Juno News - February 08, 2021


The Iran Nuclear Deal explained

Mentioned
Trump
Canadians’ rights are at risk Variable Variants

Episode Stats


Length

5 minutes

Words per minute

207.9

Word count

1,103

Sentence count

45

Harmful content

Hate speech

4

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In this episode, I discuss the Iran deal and its effects on Canada, as well as a recent report that suggests Iran may be spying on Canadian citizens. I also discuss the potential for Canada to re-engage with Iran and how this could affect our relations with them.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
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.
00:00:00.000 So I've been on the Iran deal for a couple of weeks now and after my last video a number of
00:00:09.600 people have asked me specifically to talk about the Iran deal and its effects on Canada. So I
00:00:14.080 thought I would just cover the Iran deal briefly and then talk about what's going on in our foreign
00:00:17.520 relations. Now the Iran deal itself is basically aimed at preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear
00:00:22.800 weapon but there are a number of problems. First is that the critics point out that a lot of this
00:00:28.080 will prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon within 10 to 15 years. So it's really designed 0.91
00:00:32.240 at slowing them down. There's an inspection regime and some limitations that they have so they can't
00:00:36.960 necessarily get all the technology but one of the main problems is that according to the
00:00:41.600 International Atomic Energy Agency, a UN body, they're basically violating all restrictions of
00:00:46.400 the deal. So they're not really following any of these restrictions and I think at this point in
00:00:50.080 time it's really unclear how close they are to a bomb. You know there haven't been any reports of
00:00:54.960 tests so we're assuming that they don't necessarily have an active bomb but it doesn't mean that they
00:00:59.120 can't maybe test somewhere else. You know that's often what countries do when they're trying to
00:01:02.720 develop a nuclear weapon in secret, maybe test somewhere else. But the main issue is how does
00:01:08.240 this affect Canada? Now if you did watch my last video I spoke about how the Iranian government and
00:01:13.840 the Iranian military, specifically the IRGC, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, is involved in
00:01:19.200 huge amounts of money laundering in Canada. So they're basically using Canada to launder millions and
00:01:24.400 millions and millions of dollars every year. Now this is a serious problem because number one when
00:01:29.600 you have a lot of dirty money you can get involved in a lot of dirty things. It's not just terror,
00:01:34.880 there was a report of someone who is tied to this money laundering making donations to political parties
00:01:40.640 so you know that that really sets things up where you could influence things politically. You know if
00:01:44.880 you have money that you have to burn there's definitely a lot of ways you can buy influence or buy
00:01:48.960 a favor with politicians. So that is a huge concern considering that Iran is not you know it's not the 0.98
00:01:54.480 best not the best actor with the best intentions at this particular point and this is the Iranian 1.00
00:01:58.640 regime of course not the not the people themselves. So that is I think one of the concerns but the other
00:02:03.840 concern is actually a story that very few people picked up on. This is a story of the type of thing
00:02:08.720 that the Iranians can engage in and this is an Edmonton software engineer which said that the regime
00:02:13.600 attempted to make him their spy. So they basically picked him up while he was visiting in Iran. This
00:02:18.320 is again the IRGC, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, picked him up and attempted to make him their spy.
00:02:23.040 So it's pretty clear I think that the Iranians are interested in getting involved in spying in 1.00
00:02:30.080 Canada. Canada has access to a lot of information. You know this person was a software engineer so it's
00:02:35.600 not really clear what they would have necessarily had access to that the Iranians would be interested in
00:02:39.760 but Canada has access to a lot of information given that we're part of the Five Eyes. So that's the
00:02:44.400 five countries that share intelligence. But you know this type of thing should be concerning to
00:02:49.440 all Canadians because we are in many ways letting our country be used to launder money and letting
00:02:55.760 our country be used as a platform for spying against not only our country but our friends and
00:02:59.920 allies. I think this should be concerning to all Canadians. Now there was there was a number of
00:03:05.040 people who raised concern about possibly Canada re-engaging with Iran. That really slowed down
00:03:11.360 when Trump took a very hard line on the Iranian regime and of course when Covid hit then you know
00:03:16.080 pretty much everything else went out the window and it was all Covid all the time. But there is
00:03:20.160 a large concern not only by you know people who investigate and follow interactions in the Middle East
00:03:25.440 but by a lot of Iranian expats and Iranian organizations in Canada very concerned with the
00:03:30.560 government re-engaging with Iran because again in their view it will embolden the regime. It might
00:03:35.200 provide sanctions relief, it might provide financing for the type of nefarious activities that the
00:03:39.360 Iranian regime has or you know has already been involved in and might wish to get involved in in
00:03:43.920 the future. So I think overall those are the main things that we need to be concerned in
00:03:48.160 concerned with regards to Iran. Again you know there are a number of issues going on right now and
00:03:52.720 the Middle East often seems very far away and not connected to what's important in our daily lives.
00:03:57.520 But the Iranian issue is definitely one that we should keep on the radar something we should at
00:04:02.080 the very least pay some attention to and I hope that our government is listening very seriously
00:04:06.480 to a number of stakeholders who share real concerns and again especially given the fact that a UN agency
00:04:11.840 the atomic agency says that they're basically violating every single restriction of the Iran deal.
00:04:16.320 So I really don't know you know what is the interest by a number of governments in returning to the
00:04:21.760 negotiating table. Clearly they're not falling but we'll see hopefully you know hopefully
00:04:26.080 cooler heads prevail and we don't just you know re-engage to re-engage. Other than that
00:04:30.560 I hope you enjoyed this video. Thank you so so much for watching. You learned something about
00:04:33.600 the Middle East and if there's any questions that you have about the Middle East feel free to drop
00:04:37.120 them into comments. I would love to be able to start a bit of a series or talk a little bit about
00:04:41.440 what's going on in the region and its effects on Canada. So once again for True North I'm Sam Ashkenazi.
00:04:46.400 Thank you so so much for watching. Don't forget to hit that subscribe button and that
00:04:50.240 notification bell so you can stay up to date with all the latest and greatest from True North. Thanks again.
00:04:56.080 Thank you.
00:05:00.320 I'm
00:05:01.280 so
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00:05:04.320 so
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00:05:08.320 so
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00:05:16.320 so