The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - The Palace Is Not Amused.

Episode Date: March 8, 2021

What to do with Harry and Meghan?  The Royal Family is rocked by another internal scandal this time after a headline setting interview the two royals had with Oprah Winfrey on American television. Also our regular Monday morning lay of the land on how Canada is dealing with Covid with the help of Dr Zain Chagla, infectious disease specialist at McMaster University.

Hello there, Peter Mansbridge here with the latest episode of the Bridge Daily. Oh boy, they're not here in Toronto today. The bridge coming to you from Toronto as opposed to Stratford here to do a couple of things in the city. But probably we'll be here today and tomorrow. And then back to Stratford as the week goes on. So you can always count on the Royal Family to throw up a distraction when you need one. And I don't know, did we all need a distraction of some kind from whether it's COVID or whether it's anything else? Well, we sure got one.

We sure got one last night. Did you watch it? I had not been planning to watch the big interview, the Oprah interview with Harry and Meghan. Hadn't been planning to. As the day wore on, I started thinking about it. Well, you know, I'll try a little bit. See what happens. I watched the whole two hours.

Oprah's something else, right? I mean, she is the queen. She's the queen of the interview. Now, I don't know how much of it was all a surprise for her or whether she knew what was going to be said because of pre-interviews that would be done or chats she'd had with Megan. They obviously have a relationship of some kind. She was at the wedding, I think.

I think she was invited to the wedding. Whatever, she navigated that interview like the master she is. And it was like one hit after another in terms of news headlines. You know, whether it was Meghan talking about how she thought about suicide, how it was Meghan and Harry talking about how somebody within the family had raised the issue of what color do you think that baby is going to be and those are just two i mean as i said there seemed to be a hit every minute so what does it all mean what's it gonna what's gonna Well, you can be sure somebody in the palace, at least somebody, if not a whole team of communications advisors and you name it, were watching. The interview started in Britain.

It started at 1 o'clock in the morning, ran until 3. So I imagine there were people up all night. They didn't have a pre-release on the interview. They didn't know what was going to be said. They had an idea of some of the things, but I got to tell you, they must have been sitting there gobsmacked like a lot of other people as one charge after another unfolded. And once again, we're only hearing one side of the story here, right?

However, it's a pretty one side of the story here, right? However, it's a pretty compelling side of the story. The issue will become should there be a real response, like a detailed response to all the things that were leveled in that interview, or not. And it's an interesting call. I would say, having watched this family for at least the last 50 years closely as a journalist, that this is the most serious crisis certainly since the Diana car crash in Paris. When a lot of things about the royal family came to a head

and a lot of people became disillusioned with the whole idea of the royal family and they brought in the communications people at that time And a lot of people became disillusioned with the whole idea of the royal family. And they brought in the communications people at that time. And they totally reworked how the palace operated. And they seemed to save it. Certainly save it with Queen Elizabeth at the head. A lot of people wonder, including me, what will happen when she's no longer with us, and just how successful and wanted the royal family is. But we're not at that point. The point we're at is serious questions arising about racism in the family,

about suicidal thoughts on the part of Megan, which reminded everybody, of course, of Harry's mother, Diana, and about Harry's place in all this. I mean, listen, it's not much fun being the spare. And Harry's being the spare. Right? Will is the number one son. Will will one day be king.

Harry will not. Harry's the spare if something happened to Will. As happened in the 1930s. And Edward abdicated. And his father, George VI, became king, who, of course, is the father of Queen Elizabeth. And when he passed, Queen Elizabeth became the monarch. So unless, well, it would have to be a lot more than just something happening to Will because there's a succession after Will that stays within Will's family.

So I think Harry's number six on the line in the list at the moment. It's never going to get there. So he's the spare. And the question is, is he expendable in the sense do they care what he and his wife say how much damage is caused by what they said it's clear in the the early reviews of this were in north america people were horrified at what she had to say and blamed it all on whether it was on Charles or the Queen or the whole idea of the family. But in Britain, it seems the early indications are not quite that hard

on the royal family, but pretty hard on Meghan. So that'll play out over the next few days. And the royal family will have to, Buckingham Palace and its advisors, will have to weigh that as well. But look to the Edward abdication as one possible route out. What did they do? They basically said, see you later, pal. And he had a lot of popular support

in Britain and he was basically you know banished off the island yeah I went to Bahamas for a while I went to France went to the US but he

kind of disappeared lived a long life but he kind of disappeared. Lived a long life with the woman he loved, but never made it back. The queen basically cut him off. His brother cut him off first, and then the queen cut him off. I think Charles made an attempt. At least according to the crown charles made an attempt i think that's true that part of it

of the crown is true charles made an attempt to keep a dialogue going but it's interesting to see what happened there because he left the family and the family left him. And that was it. It was a total cut off. And he had been king. He wasn't a spare. He was the real deal. So what happens with Harry? I guess we're going to find out, right? These next few days will be interesting. We'll

see what the palace has to say in reaction to last night. Now, here's an interesting statistic to keep in mind on this story. And it's very recent. It was just done by our friends at Ipsos. It was done last week. They did a survey of British adults aged 18 to 75 on who's the most popular royal.

Well, I'm sure you have no doubt about who was the most popular. Queen Elizabeth, of course. 40% of British adults said of all the royals, she is the most popular. Next up, Prince William. Third in line to the throne, right? Prince William, 32%. His wife, the Duchess of Cambridge, comes in at 29%.

So she's way up there too. Then Prince Harry at 24%. Followed by Princess Anne. That's the Queen's daughter. 17%. Prince Philip, who's still in a hospital right now in London, who's 99 Also at 13%, the Duchess of Sussex, Meghan. Tied with, on the one hand, Prince Philip, and on the other hand, the next in line to the throne, Prince Charles. They're all at 13%. Prince George is at 12%. That's Will and Kate's son, first son.

So he's like fourth in line to the throne. Princess Charlotte, that's the little girl in the family. Prince Louis. The Duchess of Cornwall. That's Charles' wife. And the list keeps going down. Princess Eugenie. Prince Edward. Princess.

The Prince Edward is the fourth son of the Queen. Or not the fourth son. The fourth child of the Queen. Princess Beatrice. Those are Andrew's daughters, Eugenie and Beatrice. Aren't you impressed? I know all these. And then Archie Mountbatten-Windsor, that's Harry and Megan's son.

He's down at 4%. And at 2%, closing out the gate, you know, you can guess, the one who's plummeted in any kind of popularity in the last year, for sure, Prince Andrew. So that gives you some kind of idea of where things stand in terms of the popularity of the royal family in Britain. As I said, the next couple of days will tell the story.

I tend to think they're going to blow them off. But we'll see. Will there be an opening to try and, you know, make things better? Will there be denials?

I guess we're going to see. All right, then. Still to come today on The Bridge, the latest COVID update. So it's been a year, really, since we really got into the whole COVID situation. And for the last week, there's been this sense that, you know what? We may really be at the first time on the downside of this. We're not done. We're nowhere near done.

And there's a fear of opening up too soon. But things are looking better. Vaccines are looking better. The distribution system, while still not as good as we'd like it to be in terms of vaccines, better than it was a week ago a lot better than it was two weeks ago these are all good things so what we've tried to do on the bridge is every monday morning we try to get a snapshot of where we are on this story, how we should be feeling, how the health experts think we should be feeling. And we've talked to experts from Halifax and Edmonton, Toronto,

and it's once again time for Hamilton, Dr. Chane Chagla from McMaster University. He's a master of science in global health at McMaster. And he's well known in southern Ontario. And he's well known to us as somebody who can help us try to understand where we are on this story. So, let's get to it. So, Dr. Chagla, when you look at the big picture, what are you seeing?

I mean, we're seeing increased supply coming into Canada, which is never a bad thing. We are seeing four vaccines on the market, which is obviously a lot better than what we started with two months ago. And I think we're seeing a change in the dosing strategy, which will probably mean an accelerated time to get that first dose into people, but may mean a slightly longer time for that full immunity to be worked out. They're calculated gambles, but I think this pays off to make sure that Canadians have the full benefits of the vaccine sooner rather than later, recognizing that our supply is probably limited to about half of eligible Canadians by June or July. Over the weekend, I saw a piece in the New York Times saying one of the areas of concern isn't the vaccine supply anymore. It's the syringe supply. Is that a problem here, too?

I mean, we have orders of low dead space syringes and everything along those lines. But globally, that is a huge, huge issue. I mean, we're talking mass vaccine campaigns for billions of people in areas of the world where syringe sterility, reuse of syringes is a common practice to save medical supplies, it's going to be a big global challenge. I mean, UNICEF and the World Health Organization are looking at alternate models of how to deliver, how to make syringes, how to essentially do it at a cheap price and do it in large scales. But thankfully, it's not a problem here, but it certainly is a problem globally as we talk about this.

You know, there aren't a lot of countries in the world that have approved four different vaccines. We're one of those now. How does that change the equation for Canada? I mean, I think you have more supply. You have more to offer people, right? You have now four distributors you can buy vaccine off off of and all of them have pre signed contracts. And so as more rolls in, you have a runway of exactly how you want to administer that you don't necessarily have to go with what you have, you can put the AstraZeneca vaccine in pharmacies, you can take the Johnson & Johnson vaccine and put them into family doctor's offices. You can use the Pfizer vaccine in mass vaccination centers.

So you have that ability to then create landscapes for every single different vaccine to reach the most people, knowing that their positive characteristics likely make them attainable in certain populations without necessarily having to rely on one and deal with supply issues and logistical issues with having to administer it. You know, we've gone from people being concerned about not enough vaccines or no vaccines to the point now where some people are saying, yeah, but, you know, I want, you know, vaccine X as opposed to vaccine y uh and the response the common response from the experts like you seems to be don't worry about whether it's x or y

if they're offering you a vaccine take it and are you still there is that still where you're at 100 100 it's crazy i mean i i agree with you It went from, yeah, I don't want to get it. I really want a vaccine. I want this vaccine. You know, there's three things. One, all of these vaccines reduce hospitalizations and deaths. And I think that is a big, big feature here. We are still struggling with hospital capacity across Canada. And to say in 28 days, if everyone was vaccinated, that stress is going to go down significantly is a big thing, especially in vulnerable populations. Number two is, you know, this campaign works of us getting so much vaccine into Canada, if people are willing to roll up

their sleeves to get it. And so we don't want vaccine sitting in the freezers and the fridges, it gives us the ability to go to family doctor's office to use AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson and hit people that may not be able to come back for a second dose with a one-dose strategy. And I think the third big thing that people don't realize is as you get more and more people vaccinated, as disease transmission is actually stopped amongst our individual, you develop herd immunity, that has global societal implications, it makes it better for the rest of society. So as a society, we want more people vaccinated, even if it's not the perfect vaccine. If they can't transmit COVID as much, if they're not as sick, that means that the vulnerable in our society have an extra layer of protection to them. This is not going to be the last vaccine people get for COVID-19. This is the

first one, right? With the variants emerging, with Pfizer, Moderna, and other companies retooling to deal with new isolates, people are going to be boosted in the future with something else. And so the gambles we make towards a single vaccine strategy really are washed out over time. And so again, this is just to establish a baseline of people not being in hospital, people not dying, and the vulnerable being protected from some degree of herd immunity. This isn't the optimal strategy to prevent everyone from having COVID in Canada ongoing. How prepared are we for the luxury of having as many vaccines as we have? I realize that everyone wants more, but we're going to be doing pretty well here in these next few weeks, a lot of them coming in.

That's one thing. But how prepared are we to actually deliver the vaccines? Yeah, I mean, there's never been a mass vaccine campaign like this in Canadian history to reach this many people this quickly. You know, there are going to be logistical challenges. I think, you know, developing mass vaccine centers is a strategy, but it's not going to reach everyone. And I think that innovation to make sure that vaccine is put into different places, it is

administration patterns in different places that registration, informatics, and the ability to contact people and bring them into places to get vaccinated. You know, those are going to be large logistical nightmares that are ongoing. I will say though, that the unbridled enthusiasm for most of Canadians to really pay

attention and say, when is my turn? When is my turn? Is a really good sign is when their turn comes along, there'll be some way to access it for them. Watching the news over the weekend and listening to Dr. Fauci and, you know, the others, there is this concern about a certain level of plateauing and I've seen it here, you know, being talked about in Canada as well. How concerned are you on that?

And when we're talking about plateauing, we're talking about the number of cases that they've been coming down rather rapidly in a lot of places. But it seems to have leveled off and leveled off a little higher than, you know, people like you would like it to be leveling off at. Yeah, I mean, I think we obviously have challenges in Canada, the climate being one of them in the sense that people are still driven indoors at this time of year, and that really creates higher risk environments for people to transmit COVID-19. The background community rates are fine, but again, these environments are there. There are still issues in workplaces, in sheltered populations, in jails, where we are still seeing huge degrees of transmission, where, again, we don't have

viable solutions outside of vaccination to get through them. And so, yeah, there probably is a lower percentage of what we can do with just societal measures restrictions without necessarily targeting these environments and the fact that again we're still mainly indoors at this point in the year rather than outdoors the weather will help though and i think that's one of the factors that might drive rates a bit lower is if you give people more chances to congregate outdoors you give restaurants the chance to open outdoors you're probably going to get less transmission for the sake that the ventilation is so much better out there. You know, having talked to you over some length of time now, I've always been impressed about the fact you try to keep optimism in your mind about the situation.

Would you say you're more optimistic now than you've been in the last year? Absolutely. I mean, I think March 7th, 2020, the world was going sideways, right? You know, we were seeing cases everywhere. I remember watching the NBA and them shutting down a game and essentially everything rippling out of that. The lockdown came on March 13th. We didn't have a clue what the end result of this was going to be, right? This was a respiratory virus that had a pre-symptomatic period that you couldn't trace as well as you wanted to, that got into vulnerable settings. We had no potential treatments, no cure. And now we're talking about four vaccines, a mass campaign, at least doses earmarked for half of all Canadians that are coming in till June,

numbers getting somewhat better. And, and again, the the ability to actually live with this virus long term. Yeah, there's so much optimism out there. I think this next few months, we'll see what vaccines actually do, as we're seeing in many places in the world. And again, if hospitals empty out and deaths settle down, yes, there are other issues with this virus, but 90% of the problem is solved at that point. Well, that's a good note to end on. Let's hope the notes keep getting better in the weeks and months ahead.

Dr. Chagla, thanks so much for your time. No problem. Zane Chagla from McMaster University in Hamilton in hamilton ontario and you know every time i listen to our doctors uh especially the ones that have been good enough to join us here on the bridge and there have been four or five of them over the last year and they've been terrific because they they've been able to talk to us in the way we talk, as opposed to, I'm sure, that they talk to each other with use of all the highfalutin medical terms. They tell us the story in a way that we can kind of understand it.

And it's nice to hear the optimism in the voice of some of the doctors like Dr. Chagla right now. This is not over, and it's not over by a long shot. But this sense that we are on the right path and that we're going to keep following it, keep doing our part, with the sense that you know vaccines aren't that far away for most of us uh it it becomes almost totally an age thing now um they're still in in my area of the world they're still dealing with the 80s and over um they'll soon get into the 70s and then the 60s and then the 50s. And, you know, as each segment drops, the group becomes larger, right? Just obviously naturally in terms of the ages, and it's going to take longer to get through them.

But the fact is we seem to be talking now about, you know, everybody who is of the appropriate age who wants a vaccine should be able to have had it by the end of June. Now, things have speeded up considerably just in the last couple of weeks. And as things continue to move on, and now we're into our fourth vaccine, there's no reason it's going to stop there. There are others that we're looking at and have contracts with. As each one adds to the list of those that Canada accepts,

that timeline is going to keep moving up. So if you believe in vaccines, then you've got to be feeling good. If you don't believe in vaccines, you obviously have got to think very carefully about how you're going to deal with this, not only the next few months, but living with COVID. So that's kind of where we are. One of the other things that I've found interesting over the weekend, I saw an article in Political Magazine, and it got me thinking.

I mean, we live in an era where technology has improved so much about our lives. It's made parts of our lives very confusing in trying to stay up to date with technology, but it's given us lots of advantages. And in this last year, there were some things that it's been, you know, really given us advantage on in terms of communications. You know, we, you know, Zoom, you've heard us talk about that. We use Zoom a lot on this, on the bridge. I mean, that's in fact how I talked to Dr. Jagla, was by Zoom.

And, you know, it's highly beneficial. The audio quality is better than the conventional telephones. It's never as good as, you know, sitting across the table from somebody. But it's still pretty good. So those kind of advantages from new tech have been terrific. But when you look at the actual fight against COVID, think about it in this way, and this is what the political magazine was article was interesting on and it was kind of the headline was the you know the the collision of health care and technology and the

argument that they were using is that for all the advantages that technology has given us in our lives today. In the fight against COVID, technology hasn't exactly been up there. I mean, vaccines are one thing, and obviously technology to some degree is used in the production and the development of vaccines. But in the daily fight against COVID while we're waiting for vaccines and the syringes that deliver them, I find that interesting. Isn't that something? Get out the vaccine, but not the syringe.

Although Dr. Chagla didn't seem to be too worried about that on the Canadian side of things. But in a fight against COVID, where's been the big advantage from the era of technology that we live in? Because what is our main tool in the fight, the daily fight against technology? Well, it's washing your hands. It's staying socially distant. You know, it's staying your hands. It's staying socially distant. You know, it's staying away from big crowds. None of those involve technology.

And the fourth and perhaps most powerful thing. You know, you now hear them saying, and I think it was Fauci yesterday who was saying it. That the most powerful tool against the spread of COVID has been our realization that the same tool that was there 100 years ago in the fight against the last big pandemic, is the mask. And technology hasn't changed the mask. Maybe, you know, here and there, little bits of ideas on how to make a better mask. But most of the masks people wear, you know, they either make themselves at home or they buy at some designer place online.

They're not involving technology. It's a mask. It's just a simple mask. So in these days of high tech and how our lives have changed so considerably because of the advantages of technology, here in this fight, this fight against a virus that's gone around the world has killed millions. In this fight, on the day-to-day fight, we're not using tech. We're using what's been used for 100 years. We're using the mask.

Okay. Coming up for the rest of the week. Tomorrow, we're going to look, and I think it's time we did this. You know, we're finally getting into a good position on vaccines and our ability to distribute them to different places in the country. And we've given hope to hundreds of thousands, millions of Canadians. Well, that's partly because we're a rich and connected country, right? But there are a lot of others out there in the world

that don't have that advantage. We're promising to help when we can. Other countries are moving in on those vulnerable countries for a different agenda that goes beyond help, goes to influence. And we need to keep that in mind. I was thinking about this,

and I wanted to talk to Dr. Samantha Nutt from War Child Canada again. And so tomorrow, she'll be on the program, and we'll dip into that question because it's an important one. And it also signals the kind of world we're all going to live in when this finally ends.

Wednesday, it is Smoke Mirrors and the Truth with Bruce Anderson. Haven't decided on the topic yet for this week. Got a couple ideas. Thursday is the potpourri day on the bridge, but also it's the day that you can also find available Good Talk with Chantelle Hebert and Bruce. And once again, you've got to navigate this through siriusxm.ca slash Peter Mansbridge.

Look at that and you'll see access to Good Talk. At least with very special offers, in other words, free, for the next couple of months. But you've got to go in there and find it. But you should be able to find it that way. SiriusXM.ca slash Peter Mansbridge. Look for the good talk offer.

And Friday is the weekend special, as it always is on Fridays. So a full week ahead. Think royal family. I can't wait to hear what you have to say about that one. Okay. I'm Peter Mansbridge. This has been The Bridge. Thanks so much for listening.

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