Juno News - November 02, 2022


Smith considering back pay for Alberta’s unvaccinated workers

Trudeau thought convoy was political opportunity, not national emergency What’s making your grocery bill so expensive？

Episode Stats


Length

1 minute

Words per minute

190.6

Word count

284

Sentence count

16


Summary

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

In this episode, Alberta Health Minister Jason Kenney responds to a recent court ruling that calls for the return of back pay to former vaccine workers who lost their jobs as a result of the new vaccine mandate. He also talks about the need for Alberta to take steps to make amends for the harm caused over the past two years.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 There was a New York court decision that came out a few days back that said anyone who was
00:00:04.800 fired for a vaccine mandate should receive back pay. Is that aspect of it something you would
00:00:09.340 like to see in an Alberta response? Retroactive pay for time that these people would have been
00:00:14.240 working had they not been put out of work because of the mandate? I certainly saw that court decision
00:00:20.080 and I suspect that we're going to see more court decisions along those lines. I want us to be at
00:00:25.280 the lead in making amends for some of the harms that were caused over the last two and a half
00:00:29.440 years. So I would have to consult with the different departments to find out how many
00:00:35.260 staff would have been in that position. How many did return to work? Because a number of them did
00:00:38.980 return to work and what the cost implications of that would be. But I think that the court
00:00:44.700 judgment is pretty clear. We've got to be mindful of that. And also businesses here have to be
00:00:50.640 mindful of that as well. That I'm still hearing that there are some organizations that are requiring
00:00:56.360 those kind of mandates. And I think that that is the first of what might be several court decisions
00:01:01.880 that end up causing a rethink on what has happened over the last two and a half years. So I want to
00:01:07.720 make sure that I'm doing things sort of in a legally appropriate way. And so I'm just going to wait until
00:01:13.080 I get that that legal advice. But I suspect we're going to see more judgments like the one we just saw.