Juno News - May 11, 2023


LAWTON: New passport ditches our heritage


Episode Stats

Length

6 minutes

Words per Minute

198.06642

Word Count

1,318

Sentence Count

80

Misogynist Sentences

3

Hate Speech Sentences

4


Summary


Transcript

00:00:00.000 Let's talk a little bit about the gateway to the world from Canada, which is your passport.
00:00:06.740 Actually, my passport is probably somewhere around.
00:00:08.800 I could have held it up as a prop, and then all the spies out there can just write down
00:00:14.020 the serial numbers that might happen to flash across the screen, but I assure you no one
00:00:17.640 is pretending to be me.
00:00:18.660 I don't even like being me most of the time, but the thing about the passports is that
00:00:23.860 they are getting an overhaul, which the government has unveiled today, and it's going over pretty
00:00:30.800 much as well as you'd expect from an announcement that involves artwork.
00:00:34.920 So let's start with the cover design.
00:00:37.880 The cover of the new passports is not like the old coat of arms design here, but this
00:00:44.460 one, they've decided the coat of arms needed a modern silhouette outline of a maple leaf
00:00:50.020 and what is that, Arial font of the word Canada in the top right, and then on the back you
00:00:55.400 get this little like, you know, twing, is it Arial, Sean is the font expert.
00:01:00.380 He says it's Arial thin, so not just Arial, Arial thin, so they just like went with the
00:01:05.260 free fonts you get with Microsoft Word to design our passports, and then you have the little
00:01:09.980 red sort of ivy-like, that's not how maple leaves grow, but I guess we're just rolling
00:01:15.260 with it then.
00:01:15.760 So that's the outside.
00:01:16.600 Now, I mean, I don't love the outside, but I also don't like change in general.
00:01:20.680 I don't hate the outside as much as some people.
00:01:23.540 The inside is a different story altogether.
00:01:27.020 Let's just cycle through some of these.
00:01:29.140 I don't know if I want to critique everyone individually.
00:01:31.280 Oh, there we go.
00:01:31.940 You get many of them.
00:01:32.940 So it's like this weird sort of sand art design of like painting by numbers.
00:01:38.480 We've got someone doing a sort of long jump on the grass, which is a very Canadian activity,
00:01:46.000 given that it snows for, you know, 360 days of the year.
00:01:49.420 What else do we have here?
00:01:50.620 My little monitor that I had, I can't actually see this enough.
00:01:53.780 So I'm like, I'm going back to the old monitor here to analyze this.
00:01:57.480 What else do we have?
00:01:59.660 We have, is that like a just geese?
00:02:01.720 Okay.
00:02:01.940 Well, I'll give them geese.
00:02:03.940 That seems like a pretty reasonable Canadian symbol there.
00:02:09.400 What else do we have?
00:02:10.340 See, some of the stuff I can't even quite make out what it is.
00:02:13.780 That's like the awkward part of this.
00:02:16.580 But the whole point of this is that this is like not Canadian.
00:02:21.760 It's not aesthetically pleasing.
00:02:23.900 It's not culturally relevant.
00:02:25.580 And if you look at what they removed, it's insane.
00:02:29.560 They removed Terry Fox.
00:02:31.980 They removed Vimy Ridge.
00:02:34.080 The, oh, you can take that down, Sean.
00:02:36.000 People are like, people are tired of those four images now,
00:02:38.280 because they're going to be seeing them for like the next 20 years.
00:02:40.540 Oh, he says it's already down.
00:02:41.720 On my screen, it's still up.
00:02:42.920 So I'm just the one that is forced to stare at it until the end of the show, I guess.
00:02:47.080 But the thing about this is that they've like taken down things that were part of Canada's history.
00:02:55.220 And again, I remember all the hand-wringing when someone dared put like a Canadian flag
00:02:59.140 on the Terry Fox statue at the Freedom Convoy,
00:03:01.400 and they were saying it was desecrating Terry Fox.
00:03:03.780 And now the Liberals have just like stripped Terry Fox off the passport altogether.
00:03:10.220 Melissa Lantzman, who is the Conservative MP, tweeted out,
00:03:13.240 a bunch of Liberal politicians got together to talk about how to fix their abysmal record
00:03:17.560 of passport delivery and unacceptable wait times.
00:03:20.920 And instead, they landed on kick Terry Fox out of the passport and cancel the Battle of Vimy Ridge.
00:03:26.600 Let's replace them with a man.
00:03:28.900 This is great.
00:03:29.820 Let's replace them with a man holding a rake and pictures of a boy about to go swimming.
00:03:35.100 So actually, the boy going swimming is about to go into the Atlantic to swim across the ocean
00:03:41.480 because he's not vaccinated.
00:03:43.040 So the Liberals aren't letting him get on a plane.
00:03:44.940 That's what the boy swimming represents.
00:03:47.580 The guy with the rake is representing all of the shredded passports of people
00:03:53.200 that don't want to look at them anymore that are trying to just get rid of them
00:03:56.320 to throw them in the big dumpster when the design changes.
00:03:58.980 So now, I don't know if they're going to pre-order this stuff,
00:04:02.080 like how long it's going to take if there's a change in government next year.
00:04:05.760 It's going to be like the old Ontario license plates where the new guy comes in
00:04:09.620 and just overhauls with a new design that he likes better,
00:04:13.120 and then everyone gets mad about the change because they've just grown familiar with it.
00:04:16.700 But I will say, I was buying a present for my nephew.
00:04:22.060 It was his birthday recently, and I went to Toys R Us.
00:04:24.340 And I don't often frequent toys stores, let alone this one.
00:04:29.860 But what struck me is that in this little potted plant right in front of the toy store,
00:04:35.640 there was a mother goose and her goslings, I think they're called, right?
00:04:41.500 Not like Ryan Gosling, but is it goslings?
00:04:43.980 Yeah.
00:04:44.520 Sean says it's goslings.
00:04:46.180 I'm not a...
00:04:46.840 This is what happens when you don't commune with nature, as one should.
00:04:49.600 Maybe I should spend more time with the Canadian passports.
00:04:51.880 But, and there was like a father goose, I presume.
00:04:55.580 I mean, you never want to be...
00:04:56.680 He could have been gender non-binary, but I believe a father goose standing guard,
00:05:00.120 which is a familiar sight because whenever there's a mother goose,
00:05:03.040 you got to run because there's a father goose nearby and they will like dive bomb at you.
00:05:06.740 I once had to kick one in Detroit because he was flying at me.
00:05:10.200 But nevertheless, the thing about this is that they had like sort of just seeded this area to the geese.
00:05:16.340 Like the geese won.
00:05:17.200 And instead, they had like set up all this caution tape and put signs so you couldn't actually go in the store the way you normally would.
00:05:25.100 You had to like walk around.
00:05:26.920 And this is what happens.
00:05:28.080 When a goose decides that they are going to camp out somewhere, we all just capitulate because the geese actually run the country.
00:05:34.900 And sometimes when you look at, for example, what the liberals passed at their convention,
00:05:38.280 you'd wonder if the geese would do a better job than some of the people involved.
00:05:42.080 But all of that is to say, I'm actually prepared to say the goose should be on the passport, even if we don't like them.
00:05:47.560 They are generally our overlords.
00:05:50.020 But then, yeah, like the guy raking and the guy swimming.
00:05:53.920 And there's like a weird, so on, maybe we put the, put them back up there.
00:05:58.840 Page 36 specifically, 36 and 37 on the passport.
00:06:02.980 There's like a polar bear on the right, and on the left, there's like a, it's like a penguin, but it kind of looks like a ladybug.
00:06:11.840 And if you tilt your head ever so, it looks like the hunchback of Notre Dame.
00:06:15.500 So, and then underneath him, there's a fish.
00:06:18.120 So, it's probably a penguin and not Quasimodo.
00:06:20.640 But the whole point is, I actually wonder if AI could have done a better job at a fraction of the price to the federal government.
00:06:27.980 And I, just to like play around, I tried to spit out a couple of AI generated images, and they all look like very weird, like Soviet passport designs, which, you know, maybe these days is more accurate.
00:06:38.720 But anyway.