Juno News - September 25, 2021


Is Ontario's vaccine passport causing more problems than expected？


Episode Stats

Length

4 minutes

Words per Minute

203.68898

Word Count

854

Sentence Count

48

Hate Speech Sentences

1


Summary


Transcript

00:00:00.000 Ontario's vaccine passport has only been in place for a few days, but anecdotally, it seems like
00:00:10.020 it's causing a whole lot more trouble than it's worth. A divisive project that we're soon going
00:00:15.080 to be asking ourselves, what on earth was the point of all of this? Now, obviously other provinces
00:00:21.420 in Canada have a passport, and other jurisdictions across the Western world have introduced this as
00:00:25.980 well. I'm going to focus my comments on what's going on in Ontario, because that's where I'm
00:00:29.520 hearing the most number of reports on the ground. First of all, one question that's really
00:00:33.640 interesting is the number of people who are choosing to opt out of it, either because they
00:00:38.120 are not vaccinated or because they are vaccinated, but they just don't support this happening in
00:00:43.180 society, this level of division. I've heard from regular folks saying, I'm just not doing
00:00:47.740 this stuff. I'm not going to the restaurants. I'm not going to the movies while they're doing this
00:00:51.420 show me your papers thing. I don't support society devolving into that situation. I've actually heard
00:00:56.300 from two hospital doctors who work on the front lines, who treat COVID patients, who certainly
00:01:01.420 support doing everything possible to stop people from having serious outcomes with this illness,
00:01:06.620 and these doctors also administer vaccines. They told me they're not going to restaurants or going
00:01:12.020 to the movies or what have you, because they are opting out of it. They are not supporting the
00:01:16.340 passport on issues of principle and issues of equity and fairness as they explain it. You go,
00:01:21.560 wow, if you're hearing that from people in the healthcare profession, I mean,
00:01:24.540 what are the views in broader society? I really hope that those people at least who said, yes,
00:01:29.560 we need a vaccine passport. That's what I need in place to quote unquote, feel safe.
00:01:34.000 I kind of want to say, okay, you've got it. Are you at least out and about living your lives now?
00:01:37.900 Or is this just another excuse, another kind of barrier that you put in place for yourself
00:01:42.540 psychologically to not learn to live with COVID as many chief medical officers of health throughout
00:01:48.280 Canada have now been saying we must do. So that's one concern. Another concern is just all the
00:01:53.500 anecdotes. Some of them are going viral as videos that we're seeing of people being denied service.
00:01:58.140 I saw a video of an old lady who was kicked out of McDonald's. She said, oh, I am vaccinated,
00:02:03.180 but I don't have the paperwork or I just, I don't have the right iPhone. Come on. Can I stay? No,
00:02:08.760 out you go. Hearing lots of stories and reports of that. I heard from one parent whose, uh, whose
00:02:14.000 children were kicked out of McDonald's for not being vaccinated, not showing their paperwork. Lots of
00:02:19.360 odd stories like that. I'm also hearing stories about the vaccine passport not being enforced in
00:02:24.640 many locations. People saying, well, I went to my gym. They didn't ask for it. People telling me they
00:02:29.600 went to a restaurant and the issue just wasn't brought up. Now I am not saying that to, to rat
00:02:35.000 them out and say, we must have stricter enforcement and so forth. But it's just kind of funny that those
00:02:39.860 people who, who, who, who passionately said we need these passports in place. Well, now we're seeing
00:02:44.980 that, look, it's just not actually going to be enforced by many places. I also wonder to what
00:02:50.060 degree is it that, that neighborhoods where people are much more inclined to be COVID busy bodies in
00:02:56.100 terms of really stressing out about this stuff. Will those neighborhoods, will those customers,
00:03:00.600 will those businesses feel the pressure from their customers to enforce the passport? Whereas
00:03:05.360 other neighborhoods where people are, are less, uh, sort of COVID busy bodies, are those places going
00:03:11.880 to be less inclined to enforce it. And we're going to see all of that happen. I'm sure we're going to
00:03:15.820 see drama where a certain media outlets want to name and shame places that are not enforcing the
00:03:20.960 rules. It's going to be a mess. There's also these rather troubling headlines about how a number of
00:03:27.120 hospitals, uh, we got the numbers on the record for Windsor hospital and Kingston hospital that
00:03:31.920 they've let go well over 100 employees over the vaccine rules. You go, whoa, hold on a second. I thought
00:03:37.700 the point of the vaccine passport, whether you support it or not was okay. We can't have
00:03:41.660 another lockdown. We can't have hospitals at capacity. This is going to help us avoid that
00:03:45.920 situation. And yet now we see these vaccine rules are actually causing problems with hospital
00:03:52.640 staffing. The vaccine rules may in fact create the next hospital crisis. So bottom line, we're only a
00:03:59.820 few days into this and things already seem to be a bit of a mess. Lots of inconsistencies and you've
00:04:05.240 got to ask, and you got to ask this to people who support the passport the most. Is this worth all of
00:04:11.060 the trouble?