Juno News - December 08, 2020


What will it take for the government to re-open businesses？


Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

181.59946

Word count

629

Sentence count

26


Summary

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

Health officials have shut down hundreds of small stores across the country because of a coronavirus pandemic. The problem is, they don t know what to do about it. They don't know how to stop it. And they don't have the answers.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 How long will politicians and public health officials stick with restrictions
00:00:09.180 that are so obviously unpopular and so obviously a bad idea doing little to help deal with the
00:00:16.080 pandemic? I am talking most specifically about the very bizarre restrictions shutting down
00:00:21.920 small retailers in different jurisdictions across the country. We've seen these bizarre
00:00:26.840 scenes playing out in Manitoba where, good grief, there are stores that they have actual aisles that
00:00:32.800 are roped off. Can't buy these products as if you're in Soviet Russia or something decades ago.
00:00:38.520 In Ontario, Toronto, Peel region, similar things playing out in that small retailers that only
00:00:44.080 would really have two or three or four customers in them at the most at a given time, they are
00:00:48.980 forced to shut down. Now the other week a whole bunch of retailers stepped forward and signed an
00:00:54.340 open letter for Ontario Premier Doug Ford. 50 major retailers, big brands, banding together and
00:01:00.420 saying, we demand to be able to be allowed to reopen for the Christmas shopping season based on the
00:01:06.640 evidence. Well, what is this evidence? I reported on the front page of the Toronto Sun that the volume
00:01:11.700 of spread that is related to retail, 0.1% of coronavirus case transmissions, just about 200
00:01:19.740 cases, are confirmed to be traced back to retail. And guess what? That also includes the staff hanging
00:01:26.020 around together in the stock room before and after the store has even opened, individuals being in
00:01:31.340 prolonged close contact. When you talk about the number of people who have actually gotten
00:01:35.800 coronavirus from others in these brief passing by each other in an aisle in a store, it seems like
00:01:40.980 the cases are, well, pretty close to 0%. I mean, it is a rounding error. If any of them have even been
00:01:47.880 proven to be related to these sort of chance fleeting encounters. Meanwhile, the Canadian
00:01:52.520 Federation of Independent Business, they stepped forward and they had a proposal for Doug Ford.
00:01:56.240 They said, please let us reopen these small stores with just three customers in them at a time. We'll
00:02:02.040 follow all the protocols, mask wearing, physical distancing, and just three people because that
00:02:07.380 will be our lifeline. And like I said, how many stores have you gone to before where, let's be honest,
00:02:13.220 there aren't ever more than three people in them in the first place? Well, guess what? New
00:02:17.720 polling numbers show the overwhelming vast majority of Canadians support small retailers being
00:02:23.420 reopened. 93% of respondents in a poll that was commissioned by the Canadian Federation of
00:02:29.860 Independent Business, they want small retailers to be allowed to stay open. And guess what? More than
00:02:35.380 three quarters of them say they feel safer in a small retailer than they do at a big box store.
00:02:41.840 Come on, we've all had these experiences the past few weeks in Costco and Shoppers Drug Mart where
00:02:46.580 you're cheek by jowl with people. You're in there just packed to the rafters with other individuals
00:02:51.180 and you go, what? This store is open and this store is quote unquote safe. But if I go to a smaller store
00:02:57.820 and there's only a few of us allowed in there, it's not safe. The facts, the evidence all say there is
00:03:03.540 no reason for these restrictions. They don't seem to be really doing anything to deal with actually
00:03:08.420 beating back the pandemic. And they're just putting businesses out of business and they're not
00:03:13.120 popular. The folks don't support it. Sadly, we have seen though a lot of politicians, a lot of public
00:03:18.000 health officials, when they get into a situation like that, boxed into a corner, well, they just
00:03:22.660 double down on these awful ideas, which quite frankly are nothing more than the triumph of ignorance.