The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Weekend Special #46 - So What WOULD you pay?

Episode Date: January 29, 2021

Special thanks to our listeners for their comments and extra special thanks to Geist Magazine for a great article to read.

And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here with the Friday edition of The Bridge. It's Friday of week 46. It's the weekend special. It's the end of another week. And Fridays, as you know, on the weekend special, these days are always made up of your thoughts and your comments and your questions. And today will be no different. We will have some of that, and we'll also have something a little different.

I've been waiting to drop on you for a couple of weeks because I think it's really neat and fun and maybe put you in the right mood for the weekend. If you were with me yesterday, you know we closed off the podcast yesterday, by asking a question. How far would you fly and how much would you pay to get a vaccine? In other words, if there was somewhere that you could pay for a vaccine,

like right now, doesn't matter how old you were, whatever, bang, you'd pay. How would you do that? Now, this was based on a piece I read yesterday from the United Kingdom, where a travel company in London is offering trips for thousands of pounds, 20,000 pounds, I think. You'd go to United Arab Emirates. You'd have to spend 10 days or two weeks there to satisfy the quarantine rules,

but you'd get your vaccine. You'd stay in a luxury hotel. You'd eat great meals. You'd go desert safaris, whatever. Now, obviously, you've got to have the bucks to be able to do something like that. And that raises all kinds of questions, right? So anyway, I asked the question,

how many of you would go anywhere, pay anything to get a vaccine? Well, the overwhelming answers were nada. Wouldn't do that. It's not morally right. There were one or two who said, hey, I'd look at it if I had the money. But the overwhelming majority of those of you who wrote in

to the Mansbridge podcast at gmail.com said very clearly that they would not do it. Fine. I'm not going to read all the letters because they're all very similar. I will read one. Erin Conser writes again. You know, she's a great writer. I got to admit.

But she says no in an interesting way. So I wanted to read that with you before we move on. So Aaron's in Sherwood Park, Alberta. I was intrigued by the last portion of yesterday's podcast where you asked the question of how much would someone pay to jump the line to get vaccinated. It stuck with me, not just as this is something I wouldn't think about doing, but that I think a better question, here she goes, you know, wants my job.

I think a better question to ask is, who would you give up your spot in line for? Interesting question. The wealthy of the world will always be able to buy their way to the front of the line and politicians will always use the existence of the line to debate ideas and show inequality. But on an individual level, we need to think about who we would go ahead of us, who we would give our dose to, so that someone else may get vaccinated sooner. Now, I read this with some trepidation because I don't want you all to think,

and I don't think Aaron thinks this necessarily, but I want to make the point. Not all wealthy people are out to screw everyone else and just look after themselves. In fact, of the wealthy people I know, it's quite the opposite. A huge amount of their time and their money is dealing with charity and dealing with people other than themselves. However, we get your point, Erin. Being in health care, perhaps, reading from her letter again, being in health care, perhaps it's in my nature to think of the person I'm helping more,

to focus my attention on who I may be helping. But I would gladly give my place in line to teachers or daycare staff, to a family who may be grieving so they can mourn together, to someone who's in a shelter and wants to feel a bit more safe. Well, there you go. Thanks, Aaron. Good letter, as always, even though you want my job. I'm going to rewrite the podcast, come up with new questions,

toss everything else out. Moving on. Some of the other letters I received this week. There were quite a few this week, but I'm going to kind of narrow it down to one area, which I'll get to in a second. First of all, Lou Fuji. And these are the kind of people we like to hear from, too.

This is Lou's first letter to us, to the bridge. Hi, Peter, I'm Luca, and a millennial listener of your podcast I never watched you on CBC as I got into politics by the time you had retired from the National I just got inspired to write after listening to your latest episode with Bruce I guess this was Wednesday's

talking about the Axios article which is a great piece about their new kind of journalistic policy. There are 10 rules that are going to guide them. But what Lou is talking about specifically was their promise to deal with news and their promise of trying to define what news was and is in today's world. So Lou says,

Your perspective inspires me to continue to search for facts and what the story is. So much of what news is these days is opinion. That's what Axios is trying to get rid of, they say. And that is important when considering the state of our democracy these days. Perhaps if we all just focused on facts, we'd be a lot better off. The problem, Lou, is that there's a disagreement as to what is truth. In other words, what are the facts?

Are they your facts or my facts? Your truth or my truth? That's what happens here. Here's another interesting letter that came out of all the discussion this week about vaccines. It comes from... It's unclear what Martin's name is is it may be martin marcin hello peter i've been enjoying your podcast since last april well good for you so is it all about money probably is and that's very disappointing and if not then i don't understand what happened

with that global working together towards achieving one goal of a vaccine, to get this pandemic under control and hopefully put it behind us. That's before any of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines were on the table. And at that moment, where there was one or two vaccines approved, Pfizer and Moderna, why that recipe was not shared with other companies, the companies known around the world that have capacity and potential to produce way more quantity than just Pfizer and Moderna. This is an interesting concept.

I mean, listen, a lot of these other companies, Johnson & Johnson came out today, in terms of their efficacy rates, They obviously believe in their vaccine. They're not going to junk it all to start making somebody else's vaccine. That's my thought. Back to Martin's letter. I'm sure that every one of them will make a fortune and whoever developed the one could make the biggest share,

so why not work together to put those terrible times behind us just wondering maybe you would know how this politics works well i don't think it's politics i think you know there are obviously certain copyrights on certain vaccines but you know they everything i've heard i don't know about the companies themselves, but the researchers have all been kind of working together around the world since the beginning on how best to follow through on these. And everybody is trying to, you know, all these different places are trying to come up with their own vaccines, but they were talking to each other about the kind of things they were discovering in the hunt for the vaccine. So there was cooperation. I'm not sure that it extends to the point of saying,

okay, I'm going to stop making mine. We're all going to make this other one. It's an interesting concept, though, and if the belief is that if they all made the same vaccine, we'd obviously have a lot more of that vaccine available. However, other vaccines that they're working on and they believe in may be a better vaccine. Maybe easier to make. May not have this two-step process. May not have this deep cold process

that Pfizer, for one, needs to go through. But Martin, it's an interesting concept, and I'm glad you raised it, and I'm glad we talked about it, and we can now think about that. Now, on Tuesday of this week, we went inside someone's home. Young couple, husband's a teacher, the wife's a professional in the media.

They're both working from home. They're in Ontario, so the teaching is remote schooling. So the husband's teaching from his area of the house the wife is doing her thing for her job from her area of the house but they also have two kids so they have also got to look after their kids and the problems that have incurred as a result of that there was a very honest, delicate, refreshing, inspiring, and worrying conversation. All those things at the same time. And it did spur quite a few comments from people. I'm going to read two or three of them here because there's a certain similarity to them. And all the comments came from people who were in similar situations.

So the first one comes from Patrick Mass. He's in Waterford, Ontario. Peter, I've been listening to The Bridge since you began episodes during the 2019 Canadian federal election, so it's almost a year and a half ago now. Though I've always enjoyed your presentation of stories and information, I have never felt the urge to write to you. I've never been one to reach out in this way to any media personality, really.

Since listening to your latest episode, an inside listen at the pressure of remote learning, I have to let you know that I greatly appreciate you taking the time to put this out. My situation is almost exactly the same as John and Laura. My wife is teaching online. I'm working from home for the most part and struggling to get everything done in a day. Our oldest is in grade one online and our youngest is in daycare. It brought me to tears to hear another family going through similar struggles due to the pandemic. I know there are plenty of people in similar and often more difficult situations than us. But listening to John and Laura say almost word for word many things that my wife and I have said to each other throughout the last few months really help justify many of the feelings, good and bad, that we are dealing with every day.

So thank you. Thank you for all of your work over the years that I have enjoyed, and thank you especially for this episode. Please pass on my thanks to John and Laura as well for sharing their story and let them know that it really made a difference in at least one person's long day that I am just trying to get to the end of. A great letter, right?

Patrick Mass, Moss, Waterford, Ontario. This episode, by the way, if you didn't hear it, whether you're a parent in a similar situation or not, is really worth listening to. It was the Tuesday episode of The Bridge. So you might want to go back and dial it up. It's really good. Next letter, same subject.

I think I've got two or three of them here. Sarah McDonald writes. She's from Toronto. She's a mom of a JK kid and a grade four boy. She's also a full-time lawyer. Thank you for Tuesday's episode where you spoke to the working parents who have the two small children, one of whom is in virtual school. They described pretty much exactly how I'm feeling,

and I was nodding along all of the way. I often feel alone in this, since many of my colleagues have different family situations than I have. And I felt, listening to this, since I know where there are lots of people out there who are doing exactly the same thing as me. I also consider myself to be so fortunate, like the people in this episode, since we have devices for both of our kids, reliable internet, jobs we can do from home, a car, no worry about paying for food or utilities, and the ability and desire to help our kids with their classes. For what it's worth, I think kids are pretty adaptable and resilient, and many of the things that we are concerned about probably won't really turn out to be a big deal. The adults, on the other hand, well, hopefully we will be stronger for it.

Great letter from Sarah MacDonald. And, you know, Sarah, I'm so glad you pointed out, you know, you obviously, John and Laura in that episode, and others I've heard from, are, you know, as difficult as their situations are, they're in a pretty good situation. You know, they've got, as you say, they've got reliable internet, they've got jobs they can do from home, they've got a car, they've got no worry about paying for food or utilities. And they have the ability and the desire to help their kids with their classes.

Not all families enjoy those benefits. Not all kids enjoy that attention. Important to recognize that. Here's another one. It's from Jonathan Castell. And I know Jonathan because I worked with him a couple of years ago now. He's a videographer, a great camera person

on one of the documentaries I was working on. So Jonathan writes, Hey Peter, still listening to the podcast. Hope you're well. Cool guests last episode. Maybe I will bump into them sometime. As for the future, the education system is in trouble. It was before the pandemic and will be after.

My partner is a teacher on contract with the TDSB. I believe that's the Toronto District School Board. I never see her. From the Google Classroom teaching, class planning, communication, searching for resources, then purchasing them, grading and report cards. Classrooms are crippingly underfunded. There are no classroom resources. It would be an interesting poll on how much teachers spend out of their own pocket on resources per year. I bet it's close to $400,000 a year. I see the teaching profession is going to see a shortage

of staff. Sure, the pay is good and you get summer holidays, but these days there are many jobs young people can get that pay the same and get endless days off. Retirees once used for subs now don't want to work in class, and some don't have the tech knowledge to teach from home. Anyway, life goes on. All the best, John. Okay. I told you I was going to do something different for the last one of these. It's not a letter, but it's an article that my buddy Mark Bulgich sent me. And Mark, of course, is the co-author of the instant number one bestseller,

Extraordinary Canadians. That's the book Mark and I wrote, which came out last November and did extremely well in the whole run-up to the holiday season. And we're very proud of it and very much appreciative of all of those of you who picked up the book and clearly enjoyed it because many of you wrote to me. Not just to get a book plate, but wrote to talk about the book. And we appreciate that very much.

Book's still out there. You can still get copies at any of the places that you buy books, including your local bookseller. Anyway, Mark, who is from Montreal, he saw this and he sent it along to me. He says, you might like this. And like it, I do. It's from a Canadian magazine that you may or may not have heard about. It's called Geist.

It's published four times a year. It's a Canadian magazine of ideas and culture. Every issue brings together, I'm reading from their little plug on the internet, every issue brings together a sumptuous mix of fact and fiction, photography and comics, poetry, essays and reviews, and the weird and wonderful from the world of words. All right, I'm going to try and do this world of words item

some justice in the read. With full credit to Geist and the author Jordan Catalano. It's called Goodbye and Good Luck. And if you've had to travel anywhere in the last 10 or 11 months

especially by cab then you might relate to parts of this article okay so we're going to give it a whirl here and see what you think. Once again it's called Goodbye and Good Luck. The cab pulls up in front of my Montreal apartment. I'm wearing an N95 mask. I put on gloves holding

my arms up so the driver can see. I open the door. Wait, wait, wait, the driver shouts in French. He struggles to get a wipe out of the dispenser on the seat next to him and then gives up. Okay, fine, he says. He looks upset as he half turns to look at me. He's middle-aged, with dark skin, a bald head, and very dry hands. The only instructions I was given over the phone were to wear a mask and gloves, I say in English. Next time, let me open the door, okay? He replies in English with a heavy French accent. Fifteen minutes later, we pull up to the emergency at the Jewish General Hospital. I tell him we have to go to Pavilion N.

Why didn't you tell me that before, he asks. I told the cab dispatcher. I'm sorry, I say. He yanks on the steering wheel, does an illegal left turn, and then guns it to Pavilion N. Are you going to tip, he asks. I guess so. Fif to tip, he asks. I guess so, 15%, I say. It's $20 extra to go to a test site for cleaning the car after. The total is $50, he says. And don't touch anything while tapping the machine with your card.

I tap, but it doesn't work. We try again, and it doesn't work. You're tapping it too fast, the driver says. We try again, and again, it doesn't work. I can use my bank card if you wipe the machine before and after, I say. He punches 5 and 0 into the keypad and passes me the machine. I punch in my code and pass it back. He has a hand wipe spread over his hand, holding it open to receive the machine,

like a doctor helping to deliver a newborn. The driver gets out of the cab, opens the door for me, and I get out at Pavilion N. Two heads appear beyond the big sliding doors, hands held in a stop gesture. It's raining, and other than the cab driver, I'm the only person here. The cab driver wipes down the seat, belt, seat, and door. Then he gets in the cab and drives off. The hands in the window motion to come in. A security guard says, French, English. He's tall, black, muscular. Then he tells me to wash my hands.

A nurse sits at the registration desk behind plexiglass with holes in it. She asks my name, address, place of work. She tells me to face the wall in the corner. I face the corner, but peek behind me. One of the adjoining walls is made of paperboard. A slip of paper emerges from a small slit in the paperboard. A nurse, round, dark-skinned, ponytail, appears out of nowhere and grabs the slip of paper. The security guard says, you can turn around now. The nurse says, follow me but stay two feet back. I follow her.

The security guard sizes up the space between the nurse and me and gives me double thumbs up. The nurse stops at a hand sanitizing station and hands the slip of paper to another nurse with a high blonde ponytail who puts the paper on a clipboard and starts rattling off questions. French or English. What are your symptoms? Have you traveled in the last 14 days? Have you been in contact with someone who tested positive for COVID-19? Have you had a nose job in the last 10 days?

I love that one. Like out of nowhere. Have you had a nose job in the last 10 days? Any other surgeries to the throat or nose in the last 10 days are you immunocompromised i'm instructed to follow the pink and black tape on the floor all the way to the room at the end of the hall without touching anything where five more nurses wait one of them scrubbing the walls. At the back of the room are two smaller rooms with glass doors.

One of the nurses, her hair in a bundle, walks in front of me, telling me to walk along the path. Another nurse observes the whole operation. In one of the small rooms waits a nurse in a protective mask and hood over her medical scrubs. She holds the door open with her body. The pink and black lines on the floor narrow as they get closer to the door. She tells me in French to walk directly to the chair in the corner of the room and to hold my arms and bag close to me. Then she says, I'm going to insert this swab in your nose. Do not pull your head back. Do not push my arm away. Please pull your mask down over your mouth. She jabs the swab

up my nose and holds it in place for 20 seconds. It feels like blood is gushing from my nose. Then she says, you should get your results in 24 hours. Do not leave your house until then. Do you have any questions? Okay. Good luck and goodbye. Isn't that great? That's how you get your test. That's how you get in a cab. And if you've had nose surgery in the last 10 days,

you better make sure you're able to tell them that. If you've had a nose job. And you know why that is. Because one of the symptoms of COVID-19 is you lose your sense of smell and taste. And obviously, they don't want you there if you don't have a sense of smell just because you had a nose job. Anyway, I love that story. Beautifully written. Jordan Catalano for Geist magazine.

Gives us something to think about. On this Friday of the weekend special for week 46. Now, as I mentioned yesterday and as I've mentioned a number of times we're going to do the transition to a new distributor of the podcast as of Monday there are some technical things that have to happen to make this work and we'll be doing those starting not long after this podcast has been put up and onto your various platforms later today. And we'll spend the weekend trying to make sure that it all works. So with any luck on Monday, the regular podcast will be there. Now, there are a number of things to tell you about that.

I'm going to put out a special short, probably five or ten minute podcast. I'm looking at likely doing this on sunday afternoon so you'll have it sunday evening if you listen to podcasts at all at that time which will give you some sense of uh what's going to happen i'm excited about it i think it's going to be great it's only happening because of you because of your interest in the bridge and the uh the great numbers that you have shown in terms of listening to the bridge downloading it we're around one and a half million downloads so far in a year and that's a huge number for podcasts i'm told i mean i don't understand these analytics at all but one and a half million on a podcast is apparently really good. And as a result,

it was very attractive to a number of potential investors in the bridge. And that's why what's happening is about to happen. After doing this for nearly a year and a half as a little hobby out of my house, I'm still going to do it out of my house. I'm still going to try to do it as a little hobby. It's not a newscast. It's sort of a rant and a ramble and trying to throw things that are of interest, I hope, to you out there. I'll still have that as the kind of guiding principle,

and I know if I get offline on that, I'm going to hear from on that i'm going to hear from you i'm going to hear from the air and concerts and all the other regulars who i've been hearing from for a year and a half and us and as i've said more than a few times i love to hear from people who say you know this is the first time i've written to you i've listened for more than a year or love the podcast I've finally been inspired to actually sit down and write something to you. Love to hear from those of you who write for the first time. Obviously, you don't read all the letters on the air. Just read some of them.

But I read the ones that I think are, you know, have a real sense, capture kind of the spirit of the country or the region or the city of that time and of that day. All right, off for the weekend. Hope you have a good weekend. It's cold here in southwestern Ontario, but the sun's out, and it looks great out there, and I, you know, this is a difficult time. We're being asked to stay home. And for the most part, I think we're doing exactly that.

But staying home doesn't mean you can't go outside. You can't go for a walk. You can't get to a park. You can't skate. It's been cold enough here that the ice is frozen over in the Avon River in the middle of town, mostly frozen over. Somebody dropped through the ice the other day, and it's not deep, and there were apparently no problems as a result of it. But there are all kinds of areas where the ice is thick enough, and there are great little skating areas. And that must be the case in many parts of the country

where it's cold enough for that. And there's nothing prettier and more Canadian and more winter scenery than looking out and seeing people skating on a local pond or a local creek or river. Socially distant. In some cases wearing masks. The important thing is

keep your distance. Stay away from others. Right? Wear a mask when you can. Always wear a mask when you go out for any area where you're going to be anywhere near people. You know, grocery store, post office, pharmacy, whatever. So keep all the basics in mind, the washing hands, the masks,

the social distancing, and staying away from crowds. We're going to get through this. It's going to happen. There will be a better day. All right, so listen, have a great weekend. Look for something from me, something short, five or ten minutes, probably on Sunday. And Monday's a new day, although for 99.9% of you,

it's going to sound just exactly the same as it's always sounded. It's mainly a kind of behind-the-scenes technical stuff that's going to happen. All right. Great talking to you, as always. And we'll talk again. Probably Sunday. I'm Peter Mansbridge. This is The Bridge.

Bye for now