The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - SMT -- WILL THE NEW COVID VACCINE BE OVERWHELMED BY THE CAMPAIGN AGAINST IT?

Episode Date: September 21, 2022

More than ninety percent of Canadians have had a COVID vaccine in the past 18 months, but will they take another shot?  An organized social media campaign and Russian bots seem to be having an impact. Bruce Anderson has thoughts on that and many other SMT issues from polling to Donald Trump and whether Merrick Galand has tipped his hand about an indictment.

And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. You are just moments away from the latest episode of The Bridge. It's Wednesday, Smoke, Mirrors, and the Truth with Bruce Anderson. Ah yes, it's a smoke day. It's Wednesday, hump day, middle of the week. It's also, isn't this like the first day of fall or the last day of summer or one of those things? It's kind of, yeah. It's getting there. Yeah. It's today, tomorrow, we'll find out soon.

You can feel it in the air already. Although, you know, you know there's going to be good days to come yet in this run up to Thanksgiving. There'll be lots of nice weather days as well, but you can feel it in the air that seasons are changing. Speaking of changing seasons, here's a non sequitur. Have you had your new vaccine yet? Today. It's set for today, later this morning.

Really? Yeah. You too, right? vaccine yet you know today it's set for today later this morning really yeah you too right well i'm certainly thinking about it this week i could do it today or tomorrow um here's what i'm wondering because so many things seem to be telling you hey it's over it's not over we know it's not over but a lot of things seem to be suggesting it's over. You know, you don't see a lot of masks anymore. You see some, but you don't see a lot. You pick up the paper or you listen to the radio or television or however you get your information,

you hear that the government is now going to back off on a number of the things that it had in place for visitors to Canada. You arrive, can't happen, stuff like that. And it just has this feeling like, you know, there's nothing to worry about anymore. There is, and I know there is. You've got to be careful because it's not over yet. But all these things seem to come around to, well, you know, really? Do I need like the fifth vaccine, the fifth jab in the last, you know, 18 months? Do I really need another one? Then there's clearly some kind of campaign against them.

And you can question who's behind it. And we will, I'm sure. But let me start with a sense of where are we on this new vaccine? Do you have a sense in the data and the research that you've been doing and the work you do, what the likelihood is of Canadians taking this, I guess, fifth shot? Yeah, we do monitor this every week, pretty much. We survey Canadians on a variety of things as part of an omnibus survey that we do. And then one of the things that we've been tracking pretty regularly is attitudes towards vaccines. So it goes right back to

before there were vaccines, we were asking questions, if one is developed that can help with COVID, will you take it? And what was really clear back then, Peter, was that but about 80% of the public in the beginning part of COVID before there were any vaccines said in our polls, I'll take it as soon as it's available to me. Now, that was before they even were sure that there was one that could be effective at reducing transmission, at preventing severe illness and hospitalization, and helping limit the number of deaths. Where we're at today is about 90% of Canadian adults

have taken at least one shot, most cases two, three, sometimes four. And when we ask the question, if another dose is recommended this fall, will you take it? The number of people who are saying, for sure I will, is 40%. Now, there's another 45% who say, I probably will. I might. I might or might not. You know, I'm open to it. But that's a big difference from what we saw when fear about COVID was much higher, when uncertainty about how we were going to end the paralyzing aspect of COVID, the businesses that needed to keep on closing down, shutting down, enforcing measures for social distancing and so on, schools that were opening and closing,

people that had no choice but to stop working at what they were doing because it was dangerous or people whose jobs were really affected. And now when I look at these numbers and what maybe people who are in favor of the vaccination as a public health measure, which I certainly am, what people might have to do in order to stimulate high take up, it's a different time. And it's not clear to me whether or not it is different because people want to believe that it's over and they don't like the idea of taking another shot if they're not absolutely convinced that they need to. It's not clear to me how much of it, the hesitancy is caused by what look to me to be organized campaigns on the internet to sow distrust in vaccines. And it's also possible that a big measure of it is just people saying, well, I probably get to it, but I'll need to be convinced that more and more people are getting sick because we don't pay attention to the data about that as much as we used to. I checked in this morning on the New York Times website, said 413 Americans died yesterday because of COVID. I think the

number in Canada was 21. Now, our numbers are routinely a lot lower than theirs. And the biggest difference, it seems to me, is our much higher vaccination rate. So it's a concern that people seem to be a little bit more lackadaisical, if you like. At least that's what it looks like from my vantage point, because I do believe that these vaccines help people. You know, I've looked at some of this stuff online the what you suggest me appears to be an organized campaign it certainly does because i mean they're kind of identical all the all the different tweets and things on twitter

and they just change the name and the and the circumstance in terms of family or job or what have you but other than that it's kind of exactly the same now some of the those who are following that and and trying to put out warnings about it say that they're russian bots that they're they're organized from russia and they're deliberately trying to you know sow disfavor in the canadian government what have you um i i'm kind of surprised you think the russians have more to worry about right now because they're getting their butt cleaned in in ukraine and um and putin seems to be you know scrambling around trying to figure out what to do next and throwing out threats and what have you um do you buy into this kind of Russian thing? I do.

I think the question for me is not whether Russia has been doing things that are intended to destabilize Western democracies, but how much and how effective. There's no doubt in my mind that over the last four or five years, different intelligence agencies and other experts who really go deep and study this stuff say there's no doubt whatsoever that this is happening. And I think the challenge for the world is to understand that, to your point, Peter, doing that doesn't mean that Putin has to get up in the morning and say, I don't think I'm going to have time to focus on the war I'm losing in Ukraine today because I've got to get my fingers on that keyboard and organize a bunch of tweets about Trudeau must go and that sort of thing. There are organizations that, according to what I've seen, are funded to house experts whose job it is to make this happen day in, day out. We saw so much evidence of it around the Trump election campaign,

the first Trump election campaign, that these Russian bot farms were provoking opinion on the left and on the right, essentially trying to make people feel as though their society was was kind of at war internally. And it wasn't always with a very consistent and specific view in mind. It was sometimes just really trying to make people get riled up at each other, even to the point of organizing events where people would show up in person and get riled up at each other. I think that's still going on. I do. And when I look at the patterns of a lot of the Trudeau must go tweets and this, the recitation of I'm a 32 year old this and I, you know, this is what I do for a living and I don't like vaccines and Trudeau said

that I was a misogynist and a racist because I don't like vaccines and hashtag Trudeau must go. as you say, identical, that at least I would say reasonable people have to wonder whether or not that's a very organized campaign because the alternative that it's entirely spontaneous and all of these people are posting pictures of themselves telling their stories exactly the same way using names that don't look like their names. That seems far-fetched to me. Does it really matter? I guess the question is, it doesn't matter to me, and I don't think it necessarily should matter from a democratic standpoint if the whole idea is simply to say, I don't like Trudeau. There's a lot of merit in having a society where people can say those things over and over and over again. If they want, they can holler them.

The question here that I think is a bigger question because it doesn't just relate to vaccines and this fall is this. Some people will debate the value of these vaccines. I don't. I don't think you do. I know you don't. But if we really need to do something as a society to protect ourselves, can we do it in the future? Can we muster the will in the future

without having the internet be weaponized this way? Whatever the point is, whoever's behind it, whatever the intent is, but the outcome could be that we are unable to cause ourselves, to encourage ourselves as a society to do the things that are in our interest collectively. This looks to me not just like a vote something other than Trudeau campaign. It is obviously that, but it also looks like something that could make more and more people say, maybe I better not take that vaccination.

And I think that's not a healthy thing. And I don't know where it goes. And I don't think the answer is necessarily to regulate it away. But I do think part of the answer is to be really aware of the risks that that kind of thing poses. I should mention that an almost exact word-for-word similar campaign took place in the U.S. in the last month. It just ended, actually, in the last week or so. And then this one's really taken off now in in canada i don't think there's any doubt that some you know innocent people who feel strongly about this issue have joined this campaign without any

intention of you know falling prey to russian bots or what have you they actually this is what they believe and they're taking part in in the process in some fashion it's funny how all these discussions whatever they are always end up back at that question of regulate or not regulate the Internet. And I think in the couple of years we've been doing this, we still haven't come to a resolution on that question of trying to find out, like, what do you do? How do you deal with this stuff? And I'm sure we'll talk about it again because it's only natural.

Let me move this to an area that I know you're obviously very familiar with because you're one of the leading research and polling firms in the country at Abacus Data. There have been a number of polls, including an Abacus one in the last little while, trying to gauge what the reaction is to the Polyev win and the Conservative leadership, where things stack up now in the landscape. I find them all very interesting. None of the results really that surprising. You know, coming right out of a heavily discussed and reported leadership race, the Conservatives are ahead.

We'll see where they are, you know, a couple of months from now. They may build on that lead. They may lose a bit of that lead or, you know, may stay the same, whatever. But they're in the release because these are mostly online polls that are done. And I want to try and understand one sentence that pops up whenever these releases are put out by the different research companies. And it's this. The results cannot be assigned a margin of error. Remember, we always used to get this error.

19 times out of 20, it's going to be up or down by 3 percentage points. These now say the results cannot be assigned a margin of error because online polls are not considered truly random samples. What does that mean? It's a notation that started to be required in the research community about 10 years ago when online polls started to become the dominant way of gathering data. And why is it there when it wasn't there for telephone polls or for door-to-door polls in the past? That's really your question, I think, right, Peter? The reason is this. When you're talking about margin of error, you're talking about an idea that begins with the notion that you could potentially interview anybody in the universe that you are interested in, no matter where they lived, no matter who they were, that everyone in Canada, let's say, had an equal chance to be interviewed when we were doing door-to-door surveying, which goes back 50 years, let's say. Why could you say that? Well, you could say that we can see where the houses are and we can go to a random number of those houses. So, we can sample randomly within

the entire population of interest. And if we can do that, then we can figure out a reliability variable, a margin of error, an understanding of if we can sample this many people and everyone has an equal chance to be sampled, then this is the reliability that we can assign to this sample. Then we move to telephones. When everybody had a landline, you could do the same thing. You could say everybody has a landline and all numbers are entered into essentially this kind of lottery-like idea where numbers are picked at random and everybody has an equal chance of being sampled. With online polls, we don't have the ability to reach everybody in the universe that we're interested in. All Canadians aren't online,

but more importantly, all Canadians haven't agreed to be part of these large panels of people who say, well, I'll do surveys. Now, at Abacus, we work with a cooperative of panel providers who together have 12 million Canadians who said, we'll do polls. So we sampled from within that 12 million group, let's say. Well, that's a very, very large group. It's very representative. And we have tools to make sure that the sample that we get is representative. But because the total universe that we can sample in is those 12 million people who said, yes, I will do a survey.

We can't then use a margin of error to project to the people who haven't agreed that they would do a poll, if you follow me. So, the question then becomes, well, is it as reliable? I actually think that it is. And I think the reason is that we assume that telephone or door-to-door polling could be more reliable, but only if we believe that everybody who has a phone would be willing to take the call. We know that's not true in the real world, that everybody who we went to the home of would enter the door and agree to do a poll. We know that's not true either. There's a technical margin of error calculation that can be applied to telephone and door-to-door polling that can't be applied to online polling for the reason that I just described. But the actual impact on the accuracy of the polling is really, I think, quite insignificant. And there are lots of other advantages to online polling these days in terms of speed and cost effectiveness and that sort of thing. And also in an online poll, you can show people things and get them to react, videos,

clips. You can play music for them and find out how they feel about it. You don't have language barriers. You don't have, if you ask what's called an open-ended question, Peter, what do you think about the sweater I'm wearing today? I don't have to sort of scramble to write down the answer that you give. You can just say it and it's recorded and then we can use that or you can type it in. So there's all kinds of advantages to online polling. There are very few disadvantages. And of course, when we measure, the last point I'd make is when we measure the results of online polls against actual outcomes in society, whether it's who are you going to vote for if an election were

tomorrow, or will you take a vaccine? We know that results from online polls can be extraordinarily accurate. They can miss sometimes like other polls could, but by and large, really a better polling solution and really the only one that's available in most cases today. That's the old 19 times out of 20 thing, right? Remember in the old polls? Whichever party was getting creamed in the poll would say, wow, that clearly was the 20th out of 20. Yeah, it always gave people a way to say, well, not that poll anyway. But no, on the whole, you know, they've gone through periods where online polling providers, including our firm, needed to be really vigilant about. Are there subtle biases that creep into online polling if you're not using, for example, an adequate proportion of people who just have cell phones.

As opposed to working from a desktop computer or something like that. But those things, the science and the technology keeps on getting better because it needs to. And it's a pretty effective tool right now i'm um i'm going to save this last five or six minutes and replay it a number of times so i can understand exactly i think i must have failed at explaining it it felt like a uh you know it was more than a 101 course in uh in online polling it was pretty detailed but i'm you know you're dealing with an old pensioner here i've got to kind of listen to this a few times so i can feel it just trust me peter that's the answer just trust okay um the here's a related question and because you just dropped that line about, you know,

the weed-out biases in the kind of questions that are asked and the way they're analyzed. This is related in the sense that I – is this a bias question? You know, like a lot of people who watch sports and who have been concerned about the Hockey Canada story of late, the reporter who's done most of the work on that is a fellow by the name of Rick Westhead who works at, among other places, TSN. And he's been kind of the lead journalist on dealing on this story.

He had a tweet yesterday, and it's a Hockey Canada story. Here's the tweet. A market research firm working with Hockey Canada is asking parents and others to complete a survey addressing Hockey Canada's sexual abuse scandal. One question asks if respondents agree or disagree with this statement. The level of criticism by the media towards Hockey Canada is overblown. Now, does that question not show a bias on the part of those who are trying to analyze the situation? Is that what you call a push poll or something like that?

I don't think that it is. I'll tell you why. First of all, there's probably questions in that poll that say, I'm horrified by how Hockey Canada has been handling this situation. I would assume that. If it is a professional poll, for it to be a professional and useful poll doesn't mean that it can't have questions that sound like that. The point of asking those questions sometimes can be, to your point about a push-pull, we're going to ask a question, and then we're going to ask it in a way that predisposes people to give the answer that

makes us look good, and then we'll publish the answer to that and somehow push it out into society because that will be good PR for us. So, it's theoretically possible. And that kind of thing does happen. There's no question about it. What I'm not sure is happening here, why I'm not sure that's what's going on here, is there's a couple of things. First of all, we don't see the rest of the questionnaire. But in any organization that's trying to figure out how deep is the trouble that it's in, what kinds of solutions might be necessary necessary where there might be different opinions around the board table and they're trying to make a decision and people are saying, well, I think X, so we better test X.

It's possible that that organization would ask this question and want to know how many people think that this is an issue that is overblown. So I don't think it's illegitimate for the organization to be asking that question. But let me add quickly, I'm horrified personally by how Hockey Canada has handled this situation. I'm stunned that the board and the senior management haven't resigned their jobs. I think it's appalling that that has been allowed to continue. And so when I think that, I think, well, there's probably people on that board who are making the case that if we just keep our heads down, the news cycle will turn and this issue will go away. Those people would have said, let's test this proposition. Whether people are making morally

correct judgments is one thing. Whether this question looks like a push-pull is another. It could be a push-pull, but because it's the visual that I think you shared with me or that I saw on the internet, Peter, had kind of the Hockey Canada logo on it. And typically, if you're trying to do, if one were trying to do a push-pull and then use it for credibility-raising purposes externally afterwards, one thing you probably wouldn't do is sort of say, well, here's our logo, and don't you think we're good people, which is a visual aspect of what that looked like. So it looked to me like a poll done among a very specific audience, not the general public.

Maybe a list that Hockey Canada had. I don't want to speculate too much, but it didn't look to me like a broader public poll necessarily. And I don't, well, I think the behavior has been nefarious. I'm not sure that question has to be. Okay, we're going to take a break um when we come back this is the point at which in the in the program that if you hate trump stories now is the time to turn off but for those of you who like to stay uh kind of monitoring this situation. This is a very interesting angle. Merrick Garland, the U.S. Attorney General,

gave a speech over the weekend at Ellis Island. I'll explain a little more in a moment. But what he said in that speech included something that some people are feeling tips his hand about whether or not there's going to be an indictment of Donald Trump. We'll talk about that right after this. And welcome back. You're listening to the Wednesday edition of The Bridge.

It's Smoke, Mirrors and the Truth. Bruce Anderson is in Ottawa. I'm Peter Mansbridge in Toronto. You're listening to us on Sirius XM Canada, channel 167, Canada Talks, or on your favorite podcast platform. Welcome to another edition of the Wednesday Bridge. Okay, Merrick Garland is the U.S. Attorney General. He's been overseeing this whole investigation into Donald Trump that has any number of different areas that they're investigating, but one of them is as a result of the raid, call it what you want, into the Mar-a-Lago residence of the former president, the

one-term, twice-impeached former president of the United States. And they took out a bunch of documents, some of which were clearly labeled top secret or higher. He gave a speech on the weekend at Ellis Island, which is the kind of historic home of where refugees have come to the United States over the last 100 and 200 or so years. And it was a speech at a ceremony swearing in new Americans. And he gave quite an emotional speech, some of it touching on his own family's past history with arriving in the United States. But he also included this short excerpt that I'm going to play for you

if I can figure out how to make all these things work, which some people think is very telling. So let me just play it for you now. As I said, if I can find it. Here we go. The law treats each of us alike. There is not one rule for friends, another for foes. One rule for the powerful, another for the powerless. One rule for the rich, another for the poor, or different rules depending upon one race or ethnicity or country of origin. The rule of law means that we are all protected in the exercise of our civil rights, in our freedom to worship and to think as we please, and in the peaceful

expression of our opinions, our and our ideas okay so that's merrick garland who takes time in this speech to new american citizens to talk about the rule of law but very specifically you know lining up the those those phrases about there's basically no rule of law for this group and another one for that group. We're all the same. Now, he said similar things in the past, but that venue, that emotion, and that statement are being seen by some as saying he's ready to indict Trump. Too much being made of that? No, I don't think so. I do think that if he was preparing to do what President Gerald Ford did

for outgoing President Richard Nixon almost 50 years ago, then he wouldn't have said those things. And in preparation for this conversation this morning, Peter, I went back into the, I'd say the history books, but it's really the screen on my computer and the History Channel kind of storyline about what it was that happened there. I wanted to refresh myself as to what happened. After those extended hearings and all of the trauma and the political bait about Watergate, Nixon, as you remember, finally resigns in 1974, and Ford takes over. Nixon left on August 8, 1974. Ford takes over on August 9.

And there had been no precedent for what Ford did then with respect to an outgoing, disgraced president. But he decided that he was going to give Nixon a pardon. And he said that America's long national nightmare was over, and he justified his decision by saying that a long, drawn-out trial would only have further polarized the public. Now, when I think about that decision, if it would make people uncomfortable or polarized or disagree one with the other, if we enforce the law against somebody who is important, like an outgoing president, then we better not enforce the law. And I think this is really at the heart of what Merrick Garland is dealing with right now, and Joe Biden is dealing with right now. And Biden has been, by the way, I think, very, very careful to say the Justice Department is going to decide what happens here, not the president. I think that's the right position to take. I think clearly America's system isn't as pure as Merrick Garland's words describe.

And the best example for me of that is this, for me, kind of wacky scenario that happens at the end of every presidential term where the president gets to go, just on my way out the door, I think that I'm going to give pardons to a bunch of people who committed crimes. Now, we don't have that here. And I can't imagine the outrage. Can you, if an outgoing prime minister said, by the way, here's my list of the people who've committed crimes, you know, like the pillow guy who gave me money or whatever, and I'm going to give them pardons so that the law doesn't apply to them in the same way that it applies to everybody else. So I'm happy that Merrick Garland is saying what he's saying. I do think that he's making sure that people understand that if charges are laid against Donald Trump, that the reason for that is that the law needs to be applied equally to everybody. He is not setting himself up for a, the law should apply to everybody except if applying the law creates political polarization. And I have no doubt whatsoever that it would create

polarization if Trump were charged. He says it almost every night on stages. If I get charged, the country won't stand for it. There'll be maybe, I forget the words he uses, but he implies that there'll be violence and manifest outrage and everything else. So the answer can either be authorities back off, which doesn't sound to me like how a democracy should work with a legitimate legal and judicial system, or it can be allowed to run its course, which hopefully is what's happening, and then we'll see. A couple of things

um you know ford paid the price right he he didn't win the election that followed his decision to give a pardon to nixon so he he never won election as president of the united states he was kind of appointed or became president because he was vice president after being put into Phil Spiro Agnew's position, who also got tossed for corruption charges. So he paid the price. The other thing I like about your story, as I walk out the door, I'm going to pardon these people of their crimes, reminds me of they weren't crimes. Reminds me of

they weren't crimes. They were patronage appointments. But remember when Pierre Trudeau walked out the door in 84. Yeah, and John Turner appointed a whole bunch of people on his behalf. Well, Trudeau announced them all.

There were like 15 or 20. And they were all there bryce mackenzie ambassador to ireland or wherever he went and there was a whole bunch of them and uh turner decided to let them go through and paid i had no choice didn't he say something like that had no option i had no option which was his line in the uh 84 debates against brian mulroney when mulroney said you had an option sir you know you could have not you could have voided those could have said no yeah could have said no but he didn't and it may well be the most famous debate exchange in canadian politics i mean it was it was quite something um there was a pretty good one the next time around it's interesting those two guys free trade 88 had the two of the best

debate moments but um anyway some similarity the other thing i like about the way you told that story is um you went you went to history you went back you went to history. You went back. You went back and looked at stuff. And it's funny how sometimes one's mind changes with distance and time. Right? I'm not suggesting yours changed on this issue, but that's what historians are all about. On Monday, I know you were glued to your set from 4 in the morning right through until the mid-afternoon

watching the funeral of Queen Elizabeth. It's hard to talk about it. Yeah. So let's not. Yeah. Well, the point I'm going to make is that I was flipping around watching all the different channels. And quite often I settle on the BBC,

especially that day because David Dimbleby, who's my hero, he's got to be in his 80s by now, was brought in to do the Windsor Castle element of the coverage. And at one point, somebody said, one of his guests said, when asked by Dimbleby, what's the judgment going to be on the reign of QE2? And this guy said, you know, it doesn't really matter what I say or anybody else says right now. The judgment will be made by historians, and we'll be mostly all gone by then. It'll be, you know, 50, 75, 100 years from now, when historians will make a judgment about her reign. And it could be considerably different

than what we're seeing wrapped in the emotion of today. Which will be, you know, it's hard for any of us to believe that. We all had enormous respect for her, no matter how we felt about the monarchy. Okay, almost all of us had that feeling about her. But it's interesting that history will be the ultimate judge. And history may not see things the same way that we saw them on any number of different issues, including that. Yeah, can I just pick up a couple of things there? First of all, I know the broader point that you're making is right.

And if you hesitated with your everybody has enormous respect for her because my head was kind of bending on an angle the way Chantal Hébert usually does. Here's why from my standpoint, which is it's kind of related to your point that people view history and view events through different lenses. And I'm very aware of the fact and sympathetic to the perspective of those whose history and the history of their forebears with the monarchy is very different. You and I know that when we are in Scotland and we're talking to people who have relatives who were displaced because of the clearances, they have an opinion about how the affluent, the aristocracy, even the monarchy dealt with poor people who were itinerant farmers in Ireland and Scotland. And we know that there are people of colour whose history of the British monarchy is extremely different because of the tradition of slavery and that

sort of thing. So I've certainly been aware of the fact that the people in Ireland, the people of colour whose history traces back through that period of slavery, might look at not just the monarchy, but even Queen Elizabeth and say things happened on her watch, early on her watch perhaps, but which don't make them feel a great deal of respect. So I'm not trying to be disrespectful of her necessarily. I'm really just saying different people will have different takes on, on that. And those will be legitimate and based on their history and based on their

lens in evaluating a queen Elizabeth, a late queen Elizabeth. The other thing I wanted to say is that there's no chance in my mind that whatever happens with Trump, if he got some sort of a pass from the judicial system, he's never going to think or acknowledge that he did anything wrong. And part of what you want in justice terms, I guess, is if somebody does something wrong, whatever the treatment of them is, it should not make them feel

like they didn't do something wrong. And when I looked at the quote from Richard Nixon after he was pardoned, and as you and I will know, this would have been this, what is he going to say if we say, you're scot-free? That would have been the subject of a discussion between their teams, their camps. And Nixon said, he admitted, according to this thing that I'm reading, that he was, quote, wrong in not acting more decisively and more forthrightly in dealing with Watergate, particularly when it reached the stage of judicial proceedings and grew from a political scandal into a national tragedy, end of quote. Well, he started the whole thing. What he was saying there is he should have destroyed the tapes.

He should have destroyed the tapes. He should have acted more decisively and forthrightly in firing the people who did the thing that he told them to do. This was on him. And he took the pardon, said, thank you very much. Sorry, these other people did this bad thing. Goodbye. And so the pardon didn't achieve any kind of cathartic acknowledgement on his part. So the public didn't really get any kind of benefit, except the benefit, I guess, of less polarization. But at the end of the day, you would at least want a sense of remorse that he did something. And those tapes, I listened to them off the people who otherwise might rat us out for

doing this skullduggery this illegal skullduggery so yeah not acting more decisively and forthrightly that's that says i was busy focused on other things and people did bad things and i'm sorry about that that's not good enough as far as i'm concerned there's no doubt that the tapes were the were the the clincher on that one and they turned finally the republican leading republican senators uh against nixon at the end and that's why he was forced to resign i still you know part of me believes that what was in some of those documents that were found in mar-a-lago some of those folders that were found empty i still believe that one of them had the translator's notes from that meeting that he had in helsinki yeah yeah like we've never we never have known what was in there uh and and what he you know, what happened in that discussion.

But anyway, that's for another day. We'll see how that unfolds. But I found the best argument, it seems to me, for thinking that this wasn't just some sort of random. He picked up a stack of papers that he assumed were his, and he kind of put them in a box and said, can you take them down to my beach house? Is that, you know, one of the documents apparently had information about the private life of the French president. Now, I don't think that on any given day, there are endless reams of documents about

the private life of foreign leaders that are sitting on his desk. What's that desk called? You remember this, the name of the White House desk. Anyway, I don't think those documents are sitting there and he just grabs a sheet for them and it happens to include something on the French president. It sounds very much like this was a curated selection of things that he wanted to have access to later

for whatever purposes, but not probably to write his memoirs yeah i i have a hard time believing he's sitting down somewhere writing a book about his his time in the white house um something tells me he's i mean we used to have this game what book do you think is on the bedside table of Donald Trump? And nobody could come up with an answer to that. Or that there even was a book there. Yeah. Yeah, I can't imagine.

And all of the answers that come to mind, they're not safe for this podcast. No. It was the Resolute Desk.ute desk resolute there you go yeah you know of course what the resolute desk was named after well i know that you know because i saw you googling it while you were i had to remember i had to google the name but i know the story the resolute desk is made from the wood of one of the ships that was looking for the franklin expedition and i have you know some area of expertise on that having you know found some of the didn't you go swimming and looking for it like scuba

diving no no i wanted to yeah but i did scour the land and found remnants of some of the guys who died there. But the Resolute Desk, this ship was abandoned and traveled without back to the States, then to England, was restored, and eventually when it was broken up, they made two desks out of it. One that was a gift to the U.S. president, which is now in the White House, and is used by some presidents, not all.

And the other was kept in england but the resolution like that story i mean that that's a part of canadian history that resolute desk and and one wonders how many u.s presidents who sat behind it know that history i'm sure somebody must explain it to them, but it is, you know, it's a real part of our history as well as their history. Okay, listen, good discussion on a variety. We call this kind of a potpourri edition of Smoke, Mirrors, and the Truth, but we really only talked about a couple of issues.

But it was fun. It was a good discussion. It was fun. Bruce will be back on Friday with Chantel for a good talk. And we always find things to talk about there. Tomorrow, it's your turn. And I have got, I don't know, it's got to be more than 100, 150 or so emails this week on any number of different topics,

mostly about the random ranter, which continues to be something that most people, not all people, most people like a lot. And the random ranter will be on tomorrow's Your Turn edition with his latest take on something. And then Friday, of course, is Good Talk. So don't go far. We'll be back.

Thanks, Bruce. Thanks, Peter. And thank you for listening. I'm Peter Mansbridge. Back in 24 hours.