Juno News - January 28, 2021


Patty Hajdu’s Davos discussion on travel and borders took place behind closed doors


Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

183.49492

Word count

776

Sentence count

26

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged


Summary

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

As the World Economic Forum's Davos agenda brings world leaders and global elites together in a virtual format to launch their so-called "Great Reset Initiative," one discussion that may affect Canadians ended up taking place behind closed doors.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
00:00:00.000 As the World Economic Forum's Davos agenda brings world leaders and global
00:00:09.360 elites together in a virtual format to launch their so-called Great Reset
00:00:13.560 initiative, one discussion that may affect Canadians ended up taking place
00:00:17.760 behind closed doors. I reported earlier in the week that Deputy Prime Minister
00:00:22.520 Chrystia Freeland and Health Minister Patty Hajdu would be among the panelists
00:00:26.120 at the Davos agenda. As it so happened, Patty Hajdu's panel actually took place in 0.85
00:00:31.720 two forms. There was a public portion and also a portion that took place behind
00:00:36.480 closed doors, inaccessible to the public and inaccessible to the media. Just the
00:00:41.640 type of transparency you'd want from a health minister in the course of a
00:00:45.760 pandemic. Nevertheless, it's not clear what Patty Hajdu was talking about. She was 0.94
00:00:50.840 discussing restoring cross-border mobility. In the public portion of the discussion
00:00:55.920 the panelists spoke about borders, quarantine, testing and also this app
00:01:00.880 called the Common Pass which could be a global travel passport of sorts if you
00:01:05.840 use it and you insert your testing details, your COVID status, your vaccination
00:01:10.280 status and all of these other sorts of things so that this app can be an
00:01:13.640 intermediary between you and governments or you and airlines. But what happened
00:01:18.120 behind closed doors we don't actually know and never will. Now I reached out to
00:01:22.320 Minister Hajdu's spokesperson and I said well let's hear about it, let's hear what
00:01:26.000 she said and I was told that well it's actually the World Economic Forum that
00:01:30.760 decides the format so if I have any questions I should talk to them. I said
00:01:35.340 well just tell me what she said and I was told well because there were no
00:01:38.840 prepared remarks there's no speech that he could send me. Now as it so happens this
00:01:44.960 may be absolutely nothing but the optics of this are significant especially as the
00:01:50.000 Liberals try to malign anyone who asks questions about the Great Reset
00:01:53.800 Initiative as being some sort of a conspiracy theorist despite the fact that
00:01:57.560 the Great Reset Initiative is a project that the World Economic Forum and those
00:02:01.820 who support it are actually quite proud of. It's right there on the website to
00:02:05.960 instill a new form of capitalism to connect the world in all of these unique
00:02:11.120 ways. Well shouldn't we in the world actually get to hear what those ways are
00:02:14.960 if not have a say in them? And that's the problem with this. So if we have in
00:02:19.040 Canada no one really asking these questions, no one talking about them and
00:02:22.700 the few people who do being maligned, it allows things like the health minister
00:02:27.200 going into a closed-door discussion to fly under the radar when these are the
00:02:31.360 sorts of things that anyone who values transparency in government should be
00:02:35.020 wanting to see, should be wanting to unearth and shine some light on. In the
00:02:39.140 public portion of the discussion Haidu was extolling the virtues of Canada's
00:02:43.320 quarantine. She said a quarantine is the only way to know for sure if someone is
00:02:48.140 infected with COVID-19. So there was no sense in her remarks that we were
00:02:52.340 actually headed towards reducing this quarantine even with an abundance of
00:02:56.120 testing because as she also said testing is just a snapshot in time and not
00:03:00.740 something you can really rely on. She was asked by the moderator of the panel
00:03:04.820 about the Alberta pilot project but let's which lets people shrink their time in
00:03:08.660 quarantine and she almost dismissed it by saying something along the lines of
00:03:12.560 well I mean yeah it's not foolproof, a test is just one moment and
00:03:16.100 basically we're just supposed to live our lives if we ever want to leave the
00:03:19.600 country by just taking that extra two weeks to be at home.
00:03:22.840 With the Alberta pilot program, correct me if I'm wrong but I believe the
00:03:28.040 quarantine requirements can be shrunk down to seven days, correct? If people
00:03:32.120 test negative and then they can go about and resume their businesses. How is that
00:03:37.200 how is that pilot program been going? It's going okay. I mean we're still seeing
00:03:42.700 importation rates that I would say it's concerning to in particular the provincial
00:03:47.980 authorities but also to the to to our own ministry and the ministry of health. It's
00:03:53.340 not a perfect solution. So the fact is this is something that is going to persist. It's
00:03:57.860 having monumental implications for the travel industry, for Canadians well-being and if
00:04:02.620 we want to reopen the economy domestically that also involves reopening some bit
00:04:07.000 of mobility internationally. For True North covering the Davos Agenda, I'm
00:04:11.740 Commander Lawton.