The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Your Turn and The Ranter on Justin Trudeau

Episode Date: February 16, 2023

Last week the Ranter took of Pierre Poilievre, this week he focuses on Justin Trudeau.  And on Your Turn, lots of your thoughts on the CBC, Ukraine, Turkey and lots more.

And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. You are just moments away from the latest episode of The Bridge. It's Thursday, it means your turn, your opportunity to cheer or jeer, and it's The Random Renter. The Random Renter, this week on Justin Trudeau. And hello there, Peter Ransbridge here. As you're listening to this, I'm in Calgary. Spending a little time in the beautiful Alberta city with the Rockies just off there in the distance. I love it. All right, it's Thursday. Let's kill that music. Let's kill that music.

Let's wind that music down, down, down, gone. All right. Because it's Thursday, it's that opportunity to, you know, reach out across the country, get some of your thoughts on a variety of different issues that we may or may not have dealt with on the program. Well, one of the things we dealt with last week, a couple of times, and there's been some response on it, it was this whole issue of the CBC and whether the president of the

CBC should be targeting the leader of the opposition, putting some of her employees, especially her journalists, in a really difficult spot. Obviously, I had my say on that. I thought it was a mistake. And it seems like many others have felt the same way. Having said that, here are some of the letters. Steve McLeod writes in, Pauliev has made it clear he will defund the CBC.

I say that makes him fair game for the employees or representatives of the company to take shots as they wish. Well, you know, I'm sure you have probably some support in that position. You don't have mine. For whatever that's worth to you. I just think it puts the journalists in a really difficult spot when you have the corporation's leadership targeting one of the leaders of a political party and a political party itself.

It makes it awfully, awfully difficult. So I disagree with you there, Steve, but as I always say, I respect your right to have an opinion. Lauren Finlayson from Cumberland, British Columbia. Lauren has trouble understanding what going digital means. It's one of the other things the CBC president said, they're going to go digital, and traditional services would be left behind and basically abandoned.

Now, she's walked that back because she had to walk it back. The CBC's mandate is to serve everybody in the country, and not everybody in the country can go digital, depending on where they live, what services they have, the strength of the variety of different communication services that are placed in different parts of the country. Anyway, Lorne writes, last week you mentioned on at least two occasions that CBC was going digital. I don't know what that means or how it would affect a long-time radio listener.

I went to the cbc.ca site and read about digitalization, but I still don't understand. Does this mean that I will no longer be able to take my little AM FM radio out to the garden with me? What about when I'm driving down the road and wish to listen to CBC? Will this digitalization mean it will no longer be available to me? You see, I go a long way back with CBC radio. As a wee lad on Sunday mornings, I enjoyed Alan Mills, the wonderful folk singer, followed by Maggie Muggins and her adventures. I still miss Peter Zosky and Stuart McLean, don't we all? No one can replace Michael Enright. However, we do appreciate under the influence ideas in the current.

I hope you can clear up this matter of digital radio for me. Well, first of all, this isn't the CBC, okay? This is just a little podcast done out of my home. I don't work at the CBC anymore, and I don't, you know, answer for them. The CBC can answer for itself. It has a massive bureaucracy to do just that, and a communications department, and you should be able to pick up the phone and call and ask, just what did your president mean when she said

that? I'd be intrigued to hear what they say. Anyway, listen, digitalization, it's just like everything else in our world, right? Your phone's different. Do you still have a landline? I guess, Lauren, you probably do. But a lot of people are abandoning their landlines and just using their cell phones. Now, that's a form, I guess, of digitalization. Not technically, but things are changing, and television is changing, and radio is changing in the way it's delivered to make it more effective and better in the long run, but it's not ready yet on a lot of different formats. Streaming services are right out there in television land, and they're replacing the

kind of traditional cable services. So going digital rather than terrestrial, which is the old format, that's happening. And it's going to happen over the next 10, 20 years. And in a country as big as ours and as widespread as ours, it's going to take a while. But it is happening. And Lauren, yeah, things will change a little bit. I'm not sure you'll be able to go out to the garden with your little AM radio. In fact, the more you read about AM, AM may disappear.

We're not talking, well, CBC, most of the CBC, I don't think they have AM anymore. It's all FM, right? I mean, at the CBC. But I'm not sure. I've lost track myself on some of this stuff. But you can be sure things are changing. But they're not going to change immediately.

And that was unfortunately part of the way that interview sounded that the president of the CBC did initially. It sounded like everything was going to change like tomorrow. That's not the case. Kurt Edmonds from Nelson, B.C. Your most recent podcast on the CBC really hit a nerve with me. Finally, someone's discussing our CBC. Over the past few years, the CBC seems to be struggling to find its audience and its

mandate. Its direction and the daily commentary on social justice issues sometimes come off as a chastisement. There are issues that this country is struggling with that should be explored. Thanks for the discussion on this and appreciate Chantel and Bruce's input on this as well. Listen, the CBC, which has been around since the 1930s, started by a conservative government, okay? It was the conservatives that created the CBC.

And part of the reason they created the CBC was to protect Canadian culture. That's what it's supposed to be doing, right? So any discussion about the future of the CBC should be something that the country involves itself in. So people like Kurt, who have strong feelings about the CBC, are right to do that and to engage on the topic. Katharina Haig in Winnipeg.

It's interesting. A lot of these are from Western Canada, right? I can't really comment on whether or not the CBC is biased, in parts because I'm a bleeding-heart liberal and therefore biased myself. But I want to point out one major thing in favor of the CBC. They're, as far as I can tell, the only radio station, both Radio 1 and Music, who regularly, during daytime hours, like when I drive home in the afternoon will play French and Indigenous artists.

I firmly believe that if we want our country to be more cohesive and all of us proud of the many facets of our society then we need to hear and see them regularly not just at obscure times or once a year. So unless the Conservatives are willing to mandate all Canadian radio stations to do this when they defund the CBC, they should keep their hands off it. You know, I used to say about the CBC when some some conservatives used to say, let's sell off the CBC. It wasn't a defund thing. It was, let's sell it off.

Well, who'd buy it? I mean, who'd buy it if the mandate of the CBC was still the same about all Canadian in prime time? You're not going to make a lot of money doing that. That's why it costs a billion dollars a year in public support. Now, if you could be like the private networks and just run American programming all night, or most of the night, I'm not knocking them for that. The private networks are there to make a buck.

So to make a buck, you run American programming. And that's what they get in return, money. CBC's in a different position. They've got to run Canadian. Now, there's nothing wrong with Canadian programming if it's done right. If you have poor programming, nobody's going to watch it. If you have good programming, people will watch it. Anyway, there you go.

Let's keep rocking here. Kevin Torgrimson. He's in Calgary. Yes, sir. Another letter from the West. I hope Brian Stewart can comment on the latest story from the BBC that Russia's February offensive is amassing 824 casualties a day. That number is staggering.

Canadians horribly lost 158 soldiers in Afghanistan. I can't wrap my head around the casualty numbers happening in Ukraine and how Russians can continually support the war. Well, you know, I agree and Brian agrees. You know, Brian is, as I mentioned the other day, is away on holidays this weekend. Next, he's in the South. He's lying on a beach somewhere.

But he listens. He downloads the podcast, and he writes in. And while he doesn't respond directly to that letter, which is absolutely accurate, that is the casualty figure. But there's another figure that's out that plays in the Russians' favor, and that's what Brian wanted us to note. Russia's firing 20,000 rounds a day, Ukraine only 6,000, and the West is being warned it cannot even meet that amount.

This is a real wake-up call, and it's very serious. Will Canada be pressured to dive into the new push for ammo production? We were very active in World War II on ammo production, but it might take years to set up now. But, I mean, you can do the math. That's going to be a problem. Right? So keep that one in mind.

I've had a number of letters, and this happens every time there's some terrible international situation where people are suffering, and we've witnessed what's happened in Turkey and Syria as a result of the earthquakes, and a number of different aid groups have written in saying, please publicize us so people will send money and donations. Let me just say this. If you want to donate and more power to you if you do,

you should make those decisions not based on what somebody tells you on a podcast or on the radio or on television, but based on your own research as to where the best place to send that money to is. And ensure that the money is actually going to end up in the countries that are being talked about and not in some administrative costs or in some other country. is and ensure that the money is actually going to end up in the countries that are being talked about and not in some administrative costs or in some other country. If you want to donate to those suffering from the earthquake in Turkey and Syria, then make sure that you're sending it to a place that will deal with that. Now, I raise this for another reason as well. You may have noticed in some print articles, some online articles, some broadcasts, radio and television,

that you're hearing Turkey announced in a different way. Turkey, yeah, or Turkey-eh. And you should understand why that's happening. As the Columbia Journalism Review wrote the other day, when you hear the word Turkey, what comes to mind first, the country or the bird? The fear that it might be the bird is one of a number of reasons why the country, well, its government anyway, has pushed in recent years for the international community

to start referring to Turkey using the Turkish spelling of Türkiye or Türkiye, a request made of government and international institutions and also explicitly of the world's media. Now, you're going to see some media organizations are actually not saying Turkey anymore. They're saying Turkey-eh or Turkey-eh. I've heard both ways pronounced. That's one discussion about Turkey that's, you know, happened quite a bit. The other is the question about why so many buildings collapse. And you see those pictures, and in some cases,

they're new-looking buildings that have collapsed. Now, after the last terrible earthquakes in Turkey, the government instituted all kinds of new rules about building construction. And the developers and the contractors say they followed those rules, and yet buildings that were built as little as a year or two years ago have fallen. The BBC has been investigating this, trying to determine why. It's early in the process, very early in the process, but those stories are going to come out,

and you can be sure that there are going to be questions raised about just how the developers followed the rules that they've been given about construction. Because it is quite glaring. It's not just old buildings that have fallen down. It's brand new buildings that have fallen down. So that'll be a story we'll be following in the days and weeks and months and probably years ahead. All right. You know, there wasn't a single letter this week on the ranter.

No, I shouldn't say that. There were a couple based on the ranter. No, I shouldn't say that. There were a couple based on the ranter's comments last week. He's doing a three-part series over the, started last week, there's this week and next week, on the three major national political leaders and what he thinks about them. Let's say they're not pretty. week was pierre polyev and some of you responded to it so obviously um this week next up is justin trudeau he decided to go in the order of what the latest polls showed as to who was in first place. There's a new poll out now this week, as we talked about yesterday,

that shows the conservatives and liberals tied. Other polls show the conservatives were the lead of anywhere from three to almost seven points. Anyway, this week it's the ranter's crack at Justin Trudeau. Don't expect him to be kind. Because he's not. So let's hear what he has to say. Here we go.

The Random Ranter. This week on Justinin trudeau last week i discovered turtles can breathe out their butts so safe search on i googled to find out what else could do it and lo and behold it's rats and pigs. Welcome to the second installment of the ranter taking cheap shots at political leaders. Today's target, Justin Trudeau. Here's the thing about Justin for me. He's either got some mad method acting skills left over from his drama teacher days, or he's a legit world-class salesman. I'm talking platinum level, slick willy good, because people have been buying what he's been selling for years. But his sunny days, well, they were more like a snow job.

He's superficial, but he does have a flair for showmanship. Remember the outfit from that India trip? God love him. That one was straight out of Mr. Dress-Up's tickle trunk. The guy is a bit of a phony. He loves symbolic announcements, but following them through? Not so much. He's the shoulder you can cry on as long as the cameras are rolling. Because when it comes right down to it, well, there's no strength to Justin's convictions. For him, political expediency rules the day. But if you like him, hey, you're not alone. Lots of really smart people

have liked him too. His cabinet is made up of them. And honestly, I used to give him credit for that. I like a leader who doesn't have to be the smartest person in the room. He clearly isn't. But I have no respect for someone who knows that, yet still refuses to listen. And that's Justin. He loves to project a leadership style of teamwork and consensus, but if it benefits him, he'll meddle, step on toes, or backstab with the best of them. Just ask Bill Murnau or Jody Wilson-Raybould. They'll tell you. But look, my main contention with him is rather shallow. I can't stand the way he talks. I mean, chatbot AI sounds more human. He's got this weird preachy cadence that oozes wokeness with every syllable. It's drippy and it's saccharine. Even the most innocuous statement can leave me gagging.

You know, be woke all you want, but do you need to jam it down our throats all the time? I mean, it's never going to make up for those blackface photos. But hey, like the great salesman he is, Justin skated right around that one. Just like he skated around SNC-Lavalin, AgaCon, and the We Charity. But no one is perfect. Over time, stuff happens. And a lot of stuff has happened in the last eight years. It could not have been easy.

And as bad as it was, it could have been a whole lot worse. If Justin was smart, he'd chalk it all up as a win and move on. But Kenny Rogers be damned. He's not going to fold him. He's going to run in the next election. It's crazy. Remember all those Harper stickers that showed up on stop signs? Well, Justin has his own flag and it doesn't say stop. The anger out there, it's palpable and it's aimed directly at him. But fuddle-duddle all of it,

he's been blinded by his ego and he just wants a piece of that Pierre Pauliev, and he's convinced he's the only one who can take him down. I don't remember there ever being two political leaders who hated each other more. Sorry in advance for saying this one, but Trudeau, aka Prime Minister Politically Correct, is choosing to engage in an old-fashioned testosterone-inspired pissing match. Now, I'm not familiar with the rules of such a match, but to me, it sounds like something no one wins. The random renter. You know, what do you expect, right? He rants. He rants every week.

And it provokes a great discussion. That's why I like the guy. I don't agree with him half the time, but I like hearing how you react to what he has to say. And that's what's happening with these rants on the political leaders. For Polyev last week, there were some Polyev supporters who took offense. And that's what's happening with these rants on the political leaders. With Polyev last week, there were some Polyev supporters who took offense. There were some Polyev, those who are not fans, who were cheering him on.

And I'm sure the same kind of reaction is going to flow out of today's remarks about Justin Trudeau. Next week, the final installment of the three-ranter rants on the major political party leaders when he takes on Jagmeet Singh. Be interesting to see what he has to say about the leader of the NDP. Okay, we're going to get back to your letters, but first it's time to take a quick break. But as I said, lots more to come here on Your Turn. And welcome back. You're listening to The Bridge. It's the Your Turn Thursday episode and the Random Ranter. You're listening on SiriusXM, Channel 167, Canada Talks,

or on your favorite podcast platform. Tomorrow, it's Good Talks, Chantelle Hebert and Bruce Anderson. And just like yesterday's Smoke Mirrors and the Truth with Bruce, tomorrow's podcast will be available on our YouTube channel.

And if you're looking for how to get that, you can get the link on my site at Instagram or Twitter. Okay, on with more of your letters. This one's from out of country. It's from Dan Mazzella in Boston. And Dan writes, thanks to you, I've always been interested in Canadian politics. Why? Well, in 1995, I was in the fourth grade and my teacher was from Quebec. After the referendum, his family sent him VHS tapes of the coverage. And he showed us a few clips because everyone here in Massachusetts was talking about the vote.

That's when I first was introduced to you. That's me. I guess, you know, obviously that was a night where I was anchoring the television coverage on the CBC. Dan says, I'm in my late 30s now and still love listening to you. I'm glad you have the bridge. I listen on my way to work every day on Sirius XM. And that's the case.

You could, you know, Sirius XM, obviously it's in most modern day cars. And you can listen to, to the bridge at noon on Sirius XM right across Northern and Central America. And that's how Dan listens in Boston. He also listened to the Moore Buds segment on Monday. Loved it. Although he thought Jerry was speaking too fast. Didn't notice that.

Well, check it out. Betsy Daub in St. Agatha, Ontario. I'm 70 years old, and I have no hope for the future. Oh, this sounds a little gloomy here, Betsy. When you combine climate change, which is only getting worse, the effects of having clowns mostly running governments all over the world, and now the war in Ukraine, this will likely go very sideways very soon. Do any of your commentators have any words of hope?

Got to have hope. Betsy. Listen, things are difficult. Life is difficult. But you never give up hope. You never give up hope that there'll be peace in Ukraine. You never give up hope that inflation will be wrestled to the ground. You never give up hope that the struggle between democracy and autocracy will end in favor of those who believe in democracy.

You never give up hope. And it's not a matter of just sitting there you got to participate right that's part of the way you keep your hope derrick andrews writes question for you on these sky objects if you're now seeing the military needing to comment and if these four incidents all appear to be happening over border locations to collect information, how should news agencies be covering this? This seems very unprecedented, so I'm curious with your experience how you think this week will play out in terms of coverage. Well, I think we're already witnessing what happens when news agencies ask questions and continually ask questions.

To some people, it looks like they're pestering, but there have been a lot of unanswered questions on this story from the beginning. And part of the role of the media, a responsible media, is to ask questions, to seek out information, to try to determine what's true. Right? That's the idea. And that's what they should be doing and will be doing throughout this week. We've already seen how this story has taken twists and turns.

And I'm sure there are a lot more to come. By the time I get back to Toronto tomorrow, I'm doing a thing with the University of Toronto at the Munk School where the plan is to have a panel of a couple of international experts on what's really going on here. Should we be worried? Or should we not be worried? Has this story been overblown?

We're going to ask some of those questions. Jay Innes from Ottawa writes, As the Director of Communications for one of the largest long-term care homes in Ontario, I've been on site at the Purley Health Centre throughout the pandemic. Unprecedented times don't even come close to describing the last three years. Your podcasts were and are the highlight of my commute. During those desolate lockdown days, sometimes it was just my car on Highway 417, powered by your podcast.

417, is that the one between Ottawa and Montreal? Or the one between Ottawa and the 401? I think it's the one to Montreal. Your Monday COVID podcast provided vital information on national and international news to inform me heading into our command center meetings. And here's something that's very kind of you. And I, you know, I know that a lot of people found the Monday COVID podcast really important for those couple of years. And occasionally we still do an update on where things stand,

but we don't do it every Monday anymore. And, you know, I miss talking to the doctors who were such a part of our program. But I'm, in a way, I'm happy that we've been able to move away from that. I know it's still out there, and I know a lot of people are still suffering. But life is slowly, slowly getting back to some degree of normalcy. But this part of Jay's letter I really found interesting. It's just a couple of sentences at the end. In a recent podcast, you mentioned rule of thumb.

I use that phrase. During my time on Parliament Hill in the 1990s and early 2000s, NDP MP Don Black once told me that the rule of thumb applied to the width of a belt by which a wife could be whipped. I believed her, and I've dropped use of that term.

Clearly, the suggestion from Jay is that I'd drop use of it as well, and I was horrified when I read that. Now, I've since done some research going through some encyclopedias and a variety of other methods. And while you can find the origins of the phrase rule of thumb, dates back to a number of different things. One of them, though, is exactly that.

The width of a belt or a stick or something with which a woman was beaten by her husband. So, yes, I agree, Jay. I'll do my best not to have that used on this program again. Nikola Milutinovich, and I'm sorry, Nikola, if I've mispronounced that name. I was wondering, do Chantel, Bruce, and your other guests receive a summary of each episode's agenda in advance of recording? You and your guests are always so thoughtful. Every time I listen, I find myself thinking, sheesh, I couldn't come up with that on the spot. Thanks for taking the time every day to put on your excellent show.

Good question. Here's the answer. In the case of good talk and smoke mirrors and the truth, there's usually an agreement before we start the program, the general areas of discussion. Not the questions. Those sort of come out of nowhere, just like the answers do. But we're going to say, okay, let's talk about the health care agreement.

That's it, right? That's as far as we go in how we're going to discuss things. With Brian Stewart on Tuesday, it's a little more detailed because there's specific areas we want to get to and Brian wants to get to. And he will send me an idea usually on the weekend before the program, and I'll send him back some thoughts, and we'll agree as to more specifically the areas we're going to talk about. Other than that, special guests, when they come on, no, there's no exchange.

Obviously, you talk to someone like Dr. Deborah Thompson a couple of weeks you know, want to talk about Black History Month. She says, yeah, let's do it. And then the next thing you know, we're doing a 40-minute conversation. And that's what it is. And there's been no other prep for it in terms of advance warning of questions or anything like that. Okay, a couple more letters. Airplane landing clapping from Rod Sims. A couple of weeks ago, we had a number of letters back and forth about how people clap sometimes

when the planes land. Well, Rod and Eileen Sims live in Vancouver. And Rod writes, my wife and I just returned from a wonderful 16-day Antarctica cruise from Santiago, Chile to Buenos Aires in Argentina. That must have been fantastic. It's the one continent I haven't been to, Antarctica, and I hope someday I get there. As Rod says, of interest to you is that most passengers clapped after unremarkable landings in Santiago, Sao Paulo, and Montreal. Nobody clapped after landing

in Vancouver. Go figure. I don't know, that somehow sounds like a slight on Vancouver, and I mean, that's probably because they were still in awe looking out the window at the spectacular sight that is Vancouver, assuming you landed on a day it wasn't raining. Here's our final letter for this week. It comes from Emmy Penny. Remember that name?

Haven't heard back from Emmy for a couple of years now. She used to write during the pandemic. Emmy lives in Pasadena, no, not California, Pasadena, Newfoundland and Labrador. So here's what Emmy has to say. I began listening to your podcast in early 2020 when my gift shop temporarily closed due to the pandemic. Your familiar voice and calm outlook was a big help to many during those early weeks of COVID, including me. I wrote to you on a couple of occasions about our COVID experience at the time, and now I thought I'd update you.

Our shop survived and thrived during the pandemic due in large part to the online store that my son Stephen had helped me set up in 2018. We'd already gone through the learning curve and our shop was positioned perfectly for online shopping. In September of 2021, I was blessed with my first and probably only grandbaby, Emmy Louise. I was about to turn 71 and quickly realized it was probably a good time to consider retirement. We put our shop up for sale in early 2022, but it wasn't until the 11th hour that we found a buyer. Saturday, January 21st, 2023, I closed the doors to our 30-year-old shop for the last time, and I'll spend the next few weeks helping the new owners during this transition. They are around the same age as I was when I started

and full of enthusiasm and new ideas. I'm so happy that Gifts of Joy, that's the name of her shop, you can find it online if you want, will continue on the west coast of Newfoundland. As I reflect on the closed down days of COVID from March to June 2020, I mostly remember the time spent listening to The Bridge as I filled orders and provided curbside pickup for my customers. To me, you are synonymous with COVID-2020,

but in a good way. Take care, Peter. I'm looking forward to your next book and will continue to enjoy your podcast. Emmy Penny in pasadena newfoundland labrador emmy it's great to hear from you and you know good luck yours is a great story love hearing it love hearing about you know the days that were so important to you as you got your store in ship shape, as they say,

and got the online operation working through the help of your son. So good for you. You've earned a bit of relaxation. That's what I thought, of course, when I retired. Now I'm busier than I ever was. But loving it. and loving the opportunity. You know, people say, why do you do the Thursday show? And I say, I do it because I love to hear from people who listen.

I love to hear their stories. I love to hear about what's on their minds. And that's been a great joy over these last few years. All right, that's it for this day. We'll be back tomorrow, Friday. Good talk. Chantel and Bruce will be here. I'll be back in Toronto by then.

Look forward to that chat. Look forward to talking to you. All coming up in 24 hours.