The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - What Happened To Buy North American?

Episode Date: February 8, 2023

There were so many angles to last night's State of the Union address by President Joe Biden, but one line may have an impact on Canada.  Meanwhile, in Ottawa, Justin Trudeau dumps billions on the health care table, will it make a difference?  And the CBC, did its President just step in hot political water?

And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. You are just moments away from the latest episode of The Bridge. It is Wednesday. Wednesday means Bruce Anderson. Wednesday means smoke, beers, and the truth. And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. Bruce Anderson is with us remotely. He's here. You're afraid to say where I am because you know I'm somewhere warm. Let's just leave it at that and have our conversation. He is somewhere warm. And I'm not afraid to say it.

I'm just kind of like jealous to say it. All right. You know, you pick the week or two in the Canadian winter, I guess is what you're supposed to do. If you're going to go south, you don't want it to be like warm at home. Well, sure as hell it wasn't warm. It is cold. It's been cold. It's a little better today little better today but man last week was brutal um you know

i mean it was winter and it is canada and that's what's supposed to happen and it did but you know you got your fingers in the ocean that's not her fingers you got your toes in the ocean you can't bend over anymore you're too old to bend over don't sound bitter let's just get on okay here's here's how we're going to get onto it um you know we got lots of ground to cover today we got some stuff about the cbc we got some stuff about health care but i want to start actually with with this you know for for years and i think i can go back to even the nixon years that that far back whenever there was a state of the union address by an american president some of us would sit here watching and going is he ever going to mention canada as if like he's supposed to mention canada

in a state of the union address but sometimes would, depending on the times and what the issues were. So it gets to last night, and it's, is he ever going to mention Canada? I wonder if he'll mention Canada. How would he mention Canada? Well, the closest he got to actually saying the word Canada was, at least from my recall, was using the Canadian word. When he was talking actually about climate change, saying, you know, we've seen the effects right up to the Canadian word when he was talking actually about climate change, saying, you know, we've seen the effects right up to the Canadian border,

like it stops there, right? But anyway, he did use it, so there was one for Canada. But, you know, in some ways it's so, I don't know, provincial of us, I guess, looking for that. Not all Canadians do. They watch it as for what it is. It's a state of the American Union, and what is that state? And so we can discuss that in a second.

The other thing that came close to it, without ever saying Canada, was when he did his rant about buy American and how everything, as far as he was concerned, had to be made in the States, whether it was lumber or metal or steel or nails or hammers or whatever, that it had to come from the States. So if you're looking at that speech from the Canadian angle, and we'll get into the performative stuff because it was fascinating last night,

but if you were looking at that speech from the Canadian angle, should you be disappointed? Should you say, hey, that's an American knight, let them do their thing. Why should we be involved in any fashion? Or were there were there red flags there in some of the stuff he was saying? Well, let me start with a confession. You didn't watch it. OK, moving on. No, I followed it, but I followed it in the way that you follow some things these days, not the way that you obviously did, which is like sitting with your cup of tea in your hand, perched on the edge of your couch, waiting for the big mention of Canada.

I didn't do that. I didn't do anything that was even remotely like that. And generally, I don't think that back to Richard Nixon, they were like, where should we fit in the mention of Canada? And in what particular context? So it's been a long, lonely and frequently disappointing wait, I think, for those kinds of mentions. But here's what I would take from the quote that you referred to. Two things. The one is that I think that those speeches are absolutely almost 100% intended just for American partisan audiences. And so the language, the vernacular, the politics that are in them have almost become more and more Americanized, if you like, over recent years, I think.

They're less about the state of the world and the state of the U.S Union within it they're more about the state of politics within the U.S uh domestically um and so I I feel like when I'm watching them I'm less tuning into a globally important event and more tuning into the latest chapter in the messy saga of U.S. democracy playing out. And I think that we're going to come to that part of it. There was quite a bit of that last night. But the second thing on the whole made in America thing is that if there had not been any significant movement within the Biden administration over the last couple of years on the definition of by American, which is really in many cases by North American or by from our allies,

then we would have reason to be concerned. And it's always good to be vigilant. But I do think that this whole reshoring phenomena is now understood by the Democrats as being something that is meant to take those production choices from somewhere distant and generally hostile to somewhere closer and generally allied. And so in that sense, it actually could be more advantageous for Canada, the more that America thinks in those terms and the more that American policy is tilted towards that. Okay, I can buy that.

I can see that. I mean, you know, time will tell, as they say, and we'll see how it plays out. But you're right. I mean, there are very few times that other countries get mentioned. I think perhaps the one that stood out the most was following 9-11, where Bush Jr. made a point of recognizing the countries that were lined up with the United States, including Canada.

But there have been other times when there have been world events where we felt slighted because we weren't in the list of countries that were mentioned. But these things pass. I think it's more of a media game than it is anything else. But let's get to the actual. Imagine how all the other countries in the world must feel if we peeled out a little bit. Because most of them. I don't think they care.

SWAT. Fair enough. Fair enough. Someone would. You know, it is a kind of a Canadian thing. You know, we're sleeping next to the elephant. We'd like the elephant to occasionally, you know... Acknowledge that we're up here doing our thing

and sometimes helping them do theirs. Yeah, I agree with that. Yeah. He did mention, not in the speech, but earlier in the day, he talked about Canada and the balloon thing, which is, that balloon thing is like, I don't know. Anyway, moving on. To the actual speech, because I thought, you know,

I actually did watch it because I wasn't down at the beach barbecue doing the thing under the bar. What is that? What's that? Limbo. Limbo. I would like to see that, though. I can remember doing that in Jamaica in, I don't know, it was a long time ago, 50 years ago.

I get bend like that. Anyway, when the speech started i thought oh no it's like this can't be normal biden speech he's going to butcher it you know he was stumbling and and stuff through the opening minutes and you went oh no this is going to be painful to to watch and it's just going to play into the republican hands but actually it almost immediately turned around why did it turn around because he got heckled he got heckled and it was like there was a switch inside and what went great this is exactly what i hope would happen. This gives me a chance to play.

And you can be sure that they sat in the Oval Office with his advisors in the days leading up to the speech going, okay, what if they heckled this? What if they heckled that? Because heckling is now part of that thing. Ever since somebody screamed out and called Obama a liar. So he was ready, and he turned it on them. And it's now being kind of trumpeted as one of his best speeches and one of the best moments for that party.

You know, these things don't always last very long, but nevertheless, it's being seen as a good night uh for biden because he was able to turn the tables on them and made them look kind of boorish and bullish and and he he slapped him around he had a pretty good he looked like he was having a great time it took him i don't know half an hour to actually leave the room at the end of it. You know, there's usually kind of a sprinkling of shaking hands, and you get out the door, and that's it. He stayed.

I shook hands with just about everybody who was there and took selfies and all that stuff. I don't know. You didn't see it, but you've read about it. When I watch those clips. You watch those clips. Look, I think that there's a bit of a risk of us marking him on a curve, which is based on our expectations of how poorly he's going to do. But isn't that the way it always goes in politics?

Is the expectation curve? Well, yes, yeah. always goes in politics is the expectation curve well yes yeah but i i do think that um you and i have watched american politics for a long time and we've watched biden for a long time and there was a time when biden was a pretty stylish cogent forceful speaker and he's more rarely that now. I don't know what combination of things is making it harder for him to do that, but you see flashes of it now, but you see a lot of other stuff too. And so I don't want to overstate how kind of eloquent and stylish his takedown of the Republicans was. But I do agree that he had a moment of strategic and tactical success in that speech last night that perhaps nobody saw coming. And the question in my mind is how much of it was

thought out in advance versus made up on the moment. I think the general kind of context for watching these things, to your point about heckling, is that they look less and less like a kind of a meeting of the most august political body in democracy in the world and more like a mud wrestling uh match right there the interventions are sloppy and hackneyed heckles um mostly from people who don't at least for me anyway the marjorie taylor greens and the laurenebert's don't command a lot of respect. What they're usually talking about is pretty far off fact, and it's pretty far off mainstream propositions in politics. But so the venue and the show has become a kind of a messier spectacle and a disappointment in that sense as a way of understanding where

american democracy has come to however the thing that he did last night that was really quite um quite successful he said he created a dynamic where the republicans were forced to deny his assertion that they wanted to eventually sunset Medicare and Social Security. By saying that some of them wanted to, he caused the others who don't want to and feel vulnerable to, especially older voters, kind of hearing that to say, no, no, no, no, no, that's not true. And so he then turned that into a situation where ultimately he said, let's stand there for older Americans. Let's back them up. Let's protect them with these programs. They paid for these programs all of their lives. And lo and behold, Kevin McCarthy stands up and applauds behind him. And so all of the other Republicans in the room do the same thing.

So that was a pretty powerful political tactic. And I want to read some stories, some good journalism about it in the next 24, 48 hours to know just how much that was a product of calculation. If I do this, they'll respond this way. And if they do, then I can take it to the next level and get them all standing up and cheering for my assertion that we should protect these two programs. If it was a plan, it was a brilliant plan. If he improvised it in the moment,

it was brilliant and drawing on the decades of great experience that he has as a politician, as a legislator. And in a way, as sloppy and mud-wrestling as it looked relative to the older version of these things, it was probably the highlight of the evening. I'm convinced it was probably the highlight of the evening. I'm convinced it was planned. At least that they were prepped to deal with it if it happened. And the fact is, you could predict there was going to be heckling. There was no question, especially that particular group of Republicans. You knew they weren't going to just sit there.

I mean, Marjorie Taylor Greene was all dressed up to be. Wearing a mink coat or something like that. Well, whatever it was, it was easy to spot with the cameras. So she knew what she was doing in terms of being in the position. And they must have known. Okay, this is probably going to this will bait them. And the whole thing on, you know, ending Medicare and Social Security was definitely going to bait them. It's a pretty good internal fight that's going on in there with a minority of their party.

But nevertheless, it's happening. So let me ask you a question, because you did sit there with your cup of tea watching the whole thing when i open up my twitter machine to kind of consume what people were saying about it every second comment was either this is the crappiest speech i've ever seen or this is genius and i was like i don't get it um well i get it we were living in a polarized world especially in that in that i know but who is right spectrum of twitter i don't know you know who is right it doesn't matter two days from now everybody moved on and forgotten what happened but in the moment i think both sides take, you know, that element of the Republican Party will be proud of their Marjorie Taylor

Greens and the rest of them who are heckling and calling them names. And the majority of the Democratic Party, there won't be any divisions in there. They'll be ecstatic. They'll be just lapping it up and trying to use it for whatever purpose they can for the limited time they'll be able to do that the most uncomfortable person in the room it wasn't marjorie taylor green i think she was like she was happy uh that she'd had her moment and she'd you know planned it and got it the most uncomfortable person in the room was

kevin mccarthy he looked like he didn't know which way was up. He certainly didn't know when he should get up or shouldn't get up, when he should clap or shouldn't clap. And he was kind of looking around the room to see at different times whether other members of his party were clapping and therefore should he. And, I mean, he just looked totally uncomfortable. He looked very comfortable at the beginning. And they actually looked like they liked each other, Biden and him.

I don't think that's the case. But nevertheless, they looked that way. And you thought, oh, well, you know, maybe this is going to be all right. Maybe there's going to be some sense of everybody's going to get along here. But that didn't happen. OK. We're going to. You want to move on? Are we going to talk about that Liz Truss interview or is that for another day, maybe down the road when we do the kind of the worst ever political comeback interviews that

we've ever seen? We can do that another day. We can do that another day. All right. Because you know what? I haven't seen it yet, among other things. But I do think we should. Yesterday, Justin Trudeau arrives at the table, as expected, with this huge bag of money, $196 billion or whatever it was, a couple hundred billion dollars, plunks it on the table with the premiers. It's a funny little table. I don't know whether you saw the pictures, but it just looked like dinky.

You know, here was a meeting of all the first ministers in Canada, and, you know, they're crammed together in this little table. Okay, we're going to talk about how we're going to cut up the cash here. You're such a TV guy. I don't like the pictures. Don't like the pictures. That's right. Anyway, they did their thing. And gee, what a surprise. Premier said, well, thank you for the money. But it's you know what? It's not enough. It's a good down payment on the problem. Now,

nobody got up and walked out. Nobody said, I won't take that money um so i i don't know i kind of look at yesterday and think okay that's good first step in the process you know they're they're heading towards some kind of a deal and i think he i think trudeau has a deal in his back pocket somewhere whether it's with doug ford or whoever it needs to to be with a heavyweight to kind of put the pressure on the rest. But if you're looking at that, yesterday's meeting is, okay, were those signs positive? Are we heading towards something here that is going to take a lot of the pressure off this problem?

Or is it just another day where everybody's going to be against each other and nothing's going to get resolved? What did you think of what we saw? I think it's going to change the politics a little bit. I think the jury's going to be out on how much it's going to affect the delivery of health care. That's going to take a long time to figure out. I think it'll change the politics because um you know for the premiers to say well um okay uh thanks for that but it's not enough if you measure that against the the alternative scenario which is justin trudeau is the devil incarnate which is the other way that that meeting could have ended. That's as close as you're going to get to a home run in terms of the nature and the tone of the federal provincial conversation around funding.

And I noticed that one or two of them may have mentioned it as, well, it's a down payment on the future, that kind of thing, which means that they're reserving the right to kind of have at the federal government again in search of more funding. But that can't immediately happen because they've all kind of indicated that this is something short of a complete disaster. And I guess the next step is that the health minister is going to send letters to the provinces today asking if they agree with the basic design of the program. And so then it'll be up to them as individuals. Now, there is an element of, I don't want to say cleverness, because I actually think that the design of what the federal government is trying to do is probably the right design in part. What they're saying is that we're going to provide a significant boost to the kind of funding that we know is needed and that the provinces are either unwilling or unable to collect on their own.

And then we're going to reserve a significant amount of money that is going to be available for us to work on bilateral deals with individual provinces that deal with specific issues that matter to those provinces and that matter to the federal government. And so that gives the federal government an opportunity to obviously establish some action on priorities that the federal government observes and to hold the provinces to account, especially around that part of the funding for improvements in things like mental health services or long-term care, what have you. So I think that design is good. And then there's a change in the increment by which the health spending will grow continuously over the future, which is probably a good thing to do too. I don't think the federal government looked like it was trying to overreach and step

into provincial responsibility. And we didn't hear that coming out of the meeting from the premiers, which is another way that these meetings normally go bad. The feds have said for a long time in advance of this, that there are going to be some conditions. Well, you could have imagined a scenario where the meeting would have broken up yesterday with all kinds of hostility. And the province is saying nowhere near enough money and way too many strings attached. That didn't seem to me to be the picture that was coming out of the meeting yesterday. It was kind of a quiet on strings, really. I mean, I'm sure there were some saying we don't really want them, but it didn't have the. There wasn't that combustibility that there could have been.

So I think from the standpoint of the federal government take itself out of the line of fire a little bit. Yes. Did it create a dynamic that will make for better health care? Potentially. But a lot of that will be up to the provinces and these bilateral deals and the devil will be in some of the details about accountability for the spending in general too. So at the end of the day, for those who believe the system is in deep trouble, and most of those first ministersisters, including the Prime Minister, have suggested in the last couple of days that it is, agreed with the critics who say it is.

For those who believe something had to happen and had to happen fast, can they take some pleasure out of what happened yesterday? Well, certainly it's better than if that meeting hadn't happened. Certainly it's better than if the federal government said the cupboard's bare, we don't have any money to help with this. Certainly it's better than if the nature of the relationship between the premiers and the prime minister had descended into kind of an unworkable situation. I mean, there are different accounts of how the pre-conversations worked to get to a successful meeting yesterday, because as you and I both know,

they didn't just walk into that meeting yesterday and have the first conversation that had been had about this. It was the culmination of months of bilateral conversations involving ministers, talking about what it was that might work, what it was that might not work, that kind of thing. So, you know, I'm always a bit of an optimist about these things. And sometimes I regret it after the fact, but this could have gone a lot worse. And the urgency of the problem is something that I seem to bring all of

these political officials together. There was an awkward moment before the meeting started where, you know, there were, there had been some kind of one-on-one meetings between the prime minister and some of the premiers and one of them that was much anticipated was with danielle smith the premier alberta with a lot of people wondering how that would go what their relationship was going to be like you know what they would talk

about well we still don't really know what they talked about when the cameras were out of the room. But we do know what it looked like. At least we do know what one particular moment looked like. And there's this, you know, very kind of awkward handshake. Now, it's dangerous to read too much into this stuff but trudeau's uh you know he kind of knows what to do on a handshake he remember how he he outmaneuvered donald trump in their first meeting and made trump look look kind of dorky on the on the handshake

and that was a deliberate move now i don't know what if there was anything deliberate yesterday but it is you know she's got she's got kind of her her hand in an awkward position where when she's shaking his and he's got his thumb on top of her hand kind of forcing the awkward look to stay there for a while um but you know i'm sure that picture is going to be on on the front pages of all the alberta papers and people it was super awkward it was super super awkward and uh but was it just a handshake like i mean we've all been we've all done handshakes it didn't go quite right you know timing was off or what have you it looked like she she had not before arriving at that moment decided whether she was going to shake his hand or not which it i don't know i mean i kind of feel like if you were meeting Vladimir Putin,

you wouldn't shake his hand. But if you're the premier of Alberta and you're meeting with the prime minister of Canada, you're going to shake his hand. Suck it up. I don't understand the mind space of a premier that gets themselves to a place where it's like, I don't know, this could be a terrible thing for me to do, to shake the hand of the prime minister who I'm going to meet to talk about, maybe we can find some common ground. So for me, the hesitancy was a little bit of a metaphor for the way that her

political leadership as premier has transpired. She does something that's kind of aggressive, and then she pulls back from it over and over and over again. We've seen examples of this. It's almost as though she can't decide how much of that firebrand to be or not to be, either because she doesn't know who she is as a political personality or because she's looking over her shoulder at the polls in the province of Alberta and wondering, if I shake his hands too warmly, are some of my base voters going to really turn on me versus if I'm too indecisive about willingness to shake his hand, will other voters kind of look at me and say, you know, what are you really trying to convey? So I don't want to make more of it.

And I know you don't about political theater. But but these small momentary gestures, remember Trump and the queen and Macron and Trump and Trump and Trudeauau there's a common thread there um we watch them and they you know and i think maybe we can just relate to them because we kind of go well what would we do in that situation and i don't know that many people who would imagine that if they were a premier they wouldn't at least kind of buy into the handshake. Or they would have sent their staff out in advance to say, don't have him extend his hand because I won't take it. Those are your two options. The third option is the one that she took, which is not really an option. It doesn't satisfy anybody. You're such a visual guy.

You're such a TV guy. You're always looking for these little moments. I'm a chemistry guy. I think politics is 90% chemistry. I'll agree with you on one thing. A lot more people make judgments about that relationship based on that picture than any meaningful content that has taken place between the two of them. That picture will become a symbol of whatever that relationship is. You know, I do think a lot of people just generally

would rather sort of say, look, they're going to say some things that are going to sound like they disagree with each other. And sometimes those are going to be a little bit harsh and more tendentious than we might like them. But we actually want them to try to work together. That is kind of the role. And I know that there are hard partisans at opposite ends of the spectrum who don't want that, who think that any of that kind of conversation is a compromise that's not in their interest. But most people actually want them to be able to have a conversation, figure out, okay, what about this energy transition? What's the right way to do it? You got an idea that's better than my idea?

Let's hear it. Hopefully that conversation happened yesterday. Okay. We're going to take our break, and then we're going to come back with our last topic for the day. And it's about the CBC. So stay tuned. Be right back. And welcome back.

You're listening to Smoke Mirrors and the Truth on The Bridge on Sirius XM, Channel 167 Canada Talks, or on your favorite podcast platform. And because this is Wednesday, you can also view us on our YouTube channel, and you can get the link at my Twitter or Instagram site. It's free, so just go for it. Okay, as you know, Bruce, I've resisted talking about the CBC in any meaningful way, partly because

I was there for 50 years. People know I believe in public broadcasting. I believe in the idea of the CBC. I may have my differences about how certain things are done, always have had. And fortunately, for the most of the time I was at the CBC, you were encouraged to raise those concerns and have them out and open, which I did and many others did. The CBC president of today, Catherine Tate, gave an interview yesterday, at least it was published yesterday, with the Globe and Mail, where she announced, she projected that, in fact, the CBC, both radio and television, were going to go fully digital.

She had a kind of time frame of at least another decade before that could happen. But that's not a shock or a surprise to anybody. That is kind of the way things are going when the ability to be fully digital to all Canadians is out there. I mean, that's part of the mandate of the CBC from the Parliament of Canada is that CBC has to be available to all Canadians no matter where they live. So that's a challenge right now on the digital side, but the whole idea of going fully

digital and streaming and all that stuff is clearly the direction in which the television industry and the radio industry is going um i guess it would have helped if she'd you know told the staff that she was going to do this before she gave an interview to the globe and mail my understanding is it came as a bit of a shock to a lot of people um just the timing of it but not the idea of it i don't have a problem that much with that i mean i have a problem with not advising your thousands of employees direction you're going in, but nevertheless, that's what happened there. But she went an extra mile. The Globe reporter asked her about the plans from the Conservative Party, on Pierre Poliev in particular, to begin a defunding process of the CBC.

And she went off on Poliev, basically said there was just a fundraising ploy and she was critical um of the leader of the opposition and and the opposition party of canada now i think that was a mistake i i don't think you't think that she should ever have put her employees, and particularly her journalists, in the position of working for a corporation where the president is taking on one of the political parties. Now, this comes at a time when the government of the day is trying to make a decision on the government of the day is trying to make a decision

on the leadership of the CBC and whether or not the current president should be reappointed or extended or replaced. I can see this being a potential problem there, no matter which direction they go in. But I thought that was over the line and um and so i've been asked by a number of people how i felt and i said well i'll think about it and i might say something on today's podcast so there it is that's that's my feeling about it what uh well i think the cbc is a idea. I think it's been a poorly run organization for a number of years. My criticisms of it aren't the same as Pierre Pauliev's criticisms of it. I don't think the whole idea that it's kind of biased against conservative Canada is anywhere near as true as he wants to make it out to be. My problems with it are I just don't really know

what sort of kind of discipline it holds itself to for the decisions that it makes. It feels to me like it meanders towards ideas that are not very well formed. A good example is I think you probably gave the organization a couple of years notice that you were departing the national and they had a lot of time to come up with an alternative solution if they wanted to change that program and they've as near as I can tell they've taken what was a flagship news brand and platform and turned it into something much less successful than it than it was and that it needs to be for the country. So I've seen a lot of problems with the way that the CBC has kind of handled the change in the technological and the political landscape over time. But my specific concern, to your point, about what the president of the CBC said is really about if you're going to step into the

communications marketplace right now, you need to be better prepared. You need to know what it is that you should say and how you should say it. And that interview to me, followed by what looked like a makeup interview that was a CBC story on their website today. Just looked like kind of unplanned and then a cleanup on aisle five sort of situation. And there were two things that stood out for me. One is I couldn't agree with you more that it is. I do think it's her job to say there are people who have criticisms of the CBC and that's fine. We live in a democracy and people pay for the service and they're entitled to have those opinions. Here's what I want everybody to know about what we're trying to do. That's very different from saying the leader of the Conservative Party is trying

to raise money by crushing our reputation, and I don't like it. She should never go there for all kinds of reasons. It's not her role. It's not going to be persuasive with people. It's not a way to rally the organization. It is a way to, as it did, invite another round of fundraising where Pierre Polyev is using her interview as of last night to raise even more money and to double down on his intent to defund the CBC. So she engaged the argument in the most, inartful is probably the nicest word I could use to describe what she did. And I think it was singularly unhelpful for the organization and for the important discussion about the role of the CBC.

In the course of the conversation, she talked about the inevitability of being more of a digital-first organization, but she managed to have to kind of redo what she said so that she started with the point of, we're not going to leave people who only get terrestrial services behind. Easy enough to reverse the order in the Globe and Mail piece and not to have to redo it again. And the other thing that sort of struck me as quite odd is that she offered a comment or two about whether the CBC should be allowed to publish sponsored content, which is essentially content produced by advertisers that sits on the CBC platform. And she, rather than make a case for why the CBC should be able to do that, she made a

case for why it shouldn't be discussed in the context of some sort of Senate amendment. And I think it's a legitimate debate. I don't know where I come down on it, but I'm kind of leaning against the context of some sort of Senate amendment. And I think it's a legitimate debate. I don't know where I come down on it, but I'm kind of leaning against the idea of sponsored content on the CBC, and I'm not against sponsored content on other platforms. But I think if the CBC president is going to occasionally step into the public fray, Yesterday was a master class example in how not to do it.

Yep. You and I would have no differences on that point. And there is this attempt of cleaning up on aisle five. No doubt about that. How that will go, I don't know. You know, you can go back a number of presidents with the CBC and discover that the relationship between the head office and the executive, the senior executive branch of the CBC

and the employees of the CBC has not been good. And you can go back a fair number of years for that. Back times into the 90s where the employees feel that they've been let down, they've been slashed and burned, they've been used as the whipping boy, whatever you want to call it, by management and by governments, successive governments, not just conservative but liberal governments as well in terms of the cuts. Morale has been at different times at very low points. And it's sad for somebody who spent the majority of their life there to witness this.

There are some incredibly good people at the CBC. Some brilliant producers, editors, documentary people, journalists, news people, all of that. But they have been hurt by the way the place has been run at different times. That's not unusual for, I guess, any big corporation have their ups and downs, but lately there have been a lot at different times. That's not unusual for, I guess, any big corporation, have their ups and downs. But lately there have been a lot more downs than ups,

and the place needs something that they don't appear to be getting right now. And that's sad, and that's all I'm going to say about it. All right. Thank you, sir. What is it today? Tennis? Golf? Beach walking? Hiking?

Fishing? Surfing? A bit of everything. Yeah. Okay. Well, don't harm yourself out there. It's a lot of work. It's a lot of work.

It's just virtual. It's from somewhere other than my regular office, as you know. We're all jealous. We hope you have a good time and a safe time. And we'll talk to you on Friday when Bruce and Chantel will be here for good talk. Tomorrow it is your turn, so your cards and letters are more than welcome. The Mansbridge Podcast at gmail.com, Mansbridge Podcast at gmail.com. Try and get it in during the daytime today on Wednesday, if possible.

And the random renter will be by. So just a second, not cards and letters then, right? Because cards and letters imply some physical thing through the poem that that's not going to happen today. Exactly. Yeah, no, email would be better. There's no question if you want a chance at having it on the program. The ranter will be by.

The ranter's starting the first of three rants on the three main national political leaders tomorrow, which should be interesting. I look forward to that. He's so jealous of you and Chantel getting the kind of doing the politics. So he wants to, he wants to enter into that fray. We'll see how he does. You know, what does he know?

We can have a rant off. A rant off. All right, buddy, you take care. Take it easy. And we'll see you on Friday. And to all of you out there, thanks for listening. We'll talk to you again in 24 hours.