The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Campaign Day 35: Stretch Run Strategy

Episode Date: October 15, 2019

Day 35 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

And hello there, it's Peter Mansbridge with The Bridge. This is day 35 of the election campaign. And my message for today is don't believe everything you hear. Don't believe everything you hear. Don't believe everything you read. Challenge things yourself. When you hear things that are being said, challenge them. Are they true? Do they really sound true? Because when we're into this point of the campaign,

you're going to hear a lot of stuff in these final few days because everybody's trying to influence your vote. The parties are trying to influence your vote. days because everybody's trying to influence your vote. The parties are trying to influence your vote. The special interests are trying to influence your vote. The media, in some cases, is trying to influence your vote. It's your vote. It's not their vote. It's your vote.

So, challenge things. Don't automatically believe everything you hear. And that could be coming from anywhere. I mean, they're into the spin game. They're into the attack game. You watch the local candidates in your riding, you watch the local leaders in your riding, and watch the local leaders in your riding, and you watch the national leaders on their campaign.

Listen carefully to what they're saying. And if it has that kind of spin feel to it, or the overly attack mode feel to it, then make your judgments based on that. We're into the crunch days of the campaign. This is where you, if you haven't already made up your mind, this is where you will make up your mind. And you want to make up your mind with the real goods, with the real facts, with things that you believe. So keep that in mind. Watching the national leaders this week,

you know, they can take any number of different approaches. They can go on the offense, and you tend to go on the offense when you think you're doing very well. They can go on the defense. If they go on the defense, the implication is they're worried. Or you can go into cruise control mode. There are risks in all three. You watch the parties today, the liberals and the conservatives, Justin Trudeau, Andrew Scheer,

they had a kind of mix of both offense and defense. Trudeau defending his record, Scheer defending his promises, both attacking what the other might do to the country if they were elected. And sometimes those attacks get pretty tough to deal with. Toughly worded. We saw it in the debate. But you know what else we saw in the debate, and this is what bothers so many people about

politics at times, is how real are they? Do they really mean what they say? Are we seeing the real deal with these people? And you know, if you watched all of that debate, the English language debate I'm talking about, and interestingly enough, when I go through the minute by minutes of those two hours, there were more people at the end of the debate than at any other time. Now, maybe they were just tuning in to see how the debate ended. I don't know, but there were more people at the end of the debate than at any other time. Now, maybe they were just tuning in to see how the debate ended. I don't know, but there were more people at the end than there were anywhere else through it. But at the end, after they'd been slicing and dicing each

other, mainly the two main leaders, what happened? They were shaking their hands, slapping each other on the back. Wait a minute. You just called him a fraud and a phony. You just implied that they were twisting the facts. And now you're acting like your best buds? I mean, pick one path or the other, but it looked a little strange to me. If you watched that last, you know,

when kind of the credits were rolling and the wave was getting out of the debate, that's what happened. But there was one person who wasn't in that group. Who was that? Jagmeet Singh. He thanked the crowd and out the door he went into the post-debate scrums.

He didn't take part in that little back-slapping moment behind the debate desks. And that's interesting because his performance in that debate and his words following the debate have led to a nice run for him, certainly through last week and on the weekend, where the numbers for him and the nightly polls that we've seen were significant, and all parties have acknowledged that the NDP has gone up.

So he had to make a decision going into this final week. What do you do? Do you attack? Do you defend? Or do you cruise? Now, I don't know. From what I've seen, it looks to me like he's gone into cruise mode. I've done well.

I don't want to take any chances. Kind of stumbled a little bit on the weekend and started talking about coalition. He pulled back on that yesterday and today. This is talking about what he would do if no party formed the government. And you've got to keep the language right here. Coalition is a formal arrangement between parties. Could be two parties, could be three parties. A formal arrangement to govern.

Probably with a time frame around it, guaranteed two years, guaranteed three years, guaranteed four years, but it would be formal. A minority government stands on its own. The one party with, usually with the most seats, not always as we've discussed before, but usually with the most seats, tries to govern. And they try to govern by trying to ensure with each piece of legislation that they're going to pick up support from the parties that will put them over the top in a vote.

Anyway, Jagmeet Singh had sort of talked about the possibilities of coalition on the weekend. And that obviously bothered somebody because by yesterday and again today, he was not talking coalition anymore. He was talking about what the realities are in a minority situation. But he's got to be careful. He can't get caught looking like he's cruising. He has this opportunity where he's captured some of the support of voters

who weren't there for him two weeks ago, but have been in the last few days. And he wants to keep that support because it's under relentless pressure from the other parties and especially the Liberals to pry that support away from the NDP and back to the Liberal Party, where it most likely came from. So he has to be careful. He can't just cruise, would be the argument.

Don't just cruise. You've got to say something. You've got to be there. And he was campaigning today vigorously in Toronto. But, you know, I look at his Twitter feed. Now, everything's not about Twitter. But the voters that he's trying to hold down, a lot of them are on Twitter, young people. And, you know, he's talking about, here's my recipe for such and such. And, you know, talking about things that are kind of already known for.

They retire, he was promising again today to abolish the Senate. Well, that's been the NDP slogan for decades. Anyway, it's a strategy. A strategy to cruise. You've got a really good significant number of votes, a lot more than you had two weeks ago. You're likely to do not badly with seats,

but a lot can happen in the final five or six days of a campaign. We've witnessed that in the last two campaigns, and you don't stop. That would be the lesson from the last two campaigns, but maybe somebody sees it differently. So those are things to watch for.

All right? Now, I've got a couple of things I want to talk about beyond just that. One of them's on the media. I know you'll love that. So right after this, we will talk about some interesting numbers on the media. Our friends at Abacus are just out of the field with some numbers that they'll be publishing, I guess, in the next day or two, but I got kind of a heads up on some of them. And it's about journalism and the quality of journalism

during this campaign. I think they're interesting and they're worthy of a few points, and I'd like to think that you might find them interesting and you may have some thoughts on them as well. So I'll just kind of mention them straight up and leave it at that, and you can say as you wish about them. So let me just get these numbers in order. When asked about the quality of journalism covering this election,

8% say it's been excellent. about the quality of journalism covering this election. 8%. 8% say it's been excellent. Now, excellent's pretty tough to get that in anything, right? But 8% say excellent. 40% say good. 7% say poor. 4% say terrible. So 48%, either excellent or good.

11%, either poor or terrible. Listen to this one in the middle. Just okay, 41%. That's a big number. 41% of those asked say the quality of journalism covering this election has been just okay. You know, that's like watching your favorite hockey team and when asked how they're playing, you go, just okay. That's not much. That's not much. That's not good.

And neither is that for journalism. Journalists want to be looked at with much more respect than that. And you get respect by doing the job well, right? So I would say, you know, more than half think it's either just okay or it's poor or it's terrible. That's not terrific. Abacus also asked to try and determine where you're getting your election news, all right? And these are the numbers they came up with. The reliance on these different forms of media to help you construct your views about the election. And it was broken down into a number of categories, but the main one we're going to focus on is quite a bit.

Nighttime national TV news. So that's your, you know, whether it's Global or the CBC or CTV or elsewhere, the nighttime national TV newscasts, 38% say they rely quite a bit on the nighttime national TV news. 35% say they rely quite a bit on news and talk radio. Daily newspaper coverage, 32%. That kind of surprises me, actually. If the question meant, or if it was interpreted by those asked, they actually physically hold a paper,

because I rarely ever see anybody doing that anymore. Friends and family, 33%. These numbers are all kind of similar. They're all in the... around the mid-30s. When asked individually, do you rely a lot on this, or quite a bit, not much at all?

Those are the categories. Columnists and opinion writers, 27%. And social media feeds, that's the lowest actually here in terms of relying quite a bit, it's 21%. Now obviously there's differences in age groups on people who do this. In terms of how this plays out, it plays out pretty much as you might expect. Older people are more

conventional in the way they gather their news or watch their news or use certain platforms to help them form an opinion on election coverage. So those are some interesting numbers, and I'd like you to think about those and see what they tell you.

And obviously, I'd love to hear it. So don't be shy. Alright, the haunting beat of the mailbag music. A couple of letters here tonight that are going to be featured on the bridge this evening. This one comes from Barbara Mitchell. She's in Montreal. If the polls don't change,

it seems that Parliament will be somewhat of a mess, and we will be back at the polls soon. Now, with our normal caveat of don't believe everything you hear, and polls can change, especially in the last few days, but I think we all hear you. We know what you're saying. This is the point, though, that Barbara's making. The Bloc Québécois, with less than 10% of the popular vote,

may have more seats than the NDP and the Green Party combined, with these two parties combining for almost 30% of the votes. Well, 20% to 30% anyway. It seems unbalanced and unfair. The present system also leads to the parties focusing on the up-in-the-air seats, watching all the political shows. It seems that Canada consists of regional Quebec and the 905 with maybe a little bit of Vancouver.

Yeah, kind of got it nailed. with maybe a little bit of Vancouver. Yeah, kind of got it nailed. I live in a riding that's a very safe liberal seat. Sometimes I've voted liberal, sometimes I've not. However, it's certainly that a liberal will get elected in my riding. And it is also a certainty that as a safe liberal riding, it is very much ignored. With some strange and unfair results, likely, and with the issues I've outlined above, am I becoming a bigger fan of proportional representation or some sort of

reform? What do you think? It's a good question, Barbara, and as happens in every election, post-election, the proponents of proportional representation will say, hey, we've got to consider this. Just look at the split on the vote and then look at the seats that are there in Parliament. And is that fair? Does that represent how Canadians feel? Well, you know, last time round,

we thought there was going to be change. Didn't happen. And those are still upset with the Liberal government and Justin Trudeau in particular for that fact. And it seemed to have been shelved. Well, this could bring it back again, especially if Barbara's right about how things unfold on election night. So good letter, Barbara, and we will watch that. We'll watch for that on election night, and we'll talk about it, I'm sure. This one comes from Bethany Collicutt from Charlottetown. Bethany writes, as we're in the home stretch of the election, I'm noticing a lot more fear-mongering from the parties than I've seen in the past. In your experience, do you

feel this is an effective tactic, or is it just a last-ditch Hail Mary before the big day. Fear-mongering has been a part of Canadian elections for as long as certainly I can remember, but you go into your history books and you'll see it goes back a long way. And it usually gets to its climatic moments in the final few days, so we're bound to see a lot of it, and we're tending to see it now.

Oh my gosh, don't vote this way, or you'll end up with that government, and if you end up with that government, it's going to be awful in Canada. Don't vote this way, because they've already proven to you that they can't govern, and there's scandals, and they will try to scare you into voting a certain way. That's part of the process. That's part of electioneering, quite frankly. But a Hail Mary, that could be something very different. And it usually doesn't work.

When you try to buy an electorate on the last couple of days of an election, people tend to see through that. If one of the parties, say, came in tomorrow and said, if we're elected, we'll drop the GST one percentage point, it's only a couple of days before the election. If they were going to do that, they should have done it in the first week, right? And it would have been costed, and you'd have to explain how you're going to do it. Now, nobody's saying that, and I don't expect anybody to say that, but that would be a Hail Mary. That, and you can concoct any number of different scenarios

of what could be a Hail Mary. So, well, I think fear-mongering is something, and it used to workering is something and it used to work I mean it used to work in this province in Ontario a lot in that four decades of conservative rule that ran through the 50s and 60s and 70s and into the early 80s whenever the NDP would pop their heads up above the

trenches and look like they were whenever the NDP would pop their heads up above the trenches and look like they were going to do some damage, the Conservatives would say, oh no, you can't do that. That'd be no different. That's not just socialism. It could be worse than socialism. And that actually used to work. Until the 90s,

until Bob Ray proved them wrong by winning the election for the NDP in Ontario. Didn't go so well after that for Bob Ray, but he did prove that you could fight that. Because they used it a lot in the last week of the campaign when the Conservatives suddenly realized and the Liberals that the NDP is going to win this

election. They tried that. Didn't work. It was the Liberals who got knocked out. Remember David Peterson lost to Bob Ray. Okay. It was the Liberals who got knocked out. Remember, David Peterson lost to Bob Ray. Okay, last one. Christine Ormsby from Ottawa. My question today is regarding the Federal Election Platform Guide

that is available from Maclean's, which is 2019 Federal Election Platform Guide, where the parties stand on everything. As you get ready to vote, stay up to date on what the Liberals, Conservatives, New Democrats, and Greens have promised Canadians. Christine Ormsby's question is, why doesn't it include the People's Party of Canada? You know what?

Christine, you're going to have to ask McLean's for their answer on that. All news organizations have been trying to deal with the People's Party and Maxime Bernier, and you saw the debate commission did, and they put him on the debate, and some people said it got off to a terrible start because he was on it, and because it seems kind of out of place.

And what right did he have to be on there? He doesn't have any seats. The seat he does hold, he won as a conservative, blah, blah, blah. You know the argument. But none of the news organizations have ignored the People's Party. Apparently in that platform at McLean's, I'm sorry, I haven't seen it, so I don't know, and I'm not going to try to pretend I know how they would answer this question.

But if you feel it should be in there, and it's not, then you should call McLean's. Ask them. Challenge them. Why isn't it there? And I'm sure somebody at McLean's will, will give you an answer. All right. Okay. Day 35 in the books. We're into the stretch run. All those cliches come out now. I do want to give you a warning, and I will. It's not really a warning, it's a promotion. And I will do it each night over the next couple of nights. If you've been a Bridge listener since the beginning,

the night before the campaign when we launched this little trial, I told you that I was working on a documentary to go near the end of the campaign where we'd have an opportunity to travel across the country. Well, it's this Friday night when the documentary runs. Friday night, 9 o'clock on CBC television. And then over the weekend, it'll be on CBC News Network as well. But it's your program.

The whole concept was enough about us deciding what the issues should be, enough about the parties deciding what the issues should be. This would be an opportunity to hear what you think are the issues. So I traveled the country with a small crew. Traveling the country would be an overstatement. I traveled to a number of places in the West, Central, East. Didn't get North. Wanted to go north.

Budget. Didn't make it. But nevertheless, I think what you'll see is a reflection, hopefully, of what you feel. I've talked to a lot of people, and this is an opportunity to hear what they think, without filters, without me telling them what they should think. And it's informative, and yet at the same time it's entertaining.

We went to some great places. Went to a rodeo, and a stock car race, and an art show, and a Greek pastry shop. Went to a couple of farmers markets all through the fall of 2019 and underlining once again what a great country we have. How exciting it is to travel. So if you get a chance, please watch.

I think you'll find it interesting. I hope you'll find it interesting. In the meantime, that's the bridge for day 35. I'm Peter Mansbridge. Thank you for listening.