Juno News - April 25, 2020


What is the government's plan to get us back to normal？

Topics
social determinants of health social isolation morbidity
Mentioned
Justin Trudeau
The government lags behind the private sector The RCMP did a commendable job in Nova Scotia

Episode Stats


Length

6 minutes

Words per minute

204.67

Word count

1,378

Sentence count

71

Harmful content

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Justin Trudeau's plan to get Canada back to a "normalcy" is a good one, but what are the other things we need to be doing to get us back to the "new normal" that we're currently living in?

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 Every day, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau holds a press conference where he updates Canadians
00:00:10.760 on what the government has been doing in response to the coronavirus crisis.
00:00:14.520 But one of the things that seems to be missing from these press conferences is Justin Trudeau's
00:00:18.320 plan for getting Canada back on its feet.
00:00:21.040 What is his and his cabinet's plan to get us back to normal, or whatever that new normal
00:00:25.240 is going to be, and how are they going to tackle the challenges that we currently face?
00:00:29.320 Now I wanted to make this video because it's a really important point we have to ponder
00:00:32.960 as a country.
00:00:33.960 However, a lot of this discussion seems to revolve strictly around economic factors and
00:00:38.480 really placing economic factors versus mortality.
00:00:41.460 It's a little bit more complicated than that, and I hope we can flesh out some of these issues
00:00:45.100 to make that conversation a bit more fruitful and a bit more useful.
00:00:48.560 So the first place I want to look is here.
00:00:50.860 This is a story out of BC that on the face of it seems very positive.
00:00:54.080 BC restaurants begin planning for dine-in instead of take-out.
00:00:57.140 And you think, okay great, now we're going to get to some semblance of normalcy or whatever
00:01:01.980 new normal that's going to be, we're going to slowly start getting there.
00:01:05.600 But if you scroll down just a bit in the story, it says that about 180 to 190,000 people are
00:01:11.060 presently out of work who work in this industry.
00:01:13.660 That is a huge number of people.
00:01:15.840 Just below, 15 to 25% of restaurants may close permanently as a result of the coronavirus
00:01:22.060 crisis because they simply do not have the money to stay open and a lot of the businesses
00:01:27.100 simply are just going to go bankrupt as a result.
00:01:29.780 Now this is an economic factor and economic factors are definitely important to consider.
00:01:35.460 We're spending a lot of money and it's something that we're going to have to do.
00:01:38.420 We're going to have to spend money to get the economy and get the country back on its feet.
00:01:41.900 But money is not the entire story.
00:01:44.280 I want to talk to you about something called the social determinants of health.
00:01:48.060 Now these are the things that we don't normally calculate because they're very difficult to
00:01:52.220 quantify.
00:01:53.220 You cannot often put a cost and the cost or dollar value you'd like to put is very different
00:01:58.380 from person to person.
00:02:00.060 These are the things we need to keep in mind and the type of plan that I would like to
00:02:03.400 see the government coming up with on how we're going to get Canadians back to, again, some 0.97
00:02:07.920 sort of normal life or back to something different because we cannot simply sustain the current
00:02:12.940 regime that we're doing.
00:02:14.280 We cannot isolate or stay home for the next 18 months until we get a vaccine for this
00:02:18.760 virus.
00:02:19.760 So I want to go through a couple of these obvious ones with you and then talk about something
00:02:23.400 else.
00:02:24.400 So now one of the things that most Canadians are obviously facing as a social determinant
00:02:28.580 of health is isolation.
00:02:30.200 So right here, social isolation is a very big one.
00:02:33.180 People are social animals.
00:02:34.100 We need to have conversations.
00:02:35.580 We need to see other people.
00:02:36.980 A number of reports coming out of China, France, Italy show that domestic violence is up,
00:02:42.200 divorces are up, and isolation, forced isolation in a small confined space is not healthy and
00:02:48.260 is not something we can sustain in the long term.
00:02:50.560 It's going to have health consequences that are maybe not readily apparent, but that are
00:02:54.700 nonetheless very important and something we need to consider.
00:02:57.920 There's also hunger and in that nutrition and malnutrition, people may not be eating or
00:03:03.140 taking care of themselves in such a way that they normally do or normally should be.
00:03:07.940 And that's obviously because we're all stuck at home, we can't really go anywhere.
00:03:11.520 And even if you want to go for a jog or something like that, oftentimes you're discouraged.
00:03:15.720 And especially by the social media mob that really is desperate to call these snitch lines
00:03:21.160 as I call them to really just snitch on their neighbors who want to get some exercise or want
00:03:26.560 to leave their house.
00:03:27.940 There's also housing in general, access to care.
00:03:30.940 I mean, right now, most of the medical services, the non-critical medical services are suspended.
00:03:37.580 Many people cannot see the doctor or if they can, then it's by conference call.
00:03:40.940 Again, this is going to have health outcomes for people down the road.
00:03:45.000 It's not maybe going to be apparent what exactly caused these health conditions, but it's obviously
00:03:49.920 clear that if you're sitting at home, you're not taking care of yourself, you're not able
00:03:52.640 to do the things that you normally do.
00:03:54.640 Your mood is affected that you're going to have a health outcome.
00:03:57.840 And that brings me to the overall point that almost no one is discussing.
00:04:01.580 And that's why here at True North, we're all about discussing a number of things, a
00:04:04.920 number of issues that are just not being discussed, especially in the mainstream media.
00:04:08.760 And that is the difference in morbidity to mortality.
00:04:12.800 Whenever we have the discussion on a plan going forward, it always revolves around the
00:04:17.460 economic factors and the mortality.
00:04:19.960 So we're going to open up the economy.
00:04:21.600 How many people are going to get killed?
00:04:23.460 That's really the basis for discussion.
00:04:25.280 But no one is talking about the morbidity.
00:04:28.440 Now for reference, morbidity is the, right here, morbidity is the physical or psychological
00:04:32.920 state that's anything out of the norm.
00:04:34.660 It's something that's going to cause a health effect or health outcome for Canadians.
00:04:38.960 It's really in line and similar to the social determinants of health, but morbidity is something
00:04:43.820 that is often tracked or at least discussed in a bit of a more detailed fashion than just
00:04:48.660 the social determinants of health because those are very, very broad.
00:04:52.320 So one of the things again, that's important is that people's health outcome is going to
00:04:56.860 be affected by how they're forced to react or how they are behaving right now during the,
00:05:03.240 during the quarantine, during the stay home orders.
00:05:05.540 Now how does this connect to the economic factors?
00:05:08.940 It's not really about money.
00:05:10.360 It's not about large corporations or billionaires.
00:05:12.900 It's about the restaurateur who is now going to lose his business and possibly his home
00:05:17.740 because of the coronavirus where he simply can't get any customers and he's not able
00:05:22.440 to stay afloat.
00:05:24.140 It's about the single mother who owns a salon who may be forced to shut down for a year,
00:05:29.300 especially if we keep social distancing rules and prevent certain businesses, certain occupations
00:05:34.180 from getting close to one another.
00:05:35.720 I mean, you can't really get a haircut if you have to stay six feet away from another
00:05:39.500 person.
00:05:40.500 And so again, the economic factors are important to look at, but more so we have to see what
00:05:45.840 economic factors are going to affect social determinants of health and how is that going
00:05:50.500 to affect the morbidity?
00:05:52.140 The entire discussion has to revolve not just around how many people are going to die right
00:05:56.480 now from the coronavirus, but how many people will have negative health incomes and how many
00:06:00.640 people may actually die or God forbid, kill themselves.
00:06:04.300 There was a report out of LA, I believe, where a suicide hotline received 8,000% increase
00:06:10.420 and 8,000% increase in calls.
00:06:13.160 So it's really something we need to balance.
00:06:15.320 And this is something that we're not seeing from the government.
00:06:17.720 There's a lot of economic plans.
00:06:19.700 They're often short term.
00:06:21.200 They're often discussing a number of the financial issues.
00:06:23.520 So there's the CERB that's giving Canadians to about $2,000 up to $2,000 every four weeks,
00:06:28.460 but there's almost nothing on morbidity.
00:06:30.520 And this is something that we'd like to see from the government, something that is imperative
00:06:34.100 that we have a discussion on and something that we plan for when we eventually move to
00:06:37.800 reopen.
00:06:38.800 So for True North, I'm Sam Ashkenazi.
00:06:41.280 Please stay safe, wash your hands, and we'll see you again next time.
00:06:43.760 Take care.