Manitoba announces a new vaccine passport, and it s the most restrictive lockdown in the whole country. What does this mean for the people of Manitoba, and why are they so worried about getting vaccinated? Ezra takes you through the details of the passport and explains why he thinks it s a bad idea.
00:12:30.080I cannot believe that I'm going to be sitting here saying a lot of negative things about a conservative leader in Canada.
00:12:37.660Now, I take it you're referring to Doug Ford, the premier of Ontario.
00:12:40.700That's what's so unusual to me, Manny, is in the United States, Republicans, or at least some, like the governors of Florida and Texas and South Dakota, have taken a real anti-lockdown position.
00:12:53.820And it's been mainly Democrats who are taking the pro-lockdown position.
00:12:58.400In Canada, there really isn't any difference between the two main parties, is there?
00:13:06.340I mean, here we have in Canada, if you look at even the chart that you presented or look at all the facts, the most, I'll say, party that adhered to conservative values was the NDP party in British Columbia.
00:13:24.280I mean, if you look at Ontario, Doug Ford, I mean, I can't believe, I am so offended.
00:13:31.080He's offended every conservative value that I have fought for for 40 years.
00:13:36.580And I'll just speak on one topic alone, which is schools.
00:13:40.340You'll recall that in October, November, even as far as December, Doug Ford, Premier Ford, was telling everyone in Ontario that the schools were the safest place for children.
00:14:18.080Number one, a very comprehensive study done, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, one of the prestigious universities, journals.
00:14:26.620And what they did is they studied Sweden, where they have two million children who were in school and did not miss a day of school in phase one, phase two, phase three.
00:14:37.840They went through school every day, uninterrupted.
00:14:41.340Sweden had a no mandatory mask policy and was slightly soft on their approach.
00:14:48.260They studied the two million kids and found that not one difference in having the children in school versus lockdown.
00:14:55.540They found that the children were very safe in school, sort of actually supported what Doug Ford was messaging for about two months.
00:15:03.880You also had the CDC do a study saying there was no added transmission to schools, to community, and it was a safe place.
00:15:13.420And the third thing that we had now that we didn't have in November was vaccines.
00:15:19.840And now we have approximately 70% of the population in Ontario, at least with the first dose.
00:15:26.180When you look at what Ford has done, you look at, you're saying, well, wait a minute, his position was schools were the safest place.
00:15:34.660Conservatives want their kids in school.
00:15:36.580They want the kids not to be abused, not to be manipulated by governmental authorities.
00:15:43.740And since that time he made that proclamation or that statement and assured the public that schools were safe for children, which they are, we've had nothing but greater signs to show that schools are extremely safe.
00:15:58.620He's the only one that shuts down schools.
00:16:00.460And we even have medical, the children's, the Toronto children, the CHEO, all the many doctors saying that children's mental health are at risk, yet he continues to defy the signs.
00:16:15.540He is, he has, listen, he has performed, in my opinion, the worst of any leader and certainly the worst of what you'd expect of a conservative leader.
00:17:52.840We've had Sweden run through it all its time.
00:17:55.500And to ignore all the compelling science, plus prestigious studies, especially saying that there is no additional harm to children, but there's extreme harm to the mental health.
00:18:30.920On April 15th, the cases were starting to drop, and it started to drop as early as April 11th.
00:18:36.740And that is even in the Ontario website.
00:18:39.560But on April 15th, this media leak of a possible model showing 18,000, and we've known that the models have been wrong every time they've used them.
00:18:50.920They've been dead wrong ever since the beginning of Fauci saying that there would be about 6,000 Americans killed and 600,000 Canadians killed.
00:18:59.700They've been wrong from the beginning.
00:19:01.160Yet, Ford did very quick on the model that's known to be proven right, known to be going in the wrong direction of the actual data, and stripped people of their fundamental liberties.
00:19:13.240And now we're 60 days past that point.
00:19:16.060We've seen a precipitous fall in cases and everything for 60 days, and he ignores the actual science in favor of the modeling science to strip away liberties.
00:19:29.860We know that courts are very reluctant to strip away freedoms.
00:19:36.440This is a society that we live in, and the laws that we know, and the parlance is best to have 100 guilty men go free than one innocent man taking away his freedoms.
00:19:49.680Well, that's something that's in our Constitution.
00:19:53.660That's something within the DNA of every Canadian.
00:20:58.720I mean, as the weather gets nicer and as it stays sunny out longer, people just naturally want to go outside, especially young people and lower income people who don't have a nice big patio, a nice big backyard.
00:21:11.260One of the frustrating things is that the lockdown class, they might have a cottage in the country, they might have a backyard, but a lot of the people who are locked down, the waiters and the waitresses and the retail workers, they had nowhere to go or do.
00:21:45.300I think that the government is going to let people out on the summer because they just couldn't keep them bottled up.
00:21:50.660But as fall comes around and it turns cooler and we go back to what's traditionally called flu season, I'm afraid that we're going to have about two months of relative freedom.
00:22:01.260And then, boom, they're going to, oh, my God, it's a new variant.
00:22:22.220Listen, you have all the right to be worried.
00:22:24.340All you have to do is look at the behavior of this premier.
00:22:27.520The premier, in my view, is acting more of a coward than a leader.
00:22:32.760Every decision that he has to make, he takes the easiest decision out, and that is at the peril of the citizens.
00:22:40.280And here's who's, you know, we talk about conservative and liberal and right and left, but more so I tend to look at elitists and non-elitists.
00:23:11.840I mean, I just can't imagine my mother and father who had two or three jobs and certainly no ability to buy computers and put the kids and stay at home with kids while they are doing online learning.
00:23:26.480My parents went to work and we would have just sat there.
00:24:20.480And I assure you, I will be doing what I can to make sure that Doug Ford is certainly not the leader of this party.
00:24:29.340You know, there was a tweet the other day by the NHL celebrating the fact that the federal government was exempting them from the 14-day quarantine that everyone else has to take when they go back and forth between Canada and the United States.
00:24:42.680Now, by the way, I don't think that that quarantine ought to be necessary if someone just took a COVID test.
00:24:49.680You have to take a test before you get on the plane, take a test when you land.
00:24:53.820I mean, fine, if you take a test and you don't have it, why are you still quarantining for 14 days, especially in a government quarantine hotel?
00:25:01.260I don't think we need that, especially if we're testing people.
00:25:04.580But the NHL was specifically exempted those millionaire players, their entourage, and their billionaire owners.
00:25:10.940And here's my point. The quarantine is supposedly to protect the rest of us from the travelers.
00:25:17.700So it's not even that the government doesn't care about NHL players.
00:25:22.520It's that they say that NHL players are not a threat to the rest of us.
00:25:26.500But if that's a fact for them, why isn't it a fact for others?
00:25:30.540What gets me about these special exemptions, Manny, is not that some people want the exemptions.
00:25:35.580I want everyone to have an exemption from these crazy rules.
00:25:38.120It's that it's so transparently for political friends, for business friends, for lobbyist friends, and the rest of us know your place.
00:26:08.860So the health experts under every jurisdiction, but particularly I'm going to focus on Ontario, created a color code system and rolled it out.
00:26:18.420I think in September or early October to give people certainty.
00:26:21.640If your region gets to a certain point, you go to yellow, you go to green, you go back and so on.
00:26:26.760So that at least to provide a certain certainty for businesses, for families, for schools, that was scrapped.
00:26:33.680It was used for probably 20 days or a month.
00:26:38.780When you scrap something that is to be giving fairness and a clear understanding, it is just trampling on rights.
00:26:46.240I mean, everything. And especially when you look around the world, I mean, I don't know.