The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - The Disinformation Blues - Is It As Bad Here as In The US?

Episode Date: November 10, 2021

Bruce is all ready to talk about the new study in the United States that shows a shockingly high rate of Americans who believe the bogus stories they are being fed.  And my question is just how pure are we?Plus the latest on the impact of any deal between the Liberals and the NDP to keep this new Parliament alive.

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. Our podcast is brought to you by Questrade, Canada's fastest-growing and award-winning online broker. Tired of getting dinged with fees every time you buy or sell U.S. stocks? Well, good news. With Questrade, you don't have to. You can hold U.S. dollars in your trading account and avoid expensive, forced conversion fees every time you trade U.S. stocks. Switch today and get up to $50 worth of free trades. Visit Questrade.com to open an account and use promo code QUEST. Conditions apply. that's right it's an smt day that means bruce is in ottawa i'm in toronto today

back from scotland back from three weeks in scotland no more talk about scotland well tomorrow there's a show i did in scotland it's special show for tomorrow, but I'll tell you about that later. Hey, how are you, buddy? Man, I am so good. It's crispy fall weather here, but it's sunny. And my dog is happy. And the coffee's good. It's going pretty good.

It's off to a good start i have been reading some stories though peter about covid misinformation that's one of the things we're going to talk about right we we are i mentioned this yesterday as i'm sure you know as a daily listener to the bridge i mentioned this new study by the Kaiser Foundation. Now, I've never heard of them before. Have you heard of them before? Oh, yeah. And they, I mean, what I read about them before we get into the data is that they're pretty reputable.

They've got a very, very serious foundation. A good reputation. Okay, so their study, i'm surprised took this long for somebody to throw this kind of stuff out there um it's all american so it's all you know the uh those who they surveyed were all in the states but the basic thrust of the of the study uh they put forward eight basic misinformation facts that are kind of out there to try to see how many people believe this stuff. And, you know, we've always known there is the kind of market that the Kaiser Foundation suggests it is. These numbers are pretty startling on at least half of the eight basic facts.

And it really gets you concerned on two fronts of what's happening in the States and two, whether it's drifting over into Canada as well. So let's leave the Canadian end for a minute and just deal with what you saw on the States. What stuck out to you? I read some of the basic stuff yesterday out of the report. But what sticks out to you as a guy who deals with research and data and numbers and people's opinions on stuff all the time? What stuck out for you in this? Probably two things, Peter. One is that you're right. Because of the work that I do, I find myself doing more and more questions for clients on our surveys where we ask Canadians

some basic knowledge questions, some true or false questions, in order to ascertain the level of kind of illiteracy about a certain subject and, you know, just how much kind of misbelief there could be out there. Mostly it's just a question of people not knowing things that maybe 20 years ago or 30 years ago, most people would have known. That has to do a little bit with the way that we consume information. We've talked about this before. So I measure a lot of it.

And most of that process has been disheartening for me because the collective fact base isn't what it used to be. And the collective guess base is a much bigger phenomena, guessing or guessing wrong. But in the case of COVID, these kind of misunderstandings or misbeliefs, they carry a bigger consequence. And so I was struck by how big the numbers are in the context of this has been a phenomena, a news story that has gripped the world for a year and a half. And even after a year and a half,

we don't share a kind of like people don't share a common understanding of some pretty basic facts. And it's easy to see somebody injecting something that's wrong into society and having people kind of go on you know maybe i should believe that because uh the quarterback of the green bay packers said it was true or matthew mcconaughey who's generally pro vax and pro mask said you know maybe we shouldn't get our kids vaccinated. So that's one thing for sure. But the other thing, and this kind of goes to the business that you have been in all your life, and which I watch with a little bit of concern right now, not to say all media, because it really did show that depending on the media that you are consuming, you could be much more likely to believe things that aren't true

about a fatal illness. And so it was kind of the size of it, of the number of people who don't know or disbelieve or believe things that clearly aren't true, even after a year and a half of it being the most important story everywhere. And second, that there are media organizations, the consumers of the products of which are far more likely to believe these things that aren't true. OAN, Newsmax, Fox News in particular. Those two things really stood out for me.

What about you? Well, all of that. It worried, you know, I mean, basically when you do the trusted news source, who do you trust in terms of your information? You're right. The largest numbers were clearly in those who watched or listened or read the more conservative right-wing media. But still in the progressive media, the numbers weren't insignificant

of those who just don't believe this stuff. They accepted scientific facts. Yeah. About COVID, about the treatment of COVID, about what you shouldn't be using for the treatment of COVID. You know, the numbers were scary. You know, sort of really leaving you wondering, I agree with you, about the state of the media, not to overgeneralize,

but nevertheless, I mean, that's where most people get their information is one way or another from different news sources that they tend to trust. And how certain news sources can be putting out that information it leaves you kind of dumbfounded you know as to why what the political agenda is what the fact agenda is and it's backed up by you know some of the people they cover some of the leading political figures or celebrities i mean you mentioned aaron Aaron Rodgers and Matthew McConaughey. I mean, it was only a month or two months ago that we were saying they needed more celebrities to come out to talk about vaccines

and the need for vaccines. Yeah. And so here you have a week where you have one guy, albeit a, you know, a well-known quarterback in the NFL, and it's all over the news all weekend and i don't know whether you read the comment section but while the uh you know why while the glitter were you know dumping all over him the people the the comments in the comment section attaboy aaron telling it like it is you're're my guy. Yeah, yeah. You know, I remember years ago I did a piece of kind of desk research, and I actually talked to some people who worked on referendum

and petition campaigns in different parts of the world. And one of the things I was trying to do was figure out, well, how do they work? Because we didn't have those in Canada very often. I think we finally had a couple. And this was in the run up to the Charlottetown referendum. And one of the most stunning things that I learned, I had no idea about it before, was that if you start a referendum campaign, asking people to support something that is already popular, you need to have at least 65% popularity starting a campaign in order to finish with more than 50% at the end of the campaign.

And the reason is that in the natural course of the way that these things get covered, you hear equal amounts about the no side as the yes side. So in effect, what the research shows is that the no side wins referendums more often than the yes side does, which doesn't really make sense because most of the propositions start with more people wanting something than not wanting something. But in the end, people hear kind of an equal weight of the one argument against or the misinformation that kind of undermines confidence in the idea of a change. And so the balance kind of tilts that way naturally. So that's the thing that I'm thinking about in the context of this, because there have probably been thousands of celebrities,

influencers, whatever we want to call them, musicians, artists, actors, writers, who've come out and said, do this, please. You'll save your life, maybe. It'll certainly save other people's lives. Do it. But we get one Aaron Rogers. And all of a sudden, we're all consumed with it, right. And so those people who are inclined to want to go, you see, I knew there was something like that we were being told that we needed to do that we didn't need to do. And Aaron Rogers, he's a smart guy. He almost was going to host Jeopardy. And so we

should just listen to him because also he throws a nice pass. The amount of attention is drawn to the very small number, relatively speaking, of people who say something that's kind of off the mark. In Canada, we had this example of Marilyn Bladu, the MP for Sarnia-Lampton, I think, who on the weekend in an interview with Evan Solomon was talking about the Civil Liberties Caucus and how they were looking forward to talking with people who had different perspectives on. And of course, to Aaron O'Toole's chagrin, I think,

that the whole world kind of blew up around him, the Canadian political commentariat and people who follow politics, like people who are listening to our podcast, and they were like, what the hell, right? And so the amount of publicity for the rogue, nonsensical, wackadoodle idea is a phenomena. And I don't know how that changes. But the last thing I'll say, and maybe you read this piece too, Peter, I'd love to know what you thought about it, that New York Times ran a piece, in fact, you may have sent me the link to it, which said before vaccines arrived, COVID killed red and blue voters in the United States equally.

It did not discriminate. And then the vaccines arrived. And now what we're seeing is that of the unvaccinated people who die, and most of the people who die from COVID are unvaccinated people, of every five of those, four are Republican. So there's a real link between this, the kind of the market for disinformation, the OAN, the Newsmax, the Fox News, and deaths. And knowing what a litigious society America is, I'd be surprised if somewhere down the road there aren't class action suits about this

because the numbers are really, they seem to me to be pretty clearly pointing in a direction that there's something about it. Now, it may not be that those news organizations are causing people to believe these things, although people can come to their own conclusions about that. It's plausible that people who believe these mistruths gravitate towards these news sources but the correlation is seems pretty clear from the kaiser work and the risk seems pretty clear from the piece of of uh reporting that we saw in the new york times now you know they the kaiser foundation you know as we just mentioned a moment ago it did go after trusted news sources and to determine who's who's believing what from where,

and you get the left-right split there. But the thing is, it's more than just journalists. As you witness in your Canadian example, and I want to talk about Canada a little more in a moment, but I want to just finish off on the States, because there's elected officials. You say what you want about that conservative MP, but she was elected by the

people of her writing to take a certain opinion forward out of the house yeah now whether it was that opinion or not i don't know but that's where she you know that's who she is that's what she does and and so she was doing her thing now in the states it's even more bizarre more wackadoodly i mean you've got that uh the q anon woman green um you know publishing the names and the home phone numbers of the republicans who voted with Biden this week with one reason only, to have supporters harass them for making that decision. You have another Republican member of Congress who's put out memes of him, you know, caricature memes, caricature memes, of him killing Biden, of him killing AOC.

And, you know, nobody says anything other than they're doing it. Now, it goes back to your point. Is it better not to say anything about them, just totally ignore them? Or are they representative of something that's out there? The quality of elected officials today in the ability to put that kind of stuff out there. And it kind of passes muster and people kind of accept it i think we have to talk about it i i think there's no i agree with you that it's it's a choice that gives these views and individuals more oxygen

and i admire a lot of what i consider to be more of the mainstream news organizations in the United States where the problem is extremely serious relative to here. Like I complain here from time to time, as you know, and as Chantal and you have kind of occasionally said, be a little bit more surgical in your criticism. And that's fair. But part of the context for me is, I don't want our society to end up being a version of what see south of the border. And I do admire how CNN, for example, has journalists who go right after the lies and call them lies and have been doing it, you know, pretty consistently for a number of years since Trump first got elected. Led by a Canadian, Daniel Dale, who used to be with the Toronto Star.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. The categorization, the quantification of the lying and the mistruths and everything else. And I'd like to say that I think that the side of right, not Democrats versus Republicans, because that's not really it, although the data do show that the people who traffic in the mistruths are much more likely to be on the right than the left when it comes to COVID in particular. But it's a, it's hard to say that the battle is being won in the United States. You know, if COVID can be so obviously such a devastating thing, I think it's still thousand people a day who are dying. And we can have this much misinformation. It's gone beyond people kind of being misinformed and saying, well, I didn't hear that or I don't know if I can trust that.

But I heard this other thing. It's more willful. It's more aggressive. It's more, why are you telling me what to do? Right. And why are you telling me what to do right and why are you telling me that i should take this shot i feel like i should take this horse dewormer instead because joe rogan or the google or you know somebody you know in my facebook friends uh group told me it's a thing that is a different thing i think it's being it's a battle that's being lost right now in america i don't know if 25 years from now we find that america's sort of auto-corrected

to something that's kind of safer and healthier but i'm worried um that you know so far we're not emulating that but we have a milder version of it. And this fight that's going on in the Conservative Party right now in Ottawa, around civil liberties and vaccination, it's not just a fight about those things. It's a fight for whether or not our Conservative Party becomes politically hostage to people who want to traffic in conspiracy theories. And I was finally glad to see Aaron O'Toole stand up. I know a lot of people, you know, were criticizing his overall approach on this and even a little bit the way that he handled his press conference the other day. But at least he stood up and said, this cannot stand.

We are not, our MPs are not going to go on TV shows or talk to the media or talk to the public and raise doubts about whether vaccines are a good idea against COVID. And I've been hoping that he would do that more consistently and forcefully and earlier, but he's doing it now and i think it's a good thing it's a big fight that needs to be resolved and needs to be won by the side of facts and science okay i i you touched on it here a little bit but i i want to just go a little deeper before we move off this topic and and that's the question of just like

so how pure are we look i think we can all agree that they're off the rails in many different ways in the States on a number of issues. And when I say they're off the rails, I'm talking, you know, there's a certain group who believe certain things. There's the media. There's the politicians. There are the influencers. Some of them are clearly off the rails but how pure are we really okay so the conservatives have had their back and forth on this issue and O'Toole looks like he's finally drawn a red line in the sand and as you say he's

drawn a red line in the sand we'll see whether it's a an Obama-like red line in the sand or if it's a real red line in the sand we're if it's a real red line in the sand. We're going to find that out in the next days and weeks. But do we have any data? And if we don't, maybe we should be trying something along the lines of the Kaiser Foundation to try and get a handle on this. Because we just went through an election campaign where they didn't win a seat, but they had 5% of the vote. And in some areas, that 5% was, you know, like 10%.

Riding I live in, in southwestern Ontario, 10% voted for the People's Party. And, you know, the significant number of those who believe on a lot of this stuff that can be ascribed to misinformation. Anyway, do we have any hard data? And if we don't, is it worth trying to do some? We gathered data on misinformation about COVID probably, I'm going to say it feels like nine months ago and maybe I'll dig it out and send it to you.

And if we wanna tweet it out so people who are kind of following our discussion can see it, I'll be happy to get it. We also, once vaccines came into focus, started asking questions about vaccines and confidence in vaccines and that sort of thing. And so that takes us back nine months, maybe almost a year, right? Because it was last November, I guess, when we started to hear that there was going to be a vaccine that might be

available. It's almost exactly a year now. And then at that time, what we were seeing was something like 50, 55 percent saying I'm anxious about this vaccine because it's been developed so quickly. And will it have been tested enough and that sort of thing. So the hesitancy size was fairly significant. But of course, we know now that of the adult population, which is typically what we measure in our surveys, we don't, you know, we don't go down below 18. Almost everybody's vaccinated or about to get vaccinated. And I think that the mandates that kick in at the end of this month are going to solve for half of what's left to be vaccinated, probably just because I'm looking at what happened in the New York State or New York City data. And it really showed that once you're kind of right up against it, you can't get on a plane, you can't get on a train, you can't probably go to your job. Those are pretty important signals in getting a lot of people vaccinated.

So we had doubts, a little bit of skepticism. We didn't have it endure the way that it has in the United States. And maybe it's been cultivated in the United States through these channels of communication that, that people consume. And I don't think there are none of them here, but there aren't the scale platforms that you see in the United States. And there isn't this kind of active, I mean, as much as I've been critical from time to time of Aaron O'Toole and some other leading conservatives on this, I've been a little bit more critical of them from the standpoint of they should do more to stamp this out. You know, I think that Aaron O'Toole should do more to call out Max Bernier, who, let's face it, Max Bernier won 12 of 13 ballots when he ran for the Conservative leadership. He only lost to Andrew Scheer on the very last ballot by one percentage

point. So this is a fellow who has a voice with Conservatives and says he's not going to get vaccinated because he jogs, and that's good enough for him. Well, you know, we have people like that who are saying things like that, but it doesn't seem to be creating a groundswell. And so far, our Conservative Party, unlike the Republican Party in the United States, is saying we're kind of tempted not to alienate these voters, but we really feel that mainstream Canadian voters don't want us to play that game. And so we're going to try to resist that temptation. Now, I think that chapter is not completely written. I think it's going to be an interesting month in it. But so far,

our system is kind of held up okay. And you can see me on the screen. I got my fingers crossed. I got my toes crossed. I really don't want us to fall into that abyss. You talk about the next month is going to be an interesting month, and it is on that front. And it also may well be on the front of how this new government, new in the sense that just re-elected

in a minority position, survives, and whether or not it's going to have a deal of some kind between the Liberals and the NDP. We'll update that when we come back. Our Black Product Sponsor is The Economist. If you don't already know, its expertise lies in making sense of the world's most important developments.

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You're listening either on Sirius XM Canada, Channel 167, Canada Talks, or wherever you get your podcasts. We welcome you no matter where you're listening from. All right, Bruce, so there's, you know, we talked about this on Good Talk with Chantel last Friday. Is there, you know, is there any, people are being very careful about this

they're not denying these talks in fact they've basically confirmed that there have been talks but they're not going so far as to say you know there's going to be some kind of agreement or written agreement on cooperation for a number of years between the two parties to keep basically the Liberals in power for a couple of years.

Now, you warned us last week that you didn't think there'd ever be a formal agreement. But should we assume that at some point there's going to be a nod saying, you know, yes, we have an understanding? Well, I don't know. I'm still in the same place, which is that it makes more sense for there to be an understanding. And it also makes more sense for there not to be a declared understanding. And the reasons for that aren't that that, you know, if the NDP sort of think hard about whether or not they wanted to say there was any sort of a formal deal at any point in time,

because if you say there's a formal deal, then people say, show it to us. And if you don't say there's a formal deal, but you just have an understanding that you're going to not cause an election to happen, except under very extraordinary circumstances, which I'll come to in a moment, then maybe that's the best way forward. Second thing I would say is the very extraordinary circumstances, you started to see NDP spokespeople raise these situations earlier in the week, by way of saying, well, you know, we would maybe have an understanding on major policy agenda items and most confidence votes or all confidence votes. But in the event that something came up that we felt was egregious, like I think the example was used was the SNC-Lavalin thing,

but really they were talking about corruption and that kind of thing. Something that fell outside of the policy agenda as outlined by the government and is generally agreed to by the NDP. Then the NDP would say, well, we didn't agree to support the government no matter what. We agreed to support or we have been in talks to support so that is always in my mind the nature of any agreement that might occur is that it is conditional in the sense that it would be about the policy agenda uh and not everything that could happen in politics and uh and that it would still be better in that case for Jagmeet Singh to say there's no formal deal, especially, and this kind of goes to what about on the government side of this?

Does the government really want to say on day one, here are the 10 things that we're going to do over the next two and a half or three years, and we're telling them to you now so that everybody can understand that the NDP has said that they're going to support us on those things. You know, governments don't like to, I mean, they will in the throne speech talk about the direction, but they don't like to make some announcements until they're ready. And some of them take time to develop and that sort of thing. So I think there are reasons on the government side not to want to categorize what might be agreed to and the reasons on the NDP side not to talk about there being any kind of a formal understanding as

well. You know, when I look at it, I can certainly see the argument that both those parties would be using in any kinds of discussions or negotiations that are going on. And I can see the value for them on all the fronts in terms of, you know, trying to have a certain continuity to put in place an agenda that they both have some agreement on. It also affords them opportunities to, you know, raise money for the next election campaign whenever that comes. But I also think it's a big potential plus for the Conservatives. It gives them, they're kind of alone on the field of being against the government.

And they'll always be able to campaign that way whenever the election is two, three years down the road, that we didn't go to bed with these guys. We didn't prop them up. You want them out. There's only one choice now. It's clear. It's never been more clear. So, you know, I can see that, you know, at a time when they need some good news

because they've had problems, as we all know. But this is potentially good for the conservatives. You know, I read a column about it, you know, making that case yesterday. And I don't know that I agreed with it. I understood the logic that Aaron O'Toole needs something to talk about that isn't, you know, the caucus tension that he feels and the sword hanging over his leadership and vaccines. Why are we still talking about them? All of that. But the challenge that is raised by this is not really just a near-term political math.

It's a longer-term political math. And by that, I mean, in our latest surveys, the number of people who identify as progressives is up to 70%. For a long time, it was around 60, and then it was up around 65, and it's at 70 now. So it's 70 who identify as progressives, 30 who identify as conservatives. So yes, those 30% can get more excited about voting conservative if you say all of the progressives are ganging up and they're controlling the agenda. But it's, you know, the fact that there might be this kind of understanding signals a bigger phenomena of concern or should be of concern to conservatives, which is that as the population changes demographically, there are more progressive voters. It's not just everybody's fighting over the same voter block as existed 25

years ago. There's a lot of young people. And there's a lot of young people who say that climate is a disaster that's going to fall on us. That income inequality is a disaster that old people don't want to take seriously, but it's our lives, especially when we can't afford homes. And they want action. And also on inclusion and Indigenous relations. There's a reason why those are the kinds of pressure points that the Liberals feel, not the deficit, not how high our taxes. It's because there's more voters over there there's a reason why the conservatives can talk about deficits and taxes and the rise of china and they're not getting any traction it's because there's not a growth in the number of voters on that side of the ledger. So if I were a conservative

advisor, I would say be careful not to take too much solace in this idea that these progressive forces are coming together, because the best scenario for conservatives is probably what's happening in the Democratic Party in the United States, which is the Democratic Party is pulling itself apart. There's the sort of middle of the road progressives. And then there's the let's get on with some real progressive action progressives. And, you know, the Democrats are paying a price and the Republicans have an opportunity. So I think it would actually be the opposite. That would be an opportunity for the Conservatives. But right now, it kind of looks to me like they just need to be careful not to

look at that yellow colour and think it's gold and maybe it'll turn out to be fool's gold. Yeah. Yeah. I hear you on that, but I mean, look, their, their job is to oppose, right? I mean, that is what an opposition party does to oppose constructively and, and to, you know, to, to be with government and agree with government when they think that's the responsible thing to do. But basically they're always looking for the angle that isn't being talked of or that should be talked of as far as they're concerned.

And the thing about politics is it's cyclical. Stuff changes. I mean, just as you said, they've gone from 60% to 70% in your data in terms of the number of progressives in Canada. They could go back to 60, right? Right. But the choice of what to oppose is really important. So the Conservatives sent their environment critic to the COP meetings in Glasgow.

Do you recall hearing anything about that? Have they said anything about it? Has Aaron O'Toole said anything about that? Have they said anything about it? Has Aaron O'Toole said anything about it? Have they said, we want to achieve these emissions reductions, but we want to do it in a different, better way? They don't oppose on that. Instead, Aaron O'Toole is tweeting yesterday that because Saskatchewan Premier Mo said Saskatchewan should be a nation within a nation, that, you know, Aaron O'Toole is now saying, well, there's a national unity crisis involving Saskatchewan again. If you choose those kinds of things to oppose on, all I'm saying is,

yeah, you should oppose. But the choices you make in those spaces have an impact. Yeah, they do. And those are the big decisions that are going to be made in the next couple of years and how they position themselves. Look, if it all goes to hell in a handbasket for the liberals and the NDP in the next two to three years on a number of fronts that they're hoping are going to show their way out of it right now, you know, it's an opportunity. Yeah. But they are critical and big decisions that have to be made. It's tough being in opposition. You've got forces pulling against each other and not with each other at different times,

and we've seen that with all parties, not just Conservatives. Let me ask you a question. You've watched Pierre Palliet for a good number of years now. And he was the finance critic, and then he wasn't the finance critic after Aaron O'Toole got elected as leader. And as of yesterday, he is again. What do you make of that? Is that smart because, as Aaron O'Toooole said he makes the liberals quiver or is that risky because

he's the kind of politician who you know who can be kind of divisive but what what's your take you've watched him for a good while we've talked about him many times sure no no we have and listen i think he's a very effective guy in House Commons when he's on the attack, when he doesn't go too far, when he doesn't kind of lose it a little bit around the edges. And we've seen people like him over time. You know, the Liberals used to have that kind of group with the Rat Pack, whether it was, you know, Sheila Copps or John Nunziata or Brian Tobin. I mean, they were – I agree with what you're saying. I do.

And so I think it was wise to get him – a very wise political observer once said to me, it's better to have them doing something inside the tent than outside the tent. Is this the only podcast in the world where we can't say pissing? That's the announcement that was made in Johnson, Iing johnson i think yeah yeah no that's right um so i think it was smart to bring him back in but they're gonna have to be careful because he he also has his own ambitions right i mean there's no doubt he wanted to run for leader last time around and for whatever mysterious reason he didn't doesn't mean he won't the next

time around so uh you know he he's um he's an interesting guy to watch and he's he can be good uh he could be very good drama inside the house of commons and outside the house of commons um but he also has to be careful on how he goes about that. Okay, we're out of time but this has been a good discussion and we'll have more of it and on Polyev, I'm sure because I bet you Chantel wouldn't mind having a run

at that discussion as well. Yeah, you know, some of the other appointments I thought were interesting too so maybe we can touch on them on Friday. I thought Michel Rempel-Garner as the resources critic instead of health

critic is probably a good choice, but we'll see how that goes. Okay. All right. Thank you, sir. Good to talk. Thank you. As always. And we'll be back tomorrow with the tomorrow Remembrance Day.

So, you know, acknowledge that moment wherever you are. In tomorrow afternoon on the bridge of a special that I did in Scotland, not on Remembrance Day, that was on Monday, as I kind of set you up for Remembrance Day. If you didn't listen to the podcast, that is one of the ones that I'm most proud of having done, of all the two years of podcasts I've been doing now. Anyway, tomorrow it's a special on libraries. You might want to, it sounds a lot,

it's much more interesting than you may think it sounds from that plug. It's a really good discussion. So that's tomorrow, Friday, Good Talk is back with Chantel and Bruce. I'm Peter Mansbridge. This has been Smoked Mirrors and the Truth with Bruce Anderson in Ottawa. I'm in Toronto. We'll talk to you again in 24 hours. Thank you.