Juno News - December 30, 2019


A Decade in Review： Canadian Identity

Topics
identity questions identity issue
Mentioned
Justin Trudeau Uighur Muslims Boris Johnson Brexit
Trudeau and Morneau don't seem to care about the economy Trudeau wants more money and bigger role for CBC

Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

181.94

Word count

724

Sentence count

39

Harmful content

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, we take a look back at the decade that was, and reflect on the decade to come. In particular, we review the decade in review issues, including the identity question, which is a topic that has been around for a long time, and which will likely continue to be around in the next decade.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 When we talk about decade in review issues, I think one very inescapable issue, but one that
00:00:12.080 is very difficult to nail down and be precise upon, and it means different things to different
00:00:16.960 people, it means different things in different parts of the world, is the identity question.
00:00:22.100 I think that meant a lot in this decade that's just drawing to a close, and I think it's
00:00:27.360 only going to matter more in the decade to come.
00:00:31.680 But what does that mean, and how will it play out?
00:00:33.780 I don't know, but I think it's something that we need to be attuned to and attentive to.
00:00:42.420 It's unfolding in different ways in different parts of the world.
00:00:46.120 In the United States and the United Kingdom, they have their concerns with broader sort
00:00:51.100 of sovereignty issues as it relates to multilateralism.
00:00:55.260 So they're concerned about bodies like the EU or the UN and other forums that are kind
00:01:01.300 of doing this lowest common denominator thing, where we've signed up for this club, but what's
00:01:06.520 really in it for us, and we're having to follow other people's rules, but it might not be to
00:01:10.460 our benefit.
00:01:11.100 And the UN and the EU, rather than kind of go, yeah, you guys have a point, we're going
00:01:15.260 to try and change things, they actually almost are defiant, and they want to make things even
00:01:19.420 more difficult.
00:01:20.020 So we're going to see that continue.
00:01:21.600 Boris Johnson has his mandate to do Brexit.
00:01:24.320 He's been sort of ratified in that in the last election.
00:01:26.660 He's going to get it done.
00:01:27.580 But those sort of issues under the surface are going to continue.
00:01:31.900 More broadly speaking, in Europe, their identity questions are related to migration, because
00:01:37.340 there they are in Europe.
00:01:38.640 We know it sort of culturally as being what it is for hundreds of years with the Renaissance
00:01:43.520 and Reformation and all of that.
00:01:45.060 They're seeing a lot of changes, because they are not landlocked, they are interconnected
00:01:49.380 to all these different parts of the world, the Middle East and North Africa, where they're
00:01:53.680 seeing a lot of migration come and changing the fabric of their society.
00:01:57.360 And it's a very awkward, and at least to some people, even a taboo conversation about what
00:02:02.160 all of that means.
00:02:03.400 So that's how the identity issue unfolds for them.
00:02:07.700 Looking in other parts of the world, Turkey, lots of identity questions there. 1.00
00:02:12.400 Pakistan and India, they are having major fights over issues related to citizenship and
00:02:18.540 borders and the Kashmir region and so forth.
00:02:21.400 And China, well, they're becoming a rising global superpower even more so, but they still
00:02:25.900 have these insecurities related to identity issues.
00:02:28.760 Having to put all these Uyghur Muslims in concentration camps to suppress that, they're figuring all of 1.00
00:02:34.640 that out.
00:02:35.240 In Canada, things are, of course, much tamer.
00:02:37.720 And it's interesting because our identity is more of a mixed identity right now, but
00:02:42.560 people are so incredibly sheepish about the issue.
00:02:46.180 Justin Trudeau himself says, no core identity in Canada.
00:02:49.000 We are post-national state.
00:02:50.760 People go, excuse me?
00:02:52.160 What the hell does that mean?
00:02:53.240 And I think it's probably because he hasn't thought through this issue very much.
00:02:56.700 Like most issues, Trudeau doesn't seem to think rigorously through things.
00:03:01.060 And I think he means identity is almost always ethnic identity issues.
00:03:06.520 And then he gets a bit squeamish about that issue.
00:03:08.880 And that does not mean the case at all.
00:03:10.520 Cultural identity, national identity are things that really go bigger and beyond those questions
00:03:16.820 of ethnicity and race and can expand to include people of all different backgrounds.
00:03:21.520 If you have these rallying points where you talk about a Canadian identity that focuses
00:03:26.360 on the things we have in common in the best of our country, where we want to head rather
00:03:31.120 than focusing on our differences.
00:03:33.240 But again, hard to have that conversation.
00:03:34.980 I wish we'd had that back in 2017 during Canada 150.
00:03:39.400 And sadly, we did not.
00:03:41.200 So the identity issue, it's there.
00:03:43.560 It was there last decade.
00:03:44.680 And I think it's going to be there even more in this decade ahead, just unsure in which
00:03:49.740 ways it'll unfold.
00:03:50.880 But it'll be an interesting one, hopefully a positive one, but certainly in some parts
00:03:55.460 of the world, probably an increasingly negative one.