Juno News - May 30, 2021


A Reopening Plan Without Reopening

Mentioned
Andrew Lawton Show Jason Kenney
Playing the Race Card Will politics ever be the same again？

Episode Stats


Length

7 minutes

Words per minute

180.2

Word count

1,343

Sentence count

99

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Andrew Lawton talks quarantine, the Calgary Stampede, the border reopening, and why Canada should get rid of the hotel quarantine program. Plus, a new plan from Ontario to re-open the border.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 You're tuned in to The Andrew Lawton Show.
00:00:09.720 In the next couple of months, we're going to get a little bit back to sort of normal,
00:00:14.920 maybe depending on where you live.
00:00:17.080 British Columbia is looking like it is getting on the normal train.
00:00:20.980 Alberta is planning to have the Calgary Stampede.
00:00:24.220 And I'm trying to get the boss to let me go cover the Calgary Stampede.
00:00:27.680 If you want to tell me what the news value is, please do.
00:00:31.320 I want to go just for me.
00:00:32.960 But if you can convince me there's a story, I can convince him there's a story.
00:00:36.180 Because I just haven't seen an actual person in two years now, it feels like.
00:00:40.660 So the Calgary Stampede would be like a sensory overload.
00:00:43.400 It would be like that.
00:00:44.380 There was a gum commercial not that long ago.
00:00:46.920 I can't remember what it was, which I guess makes it not a great commercial.
00:00:50.480 Or I'm just really bad at remembering things.
00:00:52.600 But basically, the premise was that everyone has just come out
00:00:55.460 after the quarantine's been declared over.
00:00:57.680 And it's this post-apocalyptic landscape of everyone just seeing people for the first time.
00:01:02.480 That's going to be the Calgary Stampede.
00:01:04.540 It's going to be like Zombieland 3.
00:01:06.280 But it'll be a lot of fun.
00:01:07.800 And that's going to be a sign that Alberta is back in business. 1.00
00:01:11.160 Open for business.
00:01:12.300 Open for people.
00:01:13.320 That's the Alberta promise this summer.
00:01:15.500 And then you go to my province of Ontario,
00:01:18.580 Ontario, which last week unveiled a three-stage reopening plan.
00:01:23.060 But reopening isn't actually in the third and final stage.
00:01:28.220 Now, Ontario is a bit odd.
00:01:30.260 Like they had, at first, it was like phase one.
00:01:33.340 They had phases and stages.
00:01:34.860 There was like phase one, phase two.
00:01:36.900 And within phase two, stage one, two, and three.
00:01:39.160 And we never got anywhere.
00:01:40.020 And then they went to colour coding.
00:01:42.280 And, you know, we got to be in yellow for a little while.
00:01:44.500 Then orange.
00:01:45.100 And then everyone went to grey.
00:01:46.520 And now they've just thrown the colours out.
00:01:48.760 They've thrown the numbers out.
00:01:49.880 And they've introduced new numbers.
00:01:51.680 A three-stage reopening plan.
00:01:53.980 That is not, at the end of which, giving you no restrictions.
00:01:58.420 Which is, to me, what reopening means.
00:02:01.420 And, in fact, even by the text of this plan,
00:02:04.400 Ontario is not opening in the way that the plan says it's supposed to.
00:02:09.040 The first stage of this was supposed to kick in at 60% of the population vaccinated.
00:02:15.320 Well, this week, Ontario cleared 65%,
00:02:18.600 significantly above that 60% goal.
00:02:21.460 And they're still waiting until well into June to open the province up.
00:02:27.160 And, again, I go to Alberta is getting ready to have the Calgary Stampede.
00:02:30.560 I won't even be able to get a haircut in Ontario.
00:02:33.360 Which, as you may have seen on the show earlier this week,
00:02:36.480 is desperately needed until July.
00:02:38.940 Because Ontario has also put these 21-day increments between the stages,
00:02:44.040 irrespective of where the province is on these metrics that the province has set out.
00:02:49.180 So people are actually doing better right now than Ontario says is necessary
00:02:54.080 to advance through the stages.
00:02:55.640 But they're still not advancing through the stages for completely arbitrary reasons.
00:02:59.880 And Ontario, the province that had a premier that put up these open-for-business signs
00:03:05.220 at the border, is not actually opening for anyone for the foreseeable future.
00:03:10.720 There have been some rumors, and again, I must say it's not substantiated yet,
00:03:15.400 but from American immigration lawyers,
00:03:17.760 that the U.S. is planning to open its land border on June 21st.
00:03:23.080 Now, this date is significant because it's when the current border closure is meant to expire.
00:03:29.240 And they've been renewing this every time, like clockwork, since last March.
00:03:33.760 And this is when they're set to do it again.
00:03:35.720 Now, Canada has given no indication that it's planning to open its border then.
00:03:39.500 But it sounds like if these rumors are true, and they are rumors,
00:03:43.520 the U.S. is planning to open up, which means Canadians will be allowed to go into the U.S.
00:03:48.880 for groceries at Port Huron or Bellingham, Washington or wherever and drive back to Canada.
00:03:54.280 But the problem is you'll still have to quarantine in Canada.
00:03:58.120 You'll still have to get a negative test.
00:03:59.580 You'll still have to do all of these things unless Canada matches this with its own measure.
00:04:04.420 There was a report this week that came out from the expert panel
00:04:07.760 that the government appointed to look into quarantine and border restrictions.
00:04:11.860 And this report actually suggested that Canada should get rid of this hotel quarantine program
00:04:18.440 that you have to pay $2,000 for and get put up at some crappy airport hotel
00:04:22.700 that the government has taken over for the purposes of housing people
00:04:26.520 that are daring to travel internationally.
00:04:29.120 And they're saying, listen, we should just discontinue this, end it.
00:04:32.120 There's no point.
00:04:33.260 Now, this has been welcomed by a lot of conservatives.
00:04:37.100 But the report also starts talking about a vaccine passport,
00:04:41.020 which I know has been a very contentious subject for people.
00:04:44.640 And it lays out basically different criteria depending on people's vaccination status.
00:04:51.160 And you look at this chart here, figure three in the report,
00:04:54.340 it says that people who are fully vaccinated should have to do a test on arrival.
00:04:58.140 That's it.
00:04:58.880 People that are partially vaccinated should have to do a pre-departure test,
00:05:02.580 an arrival test, a quarantine plus an arrival test.
00:05:06.140 And then people who are not at all vaccinated should have to do a full quarantine and another test.
00:05:11.480 So they're talking about laying out different criteria for people depending on their vaccination status.
00:05:18.720 And this is something that provincial governments have not put in.
00:05:22.480 They're basically doing, and I think I played a clip from Jason Kenney about this last week.
00:05:26.900 They're basically playing the we're all in this together card and talking about it as though
00:05:32.660 once we get to 60% vaccinated, 70%, 75%, then these restrictions will be lifted.
00:05:39.300 Well, one issue is that a lot of people who were down in the U.S.
00:05:42.460 because they were trying to flee all this nonsense in Canada,
00:05:45.200 a lot of the snowbirds got vaccinated, have come back.
00:05:48.180 Because they didn't get vaccinated here, they are not reflected in the system.
00:05:53.860 They're not reflected in the numbers as of how many people in Canada have been vaccinated.
00:05:59.160 So the irony is people that decided to get fully vaccinated the way governments were supposed to roll this out
00:06:05.280 with a three-week interval or four-week interval between shots rather than a four-month interval
00:06:10.960 are, ironically enough, part of the problem or what government says is the problem in not reopening.
00:06:17.960 Because they're part of that 20%, 25%, 30%, 35% of people who the government says are not vaccinated
00:06:24.860 even though they actually are.
00:06:27.720 So if governments are going to lay out these plans and say, we're going to reopen, then just open.
00:06:32.740 I've got lots of friends in the U.S. who are telling me their governors are lifting mask mandates,
00:06:37.160 they're walking around.
00:06:38.420 We've talked on numerous shows about all these big events that are taking place in the U.K. and the U.S.
00:06:43.900 Meanwhile, Canada is in the never-ending lockdown, well into its second year.
00:06:48.920 And depending on where in the country you live, no end in sight.
00:06:52.400 So I'll just put my hand up right now and say I'm an Ontario refugee.
00:06:56.180 If anyone wants to take me in in a more free province, let me know.
00:06:59.980 Although I realize it is only incrementally more free if you look at the gestalt of a lot of these measures.
00:07:06.280 But the point is, we need to do a heck of a lot better than we are.
00:07:10.980 If you're going to reopen, reopen.
00:07:12.720 And lay out some transparent frameworks that genuinely have a path to reopening.
00:07:18.880 If you liked watching this clip of the Andrew Lawton Show,
00:07:21.560 True North has lots more for you all over at www.tnc.news.