The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Has The Ex-Speaker Put The Liberals In An Even Deeper Hole?

Episode Date: September 27, 2023

How much worse can things get for the Liberals? Does Justin Trudeau have a plan to recover from the "Nazi in the parliamentary gallery" story?  If so, will it be enough to make people forget the national embarrassment caused by last Friday's incident. Bruce Anderson on that, plus his thoughts on how two polls done at the same time with the same question can result in such very different results.

And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. You are just moments away from the latest episode of The Bridge. It's hump day, Wednesday. Bruce Anderson, Smoke, Mirrors and the Truth, coming right up. And welcome aboard to the Wednesday episode of The Bridge. It's Smoke, Mirrors and the Truth. Bruce Anderson's in Ottawa. I'm Peter Mansbridge in Toronto for this day. You know, I'm not sure I've ever seen anything quite like it. What we witnessed over the last five or six days. That's a big statement because you've seen a lot.

I have seen a lot. No, actually, I have seen a lot. And I've seen a lot of things bigger than this, but they were outside of Parliament. In terms of inside Parliament, in terms of a kind of international incident, because really that's what it's become, in terms of a huge embarrassment to the Canadian Parliament,

clearly to the Speaker of Parliament, but to the government and all members of Parliament. They all stood there. They all stood there clapping and smiling and pointing and waving. And then, of course, the truth came out. And everybody did a 180 and a backflip and called for a head, a head of the speaker, and they got it. But it hasn't stopped there, and there are a lot of people wondering what comes next.

Like, how do you how do you extract yourself from this mess or do you just wait for it to blow over and a week from now perhaps somebody will be talking about it maybe a couple of days from now nobody will be talking about it but having said all that i go back to my opening line i don't think i've ever seen anything quite like what we've witnessed, what we witnessed in the house and the fallout from it. What about you? I don't know if it reaches that level of never seen anything as dramatic as that before for me.

But obviously, it was a huge, huge error. It was a mistake. And I guess that's part of why I say, I don't know if it's the kind of the most significant mistake, blunder, blow up that I've ever seen, in part because I think at the end of it all, the speaker made a mistake. I don't know the nature of the mistake that he made in the sense that he hasn't said how many invitations did he get? Did he know this fellow or his son? How did he decide that he was going to secure him a seat?

Somebody must have been involved in making that choice. It wasn't just that this fellow's son called and said, can I pick up a ticket? And the answer was yes. There was more to it than that. We just haven't heard it and maybe we never will. But it really was what happened after the mistake was made that became the real challenge, I think, for a lot of different players involved, chief among them the speaker, obviously, who never should have taken four days or however many days it was since the story emerged to resign.

It was always obvious to me that that was how that was going to end. It should have been obvious to him. By waiting as long as he did and having the parties, three of the parties anyway, the Liberals, the Bloc, and the NDP all say that he should resign, he allowed himself to be put in another embarrassing situation where it no longer looked like it was his choice to resign as a matter of honor, but rather that there was no way for him to continue. Another mistake by Mr. Roda, who by all accounts, I don't know him, is a decent man, but really screwed this up pretty severely. I think that the Conservatives are obviously trying to make more of this error stick to the Prime Minister and the Liberals.

That's the way that politics works, and the Liberals gave them a little bit of opportunity to do that, but we can come to that. Yeah, it was pretty dramatic, but to your point about will we be talking about it in two or three days or five days, I don't think most Canadians will be. I think it's one of those things where people can look at it and say it was a monster screw-up, but there are other things going on in our lives. I think I tend to agree with you in terms of the longevity of this, but it's always going to be one of those things that sort of is hanging on the wall in the background. You know, the day the Nazi was allowed into the House of Commons and everybody clapped for him.

You know, nobody's going to forget that. That'll always be there. Just like the waving of the Nazi flag at the convoy rally a year a year and a half ago but this one is like this is brutal um let me let me ask you about the the embarrassment factor is it just the speaker's embarrassment i mean i tend to think it's the they're all should be embarrassed by what happened they all everybody's just assumed that the facts were as stated by the speaker in the chair, and I suppose that's understandable, but, I mean, nobody really thought it through.

You know, if he was fighting the Russians in Ukraine in the Second World War, there's only one side he could have been on. It wasn't the Allied side. So nobody seemed to think that one through too hard. But this issue of pinning it on the government or the prime minister directly, clearly what Polyev is trying to do, and as you said, that's politics. But is there something that the prime minister has to do? And I mean, the embarrassment for the country, the clear, you know, slight that, excuse me, Zelensky has to face as a result of being there is there something that justin trudeau has to say or do beyond what he said or done already

i don't know has to but probably should um i i was surprised that um that to my knowledge anyway he hasn't stood in the House and kind of addressed the various factors that broke down in this. I think there's an explanation. I think the explanation is never pretty, but an explanation sometimes is better than no explanation. I do think that there's a little bit of weight attached to the argument that if you've got a foreign leader coming to

the house of commons especially a foreign leader who's involved in a highly controversial war that the government has some responsibility to make sure that the house galleries are full of people for whom that's a safe choice. Was there some involvement by the government in that process? Presumably there was. Did it involve looking at the invitees of everyone, including the speaker? Perhaps not. But I think at some point it's reasonable to ask the government for an explanation as to how that happened. I don't think that it will be shocking.

I don't think it will be much more than the decision for Mr. Zelensky to come to Ottawa was made relatively late in the process. It doesn't seem to me like this is one of those kind of state visits where you have months to prepare. It felt like there were days to prepare. And sometimes things happen in those situations that nobody kind of thinks to has enough time or the inclination sometimes because they're busy with other things to think through and get right. But I do think that someone on the government side is also responsible for the motion to try to erase from the record what happened with that acknowledgement. And I don't think that was a good choice. I think that the critics of that choice are right to criticize it. I'm glad that it didn't pass.

I'm glad that it didn't happen. It feels to me that Hansard is the record especially something that has the uh the consequence that this event has had uh i think is not a is not a good idea so um having said all of that i look i think that the conservatives are getting pretty far out over their skis on this sometimes especially when we think about the fact that there was a high profile german politician who visited and dined with a number of their caucus members not very many months ago, whose political leanings are pretty clearly the sort that, well, where the word Nazi has been used as a descriptor.

So there are lots of reasons why I don't think this is going to persist very much beyond this week, perhaps. But it's some more scar tissue for a government that didn't need more. There's no doubt about that. Your point about Trudeau not being in the House of Commons this week is accurate. He has not been in there. He is there later today. And one assumes that in some fashion he's going to address this for no other reason than you can be sure that Pierre Poliev, if he is in the House, is going to be challenging him.

He was certainly wanting to challenge the Prime Minister yesterday, so I assume he'll be trying again today. I wonder how much on the Liberal side that the caucus and the cabinet were leading on the push here for the resignation of the Speaker. I suspect quite a bit. Yeah, the Prime Minister was careful with his wording, but it was clear he was pissed, and he wanted something to happen.

But the members of the Cabinet and members of the caucus were much more direct in what they were saying. And then apparently last night, I don't know anything about it, but last night there was some form of Liberal caucus meeting that took place with members of backbench MPs and cabinet ministers. The prime minister was not at it. So I don't know what's going on inside that party. It's a challenging time.

They've had a couple of big meetings, that big caucus meeting two weeks ago where the stories continue to come out. Basically back in what you said two weeks ago, that it was a really very open and aggressive presentation by caucus members to the prime minister about what they thought was wrong, about the directions the party was taking

and the direction he was taking. So I don't know whether we should make more of what was going on last night or that the caucus and the cabinet seemed to be leading on the push for resignation or not, or whether the PM knew that was going to be happening and just let it happen. Yeah, I don't know if I use the word aggressive to describe the conversation that happened a couple of weeks ago, and obviously I've only heard it third-hand,

but it was blunt, I think. And people were given an opportunity. And as I understand, it took the opportunity to describe what they were hearing at the doorsteps in their constituencies, most of which was critical of the government and of the prime minister. And you and I have been around long enough to know that these things do work in relatively predictable cycles. And this is part of what happens when you're that long in office, when the economy feels like it's in doldrums or worse, depending on your personal financial situation. A lot of people are finding anxiety about food costs or anxiety about renewals of their mortgages. They're having trouble finding affordable places to live. So it would be surprising if people weren't frustrated and fed up and expressing it to MPs when they come to the door saying, how's it all going? So I actually think that this is the way our democracy functions when it's healthy, is that MPs hear from people.

They bring those views back. They get filtered into the political calculations of the government or the party, which are if they're if they're not in government. And then it's a question of what are we going to do about it? Are we going to be agile enough and creative enough and diligent enough to try to turn around our fortunes. There are different polls out there. Some show liberals behind by six or seven, some 12 or some 16. But they all point to a liberal loss in the next election unless something changes in the trajectory of the two main parties. As to what happened last night, I don't know. I didn't, I didn't hear about a meeting, but it wouldn't surprise me that there was a conversation. And I think, you know, if I were in that liberal caucus, the conversation I'd want to have is we have issues, management people. Why did it take us so long to figure out what the answer was to the question

of who is this guy? Why was he there? What happened? That seemed to, you know, question of who is this guy? Why was he there? What happened? It may seem to people outside the political domain that, well, taking a day to come to an answer about that seems like a reasonable timeframe. But if you're in politics and you're feeling the heat on Twitter or Facebook or whatever social media platform you use, or you're getting emails from people in your constituency, a day is a long time. And you want to know something more quickly than that. You want to know what it is that the government has to say or what the explanation is. And alongside that, yesterday morning, I think, was the first time that liberal politicians said probably the Speaker should think about whether to resign. Now, from my standpoint, that the prestige of the house was compromised. And so somebody has to be accountable for that.

Or we live in a world where nobody's accountable for anything. And I don't believe that we should be going down that second road. I think that this is this was one of those pretty clear times i don't like andrew coin wrote the other day i don't think that every error should immediately lead to resignation i think there needs to be a higher standard than the the hollering on social platforms sometimes sounds like but this certainly met the standard of a speaker should go. And if he didn't decide to go right away, people shouldn't have necessarily given them two or three days to, to think it over before they said, here's what we think should happen. And

the conservatives didn't want to do that because they wanted to pin it all on the liberals. But the block and the NDP got it all on the liberals uh but the block and the NDP got out ahead of the liberals and I don't really understand if I'm a liberal caucus vendor I'm a little frustrated with that that that it took that long to decide what the position was going to be um you know they were they didn't suddenly decide yesterday morning, you're right, because a lot of them wanted Rhoda to quit and get out as of Monday, as soon as it started to break. But they weren't saying it publicly. They were whispering it.

There were stories out by certainly Monday night that senior members of the Liberal caucus wanted them to quit, but they just weren't putting their name to it. By Tuesday morning, and this is why I guess I asked that question at the beginning, that they seem to be, and this has been kind of clear, at least to me, to my thinking, that the caucus and some members of the cabinet have been out front of the Prime Minister's office on a number of issues. You know, debating the word aggressive.

They have a much more aggressive tone, some of them towards the conservative leader, than had been evident before that caucus at the end of the summer. But that's what, you know, the fact that they, by yesterday morning, Tuesday morning, they were attaching their name to it. I think Melanie Jolie was the first to come out as a senior cabinet, or say he's got to go. And then others followed. And certainly members of the caucus followed. And, you know, by within hours, he was gone. And so that was what was behind my question or my thinking, that we seem to be witnessing a situation.

And as you said a little while ago, you know, we've seen these kind of movies before play out in politics in our country, both at the federal and provincial level, and you kind of know the direction these things are heading. But when you have a caucus and a cabinet that's seemingly a step ahead of the prime minister's office on some of the strategic moves, whether by accident or whether it's deliberate, or whether it's with the knowledge of the PMO, I don't know.

But that's what it looks like. Yeah, the most common frustration, I think, for people on the government side has tended to be that everything is very centralized. That's a very common, you know, I don't remember a government where that wasn't a criticism, but's kind of reduced in size, hasn't replaced a number of key people over time, and has a degree of distance between itself and the caucus that is usually a mistake when it happens. It usually creates more friction than a leader needs. And leaders sometimes have made special efforts to try to overcome that natural tendency for distance to grow between their office and caucus. And I think it's reasonable to say that I don't think Justin

Trudeau has put that much effort into keeping his caucus close emotionally. So there are those factors there. And so when you also move through what most MPs will think is the last shuffle before the next election, the whole question of who's my boss and who do I care about the most, who I care about pleasing the most, or whose opinion do I care about the most, who I care about pleasing the most, or whose opinion do I care about the most, changes a little bit. Before that shuffle, to some significant degree, it's still, I care about pleasing the prime minister. I want him to see me doing a good job. Get 10, 12, 16 points behind and that last shuffle behind you. And all of a sudden, there's a whole bunch of MPs for whom I might lose my seat becomes a bigger part of the calculation.

And being really attentive to those pressures sort of moves up the hierarchy of priorities. And I think there's a little bit of that going on. And so you've got MPs who want to talk about what it's going to take for them to win their seats again, what it's going to take for liberals to win another election. And I don't think that after the weekend that we had, or the week before that, that they're feeling more confident that their party is kind of pursuing a strategy that's perfectly fit for winning another election yet. I like your point about the centralization of power

within the prime minister's office and how this goes back a long way. You know, I'm reading, I'm currently reading John Ibbotson's new book on the Pearson-Diefenbaker years. It's called The Duel. I'm not sure if it's actually out yet. They sent me an advanced copy, and it's really interesting. There's a lot of great little anecdotes in it. But he talks about when Diefenbaker defeated Saint Laurent in 57. Surprising, Victor.

People didn't expect it, and he suddenly won, and he had a minority government. But initially, he basically wanted all the power himself. He only appointed a couple of key cabinet ministers and left the rest of the cabinet unappointed. And off he went to an international conference, I think it was a Commonwealth conference, where he assumed the role of the foreign minister as well.

He hadn't appointed one. And he got a briefing from Pearson, who was the outgoing foreign minister in the Saint-Laurent government and eventually would be the big contender against Diefenbaker in the decade ahead. But Pearson said to him, no, no, no, you can't do this. You really need a foreign minister. And Diefenbaker said, well, eventually I'll get one,

but I'm going to do this one myself. I want to do this. That was a classic case of you know centralizing the power um but uh you know it it has been a constant and it's it seems to have got more and more an issue through successive governments even as as people like justin trudeau swore coming in that they weren't going to do that but then it just seems to happen and that office swore coming in that they weren't going to do that. But then it just seems to happen. And that office and the people in that office have more and more power than even the governments before them.

Well, I think the other thing that's more true today, perhaps than it was in the past, is that there's a very strong instinct to avoid errors. And, you know, I think that in the center, as people refer to it in politics, you're either, you have confidence in your team to the extent that you're saying, go everybody and do your things. And we have confidence that it's, you know, you're going to make good decisions and they're going to accrue credit to the government and they're going to accomplish the things that are in your mandate letters and that sort of thing. So that's one setting.

Which which comes with knowing that there will be some things that screw up, but that it's better to err on the side of let a thousand ships sail than it is to keep them all in the harbor and decide which one is going to go out on what particular moment. And you've evaluated all of the risks of something going wrong and that you've tried to mitigate those risks. That's kind of the other setting. And I think right now, the government's got a management challenge in that sense of it probably can't win another election unless more of its senior, in particular, its senior ministers are scoring more goals and are free to kind of, you know, play the way that they can play. But the event of the last weekend will reinforce

that instinct to maybe overmanage for risk avoidance. What could go wrong? Let's check everything. Let's make sure that we're not setting ourselves up for some other thing that go bump in the night. I don't suggest for a minute that it's easy. I think the people doing these jobs work extraordinarily hard and almost all of them have really good judgment. Um, it's a, it's a part of the job though, that it wears on you, that it, that it consumes your life, that it consumes incredible amounts of mental energy that it seems kind of thankless most of the time. Um, and on top of all of that, people are human. Mistakes do get made. And the social media environment that we live in is pretty unforgiving about mistakes and the kinds of things that are said when people make mistakes are more trenchant, more poisonous sometimes than they might have been at different times in the past. Now, whenever I say something like that, it's a good thing my wife doesn't listen to this podcast because she tends

to say, well, you know, people used to say some pretty nasty things about each other a long time ago, and I'm sure that's right. But yesterday was a good example, Peter, of, you know, there was a conservative MP who said that she thought that the Liberal House leader was a disgrace. That's unparliamentary language. And so this, you know, the speaker got up and said, I'm going to have to take a look at the record because that might have been unparliamentary language. Now, you and I can look at that and go, well, that's the way that speakers normally say that, even though it was very clear and the MP in question stood up and said it again. So there wasn't really a need for let's go and look at the game tape like they do in football. Let's get in that tent and see if a foul occurred. a foul occurred. And where am I going?

I'm going, well, the degree of friction and the nature of the friction and the things that people say to each other in the house just keeps on kind of going in a direction. And longtime observers, you will have probably noticed this in some of the comments on social media in the last little while, they're saying it's pretty bad right now. And I don't think it's a good thing for people to race to the ugliest ways in which they can characterize each other. I think they should be as critical as they want to be but but stay within some lines is where i come from on this on both sides and the house rules need updating of it i mean they're like prehistoric some of the rules like you're not allowed to say whether somebody's in the house or not like no you're not allowed to say they're not in the house so a number of times yesterday the speaker there's a reason for that though well yeah but really come

on it's on television they can see whether somebody's there or not i mean it's ridiculous anyway let's there's a reason that that relates to all parties having agreed at one point i guess that that was a thing sure that was in like 1612. I know, I think it was, you know, look, I don't want to defend it. I think that the prime minister, it would have been better for the prime minister to have been there. Oh, yeah, it should have been. All I'm saying is that, you know, you can, A, you can see that he's not there, and B, really, you know, that that he's you know the the government can say

well you know he's doing business such and such place anyway if we end up debating the arcane laws of inside parliament where but do you agree with me that there should be some language that's considered unparliamentary yeah i think so and be rewritten and we should raise the bar and say this grace falls underneath the bar? I think we should bring it into the 21st century in terms of the way we can get into this discussion that they're having in the states. Can you wear whatever you want inside Congress? What's his name? one of the senators,

I think from Pennsylvania, is wearing shorts and a T-shirt. And others are going, oh, no, my God, you can't do that. You have to wear a jacket and tie and blah, blah, blah, blah. Really, there are important things to discuss and debate, and I'm not sure dress is one of them, for taking part in these kind of discussions. But anyway, as I said, if we end up with a discussion here about the arcane, sometimes arcane laws inside of a parliament or a legislative body were sunk. I have a much better thing to raise, and I'm going to raise it with you right after this.

And welcome back. You're listening to The Bridge, the Wednesday edition, Smoke, Mirrors and the Truth with Bruce Anderson. Bruce is in Ottawa. I'm Peter Mansbridge in Toronto. You're listening on Sirius XM, Channel 167, Canada Talks,

or on your favorite podcast platform. Or you're watching us on our YouTube channel, where the numbers rose dramatically last week. As we were discussing the last week's scandal, the Canada versus India scandal. And I'm pretty sure the numbers rose dramatically because word got around in India that we were discussing this and there were a lot of notes on our YouTube channel, comments. And they weren't very flattering. Some of them were using unparliamentary language to describe the discussions we were having.

Despite your warning. I remember you gave people like, we don't need to read those. Well, I don't mind reading ones that are constructive in their criticism. It's just like the wacko ones that turn out every once in a while. Anyway, if you are watching on our YouTube channel, right now you're seeing that bruce is wearing a dramatically you know very very nice looking sweater and the reason i pointed out is because it's from a golf course that the both of us um like to play at and are members of in Scotland called the Brora golf course and it's north of

Dornick it's up in the highlands and it's a great course it's a challenging course but one of the things it's known for is that you know in Scotland there's there's the free to roam laws and that applies not just to people but to cows and sheep and sheep. And they're all over the Brora golf course, which can make shots quite challenging to end up dropping it just between the cows and the sheep near the green, which is encircled with barbed wire. But nobody does it better than Bruce. He's such an excellent golfer these days. He has a whole new swing and new attitude, and he's just shooting the lights out. It's not barbed wire,

though. Remember, it's electric wire around the greens so that the sheep and the cattle get a little tiny shock. And every once in a while, you and I will if we bump up against it. But it's a fun place for sure. So is that more humane than barbed wire? I think it might be. Yeah. Okay. Well, my question that I wanted to get to here in our last segment, it's not about golf or cows or sheep or barbed wire or electrified wire.

It's about the other area that you know well, and that's polling. I'm sure you saw last weekend two polls that came out in the United States on Sunday or part of the morning shows on Sunday. One from ABC News, absolutely reputable news organization. The other from NBC, equally reputable. And both have polling units, which have been credited with, you know, results that are respected over the years. So anyway, same question.

And it's basically head-on-hand Biden versus Trump, who's ahead at this point. Taken at the same time, I think relatively similar in size of poll, so margin of error basically the same. The ABC poll had Trump 10 points ahead of Biden. The NBC poll had them even. ABC put out a statement along with their poll saying, you know what, this may be an outlier, this poll, because it doesn't reflect what other polling agencies are finding, not just the NBC one, but others. That's rare. I won't use the term.

I've never seen that before, but it's certainly rare that a company or a news agency that is releasing a poll would say at the same time, this could be an outlier. In other words, it could be wrong. 19 times out of 20, they're right. They're confident in the results. One time out of 20, maybe not so much. And that seems to be what ABC was suggesting about this one.

What did you think about that? Well, I saw, as I was scrolling a little bit this morning, I saw a piece that I meant to read later today that was kind of a latest piece of analysis about outlier polls. So I'm going to read that, but that's not going to inform my answer right now because I haven't read it yet. Don't let that stop you. I think that for ABC to put out a statement with that caveat, first of all, if they were sure their poll was wrong, they

probably would have just flushed it, not put it out. So they would have had conversations with their pollsters to say, why is this number so different from other people's numbers? And the pollsters would have had an argument to make. Now, whether the argument is that they believed in their methodology to be capable of gathering a more representative sample or whether their methodology included what some American pollsters do as a matter of course, which is an estimate of what likely voters are going to do. We tend not to report that in the same way in Canada, right? We look at adults 18 and older and we say,

this is what it looks like. In the United States, a lot of polling is reported, the numbers are reported as proportions of likely voters who are supporting one candidate or another. What that does is it removes all of the people who probably won't vote and in many cases won't vote because they really don't have strong feelings one way or another about politics or about political parties or candidates. So I don't know in the difference between NBC and ABC if there was a methodological difference there, but I'm going to look into it now that you've sprung it on me this morning. And I'm going to also find that piece and maybe you and I can post it so listeners and viewers can consume it. In the way that our polls are used as we get closer to an election, pollsters generally do make some allowances in their reporting for likely voters. And when

they're trying to predict seats, which as you know, I've never been really a big fan of, they do apply some weights associated with who's more likely to turn out and who's not to produce their seat projection models. But that's not what we're talking about right now. What we're really talking about now is two samples that might have been gathered differently, that might have had different makeups, that might have used different methodologies as it relates to likely voters or voters in general. And I wish I had the answer to your question, but I'm going to look into it. Well, it underlines the fact that we don't, at least recently, we don't agree as to what we're going to talk about.

We just sort of start talking. We start talking. It's obvious, obviously, we're going to talk about. We just sort of start talking. Sometimes it's obvious, obviously, we were going to talk about the speaker thing. I'm glad we're talking about it because, as you know, I like to pay a lot of attention to the American election. I don't think we've seen a poll that shows Biden with a significant lead, and I think that it's causing a lot of consternation among Democrats.

Donald Trump had another legal setback last night, massive potential legal setback. I'll say. But I saw another poll out this morning that shows among the Republican voter pool compared to the other people who are running for the nomination, he's miles ahead. This does not dent his popularity with that group. You know, there's a Republican debate tonight

with seven of the contenders for the nomination. But the lead contender, the one, as you say, who's miles ahead, Donald Trump, is not there. He just sort of blown them off. And he gets away with it. The debates are organized by the party itself. And they say, no, it's okay, he doesn't have to come. Well, really?

It just seems to me bizarre. I can understand why he wouldn't want to come. If he can get away with it, it kind of makes sense in a rotten way. I mean, in the sense that if you're not up for the competition or you don't believe that politics should have a competition for the nomination, then I guess you don't go. But it's one piece of dozens of things that lead people to the conclusion that he doesn't really believe in the Constitution.

This isn't a constitutional matter, but he doesn't believe in any of the norms that have prevailed in politics for a long period of time. And he gets away with, unlike anybody ever has before that I can recall, he gets away with ignoring those norms because people see something in him that they value. And maybe one of those things is that he sums his nose at convention. And they like that. The rest of us find it like worrying yeah but it's you know it kind of goes beyond that sort of debates are supposed to be there so different people who are vying for the job can explain what their positions are on the policies

and the positions and the issues that confront americans in this case right now like what would you do with this or that or whatever the issue may be? He doesn't answer any of those questions. All he talks about is what he wants to talk about, that he was cheated, that he's there for retribution, that he wants to execute the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. I mean, we have no idea what his position is on major issues that confront the country. This drives Trump supporters in this country nuts,

and there are some who write letters into the program here whining and moaning about what we say about Trump, who now is a convicted fraudster, right? The judge in a civil court yesterday said, we don't even need a trial beyond what the witnesses have put forward here already. It's a fraud, what he's been doing in terms of his business. And he could end up, as you said, he could end up losing everything, including his condo, Trump Tower. We'll see where that one ends up.

Anyway, I just find it amazing that the party itself is sort of saying, oh, that's fine. He doesn't have to be here. We'll have all these nob uh debate instead yeah he's got them all cowed they're all worried about retribution they're all worried that um um it's not their party anymore it's his and um his base voter uh that are big enough and energetic enough uh that that they basically decide what the Republican Party is today. It's quite a shocking turn of events. If you'd sort of said 10 years

ago, could you imagine somebody being so exceptional that they could achieve that level of control over a party of that size with that history in a democracy that big with so many moving parts, you would say, well, no, but if it was going to be some, if there was going to be such a person, you'd think they'd have to be more extraordinary in a talented way than Donald Trump. And, right? extraordinary uh in a talented way than donald trump and right i mean it's hard to look at this guy and say spend 11 billion dollars on a vetting exercise to get to this individual

but there's something about his celebrity and his style that appeals to enough people just enough people people to make him have that power. Well, he certainly seems to have that power. I still think he'll get trounced if he's not in jail in an election next year, but I've been wrong on Trump all along. So who's to say I'm not wrong again? All right. If we get closer closer I might take the over on that I might think that

we'll see I hope not but okay that's going to wrap it up for this day Bruce will be back on Friday pleasure to see you in your Aurora golf sweater Bruce will be back on Friday with

Chantal as we do a little good talk. Tomorrow it is your turn, so if you've got things to say, drop me a line. Drop it now at the Mansbridge Podcast at gmail.com, the Mansbridge Podcast. The ranter. Any ranter? The ranter's tomorrow.

He's every week, every Thursday. He's in the bullpen right now, ranting away. I'll get him ready for tomorrow. So that's tomorrow's program on your turn on the Random Ranter. I'm Peter Mansbridge for Bruce. Have a great evening. Thanks for listening. Talk to you again tomorrow.