The Candice Malcolm Show - The Candice Malcolm Show： The economic toll of COVID-19 pandemic

00:00:00.160 Canada wildly underestimates the toll or potential toll of the coronavirus.

00:00:05.440 Journalists and politicians continue to mislead us about this disease,

00:00:08.880 plus some good news. I tested negative for coronavirus and we're going to go

00:00:12.240 through a lot of fake news. Candice Malcolm here and this is The Candice Malcolm Show.

00:00:20.480 Thank you so much for tuning in. As promised, I am doing a live episode here,

00:00:25.840 reporting live from quarantine, I guess. I am now in day, I think, 14 or 15 of being self-isolated

00:00:34.000 here at home. I think it's probably good practice regardless of what the government tells you,

00:00:39.280 regardless of how strict the measures are to impose sort of self-isolation or home quarantine

00:00:45.200 measures. At this point, we know that there are lots and lots of outbreaks. There's lots and lots

00:00:49.200 of new cases around where I live, for instance, here in Toronto that, you know, even if the government

00:00:54.960 wasn't telling us to stay at home, I probably would and I would encourage you to do the same,

00:00:59.120 just, you know, for concern for, you know, your own health and safety. But it's kind of interesting to

00:01:05.760 watch the, you know, politicians push more and more pressure for us to stay indoors and for us to

00:01:12.720 basically destroy our own economy, kill large sectors of the economy without any real solid plan.

00:01:21.200 So I'm going to get into all of that. I know Justin Trudeau tried a power grab,

00:01:26.560 he tried to sneak it in. They're debating all the emergency measures today, they're going to pass

00:01:31.680 that $82 billion measure and Trudeau sort of secretly tried to throw in a bunch of measures to

00:01:38.480 give basically his government unlimited power. Thankfully, the Conservative opposition kept him on

00:01:43.440 his toes and hopefully they'll remove all that. So that's all happening today. I am doing another

00:01:48.560 episode of the True North Update, which is a show where my colleague Andrew Lawton and I go through

00:01:53.600 all of the news related to coronavirus. We've been doing it every day for the past week and we're

00:01:59.200 going to continue to do it as long as the whole country is on self-lockdown. So I encourage you

00:02:03.920 to watch that show. It'll be up later on this afternoon, probably around five o'clock. So I'm going

00:02:08.880 to talk about that in that show. I'm not going to talk about this show today. I want to focus in

00:02:12.480 on the economy, on what we are actually doing, the measures that we're taking as a country

00:02:17.520 to prevent a potentially disastrous public health outbreak similar to what we've seen in China,

00:02:24.800 what we've seen in Iran, what we've seen in Italy. We're trying to prevent that but we really don't 1.00

00:02:28.400 have a plan. We really have no idea what we're doing and what we know that we're doing is destroying

00:02:35.680 our economy, destroying the livelihood of millions of Canadians. We're going to see just an absolute

00:02:41.600 disastrous outcome in terms of bankruptcies, businesses going out of business, people losing

00:02:46.960 their homes, families falling apart, okay. This is going to be worse than anything that we've ever seen

00:02:53.200 and at this point we don't even really have any idea on like a timeline. Like how long is this going

00:03:00.160 to last? So the Conference Board of Canada came out with a report. They released this report yesterday,

00:03:07.840 The Economic Implications of Social Distancing to August. So this is a scenario where Canadians are

00:03:13.920 homebound essentially until August, August. So we're not talking a couple weeks here, you know, we're

00:03:20.160 talking five months people, five months of staying at home, nothing opened, everyone just kind of working

00:03:27.120 from their bedrooms and hoping that we don't spread this disease to the point where our hospital system

00:03:35.120 collapses. So what would the projection be if we were to continue these measures until August? Well,

00:03:42.560 according to the Conference Board of Canada, I mean, so the report isn't actually released. They said they're

00:03:46.960 going to release a full report on the 25th, which is tomorrow. But the sort of over, you know, the basic

00:03:53.280 bullet point reading here, which is all we have is bullet points, is that in this scenario, they say,

00:04:00.480 the economy sheds 330,000 jobs over the second and third quarter, boosting unemployment to 7.7%.

00:04:10.000 I'm sorry, they project that the total job losses for the country are only going to be 330,000. But we're

00:04:18.080 already way past that. We know that just in one week, last week, after Justin Trudeau announced his

00:04:22.240 emergency measures, that more than 500,000 Canadians applied for EI in just one week. So they applied

00:04:30.240 for the employment insurance scheme that Trudeau introduced. So if 500,000 people are employed after

00:04:35.920 just one week of social measures, how is it projected that we're only going to lose 330,000 jobs? I think

00:04:44.160 that this report, I mean, I haven't read it because it hasn't been fully released yet. But from just, you

00:04:48.480 know, what they've released so far, it seems absolute madness to say that we would only lose 300,000 jobs

00:04:55.440 in the economy, that the unemployment rate would be 7%. Let's just remind everybody, just last month

00:05:01.440 in Alberta, the unemployment rate was 7.2% in February 2020, before any of these social distancing

00:05:07.600 measures. So we're really supposed to believe that the unemployment rate is barely going to move

00:05:11.840 in this country, when they shut down every restaurant, you know, every bar, every theater,

00:05:17.680 every sporting event, you know, they're shutting down the whole country. Anyone who works in the

00:05:22.640 hospitality industry, anyone who works in tourism, they've basically shut down international flights.

00:05:29.120 So lots and lots of people at airlines have been, have lost their jobs. I don't really understand.

00:05:34.640 There was a report from Goldman Sachs down in the United States that projected that the economy was going to

00:05:40.400 contract, the GDP was going to contract by 50%, and that they expected a 30% unemployment rate in the

00:05:46.480 United States. Canada's economy is so incredibly tied to the US economy, that it's really hard to

00:05:51.920 wrap your head around the idea that Canada would only have a 7% unemployment rate, but that the United

00:05:58.320 States would have a 30%. I can't imagine a world where the US unemployment rate was 30% and Canada's is

00:06:04.400 only seven. So if this is the basis of the reports that of sort of the stimulus spending and the

00:06:11.040 government spending that Justin Trudeau is introducing, that the Liberal government is introducing,

00:06:14.400 is based on report like this, you know, we are wildly out of touch with the reality of what is going to

00:06:20.960 happen when you purposefully shut down the entire economy. And I think that the concern that a lot of

00:06:27.600 people are really starting to have is, okay, you know, Justin Trudeau is kind of laying down the law. He's

00:06:32.480 saying it's time for everyone to stay home, we really have to take social distancing seriously,

00:06:37.040 everybody work from home, nobody go out and about, no one, you know, they've closed parks, they've

00:06:42.160 closed all the schools, they've closed basically any public area, you know, they've banned any kind of

00:06:48.560 gathering with more than 50 people. And, you know, they're cracking down a lot less than that, like

00:06:53.520 people who continue to have their stores open, or their restaurants open, are going to be targeted by

00:06:58.480 apparently government officials fining people and arresting people. A woman was arrested in Quebec

00:07:04.560 City for testing positive for this coronavirus, and then being found walking around the town. So,

00:07:10.960 you know, the whole idea is what, you know, what, what is the future of our country going to look like

00:07:17.680 if we continue with these measures? And we're not really being told at this point how long it's going

00:07:22.160 to last, and what the economic repercussions are going to be. So, we know, for instance, that when

00:07:29.120 people don't work, they can't pay their bills, they can't pay for their homes, people are going to

00:07:33.840 potentially move their homes. You know, I know that there's been all kinds of measures taken so that,

00:07:38.000 you know, you can't evict people during this period, banks are going to be giving a lot of forgiveness

00:07:42.640 in terms of mortgage payments, late mortgage payments. But the idea still is that we know,

00:07:49.120 just again, for instance, we know that unemployment rates are linked to suicide. So,

00:07:53.520 this is from a CBC report, it was in Alberta. It said that the analysis looked at suicide

00:07:58.560 statistics and unemployment data between 2000 and 2017. During that time, Alberta's suicide rate

00:08:04.000 was higher than the national average. It was revealed that for every one point increase

00:08:08.240 in unemployment, there's a 3% or 2.8% increase in suicide. And we know that unemployment causes about

00:08:15.840 45,000 suicides a year worldwide. So, you can't just tell Canadians that they're going to lose

00:08:21.680 their jobs potentially indefinitely. Sure, we have boosted EI payments, the government is working.

00:08:27.040 Well, if they pass this emergency spending bill today, the government will be working to provide

00:08:32.080 about $1,800 a month to Canadians who have been laid off. Maybe that's enough to kind of cover the

00:08:36.720 basics, maybe, if you're lucky. But still, a lot of Canadians will just simply not be able to

00:08:42.400 make ends meet. They won't be able to afford their lifestyle. They won't be able to afford the

00:08:46.720 life that they created pre, you know, this coronavirus outbreak. And I don't think those

00:08:52.880 circumstances are being properly considered right now. You know, our number one concern is public

00:08:57.920 health, as it should be, you know, protecting loss of life and protecting an infection spread the way

00:09:03.840 that we've seen in Italy. But the problem is that there's just so much details missing. There's so much

00:09:11.200 missing. And we just don't know, again, we don't, we don't know. So the measures that we're taking,

00:09:16.400 are they permanent? Are they permanent? We're just going to all stay at home for the foreseeable future?

00:09:22.000 How is that going to, how is that going to be realistic? Are people really just going to be

00:09:26.560 complacent and sitting in their homes all summer, all spring and all summer? What are you supposed

00:09:30.320 to do with your kids? What are you supposed to do? You know, how are you supposed to stay at home with

00:09:36.480 kids? And also work from home, right? Like, it just, it just doesn't really make a lot of sense.

00:09:42.000 It doesn't really add up. Now, I have a son, he's one years old. So he's not in any kind of school,

00:09:46.480 not in any kind of daycare. But even still in my life, you know, he's an active little guy,

00:09:52.480 I like to take him out. I like to take him to classes, he has music class, he used to go swimming,

00:09:58.080 go to church group, all that kind of stuff. So he has sort of no social interactions right now. And,

00:10:03.840 you know, that's fine for now. But six months from now, I think we're all going to be a little

00:10:09.920 stir crazy. And I don't think that you can really just ask Canadians to indefinitely wait

00:10:16.240 for something, wait for a cure to be developed, wait for a vaccine to be developed, wait for different

00:10:21.280 waves so that our hospital systems don't get overwhelmed. You know, we have to come up with

00:10:25.920 some kind of a timeline here. We have to come up with a timeline. Otherwise, well, first of all,

00:10:31.120 I don't even know how the government is going to continue to afford these massive payouts,

00:10:35.120 when you have 500,000 Canadians plus applying for EI for, you know, a $2,000 check every two months,

00:10:41.840 every month, on top of all the business bailouts on top of all the bank bailouts, all the,

00:10:47.520 you know, money going increased childcare benefit. I don't quite understand the increased child benefit,

00:10:53.680 because so so families with kids are going to get more money, but you can't even use it for daycare,

00:11:00.000 you can't use it for preschool or for, you know, to sign kids up for more classes,

00:11:05.120 because everything's closed. So sure, you might be getting a little bit of extra cash every month,

00:11:09.760 but you can't really even spend it. I mean, that's that's sort of more of a stimulus measure,

00:11:14.160 as opposed to an income adjustment measure, which is what the rest of the stuff was.

00:11:18.320 So really, I'm seeing sort of a lack of an overall plan for what's happening with this coronavirus.

00:11:25.760 Like, are we waiting for a vaccine? Is that what's going to happen? Because we could be waiting a

00:11:30.240 year, if that's the case. I think that, you know, in order for Canadians to just say, sure, you know,

00:11:37.040 strip away a massive percentage of the economy, I think, I think it's probably closer to the 30%

00:11:42.320 figure that Goldman Sachs put it at. 30% of our economy is just going to disappear. And that's

00:11:47.440 everyone who works in hospitality, works in food and restaurants, hotels, you know, flights,

00:11:52.960 and not to mention a significant cutback in other industries, just, you know, tourism industries,

00:11:59.040 people who come from other places to visit Canada in the summer, you know, think anyone who works at

00:12:03.920 like an aquarium or a museum or anything like that, car rental agencies, it's just, it's all

00:12:09.760 interconnected, it's all going to disappear. And we're supposed to believe that it's only going to

00:12:13.680 result in a 7% unemployment rate. I think that that is wildly problematic. And, you know, one of the

00:12:20.800 the things that Justin Trudeau said in his press conference is that his government always lets,

00:12:27.520 it always lets science and experts guide us, science and experts. Now, I think that's a cop-out

00:12:34.240 because, you know, you're a politician, you're the leader of the country, you're the prime minister,

00:12:39.200 you have to be there to make tough decisions. That's, that's the job. It's a public policy rule. So

00:12:44.160 you can be advised by scientists about, you know, best practices, but even within the scientific

00:12:48.960 community, there's no necessarily, there's no agreement. I see reports on both sides. I see

00:12:54.160 there was a report from Stanford University of a professor saying, you know, we're kind of

00:12:58.160 overreacting. Just look at the, look at the infection rate and the death toll. It's not that

00:13:02.880 high at this point. And yet look at the reaction that we've had comparing it to other things. You know,

00:13:09.200 other people looking at the data saying, no, no, no, it's about to get a lot worse. We need to be even

00:13:12.720 more paranoid. So there's not even sort of a universal opinion among scientists when it comes

00:13:19.440 to this disease. Some people think that the numbers are really starting to level off. Even in Italy,

00:13:23.920 they're not growing the same way. Other people think, no, you know, we need to take more and more

00:13:27.840 measures. So again, they're saying that they're letting the scientists and the expert guys, but I

00:13:32.240 think that there's a real problem in doing that because if you, if you just say that you're kind of

00:13:37.680 alleviating yourself of any responsibility, right? You're saying, well, it's not me that's making this

00:13:41.920 decision. I'm just relying on the experts. Well, who are the experts, right? Who are the experts

00:13:46.720 that you're listening to? Which scientists? It's up to you to choose, you know, to comb through the

00:13:51.040 data and figure out which one is going to lead you. You know, just two weeks ago, the government

00:13:55.840 was sort of laughing at the idea of open borders and saying, no, that's not what we believe. Open

00:14:00.800 borders don't help. The virus has no borders, or sorry, open borders, closing our borders won't help.

00:14:05.200 This virus has no, knows no borders. This is a global effort and we can't close ourselves off at this

00:14:10.880 point. And then, you know, a couple of days later, they did a complete about face and said, okay,

00:14:15.200 now it's time to close the border, you know, way after other people were, had closed their border

00:14:21.440 way after. So just as an example, Donald Trump closed the United States to first two flights from

00:14:29.920 China. He did that way before anyone, anyone else was doing it. And then when he announced the travel

00:14:35.840 ban from Europe, this was March 13th, you know, the experts, the so-called experts condemned him.

00:14:43.040 So right here, viruses don't carry passports. Why travel bans won't work to stop the spread of the

00:14:49.760 coronavirus. So why is it when Trump issued a travel ban, the experts said, no, no, no, that's not going

00:14:58.320 to help. But then when Trudeau does it, it's, you know, a necessary problem. It's a necessary solution.

00:15:03.840 I, I don't, I don't understand how that is the case. And again, Canada's health minister,

00:15:09.200 Minister Hajju, she said, the more countries that have outbreaks, the less relevant borders become.

00:15:14.640 A virus knows no borders. And she said that, that, that closing borders can actually have a

00:15:19.680 contradicting effect because it will allow people to lie and that people will still be able to get in,

00:15:24.160 regardless of whether the borders open or closed. So, you know, were they listening to the experts

00:15:29.600 then, or are they listening to the experts now that they agree and they've closed the borders?

00:15:35.920 Again, this is, this is the problem that I have is that, you know, at the end of the day, you have

00:15:40.480 to choose, you have to make a decision and to just say, well, it's not my decision. I'm just relying on

00:15:44.880 the experts. Like who are the experts? Who determines who is an expert? There's so many people

00:15:51.440 with differing views at this point. Are you going to listen to economists like the folks over at Goldman

00:15:56.800 Sachs saying, you know, we're looking at a major, major collapse in the real estate sector.

00:16:02.000 It could lead to a massive stock market crash even further. Think about how many people are

00:16:05.520 going to lose their livelihood, lose their pensions, lose their savings, lose their house, lose their

00:16:09.840 family. And then you have to weigh that with the health experts that are saying, you know,

00:16:15.360 the only way that we beat this coronavirus is that everybody stay inside and nobody work. And it's like,

00:16:20.480 okay, well, which one's going to look worse in the end? And you really do have to balance and you have to

00:16:24.720 make a decision. So you can't just say, you can't just say, I'm listening to experts because there's

00:16:30.000 contradictions within what the experts are calling for. And even in experts in any given field don't

00:16:36.240 really agree. And I think when you have the news media kind of picking sides, you know,

00:16:41.040 we've seen this throughout that if you are sort of more on the, like, if you, if you like Justin Trudeau,

00:16:48.000 if you're a journalist who likes Justin Trudeau, you look at his response to this virus and you say,

00:16:53.120 wow, you know, he is just a standup guy doing everything he can, makes me so proud to be a

00:16:58.800 Canadian. You know, I saw, I've seen a lot of this on Twitter, the sort of liberal journalists and more,

00:17:04.800 more pro-Trudeau journalists talking about how much they admire Justin Trudeau and how, how proud they

00:17:11.040 are of his response. Whereas then you have sort of more of the skeptical crowd saying, wait a minute,

00:17:16.800 what, you know, what is he doing? Does he have a plan? You know, I'm seeing so many contradictions

00:17:21.920 between what he was saying a month ago, what he's saying now. And then you have the same thing

00:17:26.720 in the United States, you know, you're trying to read through the news about what's happening with

00:17:30.320 the coronavirus. And every news article you read is tainted with this sort of anti-Trump derangement

00:17:36.160 syndrome. You know, if I just want to find out what's happening, you know, reading an article,

00:17:41.520 a news report, supposed to be a news report in the Atlantic or the Washington Post or the New York Times,

00:17:46.720 you kind of have to have a filter and just ignore the like four paragraphs of complete

00:17:51.200 Trump derangement just to just to get through it. So, you know, people keep saying now's not the

00:17:56.160 time for partisanship. Now's not the time to play politics. Let's just focus at the task at hand.

00:18:01.120 But it's really impossible to do that because if people hate Trump, they're not going to be able

00:18:05.520 to write neutrally about what he's doing. And if people love Trudeau, likewise, they're not looking

00:18:10.080 neutrally at what is happening. Someone on Twitter is saying, please discuss the housing market. Well,

00:18:17.120 there was that report in Goldman Sachs. Let me see if I can pull it up because it was pretty scary,

00:18:24.400 honestly. And I feel like one of the things I'm sort of concerned about is I read a lot of news

00:18:30.640 and I'm a news junkie. I will read a lot of reports and I feel like there's a lot of information coming

00:18:35.840 out in the United States. You know, there's a lot of projections, there's a lot of critiques,

00:18:38.480 there's really, really thorough reports coming out, analyzing everything to do with this fallout.

00:18:45.680 And then I look for the equivalent in Canada and it just doesn't really exist. It's not,

00:18:50.960 obviously we're a smaller country and we don't have the same kind of like resources,

00:18:56.160 social infrastructure of, you know, think tanks and, you know, news reports and just a pure

00:19:03.120 number of people working on public policy. But, you know, to say I showed you the Conference Board

00:19:09.040 of Canada report hasn't been released yet. It's really just a one pager with bullet points. It's

00:19:14.400 not really comprehensive. Let's move on. I told you that I had some good personal news to share

00:19:22.160 and I got tested over the weekend for coronavirus. So I will explain what happened and how I got my test.

00:19:28.240 I know a lot of people have been complaining about the fact that the tests are very slow,

00:19:34.080 that once you get tested it might take up to a week. I know people in Ottawa were complaining.

00:19:38.480 And I know that there has been a huge problem with a shortage of tests. I think I got kind of lucky in

00:19:43.040 just the fact that I was able to test because I had been trying to get tested for two weeks. So if you

00:19:47.280 normally listen to my show and you're watching right now, you can tell I'm congested. My voice sounds

00:19:51.760 different. I have a cold I guess. I was in California. I was in the Bay Area where there's a massive

00:19:57.680 outbreak right now. There's been I think a thousand cases in the Bay Area. The Bay Area has been on

00:20:03.360 complete lockdown. Like people aren't even supposed to leave their house at all. And I was there two

00:20:08.560 weeks ago. I got back two weeks Saturday and from the time I got back I didn't really have any symptoms

00:20:15.280 but I was a little concerned just because not only when I was in California, you know, again pretty busy.

00:20:20.560 I had friends there. I had my son so I was taking him out to different classes. And then the night before I left

00:20:26.080 I went to a large fundraising gala. I went to the Make a Wish Foundation event in San Francisco and there was at

00:20:31.680 least 500 people there. And so, you know, once I got home and sort of realizing that there was an outbreak there,

00:20:36.400 I got a little paranoid. I also started testing myself and I had a fever. I had a low-grade fever.

00:20:42.480 So I decided to call the health officials in Toronto and also Ontario. I had a very hard time

00:20:48.000 getting through to them. And once I finally got through on the line after waiting on hold for two

00:20:52.000 hours, one night they basically said, look, unless you're in Iran, Italy, or China, you can't get

00:20:57.360 tested for this virus. So just stay at home and don't worry about it. A couple days later they changed

00:21:03.760 that and said, okay, you know, you can get tested if you're in the United States too because there's now big

00:21:08.080 outbreaks in New York City and California. They told me to call 811 in order to get tested.

00:21:13.760 You call 811 and the line is busy over and over and over and over again. Everyone in my household

00:21:18.560 was trying to call 811 so that I could see if I could get tested. Meanwhile, my fever was getting

00:21:22.800 worse and it was kind of sustaining. When I say fever, it was like testing like 101 in that range.

00:21:31.760 I got as high as 102. Anyway, Saturday morning we finally got through on the line. We waited on hold

00:21:38.480 for over four hours. When we finally spoke to an official, they transferred us to a nurse,

00:21:43.520 talked to the nurse about my symptoms. She advised that I do get tested for coronavirus. So I went down

00:21:48.400 to Toronto Western Hospital, which is the corner of Bathurst and Dundas, and they had created a whole new

00:21:55.040 kind of center. It was just brand new, opened. It had kind of been refurbished to be this testing center.

00:22:01.840 It had just opened. It just opened on Saturday. So I was one of the first people to go in and get tested.

00:22:06.480 It was really, really well done. My hat goes off to the frontline workers there. I know that they're really

00:22:11.600 putting themselves and their own health at risk in order to address this issue. So I went in.

00:22:17.600 Everything was very sanitary. You know, they give you a mask and gloves. You go in one by one,

00:22:21.760 so you're not even interacting with anyone and they're behind a plexiglass. So I gave them all of

00:22:26.160 my, you know, my health card and all my information. They sent me to a private room. I waited there,

00:22:31.520 probably about 20 minutes. The nurse came by. She did the swab, which they swab up your nose and kind of

00:22:38.080 did that. Then a doctor came by, you know, just kind of like a regular doctor visit. I left and

00:22:44.000 they emailed me the results of the test less than 24 hours later. Like by six o'clock the next morning,

00:22:48.960 I had the result. I was negative. So I'm very, very glad and very thankful that I don't have it.

00:22:53.920 And really, I think that the key to addressing this issue and solving it is that everyone needs

00:22:58.960 to get tested. The more people who get tested, the better, because then you have the peace of mind

00:23:02.960 and you know, if you're sick, you have to take quarantine really, really seriously. And if you're not

00:23:07.680 sick, then you can go out and you can continue to go to work and you can continue to have an

00:23:12.240 economy in this country. I think that that is a much better measure than what we're doing now.

00:23:17.920 It's basically what South Korea has been doing, which is testing everybody. Everybody gets tested, 0.54

00:23:23.120 focus the resource on making sure as many people get tested as possible. Because I think part of the

00:23:27.520 concern at this point is that we don't know how many people have it. We don't know how many people

00:23:32.240 potentially walking around, not really taking the quarantine measures very seriously,

00:23:36.160 and they have it. And then we know this thing spreads incredibly fast. We know

00:23:40.320 how quickly it can spread and how many people one person can infect. So if we had more knowledge,

00:23:46.400 more people tested, I think we'll be a lot better off. I wish that we were focusing

00:23:50.640 on that as opposed to these crazy to cronian measures to shut down the entire economy.

00:23:55.680 And I know we are going to be talking in depth on my other show, True North update with Andrew

00:24:00.320 Lawton about the extent of the government powers, how Justin Trudeau basically tried a power grab,

00:24:07.760 got caught and kind of had to walk away with his tail between his legs and eliminate some of the

00:24:12.720 things that he proposed. But let me just say this, you know, we're sending out $1,800 in EI,

00:24:21.120 basically welfare to half a million Canadians or more. Okay, that's a lot of money. It's going to add

00:24:30.080 up incredibly quickly. So I think that the whole $82 billion is really just a starting point. That

00:24:35.360 might be like how much money we spend in March. And then we'll have to spend that much money again

00:24:39.600 in April, potentially and May and June. And eventually, we're going to have to pay that all back.

00:24:44.240 Eventually, you know, unless we're going to just default, which would be terrible for the economy,

00:24:49.760 we're going to have to pay that back. And it is going to come from you and me, my friends,

00:24:53.840 from the taxpayer. So I wouldn't be surprised to see massive, massive tax grabs and increases.

00:24:59.920 It's kind of scary to imagine what might happen if you kind of look back to the top tax levels back

00:25:06.400 during the 1940s and 50s, when we were trying to pay back the war efforts. You know, the whole idea

00:25:11.920 of the income tax was supposed to be a temporary measure. It was brought in as a temporary tax to

00:25:16.400 help fund the First World War. It is not temporary at all. It is still here. My colleague over at the

00:25:22.400 Toronto Sun, Anthony Fury, has been looking a lot into this. The idea that a lot of the measures that

00:25:28.480 were introduced and that are being introduced right now are things that the left has kind of always

00:25:33.200 called for. They've always called for, you know, increasing the ability of AI or of EI, sorry,

00:25:39.600 making it available faster, all these other kind of measures. You know, we have to be vigilant. We

00:25:44.880 have to be vigilant. These measures are temporary and that when this crisis is over, the government

00:25:49.280 goes right back to the way it was and that we don't allow them to, you know, continue with some

00:25:55.120 of the surveillance measures or some of the power measures or some of the taxation measures and

00:25:59.200 spending measures that could be really, really potentially bad for our society. So I'm going to

00:26:04.400 leave it at that. Like I said, my colleague and I, Andrew Lawton, will be coming back to you a

00:26:09.280 little later on this afternoon. We'll have a full update on all of the announcements today,

00:26:13.440 all of the latest with coronavirus and the response, and we'll talk a lot in depth about the

00:26:18.880 emergency spending and the House of Commons today and what happens in Ottawa. So thanks so much

00:26:24.960 guys for tuning in. I'm Candace Malcolm and this is The Candace Malcolm Show.

The Candice Malcolm Show - March 24, 2020

The Candice Malcolm Show： The economic toll of COVID-19 pandemic

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