Juno News - August 05, 2019


Conservatives want to earn Saudi Arabia's ＂trust＂


Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

167.6961

Word count

543

Sentence count

31


Summary

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

Andrew Lutton explains why the Tories are eager to restore trust with Saudi Arabia, and why Justin Trudeau's Liberals have done absolutely nothing to do so. He also explains why Canada should continue to speak out against human rights abuses committed by the Saudi regime.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 We know that Justin Trudeau's Liberals have embarrassed Canada on the foreign
00:00:05.880 stage, but any party putting itself forward as an alternative needs to be
00:00:09.880 able to tell Canadians it will do better. We have a glimpse of what a
00:00:14.040 Conservative government's foreign policy would look like. The Conservatives, if
00:00:18.320 elected, would make restoring the trust of Saudi Arabia a top priority. Now
00:00:25.620 that's making it so that Saudi Arabia trusts us. This came from Conservative MP
00:00:31.300 and Foreign Affairs critic Aaron O'Toole, who says that if the Conservatives are
00:00:35.280 forming the next government, they will work to fix Canada's relation with Riyadh
00:00:39.300 and according to a CBC story, build back rapport with the Kingdom in areas that it
00:00:45.300 considers of mutual interest. Now this came about over the last year because of the
00:00:51.000 strained relationship that really was galvanized by the assassination by Saudi
00:00:56.100 officials of Jamal Khashoggi in Turkey. But condemnation by Canada was entirely
00:01:02.620 warranted. In fact, global condemnation was. I don't know why the Conservatives are
00:01:06.900 eager to restore the trust of this regime that has not shown any willingness to
00:01:12.280 meet human rights obligations. Now what Aaron O'Toole, who I like a great deal, said
00:01:17.640 is that you need to have a relationship to deal with these human rights abuses.
00:01:22.260 Once you have a relationship, you can then work on issues related to human rights
00:01:27.360 concerns about the actions of Saudi Arabia vis-a-vis the Khashoggi incident,
00:01:31.940 democratic reforms, all these sorts of things, said O'Toole. If you have zero
00:01:36.780 relationship, we're basically just yelling into the wind. We're not having any impact
00:01:41.820 on them. I'd say we weren't having any impact on them when we did have that
00:01:46.620 relationship, however. I know it's not an easy solution. Justin Trudeau has done
00:01:50.920 absolutely nothing on the Saudi file despite blustering about the
00:01:55.360 conservative inked deal between the Saudi military and General Dynamics land
00:02:00.240 systems. The Liberals did nothing about it. The Conservatives were the ones who inked
00:02:04.740 the deal, which gives them a lot more of a difficult time in trying to establish
00:02:09.180 themselves as being any moral authority on Canada's relations with Saudi Arabia.
00:02:13.940 But here we are. They are a player in the Middle East. They are still, on paper at least,
00:02:19.020 an ally of our biggest ally and trading partner, the United States. And more importantly,
00:02:23.900 they're showing no willingness of dealing with the genuine and bona fide human rights abuses
00:02:29.120 that exist there. Now, we see little glimmers of what I guess we can pretend is progress. For example,
00:02:35.920 in Saudi Arabia, as of last week, women no longer need mail permission to travel. They can get a
00:02:42.120 passport on their own. But these little stories that allow Saudi Arabia to pretend it's a progressive
00:02:47.500 state that are, you know, dragging them, kicking and screaming into the 18th century are not real
00:02:52.200 examples of progress. They're window dressing. They're an example of a regime that's picking
00:02:57.200 and choosing its battles, knowing that it's finding itself on the receiving end of global
00:03:01.580 condemnation. Canada should continue to condemn when condemnation is warranted. If we want to rebuild any
00:03:08.520 relationship and rebuild trust, they have to earn it, not us. For True North, I'm Andrew Lutton.