The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Can Trumpty Dumpty Be Put Back Together Again?

Episode Date: November 16, 2022

So he's in the race for 2024 but what are his chances? Bruce Anderson joins for SMT with thoughts on Donald Trump and Mike Pence on a big week for both. And a seemingly simple idea from Pierre Poilievre may be just the way to make some people more comfortable with the Conservative leader.

And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. You're just moments away from the latest episode of The Bridge. It's Wednesday. You know what Wednesdays mean. Wednesdays mean smoke, mirrors, and the truth with Bruce Anderson. And hello there, Peter Mans, in Toronto on this day. And a quick explanation, first of all. If things sound a little bit different today, the audio a little different on my end of things, it's because I woke up to one of those first world problems. Internet crash in the apartment in Toronto.

I couldn't get anything to work. And so I had to scramble. And fortunately, one of my good neighbors, my son, Will, has offered up his space so we can do a little podcasting, a little broadcasting, a little video casting on this day. So I'm in Toronto. Bruce is in Ottawa. Does Will have a piano? Is that a piano I see in the background?

It does look like a piano, doesn't it? Yes. But it's not. I thought maybe he could play a little walk-on music for us because I was just listening to the walk-on music for Trump and thinking maybe we need something like that. I don't know if we'd go with Hunk of Burning Love like he did. Something Jerry Lee Lewis where you can get up on the chair

and use your feet and the whole bit. Use your feet. In memory of one of the greats. A bit of an odd guy, but nevertheless was quite the musician. Yeah, actually, that's a fireplace and a chair in the distance, but together it does kind of look like a piano, doesn't it? It does, yeah. Okay, we have a, we've got lots to talk about here today.

And we start as, you and I like to talk about Trump, don't we? Trump-ty, dump-ty, as the New York Post called him last week. It's therapy for us. It is therapy, yeah. Well, Trump-ty, dump-ty tried to put himself back together him last week. It's therapy for us. It is therapy, yeah. Well, Trumpy-Dumpty tried to put himself back together again last night with his speech announcing that, gee, what a shock, he's going to run again for president, which seems to be the first time that he's admitted that he's not the president now, which is, you know, a step in the right direction, I guess. But I want to get your sense of things.

I mean, I found it crashingly boring. I find him incredibly boring whenever he speaks from a prompter. He's interesting. He's crazy when he's speaking without a prompter. But at least it's kind of fun to watch. Last night was painful to watch, at least as a performance situation to kind of gauge it on an editorial scale well that's different and that's what you're going to do now you tell me what what you thought i'll listen and uh and i'll react well there were a lot of things that

were similar to the versions of trump that we've seen before going back to when when he first entered politics um he was at one of his properties there were lots of american flags um and there were a lot of uh people of a certain demographic uh that tend to like him and his politics and the idea of his wealth and that sort of thing. Mar-a-Lago is very much, I think, symbolic of who it is that Trump appeals most to. But there were a number of things that I thought were quite different. There was no real doting coverage by fox news as many people have noted fox news actually tuned out at one point said well we'll come back if there's anything interesting that happens which given the kind of coverage that fox news has given him over the last several years that was a real

that was a real shot across his bow part of of a whole series of shots, I think, that have been taken by the Fox News and Murdoch newspapers, that sort of thing. There was no evidence of people like Steve Bannon around the event, not necessarily even on the stage, but the idea that this was the launch of a campaign that had been designed and was being cultivated by a cadre of hotline radio shows and political organizational experts. There was none of that apparatus anywhere in evidence that, you know, I didn't see the talking head version of a whole campaign team come coming together. It just felt like here's a guy and he's on his own uh his wife was with him but didn't get up on the stage when he first took the stage and that was sort of striking to me his daughter ivanka made a point of saying that she wasn't going to attend the event apparently jared was there but there wasn't this kind of big family trump thing which she's even she's even gone further right she's now saying

i'm out of it i'm out of it that's right nothing to do with politics anymore and that's why i'm not going to this thing last night yeah now the biggest difference i think pete let me just finish on this point the biggest difference i mean there was a lot of stuff that was just nonsensical and now we'll come to that because some of the things that he says that almost pass unnoticed because they were so used to him saying bizarrely untrue things. But it was low energy. up to an event that he had organized where he was a kind of a defeated heavyweight champion boxer who'd been out of the ring for a couple of years but was announcing a big comeback fight and you know you and I've seen those kinds of things before and there's a lot of hoopla and there's a lot of energy and of course they they did play Burning Love and Eye of the Tiger and

Mr. Brightside and then they sort of brought it down a yellow brick road. And that was kind of interesting because when he came up, it had that kind of low energy Elton John melodies kind of feel. And he stuck with that. He never really got very riled up. I mean, even though he was just talking about himself most of the time, and he likes that subject, but he never reached that level of energy. And he was more Jeb Bush than Donald Trump 2015. I think Elton John would really be unhappy with your characterization. It's a great song. And Elton John's music music is fantastic i don't know why trump thinks he can

continue to use these politicians songs i'm sure that those rights aren't you know secured uh it would make no sense to me that they were no and i'm sure they're not um part of the low energy thing you know i take it back to what i i said. When he's reading off a prompter, and we know this from, you know, lots of past experience with him, that that comes off as this doubling of boring and low energy. And, you know, he doesn't mean it. It often feels like the first time he's even read it. He's sometimes surprised by some of the lines and then tries to add a little ad lib to it all. We've seen that before.

We've seen other politicians in that situation before, but he's made a fine art of it. When he is on script, just like when he's off script, he's a lot more interesting. Now, somehow, somewhere yesterday, those people who are close to him, advising him, the Jason Millers, et cetera, I don't know whether Bannon, I can't keep track of Bannon. I don't know whether Bannon's in jail at the moment or not in jail, wherever he is.

But somewhere they sat down with him and said, listen, you know what? You've got to go on the prompter. This is too important. You can't take any chances. We don't want you saying something stupid that's going to derail the whole thing. And so we'll take the gamble

that even if it's a little more boring, it's a little safer. I don't know. I don't get that logic. When he goes off the prompter last night his little meanderings you know you if you're working with a really talented politician somebody who kind of who really knows how to use the anecdote or the aside as a way of kind of drawing the crowd in and engaging them and really emphasizing a point that he wants to make or that they want to make, that can be fantastic. But he doesn't do that. He meanders and he says silly things that don't

really make any sense. And then you kind of wonder well the the organized script has silly things like the greatest country in the history of the world never been anything like this great movement of ours and may never be again when i left office we were towering above all rivals we were vanquishing all enemies everyone was thriving like never before There was never a time like that. Yeah, you're good. He said all of those things. I've kind of got my own version of a prompter up here as I took notes. And I was like, who writes such, you know, over the top stuff, except that is the Kool-Aid that they serve at Mar-a-Lago and at Trump events.

He talked about how he had decimated the caliphate, he and our great warriors. So much of it was about him, right? And this is the prepared text. And I just found the prepared text so unlike anything that we've ever really seen before. And even though he's been doing it for this many years, it's still kind of surprising. And then you look for those little asides, and they're kind of incoherent. He talked about having gone decades uh without a war he was the

first president to go decades without a war well he wasn't in office for decades and there has been some conflicts in the last few decades so i don't really know where that came from in his head he spent some time talking about how joe Joe Biden was held in contempt by the British Parliament because, and then he didn't really make clear what it was, and that he'd flown for days to some place and went to an event and misspoke the name of the country. Well, I don't know how you can fly for days anywhere. As last I checked, you can fly around the world in just a little bit over a day. Anyway, these asides just make no sense whatsoever.

And it would be comical, except it would be foolish to write off the possibility that he could end up being president of the United States again. Yeah, I want to get to that in a second. I mean, it's no surprise anymore that the guy lies. He makes stuff up on the run, as you just expressed. I don't think he even knows if he's lying sometimes. When he says that the oceans will rise an eighth of an inch in 200 years, that reminds me of when Gene Whalen used to throw out all of these statistics about Canadian agriculture and a Canadian cow will deliver 16 times more milk than a French cow or whatever. He used to do all that kind of stuff and people would hear it and they go, wow,

why are our cows so good? And I asked one of his people once, how did he come up with that? Because he just made it up. And no disrespect intended to Eugene Whalen. He's a very effective communicator and minister of agriculture. But Trump seems like he doesn't. If it sounds like it's a powerful statistic, he's ready to roll it out there in the expectation that he'll do so many of those that Daniel Dale and an army of Daniel Dales won't be able to keep up with all of the fact checking. Our good friend Daniel Dale, formerly of the Toronto Star, and now with CNN, was a busy guy again last night. You're quite right. Sitting there going, well, you know, this wasn't true and this wasn't true. That wasn't true.

But, you know, it's part of the package now. It's kind of like the orange hair, which last night looked surprisingly brown. I mean, far be it for me to make fun of hair situations but i i mean it's part of the package with trump you're going to get lies and you're going to get lots of lies and i think he knows what he's doing i think he knows he's lying he's a firm believer in the old theory that you know if you keep lying it turns into the truth for some people um and clearly wait just on that though if you say i went decades without a war in his mind do you think he knows that that's a lie because it's not a very artful lie decades has a specific meaning and everybody knows he was president for four years well he was he was president decade he was president in two decades in the teens and in the

20s maybe that's what he meant all right that must have been what his thinking was um to your point about he could actually be the candidate again, and he could. I listened to George Conway earlier today, talking about the kind of landscape for the Republican Party. Conway is a Washington lawyer and a conservative, married to the other famous Conway who was in the White House or was in the White House with Trump. But George Conway was arguing today that, look, look at the facts. Unless this is a one-on-one race, Trump is almost certain to win it. He's got a guaranteed 30-35% of the vote in the Republican Party,

which if you're in a multi-candidate race is going to put you near the top, if not at the top, and is going to have you heading towards a win. But if it's a one-on-one, say against the future, DeSantis, it's a lot different picture that you're looking at. And DeSantis, in spite of everything a lot of people say about him, he seems to be, as a political figure, doing everything right right now. He's not falling for the bait that Trump lies out there to try and get him to say something stupid. He cleaned up last week in Florida.

I mean, everything, everything that he was pushing, one and one convincingly in the midterms. And he's got Trump fixated on him and worried about him. Yeah. And he's just playing it cool. So a lot of people's estimation of desantis has gone up somewhat from when we first saw him on the national scene whatever it was four years ago and you know he barely won the governorship of florida partly won it because of trump's support

but right now he looks like a very formidable figure up against Trump. But as Conway says, only if he's the only figure against him. Yeah, I think it's very interesting. I think it would be a mistake to think that Trump can't win this nomination again. And there are a couple of reasons for it. I think that what we've observed about the Republican Party is that it's become inhabited by a significant number of activists and grassroots members who basically want somebody to express their sense of grievance with the way the world is going. And nobody is better at grousing and being angry than Trump. He's an expert at it. He has perfected it.

And it sort of feels like it's natural to him, like he's not putting it on. He wakes up in the morning pissed off about how the world is treating him or not respecting him enough. And so everything that sort of flows from him, and we saw a lot of it last night, is he wants to brag endlessly.

He wants to, you know, belittle everybody who's not just his political adversary, but sometimes even his family and his staff. I've been reading this latest book. I think it's called the divider and the stories in it are really interesting on that point that he doesn't he surrounds himself with people who he then criticizes endlessly and it's all about he's a grumpy grousey kind of individual and i think that there's a whole market for that and he's the best at pitching to that market. And if DeSantis tries to, he may need to in order to make the math work. I don't know if he's going to be as good at doing that as Trump is. But I do think the other thing about Trump is his people show up.

They give money. They show up. They vote. They go to rallies. they wave the flags they make it clear to the news media that there's an actual crowd of trump supporters and while we might come up with a list of more plausible candidates and more interesting candidates than trump i think most of them are still unproven in terms of whether they can draw the kind of enthusiastic support that trump can um it would be better if they could, but all of the ones who ran against him last time we know

couldn't. And I take your point that DeSantis had a good outing, but I still want to see that 10,000 person crowd filling an arena and DeSantis saying these kind of incredibly inaccurate, but anger-raising, hackle-raising things and people going crazy for it. I haven't seen that yet. And I think that's the thing that Trump does that so far nobody else has. Yeah, the other thing, the one thing DeSantis has to worry about is there is a full-on investigation going into those migrants who were flown by Florida to Nantucket, wasn't it? Somewhere in Massachusetts.

Yes. Yeah, and New York, I think, as well. And New York. And they're looking at what laws may have been broken on that. And this could wind up at some point in the endless series of investigations that seem to plague the U.S. all the time, could end up being a problem for him. Can we just pick up, though? Because I don't know DeSantis well enough yet to know. You know, I heard Trump last night say our country is being invaded by millions of people who are entering for sinister reasons.

So he's back to that. One of his greatest hits is kind of demonizing people who are coming in from somewhere else. I know that DeSantis has played with that issue and done this obnoxious, horrible thing with, you know, putting the migrants on a plane and trying to make a bit of a political farce out of their difficult situation. But also Trump spoke about Ukraine. And you want to think that as the Republicans choose their next leader, that they've had enough experience with somebody who doesn't know what they're talking about or will make really poor choices on their behalf

that they'll bet a little bit better. What Trump said about Ukraine last night was shocking in the sense that he said, well, if I was still president, this wouldn't be happening. Well, that's so clearly obvious only to him anyway. It looked like he would do nothing to help Ukraine defend itself against Russia. And so his argument might have been that Russia wouldn't invade Ukraine in the first place. And I don't think that there's any evidence to support that idea but he just says it and

there's so many things to challenge and so little time to challenge them and so many people who will say no no no he's right uh just because it's him well i think he he may have been right on the ukraine situation because clearly what his thinking was that uk Ukraine would not have responded to the Russian invasion because they would have been so busy investigating Hunter Biden at his request. They wouldn't have had time to send troops to the front. Okay. One point you mentioned earlier, and I want to take the opportunity to underline it. You mentioned Susan Glasser's book, The Divider, which she wrote with her husband, Peter Baker, who is the New York Times, I think it's the New York Times chief political correspondent.

They are a power couple in terms of journalism. They are terrific journalists and great writers. And for the plethora of books that are out there on the Trump years, and there are dozens and dozens of them, as we know, and some of them are not bad. But that one, you know, the Glasser-Baker book is really, you know, top notch. Just incredible stories in it.

Just incredible. Okay, I want to shift. I'm trying to decide whether to take it's take a quick break here and then we'll come back with uh our good friend mike pence right after this And welcome back. You're listening to The Bridge, the Wednesday edition, Smoked Mirrors and the Truth. Bruce Anderson's in Ottawa. I'm Peter Mansbridge in Toronto on this day.

You're listening on Sirius XM, Channel 167, Canada Talks, or on your favorite podcast platform. And because it's Wednesday, you're also available to watch us. Look at that on our YouTube channel. And you can find that easily by just going to the link on my bio at Twitter or Instagram. Subscribe, no cost, and they'll send it to you. All right, Mike Pence. You know, for almost two years,

the Vice President of the United States at the time Donald Trump was president has said nothing. The lips have been sealed on Mr. Pence about what happened to him on that day, January 6th. We've seen lots of testimony from others that it was pretty hairy, pretty scary.

They wanted to hang Mike Pence, some of them. And Donald Trump appeared to do nothing about it. But would the vice president say that about his president, who he'd sucked up to for four years in some incredible ways. It used to drive me crazy watching him standing, especially at those pandemic news conferences. But nevertheless, he has finally spoken. And why would he finally choose now, almost two years later to speak, after having turned down the January 6th committee,

after having turned down various interviews, having not said a thing about that day? Why would he choose now? Hey, he's got a book to sell. What a shocker. He's out there selling his book and doing interviews every day. And he's saying what we were afraid really happened that day. That both his life and his family's life and his staff's life were endangered by Donald Trump.

So I don't know. Is this a great book or is this a coward Who said nothing for two years And now spits it out for a few bucks Yeah, not impressed at all And by the way Our mutual friend Don Newman When Mike Pence became Vice President It was around the same time that my hair was turning into the white color that it is now.

And every time Don Newman would see me in a suit with a red, a blue suit with a red tie, he'd go, Mike Pence. And he'd walk around Ottawa saying, I look just like Mike Pence. And I was like, Don, come on. But anyway, my take on Pence is a really unimpressive figure overall. I mean, somebody who was known for being obedient to the point of obsequious to a president who he had to know was not just incompetent, but immoral. And for somebody like Pence, who holds himself up to be a person of deep faith, I think that's the name of his book is something that has to do with faith. Do you remember the name, Peter?

Or maybe it'll come to us. Anyway, he is so branded as a faith-based politician, for him to stand beside Trump, no matter what Trump said, and appear to be completely happy with the years of obsequiousness to Trump. And then to have gone through this thing where Trump humiliated him, put him and his family in danger. And the most that he can come up to say is, well, it didn't end well, the relationship. No kidding. If I put your family in danger, I think you'd say more than it didn't end well, our relationship. I think you'd have a lot more to say about that. And so I think what he's doing is he's trying to say the thing that will thread some sort of needle in the Republican Party as he

plans his campaign to be the nominee. He wants Trump voters to look at him as being maybe Trump's natural heir and successor because he's not really critical of Trump the way DeSantis probably will be. But at the same time, he knows that if he doesn't create some explanation for how he feels about that, the way that that relationship ended and the January 6th event, then it further solidifies this idea of a guy who's mushy, who's not got any backbone, who doesn't have a sense of purpose other than trying to win office, which is pretty much what he looks like most of the time to me. So I hope that somebody publishes excerpts of the book because I don't want to read the book.

I don't think there's going to be much of interest in it. I don't think he's going to have an interest in candidacy. I don't think he should have an interest in candidacy. I think he's... He's not an interesting guy. He's not an interesting guy. It's like we're talking about Trump Being boring when he's reading off a

Prompter it's exciting Compared to watching Pence Yeah but I So help me God was the name of the book That's it But I you know He needs more than that He does he definitely he needs more than that. He does.

He definitely does need more than that. Um, you don't give him a shot, do you? I don't know. I don't think that he passes any of the tests. He doesn't look like he's Trumpy enough and he doesn't look like he's anti-Trumpy enough. And he sure doesn't look like he's interesting enough. I, um, you know, you said a moment ago, you wanted to understand what he really felt there at the end.

The didn't, didn't end well line. You wanted a more, more explanation of that. You know, I don't care what he felt like at the end. I want to know why he sucked up to him all those years and never stood apart from him and said, you know, he stood there with him the day that he was encouraging people to inject themselves with Modrino or whatever it was, you know, to beat the, and he knew better. He knew that was ridiculous, But that was just yet another one of the yarns that he stood by and said nothing. And I understand loyalty. I understand that the vice president has a role to play.

But man, there's got to be a line somewhere. Maybe that's what the book should have been. Where's the line you know he had the ability to say some truths about um trump that maybe nobody else could say and that doesn't mean to write a book that's only critical about trump although there's very little to praise about trump but let's assume for the moment that he wanted to kind of introduce himself to people who had only ever seen a guy in a suit who looked like he was sent from kind of evangelical central casting for politicians. But he didn't do any of that things that went sideways during that period. He seemed not to be able to

find anything that he could have disagreed with about, you know, what Trump was doing, which doesn't really make any sense. I mean, the Glasser book that you mentioned goes through so many instances where senior people, whether it's Rex Tillerson or Jim Mattis, all kinds of people in Trump's cabinet were really concerned about the decisions that he was making, the choices that he was making, the way that he was making decisions. Kelly, his chief of staff, these stories just talk of a government in chaos run by this kind of petulant guy who wouldn't take a briefing and didn't know very much about the issues.

But here's Pence. And as far as he's concerned, there's nothing to say for two years and very little to say after two years in exchange for the money that he's going to get for that book. It's pretty unimpressive. Okay. Final topic, and we bring it home for this one. You sent me a, was it a tweet by Pierre Polyev?

I think it was. It was, yeah. And I'm going to read it here because it's, I think it's pretty interesting, and it may be the most universally applauded thing that polyev has done since he since he came into office as the leader of the opposition um at least it seems could be pretty attractive to a lot of voters the the tweet is a picture of him it looks like he's sitting at a microphone doing a interview or a podcast or something.

And he says, we need more doctors, nurses, and engineers. Canadian immigrants want to do these jobs they're trained for and are in bigger paychecks. We've heard this for years, right? Decades, to use that phrase from earlier in the show. We've heard this for years. And it's always sort of, yeah, we could, but there are all kinds of reasons why we can't. And then it would get dropped and move on until the next time it popped up.

So Polyev says it, and then he says, here's how you fix it. A 60-day guaranteed yes or no response. I guess that's from medical authorities. Small study loans for those who need it. Early license approvals so people can work right away. Okay. Pretty straightforward.

I'm kind of surprised I haven't seen much pickup on that story. But it seems like the kind of thing that a lot of people would go, you know what? I agree with that. I like that. We do need doctors. We need nurses. And there are people trying to do those roles coming from other countries, but they didn't go through the Canadian practices. And how can we bring them in line with Canadian rules and regulations? What do you think of it? Well, I think the people who are paying attention to it and should are the liberals federally.

I think that my sense is that people did notice it. And it's part of, at least in my mind, and I think others are sensing this too, it's part of a pattern where you and I and Chantal talked about this last week, I think, where as far as I'm concerned, the Polyev is making some better choices since he took the leadership than maybe people expected and maybe to some degree than I expected. One choice is to be less visible, to be less bombastic for the sake of being bombastic. And this one yesterday also shows a side of him that maybe voters who hadn't really considered him and the Conservative Party didn't think that they would be interested in what he had to say, kind of sent a signal out to them that maybe they should open their minds up. Now, there are problems with the idea that he posed, but the problems don't have anything to do with whether or not intuitively voters will say, well, that makes

sense. The problems have to do with jurisdiction and provinces and, you know, that sort of thing. But that's the kind of thing that won't really hold Polyev back in terms of if he addresses an issue that people don't expect him to speak about, healthcare. If he talks about immigration in the way that he did in that context, some people will say that's a little bit surprising and positive too. And so putting those things together and not surrounding them with this kind of. And while I'm at it, let me say how much I hate Justin Trudeau, which is kind of typically what the conservative communications machine has been doing for several years. And I think has probably come to the conclusion that they're going to want to keep doing that because they will. But that only gets you so far.

You need to start doing things like this. So I sent it to you because I thought it was quite interesting. And I think that Mr. Polyev's political opponents will want to take careful note of this because it wasn't an accident. It wasn't him in an airport waiting room somewhere just deciding he was going to tweet something on the spur of the moment. It was something that was curated and crafted to make a particular point that was playing against the type that people have perhaps in their minds about him. And it'll be interesting to watch if he continues to do that kind of thing going forward, because it certainly puts the others on notice that they need to think about him differently.

Certainly better to be talking about that issue than cryptocurrency. Or the convoy. Or the convoy and taking donuts to the truckers and all that. The one thing I would say, though, that I would draw the line at, so to speak, on your point is he's not going to stop trashing Trudeau at every turn he can get. I mean, this is the same guy who last week said everything in Canada is broken and Justin Trudeau is responsible for all of it.

Yeah. So that's not going to disappear from his political jargon either. No, no. It's like your golf swing, Peter. Like there are things in it that are never going to go away. You can think about making them go away, but you're still going to stand over that ball and those things are going to come back. And not all the time. There's going to be those shots that you just correct those little flaws and the ball

travels far and straight. I think politicians are a little bit like that, just in the way that, you know, they have this kind of greatest hits kind of recording track in their heads. And I agree with you. He's going to keep on doing that. But I think that he's obviously getting some advice or his own intuition is telling him that

to kind of get people interested in the Conservative Party, reminding them what they're disappointed in with the liberals is part of it. But it's only part of what people will look for. The other is, well, what are some ideas that you have? And we know that on inflation, his one big idea was kind of Bitcoin. And that's not a good argument to make. And so he can talk about food prices, but he doesn't really have a solution on food prices. So I don't want to overstate it. And I don't want to sort of say he's going to go from a 15 handicap to a scratch golfer. And he's corrected all those flaws in his swing. But it was interesting to me.

Oh, it's easy to correct flaws in your swing. At least so I hear. I haven't found a way to do it myself. Before we go, and I've got two minutes left, Justin Trudeau had a moment this week as well. His moment was with President Xi at the international conference they're both at. They didn't have a formal sit-down, which caused some concern among some people, but they did have a meeting that, thanks to an open mic, had its moments.

Yeah, you know, I think that we don't quite know what to make of the exchange that was captured by the mic, but it was clear that President Xi wanted to say, wanted to express his displeasure at the fact that what he thought were conversations that were maybe held behind the scenes or off the record ended up being covered. And the Prime Minister kind of heard Xi's frustration, but basically pushed back and said, we're not, you know, we're, we're going to have the conversation that we want to have as Canadians. And sometimes we're going to agree on things with you. And sometimes we're going to disagree. I want to make more of it than it was, but it was quite unusual for that kind of conversation to be had in the center of a hall with a hot mic nearby. Usually, these politicians are pretty careful to avoid that kind of situation. So I don't know whether President Xi wanted to do it, and it was deliberate on his part. It didn't look like it was deliberate on the Canadian prime minister's part.

But I think people will be interested in it because the nature of the relationship with China is in a different space and people don't know quite what to make of it. And they probably want to avoid heightened friction and tension, but they also don't want to look like we're acquiescing and just going along with whatever China is doing. And so I think there'll be more interest in it and how this relationship goes than there has been in the past. All right. We're going to leave it at that.

Good conversation on a number of topics for this week's Smoke Mirrors of the Truth, Bruce Anderson in Ottawa and Peter Mansbridge in Toronto. Thanks so much for listening. Tomorrow, of course, is your turn and the Random Ranter. So if you have things to say about anything we've discussed this week, drop me a note at themansbridgepodcast at gmail.com. themansbridgepodcast at gmail.com. Friday is Good Talk.

Chantel joins us for whatever ramblings we'll have going on that day. We'll see you once again in 24 hours.