Juno News - January 03, 2020


CBC giving away Cuban holiday in contest sponsored by communist Cuba


Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

164.7152

Word count

694

Sentence count

3

Harmful content

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

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

The weather is getting cold in Cuba, but fear not Canadians, CBC might send you on a lovely warm tropical getaway to a communist dictatorship. Yes, Cuba is the choice of CBC s latest contest, the Holiday Escape to Cuba contest, which is sponsored not only by Sunwing Vacations and the Cuban Government, but also by the Cuban government.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 the weather is getting cold but fear not Canadians CBC might send you on a lovely
00:00:10.800 warm tropical getaway to a communist dictatorship yes Cuba is the choice of
00:00:18.600 CBC's latest contest the holiday escape to Cuba contest which as you can see
00:00:24.100 from the CBC's website is sponsored not only by Sunwing vacations but also by
00:00:29.460 the Cuban government now we know that Cuba is a popular destination for a lot
00:00:34.440 of Canadians it's very inexpensive and the reason Canadian tourism makes up
00:00:39.240 such a significant chunk of Cuban tourism overall is because Americans are
00:00:44.580 not able to go as tourists leisure travel is still even with the easing of
00:00:49.620 restrictions not a viable option for Americans but we have now CBC saying to
00:00:55.980 Canadians we'll send you there and we're going to take the Cuban government's 1.00
00:01:00.240 money to promote it as a travel destination now there are a number of
00:01:04.560 issues here one of them is an optical issue should we have any Canadian crown
00:01:09.900 corporation which CBC as the state broadcaster is promoting tourism to a
00:01:14.760 country with such an abysmal human rights record a country that is still a 0.98
00:01:18.720 communist dictatorship that doesn't have free speech that doesn't have free
00:01:22.380 press and that doesn't treat minority communities all that well I would say
00:01:26.580 the answer to that is a resounding no now I'm one of these people that lets
00:01:31.020 people do what they want I'm a bit of a libertarian in this sense if you want to
00:01:34.380 go to Cuba and you want to spend your money there that is your choice as a
00:01:37.920 consumer but for the government to get into bed with Cuba in this way is a
00:01:42.600 different question altogether there are also ethical considerations here given
00:01:47.540 that CBC News is covering Cuban affairs CBC has to cover Cuba how can it do that
00:01:53.600 effectively if it's taking money from that same country CBC Public Affairs
00:01:58.280 spokesperson Carrie Kelly told me this contest is a partnership between Sunwing
00:02:03.260 Vacations and CBC Media Solutions sales department which has normal ongoing
00:02:08.600 business relations with many companies and organizations as part of its work it is
00:02:13.400 entirely independent from CBC News and the contest has no connection with how
00:02:18.200 CBC News might cover issues relating to Cuba now I also reached out for comment
00:02:24.020 from the Minister of Canadian Heritage Stephen Gilbo his spokesperson
00:02:28.280 responded to say as you are aware the CBC is an autonomous crown corporation
00:02:33.380 responsible for managing its own operations now my question was not about the
00:02:38.480 business relationship between CBC and the federal government but rather
00:02:42.500 whether the Minister of Canadian Heritage who's ultimately responsible for CBC
00:02:47.120 had any issues with CBC accepting money from a communist dictatorship which
00:02:52.940 despite how nice the beaches of Cuba might be the country still is there's also a
00:02:57.860 bigger problem here which is that CBC gets 1.3 billion dollars a year it's
00:03:02.720 supposed to be subsidized by the government so that it doesn't have to be
00:03:06.500 driven by the same market realities of other private sector media why does it need
00:03:11.480 to be running cheap travel promotions when the government is giving its money so
00:03:15.980 it can be a truly independent broadcaster and not be holden to other things now
00:03:21.360 the conflict of interest guidelines are pretty clear no reporter would be allowed
00:03:25.280 to take a free trip to Cuba from the Cuban government and then write about Cuba for
00:03:30.020 CBC yet CBC itself can cash a Cuban peso check and then still send all of its
00:03:36.620 supporters to Cuba and apparently write about Cuba impartially this is just a
00:03:41.840 violation of what CBC should be and more importantly the fact that the
00:03:45.800 government refuses to say anything apart from they can deal with their own
00:03:49.580 affairs suggests it is okay with this arrangement true north is not sending
00:03:54.320 you on a Cuban vacation but we are speaking truth about issues that matter to
00:03:58.340 Canadians if you can support our efforts as an independent media organization
00:04:02.840 please do head on over to tnc.news slash donate and we greatly appreciate your
00:04:08.600 support for true north I'm Andrew Lutton