Juno News - June 19, 2020


Trudeau needs to change his approach to China


Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

187.29332

Word count

623

Sentence count

25

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 .
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.