Is Doug Ford the new Prime Minister of Canada? Or is he the new PM Justin Trudeau? And why does he want to lock down Ontario even though the flu pandemic is over? What s going on with the numbers on the death toll from the flu?
00:01:33.760Mathematically, it was actually just a Quebec pandemic the whole time.
00:01:38.520Seriously, Quebec has less than a quarter of Canada's population, but 62% of all the deaths have happened there.
00:01:45.520The rest of the country has been pretty much unscathed.
00:01:48.720I'm not saying zero, but so rare that if we didn't know the word coronavirus, and we just called it this year's flu, we wouldn't have noticed.
00:02:39.860A do not revive, assisted dying issue, especially in that pro-euthanasia province.
00:02:45.640It's not actually a pandemic if you go by the numbers, at least not for months now.
00:02:51.600Yes, the daily new cases statistics are up in Ontario, but that's just people who feel completely healthy getting a test that says they have it in them.
00:03:04.360But half of those are false positives, according to the public health officials of Ontario.
00:04:02.220Let me read from the Health Minister of Ontario.
00:04:04.800Due to a data review at Toronto Public Health, a number of cases and deaths that occurred in the spring or summer are being reported today.
00:04:26.380I use Ontario as the example here, but the numbers are even lower in the Prairie Provinces and the Atlantic, of course.
00:04:32.120But I mention Ontario specifically because the so-called Conservative Premier here has simply stopped being Conservative,
00:04:39.380if that word means anything these days.
00:04:41.060He's become a bit of a Justin Trudeau, Theresa Tam mini-me, just doing whatever the big government public health bureaucracy tells him to do.
00:04:50.300And he's getting a really authoritarian tone about them.
00:05:29.840Surely there are exemptions like there are for people who have breathing problems or for little children, right?
00:05:35.700So what age of children, actually, as you may know from our great website, maskexemption.ca, there are different rules in every jurisdiction in Canada, like the age of kids exempt.
00:05:47.420Well, I noticed that there wasn't any link on his tweet that said, I went to the law in question on the legislature website, and I went to the law's regulations, and there was nothing there at all.
00:06:00.420Well, I checked at 4 p.m. on Saturday, three hours after his effective immediately tweet, the regulations hadn't been updated for days.
00:06:10.600So hang on, does a premier tweeting constitute an enforceable law?
00:06:17.020So nothing debated in the legislature, nothing voted on, nothing that the public has even seen other than a tweet, nothing that the police have, just a short, vague tweet, but one that is effective immediately.
00:06:28.620If you're a police officer, would you enforce that?
00:06:33.580And is it the job of police to enforce the mask law at all?
00:06:49.540Finally, today, I see that the website, with the regulations, has finally been updated, finally caught up, and it has plenty of rules on it.
00:07:22.240Quote, for greater certainty, it is not necessary for a person to present evidence to the person responsible for a business or place that they are entitled to any of the exceptions.
00:07:32.640So you don't have to prove you're exempt to a shopkeeper.
00:08:22.320And New York City, the greatest city in the world by many measures, just being devastated, first by the riots, and now from the mayor, who's shutting it down.
00:08:32.460The city of New York has presented a plan to the state on how we address these clusters.
00:08:38.980We've gone over the plan with the state.
00:08:41.300I spoke with the governor earlier today.
00:08:43.660We've laid out the foundation for how to stop this spread dead in its tracks.
00:08:49.480And it is part of learning from what worked before and applying it in a very pinpoint manner.
00:08:58.180Now, the state has agreed on the need to close public and non-public schools in the nine highest risk zip codes.
00:09:08.320So that will happen effective now tomorrow morning.
00:11:01.080I can't even believe how much news has happened.
00:11:03.700In Canada a little bit, but in the United States it's just unbelievable.
00:11:07.040It's hard to believe that the leaders debate, the presidential debate, between Donald Trump and Joe Biden was less than a week ago since that time.
00:11:14.380So many things, including Donald Trump being admitted to the Walter Reed Medical Center as a patient catching the Wuhan flu.
00:12:21.680We're working hard to get me all the way back.
00:12:24.180I have to be back because we still have to make America great again.
00:12:29.320We've done an awfully good job of that, but we still have steps to go and we have to finish that job.
00:12:36.600Well, if that wasn't enough, Trump went out and greeted the fans that had mobbed the hospital doing a little victory lap in his bulletproof SUV.
00:12:46.960Well, that got the official press gallery even more furious.
00:12:51.320The Washington Correspondents Association put out a statement that they were outraged that Trump didn't tell them about it.
00:12:58.000Well, joining us now to talk about not only Trump's illness, which thankfully seems to be fairly mild,
00:13:06.040and more importantly, the media reaction or overreaction to it, is our friend Andrew Lawton,
00:13:12.560the boss of The Andrew Lawton Show, which you can get at andrewlawtonshow.com.
00:15:59.940Whatever he says, they say the opposite.
00:16:02.960Yeah, and this is, again, the whole point about the media claiming that, oh, Trump should have given them a heads up.
00:16:08.100If Trump had given them a heads up, then they would have said, oh, they were endangering us, trying to get us out when he had COVID.
00:16:13.360And same as Jim Acosta, I don't know if you saw this on Twitter the other day, tweeted somewhat snarkily that Donald Trump didn't go over to the reporters to take questions on his way to Marine One when he was going to Walter Reed,
00:16:24.960where if he did go, then he would be told, oh, well, now he's endangering all the reporters by it.
00:16:29.840So, I mean, it is really empowering for Trump because what the president can do now is whatever he wants because there is no correct answers.
00:16:38.100So, every other politician gets held up by, oh, what's the right thing to do?
00:16:42.200What's going to reflect well in the polls?
00:16:44.100What's going to make the media like me?
00:16:45.880Whereas Trump, I think, is well aware of the fact that they're going to hate everything he does and anything he does.
00:16:50.480So, he might as well just stick to what he wants to do.
00:16:53.040And in this case, he wanted to go and take a little bit of a joyride around Walter Reed.
00:16:57.520You know, I think there are legitimate questions you could be asking about, okay, what was done to make sure that the people in the car with him were safe and protected?
00:17:04.820But ultimately, the media would have hated it no matter what.
00:17:07.760They would have hated it if he retreated and holed away.
00:17:10.940And when we saw this on Twitter, he went dark on Twitter for a period of time.
00:17:14.840And everyone would have said, oh, what does it mean that he's not saying anything?
00:17:17.860And then I think very deliberately, he's been tweeting mostly today, like every hour or something.
00:17:22.880And now they're saying, oh, this is a sign of instability.
00:17:28.080You know, I understand that Trump's press secretary, who hosts the briefings in the White House, I understand that she herself has tested positive.
00:17:39.260And let me tell you what that presents us with.
00:17:41.380You know, as you say yesterday, when the media saw Trump doing the victory lap in that bulletproof SUV, his Secret Service inside the car had the face-sealed masks and whatnot.
00:17:52.840But all of a sudden, the media that is against police said, oh, my God, are those Secret Service, those Secret Service agents, they're being abused by the president.
00:18:01.080And, by the way, you're a fit 30-year-old Secret Service agent.
00:18:05.740I think you've got like one in a billion chance of being hurt by this virus.
00:18:09.880And, by the way, you signed up willing to take a bullet.
00:18:13.200I think you'll be in the car with the president who has a bit of a cough.
00:18:35.100Theoretically, every single journalist, Jim Acosta, all the others in that room, Andrew, well, now they should quarantine.
00:18:43.780I think we're about to see if the liberals mean any of it.
00:18:47.320Because all those media party journalists, if they really meant the, oh, my God, you've got to quarantine and don't spread it, they would take the next two weeks off.
00:20:15.920Yeah, I'm not sure I would view it as necessarily a net positive.
00:20:19.900We have about a month left in the campaign, and this has basically sidelined Donald Trump in some ways for half of what's left in the campaign.
00:20:29.300And it calls into question whether there can be debates again.
00:20:32.660It calls into question any sort of events that would happen.
00:20:36.100And it gives, in fact, Joe Biden a bit of an out for debate, saying, oh, well, you know, he's got COVID, so we can't.
00:20:43.500And it could take, you know, all these weeks for them to come around.
00:20:45.800And I think in that sense, Trump's greatest selling point has been the strongman view next to the sort of dotty senility of Joe Biden.
00:20:54.840That's the narrative that Donald Trump has put forward.
00:20:57.920So if Donald Trump is locked down in quarantine in some way and Joe Biden's not, that in and of itself upsets that balance just a bit.
00:21:06.240And that's why I think there is a value politically in him doing the videos and tweeting and taking the rides out, the victory laps, as you call it.
00:21:13.880But I also think that Trump needs to get out there.
00:21:17.400You can only to a point campaign from a hospital and from quarantine.
00:21:21.420And I feel that's going to be the big challenge here.