Juno News - August 11, 2022


Will Trudeau be held to account for his handling of covid？

Mentioned
Sean Carl Hinkson
Reality Check： Why is housing unaffordable？ Too much government Poilievre continues to trigger the media

Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

156.7

Word count

704

Sentence count

39


Summary

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

In this episode, we discuss the Supreme Court of Canada's ruling in the B.C. v. government case regarding proof of vaccination in public schools, and the challenges faced by the Canadian courts in dealing with the issue.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Do you think there's going to be some kind of accountability down the road from the government?
00:00:06.040 You know, you know, it's happy we're trying to do it through you're trying to do it through the courts, but you think we'll see some change maybe at the ballot box.
00:00:14.860 Do you think there's going to be any kind of accountability?
00:00:19.820 Well, I guess ultimate accountability is at the ballot box.
00:00:22.280 We are optimistic that we will see some accountability in court.
00:00:26.680 As you know, obviously, the process is still unfolding.
00:00:29.100 So we're all, you know, just going through that process and being patient and we'll see where that takes us.
00:00:33.780 But I'm optimistic that this in conjunction with several other things, you know, hopefully might get people a different result.
00:00:41.200 Yeah.
00:00:42.860 Sean, Carl?
00:00:43.780 I mean, there's a real opportunity here for the Canadian courts to, again, you know, to step up and take and deal with this issue and not simply take a deferential bow to the federal government.
00:01:06.240 It's such a, it's a complicated issue.
00:01:12.880 But that's not a reason to just rely on what the government says is being true, because the government says there's an emergency because the government says it has to do this.
00:01:21.920 This is an opportunity for real scrutiny and it's an opportunity to test more thoroughly our Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and particularly with regard to Section 1 of that.
00:01:34.060 You know, it's a young constitution.
00:01:37.260 Canada's constitution has been in existence since 1982.
00:01:40.020 We're not talking about the US constitution or the type of constitutional law that might be in the UK and old democracies like that.
00:01:50.240 There's a real, real moment here for, on the widest level, for the Canadian judiciary to look at this and to reassure Canadians that this kind of casual health-based discrimination isn't something that can take root in Canada.
00:02:09.160 I hope they take that very, very seriously and not show deference.
00:02:16.700 I mean, certainly there are, we've seen some examples recently.
00:02:20.140 I mean, I've been sitting in the Supreme Court of BC, listening to the Chief Justice there, who's due to make a hand down a decision in relation to proof of vaccination more widely in British Columbia.
00:02:33.060 And certainly some of the language that Chief Justice Hinkson was using in British Columbia was encouraging insofar as it was clear that he understood the issues and wasn't just going to take, wasn't just going to defer to government.
00:02:46.400 He wasn't just going to, you know, accept what they were saying.
00:02:50.000 And he asked some difficult questions and made some interesting, interesting statements there.
00:02:56.720 And hopefully there's something, something good comes out of that.
00:02:59.480 I think we'd like to see our case be heard.
00:03:05.440 We'd like the government, the judge who hears the, if there is, you know, there's going to be an argument around whether this issue is moot or not.
00:03:13.000 We'd like the judge who hears that case to exercise his or her discretion, that this is of such public importance that they want to hear the case and the actual, the core issues and the merits and go ahead with the hearing.
00:03:26.400 And that will give Canadians an opportunity to hear it.
00:03:29.340 It'll give the government an opportunity to explain its thinking rather than try to push it under the core of the room.
00:03:37.600 And justify it too, right?
00:03:39.580 Yeah.
00:03:40.980 I mean, that's...
00:03:41.920 Sorry, Sean, I want to echo something Carl just said.
00:03:45.760 I think it's, it is, it is a very critical opportunity.
00:03:48.540 And quite frankly, I think that difficult moments in our political history like this are the best opportunities to decide very complicated and difficult cases, because it's the point in time where people need the most guidance.
00:04:03.720 And it's likely the point in time where the government needs the most scrutiny, quite frankly, because it's, moments of crisis breed a lot of uncertainty and they breed a lot of panic.
00:04:17.340 And those are, frankly, the conditions in which we see a lot of sweeping measures come into place.
00:04:21.580 And I couldn't imagine a more appropriate time and place to consider the constitutionality of these types of public health rationales than right now.