Juno News - May 11, 2023


LAWTON： New passport ditches our heritage

Mentioned
Terry Fox Arial Melissa Lantzman Ryan Gosling Vimy Ridge Sean
Is Twitter the future of media？ The Liberals are obsessed with abortion

Episode Stats


Length

6 minutes

Words per minute

198.07

Word count

1,318

Sentence count

86

Harmful content

Misogyny

3

sentences flagged

Hate speech

4

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Your passport has been given a facelake makeover, and it s going over pretty well... except for the artwork on the cover and the design on the inside. Also, the government removed Terry Fox from the passport, and replaced it with a man with a rake.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
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 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. 0.90
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. 1.00
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 1.00
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, 1.00
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. 0.93
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. 0.68
00:06:38.720 But anyway.