The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - SMT - What Does It Say When Your Top Adviser Stabs You In The Back?

Episode Date: May 26, 2021

Boris Johnson's top strategist goes all in on condemning Johnson for his handling of the pandemic.  Could such an inside attack happen in Canada? Bruce Anderson joins the discussion on this and more.

And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. You're just moments away from the latest episode of The Bridge. It's Wednesday, that means smoke mirrors and the truth, with Bruce Anderson. Are you still trying to find ways to get into the world of crypto? Well, look no further. BitBuy is Canada's number one platform for buying and selling Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. BitBuy has launched a brand new app and website with a new look, lower fees, and new coins. Bitbuy is your one-stop shop to get involved and super easy to use for beginners. Visit bitbuy.ca or download the Bitbuy app. Enter referral code podcast20 to get $20 free And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. I'm in Toronto today.

Bruce Anderson is in Ottawa. Good morning. Welcome to you, my friend. Well, it's a pretty good morning, Peter, but I just don't see enough rain in the forecast. And I, you know, I need rain. I've become one of those people who doesn't sort of wake up every day go i hope it's sunny now i say we need a little rain yeah this is obviously

because of the alleged radishes in your field i i look i saw your edge you know look they were so beautiful i saw your tweets i saw your tweets and i thought they were great. The pictures were terrific. They look suspiciously like the radishes I'd seen that morning in Sobeys. And I'm sure you didn't just, like, pick up some at Sobeys. Is that a paid plug? Are we taking advertising now and we're going, like, I went to Sobeys and I didn't go to the shoppers? I'm sure you picked one of those places. You picked up some radishes. No, I didn't go to the shoppers. I'm sure you picked one of those places. You picked up some radishes.

No, I didn't. Those are homegrown. And what's more, Peter, is that we put some watermelon seeds in the ground because my grandson, Kit, he loves watermelon more than anything I've ever seen. It's just so fascinating to watch. So that's going to take about eight weeks and I'll report on the watermelon next, but I know that's not what we're here to talk about. No, but let me, let me finish this off because I think this is an important,

your radishes do look like they're doing very well, but this, this water situation, this is hard work, right? I mean, what do you do if it doesn't rain? I carry buckets of water, like big buckets of water from a creek up to a cistern and let them run down over the crops. But it would be a little easier if there was some rain, I'll be honest with you. You don't have an automatic irrigation system. You don't have one of those things with the big wheels that start rolling across the fields during the night. We're not that kind of operation. This is artisanal farming with a body that feels every hour of the farm work.

And is it daily? Every second day, probably go up tonight. I did manage to find a pump um which runs by battery it's one of the you know the kind of the new lithium battery devices that you can get now and i'm excited about it arrived yesterday and and i'm gonna try it out tonight and while you just set a timer on it and uh no it'll, it'll have to work while I'm there, but it'll pump the water from the Creek. And, uh, that's, it's going to be a little bit easier than me carrying bucket after bucket after bucket.

Well, I'll have to get some pictures of that because, uh, the pictures of you with the buckets. I mean, I think that that would make a definite shot and it would it would dispel the the conspiracy theories around the visit to the grocery store and it you know and i'd be the first one to support you yeah if i saw well you know what this is just going to be an ongoing thing and i'm just going to have to keep proving it to you and eventually our listeners are going to say peter you just got to kind of get with this program here that i got this is happening i got the listeners galore saying get them you've got them you've got them on the ropes you've got them on this radishes thing

no i'm very proud of you i think it's a terrific thing you're doing it's like you're painting you know you've found things that you're really good at. You know, after the disappointment of golf and picking the Habs, you've got painting and you've got radishes. Although I was... The pandemic has taught us nothing else. It's to find ways to occupy long stretches where we can't do what we used to do. That's right. That's right.

I swore I would not talk about hockey today because it's not a best of five series. It's a best of seven series. Yeah, it's painful. So no matter what happened yesterday and last night, it doesn't really matter because there's at least one more game to go, if not three more to go. All right, let's move on to a different topic. Thank you.

You know, I woke up early this morning as uh one does when they reach my age um and so i was kind of fishing around for something uh to either read or to watch or either on television or through the internet and i i found the hearings in London that are taking place around Dominic Cummings. Now, we have a very bright audience, and I'm sure most of them know who Dominic Cummings is. But for those who don't, I give you a snapshot. He was kind of the Svengali behind Brexit. I mean, he was the strategist and helped organize the winning side of the Brexit debate. Then he aligned himself with Boris Johnson when Bojo was running for the leadership of the British Conservative Party, and that worked out fine for him as well.

And then he was the chief strategist at 10 Downing Street for Boris Johnson, the prime minister. And things seemed to be going, you know, reasonably well for a while. And then the pandemic hit. And we're just finding out now what was going on in there because Dominic Cummings has left the prime minister's side. There was a bit of a scandal a little over a year ago when Dominic Cummings ignored his own rules around lockdown and started, you know, traveled across the country with his wife by car. And that caused all kinds of problems. Eventually, he ended up quitting, but also falling

offside with Boris Johnson. And now the truth, or at least Dominic Cummings' truth, is spilling out at these hearings in Westminster. And the stuff this morning was quite incredible. I mean, he's basically painted the government as a bunch of incompetence and the prime minister leading the way on that and stupid decisions being made and good advice being ignored and and an almost i don't care attitude when people were dying that was taking place uh so it's quite the performance and it's just the beginning and i'm

sure it's going to go on for a few days and and who knows how many different things will happen. Now, instead of going into the entrails of exactly what's being said, what I found fascinating that anything was being said, that you had somebody of that position, you don't get bigger next to the prime minister than the position that Dominic Cummings held. and that he is saying everything, at least his version of everything, in front of MPs is quite something. Try to imagine it here, if that was going on, say in the midst of any number of different issues, that the most senior advisor to the Prime Minister, say in Ottawa, went before a hearing and spilled everything.

If there was something to spill. Or somebody close to Doug Ford or Jason Kenney or one of the premiers did the same thing. We don't tend to see that happen here. Usually in North America, what happens is somebody will write a book, especially in the States. One of those senior players will write a book eventually. They won't say anything in public until the book comes out so they can make a few bucks on it.

And people treat it not with the same kind of energy, I think, that the parliamentary investigations would treat it not with the same kind of energy, I think, that the parliamentary investigations would treat it. Nevertheless, I found this quite interesting. And I'm wondering, I know you've had a chance to read at least some of what Cummings said, but the very fact that he's saying anything, I found fascinating. I'm just wondering what your take is on it yeah i i think i had a several reactions to it peter i i'm glad that you wanted to talk about it

and um actually drew it to my attention so i could kind of dig into it a little bit i first of all this is obviously somebody who's very skilled at using language to draw attention. Very colorful term. Talks about it being crackers that Boris Johnson is prime minister. Says things like there are literally thousands of people who would be better leaders than Jeremy Corbyn or Boris Johnson. He doesn't mince words. He uses words and phrases in a very powerful way. He knows how to attract attention. Now, I don't know if that's him in his natural setting or if

it's him as a student of how to draw attention to what he wants to draw attention to. But either way, he is using the kind of phrasing and language and words that really cut through the clutter in a way that often people talking about their life in politics doesn't. People sometimes use very cautious language or equivocate a lot. And so this is really quite different on that level. And I found it all the more fascinating for that. I think that obviously when we think about COVID, it is going to be necessary for jurisdictions to look back at what they've done and to decide what could have

or should have been done better. So I think it's a necessary function to have this retrospective. I'm not sure that entertaining and interesting as it is, I'm not sure exactly what to make of it at this particular point in time. There's always the risk that if we kind of caution people against doing this kind of thing, that we're saying, we don't want whistleblowing, we don't want transparency, we don't want honesty, we just want to kind of coddle the status quo and the people who are in charge. And that's the wrong setting. On the other hand, the risk is maybe this guy has a score to settle.

Maybe what he's really trying to do is use the opportunity of the tremendous interest in the pandemic to get some kind of vengeance. And I don't know that that's the case. And everything that he said doesn't sound like that. But I think we just have to be kind of open to the idea that if we decided that this was a good precedent, then you wouldn't be terribly obvious about it. You'd be a little bit more like this. You'd be that person saying, I made a lot of mistakes. I'm sorry for the mistakes that I made. And by the way, everybody else made massive mistakes too. And here's a list of 15 or 20 of them.

So I think it's both necessary, a little bit worrying or terrifying almost from the standpoint of if this becomes a precedent that exists within political formations that are in government, that people sit across each other in meetings and wonder, are you going to be the next Dominic Cummings? Should I really say what's on my mind? Should we debate ideas in a really open way? Or are you somehow making notes and this is going to come back to haunt me? I think there is a worry on some level about a chill that could set in to the way that politics is conducted. There already is in terms of emails and the transmission of messages and

whether or not people want to put things on any kind of record or whether they just feel better not doing that. And of course, that has its own negative consequences for our system. So fascinating, but a little bit worrying too. Let me take on the issue of whether or not he has a score to settle. And I don't know he very well may. And if he does, he seems to be trying to settle a score with Boris Johnson because Johnson looks incredibly weak and out of touch and incompetent on the decision-making and the early going. If that's the case, he may have picked the wrong timing

because the timing, if he was going to nail Johnson, was a year ago. It may not be now because right now Boris Johnson is doing extremely well in public, well, extremely well may be an overstatement, but he's doing well in public opinion in Britain. The opposition is in disarray. He's doing well uh in public opinion in britain um the opposition is in disarray he's doing well they seem to have um you know bottomed out on on uh covet and are on the on the upswing and you know i i watched the bbc news i was saying yesterday i watched the BBC News last night or I guess two nights ago, and their main 10 o'clock at night newscast, COVID wasn't even mentioned until 20 after the hour.

It was like it was a non-story. It was quite something. They've moved away from it. And so in that sense, it would be kind of like attacking Churchill in 1941 about how he'd handled Norway as the secretary of the admiralty in April of 1940 before he became prime minister, at which time he suddenly became this hero among the British people for the way he conducted things during 1940. Norway had been a disaster, and you can certainly place it at his feet,

but it would be a little late to be criticizing him for it a year later after what had happened. So I don't know. If the target, if there was a target, is Boris Johnson, his timing may have been off. On the issue, I agree with you. It does give pause to how you want to conduct yourself with your closest associates.

But at the same time, there is this issue of accountability. When I was watching comics this morning, I was trying when i was watching uh comics this morning i was trying to think has there been anything like this have we seen anything like this in canada where somebody stepped so clearly away uh from the leader they were a senior advisor to and i couldn't think of anything like that i mean mean, you know, it would be kind of like during the Harper years if Nigel Wright had stepped in front of the cameras and talked about everything that he perceived that had gone wrong during the Duffy affair.

Or Jerry Butts. I mean, Jerry Butts appeared before an inquiry, but it wasn't a condemnation of of trudeau and and quite quite possibly there is no condemnation condemnation of trudeau on that issue but nevertheless it would be like if in fact he had appeared before an inquiry and uh you know and sort of rate the prime minister over the coals yeah i don't you know i don't recall anything. No, I don't either. I don't either. Look, I think that there's no way effectively to say you can't come into one of these jobs unless you provide a complete guarantee that you will never provide information to the public about this. I mean, people can try and there's non-disclosure agreements of one sort or another, and there's obviously secrets acts and that sort of thing. But those only provide limited protection for anybody relative to somebody saying,

I just want to talk about the way that I saw things evolve and the judgments that I saw being made and what my opinion is of them, which is what Dominic Cummings is doing. And on the one hand, I can really see that that has to be the way that it is, that we need to have that kind of off-ramp to protect the public interest so that somebody feels that they can tell those kinds of stories. At the same time, I can see a real perplexing situation where if the question is, will we get better decisions and better discussions of options within government if there are too many of these kinds of situations, I can worry that we won't. And in fact, some of Dominic Cummings' own comments

were that at times he was afraid to speak up about something because the prevailing wisdom was this is not going to be a real problem. And then he didn't know if he would sound like he was panicking if he talked about it. And I think that's a very interesting and rational dynamic. And I'm not sure it's a thing that we need to look upon as a failing of our system, but rather the normal dynamic that exists. But he said a couple of things that I thought, wow, that's really interesting and a broader point that we need to reflect on. He said he himself should not have had the power that he had, that he had not accomplished anything in his life that would have prepared him to be competent at executing that power in that situation.

And I found that really interesting because we do live in a time where people can be senior in politics as organizers, as political advisors, as political strategists, and then they find themselves in a situation where they're expected to make really, really, really important decisions, colossally important decisions that affect lives, that affect the future of the world potentially. And we don't really have a mechanism that kind of stops and says, wait, is that the person who should have the most influence at this point in time? And so he said that about himself.

And he also said it about the two leaders who who duked it out in that last election, Corbyn and Johnson. And it's a separate but related point. But it caught my attention because we do sometimes wonder whether the way that we pick leaders in our political parties produces always the best outcome. Is it a great vetting system? The United States got Donald Trump. I don't think that it a great vetting system? The United States got Donald Trump. I don't think that's a great vetting system. I don't think Boris Johnson was a great choice. I think that the Conservatives in the race before the one that Aaron O'Toole ran ended up with a choice between Andrew Scheer and Max Bernier.

And they had better candidates. And so I do worry that we were somehow finding ourselves in a situation where the choice of leaders of parties has become less a good betting process for the absolute best quality people to run. And the role of political advisors has ended up finding them in situations where they've got more power than maybe is rational, given the range and the depth of their experience. And so then we have to rely on them being, you know, good people who know where the limits of their competencies lie and turn to experts and make sure that they're not having more political influence than is appropriate in the circumstance. Yeah, you know, it often leads to that discussion that you and I have had before. And, you know, sometimes we agree, sometimes we disagree on it.

But the fact that the coverage of politics, not just in this country, but in most countries, has got to the point where a lot of good people who maybe 40 years ago would have run just say, you know what, I don't need this. I don't need this kind of coverage. I don't need this continuing sort of picking away at my family life and my past and it goes beyond, you know, proper vetting. And whether or not that has led to some of this. But, you know, listen, I think it's a good discussion.

I think it's one of those ones we should have. If the Dominic Cummings story interests you, and I hope it does, because there's a lot about this guy that you may be able to draw parallels in, in your own look at politics, whether it's federal, provincial, municipal. There's a good film out there in 2019. I think it was a TV movie, but it was called simply Brexit. And it involved one of my favorite actors and i know he's a big you're a big fan of his as well and that's benedict cumberbatch who who played dominic cummings in the movie and it'll give you and it backs up your argument about that he claims hey i wasn't ready for this job i wasn't the proper person for it

because you watch how you assume the position of like incredible power during the Brexit campaign basically out of nowhere it's quite something to watch and so it's it's not only an informative movie it's an entertaining one as well so if you get a chance you Yeah, I do remember seeing it or at least parts of it. And I found it was interesting and rare that, you know, such a pretty close approximation of how politics kind of works and on a serious, serious issue. The last thing I want to say, I know know peter we're going to move on but um i remember and i don't remember the specific subject but i remember that we were um doing the panel with chantal that we used to do before a good talk uh forget the name of it but um we did it together for a few years and uh there was one moment where. Oh, that show. That show.

We, the question was asked, maybe you weren't on this, maybe it was a guest host of it, but the question was asked, it was about some military intervention. Should we go to war or join this military intervention? And I remember thinking, holy cow, this has gone way too far, this idea of pundits as experts. Like, what the hell would we know about whether we should go and join a military intervention? And there's something really wrong that the question exists. And I wasn't finding fault with whoever asked it, whether it was you or somebody else.

It was more that it seemed kind of natural to ask pundits something like that for which we have absolutely no real, and I'm sure Andrew Coyne would say, well, I know, I know the right answer. I'll have an opinion for you. But I didn't feel comfortable with it. And I sort of recall Chantal kind of going, yeah, no, I know, I know the right answer. I'll have an opinion for you. But I didn't feel comfortable with it. And I sort of recall Chantal kind of going, yeah, no, that's not that's above our pay grade. And so this separation of commentary about political strategy from, you know, kind of learned and experienced knowledge about complex policy choices,

that has gotten so blurred in the last several years. I really hope that one of the things that people take away from how Cummings is talking about his situation is these are life and death situations. And being a political organizer doesn't equip you with the skills or the knowledge to make those decisions in every instance. Yeah, it wasn't me. I would never have asked a question like that. Of course not. That's what I remember the mid starting to tell that story that it couldn't have been you. Okay, we'll take a quick break and we come back in our remaining minutes. I want to touch on where we are on the uh on the covet story in canada specifically where we are on uh on vaccines because can we talk about aaron o'toole getting a beer though we have to find a minute for that

aaron o'toole getting a beer yeah he went for a run and his wife, you know, handed him a beer after the run. And a lot of people were talking about it. And I have things to say because that is within my pay grade to talk about something like that. And I have an opinion that probably will be unpopular with some people. No, really? Maybe. Well, I can hardly wait to hear it. So we'll do it as soon as we come back

all right we're back with um smoke mirrors and the truth wednesday midweek, hump day. Bruce is in Ottawa. I'm in Toronto. And Bruce has pleaded for floor time on the critical issue of Aaron O'Toole asking for a beer after he went for a run. This is the thing. My point is really about Twitter and politics on Twitter and how silly it gets sometimes. So here's Aaron O'Toole. He posts a picture of himself. You know,

looks like he just finished a run, a little bit of sweat on him. And he's holding a can of beer and he says, just after my run, Rebecca, that's his wife, you know, brought me a cold one. And, well, of course, a lot of people went kind of bananas about that. They thought that he was sort of characterizing his wife as some 1950s stereotype of a wife whose job it was to fetch him a cold beer after he'd done that kind of manly exercise thing and and and uh one of the country's uh kind of leading journalists actually put the question out there on twitter and said well i'd like comments about this what do people think about this isn't the political messaging you know so important that you've got to be really careful how you do this. And did he cross a line?

And I remember thinking this is, you know, in the far off future, when Twitter is long gone and replaced by whatever it is that's going to replace it, someday people are going to go, well, here's the kind of thing that used to happen with this crazy platform that occasionally is very valuable because it keeps us informed about certain things, but also occasionally shows us just how bananas we can be as individuals. Because I looked at it and thought, well, if there was everything else that Aaron O'Toole was doing that made me think that he had a 1950s style mentality towards women, then I suppose I could come to the conclusion that this

was a, he didn't even think about it because he just thinks it's natural that your wife should bring you a beer after and somebody should take a picture and you should put it on Twitter. But there's nothing about him that kind of comes off to me like that. And so I looked at it and I thought, everybody just calm down here this guy is just you know it's just a nice moment it's a little bit genuine and um and you know he needs to do things that are less about who goes terrible and so that was one of those things and so good for him I thought and then um and then he had the last laugh I, on Sunday because he posted a picture of himself bringing his wife on a silver tray a glass of rosé. Basically just to kind of, I think, mock those who were kind of having at him.

And I thought, good on him. And a reminder to the rest of us to not take everything so seriously. And he's in that, say, you know, I'm not going to get into this. I'm going to leave you out there on your raft dealing with it yourself. But I will say this for Aaron O'Toole. He is at that point in the stage of many political leaders where there's almost nothing he can do that's seen as right,

that somebody doesn't take him to task for. You get in those positions. I remember well Joe Clark in 78, 79. It seemed every week there was something. And they were these kind of, in some ways, seen by many as stupid little things, you know. He lost his luggage on a plane, like it's never happened to any of us. You know, he turned too sharply,

walking around a guard of honor in Israel and almost bayoneted himself. But he didn't bayonet himself, right? But it still became a front page story. So it seemed like one thing after another, that's the kind of coverage he got leading up to the election, which he then won. So you never know with these things, right? You never know with these things.

That's right. You got to be careful. One thing we do know is that if it happens on Twitter, it doesn't necessarily happen in the rest of the country. There's a lot of people who miss everything that happens on Twitter. And there's a lot of people in politics who think everybody's paying attention to everything that happens on Twitter. And that's true in journalism, too, I think. think yes it's very true in journalism it's very true in

journalism who are absorbed by their own tweets in some cases which is a whole nother issue um okay um in our remaining moments you know both you and I have had first dose AstraZeneca. And as of the moment we're recording this, it's unclear about, in spite of it being almost a week ago now that the Ontario government told everybody you'd be getting your

second doses now. It's okay to have second doses. Then we have the supplies. We still have no idea. And the drugstores that gave us the first doses, maybe that'll be different today. Let's hope so. But as of last night, they don't know. Nobody's given them any supplies.

They don't know when and if we're going to get these second doses. It's almost as if, you know, everybody took the weekend off. You know, it's a situation is, once again, around this issue, seemingly chaotic. A lot of things are going right right now, a lot of them, and it's good. But little things like this disrupt the train, make people wonder what the hell is going on. Yeah, yeah.

Because as good as things are going, a first dose is just a first dose. And as Dr. Barrett, Dr. Lisa Barrett said to me the other day, you know, if you only had one dose, stop acting like you've had two. Keep in mind where the situation is and what still needs to be accomplished before you can consider yourself fully vaccinated. Yeah, yeah. I mean, look, Peter, I feel the same way about this. And I would even add that from the moment that the provincial governments that hit the pause on AstraZeneca as a first dose did that, which goes back weeks now, they had to know that there might come a point at which they would say, it's going to be okay to give these people who had the first dose, their second dose of AstraZeneca. And so if you knew that weeks ago, then why not have a plan in place for when you make that

decision that those doses, which now expire some of them in five days, ship right away. So all of that time, not just the week that you're talking about, which I agree kind of raises the question, because as soon as I heard the news, I thought, well, I should call the pharmacy that I went to, and they'll tell me that they'll have some next week, and I'll drive to Kingston, and I'll get that second shot. And I called them, and they were like, we have no idea. And I called them the next day and we have no idea. And I called them the next day and they said, don't keep calling us.

But I was really struck by the fact that that weeks had gone by with no plan for a contingency of this sort, even though the only choices that they were faced with then were, are we going to throw these doses out or are we going to give them? And so they knew that they weren't really going to throw them out. They should have been planning for this eventuality now. And, you know, I think especially, you know, I know that we've got a lot of listeners in places other than Ontario, but especially I think in Ontario, where you've got this very active business lobby that is saying, open up, open up, open up, open up. We want a plan to open up the economy. And you've got the provincial government that has said,

oh, the problem is we don't have enough doses. And there's too many people coming across the border. Well, you know, there are a lot of doses coming in. And there aren't that many people coming in across the border. And the one thing that you do have control of is you've got doses, get them into arms. And so they've been doing a better job of it. But this AstraZeneca thing has been a complete botch up so far. And I say that expecting that I'm going to get a note today that says you can go to Kingston tomorrow and get that shot.

And I'm going to feel like why did they have to add that level of stress and chaos, to use your word, to something that was starting to go better from a logistics and a management standpoint? The irony, of course, once again this year, that the majority, well, I don't know if it's the majority, but an awful lot of the people who are coming across the border are Canadians. They're snowbirds coming home from a winter in the south. Now, the difference between this year and last year is last year when they came back,

in many cases, the researchers claim they brought with them covid and that was a huge problem because they didn't they didn't abide by the quarantines that had been put in place and that caused problem this year the irony is most of these snowbirds are coming back vaccinated, double vaccinated, like they've had both their vaccinations. They're coming back to Canada in a fashion better off than they would have been if they'd stayed here in many cases, not in all cases, but in many cases. So it's, you know.

Yeah. I don't know. I think this brings us back, you know, as a final word today to the Dominic Cummings situation, because we may not have any Dominic Cummings, but I do know, and I feel pretty confident saying this, that in the period between now and a year from now or two years from now, we're going to hear a lot about what was going on inside the various decision-making circles in the government and the senior public services across the country. Who did things right? Who didn't do things right,

and what the accountability is for that. I think they're just kind of lining up, getting ready for the kind of inquiries that will take place and should take place. I mean, listen, here's where I'll give them all credit. Nobody ran for office thinking they were going to have to deal in their lifetime with a pandemic. So as you said many times, this was a new game in town. Nobody knew what the process was. There was no book there telling them to do this, do this, do that. And not surprisingly, there would have been mistakes made. So you got to go through that process to find out what the

mistakes were, how to prevent them, because there will be a next time. And it may not be 100 years down the road this time. It may be a lot sooner, given the kind of world we live in. Anyway, that's my last thought. And if you have one, go for it. Yeah, I do on that. And I think the point is well taken. I think that we do, we do, we will want to know more about what happened and why and how and that sort of thing.

And I think that most for most voters, the thing that they'll want to know is, what were the wrong decisions that were made? And were they made for the wrong reasons? Or was there good faith, but just a bad choice made sometimes? And I think most people in Canada generally use that good faith as the North Star. You can make a mistake, but if you're making it with the right intention, we're going to be okay in the end, in terms of the relationship between the politician and that voter. Not in every instance, but mostly that's the thing. Where I'm

kind of wondering is the media, as they do their own version of an inquiry, which they do all the time, and that should be part of their role. They tend to look at things a little bit differently. They tend to look at the world and say, well, you made this decision. Why didn't you make the more perfect decision with retrospect? Right. As opposed to why did you make this decision perfect decision with retrospect, right? As opposed to why did you make this decision given what you knew then? And the reason for that former frame is basically because it kind of feels more fun or exciting to write a story about how politicians fell short of perfect. And I would say that whether or not there were conservatives or new Democrats

or Green Party or liberal politicians in power, it somehow has become the kind of the notion in journalism that you can write everything from the standpoint of, why wasn't it perfect? Here's what perfect would have looked like, and you didn't get to perfect. Whereas everybody that I know who's been involved in politics knows that it's, at the end of the day, just a bunch of human beings trying to deal with rapidly evolving situations, the best information available, different chemistry, good or bad communications, and make some choices. And so I'm interested in what was decided, when it was decided and why it was decided. I'm less interested in how far short of perfect did it fall? Because I don't think anybody got perfect or even close to perfect in the pandemic. And I don't think it's reasonable to expect that they could. Okay. Well, on that note, we're going to expect that they could. Okay.

Well, on that note, we're going to wrap it up for this week. A good smoke mirrors on the truth. Some interesting things to talk about. And as always, great to hear from Bruce. Let's get some rain too. Yeah, you get your rain. And you tell me when they're ready to eat. I'll be there. All all right with that second dose of

astrazeneca that's right you got it okay all right peter great to talk to you again yep thanks bruce and thank you all for listening we'll be back uh tomorrow with the regular edition of the bridge friday of course is smoke mirrors or no fr is the weekend special. And if you've got thoughts, I've already got some from some of you already from earlier in the week about the work situation and where they want to go back to the office or stay at home to work. Some interesting thoughts on that. Plus, you may have thoughts on what we just discussed today on SMT. All right, I'm Peter Mansbridge.

This has been The Bridge, Smoke Mirrors and the Truth for Wednesday. Thanks for listening. We'll talk to you again in 24 hours.