The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - John Tory, Doug Ford and The "Aliens"

Episode Date: February 15, 2023

Toronto and Ontario are rocked by two scandals while at the same time, much of the country gets focused on unidentified flying objects.  Bruce Anderson puts on his alien detector to take a run at all these stories.  And a few moments too on Nicola Sturgeon calling it quits in Scotland.

And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. You are just moments away from the latest episode of The Bridge. It's hump day. It's hump day. It means Wednesday. Wednesday means smoke mirrors and the truth. Smoke mirrors and the truth means Bruce Anderson. Ah yes, hump day. Halfway through the week. Eh? What did you say? Can we call it something else?

You don't like hump day? Well, you know, it's all right. But it sort of, I sort of equate it with like, oh, the week, This is the hardest part of the week, the hardest day of the week, the day that everybody kind of dreads because you're not fresh at the beginning of the week. You're a little bit tired. You can't quite see the end of the week anyway. Well, I think that's the whole point of hump day is like you're over the hump. It's all kind of downhill to the end of the week now.

All right. I'm just going to stop whining about it, and we'll make the best of it. All right. Well, let's. What do we got to talk about today? Well, you know, we can't. The things that we texted each other about, I think that's what we should do. Okay.

By the way, you know, we were back and forth texting on a variety of different things. I don't think we can start with anything other than what the hell is going on up there? Like, what do we know 10 days after the first one of these things were shot down? What do we know now that we didn't know then? The Martians. The whole Mart know then? The Martians. The whole Martians thing. The Martians thing. Well, look.

It is, you know, you've got to admit, it's pretty bizarre to have had a situation where from the White House podium they're saying, it's not UFOs. It's not Martians. It's not, you know, something from another planet. Did you ever think you'd hear that day other than in a, you know, in a movie? Well, I, no, I don't think that I did, but I also didn't think I would hear a military officer, senior ranking military officer in the United States say he couldn't rule out anything including that these were from another planet uh so no it's quite bizarre and um you know it doesn't surprise me that people are paying a lot of attention to it it feels like

something that we should be attentive to i am at the same time, you know, so aware of following this story of how short our patience is for information when something happens, when anything happens, really. Everybody wants to know immediately, tell me everything that there is possible to know, and also just give me a flood of speculation if there isn't a lot of fact. And maybe that happens more on Twitter than everywhere else. But I think it's part of the general syndrome that we live with today, which is that if something happens, we're not accustomed to waiting five or six days for more information to be developed and then to come to us. We really do want to know it now. And so I find myself a little bit trapped by that too. I'm like, well, how long has it been since that debris landed in the various places that

it landed and how, you know, if it's taking too long for them to tell us what the debris looks like, is that because there's something they don't want us to know? So I find it fascinating as an exercise in understanding how our collective psychology works in the time that we live in with the pace of our expectations. But from a political public policy standpoint, I think my guess is that, well, my guess is one thing has happened based on some of the information that has come out. And my observation is that the system that we have to defend ourselves or identify threats and then defend ourselves is probably working pretty well. And by that, I mean that in the first instance, it sounds as though the NORAD people who are talking are saying, well, maybe one of the things that's going on is that we've opened the aperture. We've made it easier for us to spot things that invade our airspace by kind of changing

the threshold of how big they are or something like that before they are noticeable to us with our tracking devices. In which case, the corollary of that is there have been maybe many of these things and we just didn't know that they were there before. I think there's reasons obviously why people in those situations and those roles might not want to say that, but it seems like that might be part of what's going on here. That doesn't make it any less anxiety-causing or worrying or something that needs attention. And then the other thing is that I'm watching this debate, and I'd love to know what you think about it as well, about whether Canada is sufficiently prepared to defend its sovereignty or not.

And some of the arguments that you hear that suggest that we're not are that an American fighter jet shot down one of these or maybe more than one of these things. Whereas I kind of look at it and go, well, the whole idea of NORAD is that we work collectively on identifying those threats and dealing with them. And this seems to me like a pretty good real-life example of NORAD doing what it's supposed to do. What do you make of it all? Are you kind of like, where are these craft coming from? Is it outer space? Is it Russia? Is it China?

What do you make of it? Well. How would you handle it as a new story, too? How would I handle it outer space? Is it Russia? Is it China? What do you make of it? Well. How would you handle it as a news story, too? How would I handle it as what? As a news story. As a news story. I think it's a good news story. Let's say you know what you know, and tonight is the first show, and you're crafting that kind of opening segment.

Well, you know, to me, news is always, you know, putting things in some degree of context, right? This is not the first time that these countries have spied on each other. Let's assume it's China versus the U.S. on this. Certainly seems to have been the case on the very first balloon, the big one, the one the size of four buses. Chinese sort of said it was theirs, right they admitted it was theirs and it was off course and you know these you know these things can happen that could go off course i mean if you're trying to hide a spy balloon that's the size of four buses that's flying around at whatever it was 60 70 000 feet

it's pretty hard to hide that okay you're gonna see it it was seen from the ground like people not using binoculars just they could see it so obviously you kind of know it's there latest iphone right pick it up yeah the chinese say the americans have done the same kind of know it's there. Latest iPhone. Right. Pick it up. Yeah, the Chinese say the Americans have done the same kind of thing. The Americans deny that. But look, let's not kid ourselves. For the last 60, 70 years, the Americans have been spying on everybody. You're old enough to remember Francis Gary Powers, you know, the U-2 pilot. I mean, he was flying his U- u-2 over russian airspace first for spying you know he's

taking pictures well that's what this thing was apparently doing or taking readings or measurements or something um as far you know so this didn't suddenly start happening yesterday this has happened and it happens from any number of different countries do it to each other they've been doing it literally for centuries in terms of balloons um the japanese use balloons against the americans in the second world war trying to start forest fires on the west coast and they did the same thing you know launch the balloon and and the air currents will take it across the pac and, you know, hit either BC or Washington State or Oregon or wherever. By the way, I'm loving

this opening item on the news that you're doing now because it is giving us context and I haven't seen that context what you're just describing in any of the other coverage. Good, carry on yeah i mean it's a bit of a long item so far but where is it going well i think people love this story right you can't miss with this story um i think the story has changed pretty dramatically over the last 10 days and i'll get to that in a sec but first on on your question about norad i mean i think you know we don't know

what we don't know as the old saying goes and I think we probably will find out in due course that the Americans and the Canadians who tracked that first balloon it didn't suddenly go oh my god what's that over Montana I think they knew where it was coming and probably thought what it was some kind of weather balloon that may also be used for spying which they all do to each other but it was a balloon okay it wasn't like a beaumark missile or whatever the cruise missile or something you know it was a balloon um so i imagine it was tracked as it came over alaska and went down the west coast of Canada and then into the States, and then the current started pushing it straight eastward.

And then they had to decide, okay, there's so much fuss about this, we've got to take it out, and let's take it out at the right place. So that would be my uneducated guess on what happened there. NORAD operates, as you said, the two countries together. That has been the whole idea behind NORAD. You go, you have a joint command, and at different times, different countries in charge. Right now, the American general is in charge of NORAD,

and the Canadian is number two, and those positions can reverse at different times but the final decision on the kill shot when not made by the president or even made by the president is then made by the whoever's in charge why didn't the Canadian jet take out either the well it didn't take out the first one because it was over the carolinas or wherever it was i don't think either canadian jets were even involved at that point this is the one over uh you know a yukon that is kind of a question mark now the americans have a base in alaska it was a you know hop skip and a jump from where they took it out.

Where the closest we are with fighter jets is Coal Lake. Coal Lake, right? Where the Canadian jets were at that point, I'm not sure. They say they were all together up there. Whether the Canadian jets were armed with missiles to take it out, I don't know. Those questions haven't been answered. There are times when the CF-18s, they can all be armed,

but they're not necessarily armed on some of those flights. So there are questions that haven't been answered yet. But NORAD, it basically worked, right? Now, I'm a little more confused about the one over Lake Huron because if you track that back, it probably came straight over the Arctic and straight down through really uninhabited space, and there weren't people on the ground going, hey, what's that? You know?

And they didn't see it until it was over Lake Huron. You look at a map, you can kind of track where that might have come. I don't know where it came, how it came down, but it could be. It was more center of the continent as opposed to the west coast of the continent. So that's kind of a question mark, and then why the Americans ended up shooting it down when it was over the Canadian side of Lake Huron. I don't know.

At some point, these questions will be answered. The bigger question is, were they all Spanish satellites? First one almost certainly was. They were certainly Chinese and they were surveilling something. It wasn't just weather patterns. The other ones now, they seem to be kind of leaning towards, well, you you know maybe they were commercial maybe they were benign maybe they had nothing to do with another country maybe they were with a university or some private company doing you know weather related stuff um those are all possible. It's much smaller, much lower. Sorry.

I haven't heard that. And I don't know what the, you know, all I've heard is they don't have some propulsive capacity. And I'm kind of like, well, how do they stay aloft? What, you know, what? So I'm really curious about those ones as well. Oh, you're leaning leaning towards you're leaning to i can see it you're leaning towards the they came from another planet no that's what i actually know oh i can see it now i did see somebody make light speed to get here would do that so that they could put these kind of Volkswagen-sized things floating in the sky around us, these rather unsophisticated things that have no ability to defend themselves against our frail human fighter jets.

So that all seems silly to me. You've been doing too much polling on conspiracy theories. Look, I'm in the school of, I think the officials are probably very, very impatient themselves for information about this. And they're probably asking every hour and they're going to get information. And I don't know whether they're going to tell us everything. And this is the other interesting point of discussion.

And I heard in the way that you characterize this, your background as a journalist saying, well, you know, there are questions about why American jet shot it down over the Canadian part of Lake Huron. Huron. And the non-journalist part of me is like, there's a whole great category of things I don't care if I ever know about because the truth is probably going to be somewhat more mundane

than your speculation might be. But on the other hand, if we didn't have journalists being a little bit more suspicious, then we wouldn't have good journalism. So I see the balance there. And I applaud your enduring skepticism and suspicion that you might not get all of the information. And for me, I'm like, I'm going to wait until it transpires that they have things to tell us. And maybe they'll tell us everything and maybe they won't. And if they don't, maybe that's okay too. Yeah, no, there may be a very good reason not to tell us everything.

You know, it could be a while before that information, if ever, is shared. Just to calm your fears that I was kind of making stuff up um they did say yesterday you know from the podium they did do do this commercial or benign uh looking increasingly like that for the for the latest ones the the three little ones the the Volkswagen size, whatever they were, at a much lower altitude. I mean, listen, there's a lot of stuff up there. There's a lot of junk in space. There's a lot of stuff that, well, not a lot of stuff, but there is stuff that does fall from space at different times.

And there's a lot of stuff, you know, like just stuff up there. Private. Space junk. lot of stuff you know like just stuff up there private space junk yeah like lower than space junk but sort of out there yeah anyway you know i i think it's one of those stories that has that people have latched on to because it appeals to any number. It appeals to their fears of the climate out there, the international climate. It appeals to their belief to some degree of other worldly objects that could be coming down to look at us. It appeals to a lot of things,

especially at a time when we're looking for other things to think about and talk about and be fascinated by. Is there a safety issue here? Increasingly, it seems there is not, other than the possibility of something crashing into an airliner, which is, that would be a problem. I do think your question about, and I'm sure those responsible are looking heavily at this, about where NORAD is after decades of it being present. How sophisticated is it now? How able is it now to deal with situations like this? I mean, just last year and a half ago the u.s and canada announced because of the arctic that they were going to you know upgrade

things on the norad front i don't know where we are on that but i mean look at a map it's a big space a lot of stuff can happen there without anybody knowing about it. And how are we going to deal with that in today's world? Did the F-35 solve this? Not just the terrestrial side of that, too. Yeah, I agree with you. I agree with you. I mean, I don't think the F-35 solved this in any way, but who am I? We'll see as time goes on and how governments respond to it,

both the Americans and the Canadians. I think there are questions here that still need to be answered. And we'll see whether it just kind of drops off the news agenda, as things do. You know, some other shiny object comes in. The other thing I'm kind of anxious about is to see what the Republicans in the U.S. do with this. I think, if I'm not mistaken, so far they've been taking a bit of a more

laid-back approach than they do on many issues. But I'm worried that we're going to see Donald Trump intervene in this conversation in ways that kind of shape public opinion in a way that he thinks is favorable to him, but it may not have much to do with the facts. So I guess we'll stay abreast of that story. But we have other things to talk about today too. I'm not sure how well he can interfere with it.

I mean, there are, apparently there were occasions where the same kind of satellite is the first one or balloon or whatever the heck it was. There were at least three occasions that happened during the Trump years and they did nothing. And maybe doing nothing was the right approach. I don't know. It would seem odd if he took that view. and they did nothing. And maybe doing nothing was the right approach. I don't know.

It would seem odd if he took that view. I did the right thing. I did nothing. I don't think so. Okay, what else do you want to talk about? Well, I think we should talk about this John Tory situation in Toronto, and I think we should talk about Doug Ford and the integrity commissioner and the party that developers came to and brought money for his family. So you want to go deep into Ontario and Toronto politics then, right? Well, look, you're a big Ontario and Toronto guy.

Nobody loves that more than you. I know that you like to pretend that it's me that always wants to talk about that because you don't like getting letters from people in the West or the East saying, why are you always talking about that Toronto-centric nonsense? But these are two big stories. I think the Ford story is – I want to be careful how I say this. Yeah, why don't you take a quick pause? We'll take a break, and then we'll come back and we'll deal with it.

All right. Because I have no resistance to it. I mean, we spent a lot of time last month talking about Daniel Smith and a variety of different things that have been happening in Alberta. And this obviously did bring things to a standstill both the Ford story and the Tory story the mayor of Toronto story uh over the last couple of days so um we'll take our our first break our only break and uh and then we'll be uh right back so stand by and welcome

back you're listening to smoke mirrors and the truth on the bridge you're listening on Sirius XM channel 167 Canada talks or on your favorite podcast platform or you're watching us on our YouTube channel. And you can find it by looking for the link on my Instagram or Twitter feed. There is no cost to watch us on YouTube.

Okay. Two stories. Tell me why anybody outside of Toronto should care about the John Tory story. Mayor of Toronto resigns, or says he's going to resign, as a result of having an affair with a staffer. He announced he was going to resign last Friday night. He's staying on to handle a budget situation. But why should anyone outside of Toronto care about this?

Well, I don't know that they should. I mean, but that doesn't mean that, you know, for a conversation that's about politics and smoke mirrors and the truth that it isn't a relevant topic. He's the mayor of the country's biggest city. He's been the mayor for a length of time. He's been prominent in Canadian politics for decades. I met John in 1993, I think, and I've seen him be active in politics over that entire period of time, almost,

you know, in one form or another. And so he's been a kind of a big figure in politics. What do I find interesting about it? I guess I think there's two things. One is that I think it's clear now that he is exploring the option of unresigning. And I think that's a bad idea. I think that the notion that you can on one day stand in front of a camera because a story apparently is coming out that is going to be embarrassing for you and for your family, and say, I'm going to get in front of this story. I'm going to say this is what it was. This is how to think about it.

I've got a lot of work to do to repair trust in my family, and I apologize for doing something that literally any organization that has a code of conduct now, a sophisticated organization, whether it's a city or a corporation, sees this being inappropriate. So I'm going to resign. A few days later, you're allowing the conversation to be, well, maybe I shouldn't. Maybe I, you know. So what happened between then and now? What happened to the work

needed to be done with the family what happened to the idea that he violated something that is uh is considered inappropriate in literally any workplace that i know and i'm not talking about uh i'm not talking from a prudish standpoint people have affairs people can have consensual relationships i'm talking about somebody who has a relationship with somebody who works I'm not talking from a prudish standpoint. People have affairs. People can have consensual relationships. I'm talking about somebody who has a relationship with somebody who works for them, somebody who's at the top of an organization. If this happened in any major corporation, the CEO would resign. It's happened a lot.

And that has generally been the consequence of it. So I don't think it's really an option based on to come back after saying you're going to resign, not having actually resigned to say, well, you know what? I thought about it again and maybe it wasn't as bad as I thought. Or maybe on the other hand, it was. But there are people who want me to remain as mayor for whatever reason. And so I'm persuaded that the fact that they would like me to remain as mayor is more important than the things that I said were important last week, namely that I violated a principle of how you should conduct yourself if you're the head of an organization. And also, I like to think this is not a question for public policy per se. This is more kind of a personal, how do I feel about this?

And you're allowed to have feelings about people in positions of trust. If you say, I've done something very damaging to my family and I need time to work on that, take the time to work on that. That's not three days. You know, that's longer. So I don't know what he's going to do. I mean, there's a story running around that's saying Doug Ford and maybe some other politicians are trying to encourage him to stay. We'll see how it plays out. I don't think that if we sort of take the logical, maybe illogical, but the extension of it, how would we feel if every mayor of every major city decided that this was okay behavior,

or you'd take a three-day stint in the penalty box, and then all would be forgiven? I don't think that's the right way to deal with a situation like this. I think there have to be consequences when people cross lines that are considered to be important lines in terms of professional conduct for leaders of organizations. You make a very convincing argument on that case. And I think it becomes kind of this example, you know, for, you know, there are other parts of the country, and not just in municipal politics or any politics,

but in the private life, I guess, as well. You know, listen, like you, I've known John a long time. I've known since the early 80s when he was a young staffer in Bill Davis's office, the Premier of Ontario. It's a sad story because there's no question that on a lot of different levels over many years, John Tory has contributed to public life and public policy. And if this is the exit um then so be it um but it's uh it's unfortunate to say the least for a lot of people uh not just john but uh his family and you know the the woman

involved and everything else so um okay let's move to the other story. Doug Ford. We have covered on this program a number of times, and with Chantelle on Good Talk as well, this issue of the Greenbelt north of Toronto and the move basically from parkland to developed land. And Doug Ford's decision and process involved in that particular decision, and it has caused great controversy within the city and the province. Now it turns out that the developers,

some of the developers in question around that land, bought tickets to attend Doug Ford's daughter's wedding, I think I've got that land, bought tickets to attend Doug Ford's daughter's wedding, I think I've got that right, before the decision was made, which seemed a little odd to have developers, I don't know how close personal friends they were, but that's not the way it's being described. It's being described as developers attended the party, and they paid for tickets to get there.

And so this has a certain whiff to it that's not good. It doesn't smell good on any level. So that's where we are on that story. Yeah. And your thoughts on it. Well, I think there are a lot of tendrils to this story that deserve more attention and scrutiny. First of all, if the facts as presented are the facts that Doug Ford hosted a party to raise money for his daughter's wedding that people on his behalf on behalf of the party organizers encouraged those who were coming to donate a thousand dollars and that included developers

who have business interests that are affected directly by government policy by ford policy in particular that on the surface of it, he should resign. That's just not something that you can do. This is, he can say, well, it was for the family or it was for my daughter's wedding and I don't benefit from it, but I don't think that washes at all. This money that these people came and gave went to help offset a cost that his family was going to incur for a wedding and at the very least he should have been cognizant of what that might look like to people the amounts involved are not insignificant um he might just

say well you know whenever we have a party at the Ford Hacienda everybody is welcome to attend which is clearly not true he also said the developers are friends of mine and it sort of sounds as though in the in the subsequent event where they could all get together the actual actual wedding, that maybe one or more of those developers sat at a dinner table with him. Given the controversy and the sensitivity around his Greenbelt decisions and the acquisition of land by developers in ways that is raising eyebrows and is subject to an investigation, for him to stand up last week and say, there's nothing to see here. And by the way, I asked my integrity

commissioner and he said a thousand percent this was fine. Well, that raises questions about what kind of integrity commissioner deals in a thousand percent fine. If you're in that business, there is no thousand percent fine. There's maybe a hundred percent fine, but there's no like, this is so good. It's, this is so clean. It's even, it goes beyond clean. Well, it's certainly not that. And it turns out that Ford didn't ask for an investigation.

He told the integrity commissioner his version of the events. And on the basis of the version of events that Ford gave the integrity commissioner, the integrity commissioner said something. I'm pretty sure he didn't say it's a thousand percent okay and now the integrity commissioner is not answering questions about this and not indicating that he will answer questions and so the opposition parties are looking at what they can do including launching an investigation or calling for an investigation which would trigger a proper stress test of well well, who actually was there? How much did they give? What was the nature of the contact with them to solicit that money? These are all really important things. And to be honest, I don't think I've seen anything that's sketchier than this. And I've seen quite a lot of sketchy things over the 40 odd years that I've followed politics.

Sketchy happens. These are human beings and they make mistakes. And I've seen some eyebrow raising things, but this is pretty bad. So I really hope that those, it's not every journalistic organization that is chasing this story this is another aspect of it i uh there's there's a a reasonable amount of speculation that some media organizations who were working on this story tried to bury it um i think we should know a little bit more about that too it's's not as important as what actually happened with Ford and these developers and that money. But we live in a time where we need to wonder with strained resources in journalism if people will chase this story enough or if the premier strategy is just to

wait for the news cycle to turn or to hope that it gets filled up with other stories of interest to people and that eventually public interest in it passes. Because it shouldn't in this. It really shouldn't. What do you make of it? Well, you know, I think there's reason to be suspicious on a number of fronts about how this story was handled last week. It was starting to bubble up to a high degree around the wedding stuff last Thursday night and Friday morning. And then what happened?

Well, all of a sudden the John Tory thing entered the picture. And, you know, it went from one shiny object to another. And, you know, the went from one shiny object to another. And, you know, the shiny object that involves an affair and sex and all that other stuff took dominance Friday night and through the weekend. And to some degree still today because of this argument about whether or not he should have resigned by now and, like, literally got out instead of hanging in, which has impacted the story about the winning tickets and the developers and the green belt and everything else

so i i don't know whether certain organizations have deliberately backed off or whether they're just being caught up with a different story, which can happen and does happen. But at the end of the day, which one's more important? People will make their judgments on that. Which one's easier to tell? No doubt about that. The easy story to tell, which is often the story that wins out in these kind of things, is the Tory story.

You know, the John Tory story. Anyway, we're almost out of time. I do want to say, uh, on a totally different subject as, uh, you know,

any listener to this, uh, program will know both you and I have a certain, um, attachment to, uh, Scotland. And, we spent a lot spend a lot of time there.

Like Scotland a lot, like golf there a lot. And it's always been interesting, while we haven't got involved in the Scottish political story and the leadership of Nicola Sturgeon, the First Minister, the Prime Minister. She's been a controversial figure for a lot of different reasons, and the independence movement and all that. But she announced today she's resigning. And I think that caught a lot of people by surprise. Not that she hasn't been in some controversy over the last couple of months, and she a you know she's a hot figure in that sense

that she does attach controversy to her and the way she's covered and reported upon anyway she resigned I watched her statement today and without getting into all the details as to what may or may not have happened this is the second woman in the last month or so with a leadership role on the international stage, Jacinda Ardern from New Zealand was the other, who's resigned. So you're taking two major players off the stage, major female political leaders off the stage. And I listened to her talk about, you know, this is a woman who three weeks ago said I've got lots left in the tank and today she was saying I don't have very much left in the tank

I've been in politics one form or another almost all of my adult life elected since I was she's in her early 50s now since she was in her mid-20s, been in government for the last 15 years, been involved in all kinds of different things. And she said, I just, I can't do it anymore. You know, I just, I'm done. And it was interesting, you know, listening to her and wondering that that moment hits all politicians at some point. They just go, you know what, I can't do this. You know, she played the family card a little bit, but not really a lot.

It was more of the broader scope of the impact politics has had on her life. And I thought that, you know, a lot of people must go through that. And, you know, we in the public often don't kind of appreciate, I think, what goes through a person's mind who has devoted their life to public service. You can knock those who spent all their life in politics. You know, there's some criticism of Pierre Polyev that he doesn't know anything but politics. You know, in some degree, that's the case with her.

But I just found it interesting listening to her statement and this issue of I got nothing left. Yeah, no, look, I think you're, I agree with you completely that the toll that politics at the center of things takes on people is not, is brutal. And relatively speaking on the other side of it, you know, the psychic rewards are really small. There's hardly ever a day when you wake up in that kind of a role and feel the love of the people that you're working for or the appreciation of it. It just doesn't exist in our world. And maybe, you know, it's foolish to even imagine that it should.

On the other hand, we do need good people to put their energy into public service. And if the rewards, and by that I do mean psychic rewards, not monetary rewards, because I don't really think that's the issue. I think it's the sense of you're trying to do something that you believe in and it seems like a game of diminishing returns especially in the era where everybody has an opinion and it's all available for consumption on social media and most of that is negative most of the time it it corrodes your your desire to do it i think for nicola sturgeon as, it has to be a really difficult time for her in her role, given that such a big part of her project is Scottish independence.

And she has been looking for a way to have another referendum on Scottish independence, and it didn't look like she was going to be able to do that. And so and it could just be that in the next British election, the likelihood of a Labour government is very high, given the polls. that would probably be a government philosophically closer to nicola sturgeon's tastes and then the question of whether or not she really wants to fight for a another independence referendum if there's a labor government is a different question it was kind of easier to generate enthusiasm for the independence project with conservatives in charge in London and defending Brexit, whereas Labour looks like it's going to be a different kind of government. Now, I don't know what's going to happen with Brexit, but it also feels to me that if you're campaigning for Scottish independence in a UK that looks at Brexit as having been a bad thing,

it's going to make it harder to win that campaign for independence because the nature of the argument is it's better to break up than to try to work things out, right? So she may just have looked at that road ahead and said, in addition to it being a hard job generally to be a political leader, a leader of the government, that the projects that she cared the most about, the landscape is changing. And maybe for the better from the standpoint of the things that she really cares about,

even if that doesn't mean Scottish independence. Okay. So we've covered balloons, spy satellites, mayors, premiers, and first ministers. We've done it all. It was a good morning. It was a good morning. It was a great morning. It was a morning for a hump day.

All right, my friend. We will join forces again with Chantal on Friday for a good talk. Not Friday. And until that time, you take care of yourself. And thank you out there for listening on this day. Tomorrow it's your turn and the ranter. Remember the ranter last week was after Pierre Poliev. This week he trains his machinery against Justin Trudeau.

Next week he'll take on Jagmeet Singh. These are not flattering profiles from the ranter, but it is his take on the state of our political leadership these days. That's tomorrow. This has been today. Thanks so much for listening. I'm Peter Mansbridge. We'll talk to you again in 24 hours.