The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - SMT -- Is Poilievre Finding His Footing?

Episode Date: March 15, 2023

Last week Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre implied that Justin Trudeau was a traitor.  This week a different Poilievre emerged and Bruce was impressed -- to a degree. The China story keeps moving along but with the budget approaching there's also more turf, familiar for the Conservative leader, to tread on.

And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. You are just moments away from the latest episode of The Bridge. It's Wonderful Wednesday. Wonderful Wednesday means Bruce Anderson and smoke, mirrors, and the truth. And hello there, Peter Mansbridge in Toronto. Bruce Anderson is in Ottawa. I got to tell you that, you know, we did a couple of programs last week. In fact, I think we've done three or four programs down the last couple of weeks that have been more or less based on the whole issue of Chinese interference. And the response has been quite overwhelming, especially so on the YouTube channel, where you get to watch

the video presentation of whether it's smoke or good talk on Fridays. And there's been, you know, thousands, hundreds of thousands, I think, of views, and there have been lots of comments. And I got a kick out of some of the comments. I mean, first of all, the comments section kind of drives home the polarization on this issue. And you've seen it as well, Bruce, where you're either vehemently anti-Trudeau. Some of the comments are just that. They kind of make Polyev's treason comments look like peanuts.

Or you are, like, defending the prime minister and saying, the opposition has got to lay off. This is crazy. There's no proof on this story yet, real proof, et cetera, et cetera. So you see those divisions. The comment I like the best and i've been trying i've been puzzled by it ever since i got it was because all it said was stay retired so i tried to think of that i did like which way are you supposed to take that

because i like i you know sure i retired from the cbc like six or seven years ago now um but i've been working ever since on on a variety of different things including this podcast so i'm not like retired so is that stay retired mean that's a good thing or if you ask me was that intended as praise i don't think it probably was. No, that was my initial response. That was my initial thought. I don't know. I think it was put in a little bit more of a negative context.

But you know what? Maybe that's because I read so many of what I consider to be completely unfair comments on Twitter about the question that you put in whatever was posted about the episode. I think the question was something like, is it over the top to suggest the prime minister is a traitor, which was the question that we discussed. And a considerable number of people whose views were in favor of Trudeau or supportive of Trudeau interpreted that as a legitimization of the question and a criticism implied of the prime minister. Which, you know, if people listen to the show, you had a little bit of that point of view, but not very much at all. And so anyway, I think people, as you say, they react in such a heightened fashion with so much kind of energy and vitriol, especially on Twitter.

I don't think it's the same on other platforms. In fact, I know it's not. We've done some survey research on that recently, which we can talk about sometime. But it also reminded me that there are two ways to read the polls about concern about China. Some people do what observers often do, which is you look at what the majority thinks and you say Canadians aren't worried about election interference because the number is higher than 50%. I tend to always look at the, well, what would, you know, a majority isn't necessarily the only important factor. It looks like from the latest polling that about 8 million adult Canadians, eligible Canadian voters, think our elections are not safe from interference. That's a lot of people. And if that number was more like 1 million 10 years ago, we should be concerned about that.

And so probably should not put the emphasis, in my estimation, on the 71% who say we don't think that there's been a problem so far, but on the 29% who say there's a risk, especially given that it looks like about half of conservative voters have doubts, skepticism about our electoral system. That's a big number. And if we think of this as just another issue that will come and go, the news cycle will kind of wash it away at some point in time. And we haven't been paying enough attention to what happens in the United States. And we haven't been paying enough attention to what the opposition leader, Pierre Pauliev, is doing with that suspicion, including yesterday. Anyway, I interrupted you and went off on a bit of a tangent,

but not really a tangent. No, not really, because that is, in fact, where I was heading. It's interesting because you're in a way kind of in sync with Polyev. he's making the same argument, at least in one of his arguments, that that figure that seems to run anywhere from 25% to 30% of Canadians are concerned about the safety of the election process. And he's making that same argument that you are, that that is not an insignificant number. While we focus on the whatever it may be, you know, 70 to 75% who feel a system is safe. When you're talking 25 to 30%, that is a big number. Yeah, the difference between he and I on this, there's probably a few

of them. But the main difference is he wants the number to be higher. I want the number to be lower. I think he's clearly decided that the more often he can say, Trudeau is creating suspicion and creating suspicion that he has something to hide. The implication being that this is all kind of a part of a cooperation, soft or otherwise, between Trudeau and the Chinese, and that the only unfortunate thing for the government is that somebody, some courageous whistleblower has

shone a light on that. I don't think that's true. I don't think that's also the right thing for an opposition leader to say. And I don't think that if Pierre Poliev was the prime minister, that he would describe leaks from CSIS as courageous whistleblowing. I think there are lots of problems with what Mr. Poliev is doing. I think he is definitely trying to nurture, blow air on embers to try to create a little bit more fire around this issue because he has political interest as he sees it in doing that. And, you know, I read the story from yesterday about his statement in the, I guess it was another form of news conference that he was having yesterday, or a scrum at least, where he did this line about Trudeau's

inspiring a lot of suspicion about the election results. Now that's a long way from where he was a week ago, where it was basically Trudeau's a traitor, he's guilty of treason. Those aren't his exact words, but they were certainly implication in what he was saying. So he's, in a way, pulled back, but at the same time, keeping that kind of keeping it on the front burner, the issue around suspicion and with a you know in not so many words the suspicion being that there is some kind of arrangement between trudeau and china um so that's still he's migrating the issue to the notion that liberals Liberals have an institutional interest in concealing Chinese interference because it tends to favor them. So he's already established the argument that he thinks Justin Trude be a question that goes to, does a liberal party have an institutional bias in favor of concealing this activity?

That then becomes a kind of a bigger political weapon for him, I suppose he would think. But I think it's a double-edged sword. I think that there are people who at some point are going to say, and maybe that point will be after the rapporteur is announced and probably when some form of more public inquiry is in the cards, at some point people are going to get to see enough information that they're either going to decide that all of that, all of those allegations that Mr. Poliev is leveling at the government are hype and overstated by a lot and unfortunate. But that's not today. That's some time off in the future. And I think that to some degree, the government kind of created more problems for itself, as we've talked about before,

by the way they handle these allegations in the first instance. You know, Polyev makes, you know, tries to pick up ground on the issue of transparency, and he's, you know, constantly leveling at Trudeau and other Liberal ministers that they're not being transparent enough on this. They're not telling what they know. And that appears true. We're saying the same thing, you know, and we've been saying the same thing for a couple of weeks. Why aren't they answering some of these questions? But Aliyev's got to tread carefully on this transparency issue because he has his transparency issues as well. We still don't know what the full story was on that the use of his personal social media before he was a leader appealing in a sense to right-wing groups um you know extreme right-wing

groups yeah and he sort of ducked that one as he has on some other things as well so i mean you you got to be careful here when you're demanding transparency of others and you leave yourself open to the same criticism. Look, I think that in general, in life, and over the history of our observation of politics, that's true. I think that the chances that he will hold himself to a high standard of transparency are zero. I don't think that's who he is. I don't think that's how he approaches politics. I think his setting is attack every day, and he'll worry about the consequences of overstatements, embellishments,

rhetorical flourish that goes beyond what others have done in the past is something that he aspires to, not that he will be cautious about doing. And I think to some degree, if there's a secret to his success within his party, it has been because he's that guy. Because he'll say things that would make others kind of blush a little bit and say, well, that's harsh. That's over the top. That's, you know, almost, as you say, setting yourself up for criticism if you use those kind of if you use that level of rhetoric. So in a way, it's been the thing that from his standpoint has probably worked better than anything else in his political career. I do think that there comes a time when people are, you know, in between elections, as we've talked about many times in the past, that it's not a question of who am I going to vote for today? It's a question of how do I feel about the choices today and how might that affect my vote sometime in the future? Get closer to election.

And I think then people do start to look at him and say, what do I know about him? How does he come across to me? Can I really trust him? Will he be a stabilizing force in a world and a country that feels like it could use that. I think that's one of the critical questions for him as he pursues this kind of politicking. I don't think he's worried about it now. I think he might pay a little bit of a price later on, but a lot of that will depend on the politics of the moment, whenever that is, a year from now or more. Well, nobody's denying he's a, you know denying he's a smart guy in terms of the use of

various tools to push his message out. But he also has a record. I mean, because he's basically done nothing in his life except be a political figure on Parliament Hill, there's lots to go back on in terms of his pastime as a minister, his pastime as an MP, things he said on various issues. And one of that's come to the fore this week on this discussion and debate and argument around whether or not Katie Telford, the Chief of Staff, the Prime Minister, should be before a committee answering questions. I'm not sure where I stand on that one, quite frankly, because we've seen this over many years through many different governments of all political stripes.

But Polyev is demanding she appears because there are questions to answer. Somebody dug up clips of Polyev defending Dmitry Sudas, who was Stephen Harper's director of communications, who a committee wanted to have appear before them back in the Harper years. And Polyev was saying, no, no, no, no, you go back through 300 years of parliamentary history and see that the staffs of prime ministers or ministers shouldn't be put before a committee, that it's accountability, it should be the minister, that's who should be there, or the prime minister who should be there. Yeah. So that was interesting. It kind of,

you know, it is. Yeah. I mean, I was saying, and this is now on these things I think are very situational and maybe it's fair to say that, that,

you know, he's not alone in politics in that regard, but I think what he's pursuing, um, by pushing this, so we must get her to appear, is he's not pursuing information and transparency. He's pursuing a show that he thinks will be good politics for him. And maybe that show is repeated questions to which the answer is, I can't answer that question because to answer it would require me to divulge secret information and I'd be

breaking the law. So, you know, and I can imagine that he would think that those would make very useful clips for him politically, but I don't think it's, I don't think there's a case to be made that this is a way to shed more light on this. I think there are other processes that are going to either do that or not, but this looks to me like pure politics. And I think that the government could probably do a better job of just explaining why it is they can't answer certain questions and let the public understand that better. And maybe people will trust that, maybe they won't. But I don't think that there has been enough of that kind of discussion by government figures so that the public can, you know, against this wall of sound from

Pauliev and some in the news media, let's be honest, who every day are implying that the government must have something to hide or else they would tell us everything. Well, that's not right. I don't know if you watched this yesterday, Peter, but David Cochran, the new host of Power and Politics on CBC, had a really good interview with Richard Fard fadden and ward elcock together yesterday two former directors of um cesus yeah and it was just a really good discussion where he asked them you know questions and it was kind of a calm tone and an interesting environment and

they didn't have exactly the same opinion, those two people, but they talked about it respectfully of each other's opinion. And they shed light, not just heat on this issue. And I think that, you know, if people in government, in the government were looking at that, there's a lesson in it, which is keep going out there and kind of explaining what it is that needs to be explained rather than kind of letting the entire discussion pretty much be dominated by those skeptical and politically anyway, hostile voices. What do the people want? Do they want light or do they want heat? And I mean that seriously because, you know,

no matter which side you're on, there's a lot of heat on this story. You own a newspaper, you want heat because you want clicks. And if you don't get clicks, your business is going to die. What's the public want? There's probably two ways to look at the public. There's a small portion of the public, less than 30%, for whom politics is a source of high drama and entertainment and um you know in some respects it's like uh they have a sports team that they're deeply invested

in and they in every shot that's taken every uh insult that's hurled um you know, is nourishment for their passion for politics. I don't mean to undermine or to be critical of people who have this passion. But for them, a day with political drama is a good day. And then there's the rest of the population for whom don't bother me with politics unless there's something I really need to know, is the more natural setting. And I think those people, to the extent that they engage in an issue like this that comes along, they want the rational. They want the calm. They want some information.

They want to hear the arguments because the arguments are part of how you make a choice as a citizen at election time, participate in conversations with your friends. But they want more light than heat. And I think this has become a big challenge in journalism. And I don't mean that to be critical of journalists. I understand that the business models are really challenged. But why, when I see an interview like what David Cochran did yesterday, it reminds me of those long-form interviews that you used to do with leaders of parties during elections. And, you know, there's a reason why you would have observed and understood when you were doing those.

That was some of the more popular work that you ever did. And you did the one-on-one show as well, which a lot of people really enjoyed. That's a better way for people to consume this kind of information in most cases. Do you want to expand on how great I was? Well, it's so long ago, it's hard to remember, to be honest. I'm just going to stay retired. Listen, you know, I hear what you're saying, but I also watch what the government's doing. They're allowing this heat versus light to play out kind of endlessly

because they can't get their act together in determining what to do, whether it's, you know, the appointment of a special rapporteur or, you know, let's get on with some kind of inquiry or public investigation through a committee level of what happened. They're allowing it to just keep on playing out, which gives the opposition exactly what they want. Time to, you know, express their theories, express their condemnation of the

government. And, you know, so I'm not surprised it's having the impact it's having. Yeah, I think it's one of the challenges when you're in government is something like this happens, and you realize that you've kind of made a mistake in how you've handled it. And then the first thing that you need to do is kind of apply some anesthetic. You need to kind of freeze the situation that you're in so that you can have the time to provide a more permanent solution. And I think that's the zone that the government's in right now. And I think also there's only one person who's going to decide what that permanent solution looks like, and it's the prime minister. And so you've got ministers who have responsibilities for different parts of this conversation, able to say certain things about what they know and what they're involved in. I saw a good interview from Marco Mendocino on Sunday about that. But ultimately, it's going to be up to the prime minister to make the next

several decisions. Who's going to be the rapporteur, what that time frame is. And I thought it was interesting that Messrs. Elcock and Fadden both talked about what the time frame for this was. And Fadden in particular, I think, said a little bit of the challenge that the prime minister's got is he's kind of set up mechanisms that might make it really difficult for people to know more about this before the next election. And I think that's a fair point. I think when you look at the report that Morris Rosenberg did as chair of that committee of senior officials, he said it's important for people to know in the pre-writ period what's going on. I really believe that. I don't think that we can build confidence by saying, we'll let you know after an election whether it was compromised. I think that the influence happens all the time. And if that's true, and all of these experts say

it's been happening for a long time, then people need more regular updates on what to know, what to look out for, what to be concerned about, and what we're doing about it. Why did you turn down the special rapporteur's position? That's funny. I keep on putting your name in the mix and everybody's like, I don't think he speaks French enough to spell rapporteur, but that's a separate issue. That's a good point.

See, folks, he didn't deny, right? He didn't deny. We'll keep that in mind. Better start looking for... Sounds like a terrible job. It sure does. Nevertheless, I better start looking for a backup just in case he disappears for a couple of years on that job.

All right, we're going to move on. And to perhaps some people's surprise, we're going to move on to a different element of the Pierre Polyev story, one which has only surfaced in the last couple of days and one in which Bruce is very impressed. So we'll talk about that when we come back. All right, welcome back. You're listening to Smoke, Mirrors, and the Truth on The Bridge. This Wednesday, Bruce Anderson is in Ottawa.

I'm Peter Mansbridge in Toronto. You're listening on Sirius XM, channel 167, or on your favorite podcast platform, or on our YouTube channel, which, as I was saying earlier, is getting a fair amount of action, and we're happy with that. Surprised a little bit, but happy nevertheless. All right, Bruce, Pierre-Paul Lievre, quite apart from this whole issue

that we've spent the first 20, 25 minutes talking about, you were impressed with his performance on trying to, I guess, exploit his, sounds negative, it's not, trying to underline the issue around the economy. And what was it you were impressed by? Well, I think that what really struck me is that there are days, including on, I think, last Friday, when he posted a, I guess, a selfie video where he held his camera right up to his face. And I thought it was a shockingly bad communications technique. So there are days where he does things from a communication standpoint that I think are really poorly advised and executed. But then I also saw this press conference that he did on Sunday morning. And I know that some people, I think, were wondering, well, why is he doing it on Sunday

morning? And is it, you know, is it to avoid contact with the press? And, you know, possibly that's true. But it doesn't really matter. He went out and he there was a camera and he did a 14 minute spiel and there was fluency to it. We've known for some time that he's a fluent speaker. But I think if the other parties were looking at the way that he talked about the economy, the way that he wove a story that included anecdotes and used language that didn't sound institutional, didn't sound to 30,000 foot level that average people could probably relate to. This is a cautionary thing for other parties. He's pretty effective at doing that. And the other thing I noticed is that, and he does this quite a bit now, is that if there are some voters who

tended to think of the Conservative Party in the past as the party of big business and tax cuts for the rich, he is not describing what he would do in a way that reinforces that. If anything, he's describing a conservative party that is not for those things, that is for regular working people. He talks about powerful paychecks. He talks about bringing jobs home. It's a version, if you like, of Trumpism in the sense that it's aimed at people who found the economic scenario more challenging in recent years, perhaps. But it isn't a full on Trumpism. definitely, I know that we're going to hear a lot when I say this, but it's more intelligible and more likely to be effective with Canadians if they hear him tell his version of reality that way. Now, there are lots of things in what he says that I don't agree with, that I don't think are right,

that I don't think are accurate. But I was really struck by how in politics your opponents can almost kind of look away from the best communications moments you have and ignore them and just focus on the things that you do that they can make fun of or that they can hype a criticism about and not look at the things that their opponents are doing that are effective. And a little bit of that could be said about Justin Trudeau in 2015. And I sort of recall saying some of those things myself, looking at his communication style and not liking it very much. And I may have even said things like that on Ad Issue back in the day, to which, you know, in the end, I had to admit, I was wrong about that, that there were other days

that he was having where his ability to connect with people was much greater than what I had perceived. So I've always sort of taken from that experience and others as well, I suppose, that to understand that how any individual reacts to a bad day or a particular piece bit more interesting to average voters and something that his opponents should take more seriously, including yesterday. He put out a video about suing Big Pharma because he thought Big Pharma should pay the price for the devastating damage that their efforts caused through the opioid addiction. And the way that he manufactured or his team manufactured this video, there was music behind it. I don't know if you've seen it on, I saw it on Twitter. And he seemed, if you were looking for evidence that he was a compassionate individual, you could see and hear things that confirmed that he had compassion for those individuals. If you were looking for he's tough on bad businesses, there was plenty of that. If you were looking for I want the streets cleaned up because I don't want to see homeless people on them, there was enough of that. I completely disagree with his policy ideas on this. So I

don't want people to misunderstand what I'm saying. I'm just saying that he can have a bad policy idea and find a pretty effective way of explaining it so that people might not see the flaws in it and might hear some things that are kind of attractive and reassuring. And as we all know, those kind of communication skills can make a big difference, even with policy that one disagrees with when the time comes. And he's entering into some turf right now over the next couple of weeks where he is most comfortable, and that is dealing on the economy we've got a budget coming up christian freeland's budget um in the next uh 10 days to or so and you know for polyev he must be

looking forward to this because there's something about his communication skills once again and it kind of it plays out from what you were just saying where he can take macro ideas and and bring them down to street level where you know the person on the street can identify with what he's saying where they might not have identified with what was said in the budget in terms of understanding it at their level and what it could mean to them. So he enters this next little while after an interesting week on the security issue, not that he's going to drop that, but when it hits the economy, which supposedly is one of the first or second top issues that confront Canadians right now.

It'll be turf that he understands and he likes playing on. Absolutely. And I think the other thing that's happening is that at this point in the life of an incumbent government, a lot of the key players don't really spend much time or put in much effort to criticize their opponents. They spend most of their time kind of doing the administrative jobs that they have in government or defending their policies or announcing their programs. But at the same time, I think it's fair to say, maybe you'll tell me I'm wrong about this, but I don't find that in the media there's an awful lot of scrutiny of whether Palliot's policy ideas hold up or whether or not he's being consistent. But I do think that we have a situation where the major print organizations anyway in Canada, and I use print in the print and digital sense, tend to be a little bit more easygoing on what he represents

and pretty focused on the government, and maybe that's the normal course of things. But I think he gets a little bit of a free ride on a lot of those kinds of positions that he takes. And the NDP aren't going to challenge him. So if the liberals don't find it within themselves to figure out exactly how to raise awareness of what his policy ideas really are about, if they think that they can do that in the context of a 37-day campaign, if they think ultimately there's going to be too many people that just aren't going to like his style, which is something that you hear people say, my thought is he's within two or three,

four percentage points of winning a majority government. He doesn't need to make everybody excited in a positive way about what he says and how he says it. He only needs about two or three or four more percentage points. And so the Liberals have a fight on their hands with this guy, as far as I'm concerned, and it's maybe not a fight to push too far off into the future. You know, if they're banking on a style issue, you know, we've seen both sides of the style issue with Pelliev in the last week. I mean, the trader stuff was something he pulled away from within hours. And whether it was considered a mistake or whether it was worth just prodding the so-called base with that line

on one day but abandoning it after that. So we saw that element of his style and then we saw the element that you're talking about on Sunday in that news conference and his ability to sort of play some of the big economic issues into a level that all Canadians can understand. Let me just, you know, before. Did we take a break? I don't mean to. We took a break. You didn't hear it?

All right. I don't know if we need to take another one. Well, listen to this. You're the boss, and whatever you say is fine by me, and if we need to take another one. You're the boss. Whatever you say is fine by me. When he was whining before we started today about how I was playing the music or this, that, or the other, I accused him of wanting to take over the show, to be the host.

You know, the bridge with Bruce Anderson or Andy with Anderson or whatever we'd call it. I think we'd come up. And we laughed that off. And now here he is saying, should you be taking a break here? Let's go to our last topic. What is our last topic? Well, we were going to talk about the agreement between Australia, the UK, and.

Yeah, look, I, you know, I think we disagree on this one too, because I have some, I thought it looked on this one, too, because I have some... I thought it looked bad on us, not being there. Now, whether we were invited or not, I have no idea. But, you know, I don't think, you know, the price of a nuclear-powered submarine was the admission ticket to be in that meeting. It was supposedly about, you know, the Pacific in a new era of concerns about whether it's Chinese trade or Chinese military activity or what have you. But we weren't there. And that surprised me. Now you take a different view on this. Well, I did go back to the original announcement in September of 2021 of this AUKUSA, I guess is how you would say it.

And what happened in the run-up to that, of course, was that Australia was looking to buy nuclear submarines, nuclear-powered submarines. And after, I guess, some time of thinking that they didn't want any nuclear-powered anything there, and they had a contract lined up with France, and they canceled the contract with France, which caused a major breach in that relationship. And instead, they went ahead with a contract essentially to do the procurement with the U.S. and with the U.K., the U.K. providing propulsion technology, I think, and the U.S. providing a bunch of other components. So Australia wanted to buy some submarines for their use within their region. And this arrangement came to be because those three countries wanted to cooperate in that procurement process. Now, in the last election campaign, I guess Aaron O'Toole criticized the Liberals for not being part of the conversation. And the prime minister said, it's about Australia wanting submarines and we're not in the submarine market.

We don't see a need for them. And subsequently, of course, the government of Canada put out its Indo-Pacific strategy. And I took another look at it this morning, and it included the notion that we were going to be adding frigates to our role in the Pacific and a lot of other arrangements that we have in place with other Pacific nations. So yeah, I think maybe it's partly the Canadian way to kind of wonder why we didn't get invited to the party or the meeting, that sort of thing. But I don't see much in this CUSA that where we would expect to jump in unless we want to be part of at least that initial submarine program. And I think it's reasonable for us to say we don't.

And that's where we differ. But neither one of us are military experts, so who knows. But I think a lot has changed since the original discussion around this, you know, three-country situation. A lot has changed in the Pacific. A lot has changed because of China. A lot has changed because of our new and long-awaited focus on the Arctic. You know, if other countries are, you know,

going through the Northwest Passage with submarines, and there's every indication they are, should we be in that market in a better way than we are right now? Most of our submarines are terrific for above water, not so good below water. And that's been a history of our submarines over the last few decades. I didn't know. I looked at President Biden's speech from a couple of days ago, I guess. And I have to say that you have to go almost all the way through it before you get to him saying, and this isn't, the submarines isn't the only thing here. And then there was very little bit behind that. So, you know, that and I remember the criticism, I think, of the opposition parties here was if we'd been part of this discussion, we might have been able to use it to put more pressure on China to get the two Michaels back. It felt like a political stretch to me. We're still part of the Five Eyes intelligence sharing agreement, which involves New Zealand, which isn't part of the ACUSA scenario. There are lots of Indo-Pacific nations that have a direct interest in defense and security, including Japan, which isn't part of ACUSA. So, you know, I think your argument that maybe we need submarines is,

you know, a separate argument from whether or not we should be part of this agreement. Yeah, you know, I agree. And the problem with submarines is they're incredibly expensive. There's a very long lead time on, you know, if you're buying new ones. If you go into the used market, there are lots of people out there who want to sell you something. That's how we ended up in the mess we're in now on our submarine stuff. Although I guess some naval commanders might suggest that I'm wrong on that.

But nevertheless. Okay. Well, but nevertheless. Okay. Well, we've settled that. We've settled all these things. We've settled that. They're all settled. I've got a big board back here where I put a little check mark for the points that I won.

It's getting a little full, but I'm going to add one more. Well, you're very good at that. And I'm glad that you're taking the view that you need to keep a list and you need to write it down and do check marks because it's good for you. You can't measure it. You can't, you know, what's the saying? You can't improve on it or whatever. If you can't measure it, it didn't happen. So you're heading over to Scotland,

and you're going over to Scotland, and you're going to go to our favorite little town on the edge of the North Sea. That's what I'm going to do. I'm going to test out the airplane and the airline business tonight because I've got a series of different flights and going through a number of different countries trying to get to my destination. And we'll see how... I mean, I went to check in last night and they've already changed the plane

and changed my seat to the worst possible seat that I can get. And so I'm trying to fight that one so things have got off to a great start i'm really a little bit doubtful that it's the worst possible seat on the air pretty bad do you know what the safest seat on an airplane is i just read this on the the other day what safest place to seat to sit the safest seat to sit in, according to all the analysis of past, you know, as horrible as it sounds, past accidents, et cetera, et cetera. The safest seat on the plane?

Take a guess. The last row, the last seat. The last row is correct. The middle seat in the last row. So is that the seat that you have for tonight? No, that's the best seat. Oh, I see. So you've got the worst seat.

It's like up at the front by the window or something like that. No, the best seat, safest seat on the plane is the middle seat of the last row. And, you know, why is that? Why is that? It reminds me of that old you know remember bob newhart we're old enough you're old enough to remember bob newhart one of the great stand-up comedians and of course had a number of successful television shows he used to do this thing in stand-up about flying on an airline and all the crazy things that that happen um he talked about the announcement where uh you know keep your seat belt uh on in case we come to a sudden stop and then he goes

like against a mountain as bizarre as that sounds anyway they, the last seat or the last row, because when planes have bad accidents, it's usually the front end that gets hit first, whether it's in the ground, in the mountain, in the water, whatever. I don't know that. I'm never going to think about that again. I don't want to think about that. Well, I'll stop there because there is more to that story.

But anyway, hopefully the things will get sorted out. And when I next talk to you on Friday with Chantel, I'll be on the other side of the big pond, as they say. Okay. I look forward to that. Yeah, I bet you do. I'll be over in the Royal Burg, as they say. Okay. I look forward to that. Yeah, I bet you do. I'll be over in the Royal Burg of Dornick, and I'm envious, and I'm going over a little bit later on.

All right. Wish you a good trip. We'll leave it at that for now. Tomorrow is your turn, so wheel it in. I got a lot of criticism this week. Not on Polyev. Not on Trudeau. Not on China. Not on referees.

A lot of criticism about curling. We'll hear that tomorrow. And, of course, the random ranter will be by. So that's tomorrow. Friday is good talk when Chantel joins Bruce and I for our take, her take, his take, my take on the week gone by. That's it for now. I'm Peter Mansbridge.

Thanks so much for listening. Thank you, Bruce. We'll talk to everyone again in 24 hours.