The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Provocative Words From Michael Ignatieff on Ukraine

Episode Date: February 28, 2023

He's been gone from Canadian politics for almost a decade, but Michael Ignatieff's insight on international affairs is read around the world.  His latest provocative thoughts on Ukraine meet with Brian Stewart's approval on today's episode.  Also, is Vladimir Putin acting nuttier than ever? Also, two end bits you won't forget.

And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. You are just moments away from the latest episode of The Bridge. What's up with Putin? Some say he's acting nuttier than ever. Let's get to it. Ransbridge here. It is Tuesday, and for the past year, most days, on Tuesdays, we've talked about the Ukraine war. And at our side throughout all that has been the noted former foreign correspondent, former war correspondent. As some people say, he's still both a foreign correspondent and a war correspondent because he's been covering this story so well. It's Brian Stewart, of course, long-time colleague of mine, and glad to be with him again on the bridge on most Tuesdays. Last Tuesday, Brian had the audacity to take the day off and head south for a little beach time.

But I could tell he was never far away from his laptop checking on the situation in Ukraine because he sent me the occasional note on what he was thinking about in terms of what was happening. So it's catch-up time with Brian. We're going to get to it right away. And you'll find it interesting because we, at least I hope you'll find it interesting, because we start with a name from the past, a name from our past.

Wondering who it is? Well, let's get right at it. Here it is, this week's conversation with Brian Stewart. So Brian, I'm going to start this by talking for a moment about Michael Ignatieff. Now, if that sounds odd to some people, it's because he wrote, you know, one of his many brilliant articles. And Michael Ignatieff is known for a number of things, but he's a great writer, and he's written some brilliant articles on international affairs over, you know, the past couple of decades. Well, he has a really interesting one that was just in the Globe and Mail on Saturday,

and anybody who's looking for it can just go back to the Globe to find it. But the headline was, Not politicians, not sanctions, only the battlefield will determine when the war will be over. It's quite a remarkable column. It's not a long column. But it's remarkable in the sense that we tend to forget, especially some of those of us who gave him a pretty rough time when he was a politician.

Yes, right. That this guy is a smart guy with lots to offer in the discussion and debates around current events. He's got an ability to crystallize opinion and thought where others can muddy it and just muddy it all up. He crystallizes it to the essence. Yeah. Tony, what struck you in the article? I'm going to read a paragraph that struck me, but you go first. Okay. He was talking about the voices that are rising,

that more now calling for negotiation, the Kissinger crowd saying, let's get on with negotiations. And he writes, there's nothing to negotiate now. The battlefield will decide. The Russians will end the war when they achieve their objectives or when the battlefield tells them that they can't. The Ukrainians will end the war when they repulse the invader or when the battlefield tells them they can't. It comes down to that simple formula, unfortunately. And is that the case? Is it as simple as that? Is it as black and white as that? I think it is, which is, you know, really a lot of people now are more worried about the Russian defense than the offense, because if Ukraine can't really break through and pull off a successful offense across Russian lines, that means they're not going to to start looking for a way out of the war because the pressure on Ukraine then from other countries saying, look, you've got to negotiate.

We can't go on supplying weapons like this. The West will supply weapons to Ukraine as long as it's winning, as long as it has a promise of winning. But if it shows that it suddenly can't, then we're into a very dangerous area where the cries for negotiations will keep rising. Russia will feel the West is losing its will. And the West may indeed start losing its will the more it hears itself calling for negotiations that seem so murky and muddy. Here's my favorite paragraph from the Ignatieff column in the Globe and Mail once again last Saturday. And he's also in this talking about the argument to

try and make a deal. So here's what he says. Wars, experts are telling Ukrainians, often end with bad deals. Korea ended that way, and 80 years later, one side is a crazy, bankrupt parody of a dictatorship, while the other is a rich, pluralist, free society. If Ukrainians face the facts, says Steve Kotkin of Stanford, they could end up in a generation with something that looks like the Korean Peninsula. On one side, a Russian regime, dictatorial, nuclear, possibly demented, but effectively deterred by NATO.

And on the other, a prosperous, free, and rebuilt Ukraine, belonging to the EU and kept safe with an army of their own, equipped with our best weapons. Interesting. You're weapons. Interesting. You're right. Okay. That's our plug for the Globe and our plug for Michael Ignatieff. Let's move on.

You kind of touched on it a minute ago in that discussion about the paragraph you chose, but we have spent the last few weeks a few months really talking about the expected russian offensive well it seems like they tried one but it hasn't hasn't made much of a mark no this is interesting uh the big the big difference i noticed in analysts since before i took a break and when i came back, is there's much more worry now, not about a Russian offensive, but about a Russian defensive. Because while the Russians don't appear to have the necessary well-trained troops, armor, good tactics, command structure, logistics to pull off the great breakthrough offensives,

several of them, that were threatened just a couple months ago or even a couple some weeks ago. They have been spending months digging the trenches, putting in the anti-tank traps, laying the anti-tank mines, bringing up zones of fire to be a very formidable defense. And while Ukraine is not planning an offensive, apparently, until April or May, and as we'll be getting together a lot of armor and the new stuff it's been getting, whether it will be able to break through, there's nothing harder and more than breaking through this kind of long, well-prepared positions. And even with heavy artillery, Ukraine is going to find it very costly in casualties and possibly not able to be

done with a weight of troops and armor that can actually win back a lot of those territories. And if it fails in the offensive so that comes the problem i was talking about that a lot of hope for ukraine and and support for ukraine perhaps will start leaking out that's for you know i i that's why i am quite worried about uh the russians getting stronger every day every week every month in these defensive lines. And the Ukrainians desperately trying to get the weapons in from the West. They keep begging for and getting drip, drip, drip, slow additions to their strength. They face a very formidable task.

And, you know, the other bottom line to that is if Ukraine cannot win back those territories seized by Russia in the Donbass in the south, they are going to face a potentially impoverished future. Because a lot of their most valuable minerals, their industries, their farmlands and that are in those occupied territories. It would lose that. It would lose that it would lose that plus it would become even harder to defend in future from a you know a more even more rapacious russia down the road a few years maybe five years or so so there it's a terrible terrible situation ukraine has to win as much of that territory back as possible so as not to be impoverished and weakened in future for the Cold War that is now upon us. But to do that, it's going to take a lot more casualties and a huge effort that

military analysts are quite sweaty a palm over. It's going to have to be a very, very major, brilliant operation. Late last year, you talked to us about the damage that has been done in Ukraine, across Ukraine, especially in the major cities, and the incredible rebuild that was going to be necessary. And you suggested at that time it was approaching, it could approach a trillion dollars to rebuild Ukraine. I've had more than a few notes from people since then saying,

wow, really, that much? Well, not only is it now turning out to clearly be that much on other people's analysis, but also there seem to be indications that the planning is already underway on how to pull this off, how to pull off a rebuild. Yes, and this is what I would call a really good story, because we need that. You don't wait for the end of a war to start your post-war planning, your post-war rebuild. A lot of lessons were learned from the Second World War. And in fact, very high level planning is going on between the Ukrainians, the Americans, the French, the Germans, the World Bank,

the United Kingdom, on how to do this, how much it's going to take. Probably a trillion dollars will have to be raised. 128 billion alone, 128 billion, that is, just on infrastructure and housing to be repaired. And what's striking here is people say, oh my gosh, you know, a country in so many ruins and in such awful shape, the future must be eternally awful. But in actual fact, you know, Ukraine has been very badly battered in this war, but it's not as badly battered as the European continent was in 1945. And one of the strange things about the great post-war, the Second World War, is how relatively rapid the swing back to prosperity actually became. In fact, the French started to use the term the glorious 30 for the years between 1945 and 1975, because France and the rest of Europe,

after help from the Marshall Plan, of course, very big help from the US and Marshall Plan, and from Canada as well, really went into a kind of prosperous cycle that did everything seen not only just pre-war, but for decades before the Second World War. And that was a glorious kind of period creatively, artistically, intellectually for Europe, for spirit, for internationalism, and the rest of it. So post-war can offer a lot of really hopeful things to plan for. And one of the things they're doing right now, which I think is so smart, they're working on insurance because who's going to want to go into Ukraine and join in the rebuilding of that, always fearing another drone or missile from Russia. So they're going to have billions upon billions and billions

of dollars are going to be provided to offer insurance for the large scale of building. Planning is well underway already for the infrastructure, for housing. And they have, as we well know now, a very inventive, creative population in Ukraine eager to get on with reviving their future and then their national pride. So I think we're going to see a spectacle in Ukraine after the war, whether it ends this year or next year, which will be really quite inspiring. Societies and cities, in the most part, if they're democratic and if they're honest, actually bounce back far faster than people expect after catastrophes would be the natural catastrophes or war catastrophes. Because people have it in them to really want to rebuild and they get on with it. And Ukraine has this phenomenon now where before the war, they had very few activists.

Now, almost everybody's an activist in Ukraine. They're knitting socks. They're looking after the wounded. They're taking in the homeless. They're helping people with this and with that. So you've got an entire society there now primed to come back with a Ukraine much bigger and better than it was before. This is why getting back a lot of those eastern lands is going to be so important, because they're going to want that wealth, and they're certainly going to want that opening to the Black Sea as well, as much as they can get. So I'm encouraged by this, actually.

The worst thing would be, nobody wants to talk about the post-war because that implies we have to end the war soon. No, you have to get on with planning soon. And in fact, you should get on with rebuilding while the war is underway. One little historical note, you know, the whole British welfare system and the healthcare system that became such a pride for Britain and the world was really planned in 1942-43 by Beveridge, Lord Beveridge. They didn't wait for the end of the war for that. They were working on it even before the V-1 and V-2 missiles were crashing into London. But in some ways, and you've pointed this out to us before, in some ways they weren't planning

on the kind of rebuild of Western Europe until such time as the Marshall Plan came in, which was, what, like 46, 47, when they realized how difficult the situation was. They needed that impetus. And so there's a certain learning from that experience, too. That's a very good point, actually, you're making, because the Marshall Plan, we all remember when the U.S. got together and decided that only major help from the outside, huge billions and billions of dollars to help would prevent Europe from falling into that inflationary horror show and just disaster that followed World War I, but even worse because of

the damage. But the Marshall Plan didn't really arrive in Europe until 1948, the summer of 48. That's three years. This time, the Ukrainian International Recovery Plan, whatever it's going to be called, it'll be something like that, is going to arrive the very week the war ends. I mean, the Czechs will be ready. They'll be signed on the sidelines. They'll be ready to go. The construction equipment will be moving in. Construction designers and workers from around Europe will be joining in the rebuild. And it's going to be quite a spectacular sight to

see. But again, they get help much faster than Europe got it, as you point out, in the 1940s. We're going to take a break here in a second, our sort of halftime break. But before I get there, I want to just pick up on something you said a few minutes ago, because you were talking about the Ukrainians' constant desire from the West to give us more of this, give us more of that. You know, it's been tanks, ammunition, you name it. There have been all kinds of different

things one thing that they keep asking for are jet fighters f-16s in particular from the americans and yet president biden keeps saying no no you're not going to do that they do you know they don't need it they don't need f-16s. What is the issue around this jet fighter issue? Well, the Americans don't want to take Ukrainian attention off the ground war, the armored buildup, the rest of it. They don't think the F-16 will be all that effective in the offense of that should be first and foremost. But it's funny, you know, they're prepared to listen to the Ukrainians in almost everything except when it comes to, could you please give us? I have to say, you know, I found it a little bit raw of President Biden, whose

military couldn't quite handle the Taliban in Afghanistan and couldn't hold Kabul for a decent exit to be saying they're going to decide what the Ukrainians need or not need. I mean, really, I think one of the great, I think, problems of this war is the West has always gone through this phase. They get asked for something, they say, oh, no, no, no, no, no, we can't provide that. It could escalate. Then a few months later, they start saying, well, we're going to consider it. Yes, we think the Germans and the Poles, maybe the Canadians will send something in. Well, yes. And then they say, okay, yes, we're going to give them new weapons. Of course, unfortunately, those weapons won't be there for another six months or maybe even a year,

like the American Abrams tanks. So, there a kind of, I can see the Ukrainians, well, thankful on one hand, must be sometimes pulling their hair out and saying, how much, what are they not getting? But the longer they delay giving us the good stuff to fight, the harder the fight is going to be, and the longer the fight is going to be. The thing about it, the F-16s,

or any jet fighter of that significance, you can get them there in a hurry. But you can't necessarily fly them there in a hurry in terms of the Ukrainian pilots. They're not trained on F-16s. And this isn't like, you know, a rent-a-car where you can sort of go out to the lot and get into anything and drive away with it. You know, something as sophisticated as a jet fighter like an F-16, it takes pilots, even proven pilots, you know, anywhere from one to three years

to learn how to fly these things. They could probably shorten it to six months, but why isn't that six months started now? In fact, why didn't it start back in December, which means maybe then they'd be flying them in the summer. This time, what, they're going to be flying them by next Christmas? But your point is well taken. I mean, these are very, very complex weapons systems, of course. And the other part of them, they're very difficult to maintain. It's not just the pilots they need to train. They have to spend many months training the Ukrainian ground crew that are going to have to fix the F-16s.

Almost modern fighter planes have to be overhauled almost after every one, two, or three flights. They're that delicate. So all of this has to be done. But why is the preparation not already done? Well, I think maybe the, I think too, there's an element here makes me suspect the Americans also want to hold the stick as well as the carrot with the Ukrainians and, you know, hold off the fighter planes until the time comes. Well, we might give you the planes, but first we need to see you negotiate an end to this

war or get on with that. And that will be what they might have to sign on to to get such advanced weapons, in which case they may simply say, keep your weapons, we fight on. Who knows? Of course, they could just get Tom Cruise to come over there, and he could deal with it. Or yourself, you know, you trained. That's right.

You were up in an F-18, which is more than I ever wanted to go. Yes, twice. And that was enough. They're amazing. And those pilots are amazing who fly them. Okay, we're going to take a quick break and then we'll come back. I've got a great question for you on Vladimir Putin. But first, this.

And welcome back. You're listening to the Tuesday episode of The Bridge. It's Brian Stewart Day, of course. Brian's back after a little break down south, catching the sun while we're up here braving the cold. Yeah, right. But Brian's back, and we're talking, obviously, as we have been for most of the last year,

on the war in Ukraine, the Russian invasion of Ukraine and how Ukraine has responded and dealt with the situation. Now, here's my question about our friend, Mr. Putin. I love this question. Here it is. Is Putin acting even nuttier than before? Well, definitely his statements are becoming weirder and weirder and further and further out in the land of who knows what, the dreamland. But in an interview he gave, I think on the weekend to Russian television, he claimed now that the West actually wants to disband Russia. It wants to go in and divide it up and basically erase the ethnic group known as the

Russian people. So they won't even be able to survive as they do today. Hence, Putin wants his nuclear weapons nearby in case the West, in fact, doesn't come in to disband Russia. I mean, one has to either stop and think of the gall of all this or something's really amiss. I mean, Putin must know. He knows that Western militaries, the last thing they have wanted in the last three decades is big defense spending. They dodged every military bullet they were near. They were the least warlike in the entire history of Europe. And the last thing on anybody's mind in the West surely is a concept of spiral down a rabbit hole that one doesn't know how to follow. Or else it's Putin saying, listen, the Russian people seem willing to believe anything I now say.

So why don't I just load it on? loaded on. And it keeps saying over and over, the bigger, bigger lie that Goebbels had in World War II, make the lie bigger all the time, and people are more inclined to believe it. Seems strange to us, but that seems to sometimes work in a wartime scenario. The irony, of course, of him saying that about what the others are trying to do to Russia is exactly what he was trying to do to russia is exactly what he was trying to do to ukraine right moving and raising the ukrainian yes and his officials were denying the ukrainian people even existed as a people they were just basically uh you know one of these should be russians and uh the sooner they lost their sovereignty and became demilitarized and under

the kind control of the Kremlin, the better, which was the reason behind the invasion. But here he's turned it around now to see somehow Russia. But Russia always tends to play this card, whether it's valid or not. The world is coming after them. They're defending a special kind of spirituality called Russianness, the Russian soil, Russian mother, Russian religion. And the world is jealous of it and wants to eradicate it. It's never ever based on anything realistic. Obviously, in the Second World War, it was. But, you know, plenty of other times, it wasn't. It was just always the claim.

But now, it's a kind of outrageous claim that one has to really wonder either the mental mentality here has slipped a few more critical notches, or else the line is just becoming so second nature and so expanded that you have to ask, who on earth could ever sign a peace agreement with somebody with this weird way of viewing the world and viewing the truth? It's hard to believe that there could ever be a treaty signed or negotiated with him given his record on, well, on Ukraine. In other countries, like Georgia and Crimea. Exactly.

All of those. It's been interesting watching the television pictures of the last week or so with him, because he had that kind of State of the Union thing where he had all the different people from the party and the, I guess, various local governments in attendance, and they were all very, you know, they were clapping and smiling and all that. But the picture that struck me the most was a meeting he had shortly after that

where he's changed his his tactics i remember a year ago when he'd sit at a table with you know x number of uh officials he was at one end all by himself and they were all way down at the other end it was sort of you know it was said that it was that way because of covid because of the pandemic but it appeared more that he just wanted to be he didn't want to be too close to anybody. Last week, there was a picture of him at a table with officials, and they were all together. He was just one of the people at the table. And just as the visual impact of that, compared with what we'd seen a year ago, was really interesting. It was, and you'd almost think he'd go the reverse and want even more separation

because there's this curious ability in Russia and other countries as well, but certainly in Russia, very pronounced, to blame the officialdom, the bureaucracy, but not the top man in the Kremlin. Things went wrong not because of Stalin, but because of those wretched fools underneath him that he used to eliminate at great numbers. Whereas now, Putin seems to want to be amongst the very crowd that Russians will be grumbling amongst themselves, seem to be making things worse and not better. It's strange. He's a

very hard man to predict now, to say the least. Okay, here's your last question for this week, Brian. I got it in the mail a couple of weeks ago, and I read it on the air, and the question was basically, how do you at a time like this, with the kind of world and so many different ugly situations, and especially this situation in Ukraine, how do you maintain hope for the future? Now, I kind of stumbled through an answer as best as I could give, but I know this is a question that you've faced more than a few times

in all of the many different stories that you've covered and ugly international situations that you've covered where people are left going, I give up. I just can't see the future. I have no hope. How do you answer that? Well, I do get asked that a lot still. The thing to remember is after massive catastrophes or in wars, one also runs into the most extraordinary people, kind people, you know, angelic people almost, people who go out of their way in ways that are astonishing at any time. You see the morale of the people sustained when hardship, neighbors helping neighbors. There's a disaster down one end of the block everybody runs out to help sometimes too many people run out to help uh it is you know

it's and it's it's the ability of people to endure be kind to each other to dream ahead as the ukrainians are doing right now dreaming of the future Ukraine, the future world for their children they'll enjoy. The marriages are on the increase. People are even in war saying this is going to get better. We're going to make a good world. And that's what referring back again to what I said, if somebody had walked through Europe in 1945, the sheer horror and loss of hope would have been overwhelming. Walked there 10 years later, and the place was absolutely booming, and a whole new enjoyment of life and belief in life and what governments can do and what people can do for each other was kind of on the uptick

and booming. So hang on to that hope because it will revive. It's already there. It's already working in the streets and it will revive as a society much faster than people expect. And, you know, if you can't, if you have a hard time believing that could possibly be the case, Brian's right about, you know, what things look like in much of Europe in 1945.

I mean, the most famous pictures are usually of Berlin in May 1945 and how the city was hollowed out, how the downtown core of Berlin was just an empty shell of buildings. But they weren't alone. There were other cities, many of them, across Europe that were like that. And yet, as Brian says, 10 years later, you know, those cities were rebuilt. And I still have a hard time looking at them, those pictures from 45, and you think it couldn't possibly, they couldn't possibly rebuild this.

And yet they did. They did. They did. You know, and the children who went and endured war, went on to have good lives, look back on sometimes the lives, even in the rubble, playing amongst the rubble. So many British kids would tell me, of course, there were fun times. We had so many hiding places. I mean, people find a way to be kind, find a way to find hope, find a way to have joy. And, you know, five or six or ten years after the war, they can be having some of the best years that country has experienced pretty well for decades. I mean, Ukraine hasn't really had a very pleasant history, has it, going back through the whole 20th century and the new one. I think its future is going to be much kinder to it than it was, say, certainly during the Cold War, the first Cold War.

And even in the many years when they struggled against corruption and all the evils of the fallen Soviet Union. They're going to be much better in future, I think. Well, we'll embrace those thoughts as we close out this latest segment of Brian's thoughts on the Ukraine story. Brian, as always, glad you're back, but thanks for doing this. Okay, Peter, thank you. You know, I love that phrase that Brian just used. I don't know whether I love it, but it does kind of make you sit back.

And that phrase was the second Cold War. Now, for those of us, you know, who lived through the first Cold War, or as we knew it then to be the Cold War, I don't think we ever thought we'd be hearing in our lifetimes that phrase again, as like the Second Cold War, like the Second World War, like the Second Gulf War. And here we are approaching what we think is the Second Cold War. In parts of the world, it already does exist. Okay, we have time for a couple of end bits.

I know how much you like these. And if you're new to the bridge, end bits are little stories that we've seen along the way that aren't getting much attention, but are kind of interesting. Some of them are just interesting. Some of them of interesting. Some of them are just interesting. Some of them are funny. Some of them are, well, they provoke all kinds of different emotions.

So here's one I thought you might like. The headline is, Would You Like to Live Longer? Well, we'd all like to live longer. Would you like to live longer would you like to live longer consider planting a tree you know how we always when you're growing up your mother, your father, your grandmother would say to you

apple a day keeps the doctor away and so you'd chow down on an apple well this story in colorado local news is put down the apple it's the tree that can help keep the doctor away in urban areas trees shade sidewalks absorb air pollution deaden traffic noise and are simply beautiful to look at and by removing climate warming carbon from the atmosphere, trees are good for the planet, too. It turns out that the health benefits of all that greenery add up. A recent study in Portland, Oregon, not far south from beautiful B.C.,

found that fewer people died in neighborhoods where a non-profit planted more trees. And we have lots of non-profits planting trees in different parts of our country too, so I assume this runs true. The paper by U.S. Forest Service researchers adds to a burgeoning research group on the health benefits of living in the countryside. Their findings boil down to a recipe for policymakers to plant more trees. This is interesting. I'll read just a little bit more of it.

As you look out your window at your trees in your neighborhood. Like, I hope you get that. I know we get that in Stratford, not so much in Toronto, because we're kind of in the middle of the concrete jungle. And there was a huge fight in this part of Toronto over the cutting down of half a dozen trees near the old Osgoode Hall building to replace that area with a new subway station. And this is, you know, part of the reason. City trees are an essential part of public health infrastructure and should be treated as such, said Jeffrey Donovan,

the Forest Service researcher who led the study, which was published in the December issue of the journal Environmental International. For three decades, Portland's non-profit Friends of Trees planted nearly 50,000 oak, dogwood, and other tree species across the city, providing Donovan and his colleagues with detailed data on how the canopy has changed over time. Using a mathematical model by controlling for factors such as race, income, age, and education, the team found that for every 100 trees planted, there was about one fewer non-accidental death per year. Let's get those trees planted.

I'll read that last part again. The team found that for every 100 trees planted, that's not a lot of trees planted. For every 100 trees planted, there was about one fewer non-accidental deaths per year. I can see you right now. You're heading for the seed plant. You want some tree seeds. You're better still. Get a tree that's already a couple years old and plant it.

Okay, here's the other end bit for today. Well, let me just read it first, then I'll say something. This one comes out of Tampa, Florida. And it's in florida.com. Florida Senator Lauren Book filed a new bill intended to protect animals by making it illegal to let a dog be in a driver's lap or stick their head out of a window in the car while driving. Additionally, the bill, Senate Bill 932, includes provisions to make it illegal to have a dog transported on the running board, fender, hood, or roof of a motor vehicle, as well as in a trunk or enclosed cargo space. Dogs may also not be transported in a car that is being towed.

On top of these restrictions, the bill would require dogs be secured in a crate appropriate for the size of the dog while in a motor vehicle on a public roadway, be restrained with a safety harness or seat belt other than a neck restraint, or be under the physical control of someone other than the driver, if in a car. Now, you know, I hate to keep using that phrase when I was a kid, but when I was a kid, it used to scare me to see little, you know, animals, dogs, especially with their head out the window of a car driving by. Because I was so afraid the dog was going to fall out of the car or jump out of the car if provoked by something. And we all know what would happen in that

case, especially if the car was moving. So that's one part of the bill, but it is not the only part of the bill. Here's one. Shifting over from dogs, the bill also sets rules for cat owners, making declawing of cats illegal, if not for a necessary medical therapy. If a cat is declawed or partially declawed, the state would be able to fine the owner $1,000. What do you think of that? You know, I used to have a very close friend whose cat was declawed, and that declawing was as a result of the cat used to tear up the furniture

and the rugs, and some cats are prone to do that, right? So what did they do? They had it declawed. Now, the problem there is you pretty well can't let the cat outside then because that's their first line of defense is their clause, right? And they're not going to fare very well if they get into a situation where they need to defend themselves. So two things.

In Florida, anyway, Florida leading the charge on a number of fronts, So two things in Florida anyway. Florida leading the charge on a number of fronts, some of them not so fancy and not so, well, very debatable. Certainly controversial on some of the laws that they're passing right now. But there you go, two of them in Florida. One for dogs, one for cats. Those are your rain bits today. Food for thought. Tomorrow, it's Smoke, Mirrors, and the Truth. Bruce Anderson will join us. Thursday, your turn. You got some thoughts on anything from declawing to Ukraine to yesterday's tour around the world with Janice Stein.

Drop me a line. The Mansbridge Podcast at gmail.com. The Mansbridge Podcast at gmail.com. Also on Thursday, the Random Ranter returns with his take on something. I don't know what it is this week. We'll see. I know it's not going to be on the political leaders. He's done that movie.

We're into new territory. And Friday, of course, good talk. And this week with Chantel hiking across the hills and valleys and rivers and streams of Iceland, Susan Delacorte from the Toronto Star will sit in for Chantel and joined by Bruce and myself. And we'll have a go around on whatever topics we think are worthy for this week.

So that's it. I'm Peter Mansbridge. This has been the bridge for this Tuesday. Thanks so much for listening. We'll talk to you again in 24 hours. Thank you.