The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - SMT - Is It Really Going To Be Biden vs Trump Again?

Episode Date: April 26, 2023

Joe Biden announces his re-election bid and his most likely contender, at least at this point, is Donald Trump.  Bruce looks at the opening volleys in the 2024 US election campaign and we wonder if this is the best they can do. An 80 something Democrat and a multi-indicted Republican who could be perp walked and in an orange jumpsuit before the voting begins. Plus the PSAC strike and new talk of a new arena in Calgary.

And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. You are just moments away from the latest episode of The Bridge. It's Wednesday, Smoke, Mirrors and the Truth, with Bruce Anderson coming up next. And hello there, it is a smoke day on this Wednesday. Bruce is in Ottawa. I'm in my final days in Scotland before heading back to Canada this weekend. How are you feeling about the coronation? I'm leaving to go back to Canada. You're heading over this way. So I guess you've got your bunting out.

You're all ready. You're wearing your red, white, and blue. I can't wait to get to the UK. And the first thing I've got to do, of course, is I've got to buy all of these commemorative pieces of China for everybody in my circle of friends and family who are saying, don't forget to send us the King Charles memorabilia. So I'll be looking for that, Peter, and I'll be looking for the street parties and trying to pick up on the vibe.

Because to be honest, you've been over in Scotland for a while, and you haven't been here to feel the build back here in Canada. Everybody's talking about it, right? They're just like really excited. No, I don't feel it here. I'm not feeling it at all. So I'm looking forward to experiencing what it's going to feel like

in the northern part of Scotland and in particular in a little community where there are a good number of people who have had fond thoughts about the Queen, about Queen Elizabeth, but in a part of the world where the monarchy and the idea of the monarchy isn't always the most popular thing. So I'm looking forward to it. Are you doing anything before you leave to celebrate it, to send it?

I've been doing the journalist thing. I've been trying to gauge public opinion here. I mean, Charles, forget about the coronation, but Charles is fairly well liked in this part of Scotland because he spent a lot of time here. And he likes fishing and fly fishing. And he fishes for salmon on some of the rivers in northern Scotland. So he's kind of known up here.

I'm going to tell a great story next week on Monday when I get back about that. But having said that, I can tell you a firsthand on-the-ground experience. I was in Inverness the other day, and I was shopping in the Marks & Spencer. And there was a huge, the kind of stuff you want, you know, the china and the T-shirts and all that stuff, at the front of the store. In fact, at each entrance of the store, they had a lot of stuff. I can tell you, I never saw a single person go up to those counters

and pick something up, even look at it, let alone purchase it. Nobody. They just, like, walk right by it. And I thought, okay, maybe that's just the Marks & Spencer's crowd. So I stopped at a Tesco. That's like a Loblaws or, you know, a Safeway or, you know, Sears or one of those kind of places.

And they had the same thing, big counter with all kinds of coronation stuff on it. Nobody anywhere near it. Nobody touched it. Well, it feels like I'm going to get discounted pricing by the time I get there, then I'll get all the figurines for a pound. Well, that's the time to get it anyway is to go afterwards you know if you're in london you go to uh what's that big store on harrods well as harrods and there's a bunch of them right uh big department stores like the old eaton store

those kind of things um and after the coronation is the best time to get stuff. You can, you know, they're trying to move all these dishes and stuff and tins of cookies, chocolates. It's big business, right? Royalty is a big business. It is one of the things that, you know, I think there's always going to be royalty here.

We may ditch it, but it's not going to happen here because it's a big business. It's a huge business. And, you know, people depend on it here in our little town in Northern Scotland. There'll be street parties, you know. I feel like you're about to break out in a rendition of God Save the King. And I think you should do it outdoors, looking at the North Sea. You should sing it full throttle and tape it and post it to your site. But, you know, for me, that's probably all I have to say about King Charles. Okay. We'll leave that for next week. I wanted to prep you for what you're about to witness

when you arrive here. All right. Okay. Well, let's stay outside of Canada for our first topic today because it has significance, has significance here, has significance around the world, really. Joe Biden announcing yesterday that he will run for a second term. Now, normally that's not a news headline.

You kind of expect it from a president that they're going to run for a second term as well. But with Joe Biden, given his, you know, mainly given his age, right, he's 80 now. He's going to be mid-80s beyond if he wins the second term by the time he leaves office. And there is concern, and it's not just partisan concern. There's concern within his own party whether he can do this or not. But anyway, yesterday was his day. He comes out and declares that he's running. And I think everybody kind of expected it.

But nevertheless, it's already started, right? Should he be running again? What's he running for? What's the agenda? How's the other side going to react to this? Is it going to be another Biden-Trump election, two guys well into their senior years running for the presidency. What's your take on what you witnessed yesterday?

Well, it's fascinating for me to watch American politics, and that's kind of putting the prettiest face possible on it. It is sort of dispiriting to think that the likely scenario is going to be two candidates squaring off the combined age of which is in the order of 150 years. If we compare that to the Canadian context and just look at Pierre Poliev and Justin Trudeau, I don't know how old exactly Pierre Poliev is, but the combined age is less than 100 anyway. So there's kind of a massive influence of this kind of, well, the fact that these two candidates are really going to be quite old and watching them duke it out with each other, again, isn't going to be pretty. what that looks like yesterday. Donald Trump put out a video on his true social account, wherein he said, if you took the five worst presidents in the history of the United States and put them together, they wouldn't have been as bad as Joe Biden has been. And he went on about corruption and all of this kind of thing. And, you know, I felt myself thinking, even as I was watching it, that for Donald Trump, this is a mild version of what he's going to get to.

But by any other standard, it was pretty harsh. And it's way, way, way out from that election. Now, turning to Biden's launch, the video that he put out was really quite interesting to me. It was very well done. No surprise there. They've got lots of money. They've got lots of expertise to put together a very compelling video with great imagery, good music, good soundtrack, great shots, great clips. And I think it's about three minutes long. And it's full of things that are designed to send particular messages. But the overall message, which really kind of struck me, was that Biden is running to protect freedom. And when we think about that in the Canadian context,

freedom has become the battle cry of the populist right. And what Biden was doing yesterday was saying the people who want to take away your rights are the MAGA extremists, the populist right. If you're a black person, if you're a woman, if you're a gay person, if you're a trans person, if you're a person who thinks that government shouldn't regulate the books that are available to be read in a library or in a school, you need to be worried because the basic freedoms of Americans are at stake because of what these MAGA extremist Republicans want to do. So quite a different twist on the idea of freedom. And I thought when I hit play on that video, I was going to see something more about the economy and the next economy and that sort of thing, all of which I'm sure we will see from Biden. And there was some of it in there. But basically, what he was saying

is this is a fight for the soul of America, and the soul of America is about freedom, individual freedom. And I thought it was a pretty effective launch video, but he made no mistake that what he was doing was taking, he wasn't running on his record. to the far right, to the idea of the DeSantis's of the world and Trump, but maybe more particularly DeSantis in the context of the laws that are being passed that restrict a woman's right to choose, the regulations that are being put in place that penalize companies that support trans rights and that sort of thing. Very interesting launch. And I encourage people to take a look at it and consider it. And certainly it was very, very well produced.

And the Republicans in response, I sent something to you this morning to have a look at. But that's what I thought about the launch video. We can talk about the Republican response in a minute. What did you think? Yeah, I look forward to talking about the Republican response because I think it takes us into a whole other area of discussion around AI. But in terms of Biden, I mean, you know, the battle for the soul of America started, you know, when he launched his first campaign, you know, in 2020.

That was kind of even the terminology he used. And for him, that battle is still going on, maybe even more intense than it was, you know, three and a half years ago, which does sort of make you wonder, well, how successful has he been in that battle for the soul of America, if it's even worse now than it was then? I, you know, I find it, you know, I find it kind of distressing. You know, I've always liked Biden to a degree, and I was never sure he could be a president, but, you know, he became a president, and but he became a president and he seems to be kind of a good guy. He has done a lot of things during

his first term and that claim is correct, that he has achieved a lot, but there is this feeling about him that he's just not up to it as a president. And yet there you have the guy on the other side who looks like he's going to get the Republican nomination. He's indicted 34 times. By the time he gets to a nomination, he's probably going to be in an orange jumpsuit, having been cuffed and perp walked by then on various other charges.

And yet he can still run. I mean, there is nothing holding him back from running, even if he's in jail. But I don't know. It's so interesting. I'm glad you mentioned that. I was thinking about that this morning as well, that the Republicans look like they're destined to pick Trump again.

And to just think about that, a guy who is something like a six times bankrupt, twice impeached criminally indicted a draft Dodger a serial womanizer infidelity guy pretend Christian in a sense I mean I know that some people will say well no that's exaggerating but I don't think that it really is um but all of those things that you would have expected were a little bit of a litmus test by which Republicans would decide who should be their nominee. He kind of fails them all. He was bad at business. He's not religious at all. He dodged the draft.

He's been back and forth on abortion. He's broken the draft. He's been back and forth on abortion. He's broken the law. And yet, it's almost as though the party just can't. Sounds like he's got all the credentials, everything you need. We talked a couple of weeks ago. I don't know how we framed it. Is America just like how bad framed it you know as america you know just like how how how bad is it in america right now and we both seem to feel is pretty bad no matter which direction you

look in um and yet and then you see this is shaping up to be the battle it just you know there are other people it's not like these are the only two guys in America who run for president. You know, there are, you know, we worry about how bad politics is and the fact you can't get good people to run anymore. Well, in fact, there are some good people, you know, who run in the States, who run in Canada. They can't seem to get to that top level at the moment in in the states it's it's pretty odd um talk to me about the american or about the republican

ad that they put out like within minutes of the announcement by biden so they were obviously ready but you sent it to me and it is um it's telling on a number of levels yeah it is i mean i think that you know it reminded me right away of the ads that the liberals ran in 04 i guess against or maybe 06 against uh harper uh you know the guns in the street kind of as basically showing images and suggesting that if this guy is elected, Canada, as you know, it is going to be forever changed and not in a good way. But the difference with this ad is that it was made in kind of no time flat, and it was a lot of, there was a lot of AI content in it. There were kind of made up images that suggested that if Biden wins reelection, that China will be at war with Taiwan and America will be,

you know, kind of a bystander watching the world kind of fall apart, basically, and watching America fall apart. So it was quite dystopian, perhaps not as surprised that it was that, but it did conjure up the idea for me that this is going to be a little bit more the new normal in terms of how advertising is made, how quickly it's made, how much it borrows on the power of AI to create narratives very quickly, very compellingly, and to put them in the market digitally so that they affect the trajectory of things. It was, as you say, it was very quick, and it wasn't necessarily the case that they needed to look at Biden's launch video in order to decide what to say.

I'm sure they had their narrative already picked out which is that biden would be a disaster because uh america would be kind of weakened and uh on the sidelines and lots of things would fall apart uh was it effective um you know i don't think it will be effective now but i think that kind of approach might be effective later and i think that the of approach might be effective later. And I think the point that you were making at the beginning of this conversation about Biden, about how he, you know, it's pretty easy for them to put together a video where he looks like he's in command. All his faculty's functioning, lots of energy, precise words, well-spoken. If you want to put together a video like that, you can find those clips. But if you just follow him with a camera every day, every hour doesn't look like that.

Every minute doesn't look like that. There are those moments where his age does show a little bit. What did you think of the Republican video? Yeah, I wasn't as shocked by it as, I don't know whether shocked is the right word, but I mean, it registered something to you about the times we're in. I mean, I've seen, and I'm glad you pointed out that 04 or 06, I can't remember which year it was, the Martin hat against Harper and guns in the streets and soldiers in the streets and all that stuff.

Which it was kind of the AI of its day. It was using old pictures to make a point as if it was going to happen if the election went a certain way, which is all these ads were doing. Now, they may have been created faster. There may have been better production. But it's kind of the same old story, right? Try to portray what might happen if your opponent becomes the president or remains the president. So I didn't see that much in it initially,

but I guess what you were signaling to me is we could be into a whole new era of campaign advertising because of the ability of AI to turn stuff around very quickly and very convincingly. And to create fake images. I mean, the earlier martin versus harper ads took stock footage and put it together in a way that said yes uh here's some bad things that can happen women will lose the right to choose and uh there'll be uh there'll be violence and and um so it conjured up fears in that that sense, I think that's right.

This isn't completely new. But what the Republican piece hinted at anyway was the ability today to create false narratives. Now, some people will say, well, the Martin ad was a false narrative creation. And I take that point. It was absolutely an exaggeration for the purposes of making people anxious about what a Harper government would mean. But fast forward, whatever it is, you know, 15 years, we're almost 15 years. We're in a situation now where we know that many people have become

misinformed, disinformed, have accumulated information or argument really, and have interpreted as fact. So the potential to conjure up a completely false story of what's going on or what will happen and have people be persuaded that it is a reality is a much more prevalent and prominent threat. And it's not just on one side of the equation. It's not only the Republicans that can do that. Democrats can do it as well. And we've seen the ordinance that both parties can accumulate in order to persuade people. And so I am a little bit more anxious, I suppose, that the ability to manipulate imagery and message and to have things kind of travel the internet in a way

that isn't really consistent with a fair and legitimate political fight, but is more, let's see if we can bend the way that people understand reality in order to serve our political purposes. And I didn't see that in Biden's launch ad. I thought that what he was saying about the threat to rights was fairly accurate, maybe exaggerated in terms of the scale of it, but accurate on the whole. The Republican piece was basically yeah, it was sort of predictable, but it did offer up a fair bit of exaggeration, I thought. Well, it was day one. Let's face it,

if you're day one and you're Biden, you want to sound positive coming out of the gate, right? As positive as you can. And not surprisingly, the Republicans are going to sound negative. If, you know, I'm sure as we've all seen in all kinds of campaigns, the Democrats are going to have their stack of negative ads ready too. In case they need them. And they'll come out swinging hard, I'm sure.

Okay, enough on that. We're going to move topics, but first we're going to take a quick break. Back in a moment. And welcome back. You're listening to Smoke, Mirrors and the Truth with Bruce Anderson on the bridge right here. It's Wednesday. We're so happy to have you with us, whether you're listening on Sirius XM, Channel 167, Canada Talks, or on your favorite podcast platform,

or on our YouTube channel, which continues to pick up a lot of new viewers and a lot of comments on the YouTube channel as well. So we're always happy to see those, especially the ones that aren't associated with bots. Okay, so we've got a mass strike in Canada. 150,000 public servants out on strike, and no sense of any real movement happening here to bring it to a close. Whether or not Parliament will intervene

seems unlikely at this point, but you never know what might happen. What is the strike doing to politics in Canada? So far, not very much, I think. I think that the conservative leader is definitely trying to use it in the House of Commons as a way of saying the Liberals are incompetent. They spent a lot of money. They grew the size of the civil service. And now the country is faced with the biggest strike in 40 years. And I think that to some degree, it's an effective way to raise concerns without having to prescribe exactly what it is that a prime minister of pure poly would do to deal with this situation because i think the reality is is that if you believe in the collective bargaining idea um this is a legitimate strike this is a legitimate strike. This is a legitimate use of the power that employees have to withdraw their labor to stage protests in order to influence the processing of certain things that matter to people, whether it's passports or what have you.

But it is, at the end of the day, within the rules of the game. And so I don't think it would be advisable for the conservatives to say we would not let this strike happen. I mean, I think that they can say it's incompetence on the part of liberals to have allowed things to get to this point and to call to mind the notion that there's a lot of money that has been spent by the government. The deficit's been quite large as the way of saying we're going to criticize whatever you settle for. But on the liberal side, I think there's been a kind of a determination not to make their case in the public, but to make the case at the negotiating table that they need to make in order to get a resolution, to respect the legitimacy of the strike. And I think a big part of that is that they believe that that process is an important process to protect and to respect.

Part of it is, I think that you and I and Chantal talked about this a little while ago, is that the relationship between the liberals in government and the labor movement has been a really important relationship for them politically. So you can't have it both ways if you're the liberals. You can't want to have that supportive relationship with the labor movement on a whole range of public policy issues. And then when you get into a situation where there's a potential strike with a very large union to act as though you don't really respect the roles and responsibilities of people on the other side of the table. So I think the Liberals are in a tricky spot. I don't think it's added up to a significant amount of public frustration or anxiety or demand for a solution

yet but i don't know how many more days it will take before we arrive at that point and yesterday the uh the union ratcheted up the pressure by blockading uh some pieces of infrastructure ports in particular and that is the kind of thing that raises the political stakes, which is what they were trying to do. So, you know, I don't think it's a big political issue for the government yet, but you can see that it could be at some point in the not-too-distant future. Let me ask you a question about that.

And I venture into this carefully because of late I've been criticized by some for being sort of trapped in the public and labor. You know, it wasn't that long ago in historic terms, 15, 20, 25 years ago, when something like this would have literally brought the country to a standstill. The parliament would be in chaos and debate daily about what to do and why aren't you doing this, why aren't you doing that. There would be massive demonstrations.

What's changed, or am I wrong? Is it any different? What is that relationship between the public at large and the labor movement? You know, there's an interesting couple of questions in there, Peter. I mean, I think one of the things that has changed in terms of how people are reacting to this strike is that in a time where we all consumed a significant chunk of the same amount of information from the same sources, it was pretty easy for us to feel this many days into a strike of this magnitude that we've all read what was in the newspaper about it. We've all watched what was on the TV news about it. And it became,

it would have become by this time, a pretty significant point of collective knowledge. Well, we don't really consume news that way, right? I'm sure you're the same. I consume news every morning about 40 different things. Some of it is New York Mets baseball. Some of it is Scotland. Some of it is clean energy and technology. Some of it is New York Mets baseball. Some of it is Scotland. Some of it is clean energy and technology.

Some of it is mining and critical minerals. But only a portion of it is what are the big political issues of the day in Canada. Now, maybe my portion is bigger than other people's because it's one of the topics I like. But my point is that pretty much everybody isn't reading the same newspaper every day or watching the same broadcast as used to be the case. So a lot of stuff happens that most people aren't even really aware of. Um, so that's one thing. The second thing is that we've seen a lot of shocks come and go, and sometimes those shocks seem exaggerated in the news coverage, right right if you turn on a cable

news channel um especially the american ones it's almost never the case that there isn't something that says breaking news uh in a kind of a bright red chiron is that is that the right term yeah on the bottom of the screen why is it is it all that is it that everything is that exciting Why is it? Is it all that? Is it that everything is that exciting? Or is it that everything is presented as that exciting and that important? In which case, what does the public do? The public becomes a little bit inured to that, to the sense of news media are going to tell me that something awful and dramatic and that must have my attention is going on. And I'm going to, as an act of self-defense almost, decide that it might not be that important. It might not be that worthy of my undivided attention. So, and we talked, the last thing I think I would say is

that we talked about the news cycle being a kind of relentless search for new content on the part of the media. And if there isn't new content to report, they'll look for something else. And people huddled in a negotiating situation for days on end doesn't necessarily present a whole new amount of information to create that kind of breaking news syndrome. There is a point I think you were also raising, though, that the history of the labor movement and what it has achieved for workers is something that doesn't really get studied, isn't necessarily known by younger generations who haven't experienced it the way that you and I did,

where we used to talk about a tripartite situation where labor and business and government all were important stakeholders, not necessarily all equally important stakeholders, but there were three of them. You don't really hear that language anymore. But it doesn't mean that the things that unions fought for and made happen in terms of labor rules and regulations and economic agreements didn't accrue benefits for everybody in the labor force or for very many people in the labor force. I just think it's been difficult for them to have that as well understood in

the last decade or so. Okay. That does answer the question for me, or at least it gives me enough to think through the possibilities given the answer you gave. So I appreciate that. We do have time for one other topic. And this is, it's sports.

Hockey playoffs now. Yeah, but I'm not going to talk about the Leafs. How are you feeling about it though? I know you're not going to talk about it. No, I'm feeling that it's not a best of five series. It's a best of seven series. So talk to me after the seven. Well, talk to me after the series has been determined.

I won't say anything more than that. I've seen this movie before and I don't want to see it again. Okay. But it is about sports and it is about hockey. You live in a city in Ottawa where, you know, you've got an arena. It's way too far away from the downtown area and people have been whining about that for years, you know, with some good cause.

You also have an ownership problem. The team's trying to be sold and trying to, you know, deal with both these things at the same time, and you're kind of on your knees begging to, you know, Ryan Reynolds, you know, great Hollywood star, to come in and be the savior in Ottawa, be a part of the new ownership team, and, you know, drive towards a downtown arena.

That's one thing. That's Ottawa's story, and it's pretty well told. The Calgary story has been ongoing for years. Same kind of problem. They have a historical building that has been the home for the Calgary Flames, but they want a new arena, and it's all about money. They've got ownership. It's not an ownership question.

Well, it's an ownership question in the sense that, you know, who's going to pay for a new arena? But there have been a couple of things. It's funny how things happen when you get close to an election campaign, right, which is what Alberta's in, or about to be in. And now you have Danielle Smith saying it's time for a new arena and she's going to pony up with

some cash. What do you think of that? Well, look, I think that anytime there's public money going into a piece of infrastructure that will serve the needs of a professional sports franchise,

it's going to be controversial. There's going to be people who go, these sports franchises are worth a lot of money. The owners are usually pretty wealthy. Why does the public need to help underwrite the cost of the infrastructure that they need? So I can't think of a situation where there isn't some controversy around that. Having said that, I do think that it's a bad idea generally for people in another place to comment on the advisability of something like that happening where they don't live. I even heard you say people in Ottawa have been whining, and there was a certain, like, well, I don't think it's whining.

I think it's a rational kind of, it shouldn't be that far away kind of thought. I don't want to have to drive for 20 minutes to get to the stadium, you know, the arena. I want to be able to just, you know, walk to it. So, and you can in Toronto when you go to the Raptors games and the Leafs games and the Blue Jays games. You can walk from your house. That's because of good planning.

So it's very easy for you to mock people who would like to do that but can't. But so where that was taking me was i'm not i'm going to be agnostic on whether or not the city and the province should have agreed to provide the funds that they did for this because i don't live there and every city has its own dynamic and the importance of the franchise and the infrastructure that this is owned, I gather, by the city. So that is a thing to bear in mind. That could be a very helpful thing for the economy of Calgary and Alberta going forward. So what's interesting to me about it is the politics of it and seeing the clips that people

have dredged up of Daniel Smith from years ago saying we shouldn't be putting public money into hockey arenas for professional sports teams. And so yesterday there she was wearing a Flames jersey, announcing with great excitement that she had done a deal. And she sort of described it as being a deal that needed to be ratified by the voters of Alberta on election day. In other words, vote for me and you'll get this deal that I negotiated. And maybe if you vote for the other one, you won't. Which takes me to what did Rachel Notley say about it? So Rachel Notley, as a kind of a new Democrat, had this kind of curious situation where in the middle of the playoffs, she probably didn't want to say, this is a bad idea. We shouldn't be using public funds to support professional hockey. But she didn't say that.

She's probably not of the two, the most fiscally conservative of them, but she didn't feel like she was obliged to say, well, we'd want to take a look to make sure that the financial arrangements were the best arrangements that could be had for the taxpayers of Alberta. So she was being the kind of a cautious,

I'm not saying no, I'm not saying I wouldn't a cautious. I'm not saying no. I'm not saying I wouldn't do it. I'm saying I would look at the economic arrangements to make sure that we got the best deal possible. And so she was trying to de-risk the situation. Now, I'm sure that Daniel Smith at some point will start to say, well, you know where I come down on this. If I win the election, this building will be built. And if Rachel Notley wins the election, maybe it won't. So there'll be some more politics to watch on this. And it'll be interesting, especially since we're all to some degree, except us here

in Ottawa, in the grip of the hockey playoff fever. And there's a lot of attention to this topic because of that. Well, you know, the history of supporting and financing sports franchises or sports stadiums is not a good one in Canada. I mean, there have been some success stories. I can't think of one off the top of my head, but I can certainly think of the disastrous ones, you know, whether you go back to the, you know,

the 76, the Olympic Stadium in Montreal and the- The big O, yeah. Wasn't it billions of dollars that were spent by the time that thing was considered finished? And a lot of it, if not all of it, came out of government funding. You have the Toronto story. You know, in spite of your shots at Toronto,

Toronto had its own mess on the stadium front when they, you know, built the Sky Dome, which is what they called it initially. And I think, I can't remember, Mark Bulgich, my friend Mark Bulgich, wrote a great piece on this. It lost a couple of weeks for the Toronto Star, but it was around a couple hundred million dollars. They spent most of it government financing. And it turned into kind of a disastrous investment

to the point at which the government sold it, sold the whole thing for like $25 million to private interest. Rogers, sold it to Rogers for $25 million. Crazy. So you have these things, but you also have the pressure of teams and fans who want a better situation and combine that with an election looming. And it's an, it's an opportunity,

right. For, for those who want to make a promise, which would can be a very expensive promise. Anyway, we'll see how that one turns out and it'll either be added to the list of disastrous government funded sports projects sports projects or not. Obviously, we hope whatever they do, Calgary fans get their new stadium and do something about that.

They've got the basis of a great team. I don't know what happened to them this year. It's really unfortunate. But there are obviously going to be changes there, and we'll see what happens. Okay, I think that's going to wrap her up for this day. You get on a plane tonight. Tonight. You're heading across the pond to Amsterdam.

A quick stop in Amsterdam for a couple of nights, and then up to Scotland. And tell us what you're going to see in Amsterdam. Well, there's a great... Everybody who follows Bruce on social media And then up to Scotland. And tell us what you're going to see in Amsterdam. Well, there's a great exhibit. Everybody who follows Bruce on social media knows he's an artist of sorts. He's a good artist. Amateur painter.

An amateur painter. But has, obviously, a lot of interest in some of the great artists of our time. And Bruce is going to see one of them. Yeah, Vermeer, a great exhibit of Vermeer paintings. And I'll probably have an opportunity to spend some time in the Van Gogh Museum as well before heading over to Scotland. I'm really looking forward to it. It's just a great way to kind of immerse in something a little bit different from time to time. Yeah.

Well, good for you. We'll look forward to hearing about it. Bruce will be away on Friday in the art gallery, trying to figure out how to get one of those off the wall without anybody noticing. Oh, by the way, Peter, I had our good friend Philip Craig over for dinner the other night. A great Canadian artist.

Great Canadian artist. And he showed me some of the stunning work that he's doing right now for a show coming up later this year. I'm going to get him to send a few snaps of it. And maybe you can have a look at it. Maybe we can post them. So people should just see his work. It's so brilliant. It's just captivating.

Yeah. No, we're big fans and have been for many years of Philip Craig, whose work is, you know, in galleries and homes right across the country. He's a fantastic artist. All right. Listen, safe travels, and we'll talk to you next week. We'll catch up to you next week. Rob Russo will be sitting in for Brusa on this Friday on Good Talk with Chantel. Tomorrow it is your turn and the random ranter.

So if you have any late letters, you better get them in like right away. TheMansbridgePodcast at gmail.com. TheMansbridgePodcast at gmail.com. That's it for this day. Thanks again, Bruce. And as I said, safe travels. And we'll talk to all of you in 24 hours.