Juno News - August 09, 2018


The City of Victoria, BC is ERADICATING history!

Hosted by
Andrew Lutton
Mentioned
John A. Macdonald Wilfrid Laurier Queen Victoria Tommy Douglas
Trudeau's carbon tax is still ECONOMIC POISON Is the carbon tax dead？

Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

180.46

Word count

548

Sentence count

39

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

7

sentences flagged

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

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

A statue of John A. Macdonald is being removed from the City Hall in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, because it reminds Indigenous people of colonialism. Andrew Lutton explains why this is a bad idea, and why we shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
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.
00:00:00.400 Sir John A. Macdonald, a father of Confederation, the first Prime Minister of this country we call the Dominion of Canada, a legend of Canadian history,
00:00:09.100 but not worthy to be memorialized in a statue out front of the City Hall of Victoria, British Columbia.
00:00:15.340 City Council in Victoria is set to remove a statue of Sir John A., who, by the way, served as a Member of Parliament for Victoria for at least a term,
00:00:24.060 because they don't want to remind Indigenous people of the violence of colonialism.
00:00:28.680 This is, in their justification, a step towards reconciliation.
00:00:33.060 By reminding people of colonialism, you're endorsing it, and by putting up a figure of colonialism, well, you're just basically inflicting violence upon Aboriginals. 0.84
00:00:42.600 This is the slippery slope through which these politically correct ninnies are trying to govern people. 1.00
00:00:48.740 It's not a new phenomenon. We had in Ontario the Elementary Teachers Federation try to ban any school name from having John A. Macdonald in the title.
00:00:56.980 Thankfully, that didn't go anywhere in terms of actual policy.
00:01:00.600 You also have statues all over the United States of Confederate figures, regardless of the history and the context of that history coming down,
00:01:08.860 because we try to view history through this politically correct modern lens.
00:01:13.360 With John A. Macdonald, this is very misguided.
00:01:15.420 He's a figure that, if you look at him in the context of his time, he was actually a very progressive, tolerant, and definitively non-racist person.
00:01:24.520 By 2018 standards, things have changed. It's not as easy to compare people then to the people we have now.
00:01:31.300 And that shouldn't be the goal of history.
00:01:33.040 We can celebrate the positives and the goodness, the formation of this country, while also understanding the imperfection of historic figures.
00:01:41.080 That doesn't mean we need to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
00:01:44.840 Why not Tommy Douglas? 0.93
00:01:45.960 He's a figure a lot more recently who promoted at one point in his life eugenics, also called homosexuality a mental illness.
00:01:54.080 Heck, he was even honoured as being the greatest Canadian by CBC, above John A. Macdonald.
00:01:59.280 You have these other figures that, if you look at the gestalt of their lives, there might be some negatives, but there is a lot more that is positive.
00:02:07.700 Certainly, John A. Macdonald is in that category.
00:02:10.400 Wilfrid Laurier, as well.
00:02:11.820 And a great many of these Fathers of Confederation, who, under the guise of reconciliation, were to view as evil and not welcome in the Canadian discussion now. 0.92
00:02:21.760 And, by the way, it's a little bit hypocritical. 0.69
00:02:23.740 This is coming from the city of Victoria. 0.77
00:02:26.300 Victoria, B.C., the city named after Queen Victoria, the monarch at the time John A. Macdonald was the Prime Minister.
00:02:33.140 I don't see city council lining up to change the name of the city, which is proving that this is all window dressing.
00:02:39.580 And if it comes to choosing between the eradication of history or the eradication of the political correctness that is eradicating history,
00:02:46.320 I would choose to eradicate the political correctness.
00:02:50.200 Those who fail to learn history are doomed to repeat it, right?
00:02:53.760 Well, I would take it one step further. 1.00
00:02:55.560 Those who try to erase history are mindless, politically correct morons. 1.00
00:03:00.060 For the True North Initiative, I'm Andrew Lutton. 1.00