Juno News - July 09, 2019


Two Canadians are being held hostage in China

Topics
two Michaels are hostages
Mentioned
Donald Trump Michael Kovrig Michael Spavor Justin Trudeau Meng Wanzhou Xi Jinping Nice Guy Luce
Former Ukip leader Gerard Batten reacts to Tommy Robinson verdict No talk of free speech in Canada or UK at press freedom conference

Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

184.64

Word count

610

Sentence count

45

Harmful content

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Two Canadians have been detained in China for over 100 days, and one of them has now had his glasses taken away. This is unacceptable, and we need to speak out about it more often, and call it what it is: a hostage situation.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
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 The latest development of the two Canadians detained in China, Michael Kovrig and Michael
00:00:14.760 Spavor, is a particularly sad and petty one. We've learned that one of them has had his glasses taken
00:00:21.400 away. They are still being confined pretty much 24-7 in their cells, they're being interrogated
00:00:26.840 every day, but one of the few dignities remaining to someone confined in a small space in prison like
00:00:32.100 that is that you can do things like read and write to pass the time, to keep sane. Well, this has now
00:00:38.020 been taken away from one of them, and it's just one of the continuing turning of the screws that
00:00:42.720 China has been doing against Canada ever since we first arrested Meng Wanzhou, the Huawei CFO,
00:00:48.060 and prepared her for the extradition proceedings to be sent to the United States. Now, it's getting
00:00:53.560 to the point that the months are ticking by, the days are chalking up, and this is well over 100
00:00:59.140 days that these guys have been held under incredibly, incredibly dubious circumstances. There is not a
00:01:05.980 single voice in Canada that's willing to step forward and say, well, China may have a case
00:01:10.720 against these guys. We know it's all bogus. We know it's all nonsense. So why don't we call it for what
00:01:16.500 it is? The two Michaels are hostages. China is holding Canadian citizens hostages. Prominent ones 0.71
00:01:25.980 at that. An ex-diplomat currently on leave from his diplomatic duties, and in the other case, an
00:01:31.400 entrepreneur. It's simply unacceptable. Why aren't we using this language, and why aren't Canadians
00:01:38.540 getting riled up about it more? Well, because the government is leading us to believe that, well,
00:01:43.340 this is an ongoing conversation, a dialogue. They accuse us of our canola being infested with pests,
00:01:49.360 and we send negotiators. We say, oh, no, that's not the case. There's not actually pests there.
00:01:54.520 They turn around and ban all of our meat imports, and we say, okay, well, we'll smooth it over. We'll
00:01:58.620 work it over. The detained Canadians, what do we do? We ask U.S. President Donald Trump to bring it up
00:02:03.860 with President Xi Jinping. Now, there's a back and forth as to whether he did or he didn't, but it's
00:02:08.980 probably most likely that even if Trump did bring it up, he brought it up at the end of the
00:02:12.840 conversation. He said, oh, by the way, Justin from Canada, he asked me to bring this thing up.
00:02:18.120 Anyway, I know we're talking about trade. We're talking about U.S. matters here, but if you can
00:02:21.360 figure out this thing, I don't know. I told him I'd bring it up, so just, you know, there you go. See
00:02:25.040 what you can do about it. It's not like Donald Trump met with him singularly to focus on this issue and
00:02:30.260 to get results on this issue. It should be a fight that we're fighting, and I use that term quite
00:02:36.340 pointedly, fight. It's not a dialogue. It's not a mild-mannered conversation. I mean, China 0.99
00:02:42.300 they're using fighting words. They were laughing at us in a recent statement, calling us naive,
00:02:47.700 saying we have so-called allies. Their former ambassador, Luce, he accused us of all being
00:02:52.080 white supremacists full of Western egotism. I mean, no more Mr. Nice Guy here. It's incredibly
00:02:58.720 frustrating to watch Prime Minister Justin Trudeau treat this as if it's anywhere within the realm of
00:03:04.440 normalcy. It's just not. And I think one way we can change this is by changing our language. Like
00:03:10.420 I said, these guys are hostages. Let's call it like it is, and let's start denouncing it and say
00:03:16.440 release our hostages.