The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Is The World Ready For War?

Episode Date: September 21, 2026

There's a lot of talk about war, especially in countries located close to Russia, but does talk mean ready?  That's the discussion today with Dr. Janice Stein of the Munk School at the University of Toronto, in the latest of her regular Monday discussions right here on The Bridge. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. You're just moments away from the latest episode of the bridge. It's Monday. That means Dr. Janice Stein. And the conversation we're going to have is going to get you going, one way or the other. That's coming right up. And hello there.

Hope you had a great weekend. Wherever you happen to be, whatever the weather happens to be. Hope you had a great weekend as we march forward in the month of September. And we're getting close to the end. It's going to be October soon. The fall is passing us by. Okay. Mondays is Dr. Janice Stein, as you well know,

and as many of you look forward to. And this conversation coming up today is one I think you're going to find intriguing. We're going to start for a little bit on a couple of minutes anyway, on the latest Greenline story. Thanks to a tweet from Donald Trump. but we'll move on from that to a bigger conversation that has certainly gripped parts of Europe but I think it's spilling over now to the rest of the world as well

I'll tell you more about it in a couple of moments but as we always do on Monday we start off with giving you a little housekeeping tomorrow it's Raj and Russo reporter's notebook Wednesday be a version of end bits. We haven't had one of those yet this season. Thursday is your turn.

Friday is good talk with Chantelle and Bruce. So what about your turn on Thursday? What's the question this week? Hey, it's the last Thursday in September this week. And what does that mean? It means, ask me anything. AMA.

So this is your opportunity to ask me anything you wish, I will try to answer them within reason. So in AMA this week, the normal rules apply, maximum 75 words. We will

accept letters that include your name and the location you're writing from. Many of you still seem to forget. Well, not many. I don't want to exaggerate, but quite a few of you seem to forget. the name and especially the location, and then I have to write back. This is a hard request this time. Either remember name and location, or it doesn't make it,

even in spite of the work you've gone on to put your letter together. So please remember, name, location, maximum 75 words, have it in by 3 p.m. Eastern time on Wednesday. All right. and the topic is an AMA. Ask me anything. I know you have questions. Whenever I meet you personally in airports or shopping or wherever you always have questions. And AMAs have been very popular since we started them in January

and we'll keep it going into the fall season here on the bridge. So send your Ask Me Anything questions. All right. Let's get at it. Dr. Janice Stein from the Monk School, the University of Toronto. Mondays are always popular on the bridge, and this one I'm sure is going to get you talking, as I said, one way or the other.

Here we go, my conversation, my latest conversation, with Dr. Janice, Greenland. Let's start on Greenland, because, you know, Trump, as he usually does, tries to get out ahead of everybody else and say. claim, you know, that there's a deal on this, that, or the other thing. Now he is saying, and I guess we'll see the full details within the next day or two, that there's a deal on Greenland.

The deal he's outlined on Greenland seems to me something the Americans have always had by the ability to go in and put bases there. They had lots of them. They're the ones who took them out, not they weren't kicked out. Right on. Right. Right on. Look, we don't have the text yet. I'll have to wait another couple of days.

And boy, is the devil in the details here. But nothing he said in that tweet. And I have to say I am 100% skeptical in anything that Donald Trump tweets out. But even granted that nothing that he says in that tweet suggests that the U.S. is getting rights that it didn't already have, but voluntarily. didn't exercise because they had bases all over Greenland in World War II and shut them down after World War II. The big one, Peter, did Denmark and Greenland have to give up any sovereignty? You can see why Canadians would really care about that, the answer to that question,

or do they just reaffirm long existing rights that the United States had and let Donald Trump, Trump call it a win. Well, as you say, the devil's in the details, and hopefully we're going to hear the details in the next little while. But it would seem, given what the Danes have said over these last six months, it would seem hard for me to believe that they would give up any sovereignty on this. It may look like it to some Americans that they've given up sovereignty because American troops are going into Greenland. But as you say, they've had that ability all the way. long. They had it. Yeah.

And they, they used it and then they abandoned it. Yeah. So there's some of that. Now, having said all that, there is this, you know, fear of letting the,

what is it, the fox in the henhouse, right? I mean, once you start putting all kinds of American troops in Greenland, you know, anything could happen. Well, you know, I don't know if anything can happen in Greenland, frankly. you know, and American troops are not going to misbehave badly.

I mean, that's not where the problem is. The problem is at the senior levels of the Pentagon and the White House, frankly. So if they're on bases, Peter, you know, we have problems like that. In the Philippines, where you get rogue behavior by, you know, an American soldier who assaults a woman, but it's pretty hard for American soldiers on the ground on a base to really go world without orders from the top. The real issue, I don't think it matters how many American soldiers other than the local economy and how inflationary it is and how it, you know, makes, it pushes up the cost of food and Coke and things like that that come into the market.

think the real issue is what do the Danes have to give? So here's the speculation, and we just don't know. Speculation is that they have agreed that no Chinese or Russians will ever have access to Greenland, and there may, in fact, be some provisions that they won't have access to the territorial waters around Greenland. Donald Trump could package that and say permanent security forever. But let's not forget, Denmark is a NATO member, right? In what NATO country do we have Russian troops or Chinese troops? None. So what sounds like a huge concession here is not.

So what's the lesson for us in this? I mean, you know, he keeps talking about our north and how it needs to be beefed up in security. And quite frankly, a lot of Canadians feel the same way about that. Yeah. But our own security, not somebody else's. So what's the lesson in this for us? Look, you know, this past week, our prime minister and the prime minister of the United Kingdom, for the first time,

asked that Canada be allowed to join Jeff, joint expeditionary force. What is that? The joint expeditionary force, six Nordic countries that are standing up forces that are ready to move at speed into the high north and the north, should there be a threat. We wanted to join for a year.

And it's really funny because a British ambassador recently said literally a day before Mark Carney had on the plane to go to the United Kingdom. He said, well, you know, we don't have rules for this club. We don't have a process for joining. We didn't have to figure that out first before Canada could join. And I have to say, I thought to myself, doesn't that sound like a process. driven explanation. You can't join because we don't have a process. Well, 24 hours later, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Andy Brunham, and our Prime Minister together said, we would like Canada to join. Why does the UK matter here? The UK was that lead country

convening the Nordics to set up this joint expeditionary force. So this would be a way. So this joins two conversations. It's the prime minister's middle powers. There are six middle powers, north facing, come together. We would join that club, and we would have to make some commitments about forces we would put on the ground, both in the north of Europe and in the high north. There we go.

Concrete, doable. They want us. We want them. You know what the backdrop to all of this, all these discussions is, this fear that, you know, we're on the precipice of something catastrophic in terms of conflict. You know, this talk of World War III and are we ready and could we be ready? And I want to talk about that for a little bit. You know, both you and I in the last couple of days have read this piece. It's on the BBC website, part of the BBC website.

I'm having trouble with the BBC lately trying to figure out whether they're behind a paywall or not behind a paywall. Because some of their stuff, some of their stuff is. So it tells you something about how things have been going in the piggy bank for the BBC these days. Anyway, this section of the BBC website is called BBC In Depth. It's not behind a paywall. So you can find this article yourselves. War may be coming. Are we psychologically ready?

I just want to read a few paragraphs sentences really from the beginning, just to set the stage for this discussion, because I think it makes you think. It certainly makes you sit up. It's by a BBC fellow by the name of Alan Little. And he's, you know, obviously talking to a British audience here, a UK audience. So here is the first few sentences. If the UK suddenly found itself at war, would you know what to do?

Do you know what would be expected of you? The government wants us all to start preparing for severe disruption to our lives. It wants us to stockpile canned food and drinking water, strengthen our civic resilience, and plan for the possibility of, war. Work has begun on the government's so-called war book, which hasn't been updated in decades. The UK's most senior soldier has sounded the alarm. The chief of the defense staff, Sir Richard Knighton, this week said the threat from Russia meant Britain was living through the most dangerous period of his 35-year career in the armed forces. But what is the threat? In 1940, the danger

of a German invasion of the UK was very real. But the chances of Russian tanks rolling up Whitehall are surely negligible. It's not the tanks you need to worry about, says historian, our friend, friend of Janice,

Margaret McMillan, author of war, how conflict shaped us. Here's what she says. It's the cutting of cables on the ocean floor. It's the hacking into systems on which so many things depend. The possibility for asymmetric war or asymmetric war for cyber war is growing by leaps and bounds.

Well, you get the tenor of the conversation in this article and goes on for another 10 pages. Yep. So you might want to read it. What's your initial reaction on that? I got a couple of questions about this, but how do you react to it? Peter, I was really fascinated by it because how do people begin to believe the war is coming, where war is likely, and then everything else follows from that?

You might think, well, it's something that a foreign adversary does, but that actually doesn't hold up when we look back at history, and we see when public get worked up. And what the history shows us is really interesting. publics often don't get worked up. That's why this discussion about preparedness. They're not ready. And governments and publics are surprised.

That happens a lot more often than we think. Go to the other side of the ledger. They get worked up. And then a year later, it's called a war scare or a phony war scare. So they get worked up over the wrong things. So what do we know about what it takes to alarm the public? And frankly, the public in Europe is alarmed. And closely you get to the Russian border, the more worried you are right now in Europe.

There's no question. It's everywhere. So you need something that happens, usually technology of some sort of other, that makes you feel vulnerable. So in the European case right now, it's this drone, it's drone warfare. It's the nightmare that everybody's seeing if they look closely enough. And that's why I like your, you know, your discussion about Linus, because it's a great way to get people into that universe. This is what this looks like. It's really scary.

And civilians are the victim. The war is not taking place in a, you know, contain weight, it's hitting civilians really badly as well in Ukraine. And so they see it in front of our eyes. And look, we have, for Europe, it's Russia in North America. And let's distinguish the United States in Canada for a second, but all over the United States, all of a sudden, it's, you know, superintelligence. We're going to go to war with us.

That's all people are talking about. it's not a new thing, but what had to happen, a so-called rogue attack on a website, hugging face that Anthropic described, except it wasn't rogue. When you look at the details, it was not. These issues did not go off on their own indwelling. And in fact, Anthropic turned off all the safeguards in order to see what would happen and if there were no safeguards on. But it doesn't matter.

The stories everywhere right now. And, you know, particularly in the United States, but in Canada, too. Look, our minister said something about it this week. We have to be worried. They're going to destroy us. So it climbed up the threat indexing. We have our first war scare about, by, you know, a superintelligence. So the story doesn't have to be true.

In the Ukrainian case, it's true. In the Hugging to Face story, it's not true in the way it's been reported. But it doesn't matter. It's visual. It's dramatic. And people can relate to it. And the second piece of this is so interesting when you talked about the British Minister of Defense, government has to take it on.

So when a Minister of Defense says, we're updating our world. warbook. We need to be prepared. This is real. How many cans of tomato paste and how much bottled water do you have in your house for an emergency and do you have access to a generator? That makes it real to people. So it's not only what the other guy is doing, what Russia's doing, it's what our own governments are saying. Right. And, you know, and history, shows us that you need that kind of whistleblowing to get people focused on this stuff. I mean, in 1913, it was, you know, summer of 1913 was like, no worries. Don't think about anything other than having a good time. And to a degree, even the summer of 39 was like that. Absolutely. You know, in Margaret's wonderful book,

about the run up, her first book, about the run up to, you. Not her first, I think, but the causes of World War I. She describes the parties people were having even a summer of 1914, right? And if it was going to be, what was going to be short? And there wasn't this discussion. We have to prepare. We have to dig in. It could last for a long time.

There was no government ministers that were saying that to the public. Very few. But, you know, I'm back in the UK now, and I don't see, you know, lineups in the stores buying canned food and bottled water and people, you know, sticking it in their basements. Now, maybe that's happening in some cases, I don't know. But that mindset doesn't seem to have taken hold yet, even with the kind of warnings.

And I, you know, I agree with your earlier point. The closer you get to the Russian border, the mindset is much different, like Finland. Finland, for example. Oh, yeah. It's like 80, 90% of people are like totally into this and they want more conscription, the whole bit. So what has to happen for, you know, forget about Europe. There's no, there's no sense of this in North America.

No. No. You know, let me give you a Canadian example of how we were in a. a kind of escalatory spiral right now. The prime minister was asked two weeks ago at his Saturday press conference after talks fell apart late the Friday night before. And he gave a very, very detailed factual presentation, but it was a very steely voice, the Bonnie language was very, very steely.

And then a member of the press said to him. Well, that sounds like Mark Carney is. going to war against the United States. He didn't answer, no, this is a very serious trade dispute. We were having one of our biggest trade partners. He could have said that. He said, well, we were attacked. And when you're attacked, you go to war.

That changed the whole conversation in the country. And lines and newspapers, we are at war. Okay. So, you know, it may have changed the conversation, but how are willing are Canadians from what you've seen to actually, if they should, I mean, there's a debate here about how seriously we should be worried about this kind of thing. But let's assume for a moment you're worried. What evidence is there that Canadians are doing anything?

They're not stocking up on canned foods and bottled water and whatever. No, and look, I think it's even braver because if this dispute escalates, the trade dispute, as it could, there are many levers that both sides have not used yet. So it could escalate. It's not hard to paint the scenario where it would. There is going to be a really tough economic pain, right? really, really tough for us as well as for them, but because we're smaller and our exports are much bigger proportion to them than the other way around. It's going to be tougher on us. So, you know, how much is a public aware of that?

How much preparation is there for that? Not a lot. There is a huge upsurge in nationalist feeling across. the country right now. You could say Donald Trump as United Canada, you know, quite better than any Prime Minister in recent memory, in all honesty.

But when you actually ask, what are we doing, it hasn't permeated the public mood. No, I mean, it hasn't permeated a public mood. It has permeated parts of Ottawa. I mean, we're spending

billions more on defense than we would have thought of, even not just a couple of years ago. Yeah. I mean, you know, our government is in the middle now of drafting a new defense policy to fit the new world that we're in, the world abrupt fundamentally, and is having a serious look at what we need, what kinds of capabilities our armed forces need.

Part of that story, either one way or the other, have to be civil defense. and it's why civil defense not necessarily, I frankly personally think it's inconceivable, I would take it off the table, although not everybody agrees with me, that the United States would ever send any forces across the border. I think that's, you know,

I would never say zero probability, because you should never say never, but it's so low. But what could happen here? year is cyber attacks, right, and not from the United States, frankly. We are very vulnerable, just like the United States. You know, China has completely penetrated in U.S. cyber institutions, by which I mean not only cyber command, but the electricity network.

the electronic networks that control the water supply because they're digital these networks by now. They're run. And as soon as you're digital, your pipes are connected. Same is true for us. Well, what would happen in Canada if the electricity grid that connects us to the United States were the subject of a really huge hat? Would we have enough? What would happen? Would we have enough cash?

in the house because he can't use ATMs. Would we have a radio? Because our phones would die quite quickly. They'd last 24 hours, but no longer what alternative systems. We haven't had that discussion in Canada

since the Great Blackup. Right? Yeah. And it's coming. It's coming. I'm sure that as the government works on a national security strategy and a national

defense policy, we're going to have it. This stuff is so, you know, it's important to have the discussion, but there's so many possibilities to it. I mean, right now in vogue is the sort of Canada, U.S. thing, but, you know, Russia and China are just over the horizon up top of us, right? It's not all about east-west, it's about north-south. No. And look, Peter, here's one good example. The Chinese are all over U.S. networks.

They don't activate it because they know that the United States is all over their networks. And so it's catastrophic for both sides. It would only happen in very severe circumstances. But were it to happen, we are connected into U.S. networks in a whole variety of ways. You know, that is now becoming obvious. Canadian planners who are looking at this from a sovereignty perspective, if some of our key networks were to go down because of a Chinese cyber attack, we could feel the consequences in Canada for sure.

So it is, it is just over there. They're absolutely right. And almost nobody has any protection in their house. You know, I have, you're going to laugh. A crank radio one. Yeah, I got one of those, too. You know what I bought it? I bought it when COVID started.

I had a crank radio. And you know what else I bought? That's still sitting in the basement, you know, three or four of those giant bottles or plastic containers of water, right? I have no idea what that stuff tastes like now. I probably should get rid of it. But it's still sitting there.

I mean, we got, we, we very quickly got in the mindset, or at least some of us did, as a result of COVID, on how to prepare for what could be a very difficult future. But, you know, I want to talk about that after we take this break, because I don't think people just, at least people on our side of the world, think about it very often about the... very little. About how prepared we need to be.

And it's not just about what you've got in your basement. It's everything down to, you know, should there be a form of conscription? I know that that word is a dirty word in Canada because of our history, but I'm not thinking of it in those terms. I'm thinking of just some kind of basic understanding of the kind of organization you learn in the military. And there are lots of countries around the world, and you know them. that, you know, require that young people go for a year or two years of military training. And then they take that knowledge with them and they have it with them forever and they can be called upon at any time. Yeah.

So those. Look, our chief of the defense staff, as you know, Jenny Carigno, last year made a proposal that got a lot of attention. I'm not sure it was focused, you know, in exactly my language, but it was about every person. public service in Ottawa joining the reserves and acquiring those skills so that in the event of any kind of national emergency, we would have, you know, 50,000 people that would have those skills and could deploy to manage an emergency. We don't have that now. We do not.

We don't have anything like that. Nope. Okay, I've got to take a break. I'll come back. I'll ask you. I'll ask you a related question to this. But let's take the break. We'll be right back after this.

And welcome back. You're listening to The Bridge, the Monday episode, which means, of course, Dr. Janice Stein for the Monk School, University of Toronto. You're listening on Sirius XM, Channel 160, Canada Talks, or on your favorite podcast platform. We're glad to have you with us wherever you're joining us from. Okay. Here's that other question.

And it's kind of related to all this because it actually comes down to this. How do conflicts, how do wars? Yeah. Like the kind of stuff we're talking about here. How do they suddenly start? In spite of whatever warnings may have been out there, boom, something happens. You know, there's two paths, Peter. there's the Russian path to the attack on Ukraine, which really started in 2014, right?

It didn't create a war scare in Europe, interestingly enough. People should have paid more attention. They didn't. And then half of Europe was shocked in 2022 when it escalated to a large-scale war. And he telegraphed that one over and over and over. He, you know, starting at a Munich Security Conference in 2004, he effectively said the worst thing that ever happened was the destruction of the Soviet Union. And the worst thing ever happened in human history,

like he said, was the destruction of the Soviet Union. And my mission is to, recreate it. And the core of that important is Belarus and Ukraine as far as he was concerned. Everybody discounted it. Nobody believed it. And he was speaking pros, as we say. We didn't pay attention even after

the Russian irregulars. And everybody knew about them. We're there. And an aircraft was shot out of the sky full of civilians by Russian caught by Russian irregulars dressed in green uniforms. So you didn't identify them as Russian forces. So it was plain to see, but people didn't want to believe that a ground war could happen again in Europe.

That's the truth. And Zelensky himself didn't believe it. Until a few days, he was told and told and told by the Americans, the Russians are going to attack. It's going to be a large-scale attack. He thought it was a bluff to coerce diplomatic concessions from Ukraine, literally until four days before the war started. So one way is it's open.

People are saying we're going to do this, but people are motivated to disbelieve it for all kinds of reasons. Zelensky didn't want to believe it because it would have disrupted the economy of Ukraine so badly. You know, Yaya Sinwar said over and over. Before October 23, we are going to attack, and the training was obvious. People could see them training on the front lines. They just can't do it. So that's number one. The second way, and I think the way that's more worrying in Europe right now,

because people say rightly, there's no credible path for Russia to go to war against Poland, Romania, the Baltics, right? their army is believing he can't order a mobilization Putin in Russia because it would be you know because it would be so politically disruptive for him there's so much resistance

to it Russians are voting with their feet at the thought of another mobilization leaving the country this is a wounded bear bark is much worse than its bite it doesn't matter there's no way to go to war well but there's

There's what we call the inadvertent path to war. You do one thing without thinking that it's going to lead to full-scale war. But that one thing provokes a response. So let's take a look at what's going on right now in Poland and Germany where Russian rooms have penetrated Polish airspace at the Leipzig airport just a month ago, right, where had to shut down the airport in Germany. One drone hits one plane. And if that plane has any people on it,

we're in an entirely different universe. No European government could afford to stand by and do nothing. If they respond, they could invoke Article 5 of NATO, which says when one is a attack, we will consult urgently about what we need to do to defend that member that's attacked. Now, there's a little bit of weasel room

in those words you might have heard. We will consult urgently, but nevertheless, it's the strongest defense of alliance commitment. And certainly a government like the UK would be very armed. If anything like that incident were to happen in Poland, there are old memories, right?

Good, get a vote. Why would the Russians take the chance on doing this? Because I think that Putin is taking the chance on doing it because he does not believe that Donald Trump would honor the commitment of Article 5 in NATO. He just doesn't believe it. And he doesn't think that the United Kingdom or France or Germany, many would respond without the United States who would be too risky, given Russia's nuclear capabilities. So he's playing at the edge right now.

It's like playing the most risky game of poker. I'm going to do this and I'm going to call your bluff. And if I call your bluff and look, it's happened several times already, you don't do anything. I'm going to go further the next time and I'm going to push up against the line. and frankly, in Europe and in Washington, nobody knows where that line is, where it's going to be a step too far. But once you go to that line, it's too late.

Well, one line that Putin's got to worry about is the line of who's the president of the United States. Yeah. Because if he's banking on Trump, he's got a short window here now. Well, that's partly what's bothering. your fans. Right.

Exactly that. He's got, what do we have now? 28 months left of the Trump presidency. And so some of what you hear in London and in Berlin and in Warsaw, he's got 28 months. Does he see this as a window of opportunity that's closing? Does he want to go now? Right. And that's what's fueling the war.

talk in, you know, and look, the Russians are doing things. Russians are doing things. They're doing things. They're undertaking risky actions. One thing, no, you can't control. Often, you know, drones misfired. We know drones misfired. It blows up one German plane. He's also one of the few countries, Putin, you know, that has. that has nuclear capability.

Now, on the other side of that equation, there are other countries in Europe that have it as well. Yes. You know, Britain, France. Yeah, that's true. So. And by the way, and this is the other scary conversation that's going on in Europe right now. So we're in this war-scarer conversation in Europe.

The leadership is certainly having it. The militaries are. having it. The publics in Finland and Sweden are all into this, frankly, and the rest of Europe is behind in the conversation. The, you know, the polls are floating the possibility that they would develop a nuclear weapon, that they would acquire a nuclear weapon. Because they're right because they're worried that right now the British nuclear weapon cannot be used without the consent of the United States when most Brits don't really know but that's the case there's two padlocks on on the British nuclear deterring

not so in the French case but the French have said we're going to we're going to change our doctrine we're going to forward deploy, but the ultimate decision about whether we use a nuclear weapon or not rests with France. So the polls are saying, well, that's not good enough. We're a frontline state. And if the Ukrainians had not, and the argument gets worse, if the Ukrainians had not given back those Soviet nuclear weapons that were deployed on Ukrainian soil when Ukraine is part of the Soviet Union, if they had kept. them, food would never have a time. Exactly. Not sure that's right, but that's the argument.

You know, we're going to get letters, Janice. I can see, I can feel people writing them already that's scaring, you're scaring the hell of us and why are you doing this and this is never going to happen. You know, I don't know how to answer that other than to say, I think it's an important conversation to have. And I think that's why this BBC article that got us both kind of anxious to talk about this is worth reading. And you should read it. Yeah, everyone should read it.

You know, and then listen to this or listen to this, then read the article. Either way, I think it's an important discussion to have. It doesn't mean something's going to happen tomorrow, but it means, you know, you want to think about, well, you know, what if it did, how already am I? I think it's important to have for two reasons, Peter. First of all, we live in an uncertain world. As I said, there's two paths. You deliberately plan it, and I don't think that's a likely path for Russian Earth,

but you stumble into it. That's a different story, but it's a story. And there are wars that start that way. You stumble into it, right? And so I think it's important for people to know. The second reason I think it's important is the best war prevention strategy, I know, is to be prepared. Because, right, if you're prepared, you actually make war less likely. Because it becomes more expensive for any adversary that's doing the planning.

And that is the British. You know, you spend time in the United Kingdom. I do, you do. It's actually, it's so striking because there is such a deep historical culture in the United Kingdom, which I just admire. People in the United Kingdom know the history of their country, bad and good, but they know the history in ways that we in Canada, you know, struggle to do.

frankly, and need to do much better if we're in the middle, by the way, this is an aside of a wave of nationalism in this country. It would be a good investment of our time to understand the history of our country that we're so proud of, frankly. The Brits do. But they're sensitive to the different whites you can stumble into war. they understand how important preparation is. They live this nightmare. And it's real in a way that it isn't. We sent soldiers overseas.

You know, three times we sent them and more, but in important ways in 1914 and 1939, before the United States, frankly. And then again in Korea, but they went overseas. That's not the European. experience. Their homelands were attacked. Their civilian population was involved. When you say, are you prepared to Londoners? They have muscle memory of what that's like in a way that we just

don't in North America. Okay. We're going to leave it at that for this week. And if there is a next week. There is. Just kidding. There is. There is. We are. You know, I think it's really important to say this is not a story about what will happen. This is a story about what could happen. It's very different. And the AI story is not a story about what will happen. It's a story about what could happen. But on the AI story, it's exactly the same thing, Peter.

If we put in place some precautionary principles, we change their trajectory. Exactly. Okay, well, it all starts right here, and you've just heard it over the last whatever, 45 minutes. Janice, thanks so much for this, and we will talk again in seven days. Dr. Janice Stein from the Monk School, the University of Toronto, with her regular Monday conversation with me right here on the bridge. That's going to do it for today. Coming up tomorrow, Raj Russo, the reporter's notebook. Parliament resumes today.

So there's obviously going to be lots to talk about tomorrow with Althea and Rob. Looking forward to that. And looking forward to being back with you again in a little less than 24 hours. I'm Peter Mansbridge. Thanks so much for listening. We'll talk again tomorrow.