The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - SMT - Why Is Ford Saying No?

Episode Date: October 26, 2022

Bruce Anderson and Smoke Mirrors and the Truth deal with the issue of Doug Ford and why the Ontario premier doesn't want to appear at the Commission into the Emergencies Act.  Does he have something to hide? Plus what about Jagmeet Singh and his statement that even if Ottawa did something wrong in introducing the Act, he is unlikely to pull the NDOP support of the government?  Plus, why such low voter turnout in local politics?

And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. You're just moments away from the latest episode of The Bridge. It's Wednesday, Smoke, Mirrors, and the Truth with Bruce Anderson. And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. Bruce Anderson is with me. And, you know, I hate to start this way, but but i pretty well i've got to start with an admission an admission that once again i was wrong and bruce was right now we're not going to dwell on this because there's no reason to dwell on it but boris johnson is not going to be the prime minister again in the UK unless something remarkable happens again in the next few weeks. Peter, you should predict it again. I think that your tendency to predict his success

has been a real feature for me of this podcast. So go for it one more time. What's he going to do next? You know, I think he's going to disappear now. He's going to disappear for a while and leave center stage to Rishi Sunak, who is a pretty good story. I mean, this is a very wealthy guy. He's a billionaire.

Him and his wife are billionaires. But he had a start as basically just an ordinary guy, an ordinary kid. His family grew up in southern England. I think Southampton or Portsmouth, somewhere down there. And his dad was a doctor, a GP. His mom was a pharmacist. Young Rishi worked as a kind of delivery boy, riding a bicycle, taking medicine around to different people in that community.

And then he worked his way up. He went to, you know, he did great at school. He went to college. He went to university. He was in the States. He was a hedge fund manager. He made a lot of money on the markets. His wife came from a very wealthy family.

He was an early advocate of Brexit, first elected 2015. I mean, when you look at him on paper, it's pretty impressive. And he looked pretty impressive on day one as PM. But man, talk about a mountain of problems. This ain't going to be easy for the new prime minister of the UK. No, I agree, Peter. I think that, you know, I've been consuming a lot of news and stories about Rishi Sunak. And one of the most interesting voices that I've listened to is Rory Stewart, who was a conservative cabinet minister for a period of time uh in the uk and who served alongside rishi sunak

and got to know him quite well um and rory is part of a two-person podcast that i recommend to listeners if they haven't been aware of it or listen to it called the rest is politics i believe it's a bbc. It's a really interesting one on UK politics. And Stuart was talking about Sunak and his experience and his knowledge of him over the years and how bright he was and how they became friends. And then that they had a falling out over, not a falling out in the sense of a real deep personal tension, I don't think, but more that Rory Stewart couldn't understand the positions that Sunak was taking on Brexit, for example. So that's an interesting, I find him quite an interesting character. I think the most important thing about his assuming this role now is that the pressure he's under is to stabilize the UK economy, to stabilize the pound,

to reassure people that politics isn't just going to be a series of gyrations of politicians kind of going through almost histrionic position taking to kind of rally support or raise money or do whatever else it is that's their narrow political agenda but rather to take the role of being government seriously and to uh to kind of take the drama down uh well it remains to be seen what he's uh how he's going to do with that but that seems to be his intention uh for the for the time being and i think it's welcome um not just for people in the uk but for people in other parts of the world who have had enough of kind of populist gyrations you know you make it sound so simple um i know that's not your belief it It's not simple. Not simple.

It is a tough position to be in. And meanwhile, they're down whatever it was, 30 points to Labour. That may change as a result of the next couple of days and the last couple of days. But nevertheless, it's going to be a tough slog for Prime Minister Sunak. We'll have to get used to that too. The name changes in Britain. The one thing that doesn't change is the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Jeremy Hunt stays in that position. He's only been in it for a couple of weeks, but Sunak decided it was right and proper to keep him in that position as he was just starting to unveil a new plan, which I think becomes more clear either today or tomorrow. There's also a pretty active conversation in the UK about how Britons will react to having a prime minister who is a person of color. And I think it's a really interesting development. Obviously, I'm just personally kind of hopeful that it isn't a

source of tension in politics in the UK, that people sort of look at him without thinking about his colour. But I think it's fair to say that because he wasn't elected in a popular election and because he's the first person of color to hold that position in the UK, there are people who say this won't help the Conservative Party's re-election chances because there will be people who won't vote for Conservative because it's led by a person of color. I don't know if that's true. I don't know how much that might be able to affect some voters, but it'll be a thing to watch for sure. First person of color, youngest person to hold the job in like 200 years. 200 years, something like that. And a guy who's like very small in stature.

I never realized it until I saw him standing beside somebody else the other day. He's a very, um, you know, not, not that short is a fault. It isn't, uh, but he's short and he's very slight. You know, he can't weigh more than like 140, 150 pounds. Um, but he's a powerhouse. I mean, he, he exercises like crazy. crazy. You know, he runs, he bikes, he does all those things. And he's taking a different attitude towards where to live. He's not necessarily going to live at 10 Downing Street. He may a couple of days a week, but the family had just bought a home after he left Johnson's cabinet, you know, a few months ago. And they quite like that home and the kids go to school nearby and all that. So, I mean, there's some interesting dynamics around the new prime minister.

It's going to be very interesting to watch how that plays out over the next little while. Okay, let's bring it home because there's some interesting stuff going on in our country, and not the least of which is the Emergencies Act Commission, which is looking at what actually happened during the convoy occupation of Ottawa. I'm still, you know, I still have this thing about calling it, which everybody does, calls it the Freedom Convoy. That just like totally buys into whatever the pr is on one side of this issue it was a convoy it occupied downtown ottawa that's the story and trying to understand why the government chose to use special powers uh to break it up and move them out that's what this commission

is all about so one of the headlines this week and there were a number of them out of the hearings, was that Doug Ford, Premier of Ontario, was asked to come to testify at the Commission. He's not going to do that. He wants to exercise his privilege as a politician and as a Premier, which he has a right to do. But the optics of this looked really peculiar. Like, why wouldn't he go? Why wouldn't he testify? Most of this happened in his province, not just Ottawa, but the whole Windsor Bridge stuff and smaller protests in different parts of the country.

He clamped down in Toronto when it looked like they were trying to move in around Queen's Park, the provincial legislature, and closed off the roads before the trucks could get there. So he took some actions, at least in his, you know, right in Toronto. But he's not willing to sit and testify about what happened in Ottawa. And I don't quite get that. Maybe you can explain it to me as to why he's doing that. I mean, the headlines, of course, are what's he got to hide?

Well, is that the only explanation that there's something to hide here? Oh, well, I think it's interesting, Peter. I'm glad we're having a chance to talk about it. I do think that it's quite surprising in a way that the Premier of Ontario would be watching this thing transpire in Ottawa. That includes testimony from the Ontario Provincial Police Force, which reports up through him. There have been hundreds of pages of testimony delivered by the OPP. And obviously, the role of the province through the policing was part of what, in the end, the federal government used to decide that it did need

the Emergency Powers Act. And there's another story today that suggests that OPP itself had intelligence that suggested that there were foreign forces that were involved in fomenting some of what went on with this convoy, with the occupation. We should point out that they do claim to have had that intelligence in the papers and documents that were submitted. But there's no evidence of what that was, where it came from, and how reliable it was. Right. So I think if you're looking at that part of the story and you're the federal government, you're again kind of saying,

well, look, there are various pieces of testimony that are coming forward that are saying that there was a bit uncertain information, there was a bit of chaos, there was not as much coordination among the police services that could have been involved in stopping the convoy before it became a more serious occupation. The OPP and the Ottawa Police Force in particular thought that the occupiers would be there for a weekend and then they would leave. And obviously, we know that that isn't what happened. But back to your question, Peter, of why Ford wouldn't participate. First thing that occurs to me is that he has said publicly that he fully supported Prime Minister Trudeau's decision to use the Emergencies Act. He didn't provide a lot of substantiation for why he felt

that way. And people are entitled, I think, to be curious about that. And one way for him to satisfy that curiosity would be for him to participate as a witness in the hearing. But for him to take that position and to go to a hearing in Ottawa and to explain that position would obviously put him somewhat at odds with Pierre Poliev, the federal conservative leader, and with other conservatives in other parts of the country like Danielle Smith and probably Scott Moe. And it would have some conservatives look at Doug Ford and say, why are you aligning yourself with Justin Trudeau and the liberals? Because as we know, that became quite a tendentious issue. The way in which the federal government dealt with the occupation, for some people was an act of

tyranny, was part of what they hate about Justin Trudeau and his government. Whereas for the majority of people, it was more a question of this situation got out of control in terms of what the police were able to do and government needed to do something to break the situation and to put law and order back on a path. Last thing I'll say, Peter, I don't know what you think, but I feel like the media need to continue to do what they're doing to press on this issue. I don't think it's right for the premier to be able to hide behind statements like Paul Calandra, remember him, famous from his days in Ottawa as parliamentary secretary, stood up and said some of the most outrageous and obfuscating things in parliament.

Him saying, you know, the premier's too busy to go to question period. And also the province considers the commission to be a commission about policing, not politics. That is ludicrous, in my view. Policing is a question within the commission conversation, but the commission conversation is about the politics that went into the choice, that public policy choice made by politicians. So I don't think that Ford should be able to get away with not showing up. And I think it's going to be to some degree on the media to keep the pressure up on that point. Okay. Two points there. One is the media issue. And we discussed this just a couple of weeks ago on that issue of the hidden labeling of Pierre Polyev's YouTube channel,

and whether or not the media or the politicians were going to pursue that enough to find out who was actually responsible for that and why did it happen in the first place, that seems to have been dropped. Like just, poof, it's gone. Now, that doesn't mean there aren't media organizations still working trying to get to the bottom of that i don't know but it has been a couple of weeks and for the most part i haven't heard anything more about it there have been a couple of dribs and drabs here and

there but nothing of any serious nature this is kind of the same thing there will be a responsibility on the part of the media and you know you know, I watched that for all the knocks they take, that Queen's Park press gallery, at least some of them, are pretty aggressive in trying to go after Ford. But he is, it's like trying to nail, what's that expression, you know, whatever against a wall.

Nail Jell-O to a wall. Nail Jell-O to a wall. Nail Jell-O to a wall. It's awfully hard. Half the time he's not around, like they don't see him. And when they do see him, he's kind of protected from a distance from the media. But when they get at him, they challenge him and they question him.

And Ford, in his own special special way he's pretty good at it after years of dealing on city council and and other things um he he ducks it and moves on or he gives some kind of folksy answer and and out he goes but they got to keep trying they got to keep trying they got to turn out they got it it's not so much a question of turning up the heat on them, but really shining a light on what happens when certain norms in our public life are broken and are broken because it's politically convenient for the breaker and where the public may not be paying enough attention to really see the fact that something got broken. Some notion of the way in which we govern ourselves and approach our public discourse has changed. And the more, and this isn't a question just about conservatives, to be clear.

People in government of any political stripe are capable of observing a situation like this. And if Ford gets away with saying, I'm not going to go and talk about this, it sets a precedent, in my view, that other politicians of any stripe might decide is a precedent that they can use, which is that they don't have to go and contribute to a question of accountability. And this isn't even Doug Ford's accountability for he didn't make the decision to invoke the Emergencies Act. But we shouldn't let these precedents be set, in my opinion, as citizens without recognizing that this could come back to haunt us. And it's better if we kind of hold the line on some of these kinds of choices that politicians might make because it might feel convenient or politically expedient for them. Okay. I have one other question on this before we move on. First of all,

I should mention that his lawyers, Doug Ford's lawyers, the province's lawyers are saying that irreparable harm could be caused if, um, if Ford is forced to testify. Now they don't explain what that irreparable harm is, and you're left to try and guess what it could be. I suppose it could be any number of things. It could be harm to the process. It could be harm to the findings.

It could be harm to Ford. It could be harm to Trudeau. It could be any number of things, right? Well, actually, I think that what they're saying, Peter, correct me if I'm wrong, is that the irreparable harm would be establishing a precedent where a commission could compel a parliamentarian to appear. Right, the process. This notion of parliamentary privileges, they interpret it, or choosing to interpret it now, means that you don't have to, if you're compelled to appear, you don't have to. Now, that felt to me like a lawyer's argument,

which is not to say it's an inappropriate argument, but it's not a politically salient argument in my view. The notion that some horrible precedent would be set by having the premier go and answer some questions about this doesn't wash, I don't think, for most people. It shouldn't anyway. Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you. No, no, no.

I'm glad you did because it puts the point on that. It's just when you just see the headline, irreparable harm, you can think any number of things. Process is one of them. Yeah. And, you know, anyway, we'll see how the decisions are made on that here's my question to you as somebody who's been in this position uh before as an advisor what have you to various different politicians in a situation like this where you're basically trying to duck the process and you're assuming that

you're going to be challenged on this, but for how long as an advisor, what do you say to the, to the person in this case, the premier, what do you say about your positioning on this where, you know, we don't think you should do it. And here's how the next days or weeks are going to unfold. You know, I think it really comes down to a question of how long will it take before the news cycle moves on to other things. And so you'll take the heat for a number of days, maybe even a number of weeks. But eventually, people will move on

to something else. Second part of that is public opinion. How much will public opinion be engaged on this when people are worried about, you know, COVID or inflation or, you know, a variety of other issues in their everyday lives. Will people dial in on this? Or will they say, well, this is just politics, and we're not really that interested? We know that there are people who are following the commission hearings in Ottawa fairly closely, but it's not everybody. It's a minority of people who are doing that. And most of those people, their opinions and their political choices are already mostly settled. So that would be if you wanted to advise a politician to do the cynical thing, in my view, the cynical thing and not show up for that hearing.

That's what you talk about. How much damage will you take? Because the media will pound you for a while and your political opponents will criticize you. Pardon me. But how much for how long will that go on? And, you know, and the prevailing evidence over the years has been that fewer people are paying much attention to politics and the news media do feel an obligation at some point to move on to other stories and so it's not the choice i would recommend but that's probably the conversation that would happen well speaking of moving on to other stories we're going to do that now uh we're going to take a quick break and when we come back we're going to talk about a couple of things that um jagmeet singh had to say in the last couple of days and the impact they have on the landscape right now.

So we'll be back right after this. And welcome back. You're listening to The Bridge, the Wednesday edition, Smoke, Mirrors and the Truth with Bruce Anderson. Bruce is here. I'm Peter Mansbridge. You're listening on Sirius XM, channel 167. Canada Talks are on your favorite podcast platform.

All right. Chuck Mead saying the leader of the NDP has said a couple of things this week that I think encourage us to take a little further discussion on both of them. First of all, as it relates to what we were just talking about in terms of the Emergencies Act, what Singh said in an interview on CTV the other day was that if at the end of this commission process, the commission decides the government screwed up, Ottawa screwed up, the prime minister screwed up, he should never have brought in the Emergencies Act.

If that's the decision on the part of the commission, what would Singh do? Would he withdraw his support for the Liberal government? And Singh says, says no not necessarily that's not the reason we entered this agreement um if they made a mistake in the way they handled that story that should be taken into account by the uh the people of canada but it's not a reason for us to withdraw our support what'd you make of that? Well, you know, I think that Jagmeet Singh and the NDP were aligned with the government on the decision about the Emergencies Act.

And so, in a sense, I think he's basically saying we were part of that judgment. If the judgment in the minds of those running the commission was the wrong judgment then um for us to decide that we should break from the government over a decision that we supported at the time um that would seem hypocritical so i think to some degree i look at it and say well he's just basically saying that we made the decision, we made the same conclusion, we came to the same conclusion that the government came to at that time. And the commission may decide that that was wrong decision, but it wouldn't really necessarily make sense for us to say, well, what we felt then was wrong. But we're going to pretend that we

didn't feel it then. And we're just going to take it out somehow on the government. So I think that makes sense. I also think that it's a, you know, it's a reminder that for most people, the occupation and the conversation about the Emergencies Act is in the rear view mirror, they've got a lot of things that they're more worried about today than this. And so the notion that you would precipitate an election or allow one to happen because of the finding of the commission about the use of an act months ago that was for a short period of time in which most people supported at the time and still, I think that would make, you know, kind of nonsensical politics for them. You know, their voters and the voters that they want to win from the liberals in particular don't want an election about the use of the Emergencies Act last winter.

If they want an election, they're going to want it to be about other things. And so it made sense for me that Mr. Singh took that position. Well, that wasn't the only thing he talked about in the last couple of days. He also talked about, and this shifts off now, the Emergency Act. And it focuses on the Bank of Canada. Now, the Bank of Canada usually goes about its work. There's not much talk about it. It has, you know, for the last whatever number of years,

it's been an institution, a national institution that's done its thing. It monitors interest rates. It impacts interest rates. It monitors inflation. It monitors the economic situation across the country on any number of different levels. However, when things get dicey, as they have in the last couple of years, focus starts to draw attention to the Bank of Canada

and how fast or how slow it acts on primarily moving their interest rate, the prime rate up and down down to react to economic conditions and specifically to inflation now the conservatives have been after pierre paliev especially has been after the bank of canada saying he'd fire the governor he changed this he changed that and he would want them to follow the directions more specifically of the government the bank of canada is supposed to act independently from the government. Now, Jagmeet Singh kind of jumped on the let's trash the Bank of Canada a little bit bandwagon in the last couple of days by saying he was not impressed

with the way the bank has been handling the situation as it relates to interest rates, that it's more focused on inflation than it is on job creation, and that that is wrong. So talk to me about the tact that Singh is taking on the Bank of Canada. Yeah, I thought it was interesting intervention by the NDP leader. I thought it was probably a function of him looking for yet another way to kind of raise the issue of the impact that rising interest rates and inflation are having on everyday Canadians and the cost of living and particularly probably the cost of food. And I don't think that it's a choice that holds up all that well. And I think it's a choice that's a little bit dangerous in terms of the kind of the broader way in which we do politics in the country. And it's not only happening here, but there are similar conversations in other countries about central bank and policies and that sort of thing. I think that the idea of an independent bank is a really important idea.

It may not make obvious sense to a lot of people to have a separate institution that's immune from political pressure trying to deal with these issues. But over the long term, what we've seen is that if you destabilize those institutions, if they look as though they are creatures of politics or overly influenced by politics on a day-in, day-out basis, some bad things can happen to confidence in a country, in its currency, in its future trading relationships. And so that's why this notion of independence is important. Second thing is, of course, Tiff Macklin, the governor of the Bank of Canada, has said over and over and over again that the thing that he believes that he has to do to help Canadians the most that he can do is to fight inflation.

And the tool that he has available to fight inflation is interest rates. And I think Mr. Singh also knows that inflation is the thing that is causing the most hardship to people in Canada. And he also knows that hiking interest rates is literally the only significant thing that the Bank of Canada can do. So I found it a little bit more like political posturing than problem solving by the NDP leader. And I think it was a bit unfortunate that he decided to jump on the bandwagon of let's criticize the Bank of Canada, let's make it a kind of an object of contemporary politics, because I actually thought that what Minister Freeland, Chrystia Freeland said the other day was important.

She was talking really about institutions around the world and what happens if we kind of undermine their independence and the confidence that people and the rest of the world can have about them. I don't think it was meant to be a defense of the Bank of Canada. I think it was meant to be a defense of the parameters, basically, around how we do politics, regardless of party. When you do your research data on what Canadians are thinking about various things, does the Bank of Canada ever pop up in their answers? How do I answer that?

I think the issue that I see that causes me the most concern in our research is that people are less and less well-informed about how our institutions work and what public policy is or isn't in place to do. And there are also pockets of the population that are more and more misinformed or disinformed. And so it wouldn't surprise me if we were doing some polling on economic positions taken by politicians right now, if we were going to see the Bank of Canada pop up. Pierre-Paul Lievre in particular has been so critical of the Bank of Canada for a good number of months now that I would expect that it will pop up in the responses of some conservative-oriented voters. I don't think we've measured that in the last little while. But I think the broader issue is this.

A lot of people don't pay enough attention to the details of our politics and our public policy and our structure. So they don't really know what the role of the Bank of Canada could be or should be. And then there are other people who are subjected to misinformation or disinformation who end up with somewhat convoluted ideas about what these institutions are intended to do. Last topic for today. We've discussed this at different times over the last couple of years, but the issue is engagement by the public at an election time. Now, in many parts of the country, this has been municipal election time, and voters across the country have been heading to the polls.

Ontario was just earlier this week. And, you know, I've always found that municipal, having covered these stories at all levels, from back in my Churchill days covering local politics, municipal politics, and then provincial politics when I was in Winnipeg and in Regina, and then federal politics when I was in Ottawa. are most directly impacting the voter are the ones at the municipal level or at the local level, you know, whether it's about your roads, your sewer, your water, your schools, what have you. Those things really impact people. And yet, historically, when it gets around to voting, it's kind of the lowest turnout.

And in Ontario this week, it was, I don't know whether they were record low turnouts, but they were pretty low. A lot of communities, you know, 25%, 30%. You know, if you got over 40%, it looked like, wow, that's quite an accomplishment, given there were so many down in the 20s. What's the problem here? You know, because people do complain and whine about, you know, and often for good reason, about services they're getting at the local level

and property taxes, you name it. And so two things happen here. Turnout's low, and in a third of the communities, there wasn't even a race for mayor. You know, there was only one person there, so it was acclimation. So which would have taken, obviously, some of the glow off heading off. But there are council members, school boards, there's all the other stuff that's important to the way your community runs. So what's your take on this? It's a whole stew of different problems, Peter, I think, and I'm glad you're raising it.

I think it's more like 43 or 40 or something like that. Well, that's, you know, to me, that's part of the problem. We should be looking for much higher turnout rates and we should be trying different public policy measures, including possibly small fines for people who don't vote. I think that we have to challenge ourselves to figure out how to get significantly higher turnout rates in our democratic races. And there are reasons why politicians don't always favor that. Most of those reasons are cynical in nature. But it's a problem. The second thing, though, that I think happens, and you and I have observed this over the long haul, is that being in politics always came with a lot of criticism. You were always subject to the slings and arrows if you were in public life. But I think the question we have to ask ourselves is that even worse now than

it ever has been because of the role of social media, that sort of thing. And I think it is worse. I think that for a lot of people, the idea of putting your name forward, entering the public arena comes with a great fear that you're immediately going to be exposed to a level of public attack and criticism that's personal, that could be threatening, and that isn't worth, it just isn't worthwhile for a lot of people to do it. And the last thing that I'm anxious about now in this respect, particularly around local politics, is that the erosion of local news organizations, financial erosion, human resources, all of that means that there isn't as much coverage as there used to be by a considerable amount. And as I was kind of online the other night looking for results to the municipal election in Ottawa, where I live, realizing that there wasn't the kind of live coverage of a pretty significant municipal election, something that captured a fair bit of attention.

There was only some online posting. It made me realize we've fallen far from the level of coverage of our politics at the local level in particular, but you probably say the same thing at the provincial and the federal level, and that also is going to depress turnout over time. So, I think we've got work to do. I hope that there are some politicians who decide that this is something they want to help turn around. Can you make voting easier? I mean, it seems to me they've tried all kinds of things. There are more advanced polling days that are available. They spread them out to kind of take away the argument that, you know, I can't get off my work, even though I'm allowed to take time off work to vote. But, you know, I can't because

I feel that I have to be there on that particular day. So, you know, their advanced polling, their shift hours. Advanced polling has really helped. I mean, without advanced polling, imagine where we would be right now is the question for me. So yes, I think it can be made easier. The big question that kind of hangs over all of this is what about online polling? And of course, I felt like we were societally in democracies, maybe kind of inching towards that idea being embraced. But I think that the conversation in the US about whether their last presidential election was fraudulent, was rigged, was stolen, has probably slowed momentum towards that. Because the challenge with online polling probably isn't

technical or technological. it's probably will people believe that they can have as much confidence in a uh in a digital election if you like as they would want to have in a paper and pencil oriented election and i think that it is one of those things that's a little bit like confidence in self-driving cars. We're not there yet. And probably the conversation about U.S. politics in the last presidential means that the distance between now and when that technology might be embraced is further than it was rather than getting closer. Well, here's the last one for you in spite of how important local politics is to all of us because for all the reasons we've already listed is part of the problem that it somehow local politics just isn't sexy enough i mean i hate to i hate to put it in those terms but there's

something about the big elections you know when it's the Trudeau versus Poliev or Ford versus whoever the other guys put up in Ontario, and it's about to be Smith versus the NDP in Alberta in the springtime. And there's something more sort of engaging, more sexy about those kind of races. And yet municipal politics rarely seems to have that. I mean, it kind of had it with Rob Ford in Toronto, but it rarely has that kind of edge to it. That's an interesting question. I think that what municipal politics often lacks is that sense of the entertainment value. What you're talking about is sexiness. I think of as what are the entertainment values

like? If people are distracted by all of the other forms of entertainment out there, is municipal politics going to compete well with that? But on the other hand, how often your garbage gets picked up, whether the bike lanes are safe for you or your kids to use. The idea that, you know, one mayoral candidate in Ottawa offered up, which is free public transit for kids under 18. Those are real meat and potato issues that affect the way that people live in the communities in which they live. And so, well, the entertainment values might not always be what they appear to be at the national or the international level. The meaningfulness of a lot of these choices made

at the local level should logically act as a buttress for participation, but they don't. And I think one of the reasons why is this is the kind of general slow breakdown of local news organizations under the financial pressures that we know that many news organizations have been under, but without durable and promising solutions yet found to deal with that. I know that some things are being tried to stimulate local news coverage. The federal government in particular has put some programs in place to help try to fill some of those gaps that are widening. Remains to be seen whether that will work. I like to think that eventually a market will develop where people

say, I need to know more about what's going on where I live. And so will somebody provide that to me? And there will be a buyer and a seller relationship again. But that's been eroding for a good long while and to our peril, I think, to some degree in terms of understanding and influencing the local choices that are made on our behalf. Well, as one local mayor said to me not too long ago, the local newspaper is not covering the things that are facing the city and the discussions that are taking place in council. And as a result, when we have a council meeting, there's nobody there from the public because they're not aware of it because they haven't read about it,

and so they don't challenge us. And for some days, you're kind of happy for that. You can breeze through a council meeting, get it over with, but it's not the way it should work, and it's not the way we should be accountable to the public. And it all traces back, as a number of things have done on this discussion today, to the role of the media and the responsibility of the media in covering, you know, public policy issues to an extent that perhaps they haven't been doing a good enough job on for a number

of different reasons. One, because they just haven't been covering the stories. And two, as you point out, because of the economy of journalism right now and the difficulties some organizations are having just holding and hiring staff. Okay, we're going to leave it at that for this day. Another interesting Smoke Mirrors and the Truth with Bruce Anderson. Tomorrow, it's your turn and the random ranter. The ranter may take a run at the convoy commission that's going on in Ottawa.

See what he has to say. But, of course, your turn is mainly your letters, your thoughts. If you have any, get them in, like now, at the Mansbridge podcast at gmail.com, the Mansbridge podcast at gmail.com. The question of the week has been, if you had an opportunity to do one thing to the CBC, what would that one thing be? I have quite a few responses to that question, interesting ones.

All right, Bruce, thanks very much. We'll talk to Bruce again, obviously, on Friday for Good Talk when Chantel drops by as well. That's it for now. I'm Peter Mansbridge. Thanks so much for listening. We'll talk to you again in 24 hours.