The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Panic Buttons for MP's? This Is What It's Come To.

Episode Date: June 21, 2022

Those on Parliament Hill who protect parliamentarians have  asked those they protect to start carrying panic buttons with them wherever they go.  It's yet another sign of the times.   Plus Brian Stewart's regular weekly commentary on Ukraine -- this week Brian's focus is on the "resistance" or the "guerilla" warfare the Ukrainians are waging against Russia.

And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. You are just moments away from the latest episode of The Bridge. Panic buttons for MPs. Really? Is that where we've got to? And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here in Stratford, Ontario. This is the bridge for a Tuesday, and Tuesdays mean Brian Stewart. And Brian will be by with his latest commentary on the war in Ukraine. A very different kind of topic today when we talk to Brian about that conflict. But first I want to say something else for a couple of minutes because the headline in the papers today, or at least in some of the papers and some of the

news services, really does give us a sense of where we are in the country these days. The parliamentary protective services, these are the people who are assigned to protecting where we are in the country these days. The Parliamentary Protective Services, these are the people who are assigned to protecting our parliamentarians, whether they be members of the House of Commons or members of the Senate. The Parliamentary Protective Services, who were formed as a more complete unit after the shootings on Parliament Hill, you know, less than 10 years ago now.

Well, they have come up with a new defense system, if you wish, for parliamentarians. And this came primarily after a number of incidents in the last year or two. I mean, the Prime Minister was stoned, stones were thrown at him last year during the election campaign, and I think it was in London, Ontario. And then just last month, the NDP leader, Jagmeet Singh, was verbally and to a degree physically harassed in Peterborough, Ontario. And you just have to look at the video to know that was a tense moment and an ugly moment. But there have been other examples. The public safety minister, Marco Mendocino has let it

be known now that he's received a number of death threats as a result I guess of his role as

public safety minister his role during the so-called freedom convoy the truckers convoy that held up

things in in Ottawa for three weeks or so and caused border problems in a number of other places. Well, the Parliamentary Protective Services says one of the ways to deal with this is for MPs to be able to immediately signal to them

that they have a problem. And how are they going to do that? Well, you've probably seen ads on television for the elderly, who if they wear a thing around their neck with a push button, it hooks up to their alarm system and it will tell the monitoring agency that they need help. Perhaps they've fallen. Perhaps there's an issue of some kind in their home that they can't handle and they're worried about it.

Or they've had some kind of a medical alert. And that button signals the monitoring agency. You then call an ambulance and, you know, help is on the way. Well, similar to that is a panic button that the protective services people want all MPs, all parliamentarians, to carry, not just when they're around Parliament Hill, but anywhere they go in the country. And this will signal

to them that there's an issue of some kind. And they'll respond, one assumes, immediately. Well, you know, that, as I said, this signals a sense of where we are, not just in the world, but where we are here at home in peaceful old Canada, that we've got to give MPs, all MPs, and Senators, I guess, these panic buttons to alert security

that they need help, and they need it right away. So I don't know what more there is to say about that other than to say that's really a sad example of where we are and what things have come to in terms of the way we respond to public officials or at least some of us have responded to public officials. I don't know. I never thought I would see the day that we'd imagine something like that happening in Canada.

I understand security. I understand the need for it. I mean, I've covered enough prime ministers in my day to see what happens when they travel and the kind of arrangements that need to be taken for it. I mean, I've covered enough prime ministers in my day to see what happens when they travel and the kind of arrangements that need to be taken for them. But, you know, every parliamentarian on Parliament Hill having to walk around with a panic button. All right. Enough on that. Let's move to Ukraine. The story does not change really significantly this week. There is've been lucky enough to have Brian Stewart with us almost since day one to help us on Tuesdays, usually Tuesdays, with a sense of what's happening, what's different, what's new about this conflict.

And today, we're moving into an area that we haven't touched before. And in some ways, it's like watching a movie, a war movie, or reading a book about past conflicts. Because this is, at times, the nitty-gritty of war. Well, enough from me. Unfortunately, as often happens, I have these long winded introductions and long winded questions, especially when I sit down with my good pal, my good

old pal, Brian Stewart. We've worked together for almost 50 years and I've always been in awe of his experiences as a war correspondent and as a foreign correspondent and I am again on this day. So let's get to our conversation. Here it is this week with Brian Stewart. All right Brian we're going to talk about an element of the Ukraine-Russia conflict that doesn't always get talked about, but it's a real player in terms of the way this conflict is unfolding. And that is,

you can call it any number of terms, guerrilla warfare that's going on on the part of Ukrainians, both inside Ukraine and to a bit inside Russia as well. You can call it, you know, resistance. You can call it any number of things and and history has shown that this works everything from the french resistance you know to the algerian

guerrilla warfare that took place central america different parts of europe in the second world war um so why don't you before we get to what's happening in Ukraine, tell us about it. You're the expert on these. You're the guy with the history in terms of following this kind of stuff. Tell me about some of the great guerrilla campaigns of the past that we tend to look at. I think I've named some of them, but you can be much more specific. Yeah, really, it was in the 20th century that guerrilla warfare, or long warfare, people's warfare, there are various terms, came into its own. I think one thing certainly are the Vietnamese, for instance,

who successfully waged guerrilla wars against the Americans, the French, and even the Chinese. Of course, China's own war, the guerrilla wars. You mentioned Algeria pretty well around the whole decolonization movement. You had here and there areas of guerrilla warfare. And of course, during the Second World War, it was a major part of the fight against Nazism and the Italian fascists as well uh the fight of people who had been occupied who had been conquered to try and win back through various techniques

their own power and help also any help rescuers coming in from outside like the allies and it all tends to follow a normal uh beginning of a sort of modest beginning where attacks are made with grenades on a police department or a cafe where known collaborators hang out and then you get into bombing railways and then next to that you start to bomb the trains and what tends to happen in this kind of guerrilla war, and I think everybody can picture in their own mind, having seen movies about it, is that the guerrilla war itself draws more and more of the enemy troops into a counterinsurgency, trying to fight the guerrilla war. And what that does, of course, to very ruthless guerrilla commanders is give them more and more opportunities to kill the enemy. The more soldiers the occupying force or the dictatorship throw into counter guerrilla warfare, the more soldiers there are in the streets to be sniped at, shot at, blown up and what have you. And, you know,

Ukraine has been studying this over history. It's long history. In the Second World War, the Ukrainian lands were part of the bloodlands of Central Europe, where there was ferocious patriotic partisan fighting against the Nazis, for instance. And even after the war, there was a fair bit of guerrilla activity against the Soviet armies that moved in. So it's an area that is you know the people fighting today are the grandsons and granddaughters of in many cases patriotic fighters i mean zelensky's own uh grandmother was involved grandfather was involved in the the guerrilla warfare so it's a it's a it's a country that knows that kind of awful tragic warfare very well and the ukrainians have for at least eight years now been studying what they would do if the russians attack and they've

actually set up a whole core of resistance behind something called the special operations force and i don't know when you want to get into that oh yeah no i do want to get into it and i want to i i want to get a sense of what they're actually doing in these past couple of months but just before i get there um and you touched on it in your last couple of sentences there this sounds like it's it's heavily organized i mean is it heavily organized or is it you know partisans who are operating kind of on their own who were doing this what tends to happen historically is there a number of separate partisan guerrilla movements uh get said going and then they slowly come under a central command in the communist experiences uh of course that pretty well has been a central leadership from the very beginning, a very autocratic central leadership.

But for instance, in Algeria, there were scores of different underground Mecque and guerrilla warfare groups in the country. And it wasn't until three or four years of fighting had gone by that they began to really coalesce very strongly behind de Gaulle and the French government. But you could count probably 15 different resistance movements in France during the Second World War, some very effective, some not so effective, and some highly questionable indeed.

And that was pretty much the same across occupied Western Europe, for instance. In the Eastern Front, the Russians and the Soviets controlled guerrilla activities absolutely very firmly, and they were extraordinarily effective they had old armies of up to 10 000 um you know fighting in the countryside against the the germans and blowing up trains and causing major major disruption to the germans in western europe there was a lot of disruption of of course, but never to that extent.

So that tends to be the force. Now, a country that expects to be invaded, as Britain did in 1940, we tend to forget, there was always a chance we'd be invaded. They set up an underground that was going to go to ground when the Germans arrived in Britain. It was never used, but they had dug oats, dug in fields fields and they had a command structure and the rest of it and the ukrainians who do a lot of studying of british military history and western military history uh really set up several years ago a command structure knowing that it might very very likely be called into use uh if Russians invaded. And how much preparations they've done in terms of burying weaponry and isolating certain people who would play a role, we don't know yet. Because at this phase of the fighting, it's all very much in the dark.

It's all whispers. It's hide-and-seek warfare at the most extreme, where even neighbors don't know who's with the resistance and who isn't what do we know about what uh what ukraine is doing in this in this guerrilla warfare well seven or eight years ago it set up something called the special operations force with three branches to it military action supply and logistics and psych ops psychology warfare and what it has done apparently is it set the the light framework for the fight to come it's already uh there are grenade attacks there are but there have been one or two attacks to try and wipe out collaborators on the russian side who turned traitor against ukraine uh there's a attempted blowing off of railway lines of bridges

uh that kind of thing and there has been at least one attack inside russia itself though in fact many attacks have been suspected where an oil storage plant and by i think it's brand ask is the name of the city was blown up well inside russia and they think that was a a guerrilla attack of ukrainian underground but the ukrainians of course refused to take any credit for that they don't even mention it they have nothing to say about it so i think at this stage of the fight is more a question of lining up your forces, making sure that you don't get wiped out in the first days by a very ruthless enemy that'll just come in and basically arrest or do something worse to anyone even suspected of a resistance. So you want people in a way to go about their

private life, their quiet life, even if they are in fact part of the resistance. You have meetings at night deep in forest now i think what gives the ukrainians a certain well there's advantages and disadvantages in the current situation for the ukrainian the big disadvantage is the area has been turned into a virtual wasteland i mean the russian mode of attack has been as we've all seen massive artillery attacks air attacks at least in the eastern part of the country, and just devastation of villages, of towns, of cities. So you have a population that may be completely exhausted and worn out and weary, you know, in no shape right

off the bat to launch a, you know, major support for guerrilla movement. So I think in the early stages, they'll probably rely upon their own commandos who are living underground there. We don't know, but that will be the norm. And that's certainly what they've been training for. Their big advantage is, if you look at a map and see all this pink shaded area where the Russians have gone in,

they actually have far too few troops to man a front line that, if you can believe it, now runs for 1,100 kilometers. I worked at, oh, that's the distance between Quebec City and Detroit. That's the front line the Russians have to operate on and control 20% of the second largest country in Europe. So the occupied area already is fairly large. And the Russians don't have the manpower, really, to operate at the front and do a very effective counterinsurgency role in the rear.

So I think a lot of the rear areas are hardly policed at all, are hardly occupied by counterinsurgency troops. I think the Russians will rely upon rather ruthless activity to try and terrorize people in the quiet, but I don't think they have the manpower to very much enforce that if you have a determined and skilled

and well-trained resistance, which I think the Ukrainians have and have spent years developing. Certainly, they've got the kind of weapons and you know explosives and and small arms and the rest of it which they're very good at and know how to use but that's what i was going to actually ask you is there's only so much we can know about what's going on with these groups but how are they being armed i mean in terms of uh weaponry and ammunition could some of the materials that you know countries like canada are sending could they end up in the in

hands of these kind of forces well very much so i mean in some sense there's uh there's often a what's called a stay by hot stay behind force when the uk Ukrainians had to pull back, they would leave a force in place with the weaponry already in place. Also, guerrillas tend to attack and steal weapons wherever they can. And they can very effectively often resupply themselves

by knocking off convoys of enemy troops or even individual soldiers. They have helicopters that come in at night and can drop supplies to them that kind of thing uh i would add that another very very important role of the underground is intelligence of course picking up all the information they can on russian movements now already the ukrainians have such brilliant intelligence coming in from help from the western world and their own. They may not even need that much, but they're certainly getting it from their underground as well. And the other area, too, I would mention is psychological warfare.

What's called psychops is terribly important because here guerrillas can leave behind messages and papers and notices for Russian soldiers to pick up, warning them, we're watching every movement you make. Better get home as soon as you can. Working continually to create a kind of stress where the Russian soldiers, whether they're at the front or in the rear, never feel quite safe wherever they go. That was one of the big factors in the rear, never feel quite safe wherever they go. That was one of the big factors on the Americans in Iraq. But by the way, they never could really feel safe because guerrillas were always around. So even in home bases, you might fear a sudden attack. Often, one of the problems with guerrilla movements is making sure they don't go off too soon. That in france several times

where the french leaders of the underground uh movements basically in london and algiers were warning them trying to convince the various uh mackie groups don't for heaven's sakes rise up yet wait for the invasion and that's exactly what the ukrainians might be telling the underground movement right now we're not ready to counter-attack yet we want to enforce so when we counter-attack bends that's when you create your havoc in the bridges and the railways the roads and then the ambushes and what have you okay so it's a very delicate game to play at time in a very brutal fashion all right before i let you go for this week i i want to get a sense from of your take on this issue of air power and i raise it with you because you were the first to give us a sense that you know this this conflict this war was redefining

the era of the tank in warfare because so many russian tanks were destroyed very early in the going um in this conflict well there's a there's been some recent writing and i refer in particular to one that i saw on the weekend in the uh the telegraph uh in britain uh about questioning the staying power of air power and wondering about the future of air power. And this based on the fact that the Russians, up against a pretty small Ukrainian air force that has been very careful about when it's being used

and where it's being used. But in spite of that, the russians by some calculations have lost 10 percent or have had 10 casualties in their air force um and by some estimates half of the combat aircraft russia has deployed has been have been shot down or otherwise destroyed and it's making people reconsider air power the the future of air power. Do you go that far? No, I don't. I do go to some extent.

I mean, the Russians certainly have lost a lot of top flight planes shot down and the rest of it. But what's striking about the Ukraine war is how little the Russian Air Force has done from the beginning. It wasn't used effectively because they were casually averse. And what is telling about the real danger to future air war is the power now of anti-aircraft fire, both from small man pad, these shoulder fired missiles that go against low-flying planes, medium-flying planes, and missiles like the S-300 that can go to very high altitudes. It has anything but an extremely professional air force, well-trained to the hilt, are just minceme they're they're either going to get shot down or they're going to be too afraid to go in and i think what happened in the ukraine war is that the ukrainian the

russian air force is not nearly as well trained up to western standards as to how to go in and highly complex combined operations flying low flying fast, flying high, using highly precision missiles, the way the Western pilots, so the US, British, Canadian, practice over and over again. They get twice as much training in the West, by the way, that they do in Russia, where they're really quite deficient in that area. So I think what it does say is unless you have an air force that is absolutely trained to the hilt don't go near this kind of a war because anything but as highly skilled air offensive with multiple combinations and assistances and combined ops is going to be an easy prey to fire from the ground much easier than has existed in the past and i think that's what it tells the rest of the world to look carefully

at what the russians are losing but also look very carefully at what the russians are not daring to do because the ukraine doesn't have to wipe out the Russian Air Force. It just has to make it too daring to attack. Having said that, I should add that the Russian Air Force seems to regroup somewhat, and they're being very active in the Eastern Front. And, you know, people are still wondering, okay, Ukraine has about 30 planes left, 30, maybe 40. When is it going to use them at a sudden all-out strike against the Russians, possibly waiting, the same as those guerrilla attacks, for the big counteroffensive that Ukraine still hopes to pull off? And also perhaps waiting for, you know, this long-talked-about possibility of getting some of the planes from some of the NATO countries in Europe that are similar to the planes that the ukraine the ukrainian pilots fly

that hasn't happened yet either right i think the priority for ukraine now is not so much the planes it's any aircraft of the highest technical technical abilities and lots of it and high long-range artillery which to to Ukraine is as effective as aircraft because that can go in 30, 40 miles behind the Russian lines. And with precision, start taking out all those bridges and ammo dumps and supply depots that you set up and concentrations of troops. So what Ukraine really needs most of all right now is more ways to shoot down those Russian planes that do come over in the east, dropping usually dumb bombs, but dropping them on cities, shoot them down, but also fire long range artillery with precision to take all the Russian forces behind the lines. You know, those are the key priority you know i've you know you keep hearing about the the various artillery um

pieces that are being sent to help ukraine including some from canada i'm not sure how how much of the long-range artillery is is coming from canada but you know you go how do you send long-range artillery to the other side of the world into a battlefield. I mean, like, how does that logistically even happen? Heavy air transport can take about two of those giant howitzers at once. You drop them off in Poland. They're driven across the border. They say it takes only 48 hours to move up to the front. But it's perilous 48 hours because, you know, the Russian Air Force has doubled its number of sorties from 250 up to about 400 a day.

And whatever precision missiles has got left, probably not that many. It's using now to target Western howitzers, big cannons, the rest of it. It knocked out a site just over the weekend, in fact. But you can get it up there. What needs to be done, though, people have to realize, you just can't operate these things when they come into your backyard. You need weeks of training to be able to use them. And this is maybe the most important thing of all.

You need almost unbelievable amounts of ammunition. They're firing along that front line i mentioned up to 50 000 shells a day this is like world war one totals thunderous fire and even there's some concern on the russian side that they're going to run out of ammunition and the ukrainians are very concerned in fact more than concerned they're very extremely worried that they can't keep this pace of artillery fire up so even the less glamorous items that don't make the news like sending another 10 000 shells that's now desperately needed and they're going to be a lot of that's a lot of a lot of equipment and weaponry to transport across oceans by air i mean australia's been sending armored vehicles in well how long does that take by air you know right um here's my last question and and it's about that scenario that you just described of how they move um long-range artillery

over but that they have to can be concerned about training so like where does the training happen does that happen in poland do they have to move ukrainian troops into pol have to be concerned about training. So, like, where does the training happen? Does that happen in Poland? Do they have to move Ukrainian troops into Poland to be trained? Because they can't move American or other NATO force troops, including Canadians, into Ukraine to train them. So that training thing is, you know, unless they're doing it by Zoom. This is a good question because there's actually an interesting answer to it perhaps uh it's hard to train them properly in ukraine because you know even training grounds are open

to missile attacks you know basically you know precision missiles uh britain has stepped forward and said it's ready to start training up to a thousand ukrainian soldiers a month thousands of them over months. Why can't that be done in France, in Poland, in Canada, in the United States? I mean, it's not like we're going right into attack Russia within the Ukraine, but at least we've got the training up to speed, which Ukraine demonstrably cannot handle. I mean, they're not getting enough troops in the front line because they don't have enough trainers to train them enough. they're not getting enough troops in the front line because they can't they don't have enough trainers to train them enough they're not getting the high-tech equipment

anything like flowing fast enough because the training takes so long so we start moving ukrainian soldiers out to training grounds in the west and russia won't like it but you know russia's doing a lot of things that the west doesn't like so uh that would be able to start turning around two three four thousand uh ukrainian soldiers and perhaps three weeks to a month to five weeks uh trained and back in their own country and putting this stuff to heavy heavy use remember everybody is now predicting a long war so you better get on with a long-range training plan rather than just a fighting plan. All right.

As always, lots to think about and what you've left us with today, whether it was the, how guerrilla forces are operating or these, this whole question about air power, future of air power and how you arm an army that is rapidly using a lot of, whether it's artillery pieces or ammunition of varying sorts from rifles to those big guns. Anyway, Brian, thank you so much.

And we'll look forward to talking to you again next week. Great, Peter. Thank you. Brian Stewart joining us as he always does, or at least he tries always to on Tuesdays. Has since back in the four months ago when this conflict started. All right, we're going to take a break. When we come back, among other things, is the circus on its way back. and welcome back peter mansbridge here in strafford ontario brian was in toronto by the way if you're wondering where he was um you're listening to The Bridge,

the Tuesday episode on SiriusXM, Channel 167, Canada Talks, or on your favorite podcast platform. All right, time for the Tuesday notes. And we got a couple here today. I'm not sure how many of you are finding yourselves in one of these hybrid situations, those of you who work, in terms of half at home, half at the old office,

whether there's a debate within your office about where you should work, what's the most productive way of working, is it at home, where you kind of set your own schedule? Or is it at the office, where it's very different on a lot of different fronts? And it has pluses and minuses. They both do. I can remember when we started the bridge during COVID, back in March 2020. And it didn't take long.

It was like, I think in the first month, we had a conversation about everything's going to be different here. And when this pandemic finally ends, the way we work, the way we live, the way we play, it's all going to be different. And some warned us, you you know be careful about those assumptions because we often say the world has changed in that moment well there's no question that some things have changed and one of them is this whole idea of where to work and some people some employers are resisting this work from home stuff and uh the flavor the favorite employer of the day these days for the last month or so

has been elon musk and he he kind of set the cat among the pigeons on this issue a few weeks ago and it's still reverberating when he basically suggested that if people don't want to come into work then they probably should find somewhere else to work because he wants them in the office and some of his quotes both from internal memos and on Twitter, read like that. In one memo, it was headlined, remote work is no longer acceptable. He wrote that anyone who wishes to do remote work

must be in the office for a minimum, and I mean minimum, of 40 hours per week, or depart Tesla. This is less than we ask of factory workers. This was in the Guardian, this story, and it's a while ago now, a few weeks ago. But it includes some really interesting stats from our friend Mr. Musk.

He sent a memo in reply to a Twitter follower who was asking for additional comment. You know that Musk is trying to, we think, still trying to buy Twitter. Anyway, this Twitter follower was asking for additional comment to people who think coming into work is an antiquated concept. Musk wrote, well, they should pretend to work somewhere else. He has not been very impressed with some of the working situations at Twitter.

In fact, he suggested, I think it was the San Francisco office, he suggested, yeah, here it is in this Guardian story, he suggested it could be turned into a homeless shelter since no one would show up anyway. So Musk's comments have kind of set the debate full on in some places. I know I'm on the board of a couple of organizations and so far from what I've witnessed there is no problem setting up hybrid operations. In fact, employees and employers,

at least the ones I work with, have been happy with that. And it seems to be working out. We'll see how long that is the case. Because there are, as you well know, different arguments to make on this question of where to work, from home or at the office. But it is happening in a lot of places,

and in a lot of places that I know of, let's say one where I used to work, there is a lot of debate inside. A lot of people basically refusing to come back to work. And managers being a little shy about trying to enforce the pleas that they've been making, that it's time now to get back in the office. We'll see where that ends up.

This story's not over yet. I think there's going to be, there's still going to be some time determining the outcome on this issue. Here's our last issue on our Tuesday notes today. And I, I find this story interesting too, because it's once again, like our first

story, it's a sign of the times. You know, two weeks ago I was down in St. Thomas, Ontario. That's south of London. It's about an hour, hour and 15 minutes from here in Stratford, a couple of hours from Toronto. I was there to play one of my favorite golf courses.

Redtail. A spectacular course. Beautiful. But this story is not about golf. As I was driving through St. Thomas, there's one thing that kind of dominates the skyline at the one edge of St. Thomas. And that is Jumbo the Elephant.

Big, huge statue of Jumbo. Now, Jumbo was supposedly the biggest elephant in the world. And it was the star of the Barnum Circus that traveled North America. And Jumbo, as I said, Jumbo was the star. And not only did it bring in the customers to the three-ring circus, it also was used as kind of a national symbol. P.T. Barnum, when the Brooklyn Bridge opened in, whenever it was in the 1880s, I think,

when the Brooklyn Bridge opened, there was a great deal of concern among New Yorkers. That bridge is never going to hold the weight of traffic. It's going to collapse. And they wanted to see visible proof that in fact it wouldn't. So what did P.T. Barnum do? P.T. Barnum walked jumbo across the Brooklyn Bridge to prove that it could take the weight. So why is there a statue of Jumbo in St. Thomas? Well, the circus was moving by rail. I can't remember from where to where, but let's say it was moving from Detroit to Toronto,

or Toronto to Detroit, one or the other, in that sort of direction, because the rail line was passing through St. Thomas. And it stopped in the middle of the night. And someone determined that, you know, Jumbo needs a little exercise. Jumbo needs to walk it off a little bit. You got to get him out of that car he's in.

And so they did, which was a fateful decision because a train coming in the opposite direction to Jumbo hit Jumbo and he was killed. And the circus world and beyond went into mourning

for this great example of elephants, of the circus, and of the way people felt about this particular elephant. So why am I telling you this story? I mean, when's the last time you went to a circus? I remember distinctly the last time I went to an actual like three-ring circus with, you know, a trampoline act and the acrobats in the air and animals, tigers and lions and elephants. It was in Geneva.

In, I think it was 1979 Geneva in, I think it was 1979 or 78 or 79. I was over there working on a story and I had some hours off and there was a circus in town and I don't think I'd ever been to a circus. And so I went and it was, you know, it was, you know, it was fascinating, but there was always kind of a tinge. It was starting to move in through crowds that, you know, is this really fair to animals, putting them through this?

And that took off through the 60s, 70s, 80s, and there was quite a campaign that animals were being abused and circuses should stop. Well, in fact, circuses did stop. It's been, I think, about five years since the last circus. You know, Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey. They closed in 2017. Just check that. Looking in the Smithsonian Magazine.

SmithsonianMag.com That was 2017. Well, in five short years, organizers of the circus have decided, let's bring it back. But there will be one key difference. No animals. No animals in the new Barnum and Bailey circuses.

And they should start up by next year. They're already in some, you know, not rehearsals exactly, but they're in the planning stages, and there will be rehearsals at some point, and they're trying to model it by looking at the success of Cirque du Soleil, Disney on Ice, those kind of events. And they're holding auditions in cities around the world, like Las Vegas, Ethiopia, Mongolia, to find talent for the 50-plus city tour

that they want to debut in September of 2023, so a little more than a year away. So there you go. They're even going to dabble in TikTok and branded NFTs. They're looking at all the modern ways to attract customers to come back to the circus without circus animals. Another sign of the times we live in. That's it for this Tuesday.

I'm Peter Mansbridge. This has been The Bridge. Tomorrow, Smoke, Mirrors, and the Truth. Last one before we take the summer hiatus. Bruce will join us from Ottawa. Look forward to that discussion. Thursday's opportunity for your turn, your thoughts, your comments on anything we've discussed. Try to get them in by tomorrow night.

I'm going to be leaving early on Thursday. Thursday's a big day in our family. My wife, Cynthia Dale, is opening a show in Toronto at the Winter Garden Theatre. It's a one-woman show. It's kind of her story with song and dance. It should be interesting. She's been working on it for months.

I have no idea what it's like. I've not been allowed to hear or see anything. So that's Thursday night. It's on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. So if you're in southern Ontario or you're in Toronto, go for it. The Winter Garden Theatre. Cynthia Dale. All right.

That's enough. I'm Peter Mansbridge. Thanks so much for listening to The Bridge on this day. We'll talk to you again in 24 hours.