Juno News - November 10, 2019


Pro-life movement optimistic despite Trudeau win

Topics
pro-life movement optimism
Hosted by
Andrew Lawton
Mentioned
Justin Trudeau Alyssa Golob Jonathan Van Maron Andrew Scheer
This is why Remembrance Day is so important Uniting the country by fighting climate change？

Episode Stats


Length

7 minutes

Words per minute

188.71

Word count

1,334

Sentence count

63

Harmful content

Misogyny

3

sentences flagged

Hate speech

3

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Pro-life Canada's Pro-Life Conference highlights the progress that has been made in the pro-life movement since the election of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. But there is much more work still to be done, and a lot of optimism still needs to be made in order for pro-lifers to have a voice in the political system.

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 .
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 I'm here in Calgary at Life Canada's Pro-Life Conference, an organization that represents
00:00:11.160 numerous pro-life groups across the country. The theme for this year's conference, just a few
00:00:16.520 weeks after the federal election, is changes in the air. Now for a lot of pro-life Canadians who
00:00:22.760 have been very frustrated with the re-election of Justin Trudeau, who was not just pro-choice
00:00:27.800 himself but actively works against pro-life sentiment in the country and in his own party,
00:00:33.880 the message here has been fairly optimistic in fact. People suggesting that there is a lot to
00:00:39.420 be hopeful for and a lot to be proud of in the pro-life movement standing in Canada. One example
00:00:45.780 of this comes from Alyssa Golob, one of the co-founders of RightNow, a pro-life group that aims to
00:00:51.640 nominate and then elect pro-life candidates across the country. This is what Alyssa had to say. 0.57
00:00:57.380 Canada is now a more pro-life country today than it was before the election. Out of the 53
00:01:02.080 conservative pro-life MPs who are running for re-election, 52 of them got elected. And out
00:01:07.500 of the 22 additional conservative MPs, 15 of them are pro-life. So we now have more pro-life MPs sitting
00:01:12.600 in the House of Commons now than we did before the election. In Ontario, there are now more pro-life
00:01:17.860 MPPs than there are MPPs in the entire Liberal caucus. And in Alberta, when I moved here last year
00:01:23.200 to help in the provincial election, we helped over 52 pro-life candidates in the nomination process,
00:01:27.900 and the majority of them got elected, which resulted in Motion 506, an NDP motion to expand
00:01:34.240 abortion access being defeated a couple of weeks ago. That's very much the message that yes, there are 0.94
00:01:38.860 more pro-life members of Parliament in Canada now than there were before the election. They don't
00:01:44.040 comprise a majority, but it shows progress in her view. And also right now has been looking at success
00:01:49.600 in elections in Ontario and Alberta, where they've also managed to identify and elect pro-lifers
00:01:54.800 to be candidates first off, and then eventually to run and win in elections. What was interesting,
00:02:01.480 however, is really looking at some of the broader cultural issues here. And one of the things this
00:02:06.360 conference has done is focus on the various stages of the pro-life movement, from education
00:02:11.520 to nominating and electing candidates, to working within the political system and trying to advocate
00:02:17.940 and basically lobby politicians on pro-life legislation. How do you do that, however, when you're talking
00:02:24.400 about a government and a governing party that are hostile to pro-life values? I spoke about that with
00:02:31.560 Tabitha Ewart, who is a legal counsel and advisor for We Need a Law, a group that, as the name suggests,
00:02:37.840 focuses on pushing for a law in Canada on abortion. The only democracy in the world that doesn't have
00:02:44.340 any regulation on abortion is Canada. We need a law works to change that. Although she says there
00:02:49.940 are different pieces of legislation apart from prohibitions or limitations on abortion that are
00:02:55.860 on the table that are relevant to pro-lifers. This is what she said she's working on. One of the things
00:03:01.240 we just want to avoid doing is just yelling at our politicians that abortion is wrong without coming
00:03:05.920 up with any reasonable solutions. So that's one of the things why as an organization, we are always
00:03:10.160 advocating for our international standards law, right? Something that would have a 13-week gestational 0.67
00:03:13.960 limit and a waiting period and counseling for women going through an abortion. And it's working 0.90
00:03:18.340 alongside politicians, talking about strategy of how to introduce it, how to bring it up in
00:03:22.660 conversation with the media and with the general public. So there's lots that still needs to be
00:03:27.520 done, especially if there's any individual Canadians, just going to their politician and encouraging
00:03:31.580 them to be bold on this issue. And in terms of like with pro-abortion politicians, there's still a
00:03:36.780 lot of things that we have common ground with. I mean, 90-something percent of Canadians are against
00:03:41.700 sex selection abortion. That's something that everyone should be able to get on board with. 1.00
00:03:45.500 Things like being against the Canada summer jobs attestation. We saw party members of all parties
00:03:50.840 being uncomfortable with requiring people to attest that they support abortion. So there's lots of
00:03:56.340 things that can be done regardless of where someone's stance is on the issue. So these are some of the
00:04:00.220 themes, some of the reasons that people are optimistic, even with pro-lifers comprising a minority of the
00:04:07.040 representatives of the Parliament of Canada. Now let's talk about some of the cultural forces here.
00:04:12.780 I spoke to Jonathan Van Meren, author of a book about the culture war, about the cultural battles
00:04:18.360 that we see, and also himself a pro-life advocate working with the Canadian Centre for Bioethical Reform.
00:04:24.900 And he says that a lot of these big issues we see around the world are in fact showing that opinion
00:04:30.560 is shifting, that the pro-life message is being spread. The problem in North America,
00:04:36.160 the problem in Canada is that the media is out of alignment with the people. Here's what he had
00:04:42.040 to say about that. Look, I mean, Justin Trudeau won again. The media tried to make this about social
00:04:47.520 issues and really spin that as a negative conservative. Where do you think the culture
00:04:51.780 is on these things? Before the politics, the culture on these social issues now compared to
00:04:57.420 prior to the election? Well, interestingly, I think the best way to explain that is to contrast
00:05:02.760 what we see on the ground versus the political conversation. So with the organization I work for,
00:05:07.560 the Canadian Centre for Bioethical Reform, we're going door to door every day. We're talking to people
00:05:11.740 and the vast majority of Canadians are very uncomfortable with the status quo, which is
00:05:16.200 abortion legal until birth. But 80% of Canadians don't know that fact. So for me, what strikes
00:05:21.620 me, especially during an election period, is this huge divide between what the politicians are saying
00:05:26.960 and what the people on the ground are saying. And the only reason it's so difficult for pro-life
00:05:31.100 issues to get traction in federal politics is due to the fact that so many Canadians are unaware
00:05:36.060 of the status quo that Trudeau himself is defending. So the message that the pro-life movement needs to
00:05:40.320 take away from an election like this is that we need to seize the offensive on this issue.
00:05:44.280 We need to highlight where Justin Trudeau, the Liberal Party, the NDP actually stand. And we
00:05:48.880 need to highlight the fact that we are the only nation, we are the only Western democracy with no
00:05:53.240 laws on abortion whatsoever. Because what we find from a lot of liberal voters door to door is that
00:05:58.320 they're appalled when they find this out, but almost none of them know this. This has been just a sampling
00:06:03.400 of some of the messaging we've heard at this conference by Life Canada. Again, pro-lifers who
00:06:08.860 you may think have lost the election are seeing gains being made. The media doesn't like it. This is
00:06:15.380 why the media has been relentlessly pursuing its anti-social conservative and quite frankly,
00:06:20.360 anti-religious messaging with Andrew Scheer. They seem to be threatened and working against this idea
00:06:27.820 that, hey, people think it's okay to talk about values. Canadians think it's okay to be pro-life.
00:06:33.200 Canadians think it's okay to elect politicians who are pro-life. The media is the one that is imposing
00:06:39.300 its vision on Canadians and it seems to be backfiring. We are covering this, talking about
00:06:45.980 the issues that the mainstream media isn't, covering perspectives the mainstream media isn't.
00:06:50.360 We can't do this alone. If you can head on over to tnc.news slash donate and tip it a few dollars to
00:06:56.940 keep the lights on and let us keep doing this work and speaking the truth, please do.
00:07:01.900 For True North from Calgary, I'm Andrew Lawton.