The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Spies, Mercenaries, Deserters -- Brian Stewart on Ukraine This Week

Episode Date: April 4, 2023

Brian's commentary on the Ukraine War this week has it all from questions about whether there are cracks in the alliance's commitment, to China's positioning on the war, to stories of spies, mercenaries and deserters. Plus on Endbits, this shocker - is 24 Sussex Drive full of dead rats?   

And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. You are just moments away from the latest episode of The Bridge. Spies, mercenaries, deserters, we've got them all on this week's Brian Stewart commentary on Ukraine. And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. It's Tuesday, that means Ukraine stories. And that means Brian Stewart, war correspondent, foreign correspondent. Brian's been there, he's seen that, he's done that all over the world. And he brings his knowledge of past situations and his readings of present situations

into our weekly commentary on the conflict in Ukraine. This one's a little different. We've got a lot of different things in today's and this week's commentary from Brian. Some of it is about Ukraine. Some of it is about what's happening outside of Ukraine that's related to the Ukraine story So let's get right at it Brian is with us and he's eager to get going

So let's not waste any more time Here he is, this week's commentary with Brian Stewart Alright Brian, we're going to start in, not in Ukraine, not in Russia We're going to start in Berlin, we're going to start in, not in Ukraine, not in Russia. We're going to start in Berlin. We're going to start in Germany. Because there's an interesting story from the German correspondent reporting to the Telegraph this weekend in Britain. And the headline, it's one of those classic stories where the headline doesn't quite,

or at least the body of the story doesn't live up to the headline. And often these things, as we've said before, are written by different people. The story's written by the correspondent. The headline's written back at the paper. The headline says, Germany rules out any further weapons deliveries to Ukraine. Now, that's a pretty startling headline

and would have a lot of people wondering, uh-oh, is this the first real sign that there could be a problem with the alliance? But when you actually read the paper, read the article that's written by the correspondent, the quotes from the German defense minister, whose name is Boris Pistorius, don't live up to that headline. He says, to put it bluntly, like other nations, we have a limited inventory. He says, as federal defense minister, I cannot give everything away. Gaps in the military will be impossible to bridge by 2030, he added.

Okay, those are all pretty blunt statements about the state of the situation in Germany in terms of supplying arms to Ukraine, but none of those statements say we're going to stop. What's your reading on what he is saying? Forget about the headline. What he is saying and whether it, in fact, is a cautionary note. I think he's saying we're not going to give anything beyond what we've already committed to give.

And I went and looked up Germany's givings of late, and it's three pages of stuff they're giving. It's not like there's nothing. So it would be quite a ways before they reach the end of what they've already committed to give. But I think he's also signaling yet again to his own country and to NATO and certainly to the Ukraine. Look, we have a real problem in Germany. Not to put too fine a point on it.

The German military is in a mess, an absolute mess. The equipment is run down. It's old, it's too few. They've been getting weaker because they've been giving, you know, tanks to Ukraine and armored vehicles and aircraft stuff to Ukraine that their own military is saying we desperately need. Remember, we're kind of East to Eastern Europe to where we are. So but I do think Germany has gone back and forth on this so often. No, we can't give tanks. No, no, no. We won't do that.

No, we won't. OK, other countries giving tanks. And then it says eventually, yes, we will. warning from Germany that we should take very seriously because it underscores a very serious problem, which is the German military itself and its defense industry in Germany. But I don't think we're going to see any slamming of doors on the equipment going into Ukraine anytime soon. This caution about, you know, running out of weapons because so much has been sent to Ukraine is not just a German problem. I mean, we see it in Canada as well, quite frankly, don't we? We see it actually in every NATO country that's

been giving a fair bit, including the United States. We certainly see it in Canada. Yes, you're right. But in the United States, there's a lot of alarm in military circles that we're giving away so much ammunition that we're not producing enough ammunition to give it away in the volumes we're giving it, and also have plenty for ourselves, particularly with the China theater, that is a possibility. I mean, the United States and Europe and now Canada are all preparing for a heightened military challenge in the Pacific region, which seems unavoidable at the moment. Hopefully, it'll be just a peaceful Cold War, but certainly, there's going to have to be a lot of redirection of military supplies to Asia and how you can go on supplying Ukraine at high levels like this and Asia as well is a major problem. At the moment, it has to be done, but it is a major problem for all the military ministers and organizers to figure out how to do it.

Because, you know, there's something that underscores, underlies everything here. And that is we deal in the West now with defense industries that are private industries. They're out to make a buck. They're out to make profit. And a lot of these industries aren't happy with a sudden rush on. We need to get, for the next nine months, you know, 100,000 15 50, 155

millimeter shells produced because they're in for long-term contracts. They benefit most when, especially in Germany, this is really almost part of their industrial religion. We want long-term sustainable contracts where we can deal well with our unions and we can have union employees on the board and all that we don't like these emergency orders because they're not reliable they end in three months from now and then where are we we've just geared up all our machinery to make another 150 tanks a year and suddenly we don suddenly we have no orders to make them anymore. So we have this problem between militaries that actually do want to help, but they also have to arm themselves, and they have to keep going to an industry in the United States, in Europe,

in Canada, which says, well, we can only do so much. We can't turn our weapons the way we used to in World War II. We're not back in the days when we could build a ship in five days in the United States, famously, Liberty ships. Did they really do that? Did they really build ships in five days? They got it down. I think it was an experimental to something like four days. These are 10,000-ton Liberty ships.

They weren't exactly the most sophisticated ships, but they did a fabulous job in World War II, taking supplies over to Europe, military supplies and food. And a lot of the Marshall Plan aid and food went over from Canada and from the United States in Liberty ships. But they were building them like five, seven at a time on the slips that would be coming up. But we're not like that anymore. You know, a ship takes two and a half, three, four years to build. A really sophisticated ship could take, you know, seven or eight years to build. And if it's built in Canada, it could take 11 to 12 to 13 years to build. So you get the picture. We can't turn on and turn off the tap the way we once did. And this

is behind Germany's worry. It's behind a lot of countries' worry. But, you know, at the same time, no country wants to give, well, no serious giver of NATO in the EU, wants to give Russia an indication that the West is losing its will, losing its nerve, because that surely is only going to heighten the Kremlin's determination to keep going. If they see signs of cracking will in the West, and that will certainly give Putin and his friends the feeling that we just have to stay at this for another year or maybe two years. Okay, a quick last point on this. Do you think at the end of the day it was kind of a slip of the tongue by the defense minister for Germany, Pistorius, in what he did say? Or was that directed?

First of all, was it directed for Zelensky to hear? Was it directed for Biden to hear? What do you think? I think it was directed for Zelensky to hear and Biden to hear. And they would probably say, oh, no, he's at it again. We're getting the same message. It's like one of these baseball

pitchers who, they throw a pitch to move the batter back. It's called a brushback or something. This is the German, Pistorius' brushback throw to Kiev and Washington to say, lay off the pressure. We can only do so much. It could get a a lot worse but I think they really realize that the public in Germany is still behind helping Ukraine uh it's the political situation is more divided in Germany but uh the will is there and um you know this is the problem of when you go to war behind an alliance where everybody speaks their will, it's very easy for the enemy to sit there and keep thinking, well, you know, I don't think they're all that much behind this war after all. We'll just have to keep at it for a bit longer. That's the problem. There's no way

around that because we are a democratic alliance and people will speak their will. You mentioned China a few moments ago and i i want to open that up for a little bit uh because there's been some really interesting reporting in the new york times in the last little while about what's really going on in terms of the thinking in beijing uh about the ukraine war what they're learning from it, and where they actually sit on it right now. What are you taking from what you're reading in The Times? Yeah, The Times and other military analysts have been watching very closely the writing that's going on in China and military circles. We have to remember that all the militaries in Russia and

China, they also have their own communications to each other. They have to keep up with what the ideas are. The big hope was that, and maybe it's still valid, is that the Ukraine resistance and the Russian weakness was a good message to China, do not pursue the Taiwan invasion. It's going to be much more difficult than invading Ukraine because you have to cross 100 miles of strait even to get there. And Taiwan is an army in itself and will have lots of military backing just the way Ukraine did. And that would put a sort of a halt on Beijing's thoughts of invading Taiwan. However, they're getting, they're finding the message brought back from the war in China is a bit different from that,

and it's a little bit alarming. The first rule that Chinese military analysts are talking about is one thing for sure in this war, the Russian threat to use nuclear weapons had an effect. What it did was it really stopped Western countries in their steps for a while, and it reduced the amount of weapons going in and made sure that no Western country was going to get involved itself personally on the ground in Ukraine. So it had effect. What's the lesson we should take of that? We should take the lesson that China should start using that tactical nuclear weapons threat a bit more, just to let the Western countries know that we're serious. And do not arm taiwan beyond a certain point and above

all don't put yourselves in taiwan so that's number rule number one and that's not an encouraging rule to get it means that um that china will be thinking more nuclear along the way it already is boosting its nuclear warhead capacity quite a bit. But there are other lessons they've learned, too, is that they're quite honest about the fact that Russia was a bit of a shower. I mean, its logistic system was terrible. It didn't have enough ammunition in the end. A lot of its weaponry was either not enough or it was outdated. Morale was bad and training was bad. So what's the lesson we in China should take from that? Well, we should really start building up our military industries even more than they're doing already, which is very, very

significant and impressive. You will get a China if they did they take these lessons to heart becoming much more military focused in future uh and that's one of the big lessons they're getting in other words look at all the areas where Russia was strong the one area was strong was the threat to use nuclear tactical nuclear weapons really got the attention of the West and scared the bejesus out of, scared the hell out of the West for quite a while. Not so much now, but we have to be serious in using that same threat to keep the West back from Taiwan. And these are lessons that are discomforting a bit

to the Pentagon and others because they didn't get the message they had hoped. It's so hard to read China, right? I mean, you hear a number of different American analysts trying to do it and some really good ones trying to do it. But there's always this sort of caution about, well, you know, we're not really sure what they're up to. They're not really sure. And, you know, this is a very, very close society, much more so than Moscow and Russia is. But, you know, one thing that you find if you go back and start reading the military papers that were done before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, all these militaries, as I said earlier, need to communicate.

That means they have to have conferences and they have to lay out papers. And then the Navy has to explain to the Army the kind of support it's going to need. And it's going to have to debate what kind of aircraft it's going to need to use. And we need to have a strategy. And what should our strategy be? So a lot of this does get talked about in ways that Western embassies certainly can pick up. And, of course, reporters pick up a lot of their information from what Western embassies pick up and get fed back from intelligence services. And a lot of it is quite their own in the public forum,

published in military magazines and military newspapers and the rest of it. And a lot of military intellectuals in Russia and in China are very proud of their reputations as deep thinkers and like to give lots of seminars on their deep thoughts. So this gets filtered out. So it's not quite as hard as we think it is, though certainly it's not the same as trying to follow affairs in Washington or in London.

I sometimes think the third hardest would be Ottawa because trying to make sense, frankly, of what Canadian military policy really is and strategy is one of the hardest jobs I've certainly ever undertaken. And that's only half. And just, it is really difficult to get a sense of what the thinking is in the Canadian military and the Canadian Department of Defense. Okay. We're going to move finally to Ukraine itself and what we've been witnessing in the last little while in terms of the conflict on the ground, because there are some interesting developments.

But first, we're going to take a quick break. Back right after this. And welcome back. Peter Mansbridge here with Brian Stewart. It's Tuesday, and Tuesday means we talk about the conflict in Ukraine. But with all the kind of secondary issues that surround it as well and that's what we dealt with in the first half of today's episode now we're going to get onto the ground in in ukraine because two interesting things happening one on the ukrainian side one on the russian side so let's deal with the russian uh side first of all, because it's pretty clear that the Russian offensive, the much-heralded

Russian defensive, was a bust, right? That's correct. And that sort of seems to be the consensus of all the military intelligence services, the Ukraine service, and the military bloggers in Russia who have been on the case of Russia for months now saying this is failing, we're not getting anywhere, we're not moving. So it's a consensus now that that long-awaited and feared Russian offensive has really produced very, very little indeed. On the Ukrainian side, there was talk of an offensive, an early spring offensive, but they've got held up by, guess what, weather. Yeah, the old General Winter stepped back in again,

just when the Ukrainians were looking forward to seeing the ground harden and give their armored units traction for an April offensive. Along came the biggest snow dump in a decade, hit right along the eastern front. Bakhmut itself, cities under siege, everything was just ever dropped in snow. And the conditions have been absolutely incredible. The snow's been feet deep, melting in trenches already filled with water. I saw an extraordinary scene the other day on television of a Ukrainian, I think he was a sergeant who had to try and retrieve some ammunition left back in a dugout, get down to his bathing suit and dive into the snow water to swim

underneath to pick it up. That's how bad it is. Just unbelievable. And that slowed down the offensives all along the front. But above, behind that, apparently lies about 14 days of heavy rain as well. So people are starting to, and analysts are starting to suspect now, this counteroffensive that everybody's been waiting for won't come until late April and more likely into May. With some of the Russian forces that were going to be involved in their push, their offensive, and were involved, some of them have been heading home, and mainly the Wagner group, the militia group, private militia group. Mercenaries, yeah.

Mercenaries. And they're causing their own problems back in Russia now. They certainly are. I mean, the Wagner mercenaries, something like 30,000, maybe 35,000 or more, were recruited right from the jails, from prisons. And they were some of the worst prisoners. I mean, really heavy duty, long-term, because if you were short-term,

you weren't gonna sign up to go to Ukraine, which is known to be a death trap. So those facing 10 years life in prison for murder, for rape, for every conceivable crime were sent to Ukraine. And they were largely recruited back around August for six months, only six months, not a year long or anything like that. So something like 5,000 have already been released of these former convicts. Most of them, we should say, were killed because they were used as cannon fodder and fighting around Bakhmut. I mean, incredible numbers just died because they

were just thrown into battle without armor protection or even a lot of training. But 5,000 have headed back into Russia, and a lot of them have started causing, surprise what, problems. These are not only long-term prisoners who've also been exposed to an extremely violent war, likely have PTSD or other mental problems on top of that from what they've seen, and are now loose back in the villages they were basically sent to prison from. A lot of them were the bad boys of the village, the notorious ones before they left on this frightful cycle. And now they're back. And there have been major police investigations of a former Wagner guy walking down the village with a pitchfork in his hand saying, I want to kill somebody. And they're

smashing car windows and others are up for investigation into murders. So this is alarming a lot of small communities in Russia that may not have the best policing. But what are you doing? You're sending 5,000 former criminals, war veterans to boot, who have been taught to kill even more so in the war and encouraged to kill and loot and rape, frankly, and do all the damage you can.

And now you're sending them back to us without any preparation or whatsoever. And what is astounding in this story is that not only is the Russian government satisfied that the Wagner were recruiting from prisons, but they decided, no, we want those recruits ourselves. And they've now banned Wagner from recruiting prisoners. And the Russian regular army are now going to the penitentiaries and prisons and recruiting the convicts in. So, I mean, it just is a sign of the darkening, almost nightmarish cycle of despair that's swirling around the whole commitment to this war in Russia now. There was another thing that's happened in the last week or so inside Russia,

which has got a lot of people talking and a lot of people worried about this brutality coming back from the war and being in place inside Russia. And that was a bomb that exploded in a cafe in St. Petersburg, which killed one of the most influential bloggers inside Russia, influential because of the stand he took in favor of Moscow's position in Ukraine. What do we know about this action? Well, the blogger is Vladlin Tartarsky, whose real name was actually Maxim Formin, but Tartarsky is his famous name. He was not only a very fiercely pro-war blogger, he was an officer of the army. I mean, he was actually in the militia itself.

He was a propagandist. He worked in intelligence. So some say he was hardly a civilian, but he was one of the most famous and most popular of those that come on night after night after night in Russia, demanding that Ukraine be defeated, totally defeated. I mean, he's been quoted as saying things like, we will go in, we will kill, we will rob, we will rape, we will do whatever it takes to be victorious in this war. That's the kind of line he was taking. And he's a former criminal himself. He was a former burglar who escaped from prison. He wasn't even released

for the war. He got out of escaping and became famous as a blogger. But his other thing was, he was very close to the Wagner group. He was very pro-Wagner, but he was fiercely anti-military at times continually criticizing the bad the bad handling of the war the way the military were handling were going forward was just nonsense he made racial not racial but sexual slurs even on the commander-in-chief himself uh it was that kind of really dirty vile stuff stuff. And he had a night for himself in a bar where lots of other pro-war nationalist extremist Russians showed up to honor him. And the lady walked in and carried a box, and they opened the box, and in the box was the bust of a soldier and a helmet, which was presented to him as an award. It weighed 200 grams, which is exactly the amount of explosives apparently the bomb contained.

And that was the bomb. And the bomb went off, and I hate to say this, but it was recorded as a blue Tartarski to bits bits and injured 19 other of the pro-war faction. The woman has been arrested, is claiming that she was set up, wasn't her at all. And the big guessing game is now, well, who did this? Who would have blown up such a figure? The Russians were to blame Ukraine, of course, and Ukraine would come first to people's mind. But Ukraine has been warned several times by Washington that we do not want to see you conducting terror campaigns inside Russia. And that's a fairly stern warning.

There are a number of other suspects in this that can't be discounted. One is the GRU, which is the Russian Military Intelligence, which is a very big, aggressive spy service and intelligence service, the GUR. Or the SBU, which is the old KGB of old. Or even the SFB, sorry with all these initials, but there's a lot of them, FSB, the Internal Security Service may be looking for, you know, something to blame on Ukraine, or shut down voices that the Kremlin thought were getting altogether too critical of the military. Or it may have been a military freelance opposition wanting to wipe out their most vocal critic inside Russia, and also give a warning to the Wagner group

that stop building your own power base based upon attack upon us, the Russian military. So you have, you know, investigators have a woman who was tied to anti-war activities before, but says, I was just set up, told to take this box there. I don't know who sent the box. So is it from the... And here's an interesting theory. Prigozian, who is the head of the Wagner group, himself a former criminal, has to act, who also did his prison time, says he doubts it was the Ukrainian government. He says, no, they wouldn't be doing that.

But a group of radicals is very active, radical Ukrainians who would have no relation to the government. They're doing this as freelancers. So you've got now about eight or nine possible suspects. And I have to say almost all of them, you know, you have to give some serious thought to suspicion here, because we're dealing with a kind of society of violent men who are just, you know, promoting extreme theories and have extreme ambitions and have a taste for the military kill factor and have a long history of secret works and spy works

and counter-spy works and the rest of it. It's about as murky a brew as you could possibly come up with. And that's what now hangs over the bombing of it. It's about as murky a brew as you could possibly come up with. And that's what we now hangs over the bombing of St. Petersburg as it's now being called. Yeah, it is fascinating story. You know, it reads like a, you know, it does read like a spy thriller, just listening to you tell the different possibilities that surround that story. We've got time for one more thing, and it's on that level. It's a spy story. We love spy stories here at The Bridge, and we love it when you tell us. So tell us this one before we go this week.

Okay, well, you and I speculated months and months and months ago what an incredible break the CIA must have had inside the Kremlin, because they predicted the war absolutely almost to the hour. I mean, they were absolutely bang on over and over and over again. And we've known in the past, the CIA has not always been that accurate. So they had to have somebody high up. It now came out sort of in an economist story that it was one of the officials high in the foreign office who probably was warning the Americans. He worked for the foreign minister, Levlov. And the CIA got him out, extradited him, got him out, exfiliated him, whatever that term is, back to the United States, given him safe housing, and he's there in a safe house in the United States.

But the article goes on to say the CIA has got seriously worried because of the number of spies it has in Russia, who will all be wanting to be flown out at some point with their families and lodged in nice safe houses in Virginia and maybe down in Florida, where they might like it better, provided with jobs, security, and lead a nice quiet life in the American hinterland. And Americans are saying, how many of these, you know, each one is about a million bucks a year at least. How many of these are we going to have to house?

Which gives you some indication that the CIA has an oversupply problem when it comes to spies inside Russia. Something we may have guessed early on in the war when the Americans were so, and the British as well, were so accurate in their predictions. So it seems like, you know, the Russians must be going nuts running around trying to track down all the spies they feel they may have in their midst now. Great stuff, Brian. Fascinating to listen to all of this today. There's so many different threads to it. Listen, thank you again. You keep us enthralled every week.

And we'll catch up again in seven days. Take care. Okay, great. My pleasure. Thank you. Brian Stewart with us once again. And his stories. And as you saw in today's episode, there were a range of stories. And as you saw in today's episode,

there were a range of stories, some inside Ukraine, some outside Ukraine, but all as a result of what we've witnessed in this past year. So thanks to Brian, and obviously we'll be talking to him again next week. And I know a lot of you really look forward to the Tuesday episode. It shows in the number of downloads we see happening each week. Tuesday is always a very big day on the Bridge calendar. All right, we have time for an end bit.

Another thing we like here at the Bridge. Now, I never went to university. I'm not proud of that fact. I wish I had gone to university, but I didn't. So I never had the university experience. I've had it in a way by, you know, giving the odd lecture at different universities across the country. I was chancellor of Mount Allison University in New Brunswick.

In fact, I'm Chancellor Emeritus right now at Mount Allison. And that was a great experience. I was a two-term Chancellor, so that means I was there for about eight years and enjoyed that time and that experience and meeting the students and meeting the professors and the administrative staff at Mount Allison. But I never had the student experience. Now, I watched our son, Will, go through University of Toronto. And I learned a lot from watching that experience experience as I'm sure many of you have either as students or as parents of students and the main lesson I learned was

that they change fairly quickly students you know after uh you know I grew up in Stratford Ontario went to high school I went to primary, I grew up in Stratford, Ontario, went to high school, went to primary school and high school in Stratford and left to go to U of T. And in that first year, he changed considerably. That experience changed him. And I've seen it captured in this article that I'm reading in the National Public Radio's NPR's online articles. And this one that just came out last week is called, To Help New Students Adapt,

Some Colleges Are Eliminating Grades. Okay, we'll get to that part of it in a moment. But the start of this article was the first time that I really saw it captured in print, what happens in that first year of university. So I'm going to read a little bit from this article because it's great. It's written by John Marcus. So here it is. Joy Malik floundered through her freshman year in college. I had to learn how to balance my finances. I had to learn how to balance work and school and

the relationship I'm in. The hardest part about being a new college student, Malik said, is not the coursework. It's learning how to be an adult. And that was what I witnessed with Will in first year at U of T. He went in in September as a teenager out of high school. He came out as an adult. He changed, and it was that whole fact that he was living on his own. He was having to deal with issues that he'd never dealt with before. Not just grasping at knowledge through university, but learning to live as an adult. A young adult, mind you, but nevertheless, a lot different than that last year of high school.

Anyway, back to Joy Malik's story. That took a toll on her grades. I didn't do well, said Malik, who powered through and is now in her sophomore year as a neuroscience and literature double major at the University of California, Santa Cruz, or UCSC. It took a while for me to detangle myself of self-worth, a sense of self, excuse me, a sense of self-worth from the grades that I was getting. It made me consider switching out of my major a handful of times. Experiences like these are among the reasons behind a growing movement to stop assigning conventional A through F letter grades to first-year college students

and sometimes upperclassmen. Called ungrading, the idea is meant to ease the transition to higher education, especially for freshmen who are the first in their families to go to college or who weren't well prepared for college-level work in high school and need more time to master it. But advocates say the most important reason to adopt ungrading is that students have become so preoccupied with grades they aren't actually learning. So listen to this, the last little bit I'll read. Grades are not a representation of student learning, as hard as it is for us to break the mindset that if the student got an A, it means they learned, said Jody Green, special advisor to the Provo for Educational Equity and Academic Success at UCSC,

where several faculty are experimenting with various forms of ungrading. If a student already knew the material before taking the class and got that A, they didn't learn anything, said Green. And if the student came in and struggled to get a C+, they may have learned a lot. Interesting, eh? Now, that's an American university, obviously. I don't know whether that same thinking is going on in Canadian universities.

Maybe it already is. But the idea of ungrading, of eliminating grades in that first year is an interesting concept. We'll see where it heads. Okay. The other story that I saw today I'll just mention it briefly before we Wrap it up for this day It was in the National Post actually

Yesterday Headline. PM's official residence closed following discovery of walls full of dead rodents. That's serious. That's 24 Sussex Drive, right? It hasn't been occupied since the mid-teens. 2014, 2015. Prime Minister Trudeau never moved into 24 Sussex Drive.

I think Stephen Harper was the last prime minister to live there. But there has been a debate for the last seven or eight years about what to do with 24 Sussex. It's a historic building built in, I think, occupied by prime ministers since the early 50s. Louis Saint Laurent, I believe, was the first one in there. It was built in the second half of the 1800s. And it's, you know, it's a fixture in Ottawa.

It's a beautiful location right on the banks of the Ottawa River. But here we are, you know, a building full of dead rats, and, you know, a government and a bureaucracy frozen by the idea of what to do about it. It would cost millions, millions and millions of dollars to fix the place up. And nobody wants to push the button on that one and say, yeah, let's go ahead and do this. Because of how it's going to look in a time of inflation and high home costs

and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. No prime minister wants to be the person who said, okay, I'll authorize that. So it just sits there. Last time I was there, I've been to a number of functions in 24 Sussex back in the day in the 70s and the 80s. But the last time I was there was in November of 2015 when Justin Trudeau became prime minister.

The day he was sworn in, I think it was June 4th or 5th, something like that. And we were doing a documentary on day one and had really good access, including his drive from Parliament Hill to Rideau Hall, the Governor General's residence, to be sworn in as Prime Minister. So I was actually in the back seat of the limo. And, you know, we were recording and I was interviewing,

doing film work with the about-to-be new prime minister. And he wanted to walk the last final little part up the pathway of Rideau Hall to the residence. So we stopped, not on Sussex Drive, but in the driveway to 24 Sussex. We pulled in there to what was his old home. Right? He grew up as a kid in 24 Sussex when his father was prime minister. And I looked at him and I said, wow, this must bring back memories.

Do you think you're going to end up living here someday? He didn't entertain the question in a direct fashion, but it was clear from his face and his response that he was not interested in going back there for any number of reasons, I assume, which he wasn't willing to express in that moment. But he did not look like he wanted anything to do with 24 Sussex other than a place to park his limo while he walked to government house. So that's always framed my thinking in terms of what his thinking may be on spending the money to fix the place up.

I don't think it's going to happen under his watch. So whether it's going to be knocked down and destroyed and that space used for something else or a rebuilt residence, who knows? But boy, you don't get much lower than a headline that says the walls are full of dead rats. That's it for this day. I'm Peter Mansbridge. Thanks so much for joining us.

Tomorrow, Smoke, Mirrors, and the Truth. Bruce will be by. Friday this week, good talk with Bruce and Chantal. And that's because Friday, of course, is Good Friday. And we'll be taking that day off. But Good Talk will be repeated on Friday.

But its first airing will be Thursday of this week. Tomorrow, though, Smoke Mirrors and the Truth with Bruce Anderson. Thanks so much for listening today. We'll talk to you again in 24 hours.