Juno News - October 04, 2020


The new COVID-19 restrictions don't make any sense


Episode Stats

Length

4 minutes

Words per Minute

188.52708

Word Count

826

Sentence Count

52


Summary


Transcript

00:00:00.000 There's a whole bunch of coronavirus rules and restrictions in Canada that don't make a whole
00:00:10.180 lot of sense, or at least appear a bit contradictory when you compare them to other rules that are on
00:00:15.760 the books. I want to focus right now on two particular rules, what they say and what they
00:00:21.840 tell us about what it looks like public health officials are thinking right now as they lobby
00:00:27.880 for more restrictions across Canada. First, let's go to Quebec. So they have identified
00:00:32.700 three red zones, red alert in Montreal and Quebec City and a third region. And those tight
00:00:38.940 rules, they involve a whole bunch of things. One of them is that you cannot have other guests
00:00:44.820 in your home at all. Capiche? If you are a couple and you would like to have another individual
00:00:50.520 over for dinner, say, you can't have that person over for dinner at all. It's not like, okay,
00:00:55.920 you got to have the windows open and have them sit six feet apart from you and so forth.
00:00:59.960 Can't have them over. And Francois Legault, he said this at a press conference. If police come
00:01:05.200 and they knock on your door and you refuse to answer, they can actually get a remote warrant
00:01:10.960 to bust into your place to break up your little three-person cocktail party. I know it sounds
00:01:16.740 totally bizarre and over the top. That's what he said. So I don't know, the cops just phone in or email
00:01:21.960 or text a judge and then the judge gives them the thumbs up and they bust in. Really bizarre stuff.
00:01:27.920 But there's a catch. They say you can have babysitters in the house. If there's some sort
00:01:33.200 of plumbing issue, you can have one plumber over, but not two, not two plumbers because
00:01:36.620 that's going to cause an outbreak. And here's the interesting part. If you are a person who lives
00:01:42.760 alone, you can have someone over for dinner. Huh? Okay. So I said two rules. The other is Toronto
00:01:50.500 public health officer, Eileen Davila. She's calling for similar tight restrictions in what's unclear if
00:01:56.400 she wants them just in Toronto or all of Ontario, because she wants Doug Ford to sort of use provincial
00:02:01.460 rules to change all of this, but definitely wants in Toronto where people are not allowed to leave
00:02:06.920 their homes except for essential reasons. It also includes a band of people coming into your house,
00:02:13.500 having guests over, but she adds that other caveat that if you live alone, you can have another person
00:02:19.780 over. Well, what could that possibly mean in all of that? I thought the rules were just nobody over,
00:02:24.600 too dangerous. I think clearly what they're saying is that they do not want people to suffer from
00:02:30.040 prolonged social isolation. So there you go. You can still have a person over to, you know,
00:02:36.300 stop you from getting total cabin fever. Fair enough. I think that's a pretty good point.
00:02:41.440 But what they're actually doing in that moment there is they're making a holistic choice and
00:02:46.720 acknowledgement that there are bigger picture issues at play here when it comes to beating back
00:02:51.660 the coronavirus. There are other things to consider. They don't want people to suffer from,
00:02:56.020 you know, depression and so forth from being socially isolated. All right. I get that. I support that.
00:03:01.560 What I don't understand is why they're not taking that ball and running with it. A number of their
00:03:07.080 other decisions are going to crush businesses. They're going to lead to other forms of depression,
00:03:11.520 anxiety, deaths of despair, alcoholism, rising suicide rates. We've heard all the stats. Faith
00:03:16.980 leaders have gotten in touch with me to tell me the problems happening in their flocks, awful things
00:03:21.580 that people are enduring right now. And I'm hard pressed to understand why Toronto Public Health and
00:03:26.980 and in Quebec, they're acknowledging just a small bit of these holistic concerns, but not the rest.
00:03:33.220 There's a bit of a battle going on right now or a dispute, I should say, between public health
00:03:37.740 experts all across the country. Some voices stepping forward with open letters saying,
00:03:42.440 we must acknowledge more of these big picture issues. I did an interview in the post media papers
00:03:48.180 with Vivek Ghal, who is one of really the most decorated public health officials in Canada. Well,
00:03:53.340 he's now a professor, but he was the CEO of Public Health Ontario. He argues this point. But then
00:03:59.020 you've got others saying, no, it's just all about totally batten down the coronavirus cases. You do not
00:04:04.660 want to have any of them. What's it going to be? Why is it that our officials acknowledge some of the
00:04:11.320 holistic concerns, but not others? I don't have a perfect answer to all of this. I just think it's a
00:04:17.940 question that we should be attentive to and we should be asking a whole lot more.