Juno News - April 06, 2021


Community leaders can play a role in lifting lockdowns

Mentioned
Cardinal Collins Doug Ford
Wildrose Independence Party says Albertans need a new deal with Canada Ontario is ideologically committed to lockdowns

Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

202.06

Word count

773

Sentence count

21


Summary

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

In this episode, I discuss the role community leaders are playing in pushing back against some of the more over-the-top restrictions that we are living under, and playing a role in calling for a more balanced approach, or at least the way community leaders should be doing that.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 I want to speak today about the role community leaders are playing in pushing back against some
00:00:10.860 of the more over-the-top restrictions that we are living under and playing a role in calling
00:00:15.460 for a more balanced approach, or at least the way community leaders should be doing that. I keep
00:00:21.540 reflecting on how some of the most vocal people and perhaps most successful in terms of getting
00:00:26.020 traction for finding a more evolved approach to dealing with the pandemic, rather than just these
00:00:30.980 blunt lockdowns, are religious leaders. We see a lot of them pushing back, and the most successful,
00:00:36.120 I've talked about this before, is Cardinal Collins, the Archbishop for the Toronto area. He said to the
00:00:41.660 Ontario government, to Doug Ford, these rules you have, they just make no sense. This idea that it
00:00:46.860 should only be, what is it, a maximum of 10 people in a religious facility. It should actually be a
00:00:51.780 percentage of what their fire code capacity is, and he called on the faithful, not just of his own
00:00:56.520 congregation, but of all religions in Ontario, to speak up, make their voice heard. And guess what?
00:01:01.580 He was successful. He brought about change. When so many other organizations, industry associations,
00:01:08.540 pushing for changes to rules, they were not able to bring about that change. But Cardinal Collins
00:01:13.120 succeeded. I think there's a number of components to this here, a number of different things going on,
00:01:18.440 but I think the one that interests me right now is the idea of community leaders playing a role
00:01:24.840 in bringing society back online, whether they are faith leaders such as Cardinal Collins, or we have
00:01:30.280 seen people who are, for instance, organizers of community sports, children's sports, who are
00:01:35.640 stepping forward and saying, look, we can get this going, let's make this happen, and they are pushing
00:01:40.800 the envelope to bring sports back online. Because right now, we're all kind of sitting at home,
00:01:45.840 told, you know, don't leave your house, only leave for, you know, essential this, that, or the other,
00:01:50.040 trying to figure out these different restrictions that we're living under, and just, you know, sit
00:01:53.840 at home, get your takeout, and watch your Netflix. As if, as if government is sort of the only leadership
00:01:59.340 role, government, and of course, those chief medical officers who are government employees,
00:02:03.240 they're, they're senior public servants, as if they are the only people that we take our cues from.
00:02:08.300 But there's a whole civil society out there of community leaders, whether they are faith leaders,
00:02:13.280 or whether they are those, those great folks out there who, who do volunteerism, and organize all
00:02:18.120 these different community initiatives. I mean, there was a time not too long ago, when, when that
00:02:22.580 was society, that those were the people who were the leaders, even more so than politicians, in terms
00:02:29.380 of who, who put society together, and who looked at the problems we have in our communities, and said,
00:02:34.680 how can we, how can we come together as a community, as a society, and tackle those problems? And I think
00:02:41.180 more and more community leaders, whether they're people who, who organize local sports, or whether
00:02:45.420 they're people who, you know, do this or that local association, I think they're starting to think
00:02:50.240 through stuff a whole lot more, and going, no, we're, we're full a year into this, the idea that
00:02:54.660 we're going to have a second summer, where we're told, no, nothing can happen, that doesn't cut it
00:02:58.520 for them. And I think they're talking amongst each other, and I see there's lots of discussion that
00:03:02.960 they're having online, proposing plans, and so forth, going, no, we're the community leaders,
00:03:07.220 and we know we can do, you know, this activity, or that activity, quite responsibly, we know these
00:03:13.140 things need to get back online, and we're going to talk amongst ourselves, we're going to get
00:03:16.980 community support, we're going to get together an action plan for all of this happening. And that's
00:03:21.440 a good thing. Obviously, we should be listening to chief medical officers, in terms of, you know,
00:03:26.840 various other instructions and rules that they're bringing down, but at the same time, it's up to people
00:03:31.500 in the community to make their voices heard, and to advocate for responsible and sensible change,
00:03:37.860 like Cardinal Collins has been doing. So hats off to all the community leaders out there who have
00:03:42.700 been doing this, who are planning to do this, or who are on the fence about doing it, and just need a
00:03:47.980 little nudge to go in the right direction.