The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - The Race Next Door #7 -- (And A Bit Of The Race Right Here)

Episode Date: September 23, 2020

Bruce Anderson joins the pod again for insight on the US election but also some insight on the thinking behind the Throne Speech and the PM's address to the nation here in Canada today.

and hello there peter mansbridge here with the latest episode of the bridge daily it's wednesday it's hump day and you know what that means it means the race next door bruce anderson getting ready already in our Ottawa studios. We'll be with him in a couple of moments. And I use the term Ottawa studios loosely. He's in his house in Ottawa. So he's like hooking up his phone and getting his little microphone ready. And he'll be with us in a couple of minutes. Time for me to give you the latest kind of vaccine update, because we've been trying to watch this, obviously, over the last six months.

And the story has had its kind of ups and downs in the vaccine story. And you've got a U.S. president who keeps promising it's going to be ready by tomorrow. It won't be. But nevertheless, there is great expectation around the vaccine announcement. And today, Johnson & Johnson, one of the big vaccine makers, announced kind of a breakthrough for them. They're heading into phase three trials now. Those take a couple of months. They're behind a number of other areas.

But they're ahead on something, if their vaccine works, that would make things a little easier. Most of these vaccines are two dosage, so you're going to have two doses over a period of time for it to be effective. Plus, as we've said a number of times in the last week, you've got to be prepared to freeze these these doses at hugely low temperatures, minus 80 degrees in some cases, and transport them around the world that way. That's not going to be easy. Johnson & Johnson says their vaccine is a one-dose vaccine, so that's a plus, and two, it's basically room temperature.

So all those issues about shipping and movement and storage in terms of freezing are not going to be an issue for their vaccine if it works. But phase three is a trial process, and they will literally test it on tens of thousands of people. So on the one side, interesting and promising. On the other side, there's a long way to go yet. The other plus on Johnson & Johnson is Canada has a deal with them already.

So if their vaccine proves to be the right vaccine or a workable vaccine, Canada is already in the line for delivery of the Johnson and Johnson vaccine, as they are a couple of other ones as well. But that one, Canada got an early deal on. And I guess part of that deal is helping fund the research that goes on in it. But nevertheless, so we're on kind of good front, good areas on that. The other stuff that happened on vaccines today was the clear indication from the Food and Drug Administration in the United States that they are not in a hurry to approve anything.

They're going to go through rigorous testing when the companies come to them for approval to sell. And they will let science speak first, not politics. And this is deliberately being said because there is the impression out there, and you know it as well as I do, that Donald Trump wants a vaccine before November 3rd, Election Day, and he's going to push hard to get it out early.

Well, the Food and Drug Administration, the FDA, at least suggesting today that they're not going to be bullied by anybody. They are letting science dictate when and if there's a vaccine ready. Now, there's a reason they're doing this, right? The agency's reading here from the Washington Post this week. The agency's issuing the guidance to boost transparency and public trust as it approaches the momentous decision of whether a prospective vaccine is safe and effective. Public health experts are increasingly worried that President Trump's repeated predictions of coronavirus vaccine by November 3rd, coupled with the administration's interference in federal science agencies,

may prompt Americans to reject any vaccine as rushed and potentially tainted. This is a big problem. If Americans don't trust the vaccine and Canadians and others don't trust it, they won't take it. And the whole idea behind the vaccine and the billions of dollars that's being spent on research towards a successful vaccine is that people will take it to help end this virus. Now, the Pew Research Center, we talked about Pew last week in some of its other findings. They've got a recent finding on how people trust the idea of taking a vaccine, and I'll tell you, in the States, it's not good.

The trust factor has dropped from 72% in May, in other words, would you take a vaccine if it was suddenly made available, to just over 50% now. That's a big drop. So they've got to find a way to build up trust in the vaccine process after clearly having lost it over the last few months where people have felt that it's being manipulated by politics. They want it to be manipulated by science and just science. There's always going to be an element of those who, you know, the anti-vaxxers who are not going to take the vaccine. That's kind of accepted that that will happen,

but not half the population, which is, if Pew is right, that's what those numbers are saying. All right. It's that time. Are you ready? Is Bruce ready? I think he is.

Let's go. of the podcast within the podcast. 41 days to go now before the U.S. election, and we take our kind of spotlight look at it from this side of the border in the race next door. Bruce Anderson joins us, as he always does, on Wednesdays from Ottawa. Bruce, good to have you with us. Hey, Peter. Good to talk to you. Now, here's what I want to start by talking about, and it's kind of the art of the lie. Now, lying is nothing new in politics generally. It's certainly nothing new for this presidential candidate in terms of Donald Trump. However, I found these last few days, since the passing of Justice Ginsburg, everything that's wrong with politics, and not just in the U.S.

But who can you believe anymore when they say things? I mean, we've witnessed Mitch McConnell, we've witnessed Lindsey Graham saying things four years ago in defense of not allowing a justice to be nominated in the final year before an election, to those same people saying, listen, it's okay. It may only be days before the election, but it's okay to do it now because it actually serves their interest. And quite frankly, and to be fair, the Democrats have done a 180 on their position as well in the last four years. And I just look at this as yet another example of why people don't trust politicians. What do you think?

Well, I guess I think that people don't trust some politicians, and they have a little bit more trust for some other politicians. Certainly in the U.S., last time I checked, Congress as an institution was running at about 15 to maybe 20 percent favorability. So really quite low. I think in Canada, we've got generally a skeptical but not quite so cynical audience for politicians. You know, and I guess I think that partisanship has become such a coarsening part of US politics. It's been around forever, obviously, but we're reaching new levels of politicians saying, yeah, I know I said that, but my party wants me to go in this direction, so I'm going to switch. And I think ultimately politicians do that if they think they can get away with it, and if they have no moral fiber. And so, you know,

if people elect people that act that way, then they're going to get politicians that do that, and it's up ultimately to voters to carry some consequences forward for that. LMF, low moral fiber, You know where that saying came from? It came from the Second World War when bomber crews, some of them, and this is the RAF, the Royal Air Force, some of them would turn back, would find excuses why their aircraft were unserviceable,

and they would turn back and fly back to their home base. Or they would get near the target and drop their bombs early and turn around and head back. And when they were kind of discovered that this is what was happening, and they discovered this by putting cameras on airplanes and filming the bombing runs, when they discovered that kind of thing happened, these guys were stamped with the initials LMF, low moral fiber.

So good for you in picking that up from history and transporting it to this year and some of the questions about politicians. Well, it's a big theme, I think, that sits underneath this strange election that we're watching unfold. I think I checked this morning, there's 984 hours to go until Election Day. And there's a lot on the line. There's a lot on the line in this discussion about the court. And I've been thinking about it a lot from the standpoint of how does it come across to Canadians who aren't completely familiar with the U.S. system and why has this become such a big issue

in the United States and we don't really have that kind of debate here in Canada. I kind of focus on a couple of things, Peter. I mean, first of all, in the United States, voters elect sheriffs and prosecutors. It's something that we don't do here. And they're all right, it seems, with the idea of judges at the Supreme Court level having kind of strong ideological views that mean that they can change laws that were passed by elected officials. And that's another aspect of how their system works that we would find quite different here in Canada. We're not generally looking for courts to play that kind of function. It's a quasi-political function. And, you know, I know people can look at it and say, well, does it

really matter that much? And how many issues come before the court where the course of American life can be changed? And I think that's a fair question. But if you're a woman and you care deeply about the issue of reproductive rights, there's no doubt in my mind that this is as soon as Mr. Trump nominates his appointee, this is going to turn into a discussion about, is that appointee going to overturn Roe versus Wade, in effect removing the right to an abortion for women in the United States? And so that's going to add a new issue to an already highly charged election agenda. You know, I always get a kick to a certain, to a certain degree out of the way these nominees end up testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee, because they always seem to say, and it doesn't matter which side of the line they're on, whether they're a Democratic presidential appointee, or nomination or Republican one, they always end up sitting there in the witness chair saying, you know, my personal beliefs or my ideological position does not enter the equation when I'm in

a courtroom and making a decision in terms of the fairness of justice. There, it's strictly on those terms, on what I've studied through law and my feelings about the law, as opposed to my personal feelings. That's what they always say. Nobody ever accepts that in terms of the questioning that's taking place in the Senate Judiciary Committee. But they always seem to say that anyway. Let me try something else on this, because the assumption here is that Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump are really kind of aligned on this upcoming appointment in the next couple of days and trying to get it through in a hurry. I'm increasingly believing that McConnell has given up on Trump. And all he's now trying to determine is his own legacy. And if there's one thing that McConnell has tried to do throughout these past four years

is stack the courts with conservative judges and justices. And this is the last play of the round. If you assume that McConnell believes what the polls are all suggesting, that Trump is in serious trouble with this campaign, that what he's really trying to do here is not save Donald Trump or not give an advantage to Donald Trump, but to continue the buildup of his own legacy

as the guy who put the courts in a position for the next 25 to 50 years. Because a lot of these judges that are going in, not just the Supreme Court level, but across the board, are very young. They're going to be there for a long time. Yeah, I think that's right. These are lifetime appointments. And I think if we look at the balance of the court,

I think the fact is that this would be President Trump's third appointee to the court. And if we accept the logic or the argument, at least, and I think there's merit for it, that the Republican Party has become convinced that it can never be more popular than Democratic Party in terms of with regular voters. And so the only way that Republican orthodoxy can be imprinted upon the country is by stacking the court. And this is a hugely important event in the life of U.S. politics. And I do think, you know, to your earlier point about they all say, well, we'll interpret the law based on our scholarship of the law. I think that's generally true. I think the challenge is everybody's going to want to know if there's a challenge to Roe v. Wade that

comes before you, where do you sit on that issue? And so more than any election that I can remember, we're going to have an election where abortion is going to be on the ballot. And, you know, it does feel to me like that adds another element of kind of turbocharging emotions on both sides of that question. And I guess I do agree with you, Peter, that Mitch McConnell has probably decided that one way or another, his responsibility is to the other Republicans who are on tickets everywhere, where they're at stake, where they're at risk, I guess, and how he approaches that, I think, will require some deftness. But I've been surprised that there weren't more Republican senators who said, you know what, maybe we do need to wait until after the election. I thought there

might be four of them that would stand up for that point of view. And so far, it doesn't look like that's the case. And that would, or or would it argue against those who believe this is all just a distraction this whole issue i mean obviously the justice ginsburg passed away and she died and the and and her brilliant career is being marked appropriately but this whole decision about who replaces her becomes a distraction, taking away from, you know, some degree the Woodward book, taking away to some degree, although I don't think a big degree from the pandemic, that overall it's kind of a distraction, kind of worked in Trump's favor for these few days. Where do you sit on that? I don't really think that we know the answer to that

question yet. I think if I'm right and it becomes a question of what's going to happen with the right to choose or the right to life, depending on your perspective on it, then I think it might turn out to be a very unhelpful distraction for Trump, but also for a lot of Republicans who don't really want to pin their electoral or their re-election hopes on that issue. The question of who turns out to vote on election day has always been kind of at the heart of who's going to win or lose. And so you can look at this and say, well, will the right to life voter be more motivated to go out and vote if the election starts to become or sound like it's becoming more about abortion? Maybe, but I would have had the view that those voters were already going to turn out. Will it, on the other hand, animate more voters who are on the

right to choose side of the question, including more women, to go out and say, no, we can't support this version of the Republican Party, even if we're going to lose this fight about the Supreme Court nominee? It might well do that. So that's what I'm kind of watching for. I don't think we know how it's going to turn out yet, but I think that's the dynamic that's at play. As we discussed last week, these things, in terms of whatever's at the front of the news cycle, seems to change every three to four days.

We are about to see the page turn again on this. Unless something unexpected happens, which it might, the next most likely candidate for the front of the page is going to be the TV debates, because the first one is next Tuesday night, which means next Wednesday's race next door, we'll properly analyze what happens, or at least we'll take a run at it. But as we approach that date everybody kind of knows the stakes on on these things but you're dealing with a wild card and Trump who knows what he's going to do as we witnessed from the from the debates with Hillary Clinton him walking all over the stage and going up behind her and saying all kinds of you know things, which didn't seem as wild then

because we were just kind of getting used to him, but certainly seem wild now when he goes, you know, off script. What are you expecting and what are you assuming is, you know, you've been in enough of these debate preps over the years for a number of parties in Canada. And I'm wondering what you think debate prep is like for these two candidates. Well, I've got to tell you, it's unlike anything that I would ever have participated in, and probably unlike anything that any of the pros in the U.S. have done in the sense that how do you plan to debate Trump and how do you prepare Trump who doesn't think he needs preparation for anything most days?

So those are imponderables, but you have to do your best. So you have to start with some kind of some sort of sense of what you want the debate to be about to the extent that you can control that. And I think if you're if you're preparing Biden, you'd say, look, we want this debate to be about who represents the America that you want America to be, which is these individuals, in terms of their value system, if you could get a glimpse into their souls through this debate, who is emblematic of the America that you want America to be? And I think that you want to make sure that if you're prepping Biden, that you prosecute the case against Trump very effectively on the pandemic,

on the economy, on the sense of instability and chaos that has roiled his administration. And you also want to try to tease out those aspects of Trump's personality that we know we're badly. So his thin skin aspect, his instinct for braggadocio. So those, to me, would be the things you'd be kind of looking for. And that's a difficult mix to manage at the best of times. It's difficult to manage if you've got somebody on the other side of the lectern who's as unpredictable as Trump. And if you were trying, on the other hand, to prep Trump, I think, honestly, you'd be probably trying to get him to stay focused on what has he presided over in terms of the general health of the economy, where does he want the country to go in the future, and to try to limit his forays into self-aggrandizement.

Having said that, whenever he sounds like that, he sounds boring, and he probably doesn't like to sound boring. So I don't know if you're going to be able to do that if you're prepping him, and that's what I'm going to be watching for next week is is there any evidence of prepping of Trump or did he kind of throw away his notes

and just decide to wing it? And on Biden's side, is he able to manage the kind of the chemical combustibility of Trump and pursue a game plan that will work for him? Here's what I'm going to be watching. You know, you're dealing in Trump with a liar. I mean, he has lied consistently, and he will lie throughout next Tuesday night. So who checks him on that? The moderator on Tuesday night is Chris Wallace from Fox, who is a great journalist,

a very solid journalist, and does a lot of good interviews. But is he expected, or will he be expected? And he hasn't answered this question, and neither has the debate commission, I don't think. Who is going to actually, you know, Trump says what he says, and you know it to be untrue. Who calls him out? Does Chris Wallace call him out? Does Joe Biden call him out? Is it a dangerous game to get into? Sort of live fact-checking because there's the potential you're wrong

in calling him out, and then it kind of works in his favor. But at the same time, doing nothing pollutes the airwaves with more lies. And I'm confused, and as somebody who's been in those kind of situations in trying to moderate some form of debate between parties, how do you enter that fray, or do you need like a third party uh do you need a you need a whole separate desk where where somebody is is doing live fact checking and either you know like supering it

on a crawl across the screen or interrupting the the flow of things because if there's one thing we know for sure about tuesday night he's gonna lie it's like second nature to him. I don't think he even thinks about it. It just lies. So what do you do about it? Yeah, no, I think that's a good point, Peter. I don't think he knows on a lot of issues what the truth is, so he feels completely at liberty to say what he wants it to be. And so I kind of feel like if the debate moderator calls out every lie, it'll be like watching a football game where every play has a flag thrown on it and nobody really wants to see that.

It's just going to be horrible from the standpoint of a spectacle. And you've got to imagine that Trump would go ballistic if that was happening. I think there's two kinds of lies, at least, that we can expect to see. One is the kind of a fact-based or statistical lie, and Trump makes a lot of those. And the other is the kind of the rhetorical lie, the America best in the world at this, or I did more than any other president to help African Americans other than Lincoln. That's clearly a lie. But how does Chris Wallace interject and say, here are six other presidents who ostensibly did more than you? So I don't know

how he does it. I think he probably has to let the play, you know, go on more often than not and leave it to the public and the kind of the secondary analysis that will happen as a way to regulate that phenomena. But it's a really good question and I'll be watching for it too. So in other words, you have no answer. I no answer i would let neither do i though neither do i because i yeah i i really i believe you've got a point on this whole issue like a football game or a hockey game where there's penalty every play uh and that would drive everyone crazy um yeah so i you know I'm not sure. If I were Biden, if I were Biden though, I would interject on a few things.

You can kind of know what the lies are going to be about. And, um, and to have at the ready, just how ridiculous some of the things that Trump posits as facts are relative to the truth. Uh, I would do that if I were him. Right. facts are relative to the truth, I would do that if I were him. In part because it shows a kind of an alertness and a mental acuity, which Trump has been critical of in Biden, and also just a kind of a command of the files. I think everybody kind of knows that Trump doesn't really have command of the files. And that if there's an argument for somebody with the longevity of experience in public life that Biden has, it's that he knows the files.

He understands the details of some of these complicated issues. Yeah, but so did Hillary Clinton. And that's the amazing thing. You know, Trump has this ability to, when criticized, turn that criticism immediately on the person who just criticized them and make it sound like they have the have the problem remember that exchange in the uh 2016 debates where hillary clinton um when they were talking about putin said to trump directly and it was it was a great moment said you're putin's puppet and without missing a beat trump turned around said no you're Putin's puppet. And without missing a beat, Trump turned around and said,

no, you're the puppet. You're his puppet. Like there was no basis for him to say that about her. Lots of basis for her to say it about him, but he turns it around like in an instant. And she was kind of floored, didn't have an answer and they moved on. And he like wins that mini exchange, if you will. Yeah. And so, you know, Biden has to be prepared for that. I mean, it would, you've been in these mock debates that, that candidates have with their staff and somebody, you know, pretends to be in this case, somebody would pretend to be Trump up against Biden and, and Biden has to react in the flow of things. I mean, I would, because I agree with you, I bet Trump's not doing anything like that. But Biden

will be and he's probably done a lot of them already and will do a lot more in the next few days. It would be amazing to be inside that room watching something like that. Yeah. Well, I actually think Trump, you know, succeeded against Clinton in part because as kind of weird and unusual is his performance was he was running against somebody who was kind of vulnerable to the argument that she represented the status quo and the kind of the traditional Washington swamp. And, you know, that may have been unfair to her, but she was vulnerable to that criticism because the name Clinton had been around for a long time. And there were people who didn't have such a high regard for her. Biden is a little bit more of a neutral, I think, in this race, and he's not in charge. And so, you know, you saw that spectacle, I guess it was about a week ago,

where Trump was blaming Biden for not doing something about the pandemic, forgetting the fact that Biden's a private citizen and doesn't have the ability to do that. Trump does. So I think Trump's going to have a little bit more of a difficult time attacking Biden. I know that, you know, he's wanted in the past to call out Biden's son's transactions or talk about the health care policy of Obama and Biden. I don't find that any of that has really stuck with voters. And I don't think it'll stick with voters who are kind of interested in the pandemic and the economy as it is today. So I think Trump needs a different game plan from the one that he had against Hillary Clinton, for sure.

All right. Let's leave the race next door for a second and talk about the race or the potential race on this side of the fence. You have an important day today, speech from the throne, the prime minister speaks to the nation. Leave those two parts aside and give me a sense of where, because Abacus Data, which you're the chairman of, has just come out of the field with its latest kind of assessment of the lay of the land in terms of the political parties in Canada.

What is the lay of the land, at least as of when the data was assembled? Well, for sure, people don't want an election and they really don't want politics as usual. I think they're very worried about the pandemic. In some parts of the country, they're more worried about the pandemic from the standpoint of the health risks. But in all parts of the country, people are worried about the economic risks. Can our economy survive this pandemic? How much longer will it go on? What is our plan to get through it? What is going to happen if we have another bad wave and big parts of the economy kind of run out of financial gas? And our health care system cope with what lies ahead. So I think it's interesting.

I think it's a good idea that the prime minister is going on national TV tonight to talk about that. You know, I think it's good that we live in a country where opposition politicians are going to get a chance to say what they have to say about what the prime minister says too. And I think the purpose of doing a live TV broadcast is to kind of say, look, this is not me trying to make politics out of something that isn't necessarily inherently political. It's me signaling that I don't think that politics as usual is what people want. I think they want to know what the plan is. And I think that, you know, if I sort of look at the polling data from the last couple of months, it says to me that the issues that often preoccupy

people who cover Ottawa, who live in Ottawa, who work in a political bubble, and sometimes affect public opinion, but often they don't. And they don't, especially right now. So, you know, people can be frustrated with the WE scandal, but that isn't having a very big impact on public opinion, but often they don't. And they don't, especially right now. So, you know, people can be frustrated with the WE scandal, but that isn't having a very big impact on public opinion. They may be unhappy with the governor general, but that isn't having an impact on Canadian public opinion right now. And none of those kinds of issues are likely to in the foreseeable future, in my view, because I think people are just trying to get through today, this week, this month, this winter. Well, that is an explanation of what the numbers tell you in terms of issues. What about in terms of standings? I mean, there is still this, there's a lot of hype around the possibility that the government could fall. It is a minority government, after

all, it just would take the opposition parties banding up against it on a confidence vote to force the country into an election. Now, whether you think that's likely or not, if it did happen based on the numbers you're looking at now and assuming nothing changed between when those were taken in an election, what would the thing, what would House of Commons look like? Yeah, I think the Liberals would win. I think it's possible that they would win with more seats than they have right now. They have a regional advantage in Ontario. They have a pretty good advantage in Quebec.

They have a very significant advantage in Ontario. They have a pretty good advantage in Quebec. They have a very significant advantage in Atlantic Canada. And B.C. is a kind of a three-way competition. One of the things we have seen is that the support for the Green Party has been cut in half over the last couple of years. It doesn't mean that people don't care about the environmental issues. It's more that they're kind of looking at them through the lens of what kind of government do we want? What are our absolutely most urgent priorities? And I think the Liberals have made a fairly concerted effort to say we can represent those aspirations that people have that lead them otherwise to support the Green Party. I think the question of the NDP is always kind of a big part of whether the Liberal Party.

And when I look at the relationship between the unions in Canada and the Liberal Party compared to the relationship between unions and the NDP, I see that there has been a change. And the unions are working with this government on a variety of issues all the time. And we saw an announcement yesterday where Jerry Dias of Unifor had concluded an arrangement with GM, I think, to bring electric car manufacturing to Canada. And I know that that's something that government is working on as well. I expect we'll hear something about it in the throne speech today. So I think that there are more things going right for the Liberals underneath the numbers. But that having been said, I think there is, you know, there is, there has been some fatigue with the Liberals. And I think if,

if Aaron O'Toole proves to be a leader that sort of says, I'm not going to shake everything up, because I don't think people really want a lot shaken up right now, then he can be quite competitive in this election. And as we know, in 37-day campaigns here in Canada, anything can happen sometimes. That's for sure. Well, okay, so we got our eye on the kind of election ball on both sides of the border, obviously more so for sure on one side than the other. But listen, this has been, as it always is, great insight into the situations. And we'll look forward to talking next week, Bruce, about what happened

in the debate because as I said, the race next door will be on the day after the first debate next Tuesday night. It should be anything but boring. So we'll look forward to a good discussion on that one. So Bruce, as

always, thank you for your insight. Great to talk to you, Peter. Good to talk to you again. Take care. Well, there you have it, another great edition of The Race Next Door. If I'm allowed to editorialize there, I thought it was pretty good. I'm sure you will determine whether it was or not. And don't be shy.

Write us at the Mansbridge podcast, gmail.com, the Mansbridge podcast at gmail.com. Your thoughts on the race next door. All right. Thursday, tomorrow's program. I'm not sure what we're going to deal with yet,

but I'm sure we'll come up with something. And then Friday, of course, is the weekend special. And if you have thoughts or letters or comments, could be on anything, could be on the race next door, could be on schools, could be on vaccines, whatever. Send us along your comments. The Mansbridge Podcast at gmail.com. That is the Bridge Daily with the podcast within the podcast on this day,

on this Wednesday, on Hump Day. We'll be back in 24 hours.