The Blueprint: Canada's Conservative Podcast - August 31, 2018


Veteran shares experiences with Conservatives

Hosted by
Jamie Schmal
Mentioned
Andrew Nuttall John McRae
All-star team joins The Blueprint, live at Convention 2018 Spring 2019 Reports of the Auditor General of Canada

Episode Stats


Length

8 minutes

Words per minute

116.46

Word count

988

Sentence count

58

Harmful content

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Learn English with the Prime Minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau speaks at a memorial service in Halifax, Canada to honour veterans of the Canadian Armed Forces who lost their lives in the line of duty in Afghanistan.

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 You are listening to The Blueprint, Canada's Conservative Podcast.
00:00:09.040 Is the Prime Minister actually saying that taxpayers should be on the hook when he breaks the law?
00:00:20.420 What is it going to take for the Prime Minister to have any respect for any laws in this country that may curb his out-of-control behaviour?
00:00:30.000 All these deficits leading to nothing but burying Canadians in taxes.
00:00:40.000 Thank you. Thank you for that amazing introduction and the amazing weekend so far here in Halifax.
00:00:47.000 It's been a great weekend.
00:00:51.000 I'd like to take you back to April 3rd of 2010.
00:00:56.000 I'm lying on a stretcher in a grape field in Kandahar, Afghanistan.
00:01:01.000 I could taste blood and sand grit all through my mouth.
00:01:04.000 My fingers were dangling off my hand only held by flaps of skin.
00:01:12.000 My left leg was torn, my left leg was gone and my right leg was torn to the bone and twisted like a corkscrew.
00:01:21.000 This unimaginable scene is what I thought were going to be the last moments of my life.
00:01:30.000 Three years prior to that, on my 18th birthday, I signed up to join the Canadian Armed Forces.
00:01:38.000 This is the first adult decision I have ever made and it was to serve my country.
00:01:56.000 I wasn't even old enough to buy a beer in most provinces but I was old enough to serve and possibly die for my country.
00:02:13.000 Now take a moment and think about that.
00:02:16.000 Think about still being a kid and making that choice.
00:02:20.000 A choice that could put you in a combat zone, in some far off land and when you haven't even travelled east of your home province.
00:02:31.000 I started my initial training that January after my graduation and I was eventually posted to the 1st Battalion, Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry.
00:02:45.000 I was a member of Delta Company, a rifle company that deployed to Afghanistan that October in 2009.
00:03:02.000 I remember telling my parents that we were going to one of the safest areas and when in actual fact it was probably the most heavily IED'd in the whole country at the time.
00:03:15.000 In the first three months, Delta Company found three metric tons of IED making material and we suffered two losses by Christmas.
00:03:27.000 On October 23rd, 2009, my own platoon suffered our own loss, Lieutenant Andrew Nuttall.
00:03:35.000 Lieutenant Nuttall was our platoon commander from Victoria, BC.
00:03:39.000 He was a surfer dude that loved hitting the waves in Tofino in his spare time.
00:03:45.000 He was our big brother and our fearless leader.
00:03:48.000 They flew our platoon out to Cantarire Field to his tennis ramp ceremony.
00:03:55.000 And to say goodbye to our leader, our friend, our brother who just turned 30 earlier that year.
00:04:11.000 That day to me, and to the contrary to what a lot of people think, that day to me was the worst day I experienced in Afghanistan.
00:04:22.000 The heat of the tarmac, the smell in the air, and the feeling of his flag draped over his coffin is what haunts my dreams that night.
00:04:31.000 At the end of my tour, when all my company brothers and sisters returned home, Delta Company returned with five less members that were killed in action, and six of us that were seriously wounded.
00:04:46.000 The story is not much different than the countless of other stories that veterans share in their time of service.
00:04:53.000 It's a calling, and some even answered that calling earlier.
00:04:58.000 Some joined the reserves at 16, and some joined the regular force at 17.
00:05:04.000 Now imagine, imagine having that burning desire to help make the world a better place in some way.
00:05:12.000 Having a love for your home, so deep, that you want to keep the things that go bump in the night, at bay, even if it could possibly kill you in the process.
00:05:24.000 Now imagine lying in a hospital bed.
00:05:31.000 Your body ripped to shreds, broken by an explosive device.
00:05:37.000 That core to your identity is gone.
00:05:42.000 Your dream job, your calling is over.
00:05:45.000 Now imagine after going through that traumatic experience,
00:05:51.000 you find out that the country that you love so much ends up turning its back on you.
00:05:59.000 A hundred years ago, the poet John McRae writes in his poem in Flanders Fields,
00:06:06.000 The torch be yours to hold high.
00:06:09.000 If ye breaks faith with us who die,
00:06:12.000 we shall not sleep though those poppies grow in Flanders Fields.
00:06:17.000 Today, a hundred years later, the torch Canadians that were meant to hold has been dropped. 0.83
00:06:24.000 Compensation and care of our veterans have turned into a bureaucratic game.
00:06:29.000 Promises have been made, then broken.
00:06:32.000 And the enemies of our soldiers that stood in the way of us, of the freedoms that we were fighting for,
00:06:41.000 are now rewarded and given sanctuary.
00:06:51.000 Canada has become a dark place.
00:06:54.000 So dark, the veterans who have come home are becoming casualties of war,
00:06:59.000 much like the ones who have returned home in flag-draped coffins from the fields of battle in Afghanistan.
00:07:06.000 Now for those of you in the room this morning,
00:07:09.000 especially those of you who are members of parliament,
00:07:12.000 are you going to pick up that torch?
00:07:15.000 Are you going to hold it high and illuminate the darkness
00:07:18.000 and bring the ones that share your love of this country back into the light?
00:07:24.000 Are you going to uphold and legitimize Canada's sacred obligation
00:07:29.000 to take care of the ones that have given their hearts, their minds, and their body in the name of Canada?
00:07:35.000 Thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak to you this morning.
00:07:50.000 And please, today, while you're discussing and voting on your policy resolutions,
00:08:00.000 don't forget about our veterans.
00:08:03.000 And please, give us our honour back.
00:08:05.000 Thank you for listening to The Blueprint, Canada's Conservative Podcast.
00:08:18.000 To find more episodes, interviews, and in-depth discussions of politics in Canada,
00:08:23.000 search for The Blueprint on iTunes or visit podcast.conservative.ca.