Juno News - March 04, 2021


More politicians need to push back on lockdowns

Topics
end the lockdowns
Hosted by
Andrew Lawton
Mentioned
David Sweet Baber Erin O'Toole Lockdowns
Public health officials are not perfect Saudi Arabia is “just a country we do business with”

Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

181.79

Word count

748

Sentence count

38

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

More and more Canadian politicians are joining the chorus of everyday Canadians who are fed up with lockdowns and think they need to stop. Lockdowns have now been afflicting municipalities and provinces for close to a year, all after we were promised we just needed two weeks to flatten the curve. Why is opposing lockdowns something that can actually jeopardize your political career?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
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 More and more Canadian politicians continue to join the chorus of everyday Canadians who are fed
00:00:10.720 up with lockdowns and think they need to stop. Lockdowns have now been afflicting municipalities
00:00:15.840 and provinces and more importantly the people in them for close to a year all after we were
00:00:20.720 promised we just needed two weeks to flatten the curve. The latest is David Sweet a federal member
00:00:25.520 of parliament from southern Ontario who along with Ontario MPP Roman Baber took to the stage this
00:00:31.360 week to speak out about why the lockdowns need to stop. Now David Sweet is on his way out of politics
00:00:37.280 right now he's already said that he's not going to run again which means when it comes to taking a bold
00:00:41.840 stand like opposing lockdowns he politically speaking doesn't have anything to lose but that
00:00:47.040 in and of itself is one of the dangers here. Why is opposing lockdowns something that can actually
00:00:52.160 jeopardize your political career? Politicians have been kicked out of caucuses around the country
00:00:57.680 for speaking out against it. Just look at Roman Baber himself in Ontario as well as his former
00:01:02.480 caucus mate Belinda Carajalios. This is why we see the end the lockdowns caucus growing. Current and 0.90
00:01:08.560 former councillors, Reeves, mayors, MLAs, MPs, MPPs that have joined together to say enough is enough.
00:01:15.920 We need to get back to work. While we look at governors in the United States that are saying we need to
00:01:20.800 welcome in the great reopening in Canada lockdowns seem to be going further and further with no end
00:01:27.120 in sight. Even when it looked like governments were getting ready to reopen things concerns about the
00:01:31.840 variants made it so that that so-called easing just wasn't to be. Conservative leader Aaron O'Toole
00:01:37.840 was asked about David Sweet's public statements on this and had this to say.
00:01:41.920 After a year of the pandemic people are frustrated and tired. Frustration is understandable but it should
00:01:47.600 not lead to counterproductive behavior. My view and the view of the CPC is that we respect the work
00:01:53.440 being done by our premiers and health officials throughout the crisis. They are trying to put the
00:01:57.360 health of Canadians first. We all want the crisis to pass as quickly as possible and are frustrated
00:02:02.480 by the slow pace of vaccine deployment in Canada. Our focus will remain on that and the need to plan
00:02:07.840 for an economic recovery in all sectors and all parts of this country. The reality is opposing
00:02:13.520 lockdowns is a remedy against the economic carnage that's being unleashed on this country. Opposing
00:02:19.120 lockdowns is actually supporting economic recovery. So to call it unproductive or counterproductive to
00:02:25.680 oppose that misses the mark. Reopening should be a national goal and a national priority. This shouldn't
00:02:31.760 be something that's continued to be framed as fringe and it shouldn't be partisan. Liberals,
00:02:37.040 New Democrats, Conservatives, Bloc Québécois, Greens all should want people back to work. This isn't a
00:02:42.800 right versus left battle. It's not just people on the right who have been put out of work because of
00:02:48.320 these lockdowns. So why is it only politicians on the right and at that a small-ish subset of them
00:02:53.920 that are speaking up to say we need to push back against these lockdowns. No one is disputing that we need
00:03:00.160 to take health concerns seriously. But the antidote to that is not shutting down everything which we
00:03:07.040 know doesn't work. That's why after a year of this we are in a worse place politicians tell us than we
00:03:12.800 were a year ago when lockdown 1.0 came. Remember it wasn't just lockdown one then it was lockdown two
00:03:18.800 and now we're being told that the third wave might actually be worse than the second wave. More
00:03:23.280 politicians need to be speaking up and people in other sectors as well. Labour leaders, civil society groups,
00:03:28.800 people in media to say hey you know what lockdowns aren't working so we are not going to abide by
00:03:33.840 them. And we need a political culture and climate that is not vilifying those who take that stand.
00:03:39.280 It shouldn't just be politicians that are on their way out the door that are willing to speak up and
00:03:42.960 say we need to end the lockdowns. It should be everyone who has a constituency they represent of
00:03:47.440 people that have no job security in the future because we have no certainty about our economy.
00:03:52.880 For True North, I'm Andrew Lawton.