Juno News - May 20, 2022


Andrew Lawton is heading to the WEF Annual Meeting

Topics
World Economic Forum transparency
Mentioned
Andrew Lawton Justin Trudeau Patty Hajdu
Jason Kenney is resigning. What does it mean for Canadian conservatism？ What should Ontario conservatives do this election？

Episode Stats


Length

8 minutes

Words per minute

200.72

Word count

1,691

Sentence count

108

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

This week on Friday, I am off to Davos, Switzerland for the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting. I have not been invited to cover it, but it's not because I don't want to go, it's because I want to know what the heck is going on at the WEF.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
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 This week on Friday, I am off to Davos, Switzerland for the World Economic Forum annual meeting.
00:00:08.980 Now before you tune out, I have not been invited. In fact, the World Economic Forum
00:00:13.140 has gone through painstaking lengths to prevent independent journalists like me
00:00:18.000 from going to cover what's happening at the upcoming meeting. And to be honest,
00:00:23.700 if you know me, you know I'm a little bit stubborn and that has probably made me want to go more.
00:00:29.140 So I'm going to just take a step back here and explain a little bit of why this is.
00:00:33.700 So I get messages all the time, emails non-stop about the World Economic Forum, about the WEF.
00:00:40.340 Every little while, a video from Klaus Schwab, the chairman and founder of the WEF, will circulate
00:00:46.340 saying creepy things like how he's penetrated so much of the Canadian cabinet and politicians around the world.
00:00:53.300 And then you get clips from people like Justin Trudeau explaining how it's all about the Great Reset,
00:00:59.140 or how the need to reset and all of these things. And all of the stuff that is coming out here
00:01:04.480 tends to be dismissed as conspiracy theory.
00:01:09.920 And the problem with this is that if you read the World Economic Forum's own language,
00:01:15.060 they make it abundantly clear what it is they want, what it is they want to do,
00:01:19.220 and less so how they want to get there. But to some extent, they're transparent about that.
00:01:23.600 So I think there are people that have very conspiratorial views of the World Economic Forum.
00:01:29.120 But I think that for the most part, the grievances that you can raise about them are using their own words,
00:01:34.360 the ideas that they put forward. And more importantly, all of the politicians who, by their own admission,
00:01:39.880 are hitching themselves to these things.
00:01:42.340 When I went to cover the World Economic Forum's meeting in January 2022,
00:01:46.820 I didn't actually have to go anywhere because the meeting took place online.
00:01:51.240 And what happened is some of the sessions were public, anyone could watch them,
00:01:55.720 others were behind closed doors, including one with Health Minister Patti Hajdu,
00:02:00.580 where as a Canadian taxpayer, I actually couldn't see her talking about,
00:02:04.520 I think the panel was cross-border mobility.
00:02:07.340 That seems like a bit of a problem. Maybe she wasn't talking about anything of substance,
00:02:11.440 maybe she was. 0.97
00:02:12.360 But you have politicians that go to this conference and all of a sudden are putting their thoughts and ideas
00:02:18.020 and perhaps their government's thoughts and ideas behind closed doors.
00:02:21.920 So for all that the World Economic Forum says, it's not a secretive organization.
00:02:25.940 It is an organization that prides itself on being the place where discussions happen,
00:02:30.700 the place where things happen.
00:02:32.260 And when they're having it in the mountains of Switzerland,
00:02:34.760 most people who are going to be affected by these decisions and these discussions
00:02:39.180 don't actually have the ability to be there for it.
00:02:42.900 So we decided at True North months ago that we were going to cover this.
00:02:46.440 And because of COVID, it's taken a little bit of time
00:02:48.440 for them to actually have another in-person meeting.
00:02:51.460 And the next one they have is scheduled for next week.
00:02:54.560 So I'm getting there a couple days early to get my bearings.
00:02:58.060 And again, this is not about feeding into conspiracy.
00:03:01.380 It's actually about shining a light on what it is the World Economic Forum actually wants to do
00:03:07.020 and how it will affect Canada, how it will affect the Western world.
00:03:11.260 And I just want to, to this point, explain a little bit about what they're promising for this event.
00:03:15.680 Again, in their own words.
00:03:17.840 They have a number of themes set out.
00:03:19.280 You can see it on their website here.
00:03:20.460 Climate and nature, fairer economies, tech and innovation, jobs and skills, better business,
00:03:26.420 health and health care, global cooperation, society and equity.
00:03:30.360 And again, all of these things, for the most part, sound pretty innocuous.
00:03:34.600 They sound pretty benign.
00:03:36.140 You click on one of them like, oh, I don't know, society and equity here.
00:03:39.680 And you see that all of the things they talk about, systemic oppression of people of color,
00:03:44.880 a widening gender gap, social injustice.
00:03:47.620 These are all the things that they're putting up as the backdrop.
00:03:51.060 But here's the interesting thing.
00:03:52.880 They promote these ideas along the lines of which of the United Nations
00:03:58.860 sustainable development goals they think discussions about these ideas will fulfill.
00:04:04.020 So a lot of these global institutions, they're not discrete entities that exist
00:04:08.260 without a huge amount of overlap.
00:04:10.880 So UN priorities form the backbone for the World Economic Forum,
00:04:15.260 which is technically a private sector group.
00:04:17.240 But it gets all of this fawning and adoration from governments, including from Canada.
00:04:21.900 And so far, we don't know what the Canadian delegation, if anything, is going to be.
00:04:27.060 And that's one of the reasons I want to be on the ground.
00:04:29.240 Who's there from Canada?
00:04:30.600 What are they talking about?
00:04:32.500 And I mentioned a moment ago that the World Economic Forum doesn't want us there.
00:04:36.400 Well, when they announced this date, I happened to be at my computer.
00:04:40.100 And immediately, like that second, I went and said, I got to book a hotel.
00:04:44.860 And didn't I find that every hotel for a considerable radius
00:04:47.720 had already been booked up before they even announced it?
00:04:50.720 Because anytime they announced the forum,
00:04:52.860 they, before they announced it, have all of the hotels under their control.
00:04:56.160 So you can't actually stay there unless you go through them
00:04:59.540 and you book through their accommodations platform,
00:05:01.800 which you can't do if you're not a registered attendee.
00:05:05.160 So I said, OK, great.
00:05:06.400 Let's just start and look at Airbnb.
00:05:08.760 So I looked at an Airbnb.
00:05:10.600 And Airbnb has, in a lot of cases, this process where you have to request a room.
00:05:15.640 And then they have to approve your reservation.
00:05:17.960 And I would request it.
00:05:19.180 It would be turned down.
00:05:20.280 I requested it would be turned down.
00:05:21.860 There were a couple of bookings that I actually got, secured bookings.
00:05:25.400 And then after I booked them, they got canceled by the host.
00:05:29.240 And one of them was very transparent with me because he said,
00:05:32.120 listen, the World Economic Forum, I have a contract with them
00:05:35.740 that whenever they say they want it, I have to give it over to them.
00:05:39.700 And if I don't rent them my own home, they have very steep penalties that they'll heap on me.
00:05:46.360 So I don't think the World Economic Forum was specifically saying,
00:05:49.420 oh, we heard Andrew Lawton booked an Airbnb and we don't want him there.
00:05:52.600 But I do think what the World Economic Forum does is they try to take over the whole town,
00:05:57.720 which can accommodate far more people than they bring in, as I understand it.
00:06:01.380 But they try to take over the whole town and the neighboring towns
00:06:04.220 for the sole purpose of making sure that only those they want there are there.
00:06:09.700 And they have a portal on which you can apply for accreditation as media.
00:06:14.340 But only those who are given a password, only a select invited group,
00:06:19.480 can even apply for accreditation.
00:06:22.140 And I asked a number of times over the last few months for that password.
00:06:25.920 I said, I don't even, I'm not even looking for a guarantee of accreditation.
00:06:29.400 I want you to give me the chance to seek accreditation.
00:06:32.640 I want you to let me ask you and not a single response.
00:06:37.060 So this is, I think, very important.
00:06:38.820 And so people have asked me, because we sent out an email to our subscribers yesterday,
00:06:42.740 telling them that, hey, we're going to cover this thing.
00:06:44.900 And people said, well, if you're not accredited, why are you going?
00:06:47.420 And that is a very fair question.
00:06:49.700 As you know, if you've been following me for a while,
00:06:52.100 you know I've covered things that I haven't been invited to in the past.
00:06:55.260 And you can get crafty with it.
00:06:56.720 And I'm not talking about doing anything illegal,
00:06:58.280 but you start to find other ways to figure out what's happening.
00:07:01.400 And in some cases, reporting on who's going in and coming out of a meeting is of value.
00:07:06.040 In other cases, these things are not actually all that closed off.
00:07:10.060 Once they get there, they're just trying to scare people away from doing exactly what I'm doing.
00:07:14.840 And in other cases, it's talking to the people in these communities.
00:07:17.940 What do they think about when this group comes to town?
00:07:20.340 So I don't exactly know what the coverage is going to look like,
00:07:23.940 because this is going to be a very fluid situation.
00:07:26.160 But the whole point is, is that there's a story here,
00:07:29.020 and a lot of people don't want to talk about it, and we are unafraid to talk about it.
00:07:32.920 So that's going to be what's coming up next week.
00:07:35.700 As I said, I'm going to be going up on Friday, but I'll be there by next week.
00:07:39.900 And I don't know what, again, like I said, I don't know if I'll be able to do whole shows,
00:07:43.180 or if I'll do video reports, or written content.
00:07:45.840 Again, you'll have to bear with us as we try to navigate through this.
00:07:48.700 But certainly, and maybe I'll get a one-on-one with Klaus Schwab.
00:07:51.680 You never know.
00:07:52.500 That would be absolutely wonderful.
00:07:54.300 So thanks to all of you who have supported that coverage.
00:07:56.980 And I will say, it is expensive.
00:07:59.220 And again, I know it sounds like, oh, you're sending Andrew Lawton to Europe.
00:08:02.220 This is not a vacation.
00:08:03.560 This is going to be very busy.
00:08:04.880 It always is.
00:08:05.880 If you want to chip in to support our coverage, please do.
00:08:08.880 You can do that at donate.tnc.news.
00:08:11.980 And we are trying to keep costs down.
00:08:13.600 I'm going alone.
00:08:14.220 I'm not going with a cameraman or anything like that.
00:08:16.760 I'm going alone, just me, my phone, my microphone, and my tenacity.
00:08:21.960 I don't know if you can quantify that, but we will do our best.