Juno News - October 05, 2022


Why do lockdown leaders keep getting re-elected？

Mentioned
Francois Legault Doug Ford Justin Trudeau Eric Moy COVID-19
Canadian media freak out over new Italian Prime Minister Poilievre and Trudeau spar over planned carbon tax increases

Episode Stats


Length

8 minutes

Words per minute

157.35

Word count

1,297

Sentence count

95

Harmful content

Toxicity

5

sentences flagged

Hate speech

3

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In this episode, I discuss the results of the recent Quebec election, and the implications for the future of Canadian politics in Quebec and the rest of the country. I also talk about the importance of vaccinating our children, and why it's a good idea.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 I don't do a lot of Quebec politics talk on this show for a couple of reasons.
00:00:04.580 I think the general one is that it is its own animal, the politics of Quebec,
00:00:09.540 and in a way that isn't always directly analogous to the politics,
00:00:13.340 or isn't really ever directly analogous to the politics outside of Quebec.
00:00:18.980 This election, I was making a little bit more of an effort to stay apprised of what was happening
00:00:24.040 because of the emergence of the Quebec Conservative Party.
00:00:27.220 But as we saw, and I mean as we kind of feared, it didn't really make a difference.
00:00:34.080 On the popular vote, the Parti Conservatoire de Quebec had just under 13% of the vote,
00:00:39.680 which is quite significant, but that amounts to zero seats.
00:00:42.960 You take that and compare it, say, to the Parti Quebecois, 14.6% of the vote, three seats,
00:00:49.360 or Quebec Solidaire, 15.4% with 11 seats.
00:00:53.600 The Liberals even, 14.37%, and they got 21 seats.
00:00:58.560 So distribution is everything in first past the post.
00:01:02.080 So all of these parties that weren't the CAC basically had a similar enough vote share,
00:01:08.540 but for the Conservatives, it was too heavily centralised in a couple of key strongholds.
00:01:13.360 But nevertheless, Eric 2M is staying on board and will continue to lead the party.
00:01:17.800 And it really is, I mean, apart from the Liberals, which are Liberal,
00:01:21.640 the only party speaking up for English language rights in Quebec,
00:01:25.980 and I think in general for a form of conservatism that isn't rooted in Quebec separatism.
00:01:31.980 But I want to take a different look at this thing and talk about Francois Legault,
00:01:36.540 who has 90 seats now under this.
00:01:40.140 90 seats, 40% of the vote.
00:01:41.960 This is a super majority.
00:01:45.440 And if we go back just a year, a year and a bit,
00:01:48.340 Francois Legault was the guy presiding over the strictest COVID regime in Canada.
00:01:54.820 This was a guy who was threatening to tax the unvaccinated, to fine the unvaccinated.
00:02:00.500 A guy who banned the unvaccinated from shopping in big box stores.
00:02:04.860 Remember this photo that went around, I think it was of a Walmart,
00:02:07.700 where the unvaccinated had to wait in this little vestibule,
00:02:11.800 like some dirty animal under quarantine,
00:02:14.920 while someone else went and got their stuff for them,
00:02:17.260 because they weren't allowed to buy non-essential things.
00:02:20.560 That's what Francois Legault did.
00:02:22.560 Or people that were harassed and fined for walking outside their homes after,
00:02:27.720 I think it was 8 p.m. at one point, and then 10 p.m.
00:02:30.420 But the guy who put in place a COVID curfew.
00:02:33.160 So Quebec presides over the most restrictive COVID measures in North America,
00:02:39.620 and in some respects the world, and he gets a super majority.
00:02:45.960 You go back to the last Ontario election, less than a couple of months ago,
00:02:50.940 very similar thing.
00:02:51.900 Doug Ford, very strict COVID protocols in this country.
00:02:55.500 Ontario had the vaccine passports.
00:02:57.380 Ontario had the lockdowns.
00:02:59.140 Ontario had the stay-at-home order.
00:03:00.740 Ontario had, for a time, the granting to police the right to question people
00:03:05.400 who were out of their homes.
00:03:06.800 And Doug Ford gets handily re-elected with another majority.
00:03:12.480 Doug Ford, elected after putting in COVID restrictions,
00:03:17.460 elected after taking people's freedoms.
00:03:19.860 Francois Legault, elected after taking people's freedoms.
00:03:23.760 Justin Trudeau, and he's a bit of a different case,
00:03:26.740 as we've talked about on the show,
00:03:27.780 in the last federal election, just over one year ago,
00:03:31.120 he was trying to push more restrictions.
00:03:33.920 He was arguing for more restrictions.
00:03:36.240 I want to ban the unvaccinated from the public service. 1.00
00:03:38.780 I want to keep the unvaccinated off planes. 1.00
00:03:41.380 I want to separate these dirty, racist, misogynist, unvaccinated types. 1.00
00:03:45.660 And he wins. 1.00
00:03:46.580 Not a majority, but he wins.
00:03:48.560 So there's a question in all of this that must be asked.
00:03:54.220 Do people like lockdowns?
00:03:56.760 Do people like politicians who lock them down and take away their liberties?
00:04:01.840 I don't think the answer is yes, but I also don't think the answer is no.
00:04:06.340 I think that the sad reality is that this issue is not a deal breaker.
00:04:10.840 And I'll give you two fundamental reasons why I think that is.
00:04:15.980 The first is that when people feel they have no legitimate alternative,
00:04:21.400 their vote choice becomes this thing that they just do.
00:04:26.200 So the federal election in 2021 is a great example of this.
00:04:30.320 All five party leaders came together after the one debate.
00:04:34.500 I think it was actually before the French debate.
00:04:36.300 And they recorded this PSA.
00:04:37.900 We're all in this together.
00:04:40.560 We've come so far in the fight against COVID.
00:04:42.820 It's time to finish this pandemic for good.
00:04:45.100 So get vaccinated.
00:04:46.480 If you know someone who hasn't, talk to them.
00:04:49.020 For our kids, for our communities, for our economy.
00:04:52.540 It's how we get forward together.
00:04:54.600 Vaccines are safe and effective for use.
00:04:57.780 Vaccines are the best way for you to protect yourself,
00:05:00.620 your family and your community.
00:05:02.260 So get vaccinated.
00:05:03.940 Let's fight COVID-19 together.
00:05:05.600 We all agree getting vaccinated is the way forward.
00:05:24.520 We're all in agreement.
00:05:25.940 This is not a partisan issue.
00:05:27.380 So please get vaccinated.
00:05:28.500 We're united and it's time to get the shot.
00:05:32.240 Vaccines save lives.
00:05:33.940 They're how we're going to beat COVID.
00:05:35.680 And it's time for everyone to do it.
00:05:37.880 Get the shot. 0.99
00:05:39.140 Get the shot. 0.98
00:05:40.720 Now you may think, what's the big deal?
00:05:42.260 Five party leaders, a couple of them have now been deposed.
00:05:45.600 But nevertheless, five party leaders come up and say everyone should get vaccinated.
00:05:49.220 Well, it means that it didn't really look, it didn't really look like there was anyone else
00:05:55.640 speaking up for people that said, well, you know, maybe I'm okay with the vaccine,
00:06:00.160 but I'm not okay with this coercion.
00:06:02.000 I'm not okay with the mandates.
00:06:03.280 I'm not okay with firing people.
00:06:05.300 That Team Canada approach just completely made it look like there was no daylight between the
00:06:11.360 Liberals and the Conservatives and the Bloc Québécois and the Greens and the NDP, at least on the COVID file.
00:06:18.640 Now, obviously you fast forward now and the Conservative position is much different and much better than it was back then.
00:06:26.100 But at the time, only Maxime Bernier and the People's Party of Canada, who, as we know, weren't in the debate
00:06:31.140 and didn't have seats in Parliament and still don't have seats in Parliament,
00:06:34.240 but only they were talking about this issue from what I would just broadly characterize as the libertarian perspective.
00:06:42.240 So I think this is important.
00:06:44.000 If you're a voter in Ontario, say, and you're saying, well, you know, I normally lean Conservative,
00:06:50.400 but I really don't like those lockdowns that Doug Ford did.
00:06:53.960 Yeah, I can vote for the Ontario Party, but they're not going to win a seat.
00:06:57.100 I can vote for New Blue.
00:06:58.060 They're not going to win a seat.
00:06:59.300 And then I'm stuck with the Liberal or the NDP, who would have locked me down just as much.
00:07:04.640 And I talked to a lot of people like that.
00:07:06.620 Now, many of them ended up staying home, but a lot of them just said, yeah, okay, fine.
00:07:11.060 I guess I'll vote Conservative because it doesn't really matter.
00:07:14.100 There's just this resignation that this is the way politics is, and there isn't really another option.
00:07:20.460 And in Quebec, very similar.
00:07:22.040 Now, obviously, you throw the language divide in and other ideological fault lines in Quebec,
00:07:26.160 but a lot of people that felt, yeah, well, we were going to get locked down no matter what.
00:07:30.760 There really isn't a non-lockdown candidate.
00:07:34.740 So we just accept and unnecessarily settle because we don't believe, and in many cases, rightfully so,
00:07:43.260 that there are other options, that there are better options.
00:07:45.720 We're going to take a minute now.