The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Encore Presentation - How Canada Works -- The Book

Episode Date: May 1, 2024

Today an encore presentation of an episode that originally aired on November 21st. My fourth book, and my second co-authored with Mark Bulgutch is released by publisher Simon and Schuster today.  It's called "How Canada Works" and to Mark and me is a testament to the people who quietly and without fanfare make the country work.  Mark is my guest today as we explain how we found the jobs and the people who do them that are the centrepiece of our new book.

And hello there, welcome to The Bridge. This is the wonderful Wednesday Encore Edition. We go back to last November for this edition this week, this Encore Edition. It was at that time that my new book, co-authored with my colleague Mark Bulgich, came out. It's called How Canada Works. It's the story of a couple of dozen, actually more than a couple of dozen, different Canadians from different parts of the country, different walks of life, and how their job influences the way the country works. Interesting concept, and it became actually quite popular. It was a bestseller for a number of months on the bestseller lists in Canada, so thank you for that. But interestingly enough, just in the last little while, I've been asked by a number of people,

how did you put that book together? How did you decide on the people in it? And I said, well, you should have listened to the podcast on November 21st last year because Mark Bulguch was the guest and we talked about our book and how we ended up with it. So what better episode to encore again this week. Enjoy. And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. Later on today, the Finance Minister, the Deputy Prime Minister, Chrystia Freeland, will be giving her fall economic statement.

Much of it was already leaked yesterday. But today, we'll get the full details and we'll get the full response from the opposition parties and what impact that will have, first on the country's economy. And those of you who are desperate to hear some good news on the economic front, will they get it today? And we'll hear what the opposition has to say, how it impacts the political situation in the country. But that's all coming up later today.

Tomorrow on Smoke, Mirrors and the Truth, Bruce Anderson and I will discuss the fallout from the economic statement. But today, something, well, close to my heart. My fourth book comes out today. And I'm pretty excited about it. I wrote my first book more than 10 years ago. And the three since then have all been since I retired from doing the national CBC.

So I've had the opportunity to talk about, I guess in a way, my own kind of memoirs in one book off the record. But the other two books are really about Canada. They're not about me. They're not about the CBC. They're not about broadcasting. They're about you. They're about Canadians. And they're both co-authored with my good friend and longtime colleague, Mark Bulgich. Our first book together was Extraordinary Canadians, which was a national bestseller. I think it was an instant number one bestseller. And it talked about Canadians who faced various challenges in their lives and met those challenges head on.

And we all learned from that. This book, How Canada Works, is different. It focuses, well, you know what? I think the best way to talk about how this book unfolds, what it focuses on, and who it focuses on, and why it's important, we feel, for all Canadians to recognize their part in how the country works. So how best to do that?

Well, how about a conversation with my co-author, Mark Bulgich? As I said, long-time colleague in the workplace. We worked together at the CBC, well, since the 1980s, on The National, where Mark was the lineup editor and that's the person responsible for the order in which items unfold on the air and which items make it, how long different items can run. And it's a key role and it usually eats people up. It's tough.

There's a lot of pressure. Mark was there for a long time. And then he moved into producing. He eventually became the executive producer of all specials, like Election Nights. And the big unfolding dramas of our time. He was the one in my ear as executive producer, senior producer on 9-11.

So we've had a close relationship for many years. And you know what? You know one of the parts of this program that many of you talk about how much you like? The end bits. Guess who comes up with those? Mark does. He sees things during the week, he sends them along to me, and they become the end bits. But that's not what we're here to talk about today. We're here to talk about how Canada works, how this book came to be,

and how we met and talked to and wrote about the people in the book. So let's get right to the conversation. Here I am with my good friend, long-time colleague, Mark Bulkich. So what I'd like to do, Mark, is to think back to when we first started talking about doing this book. And we knew that we were going to feature a couple dozen or more people in the book. And it was as much about the people's job as it was about the person themselves. So we started, I don't know whether you remember this, we started by challenging each other

to come up with a list of jobs that we would like to, you know, investigate in terms of the people who did them and that. What do you remember about that coming up with the list? I remember most vividly what we didn't want to do first. We said we don't want to write about some guy who's an MP or a cabinet minister. I mean, the name of the book, How Canada Works, may lead a lot of people to think it's about like the elite of Canada, how the country works as a country and how we're seen in Sweden,

you know, and how we play, we punch above our weights somehow in international affairs. This is not that book. If you want that book, don't buy this one. What we did was eliminated that right from the top. We decided that we wanted to do – I know we keep looking for the right word, right? Ordinary Canadians, everyday Canadians. Yeah, we don't like those terms, but we always end up using them. I know.

It's right. But that's what we wanted. And I think both of these, certainly I come from a family, you know, with a father who worked in a factory all his life you know he he his education ended in grade three believe it or not it was a different time uh because his father died and he had to quit school to go and uh support his help support his family as a 10 year old i mean it was a different time not a better time for sure. And so he, you know, he's, he raised a family with the money he made working in a factory. And I think the book,

certainly from my point of view, and I think from yours as well, wants to talk about those kinds of people who really make this country work because they work every day. They may not wake up every day and say, yippee, I'm going to work, but they do it. That's not to say these people in the book hate their jobs. I think that we found people who really do. Yeah, most of them seem to, you know, really love their jobs. And, you know, when you think about it, all of these jobs, and we'll get to the kind of jobs we're talking about here in a minute,

all these jobs, it's hard to imagine the country working without these jobs being filled by people who love what they do and do it well. Some people have already asked me, oh, is this going to be the counter-argument to the country's broken? And I said, no, no, no. No, no, no. That's not what this is.

The country's broken argument is a political argument. And, you know, and people will make that argument, especially the politicians. And I can see that argument from both sides, but that's not what this is about. You know, that argument is about, as you mentioned, you know, the political leaders of the country, the business leaders, the labor leaders,

the education leaders, the academics. That's their argument about whether the country is broken or not. This is not about that. This is about how the country, in fact, works through the power of, here we go again, ordinary people. And so that's what I, you know, that's what I was hoping we'd achieve. And I know that's what you were hoping we'd achieve too. And to do that, we needed to find those kind of people in those kind of jobs.

And so that's, you know, before we looked for the people, we had to determine the jobs. And that's what I was getting at with, you know, thinking back to those early days after Simon & Schuster had asked us to consider something and we started thinking about this. And we were coming up with a list and part of the list, at least on my part, was a fascination with certain jobs. remember that I really wanted to do to make sure that somewhere in there we had a high rise or an office tower window washer because I've been fascinated by that job like who would go into that why would you do that I mean I I'm scared of going on an elevator let alone hanging off the side of a building but the more I learned about the particular guy that we talked to in this book,

he's in Edmonton, I realized that, you know, what they do helps make the country work. I mean, they wash windows. You know, a major building will wash all their windows at least twice a year and if they don't, the dirt builds up very quickly. you know, a major building will wash all their windows at least twice a year. And if they don't, the dirt builds up very quickly. And if you're working in an office tower, you will at least want to be able to look outside the window.

And if you don't wash them, you're not going to be able to see anything. So, I mean, that's just a little thing. It's a little thing, sounds small, but it's part of this mosaic of stories about how the country works. Now, there's lots of other. I think we, in my head, and I think in yours, I think we also thought we could put a face to some of the jobs that sometimes in our experience show up in the news and sometimes are heavily criticized i mean we i'll give you the example we have somebody who works at the uh parole board and heaven knows how often they are in the news and usually because of a bad thing happening that That's their fault in theory.

And, you know, this is part of the country is broken argument again. And so I thought it would be interesting to talk to somebody who is actually a person, like not the parole board, but here's a guy, right, whose job it is to make these critical decisions about whether an offender, that's what they call them, can be released on parole. And a lot of people in this country and a lot of, you know, he tells a story actually of going to a convention in the United States and talking about how parole works in Canada.

And somebody stood up when it was all over and said, that's all very nice, Mr. Parole Man from Canada. But I didn't hear you say he ain't served enough time, which is, you know, an argument you hear so often, even this country that that is not an argument that is limited to the united states and when and we hear that all the time when we were doing the news and you you read it now and so i wanted his reaction like what does he do about that because he knows that's a general feeling that kind of sits out there that we're just that we're soft on crime, that they're responsible for letting out very dangerous people onto our streets. And I kind of figured in my head, there's nobody whose job it is to gets up in the morning and says, I wonder how many dangerous people I can let loose in Canada today. Like I knew that wasn't going to be his story. But I wanted to hear his story and how he reacted to all the criticism that I knew he knew about. So I mean, that's putting a face,

I think, to a faceless job, just like your window washer job. You know, it's, we take it for granted in many ways that there are people out there doing these things that have to be done uh or that should be done and yet we don't think about them very often we sometimes think of them as an institution as in the parole board or we don't think of them at all just as a window washer and i think the book uh in our heads is an an antidote that, to that, like, stop for a minute, think about it. Like, you know, you surely know what you do for a living. And you may like it, you may not like it, but you know what you do. And there are lots of people in this country who contribute to just sanity. You know, our everyday sanity. We go about things because other people are just quietly doing what they are supposed to be doing. And, you know, very often thanklessly.

So the book isn't a big thank you to them, but at least it should open up your eyes, as it certainly did mine, to all these people and what they do and how they do it. And your eyes, I'm sure, and demystifying a lot of them. Because I think a lot of them come with misunderstandings at best about how they do their jobs or complete ignorance, which is probably more common. You're right. I mean, I find myself when I read the book back, I find myself

at the end of each section and there are 28 people we profile here. And, you know, sometimes it's we're profiling the job more than the person. Right. And then sometimes we're profiling the person more than the job. But I find myself at the end of each one of these segments saying, wow, you know, like the country would not work if that job and that person didn't exist. Like we need that. Like what would we do without them? Like we have a funeral director in there,

and a wonderful woman from Scarborough, in sort of the greater Toronto area. And, you know, I read her story, and, you know, it's emotional. She talks about her admiration for first responders, and then said, you know, I'm not a first responder. I'm the last responder. And what's important for her is that she treats the situation she's in the same way those first responders do, you know, with care and kindness and understanding for the family and all of that.

And you say, okay, well, like, what would we be without funeral directors? You need them. You need funeral homes. You need that to be a part of how the country works. And you can go through that with each of the 28 people we profile. I don't think, Peter, in that one, it's a good example of somebody who does that important job. And yet, if you went to a grade three class and said, what do you want to do when you grow up?

I suspect no one's picking up their hand and saying, I'd like to be a funeral director. Nor did she. Nor did she. She ran away from it when they told her she had the qualities to handle that. You know, those tests you can do at the end of high school. What would you be good at? Someone's got to do it. Right. tests you you can do at the end of high school too where what would you be good at to do it right and she done you know but and she is somebody who doesn't wake up on monday morning and say oh my god another week of this i mean she takes it seriously she understands that it's

important and that's again at it over and over in the book i think you find people who are doing jobs that you might not want to do but you can't not conceive of a country that doesn't have people doing these jobs. I mean, some of the jobs are important. Some aren't, right? I mean, well, important, capital I important. I think every job is important because it contributes in some way to the country. But I think we also went out of our way to find people who do kind of neat jobs, you know, just jobs that make our lives a little better, a little easier. I mean, I think in that category, I think you would put the wedding planner, for example. I mean, you don't know, I don't think, you know, wedding planner, again,

it's not something you pick up your hand in grade three and say you want to do. But it really contributes so much to so many lives just, you know, because weddings, and again, I'm rambling a little bit because every time I say something, something else comes into my head, so you'll forgive me. But with her and with so many of the jobs that we looked at, I think we found out something that we never even thought about, never mind in the job, but in the background of the job. When she talked about planning a wedding, it never occurred to me

because we are of a certain age, both of us, where weddings were different. And now, she says, most people who are getting married are already living together. And that changes the whole dynamic of it, of how a wedding is planned. Because she says sometimes, and she's the wedding planner that we've done is in Newfoundland. And she says, very often, people who are getting married live in Ottawa, but their families are in Newfoundland. So the wedding is in Newfoundland and they're not even there to plan it. Like she plans it and they're off in Ottawa or wherever,

and they're coming in just for the weekend to get married, but it has to go tickety-boo, right? For the mother, the fathers, the uncles that are going to be there. And it's really, it boggled my mind, you know, as a person who organized federal elections, who knows a thing or two about organizing. So there you go, folks. There's the person to blame if you don't like results on election night because he just said he organizes election campaigns.

He was with the CBC. So this is what, you know, Pauliev and everybody's talking about was with the CBC. So this is what, you know, Paul Yev and everybody's talking about, about the CBC. He organized the elections. No, we know what he means by that, right? Yeah, you know what I mean by that. Yes, he organized our coverage

of the election results that the Canadian people voted for. Right. Which is obviously an organizational task. But here is the wedding planner task, right? Completely different, obviously. But again, like the funeral director takes it seriously because it's so important to so many people. And it just, you discover things that you never even think about in so many of the chapters for me.

And in talking to these people, I said, wow, I didn't know that. And wow, I didn't know that. And wow, I didn't know that. I didn't know that a zookeeper would never get caught inside a cage with a tiger, just him and the tiger that I, I understood. I didn't understand or didn't know that a zookeeper, at least the one we profile here would not get caught in a cage with a male camel. I did not know that. You're going to have to buy the book and read it to find out why. That's right.

You mentioned a moment ago, you mentioned how the wedding planners in Newfoundland, I mentioned how the window washer was in Edmonton. We, we, you know, once we'd come up with the list, then we needed to find the people and we wanted to make sure that it

represented the country geographically. So we're looking all over so talk a little bit about how we how we found these people uh well you're quite right uh after you know finding the jobs was job one and then finding the people was job two and then we are careful about trying to make sure that everybody lives in toronto or ottawa or montreal but we do spread it across the country um and we also want a mix of women and men uh we want to represent the country in its demographies we want older younger richer poorer we want all that and in a couple of dozen stories it's hard sometimes to do that uh but we certainly have done our best um i think what i what what we did was we looked for jobs that could fit in a place so if you were gonna if you try to find someone put somebody in prince edward island for example if you work going to try to find someone, put somebody in Prince Edward Island, for example, if you work backwards.

Right. So you say, OK, what kind of job works in PEI that kind of makes the case for how that job is done? I mean, if you try to do a story and base a story in PEI of a zookeeper, I'm not even sure there is a zoo in PEI. If I'm wrong, we there is a zoo in PEI, if I'm wrong. We'll hear about it pretty quickly. We'll hear about it. But there may not be a zookeeper. There may not be a zoo in PEI. I don't know. So it's hard to do a zookeeper in PEI. It's certainly hard to do. Well, one, I know for sure they don't have in PEI, that they don't have the person who runs the Canadarm in PEI, right? Okay, so you can't do a profile of a person who works at the Canadian Space Agency and maneuvers Canadarm attached to the International Space Station. See, that's another thing I learned, right?

I always assumed, and, you know, I've been down there and did more than a few launches. And I always assumed that the Canadarm was operated by somebody on the shuttle or on the International Space Station. But here we learn in the book here that, no, that's not the way it operates. It's operated from Longueuil, Quebec, just on the south shore of Montreal. Amazing. No, it's amazing. They do it all remotely. They discovered that astronauts had better things to do than maneuver the arm. So they do it remotely from the ground.

And the Canadians do it because it's our arm. It's our contribution. Did anybody say no to you to tell their story? None of mine said no. Let me think. They all said sort of why me but they got over that quickly no nobody oh wait they didn't say no but they somehow i i had just a couple who never got back to me they said yes and we'll get to it and i you know i would write them again or call again and then it just never happened uh for whatever reason but nobody's i

mean again you're right when you deal with like here comes that word again ordinary canadians uh they don't think of themselves as subjects for a book right right? They just don't. I mean, they just don't. I mean, who's in a book? I mean. We had that, in a way, we had that problem in the first book we wrote together, Extraordinary Canadians, where there was a hesitation on some of their parts

about the sort of why me thing. And, you know, my story is, there's nothing interesting about my story. And we said, no, you know my story is nothing interesting about my story and we said actually your story is pretty interesting and and canadians found that um because the the book was a you know instant number one bestseller and uh you know it's always good to have that uh when you're selling a book um how this one will do will be up to those out there, some of whom are listening right now, as to whether they want to read this book. But here's the other thing, and I'm going to talk about this. We're going to take a quick break, and when we come back, we'll talk about

this. We learned from extraordinary Canadians that there's more ways than one to write a book like this. And we learned that lesson with Extraordinary Canadians. It went very well. And we're using the same lesson on how Canada works. We'll talk about that when we come back. And welcome back. You're listening to the Tuesday episode this week of The Bridge. I'm Peter Mansbridge. You're listening on Sirius XM, channel 167.

Canada Talks are on your favorite podcast platform. Whichever way you're listening, we're glad to have you with us. The guest today is Mark Bulguch, who is my co-author for how canada works which was released today by simon and schuster and so you can as soon as this is over you can rush out and purchase your book or you can go online and purchase it because it's a pretty easy to get hold of it online as well. Mark, what we did with Extraordinary Canadians, and it took a little while for us as writers to get used to it, was we used the people we were focusing on in that book to tell their own story.

I mean, we interviewed them, and we used the same method here with How Canada Works. So we find I mean, we interview them, and we use the same method here with How Canada Works. So we find the people, we interview them, and then we take their words, we transcribe the interviews, and then we put it together, basically using their voice, not necessarily in the order in which they were interviewed, but we put it together as a story that's their voice. So it comes off like it is written by them.

And in some ways it is, because it's their story told by them. We just reconstructed it a bit to make it a readable segment each time. Talk about the process, because it is interesting. You don't see this very often. But a lot of people talked in our last book about how that made it that much more enjoyable reading the book. Yeah. It's in some ways easier uh i would think uh because they give you this backbone that you have

to work with and nobody knows what they're talking about better than they know i mean if we were to write about window washing it would like i couldn't write a thing about window washing it would like I couldn't write a thing about window washing so they supply all the information um and but they're not storytellers necessarily and nope even the best storytellers I mean I've I've interviewed a lot of storytellers and it's very hard to tell a story a b c d e everybody tells the story a l g p and it rambles just like i'm probably rambling now and if you were to transcribe this interview and just put it on into a book everyone would say holy cow these guys are uh people actually listen to this uh but but they give us the the backbone and and they give it to us with such uh knowledge because they really do understand what they're talking about right they're not just airy fairy uh coming up with notions of things they know what they do every single day of their working lives.

And they enrich us with that. And once we get over the, really? Really? That's what's going on? Then it really is like you look at the transcript and you think to yourself, okay, what do I remember from the interview? I mean, that's just before you read it even. What sticks out to me and and there's a thread that comes to you that you say this is what's most interesting

because again like i think of the dairy farmer like i learned like i'm a city boy i like i freely admit like i know almost zero about farming. I just don't. And certainly dairy farming, nothing. And so everything he told me was big news. And I found it so interesting. And I think most of the people who will read the book aren't dairy farmers, clearly. And so I'm thinking, how do I make what he told me? Because some of it, obviously, he is inside baseball

or inside dairy farming in this case. And so you try to figure out what he said that's interesting to people like me. If it's interesting to me, presumably it's going to be interesting to other people who aren't into dairy farming as they're living. Like I had no idea. Here we go, Give something away. Cows milk themselves now in this country. I had no idea. I mean, maybe it's me

because I'm a city boy, but I, you know, I kind of understood how we come from hand milking. I had gotten past that and I knew there was automatic milking machines, but I had zero idea that cows literally now milk themselves. And again, I won't explain it. You can buy the book if you're kind of saying, what's he talking about that crazy city boy? He thinks cows milk themselves. Well, they do. And I had no idea, right? I had zero idea. And so that's interesting to me. And I figure it's got to be interesting to everybody else. And so that becomes like the thread of his story. Like what I didn't know, what I didn't know about wedding planning, what I didn't know

about being a principal in a high school in a fairly economically deprived area of this country. We have him in the book. What I know about running a shopping mall, nothing, right? I know how to shop in a shopping mall, but I don't know how to run a shopping mall. And so we have a manager of a shopping mall. And so I just take the things that are interesting to me

and try to make a story of it that will interest other people like me who I think are out there because like me, they've never thought about, yeah, I can go into that mall and everything seems to work tickety-boo. How come? It's because of this guy. You know, it's kind of the way we learned our profession over all those years in newsrooms and different parts of the country. I was out west, you were in Quebec, and then we were together in Toronto. But when you do an interview or you do any kind of a story,

you're looking for that one element that you can build around. You're a farmer, and the way cows milk themselves. Sure, Mark. Sure they do. I had one in talking with the chief of the Neskintanga First Nation in Northern Ontario. And that First Nation is fairly well known because it's had, it's one of those First Nations that has a bad water supply, and they haven't had pure,

clean water in more than a quarter of a century, which seems like unbelievable to think of in Canada, but they haven't. And there have been millions of dollars spent trying to fix it, but they still don't have it. Anyway, everything that has shaped his life was built around something that happened when he was 10 years old. And I won't say what it is, but everything, when he told me the story, I said, we've got to build his story around that moment and take it to where we are now.

And so that's one of the things we try to do as storytellers. Everybody has their own methodology on these things. And if you look hard enough, you'll be able to tell which ones of these stories that Mark has written and which ones I've written. But they're all, you know, they're all really interesting. And, you know, what do you think people will take away from this book when they've read all these stories? Because, you know, they're not linked together.

They're all individual stories. it's like basically 28 chapters um and you know with with i think you'll find interesting stories in all of them but they're more than just interesting what are the what do you walk away with having read this book well you know i think both of us have come to love this country to uh we've had an extraordinary privilege life at cbc to be able to travel this country as much as we did i mean i think you know well you certainly are probably in the top 50 of people who have seen every part of this country. I've been to every province and territory, which, again, it'd be interesting to know how many Canadians can say I've been to every province and territory. Like, I don't know what the you know, by the CBC, on the public purse, so to speak.

Mark and his wife Rhonda decided that when their first children were born, that they were going to take their kids across the country, see every part. And that's what they did each summer. They went, you know, they went to each province, each region of the country, see every part. And that's what they did each summer. They went, you know, they went to each province, each region of the country, and, you know, and saw it all that way. So there was a commitment on his part beyond the job to see the country and to learn about the country. Sorry, I interrupted you.

Thank you. But having seen the country, I sometimes think the country I've seen with my own eyes is so different from the country that is in the news, which is hard for me to say since we were responsible in so many ways for what Canadians see of themselves or other Canadians. And, you know, I think, like I've lived in Ontario now for, I guess, 40 years or so, and in Quebec before that, and you kind of sometimes think of Western Canadians as different from us. And yet when you go out to Calgary or you go to Edmonton, you go out to Vancouver, seem just like me. They seem just as proud to be Canadians. They don't hate Ontarians. People I know and my neighbors here

never keep thinking about Alberta as somehow defined by the oil and gas industry. They're just people. And that's what the book is. It says that Canadians are just doing what they're supposed to do. You know, we all wake up in the morning. We try to do the best we can. If we can enjoy what we're doing and make money at the same time, great. That's kind of what you should be trying to do. And here we have them, right? These are just salt of the earth.

I mean, again, I'm looking for the non-cliched way to say these are ordinary people, but they are. I go back to what we talked about in PEI. We have something from PEI. He's a priest because we figured, well, that's got to be pretty much the same everywhere, right? And PEI has churches, and Calgary has churches. And so let's put the priest, let's find a priest in PEI. And talking to him and the story that emerges from him is here's a guy who has a difficult job, like just like the funeral director, it seems to me, but have a difficult job like just like the funeral director it seems to me but have a

difficult job dealing with families or in terrible distress and he deals with funerals weddings baptisms all that and and what came across in in talking to him and i hope comes across in the in the in the book is not his doubt about god but his doubt about himself is he up to the challenge of of trying to keep people uh within their faith and not just faith in god but in faith in humanity and faith in life uh and is he up to it like that's again it's pretty profound uh when you think about it it so if if you asked, and you did ask me, what do I hope people take away from it? I hope they understand that this country is built on some very fine people who aren't political in the political sense um and and we know again from our political experience that's you know as journalists that most people don't pay attention to all the the raucous and the noise and the the yelling and

the screaming in the uh political arena until there's an election and then they might pay attention last couple of weeks uh so the country just goes along just fine, thank you very much, without somebody screaming that the country is broken, without somebody trying to say we have your back all the time. country because it is built on the work of these kinds of people who, you know, who may not say it out loud that they love this country, but they contribute to this country in a very meaningful way, even if their job doesn't seem to make headlines ever. But we need them, as you said, you know, we can't live without them, and they go about doing their job in a way that is unrewarded other than monetarily, perhaps, and they get some job satisfaction,

but does anybody ever come and pat somebody on the back because they stack the groceries well at the supermarket? No, nobody comes and pats them on the back. It's unusual. I mean, every once in a while, I'm not a big person who does this. My wife does this more than I do. We went to a hockey banquet

on Friday and the food was really good. The service was really good. It was a big hall. It wasn't the restaurant. It was a catering hall, I guess, a banquet hall. And she called them on Monday. And the lady who answered the phone is the wife well i guess this couple owns the thing and she said this is great just because she was starting to compliment them rather than complain and and the wife said hold on hold on i have to get my husband to hear this because we never get calls from people with a compliment all we ever get are the food was cold the food was this the food was cold, the food was this, the food was that, noisy, this. It's so nice to have somebody call

when they appreciate what we did. Well, we don't do that enough, obviously. And I know guilty is charged. I know I don't do it enough. My wife is one of the ones who does it. But that's what the book is. It's a pat on the back, not just to the 28 people in the book. I hope people see it as a pat on the back to people who just do what they're

supposed to do and we all benefit from it. And that's, ladies and gentlemen, is how Canada works. 28 people, and we should underline the fact, we're not trying to say these are the 28 jobs that make canada work nothing else counts they're just the 28 that we started with you know and uh and and we're glad we did um but there are many others who are similar to this, different jobs, different places, different people, but they too make the country work. Mark, thank you for doing this, and we'll see how the book sells.

I'm sure it'll do well. I guess it won't sell as many books as you have downloads. Is that right? Well, if it does sell as many books as we have downloads, then you and I can go on a cruise for the rest of our lives. All right. You take care. We'll talk again soon.

Thanks, Mark. You bet. Bye-bye. Mark Bulgich, co-author of How Canada Works. Pleasure to work with Mark all these years and to continue working with him. How Canada Works can be purchased at your local bookstore as of today. Today is day one of the sale of How Canada Works. You can also purchase it online.

And I hope you have an opportunity to take a glimpse because I think what you'll see when you read this book is in many cases you're going to see yourself through the eyes of these really quite fascinating Canadians who helped the country work. All right, enough with the self-promotion for today, but glad to have the opportunity to do it. Many of you, in fact, had written and asked for me to talk about the book before you rushed out to buy it,

which you've probably already rushed out the door now, and you're probably not hearing this last bit, and there's an end bit here. I like this story because, in one way way it shows the power of complaining, and in another way it shows the absurdity of complaining in some cases. So here's the story. It comes out of Britain. The headline in the mirror is church bells that have rung every hour for 200 years, silenced after one noise complaint. Bradley Jolly, a news reporter for the Mirror,

and this is what Bradley wrote just the other day. A Killjoy Council has silenced a church bell which sounded every hour, every hour, for more than 200 years after one complaint about noise. Beath Parish Church in Ayrshire, we're talking Scotland here, won't gong around the clock anymore

as the resident said their sleep had been disturbed. Now Church of Scotland has stopped the bell between 11 p.m. and 7 a.m. But more than 900 people have signed a petition to restore the chimes to 24 hours as they say the bells represent Beeth's history and heritage. Brian McWilliams, who has lived next door to the church for 23 years, started the petition as he believes the tradition is ingrained

in our community for generations. North Ayrshire Council asked the Church of Scotland to consider silencing the bell overnight after one noise complaint. The church's Kirk session said members were emphatic and recognized it could be disturbing for some people. A spokesperson said the Kirk session took environmental health suggestions on board,

embracing the Bible teaching of love thy neighbor as thyself. Mr. McWilliams, speaking to the BBC, said, The chiming clock is just a timekeeper. It serves as an audible connection to our history and heritage and has been chiming for 200 years. Built in 1810, the Beath Parish Church has been an important part of the town's history. Church archivist Tom Hart said there were previous discussions about the bell in the 1990s. However, the 24-hour tradition continued. North Ayrshire Council said that the church was advised

that when assessing for nuisance, environmental health inspectors would consider the fact that the noise was for long-established cultural or religious reasons. Really? One complaint ends a 200-year tradition. I don't think that'll last. I think that'll be back. But we'll see. I hope you enjoyed that encore edition of The Bridge

from last November 21st. And Mark Bulgich and myself talking about the book we co-authored, How Canada Works. Tomorrow, your turn. You're approaching the deadline right now, 6 p.m. tonight. You got to get your answers to the big question. Name one teacher that had an enormous influence on your life. We've had lots of entries again this week. Considerable. People are having a hard time keeping it short, but they're telling great

stories and we'll probably have to pare down the number that actually make it onto the show tomorrow. But nevertheless, some great answers to the question. Name the one teacher who's had the most influence on your life. Have your answers in by 6 p.m. tonight, Eastern Time. The Mansbridge Podcast at gmail.com. The Mansbridge Podcast at gmail.com. The Mansbridge Podcast at gmail.com. Include your name and the location you're writing from. That's it. See you tomorrow.

For your turn, I'm Peter Mansbridge. Thanks for listening. Talk to you again, 24 hours.