The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Lisa Raitt With "A Pox On All Their Houses"

Episode Date: January 9, 2024

The former senior Conservative cabinet minister takes aim at some of her former colleagues, both Liberal AND Conservative for wasting time on non-issues and ignoring the important ones, especially one issue in particular. It's a kind of Lisa Raitt "unplugged" episode and she doesn't hold back. Plus, a look at six good news stories we've missed.

And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. You are just moments away from the latest episode of The Bridge. Today, Lisa Raitt on partisanship. This is a good one. I think you're going to enjoy it. It's coming right up. And hello there. Welcome to Tuesday right here on the bridge, Peter Vansbridge here in Toronto for today. You know, one of the great things about life is that you tend to learn something, at least one thing new every day, right? Yesterday, I learned a definition of the word swatting. Maybe I've been living in a cave or something, but I've never heard this word used in the way it was used. I mean, I've heard of swatting, swatting a fly in the summer, swatting a mosquito. Sure, I've heard that.

But I was confused when I saw the headlines yesterday about one of the judges in one of the Trump cases had been targeted as a swatting victim. So I thought, my gosh, what happened? You know, did somebody attack her? Was she hurt? What's happening in this case? Did it involve guns? What did it involve exactly? Well, it turns out that swatting used that way, somebody who's a victim of swatting, is that it's a targeting of a person by a fake emergency call. Now, this happened Sunday night.

Police responded in Washington around 10 o'clock to a report of a shooting at a Washington home. And that home was linked in public records to U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkin. But officers quickly found out that no shooting happened, the Metropolitan Police Department said Monday. Now, it turns out there have been all kinds of these kind of fake emergency calls to different figures in public life in the U.S., usually related in some fashion to the Trump charges, Trump trials, all of that. Swatting, apparently, this is the official definition of SWATing.

SWATing refers to prank calls made to emergency services designed to draw a police response. Okay, so why SWATing? Well, because that design for a response is to attract a SWAT team. You know, those special, kind of special operations, police squads, that come in in the heavy gear and the big weapons to defuse the situation. So if you're able to bring out the SWAT team on a fake call, that's called SWATing. And that's apparently what happened the other day. So, you know, live and learn. Now I know what swatting means, at least in that particular way. The other thing to

remind you of today, we started off the contest for this week, for this Thursday, cutoff time Wednesday at 6 p.m. Eastern time. The question to answer, and there already have been, it seems initially anyway, you listeners like this new contest because the response has been, well, it's been, you know, amazing, quite frankly. Lots and lots and lots of ideas coming into the Mansourish podcast at gmail.com. The question this week is, if you could change one thing about the way the news media operates, what would that one thing be? Lots of answers so far. What I encourage you to do is to be imaginative.

All right. Be innovative in terms of your ideas here. There is a, you know, a lot of focus around the issue of trust and how to gain it or regain it. If the trust has been lost with the media, but there's lots of things that one can approach. And this is not just, there have been a lot of answers

responding just on the CBC question. But the media is more than the CBC, right? Media is, you know, it's print, it's television, it's radio, it's online, it's television, it's radio, it's online. It's social media. Lots of different ways of going about trying to define the media. So we're talking specifically about the news media. One thing that you would change to make the media, the news media, better. So you can send that to the Mansbridge Podcast at gmail.com,

the Mansbridge Podcast at gmail.com. Cut-off time Wednesday, 6 p.m. Eastern Time. And the winning entry will receive a new copy, signed copy of the book by Mark Bulgich and myself, How Canada Works. So look forward to continuing to read your ideas around that question. All right. Time now for our feature guest.

And this was an interview I was looking forward to doing. Lisa Rader has been on the program before a number of times here on the bridge. But this is an opportunity to kind of sit back and talk about something that happened last week. Now, for those who need reminding, Lisa Raitt was a frontbencher in the Stephen Harper cabinet. She was in politics right up until active politics, right up until 2019 was the last election she ran in. She was the deputy leader of the opposition when she left politics. She now works for CIBC World Markets. She's, I think, the vice chair.

And we had the opportunity to talk about something, as I said, that happened last week. So why don't we... Well, you know what? Let's take our break, first of all, so we don't have to interrupt the interview. And then we'll go straight to our chat with Lisa Raitt. But we'll do that right after this. And welcome back. Peter Mansbridge here. You're listening to The Bridge on Sirius XM, Channel 167, Canada Talks, or on your favorite podcast platform, wherever you're listening,

whatever venue you're on. Welcome to the program. Today's featured guest is Lisa Raitt, the former Conservative Cabinet Minister, now Vice Chair of CIBC World Markets, and a guest before on this program, but a special guest this week for one of our extended interviews and the opportunity to talk to Lisa Raitt about something that happened last week,

which I think is quite revealing, and you're going to hear the kind of talk we don't often hear from those who have been involved in Canadian politics. So let's get right at it. Here's my conversation with Lisa Wright. So there I was, you know, rolling through Twitter. I don't do that often, actually, but I was surprised that night because suddenly, boom, up in my feed came a tweet of yours or an ex of yours or whatever we call it now. But let me just read it. My feed, this is you talking, my feed is full of liberals excitedly

pointing to a post on UN withdrawal and conservatives bemoaning the PMO explanation of who was paying for the PM's vacation. Can I point out that all of that is utter, and this is where you use X language, bullshit. Shouldn't we be focused together on stopping this escalation of anti-Semitism? So it seems to me that somewhere that night, you kind of hit the wall on reading Twitter. Talk me through that. How did you end up writing that? So it's been brewing for a little bit for me, and I would preface it to say that my husband, Bruce, is a patient at Baycrest Hospital, which is located in the Avenue Road 401 area. And it's the main way for me to actually get off the 401 to go visit him. So I'm seeing this very frequently,

what's happening. And I'm talking about people taking over the bridge, protesting and the bridge being shut down. And I've been concerned about the escalation. And I assumed everybody else was, Peter. Like, I really thought that I was one of many that had been seized by this issue and the blatant expressions, in my opinion, of intimidation and anti-Semitism. And I opened up Twitter that night. I was on vacation. I told you that. And I was scrolling through. That was my first mistake, actually interrupting my vacation from social media to scroll. attempt to turn what is, I would say, you know, ridiculous commentary and partisanship into a

much, much higher concern than it should be, all at the same time abdicating what I think is their moral obligation to speak on what's happening. And I've talked to other houses. Well, I guess that was the interesting part because, I mean, it didn't surprise me to see you going after the Liberals for, you know, commenting on the suggestion by a Conservative frontbencher about the UN. But you went after your own party members as well about the PM's vacation, that this is all low-hanging fruit.

I mean, it's not the first time we've seen partisan fighting going on on low-hanging fruit. But for you, this one, I guess because of the other issues out there right now, was just too much. It was too much, and it is still too much for me. Until serious people take this matter in a serious way, we're not going to stop what's happening. And we're not going to get to a place where people feel safe in Toronto specifically, or in Windsor where it's happening as well. And, and secondly, you stop the spread of this across the country. And

when I say of this, I mean, protesting in the neighborhoods and the areas in which there is a concentrated Jewish population. I actually think it was okay that the protesters interrupted Olivia Chow's skating party. I actually think that's fair game. She's a politician. She makes statements. They're interrupting her event. So be it. I don't like it when they go after people individually. But that was a proper place. It's proper to protest in front of the Israeli embassy, the U.S. embassy, Canadian MPs places. I'm OK with all of that. It's just this next step of threat and intimidation that really, really gets to me. And I don't see enough politicians talking about it. I'll give Anthony Housefather credit. He's out there trying to bring it. Michael Leavitt,

former MP, he's out there as well. And Melissa Lansman from the Conservatives. I mean, they do come in with a serious and somber voice saying, wait a second, guys, like there's a real serious matter happening in this country that we need to turn our attention to. And I'm going to, you know, oh, my gosh, I'm going to get in trouble about this. But I'm going to say, and the media love to follow that bouncing ball of scandal. So here we see, you know, a lot of talk about what happened with the prime minister. And we see a lot of talk about the un and to me it's just people attempting to make a big burning issue out of something that as we like to call really is a nothing burger i don't think leslie lewis is going to set foreign policy or international

policy for the conservative party of canada just as i don't think that the ethics commissioner is going to say anything about the prime minister's vacation because you're allowed to take a gift from a friend. If you don't like it, change the ethics code. And in terms of Lesley Lewis, I mean, she's just got a petition in the house. There's a lot of crazy petitions in the house. I hear all that. I hear what you're saying. And I don't excuse the media.

I mean, we talked about it last week as well, both the issues that you mentioned, not the main issue that you're talking about this past week, but we talked about the UN thing and the PM's vacation. And that's, I guess, partly to do with time of year. It's easy. You go for it. You start talking about it. But why isn't, what do you think it is about the main issue, your concern about anti-Semitism, the rising in the country? And certainly a number of people have pointed this

out. But why do you think it is that people are kind of ducking that issue? They're not talking about it. And there doesn't seem to be any, you know, pursuit of the issue on the part of the forces that be. What do you think the issue is here? Why is that not happening? At its core, I think political parties specifically and elected officials seek to find a path that is not fraught with conflict. And basically, they want to be able to speak out of both sides of their mouth. And as a result, they come down in a way in which allows for one side to see hopefully their support and the other side to see hopefully their support. But I would say on this issue, that's impossible. and who are supportive of the Palestinian protests are very smart and capable of understanding

that there's a part of the Liberal Party that is saying that this is all anti-Semitism. And equally, you know, friends in the Jewish culture are very cognizant about whether or not there's that fulsome support that they're seeking from a political party. So I don't think they do themselves any favors. If they think that they're preserving a voting bloc for themselves. I can see wedge issues on a lot of things, and Canada has seen wedge issues on a lot of things. This is the one we shouldn't see a wedge issue on. And I don't think he can wedge on it. And I don't think he should wedge on it. So let's just get some clarity, moral clarity on where we're going to stand on this and how we're going to approach it. Maybe Parliament is the place to come together and make sure that we're continuing to talk about the issue.

How do you come together on this? Especially these days where it doesn't seem on the face of it that there's any coming together on any on any issue that's probably unfair because there are there clearly some discussions go on on some issues by by by people from all sides but on this one is a major issue how do you get a coming together on this one i think that a tactic that you can always use is you can hive off a part of a standing committee in parliament that it's made up of all the parties that can come together and talk about an important issue. We did that when it came down to sexual harassment within parliament. We've done that with Chinese interference. There's been a lot of times when you've seen that happen. And if parliament, if the House of

Commons can't get their act together, the Senate does good work, Peter. The Senate can do really good committee work, and they appear to be less partisan. They're still partisan. You can't tell me that these are nonpartisan appointments, by the way, but it's less partisan, and they do tend to try to follow the experts. And I would just like to see an effort to have a serious, continuous discussion and a vetting of what is happening that is cognizant of the the real strife that we're putting communities through both sides and i i don't even want to say both sides it's just on this issue there are people extremely concerned about what's happening to palestinians in gaza completely understandable and on the other side there are again with the sides there are also

uh israeli jewish people who are extremely concerned about what happened on october 7 they want to make sure it never happens again again completely valid but the mixing of it in canada is what the parliament should be seized with either through the house or through the senate you talked about protests which are entirely legitimate, protests on Parliament Hill, Queens Park in Ontario, in front of the mayor's office, the City Hall. What about when it goes beyond that and it starts targeting Jewish-owned businesses? I mean, we've all heard about the Indigo situation,

Heather Reisman's situation on that and the threats that have happened to her, but she's not alone. There are other Jewish businesses as well. Do you draw the line there? That's beyond, that's too far. It is. And I was vocal when the convoy started to block the Gordie Howe Bridge or the Ambassador Bridge in Windsor. I mean, you know what my background is in transportation, and I was beside myself that Doug Ford wasn't moving quicker to tamp this down as soon as possible, because when these kinds of things root themselves to almost a normalcy and it's acceptable, it's really hard to unroot them,

really hard to not have this happen over and over again. And look what happened this weekend in Toronto. I mean, the ridiculousness of a police officer handing a bucket of coffee to protesters and also a protester having a disagreement with the police about whether or not they're allowed to use the bathroom in the police, I guess, van that they have there in order to have a command center and that it's his constitutional right to be able to go to the bathroom in the in the in the in the command center that they have there. I mean, that is a sense of people thinking that they're OK to continue doing what they're doing. And my point is that at the very crux of it, going into a neighborhood like that on presumably somewhat private property in order to disrupt a community that is culturally associated with Israel, I think it's bonkers.

What's the responsibility for leaders in a situation like this? I mean, could you see, I mean, is it even possible to consider that, you know, that Messrs. Trudeau and Polyev say, okay, time out. We're going to sit down. We've got to figure this out because it's wrong. It's wrong for the country. It's wrong for us to be allowing it to happen. We've got to sort out some way of dealing with this, some way to get a greater understanding. Is've got to sort out some way of dealing with this, some way to get a

greater understanding. Is that impossible to even think of? No, I don't think it's impossible. I don't think we're at full politicization of this issue. My fear is that we do get to that point. But we did see them coming together on the first night of Hanukkah. I think we did see people stand with each other and talk about the importance. I think we did see a condemnation of what happened on October 7 in the House of Commons. But we're at the point where the rubber hits the road in Canada. When stuff is happening in other parts of the world, so easy to get up and have that. We all agree at all stages that this is a terrible thing that's happening somewhere else. But now we got it happening here. We have a real situation happening here. And it takes a lot.

It takes a lot of courage to stand up and work with people who are not necessarily your partisan stripe to get to somewhere better. And maybe it's not starting at the top. Maybe it's, let's have some staff from PMO, talk to some staff and OLO, talk to some staff in the NDP. And just like have that kind of general conversation of, hey, folks, what are we going to do here? Like, this is becoming an issue where we need to work together, instead of trying to score points off of one another. And maybe that's why I said what I said in that post, Peter, because I fear that we are going to get to the point where people just want to lob partisan shots at one another and how

they're responding to this situation in Canada right now, as opposed to doing the hard work of talking to one another about coming up with a point of view. The trucker convoy ended up being politicized, and it's shameful that it did, absolutely shameful. And it would be better if we try to avoid the mistakes made in that situation. Do you think that we're, you sometimes wonder whether we're just too far gone on the partisan nature that you couldn't even get staff together

from those different offices. I think you can. Cause you know what? Cause it happens postpartisan all the time. You know, somebody that I would never have talked to necessarily when she was at PMO and I was in, I was in still a member of parliament in the opposition,

we probably wouldn't have crossed paths or even spoken to one other. I mean, she's so supportive of when i come out and talk about this stuff now and uh it can happen like we're still human beings and if it's happening post-partisan that it should be able to happen while they're in the partisan soup who are you talking about there oh marcy sirks okay R.C. Sirks. Okay. Go back five years. I mean, you left Parliament Hill on what, 2019, after the 2019 election? Yeah. Was it different then than it is now, that partisan nature on the Hill? No. There was still the same kind of cut and thrust then as we're witnessing today.

I, yeah, I don't see any difference from even 08 when I was elected. You know, the Conservatives went hard after Stéphane Dion, no question about it. We were also equally prepared for Michael Ignatieff. And Justin was totally ready to take on Stephen Harper, right? Painted him in the worst kind of pictures of who he was as an individual and as a person. It always happens this way. I'm not surprised. I'm not surprised. I think partisanship has definitely been there for a long time. I mean, I mean, Warren Kinsella

wrote a book about going negative years and years and years and years and years ago, and it still holds true today, going negative and finding the wedge that you want to find in order to contrast with the other party. That's the nice word that we use. We need contrast in politics. I tend to call it a wedge now. So those who think that the place has got a lot worse in terms of the way the House of Commons operates, the kind of debates that take place in there, the kind of attitudes that exist going back and forth across the floor, they forget too soon? What's it been like all along? Oh, yeah. I think they forget too soon? What have, what's been like all along? Oh yeah. I think they forget too soon. I think if you take a look at some of the operators in like a Pierre Trudeau government or in a Mulroney government, there were some really, you know, there were some heavy fights in those John Diefenbaker. I mean,

Jonovitson just wrote a book about it. I mean, there's lots of kind of cut and thrust going far, far back, which was probably worse and far more personal than what we see today. I mean, what you're seeing is two people sparring through social media, trying to garner clicks and likes. And maybe the big difference now is that the general public feels they can get in on the fight, which is a new layer. But I think the partisanship in Parliament is no different than it always has been. There are some who feel that because of social media and its impact on everything these days, that politics in the House of Commons, in front of the cameras, is now basically designed to farm clips for social media that MPs go in there thinking okay I need something new and I you know if I can just

boil this little thought down to 15 seconds it'll be a great clip for social media that would be different than what even what you saw yeah I think that's just in the I think that's just in the delivery of being succinct in the question and the practice associated with getting the right words so that it does look better on camera or that you can take the clip and it looks and it looks good. But certainly the thesis of question period has always been gotcha politics. Rarely do you have somebody standing up and asking a serious question that is meant to elucidate an answer for their constituents, that it really is about trying to show the government in a negative light by branding them as corrupt or incompetent. That's never changed. It's as less. I mean, Tom O'Kara is the best at doing that. So you still have confidence in the system then? Oh, I do. Oh, I do. I think our system is great. I worry about big majorities because I think

big majorities do give a lot of power to a centralized government. And I know it does. I mean, in the United States, there are checks and balances and checks and balances and checks and balances and gridlock and lots of options for an issue to be dissected and maybe amended along the way. In Canada, you get one of those big majorities. You are looking at a government being able to implement its entire agenda and then some. And that's what we've seen with the Trudeau government. Well, if you believe the polls, the Trudeau government's majority ain't going to be nothing like what your party can have. Well, yeah. And I don't know. I mean, there's a lot of efficiency in the vote, Peter. You know, you and I both know that what you see is a percentage and how it clusters

throughout 338 ridings or however many we're going to have if the election's after April. It's a it's a different ballgame. I mean, in the United States, I'm reminded that 10 percent, it's only 10% of electoral votes that are really up for grabs. And in Canada, it's pretty much the same thing. It's a handful of ridings, 20 maybe across the country where you're really going to be battling it out. This has been a fascinating conversation. It's so good of you to talk about it and to be so straightforward about your thoughts on all this. It would be wrong to leave this conversation without asking you how Bruce is doing. You've been quite public about the struggles your family's been through and Bruce is going through.

How are things looking at the moment? So Bruce is, he has lost his ability to know me, which is sad. But he gets great care. He still interacts with people. He can still walk, he can feed himself. And those seem to be small things for people to think about. But they're big in our world. He's really been able to maintain a good level of quality of life right now i will tell you that let me let me just tell you something that happened over christmas so i went in to see him on christmas day and he had his regular caregiver there with him because he's got people with him eight hours a day um almost every day and he um didn't want anything to do with me

he just wanted to be with his caregiver he He kind of reject, not kind of, he did reject me. And I was, I was sad. I mean, it's Christmas, I'm dressed up, I want to spend it with my husband. And it's not going to happen. So I ended up leaving and I went to a movie in the afternoon. And you know what, it was a terrible movie. I picked a better movie to be honest. But nonetheless, I needed to just kind of stretch and clear. A week later, it's New Year's Day. I go and see him. And the minute I saw him, I knew something was different. And in Alzheimer's, sometimes there's a connection and the neurons are firing. And he knew me that day. And we spent, he had some words and we spent some time together and we watched a movie together and we held hands. And I thought, oh my gosh, what a gift, what a contrast and what a gift. The downside though, is the next day, Bruce was still very much lucid and understanding.

And he understood in that moment that he had this disease and how his life was changed and that he missed me. And he was sobbing and he was inconsolable. And the blessing of Alzheimer's, if you can call it a blessing, is they forget they have the disease. Everyone else around them knows, but they forget. And on New Year's Day, my husband remembered he had the disease. And I don't think I ever want to see that again. I will forego any happiness of having that momentary connection with him to spare me having to similar situations. They may be at the early

stages. They may be at later stages. What do you say? What advice do you give families that are entering into this world? The first four years, first of all, this disease is more than seven years. It's 15 years, at least, especially in young onset. Be prepared for that. The first four years go by very, very fast. And it's just day after day, noting something else that you've lost, the ability to make a coffee, the ability to use a phone, turn the channel, that kind of stuff. And then after that four years, it's a very, very slow march to your ultimate demise, but it's very slow. So at the beginning,

you feel very rushed. And I would say, take off your bucket list, do as much as you possibly can and get it done in those four years, three to four years if you can, because the time, the 12 years, the 10 years that followed that is very, very limited and very, very long. And it's a slow goodbye, as Nancy Reagan said. It's no question about it. Thank you for sharing this with us. We all feel for you and we all admire you so much for your ability to not only live

through this, but talk about it with us, because we're all learning. Well, I hope so. Thanks, Peter. All right. Take care. We'll talk to you again soon. You bet. Thanks. Lisa Wright, former Conservative cabinet minister, and her reflections on one, partisanship in the House, and two, the struggle that her family's going through because of Alzheimer's. A remarkable conversation in those last few minutes make us all pause.

There's no doubt about that. All right. We have time to connect on an end bit, which I think is perhaps not a bad way to start off the new year. And this is an article in a website called futurecrunch.com. And they looked at 100 ways that the world has good news to share. You know, that constant concern that many of you have is that we only focus on bad news.

And to a degree, that's true. Sadly, bad news is news too. And often it grabs the headlines because it impacts us on any number of different levels. But there is good news out there as well, and FutureCrunch.com decided, you know what, let's look for good news stories that we didn't hear enough about in the last year, but are part of our world as we begin a new year here in 2024. So on their list, I'm not going to go through all.

I think there's 60 of them that they have in the article. I'm not going to go through them all, but I'm going to go through the top, you know, the top five or six anyway. Number one, a record number of countries eliminated diseases this year. Egypt became the first country to eliminate hepatitis C, which is crazy, given that it used to have the highest burden in the world of hep C. The Maldives became the first country to eliminate leprosy. Bangladesh became the first country to eliminate black fever,

and also eliminated elephantitis. Niger became the first African country to eliminate river blindness. Benin, Mali, and Iraq eliminated trachoma. To more or less, Bhutan and North Korea eliminated rubella. Ghana eliminated sleeping sickness. And Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, and Belize eliminated malaria. Those are a lot of accomplishments on, in many cases, killer diseases. Number two on their list, progress in the fight against cancer.

We've lived our whole lives with the fight against cancer, and it's easy to fall into the trap, if you will, of saying they're never going to get this. But in fact, there is progress. European cancer mortality for 2023 was estimated to be 6.5% lower for men and 3.7% lower for women than in 2018. The U.S. reported cancer death rates have fallen by a third in the last three decades. Australia reported significant reductions in skin cancer in under 40s. There were major breakthroughs in treatments for colon, skin, bladder, and cervical cancer. And Pfizer announced it would offer all patented cancer drugs at cost to 1.2 billion people in low-income countries.

Number three on the list. Malaria vaccines started arriving in Africa. A malaria vaccine is the holy grail of global health we've been trying to create one for over 70 years now we're about to unleash not one but two of them against a disease that infects 247 million people and kills half a million children every year. That's more than 1,000 deaths of children every day. The first vaccine, Mosquirix, started arriving in nine African countries this year. It reduces severe malaria by 22% and reduces deaths from all causes by 13%. And in October, the WHO, the World Health Organization, approved a second cheaper version called R21-Matrix-M, which UNICEF will start distributing to millions of kids in 2024.

We're going to have a couple more from the list here. Number four, new therapies reshaped how obesity is treated. Obesity is a public health crisis in the United States. Around 70% of adults are affected by excess weight, and in Europe, it's more than half. Those are remarkable figures, right? 70% of adults are affected by excess weight in the United States. Europe, it's more than 50%. This year, however, a new class of therapies, most notably Ozempic and Wagovi,

never heard of that one, proved that not only could they include significant weight loss, but drastically reduce symptoms of heart failure and the risk of heart attacks and strokes. Could this class of drugs actually safeguard health in people with obesity? This year brought an answer. That answer was yes. I'm still a little, you know, I'm overweight.

I'm not drastically overweight, but I'm still a little, you know, I'm overweight. I'm not drastically overweight, but I'm overweight, and I have the same kind of problems a lot of people my age have of trying to lose that weight. And so the topic of Ozempic has come up, and I don't know. I'm still a little wary of that idea. Number five on the list. Some bright spots for maternal and child health. India, Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Liberia, Ghana, Malawi, Tanzania,

and Sierra Leone all reported significant declines in maternal and child mortality, as did the entire Southeast Asia region. all reported significant declines in maternal and child mortality, as did the entire Southeast Asia region. In August, the WHO reported that exclusive breastfeeding has increased from 38% to 48% globally in the last decade, and UNICEF reported that 8 in 10 children are now welcomed into the world by a trained professional in a health facility, up from 6 in 10 a generation ago. So here's the last one that we'll mention for now.

We're winning the war on AIDS. It's taken 40 years. It was the mid-'80s, early 80s, when AIDS started to become a story that we all paid attention to. And the fears that existed as a result of that. And the concerns around how health care was provided for AIDS victims. Remember when Diana, Princess of Wales, shook hands or held hands or hugged an AIDS victim?

What a huge story that was, because she'd actually touched an AIDS victim. Two decades ago, the disease seemed unstoppable, killing 2 million people a year. But today, it's a very different story. In July, the UN revealed that in 2022, deaths fell to 630,000. That's still a huge number, but had fallen. There were an estimated 1.3 million new infections,

the lowest since the early 1990s, and only 130,000 new infections in children, the lowest since the 1980s. There's also been notable progress on the legal front, with several countries removing laws preventing access for marginalized people in the last two years. So there's the top six of the futurecrunch.com. I think it's the 66 good news stories you didn't hear about in 2023, which is the name of their article. If you want to read more, good news stories you didn't hear about in 2023, which is the name of their article.

If you want to read more, good news stories, right? Good news stories. If you want to read more about that, you can go to futurecrunch.com and have a look and see what they have to say. Okay, we're going to wrap it up with a couple of advisories tomorrow. This is the new four-day week on the bridge. Okay, we're going to wrap it up with a couple of advisories tomorrow. This is the new four-day week on the bridge. And, you know, we looked at taking Mondays off or taking Fridays off.

Definitely didn't want to take Fridays off. Friday is owned and operated by Good Talk, Chantel and Bruce. And so we're not changing that. Monday, I kind of like starting Mondays off you know especially these days with Dr. Janice Stein so we settled on Wednesday because it kind of fit Bruce had asked for

just to work one day a week instead of two that he had been for the last couple of years and so Wednesdays is becoming the encore edition. And we searched back into three years of archives of the bridge to have an encore edition. We'll always, you know, if something huge happens on a Wednesday or around a Wednesday, we'll probably still do a program there.

But the idea for the time being to reduce to a four-day week, is to take Wednesdays off, and it will become an encore edition. So tomorrow's episode will be an encore edition. We're going to focus on disinformation on tomorrow's encore edition. So if you didn't hear it the first time around, or even if you did, want to hear it again, because it's a really good one, you'll want to hear that. Thursday, we're back with your turn and the random ranter, of course. And your turn this week is answering the question, if you could change one thing about the way the news media operates, what would that change be? Send your

answer. Condensed, short answers. And and boy you've been great this week on the the dozens dozens of answers that have come in already being short to the point don't forget to include your name and where you're writing from those are important I need them both. And you can send it to the Mansbridge Podcast at gmail.com, themansbridgepodcast at gmail.com. That's it for today. Thanks to Lisa Raitt for being with us and for going through her thoughts on partisanship and bringing us up to date on the struggles that her family has been facing

because of Alzheimer's. That's it for this day. I'm Peter Mansbridge. Thanks so much for listening. We'll be back at you again in 24 hours.