The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - SMT - What Do You Really Think About Pierre Poilievre?

Episode Date: April 12, 2023

Bruce does his deepest dive yet on Canadians' attitudes towards Pierre Poilievre, and the numbers are good for Poilievre and not good for Justin Trudeau.  This is not your ordinary party preference poll, its much different and is quite telling about where Canadians are today in how they feel about leadership in Canada.

And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. You are just moments away from the latest episode of The Bridge. What do you really think about Pierre Polyev? Well, Bruce's answers from recent research may surprise you. That's coming right up. All right, then. It's Wednesday. Smoke, mirrors, and the truth with Bruce Anderson. Bruce is in Ottawa today.

Hello, Peter. Hello there. I love the headline on your column today, which is on your website at Spark. And it also can be found on National News Watch. Polyev, the strongest challenger Trudeau has faced. Okay, well, when you look back at who he's faced, this is, you know, Polyev is number four that's run against, from the Conservative Party,

that's run against Justin Trudeau. Stephen Harper, of course, lost. Andrew Scheer, lost. Aaron O'Toole, lost. And now it's Pierre Polyev. And you're telling me that of those, of the total of four of them, he's the strongest one. Now, what do you base that on?

Yeah, well, I think that part of the question for me was when Pierre Pauliev ascended to the conservative leadership or won the conservative leadership, I guess there was a tendency in the Ottawa bubble community, and perhaps I was part of that tendency, to think that his style and the kind of messages that he'd been using in the past, especially through the convoy period, were going to grate on people and that he was not going to be a terribly effective counterpoint to Justin Trudeau. And what the latest research that I've done shows is that's not exactly what's happening. There are a couple of reasons for coming to the

conclusion, at least at this point, that he looks like the most formidable opponent that Justin Trudeau has faced. I mean, if you go back through time, Stephen Harper was pretty highly unpopular by the time that election rolled around. And so while Trudeau was kind of running in third in the run up to that election campaign, you could see in Harper's unpopularity or the fatigue with Harper that there was a chance that Trudeau could overcome him as a challenger and kind of deliver a message of change that was appealing to people. Against Andrew Scheer, I think it was clear to me that even the conservative membership who ultimately chose him, they took 13 ballots to do it. He wasn't even that unifying a force within the conservative movement.

And he wasn't that effective a counter puncher to Trudeau or a challenger to Trudeau. And Aaron O'Toole, who I think could have been with the external marketplace outside the party, he had trouble rallying the party as well for different reasons than Andrew Scheer. But that made him not a terribly effective competitor. What Pierre Polyev is doing and what I see in the data now, Peter, is I think he's spent a lot of time with messages that are really just about criticizing Trudeau, demonizing Trudeau, kind of pumping up the cuss word against Trudeau kind of thing. But more recently, I hear him talking about issues in a way that I think will resonate with people. And the research suggests it is.

What do I mean by that? When he says, I want to fight for powerful paychecks, you know, some people can think, well, that's a kind of a hokey line. But people don't necessarily who are outside of politics think of it as hokey. They just think of it as relevant, you know, powerful paychecks. I get what he's talking about. When he talks about the health care system, he tends to avoid talking about systemic changes, macro changes.

He talks about more and more nurses more quickly. When he talks about housing affordability, he doesn't talk about programs and billions of dollars in spending. He talks about, we've got to stop talking about what we're going to do to improve housing affordability. And we need to get to a place where our kids can afford homes. Now, a lot of people hearing me say this will say, well, he doesn't necessarily have a plan to back that up. That's just smoke and mirrors. And that may well all be true. I'm just looking at it from the standpoint of how is the public reacting to it. And so there were three or four questions in the poll that I wrote about yesterday. One is, do each of these two individuals, Trudeau and Poliev, to be basically good people? And Trudeau's number is, I think, 58% say yes,

but Poliev's number is two points higher than that. Do each of them have a plan that will help you for the future? Trudeau's number is not great. Polyev's number is better. Neither of them have great numbers because a lot of people don't pay enough attention to politics to be able to say, I know exactly what the plan is, but Polyev is beating Trudeau on that. Polyev is also beating Trudeau on the question of, does he understand your life? And so if I'm Trudeau heading into an election against this guy, it's better for me to realize that he's connecting with people as a challenger, as somebody who is saying things that resonate with people more than the things that Trudeau is saying resonate with people. And part of that is the tissue that comes from that many

years of incumbency. You end up sounding like an administrator who's telling everybody about the things they've done. Somebody on the other side sounds like a politician who's talking about the things they will do. And I think the poll that I published was really meant to be interpreted by anybody in whatever way is useful for them. But for the liberals, if I were them, I would look at it as a real warning signal, not to take this guy lightly, to recognize the degree of risk that he poses by communicating in the way that he does. Okay. Let me ask you a couple of questions about that. In the three areas that you talked about, three or four areas, Polyev is clearly in the lead in each one, but it's very tight, right? It's sort of margin of error stuff. Would that be fair to say?

No, no, no. And those questions, it's beyond the margin of error. I'll just follow up the number there for a second. The first one you mentioned was like two points, so that would be margin of error. And for the future is a five-point gap. Okay. And understands your life, understands your life is like a 10's like a 10 point gap.

Okay. That's to me, that's the key question, right? As we head towards an election that that could be a key question. Okay. So it's more than just margin. I think the only numbers you gave us in your rundown was the first one, which was like two points, two or three points. Okay. Now how about, how is it distributed across the country? Is it the normal pockets that we see in the classic polling that we see every month? Or is it, well, what is it?

Well, you know, not surprisingly, there are tendencies that have to do with who people generally vote. But there were a couple of things that stood out. First of all, if we just compare a separate question, which is overall favorability of leaders, which David Coletto and Abacus has been tracking for a long time, it is important to remember that Trudeau was more popular than Harper, than O'Toole, than Scheer, and he's less popular than Pierre Polyap using that favorability indicator. So even when you take into account the fact that people in the prairies are more likely to say they like the conservative leader and people in Ontario and parts of Eastern Canada more likely say they like the liberal leader, you're still dealing with a situation where on that overall favorability

indicator, the balance is tilted towards the conservative challenger rather than the liberal incumbent. But maybe the most interesting thing for me in the breakouts, Peter, is this. You and I remember when Preston Manning rode into Ottawa with a message of change that was intended to kind of resonate with almost a blue-collar male market. And one of the things that he did is he pulled boats from the NDP. And one of the things that I see in the data about Pauliev's message is that he's not attracting some of those voters who would otherwise NDP because they like the convoy or because they like toying with people like Dean Anderson. It's because the message is, I want to fight for the people who dig things out of the ground, who make things with it, who, you know,

work those kinds of jobs that a lot of NDP-oriented voters kind of associate as being the kind of the blue collar. So that's the most surprising thing for me, is that for the Liberals to beat the Conservatives, it is always pretty important for them to draw votes for the NDP. They haven't really had a challenge with Harper, O'Toole, or Scheer, where the Conservatives were trying to get those votes, or some of those votes too.

But I think Pierre Poliev is, and I think he's making some progress with it. Yeah, I agree with you. I was just talking in the last week to the head of one of the biggest unions in the country, the traditional unions that have always been kind of NDP supporters. And this fellow told me, he said, conservatives are all in on trying to get our vote.

They're all over us. They want to attend meetings. They want to speak at conferences. They're there. They're not sitting in the bush waiting for an election. They're working at it right now. I mean, that is a startling number that you said on one particular situation that

you threw out there. You had three out of four NDP voters finding that particular remark appealing to them. Three out of four NDP voters. That's pretty huge. Find the idea of powerful paychecks an appealing theme. And so what I think is interesting about that is that that's not the same as saying I'm going to vote conservative. But it's so far from I'll never vote conservative because they're not for me. They don't share my values. Right. And it's also not a culture war. And I think this is one of the things that Polyev is trying to get more right the longer he sits in this job.

And I don't think he gets it perfectly right. In fact, I think one of the things we're going to talk about a little later in the program is he got involved in a bit of a culture war thing again yesterday around the CBC. But when he moves away from culture war and he talks about economics and housing costs, powerful paychecks, that's where these voters who are looking for somebody who will fight for them are hearing language that sounds like he will fight for them. And part of it is the language. You know, I wrote in the piece that government can sound like a lot of comfortable administrators. And it's deadly from a communication standpoint. People don't really hear what it is they're saying because the sound of it is so fuzzy

and so technocratic and frankly so boring that it doesn't cut through. And also government has so many matters, whereas I think Polyev is being pretty disciplined. You hear these powerful paychecks a lot. You hear cut waste, capital unnecessary spending, and people really, they understand those terms, and they're appealing to them, and they separate themselves from the culture war thing. They do find it appealing, clearly. But at a certain point, they're going to ask,

okay, fine, how are you going to do it? And that's always the argument going into a campaign, right? Do you really lay out what you actually would do to achieve the goals you're promising? Stephen Harper told them, don't do it now. Don't do it now. Leave it to the last minute. Because the liberals will either steal the idea or they'll so trash it that it won't be worth anything by the time we get to an election campaign uh but it is a challenge because at a certain point people will start asking that question here's the other conclusion you had just on that though peter i look i think that's what

should happen and i think that it's a theory of what happens but it isn't always what happens. And I think Harper stopped putting out a, if I'm not mistaken, stopped putting out a platform in an election campaign. That's right. Scheer, I don't think put out a platform in an election campaign. If he did, it was maybe at the very end. O'Toole did in particular, because he had this kind of tremendous pressure on climate change issues specifically. But I guess my point is, if there's only one or two debates and the media are maybe

25% of what they were 15 years ago or 20 years ago in terms of just the sheer amount of coverage, let alone the amount of coverage that's devoted to the substantive policy choices on offer. It's more theoretical, I think, than practically accurate to say that people at some point go, well, wait, you've been saying nice things, but I don't know exactly how you're going to implement them. Sometimes people just gravitate towards the nice sounding messages and the hope. And if one party is saying we can make things better and the other party is essentially sounding like we've already made things better, that becomes part of the dynamic.

And again, I'm not saying that's good. I'm just saying maybe that is what this election could be about if the liberals don't get more focused on the challenge that they face with this guy. Yeah, I hear you on that. And that's especially so the longer any one particular party is being in power and people are just kind of sick of them. And they'll literally go anywhere to get away from them.

You know, at times it looks like we're facing that situation now, but there's no election today. So we don't know what it's going to be like by the time there is an election. Okay, let me get to, you mentioned it a moment ago, because if the assumption here is a lot of what Polyev is saying is being embraced to some degree by the electorate, right? Doesn't necessarily mean they're going to vote for him, but they kind of like what they're hearing.

And they feel that he's talking about what they're thinking about and what they want to hear talked about. So in the last couple of days, he's done this thing, and it's always awkward for me to talk about the CBC because I spent 50 years there. But because I spent those 50 years there, I never talked about the CBC because it just seemed like a conflict. It doesn't anymore. So I don't mind bringing this up. So yesterday,

Polyev tweets, trying to get it here, of course, as always, when you think you have it at your fingertips, it's not there. Here it is. He tweets yesterday, we must protect Canadians against disinformation and manipulation by state media. I didn't know we had any state media in Canada. I know that we have a publicly owned

broadcaster in the CBC, but nevertheless, he goes on to say that is why I'm asking Twitter and Elon Musk to accurately label the CBC as government-funded media. Now, Musk has said this about other organizations lately, including the BBC and others. Polyev concludes, it is a fact and Canadians deserve the facts. Okay. So I guess my question to you is going to be, is this what the Canadian public at large feels. Is the public at large or is it just his base that will embrace that kind of description of the CBC?

And let me remind you, just in case some of our listeners are wondering about this, who started the CBC? Where was the CBC created? When was it created? It was created in 1932 by R.B. Bennett. Who was R.B. Bennett? He was the 11th Prime Minister of Canada. What party did R.B. Bennett represent when he created the forerunner of the CBC. Why? He was a conservative. The conservatives brought the CBC into being. Now, that was a long time ago.

Lots of things have changed since then, but it shouldn't be forgotten, as many of those in the Conservative Party do forget, because I've been in the position of having to remind them, some in former cabinets, by the way, that it was the Conservatives who started the CBC. Nevertheless, here we go. In a description of Canada's public broadcaster,

that's why it was created. R.B. Bennett created the CBC for a reason. The influence of American broadcasters squeezing into Canada and nobody telling Canadian stories. That was the idea behind the CBC. You can argue, and I argue too, how well it's fulfilled that mandate over the years, and especially right now.

But that was the reason R.B. Bennett, Conservative Prime Minister of Canada, created the CBC. So what happens if the CBC is tossed aside, as Polyev continues to let his supporters believe he will eventually do? Well, I don't know. Who's the national broadcaster these days who's doing Canadian content, telling Canadian stories all the time, or just rerunning American programming? Anyway, I'm ranting, and this is not the ranter's show.

This is Bruce's show. Go for it. I think it's good. Look, Peter, I think what Mr. Polyev is doing with the CBC is harmful. I think it's ill-advised from a public policy standpoint. I think the only reason that he's doing it is that every once in a while, it feels like he needs to do something, take some action that resonates with the more fringe part of the coalition that the Conservative Party

is seeking. And so taking a swipe at the CBC is pretty reliable in terms of the resonance it has with that fraction of the Conservative base. It is also true that over the years, the number of people who aren't in that base who feel like they want to rise up in defense of the CBC is smaller and more soft-spoken than has been the case. Now, part of that is maybe the CBC has underperformed at kind of creating that sense of what it's really about and what it's trying to do or the quality of the programming. And part of it is that the fragmentation in the media universe means, unlike the days when I was delivering the Gazette and the Star and there were only three channels available on the TV,

there are still an awful lot of other ways that people can get information or entertainment today. So I think that CBC is weak now. I think it's poorly led. I think it's been poorly led for a while. I think that its effort is kind of fragmented in terms of people being able to knit together the pieces of it and decide that there is an entire kind of purpose for it,

that we would be worse off if we lost. But we are better off with a CBC. We are a country that struggles to have the financial models that can get information and disseminate it. We see the breakdowns of private sector media models, and we shouldn't be worried about those. We know that the scale of our market also makes it hard for national news to be gathered and disseminated professionally. And so if we don't do it through some sort of collective enterprise like the CBC, we're going to be left with a small group of companies that don't really have their heart in it because you can't make very much money in it. So I think it's quite the wrong approach for him

to take, but I think I understand why he's taking it. And the last thing I'll say is that the pretense that anything that has government involved as an investor or an owner is going to distribute propaganda and that what isn't owned by government is going to distribute fact is ludicrous on the surface of it um and you know i noticed that some people are saying also that there is some government ownership of twitter it's the saudi uh royal family that has the second biggest, or I guess one member of the Saudi royal family has the second biggest shareholding in it. So that's a real false dichotomy there for sure.

Okay, enough on the CBC. Well, I'll say one last thing on the CBC. The idea of Canadian broadcasting, as I said, started in 1932. 36 was when CBC Radio was officially started and the corporation was named the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. And one of the reasons CBC Radio was started was to serve rural Canadians with news that directly impacted them.

You know, farm prices, cattle prices, grain prices, you name it. And one of the driving forces behind that was the then Prime Minister in the early 30s. Did I tell you who that was? His name was Harvey Bennett. He was a conservative. I can't remember whether I mentioned that or not.

He was also the first Prime Minister of Canada to be elected in a riding in Alberta. And that was some of the, I mean, he grew up in New Brunswick, as many people know. But his riding was in Alberta, Calgary. And he cared and was concerned about the rural parts of Canada,

many of which still today depend, especially on CBC Radio, for those similar things, even though the farm broadcasts aren't the way they used to be. But nothing's the way it used to be. Well, you know, the thing that occurs to me, this notion that governments use the CBC as a state, quasi-state broadcaster is so silly. I've known politicians in conservative governments and liberal governments. I've never known one who said, oh, let's throw this story to the CBC

and they'll do it exactly the way that we want it. It doesn't work that way. It's without a shred of evidence to back up that idea that the CBC is a – I think the thing that bothers people like Pauliev or at least some of his supporters is that they see a balance of content that reflects a broader set of values, including values that they don't particularly share. And there are about 60 to 65 percent of Canadians who identify as more progressive and the rest as conservative. So if you're a hardcore conservative, you're going to see things that reflect the country, but don't feel like they are exactly aligned with your values. And maybe that can be frustrating, but that's not a reason to throw out the CBC.

And so I do think the government has a really important choice, maybe the most important leadership choice that they will ever have made about the presidency of the CBC. It's hard on the surface of it to see a reason why they should reappoint the person who's been running it for the last five years. There is an existential risk, and there's no time to get it wrong. No, I would agree with you that this decision and the future of the CBC, it's at a crossroads right now.

And, you know, the decision is a critical one, and the future of the CBC kind of hangs in the balance. And it's going to be determined not just by people, but by what the CBC does as a broadcaster and how it serves the people from C to C to C with real Canadian content that they're interested in watching and will watch. And if that doesn't happen and television.

Or listen to. Yeah. Or listen to, although radio has got a pretty loyal audience. And podcasts, you know, there's no question about that. Okay. We're going to take our break, but we've got a couple more things to talk about. And they're kind of in a similar vein. So we'll get to them right after this. And welcome back. You're listening to Smoke Mirrors and the Truth, the Wednesday episode

of The Bridge. Bruce Anderson's in Ottawa. I'm Peter Mansbridge, and I'm on the other side of the pond. I'm in Scotland. And enjoying every moment that I've got here as I'm doing a few things, including writing. My next book is coming out, co-authored with Mark Bulguch. And that'll be due this fall. Can't tell you much about it yet, but I will be able to tell you about it in the next couple of months, if I ever get it finished. As usual, Mark's way ahead of me on that front, but we're getting there. Okay, next topic.

I'm not sure how to go about this one. It all started as a result of the Justice Minister, David Lamedi, who I don't think we've ever talked about on this program before, but not an insignificant cabinet post, an important one. He was speaking to a group of the Assembly of First Nations. And at one point, one of the participants had this to say, one of the AFN people, and he was Grand Chief Brian Hardlot and Chief Donald Morocco of the Mohawks of the Bay of Quinte. This is what they said.

Canada exports natural resources to other countries. They earn trillions of dollars in revenues from those resources. Those resources were given to the provinces without ever asking one Indian if it was okay to do that, or what benefits would the First Nations expect to receive by Canada consenting to that arrangement? Well, David Lamedi, who was sitting there listening to all this, decided to answer this way. I obviously can't pronounce on that right now, but I do commit to looking at that, he told the AFN. It won't be uncontroversial, is the only thing I would say, with a bit of a smile.

Well, he was right about that. It certainly became controversial in a hurry as soon as the Western premiers heard about it, in Alberta, in Saskatchewan, in Manitoba. They all kind of leapt ahead of what Lamedi actually said, although he didn't close the option down, Lamedi. He kind of laid it out there. But the premiers have said he's on his way to doing this.

And Pierre Polyev said the same thing, demanding that they pull back on this decision, they claimed, which was in the works. So this, you know, Ottawa versus the West is a constant. Ottawa versus the West on issues of natural resources is a real potential flamethrower in that relationship. And that's kind of the way the week has been on this. What do you make it?

Was this just sort of a minister saying perhaps a little more than he should have said in the way he was trying to describe the situation or answer the question or answer the statement? Or is there something in this that the premier should be pouncing on? No, I don't think there is something that the premier should be pouncing on. I think that the decision to pounce was a political calculation. Probably if Mr. Lemedy had to do it over again, if in fact he did smile as he said it won't be uncontroversial, that wasn't maybe the best way to deliver that, the point that he wanted to make. It is a serious enough issue that, and I think he found in the aftermath, that if it looked like he was being a little bit political, then he was opening himself up to this kind of criticism. But I think at the heart of it, his mandate in his role is to figure out a path to implement the United Nations declaration that Canada agreed to to listen to the representations of Indigenous leaders.

And that's what was happening in that room. They raised an idea that unquestionably would be controversial within Canada, unquestionably would be a constitutional showdown, or at least a constitutional challenge by the provinces, which I'm not a lawyer, but probably they would win. But be that as it may, these Indigenous leaders are asked to participate in these conversations, are entitled to say what they believe is the right approach with respect to the treatment of resources. And it is incumbent upon the Justice Minister to say, I'm here to listen. He didn't say that he was going to take their request and implement it. And what Daniel Smith, Alberta premier, and I guess Scott Moe, the premier of Saskatchewan, did is that they took that exchange and said, we interpret this as though the federal government may try to grab our resources.

And then in turn, Pierre Poliev said, we think that the Trudeau government is going to do this. And I think that those politicians were doing that, were trying to create more heat than they were shed some light on an important issue. So, you know, a little bit of the culture war, and it isn't really just a question of who should control resources. And, you know, Mr. Polyev's language, I think where he said, I'm never going to let Ottawa take resources away from Westerners. The implication is that the indigenous people in this case are not Westerners. So I don't think it was a great day for the conservatives, but I do think that they probably raised some eyebrows and rallied a little bit of support around the messages. And I do think that probably Mr. Lamedi, if he had it to do over again, would do it a little bit differently. Just to clarify on the smile issue, that wasn't a description a reporter wrote of what happened when he made his comment that he was smiling.

It was actually in the quote. You know, his actual quote was, it won't, this is Lamedi's quote, it won't be uncontroversial is the only thing I would say with a bit of a smile. That's his quote. So the smile line. Yeah, that's pretty awkward. I don't really see the, you know see the value of that part of that sentence. Yeah. No, I think it is one of those things where upon reflection,

although I understand and I didn't understand as well as you just put it to me, the kind of box he's in given the whole idea behind reconciliation is to listen, right? And to hear the concerns and the thing is that will just get added, continued to the mix on the whole relationship between Ottawa and the West. Well, and the box is worse, Peter, in a way, because when you listen and look at the facts, as I'm told, what becomes revealed is even more evidence that governments in Canada entered into agreements with Indigenous people with respect to resources and land, and then violated those agreements, and have never really been held to account for that.

And so listening carefully takes you to a place where you, you know, what's revealed is not that there was a, not simply that there was a sense of grievance because Indigenous people saw their land taken over, but there were actual agreements that were entered into by governments that were never formally abrogated but just not implemented and or lived up to and i think that's a reality that if i'm critical of the conservatives on this is that they don't want and the premiers as well is that they don't seem to want to acknowledge that that is a truth um and and i think the liberals are doing the right thing by saying we're never going to get to a place of full reconciliation unless we recognize certain truths like that that are documented that are apparent if you spend any time looking at them. And I know you spend a lot of time on these issues as well.

Last topic for today. This one surprised me. I didn't, I never, maybe I'm naive. I am naive. I'm naive on a lot of things, but clearly on this one, do you read Politico in the mornings? You know, the Politico playback. Yeah. It comes out of Ottawa, the Ottawa kind of notebook, playbook from Politico. I read it a couple of times a week. They clearly go to a lot of work to put together their daily online piece. There's something in there today that I hadn't realized.

I mean, I knew there was a parliamentary delegation in Taiwan right now. And you hear about parliamentary delegations going to different places not all the time, but quite often. There's a fair number every year. This one has 10 MPs from different parties in Taiwan. Here's what I was surprised about. Not what they were talking about.

It was kind of obvious. If you go to Taiwan these days, you know what you're going to end up talking about. But what surprised me was who paid for it. It's not Canada didn't pay for it. The political parties that these MPs represented didn't pay for it. It was paid for by the Taiwanese. They cover all the costs. And that's similar to a lot of these other parliamentary delegations

that travel overseas. Now, I don't know. Something doesn't feel right to me about that. Were you aware of that? On this specific one, no, but I was generally aware that parliamentary delegations are often funded by non-government, non-Canadian government organizations. And, you know, look, I don't know how to feel about it. It's always been that way. I remember when I worked for an MP in the late 70s, early 80s, it was that way. And I think the transparency about where the money is coming from is important. But I also think there's value in the exchanges.

So I don't have a strong opinion about it. I do think that there are going to be some situations where it's going to raise eyebrows and people are right to ask questions about it and wonder if there's enough accountability about what what gets done on junkets but um what i don't know why don't you elaborate a little bit on your thoughts well i mean the reason i perhaps i never would have even thought about it twice if the story we've been covering for the last month or so hasn't been sort of on my mind as well. Right. Which is influence, right? I got a letter last week from one of our listeners saying,

you know, you and Bruce and Chantel, you talk all the time about interference from China or wherever it may be. But what are we actually saying is being interfered with? Are they changing the ballots on election day? Are they preventing people from going to the polls? What are they doing? You can never really tell us what they're actually doing.

You just use this term interference all the time and influence. And the person's right. I mean mean i think there have been some occasions where some of that's been detailed perhaps not on this show but on others but um it made me think on this one like who's to gain from this sure the canadians well they learn a little bit about what taiwan's like. But why do the Taiwanese do it? They're trying to influence Canada, right? They're trying to influence those 10 parliamentarians and perhaps others who those 10 may talk to. And it's the same with visits to the Middle East that take place all the time

and elsewhere. So is that interference? Is that kind of influence peddling? Is that interference? I don't know. I think you, you might have struck on it. Maybe we don't have,

well, I'm sure the guidelines are clear to somebody on parliament Hill on, on, on how they do these things. Cause I, I'm sure they just don't know if they go on their own without somebody saying it's okay to do this but I think I'd like to know in a better way what the real rules are um on something

like that because there's kind of a whiff to this I don't something bothers me about it yeah well you know I I sort of believe that these exchanges do add some value. They expose our parliamentarians to more information. And, you know, for sure, the information that they're going to be exposed to in some instances is delivered with a sense of purpose and advocacy. And that's life. And we probably bring people from other legislators into our country and do the same thing. I know that I, when I was in my 20s, was invited to go with a bunch of young people who worked in politics on a trip to Germany. And I believe that, I don't have the details of it now, but I believe that the costs for that trip were probably paid by NATO.

And was that an attempt to influence young people working in politics on behalf of NATO? Sure, I think it was. But it was also obvious that that's what it was. They took us to meetings where the discussion about the Cold War and East-West relations was what we talked about, what we listened to, or presentations about why NATO existed and the nature of the risk. And we even went to checkpoint Charlie. We went through the corridor into Berlin when the wall was still up. So did that affect my thinking? Sure. Was it influence? Yes. Was it interference? I don't necessarily think so, especially if there are some rules around it, and there were. We went on a Department of Defense aircraft and landed in Lahr, well, I don't know if we should be accepting delegations into Russia right now,

given the nature of the conflict that we're in with Russia. But that's a separate question from whether or not exchanges are inherently an unhealthy thing in our system, provided that they're transparent, in my opinion, anyway. I think it's a good discussion. I think it's a good discussion. I think it's a good thing to be thinking through. I mean, I see the NATO comparison to a degree. I took one of those trips in the mid-'80s,

same kind of thing to Lahr and Baden, which are the two Canadian bases in Germany, because I'd been invited to speak in Lahr to the Canadian club there. And so I went on a D&D plane. And that all had to be cleared through the CBC ethics department, et cetera. But I guess this one, just in light of everything that's been happening lately, it's just made me kind of wonder about it.

Okay, glad we had the chance to talk about it and to talk about your excellent new research paper that's available online. The easiest way to get it is go to National News Watch on the web, and it's right there in one of the top red pieces for the last couple of days. Or you can go to Spark. What's the Spark address to get it? Sparkadvocacy.ca. Sparkadvocacy.ca.

All right, that's it for this day. Tomorrow we hear from you. It's your turn. And the random rancher returns after a two-week break over the Easter holidays. Friday, it's back to good talk with Chantel and Bruce. Friday will be interesting to talk about because we're on, I think, before Katie Telford takes the stand as a witness of one of the parliamentary committees that's looking into election interference or influence.

But I'm sure there's lots of other things to talk about because there always are. Thanks, Bruce. Good to talk to you. We'll talk to you again soon. You bet, Pete. Talk to you. All right. Thank you, too, for listening.

I'm Peter Mansbridge. Talk to you again in 24 hours.