Juno News - Travel Restrictions Aren't a Silver Bullet

00:00:00.000 You may remember on last week's show, I talked about the travel ban.

00:00:15.660 And the point that I raised, which was received better than I thought it was, quite frankly,

00:00:18.920 was that by the time the government talks about wanting to ban flights from India or

00:00:22.760 Pakistan, as it did like an hour after my show came out, it's already too late because

00:00:27.680 weeks earlier, the so-called variants had been detected in the dozens in multiple provinces.

00:00:34.040 So there's no real point in saying that the double teenage mutant Ninja Turtle virus was

00:00:38.920 something that was going to come on a plane.

00:00:40.980 And that was the only way we could get rid of it by banning those flights, which, by the

00:00:45.220 way, did not stop people to come from India and Pakistan.

00:00:50.140 Someone in India just has to lay over in England or lay over in Frankfurt. 1.00

00:00:53.620 And all of a sudden, there's no issues.

00:00:55.460 So the idea that these things are being passed off as good policy is proof that the government

00:01:01.280 is continuing more than a year into this to just make things up as they go, to make things

00:01:07.500 up as they go without any indication of what the criteria for reopening will be.

00:01:13.680 And that's so important because a lot of these emergency orders and the border shutdown between

00:01:18.820 Canada and the US are implemented in four-week increments and 30-day increments.

00:01:24.180 And they're just extended every 30 days.

00:01:27.400 And the whole point of emergency legislation is that you have to put a sunset clause into it.

00:01:32.360 The rationale being that you don't want these things to require governments to actively

00:01:37.260 strip these powers from themselves.

00:01:39.960 But it's now become so rote to continue to renew this that it is as though these things are

00:01:46.720 permanent fixtures in legislation anyway.

00:01:48.740 Right now, the fact that the border is shut down between Canada and the US, despite the

00:01:53.240 exemptions for cross-border trade, is such a norm that it will just become very easy to

00:01:58.880 unquestioningly extend that every single time it comes up.

00:02:02.240 It was just extended most recently, a couple of days ago.

00:02:05.340 I have no doubt that in May it will be renewed again and again and again.

00:02:09.180 And it wouldn't surprise me if the Canada-US border is shut down for at least two years

00:02:14.660 before it is reopened.

00:02:18.100 And I'm a believer in the fact that no country has a legal obligation to admit others to it. 0.88

00:02:23.660 So I'm of the mindset that if the US wanted to shut its borders to Canadians, I would oppose it,

00:02:28.620 but it would have the legal right to do it.

00:02:30.540 So this is not about forcing countries to surrender their sovereignty.

00:02:34.180 It's about understanding the long-standing tradition that Canada and the US have a border

00:02:40.280 that is there for security, yes, that is there for control of goods, yes, but that basically

00:02:45.800 fosters a spirit of travel cooperation between these two countries.

00:02:51.640 Cross-border integration between Canada and the US is a way of life, especially if you are

00:02:57.260 like the 90% of Canadians who live within, I think it's 100 miles of the US border.

00:03:01.820 There's a library in, I forget the Canadian city, but in the American city is North Troy,

00:03:07.480 Vermont.

00:03:08.240 It's a library and an opera house that actually sits on the border.

00:03:13.020 So you can go in one door and enter from Canada and you can go out the other door and exit into

00:03:19.000 the United States and vice versa.

00:03:20.840 And I've always thought that the US should just do like a vaccine clinic on its side of

00:03:25.560 the opera house in, I think it's North Troy, Vermont.

00:03:27.920 It might be Derby, Vermont or something like that.

00:03:29.920 And all the Canadians who want to get vaccinated and can't because of Trudeau's plan can get

00:03:34.220 American vaccines in the rural New England and then head on home back through the way 0.98

00:03:39.620 they came in.

00:03:40.360 But the whole point of this is that the government has not provided any reopening plan.

00:03:44.880 You've got people like Doug Ford in Ontario who are calling on the government to do more

00:03:49.880 to secure the border as though the border is not already closed.

00:03:54.680 And let me tell you something, I get people emailing all the time saying, well, what about

00:04:00.440 the international flights coming in, this flight, that flight?

00:04:02.860 And they're pointing to all these flights that are coming in from China, from elsewhere

00:04:06.660 in the world.

00:04:07.700 Let me say something because I was at Pearson Airport a couple of weeks ago and I wish I

00:04:12.060 got a picture of it.

00:04:12.900 But I looked up at, there's like a four panel arrivals or a departures board that is in this

00:04:19.200 one part of the terminal.

00:04:20.140 It's huge and actually it might, no, it might be eight panels because each vertical dimension

00:04:24.600 has two levels on it.

00:04:26.320 And all of the flights for the entire day were on one of these eight panels.

00:04:32.020 So the idea that you can point to flight manifests and say, well, these international flights are

00:04:36.860 coming in is not really evidence of anything.

00:04:39.720 Flights are virtually non-existent and the people that are on those flights are people who have

00:04:45.160 a legal right to enter Canada.

00:04:47.160 And yeah, there are exemptions for, to the travel ban for people that have extended family

00:04:53.420 here, people that have essential work to do here.

00:04:55.860 But most of the people on these flights are Canadian citizens coming home.

00:05:00.940 And I refuse to go along with any plan that bars citizens of this country from re-entering

00:05:08.060 the country.

00:05:09.060 We have a two week quarantine, which is meant to basically let people exhaust the virus from

00:05:15.380 their system if they have contracted it while they've been abroad.

00:05:19.320 But the reality is that Canada is right now more dangerous than a lot of the places from

00:05:23.480 which people are coming.

00:05:24.760 Because elsewhere in the world, people have eased restrictions.

00:05:28.040 They've opened up because they have more of their population vaccinated.

00:05:31.380 The threat to Canada is not by and large coming from travel.

00:05:36.440 And when you do have situations like the double teenage mutant virus that have come in from

00:05:42.180 India, these are relatively isolated and they don't take away from the fact that travel

00:05:46.860 related cases are about 2% of the overall caseload in Canada.

00:05:52.800 And sacrificing the rights of Canadians, which is what people calling for more restrictive

00:05:59.140 border measures are doing, because at a certain point, that's all that's left to go after

00:06:03.980 Canadian citizens and their right to return home, which Australia did.

00:06:07.840 And by the way, stranded thousands of Australian citizens abroad because they couldn't enter

00:06:12.560 their own country.

00:06:13.640 I won't do that.

00:06:14.740 Certainly not for 2% of the caseload when 98% is coming from people doing things in the

00:06:21.040 country.

00:06:21.860 Community spread, workplace, etc.

00:06:24.780 And the whole point of this is that I've been calling since the very beginning for an

00:06:28.600 approach to the pandemic that puts science first and doesn't take these universal restrictions

00:06:34.280 that are going after everyone when we can isolate where transmission is taking place.

00:06:41.620 And Patti Hajdu, Polyburu Patti, the health minister, had said this the other day.

00:06:46.180 In fact, just hours before the government banned flights from India and Pakistan, health officials

00:06:51.460 were saying that, oh, well, you know, targeted travel bans don't work.

00:06:54.320 Now, in this case, I agree with them, even if they are contradicting themselves.

00:06:58.780 But what was interesting is that Patti Hajdu said, well, you know what, we've got universal

00:07:02.460 measures because we can't target these things.

00:07:06.120 And these are my words, not hers.

00:07:07.780 But she was basically saying that we can't play whack-a-mole with all of these international 1.00

00:07:12.140 areas.

00:07:12.740 And I'm inclined to agree, unless you are prepared to say that Canadian citizens do not have the

00:07:18.180 right to return to their country. 1.00

00:07:19.940 But more importantly, the Canada-U.S. border is where you have people that are exempt from

00:07:27.460 quarantine, exempt from testing because they work in cross-border trade.

00:07:31.800 They are truckers.

00:07:32.820 They are doing important things that, again, have always had them going back and forth.

00:07:37.180 And I would again say, do you want to sacrifice the Canadian supply chains, the food you have

00:07:42.960 on your grocery store shelves, by tightening what is already a restricted border even more?

00:07:48.620 It's easy to step up and say, oh, but flights are coming in, but oh, the poor people are

00:07:53.640 still coming across the border.

00:07:54.940 Yeah, it's easy to say that.

00:07:56.820 But the exemptions that are there are very minimal.

00:08:00.620 And I don't think the people calling for more border restrictions and more travel restrictions

00:08:05.800 have thought through what the implications of those measures will be.

00:08:10.240 If you liked watching this clip of The Andrew Lawton Show, True North has lots more for you

00:08:15.480 all over at www.tnc.news.

Juno News - April 28, 2021

Travel Restrictions Aren't a Silver Bullet

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