Growing Resistance to Vaccine Discrimination
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Summary
In this episode, I talk about the other side of vaccine discrimination, and how businesses and activists around the world are fighting back against the idea that you should be required to be vaccinated to basically be a member of society.
Transcript
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This is the Andrew Lawton Show, brought to you by True North.
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Coming up, growing resistance in Canada and around the world to vaccine discrimination
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and Justin Trudeau's unwillingness to call a spade a spade when it comes to communist Cuba.
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Hello and welcome to Canada's Most Irreverent Talk Show.
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This is the Andrew Lawton Show here on True North.
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It is great to have you aboard the program and I want to talk about the other side of the coin
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that we started down the road of discussing in my previous show this week, which is vaccine discrimination.
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And a lot of this has been coming from individuals and businesses and activists who think that
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you should be required to be fully vaccinated to basically be a member of society.
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I talked last week about this website in Toronto, Safe2Do or Safe2Do or Safe2Do.
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But it doesn't matter because the website's gone.
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This was a website set up by a Toronto lawyer to give companies the right to basically brag
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about having fully vaccinated staff and also to set out vaccine requirements for customers.
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There was one restaurant notably called Chanticleer in Toronto, which said you are going to be,
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if you want a table inside, you've got to be fully vaccinated.
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The guy who created it said that all of the businesses that were putting their names on
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there and saying, yes, we require vaccinations for customers and staff were getting backlash
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from people because there were more people that were annoyed with these policies than
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I mean, certainly people were going and leaving all these one star reviews.
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And whereas I think the best way to protest a business is to simply not shop there.
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And that's what individual consumers have a right to do with any company for any reason.
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But there was a cautionary tale in it, which is that by and large, people are resistant to
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this idea of being forced to do something, even if in a lot of cases they would have done it anyway.
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And we're starting to see this with vaccination policy.
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And I'm going to talk about very briefly some of the protests we're seeing in Europe of people
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who by and large, if you look at the stats, are vaccinated, but don't like that the government
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is getting a little bit too big brotherly when it comes to enforcing it.
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But let's talk about, as I said at the beginning, the other side of the coin here.
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So you go back a week and a half, Good Life Fitness, the largest gym chain in Canada says,
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we don't care if you're vaccinated or not, just come work out.
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That gets Good Life subjected to an absolute deluge of criticism and attacks on Twitter.
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That is what ultimately creates this mandatory vaccine show-off website, safe to do.
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Then there's a gym in Etobicoke that decides to go completely the other way on this, seeing
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that there are a couple of gyms that are talking about mandatory vaccination.
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The Fearless Boxing Club, Etobicoke is just on the outskirts of Toronto, says that it will
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not accept anyone who has been vaccinated at the gym.
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So it's like the opposite of no shoes, no service.
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They're saying no shoes, no problem, or no vax, no problem.
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Here's the line on Facebook from Mohamed Abedin, who's the co-founder of the gym.
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And then he says this, for the safety of our members, the Fearless Boxing Club will no
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longer be accepting those who received the experimental COVID vaccine.
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Our current members, including doctors, nurses, teachers, parents, and many youth feel safer
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waiting until more research is done on the side effects being discovered right now.
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I did a quick story about it over at True North.
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There were some people who said, yeah, this is great.
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Other people that I don't think missed the point, that we're calling them reckless and stupid
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A few people were sending me emails about this thing called vaccine shedding, which is basically
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this idea that you can contract someone's vaccine secondhand.
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There's something that's very rare called viral shedding, but that's not with vaccines
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that are made the way the COVID vaccine is made.
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So the idea is if someone is vaccinated, no matter how much you hate the vaccine, it's
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And we should all as individuals in a supposedly free society be welcoming and celebrating people
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making their own choice, which means if you're vaccinated, great.
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If you're not vaccinated, that is completely your choice.
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Let's not have either group start trying to force the other to do something they don't
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want to do or not do something they do want to do.
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So what he's doing here, I think, at the fearless boxing gym is basically saying, you know what,
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let's just go down the road of two can play this game.
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If you can mandate people to be vaccinated, I can mandate people to not be.
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Do I think this is what is in the interest of building a cohesive society?
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If this is just being done to troll people, I say, well played, well done.
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Because all of the people who to defend mandatory vaccine policies at businesses have been saying,
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Don't seem so keen on their libertarian bona fides when the business is using its autonomy
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and its prerogative to do what they're doing at this gym in Etobicoke.
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Do private businesses have the right to make these decisions for themselves or do they not?
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And this is why what I said on Monday's show I think needs to be restated here, which is
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that we should have a government that's completely hands off on this, that's letting individuals
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And yes, is letting businesses make their own decisions.
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But as individuals, as a society, we should not be supporting at all this trend towards
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vaccine discrimination, which is looking increasingly like the norm and not an exception if you look
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And vaccine discrimination is wrong and it's impractical and it is going to set us up for
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And this is why vaccine passports and vaccine certification has been such a big issue for
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me because if we start down the road of having these things, of having basically a green pass
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or a vaccine passport or a vaccine certificate, whatever, to access elements of society, that
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The infrastructure to set up mandatory vaccines, to set up vaccine passports, is going to be
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there longer than this particular virus or this particular pandemic will.
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And it means that when the next thing comes along, all they have to do is kind of snap
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their fingers and they have this ready-made tyranny in a box that they can apply to whatever
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the so-called experts deem is the threat du jour.
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So these things are not temporary and not fleeting.
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You look at all of the companies that have set up COVID policy.
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I was at a hotel not long ago that, like most hotels, had severely reigned back
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its service, arraigned in its service, including housekeeping because of the COVID-19 issues.
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And they're in a jurisdiction that is completely open, no public health restrictions, no mask
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They're still not doing daily housekeeping service.
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Now, I would say this probably has more to do with the hotel being cheap than anything
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to do with health, anything to do with public health guidelines.
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It's certainly not coming from a government regulation.
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But things that existed for temporary reasons for the pandemic have a tendency to remain
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It's like the old, I mean, it's not a joke, but the old observation about the income tax
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in Canada being a temporary effort for the war.
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And here we are, however many years later, a hundred and some odd still paying it.
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So all of these regulations and requirements and policies and these infringements of liberty
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will become permanent if they are not stopped and prevented from getting off the ground in
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And this is why a lot of these people that we see saying, well, yeah, I mean, I am a little
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bit uneasy with it, but you know, it's a pandemic.
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Like these people will live to rue their qualifications that they're applying to these
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If you are not going to stand up for liberty now, you are never going to get another chance
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He says the problem with saying that you aren't going to die on this hill or that's not the
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hill to die on is that eventually you run out of hills.
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And we're going to be at that point pretty darn quickly if people do not start standing
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And if you look at Europe, for example, which is not a place that generally speaking, most
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But in Europe, people are protesting in very large numbers at what's been happening there
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in the United Kingdom, where again, you need a vaccine passport if you want to do certain
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France, where even something as simple as going to a cafe requires proof of vaccination.
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Effectively mandatory vaccination in France has caused thousands of people to line the
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The government trying to mandate vaccines or vaccine passports and the people are not
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Greece hasn't even gone the full distance with vaccine passports, but people are protesting
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the government there because they think it's going to start being targeted towards youth,
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And in a lot of cases, you have parents that are not anti-vax at all.
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They've been fully vaccinated themselves, but they draw a line when it comes to their
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But now you're talking about vaccinating my 14-year-old, my 15-year-old, my 12-year-old.
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So Europe, which has had, for the most part, more aggressive lockdowns, not as prolonged,
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but more aggressive lockdowns, Europeans are standing up and saying, we do not want anything
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Because the whole point of enduring the lockdown, this is how it was sold to people.
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Two weeks to flatten the curve was short-term pain, long-term gain.
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So when you had people that were prepared to do their part, that were all in this together
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shake, prepared to do their part because it would mean freedom on the other side of it,
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people around the world are realizing that that promise of freedom is not actually materializing.
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We avoided getting haircuts for months at a time.
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And at the end of it, there's not a free society.
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At the end of it, there's not this rumspringer where you just do whatever you want.
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At the end of it is a society that is more restricted than the one that existed prior
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A society in which you all of a sudden need permission.
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Permission to engage in all of the things that you were banned from doing.
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And you're supposed to celebrate that that's a step forward because, oh, at least a few
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This is why people, I think, are finally starting to realize, even people who weren't anti-lockdown,
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that they were sold a bill of goods that the government simply isn't delivering.
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And this is why a lot of the anti-lockdown people had it right.
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You know, some people were prepared to say, I'm reasonable.
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But if the government is going to justify shutting everything down, it has to be willing
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to actually open it all on the other end of it, which the government simply is not doing.
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So my prediction on this is that there are going to be a lot more people doing what the
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protesters in France and Italy and Greece are doing, saying to the government, this
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is not what we agreed to, and we are not going to abide by this.
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Because one of the most dangerous aspects of this pandemic is that there's never going
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But Jason Kenney, last week, I think it was, had made a comment about after the pandemic.
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And he didn't, like, stand up like George Bush with the Mission Accomplished banner and say
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But I think he had tweeted something along the lines of, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah,
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There was a CBC story basically talking about all the experts that were concerned that Jason
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Thousands and thousands of people gathered at the Calgary Stampede.
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And there has not been a single uptake in cases and hospitalizations as a result that
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But Jason Kenney, who dares to say people are moving on with their lives, becomes pilloried
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And then you have this, the World Health Organization warning.
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The World Health Organization warning that the pandemic is far from over.
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So by the time this finally starts to wane, it'll be kicking up again just in time to get
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your booster shots and it will become a permanent reality.
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And again, I go back to the concerns I raise about the infrastructure.
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If the infrastructure is in place to basically require proof of vaccination to do everything,
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to require tests for anything and everything, it's not going to go away.
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Companies have invested a lot of money in these things.
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Governments have invested a lot of money and political capital in these things.
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And nowhere in the last year and a bit has there been a reckoning from government or even
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any recognition whatsoever that they've made mistakes.
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Jason Kenney said something very important back in December when I was sitting down with
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him and he admitted that, you know what, he thinks Alberta got it wrong by talking about
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which businesses are essential and which businesses were not essential.
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No one at the federal level, no one in other provinces that I've heard has actually admitted
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this, has admitted that they screwed things up, which means they've got to continue the
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lie that all of their public health measures were perfect and science-based and hunky-dory
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and it was working and all of the success we've had has been because of it.
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And we are all the casualties of it because they need to basically buy their way out of their
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And this is not about saying the pandemic isn't real.
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It's about saying that governments have taken a heavy-handed approach and far from being
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this temporary stopgap measure to get through the worst, it's become the new way that we
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A vaccine passport is not just the cost of living in a post-pandemic world.
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It is a license for the government to continue this heavy-handed approach to your liberty,
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to your mobility within and outside of your city, your province, your country in perpetuity.
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And that's why it has to be a hill to die on for people.
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I want to talk for a few moments, because we did talk in the beginning of the show about
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all these protests in Europe, about a different set of protests taking place in Cuba.
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As people, I mean, if you take the mainstream media's perspective on this, people are just
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upset that the vaccination schedule is not exactly how it's supposed to be.
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But the reality is people are trying to buck off their oppressors.
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People who have been kept under the thumb of Cuba's communist dictatorship for decades
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are finding the autonomy and empowerment to say no, to try to basically revolt against it.
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Now, we've seen in dictatorships, revolutions fizzle out in the past.
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But a lot of what happens will depend on how the international community responds.
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The Cuban regime has been doing what any dictatorial regime does, trying to put its
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They have to clamp down on their citizens' rights, because if their citizens can speak
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So this is why the Cuban government has been arresting political prisoners.
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There was this chilling video where Cuban security officers came to a journalist's house
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And Canada's response to this has been completely unsurprising.
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Just like Justin Trudeau will never find an unkind word to say about China, with Cuba,
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he has a personal relationship that clouds any desire he might have whatsoever,
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which I don't think he has, to condemn Cuba's human rights abuses.
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Cuba has made a mass arrest and appears to have shut down the internet on the island
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after people took to the streets in unprecedented numbers to denounce the government.
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Will Canada condemn the communist regime's oppression of dissent,
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or do you agree with President Diaz-Canel that the U.S. embargo and Miami-funded mercenaries
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We, as a country, Canada has always stood in friendship with the Cuban people.
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We have always called for greater freedoms and more defensive human rights in Cuba.
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We will continue to be there to support Cubans in their desire for greater peace,
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greater stability, and greater voice in how things are going.
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As we learned when Fidel Castro died, Trudeau sees him as this larger-than-life figure,
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this magnanimous contributor to freedom and democracy and all of these other things.
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Well, maybe he didn't say that, but certainly didn't care about all the things Castro did
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And then Trudeau picked up the buddy-buddy relationship with Castro's brother
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and continues to not be willing to condemn Cuba's human rights abuses.
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Well, he can, but it's very begrudging, as we saw in the last few days.
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Cuba is benefiting from a lot of whitewashing in Canada.
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And a lot of Canadians see Cuba as that place they can go for cheap vacations,
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the place they can, you know, fly to, stay seven nights, eat and drink for,
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and come back for like $600 Canadian or something like that.
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And the cost is that the Cuban government is not particularly interested in looking after its people.
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There's a reason that if you go to Cuba, you have to exchange your currency for tourist pesos,
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those which you can't take out of the country because Cuba is keeping control of its economy
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And the fact that Canadians have either been oblivious to this or willfully ignorant to this
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just because they can get a cheap vacation there is something that tends to creep into areas
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where people do need to be taking a critical eye to Cuba.
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It would be nice if when there is dictatorial oppression taking place,
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our government would speak up, a government that never ceases to virtue signal about anything and everything
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except for when there's actual human rights abuse taking place in China, in Cuba, or elsewhere in the world
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if it's in one of those giant liberal blind spots.
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The Canadian press decided to interview the people who are protesting against Cuban freedom protesters,
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of which there are only a couple of dozen, and essentially start parroting communist Cuba talking points.
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Ignoring the hundreds and thousands of protesters who are saying that what's happening in Cuba is wrong
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and spotlighting a few people who are completely happy with the dictatorial communist status quo.
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What we do about Cuba as a country is a complicated question.
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Nation building, regime change, all of these things are understandably and justifiably controversial concepts.
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But at the very least, you can call a spade a spade.
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And that means calling an unfree country an unfree country
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and not letting that get overshadowed by palm trees, cheap drinks, and white sandy beaches.
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Or to Trudeau, a childhood family friendship with a murderous, brutal dictator.
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I'm off next week, but we'll be back in a couple of weeks' time
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with more of Canada's most irreverent talk show.
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Latest episode came out talking about sports shooting.
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Thanks for listening to The Andrew Lawton Show.
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