Juno News - November 21, 2019


Canadians have no time for the outrage mob

Topics
Chick-fil-A chicken sandwich controversy
Mentioned
Chick Yorkdale Mall Ralph Goodale
Alberta MLA vows to ＂listen＂ to independence movement amid 'fair deal' study How will the new Trudeau government deal with national security？

Episode Stats


Length

5 minutes

Words per minute

187.66

Word count

975

Sentence count

69

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

2

sentences flagged


Summary

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

A Chick-fil-a franchise is opening a second location in Toronto, Canada, and it's getting a lot of media attention. Is it a good or bad thing that people are lining up to get a chicken sandwich from the new outlet?

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 .
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'd like to steal your ear for a minute today to talk about the curious case of the second
00:00:10.480 Chick-fil-A franchise in Toronto. That's right. A second Chick-fil-A will soon be opening in
00:00:16.260 Toronto in the popular Yorkdale Mall. Now you'll remember a few months ago the first Chick-fil-A
00:00:21.460 franchise opened. This was at the corner of Yonge and Bloor, a flagship location,
00:00:25.740 really one of the busiest intersections in all of Canada. Now this got a lot of people out to
00:00:32.180 protest it and oh boy did the media and the cameras love to show up and highlight these 50,
00:00:37.860 60 or so LGBT activists, a lot of drag queens on hand, to say we don't support this, this is
00:00:44.280 homophobic chicken, boycott it, do not let this business succeed. Their argument was that the 0.50
00:00:51.380 head of the organization, the parent corporation and the owner back in the United States had made
00:00:57.080 contributions to a number of Christian charities that are not supportive of same-sex rights. That
00:01:02.860 was their argument. Now that particular location in Toronto, that was a franchise location. So it was
00:01:08.440 put together, run, financed by some entrepreneurs in Toronto. Not the same people making donations but
00:01:15.040 still shut her down they said. Now that got a lot of coverage but an interesting thing happened on the
00:01:20.840 actual day. I went down there because it's just around the corner from my office to take a look at
00:01:25.360 what was happening and yes there were 50 or 60 protesters but there were also well over 100 people
00:01:31.280 in line for over an hour for 90 minutes to be the first people to get Chick-fil-A. I went back the next
00:01:39.180 day because I thought well I want to see what all the fuss is about maybe I'll actually have one of
00:01:42.900 these sandwiches. The protesters were gone on day two but there was still a line of people trying to get
00:01:49.320 the sandwiches. We were told 30 minute lineup from this spot. I said I don't have time for that. Okay
00:01:54.260 I'll come back you know a few days later when it next crossed my mind. I show up. 30 minute lineup.
00:02:00.480 What? Still? I passed by it again because I was walking by it regularly. 20 minute line. I said I don't
00:02:06.140 have time for this. Finally weeks after it all happened there's a pretty small lineup of you know
00:02:11.640 just 10 minutes so I said all right I'll try this out. I got it and you know I gotta tell you
00:02:15.340 it's a damn fine chicken sandwich. As fast food goes it's it's really the best of all of them out 0.94
00:02:20.300 there. I've been there twice so far. Wow great chicken sandwich. Now I'm a big supporter of same-sex
00:02:25.460 marriage. I was back in 2005 when Ralph Goodale was voting against it. I've always supported those
00:02:30.980 issues but I think a lot of people had the perspective that I had that you thought this is a bit of a stretch
00:02:36.620 to protest this this chicken sandwich franchise fast food outlet because of some donations the owner made.
00:02:45.040 I mean it's it's really quite a stretch. It's really looking for something to agitate against
00:02:49.440 and a lot of those people in the lineup there these were people of all diverse walks of life. They just
00:02:55.780 wanted this chicken sandwich. Some of them probably knew about the controversy just didn't care had the
00:03:01.080 same view that I had. Others probably just weren't plugged into the day-to-day outrage mob news stories.
00:03:06.680 So it's very interesting to see that despite all these claims that this is this is a bad store and that
00:03:12.720 woke people don't go here. They are thriving in Toronto. They're getting a second outlet. But another
00:03:18.540 funny story cropped up the same day. It was a headline that I read at CBC News although it was an
00:03:22.420 Associated Press story. So a wire story written by an American wire service and they said Chick-fil-A
00:03:28.460 no longer making contributions to three groups that oppose same-sex marriage. So you go okay what's
00:03:34.740 what's this? Maybe they're kind of backing away from that. They want to do a sort of different PR campaign.
00:03:40.580 They don't want the heat anymore. They just want everybody including the drag queens to line up and 1.00
00:03:45.240 buy their chicken sandwiches. Okay fair enough. And then I read of these three groups one of them
00:03:51.180 was the Salvation Army. And one of the donations that they will no longer be making is an annual
00:03:58.580 $150,000 donation to give Christmas presents to impoverished children.
00:04:04.960 Really? This is one of their hate contributions? It's never occurred to me to think of what the
00:04:13.440 Salvation Army's positions are on the culture war issues of the day. But I guess when you think about
00:04:19.160 it you go okay it's a Christian-based group. They're generally not supportive of you know official
00:04:23.520 same-sex marriage being law of the land. Okay Salvation Army doesn't support this. But that's not what you
00:04:28.060 think of Salvation Army doing. You think of it being humble people who are out there helping to support
00:04:33.340 the poor and doing soup kitchens and all that kind of stuff and whatever their views are on these
00:04:37.500 issues. Those are tertiary issues. But apparently no. Now Chick-fil-A because of what activists say
00:04:44.060 can't give their money to give kids their Christmas gifts. Odd stuff. Odd stuff indeed. At least an
00:04:50.060 interesting story about how people did not succumb to the mob and just regular folks said no I want my
00:04:57.020 chicken sandwich. Hey I'm a big supporter of same-sex marriage of these issues. I want the chicken
00:05:03.260 sandwich as well. And it seems like the marketplace of well not just the marketplace of ideas but the
00:05:08.460 basic marketplace well they prevailed this time around.