Juno News - October 04, 2020The new COVID-19 restrictions don't make any sense
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Summary
There are a whole bunch of coronavirus rules and restrictions in Canada that don't make a whole lot of sense, or at least appear contradictory, when you compare them to other rules that are on the books. I want to focus right now on two particular rules, what they say, and what they tell us about what public health officials are thinking right now.
Transcript
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There's a whole bunch of coronavirus rules and restrictions in Canada that don't make a whole
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lot of sense, or at least appear a bit contradictory when you compare them to other rules that are on
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the books. I want to focus right now on two particular rules, what they say and what they
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tell us about what it looks like public health officials are thinking right now as they lobby
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for more restrictions across Canada. First, let's go to Quebec. So they have identified
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three red zones, red alert in Montreal and Quebec City and a third region. And those tight
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rules, they involve a whole bunch of things. One of them is that you cannot have other guests
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in your home at all. Capiche? If you are a couple and you would like to have another individual
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over for dinner, say, you can't have that person over for dinner at all. It's not like, okay,
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you got to have the windows open and have them sit six feet apart from you and so forth.
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Can't have them over. And Francois Legault, he said this at a press conference. If police come
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and they knock on your door and you refuse to answer, they can actually get a remote warrant
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to bust into your place to break up your little three-person cocktail party. I know it sounds
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totally bizarre and over the top. That's what he said. So I don't know, the cops just phone in or email
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or text a judge and then the judge gives them the thumbs up and they bust in. Really bizarre stuff.
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But there's a catch. They say you can have babysitters in the house. If there's some sort
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of plumbing issue, you can have one plumber over, but not two, not two plumbers because
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that's going to cause an outbreak. And here's the interesting part. If you are a person who lives
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alone, you can have someone over for dinner. Huh? Okay. So I said two rules. The other is Toronto
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public health officer, Eileen Davila. She's calling for similar tight restrictions in what's unclear if
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she wants them just in Toronto or all of Ontario, because she wants Doug Ford to sort of use provincial
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rules to change all of this, but definitely wants in Toronto where people are not allowed to leave
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their homes except for essential reasons. It also includes a band of people coming into your house,
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having guests over, but she adds that other caveat that if you live alone, you can have another person
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over. Well, what could that possibly mean in all of that? I thought the rules were just nobody over,
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too dangerous. I think clearly what they're saying is that they do not want people to suffer from
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prolonged social isolation. So there you go. You can still have a person over to, you know,
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stop you from getting total cabin fever. Fair enough. I think that's a pretty good point.
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But what they're actually doing in that moment there is they're making a holistic choice and
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acknowledgement that there are bigger picture issues at play here when it comes to beating back
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the coronavirus. There are other things to consider. They don't want people to suffer from,
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you know, depression and so forth from being socially isolated. All right. I get that. I support that.
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What I don't understand is why they're not taking that ball and running with it. A number of their
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other decisions are going to crush businesses. They're going to lead to other forms of depression,
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anxiety, deaths of despair, alcoholism, rising suicide rates. We've heard all the stats. Faith
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leaders have gotten in touch with me to tell me the problems happening in their flocks, awful things
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that people are enduring right now. And I'm hard pressed to understand why Toronto Public Health and
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and in Quebec, they're acknowledging just a small bit of these holistic concerns, but not the rest.
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There's a bit of a battle going on right now or a dispute, I should say, between public health
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experts all across the country. Some voices stepping forward with open letters saying,
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we must acknowledge more of these big picture issues. I did an interview in the post media papers
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with Vivek Ghal, who is one of really the most decorated public health officials in Canada. Well,
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he's now a professor, but he was the CEO of Public Health Ontario. He argues this point. But then
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you've got others saying, no, it's just all about totally batten down the coronavirus cases. You do not
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want to have any of them. What's it going to be? Why is it that our officials acknowledge some of the
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holistic concerns, but not others? I don't have a perfect answer to all of this. I just think it's a
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question that we should be attentive to and we should be asking a whole lot more.