Juno News - November 30, 2019


Why wasn't Trudeau at the Grey Cup？

Topics
Prime Minister absence from Grey Cup
Mentioned
Lois Mitchell Doug Mitchell Justin Trudeau Donny Blin Bud Grant Leslyn Lewis Grey Cups Joe Clark Diefenbaker Kretchen Pierre Martin Harper
New Conservative deputy leader was Liberal until last September Conservative journalist gets assaulted by union activist

Episode Stats


Length

2 minutes

Words per minute

159.96

Word count

424

Sentence count

19


Summary

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

The absence of the Prime Minister and Governor General at the 107 Grey Cup was a bit of a throwback to the days of Prime Minister John Diefenbaker and Prime Minister Brian Mulroney. Why not Justin Trudeau?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Like many of you, I watched the 107th Grey Cup on Sunday and the end of a 28-year drought for
00:00:11.680 the Winnipeg Blue Bombers. And good for them. It's been a long time since the heady days of
00:00:16.740 Bud Grant and Kenny Plain and Leo Lewis. What was also conspicuously noticeable at the game
00:00:23.700 played at Calgary's McMahon Stadium was the absence of the Prime Minister or the Governor
00:00:28.600 General. The highest ranking official for this Grey Cup was Lois Mitchell, the Lieutenant
00:00:34.180 Governor of Alberta. Now Mitchell has long and strong connections to Canadian football,
00:00:40.040 being the wife of former CFL Commissioner Doug Mitchell, as well as all the work she has done
00:00:45.000 over the years for Canadian college football. I would expect to see her and Doug at the game.
00:00:51.580 But where was the Prime Minister? The website for the PMO simply said that he was taking
00:00:58.580 yet another, quote, personal day, unquote. I've been involved with many Grey Cups, including
00:01:05.060 several where I acted as Director of Security for the Grey Cup game and festival. It is pro-forma
00:01:10.820 for the CFL to invite the Prime Minister and Governor General of Canada to the big game. Typically,
00:01:17.220 the invitation is accepted well before the game to allow for planning and for, you know, for the
00:01:22.700 movements and seating of VIPs. Every Prime Minister since at least Diefenbaker in the 50s, typically
00:01:30.300 attended the games and often took part in the trophy award at the end of the game. Justin Trudeau's own
00:01:36.300 father, Pierre, famously took part in the pre-game kickoff and at another year when he wore what was
00:01:42.280 called the Zorro hat. Even Joe Clark went to the big game in 1979. Marooney, Kretchen, Martin and Harper
00:01:49.540 all attended the games over the years. Harper even insisted on sitting in the stands with average
00:01:54.760 football fans and was often treated as a rock star by fans in his immediate area, much to the chagrin of
00:02:01.020 the RCMP protective detail. So where was the Prime Minister on Sunday? After virtually getting shut out of
00:02:08.060 the West in the federal election and promising to reach out to the West, why would he ignore the tradition of
00:02:14.360 Prime Ministers attending Grey Cup, especially when the game was being held in Calgary, the heart of Western
00:02:20.500 separation movement? He had a chance to bridge the gap between East and West and mix and mingle with average
00:02:27.620 Canadians in the Western heartland. Instead, he took another personal day. For True North, I'm Leo Knight.
00:02:38.060 ...