Lockdown Theatre
Episode Stats
Words per minute
182.3928
Harmful content
Misogyny
5
sentences flagged
Hate speech
10
sentences flagged
Summary
The lockdowns are coming to an end, but there's still no word on when we can expect them to be lifted. Andrew Lawton explains why, and why he thinks they might not be lifting anytime soon. Plus, a look at what the government is actually telling us about lifting restrictions.
Transcript
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Welcome to Canada's most irreverent talk show. This is The Andrew Lawton Show, brought to you by True North.
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Coming up, Teresa Tam dangles a carrot, letting kids play might be child abuse somehow, and budgets, not just about money, but tools to fight racial inequity.
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Welcome to The Andrew Lawton Show, Canada's most irreverent talk show here on True North.
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It is great to have you aboard this program. I come bearing fantastic news.
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The lockdowns are on their way out. The restrictions are on their way out.
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Canadians are once again going to be walking around free with COVID vanquished.
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Yes, this is what Teresa Tam has said, that federal modeling data show lockdowns have slowed the spread of COVID,
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that a less restrictive summer is on its way, but there's a little bit of a catch.
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If 75% of Canadians have their first vaccines, or if 20% of Canadians have their second vaccine,
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Okay, I take away the celebration. I take away the jubilance.
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And when you read these headlines, it sounds like the federal government has laid out some sort of a concrete reopening plan.
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But let's listen to what Dr. Teresa Tam, the Chief Public Health Officer of Canada, actually said.
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When I say the summer, first of all, it's based on vaccine supply.
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We're going to have a lot of vaccines coming up next week.
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And so if the supplies continue as projected and everybody rolls up their sleeves,
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at least, you know, in these kind of percentages, that is when you can and you lift measures when 20% have received a second dose.
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It could be anywhere, you know, from somewhere in that sort of, I don't know, mid-July to August kind of time frame.
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But even then, you have to be cautious and not sort of just lift everything.
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You're going to lift things in stages and see what happens.
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So that was about as unequivocal as it can get.
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It's that, well, you know, maybe if this many people roll up their sleeves, as she said, we maybe could see by mid-July or August some easing, but it depends.
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I mean, this is, again, proof that there are...
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I've often talked about the moving goalposts of Canada's public health guidance.
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We're just supposed to keep running and running and running like Forrest Gump,
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not having any idea where we're going or how long we're going to be doing it and without the laughs along the way.
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Alan Silvestri, if you want to score the soundtrack to Canada's public health guidance like you did the actual Forrest Gump soundtrack, go wild.
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Because what we have now is the government not only continuing to fear monger about a lot of aspects of this,
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And this is a very critical dilemma because on one hand, the government's saying that everyone has to get vaccinated.
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On the other hand, as Justin Trudeau indicated a couple of weeks ago,
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he said that, well, even with vaccines, we're still going to have some restrictions and so on and so forth.
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And even this latest round of modeling, which is basically the government's way of just saying,
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here are some random numbers that we think tell a story,
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despite the modeling being more often wrong than it is right.
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We have the government using this modeling and using these data to say that they have a plan
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and that they have things under control when they actually don't, not even close.
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But even with this, let's look at what they're actually proposing if the volume of people they want to get vaccinated get vaccinated.
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So this is a slide from the federal government's modeling presentation where they say that high uptake of the first vaccine dose
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will influence whether it will be safe to lift restrictive public health measures this summer.
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Now, here's where we talk about the media telling a story that isn't necessarily what the officials were actually saying.
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Because when I hear restrictive public health measures, I think of basically all of the public health measures
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that are telling people how to live their lives, what they can do, where they can go, what can stay open, and so on.
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But if you look in the fine print at the bottom,
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physical distancing, mask wearing, and other personal protective measures
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alongside current levels of testing and tracing would be maintained
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even when restrictive public health measures are lifted.
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So they're saying that forced social distancing, mask wearing,
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whatever these other personal protective measures they're talking about are,
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are not in fact the restrictive measures they're talking about lifting.
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When they say restrictive measures, they're only talking, it sounds like, about lockdowns,
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about actual shutdowns, about stay-at-home orders, enforcement,
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all of these things which, by the way, the federal government has said repeatedly
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are not within its purview because it's provincial jurisdiction.
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But nevertheless, even if the provinces go along with this,
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what the federal government is actually saying here is that the new normal
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That even when we're supposed to be happy that three-quarters of the population
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have been vaccinated, we are still going to be wearing masks,
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we're still going to have plexiglass barriers between booths at restaurants,
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concerts probably not coming back, live shows, all of these things.
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So it only really sounds like they're trying to dangle as a carrot in front of people
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the summer that we had last year, the summer of 2020,
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which felt a little bit more normal maybe relative to how it had been earlier,
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but was not something we would want to live with as though it were the new normal.
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The big problem that I have with this is that the government is putting so much stock in mask wearing.
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I want to tell you a story about mask wearing because in, I think it was June or July,
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I might be wrong about the specific date, but some point last summer,
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I was in Calgary, Alberta for a Freedom Talk conference put on by our good friend of the show,
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And at the time, larger events in Alberta were allowed.
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They could have, I think, 50 people per room and they could stack different rooms together.
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So I think the conference had 100 or 150 people.
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And I got on the plane from where I live in Ontario to Alberta.
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the local government in my city had put a mask mandate in.
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So at the time, they were just starting to see a little bit of an uptick,
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And they said, all right, we have to mandate masks.
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Masks were recommended at the time, but not required.
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By the time I got home, masks were required in public places.
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Now, this is something that I find to be tremendously important
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because this so-called mask mandate has actually seen us through the second and third waves
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So how they think that masks work when the very worst parts of the pandemic have happened,
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well, masks have been required in virtually all public fora,
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workplaces, grocery stores, airplanes, buses, and so on.
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Now, the logical response to this from mask proponents is,
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well, those upticks have happened because people aren't following the orders.
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Well, even so, it's proof that the mask mandate is not in fact working.
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And as much as everyone likes to go on about, oh, those evil anti-maskers,
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I have been to grocery stores, on airplanes, I've been to different places,
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and I actually have not seen at all anyone in these venues not wearing a mask
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in the last eight months or ten months or however long it's been.
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And the reason I bring that up is to say that the mask mandate has not worked.
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So the idea that this is something with which we should be saddled in perpetuity,
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something that should become a permanent fixture of Canada's approach to public health,
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is actually quite a significant step away from where we should be going,
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which is returning to the normal way of doing things.
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And there are far too many people now, including those driving government policy,
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who want us to believe that the old normal is just a distant memory,
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and we need to start adapting to our lives as though COVID is endemic,
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and taking a permanent approach, a permanent aspect of this anyway,
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and prolonging it and never getting away from it.
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And that's what I see coming from this modeling projection here,
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that we are to understand the government is telling us that
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they might lift some of the severe restrictions
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if three-quarters of the population is vaccinated,
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but we're still going to have masks, we're still going to have social distancing,
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all of these things that they basically want us to start accepting
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And that's not something that I'm prepared to do.
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In fact, I don't think that's something most people,
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And this is where we talk about the fact that not only have the goals shifted
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and the priorities shifted tremendously through this,
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And this allows things along the way to be very politicized.
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You may remember on last week's show, I talked about the travel ban.
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And the point that I raised, which was received better than I thought it was,
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quite frankly, was that by the time the government talks about wanting to
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ban flights from India or Pakistan as it did like an hour after my show came out,
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Because weeks earlier, the so-called variants had been detected in the dozens in multiple provinces,
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so there's no real point in saying that the double teenage mutant ninja turtle virus
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was something that was going to come on a plane,
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and that was the only way we could get rid of it by banning those flights.
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Which, by the way, did not stop people to come from India and Pakistan.
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Someone in India just has to lay over in England or lay over in Frankfurt,
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So the idea that these things are being passed off as good policy
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is proof that the government is continuing more than a year into this
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To make things up as they go without any indication of what the criteria for reopening will be.
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And that's so important because a lot of these emergency orders
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and the border shutdown between Canada and the U.S.
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are implemented in four-week increments and 30-day increments,
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And the whole point of emergency legislation is that you have to put a sunset clause into it,
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the rationale being that you don't want these things to require governments
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to actively strip these powers from themselves.
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But it's now become so rote to continue to renew this
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that it is as though these things are permanent fixtures in legislation anyway.
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Right now, the fact that the border is shut down between Canada and the U.S.,
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is such a norm that it will just become very easy
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to unquestioningly extend that every single time it comes up.
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It was just extended most recently, a couple of days ago.
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I have no doubt that in May it will be renewed again and again and again.
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And it wouldn't surprise me if the Canada-U.S. border is shut down for at least two years
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And I'm a believer in the fact that no country has a legal obligation to admit others to it.
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So I'm of the mindset that if the U.S. wanted to shut its borders to Canadians,
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I would oppose it, but it would have the legal right to do it.
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So this is not about forcing countries to surrender their sovereignty.
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It's about understanding the long-standing tradition
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that Canada and the U.S. have a border that is there for security, yes,
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but that basically fosters a spirit of travel cooperation between these two countries.
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Cross-border integration between Canada and the U.S. is a way of life,
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especially if you are like the 90% of Canadians who live within,
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There's a library in, I forget the Canadian city,
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but in the American city is North Troy, Vermont.
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It's a library and an opera house that actually sits on the border.
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So you can go in one door and enter from Canada,
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and you can go out the other door and exit into the United States and vice versa.
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And I've always thought that the U.S. should just do like a vaccine clinic on its side of the opera house in,
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It might be Derby, Vermont or something like that.
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And all the Canadians who want to get vaccinated and can't because of Trudeau's plan
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can get American vaccines in the rural New England
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and then head on home back through the way they came in.
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But the whole point of this is that the government has not provided any reopening plan.
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You've got people like Doug Ford in Ontario who are calling on the government
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to do more to secure the border as though the border is not already closed.
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well, what about the international flights coming in, this flight, that flight?
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And they're pointing to all these flights that are coming in from China, from elsewhere in the world.
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Let me say something because I was at Pearson Airport a couple of weeks ago,
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but I looked up at there's like a four panel arrivals or departures board
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And actually, it might be eight panels because each vertical dimension has two levels on it.
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And all of the flights for the entire day were on one of these eight panels.
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So the idea that you can point to flight manifests and say,
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well, these international flights are coming in is not really evidence of anything.
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And the people that are on those flights are people who have a legal right to enter Canada.
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And yeah, there are exemptions to the travel ban for people that have extended family here,
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But most of the people on these flights are Canadian citizens coming home.
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And I refuse to go along with any plan that bars citizens of this country from re-entering the country.
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We have a two-week quarantine, which is meant to basically let people exhaust the virus from their system
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if they have contracted it while they've been abroad.
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But the reality is that Canada is right now more dangerous than a lot of the places from which people are coming.
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Because elsewhere in the world, people have eased restrictions.
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They've opened up because they have more of their population vaccinated.
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The threat to Canada is not, by and large, coming from travel.
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And when you do have situations like the double teenage mutant virus that have come in from India,
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And they don't take away from the fact that travel-related cases are about 2% of the overall caseload in Canada.
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which is what people calling for more restrictive border measures are doing.
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Because at a certain point, that's all that's left.
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To go after Canadian citizens and their right to return home,
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And by the way, stranded thousands of Australian citizens abroad
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when 98% is coming from people doing things in the country.
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And the whole point of this is that I've been calling since the very beginning
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for an approach to the pandemic that puts science first
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when we can isolate where transmission is taking place.
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And Patti Hajdu, Polyburu Patti, the health minister,
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In fact, just hours before the government banned flights from India and Pakistan,
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oh, well, you know, targeted travel bans don't work.
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But what was interesting is that Patti Hajdu said,
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well, you know what, we've got universal measures
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But she was basically saying that we can't play whack-a-mole
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unless you are prepared to say that Canadian citizens
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do not have the right to return to their country.
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is where you have people that are exempt from quarantine,
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do you want to sacrifice the Canadian supply chains,
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the food you have on your grocery store shelves,
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by tightening what is already a restricted border even more?
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but oh, the people are still coming across the border.
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But the exemptions that are there are very minimal.
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And I don't think the people calling for more border restrictions
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more of The Andrew Lawton Show here on True North.
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The big theme of the program over the last couple of weeks
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And one of the big challenges that we've seen in Ontario
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I'm not here to sit and lay a bunch of tickets.
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If it was something that was to continually see happen,
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Nothing about it, do you have all the complaint.
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I don't feel like I need to give my information.
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So, it's something that we have been asked to do.