The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Stars of the Week

Episode Date: November 22, 2019

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And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here with the latest edition of The Bridge, coming at you on a late Friday night, early Saturday morning. Something for you to think about on the weekend, my latest ramblings. And there's a reason for these ramblings this week, and you'll see what it is in just a minute, but I first have to tell you a little story. When our family arrived in Canada in the 1950s, we were immigrants, British citizens originally,

hoping to become Canadians. So I was just a kid, you know, six, seven years old. I'd been born in England, raised in Malaya, now Malaysia. And then we came to Canada. My parents were looking, well, I guess what you'd say, they were looking for peace. They'd grown up and served during the Second World War. My dad had been the RAF, to me, always a hero. And then we'd lived in Malaya, as I said,

and it was a difficult time in the early 1950s. There was a lot of strife going on in Malaya at that time. So they wanted to bring up their kids at that time. It was my sister and I. In a nation that was calm, at peace, and growing, and exciting. And so we came to Canada. My dad went into the public service. Started off at a relatively low level and worked his way up over time. He was an assistant deputy minister in Ottawa

when he left to go to Edmonton as chief deputy minister of health and social development for Peter Lawheed. So he had a very successful career in the public service. He was never keen on me becoming a journalist, but he took the time to take me aside more than a few times, first as a kid, and then as I was growing up and started my career in journalism, and he wanted me to always understand the importance of A, public service,, B, those who were public servants, those who committed to serve their country,

whether it was the federal bureaucracy, the provincial bureaucracy, for working for a city, you name it. That these were the people that helped make our life better. That they were dedicated, and they were nonpartisan. And while there were times when people would criticize them and criticize the occupation of public servants, public service, saying it was a waste of money and we spent far too much on public servants and there are too many of them and there should be less government. Those debates aside, my father used to say,

you have to look at the people who are there. And that he was proud to the last day he lived of his time in the public service and felt that Canada, at its different levels of government, had one of the best public services in the world, and that other countries came to Canada to see how our public service did its job. They learned from us. They were proud of us, sometimes more proud of us than Canadians were themselves of their public service.

So why this week? Why am I going on about this? Well, last week, you may recall, I spent the week traveling. Different speeches in different parts of the country. This week, I barely got off the couch. I was watching the impeachment hearings all week. Now take aside, you know, just move aside your own personal feelings about what's right or wrong, whether Trump's guilty, not guilty, whether he should be impeached, not impeached, whatever. Move all that aside.

And just look at the witnesses this week. They were almost all public servants. And I'll tell you, I thought they were amazing. Because they were, they struck those chords that my father talked about, dedicated, nonpartisan, were there for the good of the country. And you watched that ooze out of their testimony all through the week. And it was hard because they were being edged one way by the Democrats, edged another way by the Republicans, and yet they stood their ground.

And there are any number of examples. I'm not going to go through them because you could have picked on any of them. They were quite remarkable people. And I'm talking about the real public servants, those who dedicated their lives to public service. Not those who sort of bought their way into an ambassador's job through political connections. And hey, listen, in the States, all parties do that.

So I'm not talking about any one party. But what I'm mainly talking about are those who have spent their lives in public service. And you saw them from different levels of the public service this week, from the State Department, from the Foreign Affairs, departments within state, from Office of Management and Budget, from the Defense Department, you saw a lot of dedicated public servants, some of whom had volunteered to come and speak,

others who had been subpoenaed to come and speak, others who had been subpoenaed to come and speak, had resisted the idea of testifying because theirs is not a position or a job that normally sits in front of the cameras. But I'll tell you, none of these people looked uncomfortable, and all of them spoke from the heart and spoke with the facts. They were there on a fact mission. They weren't there to tell people, the Congress people, what to think.

They were there to tell them the facts as they knew them, firsthand. They put them forward. So I thought, well, good for them. Good for them to allow us that sort of window into their world, because we rarely see it. We see the politicians, and we certainly saw them this week, and some of them did not cover themselves in glory,

but the public servants did. And I was impressed with that. It reminds me of another story about public service. And this goes back actually 40 years from right now. It was back in the fall of 1979. Michael Pitfield was his name. Michael Pitfield was a senior public servant in Ottawa. He rose to the level of clerk of the Privy Council under Pierre Trudeau.

If you look at the picture in the early 1980s of the day the Queen patriated the Constitution or repatriated it, whichever way you want to describe it, that was back in April of 1982. I remember that day very clearly. It was not a great weather day, and Barbara Frum and I were hosting the program. As the Queen, up on a kind of podium stage area

on Parliament Hill, outdoors, everybody dressed up in a coat, stay warm, where she signed the Constitution. And you can see that picture, it's a famous picture, of that moment of the signature. And beside her,

Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. And immediately behind the Queen is Michael Pitfield. As clerk of the Privy Council, he was there to witness this. So he's forever captured in the history books through that picture because he's not often seen in the stories of that era. But he'd been clerk of the Privy Council for Pierre Trudeau in the 1970s and then again in the 80s when Trudeau came back and won re-election. But in that kind of nine months of 1979,

after Joe Clark had won the election and the Conservatives took power in Ottawa and they brought in and made appointments of their own into the senior public service, including a new clerk of the Privy Council, Michael Pitfield went to Harvard to teach. And so I was doing a story. I was a reporter then on Parliament Hill.

And I was doing a story about the conflicts public servants could have when they were asked to do certain things that they actually didn't agree with or they saw something happening that they felt wasn't right. How do they handle it? What do they do? And I thought, well, I'll go and talk to Michael Pitfield. So I connected with him at Harvard, and he agreed. He hadn't been one that gave interviews very often. But he agreed that if I came down to Cambridge, Massachusetts,

just outside Boston, that we do an interview. So I flew down there with a crew, went to Havad Yad, a beautiful kind of garden area in the midst of all the buildings at Harvard, and we sat there and did an interview. And we talked about this issue of what public servants could do if they were concerned about something that they saw going on in government. And at that time, his advice was, you have two choices. You can fight it internally, fight it hard, but at a certain point, you've got to come to the conclusion,

either I'm just going to do this because it's the instructions of a new government or I can quit. Those were basically the options. And so we did a nice little piece on that. It wasn't timed to anything particular, any particular policy issue. But it was at any time there's a change of government, there's sometimes these concerns about how the senior public service

will react to a change in direction of a new government. So we had that discussion, and he was great about it. We became good friends after that. In fact, through the 80s when he came back and I used to talk to Michael Pitfield quite often about public policy and about programs that were coming up in the government of that day and he was always very good to me, and we had a good relationship. Sadly, Michael Pitfield passed away a couple of years ago, just over two years ago now in 2017.

He had been a senator since the mid-1980s and served his country through a number of ways. Obviously, he was a public servant, but then later as a parliamentarian from the Senate. So I was thinking of Michael Pitfield and what he told me this week about what you can do when you see something that's not right and how you try to fight it. The thing that's changed since then is the whistleblower law. And all of this that's been going on in Washington the last couple of weeks wouldn't be happening if there wasn't a whistleblower law.

Whistleblower, we don't know who it was, and that's the way it's supposed to be. You're not supposed to know. That's why there's all kinds of protection for whistleblowers. And most governments now, not just in the States, but in Canada and at the provincial level, have whistleblower laws. So now there is this other option. You can take your concerns to the designated authority

within your department or within the government and report your concerns about what you've witnessed going on and be protected for having done that. Which makes it so odd that you watch the Republicans, especially, demanding to know who the whistleblower is. And that the whistleblower should be dragged out

and made to testify in front of the impeachment hearings. Anyway, that's not going to happen. But they did make an argument along those lines. So things have changed somewhat. But the bottom line, and the main reason I wanted to tell you all of this, was simply because it was great to see public servants

there this week in the states testifying in an incredibly important hearing. Proud of their jobs, dedicated to their profession, and nonpartisan. We don't see that often. It was nice to witness.

And keep this last thought in mind about these people. You know, when we talk about government, as we often do, we tend to think of it only in political terms. Oh, the liberal government. The conservative government. The NDP government. And we're talking about some provinces.

Well, you know, there's much more to government than the politics, than the political end of it, than the representation in whatever legislative wing there is in the parliament buildings or provincial parliaments. Government is those people. They're public servants. That's who government is. When you talk about the government,

you're talking about the thousands, tens of thousands of people who work in government jobs across this country, who help make the country tick. There's no doubt there are times we're frustrated with them. When people argue they're overpaid or there's too many of them, all of that. And there may be some basis for some of that argument. But the bottom line is the place wouldn't work if it wasn't for them. Their government, too.

Keep that in mind. Okay, we have the return in a fashion of the mailbag. And tonight, this morning, this afternoon, today, depending on when you're listening to this, when you're listening to The Bridge, today's comes up right after this. Okay, so listen, I've had a lot of letters from you guys over the last week, now that we're weekly. And what I've decided to do, because the nature of these letters, they're so different from what we got during the election campaign

where there were pointed questions. These letters are more of a kind of story. Sometimes it's the story of your life. Sometimes it's the story of your travels. Sometimes it's the story of your thoughts on something that I may have spurred you into thinking about or someone else did, but you wanted to share them. So what I'm going to do, I think this may be the best way to do this. We'll try it for a while and see. Maybe it was just this week I got this, you know, a lot of letters

and they're all long and they're all good. You know, there's Alan back from a shift in the oil sands, back home in Calgary. Carlos wrote me an email as he was getting on a plane in Geneva heading to Paris. I guess he really just wanted to rub it into the rest of us, right? Tough life, Carlos is living. Jan in Charlottetown.

Aaron. Aaron's in Canada now, but just spent the last few years in Hong Kong terribly concerned about what's been going on there. And in Hong Kong with the various student demonstrations and the fight for democracy. It's funny how much time we spent on the Tiananmen Square riots of 1989. The China story, it's not like it's not getting coverage, but it's not kind of the same. It doesn't have the same intensity yet.

And Robert wrote from Vermont. It's nice to hear from one of our neighbors to the south. And, you know, in Vermont, that's just like Canada, right? We know. We know you either cheer for the Habs or the Leaf Canada, right? We know. We know you either cheer for the Habs or the Leafs, right? Don't let us down, Robert. You don't go down, you don't cheer for the Bruins, do you? Anyway, Robert wrote as well.

As I said, I could read any one of these letters because they're all good. I don't mean that. They're all good. But that's pick one. And I mean that. They're all good. But that's pick one. And I've done that. And maybe it's because I'm so partial to Canada's north.

So this one comes from Yellowknife. It's from Scott. Scott Young. Now there's a famous name from our journalistic past. Scott Young. Now, there's a famous name from our journalistic past. Scott Young. It's Neil's father, Neil Young's father. Great sports journalist, and more than just sports.

Anyway, let me read his letter. I'm going to read it all, even the parts where he says nice things about me. It's just that it flows better this way. Good morning, Peter. I just finished listening to your podcast last night here in Yellowknife. Just thought I'd drop you a line and tell you that I, like many other Canadians, enjoy your podcast very much. Again, like many Canadians across the country and the three coasts,

I grew up watching the National with my parents before I went to bed on Bell Island, Newfoundland. Sometimes when you fly into St. John's and they take that arc out, the plane takes that arc out to come back in towards the airport, depending on the wind direction, you end up flying almost directly over Bell Island. A lot of famous people from Bell Island. Anyway, that's where he grew up, watching the National.

We would have long, cold winters there and dark, stormy nights, and I have memories of sitting in our kitchen, watching on a black-and-white TV. The wind would be howling through the house, sweeping across Conception Bay. I will admit I've been watching ever since. I'm almost 50. Now I'm watching in front of my wood stove,

here in Yellowknife, with my son, listening to the wind outside and the minus 28 degree temperatures. Yes, it's a dark, chilly night here in the north. Peter, I admire and respect what you have to say and your perspective on things, current events, politics, and point of view on world affairs, and most importantly, your delivery. You were talking about journalism on your last episode and what we think about it.

We've come a long way in society with social media and the like, and sometimes I think we have lost touch with some of the more meaningful things in life. As I said, I'm from Belle Island, Newfoundland. Grew up in St. John's and went to Memorial University there. Later I went on to join the RCMP and moved out to BC for a number of years, then got transferred to the Northwest Territories. We've been up here now for 12 years and we love it. I mention this because I know you have an interest in the North. I wish more Canadians could see more of the North country. It's absolutely stunning up here.

And with my job, I've been all over the North like yourself. Absolutely beautiful. I've now retired from the RCMP and will be moving on to a new career soon. Just in closing, thanks again for providing Canadians with your insight, thoughts, and just plain candid conversations right now with the podcast. I thoroughly enjoy listening to them at night here. Thanks for the reading. Thanks for reading. All the reading. Thanks for reading. All the best.

Well, Scott, I love that letter because I can imagine you by the wood stove in Yellowknife and that contrast to the early days in Bell Island, the black and white TV. I guess you got a lot of practice writing up tickets to write this well in your letters. It's great. I love it. RCMP, you know, they're like so many other professions.

We tend to hear them when there's some kind of controversy surrounding them, which isn't fair, of course, because so many communities across the country depend on the RCMP as they do provincial police forces and other areas. And especially in the Arctic and in the north, postings for the RCMP right across the north, those are challenging for the young constables especially who head up north, the men and women of the RCMP. So we're thinking of them today as well. As I said, there are lots of letters with lots of stories about lots of different things. And I very much appreciate getting them. I read them all.

And I'll be picking at least one a week to tell you a story about trying to give you a word picture as we did with Scott's letter. I'm pretty sure everybody can imagine sitting next to a wood stove on a cold winter's night. We'll all be getting those soon, Scott. You won't be alone. Anyway, that's where we are for this week's edition of The Bridge. Glad you joined us, and, you know, thanks so much for listening. We'll see you again, talk to you again in another week. Thank you.