The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Is It Time For More Stick And Less Carrot on Vaccines?

Episode Date: September 29, 2021

With vaccine rates somewhat stalled is it time for governments, businesses AND hospitals to step up their game on getting more vaccines into more arms?  Smoke Mirrors and The Truth is back with Bruce Anderson.  Also is it finally time to admit we lost the war in Afghanistan?

And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. You are just moments away from the latest episode of The Bridge. It's Wednesday. That means Smoke Mirrors and the Truth with Cousin Brucie. A can of pet food, where every ingredient matters. Some companies like to brag about their first ingredient, but the A Can of Pet Food team is proud of their entire bag. That's because every recipe has been thoughtfully sourced and carefully crafted with the highest quality ingredients, starting with quality animal ingredients, balanced with whole fruits and vegetables. Acana pet foods are rich in the protein and nutrients your dog or cat needs to feel and look their best. Available in grain-free, healthy grains, and singles for sensitive dogs.

Acana, go beyond the first ingredient. Do you remember Cousin Brucie? Do you remember Cousin Brucie? I'm not as old as you. I don't remember. I've heard about Cousin Brucie, so tell us about Cousin Brucie. Cousin Brucie's still around. I mean, this guy celebrates his, like, 86th birthday, I think, next week. He's at WABC in new york where he made his

name in the 50s his cousin brookie was the big rocker show he was a big dj and i can remember growing up in ottawa in the late 50s and early 60s if you were really lucky at night and you had your little transistor radio you could tune in wabc and hear cousin brucey spinning 45 in the tunes you know i was i was a dj once i did it one time for ckcu really they asked me because wait a minute ckcu is what carlton the carlton university radio station and they had observed on twitter that i really liked country music classic country music and so they asked if i would come on and do a show one day and it was i must have put more time into thinking about that show that i did literally anything else for about three weeks i had so much fun i still have that playlist somewhere that i used that morning and uh do you have the audio tapes have you got like tape of you couldn't you can we like put it

here on the podcast probably exists somewhere i was gonna do a pollster playlist because you know frank graves our good friend frank graves he's always ecos ecos polling at two uh and three o'clock in the morning if you're you, if you start to look at your Twitter feed, he'll be playing the songs on Spotify that he likes. So I'm going to challenge him and other pollsters to make some pollster playlists and see what people think about that. I think that's it. But we're not here to talk about that.

We're here to talk about your book. Oh, no, not your book. Okay, but let's talk about your book for just a minute because you are nervous you're nervous because your big book about you book about peter that's not the formal title i don't think no it's coming next week and it's not about you don't worry it's not gonna do great it's about it's about stories that have happened to me and how they influence my take on journalism and influence my take on Canada and influence my take on other people. And I'm just sort of a side issue to these. But you're right, I am nervous, as any author is, just before a publishing date. I read a very successful book last year with my friend Mark Bulguch,

Extraordinary Canadian, still available, by the way. Number one bestseller in Canada. No, don't anybody buy that because you need to buy two or three copies of this book. The new book, off the record. Anyway, really, we're not here just to promote that, but if you want to know more about it, it's at thepetermansbridge.com.

You can find out all about it on my website. Published by Simon & Schuster, comes out next week. And as a result, I'm going to be taking actually a couple of days off next week because they've got me on a big promotional tour. Tour by Zoom, as they say. And I'm really looking forward to it, doing lots of interviews for different networks and different radio stations and different newspapers

and all that stuff will be coming out in the next few days. Okay, enough about that. Although there is one story in there about DJing because I was a DJ at the beginning and it was terrible because unlike you who are a country music expert, I know nothing about music. I can't carry a tune. I was never any good when I was in the band at high school.

And that followed through into my radio career, where it was very clear, very quickly, that I couldn't do music. And that's how I started news. In fact, one of the first programs I did was an online, you know, like a phone-in show, never before done in Churchill, Manitoba. I started news. In fact, one of the first programs I did was an online, you know, like a phone-in show, never before done in Churchill, Manitoba. I started one. It was called Words with Peter Mansbridge. It was 8.30 in the morning. And the first, I'll never forget the very first edition. We came on, a big hoopla, and I was saying, now we're like the big cities down south. We're going to have our own open line show. You call in here's the number and in those days in churchill the number only had four digits but you can call in we'll put you on the air we talk about whatever you want first day no calls not not a single call

small town right and nobody wanted to get on the radio because everybody recognized who it was so there were no calls by the second day the show had changed its name from words with peter mann switch to words and music with peter now we have we do not have that problem here because a couple of motor mouse like us we can we can we can fill time um topic one uh the prime minister said yesterday he is about to fulfill the promise he made two days before the election uh which was to ensure that the only people who could travel on public uh transport systems like planes and buses and trains and cruise ships um would have to be fully vaccinated.

It's going to take a while before that actually happens. Probably, I think he said the end of next month things should be in play, which kind of surprises me that it would take this long, but I guess there's got to be agreements between companies and unions and so on and so forth. But he was adamant that they're going to follow through on this. This comes out at the same time. I'm reading the Toronto Star today.

Story by Mae Warren. She's a staff reporter at the Star. Listen to this first paragraph. Hundreds of unvaccinated staff are still working in GTA hospitals. That's Greater Toronto Hospitals. Even as other health care centers in Ontario have already begun suspending employees who refuse their COVID shots. Hundreds of unvaccinated staff in hospitals. Now, I know we've mentioned this before in terms of situation in the States.

I didn't realize it was that bad here, and especially in Canada's biggest city. So what's happening here? Why is there still this issue in terms of some of the most vulnerable places in the country, like hospitals, or unvaccinated staff? And it doesn't appear that the hospitals at least have done anything about it yet. They're threatening suspensions or the fact that those who are unvaccinated will have to take a daily or every second day test to prove that they're negative. What's happening here?

Why are we still in this situation? I think there are three things going on, Peter. I think the first thing is that there is a certain proportion of the population that is just deeply, deeply contrarian. So if everybody says A, they say B. And that's true a lot of it in recent years around the issue of climate change, where, you know, you can be living in a place where fires are way more severe and way more common storms and floods and all kinds of evidence that the climate is changing. Even if you didn't decide that you were going to consume all of the evidence from all of the best scientists in the world. And they still have this kind of no, I can't. I don't believe it's happening. The second thing that's that's that's going on that's maybe as credible as you want it to believe if you happen to be a kind of a contrarian or somebody wants to push back against authority and so i don't know about you i'm sure you get these too i get emails from people who who kind of are are

pushing some of the stuff that they see on on on the internet, on dark websites about vaccines and as an alternative invermectin. And so we've seen stories that develop about people really mad because they can't get this horse medicine because they're so convinced that the horse medicine is the thing they need to protect them. Despite the fact that the entire medical community is saying something completely different and that if it wasn't about COVID and vaccines, they wouldn't be searching for a horse medicine version of something to solve cancer for them. Right. They'd be going to a doctor and they'd be following a course of treatment. But that brings me to the third thing, which is that this conversation became politicized.

It became politicized because some politicians, I'm not just speaking about here in Canada, although Max Bernier is a great example of one here in Canada. But some politicians decided that they wanted to make a political meal out of being a champion for this kind of anti-vaccination movement, which wasn't a movement to begin with, but they basically built it into a movement. And so if you have a politician, then people in the talk radio business, you know, who obviously got more calls than you got when you were in the talk radio business, Peter, but people in the talk radio business in the United States who we've seen stories now were spending months and months being anti-vax activists and then they got COVID and died. So there's no logic to it. There's just human chemistry that's abetted by a kind of a political culture that says, hey, if you have a contrarian view, we're going to kind of celebrate it a little bit and we're going to

build it up and make it a little bit political. And the only thing I can think of that gets us close to solving this episode of this problem because i don't think that particular problem goes away just when covid goes away is measures like what the prime minister is talking about doing which is that it won't you know solve for everybody but we know that there are probably some MPs who aren't vaccinated in the Conservative Party because the Conservative Party wouldn't say how many candidates they had that were were in fact. But if somebody is out there and they've been elected to Parliament by November or by the time Parliament comes back, if they live, you know, some distance from Ottawa, they're not taking a plane or a train. And I think that's the right kind of measure to put in place to cause people to make the right choice or sort of be exposed for making the wrong choice. Because I think that has to happen as part of this, too. So it's very frustrating.

And I think we need these measures. We need politicians to hold firm on them. We need them to endure the criticism that they're going to get because we're past the time where somebody asks the PM, well, are you going to try to reach out to and understand and persuade the unvaccinated? And I think he said something, I'm paraphrasing. Well, I would have thought you'd notice we've been trying to do that.

And that has been what most governments have been trying to do for months. Well, there seems to be a bit of, OK, we've tried the carrot, and now we're going to have to use the stick. And you ask, well, why? Well, the answer to that is that the numbers, as good as they are for Canada right now, they're not good enough. If you're going to get to a figure where we can safely feel that we've got this thing seriously under control it's got to get higher and to get higher they're going to have to convince these people like hospital staff

really like i just find that mind-boggling but nevertheless it's happening uh but they're going to have to be convinced one way or another and now now they seem to be using the stick in some cases where, you know, if you don't get vaccinated, you'll be suspended. You could be fired from your job, which sounds great, except there's nobody to fill in for those people. There's a shortage already. I know. You can see that story out of New York state where the governor said that

they were firing all these people who worked in the hospitals there, already. I know. You can see that story out of New York State where the governor said that they were firing all these people who work in the hospitals there and they're going to bring in the military to provide temporary support. Now, I sort of think that some of these people who lose their jobs, you know, will be surprised even though they should have seen it coming and maybe they'll get vaccinated and then maybe they'll get back to work. I'm hoping that that's the case. It doesn't make sense to me that people will lose a job for being unvaccinated. And then we'll just have kind of these clusters of people in our communities who can't get a job in a bunch of different areas because they can't, they won't get vaccinated. You won't be able to work in federally regulated industries, I guess, is one of the things that or at least in the federal government that the government is putting in place.

And I believe other governments will. There's really only two governments in the in the country, the Saskatchewan and Alberta governments that seem to be a bit traumatized by trying to manage this this sense of well you know my freedom is compromised if you make me get vaccinated everywhere else I think governments including Doug Ford's government slow to get to it is saying no no we have to do this and I really believe and I think you probably feel the same way. I've got a grandson who's, you know, three and a half years old. And we're now at the point where if we know people who aren't vaccinated and won't be vaccinated, it's hard to decide, you know, where to draw the line in terms of your interactions with other people. And when you think about it that way, it's hard not to be angry at the people who are unvaccinated because they can walk around and put kids at risk.

You know, I don't think they're putting me at very much risk. I'm double vaccinated. I'll get a booster if it's on offer. I'll mask up, I'll social distance. I'll do all of those things, but these little ones, we can't put them at risk for the sake of, you know, some sort of weird contrarian mindset. It's just not right. Where are, you know, the numbers situation pretty well from the work that you've been doing on, on the vaccine front.

How close are we? I mean, we're not close enough, but how close are we to, I hate the term herd immunity, but that's kind of sort of where we're trying to head to towards some goal. Is it like 90%? I mean, we're somewhere around 72% fully vaccinated in the country, which would seem to indicate we've still got a long ways to go. We're over 80% single vaccinated.

But this whole sense of using the stick, not giving up on the carrot, but having to sound more forceful in the things you're doing, is designed to try and get us to a higher number. It depends how we decide what is enough, I think. What we're now aware of, especially with the Delta variant, is how badly that can go for so many people who get infected with it that our hospitals end up being clogged. So we're not at a number that's good enough if we want to make sure that everybody who needs elective surgery or who needs some sort of intervention that requires hospital

is going to get that in the way that they used to get that or with the speed that they used to get that before the pandemic. We know obviously the crisis situation that exists in Alberta because the vaccination rate is lower, but it's not miles lower in Alberta than it is in the rest of the country. It's a little bit lower. Plus, the premier decided to kind of open up the do whatever you want kind of gates. And despite all of the evidence for a year and a half that if you do that, people are going to move this virus around the community. And of course, now the ICU beds are completely overwhelmed in that province. We're not there in Ontario. But if we don't want to run the risk of another wave or declining immunity from the first shots that we got and therefore needing booster shots, so that it can struggle while taking care of the people who are unvaccinated,

who are 30 times more likely if they get COVID to end up in hospital, then we need to get closer to 100%. I don't know what that number is, but we're not there yet because we're still seeing too many people get sick and end up in hospitals and put pressure on the healthcare system. And we shouldn't have to build our healthcare system so that we need way more ICU beds than we ever did because there's a less than 7% part of the population that refuses to take medical advice and scientific evidence and do its part to end this pandemic? You know, a lot of chatter in the States this morning about one person.

And this is, you know, more on the sort of the carrot and the stick thing. Part of the push for vaccines has also been in kind of public declarations of, you know, I'm going to get a vaccine or I've had a vaccine. It's been mostly, you know, political leaders in the States. You know, I saw Joe Biden the other day getting his booster shot live on camera. Those kind of endorsements, if you will, some movie stars. But yesterday, the one that everybody's talking about this morning, or at least a lot of people are talking about this morning because of at least a lot of people are talking about this morning

because of the incredible impact he can have, is LeBron James, the basketball star, the NBA star, celebrated around the world, perhaps as the most famous athlete in the world. LeBron James announced yesterday that, in fact, he's had the vaccine. Now, it comes at a time when there is some debate within the NBA on the part of some players, a minority of players, but they're not going to get it. And the chaos of that can cause in the NBA schedule.

But the impact of one person, like LeBron James, will be interesting to watch the fallout from that. I mean, you've been big on trying to get people like endorsements of a sense, but this is like, this is the super endorsement. Yeah. I think these things are really important. I think that in Canada we've gotten as far as we've gotten and it's been quite remarkable given that it's a vaccine that's been developed fairly quickly. And we have very high vaccination rates. And so we're

frustrated because we don't have higher still. But I think it bears mentioning that our vaccination rate is actually pretty good. It's part of what makes the level of frustration be on the rise now is that the vast majority of Canadians are saying, well, look, we took the shot. We did the right thing. We want to move on from this pandemic. What's wrong with the rest of you, that small group that don't want to do this? Setting aside, of course, the people who have legitimate medical exemptions. But I was in the drugstore yesterday picking up a prescription. And, you know, the person standing the two meters away from me picking up a prescription had no mask on

and was wearing a button that said the news media is the virus. And he was arguing with them, you know, with the attendant about something. I didn't know what with the, the attendant about something. I didn't, I didn't know what, but it wasn't about COVID. And, and after he left, I asked him, well, how come he wasn't wearing a mask? I wasn't trying to be a busybody, but I actually think that it, you know, it was quite shocking because we're so used to seeing people in masks. And they said, well well he said he had

a medical exemption and what are you going to do and i sort of looked at them and said well he's wearing a button that said the news media is the virus i don't think that that signal signifies a medical exemption i think it says something else about his attitude, right? But where am I going with this? I'm going that we're now past the, you should do this stage of rounding up people and encouraging them to get vaccinated. That's, we've done as much of that as is possible to do. And it's been quite successful. And now we've got two other things that we can use. One is you shouldn't not be vaccinated because here are the things and the people that you're putting at risk.

Kids, older people, people who need surgeries, people who need those hospital beds, people who might be your next door neighbor and who've been suffering with some debilitating disease that they can't get a hospital bed to be and the kind of care that they need. Those folks who are still standing apart from the vaccinated group really do need to some degree to be reminded that it's not just them that's involved in this. There's a lot of other people whose lives are inconvenienced and whose lives may be lost. That's happening, I think, in in in Alberta because health care needs to be triaged. That's a polite word for saying they need to decide who's going to die and who's going to live. So you shouldn't do this because of those reasons now needs to come into focus.

And the last piece is if you don't get vaccinated, you can't do these things. And that's where I think that the PM's point was right yesterday. And I know there will be people who say, you know, it's it as being tyranny of that minority that doesn't want to get vaccinated in terms of the harm that they threaten others with, with the breakdown of our healthcare system. I've never quite understood the fact that in some cases, and you did put the caveat earlier about, you know, some people with certain medical conditions either can't wear masks or shouldn't wear masks or shouldn't get vaccinated. I understand all that.

But there's a lot of other people who are making this stand against vaccines who at the same time allow their kids to go because they have to, their kids to be vaccinated against all kinds of other things or they won't be allowed to go into school. They don't have a problem with that. They're not standing outside the school saying, you can't vaccinate my kid.

It's okay. They're doing it. And they themselves were vaccinated in the same system. Anyway. You remember how we felt when Donald Trump was president way back in those dark days? Oh, come on. Donald Trump was never president. That can't be true. But I remember thinking he got this. Apparently he was pretty sick.

He took the medicine and wasn't the horse medicine. I think he took whatever other funky medicines were being discussed and as well as the ones that the medical professionals said that he should have, but, and he, I'm sure is vaccinated, but he never did anything but undermine Anthony Fauci or mostly he did nothing but undermine Anthony Fauci, or mostly he did nothing but undermine Anthony Fauci and the scientific evidence. And he was adamant that America needed to make vaccines and then completely unsure of whether or not he wanted messed up in political culture these days. That's the kind of thing where we're trying to figure out, well, how can you be a parent and let your kids be vaccinated for all of these other things?

And then COVID comes, it wrecks the economy and throws our whole way of life up into the air for a year and a half. And you can see that 80 to 90 percent of the people that you know have been vaccinated and life can come back to normal. And you know, I don't want to do that. And so it's all of these little political entrails of the Donald Trump's of the world and the internet and some of the talk show people, it's discouraging some days. I'll just make one last comment on vaccines before we move on. And that is, I don't know whether you caught Dr. Bogoch the other day on Monday and was in a great deal of reaction to that interview we had with him. He was great, as he always is.

But one of the things he did mention was, and it was almost as an aside, and it was about, in particular, about people going into sporting events and having to have the proof of double vaccination. And that's going to obviously take on increased meaning whether it's in restaurants or movie theaters or what have you. The aside he threw out was, you know, assuming that it's a robust inspection.

And I worry about that. I worry about that too. I know people have, in some cases, vaccine passports. If they don't have them already, they're getting them, depending on which province you're in, or they can carry around their certificates. But, man, this stuff in today's world is easily faked. And how robust that system is will also determine how successful all of this is.

Yeah, I think that's right. That's why I was kind of, you know, when the PM said that the grain and plain mandate was going to happen in October and you said, you know, sooner would be better. I don't know this, but my assumption is that what he's trying to do is sync up the timing of a digital product that it works across the country which means that the provinces have to agree to share the data uh on who's been vaccinated with the federal government for the purposes of standing up this piece of software because the burden on businesses of checking little slips of paper and all this kind of thing, you know, just makes everything slower and more frustrating as well as opening the door to fraud. So I'm hoping that digital solution is available quick.

And I'm hoping that that becomes a thing that's harder to debroad. And at the end of the day, if it's 7% of the adult population that's unvaccinated, how many of them are going to go to the trouble of creating or finding some way to buy a fraudulent digital passport? That becomes a game of kind of inches rather than feet. And so maybe we can live with that amount of risk. Okay. I'm going gonna take a quick pause come back i got something i want to say about afghanistan that's right after this this is the bridge with peter mansbridge Peter Mansbridge, Bruce Anderson, back with you.

Sirius XM, Channel 167, Canada Talks. We're on that. We're also wherever you get your favorite podcasts downloaded from, wherever you are, listening to The Bridge. We appreciate your loyalty in listening to us. Okay, I wanted to talk about Afghanistan, and here's why. I watched yesterday, I don't know how much you saw of it, but I watched a fair chunk of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

in the United States, Mark Milley, General, talking to congressional leaders in what was a fairly active session. A lot of it was partisan, but not all of it. And he was taking incoming, so to speak, from both sides on how the whole exit from Afghanistan was handled and the disagreements that he may or may not have had with the commander in chief, Joe Biden, the president of the United States. But the one thing, and I haven't seen a lot of it mentioned anywhere that I found intriguing,

and perhaps it's because Americans have been in this situation before, but Milley admitted, directly and indirectly, what we should all, it's hard to argue with, that the Americans lost the war in Afghanistan. Not surprisingly, they went in there in 2001, knocked out the Taliban, and they left in 2021, and the Taliban took back control. So his conclusion is we lost strategically and militarily. We lost. They're back in control. They're not friends of ours.

They weren't then. They're not now. Well, as I said, this is not the first time this has happened. It's not America's first lost war. But you know what? It is our first lost war. We were there too, and we were, two successive governments said, we are at war in Afghanistan.

And we are at war against al-Qaeda and the Taliban. It was the Taliban that were blowing up vehicles with roadside bombs, killing Canadians, 159 in total. Canadians died in Afghanistan. So we were at war. We promised never to cut and run. That was the actual term used by Prime Minister Harper in 2006. And then we cut and run. That was the actual term used by Prime Minister Harper in 2006. And then we cut and run. And nobody has sort of raised their hand and said,

oh, no, no, no, we shouldn't have done that. The fact is, we lost. That's the first time Canada has lost in a conflict. You can argue about 1812 to 14. But this is is clear cut. If the Americans say they lost, then we lost too, because we were a part of that conflict. And, you know, I don't know whether that means anything in the great scheme of things, but it is actually the history of that time. We spent billions of dollars, lost, as I said, 159 lives,

and some of our reputation, not all of it, there were a lot of good that was done by Canadian troops and public servants in Afghanistan during those 20 years. But at the end of the day, the Taliban are back in control. Do you have any thoughts on this? Yeah, I do.

I mean, I think that, again, this is a sort of situation where politics over the last couple of decades, it seems, has tended to run down the idea of diplomacy and strategic and durable alliances among countries. And there can be this kind of reflexive, let's go to war, let's do battle, let's send in troops, that kind of thing. And a lot of that comes from the U.S. rather than anywhere else. But the breakdown in the durability and the consistency of those alliances, I think, has become a real problem because it creates a situation where, you know, we go into a situation because there's a sense of obligation to our partners and an obligation to it not just a sense of and but then not all partners are equal in terms of the voices about what happens and how it happens after that and i again um you know i don't always love to go back to what did donald trump break but this is one of the things that he broke um he challenged NATO so aggressively. He challenged

the idea that Russia was an adversary so aggressively. He pretended to be making friends with North Korea. He, you know, had an incoherent approach to China. The world needs America and alliances of democratic countries to work together if we're going to have any chance of influencing some of these horrible situations that develop, whether it's the Uyghurs in China or the situation in Afghanistan, or the, you know, tremendous civil rights abuses that go on in Russia. Now, what, if anything, we ultimately decide to do has to be done on some sort of collective basis. Otherwise, it's really pointless. And the pretense that you hear from some people about, well, let's really kind of get more muscular with China. What would that look like?

Why would we think that that would work? The only things that will work, in my view, against those kinds of threats are collective actions, whether diplomatic or military in nature, born of durable alliances that aren't subject to the kind of the temporary whims of whatever latest, whatever politicians been elected. And I remember, last thing I'll say, Peter, is I remember, you probably remember it more vividly than me. There was a moment in Jean Chrétien's prime ministership, where the question of, well, it's a question of whether or not missiles could be located

on Canadian soil and there was also, I guess, kind of an earlier invitation to participate in a military action by the United States. And Chrétien was kind of notable, I think, for being cautious or hesitant vis-à-vis the American position on that kind of thing. And he took some heat in Canada for it. But I think what he was trying to do, as I look back on it, was making sure that the balance of influence in those alliances didn't tilt too much to whatever the U.S. says that it wants to do,

we need to go along with. And I think that's not a bad thing to have go on. At the same time, I do think that there does need to be an agreement about what we can do about some of these larger problems that we see in the world, because unilateral action isn't going to work. It's a good point about Kraytchen and his positioning on things like Iraq. But I do, because I mentioned Harper on Afghanistan, I just want people to realize

if they'd forgotten that it was Kraytchen who put us in Afghanistan after 2001, and it was Martin who then increased the role by the move to Kandahar in 2005, 2006, somewhere in there. And then Harper became prime minister and was on side with that decision. So there were two governments of different political stripes who were involved in the

decision on Afghanistan. And that debate will ring through history. That's what history is all about, right? In trying to determine whether that was a wise decision or a poor decision on the part of the Americans and all the countries that joined in with the Americans on the move immediately after 9-11 to invade Afghanistan and the 20 years that followed. Okay. That's really just a tease of a discussion that perhaps we'll have in greater detail at some point, bring on some of our other, our other friends of the podcast, like Ian Bremmer, who I talked to him.

He's had some time to think about all this since the, the pullout. So it'd be interesting to see what he has to say. Anyway, that's all good. Thank you, Cousin Brucie. Peter, that's all pretty good talk. We can't say good talk because that's Friday, but thank you for the conversation this morning and good luck with next week. I can't wait for us to actually, we're so vaccinated.

We're going to be playing golf in Scotland sometime next month. And I'm pretty excited about that. Yeah, me too. Really looking forward to that. All right. Bruce Anderson in Ottawa. That's Peter Mansbridge in Toronto. Bruce is right.

Good talk is Friday with Chantelle Hebert. Tomorrow, we'll have your turn, your letters. So keep them coming in. Email is themansbridgepodcast at gmail.com. themansbridgepodcast at gmail.com. That's it for this day. Smoke mirrors and the truth. We'll talk to you again on the bridge in 24 hours.