Western Standard - October 24, 2022


Ungovernable - who's on trial here, the truckers or the government？


Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

132.86093

Word count

600

Sentence count

35

Harmful content

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In the wake of the truckers' protest on Parliament Hill, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his government are trying to paint a picture of Ottawa as ungovernable. But what if a government pushes people too far? Is that what ungovernability looks like?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.080 While the truckers were on Parliament Hill, Ottawa was ungovernable. That's what Canada's Public
00:00:07.280 Safety Minister Marco Mendicino has been telling the convoy inquiry. The thing is,
00:00:13.040 if people are ungovernable, whose fault is it? Theirs or the people governing them?
00:00:18.800 What if a government pushes people too far? Now obviously the Liberals and their NDP
00:00:25.760 allies are going to try and tell the story their way. That's why before that we had the prime
00:00:30.800 ministerial defamation about racist misogynist truckers and their unacceptable opinions and
00:00:37.200 Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson's slur about nasty people. So yes, Ottawa had a parking problem and for a
00:00:45.760 while it had a noise problem. But to see what ungovernable looks like, flick through YouTube
00:00:52.880 footage of the riots that swept across the US. That's what ungovernable looks like. In Ottawa,
00:01:00.160 during the convoy protest, by contrast, there were wives and children. There were barbecues,
00:01:05.200 bouncy castles, hot tubs and a lot of litter bins in case the truckers were accused of making the
00:01:11.680 place untidy. In fact, the place was well kept. Homeless people got into the habit of receiving 1.00
00:01:18.000 free food from the barbecues and significantly none of the scurrilous accusations leveled against the
00:01:24.480 convoy proved to be true. That is, it wasn't their people dancing on the tomb of the unknown soldier
00:01:32.320 or trying to set fire to an apartment block. As for the noise, the air horns stopped after the
00:01:39.360 organizers received a cease and desist order. Really, obeying judicial orders, how ungovernable is that?
00:01:50.320 These are sad days when a federal government stokes up loathing against some Canadians in order to better
00:01:57.760 justify itself to other Canadians. This is not what governments are for. Prime Minister Stephen Harper had
00:02:06.800 one overarching objective during his time in office to give Canadians good government, balanced budgets,
00:02:14.480 lower taxes and a chance for everybody to live their own Canadian dream. He liked it if you voted for
00:02:22.640 him, of course, but your opinions were your own. As we know, that's not how Prime Minister Trudeau sees it.
00:02:30.800 To him, it matters very much that Canadians have these acceptable opinions. Yes, of course.
00:02:40.480 As for good government, somebody who thinks budgets balance themselves and doesn't think much about
00:02:46.320 fiscal policy clearly doesn't know what it is. And it's because of blind spots like these that he and his
00:02:55.680 NDP allies came to push some independent-minded people who drove trucks just a bit too far. Amazingly,
00:03:03.680 NDP leader Jagmeet Singh has just promised to support Trudeau's government, even if the inquiry finds they
00:03:11.360 made the wrong decision. It's one thing to disagree. It's another to despise. And while the inquiry into the
00:03:21.120 government's use of the War Measures Act has yet to report, sorry, make that the Emergencies Act,
00:03:28.480 it's starting to look like the only thing that was ever in danger was the Prime Minister's self-esteem.
00:03:35.280 And the only thing that was ungovernable was his personal loathing to people who didn't think like him.
00:03:43.520 For the Western Standard, I'm Nigel Hannaford. You can become a Western Standard member for just $10 a
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