Juno News - October 30, 2019


Trudeau's immigration values test flip-flop

Mentioned
Justin Trudeau Kelly Leach
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was Canada’s enemy as well Encana’s move to US unavoidable in Trudeau’s Canada

Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

161.9

Word count

627

Sentence count

26

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Quebec wants to require immigrants to the province to have a baseline understanding and acceptance of Quebec values, like gender equality and pluralism. Justin Trudeau has been silent on the matter, despite the fact that he endorsed a similar proposal during the federal election campaign.

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 .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Once again Quebec gets to play by different rules than the rest of the
00:00:15.160 country. Quebec can do what it wants, the federal government will never tell them
00:00:19.840 otherwise even after an election when Quebec votes are no longer required. The
00:00:25.880 latest example of this comes in Quebec's official announcement that it will be
00:00:30.140 pursuing a value screening when it comes to immigrants. We don't yet know the
00:00:35.000 specific test that will be used or the values that in particular will be screened
00:00:38.960 for but starting in January, just a couple of months from now, the Quebec
00:00:43.620 government will ensure that all immigrants to the province have a
00:00:47.000 baseline understanding and acceptance of Quebec values. Things like gender
00:00:52.320 equality, things like pluralism. Now you may disagree with Quebec values, you may
00:00:58.200 disagree with the specific application of them in this case, but what's
00:01:01.740 interesting is that not a peep has been heard from Justin Trudeau to condemn this.
00:01:05.940 Moreover, when the topic came up during the federal election, Justin Trudeau
00:01:10.740 endorsed the idea that Quebec has a right without federal intervention to ensure
00:01:17.100 its immigration system is in accordance with the standards it sets out for
00:01:21.380 itself. Now, by the way, I think that value screening and immigration is paramount. You
00:01:26.380 want to make sure that anyone coming to your country, your province, your community
00:01:30.440 is going to fit in. This isn't about eradicating people's own identity, it's not
00:01:36.620 about banning them from practicing certain religious expressions, which Quebec's
00:01:41.060 Bill 21 does in some case. It's about making sure that there is a fit between
00:01:46.400 someone who comes from a country where the values are different and this country 0.94
00:01:50.900 where the values are the ones that we as a country decide to embrace on a regular
00:01:55.820 basis. So Quebec is not off base in wanting to achieve this. The problem is
00:02:02.420 that Justin Trudeau has relentlessly attacked anyone who's talked about
00:02:07.580 values and immigration in other capacities. You may remember back in 2017,
00:02:12.560 Kelly Leach, at the time a Conservative leadership candidate, had a very similar
00:02:16.900 proposal for the country as a whole. She gave examples of some of these
00:02:21.820 questions during the campaign, basically making sure that people who immigrate to
00:02:26.440 Canada are going to have shared values on religious freedom, free speech, gender
00:02:30.980 equality, things that all of us in Canada would say are national values and thus
00:02:35.920 things that shouldn't be controversial to ask about or to ensure are reflected in
00:02:40.840 those who come here. But what happened? The left called Kelly Leach racist. Justin
00:02:45.460 Trudeau said, oh my goodness, can you imagine what a Conservative party led by
00:02:49.480 Kelly Leach would look like? And she was subjected to some of the most vitriolic hate 1.00
00:02:54.520 of any Conservative candidate in that leadership race. And now when Quebec puts
00:03:00.020 forward what is effectively the same idea, there is absolute silence from Justin
00:03:05.060 Trudeau. Now this doesn't mean that Justin Trudeau has come around on the
00:03:09.040 question of value screening and immigration. All it means is that Justin
00:03:12.380 Trudeau is still petrified of taking off Quebec. This is a common theme among
00:03:17.780 federal leaders. We saw it with Bill 21, which by the way was a bill that I think
00:03:22.240 was worthy of federal government criticism, and now we're seeing it in
00:03:26.020 terms of Quebec immigration. But this fear of Quebec, this trembling and quaking in
00:03:32.200 the boots whenever Quebec votes are on the line, has to stop. We cannot cede control
00:03:37.480 over the national discourse to one particular province, even if they're
00:03:41.440 doing something that isn't, in this case, all that terrible an idea, depending on
00:03:45.560 how it manifests going forward. But this is what's happening right now. For True
00:03:50.360 North, I'm Andrew Lutt.