The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - You Don't Look Like Mark Carney!

Episode Date: August 18, 2020

For the first time, Canada has a female finance minister. Chrystia Freeland is now and even bigger rock star than she already was. That and a lot more on the pod.

and hello there peter mansbridge here with the latest episode of the bridge daily here we are tuesday of week 23 and i gotta tell you for the last roughly 24 hours ever since we heard of the resignation of Bill Morneau, I've been thinking about a situation that unfolded right in front of, if not right beside me, at Inauguration Day, January 2017, when Donald Trump was sworn in as the 45th president of the United States. And I was in Washington, standing on top of the Canadian embassy in Washington, which had a perfect view of the inauguration.

You remember, that's the one where there weren't as many people in the crowd than the new president thought there was. Anyway, that's not what I'm trying to get at. What I'm trying to get at is there were a number of Canadian dignitaries who came by the embassy and who talked to us as part of our coverage that day. And one of them was one of the new ministers in the new Trudeau cabinet, because remember, the Trudeau cabinet was really only a year, a year and a month, a year and a couple of months old at that point.

So they were still, in fact, a new government. And one of their star frontbenchers was Chrystia Freeland. So she'd had a year or so on the job. And I knew Minister Freeland from her earlier days as a journalist and as an author. We'd met a few times. And so she'd already been on the air, had already interviewed her. And there was kind of a break,

some kind of break in the coverage. And people were in the sort of area where you could grab a sandwich or a soft drink or a coffee or something. And she was in there, and she came up to me and said hello. And at one point, she looked at me and she said, So, Peter, you've been around. You know how this place works. You know how politics works.

What's your advice for me? And I looked at her and I said, hey, you know, you're a rock star. And you could be a big rock star. And she was. She was a rock star in that cabinet. One of the top ministers, one of the few ministers that most people could name, aside from the prime minister, of course.

So I told her, I said, look, you are a rock star and you could be a big rock star. It'll depend on how you do and the months and years ahead. And she said, well, given that, what's your advice? I said, be yourself and stay out of trouble. Don't do anything stupid. Well, here we are in August of 2020 in the middle of a pandemic and an economic crisis, and the Prime Minister goes and picks Chrystia Freeland to replace the resigning Minister of Finance, Bill Morneau. And you could argue that this is the portfolio that Chrystia Freeland had always wanted,

if she couldn't have the very top portfolio, being finance minister. It's a thankless job. There are not a lot of them who come out of that portfolio and are able to look back and say that was a triumph. You know, Paul Martin was one, but there are very few, can't name a lot of them. Jim Flaherty, maybe, from the Harper government. Things kind of fell apart after they lost Jim Flaherty.

Anyway, here she is today being sworn in as the next finance Minister of Canada. The first time that a woman has been Finance Minister in the country's history. Well, it's about time. 2020? The first woman. So, going forward, we'll have to see whether she remains that rock star, whether she continues to stay out of trouble and continues to believe in herself and draw on her strengths in that way.

And where it all leads to, if it leads any further than it does today. Now, I know some of you are saying, hey, Mansbridge, you were talking about a certain Mark Carney over the last month. Well, yeah, I was. And I still am. I still think there's going to be a place for Mark Carney in a reconstructed liberal government. May not happen. Well, it's already happened, sort of,

because he's a special advisor on the COVID situation in terms of the economy. So he'll have to work closely with Chrystia Freeland on that, as well as the prime minister. But some had thought, and I had speculated, that if Bill Morneau resigned, which it looked pretty clear for the last few weeks he was going to have to, that maybe they'd figure out a way to bring Mark Carney into the cabinet.

It's not that hard. You can appoint someone from outside Parliament to be in cabinet. You can put them in the Senate, and that's their way in. Anyway, none of that happened. But he's still around, and there's going to be a vacant seat in Toronto. Who knows what may happen with Mark Carney. But I think Mark Carney is a young guy

and whose destiny may still well include an elected position in Ottawa. And maybe one day the top one. Who knows? There was one other person today that I should mention as well, who was sworn in to a new portfolio in Cabinet, and that was Dominic LeBlanc. There were just two of them, Chrystia Freeland and Dominic LeBlanc. Dominic LeBlanc was president of the Treasury Board,

I think has now added on intergovernmental affairs. Dominic LeBlanc is an interesting guy. I've known him for a long time, son of a former Governor General, Romeo LeBlanc, from New Brunswick, somebody who's liked by members of all parties. He's been very sick the last couple of years, but watching him today,

he's made a great recovery. I was Chancellor of Mount Allison University in New Brunswick for eight years, and so I saw Dominic LeBlanc quite a few times because he always came to big days at Mount Allison. And we shared a few laughs and lots of good talk about politics and the history of Mount Allison, the history of New Brunswick, the history of Canada.

He's seen it all. A good friend grew up with the Prime Minister. They were both kids in Ottawa when Father LeBlanc was the Governor General of Canada and Father Trudeau was the Prime Minister of Canada. So there are times that those two fellows, Justin Trudeau and Dominic LeBlanc, have known each other and spent a lot of time together over the years.

So there you go. You're up to date on what happened today. A couple of things on the COVID front I want to deal with today. It's a, I don't know. I like these potpourri days where I sort of, there's lots of little things that I've seen over time that I want to bring up that I've seen in other, you know, whether newspapers or online magazines or on network television

or cable television or what have you. And I think they're worth sharing. One thing we've talked about a number of times in the past month, and I don't think it's had enough coverage in Canada, in the mainstream media, is this issue that a lot of parents are talking about, which are learning pods, this idea of setting up, in in a way your own home school.

A couple, three or four parents hire a teacher and teach their kids instead of sending them to a school. And this, you know, constant issue of whether or not schools should reopen, and if they do, whether or not you should send your kids to them. So some parents are considering the idea of going their own way, which, of course, raises questions about how, what kind of society that promotes,

whether rich can afford to do this, or even the middle rich can afford to do it, and the poor, and the middle poor can't. So, it does widen that educational gulf between wealthier children and, you know, kids of parents who live paycheck to paycheck where an extra few hundred dollars a month, this is not going to happen. So, good piece I saw a couple of days ago in the New York Times. Families priced out of learning pods seek alternatives.

Yes, I'm reading here a couple of lines from this. Whatever one calls them, learning pods, pandemic pods, or micro-schools, the hiring of teachers to supplement or even replace the virtual instruction offered by public schools has become an obsession among many parents of means. Practically overnight, a virtual cottage industry of companies and consultants has emerged to help families organize pods and pair them with instructors, many of whom are marketing themselves on Facebook pages and neighborhood listservs. But the cost, often from $30 an hour per child to $100 or more, has put them out of reach for most families, generating concerns that the trend could make public education even more segregated and unequal. Debates over nascent pods, some of which will be taught by parents who don't need to work full-time instead of paid teachers or tutors,

have consumed Facebook, parents' groups, and online forums. They have created rifts among friends, sparked accusations of opportunity hoarding by affluent whites, and compelled some parents to ponder whether and how to include lower-income children to their pods. Okay, so there's a lot of different angles to this story, and every day, it seems, every week, new angles come out, and that's what the Times article puts out. As it continues on, some parents, rattled by the unfairness of instructional pods, are exploring how to make them more inclusive. When Myra Margolin, a psychologist and mother of two in Washington, started a Facebook group in June to connect with other parents interested in homeschooling, the page quickly attracted more than a thousand members, many of whom were eager

to form pods. I found myself in the middle of this and it became apparent that it was not a positive trend, she said. So I asked, who wants to help me think through the the middle of this, and it became apparent that it was not a positive trend, she said. So I asked, who wants to help me think through the equity piece of this? It's totally clear nobody has any idea how to. So she started GoFundMe page to subsidize learning pods for lower income students in Washington. I had so many people be like, yes, this is so important, I love this, and only one $50 donation. Education experts say fundraising efforts and pod scholarships, however well-meaning, are no solution for millions of low-income parents juggling the educational, child care,

and economic challenges of the pandemic. Last sentence, more useful, they say, would be if school districts or city governments created their own version of learning pods, especially for at-risk students or children of essential workers. Now, it's a long article, and you can find it if you go online to the New York Times. And if you access, I mean, you've got to be a member. But the headline's Families Priced Out of Learning Pods Seek Alternatives. Good piece. Important subject.

You've probably heard already, you're starting to hear the issues about the seasonal flu and getting the vaccine. Well, seasonal flu doses are now shipping, and apparently officials are struggling over how to get people to take it. You know, seasonal flus get shipped to your local pharmacy. They get shipped to your doctor. And you're probably going to be hearing in the next few weeks from your doctor and seeing signs at the pharmacy

that the seasonal flu is ready. So don't get mixed up. We all know there's no vaccine yet for COVID-19, but there is one for influenza. And the officials are getting worried about what they call a twindemic, both of these hitting at the same time, second wave of COVID-19 plus the seasonal flu. Concern about a twindemic is so great that officials around the world,

and I'm reading now once again from the New York Times, are pushing the flu shot even before it becomes available. Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has been talking it up, urging corporate leaders to figure out ways to inoculate employees. The CDC usually purchases 500,000 doses for uninsured adults, but this year has ordered an additional 9.3 million doses. Okay. Okay. Yesterday we talked about positivity rates, remember? And a number of you wrote about it and asked, well, you know,

you gave us the Ontario rate. What's the breakdown province by province? Well, I'm not going to list them all here, but I'll give you the overall Canadian rate. And it's, you know, it's gone up a little bit in the last few days because it's kind of been an explosion of cases, relatively speaking, in Alberta and BC in the last couple of days. So I think yesterday, because I haven't seen the overall numbers for today, they'll be out after this podcast is out. But yesterday, I think there was around 800, more than 800 cases,

which is a significant increase from the last day I saw last week, which was around 480. So that's gone up. Not double, but close to it. And remember how positivity rates are based. They take the total number of people tested, and they look at how many tested positive, and then they figure out the percentage, and that's the positivity rate. So I think I said to you yesterday that in Ontario, the positivity rate was like 0.31%. 0.31. The accepted positivity rate, I guess nothing's accepted except zero, but the one that tells you that you're ahead of the situation

is if you're at 5% or below. Well, 0.31% is a long way below 5%, so Ontario was doing well. Today, Ontario's case numbers went up, back up over 100 for the first time in a week or so. I think the first time in a week or so. I think the first time in a couple of weeks. And that sent its positivity rate up as well, but we're talking up to 0.6% on the day. So overall in Canada, and this will give you more context on the big picture.

Overall, in Canada, the positivity rate in Canada since the beginning of this, with all the numbers mixed in, is 2.5%. That's the overall positivity rate in Canada. So half of the accepted, and I put that in brackets, rate of 5%. What is it in the states? 6.6%. Okay? Which tells you that some states are doing really well in the U.S.

because they'd have to be to have a rate that low nationally because some of the rates are out of sight in some of the southern states, up around 20%. That's perhaps a better marker of where we stand next to our neighbors to the south. We're at 2-5, they're at 6-6, somewhere in there. All right. A couple of kind of stories that I like because they tell us something about the world in which we live. This one comes out of the Washington Post.

They decided to do a piece on what's happened to car salespeople, the men and women who sell cars. Remember when this struck, everything closed down, right? All the car shops closed down. And the salespeople got laid off in many places. So Todd Frankel of the Washington Post decided he was going to go out and find out what happened to these people because some of them are now back to work.

And he focuses on a chap by the name of Mike McVeigh who had been selling cars for 16 years, honing his skills that he feared were already a lost art. That's when the virus hit. He was 46. He was out of a job. His boss at the Dodge leadership he worked for furloughed the sales staff. Sales shop closed in late March.

He left the dealership that night, stopping at a Wawa. I guess that's a restaurant of some sort in Pennsylvania. To collect his thoughts and call another salesman, Brad Ross. Well, Brad and Mike, they talked about what they could do just to keep their heads above water. Between us, we've got eight kids, two families to support. So when he was finally called back to work, a month or two later, everything had changed. A once booming economy was in tatters. Everyone wore masks. The showroom was closed to customers. Test drives were solo affairs. Deals needed to be done mostly

online. No one wanted to get too close to anybody. If I can't connect with you, if I can't do my showmanship, if I can't see you, I thought I was done, Mike said. The COVID-19 pandemic forced tens of millions of people to lose jobs and thousands of businesses to close, including initially almost a quarter of all people working for auto dealers. One out of four lost their jobs. But the workers and companies that survived often discovered it was not back to business as usual. That included selling cars, perhaps the ultimate handshake deal in a suddenly socially distanced world.

In the new world, a couple more sentences here from this Washington Post piece. In the new world, McVeigh sold zero cars in April, but he sold 58 in May, his best month ever, working deals over Zoom and over text messages. He used FaceTime to join customers on test drives. I don't know how exactly he did that without breaking the law,

but that's what it says here. And he had to do that because no one wanted to ride in a car with him, even with a mask. The dealership thrived, too, selling 216 new and used vehicles in May. Sales were even better in June, 253 vehicles. It was a stunning turnaround from March and April when state coronavirus restrictions resulted in a $750,000 loss for his dealership. Old Mike turned out to be the dealership's top salesman. He'd sold 47 vehicles near the end of July,

and in the final day, he knocked it off, hit his goal of 50. Mike believes salesmanship requires a certain finesse and ability to instantly connect with people. He liked to pepper potential buyers with questions to keep them engaged. He hunted for common ground. He had a strong book of business contacts throughout the Philadelphia suburbs, mostly blue-collar workers, police and firemen. He's active on Facebook. He constantly texted on his phone. He made sure that people

knew what he did for a living and that he could help them. So here's a guy who's, you know, middle-aged, hitting 50, lost his job, him and his buddy with their eight kids, two families, having to change everything to not only support them, but to determine a new way of working. And he did it. And he did really well at it. As he says in the last sentence, I'll read out of this. It's a long piece, a big, long feature in the Washington Post. It's called No Handshakes, A Bad Economy. These car salesmen shifted tactics and succeeded. So you can find it if you want to read more.

But I love the last line. The last line I'm going to read anyway. Everyone has that guy. A car guy. A tire guy. A go-to person for buying something. I want to be their car guy. That's Mike McVeigh.

Okay. I'll tell you something I've never liked pizza you know I've always kind of my kids love pizza my wife loves pizza most people I know love pizza but I've never been fussy about pizza it's something I don't know it just didn't do anything for me.

Until the pandemic, where I've become a pizza fan. So I saw this in Bloomberg and I thought, this is interesting. Pepperoni, America's most beloved pizza topping, is getting ever more expensive to obtain amid production snags at meat plants and high demand for pizza. Small pizza shops across the U.S. are reporting higher prices and tight supply for their usual pepperoni orders. A Charlie's Pizza house in Yankton, South Dakota.

Manager Nick Johnson has seen prices steadily increase from $2.87 a pound in January to $4.12 now. At New York City's Emily, chef and co-owner Matthew Highland is paying $6 a pound, up from $4 earlier this year. Meanwhile, Brandon King, who owns Our Pizza in Vermilion, South Dakota said availability issues forced him to change pepperoni brands for the first time in his nearly nine years running the parlor. But it's not just a supply issue demand is also up. Pizza restaurants have shown resiliency throughout the pandemic as homebound consumers turned to the original delivery staple for comfort food. Domino's Pizza

said the shift to more takeout and delivery offered a tailwind and Papa John's International reported record North American same-store sales in its latest quarterly earnings. So, pizza. Pizza's doing good. Gotta fix that pepperoni problem, though. All right? Okay. Okay. How many of you... This is the last.

This is how far down at the bottom of the barrel I had to go for this last item. How many of you watched Tiger King? Go on. Really? That many of you watched Tiger King? Go on. Really? That many of you watched Tiger King? Well, for those of you who didn't watch Tiger King and don't know what it was, you don't want to know. But for those of you who did,

well, first of all, do you know what Cameo is? It's an app, okay? Cameo is an app where you can watch well-known people performing for a fee. Well, Carol Baskin. If you watch Tiger King, you know who Carol Baskin was. Washington Post says she wears her signature flower crown and her husband Howard dons a conical birthday hat. They're holding a bottle of Bacardi rum and they're wrapping 50 cents in da club, replacing a popular expletive with the word fudge. They'd been hired to film a video

performing a hip-hop song of their choice to wish a happy birthday to a woman named Charlotte. Go, Charlotte, it's your birthday. We're gonna party like it's your birthday. We're gonna sip Bacardi like it's your birthday, they rap, holding up the bottle of rum and then breaking into laughter. She did that for $299. That's what old Carol Baskin is doing now.

But, okay, I'll tell you a little bit about what Tiger King was. It was a Netflix documentary largely about the contentious relationship between Carol, who's a big cat conservationist, she claims, and now a zoo owner by the name of Joe Exotic, who's now imprisoned. It was a huge hit. I can't remember how many episodes there were, six or eight episodes of Tiger King. It became an enormous hit as the pandemic began.

It was on at the early part. It made Baskin into a household name, at least households who watch Tiger King. But just as her big cat rescue sanctuary in Tampa became a major tourist destination, the novel coronavirus prevented people from visiting. A blow considering about 30% of its revenue comes from tours, with the rest coming mainly from donations.

So if you download a cameo, you get to see Carole Baskin do her thing. And you can get her to do it specifically for you for $299. The concept behind Cameo is simple. Users pay celebrities, Lindsay Lohan, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Flava Flav, a solid chunk of the cast of The Office, you name it, to create short, personalized videos about anything. The Saints' Happy Hour podcast spent $500 for New Orleans Saints head coach Sean Payton to insult them.

A woman hired Mark McGrath of the band Sugar Ray to break up with her boyfriend. While the breakup was later proved fake, the cameo sure isn't. And it goes on with other examples, which I won't bother reading them all off. People from B, C, and D lists. But I've been thinking, let's see, what could I do? What could I do? I have to think about that. What would people pay for me to do a personalized newscast? Good evening. I got the first two words down.

Anyway, enough is enough. And that's enough for this day, Tuesday. Now remember what tomorrow is. Tomorrow is the race next door. Bruce Anderson joins us. Tomorrow we're going to focus on conventions. I don't know, did you watch some of the convention last night? Watch Michelle Obama's speech?

Tonight's going to be an interesting lineup of people too. So Bruce and I will have watched a couple of days of this, getting ready for the big finale two days, Wednesday and Thursday when Joe Biden speaks, Kamala Harris speaks tomorrow night, Wednesday night. Anyway, we're going to look not at this convention in particular, but in conventions in the era of a pandemic. How important are they?

What can they accomplish? What's happening that we should be noting. Because next week, you know, the Republicans take their whack at a virtual convention. Although, Trump will obviously get people to

come out and watch him in certain places, whether he makes them wear masks or not, who knows. Or I should say, whether he allows makes them wear masks or not, who knows? Or I should say whether he allows them to wear masks or not, who knows? Anyway, that's next week. This week, the race next door. Tomorrow, right here on the Bridge Daily, Bruce Anderson will be here. In the meantime, if you would like to write about anything,

don't be shy, the Mansbridge Podcast at gmail be shy. The Mansbridge Podcast at gmail.com. The Mansbridge Podcast at gmail.com. And I am Peter Mansbridge. This has been The Bridge Daily. Thank you so much for listening. We'll be back in 24 hours. Thank you.