Juno News - February 27, 2021What does ＂taking the advice of public health officials＂ exactly mean？
Episode Stats
Words per minute
206.70335
Summary
In the wake of the Black Plague pandemic, many are questioning the actions of our elected representatives. Are they listening to the advice of public health officials, or are they just taking the line the government gives them? What does it mean when they say, "We're taking advice of our medical officials"?
Transcript
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.