Juno News - January 21, 2023


Why the WEF should matter to Canadians


Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

188.49806

Word count

602

Sentence count

23


Summary

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

Andrew Lawton is in Davos, Switzerland, covering the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting (WEF) 2023, which is now in its fifth and final day. In this episode, Andrew takes a look at why Davos is such a valuable place to be, and why we should all be there.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 Welcome to Davos. We are here for the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2023,
00:00:04.860 which has just wrapped up its fifth and final day.
00:00:08.000 We've been in Switzerland for almost a week in what Klaus Schwab identifies as the remote mountain village,
00:00:13.160 the place that you need to be in to have trust fostered.
00:00:17.100 Thousands of business leaders, NGO leaders, activists, journalists, and yes, political leaders
00:00:22.260 have descended on Davos for the last week to, in their words, solve the world's problems.
00:00:26.360 Yes, the whole premise of this is that the world is fragmented and there are a number of crises,
00:00:30.780 political, economic, social, and it is the people in this room that have the power and ability,
00:00:36.280 if they work together, to deal with those problems.
00:00:38.780 Now, we've had all the greatest hits come up over the last week, from digital ID, to climate change,
00:00:43.400 to central bank digital currency, and what's most noteworthy about all these things
00:00:47.020 is that the discussions are at a very high level, but they are not in any way theoretical.
00:00:51.660 These are all discussed as being a fait accompli,
00:00:54.160 as things that are going to be inevitably coming in the future,
00:00:56.940 and we all have to just get on board as citizens.
00:00:59.580 By the time these discussions trickle down to our governments, to political parties' platforms,
00:01:03.940 in many respects, the decisions have already been made.
00:01:06.800 And that remains the real question of what's happening here in Davos.
00:01:09.740 Is the real action what's happening on the public agenda,
00:01:12.100 the programs that you can live stream and that we've been sharing clips from,
00:01:15.400 or is the real power in the bilateral and multilateral meeting room,
00:01:18.960 where world leaders and business leaders are getting together without any scrutiny of the press,
00:01:22.640 where my lowly orange press badge does not grant me access?
00:01:26.420 Many people over the past week have been all too willing and pleased to chat about
00:01:30.320 what it is they're doing here in Davos, and what their visions are for a number of things,
00:01:34.380 but notably, some of these political leaders have not wanted to talk,
00:01:37.480 like Chrystia Freeland, or John Kerry, or even Her Royal Highness Princess Beatrice.
00:01:42.640 But the reason we came to Davos is because so many of these people do not like to answer questions.
00:01:47.620 They do not like to talk about these things.
00:01:49.560 They do not want to address questions about the World Economic Forum's influence,
00:01:52.980 and the influence of the business leaders who pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to be here,
00:01:57.540 which you can only surmise is to have access to the politicians who pay no money to be here,
00:02:01.980 who are here as the invited guests of the World Economic Forum.
00:02:05.140 I don't know whether we're going to be back next year for the next annual meeting.
00:02:08.400 If you do think there's value in what we're doing, please do let us know in the comments,
00:02:11.640 and also contribute to cover this.
00:02:13.620 Donate.tnc.news is where you can support our work here.
00:02:17.160 As I've mentioned time and time again, it's not inexpensive to bring a cameraman and a journalist to Switzerland,
00:02:21.980 but it's important because in many cases, it is the only way to put the questions to these people.
00:02:26.720 And this has been, for many of these elites, somewhat of a safe space.
00:02:30.020 You can tell they're not used to people that don't see the world like them penetrating this space
00:02:34.380 and getting up close and asking them about any number of things.
00:02:37.220 So, for the last time, from Davos, for True North, I'm Andrew Lawton.
00:02:41.640 Thank you.