The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - There's A New Wave Coming -- Should You Care?

Episode Date: October 17, 2022

Covid Monday is back at least for this week on The Bridge.  Many of you have been asking to bring one of our doctors back for an assessment of where we are on covid.  Dr Lisa Barrett from Dalhouse University joins us with her take and its one you should listen to.  Then it's over to London for a chat with the former Director of Communications for Stephen Harper, Andrew MacDougall, and his analysis on what's happened to Liz Truss and whether she can even survive this week only a month after getting the British PM's job.

And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. You are just moments away from the latest episode of The Bridge. There's a new wave coming. Should you even care? Welcome to another new week of The Bridge. It's Monday, and this is going to sound a little deja vu. You can probably recall at the beginning of COVID, The Bridge dedicated every Monday, almost every Monday, to covering COVID. And we had great doctors from different parts of the country join us every Monday and give their take on what was happening, how we were dealing with things.

What about vaccines? Remember those days? Would there ever be a vaccine to deal with COVID? And when we say deal, let's be specific here. Nobody has ever said a vaccine would prevent you getting COVID. That has never been the case. What was said repeatedly as they looked for researchers from all over the world, including Canada, looked for that answer to how to come up with a vaccine, a COVID vaccine.

What they always said was, what this will do would lessen the chance of getting a severe illness and death from COVID. That's what a vaccine can do. And that's proven to be the case, as we've seen repeatedly, over and over again, in thousands, millions of cases around the world and here in Canada. Now, as I said, we devoted Mondays. And then earlier this year, we decided, you know what? It's time to move on.

COVID's still with us, but we've got things seemingly under control. And so COVID Mondays were gone from the bridge, but they're back today. We've decided we need one. Part of the reason we decided that is because you told us you wanted to hear one of those doctors again to talk to us about where we are

and how we're dealing with things. And sure, that's what we're going to do. We went to Halifax. Dr. Lisa Barrett, Dalhousie University. One of our epidemiologists, one of our specialists on the COVID story who's been with us, you know, for most of the past couple of years, and she's with us again today. So let's get right at it. Let's find out what Dr. Barrett has on her mind about this issue of the latest wave. Here's our conversation. Well, it's been a while, and it's good to talk to you again,

but it's one of those things that we talk to you because we're kind of worried about where are things going. The last two falls, obviously, 2020, 2021, were tough. They were bad. And now there's talk about we're getting a new wave. How much should we be concerned about that talk? Is there a new wave underway? It's highly unlikely that we are at a point where COVID is not going to have

waves of resurgence over the next number of months. And so I think almost certainly this fall, we're going to see more cases of COVID. And to be clear, although we have stopped in most places in North America measuring it well, there's a lot of COVID around even now. So wave probably, but also that's on a very choppy sea at the best of times yet. That's not gone away. We are not into a situation yet where COVID goes away in between sort of like flu and is just there for a couple of months a year. So definitely choppy seas at the baseline. So in preparing for that, is it as simple as, you know, keep up your, your boosters, make sure you're, you're up to speed on all that is, is that what you do? Or are we at the point of, eh, maybe we should be, you know, thinking about masking again and that kind of stuff. Where are we on precautionary measures?

I think at a very basic and personal level, it's going to be a much more individual approach to how we go forward. You're very, very right at a population level and at a personal level, keeping up to date, particularly with the latest version of vaccines that are attempting to cover circulating variants is really important. We don't exactly know how much each additional booster adds to protection after four doses, but we're assuming it's going to be helpful. So yes, do that. And then beyond that, what do you do? And that's going to be very much based in number one, who you are and what your health status is. Number two, who you're around in the community, are there vulnerable people? And then number three, you know, some folks have a health model where they want to stay healthy all the time and don't want to get illnesses of

any kind. Those are the folks who do all the prevention mechanisms, do all the screening tests, and they really may not want to get COVID or any other respiratory virus. And those folks are probably going to have a slightly different approach. You mentioned masking. Those are people who may want to start thinking about masking in public, crowded, indoor spaces again. I certainly haven't let that part go, mainly because I need to be at work. I have vulnerable people around me. And I really don't enjoy having respiratory viruses, COVID or otherwise, I get quite sick. And so my approach, whether it's just COVID or COVID plus in the respiratory season, which is where we are now, may well involve some form of masking and being moderate

about the number of big indoor spaces I go to. So a few things. There's your own personal protection, and that's a booster kind of approach. Two, who's around you. If you've got a lot of vulnerable folks, you may consider it a civic approach or a family approach to want to reduce virus around folks and the transmission, and that's boosters plus, boosters plus masks. And then third, for people who have a health model where they want to stay away from respiratory viruses for their own reasons, they may well choose to take a more conservative approach and use more masking, a little bit more moderate social interaction, and really emphasizing that people around them stay home when they're sick.

What's your view on the problem they're having getting people to take boosters? I mean, the numbers are quite low. And these aren't, you know, they're not suddenly reborn as anti-vaxxers. They're just sort of like beyond it. They may have had COVID in the summer and seem to think that, you know what, I don't need to do this anymore. I've had four shots in total already. I had COVID. I'm feeling good. And I'm just not going to get a booster. You know, it's a much more nuanced time. You may notice every single answer I'm probably going to give you is longer because there's not a one size fits all answer right now. And I think people are pretty smart. Some people are just confused. There are days when I'm confused,

but a lot of people are just really sobby, tuned in and trying to figure out what the right answer is. And it's very individualized. Vaccines work best when most people get them at the right time and the right vaccine. And what I mean by that is sometimes it's okay to wait a little bit until you've had a certain amount of time between your last dose and or your actual infection to give your immune system time to recover in between. So that means that before when we had this way back in the day when vaccines were just rolling out, lots of people hadn't had COVID, everyone's right time was at the same time to get their dose. And now there's lots of time points where lots of folks, for example, I'm going to wait my hundred and sixty eight days at least because

I know my immune system needs a break in between before I get my next dose. Lots of folks want to have a bivalent vaccine that actually contains the circulating strain of the virus, B.A. 4, 5, and they want to wait a little longer until that one's available. that actually contains the circulating strain of the virus, B.A.4.5, and they want to wait a little longer until that one's available. If they're younger and well, that's a valid choice. And so I think the numbers are low for a couple of reasons. Number one, right time, right vaccine now is different for everyone.

It's not all timed at exactly the same time, the way it was in the first rollout of our vaccines where none of us had had the vaccine. Two people are asking more questions. Good job. The data and the information are a little different on when is the exact right time for each person. And then number three, I think there are some people that are still confused because the fall dose messaging is a little bit confusing and people need a little bit more time and space to get comfortable in some situations. I think that's okay. But just a reminder in the background for yourself, if you are older, you do have medical problems, you really do need an additional dose. Two, natural infection, getting this doesn't prevent reinfection, and you can still get quite sick. And, you know, three,

we are still playing the game of protecting people around us. There is still that civic, I like to call it respiratory hygiene part and vaccines hopefully are still part of what people think of as a community-minded approach to managing this, at least until it becomes backwards, I hope, to the seasonal version of like flu is. I'm going to ask you a question here that you may want to duck. Well, it's really, it's general in nature but i i'm going to use myself as an example um i'm elderly in my mid-70s or at least approaching my mid-70s i've had five shots okay i've had the the two first ones and then i've had now three boosters, just having my fifth shot a couple of weeks ago. I had COVID in the early part of July.

So I'm doing all the right things, I think, and I'm careful about where I am, and I mask if the crowds around me are real crowds. And I've actually noticed more people doing that lately. Still an overwhelming minority of people in those crowds, but more than, say, a month ago. Anyway, the question is, given that kind of history, which is, I would assume, the history of a lot of people,

what's going on in my body right now? What's happening in there? Well, we'll leave the brain part out and just go for the immune system. Okay, good. Because the psychology of this is very different for each person. Right. It's a struggle between, and I said we'd leave the head part out and there's where I start. It's a struggle between needing and wanting to feel protected by doing all the right things

and wanting to be realistic about what comes next. And, you know, nothing worse than feeling like you're doing all the right stuff. And you still have to be aware, you've still got to think about booking additional appointments for additional doses. And so I think that that's in a lot of people's head. You've highlighted something which is a general health model that's reasonable and pragmatic, but not overly fearful. And right now in your body, you have an immune system that's educated, and it's pretty darn educated, both by the vaccines and your natural infection or your actual infection that you had in July. That combination of both exposure to a virus, getting it, and the vaccines is the best immunity that we know of at the moment for COVID. And we think that that type of immunity has a lot of durability in terms of protection against further infection

with the current circulating variants based on the bits and pieces of science and real world data and small vaccine studies that we see coming out hybrid immunity so your body right now is in between we think situations where it's exposed to virus. So it's starting to relax a little bit in terms of being activated, which is a good thing. You still have antibodies around and B cells, which are going to produce more antibodies if you run into a virus. And because they've had that education multiple times in multiple ways,

there's what we call immunologic memory. I'm just teaching this now to the med students. It's kind of fortuitous. Immunologic memory. And that means that that army of COVID specific immune responses is not only present, but it's become more sophisticated than the first couple of times you got a booster. And it's ready in a bigger army than it would have been before. Because you've had some time since your last true infection, you may get micro exposed daily, who knows, given the current situation. But you've had enough time in between likely that your cells and your and your immune system are ready to go they're properly primed and they're probably at a really good point um but they're not exhausted

so if you get another booster 120 days out from your last infection you've got a good response and it's going to be about as high as it could be, we think in most people. So that means you've got the army ready, you're prepared to respond either to a vaccine or a actual viral infection. But then once you get out past that three month part, you're going to start to see that some of that protection is going to wane from the antibody perspective. And that brings us to the next part of your immune system that's also educated, and it's responsible for that protection from severe disease part, the T cells, they're not antibodies, we don't talk about them as much. But those are the the T cells are the less fancy fighters. We don't talk about them as

much, but they're in the background and they still are there. They're also educated and ready to roll. They have memory and they're the ones that protect against moderate severe disease. That part doesn't go up and down. It doesn't wax and wane as much as the antibody protection, which is what we truly boost for the most part with another dose of vaccine or a natural infection. So the T cells are there in the back. They're the backbone. They're the people pushing everything forward or the cells pushing everything forward. So your body right now, not exhausted, well primed, up to a point after you get past that 120 day mark in older folks and people with other medical

problems, you may need to boost up the antibodies, but the T-cells are sitting pretty in the background. And the only thing you're going to want to update them on is if we see a big shift in variant, and that might be necessary. There are some of those in the background. Long answer, body prepared, but you still need to get boosted for antibodies to be aware after a certain amount of time. It was a long answer, but it was a good answer. Actually, it was the wrong answer. You were supposed to say, Peter, my God, you don't look like you're in your mid-70s.

Well, I did think that. Yeah, sure. Too little too late. All right. We're almost out of time, but I want to quickly cover this because I've had a lot of mail from parents of young kids already this fall who say, you know, so many of the kids in school are, you know, getting sick. Our kids have been sent home. You know, I test them when they get home right away with a rapid test. Test negative, they don't have COVID, but they are sick. They have something, some kind of flu or something worse. And it takes a few days to get over it. And a lot of their friends in class are getting the same kind of thing.

And this has happened in different parts of the country because the mail has reflected that. So what's happening? Kids are finally back in school. They're back together. they're back unmasked and is this just the normal passing around of of you know the various viruses that you know happen to young kids at school because of the contact they have and because quite frankly they haven't been around each other for a couple years yeah most likely that's the case. I will say it's a little frustrating that we've taken away a lot of the formal testing that was helping us to actually get information in those situations that we've never gotten before we assumed things. great, but they can be erroneous. And this is not a political statement, but when we don't have data, making assumptions doesn't allow a drive for vaccines for common respiratory viruses.

There's been no political will or medical will to have developed vaccines for common colds, for rhinoviruses and other things, because we don't surveil for them. Oh, that's just part of life. I think a lot of people are wondering right now if that number and type of respiratory viruses that we're seeing in schools has to be the way it is. So one, we don't really know for sure. Hopefully some of the surveillance is going to continue so that we actually know what kids are getting sick with. But likely, yes,

this is probably, there's things out there in the common cold bucket, rhinoviruses, other coronaviruses, then COVID. There are lots of them. Among other things, adenoviruses and flu, to your point, although not quite so much in vaccinated younger kids, that made people miserable. I don't know if we remember, but everyone in grade schools gets miserable in primary for all of fall and most of winter and their parents do too. So likely that's what it is, likely a little bit of waning or never been exposed before. Because if they're, you know, between that three, four, five age when COVID started, they wouldn't have been exposed in schools. It's going to take a year or so to catch up. I hope we continue to do some surveillance. And I hope people, parents and kids, have some ability to be able, when they're truly miserable, not go to school. Not because it's going to be super

dangerous and all their kids are going to go to the hospital, but because it's not great when everyone's sick all the time. So, yes, likely common cold viruses plus some flu. Get vaccinated for flu. Don't skip it in order to just get COVID, you need both. Last quick question. When we're talking about age, you're still young. You're probably not even close to halfway through your career. Do you think you're going to be dealing with COVID situations

and COVID questions for the rest of your career? I think COVID is going to be around. If I'm lucky, people are going to continue to ask questions because that means that people are paying attention and haven't fully regressed to the mean that is let's ignore all respiratory virus disease. We did that with flu. It hasn't particularly served older people well, nor parts of the population. So I hope we're going to be asking questions about COVID. And yeah, I do think this one's going to settle in. I'm guessing, but I'm guessing that it's going to settle in and be around for a long period of time. It's hitting the viral sweet spot, which is causing some disease

completely transmittable to other people in a very, very easy way and not killing off all its hosts now because of vaccines and immunity. Plus, that immunity creates pressure. The virus is going to love to mutate and dance around our immune systems. So, yeah, we're going to be answering questions about this COVID-19 virus for a long time. Well, the only good thing about that answer is it means that we're going to be asking you questions for some time to come. And you had the right answer that I looked young. I'm going to take some lessons there. Thanks for this. Always great to talk to you. I miss talking to you and I'm sure we'll do it again soon. I hope so. Okay. Cheers. Bye. Dr. Lisa Barrett in Halifax

talking to us about, well, you know what it was about. It was about COVID and the fact that we're still living with it. Which is unfortunate, but it is real. Okay. We're going to take a quick break. And when real. Okay, we're going to take a quick break. And when we come back, we're going to, we'll go from Halifax to London. And we'll try to find out the answer to this question. Liz Truss is the new Prime Minister of Great Britain.

But is she about to be the old Prime Minister of Great Britain too? That's when we come back. And welcome back. You're listening to The Bridge on Sirius XM, Channel 167, Canada Talks. And on your favorite podcast platform. I'm Peter Mansbridge. Great to be with you again, as we launch yet another week of the bridge we're closing in, by the way,

if you listen to the podcast version, we're closing in, I think it'll probably happen. Probably happen tomorrow to 5 million downloads. Since we started with Sirius XM back in, um, when was it? February of last year, 2021. And in the podcast world, it's all about downloads. How many people are downloading your podcast?

And that we've had 5 million? Hey, that's not a bad place to be. I don't know what it really means. Bottom line, we're still in a new world. Podcasts is really a new world. There are thousands and thousands of podcasts out there. We're lucky because we've got a great partner in SiriusXM and we've got great listeners in all of you.

All right. Well, you know that it's been about a month now since Liz Truss became the leader of the Conservative Party in Britain and as a result the Prime Minister. They dumped their former leader, Boris Johnson and they elected Liz Truss as their new leader with great hopes that this was going to begin a resurgence. But it has been nothing short of a disaster for the Conservatives.

And now there's already talk about, is she going to get the same kind of reception from her party that Boris Johnson got a month ago? In other words, is she going to get tossed? And could it be even in the next few days? Well, in all things Britain, our go-to guy is my good friend, Andrew McDougall, who was the former director of communications for Stephen Harper when Stephen Harper was prime minister. And he's now a director of a strategic analysis group. They're called the Trafalgar Group, and they're based in London.

And that's where Andrew works now, giving advice to clients around the world, giving them strategic advice and consulting. So who better to go to than Andrew McDougall to figure out what the heck is going on? In fact, wouldn't that be a great first question? Let's try it with Andrew. So, Andrew, what the heck went wrong for Liz Trust? It all seemed, you know, a month or so ago,

there were doubters around her, but it seemed like, okay, a month or so ago, there were doubters around her. But it seemed like, okay, this is going to work. It's going to take time. It'll work. But it seems to have corkscrewed right into the ground. What happened? Well, yeah, I think in essence, Peter, what happened is that ideology ran right into the hard face of reality. And you had Liz Trust that went around the country in the summer, pitching a plan that was heavily predicated on tax cuts, no spending reductions, kind of a fantasy economics. And you had her main rival, Rishi Sunak, who was giving the much more

adult view of, we can't quite do that because the markets will kick back. And sure enough, Liz Trust put down her plan that she campaigned on, plus a few more tax cuts, and no plan to pay for it, Peter. And that was the big part. Markets like low taxes, sure, but they like certainty, and they like a plan to see how you're going to pay for it. The government pulled a bunch of unicorns out of its backside, and no plans on how to pay for any of it. And that's what's really put this into the ground. And the government's now been in, you know, week three of clawing back what it promised. And once you do that, you lose your credibility. And we now have the markets running Britain because they don't like what they're hearing.

And now we're down to the point of we have trustonomics without the onomics and probably soon without the trust. Well, on that last point, soon without the trust, this would be quite something if she got bounced, I guess, once again by her own party, just like Boris Johnson was, within a very short period of time. Is that likely? Is it possible? How would you describe it? Yeah, I think it's both likely and definitely possible and certainly likely, Peter, in that, you know, if you look at the polls for the last week and a half, two weeks, they're now ballooned out to a 30 point lead for Labour. And if you run that through the seat projections, you know, you're not quite in 1993 Canada territory for the Conservatives, but you're in a route, you're in like a Tony Blair 1997 super huge labor majority. And, you know, that will do two things. It can either concentrate the minds of the Tory MPs and say, we have two years in this mandate to try to get out from under this circumstance. Or you can try to do the quick fix. And I think the thing that argues for

the quick fix is that Liz Truss and her former chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng's actions have lit a couple of long fuses under the middle class economy um taxes are actually going to go up for the middle class under the trust plan which is now being reversed but more importantly mortgage rates are going to go up faster than they would otherwise have done because of this plan and there are over 100 000 mortgages that renew every month here and these are mostly to Tory voters who instead of paying one and a half or 2% on their mortgages will now be somewhere in the six to 7%.

And when you're carrying a lot more mortgage debt these days than you were the last time interest rates were anywhere near that, that is catastrophic for households. So now you have energy costs that are gonna be a problem for two years. You have mortgage costs that are gonna be a problem. So the Tories will ask them,

is there something that will be better if we stick with the Liz Trust plan and Liz Trust, or do we have to try something radically different? So I think right now it sounds like the letters are going in to the party chairman, and they want to try something else because Liz Trust has shown neither the talent nor the communication skill to kind of survive in these 40-whatever days it's been now.

If she's going to survive, it seems that she's put all her eggs in one basket, and that's the Jeremy Hunt basket. He's the new chancellor of the Exchequer, the new minister of finance, so to speak. I'd never heard of this guy before, but watching him, he looks the part. Yeah. I'd never heard of this guy before, but watching him, he looks the part. There's obviously enormous pressure on him, but also a potential future for him if he's able to pull this one out of the fire. Yeah. So, Peter, he's Britain's longest serving health secretary. So during the coalition years and then into into Theresa May, he served in that role for six years, which is a long post. And so he knows well the cost pressures the government has because health is such a big cost driver of that. He did run

against Boris Johnson for the leadership in 2019, down to the final two, and was beat pretty comprehensively about two to one in the final take. So he's on the left of the Conservative Party, or he would have been smack dab in the middle of it under the David Cameron iteration of the Tories, but certainly not a Brexiteer, not an ultra libertarian like Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng. So he is respected as an adult, but he is not particularly supported within the parliamentary party. He ran again in this latest leadership race, bowed out. He was the first one out. He only had 18 MPs supporting him. So yes, to adult, could he be a prime minister? Probably not, because there's just no constituency for him within the party. And it's this kind of metadynamic we're seeing in politics, Peter,

where the person that's right for the country might not be the person that's right for the party. And so they can't quite make it through that first step where they have to convince their own side that they might be the better option. So what you're hearing now is a mix of Ken Rishi Sunak, who was down to the final two against Trust, or another one like Penny Morden, who was number three in that race. Could they put together some sort of kind of coalition of the adults and do the things that they need to do to get the market's confidence back in Britain to buy that breathing space. Because if you don't satisfy the markets, Peter, they're going to be on your backside until you do. So this idea that you can just

turtle and weather the storm, you know, the concern here this morning was what would the markets do in response to the news of last week? And obviously, evidently, the signs weren't great because the government's moving even further and faster this morning. You know, I saw last week there were a few rumbles about bring Boris back. That's not serious, is it? Well, it's serious amongst his constituency. So if you look to the parliamentary party and everybody who got super tired of his his his lax standards and and you know he he had to go but there's a sense that he's the only politician in that party that has any chance of connecting with the wider public um but the question now is is he's a busted flush in his

own party and probably with the public because you know they might not understand the ins and outs of guilts and bond markets and whatever but they do know that they were told to stay at home and, you know, protect the NHS and know that the prime minister disobeyed his own rules multiple times and were angry about that. And you know what, quite frankly, Boris Johnson just got paid about 150 grand last week for doing a 30 minute speech. I think he wants to do a bit more of that before he comes back into the cauldron. Let's not forget the Tory party and the government now are a house on fire. And I don't know if you want to go running into that. The better long term play might be here.

Keir Starmer, leader of the Labour Party, take control. We'll get out of the way. We'll let you eat all the poop that's going to come your way from all the tough choices that we're going to have to make on tax and spend. And then we'll come back in after you've messed that up. That might be the longer-term play. And then does a Boris Johnson who's made some money then come back in and have another chance at being the king? Maybe.

But as someone who's just your average Briton here watching the firestorm, give me some competence, please. Give me somebody who can kind of walk and chew gum and speak complete sentences. That's my bar, Peter. It's not very high, but nobody's been hitting it. I know you never stop watching the things on the Canadian side of the Atlantic, and there have been some interesting things to watch that in a way kind of relate to the Liz Truss situation.

I mean, Danielle Smith hasn't exactly got off to a roaring start in Alberta. And I wonder if it's the same kind of thing that you talked about that got Truss into trouble right out of the gate in terms of what the party wants to hear, what the province in that case wants to hear. Are there similarities here? Are there lessons to be learned here? Definitely, definitely, Peter. Danielle Smith had a constituency to to satisfy and that was her party

membership in alberta and as jason kenney will probably tell you up and down they're not the same thing you got caught in that trap multiple times during the pandemic uh of having to take decisions uh for the broader public good that were posed by his party and yeah danielle smith like when your whole raison d'etre like the trustonomics for her is the sovereignty act and the very first thing she does when she gets in power as an advisor comes out and go yeah well you know we'll have to respect the supreme court i mean i thought that was the whole point is that you didn't um yeah so i think and now these comments on ukraine it's like straight out of out of uh the internet cesspool and you're like hey who was doing the opposition research on this person but But yeah,

they absolutely doesn't align to reality. And that will catch up to her. And then people will be disappointed. And again, we're getting back to these kind of meta points in politics, Peter, lack of faith and trust in governments, you know, they don't, they say what they're going to do, and then and then back away and don't do it. You know, we need some some follow through some consistency. And I guess it starts with not making stupid promises that you can't keep. And that was the trust problem. Every economist that could fog a mirror over here was saying, look, in a highly inflationary environment with a tight labor market, you can't just pour uncosted spending onto that bonfire. It will go up. And everybody knew that. And they were going, forget the establishment. That's the orthodoxy. What do they know? Well, it turns out a lot because you can't beat reality. And the free marketeers got creamed by the free market.

And that's the lesson. It doesn't matter what you think in your head. Politics has always been the art of the possible. And what's right for one scenario is not right for another. What know, what worked for Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the early 80s, it's not guaranteed to work now. And we have to always be pragmatic about that. And I know that's not a sexy word in these days and age. But you know, life is about compromise and about being an adult and not getting everything that you want and tempering your expectations. And conservatives amongst any cohort in politics should understand that, that life is not a theory. You know, we are all made from flawed timber, Peter, and we are all

imperfect people that do irrational things. So you have to keep that in mind when you're plotting your path to government and your plan for government. I'm just wondering if there's something in the air or in the water or something in this era that we're living through in the early 2020s because you have these two examples within a month of each other which are sort of glaring in their really ignorance of the way politics works. It's hard to believe they could get themselves, both of them, trust, more serious at the moment, Smith, potentially more serious,

into so much trouble so fast. Yeah. And I think, you know, Peter, like we discussed the last time we were talking about the business of news, you know, this is the information economy that we live in. You know, you can find a chorus supporting your brilliant ideas, no matter how dumb they are. You know, there is always that corner of the information economy that's going to be going, yeah, yeah, you've got it right. And in the old days of politics and media, that wasn't the case. You know, you had a very tough test to pass with the fourth estate. You had to convince the commentators in the media that you were credible and through them, the markets and the population. Now you almost have the reverse engineered. You have the kind of agitators out there online that will push you and push you. And that's what you listen to. You know, you tune out,

tune in the people that support you. You tune out the people who say something against you and you confuse that perspective with the broader reality. And I think that's what's happened here. And you have to take soundings from further out than your immediate comfort group and your ideological soulmates. You know, you have to truly understand an argument. You have to be able to articulate the opposite one in good faith to really get a sense of whether you grasp what your opponent is saying. And until you can do that, what you have to offer isn't a serious proposition. You have to test against the other approaches and reality. And if it's found wanting, you better go back to the drawing board, lest you end up where Liz Truss and Danielle Smith are. All right. We're going to leave it with this.

Where will Truss be by the end of this week? I'd say on the back benches, Peter. She is certainly in office now, but not in power. And that can't go on. If the markets aren't happy, they're going to have to see credible political leadership as well as economic planning. So I would expect her to be out. Andrew, thanks very much for this. Always good to talk. Thank you, Peter. Andrew McDougall joining us from London. And Andrew, remember, is director of the Trafalgar Thank you, Peter. Prime Minister Stephen Harper. And we appreciate Andrew's time. He always helps us out on stories that are happening in London, and it was good to have that chat with him today. Before we go, an end bit for you.

Remember end bits? Love end bits. Little stories that kind of are worth mentioning. And this one goes along with our continued kind of monitoring of the debate surrounding working from home versus working from the office. And that debate continues. It kind of rages in some operations. Employees feeling strongly about this. Bosses feeling strongly about this.

Well, listen to this. This is from V vox.com it's a longer piece but i'm just going to uh read a couple of sections from it because it's there's a twist here you go office workers say they want to continue working remotely for the same reasons many executives want to it allows them to be more productive and have better work-life balance. They also cite reasons that their bosses, who might be able to afford nannies or homes close to a city center office, sometimes don't, like how showing up in the office forces them to commute for hours or to depend on expensive and unreliable child care. Meanwhile, more than half of managers and executives want their employees back in the

office five days a week, according to a new survey by freelance platform Fiverr, saying the office makes it easier to access company computers, software, and IT, and it's a better place to collaborate than at home. A third of those leaders said employees are more motivated when they know they're being monitored in person by upper management. A quarter said workers would take shorter breaks if they were in the office. Another 25% said that since they'd already paid for office space, they might as well use it. Okay, that's all very good, but listen to the twist. Here's the twist in the story. 80% of executive jobs are currently available remotely, according to executive search firm Cowan Partners,

which helps companies fill management positions from director through the C-suite, ones that are often not visible through regular job postings that's up this is the number of executive jobs offered remotely okay that's up from 20 from about 25 pre-pandemic the share of americans overall who work remotely at least some of the time, was in the single digits then, and it's about 45% now, according to work-from-home research. Many of the executives cite being fully capable of working from home on technology like Zoom, Slack, and Teams, and say doing so enables them to work odd hours and communicate with colleagues in different time zones

while maintaining work-life balance. Yeah, fine. So in other words, they want the workers to be working at the job, not remotely anymore. The bosses want the workers at the plant or the business or whatever it is. However, they want to be at home. Go figure, right? The boss likes to work from home,

and they want the workers back at the office. Told you there was a twist. All right, lots more to come this week Tomorrow Brian Stewart is with us And once again There have been a lot of letters for Brian In the last little while And some of them continue to focus on

A Canadian angle to What in fact is really Continues to be the war in Ukraine And this issue around enlistment And recruiting Of the Canadian forces the war in Ukraine, and this issue around enlistment and recruiting of the Canadian forces. What's the situation there? Well, Brian's going to answer that as well as some other, obviously,

stories from the front that we are helping to understand the Ukraine war through the perspective of a great former foreign correspondent and war correspondent, Brian Stewart. That's tomorrow. Bruce Anderson will be by on Wednesday for Smoke, Mirrors and the Truth. The Random Ranter and your turn comes in on Thursday. Good talk on Friday with Chantelle Hebert and Bruce Anderson.

Great to have you with us today. Talk to you again in 24 hours and by the way i've had a little mail on the 24 hours thing and i'll answer that on thursday thanks for listening i'm peter mansbridge talk to you again in 24 hours Thank you.