The Candice Malcolm Show - Canada’s totalitarian approach to COVID (Ft. Dr. Julie Ponesse)

00:00:00.000 What did the COVID pandemic and the government's clumsy, heavy-handed reaction to it expose about

00:00:05.340 the weaknesses in our society? My guest today describes it as a pandemic of coercion and

00:00:10.400 compliance. I'm Candice Malcolm, and this is The Candice Malcolm Show.

00:00:24.680 Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for joining the program. So as you know, we've been very critical

00:00:28.900 of the government's reaction to COVID. It exposed so much about the weaknesses of our society.

00:00:34.280 First and foremost, it exposed the frailty of Canada's government-run healthcare system.

00:00:39.180 We didn't have the capacity, the flexibility, the innovation, or the robustness to handle a novel

00:00:44.440 virus that disproportionately impacted the very old, the very weak, and the very sick. Our reaction

00:00:50.880 to this virus was totalitarian, and I don't mean that to sound hyperbolic. I mean it definitionally.

00:00:56.940 It was total. It was all-encompassing. It demanded complete compliance and submission to a centralized

00:01:02.280 government. That is, after all, the definition of totalitarian. So that meant that for long

00:01:06.880 stretches of time, we shut down our entire society, a decision that disproportionately impacted small 0.97

00:01:12.300 children, teenagers, young adults, families, entrepreneurs, business owners, and generally

00:01:16.940 independent-minded Canadians. But healthcare wasn't the only fault line that was exposed during COVID.

00:01:21.760 We saw a colossal failure in leadership across the board, in politics, in government, at all levels

00:01:27.340 of government, the media, big business, and as my guest on the show today experienced firsthand

00:01:32.040 in academia, the universities. So my guest on the show today says that we are living through a

00:01:37.020 pandemic of coercion and compliance. She was very public about being fired from her position at

00:01:41.860 Western and has written a tremendous book called My Choice on the Ethics of Force Vaccination.

00:01:47.620 So I'm very pleased today to be joined by Dr. Julie Panessi. Julie, welcome to the program. Thank you so

00:01:53.200 much for joining us at True North. Thanks so much, Candice. So for those of you who are not familiar

00:01:58.860 with Julie, she's a tremendous individual. She is the pandemic ethics scholar over at the Democracy

00:02:04.660 Fund. Her book is called My Choice, The Ethical Case Against COVID-19 Vaccine Mandates. Prior to her

00:02:10.540 current role, she taught ethics and philosophy at universities in Canada and the U.S. for 20 years,

00:02:15.640 including at Western University and within Western at Huron College. She has published a number of

00:02:20.360 academic papers, areas of ancient philosophy, ethical theory, and applied ethics. Dr. Panessi

00:02:26.240 has her PhD from Western University. She has a master's in philosophy with a collaborative

00:02:30.700 specialization in bioethics from the University of Toronto, as well as a diploma in ethics from the

00:02:35.380 Kennedy Institute of Ethics. At Georgetown University in 2021, Dr. Panessi refused to comply with

00:02:40.640 Western University's vaccine mandate and thus decided to step away from her academic

00:02:44.860 career. So Julie, I just want to say from reading your bio and reading about you, you seem like a

00:02:51.120 person who is perfectly placed to be consulted with and to be in a position to comment on the

00:02:58.760 decision by your university to impose vaccine mandates. So I'm wondering if you can tell us a

00:03:03.920 little bit about that story about how it was that the university decided to impose this heavy-handed

00:03:08.780 edict and your reaction to it. Right. Well, I mean, of course, I don't know what the decision-making

00:03:16.760 process was like. I didn't, as a, you know, as a member of the philosophy department, see any evidence

00:03:24.060 of a process, a deliberative process. All we got last August was an announcement stating what the

00:03:31.580 COVID policy at Western would be. And that changed a little bit. We got that very late, very close to

00:03:36.940 the start of term. And then it became very clear as classes were about to start just after Labor Day,

00:03:42.780 that they were removing the testing option and that vaccination would be required for all faculty,

00:03:49.640 staff and students. And that was not the personal medical choice I was willing to make. I think there

00:03:56.460 are, you know, I mean, my personal opinion is that there are very serious concerns with the vaccine

00:04:03.060 program itself. And there are serious ethical concerns with the mandates, but, you know, this is

00:04:11.480 a much broader, this is a much broader problem, a much broader issue. And one of the things that

00:04:16.600 this highlighted for me, you know, my experience working with my department and talking with my chair

00:04:22.900 and the dean was just completely shut out, shut down, ignored. So I wrote a very long detailed

00:04:30.220 letter outlining my concerns with the vaccine mandates. You would expect, I mean, I am the only,

00:04:37.160 one of the only people who teaches anything in the area of ethics at Huron College. And you would

00:04:42.460 think that someone like that coming forward and expressing ethical concerns about the imposition of

00:04:47.440 these mandates would at least be responded to with some kind of respect and interest.

00:04:52.900 There was none of that. It was just ignoring. And then when they, when it became clear to them

00:04:58.900 that I wasn't willing to comply with the mandate, they asked point blank, are you not going to comply

00:05:02.700 with this mandate? I said, no. And I was terminated very shortly thereafter. So one of the things that

00:05:08.420 this is highlighting is just this closed sort of ecosystem that we are sort of closed eco chamber

00:05:16.160 that we have in academia. And I think it was very interesting in your intro, the way you talked

00:05:21.560 about totalitarianism being quite literally a kind of a total system. And we're seeing that

00:05:27.660 with this COVID response that there is no room for questioning, no room for reflectiveness, no room

00:05:34.480 now that we've been, you know, rolling out this response for a couple of years, there is no

00:05:40.040 sort of intention or action on the part of government, media, or our institutions to look at what we've done

00:05:48.840 and to see how successful it is. I don't know how many people know this, but every province and

00:05:53.480 territory in Canada prior to 2019 had a pandemic response plan. And what we did didn't follow any of

00:06:02.880 those plans at all. So if there's a question about whether or not we've been successful, I mean,

00:06:08.640 that's a question that needs to be asked. And even if we think that we have been successful,

00:06:14.300 there's a question, were we as successful as we could have been, as we might have been if we had

00:06:18.760 followed those plans. So there are big, I think, problems in society and the media, government and

00:06:24.760 academia that we are going to spend, I think, decades trying to address.

00:06:32.200 Well, and it's a good thing because, I mean, it's a good thing that you're doing what you're doing now,

00:06:36.340 because had you just simply complied or had the university made an exception for you,

00:06:40.500 you wouldn't have come out with this story, you wouldn't have been able to put the book out and

00:06:44.760 really try to attempt to have this conversation going. I note in your book that you mentioned that

00:06:52.200 2400 word letter that you wrote, I believe you wrote it to your administrators, but also it sounded

00:06:58.840 like to your colleagues. And you were sort of disappointed and surprised by the lack of response

00:07:03.480 that people either completely ignored you, even though it was like a very well thought out,

00:07:07.900 well documented, well cited letter, they either completely ignored you, or they said,

00:07:14.300 look, Health Canada is determining this, not us, like, like, kind of deferring to an authority. So

00:07:19.520 I'm wondering if you can sort of walk us through the initial state of sort of your opposition to this,

00:07:26.700 whether the university consulted with you, I mean, you're an ethicist, maybe you can tell us a little

00:07:30.480 bit about what what an ethicist does and your area of specific expertise. And then and then sort of

00:07:36.520 how you were treated in that in that moment. Yeah, that's a complicated set of questions. I mean,

00:07:41.300 first of all, so your point about whether or not, you know, the university is just deferring to Health

00:07:46.780 Canada, that's all I saw, right? That's the only explanation that I've seen from not just universities,

00:07:51.720 but from places of employment, and really from the government itself, right, as an explanation for

00:07:56.660 why they're why they're imposing a mandate. It's well, because Health Canada says so. The interesting

00:08:01.520 troubling thing about that is then we can ask, well, where does Health Canada get its information

00:08:05.280 from, if not from academics and researchers and people who primarily work at universities. And so

00:08:12.200 there's, there's a circular problem there, right? If we are closing off the possibility of intellectuals

00:08:19.140 having the opportunity to engage with the directives coming from our government, then we are entering a new

00:08:24.820 kind of society that I don't think many of us believed we, we lived in before, right? Your question about,

00:08:31.120 you know, what do ethicists do? That's a really, that's a really good and interesting question. So

00:08:35.340 there are sort of ethicists in two different senses of the word. There are practical ethicists

00:08:40.740 who work in hospitals or in engineering firms or business ethicists who work for, for business

00:08:45.860 companies. And then there are academic ethicists, so people who teach ethics at university. And that's

00:08:52.140 what I did primarily. I have done things like I've sat on, on ethics boards at hospitals and things like

00:08:57.460 that, but primarily I taught ethics at university. And what, what you do when you're teaching ethics

00:09:03.260 or thinking about ethics is to think about whether or not what you're doing is the best possible course

00:09:09.480 of action. So we're not asking about what's factual, what's actually happening or what's possible to do,

00:09:17.460 but we're asking about what we ought to do. And that has to do with producing good and bad. It has to do

00:09:23.460 with helping people to live lives that are the best, that live lives that are happy to make sure

00:09:29.480 that we aren't hurting people, but that isn't only it, right? We're also interested in focusing on

00:09:34.500 things like human flourishing. What does it mean to develop a good character? What does it mean to

00:09:38.740 live a good life? And certainly the thing I wanted to do, or I aspire to most as an instructor was to

00:09:46.340 help, not to teach students didactically what the answers to those questions are, but to help them

00:09:53.300 to develop the kind of mind that can ask those questions for themselves. And that comes from a,

00:10:00.220 I mean, that goes way back to ancient Greece. It comes, you know, it's a 2000 year old tradition

00:10:05.520 that started with philosophers like Plato and Socrates and Aristotle of asking questions about

00:10:10.760 what the good life, what is good for humans. And we seem to have decided now that the only people

00:10:16.220 who are entitled to answer that questions are scientists. And by the way, only particular scientists,

00:10:22.380 only the ones who happen to follow a particular narrative. And so that is closing off not only

00:10:28.640 all other disciplines, but it's closing off scientists who actually have reasonable disagreement

00:10:34.420 with the mainstream narrative that we're seeing now.

00:10:39.540 So do you think this is something that was just, that was just exposed to you during COVID? Or is this

00:10:44.320 like a longstanding sort of slide? Because I mean, I went to university in like the early 2000s

00:10:49.860 and mid 2000s. And I didn't get taught much about sort of ethics and virtue. And let's say I did a

00:10:57.360 degree in political science and economics. You know, even even political philosophy classes that

00:11:02.600 wasn't really focused, it seems to me, it's, you know, left to science to determine the sort of big

00:11:07.920 existential questions, or perhaps religion, but religion isn't really filling in that,

00:11:12.380 that void in our society. So I'm wondering, when do you think that this shift happened? And what's

00:11:18.960 been going on in the universities?

00:11:20.600 Yes, I was a bit, I was a bit naive, I was under the impression that if, you know, freedom of expression

00:11:25.260 and freedom of ideas, the exchange of ideas existed anywhere, it would be at our universities. And part

00:11:29.420 of the reason I went into academia is that I was very inspired by some very courageous, free,

00:11:34.960 beautiful thinkers. And, and I don't think I really realized the degree to which that has changed over

00:11:41.100 the last 20 or so years, but it certainly has changed. Now, if you're an academic, and you go

00:11:47.100 to a conference, I mean, I haven't been to one in a few years now. But the last time I went, honestly,

00:11:53.100 academics are not terribly interested in exchanging ideas, they're interested in voicing their opinion.

00:11:59.260 So talking, not listening, and then turning to their phones and not listening to whoever happens to be

00:12:04.220 speaking. And I know that sounds a bit trite. But I think that's kind of the modus operandi in the

00:12:09.820 academic world. Now it's, well, here's my idea, I'm going to put it into the sphere. Oh, and by the

00:12:15.640 way, it follows, you know, the, the ethos of a particular genre that I happen to be in. And there's

00:12:23.160 very little robust exchange of ideas, probably the very first thing that suggested to me that there's

00:12:29.400 something odd going on here, is that there has been no disagreement, no reasonable disagreement

00:12:35.400 among academics over the last two years about the COVID response. And prior to that, you could not

00:12:41.720 get academics to agree about anything. And that's exactly how it should be. Right? Because, you know,

00:12:49.780 I mean, I think one thing academics do have agreed about historically, is that the truth is hard to

00:12:55.040 access, it's hard to understand. And we have to work hard at that. And to do that, we have to be

00:13:00.220 willing to present different hypotheses and follow them to their logical conclusions. And when they

00:13:05.720 don't work out, reevaluate and try something else. And so the idea that there are very, very few

00:13:13.880 academics, you know, there's another bioethicist in the United States, Aaron Cariatti, who's also a

00:13:19.780 medical doctor, he worked at the University of California, Irvine, and he was also terminated for

00:13:24.500 his opposition to the, to the COVID response. But other than that, it seems as though all bioethicists,

00:13:33.180 all ethicists globally are in lockstep with the government's pandemic response. And that is to put

00:13:39.100 it very non-technically weird. Weird. Well, I mean, it's, it's, it's shocking, because like you say,

00:13:48.940 you expect to have a robust exchange of ideas, you expect people to disagree. I'm wondering why,

00:13:54.960 like, why was it that when COVID came around, we didn't know what it was, we didn't know what it,

00:14:00.420 what the long term impact was, we didn't know what the impact on our society was going to be.

00:14:04.040 So it makes sense that we would be incredibly cautious, and perhaps fearful. But, you know,

00:14:09.020 as time went on, we learned so much about the virus, we learned so much about how it spreads.

00:14:13.300 You know, we, we just generally learned things that worked, things that didn't work. And yet,

00:14:19.160 you know, we didn't see more and more voices come out. I mean, maybe, maybe there have been more,

00:14:24.440 more dissenting voices, but, but still, there is sort of this major push. So I'm just wondering,

00:14:29.780 like, why did, why did it happen this way? Do you think?

00:14:33.080 Well, I think you're right, that there has been an enormous amount of fear surrounding the COVID

00:14:36.980 situation. I think that's probably partly because there isn't a dialogue. We aren't being presented

00:14:42.820 with two sides of the story. When information comes out that suggests, as you mentioned earlier,

00:14:48.620 that, you know, COVID does not affect all people equally, that it disproportionately,

00:14:52.840 there's a stratified risk, right? And it affects people who are elderly, or who have comorbidities,

00:14:57.740 other health conditions. That should be good news to the vast majority of people. It should also

00:15:04.020 suggest that the restrictions we impose on people, which have downsides themselves, like masking and

00:15:11.840 locking down children and preventing them from going to school, that you need to balance those

00:15:16.320 harms against the benefit that come from protecting them from, from COVID, arguably. And when it becomes

00:15:23.520 more and more clear that children aren't at significant risk from contracting COVID, then the harms of the

00:15:29.820 COVID protections become weightier and weightier, right? And, and so it's, it's a little bit odd. It's very

00:15:36.760 odd, actually, that when you present to someone evidence to show that you're not actually at

00:15:42.360 significant risk from getting seriously ill or dying from COVID, the rational response would be,

00:15:47.280 oh, well, that's great news. Wow, I feel a little bit better now. That's not the response that we're

00:15:52.200 seeing. We're just seeing people ignoring that information and doubling down with fear. And our

00:15:57.840 government and our media have been all too happy to support that. I don't know if you will have heard,

00:16:04.140 but yesterday, a very influential article came out in the Canadian Medical Association journal.

00:16:10.280 It's called the impact of population mixing between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated. It was

00:16:14.560 written by three authors. One is David Fissman, who's sat in the Ontario science table. He's an

00:16:20.000 epidemiologist at the Dalai Lama School of Health in Toronto. And it basically argues that it's the

00:16:27.520 reason why we're seeing infection among the vaccinated still is because there are so many

00:16:32.280 unvaccinated people, right? Someone, you know, there are a couple of things, there are many

00:16:38.360 things that are alarming about this article, not the least of which is the way the unvaccinated are 1.00

00:16:44.060 written about, we could be reading about, you know, apartheid between racial groups, you know, 50 years

00:16:50.460 ago. But one thing I think people are not very skeptical about, rationally skeptical about is the fact that

00:16:57.780 someone like David Fissman sits on the advisory boards of the very vaccine companies that he is

00:17:04.260 defending in that academic article, right? Also, a rational person might look at that article and say,

00:17:10.700 maybe there's something going on with the immune systems of the vaccinated people. Maybe that's why

00:17:16.060 they're getting higher rates of infection than the people who are unvaccinated. And my point about that

00:17:22.480 is only that we need to temper the fear that we have with not just information, but with our mind

00:17:34.220 working on that information and deciding for ourselves whether or not that's the kind of

00:17:38.800 information that should fuel more fear or less fear. And I think this rampant fear that we've

00:17:45.400 experienced is just a kind of, there's a kind of collective hysteria. And people have felt sort of

00:17:52.360 unmoored from a kind of stability, right, that allows us to look at evidence and say, well,

00:17:59.300 maybe we're going to be okay here if we just do this, this and this, right? And that kind of rational

00:18:06.060 approach to our health, rational approach to dealing with other people, rational approach to

00:18:11.040 engagement in the public sphere, just seems to have been lost over the last couple of years.

00:18:17.420 Well, it always struck me as a little ironic that the people who are most fearful and paranoid

00:18:22.340 about COVID were also the most trusting of a vaccine that came out. And it's like, you know, I can

00:18:27.920 get why you're worried about COVID given the sort of ramping up of fear in both politics, government

00:18:35.740 and media, they push this like, and, you know, the idea of a politician is to lead you away from fear,

00:18:41.740 like there's things to be fearful of in your life every single day. And the idea behind someone who's

00:18:46.360 leading you is to say, look, we're going to go forward despite this fear, and we're going to,

00:18:50.620 we're going to persevere. Whereas during COVID, we had the opposite. I'm just wondering, in your,

00:18:57.800 I know, you wrote in your book that there was sort of a confluence of like the post 9-11 big government

00:19:03.140 security state that that pushed this idea that the government can protect us and keep us safe.

00:19:08.080 But then we also had the increasingly corporatist mindset of big businesses and people, people trusting

00:19:13.640 big business, but the exact type of people as well that you would expect to push back against big

00:19:18.300 pharma, to push back against a government edict that imposes a vaccine. Those were some of the people

00:19:24.760 that were the biggest cheerleaders of it and the biggest enforcers of this social norm that you must 1.00

00:19:29.440 get vaccinated and you must not question the science. I'm wondering, did that surprise you? And what do you

00:19:35.980 think led to that sort of switch? And I'm talking about people on the left, people who, you know, are

00:19:40.260 supposed to be skeptical of big government, big corporations. And now all of a sudden, they're

00:19:43.780 the ones that are often cheerleading and pushing, you know, the corporate government line.

00:19:48.520 I agree. That's very weird. I mean, historically, it has been people on the left, liberals or classical

00:19:53.620 liberals, at least, who have focused on individual freedom and autonomy. And now we're seeing those

00:20:00.040 people move completely sort of to the other side, we might say, and focus on a lack of autonomy. And it's,

00:20:08.100 it's more of this collectivist mentality, sacrifice yourself for the group. But of course,

00:20:12.940 you know, I mean, I've heard it said among sort of people on the right, that there's this problem

00:20:17.320 with collectivism, and we shouldn't have to sacrifice ourselves for the group. But that's

00:20:20.900 only part of the problem, right? Another part of the problem is that it isn't clear that science

00:20:24.900 supports the idea that the people who are, say, getting vaccinated and wearing masks are helping the

00:20:30.960 group, right? I think there's as much scientific evidence to suggest that those actions are actually

00:20:35.860 working to reduce people's immunity rather than build it up. So this is not just an individualist

00:20:42.640 or collectivist autonomy versus, you know, altruism debate. It's also a debate about whether or not

00:20:52.040 we are appropriately uptaking the information that we're seeing, and having that sort of feedback

00:20:59.520 into our current mental states and whether how fearful we're, we're allowing ourselves to be

00:21:05.900 right. And, you know, we've not, we haven't seen any emphasis for the last two years on things like

00:21:17.360 civil liberties, you know, when you talk about people having the freedom of belief, freedom of

00:21:22.500 expression, freedom of the press, freedom of communication. I mean, these are things that

00:21:26.820 they're not just luxuries, they're not dispensable in times of crisis. The reason why they're

00:21:33.080 codified in our constitution is because they are more needed during times of crisis than any other

00:21:38.200 time, because without them, these kinds of sort of unrestricted ideas, this kind of totalitarianism,

00:21:46.020 as we began with, just run rampant and get us to a place that is not only harmful, but quite

00:21:52.100 irrational, right? I'm wondering why you think that there wasn't more of a robust discussion and

00:21:59.380 debate when it came to the efficacy, the ethics, and the safety of vaccines when they first come

00:22:07.560 by. I know you wrote in your book that in the last 30 years, more than one third of all adverse

00:22:11.660 reactions to vaccines have been with the COVID vaccine. There's been over 6,000 injuries, and I

00:22:15.600 don't know exactly when your book came out, but I imagine that there's more now. There's been over 200

00:22:19.660 deaths. So I'm wondering if you can elaborate on the point you made in the book and maybe comment

00:22:24.980 on why we didn't have a more robust discussion about that. Yeah, well, I mean, that's kind of a

00:22:29.640 two-pronged question. So I guess one answer is, well, why, or one question is, why haven't we seen more

00:22:35.240 people step up to challenge the narrative? The short answer to that is some have, and they have been

00:22:43.860 very quickly and efficiently shut down, and I think that has sent a strong message to other people who

00:22:50.400 realize very quickly that if they challenge the narrative, they will lose their job, their reputation,

00:22:56.360 their friends, their family, their income, right? There isn't room in our society currently

00:23:03.060 not just to challenge the narrative, but to ask questions about it. We saw a member of the Toronto

00:23:10.160 Board of Health back in October, October, November, I can't remember exactly, asked questions about how

00:23:18.840 we're treating the unvaccinated in one of our major national newspapers, and she received just a storm,

00:23:27.900 an onslaught of criticism, and ended up really recoiling and retracting that position and chose not to run for

00:23:37.540 re-election, her position. So across the board, people who, you know, I challenged it, I was fired

00:23:43.460 with cause, right? I mean, this is what happens to people who speak out. Now, a further question is, well,

00:23:48.420 how did we get to the place where we punish dissenters like that, or we punish what we might call outliers?

00:23:54.160 Well, that is a bigger question, and that, I think, has been in the works for decades. Of course,

00:23:59.460 the fact that we have this kind of regulatory capture within medicine. So we have people like

00:24:08.040 David Fistman, who's supposed to be, you know, an academic, who is supposed to be objectively

00:24:14.020 evaluating data, is sitting on an advisory board for the companies who are producing the data that

00:24:20.420 he's supposed to be evaluating, right? And we have that happening across the board. We have it happening

00:24:24.740 in the States. But I think that's not a recent phenomenon, right? We saw this with the opioid

00:24:32.540 epidemic, the SSRI crisis, that big pharma, as you mentioned, has certainly been very influential

00:24:41.560 in not just our medical choices, but our scientific, our political, our societal choices and movements

00:24:53.960 over the last several decades, really. So that is a very big question. I don't think we're going to

00:25:00.000 understand, have an answer to it, probably for a very long time. But the first step is to become

00:25:05.740 aware of it. And so when an article like the one that came out yesterday comes out, as opposed to

00:25:11.180 saying, oh, my goodness, this is more reason to be fearful. Let's look at the fine print, the disclaimer

00:25:17.080 at the bottom of the page, and realize there might be a conflict of interest at work here.

00:25:21.360 Well, it looks like just another opportunity to demonize and dehumanize the unvaccinated and say

00:25:28.020 this is all their fault. And we saw that throughout the pandemic. I wanted to ask you specifically about

00:25:32.940 our Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, because we all know in the election, he infamously said

00:25:37.400 that the unvaccinated are extremists. They don't believe in science. They're often misogynists. 0.98

00:25:42.080 They're racist. It's a small group that muscles in. And we have to make a choice in terms of this 1.00

00:25:47.760 country. Do we tolerate these people? Right. We know that during the trucker convoy, he came out

00:25:52.320 and flat out said that these people are Nazis. If you're protesting against my vaccine policies,

00:25:58.080 you are a Nazi. And even worse, the media echoed these concerns and they didn't

00:26:04.320 make any attempt to push back or hold a prime minister accountable for his woefully

00:26:10.340 divisive and dangerous claims.

00:26:12.320 Yeah, that's a big problem. I have nothing good to say about our prime minister. I mean,

00:26:16.600 this is someone we need to keep in mind, was elected primarily because he had nice hair,

00:26:20.200 from what I understand. We need to be very careful moving forward that we don't make that kind of

00:26:24.520 mistake again. I've also made it a point not to respond to those kinds of comments that he makes.

00:26:29.400 I'm not going to exert energy to try to defend the unvaccinated and show why they are not, 1.00

00:26:35.320 you know, extremists or misogynists. Justin Trudeau needs to, you know, the onus is on him.

00:26:41.900 If he wants to make that claim, he has to provide evidence to show that everyone who is unvaccinated

00:26:46.040 is also a misogynist, is also a Nazi. And until he's willing to do that work, which I'm sure he is 0.78

00:26:51.220 not willing to do, then I'm not going to engage.

00:26:54.360 Well, good for you. I think that's right. I don't think it's worthy. He's worthy of their films.

00:26:58.820 My criticism is with the media and how they take his perspective and they just push it as if it's

00:27:04.400 the mainstream. I mean, Justin Trudeau came onto the scene, you know, pushing back against the

00:27:09.040 Harper government, who at the time was trying to fight. Down a scientist, right? Yeah, that kind

00:27:14.980 of stuff. But then also, you know, Harper was trying to take a hard line against ISIS and growing 0.98

00:27:20.840 Islamist extremism. And Justin Trudeau said, you know, we have to defend rights when it's popular

00:27:25.820 and when it's not popular. He's talking about giving a terrorist convicted at Guantanamo Bay a

00:27:31.160 settlement and an apology. So Trudeau used to sort of speak for the very outliers and the

00:27:36.360 marginalized people. And now he's demonizing them. So I know in your book, you also talk about how

00:27:42.100 COVID triggered crises in other institutions, you know, as well, not just academia, but also

00:27:48.120 journalism, government, and more broadly, civil discourse. So I'm wondering if you could talk about

00:27:54.280 that, but also talk about how we can mend these wounds, how we can move forward as a society, how we can

00:27:59.140 get back to a place where we all trust each other, we like each other, and we want to live

00:28:03.220 side by side as Canadians and respect each other. Yeah, this is the point where we're asking for hope

00:28:08.980 and solutions moving forward, right? You know, I spent a long time being very frustrated with the

00:28:14.740 personal particular person that is our prime minister. And I've gotten to the point now where

00:28:19.660 I realized that, you know, he as an individual is relatively inconsequential. If he resigned now,

00:28:25.280 there would be another person very much like him to run as a leader of the Liberal Party or the NDP

00:28:32.540 Party, and very likely win. And that's because I think, I won't say the majority of Canadians,

00:28:41.480 but a crucial enough majority of Canadians have decided that it's good to be ruled by someone with

00:28:49.560 a mentality. And why is that? You know, part of what he did during his campaign was to demonize

00:28:58.740 the unvaccinated and to protect those who choose to be vaccinated against them and say things like,

00:29:05.320 don't think that we're going to let, you know, you sit on a plane together or sit next to each other

00:29:09.540 on a train. And I think that, you know, the election last fall told us that most Canadians

00:29:16.080 or enough, right, want that. They want a certain subset of our population to be demonized and held

00:29:26.060 accountable for their problems. And until we can move beyond that or move through that, understand why

00:29:35.820 that is not the case. And why even if it was the case, arguably, that epidemiologically,

00:29:44.080 the unvaccinated were responsible for the persistence of this virus. To be very clear,

00:29:49.020 I don't think we've seen evidence to suggest that. But if even if that's the case, arguably,

00:29:53.660 there is still room, there's still responsibility in politics and public discourse. And part of what it is

00:30:00.340 to be a citizen, to respect other people, to try to understand their choices, to keep talking with

00:30:07.340 them. And, you know, prior to the last couple of years, we talked in ethics, academic, academic

00:30:14.580 ethic literature a lot about virtues of tolerance and patience. And we don't talk about those things

00:30:20.260 anymore. Right. And so tolerance is a very difficult virtue, because it requires you to still

00:30:26.380 engage with people whose positions you don't understand. And that requires an awful lot of

00:30:31.340 work. It requires, you know, minimizing your anger for the sake of being able to truly listen to other

00:30:38.500 people. And truly listening is something that we've, it's an art that we've lost, I think.

00:30:45.000 We need to get it back. How do we get it back? Our education system is crucial. And I don't just mean

00:30:50.740 university, but our elementary and high school educations need to be better at teaching these

00:30:56.020 virtues, I think, about, about listening. We need to understand why history is so important,

00:31:01.240 because we have been in the past through times like this, where citizens have been at odds with

00:31:08.480 one another. And we need to review those moments in history to understand how we moved through them

00:31:14.680 and how we resolved those conflicts and the harm that we can do when we stop listening to each other.

00:31:19.100 So there is hope, I think. But we need to think in fundamentally different, not really novel ways.

00:31:25.820 I mean, we've had success at this in the past, but we need to think in very different ways about how we

00:31:29.720 understand each other, how we approach each other, and what right we have to demand of someone else

00:31:38.320 that they sacrifice their life to make us feel safe and protected.

00:31:42.420 Well, I'm glad that you still, after all of this, have some hope about how we can write the system.

00:31:49.620 And it's interesting because, you know, at the same time as all this is happening with COVID and the lockdowns

00:31:55.020 and the vaccine mandates, there's another sort of social trend towards diversity and inclusion and this idea

00:31:59.920 that we have to tolerate all kinds of unique people with different identities and different biological traits

00:32:07.380 or feelings about their biology. And we're told that we have to tolerate that and understand that.

00:32:11.780 And then yet, when it comes to choices that someone makes or their lifestyle or the things that they

00:32:16.440 choose, when it comes to, like, we're talking about vaccines, we don't have that tolerance. So

00:32:21.660 it's interesting we're pushing one and then completely neglecting another.

00:32:25.280 I don't know. So either there's a double standard in the kind of hypocrisy at work, right? Or we may have

00:32:30.580 decided that what we are obligated to tolerate are certain kinds of differences and not other ones,

00:32:36.140 right? So maybe what we feel we're obligated to tolerate are physical differences, but not

00:32:40.920 ideological ones. And it certainly seems as though, you know, we have a very low tolerance for religious 0.81

00:32:47.800 differences, for example, for cultural differences, for, you know, people who choose certain fashions that are

00:32:59.280 dictated by their religion. And we now are seeing how little tolerance we have for diversity of ideas, right? And so I

00:33:08.240 don't know. Either we're hypocritical, or we have a very clear idea about what we tolerate and what we 0.59

00:33:17.120 don't tolerate. Of course, racism and gender differences are, you know, high on the list of 0.80

00:33:24.720 things that we are expected to tolerate these ideas these days. But again, I think religious philosophical

00:33:31.140 differences in ideology are not only things that we're not expected to tolerate, but they are things

00:33:38.180 that we are bad for tolerating, right? We're just fueling a kind of disinformation system if we

00:33:45.980 tolerate that kind of diversity.

00:33:48.860 Right. It's like a very superficial form of diversity that we like to champion. It's like diversity for

00:33:54.140 people who look different, but they have to think exactly like me. A final question for you, Julia. I'm

00:33:58.900 wondering if there's anything out there that gives you hope? Anything that inspires, like, what is it

00:34:03.360 that inspires you and keeps you going? I know you deal with a lot of adversity, and you deal with a

00:34:07.320 lot of bad news. I'm wondering what is it that gives you hope?

00:34:10.600 Do I ever? Boy, yes. I mean, every day I get messages from people who tell me about how, you know,

00:34:16.380 our response to COVID is ruining their lives, you know. And I think we need to be better at paying

00:34:22.240 attention to all the harms that we're doing. I mean, getting sick from COVID is not the only possible harm

00:34:26.920 that can happen to a person. And outside of the realm of COVID, you know, people, you know, they

00:34:31.460 get very serious illnesses. You can get in car accidents. There's drowning incident. You know,

00:34:36.060 I mean, and never mind that we have a children's mental health crisis, and we have unprecedented

00:34:41.080 levels of obesity and alcoholism and addiction, and the list goes on. But, you know, through all of

00:34:47.980 that, there are people who have, at the risk of losing their jobs, losing their families,

00:34:54.400 losing their reputation, have just said, nothing is worse, worse than losing who I am as a person.

00:35:02.860 And they have stuck it through and decided that this is my choice. This is who I am. I'm willing

00:35:09.280 to lose everything, including possibly my life over this. And those are the, that's the only source of

00:35:14.560 hope in our society right now. I hope they have the strength to carry us forward through what might be

00:35:23.140 coming over the next year or so. It certainly takes an awful lot of moral stamina and endurance and

00:35:29.840 resilience. I do see, you know, people having success, talking with trusted family members or

00:35:39.360 friends, and having some success, having more reasonable conversations and, you know, having maybe

00:35:46.180 a brother who two years ago said, well, if you hold that view, then I think you're crazy, and I'm not

00:35:52.860 willing to talk to you, and switching. And now to saying, well, maybe we disagree, but disagreement is

00:35:57.880 a social good. Or maybe to saying even something like, you know, I didn't see what you saw a couple

00:36:01.900 of years ago, and now I see it, and I'm really glad we've been talking. So there is hope for sure.

00:36:06.860 But we can't give up yet by any means, because our country is not what it was two years ago,

00:36:15.840 and probably is not what it was 20 or 30 years ago. And, you know, I want to leave everybody with

00:36:21.400 a thought. I came across an interview that Johnny Carson did with President Reagan in 1975. And he,

00:36:29.780 you know, they were in major crisis then too, about whether or not the government was spending too

00:36:33.300 much or not spending enough. And Johnny Carson said to, to Mr. Reagan at the time, you know,

00:36:38.240 what is the problem here? And President Reagan said, you know, the problem is, everybody's looking

00:36:42.620 to government to provide solutions to the problem. But government is the problem. And I think we have

00:36:48.420 a very similar phenomenon now that we, for some reason, want the government to step in and fix all

00:36:54.540 of our problems for us. And the government, don't forget, is just a collection of human beings. We're all

00:37:00.660 imperfect. And there's no reason to think that our government is any more perfect than any other

00:37:05.520 collection of human beings. And I think we need to pull back, take more responsibility for our own

00:37:10.540 lives, take more responsibility for scrutinizing information that comes to us, especially now we

00:37:16.780 know that there is such a coordinated, you know, effort among mainstream media to deliver the same

00:37:22.980 information which is in lockstep with our government. So there's more onus on us than ever before to do

00:37:29.320 our own research and to take responsibility for our own lives.

00:37:33.100 Well, I think that's a great note to end the interview on. I think there's so much

00:37:37.500 wisdom in that idea that people can solve problems on their own better than referring to some all

00:37:42.380 powerful institution that you might not always agree with the direction that's going and the way

00:37:47.940 that they use that power. So, Dr. Pressey, I really appreciate your time today. Thank you for all the

00:37:53.280 work that you do over at the Democracy Fund. And thank you for joining the show.

00:37:56.740 Absolutely. Thanks so much.

00:37:59.240 All right. That's Dr. Julie Panassi with the Democracy Fund. I'm Candace Malcolm, and this is

00:38:02.980 The Candace Malcolm Show.

The Candice Malcolm Show - April 28, 2022

Canada’s totalitarian approach to COVID (Ft. Dr. Julie Ponesse)

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