The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - The End Of Partisanship? - Don't Hold Your Breath, But......

Episode Date: May 14, 2020

Watching a U.S. Congressional committee hearing today on a fired whistleblower got me thinking about consensus and whether we can at least see it during a national crisis. Maybe. And yet another vaccine update.

And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here with the latest episode of The Bridge Daily. I've been thinking a lot today about the issue of something that we've actually talked about a number of times over the last, I don't know, six, eight months. And that is partisanship and how we've kind of developed into this world, especially the political world, of extremes. Whether you're kind of on the left or you're kind of on the right. Polar opposites, right? And how much of the debate on issues has been between those extremes. And it seems there's no middle ground anymore. Whatever happened to the era of consensus?

It just didn't seem to be there. I was thinking about that again today for two reasons. First, I spent more time than I probably should have watching some of the committee hearing in the United States today where they had Dr. Rick Bright on the stand at one of the committees on Capitol Hill. He's the fellow who used to be in charge of the U.S. vaccine program. And he got whizzed.

He got dumped by Trump in the middle of April. Never any specific reason given, but it's pretty clear they didn't like him because he wasn't saying the kind of things that Trump was saying, and he kind of disagreed with Trump at times, especially over the use of certain drugs that he didn't think that Trump was hyping should be used, and he resisted the temptations to go along with the president on that issue, but there were other things as well. Clearly, they didn't get along, and Trump as president has every right to can people,

and he can bright. But the committee wanted to hear him. Remember, the House of Representatives is controlled by the Democrats, so they wanted to hear him. They wanted to talk to him. And, you know, it's one of those, there are lots of arguments these days

about how the way the media is covering various stories and are they spending too much time on accountability sessions about what happened three, four months ago, not enough about what's happening right now where people are dying and what's being done to try and fix the solution now. Nobody doubts that the accountability questions need to be raised.

And trying to find the right forum for that. And the right time for that. People disagree about that. That's fine. Anyway, at the committee hearing today, you got your Democrats and you got your Republicans. And the partisan nature, especially because this is an election year, just really shone through for the whatever it was,

three or four hours that I watched. The Democrats were playing the accountability card. Who did what when? Who told you to do this? Who told you to do that? Who refused to let you do this? Who was pushing you to do that? A lot of questions like that from the Democrat side.

What were the Republicans doing? Well, listen, when you've got a witness who's trashing you, you don't have to go far to see what often the most effective method of dealing with that witness is. You see it in courtrooms. You see it in courtrooms every day. And you see it in congressional hearings and you see it in courtrooms every day. And you see it in congressional hearings,

and you see it in parliamentary hearings. The method is trash the witness. Find anything that you can throw on the table that's going to reduce this person's credibility. Make them look like they have no integrity. So there were lots of, you know, Bright, who'd been whizzed out of his job but still is within the government

in his sort of kind of changing departments. There were Republicans going after him about, where were you right after you got canned from the job you were in? Did you go immediately to a new job? No. He took sick leave because he had hypertension. He had high blood pressure.

And after his sick leave kind of ran out, he went on annual leave, which is on now. So he's taking his vacation time, and he's still negotiating what this new job is he's got. Meanwhile, he's still getting paid. None of these things are unusual, right? None of them are unusual. But his salary is, I think he said 280, 280,000.

And he's still getting paid, he thinks, the same amount. He's unclear as to, because he is unclear, he doesn't know for sure, which area of government is paying him. Anyway, so there was all this time dealt on that issue. There are 85,000 people who died in the last two months in the United States from COVID-19. This guy was in charge of the vaccine program. He has questions he can answer, but what's he talking about? He's talking about his annual vacation time.

Anyway, so, you know, there were a few exceptions on both sides, I'll grant that, both Republican and the Democrat side, where they were asking kind of questions that dealt with today. But for the most part, nobody draped themselves in the colors of responsible questioning. At least I didn't think so. Anyway, so that, you're looking at that as a partisan, very partisan at a time of national crisis, right? Which got me thinking about one of the things we talked to Ralph Goodale about yesterday as we launched our, what I hope will be a number of programs on the big project, the big idea. And one of the things that Ralph Goodale told us and reminded us of was how Saskatchewan,

back after the Great Depression, and having learned the awful lessons of that time. That was a crisis. That some very high profile Saskatchewan political leaders put aside their partisan natures and got together on a big project. That was the Gardner Dam

and the creation of Diefenbaker Lake as a big water project. And who were those people? Well, John Diefenbaker was one, eventually a conservative Prime Minister of Canada. Jimmy Gardner,

Liberal Premier of Saskatchewan, Tommy Douglas, an NDP Premier of Saskatchewan politics. Three very different parties. Men with very different ideas of what was right and what was wrong about what they should do in governing. But on that idea, at a time when the province needed consensus, an agreement, a non-partisan approach, they got it. And they got it with those three men. So, where's all this leading? It's leading to me asking the question, do we see any of that today in our country? Well, actually, you do.

You see it in the things the first ministers of the land are saying about each other in terms of trying to work cooperatively to deal with this huge crisis that's killed thousands in this country already. So it's not unusual to catch a briefing from one of the premiers who will speak in good terms about a fellow premier or a prime minister and the same otherwise.

The prime minister talking about the premiers. Have there been difficulties and differences? Yeah, there have been, and they've spelled them out, but they've done so in a way that's constructive. But for the most part, they talk glowingly about each other and the cooperation that they've had. Now, I was talking to my friend Bruce Anderson today. He was a guest on the podcast a couple of weeks ago,

and I think we probably should have him on again because he's doing a lot of research into the way Canadians feel about how this issue is playing out on a daily basis. And we're able to kind of poach on some of his data that he's got to give us a better understanding, too, of exactly that. But I was talking to him early this morning, texting back and forth, actually. And he was talking about one of the things that he hasn't seen before. And that is in terms of doing, you know, a national understanding of how Canadians

regard their political leaders, how they're cutting across party lines. You see conservatives saying really good things about a liberal. You see liberals saying some really good things about a conservative. You see liberals and conservatives saying a really good thing about an NDP premier. So you have, when you're doing these abacus data, Bruce's firm, is doing this survey is the premier of such and such a province doing a good job on behalf of their people in dealing with the COVID-19 crisis? It's not about who would you vote for.

It's about how they're dealing with this. Okay? And who's at the top of the list? They're all doing well. Given that, they're all doing well. Given that, they're all doing well. But at the top, Doug Ford in Ontario. John Horgan in British Columbia, the NDP premier. So you've got Ford, the conservative, the NDP in BC.

You've got Francois Legault, who's the CAQ, the CAQ premier, who's a former pati québécois. He's doing well. He's got a tough situation in his province. And then federally, you've got Justin Trudeau, who's opened up this huge gap between him and the Conservatives, who are without a leader right now, and their interim leader, who's their former leader,

has taken a lot of strange positions. But nevertheless, he's taken positions. But they're more of, well, let's just say, they're polar opposites to where Trudeau is. But the point I'm making is not about Andrew Scheer. The point I'm making is about, look at that, you've got Trudeau, a liberal, Ford, a conservative, Horgan, an NDP, Legault, a former Patek Québécois.

They're all doing well, and a lot of people are voting for each of them. Or not voting, but suggesting their approval is high on each of them because they admire what they're doing. So in this particular case, partisanship has been moved aside, not only on the part of the leaders themselves,

but apparently, it seems, on the part of the citizenry. We live in a time, or at least we're convinced we live in a time, where the extremes are very evident all the time. You just have to go on Twitter to see it. But not in this stuff. Not when you dig into what appear to be real research. And that's encouraging.

How long that'll last, who knows? How long these various first ministers will last in their positions of major approval from their citizens, how long that will last, who knows? That may change. The longer this goes on, or when the

eventual hearings start in Canada and in provinces about who did what and when, and could this have been handled better, and should it have been handled better. So all that is yet to come. But I find that discussion an interesting one. In times of crisis, people want their leaders to pull together. They want their leaders to tell them the truth, no matter how hard that truth may be. One other thing before we go forward this day,

and that is on this issue of vaccines. And you know I've talked about it more than a few times over the last couple of weeks because there are some reasons to feel pretty good about the potential for finding a vaccine on COVID-19. We found out today from the testimony that was taking place in Washington that there are over a hundred legitimate vaccine projects going on around the world. Over 100.

There's no guarantee that any of those 100 will work. There's no guarantee that perhaps 4, 5, 10 may work, which obviously would be even better. But they're all over the world, and there's every indication that those researchers and scientists involved in all 100 or so are talking to each other, are constantly updating each other

on what's working for them and what isn't. So while there's a race for a vaccine, it's not the kind of race where we've got to beat that university or we've got to beat that country, except perhaps in the minds of, well, at least one person. But anyway, that's encouraging. Now here's one part of it that I found not discouraging, but something we have to keep in mind. Obviously, we want them to find a vaccine

or at least a therapeutic solution that will help us tie that time between now and a vaccine. But here's the thing to keep in mind that I hadn't heard before. And once again, we're going by Dr. Rick Bright and his testimony today. And this is a guy whose vaccines is his thing. He's been involved in vaccine development for years. He worked on Ebola. He worked on SARS. You know, he's been around. He knows what he's talking about or seems to. Anyway, what he said that I found slightly discouraging is obviously the most important thing is find the vaccine

the next most important thing is to produce it in the kind of numbers you're going to need to vaccinate the world you know we had seven billion people here and he was talking mainly from the U.S. perspective, but even on that, you know, for 300 and whatever it is, 330 million people in the United States, he said, if we had the vaccine this fall, we're nowhere near ready to produce those kind of numbers. You've got to have the vials. You've got to have the proper needles. You've got to have this, that, and the other thing. And you're going to need millions and millions and millions of them. And that takes a while.

In fact, one of the time frames he put out there was that, you know, you could have a vaccine this fall, but it could be two years before you were able to be able to give it to everybody. So that was, as I said, that was a little discouraging. Now, he did say that in preparation, they've already put out orders, one of which was just today. This is the U.S. side only. It's a question worthy of being asked to Canadians. Maybe somebody can fire it away at the prime minister tomorrow. But Bright said that about a month ago was the first order for, you know,

the things, the glass vials, the needles, all of that. And the second order went in today. So people are wisely, at least now, thinking ahead. They weren't thinking ahead when they first got wind of COVID-19 in late December. Nobody was ordering N95 masks or gloves or all the things that they've been short of and are still short of and testing kits and this and that and the other. But now they're thinking, we better get ready in case they do come up with a vaccine that's workable.

So that's the point I wanted to make on vaccines. Tomorrow is end of the week, and you know what that means. It's the weekend special time. We're going to focus, not entirely, but to some degree on some of the big idea projects that you've been suggesting. We're going to sprinkle those for the next little while. There's some good ones.

There's some that are very detailed, very detailed. And there are others that lack a lot of detail, but you get the general drift. So we'll be mentioning some of those and some of your kind of regular mail as well. As always, Friday's a big day for the weekend special, and I know that you enjoy it. There's still room for your comments and questions

and thoughts for tomorrow's broadcast, so please drop me a line at themansbridgepodcast at gmail.com. themansbridgepodcast at gmail.com. themansbridgepodcast at gmail.com. I read them all. Don't use them all, but I read them all. So fire away. Well, that's your daily special. The Bridge Daily for this day.

But as I said, we will be back. I'm Peter Mansbridge. Thanks for listening. We'll be back in 24 hours. Thank you.