Juno News - November 22, 2019


How will the new Trudeau government deal with national security？


Episode Stats

Length

7 minutes

Words per Minute

191.89214

Word Count

1,409

Sentence Count

1

Hate Speech Sentences

3


Summary


Transcript

00:00:00.000 now the Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has named his revised federal cabinet and the governor
00:00:10.520 general has sworn everybody in there's gonna be a lot of questions about what these cabinet moves
00:00:15.620 mean for different files talking about regionalism of course Western alienation and that all makes
00:00:20.940 sense and have that conversation by all means but there's another broad theme that isn't being
00:00:26.440 discussed that should be how the cabinet is going to deal with national security issues I think one
00:00:33.920 of the reasons it's perhaps not being discussed much is because they don't want to discuss it
00:00:38.540 there are a number of hot potato files out there that are causing big headaches for the government
00:00:43.900 and no solution seems in sight some of them easier answers than others now a lot of these problems are
00:00:50.320 going to fall in the lap of Bill Blair who is the new Minister of Public Safety after Ralph Goodale
00:00:55.000 did not get re-elected for the first time in however many decades he has been in politics now this is an
00:01:02.080 interesting choice because Bill Blair was kind of junior minister for that anyway he was given a
00:01:06.940 special task to look at border security that was his name Minister of Border Security his title he
00:01:13.120 didn't fulfill that very well because while the stories of people crossing over into Roxham Road on
00:01:18.280 their own terms at a time of their own choosing are off the front pages in a lot of papers it's still
00:01:24.160 happening it's still happening every single day monthly reports come out to show us that every
00:01:29.940 month they're well over a thousand people who are just crossing over again on their own terms and it
00:01:35.120 looks like Canada in 2019 is set for not a record number but still a pretty high number coming close
00:01:40.480 to 20,000 people crossing illegally into this country in ways that quite frankly we are not in control
00:01:47.380 if Bill Blair never successfully shut that operation down well he's going to remain in control of that
00:01:52.620 problem now then he's also going to have other jobs to worry about so what's going to happen on the
00:01:58.500 border security file looks like for now a whole bunch of nothing I'll never forget the other year
00:02:05.000 I reported on how a director general in the immigration department gave a gave a statement to
00:02:11.200 Cornwall City Council and this was probably something that they didn't expect would go viral and well it
00:02:16.420 didn't go viral not as much as it should have but that director general that bureaucrat said look you've got to
00:02:21.880 realize like it or not this is the new normal and European style migration where people just
00:02:27.760 pretty much choose to come and go as they please where they please and when they please that's coming
00:02:32.820 to Canada uh-oh well he never really doubled down on those remarks he wasn't someone who was supposed
00:02:38.200 to be giving a public press statements for the media of course just meeting with city council but
00:02:43.200 I think we're seeing a bit of that unfold are we okay with that are we satisfied with that or do we
00:02:48.820 want to see it more effectively dealt with is Bill Blair the guy to do it the other big issue
00:02:53.920 the other security matter that Ralph Goodell well he said he was dealing with but we never saw much
00:03:00.060 materialize on it was dealing with the returning ISIS fighters several hundred Canadians had gone abroad
00:03:06.960 in solidarity with ISIS to wage jihad to try and cave out some sort of caliphate for the Islamic State
00:03:14.500 now a number of them were killed some of them have returned already some of them are are locked up in
00:03:21.120 various prisons and we're trying to figure out what to do with them as the ones who have returned the
00:03:24.580 government officially says there are about 60 of them a number of people have looked at the numbers
00:03:28.920 feel like there's a little bit more than that and what's going to happen with that these people
00:03:34.280 have violated very serious criminal code provisions to say nothing of flat-out treason they've also
00:03:40.680 violated some new provisions that were put in just a few years ago about associating with terror groups
00:03:45.900 fighting with them and going abroad to fight with terror groups but the number of people who have
00:03:50.620 actually faced charges related to this well you can count them on one hand there's really only been
00:03:55.540 a few of them even though a number of the other ones they've spoken brazenly to news outlets like
00:04:00.820 the New York Times podcast to brag about the fact we're here we're back in Canada and we don't think
00:04:05.800 the authorities are gonna do nothing about it now we hear this whole song and dance routine about how
00:04:10.580 well it's really difficult to secure conviction you can't get the paperwork from a place like Syria
00:04:15.680 and Iraq because they're just not as stable societies as us and all that kind of jazz and look that's all
00:04:20.980 fair points all good points but it seems like we're not really giving it the old college try it seems
00:04:26.280 like we could be a lot tougher on this than than a lot of people in the government are allowing
00:04:32.240 themselves to be so how will Bill Blair move forward on that file that's a big thing you're
00:04:36.760 going to have to watch in the months ahead as he really takes on this portfolio now the other big
00:04:41.280 security issue this one is a cross between Bill Blair and Francois-Philippe Champagne who is the new
00:04:46.580 foreign affairs minister and that is dealing with China coming up very soon in a couple weeks we will
00:04:53.380 have the one year anniversary of Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor being detained in Canada being held
00:05:00.480 hostage that's what it is let's call it what it is one year anniversary wow there's been no formal
00:05:07.500 charges laid against them there's no judicial process unfolding for them meanwhile Meng Wang
00:05:12.480 Zhu is walking around freely in Vancouver she's been arrested they say well she was arrested she's out
00:05:18.640 on bail but boy those are pretty liberal bail conditions for her right now so it is not a tit for
00:05:24.180 tat they are getting a much rougher ride than Meng Wang Zhu is getting very little progress being made on
00:05:29.900 that fall Dominic Barton the new ambassador to China well he did have a meeting with them okay
00:05:34.460 that's that's great but it's a shame that that is the thing that is being celebrated as great progress
00:05:40.180 one sit down with them one meeting we can do more we should expect more however
00:05:45.260 Champagne is going to need to say things tougher with China is he going to do it reports surfaced that
00:05:52.420 a couple years ago he was going soft on China said ah they're just like us go along to get along all that
00:05:57.920 sort of stuff it does not bode well now the one thing they want aside from releasing Meng Wang Zhu is
00:06:03.440 for Huawei to be approved to give them access to help build our 5g grid something a lot of our allies a
00:06:10.880 lot of security experts a bipartisan issue people on all sides of the aisle say do not do this ban Huawei
00:06:18.800 well Ralph Goodo previously when he was in the post he said this decision will be made after the election we
00:06:23.840 don't want to politicize it we want to leave it up to the experts all that jazz well we've been hearing
00:06:29.120 from the experts all over the place former diplomats academics people in the tech sector and they say
00:06:34.880 ban Huawei is Bill Blair going to make that announcement is he going to chat with Champagne
00:06:40.160 about it and they're going to acknowledge this is the inevitable state of things as it appears to be
00:06:44.080 to anyone who is looking at this situation with eyes wide open or are they just going to keep dragging
00:06:50.000 it along not wanting to upset China and willing to continue to see themselves sort of be pushed
00:06:55.520 around under the umbrella of Chinese communist authoritarian values those are the big questions
00:07:00.880 right now the national security file that Trudeau's new cabinet faces we will see they rise to the
00:07:07.280 occasion right now well there are reasons to not be so optimistic