Juno News - December 01, 2023


Canadian journalist warns US about erosion of free speech in Canada


Episode Stats


Length

6 minutes

Words per minute

187.12828

Word count

1,290

Sentence count

88

Harmful content

Toxicity

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In this episode, Alex Blumberg takes a look back at the past and looks forward to what could lie ahead for us in the future. He uses three stories to illustrate the creeping authoritarianism that has swept across Canada in recent years.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.080 I'd like all of you to think of me as a time traveler from the not too distant future coming
00:00:04.640 back to the present to offer you a glimpse of what could lie ahead for America.
00:00:09.180 I live in a time in which, in the name of fairness, you can't share the stories you
00:00:12.840 write for my news publication on social media.
00:00:15.640 I live in a time in which, in the name of the common good, you can be kicked out of
00:00:18.820 your bank and online payment system simply for expressing the wrong political views.
00:00:23.640 I live in a time in which, in the name of social justice, you can commit a serious crime
00:00:27.480 but get a more lenient sentence if you happen to be the right skin color.
00:00:31.440 I live in a time in which, in the name of safety, you can be arrested for exercising your right
00:00:35.400 to peaceful protest, if you happen to be protesting the wrong thing.
00:00:39.680 Of course, I'm not a real time traveler, I just live in Canada.
00:00:43.520 Americans, and perhaps those in this chamber, surely think Canadians are too nice or too
00:00:48.480 polite to embrace this sort of proto-authoritarianism.
00:00:52.400 But it's more accurate to say that our niceness made us susceptible to the new authoritarianism
00:00:57.240 undermining the foundations of our liberal democracy.
00:01:00.560 If it sounds like I'm overstating things, allow me to share three stories that illustrate
00:01:04.600 this creeping authoritarianism.
00:01:06.560 First, a few months ago, I reported a story from my publication, The Free Press, about a
00:01:11.320 high school principal in Toronto who had been humiliated in front of his colleagues by a
00:01:15.800 DEI consultant.
00:01:17.020 The principal's crime, besides being white and male, was that he objected to the consultant's
00:01:22.180 assertion that Canada is a less just society than America. 0.59
00:01:25.900 The humiliation he experienced ultimately led him to commit suicide.
00:01:30.160 I wanted to share that story on Facebook.
00:01:32.460 When I tried to, I was barred from posting it.
00:01:34.720 I received a message that stated, in response to Canadian government legislation, news content
00:01:39.660 can't be shared.
00:01:40.980 I was confused.
00:01:42.260 Then I remembered the recently adopted Online News Act.
00:01:45.600 The law forces social media companies to pay online media companies to link to their content.
00:01:50.900 Facebook, instead of paying for that content, barred its users from posting it.
00:01:55.880 Government officials insist that this was only a matter of fairness, a way of making sure
00:01:59.500 that media companies are compensated for the news they report.
00:02:02.840 But really, this new law props up legacy media dinosaurs like the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation,
00:02:08.160 Bell Media and other companies, which are subsidized by the federal government, and all of which can
00:02:13.280 be counted on to echo Justin Trudeau's world view and toe the party line.
00:02:17.960 Not being able to post was annoying, but it wasn't the end of the world for me.
00:02:21.020 I don't depend on Facebook for my income.
00:02:23.540 The same cannot be said of Christopher Curtis, which brings me to my second story.
00:02:28.460 Chris is a 38-year-old renegade journalist entrepreneur in Montreal who runs a digital newsletter
00:02:33.280 called The Rover.
00:02:34.720 He calls himself woke.
00:02:36.520 You might think that he's exactly the kind of journalist the Trudeau government would elevate.
00:02:40.180 On the political left, he publishes stories about the plight of the homeless and police brutality.
00:02:45.140 The problem is that, unlike government-funded news companies, independent media companies
00:02:49.080 are truly independent, which means they report stories that don't comport with whatever the
00:02:53.780 government wants them to report.
00:02:55.820 For example, in September 2020, the Rover reported a story on federal mistreatment of Mohawk Indians.
00:03:01.340 This month, it published a story about migrant workers who had been abused and trafficked
00:03:04.620 with the unwitting help of the federal government.
00:03:07.580 But under this new law, the Rover can't build its audience.
00:03:10.960 Unable to post content on Facebook or Instagram, the newsletter can't reach new subscribers.
00:03:16.460 It cannot grow its subscriber base.
00:03:18.820 This is a slow death, says Chris.
00:03:21.340 For now, he's unsure how he's going to support his partner and their three-year-old daughter.
00:03:24.980 He's thinking of going back into construction.
00:03:27.340 Which takes me to my third story.
00:03:29.380 Danny Bulford, now 41, used to be an officer in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the equivalent
00:03:34.060 of the FBI.
00:03:35.060 For years, he was a sniper in the Prime Minister's protective detail.
00:03:39.360 Then in 2021, Danny quit because he didn't want to get his COVID vaccination.
00:03:43.680 In early 2022, truckers descended on Ottawa to protest new COVID vaccine requirements.
00:03:49.600 Danny joined them.
00:03:50.660 The government declared a state of emergency.
00:03:52.440 Danny, like many demonstrators, was arrested and later released without charge.
00:03:56.940 Then something chilling happened.
00:03:59.180 On February 17, 2022, Danny logs into his bank accounts, starting with his checking and
00:04:04.180 savings accounts at the CIBC.
00:04:06.580 But instead of seeing his balance, he had about $160,000 in there.
00:04:10.760 The only thing he saw was a dash.
00:04:12.740 Then he logs onto Scotiabank to see about an additional checking account.
00:04:16.300 Once again, there was no sign of any money in his account.
00:04:19.040 Finally, he logs into the Royal Bank of Canada, which handles his MasterCard account.
00:04:22.940 When he was told he had no access to any credit, Danny's wife was also unable to access any
00:04:28.020 of these accounts.
00:04:29.020 Suddenly, they were worrying about how to cover their next mortgage payments and how
00:04:32.480 to feed their three kids.
00:04:34.880 That is what it means to be debanked.
00:04:37.200 Debanking has been one of the Trudeau government's weapon of choice.
00:04:40.080 Since 2018, it has frozen the accounts of more than 800 Canadians who did things it didn't
00:04:44.620 approve of, including those of 280 who took part in the truckers' protest, which the government
00:04:49.840 regarded as illegitimate.
00:04:51.840 Soon after, Danny moved his money out of the big banks and into local credit unions, hoping
00:04:55.440 it would be safer there.
00:04:56.760 The worst part of this, Danny told me, is not believing in the country I spent my career
00:05:00.520 serving.
00:05:01.520 It's this feeling that we're being watched, torn apart, made to feel like the much-hated
00:05:05.460 other in our own country.
00:05:07.520 Canada was once a bastion of free expression, but now not so much.
00:05:11.120 Consider that at the same time the government and its corporate allies are curbing the free
00:05:14.240 expression of truckers and journalists, the government is defending the rights of pro-Palestinian
00:05:18.420 demonstrators, many of whom traffic in what can only be called anti-Semitism.
00:05:22.960 Think about that.
00:05:24.020 Vaccine skepticism, not okay.
00:05:27.100 Peddling medieval blood libel legends about Jews, okay. 0.99
00:05:30.100 I'm all for protecting free speech.
00:05:31.700 I'm from the free press.
00:05:33.700 I just want that protection applied fairly.
00:05:35.700 I also want to be clear.
00:05:37.700 These are just a handful of hundreds of stories I could have picked.
00:05:40.920 What is happening in Canada is a gradual suffocation of free expression.
00:05:44.620 It is draped in a cloak of niceness, inclusivity, and justice.
00:05:48.580 But it is regressive, authoritarian, and illiberal.
00:05:52.120 I came here today, not simply to warn you about what lies ahead, but to plead with you
00:05:56.380 to do something about it.
00:05:58.180 Now is not the time to be polite.
00:06:00.200 Now is the time to defend, loudly, the liberties and rights that have given us the greatest freedoms
00:06:05.460 in human history.
00:06:07.140 Across the world right now, governments, in the name of the good, are considering or adopting
00:06:12.100 measures like we have in Canada.
00:06:13.960 Look at Dublin.
00:06:14.960 We're about to enact a draconian hate crime bill that poses a dire threat to free speech.
00:06:20.500 In Paris, President Emmanuel Macron has called for censoring online speech.
00:06:24.620 This is to say nothing of Russia, China, and Iran.
00:06:28.080 America is so exceptional, indispensable, really.
00:06:32.120 Please do not succumb to the same illiberalism, authoritarianism.
00:06:36.080 Please keep fighting for what you know is right.
00:06:39.500 Canada is watching.
00:06:40.500 The world is watching.
00:06:41.500 Thank you.
00:06:44.960 Canada is beating.