Juno News - September 23, 2019


Liberal MP downplays Trudeau's blackface


Episode Stats


Length

2 minutes

Words per minute

172.02132

Word count

398

Sentence count

19


Summary

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

Justin Trudeau has admitted that he used blackface in a costume. But what does that mean for his supporters and supporters in the Hamilton East Stoney Creek riding of his re-election campaign? Is that a good or bad thing?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 Andrew Lawton here with True North. I'm outside the campaign office for re-election for Bob
00:00:14.700 Retina in Hamilton East Stoney Creek. Now Bob Retina I ran into yesterday when Justin Trudeau
00:00:21.120 was having a small rally in downtown Hamilton and I asked Retina what his constituents were saying
00:00:26.700 about the Justin Trudeau blackface controversy. The photos that emerged of Trudeau dressing up as
00:00:32.840 Aladdin, doing a little bit of a jig, doing Deo. We've seen the photos by now and here's what Bob
00:00:38.720 Retina had to say. How are you hearing if at all from constituents about the news of the Prime
00:00:43.520 Minister this past week and those past photos that emerged of him in blackface? It was mostly
00:00:48.840 dismissed as a waste of everybody's time, something that happened 20 years ago and people really
00:00:55.680 understood that this was not about mockery. It was an Arabian Nights costume and that's the end
00:01:05.760 of it. So I have to honestly tell you the people that I've talked to don't even want to talk about
00:01:12.380 it. They think it's so silly. The Prime Minister himself said it was racist though so is it fair
00:01:16.760 to say it's no big deal? You asked me what my people told me and I told you. Now today Bob Retina
00:01:25.080 is getting a bit of a boost from the central liberal campaign. Justin Trudeau is coming to town
00:01:29.840 to knock on doors to go visit some business owners in Stony Creek but what's interesting is that Trudeau
00:01:35.360 himself has acknowledged the episodes were racist. He used that exact word. He said that it was
00:01:41.140 something he was ashamed of and embarrassed by and something that had a great deal of an impact.
00:01:45.520 Now I recognize it was something racist to do. Whereas what his candidate and MP was saying here is
00:01:51.440 that it's no big deal dismissing the controversy entirely. I as you know have been banned from
00:01:56.760 covering all official liberal campaign events. This means that I'm basically just here and I don't
00:02:01.820 know how much access I'll get to the goings-on of today if any at all. But I am going to ask Justin
00:02:07.100 Trudeau does he think that what Bob Retina said about his constituents is an accurate reflection of
00:02:12.360 how Canadians feel about this and more importantly should that be how Canadians feel? For True North,
00:02:17.980 I'm Andrew Lawton.