The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - What Does It Say When The Most Trusted Person in Canada Isn't Trusted?

Episode Date: March 17, 2023

David Johnston seemed to have it all when Stephen Harper picked him as Governor General in 2010. Everyone lined up from all parties to praise Johnston. The man with twenty-one letters AFTER his name was golden, until this week.  Chantal and Bruce on why some pretty heavy hitters don't think he's the right choice to look into the China story. And, do you have your party planned for Coronation Day?

Are you ready for good talk? And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here with Bruce Anderson and Chantelle Hebert. And we're, well, we got lots to talk about today. Here's how we're going to start. I'm wondering what some of this current discussion around the appointment of David Johnson as the special rapporteur says, not about Johnson, not about Trudeau, not about Polyev, but about the country as a whole. Because here we have the appointment of the guy who, up until about 10 days ago, was considered the most trusted man in Canada by an awful lot of people, if not everyone. I mean, he had an incredible track record, appointed by Stephen Harper as the Governor General in 2010, at a time when that appointment was critical because we'd just gone through some issues around minority government. And you needed a trusted person in that job.

And people lined up at the microphones to praise the appointment that David Johnston was the guy, the right guy for the job at that time. He's been in a number of roles since then, but has been applauded in all of them that I can recall, or just about all of them. This is a guy who has 21 letters after his name. That's 21 letters after his name. That's not even counting the right honorable part before his name. So obviously a lot of different people think quite something of David Johnston. But in the last 48 hours, he's been getting not great reviews from the leader of the opposition, from members of the Conservative Party of Canada,

and from a large segment, certainly of the conservative-leaning media, in both national newspapers, the Globe and the National Post, wrong guy for the job. Sure, he's, you know, he's trusted, he's this, he's that, but he's the wrong guy right now. So here's my question. Before we get to the politics of it all,

what does it say about the mood of the country that we're entertaining this kind of debate around this person, this eminent Canadian, and sort of talking about him in this way? I mean, let's remember on the day the special rapporteur was announced, whenever that was now, almost two weeks ago. I don't know about you two, but I got a lot of emails right away saying, oh, the perfect guy for this job is David Johnson. He should be the special rapporteur well i don't know maybe they asked him then and he said no or he wanted to think about it who knows how many different people they may have asked over these last couple of weeks but it's got around to applying finally appointing him and now he's a you know skiing buddy of the prime minister

he's a pal of the prime minister. He's on the Trudeau Foundation, the Pierre Trudeau Foundation that supports scholars. And David Johnson was one of the country's leading academics. Anyway, enough from me. Chantelle, what does it say about Canada, or does it say anything about Canada? I don't think it says much about Canada. I think it says a lot about social media and the time and the cycle of the current prime minister that attracts

media scrutiny that reflects fatigue on the part of the media with the liberal rule. I think if you went back to the way Stephen Harper was covered over the last year and a half of his tenure, or the way that Jean Chrétien, for that matter, was covered, including when he made that decision that no, everyone now is signing with so full of foresight to not go to Iraq, go see the coverage in the same media that you are talking about. And you will find that the media coverage was not to say critical, even more than critical. Of course, today, if you ask the authors of those columns to revisit the issue and restate exactly what they said back then, they would probably withdraw and go on holiday to avoid having to do it because they would have to eat their words and their predictions back at

the time. I think it's fair to debate whether there is a need for an independent expert. I, for one, believe that it is the prime minister's task to make those decisions and then to delegate the terms of reference of whatever exercises he chooses, if he chooses one, to an expert. That is, people compare the appointment of Mr. Johnston to tell the government the way forward on the China interference file to Stephen Harper's decision to delegate part of the process to the same person at the time of the inquiry that eventually was chaired by Justice Oliphant into Brian Mulroney's dealing with businessman Karl-Heinz Schreiber. The difference is that Stephen Harper had decided there would be an inquiry and asked

Mr. Johnston to draw up the terms of reference so that the scope of the inquiry would be determined at arm's length from the government and from a conservative prime minister who was basically opening up an inquiry into one of his predecessors, a former prime minister at that. But when I look at mood of the country things, you know, a Léger poll came out, I think, yesterday. And they asked, because mood of the country is larger than the issue of Mr. Johnston being appointed. It also goes to the constant conservative message that everything is broken in this country. So Léger asked, which of the following best describes how you currently feel about your life overall? And this is part of a political poll that also asked, how do you feel about your life overall. And this is part of a

political poll that also asked, how do you feel about Justin Trudeau, Pierre Poilievre? How would you vote in an election? So it's a political poll. It's not a, do you think that spring will come early? Does that make you feel good question? 60% said they were very or somewhat optimistic. 14% said they were neither one or the other. And that left 14% to be somewhat or very pessimistic. Mode of the country, based on those numbers, not even the people who really want to vote for the conservatives and really want Justin Trudeau to not be the prime minister feel somewhat or very pessimistic, which to me looks like a message to the everything is broken school of narrative. It may not match the mood of the country. And by the way, my last point, a lot of this is, yes, I believe,-driven and commentary-driven. And the fact that it is not attracting a lot of commentary, the appointment of David Johnston in what and who is a member of the Trudeau Foundation.

And yes, I do hope we get back to the Trudeau Foundation because all the pleasant people that I spent time when I was a mentor for a PhD student doing a thesis on religious teaching in the Middle East. Well, you're in trouble now. It's very public. All right, Bruce, away you go. Well, I think that you asked the question, is it a mood of the country thing? I think that it isn't really that. I agree with Chantal that if you step back from the inclination, if we just look at what

traffic's on social media and to some degree in some of the industrial media or the mainstream media, you can get the feeling that there's a lot of anger. And I think there's a little bit more anger than there used to be, but I don't think there's a lot more. Chantal talked about 60% optimism. My sense of the normal optimism rate, because I asked that question almost always for 40 years, is in the 67, 68% range. So it's possible that it's down a little bit because we are going through maybe a generation where the sense of certainty about the world is not what it had been for the previous generation, let's say. I don't want to go back two generations because I don't know what the numbers would have been then, but people would have been entitled to be discouraged or worried. So what do I think it is?

I want to separate out for a minute, if I can, the appointment of David or the selection of David Johnson by the prime minister, from the question of what makes it seem like we can't have a reasonable conversation about a reasonable idea anymore. That, to me, is the more disconcerting part. People of good faith can reasonably argue, did the prime minister make a politically judicious choice or a politically injudicious choice, which seems to be at the heart of what the critics of this idea are saying, except for the people who just think he's corrupt and he's trying to cover up his Chinese-related malfeasance, which I think, frankly, is a pretty small group, but it's a group that every morning wakes up thinking he's corrupt and has done something even more corrupt last night while I was sleeping. And there's nothing, no matter of evidence, you could appoint Jesus

Christ to investigate the prime minister, and he would come back and say, no, it looks like he's not corrupt. He's just doing things you don't like. And those people would say, no, no, to hell with you, Jesus. I'm no longer a Christian. So the question of whether or not Johnson was a politically judicious choice, people can debate it. People debate these choices in the bubble of people who follow politics closely. And I don't just mean the Ottawa bubble. Obviously, there are people across the country who get into this conversation. It's a passion. It's an interest.

It's good that they're doing it. It helps form the bones of our democracy sometimes. But these questions of political wisdom come and go. We talk about a different one every couple of weeks. That's the way it works, and it's okay. And so I read Andrew Coyne's comments. And I thought, I don't agree with those comments. But I, I understand them. I think they're reasonable arguments, reasonable people could, could think about them that way.

So that debate doesn't really bother me, it bothers me a little bit that there's less inclination. There's more inclination in this situation than I might have expected because of who David Johnson is and because of the question that we're talking about, which is essentially foreign meddling in our democracy. And should we be doing more about it is the first question, the answer to which is yes. And should we have somebody who generally has acted with integrity? I don't say generally, who has acted with integrity and who has been seen to have acted with integrity? Should he be somebody that we say, yeah, go and look at this and tell us what you see? Yeah, all of that makes sense to me. So what is the problem? In my view, you're going to get letters for this. I just want you to

brace yourself. Don't worry. I'm already getting the letters on the Jesus Christ comment. And isn't Justin Trudeau a Catholic? So your comparison just goes to the same insider appointment thing, for the record. Away you go, Bruce. Keep them coming. Well, you know, somewhere along the way, the right went mad and then the left went berserk at the fact that the right went mad. And I know that people on the right will go, we had to get really mad because the left was ruining the world. And I understand that. I don't see it that way. I think what happened is that right-wing politics found a road to money and activism that they had not previously decided was a road that

they wanted to take or because technology didn't allow it to be found. And that's the second part of it, which is that the media today has to be separated from the conversation about journalists today. There are many good journalists doing good traditional journalism. The media enterprises are in too many cases, businesses that are not really preoccupied with journalism as much as they are preoccupied with finding angry people, making them angrier and living off the avails of that.

And I don't know how, and I used to think, okay, well, it's not really the journalism enterprises that are the problem. It's the platforms and the social media that sit on top of the platforms. But it isn't that anymore. And I think that's what really has been revealed to me this week. week, you made the point that it's hard to find a journalist working for a presumed journalism company that can now say anything okay about the David Johnson appointment without looking like they're so far away from the mainstream of journalism that they must be in the tank or something like that. So that part of it is

broken. And I don't know how we're ever going to fix it. And it's not a criticism of journalists, journalists. But it is a it is my view that a big part of what's wrong on this issue is going to continue to be what's wrong in how we discuss anything because we've lost control of those media enterprises, control in the sense of do they function for us or do they function for themselves? So I've always noticed, and I'm sure it's the same in your business, and it was the same for you, Peter, when you did the National. It's certainly the case that when you write columns, you write uneven columns. Some are really great and some are average and some are really bad. And that you always remember the bad nights or the bad ones a lot more than you remember the good ones.

Because that's how human nature is. And when I listen to Bruce say it's hard to find a self-respecting journalist siding with the Johnston appointment for fear of passing for God knows what, I look and I say, but that's not quite true. I mean, Susan Delacorte writes for the Toronto Star and has defended the appointment before one rushes to say, of course, she writes for the Toronto Star and the Red Star. John Iverson writes for the Globe and Mail, and he has unapologetically endorsed the appointment of Mr. Johnston. And John Iverson writes for the National Post, and he has done the same. So I tend to think that the point of view of defending the appointment has been aptly defended in those three major national newspapers.

That the social media battle has been different mostly has to do with the fact that with the notable exception of Brooks here, most of the people I have named were content to have that battle fought where they have their platform, rather than try to win their case on social media on top of doing what they are paid to do. That is also my policy, that if I have something to say, I'm not going to go on Twitter and argue with a small pool of people whose first motto too often is bad faith. When I have readers, and I do not write for Twitter, I write for readers. They are not on Twitter. They're not spending their lives having these tweet fights that usually end up producing nothing particularly interesting. So, yes, there are people who are more prolific on Twitter.

They often happen to be people who are of the same view that Mr. Johnson should not have taken the appointment, that he should not exist at all or that he is a bad choice. Add to that all of the conservative comments about David Johnston, which I think are misplaced. I'm happier to have a political party criticize the very existence of that role and demonstrate the need for a public inquiry than to have character assassination of the person who is tasked with making a recommendation. That is bullying. What it is meant to do is make Mr. Johnston feel compelled to recommend the public inquiry, because otherwise they will tear his reputation to shreds. Someone said this week he shouldn't have accepted because he should have known he was going to get into that and he doesn't deserve that. My answer to that is if I live to be 81 and if I had a track record like David Johnson, I wouldn't give a damn what the likes of Pierre

Poiliev thinks of me. So that's where I'm at. I think that's all good life advice. And it's advice I'm thinking about a fair bit. And I do want to say that Chantal's right. I exaggerated the point unintentionally about whether there were journalists, respected journalists in those media enterprises who were saying positive things about this appointment. I think I was probably thinking more about the general tenor of and the and the flow of commentary about politics now feels like it's more oriented towards can we stir people up or keep them stirred up? And in a particular direction, more often than not, that's and I was trying to make the distinction between the companies and the and the volume of content that they produce that fits that lens. But again, we might disagree a little bit about that, but Chantal's point is a very valid one about those journalists who did speak out on behalf of the appointment. And again, my point is

I think he's a good pick, but I'm less preoccupied with the quality of the pick and more kind of concerned about the quality of the conversation. And I don't feel like it's easy to find a platform. I don't write for a newspaper. I don't comment on a TV show. So sometimes those social media platforms are the way that people who want to engage in politics have at their disposal to engage in politics. And, you know, sometimes I feel like, well, I should probably throw some thoughts in because I'm watching this debate evolve and maybe it will be of some use. But in the end, it doesn't feel like it's very useful. It feels like it only stirs the pot more and creates more stress. And one of the things that we measured recently was the different social media platforms, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, which ones make you stressed? And Twitter stands at the very top of

that list, as you might expect. We're going to take a quick break, but let me just mention, when I opened the program, just on the point of the journalists, I did, you know, I was talking about two papers, the two sort of acknowledged national newspapers. I know we can debate the Toronto Star, whether it's a national newspaper, but I was talking about the Globe and the Post, and I said the majority of their opinion writers, right, that the field was tilted in those two papers towards being against the appointment of David Johnston. I want to talk a little more about this Twitter angle because I think it's interesting

because we talk about Twitter as if everybody's on Twitter, and I don't know what the percentage is, but it's interesting because we talk about Twitter as if everybody's on Twitter. And I don't know what the percentage is. It's pretty low, really, in terms of the number of people who are on there. But it does seem that journalists, or many journalists, be careful here, many journalists feed their sense of what's important by going on Twitter and reading other people's stuff and contributing themselves.

I want to talk a little bit about that, but we've got to take a quick break. Back right after this. And welcome back. You're listening to Good Talk on Sirius XM, Channel 167, Canada Talks, or on your favorite podcast platform, or you're watching us on our YouTube channel. A YouTube channel which gets,

certainly in the last couple of weeks, has picked up a lot of views and a lot of comments. And while there have been good comments, the bad comments outweigh the good comments. And at times you get a sense, at least the times I read those comments, that the people actually haven't even watched the discussion because some of the things they say have like nothing to do with with what we said um but that's that's neither here nor there i guess but uh other than to say that you know we do look at them um bruce i want to pick up on this

i mean you had a twitter experience yesterday he got into it a little bit on Twitter. And I want to know, I think you've given us a hint already what you've learned from that. But whether it's going to make a difference in the way you use that platform in the future or what your advice is on it. Because, you know, we, you know, you can get aggravated, you can get stressed out, you know, looking at Twitter and you say, I'm unplugging. I'm not going to read it anymore. And every once in a while you see people who do that, friends of ours who do that, just say, I'm out of it. I'm gone.

And then slowly over time they kind of crawl back into it. But tell us what you went through yesterday. Well, actually, I like this conversation, but I'm a little bit surprised that you both think that I had a different Twitter date yesterday than I did. You lacked a life yesterday. Well, you know, the weather kept me in a little bit maybe but um i noticed that somebody had posted a picture uh from years ago of me with uh one of my daughters and whenever somebody does something like that i i think what the hell is wrong with people why

would you know and then somebody else jumps in and says, you know, you never acknowledge your bias. This is terrible that you've been saying your opinions and not telling people your biases. And I'm like, oh, my God, you know, nobody. It's not like everybody needs to know the history of every other individual, but it is probably a reasonable thing for people to do to say, do you have a bias rather than look at you, you're all biased. And, you know, somebody just revealed this picture from years ago, and that really confirms the bias. So there was a little bit of skirmishing on that, but it wasn't the more bothersome part for me. The more bothersome part for me was watching the degree to which the arguments that were being made about the Johnson appointment kind of descended into, well, they took two turns.

One is that the people who opposed the appointment seem to be pretty easily buying into the big issue here is the corruption of the prime minister narrative, which I really don't think is, you know, it's if if that's what we're investigating, then for sure, Johnson's the wrong choice. But I don't think that's what we really should be having a public inquiry about. If we have a public inquiry at all, I think that's foolish. I don't think there's anywhere near the evidence that what Trudeau was doing was materially different from what lots of other governments around the world were doing vis-a-vis China over a number of years. And so we should focus on the meddling going forward and which countries are doing it and what are the risks and we need better protocols for sure.

But that should be the focus rather than Johnson. And then the second thing was, this is somebody who gave a substantial amount of his time and energy over his lifetime to do things that were in the public interest. And there just weren't, there were people who were defending that, lots of them, and pretty aggressively, but also with a sense of disappointment that you had to. And I think this was your point opening up, Peter. And so the last point for me is Twitter is regularly used to share thoughts about public policy and politics by 8% of the population.

Another 19% say they occasionally use it. So that's 27%. It's not everybody, but it's not as small a factor as it used to be. And Facebook is even bigger. If I compare that to the right comments on news websites after reading articles and columns, 8% do that regularly, 26% on occasion. So it's become bigger than hotline radio. It's become same as, arguably, or pretty close to the same as letters to the editor. And I don't think it's a very good, I don't think it's a good addition to the mix necessarily. I think it's a, we've gone in a bad direction in many instances. I think it's a great revealer

of character and political personality. So I, for one, find it very useful to look at. But I give a session at Queen's University at the School of Business on Media. And when I talk about Twitter, I compare it to a fishbowl. And in that fishbowl, all the fish that was interacting, policy purveyors, politicians, journalists to cover policy, interact. And over the years, maybe it had escaped notice, but the sides of the fishbowl, which should have been glass to allow you to look out at the larger world, have become mirrors. And we self-validate, and I say we in the larger sense, because I try not to

participate in those tweet exchanges, but we self-validate our stance on that fishbowl and our points of views by arguing and drinking each other's bathwater, literally, is what is happening there. I think the first mistake not to make is to confuse Twitter with the court of public opinion. They are two different things. You talked about the field that was tilted in a particular way this week. True enough, but so was it in the old days when we fought the Charlottetown referendum. The field was tilted in favor of a yes vote to the accord that the premiers

and the prime minister had negotiated, which turned out to be the biggest sinking of a proposal in public opinion when the votes were counted. So were, to go back to the example I quoted off the top of this show, in the same newspapers, the field was tilted in favor of us going to Iraq. And Jean Chrétien not only won that public opinion, but he won it so overwhelmingly that the political forces that argued against that decision, and today is the anniversary of the day when he announced Jean Chrétien, which is why it's been on my mind, because I totally remember that that day, hisundits, chattering class, at the end of the day, dictate where public opinion is going. I think it's been my experience that it was highly overrated.

And I understand why Bruce says what he says about Twitter, because I too sometimes look at it and despair over the quality of the public debate that we are having. But I don't blame Twitter. I blame some of the politicians who bring that tone to Twitter. I, for instance, have a lot of time for the criticism of the NDP about having David Johnston there instead of going straight to a public inquiry. Fair enough. But I don't have a lot of time for the character assassination

that the Conservatives are engaged in about a man that they appointed as Governor General and were satisfied enough with that they kept him in that role for seven years. So I'm with Bruce on the notion that even if a perfect person had been available, he went to religion. I'm not going to go there. Apparently it's not a good idea. But I don't think anybody, whatever name you want, I don't think anybody would have had a good week

after having been appointed in that role this week. So if you were going to make a choice, if someone was going to take a beating, probably Mr. Johnston is a fairly good choice. You know, I know Bruce wants back in, but I just want to make a couple of points. One, on that last point, on David Johnson, I agree. I mean, I've known David Johnson since 80, 1980,

when he was the, you know, he did the debates. He was the moderator of the debates in the 80 or the 79 election, I guess it was. And the last thing he'll be worrying about right now is the criticism that he's getting. I mean, he's so past that. He's beyond that. The next point is, is it 20 years now since that decision on Iraq?

Apparently. According to my radio program this morning. Yeah. I mean, 20 years. Man, time flies. And it certainly flies. The older you get, the faster the time seems to go, I'll tell you that. Not fast enough for some of our listeners who are counting our years, thinking, will they ever hang up their skates?

That's not what they tell me, although they do. They're pushing this stay retired thing with me, which I still haven't quite figured out which way to take that. I'm retired now. Like, I am retired. So I'm retired. As I'm talking to you, I'm retired. But anyway, let me, just before Bruce comes in, I want to say this,

and I perhaps don't say this enough. The model on this panel was deliberate. We've got three of us here. Chantelle is, you know, one of the country's leading commentators, columnists, opinion leaders. That's a given. Respected by all parts of the country and all parties, from what I can figure out.

They all talk to her. They all want to talk to her. They all want her to like them one way or the other. Do I have to? Do I have to? They're very respected, and in the journalistic community as well. Bruce is not a journalist. He doesn't classify himself as that.

He is an analyst, a pollster, a commentator. He's been involved in the two major political parties over his time and has very good connections still into both of those parties. So good for him. So this was a way of getting a cross-section of ideas and thought going into whatever discussion we're having. And as for me, well, hey, I'm just a semi-retired pensioner. I just sit here and push the buttons on this little machine and let people

talk. So that's who we are. That's what we do. And we gather once a week and we just talk about it. And we love the fact that more and more of you are responding to it and, you know, in one way or another are listening to what we have to say. Bruce, I can't even remember what it was you raised your hand for, but go for it. I had two points that I wanted to make. One is that in looking at how Pierre Polyev characterized the Johnson appointment yesterday, it's a good example for me of the thing that I kind of worry about

in terms of this race for the bottom. He could have made a case, a thoughtful case, that this was not the right choice. Instead, he tweeted, Justin Trudeau has named a, in quotes, family friend, old neighbor from the cottage, and member of the Beijing-funded Trudeau Foundation to be the independent rapporteur on Beijing's interference. Get real. Trudeau must end his cover-up. Now, you know, Chantal made the point that Johnson had been appointed by the conservatives before, that Pierre Poliev served in the government of Stephen Harper that had appointed Johnson. Obviously, if Pierre Polyev didn't know that Johnson had a relationship with Trudeau, I'd be surprised.

It doesn't seem like it's been a kind of a great secret that's been concealed or anything like that. And so to see this characterization instead of, here's why this is the wrong choice, that's a deliberate act. And what it does is not just, again, remind us this is how at their worst, political parties raise money, raise ire, try to get people motivated against their opponents. But it weakens our collective understanding. And this is kind of where I think I have a little bit of a different view of the role of Twitter. There are a lot of people who are younger than us who do not have the sense of the background that we have. I mean, there are people younger than us who do, but we've been around a while.

We've watched and consumed a lot, and we know a lot of the history of politics and the people and the way things were done before and the way arguments were held before. And I worry that there's younger generations for whom politics as trafficked on the Internet and social media platforms is the only version of politics that they know and that they will not. They will see that and they will go, huh, that's what I need to know about David Johnson. And they probably won't dig farther. They won't sort of find another source to say, well, no, actually, that's not right, or they might not. And I think that we used to be able to look at media as a, maybe a smaller fishbowl, but as Chantal said, maybe with the sides being transparent, or you could find contrarian opinions. But I'm pretty sure that if you pick up a post-media newspaper or click on a post-media

site by this weekend, meaning by tomorrow, there will be a lot of that kind of commentary. Let me put it that way. And so I worry that I shouldn't take for granted that people who didn't grow up in the age of social media, you know, they may consume this stuff and think that it is fact. And I do think that in the political world that we live in, the conservatives are looking for the last three or four percentage points of support to get them to a majority government territory. And those are the techniques that they want to use. And it's disappointing to see it. Of course, that rests on the assumption that back in the days, young people read the Globe and Mail and all these China interference story would have been read, which was not the case, or that they did not get their information in cheaper places that basically ignored those debates.

Plus, me, I find that literacy among people, including younger people, is probably higher now than it was. I also don't think that the days when the mainstream media was divorced from the days when the mainstream media was divorced from the existence of the social media were days where people were necessarily so well informed about each other. And I am not going to drag you back in the Quebec-Canada debate that I covered for 40 years, but where I discovered that to be an expert on Quebec in the English language media was massively to do so without any knowledge of the French language. And where to talk about the rest of Canada in Quebec was mostly the purview of people for whom the furthest they had ever gone in Canada was across the Ottawa River. So if we're saying people were so much better informed

and had such understanding of each other, let me refer you guys back to where the distinct society debate. Yeah, that was great. You know, I guess I'm not really saying that. So much saying, I guess, that people were informed to a different level but that the conversation about politics it you know there was always um harsh parts of it but i feel like the harsh part of it used to be kind of 20 of it maybe 30 and now it's 70 or 80 and so if you're only exposure because of the generation that you were born into is the conversation that feels like everybody has to make win every argument, use the strongest possible language to demonize or belittle or humiliate their political adversary, then it creates a syndrome that's probably what's worrying me more. And I see it sometimes in the context of people I talk to who are to be a candidate, your party will want you to have an active voice in a significant platform on that social media. metaphor. You're jumping into a cesspool or a situation that is going to probably go badly way more often for you than it will go well. And that continues, in my view, to change in that direction almost every year. And I think it's got a lot to do with the algorithms and the business

models there. Let me just make one related comment. I was thinking of this as you both talked about the understanding for the journalists have or don't have about our political history on any number of different areas. But sort of an understanding of the past when they arrived to cover politics in Canada. And that's usually, you know, an appointment to the Parliamentary Press Gallery. When I arrived in the Parliamentary Press Gallery in the mid-1970s, I was part of a wave of young CBC reporters who were put in there to try and euthanize the Bureau, if there's such a word. And none of us necessarily wanted to go there.

There was myself, there was Mark Phillips, there was John Blackstone, there was a group of us. And, you know, we went into the parliamentary office with no knowledge or grounding in political history in political history in canada zero we were all kind of general reporters who you know like chasing around the country around the world and suddenly we were there and we could tell right away the from some of our colleagues you know from john drury norman depot past ones like like Ron Collister and others who were like appalled at this move to these young people.

And we knew once we got there and after we spent two weeks trying to find our way around Parliament Hill, which is not the easiest thing to do, we knew we were going to have to do something and we all applied ourselves to doing that and i worry sometimes that the same thing happens not just in um you know at the cbc but in other bureaus as well it's a good idea to bring fresh voices and fresh thoughts into political coverage but sometimes you get a sense that, you know, man, they don't have any idea what happened like just 10 years ago.

And so it is a big part of trying to do these stories. And now, as you know, as you've both said, and Bruce especially, the impact of Twitter is kind of like, or social media in general, has become the historical grounding for some. And that's problematic, you know, to say the least. Anyway. Yes, but there is something to be said about blissful ignorance of how things are done.

And I bring you back to a debate I witnessed as a, not yet a parliamentary reporter, but someone who did cover federal politics from Toronto. And the 84 campaign, the debate between the old guard of the press gallery and the newer guard about how you should not report on John Turner's tendency to pat the behind of the women who were standing next to him on stage, including the president of his party, because that was not done, or the even more fiery debate over whether it was okay to report that Brian Mulroney on his campaign plane was saying something about patronage that was the opposite of what he was saying on the campaign trail. Now, if you had not had young

journalists who did not think that the way things were done and the boys club manner of covering federal politics was the way that they wanted to go, those changes, which I would argue were essential, would not have happened. So I tend to think every new generation of journalists provides or changes the way things are done on Parliament Hill. And I truly think that while you always arrive there with some adversarial feelings, you are there to be the person who holds politicians to account. And at some point, you discover that the first step to doing it properly is to understand them. And if you don't like them, you can't understand them

because you cannot understand people on the basis of contempt or the sense that they are not good people because they are in politics. But I do not think that the current generation of younger journalists is skipping the essential learning curve of knowledge because social media exists. And I have not seen evidence of that in the reporting that I read from people who cover news. I'm not talking columnists who always have a fairly solid basis of what happened before and how things have been done. But I'm talking about younger journalists writing in The Globe, The Post, CBC. I find that they do great work and that I will not feel when I finally stop that there aren't people coming behind

me who will do a lot better than I ever did. Okay. Yeah. You're going to have to make this quick, Bruce. I got to take a final break and then we're almost out of time. But so make your point. I completely agree that if it sounds like we're saying younger or that I was saying younger journalists aren't up to the quality standards that we need, that's not what I'm saying. A lot of them do,

you know, really great work. And some of them have to be particularly brave about it because of the social media context that we're talking about. But just to reinforce my point, there is a columnist for the National Post who's put out a comment that now says he thinks that David Johnson should be investigated because he may be man, we've really come a long way when that becomes a legitimate comment. Yeah, you know, a lot of these people who are raising questions about David Johnson and the appointment in particular, some of that is fair game. I found it fascinating over 10 days. I haven't seen anybody say, this is the person who should do it and make the argument. Why? You know, like where, where are the, where are these alternatives that they have? I haven't

seen that happen. They've just been sitting, waiting to, you know, to crap on whoever the appointment was, but Hey, that's free speech, as Bruce says. I'm going to take our final break, and then I'll come back for one quick round. And I'm not even going to tell you what it's about right after this. Back for quick final thoughts on this week's Good Talk. Man, that was quite a session. In the last couple of minutes, do either of you know what the significance of May 6th this year? Don't everybody answer at the same time.

I'll turn them in. This is reach for the top, but nobody's reaching. Coronation of King Charles, two monarchists like you two. They do expect us, the great monarchists that we are, to even remember that. Let me take you back 70 years.

Were you there? Did you cover that? You must have covered that. I was there. I was watching. I was commenting. No, 100,000 people on Parliament Hill to celebrate the coronation that was taking place on the other side of the ocean.

Guess how many were in Montreal, Chantal? I wasn't there. 40,000. Yeah, you're not going to see that this year, sorry. Well, I don't really see 100,000 on Parliament Hill either. But it seems to have been a bit of a puzzle for the federal government to decide just exactly what to do on this, because I guess the country is somewhat divided on what to do about it.

30 seconds each on May 6th and what we should expect in Canada. Don't leap to the microphone here. We probably expect the person who draws the short straw on the CBC to host some news special that if the weather participates will be watched by few and probably more by older people than younger people.

Based on polls, the lack of interest in this event and this new king is at an all-time high. Bruce? He's not an interesting character for most people, and he's trying to make the monarchy more boring, and it already was pretty boring as an idea for a lot of people i don't you know he's not a particularly likable or liked character either and i think that if you don't have a likable character and you're trying to take the pageantry out of it because it looks like it's expensive. What have you got left?

So I'm not unhappy about the way this is going. I think we should just get on with what we know is the next step at some point. All right. That's it for today. I thank Politico for some of the facts on the coronation stuff. They have a great little piece in there today. Thank you, Bruce. Thank you, Chantel.

I'm Peter Mansbridge. Thanks for listening. It's been an interesting hour. Talk to you again next week. And Monday, we will be back with the bridge. Bye for now. Bye for now. Thank you.