Juno News - February 16, 2020


What is Canada going to do about the pipeline protesters？


Episode Stats

Length

5 minutes

Words per Minute

201.55652

Word Count

1,105

Sentence Count

76

Misogynist Sentences

1

Hate Speech Sentences

3


Summary


Transcript

00:00:00.000 As we speak, the country is spiraling into crisis, blockades continue, rail lines, streets,
00:00:11.920 intersections. People cannot access buildings like the BC legislature. Chrystia Freeland blocked
00:00:17.480 from getting into a Halifax government building to meet with the mayor. And the law enforcement
00:00:21.880 is doing nothing about it being served court injunctions in places like Ontario, Belleville,
00:00:26.760 along that via rail line, CN Rail as well, going across those tracks. And the OPP do nothing.
00:00:32.680 They get multiple court injunctions. They do not enforce it. When is lawlessness going to stop?
00:00:39.700 When are we going to enforce the law here? Well, we have politicians currently passing the buck.
00:00:44.000 Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, he's been out of the country for most of this. And he just speaks
00:00:48.360 in sort of vague platitudes. Yes, rule of law is important, but we must allow people their
00:00:53.240 opportunity to speak and et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, that's why we have things like the public
00:00:57.400 square where you can go to city hall and you can go in front of the parliament buildings and hold
00:01:00.800 up your little sign and have your say. You can email and tweet at people if you're unhappy about
00:01:05.680 their political priorities. But can you do this? No, you certainly shouldn't be able to. And yet so
00:01:11.540 many people are getting away with it. I'm reminded of an anecdote back from when I was a teenager.
00:01:16.760 My friend and I were in downtown Toronto and he was a big, a trains aficionado. He really liked
00:01:21.420 transit, trains and planes and all that stuff. And he said, Hey, let's go up to Union Station.
00:01:25.460 Just take a look at some of these trains. And I said, okay, fine, whatever. We weren't planning
00:01:29.480 to catch a train. We just went up and we walked up the steps. There was no barrier saying, don't
00:01:33.460 go here. And we were looking around at the trains. Now this was very shortly after 9-11 and we were up
00:01:38.880 there. And then these two guards came, these two security guards or sort of delegated policing
00:01:44.120 officers, CN cops. I can't remember what role they played. And they said, what are you guys doing here?
00:01:48.020 We said, we're just looking at the trains. And they said, sorry, boys, we're going to have
00:01:52.100 to write you up. And they wrote us this little sort of yellow ticket that they had there at
00:01:56.520 the Union Station. And they said, if you come back again, we're going to find you or arrest
00:02:01.000 you or whatever it was I have. Man, these guys mean business. I didn't know you could be
00:02:04.340 up there on the track. So they'll, you know, kind of make sense. Now we went on our merry
00:02:08.100 way. So they did that to me, two teenage guys just looking around, wanted to see a train.
00:02:13.320 You have people blockading rail lines saying, we're going to grind this country to a halt.
00:02:19.940 They do nothing. These guys are getting much more of a free pass than I did just wanting to
00:02:25.740 see a train pass you by. But here's the added frustration in all of this. The stakes are actually
00:02:34.240 very low. I would understand a little bit more if we had First Nations people taking to our streets
00:02:40.420 like they did in Idle No More to say, we've got some horrible conditions in our communities
00:02:44.760 and we want them to be addressed. Now, I didn't necessarily agree with all the ways that Idle
00:02:48.460 No More unfolded and so forth and who was to blame for this problem and that problem. But you could
00:02:53.720 at least take the point that, yes, there was a bona fide issue. And these were First Nations
00:02:58.960 people. And they were articulating grievances that were true to them. Is that the situation
00:03:04.040 here? What's the problem? They're not protesting boiled water advisories. They're not protesting
00:03:11.340 the lack of food or something like that in their community. These are people who are saying,
00:03:16.180 we are standing in solidarity with Wet'suwetwin people in the interior of British Columbia over
00:03:20.340 the coastal link pipeline. And that is bringing a bunch of allies to go and blockade other things
00:03:25.000 throughout the country. Little problem in all of this. The Wet'suwetwin First Nations people
00:03:30.840 support the coastal link pipeline. The majority of them, about 80 percent opinion polling has shown
00:03:36.260 there. The elected bound council openly support them. And quite a number of the hereditary chiefs
00:03:41.780 support it. It's just that four or five hereditary chiefs aggressively do not. I think that's their
00:03:47.980 right and a free society have their views, but they are vastly outnumbered. And who are the people
00:03:53.800 taking to the streets? Well, in Belleville area, the people there who are protesting, they are
00:03:59.540 self-described Mohawk warriors. Although they do not speak for that community, the Mohawk-Tayandanaga
00:04:04.960 community. The chief has made that clear. He says, these aren't our guys, or at least we didn't tell
00:04:09.220 these guys to come here. They're part of our band council. We don't know what they're doing. And one
00:04:13.420 journalist on the ground actually told me, get this folks, that at least four or five of the license
00:04:18.300 plates of the couple dozen cars that are there for protesters have New York state plates. These are
00:04:24.840 Americans driving up to participate in all of this. What on earth is going on here? But some of those,
00:04:30.040 at least the people in Belleville, they are First Nations persons. When you watch those video clips of
00:04:34.560 Christy Freeland being blocked, or people who are not being let into the BC legislature, I gotta say,
00:04:40.640 some of those First Nations elders, well, they look a whole hell of a lot like college-age
00:04:45.520 Caucasian blonde girls. What's going on? Yes, there's a few First Nations people in the mix there,
00:04:50.720 but for the most part, these appear to me to be white liberals, or SJWs, or whatever, Antifa-in-training
00:04:57.680 individuals. Are we going to accept this? Are we going to tolerate this? First Nations people, by and large,
00:05:02.020 say, we would like to see this project come about. And because some sort of unclear exactly who they are
00:05:07.860 activists have glommed onto this, and are using the name of First Nations activists to shut this down,
00:05:12.960 we let this happen. We should not let this happen. This should not be allowed to stand. So what do we
00:05:19.200 do? Everybody says, what do we possibly do? It's pretty simple. We do what would happen if,
00:05:24.860 say, a couple teenagers went up to the tracks to look at a train. You remove them.