Juno News - October 15, 2020


The politicization of the coronavirus


Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

186.2755

Word count

618

Sentence count

26

Harmful content

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, are politicians really looking at the polls to see how far ahead they are in the polls? Or are they more worried about their re-election prospects than they are about public health?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Everybody knows that Winston Churchill was one of the most decisive figures during the war
00:00:10.480 in beating back Hitler and beating Nazi Germany. The war wrapping up in 1945, and a slightly
00:00:17.600 lesser known fact is there was a general election in England that year. Winston Churchill lost.
00:00:23.320 That's right, the voters, after he led them to victory in war, well, they did not return him
00:00:27.920 to office. He screwed up his politicking, even though he won the war. Now, I wonder if he could
00:00:34.000 go back and do things differently, hypothetically. Would he have gone, ah, I focused too much on that
00:00:38.940 war thing and the beating Hitler thing? I should have probably focused more on, you know, coming 0.98
00:00:43.160 up with good campaign slogans and so forth in the general election so I could stay to power.
00:00:47.440 Should have been doing more polling, that kind of stuff, right? Right? No, of course not. I mean,
00:00:52.180 who would even suggest such a thing? And we don't really talk about Churchill's 1945 election loss,
00:00:57.780 we talk about the fact that he was the guy who beat Hitler. Right now, I'm a little concerned
00:01:04.500 that there are a lot of politicians everywhere right now, particularly in Canada, who maybe don't
00:01:10.060 know that anecdote, haven't reflected on it. Because the word on the street is Justin Trudeau,
00:01:15.280 Doug Ford, others. They're really looking at the polls right now in terms of how they manage the
00:01:20.580 coronavirus pandemic. Yes, I've heard that Doug Ford doing regular polls about his political prospects,
00:01:26.060 how he's faring with the voters and so forth. Justin Trudeau as well. Look, I get there's
00:01:30.960 always going to be a component of that, but are they really factoring polling into their daily
00:01:36.960 decisions about this unprecedented moment in human history we're in right now, the mass lockdown
00:01:42.440 of people that we experienced back in the spring? Seems like we're stepping more in that direction now,
00:01:48.080 going back into it. Something that is very traumatic for many people on an economic front,
00:01:52.940 psychological front, and more. And yet, you mean to tell me these guys are going, oh, well,
00:01:58.740 what are the decisions I make have to do with my re-election prospects? What? It's like you tell
00:02:03.880 Churchill, okay, here's the deal. You beat Hitler. You save Western civilization, but you're going to lose 0.97
00:02:10.640 the next election. Deal? I would like to think that any rational, sane person who actually loves their
00:02:16.840 country and loves freedom would say, deal, because the victory is good enough. That is not happening
00:02:23.120 right now in Canada, it seems, if they are as focused on the polls as I have been told that they
00:02:28.700 are. You do what has to be done because you feel it is the right thing to do, to both work towards
00:02:35.140 public health so that we beat back the coronavirus pandemic, but also so that we get into a situation
00:02:40.700 where these lockdowns are not causing all these awful consequences that are happening right now,
00:02:46.200 all of the heartbreak and all of the lost jobs and businesses closing and so forth.
00:02:51.300 So it's really alarming to hear that polls are a part of this. I see these opinion columns,
00:02:55.320 and I saw some in the Toronto Star, and I see there's panels on television where people are saying,
00:02:59.420 oh, well, you know, how should, what are the voters thinking about this, and how should Trudeau
00:03:03.720 appeal to this and that party? Guys, old-style political strategy, timeout, it's on hold.
00:03:09.960 None of those old rules should apply anymore. Right now, if we're in a wartime situation,
00:03:15.420 well, we've got to handle it like, well, hey, like Winston Churchill would.