The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - "What Can I Do?"

Episode Date: June 2, 2020

What can I do? That's a common question over the past few days for those who aren't near the centre of the George Floyd story but do want to do something. Some thoughts on that and more.

and hello there peter mansbridge here with the latest episode of the bridge daily as we've entered week 12 and i start with a thank you for letting me have Monday off. It wasn't like I was relaxing. It was a busy day. As I mentioned on Friday, Monday was going to be the day that I helped move our son Will into his new apartment in Toronto, and things went well, although I got to tell you, when you come from Stratford and you go into Toronto, it's a very kind of strange feeling. You know, Stratford's a small town, 32,000. Toronto is, well, it's Toronto. And you expect to get swamped by the crowds and the cars and whatever else.

That doesn't happen right now. I mean, there are parts of the city that look relatively busy. I mean, construction seems to be going at a fair pace. But there are other parts of the city that are really quiet, very quiet. You know, there's a place on University Avenue in downtown Toronto where I've often, in the old days, like three months ago, I used to go and grab a sandwich at lunchtime. If I was too busy, catch a sandwich, take it to go.

And I wondered yesterday, let's try and get a sandwich there. I wonder if it's open again. Called, and it was open for curbside pickup. I got there. There's, you know, when I used to go there in the old days, three months ago, there were at least four or five people working there, at least that many. And it was always packed because it's right in the middle of an area of a lot of downtown offices.

Get there yesterday, nobody in the line, one person working, the owner. That's tough. You know, he just opened up, I think, two weeks ago. And because he's right in the middle of all the big downtown offices, it's a tough, tough slog to get customers. But he was very appreciative that I came by. But boy, that is a difficult situation. So I imagine that you spent your last few days the same way that a lot of people have, which is trying to understand what the hell is going on in the U.S. Well, really, it's pretty simple what's going on. What's going on was as a result of one thing that happened last week, a terrible, brutal thing.

The murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis policeman, at least one. He's going to be tried. He's being charged with third-degree murder. Third-degree manslaughter, I guess, murder and manslaughter, whatever the case, it set off all kinds of things, some of which have been constructive, like the demonstrations and the protests. Others have not been constructive at all. They've been destructive. And some of them have been created as a distraction,

a deflection. We talked about this last week. You know, we see one every couple of days now or every day by a certain president of the United States who is trailing so poorly in the polls because of the disastrous performance of his administration on the COVID-19 story. He's trying to get everybody to focus on certain elements of this story. Well, certain elements of this story are worth focusing on, even in the middle of the pandemic, and that is in the inequalities that still exist in our society. Clearly, they exist south of the border, but as some have been saying, north of the border, we have our own issues on that front as well.

So the most common question I've been asked in the last few days, and I've got it in person, I've also got it by email, is what can I do? What can you do about the issue of inequality, certainly for people of color in the United States? Well, you can start by making your voice known, and that's what we're seeing a lot of. That's what you see on the cover art today. That picture of a protest, Black Lives Matter signs, that was here in Stratford yesterday.

Small town, small protest, 100% peaceful, but people making their voices heard and their feelings known and good for them. Now, I'm assuming that's happening in lots of places, small towns, big cities, in different countries. You've seen the protest marches in Berlin and London and elsewhere around the world. Most of them have been entirely peaceful. Some not so much.

Once again, some of them a distraction from what is the main issue here. But you know what I want to tell you? I want to tell you somebody that I heard yesterday that made a real impression on me on this story. You've probably seen over the last few days, if you follow social media at all, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, you've probably seen a lot of different professional sports teams getting involved in making it clear to them what needs to happen in terms of attitudes of society.

Now, when professional sports teams all start to do it at roughly the same time, and some of their athletes do it at the same time, you figure, okay, this is kind of being orchestrated. That's fine. It's what they're saying that's important. But yesterday, as I was driving back to Stratford from Toronto, I wanted a break from all this stuff. And so I turned on one of the sports stations, radio stations, in Toronto as I was leaving Toronto.

And, you know, they were dealing with, will baseball be back, will hockey be back, blah, blah, blah, all the different things. And then I popped an interview with the captain of the Calgary Flames, Mark Giordano. And then I popped an interview with the captain of the Calgary Flames, Mark Giordano. Giordano. Sorry. Won the Norris Trophy last year.

Best defenseman in the league. Also, as I said, the captain of the Flames. And they were asking him about, you know, how ready are you guys and how anxious are you to get back playing again and so on and so forth. He brought up COVID-19 issues, which are obviously the safety question is a big part of whether or not the NHL will be back. But then somehow they also turned into this issue of what happened to George Floyd and the impact it's had on the discussion of all of us. And so I wondered, what's he going to say? What's he going to say about this?

And what he said was really interesting. When he was asked, what are you going to do? What can you do about it? And the first thing he said was, I decided I had to read about it. I didn't know enough about the issue, the overall issue. I decided I had to read about it. I didn't know enough about the issue, the overall issue. And I thought, good for you, Mark Giordano.

Good for you. Because a lot of us could do that. And there's lots of material out there to read other than the headlines and catching the 24-hour news cycle to see which city is blowing up next. Read about the issue. Understand the history of inequality. understand how far we've come or, in fact, how little distance we've traveled on this issue, that it still exists in 2020. So Mark Giordano talked about how he had spent time over the last few days

reading and studying and understanding the issue. And I gather, you know, probably teaching his kids what he'd learned. And I thought, that's great. That's great. How many people can say that, that that's what they've done with their last week on this story? Okay, a couple of things on issue, well, two and three, really, which are related to the reason we do this daily special,

broadcast, podcast, The Bridge Daily. We're doing it because of COVID-19. And when I heard the number roll out today for the different provinces, particularly, obviously, I focus on Ontario because that's where I live, and I see another spike. Went up, you know, up in, I think, the high 400s in the last 24 hours,

the number of those who tested positive. A couple of weeks ago, they got it down into the high 200s. Now it's back to the high 400s. And you go, is this all a result of that Trinity Bellwoods Park thing 10 days ago? Because those would start to be kicking in now if there was a significant degree of infection as a result of that park chaos where people were far too close together and drunk,

many of them. And the health official said, well, it's possible it could be partly due to that, but that may still be yet to come. The main reason for the jump in today's numbers was actually something that we talked about here on the Bridge Daily six weeks ago. Remember, we wanted to focus on, aside from the frontline workers and the first responders, we also want to talk about grocery clerks, and we wanted to talk about grocery clerks and we wanted to talk about truck drivers

and we wanted to talk about farmers. Well, when we were talking about farmers and eventually the aid that they got from government, one of the big issues facing farmers, and they knew it, was what was going to happen with the migrant workers who they bring in every year, especially farmers in certain parts of the country. Ontario is one.

Manitoba has some. BC has some. Who come into Canada with special dispensation to get into the country to work on farms, picking crops, fruit, vegetables, whatever it may be. And one particular area that we talked about on that podcast was up near Simcoe, Ontario, which is north of here, up near Georgian Bay. Great growing area, and an area that has particular interest for migrants, and they do a lot of stuff with the migrants who come in there

in terms of special days in town and festivals, etc., etc. But as we mentioned on that podcast, one of the issues that concerned them at this time was the fact that the farms that used migrant workers had built special areas for them to live, like bunkhouses, but really nice ones from everything I've heard. But the issue was they were going to be pretty

dense. A lot of people in those. And the problem with a lot of people in one area, you get somebody who's contacted COVID-19, it's going to go through there like boom. Well, that's part of the reason the Ontario numbers went up today.

I think it was 120 on one farm. 120 cases where it tested positive. Another 20 on another farm. That's part of the reason the Ontario numbers went up so rapidly today. And they're fearful that there could be more just like that. So while long-term care facilities remain the front line of this disease in both Ontario and Quebec, we may be seeing a new area developing. All right, the other issue in issue three and the final issue for today's podcast, which by the way, if you want to write to, you can

always get me at the Mansbridge podcast at gmail.com the Mansbridge podcast at gmail.com um the final issue has to do with and we've we deal with this every few days and I think it's great that we do and this is the issue of the impact these two or three months so far, and who knows how long this is going to last, has had on people's attitudes towards work, especially those who are working at home because they're not allowed into the office. They're expected to work, but they work from home.

And we've been back and forth on this, you know, what's good, what's bad, who likes it, who doesn't like it, and there's clearly a split among employees. Some love it. Some love working from home, and they're very productive at home. I remember a number of boards, and I was on one board meeting. We're not at them anymore. We're at the Zoom board meetings this morning where this issue came up, and it was clear from those who are monitoring the situation

at this particular operation that there is a bit of a split among employees. Some people love it. And they're monitoring the situation as though they're extremely productive. Others miss the office. They miss it for companionship. They miss it for the fact they'd like to occasionally get away from their little kids, who normally in the old days, three months ago, they were either at daycare or at school or in the care of a nanny. Anyway, so there's split going on, but there's also a lot of other discussion.

And there's a really good piece in the latest Wired online magazine, you can get it, where they discuss the pros and cons of this and they sort of do some investigation into how certain companies are dealing with it. Mark Zuckerberg, who's not the most popular guy within his own company right now at Facebook because of his kind of toting up to Trump.

But Zuckerberg says he expects half of his company to toil outside a company office in as soon as five years. Now, he said that after Jack Dorsey from Twitter, who was a little more popular within his company because he called out Trump on a couple of his tweets last week, Dorsey said the company's workers don't have to ever return to the office if they prefer to work at home. Wired talked to the Harvard Business School, one of the profs there, Ray Trudry, or Raj Trudry. He studies the geography of work, and he says chief financial officers

generally love the idea of slashing real estate costs. Tech workers hired outside of the San Francisco Bay Area are generally paid less, Zuckerberg said. Facebook will reduce salaries for people who move to cheaper places. So you cut salaries, you reduce real estate costs. Lots of impact to these things. People start going into downtown centers.

You know, like I was talking Toronto, the organization I was talking about today that I was at the board meeting for, most of those people go by public transit to work each day, or used to in the old days, three months ago. And so do most of downtown Toronto use public transit. Well, if they're all working at home, or half of them tend to work at home,

that's going to drastically reduce the need for public transport. You know, yesterday as I was driving into Toronto, it was right at the rush hour, and you know, such as it is, not anymore, no rush in that hour. But as I was driving up Spadina after turning off the Gardner Expressway, I passed two of those fancy, gorgeous, new, kind of double-length streetcars. They're big, right? I don't know how many people they carry, 100? Probably at least 100. At rush hour, way more than that

because a lot of people are standing. Yesterday, I passed two of them. There was one person on each streetcar. It's like those two people got their own personal streetcars. Well, think about that over time and the impact that's going to have on our public transit system if people work from home. Now, this was another issue that came up in my

sort of researching of all this, which was mainly based on this Wired magazine and the conversations I had. And this has to do with the whole idea of promotions, of advancing in your job. So the fear is, one, new people who are hired, new hires, if they're not in the office, who's going to kind of mentor them? If they're working from home, how's that going to work exactly for them? How do they get ahead versus those new hires who are actually at the office. And then that goes beyond new hires.

It goes on to the average employee. Can you make a better impression on your managers, on your bosses, by being there than being productive from home, simply by your physical presence. So that's an interesting issue, that it becomes a part of all this. There are many different ones as we contemplate how society is going to change with all this. Let me read you one last line from The Wired Piece. And it kind of relates to that.

It's sort of how you relate to your boss or your manager, how you can make an impression, how you can let your feelings know, how the manager can get a sense of the room. Because it's easy to get misunderstood on a Zoom call, right? Actually being there next to somebody, you get a better read of them and how they're feeling about issues, whether they're talking or not talking. Zoom is a little more challenging. It's amazing how far we've come in a couple of months.

I know Zoom was around, but most people didn't know about it. And the things that happen on Zoom now, I did two convocations on Friday. I got another one, at least one more this week. They were great and they were fun and people seem to enjoy them. But this from the, and that's the last thing I'll read out of this Wired piece. And it is about this whole issue of understanding people's mood and tone about the work they're doing so here's what it says studies have shown that trust is harder to

establish in virtual teams and conflict can be more common it's easier for misunderstandings to occur and linger when people aren't able to share space and body language. It's trickier for a manager to notice the cocked eyebrow or sharp inhalation that signals unease with a new decision when the meeting takes place via group video chat rather than around a conference room table. So it's funny, isn't it? Because when we started having these discussions a couple of months ago, we kind of said, well, you know, this isn't really, things won't change that much. Things always come back to normal.

But the longer we've done this, and the longer the experience has been had by those involved in things like this, working from home, the more people are now starting to seriously think about the impact it could have. You know, when the bean counters

are thinking about the money they can save, and the managers are worrying about, will I really be able to read the room of my employees? And when some of the employees are worried about, how am I going to be able to get ahead in this place if I can't be there to make an impression? These are all great questions. And for the most part, we don't know the answers because we've never lived in a world like

this. We are now, and the question is, will we continue to be in the months and years ahead? Either driven to it by the health problems or driven it by ourselves because we want change. So there you go. Lots to think about on this Tuesday of week 12. Thanks for listening. You know, once again, VansbridgePodcast at gmail.com

if you wanted to say something on any of this. And also, you know, extraordinarybook.ca will tell you all about the book Mark Boldridge and I have got coming your way from Simon & Schuster later this year, which has nothing to do with anything I've talked about today. But you'll enjoy it. I'm sure you will. All right. I'm Peter Mansbridge.

Thanks for listening on this day, and you know that we will be back in 24 hours.