Juno News - April 26, 2022


CPC MP Dane Lloyd grills the Anti-Hate Network

Mentioned
Pat King Balgord Bernie Faber Tamara Leach Chair
The Charter didn’t stop Canada’s Covid slide towards tyranny Standing up against the corporate media’s social justice agenda (Ft. Jamil Jivani)

Episode Stats


Length

6 minutes

Words per minute

173.06

Word count

1,086

Sentence count

72

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In this episode, we talk to the Canadian Anti-Fascinating Network, a group dedicated to fighting white supremacy and white nationalism in Canada. We discuss the United We Roll protest in Ottawa, Canada, and the possibility of a terrorist attack.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 yours. Thank you, Mr. Chair. My first question is to Mr. Balgord from the Canadian Anti-Hate Network.
00:00:08.940 Mr. Balgord, would you suggest or would you say that your organization is an objective organization?
00:00:17.840 We wear our biases on our sleeves, right? We are very proudly anti-fascist and we focus on
00:00:23.660 the far right. We focus on the far right because if you speak with anybody who is a researcher of
00:00:29.320 this or an expert in national security threats, they will agree that ideologically motivated
00:00:34.820 violent extremists and threats primarily today are coming out of far right organizing. Thank you.
00:00:39.740 No, I appreciate the honesty, Mr. Balgord. It's important and not diminishing some of the work
00:00:45.320 that you do. You know, I come from an area where last summer we had a, you know, 100-year-old church
00:00:51.540 burned to the ground and dozens of people had to be evacuated from an apartment building close by,
00:00:57.100 which nearly went up in flames and killed dozens of people. But you just don't hear it talked about
00:01:02.400 in this country and I understand that it's not your organization's mandate to talk about these
00:01:06.540 things. As you've said, you're clearly focused on the far right. My question is, you know, during the
00:01:14.500 convoy protests, your executive director, I believe that's his position, Bernie Faber, posted a tweet
00:01:20.180 with a photo of a vile anti-Semitic flyer and claimed that this flyer was, that this was a picture of the
00:01:28.400 flyer being circulated in Ottawa among the trucker protesters. But upon further examination, it was
00:01:34.680 proven that this exact same photo was taken in Miami, Florida, weeks before the protests ever began.
00:01:42.520 Can you explain why the executive director of your organization was claiming that an anti-Semitic, like that
00:01:50.400 this photo was being circulated at the protests when in fact it was a photo that was from a completely
00:01:56.400 different country weeks before the protests?
00:01:58.520 Yes, thank you very much for giving me a way to address this. So first off, that was our chair, I'm the executive
00:02:05.520 director, and I was privy to the email chain that led to him tweeting that out. So what had occurred
00:02:11.520 was he was, somebody had reached out who was in Ottawa, who said that they saw that flyer there and
00:02:18.520 they provided the photo. At that moment, you know, Bernie was not aware that the photo itself was taken from
00:02:24.520 an American source. What the person was trying to communicate to our organization was that they saw the
00:02:29.520 the same flyer, but they had attached the photo from the states. So it was our error in not communicating
00:02:36.520 that more clearly, where the photo itself originated from. What the person was reporting to us was that
00:02:42.520 they had seen the same flyer in Ottawa. Thank you.
00:02:45.520 So you have no evidence other than hearsay that that flyer was actually being distributed in Ottawa, correct?
00:02:52.520 That is correct. You know, we took the report from somebody on the ground, and our chair put the
00:02:58.520 information out there. I would say we did see very similar messaging. In Toronto, there was somebody
00:03:06.520 who was wearing a billboard with essentially the same messaging.
00:03:09.520 Well, let's move on here. We're talking about the Ottawa protest, but I appreciate, you know, your
00:03:13.520 clarification on that matter. You've raised some pretty disturbing allegations about the potential for a
00:03:20.520 terrorist attack, a mass violent event. I think we can all be thankful that this didn't happen during the
00:03:29.520 protests. And I think it sort of undermines the argument that was being made by many, including by
00:03:36.520 organizations such as yours, that this protest had violent, you know, motivations, that they had a desire to
00:03:43.520 commit violence. I mean, the fact that we didn't see a terrorist attack, we didn't see a mass violent
00:03:49.520 event. I mean, it sort of undermines the claim. But I just want to ask, you know, you've connected the
00:03:55.520 United We Roll protests, which came to Ottawa in 2018, I believe. You know, a lot of people from
00:04:02.520 Western Canada concerned about the carbon tax pipelines being blocked. How do you draw this
00:04:07.520 connection between, you know, white supremacy and fascism with people that are concerned about
00:04:14.520 protecting their livelihoods?
00:04:17.520 We don't. And I'm always very careful at every juncture to point out that not everybody that was
00:04:22.520 involved in the convoy is necessarily racist or necessarily violent.
00:04:26.520 We draw a generalization here about a protest and saying that it was organized by the same people and that
00:04:31.520 this is a conspiracy to spread white supremacist and fascist views.
00:04:36.520 Under the guise of pipeline and carbon tax politics, what evidence do you have to back up that claim?
00:04:42.520 Sure. So if you look back at the Elvis Canada movement, and this is well documented,
00:04:47.520 you will find, you know, hundreds of examples of death threats and racist comments towards Muslims.
00:04:52.520 And the, so that's the Elvis Canada movement, which I just addressed.
00:04:56.520 In terms of your earlier comment about the organizers and how do we make statements of a nature,
00:05:02.520 I'd point back to, you know, one of the key influencers and organizers of the convoys Pat King,
00:05:08.520 who said the mandate would only end with bullets, right?
00:05:10.520 We saw other organizers who had previously made Islamophobic statements.
00:05:13.520 But nobody had ever heard of this Pat King fellow before these convoy protests in Ottawa,
00:05:17.520 and yet you're saying that these people were involved with the United We Roll protests in 2018?
00:05:23.520 Can, do you have any evidence to the direct connection?
00:05:27.520 Can you provide that evidence?
00:05:28.520 You've made this claim.
00:05:29.520 Sure. Tamara Lich was in fact an organizer of United We Roll, 0.85
00:05:33.520 and she was one of the key organizers of the convoy. 0.87
00:05:35.520 That's one example.
00:05:36.520 Pat King got...
00:05:38.520 Please.
00:05:39.520 At the time of the convoy.
00:05:41.520 You know, like, you know, we sometimes get, you know,
00:05:44.520 can you make a submission to the committee and provide us with this evidence?
00:05:47.520 Like, you've said it, and I guess I'll take you out your word for now,
00:05:50.520 but can you actually provide us written evidence to back up these claims?
00:05:55.520 Yes, we have.
00:05:56.520 I'd be happy to share some of the articles we've already written on the subject with the committee.
00:06:00.520 And do these articles contain primary sources that back up the evidence,
00:06:04.520 or are these opinion articles written by your admittedly not objective organization?
00:06:08.520 10-second answer, please.
00:06:10.520 Yes, everything is demonstrated in the articles.
00:06:13.520 Thank you.
00:06:14.520 Thank you.
00:06:15.520 Now...