Juno News - December 12, 2022


Canada is finally decoupling from China

Mentioned
Biden Chrystia Freeland Melanie Jolie Trudeau Trump
What is banned in Liberal bill C-21？ Elon Musk needs to stand up to Trudeau's internet censorship

Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

206.9

Word count

650

Sentence count

28

Harmful content

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In this episode, I talk about the Canadian government s decision to award a sensitive telecommunications contract to a company that was in part owned by the Chinese government, and that was facing espionage charges in the United States related to espionage.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 It is unbelievable that the RCMP had awarded a contract for sensitive telecommunications equipment
00:00:06.480 to a company that was in part owned by the Chinese government and that was facing charges in the
00:00:12.680 United States related to espionage. How on earth did this happen? People are asking. Now the sort
00:00:18.960 of kind of good news is that the federal government has stepped in. They've called the time out on
00:00:23.520 this contract. They're looking into it and they're looking into a whole bunch of other contracts.
00:00:27.180 National Defense is now saying we got to see if this sort of thing is going on in other places in
00:00:32.040 the government. So I guess that's good but why I call it sort of kind of good news is well this is
00:00:37.300 only happening because this contract was talked about in the media and it's become a bit of a
00:00:41.360 scandal and also how are we doing this right now in the fall of 2022 where these contracts were only
00:00:48.660 recently signed. This contract was signed in October 2021. I think the answer to it is because until not
00:00:55.700 too long ago this sort of thing was normal. Now I remember saying several years ago that we need
00:01:01.800 to pretty much flat out ban state-owned enterprises from being able to bid on government contracts in
00:01:07.360 Canada. Chinese state-owned enterprises and a lot of people felt that was was a step too far. Maybe we
00:01:12.360 can get to the point where we can ban state-owned enterprises from bidding on on very sort of secret
00:01:18.040 things related to uh the military related to state secrets and which this one would fall under the RCMP
00:01:24.140 contract. Now I think we're more than willing to talk about just flat out banning Chinese state-owned
00:01:29.360 enterprises from having anything to do with our government contracts but it's it's and I'm glad
00:01:33.640 that the conversation is at the point where of course people would say yes we should do that
00:01:37.460 but a couple years ago a lot of parliamentarians felt like no we can't possibly do that. What
00:01:43.400 happened? Well we have heard recently from figures in Washington connected to the White House and the
00:01:48.700 Biden administration that they are now applauding the Trudeau liberal government for saying it's time
00:01:53.320 to decouple from China. That we are echoing things that they have been saying but we've also heard from
00:01:58.500 some representatives with the Biden administration that they flat out admit that they were worried that
00:02:03.360 Canada was not going to get on the right page and wasn't going to get on the same page with them and 0.57
00:02:07.520 they were giving us some prodding which is I think why we've seen in the past few months a number of
00:02:12.160 cabinet ministers Christia Freeland, Melanie Jolie, Francois-Philippe Champagne all talk about the
00:02:17.220 need for a decoupling from China. Look I'm happy to say that when they've done something right I 1.00
00:02:22.540 acknowledge it and they're doing something right in this direction but it's interesting they're all
00:02:26.480 doing it right now all at the same time because Washington's told them get with the program. The
00:02:31.520 Biden administration's had to say you guys got to go ahead with this decoupling which was I think most
00:02:36.180 aggressively started by the Trump administration. Biden has picked up on a lot of aspects of it. The U.S.
00:02:41.280 is clearly just seeing that's the direction they have to go in. So how was this contract signed in
00:02:46.440 the first place with a partially Chinese state-owned operation getting a sensitive contract with the
00:02:51.920 RCMP? Because that's how we used to roll. That was the default position that we accepted that as
00:02:58.060 normal. We normalized that sort of thing but it wasn't normal. It shouldn't have been allowed to
00:03:02.820 happen. Thankfully we're drifting away from all of that but I can't believe it took all of this
00:03:07.340 to make that happen.