Juno News - August 15, 2020


We're more divided than ever


Episode Stats

Length

3 minutes

Words per Minute

205.56512

Word Count

756

Sentence Count

36


Summary


Transcript

00:00:00.000 I've been offering a lot of commentary on the return to schools question here on True North,
00:00:09.640 on radio programs, in my Sun Post media papers. And my general opinion is that all of the research
00:00:14.880 out there suggests that it is safe to send kids back to school. Yes, wash your hands,
00:00:19.480 practice distancing, older kids wear a mask, but all the research tells us that kids,
00:00:24.340 they are less likely to get it, they don't get it that severely, and they don't even seem to
00:00:28.000 transmitted to adults all that much. Just the other day, reports out from Australia,
00:00:32.180 out from the Royal Pediatric Society, suggesting all of this. So the facts really indicate
00:00:36.460 things are okay to head in that direction. Now, I know people are going to have different opinions,
00:00:41.120 and that's okay. I got an interesting reader response, though, to one piece I wrote where
00:00:46.100 a lady was outraged at my view, I think it's a pretty moderate view, and she called me a psychopath
00:00:50.800 for suggesting that children should return to school, that I wanted to subject them all to
00:00:54.920 imminent death, and so forth. I would normally never bother you with what one person emailed me
00:00:58.600 to complain about something I've done. I'm more than happy for people to disagree, agree with me,
00:01:02.920 say whatever you want, email, tweet, whatever you want to me. You put yourself out there when you
00:01:06.940 offer public commentary, and I have no qualms with people sending me disagreeing emails. But
00:01:12.000 I found it really interesting that this lady was so frustrated and so angry at an opinion that I know
00:01:18.480 the one that I have is shared by many people. I don't know how many, 40%, 50%, 60% of Canadians,
00:01:24.920 but she had a lot of passion in her frustrations with me, and I think she was otherwise probably a
00:01:29.660 pretty articulate woman. But that got me reflecting on the idea that, man, we are living in such
00:01:35.540 divided times right now, almost more than ever. You know, we were hashtagging, we're all in this
00:01:40.920 together back in March and April, when really the only question was, you know, what are we going to do
00:01:45.160 with our time? What sort of Netflix are we going to watch as we're all doing the stay-at-home thing?
00:01:49.240 Absolutely everything is shut down. But now we're having a lot of very interesting public
00:01:54.740 conversations about things we have never had discussions about before. The total shutdown of
00:02:01.080 society, when to reopen the economy, what things are safe to reopen, how should people be able to move
00:02:07.040 around freely, you know, basic freedom of movement questions. Navdeep Bain's floating the idea that the
00:02:12.000 federal government is considering whether or not to make the vaccine mandatory or not.
00:02:15.760 We've never had mandatory vaccines before. I don't think that's going to go over so well. Yes,
00:02:20.820 kids have to get vaccinated if they want to go into the school system. Most people do. I have my kids
00:02:25.660 doing that. I support all of that. But we don't make it mandatory for an entire population. So there's
00:02:30.680 going to be a lot of disagreement over that. And then even very just basic disagreements over whether or
00:02:35.580 not kids can go to school, whether or not this or that location should stay open. And I think,
00:02:40.880 yes, you can look at political lines and say, okay, left-wing people are more likely to think
00:02:46.480 this, right-wing people more likely to think that. But it's not clean. You can't tell based on the way
00:02:52.000 a person votes or what part of a country they live in and so forth, how they're going to view these big
00:02:56.920 questions. And I think that's okay. And I think it's to be expected because we are living in such an
00:03:04.320 unprecedented time. We are facing such unprecedented situations. And the questions really just are so
00:03:12.040 fundamentally about freedom of movement and what we can do with our basic liberties that it is no
00:03:18.400 shock that we're going to have these disagreements. So I don't have a problem with that. There's some
00:03:23.280 people who want to sort of bludgeon everyone into having the same views, but we're all trying to sort
00:03:28.120 of work it out, feel it out by ourselves based on our own unique situations. The only challenge is that
00:03:33.520 freedom of opinion we have out there, boy, it's making a lot of these conversations and a lot
00:03:38.140 of progress on these files that much more difficult.