Juno News - April 07, 2021


Ontario is ideologically committed to lockdowns

Topics
Ontario lockdown ideology
Mentioned
Kareem Kurji Doug Ford
Community leaders can play a role in lifting lockdowns How potential changes to Canada’s foreign policy will affect you

Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

181.94

Word count

597

Sentence count

27


Summary

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

Lockdown is a term used to describe the use of lockdown in response to a public health crisis. It s a term that has been around for a long time, but it s been used in combination with a broad approach to dealing with a pandemic. Lockdowns are designed to keep the public safe and secure in the event of a major pandemic or other major event.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
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 Ontario entering its third lockdown, and if you can believe it, the strictest one to date.
00:00:12.560 Ontario Premier Doug Ford actually bragging about this fact, that Ontario is the most
00:00:17.400 locked-down jurisdiction in North America, talking about it at a press conference the other day.
00:00:23.480 You know, there are so many officials all across North America who are now looking more towards
00:00:27.540 a more evolved approach, a targeted response to dealing with the virus where it is flaring up,
00:00:33.760 a more balanced approach. We're seeing that happen in the U.S., whatever part of the country,
00:00:38.600 Republican, Democrat, they're all embracing this more evolved approach. But in Ontario,
00:00:43.120 they are ideologically committed to lockdowns, and they are very reluctant even to acknowledge
00:00:49.300 there are harms to those lockdowns, even as the evidence mounts and mounts as to the harms of
00:00:54.660 these. Dr. Kareem Kurji, one of the few York Region's chief medical officer who said,
00:00:59.540 no, these broad-based lockdowns, these blunt lockdowns, they don't work. We have to do a more
00:01:04.300 evolved approach, and we got the information and the data a year into this. How to deal with this?
00:01:10.160 Let's respond to it in a targeted way. It is so troubling, and I could go over many of the specifics,
00:01:17.940 the details, a real granular view of this and that, as I have over the months, various different
00:01:23.740 aspects. But I also think there's a great utility and an exercise of just stepping back and taking
00:01:29.280 a look at this odd approach, this ideological approach to lockdowns in the first place. Because
00:01:35.180 in their essence, what lockdowns are, is you were saying, there is a virus that spreads between people.
00:01:42.120 So we are going to make it illegal for people to come together, for human beings to be in close
00:01:48.600 proximity to each other. Virus spreads between people, well, let's make it illegal for people
00:01:54.400 to see each other. Really? I mean, in this, in the 21st century, all of the bright minds we have,
00:02:01.940 the well-educated folks, the age of analytics, big data, it's that, that phrase that when you really
00:02:06.580 break it down, it seems like really not too bright, the basic, you know, essence of what is a lockdown.
00:02:12.920 And in fact, there's a reason why it was never really discussed before. A lot of these people,
00:02:18.840 these doctors who are on television advocating for lockdowns, a lot of them are also professors,
00:02:22.820 they teach various classes. I guarantee you, hands down, that three years ago, say, two years ago,
00:02:28.780 if they were teaching a class and there was some question in a tutorial, or it was in an exam,
00:02:33.400 the question saying, okay, you got this virus going around, there's a pandemic, give me your game
00:02:37.320 plan. And it's the, you know, the big question that they put there in the exam, the big, you know,
00:02:42.440 final question and so forth. You got to spend a whole bunch of time writing all these intricate
00:02:45.640 details. And someone just writes, it's easy, lockdown, make it illegal for human beings to interact
00:02:52.000 with each other. Well, I imagine those professors who are now advocating to do just that, they might
00:02:58.820 have even failed that student for coming up with an idea that we know was not in any of the pandemic
00:03:04.180 preparedness plans leading up to all of this. And that a lot of people have said, hold on a second,
00:03:09.740 this is not in the plan. Why are we proceeding this way? And yet Ontario is for the third time
00:03:15.500 stricter than ever.