The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - SMT - SMOKE MIRRORS AND THE TRUTH WITH BRUCE ANDERSON, AND JUSTIN TRUDEAU

Episode Date: March 24, 2021

Coming up later on Sirius XM Ch 167 an exclusive interview with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, so today on SMT a chance to preview the interview with an excerpt and analysis with Bruce Anderson and me.  The PM discusses everything from the pandemic and vaccines to the budget, an election, China and Russia.  

Hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. You're just moments away from the latest episode of The Bridge. It is Wednesday, that means Smoke, Mirrors and the Truth with Bruce Anderson and today, Justin there. Wednesday. Peter Mansbridge here. Bruce Anderson is in Ottawa. Hey there. It's great to hear your voice and see your lovely Zoom face. And it's especially nice to get top billing over the prime minister. That's pretty cool. My kids are going to love hearing that. Well, the big prime minister interview is coming up an hour from now on Sirius XM, one o'clock Eastern in the afternoon. But we're going to run a significant excerpt today and talk about it. But before I get there, I've got to talk about one of the common themes that people have talked about over the last year of the pandemic. And this is more of an aside really to lighten

the mode lighten the mood and lighten is the key word here because it sounds like not a lot of people have been doing it there's been a big study on weight gain during the pandemic have you gained weight last year i mean you know the the expression the sort of quarantine 15 have you gained days of battle every day's a battle peter i'm one of the the fortunate people that you know i can do my work sitting at a desk all day uh at home and i do and i'm also fortunate enough that i'm i was able to uh buy a bike that shall remain nameless unless that bike manufacturer wants to be an advertiser at some point in the future and so i kind of tiptoe downstairs every once in a while just to try to offset the uh corrosive to my health effects of sitting so long and eating so relatively

well so has it worked well you well you know i, you know, I've tried all of that. I haven't been quite as systematic on the bike front as you have been. And I've gone through periods of losing weight, and clearly I've gone through periods of gaining weight as well. The study shows, this new study out of, among other places, the University of California, this was written up in the New York Times yesterday, shows the average weight gain is half a pound every 10 days.

Two pounds a month that works out to. Wow. That's a lot. That is a lot. I don't think I've had that experience. How long has this been? I don't want to know though. I don't check on this regularly.

This has been 12 months. That's 24 pounds. I think I'm under that, but not by much. I've definitely put on weight. And you know, it's funny when you look in the mirror sometimes, instead of getting on the scales, you look in the mirror. If you look head on, you go,'s not bad i know i look fine as long as you don't do a profile yeah as long as you don't do a profile that's not good now uh we interviewed the prime minister i

interviewed the prime minister yesterday sort of late afternoon, early evening. And we did it by Zoom. He was in his office in the West Block on Parliament Hill, and I was here in beautiful downtown Stratford. So we did it by Zoom. And I mention that because there's an interesting Prime Minister and Zoom story today which shows at times the perils of this, that it can be too too easy especially when you're talking in sort of your crowd and the prime minister in this case was boris johnson in britain he was talking to a bunch of conservatives and they were talking about the successes and failures of the past year and they got around to talking about the vaccines, which as far as Bojo is concerned is a major success.

And he lets out the line that the success of the vaccine is being, being because of greed and capitalism. So that didn't go over so well when it got leaked out, he says he was joking. He says he was joking. He says he was joking that he was making a play off the movie Wall Street. Not everybody agrees with that. Yeah. You know, look, Peter, I read that story.

And I had this feeling like, you're right, that when you're having a Zoom conversation and a podcast, it feels more intimate. It feels more secure. People let their guard down in ways that they don't when they're in these more formal settings. And so I think that could be part of it. But I also had this feeling like, look, he said greed and capitalism, but obviously he doesn't believe that all capitalism is greed, or at least I'd be very surprised if he does. I don't think that capitalism equals greed. I think capitalism comes in many forms, and some capitalists are greedy. But if we didn't have capitalism, we wouldn't have companies that have built up. Well,

I suppose one could make the case that there could be state owned corporations that would have been able to to make these vaccines. But I think it's a reasonable argument that capitalism helped build competition among these companies that became so big and so successful and so good at what they do that we were able to get to a solution to this pandemic more quickly. And even just on a local scale, I find it hard to get up every day and kind of encourage myself and people I know to buy from local businesses, which are capitalist businesses, and to then say capitalism is greed. So I think he was joking.

I think it was an overreaction to try to take him to the woodshed for that comment. And I think it's kind of indicative of the time that we're in that people make sport of something like that, even though it's probably not a real story. Well, we didn't have any capitalist or greed moments in the interview with Prime Minister Trudeau, but there are moments. And that's why we're going to run an excerpt here, five or six minutes from right off the top of the interview, because it deals with one of the issues that most Canadians are really upfront on right now, and that is the pandemic and the vaccine supply and all that. So we're going to start with that, but I encourage you to listen to the full interview

because there are moments throughout this interview, and I, you know, I think the prime minister was engaged for this kind of a discussion, a podcast really kind of discussion. He was quite relaxed and sort of got into the mood gradually over the 38 minutes, I think, the full interview runs.

But here's one thing. I've talked about this before, and it's something that I say when I do interview classes with journalism students, that one of the things I look for and try to encourage to happen through the questions that are asked is hearing a pause in terms of the answer. And when you hear a pause, the person being interviewed pauses before they give an answer, it signals to me that they're really having to think about what they're going to say, as opposed to just drop the message track, the kind of pre-recorded answer that they have in their head from the various briefings and attempts to get ready for an interview.

And this happened more than a few times during this interview. It happens once during this excerpt. So listen for the pause because those are interesting moments. And then obviously what follows is more interesting, but the pause signals, okay, they're really thinking about this. Peter, can I, just before you roll that tape, I want to pick up on that if I can and just add something, which is I have done at different times in the past. I don't know, some people call it media training.

I tend to think of it presentation training, that sort of thing. And it is definitely one of the things that I try to encourage people to do is to not feel that you need to jump on a question with an answer right away. If it helps you to take that second or two to pause and think about, oppose your answer a little bit. So sometimes it can seem performative, but really it's just encouraging people to let their brain do the work before the mouse starts to engage. And I and I did. So I noticed that in the interview and I also noticed. And it'll be interesting to see if our listeners notice this, too.

I've been kind of watching the prime minister a little bit less regularly lately. I see him on TV for sometimes and I say to the people I'm supposed to, I want him to get a haircut. I feel like he's, you know, maybe got COVID brain like me some days where I'm feeling a little bit kind of oppressed by everything and wishing it would all be over. And so I want him to shave and get a haircut because it will send a signal to me that he's got a higher level of energy and a higher level of optimism because I want to have those things too. But when I listened to this interview, I couldn't see him. I couldn't see the shaggy hair. I couldn't see this scruffy salt and pepper

beard that's still occasionally weighing on me. I just listened to somebody whose brain seemed pretty clear and who seemed pretty articulate about the issues and i was like okay he's got some energy there anyway let's listen to the tape and and see if other people agree with that okay i and i would agree with your your earlier statement about pauses i don't think they're performative i think i think they're truly and maybe they're you know others have taken your advice on this, and that they're thinking about what they're going to say before they answer. And hey, there's no harm in doing that, especially when it's a question that you're not,

you really want to take that extra second or two to ensure that you're going to say what you really mean and what you really feel. So anyway, here we go with this interview. Once again, it was done last night with the prime minister. Prime minister, let's start on the pandemic. Where do you think we are on this journey right now? Have we started to emerge from the darkness?

I think we are starting to emerge from the darkness. There's no question about it. It's been a long, tough winter. The arrival of vaccines is really good news, but it's almost like one of those bad movies where as you get close to the end, there's one last danger, and that's these variants that are coming really hard and heavy and much more transmissible. So we have to hang in there, even though we're all exhausted, we have to continue to be careful because these new variants are, you know, peaking up in a way that is worrisome. But at the same time, we've seen that the vaccines arriving in our most vulnerable has protected a lot of people. We just have to make sure that this race between variants and vaccines

is won by the vaccines. So until that does happen, are we in control or are we sort of not quite in control? I mean, have we ever not been in control or have we ever been in control? I think we can control our behaviors. We can control the choices we make as individuals. Certainly as a government, we've made the choice to be there to support people as much as necessary through this. But the pandemic is, the virus is moving quickly, is adapting. We just have to stay smart and stay focused on getting through this. All right, let's talk about vaccines because you've mentioned them a couple of times and obviously they're the great savior, at least as far as a lot of people are concerned.

Are you satisfied with the current pace of vaccines? No, I think we need to vaccinate 7 billion people yesterday in order for this pandemic to be over. We need to move faster. But what we've actually seen when, if you remember last year in the spring and the summer, people saying, yeah because vaccines take a long time to develop. And everyone would list all sorts of different diseases that still haven't found the right vaccines for. And what we saw was an incredible effort by a whole bunch of different scientists and pharmaceutical companies and countries to lever unprecedented levels of resources to developing vaccines. And we invested in some Canadian options, but we also knew that spreading our net wide to make sure that whatever vaccine hit first or hit best, Canada would have a piece of it was very much our approach.

And so far, I think that's borne out. Well, let's talk about that, because as you well know, there are some people who feel that we didn't get enough and we don't have enough. I mean, the Premier of Ontario again this week saying, you know, the feds aren't getting us enough vaccine. You know, we're ready to put it in arms and we can't get enough. And when you look at the overall numbers for vaccines in Canada versus the States, and I'm hesitant about comparing anything to the States, because there are a lot of things we don't, you know, they don't look too good on when we compare. But on the vaccine question,

they do look good. I mean, they've got basically one out of three Americans has been vaccinated already. We're looking at more like one out of nine, one out of 10. Why the Gulf? And what do you say to people like Doug Ford? Well, I think, first of all, we have to recognize that the Americans have a domestic pharmaceutical industry that's producing millions upon millions of vaccines every single week. And we don't have that in Canada. And it's not something we could have stood up in the year since the pandemic was declared. So we knew we were going to be reliant on international supply chains. biggest with a small population compared to a lot of countries in the world that needs to make sure that we're drawing enough interest from the big pharmaceuticals. And I think we did reasonably well. I think we did as well as any Canadian government could have. Would we love to

have gotten more? Will we continue to fight to accelerate to bring in more vaccines every single day? Yes, that's what I'm on almost every week with phone calls to the various vaccine pharmaceutical companies, CEOs. That's what our ministers are doing. We're trying to accelerate. We've been able to accelerate. One of the promises we made was 6 million vaccines by the end of March, and we're up at 9 million plus vaccines by the end of March, which is better. So what do you say to Doug Ford? What do you say to Ford and others, other premiers,

who are saying the feds aren't getting us these vaccines fast enough? We need more. Canadians are saying that, and I'm saying that. I wish we were getting vaccines quicker, but we are getting vaccines as quickly as we possibly can. And we're working to continue to accelerate them. And we are going to have everyone fully, all adults fully vaccinated by September. And looking at the horizons that some of the provinces put forward, I think it's possible that many, many Canadians have their first doses by the time summer rolls around.

Well, so there you go. There's the excerpt we're running for today on Smoke Mirrors and the Truth of Prime Minister Trudeau in our interview from last night. The full interview is coming up at the top of the next hour here on Sirius XM channel 167. And there is a lot more to it, including some interesting thoughts that come in the very next answer to what we just listened to about the possibilities for July 1st. So you might want to listen to that. But we cover a lot of grounds, not just the pandemic, not just vaccines. We talk about the budget. We talk about an election.

We talk about Russia. We talk about China.. We talk about an election. We talk about Russia. We talk about China. And there are some significant moments in this interview. I'm going to get Bruce's thoughts again, but we got to take a quick break. We'll be right back. Okay, Mr. Anderson, you saw something in the way he was talking. You've listened to the whole interview, so I imagine you have a number of observations without giving everything away, because there's lots, as we said, there's lots in that interview. I thought it was a really interesting interview. I was really happy that you had a chance to do it. And I can start by saying, you know, I have a lot of friends in journalism, as do you.

And I've been feeling like I've been crabby with them lately. And, you know, expressing my crabbiness on Twitter, which people do, and probably I shouldn't do as much, and I try not to. But my crabbiness comes from this feeling that we're never really having kind of a long-form conversation about some of the complicated issues that are going on, that too often it feels like journalists want to constantly prosecute governments, federal and provincial, for what's going wrong. And I, just as a citizen, want to hear a little bit more about what are the choices that you made?

How do you feel about those choices? where could we have done better? And in the daily joust that is the normal form of journalism, journalists and politicians, there's really not much room for that. It almost never happens right now and hasn't really happened for the better part of a year. that you asked all of the pertinent questions, at least the ones that I care about, and gave the prime minister a chance to give his answers. And surprisingly, or not surprisingly, instead of being on the defensive all the time, as sometimes happens in that kind of jousting scenario, he cheerfully admitted that there were things that could have been done

differently or that he's not satisfied with the pace of vaccines. And I found that kind of refreshing. I found it and made it more interesting conversation. I felt like we were getting below the surface of some really important issues. So that was my, my kind of overall feeling is that what a, what a relief to have a conversation that we could listen to that covered that ground ground and and he was willing to play ball and i you know i thank his office you know for allowing us the the time with him and i think it probably helped that it came at the end of a at the end of the day i mean he'd been in question period uh in a couple of hours previous

where the where the mood is exactly the way you described it the sort of jousting back and forth and that you know that's uh that's part of the kind of you know question period game if you wish and both sides have played that for for decades um but so here he was later in the day um i did have a chance to talk to him for a minute or so before we started and i you know I just kind of reminded him of what the podcast atmosphere is that it's it's kind of different than the traditional you know accountability interview it is more laid back it's uh it's more frank I even said to him one I said you know you try not to do the spin and you know in a in

an interview like this and I can see the look on his face going really you're going to do the spin in an interview like this. And I can see the look on his face going, really? You're going to accuse me of that like right away? And he fell into spin on occasion. It's hard not to, I think, for people in that kind of a position. But for a good chunk of the interview on a lot of different subjects, it wasn't spin. It was like what he actually thought.

And you're right. I mean, he did concede where he wished things had been different and that he would have done things differently. And he had some, you know, I will always take away the moment near the end, which I encourage people to listen to, which is questions about Vladimir Putin. Talk about pauses. There are some big pauses in there as he tries to decide how to handle those questions.

But nevertheless, I mean, we don't want to sound like we're fawning here because he left himself open in a number of areas, you know, in terms of the whole pandemic issue, the way things started at the beginning, and his kind of reasoning that he saw as to why Canada got hit the way it did get hit. So, you know, there are some moments of vulnerability in there as well. No question about it.

I thought that, you know, know look i think spin gets used as a as a kind of a derogatory it has a derogatory connotation a lot but i mean everybody in every industry including journalists when they're being interviewed about their journalism indulge in what you might call spin where their answers are conditioned by the well there's some things that i could say that would go badly for me so i'm probably not going to say them so i kind of give politicians of any stripe a little bit of a pass for that because they're surrounded by this notion that people are ready to jump on anything like boris johnson saying greed and capitalism as we talked about before and say

aha you're saying businesses are greedy. And when in fact, we know that that's not really what he was trying to do. So I don't mind the notion of spin. But I don't love interviews where the answers all seem manufactured, all seem kind of pre calculated and almost pre taped in the minds of the interview. And that's not what this was. And, and I kind of felt interested in a couple of aspects of what he was doing. The question that you asked at the beginning, are we almost through this? I forget exactly how it was put. Are we emerging from the darkness?

Yeah. His answer, he used the metaphor of a horror movie where, you know, it's been horrible and then you think it's almost over. And then there's one last big scare. I thought, well, that's an interesting metaphor. And I hadn't heard him use it. Maybe he has used it before. as a way to think about the opportunity to feel optimism a little bit today, but not to be too optimistic. And it reminded me of an experience I had with a prime minister a couple of decades ago, where I was asked to give some advice to them before they called an election. And the advice that I had to offer was when you convey optimism, people believe in better

things ahead. And when you convey pessimism, people worry. And there's a political calculus in saying it's better to convey optimism. And that's not always the case. Opposition politicians might have a different math on that. But I thought he did a good job of conveying an amount of optimism that I think people are craving right now. And I thought he did it early and I thought he did it reasonably often. But he was not throughout that interview saying, no, we've got everything covered. We've done everything right.

There's nothing to be worried about. There's no reason to wonder whether we've gotten every decision right. We clearly haven't. And I thought that was quite refreshing. Your earlier comment about interviews with him in general is an interesting one. I hadn't thought of it until you raised it. And that's this issue about how he comes across on television and how he comes across basically in this situation on radio. Because I think you and I are in agreement

that many of his television interviews don't necessarily come off well for him because he doesn't i don't know what the best way of saying this is he doesn't look sincere he looks kind of programmed and that's part of seeing him right so i'm just wondering whether this was different because he was different or because it was the fact that we weren't seeing him at the same time as we were listening to him. You know, I think it is probably a if you feel every interaction in an interview scenario is somebody in quotes, holding you to account, then you're going to be on the defensive all the time. If you feel that an interview is about helping inform people, or having a conversation

where you can put information out, and you're not overly constrained by this notion of somebody's going to take six seconds of this, four seconds of that, and kind of wrap a story around it, you have a different mindset. So I think that the idea of an interview of this length and this style, because you're known for having a particular style which i think politicians generally have felt is fair uh and interesting and engaging for them um and the fact that the format is a podcast where you know you're not standing in front of a bank of microphones and a bank of scribes with their notepads out and this notion of all these people wanting to hold you to account which essentially means identify your weaknesses i think it's human nature if you're in that zone every day to put up some defenses and i remember when justin trudeau was

running for the job of liberal leader and then prime minister, I kind of annoyed some people who watched us on at issue by saying his communication style doesn't quite work for me. I don't, I don't find myself really enjoying it. I felt like there was something that seemed a little bit kind of forced and almost a little bit kind of overly dramatic. But I also recognized at that time that there were lots of other people who quite enjoyed what he had to say and how he said it. And so I sort of backed off on that and did my job as a pollster and said, you know what, there's a lot of people who like it. It doesn't have to be for everybody. But I have come to be less, I don't

know, distracted by it now. And certainly in this kind of format, I found it quite easy to listen to. I found his comments to be kind of thoughtful and engaging. And I say that regardless of whether people might agree or disagree with the substance of what he's doing. Just from the experience of listening to a politician explain themselves, I like this format and I like the way that he approached it. You know, both you and I have been lucky because we've been covering politicians of all stripes and at all levels, you know, national, provincial, municipal, for years, you know, 20, 30 years. So we've seen a lot of, a lot of different styles and a lot of different abilities paraded

before. I hate to tell you, I think it's a little more than 20 or 30 years. I know, I was trying to be nice. But let me put it to you this way, because when you talked about dealing with a certain prime minister, whenever it was, you know, 20 or 30 years ago, who, like when you think back, who's the, and it doesn't these kind of situations interview situations and uh conduct themselves uh you know for the most part flawlessly do you can you think of somebody who had that that ability uh flawlessly no i don't um i'm trying to think i you know i think that justin trudeau's father was always interesting um i don't know that i would call this style flawless but it was flawless if the point is pay attention to me and what i have to say because i'm going to say something

interesting or i'm going to say it in a way that's going to make you sit up and pay attention. So I think he was quite effective that way. But obviously, his popularity went up and down and up and down. And so it wasn't always working from the standpoint of political communication. I think Brian Mulroney had exceptional skills on some days. And he also had exceptionally bad days from a communication standpoint. But overall, and maybe even more so in retirement, he became really skilled at presenting his thoughts in a way that allowed people, even people who didn't like what he had to say, or how he conducted himself as prime minister to listen to him and say, that's interesting. I like what he had to say. You know, a lot of people like Jean Chrétien's style. It was never exactly my cup of tea. I always found it a little bit, kind of a little bit partisan in some instances and not always

as thoughtful as I wanted it to sound like. And I think some of that was a device that he used to avoid answering extremely challenging political questions. So he was good at doing that. Everybody had different skills, I guess. And I do think one of the guys, one of the people I worked with a little bit who I thought became really good at it was Jean Charest. And I remember there was a time

when he was still young in cabinet. And that experience of being a young cabinet minister generally gives politicians a lexicon that's overly complicated, overly bureaucratic. And so when they say things, you go, wow, I didn't understand anything you said, or it wasn't interesting the way you said it. And Jean Charest became a very effective communicator. And Joe Clark was a pretty effective communicator as well. So there were some who were better than others, some that got better over time,

some that I just never felt really excelled at that. What about you? Who is the best that you interviewed? I don't know whether best, I'm the best that you interviewed i don't know whether best i'm kind of like you i don't know where the best is the right word to to use but um you know somebody who sat across from all of those people that you've mentioned uh and it might have something to do with the fact that i was pretty young when it when it happened but i mean i i interviewed pierre trudeau i i guess a half a dozen times. What I remember most about those interviews was that you really had to be on your game or he was going to make you look pretty bad, which is usually what the outcome was,

not just in my case. And not because he was right. It was just that he had that uh in an interview situation to kind of command the presence in the room um and and that at times was tough to fight especially if you were like new kid on the block um but it uh you know it was it was always a challenge it's funny because i used one of his phrases in the interview with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau yesterday. I didn't identify where the phrase came from, but we were having this discussion about federalism and whether it works or not. And, you know,

one of the things his father used to say at times when he was frustrated by the whole debate going on at the federal provincial level, he talked about you know a checkerboard canada with different rules in place and different you know visions of the of the country in place and even against the opposition remember joe clark had his kind of community of communities thing and in the late 70s and trudeau went up against that for many of the same reasons um anyway i kind of threw that on the table and i could see because i could see him on zoom um you know he could see me and i could see him sort of like he knew where that phrase came from and why i was laying it on the table but he didn't bite beyond that uh but i i'd

probably say um trudeau the elder uh was certainly the most challenging. Very effective, yeah. You know, I was interested in a couple of other things that listeners to the full interview will maybe find interesting as well, or maybe they were just interesting to me. Just to remind them, it's coming up as soon as this hour ends, we will run the full interview. And bruce says there's a lot more to it but make a couple of points before we go yeah look one of the things that he said that is in the clip that that we just played is he said were we ever really in control or were we

were we ever really not in control and i, what an interesting way to describe the dynamic where, you know, we might have felt this thing was out of control, but looked at from a different standpoint, a lot of the factors that mattered were within our control as individuals. So it wasn't just a question of whether government could control all the moving parts, it's whether we as people living in this pluralistic mobile society we're doing everything we could to exercise control and i thought he said that in a way it was a very interesting point and he said it in a way that wasn't really accusatory but it was a bit revelatory it was a reminder that we all have um a role to play in as we as we close out this

pandemic with this race between variants and vaccines of making choices that put us in more control. So I thought that was quite a good point. And the other thing I wanted to say is that on the big questions of government stimulus coming up, or already done, federalism, and how does it work, which are in other parts of this interview, I was reminded of the fact that I've been trying to, in my own mind, think, has this Prime Minister made mostly the right calls during this pandemic? Or has he made a lot of mistakes? Or has he been motivated by political considerations? Or is he thinking a lot about it? Is he talking to people who are experts?

Is he kind of filtering a lot of advice before he makes these decisions? And, you know, this was a note that my general kind of feeling is, I think he has been making mostly the right calls. And what I got from the interview made me feel even a little bit more reassured. And not everybody's going to agree. And I know a lot of people think, oh, I'm just a kind of a flack for Justin Trudeau or the liberals, that sort of thing. And that's not really where I come from. But in this case, when I heard him talk about the economic policy choices, when I heard him talk about federalism, you have to deal with Canada as it is, not imagine another Canada where, you know, the federal government can do a lot of things that it can't actually do.

I thought they were all interesting answers. I thought they were all kind of revealing of somebody who was doing the work of the job rather than just doing the work of the public persona of prime minister, if you know what I mean. I think I do. But I think you're also right is that different people are going to look at this interview differently because, as I said earlier, there are a number of spots in there that do leave him open to criticism. And it'll be interesting to see how that plays out in the days ahead.

Okay, look, thanks, Bruce. And thank you for listening today. Keep in mind, the full interview is coming up. And it will be aired a number of times on SiriusXM over the next few days. But today at 1 o'clock Eastern and then again at 5 o'clock Eastern, you'll have your chance to listen. And once again, I know a number of you have written to me. If you go online right now to siriusxm.ca slash Peter Mansbridge, you can access that program, the interview special, for free. You get a month free right now, and all you got to do is put in your email.

You don't have to fill out credit card information or anything like that, just your email, and you'll get access to listening to it for free for a month. And there are also other offers there over time for that. The podcast, The Bridge, The Smoke Mirrors and The Truth are always available to you, um, at no cost through whichever format you choose either on Sirius XM or whether,

uh, it's on, um, your favorite, uh, podcast platform. So that's how you can always access the bridge, uh,

at no cost on the platform of your choice. Uh, all right, that's it for now. Thursday, tomorrow, two things to keep in mind. It's the potpourri edition of your choice. All right, that's it for now. Thursday, tomorrow, two things to keep in mind. It's the potpourri edition of The Bridge, and then later on in the day on SiriusXM,

exclusive to SiriusXM, but once again available on this free trial offer, is Good Talk with Chantelle Hébert and Bruce Anderson. We've got a number of topics tomorrow. We'll probably talk a little bit about Trudeau as well, Aaron O'Toole's weekend at Aaron's last weekend, and there's a big decision coming out of the Supreme Court tomorrow morning, and so we will talk about that one as well. That's it for today.

I'm Peter Mansbridge for Bruce Anderson. Thanks so much for listening, and we'll talk to you again in 24 hours.