The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - "Justin Trudeau On The Ropes." The Book

Episode Date: May 7, 2024

This is publication day for Paul Wells and his new book (or is it an essay?) "Justin Trudeau - On The Ropes". The well-known national columnist takes a hard look at the man who has been part of the Canadian landscape as a political leader for a dozen years now. What's the real story behind his leadership? Today a conversation with the author. 

And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. You are just moments away from the latest episode of The Bridge. Justin Trudeau, On the Ropes. That's the new book. Or is it an essay from Paul Wells? Coming right up. And hello there, welcome to Tuesday. Looking forward to today's program as I look forward to every day's program, I gotta say that. But this will be interesting. When you host a podcast or a broadcast, you're constantly bombarded with ideas of what you can use your time to do. You get ideas from listeners. You get ideas from book publishers, certainly.

And a lot of the ideas that come to me, no matter where they come from, are about, in fact, books. You know, I'll get a letter from a listener saying, no, I just read this fabulous book. It's by so-and-so, it's called this, and you should really, you should get that author on the program. And I appreciate that. And sometimes I'm able to follow it up. I mean, usually what I do with books is if it is a particular interest to me, I know this is kind of selfish, but if it's of particular interest to me, I'll follow through. I'll get a copy of the book.

I'll read it. My kind of rule of thumb on books is if I'm not really hooked in the first 50 pages, I'm usually out of there. And I know that's unfair to some authors who say the best part of the book is, you know, the last half, what have you. But that's kind of my rule of thumb. I have a pile of books. People send books to me, drop books off, send manuscripts all the time.

And I'll be honest, I don't get a chance to read them all. So I read the ones that are of particular interest to me. I can remember, is it almost two years ago now? A fellow named Ronnie McKenzie sent me a manuscript on a book he was writing about Bomber Command, the Second World War operation based in Britain that ran the air war, the bomber end of the air war, against Nazi Germany.

And he wrote about how his kind of life was the same as mine in the sense we both had fathers who'd flown in bomber command, flown Lancasters. And we were intrigued by their story, and we both had the same experience that a lot of veterans' kids had had, where it was awfully hard to get your father to talk about the experience,

especially those who were in the air war. And anyway, he decided he was going to really push hard to find out as much as he could about Bomber Command and the operations of Bomber Command, and he did so. And he wrote this book. He sent me the manuscript, you know, digitally. And I, you know, had it there and I thought, you know, I'll get around to doing this. It's kind of a hobby book by this fella and I'm sure it's well intended, but I'm really busy. I was in the middle of the pandemic.

Anyway, I was on an overseas flight and I said, I'm going to take it with me And I'll just, I'll give it a try And see what this book's like Well, it was a page-turner for me It was fantastic I mean, I thought I knew a fair amount about Bomber Command Sir Arthur Harris, Bomber Harris The controversy surrounding Bomber Command.

I thought I knew a lot of that. But I learned so much just on that flight. And so I wrote back and I said, you've got a winner here. Roddy, this is a terrific book. Anybody who wants to know anything about air operations in the Second World War as it related to the bombing of Nazi Germany has got to read this book. Well, it turns out his book has become this sensation in veterans groups and Bomber Command organizations around the world, in Britain,

and certainly in Canada and the United States. So congratulations to him. It just shows what one person can do with a vision and caring about the story that he's trying to tell, he or she is trying to tell. So anyway, if you're in the least bit interested, any good bookstore has got Bomber Command in it now. It's done extremely well.

I think it's in the second or third or maybe fourth printing. I'm not sure how many, but it's done extremely well. I think it's in the second or third or maybe fourth printing. I'm not sure how many, but it's done extremely well. Anyway, my point here is to say I get a lot of books come my way and a lot of suggestions from publishers. You know, you've got to read this book, and I can arrange it for your author, the author of this book, to be on your program. Well, it's never hard. It's never hard to get an author on the program if you're going to give them a little space.

But, you know, I do other things other than books. But every once in a while, I'll do a book. Which brings me to today, because I've been anxiously waiting this one. Paul Wells is one of my favorite writers on politics in Canada. He's one of Canada's most experienced political journalists. As they say at the publisher, after many years at Maclean's, National Post, and the Gazette, he now publishes a subscription newsletter at paulwells.substack.com he's a frequent commentator on both french and english

language radio and television he's also the author of an emergency in ottawa it's about the convoy. So when I heard that he's got this new book on Trudeau, on Justin Trudeau, I thought I've got to get him. Got to get him on the program. It's published today is day one of the book. I read it over the weekend. And, you know, as I'll tell Paul, I learned a lot. And I thought I knew. I thought I already knew a lot, having covered Prime Minister Trudeau.

From his election as a Liberal leader right through to his election as prime minister and in the three elections that he's running as leader and as prime minister. So enough from me. Let's get to Paul and his thoughts on his book. I think you'll find it more than a little bit interesting. Probably if you're in the slightest bit interested in the story of Justin Trudeau and where we stand these days, then I'm sure you're probably going to want to grab a copy of the book.

Here we go. My conversation with Paul Wills. So, Paul, let's start with the question, book or essay, because your publisher calls it a book, you call it an essay. I mean, it is, you know, 100, 110 pages, whatever, sort of in that, but how do you regard it? How do you look at it? I call it an essay. In France, we wouldn't have this problem because in france people all the time write books at at you know very short lengths rants uh all the way back to jacques um um this is part of a periodical series called subtle and quarterly each issue is capped

at 100 pages i don't get 103 pages i tried a year ago when I wrote for Maclean's. And it's a quarter the length of the big book that I wrote about Stephen Harper a decade ago. And it turns out that turning in an argument at that length is a real challenge. But God help me, I've started to like it. Well, I think readers might like it too, because it's a comfortable length for you to sit down and read it. Okay, I have a number of specific questions based on things you wrote, but I want to start off in a general way, because you're a guy who's followed Justin Trudeau for basically the whole time he's been in Parliament. You've interviewed him.

You've moderated a debate. You've been in scrums. You've done it all with him at one point or another. So going into this project, did anything surprise you about what you learned about him? Uh, yes, it was in the nature of being reminded of stuff that I, I might not have thought about in a while or, um, that I might not have thought the same way at the time. And specifically, I was struck very much looking back at the way he talked and the way his campaign published its material in 2015 when he went from third place to a comfortable majority by how much he ran as a moderate.

There's a minute I sure hadn't remembered in the debate that I moderated where he goes after Stephen Harper for bringing down eight consecutive deficit budgets. And in hindsight, not only does that show amazing gall, but it suggests that his thinking changed at some point between running for prime minister and having been prime minister in a while. And he seriously underplayed his climate policy. He didn't hide it, but he made sure that it occupied much less space than his economic policy. The economic policy was really only nudges and tweaks from what the Harper government had been doing. And so the centerpiece, the thing they still wish that we would spend more time talking about is the Canada child benefit. It was essentially an extension of a child benefit that the Harper government had brought

in and so on and so on. So that helped to orient really the whole argument of the book is that he didn't run in 2019 and 2021 as the guy that he ran as in 2015. So why? And then I seek to answer that. Want to give us a hint on the answer? I mean, I don't want to prevent people from reading the essay but yeah you tease us that way so i mean i'll tell you it's fun trying to market a hundred page book because i've got uh friends in several news outlets who've been wanting excerpts i'm like

i can't give away a lot of excerpts because there's something for people to read but um um basically it's that can Canadian politics had already been polarizing. It had already been shifting in such a way that supporters of each main stream in our politics, leftish and rightish, had been growing in the conviction that the other side was beyond the pale. And that had already been happening before Trudeau came along. And it continued when he was office. So that the center that, I think by temperament, he'd be fine pitching for the center. But what he saw was that the center was crumbling. And so he sought out some other territory,

which is oppositional to the conservatives. And so he worked within that creeping polarization in our politics, which is due to a lot of things. And eventually, starting basically with the 21 campaign, he started to nudge that polarization along. You know, it's funny because when you're left reading this essay and you remind yourself, well, you know, he's pushed government and governing to the left. But in doing so, he's pushed the country to the right. Well, because any incumbent is pretty sure that the people will never be so dumb as to support the other side.

Right. I mean, I've seen this. You know, we played in a lot of films and we've seen this happen before. I remember I was when Ernie Eves was the short live conservative premier between Mike Harris and the Abyss. I was becoming quite critical of Ernie Eves and and Ontario conservatives at the time would would buttonhole me at conventions and so on and say, oh, yeah, you're sure you're having fun, Paul, whatever, but come on premier Dalton McGinty, like that's, that's never going to happen. And, um, and then he handed their teeth to them. And, and, um, similarly, I mean, Trudeau is increasingly, as he's had a very difficult year, he's, he's just slamming away on that button that says, look at who I'm running against. And because he, he himself can't imagine that anyone would support that. And, but you're right. At some point,

the technique that got them here threatens to not work any longer. And that might be what we're seeing now. And then all the people, like people could have voted for, you know, roly-poly, jolly Aaron O'Toole three years ago, but he said Aaron O'Toole was the worst possible outcome. So now who's there left to vote for except Pierre Poilier? I mean, if like some Canadians, you've just given up on Justin Trudeau. You call the book Justin Trudeau on the ropes. And, you know, we can all have our, imagine what the signal is in the title, but it's also a pointing back in history.

Because 2012 was the year of the boxing match, you know, before he became, just before he became leader, just after he'd won his seat in the house. And I guess what I find fascinating about the way you write it is it's basically suggesting that if anyone else has forgotten it he's not one of them he remembers it it means something to him and it means something to him now because he was counting out in that fight i am i am told that he um it's not every day it's not he doesn't mention the boxing match until people are sick of hearing about it. But every once in a while, he says, you know, I've been counted out before. I have been mocked, laughed at, dismissed, bet against, and I won anyway.

And in his memoir, Common Ground from 2014, which is like the Stephen Hawking, Brief History of the Universe. which is like the Stephen Hawking, brief history of the universe. It's the book that's on every bookshelf in Ottawa, but no one's actually ever cracked it. In the memoir, he says, I won for reasons that are applicable to politics. I prepared, I trained, I strategized,

and the other person just thought they could win on brute force. And so he carries that thought around with him is that like so this is a book that's critical of justin trudeau but not dismissive of him not mocking of him and um the title says justin trudeau on the ropes the the the big thing i want people to keep in mind about that is he kind of likes being on the ropes. He kind of feels like he's at a position of maximum potential when he's on the ropes. Do you really believe that? Do you really think?

Yeah. I mean, but he's also not an idiot. Like he knows that when you're on the ropes, the next thing that can happen is that you get knocked out. And, uh, even when he was giving interviews around that boxing match,

he said, look, I could lose. But so what? When everyone expects you to lose, it's no shame to lose. And it's more powerful if you win anyway. And he's also, I mean, I'd say this in so many words, he's not a fool in that he understands that politics isn't actually boxing. But we have metaphors. So much of my writing is based on things. I think about music. Everyone carries around a metaphor that seems a little weird to everyone else. And his thing is this boxing, which I should emphasize. I don't lean on heavily in the book.

I'm not going to make people sick of the boxing metaphor. Do you think it plays into the story that we're all kind of covering now, which is, can he win again? Should he try again? Is he going to quit or not? Do you think that memory of that match plays into what's happening now? Yeah, I think very much as a sub theme like i don't think uh again i like they don't there's not a whiteboard somewhere that says you know split down the middle it says boxing polyev and then you know compare and contrast

it's not that it's not that um uh literal um but another thing I get into is that people have been looking at him and assuming they know what's going to happen to him literally since the day he was born. He was Pierre and Margaret Trudeau's Christmas miracle baby in 1970, 71.

He was on every front page in the country, or the fact of him was on the front page of every paper in the country the next day. And I mean, growing up in high school, and he writes about this again in his memoir, at McGill as a bar bouncer, a whistler, as a teacher in Vancouver. He's known that people are going to look at him when he walks in the room. And Vancouver, he's known that people are going to look at him when he walks in the room. And he knows that a lot of them are going to look at him and say,

what a tool. I mean, before he'd done anything, there were some people who were going to think that. And there are some people that are going to say, well, isn't he dreamy? Isn't he fantastic? and and so he's more comfortable with the fact of being the center of attention than any of us can imagine even you peter and um and uh it factors into his thinking and And that sort of two-step, the I know what everyone's thinking, but I know what I can do, is inherent in that sort of situation. You hinted earlier in this conversation about not delivering necessarily on some of the things that he promised. I mean, we all remember the electoral reform promise, and you talk about it in there. You do point out that there were more than a few things that, in fact, he did deliver on out of that 2015 campaign. But some things were left bare in the cupboard.

And one of them that I find interesting about, because you talk about it not necessarily as a broken promise, but as a broken kind of ideal that this guy could represent and that was the sense that there was this was going to be a very different kind of governing from the center from the prime minister's office in fact he even said to me in an interview during that campaign in 2015 that his father had made a mistake by having far too much control in the PMO, and there was no way he was going to let that happen. Well, in fact, when you see what happened fairly quickly,

he kind of made his father look like a piker on some of this stuff, especially the way he dealt with ministers forcing chiefs of staff from his choice or his office's choice on them, as opposed to them picking their own chief of staff. And then the whole issue with Jody Wilson Raybould and how that played out. Talk to me about how that has affected governing, his style of governing. So step one is to explain it. Because one thing I always try and do is be empathetic with the people that I write about at length. I assume that they're doing their best.

And with Justin Trudeau, that's not a difficult assumption to make. So why the hell did he centralize so quickly? And the answer is because the Liberal Party that he led rose from the wreckage of a Liberal Party that had had its worst decade since Confederation, three increasingly devastating defeats, ending with Michael Ignatieff and the party slipping to third place. So when they jumped from third to first they came to office with a lot of people who didn't know politics people who'd done impressive things out in the real world but who didn't know what where the bathrooms were in the center block and didn't know which way to face when they were talking to the speaker and um what happens after

first reading of a bill that they might be championing and so on and so on. And so it's arguably only natural. It's certainly understandable that you put all these people on short leashes and you make sure that there's a sort of central coordinating capacity. And so they did quite remarkable things they did trust building exercises like you might do at a at a weekend getaway for the dunder mifflin company like they had uh i covered a cat a caucus retreat the whole all the mps and there was a scavenger hunt where they had to go around uh finding the answers to clues which member of the of the caucus used to be a singer in a boy band um it was a guy from the west island of montreal whose name escapes and you know so the stuff you do when you're in middle school to to solidify the team and um and then just about the time they might have gotten enough

confidence to relax a bit the world started to get weird. Trump, Brexit, a more overtly belligerent China, and so on and so on. And so very quickly, emergency measures become permanent measures, and a tactical choice becomes an attitude towards how you deal with dissent. And I think that's what happened with this group. You know, you mentioned Trump, because it's interesting, you tell an anecdote, and I guess it's not really an anecdote, but it's a little slice of history that you've come up with somehow, that he was one of the first to notice Trump in terms of his potential. And he kind of equated it with himself

and the ability to read the public mood. Yeah, it's a slice of history I did by burning an off-the-record agreement that was eight years old, and I figured the statute of limitations. He came to the back of the plane as he was flying back from his big meeting with Obama at the beginning of 2016,

and he chatted with the press. And I thought it was such a good story, I could use it, because it's eight years ago. And what's he going to do, not give me an interview? He hasn't given me an interview in several years anyway. And what he said was, so remember the timing. It was less than a year since he himself had been elected, and it was before Trump was elected.

But Trump was starting to sort of come on strong. And what he said was, you could make an argument that I won in our election because I had the best understanding of the popular mood and what the nation was thinking. And of the people in the field for the 2016 election, which at that point was like nine months away, you could make an argument that Trump has the best understanding of where Americans are at, which I found...

There's these moments when Trudeau is astonishingly clear-eyed. There is a tendency to write the guy off as a bit of a goof, there's these moments when Trudeau was like astonishingly clear eyed. You know, there are, there is a tendency to write the guy off as a bit of a goof and I've never, I've never felt that there's, there's moments when he seems to be the guy in the room who understands things better than most people, including he, he was starting to think that not only that Trump would win, but that in a weird way, Trump might deserve to win.

It's funny that he had that feeling about him in 2016 before he achieved the presidency compared with the way we watched him deal with Trump and how that relationship kind of dissolved over time. Reading the public mood or not, you know, because it got pretty ugly. Yeah, not nearly as ugly as it could have got. I count the management of the Trump presidency as, by and large,

one of his victories because there was no extended trade war. There was no complete freezing out. Trump's ambassador to Ottawa was always welcome and part of the discourse, and the same with Canada's ambassador in Washington. And they saved NAFTA. And they saved NAFTA so completely

that there has been no attempt by Trudeau to go back to Biden and say, can we fix, you know, like that was a stopgap, but can we, you know, make that was a stopgap, but can we, can we, you know, make it the great trade deal it could be? No one feels that need. And if some of the, you know, if Peter Navarro got mad at Christopher Freeland, or Trump made some intemperate scrum statements, or some people on the Trudeau side were sometimes pretty snide and dismissive of Trump. That's human nature, but they managed to pretty completely contain the potential damage, despite the fact that none of them liked one another. I don't want to use all your book up here in this conversation, as you mentioned earlier,

but there's so many great little nuggets in there. There's a term that's going to come as probably news to some people, but I want you to talk about it for a second, because you mentioned polarization a few moments ago, but in the book you talk about effective polarization. Yeah. I just got lucky there. I am affiliated with the Munk School at the University of Toronto, as are you. And I was at one of their conferences and a couple of political scientists were talking about effective polarization

the way other people might talk about TikTok. They weren't announcing a discovery. It was just part of the discourse. And I finally figured out what it is. Affective polarization, that is the polarization of affect or emotion, is the way supporters of a political party think about the climate and liberals might have another view. And it's more, how would you feel if somebody who supported the other party became your next door neighbor or married your kid? And what we've seen in several countries, but not all the countries where this has been studied, is that it's been increasing over time.

Very much in the United States, less in Germany, and less here than in the United States, but still quite considerably. So the gap in perceptions between liberals and conservatives has essentially doubled since Brian Mulroney was prime minister. And it's been doubling kind of in a straight line. And so I heard this conversation about effective polarization only three weeks before I had to turn in the manuscript of this essay. And I thought, well, I'm going to hang my hat off of that. And so the third chapter is substantially, and it's what got excerpted in The Globe on the weekend, it's an examination of effective polarization in the context of Canadian politics

and in the context of Trudeau's tactical choices. You know, it makes the challenge of going after your opponent all that much more, well, challenging. Well, you talk about it in terms of one of the flip-flops, if you want to call it that, of Justin Trudeau is he talked in 2015 about, I don't go for personal attacks. I don't do that and we're not going to do that. That didn't last long. Well, so he would repeat that today. I mean, he would insist that he doesn't do personal attacks and, you know, like, so he doesn't

and he would interpret that as he never badmouths Pierre Poilier's personal life or he never says, well, you know, he's been putting on weight or anything like that, you know, but, but, but the, he can't talk about really any issue without putting it in the context of, you know, there's another side and you have to bear in mind that if I don't get my way, then you're going to get thrown to

those wolves. And, um, and then in another moment that I kind of, uh, obsess over that most people have forgotten at the 2018 liberal convention, David Axelrod, who was Obama's chief strategist for the, for the 2008 election and the 2012 re-elect, came up and, you know, one-on-one session with Jerry Butts in front of the convention crowd with Justin Trudeau sitting in the front row said, that's what you have to do in a re-elect. You can't run on hope twice. You have to run on hope to introduce yourself. And then when you're in the context of re-election and hard choices and disappointing results, you have to say, look, it's us or the other guys. And let me tell you about the other guys.

And that gave them, because every Canadian politician would like to be an American politician and every Canadian liberal imagines themselves in an episode of the West Wing. Having David Axelrod come up and give them permission to polarize was all that they needed. And they have taken his advice and run with it. I love Axelrod because he always makes politics sound so simple when we know it's not simple. But through a little anecdote like that, that's pretty simple. Yeah. And look, honestly, in the heat of an election campaign,

especially one that happens a few months after the SNC-Lavalin episode, which shook Canadians' faith in that government to an extent that I still don't think they understand. Honestly, I have a hard time understanding it. The SNC-Lavalin thing was a little technical, and yet people were not happy. So coming out of that context, and then in the context of a campaign where he's revealed to for the blackface thing, which was just weird. There's very few episodes where I look at what he's done and say, well, how dare he? Or how could he possibly have done that?

I think my job is to propose plausible explanations for why he did the things he's done. And I don't find it very difficult. Running on increasing polarization in the 2010s and 2020s, to me, is a perfectly reasonable reaction to the political landscape. I think it's had unfortunate consequences, but to me, it's not a mystery why he's done it. Let me wrap it up with this one. You make a point in the book that you're not making predictions, and I hear you on that.

But give me a sense of what you think we're likely to be looking at over the next year. Not what's going to happen, but the kind of tone of our politics, assuming he's sticking around. What do you think this next year is going to look like? So last Tuesday when Pierre Poiliev called him wacko in the House of Commons and got kicked out of the Commons and the whole caucus went with him,

and the Prime Minister was calling Pauli a spineless lackey of the hard right in America. That will be forgotten. Not personal, of course. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. A fine-looking lackey. That'll be forgotten by Election Day because we'll have seen much worse.

Uh, um, I, uh, I, I hope that more journalists will engage a discussion of all he has policy proposals and, and, and, uh, analysis that they, they stem from, which is eccentric, and I disagree with a lot of it, but to me, it's not empty sloganeering. To me, it's a guy who's been thinking and strategizing and planning for some time. And I hope we don't get into the kind of arid in or out speculation that we did sometimes during the Kretchen-Martin wars, where it's like, there were people on the Hill

who the only thing they were interested in was the date of Kretchen's departure, which was like the least interesting question you could imagine, right? And that's, there's a bunch of reasons why I wrote this thing, but one of them was, whatever else he deserves, Justin Trudeau deserves some serious evaluation. And the same could be, I mean, I know there's a biography of Pierre Polyev coming out soon. The same can be said for anyone who aspires to leadership roles in our country.

So I just decided I would do my bit. Well, and we're glad you did. It's a thoughtful read. It's an interesting read, and it makes you think, which is always a good thing for us to do with uh, with our listeners and readers, et cetera, et cetera. Uh, Paul, always good to talk to you. Thanks so much for doing this. Really good to see you, Peter. Thanks so much. Paul Wells and, uh, some thoughts on his new book, which is out today.

You can find it, uh, I'm sure by either going online or going into your store, your favorite bookstore. It is called Justin Trudeau on the Ropes. Go for it. All right. We're going to take a quick break and come back with an end bit. We haven't had one of those in a while, but we have time for one, and it's a fascinating one. So we'll do that right after this. And welcome back. You're listening to The Bridge, the Tuesday episode,

right here on SiriusXM, Channel 167, Canada Talks, or on your favorite podcast platform. Okay. Here's the headline in the Business Insider on MSN.com. One of the world's biggest cities is sinking, so officials are spending $35 billion to build a new capital. You know where that is?

You've heard of Jakarta, I assume, capital of Indonesia. That's the city we're talking about. Indonesia plans to relocate its capital from Jakarta to the new city of Nusantara. The new city will cost $35 billion, won't be finished until 2045, so another two decades. But, you guessed it, the climate crisis.

You know, the climate crisis. You know, the thing that some people say doesn't exist. That's why the problem exists here. The climate crisis has prompted the move with Jakarta at risk of sinking due to rising sea levels. Jakarta is on the northwest coast of Java at the mouth of the Chewang River. It's Indonesia's capital and its biggest city. It's home to some 10.6 million people, about 30 million in the metropolitan area. It's also sinking with about 40% of the area now below sea level.

The Indonesian government plans to move the capital to Nusantara, a new city being built on the eastern coast of Borneo, about 870 miles north of Jakarta. As we said, it's going to cost about $35 billion, won't be finished until 2045. However, about 6,000 government workers are expected to move there in time for the next president's inauguration this October. The decision is not without precedent. Brazil shifted from Rio de Janeiro to Brasilia in 1960,

while Abuja replaced Lagos as Nigeria's capital in 1991. But this is the first time that the climate crisis has played a role in the process. In recent years, rising sea levels have made Jakarta the world's fastest sinking megacity, which sparked the Indonesian government's decision to move the capital. You can find a lot more on msn.com and the Business Insider and it gives a closer look at the new city. But isn't that incredible? A 20-year program.

Well, if they say today it's going to cost $35 billion, you know. You know, if it's anything like our estimates, it's going to cost $35 billion, you know. If it's anything like our estimates, it's going to be a lot more than that by the time they finish in 20 years, in 2045. And moving everybody. Like it's quite something. I'm sure there'll be some great time-lapse photography on that or whatever has replaced it by then because of AI and all things like that.

Okay, quick reminder about what's coming up. Tomorrow is our encore edition. Thursday, it's your turn and part two of your favorite teacher, the teacher that affected you most in your life. We got so many letters last week when we did this that we had to expand it into a two-week process. So that'll be on Thursday, which will also include the random ranter

and whatever take he's on this week. Thursday, good talk. Chantelle Hebert and Bruce Anderson will be here with the days and the weeks political news. Okay, that's going to be it for this week, or this day of this week. Thanks so much for listening. I'm Peter Mansbridge.

I've enjoyed this, really enjoyed the conversation with Paul Wells. And if you get a chance to grab a copy of the book or the essay, you should do that because there's a lot more in it than we talked about that I think you will find fascinating. So take care and we'll talk to you again in, well, about 24 hours.