Western Standard - June 09, 2022


FILDEBRANDT Trudeau & premiers owe unvaccinated an apology

Mentioned
Justin Trudeau Erin O'Toole Jason Kenney Doug Ford Libertarians COVID-19
Triggered： AHS mismanagement of emergency services led to the death of a senior Canada’s aspiring populists aren’t actually all that radical

Episode Stats


Length

6 minutes

Words per minute

153.96

Word count

1,069

Sentence count

55

Harmful content

Hate speech

5

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Justin Trudeau is good at apologizing for the actions of other people, most of whom were long since dead. His record of fessing up to his own heirs is a bit more suspect, but that's human nature. Much as Trudeau, in the upper crust of Canada s elite opinion, may claim otherwise, Canada is not a dark, genocidal state, born in sin, redeemable only by ideological conversion therapy. But there were, of course, since no state in humanity s short history is without it.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is really good at apologizing.
00:00:03.780 That is, apologizing for the actions of other people, most of whom were long since dead.
00:00:09.060 His record of fessing up to his own heirs is a bit more suspect, but that's human nature.
00:00:14.280 Much as Trudeau, in the upper crust of Canada's elite opinion, may claim otherwise,
00:00:18.500 Canada is not a dark, genocidal state, born in sin, redeemable only by ideological conversion therapy.
00:00:25.440 But there were, of course, since. No state in humanity's short history is without it.
00:00:31.520 But in any reasonable comparison of almost any other polity on Earth, Canada's a choir boy.
00:00:37.280 That said, apologies for historic wrongdoing has its place.
00:00:41.860 It need not take the form of Trudeau's national self-flagellation and wearing of a hair shirt,
00:00:48.260 but a straightforward owning up of wrongdoing and compensation are sometimes warranted.
00:00:53.200 The wrongdoing, in hindsight, committed by the Canadian state and its provinces is normally applauded at the time.
00:01:01.740 When Canadians locked up Ukrainians during the First World War and Japanese during the Second,
00:01:07.360 Canadians overwhelmingly cheered.
00:01:09.880 These were others.
00:01:11.360 They were minorities of the population that did not deserve our understanding. 1.00
00:01:15.180 Only in hindsight, after the crisis had passed, did cooler heads allow Canadians to self-reflect at the injustices done to their fellow citizens.
00:01:25.480 Trudeau and the premiers should undergo a similar self-reflection right now as the COVID-19 crisis fades into history.
00:01:32.960 The unvaccinated weren't locked up into concentration camps, but they were locked down in their homes, locked up in mandatory quarantine hotels. 0.61
00:01:41.040 Prior to the September 21 federal election, few beyond the most wild-eyed COVID cultists were demanding vaccine passports.
00:01:50.720 But lagging in the polls and desperate to restore his majority government, Trudeau recognized it as a solid voter wedge issue.
00:01:57.080 With the support of the NDP and bloc, and only tepid resistance from the O'Toole Tories, Trudeau introduced the most openly discriminatory government policy since the introduction of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms by his father in 1982.
00:02:12.520 Canadians who made a private health care choice that did not conform with the state's desire were to be shunned, discriminated against, and overtly othered.
00:02:20.720 People lost their jobs. People were prevented from flying back to Canada for weddings and funerals.
00:02:27.680 People were prevented from crossing provincial borders in anything but their own automobiles and on foot.
00:02:33.920 There was no Berlin Wall with armed guards shooting at fleeing citizens, but it constituted a massive curtailing of the charter-guaranteed mobility rights of Canadian citizens.
00:02:45.280 Trudeau himself said, they, that is the unvaccinated, don't believe in science and progress, and they are very often misogynistic and racist.
00:02:55.200 It's a very small group of people, but that doesn't shy away from the fact that they take up some space.
00:03:01.220 This leads us as a leader and as a country to make a choice.
00:03:04.480 Do we tolerate these people?
00:03:06.060 It was a shockingly authoritarian and sinister statement to be coming from the leader of a civilized country.
00:03:13.940 In short order, every single provincial government followed Trudeau's lead.
00:03:17.720 From Quebec to Ontario to Saskatchewan, BC, and Alberta, every single premier in Canada imposed wildly discriminatory vaccine passports that made the unvaccinated second-class citizens in their own country.
00:03:30.280 The unvaccinated were barred from attending weddings, funerals, restaurants, bars, concerts, and indoor gatherings of almost any kind.
00:03:40.940 One Alberta government employee that I know was put on mandatory unpaid leave simply because she chose not to comply with what the government told her to do with her body.
00:03:49.380 It made many of us who were voluntarily and enthusiastically vaccinated before it became mandatory feel ashamed, and ashamed we should be.
00:04:00.860 I was given back my freedom to live much of my life as I pleased, while my unvaccinated friends and colleagues were forced to live like chained-up animals. 0.97
00:04:09.620 I leviated my own guilt as much as I could by assisting them in finding certain government documentation that would allow them to participate in society again.
00:04:20.300 So far, only Alberta Premier Jason Kenney has had to pay the political price for the actions of his government.
00:04:26.020 Arguably, Aaron O'Toole also lost his job for failing to take a firm stand against Trudeau.
00:04:30.660 But Trudeau himself, and every premier that has faced voters since, has been rewarded with re-election.
00:04:36.620 Doug Ford was re-elected last week in Ontario, despite his grievous record of hard lockdowns, mask mandates, and discriminatory vaccines.
00:04:47.520 Ontario's Conservatives, as upset as many of them were, held their collective noses or stayed at home.
00:04:53.220 Ford would not be so lucky if he governed Alberta, where Conservatives and Libertarians launched a veritable insurrection to oust Kenney without electing the NDP.
00:05:02.120 Provincial mandatory vaccination may be, for the most part, gone, thanks to grassroots pressure from events like the Freedom Convoy, but Trudeau refuses to remove them at the federal level.
00:05:14.820 He knows there is no science backing his position.
00:05:17.880 Vaccines do provide some level of protection against severe COVID-19 outcomes, but they do nothing to prevent transmission whatsoever.
00:05:26.020 However, the sole thread that the vaccine passport program hung by was as a means of preventing that transmission.
00:05:33.860 But the science and data be damned.
00:05:36.740 Trudeau will not end mandatory federal vaccination because it is a matter of politics, pride, and vindictiveness for him.
00:05:44.560 For much of his voter coalition, vaccines are not just about health care, but are a marker of tribal political allegiance.
00:05:53.660 His pride was severely hurt when a bunch of rednecks showed up in hot tubs and bouncy castles outside of Parliament Hill and refused to leave until he invoked martial law, enforced by mounted police and billy clubs. 1.00
00:06:05.400 This episode left him deeply embarrassed on the international stage, of which he cares so much, leaving him to exact his vengeance on the rebels of the Drucker Spring.
00:06:16.360 Canada's apologist-in-chief is unlikely to see the error of his actions, and even less likely to apologize for them.
00:06:22.540 But even Canada's premiers, who have rolled back most of their discriminatory vaccine policies, have uniformly refused to admit wrongdoing.
00:06:32.300 Like panics of the past, Canadians will likely one day look back on this era as a dark chapter in our history, when we allowed hysteria and charlatans to other a minority for their political and ideological gain.
00:06:46.100 The Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, and the Premiers owe the unvaccinated an apology, but we'll almost certainly have to wait until they are history themselves. 1.00