The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - The Race Next Door #4 - Can "Law and Order" Change the Channel?

Episode Date: September 2, 2020

My weekly conversation with Bruce Anderson about the US election race, PLUS just how safe is the air on passenger aircraft?

And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here with the latest episode of the Bridge Daily. It's hump day for week 25. We're at the Wednesday mark. You know what Wednesday means? Wednesday means the race next door. And in a few moments' time, Bruce Anderson, the chairman of Abacus Data, will join us from Ottawa for our discussion this week. And it's an interesting one, as they all are. But I think you'll enjoy this one. But before we get there, I want to just remind you of something. Because here at the Bridge Daily

we pay attention to things and especially how we've done in the past on some of the big topics of our time the biggest one can't be any bigger than COVID-19 and I thought of the Bridge Daily when I read this today which has got a lot of attention it's an interview that Dr. Fauci of the Bridge Daily when I read this today, which has got a lot of attention.

It's an interview that Dr. Fauci gave in the U.S. to NBC on the Today Show this morning. And I'll read you his quote. I believe that by the time we get to the end of this calendar year that we will feel comfortable that we do have a safe and effective vaccine. Now, that's good news. It's still at this point a hope, kind of a prediction, but it's not a fact. It's not a fact until it happens, right? But when Dr. Fauci says something, people tend to listen. And so here he is at the beginning of September saying that by the end of this year,

he's confident there will be a safe and effective vaccine. Which brings me back to April the 16th of this year, just a month after we started the Bridge Daily. When we were right in the middle of it, it was the worst of times. It certainly wasn't the best of times. And we did a story on the vaccine research program at the University of Saskatchewan. We talked to the head of that program, Volker Goertz. And it was during that conversation when I asked him, I said, you know, like, where are we in the vaccine?

You know, most of the things we're hearing is it could take anywhere from two to five, maybe even 10 years before there's a vaccine. But he talked about all the different players in the vaccine research community around the world and how they were staying in contact with each other, how they were helping each other. And he said he felt very comfortable in saying that 12 to 18 months was the period in which there could be a vaccine once research had begun. Well, when did research begin? It began in December of 2019, last year, right after things started in Wuhan, China.

They started work on trying to find a vaccine for this new coronavirus. So I said, you mean, so the clock started on your 12 to 18 months last December? He said, yes. So in other words, if everything worked out perfectly, the 12 months, the clock would end at December of this year the end of this year the same end of this year that dr. Fauci talks about today so let's not forget where you heard it first right here on the Bridge Daily, when Volker Gerrits of the University of Saskatchewan

talked to us about the possibilities once again. Not a fact, just that this is the earliest it could be. Well, as it turns out, Dr. Fauci thinks that the earliest it could be is when it's going to be. He's confident that it will be by the end of this year, by the end of the calendar year. Well, we'll see, won't we? We'll find out who's right on that one.

All right. Time to get to the race next door. I will tell you that after the race next door's episode is over for today, I have some interesting news for you on the airline front. You know that that's an issue for me. I've always loved talking about the airlines. And they're in a difficult spot. But it's something that we may want to keep in mind.

And I'll tell you why. And I'll tell you why I, in particular, want, but it's something that we may want to keep in mind. And I'll tell you why, and I'll tell you why I in particular want to keep it in mind. But that's after the race next door, which comes your way right now. All right, you know what that music means? It means that either the President of the United States is about to walk into your house and that band you see in your living room is playing Hail to the Chief. It's either that reason,

or it's because you're listening to Bruce Anderson, who's in Ottawa, chairman of Abacostata, and Peter Mansbridge, who is here in Stratford, Ontario. And we're doing the Race Next Door, the podcast within a podcast. Topic one for today is, well, there's only three words that make this work, law and order. Now, if you follow Donald Trump on Twitter, you've seen that in old caps for the last few weeks. Just that in some of his tweets. Law and order. So why is he saying law and

order? Does he actually really believe in law and order? It's one of those things that at night when his head hits the pillow, he worries about in his country? Or is it because he's trying to change the channel? Because the channel is kind of stuck on one issue in the United States, and that's COVID-19. That's the coronavirus. That's the pandemic. And whenever you get talking to people,

eventually it comes back to that issue, no matter what else is kind of on the talk agenda. It's the pandemic, which worries most Americans. However, there's always been this issue about law and order. It's always kind of bubbling along there. The problem with the pandemic for Donald Trump is he owns it, and even some of his own base blames him for the kind of mess the country's in where there's more than 185,000 dead,

there's more than 1,000 dying every day, and this is a problem for him. So he's got to get it onto another topic. And that other topic for him that he thinks he can make as a winner is law and order.

So Bruce, can he make law and order a winner? Well, he's certainly trying. I agree with that, Peter. And there's 60 days, roughly speaking, left to Election Day. And I think he's trying a couple of different things that he thinks have the best chance of helping him dig himself out of the hole that he finds himself in in the polling. I think obviously he's trying to goose the stock market. He's trying to impress the reported cases of the COVID pandemic. But he is definitely trying hard to win back those

suburban voters that he lost from his coalition or that voted for him in 2016 and don't look like they're going to vote for him now, especially women in suburban areas. And he thinks that this law and order message is a good way to do it. You know, I don't know if irony is too kind a word to describe what's happening here, but I think anybody looking at why this law and order message has become so prominent has to trace it back to the last few years has been to do things that kind of inflame people who are inclined to protest. And then he's gone about his business by saying that protesters are essentially vigilantes, looters, thugs. So how is it working, I guess, is your question. And I think it's too early to tell. But the question of his effort is unmistakable.

He went to Kenosha, Wisconsin yesterday, and it's hard to imagine any other scenario where a president would have gone to a place like that in a context like this without expressing some sense of concern for the individual who was shot without trying to call for some sort of balanced approach and a unification message. He didn't do that either. Instead, and this is maybe the last point I'll finish on, Peter, is he did yesterday what he often does, which is he kind of knows the direction that he wants to go in and they get sidetracked. So there were these clips of him talking about people who were dressed a certain way on a plane going to supposedly some sort of a violent insurrection armed with cans of soup. It just sounded bizarre. And it distracted from the message that I think he was trying to put forward. And it's the kind of thing that makes you wonder if he's going to be successful at prosecuting this law and order message, or it's just going to dwindle away like so many other things that he's tried. The irony, of course, and you kind of hinted at it, is that it is Trump's America. Like, I mean, the situation that exists

exists under his presidency, his administration. It's not like he took over last month. He's been there for three and a half years. And you can draw the argument, as you've done at least partially, that some of these problems, some of these tensions that have resulted in the, not just protests, but riots in the streets, are as a result of things he's said or policies of his administration. You talk to people within the Trump White House about like, why this? Why law and order? And they say, hey, it worked for Nixon in 68 and it can work for Trump in 2020. Well, it's kind of the same thing here. Nixon wasn't president in 68 and some people tend to forget that.

Perhaps some of the people around Donald Trump tend to forget that. Nixon was trying to become president. The Democrats were in charge of the White House. Lyndon Johnson was still the president, but he wasn't running again, and Hubert Humphrey was going to run. It was a terrible year, 68. There were all kinds of issues in the streets. Martin Luther King had been assassinated. There were riots in the streets following that.

Bobby Kennedy was assassinated. There were riots in the streets following that. The inequities of the system, the judicial system and society in general, was a huge issue through the summer of 1968. Richard Nixon promised, not only can I handle those issues, but I can bring and restore peace to the country. Now, he could say that because he didn't have the opportunity to do it then. He was the challenger, not the incumbent, which is very different than the situation we've got now. In some ways, it's bizarre and perhaps shows the weakness on the other side, on the Democratic side, on the Biden side,

that he can even get away with making the argument that he can restore peace and calm to the streets by being tough and by being strong and by putting in law and order. And he only gets to make the argument if there's lots of violence on the TV screens and on the social media feeds. If people don't see that violent activity, then they don't look for that law and order response at all. But that having been said, I think the other thing that bears mentioning, you talked about Nixon. There's a Wallace kind of aspect to this, too, if we go back in American history. I don't think this law and order message works anywhere near as well as Trump has been trying to make it work if he isn't really tapping into anti-Black racism as part of it. He is not just raising concerns about,

are you safe in your neighborhood? He's raising concerns about, are you safe from Black people? And in that sense, I can't recall an election in the United States where a major party candidate was so willing to keep on touching that nerve in American society, to keep on pressing this whole question of, well, yeah, black people are getting shot, but let's remember the police need our support and people need safety and police provide that safety. There's a kind of an equivalency there that is, you know, I don't think there's a there's a better word to describe it than inherently racist. We'll get to the Biden angle on this because, you know, it kind of puzzles me. It's almost like they've just discovered what's happened here in the last couple of days.

And, well, not necessarily just discovered it's happening, but just discovered that perhaps it's working in some places for Trump because the Biden camp is now trying to respond, even up to the point where they've just announced that they're going to go to Kenosha, Wisconsin themselves tomorrow to make a visit and perhaps show a little more empathy than Trump did, which amounted to zero empathy yesterday. But do you sense that they're starting to worry that this is taking hold,

even under the extraordinary circumstance where it isn't Biden's America, it's Trump's America that we're looking at right now, even when Trump talks about this as being Biden's America. Yeah, I do, actually. I think that the emergence of Biden in the last couple of days to talk about this issue, to kind of ridicule, essentially, the president for trying to make the case that, you know, Biden would run an administration

where there would be more thuggery because there is all of this thuggery that happened to develop under Trump's watch. It's, you know, it is telling that he decided to do something. I don't know, frankly, whether or not they look at this as, well, it was naturally going to be time for us once the two conventions were over to come off the sidelines a little bit and to make sure that this remained a conversation that the country was having about Donald Trump rather than a conversation that Donald Trump was having on his own, which is

kind of the risk that they found is that even if Trump isn't very good at staying on message, if he's the only one delivering a message, there are going to be, you know, a certain number of people who are going to hear it and go, well, there's something to that. I'm seeing buildings getting firebombed, and I'm seeing a violent act in the streets. And so I, you know, I'm interested in this message about protecting public safety. But it'll be interesting to watch, Peter, to your point about Biden going to Kenosha tomorrow. Are the Democrats going to look at this as what classically is called a sword issue or a shield issue in political parlance? A shield issue means an issue where they think they're on the defensive and they need to do something to prevent their opponent from gaining ground on the issue.

A sword issue is basically deciding that you're going to try to take this issue to Donald Trump. You're going to try to make it clear that he's the reason that people are feeling less safe. He's the reason that America feels more divided, more intense in their feelings towards one another across racial lines, across income and equality lines, that kind of thing. I'd be surprised if Biden doesn't take this issue on as a sword issue, because certainly there's a whole lot of center and particularly leftist center American voters who want to see that fight taken to Trump, who don't see that fight taken to Trump, who don't believe that he should be able to get away with this kind of, I'd say soft racism.

I don't think it's really soft racism, but I think this notion that he's the only person who can protect people who experienced a much safer sense of self and place only a few years ago before Trump was president. Fascinating way to look at it, the sword and the shield in terms of an issue and the way parties, you know, make a choice about how, which position, which position, either the sword or the shields, you know, whether they're offensive or defensive on any particular issue.

Okay, topic number two for today, and you hinted at it earlier, and that's the stock market. And you're suggesting or suggested that Trump's doing all he can, perhaps the Federal Reserve is even doing more, in trying to boost the market. And the market has been remarkable, actually, the last couple of months after taking one of the steepest dives in the history of the stock market, it's bubbled its way back up. Now, this is nothing new to Donald Trump or politics in America. It's kind of the way politics is. When the market goes up, the politician likes to say, hey, they love our policies and that's why, you know, the market is doing really well. If the market goes down, it's always somebody else's fault. It's got nothing to do with the government of the day.

And, you know, it's dangerous turf to start talking about the market. I remember, and you remember, in 2008 when the market took a dive as a result of the banking crisis, I was interviewing Stephen Harper, who was prime minister at the time, and I asked him about his feelings about the fact the market on that particular day had dropped another couple or under 300 points and what he thought of that and what his advice was.

And he said, well, you should go out and buy. It's a great buying opportunity. And I looked at him. I said, really? You want to say that as prime minister? You want to be telling people, you know, pensioners, whatever, to go and start investing right now? And he, you know, he kind of backtracked a bit and said, oh, no, you're taking me out of context, and that's not what I really meant, and blah, blah, blah, blah. But it was one of those things, and he wasn't the first person to fall into that trap, where you've got to be extremely careful what you say about an up market or a down market.

And you've got to be extremely careful about how you're trying to try to claim credit for what's happening in the market. Yeah, I do think it's a unique kind of conversation in American politics, I think. The Canadian participation rate in the stock market isn't the same as it is in the United States. There are a lot more people who in the U.S. are kind of aware of their 401k. That's their kind of version of an RRSP, I guess. And Trump is fond of, at least when times are good for him in terms of the stock market, he's fond of saying, how's your 401k doing as a way of making sure that people know that he thinks he's responsible for it. I think the other aspect of the U.S. stock market as it relates to American political

sentiment is this, that it is almost a kind of a mark of American pride that the world's biggest and best companies come to the U.S. stock markets for financial support and that U.S. stock market indicators are watched around the world as a measure of how's the world economy doing. And so there's almost a kind of a pride in a place for America in terms of when the stock market is performing well, it suggests that America is stronger. Whereas I think that you and I might look at cooling data from around the world and say the rest of the

world is not looking at America that way right now. They're looking at the stock market and saying shareholders have been getting wealthier under Trump, but America has been getting weaker, has become more divided, has become more uncertain in terms of the role that it plays internationally. But Trump needs to kind of hold on to that idea of the U.S. stock market in a bull mode as something that indicates that America is becoming, to his terminology, great again. I don't know if it's going to work. I don't know that we know yet how much that dynamic is going to play out. I do think that he's been pushing the Fed harder than most presidents do to keep interest rates low so that money flows more to the stock market than other types of investment. But here's the questions

that I'm sort of watching, Peter. First of all, the market has probably priced in a Biden victory in many instances so far, that the polls have been strong enough for Biden consistently enough that I wouldn't say that investors are heavily betting on a Biden victory, but they're not betting on a Trump victory. And so as we get closer to the election, if the polls remain favorable towards Biden, I don't think it's fair to expect that Trump did that Biden says he will unwind. The biggest of those being the multi-trillion dollar tax cut that Trump likes to trumpet that he did, that goosed the profits of business, that goosed the stock prices of many American companies, and that would have made many Americans feel better off because of the impact on their 401k. Biden has been pretty clear that he's going to go backwards on that sort of thing and

that there probably is going to be more taxes on the wealthy. And so that could have an impact as we get a little closer and people start to wonder whether or not they're really up for that. But that's generally going to affect a relatively small number of people at the higher end of the income bracket. Have you ever seen anyone, I mean, you kind of touched on this a minute or so ago, but have you ever seen a politician claim credit for a market bounce the way this U.S. president has done?

Never have. It's reckless. It's almost comical and it's exaggeration. But he's also almost comical in how he avoids responsibility for things that he obviously has some responsibility for and how he declares that he's got a huge priority one month and then it disappears from sight. I mean, he stood in front of microphones doing things that you and I have never seen politicians do before. I think it was last year, maybe around this time, that he was talking about how he was working on a major personal income tax cut that he would announce within two or three weeks. Never to be heard of again. You did the same thing with healthcare about a month ago. There was a new healthcare thing coming out. Never happened. Yeah. Yeah. So it's just, it's hard, you know,

you're tempted sometimes to think, well, this is genius. He was tweeting this morning about how he's kind of a complex chess player and sleepy Joe Biden is a, is a kind of a, a lackadaisical chess player or something like that. He's using these metaphors to describe the notion of himself as being among these kind of complex thinkers who plan everything out. But there really is so much more evidence that it's just chaos from one day to the next, that he's kind of reacting emotionally, that he's constantly trying to get people to pay attention in a positive way to him or pay attention to him in any respect because he seems to hate when attention drifts away.

Another fabulous conversation, and we're hoping you're enjoying it, and we hope you may have some questions for us as well because we're toying with the idea of doing a race next door, your letters, your thoughts, your questions edition, uh, at some point in the next,

uh, week or two. So if you have them, I've got quite a few already from you, but I'd love to see more, uh, drop us a line at the Mansbridge podcast at gmail.com. The Mansbridge podcast at gmail.com.

Great to talk to you as always, Bruce. Look forward to talking to you again next week. Always great to talk, Peter. Talk soon. Well, a little bit of sloppy mix work there on my part. Kind of cut Bruce off before Hail to the Chief came back on. And that's okay. I'm sorry.

I'll work better at trying to mix this, talk, and organize everything at the same time. But worry about that the next time. All right, I promised that there was something else I wanted to tell you. And here's why I wanted to tell you. As somebody who frequently travels by air, millions of air miles that I've got, but I haven't flown since, I think the last flight I took was the first week of March. And then everything came to a halt. Everything came to a standstill. So

I haven't flown since then, which is probably the longest time, well, at least in the last 50 years where I haven't been in an airplane. So I'm kind of looking at when am I going to go on an airplane. Most of my flying the last few years has been either for documentary work or for various speeches that I give in different parts of the country. Well, I have a speech booked in Calgary at the end of this month, near the end of this month, near the end of this month. And at the moment, I mean, I have about 20 speeches booked a year, and obviously over the last six months,

they've all been either canceled or postponed or what have you as a result of the pandemic. Well, so far, the organizers of this speech in Calgary have not cancelled it. They've made all kinds of different manoeuvres to ensure the safety of everybody. Most people will be watching the speech virtually, but there still will be a number of people, 50 or so, in the room, spaced out, and just assume that all the appropriate restrictions are in place. But at the moment, they have not postponed it or changed it to a 100% virtual presentation.

So it's up to me whether I want to go ahead with it. And obviously I've been thinking about that a lot. And part of the thinking has all been about air travel. Now, I love air travel. I've missed air travel. And obviously I want to get back on an airplane. But I'm, you know, edgy about it. It's a touchy subject. And one of the concerns obviously is the quality of the in-flight process. Everything from is everyone going to be wearing masks

to the quality of the air. So I found it interesting to read this piece last night in the National Geographic by their travel editor, their travel executive editor, George Stone. He says at the pandemic's peak in the united states there was a 96 percent reduction in air travelers i think it was at least that if not more here in canada this figure shifted in the states to a 73 percent reduction by mid-summer according to a poll of transportation engineers air travel figures in the u.s are predicted to remain at 50 to 70 percent capacity

a year from now. A year from now. They'll still only be around half full from what they used to be and what they're capable of being. Now, that's the difficult news for the airline industry and for airline passengers here's some better news high-tech filtration and low-tech masks are making flyer safer than you think says one of the experts that george talked to, the air you breathe in flight, though not necessarily entirely virus-free, is much cleaner than the air in restaurants, bars, stores, or your best friend's living room. Now here's where you break that down into some hard facts.

On most passenger planes, about 40% of a cabin's air gets filtered through a HEPA filter, High Efficiency Particulate Air System, HEPA. The remaining 60% is fresh and piped in from outside the plane. Cabin air is completely changed every three minutes, on average average while the aircraft is cruising. That's according to Dr. Bjorn Becker of Lufthansa. While the exhaled globs that carry SARS-CoV-2, that's COVID-19, can be quite small, HEPA filters effectively remove the vast majority, rendering air that is 99.97% purified. Well, as George Stone says, that sounds pretty clean. But, as he also points

out, good technology can't neutralize bad behavior. And part of bad behavior is people not wearing masks inside the plane. Well, many airlines have different rules. And in Canada, it seems the most consistent rule is you've got to wear a mask. If you don't wear a mask, you don't get to fly. Here's the one hurdle. The oxygen on the ground remains suspect. The biggest risk when flying just might be the airport, boarding, and takeoff and landing experiences. Keeping that six feet of social distance while getting to your gate, into your seat, or deplaning

is probably more important than anything else you can do except for covering your face, says one of the other experts that George Stone talked to. So I find that interesting. I find it particularly interesting about the quality of the air on the plane that is probably better and safer than any other air you're breathing. I mean, if it really is 99.97% pure, that's a pretty good deal. Well, that sounds like an alarm going. So I probably should sort that out.

If you don't mind holding it. Well, that was exciting. The alarm went off. Couldn't find anything wrong anywhere. So it must have been a false alarm or a false, false alarm. Whatever the case, things are back to normal. I was just, I think, I believe, at the point of wrapping things up. I found that article really interesting, but then again, I love to talk about air travel.

I've always assumed that the air inside a plane was better because there was obvious filtration going on, but I never realized it was that good, 99.97%. Tough to get much better than that. All right. That's it for hump day for the bridge daily and the podcast within a podcast, the race next door. We'll be back tomorrow on Thursday with well, whatever seems to touch our fancy. In the meantime, if you have questions or comments or thoughts, as I said, drop me a line, themansbridgepodcast at gmail.com,

themansbridgepodcast at gmail.com. It's been fun. Thanks for listening. And we'll talk to you again, as you know, in 24 hours. Thank you.