The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - SMT -- Are The Liberals Corkscrewing To The Ground?

Episode Date: February 1, 2023

The Liberal's polling numbers are not good, in. fact they are bad.  Can they recover? Bruce brings the SMT thermometer to the program and has his analysis.  One of Alberta's most respected writers says the provincial governing party is alone in checking out of discussions with Ottawa about Alberta's energy worker's transition to new jobs.  And the committee looking into consulting work in Ottawa begins its work.

And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. You are just moments away from the latest episode of The Bridge. It's Wednesday. Wednesday, Wednesday, Wednesday. That means smoke, mirrors, and the truth. With Bruce Anderson. Can I ask, how did you pick that music? When did you pick it, why did you pick it, and how did you pick it? I don't know. You know, because the bridge is just like a very small operation with no money.

The music director didn't choose it for you. There is no music director. But there is. My son, Will, went online to the free music section. There's places where you can get music for nothing, right? You don't have to pay residual. So right away, I was attracted to whatever the first one that popped up. But then he offered me a bunch, and I kind of like that one. Something about it says to me, smoke mirrors of the truth.

Yeah. It will always be smoke mirrors of the truth. Well, I didn't want to throw you off, so good to see you again. Good to see you. What was I going to say? What do we want to talk about? Here's what we want to talk about. You know, I hesitate to bring this up because

you know how I feel about polls. You know how you feel about polls spending much of your life in the polling business. But we always end up kind of talking about them on occasion and we talk about them with the normal caution. And the biggest caution right now in Canada on a national poll is there's no election. There's no election now. There's no election when the poll was taken. There's no election expected in the next little while. So what do these numbers mean?

Well, they give you a sense, I guess, of where the public mood is. And for the most part, since the last election, they've remained more or less the same as the election results with the conservatives a couple of points ahead but distributed across the country with seats etc etc usually meant that the liberals were ahead well not not lately not in the last couple of weeks there have been some number of polls and abacus firm you're closely associated with, is out this week. Susan Delacorte, who's one of the most respected journalists on Parliament Hill, looks at those numbers and said, liberals better get their act together here.

This is a warning. It's an eight-point spread between the Conservatives and the Liberals. Now, eight points is a lot. Eight points could probably mean, would almost certainly mean, a Conservative majority if that happened right now, if there was an election today, which there isn't. But eight points is a lot. And after a fall where it appeared to a lot of people like the Liberals were actually getting their mo back again,

these numbers would suggest that's not the case. So let's hear what kind of a spin you put on it. Well, I'm going to answer your question, Peter, but before I do that, I need to say something here because I don't know how many times I've heard you say on these podcasts or when we were doing that issue together, you go, I don't know about polls. You know how I feel about polls. If I had a tally of all of the emails and the text messages, what are the numbers that I got from everybody? You would be number one on the list by a country mile. For somebody who's so disinterested in polls, I think that I can see a different version of that.

And I just want people to know, in the interest of full disclosure, that I'm sure sometimes you do feel disinterested in polls, but I haven't seen that side of you very much. And here we are talking about polls again. Disinterested would be the wrong word. I'm interested in polls, which is the reason why I might call you on occasion, you know, once or twice a year. What exactly is the thing you're trying to convey then. I like that because polls are, you know. The issues around polls are everything from do they, in fact, have an impact on voters? Do polls during an election campaign, does a poll that would suggest one party is well ahead of another,

does that drive people to that party, even if they don't really know much about it, but just want to sort of be with the winner? There's that issue. There's the issue of whether it torques coverage one way, pushes it towards more of a horse race coverage by the media on politics. You know, there's a bunch of stuff. And then there's the whole issue of, you know, polling accuracy,

which you've raised. So, but that doesn't stop me from saying look at these numbers like what are the latest numbers you're right about that i will not argue all right look i'm glad you raised the that first uh i i wouldn't even call it a concern an observation about the possible impact of polls because i do think that is one of the things to note about the recent spate of polling information, and I'll come to that in a minute. I do think that the liberals are seeing signs of, obviously, fatigue with the just being the same for seven years and a bit now happens to every government.

It's very hard for a government to sound fresh and new unless it makes deliberate and repeated and sustained efforts to do that. Once it gets to that stage in the proverbial cycle. But I also feel like we're seeing another thing going on. And I'm going to try and because I've only been kind of studying these numbers in the last little bit, the, I want to try and make it as simple as I can. I think what's going on is that the first 20 points. We're kind of, we're kind of losing you off and on we got a bad internet connection we are back again now i'm back yeah i don't know what happened but we did lose you there for a couple seconds

but that's okay but because it gives us time when when your feed pauses to really contemplate what it is you're saying to understand the meaning to, to dig deep. I haven't said anything yet, but now I'm going to. Okay. I think the right is getting consolidated and firmer on the far right. So the first 20 points of Conservative Party support is people who don't want climate action, who don't want Indigenous reconciliation, who don't like so much focus on diversity and inclusion. And they're not really going anywhere except possibly to the People's Party of Canada at some point in the future. But that seems less likely under Pierre Pauliev's leadership, the Conservatives, than under Erno Tull's.

So they've got that support locked up. The far left tends to be pretty regularly NDP, only occasionally interested in the liberals, but always looking for more action on the policy priorities that they really care about, including inclusion and diversity, including climate change, including indigenous reconciliation. And they're almost preordained never to be fully satisfied with what a kind of a mainstream party government can do. That isn't necessarily a problem because the liberals have always sort of recognized that there's a broad pool of opinion out there in the middle that's sort of disinterested in the harder-edged, more culturally-oriented ideas. You can press a button and make things change as quickly as you want to, which is often the criticism of the farther-left advocates. But I think that's coming to question now for a couple of reasons. One is the nature of the farther left advocates. But I think that's coming to question now for a couple of reasons.

One is the nature of the political debate. Fewer people are paying attention. It's easier for people to get pulled in directions that make them feel opposed to each other than make them feel like they want to be united around solving certain problems. And it's also the case that if we look at the second thing is that when we look at the most important issues of the day, whether it's the cost of living, the strength of the economy, the functioning of the health care system, let's just focus on the health care system both be concerned about those. And both of them, because those problems are seen the way they are now, can be unhappy with the liberals, not necessarily because they see specific actions that the liberals have taken, but because the liberals are in place and the problems are intense for some people. So there's a real premium, I think, for the liberals in finding a way to connect with those people who are anxious about those issues in a way that isn't defensive, in a way that looks like they're taking action to kind of make a difference, in a way that conveys the don't pick a more radical solution to these problems.

Stick with the let's do it together. Let's make these changes. Let's keep going and and the debate that we're seeing around innovation in the health care system is a good example of how liberals are in danger of losing um ground in that debate to both the left and the right and to some degree uh that's the same in the conversation about the energy uh transition and so it's put the Liberals in a difficult situation. I think they probably knew that they were going to be

in a difficult situation this year. And the only bright lining, and this goes to the point that you made, is that for the Liberals to win again, there has to be a period of time, maybe it didn't need to start now, but it is, where a lot of voters start thinking about, do I really want Pierre Polyev as Prime Minister? Does the Conservative Party adequately reflect my interests and views? And if I don't think that, then come election time, I might need to re-elect the Liberals or vote Liberal again. So that process has played itself out in the last two election campaigns. And there's a chance that

it will happen this time. But a lot of that will depend on how effective and agile the Liberals are at managing their way through this particular challenge right now? You know, if I was a liberal right now, what I'd be worrying about is that as this government enters its eighth year, it's a little over seven years it's been in power, entering its eighth year, that it's almost too late. It almost doesn't matter what they do now. Those who are upset, and it's not a small number, as you pointed out, those who are upset are not suddenly going to change their mind. That's what I'd worry about, that given the length of time they've been in office,

that it's a very difficult situation to dig yourself out of once again, as they did in the last two election campaigns. Especially when you look at the kind of economic forecast for the next year or two, it's not good. It's not going to be easy to dig yourself out of it, no matter how popular or unpopular you are. But I guess that's what I'd worry about, that it's too late with this makeup of a government. Well, you know, that's a reasonable worry. I don't think that that's what the numbers say now. I think the numbers saying they're

definitely, it's really important for them that there's a change in government is 50%. Now, some of those want an NDP government, some of those want a conservative government, and that number is the same number as existed at the last two elections. So the number wanting change isn't really elevated now, but the number saying I must reelect the Liberals is down, is down to a relatively low number. Pardon me. So there's more votes that are up for grabs. And I think that if I were in the Liberal shoes, I would be a little bit more worried about the fact that Pierre Poliev is finding it more comfortable and maybe easier many days, not all days, to spend only 20% of his time tapping that hardcore base to keep those People's Party voters from going People's

Party and spend more of his time talking about government spending and gatekeeping by, you know, officials in government and how to grow the economy and not tax you to death and why not use technology instead of taxes to beat climate change. He is a more effective communicator than his two predecessors. I was tempted for a minute to say three. I never thought that Stephen Harper was a terribly effective communicator. And I think there are problems with Pierre Polyev's communication style, and he won't wear that well with some people. But he can get a sentence out, and he can deliver some heat, and he can create some energy in the House of Commons and on the stump and draw crowds.

And we haven't really seen that from a conservative leader in a while. And so I'd be a little bit concerned about the game readiness of Pierre Poliev if I were the liberals. And I would be absolutely determined on my side that everybody has to be on the top of their game. And the communications needs to be sharper and more effective and more clear in articulating what is it that the liberal government is trying to do. do because if it sounds like 50 things and they're all the same things as the last seven years you know it might be good policy but it won't sound like good politics the other you know forget about polling numbers because you can argue about how accurate they are and the process and all that look at the numbers on fundraising. You see those numbers that came out this week? They're pretty astonishing.

Most ever raised by a party in a non-election quarter. The Conservatives, I think it's just over $10 million. Liberals still raise a lot of money, $5 or $6 million. The People's Party had their biggest quarter in a non-election period. It was under a million, but it was still big. I don't know why people give money to that party, but anyway. Yeah. But the conservative number, that's a big number. I know they're enjoying a new leader and seem to be riding high. But as you've told us many times before, like it or not, money makes a big difference in the way you run a campaign.

You know, money does make a big difference, and it is a reasonable, a variable to use in understanding how political parties are doing, but it's changing over time in a couple of ways. One is the nature of campaigns is different. The cost of campaigns used to be disproportionately TV advertising and tour. And as you know, in the last couple of election campaigns, tour has been different. When you covered election campaigns, planes were full, and they went nonstop across the country, except when there were buses, and the buses were full, right? And that's not the way that things work anymore. News organizations don't have the budgets. And also, I think the campaigns don't feel as though that version of campaigning is as effective as some other versions

that sometimes come with much lower cost. But the other thing that's different is that TV advertising. Parties will spend money on TV advertising, but they'll spend more increasingly on digital advertising, which is a lower cost spend. So I think those two things represent a caution that the financial advantage isn't the same as it used to be, but it's also telling us something. And I think that for me anyway, without knowing more of the details, what I do know about what generates response in the internet age of advertising is things that make people upset, angry, frustrated, want to do something right now.

That's always been an important part of opposition fundraising. I think in the Internet age, it's become a more important area of opportunity. I don't love it, but I don't think that there's anything inherently – well, it's within the rules. Let me put it that way. Okay. We're going to take a quick break. There's a couple of other things I'd like to be able to get into today's program. And one of them also deals, I mean, that whole issue on polling was generated in many ways for me by Susan Delacorte's piece today in the Toronto Star. And the next one we're going to talk about is from another journalist

who I've known for many, many years, decades, and I've had a lot of respect for. And we'll get to that right after this. And welcome back. You're listening to The Bridge, the Wednesday episode of Smoke, Mirrors and the Truth with Bruce Anderson. You're listening on Sirius XM, channel 167.

Canada Talks are on your favorite podcast platform. Or you should have been watching this if I'd only pushed the record button. So I'll push it now. Recording in progress. There we go. So sorry, you missed a scintillating first few minutes on polling, folks who are watching on our YouTube channel.

And a discussion about Susan Delacorte's piece on the latest polling number that was in the Toronto Star today. Moving on now, I guess we've heard enough of the music. I think we've heard enough of the music, so I'll shut that down. You know, it's a challenge, Bruce, to be the sole operator of this program. You know, I should give you part of the job, right? You should do the music or do the remember to push the record button. I'll do the music. I like you making mistakes. It makes me feel a little bit better about myself.

So let's stick with that. Okay. Don Braid writes in Alberta and has on politics in alberta and the national picture for as i said earlier decades um i haven't talked to don in probably 20 years but we used to have him on every once in a while when i was back in my old cbc days and i still read don i know you read Don quite often too. Don always agree with him. But he has a really interesting piece that's just out in the last few days.

I'll just read the first three sentences because they're quite telling. Forget about what others say about Alberta politics. Listen to what Don Braid says. And he's been watching Alberta politics since, watching Alberta politics since the Law Heat days. Talks between Ottawa and many Alberta groups on job transition have been going on since 2019, behind the back of the Alberta government. But it was the UCP that's the governing party in Alberta,

that turned its back while Alberta business, Alberta labor, Alberta municipalities, and Alberta interest groups got fully engaged. This almost guarantees that a new national job strategy will be designed without the provincial government that has the deepest interest in the result. That's pretty telling. And it's not just about Danielle Smith, it's about Jason Kenney, because he makes the point, this has been the case since 2019, that Alberta has basically checked out of these discussions, or the Alberta government has checked out of these discussions,

but all the other, or many of the other interested parties in Alberta, whether it's industry or municipal governments, or what have you, have been a part of the process. What do you take from that? Well, it's a very timely and very, very welcome column. You know, I remember saying something like this in one of our conversations in the last several weeks, you know, that there is

a version of Alberta that is different on these issues than that which emanates from the Premier's office. And I know that I always hesitate to say those kinds of things because I think you get mail that says, what does a guy from central Canada know about Alberta and everything else? But it has been clear to me for a good while that people in Alberta are very savvy. They're very knowledgeable. They're like everybody else. They can see the change that's happening in the world.

They know that there will come a time when processing oil without regard to your emissions doesn't work. Your investors won't support it. Customers won't buy it. And so they want to get on with that. They know that there will come a time when the use of the resource, once you produce it with lower emissions, will transition from burning for energy to some burning for energy, but a lot of other uses as well. And nowhere more than in Alberta, Saskatchewan a close second, is it more necessary for there to be smart public policy that says,

okay, if we see this coming and we're completely convinced that this is the headwind that we are going to be facing. What do we do about that? And to know that the answer isn't to blame Ottawa or to pretend that it's not coming, that's been the problem, in my view, in Alberta conservative politics for several years is that they wanted to have the fight with Ottawa because of some almost a continuation of the old NEP fight with Justin Trudeau's father, because it felt good in their political DNA. Because occasionally, the federal government talked about this transition in a way that sounded somewhat presumptuous, offensive, overlording, that kind of thing. The conversation has been broken at the political level for a long time. But behind the

scenes, including some of the politicians involved, there's some very, very constructive people who are working away at what would it look like? How would we support each other? There's a lot of dimensions to this, one of which is the idea that we're going to need more electricity in this country. We're going to need a bigger, more robust pan-Canadian electricity grid to get the clean energy to the people who need to use it for all the new things that they need to use it for. That's only going to happen if the federal government, the provincial governments, and lots of different industrial and labor stakeholders come together. And I think more and more of those players are seeing it that way.

And I'm really glad that Don Braid wrote it. I believe that these internal dynamics in Alberta, as revealed to some degree by the comment in that great column of Alex Pourbaix, the CEO of Synovus, who made it clear that Canada's best chance for success is in creating this dynamic where our barrels are cleaner and our resources are used for more things and that that's the way that we should be thinking about our economy in the future.

Very welcome and very timely. And timely also because Danielle Smith has seemed to offer the opportunity to get into some of this discussion with Justin Trudeau where she wasn't as little as a week or two ago. Look, I'm all for them developing a relationship where they can work this out. It feels a little bit to me like she's stuck in a place where there's probably some people in her caucus who don't accept the science of climate change

and don't want her to go down this road at all. She's kind of put herself in such a kind of a rigid and combative posture vis-a-vis Trudeau, including over the Transition Act in the first go round, that it sounds a bit jerky almost to kind of get to the place that she is now, almost as though she was sort of reminded or learned about some of these consultations that have been going on, some of the work that had been going on, and decided, well, I better not be behind that curve. And that's the way that Don Braid ended his call. It's better to be driving this car than parked in the garage. And I think that's maybe where she is. I hope it is. I really feel like the chance for

a breakthrough of let's focus on the right ideas rather than a repeat of the old politics is possible. Can you, just before we move on, can you explain to me why there is a hesitancy or disapproval of the use of the term just transition? And that's not just in Alberta. That's also around some of the cabinet table in Ottawa. They felt that was an unnecessary use of those two words and that it's created some of the problem. Yeah.

I think the word transition alone isn't a problem. I think attaching the term just to it has a connotation that is more like a soft landing or a social program to kind of heal the wounds of people affected by this transition. And I think where it came from was from the international labor movement, essentially, who wanted to make sure that the treatment of workers as opposed to corporations in the energy transition was handled in a just fashion. In other words, to make sure that companies didn't kind of wander away from those businesses and nobody was taking care of the needs and opportunities for the employees.

That language fit more comfortably in a conversation like that um but in the conversation like the one that happens between alberta and ottawa on energy just transition has a connotation of something that maybe ottawa is going to do to alberta as opposed to something that alberta is going to want to do and ottawa is going to it do, which is probably the right place for this to be at some point. Not sure if we'll get there, but I feel a little bit more optimistic now than I have in a long, long time, maybe ever on that issue. And I think the use of the word just is, it's not like people don't like the word because they want to be unjust. It that they it sounds more like a social program uh connotation which implies maybe in the end it's not going to be very good but we'll try to make it just so i think the you know semantics of these things

um can matter in these conversations maybe it seems like in an outsized way, but that's my take on where that phrase is and why it's making people want to wander away from it. Okay. Before we move on to this issue of the consulting, which will be our final segment for this day, can I just remind those who are watching this on our YouTube channel that you missed the first 15 minutes or so, not because of some technical screw-up, not because of some conspiracy,

but because I screwed up. The director. The director. I forgot to push a button, which were recorded. But it's a pretty good conversation about the mess the liberals find themselves in when they look at the latest polling data which shows them at eight points down from the conservatives and has a lot of people wondering whether they can ever come back from that number um so if you want to listen to

that discussion you can find it by just downloading the podcast um So it's there. So I'm sorry. My fault. My bad, as they say. And can I thank you, Bruce, for earlier talking about how back in the day when I was covering campaigns as a reporter that you did include the fact that I was on planes because some people might think I was on horseback or on a train or something that it was so long ago, but it was early planes.

First one I was on, I think it was a DC-7, was a prop plane. However, I digress. Let's move on to consulting. The committee hearings in Ottawa start today, and they got a pretty big witness on day one, which is Dominic Barton, the former Canadian ambassador to China, but more importantly for the purposes of these conversations, on consulting the former managing partner worldwide of the McKinsey Group,

which has had a big target painted on its back, some of it for good reason, as Barton admitted when he was on this podcast last week. Anyway, there's a lot of discussion around consulting and whether or not it's gone too far in governments throughout the Western world, including Canada. I think it's something like $100 million in consulting fees last year

or whatever, a lot of money anyway, from a time when there used to be very small consulting figures. It started to balloon up during the Harper years. It's gone on in the Trudeau years. What do you, I mean, you know some of these players. You know what they do, and you know the argument about whether or not they're going to end up replacing or have already replaced the work, the good work, in many cases, that public servants and the bureaucracy do.

Where do you think this committee is going to lead to? What could it achieve in these talks? A lot of smoke. You know, I don't know if there's – I obviously don't know the details of all and that sort of thing. But my assumption is I haven't seen anything that makes me think that anything was done that was inappropriate so far. But I do see lots of things that in the hands of a relatively talented opposition politician can rile Canadians. And I think that's where we're

at right now. And subject to more information coming out, that may change. Why is it turning out like this? Well, the first thing I would say is that the use of the term consultants is a broad brush that encompasses a lot of small and medium businesses, size businesses use consultants to help them with IT, to help them with their financial management software, to help them with the processes by which they source things or ship things. So if there was a version of the economy when more businesses just had all of the resources that they needed inside. That was some time ago. So consulting as a way to tap into expertise that has experience doing something that maybe your competitors are doing and you want to know about and you want to incorporate into your business, that's a pretty cost-efficient model to get that expertise. And that's a big part of what consultants do.

They've done digital transformations in a variety of organizations. And so a government department can say, we should have done that five years ago. We got to get on with it. What's the best practice? What's the best way to do this so we're not inventing it from scratch? And it would be a bad deputy minister ADM if they didn't look at consultants as a way to help identify the best practice that they should follow, and in many cases, use those consultants to design the system that they need. Because you can't attract that kind of talent and experience for the kind of dollars that government pays. I hear Pierre Polyev talking about expensive

consultants, and he's going to want to make people think that these professionals are ripping off Canadians, and some Canadians undoubtedly will think that. But we don't like to pay our public servants the kind of money that somebody who knows how to do these things and has done them in a variety of different settings can make in the private sector. So we just have to decide whether we don't want the expertise or we're willing to pay for it in some of these situations. I'm not saying that's the case in everyone, but I'm saying that is the general rationale for that. And then there's another category of support that is acquired from these consulting companies that can also be a very rational decision for governments to make, which is that if you have a project that's of limited term and requires a lot of concentrated labor,

you can either decide that you're going to try to hire those workers, and then when the project is done, send them on their way, or you can contract them through an outside party, sometimes a consulting firm, to do that work because it doesn't give you the same kind of payroll bulge, headcount increase, and long-term commitment that you otherwise don't want. So that can be also one of the categories of spending under these consulting budgets that departments have enlarged over the years. And I'm hoping that in the course of these hearings, that a good explanation,

and I would say a good defense, but a good explanation of how consulting materially helps improve government services and programs or can help save tax dollars, both of which I think are often the case. I hope that that argument comes out. Well, let me just throw a counter argument at you on one level. But first, early in your answer, you talked about how there's no evidence of anything wrong happening. And I know you were talking about canada when you made that point because it's pretty clear there were there have been some pretty ugly things that have happened around the world barton admitted it on oh yeah absolutely yeah whole opioid thing scandal

and the states which mckinsey's ended up paying 600 million dollars uh to affected parties as a result was a bad thing but if there are bad things in the Canada relationship with consulting firms, then they may come up in these hearings. Perhaps the opposition parties have something they want to put forward and everybody will be intrigued to hear that. Here's my question though, my kind of counter question to your argument. Part of the criticism of consulting firms is that when they're hired by, let's say a government, to help them figure out a way to get from A to B, that B is going to be the destination, no matter what, no matter whether the consulting firm sees, you know,

actually A to C would be a better way to go than A to B. In other words, what you're hiring is somebody to back up your desire to do something a certain way. Find the reasoning that will work to go from A to B, if you will. And other options aren't on the table. I don't know whether I explained that well enough, but if I did, does that make any sense? Is that part of the reason why questions are being raised

about these relationships? Yeah. Well, I've worked with a lot of organizations in the private sector, big companies who use consultants. And sometimes they use consultants because they can have really smart people inside their organizations. But those people are defensive about continuing to do the things that they're doing the way that they're doing them. Where at the more senior management levels, leaders can be looking at their competitor set and saying, well, those guys over there seem to be doing it a little bit better. Why don't we figure out what it is that they're doing and see if some version of that should be

incorporated here? If you follow the logic of that and you bear in mind the human chemistry that's involved in organizational dynamics, it makes sense that sometimes you can't get that kind of agile and flexible thinking out of your own organization alone. Sometimes you can, but sometimes you can't. And that if you bring in outside consultants, and they try to drive towards a change that they're asked to explore and explain how to do, that it's going to cause some bumping inside, that there's going to be some friction, there's going to be some tension. I've always sort of looked at it and say, it's pretty messy sometimes to see it. But sometimes that friction is productive in an organization. Sometimes it creates, you know, more dynamic change,

more positive change than otherwise would happen. I'm not here to make a complete blanket defense of consulting. My point is really, I don't think anybody is right now. And I don't think that's right. I think it's quite easy to say consultants, just as it has been easy in the past to say lobbyists, and to imply that whether it's the head of the Canadian Medical Association or the lobbyist for opioid manufacturers. They're the same. They're not the same. All these situations are not the same.

And in some cases, consultants do very effective work that's useful for governments. All right. We're going to leave it there for this week. With apologies once again to our YouTube channel viewers, but you can pick up that first 15 or 20 minutes. There was a fairly deep dive on the situation the Liberals find themselves in right now. We'll have to get a consulting company to come in and help us.

That's a good idea. I'll get right on that. And, of course, we've got the millions of dollars here at the bridge to afford one of those top consulting companies. Sell some of that memorabilia behind you. That's right. They can auction it off for you. It's probably a service that you can acquire, too.

That's my dad's Lancaster during the Second World War. Uh-oh. Sorry. He was flying for the RAF. And I think that's a – I'm not sure. I've got to check which plane that is. I'm glad you're not wearing the toque today so we can see it more clearly. All right, my friend.

Good to talk to you. We'll talk again soon. Tomorrow it is your turn and the random ranter. Friday, Bruce will be back with Chantel for Good Talk. That's it for this day. I'm Peter Mansbridge on Smoke, Mirrors and the Truth. Thanks for listening. Thanks for watching at least part of it.

And we'll talk to you again in 24 hours.