Juno News - Canada’s totalitarian approach to COVID (Ft. Dr. Julie Ponesse)

00:00:00.000 What did the COVID pandemic and the government's clumsy, heavy-handed reaction to it expose about

00:00:05.320 the weaknesses in our society? My guest today describes it as a pandemic of coercion and

00:00:10.360 compliance. I'm Candice Malcolm and this is The Candice Malcolm Show.

00:00:24.660 Hi everyone, thank you so much for joining the program. So as you know, we've been very critical

00:00:28.880 of the government's reaction to COVID. It exposed so much about the weaknesses of our society.

00:00:34.220 First and foremost, it exposed the frailty of Canada's government-run healthcare system.

00:00:38.820 We didn't have the capacity, the flexibility, the innovation, or the robustness to handle a novel

00:00:44.420 virus that disproportionately impacted the very old, the very weak, and the very sick. Our reaction

00:00:50.860 to this virus was totalitarian, and I don't mean that to sound hyperbolic. I mean it definitionally.

00:00:56.920 It was total. It was all-encompassing. It demanded complete compliance and submission to a centralized

00:01:02.260 government. That is, after all, the definition of totalitarian. So that meant that for long

00:01:06.840 stretches of time, we shut down our entire society. A decision that disproportionately impacted small 0.94

00:01:12.260 children, teenagers, young adults, families, entrepreneurs, business owners, and generally

00:01:16.920 independent-minded Canadians. But healthcare wasn't the only fault line that was exposed during COVID.

00:01:21.720 We saw a colossal failure in leadership across the board, in politics, in government, at all levels

00:01:27.320 of government, the media, big business, and, as my guest on the show today experienced firsthand,

00:01:32.380 in academia, the universities. So my guest on the show today says that we are living through a

00:01:36.980 pandemic of coercion and compliance. She was very public about being fired from her position at

00:01:41.840 Western, and has written a tremendous book called My Choice on the Ethics of Force Vaccination.

00:01:47.620 So I'm very pleased today to be joined by Dr. Julie Panessi. Julie, welcome to the program. Thank

00:01:52.960 you so much for joining us at True North. Thanks so much, Candice.

00:01:56.680 So for those of you who are not familiar with Julie, she's a tremendous individual. She is the

00:02:01.840 pandemic ethics scholar over at the Democracy Fund. Her book is called My Choice, The Ethical Case

00:02:07.500 Against COVID-19 Vaccine Mandates. Prior to her current role, she taught ethics and philosophy

00:02:12.820 at universities in Canada and the U.S. for 20 years, including at Western University and within

00:02:17.560 Western at Huron College. She has published a number of academic papers, areas of ancient

00:02:22.240 philosophy, ethical theory, and applied ethics. Dr. Panessi has her PhD from Western University.

00:02:28.620 She has a master's in philosophy with a collaborative specialization in bioethics from the University

00:02:32.940 of Toronto, as well as a diploma in ethics from the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown

00:02:37.340 University. In 2021, Dr. Panessi refused to comply with Western University's vaccine mandate,

00:02:42.220 and thus decided to step away from her academic career. So Julie, I just want to say from reading

00:02:48.680 your bio and reading about you, you seem like a person who is perfectly placed to be consulted

00:02:55.080 with and to be in a position to comment on the decision by your university to impose vaccine

00:03:01.700 mandates. So I'm wondering if you can tell us a little bit about that story, about how it

00:03:06.120 was that the university decided to impose this heavy-handed edict and your reaction to it.

00:03:13.580 Right. Well, I mean, of course, I don't know what the decision-making process was like.

00:03:18.900 I didn't, as a member of the philosophy department, see any evidence of a process, a deliberative

00:03:26.080 process. All we got last August was an announcement stating what the COVID policy at Western would

00:03:32.860 be, and that changed a little bit. We got that very late, very close to the start of term, and then

00:03:38.580 it became very clear, as classes were about to start just after Labor Day, that they were removing the

00:03:44.460 testing option and that vaccination would be required for all faculty, staff, and students. And

00:03:51.680 that was not the personal medical choice I was willing to make. I think there are, you know,

00:03:57.480 I mean, my personal opinion is that there are very serious concerns with the vaccine program itself,

00:04:04.420 and there are serious ethical concerns with the mandates. But, you know, this is a much broader,

00:04:12.560 this is a much broader problem, a much broader issue. And one of the things that this highlighted for

00:04:17.900 me, you know, my experience working with my department and talking with my chair and the

00:04:23.460 dean was just completely shut out, shut down, ignored. So I wrote a very long, detailed letter

00:04:30.560 outlining my concerns with the vaccine mandates. You would expect, I mean, I am the only, one of the

00:04:37.640 only people who teaches anything in the area of ethics at Huron College. And you would think that

00:04:43.040 someone like that coming forward and expressing ethical concerns about the imposition of these

00:04:47.600 mandates would at least be responded to with some kind of respect and interest. There was none of

00:04:53.840 that. It was just ignoring. And then when they, when it became clear to them that I wasn't willing to

00:04:59.660 comply with the mandate, they asked point blank, are you not going to comply with this mandate? I said,

00:05:03.700 no, and I was terminated very shortly thereafter. So one of the things that this is highlighting

00:05:09.200 is just this closed sort of ecosystem that we are sort of closed eco chamber that we have in

00:05:17.060 academia. And I think it was very interesting in your intro, the way you talked about totalitarianism

00:05:22.860 being quite literally a kind of a total system. And we're seeing that with this COVID response that

00:05:29.460 there is no room for questioning, no room for reflectiveness, no room now that we've been,

00:05:35.940 you know, rolling out this response for a couple of years, there is no sort of intention or action

00:05:43.020 on the part of government, media, or our institutions to look at what we've done and to see how successful

00:05:49.960 it is. I don't know how many people know this, but every province and territory in Canada prior to 2019

00:05:56.040 had a pandemic response plan. And what we did didn't follow any of those plans at all. So if there's a

00:06:05.480 question about whether or not we've been successful, I mean, that's a question that needs to be asked.

00:06:10.920 And even if we think that we have been successful, there's a question, were we as successful as we

00:06:16.380 could have been, as we might have been if we had followed those plans. So there are big, I think,

00:06:21.600 problems in society and the media, government and academia, that we are going to spend, I think,

00:06:28.800 decades trying to address.

00:06:31.740 Well, and it's a good thing, because I mean, it's a good thing that you're doing what you're doing now,

00:06:36.320 because had you just simply complied or had the university made an exception for you, you wouldn't

00:06:41.080 have come out with this story, you wouldn't have been able to put the book out and really try to attempt

00:06:46.660 to have this conversation going. I note in your book that you mentioned that 2400 word letter that

00:06:54.000 you wrote, I believe you wrote it to your administrators, but also it sounded like to

00:06:59.100 your colleagues. And you were sort of disappointed and surprised by the lack of response that people

00:07:04.020 either completely ignored you, even though it was like a very well thought out, well documented,

00:07:09.420 well cited letter, they either completely ignored you, or they said, look, Health Canada is

00:07:15.960 determining this, not us, like, like, kind of deferring to an authority. So I'm wondering if

00:07:20.620 you can sort of walk us through the initial state of sort of your opposition to this, whether the

00:07:27.560 university consulted with you, I mean, you're an ethicist, maybe you can tell us a little bit about

00:07:30.900 what what an ethicist does, and your area of specific expertise, and then and then sort of how

00:07:36.600 you were treated in that in that moment. Yeah, that's a complicated set of questions. I mean,

00:07:41.020 first of all, so your point about whether or not, you know, the university is just deferring to

00:07:46.560 Health Canada, that's all I saw, right? That's the only explanation that I've seen from not just

00:07:51.180 universities, but from places of employment, and really from the government itself, right, as an

00:07:56.000 explanation for why they're, why they're imposing a mandate, it's well, because Health Canada says so.

00:08:00.920 The interesting and troubling thing about that is then we can ask, well, where does Health Canada get

00:08:04.640 information from, if not from academics and researchers and people who primarily work at

00:08:10.800 universities. And so there's, there's a circular problem there, right? If we are closing off the

00:08:16.400 possibility of intellectuals having the opportunity to engage with the directives coming from our

00:08:22.320 government, then we are entering a new kind of society that I don't think many of us believed we,

00:08:27.840 we lived in before, right? Your question about, you know, what do ethicists do? That's a really,

00:08:32.960 that's a really good and interesting question. So there are sort of ethicists in two different

00:08:37.260 senses of the word. There are practical ethicists who work in hospitals or in engineering firms or

00:08:43.760 business ethicists who work for, for business companies. And then there are academic ethicists,

00:08:49.600 so people who teach ethics at university. And that's what I did primarily. I have done things like

00:08:54.040 I've sat on, on ethics boards at hospitals and things like that, but primarily I taught ethics at

00:08:59.660 university. And what, what you do when you're teaching ethics or thinking about ethics is to

00:09:04.340 think about whether or not what you're doing is the best possible course of action. So we're not

00:09:11.100 asking about what's factual, what's actually happening or what's possible to do, but we're asking about

00:09:18.560 what we ought to do. And that has to do with producing good and bad. It has to do with helping people

00:09:24.140 to live lives that are the best, that live lives that are happy, to make sure that we aren't hurting

00:09:30.180 people. But that isn't only it, right? We're also interested in focusing on things like human

00:09:35.460 flourishing. What does it mean to develop a good character? What does it mean to live a good life?

00:09:40.220 And certainly the thing I wanted to do, or I aspire to most as an instructor was to help, not to teach

00:09:47.980 students didactically what the answers to those questions are, but to help them to develop the

00:09:54.560 kind of mind that can ask those questions for themselves. And that comes from a, I mean, that

00:10:00.520 goes way back to ancient Greece. It comes, you know, it's a 2000 year old tradition that started with

00:10:06.680 philosophers like Plato and Socrates and Aristotle of asking questions about what the good life, what is

00:10:11.860 good for humans. And we seem to have decided now that the only people who are entitled to answer that

00:10:17.540 questions are scientists. And by the way, only particular scientists, only the ones who happen

00:10:23.840 to follow a particular narrative. And so that is closing off not only all other disciplines, but it's

00:10:30.500 closing off scientists who actually have reasonable disagreement with the mainstream narrative that

00:10:37.500 we're seeing now. So do you think this is something that was just, that was just exposed to you during

00:10:43.500 COVID? Or is this like a long standing sort of slide? Because I mean, I went to university in like the early

00:10:48.980 2000s and mid 2000s. And I didn't get taught much about sort of ethics and virtue. And those guys did a degree in

00:10:57.680 political science and economics. You know, even even political philosophy classes, that wasn't where the focus

00:11:03.800 it seems to me, it's, you know, left to science to determine the sort of big existential questions, or perhaps

00:11:09.740 religion, but religion isn't really filling in that, that void in our society. So I'm wondering, when do

00:11:16.700 you think that this shift happened? And what's been going on in the universities?

00:11:20.460 Yes, I was a bit, I was a bit naive, I was under the impression that if, you know, freedom of expression

00:11:25.340 and freedom of ideas, the exchange of ideas existed anywhere, it would be at our universities. And part of

00:11:29.340 the reason I went into academia is that I was very inspired by some very courageous, free, beautiful

00:11:35.500 thinkers. And, and I don't think I really realize the degree to which that has changed over the last

00:11:41.500 20 or so years, but it certainly has changed. Now, if you're an academic, and you go to a conference,

00:11:48.060 I mean, I haven't been to one in a few years now. But the last time I went, honestly, academics are not

00:11:53.900 terribly interested in exchanging ideas, they're interested in voicing their opinion. So talking,

00:12:00.060 not listening, and then turning to their phones and not listening to whoever happens to be speaking.

00:12:04.940 And I know that sounds a bit trite. But I think that's kind of the modus operandi in the academic

00:12:10.220 world. Now it's, well, here's my idea, I'm going to put it into the sphere. Oh, and by the way,

00:12:15.900 it follows, you know, the, the ethos of a particular genre that I happen to be in. And there's very little

00:12:24.380 robust exchange of ideas, probably the very first thing that suggested to me that there's something

00:12:29.740 odd going on here, is that there has been no disagreement, no reasonable disagreement among

00:12:35.980 academics over the last two years about the COVID response. And prior to that, you could not get

00:12:42.060 academics to agree about anything. And that's exactly how it should be. Right? Because, you know,

00:12:49.580 I mean, I think one thing academics do have agreed about historically, is that the truth is hard to

00:12:54.940 access, it's hard to understand, and we have to work hard at that. And to do that, we have to be

00:13:00.140 willing to present different hypotheses and follow them to their logical conclusions. And when they

00:13:05.580 don't work out, reevaluate and try something else. And so the idea that there are very, very few

00:13:13.820 academics, you know, there's another bioethicist in the United States, Aaron Cariatti, who's also a

00:13:19.580 medical doctor, he worked at the University of California, Irvine, and he was also terminated

00:13:24.220 for his opposition to the, to the COVID response. But other than that, it seems as though all

00:13:31.900 bioethicists, all ethicists globally are in lockstep with the government's pandemic response. And that is,

00:13:38.620 to put it very non-technically weird.

00:13:42.540 Lauren Ruffin

00:13:44.220 Weird. Well, I mean, it's shocking, because like you say, you expect to have a robust

00:13:50.860 exchange of ideas, you expect people to disagree. I'm wondering why, like, why was it that when COVID

00:13:56.380 came around, we didn't know what it was, we didn't know what it, what the long term impact was, we

00:14:01.660 didn't know what the impact on our society was going to be. So it makes sense that we would be incredibly

00:14:05.820 cautious, and perhaps fearful. But, you know, as time went on, we learned so much about the virus,

00:14:11.580 we learned so much about how it spreads. You know, we, we just generally learned things that worked,

00:14:17.020 things that didn't work. And yet, you know, we didn't see more and more voices come out. I mean,

00:14:23.180 maybe, maybe there have been more, more dissenting voices, but, but still, there is sort of this

00:14:28.140 major push. So I'm just wondering, like, why did, why did it happen this way? Do you think?

00:14:32.860 Well, I think you're right, that there has been an enormous amount of fear surrounding the COVID

00:14:37.420 situation? And I think that's probably partly because there isn't a dialogue, we aren't being

00:14:42.300 presented with two sides of the story. When information comes out that suggests, as you

00:14:47.740 mentioned earlier, that, you know, COVID does not affect all people equally, that it disproportionately,

00:14:52.700 there's a stratified risk, right? And it affects people who are elderly, or who have comorbidities,

00:14:57.660 other health conditions. That should be good news to the vast majority of people. It should also

00:15:04.060 suggest that the restrictions we impose on people, which have downsides themselves, like masking and

00:15:12.060 locking down children and preventing them from going to school, that you need to balance those harms

00:15:16.780 against the benefit that come from protecting them from COVID, arguably. And when it becomes more and

00:15:23.740 more clear that children aren't at significant risk from contracting COVID, then the harms of the

00:15:29.500 COVID protections become weightier and weightier, right? And so it's a little bit odd, it's very

00:15:36.700 odd, actually, that when you present to someone evidence to show that you're not actually at

00:15:42.300 significant risk from getting seriously ill or dying from COVID, the rational response would be,

00:15:47.020 oh, well, that's great news. Wow, I feel a little bit better now. That's not the response that we're

00:15:52.140 seeing. We're just seeing people ignoring that information and doubling down with fear. And our

00:15:57.660 government and our media have been all too happy to support that. I don't know if you will have

00:16:03.740 heard, but yesterday, a very influential article came out in the Canadian Medical Association journal.

00:16:10.060 It's called the impact of population mixing between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated. It was written

00:16:15.180 by three authors. One is David Fissman, who's sat in the Ontario science table. He's an epidemiologist at the

00:16:21.580 Dalla Lama School of Health in Toronto. And it basically argues that it's the reason why we're

00:16:28.060 seeing infection among the vaccinated still is because there are so many unvaccinated people,

00:16:33.740 right? Someone, you know, there are a couple of things, there are many things that are alarming about

00:16:39.420 this article, not the least of which is the way the unvaccinated are written about, we could be reading

00:16:45.420 about, you know, apartheid between racial groups, you know, 50 years ago. But one thing I think people

00:16:53.340 are not very skeptical about, rationally skeptical about, is the fact that someone like David Fissman

00:16:58.700 sits on the advisory boards of the very vaccine companies that he is defending in that academic

00:17:06.220 article, right? Also, a rational person might look at that article and say, maybe there's something going

00:17:11.900 on with the immune systems of the vaccinated people. Maybe that's why they're getting higher

00:17:17.260 rates of infection than the people who are unvaccinated. And my point about that is only that

00:17:25.100 we need to temper the fear that we have with not just information, but with our mind working on that

00:17:35.020 information and deciding for ourselves whether or not that's the kind of information that should fuel more

00:17:40.540 fear or less fear. And I think this rampant fear that we've experienced is just a kind of, there's a

00:17:47.580 kind of collective hysteria. And people have felt sort of unmoored from a kind of stability, right, that

00:17:56.860 allows us to look at evidence and say, well, maybe we're going to be okay here if we just do this, this

00:18:02.700 and this, right. And that kind of rational approach to our health, the rational approach to dealing with

00:18:09.100 other people, rational approach to engagement in the public sphere just seems to have been lost over

00:18:15.260 the last couple of years. Well, it always struck me as a little ironic that the people who are most

00:18:20.700 fearful and paranoid about COVID were also the most trusting of a vaccine that came out. And it's like,

00:18:27.180 you know, I can get why you're worried about COVID given the sort of ramping up of fear in both

00:18:34.380 politics, government and media, they push this like, and, you know, the idea of a politician is

00:18:40.140 to lead you away from fear, like there's things to be fearful of in your life every single day.

00:18:44.620 And the idea behind someone who's leading you is to say, look, we're going to go forward despite this

00:18:49.340 fear, and we're going to, we're going to persevere. Whereas during COVID, we had the opposite.

00:18:56.060 I'm just wondering in your, I know you wrote in your book that there was sort of a confluence of

00:19:01.260 like the post 9-11 big government security state that pushed this idea that the government can

00:19:06.140 protect us and keep us safe. But then we also had the increasingly corporatist mindset of big

00:19:11.980 businesses and people, people trusting big business, but the exact type of people as well that you would

00:19:16.540 expect to push back against big pharma, to push back against a government edict that imposes

00:19:22.380 a vaccine. Those were some of the people that were the biggest cheerleaders of it,

00:19:26.300 and the biggest enforcers of this social norm that you must get vaccinated, and you must not

00:19:30.700 question the science. I'm wondering, did that surprise you? And what do you think led to that

00:19:36.620 sort of switch? And I'm talking about people on the left, people who, you know, are supposed to be

00:19:40.620 skeptical of big government, big corporations, and now all of a sudden, they're the ones that are

00:19:44.540 often cheerleading and pushing, you know, the corporate government line.

00:19:47.980 I agree. That's very weird. I mean, historically, it has been people on the left,

00:19:52.060 liberals or classical liberals, at least, who have focused on individual freedom and autonomy. And

00:19:58.140 now we're seeing those people move completely sort of to the other side, we might say, and focus on a

00:20:06.620 lack of autonomy. And it's more of this collectivist mentality, sacrifice yourself for the group. But

00:20:11.820 of course, you know, I mean, I've heard it said among sort of people on the right that there's this

00:20:16.860 problem with collectivism, and we shouldn't have to sacrifice ourselves for the group. But that's only

00:20:20.940 part of the problem, right? Another part of the problem is that it isn't clear that science supports

00:20:25.660 the idea that the people who are, say, getting vaccinated and wearing masks are helping the group,

00:20:31.180 right? I think there's as much scientific evidence to suggest that those actions are actually working

00:20:36.300 to reduce people's immunity rather than build it up. So this is not just an individualist or

00:20:42.940 collectivist autonomy versus, you know, altruism debate. It's also a debate about whether or not

00:20:52.220 we are appropriately uptaking the information that we're seeing, and having that sort of feedback

00:20:59.820 into our current mental states and whether how fearful we're, we're allowing ourselves to be,

00:21:05.900 right? And, you know, we've not, we haven't seen any emphasis for the last two years on things like

00:21:17.260 civil liberties. You know, when you talk about people having the freedom of belief, freedom of

00:21:22.380 expression, freedom of the press, freedom of communication. I mean, these are things that they're

00:21:27.020 not just luxuries. They're not dispensable in times of crisis. The reason why they're codified in our

00:21:33.740 constitution is because they are more needed during times of crisis than any other time, because

00:21:38.700 without them, these kinds of sort of unrestricted ideas, this kind of totalitarianism, as we began with,

00:21:47.260 just run rampant and get us to a place that is not only harmful, but quite irrational, right?

00:21:53.420 I'm wondering why you think that there wasn't more of a robust discussion and debate when it came to

00:22:00.540 the efficacy, the ethics, and the safety of vaccines when they first come out. I know you

00:22:07.820 wrote in your book that in the last 30 years, more than one-third of all adverse reactions to vaccines

00:22:12.620 have been with the COVID vaccine. There's been over 6,000 injuries, and I don't know exactly when your

00:22:16.540 book came out, but I imagine that there's more now. There's been over 200 deaths. So I'm wondering if you

00:22:21.820 can elaborate on the point you made in the book and maybe comment on why we didn't have a more robust

00:22:26.860 discussion about that. Yeah, well, I mean, that's kind of a two-pronged question. So I guess one

00:22:31.420 answer is, well, why, or one question is, why haven't we seen more people step up to challenge

00:22:38.460 the narrative? The short answer to that is some have, and they have been very quickly and efficiently

00:22:45.820 shut down. And I think that has sent a strong message to other people who realize very quickly

00:22:51.420 that if they challenge the narrative, they will lose their job, their reputation, their friends,

00:22:57.100 their family, their income, right? There isn't room in our society currently not just to challenge

00:23:05.500 the narrative, but to ask questions about it. We saw a member of the Toronto Board of Health

00:23:11.260 back in October, October, November, I can't remember exactly, ask questions about how we're treating the

00:23:19.340 unvaccinated in one of our major national newspapers. And she received just a storm, an onslaught of

00:23:29.020 criticism, and ended up really recoiling and retracting that position and chose not to run for re-election

00:23:37.980 in her position. So across the board, people who, you know, I challenged it, I was fired with cause,

00:23:44.620 right? I mean, this is what happens to people who speak out. Now, a further question is, well,

00:23:48.380 how did we get to the place where we punish dissenters like that? Or we punish what we might call

00:23:53.020 outliers? Well, that is a bigger question. And that I think has been in the works for decades.

00:23:58.700 Of course, the fact that we have this kind of regulatory capture within medicine. So we have

00:24:07.340 people like David Fistman, who's supposed to be, you know, an academic, who is supposed to be

00:24:13.340 objectively evaluating data, is sitting on an advisory board for the companies who are producing the

00:24:19.900 data that he's supposed to be evaluating, right? And we have that happening across the board,

00:24:23.980 we have it happening in the states. But I think that's not a recent phenomenon, right? We saw this

00:24:31.740 with the opioid epidemic, the SSRI crisis, that big pharma, as you mentioned, has certainly been

00:24:39.980 very influential in not just our medical choices, but our scientific, our political,

00:24:51.020 our societal choices and movements over the last several decades, really. So that is a very big

00:24:58.460 question. I don't think we're going to understand, have an answer to it probably for a very long time.

00:25:03.820 But the first step is to become aware of it. And so when an article like the one that came out

00:25:08.940 yesterday comes out, as opposed to saying, Oh, my goodness, this is more reason to be fearful.

00:25:14.700 Let's look at the fine print, the disclaimer at the bottom of the page, and realize there might be

00:25:19.500 a conflict of interest at work here. Well, it looks like just another opportunity to demonize

00:25:25.340 and dehumanize the unvaccinated and say this is all their fault. And we saw that throughout

00:25:30.140 the pandemic. I wanted to ask you specifically about our Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, because

00:25:34.620 we all know in the election, he infamously said that the unvaccinated are extremists,

00:25:39.820 they don't believe in science, they're often misogynist, they're racist. It's a small group 0.89

00:25:43.500 that muscles in, and we have to make a choice in terms of this country. Do we tolerate these people,

00:25:49.580 right? We know that during the trucker convoy, he came out and flat out said that these people are

00:25:53.980 Nazis, if you're protesting against my vaccine policies, you are a Nazi. And even worse, the

00:26:01.820 media echoed these concerns, and they didn't make any attempt to push back or hold a Prime Minister

00:26:08.940 accountable for his woefully divisive and dangerous claims. Yeah, that's a big problem. I have nothing

00:26:14.940 good to say about our Prime Minister. I mean, this is someone we need to keep in mind was elected

00:26:18.380 primarily because he had nice hair, from what I understand. We need to be very careful moving forward

00:26:23.420 that we don't make that kind of mistake again. I've also made it a point not to respond to those

00:26:27.820 kinds of comments that he makes. I'm not going to exert energy to try to defend the unvaccinated and 1.00

00:26:33.980 show why they are not, you know, extremists or misogynists. Justin Trudeau needs to, you know,

00:26:40.700 the onus is on him. If he wants to make that claim, he has to provide evidence to show that everyone who

00:26:45.180 is unvaccinated is also a misogynist, is also a Nazi. And until he's willing to do that work, which I'm sure he is 0.55

00:26:51.100 not willing to do, then I'm not going to engage. Well, good for you. I think, I think that's right.

00:26:56.300 I don't think it's worthy. He's worthy of the response. My criticism is with the media and how

00:27:01.100 they take his perspective, and they just push it as if it's the mainstream. I mean, Justin Trudeau came

00:27:06.860 onto the scene, you know, pushing back against the Harper government, who at the time was trying to

00:27:11.500 fight down the scientists, right? Yeah, that kind of stuff. But then also, you know, Harper was trying to

00:27:18.140 take a hard line against ISIS and growing Islamist extremism. And Justin Trudeau said, you know,

00:27:23.500 we have to defend rights when it's popular. And when it's not popular is talking about giving a

00:27:27.740 terrorist convicted at Guantanamo Bay, a settlement and an apology. So Trudeau used to sort of speak for

00:27:34.060 the very outliers and the marginalized people. And now he's, he's demonizing them. So I know in your

00:27:40.620 book, you also talk about how COVID triggered crises in other institutions, you know, as well,

00:27:46.860 not just academia, but also journalism, government, and more broadly, civil discourse. So I'm wondering

00:27:52.140 if you could talk about that, but also talk about how we can mend these wounds, how we can move forward

00:27:57.660 as a society, how we can get back to a place where we all trust each other, we like each other, and we

00:28:02.540 want to live side by side as Canadians and respect each other. Yeah, this is the point where we're asking

00:28:08.380 for hope and solutions moving forward, right? You know, I spent a long time being very frustrated with

00:28:14.460 the personal particular person that is our Prime Minister. And I've gotten to the point now where

00:28:19.580 I realized that, you know, he as an individual is relatively inconsequential. If he resigned now,

00:28:25.180 there would be another person very much like him to run as a leader of the Liberal Party, or the NDP

00:28:32.620 Party, and very likely win. And that's because I think, I won't say the majority of Canadians, but a

00:28:42.380 crucial enough majority of Canadians have decided that it's good to be ruled by someone with a

00:28:49.580 mentality. And why is that? You know, part of what he did during his campaign was to demonize the

00:28:58.940 unvaccinated and to protect those who choose to be vaccinated against them and say things like, don't

00:29:05.420 think that we're going to let, you know, you sit on a plane together or sit next to each other on a train. And

00:29:10.220 I think that, you know, the election last fall told us that most Canadians, or enough, right, want that.

00:29:20.460 They want a certain subset of our population to be demonized and held accountable for their problems.

00:29:29.020 And until we can move beyond that, or move through that, understand why that is not the case,

00:29:37.500 and why even if it was the case, arguably, that epidemiologically, the unvaccinated were

00:29:45.100 responsible for the persistence of this virus. To be very clear, I don't think we've seen evidence

00:29:50.140 to suggest that. But if even if that's the case, arguably, there is still room, there's still

00:29:55.660 responsibility in politics and public discourse. And part of what it is to be a citizen, to respect other

00:30:03.660 people to try to understand their choices to keep talking with them. And, you know, prior to the

00:30:09.820 last couple of years, we talked in ethics, academic, academic ethic literature a lot about virtues of

00:30:17.020 tolerance and patience. And we don't talk about those things anymore. Right. And so tolerance is a

00:30:23.020 very difficult virtue, because it requires you to still engage with people whose positions you don't

00:30:28.460 understand. And that requires an awful lot of work. It requires, you know, minimizing your anger for the

00:30:36.460 sake of being able to truly listen to other people. And truly listening is something that we've, it's an

00:30:41.980 art that we've lost, I think. We need to get it back. How do we get it back? Our education system is

00:30:49.260 crucial. And I don't just mean university, but our elementary and high school educations need to

00:30:54.220 be better at teaching these virtues, I think about, about listening, we need to understand why history

00:31:00.380 is so important, because we have been in the past, through times like this, where citizens have been

00:31:07.740 at odds with one another. And we need to review those moments in history to understand how we moved

00:31:14.140 through them and how we resolved those conflicts and the harm that we can do when we stop listening to

00:31:18.620 each other. So there is hope, I think, but we need to think in fundamentally different, not really

00:31:24.780 novel ways. I mean, we've had success at this in the past, but we need to think in very different ways

00:31:28.940 about how we understand each other, how we approach each other, and what right we have to demand of

00:31:37.420 someone else that they sacrifice their life to make us feel safe and protected.

00:31:42.460 Well, I'm glad that you still, after all of this, have some hope about how we can

00:31:48.940 right the system. And it's interesting because, you know, at the same time as all this is happening

00:31:53.580 with COVID and the lockdowns and the vaccine mandates, there's another sort of social trend

00:31:57.500 towards diversity and inclusion. And this idea that we have to tolerate all kinds of unique people

00:32:02.700 with different identities and different biological traits or feelings about their biology. And we're told

00:32:09.900 that we have to tolerate that and understand that. And then yet when it comes to, you know,

00:32:13.900 choices that someone makes or their lifestyle or the things that they choose, when it comes to,

00:32:18.220 like, we're talking about vaccines, we don't have that tolerance. So it's interesting, we're pushing

00:32:23.020 one and then completely neglecting another. I don't know. So either there's a double standard

00:32:27.100 in the kind of hypocrisy at work, right? Or we may have decided that what we are obligated to tolerate

00:32:33.340 are certain kinds of differences and not other ones, right? So maybe what we feel we're obligated to

00:32:38.380 tolerate are physical differences, but not ideological ones. And it certainly seems as though,

00:32:45.260 you know, we have a very low tolerance for religious differences, for example,

00:32:49.820 for cultural differences for, you know, people who choose certain, certain fashions that are dictated

00:32:59.660 by their religion. And we now are seeing how little tolerance we have for diversity of ideas,

00:33:06.780 right? And so I don't know, either we're hypocritical, or we have a very clear idea about

00:33:15.660 what we tolerate and what we don't tolerate. Of course, racism and gender differences are, you know,

00:33:23.260 high on the list of things that we are expected to tolerate these ideas, these days. But again, I think

00:33:29.820 religious philosophical differences in ideology are not only things that we're not expected to

00:33:36.620 tolerate, but they are things that we are bad for tolerating. Right? We're just fueling a kind

00:33:43.980 of disinformation system if we tolerate that kind of diversity. Right? It's like a very superficial form

00:33:50.700 of diversity that we like to champion. It's like diversity for people who look different, but they have

00:33:55.180 to think exactly like me. A final question for you, Julia. I'm wondering if there's anything out

00:33:59.900 there that gives you hope? Anything that inspires, like, what is it that inspires you and keeps you

00:34:04.460 going? I know you deal with a lot of adversity and you deal with a lot of bad news. I'm wondering what,

00:34:08.700 what is it that gives you hope?

00:34:10.060 Do I ever. Boy, yes. I mean, every day I get messages from people who tell me about how, you know, our

00:34:16.620 response to COVID is ruining their lives, you know, and I think we need to be better at paying attention to

00:34:22.780 all the harms that we're doing. I mean, getting sick from COVID is not the only possible harm that can

00:34:27.100 happen to a person. And outside of the realm of COVID, you know, people, you know, they get very serious

00:34:32.940 illnesses. You can get in car accidents, there's drowning incidents, you know, I mean, and never mind that we have a

00:34:38.380 children's mental health crisis, and we have unprecedented levels of obesity and alcoholism

00:34:44.060 and addiction and the list goes on. But you know, through all of that, there are people who have

00:34:50.860 at the risk of losing their jobs, losing their families, losing their reputation have just said,

00:34:57.900 nothing is worse, worse than losing who I am as a person. And they have stuck it through and decided that

00:35:06.060 this is my choice. This is who I am. I'm willing to lose everything, including possibly my life over

00:35:11.900 this. And those are the that's the only source of hope in our society right now. I hope they have the

00:35:18.620 strength to carry us forward through what might be coming over the next year or so. It certainly takes

00:35:26.780 an awful lot of moral stamina and endurance and resilience. I do see, you know, people having success

00:35:36.300 talking with trusted family members or friends, and having some success having more reasonable

00:35:42.620 conversations and, you know, having maybe a brother who two years ago said, well, if you hold that view, 0.97

00:35:51.420 then I think you're crazy. And I'm not willing to talk to you and switching and now to saying, well,

00:35:55.260 maybe we disagree. But disagreement is a social good or maybe to saying even something like, you know,

00:36:00.540 I didn't see what you saw a couple of years ago. And now I see it. And I'm really glad we've been

00:36:03.980 talking. So there is hope for sure. But we can't give up yet by any means, because our country is

00:36:13.900 not what it was two years ago, and probably is not what it was 20 or 30 years ago. And, you know,

00:36:20.140 I want to leave everybody with a thought. I came across an interview that Johnny Carson did with

00:36:25.740 President Reagan in 1975. And he, you know, they were in major crisis then, too, about whether or not the

00:36:32.140 government was spending too much or not spending enough. And Johnny Carson said to Mr. Reagan at

00:36:37.340 the time, you know, what is the problem here? And President Reagan said, you know, the problem is

00:36:41.740 everybody's looking to government to provide solutions to the problem. But government is the

00:36:47.020 problem. And I think we have a very similar phenomenon now that we, for some reason, want the

00:36:52.220 government to step in and fix all of our problems for us. And the government, don't forget,

00:36:58.300 it's just a collection of human beings. We're all imperfect. And there's no reason to think that

00:37:03.020 our government is any more perfect than any other collection of human beings. And I think we need to

00:37:08.140 pull back, take more responsibility for our own lives, take more responsibility for scrutinizing

00:37:13.980 information that comes to us, especially now we know that there is such a coordinated, you know,

00:37:19.980 effort among mainstream media to deliver the same information which is in lockstep with our government.

00:37:25.260 And so there's more onus on us than ever before to do our own research and to take responsibility

00:37:31.340 for our own lives.

00:37:32.300 Well, I think that's a great note to end the interview on. I think there's so much

00:37:37.900 wisdom in that idea that people can solve problems on their own better than referring to some all

00:37:42.300 powerful institution that you might not always agree with the direction it's going and the way that

00:37:47.900 they use that power. So Dr. Pressey, I really appreciate your time today. Thank you for all the work that you do

00:37:53.660 over at the Democracy Fund. And thank you for joining the show.

00:37:57.100 Absolutely. Thanks so much.

00:37:58.300 All right. That's Dr. Julie Panassi with the Democracy Fund. I'm Candace Malcolm,

00:38:02.380 and this is The Kenneth Malcolm Show.

Juno News - April 28, 2022

Canada’s totalitarian approach to COVID (Ft. Dr. Julie Ponesse)

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