Juno News - December 02, 2025


Joe Warmington: Canada’s icons are DISAPPEARING

Topics
Mentioned
Danielle Smith BOOED over Ottawa energy deal Professor ARRESTED for pushing back against unmarked graves narrative

Episode Stats


Length

19 minutes

Words per minute

185.67

Word count

3,593

Sentence count

251

Harmful content

Toxicity

7

sentences flagged

Hate speech

4

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Joe Warmington of the Toronto Sun joins us to talk about the death of the O Canada flag, the removal of our national anthem, and the growing threat of a carbon tax. Plus, more devastating economic news from Algoma Steel and more.

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 .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Well, Canada, since 1980, it's been our official national anthem played at hockey games, citizenship
00:00:11.080 ceremonies, or Remembrance Day events. It is a proud symbol of our country, or at least it used
00:00:16.860 to be. Not only has the song been butchered at major sporting events lately, like the World Series,
00:00:22.180 these days, the mere act of playing a recording of the song on city property can land a patriot
00:00:27.880 in trouble with the police, just ask 58-year-old Scott Yeomans. Let's listen.
00:00:51.200 Anyway, Justin Trudeau once said he wanted Canada to be the first post-national state.
00:00:55.740 Has the shabby treatment of old Canada become a symbol of our decline?
00:01:01.200 The Toronto Sun's Joe Warmington has been writing about this story, and he'll be joining us shortly
00:01:06.160 with his take. More devastating economic news. Algoma Steel announcing a layoff of 1,000 workers.
00:01:13.260 That's about 40% of its staff. The company plans to close its blast furnace and coke-making operations
00:01:19.500 in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario. Conservative Pierre Polyev says Prime Minister Mark Carney broke his promise
00:01:25.960 to those workers.
00:01:27.120 The Prime Minister looked them in the eye and promised he would protect their jobs,
00:01:31.560 that he would negotiate a win, and I quote, have a deal by July 21st, but it was a bait-and-switch
00:01:37.640 that is costing people their livelihoods. On top of that, liberals are hammering the steel mill
00:01:42.280 with a higher industrial carbon tax. Isn't it bad enough that the Prime Minister broke his promise
00:01:47.520 on trade? Why is he going ahead with an industrial carbon tax that will kill even more steel jobs?
00:01:53.260 Obviously, our thoughts are with the workers affected by the unjustified and unjustifiable
00:01:58.280 tariffs imposed by the White House, and we'll continue to work with them as Algoma Steel is going
00:02:06.360 through a difficult situation, to say the least. The U.S. tariffs did hurt Algoma's steel exports.
00:02:12.520 The federal and Ontario governments offered the company a low-interest $500 million loan in September
00:02:18.360 as it transitions to electric steel-making. While Premier Daniel Smith says she doesn't blame
00:02:25.160 Albertans for booing her during her party's convention on the weekend, he says Albertans have taken
00:02:30.840 10 years of abuse from the federal government and want to see action on pipeline construction,
00:02:35.880 not just hear more talk. Folks are worried about divisions within the party, and I think a lot
00:02:39.960 of people probably heard the boos that were directed to you at one point, but just some reassurance for
00:02:44.280 UCP members or all Albertans, and just your thoughts on how the AGM went? Well, I would say that
00:02:50.920 people, when I asked, when I asked the crowd, I hope you agree that Canada works better today than a
00:02:58.040 couple of days ago. That was the reaction that they gave. There's some proving ground that Canada needs to
00:03:03.160 do. We've been pummeled for 10 years, and a single MOU 24 hours before our AGM may not have been enough
00:03:13.800 to quell everybody's concerns immediately, but that's why we've got to work together on it. It's a process.
00:03:20.120 Last week, Prime Minister Carney in Alberta signed an energy accord that Premier Smith says is a
00:03:25.480 significant step forward for the energy industry in that province. While the leader of the Green Party is
00:03:30.760 having buyer's remorse over her decision to vote in favor of the federal budget, Elizabeth May says
00:03:37.880 she won't make that mistake again. She says the energy accord signed with Alberta and the federal
00:03:43.880 government amounts to a significant betrayal. I'm now joined by my good friend Joe Warmington of the
00:03:51.160 Toronto Sun. Joe's been a long-time journalist and columnist at that paper in the course of, what,
00:03:57.320 three, four decades? Something like that? And I have to ask you, Joe, first of all,
00:04:02.760 congratulations on that great coverage that you're doing on the fact that so many of our icons are
00:04:08.600 disappearing. I start off the show asking about whether O Canada was in fact, in a sense, being
00:04:15.240 canceled. First off, butchered during the World Series, and now we see people arrested because they
00:04:22.120 are playing the song on city property. It's absolutely ridiculous, but is it a sign that 0.91
00:04:28.120 the country is kind of disappearing, that our national identity is evaporating before our eyes? 0.99
00:04:34.040 Well, you can call for the death of Jews over there on Nathan Phillips Square, but don't dare 0.96
00:04:40.040 play the O Canada or even have a Canadian flag. This guy, Scott Yeomans, would make a great guest for 0.97
00:04:46.920 Juneau News sometime. You know, that's all he does. He's a patriot. He's not a protester,
00:04:51.960 ironically. They say they're treating him like a protester. He needs to have permits and this and
00:04:57.000 that. And then, you know, this is what we do. I mean, we beat people up. We have the authority to do
00:05:01.560 that. And yet you can have people walking around pro-Hamas all day long, all kinds of other things.
00:05:06.920 I mean, they camp out on Nathan Phillips Square with tents for weeks and there's no answer. If I go down
00:05:12.120 there as a reporter and I have, I get an umbrella, you know, hit into my eye or my ear or hit with it
00:05:17.880 and threatened and they follow you out. And, you know, there's no security there. They're on an old
00:05:21.880 guy who was on a pension, disability pension. It was a forklift driver. That's what our solution for 0.99
00:05:27.400 it was. And, you know, they, on the night of Nuit Blanche, they actually had on city hall,
00:05:33.720 it said love revolution and this kind of stuff right on city hall. So they had to talk about revolution
00:05:40.920 and this kind of stuff. And this guy's not allowed to have a Canadian flag or play out Canada.
00:05:45.240 It's really sick. And, you know, this stuff is permeating through, Mark, all of Toronto and
00:05:51.320 other parts of Canada. I mean, Ryerson's not called Ryerson anymore. It's some other name.
00:05:56.680 They changed the name of Dundas Street to reflect his MTU. Hudson's Bay is gone and there's no Christmas
00:06:03.240 windows anymore. It goes on and on and on. Little by little, we're losing Canada, including in the
00:06:09.880 Sioux where they lost a thousand jobs. So, you know, we're covering it. We're fighting back,
00:06:14.360 but they've got a head of steam for sure. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's not just the anthem.
00:06:19.560 I mean, it's so many of our iconic figures that seem to be targeted by whomever, whether it's
00:06:25.640 globalists or leftists, people who for some reason have it in for our country. I mean, we had a prime
00:06:31.400 minister elected in 2015 who seemed to do everything in his power to destroy national pride and instill
00:06:40.680 national shame. And I'm talking about the whole issue around the mass graves that weren't actually
00:06:47.000 graves, you know, at the residential school. So he heaped abuse on this country. And I'm wondering if we're
00:06:54.440 reaping the fruits of that period of time when so much of so many of our politicians seem to be
00:07:02.040 negative and down on our country. Is this the byproduct of essentially 10 years of attack on
00:07:08.840 what Canada has been for well over a century? It absolutely is. It's orchestrated. It's coordinated.
00:07:15.480 It's also funded. It's a breakdown of Canada. You replace what was here and you replace it with,
00:07:22.120 you know, all kinds of other things that weren't here instead of sort of embracing it and bringing
00:07:28.520 it in and it permeates inside of the culture, which we've talked about a lot on your radio show. I
00:07:33.640 mean, Phil Esposito and names like that, Mahavlitch, those are Canadian names, but they're Slavic or
00:07:40.200 Italian names, but they're Canadian names. But somehow it's changed. You know, you mentioned that
00:07:46.280 under Prime Minister Trudeau, I mean, we had that phony thing where they got everyone stirred up about the
00:07:50.760 graves and it was always not real. And we knew it wasn't real because the people that ran those
00:07:55.960 schools were good people. There was mistakes as there are in any school. And there's obviously
00:08:01.320 things that shouldn't have happened, but mostly it was, uh, many people were well-intentioned and
00:08:06.360 they wouldn't cover up the murders of people. And we knew that as Canadians, we knew that the next
00:08:10.840 thing they did was go after Sir Johnny McDonald. You know, they took him off the, you know, off the $10
00:08:16.440 bill and replaced him with a racial kind of story, which is an important story, but it's not the same
00:08:22.280 as the first prime minister. Then they took down all his statues and they ripped them down, ripped his
00:08:26.280 hat off. They ripped down Queen Victoria as well. Anything that represents Canada, now they're going
00:08:31.000 after Wayne Gretzky, Bobby Orr, people like that. Anything that's really Canadian, they make it sullied 1.00
00:08:37.320 and dirty and it's wrong. And you know, some of us fight for it, but not very many do it. And of course,
00:08:42.920 Don Cherry is the biggest example of that. It's all targeted. It's planned and the gutless media
00:08:49.640 lets it happen. I remember when Don Cherry went down, I looked around and there was no one,
00:08:55.400 no one that cared about that. They didn't fight for him. And now they're paying the price for that
00:08:59.800 because when he went out, so did the guy that can speak freely. He's gone. And then everybody's
00:09:06.360 afraid. You know, everywhere I go, I get recognized and people come up to me and they say, you know,
00:09:11.640 how's Don? How's Don? They all want to know. We miss him on Coach's Corner. You tell me,
00:09:16.440 as good a broadcaster as you are, Mark, has anybody ever gone in to every bar across the
00:09:21.800 country and stopped the music and turned up the broadcast? I mean, I'm not, obviously they should,
00:09:27.480 in your case and in our little thing here, but with Don, they did that, didn't they?
00:09:31.240 I mean, there's no one that had the power that Don Cherry did and they listened to him. And it wasn't
00:09:36.040 just about hockey. It was about Canada, about our troops, our soldiers, you know,
00:09:40.680 our firefighters, all of that. And I'm proud to have stood up for him. I'm glad that Hazel McCallion,
00:09:46.680 the late great mayor of Mississauga did as well. The rest of you, you let it happen,
00:09:51.400 including you, Ron McLean. I hope you watch this because while you make a million dollars a year,
00:09:55.960 you're making it, that's blood money because the guy that helped you make it, his name is Donald S.
00:10:00.440 Cherry, your old partner, who stood up for you when you were fired twice. And I know that because
00:10:06.920 I was in the middle of it also fighting for you, but you let him hang on the vine. And now we've got
00:10:12.760 a guy like Scott Yeomans facing police all around him and humiliating him and to get off of our Nathan
00:10:19.560 Phillips Square. Nathan Phillips wouldn't have stood for it. He was the first Jewish mayor of Toronto.
00:10:24.200 And he's got to sit there and have all these people that are talking about Israel and Jews
00:10:29.080 on the land that he is named after him. It's gross. And I'm glad that I have the opportunity here to 0.93
00:10:35.720 say it with you today here on Gino News. This is the truth. I mean, I know that you back the blue
00:10:40.600 and always have, but what are the police thinking here? I mean, they hate it. They hate it. They're
00:10:46.200 embarrassed. They don't know what to do. It comes from Olivia Chow. Hamas runs Toronto. I can't say it
00:10:52.680 runs all of Canada, but it runs Toronto. It's in charge here. And I saw that on October 8th when I went to the
00:10:58.200 first protest at Bloor and Young, and I was taking a picture of people breaking the law,
00:11:04.120 going up on this scaffolding on this building and lighting off torches. And they're doing all
00:11:08.760 this death to Israel stuff. Israel hadn't even responded. They just were the victim of a heinous
00:11:14.120 attack. 1200 dead at that time. We knew of 240 hostages. And these people were celebrating out there
00:11:20.760 and the police were pushing us away. In fact, I was punched by a police officer in the middle of that,
00:11:26.120 just taking some pictures. And so I knew right there, and I told you this on your radio show,
00:11:31.640 that we're in for some treat coming ahead, because I knew right then that Hamas was in charge, 0.99
00:11:36.600 and they are. Under Mayor Olivia Chow, she lets it all go. She didn't go to the one year anniversary
00:11:42.600 of that heinous act, which was the most amount of Jews that were killed in one day since the Holocaust.
00:11:49.240 We've had many Kristallnacht kind of events here. Now we're getting a little off topic, but it does fit back
00:11:54.920 to what Canada should be. And Canada should be a place where everybody's accepted equal,
00:12:00.200 not Hamas in charge. Canada's in charge. And again, the police officers, if they could,
00:12:06.120 they would never do these things. I mean, there's very few that would do it. But they follow orders,
00:12:11.160 and people say, well, you shouldn't do that. But I mean, we all have a boss. And if the boss says to do
00:12:16.360 something, you do it. It's a little different for people like us that have opinions and we get paid for
00:12:21.240 them. But even us, it's not easy all the time. So, you know, I'm not upset with the police overall.
00:12:28.280 They only go so far with it. But I don't like it. I got to tell you something. When you've got
00:12:33.640 reporters being arrested and, you know, I mean, obviously, Kian Bexty has been through a lot of
00:12:39.640 that, he gets assaulted all the time. And people stand there and go, well, you get something hit
00:12:45.160 over your head and the police are standing there and they don't care. That's not right. I mean,
00:12:49.800 you've got to protect the media and it's got to be all voices allowed, including, you know,
00:12:55.880 the people you may not agree with. And that includes people like us. We should be allowed
00:13:00.280 to do this. And it shouldn't, you know, shouldn't be stopped. And I'm glad that we're doing it here
00:13:04.680 today. I want to ask you about Dretzky, because you have been writing about that. Now, recently,
00:13:10.040 he was photographed at a golfing event with President Trump. And again, he got attacked
00:13:16.600 by people who think that he's a disgrace to the country, essentially having turned his back on
00:13:22.440 Canada. It's entirely unfair. I know this has kind of wounded him a little bit. I mean,
00:13:29.400 he's a tough guy, certainly, having played hockey all those years. But, you know, nobody wants to
00:13:34.680 be attacked by your own countrymen who think that you're a turncoat just because you play golf with
00:13:40.360 the president. Isn't that right? Well, I got this, you know, it's a scenario that's so simple. You get
00:13:45.400 a phone call, do you want to go golfing with President Trump, Brooks Kopka, who's a five-time
00:13:50.280 major golf champion, five times. And you go with Bret Baier from, you know, one of the top
00:13:55.640 broadcasters for Fox News. You're going to say, no, I want to please Olivia Chow or some NDPer 1.00
00:14:01.480 so that they don't say something mean about me. A person with 37 Twitter followers. I mean,
00:14:06.840 you know, you go. And when he goes, he represents Canada all the time. I mean,
00:14:10.520 President Trump said that in one of his tweets back there, the last time they attacked Wayne
00:14:15.400 for the stuff that at the Four Nations Cup and all that, which was all manufactured,
00:14:21.080 all designed to hurt Wayne, all part of what we've talked about here today. No, it's not right. I
00:14:27.000 don't know if I think it does. He's in the Wayne Gretzky business. That's what he does. You know,
00:14:33.240 he does Wayne Gretzky. So certainly, but they lie about him too. And I wrote this and I talked about it
00:14:39.160 on your radio show back in the day. The New York Times said that he's an American citizen
00:14:44.440 and he's a naturalized American and everybody reported that CNN and all that. And I asked Wayne
00:14:49.640 about that. And he said, no, I never took an American citizenship. I travel on a Canadian passport.
00:14:55.160 When I moved to Los Angeles in 1988, I promised my parents I would always stay Canadian. Now,
00:15:01.400 his wife is American. His kids, some of them are American. I think all of them were born in the US,
00:15:06.760 but he's Canadian and everybody knows that. When he walks into a room, there's a Canadian guy. And
00:15:12.200 that's enough for me. He didn't have to kiss the butt of some, you know, hardcore leftists that 0.97
00:15:17.240 hate him anyway and hate Don Cherry and hate President Trump. It'll be interesting to lead this 0.97
00:15:22.680 test when, you know, when it happens, when Wayne is asked by Prime Minister Mark Carney to go to an event
00:15:30.280 and see if they are upset about that. Because if they ask Wayne, he'll do it.
00:15:34.280 Any time a prime minister or president call or anybody in a charity calls, he's there. And,
00:15:40.520 you know, the charity work that he's done with the blind and with the Wayne Gretzky Foundation is
00:15:45.000 more than any of the people that hate him combined. And I know that like us covering it because he
00:15:51.800 wants it to be kind of private and give people their dignity, but he does a lot of charity as a lot of
00:15:57.240 those celebrities do. You know, Sidney Crosby and Mary Lemieux, they all do a lot too, as they should.
00:16:04.280 It'll be interesting to see where this all fix us. I mean, if we're heading in this direction,
00:16:10.040 at what point do people push back? Like when I see this guy, Scott Yeomans, you know, pushing back
00:16:15.880 saying, you know, I have every right to play the national anthem at Nathanfield Square. You know,
00:16:21.080 I like that because it shows that not everybody likes what's going on in terms of the attack on
00:16:27.480 the fabric of this country. And so maybe, you know, we need a lot more Scott Yeomans out there.
00:16:34.280 You say, no, you know, I love my country. I support my country and I'm going to express my views about
00:16:41.800 that regardless of whether you think, you know, I'm not woken up or not. Last word to you, my friend.
00:16:47.640 Well, I think it's happening. I don't think that a few loud voices on social media
00:16:52.360 will end Canada. I think a thousand jobs in the Sioux and other things like that could, you know,
00:16:58.520 this phony MOU thing with the pipeline that we all know is never going to happen because it's going to
00:17:03.800 get blocked, as opposed to someone saying, this is Canada, we're doing it. It's life or death for
00:17:08.600 this country. So, you know, we do need some people that have the leadership, obviously, on your
00:17:14.920 network here. There's lots of people with those ideas. And it's, you know, as long as they're
00:17:20.360 illegal and they don't take away the right to be able to do this. And I see the government is messing
00:17:24.920 around with different rules they want to bring in to make it hard. But at the core of it, you know,
00:17:29.800 whether someone's new to Canada or whether there's someone that's been here for generations,
00:17:34.440 they don't really want Canada to die. They don't really like the extremists. So I hope that that's my
00:17:41.560 last word is that I do have faith that most people, you know, while some are afraid to lose
00:17:47.160 their livelihoods, the pandemic really hurt, you know, Mark. I mean, that's the big one where
00:17:52.360 they crushed those truckers and they made people stay inside and they forced vaccinations,
00:17:57.480 even though they say they didn't, they did. And that broke a lot of people. It really did. It scared
00:18:03.000 them and they fell into line and they did it for that reason. But there are a lot of people that
00:18:07.800 eventually will say no. The other thing I want to say is the highway heroes, which is a big thing
00:18:13.640 that showed Canada right there. That's the organic street, Canada. And that was people from all walks
00:18:19.480 of life, all races and religions went to those bridges and lined up on those highways and went to
00:18:25.240 CFB Trenton for the repatriation of our fine men and women that came back in caskets and bravely fought.
00:18:32.120 And then what, 20 years later, they handed it back to the very people that killed them.
00:18:37.000 That broke a lot of confidence too. So we've got to stick for something. Stay with it. Stay with
00:18:42.360 Don Cherry, stay with Bobby Orr, stay with Wayne Gretzky, stay with Sir Johnny MacDonald and remember
00:18:47.960 our traditions, our history and be proud of it. We should be proud of it because those were all
00:18:51.720 great people, as are the people that are watching here today. Thank you. Joe Warmington. You can
00:18:56.920 check out his fantastic reporting and writing in the pages of the Toronto Sun. Thank you so much,
00:19:01.320 Joe. Great chatting with you once again. Thank you. And that is it for this edition of
00:19:05.960 Straight Up. Appreciate you tuning in, my friends. Let's do it again real soon, shall we? Until then,
00:19:10.840 bye-bye for now.