Juno News - November 25, 2019


Uniting the country should be Trudeau's top priority

Mentioned
Trudeau Mariam Monsef Mark Miller Chrystia Freeland Seamus O'Regan Donald Trump Mona Fortier Ralph Goodo Bill Blair
Public sector union influence is on the rise The Candice Malcolm Show： Canadian confederation is broken

Episode Stats


Length

5 minutes

Words per minute

169.97

Word count

928

Sentence count

45

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Justin Trudeau is the Prime Minister of Canada. He is the longest serving Prime Minister in Canada s history. He s been in office for a little over a year and a half, and in that time, Canada s economy has been in free fall, its infrastructure is crumbling, and the country is on the brink of a recession. And yet, he s appointed a new cabinet that is, in his words, "inclusive" and "progressive."

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
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 In the aftermath of the federal election which reduced the Trudeau government from a tight
00:00:08.960 majority to minority status, he was essentially shut out in Western Canada and a grassroots
00:00:14.480 Western separatist movement called Wexit has formed. You'd almost think that the Prime
00:00:18.980 Minister might think that uniting a divided nation would be a priority, almost. Add to
00:00:25.000 that the dire strait of the national economy. The PBO released a projection saying that this
00:00:30.720 year the country will pay $23.8 billion in interest payments alone to service the national
00:00:35.900 debt. They project that number will rise to $33.6 billion in five years. Stunning numbers.
00:00:43.140 The GDP is barely limping along in positive territory and is just a hiccup or two away
00:00:47.840 from falling into a recession. Over the course of his first term in office, Canada has lost
00:00:52.680 over $100 billion in investment we might otherwise have had but for the disastrous policies of
00:00:58.020 the Prime Minister and his Liberal government. Our national railway has just gone on strike
00:01:02.860 which will affect getting Alberta oil to market and prairie grain to the west coast terminals
00:01:07.680 not to mention not being able to transport eastern manufacturing to market including cars produced
00:01:13.060 in Ontario. In short, a prolonged strike could cripple the Canadian economy for a lengthy period
00:01:18.260 of time. With all that facing the Prime Minister as he prepared to name his new cabinet, one would
00:01:24.440 think he'd be hard at work addressing those issues for the good of the country. His stated
00:01:29.540 priority, he said, is fighting climate change. He also reversed course at the UN, siding with a bunch
00:01:35.520 of despotic countries in backing the Palestinians against Israeli settlements on the West Bank,
00:01:40.920 in a motion siding with the likes of North Korea, Egypt, Zimbabwe, and Nicaragua,
00:01:45.600 and directly against the United States, our closest ally and largest trading partner.
00:01:51.120 The mind boggles. So desperate is the Prime Minister to do the UN's bidding to get invited
00:01:56.620 for a seat on the Security Council that he would stick his finger in the eye of Donald Trump.
00:02:01.620 Which brings me to his new cabinet, just announced. He had the opportunity to make some appointments
00:02:07.060 that might signal business and the West that he is going to be inclusive and that his government
00:02:12.580 is going to do everything possible to write the listing ship. He did nothing of the kind.
00:02:18.700 He started by appointing former Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland as Deputy Prime Minister,
00:02:24.540 essentially his second in command. But what that really does is provide a buffer to further insulate
00:02:29.860 him from anyone trying to get the attention of the PMO. Freeland has, charitably, a checkered history
00:02:36.440 as the Foreign Affairs Minister. She managed to anger the Saudis, China, and other countries we used to 1.00
00:02:42.040 have good relations with. Add to that, she was made persona non grata by Russia, meaning she can't go
00:02:47.860 there. It's pretty hard to conduct diplomacy if you can't travel to that country and they won't even
00:02:52.920 take your calls. With the election loss of Ralph Goodo, he appointed the former chief of the Toronto
00:02:58.460 Police Service, the sycophantic Bill Blair, as his public safety minister, which means he is
00:03:04.280 responsible for the RCMP. One wonders what might happen to their investigation into the Prime
00:03:10.140 Minister for obstruction of justice for his role in the SNC-Lavalin scandal that was paused
00:03:15.120 at the start of the election campaign. He also created a new ministry, Middle Class Prosperity,
00:03:22.600 and named Mona Fortier to the post. Prior to being an MP, she was the Director of Communications for an
00:03:28.100 obscure Ottawa French language community college. Her resume is even thinner than the Prime Minister's.
00:03:33.640 Considering it is the Prime Minister's carbon tax and other taxes that have hurt the middle class,
00:03:39.500 one wonders exactly what her role might be. And then there's the appointment of Mark Miller as
00:03:44.800 Minister of Indigenous Services. Miller attended college Jean de Bebeuf with the Prime Minister in
00:03:50.120 the 80s. He helped organize Trudeau's first political campaign when he ran and won a seat in
00:03:54.820 Parliament. He was also the fundraising director for Trudeau's leadership campaign and hosted a secret
00:04:00.380 liberal fundraiser in New York City in October during the election. Let's not forget Mary Ann
00:04:06.360 Monsef, the newly appointed Minister for Women and Gender Equality and Rural Development. Not sure the
00:04:12.900 connection. Seriously though, Monsef, who has mused about her fascination with Sharia law, which espouses
00:04:19.300 things like female genital mutilation, men beating women, and the subjugation of women, seems like a perfect 1.00
00:04:26.140 choice. But the worst decision among many was the appointment of Seamus O'Regan to the position of
00:04:32.840 Minister of Natural Resources, which put him in a position of responsibility for our energy sector,
00:04:39.260 which accounts for 15% of the country's GDP. His qualifications? Well, he's gay and a recovering
00:04:46.620 alcoholic and a longtime friend of the Prime Minister who was in the wedding party when the Prime Minister 0.96
00:04:51.840 got married. He spent a decade or so as host of the lightweight CTV morning show and failed utterly in
00:04:58.220 his two prior cabinet positions, veteran affairs and laterally indigenous affairs. Ask the folks of
00:05:04.680 Grassy Narrows First Nations who are still coping with mercury-poisoned water just how good he did at
00:05:09.940 that position. Instead of making decisions to unite the country and giving the oil and gas industry some
00:05:16.360 hope for recovery, he might as well have thrown gasoline on the fire started by the Wexit movement.
00:05:23.040 The incompetence is stunning. For True North, I'm Leo Knight.