Juno News - February 15, 2020


Majority of First Nations support Canadian energy


Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

185.70462

Word count

640

Sentence count

32

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Wet'suwet'en First Nations block the Coastal Link project, and are demanding the federal government backpedal on its decision to allow it to go ahead. I talk about the growing chorus of pro-development, pro-growth First Nations voices out there, and why we should all support them.

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 .
00:00:00.000 If there is one silver lining to all of this shutdown and blockades that we've
00:00:09.600 seen that have been grinding our country and perhaps our economy to a halt, with
00:00:13.920 all these protests allegedly about Wet'suwet'en First Nations opposing
00:00:18.600 coastal link BC project, which they don't, which the stats show that actually the
00:00:23.600 vast majority of them supported, if there is one silver lining to it, it is that
00:00:28.000 we are seeing this growing chorus of pro-development, pro-growth First Nations
00:00:32.920 voices out there. It's really a fantastic thing to see and it should be an
00:00:37.720 opportunity for all Canadians, I think, regardless of political stripe, to get
00:00:41.080 behind these people. Because I think most people in the country agree that these
00:00:44.440 stories that we've seen over the years, over the decades of First Nations
00:00:47.800 hardships and problems and communities and reserves, they're really upsetting
00:00:52.780 things to see. Nobody wants their fellow countrymen to not be doing well and it is
00:00:56.140 a shame that in a country as developed as in Canada, there are some communities, some
00:01:00.220 First Nations communities that persist in third-world conditions. Where we diverge 1.00
00:01:04.660 is, of course, the solution to all of it. Is it that we need to go back and deal with
00:01:08.860 sovereignty issues and settler colonialism, the stuff people hashtag about? Do we need
00:01:14.320 to do that sort of existential, academic, progressive conversation? Do we need just
00:01:18.900 more government, more money, pardon me, from the government? Again and again, more money, more money. Or do we need
00:01:24.260 things like less government? Do we need more development? Do we need to completely
00:01:28.340 overhaul the Indian Act? You get my point. There's a whole bunch of different
00:01:31.400 perspectives on what to do and how to move forward. Sometimes I think when we talk
00:01:35.600 about this, though, it's always people looking from the outside looking in. People
00:01:40.580 who are not in those communities kind of saying this is how we should solve the
00:01:43.460 problems in these communities. What we're hearing now more than ever, though, is First
00:01:49.020 Nations people themselves, leaders on the ground in their communities saying this is
00:01:54.300 what we want. We want development. We want growth. So many interesting things that have
00:01:59.820 surfaced in the past few days, this past week when Canada's been grinding to a halt. The Fort
00:02:04.620 McKay, Métis Nation, they are threatening the federal government with a lawsuit if a project 0.85
00:02:12.220 doesn't go ahead. They're referring to the Frontier Tech mine project. If you reject that project,
00:02:18.300 we'll sue you. Wow. We're used to almost hearing the other way around. In fact, you just skim that
00:02:22.140 story in that sentence, you know, oh, they're going to sue if it goes ahead. No, it's the complete
00:02:25.900 opposite. One BC activist in the Wet'suwet'en community, she's now filing a complaint with the
00:02:32.700 United Nations. Oh, what is she complaining about? Probably that Canada's failing to live up to its 0.99
00:02:38.620 commitments with some UN Indigenous declaration. No, the exact opposite. She's complaining
00:02:45.660 that the UN Indigenous office is saying we stand with the Wet'suwet'en people against the Coastal
00:02:50.620 Link project. She's going, what are you talking about? We're in support of this. Stop misrepresenting
00:02:55.580 us. Stop lying about our views. More and more people coming forward, more and more powerful voices
00:03:01.180 taking a stand and saying this is what we want for our own communities. And growing the pot,
00:03:06.780 growing prosperity, growing all of the resources that are at their disposal, that's going to be
00:03:11.260 the way for everybody, I think, regardless of political background, to say, yes, let's help our
00:03:16.380 First Nations prosper and thrive. It's a truly remarkable thing to see. And I hope at the end
00:03:20.860 of this messy escapade, I hope that we take that lesson away and that we take the ball and really run with it.