Juno News - November 27, 2022


The last gasps of the Covid Crazies

Mentioned
Nillie Kaplan-Mirth Vera Etches Ontario
The winners and losers of the pandemic No more masks in Alberta schools

Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

200.85

Word count

659

Sentence count

56


Summary

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

In November 2022, the Ottawa school board voted to bring back masks at school in order to enforce a new mandate that would require 90% of students to wear them. This is a mandate that has been in place since the mid-2000s, but it was not supported by the majority of the school board.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 The last gasps of the COVID crazies. That's how I'd describe what went on at the Ottawa School
00:00:05.020 Board just the other night, as they had a vote to bring in another mask mandate. Yes, November 2022,
00:00:12.200 almost December. Hard to believe that happened, but it did. And a lot of people across Canada,
00:00:17.640 across the United States, probably going, unbelievable that that was even being proposed.
00:00:22.380 But it was. So a bit of a backstory. Dr. Nilly Kaplan-Mirth is a voice who is
00:00:27.080 very prominent on social media, getting media appearances throughout COVID, and one of the
00:00:32.420 supporters of the most aggressive COVID restrictions imaginable. Definitely was up there in terms of
00:00:37.620 the things she wanted to see implemented, never wanted lockdowns to end, masking, and so on. She
00:00:42.280 is a family physician in Ottawa. She goes and runs for trustee in the latest municipal elections,
00:00:47.500 almost as a single issue candidate, to say, let's bring back masks. And sure enough, as soon as she
00:00:53.300 gets in as trustee, because she won her election, the first thing she does, push forward this special
00:00:58.260 motion, bring back mask mandates. And a pretty aggressive one, too. They had to be N95 or
00:01:03.580 surgical masks. None of those blue cloth masks that we have all been wearing throughout all of
00:01:08.100 the previous mask mandates. Very controversial. A lot of people were against it. At the first meeting,
00:01:13.280 there were actually two meetings, if you can believe it. At the first meeting, it was disrupted
00:01:16.780 because people showed up. It was a public forum, and a lot of people were really unhappy. So parents were
00:01:21.400 interrupting and shouting, saying they didn't want it. So then they moved to a second one that took
00:01:25.400 place Thursday evening, and that was not a publicly attended one. You could just watch it via live
00:01:30.520 stream. But it was quite something to watch all of this unfold, as a number of facts came forward to
00:01:35.980 suggest, ah, this just ain't where we're at. One of them was that only 10% of the current student body
00:01:42.280 at Ottawa schools is wearing masks. That seems to be about consistent with general Ontario society right
00:01:47.500 now. The vast majority not wearing them. So hold on a second. You want to basically force 90% of
00:01:53.540 people to do something they've indicated they don't want to do? Then the chief medical officer for that
00:01:58.700 region, Dr. Vera Etches, she made a presentation and prepared documents saying, oh, I support people
00:02:04.820 choosing to wear masks. And you go, oh, okay. So she's strongly recommending masks, but she doesn't
00:02:10.220 actually support this mandate, even though she doesn't want to directly knock it down. What's going on
00:02:14.740 here? So Dr. Kaplan-Mirth, getting a sense that this wasn't going in her favor, she started watering
00:02:20.220 down the mandate more and more to deal with people's concerns. And it came to the point where
00:02:24.240 it was basically a voluntary mandate, but people still thought, what's the point then? So it actually
00:02:30.360 tied 6-6 vote, which is considered a fail. So it wasn't passed. However, it's interesting that there
00:02:35.920 were two student trustees there representing the student voice. They were the most articulate people
00:02:40.940 with the whole table, and they voted against it. So if you count them, it was an 8-6 fail.
00:02:46.620 They are non-binding votes. They're two votes. But it was interesting that the student voices said,
00:02:50.820 we don't want all of this. I think the whole spectacle was just pretty sad. Again, why was
00:02:55.880 this even being talked about in November 2022? And it lost. Democracy had its say. The students had
00:03:04.320 their say. You better believe angry parents had their say. And I sure hope that we don't have to
00:03:08.720 talk about this anymore. You want to wear the mask? Go ahead and wear the mask. But what we saw
00:03:12.780 happening in Ottawa, that was the last gasps of the COVID crazies.