Juno News - November 02, 2020


Trudeau is threatening our democracy

Topics
filibustering
Mentioned
Trudeau Harper
Choosing Free Speech Over ＂Respectful＂ Speech It's time to learn to live with COVID-19

Episode Stats


Length

6 minutes

Words per minute

204.02

Word count

1,323

Sentence count

65


Summary

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

In this episode, I discuss the dangers of the police scandal and the liberal tactic of filibustering their own committee, and why this is a direct threat to our democracy. I also discuss the role of the media and its influence on our political system.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
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 Sometimes you really don't appreciate what you have until it is gone, and I worry that
00:00:11.280 we are thinking that way with regards to our governmental systems, our institutions, and
00:00:15.880 perhaps even democracy itself in Canada and the West.
00:00:19.120 Now I think a lot of people do take what we have for granted because it hasn't been under
00:00:23.140 direct attack in their lifetime, say with fascism or communism, and they don't necessarily
00:00:28.440 think about the internal and external forces that pose a threat to the stability of our
00:00:32.400 democracy and stability of our government.
00:00:34.120 And one of the things I want to talk about today is the police scandal and the liberal
00:00:38.240 filibustering of the committees because they are definitely a threat to the democracy, at
00:00:42.480 the very least in the sense that it degrades people's trust in the government's ability
00:00:46.480 to police itself and to right wrongs, or at the very least to conduct investigations.
00:00:50.320 Now, a lot of my colleagues have talked about this, but not necessarily from this angle,
00:00:54.280 and that's what we're going to look at, so as always let's jump right in.
00:00:57.200 Here you can see these are the Google results for liberals filibustering their own committee.
00:01:01.700 Now filibustering, for those who don't know, is when you basically try and use every procedural
00:01:06.240 method in the rule book to just run out the clock.
00:01:09.040 You are speaking for the maximum amount of time, you might be calling innumerable witnesses,
00:01:13.320 you might be raising any number of points of order, you're basically trying to make
00:01:16.820 it that the committee or the legislative body or whatever it is, you're basically trying
00:01:20.160 to use the procedure itself to shut it down, to put really, you know, gum in the works,
00:01:25.540 make it that it cannot do what it is trying to do by really running out the clock.
00:01:30.040 Now, it's pretty odd for a government itself to do this.
00:01:33.040 This tends to be done by opposition parties who really want to stop a piece of legislation,
00:01:36.580 or maybe some other minority group in a parliament or a legislature that wants to raise awareness
00:01:40.920 of an issue.
00:01:41.920 Because if you drag it on and you stop the government from doing something, it obviously
00:01:44.920 becomes more newsworthy as you're having, you know, these marathon sessions, 20, 30,
00:01:48.920 40 hours.
00:01:49.920 In the States they go, you know, really crazy long and we sometimes hear about that in the
00:01:53.100 news.
00:01:54.100 But that is basically what's happening.
00:01:56.420 And that is troubling on the first point here because one of the Canadian sort of ideas
00:02:01.920 compared to the American life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness or the French
00:02:05.920 liberté, égalité, fraternité, is peace, order, and good government.
00:02:10.420 And it's basically, it's a, it's a throwback, you know, it says here in the document, it's
00:02:14.020 a throwback to the BNA Act, which is now known as the Constitution Act, 1867.
00:02:17.380 And the idea is that the government will provide good services to the people and will be an orderly
00:02:23.660 and good government, a peaceable government.
00:02:25.720 So why is filibustering such an issue?
00:02:28.800 Well, it's an issue because it basically stops the government from functioning.
00:02:32.920 And because that is the purpose of it, it also has the effect of making people feel that
00:02:37.600 the government has stopped functioning.
00:02:38.620 They don't necessarily think about what is going on with different parts of legislation.
00:02:42.740 First reading, second reading, third reading, they may not even know about these things.
00:02:46.200 All they know is whether or not bills are getting passed, new laws are happening or being created.
00:02:49.940 The government is addressing problems.
00:02:51.520 But when you filibuster something, all that's happening is a big mess.
00:02:55.680 There is no real debate.
00:02:57.320 It's just filibuster and wasting time for the sake of wasting time.
00:03:00.040 And so the people, if they are paying enough attention and it goes on for long enough,
00:03:04.320 you start to lose faith in the government's ability to actually get things done, whether
00:03:07.820 they're good or bad things or whatever things are, almost irrelevant on a certain level.
00:03:11.960 It basically stops people from feeling that their government can actually do the business
00:03:15.640 of governing.
00:03:16.840 Now, the thing that's sort of weird about this one is that the liberals filibustering their
00:03:21.820 own committee is not necessarily viewed as a direct threat to democracy or as a potential
00:03:27.700 influence harming our system.
00:03:29.100 If we look up Trudeau attack democracy on Google, you get 3.3 million results here.
00:03:34.760 But a lot of them are about something else.
00:03:37.520 There are, for example, here attacks on the media are threats to democracy.
00:03:40.660 Trudeau condemns a deadly attack on East Church.
00:03:43.860 Again, a very recent piece of news, but that's not really what we're talking about here.
00:03:47.200 There's one editorial here from The Sun and a couple, but it's not really, people don't
00:03:55.240 make it seem like it's that much of a pressing issue that the government is trying to filibuster
00:03:58.840 their own committee to investigate something which the government allegedly, or members
00:04:03.000 of the government have allegedly done.
00:04:04.280 Now, again, if there's nothing there, you would think that we would be able to sort of wrap
00:04:07.820 this up and show that there was nothing there.
00:04:09.520 And obviously, the filibustering and the delaying tactics basically give credence to the fact
00:04:15.480 that there might be something there, and that's what a lot of the opposition is using.
00:04:19.640 But if you then switch it to this here, Harper attack democracy, you've got 14 million results.
00:04:25.860 So that's way more than the 3.3.
00:04:28.580 That's over three times, almost four times as many results as for Trudeau attacking democracy.
00:04:36.220 And a lot of these tend to be about Harper's actual governance, his anti-democratic abuses,
00:04:41.800 using powers.
00:04:42.980 So it's a very, very different understanding.
00:04:45.340 And this, again, interestingly enough, this actually connects with this point here, the
00:04:50.260 first result, attacks on the media are threats to democracy.
00:04:52.360 Well, when you've got Harper attacking democracy at 14 million results and Trudeau attacking
00:05:00.380 democracy at 3 million results, even though there's a very serious issue.
00:05:04.380 Now, again, Harper, you know, he was in the government for 10 years.
00:05:07.000 That could be the difference in the total number, but Trudeau has been also there for quite a long
00:05:12.800 time.
00:05:13.400 He was elected in 2015.
00:05:15.240 It's getting up there.
00:05:16.180 So, you know, not even halfway, but who knows in terms of total results.
00:05:20.900 Anyways, back to the main point.
00:05:23.120 The issue of filibustering is a serious one because, again, it degrades people's trust
00:05:28.160 in democracy.
00:05:29.880 It does not really align with some of the original ideas of how Canadian government was supposed
00:05:34.100 to work.
00:05:34.840 And it's really just a last case resort for people that are desperate to either stop something
00:05:39.800 or raise awareness.
00:05:40.960 And it's really odd for a government itself to be doing this.
00:05:43.700 I really think that more Canadians need to be paying attention to this.
00:05:46.920 The We scandal itself may not be the biggest deal.
00:05:49.380 This actually may be a bigger deal.
00:05:51.300 The fact that we're just stopping committees from functioning to stop the investigation
00:05:54.520 of this.
00:05:54.900 But, you know, the only way we will actually get changes is for more Canadians to make
00:05:58.580 their voices heard, either by connecting with the members of Parliament or at the ballot
00:06:02.780 box.
00:06:03.100 That's really all that comes down to it.
00:06:04.300 So, hopefully we'll be able to see some better governance from our political leaders.
00:06:09.620 I know that a lot of people are obviously very disappointed in what's been going on,
00:06:13.660 and rightfully so, especially with these ones.
00:06:15.400 But, again, the only way to make that change is to make your voice heard with your MP or
00:06:19.820 at the ballot box.
00:06:20.660 So, hopefully you found this video interesting and possibly learned something new as well.
00:06:24.980 And for TrueNorth, I am Sam Ashkenazi.
00:06:26.760 Thank you so much for watching, and have yourself a great day.