Juno News - August 01, 2019


Trudeau says no to wedge politics. Really？


Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

169.44646

Word count

701

Sentence count

2

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Justin Trudeau has said that one thing we will not see in the election campaign is an embrace of wedge politics. Andrew Lutton argues that this is a mistake and points out that wedge politics are polarizing issues aimed at driving a wedge between you and your opponent.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
00:00:00.000 as the 2019 federal election nears Canadians now can start to see the issues and themes emerge that
00:00:16.260 will ultimately dominate the news cycle and there are a number of big issues facing Canada right
00:00:21.060 now from taxes to immigration all of them need to be discussed all of them deserve solutions
00:00:26.220 better than those that are being put forward right now but Justin Trudeau has said that one thing we
00:00:32.240 will not see in the election campaign is an embrace of wedge politics he said in an interview
00:00:39.060 that he is not going to have any wedge issues dominate now for those who don't know wedge
00:00:44.720 issues are issues that are polarizing specifically done to drive a wedge between you and your opponent
00:00:51.060 and specifically further to drive a wedge between your opponent and a faction of the electorate
00:00:57.780 it's what liberals are great at historically because the conservatives are a big tent party so
00:01:03.100 if you can force the conservatives to get different sides under that tent to start fighting each other
00:01:08.120 the tent collapses that is how the theory behind these sorts of issues go Trudeau says that the
00:01:14.540 reason he wants to avoid wedge politics is because he doesn't like the idea of the polarized political
00:01:20.480 climate but let's just look at the track record here Trudeau has been the one that has been
00:01:26.240 relentlessly talking about abortion and I don't just mean the Canada summer jobs funding which
00:01:30.800 took aim at individual churches or Christian charities that run day camp programs if they didn't sign
00:01:37.300 away their beliefs I'm talking about even recently when the liberals and Trudeau specifically decided
00:01:43.540 to make a about conservatives going to a pro-life movie on Parliament Hill as though this was
00:01:49.880 in some way this reprehensible thing that some parliamentarian could ever go see a pro-life film
00:01:56.700 look at M103 the anti-Islamophobia motion not put forward by Trudeau himself but very much backed by
00:02:03.700 Trudeau's apparatus this was wedge politics forcing conservatives into a situation where they had to
00:02:09.940 engage in this culture war where the liberals are fairly confident they're going to come out on top
00:02:15.360 what about Trudeau calling a random woman that at that time he had no idea who she was a racist or
00:02:22.900 implying that she was a racist this is again wedge politics right there to take aim at people because 1.00
00:02:29.220 they dare ask you a question so when Trudeau says he wants to avoid wedge politics does he mean
00:02:35.300 starting now like starting today or is he trying to pretend that he has never made this type of
00:02:41.800 politics the focal point of his role as prime minister and we don't expect this to change look
00:02:48.220 at how he won in the 2015 election he was trying to stoke these fears that Stephen Harper and the
00:02:53.180 conservatives were Islamophobic and bigoted and ultimately this was a narrative that he has tried
00:02:58.780 to push to Canadians about conservatives for the entire term of office since and Canadians need to push
00:03:06.300 back against it when someone says they're going to avoid wedge politics what they're trying to say is
00:03:11.560 that I am superior to everyone else I rise above these things the prime minister's office says
00:03:17.960 that Trudeau raising abortion is not a wedge issue because people can have a respectful dialogue around
00:03:24.380 it so that means that anytime the liberals bring something up if we can have a respectful response
00:03:29.640 to it it's no longer a wedge issue it's great when you start playing with language because we can do
00:03:34.300 it too Mr. Trudeau the fact is immigration is what he means and we know that immigration is one of the
00:03:41.040 most significant issues facing Canada right now so if Trudeau says that he doesn't like wedge politics
00:03:47.080 all he's going to do is use this to call anyone who brings up his immigration record a racist and
00:03:52.740 boom we're back to the wedging again so I don't anticipate this having any manifestation in the way
00:03:58.920 he campaigns but this is what he's trying to tell us that he's the guy that's saving Canadian
00:04:04.260 democracy from polarization for true north I'm Andrew Lutton