The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Is The Doug Ford Story As Bad As It Looks?

Episode Date: February 24, 2023

Is it as bad as it looks or not as bad as it looks?  That's the question being asked of the Doug Ford wedding party thrown for his daughter and attended by figures who paid for entry, figures that may have eventually benefitted from the Ford government.  Chantal and Bruce have their thoughts on that plus on Justin Trudeau and his handling of the leaked CSIS story.

Are you ready for good talk? And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. I'm in Toronto. Chantelle Hebert, Bruce Anderson are with us. Chantelle's in Montreal. And you know, I got to tell you, I don't know whether you have Apple television, but if you do have Apple TV, one of the things they have when you first switch it on is they show these great like visuals, you know, they're kind of like wallpaper and they're from different parts of the world. And they're, you know, they're incredibly well shot with drones, et cetera. And one of the new ones that's come on lately in the last, I don't know, few weeks is Iceland.

And it's, you know, it's on remote parts of Iceland and, you know, the mountains and rivers and it's, you know, it's spectacular. It's beautiful. And I keep looking at it right now because I know that in the next few days, Chantelle is going to be climbing one of those mountains she's going to be hiking across iceland that's don't push it that's her holiday that's what she's got planning up she's leaving like literally not long after we finish this podcast and it's not like the first time it's going in a different direction i love that chantal always follows her arrow it's great yeah and it's an arrow that has been fired in that direction a

number of times what is this your fourth trip to iceland what is it about iceland not only my fourth but everyone including my very young grandchildren always knew that my first real trip after the pandemic would be to iceland and it is. Well, I'm very impressed. And I look at some of those mountains in Iceland, they're pretty good. I mean, like... Wait to see if I come back in one piece before you are impressed. You'll be back. You'll be back.

And then there'll be Everest next. I can just see it. Chantal Hébert reporting from the top of Mount Everest. Oh yeah, right. My lungs would be shot long before I got there. Bruce is with us. He's in, well, points south. He's on a beach somewhere, soaking up the last couple of days before he comes back. The real world of snow and ice, certainly in parts of what we tend to call central Canada.

Okay, topic one this week. And, you know, this story, like a number of other stories, has been bubbling along for a while. You know, sometimes stories only last two, three, four days, then they kind of disappear. Whether they should or not is another question. But this one hasn't. It's kind of been bubbling along for, well, for most of this year already. First by some reporting by Global News and then the Toronto Star. Others have kind of leapt into it.

And it's about Doug Ford, the Premier of Ontario. And basically this is the story. You know, politics and money, we always kind of trace those, follow the money, what's happening in terms of how money's raised. And we're in kind of the money-raising season right now. All the political parties are out there raising money. And that's quite legitimate. That's the process.

That's how it works as long as you stay within the rules. People watch that carefully. This wasn't one of those. It was not a campaign money-raising thing. It was Doug Ford's daughter's wedding. And it was last summer, last September, actually, the actual wedding. And there was a stag and doe party the month before. And what's become interesting in the way this story is unfolding

is the number of people who were at these events who also were developers, some of whom benefited from the, appear to be benefiting from the Green Belt decision. Some of them were potential appointees to the Provincial Civil Service. And so it's raised a lot of questions about that process and whether that was proper and whether it smells a little bit. You know, to some people it looks like a bad movie or in fact to some people it looks like a good movie, or in fact, to some people, it looks like a good movie that has

highlighted these kind of things in the past. So that's the question here. The question is, is this as bad as it looks, or is it not as bad as it looks? Chantal, why don't you start? Well, I'll reverse your question. It certainly looks bad. And bad enough that you kind of, I was listening to you telling the story. It's bad enough that you kind of wonder whether Premier Ford would have been as welcoming and would have had this style of event with developers and others giving money to his daughter's wedding, etc. If it had taken place just before the election that saw him reelected for four years rather than just after. For sure, it suggests a certain amount of sloppiness at a minimum and a lack of thinking about the optics of the entire thing. Whether it goes beyond that, I tend to think that people who have links to powerful people and who want something out of them.

I'm thinking, for instance, of the Green Belt controversy do not need to go to a stag and dough party to exert that influence that they will in any event in venues that you probably will never hear about. So I am not convinced that, and by the way, Stag and Dau Parti, the reason why this news is not percolating in Quebec, maybe because I would be at a loss to translate this. I didn't even know that the expression existed. So that kind of tells you why Premier Ford is safe in the French media at this point. Bruce? Yeah, I'm not quite in the same place as Chantal. On some points, I think I am. I think it is worse than it looks like. I think the evidence to me that it is worse is just, first of all, on the surface of it. I agree with Chantal's point that not everybody knows what a stag and doe party is, but basically it's a party to raise money to pay for his daughter's wedding.

People were invited to come to that party and make a contribution, the monies of which would go to help pay for his daughter's wedding. I do think that Chantal's right about people who are in positions of these developers and some of the others who are reported to have been there. They will have had other and will have other ways to have influence and to gain support from the government. This wouldn't be the only thing. On the other hand, in my experience, the way that politics works is that if you get invited to come to a party to make a contribution to help pay for the premier's daughter's wedding, if you decide not to go to that, that sends a signal that it may be unhelpful to the matters that you care about at the provincial level. At least it's a very reasonable thing to speculate about.

Two other things that really make this look worse to me with each passing day. Ford has no answers, and he refuses to provide any more answers. His ministers refuse to provide any more answers. The government refused to provide any more answers. The government through the integrity commissioner says, we're not going to say anything more about this. If there is evidence that this is being blown out of proportion, if there are other ways of looking at the facts that are established and not contested, then you would think that somebody somewhere in the government, in the premier's office, in the cabinet would take it upon themselves to say, well, here's why people shouldn't look at this as a more innocent coming together of people who share a love of parties and the premier's daughter and supporting weddings.

So that isn't happening. And finally, there are news organizations and journalists who generally feel supportive of Premier Ford. I haven't seen one of them, not one of them yet, make the case that this was fine. He has no, as far as I can tell, he's got no support in the media, including among organizations and individuals who are generally supportive of his premiership. And he's got nothing to say.

And we know now that Merritt Stiles, the NDP leader, has initiated what will become a formal investigation by the integrity commissioner. People can wonder whether or not that integrity commissioner can be trusted to do the job properly, but there at least now is the prospect of a formal process to reveal more information about this, which I think is absolutely essential. And if there is nothing there that should be damning to the premier, then he should have nothing to fear from it. You know, the integrity commissioner in Ontario hasn't done a full-blown investigation of this. Did it kind of pass at it?

Kind of look at it and said, oh, it seems fine to me. But now, as you say, there's going to be a call for a real investigation into the situation. If you were my integrity commissioner, Peter, and I said to you, look, people will say I did something wrong. Tell you what it is I did, and will you just tell me that I'm good? What this looks like. it looks like, yes. There's a lot of things this looks like. But I think what makes the optics of this in the larger picture is the entire Greenbelt discussion.

If you took that out of the mix, you would probably be saying the Premier is really friendly with a lot of developers. We knew that. And if you're on the list and and I'll appoint the premier, Scott, one way or the other, if you're on the list, presumably it's not because someone looked over the guest list and said, these developers have deep pockets, so let's invite them so that we raise more money. Presumably you invited them because you have some kind of a personal relationship with

them to start with. So what this demonstrates without going through an inquiry is that there are really close ties between Premier Ford's family and developers. Throw the green belt stuff into the mix and what you have are the elements of a scandal, because those elements are all reunited. And I'm not sure what that inquiry would show, but I don't think you can use the integrity commissioner on the basis of a phone call to say, do you think I'm okay with inviting my friends to a stag and dough party, and then go around and say he gave me a pass so I'm fine. I suspect if the integrity commissioner is worth his money that he is happy to be asked to do a

real inquiry. When, you know, Bruce is right, Ford basically ducks these questions when they're shouted at him or asked of him. The closest he's come to saying anything, he's playing the family card, right? He's saying, look, this isn't politics. This is family. This was a wedding. These are friends of mine. I was just charging them $150 a ticket.

Who knows what envelopes they may or may not have left there as well. Those kind of things happen at weddings and wedding events. But what about the family card? And I raise this just because we're in this period where there are a lot of politicians who are taking a lot of heed, and it's impacting their families. People coming to their houses, knocking on their doors, going into their garages um and you're seeing some politicians just say to hell with it i can't take it anymore

i'm out of here and you know we saw nicola sturgeon last week we saw just into um arden in new new zealand basically making that argument you know know, I'm just tired of it. I can't take it anymore. The tank's empty. I can't handle these things. So he's playing a little bit of the family card, but it doesn't seem to be getting any respect. I mean, as Bruce says, even the Tory papers don't seem to be launching

any kind of big defense for him. You can't use family as a cone of silence, Silou. You can't mix business, politics, and family and say it's off limits because you can put the word family on it. I say to that what I used to say when people were saying that there were nasty remarks about politicians' kids. Usually those kids would be on the receiving end of those nasty remarks that does not make them right, but in part because their parents had used them

in photo ops, in various political activities that went much beyond walking your kid to school, to go back to Stephen Harper's famous shaking of hands with his son, which I believe was off limits. But if you are going to mix family and politics for your own benefit, you cannot complain that a family does not save you from questions, hard questions about the mix that you put together for a stag and dough party. Bruce, I completely, completely agree with that. I think if we take it outside of politics for a minute and we imagine the CEO of a publicly traded company, and let's say the CEO had a child that was getting married and the boys, whoever that

version of the boys would be, that was the term that Ford used to describe who organized this event and helped raise the money. Let's imagine that that CEO hosted a party in his backyard or her backyard to which were invited all of the major suppliers or a number of major suppliers to that company that would be a firing offense it's not there have to be some lines that um that are maintained as guardrails to prevent the perception and the reality of a conflict of interest and ford it to feel that by saying, well, my family's always had lots of friends and they've always been welcome in my house, that somehow that excludes him from the rest of the civilized professional world that understands there have to be.

Yeah, we're getting the hits on your line, Bruce, so you're frozen up there. He's not just any other father of the bride. He's the premier of the province of Ontario. And Chantal's point about the green belt, one of the most common. Man, we're losing you, Bruce. We keep, the line keeps freezing, but we're we're losing you bruce and we keep um we keep their line keeps freezing but we're getting your point i mean the other the thing i you know should say and this isn't in defense but the ford family thing has been evident through a number of generations right you know you got

doug ford the premier he had his brother uh mayor, you had their father who was a provincial cabinet minister, and they pretty well own the political turf in the Etobicoke region of greater Toronto. And for decades, the history has been that the Fords, you know, have big events, big parties, big picnics, that kind of thing. And there are lots of people, sometimes thousands of people, who come to these things. So, you know, I don't know whether he's sort of relying on that to get himself out of this situation. He's managed, Doug Ford, and his brother for that matter,

have managed to always find an escape route from whatever the controversy has been um his brother i guess eventually you know was toppled by the problems that he had but doug ford has always found that escape route and you look at this one now and you wonder you know it's gone on longer than most d Ford controversies. Is this one going to hang around? And is the potential here for some serious stuff for Doug Ford as a result of it? Well, I was looking at some numbers about voter satisfaction with their governments. And noted that among the provinces where a majority, a real majority is saying, I am not satisfied, Ontario was in that list.

And I'm assuming that this controversy, but also the Green Belt, that's all part of the mix. So it may die down, but I find looking from a distance that Premier Ford is in danger of going back where he was just prior to the pandemic, i.e. one of the least popular and least appreciated premiers in the country. And that, of course, makes any government decision on any other front harder to sell. Ask any politician who's had ethics issues, including Justin Trudeau, it does take away from your political capital, takes a toll. In this case, it's not just having a big party, it's the money

angle that is making this worse. And again, the fact that it becomes embroiled and associated with the entire Green Belt story, which I think by itself is a big story, that this only becomes a part of the puzzle, if you have a picture that is not favorable to Ford and his government. And it, you know, fits with the old journalistic slogan that's been there seemingly forever, but certainly started in the Watergate days was follow the money, follow the money. And that's what they're doing now. And full credit to, you know, Global News, who first started this story, and the Toronto Star, who's been hard on it. We've lost Bruce. Obviously.

I think the Ford boys have pulled the plug on whoever Bruce is down south. He was still able to text, and he texted me to say he's trying to reconnect, so we'll assume that at some point here he will magically reappear. But we're going to shift focus, and we're going to shift focus actually to another story that has gained a lot of momentum this week, and it's based on some of the early journalism of the Globe and Mail, basically about a week ago. And this is the whole issue of China and interference in the Canadian election process

and the way the prime Minister has handled it. So we're going to talk about that, but first we're going to take our, well, we're going to take our first break. Back in a moment. And welcome back. You're listening to The Bridge, the Friday edition. Good talk, Chantelle Hebert and Bruce Anderson. Bruce has joined us back again, having a little internet problem down south,

but he's back with us now. You're listening on Sirius XM, channel 167, Canada Talks, or on your favorite podcast platform. Or, because it's Friday, you can be watching on our YouTube channel. You can find the link, if you're looking for it, on my Twitter or Instagram feed. And there is no charge for watching the scintillating production. Because it's pretty scintillating today watching Bruce disappear off on. It's magic.

It's magic. It's magic. That's right. Okay. Topic number two is China and the issue of whether or not, well, I guess it's not whether or not anymore. It's about how serious has been the interference by China in the Canadian election system. The China interference stories have been around for a long time.

As I explained the other day, at least the last 13, 14 years. When they first started bubbling up through the former CSIS director's comments, Richard Fadden, about, he never actually named China, but it was pretty clear who he was talking about. And their attempts to interfere with certain aspects of the Canadian political system. Well, the Globe and Mail brought it more into focus in the last week with some pretty dramatic comments about interference in the last federal election campaign and the attempts to prop up a liberal minority government against a potential conservative

government by doing different things in different writings. So there's been a lot of talk about that this week, and there are calls for more investigations. And the Prime Minister, I've got to say, watching the Prime Minister this week, his kind of explanation of things has changed at different times, I think is probably the fairest way to say it. To the point now where he said some of these reports were inaccurate. So, Bruce, you start us on this one. Yeah, I don't think that this is a pretty complicated issue. I think that the simple version of it is that people across the political parties have known for some time now that there is a concerted, organized effort by the Chinese government to interfere in our election and probably not only in our elections. And the point about it being a cross-party conversation is an important one.

There was a panel set up that was intended to take the information about that kind of interference behind closed doors so that parties could discuss it without partisanship getting in the way of a reasonable discussion, sharing of facts and evidence, and ideally some sense of a common prescription about what to do about it. I still think that that is a better idea in principle than just allowing this to be a political football. Having said that, once these documents were revealed, I don't think that the prime minister or the government did itself any favors in terms of the way that it responded to this information. I think, as I said, I think on Wednesday, I think for the prime minister to say it had no effect on our election is not, objectively, it's not an accurate statement. We don't know what effect it had. We could probably say that it didn't change the outcome,

but I'm not sure that one person's assertion that it didn't change the outcome is a reliable enough argument to settle this dispute. I think the government would have been better served by saying there are some inaccuracies in this, but this is on the whole a very serious issue. We've taken it seriously. We continue to think the best way to deal with it is behind closed doors so that we don't reveal to those who are trying to intervene in our elections what we know about that and so that we keep it from becoming a matter of partisan interest.

But that horse is out of the barn a little bit right now. And so I think the government's got some real hard work to do to find a safer, more productive ground with which to have a conversation with the public and with other parties about this threat to our democracy. Chantal? Bruce says one person's assertion is not enough, that all in the end turned out okay. Well, especially when the one person is the prime minister who is said or who is portrayed as answer is from the person who was said to be the preferred choice of whoever was interfering and who actually won. Don't worry, take it on faith that you should have faith in the system. That's not going to help. I believe the government would be best served

by having independent voices explain or walk Canadians through why they have concluded that the process in the end was not tainted or distorted in a significant way by those maneuvers. I believe it's possible without going into Secret Service stuff to at least come to some conclusions as to how far the claims of manipulation versus the reality can be. I'll give you one example. For one, it's not a secret that the Chinese would prefer a liberal government historically. That would have been true throughout Canadian history from the time I started covering it. And it goes to the fact that in the DNA of the Liberal Party, there has always been an element of more openness to China than in the DNA of the other parties, the conservatives to name them. It's not an accident.

Pierre Trudeau was first out of the gate before the United States in recognizing China. Jean Chrétien led all those missions, those economic missions with the other premiers to China over his era. And Justin Trudeau, when he came to office, was decisively more open to doing more with China than Stephen Harper had been. So if you're sitting anywhere, you don't need to be a great strategist in Canadian politics to know that you would rather have a liberal than a conservative government. This is as good as it gets. But then you move on to the rest of it. And a minority government to keep the government in chains. Well, how does that work? You're actually saying you want a liberal government that has been open to

China to be kept on a leash by three opposition parties who disagree with the government on China and who want the government to be tougher. First problem. Second, we all at some points in our lives have liked the idea of minority governments, but is any of you, you're both really good at strategy, can you tell me how you achieve a minority government with four or five parties on the ballot and 338 ridings, a very small fraction of them being liable to be influenced by so-called Chinese voters who are influenced by this interference. So I read the Globe and Mail story, and I believe it's a serious issue. But when I read that part of the CSIS memo is a Chinese diplomat bragging that they got the

result they wanted, I'm thinking someone is playing with my head and collective heads by saying, look, we achieved our result. I'm not so sure that you can actually demonstrate that. But none of this comes from independent voices. All that you hear from the government or all that you heard all week was there's nothing to see here. And if you think there is, you are borrowing a page from Donald Trump's book and trying to cast so much doubt onto the integrity of our election system that we will one day have a January 6th event because people will not accept the result of the next election or the election after that. I don't think that works given the

seriousness of the elements that are put in place. If the government seriously can make its case that in the end, the result is legitimate, which I believe totally it is, it needs independent voices to say that and to say it outside the venue of a parliamentary committee where everyone will be playing political football and asking questions that, in the end, do little to advance knowledge but a lot to score political points off each other. You know, there's a little bit of, really, how shocked should we be about this, to this story.

You know, I was talking about old movies in the last segment. You know, the old movie on this one is like Casablanca, right? I'm shocked. I'm shocked to know that this could possibly be happening in this bar. It's kind of a little like that with the Chinese and the Russians, to some degree, who have been, you know, getting involved in our system, not just politics, initially business. I mean, that's how they kind of pull themselves out of different problems

by copying, spying on the way that we do things, build farm machinery. Remember the Russians, they started a farm tractor system or something in Belarus back in the old Soviet Union days. And, man, that thing looked exactly like a Massey Ferguson, you know, like right down to the nuts and bolts. But, you know, so it doesn't surprise me that this kind of thing would be going on. The question is at what level and how insidious, if you wish, that it got and where,

what influence they had and were sharing. That's where I think that. Yeah. You know what? I think that for me, the question, how big could it get? It's the scale going forward and the potential of technology and also our lack of ability to spot the problem until after the fact. You know, incredible investigative resources were applied to determine that there was a massive systemic operation by Russia to destabilize America's democracy. Don't try and tell a Trump person that. After the fact. Pardon? Don't try and tell a Trump person that. He was absolved of any problems by Cohen. You know, nobody was able to really make the case that it was a function of something that he cooperated in and all of that sort of thing. So I kind of feel like the real issue here is what about going forward? Because the scale of the potential for disruption of our democracy is so obvious. And you see it, you don't have to see it only in the context of

elections. You see it in the misinformation that has permeated US and UK and other political cultures, and to some degree, has created a set of opinions in Canada that are not based on fact. Now, I happen to agree with Chantal that the the way the government seem to be trying to argue this this week, or at least some people on behalf of the government, which is to say, well, you know, if you really sort of banging this this drum in the public square, you're you're risking a Trump like kind of division in our society. On the surface of it, that might actually be true. From a political argument standpoint, I don't think that makes any sense. I don't think it's going to get you anywhere. I don't think it's going to do anything other than make people

wonder the question that Chantal was wondering, which is that, well, if you're the beneficiary, potentially or putatively, of this kind of involvement, why should we take what you have to say seriously if you're going to start to sound like you're trying to make political hay out of it? So you have to be really, really careful about arguing for sensible public policy, a sensible plan. I think Chantal's right, the horse is out of the barn in terms of just politicians behind closed doors dealing with this. There needs to be independent voices. We need to put some better guardrails around it. But it's the scale of the problem going forward, as far as I'm concerned, that we should all be concerned about, because it can happen overnight,

and we won't know that it's happening until after it's happened. I agree with that totally. The point I was going to make is this didn't suddenly start happening with china or with russia in the last couple of years this has been going on for a long time and it's been incremental in the way they've used it to try and gain influence and initially it was more economic now it's more you know political appears to be. And I 100% agree with you. If that's left to go unchecked, unfettered, it's going to have a major impact on our system, our democratic system. Chantelle, you wanted to...

But the tools have become a lot more sophisticated, from cloning a massive Ferguson tractor to the kind of stuff that went on behind the scenes in the case of people who wanted to disrupt the European Union for their own personal gains. That's serious business. And I think that just because Canada is not the US, not France, not Germany, not one of the big players, doesn't mean it's not interesting to play with it and to achieve outcomes that bring it closer to some elements in the U.S. that Canada so far resisted quite successfully. Moreover, the way we are approaching these issues is completely out of date with how fast the technology is advancing. Just this week, and it's an unrelated subject, but it was everywhere in the media, this fake interview between Justin Trudeau and Joe

Rogan, where Justin Trudeau sounds like Justin Trudeau. Do you seriously believe that people will, in five years, be able to tell the difference? Some people in the radio show I was on said, well, you can tell that it's not really just and true, though, because you can hear the cuts. Well, they hear the cuts. I don't. I'm not a radio person to the point where I can tell these things that sound like edits. All of that to say we need almost certainly a more robust system, one. Two, the fact that the government is saying we need to keep things confidential because we don't want to let these people know or whoever is doing that what we are up to. The problem is the best way to fight disinformation and tactics like that is to shine a bright light on them. And so there's a contradiction between the need to know basis that the government is operating on and the need to expose

because how else are you going to educate voters to those realities except by exposing them? And this is not something that any politician can do properly. I love that Trudeau-Rogan thing in terms of what it signals potentially for the future and how stuff can be manipulated. You know, this is kind of similar, but, you know, I had a speech last week in Calgary to teachers. And one of the things that I hadn't realized, I know you guys know, Bruce certainly does. I hadn't heard about chat GPT, the artificial intelligence stuff. My son walked into the room as I was preparing to give these remarks in Calgary. You know, I was writing, jotting down some notes.

And he said, what are you talking about? And I said, well, you know, they want me to talk about trust and the impact that's having for teachers and why they're not getting enough respect. They think they should be getting more respect. And he said, well, here, let's try something. And he sits down at his laptop and he says, he enters one line in the chat GPT controller, and it was, you know, why do teachers not get enough respect?

Bang. And within 30 seconds, out pops, you know, a paragraph, 300 or 400 words on that. And he said, here, how is this like? And I went, holy, you know, it's not copying somebody else's speech. It's like constructing its own speech on that topic. So did you use it? That's what people are wondering now.

I used it as an example. I read it and I said, this is a problem for you guys. I'm sure you already know this, but, man, if that only existed when I was a student, I'd have some great essays. I think they've found a way to discover whether or not a student is using that. I'm not so sure, but it's pretty incredible.

Now, you take that away from the schools and teachers and you start entering it into politics, man. And you need a lot less staffers. That's right. This is a massive, massive technological shift, and it's probably good to have a conversation about it in more depth later on. But that question could have been asked, or maybe in a year or two could be asked, tell interesting that technology can emulate or appear to emulate your thought process, your inflection, your value system as it assembles the same information, basically. It's not just words it does art

now too you can say give me a bruce anderson like painting but with an impressionist style and boom it starts happening like right away i'm going to use it for that because it's easier that way probably i knew that you were giving him i saw his his face light up, and I thought, that's it now, that when he puts those on Twitter, we will have to wonder whether he worked on them or just cut them off. A long way from the paint by numbers. But I don't know. You wonder at times, and I get mail about this every week from listeners of a certain age, is it all moving too fast?

I can't keep up with it. You know, I'm checking out. But that's not new. I can remember a time maybe, what, 15 years ago, when a bit of columnists who were just a bit older than me would say, I don't need the social media. I don't want to know anything about it. I can't keep up with this and I don't need it.

Today, someone who is writing columns would say, really? You think you're going to get away with not using the social media in any way, shape or form? I think your employers will have something to say about that. So, it's a fact of life that the older you get, the more complicated it becomes to keep up with stuff. But this also means that the people who are in charge of ensuring, to go back to our topic, the integrity of our election system, have to stop thinking like it's 1990 and have to start thinking like it's 2030. Right.

Because this is coming. Yeah, to that point, I'd go a step further. And I probably am of the view that this has always been a, oh, the world is accelerating too quickly, can it slow down? That's eternal. However, what artificial intelligence presents to us as a series of risks for disinformation, a misportrayal of what one politician is saying, deep fakes, and the construction of what will appear to many people, what could appear to many people as official government information.

These things can be done in real time now, and there are no sufficient media guardrails anymore to allow people to understand what's real, what's fake, what's true, what's not true, what to think about it, what not to think about it. We're going to need new laws. We're going to need new regulations. Nobody likes to hear the sound of that. It's politically controversial. But if we imagine that we can just let people do these kinds of things

because free speech is free speech and because we haven't mustered the political courage to think about how to regulate it i think we're in for a very very unhappy period ahead taking bruce's point but uh to be a contrarian what happens when the people in charge decide to use it to manipulate public opinion their way. How can I trust the person who is keeping this in line? I don't think I can. I've covered governments in times, as you have, of unity crises. Do you think they would have been absolutely close to the argument that the end justifies the means if the end is saving the country. And then the process manipulating facts and information in a way that tells the balance, hopefully for them, their way.

Or am I so old that there are a few people who remember that back in the day when technology was not offering governments those tools, someone sanctioned a Brinks truck to be filmed in Montreal taking money out of the province on the eve of a referendum. That goes back to 1980. Having watched all this, I have absolutely no trust in a government to appoint what Pierre Poiliev would call a gatekeeper to keep all this on the straight and narrow. And at a time when the media is in such difficulty, I am not convinced that the media is also well equipped to play the game of checking things out and saying, wait a minute, this is what facts are and what is reality.

You have less and less people doing that. So I get what Bruce is saying, but I worry that the perils of all this regulation stuff probably are immense and as immense as the alternative. Yeah, I certainly wouldn't minimize that. I agree with that. Actually, I don't know that there is an easy solution. I think that just letting there be no solution is probably the worst possible outcome, though. And now Maximilien will call me because he'll think I'm finally a libertarian. I remember that night in 1980 covering the 1980 referendum,

and I was a junior reporter in Ottawa, and I was kind of sent to observe the interprovincial bridge between what was then Hull and Ottawa to look for any Brinks trucks that might be coming over. They were probably parked in an underground parking somewhere in Montreal. That's right. I also remember in 1990 when I stood in the newsroom and said, this is never going to work. We got to get rid of all this junk. What was I talking about?

I was talking about desktop computers. I said, typewriters are the only way to go. I can't believe I did that. I actually said that. All right. We're almost out of time. And we had promised to say something on the Roxham Road situation. I will do that right after this. And welcome back. Chantal Hebert, Bruce Anderson, Peter Mansbridge here, and we've only got a couple of minutes left. But the Roxham Road situation, that's what they call an irregular border crossing point from, is it Vermont into Quebec?

I guess. It's been too long called Roxham Road. I know it's next to Lekos official border point. That's as far as all the skill testing question though. Yes, that's right. Okay. Uh, anyway, basically a regular, I mean, it's not cars, it's people walking and we brought this up, uh, you know, I don't know, a month ago because it was creating new issues. Now it's like overwhelming.

Like there's a lot of people crossing the border, and it's a big problem for the province of Quebec. It's a big problem for the country. I've only got a couple of minutes, Chantal. Bring us up to date on where this is going. Well, for those who have followed the news, Premier Legault wrote a letter to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, but also wrote a rare open letter in English to the Globe and Mail to talk about Quebec's predicament with the Roxham Road situation.

And what is the predicament? It is that the social services that are meant to handle asylum seekers are overwhelmed, as are, for instance, the classes where you send kids who come to Canada and speak no French or English, or we call them classes d'accueil, at a time of teacher shortages. And with this influx that has been totally aimed at Quebec, we are running out of facilities, running out of places to house asylum seekers. For those who believe that Premier Legault has a spotty record when it comes to immigration and refugees, and certainly some of his talk during the campaign did not suggest that it was his forte. It's worth knowing that the mayor of Montreal, Valérie Plante,

or a neighbor who is the mayor of Longueuil, both of whom are identified to the left side of politics in Quebec, also share the same concerns. Basically, what François Legault is asking is, one, take everyone who crosses from Roxham Road and bring them to other provinces, spread them across the country so that Quebec does not bear alone the brunt of this, but also find a more permanent solution to close this loophole and end the Roxham Road entry into Canada.

The first is easy. You can have buses. The federal government is doing that, and it's been shipping people who come in to Ontario, eventually Atlantic Canada. That will reach a limit really quickly because no one is equipped to handle more and more asylum seekers for a very long time.

That's a band-aid. But the other issue is how do you go about ending this? Now, Pierre Poiliev, the conservative leader, is suggesting just close Roxham Road. Well, that's easy to say, but it doesn't resolve the problem. Roxham Road is a road. It's convenient. But if you close it, which, I don't know, cops there prevent people,

they will go elsewhere along the border. So Justin Trudeau's response is, we need to renegotiate our agreement with the United States that allows us at official border points to turn back people who come in from the U.S. and have it presumably applied to the entire border. There doesn't seem to be a lot of interest on the part of the Biden administration in having the president come to us next month and have the headline be, Joe Biden agrees to keep more asylum seekers in the US. The issue is politically dangerous for the president. The third solution, my friend Andrew Cohen is a main champion of that,

and as is the Bloc Québécois, is to suspend this agreement. And that would mean that people would go to official border points and claim refugee status and we would be taking them in. It would presumably spread out the problem across the country. It would also probably translate into another major increase in asylum seekers and this is where we are on Friday. All right. Bruce, I know you probably had 10 minutes

to talk about this that you'd wanted to make a number of points but sadly we're out of time so you won't we'll save it for another day right uh all right we're uh we're sending chantelle off with her backpack on on her back she's leaving like literally in the next hour, heading towards eventually to the mountains of Iceland. Mountains. It's a plane that I'm going to, and I'm cross-country skiing, not scaling Everest. No, I like the other description.

Yeah, yeah. And I will be looking at those drone shots from Iceland on Apple TV and just go, there she is. There she is. I see her. I see her. Yeah, come and rescue me. All right.

Be safe. Travel safe. We look forward to seeing Chantelle back in a couple of weeks. Next week, Susan Delacorte will sit in for Chantelle, and we're looking forward to hearing from our old friend Susan as well. Bruce, thank you. I think you'll be back by next week as well. I will.

Safe travels, Chantel. Good to see you, Peter. Thank you. Take care, everyone. Thanks for listening on this day. Any thoughts you might want to make, the Mansbridge Podcast at gmail.com, the Mansbridge Podcast at gmail.com. Look forward

to getting your email. Talk to you soon. We'll be back on Monday. Janice Stein will be back with her tour of the world, 10 countries that we should be watching back then. Take care. Have a great weekend.