Juno News - October 26, 2019


Tax dollars fund ＂Muslim voting guide＂

Topics
identity politics
Hosted by
Andrew Lutton
Mentioned
Andrew Scheer Maxime Bernier Justin Trudeau Jagmeet Singh Elizabeth May Karen Vecchio
Trudeau's re-election unleashes western alienation Trudeau's olive branch to the west？

Episode Stats


Length

6 minutes

Words per minute

154.87

Word count

987

Sentence count

60

Harmful content

Toxicity

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

5

sentences flagged


Summary

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

A new report from the Islamophobia Industry Research Project at Wilfrid Laurier University gives the major parties in Canada a grade on issues that the report contends are relevant to the Muslim community: Islamophobia, boycott, divestment, sanctions, broader foreign policy, immigration and refugees, and religious freedom in Quebec. And if you look at the final scorecard, the leaders of the right-of-center parties, Andrew Scheer and Maxime Bernier, did not fare well.

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 Canadians, your tax dollars went towards telling Muslims not to vote for Conservatives. 0.51
00:00:16.380 This sounds baffling, and the reason for that is very simple.
00:00:20.360 It is baffling.
00:00:21.700 The federal government gave a grant to a group of researchers at Wilfrid Laurier University
00:00:26.580 to publish a report specifically to guide and steer the votes of Muslim Canadians.
00:00:33.520 The report, published by Wilfrid Laurier University, has a very simple mandate,
00:00:39.220 Canadian Muslim Voting Guide Federal Election 2019.
00:00:43.460 In the guide, which was prepared by a specific Islamophobia industry research project at Laurier University
00:00:51.160 and funded by the government, we'll get back to that in a moment,
00:00:54.320 was there to give politicians, the leaders of the major parties in Canada,
00:00:58.960 grades on issues that the report contends are relevant to the Muslim community.
00:01:04.100 These issues are Islamophobia, boycott divestment sanctions, broader foreign policy,
00:01:10.400 immigration and refugees, religious freedom in Quebec.
00:01:13.720 And if you look at the final scorecard, the leaders of the right-of-center parties,
00:01:17.760 Andrew Scheer and Maxime Bernier, didn't fare too well.
00:01:21.140 Just take a look at those. An entire row of fails for Maxime Bernier on every issue.
00:01:26.860 Almost an entire row of fails for Andrew Scheer.
00:01:30.740 He got one needs improvement on religious freedom.
00:01:33.600 No one did well on that category, as you can see.
00:01:36.300 And what do you know?
00:01:37.440 Green lights for Jagmeet Singh, green lights for Elizabeth May,
00:01:40.960 and a combination of green and orange for Justin Trudeau.
00:01:46.360 Now, when you go through the point of it, there are a number of issues here.
00:01:49.340 Incomplete research, conclusions drawn about not only how the Muslim community,
00:01:54.900 which is not monolithic, thinks about certain things,
00:01:57.400 but also shoddy research on a lot of the positions that the party leaders have actually taken.
00:02:03.460 They've distilled down into these five different areas what are more broadly disagreements.
00:02:08.840 But if you think the wrong thing, according to this report, it's a fail.
00:02:12.940 One of the most egregious examples of that is boycott divestment sanctions.
00:02:16.700 The report accepts as a premise that BDS against Israel is a good thing. 0.98
00:02:22.140 And anyone who criticizes or condemns BDS therefore gets a failing grade.
00:02:28.000 So anyone that says, hey, BDS is unfair to Israelis and Jews, they get a fail just for that.
00:02:34.480 And if you look at the premise of the report as it lists its purpose,
00:02:37.740 it actually blames far-right Christians and Zionists for peddling Islamophobia.
00:02:43.740 This is the basis of this report.
00:02:46.000 Now, this shouldn't be a surprise that a group of academics got together and decided to
00:02:51.040 write out a bunch of mumbo-jumbo and start calling people racist and Islamophobes.
00:02:55.860 But again, the most significant part of this report is on its cover page.
00:03:00.640 More than any of the substance in the report, this is the big red flag for me.
00:03:06.540 Literally, the red flag, the Canadian flag on this report.
00:03:10.520 As you can see there, made possible by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
00:03:19.100 Yes.
00:03:20.180 Now, what's interesting is that this initiative at Laurier University,
00:03:24.560 the Islamophobia Industry Research Project,
00:03:27.620 which again is trying to say that it is there to dismantle the industry of Islamophobes that exists in the country,
00:03:33.700 is something that partners with the National Council of Canadian Muslims.
00:03:37.640 But take a look at the rationale for why this project exists in the first place.
00:03:43.020 The website says that the study supports M103 through its objectives to analyze, document,
00:03:50.640 and map the Islamophobia industry in Canada.
00:03:54.160 The Islamophobia industry perpetuates fear and negative stereotypes about Islam and Muslims,
00:03:59.560 leading to hate, violence, and discrimination.
00:04:01.880 It is comprised of media outlets, political figures, academics, think tanks, far-right groups and ideologues,
00:04:09.500 and the donors who fund their campaigns.
00:04:12.980 These individuals, groups, and institutions comprise a network that supports and engages in activities
00:04:19.140 that demonize and marginalize Islam and Muslims in Canada.
00:04:23.280 So this is something that is basically telling Canadians, we're all racists, we're all Islamophobe.
00:04:30.040 The media, academics, think tanks, we're all part of this problem.
00:04:33.520 But even if there is a research initiative, there's a difference between researching something
00:04:38.180 and telling people how to vote.
00:04:41.080 This study was done because of M103, the anti-Islamophobia motion that when it passed,
00:04:47.500 and people like me were saying it would threaten free speech, we were told,
00:04:51.260 no, no, no, you're just being crazy. 0.52
00:04:52.940 It says non-binding. 0.93
00:04:54.320 It's symbolic.
00:04:55.620 Well, now that symbolic and non-binding motion is justifying tax dollars going towards telling people
00:05:02.240 how to vote, and specifically telling them not to vote for conservative parties.
00:05:07.420 Now, we don't know what the impact of this was in the election, and we never will.
00:05:11.320 People get to make up their minds based on whatever criteria they'd like.
00:05:15.020 But this is egregious that tax money is going towards peddling identity politics
00:05:19.740 for a specific partisan outcome.
00:05:23.380 Now, I tweeted about this as soon as I learned it, and a Conservative member of Parliament,
00:05:27.300 Karen Vecchio, had tweeted out her condemnation in response.
00:05:31.020 She says the government should never have funded a guide like this.
00:05:34.740 It's partisan and not in the best interest of all Canadians.
00:05:38.160 Pits Canadians against Canadians. 0.73
00:05:40.460 Stop with the identity politics, she says.
00:05:42.720 B'nai B'rith has also come out and condemned specifically the BDS component.
00:05:47.660 This government-funded report contending that BDS is a good thing, 1.00
00:05:51.660 and anyone who disagrees with it is peddling Islamophobia.
00:05:55.120 But this is what we're up against in Canada,
00:05:57.260 which is why it's so important to stop identity politics.
00:06:00.760 When you have a resolution like M103 being put forward,
00:06:04.360 remember it is never benign.
00:06:06.600 This is what it leads to.
00:06:07.840 If you can support True North's efforts to stand up and fight back against identity politics,
00:06:13.000 push back against this, and fight for free speech,
00:06:15.780 do head on over to tnc.news and make a contribution to support our efforts.
00:06:20.600 For True North, I'm Andrew Lutton.
00:06:22.060 Thank you.