The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - SMT — The Clash Between Opinion Polls and Voter Polls

Episode Date: December 14, 2022

Bruce’s take on the by election outcome versus the reality of national opinion.  Also should the first ministers sit down on camera and do battle on health care?  And farewell to Jim Carr.

And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. You are just moments away from the latest episode of The Bridge. It's Wednesday, Smoke, Mirrors and the Truth with Bruce Anderson. And welcome to Wednesday, the final Wednesday Smoke Smoke Mirrors and the Truth of this year, because we're about to take a couple of weeks off. But Bruce is, well, he's way out there today. He's not in Ottawa. He's breathing in the real air. He's out in beautiful British Columbia. He's in Vancouver today. I'm in Stratford, Stratford, Ontario.

So we're crossing the country today. Now, here's where I want to start, because it's one of those classic days in the news business. You sort of pick what you want. You know, if you're a consumer of news and you lean one way or the other politically, there's something for everybody today. On the one hand, you've got a new poll from Leger being reported, and it talks about how the conservatives are ahead by a couple of points. It's close, but they're ahead.

That's the banner, conservatives lead. And then you have, just across the way in the news business, you have the report still of the Monday night by-election in the 905 area, one of the Mississauga ridings, where the Liberals didn't just win, they crushed the Conservatives. Now, it's been a Liberal-held riding since 2015, but still, new Conservative leader, tough times out in the country like really tough times maybe not in mississauga i don't know but they won by 20 points 15 points they won by a lot of points

and it's very rare in a hotly contested riding where there are lots of different candidates running for one candidate to get more than half the votes, more than 50%. But the Liberal, well-known, Charles Souza, former Provincial Finance Minister, won 51 point something percent of the vote. That's unusual for that to happen. But it did happen. And it was a crushing of the Conservatives, and it has to be tough for Pierre Palliev to swallow. Your take, sir, on those conflicting headlines. What are we supposed to

believe? Well, on the national polling data, Peter, I think the thing that I always feel is important to remind readers of polls, national polls, is the races that are hard to discern and important in terms of the number of seats are in BC, Ontario, and Quebec. In Quebec, the race between the Liberals and the BQ is a really important race. And so understanding those dynamics is always critical to understanding whether the Liberals' fortunes are flagging or are strong. In BC, it's a three-way fight. And in Ontario, the race between the Liber and the conservatives really tells the tale. So we do see polls that show the conservatives ahead nationally.

And they did win the popular vote, I think, in the last two elections. But they didn't win the largest number of seats. So I think the liberals would be well advised to think that the conservatives have a bit of an upper hand heading into the next election just because there's fatigue with the government. It's not that much stronger than it has been, so I wouldn't want to overstate it. But that takes me to the question about what normally happens in a by-election. In a by-election where an incumbent government has been in office for this long, a period

of time, with difficult economic conditions, it would be more normal to expect there to be a kind of a turnout that favored the challenging party, the Conservatives in this case. That didn't happen. What did happen in the by-election, I think, is a number of things. The most important one, I think, to reflect on, you said crushed, and I think that's right. But it's crushed among the, I think it was about a quarter of the eligible voters who turned out. I was looking for the turnout numbers this morning. The pathetic turnout rate of 25%, 26% the last time I saw it. 26%, right so we're talking about a 3 000 vote margin uh in a writing

where i think there was probably 86 000 eligible voters so very very many of those voters didn't turn out now that in and of itself tells us something it tells us that uh liberal supporters didn't necessarily feel motivated to go out and cast a ballot to show their support for the government. Maybe they didn't think that there was much risk of the Liberals losing that seat. Maybe they thought even if the Liberals lose that seat, it doesn't really matter because they're still going to be in government. All of those things could have contributed to that. But just as you and Chantal and I were talking about this last time, this is going to be more informative for the losers, the parties that didn't do well in this by-election, and there

were two, the NDP and the Conservatives. And we should talk about both of those, because I think that it is fair to say, and the Liberals have been saying it over and over and over again, as you can imagine, since the by-election result, that Pierre Polyev has been asking voters to send a message to Ottawa. And they did, in the sense that they didn't turn out and vote for Pierre Polyev and the Conservatives. In the numbers that one might have expected, given all of the things that Pierre Pauliev says are broken in Canada. And the NDP saw their vote cut significantly. And that's also something that you'd have to look at if you were an NDP supporter, if you were in Jagmeet Singh's office and say that didn't work out.

You know, the Liberal vote, I'm not sure if you just mentioned this or not, I was just checking something online, but the liberal vote actually went up. The percentage of their vote went up from the last time around, which is, you know, tells you a story. I mean, I heard from one of my conservative friends who lives in that riding, who really wanted their guy to win. But he was pretty upset about the kind of campaign,

the kind of strategy the Conservatives were using there. The candidate didn't turn up for all candidate meetings and debates, whether that was by design or not. I don't know whether it was instructed of him not to turn up at these by Party Central. I know they've done that in the past, in past elections. They've told their candidates to stay clear of those things. There were no big media interviews locally nor nationally. The media strategy of Pierre Poly of which we've talked

about before uh maybe in need of a rethink um yeah i think there's something to that yeah i think you know they're they're trying to say now that uh the conservatives trying to say well you know we never expected to win this is a liberal held writing for a long time blah blah blah all you know all the kind of excuses you expect a year after a loss. But one has got to assume they're rethinking the strategy that they used locally and nationally leading up to this campaign. I think they campaigned so that when they lost, and they probably assumed that they were going to lose,

that they could say, in effect, they didn't try very hard. You know, they didn't have the leader and a bunch of kind of luminaries spending a lot of time in the riding. And that sometimes happens when politicians don't want the stain of a defeat to be on them. They don't show up. But I think that given that it was the first kind of high profile test for Pierre Polyev of this sort, it probably would have been better for him to have, to have been more visible, to have made his case a little bit more directly to the people.

I think that there's something to be said for the, the idea that conservatives are narrow casting their message, not using mainstream media very much uh reaching out to their base using the the tools and the techniques and the channels that are efficient at reaching the base but if that's true and i think it is mostly true uh it didn't do very much uh to get people turned out in the context of a period of time when if you looked at Polyev's leadership race, you would say, well, a lot of conservatives went to meetings to help elect him as leader. Remember the stories of the enthusiasm, the grassroots kind of outpouring, right? Well, that was just this year. That wasn't three years ago. That was this year. And so a couple of other things

have occurred to me. One is that in the course of his leadership race, he tapped into a lot of anger with vaccine mandates and this idea that the convoy being a cry for freedom against a gatekeeping government and institutions that were limiting the freedom of people. It didn't look to me like very many people went out to vote for freedom or to express their support for the convoy or to voice their discomfort with vaccine mandates at all. And it didn't look like that was really part of the campaign either. So the fuel that got Pierre-Paul Lievre to the leadership, to Stornoway, doesn't look to me like it has much potential to help him going forward. He's going to need something else.

And the something else that we were starting to see as an argument was this, everything is broken in Canada. And I can tell you, based on my experience in polling, is that if you're a politician and you say, here are five things that are broken, and people say, yeah, all five of those are broken, and we need to fix them. That's one thing that's going to work. But if you say, everything is broken in Canada, and we've got a population, 70 percent of which would say on any given day, any year that I've been doing polling would say this is one of the best places in the world to live. There's a disconnect there. And I think that's one of the biggest challenges that Pierre Polyev needs to figure out as he thinks about how he's going to campaign going forward. Last thing that occurred to me as well, I was reading something about the work that Charles Souza had been doing in that riding. And one of the signature

initiatives that he was involved in was creating this kind of green waterfront in Mississauga and a large piece of land that used to be a coal power plant. Very popular initiative, I understand. And I couldn't help but think that the contrast of that with the debate about Doug Ford and the Green Belt going on at the same time wasn't a helpful thing for the conservative candidate. And I think the Doug Ford shadow is a question that the federal conservatives need to think about now because, well, he did win a majority in the last provincial election. He's also not that popular right now in his plan with respect to the Green Belt and letting developers build homes on it is controversial, as we've been discussing.

I should probably add that while Polyev uses that line, everything in Canada is broken, there's an extra part of the line, which is, and it's all because of Justin Trudeau. He's responsible for everything that's broken. So both ends of that are going to be tough to sell. And he may be rethinking it. You know, I don't know. Obviously, some of that is what happens in a campaign.

You blame the current government for things that aren't working well. But everything? Well, it's a line you use if you want the People's Party type conservative to come out to a meeting. They want to hear that. They want to hear the vitriol against Justin Trudeau. But time after time after time, if you look at the broader polling data, you find, well, you know, there's about 31% who really don't like Justin Trudeau. But it's 31%. It's not 41, it's not 51.

And it's been kind of stable in the last, I'm going to say year anyway, it went up a little bit, but it's not a fast moving train politically for the conservatives to just focus on that. And I think this is kind of the question that Polyev has, and it's relative. There's a parallel in the U.S., which is that Republicans can't win with too much Trumpism in their message,

and they can't win primaries without it. And here, I think Polyev knows that nodding towards the anti-vax movement, but really trumpeting this kind of strong negative view of Justin Trudeau is critical to keeping those People's Party voters motivated and onside. But it doesn't do much for a lot of other people. And I think if I'm him, I'm kind of wondering, pardon me, where were those voters on the by-election night? Well, only the People's Party only attracted 1% or just over 1% of the vote,

which, you know, is what it is. You know, maybe other People's Party voters did, in fact, vote for the Conservatives. I'm sure they did. It didn't help in the long run. It's just not enough, right? It doesn't grow very much right now. Right.

Let me ask you, just as a last point on the by-election night, this question, which is, it kind of relates to that conversation I had with my Conservative friend in that riding, who said to me, Peter, listen, you know, if we're going to win the next election, this is exactly the kind of riding we've got to win. We have to win this riding, just like Stephen Harper did in 2011, which helped form the basis of his majority government. Sure, it is held by the liberal,

has been held by the liberals more than the conservatives over time, but at a point where votes are moving because of dissatisfaction with the government in power, they've got to be moving to the conservatives so that the conservatives are going to win overall. It's going back to your point about BC, Ontario,

and Quebec being the regions that are going to make a difference on a night like that. So when he says, this is exactly the kind of riding we've got to win, and you don't understand how disappointed I am that for the Conservatives, they can and will use the line that a lot of parties use in this situation, which is, well, people didn't really expect us to win this, so we're not that surprised. Let's not use it to kind of analyze the broader context. broader uh context uh fair enough but um you do have this this reality which is that for the conservatives to get past the liberals in terms of the number of seats they need to win seats that liberals have won um and especially in areas where conservatives have won before as you say so not doing better in this. I mean, I think that a more rational analysis would say

that it was a high-profile and popular candidate, that the level of animus towards the federal government wasn't that strong, and that conservatives didn't make much of an effort. Will they make a better effort going forward? I think that's the questions probably on the minds of conservatives like your friend um who are wondering which pierre polyev are we going to get are we going to get the guy who doesn't actually go into the lion's den and duke it out probably not but it was surprising to me that he didn't show more in this race.

Are we going to get the guy who takes an issue like health care and starts talking about very practical alternatives, like letting people who are trained in medicine somewhere other than Canada, but who live here now, get to practice more quickly? It's a practical idea, and he's not the only one who's championing it, but it's the kind of thing that will make people pay attention to an alternative to the government. More so than, you know, the awkwardness of the cryptocurrency position that he took and firing the Bank of Canada governor and those kinds of things don't sound like a stabilizing influence for people who are saying the world's unstable. We need a stabilizing influence.

And I think for a lot of conservatives I talk to, there is a feeling that conservative has somehow morphed from being a the the idea of a stabilizing force against a a two uh change oriented uh progressive government um has it's morphed into uh if you think they change a lot of things give us a chance we'll change even more than you can imagine. And I think when people in Canada look at that, they go, is there another conservative version that doesn't feel as stressful? And I think the republicanism that we see in the States is part of why it makes people a little bit hesitant. Okay, we're going to take a quick break. When we come back, we're going to talk a little bit about the NDP because it was a bad night for them as well. It's interesting,

you know, the Liberals have taken a lot of hits over the last couple of years, and the polls continue to show that, that they're, you know, they're running in second place, but they're sort of within, you know, within close range of the Conservatives. But nevertheless, they are the party that's taken the most hits over the last couple of years. But they seem to be on a bit of a streak of good news. It's not necessarily reflected yet in the opinion polls, but it certainly was reflected on Monday night in the by-election.

But it's not good times for the NDP, and we'll talk about that right after this. And welcome back. You're listening to The Bridge, the Wednesday edition, Smoke Mirrors, No Truth, with Bruce Anderson, who is in Vancouver today. You're listening on Sirius XM channel 167 Canada Talks or on your favorite podcast platform. Or because it's Wednesday, like Friday, you can also watch us on our YouTube channel.

And you can get the link for that by looking at my bio on Twitter or Instagram. All right I promised some discussion about the NDP because Jagmeet Singh is making threats about pulling the plug on the agreement they have to keep basically the Liberals in power and And the issue for him is health care and that there is not a significant movement happening on that front between Ottawa and the provinces. And so he's saying, you know what? I said I wanted certain things, and that's one of the things I wanted.

And if they don't happen, I'm going to pull the plug. And there will be no guarantee of support for the Liberals, and it could end up forcing an election, which I don't think anybody really wants right now, and certainly not the NDP after coming up with a resounding 5% or 6% in the polls on the by-election campaign. So it's been not a good situation for them of late. But nevertheless, the threat is there.

And I've got to say, you know, we made the threat, and it sort of, people yawned for the most part. Is there, what do you think? Is there something in that threat, or is that just the kind of threat you use every once in a while? Well, you know, like a number of things that we talk about, Peter, this reminds me of your golf game. You know, I get letters saying, man, switch, quit talking about your golf game.

And I say, I don't talk about my golf game. There's nothing to talk about in my golf game. You don't't talk about it i'm just scarred watching it all these years so yeah i have to it's therapy for me to talk it out a little bit right but what i was going to say is that if you're a jugmeet singh in this situation you've got this supply arrangement with the government supplying confidence arrangement and um you know that a lot of your party members and supporters have thought that that was probably a pretty good thing to do on the whole, as long as the liberals were embracing the progressive kind of policy mix that you wanted them to. But the challenge is, you don't, it's hard to get share of voice if you're the NDP leader, basically because nobody thinks

that you're going to have anything material to say. You're not in charge of anything. You're not putting anything at risk. And so back to your golf game is like when things don't work for you that well in your golf game, I know that you only do one thing. You pull that four iron out of the golf bag. That's literally the only club that you pull out when thing. You pull that four iron out of the golf bag. That's literally the only club that you pull out when things are going wrong, and you use only that club. This is literally the only thing that Jagmeet Singh can do, is to talk about whether or not he would pull the plug on that relationship.

It is his four iron, his version of your four iron. He has no choice but to every once in a while say, you know, this magic carpet ride, liberals, that you've been on with me, you know, it might come to an end. And what happens? People pay attention. We start talking about it. It's a conversation starter. It's a share of voice creator. It's him getting some sense of rhythm back into his political swing, if you like.

And so I look at it first and foremost that way. But I also feel like it's not going to be very real in the sense of he sees the numbers that we see. He saw the result that we saw. He knows that most progressive voters are looking at the liberal government and saying, we don't like everything that they're doing, but we sure don't want an election if there's a chance that the Conservative Party will win. And there is a chance that the Conservative Party will win. And there is a chance that the Conservative Party will win. So it's a bit of a hollow threat.

It's an effort to try to get some share of voice. It's an effort to stabilize his political pitch. And it's also not unhelpful for the Liberals. I mean, I think that, you know, it's possible for us to look at this and say, well, this must really kind of unnerve for the liberals. I mean, I think that, you know, it's possible for us to look at this and say, well, this must really kind of unnerve the liberals. But in a different way, it helps them to have Jagmeet Singh saying the kinds of things that allow Justin Trudeau to say, I'm going to take a hard line with the premiers on this. We're going to need some strings attached to a major increase in funding because the healthcare system needs better results. And so it's friendly in a way, even though I don't think it was necessarily intended to be friendly to liberals.

Do you think the liberals really care one way or the other if they pull the plug on this and we end up in an election? I do. I do. I think that for the Liberals, the last election was a lesson in not meandering your way into an election without a real sense of purpose and a plan and all of the preparation that they had done in prior elections. And I think that, you know, the ministers and the government are working pretty hard at those mandate letter items. So the machinery of government is not organized for towards any kind of a near term election. People are pretty focused on trying to move the yardsticks on the things that the prime minister has set out for them to do. And I don't get any sense that the political

apparatus is kind of looking at the moment in time and saying, there's an opportunity. If we had an election here that we could win based on fill in the blank. I don't know what fills in the blank right now. So no, I don't think the liberals think it's much of a threat, but I also don't know what fills in the blank right now. So, no, I don't think the Liberals think it's much of a threat, but I also don't think they want an election. Let me move it to the premiers that we've mentioned here. Is there, I mean, it certainly appears that there's a big gang up taking place on the part of a lot of the premiers on this health care issue, and they want Trudeau at the table,

and they want to see him open up the money line. How do you read that situation in terms of the influence they have on trying to change the prime minister's mind, on opening up the taps a bit without all kinds of conditions. And how united are they as a group? I mean, we've seen them before try to use a united front against Trudeau, especially, and it's usually been the conservative premiers.

They've lost when they've tried on that front because it went to the courts. How do you see this current situation? I don't think the premiers are very well positioned. I think that the situation, as Canadians see it, is that the health care system is under tremendous strain. It is underperforming. And you've got the premiers saying, give us more money, and the prime minister saying, we need better results. Now, if that's all that voters hear about that, they're going to go, results.

That's what we want. We care more about results than we care about this flow of money and which government is helping which other government, how much. And the Globe and Mail did an interesting op-ed or an editorial today on this. It was about the argument that the premiers are making about whether the federal government is paying as much of a share as it used to. And they made the point that the premiers are misleading people about this. But even if you accept that there's room for debate about which

government has been paying as much as it should, at the end of the day, most people know that the health care system is a matter of provincial jurisdiction and the provincial governments can raise taxes to spend more money on health care. They can control the things that affect the delivery of health care services to the people in their province. And if the health care system is going badly, they're going to think that that's really on the province to solve. And just saying, well, we don't get enough money from Ottawa, I don't think is going to resonate that well with those voters, particularly in BC and in Ontario. Whereas I do think for the prime minister to say, well, we're open to the idea of more money, but we do need to see that that money is going to produce better results. That's especially relevant in Ontario, where a lot of money was moved to the provinces during COVID.

And I think people are generally aware that a lot of it wasn't spent. A lot of it wasn't used for what it was intended for. And that where governments, you know, that where the provincial governments have some fiscal room, but aren't doing anything with that fiscal room to significantly improve the healthcare system, that's going to significantly improve the health care system, that's going to rebound against the provincial premiers. So I don't think they're in very strong shape at all, and I don't think we're going to see that strong united front effort against Ottawa. Do you think we could possibly see, because I miss it, but I'm old school,

and I'm looking at it from a media point of view. But do you think we're ever going to see in the short term on this issue a situation where all the first ministers are sitting down? The premiers, the territorial leaders, the prime minister at a conference table. The old one in Ottawa worked pretty well in the good old days. And hammering this thing out. Because it's supposedly the number one issue on the minds of Canadians, when you look at the data and yours as well, healthcare and the situation in hospitals across the country is number one on the minds of a lot of Canadians.

And so one would assume that this is important enough that, okay, if you've got an argument on this, let's hear it, and let's see you make it, not behind closed doors, not in emails or telegrams or whatever, but right there, face-to-face, let's see it play out. I think it would be good. I think that it would be really useful for people to hear the stated positions and the arguments that the premiers and the prime minister make about this and really useful for people to see them trying to drive towards a solution or a set of solutions that they agree on. I don't think it's very likely because I think that the premiers will see a reason why it's

an awkward conversation for them to participate in. They might not all agree on the things that they want. It might illuminate the fact that the prime minister is faced not with a group of premiers who all want the same thing and all agree on what the problem is and all commit to spending the money to do things that will improve health services, but rather that it's a bit of a cacophony. It's different stories from different provinces asking for different things. And will it help the prime minister to have people see that cacophony? Not necessarily.

I think people will kind of observe something if it did happen like that and say, our system is messed up and it's not working on this public service that is the most important one to us, the health care system. So I like the idea, but I don't think it's going to happen. I do think we, you know, the prime minister is right to draw a line in the sand here and say, we can't just write a check and have no expectation of improvement in the delivery of health services. It's still a matter for provincial responsibility,

but it is the money that taxpayers sent to us. And we feel like we have some responsibility to try to use that leverage. Right. Here's the last topic for today. And it plays off something that you've often said to me and said to our listeners, and it's about campaign financing. The Americans have a guy in custody in a jail in the Bahamas. I don't know what it said, DF or SMB or whatever his name is. I can't remember, but it's all involved in the crypto business and the billions of dollars that the Americans claim he raised under fraudulent circumstances,

and they want him behind bars. When you peel back the story, a lot of that money was going to campaigns, both Democratic and Republican, and in the U.S. And we're not talking about $1,000 here. We're talking about millions of dollars, billions of dollars that went into campaign coffers for different candidates, different parties across the U.S. The argument you've always made is that thanks to the rules

that all the parties agreed to in Canada, that can't happen here. Is that true? It is true, yeah. Corporations can't really give money in politics in Canada, very, very limited in what they can give, and that didn't used to be the case. I don't think it was the case that, at least in our lifetimes, that corporations were giving massive, massive amounts of money.

But certainly significant chunks of money would be raised through corporate fundraising. And that's not really the case anymore. The other side of the question is, what could politicians do with the money if they could get it? And local riding campaigns can't spend very much so you know you compare um the amount that a politician could spend in a riding like mississauga lakeshore i don't know the specifics of that one but it might be a hundred thousand dollars in a in a federal election campaign that you could spend there if you look down at uh that race that just finished in Georgia, the runoff, the second version of the election, I think that the winning candidate spent something like $54 million on TV ads alone for that one month runoff. Just massive, massive differences in the amount of money that can be spent. So if you can't raise it from

corporate or wealthy donors, in the sense of there's a limit to what people can give. And if you can't spend it in the large gobs that it gets spent in the US, that conditions our system to work on a different basis. And we're better off for it, for sure. You know, I do think that there are times when I wish that more people were paying more attention to politics, but I don't think adding billions of dollars of untraceable spending is a good way to go to make that happen. Before we go, I'd also like to

say something about somebody we lost in the last couple of days. A few weeks ago, I was in Winnipeg helping host a, or not host, but helping speak at a celebration of Lloyd Axworthy's political life

and his private life as president of the University of Winnipeg. And there were a lot of people in that room that night. I can't remember 600, 700 at least who gathered there, and they were from all parties. One of the things about Manitoba, and you see it reflected occasionally in different parts of the country, but it was very evident that night where partisan differences had no part of the play of that night people came together to

celebrate something they all agreed on needed celebrating and one of the people there that night was it was a liberal former Cabinet Minister for Justin Trudeau, Jim Carr, who'd been battling, or had been battling cancer for the last few years. Well, he passed away on the weekend. And this was a fellow, I know you knew him as well, who had a lot of respect from all sides of the house. Good guy, Jim Carr, hardworking, had the energy file for a while, so you would have bumped into him more than a few times, I'm sure, on that.

But when you lose someone who's dedicated a good chunk of their life to public service, and in this case through election, and is regarded that way, I talked to him for five or ten minutes that night. He had similar concerns that I have on certain areas that are happening in the country, and right to the end, he was working at it. Yeah, I did get to know him a little bit, and I do talk to people about getting into politics, and I often say to them one of the things to be aware of is that, you know, your life changes from the day before you get into politics to the day after you go from being, in many cases, a respected member of the community before you get into politics. And then you get in and you become a, you know, a kind of a target of derision and criticism and suspicion that your motives are not very good.

And Jim Carr was one of those rare individuals who, for whom that didn't really happen, that a lot of people maintained a sense of, this is a good human being. And that's true across the aisle. And one of the things that I've always found is that, you know, politicians meet a lot of people and they have a lot of meals with people and they don't, you know, so they sometimes can be in message mode, even if they don't want to. But you learn a little bit about people by the stories that they tell you when you are having a casual or relaxed conversation. And I remember very well having dinner one night with Jim Carr. And we talked about a lot of things. I think we probably chatted for a couple of hours. But I remember how enthusiastic he was telling me that his idea of a great day,

and this was in Ottawa, was that he would get up and he would, you know, he would be thinking about what he was going to do that day as the Minister of Natural Resources, I think he was at the time. But before he left his apartment, he would load up his slow cooker with the things that he wanted to eat that night. And he would turn it on and then he would kind of go through his day thinking about how good that meal was going to taste when he got back to his apartment later that night and i thought for some reason i've always remembered that story because it was just a very real story about somebody who was

you know going to work and doing this really important thing but he was a very regular human being who, you know, loved food and loved to tell stories like that. Yeah, I think we sometimes forget that the women and men who serve politically, and we may have our beefs with them, and they may have their beefs with each other, but at their heart, they're, you know, they are literally just like us in many ways. And that's a great little story. Love that one. We'll miss Jim Carr. All right, Bruce, thank you so much for this. We'll, Bruce will be back on Friday, of course, for Good Talk, our year-ender edition with Chantel. We're looking forward to that one. Tomorrow, it's

your turn. So file your notes, your comments, whatever they may be. Get them in fast now at the Mansbridge Podcast at gmail.com. The Mansbridge Podcast at gmail.com. And the Random Renter will be here tomorrow. That'll be interesting. Peter, have we asked listeners and viewers, I guess, if they want to send questions for our conversation with Chantel on Friday as well. Have you done that? Maybe I missed that.

No, we haven't asked that. We're not going to do that. Well, now we did. If you have a comment or a question for Bruce and Chantal, we'll try and squeeze it in there. There you go. There you go. Just like that.

Same address, mansportspodcastgmail.com. Thank you, big guy. Well, have fun in Vancouver. You bet. Go for a swim in the ocean, you know. It's warm out there. Yeah, it looks a little cold right now. I'll look at it.

Okay. Take care. Thanks for listening, everyone. We'll talk to you again in 24 hours