Juno News - August 06, 2019


Freeland claims progress on the China situation. Really？


Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

154.73387

Word count

657

Sentence count

58


Summary

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

Big news on the China file and the ongoing spat between Canada and China. Apparently, we re making progress. Michael Kovrig has had a visit by consular officials. And China has agreed to keep the lines of communication open.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 Big news on the China file and the ongoing spat between Canada and China.
00:00:13.840 Apparently good news. Apparently we're making developments. We're making progress.
00:00:20.420 Two latest minor details we've learned. One is that Michael Kovrig has had a visit by consular
00:00:26.640 officials. The tenth such visit in, get this, about 240 days of the two Michaels being held
00:00:35.420 hostage. The tenth visit with consular officials. About one every 24 days or so. Barely one a
00:00:44.340 month. This is not with his lawyer. This is not with his family. This is not before a judge
00:00:48.240 to be able to say, okay, what am I charged with? What are the allegations here? Just with consular
00:00:52.420 officials to check in to make sure he's not malnourished, that he hasn't received any
00:00:56.440 illness, and to see that things are more or less okay given the terrible circumstances.
00:01:01.520 And this is the good news. But there's something else. Christia Freeland has finally met with
00:01:09.840 her counterpart, the Foreign Affairs Minister of China. Take a listen to this, how the Canadian
00:01:16.060 press describes this meeting. Freeland raised the issue of the two Canadians, and Wang Yi expressed
00:01:23.440 concerns about Meng Wang Zhu's extradition process, the minister said during a conference call
00:01:29.100 without elaborating further. When the meeting was over, she said the two agreed they would keep the
00:01:35.040 lines of communication open. Okay, hold on a second. Let me get this straight. So we've had Justin
00:01:41.020 Trudeau not really be able to talk to President Xi Jinping about this at all. And then we were told
00:01:46.320 Donald Trump's going to deal with the situation for us. And Donald Trump, maybe he brought it up,
00:01:50.780 maybe he didn't. Everybody says, oh, we're assured he did. But it clearly was not his primary issue.
00:01:55.540 He's dealing with the trade wars and so forth. So to whatever degree he brought it up, probably not
00:02:00.680 the top item on his to-do list. Christia Freeland finally, after all this time meeting with her
00:02:06.120 Foreign Minister, and it had been reported that they were rebuffing her request for meetings. So
00:02:10.060 she was lucky to get this one. And how does she describe it in a call to reporters? She describes
00:02:16.660 it as she brought up the detainees, Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, and they brought up Meng Wang
00:02:21.480 Zhu, as if the two situations were equal. Now we don't see it that way, and we shouldn't see it that
00:02:27.300 way, because Meng Wang Zhu, while we held her following our extradition agreement with the U.S.,
00:02:31.860 Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor were arbitrarily detained, and they are hostages. And yet we're
00:02:37.800 talking about it back and forth, as if they're two sort of equal sides to the same coin.
00:02:44.620 This is clearly what they want to do. They've got these hostages, and then they want to do a
00:02:48.580 negotiation, a switch, a crossover. Maybe you've seen that Tom Hanks movie, Bridge of Spies, things
00:02:53.920 like that that used to happen in the Soviet era. We got your guy, you got our guy. Okay, let's do a switch.
00:02:58.560 Hold on a second. Is that an acceptable thing? Is that normal diplomacy? Absolutely not. Yet it's
00:03:06.520 shocking that we're just accepting all of this. Tenth visit with consular officials. Great breakthrough.
00:03:13.040 Congratulations, Michael Kovrig. You should be thankful. Really? I don't think so. And then this,
00:03:19.040 finally, finally getting a meeting with her counterpart. For what? For them to basically say,
00:03:25.200 yeah, you better believe we want a hostage trade. That's not how things work here.
00:03:31.080 Think of the way they are just so brazenly saying they don't care about our norms. They don't care
00:03:37.200 about the rule of law. They don't care about fairness. They're going to stick it to us every
00:03:41.020 which way they can. And not only do they expect us to continue to take it, but it looks like we're
00:03:47.820 actually going to. Wow.
00:03:55.200 Let's do it.