Juno News - May 30, 2022


Canadian politicians need to stop engaging in American culture wars

Topics
gun control tragedies
Mentioned
Stephen Del Duca Justin Trudeau Harrison Pierre Poilievre Pat King Candice
Why Canada must think for itself Trudeau’s handgun ban won’t make Canadians safer

Episode Stats


Length

5 minutes

Words per minute

179.36

Word count

1,064

Sentence count

68

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

2

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In the wake of the horrific shooting in Uvalde, Texas, a new timeline has emerged that points to police inaction in the case of the Uvaldez shooting, which may have been the most preventable shooting in the history of the United States. Also, Canadian politicians and the media are quick to jump on the bandwagon of gun control.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
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 I want to stay with this topic, though, of sort of political culture wars that are happening all over the West.
00:00:06.120 And what we'll see this past week.
00:00:08.060 I mean, you know, the biggest news story in the world was just the unspeakable, horrible tragedy that happened in Uvalde, Texas.
00:00:14.240 We're still trying to put together the details of that.
00:00:17.260 Harrison, you and I were talking before air about this new timeline that came out that's just really unconscionable.
00:00:21.440 The idea that the police waited over an hour before going in to stop this gunman and waiting for backup.
00:00:27.700 While parents were frantically urging them to go inside.
00:00:31.860 For me, when I look at the story, I see, you know, a picture of a very isolated and disgruntled and mentally ill young man with no father in the picture.
00:00:42.360 A mother who was using drugs. 0.88
00:00:44.960 You know, he shot his own grandmother.
00:00:46.800 Like there's severe dysfunction in this young man's life.
00:00:49.880 Interestingly, you know, an 18 year old male shooter.
00:00:52.480 Exactly the same profile as the shooter in Buffalo, New York in terms of age.
00:00:57.080 And gender.
00:00:58.740 You know, it seems to me that there's a broader societal problems.
00:01:02.600 There's probably policing problems.
00:01:04.820 There's definite social breakdown.
00:01:08.780 You know, this guy spent a lot of time on social media sites like Reddit and Instagram.
00:01:14.040 There's so many things that you can analyze and try to understand.
00:01:16.940 I mean, you can't understand a horrible, unspeakable tragedy.
00:01:20.020 You never will.
00:01:20.580 But it's interesting how the political left and the news media sort of knee jerk reaction is to go straight to gun control. 0.95
00:01:29.640 In the case of Buffalo, they went straight to, you know, white supremacists, evil right wingers. 0.87
00:01:36.000 They don't want to.
00:01:36.960 They take the most simplistic perspective and use it as a political weapon against the public instead of really trying to understand what happened.
00:01:44.460 Understand what went wrong.
00:01:45.000 It seems like Uvalde was a pretty horrific case of police inaction.
00:01:49.460 And I'm saying this is someone who is generally very pro-police.
00:01:52.260 But when I read the details there, it's really just very difficult to understand what was going on in that chaotic scene.
00:01:59.420 All this is just to say that whenever there's a big tragedy that's easily exploitable by Democrats in the U.S., it just seems to quickly make its way up to Canada.
00:02:08.080 So we saw this a few weeks ago with the Roe versus Wade case where all of a sudden Justin Trudeau used that as an example to say that he was going to provide more abortions in Canada and that they were going to allow Americans to come up to Canada to have abortions.
00:02:22.260 You know, when it came to the Buffalo shooter, instantly they were trying to tie the trucker convoy and this guy, Pat King, and then Pierre Polyev to the murderer.
00:02:31.780 And then now with Uvalde, almost instinct, like knee-jerk reaction and the media around with it, of course, we saw the Ontario liberal leader here in Ontario, Stephen Del Duca, putting out this tweet saying what happened at Robb Elementary School in Texas.
00:02:44.320 Absolutely horrific.
00:02:45.040 My heart breaks for his children and teachers who've lost their lives.
00:02:48.320 The need for gun control has never been clearer.
00:02:51.260 And, you know, calling for more gun control in Canada.
00:02:55.100 Likewise, there's this CTV City News story saying new gun control measures coming in Canada, Trudeau says.
00:03:01.200 So he's already, he doesn't have a specific policy in mind, but he's ready to pounce, ready to capitalize on the horrible tragedies that are happening in the United States by somehow pretending that the gun rules in Texas are anything remotely similar to the gun laws in Ontario.
00:03:18.780 Or that the underlying social problems that are occurring in the United States, look, some of them do occur in Canada.
00:03:26.120 Some of them, you know, the problem with societal breakdown, with family breakdown, the problem with isolation, especially during COVID, these young isolated men, you know, being told whatever they're told that makes them go so deranged.
00:03:39.520 And then spending a bunch of time on social media, you know, that was a problem before it's been exasperated by the lockdowns.
00:03:45.520 But to sort of import these culture wars into Canada, pretend it's the exact same thing.
00:03:52.380 It's just so callous.
00:03:53.800 Like, I don't know how else to describe it, Harrison.
00:03:56.020 It's so callous.
00:03:56.740 It's like, they're just manipulating people who have emotional takes on these issues that don't think very deeply about them.
00:04:03.800 Their knee-jerk reaction is, let's ban all guns.
00:04:05.500 Or let's, you know, make sure that abortions are codified in our Charter of Rights and Freedoms or something like that. 1.00
00:04:12.020 Like, they have a very superficial reaction.
00:04:14.920 And then the liberals capitalize on it and the media, like, cheers and applause for them.
00:04:19.280 It's just, it's like a pet peeve.
00:04:21.080 It's so callous.
00:04:22.340 What do you think?
00:04:23.400 Yeah.
00:04:23.620 And I think it's really, I think it's a really bad practice.
00:04:27.240 I don't think it does anyone in Canada any good when politicians jump on horrible tragedies to push their narratives, when things are so fresh.
00:04:36.340 We knew this was going to come because it always does, right, Candice?
00:04:40.020 It always comes when there's something that is dominating the news cycle.
00:04:44.600 There's almost this need for figures in Canada to do something about it and to ride that wave.
00:04:50.300 I mean, the horrible takes on the shooting in Texas, obviously, don't just stop with Stephen Del Duca's comment about the need for more gun control.
00:05:03.500 The idea that there can be any comparison to the issues we're seeing in the United States, these ongoing, horrible shootings at schools, that is a United States thing.
00:05:15.720 The idea that we can even compare any of that to what happens in Canada is just not accurate.
00:05:21.000 We don't have that problem in Canada.
00:05:22.580 We have other problems, significant problems.
00:05:24.720 But the idea that we can ride this and say, well, because of that, because of what happened in Texas, we need to push for Canadian, stricter Canadian gun laws.
00:05:34.460 I think it's frankly disgusting because these parents and these students who had classmates and family and children taken from them and teachers who had lost their lives, these people should be left alone.
00:05:52.740 Their tragedies should not be used to push political narratives.