Juno News - Restricting your lives and liberties ＂out of an abundance of caution＂

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

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.

Juno News - December 19, 2021