The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - What Did We Really Learn Last Week About The RCMP?

Episode Date: April 3, 2023

The Mass Casualty Commission in Nova Scotia reported last week on its findings on the 22 murders that happened in that province in April of 2020.   The results of the report were highly critical of the RCMP and on The Bridge today a return appearance from Paul Palango, author of the best-seller "22 Murders". Plus some opening thoughts on Canada's space history given today's announcement of Canada's first lunar astronaut.

And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. You are just moments away from the latest episode of The Bridge. What did we really learn last week about the murders in 2020 in Nova Scotia? We'll check in with Paul Polango again. Coming right up. And lo there, Peter Vansbridge here. Yes, we are going to talk about the RCMP, the Mass Casualty Commission report that came out last week, the impact it's had, and what people are saying now. We'll be talking to our friend Paul Polango, the author of the highly successful book, 22 Murders,

which is the story of that Nova Scotia incident in April of 2020. But first of all, a little reminiscing about something completely different. Reminiscing is what us old guys do, right? We talk about things we lived through in the past, things we watched unfold, and the impact they've had on us. And the reason I'm going to reminisce just for a few moments is what's happening in Ottawa today. As we speak, actually, they're unveiling the new Canadian astronaut who's going to go into space, hopefully by the end of next year, on a lunar mission.

First Canadian, first non-American to head towards the moon. Not going to land on the moon, but going to go around the moon. That's the plan. Well, that got me thinking, got me remembering a day in October of 1984. So it's not that long ago. October 5th, to be exact, 1984. I was there in Florida at the Kennedy Space Station, Cape Canaveral, when Mark Garneau became the first Canadian in space.

Sitting right beside me, watching that unfold and telling the story to viewers across Canada was Roberta Bonder, who within a few years after that would become the first Canadian woman in space. So there was a lot of history on that day. There was a lot of excitement on that day. It was just at dawn when the space shuttle with Garneau on board took off. And I don't know whether you've ever been in Florida, whether you ever got there during the shuttle period,

but it's a thunderous noise. The ground shakes even though you're a couple of miles away from the launch pad. But it was a special day. And it, too, brought back memories. For me, as a, you know, born in the late 40s, watched the space race began, I remember when that first living creature went into space. Who was that, you say?

Sure, I know some of you know who that was. I'm not talking about the first human in space. I'm talking about the first living creature in space. That was in 1957, November of 57. And it made headlines around the world. Because it was the first time. It was a dog. It was a Russian dog. It was a Russian dog that was found homeless on the streets of Moscow. Its name was Laika. And they fired it into space as the space program

began in Russia. Now, Laika went up, but Laika didn't come back alive. But she was the first living creature that went up. The first human, there was another four years, well, almost four years, three and a half years later, that Yuri Gagarin was fired into space

and became the first human in space, and the Russians won that moment. But that was kind of the last moment they won in space because the Americans dominated after that with multiple orbits, race to the moon, landing on the moon, all of that. And in the last number of years, it's been more of a cooperative venture,

even with the difficulties between Russia and the United States, the International Space Station has been kind of a joint venture. Our friend Chris Hatfield went up with the Russians on a Russian spaceship to the space station, which he commanded for a while. And then he came back on the Russian spacecraft. So anyway, I digress. Today's a big day, the latest big day in the Canadian history of space programs. And the name of the new Canadian astronaut will become famous just like Mark Garneau, but nobody can ever take away

Mark Garneau's signature moment as the first Canadian in space. He would end up flying, I think, three times. I went down to talk to him in Texas at the Johnson Space Center on his last flight before he took off on that one. And, you know, he was, Mark Garneau sort of, in many ways, kind of a quiet, determined, thoughtful, well-researched, obviously, into all elements of space.

And he later became a politician, later ran for the leadership of the Federal Liberal Party against Justin Trudeau. If he'd won that, he'd have been prime minister. Anyway, he just stepped down from politics and is moving into the next branch of his quite remarkable life. And we wish him luck. But I remember that day. I remember sitting there with Roberta, looking back, watching that launch of the shuttle with Mark Garneau on board, and a nation anxiously watching as it lifted into the sky.

All right, that's that. That's the reminiscing for today. Okay, we're going to talk about the RCMP, and we're going to talk about the 22 murders that took place in Nova Scotia almost two years ago now. Sorry, three years ago now. In April of 2020, April 18th and 19th. It was a terrible weekend.

And they're still trying to piece together what happened, why it happened, and how different people reacted to it at the time. And mainly that reaction is about the RCMP. So last week, the Mass Casualty Commission, which had been formed to investigate all of this, put down its report, 3,000 pages. Talked about the things that were missed by the RCMP that should have been noticed

but weren't. It made many recommendations for the future. Now watching all this unfold has been the author, highly successful author, journalist, Paul Belango. Paul is no shrinking violet, as they say. He's a tough investigative journalist.

He's controversial at times. Certainly has been on this story, as he has been on other stories. But he's always interesting to listen to, and we're going to listen to him again today. I'm going to take a quick break before we start it, and then we'll be back right after this with Paul Polanco. And welcome back. You're listening to The Bridge, the Monday episode on Sirius XM, channel 167, and on your favorite podcast platform.

A reminder, this is going to be a short week for The Bridge. Good Friday coming up on Friday. We'll be taking that day off. We'll be running a repeat of the Thursday program, which will be Good Talk. So this week, Good Talk is coming up a day early, but will be broadcast also in its normal time on Friday. So you can catch it on either one of those platforms, Thursday or Friday. Your turn for this

week, we'll be holding off your turn. platforms Thursday or Friday. Your turn for this week. We'll be holding off your turn. So if you've got cards and letters and sweet things to say, and not so sweet, still send them in. I'll still read them, no doubt about that. But the next year turn will be a week from Thursday. Same with the random ranter. We're giving him a day off as well.

He's been at it for us since last fall, and it's been highly successful. Not everybody agrees with the ranter. That is the idea, of course. He's not there for you to agree with. He's there for you to provoke your thoughts, and some of you will agree, some of you won't.

That's fine. That's the whole idea. Okay, let's get to Paul Polanco now. You heard the run-up. And the run-up was to last week's release of the Mass Casualty Commission report on the terrible events in parts of rural Nova Scotia in April of 2020 that resulted in the murders of 22 people. So here we go. Here's my interview with Paul Polango.

Here we go. All right, Paul, I want to start off in a very general way. When you watched the report being tabled the other day and so many of the people of the Port-au-Pic area and, you know, and elsewhere, especially in rural Nova Scotia. Did it address those concerns? To some extent, it did. It surprised people by how tough it was on the RCMP that the MCC actually went to town on them. But at the same time, there were all kinds of gaps.

And many of the family members were upset because they thought somebody should be held accountable. And the commission went out of its way not to hold anyone accountable, but just to focus on the institution as if the institution had no people working in it making decisions. And I think it was best summed up by Scott McLeod, who is the brother of one of the victims, Sean McLeod. And he said, this is only the beginning because no matter what they recommend, it has to be implemented and change has to come. And I think that's where people stand, that they're waiting for something real to happen, for the governments to do something. And that remains to be seen. Well, if they're going to do something, they've got to address some of these recommendations and there were dozens and dozens. What was it? 130 or something like that at the end of the day.

You and I have seen a lot of different commission reports over the years with lots of recommendations on various issues. And often those recommendations don't get addressed. I mean, they're still trying to deal with all the recommendations coming out of the murdered and missing women and children inquiry that took place. But on this one, is there a belief on the part of that group that a lot of these recommendations will be addressed by government and will be adopted? I'd say no. There's a lot of skepticism because even in the report itself, it goes into great detail about previous reports and recommendations that were made that were ignored and never implemented. And, you know, I myself go back to the first book I wrote on this in 1994 about the RCMP, that the Auditor General making recommendations, the RCMP saying, aye, aye, we hear you. We're going to move on it right now.

And to this day have never moved on it. You know, that's the way they operate. And people are aware of that now. They're onto the game. And the commission, in all fairness, does point this out. Looking at their communications, it points out to a report in 2007 by David Brown. They said they're going to fix it. Didn't fix it.

2010, another report. Said they're going to fix it. Didn't fix it. 2014, after the murder of Mounties in Moncton. Said, oh, yeah, we're on it, going to do it. Never did it, you know, and that's the RCMP position is basically, and this is part of its so-called broken culture, is that no one tells the RCMP what to do.

They take it upon themselves that they see themselves as being right and the best, and that's what guides the RCMP. It has guided them over the years and got them into this mess, I think. All right. We'll talk in a minute about the institution, where it goes from here. But first of all, going from the general assessment of what happened in this report to some specifics. Let me divide it into two areas. One, where you, I mean, you've been asking a lot of questions over these last couple of years.

You've been making claims based on your journalism and your reporting. What did you see in this report that you were able to embrace? In other words, that you were able to look at and say they got it. They understood what happened there. They were able to believe, in some cases, what a lot of people weren't believing up until now. Where are the main points in that area? What did they get right? Well, what they got right is that the dysfunction of the RCMP,

the lack of professionalism, the lack of professionalism the lack of training um the top-down sort of uh uh structure of the force and just how discombobulated it is I mean it it goes through the uh in one section in in volume five of this 3 000 page report um they detail every step of the way that the night portapique uh april 18th 2020 and all the screw-ups that happen the lack of preparedness the the infighting the poor communications the lack of training that's what the rMP is. And I've been saying from the beginning, I mean, the first article I wrote on this in McLean's magazine in May 2020, the headline was Nova Scotia massacre encapsulates all that's wrong with the RCMP. And this builds on that and shows clearly, if you read it, very worrying things that were going on inside the force continue to go on.

So that was good. And it talks about the RCMP resisting any sort of investigation, redacting documents, hiding behind privacy laws and litigation and whatever. So even the commission in its report still says it didn't get the whole story and doesn't know what the whole story is. And that's what it's like to deal with the RCMP as well. All right. Well, staying on that vein, first of all, a lot of what they said clearly didn't surprise you because you'd been suggesting things that way for some time. But who did it surprise? Can you tell after the first moments of this report being released, who was surprised by the findings of the commission? Well, just everyone in attendance was surprised that they came down so hard on the RCMP with such detail because in their 76 days of hearings conducted last year, they did everything they can to stop any emotion, drama, momentum.

The storytelling was very limited and things were never followed up. There was no cross-examination so it was it looked like they were going to just give the rcmp a total pass but they didn't all of a sudden voila they say here it is we have all this evidence like where did it come from they brought forward a lot of things that were never discussed in public, in a so-called public inquiry. So people were naturally surprised by this, that, oh my God, they put it all together to that extent on certain things. Did anything surprise you? Did anything surprise you, aside from the fact that, you know, they came down harder than many people thought they would have on the RCMP. But in particulars, did anything surprise you in their findings?

No, not really. I mean, there are things I know. I mean, what I did find sort of concerning, and others have seen this as well, and I'm getting, as people read it, they're sending me notes about this. It's the things they didn't talk about. And they managed to ignore during the hearings itself. And, you know, they didn't deal with a lot of the really critical issues and important ones. And they didn't recommend data. Some family members were upset that no criminal prosecutions were recommended, for example, for negligence and other things that happened in the course of the 13 and a half hours and afterwards. None of that happened.

What they didn't deal with was the destruction of evidence by the RCMP. Never addressed it. Never tried to find out what it was. Never asked that question. What were they destroying and why? Never came up. And, you know, in their findings, they did address the issue, you know, that I've raised over from the beginning almost, about our workmen or someone close to workman

having uh being a confidential informant or a police agent uh what they said and and a number of police officers this is the shooter we're talking the shooter gabriel worman being uh uh a confidential informant or police agent and a number of policemen pointed out, they said, did you see what they said? They said we could not find enough detail to make a conclusion one way or the other. So they addressed that, but they never really pursued it in the course of their hearings. And one of the reasons they couldn't, because it'd be a criminal offense by the RCMP or its members to reveal this. So it's really kept in a tight little box and the commission says, oh, we couldn't get into that. Was the commission allowed to ask questions in a format where the answers were restricted just to the commission members? In other words, you know, that it was closed down for, you know,

public access to the testimony in particular areas? Well, no, they never went in camera to discuss things. But what they did do was they had prior interviews, the so-called foundational papers, where they put everything down on paper in these, you know, basically taking statements from people with no cross-examination, and then cherry-picking which ones they would use for live testimony, sort of replicating that. But a lot of things that were contrary to the official narrative were never brought out in the inquiry.

The foundational papers are there, but sometimes they tell a completely different story. But they wove this story in such a way using foundational papers, no cross-examination, and just people telling their stories. And then, you know, Commissioner Michael McDonald, former Chief Justice of the Nova Scotia Supreme Court, put it this way afterwards as,

well, I believe cross-examination is the only way to get at the truth. I just want people to tell their stories. Well, many of the families and observers say that wasn't, you know, that wasn't really the greatest thing to do because there were some people who were suspected of lying or not telling the whole truth, but they were never challenged. And the lawyers for theastised by the commission for asking questions that they shouldn't, they didn't understand, they were told that they didn't understand the nature of this commission. It wasn't there to find wrongdoing or lay blame.

It was there to find things, learning things we could learn and lessons learned, things like that. Now, you may have answered this question in that last answer, but let me try it anyway. What's the single biggest question for you that is unanswered at this moment on what happened on that weekend?

Well, they're saying, they continue to say it's a domestic violence case gone bad, that Lisa Banfield, Gabriel Wortman's wife or common-law wife of 19 years, was the first victim. But no one was allowed to cross-examine her. She told her story in a rather unconvincing way to most people. And the lawyers themselves told me they will get a shot at her in the civil suits that are to follow. The commission never went into Wertmann's criminality, the nature and depths of his criminality. And in their final report, they say, well, you know, we couldn't find enough fact about it, but they never really

pursued it. And I think in our previous conversation, I suggested that one of the reasons they didn't do that, because that would even further expose what the RCMP was doing, or not doing in that case. And another issue that I found very curious is that they made a recommendation that the police watchdog, in this case, the Special Investigation Response Team in Nova Scotia, should be beefed up so that it can do more and be more effective at what it's doing. But during its hearings, it never broached the two cert reports that are very controversial that support the RCMP 100% in spite of video that shows that what happened was completely different from the cert report.

They never broached that. They never touched it at all. And they never challenged those reports so they come up with a conclusion and a recommendation but where did this come from because in their public hearings they never addressed it you were in the room on uh friday when the prime minister was also in the room with a number of the families of victims from the massacre. Talk to us about the feeling in that room, the atmosphere, the tension, if there was tension. What was that room like? There wasn't a lot of tension.

I mean, there was people who seemed to be happy to be there. Some of the surviving family members were a little upset, as I said, that there was no criminal investigations called for. In fact, the only time the MCC called the police were the OPP to investigate me for releasing 911 tapes and the videos that weren't being shot. Otherwise, it was pretty calm. Mr. Trudeau sat two rows behind me.

Nearby was the Premier of Nova Scotia. And they just sat there, said nothing, did nothing, got up when it was over, went down the hall into the press conference, did a little press conference there, and was gone from town. That was it. You know, actually, he looked pretty glum when he walked in. I mean, he didn't have his – he had his sad face on, like someone stole his cookies or something because –

Mind you, it's a pretty sad story so like any way you look at it i mean if you if you've been smiling you would have taken a task on that too yeah yeah no i i get it it's just the feeling you get when you see someone that that's that you know it wasn't even a neutral phase it was you know both down at the corner so i sent you a picture showing you what he looked like when he came through the door and i thought well maybe he's just a good actor no i couldn't act that well um where do we go from here well the issue you know that this is part of the the the issue is that the supremacy of the RCMP in Canada is unwarranted. It's a national symbol.

It became a national symbol really in the 60s when Canada was the flag, the new flag, and we've got to have symbols of Canada. So Canada made this decision to boost the profile of the RCMP as a national symbol, which is a dangerous thing to do with a police force because police forces naturally get into trouble. And so anytime they're criticized, you know, the RCMP essentially says you're attacking Canada for criticizing us. So it's a bad national symbol.

You know, we're better, it's safer to have a semi-aquatic rodent like the beaver, which really doesn't get in trouble and really, you know, it's working for the environment. You can't call the beaver into question. Police force as a national symbol is a bad thing. commission came down on the RCMP or appeared to, most of the things that's highlighted affected members who had since been promoted before the commission even sat or were allowed to retire and are not subject to any sort of legal action. Right. Does that include the former commissioner who just retired a couple of days ago? Yeah, she retired just in time to get out of the way.

They got an interim commissioner now to absorb the flack from this. And then Mr. Trudeau says he's going to appoint the perfect person to run the RCMP after this. But the problem is the RCMP is quite clearly a broken down car with a, you know, the barely can move and he's gonna put Emerson Fittipaldi in the driver's seat. It ain't gonna go any better.

You know, the problem is the structure of the force. And the underlying thing I can see thriving this commission is that they miss how dysfunctional the RCMP is. Because one of the recommendations is that there's a lack of communication and cooperation between various police forces. Essentially, nobody wants to work with the RCMP. That's what's going on in Canada, right across the country. You're seeing big drug busts now in southern Ontario, where the RCMP isn't even part of it. The OPP and Toronto Police deal with the FBI and the DEA, not the RCMP as they used to, because the RCMP doesn't have the resources or ability to do things. Nevertheless, the commission has said that all police training in Canada should be unified.

This is one of the recommendations. All new policemen should have a three-year university course. And this structure should be run by the RCMP. So we've already proven in this matter that the RCMP was dysfunctional, had poor training, et cetera, et cetera, and poor standards, but we want them to take over all police training, which was not going to go over very well in the rest of the policing community.

You know, I'm amazed when you tell me that there is little to no cooperation between the different police forces as they relate to the RCMP. They're like the OPP and the Toronto Police Force seem to have a good relationship is what you're suggesting. But as soon as the Mounties get in the mix, it falls down. And I assume that's elsewhere in the country as well.

It's right across the board. I mean, I talked to a former deputy commissioner yesterday and he's saying, you know, and he's reiterated, he says the RCMP has got doing nothing right across the country. So I'm embarrassed to say this. Federal policing is a disaster. It's been a disaster for 35, 40 years. And there's no will by the government to basically do something about that. The commission says maybe the RCMP should be restructured, different other entities set up. And maybe that's what Canada needs. Get the RCMP out of contract policing. You know, the people in Ontario and Quebec, taxpayers in Ontario and Quebec are subsidizing provincial and municipal policing in the provinces outside of Ontario and Quebec and don't realize it.

And why are they doing that? Alberta's a rich place. BC's a rich place. Saskatchewan's a rich place. Why are they not paying for their own policing, which would be accountable to the provincial governments? And there's some some of that movement is going on now. But the real thing that should be done by government is, instead of putting the perfect person in as commissioner,

it's restructuring policing and creating models with rules and regulations that will be effective to deal with the future problems of the country, then putting quality people in to run them. Instead of trying to flog this, albeit a dead horse, because it's a national symbol of Canada. It's not doing Canada or Canadians any justice. But who comes up with those parameters that would fit some new person coming in? I mean, who would determine that? Because the way you're

describing the situation, you've got a prime minister saying he's going to find the perfect person as if he's going to be able to, you know, pull this rabbit out of a hat somehow. And you're telling me that not only is there no rabbit, there's no hat to pull it out of. I mean, you have to look at what are the requirements for policing in Canada right now. We need, you know, if you look at the national security issues, you need a strong RCMP. You know, we see the China problem that's going on now. Cybercrime is massive in the country, and there's no ability for the RCMP or anyone else to deal with it. The RCMP says they're going to deal with it, but you're putting people who have been police officers making $110,000, $115,000, $20,000 a year with no experience in computers into cybercrime. You almost need a completely different force to deal with that and fraud.

Financial crimes. The United States has multiple police forces at the federal level. Canada has one doing everything. Setting up a separate protective service for Ottawa. police forces at the federal level. Canada has one doing everything, setting up a separate protective service for Ottawa. That's not a hard thing to do. You know, you've got officers sitting in police cars on Parliament Hill, gaining seniority as Mounties, then put in detachments in charge of operational policing. Guess what happened in Nova Scotia? Those people were in charge. And look what happened. So it makes common sense to just divide things up, create entities that make sense not

only for now, but for the next 50 years, and deal with crime in a way we should be dealing with it with new kinds of police officers, not defunding the police, but rethinking policing in a modern context. And that's hard work. Governments don't like doing that. You know, I think we're going to leave it at that. But as we talked, whenever that was, about six weeks ago, we said we'd talk again once the commission reported. And I think I can safely say that we'll talk again down the road here when either when that somebody's picked to run this uh force or or some new ideas are put forward about how to clean it up it seems like if there's one thing everybody agrees on is it's a mess

it's been a mess for a long time decades really there's always seemed to be this issue about how are you going to make the force right um this time well the big the biggest issue is politicization of the force one of the biggest issues is politicization we talked about this before in 1984 when they made the minute the commissioner deputy minister in the government uh that's not the requirement in policing you know we need we need a we need to think and I talk to a lot of police about this, we need to think this through in a fundamental way to create something for the future. You know, if you look at the issue, you know, the China issue, I was reading recent stories about it.

I'm going, oh, geez, this is all familiar. I've read this all before. Then I realized I stories about it. I'm going, oh, geez, this is all familiar. I've read this all before. Then I realized I wrote about it in my book, Dispersing the Fog. There are two chapters talking about exactly that thing, about the Chinese come in doing this. Some of the same characters are involved in my story then. But I also put a reason on why there was government reluctance, and that was because Jean Chrétien's son-in-law

was running the Three Gorges Dam project in China at the time. So they didn't want any interference in that because that was a business thing going on. And that's the way Ottawa runs. The last point, Peter, like really, I should have said this earlier, but I find this sort of the report, I find the report's findings on the RCMP performance sort of delicious in a sort of devilish way because when the commission started the Globe and Mail ran a piece by Greg Mercer the reporter in Atlantic Canada at the time in which he quoted Brian Sobey the head of the National Police Federation the RCMP union that the RCMP response to Portapique was textbook. That's what Sobey said.

And because I'd argued otherwise from the beginning that it was an epic failure of policing, as I called it back in May, June 2020. And so the report shows that it was an epic failure in policing. And then what happened? The Globe and Mail interviewed Brian Sovey. Greg Mercer interviewed Brian Sovey the other day after the commission report came out, and Brian Sovey says, the members were very brave considering the lack of management, the poor management, and the practices they had to deal with.

Not quite the way he put it a couple of years ago. Yeah. All right. Listen, Paul, I appreciate your time again. No, anytime. And I'm sure we'll talk again. But thanks for this today. And there you go, Paul Blanco, the best-selling author of 22 Murders, the story

of the, or his story of the 22 murders in Nova Scotia almost three years, almost exactly three years ago now. This story we will continue to watch and we'll continue to check in with Paul every once in a while to see what he's determining, what he's finding as he keeps following the story. And as I think he mentioned, he's already going to be doing a second book on this particular story. Indeed, hasn't started writing it yet. So that takes a while, as we know. All right. We're almost wrapped up for this day. I do want to mention something else.

This has, like, nothing to do with the RCMP. It's got nothing to do with space. But it's something we all tend to think about. What would it be like if you live forever, right? Haven't you thought about that a few times in your life? Didn't you as a kid go, well, you know, by the time I get old, they'll have come up with a cure for life. Life will be extended forever. Well, we haven't seen that day yet, have we? However, in yesterday's Mail Online, here in the United Kingdom,

here's the headline. Humans will achieve immortality in eight years. Not 80 years, not 800 years, eight years. That's not very far away. And who's saying this? A former Google engineer who has predicted the future with 86% accuracy. Who is this guy, you say? His name's Ray Kurzweil.

He's a former Google engineer. He's made a stark realization that humans will achieve immortality in just eight years' time. And 86% of his 147 predictions that he's made in his career have been correct. Like what, you say? Well, in 1990, he predicted the world's best chess player would lose to a computer by the year 2000. And, yeah, that happened in 1997 when Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov. He made another startling prediction, says the Daily Mail Online. In 1999, he said that

by 2023, a $1,000 laptop would have a human brain's computing power and storage capacity. Well, I think we've reached that point too, right? AI, that's not a bad example. He said that machines are already making us more intelligent and connecting them to our neocortex. That's what this is all about now. Will help people think more smartly. Contrary to the fears of some,

he believes that implanting computers in our brains, I don't want to be the test case here. I don't know how you'd fit a laptop in my brain. I know, I'm such a funny guy. We're going to get more neocortex. We're going to be funnier. We're going to be better at music. We're going to be funnier. We're going to be better at music. We're going to be sexier, he said.

Excuse me, where do I get one of these? And how difficult is it to implant in my brain? We're going to exemplify all the things that we value in humans to a greater degree. Didn't Star Trek, didn't they have something like that? Weren't they implanted with something? Tiny robots, nanobots is what Kurzweil calls them. Age-reversing nanobots.

So the secret here is it's 2023. He's talking about, what's he talking about, 2031? So you got to hang on until 2031 because then, bingo, you get zapped in your neocortex with a nanobot, and you will live forever. Forever. Which is about how long it's going to take before the Leafs win their next Stanley Cup. Forever.

That's it for this day. I'm Peter Mansbridge. Thanks so much for listening. The Bridge will be back tomorrow. It's Tuesday tomorrow. We're into April. Can you believe it? We're into April.

Tuesday tomorrow, Brian Stewart will be by. You know what that means. Discussion about Ukraine, Russia, the global stage. Wednesday, Smoke, Mirrors and the Truth. Thursday, as I mentioned earlier, Good Talk on Thursday this week. Repeated on Friday, on Good Friday. There'll be no new show on Good Friday. As a result, your turn and the Random Ranter get benched for the week,

but they're back next week. So keep your cards and letters coming. Always happy to read them, even when we disagree. And some of you know we do. But that's okay. That's what this is all about, right? Nice, polite exchange of ideas. Okay.

As I said, thanks so much for listening today i'm peter mansbridge we'll be back in a mere 24 hours