The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Lisa Raitt On The Bridge

Episode Date: June 13, 2022

The former deputy leader of the CPC on the leadership race and what to believe and what not to believe.  And, her up-close candid assessment of Pierre Poilievre.  Plus some Monday Notes on everything from the accuracy of Covid case counts, to some secrets of your fast food delivery people. 

And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. You are just moments away from the latest episode of The Bridge. Lisa Raitt is in the house. Lisa Raitt, the former deputy leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, many times a cabinet minister. She joins us on the CPC Leadership Race. Well, one of the things I like best about this time of year is convocations. This is the opportunity through school, through university, when the graduation approaches. And universities for, well, much of the last month, depending on where they are in Canada, have been marking their convocation date when students graduate. And after the last couple of years, this is a big moment. You know, I remember last year when our son, Will, graduated.

University of Toronto, political science. We'd been waiting all his life for this moment. He certainly had. And, you know, we were proud parents. Neither one of us went to university. Neither one of us have a university degree. And here was Willie. He'd earned it.

And so how did we celebrate that moment, that moment of graduation, that moment where the degree is handed down? We were sitting in our apartment in Toronto, watching it on a laptop computer. Because of COVID. Because of the pandemic. There was no ceremony as such. The ceremony was online.

And when the big moment arrived, when Will would have been walking across the stage at the U of T, his name rolled across the screen very quickly. It wasn't there for longer than a fraction of a second. That was it. That was it. I mean, I was still very emotional.

It was a huge moment, but I felt so bad for Will that four years and all the years before that had wound up in this fraction of a second on a laptop computer screen. Well, that's not the case for most students this year, even though this year was a difficult year, a lot of Zoom classes, but convocation is actually taking place in most universities and colleges in Canada. And such was the case yesterday when I went to the University of Toronto, the Munk School, for the convocation of its graduates. And each year at the Monk School, I give what's called the Peter Mansbridge Gold Medal to the top student upon graduation.

So that was a big, big moment. And I enjoyed doing it. The only unfortunate part was it was indoors. Usually they're held outdoors, but there was a threat of rain and lightning. And so they had to hold it indoors and they held it indoors in a small room with no air conditioning. I guess there are things you can hope for, and there are things that you can't. Watch delivered.

Anyway, nice moment. And one of the best moments for me, I mean, I've heard a lot of convocation speeches by those getting honorary degrees. I've given a few myself. But I watched the one yesterday, and there was a great line in it by this student who was giving the student's address.

And, you know, one of the big fears for any graduating student in any course at any college or university is, you know, what happens now? Am I going to find a job? This is a difficult economy. What happens now? And in this speech yesterday, that was dressed head on in this way, very simple way, but I found it really marked something for me. What the student said was, don't be afraid of tomorrow.

After what we've been through the last couple of years, tomorrow looks easy. You know, great attitude and so true. Look what they've been through. They've been to university taking courses on Zoom or some other mechanism to watch their teachers. In some cases, they never met their profs. Now they were at the other end of a mute button. Don't be afraid of tomorrow.

After what we went through the last couple of years, tomorrow looks easy. The millennial class is hitting it. They're about to crush it. They're moving in. They're moving in on Generation X. They're moving in on all of us, right through to us baby boomers. The

millennials have arrived, and they've got a hungry attitude. All right. I promised Lisa Raitt, and Lisa Raitt I am going to deliver. Lisa Raitt has been on the bridge before, but it's been a while. I think it was probably back around the last conservative leadership race. But they're certainly into one now. And there's a lot of indications that there's a lot of interest in this conservative leadership race. So I wanted to get the opinion of a pro. Someone who's been there. Somebody who knows what it's like.

Ran herself. Lost to Andrew Scheer in 2017, but became, as a result of that, and the following election, or not the following, the previous election, she became the deputy leader of the opposition. She's well respected on all sides of the house. Many people wish she'd run for the leadership again. But she's sitting it out. She's the vice chair of global investment banking

at the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce. So she's a pretty busy person. Lives in Toronto. Has roots in Milton, Ontario. Yesterday, I tracked her down in Halifax where she was visiting her son. One of her sons. And it's kind of funny actually where I tracked her down.

She was having breakfast in a little kind of diner in Halifax. And it was noisy in that diner, but we wanted to talk. So I won't tell you until the end of this conversation where we ended up doing the interview front. But it works out fine and the audio is great, so you don't need to worry about that. But let's get into it lisa rate on the situation inside the conservative leadership race right now as we head into the

summer of 2022 the vote takes place in september are you ready for this i'm ready this. So let's get at it. Here's Lisa Wright. Lisa, why don't we start with you kind of declaring where you're at on this campaign. Do you have a candidate in the race, a dog in the hunt, a horse in the race, whatever? Do you have any of them? So I'm not going to actually mark my ballot until I get my ballot. I'm still watching everything.

I know where I'm leaning towards, but I'm not going to come out and endorse anybody because just given the role I have with CIBC, it's not prudent to start declaring for one or the other. But I'm watching very carefully. I'm watching what's happening. And I think what is happening is really important to the conservative movement. You know all these candidates, right? I do. Actually, do I?

So, Leslyn, in passing, Scott Aitchinson, for sure, and Patrick and Pierre and Sheree, I do. And Roman. I know Roman a little bit, too. Okay. So, you have knowledge of all of them. Tell me this. There's this assumption on the part of a lot of the media, not all of the media, but a lot of the media that this is all, it's all over already.

That Polyev has won this and possibly on the first ballot. Do you subscribe to that? I don't. I don't. And I think there's a long period of time between now and september 10 and i think that is going to be important for these candidates for sure they're going to be they're going to be out there trying to get those memberships for people first of all to go ahead and vote because that's going to be an important piece but secondly you

want to get that second vote and we'll see what ends up happening. But I think Pierre's campaign is certainly letting everybody know that they think it's over. Is that a good thing to do? Sure. If you're the front runner and you want to scare people

and start having them doubt whether or not they should be supporting a certain, I was going to say character, that's not very fair, a certain candidate, like what happened, that's not very fair a certain uh candidate uh like what happened i guess most recently with two mps switching over from patrick to pierre right i guess the the danger in this is that it's not all about memberships it's this is this a system where membership sort of guide you to points, but don't necessarily, they don't equate by a long shot.

So things can get mixed up in that. I would agree. And the deal is that it's 338 constituencies across Canada that get 100 points each. And these memberships are not equally distributed throughout these 338 places so some places may have a hundred some places may have 10 000 and the sheer number of memberships you sold in the 10 000 place gets you as many votes as you can get in the uh in the hundred point place well one thing is clear they've sold hundreds of thousands of memberships between the various candidates. And on the face of it, that sounds great.

It's democracy in action. It's giving lots of people the opportunity to vote. But it also seems you've been sort of raising the specter. There's potential for problems when you're dealing with that many memberships. There's a lot that can go wrong. And maybe I'm being too much of a negative person when it comes to stuff like this. But, you know, we ran LEOC back in 2020. It was during COVID.

We had a really hard time getting all those ballots out, making sure that they were sent to the right addresses, making sure that they were verified. And I'm sure that they're going to have the same problem, but on a much bigger scale. You know, 600,000, if that's the number of memberships, is a lot more than the 250,000 that we had to deal with. However, that being said, Peter, CPC has assured everybody that they've got it under control and in hand, and I hope they do.

They got a lot of people working on that. I mean, 600,000, that's a lot of memberships if you're doing an actual vetting of all those. This is what my concern is. It's a big number. I looked at what Elections Canada ended up having, and they had to send out 1.2 million ballots in the last general election. And they have a full Elect elections candidate to do that. They have a big, big step. So CPC would have to step up,

but I understand that they have it under control. Is this the kind of thing that can lead to conspiracy theories? God forbid that we would have anything like that. I think everything leads to conspiracy theories this day. I think don't discount that you're going to have people who are going to say, I didn't get my ballot. Look, there are some folks who didn't get their ballot back in 2020. And there was a, they would question initially, I didn't get it because I bought my membership through this website. And that's not the case. It's unfortunately luck of the draw when you're trying to get these ballots out because the party's agnostic to where you bought your membership from.

Actually, it's private personal information. We don't disclose who bought their membership through which portal. What should we actually believe about these numbers? And let's assume they're all vetted and turn out to be real. Let's assume that for a moment. What about the numbers of these people who actually will vote when it gets around to voting time? So in 2016-17, we had just over 50% voter turnout. And the last one, we had over 60% voter turnout.

I think you'll see it higher again this time. And I'm wondering if it's growing as the disillusionment with the liberal government is growing and the anger and the desire to replace the liberal government grows. Because as you know, in general elections, people get out to vote to change the government. And I expect we're going to see a high number again of people turning up to vote and filling in their ballot. But I want to point out one thing regarding the membership sales, you know, how each campaign is coming out and saying we sold this many, we sold that many. The party, I don't think, can ever actually verify for you how many memberships were sold by each candidate due to privacy reasons. I don't think they have the ability to do that

so these may just be claims numbers that are claimed by the individual campaigns that really can't be verified for privacy reasons that's interesting i hadn't realized that but that puts a totally different perspective on whatever numbers the party eventually does put out it doesn't necessarily mean it's going to say, you know, candidate X sold this many memberships. Yeah, we weren't going to do that back in 2021. So I'm wondering if they're going to do that this time. Tell me about the front runner, because obviously, you know,

Pierre Pelliev, you served in cabinet with him. You were in that caucus for more than 10 years with him. What is he like? Because it's hard to watch from afar and try to figure this guy out. He's a very dynamic speaker. He loves to get in with the cut and thrust. Is he a team player? Yeah. Yeah yeah he is i mean he's measured and he's certainly um peter's a peter here's a very hard-working individual extremely hard-working

probably one of the ones um that i would deem as one of the more um hard-working individuals but it's not necessarily always about the party he certainly has his own vision that he wants to make a case for within caucus sometimes he wins sometimes he doesn't but he put in a lot of effort when he was finance critic and treasury board critic because those are things that he cares about and those are the things that he is done reading on when you move into opposition you do have a lot more time. And on the other side of it, you also have more responsibility to do your own research because you're not staffed up the way you were when you were a government MP. And as a result, he has done self-study.

And those things that he has been self-studying are now coming to the fore with respect to his, I guess, guess his platform the way it's come out you know he obviously um you know he obviously knows how to give direction when he's dealing with himself can he give direction when he's dealing with others what do you mean by that well i mean a leader a leader's got a lead right they they have to um have the ability to get other people to come along with them on the path that they're taking them the the party on um yeah and sometimes that works sometimes it doesn't and if he's been if he's been a guy who's been very single focused on what he wants to accomplish, as opposed to necessarily the board, the party is trying to accomplish,

does that make for a good leader? So, yeah, he's been single focused on the kinds of things that he cares about in order to shape the overall policy of the party, which I think he has done successfully through caucus. And my observation would be that in caucus, overall policy of the party, which I think he has done successfully through caucus. And my observation would be that in caucus, he advocates strongly and he wins a lot of the battles. So can he lead? Yeah, I think he can sway caucus. I've seen him do it. And I think he can bring them together and go forward. But the leader gets to pick the path. The leader gets to pick the policies, the platform

and what you're seeing in leadership should be carefully watched because that's what is going to be showing up in a conservative party of canada platform because if you you know this is nothing peculiar to uh pierre poly f but in a in a leadership campaign when you're when you're running for you know a position within your own party you can say one thing and history has shown that when you then take that beyond the party to the people of the country at large you can sometimes pivot as they say in politics and change your change your view on subjects is this a guy who's because he has definitely taken some very hard uh stands on certain issues uh and people wonder well you can never take that to the country so he's obviously

going to pivot is is there pivot in the in the way you spell pierre poliev no no and i don't think it would be a pivot i think it would be a reframing. And I guess I'm going to give you an example. I'm going to give you an example of it that happened in the liberal government. The liberals ran in 2015. This will be the last time we have a first pass the post-election. We all remember that. And that got a lot of Green Party voters and it got a lot of NDP voters. Well, suddenly after they went through their process, no, that's not going to happen after all. So, I mean, this happens a lot in politics.

It doesn't matter if you're conservative or if you're liberal, it's a reframing of the issue. After you've discovered certain things, therefore you can do this or that. You know, when you become government, you look at the books and say, oh, I would have loved to have all done all these spending things, but they left us in such a mess. I can't do it. So I don't think it's a pivot. I think it's, you're going to make fun of me for semantics. Oh, that's cool. Reframing, reframing, but every politician does that. Mr. O'Toole wasn't successful because he tried to do it within the party and it was too fast. And he,

he didn't have that touch and feel with individual members because COVID made everybody communicate from home. Pierre will have the advantage if he wins of actually being in the room with people and getting their their buy in on the direction to go in. OK, if I accept your your change from pivot to reframing and accept that other parties have done it, which I do. Yeah. Is it is it an honest way to do politics oh that because i think the assumption is that people people believe or they don't believe you they they don't think you're going to do what you say you're going to do when you're just running for the party and then you're going to take that to a different

level when you're running for the country correct and that is that is unfortunately where i think politics is right now peter i think a lot of people say a lot of things in order to get those specific votes that they need to put them over the top and i think it's all parties who do that and then suddenly they can't fulfill their promise but this is age old i mean do politicians break promises ask the average person on the street of course they do and that's terrible but that's unfortunately politics is it unfortunately politics or can it be changed i mean what happens to what happens to the the woman or man who comes in and says, this is what I'm going to do and come hell or high water, I'm going to stick by that promise. I would applaud them.

And I think that's great. And if they've got the mandate to do it, then they're going to go ahead and they're going to do it. And sometimes you get to do that on parts of your platform, and sometimes you just can't possibly do it. And it's not because you don't mean that you didn't want to do it at all when you said that you were going to pursue a certain direction. It's just circumstances get in the way of you actually being able to fulfill. And back again to the example of the first past the post. But to contrast that, the liberals promised that they were going to bring in a carbon tax. And boy, did they ever. Come hell or high water.

Exactly. One other area. You remember what it was like for Bob Ray when he ran for the Liberal leadership. He was never forgiven for having been an NDPer. And what the NDP in Ontario had done to the Liberals. In other words, taken power away from them. Does Jean Charest suffer from somewhat the same situation, given his political past?

No, I don't think so. I think not in, maybe out West. I don't see that in Ontario. And in Quebec, I'd have to defer to somebody else who knows the ground better than I do, because I don't know the ground in Quebec well'd have to defer to somebody else who knows the ground better than I do because I don't know the the ground in Quebec well enough to comment but I think it's been definitely explained enough that the Liberal Party in Quebec is actually not the Liberal Party of Canada and as a result I don't think that that's going to be a detriment. It's going to be an accusation that is definitely thrown around.

But whether or not it's going to stick, only those who are already hardcore voting with Pierre are going to continue to say that. Last question. Yeah. Has this been, you know, the conservatives were always concerned in the last few leadership races that they didn't get any publicity, that, you know, the race wasn't being covered. And debates would go by and hardly anybody even mentioned them. This one's had a lot of coverage now, whether it's because there's not a lot of other things going on, except inflation and gas prices and you name it. But it's certainly getting coverage so is this no matter who wins at this point has this been good for the conservative party yeah how can selling 600 000 memberships not be good for the conservative party of canada

look if the numbers are true and let's say that you spread these people out across 338 ridings, that's about 2000 people per riding who have taken out a membership that you have a chance of converting into a volunteer on the ground. You get 500 people as a volunteer on the ground, oh my gosh, you're going to win the election. Like honestly, it's from a riding by riding point of view. This having this list available to get people to come out and help you carry off a precision campaign is invaluable. So, yeah, it's a good thing for the Conservative Party of Canada. Lisa Rae, thanks so much for your time today. I have to share with the audience that you're actually sitting at a bus stop in Halifax. I know.

Wearing sunglasses and a hoodie. Yeah. I look so sus right now. It's unbelievable. Like, I'm sure someone's going to call the cops on me. But nonetheless, it was a great pleasure to talk to you today, Peter. Thanks, Lisa. Take care.

You bet. Lisa Raitt. And she's a straight shooter. Even sitting at the bus stop. And no kidding like i could i can see her right because we're using zoom so you only hear her i i see her she she's she was sitting at the bus stop and in those sun dark sunglasses and and a hoodie um trying to shield the the wind and a bit of the noise every Every once in a while, you heard a kind of whoosh. You know what that was? That was the bus.

That was the bus going by, picking up people at the bus stop, and so on and so forth. So all thanks, many thanks to Lisa, whose idea was, like, let me leave this diner because it's too noisy and we'll do it from outside somewhere. She ends up sitting at the bus stop. Anyway, great to hear from Lisa Raitt. And as I said, straight shooter, calling it the way she sees it at this point in the conservative leadership race. Okay, we're going to take a quick pause.

When we come back, well, some Monday notes on a variety of different things. So get your buzzers out because one of these is a question for you. And that's right after this. And welcome back. You're listening to The Bridge on SiriusXM, Channel 167, Canada Talks, or on your favorite podcast platform and wherever you're listening from. I'm glad to have you with us on this uh monday another week as we approach well i guess we're almost at the midpoint of june and a reminder that uh june 24th is our last show before we take a bit of a break for the summer

we'll still be on with some encore editions some of the best of the bridge from the last year at different points each week, probably one a week. And a number of times during the summer, we'll also have special editions of Good Talk Live. Well, taped, we should say, the day of their airing. So we look forward to that. Chantel and Bruce, looking forward to keeping you in touch with some of the stories that are circulating on the national political front. Okay, I promised... Whoa, a little music there. I didn't promise that. Okay, what I did promise was a couple of other stories. Monday notes, we'll call them. I saw this one, so let's see how sharp you are, and you can't look it up. All right?

You're just off the top of your head. I saw the rankings for the top websites in the world, the top websites in the U.S., and the top websites in Canada over the weekend on something called SimilarWeb. And this gives you a sense of what are the websites that we go to most often. Now, some of these should be obvious to you. I mean, think about it. Where do you go most often for information on the web? Well, if you said Google, you're right. In fact, it's the same in the US, same worldwide. Some of these rankings come in exactly the same. The U.S. and Canada are exactly the same in the top three. Number one is google.com.

Number two is youtube.com. And number three is facebook.com. Now this is where it gets interesting the number four most often go-to place in terms of looking for websites in canada is different than the states different than the world rankings in fact it is clearly a canadian thing i mean most other listings from different parts of the world would you know would show amazon or twitter or you know a variety of different very common names like that worldwide common names but not so much canada do you know and i once again don't look it up. Do you know what the number four ranked website in Canada is? I never would have guessed this. Obviously, I should have guessed it.

But the number four ranked website in Canada is canadapost.ca. CanadaPost, postcanada.ca. So I guess a lot of people are looking up postal codes or trying to get a rate for this, that, or the other thing. But Canada Post, I don't know, does it have a search engine? I don't know. You look at these top 10 lists and there's porn sites. Does Canada Post offer porn? I don't think so.

But it's right there, number four in Canada. I'm not going to run through the whole list, but number five, just so you know the top five list. Google.ca. So a version of Google.com, but Google.ca. So just like the Canada Google. There you go. I found that fascinating. The Canada Post was up there. For all the stuff we say about Canada Post

and what they do and what they don't do, what they do well and what they don't do well, apparently we got a lot of faith in Canada Post because that's number four on our website list. Okay, a different topic. You know, in the last six weeks, two months, where COVID has sort of, you know, not become the dominant issue that it was before in terms of what we talk about, certainly on the bridge, but also in general conversation. And when you go out, most people you see are not wearing masks.

Perhaps they should be, but they're not. And we sort of listen to the COVID news when it comes out and the numbers, case numbers. And yet we all know people who've got COVID, right? We all know that. Who've either got it now, had it, got through it, five days days two weeks most cases are hate the word mild but they're mild compared with what they were a year ago but do you believe the numbers you're hearing well you probably shouldn't because looking at a new study that was done by a professor of epidemiology at the City University in New York City, Dennis Nash is his name. And this is not going to surprise you, I don't think. But it's basically that the COVID numbers we're hearing on case counts are way below what

they actually are and why why is that the case because most people aren't reporting it you know you got friends when they realized they had covid they took the test the rapid test they took it at home what'd they do did they immediately phone some central records place and say i've got covid it's proved and you're added to the list no i don't think they have done that certainly the people i know haven't done that they just dealt with it they may have talked to their doctor just to ensure they were doing the right thing in terms of the way they were treating it which was basically stay at home, get over it. And when you're over it, you can get back out there.

Keep testing yourself every day. But most people aren't reporting it, and that's what Dennis Nash found. No one knows for sure, and that multiplier will vary but at this point if you see a daily local case count of say a thousand some data suggests it's reasonable to figure the actual count is likely somewhere between 3 000 and 31 000 that 31 000 comes from a study not yet peer-reviewed or published, led by the aforementioned Dennis Nash, professor of epidemiology at the City University of New York.

It surveyed more than 1,000 New York City adults and concluded that more than one-fifth had the virus in late April or early May of this year. So that's a big difference, right? It's still out there. And we keep seeing that, and we keep reminding ourselves of that. And, you know, I told you I was at that indoor convocation yesterday at the University of Toronto. Most people were not wearing masks. I was wearing a mask for a bit of

the time, not all of the time. I should have worn it all the time, but I didn't wear it all the time. So now I'll monitor myself very carefully over these next few days and see what, if anything, happens. All right. A couple of other points. A couple of other Monday notes. As many of the loyal Bridge listeners know, I've had a few books in the last couple of years. I'm working on another one now. It won't be out this year.

It'll be out hopefully next year. I'm doing it with my good friend Mark Bulgich, who we did Extraordinary Canadians together. So we're working on that. We're already at it. Which will give us a fair amount of time this summer and this fall working on that. But I found it. There was a piece yesterday in the New York Times about book selling, the business of book selling.

And some of the statistics in there are quite remarkable. Last year, and we're talking about the United States here, And some of the statistics in there are quite remarkable. Last year, and we're talking about the United States here, last year, readers bought nearly 827 million books. That's an increase of roughly 10% over 2020. So 2021 versus 2020. And a record since one of the book scanning companies began tracking 20 years ago. So 827 million print books, which, you know, that sounds like fantastic. And it is fantastic.

Here's the challenge, though. It's one thing for well-known authors to be able to sell their books, and also by some new or lesser-known authors. There, it's gotten much harder. With the exception of surprise runaway bestsellers, and they mention a book called Where the Crawdads Sing, for example. Is that what it says? Whatever it is, I haven't heard of it, which is more a reflection on me than anybody else. And books by celebrities, Matthew McConaughey. I had a book last year, did very well.

Most writers fail to find much of an audience. Of the 3.2 million titles, the BookScan, that's one of these tracking agencies, followed in 2021. 3.2 million new books. This is in, once again, reminder, this is in the U.S. Fewer than 1% of the authors sold more than 5,000 copies. Fewer than 1% sold more than 5,000 copies. Now, 5,000 copies in the U.S. is like 500 copies in Canada if you use the 10 to 1 ratio, which we tend to. Now, I don't know whether that's the case in Canada,

that fewer than 1% sell 500 copies. That would scare me a lot because I know what goes into writing a book. It's a lot of hard work. But in Canada, the number 5,000 is what's regarded as a bestseller. Doesn't sound like a lot of books to be a bestseller, but that's what it is. Now you get some understanding of why. It's hard. It's tough to sell books, especially if you're a new author, not well-known. So most books are sold online, and they're looking at new ways to attract booksellers or book buyers to bookstores. Because if you're buying online, especially through the pandemic,

that's where most books were sold by far and away. But if things are opening up, there's nothing like a great bookstore to

sort of get into and kind of feel the book. Sit down and read some of the book, which is what you're allowed

to do in some of the great classic bookstores. Have a coffee, maybe. Just sit and feel enveloped by that world of books. Anyway, I thought this is a much longer article. And as I said, it's in the New York Times yesterday. Or is it a couple of days ago?

It's in the last few days. It's called A New Way to Choose Your Next Book by Alexandra Alter and Elizabeth Harris. So you might check that out. Okay. I'm going to leave you on one and you're you know if you if you got a weak heart or a weak a weak stomach don't turn off now this will only take 30 seconds it's a new study done in england and the study is on food delivery workers you know your fast food delivery services which have just taken off because of the pandemic right huge and it will probably

remain huge now for a good amount of the rest of time I'm only going to read one example of this, but they did a study of food delivery workers to try and get a sense of what happens when they pick up the food, they get in their car on their bike and they take it to the final spot, the delivery. And are they ever tempted? And the only question I'm going to read from and give you the answer is, are they ever tempted to maybe, you know, eat some of that thing themselves that they're taking somewhere?

You are going to be shocked to find out. As the article says, and it's in something called Study Finds. You can see it online. Ordering takeout tonight, it might be a good idea to go pick it up yourself. A new survey finds eight in 10 food delivery workers admit to eating part of their customer's order.

Now don't look for a bite mark in the pizza, but you might count those fries. I leave you with that thought. Tomorrow, Brian Stewart will be by with the latest on the situation in Ukraine. Wednesday is Smoke Mirrors and the Truth with Bruce Anderson. Thursday is your opportunity to weigh in with your thoughts on whatever stories you might want. The Mansbridge podcast at gmail.com is where to write. And Friday, of course, is Good Talk with Chantelle Hebert and Bruce Anderson.

Don't order any food. Okay, that's it for this Monday. I'm Peter Mansbridge. Thanks so much for listening to The Bridge. Talk to you again in 24 hours.