Juno News - December 19, 2021


Restricting your lives and liberties ＂out of an abundance of caution＂

Mentioned
Justin Trudeau Erin O'Toole Doug Ford
Religious freedom in Canada is under attack What does it mean to be a Canadian Conservative in 2021？ (Ft. Andrew Scheer)

Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

191.86

Word count

594

Sentence count

36

Harmful content

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In this episode, I discuss the removal of the travel ban on 10 African nations, and why we should have waited until we have all the data to make a decision on whether or not they should be allowed to come to Canada.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Coronavirus rules in Canada are seemingly changing by the hour. It's hard to believe
00:00:09.960 we're back at this place again. Hard to comment on any specific changes, although I do want to
00:00:14.840 address one announcement that was made. It was one of the quieter ones in that I don't think
00:00:19.780 it's going to dominate what people are talking about. It's not going to make the front pages,
00:00:23.120 but I think it's indicative of government response being too hasty and perhaps a lesson as to why
00:00:29.480 we should not be rushing in to making all these COVID restriction announcements. It's the news
00:00:35.100 that the federal government is dropping the travel ban on 10 African nations that they only put in
00:00:41.500 place really just the other week. I very much remember when that happened, the day, because it
00:00:46.140 began with Doug Ford and Aaron O'Toole calling for Justin Trudeau to close the borders to these
00:00:52.240 countries to stop the Omicron variant from coming to Canada. A lot of good that did, eh? And I remember
00:00:57.300 saying, guys, hold on a second. This is going to begin the cascading effects that bring us closer
00:01:03.520 to lockdowns. It feels like we're in March 2020 all over again. Haven't we learned our lesson? Now,
00:01:09.140 it's funny, that was kind of their argument because they said, hey, hasn't Justin Trudeau learned his
00:01:13.560 lesson? He was too slow to shut down the borders last time around. He's got to act quickly. Things are
00:01:20.660 very different now, though, than they were in March 2020. And I got to say, I'm a little frustrated by
00:01:26.660 these conservative leaders calling for things that I don't think are necessary, but they're doing it
00:01:31.700 really just to make Justin Trudeau look bad. Because I don't think that those border closures
00:01:36.940 were really going to have any effect on public health. And I think we've learned that that's
00:01:41.020 been proven to be incorrect. And now, quietly, the liberal government acknowledging, okay, well,
00:01:45.800 I guess we didn't need to do that. And now they have lifted those specific border bans from those 10
00:01:52.040 African nations, which maybe if we just waited a few days, we would have seen, okay, we didn't need 1.00
00:01:58.160 to do this after all. Now, there's a phrase you've heard a lot about, many of you are probably sick of
00:02:02.660 it, out of an abundance of caution. We have to do this thing out of an abundance of caution.
00:02:09.020 Maybe there was a time and a place for that. We can argue when that was the case, and when we should
00:02:13.880 have stopped doing that. But I hope we can all agree that now is actually not the time to greatly
00:02:19.460 restrict our lives, our liberties, and bring about the increasingly well-documented harms that those
00:02:25.660 things have caused out of an abundance of caution. Yeah, might as well. Why not? I'm not so sure,
00:02:32.240 but I'm going to do it anyway. No, you don't do that anymore. Now, you wait until these things are
00:02:38.180 absolutely 100% proven to be vital, necessary, and effective, which means we hold off on all of this
00:02:44.860 stuff until we know more. There's some disagreements right now as to the severity of the
00:02:49.180 Omicron variant. It seems most folks are saying, no, it's actually not more severe. A couple outliers
00:02:54.940 like the Ontario Science Table saying, yes, it is more severe, but everybody kind of agreeing that
00:02:59.760 they actually don't have all that much data. So you know what you do? You wait until you do have the data.