Juno News - January 19, 2023


The elites run away from the media

Topics
World Economic Forum transparency
Hosted by
Andrew Lawton
Mentioned
Chrystia Freeland Tony Blair John Kerry
PM Trudeau launches into 5-minute tirade against Poilievre and Convoy What’s really going on at the WEF？ ｜ Thomas Fazi ｜ Part 1.

Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

196.66

Word count

812

Sentence count

48

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

The World Economic Forum prides itself on transparency. They stream live, accrediting members of the media, even people like me that have been critical of the organisation. But the big question that we ve been asking all week is: what exactly is happening outside of public view? There are rooms for bilateral meetings and multilateral meetings, for business leaders and country leaders to all get together in ways that are not on the public agenda, and on the sidelines, no one knows what conversations are taking place. So the question remains: if there is nothing to hide, why not be open about what you re doing here?

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 Coming to you from Davos, Switzerland, here for the World Economic Forum 2023 Annual Meeting.
00:00:06.100 The World Economic Forum, an organization that many people have many different perspectives of.
00:00:10.840 On one hand, the way that we can foster global cooperation to solve the world's crises.
00:00:15.720 On the other hand, this sinister, evil, scary, bond-villainy corporation
00:00:19.520 that is trying to do all sorts of things to control the world.
00:00:23.400 Like with anything, the truth is probably somewhere in the middle of those.
00:00:26.800 The World Economic Forum prides itself, it says, on transparency.
00:00:30.880 They live-stream sessions, they accredit members of the media,
00:00:33.780 even people like me that have been somewhat critical of the organization.
00:00:37.220 But the big question that we've been asking all week is,
00:00:39.660 what exactly is happening outside of public view?
00:00:42.920 There are rooms for bilateral meetings and multilateral meetings,
00:00:46.140 for business leaders and country leaders, heads of government and state and NGO leaders
00:00:51.220 to all get together in ways that are not on the public agenda, that are not on the public program.
00:00:55.380 And on the sidelines, no one knows what conversations are taking place,
00:00:59.400 but certainly we probably see the policy implications of those conversations
00:01:03.380 when politicians come home and start putting into action ideas
00:01:07.720 that they've discussed with their counterparts around the world.
00:01:10.600 So the question remains, if there is nothing to hide,
00:01:13.840 why not be open about what you're doing here?
00:01:16.320 This was one of the questions I wanted to put to Deputy Prime Minister of Canada,
00:01:19.880 Chrystia Freeland, who, as you know, is a member of the WEF Board of Trustees,
00:01:24.300 isn't having those two roles itself a conflict of interest?
00:01:27.980 That was what I asked Deputy Prime Minister Freeland.
00:01:31.280 Hi, Minister, Andrew Lawton, True North.
00:01:33.220 I was just wondering if it's a conflict of interest for you to be a trustee,
00:01:35.820 while also a Cabinet Minister.
00:01:38.220 Are you proud of the work?
00:01:39.400 And if so, why is there an issue answering a question about it?
00:01:43.580 Enjoy your panel, Minister.
00:01:44.620 As you can see, she didn't want to answer any questions whatsoever,
00:01:48.200 didn't even want to make eye contact.
00:01:49.900 This is the woman who once tried to ban True North from asking her a question 0.98
00:01:53.300 at a Media Freedom press conference at the Global Conference for Media Freedom,
00:01:57.800 which she was co-hosting a couple of years back.
00:02:00.540 But I will give credit to Minister Freeland.
00:02:03.160 She's not the only politician to want to duck questions.
00:02:06.100 Tony Blair, former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom,
00:02:08.280 wasn't interested in making eye contact,
00:02:10.240 let alone talking to any members of the media as he was walking through Davos today.
00:02:15.320 And also John Kerry, the United States climate envoy,
00:02:18.460 was in a very controlled environment talking about all the great things the U.S. is doing
00:02:22.680 and that he wants other world leaders to do.
00:02:24.880 But you take him outside of that environment and he's a little bit more tight-lipped.
00:02:28.240 Why should anyone else in the world have to deal with emissions reductions when China is not? 0.74
00:02:33.720 You can't speak about China's impact, sir?
00:02:35.840 Why should we have to deal with carbon prices when China is not lowering its emissions?
00:02:42.080 Most people have been all too friendly and all too willing to chat about what it is they want to do.
00:02:47.180 And certainly if you look at the panels, you get remarkable candor from some WEF partners
00:02:51.100 and invite a guest about the policy prescriptions they believe the world needs.
00:02:55.480 On that last one, I think I will combine it with your question,
00:02:58.920 what it would be your wish, is to get much higher carbon prices
00:03:03.080 and to use that money to subsidize clean energies.
00:03:06.220 It's very, very simple.
00:03:07.440 But in Europe, we've seen an enormous response this year,
00:03:11.360 20% less natural gas usage.
00:03:13.640 Why? It was very expensive.
00:03:15.840 It's very simple.
00:03:17.280 It's a very capitalist intervention,
00:03:19.000 but just make what you try to avoid expensive
00:03:21.520 and subsidize the thing that you try to build.
00:03:24.980 It's not difficult, but we're not doing it, certainly not globally.
00:03:27.540 Now, you may agree with that, you may disagree with that,
00:03:30.040 but remember, you don't vote for any of the people here.
00:03:33.060 You do not have any oversight or any say in what happens in those rooms
00:03:37.380 in the World Economic Forum's annual meeting.
00:03:39.840 It's not a government.
00:03:41.000 It's not an intergovernmental organization.
00:03:43.120 It just acts like one.
00:03:44.920 Yet all of the influence and all of the authority that the WEF has
00:03:48.080 is because people decide to give it to the organization.
00:03:51.360 People like Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland,
00:03:53.560 who lends her name and influence as a Minister of the Crown in Canada
00:03:58.060 when she sits on that board of trustees.
00:04:00.600 And still, she won't answer a single question
00:04:02.600 about whether such a relationship is a conflict.
00:04:05.540 For True North from Davos, I'm Andrew Lawton.