The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - SMT -- Do Debts And Deficits Even Matter Anymore

Episode Date: November 22, 2023

It is the morning after the day before, or in other terms, the day after the FES, the Fall Economic Statement. Was it a good day or a bad day for the Liberals as they try to climb out of their double-digit deficit to the Conservatives in the opinion polls? Bruce is here for a spirited discussion about that.

And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. You are just moments away from the latest episode of The Bridge. It is Wednesday. Bruce Anderson, Smoke Mirrors and the Truth, coming right up. And hello there, Peter Mansbridge in Toronto. Bruce Anderson is in Ottawa. So do you remember, I don't know, when was it? A month ago? Probably not. Around Canadian Thanksgiving. Remember that?

And the big issue is the price of turkey. It was $120 a turkey, and the turkey prices have gone way up. Yeah. That wasn't everywhere. We had people writing in saying oh that's not true it's only 25 where i live that must have been a really small turkey but there's no doubt there were 120 turkeys and turkey prices had gone up so that was a given however i see in the space in between the canadian thanksgiving and the American Thanksgiving, the price of turkeys has dropped, plummeted in some places.

So you're getting a better turkey deal in the States than the turkey deals in Canada. What do you make of that? Isn't that something we should be discussing? Turkey prices better in the States than in Canada. Why is that? I don't know if that's what we should discuss but i do think that there was some really interesting news yesterday on the food inflation on the inflation side of things in canada inflation he's going serious right away

try to have some fun with turkeys and he's going to immediately go to the serious nature okay that maybe that's people want to hear that you know all right um price of gasoline cheap in the united states but they measure it in gallons and we measure it in liters what's wrong with that why don't we talk about that these things aren't necessarily. So let's just move on to what the... Actually, I think it's the price of gas that has something to do with the turkey price dropping. I've heard Pierre Polyev talk about that, that everything comes back to the price of gasoline. And if you're not worried about the carbon price and the price of gasoline, then you don't understand how the cost of everything goes up.

He talks about that quite a lot. And I don't find it that persuasive, but I understand that some people do. So can we talk about. Yeah, no, we'll get to it. On the price of gas, I am still, and this has been years in the making. You know this. I've heard you ramble on this in the past as well that the price of gas is down not because of anything canada's done not because of any government regulations or you know demanding this that or the other thing

it's because the opec countries have increased supply right it's as simple as that and they you know either turn on the tap or turn off the tap fairly quickly. Especially when the price goes up, it's almost immediate at the bumps in Canada. Like, bingo. When the price comes down, it takes a while. I mean, it has come down. But it doesn't seem to go down as fast as it goes up. And we've never been able to deal with that.

Don't you agree about that? That simple point? How do you like them apples? That's right. Okay. Honestly, I remember having that conversation with people in politics in 1980 when I worked in it. Everybody likes to talk about the price.

I have a friend whose father, I live in Cape Breton, and whose father helpfully sends her information every week or every few days on the price of gasoline at different stations. And it's a kind of an early warning system

of when to fill up your tank. So it's a little bit like the weather, I think, in Canada, is that people do like to share information about it. But, you know, the price goes up, the price goes down, as you say. And largely world events and choices made in OPEC have the most to do with it. But every once in a while, we still have a conversation about why did the Canadian politicians let the price of gas go up and why does it come down more quickly? But I have nothing to contribute to that conversation.

All right. Or the Turkey in the United States one. So you're off gas, you're off Turkey and you're on to what? Price of things in Canada. I thought there were two things that were interesting yesterday. One was the new inflation numbers at 3.1% down from 3.8% previous month. Because of gas prices. That was the probably – The major movement. I think the Liberals have had a ton of bad weeks in the last few months,

mostly bad weeks, almost only bad weeks. And I have said over and over again, I think they are in a five alarm fire situation in terms of their public opinion support. If an election were held now, they'd be virtually wiped off the electoral map. This week, I think they're having a little bit of a better week. And one of the reasons is the new CPI data. Because if inflation comes down, inflation and interest rates are the two things that are having the biggest impact on on public opinion towards the liberals, in addition to a bit of fatigue with with Justin Trudeau.

And maybe I don't need to add the a bit part. But if inflation comes down and if, let's say, inflation comes down enough to permit interest rates to start to come down, that's the only scenario that I can see where the liberals start to recover some share of voice and some competitiveness heading into next year, which doesn't those things aren't guaranteed. But certainly if inflation had gone the other way, it would have been a horrible situation, especially because the relationship between interest rates and the federal deficit is massive now. And this is the main, you know, one of the main points of discussion about the fall economic statement, which I'm sure we're going to come to. So the inflation number was a massive piece of good news for the Liberals yesterday, both because it means that pain that people were experiencing so acutely

when they were shopping for groceries or filling up with gas is less now than it was before, and also because it holds open the promise that there'll be some relief on the interest rate front somewhere down the road, even as more people are renewing their mortgages. So that was very good news for them. There was one other thing that happened on the food prices side of things, which I noticed just this morning, and I'm sure that being eagle-eyed the way you are, you already picked up on this and got your shopping coupons out or circular and circle the things that you're going to go out and buy. That's what I was doing while I was waiting

for you to come online. So this was an announcement by Sobeys, which is one of the largest chains of grocery retailers in the country, owns Safeway and other brands that operate in a bunch of Canadian cities, they said that they were going to expand and kick off their price freeze program, that they usually have one this time of year. They're expanding the number of products that are going to be included in it to something like 90% of the packaged goods that they offer. And that does seem to me to be in part a response anyway to the idea that the government was working with the sector to try to stabilize prices.

I don't know that you can make the case that it was a one for one relationship. But if you're the government and you were wondering, are you ever going to see any merits from your announcement that you're working with these companies and you're putting pressure on them? Well, this announcement was an important one, I think. And now we'll see whether other companies follow suit. I don't disagree with that. I'm all in with you on that, you know, that hope for the future in terms of what we saw from Sobeys and whether we're going to see that from some of the other grocery chains as well. However, let me just rewind a bit to the CPI number. I was happy to see that 3.1 drop.

I know how people are hurting, hurting really bad as a result of the inflation, not just in what they know, what they're purchasing in groceries and what have you, but the impact it's had on interest rates. And people who are renegotiating mortgages this year are looking at a huge increase in the amount they've been paying if they've been on a long-term mortgage situation for the past, you know, three to five years. What they're looking at now is not pretty. The only cautionary note I bring, and I think you were careful the way you worded it, is most economists are saying, don't get your hopes up yet. That's a great drop. It's nice

to see it at 3.1. Maybe it'll go under 3 if gas prices continue to drop because they're the major contributor to that decrease in the inflation number. But that is what they were saying yesterday. And I know economists. Economists, I love economists as much as the next person. But they are kind of like Leaf fans in terms of the quality of the predictions i don't know how many stories that we read that that you know this is the belief version is even though this was meant to be the rebuilding year it turned out badly and in the in the economist world there's like stunning economists who had predicted otherwise Otherwise, today's inflation rate, unemployment rate, GDP number was X instead of Y. So that happens.

And, you know, they're more knowledgeable than I am about it. But it's also it's not as good as the weather predictions, I don't think. And they're not always that good. So, you know, I'll take the good news when it comes. And maybe we'll have another conversation in a month to see if those predictions that you heard yesterday are borne out or if, in fact, inflation is actually cooling. Yeah, I mean, they weren't predictions as much as they were cautionary notes. Be careful. Don't get too excited yet.

We've got to see more, you know, on this path. And yeah. All right. I'll keep it in check. All right. Too excited yet? We've got to see more on this path. Yeah. All right. I'll keep it in check. All right. Okay. In terms of the fall economic statement, or what do they call it now? Yeah, that's what it is.

Is that what they call it? FES. Fall economic statement. Because they've called it lots of things over the years, you know, mini budgets, lots of other things. Some of them we can't even mention what they've called them. Anyway, when I looked at, you know, it's a big number crunching day, right? There's all kinds of numbers and tossing billions of dollars around here,

there, and everywhere, in this case a lot on housing, the promises for the future. The number that stuck out for me, and maybe I just look for the negative on things, I don't know, but you kind of mentioned it as well, is the interest that the country's paying on the national debt, which now is forecast the interest to be $46.5 billion as we look ahead. And now put that in perspective. I mean, that's a hell of a lot of money, obviously. But the whole defense budget for the country is almost half that, a little more than half.

I think we need to give David Cochran credit for repeatedly hammering this point, that the size, the amount of interest that's paid by the federal government is the size, is the cost of two Canadian militaries. It's a big number. Almost, yeah. Well, I'm glad David picked up that point from me. He must have heard it from you then. Exactly. Oh, David's a good man, and I know you've been doing a lot of PR for him lately, and that's good. I hope he's paying you well. But still, those are staggering numbers and a staggering comparison. And now here's my question, because you gauge public opinion

on a variety of topics, and I've always wondered, back through a number of different governments, I used to think about it during the Mulroney years when they were, you know, running high deficits, the Pierre Trudeau years as the deficit numbers started to get out of control in the late 70s, how much do people actually care about that? You know, the annual deficit and the accumulated national debt. Is this something people, you know, a significant number of people, make their decisions about who they want governing them,

who they're going to vote for, based on the debt load and the annual deficit? As always, this is such a good question. This is a really good question that you've asked. Here it comes. No, it is. And the first time I saw that question kind of tested in public opinion terms was Don Mazenkovsky was the finance minister in Brian Mulroney's government after Mike Wilson was. And the Conservatives had been battling this big deficit problem. And remember when Mulroney first came in, he thought,

I'm going to cut some spending in some areas that might be a little bit sensitive, but I've got this big majority. And then he got backlash on it. And what at the time would have been not that huge a change. But anyway, he got backlash, backed away from it and ended up continuing to produce pretty significant deficits, in part because of the interest costs that were being paid on the accumulated debt at that point. There was a moment in time when Mazenkovsky tabled a budget which featured what they called an operating surplus, which meant that if you set aside the amount of money that was paid on interest on the debt that had already been

accumulated and just looked at the amount of revenue that was being raised and the amount of expenditures that were happening on a given year, there was, those numbers were equal, or maybe there was an actual operating surplus, which if people wanted to ignore the historic debt and the interest, they could at least look at that and say, all right, well, they're not digging the hole deeper. They're, you know, they've arrived at a point where what they spend every year is in line with what they take in. And there's a little bit left over to pay down the debt. And then it became a question of, you know, how long will it take on the trajectory for

that to occur? Did it work in public opinion terms? Not particularly. I think at that point, people were so fed up with the idea that governments had overspent that they didn't really want to. And they were kind of tired of the Mulroney government at that point. And so they sort of ignored that argument. But it did have a salutary effect among conservatives who were looking for a way to explain themselves and their fiscal

situation to the voter in a way that helped the voters see that they were making an effort. Because at the end of the day, what I've learned about how Canadians react to the deficit is it's not the number that matters, it's the attitude. If you have a big number, but it looks like you care about it, they can forgive a lot because the size of these numbers are hard for people to relate to. And they also accept the idea that there are going to be circumstances that are unforeseen, like a pandemic, where you're going to need to spend more money to keep worse things from happening. And so there's latitude on the number, but there's not that much latitude if you look like you don't care about it.

And I think the only thing, frankly, that Chrystia Freeland wanted to try to communicate yesterday remains to be seen whether or not it landed well, was that we're not going crazy with the spending. We're trying to get to a place where the trajectory of the federal deficit comes down. Now, they also have an argument that they make, which is that relative to other countries in the current timeframe, Canada is doing pretty well. I saw a table of some 40 countries and we're in pretty good shape, if that's how you want to compare. But Canadians tend to be pretty pragmatic and careful about this. I don't want to overstate that. When I started in the polling business, people actually liked the idea of a balanced budget every year. And that's not really a thing that most people are looking for now, even though Pierre Polyev is talking about it every day. He talks about it in a way that sounds like it's an attitude, not a math solution that he's looking for.

He's not saying I'm going to cut $40 billion worth of spending or add $40 billion worth of taxes or some balance of those two in year one if I'm elected. He is saying it's time to balance the budget, which will bring down inflation, which will bring down interest rates. And that's a pretty neat communications trip to string those things together. And he's got the liberals on the back foot, which is a bit why their their FES came out the way that it did yesterday, with more of a focus on we're getting the fiscal house in order than than virtually anything else. You like the way he slips in the little codes, you know, like FES, like the FES. Well, it hasn't really been called that many other things.

I think I'm just trying to put that brand on the table so that it lingers there. And if we talk about it again, you'll call it the FES. And just in case you haven't been following the fes's fall economic statement there we go all right um you know when you look back at who's been successful at attacking deficits and bringing down the national debt very small chunks of bringing down the national debt but nevertheless bring it down as opposed to pushing it up. The Kray-Chenk-Martin combination did that in the post-Milroney years. And Harper, who was fixated on things like deficit,

was running a surplus, thanks in some ways to Martin and Kray-Chenk, when he first took over, but then was hit with the 2008 banking crisis and had to bail parts of the country out. I think it was the highest deficit on record in the country at that point, over $50 billion. But he immediately went after it, right, as things settled down and brought that

number to him and uh and his financier finance minister um brought that uh brought that number back down so they were successful uh in attacking the deficit and in in a way tackling the uh the national debt as well but we seem to and, and certainly partly because of the pandemic, where they spent hundreds of billions of dollars, the national debt went up considerably. They seem to be forecasting in yesterday's FES that they've got control of the deficit at the moment. They're bringing it down ever so slightly in the next year or so.

But I'm glad you gave us that little lecture on where it sits in the public mind because I've never quite sorted that out. Yeah, it's a problem for the Liberals now, but not the kind of problem that they can solve by saying, we're going to slash spending or increase taxes and get back to, you know, a much smaller number very quickly. Now, I do happen to think that part of what they did yesterday was they continued the effort to say we're going to spend money to solve the housing crisis. I don't think there's any choice that they had, but that they had to do that. But they also sort of imply that they weren't going to spend a bunch of money on other things. They didn't mention pharmacare, which we've talked about as a potentially big ticket item because of their relationship with the NDP

for some time. And the projections that they put out for deficit in the coming years sort of implies that there's not going to be that program. Now, they could change that in the budget, which is different from the FES. The budget is the budget and the FES is just a fall update, also known as an update, as you say. So I think the Liberals had a relatively good week. I think they had a relatively good day yesterday. But I don't mean to minimize their political circumstances. They're in a lot of trouble right now. And they'll need more good weeks and better weeks before they can see a chance of victory in the next election. That's for sure.

The conservatives, you know, they've had their bad moments over the last few weeks, but they seem to be totally obliterated by the good moments and the sense that they're riding so far ahead of everybody else that it's like home free. You know, this is what brings me to the second topic for this morning, Peter. I don't know if you want to take a break now or do you want to just move right into it? Well, we can take a break. Let me ask you one thing before we take the break.

Was it a good or a bad week for Jagmeet Singh? I mean, he had to stand there yesterday and said, well, you know, I wasn't really expecting Pharmacare today. And maybe he wasn't. But there was a lot of expectation elsewhere that there was going to be something on one of his key demands. I don't think it was a good week, but I don't think it was a terrible week for him either.

I just think it was a kind of a neutral week, and he has a lot of them. And I think that's the dilemma for him. But it's also what Chantal Hebert used to tell us was the dilemma of the NDP, which is that they don't spend a lot of time thinking about winning elections, unlike the other two parties, for whom winning is really, really important, deeply important. For the NDP, it's a little bit of a different culture. So a neutral week doesn't necessarily frustrate them, maybe, even though it might feel frustrating for other parties if they were less a part of the conversation, which is sort of what happens to the Nndp sometimes now but what they want the ndp is if you know if they're if they're able to

put winning on the back burner what they want is to impact the way the the the quality of life for canadians yes for them pharma care was one of those things yes yeah well look i think that the final uh chapter on pharma care isn't written i I'm just reading the storyline of pharmacare from the standpoint of what are the political circumstances that caused the government to say we might do something like what they want and how those circumstances changed over time to the point where the NDP don't seem to be saying, you know, we're going to have an election unless we get this. And I think the biggest part of that, frankly, is the combination of the fact that there's not that much public opinion demand for it. And there is public concern about the size of federal spending. And so I don't think Jagmeet Singh thinks he would win an election or gain in an election if he forced one on that issue. And I think that's part of the calculation. All right. We're going to take that break.

You mentioned when we come back, we talk a little bit about. You probably didn't know there was a Canada-Ukraine free trade deal that was sort of in the works, working on, being adapted, being renegotiated. Well, there is and there was. And there was a vote in the last little while where the conservatives voted against it. And there have been some questions raised about that and what that may mean for going down the road on the Ukraine story overall. So we'll talk about that when we come back. And welcome back. You're listening to the Wednesday episode of The Bridge. It is, of course, Smoke, Mirrors and the Truth.

Bruce Anderson's with us. You're listening on Sirius XM, Channel 167, Canada Talks, or on your favorite podcast platform. Or you're watching us on our YouTube channel. We love our little YouTube channel. We love the people who comment. And there have been lots of great comments. There's also some, like, not so great.

They usually have, like, a few letters and a number of numbers after their letters. There's not really names for a lot of those. No, that's true, which makes one awfully suspicious of where they were coming from. But nevertheless, we read them all. We look at them all. And we're glad you uh the real people there

if these numbered things are not real uh we're sort of glad uh that it's generated so much what is it you know that we're getting quite a few views on that youtube channel which is kind of like the third string of the third string of our our podcasts you know, after Sirius, and then the podcast which just hit 10 million downloads, still number one this week on the Apple rankings for political podcasts in Canada. How long has it been number one, Peter? Well, you know, every once in a while there's some American Trump thing that knocks it out.

Yeah, but a lot, right? There's a lot. Have you noticed how many different podcasts there are that are clearly anti-Trump, but have a pretty big following? Of the top 10 podcasts that are listened to in Canada, political podcasts, The Bridge is number one.

Most Weeks is number one. Most weeks is number one. And most of the time, the other nine in the top ten are American podcasts or listened to by Canadians. The House from CBC comes in every once in a while. Our friend Hurley pops up sometimes, you know, in the kind of nine or ten spot. And that's good. But for the most part, it's all American stuff, which is interesting. Anyway, let's get to this Canada-Ukraine free trade deal, which I don't think we've ever talked about before. I'm not sure how long we'll talk about it here. But the fact is it played a role

in a lot of discussion this week. Yeah, look, I think the most important thing about it is that the conservatives unanimously voted against this enhanced free trade agreement with Ukraine, which raised a lot of eyebrows because the conservatives have tended to say that they're very strong supporters of Ukraine in its fight with Russia. But why wouldn't they support this agreement, which passed the House of Commons because the other parties supported it with the liberals? And the reason that they've been giving is that they don't like

aspects of that agreement, which include undertakings by the two countries to harmonize their environmental commitments, to make sure that one country effectively can't gain an advantage over the other by doing things that harm the planet, that pollute, that sort of thing. The idea that countries would have a trade agreement that protect themselves against the others from doing things that society doesn't really want, whether it's child labor or environmental contamination or that sort of thing, that shouldn't be that radical an idea. But what the conservatives fixated on was that they saw language in there that they thought represented a commitment to carbon pricing. In other words, use market mechanisms to deal with the climate issue.

And they are not, you know, obviously they're in a crusade against the carbon price. So they wanted to make the point that this was some sort of a trick by the liberals to impose their kind of woke environmentalist agenda into a trade agreement with Ukraine. Now, I think the Conservatives got this wrong on a couple of counts. I think that it opens them up to the criticism that they think that Canada should be signing trade deals with other countries that don't have environmental undertakings. Now, they'll probably disagree with that, but they didn't really make the point that they liked the principle of environmental protections, mutual environmental undertakings. They just focused on the carbon pricing aspect of it. And I think for most people, they go, you know, where do you really stand on this? Because we've seen in the past that some

countries can gain advantage over others if they don't have those kind of regulations and undertakings in effect. But the second thing that I think that the Conservatives got wrong is that it looked like, and I've been saying fairly positive things about their communication strategy and their positioning lately in terms of its effectiveness. It felt to me like they're getting a little carried away with their lead in the polls, that they would unanimously oppose this deal. It felt like the kind of thing that a party does or a leader does when they think nothing can touch them, where they can just sort of make an argument and everybody go, well,

Pierre Polyev said this was a bad deal, so it must be a bad deal. And I don't think he carries that weight in public opinion now. And I don't think that people will understand why the conservatives seem to be against either supporting Ukraine or the idea of a trade deal that has mutual environmental undertaking. So I think it was a mistake, maybe born of a bit of arrogance that's creeping into the conservative mindset or the conservative leader's mind. But it was another reason why I think this was not a fantastic week for the liberals, but at least there were some hopeful signs for them. One being the inflation side of

things that we just talked about. The other being the possibility that the conservatives are going to make what I think is a mistake, mistakes like this, born of a sense of their invulnerability so that they can do things that people might look at and go, I don't understand why they do that, but instead just go along with them because they're in the lead in the polls or something like that. You don't think you're stretching, looking for some potential plus signs for the Liberals after a horrid last few months? Well, I'm not really looking for it, but I do think that the chemistry in the House is usually an early indicator, not of public opinion so much, but of whether or not, like, you watch the House for as long as I have, maybe longer.

When you talk to some MPs about the House, they understand that the public doesn't watch. They understand that it is not a reflection of how politics plays out in society more broadly. But they also know who won question period on any given day. And they know that there's pretty good consensus about that across parties. The losing side knows when it lost. The winning side knows when it won. And so I actually think that this week has been a relatively good week for the liberals. But I say relatively. And I think that part of what they see is the potential that maybe

the conservatives are going to make some strategic errors, because they're so infused with confidence about their giant lead in the polls. And I think, you know, one of the things that everybody who's ever been behind knows is that when you're well behind, yes, there's some focus on you and what you're going to change in order to try to get competitive. But there's also increasing focus on the people who are ahead. And that I think is, you know, maybe you say, well, that's making lemonade with lemons because you got lemons. That's true. But that is the nature of the game. It's a competition. And when you've got the bag of lemons,

you better not just look at the lemons. You better do something with them. Okay. Let's talk about who's just for the last couple of minutes here our little i can't believe we're almost out of time we are almost out of time but we do have time as we often do to have a little trump a little trumpy in the uh in the closing moments you remember after the 26th election there was a lot of thumb sucking on the part of the Democrats and the part of the media about, you know, did this guy get way too much airtime? Did he get more airtime than he deserved to get? You know, the media fell all over him. We let it happen, the Democrats would say, because we thought he would just expose himself as an idiot, a failed reality TV star.

Didn't turn out that way. He won. And so there was this thing, well, we're never going to get trapped like that again. New York Times today has a piece where they're quoting Democrats saying, there's got to be more Trump on the air. Americans have to see what this guy's turned into. They're not covering him enough. We want to get back to when they covered all his rallies.

Put him on live. Let Americans see this guy. It's an interesting turnaround over eight years. I was kind of surprised at it. What about you? Yeah, I noticed the same thing. I noticed the conversation on Morning Joe on MSNBC this morning where somebody was saying that the White House has decided that they need to be talking about Trump a lot more, that Trump needs to be the center of attention. to credit Trump with any particular genius. But I do think that it was smart for him to choose not

to go to those debates. Because somewhere along the way, you know, he figured out or people figured out on his behalf, that if he's too exposed, that people then sort of look at him and go, yeah, I'm tired of Biden. And I don't know about that. But this guy is a bit wild, right? And every once in a while now, we are seeing these clips where he, Trump is saying completely bonkers things about, you know, he's going to find every leftist, socialist, Marxist, wokeist, and he's going to jail them. And it's all it's so kind of autocratic dictator speak. And I think he's become used to speaking to this kind of bubble of MAGA voters and people who attend the MAGA rallies and not really being kind of stress tested by it being on

the major networks that now he's you know if they go along with what the New York Times is saying what the White House apparently wants and we get more Trump it'll remain to be seen whether he he feels that stress test and then he kind of tries to dial it to something that sounds a little bit more I want to I don't want to say the word electable because I think it's scary how electable he seems to be in America. How many people seem willing to consider him as a better alternative than Joe Biden? And I'm not here to say Joe Biden is a fantastic president. But if you care about world peace and a stable economy, he does seem to me to be a much better choice than Donald Trump.

I think you'd probably agree with that. I probably agree with that. I still don't think Biden will run, and I think his major problem is the age. And I know that that upsets many people in our audience who don't want to hear me say that or hear anybody say that. But I think it is a real issue. It's especially an issue on the part of younger Americans, who for some reason don't seem to

feel the same way about Trump. Although if he was elected president again, he'd be the oldest person ever elected president of the United States. You know, the focus is always on Biden. I, you know, I watched Trump do the, you know, the rallies that he has done in the last month or two. The audiences are way down compared with what he had in 2016. There's lots of empty seats, people leaving in the middle of it because he sounds like a crackpot in some of the speeches he gives. And then you look at the numbers in the polling.

He keeps going up. So somewhere there's a disconnect here. It doesn't make sense. And I don't think it's going to settle down until we really know who's running against whom and what's going to happen in some of these court cases. I just find the whole thing depressing about the state of politics in the U.S. At times I feel the same way about what I see here. But it is what it is.

It is what we get. And somehow at the end of the day, we'll get the government and they'll get the government they deserve. I think the latest, if this is a shift in strategy by Biden to put the focus on, you know, the characterization of the strategy that I heard this morning that had been in place by the Biden White House up till now was to be, in quotes, aggressively boring.

Well, they won that. Yeah, you know, I kind of felt like this is the sort of thing that happens in politics where people have a bad patch of polls, and then they create this description of what they were trying to do that led to the bad patch of polls, so that people will go, oh, well, they were trying to were aggressively boring and that's why they're so far behind. And I think American politics, I would say for better or for worse, but it is only for worse as far as I'm concerned, feeds off this idea of relentless energy to shock and dismay and anger and everything else. And if you're not doing that, the other guy is, he's winning. And so I don't want to see an escalation of it, except the thing I more don't want to see is Donald Trump as president again. So it's like Biden, if you're the guy, get at it because aggressively boring is not going to beat aggressively space cadet or whatever it is that Trump comes up with tomorrow.

Okay, well, I guess we'll leave it at that. It's fascinating that we've got a whole other year of that to talk about. Well, at least as many months as the two of them stay in the race before it gets really interesting with new people. I know I got to let you go because I don't quite see it in the background of your shot, but... What are you looking for? Oh, yeah, no, it's time to go and get your book. Yeah. I thought you'd want to get reading on that.

Well, I always like to read what, uh, what Mark writes and, uh, I've been looking forward to his newest books. Mark is, uh, is one of the greats, Mark Boguch, a coauthor on how Canada works just happened to have a copy here with me. And, you know, you can find it anywhere. It went on sale yesterday. If you look in the index, is there my name? That's what a lot of people in this town are going to do.

And if you haven't credited them with something to do with how Canada works, it's going to be a poor seller here in the run-up to Christmas. Let's be honest. There's not a single person from Ottawa in this book. Wow. Close to Ottawa, but not in Ottawa. Okay? It's not that kind of book.

It's not about the sort of political leaders and the political manipulators and the people behind the political people or the business people or the whatever. This is like real, true. It's good. All right. Let's go get a coffee. It's going to be great. It's going to be a big winner.

It is going to be a big winner. And I'll be happily signed your copy when i my book tour lands in ottawa in a couple of weeks can't wait all right my friend thank you very much it's good to talk as always bruce will be back on friday with chantelle for good talk tomorrow it's your turn and the random rander so if you have something to say get it in like now at theansbridgepodcast at gmail.com, themansbridgepodcast at gmail.com. Thanks, Brooks, and thank you. We'll talk to you again in 24 hours.