Dr. Tam’s flawed advice—like downplaying masks in early 2020—paired with Trudeau’s February shipment of 16 tons of Canadian masks to China while two Canadians remained detained, exposed systemic failures. Canada’s unemployment skyrocketed from 5.6% to 16% in a month due to 2.1 million layoffs, mirroring the 1933 Great Depression peak (19.3%), yet NYC’s data showed only 18 COVID-19-only deaths out of 1,397, with 2M minors unaffected. Taiwan’s targeted testing and border controls kept cases low while Canada ignored travel bans, mandatory screenings, and China’s suspected 20x underreporting, prioritizing ideological correctness over civil defense—risking economic collapse and public health crises. [Automatically generated summary]
Today I take you through a detailed report from New York City on the death toll in that city, which is over a thousand people.
But there's some fascinating things.
A single casualty under the age of 18, and he had a existing precondition.
I'll go through the demographics of who's dying, and of course it's an unhappy business and we don't want anyone to die.
But the demographics of who dies and who doesn't is so striking, maybe we can use that information on how to fight the virus and let the rest of us go free.
I'll take you through that shortly.
Before I do, please consider becoming a Rebel News Plus subscriber, especially when I take you through that New York City chart.
It really helps to see the chart with your eyes.
I'll do my best to describe it, but Rebel News Plus gets you.
The visual, the video version, as well as Sheila Gunread's show and David Menzie's show, and it's eight bucks a month.
Not a bad way to pass the time in quarantine.
All right, here's today's podcast.
Tonight, Canadian unemployment hit 16%, the highest level since 1933.
But can I show you something interesting out of New York City?
It's April 2nd, and this is the Azra Levant show.
Why should others go to jail when you're the biggest carbon consumer I know?
There's 8,500 customers here, and you won't give them an answer.
The only thing I have is in the government about why I published them.
It's because it's my bloody right to do so.
Incredible, shocking, terrible news today.
Over the past two weeks, 2.1 million people have been laid off in Canada.
2.1 million.
A week ago, the number was 929,000 laid off.
So this is the same amount again, actually a little bit worse.
And I have to say, there's no reason to believe it won't be the same again next week.
Another million.
Yesterday was probably the last day a lot of these folks will be able to pay their rent or mortgage on the first of the month.
Not a lot of people have a lot of savings.
The economy was already slowing down before the pandemic.
I haven't seen the official math yet, but Canada's labor force is about 20 million people, just a touch higher than that.
So that's people who work or want to work.
That's what the labor force is.
Obviously, it doesn't include kids, retired people, moms or dads who stay home.
So there's 20 million workers.
Until February, 1.1 million of them were unemployed.
That means they were looking for work but couldn't find it.
That's a pretty low 5.6%, but obviously it gets worse in certain regions.
Alberta had it worse, for example.
So 1.1 million unemployed a month ago.
Now it's 1.1 million plus 2.1 million new unemployed.
That's 3.2 million out of work out of 20 million workers.
By my math, that's 16% unemployment.
So we just almost exactly tripled our unemployment from 5.6% to 16% in just a month.
We used, so here's a historical study I found by Statistics Canada of unemployment rates going back all the way in history to 1920.
Sorry, this is low resolution, but I wanted to use this because it's from StatsCan, so it's authoritative.
You can see that the last time unemployment was this high was in 1933.
In fact, in 1933, that was the year of the highest unemployment in Canadian history, 19.3% at the absolute depth of the depression.
I'm sorry to be pessimistic, but do you doubt that we'll exceed that historical number before the pandemic is done?
19.3%?
We're almost there.
And what will it be like, that high unemployment, after a week, a month, God forbid, six months?
Do you think that the thousands of little businesses and companies that are shutting down now, going broke now, will simply just start right back up again on command?
And it's a domino effect.
Airlines, hotels, the whole tourism industry, travel industry, hospitality industry, retail industry, so many things are wiped out.
So how will that go?
So far in Canada, there have been 134 deaths from the virus, and that's a tragedy.
But you put 3 million, 4 million, God forbid, 5 million men out of work, and you put their families in crisis and put people in poverty.
I promise you there will be more deaths just from suicide alone, let alone economic crimes of desperation, let alone just the sickness that goes up when people are poor, too poor to eat right, too poor to buy medicine.
Government Inaction Revealed00:02:47
And what are our leaders doing?
They don't know what to do is what?
In the United Kingdom, police have deployed drones to shame people who were going for hikes in the wilderness in groups of two.
So they're obviously husband and wife.
They obviously live together.
So they're not going to spread the virus.
They're already living in the area.
They're not going to catch the virus out there in the wilderness or give it to anyone.
Why are the police doing that?
Well, because maybe they don't know what to do.
They just want to show they're doing something.
Look at this clip.
You'll get a fine.
And if you can't prove who you are, you'll get arrested.
Write the fine.
We're gonna drive, that's fine.
So simple fact is, you can drive this car home because you're the driver.
The rest of the passengers have to walk to wherever they want to go to, that's a dispersal.
Where your final destination is, is down to you.
Right.
You are allowed to be on the street together.
But we're in the car now together.
So you're going to separate more people into the streets.
Separately, away from you, away from each other.
Why?
We're in the new car together now.
It don't make a difference.
You're all round us.
You surrounded us with how many police are here.
That just doesn't make sense in itself, especially when you juxtapose it with those jam-packed subways and buses in London, if we're talking about the UK.
And of course, no one has any masks because all the masks were stolen by China.
Instructed to drop everything and source bulk supplies of essential medical items to ship back to China.
A whistleblower from that same company said it was a worldwide fleecing of stock.
So in cities and rural towns around Australia, and you remember the shots of those buses in places like Orange and Parks, in an almost military operation, massive numbers of surgical masks, thermometers, antibacterial wipes, hand sanitizers, gloves and panadol were stripped from the shelves and shipped to China.
They even had the temerity to exhibit the packing on social media.
This carried on unabated for two months.
Most of these employees would be Australian residents and citizens, but with an overwhelming loyalty to their old communist masters back home.
That's from Australia.
It's in the United States too.
Here in Canada, Trudeau was part of the plan to send all our masks to China.
As you know, he just shipped them, 16 tons worth.
So I guess if you don't have masks and if you refuse to close the borders, that's another headline from today.
Over 150 flights that have come into Canada over the last few weeks have had virus people on them and we've been showing that every day and the government doesn't care.
But what else are you going to do?
But police people going for a walk if you're not going to close the borders and you don't know what to do.
You don't have masks to do it.
Trudeau's still doing that self-hiding thing.
For three weeks he's been lounging around at home.
Is any other world leader doing that?
Canada's Mask Dilemma00:04:34
Here's Vladimir Putin.
He's not lounging around at home.
Trudeau is working, Truth is working half an hour a day.
Trump's working seven days a week, as he always does, talking for an hour a day with the press, detailed questions and answers, calling up business people.
I guess that's the difference between a lifelong businessman and entrepreneur Donald Trump and a mascot, selfie guy, which is what Trudeau is.
The other day, Trump revealed a graph, a model, a projection, it's a guess, scientific guess, how many deaths might happen if there was no public health reaction to the virus and how many deaths they were trying to squish that number down to based on their interventions, their quarantine rules, social distancing, clamping down on travel, et cetera.
So that's his model, his projections.
As they say in computers, garbage in, garbage out.
Or to be more polite, a model is only as good as the people who make it and the assumptions they plug into it.
We know from global warming models that they're only as good as the person building them.
They all do exactly what the people who design them want them to say.
So in global warming, they all predict doom and gloom.
None of the climate models ever actually come true.
Are we making the same mistake with the pandemic models?
Could be.
One of the problems is that we don't have any reliable information because China lied and covered it up and still is.
So was it really, really bad or just no big problem, just a little problem as China has said?
They said they've already solved it.
Well, U.S. intelligence agencies have confirmed that China lied and covered it up perhaps 20-fold, perhaps they had 20 times the deaths they acknowledged.
So you see, relying on China's stats could actually have been a deadly mistake, which is why Taiwan is so lucky to have a built-in distrust of China, their mortal enemy.
We, on the other hand, have a prime minister who is so in love with China, he actually sent them all our masks, even though they have two Canadians held hostage.
Oh, look at this just today.
There's no indication that the data that came out of China in terms of their infection rate and their death rate was falsified in any way.
In fact, if you look at the death rate overall in China, it's much higher than the one we're seeing now.
And so we rely on the World Health Organization to do this important work because, of course, we're all in this together.
And I think one of the most important things to understand about this pandemic, this global pandemic, is that as long as coronavirus exists in one country, it exists in all of our countries, that we actually have to work collectively as a world now to defeat this virus, to find better ways to treat and then eventually prevent this virus through vaccination or other kinds of methods.
And that's going to take everybody working together.
Sorry, please let her finish.
No.
China has shown that they're now helpful.
So I would say that your question is feeding into the conspiracy theories that many people have been perpetuating on the internet.
And it's important to remember that there is no way to beat a global pandemic if we're actually not willing to work together as a globe.
Got it.
So trusting China, which would be like trusting the Soviet Union's explanations about Chernobyl in the weeks after the explosion, trusting China is sound, but questioning China is a conspiracy theory.
You can tell why these people want to censor the internet, Trudeau.
Curiously, Trudeau won't release his model like Trump did.
Why not?
I think people can imagine a range of scenarios that shows everything from everyone gets suddenly better within the next few weeks to this situation just keeps getting worse and we face a situation like some other countries in the most dire situations have.
There is a range out there and just highlighting that range is not as useful or important as being able to get clearer numbers and clearer analysis of what we are likely to face.
Ontario's Doug Ford, who has been universally praised for his handling the crisis, even by his nemesis, the Toronto Star, says he will reveal his model.
You can disagree with it, you can agree with it, you can try and improve it, but he'll treat you like a grown-up and let you see it, which also suggests that he himself is thinking about it a lot.
He's guided by it, which is more than our childish Trudeau can say.
Tomorrow, our top doctors will provide an update on where Ontario was, on where Ontario is, and where Ontario could be.
Second Wave Risks00:14:35
Over the past few weeks, we've shown we'll not hesitate to take every step necessary to slow the spread of COVID-19.
I don't trust anyone's model that much.
Canada's is obviously based on Chinese lies.
Who knows what Doug Ford's is based on, perhaps on worry-wart doctors who want to bring the medical risk to zero, which I guess is their job, but they're not thinking of unintended consequences outside their field of expertise, such as what happens when you have three, four, five million Canadian men out of work and out of hope for six months or 12 years, whereas the Great Depression went 10 years.
But look at this.
Look at this from New York.
This is the number of people who have died from coronavirus in New York City.
New York City has some of the best hospitals in the world, and I trust their accuracy and honesty.
So this is a tale of tragedy, of course.
1,397 people have died as of the moment this was published.
But look at those vertical columns.
The first is called underlying conditions.
The second is called no underlying conditions.
And the third is underlying conditions pending.
So the first column is people who might have diabetes or cancer or respiratory problems or lung, I don't know, chronic illness of some sort, and they get the coronavirus.
The second is people who just get the virus.
And the third is, well, they're still waiting for info about those patients.
So a grand total of 18 deaths in New York City are the result of people who died only of the virus.
18.
The rest died of the virus and something else.
Or perhaps they died of something else, but they just also had the virus.
Now, that doesn't lessen the tragedy or the public health urgency of fighting the virus.
And it suggests we have to protect people with a pre-existing condition, but it suggests that we can have a different approach to different people based on their risk profile.
Let's treat low people differently than we treat low-risk people differently than we treat high-risk people.
Protect people with underlying conditions.
Let the rest of the country go back to work.
Perhaps the most striking fact from New York City stats is that of age, only one person under 18 has died in New York, and he had an underlying condition.
Yet all the schools are closed to everyone?
The schools.
One minor.
That is lightning strikes you rare.
There are almost 2 million people who are minors in New York City.
Almost 2 million kids.
And none of them have died of the virus only.
Not one.
One kid died of a condition he had already plus the virus.
That is less than a one in a million chance.
I'm sad, but that is not a youthful pandemic.
Only 61 people under the age of 45 have died.
And all except for five of them had underlying conditions.
But under 45s are 61% in New York City's population.
But under 45s are only 5% of the deaths.
And of course, most of those are people with underlying conditions.
How about let's not waste medical attention, medical equipment, on people who are extremely unlikely to need it.
And how about we then take that and double or triple the attention on those who do need it?
Seniors, people with an underlying sickness, and by focusing on those who need it, we'll let working-age people get back to work.
Only 6.6% of New Yorkers are aged 75 and up, and yet they represent 42% of the deaths.
How about stop the total lockdown on the entire population and give all the care and protection to the sick and the elderly and let everyone else go back to work to pay for it all?
I can guarantee you that out of the 3 million plus unemployed people in Canada today, those in the labor force, that those age 75 and up are less than 1%.
Old people are getting sick, but it's young people who are being told not to go to work.
That cannot be sustained.
People won't accept it.
But more importantly, how does it protect anyone from the virus?
That's the model I'm interested in.
Learn from Taiwan and its focus on masks and its tightly controlled borders.
Learn from New York about who is really vulnerable and who isn't.
But I don't think we're going to get either part right, though, with Trudeau and his team of second raters, do you?
stay with us for more there's no indication that the data that came out of china in terms of their infection rate and their death rate was falsified in any way In fact, if you look at the death rate overall in China, it's much higher than the one we're seeing now.
And so we rely on the World Health Organization to do this important work because, of course, we're all in this together.
And I think one of the most important things to understand about this pandemic, this global pandemic, is that as long as coronavirus exists in one country, it exists in all of our countries, that we actually have to work collectively as a world now to defeat this virus, to find better ways to treat and then eventually prevent this virus through vaccination or other kinds of methods.
And that's going to take everybody working together.
Sorry, please let her finish.
No.
So I would say that your question is feeding into conspiracy theories that many people have been perpetuating on the internet.
And it's important to remember that there is no way to beat a global pandemic if we're actually not willing to work together with the globe.
That is Patty Haidu, Canada's health minister, the same health minister whose first advice was everyone should run to stores and stockpile and hoard on masks, the same health minister who later said that arriving international passengers at our airports would be given face masks before traveling on domestic connections.
Remember she said that?
Asymptomatic passengers are given public health advice, including the order to quarantine when they get to their final destination, along with a mask and told to don the mask should they become ill at any point of their onward travel.
Yeah, our own David Menzies and Kian Becksty have been to the airport half a dozen times in the past week and that simply isn't happening.
Well today she's saying that it's simply a conspiracy theory to not believe the Chinese Communist Party.
This speaks to a problem that Lorne Gunter addresses in his latest column about political correctness.
The headline of his essay, which I highly recommend, is political correctness got in the way of a swift COVID-19 response.
To the extent our initial response was the result of an it could never happen here mentality, it's forgivable.
However, the extent to which our leaders' less than optimal response was driven by political correctness, it must change dramatically.
And joining us now via Skype from Edmonton is our friend, Lauren Country.
Great to see you again, my friend.
Hope you're staying safe and healthy.
Yeah, likewise, I hope you are too.
Well, thank you for that.
I understand there is a public health aspect to keeping people calm.
But at a certain point in time, people no longer believe calming platitudes.
And especially when there's a disconnect between what you say and what you do, I think that Canada has been untransparent, unresponsive, and now they're just, especially Patty Haidu.
It's a blend of political correctness.
Don't criticize open borders.
Don't criticize Chinese people or China.
And hey, guys, we're all going to be fine.
What's your take on it?
Well, I think that's a pretty good summation: is that we have far too many leaders who are still saying don't blame China.
You know, interesting, two days ago, there were several reports in American outlets of a U.S. intelligence report that had just gone to the White House and to senior intelligence people in the United States saying, the situation in China is not over, and it's much worse than they let on.
You can't believe their numbers of 80,000 infected and 3,000 dead, because both are gross underestimation.
So, you know, here we have politicians and political doctors like Teresa Tam, who's the chief medical officer of health for Canada, saying things all along, particularly in January when this was forming up first all in China.
We were first becoming aware of it, that it existed in China, saying it's just racism, racism to say that this is a problem with China or that we should be screening people coming from China.
There was even a Chinese heritage parent in Toronto who started an online petition to get the school board in Toronto to recommend, not you can't enforce anything, but just to recommend that people who had gone to China for the Lunar New Year celebrations be asked to stay at home for 17 days when they return.
And the school board rejected doing that, saying that it was racist and hateful.
Even though the suggestion came from a Chinese Canadian family.
Exactly.
Exactly.
So, you know, they're so caught up in their cult of multiculturalism and in progressivism and showing how woke they are on racism.
I mean, John Torrey, the mayor of Toronto, said that, you know, we can't allow racism to affect our community values.
And to the extent that people who are Chinese Canadians who'd never been to China during the last year, you know, were being looked down on in the street.
That's right.
But there was no evidence of that.
I remember that story.
And no one could point to any examples.
To the extent that that was happening at all, that's wrong.
But that's separate from do you screen people who are coming from a pandemic hotspot?
And people in the government in Taiwan is a very good example of this.
Taiwan is just a few miles from China off the coast.
And as soon as the announcement was made that China had an infection it didn't understand, it wasn't able to control, Taiwan started testing everyone who arrived in their country from China.
And if they had any symptoms at all, they were compelled to go into a 14-day self-isolation.
The self-isolation was enforced with your phone.
You have to give governments your phone number, and then they will call you at any time, day or night, and insist that you show them using your phone that you are staying in place.
So that is a pretty good measure.
A few days after that, they said, look, it's just too much a risk.
We have to refuse all travelers from China.
We're simply not going to take anybody in from China.
And as a result, 24 hours ago, Taiwan had about 300 infections in a country of 24 million people, and it had had five deaths.
So its infection rate is much lower than our own.
And that's because they're not politically correct.
They realize there's a giant threat across the straits in mainland China and they act very quickly.
Yeah.
Well, we've been going deep on China.
In fact, yesterday we had a former head nurse in a Taiwanese hospital talk to us at some length.
Fascinating.
The key point, Lauren, to me, is not just that they've held the infections and the deaths so low, but that they've done so while their schools are still open, while their restaurants are still open.
You know, the most incredible statement by that same Patty Haidu the other day was she said, if we all stop talking to each other, freeze in motion for two weeks.
Now, she was using it as a hypothetical.
But it was so insane here.
Let me just play that clip because I don't think people will believe me if I don't show you what Patty Haidu said.
Take a look at this.
In fact, one of the things that I read recently that I thought was fascinating was that if we all stopped moving for two weeks and nobody talked to anybody for two weeks and we all just stayed put, in fact, we would see this virus die.
That is the reality.
The virus needs hosts to continue to infect in order to continue to grow.
Lauren, I mean, I know she didn't literally mean that, but I should tell you, at the same time, she's talking about us not even talking to each other.
There are flights from China landing every day in Canada, Lauren.
Every day.
Yeah, I mean, and we have to be smarter about it.
Now, the Americans shut off all flights from China on January 31st, and they are in bigger trouble than we are because they didn't get on to social distancing and stay in place as quickly as we did.
So closing down the borders is not a cure-all.
That's not the only thing you do, and then you're going to be okay.
The other thing we need to do, and we have got to get ready to do this because there could easily be a second wave of COVID after this first wave dies down.
If not, COVID-19, there'll be a COVID-20, there'll be a COVID-21.
They might not all be really, really awful, but at some point there's going to be another pandemic.
Test, Test, Test00:11:30
And we have got to be ready to test, test, test.
Iceland now, because it's a country of only 340,000 people, and it has about a thousand infections.
It's been quite scared about this, has decided that it's going to test the entire population.
And so far, they've tested well over 100,000 people out of about a third of the population.
And they found that about half of the cases of COVID go undetected because the people don't even know they have it.
And they develop an immunity to it, which then can be used to determine who should get back into the economy, who should be allowed more freedom of movement.
And we've got to have the Germans are starting to talk about this now, too.
The Germans have been very good about testing a lot of people, which is why, even though their infection rate is quite high, their death rate's nowhere near as high as it is in Spain and Italy and France.
That's testing, testing, testing.
And the Germans are now saying, well, we think we will find people who have had COVID and don't know it.
And we will give them an immunity certificate.
And they will then be allowed to go back out into the economy.
They can open up shops.
They can go to restaurants.
They can open their offices.
They can do those sorts of things.
And it's unfortunately what we have here, I think, now is a perfect storm between the economically illiterate, which is the federal liberal government, and the ideologically driven political correctness types.
And so we've shut down the entire economy rather than identifying where the real problem is.
Now, to some extent, I don't blame governments for that because this hit us out of nowhere.
Who would have known in mid-January that this was going to happen here?
So I give them a bit of a pass.
But going forward, their job has got to be not just to protect the population from infection.
It's got to be to protect the economy from collapse.
And there has got to be a smart way of doing that.
The key to which is testing.
Yeah.
Testing, and I think masks.
You know, I saw a campaign in another country.
My mask protects you, your mask protects me.
I thought, yeah, well, not only is that a very compelling argument, it's actually community cohesion building.
It's like, let's all trust each other.
Let's all work with each other.
Let's do this for each other.
One little problem with getting the protective equipment that A, frontline workers need and B, the rest of the population need.
Getting it in sufficient numbers is tricky.
Like, you know, when people are saying, well, you're right.
I mean, I'm going to order General Motors to make ventilate.
Well, you know, you can't just stop making pickup trucks and turn over the same equipment to make and ventilate.
It just doesn't work.
Ventilators are high tech.
In advance.
Yeah.
Ventilators, I guess, are high-tech, but a mask is actually a very low-tech garment.
And you don't need an N95 mask.
The stuff that I'm, I'm sure you're seeing the same stuff.
The stuff that's been coming out the last few days from infectious disease specialists is that, you know, a homemade cloth mask is not perfect.
It's not going to protect you 100%, but it beats nothing.
Yeah, which, and nothing, by the way, is the advice of Teresa Tam, which is so infuriating.
In Taiwan, I should tell you that I reached out to the Taiwanese embassy or the economic office they have here in Toronto.
And I said, well, our viewers would love to crowdfund.
I bet we could raise a quarter million bucks to bring over like a bunch of pallets of masks, I said.
And they wrote back and said, well, we love that idea, but we have an export ban on masks.
We're giving some as a gift to allies, but only limited numbers because we need to protect ourselves because otherwise, I mean, masks are not expensive.
Like those, they're frankly pennies.
But because it's so critical, and they started their mask industrialization two months ago, so now they're making 10 million a day.
And I thought, well, can we buy a million?
And my idea was to distribute it to hospitals in Canada.
They said, sorry, mate, we need it for us.
And that's wise.
And that's why they're smart.
And we got Justin Trudeau.
Yep.
Yep.
And, you know, Singapore, same sort of thing.
Malaysia, similar, good numbers, better numbers than ours, and much, much closer to China.
And a fellow that I know who used to be involved with security at some of our embassies in Asia said, look, these countries all live in a dangerous neighborhood.
They know that this is going to happen periodically.
And so they're all ready for it.
And I think the lesson from this is we were ready for a second SARS.
After the SARS infection in 2003, we did get better at that.
There was more equipment available and more alertness to the early indications so that the healthcare, in the SARS outbreak in 2003, two kinds of people died: older people with compromised immune systems and healthcare workers who worked directly with them.
And this time we knew better.
We knew to keep the health workers covered so that they didn't catch it the same way that they did in 2003.
But there were fewer than 500 people in Canada who got SARS in 2003.
And now we're looking at 10,000, probably many more, who have COVID-19.
So we got ready for SARS-2, but this is SARS times 20 or SARS times 50.
So we've got to think about this as a civil defense mechanism and start preparing material going forward, testing kits, and hopefully we'll get some vaccines.
But if we don't get a vaccine, which is not a guarantee, at least we'll have a lot of tests.
We'll be able to identify the people who are sick early.
We'll keep them out of the general population.
We'll hunt down their hunt down.
We will gently look for their contacts and test those people too.
And then maybe like Taiwan and Singapore, Hong Kong, Hong Kong has a much lower infection rate than you would ever imagine.
And it's smack dab up against China.
So, you know, I trust all the, you know, the less people trust China, the less healthcare systems trust China, the more I trust them, them.
So who in the world knows how the Chinese Communist Party lies, deceives, covers up?
Well, Taiwan knows more than anyone in the world.
Hong Kong would be a close second.
Singapore, so Korea, ironically, as you point out, they are the closest to China, so they are not in thrall with China, unlike Patty Haidu and Justin Trudeau.
Lauren, I just got to get your comment on one last thing, and thank you for all this time.
As you know, on February 9th, Justin Trudeau sent a plane load of our mask stockpile to China, 16 tons of masks.
I can only imagine how many thousands that was.
He did that for free, by the way.
No, he didn't even sell them in foreign aid to the richest country in the world that was still holding two Canadian hostages and has to this day.
And Trudeau was just asked, Well, what do you make of the fact we're out of masks?
And so, well, a lot of countries will have to reflect on this.
What do you make of the fact?
How bad, how much of a moral error was it?
Was it a trifle or was it a sign of deep delusion that Justin Trudeau sent our masks out to China just two months ago?
That's a sign of deep delusion.
I don't fault him for sending Canadian aid to a country that's suffering.
That's just part of our nature.
The part problem I had with that shipment in February was, as you point out, the fact that the Chinese government still has two Canadians who are falsely imprisoned and they're doing nothing to let them out.
So I'm not real keen to help them as long as that's happening.
But nobody expected, I didn't certainly had no inkling that this was going to spread this far this quickly.
You know, you hear about these things in the news.
Every other year, there's something that wipes out, you know, hundreds of thousands of people, tens of thousands of people in places far away from here.
You don't ever expect it's going to happen here.
I mean, for instance, in Africa and India, there are 600,000 people a year who die of mosquito-borne illnesses.
We don't expect that's going to happen here.
So with this, I didn't expect it was going to come here.
I give them a pass on that.
But once it started to come here, the fact that they would not put travel bans on and wouldn't even test and isolate people coming from China, whether they were Chinese or not.
They could have been Canadian business people who have been over there doing deals.
I don't care.
You were in a hotspot, you test it, you get isolated.
Yeah.
You're so right.
And by the way, I mean, it's been fascinating to me to watch David Menzies' interview, all these people getting off the planes.
And I find almost all of them are very conscientious, very worried, very attentive to their own health.
Many of them are wearing masks of their own device or provenance.
And every single one of them expresses alarm that they were not given a temperature test or clear instructions.
So I'm ready to get really mad as these people get off the plane.
And then David talks to them and they sound like me.
They say, this is the, like we just talked to a guy yesterday who flew from Mozambique, Mozambique to Lisbon to, I think, Frankfurt to Toronto, four airports to get home.
He's a Canadian, and he said in the first three airports, they took his temperature.
Not in Canada.
I don't understand.
I really don't understand that because nobody's going to be offended by that now.
Oh, the opposite.
They're offended that they weren't checked.
They're scared that no one's on duty.
But you remember during the old war on Christmas, right?
Where we were told by public officials that they had to take down decorations from public locations because that was mixing church and state.
The people who were behind that always were nominally Judeo-Christian background.
They weren't people from other faiths.
They were nominally Christian, like they'd raised in a Christian home or at least in a nominally Christian culture.
They were doing it because they were sure others would be offended.
Nobody else was offended.
If I go to India, I don't expect them to stop all of their celebrations just because they're not my celebration.
And similarly with people who come to Canada, they don't expect us to stop the celebrations.
Same with this.
The people who are preventing the temperatures from being taken at the airport are not angry incomers who are saying, oh, I'm offended that you think I might be diseased because I'm not from you.
They're people in Ottawa who are saying, oh my goodness, we couldn't possibly show our racism.
Why Others Aren't Offended00:02:25
That's the mentality we're up against.
Yeah.
Well, Lauren, thank you for being so generous with your time.
Stay safe there in your library.
It looks like a good place to be holed up.
Lots of good reading there.
It is.
It is.
Lots of reading.
Well, you take care, my friend.
Thanks for joining us.
All right, there you have it.
Lauren Gunter, senior columnist at the Edmonton Sun, and his column was also in the National Post.
It's called Political Correctness, Got in the Way of a Swift COVID-19 Response.
Stay with us, we're ahead.
Hey, welcome back to my monologue yesterday on how bats linked to Chinese government labs caused the coronavirus outbreak.
Chris writes, I just hope the world doesn't forget that the government of China is responsible for this.
Well, Donald Trump certainly doesn't want them to forget it.
He keeps saying Chinese virus.
Some of the media does, but oh my God, so much of the media is just parroting Chinese propaganda.
Fred writes, you shouldn't have named the scientists.
I bet they will never be found again.
Well, listen, I didn't name them.
They named themselves.
And they published that paper.
And obviously they were found because the paper was deleted from ResearchGate.
And the fact that it was deleted from ResearchGate made me worry, well, is this a genuine document?
By going back to the Internet Archive, I could check and confirm that that had indeed been published back in February.
On my interview with Dr. Lyron Chu, Peter Wright, Paul Wright, excuse me, the world needs to disconnect from China.
They are a disaster in the making across the board.
Taiwan needs to maintain as much independence from China as possible.
Well, I agree with you, and apparently the people of Taiwan do too, since they re-elected President Tsai, who's doing a great job.
And as I mentioned, Lauren Gunter, I reached out to the Taiwanese representatives in Canada and I said, can we crowdfund to get some masks or even mask equipment?
And their answer to me was, no, sorry, we have a rule against exporting masks.
We have to take care of our own people.
And can you blame them?
Because no one else will take care of them.
I just wish we had a prime minister in Canada who wanted to take care of us as much as Taiwan's president wants to take care of her own people.