Juno News - April 19, 2021


Ontarians snub their noses at Ford's outdoor restrictions


Episode Stats

Length

4 minutes

Words per Minute

172.00513

Word Count

716

Sentence Count

31

Misogynist Sentences

1

Hate Speech Sentences

1


Summary


Transcript

00:00:00.000 Hey guys, Anthony Fury here, standing outdoors in Ontario. And I gotta tell you, I'm not entirely
00:00:12.040 sure if what I'm doing is actually legal or not. As you can see right behind me, I'm standing at
00:00:17.560 a baseball field. I'm not actually on the red, I'm standing on the grass, just out of the red.
00:00:23.480 Although I know if there was a game going on, this grass would technically be part of the outfield,
00:00:27.180 which maybe means I'm actually standing in the baseball diamond or the baseball field. So am I
00:00:33.080 doing something illegal? Because a couple days ago it was ruled that sports fields had to be shut down
00:00:38.020 in Ontario, in addition to a whole bunch of other things that were shut down, mostly outdoor amenities
00:00:42.860 that, well, they caused quite an uproar from Ontarians, where we saw really millions of little
00:00:48.700 acts of civil disobedience. People saying, thanks, but no thanks. I'm not going to abide by these rules.
00:00:54.760 Those playground closures. People said, what? Parents said, uh-uh, I'm just not doing that.
00:00:59.860 We gotta reopen the playgrounds. Politicians, mayors, stepped forward and said, you've gotta
00:01:03.760 reopen them. And also, a lot of technical rules that I don't even know if people are even aware of
00:01:09.080 them, like how it's technically still illegal. So they retracted the playground rules, which were
00:01:13.600 very controversial, and they also retracted the rule that police could be able to stop you, really,
00:01:17.920 at any point, a pedestrian or a motorist, and demand to know who they are and where they're going.
00:01:22.700 They took that one back after a number of police services stepped forward and said, we're not going
00:01:28.240 to be enforcing those laws. But some other very nitpicky laws still remain in place. You're not
00:01:34.360 allowed to leave your house and walk around with someone who is not a member of your household. So you
00:01:40.440 can't meet up with a friend and then, say, line up socially distanced for a latte at a coffee shop and
00:01:46.640 go for a walk together on the sidewalk. If you read the law, I mean, that's pretty much illegal.
00:01:50.780 But I gotta tell you, from driving around, bicycling around the east end of Toronto, there's a whole lot
00:01:56.300 of people who, while they're not staying at home, as the stay-at-home order says, they are doing the
00:02:01.280 things that, I guess, throughout the past year of kind of learning about the pandemic and coronavirus,
00:02:06.780 they have determined that those are safe things to do. It's a very interesting situation for the
00:02:12.320 Ontario government to be in, because I think there's widespread compliance when it comes to things
00:02:16.620 like closing indoor facilities, indoor dining, that kind of stuff. There's, you know, not a lot of
00:02:22.700 indoor sports games and so on going on. But these outdoor rules, I guess people are saying,
00:02:28.980 sorry, it doesn't work for us, and we're just going to keep doing what we want to do. What does that all
00:02:34.260 mean? It's very interesting for a government to have many police forces say, yeah, we're going to take
00:02:39.200 a pass on that, and for millions of people to basically ignore these new restrictions brought in
00:02:45.000 concerning outdoor gatherings. Why did it have to be this way? Michigan is actually going through a
00:02:50.460 third wave that is very similar in the numbers to Ontario's. And guess what? Michigan does not have
00:02:55.560 a stay-at-home order, doesn't even have a lockdown. Their Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, she has
00:03:00.620 said, look, we recommend people do this, we recommend they do that, and so forth, but things are allowed to
00:03:06.120 be open. Indoor dining is allowed just at capacity limits. So a similar situation in terms of what they're
00:03:13.160 dealing with in terms of third wave of cases, but a very different response, a very different
00:03:19.040 approach. And based on what we saw in the streets of Ontario and what we're still seeing now is people
00:03:23.780 snub or ignore or maybe didn't even pay attention in the first place to some of these more nitpicky rules
00:03:28.920 like, well, whether or not you can't even stand on a baseball field or not, maybe it suggests that
00:03:34.220 Ontarians, they would have preferred to go the direction of Michigan's rules.
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