Juno News - June 06, 2020


Did Trudeau finally criticize China？


Episode Stats


Length

2 minutes

Words per minute

192.44325

Word count

455

Sentence count

22

Harmful content

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Justin Trudeau has finally criticized China for their new Hong Kong law clamping down on Hong Kong. But why hasn t he done the same on the Hong Kong Hong Kong issue? And why has he not done the bare minimum in supporting Hong Kong?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Why won't Justin Trudeau criticize China? That's what we've been asking for well over a year. Well,
00:00:11.260 I've got a development on this file that kind of leans towards good news. Justin Trudeau has
00:00:15.660 criticized China when it comes to the new law they've introduced to clamp down on Hong Kong.
00:00:21.240 He said it under no uncertain terms just the other day. And well, kudos to him,
00:00:25.580 although it was a long time coming. Now, the prime minister, he also said that he would encourage
00:00:30.960 any of the 300,000 people residing in Hong Kong who have Canadian citizenship to return to Canada,
00:00:38.400 to come here whenever they feel uncomfortable, whenever they feel unsafe. I think that's a
00:00:43.560 great message to send, but keep in mind they are Canadian citizens, so you don't ever really need 0.60
00:00:49.200 to tell citizens explicitly you're welcome in the country. That is a default. What I wonder is why
00:00:55.000 Justin Trudeau has not done is hashtag welcome to Canada that he controversially did back in 2017,
00:01:00.960 and that is believed to have played a significant role in creating the illegal border crisis
00:01:05.460 at Roxham Road. Justin Trudeau, he's able to hashtag and virtue signal in certain situations,
00:01:11.640 but apparently not able to do it here on the Hong Kong file. A year ago, there were a lot of
00:01:17.540 protesters who were calling out for liberty, and they had the law enforcement clamping down on them a lot.
00:01:23.220 There were arrests for people who were really doing nothing wrong. I spoke to one of the leaders
00:01:27.760 of the student protest, Joshua Wong, a number of times back when that was happening. He himself
00:01:32.400 was arrested, and we heard nothing from Justin Trudeau. It was almost like it wasn't happening
00:01:37.200 at all. And these were people who should be allies of ours, who are a democratic nation,
00:01:42.980 who are a country, in many respects, a lot like Canada. You would think that we would feel a kinship
00:01:47.780 with them, and that we would be there for them right away. But no, Trudeau shied away from supporting
00:01:52.700 Hong Kong, perhaps because it meant, in turn, he would be criticizing China.
00:01:56.960 So I will applaud the Prime Minister for saying what he said this time around. It's the right time.
00:02:01.520 But it's funny how on some issues, he has the tweet ready minutes after the first news story breaks,
00:02:07.160 whereas when it comes to the Hong Kong file, it seems like it's taken Justin Trudeau many,
00:02:11.840 many months just to step up and do the bare minimum. Well, I remain the optimist, and I hope we'll hear
00:02:17.560 more from the Liberal government in terms of supporting Hong Kong, but it remains to be seen.