Juno News - March 01, 2020


Disrupting blockades works


Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

183.5273

Word count

820

Sentence count

58

Harmful content

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

After blocking rail lines across Canada, the OPP finally moved in and disrupted the rail blockades that had been going on for almost three weeks. But did they do it? And did they have the authority to do so?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 So I've got some crazy breaking news to tell you guys all about. This just in,
00:00:10.720 police immediately disrupting rail blockades, actually works. Who would have thought it?
00:00:17.440 It's with great relief that we see that there are really no blockades happening across Canada.
00:00:22.200 Right now, after there were attempts to bring solidarity blockades to a whole bunch of rail
00:00:27.360 lines to strand people's commutes after the OPP finally went in after almost three weeks and
00:00:33.520 disrupted those Belleville, Ontario via rail line blockades. There was a lot of hand-wringing,
00:00:38.480 a lot of discussion over whose authority is it, who can do what, what's appropriate. Justin Trudeau
00:00:44.160 was using phrases like dialogue and coming together to meet to talk about this and that. We heard it
00:00:49.760 from many other cabinet ministers. I thought, okay, if you want to talk about these broader issues,
00:00:53.600 fine. Meanwhile, you've got people on rail lines, some of whom may have been tampering with those
00:00:58.880 rail lines. Get them off the rail lines. It's illegal. No one else would be allowed to stick
00:01:03.600 around and do that for so long. But we had the provinces and the feds arguing back and forth
00:01:08.080 about whose responsibility it was. Justin Trudeau saying, we do not tell the police what to do.
00:01:13.120 Politicians can't do that. And then he had a press conference telling the police, okay, guys, you can
00:01:18.000 move in now. And you know what? Here's the thing. They did move in. The OPP moved in at Belleville and
00:01:24.080 there was no violence. Nobody got hurt. There were several people arrested. Quite frankly, I think they
00:01:29.920 got off quite easily because one should not be allowed to do what they did for so long and not
00:01:34.800 suffer legal consequences. Here's the thing. A lot of activists, particularly those sort of far left
00:01:41.600 social justice warrior climate activists who wanted to affix themselves to all of this and kind of
00:01:47.040 pretend that they were also First Nations activists, they went and they went to do a whole
00:01:51.920 bunch of shutdowns in British Columbia and in downtown Toronto. They tried to blockade the
00:01:56.480 commutes coming out of Toronto one afternoon rush hour. And they were up on those rail lines for,
00:02:02.400 I don't know, 15 minutes. The police came on force. They took them off the rail lines right away. It was
00:02:09.520 really only a one hour disruption for people's commutes. And then they got the trains moving. And there you go.
00:02:14.640 You know, we had a number of voices come forward to say, what needs to happen? Who needs to do this?
00:02:19.840 And that. Eric O'Toole stepped forward, conservative leadership candidate, and he proposed this sort of
00:02:24.320 bringing in a law about critical infrastructure and you can't block the, okay, whatever, fine,
00:02:29.600 maybe that law is helpful. But basically it's still illegal to have done all of this from the get-go.
00:02:36.480 And we saw that when police finally did decide to enforce the law, well, they just did it. And then
00:02:42.000 people got off the lines. The GO trains in the Greater Toronto Area got back to service. And now we have the
00:02:47.520 Via Rail lines more or less operational again. Although we've learned that it's going to take several weeks to get
00:02:53.200 all of those backed up trains back into, I guess, the logistic system so they can get their grain shipments and so forth
00:02:59.600 out and about. But what a lesson. What a teachable moment. Pretty crazy. I thought the idea that this would
00:03:05.200 somehow come to blows and that everybody would be, you know, severely harmed or even killed. It was
00:03:10.000 really almost kind of offensive, both to the police that this is the way they conduct themselves and
00:03:14.480 they would do this, and also to assume that the activists were so violent that basically they wanted
00:03:21.280 to get into this situation. Now, when you see these people who have been running in front of trains and
00:03:26.640 then throwing pallets down in front of the trains, that's another story. And I think if these people are
00:03:32.240 going to go without facing legal consequences to do something that, let's be honest, is domestic terrorism,
00:03:37.760 we got another thing coming. When it comes to the basic blockading of the GO trains, the Via Rail lines,
00:03:43.520 there, they get on the tracks. Five minutes later, cops come. They take them off. It's that simple.
00:03:48.640 We always had the resources for it. We always had the correct laws in place. What needed to happen was
00:03:53.600 people needed to act. And next time they do it, five minutes after it starts, the police should act.
00:04:02.240 have done a time so that they're not kept running away.
00:04:09.280 So I want to be able to go without police repair and work.
00:04:20.520 To be honest, I want to be able to engage possess thatças but not me. 1.00
00:04:25.840 So I am ?