Juno News - November 23, 2019


Will Justin Trudeau continue to be silent on China？

Mentioned
Michael Kovrig Michael Spavor Dominic Barton Justin Trudeau Kong Pei Wu Meng Wanzhou Lu Shea
How will the new Trudeau government deal with national security？ Public sector union influence is on the rise

Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

182.15

Word count

707

Sentence count

37

Harmful content

Hate speech

6

sentences flagged


Summary

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

China is just getting more brazen and brazen and the Liberal government needs to answer. Now that they ve been re-elected, now that they've cobbled together their new variation of their cabinet, what are they going to do about it? Are you going to keep taking all the hits from China?

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 just getting more and more brazen and the Liberal government needs to answer now that 1.00
00:00:10.840 they've been re-elected, now that they've cobbled together their new variation of their cabinet,
00:00:15.540 what are you going to do about it? Are you going to keep taking all the hits from China? 0.98
00:00:21.900 Now we are almost at the one-year anniversary of Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor being
00:00:27.460 arbitrarily detained in China, two Canadians being held hostage. Yes, let's use the word because that
00:00:34.960 is what it is. Now the previous ambassador from China to Canada, Lu Shay, he wasn't a particularly
00:00:42.120 good fit for us. He said some pretty outlandish things and he had the nerve to accuse Canadians
00:00:47.180 of being rooted in white supremacy because of their attitudes on this file, because they dared to ask
00:00:53.360 can you please return these two Canadians, because we dare to be critical of a lot of the things that 0.53
00:00:58.740 China is doing to us right now. Well, there is hope that perhaps the new ambassador would be a little 1.00
00:01:02.920 better. Not so much. The new guy, Ambassador Kong Pei Wu, he gave a media interview to a roundtable
00:01:10.160 of people on Friday and, well, he said some pretty interesting things. For starters, he encouraged
00:01:15.060 Canadians to speak out and be opposed to the pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong. Really
00:01:20.740 unbelievable stuff, particularly given that you already have people on the ground in Canada right
00:01:26.120 now in places like Vancouver and Markham who are speaking out against the Hong Kong pro-democracy
00:01:32.700 activists. It's really alarming and disappointing to see that happen. And now the new ambassador is
00:01:37.620 goading them along, encouraging more of that to happen. But here's what he also said. It was very
00:01:42.780 interesting. He said that the arrest of Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou, well, that had caused some of the
00:01:49.620 severe difficulties that the Canada-China relationship has now. Really? So this guy's
00:01:55.220 pretty much admitting now, almost admitting publicly and unashamedly, that Michael Kovrig and
00:02:01.620 Michael Spavor were just arrested, detained, arbitrarily being held for a year just because
00:02:07.240 of Meng Wanzhou, who is facing the legal system, the above-board legal system in North America in the
00:02:13.660 same way anyone else would be. Meanwhile, the two Michaels are not facing anything resembling a fair
00:02:19.260 and accessible justice system. That is not what's happening at all. So we cannot continue to play
00:02:25.240 their game. You know, we heard that when the new ambassador, Dominic Barton, first got into his
00:02:29.920 position, he actually went there and he met with them when consular assistance was provided for them.
00:02:34.200 They've had very few meetings, very few interactions in the outside world, but Dominic Barton went and
00:02:38.640 saw them. Okay, that's great. Good to see that. And now we, of course, learned that the pork ban has been
00:02:44.620 lifted. So Canadian pork products now have access to the Chinese market. And Justin Trudeau thanked
00:02:49.800 Dominic Barton for playing a role in that. Okay, that's great. We'll take it where we can get it.
00:02:53.620 However, as a lot of observers have noted, there was a major pork shortage going on in China. It's a
00:02:58.940 very popular consumer product and they had swine flu and they had to kill off many, many, many pigs
00:03:04.280 there in that unfortunate swine flu they had. So they probably lifted the pork ban because they needed 0.55
00:03:10.460 to, to get access to pork products, not because of anything that we were doing, any superior
00:03:15.760 negotiating. So what's going to happen? How are we going to advance this file? Because clearly from
00:03:21.760 what the new ambassador is saying, they just don't care anymore. They're going to continue to prod us.
00:03:25.960 They're going to continue to practically laugh in our faces about this, doing it their way or the highway.
00:03:32.240 And that's the question this government's going to face and the new cabinet is facing. Are you going to do
00:03:37.640 it the Canadian way or are you going to do it the Chinese communist authoritarian way? Because they're 0.92
00:03:42.780 saying it's got to be that way. I think if you ask regular Canadians, they're going to say,
00:03:47.100 uh-uh, not a chance, no thanks. So the ball is right now in Justin Trudeau's court.