The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Who Do The Year End Interviews Benefit Most?

Episode Date: January 3, 2024

After more than a dozen year end interviews by some of Canada's political leaders, who benefited most?  The leaders? The media? The public?  That and more about the relationship between the media and the leaders with a former bureau chief at the Canadian Press and the CBC in Ottawa, Rob Russo. WE cover a lot of ground, so enjoy.

And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. You are just moments away from the latest episode of The Bridge. The year-end interviews. Who do they benefit most? And hello there, Peter Mansbridge in Stratford, Ontario. You're listening to The Bridge. Good to talk to you once again. This is one of the few Wednesdays we'll be talking to you throughout this year. It's Wednesdays that are going to be kind of a day off for The Bridge. We're going to a four-day week. Everything else will be in place, though.

But today's different. We've got a special interview today with Rob Russo, former Bureau Chief of the CBC in Ottawa, former Bureau Chief of Canadian Press in Ottawa, also a correspondent in Washington and Quebec City for CP. What we're talking about today is the year-end interviews. You probably saw or heard about a whole bunch of them over the holidays, year-end interviews with the leaders of various parties. Well, the question becomes, who do they benefit most? Do they benefit the leaders?

Do they benefit the news organizations? Or do they benefit the people? Who benefits most, and a lot of other questions that are associated with this, including the age-old one that many of you write about sometimes and ask me about. Do you send in all the questions to the leaders before the interview? We'll answer that question too. But before we get to Rob, just a couple of notes on yesterday's program with Janice Stein. You remember, lots of nice comments about it. And lots of nice comments

by the way over the holidays from people who wish us here at the bridge, you know what us means, happy holidays and we return that wish for happy holidays for you and a happy new year as well. And lots of nice comments, too, about people who ended up getting the new book as a Christmas gift. And I appreciate that as well. Okay, well, the book is the prize for the best question this week.

And the question category is pretty straightforward. It is, if you had the opportunity, what one thing about the Canadian political system would you change? One thing. Not, you know, one thing you can handle in probably two or three sentences, right? Not two or three paragraphs or two or three pages.

And most of you, and an incredible number of you wrote already in this last 24 hours, adhered to that. And, you know, I'm sorry for the ones with the big longer letters. I did warn you. One point. Okay? One point.

So you can keep writing. We're not closing this out until probably supper time, Eastern time zone today. Right? this out until probably suppertime eastern time zone today. Right? And this will be a part of your turn tomorrow. The best letter we'll get a copy of the new book signed.

And I'll get it out to you. So that's it. The new book How Canada Works Mark Bulgich and myself wrote and we're very happy with the way things have gone on the marketing of that book over the pre-Christmas period. So that's it. The Mansbridge Podcast at gmail.com.

The Mansbridge Podcast at gmail.com. That is where to write today. Today, closing out, let's say 6 p.m. Eastern time today will be the closeout of the competition because we've got a lot to go through here. And we will deal with that for tomorrow's program along with the random ranter, his first take of the year. So we'll hear what he has to say.

All right, enough already. Let's get to today's topic, and that is the year-end interviews. Who did they benefit most? Let's have that conversation starting right now with Rob Russo. So, Rob, let me start with who benefits most from these year-end interviews. Is it the leader whoever that leader happens to be or is it the the media organization that's doing the interviews or is it the public well it's always a good idea when voters get a chance to assess what their leaders

are like under the pressure of these interviews and when they're asked pertinent questions about what they're going to do with the country. Look, whenever it came to campaigns, I like to think about organizing a citizen-first thrust to campaign coverage. So I think voters get the most out of it if the interviews are done well. And even when they're not done particularly well, and we'll get into this a little bit later. A lot of people criticize some of what's called the soft interviews, but I think that we can even derive some benefit from those.

I can tell you leaders don't like them very much. They go to them reluctantly. Some of them don't mind skirmishing. Some of them certainly like some of the interviewers more than others. We saw some of that this year. Some of the leaders avoided interviews with certain people. Reporters get something out of it, or journalistic organizations do to a certain extent, because it takes them into the holiday period when there often isn't much domestic news in particular, and they can chop the interviews up and reuse them throughout a very slow news period with what they call exclusive content.

How exclusive that is, though, is left in the eye of the citizen. Often, these guys are asked the same questions uh and they know what questions are coming and they prepare for them uh long in advance what's the what's the process so walk is busy you know you've been bureau chief a couple major uh ottawa-based bureaus you know with the economists um you're getting certain interviews what's the process on these kind of year? There's two time periods that I see as regular leaders' interviews. One is the year-end interview, and the other is often the campaign-end interview.

Right. You know, when you're into a campaign, usually in that last week, certain news organizations will get one-on-one time with whoever the leaders are. But what's the process going into that? Well, the ones around year-end interviews, they're really just like jingle bells and awkward office parties. They're everywhere just before Christmas, right? And there's a lot that actually goes into them. The leaders sit down with their communications people and other people, and they say, here are the questions you're probably going to get. And they go through them. They go through the potential answers. And you can see that

in the similar natures of the responses that, for instance, Justin Trudeau gave this year in his year-end interviews. So there's a lot of prep that goes into it on the leader's side. On our side, on the reporter's side, we sketch out questions. We sketch out possible responses. I remember sitting down with you, for instance. You didn't do these year-end interviews very often at the end of your time at the CBC, and we'll go into that in a second.

But we sort of came up with a game plan of what it was we were hoping to get out of this, and then we kind of tailored our questions around that game plan. What is it that we want the prime minister or the leader to say? What is it that we would like to hear from him? And then we built our questions accordingly. Then there's the nature of this end of year or end of campaign.

End of campaign you see less now because the campaign has to be going very, very well for a leader to down and often they don't want to risk that so you see those end of campaign wins less but at the end of the year it's a cattle call uh and and so a lot of people you were one of them susan delacorte is another one of the at the toronto stars say i'm gonna wait i i'm gonna say i'm gonna take a rain check on this as long as as you guarantee me, I've got an interview. I'm going to do my interview in January or February because just like jingle bells, none of them kind of stand out distinctively unless there's something really, really big in the interview. And because they're so prepared, it's not often that you get a lot

of big news out of these interviews so who says no it's people who might want to wait a little bit like like you did like susan delacorte uh does and say no i was one of these guys that um that suggested that we never say no that we always uh get it whenever you have a chance to sit down with a minister or a leader or a prime minister, you take it. So I was I tried to be clever and said, well, Peter has a separate interview. The Ottawa Parliamentary Bureau gets an annual interview and we'll take that so that we got as much face time as possible with with the prime minister in particular. So so then it's all about where do you do it? That becomes a big question. Prime Ministers in particular like to do these interviews in

controlled settings. It used to be 24 Sussex. It might be the Prime Minister's office. Now it's Rideau Gate Cottage. They want to do it where they can control the backdrop and they can often feel much more comfortable in those circumstances. Reporters want to take them out of that comfort zone, not just rhetorically, but also physically. And they think that sometimes that leads to a better interview. So a lot of thought, particularly in television, goes to what it's going to look like. Let's get them outside, for instance. Let's get them with voters passing by,

with gasping and doing double takes. Let's get them out of their comfort zone, walking, talking, that sort of thing. So there is a fair amount of meticulous planning that goes into it. I like your suggestion that what the media or what some media organizations like to do is sit down, pre-plan these things, and ask the question, what do we want to get out of this? Because you know

that in the office of the prime minister or the leader of the opposition or whatever, they're asking a similar question. What do we want to put into this? Like, what do we want the story to be coming out of it? What do we want to say? How do we want to try and swing this interview to what we want to talk about? So you've got these two competing thrusts going on at the same time. That's right. And also, what is it that we don't want to talk about is what the leaders are talking about as well. I mean, if you're Justin Trudeau, everybody knows the question coming to him.

And the basic question that came up to Trudeau over and over and over again this time is, why haven't you quit yet? It wasn't like, are you going to stay? It's, how come you're still here? And he knows that question is going to come along. He doesn't really want to deal with it, but he knows he has to deal with it. With Pierre Poiliev, the question he got, not often, but he got in a lot of his interviews was how come you haven't showed us any policy cards yet? Show us some of your

policy cards. And so those are the questions that they want to get out and answered. The messages you say that they want to transmit, but they're also the ones they don't want to transmit as well, they don't want to deal with. It's funny because you kind of know the answers to all of those questions before you sit down. You know he's not going to suddenly say, yeah, I'm going to be leaving,

or I was going to leave then, but now I'm going to wait another month. He's never going to suddenly say, yeah, I'm going to be leaving or, you know, I was going to leave then, but now I'm going to wait another month. He's never going to say that. He's always going to say I'm here for the long haul and I'm running and that's it. That's all. And as opposed to the, you know, in relation to the opposition leader, they're not going to, you know, show all their stuff. They're not going to strut it all in front of the media a year or two years, possibly from an election campaign.

That's a given and goes back, you know, decades. That's how opposition leaders operate. So some of those, some of the questions are predictable. The answers are equally predictable. Unless somebody screws up, unless they slip up, you know, and say something that they weren't planning to say but you know these guys have been around for a while now they know how to handle those kind of obvious questions but but but there are still times when they might not slip up but they might reveal one or two things that helps you um draw the faint outlines of where they might be going with policy or where

they might be going with their career. In terms of whether they're staying or going, as you said, it's a complete head fake indeed. Again, Susan Delacorte did a look at how Trudeau responded to these questions as to why aren't you leaving and reminded us that in the winter of 92, 93, Mulroney did a bunch of year end interviews, knowing going into them that he was going to resign in a couple of months. He didn't say any of that. He never, ever intimated in one way, but he knew he had a date in his head. He had a date circled and he was just going through the motions. And so they know, we don't know, but it's our job to try to pin them down, not necessarily on whether they're going to stay or go, but what they're going to do policy wise, what they regret doing in the past year, and how they're feeling about the country and about the people they're leading.

And sometimes we do get little glimpses that are more revelatory than they might have intended to, or they're trying to give us hints. And we've got to carefully comb through the entrails of it all and see what is there. Because sometimes there is very, very interesting material there. All right. Well, so tell me, you know, of what seemed like dozens of your interviews this year, did any of them reveal glimpses not only of what they're planning to do,

but glimpses of who they are that surprised us. Yeah. You know, let me start with the most disdained interviews by those of us in the parliamentary press gallery, and that's the friendly interview. They all do the friendly interview. The prime minister does one with Terry terry demonte who was a former radio host in montreal he's done one every year for years and years and years decades yeah before

long before he was even in politics that's right yeah that's right and it's i i actually find it very very interesting and revelatory me too um too. They sit there with a beer. The Prime Minister is obviously very, very relaxed. He talks about some behind-the-scenes stuff that you normally would not think he would talk about. He told a great story about the leader of Mexico and Joe Biden. They were down in Mexico City for a summit. And AMLO took them on this old creaky elevator with their wives.

And just to show them, he said he was just going to show them the elevator. And the next thing you knew, he closed the door and got it going, lurching downwards three floors before the Secret Service could do anything about it. They were standing there, gape-mouthed. The elevator opened up three floors below, and they were out in the street. And can you imagine? Can you imagine the Secret Service? Apparently, they all enjoyed it immensely.

For a few moments, like real human beings out there among the great wash. And can you imagine the people on the Mexico City streets suddenly seeing the leaders of three countries? But just imagine how panicked the Secret Service were. They got a great kick out of that. The prime minister talked about how he likes to go to Canadian Tire some Saturday mornings, putting on a ball cap and wandering about. These are the kinds of things that he doesn't often talk about. The same with Pierre Poilier. Talked about going tobogganing with his daughter and

showing his son for the first time, his young son, meaning Christmas. Some awful sounding drink that they concoct every year called moose milk um that involves baileys and something else uh but you just um they they remind us sometimes in these interviews that they have lifelike tendencies and that's not a bad thing but don't you think even that stuff even both those examples are kind of like they could have been planned. You know, they're age saying you've got to say,

you've got to look more human. You've got to sound more human, tell them stuff that you haven't talked about before. So you end up with those kinds of stories. Like, I mean, I really liked Terry Damonte's interview because he also pulled back the curtain a little bit,

was able to get Trudeau to pull back the curtain a little bit in terms of what his strategy was. He was the first one to get this stuff out about how he's going to paint Polyev in the Trump way, sort of the American right. This is the big battle to come. And that was revealing and gave a sense of where direction that things might be going in. With Polyev, he seemed to have an interesting strategy, which was doing a lot of local and regional interviews, as well as interviews that are very, you know, he wasn't going to get in trouble doing an interview with the Toronto sun. Um, well, although that wasn't, wasn't, wasn't a bad one. I would say that, that it's true that there was keen competition for the friendliest interview with,

with Pierre Poirier. Um, that I thought Brian Lee's interview wasn't, wasn't bad at all. I thought it was pretty good. There were some howls of, uh, of outrage about,

um, Rex Murphy's interview. Uh, I think Shannon proudfoot did a column on it in the, in the Globe. Yeah. I think one of the questions was about school boards teaching what he called a woke agenda.

And his question was, it's a scandal. And what, and then, and then what you have kind of looking perplexed saying, is there a question coming? And finally Rex kind of blurtplexed, saying, is there a question coming? And finally Rex kind of blurted out, what do you think of my scandal? Well, that's Rex, and Rex has always been that way.

He's not the traditional journalist asking questions. He's the traditional columnist giving statements and trying to get you to react to them. Yeah, I always enjoyed Rex. But yes, Poirier took the tack of basically avoiding the parliamentary press gallery and doing interviews with people who he felt much more comfortable with. Trudeau did that with Terry DeMonte. But the Terry DeMonte interview is unique.

You know, we talk about some answers at our practice. It doesn't look like Trudeau is reaching in the grab bag of cliches when he's sitting down with DeMonte. And you can tell there are a couple of times like that story about him in the elevator with Biden and Ammo, where it's almost like he doesn't think he should be telling this story. And he goes ahead and does it despite his kind of better, you know, whether or not he should go ahead and do it. So that one's unique, but all of them are interesting. All of them you can derive information from.

You really can. Did anybody, through what you've read and listened and watched, did any of the leaders screw up? Screw up? I would say no. They did reveal some elements of policy that i think bear watching and and bear further questioning on um look let's let's take uh like you always want the prime minister to accept responsibility for mistakes response prime ministers never want to talk about mistakes. But there is now a sense that immigration and the number of newcomers in total coming to Canada

has gotten ahead of the capacity of the public school system, the public Medicare system, and housing to accept the newcomers. And so repeatedly, the Prime minister was asked about this issue, and repeatedly he kind of ducked it. But once in a while, he would say something like, you know, weren't you wrong on this? Weren't you wrong on this? And finally, in one interview, it was with Radio-Canada, and that's the other thing that's different.

The English and French interviews can be a little different, and they both bear watching, and watching for the subtle difference. And with Radio Canada, he said, yes, there were some problems, but it's really the total number of immigrants that we might have gotten wrong. In other words, he's talking about students,

temporary foreign workers, and the number of permanent newcomers. He says we probably got that permanent number right, but there are probably too many student visas and too many temporary foreign workers. So he acknowledged an error there. And I think immigration was another interesting, and I thought very interesting point

that was raised with Pierre Poilier because he hasn't said a word. It's very interesting that in Canada, you don't get any of the political leaders coming out against what is a substantialarity in the Western world where this notion of immigration, even though we have demographic challenges throughout the Western world, in Western Europe, for instance, in the United States, even though they have a demographic need, there is a call for a clampdown on new immigrants. You don't really get that in Canada. Politicians are very, very careful. But Boniette did something on immigration, I believe it was with True North, it was, and he outlined, again, the broad outlines of his policy. He said that he's going to bring in a mathematical formula that ties the number of immigrants to the number of houses built. Well, that's really revelatory. That's the first time he said anything, and that would most likely lead to a reduction in the number of immigrants that Canada takes in.

Because I think Stephanie Levitz did the math on this at the Toronto Star. There's about 200,000 homes that were built in Canada in 2022, depending on what the formula is, that'll probably lead to a substantial reduction in the number of immigrants allowed in Canada under a Pierre Poiliev government. So I'd like to know more from Mr. Poiliev about whether or not that's the exact formula, and what he's prepared to tell those who want their family members to come in, for instance, those who want people to come in to take jobs that are not being filled, what he's prepared to tell them about that formula as well. That's a substantial new piece of information. That is, and it's a substantial issue out there.

I mean, if my mail is anything, the two areas that you get most of the sort of, you know, constructive and thoughtful letters on are either housing or immigration. And they're not necessarily in that order. So it's very interesting in that sense. And you're right. I hadn't realized that Polyev said that. And that is going to, you know, engage a certain debate about the future of immigration, especially in the short

term. Let me ask you one question that I know some of our listeners ask a lot in terms of interviews with the leaders, and that is the issue of whether or not news organizations submit a list of questions to the prime minister's office or the opposition leader's office now i know you can't speak for all news organizations but you have been involved with a number and you know how a number of others operate certainly i was never involved in anything like that at all the only time and i think i've said this before. The only time anybody ever asked for a list of questions was Al Gore when he was visiting in Toronto. And I said, no, I wouldn't do that.

So we didn't get the interview. And it went to somebody else who I won't bother naming, but I assume they gave their list of questions. And that's how they got it. this issue of, because there are people out there, especially in this era of distrust of media who believe that, you know, we submit a list of questions and away we go. Yeah. Yeah. There's, there's, there's nothing like that at all that I've ever been involved with. I have been involved with prime ministers who want you, uh, will give you an interview ahead of, let's say a major event. event. And they want you to just ask questions about that event.

And I remember being in conversations with the communications staff of the prime minister who said, look, we want to build trust with you. And this is one way you can show that you're trusted. And I said, you're offering me a shackled interview and I can't do a shackled interview. I don't know of any of my predecessors that have ever taken a shackled interview. And if I take it, then I'm the guy who set the precedent that this organization has with the Canadian press at the time, except shackled interviews. And I, I can't do it and I won't do it. We didn't

get the interview. They did it with somebody else. So apart from that one instance, no, they're freewheeling. I can tell you, though, that there is a tendency sometimes to try and ask gotcha questions. And those are the ones that i enjoy the least and often the the the politicians um enjoy the least as well um if if the questions are wide open um not didn't you say this on this day more more like tell me your thoughts about you know leadership where do you think leadership is going in the next little while given that popular that's just an example if you ask a wide open question and then use deductive questioning to try to get to where you really want to go i find that those are the most

interesting interviews you find more out more about uh the person who's trying to lead the country and where they're trying to take us um But never, never have I ever subjected to a shackled interview. And I don't know of any other instance, except for that one instance in 35, 36 years on the Hill, that that's been the case. All right. We're going to take a quick break and come back for a couple of final questions. We're talking with Rob Russo, the correspondent for The Economist here in Canada,

former bureau chief at CBC in Ottawa and Canadian Press in Ottawa. Also been in Washington, Quebec City, you name it. Rob's been to a lot of different places. Back with The Bridge right after this. And welcome back. Peter Mansbridge here with The Bridge, the Wednesday episode for this week. Going forward, there will be no more live Wednesday episodes. Wednesdays will be sort of best of.

I'm sure this fascinating interview will come up in the best off at some point in the Wednesdays ahead. So we've got Rob Russo with us, and we're talking about, well, the main focus was on the year-end interviews that have happened. You're listening on SiriusXM, Channel 167, Canada Talks, or on your favorite podcast platform okay here's um i want to look forward because i want to sense you know so much has changed in the way we cover politics in the you know some things are the same as has been the case for as far back as you can remember but some things have changed and one of

the things that's changed is the way we cover campaigns, election campaigns. Not only the way we decide to do them, but the way the parties look at coverage and the need for coverage and whether they really want all these journalists tagging around behind them. We could have an election in the next year, certainly in the next two years. What's the rumble out there in terms of whether or not this next campaign, journalistically, is going to look any different than what we've witnessed in the past?

Well, we don't know. We are far out in advance. They always have to have emergency plans. In a minority government, you know that each party has an emergency plan ready to go. They've got an option on a plane. They've got an option on a bus. They've probably got preliminary what's called wrapping. So in other words, what used to be called the library on a plane and a bus,

the sort of decals and everything else, what that might look like if they had to go right now. But I'd be surprised if they decided on their communication strategy right now. Look, the nature of campaigns are much different, but in many ways, much the same. We call them national campaigns, but in reality, they're really just 50 to 80 ridings that are in play. And those 50 to 80 ridings are where the parties, all of them, poll every night.

Thousands and thousands of people are polled every night in a very expensive operation. And it's where they spend the bulk of their time. There are a lot of parts of the country, when you look at the electoral map, who's elected, that are called flyover countries by the campaign managers. They don't spend a lot of time there. They fly over them as they try to get to contested ridings. Because those contested ridings, those 50 to 80 ridings, are still disparate.

It's Vancouver, Vancouver suburbs, BC Lower Mainland. It's southern Ontario in a big, big way. And this year we might see more of those contested ridings in Atlantic Canada and to a lesser extent, Quebec. Those are so disparate that you have to have an airplane. You have to fly from one part of the country to get there. But most of the time is spent not in the air, like it was when you and I were covering campaigns,

but on the ground in buses now. Because you fly to get there, and then you spend a lot of time in these battleground areas. So does that mean that some people might not go with a traveling retinue? I would be surprised. I would be surprised if it could happen. There is clearly a strategy by this iteration of the Conservative Party to

avoid the parliamentary press gallery. And the people covering these campaigns, these national campaigns, most often are people in the parliamentary press gallery. So will that continue? Will the Conservatives do that if there was an election held this year? Perhaps. But it's going to be harder for them to do it. It's going to be harder for them to avoid gallery members because they'll just set up in some of those hotly contested areas. So I don't anticipate we're going to see a lot of difference in the way people travel, but clearly campaigns used to be designed in the last few decades

for television. That's not the case anymore. They're now designed for social media. They're designed to, you know, we used to talk about, about the 10 second clip. You remember the 10 second clip? Well, that's a luxury now. And it's really, it's really, you know, the visual two or three second clipip that sells on social media. They're initially quickly edited and expedited out through various social media channels to people that have been identified on Facebook and Instagram, to a lesser extent Twitter,

and aimed solely at them. You could not run a campaign now, a successful campaign, without an ace digital media strategist who is, along with your pollster, probably the two most important people on your campaign. Okay, last question, and it's about money. Conservatives have bags of money. They can run, I'm sure, any campaign that they want to.

They are loaded and will only get more loaded as time goes on unless something radically changes. The Liberals are not loaded. They have money. They know where to get money, but they're not in the same position as the conservatives and then there's uh well you know we haven't mentioned the ndp but they're a player and they're a player in a lot of these tight races that you've already mentioned um but then there's the media and the media is not flush on cash and traveling in a campaign on on the planes is a very expensive

yeah so money will have an impact here too it it already it already has an impact when when the prime minister travels abroad the number of news organizations that travel with them have dwindled down to very, very few. Even the news networks, television networks that used to have all the money now do what's called pool coverage, which was a surprise to me when I arrived at CBC, just really how much is pooled and how it's just one news reporter for each television network and their technical teams are shared. And so even they've fallen on hard times. So what does that mean?

It really means that the cares and concerns of regional media often go unheeded. And that's a shame. And it's one of the things that those of us who tried to organize national campaigns had to take into account. A campaign is one of those rare instances where as much as possible we've got to put the voter and the citizen

first and in some instances that means getting out of the way of the voter and the citizen and allowing a more direct contact between the voter and the citizen and allowing a more direct contact between the politicians and voters while trying to get the politicians to say exactly what they would do. I remember a famous campaign when I started as a young reporter, the Trudeau campaign in 1980, where they did what they called low bridging him, trying to keep him as quiet as

possible. This is Pierre Trudeau and not say much because he was going to skid to victory if he did after a disastrous kind of nine month Joe Clark term. And you don't want that to happen. But you don't want areas of the country to go unheeded. And areas of the country will not get their concerns addressed in this campaign as it is now. And that's not a good thing for our democracy. Last quick point. Does the media still do a good job covering politics in Canada? Oh, boy. How many hours have we got left in the broadcast?

We don't. Yeah. You know, look, I think that it's a very, very difficult job. It was the best job I ever had. I think the current circumstances are more difficult now for media than ever. But I think that we do have a responsibility, and we have played a role in some of the mistrust that has grown in media as well. We have a lot to learn. We have a lot to be reflective about. And there are times when I don't think we're reflective enough. That being said, there are people who are intent on taking

the credibility we have and trying to destroy it. And I think that that's, again, a bad thing for democracy. In this day, when facts are under assault, we need places where people can come together and get facts. And it used to be that we could do that around our newspapers, our radio broadcasts, and our television broadcasts, and that isn't the case anymore for a variety of reasons. And I think that that's too bad. I think we need to do a better job in the media. And I do think that those who profit from the politics of division, and I don't think that

this is restricted to any one party, I think those people do a disservice to the country and to our democracy as well. We're going to leave it at that. Great conversation. Thanks so much, Rob. Always a pleasure to talk to you. My pleasure as well, Peter. Rob Russo with us today. And just to remind you, Rob is now currently the correspondent based in Canada for The Economist. And he's already had a number of big stories

in his new role at The Economist, which is only, I think, a couple of months old now at the moment. But formerly the Bureau Chief at two of the biggest bureaus in the country, actually. The Parliamentary Bureau of the CBC News in Ottawa and the Parliamentary Bureau of Canadian CBC News in Ottawa, and the Parliamentary Bureau of Canadian Press, also in Ottawa. So it's always interesting to hear from Rob. Obviously, I'm a big fan of Rob,

and in many ways when he was Bureau Chief in Ottawa and I was doing the National, he was kind of my boss whenever I did anything in Ottawa, and I greatly benefited from his wise counsel over many stories and many days. Okay, a couple of quick points before we leave you. One is an in-bit of sorts. Did you have a white Christmas? We didn't here in Stratford.

The day after Christmas Christmas it snowed and actually it was actually the day after was it the day after Christmas or the day after New Year's? No, it was the day after Christmas it snowed and there's still snow

not much maybe an inch or two on the ground but as Rob said haven't had any snow in Ottawa yet. No white Christmas there. No white Christmas in many parts of the country. Not all, but many parts of the country. But here's, how do you define a white Christmas? Now, I imagine different countries and different communities

have different definitions on how they define it, but I found this interesting. It's from Scotland. And it's from a particular area in Scotland, Tulloch Bridge and Abamor. Now, the Met Office the Metropolitan or the Meteorological Office in those communities

their decision on how to define a white Christmas depends on snowflakes being recorded on Christmas Day. And this year, they determined that Avamore and Tellick Bridge had official white Christmases because it is defined as at least one snowflake falling on the 25th of December.

One snowflake. Doesn't matter if by the time it touches the ground, it disappears within a minute. It was there for a minute. And therefore, there was a white Christmas. Oh boy, you learn something every day on the bridge, right? Now you know the official definition, at least in that part of Scotland, of how you get a white Christmas.

All right. Last reminder about tomorrow. Tomorrow, Thursday on the bridge is your turn. But your turn very specific this year in our new year. We're going to ask a question each week. We'll try to put it out there on Mondays. Ask you the question, and you'll have a couple of days to respond. And the best answer on that question will receive a signed book. So we're looking

forward to doing that. Here's this week's question, and there have already been many, many really good, thoughtful answers to this question. The question is simple. If you were able to change one thing about the way politics is done in Canada, about Canada's political system, one change, not two, not three, not a half a dozen, one, just one. One change, what would that change be? Now, as I said, there have been many people have written

in already. I've also asked to keep it short, a couple of sentences. You don't need much to give one change. So away you go. Those who write longer, and there have been a few who've had quite a few suggested changes. They either disqualify themselves because it's not fair to others, or I just pick one at random out of their suggestions. So we'll see where that ends up, right? Please don't forget to not only include your name, but where you're writing from. That's an important part of this.

We'd love to get a sense of the country in your letters and your ideas. So you can write to themansbridgepodcast at gmail.com, themansbridgepodcast at gmail.com. That's tomorrow's show along with the random ranter and maybe another end bit. I've got a whole bunch of them here and if there's room for one, we'll certainly put it in there. That's it for today. I'm Peter Mansbridge. Thanks so much for listening, and thank you again to Rob Russo. We'll be back in 24 hours.