The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Why Kamala Harris Has A Pretty Interesting Canadian Connection.

Episode Date: August 6, 2020

Susan Rice is married to a Canadian. We talked about that last night. Well Kamala Harris has Canada in her CV too.The supposed short listers for Joe Biden's #2 both know a lot about Canada.

and hello there peter mansbridge here with the latest episode of the bridge daily and today was another example of the worldwide reach of the Bridge Daily. What am I talking about? Well, here's what I'm talking about. If you heard yesterday's Bridge Daily, you know we talked a little bit about the U.S. election and the Democrats' upcoming pick for their vice presidential nominee. Well, Joe Biden actually does the picking, but we said that the current betting seems to be that the short list is now down to just two people, and they are Senator Kamala Harris

and the former National Security Advisor to Barack Obama, Susan Rice. What I had to say about that yesterday was that Susan Rice is a friend because I used to work with her husband and therefore had met her and have talked to her more than a few times, both on the air and off the air. And we did an event together not that long ago, just before the virus hit, actually, when she was touring with her new book. Well, it was new at the time, not so new now, but it did very well.

And obviously, I have an affection for Susan. She's a great person. I think she'd make a, if not a great vice president, she would certainly make a great secretary of state. And I think both of those are potentials for her in the future, assuming the Democrats win the next election. Senator Kamala Harris is kind of the odds-on favorite at this point, I'd say. And as I mentioned, that's who I think will end up getting the nomination. But we'll see, won't we? Anyway, the worldwide reach of the Bridge Daily, buried there in the emails that came

in overnight, was one from Manila in the Philippines, from Peter MacArthur. And Peter is a Canadian living in the Philippines, I guess, right now. But he listened to the podcast last night, and I'm going to read you his letter, which I don't usually do during the middle of the week, but it's just kind of neat. I enjoy your daily podcast on my daily evening solo strolls and found your comments this week on the Susan Rice Canadian connection to be interesting.

I was not aware of that. As to the more likely VP choice, Kamala Harris, she spent, now I kind of knew some of this, but I didn't know all of it, so listen. She spent her formative years in Montreal from the mid-1970s. She graduated from Westmount High School in 1981. At the age of 12, she accompanied her mother to Montreal, who conducted cancer research at the Jewish General Hospital and taught at McGill University.

That's why they ended up in Montreal. Because Kamala Harris' mom was teaching at McGill. The future U.S. Senator would have lived through Bill 101, the French language law, and the federal-provincial constitutional debates, and the 1980 Quebec referendum. Pierre Trudeau was prime minister when Kamala Harris was just a kid. So I'm sure she was watching these events on television,

and she would have seen me there covering the Quebec referendum, covering the constitutional debates, covering the patrician of the constitution, covering the Supreme Court of Canada's decision on patrician. Now, she was 12 or 13. I'm not sure how many of those things

she actually watched, but you couldn't grow up in Montreal at that time and in Quebec and not be aware of the story around you. Peter writes, would it not be interesting to have a vice president and a possible future president having had several years of Canadian experience in the current PM's home city. Never before FDR and time he spent on his New Brunswick vacation property, but that's the closest it would get. So we shall see, writes Peter MacArthur from Manila in the Philippines.

Thanks for that, Peter. And it's good to think about that. So if it is either one of those two, they're going to know more about Canada from their personal experiences than perhaps any other president we've had since FDR, who basically just vacationed just on the other side of the border into Brunswick. Thank you for that.

I also mentioned yesterday that we were going to be instituting a kind of regular feature on the Bridge Daily over these next weeks and months. And I was talking to Bruce Anderson, who's going to be on it each week as well, this morning, and we talked about, well, what are we going to call this program, this little segment? And Bruce had the idea of let's call it the Race Next Door. And that's exactly what we will call it. Because that kind of sums up everything.

We're not in the race. We're not covering the race. But we're next door and we're watching the race. All of us. And it'll be fun to talk about it from that perspective. From being next door. Not necessarily what it means to us, but how we see it from next door. And we're toying with when we'll start it.

We'll probably maybe start it next week. We're toying with the idea of making it a regular feature for certain days of the week. We're thinking of a Wednesday, but let's see. We're going to play with some ideas on that front. And there's so much to talk about. And I'm sure when we're not talking COVID-19, it's not a bad place to land on a different topic. Because these next weeks and months are going to be pretty fascinating.

August, we'll see, normally would see the two conventions, right? The Democratic and Republican Convention. Neither party is going to have a convention in the old style because of COVID-19. But there'll still be something going on in both the weeks of those canceled conventions. And then we get to Labor Day, the traditional starting point for U.S. elections.

And it's battened down the hatches and away we go for two months. Through September and October and then into that first week of November and the actual election. So we've got things to talk about. And to talk about. Talk about them. We will. Now here's topic two for this week. A reminder, by the way, tomorrow is the weekend special. You want to get your thoughts or comments or questions in, you've got to write them.

You've got to send them. To themansbridgepodcast at gmail.com. themansbridgepodcast at gmail.com. Here's the other topic today. As most of you know, I live in Stratford, Ontario, home of, that's right, the Stratford Festival. Known across the country, across North America. It's one of the finest theaters there is.

Focuses, not surprisingly, because it's Stratford, on Shakespeare, but there are musicals and there are other theater offerings as well. So this year, like every theater in North America and every major theater in the world, shut down by the coronavirus. Nothing happening, which is a huge issue for a small community like this, a city of 31,000, 32,000, where so much reliance is placed upon the tourism industry

and the major tourist attraction is the Stratford Festival. So that hasn't been happening. So a lot of concern here about the future. What does it hold? When will the theater reopen? And those kind of feelings are the same everywhere. Down the road, Niagara-on-the-Lake for the Shaw Festival. Broadway.

Toronto. Vancouver. Halifax. St. John's. You name it, wherever there's theater, that discussion has been taking place about when will it be back? And when it is back,

what will it be like? Do you see yourself rushing off to a theatre? For a stage presentation? Theatre for a stage presentation. Theater for a movie. Arena for a hockey game. Listen, I'm glued to my set every night watching hockey or basketball, sometimes baseball, but not often. It's usually hockey or basketball I watch,

and it's very strange watching it with nobody in the arena. You kind of get used to it, and then something happens that makes you realize, wow, there's nobody there. It's so quiet. And when did I think that the other night? In the Leaf game. Toronto versus Columbus in the last two minutes of the game and one of the Toronto players, Jake Muzzin, got injured.

And it appeared to be very serious. He was lying on the ice. Attendants and doctors around him had to take him off on a stretcher. They were being extremely careful. As it turned out, things were fine. But in that 10 minutes to 15 minutes that he was lying on the ice, you could hear a pin drop in that arena. They stopped the fake crowd noise.

They stopped the music. There was no mumble or rumble from fans. It was quiet. It was eerie quiet. And that's what every theater in North America is like right now. There's nothing going on inside it, and they're eerie quiet, and people are wondering what will it be like if it ever returns, when it returns. Well, there's a piece in the New York Times today. You know where the Berkshires are? It's in Massachusetts. It's an area where it's big on the summer cultural issues and affairs.

It's a destination in western Massachusetts for people to go. And various actors and theater unions had agreed that this August, they would test out a few things in the Berkshires to try and see, just through rehearsals, how it would work. How would it work if theatres come back? So for the first time anywhere in the country, a handful of actors, all union actors, have returned to the stage.

Two stages, actually. Both in the Berkshires. Two productions are being kind of played out there. Godspell and Harry Clark. They're kind of, as the New York Times says de facto public health experiments if they succeed they could be a model for professional theater during this period of peril

but if actors or audiences get sick that would obviously be a serious setback now so what has it been like be a serious setback. Now, so what has it been like? They've just started this. And the writer from the New York Times,

Michael Paulson, I guess, had a chance to get down there and from a distance witness some of this. Could this be what theater looks like in the future, in the near future? And near future for theater means maybe next year. So he's watching this and he's talking to some of the actors. I'll just read you a little bit of what he wrote. It had been a long first week and not just because there was so much to memorize. That's normal.

There were the nasal swabs and the temperature checks and the quarantining and the face coverings. And now there were tape measures to double-check distances, and translucent screens to enclose backup singers. Still to come were costume pockets to stash hand sanitizer. The rehearsal halted. The keyboardists stopped playing. The singer buried his head,

pierced in one ear by a cruciform stud under his blank tack-top. This is from Godspell. The director says, In the real world, we'd come over and hug you. But complying with the rules of the day, the director didn't rise from his seat, nor did any of the other actors,

who instead extended air hugs. The actor took a moment, collected himself himself and finished the scene here's what he said as i started to sing when your trust is all but shattered that took me out really hearing that that's the line from godspell when your trust is all but shattered. We've lost all faith and trust in each other and trust in the theater. Will it ever come back? That's a key question, right? It's the question for so many of us in so many areas of our life. Will it ever come back?

But in theater, I tell you, there are people in theater now, and obviously I know this because my wife is an actor who's been on stage, on film, in musicals, you name it. She's what they call a triple threat, singer, dancer, actor. She's done it all. And she's got a lot of friends in the business, and they all talk, and they have all been talking. It started off, you know, in March as, okay, we're going to have to take a few weeks off. Well, here we are, more than four months later, with no end in sight,

and the likelihood that things are going to drag on for at least another year. One of Cynthia's best friends is in Come for a Way in Toronto. They don't know what's going to happen. They all just signed extensions, like I think two or three-year extensions to their contracts in February of this year. And then in March, they were all told to go home. They don't know what's going to happen.

They don't know whether they'll be back next year. They don't know whether they'll ever be back. So I appreciate this is just one job area, right? And there are lots to be concerned about. And there are lots of big issues to be worried about, schools being one of them, and this endless discussion and debate about whether kids should be going back to school.

And it's a deadly serious debate and discussion. So I appreciate that there's lots going on. But in a town like this, you can only imagine the number of people who are talking about this issue about theater. You know, I look down my street and I see people who are directly connected to theatre because they're actors.

I see people who are indirectly connected to theatre because they work in support industries or they work in the restaurants that look after the tourists that come to town or they work in the hotels that look after the tourists that come to town. Or they work in the hotels that look after the tourists who come to town. Excuse me. Or, you know, they have a bed and breakfast.

Or they have an apartment that they rent out in their home. All of these are connected to theater. Now, there are other things that happen in this town, but the theater is the big draw. And what happens with the theater may very well determine what happens with Stratford.

So there's a little snapshot of our life, and I know it can fit into your story no matter where you are as well. Because you have maybe not a theater in your town, but you have other things that have been directly affected by what we're all going through and what we're all hoping we will one day see the end of. All right. Another gentle reminder that tomorrow is the weekend special. Tomorrow's Friday.

Tomorrow is the end of week 21. We hardly got to know you, week 21. But there's a day left, and if you want to get in on it, you've got to write themansbridgepodcast at gmail. got it right the mansbridge podcast at gmail.com the mansbridge podcast at gmail.com don't be shy i am peter mansbridge this has been the bridge daily glad you joined us thanks for listening we'll be back in 24 hours Thank you.