Juno News - November 20, 2020


Action is needed on the China file


Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

207.64221

Word count

797

Sentence count

21

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

3

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Justin Trudeau's government seems to be slowly but surely moving in the right direction on the China file. But is it enough? Is it time for the Liberals to stop playing chicken with China and start standing up to China?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 I've been thinking for a while now that it is only a matter of time before the
00:00:08.960 Liberal government starts inching in the right direction on the China file.
00:00:12.600 I mean we can only be insulted so much. China can only do so many things to
00:00:18.480 Canada and to our allies until eventually any government is gonna wake
00:00:22.640 up and go okay fine we admit we got a problem here. When I first started really
00:00:28.440 thinking that the Liberals were gonna pivot was when those poll numbers came
00:00:31.740 out. Only 17% of Canadians held a favorable view of China and that view had
00:00:36.500 been plummeting the past couple years because of everything that's been
00:00:39.180 happening with China and I thought surely the Liberals they're not gonna let 1.00
00:00:42.440 themselves be so offside on such a major issue where the rest of the nation is on
00:00:47.360 the other side of the coin the other side of the question and sure enough they
00:00:50.760 have started inching in the right direction although kind of in inconsistent
00:00:54.280 ways. So we heard from Francois-Philippe Champagne the foreign affairs minister a
00:00:58.260 number of weeks ago he made the comment that the China of 2020 is no longer the
00:01:02.560 China of 2016. I don't know why he said 2016 I feel like because that's around 0.94
00:01:07.920 about the time the Liberals got into office and maybe he's saying oh it's
00:01:11.400 okay that we had a different view then but now you know we're changing our view.
00:01:15.140 I mean really it's 2012 is the year that things should have become clear that China 1.00
00:01:19.960 is not actually trending to be more liberal and more democratic and more favorable
00:01:24.560 towards human rights and all of that as a lot of people predicted in the 1990s they said
00:01:28.780 oh it's just gonna get better with China. 2012 changed when Xi Jinping got into power
00:01:33.380 and he made it clear that's not how I roll that's not the direction we're headed in. So
00:01:38.200 a lot of China watchers say it became pretty clear soon after Xi got in giving speeches
00:01:43.380 and releasing all these different statements and so forth around about 2013 you should have
00:01:47.420 been pretty clear about where things were headed. But I digress Francois-Philippe Champagne
00:01:52.220 okay he said sort of kind of the right thing. Justin Trudeau as well seeing something interesting
00:01:57.520 on Thursday he was pressed on the Meng Wanzhou issue and how China still says you gotta let
00:02:02.000 her go and he said well no sorry we're a country that believes in the rule of law we're not gonna
00:02:06.520 let her go and by the way China's aggressive diplomacy it's not gonna work out well for them 0.95
00:02:11.480 they're gonna find it's gonna backfire for them and well we have to stand up to that.
00:02:15.500 I thought oh okay I would have used much stronger language than that but you know whatever I'll take
00:02:19.960 what I can get nice to hear Trudeau actually stepping in the right direction. But then it's
00:02:24.660 kind of funny because just the day before there was a motion in the House of Commons saying
00:02:28.000 the two easiest words that we should be able to string together ban Huawei. All the cool kids are
00:02:33.820 doing it all of our allies are doing it they're pressing us to do it it's kind of logical it's in
00:02:38.380 our interest the liberals just can't bring themselves to do it and most opposition MPs voted in favor of
00:02:43.460 that the liberals would not they voted against that motion. I mean I don't know why they're still
00:02:48.460 sitting on this file it's really obvious I would be able to make the decision so easily you have a
00:02:53.080 press conference you know you hold up the Huawei deal you tear it up on the live television say there
00:02:58.840 you go we've just banned Huawei. So Justin Schro and other cabinet ministers they're starting to say
00:03:05.120 interesting things pivoting on the China file fine but they've got to start acting as well it's not
00:03:11.440 just about saying the things get off the pot on the Huawei file and just ban them. Lots of concerns about
00:03:17.040 TMAC resources that is that underperforming gold mine up in Nunavut in the Arctic Circle the Chinese
00:03:23.120 government state-owned enterprise they're trying to buy it. Why are they buying something like that
00:03:27.740 there's much bigger fish to fry they could go after bigger gold mine operations well I think it's
00:03:32.620 kind of obvious. Arctic Circle they've got an airstrip they got a seaport there it's a strategic
00:03:37.380 interest we gotta say no to that plain obvious. So happy to hear Justin Trudeau saying things about
00:03:43.660 standing up to China correct language indeed want to see the actions though want to see the right decisions.