Juno News - June 19, 2020


Trudeau needs to change his approach to China

Topics
two Michaels
Mentioned
Justin Trudeau Meng Wang Zhu Michael Kovrig Michael Spavor Meng Wanzhou
Can we trust Trudeau's foreign affairs minister？ The radical left cannot get their way

Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

187.29

Word count

623

Sentence count

28

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

5

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor have been held for over 550 days, arbitrarily detained, being held hostages, really as a tit for tat for Canada arresting Meng Wanzhou, they have now been formally charged with spying. Both on the same day, in courts that typically have a 99% conviction rate. This is not good news.

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 An incredibly frustrating development on the Canada-China file. The two Michaels,
00:00:09.720 Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, who have been held for over 550 days, arbitrarily detained,
00:00:16.260 being held hostages, really just as a tit for tat for Canada arresting Meng Wanzhou,
00:00:22.200 they have now been formally charged with spying on Friday, both on the same day,
00:00:27.960 in courts that typically have a 99% conviction rate. This is not good news and all Canadians
00:00:34.720 should be dismayed by this and hope that somehow we can get the two Michaels back. There's also a
00:00:41.020 lot of lessons in all of this, coming just after Canada has been rejected from the UN Security Council
00:00:46.220 seat. Justin Trudeau feeling like maybe if he pulls his punches on a whole bunch of issues around the
00:00:52.320 world, that will mean world leaders like him more, that things go his way more. Well, that didn't cut
00:00:57.620 it with the UN Security Council and it's not cutting it with China. Word on the street was one of the
00:01:02.640 reasons why Trudeau had not made a decision on Huawei entering our 5G grid was because he didn't
00:01:07.700 want to further anger China and see negative developments with the two Michaels. You can 0.99
00:01:12.400 sort of appreciate that, but then you go, well, where does that leave us? Does that mean that then
00:01:17.360 they can just hold hostage another couple of Canadians anytime there's something that they want to push in 0.61
00:01:23.660 their direction anytime they want to get their way? Justin Trudeau still hasn't made the Huawei decision
00:01:28.360 and yet here we go. The two Michaels have seen their cases unfortunately develop in the wrong
00:01:33.640 direction. Now this comes after last month, one court justice here in Canada did decide that Meng
00:01:39.660 Wang Zhu's case can continue, that it's not going to be thrown out as Meng Wang Zhu's lawyers wanted.
00:01:45.340 So China clearly unhappy about that and they've made it pretty clear that they are unhappy with this
00:01:51.020 in a government way, that these are government spokespeople, they're not just hair lawyers,
00:01:55.340 they're not just Huawei executives talking and it seems pretty clear that Michael Kovrig and Michael
00:01:59.940 Spavor are being held in retaliation and they pretty much acknowledge that. What can we do to get them 1.00
00:02:06.060 back? That's one part of the conversation, but what can we do to basically stand up to China, 0.82
00:02:12.000 which is what more and more Canadians are asking for. The latest authoritative poll showing only 14%
00:02:16.980 of Canadians have a favorable opinion of China as a government. A clear sign is the time to act is now.
00:02:23.040 We can no longer tolerate their diplomats saying really offensive things about Canadians and Canada
00:02:28.640 as they have been doing. If we need to make a decision on Huawei, which we do, all the experts say
00:02:34.080 no, you must ban it. The United States basically talking about having alliances where Canada is not
00:02:39.660 in on the conversation because we wouldn't be able to be trusted. We've got to ban Huawei. We have to do
00:02:44.880 other proactive measures to decouple from Beijing as much as we can. Talking about putting a pause
00:02:50.700 or a permanent ban on state-owned enterprises, buying up Canadian firms during the pandemic.
00:02:56.580 A lot of action items on the table and this latest situation, well, it shows us that no matter how much
00:03:02.880 you appease China, it's not going to work. In fact, it may even go the other way because they learn, 0.57
00:03:08.580 oh, there we go. We can get leverage on Canada after all. We got to change our approach to all of this.
00:03:14.120 And, well, we got to have all of our thoughts and our hopes and our fingers crossed for the two Michaels.