Juno News - May 10, 2020


Leave it to Trudeau to make the economy a partisan issue

Mentioned
Justin Trudeau Jason Kenney John Horgan Doug Ford New Brunswick
Politicians are drunk with power Conservative Leadership Series： Erin O’Toole

Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

202.17

Word count

722

Sentence count

39


Summary

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

The coronavirus outbreak continues to spread across the country, and the number of confirmed cases continues to rise. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has been slow to get on board with the plan to re-open the nation's hospitals, and some critics have accused him of partisanship.

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 Remember during the early days of all of this when we were told we're all in this together and
00:00:10.040 leave partisanship behind? We were all supposed to rally behind all the various different chief
00:00:14.680 medical officers, the premiers, the national leaders, and we would all do what's best for
00:00:18.960 the country together. Kind of made sense at the time. I mean, a lot of people used it to blunt
00:00:24.000 criticism of federal officials like Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, but you know, otherwise the broad
00:00:29.040 sentiment correct. No? Sure. Why then are some people not following it anymore? It seems like
00:00:36.020 increasingly the response to the coronavirus and particularly the reopenings have become a deeply
00:00:42.320 partisan issue. And a lot of this is starting at the top. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau,
00:00:48.600 he had called for national coordination among all the different premiers. He only did this though
00:00:53.460 after a couple premiers, John Horgan, Jason Kenney putting forward his five-point plan,
00:00:58.240 others putting forward these various plans that showed that the premiers were leading the charge.
00:01:03.860 Justin Trudeau then calling for national coordination. I guess he didn't want to see
00:01:07.620 control slip away from his fingertips. But the problem is that healthcare is a provincial issue,
00:01:12.880 and we've also seen that one size does not fit all. So all the different measures that are
00:01:17.560 introduced in different provinces, well, they make sense for some provinces. Quebec and Ontario,
00:01:21.740 the hardest hit. New Brunswick, hardly any cases at all. Nunavut, zero. So of course,
00:01:27.360 you're going to have different policies for different provincial levels. Well, Justin Trudeau
00:01:31.500 has taken his criticism one step further. The other day, he actually said he is very worried
00:01:35.740 that hasty reopenings are going to see another flare-up in the summer, and we're not going to be
00:01:40.400 able to go out and enjoy the summer. Kind of a downer, kind of also going up against the premiers
00:01:46.120 in all of this. Because if you look at their different plans, for the most part, they are all
00:01:50.520 three or four or five stage reopenings. Very cautious plans. And they all say, if we're not
00:01:55.620 ready to move on to the next stage, we're going to. And they also say, if we realize we've gone to
00:01:59.660 one stage, and man, this thing's blowing up on us, we're going to close it back up, and we're going to
00:02:04.100 go back to the previous stage. Steady as she goes. There's not a single government official in Canada
00:02:09.400 who's calling for some massive green light reopening, where we all just start running around and doing
00:02:13.980 whatever we please. And it should be noted, polls show that Canadians, even if they were given the
00:02:17.800 liberty to do that, most of them wouldn't. They would make their own judicious decisions. And yet
00:02:22.860 we've got a whole bunch of voices out there in the media, on social media, who are almost taking
00:02:27.700 these partisan approaches to say, yes, here's why reopenings are wrong, and it's just conservatives
00:02:32.220 who want them, and it's just business people, and all of that. As if they don't understand that the
00:02:36.300 economy is not just a word to refer to the stock market, it is a word to refer to our very
00:02:42.560 foundations of our way of life. And a lot of people looking for opportunities to cheap shot say Doug
00:02:49.140 Ford, too hasty with the reopening, he has been incredibly cautious. And it should be noted that
00:02:54.400 the premiers of this country, who are all in favor of some form of reopening, they represent, yes,
00:02:59.420 conservatives, Doug Ford, Jason Kenney, John Horgan, NDP premier, he's taken a pretty good approach.
00:03:04.280 We've got liberals, like over in the East Coast, yet Justin Trudeau seemingly being the one
00:03:09.860 to not get on board with the province's plans. He should be saying up at the podium,
00:03:15.020 I support these guys, I place my trust in them, and if they want to phone me up and say, here's how
00:03:19.540 I can support them, I'm going to do that because I'm 100% on Team Canada. And yet we have not heard
00:03:24.980 that from Justin Trudeau and some of his proxies. Is this just partisanship playing out at a time
00:03:29.960 when we need it the least? Boy, I hope not, but some of the evidence suggests so.