Juno News - September 12, 2025


MP Aaron Gunn on Kirk assassination & free speech

Topics
Charlie Kirk Assassin
Mentioned
Charlie Kirk Melissa Lansman Barbara Perry Pierre Poilievre Andrew Lawton Jamil Giovanni
Kirk’s influence on the next generation of activists Conservative MPs react to Ottawa targeting Juno News

Episode Stats


Length

6 minutes

Words per minute

150.14

Word count

980

Sentence count

34

Harmful content

Toxicity

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

On the heels of the shooting of Charlie Kirk, Conservative MP Adam Jourdain joins me to discuss his thoughts on the events surrounding his death, and why we must never allow political violence to be tolerated in our society.

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 You spoke a lot about, you know, Charlie Kirk today.
00:00:05.280 Could you just give a little bit, like, just your response to the assassination of Charlie Kirk yesterday?
00:00:13.460 Well, I just think it's a really important opportunity for all Canadians,
00:00:16.900 but especially those holding elected office, to be clear that we can never allow political violence.
00:00:23.100 We must always, we can never allow free speech and free expression to be intimidated in our country,
00:00:27.380 and we have to make sure and do everything in our power to make sure some of the violence
00:00:31.520 that we're seeing south of the border in the United States doesn't make its way up to Canada.
00:00:35.980 We have our share of issues, of course, but we have to make sure that those are always debated
00:00:41.120 and resolved peacefully through the democratic process and using these great democratic principles
00:00:47.480 that have been handed down to us by generations that came before us
00:00:51.740 and defended, by the way, through two world wars.
00:00:54.600 So I think that's an ultimate responsibility, and it was just very shocking to see what happened.
00:00:59.820 You see someone who was assassinated, who was murdered, essentially for the views that he held
00:01:04.480 and the speech that he was engaging in.
00:01:07.780 Absolutely.
00:01:08.540 And the state broadcaster, the CBC, did several pieces on this.
00:01:15.440 You commented on it on X.
00:01:17.460 There was also, this morning, hate expert, so-called hate expert, Barbara Perry, was interviewed,
00:01:26.840 and she kind of said the back, like, she was worried that this attack would be a backlash towards the left.
00:01:38.620 She said that Charlie Kirk wanted to execute queers, and I just want to get your response on what the CBC's reporting has been on this.
00:01:49.260 Yeah, I think, look, whether it's the CBC, it's always especially egregious with the CBC
00:01:54.380 because, of course, they're being subsidized with over a billion dollars in taxpayer money,
00:01:57.740 but, you know, when somebody, especially somebody who is engaging in free speech,
00:02:01.840 engaging in the free exchange of ideas, who's putting themselves out there courageously in pursuit of the truth,
00:02:07.700 is gunned down, that is not the time, 12 hours later, to contextualize their gunning down,
00:02:14.720 to somehow create this kind of social narrative,
00:02:19.900 yes, they were killed, but, or these are some of the most controversial views that Charlie...
00:02:25.300 No, now is the time to grieve, first and foremost,
00:02:28.920 to reflect back on what society and the state of public discourse has become,
00:02:35.720 and to, most importantly, reinforce that this is completely unacceptable,
00:02:40.000 that we can never allow or justify in any way, shape, or form political violence,
00:02:45.280 and we must always stand up for free speech, free expression, and the free exchange of ideas,
00:02:52.060 especially on our university and college campuses,
00:02:55.660 which Charlie Kirk was obviously most well-known for.
00:03:00.440 Absolutely, and you talked about public discourse,
00:03:02.320 and we've seen a lot of, like, backlash, or, you know, reactions to his death,
00:03:09.660 and celebrations of Charlie Kirk's death online.
00:03:13.980 What, do you think that has anything to do with, like, kind of the radicalization that may have led to Charlie Kirk's death?
00:03:22.540 Like, do you have a response on why this could have happened?
00:03:24.940 Well, look, there's always a couple things.
00:03:31.120 You're always going to have people on the fringes. 0.61
00:03:33.160 You're always going to have despicable, ugly souls out there that are celebrating violence and celebrating murder like this.
00:03:40.900 So, that's always going to be there.
00:03:43.280 With the internet now, it's out there for everybody to see.
00:03:46.400 We must always condemn it.
00:03:48.380 At the same time, we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that pretty much everyone across the political spectrum
00:03:53.620 has been outspoken in denouncing this.
00:03:56.340 This is a moment for people to come together, I think, in their denunciations
00:04:00.420 and their reaffirmation of the important values that we all hold as Canadians
00:04:05.040 and as members of Western civilization.
00:04:07.440 I do think it's also an opportunity for conservatives, I think, to make sure that we're separating our liberal friends
00:04:17.300 who we can disagree with proudly and disagree with strongly on matters of public policy
00:04:25.760 but continue to debate and exchange dialogue with as we compete for voters in our country
00:04:31.980 and elements of the hard left that have been moving away from liberalism,
00:04:37.680 moving away from the democratic process and resorting to more extreme tactics and rhetoric.
00:04:42.960 Things like words are violence or deplatforming people
00:04:47.000 or this anti-free speech wrapped up in terminology like anti-fascism and things like that.
00:04:53.740 So, I think it's important as responsible conservatives and leaders to separate those two things
00:04:57.900 as well as liberals because the vast majority of Canadians
00:05:02.500 and the vast majority of our political leaders are on the same page about this kind of stuff
00:05:06.540 so it's important for us to be very vocal about it
00:05:09.180 while also identifying those corrosive elements of our society that need to be called out,
00:05:15.640 that need to be put into the corner where they belong
00:05:20.740 or they have no place in the public square.
00:05:24.800 Is there anything I didn't ask you that you think is relevant
00:05:27.040 or just something you'd like to add?
00:05:30.980 I don't think so.
00:05:31.960 I just think that it's great to see people like Melissa Lansman and Pierre Polyev
00:05:37.920 and Andrew Lawton and Jamil Javani who were all very outspoken after this event.
00:05:41.720 I know, look, you read the headline and you see conservative political commentator assassinated.
00:05:48.040 I mean, up until five months ago, that was my byline, was conservative political commentator.
00:05:54.180 So it hits really close to home.
00:05:56.760 It makes you think about things.
00:05:58.680 But I think for most conservatives that I talk to,
00:06:01.320 it's made them more determined than ever to keep up this fight.
00:06:05.760 We're not going to be intimidated and we're just going to keep fighting for the truth
00:06:08.500 and for the courage of our convictions.
00:06:10.680 We're not going to beеляén. 0.96