Juno News - September 28, 2022


Trudeau lifts mandates, but for how long？


Episode Stats


Length

7 minutes

Words per minute

175.03896

Word count

1,273

Sentence count

79

Harmful content

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Justin Trudeau announced that the federal government will no longer require people to be vaccinated before boarding flights in Canada. This is a good thing, but there are still a lot of people who are still waiting to get their flu shot. And the government says it's all about the science.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Per Justin Trudeau's executive fiat, the mandates at the federal level for borders for air travel will be coming to an end on September 30th or specifically on October 1st.
00:00:12.680 So if you're traveling on an overnight flight September 1st to, or sorry, September 30th to October 1st, you get to like dramatically rip off your mask mid-flight.
00:00:21.540 If you take off, you may need to arrive camp, but by the time you land, you don't.
00:00:25.120 It's all going to be very exciting.
00:00:26.820 It's Canada. People are probably just going to keep their masks on, but you never know.
00:00:30.840 But I do want to talk about this because I devoted considerable attention last week to saying,
00:00:35.740 even with all these reports coming out that the mandates are going to be gone by the end of this month, people should not be too excited.
00:00:43.640 And I was not trying to be a Debbie Downer. I always try to be a ray of sunshine if possible.
00:00:48.580 It's very difficult sometimes, but I try.
00:00:51.720 But it was more that the government has never apologized.
00:00:55.020 And it's not, I'm not one of these like really emotional and overly sentimental people that's like,
00:01:01.000 no, you didn't say I'm sorry.
00:01:02.400 So it's, it's more than that.
00:01:03.920 It's because the government says still, and they were clinging to this when they made the announcement yesterday,
00:01:08.800 that this was all about the science and that they haven't changed their minds.
00:01:12.880 The science has changed.
00:01:14.120 It was unsafe to do this a week ago, but now it's safe.
00:01:16.980 And it's the same rationale that they'll use if they bring it back.
00:01:22.880 Because when every other country in the world, for the most part, made the announcements that it was gone,
00:01:29.160 they did it in a celebratory way.
00:01:32.340 When restrictions ended in Israel, when restrictions ended in the UK,
00:01:36.440 when restrictions ended in most American states and so on,
00:01:39.380 it was done because they said, yeah, we beat this.
00:01:41.540 It was like George Bush with the Mission Accomplished banner.
00:01:43.740 Justin Trudeau, while making the announcement that the mandates were ending, said this.
00:01:48.740 We stepped up during this pandemic as individuals, as communities to get vaccinated quicker and to higher levels
00:01:56.580 than just about any other country in the world.
00:01:58.380 And because of that, studies have shown that we avoided hundreds of thousands of deaths
00:02:03.640 because of the decisions that municipalities, the provinces, the federal governments took
00:02:08.760 during this pandemic that kept people safe.
00:02:11.760 And right now, the best thing each of us can do to prevent a resurgence of COVID-19 as winter approaches
00:02:19.960 is to make sure that you get up to date in your vaccinations with the new formulations coming out
00:02:27.320 that'll keep us even safer.
00:02:28.760 And that'll mean that we won't need to take further steps, hopefully, if everyone gets vaccinated.
00:02:35.760 So he's not even saying it's over.
00:02:37.620 He's saying, well, it's over for now, but everyone has to get vaccinated
00:02:41.680 because if you don't, I might have to do something else.
00:02:44.860 As though he has no choice, as though he has no autonomy.
00:02:48.020 And it is this sort of Damocles hanging over people's heads
00:02:51.860 that was exactly why when they suspended the air travel vaccine mandate so long ago,
00:02:58.100 I said, I hope the lawsuit carries on.
00:03:00.540 And that lawsuit has been thus far carrying on.
00:03:03.160 Because the government thinks that all of this was good.
00:03:06.640 The government thinks all of this was helpful.
00:03:08.280 The same government that thought we had to put people on planes
00:03:12.360 after they have proven they're vaccinated was a good idea
00:03:15.900 is also the government saying, well, we follow the science.
00:03:19.140 So just trust us.
00:03:20.140 And it's on you.
00:03:20.820 It's not our decision.
00:03:22.160 It's your decision whether we get more restrictions.
00:03:25.900 And this is what's happening now.
00:03:27.580 They're moving the discussion.
00:03:29.020 They're moving the narrative to, as you heard in that clip, up-to-date vaccinations.
00:03:33.740 So if they do put in restrictions,
00:03:35.540 it's not even going to be where your two doses
00:03:37.680 is enough to classify you as fully vaccinated.
00:03:40.840 It's going to be where you need to have a vaccine within the last,
00:03:44.460 perhaps six months, maybe even three months.
00:03:46.660 You never know.
00:03:47.460 And that is the only way you get to say that you are up-to-date.
00:03:51.560 And booster mandates, like they have at Western University in London, Ontario,
00:03:55.940 are going to be what replaces the old version of mandates.
00:03:59.720 And just taking a look at the Western situation,
00:04:02.920 on the weekend, the Superior Court of Justice,
00:04:06.060 before whom lawyers for the university and also Lisa Bildi,
00:04:09.800 representing a number of students affected by the vaccine mandate,
00:04:13.360 argued their case.
00:04:14.700 And the court sided with Western.
00:04:18.020 The court released its decision on the weekend,
00:04:20.080 saying that Western has the right to manage its own affairs.
00:04:23.960 And it's Western's authority that decides whether this policy is valid or not.
00:04:29.240 It was not a constitutional challenge.
00:04:32.320 And there's a reason for that,
00:04:33.820 because they were trying to go after the school on very narrow grounds
00:04:36.700 on the collection of privacy,
00:04:38.660 and the obligations and regulations on that.
00:04:41.720 And the court still found a wide latitude,
00:04:45.340 a wide berth that it was able to afford Western,
00:04:48.340 that basically say Western can set a policy,
00:04:50.800 and then come up with whatever collection mechanism it needs to,
00:04:55.760 to enforce that policy.
00:04:58.540 And I find this all to be so disheartening.
00:05:01.540 And it's an example of why the legal battles are important,
00:05:05.840 but they're also not the be-all and end-all,
00:05:07.660 because I have a degree of pessimism about
00:05:09.680 where courts are going to land on these issues.
00:05:12.380 Because we know that courts have given governments
00:05:14.880 a lot of deference on this because of the pandemic.
00:05:18.880 They've given governments a lot of latitude to say,
00:05:21.040 well, yeah, it's a deadly pandemic,
00:05:23.080 so even though you're violating constitutional rights,
00:05:25.300 I guess it's demonstrably justified,
00:05:28.780 reasonable limits, free society, all of that stuff.
00:05:32.000 That section one test that most Canadians know now,
00:05:35.060 because it's the one that blocks,
00:05:37.500 the one that blocks so much liberty from taking hold in policy,
00:05:43.560 because it focuses on government's rationalization
00:05:46.500 for infringements on freedom.
00:05:49.660 So right now, we have at the federal level,
00:05:51.980 them saying we have to get rid of these mandates now
00:05:54.100 because the science no longer requires them.
00:05:57.040 And then at one particular university,
00:05:59.060 you have the mandate that is going beyond
00:06:02.280 any mandate the federal government has put in,
00:06:04.760 which it claims is rooted in science.
00:06:07.860 It's amazing how science can say
00:06:09.940 so many different contradictory things.
00:06:12.660 And this is, I think, where the important truth is
00:06:14.940 that people need to understand here.
00:06:16.460 It's not about politics.
00:06:17.740 It's not about the law.
00:06:19.800 It's about culture, and it's about society.
00:06:23.160 Government responded to society.
00:06:26.780 It was people.
00:06:27.380 People wanted restrictions.
00:06:29.460 People wanted restrictions.
00:06:30.740 Justin Trudeau won an election
00:06:32.220 on the backs of threatening the unvaccinated 1.00
00:06:36.380 by taking away their right to work for the public service,
00:06:39.060 to work, to ride a plane, to ride a train, to all of that.
00:06:43.760 That was something that Justin Trudeau was rewarded for doing.
00:06:48.940 People wanted it.
00:06:49.920 Now, have people changed in the last year?
00:06:52.120 Yes, you throw the convoy.
00:06:53.380 You throw other protests.
00:06:54.480 You throw more pandemic fatigue in there.
00:06:56.960 Totally agree.
00:06:57.880 People change.
00:06:59.560 But the reality is the piece of paper
00:07:02.140 that we call the Constitution is not going to save you.
00:07:05.460 Justin Trudeau, the liberal prime minister,
00:07:07.320 is not going to save you.
00:07:08.980 It's winning over the hearts and minds of people
00:07:11.580 that is, I believe, the only way we turn the page on this.