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

Episode Date: November 21, 2023

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, Peter Mansbridge here. You are just moments away from the latest episode of The Bridge, How Canada Works. That's the title of my new book. And today, my co-author Mark Bulguch is here and we're going to talk about it. 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'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? 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, longtime 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, right?

We said, look, we don't want to write about like some guy who's an mp or a cabinet minister um i mean the name of the book how canada works may lead a lot of people to think it's about like the the elite of canada how the country works as a as a country and how we're seen in sweden you know and how we play uh we punch above our weights somehow in international affairs uh this is not that book if you want that book don't buy this one uh because that's you know what we did was eliminated that right from the top you know we went when we decided uh 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 the... certainly I come from a family with a father who worked in a factory all his life. You know, he his education ended in grade three, believe it or not. It was a different time because his father died and he had to quit school to go and support his help, support his family as a 10 year old i mean it was a different time not a better time for sure um 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 uh 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. You know, 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, 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. That argument is about, as you mentioned, 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 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 look 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. I can 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'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. 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 others. I think 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, I'll give you the example. We have somebody who works at the parole board and heaven knows how often they are in the news, and usually because of a bad thing happening

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. in this country and a lot of you know he tells a story actually of uh 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, 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 to that to that like fist up for a minute think about it like you know i you you surely know what you do for a living uh and you may like it you may not like it but you know what you do uh 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 all these people what they do and how they do it uh and this and your eyes i'm sure i mean and demystifying a lot of them and because i think a lot of them come with uh 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 we're profiling the job more than the person. Right. And then sometimes 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 there's a we have a funeral director in the in the wonderful woman from um scarborough um in sort of the greater toronto area and you know i read her story and you know it's it's emotional she's 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.

Yes, 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? 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, over and over in the book, I think, you find people who are doing jobs that you might not want to do. But you cannot 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, is 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 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 um with 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 like 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 what we've done is in newfoundland uh 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 uh and they're not even there to plan it like she plants 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 uh you know paulie 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 i 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 uh but again like like the funeral director takes it seriously because it's so important to so many people uh 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 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 um 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. And we also want a mix of women and men. 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.

But we certainly have done our best. I think what we did was we looked for jobs that could fit in a place. So if you try to find someone, put somebody in Prince Edward Island, for example, if you work backwards, right? So you say, okay, 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 a zookeeper i'm not even sure 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 zoo there may not be a zoo in pei i don't know um so it's hard to do a zookeeper in pei it's certainly

hard to do well i one i know for sure they don't a 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 Canada arm 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. Nope, it's operated from Longay, Quebec, just on the south shore of Montreal. Amazing. Yeah. No, that'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 i didn't 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 had just a couple who never got back to me. They said yes, and we'll get to it. And I would write them again or call again. And then it just never happened for whatever reason. But nobody's, I mean, again, you're right.

When you deal with, here comes that word again, ordinary Canadians, they don't think of themselves as subjects for a book. Right? They just don't. I mean. Right. 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 nothing interesting about my story. And we said, actually, your story is pretty interesting. And Canadians found that because the book was instant number one bestseller. And, you know, it's always good to have that when you're selling a book. 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 or on your favorite podcast platform whichever way you're listening we're glad to have you with us. The guest today is Mark Bulgich, who is my co-author for How Canada Works, which was released today by Simon & 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 purchase it because it's 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 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, I would think,

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, like I couldn't write a thing about window washing. So they supply all the information. But they're not storytellers necessarily. And even the best storytellers. I mean, I've interviewed a lot of storytellers.

And it's very hard to tell a story. A, B, C, D, E. Everybody tells a 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 into a book, everyone would say, holy cow cow these guys are uh people actually listen to this but but they give us 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 and they and they enrich us with that uh and once we get over the really really that 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 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 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, 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 thinks cows milk themselves. Well, they do uh 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 the of of his story like what what i didn't know what i didn't know about wedding planning what i didn't know about being a principal in a in a high school of uh in a fairly economically deprived area of this country we have him in the book uh you know what i know about running a shopping mall nothing right uh 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 uh 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 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 that it's kind of the way we we learned our profession over all those years um in newsrooms and different parts of the country and i was out west you were in you know in quebec and then we were together in toronto um but when you were when you do an interview or you do any kind of story you, 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 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 got to build his story around that moment and take it to where we are now. And so, you know, that's one of the things we try to do as storytellers. Everybody has their own methodology on these things. And, you know, 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 they're not linked together. They're all individual stories. It's like basically 28 chapters.

And I think you'll find interesting stories in all of them, but they're more than just interesting. What do you walk away with having read this book? Well, you know, I think both of us have come to love this country. 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, 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 percentage is, but it's low, I'm sure. And people should understand when Mark tells you that story,

he's not talking about travels that were, 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 to each province, each region of the country, 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 uh they don't hate ontarians uh 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 i'm looking for the non-cliched way to say these are ordinary people um but they are like the i'll go back to what we talked about pei well we have

some from pei he's a priest because we thought 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, here's a guy who has 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, God, but his doubt about himself. Is he up to the challenge of trying to keep people within their faith? And not just faith in God, but in faith in humanity and faith in life. And is he up to it? Like that's, again, it's pretty profound when you think about it. So if you asked me, 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. And we know, again, from our political experience as journalists, that most people don't pay attention to all the raucous and the noise and the yelling and the screaming in the political arena until there's an election and then they might pay attention last couple of weeks. 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. It just gets along and we are this, what i think of as a terrific 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 in a very meaningful way even if their job doesn't seem to make headlines ever but we we need them, as you said. 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 because they stack the groceries well at you know at the supermarket no nobody comes and pats them on the back it's unusual i mean every once in a while like 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 you know it's 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 it's a couple owns the thing. And she said, just because she was starting to compliment them rather than complain. 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 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 as 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 that people who just do what they're supposed to do

and we all benefit from it and that's ladies 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 we're glad we did. 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 you have downloads. Is that right? I don't think so. 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. Yes.

All right. You take care. We'll talk again soon. Thanks, Mark. You bet. Bye-bye. Mark Boguch, 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 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. Beith 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 11pm and 7am. 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 spokesman 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. and it's a 200-year tradition. I don't think that'll last. I think that'll be back. But we'll see. All right.

Tomorrow, Smoke, Mirrors, and the Truth will get out the fall economic statement, which will be released later today by the finance minister. Thursday, it's your turn, so if you have thoughts, letters, send them in to themansbridgepodcast at gmail.com. themansbridgepodcast at gmail.com. Want to hear more about the book?

Go to thepetermansbridge.com. That's my website. You'll see the book there. A little bit more about it, although I think we've told you enough today. You can make your judgments on that. And visit and support your local bookstore, no matter which book you buy. Of course, this one is the one you really want.

Thursday, your turn. So get those cards and letters in. you really want. All right. Thursday, your turn. So get those cards and letters in. The Random Ranter as well. Friday is Good Talk with Chantelle Hebert and Bruce Anderson. That's it for this day. I'm Peter Mansbridge. Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you again in, well, 24 hours. ours.