Juno News - October 01, 2019


Why is Canada celebrating China's anniversary？


Episode Stats

Length

5 minutes

Words per Minute

180.50864

Word Count

944

Sentence Count

48

Hate Speech Sentences

2


Summary

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

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
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
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.