Juno News - March 05, 2021


Saudi Arabia is “just a country we do business with”

Mentioned
Justin Trudeau Samara Bawadi Raif Badawi Chuck Todd Omar Khadr
More politicians need to push back on lockdowns Canadians have a right to have an opinion

Episode Stats


Length

5 minutes

Words per minute

197.51

Word count

1,127

Sentence count

74

Harmful content

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Justin Trudeau was asked if Saudi Arabia was an ally of Canada, and he said, "Nope, I wouldn't say that. They're a country we do business with, and we advocate for greater transparency, protection of human rights, and that type of thing."

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
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 So an odd thing happened this week when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was on Meet the Press
00:00:09.380 with Chuck Todd. He was asked directly whether or not he would consider Saudi Arabia an ally
00:00:14.960 of Canada. And he said bluntly, nope, I wouldn't say that. They're simply a country we do business
00:00:19.440 with. Is Saudi Arabia an ally to Canada? No, I wouldn't say it. They're a country we do business
00:00:28.360 with. They're a country that we continually advocate for greater transparency, greater human
00:00:34.340 rights, protection of women, of activists. Now, it's pretty odd for the Prime Minister to give such
00:00:40.980 a blunt and strong answer, to be honest, to really any question. And really any politician is usually
00:00:47.340 not the type to give such strong and blunt answers. Now, he said, you know, they're a country we do
00:00:52.100 business with and we advocate for greater transparency, protection of human rights and that type of thing.
00:00:56.400 So that was his quote. But I thought I would explore with everybody here, what was the
00:01:01.040 business that he was talking about? So what business do we have with Saudi Arabia? And why
00:01:04.180 have things gotten so bad? They would say they're not an ally. And, you know, you can think of it as
00:01:08.400 maybe colloquially an ally. So like a friendly country. I don't know if a lot of people would
00:01:12.700 say an ally as in having an actual alliance or some, you know, formal alliance, maybe like NATO or
00:01:17.980 something like this. But where did we get to? And, you know, how did we get to this to this place
00:01:22.900 where we are at? So really it started, the main thing started in probably 2018 when the Saudis
00:01:30.600 arrested two bloggers, Raif Badawi and her sister, Samara Badawi. They are human rights activists.
00:01:35.960 And so they had been advocating in Saudi Arabia and they were arrested. Now, Canada called for
00:01:41.480 their release and the Saudis basically said, you're interfering in our domestic affairs. And they
00:01:45.360 took great offense. Now, normally a lot of times a country will, you know, protest on other
00:01:49.520 countries actions, you know, issue a statement, maybe condemning them. But the Saudis went pretty 1.00
00:01:53.300 far on this one. They actually pulled their ambassador from Ottawa and they are ambassador
00:01:59.060 to Saudi Arabia persona non grata. So they gave him 48 hours to leave the country. They also suspended
00:02:03.980 all trade except for oil. And they froze all flights from the Saudi national airline to Toronto
00:02:11.420 and canceled scholarships for thousands of Saudi students. Now, that's sort of on the Saudi end. But 0.85
00:02:15.720 the other business that is going on, the main business, aside from some trade, you know, there's
00:02:20.080 some, some agricultural trade that goes on, but the main business that it seems the prime minister
00:02:24.220 was referring to was the sale of LAV3s. This is a wheeled military vehicle. They're used in Afghanistan
00:02:30.560 by the Canadian military. And so we're selling these LAV3s to Saudi Arabia. And the idea is that
00:02:39.840 a number of human rights organizations have accused Canada of enabling Saudi Arabia to conduct
00:02:45.640 a war in Yemen. Now, the war in Yemen is a really underreported story. I think there's not that much
00:02:51.560 with regard to it in the Canadian media. It's something maybe for another video, but long story
00:02:57.060 short, in a nutshell, you can think of it in many ways as a proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran
00:03:02.120 being conducted in Yemen. So that is sort of where we're at and the business that he's talking about.
00:03:07.500 But I think another sort of unusual thing, and I guess this really speaks to where we have come to
00:03:12.900 in our dispute with Saudi Arabia, is that to say it so bluntly, and you know, the prime minister
00:03:17.020 really is not the type, you know, you just listen to his statements, he's really not the type to give
00:03:20.860 these strong, blunt answers. He might, you know, elaborate on something or say, well, it's complicated.
00:03:26.580 You can, for example, take his, his, the way he was speaking about China when they asked him whether
00:03:33.020 or not that's a genocide in China. He, you know, did not give the strongest answer. He spoke around,
00:03:38.800 well, you know, kind of this and that. So this is quite unusual, but Saudi Arabia has an interesting
00:03:46.180 place in the current international order. Now they're one of the world's largest oil exporters.
00:03:51.580 In terms of oil producers, America was largest in 2020, followed by Saudi Arabia. Canada was actually
00:03:56.540 fourth. So we were pretty high up there, but they had basically double our oil output. So they're an
00:04:02.120 important country economically, but they're also an important country in terms of, again, the global
00:04:08.180 order, because the way that our systems are structured, we still rely on oil and being a large
00:04:13.900 oil exporter that gives them a lot of sway politically, internationally. They're a very large
00:04:19.600 member in the Arab League, in OPEC, and so they have a lot of sway in international organizations.
00:04:26.260 And again, it's quite interesting that he would say that. Now, I'm not sure whether or not Canada is
00:04:32.000 going to ultimately prevent the arms sales from going through. So preventing those LAVs from going
00:04:37.240 through, it looks like we're just going to sell them because according to the government, they say
00:04:40.560 that we have no choice because the Saudis could sue for all that money. Now, you know, again, it really
00:04:46.340 depends on what you think. The Omar Khadr issue maybe sounded the same. Well, we got to give him all
00:04:51.140 this money or else he could sue for the same or more money. So it's hard to tell what is really true
00:04:56.980 and what's not. A lot of the details of that deal are secret. But that's sort of where we are at.
00:05:02.360 And I think it's really interesting to follow what this story is going to bring. Again, we have the
00:05:07.280 Jamal Khashoggi thing overhanging. You know, he was murdered in a Saudi embassy in Turkey. And right
00:05:15.100 now there's a report in the United States basically implicating the Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. So
00:05:19.100 everything is really active in the Middle East. And I know that it doesn't necessarily always seem
00:05:24.800 like there's much for Canada to be involved with in the Middle East. But there's actually quite a lot
00:05:29.200 going on and a lot that does affect Canada. And I hope that you'll stay with us and with me as I
00:05:34.160 try and explore and unpack some of these issues with you. So for TrueNorth, I am Sam Ashkenazi.
00:05:39.320 Hopefully you enjoyed this video and thank you so, so much for watching. Have a great day.