The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Smoke, Mirrors And The Truth -- Bruce Anderson Joins Me For The New Podcast Within A Podcast

Episode Date: December 2, 2020

Oh, I think you might like this. Maybe not agree, but like, yes!

and hello there peter mansbridge here with the latest episode of the bridge daily it's hump day wednesday week 38 and as promised we're beginning the the new podcast within a podcast today. Bruce Anderson standing by in the worldwide studios of the Bridge Daily in Ottawa, getting ready to take part in our new podcast within a podcast. We're calling this one Smoke, Mirrors, and the Truth. And we'll have a little discussion in a moment about what that means. So does this mean we buried forever the race next door? Well, you know, kind of, because the race is over.

He's cooked. He's toast. He's a goner. All that's left is the pardons. And boy, there are going to be lots of those, right? And we got a theory on pardons, and I can't remember who it was a month ago talking about pardons would become an issue, and sooner or later, Joe Biden was going to have to answer the direct question, would you pardon Trump? He's kind of hovered around it, but he's never been actually asked directly, would he? I'll be fascinated when he is. Anyway, we also have a couple of things to update on other issues,

but we'll save them to a little later, including the book. Have you heard about that book, Extraordinary Canadians, number one on the Canadian bestseller non-fiction list? Still available out there, by the way. Anyway, and book plates. I got to talk to you about that. All right. Let's get started with a little, you know,

I've been trying to come up with some theme music. We're still kind of working on it, but we have something for today. So let's, that wasn't it by the way uh here it comes right now all right some real smokyy, truthy kind of music. For Smoke, Mirrors, and the Truth, the new podcast within a podcast. And Bruce Anderson joins us from Ottawa. Good morning to you, sir. Good morning, Peter.

That was so much fun watching you play air guitar to that new music. We may still need a different intro song, but I always want you to play that air guitar. I love the air guitar. Love it. Okay. I guess we should maybe say a little something because we're not always in agreement on these things. But we probably should say something about the whole titling

of Smoke, Mirrors, and the Truth. I really like the title, and I like it because, you know, most of what we talk about is political in some fashion, whether it's south of the border or north of the border. And I find that those three words encapsulate a lot of the discussion and debate around politics. Smoke and mirrors, to me, is kind of its spin. You know, it's not necessarily the truth. There was a British general who used to say, I'll never lie to you, but don't assume that means I'm telling you the truth. And that's kind of the way sometimes politics unfolds, no matter the party, no matter

the partisanship, is there's a little edge to the positions that are taken. And that's where smoke and mirrors gets involved. The truth, that's pretty clear, or is it? And I'll get to that in a moment. But I like the title because I think it covers the kind of sweep, the broad sweep of what's possible when you're discussing issues that deal with politics, whether it's smoke and mirrors or whether it's the truth. So that's my, that's kind of why I latched onto this idea. And to be fair, it was a version of this was your title. It was your idea, just like the raise next door was your idea. But what does smoke mirrors and the truth say to you? Well, I just want to be clear.

I want to tell us, tell our listeners a particular truth, which is it wasn't a version of this. That was idea it was this that was my idea but anyway i don't i don't care about credit that much uh that much or or well you sort of said a version of it now i did kind of back away from the truth because i don't want people to think that we're so, you know, we got these kind of egos and it's only us that knows what the truth is. So I was kind of smoke mirrors and data or smoke mirrors and truth. But anyway, I'm happy with what it is because I like the idea, as you said, Peter, that part of what we're going to talk about is fact and how fact compares to argument. That's sort of how I contextualize the way politics goes sometimes. And I just refreshed my memory. Well, maybe I came up with a new piece of knowledge because I don't know that

I ever knew this before, but smoke and mirrors is a phrase that comes from the history of magic. It's about illusions. And it goes back to as early as 1770. So there's quite a history to the idea of that term as a way to describe the art of illusion and the mystery as sometimes of illusion. And of course, it isn't always wrong for politicians, I'll just put a controversial idea out there, to engage in obfuscation or prevarication or a little bit of illusory communication. I don't consider that the same as outright lying. I do consider it sometimes a part of the kind of the grimy necessities of politics. But I am, as you and I have talked about, and I think we probably share this, and probably a lot of our listeners do,

I'm probably a little bit more worried these days about truth than I have been in all the years that I've been paying attention to politics. So I like the name. I think that's a good range of ideas for us to kick around, whether it's about politics or sometimes corporate issues, too. Yeah, good point. Before we leave the generalities around it, I mean, one thing we have seen discussed a lot of in the last four years, mainly because of Trump, but is the simple question, what is truth? And, you know, that very first weekend of the Trump presidency and Kellyanne Conway going out and say, well, you know, you say it's truth.

We say what we're saying is not a lie. It's an alternate truth, alternate facts, which everybody laughed at at that time, but then people have latched onto, and some people have basically accepted that as, okay, that's okay, you can do that. You can have alternate facts that aren't necessarily the same as the truth.

But it begs this question, what is truth? If truth matters so much, and I, like you, feel it does. In fact, I feel that truth is all that matters. But what is it? What is truth? Who determines what is truth? Well, I think that's, you know, I don't really want to really litigate this whole question of, well, if media don't, where if there are people who will go on programs or give interviews and say things that are not factually correct, and I'm not talking about, you know, off by a fraction, close to accurate, but not quite. I'm talking about factually incorrect. For example, the idea that some have been putting out there that Canada put all of its vaccine hopes on a deal with China, which was not factually

correct. It was never factually correct. It wasn't even close to factually correct. It wasn't true. So in that kind of instance, we've seen an evolution where a lot of people, if they don't hear that challenged, will maybe assume that it's true. And the consequences down the road for all of us of not having those guardrails are really quite severe. And we only have to look at the United States to know how severe those consequences can be. They may get out of this pandemic. Well, they probably will this year. But whether they'll get out of it as quickly as they should, because of this, the currency of mistruth being treated as though it is just fact, it's just alternate fact. We've never seen anything in our lives like that. We know from earlier history that propaganda in an age when it was maybe easier in a different way to spread propaganda could confuse a lot of people a lot of the time and cause wars to happen and that sort of thing. But this is something quite new what we're seeing now. Well, what we've seen in the last week, and it kind of relates to what the example you

brought up about the vaccines. In fact, it relates totally to the whole vaccine issue in Canada, has been this discussion, debate, argument, the smoke mirrors and the truth, if you will, of the vaccine rollout in Canada. What did we buy? When did we buy it for? How much did we buy it for? When will it be delivered? How long will it take before everyone who wants a vaccine gets a vaccine?

And, you know, both the media in trying to do its job of seeking information and the opposition in trying to do its job of attacking the government where they felt it was vulnerable, seem to, in places, kind of join forces in an all-out assault on the government and it's, you know, in their defense, and it's kind of different versions of the story that kind of came out over the last week or so. But at the end of it all, what was smoke, what was mirrors,

what was the truth, have we actually got there? I mean, I found it interesting. I mean, you talk about the media's role in all this. Andre Picard, who's, who's, for the most part, recognized as the premier health reporter in Canada for the Globe and Mail. And he's really good, and we've quoted him on this podcast before. But he wrote a really good piece, I think it was yesterday or the day before,

which was basically putting the opposition over the coals for some of the things they had said in the previous week. But if I'm sitting... Probably some journalist in his paper too. Exactly. Yeah, some of the journalists, columnists, opinion leaders in his own paper he went after. I don't think by name, but it was pretty clear what he was talking about. Meanwhile, at home, those who really care about this,

which I think are most Canadians, are left wondering what the hell am I supposed to believe with all this back and forth and claims and counterclaims. So I don't know. I know you've got some new data on Canadian's attitudes to things, and I want to get to that in a second. But just in the big picture on this issue, you know, how does it fit under our new title?

Because we saw it all in there, I think. Yeah, yeah. Well, before we get to the data, I do think that's, you know, what I observed is what seemed as though it was an effort to manufacture friction without information to base that friction on, but simply because there's a market for friction. There's a political market for friction. There's a news media market for friction. And so both the opposition and some in the media seem to want to tap into that market, stoke it, see if they could find a way to get people angry about a situation, pretending to have some facts, but not really having facts and using kind of supposition and

insinuation. The insinuation in the journalist part was, you know, something that we see a lot and almost doesn't matter what government is in office, which is the idea that everybody in government is stupid. It has no idea what they're doing and probably spent too much and probably bought the wrong things and probably has no idea how to answer the question that they're being asked. And of course, I come from having worked with lots of people on different parties in government, and for the most part, they're pretty smart. They have a lot of information. They make more careful decisions than that supposition really allows for. And so when I saw that skirmishing about why won't the prime minister give us an instinct is, well, if he's not giving that answer, there's probably a good reason for him not giving that answer. That has something to do

with the dynamics behind the scenes and something as well to do with not setting up expectations that can't be met. And so I kind of feel it's natural enough, if unpleasant, to see opposition politicians sort of take that approach. They've always kind of tended towards that, although I would sort of make the case that in a pandemic, with health and livelihoods and this much economics on the line, maybe not do so much of that right now. But for journalists not to pause and say, well, maybe there are reasons that we don't know the answer to and we're not going to get the answer to. Because sometimes the role of government is not to say, here's what's going on behind the scenes so that you can tell people and maybe damage what's going on behind the scenes unintentionally for sure. But there are good reasons why government can't answer all of those kinds of questions exactly the way that

journalists want. And I'm not excusing government for often being really slow to release legitimate information and access to information laws need to be there and all of that sort of thing. But I do find that the market for friction is where the media go now in this area of clickbait. And they try to make a market for friction sometimes. And it doesn't look good on media. And it doesn't speak well to the future of are we getting the truth from the media? Are we getting smoke and mirrors mixed in with a little bit of truth? And I'm worried about that too. You know, the thing that puzzled me throughout this past week in this discussion,

sorry about the bill that keeps going off. I still haven't figured out how to make my preferences work properly to eliminate whenever I get an email, my bill going off, or a text message or what have you. Anyway, the thing that's puzzled me in this last week, where people, whether they're opposition MPs or whether it's been the media demanding the answer to that question, when will the first day these be available and who will get them, is pretty simple.

Nothing's been approved, right, until this morning. Nothing had been approved. There's half a dozen legitimate candidates front runners right in the vaccine race they don't know when they're going to get approved and therefore when when you don't know when you're going to get approved it's a little hard to say when it's going to start going into arms now no applications were submitted i think until yesterday morning and the johnson and johnson one went in right. In Canada. But, I mean, that's the irony, because the Americans have always assumed they'd be first, and most people kind of accepted that, that the Americans would be first. They're

putting up a lot of the cash. Some of the companies are directly or indirectly involved with the U.S., and that had been the assumption until this morning. Because, you know, who knew? The Brits are going to be the first ones to be getting the vaccine in their arms. Could be as early as later this week or early next week. The Americans, depending on who you listen to, it changes every day, but Fauci was saying the other day before the end of the month. Others are saying, saying you know perhaps within two weeks so who knows where you know as you said it's now before certain elements of it are before

the canadian health authorities and if they unlike um the history they're extremely careful the uh food and drug people in Canada, about what they approve and what they don't approve. But let's say they approve it next week. Canada could be front of the line, not middle of the line or back of the line, like way near the front of the line. We don't know is the simple truth. You can put as much smoke and mirrors around it as you want, but until certain facts

are known, you can't calculate delivery times. What you can discuss is how ready are you for delivery? You know, how are you going to move these stuff around? Some of the stuff, which is really sensitive to temperature. How are you going to move it around the country? How are you going to get it to places? Who's organizing it all um and who's going to be getting it first you know i i thought it was a reasonable discussion to have which is saying that what's what's most important is not who gets it first but who and when get it last so like how much time are we talking about and no matter country, they're all talking about roughly the same kind of time limit, which is well into next year, early fall, you know, August, September, October before.

Everybody who wants the vaccine will have had the opportunity to get the vaccine. I mean, there's going to be all kinds of questions through this whole period about how the delivery works, how you ensure that it's only people who are on the approved list to be getting it, are getting it. How do you prevent a black market in vaccine? How do you, you know, prevent queue jumping? All those stories are going to come.

You just know it, it's predictable. There are going to be those kind of stories. Friend of so-and-so gets a vaccine. Friend of such-and-such a politician got a vaccine and didn't qualify under anything other than they were a friend. So all that stuff's going to come out. But on the very basics, we don't know the real answers yet. We may.

We may only be hours or days away from knowing those real answers that we'll start off disposing. led to this clearly politically inspired speculation on the part of Aaron O'Toole and Michelle Rempel-Garner that everybody in the world was going to get the vaccine before us, that we were at the back of the line. And when challenged occasionally, and they weren't challenged very often to explain, well, how did you come to that conclusion? The answer was, well, we didn't get an answer. Well, this gets right to the heart of smoke mirrors and the truth. That is not a fair representation of the information that is available. And of course, your former colleague, Rosie Barton, in her show on Sunday morning, helped us all clear that up very quickly. Having the CEO of Moderna on the program who said, no, no, no.

Canada is at or near the front of the line. Right. And I think that there were probably a lot of journalists around the city. And there certainly were a lot of politicians who were watching this thing play out last week going. Wait, it's the stakes are high here for misrepresenting this situation. Why are people going along with this misrepresentation that we're at the back of the line, including that kind of almost sneering reference to Mexicans getting the vaccine before Canadians would, which was a particularly unpleasant bit of politicking in the House of Commons. Anyway, I think

you and I are probably at one on this and hoping for better conduct of that conversation going forward. All right. We've spent a lot of time on this, and I'm glad we have because I think it's really important. Give me the headlines out of the new Abacus data survey results that are just being released actually as this podcast is being released. What are the headlines? The big picture, Peter, is that right through this piece,

Canadians have been remarkably patient about the discomfort, the sacrifice, the difficulty economically and from a social and mental health standpoint. And this continues to be the case. Rather than people getting angry at governments for taking measures that slow the economy effectively and intrude in their lives, prevent them from doing certain things. Generally, governments that have been doing that have been finding public opinion support. And governments that are trying a different approach, like Jason Kenney's, they're at the bottom of the list of popularity right now. So on the vaccine question, I'll come to the question of government satisfaction in a minute, but on the vaccine question, I was struck by the contrast in our data from the conversation that

was being held in the House and in some parts of the media last week. In our data, we said, when do you expect that you will be able to get this vaccine yourself? And is that date acceptable to you? To get a sense of whether people were thinking about this, like, I need this now. I must have this now. And if I don't get it right away, I'm going to be mad as hell. And that's not what we found. We found 23% of Canadians thought that they would get the vaccine in the first quarter. 27% thought they would get it in the second quarter, 17% in the third quarter, and 20% thought it would be October or later. And so from the standpoint of how that squares with the availability of the vaccine, it really is a signal to government that expectations are modest about how quickly

it's going to be available. And then on the question of whether that timing that people supposed for themselves was acceptable or not, only 13%, regardless of the month that they picked the average, only 13% said it was too slow. Everybody else said it was acceptable or better than that. You really only get to about a quarter saying that's a little bit slow once you get into August, September, and a little bit beyond. And even then, it's only one in four people saying that's too slow for me. So this will probably change somewhat, and it could change, as some people have suggested, if people see a situation in America or in a in a EU country where all of a sudden everybody is getting vaccinated a lot more quickly and their economies are picking up and their social situation is improving. It's possible that Canadians will get frustrated. But we also ask the question, well, do you would you be angry? It's possible that Canadians will get frustrated.

But we also ask the question, well, would you be angry if we didn't get it at the same time, the vaccine at the same time as other countries like the United States? Or would you be okay as long as it was within a couple of months of the timetable there. And the answers to that were really quite eye-opening because basically 24%, one in four said, well, I'd be angry. Everybody else said, three out of four said, no, no, as long as we're within a couple of months. Now, part of that is people saying there are going to be people and situations where the vaccine is needed to protect frontline health workers or old people with comorbidities. And here in Canada, anyway, we've been pretty good about saying we need to look out for each other. We need to be careful about how we approach the risk of infecting other people. And I think we see that attitude carrying over into

how people feel about the vaccine. And I found it interesting that this whole question of anger, would you be angry if other countries got the vaccine first? Even among conservative voters, it's only 28%. And I saw somebody describing, you know, in the media today, polarization in Canada. And there's a little bit of difference of degree between conservatives and others, progressive voters. But that's a pretty small difference. That's four points off the average. 72% of conservative voters saying, I'm OK, as long as we're within a couple of months. And the last thing I'll say is you've probably seen the studies that I've seen, that World Economic Forum and The Economist and today Goldman Sachs

put out their analyses of where Canada was likely to be relative to other countries. And there's no apparent lag there. If there is, it's a very small lag. So we'll see how it turns out. But right now, Canadians are saying, we're okay with what we think will happen. And we have confidence in the federal government, and in most cases, confidence in their provincial government. That's the other piece of data in our release, which people can get on our website today at abacusdata.ca, it's about 60% across the country who say that they're satisfied with the way the federal government has been

handling its pandemic responses. And 60% isn't 90%, but it's higher than they're getting for almost anything else that they work on usually. In fact, it probably is the highest thing that they get right now. And even among conservative voters, 40% are satisfied with the federal performance on the pandemic. And then if you look at the provincial government performance, the average across the country is almost identical, and it's quite a bit lower. A majority, 63% of Albertans are unhappy with Jason Kenney's handling of that, and we know that that has to do with the fact that he doesn't like the idea of putting as many restrictions on people. It's not that people are saying he should put more. It's not that people are saying he should put less restrictions on people. They're saying our infection rate's not, not good enough.

We've got to be, you know, it's funny because I, uh, I was reading a piece in a, in an old, um, history magazine. The magazine's called history now back in, you know, 15 years ago, it was called the beaver. And, uh, it was in one of the old editions of the beaver. I think it was 2008. They did a, they did a look back at the, at the at the flu of 1918-19 uh kind of from the perspective of you know we're so much better now we you know we know how to deal with these kind of things which was ironic in a way but one

of the things that stuck out to me was they talked about alberta and how alberta kind of led the charge on masks. They mandated mask use in 18-19, in 1918 and 1919, which, of course, is not the situation we're seeing now. Here's what I took from those. I found the stuff in terms of vaccine really important, the data that came out of the new Abacus survey. On this latter part about performance of governments, there was data out yesterday from Angus Reid,

which is somewhat similar, although they also showed Manitoba plummeting, and understandably, they've taken a real hit lately in terms of cases. But what I found interesting about both angus's data and your data is that they're not that much lower if at all than they were in april and may that they've held the confidence of most of the you know alber Alberta is an exception, but they've held the confidence of most of the people in their province, which is not normal for today's day and age,

where people, you know, move around quite quickly, especially in our 24-7 world of news. Yeah, that's absolutely right. And I think one of the things that is a bit confounding for opposition politicians in this is that you tend to look at, if you're in that opposition role, you tend to look at everything that happens as an opportunity to tear a strip off the incumbents and say, they screwed up. They're not handling it right. And you might especially think that if there's a health crisis and an economic crisis. But what's different about this is that this is, you know, most Canadians look at this and go, well, governments didn't cause this. Governments were only responsible for responding in the best way that they could. And so I'm measuring them against two things, really. One is what would have happened if they hadn't taken the measures that they did.

And I think most people are looking at going, the economy would have been in a lot worse shape, more people would have died. And so whether folks are able to look at those statistics and study them or just have that feeling of we could have fallen off a cliff and. I'm not inclined to believe that. And if the opposition party says we could do a better job, they better have some ideas that are more specific. And I noticed, you know, Erin O'Toole the other day was saying, well, we need to have a parliamentary committee hearing into why the government started a conversation with a Chinese biotechnology company. And then that fell apart. And I was reading that thinking, I can't imagine anything but the most partisan individual voter out there thinks that that's a good use of parliamentary time to have a conversation about that right now, which is not an argument against accountability. It's basically just saying, look, people are focused on how are we going to get through the winter? How are we going to keep those infection rates down?

How are we going to stop the spiking? How are we going to manage the holidays? And what does the other side look like? And they want calm. They want confident. They want optimistic. They want realistic. And they probably would rather all parties try to work towards that same point of

view. And so if I were advising an opposition politician right now, I would say down the weapon. Just try to work with government. Just try to sound like you're on the same page in terms of what the country needs to do to get through this. Which is always a tough one for opposition parties, no matter, no matter their stripe. I mean, it goes against the grain of what they're supposed to be doing. They're supposed to be opposing. Right. But this is a, you know, peculiar time, whether that is the right solution or not. You know,

I'm not sure you'd like to think that in times of crisis parties can get along. They have shown they can in past times in Canadian history, up to and including coalition governments. But this is a moment, and you're often judged for your leadership in times of big moments. You don't do it, though, for the reasons of it's the right public policy, it sometimes is good to look at what you're doing in the sense of how does it work as communication. And if you're an opposition politician, and I think Jagmeet Singh is doing a better job of this than Aaron O'Toole, for example,

if you stand up every day and say, this government has got everything wrong, we are worse off than we were in March, we have nothing to show for all of the efforts that have been put in, you know, his level of rhetoric about that, I look at it and go, he's not convincing anybody. He's probably getting nodding heads among his base, but everybody else is going, oh, I thought he was going to maybe be different from the last guy, you know, hyper-partisan and that sort of thing. And I think he's kind of squandering his kind of introductory phase a little bit, is how I would put it, by pursuing some of these lines of attack. Smoke, Mirrors, and the Truth, Episode

1. You've just heard it. Obviously, we'd love to know what you think. We're going to do this at least every Wednesday, and there's always going to be grist for this meal, you can be sure of that, whether it's here or south of the border or on the other side of the world. We will search out the debate and the discussion around smoke mirrors and the truth. Bruce, don't go away because I want to ask you something that's got nothing to do with this podcast within a podcast. So we'll play that catchy music now and come right back. Wow.

What do you know? Catchy music. We're smoke mirrors and the truth. Yeah, not bad. Okay, here's what I want to talk. I want to talk about two things. One, you don't have to worry about. You can catch your breath for 30 seconds. it's to do with the book plates i'm still getting a lot of requests i did

they kind of died down over the weekend i thought okay that's it it's going to slow down for a while and uh but now it's come back with a vengeance and i've had to order more book plates or into our third or fourth delivery now of book plates. And all I ask, you know, this is a feature just for podcast listeners. Nobody else is getting this kind of personal delivery of signed book plates. All I ask is that you show some indication that you've actually got the book or in some cases the four or five copies of the book that you've shown me. In most cases, people send a picture of their books or a copy of the receipt, whatever.

Send something, and you will get it in the next mail out of Stratford. The ponies arrive here every couple of days to pick up the mail and head out down the highway to see where they can take it to. All right. Bruce, you can come back into the conversation now. Bruce is an F1 fan. Has been for as long as I've known him.

Has been to F1 races, watches them, and they're usually like, what, Sunday mornings, like early Sunday morning, you get the F1 race. Yeah. And on yesterday's podcast, the last thing we mentioned was this terrible accident that happened on this past race, the one in Bahrain on Sunday, where the French-Swiss driver, Romain Groschon, miraculously walked away from a terrible accident. It looked like the car exploded, terrible fire, the whole bit.

And yesterday we mentioned it at the end of the podcast, simply because there had been an article about the crash saying that four new developments in the way cars are made, the tech involved in auto racing, had saved this guy's life four different times within 28 seconds and how remarkable that was. So I got a great letter today from one of our regular correspondents, our correspondent based in Grand Bend, Ontario,

out on Lake Huron, Bill Chichard. So here's Bill's letter. I'm going to read it here, Bruce. It's not that long, but it's right up your alley in Tuesday's podcast you mentioned Sunday's Formula 1 race in Bahrain due to the first lap accident involving Romain Grosjean

as horrific as the crash into the street barrier was Grosjean's injuries are relatively minor burns to the back of both hands to say the young driver is alive due to safety technology and procedures in F1 racing is an understatement. In a sport fraught with danger, the cars and the courses upon which they compete are safer than ever before for myriad reasons.

But the one safety feature newly instituted last year, the so-called Halo, was the one that saved Grosjean's life, no question. But there was one other aspect of the race that also played a key role, of which few are aware. At the start of every F1 race, there's a Mercedes-Benz driven by a professional driver, in this case Alain Vandermeer, that lines up at the back of the pack on the start grid. This medical car also has a passenger, a physician. The medical car follows the race cars for the first lap, which is the most dangerous lap of the race due to the proximity of the cars all trying to get into a better position. Although the medical car is much slower than the race cars, it will get back to the start finish before the lead race car,

at which time it leaves the track. In the case of the accident on Sunday, that medical car reached the crash site within seconds. Driver van der Meer and a physician were there to assist Grosjean as he extricated himself from his race car, which was sheared in two. Your listeners might like to know that thanks to developments in safety features in race cars, the family vehicle is the beneficiary. What follows is a list of features found in virtually every vehicle on the road today that came from auto racing. In no particular order, the top 10 include rear view mirrors, seat belts, disc brakes, roll cages, road gripping tires, all-wheel drive, anti-lock brakes, independent suspension, neck and head restraints,

and crumple zones. Now here's a question. The Society of Automotive Engineers, SAE, have determined which safety features in that list have saved the most lives. Which one? Most would guess seat belts, but the answer is anti-lock brakes. Thanks, Bill. It was a good letter. And, Bruce, I kept you on just because of your obvious interest in F1. And, you know, you've watched the races. You've been to the races.

So I just want off the top of your head what your reaction to all this is, including Bill's letter. Well, it was shot. That is a really good letter. And I think that a lot of people may not, if they don't follow Formula One, be aware of the degree to which technological experiments really in Formula One often lead to development in vehicles that everybody buys. And there's, in addition to the safety ones that the writer mentioned, there's increasingly energy system ideas. So, for example, one of the ones that exists now is that braking is used to create energy within the vehicles. And so when we think about the electric vehicles of the future and the energy systems and how to make cars operate more

sustainably, there's an awful lot of technological innovation that's going on in Formula One from that standpoint. But I was happy to see the safety measures work as well as they did. I've seen accidents that ended worse than that. Obviously, as a Canadian watching Formula One for as long as I have, I remember Gilles Villeneuve losing his life. And, you know, I know the circumstances of that. And I know that these drivers are much, much, much better protected by the design of the tracks and by the installation of all of the barriers and other safety systems. The car gets sheared in two. Would have been hard-pressed to imagine anybody could walk out of that, let alone walk out of it within seconds.

Surrounded, engulfed by flames, but protected by this flame retardant. It was really quite remarkable, and it was good to see. Formula One, for me, is really, you know, you hate to see accidents. You just love to see the racing. It's quite a spectacle, and I was happy that it worked out that way. All right. Thanks, Bruce, for hanging in for those comments. This has been, you know, the Bridge Daily with the podcast within a podcast

and a few extras as well for the midweek, the Wednesday of week 38. Look forward to talking to you again tomorrow. I'm Peter Mansbridge. Thanks for listening, and we will be back in 24 hours.