The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Gotta Love Those Vikings

Episode Date: May 20, 2020

Starting tonight with some encouraging news from Denmark -- and then my take on the "Art of Deflection". Plus, a June Wedding -- how times have changed.(Sorry, but an earlier release of this episode had the sound of a metronome going throughout the podcast, I think that's fixed now!)

And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here with the latest episode of The Bridge Daily. Now, as the music begins to die out, you may hear in the background the sound of a lawnmower. You know, I'm leaving the window open so I can hear the lawnmower. I'm so excited about hearing a lawnmower. Finally. You know, the snow's gone, the rain has stopped, the sun's out, and the sound of a lawnmower.

Of course, as soon as I start talking about it, it's kind of disappeared. A bit of a hum out there. You may hear it again. Anyway. So what do you know about Denmark? You like that transition? The lawnmower to Denmark?

What do you know about Denmark? I'll tell you what I know about Denmark. Not a heck of a lot. I've never been to Denmark. I've talked about Denmark before. You remember early on in the Bridge Daily, I talked about our friend Rebecca, who was trying to make that decision of whether to come home or not. She's taking University Copenhagen this year. And as it turned out, she did come home. Home for her is Vancouver. So that's where she is now. Kind of waiting out the year and doing things, doing her university classes online to finish off the year. So that's sort of my only connection with Denmark. Love Vikings. I've always liked Viking stories

ever since I was a little kid. Was it Leif Erikson? Or was the other guy Red? Eric the Red or somebody Red? So I like Viking stories and I like watching some of these Viking shows that are out there. That was not a lawnmower, that was a motorcycle that just went by. See, like it's, it's going to be summer soon. So in spite of all the craziness around us and the way we're living and the way we have to live,

there are some nice aspects to this time of year that we're still getting to enjoy. Anyway, back to Denmark. So great television shows. They make some great television shows. There was one just a couple of years ago that was about the Danish prime minister. She was terrific.

She was tough, smart. And it was a great series. So great, I can't remember the name of it, but it was really good. So look it up. Danish television series about Danish Prime Minister. You can find it. I think it's probably on Netflix or Crave

or one of those streaming services. And it's a good one. There's the lawnmower. And finally, there's Freddie Anderson Freddie Anderson from Denmark Freddie Anderson the goaltender for the Toronto Maple Leafs Freddie never got back to Denmark

during the COVID-19 scare he instead went down to Arizona with his buddy Austin Matthews and they've been kind of holed out there waiting for a final decision on whether or not they're going to start up the league again. Play the remainder of the 2019-2020 series. Schedule and then into the playoff series.

So those are kind of the things I know about Denmark. But here's what you want to know about Denmark today. It's a really interesting story. On the side of, you know, good news, promising news, positive news on the COVID-19 story. Denmark's Government Disease Research Centre, they call it the SSI, released some stats today.

This is after four and a half weeks, four and a half weeks, since Denmark began reopening. So the first reopenings were in Denmark. Four and a half weeks ago. The first country outside of Asia. To reopen. And the fear has been.

It's always been. That if you reopen. Things the fear has been, it's always been, that if you reopen, things can bounce back and you can get hit just as hard again, which would make it even more difficult to deal with this virus. That was the fear. And it is the fear. and it remains the fear in everywhere that reopens. But Denmark, they're doing something right because their numbers have not gone up. They haven't gone up hardly at all. We've opened the economy. People are not getting sick,

we're very confused in a way. And what are they confused about? They're confused as to why this is actually working so well. Why increased infection activity is still not recorded four and a half weeks after the first reopening of Denmark. That's from their health people. We do not know whether this is due to high compliance with physical distance and hygiene advice.

Now, I'm not an expert. I don't know. But I would argue you do both things. You're able to pull off both things, reopen a bit, and keep physical distancing and washing your hands and all that stuff. Masks when needed. You've got a good chance of dealing with this, not letting the situation get worse.

Well, Denmark brags that it has a high compliance rate, high compliance rate. That's what we're looking for. That's what we're looking for here as province after province begins to deal with reopening. Everybody's different. Manitoba today, I think, is increasing its number of gatherings. It can go from like 25 people. There's Bella, the dog, has finally woke up for its afternoon slumber

because it's heard the lawnmower outside. So she's going to bark for a while until she gets bored of that. So we'll add that to the mix of great sounds going on in the background here today. A little dog barking, a little lawnmower, a little motorcycle. Let's see what else we can get in here. Anyway, that's one possibility, is that the high compliance with the kind of advice we've all been getting, whether we're in Denmark or here in Canada, or the Danes say, is it a weakening of the virus itself?

I don't know. That may be a stretch. That may be wishful thinking. But whatever way you look at that story from Denmark today, it's positive. It's encouraging. It shows that if you are focused on how you're going to deal with life now, then perhaps good things can happen. So that's what's happening there. All right, Bella.

Okay, you've been barking. That's okay. That's enough. Seriously. She's a Nova Scotia duck tolling retriever, and she's, I guess, around 12 years old now. Great dog. She's been a fantastic dog.

And if you follow Cynthia on Instagram, you'll see pictures of her all the time. All right, moving on. Topic number two. I think I mentioned this at some point during, might have been during the election campaign or leading up to the election campaign or immediately after the election campaign.

It's one of the things that politicians do when they want to bury a story. You got bad news, you got to deal with it. I first remember doing this, watching this unfold in the, it was be in the late 1970s. I'm sure it had been going on before then, but it was the first time I noticed it when I was a Parliament Hill reporter in Ottawa covering Pierre Trudeau. And whenever they had something, well not whenever, but occasionally when something

was bad news and they wanted to kind of bury it, they would make sure they didn't announce it until Friday afternoon at four o'clock, just as everybody was getting ready for the weekend. It would get a little bit of play. It would be in the Saturday morning papers. But by Monday, by the time everybody was back at their job, things had moved on. And whatever that bad news was, may not have been forgotten, but it wasn't up there on the front page of the newspaper anymore.

So decade after decade, other governments have done exactly the same thing. It doesn't matter what stripe they were. Conservative governments, NDP governments in the provinces, and the liberals, of course. They've all done it. Now, watching Donald Trump, he's added a kind of different texture to it. It's kind of the art of the deflection. He's moved the timetable up. He doesn't 4 o'clock on a Friday afternoon. It's too early for him.

He wants it late Friday night. So it misses all the evening newscasts, and it's really kind of buried into cable news for the next few days. So in the last eight weeks, four of them on a Friday night, usually late at night, somewhere between 8 and 10 o'clock at night, he's fired an inspector general. Each department has one, and they're kind of independent of everybody, and they sort of investigate concerns that are expressed within the department about the way the department's

running, and yes, they investigate whistleblowers as well. Well, four inspectors general have been fired by Donald Trump on a Friday night. And they've all seemingly had something to do with some kind of investigation of some kind of scandal that involved Trump or somebody close to Trump. Same reason, bury it, deep six it. Now, the media is a little different now than it was, you know, 40, 50 years ago. They do tend to follow up. So that Inspector General story was getting a lot of play over the weekend and was set to be the big story on the Monday

when everybody was sort of back in town in Washington. So that's where the art of the deflection comes in. And if there's one thing you can say about Trump, is he's been a master at deflecting. Now either he's been a master or the media have been suckers. Either way, it's kind of worked. So what happens on Monday? What happens on Monday?

Out of nowhere, Donald Trump's giving a statement on something and drops the little bomb that he's on. Hydro, what is it? Hydrochloric, you know the one. Chloroquine. That he's on it, he's taking it. As a preventative. Now, this is a drug, hydroxychloroquine.

This is a drug that the FDA, the Food and Drug Administration, has said is dangerous for anyone who takes it without a doctor's advice on a particular area, usually malaria. But Trump and some of his toadies have been saying for weeks that this drug can help you if you've got COVID-19. It can lessen the impact of it. There's no firm medical proof of that, but he's been saying it anyway. So on Monday, he drops this little thing, saying that he's actually on it as a preventative. Nobody said it was a preventative, even those who were claiming that it worked as lessening the degree of severity of the disease. But he says,

oh, no, I'm taking it as a preventative. I take it every day. My doctor and I talked about it and we decided the risk was worth it. So, of course, the media goes crazy. The inspector general story kind of like disappears. Not totally, but it certainly dropped from the top story as everybody got all excited about this statement by Trump. And part of the excitement was based about what? Do you believe him? And it's difficult to believe the guy, right? He's told by most accounts more than 18,000 lies since he was inaugurated as president.

So why isn't this just another lie? Because a lot of the lies have been about deflection. About, sure, there's this big story going on in front of you, but look at that shiny ball over here in the corner. And on this day, the shiny ball in the corner was hydroxychloroquine and the fact that he was taking it of course people wanted to hear from his doctor

we have still not heard from his doctor other than a statement that was put out the day after Trump had made his statement and nowhere in that statement does he say that he'd given him the advice to take the drug, only that they had discussed the pros and cons of taking the drug. No indication whether he gave him a prescription for the drug, no indication of whether he witnessed him taking the drug, nothing. But you know, it doesn't matter, because it was all about the art of deflection.

Try to get things away from the Inspector General story. And you could name dozens of times just in the last 10 weeks where Trump has moved a deflection into the arena. The masks was a deflection. The Fauci's going to get fired was a deflection. All these things. Now, once again, let me say again,

he's not the first guy to do that. He's not the first politician to use a deflection. He's not the first politician to try to bury bad news on a late Friday night. That's part of the political game, if you will. And so that's what's happening there. And the only reason I bring this up is a few of you have written asking me to talk about the hydroxychloroquine story,

what I thought of it. Well, that's what I think of it. Beyond that, I don't think anything of it. Would I take it? Absolutely not. You know, unless my doctor came to me and said, you know, you've got to take this. But my doctor is not going to say that. He's certainly not going to say that based on any evidence that he's seen, and

he's on top of this situation. So, there you go. That's what I think of that story. I don't think a lot about it. But, like everything else in politics, these things don't happen by accident. Look carefully at that media availability where Trump dropped this little thing. That looked pretty deliberate. Just happened to pop into the story on a Monday afternoon when he's being questioned about

the Inspector General story. So you can expect these things to come along, whether it's Donald Trump, whether it's Joe Biden, whether it's Justin Trudeau. I was going to say whether it was Andrew Scheer, but you know, he has not learned how to deflect. The fact that he's still having to deal with this issue about having dual citizenship,

Canadian and American, and now he's not going to take it back, the American citizenship, he's not going to hand it in like he said he would during the election campaign. But he's still dealing with this. It's crazy. And once again, full disclosure, I have two citizenships. I was born in Britain, so I have a British passport

and I have a Canadian passport. And like a lot of other journalists I know, it's a good thing to have two passports. Sometimes you have to separate places you've been to. It makes getting in and out of countries a lot easier. But hey, I'm not running for prime minister. And I didn't say that I would get rid of one and then go back on my promise to do that.

Anyway, he hasn't learned how to deflect. There's an art in that. But you've got to be careful how often you use it or nobody will ever believe you if you do it too often. And that's part of the problem we're seeing in Washington today. Nobody believes it except the hard, hard core, the so-called base that it appears still here, just months before an election.

Donald Trump is trying to protect his base, trying to engage his base, trying to ensure that his base still supports him. Usually by this time in an election year, you're out there trying to open that tent up, broaden the base, bring in more support. Base is not going to get you a lot. Real base is around 30 to 35%. Most polls right now show him in the 40 to 42, 43% range. You're going to get wiped out if that's all you can get on election day.

Now, election day is not until November. Who knows what may happen between now and then. But it's not a good sign that if everything you're doing and everything you're saying is trying to appeal to your base, that's going to make things really difficult come election day. All right, enough. I said, didn't I promise one time that I wouldn't talk about Trump anymore? You asked. You asked me to, so I decided to do it.

Okay, I've got one other thing. What's the most popular month of the year for weddings? That's right, June. And I bet a lot of you probably know somebody who was planning to get married in June. It could be you. It could be your daughter, your granddaughter. It could be a niece. It could be a friend.

Well, the odds are that wedding may still go ahead, but it's sure going to look a lot different than the way it might have been planned six months ago. And there's a good little piece in one of the papers today that I follow about that, the sort of wedding industry and the crunch that's happened as a result of COVID-19. So people are adapting,

and instead of the wedding with 100 to 200 people, the wedding's with 20 people or 30 people maybe. So what is that going to do? Well, it's probably going to hurt the wedding industry a little bit. It's probably going to hurt the hospitality industry a little bit, hotels, restaurants, dining services. But you know what it's not going to what? It's not going to hurt. It's not going to hurt that married couple.

They're not going to blow all their cash on a one-day wedding. They're going to have something, and they may need it, you know, to buy a house, to buy furniture, to buy a new car. I was going to say, go on a cruise. That's not going to happen either. So there's an upside and obviously there's a downside. Big weddings are a big deal for a lot of people. But big weddings are not happening this June.

All right. That's the Bridge Daily, the latest episode. For this day, we're already at, what do they call this, the hump day. It's Wednesday, halfway through the week already. Short week after a long weekend. But we got those lawnmowers going out there. That's a good thing. Anyway, I'm Peter Mansbridge. Thanks for listening today.

It's been fun. We'll talk again in 24 hours.