Western Standard - January 07, 2022


FILDEBRANDT： Mandatory vaccines are the point of new return


Episode Stats


Length

6 minutes

Words per minute

149.34688

Word count

1,029

Sentence count

48

Harmful content

Hate speech

3

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Mandatory vaccination is back in Canada, and the federal government seems to be on a warpath toward making it mandatory for all Canadians to get their flu shots. But what will the provinces and their leaders do to fight back?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Writing in 1984, Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman wrote,
00:00:13.540 nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program. He was referring to
00:00:17.700 government spending on social programs, but his commentary is just as relevant today
00:00:21.700 as it concerns emergency authoritarian powers that governments are granting themselves.
00:00:25.820 These extraordinary powers have been amassed by governments step by step since then, with the goalposts moving evermore in a dangerous and authoritarian direction.
00:00:35.820 One new set of powers to combat the latest COVID-19 variant is stacked atop the previous set of powers.
00:00:42.820 Any rare relaxation of these powers is never fully repealed, but it provides a short reprieve from evermore extreme measures that are introduced next.
00:00:50.820 next. Fears over how far these powers will extend are dismissed as wild-eyed conspiracy theories
00:00:56.500 until they're not. They are fever dreams on Monday, then their government policy on Tuesday.
00:01:03.620 Restrictions to stop mass gatherings like concerts became police attacking kids for playing hockey
00:01:09.300 or jailing church pastors. It's official government advice that masks don't work
00:01:14.100 to mandatory masking for little children at no risk of COVID. Its premier is vowing never to
00:01:20.620 impose vaccine passports before requiring them by law. It's the government endlessly praising 0.61
00:01:26.440 frontline healthcare workers before firing them for being unvaccinated. With every inch we give,
00:01:33.900 the government takes a mile. Every time they take new powers for themselves, they promise that
00:01:39.260 they're temporary and necessary, but it's rarely the truth. Dismissed by the political and media
00:01:45.180 classes were warnings that these draconian measures were on a clear path to mandatory
00:01:51.180 vaccination. By mandatory, I'm no longer speaking about discriminatory and coercive measures like
00:01:56.540 vaccine passports, which make vaccines mandatory if one wishes to live an even semi-normal life,
00:02:02.300 or threats of firing workers who do not comply. I now mean mandatory in the sense that the
00:02:07.900 government will prosecute you like a criminal if you are not vaccinated. Just weeks ago,
00:02:12.940 Austria and Italy began their program of mandatory vaccination, charging citizens for not getting the
00:02:18.300 jab as if they were petty thieves. The silence of the Canadian political leadership and media
00:02:23.100 should have been a clear sign enough that they didn't think that it was such a bad idea.
00:02:27.900 But none of them said it out loud until today. Federal Health Minister Jean-Yves Duclos told
00:02:33.740 the media that he believes provinces are likely to soon introduce mandatory vaccination.
00:02:38.220 Quote, what we see now is that our health care system in Canada is fragile,
00:02:41.740 our people are tired and that the only way we know to get through COVID-19, this variant and
00:02:45.900 any future variant, is through vaccination," Duclos said on Friday during a news conference.
00:02:51.500 Based on his, quote, personal understanding of what we see internationally and domestically,
00:02:55.900 end quote, and the conversations he's had with health ministers across the country over the past
00:02:59.980 few weeks, Duclos said he believes discussions around mandatory vaccination policies will be
00:03:05.180 coming in the near future quote that's why i am signaling a conversation which i believe provinces
00:03:12.220 and territories and support with the federal government will want to have over the next weeks
00:03:15.900 and months end quote well thankfully ottawa's ability to impose mandatory vaccines is limited
00:03:22.780 by the constitution where healthcare is theoretically under exclusive provincial
00:03:26.780 jurisdiction ottawa's ability to meddle has mostly been limited limited to requiring a vaccine
00:03:32.140 passport for Canadians to travel by air and water, an exit passport that more closely resembles 1980s
00:03:37.900 East Germany than 2019 Canada. But the provinces have closely followed Ottawa's lead on most things
00:03:43.660 COVID. When Ottawa said masks should be mandatory, all provinces made them mandatory. When Ottawa
00:03:49.740 said that there should be vaccine passports, every single province introduced a vaccine passport.
00:03:55.900 Now Ottawa's signaling that it wants to move on the effect of criminalization of the unvaccinated.
00:04:01.660 Can we really expect the provinces to stand their ground this time?
00:04:05.540 Alberta Premier Jason Kenney signaled that he won't play ball in a tweet responding to Duclos' comments.
00:04:11.940 He said, quote,
00:04:13.240 Alberta's legislature removed the power of mandatory vaccination from the Public Health Act last year and will not revisit that decision.
00:04:20.060 Period.
00:04:20.920 While we strongly encourage those who are eligible to get vaccinated, it is ultimately a personal choice that individuals must make.
00:04:28.820 Except it's not.
00:04:30.720 Premier Kenney already took away the personal choice of individuals to get vaccinated
00:04:34.500 when he imposed a vaccine passport of his own,
00:04:37.900 although he chose to call it a restrictions exemption program.
00:04:41.480 But the Premier's statement is clear.
00:04:43.640 Ottawa can say whatever it wants, but Alberta is wild-rose country,
00:04:47.400 and we're not going to take any of Trudeau's authoritarian diktats.
00:04:51.480 But we've heard it before.
00:04:53.040 On masks, lockdowns, vaccine passports,
00:04:56.660 Alberta's government has rolled over every single time.
00:05:01.700 It's too late for Kenny to paint himself as some kind of Western freedom fighter doing battle with an evil overreaching Ottawa.
00:05:08.860 But there's a chance for him to do the right thing this time.
00:05:12.780 Kenny has drawn this latest rhetorical line in the sand, but it's difficult to believe when he's drawn so many before, only to cross them and go beyond.
00:05:21.860 All Kenny can do this time is to keep his word.
00:05:24.220 politicians can draw all the lines in the sand that they like but the only defense against this
00:05:30.040 most extreme act of authoritarian overreach is for citizens to draw the line themselves
00:05:34.660 people vaccinated and unvaccinated alike need to make clear that this is not just unwelcome
00:05:41.140 it is an unacceptable attack on their most fundamental liberties it is an action that
00:05:46.920 would delegitimize the power of the government to exercise its will for my own part i now
00:05:53.420 identify as a non-vaccinated person. The two previous doses that I freely took in the spring
00:05:58.700 of 2021 should be wiped from the record. If my friends, family, and colleagues are now quasi
00:06:04.020 criminals for exercising their own choice over their own bodies, well, so am I. There is no good
00:06:10.880 place beyond here. This is the point of no return. Beyond here is only a dark descent into a world
00:06:18.360 that is unfit for free men and free women. 1.00
00:06:23.420 We'll be right back. 1.00