Juno News - June 21, 2020


Why is Trudeau pushing American rhetoric on Canadians?


Episode Stats

Length

11 minutes

Words per Minute

190.96564

Word Count

2,149

Sentence Count

1

Hate Speech Sentences

1


Summary

In this episode, I talk about anti-Black racism in Canada and why we have a serious problem in this country. I discuss the role of the Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, in tackling racism in the country, and how we can tackle it.


Transcript

00:00:00.000 we have a serious problem in this country and it's not systemic racism or discrimination or
00:00:10.960 environmental pollution or any of the other issues that may exist in this country it's the fact that
00:00:16.240 we are not talking about real canadian issues in canadian contexts you see most recently our
00:00:23.120 national conversation has revolved around two things first it was the gun ban where
00:00:27.640 presidential trudeau and bill blair banned 1500 assault style rifles and most recently of course
00:00:33.520 it was the george floyd protests and anti-black racism now these are both issues that we should
00:00:39.440 discuss as canadians there should be nothing that is sacred that we cannot discuss or debate the
00:00:45.000 merits of or how we're going to change or govern this country but i want to look at both these
00:00:49.780 issues for a second and try and figure out why we are being fed so much american propaganda and whether
00:00:55.080 or not these things are actually problems in this country so first we have this is the this is the
00:00:59.760 gun list so there's a 1500 assault style rifles that they that they banned but if we do a quick search
00:01:06.300 we're going to find things like the missile launcher 9k 111 fago this is a anti-tank rocket
00:01:12.100 or just below it the missile launcher 9k 310 igla 1 strella 2 strella 3 igla these are all surface to
00:01:20.060 air missiles so if you're talking about assault style rifles unless you plan on assaulting some
00:01:25.860 police helicopters or army helicopters that's not the gun that you're discussing that that's simply
00:01:32.080 a red herring and i don't know these things were they tossed in simply to pad up the numbers to make
00:01:37.100 it sound like they banned 1500 different versions of ar-15s you know we will only know uh or sorry we
00:01:42.640 will never know unless unless perhaps someone at the cabinet table decides to tell us but
00:01:46.780 the issue is why did the prime minister and bill bear focus on this issue so frequently well a couple
00:01:55.940 of reasons number one it is easy to do because we're all so steeped in american culture we tend
00:02:01.920 to consume a lot of american media we tend to listen to a lot of american music and watch american tv shows
00:02:07.840 american movies and so we often feel that what's going on in the states and the culture that's that's
00:02:13.160 there is really the same culture that we have and it's only once you travel to the states that you
00:02:17.080 notice that things are a bit different second it allows them to focus attention on other problems
00:02:22.780 rather than ones that actually exist here and ones that may even be of their own creation so by focusing
00:02:29.580 on the 1500 assault style rifles it really allowed them to sidestep this one which is the missing and
00:02:36.460 murdered indigenous women now there were numerous inquiries on this and the prime minister made this
00:02:43.120 a key key pillar of his election platform twice he said that he was going to deal with first nations
00:02:50.120 and indigenous issues and instead he's doing an order in council which is you know it's pretty low to
00:02:56.440 do that or pretty shady to do that in the middle of a crisis not of a chance to discuss that and then on
00:03:02.400 top of it when you actually you know when you look at the list and you find these at guns and things
00:03:05.740 like that really it should raise a lot of questions so that's the first one then the second one is this
00:03:13.340 one you may recall the prime minister heading out to the protest and taking a knee in solidarity so
00:03:19.920 my colleague candace malcolm had a very solid point which is what is the canadian context of this why
00:03:25.340 why is he taking a knee it's totally not clear how this is a a canadian thing what what does it have
00:03:32.800 to do with canada we don't have the nfl we don't have colin kaepernick here where this whole thing
00:03:36.460 started i'm still taking a knee business um but more than that he's not just a guy or he's not just
00:03:43.100 a guy with name recognition or even a platform so he's not me he's not you he's the prime minister of
00:03:48.360 this country and so if there's anyone out there that could make a change on what's going on with
00:03:56.460 anti-black racism in this country it's got to be that guy it's got to be him now i know that it's
00:04:03.460 an important issue to discuss and i'm not trying to minimize or or downplay any of the difficulties
00:04:09.980 or the racism faced by by black canadians or by any minority group or by any canadian and yes you
00:04:16.720 can discriminate against anyone regardless of their skin color if you are making a discrimination based
00:04:22.500 on that alone and this is actually what i want to talk about the types of discrimination and how
00:04:26.960 we can help look at some of these issues and understand them now thomas soul who i admire
00:04:33.260 very much dr thomas soul is an economist and political commentator and he provides a useful tool
00:04:40.800 to understand how we can um how we can look at some of these things now one of the ways we can look
00:04:48.160 of discrimination is by breaking it down into three parts so we can have a discrimination 1a i've got
00:04:54.480 them down here so we can have a discrimination 1a discrimination 1b and discrimination 2 so this
00:05:00.040 entire section right here in the column discrimination 1b is when you are discriminated against based on
00:05:06.600 characteristics specific to the individual and the relevant to you so someone is discriminating
00:05:12.100 against me because something that i did or something that some personal history that i have that is very
00:05:17.340 specific discrimination against me as an individual has nothing to do with any of my other attributes
00:05:22.880 doesn't matter that i'm jewish or that i'm a male doesn't you know none of these things matter
00:05:26.940 1b is i think where a lot of people get into trouble and this is trying to predict unknown
00:05:33.760 individual characteristics based on known group characteristics so another example that i'm going
00:05:38.980 to use in a previous column and that was during covid if you for example went to a language school
00:05:45.460 and there were a group of iranian foreign exchange students and you know that all of them go back and
00:05:50.980 forth to iran on a regular basis but you don't know which ones have gone to iran recently and which
00:05:57.200 ones have not and again you're in a language school so so you may not actually speak english or may not
00:06:01.380 be able to communicate with them effectively now you're going to have to make a choice and again keep
00:06:06.120 keep in mind this is when iran had a covid outbreak a very strong covid outbreak so you're going to decide
00:06:12.060 based on the known characteristic the known group characteristic that they all are iran foreign
00:06:17.600 exchange students and they all go to iran frequently you're going to decide to predict the unknown
00:06:22.960 individual characteristic is that this person may have gone to iran recently and therefore i'm going
00:06:28.620 to avoid them this is very very different than discrimination 2 which dr somersault lists as the more
00:06:36.180 typical animus or the hate-based racism that you're probably thinking about and this is i'm going to
00:06:41.220 discriminate against this person because they're iranian or because they're black or because
00:06:45.060 they're asian or jewish or white or whatever this is where this is where you get into trouble between
00:06:51.480 1b and 2 and there's a debate to be made between when you're going from 1b to 2 that is that is the
00:07:00.400 the thin line that separates discrimination between something that is reasonable and something that is
00:07:04.720 clearly not reasonable now why is this important i bring it up in the article here
00:07:10.720 it's important to look at the types of discrimination because thus far we've just been
00:07:16.280 talking about police brutality and general racism general discrimination and in this case the the
00:07:23.540 prime minister and um a lot of his cabinet anti-black racism now there are a couple different things that
00:07:29.700 we have to keep in mind with um the black community in canada and the black community in the states
00:07:34.440 there's the uh fact that canada never had that legacy of slavery the fact that 56 of them are
00:07:41.920 first generation immigrants so it's more of an immigrant community as opposed to um a community
00:07:46.720 that's been here for a long time again you know we didn't have that that um legacy of slavery we did
00:07:52.000 not have jim crow laws we did not have a lot of the problems or intercommunal problems that they did
00:07:59.180 in the united states and that's that's not at all to say that we don't have our own problems
00:08:02.980 and our own problems and that is literally my entire point you may have heard of something called
00:08:08.700 carding or street checks this was something that was done in toronto until about 2014 it's still done
00:08:15.080 in some other cities and this is when the police pull you over and they basically ask for your id and
00:08:20.260 what you're doing now this can be anywhere a police officer is they don't have to suspect you of
00:08:24.220 any crime it could be on in public in the public property on public property or on private property
00:08:28.700 it could be just anywhere you bump into a police officer they can suddenly street check or card you
00:08:32.820 and this was stopped in toronto because the toronto star showed that a higher proportion of black and
00:08:39.420 brown-skinned uh canadians were getting stopped and this similar results were found apparently in
00:08:44.600 vancouver where um both black and indigenous people were were more likely to be considered suspicious
00:08:50.320 and so therefore they were street checked more than others now this is a serious canadian issue
00:08:55.860 and you know the charter protections against all unlawful search and seizure entertainment aside
00:09:01.460 which those are also very important issues to discuss if carding is even constitutional but it is
00:09:06.620 important to discuss this issue and i would like to know whether or not they are deploying and
00:09:13.320 employing type 1a 1b or type 2 discrimination did they pull this person over arbitrarily
00:09:20.120 because they are black did they pull them over because they're trying to predict some predict some
00:09:25.020 some unknown characteristic based on a group characteristic and i have an example here
00:09:28.780 about street checking james's friend in a high crime area because he was previously seen there
00:09:32.680 with james and his gang so again is it something like that where you you suspect that it could be the
00:09:38.500 case but you're not quite sure or do they actually know this person they might recognize him you know
00:09:43.700 the officer knows or he's familiar with him and he has a previous criminal history or just
00:09:47.900 interactions with the police and so they decide to street check him so this is a serious canadian
00:09:52.980 issue we need to be talking about canadian issues we need to be talking about anti-black racism
00:09:58.280 through a canadian lens we need to be talking about discrimination and police brutality through a
00:10:03.700 canadian lens we need to be talking about violence against indigenous women through a canadian lens
00:10:09.060 but we're not going to be able to do that when the prime minister is so focused on what's going
00:10:14.500 on south of the border now there's a lot of reasons that he does that and i might get into it in
00:10:19.100 another video and i'm going to put out a column about it but in a nutshell because we're so steeped
00:10:24.640 in american culture it works it makes it easy to fool canadians and to talk to them about american
00:10:31.780 phenomenon and just make it seem like this is something that goes on in this country so the
00:10:36.400 important thing that we all need to do as canadians is put on our critical thinking hats i've got my
00:10:41.280 critical thinking yarmulke on here we need to put on our critical thinking hats and we need to
00:10:45.540 examine the issues is there discrimination what type of discrimination if the outcomes are not the
00:10:52.300 same what is the reason for the outcomes a good book that i recommend on this one again is dr thomas
00:10:57.160 soul's book discrimination and disparities what are the reasons for the different outcomes what is the
00:11:01.080 reason for the discrimination it's something we need to know it's something we need to discuss
00:11:04.900 and by simply discussing american issues we are basically allowing and and encouraging those
00:11:10.880 canadian issues to stand so for true north i'm sam ashkenazi thank you so much for watching