Juno News - March 15, 2021


Opposing lockdowns shouldn't be a partisan affair

Mentioned
Doug Ford Gretchen Whitmer Lori Lightfoot Joe Biden
Leave the kids alone Recall and WEcall

Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

183.58

Word count

586

Sentence count

30


Summary

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

In this episode, I talk about the disconnect between what's happening in the United States and Canada on the issue of lockdowns, and what's going on in Ontario and Michigan on the other side of the border. I also talk about how politicians in the U.S. are doing a better job advocating for reopenings than those in Canada.

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 One really interesting phenomenon that's been going on recently is how Democratic politicians
00:00:11.080 in the United States are doing a better job advocating for reopenings than conservative
00:00:16.500 politicians here in Canada. You know, it was a bit of a cliche early on that reopening,
00:00:22.540 not supporting widespread lockdowns, well, that was a conservative, a right-wing, a Republican,
00:00:26.760 a Trump position to do. And therefore, the left-wing position, the progressive position,
00:00:32.040 that had to be to support lockdowns. But that's not the case anymore. All you have to do is look
00:00:37.400 around North America and read the stories happening in major cities and major states to realize,
00:00:42.020 no, that is just not playing out, at least not in the United States. You've got Democratic politicians,
00:00:47.800 sometimes very left-leaning ones, who are championing reopenings and really fighting for
00:00:52.620 their state or their city. I mean, yes, there's examples of Texas and Florida, obviously led by
00:00:57.520 Republican politicians who are doing very aggressive reopenings, and in Florida saying no mask mandate,
00:01:02.760 of course. But you've also got examples like the Democratic left-wing mayor of Chicago,
00:01:07.380 Lori Lightfoot, who's been really fighting for her city to be able to reopen, see the restaurants get
00:01:12.920 rid of some of their capacity limits and, you know, further liberalize those rules and so forth. And
00:01:17.320 she's been really standing up for small businesses. So you go, clearly, this is not a political issue,
00:01:22.120 or at least doesn't need to be. And it's been very interesting and dismaying to watch how I think
00:01:27.220 Canadian politicians are still just so much further behind the very balanced approach that pretty much
00:01:33.880 all politicians both sides of the aisle are managing to take in the United States. And I think
00:01:39.720 one example that illustrates it the best is what's going on right now in the part of Ontario that
00:01:45.560 borders the Michigan border, the United States border with Michigan, and what Michigan is doing.
00:01:50.160 So on Monday, Doug Ford said the Sarnia region, Lambton County, had to go into lockdown again,
00:01:56.660 lock her down, shut her down. A lot of people really upset about it, and some businesses were defiant.
00:02:01.300 We had gyms and others that said, no, we don't want to shut down at least one video of the cops coming in
00:02:05.760 and trying to bust up one of those gyms that said we are not going to be shut down.
00:02:09.760 But what's going on on the other side of the border? In Michigan, they are just further reopening.
00:02:14.400 You look at stories about Michigan's reopening, and they started a while ago, and the latest
00:02:18.500 developments are just that, okay, capacity limits have been eased further at this locale and that
00:02:22.980 locale, and they're loosening this and that restriction. They are making progress. They are
00:02:27.640 moving forward right on the other side of the border. Ontario moving backwards. And who is the
00:02:33.840 Republican governor in Michigan who's doing all of this? Well, it's none other than Democratic
00:02:39.600 left-leaning governor Gretchen Whitmer, who's actually quite close to Joe Biden. So there you
00:02:44.840 go. Another example of how you have these more left-leaning politicians in the U.S. who are able
00:02:50.820 to do more pro-business positions and just more pro-society positions and politicians like Doug Ford
00:02:57.480 here in Ontario who are just stuck in a rut. And anytime anyone proposes, well, we got to lock down
00:03:02.740 this jurisdiction, they seem to go for it. Very little pushback. And boy, is it very frustrating.
00:03:09.600 to see this disconnect unfold.