Juno News - July 05, 2021


Are we witnessing a national unity moment？

Topics
divisive moment right now
Mentioned
Extinction Rebellion
The kids are still locked down Churches burned on Canada Day long weekend, and the media is partially to blame.

Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

197.36

Word count

702

Sentence count

30

Harmful content

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In this episode, I talk about the challenges First Nations people are facing right now, and how we can work together to overcome them. I also talk about some of the positive things that have happened in the past year and a half regarding First Nations issues, and what we can do to move forward.

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 Whenever there's a national conversation renewed about First Nations people in Canada and the
00:00:10.260 hardships that they faced over the years, well, we should hope that that conversation takes us
00:00:14.440 in a positive direction. One of the outcomes of that conversation is that we see more success,
00:00:19.080 more prosperity for First Nations people, and that those unfortunate negative headlines and
00:00:23.920 stories that we read about that are often the spark for these conversations, well, that we see
00:00:28.220 fewer and fewer of them, that we trend towards good things as opposed to bad things. We see fewer
00:00:33.680 of those bad stories. So we should all, as a nation, hope that that is the outcome of this conversation
00:00:39.780 that's going on right now. However, there can always be a negative direction that things head in,
00:00:45.460 in terms of more division and more, I guess, more of an us-versus-them mentality that can sort of
00:00:51.420 settle in in the minds of, well, anyone on any sort of side or perspective of this conversation.
00:00:56.660 One sort of positive direction that happened about a year and a half ago, you'll remember
00:01:01.200 there were the blockades that happened just before the pandemic hit in Canada, early 2020,
00:01:06.560 lots of rail lines being blockaded, and an us-versus-them conversation initially materialized.
00:01:12.500 But then there was a lot more nuance, and people realized, well, hold on a second,
00:01:16.220 we've actually got band councils that are saying, we want these pipelines developed in Western Canada.
00:01:21.600 We want to see this. We want to share the spoils. We want jobs. We want stability for our families.
00:01:26.700 And a lot of the people who were actually doing the activism weren't even First Nations people
00:01:30.780 themselves. Yes, we had these hereditary chiefs who were saying they were against the pipeline,
00:01:34.560 but a lot of the people who were doing the various activism, for instance, there's this group
00:01:38.460 Extinction Rebellion. They're like really extreme environmental activists, and they've been
00:01:42.720 arrested and so forth. Well, those individuals, they were not First Nations people. They were just 0.95
00:01:47.560 kind of appropriating the issue for their own benefit, their own gain. And a lot of people saw
00:01:52.760 through all of this, and there's this really sort of positive direction the conversation headed in
00:01:57.560 where people who are not First Nations and maybe aren't traditional advocates for them, they looked
00:02:01.840 at all this and said, well, hold on, what's going on here? We have these opportunists who are trying
00:02:06.480 to seize on this story for their own gain, for their own agenda. And meanwhile, we have First Nations
00:02:11.040 people who, like, they're just regular folks like everyone else who want good things for their
00:02:15.840 communities, for their families. They want jobs, they want success, they want, you know, more income
00:02:20.720 in their bank accounts so they can provide for all the things everybody in Canada wants for themselves
00:02:24.860 and their families. And I think a lot of people, I saw a lot of people say, yeah, let's rally behind
00:02:30.520 these people. We're not buying this us versus them thing. Or if there is an us versus them, it's the
00:02:35.700 little guy, it's the regular folks against these elites, these sort of, like, niche academic
00:02:41.040 activists and so forth. Forget about them. We all have to rally together. And right now in Canada,
00:02:46.640 we're seeing statues torn down of not just historical figures, but the current reigning
00:02:50.840 monarch, Queen Elizabeth II. And we see all this, I go, oh, man, like that can send us in the wrong
00:02:57.380 divisive direction right now. That's going to really send in us versus them that we don't want. And I
00:03:02.500 just hope we can find some opportunities now, moving forward, to get back to that glimmer that
00:03:09.220 I think we saw, I think was materializing a year and a half ago, where everyday Canadians were really
00:03:14.840 feeling that they were allied with everyday First Nations people and that there was unity there and
00:03:19.780 that we were all beginning to root for each other's success. I really hope that this sort of divisive
00:03:25.400 moment right now can actually conclude in not further division, but further unity and people really
00:03:30.860 coming together and having each other's backs.