The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - SMT - Is This The Plan To Solve The Housing Crisis?

Episode Date: December 13, 2023

Going back to the future may be one way to look at Housing Minister Sean Fraser's latest announcement for a housing fix. Another way may be to listen again to what the Random Ranter had to say on housing on September 7th!  Bruce Anderson is here for SMT.

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. Bruce Anderson coming right up. Love that music, but really, how much longer are we going to hear it? I mentioned yesterday. Two more. Two more. Today and one more. I know. These are collector's editions.

They are collector's editions. I mentioned this yesterday that you were going to take the high jump out of Smoke, Mirrors and the Truth. Only Smoke, Mirrors and the Truth is still going to be here on Fridays. And there was an immediate reaction from our audience. It was kind of 50-50. The first half was, no, no, Bruce can't go. We can't have Bruce go.

And the other half was, how do I get that job? How can I have that job? There were lots of... Well, it's been a lot of fun doing this and starting out in this podcast direction with you and enjoying our Wednesday chats, enjoying our Friday conversations. And there's still no shortage of smoke, mirrors, and mistruths or untruths. Yes. But there is a shortage of time mirrors and mistruths or untruths uh but there is a shortage of time uh from you know from my standpoint so um yeah i think that i i love spending time getting ready

for the friday conversation but two in a week is that's a lot of opinions to generate it takes a fair bit of time so i'm happy to do the occasional smoke mirrors and the truth in the new year, but not on a weekly basis and only when it seems like it's a, you know, useful thing for you to do and for me to do and for people to hear about. Well, it has been incredibly useful and rewarding for me and for the audience for the last couple of years. I think people don't tend to realize that in your case, you have other jobs, and trying to divide up your time is not always easy. Bruce, every once in a while people say, Bruce is a journalist, why does he have these kind of opinions?

No, not a journalist. Not a journalist, never been a journalist, never could is a journalist. Why does he have these kind of opinions? You know, like he's not a journalist. Not a journalist. Never been a journalist. Never could be a journalist. Too honest. Oh, I didn't say that. But, you know, obviously in his research work and polling and data consumption,

his advising roles, his analytical roles, his all kinds of things. He's even a part restaurant owner. With a hole in the wall and another one that's not a hole in the wall. That's right. Yeah. Maybe one day I'll be an author like you, though. I see that book there.

I know it was still a bestseller, but we don't need to talk about that today because we've got other things to talk about. No, we don't need to talk about the book. We can see it if you're watching on YouTube. Anyway, let me begin the conversation this way. I found the story really interesting yesterday that the Liberals are reviving a World War II plan on housing. And this is the housing minister, Sean Fraser,

outlining this yesterday. I'll get to one of the reasons I found this particularly interesting, but I actually like the idea. I think it's a smart idea. And I'm sure, you know, various people will have various opinions on that. I kind of like it. I think it's interesting. It's an interesting way to go about one of the

issues that Canadians headline their concerns with, you know, whether it's inflation, climate change, housing, and housing cuts across some of the key areas that the Liberals or any party right now is going to need on their side if they're going to do well in an election campaign, and that are young people, the middle-aged, the elderly who worry about their kids and their grandkids and housing. So here's an interesting idea. And I'm just wondering how you saw it on a day where you actually decided to, you know, get into watching the MPs in a way you hadn't done in, you know, in some time?

Well, first of all, on Sean Fraser's idea, it's a great idea. It's an idea that shows that the government still, notwithstanding the fact that it's been in office for so long, and that can tend to be a bit, it can make a government sclerotic in the sense that it's not very agile. A problem comes along, it gets bigger, people get focused and anxious about it. They look to the government for a solution and government finds it hard to be creative and agile. And what Sean Fraser has done in this instance is he kind of looked around for the best ideas and the best advice. And there's a kind of a well-known economist named

Mike Moffitt, who I know met with the cabinet and delivered a lot of recommendations this summer with respect to how to solve this housing problem. He's a policy expert as well as an economist. And Fraser just kind of knew that he had the ball and he had the kind of the moxie and the sense of political opportunity given to him by the prime minister to deal with this situation. And he went for a bunch of ideas, including this one, which I think is fascinating because not very far from where I live in Ottawa, there still is a whole area of town that has these houses that were built as victory homes after World War II. And the idea in a nutshell is that if the federal government can create a template for different

kinds of homes that can be built according to code so that more of them can be built more quickly in communities that are ready to accelerate progress, that will increase the housing supply more quickly than if they don't do this. So it's a great idea. And the best evidence that it's a really good idea is I saw Ontario Minister Paul Calandra, Conservative government in Ontario, where this housing crunch is a really big thing. And he called it a fabulous idea today, I think, or maybe it was yesterday, but it was on social media. That's going to change the political chemistry around

housing issue a little bit in Ottawa. Not that that's a big deal. The real big deal is will it make more houses happen? And I think the answer to that is yes. And so I want to hear your thoughts on it, because you said there's a particular reason why you're interested in it. And I could talk about the House of Commons yesterday, because as you say, I just had an instinct to go. This is the last week before the Christmas break. And, you know, MPs are preparing for, you know, a little bit of a break from the politics of Ottawa. Usually there's quite a lot of energy around this last week. And I hadn't been up to the new House of Commons in the West Block while the Centre Block is being

rebuilt. And I just wanted to kind of get a sense of what was going on there and what the chemistry was like. So back to you on housing first. Yeah. You know, you mentioned how not far from where you live in Ottawa, houses just like this that were built in the, you know, late forties, early fifties, victory homes for returning vets and, and, and, and, and they're, you know, they're the marriages that so many got involved with almost immediately. It was the beginning of the baby boom. And these houses, which are small, they're sort of 900 to 1,200 square feet, but they were all those families needed.

And it's not just in Ottawa. You could go to almost any major city in the country, and some less than major, and you will find areas where these similar kind of homes were built, and they're still standing today. They were built well, they were serviced well, and they were lived in well. And so, you know, you can go to Winnipeg, Edmonton, Calgary, Vancouver, and Halifax. And you can look around into these particular areas and see these small homes that are still there and they're still being used by families.

Now, we live in an age where the homes we build are huge, you know, 2,500, 3,000 square feet, often way more space than needed. They're complicated in terms of construction. There's all kinds of zoning laws and this, that, and the other thing that have to be accomplished in the process. What we have here now is they basically went, Fraser and his people went into the vault

and they found the original plans, right, for these homes from the, you know, around the 50s. And they're perfectly good and usable again today. I'm sure there will have to be some adaptions made in some cases for whether it's materials or what have you. Here's why the other reason I find it interesting. Circle the date September the 7th, this past September 7th. The first program after we were back from the summer fell on a Thursday,

and the random ranter did his rant. You can go back and listen to it. It's this plan. It's this exact stuff. Now, I don't know whether that had an impact on anyone. I know it was around that time that I was hearing from people on Parliament Hill the increasing numbers of those who listen to our program and especially listen to Wednesdays and Fridays, or at least have in the past,

but we're expanding their listening situation as well. And so I spoke to the ranter last night. I said, have you seen the paper? Have you seen what Fraser did today? It's like he'd been listening to you. Now, I have no idea whether he was or whether that had any impact or not, but it is kind of ironic really, because his whole argument was smaller is better. And we don't need these big homes. Look how we all grew up. You know, he was a, you know, he he he was the result of a baby boomer family uh so am i so are you um and that's the way things worked and they worked really well then yeah i think there's a

couple of other things that jump out so first of all i think that the idea of creating a catalog is the is the heart of the idea so i don't think that the first blush of these is going to be those homes. And I don't know what the sizes are going to be, but they'll probably be, you know, there'll probably be a variety of different options. I think they want to make sure that they create a catalog of solutions for housing that have a little bit more density, because that's one of the things that's a challenge in, in the cities, right? We built all these homes as single family homes. And so the city's just sprawled out and then there was less land and longer commutes and that sort of thing.

So having ideas that can be built on mass, as Sean Fraser said, that includes some aspect of density. So you can have these kinds of neighborhoods where more people can live happily. I think that's a good idea. The other thing it helps solve for is the shortage of skilled labor, that it's hard for builders to get the trades people because not enough people have been training in those skills.

But if they're building the same home over and over and over again, it's going to be easier to find and train people to do that in a cost efficient and a timely manner. So lots of reasons why this is one of the strongest ministers in the Trudeau government right now. And I think that what he's doing in this policy area is kind of carving out a path for the government to look at and say, you know what, we can still find game. We can see the problem. We can find a solution. We can champion a solution. And we can communicate it well, because that's the other thing that Sean Fraser does remarkably well, is he knows how to deliver his message. Yeah, that he does. I, you know, I've talked often about seeing Polyev earlier this year at a

construction, uh, trades union conference, um, uh, where I was pretty impressed with the way he, he handled the room and, and, and his speech, um, also on the agenda that day was Sean Fraser. And I'd never seen him before. I didn't really know anything about him. I was his portfolio before housing, which was, I believe, immigration. But he was good. He's a great communicator. And he won't be – I mean, he's carving out a space for himself as well. In future administrations or future governments or future opposition parties,

he's pretty impressive. But we'll see how this does. I mean, I think, as you say, they're developing a catalog, but one of the parts of that catalog that is important to him is the timely fashion you mentioned about. These are ready to go, these drawings, these plans, these ideas, and it eliminates a whole backlog in time uh once you start trying to find new designs etc etc anyway enough enough on that tell me about your visit to uh

to question period how long has it been since you sat in the house of commons and watched something like that well i said to a couple of people yesterday i think it must have been 25 years but if i think i'm really being honest it might've been more than that. I worked on the hill and I went to question period every day. I think it was 40 odd years ago. So I was walking out and down from the hill and I ran into a reporter that I know that you know as well, and she asked me, well, how did it feel? What was different about it? And I said, well, there's a lot that's different. Politics was a lot different 40 years ago, but the House of Commons in question period had one thing that was essentially the same, which is that it is not a fact situation. It's a chemistry situation.

It is all about the chemistry. And I know that that's one of the things that have kind of made people tune out. They feel like it's a show being performed by the people in the show for the other people in the show rather than for the broader audience. And ever since they put TV cameras into the House of Commons, there's been this, why can't they perform so that the TV audience can enjoy it more? And that question just keeps on coming back. And the reason they can't solve for it is, you know, you know this place, Peter. You covered it forever. They're in close proximity.

The lights are bright. The sense of risk of you get it wrong is high. The sense of reward if you get it right and deliver a message with some punch is strong. Emotions run high. There's constant heckling. It's a bit of a zoo. And it was a bit of a zoo yesterday. But in the zoo, some of the things that I saw that I was happy to see in person, because I've been watching it a little bit more on TV this year, in part to prepare for these conversations. But Pierre Polyev is obviously very, very gifted as a communicator. He knows how to stand up with no notes. He knows what he wants to say, how he's going to say it. And he knows how to kind of look at the speaker,

but just be pummeling the prime minister and the front bench. And for the last several weeks, anyway, he's been on the offense, axed the tax. The liberals are not worth the cost. Trudeau's not worth the cost. Why won't they ask the tax? So he was still doing a bunch of that yesterday, but something had changed. And what I think has changed is that the liberals have been deciding, and maybe it's a 19-point gap in the polls focuses the mind a little bit. They've decided to go on offense. And they've been on

offense for about, I'm going to say, 10 days, two weeks. But you can see the change where they've decided they're not just going to take the beating every day. They're going to give back. And yesterday, they were really giving back. And part of the reason why they were giving back is that they feel as though the Conservatives have put themselves on the defensive by voting against this Canada-Ukraine free trade deal without really explaining why they, you know, giving a reasonable explanation. They say some things about whether it's a carbon tax that's imposed in it, which isn't true. But they've been, and so the conservatives have been on their back feet a little bit on this issue. And when you watch the chemistry in question period live and in person, you see what happens when the beating is going one way and the politicians on

the side receiving the beating are quiet. They're a little bit hunched over. You can feel their kind of discomfort when it's going the other way. You see that that same thing happened on the other side. And yesterday, one of the things that the prime minister was doing, which I hadn't seen him do in a long time, was he was using this kind of technique where. You're trying to make a point about the other guys. And you say, and what did they do? And everybody behind him said they voted against. And it was kind of running through all of these things that the conservatives voted against in the bills that were being debated last week. Childcare, food programs, all that kind of thing.

And I hadn't seen him in a long time be able to kind of deliver that kind of punch and have his entire backbench and front bench super motivated to participate in that. Now, I'm sure that if I watched it on TV, it might look a little bit off-putting. It might look a little bit kind of gimmicky, you know, come across as being kind of politicians performing. So I'm not taking anything away from the fact that it might not work as TV. But I did see a chemistry shift in the House yesterday.

And it was definitely a little bit more of a feisty liberal front bench. Oh, there's one other thing I wanted to mention. And you pick up any of those threads you want. Karina Gould, who is the government house leader, she acts as a little bit of a play caller. You don't really see it unless you're there, but she knows the flow of the questions that are coming

or she sees them coming and she sort of signals some decisions about who's going to take what question and what way they're going to structure their answers so that one questioner might ask two or three questions. But it won't be the same minister that answers those questions, depending on whether they want to make a point about what the Conservatives voted against or the families question that Jenna Suds talked about yesterday. So I was really impressed with Karina Gould's role because I felt like she has been helping that front bench be a more feisty and forceful front bench for a little while now. And I'm not saying it's just her, but I did sense a difference there. Who impressed you on the other side? Well, you know, Polly definitely, you know, he's skilled at making his points.

I think Rick Perkins from Nova Scotia got, you know, he got a lot of energy into his question. It was about the sustainable development technology issue that's been kind of raffling around Ottawa. I don't know. When I looked at what he did and Francois-Philippe Champagne, I have to say I thought Francois-Philippe Champagne was probably better yesterday than I've seen him before. I thought he was. He's the liberal minister. He's the liberal minister responsible for that organization. So those were good exchanges. And, uh, the member for,

uh, I want to say whatever Tom Cox at soul driving was around Peterborough. No, it's not. Well, it's not. Yeah. But it's, it's kind of Eastern Ontario, I think. Anyway, his name escapes me right now. He was also quite good. But again, the exchanges with Jonathan Wilkinson on the government side, I have to say, I think Jonathan Wilkinson, he's had fire for the last few days. He says, we've hit this target, we beat this target, we're going to

meet the interim target, and we're going to make our final target. And you guys don't have any climate plan. It's all, I think, part of the, are they just taking the hits and hoping that the beatings stop, or are they fighting back? And I see a lot of fight now. So I think the Conservatives have been really good at this question period for weeks. I think the Liberals have started to become very competitive. And we'll see where it goes. One of the knocks on both sides is they all speak from notes. Are they getting away from that?

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, sometimes you see people. I think the Conservatives are less inclined to speak from notes. They kind of memorize that because a lot of the questions end with, they're not worth the cost, ask the tax, you know, so they know kind of what half their sentences are going to be. But I don't want to take anything away from the fact that they're good.

They know what the points are that they want to make. Now, I think Pierre Polyev made a mistake yesterday, and we'll see if it was a mistake by whether or not he changes his language. But on the liberal side, there are some who stand up with notes. Sometimes they use the notes too much as a kind of a crutch, right, to keep from making mistake and because they're nervous, that sort of thing. But for the most part, it's people kind of holding up a piece of paper with a number or a fact or a sentence or a word, and they're waving it rather than reading it. And I think it doesn't really, it isn't as much of a problem. So I saw less note

use yesterday than I expected to. And I thought it's kind of the way it should work on both sides. You know, I watched Melanie Jolie yesterday, not in the house. She was giving a statement about the Middle East situation. And on a key issue about Canada's new call along with Australia and New Zealand that there be basically humanitarian ceasefire but she couldn't do it without reading it and it just looked like I don't know that's not very convincing on a key issue like that that the world is facing and she was locked into her notes um anyway, just back to this. We have, you know, a lot

of MPs and partisans listen to our show. Both liberals and conservatives and NDPers, they all listen. Or a lot of them listen. So I can hear some of the conservative partisans now saying, oh, there they go, they're making up excuses for the Liberals

and saying they're on their way back, et cetera, et cetera, which we occasionally hear, even though they love the program and they say that, you know, I love your program. But, you know, the facts are for the last whatever it's been, couple of months, it's just been an opening up of the lead the Conservatives have had over the Liberals, substantially, in numbers we haven't seen in decades. And it's kind of settled for the last few weeks

on, you know, 18, 19, 20-point gap. Now, this may be a, what do they call it, an outlier or a one-off, but there's a new poll today from Abacus, who have been one of the leaders in the wide gap, suddenly suggesting that it has dropped over the last 10 days from a 19-20 point lead to a 10-point lead. Now, a 10-point lead is still huge.

I mean, that's a big lead. There used to be a saying in election campaigns, if you're 10 points down going in, you can't make it up. Now, that was a long time ago, and things can change in a hurry these days, as we've witnessed in other areas. But there seems to be an indication from David Colletta, your old friend who runs Abacus, that something, in fact, has happened in the last couple of weeks. Once again, it's just one poll. We'll see how the others start

reporting in over the next week or two weeks. But what did you make of that? What did you make? Yeah, first thing is just to reinforce here, it's one poll. And that's a very big change to report in a relatively short period of time. And so people like me and David and others who have been in this business for a while know to look at that size of movement and say, let's all be careful because we need to see more polls to see whether or not there is a narrowing, really. It's possible that the 19 point was a little bit overstated. It's possible that the 10 point is a little bit understated. I saw Nano's poll out there with, I think, 14. So to your point, it's still a big lead. It's a majority government for the Conservatives with these numbers.

Only question is whether something has happened that is going to be a signal to the liberals that they're not completely out of it yet and a signal to the conservatives that they have to be more careful about how they proceed because now they're in that zone where people have read enough stories that say, all things being equal, the conservatives are going to run away with the next election. And this does always happen when you see this scenario, when there's a breakout leader in the polling. All of a sudden, the focus becomes, do we want them?

Is that what we really feel comfortable with? The focus is all on them rather than on the incumbents that they're haranguing. So I do think there probably has been some narrowing. And the reason I think that is in David's analysis, and I looked at the more detailed numbers and we exchanged some notes, the approval numbers for government haven't changed. The approval numbers personally for Trudeau haven't changed. The only numbers that did change among those kind of three variables that you would look at as being the most likely indicators of something were Polyev's personal numbers, which did deteriorate a little bit.

Don't want to overstate it, but if you see stability on approval of government, stability on Trudeau's numbers, and you see Polyev's numbers go a little bit south, then that would be what you'd be looking at as an explanation for. And now I don't think that's all about him. I think it is more about what he's been saying and whether everybody, having looked at him as the next incoming prime minister are as comfortable with what he's been saying as they thought they would be. Now, that's a lot of people who haven't really paid very much attention. Maybe they're paying a little tiny bit more. I wouldn't overstate it. But, you know, I mentioned yesterday in the course of his exchange with the prime minister about axing the tax and the prime minister going back and talking about the things that – I mean he basically ramped up the argument that Pierre Poliev has a MAGA base, a Trump-like base in Canada. And I don't know that he'd been doing as much of that as he was yesterday. And I feel like that's where the liberals are going to go,

especially because of this Ukraine issue. And so he went back at Pierre Polyev about how could you vote against Ukraine again? And Polyev didn't really want to address it, but he did refer to the idea of a distant, far-off land. Trudeau's kind of fascination with what's happening in a distant, far-off place. And liberals have kind of pounced on that because they felt that what he was really doing was saying, we're not going to back Ukraine if we get into power. And a lot of people who believe that Canada should back up Ukraine will kind of interpret that as being a bit of a green light to Putin. And so that's a, I think he's doing it because I think it does please that base, that far right base that says, you know, something happening somewhere else. Why should we spend any money on it?

But there are a lot of Canadians for whom the point isn't to spend a lot of money, but the point is that there needs to be some sort of rules-based world order. And if we just all decide that we can't afford to get involved in something because it happens somewhere else, that's not a great solution either. So I do sense that there could be a bit more focus by Canadians on Pierre Palliev and who is he and what does he really stand for and do I like it as much as I thought I did when I was just kind of fed up with Trudeau. feeling like there's a lot to play for here, that this isn't settled math, this political season, and that the conservatives are going to need to not assume that they can walk away with a victory, but they're going to have to fight to win it.

And liberals, you know, maybe will go away feeling like their hopes aren't completely dashed of re-election. All right, we're going to take a quick break. When we come back, we're going to talk about Canada's position on the situation in the Middle East, the Israel-Hamas war. It seems to have changed over the last 48 hours, at least slightly. We'll talk about that and the impact it may have inside the government. That's coming up right after this.

And welcome back. You're listening to The Bridge, the Wednesday episode, Smoke, Mirrors and the Truth. Bruce Anderson's in Ottawa. I'm Peter Mansbridge in Toronto. You're listening on Sirius XM Wednesday episode, Smoke Mirrors and the Truth. Bruce Anderson's in Ottawa. I'm Peter Mansbridge in Toronto. You're listening on Sirius XM, Channel 167, Canada Talks, or on your favorite podcast platform, or you're watching us on our YouTube channel. Okay, so yesterday, we kind of hinted at it earlier, we were talking about Melanie Jolie,

the Foreign Affairs Minister, Global Affairs Minister. Canada's position on what's happening in the Middle East, after many calls from different areas and different people saying that Canada should be involved in a call for a ceasefire, and Canada backing away from that, not doing that. Yesterday, Canada announces in conjunction with Israel, or sorry, in conjunction with New Zealand and Australia, and a UN vote that also happened yesterday, Canada called for a humanitarian ceasefire, which is kind of like one stage up from the pause

that we went through about two weeks ago. There had been a clear split inside the Liberal Caucus on doing something approaching this. Those who were in favour of it, those who were against it, those in favour clearly have won the day, or at least a partial day, in their call for a ceasefire. What is your take on what happened and whether or not, or how much of a split this really was in the end?

I see there's two or three Liberals overnight who said they were not in favor of this and were upset by it. I think it's an extremely charged issue. And so there's going to be divisions around it. And they're going to be legitimate divisions where people have very strong feelings about how they see the situation developing. And it puts politicians in an extremely difficult place because whatever you say, you're going to leave some significant number of people feeling as though you haven't said what they want you to say.

And that's not an argument for politicians only saying what they think people want to hear. It's a reflection of the fact that for many people, this is an extremely difficult set of issues. For a lot of Jewish people, the rise in anti-Semitism, as well as the massacre, the terrorist massacre that happened on October 7th, those should be the preoccupations for everybody. For a lot of other people, those are important, but they also believe that the deaths of civilians in Gaza is also a very urgent issue. So in those situations, I think what we've had is politicians trying to figure out how to use their voices in a constructive way. And sometimes I think they do it better than others.

Sometimes it's a bit of a problem. I think for Canadian politicians now, at least on the government side, what I took from yesterday as I was watching what Joe Biden was saying, is that the American tone on this situation is changing. There's more clear messages from Biden that are similar to what Justin Trudeau and Melanie Jolie said yesterday, the last phrase of which is a two-state solution. But everything that precedes it sounds a little bit like we really want to support, and I'm sort of decoding it, I guess, in my mind. We really want to support the Jewish people, but we're unhappy being in lockstep or feeling handcuffed to the decisions that Benjamin Netanyahu takes. It's that discomfort with the Israeli government that is causing even the supporters of Israel to wonder how they're going to see an end to civilian deaths,

and to wonder whether or not the Netanyahu government can be trusted to try to find a way to limit those deaths. And there are reasons for that that have been kind of emerging in some of the stories about the Israeli government. It doesn't really have anything to do with how these politicians feel about the rise of anti-Semitism and the horrible acts that Hamas committed. But I think it's become clear that the United States and other countries, including Canada, I think want to send a message that the Netanyahu government doesn't speak for them.

And I think in some cases they're worried if it's not him, maybe it'll be a more right-wing version of his government that would replace him and more worrisome in terms of peace and potential loss of civilian life. It's hard to believe it could be more right-wing than Netanyahu, who has developed over the last couple of years. I appreciate he's been around for 40 years in senior positions in Israel, but the positions he's taken in the last couple of years, sort of hanging on to power,

trying to change the Israeli constitution and everything else. It's hard to look out there on the landscape and see anybody who is supportive of Netanyahu on the global stage. And so how that's going to play out and the impact it's having on this current situation could be determined. but you're quite right i mean the certainly the war cabinet he has is extreme right wing uh and they just want to keep pounding and for every indication they're still doing that i mean i place a lot of faith in janice stein and sort of a lot of other people and institutions around the world. And Janice is convinced that this can't go on

for more than the next couple of weeks, that Biden's patience, you know, if it hasn't run out, it's running out rapidly. And there will be consequences if it continues that way. He was pretty clear, I thought, yesterday. And, you know, sometimes it's hard to read the tea leaves and the subtleties in the language that's used in diplomacy like this. But I don't find it's very camouflaged now. I think the Americans are getting fed up with what they're seeing happening and worried that they're kind of being expected to support things that

they don't want to support. Some of the critics of the Trudeau government on this issue have suggested that their change in their position in these last 48 hours is as a result of the Muslim communities in Canada and associations pulling their support and their financial support of the Liberal Party as a result of their refusal to call for a ceasefire. I don't believe that. I understand that argument, and I understand that those are facts, but I don't believe that the government is making its position based on those influences right now.

I think that it's possible that, you know, it's reasonable to assume that the government is making its position on the basis of understanding the different perspectives that exist in Canada. But that's different, I guess, in my mind from people saying, we won't contribute to your party and that sort of thing. I think I kind of trust the system to realize that at the senior political level, that these are incredibly difficult issues and they need to be taken seriously. And as matters of fundraising, that's not serious as a consideration in my view. And I would be very disappointed if people were, but I don't think that's what's happening. You know, apparently there was a lengthy and at times heated conversation between Trudeau and Netanyahu yesterday.

You know, we're never allowed to see what those conversations were or have a real readout of what happened in the conversation. Which is a good thing. Don't you agree? I mean, people should be able to have those conversations without feeling like it's to hear them say things in a certain way. You know, sometimes it's better just to have. Yes. Yes. And no. I mean, you and I disagree on these things sometimes about how transparent one can be. If you're going to leak the fact that it was a heated conversation.

Well, then, you know, maybe you've got to tell us a little more so we can determine how heated it was and how heated it was each way and who was winning the parries and thrusts of a conversation

like that. I mean, I don't know. I understand the diplomatic necessity for keeping things under wraps when you have a, you know, on a big issue like this, when you're having a very frank conversation. I get that. But, you know, a hint is sometimes too tough.

Look, you know, I think that's the journalist in you. You can't get away from, like, I need to know the story. I need to know what happened behind the scenes. And I'm like, well, sometimes that's bad for democracy or people or, you know. So, no, we're not going to see eye to eye on that. Well, we're probably going to see it one day in a history book, right? Which is good. Trudeau writes his memoirs 20, 30 years from now.

He may include that conversation. As Mulrooney, as Craychan, as others have done about conversations that were kept under wraps and for good reason at the time. But, you know, since, you know, afterwards they tell us. Unfortunately, I won't be around to hear it. So I'll never know how heated it was. Who scored most? Well, you've got a lot of those stories already accumulated.

So you've got a lifetime of them. And they're in that book. Right here. I can see that book behind you, yeah. If I hadn't mentioned it, How Canada Works, available at your local bookstore. Okay, we're out of time. You got anything else you want to say on your second last Smoke, Mirrors, and the Truth? No, it's one of the last two collector's editions. So, no, just happy to be having this conversation.

Happy to have next week's. And, of course, we wouldn't be here if we didn't. Yeah, yeah. I like the idea of continuing to do that once in a while. And just also, we're having so much fun with Fridays with Good Talk with Chantel. And it's so interesting. Who was that? Who's the third person on that show?

Yes. What's her name again? The Chantel Nation. Chantel Nation. I've met a lot of them on the road in the last 10 days selling the book. We have a lot of fun with it. And it's been, I know she enjoys it too. So we look forward to a lot more of that.

Yeah. And that next one comes up on Thursday. Tomorrow it's your turn and the random ranter. So if you have something to say, please get it in like in the next few hours. The Mansbridge podcast at gmail.com. The Mansbridge podcast at gmail.com. That's it for this day. People say, people still write and say, why do you say you'll be back in 24 hours? And why don't you say you'll be back in 23 hours? Well, you know, because- Who has time to write you with that thought? They do.

You'd be surprised. I get probably one letter a week just on that topic alone. Well, just say I'll be back soon. No, I like 24 hours because I will be back in 24 hours. If only to say I'll be back soon. No, I like 24 hours because I will be back in 24 hours. If, if only to say I'll be back in 24 hours, but, uh,

whatever it is, what it is. It has a nicer ring to it than 23 hours. Sounds like a mistake. It's not, it's the right number, but it's, it just doesn't feel right for me.

Anyway, thank you, Bruce. My pleasure, Peter. We'll talk again on Friday. I'm Peter Mansbridge. Thanks so much for listening. We'll be back in 24 hours. Thank you.