The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Death Of A Colleague -- Sirius XM's Loss is Your Loss Too.

Episode Date: May 24, 2022

The loss of Andrew Krystal is a loss to his colleagues, but a major loss to his listeners too.  Plus,  Brian Stewart's regular weekly commentary on the Ukraine War with this week's focus on how POW's are and should be treated. 

And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. You are just moments away from the latest episode of The Bridge, Death of a Colleague. Sirius XM's loss is your loss too. And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here in Stratford, Ontario. You know, there are two ways to listen to The Bridge. One is on the podcast platform that you choose, your favorite podcast platform. You search out The Bridge and you get it every day, Monday to Friday or on weeks like this, Tuesday to Friday, as yesterday was a holiday. The other way is to listen to SiriusXM Canada,

channel 167, Canada Talks, where every day at 12 noon, once again, every weekday at 12 noon, The Bridge is available and listened to by SiriusXM subscribers right across North America. So 3 million potential listeners on the subscription list of SiriusXM. And if you listen on SiriusXM, the bridge doesn't last an hour, except on Fridays with good talk. So part of the hour from 12 to 1 has to be filled otherwise. And for the last two years, the last almost a couple of years now,

on Sirius, the person who's filled that time slot has been Andrew Crystal from Crystal Nation. We lost Andrew over the weekend. Young, just 63 years old. And as one of the managers said yesterday, as he was explaining to staff what had happened, said Andrew was one of a kind. And you know, he truly was one of a kind. I, you know, he truly was one of a kind. I didn't know Andrew well. I met him first, I guess, about, well, it would be almost 10 years ago when my first book came out.

I was still at the CBC. I was doing the National, and my book, One on One, came out about some of the interviews that I've done. And Andrew's a big interviewer, obviously. He's interviewed people all his career as well. And I could tell right off the bat that Andrew was a little different than everybody else. He had his own way.

But one of the things he did do was he knew about the subject he was going to interview on. Now, that sounds normal. You'd figure everybody has to do that. But it was clear to me immediately that Andrew had actually read the book. And a lot of interviewers don't, not because they're lazy, but because they're, in fact, the opposite. They're so busy, they don't have time to read the books they interview the authors on.

They'll read a bit of it, but they won't read the whole book. And I know that's to be the case because I've been in that situation myself where I just simply didn't have time. But not so Andrew. He read the book. And he read my latest book from late last year, off the record. It was clear when we got into the interview, because he was asking all kinds of questions that aren't the predictable questions, but were based on his reading of the book. So when

Joe Thistle, the manager, one of the managers at SiriusXM, said yesterday, one of a kind, he was one of a kind in many different ways. He was funny. He was a bit eccentric. He wasn't shy about his opinions. And at times over his career, a career that spanned a number of different stations and networks and provinces, he got himself into trouble over expressing some of his opinions. He was one of a kind.

He was also an absolute diehard Leafs fan. Boy, over these last couple of years, especially over these last couple of months, Andrew would send me emails, we'd be back and forth on the subject of the Leafs. As he was with many of his other friends, like Steve Bacon at TVO. He'd talk about, oh my gosh, what are we going to do?

You know, what about the goalie situation? What about this? What about that? What about defense? And if they'd lose a critical game, he was, oh man, are we ever going to be able to do anything if we don't get past the first round? I don't know what I'm going to do. Well, we didn't get past the first round.

But you know, Andrew was also one of the first to say, we played pretty well against the two-time Stanley Cup champions. Ask the Florida Panthers how well Toronto played. They're gone in four games straight. But he loved the Leafs. He bled blue, as they say. Leafs fan through and through. He also loved his cat. He and Michelle, his wife, were devastated

just a few weeks ago when their cat, Buini, passed away. 14 years, 2 months, 23 days. That's how long they'd had their can. Extremely close. And he knew Buini was not going to last long, and he wrote emails about that too, about how difficult that time was, and everybody who's had a pet knows that kind of feeling. And after Buini passed, as he himself said on one of his tweets,

buried Bwini on a quiet sunny farm near Orangeville, Ontario. Now, it's just captured in a few words, and you have the sense of that moment, right? You have the sense of the moment of Andrew and Michelle burying their cat, their pet. And he turned that into a program that day about the difficulties of pet ownership, the closeness that you have with your pet. Anyway, this past Saturday night, Andrew may well have been thinking about Buini or the Leafs or his work,

his family, his friends. He went out for a walk, never came home. And now we mourn Andrew Crystal, a one-of-a-kind, special guy. And our colleague at SiriusXM. Won't be the same without him. Won't be the same without getting those sometimes crazy emails from Andrew. And listeners will find it not the same.

That is special kind of interviewing style and topics that he chose to talk about. So I'll leave it at that, but I did want to say something about the loss of Andrew Crystal. Crystal Nation is in mourning, and so are those of us at Sirius who called him a colleague.

All right, going to take a short break. When we come back, we'll check in with Brian Stewart. He's got some interesting things to say about prisoners of war and perhaps what we don't tend to think of in terms of that relationship that prisoners of war have with the countries that caught them, what the obligations are of that country, and the treatment that they should get. Now, if you were listening yesterday,

Brian was on yesterday, but that was the Encore edition from last week. This is new, fresh edition with Brian, the regular Tuesday commentary from one of the great foreign correspondents of our time, who's covered many conflicts over his time. And as I said, we'll take a short pause. When we come back, we'll talk with Brian Stewart. And welcome back. You're listening to The Bridge.

I'm Peter Mansbridge in Stratford, Ontario. You're listening to The Bridge on Sirius XM, Channel 167, Canada Talks, or on your favorite podcast platform. It's Tuesday. That means Brian Stewart's with us. And today he's focused on two things. Spy Wars, once again, an update on that story. And you found that incredibly interesting a couple of weeks ago, and a Canadian angle to spy wars. But we begin with this issue of POWs. Here's Brian Stewart.

So, Brian, the whole issue of POWs has kind of popped back up into this conflict. And, you know, there's a trial underway involving, you know, a POW that the Ukrainians have put on trial for war crimes. But that's kind of separate from the more general issue of POWs and how they're treated. And I think it's worth reminding everybody that there are rules. There are, in fact, rules about how POWs are treated. So can you talk to us about that? You know, there are indeed. We have a tendency to see war as just a madcap, wild, brutal, awful, ghastly thing.

Well, it's often a lot of those things. But it also has a remarkable number now of real rules and procedures of the right way to do things and the wrong way to do things and basically since the second world war the international community over 200 countries are now signatories of new humanitarian rules for war that basically try to balance off the human the an individual, the human, and the needs of military necessity and more. And they worked very hard on what are the rules and procedures for handling prisoners of war.

I think the international community should be very, very involved in asking both Russia and Ukraine for a lot more details than they're giving with the number of prisoners they've got. We don't know how many Ukraine has. It's been very coy. It just will not release the number. And I understand they keep the locations hidden. But the International Committee of the Red Cross has visited their prisoners, apparently.

But we know no details on the outside world. We know virtually nothing of the thousands now in Russian hands, particularly after the surrender of the steelworks in Mariupol, where apparently the Russians have brought in another 2,500 Ukrainians and threatened them with some form of trial, put them before a tribunal, charged them with war crimes for being Nazis and all that.

We have to remember and we have to be very strong in stressing this, that the rules of war protect those who are made prisoners of war. They are given two assurances. One, that they are not held responsible for the war at the outset. They are not prisoners to be punished. And second of all, they're being detained so they can be protected. They have certain protections

including from angry mobs and the rest of it. And health protection. The rules are that if you're a prisoner of war, you're essentially detained. The reason you're detained by the other side, the other army, is that they want to make sure that you're not a combatant anymore.

You don't take part in the war. Once you don't take part in the war, you're detained until the war is over, at which point you're supposed to be released almost immediately or as soon as possible. And you're recorded protection for your safety and your health and the rest of it. You're not seen as a prisoner. You're not a crime. Prisoners of war are not held responsible for causing the war, the invasion. That's up to their governments and the officers

ahead of them. They're not responsible for the fact that they fired at your own troops. That's up to their governments and the officers ahead of them. They're not responsible for the fact that they fired at your own troops. That's what they were ordered to do. They can be held responsible, of course, if crimes can be proved against individuals, if soldiers rob a bank, if they are seen on CCTV cameras, you know, raping people and shooting civilians. Yes, indeed, they can be brought before international tribunals, before courts of law and held for those crimes, which we're seeing now done in Ukraine. But without that, a prisoner of war must be regarded as essentially just a detainee who's been held to keep him out of the war. He is given assurances of safety. He has to be held as far away from the fighting as possible.

He has to be decently fed and clothed. The rule of thumb is that basically he should be fed the same food as the host soldiers and at least kept in the same degree of comfort. If you're a prisoner of the Russians, that may be a very poor guarantee because their own troops are treated very badly. But above all, you cannot be continually harassed. You can't be threatened.

You can't be allowed to be sick and die of illnesses. You can't be starved. And even in interrogation, there are very strict rules. You cannot harass and threaten the prisoner of war to give information. That is actually a crime against war if it can be proven. So these old Hollywood images or movie images, I should say, of the prisoner being having a gun held to his head and told that he won't see the morning if he doesn't cough up the location of his battalion. That's all a war crime, and it's not permitted.

When they're in a camp, they basically are supposed to be housed in got-in cells, individual cells, like prisoners. They're held in barracks. They get mail from home. Their families are informed, supposed to be informed, where they are being held, and they can write to them and even send food parcels.

And the International Red Cross works to get in special parcels for prisoners of war. And their efforts are made to keep them entertained, to give them exercise. They're able to put on their own shows and the rest of it it's not supposed to be hell on earth because the whole purpose of prisoners of war is to make is to make sure these individuals don't take any further part in the war you know i was going to say that there's an irony in this and i i don't mean to interrupt you but there's

an irony in this because it's the responsibility of of one side to you know defeat the other side and and often that involves killing those on the other side and at the moment they become a prisoner of war the responsibility shifts you prisoner of war, the responsibility shifts, you know, 180 degrees. Suddenly the responsibility is to protect them and to ensure their safety almost at all costs. Exactly. Exactly. It is an odd, bizarre twist. But that's like a giant referee comes and blows a whistle and says, you take these guys who are just firing at you this morning and you house them as prisoners of war safely and make sure they get home to their families and loved ones at the end of the war.

I would also always point out something that always astounded me, that certain armies allow themselves to get reputations for being utterly miserable to prisoners of war, the Japanese in the Second World War, one could even say some allied units in the Second World War, because it's every way to feed your purpose. What you want is as many enemy to stand up and surrender as possible. The Ukrainians are going out of their way to try and get a message through to the Russian soldiers. Look, if you surrender to us, we're going to treat you well.

We're not going to kill you. We're not going to harm you. We're not going to harass you. And as soon as this fighting is over, we're going to send you back to your loved ones. That's the message they're trying to get out. The Russians, on the other hand, are saying these are Nazis over there. They're drug addicts and Nazis. We're going to try them as war criminals and possibly we'll end up with the, they may end up with a death sentence.

Well, who wants to surrender to that kind of regime? So maybe you stick in extra long in your foxhole or your dugout and you fight extra hard and you kill extra numbers of the enemy soldier. You're just defeating yourself treating an enemy like that. Whereas in fact the carrot and the stick, the carrot is much more useful in getting soldiers to come over to your side. Prisoners of war are very valuable. They're valuable not only as a bargaining chip as the war ends to some degree, but also they give up information whether they know they're doing it or not. They're

very invaluable sources of information. I would point out that the Geneva Convention, there's now I think four of them, they keep adding to them, plus a major protocol that was brought in in 1977, has really gotten strict on how they are to be prevented. You can't even really embarrass a prison war much anymore. For instance, the old scenes you used to see all the time, the Second World War footage, or Korea for that matter, of long lines of prisoners being marched before the newsreel

cameras and the rest of it, that's now prohibited. You're not supposed to allow news crews in to take pictures of the POWs because that causes them embarrassment and humiliation and may cause them to lose their sense of military pride. It strikes me

frankly, this is a self-defeating rule. Quite frankly, if I was a prisoner of war in Russian, I would want news crews coming and finding me rather than having nobody know where I was, which is really the case now. Nobody outside of those holding me. I think that's self-defeating and I think it's wrong. But that goes to show you the length to which now there are rules and regulations for the handling of POWs,

and also for the handling of civilians. The rules of war generally are very much down. And 200 countries on Earth, basically, including Ukraine and Russia, are both signatories to all this. So the Russians can't turn around and the Ukrainians say, wait a minute, what are these crazy rules? We don't follow this. They signed on to it and they have to live up to it. And the international community should be saying, OK, we want an accounting now of what happened to those prisoners. Where are they? What shape are they? Well, especially given Russia's track record on this issue, when you look back at the Second World War,

I mean, they took German prisoners back to Russia, and it was years before some of them ever got back to their country. It was 1955 for the last of the prisoners, so 10 years after the war ended. And there were terrible statistics. For instance, of 300,000 who surrendered at Stalingrad. Only 90,000 came back alive. Now, some of that was due to just horrific conditions in Russia itself, the winter conditions, the famine, the food, the rest of it.

But a lot of brutality was at stake there. Of course, the Russians who were made prisoners of the Germans had, I think, several million, certainly more than a million and a half of their own soldiers died in German hands. But the Germans had signed on to the Hague agreements and rules of war, and they actually treated the Western allies much more carefully. And our losses in German hands were minuscule compared to what the Russians lost. And that goes to show it's very important to sign these agreements and live up to them. And the more these agreements come in and really hamper the action of individuals, the better. Another thing, by the way, that's very interesting to point out is that

if there are crimes against prisoners of war, the crimes do not settle just on the individual soldiers who committed those crimes against the prisoners, or the commandants who allowed them to happen. They actually go right to the

central government itself. So Russia would be held responsible for crimes against Ukrainian prisoners and vice versa. Ukraine will be held responsible for crimes against Russian prisoners and there are some of those as well. So it tries to avoid letting high authority get off by saying, allowing basically the troops to run rampant without even knowing what the rules of war are, the rules of engagement. Excuse me. Most armies now are very careful to lay down

and make sure their troops are trained in how to handle prisoners and civilians and what have you, because the upper officers and politicians don't want to be held responsible. Remember, Canada got in a mess in Afghanistan. We handed over some Taliban prisoners to the Taliban's regime. Basically, it was obvious they were going to be tortured, and they were tortured. And Canada claimed, just handed them over to the government authority.

It was pointed out in international circles that the Geneva Convention strictly forbids a country handing over prisoners to a third party. It doesn't forbid them. You can do that, and it's done quite often. But you are held responsible. Those prisoners are mistreated, tortured, killed in the hands of that third party. So Canada found itself in a very awkward position, as did the Americans early on. Just one last question on this POW issue,

because there has been some talk in recent weeks of the potential for a swap of prisoners. Does that fall under any of these rules that are being agreed to by countries? You can have swaps before the end of the hostilities, and that goes on quite often. But basically the rules are that once the hostilities end, the prisoners are supposed to be sent home. So forget the swapping part. But in actual fact, as you know, the negotiations can drag on for ages. I mean, remember Korea, the negotiations in Panmunjom went on for a year and a half.

And during that period, there were certain prisoner swaps. So I think the international community is very leery of the prisoner swaps because they're making human beings negotiating tools. And what tends to happen is, you know, you can make sure certain prisoners are not particularly well treated, which will make the other side all the more eager to bring them home. And certain things like that can play. It's best to see them all released at once. And by the way, anyone who is ill, who is sick, should be released as well, because if they can't take part in the war, they have no reason to be held either. All right.

That's been a fascinating conversation I've got time for a couple minutes more but on a different topic one of the most popular topics we've dealt with on this weekly segment with you Brian has been the spy wars issue and the sort of spy wars 2

here or at least an addendum to some of our earlier stories that you wanted to put forward this week. So it's spy wars with a Canadian connection. So tell us about it. Indeed. And this is a particular part of spy wars. It's satellite spy wars, which are just blossoming as never seen before.

One of the big disadvantages Ukraine had at the beginning of the war they didn't have good radar imagery, this sort of synthetic aperture radar imagery they call it they can see through darkness see through clouds and pick up images on the ground

well they went to allies and said can you help us and one of the best helps has turned out to be Canada's pride of its whole space system right now, RadarSat-2, RadarSat I suppose it's basically called, which is this giant synthetic aperture radar imagery system set up by Canada back in 2007. And what it does

is an extraordinary ability to pick up images from the ground in nighttime and through heavy cloud cover. And Ukraine was very heavily covered by cloud during the winter months, of course. And apparently,

because it is linked into an alliance of other satellite and intelligence gathering, private organizations, open source intelligence systems, it is able to get its intelligence through to the Ukrainians in no time at all. It's very proud of that. It's almost like a real-time intelligence.

Now, this becomes a bit of a worry, a contention because I think we dealt with last week and the week before, the very serious situation where the Americans have been bragging that their intelligence has allowed certain Russian generals to be bumped off, knocked off, and also their intelligence

was in play in the sinking of the Russian flagship in the Black Sea, the Moskva. Well, the fact is they think the radar sat was very effective in that kind of intelligence. So Canada has been sending exactly that very sensitive, incredibly valuable military intelligence to the Ukrainians with the backing of the Canadian government and the full backing of the company, which is very happy and proud to be doing it.

We don't know yet whether the Russians are reacting specifically through private warnings to Canada. We don't know what kind of talks have gone on between Canada and the Russians, but we're playing a major role. And I think Canada, I remember early in the war a certain number of Canadians tended to snicker at our contribution.

Canada is helping with certain space imagery and pictures and the rest of the people would scoff and say that's the big help. In actual fact this is giant help for Ukraine and they're very, very grateful they been able, because they've got their own extremely good intelligence services, they've been able to turn

this around and play it with other intelligence coming in from at least 12 other international satellite and other information gathering systems and really produce an almost up to the moment picture of what the Russians are doing everywhere in the country, whether they're tanks, whether they're armored cars, whether they're artillery or cannons. And this has kind of stripped the invading army of all the normal cover it would normally count on, whether it be force or whether it be nighttime or whether it be heavy cloud cover or whatever,

they can't move without being spotted by the Canadian eye in the sky and all these other open source intelligence services. I know Canada's got a lot of QNOs in the highly tech area. That's not an area I often actually peep into, but it's been getting a lot of praise for exactly the product that comes out and the degree, the speed with which they have been able to get information, vital information through to the Ukrainians.

I think we're going to leave it at that, Brian. It's fascinating stuff. I'm really glad you've brought us up to speed on that and you're quite right I mean the early days of this conflict there was a lot of criticism of Canada that wasn't doing enough in terms of help for

Ukraine perhaps some of that was warranted but clearly not on this side of things which didn't get a lot of play so thank you for helping us bring it to the forefront this week. Pleasure. Brian Stewart, thanks again, as always. Talk to you again next week.

Okay. Brian Stewart talking to us. Brian's in Toronto. You know, I first met Brian in the early 1970s. He was a young reporter, just moved to Ottawa. He'd come out of print. He was at the Montreal Gazette, an award-winning national newspaper award winner as a reporter journalist in Montreal. And I was far from that.

I was just out of Churchill, Manitoba as a local reporter, moved to Winnipeg. And, you know, I guess the CBC saw in both of us the possibilities for the future. And they wanted to get us into the more formatted kind of CBC training that takes place in terms of everything from writing to performance on camera. And so that's where we met. We met at a training course in Toronto, and we've been friends ever since. And I can sit enthralled listening to Brian's stories about past assignments over and over again. In fact, there's been more than a few times where with a group of other colleagues, I've said, Brian, tell them the story about blank, whatever that happened to be. And, you know, he always tells the stories and they're exactly the same as they were the first time I heard them.

No embellishment, and there's no need to because they're great stories to start with. Anyway, we thank Brian, as we have each week since this Ukraine conflict started because his additions to this program have been really, really important. Before we go today, one thing, this comes up every once in a while about presidents, prime ministers, leaders of countries, premiers, whether or not they leave themselves open enough for questioning. You've seen it come up a number of times on the Conservative campaign in the province of Ontario heading towards the June 2nd election.

Is Doug Ford available enough to reporters? And even when he is, does he actually ever answer the questions that are asked of him? I saw a great little exchange yesterday with a global reporter, a global reporter, global television, where the reporter was doing his job by asking questions

of which he was getting no answers at all from Premier Ford, the Conservative leader in the fight for the Ontario election. Anyway, it's come up again about Joe Biden. This after, I don't know whether you noticed yesterday, but Biden dropped another one of these kind of unscripted comments. In this case, it was about China and Taiwan and what the Americans would do if China ever invaded Taiwan.

That's a really delicate question, but when asked, Biden said right out of the gate, oh, we'd defend Taiwan, which may well be the case, but it's never been put that bluntly before. And this is one of the reasons some say that he doesn't do interviews or press conferences, because he tends to make these kind of statements that come out of nowhere and leave his staff trying to explain what he meant and why he said what he said. So there have been these questions lately about how long has it been since Biden last did a news conference and how many news conferences he actually had during his term as president. Now, you may think these news conferences are not a big deal. And there is an argument for that because some of them are not very, you know, forthcoming of real information to start with.

But nevertheless, it's been a tradition that presidents talk to journalists and leave a space open in their calendar to have news conferences, just as prime ministers do. So, here are the actual stats on Biden. Alright? Biden's interview frequency falls short of his predecessors, with just 23 conducted since taking office. Just 23. At this point in their 10 years,

President Trump had taken part in 95 interviews. President Obama reached a scorching 187, more than eight times as many as Biden. One of those 187 was with me just a couple of weeks after he took office at the White House. In the White House, it was quite an experience for me. The current president's pace to date is also well shy of George W. Bush. 60 interviews. Bill Clinton, 64.

George H.W. Bush, 70. Ronald Reagan, 78. He's gone 100 days without a press conference. Underscoring how little Biden cares to answer for struggling Americans seeking solutions to the crises he created, say the Republicans. 100 days. More than 100 days. Now, this was last Friday, marked the 100th day since he last had a news conference. Now, he does scrums occasionally. He does take a number of questions

sometimes at the end of major statements, but a formal actual news conference in the White House, in one of those rooms, or in the Rose Garden, hasn't taken place. And sit-down interviews, hardly at all. The last last sit down interview he did Was on Super Bowl Sunday February 10th Alright There you go A little factoid

You may have opinions on that You may say Hey they're pointless I've watched them all You never get anything out of them. Well, that would be untrue. There are lots of times where you actually do get real information. But there are also times where it's kind of spin, spin, spin. You feel like you're in the spin cycle of a laundromat. All right. And leave it at that for this day, Tuesday. Tomorrow, Smoke Mirrors and the Truth.

Bruce Anderson will join us. We're going to talk about something that's interesting. We're going to talk about television in the United Kingdom and perhaps a shocking piece of information for you. And we'll try to understand why it's shocking. Now, that's a tease, right? That's tomorrow on Smoke, Mirrors, and the Truth. The Wednesday edition of The Bridge with Bruce Anderson.

Bruce in his last week in Scotland before returning home. I think he's returning home next week. All right. That's it for this day. I'm Peter Mansbridge. Thanks so much for listening. We'll talk to you again in 24 hours.