Juno News - January 02, 2021


The hypocrisy of Canada's politicians

Topics
hypocrisy of Canadian politicians
Mentioned
Doug Ford Andrew Lawton Tracy Allard Jason Kenney Nikki Ashton Jeremy Nixon Pat Wren
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Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

138.37

Word count

580

Sentence count

42

Harmful content

Toxicity

2

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Canadians are tired of politicians lying to their constituents about where they are and what they are doing, especially when it comes to their social media accounts. We have seen politicians post holiday greetings to constituents from all over the world, including St. Bart's in the Caribbean, Alberta's Minister of Municipal Affairs, Tracy Allard, filmed a holiday message in a warm sweater and with a large Christmas tree in the background, then she promptly boarded a flight to Hawaii.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
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 Happy New Year. I truly hope this will be a better year than 2020. Good riddance to that one.
00:00:12.460 I, like many, if not most of you, spent a quiet New Year's Eve with my lady. We didn't do the
00:00:19.360 champagne thing, but we had some nice wine and watched some movies. Such is life in 2020 with
00:00:25.700 the COVID pandemic. The news on New Year's seemed to focus on hypocritical politicians. 0.97
00:00:32.400 Not that that is a new thing, but it is the breeziness of this hypocrisy that has shocked 0.97
00:00:38.800 and angered Canadians. First, we had Ontario MPP Rod Phillips, who was also Finance Minister.
00:00:46.580 He tweeted to his constituents from St. Bart's in the Caribbean. On at least one occasion,
00:00:52.100 he even wore a winter sweater and recorded it in front of a fireplace to give the illusion that
00:00:57.940 he was still in Ontario. That sweater must have been awful warm in St. Bart's. We don't know for
00:01:05.100 sure that Premier Doug Ford was aware of his trip in advance, but when the media got a sniff of it,
00:01:12.100 Ford ordered Phillips home early. Phillips promptly apologized publicly, and by the time he got back
00:01:18.980 to Ontario, he resigned. Out of guilt or was he pushed, we just don't know. Then the revelation
00:01:26.540 started to come fast and furious. Alberta Minister of Municipal Affairs, Tracy Allard, filmed a holiday
00:01:34.660 message on Twitter in a warm sweater and with a large Christmas tree in the background. Then she
00:01:40.180 promptly boarded a flight to Hawaii. I should add that Alberta was under limited lockdown restrictions
00:01:45.980 at the time and mask mandates. Regulations that she helped put in place and helped to pass. She would
00:01:56.220 be hard pressed to plead ignorance. She even tweeted to her constituents from a beach in Hawaii. Her boss,
00:02:04.700 Premier Jason Kenney, claims he didn't know about her trip to the Aloha State, but like Doug Ford,
00:02:11.580 when he learned, he ordered her to return. She was out of the country from December 19 to December 26.
00:02:20.060 Apparently, it's too dangerous to eat at a local restaurant, but take a 10-hour flight to a tropical
00:02:25.980 paradise and eat at all the restaurants you want, and that is fine. Not to be outdone, MLA for lesser slave
00:02:33.820 lake. Pat Wren posted a Christmas message from an adventure park in Cancun, but it didn't end there.
00:02:41.340 Manitoba NDP MP Nikki Ashton tweeted out a stay home message, and then for some reason after the
00:02:49.100 Christmas message, Ashton hopped a plane and traveled to Greece to visit her grandmother.
00:02:55.500 Inexplicably, she admitted that on Twitter, her social awareness seems very limited.
00:03:02.700 Ashton lost her critic position within caucus. The NDP statement said Canadians expect their
00:03:09.100 representatives to quote, lead by example, unquote. Then on Friday night, Post Media confirmed Calgary
00:03:16.460 Pagan MLA Tanya Fehr and Calgary Klein MLA Jeremy Nixon each traveled abroad in December.
00:03:25.020 They both went to the U.S. Fehr also tweeted out holiday greetings to her constituents,
00:03:31.180 right before boarding a plane to quote, visit her sister, unquote, in Las Vegas.
00:03:36.940 She has since admitted her transgression and apologized on Twitter. Politicians and members
00:03:43.980 of the entitled class being hypocritical is nothing new, but these recent examples are egregious.
00:03:50.460 Or, as my True North colleague Andrew Lawton said yesterday, quote, if public officials don't
00:03:57.100 have to follow the rules, why do we have to, end quote. Good question.
00:04:02.860 Good question. For True North, I'm Leo Knight.