Juno News - November 04, 2026


Carney’s EU deal puts Canadians’ privacy at risk

RCMP to test facial recognition systems using Canadian police booking photos Canadian troops deploy to Russia’s border

Episode Stats


Length

24 minutes

Words per minute

171.3

Word count

4,247

Sentence count

70

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

8

sentences flagged


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 .
00:00:00.000 There will be digital strings attached when Canada aligns itself closer to the EU.
00:00:11.000 You can read that story at JunoNews.com.
00:00:14.460 Carney's deal opens the door to Canada-EU digital ID integration.
00:00:21.200 For Canadians worried about having their private information accessed by an army of controlling
00:00:26.300 bureaucrats in Brussels, this will not be welcome news. And yet here we are. Even as the largest EU
00:00:32.880 countries line up against the idea of Canada becoming an associate member, Prime Minister
00:00:38.320 Carney and the EU's Ursula von der Leyen appear determined to make it happen. The EU and Canada
00:00:45.280 have agreed in principle to, quote, work towards mutual recognition of digital ID and trust
00:00:52.580 services which would in effect mean that a digital credential issued in one jurisdiction
00:00:58.980 would be acceptable in the other our guest today is david nightlag whose latest column in the
00:01:05.380 national post is as follows the us ai panic is a gift to canada now is the time now is the chance
00:01:13.140 rather to build supercomputing infrastructure like crazy david nightlag joins us from washington dc
00:01:20.180 welcome david great great to be with you again mark great day to be in washington dc obviously
00:01:25.460 with the midterms what's the mood over there right now oh it's crazy i mean uh the uh it's
00:01:33.700 been a brutal midterm battle there are six races within one point depending on how you read the
00:01:39.140 polling there's a lot of uh the dirty tricks this year were unbelievable you know you've got two
00:01:45.140 you guys named Sullivan running in Alaska. Um, and that there's even can some contention around
00:01:51.440 whether some of that's crossed the line to criminality at this point. So the DOJ is
00:01:55.420 intervening, et cetera. So it's been a crazy season. It looks like the Democrats will take
00:02:00.680 the house and the Senate hangs by a thread. So there's a, there's a lot of, um, there's a lot
00:02:09.000 of debate right now uh dc is a kind of a uh you know it the population of dc tends to work for
00:02:17.420 the government and most government workers tend to be sort of more pro big state solutions they
00:02:23.120 tend to be on the left but you do have um some really thoughtful people kind of looking at some
00:02:29.380 of the dynamics here and the the big question i think for the democrats is how much will they
00:02:35.160 tolerate the the democratic socialist the dsa uh movement mandami was elected mayor of new york
00:02:43.580 city under that banner al-sayed is a very contentious senate candidate and in michigan
00:02:50.700 which is normally just a very obvious democrat stronghold but that could actually end up going
00:02:56.440 to the republicans a very close fought race there and in fact the woman that he lost that that he
00:03:02.420 beat in the primary to take the banner uh he beat he beat with a very wide sort of polling margin
00:03:10.020 but when the actual votes came in it was close to one point um she has now endorsed his republican
00:03:15.460 challenger so the democratic party in michigan is split and uh alaska you've got um that crazy
00:03:22.500 scenario with two guys named dan sullivan on on the ballot that's a very close race you've got
00:03:28.020 close races and i was very close so this is this is going to be a really interesting day
00:03:35.220 yeah i mean some of these radicals like hassan piker for instance and uh
00:03:39.540 al-sayid and others seems to have uh maybe rattled maga out of its slumber you know a lot of those
00:03:46.420 people might not have voted especially since they're a little grumpy about gas prices but
00:03:51.940 you know with all the news coming out about the radical views of some of these people and then of
00:03:56.420 Of course, to your point earlier about Stevens flipping over in Michigan and endorsing Rogers, who's running for the Republicans.
00:04:06.600 I mean, things like that are big news and might wake up the base.
00:04:10.820 But we're also hearing some of the shenanigans you were talking about earlier in Broward County.
00:04:16.900 Now, there's always those inevitable breakdowns in the day of when all the Republicans tend to vote.
00:04:21.680 you know democrats are big on voting before election day then on election day oh all the
00:04:27.440 machines magically break down and you know people can't vote the lineups you know are really long
00:04:35.440 and that happens you know i routinely yeah i mean it's just it's just craziness but it'll be
00:04:43.040 entertaining to watch anyway we'll see what happens um on the eu situation i was speaking about that
00:04:49.040 matter i know you have some thoughts about canada aligning itself with the eu but there are also
00:04:54.720 issues around the digital attachment to the eu and where that's going i mean issues around privacy
00:05:01.840 for instance i mean do you really want your details your personal details access in brussels
00:05:08.640 by some bureaucrats over there and always that specter of control bureaucratic control over what
00:05:14.960 you do and when you can do it that always comes into the discussion what do you make of all of
00:05:21.440 that well look i think if you think back five ten years ago if you had said to people you know i
00:05:28.080 don't want to post my real feelings about um the migration problem in in south england because
00:05:35.360 somebody might one day come along and arrest me for my posts people would have said you're a tin
00:05:40.880 foil hat wearing conspiracy theorists you're crazy the police don't care the police are out there
00:05:46.400 trying to arrest real criminals they're not going to come to your door and ask you about the post 0.96
00:05:51.120 you made about some lunatic criminal um that shouldn't have been in the country in the first
00:05:56.800 place and now you've got the uk with several thousand people being arrested routinely for
00:06:01.680 what they put on social media yeah so uk was was the origin of the idea of freedom of conscience
00:06:09.360 freedom of speech, and as an essential pillar of open democracy, because democracy is rooted in
00:06:16.020 dissent, as a core idea of how you arrive at truth. Nobody's got a complete monopoly on truth.
00:06:23.240 And in every era, the guys that often end up being persecuted for a particular viewpoint,
00:06:28.600 that viewpoint, a hundred years later, becomes a dominant scientific or philosophical or political
00:06:35.260 fixed point of that society and so you know for a few hundred years we've very carefully maintained
00:06:44.140 and restrained authorities from being able to dictate to people what they can say
00:06:48.940 because what they can say is the indicative of what they can think and what they think
00:06:53.580 is a matter of conscience and it's corrected for by open debate so if you think something that's
00:06:59.660 it's lunacy. You get to find that out in open debate. If you're not allowed to have open
00:07:07.260 debates, then you hurt both sides of the equation. You hurt those who have the ability to confront
00:07:13.580 bad ideas and defeat them, you know, through open debate. And you also give over to the
00:07:20.980 government the power to define what they believe constitutes misinformation. And that's the entire
00:07:26.680 point someone like ursula von der land has pursued and been dedicated to policies that are horrible
00:07:34.040 and should never have been pursued and by all accounts have been terrible for europe
00:07:39.560 right open borders been horrible for europe migrant communities are vastly overrepresented
00:07:44.680 in crime and terror and sexual violence across europe and european capitals and yet they pushed
00:07:50.600 for uh open borders they punished governments of countries that were wanted to refuse to do that
00:07:56.600 especially small countries places like ireland where it's now become a flashpoint um they've
00:08:01.240 they they pushed uh de-industrialization they ended up giving the manufacturing base once
00:08:06.840 incredibly strong manufacturing base of western europe over to china which is the highest emitter
00:08:11.640 in the world and uses coal and everything else to to create a cost of energy that's
00:08:18.120 It's now four to five times higher in Germany than it is in China, and China took that industrial
00:08:23.840 base. 0.92
00:08:24.180 And by doing that, they also gave, you know, by de-industrializing and also falling into 0.79
00:08:28.140 this green philosophy, this green alarmism, they gave Russia complete control over Western
00:08:34.580 European and the NATO alliance, energy security.
00:08:38.280 So on so many fronts, the EU is just obviously on the wrong side of history, the wrong side
00:08:45.260 of security, the wrong side of prosperity.
00:08:48.120 and the eu in 2008 was like 110 to 120 percent more wealthy than the united states today they're
00:08:55.160 70 as wealthy as the united states so this has happened very rapidly and if and if you were to
00:09:01.080 to say to somebody look um let's give the eu which is not a government not a state has no borders has
00:09:09.360 no assets right it's a leftist franco-german bureaucracy that hijacked what used to be a very
00:09:16.640 good idea, the European Economic Community, which was a free trade zone that created velocity of
00:09:23.200 trade and extraordinary opportunities for larger marketplace economics, especially for small
00:09:28.400 countries, which is why so many people wanted to be part of it. That leftist Franco-German
00:09:33.520 bureaucracy got their hands on it, and they've now turned it into a lab for all of their worst ideas. 0.86
00:09:40.760 And one of their worst ideas is to control the way that people think, because they're furious,
00:09:45.760 because now the polls tell them they're losing complete control of Europe. Europeans en masse
00:09:53.000 are voting against, with their votes, they're voting for nationalist parties to try and deal
00:09:57.700 with the horror of these open borders and what it's done to their cities and their lifestyles,
00:10:02.120 the horror of the green energy and what that's done to the cost of household living. It's now
00:10:06.280 three to four times more expensive than anything in the United States or Canada. And the horror of
00:10:12.060 what's happened to their own economy making them poorer by every possible measure so you know that
00:10:17.340 that consideration the fact that the same people that brought you the horror will now refuse to
00:10:23.000 allow you to talk about it and now they want to have access to your bank accounts you know like
00:10:27.360 you don't this is this is the chinese model where you use social credit scores information scores
00:10:33.760 to control what people can do and because people tend to be pretty resilient they're now trying to
00:10:39.180 attach all of that to a centralized authority over your banking which represents your savings
00:10:46.540 your life you've invested in you know what you hope to spend so no i don't like canada first of
00:10:53.900 all it's totally unnecessary canada has no need to do anything with the eu except get maybe a
00:10:59.100 student visa deal to allow canadian students to do to work over there and explore that part of the
00:11:04.700 world but everything else is uh technocratic bureaucratic nightmare and they have nothing to
00:11:11.200 show for look if the eu is some hugely prosperous place that had this record of outstanding success
00:11:16.620 you'd look to lever that relationship to try and get good things for canada but they don't by every
00:11:21.900 possible account i i posted something on uh x the other day asking andrew coin if he had any thoughts
00:11:28.360 on these things and and uh because he was very bullish on the un and you know i still don't see
00:11:33.940 any positive outcomes from it.
00:11:37.000 Yeah.
00:11:37.220 I mean, it looks like a sinking ship.
00:11:38.700 I mean, you make so many great points about the state of their economy
00:11:42.180 and how it sounds 70% that of the United States, the U S is growing.
00:11:46.640 The EU is stagnating, stagnating.
00:11:52.000 And the fact that many of these countries now, the nationalist movements
00:11:56.080 in places like Germany and France are rising.
00:11:59.140 You had Brexit in the UK, which of course, as you know, is no longer
00:12:02.460 part of the eu um and in this country now uh we've had a government that has pushed for
00:12:09.580 internet regulation and censorship online and more control over what people say why and to what end
00:12:17.260 to what end is this happening yeah you know exactly what end like look violent crime in
00:12:23.020 canada since they've started censoring what people can say what they haven't done is they haven't
00:12:27.820 done anything about the rapid rise of violent crime in canada extortion is up over 200 in canada
00:12:34.780 right to what is the purpose of controlling what people say right the purpose of showing
00:12:41.020 people to say ostensibly is the harm principle which is you can't yell fire in a crowded theater
00:12:46.940 right that's always been the restriction on on the the limit imposed on free speech has always been
00:12:52.780 a limit tied to a direct harm and what they've started to do is say categorize harms as emotional
00:12:59.500 harms you can't make people feel unsafe that's a very different thing than people being unsafe
00:13:04.860 so we live with this great irony of a nation that's become far less safe by every account
00:13:10.220 in the last decade 50 000 young canadians have lost their lives to drug overdoses almost all of
00:13:15.340 it chinese-based fentanyl delivered by gangs that are almost always multinational gangs that are in
00:13:21.980 in this country illegally or 50 000 or our kids are dead right where is that in the press and how
00:13:28.800 is this solved for by now turning around and saying we don't want you to talk about it we
00:13:33.220 certainly don't want you to talk about the implications on migraine migrant policy because
00:13:37.620 that might make people feel bad right that you have in europe right now you have you have people
00:13:43.100 serving longer sentences for saying things that the state deemed islamophobic than islamists who
00:13:49.280 actually committed horrific crimes against people, crimes of terror. So we've reached this Orwellian 0.53
00:13:56.580 moment where the same state that wants to control speech has been unable to control the streets or
00:14:02.280 keep people safe. And I think there's a backlash against this. And I think that's one of the
00:14:07.640 reasons why someone like von der Leyen is so desperate to try and find some kind of positive 0.84
00:14:12.680 growth concept by bringing in an obviously non-European country like Canada. I find the 0.96
00:14:18.960 whole idea farcical i think i think the prime minister is doing some good things but i think
00:14:23.360 he's desperate to try and avoid the um decline of the trade strategy that's happening in very
00:14:31.360 obvious ways we do more business with illinois than we do with the entire eu we do more business
00:14:36.460 with michigan than we do with all 26 nations in the eu we do far more business with texas than we
00:14:42.220 do with all of the eu von der leyen talked about 12 supercomputers in europe that canada could access
00:14:47.980 America's got 170 supercomputers Canada can access and it's right there and our economies are
00:14:54.860 integrated our cultures are integrated our military is integrated our signals intelligence
00:15:00.360 is integrated everything that we would use to protect our domestic security is integrated with
00:15:06.080 U.S. oversight which is highly effective it's the best equipment in the world the most modern
00:15:11.080 best military in the world the EU has no military it has no signals intelligence it has no
00:15:17.020 supercomputers what she's offering are things that exist in sovereign nations that canada can easily
00:15:22.620 do business with and should be doing business with right this technocratic committee their
00:15:27.240 digital id their speech codes their failed green energy policies their failed deindustrialization
00:15:33.080 policies their failed open border policies none of it has any business in a free nation that wants
00:15:39.220 to prosper like canada and yet it feels like canadians are being herded into eu status with
00:15:44.980 very little debate. And, you know, Trump is being used as the pretext. And it has occurred to me
00:15:50.740 that Carney may have walked away from that trade deal in August without ever showing us what was
00:15:55.900 in it in order to justify aligning ourselves to Europe. It would have been a harder sell
00:16:01.940 if, for instance, he had been able to sign that deal. That's what I think.
00:16:06.560 I still think, Mark, you know, I'm an optimist. I still think it's going to be a hard sell because
00:16:11.200 it just doesn't make sense there's just nothing and also the europeans are highly skeptical
00:16:15.840 ursula von der leyen doesn't have the support of the germans on this you know macron and ursula
00:16:21.520 von der leyen are both trying to survive right now they're deeply unpopular people um they have
00:16:27.760 you know macron's got paris burning instead of speaking to the obvious integration between the
00:16:33.280 hard left and the islamists in what's happening in across france right now instead of directly
00:16:38.720 speaking to that. He instead wanted to castigate other world leaders who said, you've got a
00:16:44.180 disaster on your hands because of your terrible policies on Islamists and the hard left. And so
00:16:49.800 when you've got someone like Macron or someone like Ursula von der Leyen, these two abject
00:16:54.120 failures who are very good at presenting, but very poor at governing, then I don't think that's
00:17:00.020 who we want to do business with. And I think other countries would love to do business with Canada,
00:17:05.180 but they're not going to, they're not going to, um, abdicate their negotiation with Canada to
00:17:11.280 somebody as terribly as something as terribly managed as the EU. Yeah. I mean, with Marine
00:17:17.320 Le Pen and people like that coming in the AFD in Germany, I think this is kind of a last ditch
00:17:22.300 effort. I think they're using Canada as kind of a life preserver, you know, the situation in,
00:17:27.940 in Romania, in Hungary, right now in Poland, what's happening in Poland right now, you know,
00:17:33.480 the EU is desperate to try and keep any governments that are going to appeal on a populist basis
00:17:39.980 to nationalist sentiment. And look, not everybody that they're up against is a good person. But the
00:17:45.960 point is, the reason the EU is losing is because they haven't proven that what they have pushed
00:17:51.700 for over a decade, sometimes two decades, has been good for Europe. And by all the data you read
00:17:56.620 since 2008, it's been terrible for Europe by every possible account. And now that people are saying
00:18:01.660 it out loud they want to regulate their speech and know that they want to move they want to
00:18:05.720 regulate their currency with digital currencies that they can tie to data-based analysis of who 1.00
00:18:11.320 they are and profile them so all of it's no you wouldn't want that in the hands of the chinese
00:18:15.900 communist party uh you certainly don't want in the hands of of franco-german bureaucrats that 0.71
00:18:22.220 are desperate to retain their power and pulling out a little bag with dirty tricks or pulling out
00:18:27.440 this sad uh these announcements i found her deeply unconvincing when she spoke about you know arctic 0.60
00:18:33.880 security she she has no navy she has no technology she's got nothing to deploy to help us with arctic
00:18:39.460 security um or technology they've destroyed the tech infrastructure and investment infrastructure
00:18:45.500 of europe so yeah i i think it's dead on arrival all of it uh and not dead on arrival for any
00:18:52.260 partisan reason i think that there will be smart liberals that look at it and just say
00:18:55.600 there's absolutely no functional reason why we'd want to do this there's great things to do with
00:19:01.300 the eu probably four or five of them you know open visa status uh schengen zone relationships um
00:19:08.820 certain kinds of uh you know you know certain kind of uniformity of eu member states being able to
00:19:16.660 send bright young doctors here to study and work be great right it would they're a regulatory
00:19:22.560 superstructure and sometimes if you can help cut the red tape by doing a deal with regulatory
00:19:27.860 superstructures go for it do it but other than that they offer us nothing with the minute we've
00:19:33.840 got left uh your new column in the national post the u.s ai panic is a gift to canada i mean this
00:19:41.920 already kind of being played out in alberta right which signed a deal recently for uh data centers
00:19:48.900 um you're saying this is our chance really to build supercomputing infrastructure like crazy
00:19:54.740 maybe you could talk a little bit about that sure look um the tell uh in the u.s right now is that
00:20:03.720 the ceos of the two largest ai companies anthropic and open ai uh dario amaday and sam altman uh
00:20:11.600 were desperately trying to get uh liability um sort of shields built into regulation that would
00:20:20.640 allow them to basically not be held liable for mistakes that were being made that they were
00:20:25.920 talking about and they were were basically promoting this idea darium the day even wrote
00:20:29.840 a white paper on it saying you know we face really serious um problems with ai you know
00:20:36.080 even existential problems if we're not very very very very very careful and the only way to be
00:20:41.360 very, very, very, very careful as if the government would please give us a huge regulatory
00:20:45.880 moat that would allow the two largest frontier AI models in the U.S. to maintain their dominance
00:20:51.580 and have the protections of the government as we go into trillion dollar IPOs. Now, they failed on
00:20:58.380 two fronts. First, other people in the AI industry said, these guys are jokers. They're doom saying
00:21:04.080 is totally self-interested to get regulatory rent seeking arranged for themselves at the
00:21:09.160 expensive market competition number one and number two the different issues they pointed to
00:21:14.240 particularly open ai were fraught with problems of just experimental lack of oversight so the
00:21:21.620 danger of ai was the danger of ai not being well managed by sam altman and open ai that those
00:21:27.280 weren't dangers intrinsic in ai and it was as ridiculous as if a chemistry company ceo said
00:21:34.420 you know we were playing around with some toxins and when we put them in the water supply it showed
00:21:39.140 that they could spread around the world and destroy everyone and you know you'd say that
00:21:43.560 guy's either got to stop talking or go to jail or go in front of a senate subcommittee and tell us
00:21:49.100 that when they're doing these tasks they're ring fencing them appropriately right uh and which is
00:21:54.580 what's happened so scott bassin came out and said this is crazy but they're concerned because
00:21:59.780 competition is coming on strong um and they are also concerned because the technology is evolving
00:22:06.600 so quickly into new forms that go beyond large language models into things like world models
00:22:12.320 or large signal models, which take information that's not just text, but information that has
00:22:17.920 to do with spatial reasoning and deploys it for very intelligent processes for robots or cars or
00:22:25.080 spaceships being able to operate independently, but in coordinated ways with other things in
00:22:30.560 space and that's a very different kind of science than just textual analysis or numerical analysis
00:22:36.960 and that science involves multiple different sensor driven approaches and that's why it's
00:22:42.540 called large signal models but you would never want to write regulation for a large language model
00:22:47.560 knowing that something like large signal models are emerging very quickly any more than you'd
00:22:53.220 want to write regulations around laptops today based on typewriters from 40 years ago just
00:22:59.200 doesn't make sense so the ai doom the ai panic has been driven in part oddly by these two big ai
00:23:07.500 companies and their enormous lobbying capability and they've locked on to the democratic party in
00:23:13.440 the united states and you've got all these all these governors saying i want a moratorium
00:23:18.520 and the beauty of that for canada is let them have their moratoriums let's just build like crazy
00:23:24.000 we're cold weather great talent it's extraordinary to being given the gift of being able to build
00:23:29.140 supercomputing infrastructure across the country that will benefit our our kids and grandkids for
00:23:36.520 generations to come because this is the next version of the railroads the pipelines and the
00:23:41.600 ports that will be what drive the labs and universities and ideas of the future so it's
00:23:48.940 a great opportunity for us it's a gift for us that the u.s had these two big great and they are that
00:23:54.040 they are the global head of ai and they will will continue to be sort of merged that way
00:23:57.980 but we want to be an enormously important part of the infrastructure of that and we have all
00:24:03.500 these natural capabilities and benefits water cold weather great industrial capabilities great build
00:24:09.420 capabilities it's a chance for us to take over while they sit on the sidelines in some of the
00:24:15.200 states for uh you know a year or two they'll wake up soon and they'll start building again you're
00:24:20.520 seeing elon musk build a scale that's unprecedented but right now canada's got a huge opportunity so
00:24:26.300 I hope we seize it.
00:24:27.720 David Knightleg, thank you so much for coming on the show.
00:24:29.900 We appreciate it.
00:24:31.140 Thanks a lot, Mark.
00:24:32.260 Coming to us from Washington, D.C.
00:24:34.400 If you enjoy the show and appreciate great independent journalism, please consider becoming a premier member of Juno News by going to junonews.com backslash straight up.
00:24:43.620 It helps us do what we do here.
00:24:45.120 Thank you so much for tuning in.
00:24:46.700 We'll see you next time.