The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Truth Matters - It's All That Matters

Episode Date: February 21, 2020

How a two day trip to southwestern Alberta this week reminded me about the importance of truth.

And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here with The Bridge. Here we are, just past the middle of February. And I mention that because it was kind of the launch of my speech season. When you give speeches in different parts of the country, they usually start, speech season usually starts kind of late January, mid-February. We'll run until June, take most of the summer off. Not a lot of conventions or association meetings in the summer. Some, but not a lot.

Start up again in September, run to kind of end of November, first week of December. So for me, first one of this year, last year was a great year for speeches. I gave, I guess, about 20. And I'm already looking at my schedule for this year, and it should be somewhere in the same ballpark. So first one of the year yesterday, that's Thursday, was in Lethbridge, Alberta. And I haven't been to Lethbridge in about 10 years. Bustling city in southern Alberta, 100,000 people or so. And the speech was for SWATCO, the Southwestern Alberta Teachers Group.

And there were, I think, close to 2,000 teachers there yesterday. And I had the honour of giving the keynote opening address for their convention. And it was, you know, it was a quick trip, as these things usually are. Flew out there Wednesday night and flew back on Thursday night. But for mid-February, it was great. It's a bit of a gamble sometimes, going to some parts of our country at that time of year,

but it was gorgeous all the way there, clear skies most of the way, good view of the country passing underneath, and then that was to Calgary, then a short flight from Calgary to Lethbridge, and not a cloud in the sky the whole time I was in Lethbridge. It was great. And interesting to talk to teachers.

My feelings about teachers are fairly well known. I wrote an article with my good friend Mark Bulgich. I guess it was seven, eight years ago. I think it was 2013. It was online at the CBC. And it was kind of a defense of teachers. We were going through this period of labor negotiations in different parts of the country, including in Ontario.

And teachers were getting beaten around a bit. Negotiations weren't going that well. I wasn't taking a stand on negotiations. I don't take a stand on negotiations now either. But I do place my belief in teachers, in the quality of teachers, in the work that they do. I mean, after all, they are responsible for looking after our most precious asset, our children, and helping them get ready for the life ahead.

And I think it's incredibly important that we recognize their work. And it bothers me when I see others trashing them. Teachers. And while my speech yesterday in Lethbridge wasn't about that, I did kind of refer in a way to my feelings about teachers. I mean, you know, let's be fully transparent here. My daughter is a teacher, has been for more than 20 years in Winnipeg. Mark's daughter is a teacher in

southern Ontario. And so when we wrote that piece, we wrote it from not only our belief about teachers, but also the fact that we had two kids in that profession. But because there are things going on in Ontario, there were thousands of teachers. You know, I got up this morning, I could see them out my window.

It's the office building for Man's Corps Media Services, which is the host of your podcast, The Bridge. My little company has its little headquarters inside a condo in downtown Toronto. And you can see Queen's Park. That's where the provincial legislature is. And you could see all these thousands of teachers out there demonstrating today. Because they are in a situation in negotiations that are tense and ongoing with the Ontario government. And so they were making their positions clear, and they had taken this day off.

They were, in effect, striking this day, one day. And all the teachers were there. So I was watching that. I'd listened to the Alberta teachers who have a contract right now, but it runs out in, I think, about six or seven months, and then they'll be into a situation of negotiating as well, and they could be in this position, the same as their Ontario counterparts, about a year from now. So they're watching very closely to see what happens in Ontario.

Anyway, as I said, negotiations aside, I had strong feelings about teachers. And I was surprised the number of teachers in Alberta who remembered this piece I wrote with Mark seven or eight years ago. And said they still read it every once in a while. They go online and look at it and they show it to their fellow teachers. So I thought I'm just going to share

a couple of paragraphs with you because it's still the way I feel. Once again, it's not about the issues and class sizes and class composition, all of that. It's not about pay. It's not about that, this column. It's about teachers, about who they are and what they represent for us.

Because I just find at times like this when there are negotiations going on that out of the woodwork come all these people who are just crapping on teachers. There are any number of starting points. It's usually the underworked part. And this is where I'm reading from the column we wrote. That argument usually starts with July and August. Teachers get the whole summer off. No doubt about it, that's nice.

But they need the break. I know there are lazy teachers, just as there are lazy bankers, letter carriers, doctors, and yes, there are lazy journalists. But overwhelmingly, teachers are not lazy. In Ontario, the teachers stopped participating in extracurricular activities as part of their fight with the government. This is the last labor negotiation back in, I think, 2013. What an uproar that caused. School plays, sports teams, newspapers,

chess clubs, fashion shows, and on and on. None of them possible without teachers freely giving their time. Critics are anxious to count the summer against the teachers, but they never count all those extra hours in their favor. And sure, classes go from about 9 a.m. to 3.30, but anyone who thinks a teacher's work is just six and a half hours a day doesn't know many teachers. Preparing for class takes time.

Talking to kids after school takes time. Meeting with parents takes time. Mark school takes time. Meeting with parents takes time. Marking takes time. I can't imagine reading through 60 essays on why Hamlet is so sad and writing helpful comments in the margins. You know, we send teachers children from good homes. We send teachers children from broken homes, from abusive homes, from negligent homes.

We send teachers children from homes where both parents work, or where the only parent works, or where no parent works. We send teachers children who leave home without breakfast, and whose grasp of mathematics is grounded in the reality that welfare money sometimes runs out in 28 days or 29 days and can't be stretched to cover 30 or 31. We send teachers children who are new to Canada, children who stare blankly ahead, unable to understand a single word that's being spoken. And we ask that those teachers turn each of those children, each of our children, into productive little citizens. We ask that even though there are 28 or 29 other students in the classroom,

even though there are students misbehaving, even though some parents don't support teachers by reinforcing lessons or by making sure homework is done, or even by insisting that the student listen to or respect the teacher. So, argue the fine points of teacher contracts all you like. I'm not saying teacher unions are always right. I'm just saying running down teachers is wrong. So there you have it. That's how I feel about teachers. And some of you may feel the same way.

Others may feel differently. But when I looked out in that room yesterday, at those almost 2,000 Southwestern Alberta teachers, most of whom, I got to tell you, look awfully young to me. Now, I know I'm getting awfully old, so a lot of people look awfully young to me. But gee, the way I remember teachers in my school, most of them were older. You know, like older. Not so yesterday. The overwhelming percentage looked very young.

Twenties. But they were keen, and I talked to many of them both before and after my speech, and they love their job. Love their job. Love Southwestern Alberta. Most of them were from Lethbridge, not all of them. Love Lethbridge. But they love their job and they love the opportunity that they have to make a difference in a child's life. And you

know, I think we should be grateful and respectful of what they do. Now, while I'm at it, some of you may remember this because I think I mentioned it a couple of months ago. That article that I wrote on teachers, I was co-authored with Mark Bulgich, a longtime friend and colleague of mine at the CBC. Mark was, among other things, was the lineup editor for The National for years,

I think longer than anybody else has ever done it. Most of the time that I did it, The National. Mark was lineup editor slash producer, producer of special events coverage. Some of the big specials that I did in different parts of the world were with Mark. We were at the Berlin Wall together when it came down in November of 1989. Anyway, the lineup editor makes the decisions at night

as to what stories will make it into that use whole, as we call it, how much time will be given to each one, and what order they'll go in, and kind of supervises the evening with the writers. And it's a challenging job with a lot of tension, and when things are breaking and stories are changing, he's one of those who has to make instant decisions. Anyway, Mark and I co-wrote that

and a number of other pieces over the years, and this fall, I've got to be careful not to say too much here because it hasn't been announced yet, but we have a book coming out, Mark and I, Simon & Schuster, and is the publisher. And title, still a secret.

Subject, though, is, you know, we're writing about some extraordinary people, and we're writing their stories, some of whom you may have heard of before, but not all of them. But you certainly won't have heard the stories that have led them into the lives that they lead now and the impact they have on us because of their lives. So I think you'll find this interesting.

We kind of divided up the list, talked to different people, wrote these stories. And we're in the final kind of editing process. I don't know what you know about book publishing, but it takes a long time, a lot of work, a lot of research, a lot of writing, a lot of rewriting, a lot of editing before you get to a kind of final copy, and then you go through the publishing process.

So I think the target date is November for our book, and we're excited about it. And obviously when I can tell you more, I will tell you more. And that should be in the next month or two. So that's what I'm talking about tonight. Talking about teachers. Now, some of you may have expected and even I expected that I was going to come into this Friday evening with something on the blockade situation. But because it is such a volatile story in terms of the changing nature of it,

I think I'm going to wait, because it'll just so quickly get out of date. So that'll be one, certainly for the next little while, to be following on our newscasts as opposed to our podcasts. Unless you just simply want, I'm against this, I'm all for that, I'm mad at this person, mad at that person. But that's not my game, and you know it. What is my game is doing the best I can to tell the truth.

And I found it interesting in the questions I had in the Q&A session with the teachers in Lethbridge, that they said one of their challenges was trying to determine how best to tell some of these stories that are complicated at times. And one of them was this protest. Another one was the polarization that is happening, we witness obviously in the United States, but it's happening here in Canada too around big issues.

Gone seem to be the days of consensus and compromise, replaced instead by bitter rivalries and polarization of opinion. And so the questions that I was getting from the teachers were along the lines of what should we do as teachers in dealing with these issues with our students? I said, look, I'm not an educator and I'm not a teacher and I'm not trained that way, but I am trained as a journalist

and I think there is some similarity to our roles on this point. And what it comes down to, our challenge, is to tell the truth. Because truth matters. In fact, you could argue it's the only thing that matters, is the truth, in helping people understand. And because we're living in a time where truth seems to be not something that's valued that much anymore,

it makes it even more imperative that we as journalists and teachers as educators try to get across the fact that truth does, in fact, matter. It matters very much. It's what, in many ways, our whole system is based upon. I don't know how closely you were following the Roger Stone case in the United States. A lot of untruths told around that. From a variety of people.

But in the court yesterday when sentencing came, what did the judge say? The judge who'd been under bitter attack from everybody up to and including the President of the United States, what did the judge say? The judge said, truth matters. It does matter. It matters a lot. Okay, I have some closing thoughts. I'll give them to you right after this. Okay.

Closing thoughts. And closing thoughts this week will not be from the mailbag, the Mansbridge podcast at gmail.com. The mailbag did have more than a few entries in it this week, but the majority of them were mostly, well, they were really nice, but sort of embarrassingly so and instead of using the mailbag to say how much you like this that or the other thing about the podcast

I think I'll save it for those those letters that have big impact in terms of something you want to say about an issue or about someone so I'll keep that something you want to say about an issue or about someone. So I'll keep that. I'll keep these ones that I've had because you never know. Maybe I'll say, oh, boy, I really need somebody to say something nice.

But I'm going to hold off, at least for this week, on anything from the mailbag. But please, you know, I love your mail. I read them all. And sometimes I respond privately to some. But for the most part, there's something to value, and I do value them. The address, once again, is themansbridgepodcast at gmail.com. The mansbridgepodcast at gmail.com. Now, as I said, this week I was away for a couple of days in southwestern Alberta. Next week I'm going to be in Scotland, leaving Saturday night during the Leaf game.

So that's going to be tough. It's a big game against Carolina. Got to figure out some way. I think there's Wi-Fi on this flight. And if there is, I'll figure out some way to listen or watch the game as we're heading out across Atlantic Canada and then across the pond. But going to Scotland to look at some work we're having done on an old home in northern Scotland in the Highlands.

And we'll see how that's going. Slowly, from what I can tell, it's going very slowly. But we'll be heading over to Scotland. Now, I'm due back next Thursday night. I still plan on doing a podcast

whether I'm back or whether I'm still in Scotland. I love the regularity of trying to do these things every Friday night. So I will try to do that next Friday night from wherever I am. And then I'm only here for a couple of days before I leave on another big adventure, this time to South Africa, Botswana, and Zimbabwe,

an area of the world that I have been to before as a working journalist, but into so many of those trips that we've taken in different parts of the world on the job, you often don't get to see anything except the inside of an edit suite or inside of a recording studio or the inside of somebody's office for doing an interview or standing on a street somewhere doing it on camera. But this is my opportunity to go to southern Africa and do, you know, a little work, but mostly a lot of sightseeing. And I'm really looking forward to it.

It's a longer trip, a couple of weeks. But I'm taking my little podcast gear as well. And so I'll do something from there. It may not be what you're kind of used to, but I don't know. I'm doing it all. You know, I'm going to be on a, obviously I'll be on a plane to get there, going on a train as part of the traveling across South Africa. Going on a small cruise line as part of it.

So who knows? I could be doing the podcast from any one of those modes of transportation. And then I'll feed it back to Willie, my son Will, who will get it out hopefully on time. So the next three Fridays could be from

very different parts of the world. But in all of them, I hope they impart something for you to think about, something for you to consider. So for this week, I'm Peter Mansbridge. This is The Bridge. Thanks for listening. Thank you.