Juno News - September 07, 2019


Canadian values should drive the China file


Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

193.37277

Word count

959

Sentence count

1

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

3

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Dominic Barton has been appointed Canada's new ambassador to China. Is he a good choice or a bad one? What does he bring to the role and what does he lack? And is he the right choice for the role?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 soon all the talk on the Canadian political scene is going to be just the
00:00:12.840 federal election but there are a number of big picture issues that should play
00:00:16.440 a big role in the election they probably won't and they are going to continue no
00:00:20.640 matter who becomes the next Prime Minister the biggest one of all a foreign 1.00
00:00:24.240 affairs issue and one that really speaks to the heart of the future of our
00:00:27.180 country and where we are headed is the ongoing spat with China as the
00:00:31.800 communist authoritarian regime basically tries to push us to be more like them
00:00:35.880 and to play the game according to their rules not our rules ever since earlier
00:00:41.520 this year we have had no ambassador in the post Canada has not had an ambassador
00:00:45.540 to China after John McCallum vacated that post that's caused a bit of a vacuum and
00:00:51.360 it's led a number of people including myself writing in a column to say we
00:00:54.840 need a China policy we need to sit down and say what is it that's really
00:00:59.760 happening both with this current spat and with our general broader relationship
00:01:03.460 with China what do they want what are their long-term goals for for the world 0.70
00:01:08.400 for their direction and in human history where do we want to place ourselves in
00:01:13.020 response this a really big picture conversation about all of that and you
00:01:16.920 can't really do that if you don't even have an ambassador in place well now we do
00:01:21.420 Dominic Barton has been appointed Canada's new ambassador to China and if
00:01:26.340 you look at his resume you go wow that's a guy who's done a lot of stuff okay hats
00:01:30.060 off to him fair enough he was head of global global consulting firm McKinsey he'd
00:01:34.440 been a professor at a university in China he had spent a lot of time doing
00:01:38.460 things in the Asian region and in China in particular okay he knows the file he
00:01:43.500 knows the beat is this a good choice or is this a bad choice well some have
00:01:48.120 pointed out that Dominic Barton made a financial contribution to Christy
00:01:51.600 Freeland's election campaign when she was running to be a liberal MP in
00:01:55.080 Toronto that's obviously a bit of a problem in and of itself but let's go
00:01:58.580 bigger picture here because conceivably he could be a donor there and still be a
00:02:02.240 good ambassador even though you you gotta wonder about that contribution is he
00:02:06.060 going to be good in the role well how about I don't answer that question how
00:02:10.400 about we leave it up to China to answer that question and we can see what
00:02:14.280 their response tells us well there is already something of a response the very
00:02:18.060 day after Dominic Barton was named and appointed to this post China gave a
00:02:22.260 press conference Geng Shuang their foreign ministry spokesperson saying Canada
00:02:26.640 needs to do the right thing smarten up and release Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou just
00:02:32.580 drop her release her from the current situation she's in right now allow her to 1.00
00:02:37.260 head back to China oh really why would you suddenly make that announcement
00:02:41.280 right now at this point why do you suddenly feel like your request has a
00:02:45.460 greater chance of being taken seriously clearly they're looking at the deck being
00:02:51.460 reshuffled here with Dominic Barton put in and they feel like it has been
00:02:55.200 reshuffled in their favor now Dominic Barton being someone in senior consulting
00:03:00.920 and business circles who has done a lot of stuff in Asia probably one of those
00:03:05.700 people who's part of that old guard view of people who sort of first got their
00:03:09.700 thoughts on all of this back in the 90s where they said China they're they're
00:03:13.460 gonna get into the world trade organization their economy is growing
00:03:17.140 they're opening up to business we got to get in on the ground floor we got to do
00:03:20.740 whatever we can to increase relations with China increase trade with China and
00:03:25.600 just give it a few years and they will become just like us they will ask most to
00:03:28.980 become exactly like us now a lot of people made that mistake many people left
00:03:33.520 wing right wing they all kind of thought that was the direction China was
00:03:37.220 headed not so fast Xi Jinping said we're going back to the old way he's been
00:03:42.320 described by a lot of people as the toughest fiercest leader since Mao and he
00:03:46.640 is sending it in a very defiant still authoritarian communist direction now
00:03:52.460 people like Dominic Barton they don't show too much of awareness of the new
00:03:56.420 reality of China under Xi Jinping they still feel like it's like it was back in
00:04:00.620 1999 now everything is gonna be rosy that ain't the case who we really need in
00:04:06.320 this role to be an ambassador to China is a hawk is someone who is naturally
00:04:11.840 critical reticent and concerned about China not someone who's gonna downplay
00:04:16.940 all of these concerns or almost spin them into positives as John McCallum seemed
00:04:21.440 to be I hope I'm wrong about Dominic Barton I hope he can he can broker things
00:04:25.100 sort of favorably but we really need to head in the direction of making sure that
00:04:29.360 Canadian values are what's driving every single decision we make on the China file
00:04:34.220 not that they were constantly willing to turn a blind eye anytime China does 0.95
00:04:38.460 anything negative towards us and boy they've constantly been doing a lot of
00:04:42.320 them so all eyes on Dominic Barton how he actually performs great resume looks
00:04:47.460 like someone who would certainly perform well in this role but you've got to ask
00:04:51.320 about the underlying philosophy and it doesn't look positive