Juno News - January 15, 2022


Trudeau’s vaccine mandate for truckers will be a disaster


Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

193.44154

Word count

584

Sentence count

22


Summary

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

Justin Trudeau's plan to mandate a vaccination mandate for truckers crossing the border into Canada from the United States is causing a whole host of unintended consequences, including food and medicine shortages and higher prices. What's the point to all of this?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 I think it's fair to say that here in Canada, when it comes to public policy measures to deal with COVID-19, there have been some really bad ones.
00:00:13.740 But when all is said and done, I think looking back on it, one idea that will make the top 10 or top 5 of worst ideas is Justin Trudeau's stubborn insistence about bringing in a vaccine mandate for truckers crossing the border.
00:00:29.100 This is a policy that so many people who are really knowledgeable about various sectors, very knowledgeable about the supply chain say, this is not a good idea.
00:00:38.760 This is going to cause a whole host of unintended consequences. You just don't want to go there.
00:00:45.140 Concerns about how products on the shelves that you're used to seeing, you're not going to see them anymore.
00:00:50.300 We're going to have shortages that we saw a long time ago. We thought that was behind us.
00:00:55.300 We're going to see concerns with even the healthcare supply chain.
00:00:58.540 I was speaking to one hospital physician who said they had a meeting with all the people who helped manage emergency operations,
00:01:04.800 and one of the persons responsible for supplies said, we're going to have a problem with various supplies we need.
00:01:09.680 IV tubing was one example cited, and that if you have problems with these supplies, well, you're going to have to delay surgeries even further.
00:01:17.540 This could be a disaster.
00:01:19.020 If you're concerned about inflation now, well, if you limit the supply of goods into Canada,
00:01:23.700 which this public policy measure that Trudeau's insistent on could do, well, you're going to see inflation for certain goods rise even further.
00:01:31.980 What are the benefits to all of this?
00:01:35.140 This seems like nothing but pure politics so far down the line when we're in a situation where thankfully the headlines tell us and the experts tell us that the Omicron variant,
00:01:44.420 a much milder variant, a much smaller percentage of persons ending up in hospital compared to previous variants.
00:01:50.760 I mean, there's a lot of good news.
00:01:52.140 There's a lot of opportunities to take the ball and run with it in a positive direction,
00:01:55.860 and yet it seems like, I don't know, there has to be a last hurrah from the federal government in terms of really restrictive
00:02:01.840 and, frankly, really wrong-headed policies that so many experts are saying, don't go down that path.
00:02:08.600 I mean, this seems unnecessarily punitive for an industry where, what are the truckers doing?
00:02:13.460 People sitting on their own in their truck, driving from point A to point B,
00:02:17.900 and then pretty much turning around and going back home again.
00:02:21.180 Someone in the trucking industry described many truckers to me as basically today's version of cowboys
00:02:26.140 in terms of these are individuals who are just on their own, out on the road, they want to do their own thing,
00:02:32.120 they want to be left alone, and if government says, you've got to do this, it's probably not going to work well.
00:02:37.440 They're not going to positively respond to that message.
00:02:40.220 So what is the point?
00:02:42.360 And yet Prime Minister Justin Trudeau adamantly refusing to budge on all of this.
00:02:46.440 There have been opportunities, initial reports that maybe they were going to step away,
00:02:49.880 but they're saying, uh-uh, we ain't going to do it.
00:02:52.880 What is the point to all of this?
00:02:54.520 It seems like, really, there's hardly any positives to talk about with this policy,
00:02:59.320 but there is a whole host of negatives.