The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - O'Toole For The Win

Episode Date: August 24, 2020

Well that was a surprise. What happens now?

And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here once again with the latest episode of the Bridge Daily. As we kick off week 24. Week 24, can you believe it? It just seems amazing. Well, here we are as we get close to the end of August. Were you up a good chunk of last night? Maybe on the West Coast where people are watching the Canucks. Not a good game.

But hey, it's only the first, best of seven. That's a pretty formidable team they're playing against. But let's see how it goes. Raptors won earlier in the night, swept four games straight against the Nets. But I would assume that people who follow this podcast may also, some of you anyway, may also have been watching that event called the Conservative Leadership Convention.

So I better start by saying a few things about that. Because in the end, it was a surprise on a number of fronts. It was a surprise to how disorganized it was, and how they couldn't get the voting straight, and the vote counting straight. And let's face it, this is the same party who just last week where at least some of its members were criticizing the new finance minister, Christia Freeland, saying, you know what? She's not qualified to be finance minister.

Really? Maybe you better go take a look at some of the finance ministers of the past from all parties. And, you know, say, how qualified were they? Like, I don't think I've ever heard anybody say a finance minister wasn't qualified. But, gee, first woman comes along and suddenly she's not qualified. This from the party that couldn't figure out a way to count the ballots last night without ripping them up. So I think they might want to rethink those things.

Anyway, they took a beating, not surprisingly, and justifiably for the way they ran that ballot counting process last night. But on the other hand, let's be fair. A week from now, two weeks from now, people will have forgotten that whole thing in terms of how the ballots were counted and screwed up. They'll remember over time at future conventions, people will look back and say,

oh, remember that convention back in whenever it was the conservatives ran, they got all the counting screwed up. How many of those have there been in the last 20 years since they moved away from the regular, or what had been the regular conventional way of doing leadership conventions and the ballot process and big hockey rinks and what have you? And as soon as they started doing, you know, per member votes and using the internet

and doing huge numbers, problems started. Well, problems are inherent in a process like that. Anyway, that's what happened, but I think people will get over it. The important part of, I mean, one of the reasons why it was talked about so much yesterday was nothing else to talk about. They didn't have any results. So you had endless chatter from the television and radio and internet hosts trying to tell a story

that they didn't have a story yet other than a process that wasn't very impressive. So that's what they talked about. And, you know, let me just give credit where credit's due. I did some flipping around, watched a few, as much as I could bear watching last night when they didn't have any results. But they all did a great job of, you know, they put on there to talk and talk they did for hours and hours and hours,

which is always a challenge. It can be fun and you can have fun but it's still a challenge i remember the longest leadership convention i did was 1983 and i did quite a few leadership conventions but 83 i think was the longest one was 13 hours straight no commercials it was the conservative progressive conservative leadership convention that elected b Brian Mulroney. We were on the air for 13 hours, no commercials, which meant no pee breaks. I have no idea how I managed that, but I did somehow. And I'm sure glad it's not today because I can tell you I couldn't handle that now.

Anyway, the real story of last night is the Conservatives have a new leader, and it's not the leader many thought, including me, it was going to be. Most people assumed it was going to be Peter McKay. It wasn't. It's Aaron O'Toole. Now, I can tell you that as much as we assumed it was going to be Peter McKay, and I included in that group, it was based on the fact he had lots of endorsements. He had lots of endorsements for caucus members, members of the conservative caucus in Ottawa.

I think he had more than anybody else, more than everybody else put together. And he had some business support, but he ran a terrible campaign, especially in the first few months. It was awful. And perhaps he never recovered from that because it opened the door to Aaron O'Toole, who did two things. That door opening he took advantage of. And he appealed to the social conservatives, the right wing of the party.

Now, I've known Aaron O'Toole for a while because he was always very supportive of a charitable event that I was involved in and continue to be involved in, in Ottawa each fall. It won't be happening this year because of COVID. But where we raise money for internship programs, both at the parliamentary level in terms of parliamentary interns and in journalism for journalistic interns, journalism interns, at major news organizations. Could be CTV, could be CBC, could be Globe and Mail, Toronto Star,

you name it, Canadian Press. And we depend on the support of companies. And the fact that we have a big kind of evening, and it's mainly for the political crowd in Ottawa, you know, MPs, senators, journalists, and they come out. We usually hold it on the Gatineau side of the river, and it's a fun evening,

and it's one of those few evenings where sort of partisanship is checked in at the door. You come in, you have a good time. And I do a kind of bad stand-up comedy routine where I make fun of everybody, including myself. None of that's hard. But of the conservative MPs who come, Aaron O'Toole has always been one and was willing to stand there and take the good-natured heat. So I always admired that. I'm a little bit puzzled as to how he's gone about winning this leadership and his appeal to the right of centre, well not even right of centre, right of right of centre part of the party.

And how he will deal with that in the future because that is right now, or it could be a very difficult situation in a general election. If you're looking for a, and I saw this today on Twitter, a really good thread that explains kind of how he got to the position he's in today. Then look up Scott Reed's thread. It's really good, and it's long. So, I mean, if you are on Twitter, you know, search out Scott Reed. Scott is a, used to work for Paul Martin. He has a consulting firm with Scott Vestchuk, now based in Toronto. He helps governments and businesses with advice. And he also works for CTV. He's on one of their political panels.

Anyway, on Twitter today, he wrote, which basically would have been a great column in some newspaper this morning, if you were trying to figure out what the hell happened last night in the Conservative Leadership Convention. This is the answer. It's really good. So look it up, Scott Reid. You can search him out and then look for the thread.

There's, I think, about eight or ten or maybe more tweets as part of that thread, but it'll give you the explanations that you need. Now, the next big question is going to be, what impact will all this have on the national political landscape? Does it mean an election is immediately in the offing? The Bloc Québécois say they want an election. They're going to move non-confidence.

Will the other opposition parties, now the newly-led Conservative Party and the NDP, will they support that motion? If they do, it's game over for the Liberals, and we're into an election. People aren't so sure of that, because a lot of the parties don't have any money. They're still trying to pay off the last election.

And for the new conservative leadership, they've got to get their ducks in a row, including what exactly it is they stand for. So all of that is yet to be determined. Now, there of course is another way we could end up in an election fairly quickly. And that, of course, would be if Justin Trudeau decides he's going to have an election.

So he comes back with a, you know, they're on a break now. He's shuffled his cabinet, comes back with a new agenda and a new cabinet. And he goes, you know what? We need the people of Canada to say, okay, we believe the government's handling the COVID crisis well, and we've seen now their plans for the future. Could be a budget, could be a throne speech, could be whatever. And we need to know that they, in fact, agree with that. So, Mr. O'Toole, other opposition leaders, I'm going to ask the Governor General to dissolve Parliament, call for an election.

That's possible too. And of course, the third possibility is no election. But you've got those kind of three scenarios. And any one of those could play out in the next little while. I mean, it's hard to imagine an election during a pandemic, but Elections Canada is working to prepare one just in case, as they should. We're in a minority government.

It could fall at any time for any reason. So, all those things are things for Aaron O'Toole to ponder on this day. His first day as leader of the Conservative Party of Canada. He doesn't get a break. He doesn't get a honeymoon. He doesn't get a holiday. He's got to hit the ground running and be prepared for any eventuality. That is the landscape at the moment. Okay.

A glance ahead to the rest of the week for the bridge daily. Bruce and I have talked about the next race next door, which will probably be Wednesday. And the Republican convention is going on starting now. We'll kind of keep an eye on that and see whether there's something we want to do about it. I know one of the things that I've often pondered, because we're not looking to do the daily cut and thrust of these conventions, because, you know, you want that, watch regular newscasts.

We're trying to add something else, kind of value add to our conversation. One of the things that I've often thought about is, you know, Trump supposedly has this great reputation as this guy knows TV and, you know, he was on The Apprentice and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And he wrote books. Well, he didn't write any of them, but people wrote books for him to put his name on.

But really, is he a great television performer? Apparently, he's been orchestrating this whole week. He's trying to be deciding who should speak and how they should speak and how long they should speak for and what things should look like, and he's going to use the White House as a backdrop on Thursday night. But is he really a great television producer? That's one thing that I was thinking of talking about with Bruce. So I give him that to ponder over to see whether he wants to talk about that.

The other thing is, and I think this one's important, and we should do it soon, if not this week, and that is polls. And, of course, Bruce is an expert at polls, but the issue is not what's in the current polls. The issue is what should we be looking for? So, you know, you want to think that one through. And you know you want to think that one through and i've asked bruce to think that one through as to whether or not he wants to

deal with that so that's my idea and it's those are a couple of ideas for this wednesday's race next door but of course the main reason we do this podcast is to follow the COVID-19 story. And, obviously, that's what we'll be trying to do in a couple of, at least a couple of days this week. Because there are always new developments on that story, right? Including a few today. They're kind of of lesser importance, but they're nevertheless, they are important. So I'll mention them now. Let's get at it. You know, there's one of the issues that we've talked about is what's an essential service, right? And we have discovered through this process the things we'd never thought of as essential services necessarily have become very essential services, whether those are, you know, grocery store clerks.

Obviously, frontline health care workers are always essential, but they prove their value 10 times, 100 times more than usual as a result of this. The grocery store clerks, farm workers, truck drivers, they've all become, and knowingly to us, essential services. Well, I found this little story interesting. It was reported by Bloomberg. It reports that Argentina is extending a price freeze for TV, Internet, and mobile service, which means that providers won't be able to raise prices without government approval until the end of the year,

deeming them essential public services. And that, of course, is, among other things, the reasons for COVID-19 and how people rely specifically on TV, Internet, and mobile. Price freeze. End of the year. Now, I don't know. Maybe the various different mobile services and internet services and cable have put a price freeze on any plan increases they might have had in Canada. Perhaps they have. If they have, I'm sure they'll write or you'll write on their behalf. But I thought that was interesting that now those are essential services. Here's a story about, I don't know, colleges and universities and admission.

And this one comes out of the New York Times. In the industry of higher education, the campuses that reopen for in-person instruction are now taking action ranging from shutdowns, warning, and scolding their students after multiple incidents on campuses that have exposed students to coronavirus. North Carolina State, Syracuse, Vanderbilt,

all have become more stern in their communications to students after University of North Carolina suddenly decided to shift to remote learning after an outbreak in the first week of its reopening. And that's the great fear, whether it's a university campuses or college campuses or high school or grade school, is that, you know, they're going to go back to school and then bingo, right away, something's going to happen. There's going to be an outbreak of some sort because certain elements are either not following the restrictions that have been placed upon them, or those who placed restrictions hadn't thought through what they needed to do.

So these things, this issue, continues to be a problem and a dilemma for administrators, for educators, for parents, and for children, for kids, whether they're five years old or 20 years old. It's a dilemma. now we're going to close out on this thought for day one of week 24 and that is you know when you're holding an event like the democrats did last week and the republicans are this week you're looking for moments that people will always remember. And those aren't easy to capture. You know, you've got to think that one through. Some of them happen kind of ad lib.

They just sort of happen. Others are planned, carefully planned. And the master of these capturing a moment, you know, was Ronald Reagan and the team around him, who started that process of, you know, during the annual State of the Union address, of placing somebody in the president's gallery during the speech that he could refer to. It might be a soldier or a firefighter or a nurse or it could be any number of people. And he'd get them to stand up and he'd tell their story

and there was always one everybody could understand. And it was a moment. And when it first happened, people were, oh my gosh, did you see what the president did last night? Now it's kind of routine. It happens all the time. Last week there was a moment, and you can bet that Donald Trump is hoping there's going to be a moment of some kind this week. So far, when you look at his array of speakers, two of whom he's lost already in the last couple of days,

Kellyanne Conway and Steve Bannon. She quit, and he went, you know, he's being charged with an offense. So of their, whatever it was, 10 or 12 speakers, he's already lost two. And the rest are, you know, his daughter and his sons and his, well, two daughters, two sons, his wife. They're all going to be speaking. They make up about half the speaker list right now. Anyway, that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about something unexpected,

something involving someone that nobody knew. So what last week was the big moment? What do you think it was? If you watched it, this is something you wouldn't forget, and you're probably saying it right now. This is what it was. The praise continued unabated on social media around the DNC, the Democratic National Convention, speech of a 13-year-old boy with a stuttering condition who shared that Joe Biden had informed him that they were part of the same club and taught him how to mark his speech

to make it easier to deliver. This was a piece in Axios, the news agency. It was so heartwarming that some even said it rivaled Joe Biden's speech, and conservatives praised it as well. So that was a moment. If you didn't see it, you probably want to Google it and watch it, because it is quite remarkable. And something that as moments go, you're never going to forget. So that's what they'll be looking for this week on the part of the Republicans. Well, that wraps it for this day one of week 24 of the Bridge Daily.

Glad you joined us and hope you join us again through the rest of the Bridge Daily. Glad you joined us, and I hope you join us again through the rest of the week, including probably, almost certainly, the race next door on Wednesday and the weekend special, obviously, on Friday, where we're looking for your letters and your comments and your thoughts. So keep them coming all this week. All right, I'm Peter Mansbridge.

This has been The Bridge Daily. Thanks so much for listening. We'll talk to you again in 24 hours. Thank you.