The Paul Wells Show - Jason Kenney is mad

Episode Date: March 12, 2025

Former Defence Minister and Alberta Premier Jason Kenney has been horrified by what he’s been seeing from the new Trump administration. He got so mad that he ended a lengthy Twitter hiatus to sound off about it. He joins Paul to share his views on Trump’s takeover of America conservatism, Trump’s relationship with Ukraine, and what Canada should do about U.S. aggression.

The Paul Wells Show is made possible by McGill University's Max Bell School of Public Policy, where I'm a senior fellow. How do you defend Canada along the world's longest undefended border? We've got to make the White House understand that, yes, they're ten times bigger than us. Yes, they can roll over us and inflict disproportionate pain. But there are some things that we can do that would be painful as well. This week, Jason Kenney's back. He used to be Canada's Defence Minister, and he's spoiling for a fight.

I'm Paul Wells. Welcome to the Paul Wells Show. I'm Paul Wells. Welcome to the Paul Wells show. Having Jason Kenney on this podcast more often than any other guest was never part of a big plan. It's just the way things worked out. He's a good talker and he's done a lot of things. So he's back on the show today for the fourth time. This time I think it's fair to say he's angry. Angry at Donald Trump, the American president, for letting Ukraine down, and for picking a fight with Canada.

The first part, you could maybe see coming. The second part was a surprise. And it's starting to look like a real threat to Canada's economy and sovereignty. So let's talk about all of that now. Jason Kenney, thanks for joining me. Good to be here, Paul. Am I right?

Are you not enjoying this month? No, who is, at least in Canada. I think we all feel shell shocked and sometimes wake up in the morning wondering whether this is real or a simulated parallel universe. And yeah, I think I have a reputation for being a pretty cheerful avuncular guy. But you're right in identifying that I

share a great deal of frustration and even anger with what's going on right now. Tell me about your, I don't know how to put it, your intellectual history as an observer of Donald Trump's influence over US Republicanism. I sure took it as a joke. I remember that the first Republican debate among the candidates for the nomination in 2015,

leading into the 2016 primary seasons, was the night of the debate that I hosted between Stephen Harper and Justin Trudeau at the beginning of the 2015 campaign. And I went on the radio and I said, look, Donald Trump's never gonna be the president of the United States, but somebody on my stage is gonna be the prime minister,

so you should watch my debate. And then the son of a gun got himself elected president of the United States, made me look like a liar. When did you realize that he was something, not only somebody who might get himself elected, but somebody who might change American politics? Well, Paul, by the way, you were in pretty good company. There were a lot of clever people who mocked the concept of a Trump presidency, most notably President Barack Obama who infamously

did so at the 2015 White House press correspondence dinner in which he mercilessly mocked Trump who was in the audience and had all of the bien pensant of the Washington elites openly ridiculing and laughing at Trump. And it was apparently that moment where he decided he was going to prove them all wrong. And boy, has he ever. On your question, I went to college in the States and I had vague memories about stories in the 80s of Donald Trump hosting major fundraisers and gallows for the Democrats and liberal causes in Manhattan and being very public, loud and proud advocate protectionist policies when American politics was swinging towards free trade.

So that was sort of my earliest recollection. He was a protectionist liberal Democrat. I also recalled him running for, I think, twice for reform or independent. Reform, as you remember, was a kind of briefly lived, that Pat Buchanan aligned, populist right third party. And so when he went down the escalator at Trump Plaza, Trump Tower in advance of the 2016 election, I thought it was part of what

those earlier campaigns was. I thought was part of the branding exercise. I thought it was an opportunity to get some free-earned media, maintain relevance, have influence. I didn't think he was actually a serious candidate and was quite astonished with how the 2016 primaries unfolded. I think I wasn't the only one. I mean you had the most talented panel of Republican presidential nominee candidates, I think, arguably in modern history then, in that 2016 cycle. And they all just got crushed. So it, well, we've all learned our lesson.

Now we have to get into MAGA one and MAGA two. I mean, because this president Trump seems to be different in significant ways, not only in kind of how hard he's pushing, but in what he's pushing on. I recall him complaining about NAFTA. I don't recall him complaining about Canada the first time around. Yes, I'd make this point that the notion this

has been some kind of deeply held, long conveyed policy obsession of President Trump's is totally counterfactual. I mean, look, we know, we always know he had a grievance against NAFTA. Fair enough. That became a fairly broad cross-partisan consensus. I mean, don't forget, by the way, that Kamala Harris voted against USMCA Kusma together with a bunch of liberal Democrats because they thought it was too pro-free trade. So, you know, being anti-NAFTA was not a startling position for him to take. And to be honest, I mean, the Americans raised in the Kusma renegotiations, what I would say are, like, were valid national interest conventional trade policy issues. And I think there's still a lot of people in

MAGA who look at those issues that way. You know I had a lunch with Rob Lighthizer, Trump's last US trade representative, who's not gone into this administration but his former chief of staff is the new USTR a couple years ago and he said to me, if we get back into office We're coming for supply management. You guys are not going to get to it the USC MCA Renegotiation table until we see the head of supply management on a table, but he didn't talk about Fentanyl the shadow boxing against candidate as as a security threat Greater than China and equal to Mexico. There was none of that stuff. It was just like a couple of, I would say, fairly conventional and one might even say defensible trade grievances.

In the, what, 18 months that Trump campaigned for this cycle, the millions of words that he uttered, the hundreds of events that he attended and thousands of interviews he did, he barely ever mentioned Canada. He never came out with this running, hundreds of events that he attended and thousands of interviews he did, he barely ever mentioned Canada. He never came out with this running line about the 51st state until December of last year. So this was not something that was long gestating in his mind.

Where do you think he got it from? Well, when people try to find or impose rational explanations on Trump's behavior, I think they're discounting the often improvised and impulsive reality of how he works. So there's not always a grand strategy. Everybody's trying to impose upon him like the mastermind playing four-dimensional chess. I'm not sure I see that. I suspect something like this happened. He loves the idea of tariffs. We know that. As David Frum has pointed out, President Trump has held virtually every conceivable issue on virtually every major public policy issue of the past 40 years except tariffs. An issue where he's had a particular zeal, even when it was well outside conventional

wisdom and elite opinion. In the 1980s, taking out full-page ads in the Wall Street Journal calling for tariffs on the then rising Japanese economic threat. And so, you know, tariffs are the best word in the English language, all of that. He really does believe that. He's now been surrounded by a small group of, let's call them mega or mega adjacent right of central intellectuals who have given this neoprotectionism of the near of intellectual credibility.

And he's picked up, I think, some concepts about raising revenue from them. And, you know, renewing American manufacturing. So he's got a couple of ideas, substantive ideas that are supported by some smart people, and a lot of voters comes to office and he finds out, you know, that because of the dysfunction of the American Congress is very little he can actually do in advancing a legislative reform agenda, which is why every day we're getting executive orders. And that also includes tariffs with one exception in tariff policy, which is where he can invoke a national security threat. So I think somebody in the transition period explained to him that he could impose unilateral tariffs through fiat declaring this a national security issue.

Well it's kind of hard to do that with the European Union, but look at the security issue he ran on, the borders. So I think that's where it probably came into focus for him, that he was elected primarily on the southern border, he wants tariffs, the immigration issue and the drug issue gave him an electoral mandate. The American people wanted action on it. Why not also use that for tariffs? And hell, why not throw Canada too? We'll throw Canada into this.

And then I think the whole 51st state thing was at first a joke, but it started to get a real reaction. And I think that just encouraged him to keep poking it. There's also a lingering American perception that Canada doesn't have its shit together and that Canada is barely a functioning sovereign state and a bit of a hangover from the arrest of Ahmed Rassam at the Canada-US border in 1999,

because he was heading down to blow up Los Angeles International Airport. And my recollection is that when the Harper government came to power, you were frequently surprised by the momentum behind American efforts to thicken the border, that they had a security mindset when it came to relations with Canada

that was really hard to shake them off. Yes, true. Let's not forget that in the first hours after the 9-11 attacks, a report circulated in American media that some of the attackers had come out of Canada. So there had been an Al-Qaeda cell in Canada that infiltrated the United States. First impressions are lasting impressions. A lie can make its way around the world before the truth can strap on its

boots. Well, that was the case that day, 9-11, where we got tagged. And that's, of course, if you talk to anybody who worked on Kennedy-U.S. relations in the ensuing decade or so, they'll say they were still encountering that 10 and 15 years later. So yeah, there was always that, I think, residual anxiety about the security of the Northern border. I was a minister who dealt with U.S. Homeland Security secretaries in different party administrations on these things, and they did have some legitimate grievances. Absolutely, as did we.

I think one of the mistakes that we have made for decades, especially in the 9-11 period, is we allowed ourselves to go completely on the defense on border integrity issues. We should have been the ones banging the table, as I did as immigration minister about the Americans of basically facilitating large amounts of irregular migration across the Canadian border. US NGOs that were taking failed asylum claimants and helping them to prepare them for walking across the border, what they would say to the Canadian officials, how to file an asylum claim, all of that.

So there's actual American NGO facilitation of this. They refused. Janet Napolitano, my counterpart at the time, refused to do it. Canadian officials how to file an asylum claim all of that so there's actual you know American NGO facilitation of this they refused Janet Napolitano my kind of part of the time refused to amend the Canada USA third country agreement To plug the loopholes that were allowing people to make second redundant asylum claims again. I'll just give you one example The guns that have come across the border hundreds of Canadians who have been killed by American-produced smuggled guns. And my God, a month ago, the Toronto and Ontario police detained a semi-tractor trailer full of cocaine that had crossed the US southern border, crossed the entire continental United

States before entering Canada at the Ambassador Bridge. Now if the inverse had happened, imagine a semi truck full of drugs from Canada ended up being detained in, I don't know, Houston. Donald Trump would be down there holding a press conference in front of it. But here it was like a one day police process story. So here's my point. I think there's been a huge asymmetry in the dialogue about border security issues. And we've allowed ourselves to be completely put on the

defense of unjustifiably on this. I want to say a word about the people who are supporting this podcast. McGill University's Max Bell School of Public Policy is committed to the research, teaching, public outreach, and practical advocacy of sound public policy, grounded in a solid understanding of the overall policy process, with all its imperfections and limitations. With their one-year intensive Master of Public Policy program, they teach a principle-based design of policy solutions to important problems. Learn more at mcgill.ca slash maxbellschool.

Okay, let's park all of that for a minute and cross the ocean and go to Ukraine. As I said, Donald Trump being strange on the Russia-Ukraine file is a little less surprising. He's got form on this, as the British say. He had the GOP platform amended in 2016 to eliminate language about providing lethal assistance to Ukraine.

He got impeached over pressure on Zelensky, vis-a-vis the Biden family. So the idea that he might be looking for a way to dump the American alliance with Ukraine is a little less surprising. What do you make of that file as it has evolved over the last couple of months? Yeah, deeply discouraging.

Look, I think all of us who are supporters of Ukraine were kind of prepared for the worst, but hoping for the best. There had been a fair degree of unusually calculated ambiguity on Trump's part. We knew there was a certain publicly expressed sympathy for Putin and Russia, but also he had not committed explicitly to ending military support for Ukraine.

And there were some early indications, with the appointment of Mike Waltz at the National Security Council, Mark Rubio at State, who had been strong supporters of Ukraine, that perhaps he was going to surprise us all. Paul even three weeks ago, he was talking about exercising maximum economic pressure on Russia to force them to the table with a reasonable peace agreement. You may recall he publicly called on the Saudis and OPEC to massively increase oil production in order to crash global oil prices to end Putin's main source of revenue.

So I was surprised even with the huge VoltaFast that happened around the time of Zelensky's visit to Washington, where it all seemed to go off the rails. There's lots of things you can... Now I do think that working behind the scenes and very close to the president, there has been a particularly obsessive anti-Ukraine pro-Moscow group that appears to include Donald Trump Jr., JD Vance, Elon Musk, and some other very powerful people who have, for the better part of two years, some of those characters have been openly mocking and deriding Ukraine. So my hunch is perhaps those folks got their message through and unfortunately it is now of course completely upended the

entire international security framework. There is a stereotype of Zelensky as essentially a sloppy dresser from theater school who comes to town and fleeces well-meaning legislatures for every dime he can get and then goes off to waste it on a war that nobody wants. It's a version of a caricature of him that has been out there for a couple years. And plainly Trump is not immune to that interpretation.

Especially when JD Vance, who's been peddling that version as hard as he can get, is in the room. Yes, this reminds me, you were talking about the perception of Canada in American politics. I'm gonna connect the two. I think a lot of the derision that we've bizarrely seen being expressed for Canada in recent months is connected to nearly a decade of right

of Central American populists like megamedia, using Justin Trudeau as one of their greatest targets of ridicule and derision. So I think amongst a mega Americans, Justin Trudeau has become a much higher profile Canadian prime minister than any of his predecessors because he's been almost a daily and certainly a weekly item feature. Whenever he did one of his silly woke things,

it would be a top story on Fox for 48 hours, right? So I think that that helped to create, it worsened the brand problem, okay? And I think exactly the same thing has happened in mega media with Zelensky. And I think it's because, you know, most Americans 20 years ago wouldn't have been able to identify Ukraine on a map, maybe vaguely recall it being part of the Soviet Union. For Manga World, their introduction to sort of modern independent Ukraine was those two incidents, the Bruce Minergy, Hunter Biden, and the Trump campaign Russian collusion argument.

So I think from Manga's perspective, the notion that Russia is a malignant adversary of the United States is the invention of the media elites. And this was all disproven in the discrediting of the Russia collusion story. And yeah, that Zelensky is somehow vaguely involved in the Biden family's enrichment and in all of this. And don't forget, by the way, when Russia did invade three years ago, February three years ago, you saw in the polls broad public sympathy. I think there was a natural moral reaction of Americans against that kind of aggression. There's been since three years of a daily drumbeat in, at first, the more marginal clickbait rage machine part of mega media, and that has gradually, I think, moved in to the mainstream, the mainstream of American conservative movement.

I mean, for goodness sakes, the Heritage Foundation, which used to be sort of the think tank of the Reagan Revolution, which was a very much, like, traditional American conservative establishment voice, has been leading the charge against Ukraine. That would have been completely unthinkable a decade ago. So that, what you see here is a reflection of the capture of many, if not most, of the American conservative Oregon's by MAGA.

And you've got some personal history with that trend because it was essentially elements of that Trumpist movement in Canada that put paid to your leadership of the United Conservative Party in Alberta. Yeah, there were certainly parallels, no doubt about it. Yeah, there are certainly parallels, no doubt about it. I was told by the United Conservative Party that in the leadership review vote for me in 2022 that 65% of the people voting had never before been members of the UCP, the Progressive Conservative or the Wilder Rose Party. These were new entrants, most of whom had been radicalized through the COVID era. But the radicalization

didn't happen overnight. It was, I think, part of a organic process that started with alt-right media, whose business model is the monetization of anger. And the folks who consume that consume no legacy institutional media. And therefore, a lot of them had a hard time understanding what the big deal was about COVID, because for them, COVID was watching rebel news and seeing, you know, TikTok videos of nurses dancing in empty hallway corridors,ies between aspects of that and how the alt-right media have had such disproportionate influence in the United States. When you see reporters from Rebel News getting the few available question slots at Pierre Poliev's news conferences,

does that make you nervous? No, it doesn't make me nervous. Uh, I think any party has to, uh, deal with the new media world. And that includes the fact that there are a lot of unconventional outlets on the left and the right that have significant audiences. I'm not going to second guess how to deal with that. I would just say, what matters is the answers that they get.

And you like the answers that Mr. Polyaev gives on this border dispute and on Ukraine? Yes. Yes, very much so. I know there were a lot of people who were anxious about his position on Ukraine, say a year ago, I think most of that was a tempest in a teapot. I think there was a tactical decision. Some might say it was perhaps in retrospect too clever by connecting the carbon tax or talking about the carbon tax provision in

the Canada-Ukraine free trade renewal bill. That really ought not to be seen as a symbol for broader support for Ukraine. But if you look at Pierre's actual statements on the conflict, and they are more robust and more frequent of late, you will see that he is very much continuing in the line of Stephen Harper. And I will remind people that the biggest applause lines that Stephen Harper used to get in 2014 and 15 were his stirring defense of Ukraine and his denunciation of Vladimir Putin, reminding the audience at the time he told Putin to get out of Ukraine, how he led the charge to remove them from the G8, et cetera. Paul, in the minds of most Canadian conservatives, they'll tell

you that they think Stephen Harper's greatest policy achievements were on foreign policy. And if probed, most of them will say on Israel and Ukraine. So I think Pierre Polyaev is echoing that justifiably proud tradition. The Moroni government, that was the first in the outside of Poland to recognize Ukrainian independence following its referendum in 1991. And I think that's where sort of 70% or more Canadians are at.

The other 30% who think that Trump and Putin are doing great work in Ukraine are well represented on social media. And in the responses, every time Poliev supports Ukraine and says Canada should keep supporting Ukraine, he gets a wall of comments from people saying, well, you just lost me, Pierre. I thought you were my guy, and now you're just another globalist and things like that.

Is that representative of something in public opinion? Yeah, in minority, but still, and you're right, they're bloody noisy. As you may have observed, for my Lenten mortification, I decided to go back on Twitter after two years. And the comments I see about these things are mind blowing. Now, presumably, some of them are sort of the much-storied Russian bots, but a lot of them are Canadians sitting in their basement.

And they're just regurgitating this crazy stuff. You know, Paul, when Mr. Poliev was running his leadership campaign, quite famously, he would stand at the back of the hall at the end of each rally and shake every hand and talk to every person who went into the queue, sometimes until midnight or 1 AM. And many of the people who queued up at that time, was at the tail end of kovat would say to him We sure hope you're not one of those world economic forum Davos globalists like prove it to us

and I remember my created my or Theo flurry I say that Deep sarcasm it Theo has it has implicitly accused me, by the way, of being involved in the Pizza Gate QAnon conspiracy because I somehow am dependent on Adrenochrome, a secret chromosome extract that the globalists extract from children in a modern reiteration of the medieval blood libel. Anyway, Theo Flurry started attacking Pierre as being completely unreliable

and a weffer globalist stooge. So I was delighted when I started to see that during his leadership campaign and it's only intensified from those folks since. But he spent a lot of time when he was running that by-election against Maxime Bernier in Manitoba, making sure everyone knew that Maxime Bernier

had been to the World Economic Forum. Why doesn't he simply say, what on earth does it matter? It's a meeting. Calm down. Why does he play along with that crap? Well, okay, fair question. Two points. One, long before the Davos globalist conspiracies started getting purchased, normal conservatives like me were dismissive of Davos as a huge exercise in hypocrisy by neoliberal elites who would fly there on their Gulf Streams and lecture the world about decarbonization. So I was always pretty critical of it.

I never thought that it was sort of the center of the global conspiracy. So there are people who have had longstanding legitimate and then grievances. And then Klaus Schwab did publish this book called The Great Reset, whose thesis was that the world should use COVID as an opportunity to recreate the modern state along Dyrhysh status lines. So, you know, Klaus Schwab, the leader of the organization put it in the crosshairs as somehow being, COVID being about this one world government conspiracy theory. So they have to take some of the responsibility for that. And it is true that Justin Trudeau and others in the Trudeau government were super excited about the idea of a great reset, which they saw as a chance to win by default all the debates that they had had such a hard time winning in parliaments around the world.

Yeah, we heard lots of domestic political slogans on the center left that reflected this build back better, et cetera. So I think there were many people on the center left who actually believed this, that this was an epoch changing moment that we could start at year zero and it was a great political opportunity for statist ideas. And I think Pierre Polyev has always been opposed to those philosophies. And that's why he's not a fan of Davos. Fair enough. I mean, Boris Johnson, who nobody's going to accuse of being a mega adjacent populist, he was populist in some respects, a huge supporter of Ukraine, but Boris Johnson

told his cabinet that they weren't allowed to go to Davos. So this is not a unique position in the Canadian center, right? All right. This has been a fun sort of intellectual tour of things, but now let's get down to action. Let's do a table exercise. What on earth is Canada supposed to do about a

president who thinks that we belong to him? Well, being as united as possible, be strong and resilient and move from all of the good intentions to real action on the national productivity agenda. If there's something good that's come from this, it's perhaps the huge kick in the pants that we needed to move out of our slumber, our holiday from history, where we've just been sort of gradually watching this decline in national productivity and wealth, this ossification of our public institutions and services and We just thought we were you know had a right To an ever-growing economy ever greater prosperity and always to be the envy of the world well

Now, you know we realized we can't take anything for granted anymore including our largest export market including the basic architecture of our international economy and our intelligence, military, and strategic relationships. So time to put on our big boy pants, time to move from endless, how many entire forests have been cut down to print the think tank papers and academic research on the productivity and challenge over the past 30 years. And yet it continues apace. So I am excited actually. While I'm angry about what's going on, I'm excited to see something like, I believe, a pan-Canadian, fairly cross-partisan consensus

on some pretty key pillars about getting our economic house in order, obviously major infrastructure, energy exports, deregulation, tax competitiveness, internal trade, pre-mobility of labor, getting back to a functioning immigration system, and other key points. It's exciting to see a moment of opportunity appear in Canadian public policy. To get to that debate, we need to survive this trade war and there's been a little bit of divergence among premiers about how hard to fight. Doug Ford, you've been in meetings all day, you might not have heard that Doug Ford promised the 25% export tax on hydro and Trump up the ante and now they both climb down for the moment, but Danielle Smith in Alberta

has not been as eager to use Alberta's resources as a chip in this fight. Yeah, and I think perhaps understandably, I mean, look, her job is to defend the interests of Albertans. In this context, I think every Premier's job is first and foremost to defend our country, Canada first, as Pierre Bolliev says. And for me, that means you don't take anything off the table, particularly not our single biggest bargaining chip, which is our energy exports to the United States. So it's my view that strategically, we need a level of ambiguity about what we might do next. We've got to make the White House understand that, yes, they're 10 times bigger than us. Yes, they can roll over us and inflict disproportionate pain.

But there are some things that we can do that would be painful as well. And to take energy as a bargaining chip off the table completely, I think would be imprudent. Now, having said that, there's some practical realities, Paul, you know, to quote unquote, cut off the Americans from the 20% of the oil they consume which comes from Alberta Would shut down the central Canadian economy because most of it flows through the main line then through lines five and nine that passed Through the United States before coming back into Canada. So you can't like turn off the tap For the American refineries without turning off the tap for Toronto and Montreal

but an export tax, remember it's a tax not on Americans, but on the Canadian producers. Would it be effective? I'm not sure. I think you could have a debate about it. I think we should keep everything on the table. Meanwhile, it's not at all clear who the we is on this fight between the White House and Premier

Ford. I decided I would see what the PMO thinks. It's not at all clear who the we is. On this fight between the White House and Premier Ford, I decided I would see what the PMO thinks. And today, Tuesday, it wasn't clear to me which PMO I should call. Justin Trudeau's or Mark Carney's. And either one of them would face defeat in the House of Commons

if they dared to meet the House of Commons. It's not an ideal situation. What a disaster. Let's be honest that we find ourselves in the most precarious strategic and economic position. I think in postwar history, effectively without a functioning government or clear leadership, I guess this would be my opportunity

to make all sorts of partisan points about the liberals. I'll restrain myself except to say that they should not have put us in this position. But here we are. So let's get on with it. I hope there'll be an election as soon as possible. My message to Mr. Carney would be if he thinks that by staying on, maybe making a deal with the NDP, that he's going to be able to demonstrate his brilliance as a leader and so forth, I would just say this. It's a lot easier to campaign, as he obviously intends to, against Donald Trump for 40 days on the stump, than to govern against him getting punched in the face every single day and owning the tariff recession six months from now.

So let's get it on and let's try to do it in a way where there's broad unity on the key points about the defense of Canada, but also acknowledge this is a democracy and there will be differences. All of us need to know that whatever we do and say, I mean, I should let me say what political leaders do and say in the context of a forthcoming campaign can and likely will be used against us as leverage as division. So let's not fall for that but I'm a little concerned Paul that we might be starting to hear from some of the corners of elite Laurentian opinion,

the idea that, you know, my friend Tom De Kino's essay about a grand coalition government, that we need essentially to put aside any domestic political differences at this time. No, we need an election that means four or five weeks of some disagreement disagreement and then we get behind the new government, whoever it is, for the fight for Canada. Jason Kenney, it's always a pleasure to catch up with you.

Thanks for joining me. Thanks, Paul. Thanks for listening to The Paul Wells Show. The Paul Wells Show is produced by Antica and supported by McGill University's Max Bell School of Public Policy. My producer is Kevin Sexton. Our executive producer is Stuart Cox. Laura Reguerre is Antica's head of audio. If you subscribe to my Substack,

you can get bonus content for this show, as well as access to my newsletter. You can do that at paulwells.substack.com. If you're enjoying this show, give us a good rating on your podcast app. It helps spread the word. We'll be back next Wednesday.