The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - The US-Iran Deal - What Was Really Accomplished?

Episode Date: June 15, 2026

A deal is a deal, but what kind of deal was this? Did Donald Trump accomplish anything in his nearly four-month war with Iran? Dr. Janice Stein is here for her regular Monday conversation. Also, a political resignation in Britain is considered a warning not just for that country but for all NATO countries -- it's time to prepare for a confrontation with Russia. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. You're just moments away from the latest episode of the bridge. It's Monday. Dr. Janice Stein is here. The question, a deal is a deal, but really, what kind of deal is this between the U.S. and Iran? We'll deal with that right after this. And hello there. Peter Mansbridge here.

Good to talk with you on this Monday, the beginning of another week, and Monday's always me and Dr. Janice Stein. She'll be here in a few moments' time, but we've got to talk. a bit of housekeeping as we like to do on Mondays. First of all, letting you know that this Thursday, the your turn question, it's an AMA week. It's our final your turn before the summer break. And we have lots of your answers already.

For ask me anything, we do not need any more. We've got tons of them from past AMAs. So don't worry. There's no pressure to run. this week, no pressure at all, because, as I said, we have enough of your questions for an Ask Me Anything Week, which will be Thursday, along with the random Ranter, of course. He'll be by as well for his last rant of the year. We have a couple of shows next week, but we'll end a week on Wednesday of next week.

And then we're into the summer hiatus. We're around, of course, if something big happens, and there will be a couple of special good talks during the summer. And I'll give you those dates later this week. Okay. Before we get going with Janice, I wanted to just tell you a little story. I hope you had a good weekend.

We had a good weekend here in Scotland, one of our last weekends before we head back to Canada. We'll be there in time for Canada Day, of course. And this weekend, we went to Dingwall, which is not far from where we have our Scotland home. And I always like going to Dingwall because it underlines to me that everything's always possible. You may have a dream in your life, something you want to accomplish, something you want to do, and you wonder whether you're ever going to get there. but you believe.

And if you believe, the chances are you very well may get there. So what's that got to do with Dingwall? Well, I love the Ding Wall story. And here's one. January, imagine this. It's January of 1963. and you're a promising young musician, singer, rock singer.

You've been at it for a few years with your friends, and it hasn't really taken off. But your manager says, hey, we've got a little tour for you. You've got to go up to Scotland. You're from Southern England. well yeah actually from not southern england but sort of the middle of england anyway we've got this tour for you and you should head up there and part of that tour lands in dingwall

now dingwall is up in the highlands right it's north of inverness not far north of inverness maybe half an hour drive So you and your buddies go to Dingwall. You get there, I believe it was a Friday night. Get to Dingwall. They get to the hall where they're going to be playing.

Remember, it's January of 1963. You and your pals have big dreams. You've worked hard. You've tried hard. You write a lot of your own music. You get to Dingwall and you're playing in the home. and you look out at the crowd that's gathered there. And how many are there?

There are 19 people there. 19. Now, you've learned in your career that there may be 19, there may be 190. It doesn't matter. The ones who were there really wanted to come and see you. So you give them a show And the boys gave them a show that night here in Dingwall

It's January of 1963 You still believe and you must have believed When you drove into Dingwall And when you left later that night You must have still believed We're going to make it somehow Well these boys made it They made it

And they were just literally weeks away from making it. By the end of that year, they were the biggest band in Britain. And early in 1964, there they stood on stage at the Ed Sullivan Show in New York. And they became the biggest band in the world.

Who are we talking about? You know. We're talking about the Beatles. That's right. Dingwall. Dingwall might have been the low point. with only 19 people there. But it became the year that the Beatles took off,

especially in the UK. But by the end of the year, the demand was beyond the UK. And it was that couple of Sunday nights in New York with the Ed Sullivan show that sealed the deal. So there you go. There's my little story from the weekend. I think I'm, you know, I've told that story a couple of times because I always get a kick out of it.

I had to give a speech here in Scotland last year and I told that story because I was not expecting much of a crowd in Scotland. They don't really know who I am. That's one of the reasons we come here. It's nice. It's nice to be kind of nobody special. But I've told it a few times in speeches because I love it as sort of that point where, you've always got to believe. It may take longer than your thought,

but if you keep believing, good things can happen. All right, enough. Let's get to what you're really here for on Mondays, and that, of course, is my good friend, and your good friend, Dr. Janice Stein, from the monk school of the University of Toronto. The U.S. and Iran have a deal of sorts

to end the war that's, It's gone on nearly four months, but really what kind of deal is it? Here's our conversation with Dr. Janice Stein. So Janice is always in these kind of things. The devil's in the details, and we don't know the details. We don't even know the deal yet. But I assume this is all going to come down the next few days. And what we do know, what is your assessment?

Was this all worth it for Donald Trump for the United States? to do what it's done for the last three or four months when you see the shape of the deal? I don't think anybody would say that this war was worth it for the United States. It's tied up the presidency. It's pulled assets out from all over the world, Peter. And what have they gotten for it?

They've gotten a much more hardline military, You know, as one of my Iranian friends said, the regime has moved from the divine to hard military power. And that's how this government negotiates. I think there will be the deal that was on the table, and this is the really galling part, the deal that was on the table on Iran's nuclear program before this war started was largely as good as the deal that's likely to come out of it. If there had been some strategic patience and they kept on negotiating, I think they would have gotten an outcome that is as good as what they're going to get

if they ever get it. And there would have been no need to go to work. I got to say, I mean, I've been pretty critical of Trump for quite some time now. so it's no surprise coming from me. But he's looked desperate to get a deal in this last while. I mean, not just anxious to get a deal, but desperate to get a deal. Yeah. And that is the worst negotiating stance you can have.

Because this ultimately, you know what, I'm going to come back to a point I've made before and not many people agree in quite this way. but the Iranians are desperate for a deal too, and it's getting worse and worse for them all the time every day because the impact on everyday life in Iran for people. You know, cooking oil, 300% more. We're talking about basic food stuffs. They know they cannot keep going.

And one of the Iranian officials said, we can't last more than four or five months. But for Donald Trump, that's an eternity. And it's all about the midterms, all about the midterms for him, despite everything he says. If you go into a negotiation showing how badly you want to deal, you get a terrible deal, Peter. And it looks like, at least it's looked like these last few weeks or month or so, the only thing he wants is to get gas prices at home down. Yeah, he's caught in a dilemma, right?

Is this a Trump, you know, this is Donald Trump's kind of dilemma? So if we were talking about the United States, we might talk about the strategic interests the United States has here, but that's not relevant. This is about Donald Trump. Get gas prices down before the midterms, number one. Two, come out of this with a deal that is marginally better than Barack Obama's terrible, awful deal.

that he has talked about for the last decade. And third, don't pay the Iranians any cash. That's how he thinks about it, until there's some record of performance. Those are the three things that he wants, and they tell us his team over and over. Well, he may tell them that, and he may claim that this is that,

but it doesn't look like it is that. You know, I mean, the Obama deal, well, there's no deal, right. There's no deal. We can't even compare because there's no deal. This is a framework about a framework, right? We're going to stop the fighting. Lebanon, in or out, not clear yet. We won't know until we see the tax.

That's for sure. The Iranians say, yes, the Americans say no. We're going to open the streets of Hormuz. Yes, we are. But the Iranians are saying, well, there's going to be some management fees. And the United States says, no, they're not. So we don't know.

Lift the blockade when the Iranians open the street. Yes. Free up frozen Iranian money that's in Qatar. At least half of it is in Qatar. Well, that's fine because that's not the United States, moving truckloads of cash to Iran. And that's all we know. So we have, and then 60 days of negotiation, that would be something close to a miracle, given Iran's record on negotiation.

It will take months and months and months to move. It will be stressed out almost forever. Especially so if those negotiations are quite a bit about what to do with the, on the nuclear issue. That's not going to get solved in two months. You know, I actually think because they made significant progress before the war started, it's harder now, by the way, to negotiate because the distrust is much higher. But they actually made progress. And that's what, to me, the really frustrating element is.

Before this war started, in the talks that were ongoing, Iran agreed that there would be a period in which they would not enrich. at all. That's better than the Obama deal. He could have taken it and declared a win, right? I think when they get back to the table and because Iran is desperate to get some cash and the cash is not going to, you know, some of it will go at the beginning, but it is going to be phased through this negotiation process. I think the outlines of a deal are there. It's going to be, be a period with no enrichment. The Iranians say five. The Americans say 20.

The Iranians have signaled 10, well, that's 10 years better than Obama has. All right? He can walk away from that. The highly enriched uranium, the Iranians were so sure that another American strike was coming that they sealed and mined the entrances

where the highly enriched uranium. you miss sword. But that makes it hard for them to get at it now, as well as harder for Trump to get at it. So, and they've said they're going to either ship some of it out of the country or they're going to dilute it with with international inspectors. There's the deal. They've said they'll close down two of their enrichment facilities, but not the third. there'll be a big fight about inspectors whether they can come in and surprise or not and there's no question

this week we saw the satellite pictures there's no question there's a fort site Peter until it called Pickax Mountain because they were busy fortifying that too and they wouldn't have done that otherwise so yes they're they're not going to give up all their centrifuges but they're not going to turn them on for the next 10 years.

years. If we rewind back to the last week of February, just before the actual war began, you had and you've referred to it a couple of times, you had Whitkoff and Jared Kushner. Jared Kushner, meeting with the Iranians or meeting with somebody on a possible deal. I think they met in Geneva. They met in a couple of different places. what you seem to be suggesting now is they could have made a deal there but it seems to me they didn't make a deal because Trump wanted a war

he thought he could win a war easy being convinced by Netanyahu maybe he'd been convinced by what's his name the defense secretary Hegesa Hegsus Yeah that somehow they'd convince him that this was going to be like Venezuela. It was going to be over in a hurry. You know, I think that's absolutely the case. He came off Venezuela on high.

Literally on high, this is a, you know, this is, frankly, incredibly inexperienced men who, you know, the image I have in my head is kids playing video games. And, oh, wow, this is in heart. and, you know, the Americans go in one night, they were out in three hours, they got the leader, we now know there were some secret conversations with Ahmadinejad, which also defies imagination. He believed this was going to be easy, and he had no understanding of, you know, what the difference is between a small country like Venezuela and a huge country like Iran with a very large population, and that the Iranians were preparing. They were preparing for at least six months since the last episode.

And they got it completely wrong, Peter. So that's why when you asked me at beginning, would he do this again? If he knew now, what he knew then? Absolutely not. He was not prepared for a war that would go for four months or more and destabilized the global economy this way. I just find it mind-boggling because anyone who knows anything about the Middle East or the world generally knows that Iran is not Venezuela. Anybody, right?

They could have expected at least what they got. You know, who is in that room? Hexath, we're not going to say anymore, right? Marco Rubio, who probably doesn't know much about the Middle East, knows a lot. about Caribbean and the Latin America, because that's always been its interest, but doesn't know a lot about the room, about the Middle East,

and the chief of the joint staff, whom he had appointed after he fired the person who was there before. And so, yes, he told them that there was a probability that Iran would close the straight-so-form moves. Oh, they won't do that, said Donald Trump. And he moved right on. He didn't have the staff. He doesn't have an independent national security council.

He locked off the top third. The Pentagon, the number of firings that have gone on, the State Department, it's been wholesale. They shut out the expertise in the first year of that presidency. So they didn't have it when they needed it.

And he doesn't know much about it. the world, Donald Trump. No. And into this weakness on the Americans part plays Benjamin Natanyahu who he may be a lot of things.

He is a lot of things, but he's not stupid. No. And he understands the Middle East, as he should, he's in it. But we've witnessed him throughout this and Israel, take a position that is

offside from Donald Trump, offside from the United States, right up through this weekend. Still doing it. Still doing it. So what does that tell us? So let me just go back and set the scene a little bit. There's one Benjamin Tanyau before October 7th.

There was another Benjamin Tenegu after October 7th. He was utterly shocked. He was the architect providing funds to Hamas, really believing that if money flowed through Hamas into Gaza, that would reduce the incentive to attack. And that was the belief, his strong belief, and also the belief, even of military intelligence, to such a degree, Peter, that on the night of the sixth, when the information started to come in, the advice was, you know, don't move any forces around

because Hamas will miscalculate and think that we are about to attack them. That's how embedded that belief was. So that disrupted everything, number one. And he's a different man. He was regarded as cautious about using force. Always said no, always said, wait, never wanted a ground invasion of Gaza before that. The shock of being that wrong just loosened all the restraints. And I think that's a big part.

He's also got the two most right-winged, fanatically right wing. There's no description. There's no right word for them parties in that coalition until his personal interests, like Donald Trump's, overlap and pushed him to keep that government alive because he faces all these trials, which are being postponed and postponed and postponed as long as his prime minister. That combination has been deadly.

And the proof that it's this powerful is he sacrificed his relationship. while you are giving up one of your most important strategic assets by being offside Donald Trump as it became clear within four weeks, frankly, that Donald Trump wanted to end this war. And he's further offside than he's ever been. And the United States, for its part, Trump has cut Israel out completely of these negotiations. They're not briefed. They don't get regular briefings. They're not informed.

The Israelis are getting information about what's going on between Pakistan, you know, as the mediator and Iran, from the Emirates, not from Washington. That is close to a relationship that's broken. Well, that is my question on this. You know, both men, Trump and Netanyahu, you know, try to maintain that they're each other's best friends, and etc. Are they or has that relationship between the two countries, not just the two men, but between the two countries, changed forever as a result of what we've witnessed

not only the last four months, but in the last, you know, a couple of years. You know, forever is too long a time. But changed for the foreseeable future, absolutely, yes. First of all, the relationship between these two men, is brought attention. And, you know, Donald Trump has lost it with Netanyahu in conversation, sworn at him and didn't even have trouble

in one of those calls with reporters that happened in one in the morning saying, yeah, I said that to him, swore at him. So the relationship between these two is broken. Netanyahu feels betrayed by Trump. He's exposed. And Trump wants to end this war.

and simply has no tolerance for Nathanion doing anything that would prolong the war. And that's what's going on in Lebanon to some degree. So look how that empowers his blah, right? It's perfect. All you do is fire 10 missiles across the border on any given morning. You know Israel's going to respond and you know that Trump is going to explode. That's the strategic dilemma. But the problem started before, Peter, it started.

and interesting enough. It started again after the Obama deal. The whole urgent story here is the Obama deal. Netanyahu was so outraged by it because his perspective, really from 2010 on, as there was only one strategic enemy that Israel had with Iran and that they were a mortal threat because they were a threshold nuclear power

and they could move very quickly to a nuclear weapon. And so he comes to Washington, and he addresses Congress, and he makes fundamental, what was a partisan statement, the criticism of Obama was slashing even when Obama was president. You do that. You want to antagonize every Democrat that was in that hall. And so he did. what no other prime minister had ever done, he made Israel a partisan issue in U.S. politics.

And that's the real damage far beyond the relationship with Trump. And that's going to take a very, very long time, if ever, to repair. Well, if that is a failed relationship in this moment, what impact does it have there, the Middle East? So, you know, in an odd way, Netanyahu has the same electoral pressures that Donald Trump has, only more, because an election has to take place by the end of November. And there's polls. Now, you know, there's only one poll that matters. And it's where June, and an election could be three months off. But the current polls have the opposite.

When you add all the opposition parties together, except the Arab opposition. And I'll explain in a moment why I said, except there. There's a dead heat. The opposition has one or two more seats than Nathaniel who's coalition partners. One of the really extreme parties doesn't make it back in. They don't meet the threshold. The other does. So he's short.

He cannot form a government, but neither can the opposition. So there are likely 10 Arab seats in that Knesset. These are Israeli Arabs. And the opposition, or one of the main parties in that opposition, in an effort to get votes, said no non-Zionist parties was the language they used in the government. Well, you can't form a government without Israeli Arabs, which is this has been the problem. Israeli politics. That's why Netanyahu formed that extremist government with these extremist parties that no other Israeli leader before him was willing to touch. The Arab, the

Palestinian, the Israeli Palestinians are part of the future governance of Israel. They have to be. Right. Okay. Well, you know what we have to do? We have to take our break. And I want to come back and talk about something that in a way is related, but it's kind of very different. We'll do that right after this. And welcome back. You're listening to the Monday episode of The Bridge. That means Dr. Janice Stein from the Mug School at the University of Toronto.

You're listening on Sirius X-Gem. Channel 167 Canada Talks are on your favorite podcast platform. I'm still in Scotland, be here from a lot of, a couple of weeks actually. But what's unfolded here in the UK over the last week has been quite something. I mean, we know that Sir Kier-Starmer, the Prime Minister of Great Britain, the Labor Prime Minister, has not been in a comfortable position for quite some time. Many in his party are upset of the way he's been governing, even though he has a majority

government. and there's all kinds of rumors about how he may be toppled. Now, set that as a background to last week, one of his most powerful ministers. A guy we've talked about on this program before, the defense minister, resigns, pulls out. This is the guy who just last year said, we're not ready for a war, and we need to be ready.

And his explanation of how you get ready is you've got to spend a lot more money. And so for the last year, he's been pushing and pushing and pushing the government and Starmer to make more money available for defense preparations for the UK. Hasn't happened. He suggested everything, including cuts to hospitals, healthcare, you name it. but trying to emphasize how serious the situation is and the threat of Russia, I don't know, just this weekend,

they boarded a Russian tanker, a bunch of British commandos in the English Channel. Nevertheless, that's happened, and once again, it's thrown the spotlight on Starmer and the way he's governing. But in a way, it throws the spotlight on a lot of NATO countries,

because many of them are in the same kind of situation, including us. I mean, Canada is spending billions to try and get up to speed. There's still some question where all that money's going to come from, but they are spending. Anyway, this is what's happened here. How do you look at this story and what's happened in the threats to Stamish leadership? You know, for your, it's absolutely an astonishing week in Britain I found. John Healy resigned. That's no small thing in the UK. Risk take defense seriously. I'm always impressed when I cross the ocean.

They know their military history. They're proud of it. It's so woven into the fabric of the United Kingdom. So to have John Ely, who's not regarded as a very partisan labor minister, he's regarded as a serious minister to resign. Why? Because the United Kingdom cannot get to 3% of defense spending by 2030. Now, if that weren't bad enough in Europe, there were two other minor shocks and one big shocks that hit Europe. The first is that the Germans withdrew from a fighter-reliacro.

partnership with France and Spain. So here's how the Europeans are actually going to build a platform. They're going to collaborate. The Germans walked away. That's frankly the kiss of death for that partnership. One of the things that's not likely going to get funded now, that funding in the UK is where it's at, is a partnership that the UK did with Japan and Italy

on a global combat year. craft. So add those two together, the Europeans do not have a partnership, a platform where they can work together with allies to build one of the most basic things that they need over the next 10 years. Because the intelligence estimate, and this is the official intelligence estimate coming out of NATO, which I'm not, I'm taking by the grain of salt here. But the an estimate is that Europe has to be prepared by 2030 for an attack by Russia. That's what's being shared with NATO members. And then to top it all off, a letter went that was just leaked this week, but a letter went at the beginning of June from the United States to NATO.

It is not simply a matter of removing 5,000 Americans from Poland, them coming back, which is what we heard about in public. They're going to cut the fighter aircraft, the F-16s and the others, by a third. They're going to go down because they're going to redeploy them somewhere else. They're going to pull out one of the nuclear missile submarines that can launch missiles. It's one, and they're going to move an aircraft carrier off the shore, Atlantic shore. they're going to redeploy it somewhere else, they're going to move one of two groups of fighter bombers. You put this whole story together.

They're a very, very bad week for Europe and its capacity to defend itself, frankly. You know, you're right. It has been a bad week, and it's just the shape of it is just starting to become clear to a lot of ordinary folk like myself. I mean, you've seen the leaders of the G7 countries, excluding the U.S.,

have clearly been recognizing what's going on here. Yeah, yeah. And it kind of explains why Carney and others use these terms, like we really are seeing a different world order shaping here. Yeah. Because the Americans are just not playing the role that we always assumed. No, no. They did, but we always assumed, we always assumed they always would.

It's not different. It's certainly different under this president in terms of withdrawing, you know, going, you know, back, either back home or to different places in the world, as you suggested. So when you, when you see what Healy's done, John Healy, the defense minister who resigned, it's almost Churchillian in a way. Yeah. You know, it's not partisan. It is, we're under threat.

We've got to do something about it. We've got to spend money. And I've waited a year. I'm not going to wait any longer. I'm resigning. Now, I put that to somebody who knows Healy well over this weekend to ask what this person thought of it and said, you haven't heard the last of John Healy.

And so I immediately thought, of Churchill. If Starmer, something happens to Starmer, there could be a significant group that goes to healing. You know, I have to say, I feel exactly the same way. What have we had a minister resign? Sheebo, right? But it's so rare, Peter, that now, I, the person you spoke to is reading the political tea leaves. I understand this is a, this just looks like his. sinking ship, but that's not the reputation that John Healy has any more than the reputation that Gibo has. These are people that went into politics

because they cared about the issue. Healy is a serious person, and there is something Churchillian about saying, I cannot keep silent about this. This is a grave issue, and I'm going to resign even if I can't, don't come back because it did, it pushed the issue back to the center of the agenda again in the United Kingdom. It's so rare. It's almost, you know, I think sometimes for young people who tell me that all politics is rigged

or it's all about self-serving individuals, when you get these kinds of actions, young people sit up and pay attention, believe it or not. what do you when you look into this next couple of days when the G7 meets I mean the G7 it used to be a big deal like a really big deal yeah and it you know it's supposedly set up to talk about you know it's an economic summit well it's yeah it always gets caught up with whatever's going on in the world right at that time and I'm sure it will again this week um But how much of a role do you think what we're witnessing right now is going to play with the makeup of that table? I mean, Trump will be there for, you know, a day or a couple of hours or whatever, you know. Half of it. It somehow has to be about him. So, you know, he has to create a scene of some kind.

But there are six other players at that table, and they're not insignificant. What happens here? You know, for sure, it's interesting. That's why I refer to. to those two partnerships that cracked apart because one included Japan, right? Because the others are Europeans and Japan. For the summit to be meaningful, you remember Mark Carney talked about variable geometry and that famous speech in dialogue.

So what does that mean in plain English? It means building a coalition of the willing so that you can get moving on issues. You don't have to have everybody saying yes. You don't allow one country to exercise in Vichol, which is a big problem in the European Union, but you put together a coalition of the willing. Here we're two small coalitions of the willing to get stuff done. They couldn't do it.

So we can talk all we want about new world orders and the new role of Europe and the new role of middle powers, The test, what can they get done together? And, you know, on this agenda, for sure, the war in Iran, if the ceasefire package doesn't get over the line by the 15th, and that will preoccupy everyone, because that's causing such a mess in the global economy. AI.

Well, the issue with AI is about an AI where all the research, all the breakthroughs are in the United States and secondarily China. That's another version of new forms of power that are being made in the United States and causing huge challenge for Europeans and Canada. If they can't come together around some concrete plans, I don't mean declarations. G7 or greater communicates. I think the time's past for that. What are you going to do together?

And by when are you going to get it done? You know, they've even suggested there won't be a final communicate this time. Well, there you go. That's because of Donald Trump, though. Exactly. Yeah. But maybe that's the way to go at this point in. Yeah, but what are the other six going to do, right?

So you had in the first partnership, that's why that struck me this week when these two collapsed. The UK, Italy and Japan, that was one, no United States there. You know, France, Spain, and Germany, no United States there. There's the sex. Both partnerships broke apart. And who knows what's going to happen in France? And when is it in spring? There's the next year.

Macron can't run again. Macron can't run. And the favorite at the moment is the right wing, is Marie Le Penh, but she may not be able to run because of other issues that are confronting her. right now, but I noticed that the person who's the leading candidates, a young guy, is a Bardello, I think it is? Yes, Bar Dello. He was interesting over the weekend because he was asked about Trump, with the assumption

being that he would be a, he would be a big fan of Trump's and would welcome a Trump endorsement. He took the opposite approach. He said, I'm not interested in Donald Trump, what he's saying, what his, solutions are, and I certainly don't want an endorsement. That was interesting. It is interesting because that's where Georgia Maloney is, too. Yeah.

The Prime Minister Italy, who started out, had a great relationship with Donald Trump, was one of the first people to fly, you know, across the ocean and go to Mar-a-Lago. She's distanced herself now from Trump. So his rhetoric, his insults, Greenland, that was the game changer in Europe. That was the absolute game changer in Europe. It was an, oh, my God, a moment. Even the far right in Europe has, and then when Orban gone, the far right is distance itself from Trump in Europe. You know, I was trying to think back.

you know, was Maloney the first to go to Mara Lago? Yeah, one of the first. Was it Daniel Smith and Kevin O'Leary were there first? Okay, sorry. Could have been. My bad humor. Okay. Listen, that's going to wrap it up for this week.

And next week is our last one. Oh, I'm glad. Before the summer hiatus, I mean, assuming we get a summer hiatus. I mean, who knows with this world. But we should think carefully about how we want to handle next week to try and set your fans, our listeners, up for a summer without you, because they get quite frustrated. I'm glad the G7 meeting is before next week.

That's right. Because that can be the framework. It could be. All right, Janice, thanks so much. We'll talk in seven days. Have a good week, Peter. Dr. Janice Stein from the Mug School, the University of Toronto. Great to have her with us, as always.

And we look forward to next Monday's program with Dr. Stein. I'm going to wrap it up for today, a reminder that tomorrow will be the last before the hiatus for the reporter's notebook, Althea Raj and Rob Russo. We'll be by to talk all things political. tomorrow. All right, I'm Peter Mansbridge. Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you again in about about 24 hours.