The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Campaign Day 17: And The Winner of the Week is...

Episode Date: September 27, 2019

Day 17 of Canada's 2019 Federal Election. | Thank for subscribing and for submitting a rating and review! * TWITTER @petermansbridge | INSTAGRAM @thepetermansbridge ** https://www.thepetermansbridge.com/ *** Producer: Manscorp Media Services

Hello there, Peter Mansbridge here with The Bridge. We're coming to you this night from Stratford, Ontario. That's hometown for me, has been for me and my family for, well, more than 15 years now. We love it here. Community about roughly an hour and a half, hour 45 drive from downtown Toronto. And when you get out here, spread your wings a little bit, drive through the country, fresh air, got to love it.

And we certainly do. And I've enjoyed our time here and spent a lot of time in Stratford, even though both, well, all three of us now spend a lot of time in Toronto too, with Sun Will at the University of Toronto. Okay, so we're at Friday of week three, and we're fast approaching, rapidly approaching, the halfway point in this campaign. Just seems like yesterday things started, but here we are coming up on the halfway point. Now, if you recall, at the end of week one, I gave a sort of the Mansbridge podcast award for who I thought was the best performer of week one, and that was Jagmeet Singh,

the NDP leader, in my view. On week two, I gave it again to Jagmeet Singh, mainly based on the way he handled the Trudeau photo issue. So here we are at week three. Who's our player of the party leaders they all had very important weeks dropping policy making announcements on costing giving some indication of where they might get that money from but a lot of promises totaling up billions and billions of your tax dollars in what they would do with your money. So those were all important, and they're important for Canadians to look at those promises and judge whether they are important to them and what they would mean to their lives. That's all important. But in some ways, it was kind of a week that didn't have any big moments in it until today.

Today was a big day. And when I hand out the award, the Mansbridge Podcast Award for Player of the Week, on this night, I'm not giving it to any of the leaders. Not to Justin Trudeau, not to Andrew Scheer, and not to Jagmeet Singh, not to Elizabeth May, not to Maxime Bernier. I'm giving it to the people. This was the People's Day.

Now, it was heavily partisan. They were all on one side of the climate issue. But they were out in huge numbers, believing in that old adage that if you believe in democracy, you have to believe in participation. And they were out by the tens of thousands, by the hundreds of thousands, in cities and in communities across the country. I think the total I saw was more than 200 communities had some form of demonstration today calling on more action as a result of climate change. Now, it was that effort sparked by that amazing young 16-year-old Greta Thunberg, who has got the world to follow her demand

for protests in cities and towns across the world about climate. But the people are today's or this week's winner, as far as I'm concerned, in terms of their involvement in the election campaign, because one assumes nobody could not be impacted or made aware of the fact the streets were full of people demanding action. So we've got four major party leaders and a fifth in Maxime Bernier from the People's Party of Canada. So I assume you have five major party leaders. fifth in Maxime Bernier from the People's Party of Canada.

So I assume you have five major party leaders. I'm not sure the People's Party is a major party, seeing as they have never elected an MP. Their leader sits in the House of Commons or has sat in this past house, but was elected as a conservative. But nevertheless, let's say we have five. Three took part in the protest marches, in the marches across the country. Those were Justin Trudeau, Andrew Scheer, and Elizabeth May. What about the other two? Maxime Bernier and Andrew Scheer did not take part.

And you gotta wonder why. In Andrew Scheer's case, he said that his climate policy is clear, that he believes in climate change, he believes that it's happening, and he has put out his policies on how to deal with it. He doesn't think demonstrating in the streets means much, that the policies matter more. Now, okay, that's his position, but he's disconnected from hundreds of thousands of people who felt this was an important day. But he chose, even though he was in one of the cities where the most people were demonstrating,

Vancouver, he chose not to take part in it, which is his right. And people will judge that decision as they judge all politicians on their actions. And we'll see what that means in the future for Andrew Scheer. But the other party leaders were there. Justin Trudeau was marching in Montreal. He had a lot of protesters out yelling things about pipelines at him, stopped the pipelines.

There were a couple of moments where the RCMP had to step in to protect the Prime Minister, and there was one scene where clearly somebody got quite close, RCMP had to step in to protect the Prime Minister, and there was one scene where clearly somebody got quite close, didn't touch the Prime Minister, but it was close enough, and there was enough of a tussle that it clearly upset, and you can see in the video, the Prime Minister's son, young son, Xavier, I think it was, who was marching alongside the Prime Minister.

Nobody wants to see that happen to any leader's family, no matter which party it is or who you support. Nobody wants to see that kind of thing happen, and that was unfortunate. But there's your week. As we approach the midway part of the campaign, we're getting closer to the debates, which are a little more than a week off now. And quite often, the debates are the turning point in a campaign.

The turning point in the sense that that's when most people engage. A lot of Canadians just simply haven't engaged yet with the campaign, if history gives us any indication. But they start to around debate time. They watch debate in huge numbers. And some people make their decisions based just on watching the debate. But it's a major point, and from then on, for the final days, final weeks of the campaign, it's pretty heavy duty. So if there's a pause coming up, it's in this next week or so,

although there are some big moments next week. The CBC is holding town halls for the leaders, and those town halls will be a good indication for many Canadians of what these different leaders stand for. But in face-to-face combat, if you will, political combat, that'll be in the debate itself. Okay, as of Friday night, I want to kind of clean up the letters and get as many in as I can before we take a couple of days break. So we'll be right back with the mailbag. All right, welcome back. Mailbag time here on the bridge uh this first one comes from sarah babbage and andrew mccall

and they're writing from washington we are canadian expats living in washington enjoy staying in touch with canadian politics by listening to your podcast well thank you both until recently canadians abroad for more than five years lost their right to vote in federal elections. That's true. A law enacted last year and a Supreme Court ruling in January returned our right to vote, regardless of how long we've been out of the country. The most recent estimate we could find on the number of Canadians living abroad was almost 3 million. That's a lot of people.

A substantial amount, although it was from 2009, that estimate. I assume it's at least 3 million, if not more now. Is any polling conducted on this voting bloc? Do national polls take us into account? Do you expect many expats will vote? Great questions. I don't know any of the answers to those, but I can guess. I don't think there's any polling done on that voting block

because the problem is tracking them down, how to find all the expats to get a sense, and, you know, depending on where they may live in the world. So it's an interesting question. I don't think so. Do national polls take us into account? I don't think so. Do you expect many expats will vote?

I hope so. You know, if it goes by what the turnout rate was last time, was I think about 68%, let's assume we're going to be in that same neighborhood with the expat vote. I don't know. I'm just guessing. But if you guess that it's roughly the same,

that's a lot of votes, and they could make a big difference. So it's something to watch for, and I'm going to ask a few questions in the next few days. A number of people, don't forget, Monday night we're having a special bridge on polling, and I'll ask that question, because I would be surprised if the answer is yes

on whether or not expats are polled. And before they signed off, they threw in one last question. Do you have a favorite model of airplane? I guess that was because I did a couple of bridges this week from my flights back and forth from the West Coast. I actually do. Yeah, I like all planes. I'm a plane nut. I always like planes.

My favorite is the Lancaster. You know, World War II, British aircraft. One of the reasons it was my dad flew in Lancaster during the Second World War. And we still have two left in the world. One's in Britain. It's operated by the RAF. And one is here in Canada,

operated out of Hamilton in private hands. Fantastic plane. And for a good chunk of the year, certainly through the summer, late spring, and early fall, you can see it flying, especially on the year, certainly through the summer, late spring, and early fall, you can see it flying, especially on the weekends, out of Hamilton, comes to Toronto, flies around the CN Tower, and then flies back again. I've taken that flight a couple of times. It's spectacular. You'll hear the Lancaster coming from a long way away. It's a very loud plane. My mother used to talk about how as a young girl in Lincoln, England, which was near a couple of the major RAF bomber bases, including the one where she met my dad at, they used

to hear the planes take off at night. And it was a deafening roar roar especially on the big nights of the thousand bomber raids when a lot of planes would take off from the Lincoln airfield join up with their other aircraft from different airfields across England and fly across the English Channel on their on their bombing runs to into Germany but she said it used to be so loud, and then when the planes had come back in the very early morning hours, it was never quite as loud, because there weren't as many planes returning as had taken off.

All right, moving on. Jesse Wright writes, I was wondering if you had any thoughts into continuing the podcast after the election is over. I know nightly would be too much, but what about you doing a longer 45-minute, one-hour podcast once a week or every other week? I listen to a lot of political podcasts, but none of them speak with your experience or enthusiasm for doing it. Hey, Jesse, sounds great. We'll use that as an ad. I haven't thought about it. You know, I always wanted to do one. As soon as I started hearing about podcasts, I thought

the election's a great time to be doing a nightly podcast. Most people are doing them, you know, weekly. Some do it a little more than that, but I wanted to do a nightly one, and I wanted to be able to talk to listeners and try to help them with some of the questions they may have. I'm going to think about it, about doing something afterwards, but we'll see. I haven't quite made up my mind, but I can tell you I've certainly loved doing this. Jesse Wright lives in Mackenzie, British Columbia. This is a fairly lengthy letter from Mark Leger in Toronto. The 2015 federal election was the first where election night results were broadcast live across Canada, including areas where polls were still open. I think there was another one when they were testing things out earlier in the 2000s,

and it was controversial at the time for that very reason. I don't think this is a good move, says Mark. I understand that the law preventing the transmission of election results until polls were closed nationwide became impossible to enforce in the age of social media. I wonder why couldn't results be embargoed across the country until all polls are closed at 10 and 7, 10 o'clock Eastern, 7 o'clock Pacific. You know, we tried this one election, too,

where it was kind of a common poll- poll closing time across the country. It was either an election or a referendum and I thought it was a good idea because in that fashion nobody got advance warning of how Canadians were voting. Everything closed at the same time. As Mark says, I don't think Atlantic Canadians would suffer by waiting a few hours after the polls close to find out their results if it means a fair vote across the country so what Mark's suggesting is they close it at the regular time in Atlantic Canada but they don't count or release the votes until everywhere is closed um it's asking what my view is. I'm not sure.

I seem to have seen it all kinds of different ways. I think I would probably be happier if everywhere closed at the same time. But at the moment, that's not the way they do it here. But seeing as we've done it a number of different ways over the last 20 or 30 years, nothing will surprise me if it changes again. I'll tell you one quick little story. Don't want to go on too long,

but I'm told by a number of you that you love the anecdotes. I can remember one of the things we do to get ready for election nights is we do rehearsals in the two or three days before the real deal. And to do that, you put results into the computer, which a couple of the senior editors know, but nobody else does, because you're testing your on-air staff on how they react to results as they come in.

And so you do that over a period of two or three days before the election. And it gets everybody sort of pumped up and ready for things. When we first started doing this in the, I guess it would be the late 70s and early 80s, I was anchoring one of these rehearsals. And what you do is you fire up all the different stations you're using across the country so everybody's getting these phony results and reacting to them and you've got your reporters in different places.

So we were doing this and it was all up there on the satellite, right? And that was in an era when big satellite dishes were starting to pop up across the country, especially in rural areas where farmers who were kind of displaced from regular cable TV used satellite dishes to bring in feed. So they saw everything that was up there. And we were sitting there doing this show.

It was like a Saturday afternoon a couple of days before the election, suddenly we were getting phone calls and, you know, different communications from different parts of the country and from the headquarters of the CBC, with people outraged, furious. They'd finally realized that the CBC fixed the election. And here they were two days before anybody had even voted, and they already knew the results. And they were mad. So we had to kind of stop the rehearsal and explain to everybody what was really going on. I'm not sure they all believed us at the moment, but you wonder where conspiracy theories start, and that was one of them.

So anyway, Mark, thank you for your letter. Okay, a couple of letters here about the People's Party. One from Alyssa Chadney, and one from Michael. I don't think we've got Michael's last name here. But both basically boil down to the same issue. And I'll read Alyssa's. I've been listening to your podcast. I want to know why you haven't addressed why the media is censoring and avoiding talking about issues Canadians want to talk about. Issues that the PPC, the People's Party of Canada, is willing to address, like immigration and freedom of speech. Please bring some attention to this.

All right, you're correct. We haven't spent a lot of time talking about the People's Party of Canada. One of the reasons I kind of hinted at before is that they're not a major party. And right now, you know, no matter which poll you look at, they're pulling around like 2%, sometimes less, sometimes a little bit more, but never very, very much. They have no seats. Their leader has his seat because he won the election as a conservative in the last election. We mentioned them. We cover their opening news conference. And let me tell you this.

If they're that anxious about coverage, then why, even after they got on the debate, which they're on, why next week all the parties were offered a town hall, their leader, people who have been picked by an outside firm, who are undecided voters, people who will question the leaders. So Trudeau agreed, Scheer agreed, Singh agreed, and May agreed. What happened with Maxime Bernier? He initially agreed, then he backed out.

Said he wouldn't take it. Here's full network time, an opportunity for an hour to talk about your policies. Turned it down. Also turned down the traditional 10-minute interview with the CBC. I don't know whether or not he's turned down other interviews with other networks, but at this point, the only time you're going to get to see him is on the debate. And that's not by the choice of the networks or the news organizations. It's the choice of that party. Okay, I love this one. Hi, Peter. We're two Canadians who enjoy your broadcast all the way over here in Cork, Ireland. Hope you like the photo of a neat pub here called The Bridge. Adds a picture. Looks great.

If Trudeau had adopted proportional representation, might he have been at an advantage should the Liberals take a hit on October 21st and or win a minority? Rob and Teresa Donaldson in Cork, Ireland. I've been to Cork. Great city. Great city. Great country.

I don't know the answer to your question, and nobody will know until election night. When we see all those results across the country, somebody will be able to sort of lay in some form of the proportional representation idea and see what would have happened on that election if proportional representation had been in play. So we'll keep that in mind because it's a good idea. And the last one comes from Graham McKay.

You've probably seen some of Graham's work. I have. He says, I grew up watching your newscasts. Really, I always like that, Graham, when people say, oh, you know, I grew up watching you. It makes me feel young and vibrant. Just kidding. I grew up watching your newscasts

and have been a fan of yours for decades. Thank you. I've been enjoying your podcasts and listen to them at work here at the Halifax Spectator as I draw the day's editorial cartoons. You'll find attached a copy of the at-issue panel when you were moderating,

and it shows a great cartoon from then. Given the increased scrutiny and criticism the media gets with accusations of bias and fake news, I was wondering what you think of satire, and in particular, editorial cartoons, and if you think they should keep publishing editorial cartoons. Let me see what happened to that. I kind of lost the last part of that letter. Anyway, thanks, and looking forward to your election broadcast,

Graham McKay, or McKay. Graham, we better not lose editorial cartoons. They are so important, and satire is so important. We take things seriously as we should, but there's also room for satire. And sometimes satire strikes closer to the bone than anything else. And we're lucky to live in a country that allows it, for one, and a democracy that allows it, and we don't ever want to lose it. And when we see the problems that in some countries editorial cartoonists go through,

that's not good. It's not good for democracy and it's not good for the system. So keep drawing. And next time you draw me, Graham, because I was looking closely at that one, you have only three hairs on the top of my head. There are actually four. So I'd like you to please keep that in mind.

All right. That's it for this week. Letters. Keep them coming. Love them. TheMansbridgePodcast at gmail.com. TheMansbridgePodcast at gmail.com. I hope you have a great weekend. Enjoy it. I hope

the weather is going to be okay for you. Colors are starting to change. I'm looking out the window here in Stratford and they're starting to change. It's a beautiful time of year. So enjoy it. This is Peter Mansbridge for The Bridge. Thanks for listening.