Juno News - What does ＂taking the advice of public health officials＂ exactly mean？

00:00:00.000 I gotta say, if there's one line that's grating my ears more and more now as I hear it come from

00:00:10.340 Canadian politicians, it's their continual go-to refrain of how they are taking the advice of

00:00:16.460 public health officials. It's the line that they roll out whenever they bring in new restrictions

00:00:21.200 or whether they continue lockdowns after they were supposed to end, or they say, oh no, that 28-day

00:00:26.360 period, it's actually not coming to an end, we're going to renew it for another period. Those times

00:00:30.400 when they always roll out that line as their sort of excuse, this is why we are doing this, and one

00:00:36.080 may not question that. And I imagine I'm not the only one who feels some frustration at that go-to

00:00:41.220 line of theirs, in part because I want to know, what does it mean? What do you mean when you just say,

00:00:46.720 we're taking the advice of our medical officials? Now, I think most of us are smart enough to include

00:00:51.020 into the fact that it's kind of their insurance claim if things go awry. They go, oh, well, it

00:00:55.860 wasn't me. I didn't come up with this. I know I'm the premier, the mayor, what have you, but I'm not

00:00:59.960 responsible. It's those guys. It's the medical officers. They're responsible. I imagine there's a bit

00:01:04.440 of a liability component to it as well. But I also wonder to what degree are they just taking this

00:01:10.360 advice, hook, line, and sinker, and not pushing back, not asking critical questions, not asking

00:01:17.040 follow-up questions, or even at some point saying, look, thank you very much for your presentation and

00:01:21.180 your assessment and your game plan for what we should do, but just so you know, we're not going to

00:01:25.640 totally shut down retail outlets. We're going to, oh, I don't know, we're going to take the Canadian

00:01:29.020 Federation of Independent Businesses' very modest request that says small retailers can stay open

00:01:33.940 to three customers at a time, no more than three, and we're going to make that work. So that's what

00:01:38.500 we're going to do, and please, public health official, take what I've just said right now, and then

00:01:42.280 go work out a game plan for that to happen. Has there ever been a time like that where our elected

00:01:47.780 representatives are actually managing the officials as opposed to those officials, the public servants,

00:01:53.320 managing the politicians? Because it sure seems like the latter is taking place. I spoke recently

00:01:59.420 to Lieutenant Colonel David Redmond, retired from the Canadian Forces, and after his time in the

00:02:03.400 Forces, he ran Alberta's Emergency Management Office a number of years ago, and he talked about how the

00:02:08.620 original game plan is not for the public health official to become the person basically in charge

00:02:14.820 of everything during the time of a pandemic. They play an important role for sure, but they're

00:02:19.800 they're sort of one part of all that, one spoke in the wheel, because there are so many other factors

00:02:25.560 that need to be taken into consideration. And then there's a leadership person, emergency management

00:02:30.540 official, or hopefully just the elected representative, the person who we've elected to be in charge,

00:02:35.620 who listens to a whole variety of top experts and then makes the decision based on all of that.

00:02:42.320 And I think as we step away from the pandemic, as it recedes in the months ahead, and we start doing

00:02:49.140 more postmortems on what happened, I think more and more people are going to be looking back

00:02:53.320 at those pandemic guidebooks that were written by the federal government and the provinces that said,

00:02:57.920 this is the way we were supposed to do things. It's kind of a very maddening experience to actually

00:03:03.120 read those documents as I did recently, because you realize, oh, we weren't really supposed to do it

00:03:09.140 this way. So why did we? I think a lot of people are going to be asking those questions, and they're

00:03:14.500 going to be asking those politicians, why did you just always throw up your hands and say, well,

00:03:18.580 all I'm doing is following exactly what I'm told to do by these health officials.

Juno News - February 27, 2021