The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Welcome To The Second Wave

Episode Date: September 22, 2020

It's here. Says me anyway.

Well, hello there. Peter Mansbridge here with the latest episode of the Bridge Daily. Good to have you with us. It is Tuesday of week 28. Well, we're into it now. I've become a believer that we are now in the second wave. The second wave is upon us. A week ago, I did not think that. A week ago, I was still figuring we were kind of at the tail end of the first wave. The second wave is upon us. A week ago, I did not think that. A week ago, I was still figuring we were kind of at the tail end of the first wave, if there is such a thing as waves, but that we weren't into a second wave yet. I've changed my mind. I've seen enough in the last seven days to convince me we are now into something different. We are into the second wave.

And not just here in this little cozy bubble of southern Ontario, or Ontario, or central Canada, or Canada. We're into a second wave in many parts of the world. We're certainly seeing it in Europe. I think we did see it in parts of Asia of the world. We're certainly seeing it in Europe. I think we did see it in parts of Asia during the summer. The U.S. is the U.S. They got their own issues. But we're into it now, and the numbers keep going up fairly rapidly. I mean, it was only a couple of weeks ago in Ontario that the numbers were in double digits. You know, 50, 60, 70. Today,

almost 500 new cases of COVID-19. And, you know, officials are getting concerned. I guess they're always concerned, but they are worried. And today in Ontario, they were talking about the seasonal flu vaccine, and you've got to get ready to get it as soon as it's here, which should be in the next week or two. Figure out where you're going to do that. And that they have warned there are four or five other measures coming very shortly. Over the next couple of days, they'll be announcing them.

No indication yet, even though the calls are pretty loud, that they should do something with bars and restaurants, in-restaurant dining, strip clubs. I've never figured that out. What is so important about strip clubs to be open? And it's clear that those have been the cause in some cases over these past few weeks of some exposure to new cases of COVID-19. But I haven't understood what the economic benefit is.

Why are they essential services? Really? Strip clubs? Anyway, no indication yet that those areas are going to be shut down. Maybe shortened bar times. That's what happened in England today. Their numbers are going fast up. They're now talking about, in England,

having upwards of 50,000 new cases a day within the next few weeks. So what did Bojo do today? What was his big announcement? Pubs are going to close at 10 o'clock at night. Well, that should stop everything. Man, that's as good as a vaccine. Pubs will close at 10 o'clock at night. See the picture on the cover art for today's podcast?

That's a picture of a London pub. If you've ever been to London in normal times, or this summer when pubs reopened, the big time, or one of the big times for pubs, is around supper and people get out of work. They congregate at the local pub and they spill out onto the street, as you see in the picture. And that's an organized street scene outside of a couple of pubs. Well, that's still going to happen. They're closing at 10 o'clock at night. Many of those people are already home by then,

staggered off, homeward bound. Anyway, at least it's done something, but a 10 o'clock closure of pubs doesn't seem to me like it's going to bring those numbers to a shuddering halt in England. So what's going to happen here? Well, perhaps we'll get our first indication on a national basis what the federal government thinks is happening

with the throne speech tomorrow. Now, I don't know what you want or expect out of a throne speech. Usually they're pretty generic and not detailed, sort of a broad swish of the pen as to what the plans are for the government in this next session. But hey, I'm just a citizen. I'm living in a pandemic. And I'm watching a lot of people around me,

once again, as they did in the spring, get very concerned about what's happening. So I look towards officials. They may be municipal, they may be provincial, they may be federal. But I look for some direction as to what they're planning to do. So I'm assuming, hopefully rightfully, that we're going to get some indication from Prime Minister Trudeau through the speech from the throne read by the Governor General,

who seems to have her own issues. But we're going to get some indication of what the plan is. What are they going to do? They're seeing these numbers. The country's Chief Medical Health Officer, Theresa Tam, today, acknowledging these numbers and acknowledging the concerns surrounding them. What's the plan, Stan?

Let's see. What is the government going to say tomorrow? If you're looking for comfort of some kind from the government federally, then perhaps we'll hear it tomorrow. Let's hope so. Speaking of tomorrow, tomorrow is the race next door. Bruce Anderson will join us. I think we'll look at some fallout from the death of Justice Ginsburg

and the way things are set up to move forward, I guess, in terms of the new nominee and the impact that may have and the questions surrounding the whole decision to move forward by the Trump government, by the Republican Party, by the same group who four years ago said, oh, no, no, you can't do this in an election year, when Barack Obama tried to do it. But they're doing it now,

with literally days to go before the election. To further tilt rightwards the Supreme Court, which is the right of any government. They can appoint who they want under the Supreme Court as long as they can get a pass through the Senate. I don't know. Crazy times. Anyway, Bruce and I will talk about that and other things. I know Bruce has a new poll

coming out tomorrow morning, not on the U.S. election, but on the Canadian political situation, and it may be well worth talking for a few minutes about it as well, given the fact there's a throne speech, given the fact the government could fall at any time because it's a minority.

And we'll talk about what those new numbers from Bruce mean, if anything. So that's the race next door tomorrow, right here on the Bridge Daily. It's the so-called podcast within a podcast. And this will be episode number seven of the Race Next Door, and it's been very popular. I look at the podcast downloads for each week.

Almost every week, the leading Bridge Daily of the week is the Race Next Door episode. I think it's been the leading one every week with perhaps one exception. Now, something else going on this week that normally in past years we'd pay a lot of attention to. What is it, you ask? Well, it's the United Nations General Assembly meetings, when leaders from around the world, from the almost couple of hundred nations that belong to the United Nations,

when their leaders fly to New York and speak at the General Assembly. That's the way it's been since back in the late 40s, when the UN was formed after the Second World War. But not this week, right? The pandemic has crushed the UN General Assembly meetings because the United States told UN member states that anyone who wanted to come had to self-quarantine for 14 days upon arriving in New York. And as a result, it will be a General Assembly like no other.

The behind-the-scenes bilateral meetings between different countries, side events and chance encounters that turn the annual meeting into a diplomat's playground will be absent. World leaders will not be at the podium in New York delivering set-piece speeches, but instead many of them, as was the case today with Donald Trump, will be sending pre-recorded messages from behind their flag-festooned office desks in their capitals. Only national diplomats already in New York will be present in the UN chamber, probably about one per country. Bob Ray, who's Canada's new ambassador to the United Nations,

has been in New York for most days since his appointment last month. So he'll be there. He'll be a busy guy. But it's not the same. It's not the same, obviously, as having the leaders present. So I'm reading a couple of things from The Guardian about this, what they're now calling

Zoom diplomacy. That's how leaders talk to each other now. As the Guardian says, there will be no repetition of the drama of last year, for instance, when Emmanuel Macron, president of France, shuttled through New York hotel suites late at night in an attempt to persuade Donald Trump and the Iranian president, Hassan Rouhani, to bury their differences over the Iran nuclear deal. So there was a lot of drama in that, but obviously, as we know, it didn't happen.

He couldn't convince them. One diplomat with 40 years experience said, the French say you cannot truly build a relationship of trust until you've had lunch with them three times. Through video calls, you can maintain existing relationships. You cannot cultivate new ones. And I get that, right? It's one thing to talk to somebody who you've never met, who you know of perhaps by reputation or by name,

but you don't know them. And it's one thing to talk to them remotely. It's quite another to sit down and have a lunch or a dinner or a drink or a coffee or whatever. You can actually get to know somebody that way. Now, as the Guardian says, arguably the isolation has had a practical impact. Some rounds of talks between the European Union and the United Kingdom were either lost or conducted online. And the latest report suggests some of the blockages

only eased after face-to-face meetings in London. Not sure those face-to-face meetings are going to be happening anytime soon again because of this recent spike in the numbers, not just in the UK, but in France, Spain, Germany, Italy. Now, as the Guardian concludes, that does not mean Zoom diplomacy has no merit or that it has not prompted innovation. Foreign policy think tanks and academia have opened their doors

to find a wider global audience. Jean-Christopher Baugh, the chief executive of the Dialogue of Civilizations Research Institute, there's one I've never heard of before. But he's quoted here saying, actually what we've seen is that Zoom and other digital tools are making dialogue and negotiations more accessible and can help to bring a wider range of people together,

people who would never otherwise have been at the same table. Well, that's encouraging, but that's not the same as the leaders being together versus trying to talk to each other remotely on camera. I've been to more than a few UN General Assembly sessions during my time as a correspondent and anchor at the CBC. And there was always kind of a vibe in there in the hallways of the UN that was inspiring in a sense because here are all these countries together some of them were very different agendas but there they were together and talking to each other and

exploring each other's attitudes and agendas and for some of these diplomats, it was a big deal to give that speech up at the podium. Usually leaders, prime ministers, and presidents, but not always. I remember in, it would have been 1979, when speaking for Canada, the first time a woman spoke at the podium during the General Assembly, and it was Flora MacDonald, Joe Clark's Foreign Affairs Minister.

And I was there for that, and Flora MacDonald was an amazing person, both as just a person and as a politician and as a political leader. She was quite remarkable. As a person there, she was climbing mountains. I think it was Kilimanjaro. I think she climbed when she was into her 80s. But it was a big deal for her and for Canada when she spoke that day in New York at a UN General Assembly. And I was proud to be there covering that story.

Now, there's one other thing I want to read to you before we call this one a wrap. And I saw this in Axios today, the news agency, the online news agency. And it's about one of the books they're reading as opposed to reviewing. Interesting book because the two people who wrote it together are the editor-in-chief of Bloomberg News, so he's based in New York, John Micklethwaite, and the political editor of The Economist, Adrian Wooldridge. So he's in New York. So they're oceans apart, and yet they're working together and work together on a book, which

they call The Wake-Up Call. So we're reading from Axios here. The wake-up call by Bloomberg News Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwaite and The Economist political editor Adrian Wooldridge warns the West about what can happen to great powers that mishandle a pandemic. Now think about this for a minute, okay, before I read on. You've got, I mean, think about how things have gone in this almost first year of the pandemic. When you look at the world in regions, South America, North America, Europe, Africa, Asia,

when you look at it that way, North America, Europe, Africa, Asia. When you look at it that way in regions, which big region has handled the pandemic best? South America? I don't think so. North America? Because the U.S. is dominant in North America, you can't count North America as handling it well. Europe, Europe's had its issues, and Europe's now back into it again.

Not to the degree it was, at least not yet, in the spring, but it's back into it. And there have been issues in some countries on the way it's been handled. Not all. Germany's done very well. Angela Merkel. Africa. Actually, so far, it hasn't been hit as bad as some thought it was going to be.

It may still be. But so far the indications are better than expected. Asia. Actually, Asia was hit hard. Hit first, hit hard, reacted quickly. Now, there's a different political system, and they get away with doing things governments do in some areas that couldn't happen elsewhere.

But nevertheless, Asia, unless there's another bounce back. Seems to have dealt with the situations pretty well. And their second wave incidents seem to happen over the summer and they dealt with them rapidly. So let me go back to this article.

It's really important whether we find a vaccine. It's really important what happens to the economy. But in 20 years' time, if a historian looks back at this year and they say, wow, 2020 was the year when Asia clearly began to get ahead of the West, that will be a much bigger deal. Now, the aim of this book, according to the authors, is to say to the West, Wake up! Most of the things Asia are doing are things we can copy. Not anything to do with autocracy, just simple things like improving schools and so on.

Micklethwaite told Axios, the West's decline isn't inevitable. If you look at bits of the West, they're still massively superior. You look at all the brains and talent in Silicon Valley. That's not really comparative in places like China. The challenge for the next American president is to try and reunite a wider version of the West, which brings in all the democracies of the world.

The current president, as you know, has seemed to have done the opposite. Back to the article. America has to wake up when it comes to the public sector side. What COVID showed is merely having a very dynamic private sector is not enough. Unless people start to think about how to reform American government, America will fall behind. I do, this is once again the authors, I do very strongly believe in the power of American regeneration. So that's just a snapshot of what's in this book, The Wake-Up Call, and it sounds really

interesting to me and one that I'll probably pick up and read. This has been one of the debates that's existed for the last 50 years. Will Asia and China specifically, and India to some degree, end up taking over the dominant position in the world. Economically, militarily, technologically,

and in dealing with things like a pandemic. We may beat this one. We will beat this one. We will beat this one. But there will be another one. Could come in two years, ten years, a hundred years. But there will be more. All right. Are you ready for the podcast within a podcast?

Tomorrow, the race next door with Bruce Anderson joining us. Are you ready for the podcast within a podcast? Tomorrow, the race next door with Bruce Anderson joining us. That's just 24 hours away. This has been the Bridge Daily. I'm Peter Mansbridge. Thanks so much for listening. We will be back in 24 hours.