Juno News - October 31, 2022


＂Francophobia＂ ？？？

Mentioned
Andrew Matthew Fleury Brendan Miller Borgo Tassé
Danielle Smith takes on the WEF Trudeau thought convoy was political opportunity, not national emergency

Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

186.68

Word count

928

Sentence count

38

Harmful content

Toxicity

6

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In this episode, the guys talk about a new piece from Isabel Borgo Tassé's piece on francophobia at the Emergencies Act inquiry, and why it's not just about the fact that First Nations, Inuit and Métis people don't speak English in Canada.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 This is a bit of a weird topic because it goes back to when we, I can't remember if we did it on this show a couple of weeks ago or if it was just on my show or if it was just on Twitter or if I dreamed the whole thing, but it'll be a story that's a couple of weeks old now, which is the somehow losing the ability to speak English under oath when you've been testifying under oath in English for several hours and using words like specificity and microaggression.
00:00:25.800 That was Ottawa City Councillor Matthew Fleury, but sometimes the opinion columnists are a little bit late to the party here.
00:00:33.900 I am myself a victim of that.
00:00:35.800 It'll take me a while to write a column and by the time I publish it, other people have moved on, but I think it's still relevant.
00:00:41.300 In this particular case, the Toronto Star in a piece on the 26th, so that was Wednesday of this week, took aim at francophobia at the Emergencies Act inquiry.
00:00:52.380 It was a piece contributed by Isabel Borgo Tassé, which I believe is an Irish Chinese name, if memory serves, but Isabel Borgo Tassé says that francophonie meets francophobia at the Emergencies Act inquiry.
00:01:09.280 And she says, English is always first, the French follows, my tongue is put in its place, disquieting absence of the First Nations, Inuit and Métis languages, manifestations of Canada's troubling linguistic pecking order, emblematic of the country's colonial history.
00:01:26.620 Man in like diverse woke bingo.
00:01:29.600 That one just like got a straight line, a box, the four corners, diagonal line, everything.
00:01:35.280 And what I find interesting about this, the column just goes on to talk about, you know, Matthew Fleury's francophone, anglophone distinction and all of that.
00:01:45.420 But it's like of all the things you take from that, like we made fun of the language thing, but it wasn't actually like the central thesis of the Public Order Emergency Commission's work.
00:01:55.060 It's like that, like you just have to be really looking for a grievance if you've been watching the, what is it, 11, 12 days of testimony now, and that's the one that, the one thing you've taken from it is they're francophobes.
00:02:06.820 I, you know, it's very easy, I think sometimes, if you're really plugged into the day-to-day news and it's your job to read too much into things.
00:02:16.540 And I think all of us at certain points fall victim to that, just overanalyzing things and reading too deep into them.
00:02:22.800 The reality is, as we all know, Matthew Fleury just miraculously forgot how to speak English when he was put in his place and asked to define a word that he had accused truckers of committing microaggressions multiple times.
00:02:35.740 The second he was asked to define that, he breaks out the whole I'm francophone for the first time, I should say, in the hearing.
00:02:42.680 The only time he broke that out was when he was being cross-examined by Brendan Miller, the convoy lawyer.
00:02:47.380 So very, very, very creative excuse to just decide, actually, I'm not going to be able to speak in English for this one section, and I'm going to go back to speaking English just fine, without an accent, without a problem, right after.
00:03:00.520 Right after I'm done being questioned by someone I don't like.
00:03:02.880 And that's really what this is all about.
00:03:04.360 And the article itself is so absurd, Andrew.
00:03:06.900 You talked about the woke bingo card, the fact that, you know, it would be an instant win.
00:03:11.200 Those aren't even all, those aren't even all, like, the sort of fake words they're putting into this article.
00:03:14.840 There's one here, Anglo-normativity, which I haven't heard before.
00:03:18.760 It's like this idea, I guess, I guess it's becoming too normal, Andrew, to speak English in Canada.
00:03:24.260 Last time I checked, I think English is the dominant language spoken in Canada by quite a significant ways.
00:03:30.620 So I guess in that instance, Canada is far too Anglo-normative. 0.96
00:03:36.200 And I guess the point of this whole article is to basically say that we are far, we speak too much English in this country, and it's not right.
00:03:43.860 At the beginning, this writer says that along with the fact that English is always first and French follows,
00:03:49.880 it's in tandem with the curious, disquieting absence of First Nations, Inuit, and Métis languages.
00:03:56.200 And I'm just trying to figure this out, Andrew.
00:03:58.000 Like, are we supposed, is this article trying to basically tell us that we need to have Inuit, Métis, and First Nations languages
00:04:04.820 in government documents, in more public places?
00:04:09.780 Like, is that going to help us better understand things that are going on?
00:04:12.780 Again, I'm very confused about all this.
00:04:15.540 And the reality is, you don't always have to defend people for, you know, absurd things that they're doing that are obviously absurd.
00:04:23.280 I think it would be, the average position for anyone who hears this will say, 0.59
00:04:27.660 that's ridiculous, this guy sounds like he's just bitter and trying to avoid answering questions. 0.88
00:04:33.140 We don't need to have some great big francophone, anglophone debate over this. 0.97
00:04:38.140 It's clear that Matthew Fleur was obviously playing around, trying to mess around,
00:04:42.820 and he got called out for it by Miller, who rightly said, if he was asked to speak French,
00:04:49.000 he reintroduced himself as Je Mappelle Brendan. 0.66
00:04:51.400 The perfect response, in my opinion, Andrew, to such a ridiculous thing to try and pull like that, 0.85
00:04:56.500 as if no one was really paying attention. 0.95