The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - How Are Governments In Canada Doing In The Fight Against Covid -- Bruce Anderson With The Latest Survey

Episode Date: November 18, 2020

Just out of the field with new research on how you feel.

and hello there peter mansbridge here with uh the bridge daily it's hump day wednesday of week 36 and uh we got a special guest he's not special. He's on all the time anyway. Bruce Anderson is going to join us in a moment from Ottawa with the latest research on how Canadians are feeling about COVID in the sense of what kind of treatment, it's not really the right word, but what kind of reaction are they getting from, and help are they getting from governments, and that's whether it's federal, provincial, municipal, and how they're generally feeling in this era of COVID. But first, a little, a brief bit of housekeeping.

I've had quite a bit of mail responding to the letter I read on, I guess it was Monday of this week, from that soldier to his son. The fellow had written it in the final weeks of the Second World War, an American soldier as he was moving into Germany. He wrote a letter to his son, who he'd never met before, was born while he was away. And he wrote it because he was, I guess, concerned that he might be killed in the final actions. And he wanted his son to remember a few things about his dad and about how his dad felt. Anyway, it was a very good letter, very strong letter. Lots of you responded to it, which is kind. But a number of you said, how do I find the full letter? Because I was kind of

unclear. And it was in the Washington Post on November 10th. So that was a day before Remembrance Day. And you can track it down. It was written by the son, Jeffrey H. Smith, in the Washington Post. You shouldn't have any trouble finding it. Excuse me. The headline was, A World War II Veteran's Timeless Words for His Son and His Country. If you Google that or just go to the Washington Post, it's bound to pop up. So that's that. The other bit, a couple of people wrote about the story,

which I also think was on Monday, about vaccines and how well Canada was doing in terms of pre-purchasing vaccines from some of the big vaccine makers who were still in the testing process, including Moderna and Pfizer. And Canada is number one. And the question was, is that a good thing? Or are there kind of questions about morality in purchasing all this stuff up when really clearly rich nations are the ones getting this stuff and poor nations are not? And Canada's way ahead. I mean, I think we're at this moment in pre-vaccine orders,

we're showing nine and a half dosages per person in Canada. And the next highest on the ranking is Australia at five and a half. And so some questions were being raised about it. Is that really fair that Canada would be that far ahead? And a couple of people wrote in, and I'm glad they did, because what I failed to mention is that Canada has said, while not giving specifics on how this would work, that they would also give vaccines that they purchase that clearly are not needed in Canada, they would give them to countries where the need was high

and the ability to pay for them was low. So I've mentioned that. And finally, on extraordinary Canadians, the book, a couple of things. I'm still getting lots of requests for book plates. There have been hundreds so far. And if you had sent one in before, I don't know, 4 o'clock yesterday afternoon, Toronto time, you're going to get it in the mail.

It's already in the mail. You may have to wait if you've sent some in since because I've run out of book plates. They're sending me a bunch more from Simon & Schuster. But you will get them. You may just have to be patient. And also there have been lots of questions about, well, not lots, but I don't know, half a dozen or so, whether or not I'm going

to do an audio book on Extraordinary Canadians. The forward is available on audio that I recorded. And I think you just get that through the Simon & Schuster website or through Indigo. I think they're running it as well. But the book as a whole, at this point anyway, I haven't done an audio book for that. We'll see whether that happens in the future or not.

So that's that. That's all the housekeeping I have to do. Really pleased with how the book is doing. We should find out, I don't know, sometime today or tomorrow, how well it's doing on the bestseller chart list. Which is always encouraging.

Alright, let's talk COVID. And just as a setup for it, here's what you need to keep in mind. We've talked recently about how much the stats have gone up of late, and they have gone up a lot, as you know.

And when I look at the latest compilation of numbers, and this is done by the federal government, that's released each night, these are last night numbers, but in new cases yesterday, 4,276 new cases. 59 deaths recorded yesterday. So BC's numbers are up in the 700s. Alberta in the 700s. Saskatchewan, 250.

Keep in mind, that's a province that was barely registering anything over zero not that long ago. Same with Manitoba. They're in the high 200s. Ontario yesterday was 1,249, which doesn't sound like a lot compared with the 1,500s they were getting in the days before, but there hadn't been much testing done for yesterday's number. Quite a bit lower than normal, so it's not surprising that the actual case number would be lower. Quebec's still around 1,000. And then you hit the Atlantic wall, right? The Atlantic bubble, Newfoundland, Labrador, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, PEI. You add them all up and they're not even,

I mean, they're at 11 total cases in four provinces. That is a great story about the way the Atlantic provinces have dealt with this, with their Atlantic bubble. And the rest of us should be looking. I recognize the population is much lower, and the travel in and out is much lower, but still, 11 new cases yesterday, right? No deaths. Yukon, Northwest Territories, and Nunavut.

There's something going on in Nunavut because there were 34 new cases there yesterday. Northwest Territories, none. Yukon, one. All right. So there's some numbers. Let's bring in Bruce. He's in Ottawa. And as well as being our kind of resident analyst on all things,

especially politics, he's also chairman of Abacus Data, one of the country's leading research firms. And he and his colleague, David Coletto, do a lot of research into the way Canadians feel about various issues. And Bruce, you've just come out of the field, like literally just come out of the field, with new data on Canadians' attitudes towards the way they, the kind of services they're getting from various levels of government on the COVID situation. So that's what we want to talk about. First of all, good morning. It's great to have you with us as always. And secondly, give us a sense, first

of all, in a kind of general way, where Canadians' heads are on this issue right now. I can't believe I did this again. Get the microphone on. There. You're up and available to talk to now. Good morning, Peter. Good to talk to you again. We're going to put out a release on our website this afternoon for people who want to dig into the data in more detail, but I did like the idea of us getting together to talk a little bit about the patterns

of public opinion that we've been seeing over months. I think we're into our 20th wave of research on how Canadians are reacting to the pandemic. So we've come to learn quite a bit about it. And there's a few things that I thought would be worth highlighting this morning, maybe three or four. I think the first thing is that you and I and probably lots of our listeners might consume a lot of media coverage that

highlights the things that maybe governments got wrong initially or aren't doing enough of. And I think that's a proper rule for journalism to highlight those shortcomings of authorities, whether as you say at the federal or the provincial or the local level. But against that backdrop of us being reminded of what those shortcomings and miscues and misfires have been, one of the things that's been really striking for me is the degree to which most Canadians say they think governments have been doing more or less the right thing over this entire period of time.

Now, that ebbs and flows a little bit, and certainly some people in some areas have experienced a degree of frustration and fear that other people haven't. You mentioned Atlantic Canada being a situation where people noticed that they were able to flatten the curve and they supported the policies that even though some in those provinces felt were too draconian in terms of the economic impact, the public opinion has been very, very consistent

there that people do not want that health risk. And they believe that those kinds of containment measures, the Atlantic bubble, has been really important in protecting their health. So what we wanted to do this week is look at three different kinds of risks. The health risk, the spread of the infection. Second, the economic risk. What is it doing to our economy, to our sense of optimism about our economic futures, to our confidence that we're going to have our jobs if this continues for very much longer. And the third risk that we measured is the mental health risk. And we wanted to find out how well people thought authorities were doing at managing

the combination of those risks. Because as you probably noticed and probably discussed with your listeners, we hear more politicians talking about how these things work together. The longer this goes on, the more people fear the health risk, the more they worry about the economic context, the more pressure it puts on their mental health. And we did find that of all of those three risks, the greatest number of people are saying more needs to be done to mitigate that mental health risk. And so we are seeing that in the ascendancy. It's not like people are saying don't bother worrying about the economic risk or don't bother worrying about the health risk.

They're saying don't forget this other risk that is growing that we see in our families, in our neighborhoods, with the people that we deal with, the shopkeepers that we support. We know that more needs to be done there. And in some cases, governments can help. Now, when we were first designing those questions, I thought, well, we might find that people would say, do more to alleviate or mitigate the health, the mental health risk by opening up the economy. And that's not what we're seeing. In fact, what we're seeing is most people, very few people saying, I want governments to kind of

loosen the protocols to allow the economy to go back to normal more quickly, or because I don't fear the health risk. Those numbers are really quite small in our survey. There are more people in every instance saying do more to alleviate those risks rather than do less, but the majority are saying governments are doing pretty much the right balance. And the last thing I'll say, and I want to hear what you think about these numbers, is there is really one exception uh in the country to that general level of satisfaction the area where frustration

with government with authorities that is highest is in the prairie provinces and in particular in alberta and so when we hear the prime minister talking about what more needs to be done and raising the alarm bells and saying there are problems and we need to acknowledge that there are and, you know, recognizing that there's only so many sounds like the federal prime minister is criticizing the Alberta government goes down badly in Alberta. Our history is ripe with examples of that, but that's not what's going on here. Albertans themselves in significant numbers, the plurality are saying their provincial government is doing too little. I say local authorities or authorities that affect where they live and work.

But for most people, that is the provincial government. So there's pressure and friction in the Prairie Province. There's no question about it. And there's a growing concern with the mental health effects of the pandemic on everybody. And on the one hand, people need to be reminded of the things that they need to do. On the other hand, there is news again this morning about vaccine success rates. That's quite encouraging. And I know you've been talking about it this week. And I think a lot of people are going to say, can we just get through this period? Can we just do the things necessary?

Can our government support those things until we can get to a vaccine solution, which feels like maybe it's 365 days and counting down to when most people in Canada will have been vaccinated, maybe we'll have life back to normal. Yeah, it's going to take a while. It's the only challenge in this news, this really encouraging news about vaccines.

I mean, the efficiency rates on both the two main ones that have been talked about for the last week, Pfizer and Moderna, are remarkable. I mean, they're remarkable. Even Pfizer today upped their game from 90% to 95% efficiency, so it's kind of even with Moderna, whether they did that for competitive reasons or whether they did it because that's what their latest research is showing.

I'm assuming it's the latter. I want to hope it's the latter. But either way, this is going to take a while before our average listener is going to be anywhere near that needle in their arm. We're talking months away, not days or weeks. But still, it is encouraging. Let me talk a little bit about your data because I've got a number of questions.

One on the regional breakout. You know, I see the stuff from the prairies. As you know, I have family in Manitoba, and they are really frustrated right now in terms of how the government is handling this. My daughter's a teacher, and my son-in-law is in the private sector. They're anxious. And this is interesting because through the summer, um, the Palliser government in, in Manitoba was very strict on its restrictions and allowing people in and out. And therefore they couldn't come down as they always do to come and stay

time at the, uh, at our place in the Gatineau. And, uh, you know, they, they were unable to do it because of the restrictions placed on, you know, a 14-day quarantine when they went back. And that was just, you know, it kind of made the whole holiday not kind of work, especially for my son-in-law and his hours of work. Anyway, but now it's like the opposite. The things seem to be in a small province, somewhat out of control and they want more action taken.

Um, and they're not seeing it. So they're frustrated. They're frustrated in a way in the summer, they were frustrated, but on a personal level kind of understood it. And we're, you know, very happy to look at extremely low case numbers.

Now they're frustrated because life is not anywhere near normal and case numbers for a Manitoba, for a smaller province are way up. Here's my question that kind of puzzles me. So I see where the frustration level on the prairies is high. I'm surprised that it's not high in Ontario and Quebec when you look at the kind of numbers that we're seeing, how the spike just sort of took hold in both those provinces. And yet, according to your numbers, there's still a level of satisfaction with the way government is handling the situation. And I've got to say that that does surprise me.

Yeah, I can see that myself, Peter, and I think in part it's a reflection of the fact that there is a part of the population that consumes an enormous amount of information about this. You and I are probably in that group. Probably everybody in our family is in that group. And most of the information that we consume is really highlighting those things that could have been done better, that could be done better. And I think that one of the things that I've learned over the years in our research, and you and I have talked about this before, is that 70% of the population doesn't consume very much news about issues on any given day. Now, a pandemic is going to be a little bit different, but it's been around for nine months. And so the people who are following the case counts in their community or in the province, the people who are kind of occasionally dialing in those press conferences that the premier gives, they already kind of know what they know about this. And some of them are frustrated. Those are the people who are more likely to be frustrated. So what is it about the others? Well, first of all, I think they're probably not consuming the data in the same way that is raising the level of fear that you and I might experience when we consume these case counts. We've also been consuming a great deal of information about U.S. infection rates. And anybody that's doing that can't help but notice

what the huge death tolls look like when this gets out of control and when politics in particular wraps its arms around a health problem and makes it worse, which is definitely what has been happening in the United States. But that's us, right? And I think the other large proportion of the population isn't indifferent to this pandemic at all, but they consume less information about it. And they generally also, if they live in this part of the country, Ontario, where we are, they've seen masks in the community for months

now. They've seen social distancing in the community for months now. They've seen social distancing in the community for months now. They didn't live in provinces where there didn't appear to be very many cases, and so maybe people were kind of living in what seemed to be a more normal life. And I can't help but think that right now what we're seeing a little bit is people saying, well, look, I don't know that I'm happy with everything that the Ford government has been doing and maybe that number that's frustrated will grow uh as cases grow um and it stands to reason that at some point it could because people will say well we actually know what needs to happen and there are idiosyncrasies where you can say, well, why is it okay to go to a gym? And classes can't be normal again.

And so those inconsistencies will make people more frustrated if case numbers continue to grow. But if you live in a part of the country where masks and social distancing have appeared for months and have appeared to be mostly working, it's going to take you a little bit longer before and more evidence before you say, okay, the right things aren't being done. Right now, most people who consume lightly at the information that's on offer will say, I see the politicians expressing anxiety every day. Even if they're not doing full lockdowns, they're talking about maybe doing full lockdowns. And, you know, you and I might look at that and say,

well, is that enough? Is that deliberate enough? Is it disciplined enough? Is it consistent enough? But a lot of people might not apply as stringent a test as that. A lot of the mail I get, emails that I get, have on the COVID story have tended in the last couple of months really, many of them touching on this whole issue of mental health, whether they're questioning about how they themselves are reacting or how their kids or their parents or their husbands or their wives or whatever, it touches

on this issue in a much greater way than it did in the spring and early part of the summer. Now, you've touched on this, you mentioned this, and I'm just wondering if there's more to say based on the kind of answers you've seen on this issue. Yeah, I think there's a couple of things. One is that it has become more normalized, I think, for people to talk about mental health in recent years. I think that's been a good thing. I think we've seen lots of people in public life get behind that agenda. We've seen major corporations like Bell invest significantly in this whole idea of let's talk about mental health. Let's not be afraid to talk about it.

And so I can't help but feel that one of the things that's happening in our research is that people are more willing to say, yeah, I see a problem. I hear a problem. I kind of notice the problem. And so the acknowledgement, the public acknowledgement in the form of survey responses is probably different because the normalization of the conversation is there. The second thing, though, is that we do know that in an internet age, especially with a lot of mobile devices, that we can see patterns of increased mental health problems, especially

with young people, especially tied to the prevalence of the use of mobile devices and meeting time on the internet and social media exposure. And so that's another factor. We're more aware of more stresses in our society all the time now because it's coming at us 24-7, 365, and if you're on social media a lot, you're going to get like a fire hose of things that could potentially make you worried or fearful. The ratio of worried or fearful content to hopeful content is not what you

would design it to be if you wanted a mentally healthy population. I think that's pretty obvious. And then the last thing I will say is that heading into a Canadian winter and realizing that in many cases people haven't been able to see their aging parents, they're worried about whether their kids are having a normal social development, they're thinking they're probably not going to be able to get together for the holiday season. And they're thinking it's going to be dark and cold for months to come.

Those are all things which are going to add to the pressures even before you get to the question of what kind of economy are we going to have when this is over so you've really got a kind of an unprecedented combination of technological generational health risk and economic uncertainty brought to bear and we kind of can't look at governments and say there's a magic wand that can be waved. We can say, you know, it's going to be a bunch of different things. Masks, distancing, patience, grinding it out, looking out for one another, figuring out who in your neighborhood or circle might have a mental health issue

that could use a chat, getting ready for the vaccine, not resisting the vaccine when it's ready. All of those things. And trying to keep our businesses alive through that whole period of time. And so, you know, I think one of the things that I see in our data, at least it's my assumption, and I'll kind of stop on this point. If government hadn't pumped as much money as it has into households and businesses, I can't imagine we would be looking at the public opinion that we're looking at today. I can't imagine that things would be a lot worse and that the level of fear and mental health duress

would be much, much higher. I agree with that. Absolutely. Especially when you compare it to South of the Border and how so many of their programs ran out in July. How people are, well, we know they're not surviving. You just look at the lineups of food banks in the States. I mean, it's unbelievable.

And you know what I find the most distressing? Looking at those lineups, whether they're in Texas or Arizona or other places, when you look at the lineups of thousands of cars, we're not talking about old jalopies. Those cars, there's Audis and Mercedes and, you know, they're in that lineup. Now, maybe they, those individuals were spending far too much on cars. But nevertheless, that's the car they have and the car they were able to live with pre-pandemic. And now that car's in the lineup for a food bank.

It's like, it's incredible to watch um now i want to um first of all when you ran through the list of things that we do you forgot one thing you know with the washing hands the distancing i don't know you forgot one thing smile now bruce and i have had this discussion for years. It goes back a long way. And it goes back to actually golf. I can remember when I was having a lot of trouble with my drive, and suddenly I seemed to be able to straighten it out.

And we were playing Ballybunion, of course, one of the great courses in the world. It's in Ireland. And Bruce said to me, me, what are you doing? What have you changed? And I said, I smile on the downswing, which I was doing. So every time now I hook it or slice it, you'll say you forgot to smile. But I got a kick out of that on the weekend watching the Masters

because they had a discussion about that. One of the holes, I can't remember which player player it was who was smiling during his downswing and they said yep this really works for him he smiles so it's not so stupid after all and anyway we can all use a good smile even in these difficult times well that's right yeah here's the last question um governments whatever level we're talking about, they all do a lot of research and surveys themselves. And one assumes they're coming up with similar answers when they do that, that you've come up with in this one. Their data is held privately and yours is out in the public domain. But if you're a premier or a prime minister or a mayor

and you're looking at this kind of data, what do you take from it? What do you change? You can't, you know, none of them are saying, oh, just do nothing. Let's just say exactly what we're doing because it's clearly in some cases is not working. But with this data in terms of the way the public's reacting to everything, how do you react? What do you take away from this? Well, I think one of the things about being in government during this kind of a situation, as unusual as it is,

is that an awful lot of what you'll hear about is pressure from different parts of the economy business sectors to alleviate some of the curtailment of their activities to allow them to do more normalized things and I think the the right stance for government is to weigh all of those not just against what will it look like to the public if we reopen this or reopen that, but rather what will be safe. And that the public opinion is pretty clear that people don't want measures that are more draconian than they need,

but their bias is in favor of protect us, protect the health first. What we're seeing nine months in is this corresponding issue of if it starts to become too much, then the mental health stresses become a different kind of problem to deal with. And so I think that it has raised the importance of more nuanced policies on protocols, not nuanced so that this group doesn't get angry and that group doesn't get angry, but nuanced in the sense of people believing that these are rational choices being made as it relates to one kind of

business or individual activity versus another. And different in the sense that the politicians aren't saying we must do this to people who are already doing it. This is important. I think that politicians need to say, we know a lot of you are washing your hands wearing masks smiling maybe but social distancing for sure and we know that some aren't and so we also can take from that that just us saying we must do this isn't going to change all that behavior but you if you know somebody who's cutting corners who who's doing unsafe things, you should say something. You should do something in your community. That, to me, is one of the things that politicians should take from this data because more rules may be needed, but the evidence is that the rules aren't going to solve for all of that.

The peer pressure, we know peer pressure makes a difference. And so I would, if I were in politics on this file, I would be trying to harness that peer pressure a lot more. And I would be having blunt conversations with businesses saying, do not ask us to do unsafe things. Tell us how the things you want to do can be made safe because we're not going to do unsafe things because you tell us there's an economic there's a better economic outcome we are only going to do those things that can be healthy for people and can be good for the economy and especially with vaccines coming into focus now we're in a eightmonth period now where those kind of clashes, that friction is going to be really central.

And the public opinion is pretty clear. We're on the side of protecting our health. Remember that our mental health is under strain. The longer our economy seems uncertain and less time, the more time we can't do the things that we like to do as people. But don't listen to the lobby sometimes that come at you and say, let's open it up. And, you know, that's so particularly true in Alberta, in our data, where you would expect the largest number of people kind of notionally, naturally to be saying, why are we tightening the economic screws so much? They're saying the opposite of that. Okay. That's good. That's a really good look inside not only the minds, according to the survey you've done, of Canadians right now from coast to coast to coast,

but also a sense of what politicians may be weighing and leaders may be weighing in terms of how they react in a continual way to the dilemma in front of all of us and certainly in front of them in terms of the policies that they undertake now. Bruce, thanks very much. Always good to talk to you and we'll talk to you again very soon, I'm sure. Thanks.

You bet. Take care. Okay, so that's going to wrap it up for this day on the Bridge Daily. And we are crunching towards the end of the week. This was Hump Day, Wednesday. We love hump days, right? We'll be back on the Bridge Daily. I'm Peter Mansbridge. Thanks for listening.

We'll be back in 24 hours. ¶¶ Thank you.