The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - How Will This End? -- SMT with Bruce Anderson

Episode Date: February 16, 2022

Bruce brings his latest data book with him and gives us a sense of how Canadians feel about the convoy mess.  Also the big question -- will this ever end and how will it end?

And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. You're just moments away from the latest episode of The Bridge. It's Wednesday, Smoke Mirrors and the Truth, with Bruce Anderson. Alright, I'm back in beautiful Stratford, Ontario. A lot of snow here, compared with Toronto. Not that far away, but we are in the snow belt, as they say. And there's been a lot of snow here in the last week, two weeks really. Bruce Anderson's in Ottawa, the capital of Canada. The site of so much excitement over the last three weeks, and it's still going on.

It's backing off everywhere else, it seems. Emerson, Manitoba is supposed to open up today. Coutts, Alberta closed down for a long time, a week or ten days. It was opened up yesterday, and of course the Ambassador Bridge on the weekend. Ottawa still to go. Doesn't look like anybody's moving up there right now Bruce, I know you've been in the field Lately

As we say, in the field As a pollster Getting a sense of where Canadians are On a number of different issues Obviously including this one What's your sense of Of where the people are in terms of the protest movements across the country? I think it's still a kind of a developing perspective, Peter.

I think the first thing I would say is that there's a difference between how people feel about COVID measures and how they feel about the protests and the way that the protests have manifested themselves. I think what we saw right from the get-go is a pretty strong feeling that a protest of this sort, where people get a chance to speak their mind about COVID measures, is entirely legitimate. It's part of freedom of speech. It's part of what we really like about living in Canada. So there's kind of a question of, is this kind of protest legitimate? Second question is, is this particular protest appropriate in the way in which it manifested itself? And then the third question is, how do people feel about the thing that the protesters are asking for? And so let me just touch on each of those three in turn. Right now,

three out of four Canadians say the protesters have had a chance to make their point and they should leave. So that's, you know, 74%. And I don't think I have breakdown data for Ottawa, but it'd be pretty close to 90% here in Ottawa. I would think people are pretty fed up in this city. The second thing is just a straight out question. Do you support the so-called self-named freedom convoy? concerned about the tendency sometimes to just sort of accept the label, the branding that the protesters have put on it. When I look at that cache of arms that was seized at the Kootz border, I'm not sure what that had to do with COVID measures. And I'm not sure that anybody would

reasonably look at that and say, well, that makes sense to have all of the armament as part of a so-called freedom convoy. But anyway, 28% say that they support the freedom convoy, and the large majority say that they don't. So it's pretty clear that most Canadians are happy enough that there was a protest, happy that it's ending in places where it's ending, and didn't like a lot of what they saw in terms of the way that it landed. And then the last question is, do people support the demonstrators' call to end all of the COVID measures and restrictions? And the answer is 37% do.

Now, the gap between the 28% who support the convoy and the 37% who support the call to end all measures is really people who are saying, I've taken the measure of my sense of risk around COVID, watching Omicron, being boosted, feeling this sense of I've got to get back to my normal life. Parents in particular, we see this kind of elevated feeling among 30 to 44 year olds, saying, we can't keep on living our life like this one day longer than is absolutely necessary. And so there's a straining in that direction. But it's so important to recognize that it's 37% who support the call to end all COVID measures and restrictions.

63% oppose that idea. And I don't know about you, Peter, but just consuming some of the coverage sometimes, it seems like we kind of yank the wheel from everybody thinks this to everybody thinks that. And I think the truth is right now, people don't know quite what to make of which measures are necessary and which ones aren't, which ones can be ended sooner and which ones can't. They're looking at some politicians and saying, I think they're acting on the basis of science, but it's possible that they're acting on the basis of their sense of political risk. And also they're looking at, and you've done a lot of work constantly through this pandemic.

I'd like to know what you think about this. Around the world, I'm trying to follow these threads by these learned epidemiologists who are trying to tell us whether we should be worried about omicron or less worried about it whether we should be heading back to more normal or not and there are days when i find it hard to to kind of get a clear picture of that so that's where i think that canadians are very hopeful that both the protest ends soon and COVID ends soon, obviously. On this issue of where the epidemiologists stand, obviously, you know, there's some differing opinions out there, but the ones I talked to, I think they would generally say that we were quite properly worried about Omicron when word first came out just before Christmas.

And we took all the actions as a result of that concern. And partly because of the actions that were taken, and partly because it turned out not to be as, you know, as bad, as deadly as some people thought it might be. We kind of won the battle of Omicron in its initial stages. But I think there's a tendency, and certainly the ones I've talked to, whether it's Dr. Bogoch last week or Dr. Barrett in Halifax this week, there is a tendency on the part of all the ones I talk to that we got to pace ourselves in the coming out here. You know, things look good and there's every reason to believe we're over the worst of it all. But as we've seen before, as we saw with Delta, as we saw with Omicron, the stuff can come out of nowhere apparently and boom you're suddenly you're back into it and so we've got to be careful i mean all indicators point towards um you know that we're

we are over the worst of it and that includes just the general length of time a pandemic sort of is around um you know a couple of years and we're we're at that point now um but you know we we've we've got faked out by this covid virus in a couple of times in the last couple of years and we got to be careful we don't get uh we don't get faked out again. So there's that. The other point you brought up, I think, is really interesting, and it's about the power of a word. And that is, you know, somewhere some of these organizers got together at the beginning of all this protest and said, what are we going to call it? You know, we're going to call it a mandate protest.

That doesn't sound very good. It doesn't sound too exciting. And somebody must have said, why don't we call it a freedom convoy? And that was a very smart play on their part because it worked. It worked in terms, you know, in terms of the signage. It worked in terms of how the media played into it. And I'm being careful about what I'm saying about the media, because I think in many cases the media has done a terrific job on this story.

And I know there's a lot of arguments out there on it, but the whole follow the money aspect of this, and trying to get at who the actual leaders of the various protest movements have been and what their backgrounds are and some of it's pretty scary stuff and it wouldn't have come out if it wasn't for the media pursuing it but on that word freedom convoy which is you know i'm proud to say i don't think i've used it at all until just now over these last three weeks. But, you know, for the most part, the media has called it that and they constantly are showing the pictures with freedom convoy very much in the dominant in the frame. And, you know, that has an impact. You keep using

that word when we all know now that the freedoms of a lot of other people were taken away as a result of the protest movement. So the power of a word is quite powerful. It can be quite dominant in terms of not only the coverage, but the way people speak of something that's going on and the look of it all, which played to their favor, at least for a while. I'm not sure it does anymore, except for those who are totally converted in the cause um i feel i find your numbers you know quite um quite intriguing because i think that over the last three weeks there's probably been some movement in that number that initially when it was it when it looked like a peaceful non-violent, you know, protest movement. I'm talking about the first couple of days. I think they attracted, you know, support in different parts of the country.

And those numbers were probably not as they seem to be today. And I think, I don't know when you came out of the field, but the whole thing about the guns at the Coutts border may have been after you came out of the field, but the whole thing about the guns at the Coutts border may have been after you came out of the field, which would indicate even stronger resistance to the various protests. So that is exactly the kind of stuff that Steve Schmidt was talking about last week that we were running the risk of seeing happen here.

Yeah, look, I think that that's probably right, Peter. we were running the risk of seeing happen here. Yeah, look, I think that that's probably right, Peter. But I also know that one of the things that was happening in polling and the way that polling is constructed and sometimes the way that it's reported on is that, you know, just in the numbers that I showed you today, the difference between the 28% who say that they support the so-called freedom convoy and the 37% who say that they support the demonstrators call to end COVID related measures and restrictions tells us that how you ask the question can give you a different sense of how much support they have and a whole lot of that 37 percent or a significant chunk of it are people who would say can i support the call to end the covid related restrictions without

having people do abusive and hateful things without people carrying confederate flags and nazi swastikas and selling star of david things and and piling weapons into uh trucks down at the coots border without causing 300 million dollars worth of economic damage that was the quote from i think that was quoted in nbc news american news channel can i can i have a way of expressing my desire to end these measures without buying into all of that? And I think that there was at least one polling company, and I'm not going to name names, that put a poll out that kind of insinuated that basically the desire to end mandates was the same as the support for the convoy. And I don't think that was ever true.

I do think you're right that once people started to see what was happening in Ottawa and how long it was going on and how disruptive it was and the various sub elements and some of the people leading, you know, the president of Freedom Convoy 2022 sitting in front of a TV camera and pretending that they were going to be able to negotiate the dissolution of government. Then I think people just started looking at it and going, this is not how we would ever want to end these COVID measures. We didn't come through two years of living with the anxiety about health for ourselves and for our loved ones and the disciplineth hour that the queen of

whatever i mean these people that that sort of profess all these conspiracy theories let's just sort of surrender the reins of government to them so um i do think that what has been happening in ottawa has made some people go this is this has gone on way too long there's something really wrong with the policing situation maybe we're going to come to that the arms at the coots border absolutely the blockade of the ambassador bridge and the sense of economic turmoil that that caused i think it all just sort of laddered up to a can somebody take the wheel here? Can we stop the protests and have the proper debate about what to do about COVID? And hopefully

we're not there yet. Hopefully we'll be there soon. But the Ottawa piece is going to be a hard one, I think, to finish. Okay, I want to pick up on that. We will after this quick pause. And welcome back. You're listening to Smoke Mirrors and the truth on the bridge for this wednesday bruce anderson's in ottawa i'm peter man's bridge in stratford ontario you're listening on sirius xm channel 167 canada talks or on your favorite podcast platform and as we always say you're

welcome to join us from wherever you can we're glad to have you with us and we're glad you know i i think i've mentioned this a couple times in the last uh last couple of weeks that the numbers for the bridge smoke mirrors and the truth good talk all of it have gone up considerably um well it started in the last election campaign but it's just on a continuing movement upwards. It's been nice to look at the charts that are put out by Apple that the top political podcast in Canada has been the bridge for the last couple of weeks. And it still is there today.

So, you know, that's encouraging. It's good to know that you like to hear what we have to say and the guests that we've had on the program. Okay, let me get to some of the things that you mentioned. The Ottawa Police Force. The chief resigns yesterday, was fired. I guess we're probably not going to know the real truth to that story for a while uh whatever the case um a lot of unrest and unhappiness

about the way the ottawa situation has unfolded and the lack of what seemed to be any enforcement law law enforcement um with the protesters uh do you want to say anything about this? Do you know something? Yeah, I'm kind of cautious about not going on too long about it because a lot of listeners don't live in Ottawa and don't feel it quite as keenly. But as someone who lives here, watching the occupation of the city and knowing so many people and businesses that were really hard pressed to kind of, you know, just kind of get through their daily lives without going crazy from the noise, without feeling fearful from the kind of aggressions

of people who would stop and insult them if they were wearing masks, the efforts to get into businesses without obeying the mask mandates, that sort of thing. It's been traumatizing for a lot of people. And I think one of the worst parts of it has been a growing realization that our police force wasn't really up to the job of preventing this from becoming something more than a protest where people come and express their opinions and instead becoming something where lives and businesses were disrupted and a you know a group kind of encamped themselves saying that they were going to overthrow the government however

silly that sounds on the surface the fact that you can park all these rigs in front of the parliament building and prime minister's office and nobody seems able to figure out how to move them out that was quite distressing for people and it takes me to the question of well what was wrong with the police force because certainly what the federal government was saying and i think the ontario government was basically hiding out uh through this first couple of weeks through the first couple of weeks of it but the federal government was saying the way policing works in a situation like this is the local municipal police force has a jurisdiction and so it's up to them if they um the laws. And if they need more help, they should ask for it.

And the chain of command is ask the province and the province asks the feds if there's still more help needed. And that didn't happen. And it didn't. Or if it did, it wasn't clear enough that it was happening. And so we ended up in this situation where it got worse rather than better. When I think most people thought after the first three days, oh, going to dissipate people are going to go home they're going to have said their thing you know slept in their trucks long enough ate rotten food long enough found no place to go to the bathroom enough times and they'll just kind of leave and now that what's clear is that they're

not a whole bunch of them are not doing that and they're not intending to do that and so there are questions about how did the police not understand that there were some underlying elements that were um that are determined to have some sort of conflict maybe a physical conflict i think that's where we are. We don't know if financial measures are going to be enough to have these rigs leave town. I don't think that's clear at all. I hope that that happens, but I hope it starts to manifest itself soon. So the whole question of the competency of the policing has been a huge one in Ottawa. There are questions about some of the video that we saw out of the Coots border as well, which I think most people would look at and say police are humans. They're entitled to have their opinions, but it should be pretty clear what side of the law they're on when they're in the business of enforcing law in a situation like that.

And it wasn't clear in some of the video that I saw. But back to Ottawa for one last point competency is one thing but whether or not police feel that they're entitled to reinterpret the law or only enforce the laws that they want to enforce that's become a question in respect of the ottawa police force and yesterday, you know, might make some people feel better because if you thought, well, the real problem was Chief Slowly wasn't very competent and he's gone. And so whoever replaces him will be more competent. That's only looking at the one aspect of the problem that was apparent here, the competency aspect. The other issue, which is

whether or not the force has a problem inside it of officers who feel as though they don't want to enforce laws that they don't personally like or agree with, I think that remains undealt with. And I just saw this quote this morning, Peter, I want to leave this with you and kind of ask you, how does that strike you? So last October, the Ottawa police chief told CBC that, quote, there's rot in the organization that's going to come to light. It's not going to look good, but have confidence that we're actually doing that work the heavy difficult the necessary work of ridding the organization literally of cancer that was the ottawa police chief last october and now he's gone and do we think that that cancer that he's referring to is gone so look i can look at the announcements yesterday of his resignation and

say, well, you know, people said that he was bullying and, and I don't support bullying, but, and I don't know what the truth was, but I know in October he was describing something that sounded like a real problem. And here we are today. And it's hard for me not to think it's still a real problem yeah um it's clear and it's been clear to me uh you know for some time that there i guess it started with some of those comments from the police chief last fall that there are real issues inside that force and there was a real, there were real issues at the most senior levels of the force between some of the most senior officers. They didn't like each other.

They didn't respect each other. They didn't take direction from each other. So that was all already in play before this even started. So then it appears to have even got worse during the protests. We don't know the story. We don't know the real story. I see that some of the CBC journalism on this

has been terrific in the last, well, last few months, but especially in the last few days of trying to get at what was really going on in there and what should we assume is going to happen now. I mean, you don't paint a very pretty picture of how this might end. You seem truly worried about how this might end. I'm worried about it because I do think that some of the people

who are at the heart of the organization of the protest have never had a realistic sense of what they were going to be able to accomplish don't seem to be particularly fussed by the fact that they don't have support the fact that there is a now an emergency measures act that's been brought into play the fact that they don't have support, the fact that there is now an Emergency Measures Act that's been brought into play, the fact that, you know, there's a lot of public opposition that's become apparent to them around them. kind of see what the level of energy and vitriol was on the part of Ottomans who were saying, you know, police aren't doing enough. We're going to make our voices heard. And it was quite powerful, quite a powerful experience. And one of the most powerful moments was looking at these pickup trucks, essentially, because this is trucks that were trying to come in and go to the downtown core that were stopped by regular citizens who

said we're just going to stand in front of them we're going to hold signs we're going to chant and we're going to tell them to go home and off to the side were probably 100 police officers who were just kind of standing away from that scene and the only role that they seemed to play was once a trucker decided that he was going to go home, I say he, there were some she's, but it was mostly he's, then the police would surround the truck and help them get through the crowd of regular citizens and get on their way. So there's a real kind of mistrust of the police now that's developed. I don't think the mayor has done a very good job of kind of giving people confidence yesterday he was asked if slowly was a scapegoat and his quote was that at the end of the day the final shots are made by the chief well

that's not leaving us with a lot of hope about how this is going to go and And I kind of also feel and you mentioned the freedom convoy and the use of words. And this is our smoke mirrors and the truth episode. And I also have watched as politicians kind of some of them, they kind of go back and forth with what they sense is the wind here yesterday. She's so unusual for a politician to do that. It's definitely the thing that they are most often associated with. I get that. But yesterday, Doug Ford was asked about vaccinations and vaccine mandates

and he said something like, well, you know, there's hardworking folks who don't want to take them. And, you know, God bless them. That's their choice. Now, there's OK with us. I think there has to be a through line. And different messages or significantly different messages into the marketplace in the hopes that people hear from you what they want to hear from you and don't hear the other thing that you're saying that's exactly the opposite of that. It's a sad thing to watch in politics now because I think that there is a lot of good journalism right now. And I think a lot of good journalists want to shine a light on that but they're kind of overwhelmed

by how much of it there is how much of it doesn't traffic through normal media channels it's just kind of online out there people saying things on twitter and so on. And it kind of confuses the mindset of the public sometimes. There's no question about it. Just before we leave this issue of police forces and the military, for that matter, let me just say that long before this protest, there have always been questions about certain elements within groups like that, police, the army, what have you, who had extremist views. And we've seen it play out in different issues over the last 20, 30 years. We've seen it play out on this.

I mean, as you warned earlier, earlier you got to be careful what you trust on on social media and what's the origin of some of this stuff but there you know there appeared to be um you know police officers ottawa police officers in some cases opp officers the ontario provincial police you know they're expressing their support for the protesters when they're supposedly policing them, which seemed very odd, odd at best. Odd is the most polite Canadian way to describe that. And I salute you for doing that. But you and I both know odd is the nicest thing that you could say about it. That's right.

It is. The Army doesn't appear to be screwing around on the way they're dealing with issues within the Canadian Armed Forces. They already tossed out two guys from JTF2, the elite commando force, who I think more than just expressed support for the protesters, they were involved in the protest. So they're history. They're gone. And an investigation is underway. But, you know, whether that's in a way the kind of cancer, the rot that the former police chief in Ottawa was talking about in terms of what happens inside some groups that are there

to police and protect it's got to be it's got to be dealt with and it has to be examined and investigated and taken more seriously than it clearly has been before if he knew this last fall that he had a problem within his own force and nothing's been done about it so far that's an abdication of responsibility and needs to be investigated and I assume it will be one assumes there's going to be once this is all over and it will end at some point you know and hopefully not in a violent manner, but it could be. But whatever happens to end it, there will be some kind of board of inquiry or investigation into how all this played out. I think there should be a Royal Commission, and I don't love the term Royal Commission, but I think it's the highest level in our country of this is a serious matter that we have to investigate. And I know that some have called for a commission that looks at COVID and the measures and the choices and all of that.

I actually think that it's useful to do that, but not from the standpoint of a kind of a prosecutorial who got what wrong, but rather what do we need to know and do differently going forward? But I'm more preoccupied with this question of, are we giving people weapons in our policing services and in our military who don't accept that they're there to enforce laws passed by elected people. I think that's a big issue, and it's time that we dug into it. What are you thinking about that? Well, you know, we've both been around long enough to have seen, not as frequently as it used to be, but the appointment of royal commissions, and they take far too long to come up with their study and recommendations and conclusions.

It costs an awful lot of money. And by the time they come out, people are so like, that was yesterday's problem. And they've kind of moved on and the things sit on a shelf somewhere. So I've seen that. You've seen it um including on on policing remember donald mcdonald and the commission of inquiry into the rcmp in the mid 1980s early 1980s um but i do think something has to happen because i think that issue about um the fact that some members of our forces that are there to protect and serve and police are ignoring the instructions they're given by the appropriate authorities and have their own take

on the way things should be and that that can't be allowed to happen. We have a system here and a line of authority and it should be obeyed. I want to get one more, squeeze one more thing in here in the couple of minutes we have left. You touched on a little bit in terms of mandates and vaccine rollouts across the country and where we are on restrictions, etc., etc. There is seemingly a rush to the door marked end of restrictions or let's get to normalization or, you know, you're on your own. Everybody's going to get it anyway.

So blah, blah, blah. And there is uh that term that i think you used in the past it's kind of the wild wild west out there depending on what province which government what authority uh as to what the rules are um which doesn't make for a a very um you know it doesn't make for a country where everybody kind of gets it, knows where we are, because I lose track. Because every day you hear different provinces doing this and you wonder, well, what about the province I'm in? You know, is there going to be some kind of uniform exit from

all this? Is there a rush to the door to normalize is you know are they still listening to science and i use the generic uh we and they uh in all this is you know are they still listening to science or are they listening to polls i mean you know what i think that's a great question uh Are people listening to science? Because I think the answer is, for the most part, they really are. Now, the difference between what young people are observing and hearing in the science and what older people are taking away from the science is really quite striking. So one question that we're going to publish in the next couple of days, Peter, is, is it safe to treat COVID like the annual flu now? Or is it better to continue to treat it as though it's more dangerous than the flu? And the answers to that across the country are 41% saying it's safe to treat it more like the annual flu now. So again, remember that 24% or 28% support the convoy, 37% support the call to end

the measures, 41% say it's safe to treat it like the flu. How does that 41% happen? It happens because Omicron was the latest welter of evidence that people consumed. And what they consumed about it was people who they knew who got it didn't get that sick. The measures weren't, the symptoms weren't that bad. The health system also didn't buckle. And so if you're consuming that science, you might reasonably say it feels safe. I'm not just a wishful safe, but an evidence-based safe. And I think this is the challenge for the epidemiologists and the public health officials is that the – so I'm just going to give you the breakdown between the 18 to 29 crowd and the 60-plus crowd.

All right. If you're 18 to 29, 50%, 51% actually say it's safe to treat it as the flu right now. If you're 60 or older, it's 28%. It's literally twice as you're twice as likely practically to, if you're older to say, I don't think it's safe to treat it that way. And is one demographic anti-science or unscience in their interpretation and the other not? Not necessarily, because we've heard throughout this that older people are more vulnerable. And so the level of risk that people are consuming, they're not just making up what they want it to be in order to get back to normal if they're younger. And they're not just making it up because they're frightened if they're older. To some degree, the evidence has been pointing them in that direction. And I think part of what makes this a more dynamic political situation is that the politicians who tend to want to tack with the winds, see what's happening with

young people, see that the difference between people on the left and the center and the right is really quite striking on this kind of question. And so it starts to become more of a political calculus than maybe it should be. But science is part of it for most people. Their consumption of what happened in Omicron is different. We had 78% who say that they knew someone who had COVID. Now, that number grew phenomenally through Omicron. And only 5% say that most of the people that they knew who got it had bad symptoms. Everybody else said, well, some bad, some not. Most were mild. And that's kind of informing people.

That's a real-life kind of evidence base that they're consuming. A lot of numbers there you've just thrown at us. And I know at some point in the next couple of days, this will all get put together into some kind of a release at Abacus Data, and you'll be able to find it all online. Yeah, I thinkid colletto and i thinking about writing a kind of an essay with it to kind of give it you know some context and readability because uh you know until we turn this into a a video uh podcast where we can throw some

things up on the screen and i'm hoping hoping that one day your production team can turn their attention to that. My production team. Good luck with that. And your executive producers and your set designers. Exactly. We'll get them all working on that. All right. Good conversation.

Good discussion. And we'll have more on Friday, of course, when Chantel joins us for Good Talk. Tomorrow is your turn. So get those cards and letters coming in. There's been a lot already this week, some great programs this week. The Mansbridge Podcast at gmail.com. The Mansbridge Podcast at gmail.com. Draw me a line. All right, thanks, Bruce, and thank you for listening.

I'm Peter Mansbridge. We'll be back in 24 hours yeah you too