Juno News - August 04, 2020


The actual history of slavery in Canada

Topics
slavery in Canada
Mentioned
Catherine McKenna Trudeau John Graves Simcoe
Will Trudeau face any consequences？ The erosion of the rule of law

Episode Stats


Length

5 minutes

Words per minute

148.4

Word count

868

Sentence count

50

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

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

The Trudeau government would like us to have an honest conversation about the history of slavery in our country, and yet, Trudeau officials themselves aren t even being honest with Canadians about the basic facts when it comes to our history.

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 The Trudeau government would like us to have an honest conversation about the history of slavery
00:00:09.520 in our country. And yet, Trudeau officials themselves aren't even being honest with
00:00:14.460 Canadians about the basic facts when it comes to our history. First, check out this tweet from the
00:00:19.840 Minister of Infrastructure, Catherine McKenna. She writes, today is Emancipation Day. On August 1st,
00:00:26.120 1834, slavery was abolished in Canada. We need to keep having honest discussions about our past in
00:00:32.440 order to build a more inclusive Canada, free of racism and discrimination. First, it's a little
00:00:38.640 rich to hear from McKenna and hear her talk about wanting to build a, quote, more inclusive Canada,
00:00:44.140 given that she's the one with the bad habit of pitting Canadians against each other 1.00
00:00:47.560 and dismissing her critics, calling them deniers, racists, bigots, etc. Remember this interview
00:00:54.780 when she said she didn't have time for Canadians who she disagreed with?
00:00:58.200 Let's be clear, like, climate change has huge costs now. I have no time for folks who are like,
00:01:02.680 you know, we shouldn't take action.
00:01:04.660 Second, yes, August 1st is Emancipation Day across the entire Commonwealth,
00:01:08.680 where we acknowledge and even celebrate the fact that the British Empire was the first to take the
00:01:13.980 remarkable step in 1834 to abolish slavery throughout the empire. It was 40 years before the American 0.58
00:01:21.260 Civil War and leaps and bounds before other countries and other cultures finally took the
00:01:26.220 step to abolish the despicable slave trade. Great Britain showed tremendous leadership during that
00:01:31.660 era to end a deeply egregious and immoral practice. McKenna should acknowledge that one month earlier,
00:01:38.680 July 1st, we celebrate Dominion Day, honoring the creation of the Dominion of Canada in 1867.
00:01:44.900 Slavery was abolished in the British Empire in 1834. Canada was created in 1867. Therefore,
00:01:52.660 there was no slavery technically that ever happened in Canada. Sure, that's semantics,
00:01:57.540 but it's McKenna herself who's saying that we should have an honest conversation.
00:02:01.240 She should also include the facts if she wants to have an honest conversation.
00:02:05.920 Now, McKenna was not the only liberal pushing this division and revisionist history trying to make
00:02:11.180 all Canadians look bad. Parks Canada's official Twitter handle also claimed that Canadians were
00:02:17.620 complicit in slavery. They tweeted this. Between 1629 and 1834, approximately 4,000 people of African
00:02:25.740 descent were enslaved across Canada. This left a legacy of discrimination and systemic racism that
00:02:31.060 Black Canadians still feel today. Learn more about this shameful period in our history, and it includes 1.00
00:02:37.040 a link that goes to a press release for a bunch of liberal cabinet ministers and officials are
00:02:42.500 basically condemning Canada and saying how awful of a country we are. Well, of course, this was a
00:02:48.740 shameful period in world history. And keep in mind that it was world history. The slave trade spanned
00:02:53.560 across the entire globe and included slaves and slaveholders from all different races. But here in
00:02:59.120 Canada, these liberal officials left out a few very important and very relevant details. For instance,
00:03:05.500 on August 1st, 1793, Upper Canada, the territory that's now known as Ontario, the governor, John
00:03:12.880 Graves Simcoe, issued the Act Against Slavery, banning the import of slaves and providing freedom
00:03:18.880 to the children of slaves. In fact, Upper Canada was the very first British colony in the entire world
00:03:26.520 to ban slavery, a remarkable sign of leadership at the time. Canadians should, of course, be aware that
00:03:33.320 there was slavery here before Canada became a country. But the story is far more complicated
00:03:38.040 than these banal messages from liberal officials suggest. While historians do believe that there
00:03:43.200 was a total of about 4,000 enslaved people in New France, which became British North America,
00:03:49.420 which became Canada, Parks Canada is wrong to say that there were 4,000 people of African descent
00:03:56.260 enslaved here. I've looked through a lot of records. I've looked at a lot of historical accounts,
00:04:00.660 and every record I saw that showed that 4,000 figure said it applied to all slaves in Canada.
00:04:07.640 And the majority of slaves in this territory were indigenous. Only a small fraction were of African
00:04:13.640 descent. It's important to note that slavery was common practice among First Nation tribes
00:04:19.060 before Europeans arrived in North America. They used to take prisoners of war. They were either killed
00:04:24.980 or they were kept as slaves. And also compare that total of 4,000 slaves that were held in New France
00:04:31.600 and British North America. Compare that to what happened in the 19th century in Canada. Canada was
00:04:37.520 refuge to 20 times that many freed slaves who left the United States, fled the United States,
00:04:43.960 came to Canada through the Underground Railroad. As many as 100,000 Africans, former slaves,
00:04:50.960 found freedom in Canada because of this remarkable network. So sure, there are aspects of our history
00:04:56.320 that are shameful, and we should acknowledge that. But there are also many things to be proud of.
00:05:01.220 Instead of sowing division and trying to push misinformation about Canada's past,
00:05:05.820 the Trudeau government should brush up on its own history, learn the facts, and stop hectoring
00:05:10.740 Canadians with their divisive, anti-Canadian, woke rhetoric. For True North, I'm Candace Malcolm.
00:05:20.960 For True North, I'm Candace Malcolm.