Juno News - Remember when the Left politicized the coronavirus？ We do!

00:00:00.000 It's really interesting to compare and contrast the way that the coronavirus in Canada was first

00:00:10.960 discussed at the end of January when the first case had emerged here, and how it's being discussed

00:00:16.440 now at the beginning of March. Really tragicomic, and I say that because there's some odd humor in

00:00:23.200 how we like to deal with political issues in Canada, although tragic of course, because this

00:00:27.720 is a serious issue. There are people dying around the world. So let's backtrack about five weeks.

00:00:32.920 January 25th was the day where there's a press conference in Ontario to say we have our first

00:00:38.080 case. Now at the time we knew even less about the virus than we do now. Still a lot of unanswered

00:00:43.460 questions about it, but it seems medical experts have a bit more of a handle on things. Back then,

00:00:48.740 just five weeks ago, we didn't know, is this thing just going to suddenly flare up and

00:00:52.740 massively infect many people in Canada. A lot of people were very concerned. Particularly,

00:00:58.840 there were parents in the North GTA and communities like Markham that had a sizable Chinese Canadian

00:01:04.260 population, and they were concerned, those Chinese parents, about what this would mean for their

00:01:09.720 community and their children and their schools because they knew that their neighbors, many of

00:01:14.660 them, had gone back to China for the Lunar New Year, even some of them to the Wuhan area, and would be

00:01:20.520 returning. They were concerned about what this meant in terms of spreading the virus, and there was a

00:01:25.240 major petition that said, hey, maybe we can ask children coming back from the Wuhan area to not be

00:01:32.660 allowed to attend school for two weeks. Now, interestingly enough, that is of course what we are pretty much

00:01:38.860 asking everybody to now do. Returning from China, Iran, and Italy, calling for self-quarantine. It's just a

00:01:46.200 logical thing to do. How things have changed over five weeks. If you were to propose that idea now,

00:01:52.220 politicians, public health authorities would all nod and say, yes, that is what we recommend,

00:01:56.460 self-quarantine. But oh no, five weeks ago, there was a word for that. That was racism. That was

00:02:02.280 intolerance. Toronto Mayor John Tory standing at a podium and bizarrely saying that there have been people

00:02:08.300 who have been calling for quarantining Chinese Canadians, as if it was a call to quarantine people

00:02:14.320 based on their ethnicity, their heritage, rather than the fact that they had just returned from that

00:02:20.240 affected area. And of course, he missed the fact that it was largely Chinese-Canadian parents who

00:02:25.560 were the ones calling for that to happen in the first place. You know, it's really funny. I mean,

00:02:30.920 these days in politics in North America, it's just such a cheap and easy thing to do, to do sort of

00:02:35.940 social justice, virtue signaling over these various identity politics issues. It's the first thing they

00:02:42.100 reach for. It gets them a lot of retweets. It gets them a lot of applause from the activists. It's

00:02:47.360 kind of the low-hanging fruit of politics this day and age. And that is what Mayor John Tory and other

00:02:52.220 politicians reached for instantly with the coronavirus story. Five weeks later, that is, of course,

00:02:58.940 what we are doing. And the federal government even quarantined returnees from Wuhan for two weeks

00:03:03.920 at a military base. And nobody batted an eyelash about it, because it seemed like a reasonable thing

00:03:10.160 to do. Of course, it was a reasonable thing to do. And we're seeing other measures being brought

00:03:14.780 into place. We're now talking about whether or not one should be banning flights from places like

00:03:19.120 Italy and South Korea. Public health officials now saying because it is flaring up in the United

00:03:23.980 States, it may be a moot point about all of this, the containment issue. They more want to deal with

00:03:29.100 stopping community spread and other facets. But it doesn't change the fact that, well,

00:03:34.160 John Tory and others like him, who were chastising people and saying,

00:03:37.820 the big concern here is not the coronavirus, but people refusing to eat in Chinese restaurants.

00:03:44.880 These would probably mostly be Chinese people who were already frequenting Chinese restaurants,

00:03:49.380 deciding that they didn't want to go out at that period for whatever reason, that those

00:03:53.480 are the real villains. That is the real problem. And you want to roll your eyes at all of this. And,

00:03:59.860 you know, in other situations, in other public policy matters, in other moments,

00:04:03.420 all right, it's okay to sacrifice whatever the issue is to the altar of political correctness.

00:04:09.480 But public health? Really? I think that is the one issue that we should be able to

00:04:14.520 put all of the social justice antics behind and just look at the facts and assess it all. I hope

00:04:20.260 that that little period there when we were virtue signaling about the issue did not

00:04:24.320 cause the virus to further spread in Canada. Seems like we've actually fared pretty well because

00:04:30.260 we have that first case in January 25th. Five weeks later, there's only a couple dozen. Whereas

00:04:34.920 back in January 25th, Iran and Italy didn't even have a single case. So looks like it didn't really

00:04:40.020 get in the way of how the whole system unfolded in public health protocols in Canada. But the fact

00:04:45.400 that that was their priority when we were dealing with a serious issue, well, that's unfortunate.

Juno News - March 04, 2020

Remember when the Left politicized the coronavirus？ We do!

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