The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - The Making of Modern Canada

Episode Date: May 1, 2024

We don't often get significant new books on former prime ministers, let alone on two in the same book. But from 1958 to 1968, Canada got two of its most noteworthy PMs. Journalist John Ibbitson's new book is called, "The Duel: Diefenbaker, Pearson and the Making of Modern Canada." Steve Paikin caught up with him in the House of Commons.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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John Diefenbaker over here and Lester Pearson over here, not only hated each other, but were extraordinarily different in every way. Dief was a Tory. Pearson was a liberal. Dief was filled with angry, prairie-based grievance. This guy won a Nobel Prize for diplomacy. Well, John Ibbotson's come along from the Globe and Mail and has written a book saying these two guys built on each other's work more than you might think. The book is called The

Duel, Diefenbaker, Pearson, and the Making of Modern Canada. How long did it take you to write this? Four years. Started it in 2019 and finished it, well, it was six months before it came out last fall. Don't take this the wrong way, but what's so long? Well, I had a day job, for one thing. There is that. And it's a big topic. It's 160,000 words. Huh.

That is a big book. Look at this portrait, for starters. What kind of a guy does that look like to you? It looks like a guy who never got over the fact that he was a small farmer, son of a small farmer who was a failure as a poor kid growing up, who couldn't believe all the honorary doctorates that he was given once he became prime minister. So he wants his robes on when he has his portrait taken. It's so John Diefenbaker. How much of the reason for your writing this book is the fact that you think John Diefenbaker basically got a raw deal from previous historians in this country's history?

Half of it, I would say. So I don't know about you, but I read Peter Newman's Renegade in Power when I was in high school. It was in the high school library. And I grew up, as everybody else did, with the assumption that Diefenbaker was a failed prime minister, that he had the biggest majority government in Canadian history, and that he squandered it. He was erratic, temperamental, indecisive. And then finally he was defeated by Lester Pearson, who gave us the flag and pensions and everything else. But I found over the decades, as a journalist, I kept stumbling across stuff.

Oh, that immigration reform, that was Diefenbaker's watch. Oh, that health care reform, that was Diefenbaker's watch. Oh, apartheid, Diefenbaker started the fight against apartheid. I didn't know these things. So I began to think, you know what, we need to do a reconsideration of John Diefenbaker. Newman was wrong, that in fact, yes, he had his personal demons. He certainly did. But he was actually a very successful prime minister. Major reforms took place on his watch. But I didn't want to diminish Pearson. I just wanted to say that Pearson was building on things

that had already started, in many cases, under Diefenbaker. So I wanted to make it a joint biography in that sense. And then also, the other half of it was, it was just such a great story. I mean, 10 years, these two men fought in the House of Commons and on the campaign trail for power over four elections. That's never happened before or since in the life of this country. So, you know, the novelist in me said, it's just going to be a great story to tell. And it was a great deal of fun doing it. Well, let's go back and look at some of the major elements of Diefenbaker's life. And I like this quote of yours from the book. At an early age, I developed a

consciousness of injustice that has never left me. And then you add, and a sense of resentment and inferiority that never left him either. Why? He was the son of a teacher, a tenured teacher. So they moved around from one community to another in southern Ontario. And then his father had a health crisis. It might well have been a mental health crisis, frankly. And the family decided to move to Saskatchewan where they had a farm. Not a very successful farm.

So Diefenbaker grew up poor. He's from Ontario. He's from Ontario, but he was poor when he was in Ontario, and he was poor when he was in Saskatchewan. And he then became a very fine defense attorney, probably the finest defense attorney Saskatchewan has ever known. He also was a crusading attorney. So he would take on the cases that no one else would take on.

He represented Indigenous defendants. He represented a woman who had been accused of murdering her baby, and another woman who had been accused of murdering her husband. another woman who had been accused of murdering her husband. So he sat in the jail cells listening to these people, and he grew up among these people. So it left him a genuine populist, someone who spoke for the little people and lived among them and was one of them himself.

But it meant he never really belonged. He never belonged here. He was never comfortable with the elites of his own party. And yet, you've got him in a book, and this story can't be true, because it's too perfect to be true. You've got him at the age of eight or nine, predicting he would be PM someday.

Well, he said it in his memoirs, and I believe it. I mean, you know, Diefenbaker was always a man who felt he was possessed of destiny. But he was also neurotic and paranoid, increasingly paranoid, distrustful, indecisive. And he was quite often, as prime minister, his own worst enemy. And that's what so many people focus on, the eccentricities of Diefenbaker, the fallibilities of Diefenbaker.

What they don't look at is the record of those cabinets. And it is a very impressive record, indeed. We shall get to that, but I'm not finished with his childhood yet. Did he really meet Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier as a young kid? Well, maybe. There's a statue, the Star Phoenix, I think, paid for a statue commemorating the event when he was a paperboy and he met Sir Wilfrid outside his train. According to Diefenbaker,

he finally, after having chatted with the Prime Minister, said, well, I can't stay any longer. I've got real work to do. And that's the story in the memoirs. That's the story that everybody tells. That's the story that may be true. But, you know, as they say, some facts are too good to check.

Moriarty had a generous immigration policy. He created the Prairie Provinces. He laid the foundations for the multiculturalism that Canada would soon embrace so why was D a conservative and not a liberal again he was an outsider in those days Saskatchewan was deeply deeply liberal Diefenbaker used to joke that the only thing that protected conservatives in Saskatchewan were the game laws so of course if everyone in the Saskatchewan with the game laws. So, of course, if everyone in Saskatchewan is a Liberal, he has to be a Conservative. Also, he got into a fight with a prominent Liberal lawyer

and probably would never prospered inside the party for that reason. But I think mostly just because he was a contrarian and a loner and wanted to be the big fish in a small party rather than the small fish in a big party. The first five times he ran for office, municipally, provincially, federally, he lost them all. Why did he keep trying? I think because he had that sense of destiny.

Frankly, he should have lost the sixth. He should have lost the one where he actually finally didn't get in. But he had a sensational court case that involved a woman who had killed her husband, and her husband was a Nazi. And this was right at the outbreak of the Second World War. And so the sensational court case probably delivered him the vote in a way that it wouldn't have if he hadn't been trying the case. Here's Bruce Hutchison, the former journalist, writing,

He, Diefenbaker, was tall, lean, almost skeletal, his body motions jerky and spasmodic, his face pinched and white, his pallor emphasized by metallic black curls and sunken hypnotic eyes. How does a guy described like that turn into a guy who captivates the country? Oh, because as Hutchison said in that same passage, once he started to speak, the room fell silent. Even as a university student at debating clubs, he had the ability to hold a room and to carry the room. He was probably the greatest orator of any prime minister we had in the life of this country. And even when he was in his 70s, he was out of power, he still could go down to Main Street and people uh adored him my own

mother adored him um and uh he had that kind of a hold on people but mostly i think it's just the power of his voice okay that's the early story on deef let's go talk about mike pearson sure follow me a different picture. You know, I had never noticed it before all these years I've been around the house. It's a smaller portrait, just physically smaller, and he's smaller within the portrait than Diefenbaker is. What does that say?

Yeah, I wish I'd known this before, to put it in the book. It says a great deal about Pearson himself. I mean, he was a prime minister, and he was a man who wanted to be prime minister, so he had his ego. But he was also a modest man. His humour was self-deprecating. He was a team player, played every sport there was,

and rose through the ranks of the civil service and then in cabinet because he was the kind of person that other people trusted and wanted to know and wanted to have as a friend i think that portrait speaks to that another guy from ontario so um pearson was the son of an itinerant preacher dieffenbaker was the son of an itinerant teacher and the early years in that way uh were quite similar except that ministers uh lived better than teachers did. They had the mats. And moving around all the time could have made Pearson, like Diefenbaker, a bit of a loner, a bit isolated. Instead, he mastered the art of making friends instantly. And again, as I mentioned

in the book, Diefenbaker's great passion was fishing, which is essentially a solitary pursuit, you and maybe a couple of friends. whereas Pearson could have been the head of athletics at the University of Toronto if he wanted to be. He was a great athlete, great baseball player, great hockey player, you name it. And he played it, and he played it well. He played hockey at Oxford. He did.

Oxford Blues. As you can imagine, there were a bunch of Canadians on the Oxford team, and they crucified all the competition, just in Britain but in Europe. Now one thing I learned from your book that I did not know was that both these men fought in World War I and they left the war, their military service, early because of some particular controversies. What's the story there? Sure, so Pearson said that he was hit by a bus during a blackout. The bus was running without lights and that was the end of his career as an aspiring pilot. But the record suggests, and the documents are available online now, that there was a medical history that had more to do with some kind of trauma,

almost looks like PTSD, speculation that he crashed his plane and maybe couldn't get back into a plane after that. But whatever it was, he wasn't being hit by a bus. At least certainly there's no medical records of him being hit by a bus or being hit by a bus in such a way that it would have been the limit of home. He was sent home because of his nerves and then, you know, invented the story essentially. And the same is true of Dieffenbaker. He said he was hit by an entrenching tool like a shovel or a pickaxe, when he was training for digging trenches. But again, the medical record suggests that there was some kind of palpitations of the heart,

which often is a subtext for, again, trauma. The medical board doesn't think he's fit to be an officer. He cannot be safely sent to the front. And he was invalid at home. So both of those men made up stories as to why they didn't fight to the front. And he was invalid at home. So both of those men made up stories as to why they didn't fight during the war. And I suspect most of them came to believe it at some level because I found actually Diefenbaker's diary entries

in his correspondence, which he should have destroyed if he wanted to keep that story a secret. No one called him Lester. Everyone called him Mike. How come? Because when he was at flight training school, some officer said, Lester's a sissy name. I'm going to call you Mike.

And Mike agreed. And he was called Mike for the rest of his life and called himself Mike for the rest of his life. And indeed, his biographer, John English, who had a very fine volume, called him Mike all the way through it. There would be a future Liberal leader in Canada, also with the first name Mike, who was named after him and didn't know it. Yes, I didn't realize that Michael Ignatiev was George Ignatiev's son.

George Ignatiev was a good friend of Pearson's, and they were a small band of Canadians during the Battle of Britain, those heroic days, who lived and endured the Blitz together, became very close friends, in some cases even more than friends. And Ignatiev's son Michael is named, according to John English, after Mike Pearson, although I'm told that it's news to Michael Ignatiev. Well, this is it. When I read it in your book, I emailed Mr. Ignatius, and I said, did you know this? And he said, didn't know it at all,

but I love Lester Pearson, so I'm happy to be named actor. Yeah, it's in the book. Lester Pearson was a professor, do I have this right, who married one of his students? Yes, he did. It was a bit unusual even then, but then a female student was fairly rare. But Marion was in one of his classes. He was was just starting out he was still in his 20s um as several people who

took his classes said he he felt more like a student than a professor um but and she was a very good student he gave her an A but she got A's everywhere so uh she I'm sure she deserved it as well. Marion Pearson's best line is behind behind every successful man, there stands a surprised woman. How much did she love, or not, being the wife of a very public man? She didn't like it at all. And there were a lot of people who didn't like Marian Pearson very much at all. And she was criticized as being cold and harsh and bitter. But, you know, she herself was very intelligent and had all sorts of ambitions

when she married Lester Pearson she knew she was sacrificing those ambitions to be the wife of a man who was rising in the public service and then in in politics she reconciled herself to that I don't think she I don't think she was ever happy in that her story really contrasts the story of Edna Diefenbaker's, John Diefenbaker's first way. What was her ultimate destiny? Edna, again, in some ways made John Diefenbaker. She was the one who taught him that you need to remember everybody's name and face and have a question for them when you see them on the street. She was his champion. She would talk, have long conversations with Mackenzie King when he was

prime minister. And Diefenbaker was on the opposition benches. She was also a good friend of Tommy Douglas when he was an MP and then later as premier. She was devoted to him. But John Diefenbaker was married to his wife, but always his mother's son. And his mother always came first and then became increasingly frustrated with her role as a junior partner in what was essentially a three-way relationship and she became increasingly resentful eventually developed mental health issues and spent some time in the sanitarium and was largely forgotten after John Diefenbaker married his second wife Olive. She died and then died of leukemia but in many ways Diefenbaker owes as much to Edna as he did to Olive.

All right, having set up the backgrounds of these two men, let's now talk about their duel. Shall we have a seat? Let's. So, 1957, liberals have been in power for a while. Louis Salarau is the prime minister of the country. Everybody thinks he's going to sail to another victory. Who is this John Diefenbaker guy anyway going up against him? What happens? that they were just always going to be in power. They were the natural governing party. But there'd been a big fight over a pipeline the year before. And Canadians started to wake up to the fact that this government had been in power a very long time.

And Santa Monica was looking quite old. And at the same time, just before the election happened, the conservative leader of the day, George Drew, became deathly ill. And his doctor said, you have to step down or you're not going to survive. And so he did. And the party needed quickly to find a leader. And although, you know, Diefenbaker had no cachet within the ruling elites at the party,

they needed somebody. They needed somebody fast. The caucus liked Diefenbaker. The party's faithful like Diefenbaker. And Diefenbaker won a very quick and hastily arranged leadership. But that's all right, because we'll lose. We always lose. And once we lose, we can go looking for someone to replace Diefenbaker. But the whole world discovered, at least all of Canada discovered, that John Diefenbaker on the campaign trail is an astonishing politician and he campaigned amazingly well. The polls still showed the Liberals well ahead. Maclean's

went to bed with an issue assuming the Liberals had won the election. It was very much Dewey beats Truman. But on election night, to everyone's surprise, except John Diefenbaker, he always insisted he was going to win that election and he was right. He did. Okay, so Louis Saint Laurent loses. The Liberals need a new leader. In comes Mike Pearson. His first speech, I gather, in the House of Commons is what? A total disaster. The Liberals had been in power for so long, and they were so shocked that John Diefenbaker had defeated them, that they wanted to engineer the defeat of the government as quickly as possible so they could go back to being in power. This was a minority government.

This was a minority government. What they hadn't noticed was that Diefenbaker was popular. He was governing well. He'd introduced major reforms. And the Poles, you know, much earlier time, they weren't as powerful and important as they are now. But they showed that the Conservatives were doing well. Nonetheless, Lester Pearson wins leadership of the Liberal Party.

On his first appearance in the House of Commons as Liberal leader, he urges Diefenbaker to resign so that the Liberals can once again form government. And Diefenbaker sort of turns to the guy beside him and says, I got him. And he stands up and he just eviscerates Pearson, just eviscerates him. And everyone in the House knew it, including Pearson, who admitted in his own memoirs that he was destroyed by Diefenbaker, who said, all right, you want an election? Let's have one. And they call the election. And it turns out to be the biggest majority in the history of the country. 208 seats. 208 seats and

I believe more than 50 percent of the vote. How did Diefenbaker as prime minister then lead a huge majority government? In many ways well, in some ways not well. Strangely, although we had a huge contingent of Quebecers, he didn't put very many Quebec ministers into cabinet, and he should have, because that eroded his support in Quebec. He made a deeply controversial decision early on, which was to cancel the Avro arrow. The arrow needed to be cancelled. It was obsolescent the day it was rolled out, and in fact, the Saint-Laurent government had already decided to cancel the arrow, but to wait until after the election to make the announcement. So he was only carrying out a decision made by the previous Liberal government. But still, it was huge controversial. Still is to this day. There are still people who think

he made a terrible mistake. He didn't. He developed a reputation quickly for dithering, for being combative, for not making decisions. And that's the narrative that gripped the Parliamentary Gallery. But what the Gallery wasn't noticing was that he was also, his cabinet, making decisions and that's the narrative that gripped the parliamentary gallery. But what the gallery wasn't noticing was that he was also, his cabinet, were making huge reforms, eliminating the incredibly racist immigration policies of the country, bringing universal hospital care to the country, leading the fight against apartheid in the Commonwealth, bringing in the Canadian Bill of Rights which has set the agenda, the rights agenda, for the decades ahead. Big reforms in the Justice Department and penal reform.

All in all, if you looked only at the agenda of the government and you forgot about all the storms and scandals, you would have said that was a very successful government. Well, let's look at a few more things. First female cabinet minister ever, Ellen Fairclough from Hamilton. First Ukrainian cabinet minister ever, Michael Starr. First indigenous senator ever, James Gladstone. First Nations got the vote for the first time in history.

Diefenbaker himself is the first non-English, non-French background prime minister. How much of the fact that Canada is a multicultural country today do we owe to him? A lot. Let's go back then to Alan Fairclough and immigration. Up until that time, the most racist place in Canada was the Immigration Department. Its job was to keep Canada white, to keep only Europeans coming into the country and no one else. And Diefenbaker resented the fact that he had been made fun of because of his German name. So he put Ellen Faircloth into immigration and said, clean it up.

And it took her a long time. But early in 1962, she stood up and announced a new order in council and said, henceforth, from this day on, the colour of your skin, the country of your origin, the language that you color of your skin, the country of your origin, the language that you speak, your religion shall have no bearing on your entry to Canada, only your suitability to integrate into this country. And that was the beginning, that day, that literal day was the beginning of multiculturalism. And again, the book talks a lot about how Pearson complimented

Diefenbaker, even though they clashed repeatedly. It was Pearson who came in and said all right but that's just a government you know order and council how can we entrench that and he came up with the point system which gave us the multicultural country that we have today so the two of them actually worked in tandem to transform Canada into multicultural society there's a guy over my shoulder here Pierre Trudeau who was responsible for the charter of rights and freedoms but Diefenbaker had the bill of rights and freedoms but defenemaker had the bill of rights which he brought in in 1960 how significantly was that treated back in the day it was not treated significantly enough by the supreme court of the day and rosalie abella talks about i interviewed her for the book and she pointed to the supreme court of that time

really just saw its job as deciding whether something was provincial jurisdiction or federal jurisdiction. It didn't really understand a rights agenda, so it downplayed the importance of the Bill of Rights. But Pierre Trudeau was always very grateful to John D. Baker for introducing that bill because it introduced the notion of we need a charter of rights and freedoms, you might call it, entrenched in our Constitution. I was grateful to Diefenbaker for doing it. They always liked each other. He had them over at Sussex Drive for lunch. And whether or not you think the Supreme Court was right or wrong

in downplaying the importance of the Bill of Rights, nonetheless, it started the conversation that led to our Charter. Who said of John Diefenbaker, I don't want to see that boring son of a bitch again? That would be John F. Kennedy. Why did he say it? Kennedy and Diefenbaker didn't get along. They were just old, young. And Diefenbaker was not someone the Camelot considered sufficiently interesting. But more important, Diefenbaker had initially agreed when Eisenhower was president to allow nuclear tipped surface to air missiles into Canada, the Bomark missiles. Diefenbaker later, though, became increasingly concerned with the fact that Canada would be a nuclear power.

We would have nuclear weapons on our soil. There would be nuclear missiles on our fighters in Europe. His cabinet was split on the issue and he refused to make a decision. He should have made the decision one way or another, but he refused to make a decision, and in not making a decision, he was in essence saying no. And Lester Pearson, who knew what side the bread was buttered on, the Liberal Party had always opposed nuclear weapons on Canadian soil. He did a Damascene conversion

and suddenly announced that he would accept the nuclear-tipped Walmart if he were prime minister. And in essence, the Kennedy administration campaigned for the Liberals during the 62 and 63 elections. Diefenbaker said, I'm not running against Mike Pearson, I'm running against John F. Kennedy. And largely, he was right. And in 62, that massive majority government from 58 gets kicked down to a minority government. Gets kicked down to a very weak minority government, doesn't last very long. The Bullmark Missile Crisis brings its downfall and brings Lester Pearson to power. In 1963.

Correct. Was Deef shocked that he was out after just not that many years, frankly, in power? He'd waited a long time to get there. He was deeply disappointed and, of course, sought to return to power. But in some ways, I think he was happier in opposition. John Diefenbaker was a defense attorney, a crusading defense attorney. And John Diefenbaker, with the left on his hip and the right hand, how dare you, was in some ways more comfortable as leader of the opposition

and had more fun as leader of the opposition, I think, than he had as prime minister. If he was such a disaster in government, which is, you know, a lot of the conventional wisdom of the day, how come the Liberals come in in 63 under Mike Pearson with just a minority? And in 65 with just a minority. Pearson wasn't a very good politician. He came up through the ranks of the diplomatic corps, became in those days, believe it or not, you could do this sort of thing. He went from deputy minister to minister in his own department and then became leader. And he was very comfortable in the corridors of power.

He would have been very happy in a place like this, but he was not happy on the campaign trail. He spoke with a bit of a lisp. He was not a natural politician. And Diefenbaker was born to campaign. So time and again, the Liberals went into the election campaign fairly confident they were going to win a majority government, and came out again with another minority because Dieff out-campaigned Mike. But Dieff is still the leader. He's 68 years old, and he won't step down. Why not? No, and this is where it starts to get sad. Whatever his ego, his vanity, his paranoia, he simply could not accept the fact

that he had lost now the 63 election. He had lost the 65 election. It was time for him to go. It was time for a new generation of leadership, but he wouldn't leave. And Dalton Camp and others had to conspire within the party to force a leadership convention in which he ran, which was, again, you know, sad. He ran to succeed himself. He ran to succeed was, again, you know, sad. He ran to succeed himself. He ran to succeed himself. Did very badly, of course. But stayed, stayed in the House, and literally died while he was still in office.

So Mike Pearson becomes, well, let's look at some of the record of the Pearson years, which are admittedly short, right? 63 to 68, he's prime minister. Got a lot done. He did. So he built on Diefenbaker's health care reforms in which hospital care became universal and made it a universal public hospital care.

A commission, by the way, that Diefenbaker had appointed, but it was Pearson who actually initiated it. It was Pearson who created the point system to entrench the immigration reforms. It was Pearson who created the Canada pension plan, or his government created the Canada pension plan. And it was Pearson who gave us the Canadian flag, something that Diefenbaker stoutly opposed. He wept when the new flag was raised because he was still wedded to the British Empire.

But Pearson knew where the world was going, and he knew that the empire was dying, and that the American empire was what Canada had to deal with now. And that flag is one of his greatest accomplishments. Why would Pearson step down after only five years as Prime Minister? He was old. He was tired. His government had been wracked with scandal. We've forgotten about them now, but by God, they did scandals in those days. We've lost the art of scandal, I'm afraid. And he was not very popular. And Expo 67, you know, sort of showed the world a young and vibrant and vital Canada it was the 60s it was demonstrations occupations you know the war in Vietnam and there was a

feeling in Canada the two old tired men who'd been fighting each other for a decade needed to go away and introduce a new generation of leadership and And, of course, Pearson completely agreed, happily stepped down, and worked to ensure that Pierre Trudeau would be his successor. Trudeau takes over, 1968. Four years later, Pearson is dead. Where is he buried? A beautiful cemetery in Wakefield, Quebec,

just across the river from Ottawa. If you're ever in the national capital, especially if it's a nice day, go up to the Wakefield Cemetery. You'll see his place of rest there. And also you'll get a great view of the Gadno Hills. Deeth continues, as you suggest, to be an MP until age 83.

He's suffering from dementia at this point. Where's his final resting place? Deethan Baker is buried back at the University of Saskatchewan. He was chancellor there. He wanted to be buried there. His archives are there. And if you're in Saskatoon and you want to visit one of the most beautiful college campuses in the country at the University of Saskatchewan, you'll find the Diefenbaker Center there and his place of rest. I'm guessing that you are actually too young to have remembered much of the Diefenbaker and Pearson years,

because you're not much older than I am, and I don't remember those years at all either. So where does your interest in this time period in our history come from? Actually, it's the only time I ever mention myself in a book. My first political memory was of going into my grandma's house. Mom and grandma were both there, and they were so upset. And it was the 1967 Conservative Leadership Convention, where Diefenbaker was being defeated. And they said, this is terrible. He's a wonderful man.

He speaks like Churchill. And these awful people are forcing him to leave the party. So that's when I first started to become interested in politics. And I then watched Pierre Trudeau win the next year. There was a wonderful series, The Tenth Decade, that I used extensively in the book, which chronicles this decade of power between the two men. 1970, I believe it was. And then, you know, the die was cast. Did you ever meet either one of them?

No, never met either. I didn't get up onto Parliament Hill until 2002. I've got a thousand questions about what you might have asked each of them had you had the opportunity, but I can imagine that one of your favorite imaginary dinner parties would be john ebbson john defenbaker lester pearson all together at the same table oh i don't know about that no uh because they'd have just fought the whole time you wouldn't be able to get a good i mean i guess as a journalist it would be fun to watch yeah uh because they became uh they didn't just compete uh. They came to dislike each other strongly. Pearson despised Diefenbaker.

And Marion despised Diefenbaker as well. So it would be an interesting dinner party, but one in which I don't think I'd be doing much more than trying to keep anyone from smashing their glasses. That'd be fun. Well, it would be that. It would be that. John, it's a great book.

Congratulations. Thank you, Steve. Well done. Yeah. The Agenda with Steve Paikin is made possible through generous philanthropic contributions from viewers like you. Thank you for supporting TVO's journalism.