Juno News - August 12, 2021


Journalists are misleading Canadians about vaccine hesitancy

Topics
CTV Vaccine Hesitant headline forced vaccines and vaccine passport Black Canadians Vaccine Hesitant forced vaccination for First Nations
Mentioned
Justin Trudeau Jonathan Kaye Story
Deradicalizing the COVID busybodies UN climate change report is the same old repackaged alarmism

Episode Stats


Length

9 minutes

Words per minute

167.68

Word count

1,595

Sentence count

94

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

The media have created a misleading narrative about vaccine hesitancy in Canada, and for once, that s bad news for Justin Trudeau. Today, we re asking, who are the holdouts on vaccines in Canada? Is it the right wing, the left wing, or the middle ground?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.040 The media have created a misleading narrative about vaccine hesitancy in Canada.
00:00:05.160 And for once, that's bad news for Justin Trudeau.
00:00:07.780 I'm Candice Malcolm and this is The Candice Malcolm Show.
00:00:15.160 Conventional wisdom in Canada these days seems to say that the people who have vaccine hesitancy,
00:00:20.800 sometimes pejoratively referred to as anti-vaxxers in the media,
00:00:24.440 but that those people are a fixture of the political right.
00:00:28.000 Many journalists seem to think that those holding out on vaccines and those that are most skeptical
00:00:32.580 and therefore dragging out COVID, making us all at risk of more cases,
00:00:37.320 potentially another wave and more lockdowns,
00:00:39.240 that this is the fault of conservatives and people on the fringe far right.
00:00:44.400 Here is journalist Jonathan Kay making the bizarre case that because people in Prince Edward Island
00:00:49.600 apparently don't trust outsiders, that means that conservatives are the holdouts.
00:00:54.300 Even though every single seat in Prince Edward Island federally is held by the liberals
00:00:59.060 and the liberals have swept PEI for the last two elections.
00:01:03.340 In fact, conservatives have only won two seats out of the last 10 elections.
00:01:08.220 Two seats in 33 years.
00:01:09.720 But somehow Jonathan Kay is blaming conservatives.
00:01:12.760 All right.
00:01:13.540 Look at this CTV tweet and headline,
00:01:15.400 which basically tries to blame vaccine hesitancy on rural conservatives on the prairies.
00:01:19.900 It says this while Canada's vaccination rates are among the highest in the world.
00:01:24.340 Some of the country's lowest can be found in the prairies with Alberta and Manitoba reporting
00:01:28.020 vaccination rates as low as 16% in certain regions.
00:01:32.000 But wait a minute.
00:01:33.180 That isn't even true.
00:01:34.240 And as Danica McClellan points out, she writes,
00:01:37.000 what a misleading headline.
00:01:38.100 The story itself even acknowledges it.
00:01:40.500 So this is buried later in the story.
00:01:41.940 It says, however, Alberta health officials have said that these numbers may be low
00:01:46.500 because First Nations reserves in the province ran their own vaccination drives
00:01:50.960 and those numbers are not included in regional tallies.
00:01:54.820 So the numbers aren't even complete or correct.
00:01:57.340 But I guess accuracy and honesty isn't exactly what CTV is going for.
00:02:02.300 The media insists on this incorrect idea that it's conservatives who are holding out on the vaccines.
00:02:07.260 And then they argue that, therefore, this presents an opportunity for the liberals.
00:02:11.440 This strategy allows liberals in politics and the media to demonize what they call the anti-vaxxers,
00:02:17.440 to condemn what they call selfish right-wingers as potentially being responsible for prolonging
00:02:22.280 the pandemic.
00:02:23.440 And this allows for them to push this idea of forced vaccines and implementing a vaccine passport,
00:02:29.020 which will further divide our society. 0.72
00:02:31.140 They think this is a winning strategy.
00:02:32.900 Here's a liberal lobbyist saying just that in the Globe and Mail.
00:02:35.960 The article headline reads, vaccine passports could win Trudeau a majority.
00:02:40.120 This is why Trudeau recently announced that he is looking into forcing employees of the
00:02:45.060 federal government and federally regulated industries to get vaccinated.
00:02:48.960 It is time for people to get vaccinated.
00:02:52.220 Those who are hesitant to go and get their first doses and their second doses.
00:02:57.360 That's why I've asked the clerk of the Privy Council, who is responsible for the federal
00:03:01.280 public service, to look at mandatory vaccinations for federal employees.
00:03:06.660 I thought liberals believed in my body, my choice.
00:03:10.240 I guess not.
00:03:11.380 But it seems increasingly clear that liberals think forcing people to get vaccinated is a
00:03:16.720 winning election strategy and presents a pathway to victory in the forthcoming election, which
00:03:21.800 seems to be imminent.
00:03:22.980 Perhaps it could be starting as soon as this weekend.
00:03:25.820 But hold up just a second.
00:03:27.520 I don't want to give advice to the liberals here, but I think they're all wrong about who
00:03:31.500 is holding out on the vaccines.
00:03:32.820 First, take a look at this report by a longtime liberal insider and strategist.
00:03:37.460 It's actually remarkable just given how self-aware it is.
00:03:40.780 It says, typical vaccine hesitant person is a 42-year-old Ontario woman who votes liberal,
00:03:46.540 according to Abacus Polling.
00:03:48.180 Let me read from this McLean's article.
00:03:50.200 It says,
00:03:50.580 If they were voting in a federal election today,
00:04:20.180 35% would vote liberal, 25% conservative, 17% NDP, 9% green.
00:04:26.980 Pretty similar to overall voting intentions for the entire society.
00:04:30.760 However, compared to the vaccinated, they don't have a lot of trust in government.
00:04:34.720 They also try to avoid prescriptions, dislike putting anything unnatural in their bodies,
00:04:39.040 and 83% say they are reluctant to take vaccines.
00:04:42.080 Most worry that COVID-19 vaccines haven't really been tested for a long time.
00:04:45.620 Just under half hate needles and 43% believe that if others get vaccinated, they don't
00:04:51.300 need to.
00:04:52.260 A third say their doctor could persuade them, and a quarter say friends and family can.
00:04:56.360 A similar number say they will get vaccinated if it makes attending events and traveling easier.
00:05:01.240 So that sort of throws a wrench into the whole concept and narrative that conservatives are
00:05:06.200 the anti-vaxxers, and it gets even worse for the liberals.
00:05:09.980 Take a look at this report from True North.
00:05:12.600 It further bursts the bubble of a potential forced vaccine campaign by the liberals.
00:05:17.380 Headline says,
00:05:18.200 Trudeau ignores impact of mandatory vaccines on First Nations Black Canadians.
00:05:22.720 I'll read from the story.
00:05:23.560 A Statistics Canada COVID-19 vaccine willingness survey from March 26, 2021, reveals that Black
00:05:29.640 Canadians have the lowest willingness to take the COVID-19 vaccine, with just 56.6% saying
00:05:35.900 they would, while Indigenous Canadians have the second lowest rate, at 71.8%.
00:05:41.880 Certain subgroups in Canada are more likely to report COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy.
00:05:47.040 These include Black Canadians, Indigenous peoples, newcomers, and younger adults, among others.
00:05:52.460 This is according to a federal government backgrounder on vaccine hesitancy intended for
00:05:57.000 healthcare workers.
00:05:58.400 So Black Canadians, Indigenous, newcomers, and young adults.
00:06:01.920 Hmm, that doesn't exactly sound like the French far-right to me.
00:06:06.040 And it gets even more interesting when you think about this in the context of forcing
00:06:10.360 federally regulated employees to get vaccinated, as Trudeau said that he is currently exploring.
00:06:15.060 This again is from the True North report.
00:06:17.480 According to the Government of Canada's website on federally regulated industries and workplaces,
00:06:21.600 First Nations band councils, including certain community services on reserve, are included
00:06:27.300 in the list of organizations that are federally mandated, and therefore would fall under Trudeau's
00:06:31.640 proposed mandatory vaccination scheme.
00:06:34.240 Is Trudeau seriously going to force First Nations band leaders and reservation staff to get
00:06:39.120 vaccinated?
00:06:40.180 What if they say no?
00:06:41.020 What is he going to do?
00:06:42.340 Can you imagine?
00:06:43.760 First Nations people in this country have every right to say no. 1.00
00:06:46.640 And frankly, they have very valid reasons to be skeptical or unwilling to trust the federal
00:06:51.720 government with their healthcare decisions, just given the history in this country.
00:06:55.660 I cannot imagine in a thousand years, Justin Trudeau forcing First Nations individuals to
00:07:00.640 get vaccinated against their will.
00:07:02.480 So if he can't force them in that area, can you really enforce it on other employees?
00:07:07.500 Likewise, only about half the Black population in Canada say that they're willing to get vaccinated.
00:07:12.500 So are the Liberals really going to try to demonize this community?
00:07:16.140 I highly doubt it.
00:07:17.240 If the opposition parties in this country have any sense, they'll bring this up and ask Trudeau
00:07:22.060 about it.
00:07:22.420 They'll bring it up every time he talks about the unvaccinated or flirts with the idea of
00:07:26.740 forced vaccination.
00:07:28.160 Is he really going to take communities that are already marginalized, perhaps they're already
00:07:32.700 impoverished and excluded, and exacerbate that chism by saying that Indigenous people,
00:07:38.080 Black Canadians, newcomers, and young people will no longer be able to access certain services,
00:07:43.300 enter certain parts of their society, and potentially get jobs or work in the federal
00:07:47.600 service or federally regulated industries just because they have an aversion to this new
00:07:52.200 vaccine.
00:07:53.100 Now, remarkably, no one in the media has thought to ask Trudeau about this.
00:07:57.460 Nobody asked Trudeau whether he would force vaccines on First Nations leaders, and you
00:08:01.360 guessed it, the CBC even covered for him.
00:08:04.020 Let me read from another Trudeau report.
00:08:05.720 Story says this, a CBC news report on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's announcement that
00:08:09.800 his government would pursue making vaccines mandatory for federally regulated industries
00:08:14.160 omitted the fact that the mandate would also apply to First Nations bans and services.
00:08:18.640 The August 5th article entitled, Trudeau asks top public servant to look into mandatory
00:08:23.560 vaccination for federal workers, made no mention of First Nations communities when listing
00:08:28.080 impacted groups or sectors.
00:08:29.840 So this is what the CBC report said.
00:08:31.840 It says the Prime Minister also said the government is looking into making vaccines mandatory in
00:08:36.860 federally regulated industries such as the airline banking and rail sectors, the article
00:08:41.780 said, failing to mention First Nations ban councils and reserve staff.
00:08:46.000 Now, in an email to Trudeau, a CBC spokesman said that the article was merely highlighting some
00:08:51.620 affected areas.
00:08:52.560 This is what the CBC said to Trudeau.
00:08:54.440 The story was a very broad overview of a new proposal and highlighted some of the areas,
00:09:00.040 but obviously not every area.
00:09:02.080 As the story continues to unfold and policies firm up, we will report on potential impacts
00:09:07.500 where relevant.
00:09:08.640 Right.
00:09:08.980 Well, I won't hold my breath waiting for the CBC to challenge Justin Trudeau or to try to
00:09:13.360 hold him accountable.
00:09:15.000 But Canadians, on the other hand, should challenge the Liberals on this idea of forced vaccines,
00:09:19.820 and they should hold Justin Trudeau accountable for introducing a policy that could potentially
00:09:24.340 be very bad for Black Canadians and for those who are First Nations.
00:09:28.680 I'm Candace Malcolm, and this is The Candace Malcolm Show. 0.83