The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Good Talk - Is Twitter Dying?

Episode Date: November 18, 2022

After a night of bizarre Twitter goings-on, Bruce and Chantal hold court on the future of Elon Musk and his 44 billion dollar gamble. Also up for discussion, can the RCMP commissioner survive the convoy inquiry?  And how seriously should we take the toe to toe "confrontation" between Justin Trudeau and Xi Jinping?

Are you ready for Good Talk? And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. I'm in Toronto today, Chantelle Hebert is in Montreal, and Bruce Anderson is in Ottawa. We've got a packed Good Talk agenda today, so let's get right at it. got i guess three main choices we could go with well we could go with that standoff that toe-to-toe face-to-face head-to-head confrontation between the guy in the red and white trunks on one side and the guy in the red and yellow trunks on the other side what really happened in in that Justin Trudeau, Xi Jinping confrontation, if you want to call it that? And does it really matter? We'll talk about that.

We'll talk about the Convoy Commission and this rather remarkable thing that we witnessed over the last, well, 24 hours or so, where you have a cabinet that had been on the verge of making the decision, was in one of the final meetings before it decided to go with the Emergencies Act, and you have the RCMP commissioner in the meeting with full knowledge that the police actually had a plan to end the confrontation, but she never said anything about it in this meeting. And cabinet went ahead and approved the Emergencies Act. How does this person still have their job? That'll be one of the questions we ask there.

But we're not going to start on either of those two. We're going to start on something that I know some of you detest, some of you won't have any part of, but many of you do, especially many of the people who listen to this program, and that is they follow Twitter. That's where many people get their news links on Twitter. That's where they find out kind of what's happening. But Twitter is going through this incredible moment with their new billionaire owner who's fired half of his or more than half of his senior executives and told everybody else, stay home, don't even come to work.

There's a sign on the door saying, we're not open now. We may be open on Monday. Who knows where we'll be by Monday. So what the heck is going on at Twitter? That's how we're going to start today. We're going to start with Bruce because I got, you know, I hate doing this, but it was months ago when Musk first said he was going to take over Twitter, lay out the billions of dollars to buy it. But Bruce said, this could get ugly. Sure, he's had lots of successes, but this could be his downfall. Bruce warned us of what may be happening as Musk took over Twitter.

Well, this weekend looks pretty dark for Twitter. But does he have some secret plan in mind? Musk or not? Bruce, you start us. Well, Peter, you know, nothing is more fun than having you start these sessions by reminding everybody the things that I've been right about. But against that, you know, there is a golden rule, which is it's always better for me to go after Chantal so I can be smarter because of hearing her answer. And I can say, I agree with 85 percent of it. And here's the few other morsels of maybe something worth hearing that I'll add.

But, OK, I'll take the challenge. And here's what I would say. I do. I remember thinking when he when he bought it, that either he was predominantly a business genius with an erratic personality and that the business genius and the 44, the weight of the 44 billion dollars was going to be the driver of his behavior. And that if you judged by SpaceX and Tesla, you'd probably want to bet that he was going to make a more successful business out of it, including managing this sensitive issue of content moderation. So that was one scenario that I thought was how it could play out. The other was that he'd sort of evolved. And so that now he was kind of 80% erratic personality and 20% business focused.

And in that scenario, which is, I think, the scenario that we see today, that he would make a total mess of a business that was already not functioning all that well and was facing these real existential problems. And, you know, be set by this kind of paradox of enough people using it and understanding the value of it, but feeling that with each passing month or quarter, the negatives of Twitter were starting to overwhelm the positives. I don't see him pulling this plane up. I don't think that he has the wit or the wisdom. I don't think he has the personality traits. to kind of demand fealty and intense work effort and loyalty to him.

I don't think that's working and I don't think it's going to work. And I don't think that people are going to have confidence in him or the platform. What happens to it? I don't know. It does feel to me a little bit like it's a big machine that's running on whatever energy is in it right now. But maybe nobody's kind of at the controls. And I think that the flight from that platform by institutional users will accelerate. I don't see how it can't. And I think, you know, six months from now, maybe there'll be some organization that steps into the void and says,

well, here's a version of this, because it doesn't seem like the most complicated thing ever invented in the world. And it does feel like people in politics, in the media, in marketing, in society in general want a platform like this. And if Elon Musk can't make it happen for them, then somebody else will and should. Chantal. Well, getting this plane off the ground, I suspect that Bruce's wildest imagination did not totally capture what's been happening over the past two, three weeks. Let's be serious here. It's not as if Elon Musk is suffering from discovering something that is ailing. It's like calling in a doctor to kill you slowly but surely, inexorably. So that plane has been headed to a crash by the new pilot,

deliberately, step by step by step. You have to wonder what the end game is. Just on a human level, if I worked for Twitter, and I worked hard for Twitter, and suddenly the new boss said, from now on, you are going to put in 40 hours in the office, and you better work hardcore or I'm going to fire you. I would take my CV and walk, because I would think, I've worked hard for this organization, but if I have any self-respect, I cannot stay under those conditions. The message being that I've been freeloading as an employee for all this time.

And now we are going to be watching you and counting those hours, which also goes against the very culture of the people that he needs to attract to work there, who are people who are used to working remotely and who actually see this often the hybrid workplace as a precondition to giving their talents to organizations, not just Twitter. Will it be recreated? Possibly, but I suspect it's going to take a while to recreate it from scratch. Why do people use Twitter and what is lost there? Well, it's a loss to news organizations in this country and around the world. Why? Because many of us have been using it mostly not to see cat videos, although they can be entertaining, but mostly as a shortcut to going to all those websites to see what was on each organization. Most of my subscriptions are for news organizations, the CBC, Radio-Canada, La Presse, the Globe and Mail, go down the list.

And I also subscribe to some hyperactive Twitter people. I'll name my panel mate, Andrew Coyne, who is at the top of my list for that. So this easy communications that Twitter allows between journalists, politicians, people interested in politics, will, I agree with Bruce, possibly be recreated, but there will be a loss. Last point, people have a lot of opinions on Twitter, often seeing the worst of it. There have been many good things about it. One of those is that it is one of those rare places where francophone politicians, journalists, commentators, and English-speaking ones interact and see each other's different takes on issues.

And I think in this country, we are well served by anything that breaks down those silos. You know, I think one of the key things you bring up, and I guess in many ways, both of you bring up, is what really is his endgame here? And I want to try and think that one through. I mean, he clearly hasn't lost his sense of humor. I mean, the guy still has a wit. In the middle of the night here, in the last 24 hours, he put out this tweet. How do you make a small fortune in social media? Start out with a large one.

He's certainly following through on that. I mean, that's an old saying. It's, you know, been taken any number. They talk in wine country in Ontario, they talk about, you know, how do you become a billionaire in the wine business? Sorry, how do you become a millionaire in the wine business? You start off as a billionaire. And, you know, one assumes there are a few examples of that.

But this guy isn't stupid. Bruce acknowledges that. I mean, he's had some tremendous successes. Some of them are not looking so good at the moment. I mean, Tesla's taken a huge hit. It's dropped about 40% in its market position so far this year, partly because he's had to borrow some money from, a lot of money from Tesla to buy Twitter.

But, you know, the SpaceX, the list goes on. I mean, he has some smart decisions in his background. And he must be thinking something here other than just plowing $44 billion into the ground. I mean... No, look, I think what happened here is that the more famous he became as an iconic business inventor, the more enthusiastic he became about his fame. He became kind of really interested in having the kind of platform that he saw Donald Trump enjoy with Twitter. He wanted to shape the world and he saw it as an opportunity to own a platform that would allow him to do it. I think in doing that, he definitely sort of got to the point where he, in his own mind, overstated his importance to the world conversation.

He's not the first person to do it, but he might be the first person who said, I've got $45 billion sitting around that I can use to see if I can do something like that. And then what happened? I don't think he wanted to buy the company after he'd sort of mused about it. I think that was all a bit of a kind of an error, an ego driven error. And he put himself in a legal situation where getting out of the error was both embarrassing and costly. And so in the end, he decided he was going to go ahead and do it. Then he tried to ignore what the consensus had already developed was the biggest problem on the Twitter platform. It was the online hate, the polarization, the divisiveness,

the siloing, all of that kind of stuff. And people from left and right all kind of saw it as the problem, but they diagnosed it differently, obviously, given their different values and points of view. But instead of thinking that that problem needed to be solved, he, you know, to Chantal's point, he administered exactly the wrong treatment to it. He basically said we should just have more freedom. Everybody should be able to do and say whatever they want. And we're going to remove some of the rather insignificant and not very effective guardrails. And that seems so out of touch, not just with the problems that Twitter was already facing,

but with the times and the linkage to the, with the times that we live in and the linkage to what happened in the U S midterms to me is really clear, which is that, you know, America got pretty close to looking at the amount of division and polarization and harsh personal attacks and language and argument that broke barriers that we had lived with before and said, I don't think we should keep going further in that direction. And that happened at the same moment as Elon Musk was trying his experiment about going further in that direction. And let's not forget, last point, for me, the day before the midterms, I think it was the day before, he endorsed all Republican candidates over all Democratic candidates. Presumably, it was another misjudgment. He thought his voice would probably not sway the outcome, but be reflective of the outcome that

was about to happen. And he was wrong about that, too. So it could be that Mr. Musk made the same mistake as many Canadian or other politicians make, That is, I think that Twitter is the universal place where you speak to everyone rather than to a select crowd. I spoke about news organizations having to ponder where they go from here. And I'll give you an easy example. When my column comes up on the Star website, I post a link on Twitter. I know that I am driving up traffic to the Star website big time because I have 270 something followers. So people like me are useful to news organizations for doing that. Same with Andrew, Althea, et cetera. But the other question that I find interesting is political parties, all of them, would have to be looking at this, also wondering where they go from Twitter failure for two reasons.

The first one is fundraising. Twitter is one of the places where they most keep in touch with people who are liable to give them money. That is where they ensure their presence to the base. It's not just the conservatives. It's everyone. I understand Jokneet Singh, TikTok, but where the money is is not necessarily where the younger crowd is. You do want younger voters, but they're not going to dig deep in their pockets to fund your party. Not happening.

They have other issues to deal with that are more important than sending money to whatever party is on social media. So that is one. And two, Justin Trudeau, Pierre Poiliev, they've all been using social media to get messages out, sometimes messages that they do not want to necessarily stress or that they... Take Pierre Poilier. He doesn't want to talk to the parliamentary press gallery, as opposed to every single opposition leader that I've covered. He does not come out after question period ever to talk to the media. But he uses Twitter abundantly to feature himself in question period. I don't think that just being on CPAC live or even taped is going to replace that access to voters to show that this is what he's been doing with his day as opposition leader. I suspect most strategists are sitting back, comm strategists sitting back thinking,

let's see how this evolves and where the chips fall before we take some decisions. But all of those organizations will have to be taking decisions as to what they do going forward. Final point, it's not necessarily a bad thing for people who are deeply involved in the political conversation and those leading it to sanitize their minds and realize that maybe the real world is not the Twitter world. A quick point of clarification on behalf of Chantal. She mentioned the number of followers she had as 270. So it's like 270,000.

Yes. Otherwise, the star would not like me tweeting so much. It would not show in the ocean of readers that it already has. Okay. Well, that's enough on Twitter. And, you know, with full knowledge

that there's a lot going on in the social media space right now, and it's not all good for the social media companies like Twitter. Facebook's having its problems too. So it's an interesting time to be following this discussion, and a lot of it comes down to what Bruce mentioned in terms of content moderation and what's going to happen on that front. So we're going to keep following that.

We're going to take our first break. When we come back, we're going to talk about the Convoy Commission. That's right after this. And welcome back. You're listening to The Bridge, the Friday segment. Good talk, of course, with Chantelle Hebert and Bruce Anderson. You're listening on Sirius XM Channel 167. Canada Talks are on your favorite podcast platform. Or you're watching on our YouTube channel.

And if you haven't subscribed already, it's easy to do it, no cost. You can follow the link on my bio on either Twitter or Instagram. So you better move fast if you're going to go to the link on Twitter. All right. The commission looking into the use of the Emergencies Act has been going for a number of weeks now. Next week is a huge week because the Prime Minister is set to testify and a number of his senior cabinet ministers as well. This follows an extraordinary week, especially yesterday on an extraordinary day,

where the RCMP Commissioner Brenda Luckey testified. And one of the startling things that came out of that testimony was the fact she was at a meeting of the cabinet as they were making their final decisions on whether or not to use the Emergencies Act. And she was there with full knowledge that the police had a plan ready to execute that would end the thing, without any extraordinary or additional powers. But she never expressed that knowledge, that news, to the cabinet table. Or at least that's what we're told happened. Or didn't happen.

And that has left a lot of people totally baffled as to how that could happen. And what kind of advice the government was getting from its lead RCMP officer. Chantal, where are you on this? Well, the cabinet was not getting direct advice from its lead RCMP commissioner because she said in testimony that she was not on the speaking list, so she decided that she was not going to contribute to the discussion. That is kind of a weird explanation. I'm going to give you my take, which is based on just political human nature. I believe her when she says that the police had

a plan. They must have had a plan a day at this point, and they must have had plans almost every day for a number of days, none of which worked. It is totally possible that she understood that if she told cabinet, we have a plan, don't rush into this. I trust my plan. Cabinet might have held off on making a decision on the Emergencies Act for a couple more days, but it also meant that if the plan failed, she would wear that failure directly. let cabinet go ahead where it was probably obviously headed absent any interventions like hers um then having to wear a plan that might or might not work that being said if you think all this doesn't add up to a great show of leadership uh that is exactly what i'm trying to convey bruce yeah i think that i'd start where Chantal finished, that these rather startling revelations from the RCMP commissioner this week aren't coming after years of apparent success with her mandate. She's had a series of challenges and questions raised about whether or not she was doing enough to deal with the issue of

systemic racism, especially as it related to Indigenous people in Canada, about the toxic culture within the RCMP that former Supreme Court Justice Bastarach said existed, it tolerated misogynistic and homophobic attitudes. I don't think that there has really been a period of time. And I think that there were a lot of criticisms that seemed to me well-founded about the handling of the mass murder in Nova Scotia. It doesn't seem to me that I can point to a single instance where Commissioner Luckey really kind of established a strong sense of leadership and a convincing change dynamic within the force.

And that's not to say that it was easy to solve or deal with those issues that I've just identified, but it does give a context for understanding and reacting to the way in which she contributed to the hearings this week. She had weeks or months to prepare for what she was going to say in these hearings. She didn't just show up not knowing what the questions were going to be, not having done training and rehearsal. And it seems to me that as part of that, inevitably, she would have known that the question would come up,

well, if you didn't think that the Emergencies Act was needed, what were your solutions that would have made that unnecessary? So, you know, to say that after the fact that you had a plan, but you didn't table it, you didn't bring it up, either means you didn't have a plan. So not being particularly honest, or you had a plan and you didn't think it was good enough. Those are, to me, the only two. The idea that you didn't imagine that this question would come up, and so you can't reconstruct in your mind what happened at that critical moment when you were going to

these meetings that were full of energy and stress every single day, as the head of the National Police Force, if you had a plan to solve it and you didn't bring it up, you know, her appointment comes up for renewal in March. I don't know how she can expect, as she expressed yesterday, how she can expect that the government would reappoint her. I don't know what they'll do, but I don't know why they would. A couple of points about this renewal. This is a government that is notoriously being slow at filling vacant positions or making appointments to the point where you think, don't they ever prepare for things that are bound to happen?

Are we still waiting for an ambassador in Beijing? We'll get to that, I guess. How long did it take to appoint Stéphane Zion as French ambassador? Go down the list. So I'm guessing they're either thinking of interim or they should be scrambling for a replacement. Because one, Justin Trudeau's national security advisor, Jody Thomas, was up in front of the commission Thursday.

And basically, through Brenda Luckey under the bus by signing, we got no sound from the RCMP that this could be resolved in any other way. That wasn't shared with cabinet, et cetera, et cetera. And if they did have all those solutions, they certainly weren't forthcoming about it. That is the equivalent of throwing someone under a bus. But in the case of Brenda Luckey, as opposed to other RCMP commissioners who have had trouble with a government or a party.

Think Paul Martin at the time that it was devolved by the RCMP commissioner of the time that Ralph Goodale, his finance minister, was under investigation for possible leaks, pre-budget leaks. But in the case of Brenda Luckey, she does not have a friend across the aisle in the House of Commons. She is not the Conservatives RCMP commissioner. She's not the NDP's or the Bloc Québécois. And that to me, I mean, if you can't add all of that up, and you're the RCMP commissioner, you can't count when you're coming out of a hearing and you say, I totally plan to stay on as RCMP commissioner. So she cannot be extended at this point. She has to be replaced either temporarily or permanently in March. That's basically where this is going. And if

she doesn't see the writing on the wall, she's being willfully blind. If she doesn't have a friend across the aisle, she also doesn't seem to have a friend within the RCMP. I mean, many of her own senior officers, a couple in particular, have spoken out against her leadership and against some of her past statements, especially on the Nova Scotia story that Bruce mentioned. So she's alone on an island, or it certainly appears that way at the moment. And the questions next week, when they turn to cabinet ministers,

Marco Mendicino, the public safety minister, and then, of course, the prime minister, are going to be the answers to whatever questions are asked of those people are going to be fascinating answers to whatever questions are asked of those people are going to be fascinating to listen to. In terms of Justin Trudeau himself, I mean, as we've pointed out before on this program, the early weeks of the commission seem to be going in the favor of the government in terms of the testimony that we were hearing. This past couple of days has been tricky for the government on a number of fronts.

You know, the CSIS testimony, the Brenda Luckey testimony. So there will be a degree of pressure on Trudeau next week when he sits in the chair to give his testimony as to what happened in those final days leading up to the use of the Emergencies Act. What does Trudeau have to do next week? What kind of a position does, well, not position, but what does he have to show when he's testifying next week? Bruce?

Well, I was listening to you say that this last week has been more tricky for the government. I'm not sure I sort of feel it the same way. I still think at the end of the day, the narrative that emerges to me is that this maybe wasn't the most enormous national emergency ever, but also that the police forces that had some opportunity to deal with it weren't dealing with it, didn't have a plan,

weren't coming up with better solutions, and that the pressure over time was building. And it wasn't just the Ottawa convoy. It was the notion that there was maybe a precedent being set that people could stop commerce, could shut down the centers of cities, and that there was no viable response. And within that context, I think my sense would be that reasonable people watching the flow of the testimony will conclude that you know it might still look like using a very large weapon to deal with a more modest size problem because it only happened in a few parts of the country and in particular in ottawa but um against that background as the prime minister has said

repeatedly the use of it was short and contained and guided by the principles that were sort of embedded in how it should be, including the fact of a follow-up inquiry like this. And if I were him, that's how I would approach it. I wouldn't sort of champion it as a great moment in Canadian governance or anything like that. This is no victory for the government in having had to use the Emergencies Act. And to some degree, you know, maybe you're right, Peter, there is a bit of a how after this many years in government and with their commissioner in place, could the RCMP have been so unhelpful in this. But if I were advising the prime minister, that's what I would encourage him to do is just kind of stick to the facts and describe the moments as he observed them and the inputs as he received them and the choices that were made available to him and leaving Canadians to come to a conclusion about whether or not he made the best available decision among the alternatives,

something we pulled on a little while ago, found most people said that they thought he did. I think that probably won't have changed. Chantal. It would be easier for Justin Trudeau if he were the only person from his government and from his cabinet that will testify. Because what we're going to see next week is not just the prime minister who can handle himself in that context. He's done so in more embarrassing circumstances in parliamentary committees and in more hostile circumstances in the past and come out not terribly damaged.

But he will have to come after some of his ministers have testified. And this is the finger crossing moment in the PMO, where you hope that they will all acquit themselves in a way that doesn't open gaps in the government's narrative. And there will be those who will be looking for those gaps or for gaps, and one and the other are possible. So ideally, if you're Justin Trudeau, what you would want is that your ministers don't come across as equivocating, as in we have something to hide, or we don't know what we're talking about, or we're a bunch of keystone cops, and we didn't know what we were doing, but also that the narrative sustains all these testimonies until the prime minister shows up, that he is not like all these police officers

who kind of had to deal with contradictions in the narrative of the police forces, because at that point, he will look like someone who is leading an incompetent government. And I think that would be the worst fear from a public communication standpoint of the government, that they all look like they, you know, the right hand didn't know what the left hand was doing or what the left side of the brain, if there was one, was thinking about versus the right side. If there was one. Well, that's the other thing. We've had the impression after this law was used, some of the ministers made fairly outlandish statements that they will have to live with next week about why it was used,

statements that were found to be wanting, that were not sustained by what was said in front of the commission so far. And everyone knows where those weak ministerial links potentially are. I'm convinced that with as many lawyers in the room, there will be pressure to see if they break. And that's why I think Justin Trudeau would be happy enough to be the only person speaking for the entire cabinet next week. Remind us again that all the lawyers in the room who are representing different parties,

they can all take a run at these witnesses, right? Including the prime minister and all those ministers, yes. The lawyers for the convoy, lawyers for the police. The list is long. You know, I'm going to be the contrarian on this. I actually, I don't think this is an empty net, you know, scoring opportunity for the government politically at all, but I don't see it as having very much risk.

I think Chantal's right that the risk is if you have more than one spokesperson being questioned by more than one lawyer from different perspectives, the risk of things being said in a way that allows more different stories to emerge rather than one story, that definitely goes up. And more stories is usually worse than one story if you're the government trying to manage the situation. But on the basis of the evidence that I think that we've seen so far, it does seem to add up to, yes, people would have said things

in the heat of the moments or the days that with the value of hindsight, don't hold up to scrutiny as well. But more of those, if we're just thinking about the politics of the situation, more of those were said were done by the conservatives. And so if I'm measuring the risk, I'm wondering, well, how much are the Conservatives really going to want to relitigate the convoy and the Emergencies Act? And I don't think it's that much. And I don't think that the things that could come out next week will increase the risk of the Conservatives wanting to go into the next election saying the Emergencies Act. That's the thing that we must talk about. So I think this issue will disappear pretty quickly,

except among the hardcore base of the Conservative Party that signed on to the Pierre-Paul Yves mission because they wanted to vent about Trudeau and tyranny and COVID vaccines. And I think that is a challenge for Pierre Pelliet. I think he's been trying to make moves to not lose those voters, but not seem preoccupied with them. And I think that's the right move for him. I think it's strategically the only way that conservatives can take their three-point lead right now and turn it into a five or a six or a seven-point lead and be poised to form government. So all of that takes me to a place where, yes, there's a hypothetical risk in my mind,

but I don't know that it's a very real risk for the government politically of having to endlessly talk about the Emergencies Act. So in his bid to be contrarian, Bruce has conveniently left out the elephant in the room. And that is not the issue of the convoy or what the conservatives have said or will do. I agree with him. They're not going to want to relitigate it. But the larger issue is government competence or incompetence. That is how governments get defeated. That's how Paul Martin lost power. The impression that the government was rather dithering. Remember those words. And for those who haven't noticed, Pyap-Valiev has already pivoted. He hasn't pivoted to a, I'm more of a centrist. He has pivoted to government competence. He has seen that. He's seen it all week when he talked about children's medication not being

available on the shelves of drugstores. So the risk to the government is not so much that they're going to end up with a report that says they shouldn't have used the Emergencies Act. It is that in the process of showcasing their decision-making, they come across like a bunch of people who didn't have a clue what they were doing, like incompetence. And that the conservatives will not need to point to it because the media will. And it will do so with a vengeance if those failures of having a sense of direction start to emerge at the commission. And believe you me, there are many, many, many journalists who will be spending all of next week listening to every single word,

plus the emails, which sometimes are more devastating than the actual testimony, because this commission has brought to light emails that we never see between ministers and their chiefs of staff. Calculations that are nakedly partisan show up in some of those emails. So yeah, I think by and large, the prime minister and his team will be happy when the calendar turns to December and this next week is behind them. You know, emails are like open microphones. And we're about to switch to that topic right after this. And welcome back. We're into our final segment of Good Talk for this week with Chantelle in Montreal, Bruce is in Ottawa, I'm Peter Mansbridge in Toronto.

Okay, so we have this little bit of video that was shown to Canadians and to the world, I guess, this week, which has been pitched as the great confrontation between the leaders of China and Canada over basically whether or not the leader of Canada should have said anything about an earlier meeting they'd had in public, said something in public, briefed the media on what had been discussed at this earlier meeting. So, you know, in fairness, there are two very different countries, right? One's a democracy, one isn't.

One claims to be able to put forward all the information possible in those kind of meetings, in sort of leader-to-leader meetings. They have briefings. They talk to the press about what was said in them. They put out notes in terms of what was said, and sometimes the other countries do as well, including sometimes non-democratic countries anyway this blew up it got a lot of worldwide attention the video is depending on

how you look at it and how much you look at it trudeau looks a little off balance at parts of it other times he looks like he's ready for a confrontation he moves right in physically moves in uh to the discussion with President Xi. The whole thing lasted just a couple of minutes, if that. What was captured on video was more like a couple of seconds. But nevertheless, it's out there, it's being discussed. And the question is, was it really worth all this kind of discussion? And if so, what does it really signify about the relationship, not just between these two men, but between these two countries? Bruce, start us on this.

I think it's interesting. I think it's a good thing that we're seeing that there has been friction. I tend to feel like there's a lot of people kind of staring carefully at a tiny bit of footage and trying to judge the body language. It's kind of like scoring Olympic skating events. Did Trudeau look kind of shaky and kind of off his stride or did he look like you know just a normal trudeau which is a little bit kind of um over poised or something like that i don't know i like i understand how people and sean tells me this point so many times

in the past that it sticks in my head now that people will observe these things from their own biases. And those who generally think the prime minister is good will go, good for him. You know, he stood up and he looked strong in the moment. And those who tend to think he's a weakling will say, look at it, he looked like a weakling. And I do understand that people could look at that tiny little grainy bit of video and the sound and hear it and see it two different ways. But stepping back from the… It wasn't that grainy. It wasn't like it was from the 60s or something. Well, maybe my eyes aren't that good, but it wasn't fabulous.

There weren't three cameras on it, so we could see if the football, you know, crossed the line or anything like that as we're used to now when we're looking at replays of important events in our lives. We didn't have that quality of video. But if we step back from the fascination of the body language conversation. What really happened here? Trudeau had a conversation with Xi. He expressed a lot of frustration, apparently, about meddling in Canadian affairs. And then somebody leaked the fact

to a Canadian news organization that that had happened. Nothing terribly obnoxious or unusual about that. And the idea that China would think that it's credible for them to say, how dare you leak a point of view about us when they're always trying to manipulate media stories and intervene in our elections. We're not trying to intervene in their politics. They are trying to intervene in ours. The most that we're doing is saying publicly what our value system and our diplomatic efforts are, you know, transparently trying to do,

which is to say, we don't like your human rights record, and we don't want you meddling in our country. So I think the fact that that was said, I think that the fact that the Chinese president was upset about it. Good. I mean, I don't think you can have a situation where you want the prime minister of the country to be assertive about the positions that we take and then be surprised and taken aback if the Chinese president is unhappy about that.

I think that's just one of the things that, you know, as Canadians, maybe we don't like the feeling of the Chinese president being unhappy with us, but we're going to have to get over that if we want to use our voice on the issues that matter both to our own democracy and to the world in general. Probably be more Canadians worried if we felt the Chinese were happy with us. Yes, I'm trying to imagine what we would all be writing if the headline had been, Chinese President Hugs Justin Trudeau.

And what we would read into that body language, it would be endless. And that kind of goes to Justin Trudeau's predicament. He's going to not one summit, but multi-summits, where he is going to cross paths with the Chinese president against the backdrop of allegations of election interference by China, against the backdrop of the arrest by the police of someone who used to work for Hydro-Quebec

and who has apparently been working for the Chinese government for whatever purpose or reason. He is not getting an official meeting face-to-face with the Chinese president, either because it was refused or it was amassed. I can't go into that. So he can't come home to a headline that says, Justin Trudeau spends a week in the same hallways as the president of China and never raises these issues with him. My understanding is that after the initial hallway conversation,

which did not take place in view of the media, the word leak has been abused by the Chinese president in the sense that the media traveling with the prime minister were briefed not as to what they purported to be the response of the Chinese president, but as to the issues that Justin Trudeau raised. That's called being accountable for what you do. But nowhere in all those briefings and all the coverage that ensued, do you see the Canadian delegation putting words in the mouth

of the Chinese president in any way, shape, or form. It's silent on what his reaction was, including his body language. But it does get Trudeau headlines, not just in Canada, which is where he wants them, but across the media universe, the Guardian, the BBC, et cetera. So next day, the Chinese president, I am sure not by accident, finds that the Canadian media has a camera where Justin Trudeau and he happen to be, and then goes for this, whatever you want to call it.

I'll talk about body language, because it goes also to language. If you're standing in front of a head of state, and that person is speaking to an interpreter, and you don't have a clue where he's going, you have to wait with some uncertainty for the interpreter to get far enough in the translation that you know what you're dealing with. You're not going to look like you want to punch the guy when you don't even know if he's inviting you to a Chinese New Year celebration. So there's Justin Trudeau looking uncertain, and then there's Justin Trudeau looking uncertain, and then there's Justin Trudeau looking like he wants to fight back. And the difference between the two is not suddenly Justin Trudeau thinking,

a camera is filming this and I need to look assertive. It's this is what he wants to say. Well, I'm not going to just shrug this off. I need to respond. And so he does respond. And why is it interesting? Because it marks or it's a vivid illustration of the deterioration between the relationship between China and the Trudeau government, which is steep compared to when Justin Trudeau came to power. But for those who have forgotten, this is not the first time the Chinese leadership

chided a Canadian prime minister in public. Stephen Harper was chided similarly for not showing up in China fast enough. The bully diplomacy is what the Chinese do. They tend to practice it with countries that are not the United States, France, and Great Britain, who are their size, because bullies don't pick people their size. But the difference is, this time, Justin Trudeau found more than a few people to say, well, good for him. Stephen Harper found none back then. It was a, oh my God, including the liberals, oh my God, there's Stephen Harper, who's never gone anywhere except Disney World outside of Canada, goes to China and messes up a really, really important trade relationship by not knowing what he's doing.

So the Canadian public has also changed. I mean, we're talking about a guy whose government jailed two Canadians as political hostages. Consider this. And for those who are still writing, well, Justin Trudeau should have been nicer, and this shouldn't have happened. At what point do you say the headline you want is Justin Trudeau gets approval from a dictator who jails Canadians. Great. Yeah. Yeah. A bully.

I mean, honestly. You've got to say this quick because we're out of time. Go for it. Well, you know, it reminded me a little bit of Trump trying to browbeat and humiliate Trudeau after the Charlevoix G7 meeting. This guy is very similar. Didn't have the courage to do it in person. No, at least this was in person. It was in person.

He didn't use exactly the same kind of language and thuggishness that Mark Trump. But they're peas in a pod, right? And that's why Trump calls him King Xi and says he's president for life. And I love him and he's King Xi and all of this stuff. Anyway. Okay.

Good for Trudeau. I'm glad he did what he did. Got to leave it. I'm glad that we actually got to see it. So good on them for releasing the video. What about the body language, Peter? How did you see it? I saw it as exactly the way Chantel described it.

He was initially listening and then he went in to try and make his body blows. Unlike what we saw in Helsinki, where Trump still refuses to allow the translator's notes to go further. What was it, a two-hour meeting he had with Putin? I'd love to know what was said in that meeting. Anyway, we're out of time. Great discussion on a number of topics. All good. Chantel, Bruce, thank you much. See said in that meeting. Anyway, we're out of time. Great discussion on a number of topics. All good. Chantelle, Bruce, thank you much.

See you in a week. That's it for a good talk for this week. I'm Peter Mansbridge. Have a great weekend. We'll talk to you again on Monday.