Juno News - October 01, 2019


Why is Canada celebrating China's anniversary？

Mentioned
Justin Trudeau Xi Jinping Brad West Michael Kovrig Michael Spavor Jagmeet Singh Elizabeth May Mao Zedong Bill Morneau John Tory
Climate alarmists don't have any viable solutions Why aren’t forestry jobs as important to Liberals as SNC-Lavalin jobs？

Episode Stats


Length

5 minutes

Words per minute

180.51

Word count

944

Sentence count

48

Harmful content

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

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

China is celebrating the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China, and there's no shortage of celebrations happening around the world. In Canada, there's a flag raising ceremony in Toronto where China's communist flag was raised, and some Canadian politicians are against it.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
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 China is currently in the middle of celebrating the 70th anniversary of the founding of the
00:00:14.440 People's Republic of China. Now, it's no surprise that it's a big deal on the ground in China,
00:00:21.040 so much so that they are having the largest military parade in their history, which may
00:00:26.300 actually prove to be the largest military parade in human history. It's quite something. Now,
00:00:31.900 it's no surprise that this turns around and becomes an event in some other countries adjacent
00:00:36.660 to China, like Hong Kong, for instance. The protesters who continue to ask for more democracy
00:00:41.980 on the ground in Hong Kong, well, they've been met with a fierce reaction by police. The first example
00:00:48.240 we have now of a person being shot by police in Hong Kong, a protester actually taking a bullet as
00:00:54.720 these protests enter their 17th week. Canadians, though, might be surprised to learn that these
00:01:01.100 celebrations are to some degree happening right here in Canada. Just the other day, the city of
00:01:07.720 Toronto had a flag-raising ceremony where they raised the flag of the People's Republic of China.
00:01:14.620 Now, this was apparently on a courtesy flagpole that is made available for other such flag raisings. You
00:01:19.760 often hear about the pride flag being raised around pride celebrations. Well, this one was the People's
00:01:26.460 Republic of China flag. Now, I want to pause for a second because we're talking about the 70th
00:01:30.440 anniversary of China, and a lot of people probably say, well, hold on a second. I mean, isn't China
00:01:35.040 way older than that? Isn't it much older than Canada? Don't they have thousands of years of
00:01:40.200 wonderful history and culture behind them, the Chinese people and Chinese society? Yes,
00:01:44.760 that's true. That is not what is being celebrated in these recent days. What is being celebrated is
00:01:50.520 the 70th anniversary of Mao Zedong's brutal and violent takeover of China by authoritarian communists,
00:01:58.460 a legacy that President Xi Jinping has been pretty pleased to take the ball and run with, and he
00:02:03.020 has been called the most hardline leader of China since Mao. So they're celebrating this anniversary
00:02:08.500 there in China, and well, I guess that makes sense because it's their country and it's still the 0.95
00:02:13.240 communist regime. So they're proud of that, but people are proud of it here in Canada, and they're
00:02:18.560 celebrating it, and they are getting official standing in cities across the country, in the city
00:02:24.940 of Toronto, no less. Now, Toronto Mayor John Tory, he says he's boycotting this flag raising because of
00:02:30.120 the hostage situation with Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor. Fair enough, but why is this even allowed up
00:02:36.500 there in the first place? They say, well, it's what we do. It's our protocol. Any group organization
00:02:41.340 can come and sign up and have the opportunity to raise their flag? No, don't hide behind policies.
00:02:46.260 Don't hide behind rules, because you make the rules, and you can say, not on my watch. We are not
00:02:52.580 flying the communist flag of China right here at City Hall. Yet they did it anyway. Now, there are some
00:02:58.700 politicians taking a stand. Brad West is the mayor of Port Coquitlam in British Columbia. Now, the Union of
00:03:05.180 BC Municipalities recently had one of their gatherings in British Columbia, bringing together a whole bunch of
00:03:10.820 mayors and city councillors, and at one of their functions, one of their celebrations, it was actually
00:03:16.820 funded by the government of China. It wasn't the most expensive event. It cost something like five or six
00:03:21.980 thousand dollars, but it was paid for by the Chinese government, clearly as an opportunity to lobby all
00:03:28.940 of these different BC municipal politicians to bring them on board with China's agenda. Now, Brad West,
00:03:34.900 good on him. He said, I'm not going into this event. Me and some of my other city councillors,
00:03:39.620 we're going outside and we're protesting this association. And then they let a vote at that conference to vote
00:03:46.700 against accepting money from foreign governments for these sorts of events that they have, rejecting
00:03:52.700 sponsorship money. Two-thirds agreed, yes, we've got to reject this. It's kind of troubling that a third of
00:03:58.740 municipal politicians in British Columbia are okay with accepting money from China for their various events.
00:04:05.140 It's incredibly troubling to see. Every single week, every single month, we see more and more stories
00:04:10.420 that show just how interwoven Chinese communist goals are with what's happening in Canadian society.
00:04:17.760 Too bad we don't have an election campaign happening right now or coming up where we can discuss these
00:04:22.580 big ticket issues. Oh wait, of course we do. We are in the thick of it. And we're hearing nothing about it
00:04:29.100 from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, nothing about it from NDP leader Jagmeet Singh, very little from
00:04:34.200 Elizabeth May, and I think very little from Maxine Bernier as well. The main person who's spoken out
00:04:38.940 about this is Andrew Scheer, and he hasn't really been saying much. His main thing is that he would
00:04:43.340 withdraw Canada from the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, this global banking entity that
00:04:48.800 Xi Jinping has created to rival the IMF and the World Bank so that China can take over dominance of 0.50
00:04:54.500 world finance as opposed to the US-led institutions. We've got to get out of this thing. And it was
00:04:59.460 actually controversial that Bill Marno and Justin Trudeau signed us up for it in the first place. The
00:05:03.580 US really didn't want us on board with that. But other than that idea from Andrew Scheer, which is a good
00:05:08.920 one, that's all we're hearing right now on the campaign trail. And that's alarming.