Juno News - January 08, 2022The pandemic is over when Canadians say it is
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Summary
Coming up, the demonization of the unvaccinated in Quebec, the introduction of a 3-dose vaccine passport, and Aaron O'Toole's vaccine mandate flip-flop. The Andrew Lawton Show starts on January 7, 2022.
Transcript
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This is the Andrew Lawton Show, brought to you by True North.
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Coming up, the demonization of the unvaccinated.
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Quebec weighs a three-dose vaccine passport and Aaron O'Toole's vaccine mandate flip-flop.
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Hello and welcome to the Andrew Lawton Show here on True North, Canada's Most Irreverent Talk Show on Friday, January 7th, 2022.
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Yes, the 2022 year is still going on, although as I may have said a pretty dark tone for it a couple of shows ago,
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I can't say things have improved all that much.
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Even in Quebec, now we spoke about Quebec with Marie Oakes in the context of being one of the most locked down and restricted jurisdictions in Canada.
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And they've managed to actually go more into the restrictions in the days since that interview.
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So the latest news, and we heard whispers this might be happening, is that the vaccine passport in Quebec has been expanded to cover the SAQ,
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which is the Quebec liquor store, which is quite a popular place because you need to have copious amounts of alcohol to cope with the fact that you live in Quebec.
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So the SAQ is now going to require you to shop there to have your vaccine passport.
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And it's also going to apply to cannabis stores.
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So if you want to go and get some Quebec government-issued pot, you have to be fully vaccinated.
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You've got to get the two doses to go and get whatever it is you buy at the Quebec cannabis store.
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Now, Quebec's a little bit different than other parts of the country.
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Ontario's come a little bit in the right direction on this.
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In Quebec, you can go to the Depeneur and buy your beer and wine, whereas in other parts of the country, you can only go to the state-run liquor stores.
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So in that sense, I guess it may not be the end of the world for some people.
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But even so, we're now talking about an environment that, from a transmission risk, is no different than you going to a grocery store.
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The interaction is very limited, and then you go on your merry way.
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I mean, I don't even think I need to say this anymore, but I do feel there are some people that don't quite understand this yet.
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It has nothing to do with risk, nothing to do with epidemiology or virology, and everything to do with control.
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They're not trying to reduce the risk of COVID at the SAQ.
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They're trying to make life miserable for the unvaccinated so that slowly but surely, they feel they have no choice but to go and get the jab, even if they don't want to, because they can't even go and buy a 24-ouncer of whiskey or something.
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They're trying to make life so miserable for the unvaccinated that they don't feel they really have a choice.
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If you're unvaccinated in Canada, you, by and large, can't travel.
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You have to quarantine if you do manage to get out of the country when you come back.
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And now they're saying you can't even go to the liquor store.
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How long until Quebec does what New Brunswick tried to do a few weeks back, which is make it so that grocery stores could even prohibit people from going?
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Because Quebec's rules are moving towards the prohibition of the unvaccinated going to any non-essential retail.
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And once you start down that road, the government's actually the one who decides what is essential and what is not.
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They may say that going to a Home Depot is unessential or non-essential.
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They may say that going to a gourmet food store is non-essential.
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And then at a certain point, you actually, as an unvaccinated person, are relegated to your own home.
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And it's not because they think you're a disease vector that's going to infect everyone when you go out into the world.
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Fully vaccinated, unvaccinated people, pretty much everyone is getting infected as of late.
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No, what it actually means is that they are punishing you for a choice you've made that goes against the choice the state wants you to make.
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And when the state wants you to make a choice, it's really not a choice.
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And Emmanuel Macron, his line on this was actually incredibly honest.
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He said in a newspaper interview that his goal is to, I won't use the translation of the word, it's MLD is what he used.
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And if you know the French for the S word, you'll know exactly what that means.
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But basically, if you even do a crass or English translation, he wants to piss off the unvaccinated.
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So at a certain point, I mean, that is my friend Mark Stein said on his show on GB News, it's saying the quiet part out loud.
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You're supposed to pretend that this is all about reducing risk and reducing transmission.
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And there was another comment in that interview.
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Because everyone was focusing on the pissed off part, no one caught this.
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And I had actually missed it the first time until my producer flagged it for me.
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Macron said, quote, irresponsible people are no longer citizens.
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So his position, and he's being very transparent about this, is that you are no longer a citizen of France if you are unvaccinated.
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Now, I mean, I'd say most people who voted for Emmanuel Macron are irresponsible.
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So I don't think we want to say that they are no longer citizens.
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I know it's a few, actually, it's a few months old now.
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This line from Justin Trudeau that fits into this broader narrative here that you absolutely must hear.
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Yes, we're going to get out of this pandemic for the vaccination.
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And we know all those people who are trying to hesitate a little bit.
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But there are also those people who are far away from the vaccination.
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And there, there is a choice as a leader, as a country.
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That if you're unvaccinated, you're a racist, sexist, misogynist, homophobe, transphobe, bigot.
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I'm adding the derisive terms there because that's basically what he's doing.
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You're just a terrible person if you are not vaccinated.
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Now, I want to talk about this from two angles.
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One is just that it's morally wrong to start castigating and demonizing people in your country in this way.
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But even if, even if we agree that 100% vaccination is the goal.
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Do you think this is turning people on to your side?
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Do you think that any of these unvaccinated people are sitting at home?
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And by this point, they've resisted PSAs, advertising campaigns, in some cases, calls from public health officials, check-ins, signs everywhere.
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But by this point, if you're not vaccinated, it's not for lack of opportunity.
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But there's no one who's like accidentally unvaccinated right now.
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So do you think that any of those people who, for the last year, have been saying no to being vaccinated are sitting at their homes and saying,
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I'm going to go out and get vaccinated to prove that I'm not a white supremacist neo-Nazi.
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But again, the problem with demonizing people, apart from the moral wrong, is that eventually you're giving them nothing to motivate them to do what you want them to do.
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Because you're proving that you view them as unworthy of, I was going to say breathing the same air, which has never been more literal than it is right now.
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They're unworthy of breathing the same air as you.
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They're unworthy of living in the same country as you.
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And again, right now, the goalposts are shifting yet again.
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Kelsa Preeze and Quebec has become the first jurisdiction in the country to start talking about a vaccine passport being a thing that requires three doses.
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So we were talking about the places they're expanding the vaccine passport to.
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Well, all of the people in Quebec who are fully vaccinated will not even be fully vaccinated unless they get the third dose.
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And all of this vilification of anti-vaxxers, it's going to be quite hilarious.
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When in three months time or so, the government is calling two vaxxers anti-vaxxers, basically.
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Oh, if you've got two vaccine doses, yeah, you're just an evil racist anti-vaxxer.
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Yeah, you only like the three vax people are the ones who we truly decide are worthy of living in this country.
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And this is why the endlessness of this is something that people are criticizing.
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And this is crossing against left-right lines, truly.
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In which I talked about the fact that if the vaccine passport is being warranted in all of these places,
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which later get shut down, it's proof that the vaccine passport wasn't helping.
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I was hearing about it from people in my life who are not political at all,
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who, for whatever reason, don't follow me, don't follow my work.
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Like, people were sharing that beyond Twitter because they're so angry right now.
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And that's something that's not going to go away.
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Now, again, Ontario has an election in about five months' time.
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The challenge for a lot of Ontarians who reject what the government is doing
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is that there's not really any party that could say they'd be doing it better.
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If anything, the criticism that Doug Ford is getting from the Liberals and the NDP
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He was getting people angry at him last year, I guess two years ago, December 2020,
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because they thought that he should have shut down things right before Christmas
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How dare you let people have Christmas dinners was basically the primary critique of Doug Ford
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Now, with kids in schools, that seems to be where there's a bit of a divide further happening.
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The only people I've heard from are deranged Twitter users.
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I've not heard from any parents who say, yeah, I want kids at home, right?
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Now, every parent, every parent, even the parents that are double vaxxed, triple vaxxed,
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full mask wearers are saying, yeah, kids need to be in school because parents with children
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are seeing more than anyone else, the devastating and ongoing effects of lockdown.
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Children that have no idea how to socialize because for the last two years of their lives,
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they've not been able to with any degree of regularity or consistency.
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So absolutely, that's going to be the make or break factor, I think.
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And just I want to go through some of the dates here, some of the thresholds that have been set,
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because a lot of this is really coming down to a line in the sand.
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Some provinces are saying, yeah, we're sending people back.
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But I don't think anyone believes they're going to go back in that couple of weeks.
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So Quebec claims that they're going to reopen for in-person learning on January 17th.
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I'm not buying it, given all their talk about these extreme vaccine passport measures.
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Saskatchewan, they never took them out of class.
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Quebec, and we already talked about Ontario, says it's going to be in two weeks' time,
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But like I said, no one believes that's happening.
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Newfoundland is indefinitely online now, I believe.
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New Brunswick as well has done this two-week thing.
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So all of these provinces are banking on, you know, January 17th or something or so,
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thereabouts, being this magic day at which they'll wake up and say,
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So anyone who thinks that there is going to be a magic point this month at which these
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overlords that we have now put so much of our faith into for two years, that they're just
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So I don't think kids are going back to school in most of the large provinces anyway
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At the very least, I don't think we're going to see a lifting of restrictions by February.
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Like, we talked last week a little bit about people who have fled the country, literally.
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And I've had a lot of emails from people in the days since then saying, yeah, I wish.
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A couple of people asked me for immigration advice.
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Don't ask me for advice on how to get out of here.
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And again, you have to, if you're unvaccinated, you have to pick a place that you don't need
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to fly to because you aren't going to be allowed on the plane still if you're not
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vaccinated and this is a problem that society has to contend with because right now, all
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of these things that people might have only accepted because they were temporary are proving
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And it's like I said about the vaccine passport.
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This was in Ontario, supposed to be, and you can take a look right there, supposed to
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So we're talking about more restrictions, third doses for vaccine passports, kids being
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This was supposed to be the month that the vaccine passport had served its time and was
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We were back to being a desegregated society.
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But a lot of the people that may have only gone along with it because of its so-called
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temporary nature are finding that all of these temporary war measures, they're all proving
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As I've said, I mean, my big fear is that masking is always going to be here, that the
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flu shot is going to become part of the vaccine passport every year, and more and more of these
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So this is why you can't start ceding territory on these things, even if you think it might be
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a so-called minor inconvenience, because all of these things combined reshape the world in a way
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And also, by the way, I mean, at this point, the polarization is such that if you do not go all
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the way and, you know, promote double masking and triple dosing of vaccines and all of that,
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if you don't do all of that and support it being mandatory, you get vilified just the same.
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So yesterday, Aaron O'Toole, conservative leader, emerged from his slumber, saw his shadow,
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declared six more weeks of winter, and decided to do a press conference in which he talked about
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how he thinks we need to be accommodating when it comes to truckers, because right now,
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the Liberal government is looking at giving truckers or getting rid of their exemption from
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So right now, if you're a cross-border trucker, essential to our supply chains,
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The Liberals are thinking of getting rid of that.
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So one of the points that Aaron O'Toole made is that we need to accommodate individuals,
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So he makes this comment, and then no one gives him credit for this comment,
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in which he was defending the vaccine mandate for members of the Canadian Armed Forces.
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As a former member, I'm curious about your position on this now.
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Do you support a vaccine mandate for regular and reservist members,
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particularly when some of them are now being deployed in Quebec today, for example,
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With the service above self that we see in the Canadian Armed Forces,
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there will be a requirement for many and most operators to be vaccinated.
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This is a critical job that attaches with it the potential risk that you take by serving your country in uniform.
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So balancing off, making sure that as many people are vaccinated as possible,
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needs to be the priority for the Canadian Armed Forces.
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Both Dr. Ellis and I are veterans of the Canadian Armed Forces.
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And actually, Glenn, this issue has been looked at many times in the past
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because of previous vaccinations that caused higher hesitancy in the Canadian Armed Forces.
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So my message to the military and the military families right now is simple.
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Ask questions to military docs like Dr. Ellis was years ago.
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And make sure you're part of our fight against COVID-19.
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And I think everyone in uniform should be vaccinated.
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Now, incidentally, I disagree with his position on the Canadian Armed Forces.
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But the whole point is that he goes along with the Liberals on that.
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He goes along with the narrative that says, yes, vaccination must be mandatory in this space.
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And that's despite all of these previous claims that he's made during the election
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that it should be a personal choice resisting the Trudeau vaccine mandate, like here.
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Vaccines are a critical tool to fight the pandemic.
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And Canada's Conservatives have been fighting for over a year for better and swifter access to vaccines.
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We do feel that Canadians have the right to make their own health care decisions.
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But we also have to make sure we have the tools to protect all Canadians from some people that will not be vaccinated.
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Rapid testing, masks, distancing, all the tools.
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But rapid testing in particular, on a daily basis, can be very effective to make sure we reduce the spread.
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So O'Toole was against the vaccine mandate before he was for it.
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But then everyone jumps down his throat when he says something that's perfectly reasonable, like,
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hey, maybe we shouldn't be banning truckers from entering the country.
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One point here, if you look at Britain, Britain's a fascinating case.
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So they don't have a vaccine mandate for NHS workers just yet.
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They're doing one, I think it's in April, but right now they don't.
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They're finding without a vaccine mandate that their staffing levels are insane, insanely bad.
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And part of it is because everyone's getting home because they are isolating due to testing positive for COVID
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or being a close contact of testing positive for COVID.
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And the NHS just doesn't have the staff so bad they're thinking of calling in the military.
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Now, Britain, imagine what's going to happen when they say, all right, all of you who are working,
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Because right now we have this two-pronged effort.
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All of these places are complaining about having a huge staffing crisis.
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And all of a sudden, no one's prepared to say, well, okay, maybe we shouldn't have fired all those people.
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One example of a backtrack on this comes from Niagara Health.
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They actually dropped their vaccine mandate for workers because they just didn't have the workers.
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We remain committed to a fully vaccinated workforce at our hospital,
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and we will proceed with the implementation at a later time to be determined.
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That's a line from President and CEO Lynn Guerriero of the Niagara Health executive team.
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And they're finding that they just do not have the staff to deal with all of the health challenges.
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On one hand, if you're going to say that we have no people, we have no staff,
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you can't, on the other hand, justify terminating all of your staff,
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which is exactly what's happening in all of these fora and all of these venues.
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But this is where we go back to the separation from reality of a lot of these measures.
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People are not interested in what makes sense, what's the most scientifically or medically sound.
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They are interested in penalizing and vilifying people who have made a choice with which they disagree.
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And I cannot stress enough that this is not an argument against vaccination.
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This is an argument against coercive vaccination, against mandatory vaccination,
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and an argument against these efforts which are counterproductive to vilify and demonize those who are unvaccinated
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because of something that is legally and morally their choice or should be legally their choice.
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I want to talk about Aaron O'Toole for a moment on this because, as you know,
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I've been trying for, oh, I don't know, two years or so to get an interview.
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No, we had ample access to him during the leadership race
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and had an interview with him in December of 2020.
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But since December 2020, I have not been able to get any one-on-one time with Aaron O'Toole.
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I've tried to dial into press conferences and mysteriously, my questions have not been taken,
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What I wanted to ask him, because Aaron O'Toole decided to take a stand against lockdowns-ish.
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He was talking about how Canadians don't deserve lockdowns and Justin Trudeau has normalized lockdowns.
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There was this tweet he put out saying, yeah, Canadians deserve better than lockdowns.
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Because any time Aaron O'Toole has been asked about lockdowns or restrictions in the last two years,
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he said, oh, I'm not going to interfere in political turf.
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Are you saying that you reject what provinces are doing?
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And ultimately, he ended up defending lockdowns in a way.
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Travis Dandrash of CBC had asked him a question of, like, you know,
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why are you going after Trudeau when it's the provinces that are making these decisions?
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And O'Toole just kind of blamed Trudeau for doing all these other things wrong
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You say that you respect the decisions of provinces to minimize the spread,
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But the provinces are the ones determining whether or not lockdowns should happen.
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It was Premier Ford and his cabinet here who decided to put Ontario back into stage two.
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So why are you blaming the Prime Minister for lockdowns, which are provincial decisions?
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And do the provinces hold any responsibility when it comes to these lockdowns, in your view?
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In spring of 2020, Mr. Trudeau on his doorstep said he'd spoken to the provinces
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and the federal government was taking responsibility for testing and tracing.
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He actually said those measures would help keep the economy as open as possible.
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That's what he said at the beginning of this pandemic.
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The programs of support the federal government put in the budget last year is the substitute.
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He's funding lockdowns as opposed to funding tools to actually help us keep some balance here.
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The priority has to be the health and well-being of Canadians and keeping pressure off our systems as much as possible.
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But he's also had two years to help develop surge protection for hospitals and ICUs.
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I haven't seen any action from the federal government on the key tools that would have allowed the provinces to make some other decisions.
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So in a way, I mean, the problem with that is that it kind of endorses that these things are so-called necessary evils.
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When the reality is provinces have a choice here.
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And I mentioned when I was doing the laundry list of schools and schooling decisions that provinces have made.
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There's a range and a lot of them are kind of clustering around, okay, two weeks, two weeks, two weeks.
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But you could do what Saskatchewan did, which is keep schools open, keep students in the classroom.
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Do what Alberta's doing, which is delay it a week and then go back into the classroom and focus on making it safe to be there.
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Quebec and Ontario as being the two most strict regions in this country.
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No one's forcing them to keep their vaccine passports on the books indefinitely.
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No one's forcing Quebec to expand the vaccine passport to require three doses.
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Speaking of Emmanuel Macron, he's talking about boosters being an every four-month thing.
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So a booster shot, I mean, that's, I don't think any booster is like that.
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When I was younger, a booster was something you got, you know, after several years, not every four months,
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at which point it's just like you're treating a chronic illness.
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So if that's going to be the reality, most people are not going to go along with it.
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I mean, right now, booster shots are finding there is a lot of people that want them.
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But at a certain point, once that initial wave gets through,
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we're going to be looking at a population that already was not vaccinated enough for what the government thought.
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And even fewer will have gone to get the third shot.
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So if the government's approach to getting more people vaccinated is to punish them and close off society,
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all the government's going to be doing, we know it,
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is further closing off society to people who only have two shots and not a third.
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So, I mean, if you don't see where this is going, I don't know how you can't.
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And then you may say, well, what's the big deal?
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If you got the two shots, then why not just get the third?
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The whole point is that we're moving towards a crisis that is being manufactured just to keep it going in perpetuity.
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The never-ending lockdown, the permanent emergency, whatever you want to call it.
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So, listen, I mean, I want to just make this very clear here that I don't think things are getting better.
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I know that's not something that was really hidden.
00:26:22.900
I'm very pessimistic about things, but I also want to turn that into something that is a bit of an action item.
00:26:29.020
And I must restate the point that I made previously,
00:26:32.120
which is that I think most Canadians are starting to see that the emperor is not actually dressed.
00:26:39.460
Canadians are starting to see through the charade of advice and guidance and guidelines.
00:26:44.100
And I'm not calling for a rebellion in the streets here.
00:26:46.980
What I'm calling for is for Canadians to stand up and start challenging this.
00:26:52.660
And again, I mean, be very focused on who the problem is.
00:26:56.160
The problem is not the store that's trying to comply with these legislations from the government
00:27:04.160
The problem, I mean, airlines are problems in other ways.
00:27:06.280
But in this case, the problem isn't necessarily the airlines.
00:27:12.600
And they're seeing a population that, generally speaking, has just been going along with it.
00:27:17.560
And there have been numerous, numerous situations where I think Canadians have started to turn on this.
00:27:24.440
Canadians who were, like I said, dutifully and diligently going along with whatever was asked of them
00:27:29.360
that reached a breaking point in this lockdown or the previous lockdown.
00:27:36.740
Like I've said, the pandemic is over when you say it is over.
00:27:41.400
My thanks to all of you for tuning into the program.
00:27:43.660
We'll be back on Tuesday with more of Canada's Most Irreverent Talk Show.
00:27:49.640
Thanks for listening to The Andrew Lawton Show.
00:27:51.660
Support the program by donating to True North at www.tnc.news.