The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Is China interfering in our elections to benefit the Liberals'?

Episode Date: February 22, 2023

The Globe and Mail has been all over this story for a week now and leaves many things to be discussed. Bruce takes up the challenge on SMT today. Also thoughts on Joe Biden's visit to Kiev and the impact its likely to have on Russia.

And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. You are just moments away from the latest episode of The Bridge. It's Wednesday. Bruce Anderson is here with Smoke, Mirrors and the Truth. And hello there. Wednesday, SMT, Smoke Mirrors and the Truth. Bruce is with us. And the topic, and you know, you love this when I kind of start off with a two or three minute ramble to kind of set the pace. Standing by. Standing by. The opening topic is China. And it, you know, obviously relates to a lot of the good work that our friends at the Globe and Mail have done the last few days on trying to point out that there is something to this story about China meddling in Canadian political affairs.

Or trying to, at least. And here's my background to this, because most of our listeners and viewers probably don't recall this, but 13 years ago, almost exactly 13 years ago, it was April of 2010, my good friend and your friend Brian Stewart did a documentary on the CBC about CSIS, about the intelligence service, and kind of what they were up to and how they were operating. And these were the days of Richard Fadden was the director of CSIS. And included in that interview or in that documentary was a number of clips of Richard Fadden. And one of the things that was raised in there was the potential

that seemed to exist that China might be trying to interfere at some level on the Canadian political front. Remember, this was 13 years ago. Now, I don't think he ever said the word China, but the implication was clear who he was talking about. As a result, we decided, well, you know, we need to do a follow-up interview on that same program. And so we did. And I interviewed Richard Fadden. I went up to the CSIS headquarters and in his office, and he was very nice and accommodating. And we pursued more this issue about China but he was being very careful but the indications from what he was saying is that there were a couple of places that appeared potentially vulnerable to Chinese government influence and those were in

in Ontario and in British Columbia and he seemed to be talking more about provincial affairs than federal however However, it was kind of out there. It caused quite an uproar. And there were a lot of questions raised about, you know, had he gone too far? Was he revealing, you know, state secrets or what have you? And should the prime minister fire him? All those kinds of things were happening. The prime minister of the day was Stephen Harper. But he was, Harper was very careful. He kind of deflected a lot of this stuff and Fadden survived. So the feeling at the time was Fadden had, you know, got carried away in television interviews and said more than he should have said. Well, that feeling has kind of changed over time

that in fact Fadden was playing the media, was playing us, more than he was being played. That he was trying to get it out there, that China was doing things they shouldn't be doing in Canada. And that the Prime Minister was fully aware of that and wanted it out there in this kind of way. So it was out there, and Fadden, as it turned out, kept moving up the ladder. He became deputy minister of defense.

He became the national security advisor to two prime ministers, to Harper and then to Justin Trudeau, for about a year after Justin Trudeau took office. So the story on Fadden has changed considerably over these last 13 years. And the story about China has changed as well as more and more details seem to play out. To the point now where the Globe has been reporting, based on confidential CSIS documents, that they really did try to have an impact in the last couple of elections and what the impact was they were trying to support liberal candidates in some writings to try and ensure that the liberals won a minority not a majority but a minority government so you can take from that

what you will because we all know they ended up with a liberal minority government. But there's more, including this week, the Globe is now reporting on something that has been suspected for some time, that China is just one of the countries playing in our Arctic. And it's been a thing for me, as you well know, Bruce, I've raised it a number of times thinking that we're not doing enough. But if clearly we seem to be doing enough to know that China was dropping buoys in the Arctic Ocean to do everything from, you know, checking weather patterns to checking who was using the Arctic, whether the Russians were putting subs through the Arctic, which they have done, and the Americans too. Anyway, the story continues.

But the headline, the blaring headline is still interference in Canadian elections. How serious was it? Is anything that they do should be considered serious? So there are parliamentary committees at stake. And the liberals are saying this and the conservatives are saying that and it's all you know it's a it's an interesting story especially the time when parliament's not sitting certain things that actually grab the headlines and that's what's happening now uh and so full credit to the globe for doing it full credit to

the globe's national editor david womley, who was my editor back in the day in 2010 and pursued this China story vigorously and kept wanting more and more on it and has done so continuously since he was at the Globe. Anyway, where are you on the China story? Well, I went back and looked at some of the coverage of the Fatten period, and I don't really know quite what to make. I heard what you said about maybe he was playing the media. I also sort of read in one of the stories that he said he hadn't informed anybody in the PMO,

but it sounds like post-talk that maybe that wasn't exactly right. So I don't really have a point of view about how he handled that, but I do generally feel that we as a society need to know more about this, but there's also limits to what we should be told. And what I really mean by that is that it is imperative, especially in these times when social media, the internet, and maybe with the additional aspect of artificial intelligence, our democracy can be more susceptible to this kind of outside influence more rapidly than we could ever have imagined would be possible.

So I think it's good that all the parties that have been talking about this say that they agree that the last election outcome wasn't really affected by this. But all parties seem to feel like there is a certain amount of public knowledge that needs to happen. Where I think the rub is right now, and one of the really interesting things to watch in terms of this parliamentary committee that's asking for more appearances by Minister Jolie and Mendocino and another minister, name escapes me right now, to answer more questions, is how much public discussion of the details of this interference is in the public interest. Because on the surface of it, you would think, oh, well, maximum exposure is good. People just need to shine a light on it. It's the best disinfectant.

It's the best way to shame the Chinese or other foreign state actors who might try to intervene in our election. But the rub is this. If the information that is shared publicly allows those adversaries to understand what we're learning and how we're learning it, then we put ourselves in a disadvantage because we've created a scenario where they can kind of adapt their methods based on knowing what it is that our intelligence services have provided. I don't know where the conservatives are going to come out on this. I think it's been a good thing so far that conservatives and liberals have both tended to be on the same page, which is that we shouldn't disclose too much.

But I'll be watching very carefully for whether or not this becomes a more partisan issue, where conservatives decide that they're going to push for more release of information because they sense that that puts the liberals on the defensive and makes the liberals look as though there's something that they're trying to hide, as opposed to this kind of soft agreement, basically, that there should be some limits. Last point for me is that we've seen in the United States plenty of evidence of foreign efforts to intervene in the democratic elections there. And we've also seen that at the partisan level, there's been a fight over whether the intelligence community and the information that it provides to people in government can be trusted. I think that second part has been really bad for America, and we should really try to avoid it here in Canada. We need to be able to count on and trust certain things in order to make wise decisions in government.

And we need to keep some of them pretty inoculated from partisan discussion or partisan fighting. And intelligence gathering on foreign involvement in our country is one of those things in my view. And so it'll be interesting to see how the different party leaders deal with that subject in the weeks ahead. Yeah, I think you're right about that. And I think it's an issue on not just on the conservative side, but also on the liberal side, as we've seen the last couple of days, some liberals trying to make some partisan issues out of the same thing. It is interesting to note, at least it appears,

that Aaron O'Toole, when he was leader of the Conservative Party and during that last election, was aware, as some Conservatives were, that things were going on, that ran against the Canadian democratic objectives for an election campaign and that China was involved. But he chose to be very careful about what, if anything, he said on that for, I guess, the reasons you're explaining. It's a delicate situation because, you know,

I can see the argument on both sides of this equation, as you outlined. But to choose to not say anything, especially when you're the party that could be most affected, well, most affected from a negative way, to sort of stand by and not say say anything not bring it up yeah well one of the more worrying things for me peter is that there's a through line in terms of the coverage that we've seen of the involvement of russians in uh in american politics and chinese where they've

become involved is that their main point um isn't always the election of a certain individual, although I guess in the case of Trump, it probably was. And in the case of the minority government scenario, probably was in Canada. But underneath that kind of outcome objective, there is this general notion that what these foreign involvement efforts are trying to accomplish is to break down social cohesion in our country and in the United States to create a sense of you can't trust the information that you're being given. You can't possibly find common ground with somebody who disagrees with you on the opposite side sort of ramp up that uh that friction uh that makes for great clickbait that makes for a sense of drama

in elections that produces outcomes that people maybe didn't see coming, that the corrosive effect on the idea of we have elections, we battle it out over ideas and personalities, the outcome is counted, the votes are counted, the outcome is clear, and then we move on. And then we generally try to get our democratically elected bodies to compromise on some things so that progress is made. These efforts to break down social cohesion, separate and apart from the partisan outcomes that the foreign state actors might be looking for, that's a bigger problem in my view, it's a deep, longer-term problem. We don't quite know how to defend against it. And we don't know how to defend against the 2016 version of it. But with the introduction of artificial intelligence, the 2024 and 2028 and so on versions of it are going to be even harder to know how to deal with because the proliferation of fake accounts that look like they're passing on real information that can reach

huge numbers of people instantly, that can ramp up anger and frustration and fear and division. That's the real thing. And everybody shrinks at the idea of regulating what happens on the Internet. And I don't know what the right answer is, but I'm pretty sure that the right answer isn't to just let that nuclear energy sort of do whatever it will to our societies and to our democracies. And I think we need to be very, very worried about it. Do you think we're being too pure by half here? I mean, would you assume that we, then I'm talking about the collective we, you know,

Americans, Canadians, Brits, Aussies, New Zealanders, whomever's in the kind of Five Eyes group. You think we're doing the same thing to them? No, I don't. I mean, I think there's more of it than we might want to imagine. But, no, I think we're probably doing things that if they were all disclosed, there might be a sense of, oh, I didn't know that we were doing that kind of thing and maybe we shouldn't do it. But my suspicion is that those don't include efforts to create a destabilization in other countries. Now, when you say the collective we, Canada, the United States, I wouldn't feel as confident saying that, what I just said about the United States.

I would think that the United States does have initiatives, have always had initiatives during my lifetime and yours, I think, that had as an objective shaping political outcomes, maybe in some cases destabilizing regimes. But I don't believe that Canada has had a program that looks like that. I don't know whether I could speak to the UK or France or some of the other allies. But I also think there is a qualitative difference and a technological difference between what could have been done using old fashioned methods and what can be done now using technological methods and at scale by countries like Russia and China, which are so clearly isolated in terms of their posture on the world stage and clearly antagonistic to democracies like ours and like the United States two of the most powerful actors in the world. And their common kind of orientation, I think, is to destabilize democracies. And part of that is to create social friction within those democracies and confuse people about facts and information. Okay, two more questions on this. One is the Justin Trudeau position on this over these, well, throughout his term on China has been one that has aggravated some

from his early days in office, saying the country he admires the most is China, and whether that was taken out of context for the question that was thrown at him. It still hangs there. It's a clip. It's out there. It's run every once in a while.

There's that. I think we just did it. Yeah, well, it's still out there. I've seen it played a couple of times this week as a result of the china story yeah um now up to and including this week when he's he's saying listen it happened but there's no evidence that had any impact on the election outcome. So talk to me about that, you know, his position on the China story and on the China trying to peddle influence in Canada in the election process. Is he saying the right things?

Yeah, I'm going to answer that question, but can I just go back to that clip? The idea of clips that stand out there, and even if they're misinterpreted, the fact is that the misinterpretation gains kind of currency and reuse. So there are two that come to mind for me. One is what he actually was communicating in his comment about China was that a thing that China is able to do that other countries aren't is to be able to build big nationally important projects quickly, as I recall the specifics of it. Now, it was inartful for him to say that he admired that or that that was the country that came to mind in answer to that question.

But it does bear noting that he didn't say China is a great country in every respect. He isolated one thing that he thought was kind of material to the idea of great national projects. The second one that comes to mind for me is this notion that he characterized all of the people who are against vaccinations as being a fringe minority with unacceptable views. He didn't say that. He said there is a small group in Canada that have views that touch on anti-vaccination and other points of view. I'm not going to kind of get into the repetition of it, but it then became kind of characterized as he divided the country into two big kind of segments.

And that's not what he did. It's not what he said. But it lives a little bit as a clip to the point that he felt obliged to, in the aftermath of the Rouleau report on the Emergencies Act used last week, say, I could have chosen my words better. I suppose good for him for saying that. But on the other hand, I don't think he said anything that was inaccurate in the way that he constructed that original sentence. Okay, so to your question, I don't, I can't even remember what it was now.

Well, I don't really think that he can say with certainty, and it sounds like the quote had a sense of certainty to it, that the involvement of China didn't affect the outcome. I think he can say that it might have affected how some people voted, but it didn't amount to a critical mass of influence that changed what kind of government there was going to be. And saying it that way, the way I just did, feels more plausible and more provable, probably. But implying that it didn't have any effect on how anybody voted, I don't think is plausible. I don't think we know the answer to that. I don't I think we must assume, on the other hand, that some people who were exposed to the misinformation that was reported by the Globe and that has been kind of in the subject of a lot of these stories. It probably did have an impact on how some people thought about their vote.

And so, you know, maybe what he was trying to do was to kind of reassure Canadians that our democracy hadn't been fundamentally compromised. But if I were advising him, I would say, don't go too far in that direction. Because if we think this is a problem, then we must think that it's a problem because it can affect the way people vote and because it can affect our democracy. So if it is a problem, it's a problem because we think it works. And if we think it works, we shouldn't say that it didn't have any effect. So I think there is room for him to be a little bit more clear in stipulating what he thinks the problem is, the dimension of it, and what the solutions need to be, and explain why some of that can't be fully presented in the public square for everybody, including our adversaries, to dissect it and understand it, interpret it, and maybe adapt. Okay, one last...

What do you think? I think you're right on that one. I think he probably went too far with that blanket statement. Unfortunately, I don't have the exact quote here, but it certainly came off like a blanket statement that there had been no impact. I think he probably would have been better to leave that one aside. Right. And say, we're concerned about this, we're investigating it,

and we're going to fully report to the public what we determined to be true and leave it at that. Let me ask a related question that not to Trudeau or not to the way the Canadian government is reacting to all this. Are you a TikTok person? I've looked at it from time to time uh i have not posted anything on tiktok well you're not familiar with it okay will you explain the tiktok china story to me and why some people get really worked up about it? Well, as I understand it, TikTok is owned by an enterprise in China that is essentially a government enterprise or is so closely tied to the government that reasonable people can assume that the data that TikTok gathers on individuals is data that's available to the Chinese government. So there are a lot of people who think that an app like that, widely used,

creates a flow of information that goes, if not directly, then ultimately to the chinese government and given the posture of china relative to our country and the united states and other places the question is i think quite legitimate whether or not people believe that that is in our national interest whether there are ways in which that information might be used to compromise our interests or to affect our interests. I don't know as much about the technological aspects of that, specifically what kind of data and how it could be used. But that, as I understand it, is at the crux of the concern about TikTok in China.

Okay. We started this segment with an answer. That been dancing uh i was going to say whoever those chinese owners are must be tired of watching really bad dancing dancing tick tock some of it's good yeah it's funny i know some of it is funny um i started this segment by telling an anecdote. I'll close it with a shorter anecdote. You said one of the reasons Trudeau said what he said about China was that he was impressed with how they can make national projects work and work relatively quickly.

I can remember being in Beijing in 2008 and watching from my hotel room window as they built a pedestrian underpass under a, not a highway, but an important roadway in 24 hours. 24 hours. That was pretty impressive. Now, mind you, that 1,000 people working on it, half a cent an hour or whatever, told they had to be there. It's not like they were, boy, let's go build an overpass or underpass. But they certainly accomplished that. I'm not sure I'd want to work in a system that would have you do that,

but nevertheless, they did. Oh, that's right. Sorry, you were going to say something there oh i was going to say that you know the rights of workers the trampling of uh all kinds of things that people you know in other countries would expect couldn't be trampled on like you live someplace and all of a sudden the government decides that you can't live there anymore. Now that can happen in other places, but it doesn't happen in the same way that happens in China. And so the efficiency with which China can scale its economy, can make these kind of infrastructure changes, comes with huge downsides, obviously. And I mean, maybe in retrospect, that was another aspect of what,

if Justin Trudeau was answering that question again, he would probably want to say, but it is unmistakable that China has created a much different country than existed 10, 15, 20 years ago. And the speed with which they've done that is something that is quite stunning to watch and disconcerting in some respects, obviously. Okay.

We're going to take a quick break. When we come back, we're listening to the bridge the uh wednesday smoke mirrors and the truth episode with bruce anderson uh you're listening on sirius xm channel 167 canada talks or on your favorite podcast platform, or you're watching on our YouTube channel. Okay, China to Russia. This is kind of like the international edition of Smoke Mirrors and the Truth. And I guess Russia, we're really talking about Biden in talking about Russia. And that is Biden makes his first visit to Kiev, to Ukraine, into a war zone, with no American troops visible around him.

One of the first times, if not the first time, an American president has made such a trip. This is his 18th foreign trip since becoming president you'll note that none of those 18 um are canada he apparently is going to make a trip in march to canada in the past tradition had it that the first trip an american president uh take would be to Canada. Now, it didn't always play out that way. Trump never came to Canada. This is such an old trope. Oh, my goodness. Okay, carry on. That's just

laying out the facts, right? But we live in a different time. There's a war going on, and he made this trip, and with the exception of some Republicans, he's being praised for it. Standing there in the middle of Kiev with the sirens going,

and then in Warsaw yesterday with another big speech. This was a moment for Joe Biden, there's no question about it. But like so many of the other moments for Joe Biden, there's no question about it. But like so many of the other moments for Joe Biden, they don't seem to be having a big impact on the way Americans look at their president, which seems bizarre in some ways, because when you rack up the accomplishments, there are many on the Biden side. But he doesn't seem to always be getting the benefit of it. And instead, they talk about how old he is and whether he looks fragile and

frail walking around. He was in a war zone. If he was that fragile, I don't think anybody would have let him go there. But he was there. And he made the big speech when he was there and took all the right photo ops. Your take on Biden in Ukraine, basically facing Russia. Yeah, it was a really interesting week in understanding where we're at with those geopolitical issues. I think Biden visiting Kiev, meeting with Zelensky and his government,

showing America's demonstrated willingness to stand by Ukraine and promising to continue to do that in the future was a very important signal, a very important signal for allies, important for the world to see, because we have in the last several years come to wonder what kind of America is going to show up when the next global crisis arrives. And we still wonder, I still wonder about that, because I don't know if the Republicans were holding the White House, whether Ukraine would be able to count on support.

And I think that the Republicans basically continue to make it unclear what kind of support they might or might not provide in that scenario. So I think it was a good thing. On your point about whether or not what Biden does aggregates up to a level of public support that's higher, it's a really interesting piece in the New York Times today on the problems facing the Democrats. But one of the elements of it was a recognition that very few people follow national, let alone international affairs the way that they used to. They just don't consume the news the same way that you or I might, or that prior generations who were all cable news subscribers, even before cable news, TV news users and newspaper readers. So there's huge gaps in what people are consuming. And they tend to be gaps between things that happen on a higher, more global or national level and may not affect me very much today and the things that affect me very much today.

So that's a good piece. And maybe when i tweet out the link to this episode i'll i'll tweet out a link to that that piece and if listeners are interested in consuming it but the other thing about um biden in ukraine yesterday that i found was interesting is the is the kind of the putin response and what what Putin was doing at the same time as Biden was doing this, because, as you know, Putin was giving this kind of State of the Union address to Russia and, by extension, to the world on how he saw the world at the same time. So this was a real kind of a face-off. Now, I understand that in one story I read that the Americans told the Russians that Biden was going to be there.

And that made sense to me because I think what they were doing was saying, if you don't want an accident where your bomb hits our president, you need to know that he's going to be there. And they would have understood that the Russians did not want to have that he's going to be there and they would have understood that the russians did not want to have that kind of thing happen and so that it was essentially going to be safe or safe-ish for biden to be there but that doesn't change the uh the fact that biden showed a certain amount of courage in doing it might not have been the same level of physical courage as people might imagine thinking about it as a war zone, but it's definitely, he spent some political capital doing it. And he demonstrated where his party was on these issues. And of course, we know that the Republicans are divided, I guess is probably the best way to say on it. So I was happy to see him do what he did. Putin, to me, looks weaker.

I gather that he decided that they're going to have a massive draft of young Russians to put more troops in harm's way, following those who've suffered badly, a lot of casualties on the Russian side. But what we're seeing in China and in Russia is dictators can do what dictators want to do unless and until there's some sort of counterforce in those countries, even if those policies are bad for the world

and bad in many instances for those countries. On the issue of Biden courage, it's true what you reported about the Americans warning the Russians or advising the Russians that Biden was going to be there. But I wouldn't take, you know, Putin is, Putin's got his back to the wall. Putin's up against the ropes. He could do anything at this point. And I would still say it took courage to do what he did. You know, usually he's surrounded by a hundred Secret Service guys and U.S. military on, you know, on various foreign trips, especially ones into a war zone like, you know, Afghanistan, Iraq, Bosnia, all, you know, over the last whatever number of years,

American presidents have been surrounded by that. He didn't have that. Or if he had it, it was hidden from view. You couldn't see it. All you could see was some Ukrainian soldiers and not a lot of them, right? And Zelensky and the two of them walking through the square with that siren going on now i don't know what the siren was keyed by or whether that was for effect or whatever it was doesn't matter it's a war zone and missiles are going into that area all the time um so he did what he did back to the point of putin with with his back against the wall.

The problem with that is, you know, it's very unpredictable. He's just been through the first two weeks of what was supposed to be their big offensive. It doesn't appear to have had any impact at all. It doesn't appear to have had any impact at all. So what does he do now? You talk about a draft of even younger soldiers. What, are we heading towards the 12-year-olds that Hitler pushed under the front line in Berlin in 1945? God, let's not hope so.

The one card he hasn't played yet, and Brian keeps warning us of this, is the one card he hasn't played yet, and Brian keeps warning us of this, is the one card he hasn't played is the Russian Air Force, which is not an insignificant force. But you play that, you put that in the air, that's your last card. So that's what I'm going to be watching in these next few weeks that could be

game set match I think there are obviously a lot of pressures on Putin I don't have any insight into whether or not the cumulative effect of those is going to be enough to stop him from exhausting all of Russia's

military resources in what probably will never be as successful an endeavor as he hoped that it would be. But I do remember that when we first talked about this almost a year ago, talked about the fact that even if Putin was able to accomplish in the near term, his geographic kind of goals, would he be able to hold on to them? Was the question that we were asking then. And he hasn't been able to even accomplish them a year later, despite the expenditure of a lot of blood and treasure of the Russian people. And so even if he could accomplish some geographic expansion in the near term, it's even more doubtful to me, given what the world has done and how Ukrainians have responded. It's even more doubtful to me that he'd be able to hold on to those. And so I think his time as an individual, I don't know what would follow him, is probably

not 10 more years, maybe not five more years. Who knows exactly? But what follows him is either going to be a Russia that tries to kind of retrench and rebuild and recognize the disaster that this campaign has been, or it's going to be a Russia that tries to kind of retrench and rebuild and recognize the disaster that this campaign has been, or it's going to be something worse because people will feel like there's a pent-up anger, a pent-up frustration, and we can only hope for the former rather than the latter, and sooner rather than later. We could be testing that old saying about the devil you know is better than the devil you don't in terms of what comes after Putin, if that's where we're heading.

Last quick point, and it kind of returns us full circle to where we started when we're talking about China. In the last couple of days, you've had the U.S. Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, suggest that the Chinese are now considering arming the Russians to a serious extent to help them in their situation against Ukraine. And the Americans, including Blinken, have warned China, if you do this, you're getting yourself into a real bad position. Now, we've heard that, but also in the last two days, we've heard the opposite, that the Chinese are telling the Russians, you've got to end this because it's not going in your favor.

So the Chinese may be the ones who determine where this is going in the near future, and what influence they have over Russia, what influence President Xi has over President Putin. We may very well find that out in the next little while. Yeah, well, it does feel to me like if the U.S. wanted China to think twice about helping Russia, that one way to accomplish that would be to have Blinken say that this was a possibility. So they may have been putting it into the public square as a way of creating that kind of anxiety that here we are talking about this, right, that we all feel. You may also be having an eye on this notion of how will the U.S. come together. I mean, at the same time as this huge geopolitical conversation is going on, so much of the

energy around the Republican Party is consumed by Marjorie taylor green saying the red state should secede from the union and and we should have effectively two countries um this is completely ludicrous idea but in terms of the amount of coverage that it gets relative to well what are the what are the thoughtful leaders of the Republican Party? What do the putative next presidential candidates of the Republican Party think about Russia and China and Ukraine and the state of the world? DeSantis and Trump are battling it out over, you know, just really kind of ridiculous culture war ideas. They're not talking about geopolitics. So what everyone thinks of the Democrats and a lot of, you know, Canadians would be more inclined towards supporting the Republicans.

The Republicans aren't looking like a party that would help stabilize the world and put America's influence into action to help stabilize the world and put America's influence into action to help stabilize the world. And maybe what Blinken and Biden are trying to do is create the conditions where more people who may be supporters of the Republican Party push for a Republican Party that gets involved in discussing these issues in a thoughtful way, not just Don Trump Jr. waving his arms on Twitter and Trump, you know, calling the media names. It's brutal what's going on there. Okay, we're going to wrap it up for this day. It's been a very interesting international edition of Smoke, Mirrors, and the Truth. I've enjoyed those a lot. Let me just say one last thing.

You and I talked about the courage of President Biden on what he showed us in Ukraine the other day. Courage is forever going to be defined by our generation as the people of ukraine they have been incredible over this last year and we say evidence of it every day the courage of of staying uh you know in in their country those who've stayed and chosen to fight those who stayed and chosen to be with their loved ones and putting up with just horrendous situations. There's another courage being exhibited in Ukraine as well these days, and it's from those journalists who are traveling daily

as close to the action as they can to tell the story. And this is not gung-ho heroism. It's a belief that to tell a story, you've got to be close to the story. And I think of people like Richard Engel from NBC, who's sort of my hero in the journalism business. And if I could ever come back to be somebody, that's who I'd want to be, is to be Richard Engel. But there's somebody else I'm going to mention quickly,

and you can find her reporting from the last week. And that's my friend Adrienne Arsenault, who has been for the last 30 years, 20, 30 years, one of the great foreign correspondents of our time. She's now the anchor of The National. But she's been back to Ukraine in the last week or so, and some of her reporting has been outstanding, world-class, angle level, as we say. So if you can find it, you should.

Get it on CBC Jam or go through the National Archives. You'll find it certainly worth watching with admiration. All right. Bruce, you take care of yourself. Bruce will be back on Friday with Chantal for a good talk. And then she goes away. She's going hiking in Iceland or somewhere. She takes the best holidays.

She does. Yeah. So we're going to miss her for a week or so, but she will be here this Friday for a good talk, and Bruce will be back there as well. Tomorrow is your turn, and the ranter completes his trilogy on the political leaders. Man, he's been taking some beating up. He wanted to go after all the political leaders, and he's certainly been doing that. Tomorrow it's Jagmeet Singh's turn.

The NDP leader faces the wrath of the random ranter. That's tomorrow on what do we call this program? The Bridge. The Bridge. Bruce named it. Well, Bruce's son-in-law named it. Right, Perry named it, right?

Didn't he come up with the name The Bridge? Him and George Strombolakis. I don't remember, but yes, it was a family conversation for sure. All right, my friend, you take care of yourself, and we'll talk on Friday. That's it for now. I'm Peter Mansbridge.

Thanks so much for listening. We'll talk to you again in 24 hours. Thank you.