The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - SMT - The Politics of Islamophobia

Episode Date: June 9, 2021

Vigils are one thing, action is another.  Will anything change or is it just "thoughts and prayers" from our political leaders?  And Bruice's thoughts on what's going on behind the scenes on some new polling data.

And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. You are just moments away from the Wednesday edition of The Bridge. You know what that means? It means Smoke, Mirrors, and the Truth with Bruce Anderson. Are you still trying to find ways to get into the world of crypto? Well, look no further. BitBuy is Canada's number one platform for buying and selling Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. BitBuy has launched a brand new app and website with a new look, lower fees, and other cryptocurrencies. Bitbuy has launched a brand new app and website with a new look, lower fees, and new coins. Bitbuy is your one-stop shop to get involved and super easy to use for beginners. Visit bitbuy.ca or download the Bitbuy app. Enter referral code PODCAST20 to get $20 free when you make your first deposit. it and hello there peter mansbridge in stratford ontario bruce anderson is in ottawa and man we

are both double dosed either i tell you something every uh couple of hours since I got that second shot of AstraZeneca, thank you AstraZeneca and Oxford for making it. I hold up keys near my head and a fork or something like that because I heard this doctor in Ohio yesterday say that there's magnets in it and nothing, no metal is sticking to my head. And also, I feel like I'm ready to go out on the golf course i think i'm going to hit another 10 or 15 yards on my drive i know you're probably not going to get that effect because you had the pfizer and it's not known for that quality but

i'm happy for you that you got it even though it might not deliver that benefit the pfizer is it has no impact on the length of your drives i don't know whether that's got to do with the magnet stuff. And I'm, you know, I should tell our listeners that I am looking at you and you do not have a fork or a spoon stuck to your forehead. So obviously that doesn't work. That doesn't work or you're an aberration in the process. What Pfizer does for you is it limits you to one putt. You get an automatic gimme.

If you get on the green. If you get on the green. It's been long in years. If you get on the green, it doesn't matter how far you are, Pfizer gives you an automatic gimme. So that's good. I would take that over the 10 yards and drive because it's like a passport a special kind of extra well that's great that's great i mean 10 yards on the drive for you booster yeah 10 yards on the drive for you just means you're 10 yards deeper in the in the rough so it doesn't really make a lot of difference um anyway listen it's a great feel and

also you know for me uh the uh the nod to uh the people at Pfizer and Moderna and J&J all these people uh who have been involved in the research on vaccines you know our thanks to all of the men and women who have been involved in that, because it there's always, you know, debate and, you know, you've got some news organizations, newspapers anyway, going to editorials on, oh, they're way behind. Well, in fact, on the one dose there, we're quite far ahead. And on the two dose, we are behind, but that's moving quickly. That's picking up real speed right now. I think that, you know, and we did some polling last week, Peter.

And one of the questions that we asked was, when do you think you're going to get your second dose? And 86% picked a date before the end of September, which really means that while there was a lot of people uncertain not that long ago about maybe it'll be 2022 before we get our second doses. Governments have been consistently saying, no, we're going to get this done sooner than that by the end of September or by September, I guess, is the term that has been used. And Canadians are inclined to believe that now. And 72 percent of them say that that timing is good good by them good or acceptable they're not saying it's too slow uh so that we've seen a lot of opinion move and people sort of expecting uh that this is going to continue to go in a positive direction the um you know when i got my first dose with beginning of, or I guess somewhere around the middle of March.

They told me it would be end of July, you know, before I could get a second dose. And they even gave me a date and everything. But then, and that was, you know, that was based on the way vaccines were rolling out at that time, the way they were coming into the country and being distributed in different places and the um the numbers have increased you know dramatically over what had been thought and that's why you know all of a sudden i i had a choice i was one of those people i was talking to you know dr bogoch the other day what do you do if you have a choice on your second vaccine of which kind you're going to take and uh you know because it's you know obviously a personal choice and in the end and i you know i made mine on because i believe in putting over driving so you know there you go so you're a pickup truck guy too and and you uh i am you have food habits i don't know

about those but you know what i think it's a fair choice you made. Nothing against pickup trucks. But yeah, you're not a tastemaker for me anyway. So I'm glad you took the Pfizer. And I hope you don't whine about the side effects too much. I haven't had nothing. I'm fine. I had nothing on the first one. And I've had nothing so far on the second one, which apparently is unusual. So unusual that I emailed my pharmacist today, this morning, and I said,

you sure you actually had something in that needle when you gave me that shot? Because nothing, you know, you get the warning of all the things that, you know, might happen from mild to more than mild. But I've had nothing. No pain in the arm, no side effects. Wow, with an aging body like yours, that's really amazing. Way to go. Really happy.

All right, let's talk some politics. Okay, let's, you know, it's pretty hard to ignore, and we won't, the story in London, Ontario. But here's the approach I'm going to take on it, and I'll be intrigued to hear what you have to say. We are not immune to tragedies happening in our world. And whether it's in Canada or the United States from, you know, shootings in schools or shootings elsewhere,

same things happening in different parts of Europe. And one of the things we've become accustomed to is seeing, as a result of the horror that happens, the political leaders of that state, that province, that country, going to the scene of the horror for a vigil of some kind, usually the night of or the night after, and being together with those who've been the most affected, whether they're the families or friends of the victims.

And, you know, it's always a touching scene, and they come with messages of hope and prayer and thoughts. But after the last 10 or 20 years of witnessing different things like this, people start to say, you know what? Enough with the thoughts and prayers. We want to see action. We want to see action. We want to see something happen to make this stop. And I had that same feeling last night.

I was proud of my political leaders, for all of whom went to London, to be a part of the vigil, to say all the appropriate things, to stand there and hug those most deeply affected, and to show emotion. And some do, some do a lot. You know, Doug Ford, the Premier of Ontario, you know, is known for being a very emotional guy on different things, and he was emotional last night at the vigil. But, you know, you're left wondering, and especially if you're part of that group, what's actually going to happen? What's going to change?

We've seen in the States, we certainly saw last summer in the Black Lives Matter movement, that they'd had enough of the, you know, nice messages. They wanted change. Now, there have been some indications of change in the states, but there have also been some indications of, you know, trying to prevent what they want, say, in the area of voting rights. Their voting rights, in many cases, minorities, blacks in particular, are being suppressed. So the battle sort of goes on.

And it's a difficult one. But so last night, you know, last night I liked the site. I worry about what does it mean? What does it mean a week from now? Have we moved on? Something else? Is there some real attempt to deal with this issue of Islamophobia in Canada? All of the leaders now claim that they believe that exists and has to be dealt with, which is movement of a sort. But what happens after the words? So where you go?

Well, I think the first thing I'd like to say is that it's better than all political leaders get on the same side, take the same positions, have the same level of commitment to fighting racism. I don't believe you can eradicate racism. And so people who want it to stop completely, I want it to stop completely, but I think human nature is what it is on some level, and you can't completely eradicate it. But there is a choice between working to fight it, actively to fight it, and making racism acceptable.

And in Canada, but not only in Canada, in the last couple of, I'm going to say the last couple of decades, but one could go back further than that, but particularly in the last couple of decades, I guess, or last decade and a bit around Islamophobia and maybe more recently toward people of Asian descent, we've seen politics offer comfort or legitimacy or acceptability to those who harbor these views and want to express them.

And my point this morning isn't to say, you know, Aaron O'Toole shouldn't have gone or Jason Kenney shouldn't say that he's, you know, that he's four square behind uh muslim canadians or um that you know i was pretty disturbed by kelly leach's leadership campaign i don't feel like i i actually agreed with the prime minister when he said that what we need to do is kind of look forward um and i'm hoping that as conservatives witness this horrible, horrible act, and as they read the comments of that candidate, that PC Ontario provincial candidate, who talked about his experience as a candidate, saying that he would kind of run into people who say, I can tell just by looking at you that you're the kind of candidate I can support. He knew what they were saying. He had campaign workers who say, I wanted to come and help you, but I went and I looked at your campaign office and it looked like the Middle East. He knew what they were saying. And good on him that he said this kind of conversation happens. And if you don't jump on it, if you don't reject it, if you don't take that action that tells somebody that that's not acceptable, then you're part of making racism

acceptable. So I'm taking some hope from the fact that, well, we have seen a rise of Islamophobia. And I think that there have been some political moves and some political conversation that legitimized it, even while saying we don't think it's that big a problem or we don't think it's a bigger problem than other forms of racism. I don't think that I can examine the last, well, I guess a couple of elections ago when Conservatives ran on a snitch line for barbaric cultural practices and campaigned against kneecaps and basically said that it's so important that if people are going to take the oath of citizenship, that they do it with their faces uncovered. You can look back at those things now and say, were those really important initiatives? Was the country really suffering from those barbaric cultural practices? And was there a problem with our citizenship ceremony and the fact that people of the Muslim faith might want to wear a face covering? Or was this a political formation trying to make some politics out of it?

So I obviously believe that it was the latter. But more important for me is what happens now. And I want to end my thought here, Peter, on a positive note, because as in the case of the reaction to the murder of those children in Kamloops. I sense that we're at a tipping point. I sense that the political argument against cancel culture, the political impetus to defend people of Muslim faith against Islamophobia, that's in place.

Now, people may forget the details as the news cycles move on. But I kind of think that once that dial turns past a certain place, there's no going back in terms of political leadership. We're probably not going to hear somebody do what that one MP did after the Christchurch murders, use the manifesto of that person as an argument against there being Islamophobia in Canada, which was a shocking moment and he got demoted, but he just got demoted. I think that we've changed. I think that we're going forward in a positive direction. I think young people are changed. I think that we're going forward in a positive direction. I think young people are principally responsible for that.

And I think that's a good thing. And I know that sounds more hopeful than I can, you know, I can't muster the proof that it will be that way, but I do think that we've made a change and good for Aaron O'Toole and the other leaders to be part of that vigil and to express their views in such strong language in the last couple of days. Well, you know, I hope you're right, obviously. I think we all hope you're right, that we can,

we should be hopeful and try to look forward. I just, you know, it's like the indigenous file to me where it's been decades centuries and you know on some fundamental things nothing's changed on this one it was only four years ago that that was there was that horrific situation in quebec city at the mosque there and a gunman went in and shot the place up and killed a number of people. I remember standing in front of that mosque that night, the night, well, I guess it'd be the night after it happened because we did the national there and it was, you know, minus 30 or something, a really, really cold wave going through there and telling that story and hearing all these people saying at the time

the right things and yet a few days later when the house of commons you know had a had a vote in front of it about islamophobia condemning it. You had the official opposition standing up, not in unison, but almost. All but one, wasn't it? Yeah, I think it was all Michael Chong. Everybody else, including Aaron O'Toole, standing there and saying, no, no, no, we're not going to condemn Islamophobia. Now, you know, they pull out all kinds of different reasons and freedom of speech, et cetera, et cetera.

But really, you know, when you look at the cold, hard story around that, I don't think that's what it was about. Well, plus it was a motion. It wasn't a law that was being passed. It was a motion expressing the sentiment of the House. And the choice, I think, was to say, well, we don't want to single out Islamophobia. We want to decry all forms of racism. Well, why would you do that in the days immediately following that obviously, you know, inspired by Islamophobia attack. So, yeah, look, there's a lot that I hope the conservatives do in terms of not just how do we present ourselves better, but what do we think about what we know is in our base of support. What are we going to do about it?

Are we going to kind of be quiet about it and just hope it doesn't come up? Or are we going to be more active about it? I think there's a legitimate question. But I suppose my hopefulness, Peter, is that I think that, you know, for the longest time I've seen in my data, two-thirds of Canadians are progressive, one-third define themselves as conservative. Everybody on the progressive two-thirds sees this in the same general direction, which is we need to fight racism, we need to promote diversity and inclusiveness, and we need to be honest about our culture and not pretend that we're some sort of shining model to the world that never experiences racism or anything like that.

But the question is among the conservative base. And it's not just here in Canada. We know that it's rampant in the United States and in other places. Will conservative leaders take back conservatism so that it doesn't become a safe harbor for people who have these views and who want to spread them? And we know how they spread. It's a little bit political, but it's mostly online. And the intersection of politics and online is a dangerous, dangerous place, and it needs voices to call it out. So if I'm hopeful, it's partly because I think that most of the country was already pointed in this direction and isn't getting drawn over towards racist tendencies, and that that part of the

political spectrum where we do find some of this, that the leadership cadre looks like they're digging in to make a change in the way that they might approach things from even as little as 2015. So maybe I'm more hopeful than warranted, but I guess I'd rather have that setting some days. Well, you know, if they're digging in to make a change, they're not following the example of their counterparts in the United States, who, if anything, seem to be digging in to go the other way because of the popularity of Trump and what he's said. And you're seeing the Mitch McConnells of the world, you know,

doing backflips to get back in line with what he's saying. And on issues like this, they're not digging in for change. They're digging in to go back 50 years. Yep. So you're right. I mean, it's a challenge for those who are in the position of trying to make change happen in their party. And, you know, you've seen some indication from Mayor Aaron O'Toole on the climate situation. I know it's dangerous to make similarities here but he you know is going he he personally and as leader has been going against what the party has said in its most recent vote just a you know a couple of months ago um so he seems willing to

dig in his heels and argue for change and he's also looking at the political reality when you you know you when you do those overall numbers and they're kind of baked into the cake those that's kind of been the numbers for a long time right sort of a third of the country as you know has conservative tendencies the other two-thirds have you know progressive tendencies and it could be split in any number of ways with with different parties but he's looking at the reality of that and if you're ever going to win another election he's thinking maybe it's time to change on some fundamental issues um not all of them not all fundamental issues they still feel very strongly about different things on the fiscal side.

But on these, I guess on the social side, perhaps it's time to make some change. Can I just add on that, Peter? The Aeronaut tool, if he chooses his path, it will be difficult, but it's important work to do. And, and, you know, if he does it, his recent predecessors didn't. But even we see in the, in the, and the reason I say it's difficult, there's going to be forks in the road that are going to be perplexing for him. We saw another one on the weekend with the comments from the Pope. And the Conservative Party is a party that values its relationship with religious authorities and with religious groups.

And there you had on the government side, you had the prime minister, a lifelong Catholic, and his minister of indigenous services, Mark Miller, both going right at the comments of the pope and the Catholic Church as represented by the pope and saying that's not good enough. They should be ashamed of the fact that they didn't apologize, didn't do anything to authorize the release of the documents that would help us understand more about what happened in these residential schools. And that's the kind of thing where I kind of believe we're in a global struggle between those who say hate and racism is a giant problem and it's getting worse unless we stamp it out and those who say i i can't be for it but it's hard to be so volubly against that and still marshal support for a political movement that is small c conservative in nature that's a real fight and um and i hope he embraces it um because we need it. Talking about the Pope the other day, I don't want to get into this, but for a man of faith who has spent a good deal of his life

looking and caring and speaking out for the oppressed in his own country in South America. I just found what he had to say shocking. It's like, did you read the file, sir, on this before you said that? It was, you know, there were lots of things he could have said that would have put him on the pathway to an apology, but he chose not to. And it was just a very strange thing to see happen. And so, too, were some of the, you know, comments made by Catholic leaders in the country after everything that happened last week.

But let's move on on this. I want to talk about something totally different, but it's right up your alley. You talked about you're looking at some recent data. For those who forget, Bruce is also the chairman of Abacus Data, one of the country's leading polling and research firms. And I got a couple of polling questions that I want to ask you, but I will ask you them after this. Peter Mann's Bridgeback with Smoke, Mirrors and the Truth on today's episode of The Bridge.

Bruce Anderson is in Ottawa and I'm here in Stratford, Ontario. Okay. Morning Consult, which is one of the polling firms in the U.S. and seems to have a pretty good reputation. That was some new data this week. In fact, it just came out this morning. And to me, there are a couple of startling numbers in here. First of all, this one, which will prompt my question.

I'm sure you'll have thoughts on this number, but my question about it is interesting, too, I think. They claim, Morning Council claims that 30% of Republicans, 29, I think, was the actual number, but almost 30% of Republicans feel it's likely that Donald Trump will be reinstated as president in August, in two months. He's just going to poof, or he's going to say,

okay, hey, you out of there, you back into the White House. Now, 30%, I mean, it's almost one in three Republicans believe that. You know, it's not they're wishing for it. They actually believe it is true. Which led me to hear a guy say this morning on one of the morning shows in the states he said you know if you are sort of devoid of an opinion on the question of the color of the sky if everybody you talk to says the sky is green everybody you talk to says that the circle of friends you have in the kind of community of thought that you're in and the media that you frequent that has that same kind of community

of thought is saying to you the sky is green and you hear no other opinion after, you know, six months or so, you're probably going to believe the sky is green. No matter what you might see up there, everybody's telling you it's green, so it's got to be green. So a lot of people have been saying he's got to be reinstated. A lot of the members of that community of republican thought are saying he's going to be reinstated and it appears that 30 percent of republicans figure that to be true so what about that theory that if everybody you you talk to

everybody you associate with, everything you read is saying one thing, that no matter what you might have thought, you're eventually going to feel that way too. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, look, I think America is its own special brew of fables and fiction and urban legends, And we've got our own, but I remember that we pulled for years after Elvis Presley died. Do you believe he's alive? And there was a remarkable

number of people who believed that Elvis was alive and there probably still are. We stopped asking the question a few years ago because I guess he'd be like 86 today. But yeah, it's so America's got this kind of ability to kind of harbor beliefs of things that you would think is quite remarkable. But that's that's 20 million people. The number that you just cited, 20 million people walking around streets in America thinking that Donald Trump is going to be reinstated this summer. That's bananas.

That's just bananas. And how does that happen? I do think that there's something to the echo chamber idea that if you only hear one sort of thing, and I don't know how we ever put the genie back in the bottle because i i've been in in the pr business in one form or another alongside the polling work that i've done for years but if i go back to when you were running the national essentially you you were the, the anchor, but also the, the editor of it. I think, I don't know, Peter, you can give me the title correctly, but you had

editorial, uh, you had an important editorial role in deciding what made that broadcast. Right. And if I had an idea on behalf of a client that I wanted to get into a news story on your program, I had almost no chance of making that happen. And if it didn't happen on your program or on the other program, I forget that network's name, it didn't really happen for most people in terms of TV news. And really what I'm focusing on is that there were editorial filters and funnels that mattered more because there were fewer channels. But now if I wanted to say, Peter, could you get a story on about, look, the keys didn't stick to my forehead, but it did seem like they were sort of swinging a little closer to my forehead when i passed them up after i'd taken the vaccine you

know that the metal was just kind of you know it seemed like it wanted to get a little closer could you maybe can we talk about a story like that you know back in the day, you'd go, Bruce, stop calling me. I don't want to know anything about you anymore. And today, I wouldn't even bother because I'd go, why don't I start my own news channel or find one of these wacky new news channels that exist online and take the story to them and see what they'll do with it. And I'll find an audience with that story. And so I don't blame that on Google. I don't blame that on And so I don't blame that on Google. I don't blame that on YouTube.

I don't blame it on Facebook. I think that it's really a function of the fact that what we're used to having as funnels and filters on what passes as fact, those are all dissipated. For most of our lives, if I asked you who are the anchors of the three major U.S. broadcast news programs, you'd rattle them off like that. I'm not going to put you on the spot right now, Peter, but I suspect that you might not know the answer for two of those three names. I couldn't. I couldn't tell you them. So it's a lot that's changed. And, and on one hand, there's some good in that because a lot of people can find voices,

can build audiences to raise the profile of stories that are important for us to know that we might not have known of before. That's a huge, huge upside. But the downside is that people can traffic in these ridiculous bits of fantasy, often for their own agenda, often just to make money off trafficking in fantasies. And there's not much that anybody can do about it, at least as I see it right now. And I don't know how you do very much about it without compromising the idea of freedom of speech on some level. Okay. You've raised a few things that I should briefly respond to. Actually, I can name the three anchors of the three main networks, but what's important... No Googling. No, no, no. I don't have to Google, but that's not important.

What's important is, and I think the point you're making is a really legitimate one, because it talks about the lack of power of those three networks compared with what it used to be not that long ago. Because you could have gone out onto the street and asked the man or woman on the street that question about the three main anchors, say, 20 years ago, and they would have all been able to name them. Today, absolutely not the case. Just not. And that shows how so many things have changed since then. My role at the National, I was chief correspondent, which made me one of the senior editors.

But it was always a group thing, and I assume it still is. But, you know, you'd have, you were open to opinions throughout the day about what's news, what isn't, what should be on the program, how long should you go, what order of things. At a certain point, a smaller group had to make those decisions. And it was a group thing, and often it wound up in good discussions and debates, which is the way a newsroom should work. And finally, the most important element is, you know where Tweed, Ontario is, right? You know where Tweed is? It's sort of halfway roughly between Toronto and Ottawa

when you take the old Highway No. 7. And Tweed is important, and I think I've mentioned this before, because that is where Elvis Presley lives. Even at 86, Elvis is alive and well and lives in Tweed, Ontario. And, you know, if you're lucky when you're driving through, you might see him walking around. He occasionally comes to Ottawa and eats at Moe's Pizza because there's been a sign up there for years

that this is his place for pizza. Yeah. One of the great correspondents of CBC Pass, Patrick Brown, was assigned to go to Memphis, Graceland. That's where Graceland is. Yes, it is. Which is Elvis' home and where the funeral was. And Patrick made a point, because he knew these stories would happen, he made a point of, it was an open casket.

He made a point of going up to the casket and looking in, and Elvis was there. Well. So there you go. Might have been an Elvis doll. We don't know. Yeah, okay. All right, here's the last question of the day,

and it's another polling one. And this one is a little more, you've got to take this one a little more seriously. All right, here's the last question of the day, and it's another polling one. And this one is a little more, you've got to take this one a little more seriously. Because it's an overall number, it's all Americans. And the question asked is, you know, do you believe that your democracy is being threatened? And the number is kind of stunning. It's 77%. Three quarters of Americans, both Republicans and Democrats. In fact, I think the Republican number in here,

when you split it out, is a little higher than the Democrats. But they believe, something specific explained here, but they believe in the basic idea that their democracy is being threatened. The democracy they knew of is being threatened. Now, maybe some Republicans say it's being threatened because of the voting system. It's not fair to us. Democrats may see it fundamentally the other way, but on the same question, they may give the same answer that their democracy is being threatened. But that seems to me to be an incredibly high number.

Yeah, you know what? When you told me that number, I thought that's a high number. But is it high enough? Like their democracy is threatened. There's no question about it. It should be 100 percent who think that. But they should recognize that the threat is not what is being described to them by a Donald Trump, for example, who says, I think he said on the weekend, I'm not the guy who's breaking or undermining democracy. I'm the guy who's saving it. Well, no, that's not true. But there are, you know, this polarization in partisanship in the United States has created this view that when they have elections, the elections become evidence of people trying to break

democracy. The Democrats see it in the Republicans' efforts to keep Black people and other people of color from voting, and they're right about that. And the Republicans see it in terms of this sense of people like them are no longer as important in determining the outcomes, and therefore, in that view of the world, democracy is broken, which is ludicrous, because that is democracy is basically everybody gets a vote and the outcome is the outcome and you move on. So the political parties are, I think, on the one hand, really undermining democracy, on the other hand, trying against a very concerted, well-funded effort to undermine it. And meanwhile, you've got Russia and you've got China and you've got ransomware hackers and you've got all kinds of other stuff going on online. You've got organizations that portray themselves as news organizations, which essentially exist to foment hatred and anger to make money. And a lot of what they do is focused on stuff that undermines democracy.

So I think it's 100% true that America's democracy is threatened. I think it's somewhat true that democracies everywhere are facing these threats. But I don't think that that's what was behind that 76% number. I think in the United States, that number represents people of different partisan leanings thinking the other guys are the problem. Yeah, I think you're right on that. I like your answer, though. I like all your answers. You know, you're a pretty smart guy. Especially the double dose answer. Have you found that's a little bit better? I think things have stepped up with the double dose.

That's what I think, too. For both of us. Longer drives, better answers. Better putts. A little bit. All right, my friend. Good discussion. We never got an update on the radishes, but we save that for next week.

There's a lot of interest in that subject. Need some rain. People write about it. Need rain? I think you're getting some because it's been raining here off and on for a couple of days. I'm supposed to pick up again tonight. All right. Thanks, Peter.

We will talk soon. Thank you, Bruce. And we'll be back tomorrow with the potpourri edition of The Bridge. Friday, of course, is the weekend special. Look forward to talking to you. I'm Peter Mansbridge for Bruce Anderson in Ottawa. Thanks for listening to The Bridge. We'll talk to you again in 24 hours. Thank you.