The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - The 48 Hours That Might Make Peter MacKay Leader Of The Conservatives.

Episode Date: January 24, 2020

What really happened to lead three of the top five leadership contenders for the CPC to drop out of the race, leaving Peter MacKay as the most likely winner at this point. It's intriguing and no one seems to know exactly what happened -- all in 48 hours, Plus a "bridge" first -- a movie review. 1917 - I loved it, will you?

Well, hello there. I'm Peter Mansbridge. This is The Bridge, and let me start with a couple of explanations. First of all, if this sounds a little different than usual, it's because I'm using my little portable podcast kit. I'm on the road, so it's not the clean quality studio sound that we usually get. But it's close. It's not that bad. The other thing I really feel guilty about, I'm not in the great white north this week. I'm in fact in the great sunny south. Felt it was time for a little golf. And I'm still trying to find that time for a little golf because what I've been playing does not look at all equivalent to the word golf.

I'm kind of hacking it around this week. But nevertheless, it's fun. It was 23 degrees today. I was wearing shorts. It was quite warm. I had too many layers on. Nevertheless, I'm sure you've heard enough about that. I hope you're enjoying your winter.

And all the best to my good friends in Newfoundland. I've been reading their tweets for the last week, ever since the storm hit. Mark Critch and Melissa Royal Critch, their stories. Mark's ode to Newfoundland the other night. Saw it. Great. So listen, more power to Newfoundland and to all those parts of the country

that have had difficulties with winter in the last week. I don't feel guilty anymore, okay? A little bit. I've been following developments all week with the Conservative Party leadership, and what a story that has turned out to be. Because let's look at it this way. When this week started, go back to Monday, you had kind of the big five in the race, or expected to be in the race. You had Peter McKay, that's no particular order. You had Peter McKay, Aaron O'Toole, Ronna Ambrose, Jean Charest, Pierre Polyev.

There were others as well, but kind of lesser lights within the Conservative Party. Those were kind of the big five. That was Monday. Tuesday comes along. Wednesday, Thursday. Here we are at the time of recording this podcast, Friday. There was a period in there of about 48 hours where three of the big five disappeared.

Ronna Ambrose announced she wasn't going to run. Now, if you've been listening to this podcast for the last month, I kind of suggested at least a month ago that I didn't think her heart was in it because I'd seen where her heart was the night she gave up the interim leadership and handed it over to Andrew Scheer, that she was so relieved to being allowed to spend her life away from politics. And when I saw her that night parking lot and we talked and she, it was clear. She was excited to leave that part of her life behind her. So it doesn't surprise me that in the end, after a number of people, you know, tried to pressure her into running for the leadership, and every indication that if she had run, she would have been, if not the winner,

very close to being the winner. But she said no, and she's staying outside of active politics. So that didn't surprise me. What happened to Jean Charest and Pierre Poliev did surprise me, because I think both of them were in it to win it, and both of them had a shot at possibly winning it. Charest had been working on it for a couple of weeks,

even to the point I think I saw today a videotape of what his kind of announcement was going to be. Same with Polyev. Many people were saying he may be the guy. He may be the winner. A lot of support is a guy who can kind of actively take on the liberals. But Charest drops out, and then hours later, Polyev drops out. What happened?

Okay, I don't have, for starters, I don't have any inside knowledge, but I've got to tell you, I'm a believer that there's more to that story in both those cases than we're being led to believe. It just doesn't seem right. Something doesn't seem right about that story. I mean, why would people get to the point of serious consideration of the job? And I mean serious consideration. Lining up supporters, lining up money, lining up everything. Why would they get that far and say, you know what, I'm not going to do it. Suddenly. Well, let's think about that for a minute. There's probably, you know, I think we can sort of narrow it down to three possibilities. You decide, you know what, it's just not for me and where I am in my life right now.

I've thought about it, but it's not for me. And I think Ronna Ambrose falls into that category. So as I said earlier, I kind of put that one aside. And the second possibility could be, you know, because of this party, remember, the Conservative Party of Canada was a union of the old PC Party and the kind of reformed Canadian Alliance. So you package all of that together. Those aren't natural allies. That's why they fought against each other all the way through the 1990s. There are a lot of different opinions about issues that confront Canada and Canadians within that group. You know, and certainly on the social conservative side.

You've got issues surrounding LGBTQ, around abortion. You saw them play out through the last campaign and through the last few weeks and days. There are strong differences there. And one may come to the conclusion that, you know what, I can't deal with this. It's a fragmented party. And it's not one that I can see myself bringing some kind of cohesion to, some kind of unity to. So that's possible.

That's possible. And then the third possible reason is more of a kind of wild card, and that's the, you know, for the lack of a better term, is kind of the brown envelope issue. or you're concerned that something might come up about your background. I mean, let's face it, we live at a time where getting into politics or getting into a senior position in any area can sometimes be governed by your behavior in the past. And what some people may have found, if not acceptable, at least something that was kind of

almost swept under the rug in the past, no more. So other issues kind of come up, and I think you can imagine what some of them may be. And so there's this wild card, this sort of brown envelope. Somebody reminds you of something about your past that could be severely embarrassing to you, to your party, to your friends, to your family, to whatever. And you say, you know what? I'm not going to go through that.

So there's some possible reasons, and once again, I don't know. I don't know what the answer is. But I do know that it's extremely unusual within that short period of time, at a time when the parties seem to be on the march to a big convention and big names, that in a matter of about 48 hours, you lose three of them. And Ambrose, Charest, and Polyev, gone, vanished.

So what's left? Well, you know, the first thing you heard last night about in the what's left category is, hey, maybe Stephen Harper should be running again. And I think that all came out of, you know, rumors were rampant for a few hours last night, Thursday night. Kind of started with an article that Don Braid, the great veteran columnist in Alberta, wrote,

not suggesting anything other than people are talking about Stephen Harper. And then it kind of spread like wildfire around the country. Even to the point where last night, just for the heck of it, I threw in a... I threw a poll in my Twitter. You know how you can make a poll on your tweets? I put one in about, who would you prefer as prime minister? Stephen Harper, Justin Trudeau? And, you know, the last time I looked at it, there were... Well, here, let me check it and see.

There were an awful lot of people that voted. I'm looking for it. Here we go. Harper versus Trudeau. 6,300 votes as I'm looking at it now. 57-43 for Trudeau. That's an awful lot of votes. I was stunned at how many people actually voted on this. Now, I wouldn't go to the bank on these numbers. It just happens to be those who, you know, out of my 300 or so thousand

followers, people who actually saw this and chose to vote on it. It doesn't mean anything more than that. But there were a lot of people who found that interesting. But I did two. I did another one that actually got almost twice as many votes, and that was by the guy who now seems to be, by the way, Harper, people have put out the word that he's absolutely not running, so drop his name. But the person who seems clearly in the lead here right now is Peter McKay.

He's kind of all alone in the big, big names. It's early yet. The convention's not for months yet, but at the moment, Peter McKay is in there. When the poll was put to my followers on that, Trudeau versus McKay, 12,000 votes in so far, 63-37. 63 for Trudeau, 37 for McKay, for whatever that means. It means, you know, in those two polls, you've got almost 20,000 people voting. So either they're really bored, trying to find something to do on Twitter at night, getting tired of watching the impeachment trial in the U.S. Anyway, they were game for that one. And that's interesting. so where do things stand now

well you got mckay you got aaron o'toole that's it you got those two as the big names out of the big five mckay and o'toole and mckay would be have to be seen by most people as the favorite at this point of those two. There are other candidates in the race. As we said, they're kind of minor at the moment. Could become major over a period of months, but at the moment they're minor players. So what you don't see in McKay and O'Toole at the front end of the big names is you don't see any women.

It's hard to believe there won't be women by the end of this, but let's see. The women being talked about right now include the former Premier of B.C., Christy Clark, and the Alberta MP, Michelle Rempel. Interesting when you look at who dropped out. Ambrose from Alberta, Charest from Quebec, Pelliev from Ontario. So there's no Alberta candidate in there right now. Up at the top end. You've got McKay from Nova Scotia, you've got O'Toole from Ontario.

Interesting. Christy Clark O'Toole from Ontario. Interesting. Christy Clark would, of course, be from B.C., and Michelle Rempel would be from Alberta. So there you have it. This is going to be, well, at the moment, on this day, at the end of this week, it seems like a lot less interesting race than it was on Monday. Let's see where it is a week from now, two weeks from now, a month from now, two months from now. Things can change, as we've witnessed this week. But a lot of questions questions unanswered as to what's actually been happening.

Right? So keep all of that in mind. Now, I'm going to take a quick break, and then I'm going to come back this week. Once again, I'm going to delay mailbag until next week. But what I am going to delay mail back till next week but what I am going to talk about I can give you a quick movie review how's that for something different back right after this

and hello again. Peter Ransbridge with The Bridge. And as I said seconds ago, I'm going to try something different this week. And it's because I saw a movie the other day that I really wanted to see. I'd seen it advertised. I'd seen that it was winning a few awards.

I wanted to to see. I'd seen it advertised. I'd seen that it was winning a few awards. I wanted to go see it. So I went by myself down the street in Toronto. Won kind of a lunch hour screening, which was different for me. I'd never seen a movie in a theater at lunch hour. Not a lot of people seeing movies at lunch hour, but you have no problem finding a good seat, that's for sure. Anyway, so there we go.

Sitting in my seat, being through all the trailers, and what happens, what unfolds on the screen at the beginning of this film is a date. It says April 6th, 1917. And that of course is the movie, 1917. But what I found fascinating about the date is April 6th was just three

days before the start of the Battle of Vimy Ridge, arguably one of the most important battles in Canadian military history. Now, this movie has nothing to do with Vimy Ridge. But it's interesting that it does happen to be just days before Vimy. Now, 1917 is a fictional movie. Sam Mendes is the director. And it's basically from a story that his grandfather, I think it was his grandfather or his uncle, I think it was his grandfather or his uncle, I think it was his grandfather, used to tell when they were kids. His grandfather had fought in the First World War.

And he had a lot of stories. And some of them were even true. This one was a stretch. There was a great story. And the kids used to sit around and listen to it, and he'd tell it to them every once in a while. And without being a spoiler here, and I'm not going to be, the movie is pretty straightforward. It's a journey from A to B, okay? The story and, you know, if you've seen any of the promotions on television,

I can safely tell you what the premise of the story is. It's about the British Army's concern about the safety of one of its regiments that they thought were about to get trapped, sucked in by the Germans, some distance away. And the only way to reach them, because the phone lines that were running across the battle-scarred landscape had been broken.

The only way to reach them was to send runners. So the British general chooses a runner who has a brother in the other regiment and figures, obviously, that'll be an incentive for him to get there because if he doesn't get there, his brother's going to die, and that's what he tells him. So the whole film is about the journey from A, where the general was and recruited these two guys,

to B, where the other brother is. You know, are they going to make it? What do they have to go through? They have to go through a lot. But it's stories for me to be. But the story is almost secondary as to why this is such a fascinating film and why I'm even bothering telling you about it.

Here's why it's fascinating. The hook is basically that the whole film is one shot, one piece of film, uninterrupted in terms of the way it was shot. That's kind of the premise. It's not true, but it's a lot different than every other movie you've ever seen where the shots are, you know, maybe 10 seconds long, 15 seconds long, 30 seconds long in some extraordinary cases. But basically they're bits of film edited together. Not 1917.

That's not the way Sam Mendes does this film. In fact, I'd say the first six or eight minutes of the film is one continuous shot. Now, to the untrained eye, you'll think the whole movie's one shot, but there are places where you can see where an edit could have been made. But basically, the camera follows these two guys who are going from A to B through everything through trenches through battlefields through horrible areas of death and destruction.

The camera's right there. It's behind them at times, beside them at times, in front of them at times. But there are no edits. Not such. It's following them and following their conversations and their encounters all along the way. Now you think, how the heck could they have ever done that? How could they have filmed that?

How could the actors have been able to do that? You know why? The two guys who were picked at point A, and I haven't revealed anything to you, no matter what you might think about the way I've said things, I haven't revealed anything to you in terms of what happens in this movie. But these two guys, these two actors, are theater guys. Young guys, I don't think they have any film credits to their name. They're going to have in the future, you can be sure of that.

But Mendez says he blocked this film out and worked with these actors to basically do huge sections like this, six, eight minutes at a time. And they'd rehearse and rehearse and rehearse just like they do for theater companies. This is not a film where you could turn up, as some actors do, barely having read their lines, because they know they're only going to have to remember

10 or 15 or 20 seconds at a time. No. These guys knew their parts. And you watch this in incredible admiration. Of course, for many people who watch it and not even know the difference. I do partly because I'm kind of in the television business

and have been for most of my life because I'm married to an actor so I've seen what they go through an actor who has both been in film in movies in Academy Award winning movies and on theatre and I know from talking not just to her movies and Academy Award winning movies and on theater.

And I know from talking not just to her but to other actors, there's certainly a lot more money in television and the silver screen than there is on stage. But the kind of action you get on stage, the fact that you're reacting immediately with an audience, you can tell from that audience what they think of it all, is a charge they don't get anywhere else. Anyway, that's the story of 1917. As a film and a story and as a drama, it's really good.

It's very good. It wouldn't be the greatest movie I've ever seen. But in terms of an actual piece of artistic cinema, it's amazing. It is absolutely amazing. So if you get a chance to see it in a theater, good for you. If you have to wait until it's on television, it's well worth the wait.

So I would, I'd highly recommend it. I know it won, I think, a Golden Globe, at least a Golden Globe for Sam Mendes as best director. It might have even won best film. I'm not sure. We'll see how it does in the Oscars in a couple of weeks. So there you go. As I said, next week we'll get back into the mailbag.

Mail doesn't get delivered down here in Florida. Just kidding. Anyway, I wanted to make those remarks about 1917 because I clearly was blown away by it, and I've thought about it a lot since I saw it about 10 days ago. If you want to contact the bridge, don't be shy. TheMansBridgePodcast at gmail.com. TheMansansbridgepodcast at gmail.com, themansbridgepodcast at gmail.com. That's the bridge for this week. Thanks for listening. We'll be back in seven days. Thank you.