The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - SMT -- The CBC in a Crisis of Cuts

Episode Date: December 6, 2023

The CBC has decided to make up its budget shortfall of 125 million dollars with a series of cuts in personnel and programs. Is the public broadcaster worth saving and if so how? Bruce is with us for SMT and he has some thoughts about all this and the way CBC management is handling it. Not surprisingly, so do I!

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. And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. I'm in Winnipeg today. Bruce is right there in Ottawa, if you're watching on our YouTube channel. I'm at what used to be the most famous corner in Canada, right? Portage and Main. It was always famous for the wind. Mind you, it was a lot windier in the old days, because the buildings created the wind tunnel at Portage and Main.

And a lot of those buildings are gone, replaced by more modern, high-tech-y buildings. But it still is Portage and Main, and there's still history to it all. I've stood here, Portage and Main, in 1972, when Bobby Hull signed with the Winnipeg Jets and started a whole new era in hockey, creation of the World Hockey Association, which led to eventually the expanded NHL. So that was a big day in the history of this city. As was last night. Hang on, before we get to the book conversation, which I knew we were going to get to.

Wait till you hear what I tell you on the book. You're going to get quite a charge out of this. But go ahead. If Portage and Main is not any longer the most famous corner in Canada, what do you think has passed it? And second, what was the state of Bobby Hall's hair when he did that signing? Because remember, he was the golden Chad. He was.

And then it kind of went away a little bit. So what about those things? That's what people really want to know. Well, first of all, I didn't say it's no longer the most famous corner. You said it once was. Yeah, it was once known as, right, the most famous corner in Canada. And it probably still is because that kind of last generation is good. But I can't think, maybe you can, of a corner that replaces it.

I mean, it's kind of the crossroads, it's the gateway to the West and all that stuff. You know, you feel a lot of history here. You still feel cold, especially at this time of year. As for Bobby Hull's hair, it was starting to disappear at that time. I spent some time with him that first year because I did a little kind of mini-documentary on his first year in the WHA. And, you know, he's an interesting guy, to say the least. But the hair was gone. I saw him, you know, he passed away in the last year.

I saw him about, I guess, two years ago in the Air Canada lounge at Pearson Airport. And, you know, he was into his 80s then, I think. And he came over, and I got up to see him, and we shook hands. And I'll tell you, he still had that grasp in his handshake, like a crush, crush the bones in your hand as you shook his hand. You know, he was far from a perfect guy. There were issues surrounding Bobby Hill, but in his moment on the ice, he was an actual hockey player.

There's no doubt about that. Okay, last night. I'm in Winnipeg because, as I've said repeatedly over the last week, I've been on this book tour crossing the country, and later today it's off to Calgary, and looking forward to that. But last night, we had an event in the Knox United Church in downtown Winnipeg, and it was a great event. A good crowd, a couple hundred people, at least maybe 300.

A wonderful Q&A session with my old friend Cease Rosner from CBC Winnipeg who did the kind of interview, and then the Q&A with the audience, and then book signings. So in the middle of that, we were in a church, right, an auction out of church, and if you look at the picture on Instagram, you'll see I'm wearing everything but, you know, minister's robes. It's quite the scene. It's a beautiful old church.

Anyway, when the Q&A section ended, I got up because I had to move towards the table where I'd be doing book signings. So I stepped down. My daughter, one of my daughters, was in the audience. And I wanted to head straight over to her and give her a hug, all that. I fell. I did a Joe Biden. I missed a step.

Totally didn't see it in my excitement to get over to see Jennifer. And I face planted right on the floor in front of these, like, 250 or so people. It was my Joe Biden moment. Jesus. 50 or so people um it was my joe biden moment as my son-in-law uh said to me as they all came rushing over you know and they're all oh this poor old guy you know what does it really break a leg you break an arm did he you know scratch his face as it turned out i had nothing i had none of those and you know and i i'm i'm fine today you, a little sore, but not really. But it was, it made me think, in that split second anyway, how Biden must feel. I mean, Biden is a couple years older than me, but not a lot. And it's just, you know, that momentary thing, you never, you know, it's kind of automatic.

You know where steps are and this was a very short step. It wasn't like, you know, high. It was maybe, I don't know, four inches. But that moment when you're in air, you're literally in air, you think you're about to step on the floor but you're not and you're in air, you're literally in air, you think you're about to step on the floor, but you're not, and you're just gone.

And I thought, all the stuff he's taken, all the pictures of him, and I, so of course. Somebody's got to have a video of this out there. Well, that's what I was, that's what I'm afraid of. I haven't seen it yet. People were already kind of like turning around to get back to the line to get the book signed. But I'll tell you, my daughter was really worried about me. And, you know, so were the people at the church

and the Simon & Schuster people at the publishing company. Anyway, it was a moment, as they say. Wow. Well, I'm glad you're good. Be careful out there in Calgary later today. Calgary, they were golfing yesterday. It was like 15 or 16 degrees.

It's crazy this country at this time of year. Well, Calgary, what do they say about Calgary? You can get snow any month of the year in Calgary. So it's not all, you know, peaches and cream there. Exactly. But, you know, in the snapshot of a week, we've been on the road for five days. Southern Ontario, southwestern Ontario, Nova Scotia, Manitoba, later today Alberta and everywhere

the weather has been you know garbage quite different well it's been garbage in some places but it's

been so different it's all like Canada in the winter right where you forget at times how big a

country we are and how many different pressure systems and weather systems there can be at the same time. But once again, experiencing it on this trip and meeting a lot of people.

And it's great to hear what Canadians have to say. Because a lot of them listen to the podcast. A lot of people in those lines saying, yeah, I listen to the bridge every day. Don't take all that crap from Bruce all the time. Shut him down. I hear the other version of that. Yeah. Keep on bringing it.

All right. That's right. Hey, they probably, whoever's listening, if they're still listening, they probably want to get us on to politics or something. Well, here's the story, because it's come up in a couple of places, on the East Coast and now on the prairies. And that's the situation around the CBC and the cuts that are taking place, $125 million cuts that the president of the CBC announced the other day.

And what it's doing is it's focusing the minds on the future of the place and should there be a future of the place. I mean, most of these people who come out to my events obviously have a connection of some sort with the CBC. Grew up listening to it. Some don't listen or watch anymore. Some do. They all sort of, they're at that point where it's sort of the future of public broadcasting, whether the country needs a

national public broadcaster, whether it can afford to be, you know, propping it up to the tune of whatever it is now, $1.3 billion. Especially when it's losing money. When the situation in terms of ad revenue is down, but there's, you know, in my view, there's been a degree of mismanagement about all that. But nevertheless, it's interesting that people are thinking about it. And they know one of the parties is defunding the CBC. If they get to power, they promise. And the other, it seems the government in the last 24, 48 hours

has been supportive of the notion of the CBC. But it's a critical moment. You and I have talked about this before, a critical moment for the future of the CBC and how it's being handled, how it's being managed, and how it's being funded, and what its future may be. So today, this week's development, so what is your, what's your take on what you've witnessed here? Well, like you, Peter, I'm very much of the view that we need a CBC.

I think we need it for news and current affairs, maybe more than I think we need it for some other aspects of what the company does. And I think that for a long time, the CBC has tried to do more things than it was probably capable of doing with the amount of money that it could earn in the marketplace from advertising or get from government. And so the level of attachment to the quality of the product has weakened over time for a lot of reasons. It's a tough business to succeed in. But I think the only way that it could have done better is by making tough decisions earlier and bringing more focus to what it does. Now it's in a situation where the fellow who's leading the polls by 20 points. And I know, you know, whenever we talk about polls, some people are interested in that.

And some people say, why are we always talking about polls? But polls tell us that there's a real existential risk to the CBC because the fellow who's leading the polls by this wide margin is saying things that shouldn't sound reassuring at all to people who think that we need a national public broadcaster. Or even just that portion of it that is focused on news gathering and reporting on a community or local or regional or national basis. He is talking about defunding the CBC and he's not being careful to say there are obviously parts of the CBC that I would keep and parts that I would change. He's using a very blunt instrument and he's saying defund the CBC. And so people who care about that should be properly focused on that, including the president of the CBC. And when we talked about this before, I've been quite critical of the fact that she seems to be incapable

of managing that role of leader of the organization, a person who can describe to the rest of the world, including all the people who, like you and me, care about the CBC, what it is that she has in mind, how it is that she intends to solve the problems that beset the CBC and put it on a path that we can all look at and say, oh, well, that will make sense for the future. This week, there were two things that struck me, and both of them were in one story on the CBC, if I'm not mistaken, that I was reading this morning. The CBC went before the CRTC,

the commission that regulates broadcasting and telecommunications in Ottawa, and it said, we need money from the streaming services, right? This is a big conversation in Ottawa. Money for Canadian content is something that is in shorter supply because cable companies and broadcast stations don't have the same revenue that they used to have, and they contribute to a fund based on a proportion of their revenue. So that money has been going down. Organizations like the CBC are in support of this idea

that streaming services should make a contribution to offset that. There's arguments on the other side, and full disclosure, I work for people who have an interest in that. But for the CBC to go before the CRTC and say, we're desperate for money and we need these people to give us money so that we can continue to do our work. And at the same time, have the president of the CBC announcing hundreds of layoffs and being unable to answer the question, will you pay performance bonuses to people in the CBC, just feels to me like the kind of chaotic and poorly thought out leadership that has bedeviled the organization for some time. I'm not trying to be overly critical of this one person.

This has been an organization that's had some management challenges for a good length of time. But this is, we're getting deep into the fourth quarter, to use the football metaphor. And this is no time to be wandering around making mistakes like that. When you take an interview as the president of the CBC with your chief news anchor, Adrienne Arsenault, and you haven't figured out what you're going to say about this question of bonuses, she probably thinks that she was ambushed by that question. I would look at it and say it's a reasonable question. And if she didn't know it was coming, she should have had an answer for it anyway. She should have known what the answer was. And if she hadn't even thought about it at all, she should have known it in the context of an interview about layoffs. There's only one right answer, which is it won't feel right to pay bonuses while we're putting people out on the street. And she didn't do that.

And it was another failure for the CBC. And I don't like that because I think it emboldens the people who would want to shut it all down, even though we do need it, I think. I know there was another point you wanted to make, but let me make a point on that question because I, too, was astonished watching that. When Adrienne asked that question, perfectly legitimate question, you're right, there's no reason why she shouldn't have been briefed that that question could come from her advisors. I mean, it was obvious.

It had been kind of around earlier in the day on some of the wire copy that had been out, raising questions about bonuses, and that her answer was, it wasn't there will be bonuses or there won't be bonuses. It was, well, we haven't talked about that yet. Excuse me? Haven't talked about it yet? I mean, that is mind-boggling.

You've got people crying in the hallways, young people, young journalists, young producers, young editors, who know they're going to lose their job in two or three months when the cuts finally actually take place. And I know they're crying in the hallways because I heard about it from people who were there. I talked to a young fellow last night here in Winnipeg, who was at the book signing, who knows he's going to lose his job and is really upset about it,

spent his whole life in education getting ready for getting in. And, you know, he hears the president say, well, you know, we may keep bonuses coming for, you know, in a lot of cases, executive management types and performers on the air. So I thought it was such a disconnect with not only your staff, but the people and those who could be, you know, running the show in Ottawa in the next year or two. I talked to a former senior executive at the CBC in the last 24 hours to see what their take was on this. They told me, equally amazed me, about 10 years ago when this similar situation

came up. They were having the executive meeting of management, and one of the managers said, listen, this really looks bad, and we have to show equal pain. We should, as managers, take a 10% cut and announce it. Not one person supported him in that suggestion. Not one. Not one. And they moved on, laying off people. I mean, that's just. Yeah, well, it's a.

It's just a it's just a sad on some level to see a brand like that. Put itself over and over and over again in these positions where people look at it and say, well, we don't really know what the value system is. And we're not sure that we can have any confidence in the management. And my point about connecting the dots with the demand for funding from other sources is that, you know, for people to decide that the CBC should get more money when it can't answer a simple question, like you figured out that you're're 125 million dollars short but you haven't figured out whether that includes that shortfall that you've measured includes a provision for bonuses that doesn't make any sense either it doesn't she doesn't want to say or there's another set of numbers that kick in later on that incorporate what they think they might do because it's not like this would be the first year

that CBC has figured out about bonuses. It paid $16 million in the previous year in bonuses to management, I think. So it just feels shambolic. Just in terms of the way in which the organization presents itself to the rest of the world, principally through the president of the CBC, who, as you and I recall, wasn't really renewed for a second term, only a partial second term. And I thought that was probably a mistake then, and I think it's a mistake even more today. Last point on this.

One of the questions last night from the audience here in Winnipeg was about the CBC. And the question was basically, this woman was a longtime listener of the CBC and a viewer of the CBC, and wanted to know from me how she should handle the argument that she has with a lot of her friends who figure, tell her that this is too much money. We need it in other places, homeless, housing, you name it.

CBC doesn't deserve this money. I don't watch it anymore anyway. Why should we be doing this? She said, how do I make the argument that we need the CBC? And I said, well, listen, for starters, you have to make the argument that the CBC as it exists is important to the fabric of the nation. And you do that by going through all the channels that are available to you. And when you get to the CBC, you should be able to say, just looking at it, at any time of the day or night, that's the CBC. That's different. I can't get that anywhere else on the dial. They're telling a Canadian story.

They're telling it well. It tells me something about the country I live in and the people I share this country with. If you can't do that, if you can't see that, if you can't feel that when you hit that dial, then it's a little hard to make the argument that you need a CBC. So I agree with your earlier point. At this time, you can't do everything for everybody.

You've got to pick your lane. You've got to pick the spots that you want to focus on as a broadcaster and do them well and get out of other areas. If you don't have the money to do them all, then do the ones you can do and do them well. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And digitally more and more, right. I mean, I think the, you know, the challenge that I see and I think that you probably experienced it too, which is that I don't

turn on the CBC on a linear TV basis. I don't do that anymore. I only rarely will listen to the CBC radio. It's not because the content isn't good. It's because I'm picking up news all day long on the internet, on various sources, and I'm listening to podcasts or music if I'm in a car, something like that. Doesn't mean I don't want the content. Doesn't mean that if I lost access to the content that the CBC produces, that I wouldn't lose something important. I just get it principally through a variety of other methods. And I think the CBC has been painfully slow in adapting to that world where people are going to consume the information that the organization produces in ways that don't

align up with where a lot of the expenditures are in terms of the infrastructure for delivering TV and radio. And I know it's different for people who live in rural areas, and there's a requirement legally to deliver those broadcast services in the way that they have traditionally been delivered. But the competition is in digital now, and I don't think the CBC has done a very good job of being there. You know, I'll defend them in some areas. They are experimenting.

They are trying in areas to break through on that level, because you're right, linear television is like the dinosaur. So, you know, but here's the problem with the experimentation they're doing. Who's doing it? The young people who are going to get the hook here. You know, things don't change. And I understand, listen, there's union contracts and this, this, that, and the other thing that dictate who ends up on the list to get laid off.

But that's what you're going to lose. You're going to lose the bright young talent of the future who are working on these new areas of experimentation on, you know, on television and radio. And that's just, you know, it's just an awful situation to be put in. I mean, it's not easy to lead a crown corporation of that many people with a budget that big, but they're going to need help to sort this out.

Okay, listen, we're going to take a quick break and we'll come back. We've got a couple of other things to talk about, so we'll be right back after this. And welcome back. Smoke, Mirrors and the Truth. Bruce Anderson's in Ottawa. I'm Peter Mansbridge in Winnipeg today.

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. We get so many comments on our YouTube channel.

And some of them are constructive. Some of them are just wacko. Clearly from people who haven't even watched or listened to what we're talking about. And in your belief, some of them aren't even people, just like dialed in on the bot channel. But whatever. We'll take them all because we love serving the public.

Agree with us or not. Okay. I know you want to say something about the cop talks in Dubai, but before we get there, what do you make of this whole speaker fuss? Speaker Fergus,

a couple of the parties, the Conservatives and the Bloc, trying to get him to step down because he appeared in a video or something saying nice things about somebody who'd been a Liberal Party leader for a while. It's possible that I've been around too long and I've seen too many errors, too many mistakes. And so I sort of discount things because I keep thinking, well, I've seen worse than that, but I've seen a lot worse than this.

Um, and this reminds me, I was watching a golf tournament on the weekend and, and some golfer, a professional golfer got penalized two strokes because his caddy used a device on the practice putting green to measure how far a putt would travel and wrote it in a in a yardage book that he then used on the course as though that had any material effect on what he was doing in any way it was in some obscure rule book and he got a two-stroke penalty which is a big deal in that kind of a situation and when i was thinking we were going to talk about this for a minute, I was thinking it feels to me like the most minor transgression. And I'm sure there's going to be people who are going to go,

ah, I'm horrified that Bruce just wanted to kind of like write this off as though it's not that important. But honestly, honestly, it's not that important. He gave a little talk. He was wearing the robes. And he said, oh, yeah, I probably shouldn't have done that. And now people are saying he should resign. Well, I don't get it.

No. There are resigning offenses. And if everything's a resigning offense, maybe that's the new world that some people want to live in. But it's not the world that I want to live in. And I think it's silly. What do you think? I think it's time they restructured the way things operate. Why do you need a speaker who's a member of one of the parties?

Because you're at a time of high partisanship, and we're certainly in it now. These kind of things are always going to happen. And you're going to have yelling and screaming and moaning and whining from all sides, whoever's there. Somebody wrote to me the other day and they said, it's kind of an administrative function, the speaker's role. Why don't they have somebody who's like the clerk of the house is an appointed thing, like it's a civil service job.

Why isn't the speaker the same thing? Because all they're doing is sort of recognizing, okay, you talk now, you talk now. And they have to make the odd ruling on things based on, I mean, the rulings usually are done by the clerk at the table, right? And they're handed to the speaker and the speaker makes the rule. So why set yourself up for this kind of situation when I just, you know. It's a tradition and people don't know how to replace some traditions that don't work. And I

don't really mind it as a tradition, but I think that, you know, I think people got to chill out a little bit on something like this. And this is not a chilling time for people who follow politics closely. Everything has to be, you know, guns at dawn. I don't buy it. Speaking of guns at dawn, before we get to cop, I promise I will save you a couple of minutes for this near the end. But what about the Polyev housing video?

This guy knows how to use the media. You can argue about the good moments and the bad moments, but he seems to have had more good moments than bad moments using the media when he's controlling it. Certainly through the summer and the whole kind of new look of Pierre Pauliev seemed to be highly successful and was the kind of springboard to the huge leads he's got right now in the surveys. Now he comes out with a housing video.

So you assume, having watched political advertisements over the years, that, okay, so what's he got, a 30-second or 60-second commercial? No. It's like 15 minutes long. And, you know, it looks like a mini documentary. Well, he calls it a documentary, I think. And it's got a lot of facts and figures, and people have been fact-checking it, and some people have been saying, oh, this is kind of out of context,

or that's out of context. But overall, the views seem to have been pretty good from the experts that this is a fairly decent reflection of the housing situation in the country. But it's prompted a lot of back and forth between the Conservatives and the Liberals and others. What's your take on it? Yeah, I think it's enormously effective. I think the people who don't like Pierre Poliev and the conservatives

kind of really don't like to see polls that say he's in the lead and that he's kind of gaining ground and everything else. And for me, it's just information that tells people, well, this is what's happening. And what's happening is, and why this video is. And for me, it's just information that tells people, well, this is what's happening. And what's happening is, and why this video is such a good example of what's happening is you've got an opposition leader who has certain skills. He's very good at focusing. He has been on this cost of living issue for a good long time.

He described it coming our way. He said, this is what's gonna happen. It's gonna get worse. The government's spending too much. It's throwing kerosene on the inflation fire. It's gonna be a big problem. And it does look in retrospect as though the government wasn't really as prepared

to deal with what was gonna happen to the cost of food, the cost of housing, the cost of energy, and so on. And so they've been on their back foot a little bit. So he knows how to focus. He knows how to press a case. He also knows how to deliver a punch. And that's true whether or not he's doing it in the house, whether he's doing it in a speech in a hall, or whether he's doing it through a video and this 15 minute he

calls it a documentary and i think about you and you make documentaries and i don't know what your documentaries cost but i know that there was a time when if somebody said make a 15 minute documentary you'd say where's two million dollars or some number like that, this would have cost maybe $10,000 to make. Stock footage, it's his voiceover. But, you know, for most people, they're not looking at it and saying, well, I don't know about the production values. The music track wasn't that great. His voice, I don't know. It was perfectly acceptable on all of those levels for most people. 15 minutes is probably more than they felt like they needed. But 15 minutes also can give it a sense of it's substantive, even though he's doing what opposition politicians before him have done,

which isn't to excuse it, which is he's simplifying issues. He's saying, the other guys say this is a complicated problem and they've done everything that they can. I'm telling you it's a simple problem and we can do more. It's the oldest formulation in opposition politics. And so I get that people are able to look at his argument and say, it's simplistic, it it won't work it doesn't really have solutions in it i think all of that is is largely true um but that doesn't make it kind of illegitimate politics it makes it kind of what politics has been about a lot and i think it's more incumbent on the government instead of saying well his arguments are simplistic, probably to say, here's what he would do that would make the problem worse. Those arguments are available. But

I think the government is still sort of trying to figure out how do they get off the back foot? How do they not stand up and say, well, it's too bad he's focused on the number of clicks and the number of people who watch his video. We're just focused on the work. Describing him, the problem up here, Pauliev, as somebody who's into self-aggrandizement, is not going to win the liberals any seats. They need to get at the substance of the changes that he would bring and what those would mean for the lives of people. Because right now he's kind of got free reign to say whatever he wants, because they're not really challenging those aspects of his policy mix. They're kind of offended by his posturing.

And I don't think it's very effective to be offended by his posturing, because I think his posturing kind of fits within the zone of normal for most people as they observe politics. It's going to be interesting. I mean, the Liberals have had a bit of a splash in the last week with the announcement they're bringing in some marketing guru to take over their communication strategy. I don't know whether I'd want that job, given everything that's happened for the Liberal Party in the last, whatever, well, the last few years.

But nevertheless, they've got a new guy who's come in, and how he reacts to this and counters this will be more than a little bit interesting. Okay. I promised a couple of minutes on the COP conference in Dubai, looking at the climate situation. Canada has a delegation there led by Mr. Guilbeault, the environment minister. And there's stuff going on both there and in Ottawa in conjunction with it.

Is this going to make any difference the way we live? Well, climate changes. And so I'm looking at it from the standpoint of I worry about that issue. I think, as you do, that we need to do more. We need to stay committed to the path of trying to reduce emissions. But I feel like there's political forces that are kind of gathering some strength against that. And this COP felt for me, in part because of where it was located, in part because of the size of the delegations from fossil fuel producers, in part because the chairman of this meeting is someone who questions some of the science around climate change.

He's very much a kind of an oil-interested executive. It has felt to me like this one is an inflection point. Either we're going to continue as a world to keep moving in the direction of how do we reduce emissions and keep the planet from burning up, or we're going to give up that fight because the cost of living is a problem, because the political mood has shifted away from woke towards let's just all live our lives and not tell each other how to behave.

So I'm anxious about it. And I don't think it's been a great outing for the people who are organizers of COP. I think it's been one of those situations where even though the climate problem keeps getting worse every year, this has been a little bit of a more bumpy exercise. I think there's been some good points, including Canada's announcement on methane. I think there's been some challenges, though. And then just to put a final point on it,

I watched excerpts from an interview that Hannity on Fox did with Donald Trump last night. And it included asking him about global warming. And he, Trump said, we shouldn't be thinking about it at all. The only warming that we should be thinking about is nuclear global warming because we're very close to a nuclear war. It was kind of classic Trump nonsense in a way, but he couldn't have been more dismissive of the drive towards cleaner power.

He made fun of wind. He made fun of solar. He basically said, this is all a bunch of hogwash and we shouldn't pay any attention to it. And he talked about oil as liquid gold. And he said, we have more liquid gold in our country than any other country in the world by far, and that's what we should be using. So I worry we're headed towards some sort of dark ages zone on the climate change issue, and for me, this COP did not make me so far feel like I can put that worry away and focus on the other 98 things that I'm worried about some days.

You know, Trump's access to Fox and to Hannity especially is just, you know, one wonders whether there is any integrity on the journalistic side at Fox at times, especially in that arrangement. You know, Trump goes on there whenever there's about to be something else that's happening that's going to be against him. So the debate is tonight, right?

One of the last debates before the first real voting starts with the four candidates who are trying to knock him off. Little chance they seem to have on that. But he doesn't go, because he's above it all. He doesn't have to go to debates. And I'm sure if I was advising him, I'd tell him not to go to them either, because he'd actually have to say something about policies

instead of just this normal rant about how rich he is or was or would be. And his views on climate change to me are the view of a guy who's either going to be in jail or dead in the next few years. He doesn't care. He's not going to change his life. And he knows there's a degree of support for that position out there in his base. Anyway, good conversation, at least for us. We enjoyed it.

It was good to see you again this morning. Yes. Take care over there in Calgary. Yes, I'll watch my steps. Count the steps. Hold the handrail. I'll watch my steps. Count the steps. Hold the handrail. I'll watch my steps getting down from the plane. Ay-yi-yi.

Okay. Listen, we will see you on Friday with Chantel for Good Talk. Tomorrow it's your turn. It'll be a different kind of your turn tomorrow because I'm on the road and trying to get all these different comments together is a bit of a challenge. But I'll be here tomorrow, so will the Random Ranter. And a big day for the Ranter tomorrow, because he does the third and final part of his series on advice to the leaders.

And tomorrow, who is he giving advice to? Pierre Polyev. Let's have a listen to what he's going to say tomorrow. I'll listen to that. Absolutely. Very good. Okay, take care, and thank you for listening out there. We will talk to you again in 24 hours.