The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - SMT - The pre-debate jitters

Episode Date: September 8, 2021

Bruce has briefed various leaders from different parties on how to prep for the big debate nights.  He takes us inside some of those stories on today's Smoke Mirrors and The Truth. 

And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. You are just moments away from the latest episode of The Bridge. It's Wednesday, it's election time, that means smoke mirrors and the truth with Bruce Anderson. Tim Horton's Smile Cookie Week is back starting September 13th. For one week, the iconic chocolate chunk cookies topped with a pink and blue smile will be available at Tim Hortonons restaurants across Canada. 100% of the proceeds from each Smile Cookie will be donated to local charities and community groups in each restaurant's neighborhood. Celebrating its 25th anniversary, the Smile Cookie campaign has raised more than $60 million

for charities, hospitals, and community programs across the country. Grab your Smile Cookie from September 13th to 19th only at Tim Hortons. I love that music on Wednesdays. Smoke mirrors and the truth. You can just hear that sounding like smoke mirrors and the truth every Wednesday. And that means I'm in Stratford, Ontario.

Bruce Anderson is in Ottawa. Good morning. Good afternoon. Whatever time of day it is in whatever part of the country you're in. The fog, the smoke is lifting. It's been raining all night, Peter. I don't know about where you are, but it's been raining cats and dogs, as they say. And I've been looking forward to this

too and of course i was really thinking about it a lot yesterday and then i got this notice on my calendar that i think you've got a book coming out soon don't you have a book coming out soon and i was like do i have to order it now you do and if you order it now, you go right into the special pool to get a book plate signed by me to stick inside that book. I'm so glad I remembered it. That's right. And, you know, I don't know, maybe it was the wrong thing to bring it up on the show this morning. No, no, no, it's fine. You can bring it up.

It's Simon & Schuster. It's called Off the Record. It's Off the Record. I think it's Off the Record in the sense these are the stories that i never told on air they're the stories that um why did you conceal them peter all these years and why do people have to pay now to get these like i will pay i understand that that's you know you gotta earn a living and everything else it's tough being a pensioner man all right i'm telling you struggling here in my one-man band in my

little podcast studio in stratford ontario this is this is a tough life this ain't the cbc where i was surrounded by thousands of good public servants who worked awfully darn hard i must say but here i am all alone occasionally my son will You know Willie. He's a great kid. But, you know, he's off in his own life and his own job these days. But he will, you know, he spends a bit of time every day giving me advice, especially on branding and social media stuff. But anyway, I digress. The book is a collection of stories about different things that have happened during my career that there are these kind of stories and and you tell them just like i do you you were at a

certain event or what have you and it you know there was a a public discussion of whatever that event was and yet things happen kind of behind the scenes that are either funny or emotional or interesting in some fashion, that that's what you end up telling about that moment when you're sitting around with friends or over dinner. And that's what this book is. It's a collection of those stories. A couple of them I've told, you know, during the podcast over the last couple of years. But there are i don't know four or five dozen of them in in this book and that you have you have great recollection i can barely remember the story last that i heard last week or the thing that you know i experienced last week but you've always had great recollection and so your storytelling is fantastic i mean it does strike me as a bit, I don't know, hurtful that we've known each other for at least 30 years and there's no stories about, you know, your time with me.

But I'm going to leave that aside. I'm just going to put that away and let's talk about it. I could probably squeeze in that story about that two iron I hit on 13 at Cruden Bay in Scotland that and it resulted in a birdie on a hole. I don't think you've even ever parred. You've heard that story. Yes, I've heard that story. You're mentioned in the book. You have a, you're kind of a, let's just say your picture's in the book.

Great figure. Your picture's in the book, and there's a story that mentions you but i've i've saved all the really good stuff for the next volume the next book inside smoke mirrors and the truth all right all right i'll wait but this one uh the i i think people will enjoy this one and uh if you and now that you mentioned it, if you log on to thepetermansbridge.com, there's a special section there that Simon & Schuster has organized. That's my publisher. And you can pre-order the book. Comes out October 5th.

And you can enter the contest. Anyway, that is not what I planned to bring up. But I did want to bring up some of that stuff, the same kind of stuff, but from your perspective. I want you to start by, you know, here we are. We're, you know, a couple of hours before the major French language debate, which will be on tonight, Wednesday night. And then tomorrow night, it's the major English language, the only English language debate between the leaders on Thursday night.

And so those both are going to get a lot of attention. Now, you've been involved with leaders before, both conservative and liberal leaders in the past. You've been around on these kind of days. And I want to get a sense of what's likely happening, you know, inside, you know, the war rooms, the leader's room, those who see the leader on a day like this. I mean, I remember when I, on those far off days when I went to school,

high school as far as I got, I didn't actually quite finish it, but nevertheless, I was there. And I, you know, on days of exams, I was a last minute crammer. It was awful. I was cramming on the way, on the walk to school. And it, that doesn't work. It certainly didn't work for me. But, you know, what happens with leaders on a day like this?

Are they last minute cramming or the people around them say, listen, if he or she doesn't know it now, they're never going to know it. So just let them relax. Well, I think it's probably different from election to election and certainly from leader to leader, Peter. I think one of the first things that occurs to me about this next two debates is that for four of the five leaders who will be on the stage, I got that right? For Aaron O'Toole, Justin Trudeau, Jagmeet Singh, and Annamie Paul. You forgot Aaron? Did you forget Aaron O'Toole? The five leaders on it right oh no you're saying of the four of the five yes okay got you blanchette is the only leader for whom his job probably isn't on the line um so that makes it a different kind of debate on some level i think that um usually

there's somebody who's ahead and somebody who's more secure and somebody who's less secure in their job. And so somebody's trying to avoid trouble and somebody's trying to land that kind of heroic punch on the other actor that everybody always looks for. And it doesn't always happen. But the idea that somebody needs to make something happen and somebody else needs to avoid something happening is usually part of the frame. And I don't think that's exactly where we're at right now. I think Justin Trudeau knows that having called this election, having fallen a little bit behind in the polls, he has a chance to win the election campaign,

but he needs to really do a couple of things that are pretty important. Now, what he needs to do probably doesn't require him to cram more policy thought into his head than he already has. And if you're experienced in these debates, you realize that they go by pretty quickly. And if you try to fill your thought with endless amounts of policy detail, it's not going to serve you very well. You're never going to get a chance to use it. And if you do try to use it, you're going to end up sounding less interesting, basically, to audiences.

They really want to hear shorter, punchier versions of the point that you want to make, either about your own ideas or about the personality or the ideas of the other. So I think for the incumbent in this case, Mr. Trudeau, it's quite different than for Mr. O'Toole, who started off well and I think has spent the last, I don't feel like four or five days now, a bit on the defensive about a couple of issues and in particular guns and the relationship between his party and his leadership with the gun lobby. And so he's got to do something to quell this sinking feeling that might be there with some of his caucus and candidates and party that,

that they missed their chance maybe and that they're going to fall behind again in terms of at least the seat outcome. And Jagmeet Singh is sitting there with a bigger number than people maybe expected. And no question that those votes are the votes that the liberals are going after. He's got to defend those. So everybody's got a different objective. And some of it will be about personality, their own, or characterizing the other. Some of it will be about someential, and the leaders are all pretty skilled. So it should be worthwhile watching.

Yeah, I agree with you. I think they are going to be consequential, and especially so the – I mean, the ground was set to a degree with the French language debate at TVR last week in Quebec. That could alter tonight, but let's assume you set that aside for a moment. The tomorrow night debate, the English language debate is going to be huge and could have a real difference. And part of the reason is, I remember last week you telling us that, you know, no matter how you feel about polls, if you want to sort of get a sense of where we are in the race, you know, kind of look at the spread of different polls that are out there. And the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle there.

Now, what's interesting about this time round, as opposed to most other election campaigns that I can remember, there are a lot of polls. So there have been four or five in the last four or five days. And there do not appear to be any rogue polls, so to speak. In other words, one poll was kind of way out there for one party or another. They're all basically bunched up together within one, two, at the most three points of each other, the lead parties. Most of them, margin of error included, they're basically ties. So that really is where we are, if you go by your theory from last week, and I tend to agree with that. And if that is where we

are, the slightest movement on a night like tomorrow night could have a huge impact. Yeah, I think that's right. I think the polls have been telling us that most people, if the choice comes down to a conservative or a liberal government, something like 60 to 65% would prefer a liberal government to a conservative government. So if you're the conservatives, you look at that 40 percent and say, well, that's more than enough to elect us if all of those people voted for us. But that leaves very little room for error. I think they will understand that, especially having spent a few days talking about guns and vaccinations and being challenged a bit on the climate change issue, that they need to do more to shift that balance so that those progressive voters are maybe kind of indifferent to liberal versus conservative. And I think that's a challenge, but I think it's always the challenge

for the Conservative Party in the modern times that they've got a smaller accessible vote pool. And now not every pollster is finding that. We have found that consistently in ours and a couple of other polling companies have found that as well, that more people say they're willing to consider voting Liberal than are willing to consider voting conservative. In fact, the NDP is second in our polls consistently in terms of the total accessible voter pool. So that's the challenge for the conservatives as they head into it is a lot of people will surround the conservative leader and say, galvanize the base, motivate the base, do the things that make people really excited and want to get out there and vote. And others and say, galvanize the base, motivate the base, do the things that make people really excited and want to get out there and vote. And others will say, keep on doing what you started

trying to do at the beginning of this campaign, which is opening minds up to the idea that you could be a good prime minister, even if they're not conservative by nature, they're just a little tired of the liberals. So it'll be interesting to see what kind of Aaron O'Toole comes into that debate tomorrow night, because I imagine it's typically the case that, you know, advisors like to cram into these rooms and surround these leaders and give them their advice. And the best run campaigns usually have one person who hears that happening and says, you bunch, exit. Because there only needs to be one kind of advice

in that situation because things go really badly if the leader has two or three different thoughts that they're trying to do. So I'm going to be very interested in what kind of Aaron O'Toole comes into the debate. I think we know what kind of Justin Trudeau is going to come into the debate. I think he's going to be stylistically quite like what he was in Quebec last week on the TVA debate. I think he's going to spend a fair bit of time talking to those soft NDP voters about what a conservative government would mean,

and also probably making some points about the NDP policy on things like climate change, which independent reviews have said isn't quite as good as the Liberal Party platform on climate change, and isn't even as good, these observers would say, as a conservative climate policy, which I think will come as a surprise to some of those voters who kind of assume that the NDP might have maybe the best climate plan. So I think Trudeau is going to be trying to do that. And I'm not sure where Jagmeet Singh is going to come from. I mean, he has spent a lot of time talking about the Liberals being all talk, no action. And I think that's easy to do in advertising, but it might be more difficult to prosecute in the room and,

and Trudeau will be there with a chance to rebut, but actually this chance to rebut, I wanted to ask you a question, Peter. You know how the media work and how they talk about format and that sort of thing. It always feels to me like we end up with a format that's overly complicated, that has too many people asking questions, that I don't really understand how we end up in a situation where we worry that we're never really going to see genuine, authentic, at length exchanges between the leaders because there's so much structure to the role of different media people.

And and I'm worried about that for the for the English language debate tomorrow night. I really like the TVA debate last week. But but why does happen? How does that – tell me a little bit about that. We touched on this a little bit yesterday on the reporters with Rob and Althea, but my own view on your question is, look, you have two routes you can go. You can either pick the one moderator, and that usually has to be somebody who is clearly neutral from all the participants on the stage in other words not just the leaders but the the media organizations and so then you you go in the past and you see like the david johnston's from the from the uh

you know 70s and 80s um you see steve bacon from uh tvo who wasn't associated with any of the networks who were you know part of the what was then called a consortium and so you either go that route or you let which seems to have happened these last couple of debates on the english side not the french side on the english side, where you basically let the networks make a decision. And it's all about branding for the networks. So, okay, you know, global, if you're going to have Donna Friesen, we have to have Lisa Laflamme.

And the CBC has to have, you know, one of their anchors. And in this case, it's Rosie Barton. So that way you can see the problem building. You have this kind of building block of news organizations with their people up front that brand their network as part of all this thing. So you have too many people and then you have a moderator and then you have the the four or five different leaders who are on the

stage and you end up with what we ended up last time around but as i've said before last time round we all thought was awful and it was awful i think but it was extremely popular in the sense a lot of people watched it so you weigh these two things in fact i think more people watch that debate than any debate are you saying that you think that it was popular first of all i probably don't have the same i don't interpret popular just because a lot of people watch it people might watch it because it's an election maybe popular is the wrong word i mean i mean i think they watched it what like they watch a train crash right i mean they they said wow this is crazy right you know do you think that more people come to a program like that because the the the well-known network anchors are there is that part of what you're

saying that no you know as rob pointed out yesterday it's quite correct i you know if you think back to all the debates we've watched the only time a moderator ever became part of the story um was in one of the french language debates when when the moderator fainted and i was there i was in the room you were in the room and then it became a question of which leader is going to move first to help that poor person out who's basically lying on the floor. Anyway, the. We should tell listeners that she was fine in the end. She was fine in the end. Yes.

But it did. Did it delay the. Oh, yes. Did it delay it a day or did it delay it like an hour or something? An hour or so i don't remember exactly how long but i do remember because i was helping um jean charre during that debate and we had prepped him in this little holding room each leader has a holding room it was at the national railway uh center building in downtown ottawa and um then he goes on the stage and the handful of us that had been with him are watching on

tv and then they took this break because the moderator as you say fainted and he came back and very unusually we got a chance to talk about how it was going and i don't know i think i was watching the u.s open in tennis last night and i was thinking well that wouldn't be allowed in tennis. You wouldn't be able to do any kind of discussion of strategy or anything like that in the middle of a match. Anyway, that was a one-time experience. But, I mean, the point I was making is that of all,

when you go back through all the history of all the debates and the moments that became the moments of whatever debate, they don't include the journalists. know they're not part of it so um you know people come to the set to to help them make a decision they don't come to watch networks branding each other as much as i was involved in many of those kind of moments not in debates but in other moments where you know it clearly was part of the branding of the network. But listen, you know, the television debates, especially this one, these two over the next couple of nights,

are an important part of the democratic process. People are trying to make up their mind about who to vote for, what kind of government they want, et cetera, et cetera. And that is, for a lot of people, becomes a key point in their decision-making process. Whether they watch it live or they end up watching clips later. I think that's right. I think starting at nine actually as well is going to, in some parts of the country, produce a smaller audience and therefore more reliance on clips. I think that when you have that many journalists, and I guess there's a pollster as a moderator as well,

like that many personalities on the stage who are not the politicians, there's a risk that the amount of airtime for the politicians is less. I hope that's not the case because it's the only English debate that there is. Last time there were more. And so I don't know. I don't love this format, but it is what it is and it'll have to do. And hopefully if people find it clunky again this year, like they did the last time,

the network will kind of hear that message and come up with a different formula going forward. Okay. I want to take a quick break. I have a question about polling that I would like to try and help me with. And some of our viewers, because they've been asked the same kind of thing. But first of all, this quick pause. Starting September 13th, Tim Hortons Smile Cookie Week is back. From September 13th to 19th at Tim Hortons,

100% of the proceeds from all Smile Cookies purchased will be donated to local charities and community groups across Canada. In the last 25 years, you have helped us raise over $60 million. And in 2020 alone, Smile Cookie Week brought in $10.6 million while helping over 500 community organizations. You can participate by grabbing your own Smile Cookie at Tim Hortons restaurants across Canada from September 13th to 19th. You're listening to The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge.

All right, Peter Mansbridge back here with Smoke, Mirrors and the Truth. Bruce Anderson is in Ottawa. I'm in Stratford, Ontario. We're hours away from the final French language debate and a day away from the only English language debate in this campaign. So it's an important couple of days. And it comes amidst a series of public opinion polls and research studies that would seem to indicate this is basically a tied election between the top two parties, the Liberals and the Conservatives. And quite frankly, the NDP aren't that far back. They're 10 points back, could be a decision maker in terms of any minority parliament. And the move will be on, as Bruce mentioned a little while ago, by the

Liberals to try and attract some of that NDP vote back to the Liberals, if that's where they'd come from, to try and help blunt the conservative numbers. Here's my question, Bruce, about polling. Because you, like many other pollsters, have done this over time, and it's called this kind of three-day rolling poll number. So I want to try and understand how that works because that tracking poll, as they call it, a daily tracking poll, gets a lot of attention. So I want to understand.

I know different polling organizations handle things differently, but generally, how do those work? Yeah, it's a good question, and I'm glad you brought it up. These rolling tracking polls have become like the bag of movie popcorn for people like you and me and others who really get into it. It's like our hands just keep going right back into the bag and we keep on filling up. But is it perfectly good for us? You know, it's tasty and it makes you want more. But they do need to be observed with a little bit of caution.

And here's one of the reasons why. I mean, what happens with a rolling tracking poll is that the survey company interviews a certain number of people, the same number of people typically every single night. And each day they report the fourth night ago and introduce a new night's data. So the changes that get reported are changes when you kind of shift from one set of three nights to the next set of two of those three nights plus a new night and then that repeats itself the next time it can make um or some challenges when you have one day or one night where the number of people the kind of people that you're reaching on the phone because we're talking mostly about these uh phone base polls right now is different from those that you might get on another day. There's

been some evidence in my mind anyway that weekend numbers are a little bit less stable because people who answer the phone are different from the people who might answer the phone on a weeknight. But if you have a kind of a weird set of numbers on any given day and any polling methodology can get that. I'm not being critical of a particular methodology or a company or anything like that. It can just happen. Then that sits inside your three-night tracking pool until it gets exhausted because you've added more data. And it can create this sense of fluctuation that isn't really real. But because we're sitting there with the bag of popcorn, we kind of assign a level of importance and

enthusiasm to it. And the partisans get all into it and decide that this is a, you know, a moving vehicle, call it momentum of a sort that maybe isn't really there. And as you remember from our earlier conversations, Peter, including those with Chantel, my advice was you might see some movement, but basically assume that not that many people are paying attention. And this brings me to another point, and I don't want to screw up too much clock talking about polling methodology, But I do think that we're watching now, you mentioned that you thought all the polls were kind of huddled together and there weren't really rogue polls. To my eye, there have been a couple of, of roguish looking polls.

There was one that had a nine point conservative lead, which I don't think ever existed. I didn't see any evidence in our polling or in any other company's polling that that was the case. I could mention a couple of others, but I'm not going to. But I think that when you have so much interest in polling, the temptation is to kind of report and accentuate numbers that look like change happened. And I think we all need to be careful about whether or not that change really did happen. And so where I was getting to is that we've got online polls, we've got live phone calls where an individual is phoning somebody and saying, what are you going to do? And then we've got robot phone calls, basically, where if you pick up your phone,

you get an automated question that says, press one if you're going to vote liberal, two if you're going to vote People's Party, and so on. I think over time, you know, we're going to want to examine more carefully what kind of people answer the phone in these election periods, maybe especially in the early election periods. I'm not saying that because I'm sure they're a less representative sample, but I have questions about them now. And I don't have the same questions about online polls, which is what we use. I do have concerns about online polls, but I think these methodologies aren't all the same, I guess is what I'm kind of struggling to get out. And I think, you know, after this election, it would be a good time to take a good look at how they work through the election, not just did they all

get as close as possible to the right number the day before election day, because there are lots of reasons that that can happen, but that isn't the only way i think to measure the effectiveness of them you know that's one of the reasons why i have problem with um and once again this isn't directed any you know one person or one organization but why i have a problem with those who aggregate polls so you know throw them all together and you know and come up with some theme some tracking theme to polls because there are such different methodologies and different questions are asked and more being asked these days, including by pollsters themselves, as you've just witnessed, about the methodologies they use. Things have changed a lot in every other industry.

It wouldn't be surprising if they're going to need to change in the polling and research industries as well. Last question for this week, and this is, you know, and I was thinking of it when you were telling the Jean Charest story about the, you know, the day, the unfortunate incident with the moderator fainting in the middle of a debate. Because you've seen a lot of these players close up over time, especially around intense moments like debates, if you draw on your anecdotal experience and your personal history with them,

aside from that moment, are there stories where a leader surprised you or uh you know impressed you beyond what you already thought of them because of they were the way they were handling the situation or the way they took in information or the way they used that information you know moments later on on the uh debate floor You don't have to mention names, or you could. But you've worked with an array of different leaders from different parties, and I think it would be interesting to hear your experience on that. Yeah, well, one of the most famous ones was Brian Mulroney debating with John Turner.

And, you know, the moment was really about Turner having taken over the liberal leadership and preparing for a campaign, but in between taking over the leadership and launching the election campaign, he made a number of appointments that clearly to most eyes looked like patronage appointments and the kind of patronage appointments that make voters feel a little bit icky. And, and Kerr was not really prepared properly for that. And I'm not blaming his advisors. It's on him.

Ultimately his answer to the question, why did you do that? And how did you feel like that was okay? It was not what it needed to be. And, and in the sense that he said, well, I had no choice and Brian Mulroney jumped on that and said, well, you did have a choice. And I thought that was a pretty dramatic moment that people still talk about in terms of the career making kind of episodes for Brian Mulroney. And he was very effective. I also did think, and not just because I worked with him,

Jean Charest was very effective in that format. He didn't start out necessarily that way. Actually, when he entered that leadership race, he was kind of a 5% candidate, and Kim Campbell was about a 35% candidate. And by the end of it, significantly through the course of debates and just learning how to sharpen his message and be able to say, this is what I'm running for this, this and this, and this is what's wrong with her platform. He, you know, if there had been another week in that leadership, he probably would have won it. And who knows whether that 93 campaign would have

turned out much differently, but it could have. So, you know, and I think Chrétien also, well, I didn't really agree with him on a lot of policy issues. I felt like he was, he kind of managed himself pretty effectively in those debate situations. He kind of played with the tools that he had rhetorically and from the standpoint of presence. And, and I think that was, that was effective for him. I, you know, I don't know that there have been monumental failures other than the, the Turner one. I do think Andrew Scheer was not great last year and it, and it propelled him to the finish that he had.

And so, you know, I don't love the was there a knockout punch question because I actually think that there can be in the course of a debate a number of episodes of exchanges that happen that layer in thoughts into people's minds. And they may not be able to tell you, oh, there was this moment on vaccines or on climate or on guns that was really so compelling to me that it pushed everything else out of my head and it made up my mind how we're going to vote that's probably not a thing to be you know spending a lot of time looking for it but on the other hand this is an audition for Aaron O'Toole is he up to the job of being prime minister even if people have some doubts about his party those swing voters will

they let that happen if they're NDP voters and they're just a little tired of the liberals? Will those swing liberal conservative voters go, yeah, Aaron O'Toole, he's okay. Trudeau feels a little tired to me. So that's Aaron O'Toole's challenge. And it won't be one sentence that decides whether he passes that job audition. And for Trudeau, I think people are looking for, show me that you really want this. Show me some humility. Ask to be rehired.

And if he does those things pretty well, I think that there are a lot of people saying, well, I don't know that I really want to change government. And so that's his challenge. And I think for the others, it'll really be about how do you get share of voice? How do you really get noticed as this looks like, as you just put it, a fight between two parties as to which is going to form government? Okay. Good synopsis.

I can't wait. We love to watch these kind of moments, and sometimes we end up thoroughly bored and disgusted by it all. But other times it can be pretty exciting. And the pressure that is on these people, all of whom are running for public office, they are the gutsy ones. A lot of us sit in the sidelines and yell and scream about government. These people actually are willing to serve. You can argue about how well they may do in that job, but they are willing and they're there. They put themselves forward. And with that, they put all their vulnerabilities and their credits in front of all of us to weigh. So I think you have to have an enormous amount of respect for all of them, no matter which party and which ideology they represent

when they're standing there on the stage. Okay, Bruce, thank you for this. Bruce will be back on Friday, of course, with Chantel. When we kind of put all this together about, well, what happened? We've watched two days of that, and here we are a week away from the election. What does it all mean? So that's good talk on Friday. Tomorrow, on Thursday, will be your chance to weigh in on whatever it is you want to

say about the election campaign. So write me at themansbridgepodcast at gmail.com, themansbridgepodcast at gmail.com. themansbridgepodcast at gmail.com. I read all your letters. Some of them make it onto the kind of your turn moment on Thursdays. And it's always fun. And you seem to enjoy it as well. So we look forward to that tomorrow.

But if you want to say something about anything, you better get it in today, by midnight tonight. Get me your thoughts for your turn. That wraps it up for this day. Bruce, thanks very much. We'll talk to you again soon on Friday with Chantal. You bet, Peter. And thanks for listening, everyone. We'll talk to you again in 24 hours