Juno News - October 13, 2022


Lawton： The discrimination of the unvaccinated must be called out

Topics
unvaccinated discrimination vaccine discrimination
Mentioned
Danielle Smith Alexandra Marshall Jason Kenney Doug Ford
Everyone is moving to Alberta How will the Emergencies Act hearings unfold？ (Ft. Eva Chipiuk)

Episode Stats


Length

11 minutes

Words per minute

172.0

Word count

1,942

Sentence count

115

Harmful content

Misogyny

4

sentences flagged

Hate speech

3

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Danielle Smith, Alberta's new human rights minister, takes questions at her debut press conference. She says that the unvaccinated are the most discriminated against group she has ever seen in her lifetime. What does that have to do with vaccines?

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 .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 But Danielle Smith was doing her debut press conference this week and she was taking questions on a number of issues.
00:00:07.040 She was talking about the Sovereignty Act first and foremost, which I don't think the media is really going to want to let her off on.
00:00:13.820 But it wasn't until the tail end of the press conference where she got a question about her plan, which I think is a very good one, to put vaccine status in the Alberta Human Rights Code.
00:00:24.600 So it would be illegal, illegal under Alberta law to discriminate against people based on their vaccine status.
00:00:34.120 Now, Danielle Smith has been a longtime libertarian.
00:00:37.540 She is an advocate for individual choice.
00:00:40.240 She has been, throughout the course of the pandemic, an incredibly strong voice, incredibly strong voice on vaccine choice.
00:00:48.340 She was when she was on the radio.
00:00:49.860 She has been in her work since and she was during the campaign.
00:00:53.560 She had a very clear position on this, a very clear proposal.
00:00:56.600 She wasn't just saying I'm against mandates.
00:00:58.200 She was saying I have a way that we can codify in law this opposition to mandates.
00:01:03.580 And that was to put this human rights protection in place, which protects your right to be unvaccinated the same way as it protects your right to be free from discrimination as a racial minority based on your religion, your gender identity, your sexual orientation and all of these other things.
00:01:18.580 And she gave a very good answer, which has gotten now millions of views online when asked about this.
00:01:27.540 I have a question about vaccine choice and how you want to protect that under the Human Rights Act.
00:01:33.520 I'm wondering how a vaccine choice, how you see that as equal to something like race, gender, sexuality, which we protect because those are not about choices.
00:01:44.960 Well, I guess the way I look at it is that the community that faced the most restrictions on their freedoms in the last year were those who made a choice not to be vaccinated.
00:01:56.280 I don't think I've ever experienced a situation in my lifetime where a person was fired from their job or not allowed to watch their kids play hockey or not allowed to go visit a loved one in long term care or hospital or not allowed to go get on a plane to either go across the country to see family or even travel across the border.
00:02:17.600 So they have been the most discriminated against group that I've ever witnessed in my lifetime.
00:02:23.300 That's a pretty extreme level of discrimination that we have seen.
00:02:26.960 I don't take away any of the discrimination that I've seen in those other groups that you mentioned.
00:02:31.920 But this has been an extraordinary time in the last year in particular.
00:02:37.560 And I want people to know that I find that unacceptable, that we are not going to create a segregated society on the basis of a medical choice.
00:02:45.880 The part that has a lot of people on the left just exploding their own minds, spontaneously combusting, is Danielle Smith saying that the unvaccinated are the most discriminated against group she's ever seen in her lifetime.
00:03:01.660 Now, she was born in the early 70s.
00:03:03.660 I don't know exactly how old she is.
00:03:05.460 But nevertheless, she says that the unvaccinated in her lifetime are the most discriminated against group.
00:03:10.320 And on the surface, this does not sound like an inherently illogical thing to say.
00:03:15.000 In the last two years, certainly, the unvaccinated have been not just as a matter of discrimination and bigotry they experience in society,
00:03:23.060 but as a matter of systemic government-imposed policy discrimination, barred from working in the civil service.
00:03:30.640 They've lost their jobs.
00:03:31.840 They were banned from taking planes.
00:03:33.480 They were forced into quarantine, banned from trains.
00:03:36.180 The amount of discrimination that has been heaped on the unvaccinated, not just by bigoted individuals, but by the state, is monumental.
00:03:45.940 At the same time, I also don't want to get into this comparison game.
00:03:50.280 But when you make a comment like no one else has ever had that discrimination, which is not what she said,
00:03:56.320 but when you make that comment that it's worse than anything else, people start throwing their own understandable grievances there.
00:04:04.860 For example, in Danielle Smith's lifetime, there were still residential schools.
00:04:08.840 In Danielle Smith's lifetime, gay marriage did not exist with the force of law for much of it and so on.
00:04:15.660 But I don't like the comparison for a number of reasons, because I think all discrimination is wrong on its surface, on an individual basis.
00:04:24.040 You don't need to compare and shouldn't need to compare one person's discrimination against another.
00:04:29.520 And it's doing that that always rubs me the wrong way, because people try to delegitimize or minimize other people struggling because they think theirs is worse.
00:04:39.460 Whereas I take an equal opportunity approach on this.
00:04:41.760 Let's say that, yes, racial discrimination is bad.
00:04:44.040 Right. So is vaccine discrimination.
00:04:47.380 The whole point of intersectionality, what we were told we're all supposed to move towards, is that we can't just look at these things in isolation.
00:04:54.940 But I think we need to, in a lot of ways, call them out on individual terms and call them out individually when bad things are happening, when discrimination is taking place.
00:05:04.820 And Danielle Smith, in the full context, in the full comment, does, by the way, say that she is not diminishing other discrimination that was raised in the question, such as racial and sexual orientation and so on.
00:05:19.440 And she's not talking about diminishing or downplaying that.
00:05:22.540 She's just saying that we need to call out the horrendous discrimination that has been taking place on the grounds of vaccination status.
00:05:31.580 And this is a discrimination for which the federal government in Canada has been unrepentant, for which provincial governments in this country have been unrepentant, and for which no one in Canada, in Canadian politics who holds elected office, has taken the view that Danielle Smith has just done,
00:05:49.920 which is to say this is wrong, which is to say this is wrong, and it will never happen, and to do so in a believable way.
00:05:56.660 When she came out and said segregation would not exist in her province, Doug Ford said that in Ontario, that he would not support a segregated society.
00:06:04.520 Danielle Smith's predecessor, Jason Kenney, had at one time taken it off the table.
00:06:09.920 But Danielle Smith knows that history.
00:06:12.880 And Premier Smith, I should say, is well aware of that.
00:06:16.660 When she makes that commitment, I think she understands the weight of what it is she's committing to and what it is that she's promising.
00:06:25.460 And that is that there will not be a lockdown, there will not be segregation, and there will be protection of vaccine choice in Alberta from here on out.
00:06:37.000 And there's a reason that that clip has gone so viral, not just across Alberta, not just across Canada, but around the world.
00:06:43.500 I've got American friends, Australian friends, British friends that are sending me this, being like, who is this woman?
00:06:48.660 Like one person's like, I don't know what Alberta is. 0.57
00:06:50.680 I think it's a Canadian thing, but I'm all for it.
00:06:53.500 And that to me is exceptional, because right now we are in the midst of a global trend,
00:06:58.720 where governments and countries can stand and look at the fork in the road and say we can choose freedom or we can choose not freedom.
00:07:07.160 And most have been choosing not freedom.
00:07:10.320 Most have been choosing to go so far away from this idea of individual freedom.
00:07:14.480 In Australia, as Alexander Marshall, who's a tremendous commentator and writer for The Spectator, pointed out,
00:07:20.620 Australia even still, we're approaching three years since COVID was discovered,
00:07:26.560 and nearly three years on, Australia is still in some parts committing to vaccine discrimination.
00:07:31.760 Insane.
00:07:33.420 Insane.
00:07:34.600 And it's an island nation.
00:07:35.940 The unvaccinated were, actually, I mean, the entire country was basically an open air prison in large terms 0.99
00:07:42.180 because of their inability to travel, to leave.
00:07:44.220 But the unvaccinated are still, are still significantly discriminated against.
00:07:49.880 Not, again, not incidentally, not peripherally, but as a matter of public policy.
00:07:56.260 And this is unacceptable.
00:07:58.080 And I said some weeks ago that there needs to be a reckoning.
00:08:01.100 It's not just enough to lift or suspend restrictions.
00:08:04.740 Governments need to be held to account.
00:08:06.920 They need to be ousted.
00:08:08.200 They need courts to slap them down. 1.00
00:08:10.220 And we need politicians that are going to say on behalf of their provinces, their countries, their jurisdictions,
00:08:15.560 that this is not something that we will stand for.
00:08:19.200 And that is precisely what Danielle Smith did. 0.81
00:08:22.180 But it isn't just theoretical here.
00:08:24.400 She's talking about changing the Human Rights Act.
00:08:26.700 Fine.
00:08:27.580 She's also talking about the why.
00:08:29.760 And this is where I have to look at a bit of a global context right now.
00:08:33.940 And you probably know the clip I'm going to in a few moments' time from the European Parliament.
00:08:40.000 But I want to set the stage because that clip from Danielle Smith, that initial minute I just played,
00:08:44.540 there's another minute where she talks about more of the scientific basis of this.
00:08:48.840 And this is where we actually need to go down the road of explaining a little bit about what the premise was.
00:08:57.400 The premise of vaccine passports, the stated premise, the public one that the government acknowledged,
00:09:03.960 was that it was unsafe for the unvaccinated to congregate in a restaurant, in a sports venue, in a music venue, etc.
00:09:11.560 It was unsafe to do that because the unvaccinated were going to transmit COVID. 1.00
00:09:17.380 And then they were going to get sick.
00:09:18.960 And then they were going to overwhelm the hospital system.
00:09:21.040 And then so and so and so and so would happen.
00:09:23.400 And we would just have this collapse of society.
00:09:26.320 So the premise of the vaccine passport was that you need to be vaccinated and ensure that all the people around you are vaccinated
00:09:34.600 for certain spaces to be safe, whether they were airplanes or restaurants.
00:09:38.680 That was the premise.
00:09:40.240 Community spread needed to be stopped.
00:09:43.280 Vaccination was going to do that.
00:09:45.580 A lot of people got vaccinated not because they personally felt at risk of COVID, but because they wanted to save grandma.
00:09:53.640 The titular grandma at the center of all our COVID policy, they got vaccinated to save her life, not their own. 0.75
00:10:01.940 And a lot of people bought into this idea.
00:10:06.120 And I totally understand it.
00:10:08.280 When everyone is saying that vaccines prevent transmission, that's typically been our understanding of a vaccine.
00:10:13.480 I totally get that.
00:10:15.480 So people get vaccinated because they want to stop transmission.
00:10:18.620 We know that has been an absolute farce, especially in the Omicron era, the booster era.
00:10:23.800 The vaccines are not stopping transmission.
00:10:26.300 The benefit of the vaccine that's stated and promoted now is reduced to limiting your personal risk of hospitalization or death,
00:10:35.100 which means it is the epitome of an individual choice.
00:10:39.300 It affects no one else, whether you get vaccinated or you don't get vaccinated.
00:10:48.620 And we don't have to, because we're at the end of this idea.
00:10:51.400 We don't need to avoid any big problems.
00:10:52.240 Now the vaccine and number, don't need to stop transmission.
00:10:56.480 We don't need to.
00:10:57.800 We don't need to be afraid of issue.
00:10:59.140 And the government has to disable them.
00:11:00.440 We don't need to deal with them.
00:11:01.880 And then we're to prevent protoANGAq 1.00
00:11:14.480 So we're being attacked and we do not need to reduce testing.