Juno News - November 02, 2020


Canadians aren't taking the government seriously


Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

194.5542

Word count

755

Sentence count

33

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

No Canadian politician has come forward with a clear plan on how to deal with the coronavirus pandemic. What is the objective of public health in Canada? Is it to get to zero cases? Or is it to learn to live with the pandemic?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 There's one particular part of our pandemic discussion right now that gets more troubling,
00:00:10.300 more problematic, the more weeks and months pass by. And what is that? It's the fact that no
00:00:15.900 Canadian public health official, no politician, no real international public health figure or
00:00:21.840 politician has clearly articulated what the objective is. And this whole sort of
00:00:27.700 social disarray we're seeing, a bit of tearing of the social fabric, where increasingly people are 0.94
00:00:33.360 not saying hashtag, we're all in this together, and they're troubled by many of the restrictions.
00:00:38.380 They're asking follow-up questions. They're doing a bit of pushback, even potentially a bit of civil
00:00:43.120 disobedience. I think all of that has been worsened by the fact that we are not having that conversation.
00:00:49.080 We're discouraged from having it. And there's no leadership to try and bring forward all the
00:00:54.440 different options to talk it out here in society. What do I mean by that? What would the end goal,
00:00:59.480 the objective be in all this? Well, is it to flatten the curve, as the saying goes? Well,
00:01:05.120 we already flattened the curve more or less, and things are actually doing pretty well. There's a
00:01:08.840 lot of positive notes to talk about as we enter November in terms of dealing with COVID-19 and the
00:01:14.460 death rates and hospitalizations and so forth compared to the first wave. Okay, so is that the
00:01:19.100 objective? If so, we've kind of already accomplished it. All right, well, what about this then? Is it
00:01:23.540 to get to practically zero cases like we've seen in places like Australia? Okay, maybe it is. I mean,
00:01:30.820 that's pretty impractical here in Canada, but is it? I don't know. Tell us. Let's talk it out.
00:01:35.360 Is it to learn to live with coronavirus, to basically do calculated risk assessments,
00:01:41.480 try and inform people as much as we can about how their particular demographic profile, their age and
00:01:47.240 their health indicators and so forth, how that makes them vulnerable and what they should do
00:01:50.900 to protect themselves, but then, you know, otherwise go about their business? What is
00:01:55.500 the objective? Now, you listening may say, okay, I think it should be this or that or the other and
00:01:59.880 so forth, and that's fine, but the problem is we haven't heard from Dr. Teresa Tam or Justin Trudeau
00:02:07.280 or Doug Ford or anybody what they think the option should be, and we really need leadership on that,
00:02:13.100 and I don't think that they have a preference. So Dr. Tam released this report the other day,
00:02:18.680 her big annual report looking at the pandemic and just everything in Canadian public health. It was
00:02:24.160 on the pandemic, and you would think this would be the prime opportunity for her to actually step 0.96
00:02:28.940 forward and articulate that very proposition that I'm saying. All right, guys, you know, I've been
00:02:33.920 watching this unfold for seven months and pay attention to this, that, and the other, and I put
00:02:38.460 it all together, and this is the path forward. All right, Team Canada, here we go. Let's rock and roll.
00:02:43.780 And you can hear her say that and see what she's read and either agree or disagree,
00:02:47.340 but it's a starting point. But she didn't do that. It's a very troubling report, actually. It was more
00:02:52.560 about equity approaches to the pandemic and concerns about age and ableism and intersectionality and all
00:02:58.620 these sort of social progressivism things in there that really didn't have all that much to do with
00:03:04.400 outright managing the pandemic. Kind of more read like Dr. Tam was running for the NDP leadership than
00:03:09.340 as if she was trying to get us out of this very troubling and dark chapter in our lives. So guys,
00:03:14.760 I don't think that we're going to be able to really unify as a society and even progress in
00:03:20.900 a productive way, in a way that isn't full of rancor without having that discussion. And that
00:03:26.120 discussion has to start at the top. If all these people who are issuing recommendations and advice
00:03:32.800 and flat-out edicts about the way we have to live our lives, well, if they want to be listened anymore
00:03:37.800 and if they want to be taken seriously, because right now I think there's a whole bunch of people
00:03:42.000 out there who are not listening all that closely to them anymore and are not really taking everything
00:03:46.700 they say all that seriously anymore. And based on the way things are unfolding, it's kind of hard
00:03:51.840 to blame them.