Juno News - May 12, 2019


Andrew Scheer's foreign policy is a breath of fresh air


Episode Stats


Length

5 minutes

Words per minute

168.51064

Word count

858

Sentence count

41

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Andrew Scheer's foreign policy positions contrast sharply with Justin Trudeau's lack of a coherent foreign policy. Why does this happen? And why does it matter? In this episode, I discuss the contrast between the two, and why it matters.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
00:00:00.000 The other day, Andrew Scheer released his foreign policy positions in the lead-up to the election.
00:00:14.560 He gave a big-picture speech on all the foreign policy issues of our time,
00:00:18.880 all the issues that Canada faces right now and is grappling with,
00:00:22.400 including Arctic sovereignty, cybersecurity,
00:00:26.060 the big players in the world we have to deal with,
00:00:28.600 like Russia and China.
00:00:30.440 Now, there are a lot of ideas, and there are a lot of things worth talking about,
00:00:33.540 a lot of things worth considering,
00:00:35.520 but it wasn't any of those specific ideas that struck out to me,
00:00:39.000 so much as a bigger-picture issue
00:00:41.240 and how that bigger-picture issue contrasted with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's foreign policy
00:00:46.840 or his lack of foreign policy.
00:00:49.920 And that was the contrast between the idea of moral clarity and moral relativism.
00:00:55.500 Andrew Scheer seemed unafraid to identify the threats and the challenges Canada faces today,
00:01:02.220 speaking about them in clear terms and speaking rather specifically and unapologetically
00:01:07.420 about what he would like to do about them.
00:01:10.480 That's called moral clarity.
00:01:11.780 The threats we face in the 21st century may have different names,
00:01:16.620 but we are having similar debates about how we engage with them.
00:01:20.800 Some would continue to prefer to see Canada take a non-alignment posture,
00:01:24.940 treating democracies and dictatorships in equal and similar fashion.
00:01:28.820 But as Prime Minister, I will firmly reject that pretension
00:01:32.260 that Canada could or should be neutral on the big questions of our time
00:01:36.980 or fail to work strategically with our allies
00:01:40.400 to advance the space for freedom, democracy, human rights, and the rule of law.
00:01:46.000 Whereas Justin Trudeau personifies and exemplifies, most unfortunately,
00:01:50.220 the idea of moral relativism,
00:01:51.980 that idea where you say,
00:01:53.920 well, you know, Canada's great,
00:01:55.720 but, you know, other countries are great as well.
00:01:57.720 And yeah, I guess we should do this and that,
00:01:59.920 but we don't want to upset them
00:02:01.200 and we have to understand their values too.
00:02:03.180 So, okay, I don't know.
00:02:04.140 Let's just let them do their thing.
00:02:05.980 And you're left with this uncertainty about,
00:02:08.300 okay, fine, but we have to play the cards we're dealt.
00:02:11.640 Here we are in the world.
00:02:12.600 How are we going to deal with a lot of these challenges?
00:02:15.560 Now, in the lead up to the 2015 election,
00:02:17.700 Justin Trudeau never actually articulated much of that.
00:02:20.840 He did leave a very moral relativist position.
00:02:24.200 He talked about Canada's back in this very sort of mushy broad way
00:02:28.320 based on this mistaken notion that Canada had always been peacekeepers
00:02:32.240 and we had somehow stopped being peacekeepers.
00:02:35.120 And then there were places in the world
00:02:36.360 that required our peacekeeping leadership.
00:02:39.840 And I want to say this to this country's friends all around the world.
00:02:45.640 Many of you have worried that Canada has lost its compassionate
00:02:51.240 and constructive voice in the world over the past 10 years.
00:02:56.000 Well, I have a simple message for you.
00:02:59.260 On behalf of 35 million Canadians, we're back.
00:03:03.220 It was all rather disconnected from reality.
00:03:09.220 And we've actually seen a lot of that come to fruition lately.
00:03:12.960 There's a big challenge where if you cannot identify your threats,
00:03:16.420 if you cannot list your threats, how are you going to deal with them?
00:03:20.060 There's this famous document from the 1940s
00:03:22.220 in American foreign policy called the Kennan Telegram.
00:03:24.860 George Kennan was one of the leading diplomats
00:03:28.980 that they had in the Soviet realm in the USSR.
00:03:32.760 And he was trying to do a threat assessment
00:03:34.460 of exactly what the Soviet policy was,
00:03:37.000 what they wanted to do to the rest of the world,
00:03:39.120 their relationships with the US,
00:03:40.520 and how there should be a response.
00:03:42.160 A very robust, mature, rigorous document.
00:03:45.180 And it crafted a lot of American foreign policy
00:03:48.400 for the next decades to come.
00:03:49.820 It proved as a sort of guiding document for all that.
00:03:53.160 Now, Andrew Scheer, he hasn't done any deep dive comparable to that,
00:03:57.060 but he's talking about the big issues of the day
00:03:59.820 in a very unapologetic and aggressive and firm way.
00:04:03.420 Whereas Justin Trudeau, you notice he just talks about
00:04:05.980 go feminism and go diversity, 1.00
00:04:08.540 not just on the domestic sphere, but in foreign policy as well.
00:04:12.380 On Wednesday, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau
00:04:15.700 visited UN headquarters for the first time
00:04:18.560 since becoming leader of his country.
00:04:21.180 The reason?
00:04:22.440 For this self-proclaimed feminist to talk about gender equality. 1.00
00:04:25.960 And then that's all great.
00:04:27.460 I mean, those are both phrases that you go,
00:04:29.240 okay, sure, we can all support that sort of stuff.
00:04:31.980 But it's not a clear and coherent foreign policy.
00:04:35.440 And perhaps that contrast,
00:04:37.340 why Trudeau is a moral relativist
00:04:38.960 and why Andrew Scheer and Stephen Harper
00:04:41.620 had a bit of moral clarity,
00:04:43.420 perhaps that contrast and Justin Trudeau
00:04:45.840 going down the route that he went
00:04:47.800 and having that lack of coherent perspective
00:04:50.600 is why Canada has found itself
00:04:52.560 in the place it is at right now,
00:04:54.040 where we're not doing too well in the world stage,
00:04:56.700 whether it's the embarrassments in India
00:04:58.460 or where we find ourselves with China now.
00:05:01.120 So lots of interesting stuff put forward by Andrew Scheer.
00:05:04.060 Things very much worth considering.