Juno News - January 26, 2020


This is what politicians should really be talking about

Mentioned
Pulse Attack
Trump vs. Greta, Crying Over Spilt Wine, What Conservatives Care About (feat. Spencer Fernando) The Candice Malcolm Show： What it means to be conservative

Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

192.49

Word count

907

Sentence count

39


Summary

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

The Wuhan Virus, the Amber Alert, and the nuclear crisis in Ontario have got me thinking about how fragile our increasingly complex civilization is and how at risk everything could become of suddenly crumbling away at some point, falling apart if we don t take our emergency management seriously.

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 There have been a few things happening of late that have got me thinking about just how fragile
00:00:11.160 our increasingly complex civilization is and just how at risk everything could become of
00:00:17.120 suddenly crumbling away at some point, falling apart if we don't take our emergency management
00:00:23.040 seriously, if we don't talk about those very unsexy things like managing critical infrastructure.
00:00:28.840 That our politicians do sometimes talk about trying to do reports on, but it doesn't always generate all that much interest.
00:00:35.040 The big story in the news right now, of course, the Wuhan virus.
00:00:38.260 And we've got a lot of experts out there saying, okay, no need to be alarmist,
00:00:42.460 but then you look at the things that are happening in China, how quickly it's spreading,
00:00:46.520 and how leading public health officials have said that it's really just a numbers game of inevitability
00:00:51.880 until one or two cases crop up here in Canada, and it starts to get you worried.
00:00:57.060 Several years ago, I played a very small character in the television series, The Strain,
00:01:01.960 which is about an infectious disease coming to the United States and a wild outbreak,
00:01:06.800 and it becomes a big science fiction narrative and so forth.
00:01:09.060 But it gets you thinking about how these things, they can turn at a moment's notice
00:01:14.660 and turn into something very different that if you're not prepared for it, who knows what direction you will head.
00:01:20.380 Now, public health officials, they've upped their game in recent years, they're very serious about it all.
00:01:25.340 But that is not the only front where we are at risk, where we are an increasingly fragile civilization.
00:01:31.680 Just the other week, people in Ontario received an Amber Alert notice to their phones, a text message.
00:01:37.740 I shouldn't call it an Amber Alert. I think that's exclusively what's used to describe missing children.
00:01:42.120 But it was the same system that sends those out, and it was an emergency alert.
00:01:46.080 It was sent out at 7 a.m. on a Sunday that said there's been a problem at the Pickering nuclear plant.
00:01:52.540 Wow! And a lot of people, particularly living in the east end of Toronto and the GTA near that power plant,
00:01:58.760 thought, what on earth does this mean?
00:02:01.100 I thought, what does this mean?
00:02:02.620 I went on social media like everybody else, and all I saw was people freaking out.
00:02:07.620 Now, the alert did say there's not actually anything dangerous right now to worry about,
00:02:12.880 but there's a situation, there's a problem, and we're monitoring it.
00:02:16.500 Uh-oh. That still worried people.
00:02:18.520 Now, that was at a time when public officials weren't really awake, or media weren't awake,
00:02:22.880 people who deal with these things.
00:02:24.000 You know, 7 a.m. on a Sunday, a lot of people were still in bed.
00:02:28.100 And that was a time when, really, we would have been caught off guard, and there could have been havoc.
00:02:32.660 Both if a real incident had happened, and here, more worrisomely, if some sort of bad actor out there,
00:02:39.460 some person in China or Iran or Russia or some non-state actor, decided, you know what?
00:02:45.320 We're going to hack into that alert system.
00:02:47.380 And instead of sending out this message saying, well, there's a problem, but stay tuned,
00:02:51.140 maybe we said, there's a problem at the Pickering plant.
00:02:54.120 Everybody evacuate.
00:02:55.400 What would have happened Sunday at 7 a.m.?
00:02:57.480 There wouldn't have been enough people awake, enough officials to get the message out to say, stand down.
00:03:02.120 People would have taken to the streets.
00:03:03.840 There would have been accidents at intersections.
00:03:06.060 People would have gone into grocery stores and fought over things and so forth.
00:03:10.580 These things could really happen, which is why I think Ontario does actually need to investigate
00:03:14.920 why that accident went out, that message was wrongly sent out, how that all happened,
00:03:20.340 because these things matter.
00:03:23.400 You know, we live day by day in this really great society,
00:03:26.880 better than really any time or place in human history.
00:03:30.060 And we enjoy all of these luxuries, but again, there is the fragility of the system.
00:03:34.960 I thought about this a lot and wrote about it a lot when I wrote my book a couple years ago,
00:03:40.300 Pulse Attack, the real story about the secret weapon that could destroy North America,
00:03:44.840 a book that looks at separating the fact and fiction behind electromagnetic pulse attacks
00:03:49.880 and the possibility of taking down the electricity grid for several days, several weeks,
00:03:56.180 maybe even several months, upwards of a year.
00:03:58.520 And what happens when you suddenly lose something like electricity that we all rely on
00:04:03.460 and we have built our lives on?
00:04:06.060 All this is just to say when we're looking at the Wuhan virus
00:04:09.240 or looking at this emergency alert coming on our phones,
00:04:12.420 the next time you hear that there's some need to look into critical infrastructure
00:04:16.960 or they want to do a report on emergency planning,
00:04:19.960 we'll encourage that to happen.
00:04:21.640 Give it just as much attention as you'd give any other news story
00:04:24.560 or any other emotion or thing a politician is working on,
00:04:27.020 because these, these things happening behind the scenes
00:04:29.940 that require, yes, some of our tax dollars to back them up and fund them,
00:04:33.880 others just rolling up our sleeves and getting to work and sweat and effort,
00:04:37.680 these are actually the real things that, at the end of the day, may end up saving our lives.