The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Trumpism 2.0 -- This May Be The Best Explanation Yet.

Episode Date: January 27, 2025

Is Trump's vision all about American Imperialism, and does it compare with a similar time in the 19th century?

And hello there, Peter Vansbridge here. You're just moments away from the latest episode of The Bridge. It's Monday, beginning of a new week. Here's our topic, Trumpism 2.0, explained. And you better be listening, because this one is really good. Coming right up. And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. Yes, it's the beginning of another new week, and we start it the way we always start it on Mondays, with Dr. Janice Stein from the Munk School at the University of Toronto. And this one, I'm telling you, this is a really good one. Well, you'll see as it unfolds.

But basically what you end up with after listening to Dr. Sein for 40 minutes, you will have a pretty good idea of what Trumpism 2.0 was really all about. We deal with a number of topics in here, but I'm telling you, it's really good. I was invigorated, like I was really into it. And I think hopefully you will be too. I think you'll learn things. We learn things every Monday from Janice Stein. There's no question about that.

And I see it in your mail and I see it in the numbers. This is now one of our most rivals. Good talk is the most popular podcast of our week. And it's because of her amazing knowledge of the world and her ideas and her thoughts. And as I've said before, and as she said before, not everyone agrees with her ideas and her thoughts. And as I've said before, and as she said before, not everyone agrees with her. That's fine.

That's, that's what makes it so interesting because it engages us and makes us think, okay, we're going to get to that after that buildup. I better get to it fast, right? Well,

I got to give you the question of the week. Another huge success last week. And, um, Well, I got to give you the question of the week. Another huge success last week. And question of the week in terms of the number of people who hadn't written before who wrote for the first time. That was wonderful. Here's this week's question. We kind of toyed with this over the last, I don't know, few months. But here we're going to get your answer to this question. Have you changed how you follow the news?

Okay, what do I mean by that? Well, there used to be a time people just read newspapers, and there was a time when people just listened to the radio, and there was a time when people just watched television news. You know, the late-night news, the late-night network news, whether it was at 10 o'clock with, what was that guy's name? I can't remember. Or at 11 o'clock with Lloyd.

You know, those still exist, different personalities, different anchors. And that's all good. Very professional, great journalists. But is that how you follow the news? Or do you not watch news anymore? Do you just go online? Do you listen to your Facebook friends? Do you watch cable?

Do you watch Facebook friends? Do you watch cable? Do you watch streaming services? Do you listen to podcasts? Do you go on YouTube? How do you follow the news? So just like in the past, I'm looking for short, tight, and you were fantastic last week in doing that um answer so how you follow the news and why you've chosen that path so that's what i want to hear from you and um hopefully you'll write to the mansbridge podcast at gmail.com the mansbridge podcast at gmail.com. Get your answers in before 6 p.m. Eastern time on Wednesday.

All right? 6 p.m. Eastern time on Wednesday. Make sure you include your name and the location you're writing from. Those are all conditions that you have to meet if you end up getting it read on the air. Not all do because there's just so many, but we certainly try to get the best ones on. And we love new writers.

So don't be shy. We've got literally thousands of people who listen to this program every year or every day, tens of thousands. So don't be shy about writing in. So there you go. Right? Wednesday, 6 p.m., the Mansbridge Podcast at gmail.com. Keep it short.

Use your name and the location you're writing from. All right. Enough said. Let's get to this fabulous episode. Have I built it up enough? Let's get to this, so to speak. So he now has the presidential authority when he says it and has people worried. And the issue is very simply 5% GDP on the part of NATO countries. They've got their up their game from the 2%. Now, we never reached 2%, or at least we haven't in recent memory. But 5% is a long stretch for a lot of countries.

So, A, how serious is he? And B, can they get there? Or will they get there? Will they even try to get there? Or does this signal see the end of NATO? So take them in any order you want. So let's start with the number first, Peter, the 5%. It is a massive stretch.

Leave aside the fact that we are laggards. And our defense minister said this week we're going to get to 2% much more quickly than he thought we could. Think about this, 5% for us would be $100 billion a year of defense expenditure. I mean, there's no way this economy, frankly, could support that, but we're not alone here. So I think in this case, and we're all busy trying to decide whether when Trump puts a number on things, the number is real or it's a negotiating position.

I don't think this number is real because nobody really in NATO, the United States is not there. Right. The United States, three and a half percent, actually. It's just got such a large GDP. That's three and a half percent of its very large gdp is a lot of money uh so i i don't think that number is real but it's a real signal and that's how i read it you're not doing enough you're not doing enough you're not doing enough this is an old long you know barack obama this. This is not a song that Donald Trump is singing. At the other end of the spectrum, does this mean the end of NATO?

I don't think so. I don't think that's ever been his goal, really. There's not a lot to gain for Donald Trump from making things smaller. That's not where his head is on anything else. So why would he break up NATO? It makes things smaller. The United States has fewer allies. And, you know, there's a really interesting conversation about article 5 now you know

for our listeners article 5 is the crown jewel of the nato treaty because it says an attack on any one of us obligates the rest of us to come to that party's defense. But it's really silent on what we have to do when we come to their defense. It doesn't mean we automatically go to war or provide military assistance, contrary to what a lot of people think. And that's been a debate that is 60 years old. So it's not the tight constraint that many people think it is. So NATO is a great bargain. You know, using Trumpian language, NATO is just a very good deal for the United States. It gets lots of extra support. It gets access to bases in Europe. You could sell this to Trump as a good deal

without a lot of effort. But the allies have to do more. I think that's the territory that we're in, Peter. This is bargaining. The only time Article 5 has been instituted, I believe, was 9-11. Yes. And the other NATO countries, basically, including Canada, rushed to the aid of the United States,

took part in the Afghanistan invasion, and were there for, in our case, 10 or 12 years. But when you look back on that, Peter, NATO declared Article 5 right after 9-11. We didn't provide any military assistance to continental United States. There was a discussion among the allies, what could we do and what would be helpful?

And it was ultimately an attack on Afghanistan to remove the Taliban from power because they had sheltered Osama bin Laden. So it was nothing automatic about the way we would support the NATO member who was attacked. Right. But having said that, it was a long-term engagement on the part of a lot of countries, including Canada. And look how well that turned out. Not very well in the end of things. Anyway, I hear what you're saying. Just one more little flip in here, because it is important that we understand there's no automatic trigger to any of this and he knows that why has Biden made such an issue as soon as Russia invaded Ukraine he came out in May in an op-ed in the New York Times

which is a funny place for a president to make a statement but that's where Biden did it and he said, any attack on any NATO member is an attack against the United States, and we will come to their assistance. So he drew a line, but he's adamant that Ukraine not be admitted to NATO because that's precisely what he was trying to avoid was an automatic obligation

and that's why Ukraine the prospects of Ukraine being admitted to NATO are so low there's one big exception in the history of NATO Germany was divided and half of it you could argue was under Soviet

occupation at the time and it was admitted to nato but other than that no nato member wants a country inside nato that is likely to be attacked um i'm glad you raised germany because i i want to understand what five percent would mean to germany not only and whether it can afford it, it probably can, it's got bags of money, but the issue of what it's allowed to do with its defense forces and production. This is a huge issue, and you know, just to get to follow this thread, a big impetus

for creating NATO in 1949, and it's this famous phrase, you keep the Russians out and you keep the Germans down. That's why it was such an attractive thing. Nobody in Europe at that time was confident that the German, you know, the history of German aggression in 1914 and then in the 1930s was over. So

this was the best way you admitted divided Germany in. If NATO were to be dissolved, which is the worst case that you put on the table, there would be powerful incentives for Germany to develop a nuclear weapon.

It is in many ways the closest major frontline state to what is clearly a Russia that is thinking again in imperial terms. That's the huge advantage of NATO. As you rightly put it just now, it stops Germany from doing what it could otherwise afford to do.

And that is the overwhelming reason why the United States, Britain, France will not lock the boat on NATO, not even Donald Trump. I see that in the past week you've had Macron in France and his German counterpart meeting to try and sort this out as to the approach they want to take. And both are saying, look, we can't count on the Americans anymore. Right. We've got to get our act together as a European bloc.

Where's that going? Well, let's look at the two men who are the core of the European Union. Without that relationship between Germany and France, there is no European Union. Boy, are they both in domestic trouble. Are they? They are. Pardon me. both in domestic trouble. They are, pardon me, they are the Trudeaus, the Justin Trudeaus of Europe right now.

You know, Macron, because it's a presidential system, hangs on until 2027, but he's lost control of his own parliament. They haven't passed a budget, Peter. He's appointed one prime minister. He couldn't do it. He's appointed one prime minister. He couldn't do it. He's on a second one.

This is historically the weakest position that Macron has ever been in. And frankly, a weaker position than almost any other French president in memory. Olaf Scholz. An election coming up. If you believe polls, it would be nothing short of a miracle for Scholz and his party to win. He's going to lose control. So what these two, these two, it's difficult to say, speak with authority for Europe anymore. But who does, is a big

question. It's George Maloney, the Prime Minister of Italy. That is a stretch for many Europeans. Macron, when he talks about this, he's harking back to a theme which he calls European defense, strategic

autonomy. There's a whole series of buzzwords like that that he uses. But this is de Gaulle, you know, living on through Macron. De Gaulle, as a result of some very bitter wartime experiences with FDR and Winston Churchill, who didn't pay much attention to him, thought he was a nuisance. You read their memoirs. They did not have a lot of patience with Hottie Charles de Gaulle,

emphasized all the time how important it was for France to have strategic capability. And France broke the mold and developed nuclear weapons. And that was one of the things that JFK then said, we don't want this. We don't want nuclear proliferation. It makes the world less safe.

How France, where the economy is struggling, where there's very low growth. And Germany, which probably is facing the toughest economic times they have since the 90s, when they restructured their economy and made it easier to fire people and weaken the power of the unions. These are very tough things to do. How either of those two can manage to make the investments, you have to be a Euroskeptic at this point. And both aging societies, Peter, with not a lot of young men. Okay. I'm going to ask you a tough one.

I'm less than impressed, as we say. Yes, it sounds like it. But let me ask you a tough one in light of that. If, and you know, there's no way of knowing this, but we depend on your expertise to give us some guidance on how we might be thinking. If in fact Macron continues to be in the bad position he's in and at some point loses control and the German leadership loses control. One assumes in both cases to a two parties or a party more to the right of where they are right now.

Right. Right. Paint me the picture of that Europe in light of where they are right now right right paint me the picture of that europe in light of where we are in the world today yeah and that's how i think that is a very alarming picture and you know the present is always connected to the past here you had elon musk in germany making a speaking at the rally of the all you of the alternative for the defense of Germany, the AFD, which is an openly fascist party that makes no bones about its ties to fascism. And Musk says something like, and I'm sure I don't have the words exactly right, but it is, you know, we've had enough of guilt. There is no point in continuing to remember the past.

Grandchildren should not pay for the sins of the grandfathers. It's time to turn a page. You make that statement in Germany at an AFD rally. I have to tell you, I certainly sat up and took notice of that. Were you, I think we will for sure will have a return of the Christian Democrats who are to the right of all left. So it's the big question, does the AFD, do they do well enough so that the AFD doesn't join the coalition? Because every party in Germany has said they would rule it out.

France, you know, Macron cannot run again. And Marine Le Pen, which is, again, a far right wing party. Her father openly, fascist openly, who just died. And she's broken those ties. But 40% of the vote, 40% in the popular vote. So populism is not an American disease. Let me put it that way. You had a President Trump in office,

along with two powerful right-wing governments with quiet ties to the far right. That, I think, would imperil NATO. Can we learn from what's happened in Italy? Is there, you know, I mean, she's a pal of Musk's, right? Yep. Seems to be. But we don't look at Italy in the sense that we might look at Germany and France. We don't because, first of all, they don't have the weight and the power.

Although, again, it's really interesting. The Italian economy is growing, while the German and the French economies are really, really struggling. Now they're smaller. But it is growing. But, you know, you could argue that George Maloney is a good news story. She ran on a populist platform when she became prime minister. She supported Ukraine. And she supported European military assistance to Ukraine.

So she walked back the elements that would have been most alarming to her European allies. You know, she could be a more pragmatic version. You see the AFD rally. I don't have much hope that they would ever do that, Peter. Italy is a smaller country. But for people who argue that right-wing populists who are, there's a subtext of fascism in those movements, will moderate enough once they come to power you're gambling

with history that's in germany and in france you're gambling are the trains running on time in italy they're better that's what i said the economy the economy is growing it that's right they're you know the trains are running, creating some jobs. I didn't mean that as a good thing. I know, but you're right to ask the question, Peter, because part of this, you're absolutely right to ask that question. Part of the support for these parties is make government work for me, right? That's, you know, that's the conversation around what we laughingly call Doge.

But it is underneath Doge, the Department of Government Efficiency in the United States, which Elon Musk is heading, is make government work for me. Do something for me that will benefit me rather than these elites. So it's this powerful anti-elitist feeling that the system is rigged. And she actually has done that. And that's probably why she's so popular in Italy. It's fascinating. Yeah. You know, it's fascinating to watch how the geopolitical structure of Europe and the world, for that matter, has changed so dramatically in a relatively short period of time. Yeah.

Right? Yeah. I think that's the big shock. I think everybody, we thought our institutions were deep. Right? That's the famous liberal international order that Canadian leaders have rightly celebrated. It was great. People played more or less by the rules.

And it's great for smaller countries always. When that happened, a decade, just a decade. What took 70 years to build is undermined in a decade. It's true. Yeah. Okay, we're going to take a break, and then we'll come back. We've got a big question. Yeah.

Big question. And we're going to ask it right after this. And welcome back. You're listening to the Monday episode of The Bridge. That, of course, means Dr. Janice Stein from the Munk School, the University of Toronto. You're listening on Sirius XM, Channel 167, Canada Talks, or on your favorite podcast platform. We're glad to have you with us wherever you're joining us from.

Okay, so Janice sends me this email the other day, and she says, are you going to talk about whether Trump is the American imperialist, the 19th century American imperialist here in the 21st century. And I said, well, I hadn't thought about that. Do you want to make that argument? And she said, absolutely, I want to make that argument. So, of course, I've had two days to Google American imperialism in the 19th century. And my God, there are a lot of similarities that's right so go professor stein give me your argument you know this came out of

my listening to the 51st state of canada and oh by the way let's grab the panama canal and let's not stop there let's you know Greenland would be nice too and he had a conversation by the way with the Prime Minister of Denmark again again about Greenland and he gave this

speech at Davos did you see the clip Peter audible gasps in the room Canada wouldn't have any of these problems if it just became the 51st state. It actually shocked that most crowd. So where does this start? I thought, this is not just tariffs. It's not just tariffs.

It's not just bargaining. Something more there. So the 19th century, there's two big pieces to this. The first comes with manifest destiny, which James Polk, the president of the United States at that time, and there are writers who are starting this discussion before the Civil War, and it's all about the United States has a manifest destiny. That's its fate, And Trump used those words,

manifest destiny, in his inauguration speech. So that was the clue, in a sense, to look back. There's a manifest destiny to expand across the continent, to be bigger. So you can add, by the way,

race is just under, that is, again, the subtext in this. It is white Americans who will expand across the continent. And indigenous people, they're inferior. And as well as, of course, the black community in the United States. So you put those two stories together, and to me, I hear echoes of that conversation make a bigger, the fury around DEI that comes up, diversity, equity, and inclusion

that comes up in almost every Republican who's testified before the Senate. You hear those Hokey and themes. I just go forward 40 years more to the 1890s to William McKinley, who fell in love with tariffs and raised tariffs across the board. This was the famous McKinley tariff that raised tariffs from across the board on everything from 38% to something like 46. I hope that number is right. I was not surprised that in the new Oval Office,

they redecorate in the two hours between presidents. There's a picture of William McKinley on the wall. You know, when you look it up up when you go into the research files you look for the definition of american imperialism in the 19th century um stuff like the united states abandoned its century-long commitment to isolationism yeah and became an imperial power. After the Spanish-American War, the United States exercised significant control over Cuba, annexed Hawaii, claimed Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines as territories. Panama, Greenland, Canada.

Yeah, and somebody just this weekend suggested Cuba too, right? So this is language that has such strong echoes. It's as if, as you put it earlier, Peter, all those institutions that were built after World War II, he's just jumped backwards over them and gone back to a vision of the United States, bigger, greater, more tariffs. Those were the big themes in American public discourse

and political conversation. You know, we tend to think and have thought for some time that Trump doesn't have the smarts to come up with this stuff himself. Now, we may be wrong on that. We may be proven wrong over time. But let's assume we're right. Who's pushing this agenda now? There's a constellation of people around that have been preparing for this administration for quite a while.

So the Freedom 2025 that the Heritage Foundation put up, for my sins, 800 pages. And let me tell you, the prose is deadly. Deadly. I wouldn't say to anybody, read it. It is not fun. Many of those ideas are floating around in that document. There are, you know, people like Stephen Miller, who was in the White House last time, was frustrated because he couldn't get some of these ideas done.

He's back now in a very powerful position, and he's a perfect Trump appointee because he doesn't like the limelight, but he's come into the White House with a really developed agenda. And there are a whole group of ultra conservative members who would not normally even be active members of the modern Republican Party that they reject, who believe that the United States is the undisputedly most powerful country in the world. It should use its power. It should make others pay, whether it's on defense or economic production. And oh, by the way, everything would be much simpler if we were bigger. And if you don't think this is serious, out of that conversation with the prime minister of Denmark,

in which it started over Greenland and Trump repeated it several times, they now agree to have a discussion about the Arctic. I think the Prime Minister of Denmark tried to do that to shift the conversation. But again, bringing it home to us in Canada, just imagine when Trump starts to focus on the Arctic and looks at our, to be blunt, undefended Arctic. So I think we have to understand we're dealing with a different kind of president here.

It was a different vision for the United States. And yet it's very much part of American political tradition. We just don't talk about it. It goes on 100 years. And rarely does it happen where the president who may have these ambitions has the kind of power that he's got now controlling all three levels of government in the United States. I mean, if he's going to do anything, he's got two years to do it. 18 months. 18 months to do it.

Exactly. And he knows that. And the people around him know it. They're explicit. That's why they've come out of the gate the way they have. This is probably the most active first week of a president since FDR. And that's not by accident. They know they have 18 months.

It's not long. And they're going to take advantage of this. They have, it's not only the two houses of government. It's a friendly Supreme Court. It's a cowed opposition which, frankly,

has flattened the Democrats. They can't get themselves organized. They can't get up off the floor as one Democratic senator just said. Civil society groups that were on the streets last time, women, are not there. They're much more careful now, and they're trying to see if there's anywhere they can make a difference. The only opposition right now, Peter, are Democratic governors of states. It's a very, very powerful president who would win in his sales.

Does this change the shape of the debate and the discussion in this country, given the things that are going to happen this year? And it's not just the liberal leadership. It's the election itself, it's where the man who would be Prime Minister, one assumes if there was an election today, what he says and how he says it, and what in particular he says in relationship to the United States?

Yeah, I think it does change the conversation and that's why when these echoes when I began hearing the echoes of 19th century politics, it's not simply about NAFTA 3 or it's not simply about getting the best possible deal on tariffs or protecting the auto sector. There's a bigger issue. And I think for both leaders of the two big parties,

they have to change the frame and understand where on the bigger vision, where are some wins for Trump that we can imagine working together so that he claims a victory of a much bigger North America? Can we do stuff on the Arctic? Really seriously do stuff because frankly we're not. Really seriously do stuff on the Arctic and put a label on it just like, you know, this may sound so impractical, but think about NORAD

which is a joint air defense command where we have integrated U.S. and Canadian officers working together. That has been a big success, Peter. We need structures that are going to reframe like that where we can work together. You know, in a funny way, Doug Ford, who has, you know, he's a great communicator. On good days, he's a great communicator. He has his ear to the ground, and you look what he's done with his cap, right,

which is the first Canadian meme. But the other thing he's been talking about, a bigger Canada America pact there's a kernel of a very good idea in there, if you could sell that to an enraged Canadian public right now, but that's

a different frame, it's not only about money it is about money, it is about money, because Trump, and that's the other thing we need to understand trump needs money united states today is not the united states of 2016 they've got they are butting against the deficits they have no room to spend like crazy, and he needs money and tariffs. Actually, the Treasury wins. Consumers lose, but the Treasury wins in the United States. So it is about money, but it's about more than money.

Here's my last question on this American imperialism issue. Back in the middle of the 19th century, when all this was happening, was there a target on Canada during all that? I mean, we listed all the countries that the Americans went after. But Canada, which wasn't even a country at that point, was it a target on the table? Well, no. You know, we were small um we had a bunch of annoying ex-americans who left

all those united empire loyalists who didn't want to be part of this american revolution and they were fired up that That's where the manifest destiny that starts around the middle of the 19th century, they were going west, and it was an endless frontier. They didn't see any indigenous people who were living there, and if they did, there were Indian wars that were going to take care of that.

So they were going to go west and reach the Pacific, and that was how you made America bigger. He's not looking east-west, Donald Trump. He's looking north-south now for the first time. In that same tradition, but he's looking north-south. We should pay attention. Oh, yeah. Yeah, we certainly should.

And certainly the way you've outlined it to us makes a lot of sense as to why we should. I've only got time for one other issue today. You know, one of the successes we've had in the last couple of years is doing a segment with you called What Are We Missing? We don't have time to do a regular one here today, but we do have time to do one thing that we are missing. What would it be? Did I set up, Peter? And this is a story that was buried on page 12 of every major newspaper. It's a Chinese company called Deep Seek.

When I saw Deep Seek, I thought, whoa, look, here's what they've done. They've built a large language model that frankly, and we don't know quite enough yet, so let's wait and see, but that could rival OpenAI's TouchEPT, that's a familiar name, 3% of the energy. 3%.

We've had a huge conversation about global energy requirements and data centers being built all over the world. I just saw that Meta is going to spend $60 billion largely on building data centers to power these large models. And here, Chinese engineers, 3% and based on NVIDIA chips, not the most advanced ones, so they're not caught up in UF export controls, they repurpose them. If this is for real, this changes. And by the way,

it's going to be open source software. So you can download it on your computer. On your phone. You can build a smaller language model and just upload only valid information about every prime minister in the history of Canada and every cabinet member and their biographies. And then

when you want to know something, it takes you five seconds and you get reliable information and the cost is low in terms of energy. This is an amazing story. That's the part of this that I'm sorry, I'm not following.

The 3% energy, what do you mean by that? So the biggest issue for large language models that OpenAI and Throppet are producing, they are the most rapidly energy hungry programs. To give you an example, if you do a Google search the old way, that consumes one tenth the energy that a search does in ChachiPT4.

And that's why everybody's racing to build these data centers, right? Because they understand that very shortly, just these large language models will consume the energy that a city like Houston uses. And everybody who's doing the projections 10 years out, as these grow exponentially, says there's not enough energy. We can't power these things. We're going to hit the wall. And so people have said, well, AI policy is just energy policy. are looking at this to say, we have a play because we can provide cheaper energy and we're cold because you have to cool these machines. And the number of data centers that have opened in Alberta

in this last year, astonishing. Dubai is making an enormous play on this. What if it's only 3% of the energy costs? All of a sudden this becomes an energy affordable really advanced open source tool. That changes the

whole discussion of the future of AI and large language models. And who did it? Really smart Chinese engineers who again and again, we've seen this story. They're not the first out of the gate, but boy, when somebody else is out of the gate, they produce. It's the story of EVs, right? They didn't invent, but the cost of their EVs, a fraction of the electric vehicles that are made in Germany and the United States.

And if there weren't tariffs on electric vehicles, there would be no car industry in North America and in Europe. It's an amazing story. So we're all watching all the nerds and all the geeks. We're going to play with it as soon as we get it. But it is. I think it's the biggest economic story of the year, bigger than Trump's tariffs.

Wow. And we've missed it. It's on page 12. Until today, where we now are all aware of it, thanks to you. Deep seek. Deep seek. Yeah. All right. We're going to wrap it up for today, Janice.

Man, you've given us so much to think about, as you do every week. But this has been a classic. So much fun to be with you, Peter. It's no wonder your students love you so much. They get to hear you talk. Okay, thanks, Janice. We'll talk again in a week. See you next week.

I tell you, that was a classic. Should be required listening because it provokes the mind. Okay, Janice Stein. She'll be back with us a week from now. A couple of things to make mention of. Shortly after this is over, I'm flying to Montreal. I'm doing an event this evening at the Holocaust Museum. It was 80 years ago today that Russian troops

liberated Auschwitz. And I'll be talking to one of the survivors well into his 90s. We'll have a chat tonight about that day in history and about that history and what it means today.

That's Montreal tonight. I'll be back tomorrow. And tomorrow's program, of course, is Smoke, Mirrors and the Truth with Bruce Anderson and Fred Delore. And tomorrow we'll be looking at, well, a couple of issues. One, endorsements, do they actually matter? And two, interviews, do they actually matter?

It's interesting because both issues, endorsements and interviews, have been a point of some discussion over the past few years in politics about the impact they really have. And now that we're into the liberal leadership race, and then we'll be into the federal election, two interesting discussions for our insiders. Bruce and Fred, looking forward to that discussion tomorrow. Okay, that's going to wrap it up for today

The question of the week Is at the top of the show So you want to If you didn't catch it at the beginning You want to rewind now And have a listen Because it's a good question We want to hear your answer on it

That's it for this day I'm Peter Mansbridge Thanks Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you again in almost 24 hours.