The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Smoke Mirrors and The Truth -- Where Should Opinion Fit In?

Episode Date: January 27, 2021

Lots on top here this week with Bruce Anderson -- the GG failure, can Erin O'Toole survive, and should news orgs ban opinion?

and hello there peter mansbridge here with the latest episode the bridge daily it's hump day that means it's wednesday of course and wednesday means Smoke, Mirrors and the Truth. That's why we have the little kind of different music for Wednesdays. Smoke, Mirrors and the Truth. Bruce Anderson is joining us, as he always does. Peter, it's good to talk to you. The middle of the, no, it's not the middle of the pandemic. It can't be the middle of the pandemic. It is kind of roughly.

Roughly, I'd say it's the middle of the pandemic. Well, no, no, it can't be for another year. We're like a year in and that's enough. And let's have another few months and let's get back to normal. Boy, wouldn't that be nice. I don't know. I've given up trying to follow all the various projections and predictions and hopes and dreams of the different manufacturers.

Although I'll put it this way, with more vaccines coming online, Johnson & Johnson giving some encouraging news yesterday, AstraZeneca is still somewhere out there. We're dealing with Pfizer and Moderna, and we're dealing with the various delivery issues on those two. But, you know, within the next month or two, we're probably going to have at least double the number of vaccines that we have now, which should only speed up the process a bit.

So those projections that everybody who wants a vaccine will be vaccinated by the end of September are probably. They should still hold up. They should still hold up. That's what the data seemed to be saying to us, yeah. I mean, there's a lot of talk about this issue, and it goes back and forth, and a lot of finger-pointing. But, you know, as one of the doctors I was talking to the other day

made a point of saying, you know, two months ago, we didn't even know there was going to be a vaccine yet. Right. And now we're arguing over the number that are being delivered each day and getting all wound up about it. The fact is, it's pretty impressive what has happened. I know there have been issues. They admit there have been issues. But hopefully these are going to get sorted out in the days and weeks ahead.

Well, it's almost like, how could there not be issues? And I get asked this question all the time, Peter, about public opinion. What do your polls show about, are people really getting frustrated and angry and impatient about the vaccines? And the truth is, people are frustrated about the virus, but when it comes to the management of the solutions, both the economic solutions and the pace towards a vaccine, most people are actually pretty patient. They don't have expectations that were in place for what a pandemic would be like before this. And so they're kind of observing it and reacting to it as they go along. And they're looking at whether people are doing the right things, acting in good faith. And so far, their feeling about the vaccination situation is people are trying to do the right thing and we're going to get where we're going to get quicker than maybe we would have ever

been able to before. That may change, but that's where people are at today. Right. I know your conclusions are based on real research as opposed to mine, which are based on sort of like who I bump into in conversation on the phone or across the street or whatever it may be. I mean, I've noticed not an anger but a frustration, and it's kind of similar to some of the things that have played out in the last year where the things they're being told don't exactly turn out to be the way they are.

Now, whether that was, you know, the initial kind of kerfuffle around masking to this whole situation of, you know, when and how the vaccines would be available. I agree with you. They're not angry in the sense that, hey, I want mine today and it's not there and where is it? It's sort of, I'm confused by some of the messaging that's been going on. I think that's true about vaccines a little bit. I think it's true about the guidance around travel or not. I think people are, because they're frustrated, their sense of it's not clear enough, it's not precise enough, it's not consistent enough some cases, there are inconsistencies. And there are some people who say, why don't governments just say you can't travel and you can't get on a plane and all of that sort of thing. So I get that. And I do feel, though, that you've got a smaller segment of the public that's paying intense attention to all of these advisories and the stories about vaccine production and rollout. And it's those people who tend to get more upset if they hear one thing one week and then the story seems to change the next week, whereas the rest of the population, the bulk of the population, have basically settled into a mindset of this is

a grind. It's going to go on for a while longer. I'm going to get a vaccination when it's available. It's going to be sometime this year, probably sometime between now and September. And I'm not happy about it, but I'm okay with that. And I think, so when I look at the columnists, like one of our former panel colleagues, who seems almost to be looking for evidence of failure in the vaccine rollout and the vaccine plan, maybe to justify a column that he wrote two or three months ago that said that Trudeau had failed Canadians on vaccines. I find that the people I'm talking to are either not paying attention to that opinion or they're kind of annoyed at it because it feels as though it's opinionators looking to justify an opinion and criticize people who are, for the most part, trying to do the right thing.

I think that's fair. You know, it's funny when you're in this business and you make certain claims or, or, or claims that look like predictions, um, you really got to be careful and you got to be prepared to go back and say, you know what, I was wrong on that. I was wrong. Yeah. Um, I'll tell you what I was wrong on. Uh, you know, I, I, I was a guest on another podcast of a few weeks ago, a month ago now, where I gave credit, big credit, to those Canadians who were buying up vaccines or getting commitments on vaccines. And I didn't know enough. I mean, I still think that in many ways they did a good job,

but not in all ways. And we found out since where there's been a shortfall on some of the work that they were doing in trying to position themselves for vaccines if in fact those particular companies developed a vaccine that worked. And that was always the gamble. I mean, they were out there last summer

trying to make deals, which was a tough position to be in because you didn't know whether any of them would work, let alone some of them. But you were trying to position yourself in all cases in case they did work. So I might have given them too much of a 100% pass on that.

But nevertheless, the fact is success or failure on a lot of these things is not going to be fully placeable until this is all over and we're able to look back at the kind of decisions that were made. And listen, nobody's assuming that every decision made in this is going to be perfect because it won't be by anyone.

Yeah, it can't be. It's impossible. Exactly. Too many moving parts. But too many moving parts and too early to make those big judgments on success or failure as we tend to want to do often when it comes to things that have any sense of a political decision in

the making. Having said that, let's move on to one that looks like it was a total disaster. And that was the choice surrounding the latest governor general, Julie Payette, who has resigned in the past few days. This one looks like a clear case of what, in fact, many people worried about at the time when certain things started to come out after the announcement was made that she'd be getting the job, that it had not been properly vetted, her background, how well she worked with people, where she'd worked elsewhere, and getting a full sense of just how appropriate she was for this job.

It looks like the old F for a fail on that one, on the part of this government. Yeah, I don't even think that's debatable, to be honest, Peter. I really don't care about the role of governor general. I'm not a rabid anti-monarchist, but I'm so indifferent to the idea of the monarchy in Canada and the governor general that it's been hard for me to care about this story. And I kind of find myself wondering, is that just because we're in a pandemic? Or is it because it's the internet age and there are 40,000 stories coming at me over Twitter or everything else all day long, and this one just doesn't have the, there's no wow factor for me because months ago, maybe a couple of years ago,

I had already come to some conclusions about what kind of a person this was in this role. And they weren't positive conclusions. And she did nothing since the first of these stories came out to make anybody feel that she was learning from the experience, that she was trying to do better. If anything, it was just stonewalling and denial and blame placing on disgruntled employees and pretending that she wasn't ever going to be held to the kind of standard that other people expect to be held, who are in management or senior positions. So yeah, I think there was a vetting problem for sure. But I kind of focus on the performance problem. This person took on this role. This is not a dumb person. This is a well-educated person, a person who had been in positions of

authority and influence and significant life experience. And she just booted the job from the get-go, it seems. And so I'm glad she's gone. I hope they make a judicious choice. I don't really like the idea of letting opposition parties to have some sort of a veto on who the next choice is. I think that kind of sets a weird precedent. But I also kind of feel a little bit for the government, which is you have to

appoint one of these people, you have to fill this job. But the job really is so ceremonial now that the inclination is probably to find somebody who can attract the crowd, some attention, which leads you not to where I wouldn't call her a celebrity. I don't think an astronaut is the same thing as a movie star, just like I don't think a TV news anchor is the same thing as a celebrity. I think these are different things. I'm glad you think that way. Hey, you know, there are a lot of people, Peter, who say, how is Peter's French?

Because he's very well-known and loved. Sure, Paul. I hear that a lot. There's a lot of people saying that. But anyway, that's where I am on it. There's nobody saying that, and nor should anybody say that. But let me get you on that. Good riddance to a bad choice.

That's what I say, and I want to talk about almost anything else, but let's talk about it some more if we need to. Okay. I just want to talk a little bit, because it picks up on one of your opening comments about how you feel about this role in the first place um because right now there's one assumes this time around they're doing a real vetting process if in fact they are going to appoint somebody and as opposed to just letting the uh there's the chief justice of the supreme court kind of run this role for the next little

while and and sort of sit and breathe and let people think about how they want to continue or whether they want to continue. I mean, the whole role about the monarchy in Canada and the role of the governor general and whether it's, you know, 100% ceremonial and really doesn't do anything other than that and whether or not we should continue on. I don't know how big an issue that is or whether it's even worth, especially in these days and times, spending any amount of the valuable time that all the various people in Ottawa have to discuss this. But that is an issue. Vetting is an issue.

Vetting's always been an issue on a lot of things. I mean, you know, when new cabinets are appointed, often there's very little time to vet. And, you know, I've talked to RCMP officers and commissioners of the past who have said, you know, look, we are asked to vet, and we're given like 24 hours to vet. And in 24 hours, you really can't do much except check their you know their driving record their criminal record that kind of thing you can't really go deeper than that now with the governor general you've got a little more time there's

there's no urgency to have to do this right away and it it is remarkable some of the things they seem to have missed last time around that they should have been able to get. But I guess the issue is, and you've made your position clear, I guess, is you don't care what they do here or whether they do anything. Is that going too far in terms of where you feel? I mean, do you think… Yeah, it's going too far. Look, I think that when it became clear that the government was faced with a dilemma,

which is can you actually fire someone who was appointed effectively by the queen on advice? What does that look like? How does that work? Is there precedent for that? What sort of evidentiary base would you need to have in order to trigger a process like that? I think the government did the right thing then, which was to launch an independent, arm's-length investigation into the allegations, to ask for a

report in a timely fashion, to get that report. And then to, without making it overly dramatic point of vilifying this person, but yet making it pretty clear that there was disapproval of the behavior. I actually, you know, I think that the prime minister handled this situation post hoc as well as one could do to remove something that was problematic, a person who is problematic and who didn't seem to have much remorse for the kinds of stories that were coming out. And so where does that leave us now? What should happen? I mean, I think they have to fill the role. I think they need to be aware that vetting of prior acts, life, whatnot is important. But also a pretty careful discussion of what the role entails and the expectations in terms of the human performance. That has to be part of it too because you can't always tell what people are going to be like

in a role because of what they have or haven't done before that's useful information but i think that going forward they should pick somebody and they should grill them pretty carefully to make sure that they're going to uphold the values that we expect of somebody to be in that ceremonial position, to be symbolic of what Canada really is. And, you know, one of the truisms about Canadians is we're polite. And we, you know, expect people in those kinds of offices to operate within a bound of values, a kind of a code of behavior. It is unwritten because it never seemed that we needed to write it down. And I don't think we need to write it down,

but I think we do need to check and make sure that the next person hits a much higher standard. Okay, I'll just close this part of the discussion off on taking issue with one thing you said, which was that astronauts are not celebrities. Well, that was certainly the case with her. But, you know, you take Chris Hatfield.

I mean, he's a celebrity not just in Canada but around the world. I mean, he's huge. And, you know, he was supposedly on the short list. I don't know whether he was or he wasn't last time around. But he would have been a terrific pick. Yes. But that's not been a terrific pick. Yes. But that's not for a number of different reasons. The kind of candidate they were looking for.

I'm just making a distinction between celebrity and somebody who's well-known. For me, the term celebrity kind of implies that you're known for being a celebrity as opposed to you're known for having an area of expertise and excellence and that sort of thing. So that's what would cross you and I off the list, right? Well, you're… Moving on, moving on. All right.

Topic number two for today. I mean, talk about guys who are, or people who are in difficult situations. Aaron O'Toole, the relatively new leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, has watched his favorability ratings drop. Now, the latest is today. Angus Reid, one of your polling colleagues, polling competitors, in the polling business. Esteemed competitor. Angus Reid.

He's come out with a new series of data today, which looks at the favorability issue for Aaron O'Toole and the numbers since he was elected late last summer have dropped unfavorability was at 31%. That's kind of in the ballpark that you kind of want to be there. That's okay. You'd like it to be lower, but it's not bad. Then late last year, end of November, it dropped to 42%.

That's not a good place. But it's a lot better than where he is today at 47% unfavorable ratings. That's a steady climb over a period of less than six months. And none of that is good for a guy who could be in an election campaign in a couple of months. What's got him there? I mean, I think we can point to a number of things, but those are terrible numbers. They are bad numbers. And we saw a similar pattern in our numbers a few weeks ago his introduction to Canadians as a leader, that his negatives were rising.

And when you're opposition leader, there's no real obvious reason why your negatives should rise. You don't have to make any difficult decisions about policy that affects people. You only have the opportunity to criticize and to say what you would do differently and to argue for something better for people. So whenever an opposition leader sees their numbers, their negative numbers rising, it almost invariably is a question of they're doing something that is counterproductive to their political agenda. Now, I would say that there are a couple of other things here to note. First of all, I think it's a hard time to be a conservative in Canada because the movie of conservatism in the United States is a bad movie for Canadians.

They watched the Republican Party become taken over by Trumpists, become infiltrated by a large number of conspiracy theories and theorists and climate deniers and racists. And so the whole idea of what conservative policy is, which used to have something to do at least with what we would see from Republicans in the United States, has turned into a horrid mess. And they can see, people who are watching conservatism in the States, they can see a huge rift between maybe traditional conservatives and Trumpists. And they don't know how it's going to turn out. But one thing they know is that even the traditionalists are kind of weak-kneed, weak-willed, vacillating, not standing on principle.

And so it's pretty hard in Canada to make progress in a country that is more center-center-left rather than center-center-right, as in the United States, unless you're going to play against that movie, say, we're not that, we're something else, we're going in a different direction, which Aaron O'Toole has tried to say, but I think it's pretty clear that he's got a rift in his party. It's not quite the same as the Trumpist Republican one, but it's there. And you can see it play out in a couple of things in the last little while that spell trouble for Aaron O'Toole, unless he figures out what to do with it. One is this MP Derek Sloan, who has been a problem for some time. Won more votes than people might have expected in the leadership race, took positions that were deliberately intended to be

controversial and to curry favor among people who were maybe more fringe in terms of their political perspectives on the far right of the right. And then when he moved to get rid of Derek Sloan, what happened was instead of his caucus rallying around him, which is what you would have expected to happen at any other time in the past, there was a five-hour discussion, which by some accounts that leaked out was a pretty heated discussion. Second thing that happened is people were wondering about the relationship with rebel media, which, as you may remember, Peter Andrew Scheer got into trouble with for having done interviews with rebel media

when rebel media became well-known around the world, really, as a voice of extremism and very provocative in terms of the way that they covered issues, including some of the violent acts in the U.S. And the best that Aaron O'Toole could come to coming out of caucus the other day was to say, I'm not going to do any interviews with rebel media, but my caucus is free to decide whether they want to or not, which from my standpoint was actually a step back from the position that he had been taking, which is, I want Canadians to wake up in the morning and look in the mirror and to see the possibility of conservative there. And the last thing I'll

say is that I think he's struggled to find an agenda that has any chance of appeal with mainstream Canadians other than those who live in Alberta and Saskatchewan. He spends a lot of time talking about China without really explaining what his belligerence towards China would do for us, because simply being belligerent towards China, I don't think there's any evidence that it's made China cower. And so there needs to be something more to it. Otherwise, people just listen to it and say it's noise and it's informative. And what difference does it make? And more recently on this TransCanada pipeline issue, you know, he wanted to have his caucus go into the House of Commons

wearing I love Canadian oil masks. And that was rebuffed because you can't wear that kind of thing in the House of Commons. They did him a favor by doing that because for most Canadians, that's not how they want this first month or two with the Biden administration to go. O'Toole is kind of being carried along by Jason Kenney's argument that we should start a trade war with the United States. I don't think Doug Ford is going to go along with it. I don't think Aaron O'Toole wants to go along with it. But unless and until Aaron O'Toole says, I'm the leader, you're following me,

we're not going to pursue these kind of, I don't want to say fringe issues, because I know that that pipeline is not a fringe issue for many people. But unless we're going to also talk about a broader agenda that appeals to more Canadians, we're going to end up looking like that party that only has seats in a certain part of the country because we only ever talk about the issues that animate voters in those areas. What do you think? Well, I think that you were onto something two months ago when you talked about, as we watched the situation in the States develop, when you talked about how this is heading towards a third party. And I kind of pooh-poohed it and didn't think that it was going to go that far. It now looks like it's going to go that far.

And if that's what can happen there, it can happen here again. I mean, it did happen here, as we all know, in the 90s with the birth of the Reform Party and the splitting of the PCs and the Canadian Alliance, et cetera, et cetera. And what that meant was conservatives were banished to opposition or worse status for more than a decade until Harper put the foot down and brought them back together. They run the risk of the same thing happening here again now, I think, because he didn't deal with the Sloan issue, and he hasn't dealt with the Sloan issue. And, you know, maybe he can't deal with the Sloan issue. And, you know, maybe he can't deal with the Sloan issue. Maybe it is, you know, unsolvable at the moment.

And if it is, it will lead to a splitting of that party, which would be disastrous for them in the electoral way. But these numbers are bad. You know, it's hard to find anything good in these numbers. I was looking around yesterday. I did see one thing that had some potential for good for the Conservatives, if they can ever get their internal act together. Remember when we talked to Bruce Haim and the former US ambassador to Canada during the final weeks of the campaign in the States. And his big deal was to try and get American voters who were living outside of the U.S.

to vote in the campaign, but in numbers that they hadn't done in the past, that they could be the difference for Joe Biden. Now, I think in the end, he got a lot more people to vote. He and the campaign to get expats to vote. I don't think it was the deciding factor in the election, but it obviously had some impact. So what do we hear yesterday? We hear the two kind of, you know, former stalwarts of the, uh, of the conservative party, John Baird, the former foreign affairs minister in the Harper government and Nigel Wright,

who we haven't heard of really very much since the Duffy affair, who was a chief of staff in Harper's office are banding together to form this. We've got to get Canadians outside of Canada to vote in the next election, especially those who may be favorable to our party. So it's strange to have these two things happening at the same time. You've got a leader in trouble and a party in some disarray, and yet you've got this smart thinking going on outside by a couple of guys who clearly watched what happened on the U.S. election and the impact that Heyman and others had. So that's an interesting thing to look at and to monitor to see how it works out. I agree.

I also would add into that that the columns written by Andrew McDougall and Ken Bosenkul recently have been really quite persuasive. And you could tell that what they're doing is trying to not just nudge, but push for a version of a conservative party that they think has a chance of forming a government. And I say it that way, but I don't want it to be understood that I think that they're being cynical. I actually think that they've understood that, you know, most... politicians to try to approach things from more of an open-minded, compromised, talk it out, try to find common ground, try to move forward, bearing in mind, as they will understand because they're very seasoned political observers, that roughly 65% of Canadians voted for parties that are by and large progressive and or green economy oriented, leaving really a relatively small pool

for the conservatives. And what we've seen and what I think they've seen is the number of people who say they're willing to consider voting conservative is getting smaller and smaller and smaller. And we can put all of that on Trump, but it isn't all on Trump. Ultimately, it is a question of leadership. And where is the leadership going to, what is the leader going to be able to do to pull his party along if it has a very big chunk of people for whom winning an election isn't really the most important thing? And making a point and making an angry point is more important. And I'm reminded that in the leadership race that Andrew Scheer won, Max Bernier was beating him, I think, 12 of 13 ballots. And Max Bernier is now a People's Party guy,

and we've got Jay Hill with the Maverick Party. And so I get that Aaron O'Toole has a math problem in terms of splintering on the right, but he's got a bigger math problem in terms of the center. And the only way to convince the center that you could have a conservative government that isn't going to be too cozy with conspiracy theories and fringe views is for the leader to be pretty blunt,

very consistent about it. And I know that's a hard thing to do, but I think it's the right prescription. Well, it's hard and it's not hard. I mean, it wasn't hard for Stephen Harper. I mean, Harper was in power for, what, almost 10 years. I mean, he lost a big election at the end, but he remained in power and still has a lot of consequence

within that party because he was firm. Took a stand on issues and sometimes always with the assumption that the stand he was taking was good for the party in the long run and at the ballot box. Not necessarily a stand that he personally agreed with either at times. Right. But knew what had to happen. Well, I think one of the things to give Mr. Harper a little bit of credit is that he was up and scanning the world, and whether you agreed or disagreed with his policy prescriptions, he kind of knew that the world was a constantly changing dynamic, and that you needed to adapt

your policy thinking along the way, in some respects to maintain access to a large enough cohort of voters that you could form a government, but also because the world presents different problems and you need creative solutions. I think one of the problems for the Conservative Party is they're kind of stuck with a very narrow agenda. And I think Jason Kenney has a lot to kind of answer for in terms of almost insisting this constant talk about fossil fuels and the willingness to kind of insult our American allies and friends while at the same time saying they're our best friends and allies and to expect that that's going to net out to a good place.

You know, the federal leaders should just say, look, we need to get on with the climate agenda and we need to stop pretending that we can kind of fake or spin our way out of that dilemma. I think a lot of Alberta voters are there. I think you see that in Jason Kenney's numbers. But I think the Conservative Party can't break out of its fascination with fighting the climate change issue and also this whole kind of China fascination, which I think is really just a rhetorical reflex of saying communism is bad.

But I don't think most people would necessarily disagree with that. I just think they don't know what to do with that. And why would they? Against that, I don't think I've heard Aaron O'Toole say anything about the deaths in long-term care facilities. And if I was thinking about political strategy for them, I would find it hard to imagine that I'm going to get as many votes from older voters, traditionally an important part of the conservative base, unless I'm talking about that. Now, that doesn't mean criticizing Doug Ford, although there's a lot to criticize there. But if I'm the liberals, I've got to be looking at privatizing those, you know, taking those private long-term care facilities into the public health system somehow, because the death rate is just

horrific to look at, and it's an embarrassment to the country. I agree with you on this is a traditional ground for conservatives. I think he has a real issue on the Doug Ford landscape. I mean, Scheer tried to ignore Doug Ford, or tried to make it look like to ignore Doug Ford or tried to, you know, make it look like he thought Doug Ford was a liability and he got hammered because of it. He lost seats in Ontario where, like it or not, that's where the elections are won and lost. He lost seats in Ontario, which cost him the election. And so, you know, for O'Toole, not the least

of his problems. He's got a lot of problems. But that's one of them. How do you deal with the Ford factor? Especially when Ford is still, as you said, still incredibly popular, even with things not necessarily going his way in a number of areas and the long-term care thing is certainly one,

although there's blame to spread around on that one. It's not all just provincial. Okay. Can I just add one thing, though, Peter, on that? Okay. A good example of how this kind of fossil fuel-infused way of thinking, this climate denial, presents a different kind of problem for Aaron O'Toole. Is Aaron O'Toole tried to really bash the liberals for GM announcing that it was going to close some manufacturing facilities?

And he basically took the opportunity to kind of say the liberals don't know anything about the future of the economy and they'll drive investment out and their fascination with kind of a clean economy transition is going to get us all in trouble. Well, fast forward a number of months and we've got billions of dollars of investments from the auto manufacturers in new manufacturing capacity in Ontario, the heartland for Aaron O'Toole. And he's kind of left standing on the sidelines. He's left unwilling or unable to completely endorse e-vehicles, which consumers are showing tremendous interest in and which are clearly the way of the future. And he's only unwilling to do

that because he's kind of got this part of his party that says, we can't talk about that. And I think that's a real limitation for him with the rest of the country, for sure. Okay. Before we move to our last topic, and it's just a brief one, but before we do, I just want to let listeners know that when they've heard a couple of times during this podcast what I call an internet hit, it's sort of where you kind of lose the sound, the incoming sound, for a couple of seconds. It's never very long. Two, three, uh, on the quality of the internet that's coming in over time. Now, everybody's using the internet now because of all these various different platforms that are being used. So there've been a number of hits on this that were yesterday, as you may well have heard in yesterday's podcast, there were a couple.

And it's just we're asking for your patience. We're working on that and trying to figure out better ways of doing that. And that's one of the reasons why there's going to be a switchover in the way the podcast comes to you within the next week or so. I keep telling you it's coming. It is coming. But this is one of the areas we're trying to resolve. So I apologize for that, but I don't think in any way it's cost you anything today other than a couple of seconds of pause in between some of the comments we've been making.

Okay, here's the last topic for today. I don't know how closely you follow the various news organizations in the United States, but one of the real up-and-comers in the last couple of years has been a relatively new news organization called Axios, which has some terrific reporters, many of whom have already made their names at other news organizations. I guess the leading one is a fellow by the name of Jonathan Swan, who's just a terrific interviewer, but also knows how to get a story. Anyway, their readership and listenership has expanded greatly over the last couple of years. I think they started in 2017.

So they haven't been around that long. But they came out this week with a manifesto. It's basically what they call an Axios Bill of Rights. And there are 10 things in it. They're all interesting. And they're all to try and assure you that what they're doing is responsible and they're thinking of you and they're thinking of 10 of them. But one of the ones I found intriguing, and I checked with Bruce, he does too, and we just want to mention it because it's quite interesting, especially in today's world.

I mean, opinion has always been some element of journalism, especially in the print world. I mean, newspapers have been built around their editorial page, which is opinion of the ownership and the editorial board of that paper. And there's room usually on the opposing page, the editorial page for other thoughts and opinions. But they've always been, or at least the desire was always to keep very protective of

the rest of the paper, that it was a newspaper and news has no opinion. It's just to lay out the facts so readers can make their own determination on how they want to feel about the issues. That has all kind of changed greatly in the last 25 years, especially with the introduction of heavy-hitting cable news, opinion-led, especially in prime time, not just by Fox, but also by MSNBC and to some degree CNN as well. So what does Axios say in their third principle? Let me read it. It's the last phrase that is caught our eye. Every item will be written or produced to inform, analyze, and explain. Axios will never be a platform for incitement or argument. We will never have an opinion section. Now that's quite something. That's a real departure from the direction everybody else seems to be going in. Bruce? of watching the changes in the nature of the journalism business and how it feels as though the relative proportion of reporting

versus opinion has been shifting towards more opinion. And in many cases, I think a lot of platforms are putting opinion in the window because it's free content and they don't necessarily apply the same level of scrutiny to it from an editorial standpoint as one might have expected in years go by. And so I don't know if we're headed for a world where people say, I want to go to an opinion site as opposed to a news site, or I just want to go to a news site that never has any opinion. But I like the fact that that choice is being highlighted by Axios. And personally, I find myself tuning out some of the cable channels that I used to watch more rigorously

because I feel like I'm getting almost no news. I'm getting almost no hard information that I can use to form my own judgments. I'm getting only repetitive opinion. And even saying that, I'm very aware that I'm an opinionated person, and we're having an opinion discussion on this podcast. But again, people can choose whether to listen to it or not. And we're not presenting ourselves here as a journalistic project per se, or at least I don't think you are, but I'm certainly not. But there were two other things in this manifesto or bill of rights that I was struck by too. One is the second one, which says we take responsibility for all content that appears on our public platforms, putting the pressure on us to provide the highest level

of scrutiny. And I don't know about you, but I've been to sites now of respected brands in journalism for the last several years, and I've seen pieces there that I didn't think I would ever see. Just not a great degree of scrutiny on the quality of the analysis that was being presented in support of what was essentially a political argument or a political piece, sometimes a political hit job. And that's not to say that there shouldn't be room in the public square for that. Obviously there should. I'm a big believer in free speech. But the trust in journalistic enterprises goes down when people can't spot that difference and editors lose or surrender the ability to draw those distinctions. And then the other one that caught my attention was number eight.

We'll go the extra mile to earn your trust. All employees are asked to refrain from taking or advocating for public positions on political topics. Now, in the age of Twitter, I see a lot of journalists who are drawn to Twitter as a way to kind of build interest in the work that they're doing, and that makes perfect sense to me. At the same time, Twitter almost compels people to say things sometimes that are in effect opinions. And they're opinions on topics. And sometimes they get themselves into situations where they're predicting things. They're saying this is going to turn out to be bad for X or Y or Z. And I think it's one thing for me to do that. But if I expect people to believe that I'm a reporter, I'm covering news.

I remember our friend Chantal Hebert said she had a rule, which is basically if you start predicting things, people are going to hold you to account for that. And they're going to wonder whether or not if your prediction isn't quite coming through, are you going to adjust your journalism in order to make it look like you weren't as wrong as you might have been? And I think that's a really important point for a journalistic organization to say, we need a hard line where our reporters don't look like they have a partisan point of view or they lack objectivity on a public issue or they've taken a position that will be hard for them to walk back. I'm glad you mentioned Chantel because we're going to have some news on Chantel in the next couple of weeks and I think you'll all enjoy it. Just to underline some of what Bruce just said, the bridge is not a newscast. It is what it is, especially on this day, on Wednesdays,

with Smoke, Mirrors and the Truth. It's the two of us kind of ranting occasionally with a guest about things we see and how we feel about certain things that are unfolding. So, you know, there is a lot of opinion in our kind of weekly conversations. But once again, we're not a newscast. I spent 50 years in the news business where I prided myself in not having an opinion in the programming I did. And sometimes, you know, I used to be criticized by those who felt I did express an opinion

or they'd look at the way I would, you know, they'd look at my eyebrows and say, hey, he kind of raised his eyebrows when he said such and such. And that obviously means he feels a certain way. Well, you know, I'm pretty careful about what I say. And I'm also very careful about ensuring that you know when I think I've said too much or gone beyond the bounds of accuracy.

So I try hard to fulfill that. But I think this is interesting. I'd love to hear what you think, and so you shouldn't be shy about obviously writing to us about any topic that you want to, anything that we may have covered over this podcast today at the Mansbridge podcast at gmail.com, the Mansbridge podcast at gmail.com. You can definitely drop us a line and we'll include some of the best ones on this Friday's weekend special. Don't forget the write-in ballots for Governor General, because that was an earlier part of our conversation today.

That's right. I'm looking at the score so far. You're way ahead. People really want you in that role. They want to see you in a uniform on a horse. On a horse. Nice. And given your

childhood in rural Quebec, I'm sure you know how to do that. Well, you know, that would be a choice. I don't think it would be a good choice. All right. We're going to wrap it up for this day. Thanks, Bruce, as always.

And for those of you who will be tuning in we're going to wrap it up for, uh, for this day. Thanks Bruce, as always. And, uh, for those of you who, um, we'll be tuning in tomorrow. I haven't decided what to talk about tomorrow, but we'll, uh, we'll keep it to the facts.

We haven't had a real potpourri day, uh, this week, and I've got a whole pile of great little stories that I've been collecting over the last little while. And, uh, it may be the day to roll some of those out.

Uh, Friday is the weekend special, as I mentioned, where we get the best of your questions and thoughts and comments. So for this day, for this Wednesday, for hump day of week 46, I'm Peter Mansbridge with Bruce Anderson. It's been great talking to you and we'll talk again in 24 hours. Take care, Peter.