The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - SMT - Are The Liberals Botching The China Issue?

Episode Date: March 1, 2023

Did the Chinese interfere with the Canadian elections in 2019 and 2021 and did Canada know they were doing so?  Those two questions continue to hang over the Trudeau government and their handling of the issue isn't helping their case.  Bruce Anderson on that and, Fox News -- does lying even matter anymore?

And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. You are just moments away from the latest episode of The Bridge. It's the middle day of the week. That means it's Wednesday, otherwise known as Hump Day. Smoke, Mirrors, and the Truth with Bruce Anderson coming right up. And hello there, Peter Vansbridge in Toronto today. Bruce Anderson is in Ottawa. He's back. He's back. He's back, slightly tanned. Ready for the end of winter in Ottawa.

None the worse for wear. Happy to be back. It's a little bit white and gray, but it was nice to be away for a little bit too. Well, it's good to have you back. Here's what's interesting, I think, about this day or this week, really. I think we all know that whether it's Ottawa or whether it's Washington, that while the attention seems to play on

what's happening in the main chambers, like the House of Commons or the Senate or the Capitol Hill in Congress in the main chambers, but really the real action takes place in committees in both those cities. Lots of the main topics of the day are discussed in committee, and sometimes it doesn't turn into the kind of partisan bickering that it turns into in the main chambers. Well, I bring this up because usually these two areas,

Washington and Ottawa, are not necessarily in sync on what the main issue of the day is, but they sure seem to be this week. They're both discussing, while there are lots of different committees going on, but the main committees, the ones that are getting the most attention, are both dealing differently at times,

but they're both dealing with China and China's influence on the relationship between, in one case, the United States and China, and in our case, Canada and China, and specifically on the issue of election interference, which has been bubbling up over the last couple of weeks. And the government seems to have been stumbling around a little bit on this. But it's a really interesting play. Did China interfere with the Canadian election, or did it not? If it did, how was it doing that, and who knew about it,

and what was done because of it? Those are just some of the questions that are being asked. Now, there were calls for a more formal investigation, like a royal commission looking into the China interference of the Canadian election inquiry. The prime minister said no to that. But there have been increasing voices saying, you know, maybe there should be some kind of official inquiry, maybe not a Royal Commission, but

some kind of official inquiry that looks at this story beyond just MPs looking at it. And among the many voices, and I mean many voices, that spoke up on this in the last few days is our friend Bruce, who sort of went at the government for backing off on this idea. But bring us into your headspace on this story, first of all, and the bigger picture of this story, because it seems to be getting an awful lot of attention and some startling facts are starting to roll out.

Well, I think the first thing that I would start with is the point that you were making about the committee work and that you were referring, I think, in part to committee work that we saw starting to take shape in the U.S. yesterday as well as the committee work here in Canada. And in the U.S., people might not have had a chance to consume this news yet, but in a world where it's almost impossible to get Republicans and Democrats to agree on anything, let alone to work together on anything, there is a bipartisan committee which got together and declared its bipartisan intention to root out the problems that it sees in the relationship between the U.S. and China.

Commercial, trade, economic, political interference, financial, and some of the language that was used, as I saw some clips coming from that committee, was really quite harsh. People talking about the infiltration of K Street and Wall Street by Chinese influence and how it was important that America turn that back. Some of the speakers talked about how there was a colossal failure of conventional wisdom some 20-odd years ago when the mood was embrace the relationship that's developing economically with China, build a different future together with China, assume as part of that that China was going to become more like America or democracies. And now that conventional, the conventional wisdom today seems to be that was a huge mistake. It only enriched China. It only empowered China.

It did not achieve any of the democratic aims and it created economic and security vulnerabilities for the United States and other countries. So as I say, very rare to see bipartisan enthusiasm for a subject the way that we see it taking shape in the United States right now. We are not right now seeing bipartisan accord on how to deal with the Chinese influence risks in Canada. My point the other day was that I don't believe that it's tenable for any prime minister to say, we should all be worried about Chinese interference or foreign interference in our democracies, in our election processes. It's real. It's tangible. It's growing.

But I can't answer questions about it, and we can't have an inquiry about it. Now, as we've talked about before, there are arguments to be made why you can't, why there are risks associated with the public discussion of these efforts to interfere. But at least you have to explain what those risks are and how you're trying to balance them. And you have to be prepared for people to wonder whether or not, especially in this case, because the evidence seems to be that the Chinese wanted a minority liberal government. If you then go on to say, and I'm satisfied that there was no impact on the integrity of this election, I don't think that's tenable. I don't think that people should be expected to kind of accept all of that from any politician leading the country of any

political stripe. So I think it's been a bad outing for the liberals in terms of how they've attempted to deal with this. But I'm going to stop there because I do want us to spend a few minutes also on the report that was tabled yesterday, because there's some really important issues for people to know about and think about as we go forward. But that's how I see it right now. The liberals are on their back heel. I don't think they deserve to be because of Chinese influence. I think they deserve to be because they rather badly mishandled the way that this issue came before the public. Okay. Well, let's deal with what happened yesterday, the report that came out yesterday.

First of all, I just want to, for those who may not know, your reference earlier about three or four minutes ago to the kind of melding of K Street and Bay Street or Wall Street. For those who don't know, K Street is the name of the street in Washington that is home for all the big lobbying firms. Like, and we're talking big lobbying firms. It's a euphemism for lobbying in America, yeah. Most of them filled with former, you know,

high-ranking officials of the government from both sides, Republican and Democrat and bureaucratic officials. Anyway, there's that. Now, the report you're referring to that came out yesterday was a report that had been commissioned during, I believe, both the 2019 and the 2021 elections to look at this issue of foreign interference and whether or not there was.

And if there was uh how significant it was so that report gets dropped yesterday i assume it's being available to uh you know the prime minister or others in his office you know for some time i don't know that but when we tweet about it i can include a link to the report it's uh it's available for people to read all right so i clearly that's being released at this time to try and deflect some of the criticism away because the report seems to suggest there was no big deal. Was there interference? Yes, but it wasn't a big deal.

It didn't seem to have any impact on the way the election unfolded. Is that the wrong characterization of the report or no? The basics of it. You'll get into the nitty gritty, which is pretty interesting. It's one of the biggest problems that I see in the report, and it's not really the fault of the people who did it, but it's called the critical election incident protocol. And the term implies that what it needs to be alert to is some incident which has enough impact on its own

to raise questions about the outcome of the election. Well, surely that's an important thing to be alert to. But that's not the same as saying, how did everybody vote in the election and to what degree was voting intention affected by dissemination of misinformation, efforts to manipulate opinion that occurred in the period before the writ, because part of what this protocol does is it only really looks at what happens in that rather short period of time. And so I don't think that on the basis of this report, the prime minister, nor the authors of the report can reasonably say, we know that our election integrity was not compromised. I think they can reasonably look at the way in which the

mass of people voted and say there was no huge significant evidence of a single incident that caused changes. But having been in the polling business for 40 years, people ask you all the time in this business, why do people vote the way that they do? And the answer is very hard to figure out. It's not as simple as the questioners want it to be. There are lots of things that enter into the mind space. And in this report, they do refer to articles that were written in periodicals that serve the Chinese diaspora. And so when I see those pieces of evidence, and I also hear politicians saying, well, you know, the outcome wasn't affected. I think, well, I don't think we know that that's true. I think it's reasonable to say the outcome was probably what it was going to be. But the risk is bigger than that. The risk, it's a little bit like we're trying to measure where is water. It's flowing everywhere. We don't know what

impact it's having. It's a huge problem. And it's not just a huge problem here. And this rather narrowly constructed device to see if something blew up in the course of an election campaign is the wrong tool for us to be trying to evaluate and deal with foreign influence or malign domestic influence in our election systems. So what could a new inquiry do? If it's that hard to determine, you know, motivation or understanding or interpreting results, what good would yet another inquiry do? I don't know that an inquiry is the right answer. I think the question about an inquiry

is probably now a question of, has the government compromised trust to the point where the only way for it to manage its way out of this is to have some version of a public inquiry or more public hearings so that people can kind of consume more of the information. Right now, we've got news stories that imply that people who work for our spy services, CSIS in particular, are giving information to journalists to help them write these stories. Some of that information, the government, the prime minister in particular says is not true. Well, I'm going to ask you, I told you I was going to ask you this question about journalism and what to make of this, because I think it's quite an interesting dilemma. If you've got a journalistic organization that has a secret source working within the spy agency that says this happened and the prime minister says this did not happen, what does a responsible news organization do with that? It's an honest question.

I don't know. And the separate question for me is, I'm waiting for some news organization to write a story that says, it appears as though some parts of Canada's spy service are engaged in an effort to draw criticism towards the government because of something that they see going on. That seems to me a new story in and of itself, but I haven't seen it dealt with that way yet. Maybe it will. So an inquiry for me is probably an exhaust opportunity for the government to sort of take some of the pressure that's building up around this and deal with it by saying, well, we'll have a conversation in the public sphere, the design of which obviously needs to be careful to protect the information that

should be protected so as to not equip our adversaries with information that they can use against us. But that's a smaller problem to figure out than how is it going to feel to go through two or three more months of people saying, well, exactly what happened that you said didn't matter? And exactly how do you know that said didn't matter? And exactly how do you know that it didn't matter? And exactly what things did you look at? And what things did you not look at as part of this protocol? So there's a lot of work for the government to do

to dig itself out of this hole that it put itself into. But also also I think the protocol that we've got isn't the right one to deal with the huge threat that we know exists now. So do you want me to try and answer the question you have? I gave you extra time by ragging out that last point so that you could get ready to solve this for the media, because I think it's a big challenge. And I think I want to hear your thoughts. Listen, it is an interesting question. I, I, the first thing I would say is look, there are two very different stories here, right? There is the charge that the election was interfered with and the China was

doing bad things. There's that charge that needs to be investigated separately, I believe, than any investigation, if warranted, into how various news agencies got their stories in the first place. Two very different things. You don't want one to take away from the other. So there's that. Now, on the issue of the media, as you said, it's implied that they got the information directly from CSIS in this case, the spy agency. Implied, as opposed to knowing with certainty that it came directly from CSIS to the news agency. And I think that's an important distinction because if I go by my own background in covering stories

similar in a way to this, this would not be the first time an intelligence agency used a third party to get at government that they felt wasn't listening to them. We've seen it before, and it's caused a certain consternation, but there's kind of ways around it. These intelligence agencies, by their very presence on the Hill and testifying and giving, you know,

and taking part in examinations of various things, develop relationships with parties other than just the governing party and governing members. And sometimes information gets circulated for a reason, you know, and the reason being that they want to get the information out. Now, when that happens, you have to, as the reporting agency, whether it's coming directly from, say, in this case, CSIS or some roundabout way, you've got to be sure about who you're dealing with, what their motivations are, before you report anything,

before you deal with the fact-checking that you would have to do. So it's a complicated question. Let me ask you a question on that. Okay, sure. If you're the reporter and you're talking to someone from CSIS, and both you and they know that the nature of that conversation is breaking the Official Secrets Act, what is your responsibility in light of that?

And separately, if you're a journalist in another organization, is it that a legitimate story for you to draw some attention to? Now, I'm not saying that those are the facts, but on the basis of the reports that we've seen so far. In fact, I did see in one story there was an acknowledgement that people didn't want to be named because they knew that they were breaking the law. Now, who knows exactly what's truthful in that? So I'm asking about the hypothetical. Well, everybody's breaking the law by releasing any of the information, right? Technically, they're all breaking the law. So in the media's case, that's why a good media organization and just all the ones I know, legitimate news organizations, have lawyers who something like this would go before. Say, okay, look, this is really sensitive, and it may well break the Official Secrets Act,

and what's our position on that? Because the one side of the argument will be it's in the public good for this information to come out. And are we prepared to go to court? Are we prepared to go to jail to protect our sources? And we've seen evidence of that in the past with journalists who protecting their sources to the last, you know, completely, end up in prison, know, in prison,

serving a prison sentence. So that becomes a, you know, it's not a sort of one-off, hey, I'm out, I just met some guy on the street corner and I made the decision myself to do this. It's more complicated than that. And it will go through a number of strains. And there will be times, and I've seen them in my, in my past where the lawyers say we can't,

we can't do this. I'm not, I'm not giving an official secrets act explanation here. I'm just saying that there are times when lawyers will say you can't, you don't have enough. Well, it'll be interesting to watch how that, that develops.

There was one or two other things that I thought we should spend a minute on, Peter, that jumped out at me in reading this critical election incident protocol report. One is that this was a committee of some of the most senior public servants in our country. I know some of them, extremely accomplished people, very smart people. But there's something about having a group of career public servants explore a subject that is about on-the-ground politics. That makes me think they could have hired, I'm sure they hired service providers to help them understand technology.

Probably they talked to people who were involved with politics. But what feels like what happens in these interference areas right now is almost kind of in the weeds. It's hard to see, especially unless you're a trained political operative. Now, I'm not suggesting that the committee should be made up of trained political operatives, but I feel like if it's not got some experienced political hands, maybe retired politicians who at least know what kinds of questions that might be pertinent to ask in terms of what are political organizers trying to do, what tools might they use and that sort of thing. is sufficient to advise the country going forward on the nature of the threat. Second is that one of the, at least one of the members of this panel,

specifically is reported in the report as saying, it doesn't work to only look at this during the writ period. We know influence happens outside the writ period. I think that was a well-made point. And I heard that Minister Dominic LeBlanc said they were going to look at the recommendations and take a bunch of them on board. And I think they should look pretty hard at that one as well. And the third thing is that in the report, they talk about there having been a joint declaration signed by Google and YouTube and LinkedIn and TikTok and Twitter about their effort to minimize,

suffuse, deal with these kinds of threats during a rip period. Well, TikTok is not functioning right now in terms of government devices, and we see politicians are abandoning it. So TikTok's participation in that joint declaration is an obvious question mark. But also Twitter isn't what Twitter was. Under Elon Musk, it's definitely looking like the kind of platform that is more open to that kind of influence than it perhaps was a couple of years ago. So that's another aspect of our presumed defenses, which probably aren't as sturdy as we hope they would be and which need to be looked at pretty carefully. And with some urgency, I would say, because it is a minority government and we don't know when the next election will be. And we can presume, based on

the way that China has been dealing with this conversation, is that they're not standing down. If anything, they might be accelerating their efforts. Yeah, no, there's every evidence that they're accelerating their efforts which gives you lots to be concerned about in the big global picture um you know they're said to be reconsidering now whether they're going to arm the russians uh in their fight with ukraine and reconsidering in the sense that in fact arming the r the Russians this time around as they're pausing in that consideration. So, I mean, there's real reason to be more than a little bit worried about where we are on the China story right now.

And watching these two different committees in North America, which seems to have a much more concern about this than Europe, certainly at the moment. But Canada and the United States, very concerned. Just before we take a break, you mentioned TikTok, and the fact that some politicians who are now punting, most politicians were punting on their use of TikTok, which has become kind of the darling of some politicians,

certainly in the last couple of years. CSIS, our friends at CSIS, put out a thing yesterday, a declaration that on mobile devices, TikTok collects your personal data, including contact lists, calendar entries, device location, hard drives, including external ones. So that's like pretty well everything that's on your phone, right? Users who have downloaded the app are more vulnerable to cyber attacks.

Now, the government departments have all been told they can't have TikTok on government phones. The opposition parties, the conservatives, say they're taking TikTok off their phones. And even the NDP leader, Mr. Singh, who has championed TikTok for the last few years as a way of getting to his supporters i think he's got almost like a million uh followers on tiktok has paused his uh membership in tiktok while he investigates this and makes a determination of whether or not to to punt a hundred percent on tiktok so um so there's your can i just say like this pause thing, that does not look like a serious decision. I mean, honestly, it looks like somebody who's got 800,000 followers

and doesn't want to give up access to the platform for personal political reasons. Unless he has some intelligence that says, no, no, no, TikTok's not doing what CSIS says, then he should set an example and delete the app and encourage other people to delete the app. Well, he seems to be slowly heading towards that direction, but you're right.

He's pausing, you know, he's not cutting it off. Okay, we're going to take a quick break. When we come back, I'm flipping a coin here. There's two things that we could talk about in our remaining time. I'll decide during this break. We'll be right back after this. And welcome back. Peter Mansbridge here. Bruce Anderson is in Ottawa. You're listening to Sirius XM, Channel 167, Canada Talks,

or you're listening on your favorite podcast platform, or you're watching The Bridge in production right here on your youtube channel and you can get the link by checking in on my twitter or instagram feed not on tiktok tiktok never been on tiktok i haven't been on tiktok not because i thought this was the wrong place to be but because i couldn't couldn't figure out how to do it. And I can't say anything in 20 seconds or whatever your time limit is. I don't think you have the dance moves for it yet, but I think if you work on it a little bit more this summer, maybe an alternative to TikTok will emerge and you can put up some Mansbridge dancing moves.

Yeah, that'll be the day. Never been able to dance. What are we going to talk about in this final segment? Okay, here's what we're going to talk about. I'm going to save the other one for Friday when Susan Delacorte is with us. This one. Because you dragged out your favorite whipping boy, the media, and said it's all the media's fault. Tiny, tiny little conversation.

Let's talk about fox news like i've never been a fan of fox news the fox news basically their prime time schedule never been a fan of that just a bunch of blowards, frauds, con artists, pillow salesmen, you name it, one after another. And you know what? It's been proven in this lawsuit between Fox and the Dominion, the election machines, that not only was Fox lying about what they claimed to know, they knew they were lying, and their executives knew they were lying,

and they were doing it all for money. They were doing it because if they didn't do it, they were afraid they were going to lose viewers, and as a result, advertising. And it seems like a cut-and-dry case. But, you know, we get around to defamation, nothing's cut-and-dry anymore. I mean, the main point of the suit is that Fox had claimed that the Dominion voting machines were rigged in favor of Biden and deliberately cost the election for Trump. And it's just total garbage, as most of their own officials,

like Bill Barr, even Bill Barr called it BS. But Fox has taken a huge hit on this in the public domain, but who knows what impact that's going to have in the courtroom and on whatever settlement or decision is made by the, by the courts. They're being sued for what is it? One and a half billion dollars, which wouldn't, wouldn't, wouldn't end Fox, but it was sure cripple them. But it's, it's more than that. It's, it's the fact that everything people have claimed about Fox, but it would sure cripple them. But it's more than that. It's the fact that everything people have claimed about Fox,

its critics have claimed about Fox, is proving not only to be true, but to be worse than what they claimed. So there's your media story, Bruce. You can have that one. Well, you know, there's a lot to chew on there and um you know first of all i think if murdoch wanted to make this go away he could write a check and it wouldn't affect his um his financial situation um and he could settle this this lawsuit so the decision to kind of go ahead and let the um the depositions and all of that evidence come into the public sphere, I guess we could look at it as a financial decision.

But also, in a curious sort of way, well, to your eyes and mine, this should be a matter of huge embarrassment to Fox. In another sense, it might be strategic. And let me tell you why I say that. Because what's really come out is evidence that these journalists, I use in air quotes to describe them, the hosts of these programs, are revealed to be people who are afraid of crossing their audience, who are terrified that the things that they say might offend their audience. And so they will say things instead that they don't think are true, but that will please their audience. Now, that should be an indictment of a news organization. But to make that point, you have to believe that Fox was a news organization as opposed to a

group chat, essentially an echo chamber that had been built specifically to allow advertisers to find an audience that was congenial to them, that was kind of reliably of a certain set of values and opinions. And Fox seemed to love that business model. And what seemed in the depositions to be the most dramatic information was the fear that Fox had that it was going to lose that connection with those people by telling the truth as opposed to by repeating the lies. So to your eyes and my eyes, that's a scandal about journalism, except I kind of wonder if it's a mistake to think that it was a journalistic enterprise to begin with, because the evidence is that's not what it was trying to do. Ultimately,

it thought it needed to kind of turn the corner on Trump. So it put some information into the mix, maybe in the hopes of creating the next generation conversation about Ron DeSantis or something else or somebody else. But then it got scared because people didn't like that. The audience didn't like that and Trump didn't like it. And so the revelations are scathing in one respect, but maybe help us understand what that business is really all about. Well, if you're a viewer or listener to Fox News, what are you supposed to believe they are when they're called Fox News? They're not called Fox. They're not called Fox Opinion. They're not called Fox We're Not news. They're called Fox News.

Look at every day you and I look at comments back to news organizations based on content that they put out. And a huge proportion of those comments are either people saying, I agree exactly with what you said was the news. Thank you for doing it. Or you're the devil. Why did you say that thing that wasn't true and call it news? And so we live in a different world now where most of the audience of Fox News wants news that says Donald Trump was a great president, would be a great president again, had the election stolen from him. And if you tell them news that says Donald Trump was a great president, would be a great president again,

had the election stolen from him. And if you tell them news that's not aligned with that, they don't go, oh, I'm glad that they told me that. I hadn't thought about that alternative scenario. Thank you, Sean Hannity, for making that point. They go, why is Sean Hannity turning into the devil? And this is the challenge with news organizations that have wandered so far away from the mandate that has generally in the past been associated with journalism. And there are one or two organizations in Canada that look like they've wandered some distance away from that too, but that's for another day maybe. Why wait for another day? You know, I hear what you're saying, and look,

it's naive to think, for any of us to think that certain media organizations have always made room in their pages or in some cases on their airtime for opinion and properly labeled and described as such. But the news portion has been kind of sacred, right? It is what it is. This should be the news, the facts, you know, the varying arguments and allow people to make up their own mind.

But let me ask you, just because Fox News is called Fox News, it doesn't make it news, right? But do you think that MSNBC is a news organization? I think they have, and we've done this before, I think they have the same issue at night as Fox does, their opinion. There's a difference between opinion that's based on lies and opinion that's based on an ideology or a political stance on something. The thing that is proven in this court case is that Fox based its opinion on lies. And not only were they lies, they knew they were lies.

And they did it deliberately, not because they believed what was being said. They made fun of these people who they were quoting, you know, privately between each other, but on air, they treated them like the gospel. That's the difference. I mean, I, you, you know, I, I, I have, uh, points at which I turn all of these off and not just as you said, not just the American ones. Once you get into opinion, um, you're, you're into, you know, uh, challenging ground as, as a viewer looking for facts, you've got to be careful. I think if you draw the line at lies, your point is well taken.

But I guess what I'm saying is that there's aBC than ever watch Fox because the tilt that it has is more aligned with my values. But I can't hardly watch it anymore because I feel like it's such an exaggeration of the political conversation. And I find that it's like that all day long. So I don't watch it during the day. I don't watch it at night anymore. Maybe I'll see some clips on YouTube and I'll watch them if it looks like there's something that's actually newsworthy as opposed to what everybody does now, which is kind of Chiron breaking news. And it's an assertion of the same sort that's been made 150 times before in the previous seven days. So I think that's a problem. I think it's a problem on the right. I think it's a problem on the left. And I think it's a problem on the internet as well. Thank God there's the bridge

that just drives straight down the middle, right? The bridge between these two extremes the exaggerations and the lies i like your i like your your differentiation on those two words and i i'm not sure i agree with it but i think it's the basis of a another conversation uh that we should have because i think it's a good one especially especially now we're out of time. Bruce will be back on Friday, of course, with good talk. Susan Delacorte will join us. I mean, the other thing I wanted to talk about, and we can talk about it on Friday,

as who knows what other things we'll talk about, but this trend that I've seen with Pierre Palliev of late, well, not just of late, but of the past year, is that whenever he's kind of got his back against the wall on a claim, whether it's by the media or by the other parties, that they're doing something bad to conservatives, he goes, I know nothing about it. I never knew anything about it. And he says that there are three or four examples of that. And you go, really? Like, how could he not know about some of these things? And is he always going to take that position? I didn't know about it when there's some questions about the activities of

either his members or his party or his office. So we'll have a little fun with that as we've had fun with the topics today as well. Tomorrow, it's your turn, your thoughts, your ideas about certain things. If you have anything to say, get it in like now, not like tonight, but get it in now at the Mansbridge Podcast at gmail.com. What, do you got a hockey game to go to tonight?

The new Leafs. The new Leafs. Have you seen the trades? The Leafs? Maybe that's what we should talk about on Friday. The comeback Leafs. The comeback Leafs. This is it.

That long drought is over. Well, it's spring, and that's what, you know, the leaves do come back. Spring. All right. Not here, at least. Your turn on the Random Ranter tomorrow. Good talk on Friday. Susan Delacorte filling in for Chantelibare,

who's off hiking the mountains and the rivers and streams of Iceland. She told us it was a plane, not mounts. It was a plane. I don't know. I like the mountain idea. Somebody needs to be accurate about that. I'm lying. I'm lying.

I'm not exaggerating. I'm lying. That's what you want to hear. A full declaration. Okay, that's it for this day thank you bruce talk to you again on friday and for you out there thank you for listening we'll see you again in 24 hours