Canada’s healthcare system is broken. Vaccine Mandates make this problem worse.
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Summary
Vaccine mandates are causing a major problem in Canada's healthcare system, and it's only going to get worse. Canada's failing government-run healthcare is on life support, and heavy-handed vaccine mandates are about to make the problem a whole lot worse.
Transcript
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Canada's failing government-run healthcare is on life support, and heavy-handed vaccine mandates are about to make the problem a whole lot worse.
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I'm Candice Malcolm, and this is The Candice Malcolm Show.
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Hi everyone, thank you so much for tuning into the podcast.
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So you're probably paying close attention to the rollout of these vaccine mandates and wondering what it's going to do to our healthcare system.
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We know that throughout the pandemic, we have heard countless news stories about the number of cases and stories of individuals who have not been able to get the right treatment that they needed,
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about surgeries that have been cancelled, about people who have ended up dying because they don't get the care that they need.
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So these are the sort of unintended consequences or the second and third order impacts of COVID-19 and the pandemic.
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And like I said in the intro, things are about to get worse because of more government meddling.
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Government meddling in the first place is part of the problem in our healthcare system.
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We don't have the right allocation of scarce resources because our entire system is government-planned and centrally planned.
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And here we have more government interventions making the problem worse, forcing people who would otherwise be happy to deliver services,
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people who are trained as doctors and nurses or healthcare professionals who will not be able to go to work because of a mandate that is being enforced by the government.
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Vaccine mandates are causing a huge problem in Canada, a huge problem specifically in Canada's hospitals.
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So I'm going to read a little bit first from Tristan Hopper over in the National Post.
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He's a great writer and he has such an amusing way of putting things.
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Remember all those healthcare workers we banged pots for and spent months proclaiming as heroes.
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Under new federal vaccine mandates that Routers has called one of the strictest vaccine mandates in the world,
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any healthcare worker who refuses a COVID shot faces dismissal with no options to substitute regular testing or even opt out on account of prior COVID-19 recovery.
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So here we are, Canada taking the infamous title of one of the strictest vaccine mandates in the world.
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While implementing a heavy-handed strict mandate like this, strict measures are clearly going to have consequences.
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And one of the consequences is that a lot of people in the healthcare profession, a lot of people who are experts,
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a lot of people who understand the science, understand the pros and cons of taking the vaccine,
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have chosen for themselves that they don't want to do it.
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Upwards of 20%, roughly 20% of some healthcare professionals are not vaccinated.
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For instance, out in British Columbia, the Nurses Union says that roughly 20% of nurses are not vaccinated for COVID-19,
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which of course means that we could be losing a whole bunch of our workforce,
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a whole bunch of the people who are there to help people when they are sick because of these heavy-handed mandates.
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So the first consequence that we're seeing is that emergency rooms are already shutting their doors
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because they don't have enough staff, they don't have enough resources to stay open.
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Three BC emergency rooms shutter their doors, locals told to drive an hour away.
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So three BC emergency departments have closed due to staffing issues
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and local residents in need of medical care are being told to look elsewhere.
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According to the Vancouver Sun, Interior Health Hospitals in Ashcroft, Clearwater, and Elkford
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have either closed fully or partially due to what health authorities are causing unforeseen limited staffing availability.
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Interior Health has not provided details on what has caused the staffing shortages
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The BC Nurses Union, however, publicly voiced its opposition to BC's order to mandate vaccines
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You may remember this story over in the Globe and Mail.
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BC nurses in turmoil as province pushes mandatory COVID-19 vaccinations for health care workers.
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Over in the Globe and Mail came out on September 21st, 2021.
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One of British Columbia's largest health unions embroiled in an internal dispute over its opposition
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to mandatory COVID-19 vaccinations in the health care sector is facing a leadership crisis.
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Just days after the BC Nurses Union, with 48,000 members, came out against the province's
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mandatory vaccine order, the union announced an abrupt departure of its top official.
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So there is political turmoil over at the BC Nurses Union, but again, they oppose the vaccine
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So here it says, we cannot support any order which will serve to remove even a single nurse
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or other health care worker from the health care system at a time of severe crisis, said
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According to the union, roughly 20% of nurses are not vaccinated for COVID-19.
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By the end of September, over 100 health care workers were removed from their positions
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Vaccination will be mandatory for all workers by October 26th.
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Those who refuse to comply will be put on unpaid leave.
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Ontario health sector braces for worse staff shortages as vaccine mandates come due.
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So here we learned that hundreds of Ontario workers in hospitals and long-term care could
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be out of a job in the coming weeks because they did not get vaccinated against COVID-19,
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further complicating what advocates call a perfect storm of staff shortages.
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Ontario has not followed Quebec's lead in mandating immunization for all health care
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workers, but many hospitals have implemented their own hardline policies.
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Deadlines for workers to show proof of their shots or face unpaid leave or termination are
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For instance, just in the Waterloo, Wellington region alone, there are over 250 individual hospital
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staff who are on leave due to unwillingness to get vaccinated.
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And this is, again, happening all over the country.
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This is reported over at tnc.news on vaccinated Quebec nurses to have their license suspended
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Amid a nursing shortage in Quebec, thousands of nurses in the province could be suspended
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without pay if they refuse to get a COVID-19 vaccine.
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Roughly 15,000 health care workers could be suspended without pay beginning on October 15th,
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Additionally, the Quebec order of nurses has said it will be suspending nursing licenses
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of any nurse who is not fully vaccinated beginning this Friday.
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So, of course, that was the big news of the story that we were heading towards this deadline
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that Quebec had set for its health care workers to be vaccinated.
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But we learned this week that Quebec will push that deadline back one month until November
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So, Quebec pushes back vaccine deadline to November 15th for health care workers, despite
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repeated claims that the October 15th deadline would not be pushed back.
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We learned on Wednesday, Quebec Health Minister Christian Dubé announced he is giving health
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care workers 30 more days to get two vaccine doses, admitting that losing thousands of workers
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due to vaccine mandate will cause Quebec to run into a wall.
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The minister said workers in the health care network will now have until November 15th to get
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And so, of course, the CBC being the CBC is completely disappointed by this idea that
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the Quebec government is giving people one more month to try to encourage them to get vaccinated.
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And so this was the headline that they ran over in the CBC.
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It says, by blinking first on vaccine deadline, Quebec may have given unvaccinated health care
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So, of course, the CBC doing what they do, which is dividing Canadians and pitting us against
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Here they have divided the vaccinated against the people trying to encourage people to get
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And we're told in this sort of gloomy headline that the unvaccinated have got the upper hand.
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And here they, let me just read the first couple of paragraphs here because it's pretty
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It says, thousands of unvaccinated health care workers have been given an extra 30 days to
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get vaccine doses that have been available to them for months.
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So right off the bat, the first sentence, we are told that these people have already had
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And for some reason, Quebec is giving them another 30 days.
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Wednesday's compromise on a vaccine mandate is raising concerns.
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The Quebec government has all but squandered its leverage when it comes to pushing holdouts
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Weak, weak, weak, said Nathan Freeland, an emergency room nurse at the Lakeshore General Hospital
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The way I see it, you have a bunch of health care professionals acting unprofessionally
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and they've tested the resolve of a politician and they got their answer.
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They are obviously very, very pro-vaccine mandate.
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And they are telling the side of people who are angry at the Quebec government for not being
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more totalitarian and aggressive in their push to force people to get vaccines even against
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And just as an amusing aside, as True North broke during the election campaign, the CBC
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It does not have a mandatory vaccination policy in its offices, in its studios.
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They do not require their own staff to get vaccinated.
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And yet they love to push these stories about how terrible it is when provincial governments
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They had lots and lots of stories about how outrageous it was that the Conservative Party
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of Canada and Aaron O'Toole did not force candidates to get vaccinated.
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So they love to push this idea that everyone else should force people to get vaccinated.
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And then, of course, when it comes to their own office and their own company and the way
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they run their business, they do not require it.
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So just a little bit of hypocrisy over at the CBC.
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And, of course, the problem, of course, with this idea of like a one-size-fits-all approach
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that everyone must get vaccinated, everyone must have the exact same recourse in dealing
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with a very sort of complex medical issue that we should all have the exact same opinion,
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that we should all have the exact same treatment.
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Of course, that is problematic on so many levels.
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Everybody has a different sort of equation and calculation that they look at when they're
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I mentioned on the show the other day that I decided to get vaccinated myself, but I am
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I think that for me and my family, it made sense.
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I did research for me personally, again, and I think that everyone out there is entitled to
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But for me, when it came to the threat of either COVID, getting COVID-19, which I haven't
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had yet, the idea of getting it and some of the potential negative consequences that come
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from COVID, not just having it and the threat of dying from it, but potentially long-term
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And you weigh that against the possibility of something going sideways, something going
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wrong with the vaccine, which does seem to happen in a very small number, but still
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I weighed the two and decided that I would rather take my chances with the vaccine.
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I also wanted the ability to protect people around me.
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Like I said, my elderly parents who are also vaccinated, I want to be able to see them.
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I have two little kids and obviously they can't get vaccinated.
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So I want to try to protect myself to protect them.
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And then also just in terms of my ability to travel.
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I like to be able to jump on a plane and visit them without worrying too much about getting
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So for us, it just made sense to get vaccinated.
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However, the idea that we are going to force everybody in society to make the exact same
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decisions for themselves, you know, obviously their equation might be different.
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If you've had a negative reaction to a vaccine in the past, or if you'd prefer to have a different
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kind of proactive treatment, if you've had COVID in the past from recovery, you had the antibodies,
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or if you're not too worried about COVID, if you, if you think that you would rather get
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COVID and deal with that than deal with the potential side effects of a vaccine, that's
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And that's totally within your right in a free society to make those kinds of decisions.
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And so the more that we're creeping towards this idea that we all have to have the same
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And on top of that, you have a second layer, which is that do you really trust a big bureaucratic
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and competent government to manage the system, to have another layer of documentation to
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determine whether or not you can go to a restaurant based on what vaccine you've had, given all
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of the conflicting information that we've had over time.
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You know, we're now in a situation where some people have had mixed doses, right?
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If you took your first dose of AstraZeneca, and then they paused that and said, if you had
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AstraZeneca, go ahead and go get one of the other doses.
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And now some jurisdictions don't recognize you as being fully vaccinated.
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If you've had two different vaccinations, even though you were following public health
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advice at the time, where, you know, we're dealing with something that we don't really
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And somehow we're supposed to, again, trust the government to oversee this whole system.
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And that doesn't even get into the privacy concerns.
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And so there's just obviously so many reasons why conservatives oppose vaccine mandates.
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There are many, many more that haven't even gotten to.
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And so this decision to implement the vaccine mandate in hospitals to say that if you don't
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have the vaccine, that you are going to lose your job, that you're going to get fired,
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you're going to put on unpaid leave, punishing you until you change your mind or what, go find
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This just makes the problem so much worse because we already have huge shortages in Canada's
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We have a government run system, a terrible way to allocate scarce resources and scarce goods.
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If that hospital is really busy and overrun, it's not like you can just choose to go to
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And this idea that we are making our scare system artificially even more scarce by firing
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people who have the skills and the capacity needed to help, but because they don't conform
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ideologically, you are going to make them sit at home.
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Again, makes this problem in our healthcare system so much worse.
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So this is just the worst time to implement a vaccine mandate because COVID-19's deadly
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And this is in terms of delays, in terms of postponed surgeries and so on.
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More than 2,000 patients in Canada died while waiting for medical care in 2020.
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According to a report, at least 2,367 patients across Canada died on a waiting list for medical
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According to a report, the results were obtained by a think tank called Second Street, which
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used responses from public data and freedom of information requests submitted to provincial
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It counted patients who died while waiting for surgery, diagnostic scans, and appointment
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And, you know, this is, of course, this is incredibly tragic, but we've been hearing
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these kinds of stories throughout the pandemic in Canada.
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So back in March 2021, there was a story over in CTV that said this, nearly 354,000 surgeries,
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procedures, consultations were postponed due to COVID-19, according to a report.
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So these figures were released by that same group, SecondStreet, secondstreet.org, which
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drew its information from freedom of information requests submitted in June 2020 to health departments
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So that all just happened in the first few months of the pandemic.
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It's so wild to imagine how much COVID has just slowed our healthcare system to a halt.
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And in terms of any other illness aside from COVID, it is a secondary concern.
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And because so many of the scarce resources were devoted towards helping COVID patients,
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One, doctor warns that 200 surgeries a day are being cancelled in Saskatchewan alone.
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Saskatchewan has been forced to cancel 200 surgeries a day as it tries to combat the rising
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numbers of cases, according to Dr. Hassan Masri, an intensive care specialist who works at
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Royal University Hospital and St. Paul's Hospital in Saskatoon.
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He expects the cancellations will continue, as will the ramifications on people's health.
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So we clearly have a problem when it comes to socialized medicine in Canada.
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And instead of taking a pause, trying to determine how we can make our healthcare system better,
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how we can improve perhaps the design, the structure, how we can make it work better for
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everyone, instead of that, we are in a situation, we're criticizing healthcare and talking about
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It just doesn't happen, as we saw in the last federal election.
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As soon as Aaron O'Toole even mentioned the idea of having more private delivery, private
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care, he was completely demonized, and the Liberals ran an attack machine backed by the
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Liberal media, backed by the legacy media, backed by the CBC, which made Aaron O'Toole
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just completely stop in his tracks and stop talking about it.
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So we can't have a real conversation about the issue in Canada.
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And rather than try to at least improve the system that we have, we have this harsh, heavy-handed,
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ideologically driven mandate that will just make the system so much worse.
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I'm Candice Malcolm, and this is The Candice Malcolm Show.