The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - The End Of Smoking. Really?

Episode Date: December 14, 2021

It's a potpourri day and some pretty interesting "stuff" to talk about.  Starting with the decision from New Zealand to begin a process that will eventually, if it works, end smoking in the country.�� But lost more from electric vehicles to shipping containers to diversity issues.  And of course, a possible hint of encouraging news on the Omicron front.

and hello there peter mansbridge here you are just moments away from the latest episode of the bridge something different today the end of smoking and hello there, welcome to Tuesday. You know, there's a picture in my book, and this is not a promotion for my book, it's actually part of what the lead story in our potpourri for this Tuesday is all about. There's a picture in my book that's, where is it here here it's on page 25 if you have your copy with you it's a picture of me from 1969 in the little area that they gave me to do the news each day where i would compile it i'd write it on my little typewriter there and the funny looking tape recorders and editing machines that are in the in the background but there's something else in the picture

if you look to the extreme right of the picture not halfway, almost halfway up, there's what they used to call in the old days an ashtray. And actually, if you look hard, you can even see a cigarette sitting in the ashtray. I used to be a smoker. I started smoking when I was in the Navy at 18, and I kept smoking. And I was a bad smoker in that I smoked a lot. A couple of packs a day. Now, I'd actually left a lot of cigarettes sitting in ashtrays like in that picture.

But I went through cigarettes. Of course, those were back in the days that cigarettes didn't cost much. But I kept smoking until a number of things happened. One, this kind of world closed in on smokers, and you couldn't smoke in the office. It's hard to imagine those days, even in the 80s. People could smoke in the office. They could smoke pipes.

They could smoke cigars. They could smoke whatever they wanted. But by the early 90s, it had closed in, and the smoking bans took place. So between that and the desire that I had to quit. I tried quitting a few times. It hadn't been very successful, but I tried quitting a few times. But I decided I had to do this for my health, for the health of those around me, and as a signal to my kids,

and eventually to my grandkids, that smoking was not the way to go. So, I quit. Finally, and completely. In 1994. Now, the generally accepted timing on smoking is that immediately, within months, your lungs start to cleanse.

But that it takes years, decades in fact, before they tell you that you can actually say your lungs are in as good shape now as if you'd never smoked. And that figure is usually 20 years. So by 2014, I was feeling pretty good. I'd quit smoking and I had cleansed my body. So here now, all these years later, I feel I don't even think about it anymore it took a long time and i know many of you have quit smoking will say the same thing that there were those rushes at certain points of the day especially after a good meal where you went oh my gosh i'd love a cigarette well that happened to me but that's gone. I never even think about it anymore. In fact, I had to think about it today to actually tell this little story.

So why am I telling the story? Well, as I said, it's a potpourri day. There's lots of interesting stuff to talk about. And the first one I decided comes out of New Zealand. You may have heard of this, but it's worth repeating, even if you have, but for most people, I'm sure they haven't heard about this yet. New Zealand is banning smoking for the next generation.

In a bid to try and outlaw the habit by 2025. We're talking about banning smoking. Not only banning it, making it illegal. So how are they going to do that? Well, first of all, the backdrop for them is smoking, still in spite of everything that's happened in the last couple of years, is the leading cause of preventable death in New Zealand. Causes one in four cancers.

Sorry, I just turned the, I had a little heater on in my little room here. I don't know whether you could hear it buzzing in the background, but I've turned it off. Causes one in four cancers. So what are they going to do? How are they going to do this? It's interesting.

People aged 14, when the law comes into effect, hasn't been passed yet, but it will be in 2022. In other words, in the year that's about to come along. People age 14, when that law comes into effect, will never be able to legally purchase tobacco. And people, it will be illegal for stores or anybody who moves tobacco to sell to those 14-year-olds. They will be charged, both.

So the following year, when those kids are 15, they still can't smoke. It'll still be illegal for them to smoke. And a new cohort of 14-year-olds will be introduced to that. Illegal to smoke. And obviously, the age keeps progressing. With the hope by 2027, 2030, 2035, as all these kids get older, that smoking will eventually be gone from New Zealand.

We'll have to watch that. I'm not sure how that's going to exactly work. Right now, there are 8,000 retailers in New Zealand who can sell cigarettes. That's going to drop to 500 when these new laws come into effect. So they continue to crowd in, A, on smokers, and B, on potential smokers of the future. As I said, we're going to watch that. See how it makes out. I've mentioned a couple of times in the last few weeks

that I'm going to take a couple of weeks off. It's been a long year for all of us, and I'm looking forward to just taking it easy for two weeks. So that'll start next week. But during those couple of weeks, my good friends at SiriusXM, where we've had 1.8 million downloads of The Bridge as a podcast since February 1st when I started with Sirius. My good friends at Sirius are going to take some of the best shows of the last year and

give an encore presentation. So that'll start next week and the following week through the holidays. But about a year ago, well, no, not a year ago, about eight months ago, we did a two part series on the future, basically the future of driving. We talked about in the first one, kind of the end of oil,

if that's the direction we're heading. And the second one was about EVs, electric vehicles. And it was very was about EVs, electric vehicles. And it was very popular. It was a very popular series. Well, there's an interesting little update here. This comes from the online magazine, The Verge. Okay. The U.S. will need more than 100,000 fast-charging ports

for the 22 million electric vehicles expected to traverse American roadways by 2030. I don't know the numbers or the predictions on the Canadian numbers, but it's interesting looking at this because this will give us some idea. Over 50 utilities across the U.S. have come together to speed up the build-out of electric vehicle charging stations along the nation's highways as part of a new National Electric Highway Coalition.

That's been one of the issues, right? There's some beautiful new EVs you know it's not just teslas anymore that almost every auto manufacturer has one um they're still being judged as to their efficiency and how good they are but they look great some of them look spectacular but the issue has been among among others the issue has been, among others, the issue has been, where do you charge these things? Are there enough charging stations to handle a sudden, huge impact of electric vehicles? And not only that, how long are you going to sit at the charging station? Well, for now, according to The Verge, there are roughly 1.8 million electric vehicles registered in the U.S.

And they juice up at just 46,000 public charging stations in the country. Just around 5,600 of those are D.C. fast charging stations that can get an ev battery to 80 charged in under an hour that's that's still a while right especially if you're out on the highway you find a charging station and you sit there for an hour to charge it now there are faster charging stations i I know that. But that's the average in the U.S. at the moment. So this is welcome news to electric vehicle owners and to potential owners, many of whom are sitting on the sidelines waiting to go.

They want to buy an EV, but they're worried about things like battery life, charging stations, and how long a charge will last. How often are they going to have to stop? Here's a related story on electric vehicles. You know, Tesla gets all the great news, right? All the time.

They're a guy. Yesterday. person of the year, Time Magazine, Musk. Well, according to Bloomberg, Tesla is now being scrutinized for allowing video games to be played while its cars are moving. Man, I thought that was like a non-starter. I thought all these cars were able to block any videos from being on that screen in front of your car. But here's what Bloomberg says. The U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said it's reviewing a recent software update by Tesla

that allows drivers to play video games while the vehicle is moving. Which obviously creates a public safety issue. Three new video games have been added to the

in-dash touchscreen in the cars for drivers or passengers to play on going against the agency's recommendations that vehicles be designed so that they cannot be used by the driver to perform a distracting secondary task while driving they call it a recommendation i thought it was a law anyway that's what's happening there on that front now here's some interesting news um you can recall how in the last i don't know to five years, whenever we get around to the big award shows, and they'll start again in January, the Golden Globes and leading up to the,

eventually to the Oscars, the concerns that have been expressed about how diverse those awards are in terms of the presenters, the hosts, the winners, the nominees even. How diverse are they? How do they reflect the diversity of the film industry, whether it's in the US or Canada?

And they've come up short on that front in terms of the articles and the commentaries that have been made about it. So people are watching this, you know, very closely. So there's a new study out. CNBC reports on it and it's encouraging. The headline on it is black and non-binary representation in TV and film jumps during the pandemic. Here's what they say. The Entertainment Diversity Progress Report conducted by Variety Business Intelligence compared the leading cast in television and movies over the course of two 18-month periods.

It found that black and non-binary actors saw significant jumps in representation in film and television during the pandemic. The report is part of a larger initiative to create an unbiased database to track diversity and inclusivity in the entertainment industry now the study found that the gains were significant but unevenly spread latin and hispanic actors saw the biggest jump in representation for movies but actors of Middle Eastern and North African descent also saw their numbers decline as series regulars to 8% from 9.3%, as well as a decline in the overall percentage of roles,

1.4% versus 1.6% earlier. So, some interesting numbers there and some interesting indications on the one hand things are getting better on the diversity front and others perhaps um clearly still a lot of work needed to do you know last year, last year, I've mentioned a couple of times on this podcast my affection for Scotland. I was born in the UK, not in Scotland,

but I was born in the UK, have some Scottish roots, and love golfing in Scotland. And I've been going to Scotland look for that, you know, secondary retirement home. And we found an old farm area along the side of the North Sea up in the Highlands. And we took the old farm buildings, the barns really, steadings they call them, for sheep. And we turned them into a small little house.

So then we had to furnish it. And after doing all the calculations and figuring out, we determined that it was cheaper to send old furniture of ours from here in a cottage we had left by container to Scotland rather than to buy new furniture in Scotland by a considerable margin. So that actually happened almost a year ago.

You know, we got the stuff all packaged up, and there's certain things you have to do on, you know, transatlantic shipping. There are certain regulations that have to be followed anyway. To cut to the quick on this, they went into a shipping container in Montreal, the port of Montreal, and then crossed the ocean. And it's amazing what you can do now, right? I watched this on my computer by logging on to one of these kind of shipping watch apps.

And you can isolate the ship, your container's on, and then you can follow it right across the Atlantic. And I watched this. It took a few weeks after leaving Montreal up to St. Lawrence, out into the, is it up to St. Lawrence? Or is it down to St. Lawrence out into the... Is it up to St. Lawrence or is it down to St. Lawrence? We're not going there again. Anyway, across the Atlantic, it went to first Rotterdam

and then to Antwerp and then back across the English Channel to eventually land in, I think it's called Grangemouth, which is the big port in Scotland between Edinburgh and Glasgow. And then from there, put on a truck and up to the highlands to our place. And the whole process, as I said, it took a few weeks, but it was all done by last June. And, man, we just made it in time because the whole container business has gone wacko since then

with huge delays. And ports, some of the biggest ports in the world, crowded out in the offshore with ships waiting to unload their containers. And that's been part of the whole supply issue. So where am I going with this? It's really interesting. MarketWatch has done this study on the container industry

and what's been happening, especially in these, you know, last year or two. And they're finding that an overwhelming number of containers coming into the united states are full because they're coming from asia or where you know wherever but mainly asia mainly china filled with stuff and then usually the pattern was the containers would be emptied and then filled with exports from the u.s going to different parts of the world that's not what's happening because their productivity rate in in the u.s in terms of in terms of what was going into containers has dropped considerably and And they conclude 12, this is market watch, 12.1 million shipping containers left the biggest U.S. ports empty. Hey, imagine that, right? Out on the ocean, you look at the ships coming in, they're well down in the water, right?

They're heavy because they're full. The ships going out, they're riding high because they're heavy because they're full the ship's going out they're riding high because they're empty so what's the conclusion here on the on the part of market watch there's been a lot of attention recently on the problem surrounding imports there's also an uptick of export containers containers leaving U.S. ports empty, up 46% from 2020, before the pandemic. In total, 59% of containers leaving the nation's nine biggest ports have been empty in the first 10 months of the year, 2021, and loaded export containers leaving these ports carrying American goods have dropped 10% since before the pandemic. Demand for imported goods by U.S. consumers has pushed shippers to leave with empty containers to rush them back to Asia to be filled again, as the trip from Asia to the U.S. is far more lucrative than the journey the other way around.

So they're not waiting. They're not waiting for those empty containers to be filled with American goods to ship out. Or in Canada, Peter Mansbridge's household belongings. They're going empty. Because they can make considerably more money with a full container coming back usually from china or different parts of asia and the final remarks from market watch with these ships with 16 to 20,000 containers on board, getting $15,000 per container, imported containers.

They're deciding we're going to forego that U.S. export cargo. It's not worth it if we can get another sailing inbound of import cargo over the year. Funny, you know, until I was monitoring my cargo ship, which was just one of hundreds that were out there along the route that I was watching and monitoring, even then, there were like big build-ups at the ports, the major ports, Montreal, Rotterdam, Antwerp, Grangemouth. Everything's booked well ahead of time as to when you can leave, when you can arrive, how long it's going to take

to get your container unloaded. But I had never understood the massive amount of movement on the part of containers until I watched that and I've been watching the story continue to unfold in the last year. I mean, we're used to seeing containers. You see them on the 401 all the time, right? It's like blocked with container trucks. And usually those containers are heading to some port.

Anyway, time to take a quick break. A couple of interesting, more interesting, a couple more interesting stories. Spit it out, Mansbridge. And we'll get to those right after this have peter mansbridge back here with the bridge, coming from Stratford, Ontario today. You're listening on either Sirius XM, Canada, Channel 167, Canada Talks, or on your favorite podcast platform.

And as we love to say, wherever you're listening from, great to have you with us. It's a potpourri day, so I've been telling various stories about different things. And here's another one. It's another Bloomberg story. A lot of good stories on Bloomberg. Headline is, oil diversity stalls with women holding 22% of the jobs. A recent study found that the share of women in the global oil and gas workforce was just 22% in 2020, exactly the same as it had been in 2017,

showing that although the industry may be recruiting more women, they don't seem to be staying. The survey cited a number of career obstacles faced by women in the industry, including unfair evaluations and lack of training for women, meaning the oil industry doesn't seem to fully grasp the importance of diversity for financial outcomes and results. At the World Petroleum Congress, only 20% of the speakers were women, again highlighting the lack of women in this industry. Companies with three or more female directors

had a 53% higher return on equity than those with less, while companies with leadership teams with above-average diversity saw an almost 10% improvement in earnings. Now, you look at those last two facts and you wonder why some of those in the global oil and gas industry aren't pushing harder for diversity on the gender front. Well, you may have noticed that I've, after yesterday spending the whole program on COVID, I've been COVID-free on this broadcast until this last one. And there are a couple of stories here that I want to mention before we go for today.

One's kind of an observation on the overall feeling about Omicron. And the other is the potential, potential. Bit of good news on the Omicron front. And at this point, it's just the potential. But you know what? Sometimes it's nice to embrace some good thoughts because it is a difficult time. And the push is on for boosters, But you know what? Sometimes it's nice to embrace some good thoughts because it is a difficult time. And the push is on for boosters, as you know.

Yesterday, Dr. Bogoch gave us a very strong suggestion that the age limit is going to drop down to the 17s and overs for boosters very soon it's in in some places where it doesn't already exist the date is january 4th you can't as i said yesterday you can't have both ways you can't say get your booster get it now we want you to get it right now. And then say, but however, if you're in that sort of over 17 bracket, you can't have it till January 4th. Sounds like that's going to change.

Anyway, I'm going to get to the two things. Axios did a poll with Ipsos in the United States about how people are reacting to Omicron. And this is what it concluded, that they're generally shrugging off Omicron. Most Americans aren't willing to make big changes in their behavior to minimize the risks from the Omicron most americans aren't willing to make big changes in their behavior to minimize the risks from the omicron variant now this is a couple of days old and this story is changing

rapidly but these are the numbers um based on the questions that were asked last week and it's worrying some people because it's raising flags that the American society may not conform to regulations passed to contain the spread of the new variant. Larger numbers of Americans are open to broad public responses

to Omicron, like businesses requiring customers to wear masks indoors. 69% want to do that. Travel bans to keep people from other countries from entering the U.S., 67%. And local governments requiring masks in all indoor public places, 65%. But not to changing their own habits, such as stopping indoor dining, only 33% say, let's stop indoor dining.

Stopping any meetings with people outside of the household, 28%. Only 28% say, stop those meetings. Or cancelling holiday travel plans, 23% agree with that statement. I think that's changed dramatically in the last over the weekend i mean i was talking to my uh travel guy and he says the phones keep ringing with people canceling canceling especially trips to europe not so much to the sun, to the Caribbean, where as of this moment, things are pretty much under control

in most of those island nations. All right. Here's the good news. Or the potential good news, and I underline that. As you know, thanks to the South Africans, we first heard about Omicron because of the scientists and the medical practitioners in South Africa who isolated the Omicron variant and warned the world.

And their numbers were pretty high, right out of the gate, because this variant moves fast. However, however, the science editor for The Telegraph, Sarah Napton, writes in today's Telegraph that studies of the current numbers would seem to indicate that as fast as it transmitted, it's slowed down, one, and two, the death rate is very, very small,

indicating that this is a mild variant. That's not to dismiss its potential issues surrounding it because it's so transmissible. So here's some of the conclusions. One of the lead response groups in South Africa says that although the country had surpassed the peak of previous waves, some areas were beginning to see a lull. Here's what one of the researchers says. Case growth is steeper than last week, but still has slowed down versus November.

In Guateng, that's one of the provinces where the initial problems were discovered, cases are still leveling off. Cases in Tshwani and other province are relatively flat, with a slight increase in the most recent days. Statisticians in South Africa have also noted that the case fatality rate, the percentage of people who go on to die from an infection, has fallen considerably since the arrival of Omicron. With the Delta variant, around 3% of infections, 1 in 33, were resulting in death.

But now that figure has slumped to 0.5%, 1 in 200, the lowest it has been throughout the pandemic in South Africa and 10 times lower than September of last year. Now, some of the researchers and scientists in South Africa are saying, whoa, whoa, be careful here because there is this lag between the case count and the death rate right it's 10 days a couple weeks but peter striker who's a research associate at the university of johannesburg pointed out that the infection to death lag in south africa is just 10 days because most cases are only picked up once they arrive in hospital, when many are already severe. It means Omicron should have been visible in the death data by now.

This is what he says, the case fatality rate was consistently at 3% until late November, mostly Delta deaths. If the case fatality rate remained at 3%, we would have seen 200 deaths per day by now. We are seeing around 21 deaths per day currently, of which eight are probably still delta deaths. Omicron, these are his words, they're not mine. Omicron is extremely mild. The rest of the world has nothing to fear. Well, that's disputed clearly by a lot of other researchers and scientists, but this guy's right in the middle of it, right?

So, you know, I'm not blowing this out of proportion. I didn't lead today's broadcast with this. But at a time when, you know, we're trying to find some potential, you know, the old light at the end of the tunnel, maybe that's it. Maybe that's it. We can hope that's it. But that doesn't mean we just sort of sit back and wait for it. Because, you know, the way these things work, we've witnessed it enough times.

We see the kind of area where things are first discovered and then, you know, three or four weeks later it's moved and in this case it's moving towards the uk and they're moving very fast on clamping down on all kinds of things to prepare themselves for the onslaught of omicron and then usually it's a couple of weeks after that by the time it hits North America. Because it's hitting us, but it hasn't hit us in the big numbers yet. But that's going to happen. You heard Bogoch yesterday, Dr. Bogoch, who said, look, it's coming. There's no question it's coming. We still are unsure in the one area about is it going to be milder than what we witnessed with Delta and Alpha and the other variants.

One thing we know for sure, it is going to move fast through the population in terms of how quickly it's transmissible. So the next few weeks are going to be the determining factor. Those numbers from South Africa are encouraging. Let's see whether they continue on that front. Want to leave you with something to feel better about. Tomorrow, it's Smoke, Mirrors, and the Truth. Bruce Anderson will be here. Looking forward to Friday on Good Talk.

Bruce and Chantelle Hebert will join us because we're going to have a special Good Talk for kind of the year-end Good Talk. We're going to ask some of those questions that you love to have on year-enders about who did what during the year. Who was the best at this? Who was the best at that? Who was the worst at this? Who was the best at that? Who was the worst at this?

Who was the worst at that? So that's Friday. Thursday is, you know, always the chance for your talk. So don't be shy. Send in your thoughts on whatever the subject may be. Here's one for you.

Here's someone that's different. Nice for the end of the year program. What are you going to do this holiday season that's different than you've ever done before that you're looking forward to? Okay? I don't want to hear about, oh, I can't see so-and-so. We're not going to be able to do this. We're not going to be able to do that. Tell me what you are

going to do to try and make this a holiday season worth remembering. So if you have some special idea, something you've never done before that you're planning as an individual or as a

family to do, let me know. Or as I said, any other subject you may have. That's it for The Bridge for this day. I'm Peter Mansbridge. Thanks so much for listening. And we'll talk to you again in 24 hours. Thank you.