Juno News - January 31, 2021


There's no end in sight of the lockdowns

Mentioned
Chris Matthews Theresa Tam Doug Ford John Tory
Iran, Biden and Canada – Why the Middle East matters Don't be afraid to speak out against the lockdowns

Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

138.36

Word count

610

Sentence count

36


Summary

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

In this episode, we take a look at the ridiculous ways in which Canadian law enforcement agencies are trying to keep us in a state of COID lockdown, and why it s so hard to go about our lives and do what we need to do.

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 On Sunday, the Church of God in Elmer, Ontario, a town of less than 10,000 people southwest of Toronto, held a service with 47 people in attendance.
00:00:15.720 Three days later, the Elmer police started tracking them down and writing what has been reported as $861 tickets for being in breach of, quote, emergency orders, unquote.
00:00:27.440 For the police to do this, they must have recorded all the license plates in the parking lot, ran the ROs, that's the registered owners, tracked them down, and ticketed them.
00:00:37.640 Looking at the org chart for the Elmer police, this must have taken up every on-duty officer for the 27th.
00:00:44.700 For this, on the good side of the coin, no one was arrested, unlike the folks who were protesting in downtown Toronto on Saturday for the third straight week.
00:00:53.420 Toronto police again arrested several folks for seemingly nothing more than engaging in their free speech rights.
00:01:00.100 One wonders if any of these officers, or their superior officers who sent them there, have ever heard of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
00:01:08.440 The Charter guarantees you the right to free speech and the right to free assembly.
00:01:12.420 It is the paramount legislation in this country.
00:01:15.660 No junior government can enact any legislation that supersedes the Charter.
00:01:19.980 Doesn't matter what Premier Doug Ford or Mayor John Tory wants, the police have no authority not to follow the Charter.
00:01:27.300 Not for any reason.
00:01:28.660 The only thing Ford could do, to supersede it, is invoke the Notwithstanding Clause.
00:01:34.380 He hasn't done that, and he's not likely to do so.
00:01:38.140 Then in Calgary, just a couple of days ago, an Edmonton pastor was expecting his wife, Nikki, back on a flight from Mexico.
00:01:46.160 She had thought she'd done everything right.
00:01:49.000 She had negative COVID tests before she went there, and before she boarded her plane to come back.
00:01:54.440 She was met at the Calgary airport by a Calgary police officer in what she believed was an official from Alberta Health Services.
00:02:01.880 The pastor, Chris Matthias, wrote on his Facebook page,
00:02:06.200 She was taken to some sort of COVID containment.
00:02:36.200 What made her worse is her husband spoke by phone to the police officer, an AHS official, and tried to find out.
00:02:47.220 They refused to tell him.
00:02:49.660 It's unclear what sort of a threat she posed.
00:02:54.040 Meanwhile, in Quebec and Ontario, authorities have issued hundreds of tickets to businesses and individuals for not following government COVID guidelines.
00:03:03.680 Literally, just for going about their business and trying to live their lives.
00:03:08.300 Then yesterday, Canada's chief public health officer, Dr. Theresa Tam, announced she was contracting private security services in 35 cities across Canada to do home checks,
00:03:21.740 to ensure people were following the regulations and staying quarantined as ordered.
00:03:27.140 This is gone from the sublime to the ridiculous.
00:03:30.680 There's no question the country's COVID response has been booted around the block by the federal government, right out of the gate,
00:03:37.980 and watching their vaccine response shows nothing has changed.
00:03:42.760 Most of the country is still in some form of lockdown, and people don't understand why.
00:03:47.620 We are a year into this.
00:03:50.520 We were told initially we just had to disrupt our lives for two weeks to, quote, flatten the curve, unquote, to let hospitals get prepared.
00:03:59.680 Well, that was a year ago.
00:04:01.180 Currently, the number of deaths are roughly the same as any other year from seasonal influenza and other causes.
00:04:08.380 For some reason, governments are trying to disguise all of these as COVID deaths, when they are clearly not.
00:04:15.600 Yet our businesses are closed, and we remain in one form of lockdown or another.
00:04:21.700 This insanity needs to end.