Juno News - June 15, 2019


Censored： Official audio record of Conservative MP edited


Episode Stats


Length

5 minutes

Words per minute

157.37648

Word count

911

Sentence count

56


Summary

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

On June 4th, a motion was introduced by Liberal MP Randy Boissoneau to have Michael Cooper's comments on a witness removed from the official Hansard transcript of a meeting of the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 If there was ever a case where silence is deafening, it's now.
00:00:06.580 I'm talking about the edited audio recording of a meeting of the Justice and Human Rights Committee on Parliament Hill
00:00:12.680 just a couple of weeks ago in May, the meeting where Michael Cooper, the Conservative MP,
00:00:18.500 famously told a witness, Faisal Khan Suri, he should be ashamed of himself
00:00:23.720 for daring to link Conservative commentators with mass shootings and mass shooters.
00:00:30.740 And what Michael Cooper did, just to give you the recap here,
00:00:33.480 is quote a section of the Christchurch Shooters Manifesto,
00:00:36.660 a section that basically says the shooter, Bretton Tarrant, disavowed and rejected Conservatism,
00:00:43.040 identified more with China.
00:00:45.160 It was not to glorify it, it was to disprove the defamatory assertion made by the witness.
00:00:52.160 But then you fast forward to June 4th,
00:00:54.740 another meeting of the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights.
00:00:58.180 Liberal MP Randy Boissoneau introduces a motion to purge Michael Cooper's comments from the record.
00:01:05.080 Now, Michael Cooper himself had already been purged from the record
00:01:08.420 when Andrew Scheer, the Conservative leader, decided to kick him off of the Justice Committee
00:01:12.960 for this supposed transgression.
00:01:15.880 But now Randy Boissoneau wanted to go one step further
00:01:18.560 and make it so that the official record, the official Hansard transcript of the meeting
00:01:23.440 would have no indication that Michael Cooper ever said what he did.
00:01:28.320 What I didn't realize is that Parliament would go even further than that.
00:01:33.000 Purging the record doesn't just mean taking it off the transcript,
00:01:35.960 but even going back and retroactively removing it from what is supposed to be
00:01:40.680 the raw audio feed of that meeting.
00:01:43.820 Here's a clip of the edited version.
00:01:46.540 Thank you very much, and we'll now move to questions.
00:01:48.740 Mr. Cooper.
00:01:49.340 Thank you, Mr. Chair.
00:01:50.920 First of all, Mr. Suri, I take great umbrage with your defamatory comments
00:01:57.340 to try to link conservatism with violent and extremist attacks.
00:02:05.220 They have no foundation, they're defamatory, and they diminish your credibility as a witness.
00:02:12.220 And let me, Mr. Chair, read into the record the statement of
00:02:17.420 who is responsible for the Christchurch massacre.
00:02:22.880 He left a 74-page manifesto in which he stated
00:02:27.160 And I certainly wouldn't attempt to link Bernie Sanders
00:02:45.260 to the individual who shot up Republican members of Congress
00:02:49.140 and nearly fatally killed Congressman Scalise.
00:02:54.260 So you should be ashamed.
00:02:55.680 Now, with respect, with respect...
00:02:59.540 Yeah, I know it's kind of awkward to stare there and listen to silence,
00:03:05.400 but I wanted you to understand what has happened at the hand of parliamentarians.
00:03:10.940 Removing words that were uttered, literally erasing the historic record of a meeting of government.
00:03:18.620 This is something that legitimately comes out of Orwell.
00:03:21.980 That's not an exaggeration.
00:03:23.400 There's a great quote from the book where the character says
00:03:25.780 that all the records have been falsified, destroyed.
00:03:28.500 The only thing that remains is one's memory,
00:03:31.460 which means that you can't prove what happened even when you know what happened.
00:03:36.260 And those were very prescient words, written about 1984,
00:03:40.600 but now we're in 2019 and the reality is still the same.
00:03:45.000 And the one thing that I would say most Canadians need to realize here
00:03:49.040 is that when parliament can just remove the words and arguments put forward by MPs
00:03:54.420 if it doesn't like them,
00:03:55.920 there's no limit to what else they could give the same treatment to.
00:04:00.300 There's no limit to what else they could decide.
00:04:02.000 We don't think this should withstand the test of time.
00:04:04.580 We don't think these words should exist in history.
00:04:07.240 They were uttered.
00:04:07.900 They were said.
00:04:08.860 That's unavoidable.
00:04:10.140 That's indisputable.
00:04:11.660 And mainstream media outlets didn't actually write in the full context
00:04:15.040 what Michael Cooper said.
00:04:16.740 They referenced it.
00:04:17.680 They would include sections of it.
00:04:19.460 But what has been removed from the hand shirt and removed from the audio
00:04:22.920 didn't exist in writing anywhere until I put it up on True North, on tnc.news.
00:04:28.880 The reason I did was not because I support the Christchurch shooter
00:04:32.360 and to say otherwise would be asinine,
00:04:35.320 but because I believe that words that have been uttered in the course of a parliamentary debate
00:04:39.360 do not deserve to be relegated to the dustbin of history
00:04:43.780 because someone does not like those words' application.
00:04:47.540 And I was quite pleased.
00:04:48.680 After I made the decision to publish these things,
00:04:50.820 I had transcribed them manually from the audio, which is now gone.
00:04:54.660 I was pleased to see other people on Twitter and in another website,
00:04:58.180 The Post Millennial, do the same.
00:05:00.620 Because if you are not prepared to have an honest and truthful accounting of history,
00:05:05.940 you are not prepared to have an honest or truthful account
00:05:08.820 of anything that happens in the world
00:05:11.040 because you believe it should be subjected through this lens
00:05:14.400 that you can just decide on a whim.
00:05:17.920 My condolences to Michael Cooper,
00:05:20.100 that his political career has been put in the crosshairs here,
00:05:22.720 and that his words that he said have been allowed
00:05:25.880 to quite literally be purged from history.
00:05:28.520 We're trying to do our part for truth and for honesty.
00:05:31.660 And we can't do it alone.
00:05:32.700 If you want to support our work and being a voice
00:05:35.240 that the mainstream media refuses to be,
00:05:37.540 we need your help.
00:05:38.400 Head on over to tnc.news
00:05:40.220 and you can join my Heritage Club for just a few dollars a month
00:05:42.880 or make any other contributions as you're able to.
00:05:45.740 For True North, I'm Andrew Lutton.