Book looks at our everyday heroes
Peter Mansbridge tells stories of Canadians who are making a difference
Peter Mansbridge has spent the last year thinking about heroes. Not caped crusaders and not those who have landed on world stages. He’s been thinking about people who lead remarkable lives outside of the public spotlight.
Over his storied broadcasting career at CBC, Mansbridge estimates he has conducted around an astonishing 20,000 interviews.
“Many were either political figures or they’re celebrities. But as exciting as that was, they’re really not the people I tend to remember,” he says. “The ones that stick out are the more ordinary people who were caught in some kind of extraordinary circumstances. There’s no spin to their stories. They weren’t seeking publicity but, suddenly, they were there.”
Peter Mansbridge’s 2010 book “One on One” included transcripts from his notable conversations with former U.S. presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. It seems fitting given his new book, “Extraordinary Canadians: Stories from the Heart of Our Nation,” that Mansbridge spent the recent monumental American presidential election weekend enjoying the late-season sun from his home in Stratford.
The idea for “Extraordinary Canadians,” which was co-written with former CBC colleague and producer Mark Bulgutch, initially came in mid-2019 from Mansbridge’s publisher, Simon & Schuster Canada. He found the idea of returning to intimate interviews appealing as a new project.
The book features 17 first-person accounts from people with
varying backgrounds from across the country, as told to Mansbridge and Bulgutch. There are soldiers and activists, educators, religious leaders and immigrants, each with a unique personal history.
There are those whom Mansbridge had spoken to before, such as Cindy Blackstock, a Gitxsan activist for child welfare and executive director of the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society of Canada. He first interviewed her five years ago as part of her fight to improve health care and education for Indigenous children.
As he began the book, Mansbridge thought again about Blackstock, realizing that he didn’t know anything about her background. He discovered through their conversations that she grew up with a non-Indigenous mother and experienced different treatment as a young child depending on which parent she was accompanied by.
“I’ve spent a lot of time in parts of the country where Indigenous Canadians are heavily populated. I thought that I understood the issues, but I didn’t know it as well as I should have,” Mansbridge says in recollection. “Cindy helped me understand through her story part of the challenges they faced and that so many Indigenous Canadians still face.”
And then there are the surprise entries. Around the time he agreed to do the book, Mansbridge was at Nathan Phillips Square for the Raptors’ victory parade. He had never met the team’s play-by-play announcer, Matt Devlin, before, but the two exchanged some friendly words before American-born Devlin — who received his Canadian citizenship in 2019 — went off to emcee the celebratory event.
When gunshots rang out, Devlin’s calm words are widely credited for keeping the jammed crowd calm and avoiding what could have been a
deadly stampede.
“I watched the way he handled it and I thought, ‘I’ve been in the business for almost 50 years, would I have been able to do what he just did?’ I wasn’t sure that I would have,” says Mansbridge, who discovered Devlin’s childhood fantasy of becoming a broadcaster. He chuckles now, recalling the story of how as a kid, Devlin would sit in the stands with a tape recorder and hold a microphone to call the play by plays.
“I like telling stories that are attached to specific moments,” says Mansbridge. “I took what was kind of a basic story and then tried to make something more out of it, given Matt’s travels, to where he ended up, given the strange nature of last year in terms of the success of the Raptors, and his family’s voyage to becoming Canadians.”
Of course, the notion of everyday heroes has taken on new context given the sacrifices made by front-line workers
during COVID-19. The first draft of the “Extraordinary Canadians” manuscript was due in March, just as the pandemic numbers began to rise in Canada and the country went under lockdown. The co- authors quickly added an interview with Moses Li, an emergencyroom nurse and volunteer humanitarian who works at St. Paul’s, a Vancouver inner-city hospital.
“It was still so early in the process that we knew there were a lot of extraordinary people on the front lines of health care,” says Mansbridge. “But as we know now, there’s so many other areas we also could have gotten to whether it was a truck driver or a farmer or a grocerystore clerk. But Moses is pretty extraordinary.”
Given the book’s timeliness, “Extraordinary Canadians” is a feel-good, inspiring read. But Mansbridge cautions that these stories are also there to help us understand that Canada has a long way to go before it’s a “truly fabulous” place to live for everyone.
“Most of these people, the challenges they’ve met are because of inequalities. They’ve taken situations into their own hands and tried to make things better, not necessarily for themselves, but for others,” says Mansbridge. “There are lessons in this book about the country and the things we need to achieve.”