The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - "Shut Up, Man" -- The Race Next Door #8

Episode Date: September 30, 2020

Bruce Anderson joins the pod again for our regular Wednesday Race Next Door.

And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here with the latest episode of the Bridge Daily. It's hump day, Wednesday of week 29. And you know what Wednesdays mean? The Wednesdays mean the race next door. Bruce Anderson will join us from Ottawa in just a few moments time. And you can probably guess what we're going to talk about. But before we get there, I find this an interesting piece of information because it kind of relates in some ways about how Americans feel with 35 days only left in this campaign about their president, at least on a certain issue. And that issue is trust. So the Axios news agency, along with the research firm Ipsos, did a survey of Americans, and they're trying to find out what it would take

for an American to take a vaccine who they'd listened to on trust. All right? So here are the results. If their doctor said, hey, this vaccine that we've come up with is safe, 62% of those surveyed said they would be more likely to take the vaccine. If the FDA, the Food and Drug Administration, which has been involved in certain controversies over this last six months, if the FDA announced that it saw the vaccine as one that was safe to take, 54% said they would more likely take the vaccine because of that.

If they were told the cost was completely covered by insurance, 56% said they would take the vaccine. So here comes the question, and you can probably guess what it is. The question is, if the only person standing there saying this vaccine was safe and you should take it was Donald Trump, how likely would it be that they'd take the vaccine if that was the main promoter of it at that point. So this is Ipsos, world respected research firm, along with the Axios News Agency. They asked that question.

The answer, 19%. That's it. 19%. Say the president's stamp of approval would make them likely to be inoculated from the virus. And of that 19%, of the Republicans who made up that 19%, only 40% of the Republicans were in agreement with that theory, that just the president, their president, their party's leader, if he said it was safe, only 40% of Republicans would find themselves likely to take the inoculation,

which would be designed to prevent them from getting the virus. All right. There's your little bit of information to think about. As promised, it's time for you know what. All right. Those nice notes from Hail to the Chief, which seems in many ways to be odd to play today after watching that debacle last night.

Bruce Anderson joins us from Ottawa, the chair of Abacus Data. Good to talk to you, Bruce. You know, when I got up this morning, I decided I'm going to go back to October of last year and listen to the podcast I did on, I think it was October 7th or 8th of last year in the middle of our election campaign after the English language debate. And it was, well, the word that I used quite a bit, and I wasn't alone in this,

in describing the English language debate in Canada was brutal. That it was, you know, there was a lot of yelling and screaming and stomping on each other, and the moderators seemed to have a hard time controlling what was going on, and just trying to find clips was a difficult thing for most news organizations because of the way that different candidates were jumping in on each other anyway it was kind of universally panned that english language debate and i think you were a part of the panning that was going on as well yeah and so i watched that because there were times last night when i was watching um the american debate where i thought this is

the worst thing i've ever seen. I had to be reminded that's kind of what I was saying about our debate last year. But this one last night, I think, you know, as it turns out, was worse. You know, if you can compare two bad debates. But last night, at times, it was bizarre. It was like, what am I watching here? What the heck is going on? Because trying to pull something useful out of it was really difficult.

I mean, we talked last week about the kind of stakes going in and what we thought each side would do and what their goals were. And, you know, I think everybody kind of agreed that what Trump would try to do is disrupt things, to try and throw Biden off his game. And the way he chose to disrupt was by interrupting and by yelling and by throwing insults, you know, at Biden and his family. He tried all of that stuff, but in the end, it just had this kind of dirty feel to it overall. That is this what is this what democracy has come to that we have a kind of scene like

that? Anyway, that's my opening rant. So why don't you throw yours my way too? Yeah, it was something to behold for sure. And I, you know, I do remember that debate. And I think that with the number of leaders that were on the stage for the Canadian debate, it was always going to be a real challenge to keep them from trying to find a way to interject, take control of the mic, force the cameras to them.

And I think anybody who's helped coach a leader for Canadian debates where there are multiple leaders has been familiar with the tactic of if you start talking, eventually the camera has to come to you, even if it's not your turn. And so it does kind of in the Canadian context often have a bit of a battle royal feel to it. But you almost don't expect that in a debate with two people and one moderator. There was really only three people there. And so it would have been reasonable to expect that, A, the moderator could have had a better handle on

the interruptions by donald trump earlier on and kind of really brought the gavel down and said this can't continue this way i think he should have done that i think he should have been stronger on that earlier and and he wasn't and it continued and got even more out of control, I think. And in watching it, you kind of like if this was two people at a table next to you in a restaurant, you'd want them to leave or at least you'd want one of them to leave because it would be so disturbing, I guess, to watch. Now, I happen to think that the only reason, other than his own kind of emotional kind of lack of control that Donald Trump would have approached last night the way that he did, determined to constantly try to upset the flow of the conversation and interject as much as he did, is he he felt like and was coached to swing for the fences that

he's trailing badly that nothing he's done so far has been able to uh improve the trajectory of the polls for him and that he needed to do uh dramatic things to change the the direction so he did dramatic things but i i think it will have hurt him rather than helped him and maybe quite significantly you know i i watched as i'm sure you did both after the debate and again this morning um some of those who are not necessarily in the trump camp but at least trying to find something out of that mess last night that worked in Trump's favor, it was hard. Most of them seemed to agree, even some Republicans, that this was damaging for them, especially in some of the Senate races, the kind of approach that Trump took last night.

But there's another thing about debates, and you've always pointed this out to me and reminded me of this going into them, that while the numbers may be high for those who actually watch the debate, what really television ads, and do that. Because you can impact the mood, the feeling, the reaction of voters by having an effective media campaign after the debate. You can even change some minds about what people may have thought about your candidate's performance by the way they manipulate those social media ads in particular. So if you were doing that on the Trump side,

was there material there that you could use and that we should expect to see in the, if we're not already seeing it in the days ahead? Yeah, probably. I mean, I think that Trump has been trying to focus on and kind of worry the wound, as they say in boxing, with Biden on the basis that he's not, he's lost a step, that he's not as crisp in his delivery, that his mind kind of wanders a little bit when he's trying to make a point, that he searches for the words that he wants to use. And there was a little bit of that last night, certainly enough that you could

cut a couple of quick TV spots out of it. And that's, you know, if I had to guess, that's probably where you'd look if you were on the Trump side, but there wasn't that much to work with. And I was looking at Donald Trump's tweets this morning, and what he was trying to do was drive home this idea that Biden lost the far left because he didn't embrace the Bernie Sanders AOC agenda. And I'm looking at that and I'm kind of going, that seemed to me to be one of Biden's strategic priorities last night, that roughly 8% of voters who are still undecided, who probably don't like Donald Trump, but worry that the Democrats are too radical a solution. And so Biden, if he, you know, if he had one message to them, it was probably I'm a decent person. He's not. And also, I'm not a radical leftist. I'm a centrist. I'm an old school, find consensus, bring people together. And that's what I'm here to do. So in Trump's attack on Biden this morning, I think he's making another mistake because he's kind of highlighting something that probably is what Biden wanted to highlight a little bit last night. I was also thinking last night as well, I was watching this, Peter, I don't know if you remember this debate where, I think it was the last one where I was actually kind of part of a small coaching team for one of the leaders or a prep team. And it was for Jean Charest. And it was a

debate where one of the moderators fainted. And we had this kind of opportunity because the broadcast was interrupted. The debate was interrupted for a period of time. I forget how long it was. It was a while. My memory sort of says 20 minutes or something like that. And we were able to kind of retire to the little holding rooms that they have. It was at the National Conference Center in Ottawa.

And that was an opportunity to kind of say, well, how are we doing? What do we feel about this or that or the other thing? And I couldn't help but think that either with an earpiece or with a disruption where they could, you know, go back into the dugout or the locker room and talk to Donald Trump, his team would have wanted to have a conversation with him at some point there to say, look, this isn't working. It's just coming across as way too hot. And you certainly saw that from the talking heads that were on the Republican side in the post-debate analysis. Including Chris Christie, who had been one of those who had been briefing him and doing some role-playing in some of the limited practice that he had for the debates. But he came out and I think he used that very phrase

and said it was a little harder than we had planned. When you look at the answers that Joe Biden gave, including those ones about the issue about the left, the way I took it, it was also on the question about whether or not he was going to stack the Supreme Court. If he won, would he increase the numbers beyond nine to balance things out between conservative and liberal judges. But what I took from those two examples was the likelihood that in the practice rounds on the Democratic side with Biden, the consensus amongst his advisors and him is, listen, there are certain things you don't want to answer. You've got to be very careful because if you answer it,

you have the potential of really upsetting some people on some issues like the Supreme Court especially. So you've got to find a way of not answering it but still kind of being a part of the discussion around that issue. And I, I, you know, some people were suggesting afterwards,

Oh man, he, you know, he missed an opportunity or he blew that one or he didn't have an answer. I don't think he had an answer because he didn't want to answer that question. And sometimes there are issues where you really don't want to be definitive in your answer. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think that's right. I think that there were, and these were kind of complicated issues in some instances. And certainly, you know, the whole idea of Donald Trump as prosecutor in this debate didn't really work, I don't think.

And I think it was kind of a poor design. He was the prosecutor in 2016. And Hillary Clinton was in the dock, as they would say in a courtroom. This time, it was going to be reversed. This is going to be a referendum election on Donald Trump. He made it that way himself by choice, because he never stops talking about himself and describing his virtues in a way that makes it natural for people to say, well, actually, let's stress test this argument that you're making about how good a job you've done. I thought Biden was at his best when he would pivot to either one of two things. I especially thought he was strong when he said, look, you said you were going to make America great again. We are weaker, we're poorer, we're sicker, we're more divided than we've ever been. I think that, you know, if I kind of look

for the symmetry between what polling data tells you and what politicians kind of take from polling data as really kind of blunt force instruments that they can use in a debate. Those lines looked like they came off a page of polling, not to say that this is kind of a fiction that he was creating. I think he really believed it, and I think lots of Americans do as well. The second thing that he did that I thought was really effective, especially given the tirade that was going on to his right is when he turned and looked directly at the camera, he kind of understood that from his prior experience and probably the coaching that he got is that when there's chaos to the right of you and you just really need to land a point, turn to the camera and say your thought to the people who are watching. And I thought that was

very effective. And he did it a number of times during the course of the evening. And again, when I look at the polls and how they're showing a pretty consistent lead for Biden, I'm remembering that there were 84 million people who watched the debate in the last election campaign. And Trump won by 80,000 votes spread across a number. He didn't win the popular vote, but 80,000 votes spread across a number of those swing states. There was a lot at stake last night, and I think Biden probably did himself a lot of good. You know, on this issue of looking at the camera, that is, it's such a basic technique that is used in debates and has been used for years to break from the person you're debating and deal directly to those who are going to make the ultimate decision. That it was, you know, I agree with you. I thought it was very effective last night.

But I find it surprising that we have to point that out because the other guy never did it. And the other guy could have done it, right? It is a kind of accepted long-time technique that has been used by many politicians and debaters in the past. And that Biden used it a few times very effectively, good for him, that the other guy never thought of it or was never told to do it or was told

to do it and forgot about it is kind of remarkable. I mean, there is kind of a history for incumbents that they don't necessarily do well in their, in the first debate of what are a series of debates. Obama did poorly, very poorly in the 2012 debate, which after four years. George Bush, same thing in 2004. Now, part of the reason for that is they've just spent four years where everybody has

been, you know, to be a little crude, kissing their ass in discussions and not challenging them on anything, especially if you've got a group of toadies surrounding you in your office, which Trump surely does. That's all that's left there are toadies, starting with his vice president. But he hasn't had anybody challenging him. does that's all that's left there are toadies starting with his his vice president but he hasn't had anybody challenging him and suddenly here's this guy being you know being courteous but at the same time really challenging him you know calling him a clown telling him to shut up

calling him a liar yeah all these things to his face, six feet away from him. That has not happened in four years. And, you know, in return, Trump just got madder and crazier in terms of some of the things he was saying. Whether they'll be able to put a net around him and say, look, you know, that is not going to work, as you say. If they'd had that chance halfway through the debate, they may have tried to tell him that.

They now have to work very hard at ensuring he's not like that for the next debate and the third debate if they, in fact, happen, which it appears likely that they are going to happen. But still, they're going to have to do something. Yeah, look, I think that's a really interesting point, Peter. I think that if we sort of talked about this yesterday and said, hey, let's imagine that Joe Biden is going to stand there and call Donald Trump a racist and a clown and the worst president in the history of the United States, you could have imagined that that would have gone badly for Biden, almost too aggressive. But I think in the way that it turned out, Biden said these things, and it kind of came off as part of a natural reaction to an extremely frustrating circumstance and kind of a legitimate description of what we were all seeing. And the point on racism, I think, is something that I would say, you asked the question earlier about what would you cut from this tape if you were going to make a pro-Trump ad. You know, clearly there was a lot to work with

in terms of what the Biden campaign has. And I'll be watching for their stuff and also the Lincoln Project ads, which are normally extremely effective. But one of those things, I think, has got to be the deliberate insistence on the part of Trump, yet again, not to disassociate himself with the Proud Boys, with the white nationalists in America. And he didn't need to take that position.

It's a desperate position to take. It's obviously a horrible position to take, at least from my personal standpoint. But I think it was a measure of just how, as you put it, out of control he was. And yesterday I was doing a Zoom call with a bunch of my colleagues. And one of the things that they did almost to kind of have a little prank with me is they took a series of screenshots of my facial reactions as things were being discussed in the

course of this conference call. And they sent me what looked like a bingo card of all my different faces. And, you know, it made me laugh. But I was thinking about it last night when I was looking at Donald Trump's face throughout the debate because it was constantly expressing anger, cynicism, vitriol, never a sense of dignity, never a sense of steadfastness, never a sense of dignity never a sense of steadfastness never a sense of thoughtfulness never anything that resembled courtesy towards the the person that he was standing next to and i know that people expect this to be cut and front cut and thrust politics

in the united states but i still think people would have found it quite coarsening and quite shocking to see none of that from the president and a fair bit of it from Biden, even though he did, as I say, say, racist and clown and worst president ever. But I wanted to ask you, Peter, about the whole question, the whole question that people are talking about, about the debate moderator, Chris Wallace, who I think most people would say is a pretty respected journalist, certainly the one that people single out among Fox News personalities as the one that can be most likely counted on to kind of offer a fair hand in something like this. But there's been a lot of criticism of his role last night. What did you see and how would you have done it if you were in his chair?

Well, first of all, he is a respected journalist, very much so. And the lineage of the Wallace family obviously goes back. And his dad, Mike Wallace, was a really tough interviewer. And so has Chris Wallace. I mean, some of the best interviews that have been done in the four years of the Trump presidency have been ones done on Sunday morning by Chris Wallace, including one not that long ago with Donald Trump that provided some moments that certainly didn't help the Trump campaign. So he's sort of not the kind of Fox person that a lot of people look at in terms of when they watch Fox, and rightly so, because it's pretty bad, especially in the evening with the

opinion broadcasters. Anyway, so let me start from that point and then say that, you know, I watched it expecting to see, you know, Chris Wallace look very strong during the debate. Now, I've never done a national debate like that, but I've done lots of kind of mini debates between politicians within the panel system, cbc and the national uh i'd never been quite in a situation quite like that they are for starters very difficult because you're trying to be fair you're trying to um follow the rules that everybody agreed to you didn't set the rules. The parties and the electoral commission set the rules. The way that went off the rails last night, I mean, people are saying,

oh, he should have just cut the mics or they should have a mic kill switch. Well, sure, that's easy to say, but they're six feet apart. If you've got one guy yelling at the other guy, it's not going to make a difference whether there's a mic on or off. You're going to hear it and it is going to disrupt things and potentially throw the other person off. If they tend to break the rules, well, you know, what can you do? Can you sort of stop things? And I'm sure some people are suggesting today with the beauty of hindsight that, you know stop

the debate say go return to your corners go to your dressing rooms this is pathetic and and nobody's going to follow this um i'll be intrigued to see you know it is a little like watching a train wreck people don't turn away from it they watch you know, and I'll be interested to see what happened there. In the Canadian example of a year ago, we all said nobody's going to watch this. They watched it. They watched it in fairly significant numbers. We'll know later today how, you know,

what the numbers are like for last night's debate. But, you know, they're obviously all going to have to sit down and figure out a better way of doing this. That's the only debate Chris Wallace will moderate. You have one guy going into the debate with that basically being his plan. He was going to yell and scream and try to interrupt everybody. Could he have – I'm just not sure what he could have done. He was going to yell and scream and try to interrupt everybody. I'm just not sure what he could have done.

So I'm somewhat sympathetic to his position. He may well have been a little late in saying to Trump, listen, you guys agreed to these rules. You're breaking these rules now. And nobody is going to watch this and not realize you're breaking the rules so you've got to follow them um he may have tried that or should have tried that earlier i'm not sure i'm not going to criticize him i think he was in an impossible situation i'm not sure who could have handled better given you got this crazy guy going uh off on one side of the stage let me um yeah let me switch it um to one other issue i mean

debates the the practice that's done on them uh because you've been there, you've seen this, you do try to come out with short, punchy lines for your candidate to use at certain moments if certain subjects come up. And when that opportunity arises, you're thinking of, you know, the ads post-debate. But a lot of time and energy is spent on that. And you could see Biden was searching at a number of times for the lines that they'd worked on and and and he used a couple and they came off the one that you know that i think of is where he basically quoted trump back to himself when trump's

explanation or for how he'd handled the the pandemic was it is what it is and so biden looked at him and said you said it is what it is because you are who you are and i thought that's that's exactly the kind of thing you're looking for right something that you can fit into five or six seconds max and carries all the punch of a special kind of political delivery. Yeah, absolutely. I thought that, you know, probably Biden had several more of those kinds of very short, snappy lines. And when I was sort of doing this kind of coaching or preparation help I used to call these things fastballs in part because you needed to think of them as sentences that needed to be delivered with some pace they don't work if they sound kind of

over rehearsed and and you don't necessarily get to deliver the whole thing if it's too long and run on. And so that was a kind of a useful way to think about them. There are things that you have to be able to say in kind of two seconds, three seconds, and they have to have bite and edge so that people go, wow, that landed. I understood that point and it was powerful. And I think Biden must have had more than he was able to use because of the constant disruption. And that's just how the game goes sometimes with these things. But there was certainly more that could have been done with these explosive stories coming out of the New York Times about Trump and his taxes. I did think that Biden at one point, you know, did sort of work towards this notion of this is a guy who's played a lot of working class people for suckers and he doesn't pay taxes.

He expects you to pay taxes to support his, his lifestyle. I thought he was, I thought he was pretty good on that. And there was one other where I thought that Biden was probably authentic, possibly not kind of a rehearsed or a practiced or a pre considered message. But it was when Trump raised Beau Biden and his experience with drugs, with cocaine, I guess is what he was referring to. And I thought that Biden dealt with that very efficiently and very effectively and in a way that that kind of made the president look even smaller than he had looked up to that point in time. We're almost out of time. We're almost out of time, speaking of time. And I want to try and point forward

here because we've obviously learned and we've discussed the last couple of weeks about the news cycle and how there's always something changing and takes you off the ball of one issue and moves you on to another. And you can be sure that Trump will be desperately looking for a shiny object to move people's attention away from last night and point them in another direction. But at the same time, he's also going to have to think very carefully about how he deals with the next debate. There are two more to come. The vice presidential one is next up, actually. I think it's next week.

But when you talk about working on those lines and looking for the opportunity to use them, it looks like Trump, they never had any lines. Or if they did, he never used them. Because he was basically, for all everybody is saying about what a shock it was to watch last night, it was pretty predictable. You knew he was going to be looking for that knockout punch of some kind,

and he was going to be in rage. I mean, Bob Woodward must have been the happiest guy around. His book's called Rage, and that whole night on Trump's side looked like the definition of rage. So I don't know. I'm not sure what to expect going forward. There are, what, 35 days left in this campaign. That really, in one way, is a long time, as they say. Weak in politics is a long time, as they say. You know, we can politics a long time. But another way, boy, it's hard to right the ship in 35 days.

You know, if this is the Titanic, it is already, you know, tipping. The railings are a little bit underwater already and the band's playing. And what the heck are you going to do to try and change that now? Oh, yeah. I think that's right. Peter, I think he was going to be a rage machine because that's kind of how he lives every day by all the accounts of all the books that have been written about him.

He's not somebody who wants to study up, who wants to practice, who wants to rehearse. Every once in a while, he gets bottled up and kind of decides to agree to use a prompter, in which case he's boring and dismal at that. But he wasn't going to be that guy last night. And a good example for me of something that I can't imagine was ever part of a plan is that when he attacked Biden for being not smart. And it would just seem kind of ludicrous because I don't know that if I were Trump and I were looking to distinguish myself relative to Biden, there's probably

several things I would have tried before I got to, well, I'm smarter than him. And he went to a college that's inferior to the college that I got to, well, I'm smarter than him. And he went to a college that's inferior to the college that I went to. It just looked kind of desperate and lame. And again, not something that would have been rehearsed. Now, as I think about the next couple of weeks, I think one of the things that if I were Biden, I might try to bring to the fore a little bit more. I saw Nancy Pelosi was doing it a little bit today, which is one of the things coming out of the New York Times analysis of Trump's finances is that he owes more than $400 million. And do people have a right to know who

he owes that money to? Because all of the evidence is he's not going to be able to pay that money back. And is it a national security risk because he owes it to unnamed Russian or other foreign lenders? That's a pretty interesting line of questioning. And of course, there's enough out there now that Trump hasn't really denied the numbers that make it harder for him than ever to say, I'm not going to release that information. And Biden and Harris released their tax forms themselves just yesterday. And then the second thing is that as the pandemic infection rates spike again, which they're doing right now, Biden talked a little bit last night

about what happens if this Amy Comey Barrett becomes a Supreme Court justice and the first item of business is the Affordable Care Act. And you've got this scenario where people are worried that they're going to lose their jobs, lose their health benefits, lose their health insurance. And they're going to have a Supreme Court that's going to be oriented towards reducing their access to health care. That's a very serious risk scenario for not just Trump, but for those Republicans who are running for reelection in the Senate, which is now, I think, probably where Mitch McConnell is putting most of his mental energy is how to not let a disastrous performance by Trump, if there is another one, be the ruination of four or five or six Senate races that he cares about. You know, when you suggested to me, whatever it was, more than a month ago, two months ago now, that we consider doing this

weekly podcast within the podcast of the race next door, I thought, yeah, I wonder when we should start that. Cause really, you know, there's, is it really going to be enough to talk about each week? Well, I was wrong about that. And you were right because there has been no shortage of things to discuss. And as always, Bruce, you bring that special insight to these conversations that very few people can rival. So I thank you again. You've given us lots to think about and look forward to talking to you again

in one week's time. Yeah. Great chat again, Peter. Thanks a lot. Talk to you soon. And there you go. The Race Next Door, the podcast within a podcast on the Bridge Daily. And we like to hear from you, so please don't be shy, as we say.

Drop us a line at themansbridgepodcast at gmail.com. themansbridgepodcast at gmail.com, the Mansbridge podcast at gmail.com. If you have thoughts on the debate or on how to improve the debate, whether you find debates useful at all, because it seems to be something fairly common for us to talk about, about how the debate left things, well, short in terms of our hopes for what it may produce. All right, before we go today, I've got an interesting little story about the pandemic.

I use that word interesting a lot because when I'm looking for these little tidbits, I'm trying to find something that's interesting, informative, educational perhaps, but always in some fashion interesting. That's what I'm kind of looking for when I find them. Well, according to The Cut,

which is a website, according to The Cut, people are already buying products to hunker down and winterize their outdoor amenities for the cooler and rougher weather. I want to know whether you're thinking about this yet. I mean, it's awful to have to be thinking about winter coming.

It really does just seem a little while ago that we so looked forward to spring coming after those difficult months of March, April. And it just seems like not long ago that spring was upon us. Well, now fall's upon us. And the thoughts of winter are not far off. So, this is what some people are doing to get ready for winter. Because what's been great about spring, summer, and fall?

We get outside. And the fear is, we're not going to get outside in the winter. Well, perhaps we will, if we think about how we'd condition ourselves for that. Items like outdoor heaters are selling out, so says this article in the cut, as well as fire pits, blankets, party tents, and tarps, as people plan ahead to make being outside manageable to allow for properly distanced, well-ventilated outdoor social time. Some of the more luxurious items include

a magical table that warms up legs but somehow doesn't overheat its glass top. And of course, that one thing that some people seem to love. I've just never, you know, every once in a while I think about doing this, and then I go, you know, I'd never do it. I'd never use it. Or I wouldn't use it much. Or I'd use it for the first few days, and then I wouldn't use it. What am I thinking about? That's right, a hot tub.

Apparently hot tub sales are going up. I don't know what my big fear is about hot tubs. There is something there that I'm not fond of, I'm not in favor of. I'm certainly not in favor of running into the backyard in the middle of winter in a snowstorm, whatever number of feet or meters it would take to get into the hot tub. And then having to do it on the way back. But I'm sure I'm going to hear from some of you who have hot tubs who say,

Peter, it's the greatest thing in the world. I love it. And it's going to be great this winter because, you know, we're going to be in a semi-lockdown, if not full lockdown situation again. And it's one way of getting outside. Yeah, you get outside by cross-country skiing. You get outside by walking around the block. You get outside by walking around the block. You get outside by walking around your backyard properly dressed. But to run across the backyard in your swim trunks or less,

to jump into the hot tub, I don't know, that takes a certain kind of courage. I'm not sure I've got it. All right, folks. You heard it here first. This has been the Bridge Daily with the race next door. Right here. I want to thank you for listening. I'm Peter Mansbridge.

We will be back again. same time, same place, in 24 hours. Thank you.