, the obvious answer, the answer that feels most obvious is you have to let him have that platform. After four years of watching how this president tries to break the guardrails that exist to make sure that we have a relatively informed society.

I'm out a little bit more on the other side of this argument, which is that that more measures need to be taken to prevent him from breaking down those norms of information flow that we used to be able to rely on, but we can't rely on it as much anymore. I mean, this is a guy who started lying on the day of his inauguration about the weather and about the crowd sign. And he's lied by some measures 10,000 times or 20,000 times since then. I think Daniel Dale said that he lost count during the election because the fast flow of lies was just too much. The other norms that this president has really compromised are any notion of a reasonable relationship with the media. He's been absolutely brutal in saying that the media are lying to you all the time. And he's convinced a lot of people about that. I mean, he told 20,000 lies and he got 70

million votes. So when I look at that math and I look at him campaigning from the White House and basically the media say it's not supposed to work like that, but he still goes ahead and does it. I think, well, if we don't start putting some barriers around the ability of the head of state to break through with a message that might be untrue, that might be disruptive to civil peace, that might be dangerous for people. Aren't we going to regret that more down the road? So that's where I come out on it.

All right, Chantel, where do you come out on it? I'm not comfortable with the network's decision, and I am not comfortable with the notion that a network heads would cast judgment on whether a message is socially acceptable enough or fits standards enough that it should be broadcast. And my main concern is, sure, it's easy to support the decision that was taken this week.

Obviously, the president, for all the reasons that Bruce has given, obviously Donald Trump was about or did do the equivalent of putting a match to a powder keg. And it was a totally irresponsible message and irresponsible press conference. I'm worried about the slippery slope. It starts with this, and then one day a leader does not get to deliver his or her message because it is judged not to be good for the social fabric or because it has pieces in its platform, in the party platform

that are judged to be unpolitically correct, anti-immigration, go down the list, that you do not get, or you do not give a chance to voters to make up their own minds. And I totally understand the temptation, but I also believe that if American voters did not spend four years watching this spectacle, the critical number that switched from Donald Trump to Joe Biden over the past week would possibly not have. And sometimes you need to see that stuff. Peter, can I ask a question? I want to hear what you have to say.

But I just want to ask Chantal a question because I hear her argument. I think that there's a lot of merit in it, obviously. I think that the slippery slope argument is something that we all need to be concerned about. But what about this hypothetical? Trump tonight, again, waits for the networks to be on air with their broadcast and then goes on TV and asks people to take their guns down to polling stations

and to occupy those polling stations. I know it sounds hyperbolic, but this guy has gotten so close to doing that kind of thing that doesn't that then raise the stakes for media to say, well, you know what, he's the head of state, even though ostensibly he's lost the election. And voters have a chance to at least judge his statement. I mean, is there any line really or no? But that's an interesting construct, but it's based on the assumption

that there is still a mainstream media that has total control over what gets out. And that is not what happened this week. What happened this week is mainstream networks pulled the plug on a news conference that you got to watch on other networks or you could have watched on Facebook with even less context than if you allow this to happen and contextualize it for your audience as it's happening or after it has happened. So this notion that some consortium of well-meaning network can decide this is proper and this is improper, and I don't find your suggestion that Donald Trump could go on TV and say,

get a gun and do something. I don't find that so far-fetched. But I'm just saying if the point is to suppress it, what happened that night when the networks pulled away? What did most people who wanted to see for themselves what was happening, what did they do? Well, they switched channels, right? Yeah, you're right. No, the people can find out. I guess it's really what the individual who has the ability to press a button for their channel of information decides rather than the collective. But anyway, sorry, Peter. Listen, I think I'm, you know, I'm on Chantel's side on this. and I do think we're lucky to live in a democracy

in such a sense that there were different options that you could go to at that time. I mean, some networks chose one way, others chose another way. I would have chosen, I believe, in the same way that Chantel would, that here we are in the midst of the biggest story going on in the world right now. And the two people that Chantel would, that here we are in the midst of the biggest story going on in the world right now.

And the two people that you want to hear from more than anything to determine which way this is going to go and how you want to feel about it are the two main combatants, Biden and Trump. You want to hear from them, unfiltered, and make some decisions based on what you're hearing. You want to hear from them more than you want to hear from Jake Tapper or John King or whomever it may be from different networks, as much as I appreciate their work and respect their work.

But in that critical moment, that's who you want to hear from. You want to hear from the two main players in the story and make your judgment about what you think about them based on what you hear. Going to the extreme, and Bruce's suggestion is certainly one to be considering because you never know what this guy's going to do, does give you pause. But I still think in the end, you want to hear that.

You want to hear it for yourself and determine at that point how you want to feel, what you want to do about it. I mean, the way I even raise this is because, you know, as both of you have said, we've known this guy's a liar, um, since day one, he was a liar before he ran for political office and he remained a liar as soon as he was in political office, no matter what people had assumed he might be like, if he became president back four years ago. I remember I was in Washington for the inauguration, and I remember clearly that initial weekend, there was the inauguration was on a Friday, the women's march was on the Saturday, and it was during the Saturday and again on the Sunday morning that Trump and his people like Kellyanne Conway came out and made these outrageous comments about what had happened on Inauguration Day in terms of the crowd size and the weather and all that.

And they were straight up lies. There was no issue about it. Now, it was about a crowd size and about the weather. But it was a lie. And it was a lie coming out of that White House in the first hours of the administration. And, you know, I'm kind of proud of the fact, I don't do a lot of tweets, but I did one then. That weekend, I wrote a tweet about what this said

about the new administration, that they would lie. And it was, you know, like one of the pillars of democracy was truth. And here was a lie right away. And what was it going to signal about how this administration was going to run? And you know what? I took hell for that, for using the L word on that weekend. I got tons of, you know, people responding to me on Twitter. And I even had some people in the office saying, yay, you know, really lie. Do you want to use the

L word on that? It's a lie. You know, call it what it is. Uh, and it took a long time before the mainstream media in the States use the L word. Daniel Dale, a great Canadian, used to be a colleague of Chantal's of the Toronto Star, is one of those who moved forward in terms of fact-checking in such a fashion that gradually ended up convincing his organization, CNN now, to use the L word in association with some of the things that were being said. Anyway, here's my point. After that long-winded preface to it.

My point is, this guy's not the first guy to stretch the truth. Politicians have been stretching the truth for years. He's taken it to a new level and a fine art. But you know what? As Bruce said, he won 70 million votes here. He's probably lost the election, but 70 million people knowing he's a liar said, he's okay. I'm okay with him. Does that signal to the next era, the next generation of politicians that, you know, lying like real lying is a serious option for, you option for doing the politicking of this era?

And if so, is there evidence that it spread to this country as well? I mean, stretching the truth has been around, as I said, in politics for a long time, including in this country. But the fact is, this has been a way of life for four years. And while some people thought he was going to get hammered at the polls, he didn't. And you wonder what impact the lying issue is going to have in the future. Bruce, you want to, you're waving your hand on that? Yeah. Look, I kind of think this is making my point. My point is not that we should encroach upon the freedom of the press or that the press should encroach upon the ability of politicians

to get their message out. It's to say that if we don't have any guardrails, we can see what's going to happen. We can see that 20,000 lies were told, but those 70 million people didn't know that they were all lies. The scrawl on the screen that said they were lies didn't reach them, didn't penetrate. Some of them did for sure. Some of them said, well, that's a lie I can live with. Some of them said it's a lie I like. Some of them said I'm a red shirt wearer, so lie for me every day. But the definition of a lie is the liar has to know it's a lie. And who knows with Trump? He's confused a lot about a lot of facts, and it's impossible to know sometimes whether he is willfully lying

or just accidentally lying, if you like. But let's imagine another scenario that's not also too far-fetched, although I don't think I like it, but we've seen a migration of economic We've had a pretty active debate about shouldn't Facebook and shouldn't Twitter do more to control what is said on their platforms, because the consequences for society are very clear and often very negative. We know that they create more violence. We know that there are mental health problems that are growing because of this. We see the misogyny towards female politicians and females in the news media. We see the hate groups finding these platforms as a way to foment disruption in society, but also disinformation. And so if we fast forward 10 more years, and heaven forbid there aren't any media organizations because they haven't fought for the idea

of providing those guardrails in society because they've sort of defaulted to the, well, it's not really our job. Well, whose job is it? That's my concern is where are we going with this if we don't stand up for some of those really important guardrails on our conversation as a society? and that is desirable is to self-appoint as to the arbiters of what is acceptable and what is not i also worry to go back to those networks that's pulled out that if you take yourself out of the mix you're only creating a vacuum and in that vacuum not desirable outcomes uh will seem to fill it. To Peter's question about the place of the truth

and the 17 million votes and whether the message is that there's a recipe here for electoral success through lying, I'm guessing that, for one, Donald Trump is not the template for your normal politician. This is something completely different. But I'm also guessing that an intelligent, smart, but not adverse to lying political leader who is looking at having a chance to make his or her mark in public life that is to last more than four years and be seen as a sad

interlude would not be looking so much as the 70 million votes but would be looking at the possible defeat after just one term because truth does get back to you you can for instance, and I'll take Quebec because I'm here, and someone who is charismatic could campaign on the notion that if we vote for him the next day, not only will Quebec be a separate country, but we will be rich and happy, and who knows. But truth will catch up. And when it does catch up, the corrective measure is not the media getting in the way of allowing people to see lies.

It's in voters deciding that they will not put up with it. And in the case of Trump, yes, 70 million did vote for him. But at this point, what most politicians would say about what's been happening this week is that it does not look like a winning streak. And most politicians play to win. Let's move it on a little bit from that. That was a fascinating discussion. It is one of those discussions where there are clearly two legitimate sides to the argument, and you can find yourself bouncing back and forth between them. When you look at this campaign,

I mean, much was said after the last campaign, the 2016 campaign, and also the 2015 campaign in Canada. Much has been said about how the media in general kind of misses the story because they're so focused on what's happening in, you know, in the big cities, in the cities where the media is centered, that they're not listening to or hearing or seeing what's happening in a whole other section of the country. And there was a lot of criticism and a lot of media organizations agreed with the criticism after 2016 in the States,

that they missed this Trump support. They'd never let that happen again because they would spend more time being like out there listening to people about what their concerns were that hadn't been addressed or were being ignored. And yet here we are looking going through the results again this time round after a lot of news organizations had been pointing towards what looked like a an easy biden victory and they're wondering did we do the same thing all over again? Did the same thing happen here? Chantal, why don't you start us off on that one? First point about this particular election and outcomes versus expectations in the media. This is the first big election where mail-in ballots matter in the way that they matter. And the lag between the time that they are counted versus the in-person vote

does impact on the perception of the outcome. If all those votes that are being counted this week had been counted on election night, the gap between the perception of the media that the Biden would get there and it would not end at five in the morning would probably be closer to reality than it has been because of those mail-in ballots. So that's a particular circumstance due to the pandemic. But I've covered election campaigns since the 70s, and one of the things that I have noticed over all that coverage, and some of them have been,

like yours, change elections or not change state of course elections, the media has never done a great job of seeing change in an election until it is staring it in the face. Even when there was no social media, when you found out in regions and did this, you know, southwestern Ontario and you talked to voters, we are not good at seeing change in part because we are wedded to conventional wisdom. Take the 2015 federal election. No party has ever gone from third place to first place. So it takes forever to notice that maybe some party is actually in the process of doing that. The social media should have provided us with a window to more reality,

but that's not been happening. Instead, we are using social media as a place to have a conversation with politicians. And instead of being a window to the world that is more accessible, that makes us better at seeing what's happening it's a mirror and we've been using it to look at ourselves uh and talk amongst each other and so i think the social media which i find very useful and i use twitter and i would not go back to the previous era but i don't think that having your head in it and getting all this excitement about going back and forth with politicians on the social media,

etc., I think that distorts your view of reality. If everyone you're talking to is emotionally invested in the notion that they want an outcome in an election, it skews your capacity to be analytic about it. Because you start lining up, it's like when you find out things about a good story, and you find so many facts that make the story compelling, and then you need to stop and say, maybe I'm just picking the pieces of the puzzle that works so that I have my nice puzzle,

and you're disregarding all other pieces and then you end up with something that is great but it's just not quite true and I think we do that when we analyze outcomes leadership conventions campaigns and we are emotionally invested in an outcome be it through affection or just safe because it stops us from putting ourselves really in the shoes of the people who do not happen to think like our preferred outcome you know Peter I'm I I stay in touch with Chantal as you do and but I can't help but be thinking I really missed our Thursday evening conversations. So I'm so happy that we're doing this today because I always love hearing your take on this. years ago, that when you were talking to young people in journalism, that you often felt like

you had to make a point about the difference between friends and sources. And I thought, what a compelling point to understand the role of journalism. And you made several other really important points in what you just said. I wanted to build on that a little bit. I think that in addition to people in journalism having an interest from an affection or a distaste standpoint in an outcome, there is also this whole prognostication role that many journalists have adopted as part of their work. And I find it's quite difficult. And I remember you looking at Peter and giving him a very stern look one night when he was about to ask us how we thought an election was going to go. And you said, why on air? And I thought it was good. But when I look at all of the

journalists, many of whom do work that I really admire on social media. It's impossible not to see their instinct for expert prediction come to the fore a lot. And it creates some really unfortunate dynamics, for sure. I think one of the dynamics relates to the polling industry, which I'm very familiar with, obviously. And what happens in a U.S. election now is it becomes very reductionist very quickly. We immediately go to, and I'm somewhat guilty of doing this in the sense that people ask me, clients will ask me, how's this election going to go? And I'll go, well, it's going to be determined by this many voters in this few number of states. And by default then, the conversation about what else is happening kind of stopped. And I was looking through some coverage this morning, and I was realizing that there were

a couple of things that happened in this election campaign that I wasn't aware of that are potentially important, and one of which I'm quite fascinated by, that Donald Trump won Texas because he got a lot more support than people expected, and more than he did last time among Hispanic voters living along the border with Mexico. And I'm scratching my head about that. It never occurred to me that that would happen. I have no way of understanding how it would happen. Nobody was doing the research on why it was happening. But it's from the get-go. It's a Democratic stronghold, so what's the point of investing our time thinking about what's going on in California? But Californians, even though they're top to bottom of the ticket electing Democrats, also were rejecting a number of very progressive referenda initiatives this time. And the argument in the piece that I was reading, which came out after the election, was that maybe people need to pay a little bit more attention to that kind of pattern.

So I really do think that the reductionism prevents us from looking at the nuance. Obviously, there are resources constraints within the media. And I don't want to stay alone among your peers. I don't want to embarrass you. And I don't want to castigate too many others. But the number of people who have the time, take the time, put in the effort to do the research, to inform columns with kind of deeper information about what's going on, to kind of look a little bit beyond the kind of deeper information about what's going on to kind of look a little bit beyond the kind of the thing that everybody else is covering. It feels to me like that we need our journalistic organizations

to really ask the next generation of journalists to push in that direction, to do more in that direction. So you're kind of hoping that it is made clear early on that one's opinions are not all that interesting for very long. That would be a really important point to drive into people's heads, that nobody's opinions are interesting for very long unless they're based on facts that actually advance the other person. And that makes the other person say, I didn't know that. As opposed to, yeah, well, I agree. I agree with her. It's not as good as I didn't know that. You didn't know that, right? That curiosity aspect. Right. I think just getting back in a way to what I was trying to say in that question,

was the concern here is that journalists who are supposed to be covering a country, and it could be Americans covering their country or Canadians covering our country, one would assume that the good ones, the good journalists, are going to leave their viewers or readers or listeners with a sense of that country, like who we are as a nation. And I guess that's the troubling part of some of what we've witnessed here is that we're not really answering that question or that question is not being answered by a lot of top journalists. Sort of giving a sense of who the country is in this moment,

in this case, in an election year in the United States, how well did American journalism, and journalism from outside of America, you know, cover that story of where is America in 2020? Like, do we have a better understanding of, you know, the soul of America after 2020, after this election, where millions, tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent by journalistic organizations, trying in a way to answer that question. You know, sure, most of them get caught up with the horse race, and we're all guilty of that at times. But the deeper question was that, and I'm not sure anybody was answering it. You know, to be honest, I think one of the things that we found out, Peter, after the

fact, is that Trump is more feature than bug in America. And I think a lot of people, especially maybe in Canada, where three out of four people don't have a positive feeling about Trump, wanted to believe that there weren't that many Americans who felt the way that he did or could embrace the way that he acted, and that maybe he just got elected because of some fluke of circumstance and involvement by Putin. But Putin didn't get him those 70 million votes this time. And it's impossible not to observe that some significant number of those people said he speaks exactly the way that I want him to speak and says exactly the things that I want him to say.

And yeah, I think you're right. I think that's a very important question. How do we reflect those kinds of perspectives? And I don't think we have the answer. But journalists are a product of their environment. They're not divorced from their environment. And in the case of Trump, Trump lies. Journalists have spent four years listening to lies

and telling the public that Trump lies. At some point, the capacity of journalists or the willingness of journalists to look beyond the Trump lies, and if you vote for him, then you're like a liar and you like being lied to, and so you're not worthy of my time because you're obviously a dummy. That leads to the vacuum in reporting and the absence of texture in reporting that you saw. And it is not just

something that happens to journalists in the U.S. covering Donald Trump, where I totally understand how you get to where you get after four years. Can we go back to the election of Doug Ford, the mayor of Toronto? Rob Ford. And the notion, the widespread notion in the media that this couldn't happen, and that the people who wanted to vote for him were just dumb, and there weren't enough of them to get him elected. And that led to coverage that no one can really be totally proud of, and the election of Rob Ford as mayor of Toronto.

So, and as for Canadians looking at Trump and saying, well, we can't understand why people would want to vote for this man, I live in a province that's elected a lot of premiers that other Canadians cannot see as, why would you want to vote for someone like that? Can we talk about Jacques Faguzot, Lucien Bouchard, or even my current premier, François Legault? And when journalists approach a story on the basis of everyone around me who lives not where I'm covering thinks that you would have to be stupid or foolish or racist or this or that to vote for this person. That is not coming to the coverage of the story with the idea that you should try to listen.

Maybe listening should come first and then talking second. But if your mind is made up that this person to a normal, sane person would be unacceptable. You're not going to be spending much time trying to hear what is being said by the people who want to vote for him or her. You know, I'm looking at the clock here, and we've sort of done two topics. We had like 16 that we thought we might be able to get to. So if anything, this is going to encourage us to do this again and soon because there's lots more to talk about coming out of this election.

But let me try one more area. Earlier this week, Bruce fell on the polling sword in his first reaction to the results on Tuesday night. I don't know whether he's reconsidered his position on that or not. We're probably about to find out. But the issue of polling once again comes up as a result of coverage and news coverage of this campaign. There were so many different polls. I mean, I'm trying to remember on that last day of the campaign, you know, the day before voting day and the pages were full of like, you know, 10, 12,

15 different polling organizations and all their different results for each battleground state and the national polling number and blah, blah, blah. I'm sure one of them somewhere will claim that we were exactly right, but most of them will not be able to claim that, and that's for sure. Here's my question, and it's not about polling as such. I think we all agree that pollsters need to take a hard look at their methodology and whether the way they operate today has changed enough given technology and attitudes of people.

But my question is more about, once again, the media and the media's relationship to the polls. And the media's kind of constant, as part of the horse race coverage, quoting of polls and going to bed with polling companies, having relationships with polling companies, sometimes, well, thirdly, for the benefit of both, but sometimes, you know, questionable relationships. And I just, you know, I've been as guilty as anybody in quoting polls and talking about polls, but I've also maintained for the last 25 years that we should be out of polling

in terms of the news media. We can use it as background information to us in terms of what issues are on the minds of Canadians to, you know, kind of tailor our coverage in a general way, not during elections, but just generally about making sure we're talking about the things that Canadians are talking about. But I'm just wondering, is this yet another opportunity to do a hard examination of that relationship between the media and polling and how it tends to dominate coverage during an election campaign.

Let's see, who should we start with here? Let's start with Chantal. Let's hear from Chantal. Let's hear from Chantal before Bruce does whatever he does. It's easy to be virtuous about polls and say, yeah, we should not play in this forced race game. But that is like saying, if you like wine, yeah, I should stop drinking a glass of wine during the week. You know you're not going to do it. We love polls. They're like candy to us. And I include all three of us.

Remember the Orange Wake and that first poll that showed the NDP ahead in Quebec. Seriously, do you think that people who are interested in political panels and political discussions beyond straight coverage, would they have let us get away with not noticing that or not placing that in the general conversation? In that campaign, I did happen to feel on week one that something was happening to the NDP. Luckily for me, there's faith somewhere that shows that before that poll. But I do know that if we'd gone on air anywhere and ignored the poll,

I mean, the new Democrats themselves would have been the first to say, what are you doing? You're burying the biggest prospective developments of this election campaign under some cover. So it's easy to say in the abstract that the relationship between pollsters and political journalists is not always very healthy. It is healthier than it used to be. We're all old enough to remember the days when a media organization would allow its reporters to only talk about the polls that it paid for,

ignoring all of the other ones. Oh yeah, that made for really, really balanced and great reporting. I covered a campaign in this province about 20 years ago, when Jacques Paguso won, where the Journal de Montréal and La Presse had conflicting polls, and both were bound to write analysis strictly on the basis of their own polls i let you imagine what those stories look like by the way the paper i worked for them that price is full which forces the truth but um so we we have improved i think it's useful to have people like Eric Bonnier at the CDC that does write about polls in an informed way.

I think it spooks people from being too stupid about how they report polls to have people like that. I'm not saying that you should spend your life reading about polls, but it's more useful than just throwing it out there with no context and no explanation. Yeah, I'm not a fan of polling aggregators. I find there's just too many different polling companies with too many different methodologies and throwing them all together to come up with some mixed up, you know, a number based on everybody kind of put together,

even though they claim there's safeguards in it. I just, I get anxious about that. I will say one thing, though, about the Orange Wave. You know, it's almost 10 years now since that. And I remember that campaign distinctly. And it wasn't a poll that warned me about it. It was Chantal Hébert who warned us about it. And we would have been wrong to have ignored her advice.

I mean, there were a lot of people who wondered about it at the time that Chantal made it on the air and in a column that something was going on and we had to be aware of it. It's just that it struck everybody as so unlikely that suddenly the NDP would make a breakthrough in Quebec. But in fact, that's exactly what happened with Jack Layton. But I don't know. Let's give credit where credit's due. All right, Bruce. Well, you know, I've been hearing criticisms of polling for almost 40 years, and many of them are legitimate, and I've got all the battle scars to show for it. And, you know, I think at the end

of the day, it is a form of information, and we're all kind of addicted to it, the public included. And so the notion that it's going to go away, it isn't going to go away, I don't think. It can always get better methodologically. And the idea of getting people to give you their opinion is getting harder and harder and harder with all of the competing influences. And, you know, we can't go to people's doors anymore and we can't really call them on the phone anymore. So, you know, it's never going to be perfect and it's always going to exist. So how can we make it better is what I tend to focus on. And I think there are smart criticisms of polling and there are stupid ones. And the stupidest one I've heard in a long time was Trump's criticism last night that the polling was all designed to suppress

his turnout. And of course, he got more votes than any Republican candidate ever did. So if it was, you know, some great conspiracy to suppress Republican votes, it was a terrible one. I don't buy that argument at all. I think that the media use of them and including the aggregators tends to focus way, way, way more, and everybody said this for a long time, I'm sure,

on who's going to win an election if there's an election right now. And so the aggregation is usually a function of taking the vote horse race number from one company and melding it with the same number from another company. And it can be a little bit like, you know, taking a giraffe and blending it with a dog. But it doesn't matter. At the end of the day, it's only one little piece of information, which tells us something about where things are at today, where I think actually the more important work that we in my business can do is explain why people think the way that they do.

Get into the nuance of these issues that we were talking about as a challenge for the media and saying, well, you know, there are these people who are saying that they might vote Wexit. Do they really believe that their province would be better off, that they would be better off if they were separate from the country? And if so, why do they believe that? What pieces of information do they use to come to that conclusion? Another way to think of it is to really understand that people can be persuaded of a lot of different things with a good argument by a good political party and a good politician.

And so the challenge in research sometimes is to, and I do a lot of this kind of work myself, is to try to figure out, well, where could people go? What would they be willing to accept as a new policy idea idea rather than what do they think about things the way that they are today? My last example would be, I did some work on immigration a little while ago because I was interested in the math of the country and the fact that if we don't have more people in this country, our economy is going to shrink and we're not going to be able to pay for the services and the programs that we value because we're just not making enough babies. At the same

time, the word immigration has become politically loaded. So the question of how you get people to evaluate the idea of increasing immigration is a really good use of polling data. We can explore what it is that makes people hesitant and what it is that might make them feel more open to that argument. And so I believe that media can use polling more like that and less just to focus on the horse race and the foible of the day or the gap of the day, which is frankly so much of what it is that gets covered in these polls. Like, did this WE scandal cause some irreparable harm? And, you know, those of us who have been watching this for a long time know that 80 to 99 percent of the time the answer to that question, did this cause irreparable harm, is no. But we still poll on it, and it still gets reported,

so it's newsworthy as well. So anyway, that's my long-winded-ish take on polling. All right. I think we're going to leave it there for today. This has been great. And Chantal, you don't know how much we appreciate you coming and sitting down with us and and talking about the kind of issues that we all love to to talk about um and you know we we

will want to do it again because as I said there's a lot more left on this list um so please don't be surprised um if we call and beg once again. I know the audience loves this. And as I said, when we put out the word last night that you were going to be on, the reaction was overwhelming. And so I'm sure there'll be a lot of people spending their weekend, this weekend, starting tonight, listening to you and your thoughts on what we've just witnessed south of the border and the impact that can have on this side of the border as well. So I thank you once again, and I thank Bruce as, uh,

as always, uh, for being on this, the race next door. We'll be, uh, we'll be back next week. Uh,

Monday is going to be a special podcast on, uh, on my new book, which comes out on Tuesday. And as my coauthor, uh, Markgich, will be on the podcast, and we'll talk about some of the things that you might find in the book that you might find interesting if you purchase it. So with that, we're going to sign off for this weekend,

and we hope you have a great weekend. Keep in mind all the things we always tell you about, you know, socially distant, wash your hands, avoid big crowds, wear a mask, all of that. And at the bottom of it all, smile because there will be a tomorrow. All right. That's it for week 35 of our little podcast. And the podcast within a podcast, The Race Next Door.