The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - SMT - When Overconfidence Backfires

Episode Date: January 4, 2023

Bruce Anderson has his take on the Kevin McCarthy mess in the United States. Far from the lock he thought it was McCarthy may have blown his chance to be Speaker, and Bruce sees lessons for all in what's happening.  Also looking ahead to the 2023 challenges for each of Canada's three main national parties.

And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. You are just moments away from the latest episode of The Bridge. It's Wednesday, first Wednesday of 2023. That means smoke, mirrors, and the truth with Bruce Anderson. All right then. You know, one of the things, Mr. Anderson, that I admire most about you is your strategic analysis. It's been built over years. It's been built over decades of being in the thick of all kinds of big decisions, whether they're political or business. You know, you understand how things work. You advise people at the center of the action.

I smell a rat. Where is this coming from? No, no, no. This question's been puzzling me for the last couple of days, and I thought I would ask you for advice on this, because this is the kind of thing you do. You give advice, right? The doctor's in.

The doctor's in. The doctor's in. Okay. So here's the story. You want a job. You cherish this thought of being in this particular job, and you have for years, if not decades. It's been a long time. You've wanted this job.

This job more than any other job. And you've done all you can. You've sucked up. You've done your stuff. You've played your cards right to get in the position to get that job. And you're approaching the moment where the final decision on that job is going to take place. And you clearly got the edge over anybody else for that job.

But you think, you know what, maybe I can just do one more thing to push it over the top. Just give myself the edge. Show confidence. Show the people who will make this decision that, you know what? I'm so confident I'm going to get this job that I'm just going to show a little edge, a little forethought. I'm going to be so ready to do this job that I'm not going to be in the job when they announce that I'm the winner. So I pack up the, you know, those kind of blue boxes that they have of all your materials, all your office stuff, and I move it the night before the final decision is going to be made, I move all that stuff into what would be my new office.

So here's my question. You might think, oh, that's a dumb move. You shouldn't do that. Or you might think, hey, that guy's really showing that he knows where things are going, he wants to look confident, and he's going to just do this, and it's the right thing to do. So here you are. You're the strategic analysis guy. Good thing, bad thing i don't know it's a good question peter i think the the reality is that probably he thought that the best argument for him in terms of the remaining holdout republican

congress people was the idea that he was the inevitable winner. Even though he probably knew that he didn't, well, he would have known that he didn't have the votes on the first ballot. He might not have known that he wouldn't have had the votes on the second and the third. And I guess it was four. No, just three yesterday. Fourth one. In fact, the fourth one is just starting as we go to air here on SiriusXM. Right. So it's going to be who knows how long it's going to be. And just in case anybody's confused, the question we pose is really all about Kevin McCarthy, who wants to be Speaker and has wanted for years to be Speaker of the Republican Party.

He's the guy who moved all his stuff into his office the night before the vote. It looked pretty bad in retrospect. It might not have been that they had that many choices. I mean, I think one of the things about that role is that it's always kind of impressed me and amazed me a little bit how much power that role has and how much less visible the holder of that office can be to the public in terms of what they do to get that job, in terms of how they flex their power. We've had more prominence for Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell in the last few years, but relatively speaking, they have quite a lot of power and they don't go through the same kind of stress testing and visibility process that a presidential candidate would have. And some of them have arrived in those jobs by virtue of being popular-ish with the external

public, but others have really just kind of worked the corridors corridors uh lyndon johnson famously uh he you know might not have ever become president because he didn't have that kind of external visibility but he had a lot of power and most of what he accumulated as power he accumulated through the force of his personality and his kind of determination to either cajole and charm or threaten and bully. And so it's kind of a mysterious set of ingredients that go into getting that job. And a lot of it seems to revolve around the idea of inevitability, that you're in a position in the ascendancy, in the party structure, and that you're the logical next

person to take that job. And I think that we're in a different era now. And I think that the idea of inevitability doesn't work as well if you've just had a few bad outings as a party, which the Republicans have had. And it especially doesn't work that well for McCarthy if the kind of key dividing point is Donald Trump. Do you like him or do you not like him within the Republican Party? And if you've been on both sides of that question more than once so that people don't know if you're going to solve the Trump problem or you're going

to solve the anti-Trump problem. And I think McCarthy didn't know going into yesterday what he was really about in terms of the answer to that question. And so pushing his boxes around into the new office looked like the act of the inevitable winner. And maybe that was the best shot he had, but it doesn't look like it's worked out so well so far. Yeah, it's hard to say where this one's going to end up. It could go on for, well, it could go on for hours or it could go on for days or as history has shown us, I mean, 100-year-old history, It could go on for weeks or even months. Or a bunch of them could have got drunk last night and decided what they were going to do today and solve it today. That's possible.

They don't even need to get drunk to do that. No, but it might have happened, I think. Many of them look like they sure wanted a drink after what had gone on yesterday. But, you know, you're quite right. This position is kind of underestimated by the people at large. You tend to forget how important Speaker of the House of Representatives is in the U.S. power structure. I mean, they're, after the President and the Vice

President, the Speaker of the House is next in line for the presidency. I mean, if something awful happened to the first two, bingo, that next person is there. But meanwhile, it's not a bad job to have. You have basically all the trappings of power. You've got the Secret Service, you've got the limos, you've got all of that stuff. So it's a very powerful position, and you decide, and that's been part of the story,

you decide as Speaker of the House who's going to be on all the various committees, and there are lots of them, lots of committees in the U.S. Congress. You decide not only who's going to be on the committee, but who's going to chair the committees. And so that's been part of the bargaining here too, is apparently the lineup at McCarthy's door in the last few weeks with those who were willing to commit was all based on which committee they were going to get. So it's really quite an important position. But the fact this hasn't happened in a century where a speaker has been brought forward and nominated

and then immediately got the job, there's no doubt it tells us something about where things stand in the Republican Party right now, but it also kind of tells us something about where things stand in the Republican Party right now. But it also kind of tells us about the system, the American political system, for all the good things that it has. At times like this, you can kind of be glad that it's not our system. It's very different the way we do things in our democracy and make key decisions like this one of a position of real clout and real power.

Yeah, yeah. I think there is a couple of new things. There are a couple of new things that are going on as well, Peter. And I was kind of watching a fair bit of commentary yesterday and thinking about this more last night. Two things that stood out for me, there have always been divisions within the left, what's largely called the left, and within what's largely called the right. And that's true in Canada, too. In the left, we have new Democrats and we have liberals. And then the right, we've got conservatives and we've had the Maverick Party

and the Reform Party and the Canadian Alliance and blue liberals and blue liberals. And so they, you know, their two party system sometimes makes it a little harder to discern those kind of crevices within their coalition. But in recent years, for example, with Bernie Sanders on the Democrat side and AOC and on the Republican side, we've seen a fair bit of of evidence of splintering. And so we're a little bit more conscious of it now. And I do think that one of the things that's changed is the influence of Donald Trump, because Donald Trump kind of disrupted the idea of the role of a leader

relative to the ideological point of view of the party. He essentially said, it doesn't matter what ideas I champion. It matters only that I champion them. Right. And I remember when he was running for the nomination and you and I would talk about it and I was quite skeptical that he was going to win that nomination and I was skeptical that he was going to win the election. And it was mostly because I thought, well, he's

not really a Republican. And he sort of explained that to Republican voters, that he wasn't always a Republican and that it didn't really matter what his positions were, any kind of feigned being interested in religion, even though we knew that it was a pretty religious party, or at least that there was a significant part of the Republican Party that was very religious. He didn't carry any of that Republican orthodoxy. And he created in his wake, maybe it's not his wake, maybe it still exists. So calling it a wake is presuming that he's done and that's not right but he created a point of view in the party which is untethered to historical republicanism it doesn't have much relationship with a philosophical point of view about the role of government or the role of america in the world

or you know other than maybe lower taxes. And I think that's been quite disrupted because he's created... Or no taxes. Pardon? It's not just lower taxes. It's no taxes. No taxes. That's right. So I think he's created a real challenge in his party where it's part of what we were watching yesterday, which is that you have some people who are saying, well, we're kind of true blue Republicans and others saying we're Trump people and MAGA people. And are you not you're not MAGA enough? And it was chaotic know that in the past we've had the influence of an individual who's basically said, all y'all's kind of ideas about public policy, that's not that relevant.

It's personality and the cult of personality that matters. And then the second thing, and I'd love to, I think this relates to, your point about our system is different. And I think it is. And I think this is maybe something that we might see more of in Canada, but I don't know if we should want it, is that the members of the House seem to want more sovereignty. So the idea of going into McCarthy's office and trying to work out deals where, you know, I'll support you and I'll get my three friends to support you if you agree to give me this role on this committee. I think that's there. But I think that there's more hesitancy on the part of those members to agree in perpetuity to always support

that leadership cadre, that instead that what they want to do is be free agents. They want to be able to get that appointment. But six months from now, they also want to be able to say, I need something else. I want you to bend to my will on something else. Whereas in the past, that commitment to the party being unified, at least externally, might have been stronger than it is right now. And some of that is an impact of Trump, but some of it is also the idea in the era of the social media. A lot of these people have big followings, and big followings mean you've got a big platform, you've got a share of voice that's bigger than it would have been before, You can raise more money. And we all know that they need to raise a lot of money. These folks are going to race every couple of years.

And so that's different, too. And I don't know if we're going to see that kind of breakdown on the on the Democratic side heading into the next presidential election. But it isn't just the kind of thing that can affect Republicans. It can affect people on the left, too. You know, one thing, and it's my last comment on this subject, but I'd be interested to see what you think. Part of the focus on the Republican Party in the States by the media in general over the last couple of years has been the so-called whack jobs. Some of the members of the Republican Party who said conspiratorial things, crazy things, tinfoil hat things, that have become kind of a joke

for the Republican Party. And yet, as you just mentioned, they gather support out there. They have not insignificant numbers who are supporting them. But what I noticed yesterday, and it's rare that we see this, because the focus was on what the Republicans were doing, was that the media, and I was flipping around channels, the media was interviewing more Republicans than they normally do. And that's not just because they don't want to,

it's because Republicans won't go on most of the mainstream news channels. But they were yesterday. And what I found interesting was they weren't all the, you know, Gateses and what's her name, Marjorie Taylor Greene. Taylor Greene, yeah. There were some, you know, reasonable people giving reasonable arguments about the future and the changing nature of politics in their country and making some of the points that you just did.

And I thought that was, I don't know whether refreshing is the right word, but it was nice to see a different kind of take from inside that party than we've been watching for the last couple of years. I think that's a really interesting point. And I'm glad that I'm really looking forward to talking with Chantal on Friday. But I'm going to say something right now that I'm happy to be saying just to you. Because she's going to say, no, Bruce is wrong. Chantal has strong views about this.

And we both know that we love to hear Chantal's strong views. But I'm just going to say this to you now. And if it needs to come up another time, then we can, but it has to do with how much the media build up, uh, these really, um, these political curiosities, uh, the Gates, the Marjorie Taylor Greene's, the Lorraine Boebert's versus how much that's on them. I don't really, you know, there's a lot of people that try to get a share of voice and try to do inflammatory things. They don't all succeed in getting as much share of voice as some of these folks have. And I think some of that is some in the news media like that content. They see what it does

when they have those clips of those people. They go, I'm not going to go and try to find somebody who's going to use a whole bunch of, you know, 50 cent words and they're going to shilly shally around an issue. And it's going to be a little bit unclear where they're coming from because that's terrible content. Those are bad pictures, to use the word that you've often explained to me, it can be really important, especially in TV news. So I don't know who, you know, it's a chicken and egg situation, who made Marjorie Taylor Greene a national political figure. But it wasn't only Marjorie Taylor Greene, I guess is my point. And if I had to look somewhere else to point a finger, it might be into the press core. But I'm just going to leave that there. I don't know how you feel about that. Well, I do feel that they've also, I think the media has

some responsibility for that, obviously. But I think so does the republicans themselves they've allowed her and others like her uh to become the symbols of their party yes not necessarily the spokespeople but certainly the symbols those are the names that come to mind when it's probably unfair i mean there are 200 and whatever it is 20 republicans in the congress another 49 in the senate and you know you could walk 95 of those people past the camera and nobody would know who they were yeah yeah no look i think trump to some degree created this phenomena of be as outrageous as you can imagine being, and you're going to become well-known and maybe even popular and certainly popular on Fox News and Newsmax and, you know, those channels that kind of reach that base. But I do think that there are a lot of thoughtful people in the Republican Party,

and I think there's a similar set of questions being asked within the conservative movement in Canada. And that has to do with the role of some of these issues in the party and the impact in terms of the demographic patterns of voting. I think I shared with you something the other day that the Financial Times had put out. It had done an analysis of the proportion of votes that went to conservative parties, the conservative party in the UK and the Republican Party in the United States, and how that tended to show that over time, the older somebody got, the more likely they were to vote conservative or Republican. And what that analysis showed is that among millennials who are now more populous than baby boomers, that pattern is broken. That millennials, as they age, are not becoming more inclined to vote for those parties.

And I think a lot of that has to do with those parties having become more populist, white and right, and less interested in climate change and diversity and equality, because that demographic, that younger demographic is very interested in all three of those issues and is much more diverse by its nature. So I think this is a huge challenge for the Republican Party, that the role of Trump and the Marjorie Taylor Greene's and the Lorraine Bobberts has sort of occluded. But I think it's at the heart of what a lot of Republicans who are probably sitting in that conference today are thinking about, which is when are we going to break our addiction to this kind of rage farming and fame seeking and instead kind of focus on developing an agenda that has a chance of not just eroding our party's support,

but building it up. And I think that's a similar challenge for conservative parties in Canada and in the UK and other places too. All right, we're going to leave it at that. We're running a little longer than I thought it was going to with that little simple question about what would the analysts say. But I'm glad we had a good discussion. I want to refocus to Canada and briefly look ahead

to the year ahead and what each party has at stake. But first of all, this quick break. break and welcome back peter mansbridge here in toronto bruce anderson is in ottawa you're listening to the bridge the wednesday smoke mirrors and the truth edition uh 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 watch us on You Channel. You Channel. On YouTube. Our channel on YouTube. And, I mean, really, how much more fun could you possibly have

than watching two old guys sitting in their offices in their homes babbling away about politics, whether it's Canadian or American. We focus Canadian here. I've got that little golf trophy back there. I think that's one that I won off you. And will we talk about that today too? Maybe you don't have any.

You just have like. No, I don't keep my golf trophies in this room. They're in my trophy room. Separate room. Okay're in my trophy room. Separate room. Okay. Fair enough. Okay. It's a very small room.

Just small. Small room. All right. Good. Okay. All right. So Canadian politics. Yeah.

Okay. Let's, I don't want to rush you, but we went so long in that first segment. What I want to do is, in terms of the three traditional main parties, Liberals, Conservatives, NDP, what each has at stake in the year ahead, what they have to accomplish in the year ahead. So let's start from the party that's least represented in the House of Commons first. That's the NDP. What do they have to do? What does Jagmeet Singh have to do? So let's start from the party that's least represented in the House of Commons first. That's the NDP. What do they have to do?

What does Jagmeet Singh have to do in this year ahead? I think his biggest challenge is getting share of voice. You know, his natural inclination, I think, would be to say things that sound like the Liberal Party has not been progressive enough. But for a lot of voters, the Liberal Party has been progressive enough, including for a lot of progressive voters. Second thing that a leader in his situation could conceivably do is criticize Trudeau personally. And I think that's less plausible now. You know, Jagmeet Singh has been relatively popular. If we just look at the surface of

public opinion, I don't know that there's been a lot of sense of deep knowledge of him, but his positives have been routinely higher than his negatives for the last few years. And that puts him in better standing compared to Trudeau or the conservative leaders that have been in place during that period of time. But another option for him would be to be quite critical of Trudeau. I think when he's tried that in the past, it doesn't come off well. I think that there are progressive voters who wish that Trudeau would do some different things, but don't dislike him personally that much. The dislike for Trudeau is way disproportionately on the right. So for Jagmeet Singh, this is a

difficult period of time. The economy is going to be, by all accounts, a little bit tougher, but so too is the fiscal situation. And so the inclination on the part of voters to support big spending to solve economic problems isn't going to be what it was during the pandemic. And I don't know if his party is as enthusiastically unified around him as has been the case in the past. Let's also imagine that Rachel Notley wins that election in Alberta coming up this May. That'll take some of the focus away from him, but also put some pressure on him a little bit. So I think this is arguably going to be one of the tougher years that Jagmeet Singh has faced in Canadian politics. How will he find

a share of voice? What will he have to say that the country needs that the liberals aren't already working on? And of course, the worst nightmare for an NDP leader is always how scary is the conservative leader and the best thing that could happen uh in a way for jagmeet singh is that it looks like pierre poliev can't win the election but if it looks like pierre pauliev can win the election that's difficult difficult time for jagmeet sing sing because a lot of progressive voters will go we'll vote liberal to stop the conservatives and that that still holds true right that's that's all you know that's been the case for decades in canadian politics it's you know you know that liberals are are in trouble when they wave that that wand oh, beware, you know, beware of voting for the NDP,

you're going to get a conservative government. And that usually, that often works. Hasn't always worked. Didn't work in Ontario in the early 90s when Bob Ray ended up, you know, becoming Premier of Ontario. But traditionally that has worked and you think it still has an impact? Well, I think it does. I mean, I think that the question usually comes down to who the conservatives pick as leader.

I think a case could be made that if Aaron O'Toole were still the leader of the Conservative Party, the Conservative Party might have had a better chance to win this next election. Boy, that's the last thing they want to hear right now, right? After dumping him, after sticking the knife in him, right after the last election? Yeah, but I think they did that because of the same kind of corruption, the disruption that the Republicans are experiencing, which is that what are we here to do? Are we here to kind of rage farm and to use that form of politics, you know, associate ourselves with the convoy and the anti-vax protesters and that sort of thing?

Or are we here to put thoughtful ideas in place and sort of take advantage of the softer popularity, let me put it that way, of Trudeau as the years go by? The second approach always feels more boring. But in Canada, you know, it's more likely to win over the medium to longer term if you stick with it, if you're a conservative party in a country where two-thirds of the voting population consider themselves to be progressive, not conservative. So it isn't just that the liberals do it, it's that the conservatives set it up as an artifact in our politics in a way that sometimes, you know, puts the fight over the win as the goal.

And sometimes they put the win over the fight as the goal. Brian Mulroney did that very well. And when they do put the win over the fight, they tend to do better. I don't think we know what Pierre-Paul Lievre we're going to see going into the next election. I think it's easy to underestimate him in the sense of he'll have figured this dilemma out. Where he comes down on it, I don't think we know. I think that we've seen two sides of him so far. And I think that there's a part of him that obviously is pretty motivated

to win. But whether or not he has all of the skills and the adaptability necessary to do that, I think is another question, whether or not his heart is in that place. I don't know. Well, tell me what is necessary for him to do, because when you look ahead for the Conservatives, the two elections in a row, they have more votes than anybody else. How do they translate more votes into more seats? What does he have to do? Yeah, well, I think that, you know, I went back over the math of the last few elections, and I noticed that in the three elections that Trudeau won, there was a swing of 24 seats over the course of those elections and a swing of 1.4 million votes. So, you know,

we're not really talking about a lot of votes. If Pierre Polyev wins another, call it four or 500,000 votes, he wins the majority probably in the next election. I think sometimes we get drawn into a conversation about politics as though it's really about kind of how do you completely change the way that your party is seen by large numbers of people in the country or almost everybody. And the math of the voting population is 27 million roughly voters and 9 million won't vote and 9 million will vote, but they've already made up their minds and the other 9 million are up for grabs. And if you're Pierre Poliev and you really only need to find three, four, 500,000 voters, who are they? What do you need to say to them? Well, the first thing that

you know is just saying Pierre Trudeau, Justin Trudeau sucks. That's probably not going to do it. If it hasn't worked with them so far uh it's because they kind of either don't believe it or they think you don't have anything better to say and so find something else a lot of those people are younger they're urban and they're listening to what he has to say about the environment and climate change and they're not persuaded and that's been true for the last few conservative leaders. Arnold Toole got a little close to that, and then he got taken down by the people in his party who really don't like that issue being near the top of the agenda. Those are the choices that

he has to make. I think that if he wants to win urban voters, he's had a comfortable time saying the cost of food and the cost of energy is too high. And Justin Trudeau made it that way. I say comfortable because what else could he say in the last year, really? He hasn't figured out exactly where he wants to be on foreign policy issues. He knows that his position on environment and climate change won't sell well in a general election. So he's sticking to these things that he knows most people will go, yeah, the bananas that I got, that cost a lot. And, you know, I'm worried about that. Does he have a solution for it? No. But does he need one right now? Probably not. As we get closer to an election, he's going to need a platform. He won't have the luxury of doing what conservative leaders have

done for the last little while, which is not to have a platform. Stephen Harper probably felt like he didn't need a platform, and maybe he was right, because he didn't look like he wanted to flip the table over. Pierre Polyev looks like he might want to flip the table over and he's put enough things out like fire the bank of Canada governor and adopt, you know, do something, whatever it is with cryptocurrency that people are going to want to know more.

I don't know if the media are going to pull that out, but I think the voters are going to stay. They're going to hold back that half a million voters that he's looking for unless they see more evidence that he'll be a stable and more centrist leader and less tempted um to rage farm and to kind of hang out with those more fringe conservatives that uh that alienate the the center voter all right Last up are the liberals. What is Justin Trudeau, assuming he's in for the long haul and he appears to be, you never know with these people because they like to trick you. They like to make you think you're one way and then they go the other, which is kind of what he did after the election. Most people were thinking, us included, that he was probably

not going to run in another election. And now everybody's assuming, in fact, he is going to run in another election. So assuming he is, what does he have to do this year? He has to find a way to make his voice more interesting, I think, to people. And I kind of think that he knows that there is a way for him to do it. He also probably understands this phenomenon quite well, which is that if you're so exposed and you have a style and you've sort of developed that style over time. Eventually, people might get a little bit numb to the way that you speak.

They might kind of see you talking, but kind of tune it out because they think, I've just heard this too many times or the style sort of puts me off a little bit or I'm a little bit bored with the style. And so I miss the substance. And I think that has been a bit of a challenge for the liberals in the last little while. They've done some things that are probably having some positive impacts for people, but they don't quite know how to get through that foggy window that is preventing their communications and their policy from being kind of recognized by people. A good example is the number of folks who are probably seeing their costs for child care go significantly down because of the choices that the government made to invest a lot of money in that. So I think the big challenge for Trudeau and the government is to develop a new communications approach that includes an approach by him that is a little bit more like the, and stylistically just something that's different

enough that people are inclined to pay attention. I think the second thing that he's got to do is he's got to decide what is it that having had three mandates, what is it that his fourth mandate would be about rather than winning another election. And it's so customary for governments at this stage in their age to only want to talk about the things that they've done, but voters don't care about that as much as they care about what comes next. And I think that's a discipline on the government that he as the leader needs to really challenge his party to grapple with. It's not that there's a lack of issues, but finding that energy and that focus to renew yourself to that degree after you've

been in office for that length of time isn't easy. And so part of that is bringing in some new candidates, refresh the ranks a little bit, do something that challenges everybody to challenge themselves in terms of the next generation ideas. He's got to do a lot of that kind of thing. And the communications part has to be, I think, significantly different, too. Okay. I've only got a minute or so left. But one of the last things you just mentioned was bringing some new players on the team.

Usually what happens is you bring in new players and they're kind of at the back of the team. They're kind of like, you know, one level below the front. At least one level below the front. Does he need new players on the ice that are very visible to kind of change that, you know, tired feeling that some people may have. I don't know if he needs new players as much as it needs to be. It needs to feel like there's a faster pace and a fresher energy.

And I say that with some hesitation because I know everybody in government that I know, they're working flat out. They've got a long list of to-dos, and a lot of them are complex, and they take a lot of time, and they take a lot of energy, and everybody's tired after the pandemic. So it's really more of a management challenge as to how you grapple with that set of facts, plus the imperative to say, we need to do more than just kind of wander into the next election, imagining that we can show some bad clips of Pierre Pauliev, and that will scare some NDP voters into our tent and we'll win the fourth election that way. So recruiting candidates, always important because you're going to lose some people. Some people are going to retire from politics. Making sure that the people who are in

the most prominent roles are at the absolute top of their game and the best performers that you have, that's really important too. And figuring out that way to change the communication style so that people are more interested in it, those are the three things that would be at the top of my list. All right. Going to leave it at that. Good to talk to you again. You're just as good in 2023 as you were in 2022.

Younger. I feel younger. Do you? Fresher. I don't feel younger. I got to tell you that. Not today, anyway. Why not?

It was a lot busier holiday period. Were you out watering the rink last night? I'm trying to put the finishing touches on book number four, and that's hard work. Anybody who thinks writing a book is easy, I've got to tell you, they've got another thing coming if they ever try it. And I know you're working on yours, and we're looking forward to that. Bruce Anderson, stories from the inside,

the stories that have never been told before about Canadian politics. He's got it, folks. It's all in his head. Now he's got to put it on paper and put it in a book. And I'm out of time, so you don't get to respond. But Bruce will be back on Friday. Good talk with Chantal Hébert and Bruce and myself. Looking forward to that on Friday.

Tomorrow is your turn. The random ranter will be by, or the ranter formerly known as random, will be by as well. So we'll look forward to that. That's it for this day. I'm Peter Mansbridge for Bruce Anderson. Thanks so much for listening, and we'll talk to you again in 24 hours. Thank you.