The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - SMT - If Telford Can Testify, Why Can't Trudeau?

Episode Date: March 22, 2023

Katie Telford is the prime minister's most senior staffer and his closest advisor.  And now she has agreed to testify before the parliamentary committee looking into the alleged Chinese interference in the 2019 and 2021 federal elections.  If she could appear why can't the prime minister?  That and a lot more up for discussion with Bruce Anderson on SMT.  And we'll also discuss Joe Biden's visit to Ottawa this week.

And hello there, Peter Ransbridge here. You are just moments away from the latest episode of The Bridge. Wednesday, Bruce Anderson, Smoke, Mirrors and the Truth. All right then, Bruce is in Ottawa. I'm in Scotland. Today, anyway. It's good. It's good.

No snow on the ground here. It's either sunny, or if you look out 10 minutes later, it's windy and howling and raining. So it's back and forth. There's some gales coming, I heard. There are. I like that they're called gales there. We don't use that term very much here. But there's still

golfing out here. And I'll tell you, some of the... I think this is a special weekend of kind of a university, British University golf clubs competing against each other. It may even be a kind of Cambridge-Oxford thing.

I'm not sure, but I've been watching some of the players hit the ball, and I'm telling you, it's like another world. They hit the ball. It's that feeling that you get watching me play, right? Yeah, exactly. It's like you hit it like that. That's it. You know, that's a very good comparison.

Okay, I'm going to show you. You know, for all the talk we do about how so many people trash politicians, almost doesn't matter their stripe, and we've been saying, you know, come on. You know, if you're ever going to get people convinced to run for politics, somehow you've got to admire what they do right, not only when you think they're, you know, they're screwing up. Good luck with that. Yeah, good luck with that.

Let me show you the – I mean, it is the Daily Mirror after all, but here's the front page of the Daily Mirror. They're talking about Boris Johnson. They can't get enough of Boris Johnson. He's's been gone for months oh i see okay last chance buffoon you know he's fighting about something he's trying to convince parliament that he didn't have parties during the pandemic toast he soon will he soon will be, says the top headline. And then down below it's, Johnson hopes to salvage career with dodgy dossier on how to define a party.

Last chance buffoon. Don't you love that one? I do. I love that you're buying tabloids, old school style, and catching up on it i got i got the day old one because way up here in the highlands up north that you know the stuff gets doesn't exactly land at the newsstand on on time but uh back it on nevertheless um okay last week we had lots of conversation uh around the china interference story or whatever you want

to call it uh and i you know i get letters say it's not interference it's it's this it's that it's trudeau screwing up it's polyev being mean it's with it's whatever anyway whatever it was a lot of conversation a lot of talk a lot of domination of that story in the news agenda. 10 on the Richter scale. Probably down to, what, 7 or 8 on the Richter scale this week. I mean, Katie Telford is going to testify. I think it's down in Scotland, but it's still pretty high. Is it still pretty high?

Okay. I just, like, in reading what I'm reading, it just seems that the temperature level is being, it's still there clearly, but it just seems to be lowered a bit because some of the things are being taken off the table. Will the prime minister's chief of staff testify or won't she? Well, she's going to now,

but not until like the end of April or something. It could be any time between now and the end of April. David Johnson's terms of reference, what were they? Well, we got an indication of that yesterday and a timetable. It's what, end of May before he has to report? It doesn't mean he'll take all that time, but it could be that much time. Yeah, yeah. Look, I mean, I don't think it's wrong to say, Peter, at all,

that some air got let out of this. But I think I was probably more thinking it literally just got let out of it yesterday, that it had been building up until yesterday into, will this be a confidence vote, which was, I think, the government really putting pressure on the NDP to vote with them on the question was not helping them convince people that there was nothing to see here. It was having the opposite effect. It was kind of empowering the opposition voices, empowering the skeptics, and giving more oxygen to this idea that maybe the government does have something to hide. So I don't know that they were confident that the NDP were going to vote with them. And at some point, especially with the visit of President Biden, you know, he's arriving tomorrow, I guess,

you know, became clear that it wasn't really a good time to have an election, even if that was a good thing to have an election over, which it isn't. And so they had to make sure that that didn't happen. And the only way to make sure that that didn't happen, and I'm not suggesting this is the only reason they did it, is to take the air out of that and say, yes, she'll testify. I also think that the release of the terms of reference for the special rappapporteur David Johnson

was a helpful step from the standpoint of the government and also just for reasonable people who say well let's let's move past the epithets and the daggers being thrown one way or the other on this to what are we going to do about it? What does this special rapporteur idea look like in practical terms? And I spent a little bit of time this morning looking at the terms that were released. And I have to say, I think it's a pretty thoughtful program. Won't solve the question for people who think he's the wrong pick because he's too close to the prime minister. But if you look at the terms of reference, to me, they look well constructed and they make sense. And it looks like the kind of

process that should shine more light on what's been happening and what the government did and why and what to think about going next. I don't know. What did you make of the terms of reference and the way the government handled this last couple of days? Well, I mean, the main thing that I thought of on both of these is I understand the terms of reference, why it took this long, because they didn't have them. They were still writing them. I mean, a week ago, they were still trying to look for somebody who'd agree to do it. And they i i assume that person had some discussion about what they'd like to see in the terms of reference before that was filled so that didn't surprise me the telford thing i don't get i don't understand what they were worried about i mean as you've

mentioned before you know katie telford is you know this isn't her first rodeo she's been around the block a few times she She understands politics, obviously, but she also understands those committee hearings. So she's been in a few. So what was the issue? Were they just like playing for time or what? Why did that get stretched out so far, do you think? I suspect that, and I don't know for sure, but I suspect that the main reason was the number of questions that you could get asked for which the only possible answer is, this isn't going to solve anything.

It is going to empower those who think that the government's trying to hide something rather than kind of advance the issue. And it's political theater that the opposition party, the conservatives anyway, wanted, and bad political theater from the standpoint party, the conservatives anyway, wanted and bad political theater from the standpoint of the government. Now, it will probably still be the case that she'll answer that question that way or answer a number of questions that way, which is that there are reasons why I can't answer that. And this is here's what those reasons are. I've generally been of the view, especially since I think the prime minister

didn't do a very good job of handling this issue right out of the gate, that the government just needs to spend a little bit more words explaining to people what the challenge is of not revealing sources or methods or the fact that you can get intelligence from intelligence agencies but then you still have to weigh whether or not what you're being told is absolutely true or plausible possible and all of that becomes hard to do in the you know under a political spotlight with suspicions of partisan agendas kind of playing in the air around it. So I think they thought it would be a bad moment of political theater, and I think ultimately, as with the question of needing a rapporteur

and possibly an inquiry, the government kind of put itself in a situation where it wasn't going to really have any choice. People were going to have to answer some questions publicly and probably at that level. Let me go for the long ball here. Why wouldn't the prime minister himself say, I'll appear before the committee? I mean, he appeared before the inquiry last year into the convoy thing, and most people seemed to agree that it was his finest hour in some time, if not in all time, that he handled that really well. Now, I realize a committee hearing is a little different than an inquiry.

It's going to be almost certainly very partisan. But he can handle that stuff. So why wouldn't he? I mean, if there are security issues, his answers are going to be the same as hers. Can't talk about that. Here's why I can't talk about it. Why not? Look, I think that that is the right I mean I think that if he had done that when the story broke had effectively had a uh you know a series of long

form interviews where he's sitting down explaining in some detail what the role of the prime minister and the government is when it receives this kind of thing, exactly what it is that the government had underway, where the shortcomings might be, what might also be considered. That all existed in the functioning of government and in the mind of the prime minister, I have no doubt. But time and again, I think if the government gets something wrong, it often gets it wrong because there's a kind of a hasty middle of a scrum or coming down a stairway answer to a question that's a little bit too curt and that becomes packaged in a way that creates more challenges for the government down the road. That is what happened here.

I remember on the weekend, there's been a lot of things that happened since we last talked. I think the leaker or whistleblower, depending on your point of view, wrote an op-ed, wrote an opinion piece or a piece explaining why they did what they did. And, you know, lots of people will read that and come to different conclusions about it. But my conclusion was that this person said, I had been trying to get the system to do more because of the things that I saw as being threats of foreign interference. And I was frustrated that more didn't seem to be happening. But crucially, I don't think that the cause of that was the Liberal Party wanting to have the help of the

Chinese. And I don't think that whatever degree of interference there was had a material effect on the election outcome. Now, there are people who look at that and say, hallelujah, this person did a courageous thing. I kind of look at it and say, well, in every organization that I've ever known, there are people who wish that the things that they've been recommending were taken more seriously, acted on more swiftly, a bigger part of the agenda of the organization. But that alone isn't complaining about that through the media anonymously isn't necessarily whistleblowing. It would be characterized as complaining about the decisions of the government. If you really believe that there was corrupted tent, or if you really believe that there was such dramatic negligence that the election outcomes were in jeopardy, then,

yeah, it does rise to that standard. But I found it interesting in that piece that that wasn't really the argument that was being made. And I tend to think that on the journalistic side of things, there's a little bit of a bias to feel like a leaker is a whistleblower. And on the institutional side of things, there's a little bit of a bias to think a whistleblower is a leaker. And that's a natural set of biases. And I think reasonable people should consume this information and have those questions in their minds rather than just sort of rushing to that's a leaker or that's a whistleblower. You know, in this case, I come a little bit closer to the, if you don't think something was corrupt in its intent, you don't think it mounted to a level of negligence that changed the outcome of an election or threatens the next one. Then, you know, pushing all of this content out of a newspaper, it felt a little bit more like trying to bend the government rather than trying to save the people from

foreign interference. Yeah, I tend to agree with you on that. You know, I think leaker is the proper term. It's not whistleblower here. It would be whistleblower if the leaker had said, there's proof that the prime minister was a traitor on this issue, and here's that proof. That's a whistleblower. No question about it. But in fact, in that, correct me if I'm wrong, in that piece he wrote for or she wrote for the Globe and Mail, they made the point no one was a traitor here.

Yep. And I also don't, the person also said that they didn't think there was an impact on the election result. So taking away two of the main cards, right? And so then it becomes a leak. And so they would, you And so for that person, whoever they are in public service, who feels so strongly about a government's action or inaction that they want the story out, what can they do?

Well, I remember talking to the former clerk of the Privy Council, Michael Pitfield, about this very issue. Back when he was teaching at Harvard, I went down there to talk to him about a number of things, and including that, what do they do? What do you do if you're inside and you think a policy or decision on the part of the government is so bad that you've got to get it out there?

And he said, there's only one thing you can do. You have to resign and then call a news conference and explain it all. That's your option. That's the appropriate option. So, listen, I like leakers. I've benefited from leakers over the year as a journalist. So, you know, I but I'm just I'm kind of laying out the options. I think you'd agree with me that there are some areas of the work of government where people inside an organization, you know, want to influence things a certain way.

And they speak off the record to journalists to try to get that influence going. And I can look at a lot of those and say, look, they're, you know, if you're in the organization, you might be frustrated by it. But if it doesn't involve breaking an oath of secrecy, if all the person is doing is talking to a journalist about the things that are frustrating to them and that journalist then turns that into a bit of a story I can see that kind of fear ball all of that and there's a lot of it all the time always has been right how many of those how many stories only happen because that kind of conversation goes on,

but they're not involving intelligence gathered in the course of, in the context of the security systems of our country where people swear and oath about how they deal with that. And so I think this instance of leaking needs to be seen as different in quality from kind of regular fetching about something that you see happening in your department or in the government that you're unhappy with, that you choose to speak to a journalist off the record on. I think there's a different quality when you take that oath of secrecy with respect to that kind of information. One other thing which I noticed on the weekend, because I was sort of rooting around the Internet, gathering some information on this, is that if you go back to 2021, CSIS put out a document then

which described the things that government was doing across different agencies to explore, investigate, monitor, react to foreign interference efforts. And in that document, it's a pretty interesting list of things. It's not nothing. It's not like you could look at that from 2021 and say, well, the government's been hearing about this, but not doing anything. Instead, what you'd get if you read it was the government's been doing a lot of things. And even the report of the Rosenberg

Committee of Senior Officials said, there's a lot of things being done, but they said there are a couple of things that we should change and improve upon. You know, extend the purview to the pre-writ period. Make sure that we're reporting more regularly to people. Make sure that the threat that triggers a report publicly is the threat level is lower than is the election in jeopardy so there was an active conversation about whether there were active measures in place and there was an active conversation about how to improve it uh the Rosenberg Report, for all that everybody who criticized it wanted to focus on the relationship between Morris Rosenberg

and the Trudeau Foundation, said, here's some more things that we need to do. So if you look at that combination of evidence against the whistleblower leaker, it sort of suggests, well, maybe they weren't sufficiently giving credit to the government for doing some things in this area. Now, that doesn't solve the fact that the prime minister didn't handle this question well from the beginning.

And that's what we've been talking about for a couple of weeks now. And I think to some degree, that's why we've been talking about for a couple of weeks now. And I think to some degree that's why we've been talking about it for a couple of weeks is that his first answer was, this is a big problem, but we can't talk about it. It's not going to work. No. I'll just give one thing, one puzzle that I have about the terms of reference.

It's basically restricted to the 2019 and the 2021 elections, right? I don't understand why they didn't include the 2015 election and possibly even the 2011 election. Go back a decade. Look at them all. What were the issues? Because there's no doubt that China was involved and on the radar of a number of the intelligence agencies early in that 2010-2013 period. I'm just surprised that they just restricted it to the two. I'm sure maybe time had something to do with it or the amount of work involved in going through all the elections it just seems to me it would have been a fairer balance a better sense of of where we were

uh both intelligence wise and political uh politically wise um last point on this before we take a break and move on to the uh visit from joe b Biden coming up tomorrow, I guess, to Canada. Before we move on, do you think this in some ways will be like the whole convoy issue last year, where now that there is a process in place to investigate all this, things are going to die down until such time as there are either public elements to the Johnson inquiry or until a decision is made? Are we going to kind of move on now to other scandals or other issues or other policies? What do you think? I actually think so. I don't think there's like as concerned as I am about the efforts by put, some pressure has been added onto the government to do more and to change the approach to widen the lens, as I've just said, and to create more sense of awareness of it,

and that in turn will help hopefully create better defenses against it. People will be aware of it. They'll be alert to it. There'll be a kind of a sense of, you know, people kind of looking for evidence of interference more than perhaps would have been the case before. And that's a healthy thing. But I don't think it's got, I think there's stuff in this that will be so revelatory and shocking to people that it will carry that much public interest. I could be proven wrong, but it doesn't feel to me like that. I like the fact that the work of Mr. Johnson has a time limit on it and that the result of that work product is going to be, well, we're going to maybe change some things in the way that we do them, but those are probably already mechanisms

that exist. Maybe there'll be something added to it, but it doesn't feel like that needs to be the case, at least at this point. So I do think that there will be days in the course of the months that Johnson is doing his work that will attract a lot of interest in specific instances. But I think on the whole, it won't be a dominant electoral issue at the next election or even really a prominent issue come this time next year. All right. We're going to move on. Air Force One is on its way to Canada,

or will be in a few hours. And it's not Trump Force One. That might be on its way to Sing Sing or something like that. I don't think they'll send him to Sing Sing. I'll tell you one thing. If Trump gets indicted in the next couple of days, the last thing Americans are going to care about or want to hear about is the fact that Joe Biden's in Canada. Now, that could be used as a good thing or a bad thing, but it's one of the realities of the next couple of days. But there are real issues that are going to be talked about. We'll talk about them right after this. And welcome back. You're listening to The Bridge right here on Sirius XM,

channel 167, Canada Talks, or on your favorite podcast platform. Or, because it's Wednesday and this is Smoke, Mirrors, and the Truth with Bruce Anderson, we're also on our YouTube channel. So if you wanted to see the front page of the Daily Mirror that I was holding up, you've got to go to the YouTube channel. So if you wanted to see the front page of the Daily Mirror that I was holding up, you've got to go to the YouTube channel to see it. Plus the spectacular Scottish hat that I'm wearing as well.

Cap. Whatever. Okay. There's a great piece on cbc.ca today by Alex Panetta, great reporter, great journalist, longtime Canadian press, Washington bureau chief, now working for the CBC out of Washington. And he kind of sets the stage.

Bruce pointed this out to me this morning, and it's well worth the read for any of you. It's a lengthy piece, but it really sets the stage for what's likely to happen in these next couple of days, at least what's likely to be discussed. And some of the tensions that exist within the relationship on a number of fronts, and yet at the same time, of course, we're going to witness a lot of glad-handing and hugging

and state dinners and and all of that it comes with the territory as well um to you bruce what's what's the key part of this trip other than it's just simply taking place um you know that friendship between you know our two countries in spite of you know moments of tension around certain issues. What do you see as the big moment in this? Well, I think that, well, first of all, I think Alex does the best journalism now on the Canada-U.S. relationship. And I love the long form approach that he takes. And he covers off a lot of issues and people should read it on the CBC site if they have a chance.

And they're interested in kind of knowing some of the context for the Biden-Trudeau discussions. Second thing I would say is that it is reassuring for Canadians generally to realize that, oh, you know, we've got a relationship with the United States. It's important enough to them that we have this kind of meeting from time to time. Now, I don't tend to buy into the idea that we have some sort of collective psychosis. Does America, you know, care about us enough, that sort of thing. I read the comments of Scotty Greenwood, who's involved in the Cross Border Business Association saying, well, if Canada wants to be taken seriously in Washington, that it needs to be more relevant and bring something serious. I don't really, I don't kind of share that point of view. I kind of feel like America is going to do America.

And there isn't really anything that we can do to change that. We can't make Canada be more of a central conversation in American life than it is now. The best that we can do is have the kind of relationship where the irritants that normally occur, you've got neighbors around you, there might be the odd irritant over the life of your relationship with them. Those irritants can be discussed and resolved. And sometimes it's, I need you to do this, and the other person says, I need you to do that,

and that's all good. And I feel like if we look at how relationships in Europe have gone lately, if we look at the way that this relationship felt when Donald Trump was the president, we're in a better place now. So the irritants that are on our list of here's some things that we would like to feel a little bit better about, it's a manageable list. It's not like they're all easy. The safe third country agreement, which is really a policy issue that goes to the heart of migrants coming across our border at Roxham Road in Quebec in pretty large numbers. That's something that we care about.

I don't know if we're going to get the kind of answers that we want on that. We also care about the U.S. treating our participation in the critical minerals market as though we are a very friendly country and a very important producer for the world and the U.S. and its allies. I think those are important issues. I think they fall squarely into the domain of things that if the leaders of two countries can talk through, they can probably find accommodations for each other. And obviously there are some things that Alex points out in his piece

that the Americans care about and we'll be applying a little bit of pressure on it. So I feel like this is a reassuring moment, the fact that we can have this visit. But I don't think that the logical endpoint is all of a sudden we should be front and center on the American political agenda. They have a lot of other things that are going to preoccupy them more than this relationship.

There are two things that I'll be watching most closely, and that is the likely request, it's already started in some fashion, from the Americans that Canada helps out in a lead role on the Haiti situation. Haiti's a mess. We've known that for years now, but it's really a mess right now. And there's a certain degree of reluctance on the part of Canada to get more heavily involved than it has been because it is such a messy situation. It almost seems like there is no way out of the mess.

But the Americans have a problem in Haiti. I mean, they have like zero credibility or close to it. And they recognize that given the history. And so they want Canada involved. And there's a reluctance, as I said, on that. And it'll be interesting to see how that plays out. The other is in defense spending. And specifically in areas that, you know,

I know you're bored with me talking about the Arctic, but it's an issue. And the Americans are pushing hard on it. And I know Anita Anand, the defense minister, wants to help. But there are technological issues. There are financial issues. It's very expensive to upgrade everything in the Arctic. But if we're going to take sovereignty in the Arctic seriously and if we're going to be joint partners in the defense of North America

from the Arctic, it's get-up-and-go time. So I'll be watching those two areas of interest. I know there's lots more, and there's only so much you can cram into a whatever it is, 36, 40-hour visit on the part of the U.S. president. And what I said earlier is if something happens to Trump during that time, you can forget about that kind of yeah i mean i think that in a way it might be the best of all possible worlds if trump gets arrested and and the conversation that happens between biden and trudeau is kind of lower profile and more productive in a way

but that's maybe just me hoping that Trump gets arrested. You know, on your point, I did think that the prime minister's, the comment that was attributed by Alex Panetta to the prime minister about Haiti was an interesting one where he said the reason that Canada is hesitant isn't that it doesn't see a problem in Haiti, isn't that it doesn't want to help in Haiti, but that certain types of involvement actually have proven not to be helpful. And I don't think that quote was intended as a way of saying the U our patience for a solution is short. Our instinct for an easy-sounding solution is strong.

And sometimes that easy-sounding solution not only doesn't work, but makes things worse. In the defense question, I admire your fascination with the equipment and want to have more of it. The government has committed to spending significant amounts more money, not as much as the Americans want, that's for sure. But I do think that taking sovereignty seriously also means, especially in the North,

means, is that about physical defense? Or is it going to be about a different type of diplomatic effort over time? It's obviously a combination of both, but I feel like there isn't enough money in the world to sufficiently equip ourselves so that we can protect ourselves against the incursions of states that might want to take that over. And so I think we need to be practical about that that too, which isn't an argument to spend nothing. It's an argument that spending money on equipment isn't necessarily going to provide us with the ultimate solution to protect our sovereignty. Yeah. Listen, it's a big topic,

and there are many different angles to it. It's mainly about surveillance, and the options on that are, you know, the technology exists today where we could perhaps be doing more. Get some satellites up in the air a little bit more quickly. I mean, you know, I've had some people write to me and criticize me for this saying, oh, you don't really know what's going on up there because there's a lot more than you know. Well, that's possible maybe it is um but you know i i've spent a considerable part of my life uh there and i um yeah i i do know some things and uh i do know that there's a desire on the part of uh you know a lot of people who watch

this story that we were more deeply involved than we are right now. Let me read you something about, you know, because I found this intro, and I didn't realize this. I don't know whether you did. But on this issue of those crossing the border coming into Canada and the Roxham Road and all that, Julia Ainslie is, you know, a pretty good defense reporter for NBC News. Wrote a piece online a couple of days ago let me read the first two paragraphs on the snowy border between new york and canada the local sheriff's office is calling for the u.s border

patrol to put more manpower behind what he calls a growing crisis the number of illegal border crossings in the area over the last five months is nearly 10 times what it was over the same time last year, and the border crossers are in danger of freezing to death. They're not talking about people going north. They're talking about people coming south. From October 1st to February 28th, about 2,000 migrants crossed the border between Canada and New Hampshire, Vermont, and New York, south through the forest, compared to just 200 crossings in the same period the previous year. They're mainly from Mexico. They fly to Canada, and then they come down into the States.

It's interesting. I hadn't realized that. I assumed there probably was something, but those are, you know, not insignificant numbers, as we say. This is a big global problem. I mean, you're in the UK now and you see the mention of the problem as it's being discussed in England. The arrival of boats across the channel and people putting themselves at great risk. And, you know, some of it is refugees fleeing situations where their lives are at risk and they're being persecuted. Some of it is economic migrants basically saying we're desperate

and we need to be in a place where there's some more opportunity. And the world doesn't and has been grappling with this for a good long while now. There aren't any obvious solutions. And we've seen how nasty and divisive and poisonous politics can be in the United States. And I'm happy to some degree that that hasn't happened in Canada. We did have a pretty tense conversation about 25,000 Syrian refugees not that many years ago.

And that was worrying because it's not a very large number of people. And it was obvious that people were dying in Syria and that we could do more to help. And it was a wake-up call for me to realize that we could be in a situation where our politics became quite divisive about that too. And so let's hope we don't get there. All right. We're almost out of time, but I will give you a minute to talk about the likelihood of your favorite American politician, personality, billionaire, or maybe it's just a millionaire. Who really knows for sure. But, I mean, he could be fingerprinted and handcuffed and paraded off to wherever, indicted in the next couple of days.

Yeah, I can't help but think about this in a way that, you know, some people say, well, he broke a law with this, it looks like, but it was like the least law-breaking that he's ever been. And this is going to be the thing that ends up with his fingerprints being taken. And it reminds me of O.J. Simpson, who ended up going to jail for something that was much less serious a crime, I suppose,

than the murder of those two people, which he was held civilly responsible for, even though he was acquitted of the criminal charge. And, you know, so I kind of look at the Trump situation and I don't think, oh, well, I'm disappointed if they only charge him for this. I kind of feel like he this question of does the law apply to everybody? I think it's a really important question. And I think America can't have it both ways. Can't say we're a city on a hill. We're a country that is a country of loss.

We believe that no one is above the law. And and and at the same time, say, as the Republican House leader was saying, Kevin McCarthy, yesterday, that we should let it go because he's who he is. And people don't want to see him charged. I mean, that doesn't make any sense to me. Does it make sense to you? No, it makes any sense to me. Does it make sense to you? No, it makes no sense to me. The other thing, just on, you know, of all the things he's being investigated for, this is probably the, you know, the smallest infraction,

but it's an infraction nevertheless. The other ones could well end up at the same level, indictments as well. In fact, it seems almost certain that there's going to be kind of a run on indictments against Donald Trump in the next, you know, in the next while, the next few months. And sometimes these things start small. It was the guy who was convicted after murder, after murder, after murder for tax evasion. Died in jail on tax evasion. Right? Biggest gangster the Americans have ever known at that time.

So these things, you know, if he's proven guilty, he's proven guilty. If it's a felony, he'll go to jail. If it's a misdeme, a felony, he'll go to jail. If it's a misdemeanor, he won't. On this one. And then they move on to the next one. Yeah. So there we are. Well, it'll be interesting to see if he does fundraise off it the way that it looks like he will.

And how the Republican party really does deal with it, because they're still caught in this, can we distance ourselves from him without losing the opportunity to win an election? And I don't think they know the answer to that, but I think they should know what the right answer is, which is they should be rid of him and move on. Well, that and a lot of other things we'll find out in the days ahead. Thank you, Bruce. Great to see you.

Great to talk to you again. And Bruce will be back on Friday with Chantel for Good Talk. That will also be available on our YouTube channel. Tomorrow, it's your turn. So get your cards and letters coming in. And the ranter, I think the ranter is going to talk about AI tomorrow, artificial intelligence. You know, when we talked to Michelle Rempel-Garner a couple of weeks ago, I mean, we weren't the first to talk about AI,

but it does seem that that was well positioned because there's been an awful lot of discussion about AI and whether it needs to be regulated ever since then. And we'll keep that going tomorrow with the ranter, with his take on AI. All right. Thanks again, Bruce. We'll talk again in, well, 48 hours in your case.

I know you'll be busy watching. You'll probably be lined up in the airport road waving to Joe Biden. I think another big announcement today, I think, from the Fed in the U.S., is inflation cooling enough that interest rates don't keep having to go up? I think for a lot of people it's a big economic day today, and so I'll be watching that too. Yep. Well well it has cooled but that remains the question hasn't cooled enough uh all right we'll talk uh we'll talk again

in the future thanks bruce and thank you for listening the uh the bridge will be back in 24 hours.