Juno News - February 07, 2020


What's the point of an UN security council seat？

Mentioned
Justin Trudeau
Trans Politics and Free Speech (feat. Barbara Kay) Protestors of Canadian energy don't speak for Canadians

Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

195.63

Word count

806

Sentence count

38

Harmful content

Toxicity

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

3

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Justin Trudeau is in Africa trying to get Canada a UN Security Council seat, and some are calling for him to just drop the whole thing. Is it worth the effort, the time, and the money to get there? Or should we just go along to get along?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
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 Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has spent time in Africa trying to court the dozens of nations
00:00:10.440 there that comprise a lot of the voting bloc at the United Nations into supporting Canada's pitch
00:00:16.540 up against two other countries to try and win a temporary UN Security Council seat. Is it worth
00:00:23.020 the time? Is it worth the money? A lot of people are automatically saying no, let's just drop this
00:00:28.960 entire charade. I'm half inclined to agree, but I have a little bit of a caveat. Do we have a problem
00:00:35.920 with these multinational gatherings that we have, the United Nations and other bodies? We absolutely
00:00:40.600 do. And here's the reason why. Because they so often represent the proliferation of the lowest
00:00:46.900 common denominator. And the good guys are not allowed to stand up and assert what they know
00:00:51.920 to be right. And true, case in point, all these sketchy countries that are on the UN Human Rights
00:00:56.820 Council, Saudi Arabia, and other countries that are allowed to get up and hector others about their
00:01:02.920 performance. Meanwhile, they have some of the most poor human rights performances in the world. It's
00:01:07.600 just a joke. It calls into credibility the entire respectability of the United Nations. It's a great
00:01:13.020 argument for dismantling the whole darn thing. But if you can have someone who stands up there and says, 0.90
00:01:17.780 you know what, instead of going with the flow, instead of doing a go along to get along, I'm going
00:01:22.180 to get up there and I'm going to do the Herculean feat of trying to grab opinion by the horns and
00:01:27.460 wrench it in my direction. If I'm going to assert that Canadian values, the Western values, liberal
00:01:33.780 democratic values are good values that need to be promulgated, that need to be celebrated. If we can
00:01:40.020 do that, well, good on us. And I'm left wondering, when Justin Trudeau is in these African countries,
00:01:46.280 is he doing a go along to get along with some of the countries that may want to push us in certain
00:01:51.780 directions, to be more and more on climate alarmism, to be more and more in league with what China is 0.90
00:01:57.580 doing, the rise of the global superpower. Because this isn't something that's discussed much in
00:02:01.460 Canada, but China has actually done a lot to get its tentacles into Africa and African nations, signing
00:02:07.560 a lot of deals with them, bringing them into the Belt and Road Initiative, a lot of things to bring
00:02:12.140 Africa under the wing of the new sort of world order that China is trying to do, supplanting the United 0.97
00:02:18.700 States and these sort of post-World War II Western-led institutions and bringing the world more
00:02:24.740 into their favor. What's going on when Justin Trudeau is there with these African nations? Because 0.89
00:02:29.880 Africa, I think, is a continent that will grow in importance. Canada will have more relationships
00:02:34.660 with those nations. We're going to have probably lots more interactions with, say, the good people
00:02:39.500 for instance. And by and large, we should make that a positive thing and find ways to make that
00:02:44.760 happen. But are we going to do it in a way where we are actually out there as envoys and emissaries
00:02:50.220 for broader Canadian values, the things we want to advance at places like the United Nations? What is
00:02:56.500 the point of getting a whole bunch of votes for this UN Security Council seat if we don't tell people
00:03:02.980 this is why we want this seat, this is what we're going to do with this seat, this is the way we're going
00:03:08.520 to vote, this is why this seat matters to us, and these are the values we're bringing to the table.
00:03:14.520 Because you better believe that those permanent members, Russia, China, and so forth, and obviously
00:03:19.400 the UK and the United States, they have a strong sense of themselves and their identity, and that's
00:03:23.520 why they so often come to loggerhead and why we have stalemates with the UN Security Council
00:03:27.780 veto power. Canada needs a strong sense of itself and needs to be proud of it and have swagger with it.
00:03:32.860 If, if we realize, looking at the lay of the land, we just can't possibly get votes because countries
00:03:38.820 don't agree with the way we're doing things, they don't agree with our values. Well, do we keep going?
00:03:46.980 Do we fight the good fight? Or do we compromise and go along to get along? If it's the latter,
00:03:53.280 let's not do it. Because then it's just not worth it. To me, it's not the quantity, it's not the money,
00:03:57.960 it's not the time, it's not the saving face, it's the quality. It's what are we actually standing up
00:04:02.960 for as we fight for this seat? What will we stand up for should we win?