00:00:00.200Canada's failing government-run healthcare is on life support, and heavy-handed vaccine mandates are about to make the problem a whole lot worse.
00:00:07.580I'm Candice Malcolm, and this is The Candice Malcolm Show.
00:00:14.620Hi everyone, thank you so much for tuning into the podcast, so you're probably paying close attention to the rollout of these vaccine mandates
00:00:22.800and wondering what it's going to do to our healthcare system.
00:00:25.980We know that throughout the pandemic, we have heard countless news stories about the number of cases and stories of individuals who have not been able to get the right treatment that they needed,
00:00:36.300about surgeries that have been cancelled, about people who have ended up dying because they don't get the care that they need.
00:00:42.560So these are the sort of unintended consequences or the second and third order impacts of COVID-19 and the pandemic.
00:00:50.320And like I said in the intro, things are about to get worse because of more government meddling.
00:00:55.080Government meddling in the first place is part of the problem in our healthcare system.
00:00:58.960We don't have the resources that we need.
00:01:00.960We don't have the right allocation of scarce resources because our entire system is government-planned and centrally planned.
00:01:08.340And here we have more government interventions making the problem worse, forcing people who would otherwise be happy to deliver services,
00:01:15.980people who are trained as doctors and nurses or healthcare professionals who will not be able to go to work because of a mandate that is being enforced by the government.
00:01:26.480We're going to get to all of that today.
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00:02:15.940Remember all those healthcare workers we banged pots for and spent months proclaiming as heroes.
00:02:21.480Thousands of them are about to get fired.
00:02:23.440Under new federal vaccine mandates that Routers has called one of the strictest vaccine mandates in the world,
00:02:29.860any healthcare worker who refuses a COVID shot faces dismissal with no options to substitute regular testing or even opt out on account of prior COVID-19 recovery.
00:02:40.880So here we are, Canada taking the infamous title of one of the strictest vaccine mandates in the world.
00:02:46.980While implementing a heavy-handed strict mandate like this, strict measures are clearly going to have consequences.
00:02:53.740And one of the consequences is that a lot of people in the healthcare profession, a lot of people who are experts,
00:02:58.980a lot of people who understand the science, understand the pros and cons of taking the vaccine,
00:03:05.440have chosen for themselves that they don't want to do it.
00:03:07.880Upwards of 20%, roughly 20% of some healthcare professionals are not vaccinated.
00:03:13.220For instance, out in British Columbia, the Nurses Union says that roughly 20% of nurses are not vaccinated for COVID-19,
00:03:21.020which of course means that we could be losing a whole bunch of our workforce,
00:03:25.420a whole bunch of the people who are there to help people when they are sick because of these heavy-handed mandates.
00:03:31.600So the first consequence that we're seeing is that emergency rooms are already shutting their doors
00:03:36.460because they don't have enough staff, they don't have enough resources to stay open.
00:05:46.980Ontario health sector braces for worse staff shortages as vaccine mandates come due.
00:05:53.120So here we learned that hundreds of Ontario workers in hospitals and long-term care
00:05:57.060could be out of a job in the coming weeks because they did not get vaccinated against COVID-19,
00:06:02.380further complicating what advocates call a perfect storm of staff shortages.
00:06:06.700Ontario has not followed Quebec's lead in mandating immunization for all healthcare workers,
00:06:11.280but many hospitals have implemented their own hardline policies.
00:06:14.620Deadlines for workers to show proof of their shots or face unpaid leave or termination are now looming.
00:06:20.620For instance, just in the Waterloo, Wellington region alone,
00:06:23.420there are over 250 individual hospital staff who are on leave due to unwillingness to get vaccinated.
00:06:31.420And this is, again, happening all over the country.
00:06:33.540This is reported over at TNC.news on vaccinated Quebec nurses to have their license suspended amid staffing shortage.
00:06:41.880Amid a nursing shortage in Quebec, thousands of nurses in the province could be suspended without pay if they refuse to get a COVID-19 vaccine.
00:06:49.240Roughly 15,000 healthcare workers could be suspended without pay beginning on October 15, 2021, according to the health minister.
00:06:56.480Additionally, the Quebec Order of Nurses has said it will be suspending nursing licenses of any nurse who is not fully vaccinated beginning this Friday.
00:07:06.480So, of course, that was the big news of the story that we were heading towards this deadline that Quebec had set for its healthcare workers to be vaccinated.
00:07:13.660But we learned this week that Quebec will push that deadline back one month until November 15.
00:07:19.500So, Quebec pushes back vaccine deadline to November 15 for healthcare workers, despite repeated claims that the October 15 deadline would not be pushed back.
00:07:28.760We learned on Wednesday, Quebec Health Minister Christian Dubé announced he is giving healthcare workers 30 more days to get two vaccine doses,
00:07:37.380admitting that losing thousands of workers due to vaccine mandate will cause Quebec to run into a wall.
00:07:42.720The minister said workers in the healthcare network will now have until November 15 to get their two shots to avoid being suspended.
00:07:50.600And so, of course, the CBC being the CBC is completely disappointed by this idea that the Quebec government is giving people one more month to try to encourage them to get vaccinated.
00:08:02.140And so this was the headline that they ran over in the CBC.
00:08:04.980It says, by blinking first on vaccine deadline, Quebec may have given unvaccinated healthcare workers the upper hand.
00:08:11.200So, of course, the CBC doing what they do, which is dividing Canadians and pitting us against each other.
00:08:17.000Here they have divided the vaccinated against the people trying to encourage people to get vaccinated.
00:08:22.440And we're told in this sort of gloomy headline that the unvaccinated have got the upper hand.
00:08:28.500And here they, let me just read the first couple paragraphs here because it's pretty funny.
00:08:32.920It says, thousands of unvaccinated healthcare workers have been given an extra 30 days to get vaccine doses that have been available to them for months.
00:08:40.120So right off the bat, the first sentence, we are told that these people have already had the opportunity to get vaccine for months.
00:08:46.600The vaccine has been available for months.
00:08:49.300And for some reason, Quebec is giving them another 30 days.
00:08:52.260Wednesday's compromise on a vaccine mandate is raising concerns.
00:08:55.700The Quebec government has all but squandered its leverage when it comes to pushing holdouts in the healthcare system to get their shots.
00:09:03.360Weak, weak, weak, weak, said Nathan Freeland, an emergency room nurse at the Lakeshore General Hospital in Montreal's West Island.
00:09:11.540The way I see it, you have a bunch of healthcare professionals acting unprofessionally, and they've tested the resolve of a politician, and they got their answer.
00:09:20.280So the CBC doesn't exactly hide their opinion.
00:09:24.500They are obviously very, very pro-vaccine mandate, and they are telling a side of people who are angry at the Quebec government for not being more totalitarian and aggressive in their push to force people to get vaccines even against their will.
00:09:41.100And just as an amusing aside, as True North broke during the election campaign, the CBC itself does not require vaccines.
00:09:47.880It does not have a mandatory vaccination policy in its offices, in its studios.
00:09:53.000They do not require their own staff to get vaccinated, and yet they love to push these stories about how terrible it is when provincial governments don't force vaccine mandates on their workers.
00:10:04.980They had lots and lots of stories about how outrageous it was that the Conservative Party of Canada and Aaron O'Toole did not force candidates to get vaccinated.
00:10:13.600So they love to push this idea that everyone else should force people to get vaccinated, and then, of course, when it comes to their own office and their own company and the way that they run their business, they do not require it.
00:10:25.040So just a little bit of hypocrisy over at the CBC.
00:10:29.360And, of course, the problem, of course, with this idea of, like, a one-size-fits-all approach that everyone must get vaccinated, everyone must have the exact same recourse in dealing with a very sort of complex medical issue that we should all have the exact same opinion, that we should all have the exact same treatment.
00:10:46.080Of course, that is problematic on so many levels.
00:10:50.300Everybody has a different sort of equation and calculation that they look at when they're determining whether or not to get vaccinated.
00:10:57.100I mentioned on the show the other day that I decided to get vaccinated myself, but I am not on the side of vaccine mandates.
00:11:03.680I think that for me and my family, it made sense.
00:11:06.560I did research for me personally, again, and I think that everyone out there is entitled to their own opinion.
00:11:12.320But for me, when it came to the threat of either COVID, getting COVID-19, which I haven't had yet, the idea of getting it and some of the potential negative consequences that come from COVID,
00:11:25.000not just having it and the threat of dying from it, but potentially long-term threats.
00:11:29.820And you weigh that against the possibility of something going sideways, something going wrong with the vaccine, which does seem to happen in a very small number, but still a very, very small number.
00:11:39.460I weighed the two and decided that I would rather take my chances with the vaccine.
00:11:44.680I also wanted the ability to protect people around me.
00:11:47.720Like I said, my elderly parents who are also vaccinated, I want to be able to see them.
00:11:52.320I have two little kids and obviously they can't get vaccinated.
00:11:55.120So I want to try to protect myself to protect them.
00:11:58.280And then also just in terms of my ability to travel, I like to go, my family lives out in Vancouver.
00:12:04.540I like to be able to jump on a plane and visit them without worrying too much about getting sick on a plane.
00:12:12.240So for us, it just made sense to get vaccinated.
00:12:15.660However, the idea that we are going to force everybody in society to make the exact same decisions for themselves, you know, obviously their equation might be different.
00:12:24.840If you've had a negative reaction to a vaccine in the past, or if you'd prefer to have a different kind of proactive treatment, if you've had COVID in the past from recovery, you had the antibodies, or if you're not too worried about COVID.
00:12:35.140If you think that you would rather get COVID and deal with that than deal with the potential side effects of a vaccine, that's totally fine.
00:12:43.800And that's totally within your right in a free society to make those kinds of decisions.
00:12:48.140And so the more that we're creeping towards this idea that we all have to have the same opinion, that's obviously a huge problem.
00:12:53.840And on top of that, you have a second layer, which is that do you really trust a big bureaucratic and competent government to manage the system, to have another layer of documentation to determine whether or not you can go to a restaurant based on what vaccine you've had.
00:13:09.880Given all of the conflicting information that we've had over time, you know, we're now in a situation where some people have had mixed doses, right?
00:13:16.860If you took your first dose of AstraZeneca, and then they paused that and said, if you had AstraZeneca, go ahead and go get one of the other doses.
00:13:24.120And now some jurisdictions don't recognize you as being fully vaccinated if you've had two different vaccinations, even though you were following public health advice at the time.
00:13:32.820You know, we're dealing with something that we don't really understand that's constantly changing.
00:13:36.960And somehow we're supposed to, again, trust the government to oversee this whole system.
00:13:41.740And that doesn't even get into the privacy concerns.
00:13:44.820And so there's just obviously so many reasons why conservatives oppose vaccine mandates.
00:13:50.200And again, these are just a few of them.
00:13:51.680There are many, many more that haven't even gotten to.
00:13:53.680And so this decision to implement the vaccine mandate in hospitals to say that if you don't have the vaccine, that you are going to lose your job, that you're going to get fired, you're going to put on unpaid leave, punishing you until you change your mind or what, go find another job.
00:14:08.380This just makes the problem so much worse because we already have huge shortages in Canada's health care system.
00:14:13.980We have a government-run system, a terrible way to allocate scarce resources and scarce goods.
00:14:20.440There are no other options in most cases.
00:14:31.860And this idea that we are making our scare system artificially even more scarce by firing people who have the skills and the capacity needed to help, but because they don't conform ideologically, you are going to make them sit at home, again, makes this problem in our health care system so much worse.
00:14:49.300So this is just the worst time to implement a vaccine mandate because COVID-19's deadly effect on hospitals will get even worse.
00:14:56.500And this is in terms of delays, in terms of postponed surgeries and so on.
00:15:03.660More than 2,000 patients in Canada died while waiting for medical care in 2020.
00:15:08.280According to a report, at least 2,367 patients across Canada died on a waiting list for medical care in 2020, according to a report.
00:15:16.920The results were obtained by a think tank called Second Street, which used responses from public data and freedom of information requests submitted to provincial health departments and hospitals.
00:15:27.320It counted patients who died while waiting for surgery, diagnostic scans, and appointment with specialists.
00:15:32.480And, you know, this is, of course, this is incredibly tragic, but we've been hearing these kind of stories throughout the pandemic in Canada.
00:15:38.020So back in March 2021, there was a story over in CTV that said this, nearly 354,000 surgeries, procedures, consultations were postponed due to COVID-19, according to a report.
00:15:49.900So these figures were released by that same group, 2nd Street, 2ndStreet.org, which drew its information from freedom of information requests submitted in June 2020 to health departments across Canada,