The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - SMT Ukraine -- How A Moment Can Impact A Country's Point of View

Episode Date: April 6, 2022

The charge of atrocity has horrified the world.  Or has it?  Ukraine says it happened and we believe them.  Russia says it was faked and their followers believe them.  How do you tell the smoke and mirrors from the truth? Bruce Anderson is here with that and much more.

And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. You are just moments away from the latest episode of The Bridge. It's Wednesday, Smoke Mirrors and the Truth. Bruce Anderson is next. And hello there. In Stratford, Ontario today, I'm Peter Mansbridge and welcome to Smoke, Mirrors and the Truth. We call it Smoke, Mirrors and the Truth because we're always looking for those kind of moments, issues, plays that are impacted at times by, well, by the way they are presented to the public. And are they presented in such a way that it encourages you to think one way about whatever that impact of that issue is. So we have a number of those on tap for today. And we're going to start off with Ukraine because clearly the most dominant issue of the week on Ukraine was the revelation of the atrocities that have taken place there. And as far as we're concerned,

the Russians executed cold-heartedly a number of Ukrainian citizens, could be in the hundreds, shot them in the back of the head, their hands tied behind them, their legs tied, women raped and then murdered. I mean, there are horrible scenes, and we've seen the images. So for the world that is supporting Ukraine, there is no question about that, none at all. And there's lots of evidence to prove it including satellite imagery taken a couple of days before the bodies lying in the streets and the russian troops still

in present in that area now the russians say no no we didn't do this. This is fake. This was done by the Ukrainians themselves to make it look like we did it. Now, we can prove that to be wrong. However, don't take away from the impact that the Russian statement has, because not only are there still a lot of Russians who believe in everything Putin says, but social media in China and

to some degree in India is towing the Russian line. Now think about that. That's like, you know, bordering on two-thirds of the world's population buying the Russian story. Now they both can be right. And we're pretty confident in ours, and so are all the members of the United Nations, with the exception of Russia and a couple of its sycophant countries.

So is this a classic example of smoke mirrors and the truth, Bruce? And how does it impact public opinion? I know you just came out of the field in Canada about Ukraine and probably just before the revelation of these stories. But you still would have an idea, an impact assessment of what this means. Yeah, Peter, I think that there's no doubt that Canadians will have seen these images. They were everywhere on the traditional media, the legacy media, as some like to call it, and also all over social media. And they're extraordinarily difficult for people to see,

whether it's the videos or the still shots. And they will only firm the resolve of most Canadians that we have to stick with this fight, stick with Ukraine, do as much as we can. I don't think they're going to change the calculus in people's minds about what nature of intervention. It feels to me that people have, by and large in Canada, decided that that's going to be up to the military leadership and the political leadership to make those judgments and to do it as part of an alliance of countries will still make the most sense. Our latest poll shows that three quarters of Canadians still believe that in the short term or in the medium term, Russia will end up losing its bid to control Ukraine. Either it will take it over for a period of time and then have to give it up because the resistance will be so strong or that um they just won't succeed in the first instance um so the fact that this has gone on as long as it has when many people

might have surmised that it was going to be a short uh attack and a takeover has um has not made canadians feel like well okay r Russia is really gaining the upper hand and gaining momentum. It hasn't on the other hand, really moved the yardsticks the other ways. The kind of Canadians have been convinced that Putin is going to lose this war at some point in some fashion. And they also believe that he's, you know, 53%, which is I think up a little bit from our last poll, I think he's going to be gone from the leadership in, in a couple of years.

But to get to your point about the the leadership in in a couple of years but to get to your point about the smoke and mirrors a couple of things really struck me um one is that we're watching in the united states i'm i'm paying close attention to the effects of some of the disinformation that happens on social media and i'm seeing clips of people who are being asked whether they think that putin worse than Biden and things like that. And it's shocking in our modern world how many people can be seduced by the kind of blatant disinformation that you referred to that Russia is putting out on the airwaves. And I say on the airwaves, but really on the internet, and how far and wide that can travel and how it can find some

root system, even in democracies, free democracies like ours. I don't see much evidence of it in Canada yet, but I think it's naive if we imagine that it won't reach some Canadians and won't convince some Canadians that, well, maybe there's another side to this story. I think that's one of the questions that are at the heart. The last point I wanted to make is we're debating a new law in Parliament right now about regulation of content in Canada. And it's a good debate to have. It's a good debate to have in a kind of a democracy like ours because there's no

perfect answer but what's going on in russia and the russian disinformation effort the latest in a series of russian disinformation efforts is a pretty stark reminder that if we don't have some guardrails over what travels the internet that it can really confuse and poison our societies in ways that weren't really very possible with traditional media and it can happen fast i i want to uh pursue that that auto development in just a minute but one last question on on on canadians attitudes can you sense from what you did how deep the resolve is because this could go on for quite a while you know at the beginning of this we all talked about well it could be over in days and weeks then it became sort of weeks or months

and now i heard yesterday the um u.s uh head of the Joint Chiefs of the Military, saying this could go on for years, maybe even decades. Well, that's a big commitment from all the countries that are supporting Ukraine, if in fact anything like that is true. Can you sense how deep the resolve is on the part of Canadians? I think it's pretty deep, but I think the question is really relevant. You mentioned in one of our conversations a few weeks ago, Peter, that eventually public attention will shift to something else. Pictures will be different. There'll be fewer of them. Other stories will come to the fore, will capture the public imagination.

And I think that's, it would be foolish not to believe that that's going to happen. We live in a world where some people call it an attention economy. There are so many subjects and purveyors of information that are vying for public attention. So that competition is constant and it's unrelenting. And there's going to be a certain measure of people saying, unless there's something new in this story, I'm going to be distracted by something else. That doesn't mean that their resolve to support Ukraine against Russia will wither. other conflicts where you could say that over time the public will feel like the price being paid is too high relative to the sense of progress there aren't a lot of canadian lives being put well there are canadian lives obviously being put at risk in some respects but we don't have troops on a battlefield and body bags coming home and you and I remember the corrosive effect on support for the Vietnam

involvement as American young man, mostly went to a war there and bodies came back and you could see the effect on the political support levels. The second thing is that sometimes the cost to treasury of participation in something like this can be a corroding factor over time. I don't see much evidence that that's a challenge right now, in part because people don't really pay that much attention anymore to what things cost in terms of when governments decide to spend. And if anything, we've seen a boost in support for uh military spending through this period so the things that would normally um i guess two parts to your question will people

still be paying as much attention probably not um will they still support the uh the effort uh by ukraine in our involvement in it Probably they will, would be my answer. Okay, let me touch on this point that you raised about basically control on the internet. Because an interesting speech yesterday by the head of the CRTC, the Canadian Radio Television Commission, which kind of monitors and to some degree controls the airwaves in Canada,

and that includes the internet. I'm not sure how much controlling they're doing, but they're suggesting, at least in this speech, that there are going to be more controls, and yet they will not impact freedom of speech or freedom of expression. I don't know how you fit those two things together. Now you can have both. Well, it's an interesting debate for me to watch

because I think for a lot of people who may not have spent as much time as you or I or some of our listeners kind of following public policy and politics, it can be easy to assume that there has been no regulation of speech, no ways in which speech is constrained in Canada. And of course, that's not true. There have always been rules about what can be said on public airwaves.

There have always been regulations that are associated with the giving of licenses to broadcast entities that require them to adhere to certain standards. And so we've always bought into as a society, the notion that you can't use public airwaves to say anything that you want, because understand that um there's advantages both economic in terms of and technological in terms of building up a critical mass of broadcast infrastructure and telecommunications infrastructure and you only get to do that if you regulate it and you create an industry that can thrive in that area but also that there are there are certain things that if there

aren't rules against saying them or purveying them, that it will cause harm to society. So, the basic idea of some constraints over speech is a settled dispute for most people, although it feels in the hands of some politicians in the United States and a few in Canada as well, as though it's a completely new idea that it's sort of fallen from the skies. And we're looking at this idea for the first time and how outrageous it seems that Ottawa or anybody would want to constrain what we might want to say. And, you know, be that as it may, may i mean i think most people are kind of now saying well okay if we need some guardrails what should they look like how extensive should they be who should decide them should the politicians get to decide them or should we have this kind

of regulatory body that's a little bit arm's length from a politician, which is the CRTC in this case. As I said, I'm happy to see a vigorous debate in Canada. Just as a citizen, I think this is not something that should be done undercover or should not provoke a good debate. But I think on balance, the idea of the politician deciding day in, day out is a bad idea. The idea of a regulator is a better idea. And the idea of no internet in recent years and the crtc had

said yesterday i think or the day before that they've taken a light touch with respect to regulation of online content and i think that's true and And the question is, says that light touch been on the whole better or would it have been better to have a little bit less light touch? Um, and I come down on the, there's a lot of stuff that's trafficked that has caused harm. And so there is some reason to look for regulations that reduce the amount of harm that can be caused, but to be cognizant of what that can risk in terms of freedom of speech, I think is a good debate to have, as you said.

Where do you come down on this? It's a tough call. I mean, it really is. I mean, you look at some of the trash that traffics on the Internet and is taken seriously by an astounding number of people. Yeah. You go, God, something's got to happen here. Something's got to be done to make this a better situation and a more uh and a situation that uh you know it helps inform and educate people as opposed to twist their minds um there was another

thing that happened this week which it'll be interesting to see whether it has an impact or the government's moving finally on this bill that they couldn't get through the last parliament and they've made some changes because it was quite controversial, but the suggestion seems to be that they're going to ensure that social media companies, the Googles, the Twitters, the Facebooks, whomever have to pay for the content they move through their system. In other words, pay to, you know, legitimate news organizations when they sort of push something out from the Globe and Mail, say, for example. They've got to pay for that.

There have been some arrangements in the past for this that have been done on an individual basis, but this would be the law. And one assumes that would have an impact because they'll want to make revenue, the news organizations, and they'll be on top of ensuring that they're paid for what's used. It could work both ways. You know, the social media companies will either, you know, pay for what they use or they'll go elsewhere to get what they can for nothing. And that's where the trash works in. So I don't know. I think there's a fair bit of content that already exists that, you know,

that fits that category that you just mentioned at the end so that part is happening um and so there's that question of whether or not more should be done to to put parameters around that content i do happen to think that if uh if I want to post a story on Facebook that I read in a newspaper and the newspaper paid to have that story written, research and written, then if we expect to have news organizations, then we need to create a value chain that allows them to get some revenue from that. I don't think there's any, you know, any other way to look at it. If we don't, and we're simply relying on, well, they need to distribute hard copy newspapers or have people go to their news sites. There aren't very many news organization sites that can survive in that kind of mode. And there aren't very many physical newspapers being picked up by people at newsstands anymore. So we're really in a situation where our choices are to pretend that nothing's changed and to know that what will happen is the number of news organizations will wither. The number of

organizations that create content that's designed to get clicks, which isn't necessarily the same as news as you would define it, and as you spent your career developing it, it's more like what will make people excited, angry, frustrated, divided, tense um that will grow um to some degree i think that's what we've been seeing and i don't consider that to be all the news that i need uh just as a member of society to make wise choices and i think this is the crux of the dilemma for reasonable politicians is to sort of watch this happening, to see what's happening, the version of it south of the border where that representative Marjorie Taylor green yesterday was, you know,

it was on Twitter talking about the Democrats being pro pedophile. And, you know, at every stage, there's one more shock where we see that kind of thing. And we wonder, are we losing our ability to be shocked by it? And we look at the United States and we say, well, they seem to be losing their ability to be shocked by it. And they're not doing anything about it. The race to the bottom of that conversation is not slowing down it's gathering pace and i think we need to look at our society and say is that what we want to see happen here do we think that

there's a chance that it will happen here does the whole thing that we saw with vaccinations and blockades uh is that a kind of a warning sign for us. There's a whole conversation about freedom, a Trojan horse for a lot of these ideas that freedom means I get to say, I don't like the color of your skin or the faith that you choose, or you say that your sexual orientation shouldn't be something I have an opinion about. Well, what if I have an opinion about it? So I, you know, I hate to sound like that old man yelling and waving his fist at the clouds,

but some days I go, you know what guys like we got to pay attention to this. It's a problem. It's a problem. Yeah. We're going to take our break, but you know, you used a phrase in there a couple of minutes ago that we don't hear often anymore, newsstand. Which used to be such a big deal, right? The newsstand, whether it the city square of big european cities was like there was lineups at it because you were getting you know the new york herald tribune or whatever it was which would give you everything from the day's news stories in english to the

baseball scores from the day before you know like it was a big deal. But even in our hometowns here in Canada, you know, the store that had the big selection of newspapers, not just from across Canada, but from across the world, that was a big deal. Oh, I used to love going to the one in the Glebe. You probably used to use that one as well. You'd go in there and pick up whatever you wanted, and you'd have a chat with the dude who ran it and you talk about the politics of the week and he'd probably tell you what he

thought about your show that week oh yeah but it was a uh there was a dynamic to it and a and uh it's harder to replicate that these days for sure now we really do sound like those two guys in the balcony of the muffets or whatever it was. All right. You know, we got to live in a different world. Okay. We got to talk COVID because, you know, just as we were talking, I saw that. He said you wanted to take a break and then I didn't let you.

Yes. No, we're going to take a break. All right. You know, one of those quick pauses. But when we come back, we're going to talk about COVID again, because it's coming back. It's coming back. I see the bulletin that just crossed the wires. Well, it's not really a bulletin.

It's an information piece. You know, worries of more school disruptions are rising alongside COVID-19 cases. Man, go away. Leave us alone. Back in a moment. And welcome back. You're listening to Smoke, Mirrors, and the Truth on The Bridge.

Bruce Anderson's in Ottawa. I'm Peter Mansbridge in Stratford, Ontario. You're listening on Sirius XM, Channel 167, Canada Talks, or on your favorite podcast platform. You know, yesterday we were talking to Dr. Lisa Barrett here on the bridge, and the headline yesterday was basically governments are leaving us to make up our minds on our own about what we want to do. Now, the indications today that they're coming out with a fourth dose, you know, a second booster, that's good. But the whole masking thing, people are almost afraid to say you got to wear a mask,

but you got to wear your mask. They're letting people, you know um go into big public places arenas sports arenas uh without masks if they want to you make up your own mind about that meanwhile crunch crunch crunch the latest omicron variant of ba2 whatever it's called is uh made it's making its way in big numbers, initially in Europe and in the UK, and now it's starting to make its move here in North America, both in the Northeast United States and across different parts of Eastern Canada. So that's for real.

That's not smoke mirrors and the truth. That's what's happening. So what are governments going to do? Are they just going to sit back and let it roll over us? Is that the point at which we've arrived? I think the question for the Omicron wave, and it will be the same for this one is that they probably will they probably will sit back unless and until they start to feel that hospitalization rates are becoming such a big problem that um more needs to be done to keep the health system from collapsing and of course you and i are probably looking at the at the data

coming out of the uk and the uk data is saying the hospitalization rates are going up and if that starts to happen here i think it's going to change the political calculus right now i think there are some politicians who are looking at this from the standpoint of the you know if we imagine kind of political cowardice and political courage at opposite ends of the spectrum, the public wants this pandemic to be over. And so the default setting for the politician is if it's not really going to kill people because the vaccines have done such a good job, then maybe we don't want to be those politicians who look like they're keeping mandates in place on the other hand it does take some courage and probably some important courage to look at the situation and say with the rising number of cases for vulnerable people and for children who can't be vaccinated yet we need to do more to protect them and i feel this quite acutely because i've got two grandkids and one is four and the other is four weeks and so i'm in

ottawa and the covid is ripping through this community and i'm going into stores and in some stores a hundred percent are mass and others it's% and in others it's 25% and there have been events here I won't name the places but where you know a bunch of people got together and 100 people apparently picked this up now most of those will be mild cases but for the people who can't be vaccinated or who have other underlying health issues, that risk is really real. And your point about the politicians have basically said, the provincial politicians especially, who control these decisions have said, we're not going to do anything right now. They haven't ruled out doing more in the future, but so far they're not. And I think we're right on the cusp of will they need to or not? And I don't think we'll know the answer for several days, but I think a lot of people are already personally

making choices that reflect a higher degree of anxiety than was the case a week or two weeks ago. Well, you know, I know for a fact that there are a lot of the doctors, the epidemiologists who have been advising government who are not in agreement with what government's doing. And they're quite upset. Not 100%. Some clearly are making the same with what government's doing. And they're quite upset. Not 100%. Some clearly are making the same case the government is making. But a lot of others, because I've talked to them,

they tell me. And I'm talking about a lot of them in different parts of the country. And they're frustrated by what politicians are doing, and they are convinced that the political agenda, especially in provinces that are, you know, they see an election in the next year, got a little bit spooked by the convoys, et cetera, et cetera. They're not calling the shots the way they were calling the shots a year ago

in terms of what the values were that they were considering. Well, I think they also are cognizant of the fact that the bulk of the data up until maybe the last week or so seem to be saying a lot of people are going to get it and a lot of people who get it are not going to be terribly sick and there's and and the vaccines may have been the the factor that had the most to do with that so if you're a politician and you're kind of watching how they the last month of lockdown felt and the degree of social tension that existed the way in which the convoy and all of the related kind of freedom opinion developed you may remember peter r polling showed

that well a lot of people didn't like the convoy more people than we might have expected associated themselves with the idea of i want some of my freedom back this was just a manifestation of feeling too constrained for too long not logical necessarily not people saying i think it was wrong to constrain my behavior or i don't want rules but i'm just desperate to you to have less constraints in my life. So I think the politicians who are at risk here or worried about their electoral situation are probably being very, very careful and erring on the side of not imposing any more restrictions. And so it might be an error, and it might be an error that they come to wear and to regret, and that we all come to wear and regret.

But so far, I think they're taking solace in the fact that most people know somebody who has COVID or had it recently, and for whom the health consequences were not that severe. Now, let me just say before you get a whole bunch of mail, that is not me saying that's what people should think. All right. But that is what I think has been happening. I will say this on the part of governments.

Some have been trying to ride both sides of this issue very carefully while reducing the restrictions, if you want to call them that. They're also ensuring that there is, you know, the ability to, you know, protect yourself. And it's on hand and it's available in good numbers. And I'm thinking specifically of Quebec, Ontario, BC, the whole idea of a second booster, the fourth vaccine. It's going to start rolling out almost immediately for certain age groups. They've extended the kind of free test kits

that were being available in certain, you know, like grocery stores and drugstores. They're extending the time. They were supposed to end up, you know, I think at the end of March. Now it's extended into midsummer. So they are doing certain things while at the same time doing other things that don't look like they're in any way controlling the spread um so they you know we we are at that point where you know a lot of people just say hey i'm you know i've

resigned myself to knowing that i'm going to get it and i'm just you know i've i'm fully vaccinated i'm boosted up it's not going to kill me i up. It's not going to kill me. I'm convinced it's not going to kill me because I've done all the right things. So if I get sick for a week or 10 days, then I get sick for a week or 10 days and move on with life. I don't know. I guess that's what freedom is. I make that call. You want to say something else before I go to our quick last topic?

No, let's go to the last topic. Okay. Tomorrow's budget day. Now, budget day used to be like a really big deal in Canada. Not that long ago. They used to have budget speeches in prime time. It would be big network specials on all the television networks. Everybody would be dressed in their fancy budget clothes and all the different special interest groups would turn up.

Well, some of that still happens, but it happens in the middle of the day or four o'clock right after the markets close, so it was not to impact markets. But it is kind of just the basic highlights. It's kind of the first sentence of individual programs. But a lot's placed, a lot of value is placed on the budget discussion, and we'll have a big talk about it on Good Talk this week, later this week when Chantel will join us, I'm sure. But is it also an example of smoke mirrors and the truth

in terms of budget day? I mean, is it really just a big PR exercise? I actually think it's kind of a small PR exercise relative to what it used to be, but it is a small PR exercise surrounding an important part of the political process. There needs to be a budget. The budget needs to turn into pieces of legislative activity that then get debated and passed or defeated in parliament and the budget allows the rest of the world outside of government to have a closer look than they do at any other point in the year at the financial situation and to hear what the government thinks is the forward-looking path of the economy. So I do think it's a really important thing. I do think in the past, there has been more,

there was more effort to add the hoopla, to create that sense of excitement and drama and everything else. And I was just, I was just looking at, you remember when Mike mike wilson had that budget i think it was 1986 so this is going back a long way hard to describe mike wilson as dynamic and hoopla right so but doug small who was the global tv reporter got a copy of the budget and ran a story about it and it turned into this giant scandal and i guess there was you know maybe there was even a court case and uh and it wasn't even a

copy of the budget his cameraman in taking the the pre-budget day pictures of the finance minister with his you know feet up on his desk getting ready saw a copy of the budget and in one shot it's sort of a glimpse in a corner saw something about a hundred i think it was a let's say it was a hundred million dollar you know deduction on something and they had to change the budget at the rewrite that sentence that's right And so fast forward to today, and I open up the news site that I use to sort of see what's going on. And there are stories there that are pretty clearly leaks and not accidental leaks, not somebody with a camera kind of shooting from a distance, catching a piece of information but you know some years ago people in government figured out well if you if everything in the budget is essentially secret until the budget is read on four at four o'clock on budget day then what happens to the news coverage of it is

you get like 10 of the coverage on the substance of the budget and 90 percent of the coverage is on people having issues with it, saying, I don't like this part of it. This part's OK, but that part sucks. Or, you know, why did they do it? What is the political math? All of the stuff that's other than the here's how this budget is intended to help people. And I think that governments correctly surmise that it was bad political communication strategy to hold back all of your messaging until the measures are announced in the House of Commons at four o'clock on a Thursday afternoon or whatever the normal day might be. But it's Thursday this time. So I don't think it adds up to that much hoopla relative to, you know, Mike Wilson. I'm looking at this little picture of him with his new shoes. Maybe we'll see some new shoes on Chris Freeland today, but it kind of feels hokey to me to do that. I don't think I would do it if I was her, but.

I wouldn't be buying shoes at a time of high inflation. That's not the signal they want to send send but one thing you can almost be sure if there's been a constant for most of the budget speeches that i can recall back into the you know going back a long way is they're pretty boring in the moment like they did there yeah you know unless they they make them short and then there were a couple that were in the sort of 15 to 20-minute range you could watch. But some of them go on forever, you know, like an hour, hour and a half. Budget speeches are ridiculous. And these aren't the great presenters.

I mean, you've got to think back to John Crosby was probably the last one, and his budget was a disaster. The government fell as a result of it. but at least it was fun to watch they're bad speeches written in ways that are overly flowery and self-congratulatory and it drives somebody like me crazy because I'm like do eight eight minutes, nine minutes, let people kind of absorb what you're saying rather than, once you go past that, they're never going to follow the whole thing and they're not going to get a sense of anything other than that you talk too much. You've got to be a serious junkie

to watch a whole budget speech. In fact, the networks, the rule used to be the networks had to cover them from first word to last word. Now they are, you know, they drop in and out of the speech box. They rip away from it as quickly as possible. That's right. They're pretty brutal.

Anyway, we're going to leave it at that with the reminder that this Friday we'll have a special Good Talk. We'll deal with the budget. It will not be available at noon Eastern, not until 5 Eastern. Long story. I'll explain it again tomorrow. And tomorrow, of course, is your turn. So if you've got thoughts on anything we've talked about this week, send them in. The Mansbridge Podcast at gmail.com.

The Mansbridge Podcast at gmail.com. All right, Bruce, thanks very much for talking again on Friday. I'm Peter Mansbridge. Thanks so much for listening. We'll see you again in 24 hours.