The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Trump The Wedding Crasher - Smoke Mirrors and the Truth

Episode Date: March 31, 2021

First some good strategy talk on why Doug Ford is attacking Justin Trudeau, and then some pretty funny talk about Uncle Don at a Mara Lago Wedding.

Hello there Peter Mansbridge here you are just moments away from the latest episode of the bridge it's Wednesday that means smoke mirrors and the truth with Bruce Anderson and hello there. Happy Wednesday. I'm in Stratford, Ontario, as usual. Bruce is in Ottawa, as usual. And Bruce. It's great to be here. As always, the truth part of the Smoke, Mirrors, and Truth. Looking forward to another Wednesday chat with you. Well, on behalf of Smoke and Mirrors,

let me ask you about your... You seem today to be surrounded by antibodies. They just seem to be all over you. Antibodies, like I'm two weeks in and I've got the now kind of under a slight cloud, but it probably shouldn't be. It shouldn't be for me anyway. I've got the AstraZeneca vaccine in me two weeks in, and I'm feeling good. I have not had any side effects.

I'm happy that there's a bunch more coming into the country, and I hope a lot of people take it. Yeah, well, you're supposed to be, like, full of antibodies now. You're, like, you've got this wall in you fighting off the COVID, whatever. After one dose, it's like. Spread the good COVID fighting vaccine taking word. That's me.

That's my week. That's my, probably my next few months. Well, I've still got a couple of days to go because I'm, my two week time when the antibodies start being all around me is, I think Friday. So I've got a couple of days to go a couple more days hiding in the basement before i can go anywhere now you still got to be careful right

you still got to be basically life continues on as it has been for the last year you know masks social distancing all of that stuff you don't have to say it that way well well that's basically the way a little different maybe it can be a little different peter come on it's wednesday it's hump day we got to get through the week let's give our listeners a little bit of something to cheer for and you don't mind you know we're both astrazeneca babies here um And you're learning to live with that, right? I actually asked for the kind that adds a little bit of speed to my golf swing. And I got that. I don't know, maybe you didn't ask for that, but I did.

And they told me, yes, not a lot of people know about it. And if you didn't ask for it the first time, you can't get it. But I can't wait. I did not know that. And I wish I had known that because I definitely need. I don't need just more speed. I need follow up. I have this habit of on my golf swing stopping about, you know, a foot from the ball.

Everything's kind of stops and there's no follow through. Yes. Which, you know know vaccine can't help with that's the i mean it still means that i you know drive it past you but just think how far it would go if i had a full follow-through yeah how much farther yeah yeah okay all right well on to enough about that here's what i want to talk talk about first. And it's this issue of when to attack when you're a political figure. Because clearly Doug Ford has decided, the Premier of Ontario, that now

is the time to attack on Justin Trudeau. But Justin Trudeau seems to have taken the approach, I'm not going to fall for that. So I want to talk about that. And the best evidence, actually, of the difference between these two was last week during the interview that Justin Trudeau gave The Bridge last week, where I asked him sort of a number of times to uh to explain why he wasn't uh biting on on um the doug ford temptation with doug ford attacking him why wasn't he responding and so i'm not going to run through

the whole part but here's you know here's a a sense of his answers on that what do you say to ford and and others other premiers are saying the feds aren't getting us these vaccines fast enough we can you know we need more canadians are saying that and i'm saying that i wish we were getting vaccines quicker but we are getting vaccines as quickly as we possibly can and we're working to continue to accelerate them and they're we are going to have everyone fully vax all adults fully vaccinated by september and looking at the horizons that some of the provinces put forward i think it's possible that many many canadians have their first doses

by the time summer rolls around so what's interesting here is that he never even mentions Ford's name. Now, I asked him the question two or three times. He never responded to Ford directly. And he gave the kind of answers he gave in terms of what they've actually accomplished on the vaccine front. But he didn't get into the political gutter, if you will, in terms of a hands-on fight with Doug Ford. Now, what do you make of that? Because there's obviously a number of strategies at play here. Why don't we talk about Ford first?

So why is he doing what he's doing by attacking Trudeau? Well, I think Ford knows that more than anything else, people are evaluating him on the basis of his performance on the pandemic issue. I kind of feel like it's a little bit like politicians, you know, naturally think that the public is giving them a report card with a kind of a grade on math and science and history and biology and so on. And that's almost never true. People don't focus on that many different things in evaluating their politicians. But right now, they're only grading one subject. What are you doing on this thing which has upended my life,

which has made me worried about my health, worried about the health of people I love, worried about the economy, worried about my job. It is the pandemic. So Ford, I think, is following very clearly a strategy of saying, I'm going to try to help people and I'm going to blame Justin Trudeau as much as possible for things that might frustrate people. And I'm going to hope that the media or others don't really kind of pick into the things that I'm saying and take them apart. But I think he's kind of he's built for himself a relative equilibrium in public opinion. He's got as many people in Ontario who like him as who don't like him. And relatively speaking for him, those are bad numbers.

But this is crunch week for him this is the first week when pretty much everybody in ontario and a lot of the media i think are looking at the fact that there's going to there's 720 000 doses in the freezers of ontario right now this morning and there's more coming and if he doesn't ramp up and use more of those doses um people are going to start judging him harshly and they're going to start looking at his commentary about justin trudeau and saying you're just pointing the finger because you're not doing your job and you don't want us to notice that so i think he's this is a crunch week for him and we'll see what kind of grade he merges with you know it's interesting because you know if you go back six months, it wasn't this kind of attack from Ford at all.

If anything, it was, he's my best buddy. I love Justin Trudeau. He's doing everything right for all of us. And, you know, suddenly things started to change and they seem to have changed when more questions were being pointed at Doug Ford and the province's administration of the fight against the pandemic and that could have been you know initially on the long-term long-term care homes and it's now got into vaccine distribution but it seems when the when the focus was starting to be on him and his actions, his focus turned to find a deflection point, to find somewhere else that he could point the public's attention to. And some of that worked on vaccine distribution because there's

no doubt it seemed to be confusing at best at the beginning. But it's seeming to be less so now, although he hasn't stopped pushing the argument. But the transition, the change in his position has been quite something. I think he knows he's kind of on the bubble. And this week is going to tell an important tale. I think the public opinion that I'm looking at, I'm reminding myself constantly of the fact that as of, let's say, October of last year, nobody expected doing everything we can, folks, but who knows not getting us the vaccines. It's still the case that two out of three people are saying, you know, it's okay, that the flow of vaccines is probably better than we expected. It could be better still. But, you know, two people are more satisfied and dissatisfied about that. So Ford is talking to still a minority of people and he's hoping to make them kind of excited and distracted and and and maybe convince some others.

But with the flow of vaccines that's predicted right now by the federal government, it is more plausible to me anyway, as an observer of public opinion, that in the coming weeks, people are going to go, I'm glad the Fed's got this many doses. And if Ford's rollout plan doesn't keep up with that, the attention will turn on him. The criticism will turn on him. You know, what I find interesting about the prime minister's position is I've heard both sides of this in the last week. I've had people write to me or say to me, you know, that was such a mature handling of things by Trudeau in terms of not falling for the Doug Ford attack, just basically ignoring it and moving on and addressing the situation of the number of vaccines. So I've heard that said by some, and I've heard the opposite said by others,

like, come on, what is the matter with Trudeau? Why doesn't he punch back? So let's walk through that. You know, they're, they're competing strategies there.

I think one of the hardest things about being a party leader is recognizing that there are going to be times when your party is looking at your standing and your situation and they see an election coming and they, you know, they have an instinct that they're not doing well enough, that there could be better results, better polling if you were a little bit more combative or if you did something a little bit differently, or if you got your hair cut and your beard shaved. And so that there is a natural second guessing instinct within a party. And in our polling, we've been seeing gaps of three or four points in favor of the liberals nationally over the conservatives. And there's

probably a bunch of liberals who think, you know, given everything that we've been trying to do to help people, that gap could be a little bit bigger, couldn't it? And so the natural instinct for some of those folks is to say, the solution to that is to be more combative. And the hardest thing sometimes for a leader is to kind of think carefully about whether or not that's really something that the public has an appetite for because the data have been really pretty clear that people do not want politicians fighting over their political one-upmanship kind of subjects they want politicians focused on protecting their health making the available, and getting the economy back to something approaching normal again. That's it.

And so if I'm Justin Trudeau, I got to choose between erring on the side of more pugilism that maybe rallies my troops and makes them a bit more fired up going into what will probably be an election sometime this year, or holding my fire and saying the time for me to be combative is in an election campaign it's not right now and i think you know on balance he's probably making the right calculation that people do not want to see politicians doing things that look like they're more about their party's interest than about the interests of people rallying the troops

though is is not an insignificant thing especially if you do think you're on the verge of an election you need those troops to be out there you know working for you fighting for you going door to door doing everything else yeah that may not be possible during a pandemic but the other way of looking at it too is for those who want him to be more pugilistic as you say um they're not going to be voting for doug ford anyway i mean they've already made their decision they don't like ford and you know that matter he's not even on the ballot but you know that the the odds are they're not going to be voting conservative if they want more of an attack on Doug Ford. Whereas they are going to be voting for Justin Trudeau, whether he fights back or not,

or they're going to vote for something other than the conservatives, whether he fights back or not. So he may be in, at least for the moment, a no-lose position by taking the approach he's taking. But I agree with you. When you get into the campaign or real close to one, you've got to start showing that you've got claws too. You've got to start talking to people about things that make them go,

yeah, I better not do that. I should probably think about doing this. And people aren't ready to make that kind of calculation right now, but they will be at some point. And I think that it's always the case that the frame for an election is a combination of what's wrong with the other guy or the other person. And what have I got on offer going forward? So I assume that this election will be no different from that. But I also think that one of the challenges always as a political leader is not to be distracted by the,

the kind of the hot tub of highly charged partisans and Twitter people who are constantly every day, every hour going, I'm mad as hell about this. You should be mad as hell about it too. And recognize that there's a whole other sea of voters who are just trying to get through their day, just trying to manage what their kids learning online and, and, you know, whether they're going to have any kind of vacation anywhere this year. And they don't want to hear that stuff. They're just like,

don't give me that, that kind of Twitter hot tub, highly charged partisan version of life i don't want to know about it and and i think you know trudeau's probably making the right choice but it does come at some expense of people in on his side wondering if he's got the fire does that they want him to have because this has been a bit of a polarizing event where people can look at a Doug Ford or a Jason Kenney or a Donald Trump and say, I don't like that approach. And I want I want it. I want the pandemic to end. And I want you to call out the people who are, in my view, responsible for the bad choices. And we're coming up to an inflection point on that in Ontario, I think, in the next two or three days. And yesterday,

in the kind of the hot tub of frothy opinion that is Twitter, we saw a lot of commentary about Ford saying, you know, I might have to close up again, close up everything in the province again on Friday. And naturally, you know, some people will say, well, if you're going to tell people that you're going to maybe close up on Friday, why don't you close up now? If you're pretty sure that that's what's got to happen on Friday, then shouldn't it happen now? I think that's a risk for him. You know, we keep talking about this as if it's a, you know, a Trudeau-Ford fight and, you know, it is on some of these issues, but the bigger fight for Trudeau is going to be against O'Toole. Does O'Toole, where does he fit in this picture? In the picture of Ford.

I mean, we all remember Andrew Scheer did not align himself with Doug Ford in the last election campaign in what may have turned out to be one of the stupidest moves of a campaign that had a number of stupid moves in it. But he didn't. And here it's hard to see where well i shouldn't say that i i think it is it seems clear that o'toole is much closer to ford's position on this fight over vaccines um than sheer used to be on with ford on other things uh but where does he fit on this

particular battle or does he is there a place for him in this fight well i think he's got a real problem uh that's of a slightly different making i i mean i think his biggest challenge as we saw coming out of that policy convention is his party is not really one party it's at least two maybe more pieces that are kind of together under a brand, but not necessarily together in terms of what they care about. And one part cares about winning and the other part cares about making a point. So he's got that to manage. With the public, he's got a separate problem, which is that he is trying not to take the test on the subject that the public really cares about the most. He wants to be graded on math and biology and science and French and

anything but the pandemic. So he doesn't really talk about it very much. He doesn't talk about long-term care homes and the deaths that have happened there. He doesn't talk as much about whether the vaccines are coming as fast as they should. Remember, that was a major point of conversation for him a couple of months ago. And so what he's got himself into is a situation where maybe he's not doing as much harm to himself as he was when he was criticizing every aspect of the Trudeau government performance on the pandemic, because that created a problem where voters said, you sound like you want Trudeau to fail and we want Canada to succeed. So he's dialed that back.

But now he's just not really in the conversation in a meaningful way. And yesterday we saw him kind of pop up around this comment that Michel Rample-Garner, one of his critics, put out saying Canada needs a reopening plan. And O'Toole kind of endorsed that, said, yes, we do. And I think that, you know, I understand why he wanted to do that. But right now, opinion is really more two to one or three to one. We're almost at the finish line. Let's not mess this up. We need, if anything, we need more stringency rather than less stringency.

And we'll get to a reopening when it's safe to. And the vaccines are rolling in and so i think he's a little at risk of siding with one of his you know prominent critics but taking a position that most of those voters that are accessible to them and that they need to grow the conservative franchise are going to say today is not the day to be calling for that and also there's a big issue of the province's control a lot of the decisions that have to do with reopening you know the federal government can't just say okay everybody reopen everything and and it happens it doesn't work that way um we're going to talk about this reopening thing uh tomorrow with

chantelle on um on good talk and i think it's a you know it is a good talk topic so we'll we'll get more into it and the ups and downs of a reopening strategy and whether it can be a winner for the conservatives to push that but a couple of months ago you mentioned another another name a name from the past and we're going to talk about that name when we come back all right back with bruce anderson on smoke mirrors and the truth your wednesday edition of the bridge um do you like going to weddings? You know, yeah, I kind of do.

Yeah. Yeah. Look, I'll go to anything. Once it's safe, you know, people can invite me to a block party, a wedding. It doesn't matter.

I'm there as soon as it's safe. I was thinking more generally, do you like weddings? I've always found them a bit of a stretch. Maybe it's because I've been to so many weddings over the years but um they they get i don't know i i'm not a big fan of those days although some romantic thing to say yeah wednesday morning yeah i don't like weddings no i said i didn't say i don't like weddings i said i'm not a big fan of weddings.

I mean, I'd be into weddings. All right. More than a few. Anyway, let me back up. Let me try to get into this properly. One of the things that happens at weddings is there are speeches, and they're great. You know, the groom speaks, the best man speaks. Sometimes the parents speak.

Sometimes the bride speaks. not always, but sometimes. And then sometimes you have that sort of crazy uncle who gets up in the middle of the wedding and starts talking. Even though they weren't kind of planned to speak, they end up speaking. Well, down in Mar-a-Lago in Florida over the last weekend, where his Uncle Don was up at the microphone, there was a wedding going on in his hotel in the Mar-a-Lago in his resort.

And he wasn't invited. I mean, it wasn't him. It was people who had rented the space. But who turns up in his tuxedo, you know, in the middle of the speech session. But Uncle Don. And, oh, I guess that's nice when the proprietor turns up and, you know, maybe buys a round for the house or something. But, oh, no, Uncle Don wanted to speak.

So, and guess what he wanted to speak about? Do you think he wanted to speak about the bride and groom who we didn't know? Do you think he wanted to speak about the bride and groom who we didn't know? Do you think he wanted to talk about? How much he loves weddings. He didn't want to talk about that. No. He's not that much of a romantic.

He's a little bit like you that way. Sounds like. Jeez. I really got myself into that, didn't I? Anyway, here's 30 seconds of what he did speak about. And you'll be surprised at the topic he speaks about. Here he is. Do you miss me yet?

No. We were saying we didn't get 75 million votes. Nobody's ever gotten that. They said, get 66 million votes, sir, and the election's over. Well, I got 75 million and they said, but you know, you saw what happened. 10.30 in the evening, all of a sudden they said, that's a

strange thing. Why are they closing up certain places? A lot of things happening right now. I just want to say, it's an honor to be here. It's an honor to have you at Mar-a-Lago. You are a great and beautiful couple. Thank you. Peter, are you familiar with this service that's available online?

I think it's called cameo it's a it's a service where you can say i want um a kind of a a c movie star or a d1 from the 1970s to wish me happy birthday on their phone and uh there's a price for everything like some celebrities will be like a hundred dollars some will be fifty dollars some will be two hundred dollars this has the feel of that that donald is sitting you know in his kind of cheeseburger filled palace down there at mar-a-lago and he doesn't have much to do and they when somebody books a wedding there they go do you want him to come out in his tuxedo and say a few things and it costs you six thousand dollars or something like that it kind of has that feel to it like he didn't mention the name of the couple he didn't say you know bruce and nancy they're such lovely

people i'm so happy to see you again it was just a lovely couple and did you miss me yeah honestly it was it was kind of pathetic um the other side of it is they loved him right the wedding crasher the wedding singer the wedding whatever uh they got their six grand's worth if if they had to pay anything who knows uh i am aware of your thing i've had a number of people suggest that I should go on there, but I am resisting the temptation. I did look at it, and I saw all these kind of hockey stars from the 60s are on there for like 50 bucks. You can get them to say something about, you know, whatever.

But, you know, if this is the way Trump is going to fight back against being knocked off Twitter, listen, he got a lot of coverage for that little clip. I know he was directing it mainly. I really want to get on the bridge. But he also got on a lot of other things in the last few days as a result of standing there and doing his normal thing about, you know, implying that he was robbed of the election yeah this kind of feels though like first of all i'm going to use a fishing analogy like if he can't get people wildly cheering in the banquet hall after drinks at mar-a-lago he's not gonna he's really lost it these are people who've chosen to pay him money to go to his place and have a party. So that's called fishing where the fish are. The second thing is that he didn't really have anything to say.

He could have used that if he really was thinking strategically. To me, he is like a fish that's kind of flopping around for the last few times on the deck of the boat of the fishermen that caught him. He delivered nothing of any news value except the fact that here's this wacky old uncle who used to run things and almost run the country into the ground, and he's barking something at a bunch of kind of drunken revelers at his palace in Florida. So I kind of felt on the one hand, he is like that car crash that we always turn our heads to look at. And on the other hand, and that made me a little bit sad because I kind of wish we weren't always that distracted by that kind of foul player. But on the other hand, he didn't have anything to say it had no impact politically and everybody else immediately seemed to resume going about their business except

for what we're doing which is to say well he can attract attention but he doesn't have anything to say and he has no power well i guess that issue of whether or not he has power is the one that kind of intrigues me because you know what he used to say while he was president was you know you you know the i hate the media the media is fake news and etc etc but you know what you guys will hate it if i'm gone. You'll have nothing to talk about. Your ratings will plummet if you don't have me to talk about it. So be careful about who you wish wins the election.

Implying that the media cares one way or the other. Elements of the media certainly care. And we know which ones we're talking about. But, you know, that was a donald trump truth and it's bearing out to be true because the numbers you know that i've looked at for the various american news channels and the news broadcasts on the main channels are all down since trump left you know they're not intrigued by listening to,

well, how exactly is Joe Biden going to spend that trillion dollars on infrastructure programs, and is it going to go this way, that way, whatever, versus the kind of stuff they used to talk about endlessly in terms of Trump. So, in one sense, there is a Trump truth there. You're going to miss me when i'm gone um and i wonder what that says not about trump i mean i think we you know we tend to agree on on that image from last weekend of how pathetic it was but what does it say about us and what does it say about the the media in general um that they don't have a product

to shop around as much as they did have when trump was president yeah well i think it's an interesting conversation i think there are two things that come to mind for me i think trump correctly observed that the media were vulnerable as a stakeholder group in our democracies. And that's true here in Canada too. And they're vulnerable in the sense that they often can seem to viewers, listeners, readers, as though they have decided that their responsibility is greater than the responsibility of politicians, of people in government, and somehow that they occupy some kind of higher moral ground than everybody else. And I don't know exactly how that evolved, how that developed, but

it does create some distance with the public. And you see it really playing out in various aspects of the coverage of the pandemic, where the public is kind of wanting the information, not necessarily wanting the constant prosecutorial aspect. And I think on the coverage of vaccines, we're going to see more of this tension, where the public is going to want to know, tell me the truth about what's safe and what's not safe. Don't just tell me that it might be unsafe because there is one case somewhere or a very small number of cases somewhere, which is the natural instinct, I think, of media coverage on something like that. So I think Trump identified something that was potentially

explosive um for his use in politics and he did something productive with it in terms of his own campaign i don't think it was good for his party i don't think it was good for his country i don't think it was good for the world but i think he he kind of saw that new gunpowder and he did something with it um but i think the second thing for me peter that comes to mind i'm curious about about you is i feel like people got so tired so exhausted from the outrage that he was causing some of it deliberate some of it not of his choosing, but he was an outrage machine for the world to look at. And add to the normal outrage he was creating for the years before the pandemic, the pandemic, and you had a situation where I think people are at this point,

I'm just glad there's not that much outrage. It's a little bit like my wife and I saying, we're not going to watch any more of these Britishish tv shows because everybody just murders each other on them that's almost seems like the entire british oeuvre of export tv that we still want to see any more of that because we're kind of ready for something that's a little bit more positive and i i think for trump and for his republican party there is a bit of a quandary, like his potential successors kind of know that the public isn't really up for, let's dial up the outrage machine again. And it's not working when they try to do it against Joe Biden. And it's not working when

they try to say, let's reopen and put ourselves all at risk. And so, you know, I'm encouraged a little bit by that, I guess. We will reserve the right to do a full debate on British drama. I still do watch it a little bit. We just don't watch it together. It's just so good. I mean, the writing is so good. The acting is so good. I mean, it's like all so good although

there is a sense that that everybody gets murdered at some point in every small town every small town that's right it's just like bad weather and lots of murder and like a significant proportion of the cops and the detectives seem a little bit shady but other than that the dramas are really well constructed the acting's fantastic on on your larger point about the trump situation and the way people are reacting to it i think there's there's no question you're right that there was an exhaustion level that had had reached been reached by you know by even before the pandemic i think it was starting to kick in. Then there was the pandemic and the nature in which people related to the administration doing a poor job on handling it. And then there was the outright being scared after watching what happened on January 6th. So I think all those things contributed.

My fear is that the further you get away from all of that the uh the desire to you know pick up on stupid little things like the the wedding thing is are going to take off i mean let's face it i didn't want to do the wedding thing you were the one who wanted to do the wedding thing you said peter we've got to do the trump wedding at mar-a-lago well i just want to use that fish flopping around on the deck, trying to get somewhere, but he's not going to get anywhere. We could have done the boat in the Suez. I found that fascinating.

And I like the fact that everybody in the world is like, well, you know, it's still a pandemic, but let's look at that boat. It's a ship. Let's try to figure out when that boat is going to get dislodged. A boat is what you have at your cottage. It's a ship. Let's try to figure out when that boat is going to get dislodged. A boat is what you have at your cottage. That was a ship. And it was a great story. And we did a whole, pretty much a whole bridge earlier this week on it.

Especially for me as a veteran of the Suez Canal. I've been through the Suez Canal twice. You know, unlike you. You don't know. You're lucky to have been in the Rideau Canal. I was in the Suez Canal. Of You know, unlike you. You don't know. You're lucky to have been in the Rideau Canal. I was in the Suez Canal. Of course, I was two years old at the time, but nevertheless, it was an exciting trip.

This has been a really invigorating discussion. I've enjoyed it from top to bottom. Just what you want on a Wednesday morning on hump day. We're getting through it. Another week in the life of the pandemic. We can see the other side. It's that asterisk. Through the smoke and the mirrors we can see the truth.

That's it. That's it. Good to talk with you, Peter. Good to talk with you. We'll be looking forward to having Chantal join us tomorrow for Good Talk on Thursday afternoon, 5 p.m. Eastern. You can subscribe

on a free trial offer at SiriusXM.ca slash Peter Mansbridge. So, you know, register on that one and you'll get a chance to listen to Good Talk. And of course... In the first hundred, Peter is going to send, the next hundred, Peter is going to send you next hundred peter's going to send i will appear at your wedding i'll appear at your wedding he's going to sing there yeah wedding singer uh and of course tomorrow at its normal time the bridge

uh thanks bruce and look forward to talking to you tomorrow that's it for this day on smoke mirrors and the truth i'm peter mansbridge thanks so for listening. We'll talk to you again in 24 hours.