The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Can Tony Blinken's Mid-East Mission Stop The War From Spreading?

Episode Date: January 8, 2024

The United States Secretary of State is on a week-long dash through seven mid-east countries desperately trying to prevent a wider war than the one already underway between Israel and Hamas. Janice Stein walks us through the challenges he faces, plus her latest assessment of the Ukraine-Russia conflict, and the importance of this week's upcoming election in Taiwan. 

And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. You are just moments away from the latest episode of The Bridge. Tony Blinken is off on a seven-country dash through the Middle East. His goal? Trying to stop the war from spreading. Can he succeed? That's coming right up. And hello there, Peter Mansbridge in Toronto today. Welcome to another week of The Bridge. Looking forward to chatting throughout this week. We're going to start with our regular Monday feature. That's Janice Stein from the University of Toronto's Munk School, her analysis of the two

big hot spots, Middle East, Ukraine. But also as we continue to keep our eyes on other parts of the world, Janice has picked this week for what we are missing. But before that, a couple of notes to keep in mind. We had an extremely successful debut idea last week on Thursday, on your turn. We introduced a feature that had you writing in with an answer to this question. If you could change one thing about our political system, what would that be? And we had a whole lot of letters.

And it was really quite revealing of what you're thinking in terms of how the country operates politically, how it could operate better, a lot of your ideas. And, you know, a number of you have written afterwards, well, what happens to all our ideas? Are you going to submit them to Parliament? That kind of thing. Let me tell you, a lot of MPs, a lot of cabinet ministers, listen to the bridge. And so don't worry, those ideas are going to get some discussion around various tables, not just our own dinner tables, but around some of the politicians' tables as well. Because what you were reflecting is kind of the mood, certainly of the kind of people who listen to the bridge.

So good for you. Well, we're going to keep this theme going, this idea if there was one thing you could do, on a number of different topics. This week, you should like this one because you certainly write about it a lot. If you could change one thing about how the news media operates in Canada, what would that be? All right?

So if you could change or improve by changing one thing about how the news media operates in Canada or just generally, what would that be? So here are the things to keep in mind on that question. Short, to the point, remember to include your name and your location. Now, last week we kind of let that slide for a lot of people who forgot one or the other because they were busy focusing on their answer to the question. But really want that, and it will be a disqualifier if you forget, okay?

So keep that in mind. The question, if there's one thing you could do to change the way the news media operates, what would that be? All right? We often talk about how can we improve journalism? How can we improve the kind of news that you're getting? Has there been a deterioration in news?

Have you lost faith or trust in the news media? Well, here's your opportunity to name one thing. One, okay? Not two, not three. One thing. What would that be? And be imaginative. Be innovative.

Okay? And as you were last week, lots of great answers to that question about last week changing in the political system. So there you go. Short is the answer. You know, if you can do this in a paragraph, that's great. The long letters, they don't get the time

that you spend putting into them, okay? So let's keep, you know, we had a lot of letters last week, and we didn't get half of them on the air. So keep that in mind, all right? Okay, and where do you send? TheMansbridgePodcast at gmail.com. TheMansbridgePodcast at gmail.com. The Mansbridge Podcast at gmail.com. The cutoff time for this is Wednesday, 6 p.m. Eastern.

We probably had 50 more letters come in after the cutoff time last week. But a cutoff time is a cutoff time, all right? So you've got three days to think about this. As long as you get it in before Wednesday at 6 p.m., you're in the contest. And the contest is a signed copy of my latest book, along with Mark Bulgich, How Canada Works. And that's off to you immediately after the program airs on Thursday.

Okay. Enough about that. Let's get to Janice. And you well know Janice Stein by now. She is the founding director of the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto. And we're lucky enough to have her join us every Monday to deal with the two big stories, the two big foreign stories on the landscape,

which are Israel-Hamas and Ukraine-Russia. And Janice brings us up to date on kind of what's happening and her thoughts and her analysis. She is a Middle East expert. She's a conflict management expert. She's listened to and her advice is sought by governments, leaders, business leaders, literally around the world. So we listen to what Janice has to say,

and she's so plugged in in all the different important places in the world to help her with her analysis. Okay, enough from me. Let's get to Janice with the first question. Here we go. So Janice, Tony Blinken's off again traveling. I'm sure he's traveled more in the Middle East in the last three months than he's been at home in the United States. But this latest trip had him over the weekend in both Turkey and Jordan.

And after that, he's going to Qatar, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Egypt. He's also going to stop in the occupied West Bank. So what's he likely to encounter with all of that? Well, he's going with a suitcase Peter Pat with demands. In Turkey, he's probably having a harder time than he thought, largely because Hamas has many largely Hamas-owned businesses operating out of Turkey, and Erdogan certainly is not predisposed to interfere with that. So that was probably a tougher reception.

Erdogan has also been a strong supporter of the Palestinians, but Blinken needs Turkey on other files. He can only go so far. Qatar is much the same. When he gets there, Blinken needs Qatar. It's hostages, hostages, hostages, but also a large number of Hamas-owned businesses that keep the funds flowing.

And the United States now, the light's gone off tracking the funds. So there's an irony here. Qatar is most valuable as long as those hostages are in Gaza. Once they're out, other parts of the agenda are going to bubble up. If we go to the Gulf, UAE and Saudi Arabia, they are very important to Blinken because they have to be part of the solution the day after. They are the funders of the reconstruction of Gaza. They will dwarf others. And Blinken needs them not only for their money,

but he needs them because they give legitimacy, Arab legitimacy to any solution that comes out of these conversations. Egypt is a big player here. It controls the border with Marafa. We tend to forget, Peter, that Egypt blockaded Gaza along with Israel. So what goes into Gaza from the Egyptian side in the future will really matter. How it goes in, who inspects what goes in, what Egypt is willing to coordinate and to cooperate with will matter.

Egypt is a neighbor. It's a frontline state, really, in this conflict, surpassed only by Amman, Jordan, where King Abdullah is an absolutely crucial piece. He has historic responsibilities for the holy sites as that Israel will engage, doesn't matter what you call it, voluntary evacuation. It's forced expulsion of Palestinians from the West Bank into Jordan and from Gaza into Egypt. He misses no opportunity to talk about how unacceptable that would be. In the background is a slightly muted conversation, just bubbling up now, about some sort of confederal solution as a possibility to this. Israel, Jordan, West Bank, Gaza, probably challenging in its own way to put together, but at least with some ballast in Jordan.

Problem for King Abdullah, 65% of his public is already Palestinian. He doesn't want to destabilize his regime. Last stop is Iraq, or wherever in the itinerary it is. But this is a stop that if I were Tony Blinken, I'd be taking a deep breath before the plane hits the tarmac. It is about when are you moving to phase three. Give me a schedule of the withdrawal of your forces. I need to know what the timeline is here and how fast this is going to happen.

Secondly, humanitarian aid. It is truly urgent that Jordanians have a ship off the coast of Gaza. They are treating patients in a hospital ship. Food has to get in. If starvation, if widespread starvation is not to ensue. You know, over the weekend, I saw a video on the web. Well, but it was of eight trucks coming in through Rafa.

It went viral, this tape, and it had Hamas fighters on the back of the trucks, which now who knows if those are real or not, but it speaks to a larger problem. How do you secure the humanitarian aid that comes into Gaza? Rafah now has a million people in a town of 300,000. Everybody's jammed up against that border. And the A-trucks don't get beyond Rafah. So it is really dire. And there have to be ways,

and I think Blinken will push very, very hard. Last big one, what's the plan for the governance of Gaza? So one development in Israel, the defense minister on his own, clearly on his own, brought a plan to the security cabinet in Tel Aviv, which said technocratic leaders, in other words, those who are not part of the Palestinian Authority or Hamas, people who don't have a prior association will be identified and they will be put in charge of the administration of Gaza who's going to do the identifying unspecified. But he made one commitment that Blinken wanted to hear no new Israeli settlements under any circumstances in Gaza. Took that to a cabinet meeting.

It's impossible to describe the fireworks that went off in that meeting because the willingness to talk about an interim government, Palestinian interim government, is enough to blow up those two extremist right-wing partners. Two events that probably fall under the radar, really important. One, by the chief of the defense staff. The second, by the controller General, like our Auditor General, each of them independently without getting Netanyahu's agreement are launching widespread inquiries into the military failure,

the state failure. They are so broad, these inquiries. No accident, one announced one day, the other the next. They're not waiting for Netanyahu to end this war. They are starting the process of holding everybody accountable. This is Netanyahu's worst nightmare. And what this indicates, people are tired of giving him an unlimited run. We can just talk this process going.

They're going now. Okay. You've given us a great overview, certainly of Lincoln's trip and where he's going and some of the different agendas that may be in play in some of those conversations. But is there, in terms of all these countries, leave Israel out of it for a second, but all the other countries, is there a common purpose there, aside from sharing territory,

the same space on the planet, is there a common purpose to end the war? Do they all want this war ended? No question. There's a consensus in every one of those countries. Stop it yesterday. There's urgency about ending the fighting in Gaza. Every one of them is worried that if it keeps going, it will escalate other hotspots in the region.

They want it stopped now. Everyone. Yeah, I mean, I heard Blinken yesterday, on Sunday over the weekend, saying that his main focus on this trip is to bring de-escalation to this conflict. Not bring peace, not to bring an end to the conflict, but to ensure that it doesn't deescalate.

Is that reading too much into what he said? Yeah. Well, you know, he's very careful with his words. The reason he's using that formula, I want to make sure this doesn't escalate, is because with the Israelis, he has been talking about drawing it down, pulling forces out. He hasn't been using the phrase the end of fighting,

because I think in his judgment, he knows he'd get a flat out no for that. But what he's hearing from every Arab government and capital that he visits with, the best strategy of de-escalation, stop the fighting. The Houthi attacks would stop if the fighting stopped. On the border, on the northern border, Hezbollah would not feel compelled to keep going if the fighting stops. So the best de-escalation strategy is end the fighting. That's what he's been told everywhere.

You mentioned Hezbollah on the northern border with Lebanon to Israel. This was an interesting week because one of the top Hamas leaders who was in Beirut at the time was assassinated. Now, everyone assumes it was the Israelis who pulled that off because that's the kind of thing they can do. But Israel's not saying anything, but the assumption is that it was Israel. The Hezbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah, announced that this would not go unpunished, but really, quite frankly, you know, he fired a few

rockets. Hezbollah fired a few rockets into Israel, maybe more than a few, but it seemed like it wasn't quite the big response that a lot of people were fearing might happen. Well, you're right. There is a kind of code that both sides use. They speak with missiles, but they understand each other. So you fire 10 or 12 over the border at Israel. And this one, by the way, so this may be enough to satisfy Israel, took out a big air monitoring station just around Yerushalayim. So there's something concrete he can say he did. Israel responds with

the same eight or nine, but everybody watches the count and makes sure that they're not a lot bigger than yesterday. And both sides walk away understanding we're doing what we have to do, but we do not want this to escalate. I think we're still there now, Peter, but it would be foolish, frankly, not to worry that that one could blow by accident, which is what could happen. And of course, the United States is the one now firing back against the Houthis and against those who are sending missiles against U.S. forces. So that one might go before even the northern border. It's in everybody's interest, therefore, to stop the fighting.

Last point on Israel-Hamas. You've warned us before, and we warn again, that the numbers that come out, you've got to be careful assuming too much about their veracity in terms of the numbers. But the numbers we're left with at the end of this week, or the end of last week, were 22,000 dead in Gaza, most of whom are civilians, most of the civilians women and children. And that has provoked the outrage

just, you know, understandably so around the world. But 9,000, say the Israelis, of the 22,000 figure are Hamas fighters. Now, you know, they're either killed or captured. Put that number in context for us. As you've just said, people are very dangerous to play the numbers game. Not only because we can't verify, but because in the past, military body counts can be very misleading. 9,000 fighters out of

approximately 30 to 35. That's as two-thirds of Hamas fighters are still able to fight in Gaza. I don't think that's the right indicator. Let's look at the command and control structure, which is really what matters in all warfare. For all intents and purposes in the north, that command and control structure has been totally disrupted. So the Hamas leadership is not able to transmit orders down the chain.

There's isolated fighting. That's not true in central and southern Gaza. There are fierce battles still going on between Israeli soldiers and Hamas fighters who are not dressed in uniform. That's why these numbers are so difficult. So you judge by the fighting, which you can monitor by open satellite sources. There is still fierce fighting, which says that the central military structure in Hamas is still intact in half of Gaza. That's, of course, why the Israelis are resisting drawing down their forces.

I think it's a much more even fight than those numbers tell us, 9,000 to 175 soldiers. Well, that is the, you know, I mean, it sounds when you just use those two numbers, 9,000 Hamas to 170 Israeli soldiers, it sounds like a slaughter that's going on there. It would be. I mean, that's correct. If you look at the, just just the military piece of this, not the civilian piece. But that misses the cost to Israel.

One, maintaining a reserve army mobilized. Israel has a small standing army and mobilizes reserves. That's what it did by October the 8th. Where do these young people come from? From the high-tech sector and from the agricultural sector. Those are the two sectors that earn Israel's hard currency as it exports into international markets. They're reeling from the fact that so many people are not at work, but they're in the army. That's partly why Blinken has been able to persuade Israel to draw down.

It is just so difficult to sustain over the long term. That kind of costs don't get reflected in the 9,000 to 175. On the Hamas side, they're in tunnels, they're well- stocked, food, fuel, ammunition, they're prepared, they can sustain this for a long time. That's a different kind of asymmetry. And especially if they still have command control structure in place. They do. There's no question they do in the south and parts of central Gaza still. All right. There's no question they do in the south and in parts of central Gaza still.

All right. Let's move to our other focus, dual focus over these last three months, Israel, Hamas, and then Ukraine. the Ukrainians seem to be increasing a tactic they did not use for most of the first couple of years of the war, which was the fight was inside Ukraine. It wasn't outside Ukraine. And they were as tempted as they might have been. They didn't go across the border into Russia. That's not the case anymore. They are attacking inside Russia in a couple of strategic locations.

What's going on here? What's this telling us? So this is a strategy of desperation by the Ukrainian military leadership because the war on the ground is not going well, Peter. And Russia captured another destroyed town. There's real fear that it might break through on the ground in Donetsk and be able to push forward. What's the only option that the Ukrainians have now to use their longer range attack missiles and attack Crimea, which is what they did. Crimea matters to perspective.

One, it's absolutely essential to the resupply of Russian forces. Everything is staged and Crimea goes through and supplies Russian forces. Secondly, if there's a political symbol for Putin, it is Crimea, which he seized in 2014. There are elections coming up, and he cares about them, even though the rest of us will write that one off. He cares. And when there are repeated attacks against Crimea or against the border towns where there were significant

Russian civilian casualties this last week, that makes it very difficult for him to say to voters, we've got this in hand, we're winning. I think over the next two months, we are going to see this kind of war in the air, attacks in the air. You know, just a couple of weeks ago, Russia escalated its attacks in the air

against Kiev and other cities. They overwhelmed Ukrainian air defenses because they mixed the missiles. So the electronic identification was more difficult. That's the critical battle to watch for the next two months. If Russia can break through Ukrainian air defense, that is frankly a game over strategy for Ukraine. Ukraine's only resort now is go behind the lines,

make it tough to resupply, inflict casualties in the effort to really create the sense in Russia that despite all the claims to victory, Putin has not been able to secure his core objective. We've seen that work before. Remember the Tet Offensive? Yeah, it was a terrible loss, military loss for Hanoi, but it turned the tide of the war because people lost confidence in the United States and in the South Vietnamese government. Very similar kind of strategy by Ukraine right now.

So the desperation on the part of the Ukrainians to get a better air defense system included even Zelensky appealing to Trudeau in this past couple of days. I'm not sure, quite frankly, how much Canada can offer there in terms of bolstering their air defense system. No, I mean, not a lot. Not a lot. Frankly, you know how stretched our army is. We're hearing from the chief of the defense staff. We're hearing from our chief of the Navy.

We are down to the bare bones. We have some capacity on the Navy. We are down to the bare bones. We have some capacity on the ground to make armored vehicles, and we have some ammunition stocks. But what Zelensky is really going to need now, resupply of missiles, that's not something where Canada can, and air defense, that's not something where Canada can really make a critical difference. Alright, so clearly we're looking at another one of those key moments in the situation in Ukraine? Yeah, watch

the air, watch the air war in the next two months. I saw one thing in these past couple of days that seemed to me that it must have really upset Putin. And that was one of the Chechen leaders offering up a deal with the United States. We'll release

some of the Ukrainian POWs we've captured if you stop the sanctions against his particular family. It wasn't even Chechnya in general. It was his family, the Chechen leader's family. You know, that, of course, is not going to go anywhere, but it also must, you know, upset, to use a calm word.

What a bizarre story that was. I mean, that's almost a light moment because it's so bizarre that it's almost impossible to believe. You know, Kadyrov is one of his closest allies and he goes out on a limb like that and says, I'll exchange prisoners if you can, if United States, you lift the sanctions against my wife. I mean, where would you, you can't make this stuff up, frankly.

If we tried, we, you know, our listeners would say, come on. So what that really tells you is that Putin, who thinks he pulls all the strings here, can't control some of his closest allies. You know, unclear to us whether Lukashenko, the president of Belarus, stepped in because he was asked to with precaution or stepped in on his own.

Even the most brutal of dictators has trouble with his friends always. It's your friends that do the end, as we know. Right? And this is just. Okay. We're going to take a break. But when we come back, we want to start including once again as we mentioned last week

the kind of area that you've been so good at which is the sort of what are we missing story so what part of the world are we missing we're going to come back with that right after this. And welcome back. You're listening to The Bridge, the Monday episode. Janice Stein is with us from the Munk School, University of Toronto. And as we do each week, we've been looking at the Israel-Hamas situation and updating on the Ukrainian story as well. But we're introducing this week the old segment that we used to do called,

What Are We Missing?, which Janice has always been big on. You know, Janice follows all the countries in the world, it seems, and she always has something to say on that area about what we should be thinking. And this one is actually something that's been bubbling along for the last, well, few years, the fear that China might move on Taiwan, especially so after the Russians moved on Ukraine. So what's happening on that story this week?

Well, what's happening is there's an election in Taiwan, and it could be a critical one for the bigger story. So tell us about that. Big, big election coming up next Saturday, January the 13th. Peter, you know, we've all been told over and over, this is the year in which half the world votes, alone to the racing in itself. But this election is a pivotal one to start with.

There are two political parties really in Taiwan. One is the old Sun Yat-sen's Kuomintang and Chiang Kai-shek's party. It goes back right from the beginning. They fought the Chinese communists in a civil war, lost, withdrew to Taiwan. Irony of history. They are now the friendliest to the government in Beijing. Their view is we need to accommodate. We don't poke Xi Jinping in the eye. We deepen economic relationships. We have, in a sense, we struggle to keep our autonomy

here. We don't want to end up like Hong Kong, but we avoid being Hong Kong by preserving close family relationships. I may have overstated it just a bit, but that's certainly the tone. KMTD is behind in the polls. In the front is the Democratic Progressive Party, the DPP, led by William P. Hyde, who is ahead. The story here is not only this election, but the fact that the DPP has now had two successive terms, if it wins a third term, which it looks like it will, and you and I have both seen polls be absolutely wrong, so I'm going to be watching on January 13th. But if the polls are right and he wins, Xi Jinping is going to be a very unhappy leader. He's going to be unhappy because William Tai is even more outspoken than his predecessor about keeping his distance from China. He does not use family-like language.

It's the reverse. He talks about he skitters around the word independence, but it's on the tip of his tongue, which would of course be a disaster. And even more important to Xi Jinping, that outcome would say there's no political path here to reunification, which she says is inevitable. This is not a fluke that the DPP has won. It's a pattern in which the majority of the voters in Taiwan are now hostile to Beijing.

And that's got to be, for Xi Jinping, a very distressing signal. Now, what can make this just a little better? There's parliamentary elections, too. There's a third party, the Taiwan People's Party. If together, the Taiwan People's Party and the KMT get enough in the legislature to do what Xi Jinping hopes,

which is restrain the new president. That might soften the blow, but this is an election where truly the future is at stake, not because of anything that's going to happen in the election, but because of how Xi Jinping reads the results. How is the West looking at this? Do they have a horse in the race here, or are they trying to stay out of saying too much? They're trying to stay out of saying too much,

because like always, domestic politics really matters. And what the West wants sometimes, if it speaks openly, voters do the opposite in many of these countries. So silence is a good policy. I would bet there are many who are secretly hoping that the GPP does not win because they recognize how escalatory that would be, how much additional risk that would put into the situation. But certainly they're hoping that there's a split, that William Todd takes the presidency, but that the parliamentary elections are much more evenly distributed

so that Xi Jinping can tell himself a story. That's what this is about. Coming out of it on Saturday night, can Xi Jinping tell himself a story that there's still a possible political path to reunification? If he can't, that's the nightmare for everyone. I'll say. Well, listen, this will obviously give us something to talk about next week, because by the time we get together again, we should have a clear result out of Taiwan. We should.

We'll see what that may mean. Janice, thanks so much for this, as always, and we look forward to talking to you again in seven days. See you in a week, Peter. Janice Stein, Dr. Janice Stein, University of Toronto, with her weekly assessment of the situation, not just in the Middle East, but in the Ukraine and Russia as well. And this week, adding China, or well, adding China and Taiwan Taiwan Taiwan being the election this coming weekend and with any luck we'll have a clear result as we said and have an opportunity to discuss the impact of that result next week when Janice visits us okay we have a few minutes left and I'm glad we do because I wanted to get this in. Do you remember last year we talked to

Catherine Hayhill who's a climatologist in the United States with Canadian Connections and we had a great show with her. She was kind of updating us on the situation in terms of climate change where we stood at that time. Well, she has a newsletter, which I know some of you subscribe to, and it's a good one, comes out every week. And Catherine's, obviously, her newsletter in the past week has been about, okay, where are we at the end of one year and the beginning of a new year? And there's kind of a mix of good and bad in here

in terms of how to feel about the climate situation. On the one hand, 2023 was the warmest year since human recording began, according to Catherine. One analysis from the Copernicus European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts put the average temperature at 1.48 Celsius above pre-industrial levels, meaning it's the warmest year on record by a lot. July was the hottest month ever recorded,

and thousands of high-temperature records were shattered around the world all the way through December. Okay, so that sets the scene for what the year was like, but here's a couple of things that you can think on the positive side. These days, climate solutions are already making a real difference. In the U.S., I'm just reading straight from Catherine's newsletter. In the U.S., according to a new EPA record, all the EVs and hybrids already on the road have measurably reduced U.S. carbon emissions from vehicles. New instant rebates of $7,500 to the U.S. on qualifying new EVs and $4,000 on used ones will help the U.S. begin to catch up to China, where 42% of passenger cars are already

plug-in hybrids, or fully electric vehicles. No country can rival Norway, though. Their plug-in fully electric cars make up 90% of registered personal vehicles, and now EVs can charge as they drive, if you live in Detroit or Frankfurt, that is. What about electricity? Solar is now the cheapest form of electricity in most countries around the world, saving people money that can be used for other important things like teacher salaries. Back in 2021, a school district in the small town of Batesville, Arkansas, made headlines when it announced that it would raise its teachers' salaries by up to $15,000 a year,

thanks to all the money it saved from putting in a solar array. Within a year, their school superintendent heard of at least 30 other school districts in the area that were doing the same. That's impressive. On the downside, more than three-quarters of the temperature increase is caused by burning fossil fuels. So, of course, that's being phased out, right? Wrong.

Oil and gas production in the U.S. hit an all-time high last year. And while the world burns, the five super major oil companies, BP, Shell, Chevron, ExxonMobil, and Total Energies, are set to pay shareholders record dividends of more than $100 billion for 2023, likely topping 2022's record of $104 billion. All right. Now, she also has a section called What You Can Do Personally. And, you know, maybe later in the week we'll mention a few of those. There's three things there that what you can do personally to have an impact on the climate story.

But those are the big headlines, the overall headlines. If you're interested in Catherine's newsletter, and I know some of you are, it's called Talking Climate with Catherine Hayhoe. H-A-Y-H-O-E. All right? Okay, to recap. We have a new contest this week. Thursday, on your turn, I'll be reading some of the best letters I get from you on this topic.

Okay, here's the topic. Single focus. If you were able to change one thing to improve the news media, what would that change be? All right, so it's one thing, not two or three. One thing. And you should be able to tell me what it is and why you want that change, in a paragraph, a normal paragraph, not a really long paragraph, okay? So keep it focused. You were great on this last week. Keeping it short, keeping it focused,

because there will be lots of entries again, I'm sure, this week. And the more we hear from people who haven't written in before, the better. We'd love that. But whoever you are, no matter how many times you may have written, go ahead, let us know. I know that I get a lot of mail on this topic, so I'm sure you all have an idea of one thing you'd do to change the news media that you think would improve the way the news media operates. So let's hear what that one

thing is. You send it to themansbridgepodcast at gmail.com, themansbridgepodcast at gmail.com we have a deadline the deadline is 6 p.m eastern time this wednesday and we need that time to process all of the mail get it organized and decide which ones we're going to read okay so if you could keep that in mind 6 p.m eastern time this wednesday you've got the question now. You've got lots of time to give us your thoughts on that. The winning entry

will get a signed copy of Mark Bulgitch's and my latest book, How Canada Works. On the bestseller list, by the way. That's it for this day. I'm Peter Mansbridge. Thanks so much for listening.

Have a great day. Talk to you again in 24 hours.