The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Smoke Mirrors and The Truth - Is Polarization Real?

Episode Date: February 17, 2021

US President Joe Biden now says his country is not divided, but is it?  And is Canada divided too?  We lift the curtain on what's real and what isn't. And how it could affect the future here at home.  And, some exciting "breaking news" on Chantal Hebert!

Hello there, Peter Mansbridge here, just moments away from the bridge where we'll have a surprise for you right out of the gate. Well, it's Wednesday, you know what that means, it's Smoke Mirrors and the Truth with Bruce Anderson. And you know what I promised? I promised a surprise right out of the gate. And you can't over-promise and under-deliver. You've got to deliver. And I think we can deliver with this surprise. We've, and when I say we, I'm talking about the bridge.

We have reached an agreement with Sirius XM to start a new program over and above the bridge. It's going to be a weekly program. It'll be Thursdays at five o'clock on Sirius XM channel 167 Canada Talks. And we're going to call it Good Talk. All right, Good Talk. And Good Talk is basically, well, it's a political panel. And you're going to love who's on it. Aside from Mr. Anderson, who joins us, as he always does, from Ottawa on Wednesday mornings, and me, we're going to have Chantelle Hebert,

perhaps Canada's most read journalist. Here she is, a leading francophone journalist, journalist in the sense of French Canada. Who do they read about politics? They read Chantal Hébert. Who do they read in English Canada about politics? They read Chantal Hébert. In Quebec, she's in La Presse.

In English Canada, she's in the Toronto Star. She's one of the most followed journalists on Parliament Hill. Everybody else follows her because she always seems to have the edge on where stories are going, the direction of stories, whether they're about people or about issues. And, of course, Chantel and Bruce and myself have been friends and colleagues for for a long time I've known Chantel for 30 years and worked with her for 30 years so achieving this is quite something it'll be an hour-long program the the mainstays will be the three of us

we will occasionally have a fourth on the program could be another journalist could be an analyst like Bruce is, like a pollster, could be a politician, could be a business leader, could be any number of different things. But the fourth will be an occasional guest to fill out the panel. One hour, five

o'clock Thursdays, Good Talk is what we're calling it. It'll be rebroadcast on both, I think Saturday morning and Sunday morning on Sirius XM channel 167. So this is great news. And I know you're as happy as I am, Bruce. I am so happy about this.

Is it also going to be available as a podcast, Peter, for people to download as well? That is the plan. You know, Chantel, you're right. She is the doyenne, really, of political commentators and observers. She's always got an interesting take. She's always had that kind of ability to step back from the moment-to-moment kind of play in politics and say, what is the larger takeaway here? She's always got an open mind when she hears a different argument.

You and I have seen many times when we were in studio with her, her head movements, her shoulder and head movements, which always amused me because often, you know, Andrew might be saying something and you see Chantel kind of hunching over and shaking her head a little bit. And I could tell that she was sort of signaling to you that she was ready to get in there and say something different. But she always presents her point of view with a bit of humor and a lot of respect and a lot

of thoughtfulness. And I'm really excited about it, as you are. Yeah. And as I should point out, it's not just journalists who follow Chantal Hebert and the public at large, it's politicians. Absolutely. They listen to what Chantelle says. And it's wonderful that, you know, various, you know, social engagements or different things that happen on Parliament Hill on occasion, you'll see politicians trying to sidle their way up to Chantel and try and make an impression in some fashion, right? But she's remarkable, and we're extremely lucky to have her as part of Good Talk,

which starts a week tomorrow. So not tomorrow, not the Thursday that follows this Wednesday. It is a week Thursday. So that's February 25th. 5 o'clock Eastern will be its first airing. And as Bruce says, we're going to put it up on a podcast as well. I'm not sure the particulars on that yet, but we will have them by the time we first go to air. All right, let's get into today's topic,

which loosely is defined as this. If you accept that the United States is a very polarized country, split down the middle, divided, then the question for us, I think, becomes, well, are we different? How different are we? Are we as polarized as the Americans are? So we're going to get to that, but first we've got to deal with the assumption

that this is all based on, is that the Americans are a split, divided country, almost 50-50. And this is debatable after last night. Now, I don't know how many of you watched the, it was on CNN. It was a town hall, the first town hall by the new president, Joe Biden. And, you know, he performed very well. I think not surprisingly as his first town hall, you know, he has this ability to really frame himself in such a way that he's sympathetic

to the guests who are asking him questions, whether some were there with their kids, and he gets right into it. It reminded me, Bruce, in some ways of Jean Chrétien in the early 1990s after he won the 93 election, where we did a couple of town halls with him in 93 and then again in 94 94 where he was this huge hit. Everybody loved him. He was funny. He seemed to be understanding of people's concerns.

And it didn't hurt him at all. Then when things started to accumulate on his government, especially because of the cuts, the economic cuts that he was handing out, people were getting edgy. And the town halls kind of turned into a disaster for Jean Chrétien, and he stopped having them. He stopped agreeing to do them. So you've got to be careful on making these very early judgments, especially a month or five weeks out from an election where he was extremely popular last night, it seemed, at least to me.

Here's a question, though, and I want to get your thought on this right away. He said last night, he was asked about this issue about polarization and a divided nation. And here's his answer from last night. The nation is not divided. You go out there and take a look. You talk to people. You have fringes at both ends, but it's not nearly as divided as we make it out to be. That was Joe Biden last night talking about the U.S. What do you think? I think that's a hopeful take, and I hope it turns out

four years from now that it's true. I don't think it's true right now, to be honest. I think it's the right thing for him to be raising. And I think he's done a really good job of bringing humility, the idea of humility to that office. Because humility, when it comes from a prime minister, I think Jean Chrétien did it very well in his town halls, or a president, especially after what Donald Trump sounded like. Humility kind of diffuses that instinct towards polarization. You're not immediately forcing people to kind of get their backs up and say, you're going to tell me this and I'm going to tell you no way because you're, you know, the opposite party. But I do think that they have a very, very high degree of polarization.

I think they have it in part because of some factors that we don't have here. I think one of the major issues that was revealed as a source of polarization in the last several years in particular is racism. And I'm not saying we don't have racism in Canada, but we don't have an active discussion about whether the problem is the lack of police enforcement against minority people of color, which they do in the United States. We don't have a leader of our country who says there were riots, even though the riots were triggered by police killing a black man. And his answer is, we need to police the looters and punish them. So

that's one factor. A second factor is media. We had a brief experiment in Canada with a version of Fox News, and it failed. And it failed not just because there isn't the scale of audience here in Canada to support an enterprise like that. It failed because our instincts generally are not towards the extremes. They're to bring people together, to kind of look at our situation and say, look, we're not going to get very far if we're always at daggers drawn. It's better if we have a conversation where we're more likely to find a middle ground, even if we think occasionally that a middle ground is kind of slower, less aspirational, that kind of thing. And the last thing is that politics is fueled by money wants wins. And we don't have that problem in Canada. I think they spent $8 billion on this

last election cycle. We spent $140 million on ours. People can give, I think, $1,200 here in Canada. People can give essentially unlimited amounts in the United States. And all of that money gets organized around the idea of how do we win. And so I think there is a very high degree of polarization. I was looking at something this morning, Peter, that said the number of states that have a split Senate delegation, in other words, each state gets two senators, and the number of states that elected one Republican and one Democrat is six. And I think about 30 years ago, it was 27. And so we are seeing increased polarization. I hope that Biden turns that around.

I think it's uphill work, but it's the right thing to do, right thing to try. Let me pick you up on the Senate numbers, on the number of senators for each state. As you say, it's two. Now, I've heard you, I think, make this argument a little bit in the past. And so let me try it on you now, because it runs counter to the divided theme. I mean, sure, you look at the Senate now, it's 50-50 in terms of, you know, 50 Democrats, 50 50 Republicans. So hey, that's divided. And we saw evidence of how

that works during the impeachment trial. But when you break it down in terms of states by population, the states that are dominated by the Democrats represent roughly, and I'm saying roughly, 60% of the population. The states that are represented by double Republicans represent the rest, the 40%. So it's like a 60-40 split, which is a lot different than a 50-50 split. Yes. At least in the Senate. And when you look at a map, you see the blue for the Democrats are basically the coastal states.

And the red states for the Republicans are kind of the middle of the country in the less populated states. So does that argue against the divided country theory? A little bit. I think that I was looking at some of those trends over time, and there have been consistently more Democrats than Republicans. And when you look at these swing states and we see these results, which are so close to 50-50, it really does make us think America has one Republican for one Democrat everywhere in the country, and that's not true. However, the other aspect of polarization isn't just the question of whether or not both armies are equal sized. It's what does the partisanship

kind of turn into? And I think this is one of the more perplexing problems for policymakers on complex issues, whether it's coronavirus or climate change, that sort of thing. If I'm a Democrat and you're a Republican, I'm going to give you evidence about the value of wearing a mask. I'm going to give you evidence about the value of social distancing. I'm going to give you evidence that it's a good idea to control guns more, to save more lives. I'm going to give you evidence about climate change, and you're going to reject all of it. You're going to decide that it's some sort of leftist or communist take on things that's fed by misinformation and that I'm trying to kind of manipulate you with lies. And the reverse is true to some degree, too. But one of the big complexities, and I noticed that John Iveson was

raising this question this morning in a column about what will Aaron O'Toole need to do on climate change, is that when that hyper-partisanship, that polarization effect kicks in, if you need people to do something for their own good, forget about what is in the national interest or that sort of thing, but just for their own good, if they don't even accept that information, if Donald Trump says Anthony Fauci is brilliant one day and then two weeks later he says don't listen to him anymore, and those voters say that's it, I'm't listen to him anymore. And those voters say, that's it, I'm not listening to him anymore. Really bad things can happen. And I think that's

the more fundamental challenge of polarization right now in the United States. But if I could just add one more thing, I was looking this morning at some Pew research data about attitudes among young people versus older people. And it really suggests that older people have pretty fundamentally different views from younger people on some of these big issues of the day and the future, like climate change. And it suggests that the amount of polarization among young people is less because they're basically not coming at it from the standpoint of what party do I want to belong to. Most of them are saying that's not really a thing for me.

They're saying, what are the problems and what are the solutions? And so I'm hopeful that that polarization effect can age out a little bit, not to put too fine a point on it. Okay. When you stretch it into, as you did earlier, the impact in Canada, let me ask it to you this way. I mean, we have this historic ability to find consensus, to find the common ground. That's kind of what, you know, we like to think of ourselves as a country that does that, and we can point to history and show examples of where that, in fact, happened.

Does it still happen? Like, are we still a country, or are we living in the past when we talk about we're a country of, you know, finding consensus, finding common ground? Or have we passed that? I'm actually fairly positive on this. I think we've kind of looked at it, smelled it, experimented with it, and kind of put it aside. That doesn't mean that it won't come back.

That doesn't mean that there aren't pockets of it, but we have particular nuggets of polarization that we can kind of observe and say, okay, well, those don't seem to be becoming larger features of our political landscape. I'll give you an example. I think for sure there is a regional polarization where many voters in Alberta and Saskatchewan hear something from a federal liberal government, and they just disagree with it because they just hate the federal liberal government. It's not everybody in those provinces. In fact, it tends to get exaggerated sometimes. Maybe it's 50 percent.

Maybe it's 55 percent. But there's still a lot of other voters in that. But no question that in every poll, you see if it's mapped onto, well, what would this turn out in electoral terms? What would it cause in electoral terms? You see two blue provinces and a bunch of orange and red and light blue in Quebec otherwise. So there is a regional aspect of it. But the version that we see in the United States where this is kind of MAGA, Trump, conservatives,

or hardcore Republicans, we asked in a recent survey at Abacus, what are the percentage chances that you will vote conservative in the next election? And we gave people a choice between 0%, under 50%, 50%, over 50%, 100%. 13% said it's 100% sure I'm going to vote conservative. That's a pretty small polarization effect. Now, those numbers are kind of similar for other parties, smaller for some of them,

but not that dissimilar for the liberals. So that to me says we're still a party where 70% define themselves as being kind of more or less on the center of the political spectrum. And every time we've had a high profile debate about things like abortion, legalization of marijuana, same-sex marriage, climate change, we kind of steer. It's ugly sometimes. We steer towards, so what is the information telling us about what we should do? What does it feel like we should do, even if it's not my own personal preference, but if it kind of accommodates the fact that there are other people with different perspectives. I think that's been one of the bigger challenges for conservatives in Canada, and I do see it as a problem for the Conservative Party in Canada,

especially because, this is the last thing I'll say, I want to hear what you think about the Maverick Party and the People's Party. But I look at them and say, well, on the one hand, they have not achieved any significant growth in public opinion support. On the other hand, if I look at those voters who self-identify as supporters of the People's Party, I think 70% of them don't believe that the COVID vaccine will be safe and don't want to take it. Now, is that because they're reading different scientific evidence or is it just because, well, you know, Trudeau's in office

and I don't like Trudeau and so I'm going to listen to whatever somebody tells me who says that they hate Trudeau. It's more the latter. And I think there's a little bit of that in the Maverick Party too. Okay, I want to mention leadership here for a moment because I want to see what leadership means to the attempt for consensus. But on your point about what's the impact that these smaller fringe, literally fringe parties, because we're talking of one you know, one or two percentage point support, and sometimes less than that. But it seems to me on the face of it, all that support, if it was going to go anywhere, and those parties didn't exist, it was going to go to the

Conservatives. So it's a problem for the Conservatives, because they're losing vote. And sometimes that vote can make a difference. It might have made a difference in the last election if that, you know, the People's Party vote had gone to the Conservatives. And it could mean the same thing again here. So that's something that Aaron O'Toole has to worry about. Justin Trudeau and Jagmeet Singh have to worry a lot less about.

In fact, it plays to their advantage to have those parties out there. But on the question of consensus, how important is leadership? Because you've got a situation where you quite rightly point out that some of the anti-Trudeau feeling reminds me, obviously, of what it was like in the days when his father was, was running the liberal party. I mean, he was hated in the West, um, you know, from sell your own wheat to, you know, giving the finger out of the train window, uh, as he was going through

Alberta. Uh, I mean, memories die hard and, uh, he, Justin Trudeau seems to have reinforced those memories for a lot of people in, as you say, Saskatchewan and Alberta. So it's a little hard for that person to be the consensus candidate when he's already hated. On the other hand, you've got Aaron O'Toole, who is now being painted, you know, quite, I wonder how effectively, but the attempt is there on the part of third party commercials to paint this guy as a real threat to the kind of Canada that most Canadians seem to suggest they want to live in. So they're attacking, in both cases here, they're attacking

the leaders, which at a, you know, in a situation like this, if you're looking for consensus, it's going to be pretty hard with that kind of a situation going on in terms of leaders, because one assumes if you're going to find consensus, it's going to start with leaders. Yeah, I think leaders have to, in these situations, decide what it is that they're going to try to do. Are they going to try to kind of ignore or soft pedal or downplay the problems in order to, you know, hope that everybody kind of forgets what they were angry about yesterday and comes together at election time? Or are they going to kind of challenge the energy that causes these divides and try to pull it in a more productive direction? I think the second approach is really the only one that really works for the long term. And if you ask me about the history of the Conservative Party in Canada in my lifetime, and I used to work, as you know, for a few different progressive Conservative Party leaders. For me, the history of

the Conservative Party has been one of more frequent failures than made sense. But because they couldn't escape that kind of sense of, you know what, there's too many people who want things that too many other people will not abide in the country. And that is, I think, ultimately a question of leadership. We see it playing out in a very large way with Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump right now as they talk about what to do about the Republican Party. And our own version of it is kind of smaller and seems a little bit more tepid, I suppose. But it's a real thing. And it's been a real thing for a long time.

I was kind of going back to one of the earliest controversial debates that I can remember in Parliament around capital punishment. You're a little older than me, so maybe you remember this more vividly, Peter, but it was about a bill that was brought forward to restore capital punishment. And you may remember this, that Brian Mulroney and Ray Natishian and Joe Clark all voted against that, the idea of restoring capital punishment. But Don Mazenkovsky was the deputy leader, and the majority of their caucus voted to restore capital punishment. And I use that as an example because that has been a kind of a recurring challenge within the Conservative Party. self-identify as strongly as MAGA or Trump conservatives, twice as many strongly identify as compassionate conservatives. And that has been the tension within the Conservative Party,

and it's the challenge for leaders ever since I've been kind of watching that party. And I hope that Erin O'Toole confronts that challenge and says, look, we need to be a party that truly is more for the bulk of Canadians, because I think there are a lot of Canadians who want that competitive, small C, conservative alternative. It's funny doing that flashback on the names and Don Mazinkowski in particular. It's Vegreville, Alberta. I think he was in the car dealership or the gas station business, but really spoke to his constituency. And he was extremely well-liked.

You know, you talk about a non-divisive period. Those were the days when it didn't matter which side of the aisle you sat on, there was this ability to become friendly and learn from each other. And it was a time of some degree of consensus, not 100%, but some degree. And mass, as they all called them, was part of that. Well, you put your finger on something, which I really recall a lot from back then, which is that you might, I might have been for the abolition of capital punishment.

You might have been for restoring it. But I used to watch politicians in those times, and they would debate it, and they would kind of be fairly blunt with each other in the House of Commons. But it wasn't personal. It wasn't like, because you disagree with me about this, I'm going to challenge certain facts. I'm going to challenge everything you say. I'm going to disagree with everything that you have to say. I'm going to try to vilify you personally at every opportunity. That wasn't the way things were. And we've had more of that in the last few years in Canada than we used to have. I happen to think that somewhat it has to do with the way that people consume politics as kind of entertainment in the media these days. But it is more Canadian than not, I think, on the whole, to be polite in disagreeing with each other.

Okay. I'll take a quick pause, catch our breath for a minute, and talk as we close out today's edition of Smoke, Mirrors, and the Truth about vaccine supply. Okay, I don't want to go too deep into this, but something that Joe Biden said last night did tweak my interest, especially when this morning I read something else online coming out of the United Kingdom. And it's interesting when you stack them up this way.

And I want to know what your thoughts are. And we're talking about here in the fight against COVID, it's all about vaccine supply now, right? And we've had our controversies here as they've had them elsewhere. But it was an interesting stacking up of where the three countries, the two that are most close to us in many ways, the United States and the United Kingdom and us, are looking at vaccine supply and trying to forecast the moment at which all their residents who want a vaccine will have had a vaccine. So this is the way it's stacked up. Last night, Joe Biden said,

all Americans who want a vaccine will have had that vaccine, had the opportunity for that vaccine, by the end of July. Okay, that's not that far off. In the UK, Boris Johnson's saying today, all Brits who want to have a vaccine will have had that opportunity by the end of August.

And here in Canada, as Justin Trudeau has said repeatedly since December, that all Canadians who want a vaccine, in spite of the problems that we've had that seem to be, have been worked out now, all Canadians who want a vaccine will have had that opportunity by the end of September. So you've got July, August, September. What does that tell you? Well, you know, I think it's been such an interesting thing to watch just as an experiment in social psychology and politics and media.

I remember, as you were saying that, you know, when John Kennedy said, in 10 years, we're going to put a man on the moon. And he had no idea how that was going to happen. Now, the good news was it did happen. But it happened in part because he had 10 years. If we don't have 10 years for this, we have 10 months and maybe less than that, depending on the pace of expectations. But that's a number that, you know, is kind of zone, I think, all of this coverage, and I'm finding myself kind of horrified by all of the quasi-experts. And I'm being generous when I say quasi-experts. And I remember there was a night on our at-issue panel years ago, and I forget what the subject was, but it was probably about whether there should be some armed conflict intervention somewhere in the world. And the question was put, well,

should we do that? And it wasn't you that put it, I think, but it was coming up. And I remember thinking, well, how the hell would I know whether it's a good idea if we should do that? I don't have all of the information. I'm not an expert in this area. And yet on the coronavirus and the vaccine, the idea of getting all of these doses and getting them into arms in a short period of time when the rest of the world is all clamoring for the sack, same thing. I find myself reading these people saying, damn it to hell. Why can't we see the contracts?

Why can't we kind of get underneath the hood of this? And I'm thinking, well, what would you see in those contracts? What could the downside be of doing that? What are the reasons why? And maybe we should just kind of let the process work, evaluate it afterwards. I know that there are people who are going to disagree with that, but there's so much in expert opinion, pretending to be expert opinion on this, that it's driving me a little bit crazy. And to see the mood swings that are possible because people are really feeling frustrated with this. And so then when they do hear somebody say, this has been a disaster, and they hear that maybe we're not getting any vaccines last week, some of them start to say, well, maybe it's a disaster. And then this week, 400,000 doses come, 400,000 next week, 400,000 the week after that.

They're probably going to have a little bit more of a, well, why were people saying that this is such a disaster? It seems to be kind of rolling along. So, you know, I feel like people in politics and covering politics need to have this conversation. But I wish it was a little bit more tuned to the fact that people could use information and informed analysis, but not just a whole bunch of kind of scattershot opinionating. I think that's right. And, you know, I've gone back and forth on this myself over these last months because I've been,

or last weeks and days, because I've been influenced by some of these columns that you talk about and some of the commentaries that you've been talking about. I try to stay focused not on what the politicians or the journalists are saying, but what the medical people are saying. I try to stay focused on that. But, you know, I'm 72. I'm wondering, okay, like, when am I going to get mine?

You know, where am I in this sort of kind of pecking order? How far am I away from even getting in a line, let alone getting to the head of the line? And you hear these stories about different people who seem to have got to the head of the line who you may sort of wonder about, was that really fair? And then you also hear about situations in other countries, like my friend Rick Mercer. We all love Rick. He told me a great story last night. He told me to talk about a couple of things, but he said, you know, a friend of mine in Los Angeles called me up two nights ago and said, you know, he's kind of a night owl and he is a smoker. And he ran out of cigarettes at 2 o'clock in the morning.

He went to the local drugstore to get some cigarettes. Where they still sell cigarettes in a drugstore. And the guy behind the counter says, hey, have you got your vaccine yet? And the guy says, no, no, no. He says, I'm not old enough for that. And he says, I can give you a vaccine right now. We've got some right now.

You can buy one right now. So he got a vaccine in the drugstore at 2 o'clock in the morning in Los Angeles. And he's, you know, like 30 or something. Now, the situation there is a little different. In fact, I think it's similar here in some cases because the Pfizer only lasts for once you've got it into circulation ready to vaccinate someone, it only lasts, I think, for five days.

So you've got to move it. And if you haven't moved it, you'll give it to the first arm you see go walking by that hasn't had one yet. And that's what happened to his situation. You can dumpster dive for vaccine down there, basically, if you show up at the end of the day. They're at risk of throwing it out. You might get lucky.

Here's what I thought about the three though. When I thought it was quite telling really that, you know, July, US, August, UK, September, Canada. The US and the UK have huge manufacturing plants for their vaccines, whether it's Pfizer, whether it's Moderna and whether it's AstraZeneca in Britain. So they're right there. They're a captive group in terms of getting access to the supply. That we're one month out from that, in the case of the UK,

two months out from the case of the US. If that's what happens, if these leaders are accurate in their forecasts, I'm not sure that's so bad. The same here. I don't think that, and our research has shown that people are, 70% I think was the number said, if we're only a month or two behind the U.S. rate of vaccination, that that's going to be considered a good outcome, relatively speaking. The other thing that, you know, gets lost is 50% of our population, of our adult population right now in Canada says, I want that shot as soon as it's available to me. That's only 50%. Then there's a whole other bunch who are saying, Peter, I would like you to have it first, and I would like us to stay in touch and see how it's going with you, and if there's no

side effects, then I'm ready to have it. And then there's another, call it 12%, 13% who say, I don't really want to do it, but I probably can be persuaded. And so in the analysis or the commentary about how big a crisis this is, how huge a political downside there is for the government federally, a lot of that is just getting kind of ignored, that there's many people for whom they don't expect it in January, February, or March, or April. They expect it later. And there's many people who say, I'll take it, you know, but I don't need it right away.

I don't mind looking at what happens with other people. Those are factors that I think kind of speak to a patience about this. I saw like a public patience about this. And I saw a poll the other day that said, you know, this many people blame the federal government for vaccine delays. And it reminded me of a thing that I learned from our friend, mutual friend, Alan Gregg years ago when I started in the polling business with him. And it was about questionnaire design. And I'm not trying to criticize the company that wrote this question. But if you, in fact, I think our company probably wrote a question like this not that long ago. And I'm not trying to criticize the company that wrote this question. But if you, in fact, I think our company probably wrote a question like this not that long ago.

And I looked at it and I was like, if you ask people who they blame for something, but you haven't established that they think blame is a necessary part of the equation, they'll still answer the question. And you'll get an answer that can be portrayed as more people blame the federal government than blame the provincial government. And I'm not trying to argue which level of government deserves more disappointment or anything like that. I'm just saying I think the notion that Canadians are rushing to political judgment about this is wrongheaded. I don't think it holds up to scrutiny in terms of what the polling data say. And it doesn't kind of make sense in the context of people knowing that these vaccines were only available for the first time eight weeks ago.

Eight weeks ago, after nine months of a pandemic, the likes of which we'd never seen before. And four months ago, people had no idea if there were going to be any vaccines. So you have to be a little bit too inside the bubble, I think, to believe that this is a huge political crisis for the government, but we'll see how it turns out. And we will. Hey, thanks. It was a good discussion on a lot of things that we hadn't even thought about talking about until we got into it. So that was a good discussion. And I'm grateful, as I always am, to Bruce Anderson in Ottawa, chairman of Abacus Data and a regular member of Smoke Mirrors and the Truth.

And starting next Thursday, a week from tomorrow, a member of the Good Talk panel with Chantelle Hebert. So thanks, Bruce. We'll talk to you again in the next little while. And for all of you out there listening, thank you so much for listening. I'm Peter Mansbridge. This has been Smoke Mirrors and the Truth, the podcast within a podcast, the broadcast within a broadcast, right here on SiriusXM, Channel 167,

and wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening. Talk to you again tomorrow.