Juno News - May 20, 2022


Was flip-flopping on vax passports Jason Kenney’s downfall？

Topics
flip-flop on vaccine passport
Mentioned
Jason Kenney
Jason Kenney is resigning. What does it mean for Canadian conservatism？ What should Ontario conservatives do this election？

Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

188.43

Word count

797

Sentence count

36

Harmful content

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Jason Kenney is the new leader of the United Conservative Party of Canada, and he has been in office for less than a year. In that time, he s had to deal with a pandemic, a surge in unvaccinated patients, and a new set of restrictions on access to vaccines. But what was the one thing that stood in his way? A vaccine passport.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 This news just came out last night, but I've been thinking about the reasons why I think that Jason Kenney lost,
00:00:05.460 and I think it can really be boiled down to four reasons.
00:00:07.900 So I'm going to go through the four reasons right now.
00:00:10.020 Number one, I think the most obvious reason that the pundits and the media are going to is COVID.
00:00:14.740 It's a COVID response. It's a COVID handling. It's the pandemic.
00:00:17.500 I think that's true, but there was one particular part of the COVID pandemic management that really stuck out,
00:00:22.860 and I think that this really was a turning point and something that was a sticking point for many conservatives,
00:00:27.340 and that was his flip-flop when it came to vaccine passports.
00:00:30.580 I think Kenney could have been forgiven by the conservative base, by many conservatives in Alberta,
00:00:34.880 for the initial lockdowns, for closing down schools, for doing all the things that everyone else was doing.
00:00:39.800 But when it came to the vaccine passports, this is like a red line for many conservatives,
00:00:45.220 especially those of us with libertarian leanings.
00:00:47.120 The idea that the state is going to track our health status and determine whether or not we can get into certain places
00:00:52.280 and have access to certain parts of society based on our personal health status,
00:00:56.800 that that's a bridge too far for most of us, and the fact that it happened all over Canada is a total disgrace.
00:01:03.140 The thing about Jason Kenney, though, and the way he rolled it out,
00:01:05.400 is that his initial response to the idea of a COVID vaccine mandate was completely correct,
00:01:10.780 and he was incredibly articulate.
00:01:12.540 He was incredibly forceful in his opposition to the concept of a vaccine passport.
00:01:18.620 He came out with the exact correct position, and this is in the summer of 2021.
00:01:23.440 This is a clip of Jason Kenney on July 12th, giving the correct response and saying exactly why
00:01:29.600 he vows to not cooperate with the federal government, and he vows to not bring in a vaccine passport.
00:01:36.000 Here's that clip.
00:01:36.720 What's your position of vaccine passports for those individuals unwilling to be vaccinated?
00:01:40.740 Opposed.
00:01:41.220 And we've been very clear from the beginning that we will not facilitate or accept vaccine passports, 0.83
00:01:45.780 and that, in fact, we regard, I believe that they would, in principle, contravene the Health Information Act
00:01:53.020 and also possibly the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act.
00:01:57.080 We also amended the Public Health Act to remove the 110-year-old power,
00:02:01.920 allowing Alberta to force people to be inoculated.
00:02:05.160 So these folks who are concerned about mandatory vaccines have nothing to be concerned about,
00:02:09.360 and there will be no vaccine passports in Alberta.
00:02:11.080 Will the provincial government act on behalf of Alberta citizens if the federal government seeks to impose such restrictions?
00:02:16.760 Yes.
00:02:17.320 So there you have it.
00:02:18.040 Jason Kenney was unequivocal in his opposition to vaccine passports.
00:02:22.600 However, a mere two months later, on September 15th, Jason Kenney announced a new set of lockdowns,
00:02:28.740 a new set of restrictions, and, yes, a vaccine passport.
00:02:31.640 So dealing with another surge in COVID that came after his, you know, open-for-the-summer marketing campaign
00:02:38.240 that kind of fell flat because it caused a huge spread in COVID,
00:02:41.420 or at least facilitated and allowed a huge spread in COVID in Alberta,
00:02:45.700 he sort of reluctantly came out and announced it.
00:02:48.560 He didn't even announce it as a vaccine passport, though he called it a restrictions exemption program,
00:02:53.400 which sounded very Orwellian.
00:02:55.060 So here is a sort of defeated-looking Jason Kenney announcing the exact opposite position
00:03:00.940 of the principled stance that he had taken just two months earlier.
00:03:03.720 Here's what that looked like.
00:03:04.680 But it has now become clear that to save lives and prevent business closures,
00:03:09.500 we must go further in encouraging vaccination and reducing the chance of infection for those who are unprotected.
00:03:16.720 That is why the government has reluctantly decided to adopt the restriction exemption program,
00:03:25.380 a proof of vaccination program for participation in certain discretionary activities
00:03:30.560 that have a higher risk of viral transmission.
00:03:34.420 No one will be compelled to get vaccinated against their wishes,
00:03:37.940 and a negative test option will be offered as an alternative.
00:03:41.920 But with unvaccinated patients overwhelming our hospitals, 0.99
00:03:46.880 this is now the only responsible choice that we have.
00:03:51.480 So there was Jason Kenney even admitting that he had obviously done a flip-flop on this issue.
00:03:57.240 And again, I think that this was just so damaging for the premier,
00:04:00.380 so upsetting to principled conservatives who, first of all,
00:04:03.120 don't want to see a vaccine passport in their province,
00:04:06.080 and second of all, just don't like the idea of a politician reneging and flipping.
00:04:09.420 And so I think that was, to many people, the final straw.