The Rumour Train – May 11 for Monday Night Live!

Good Evening St. Thomas! Welcome back to Monday Night Live! We’re here with Dan Reith for The Rumour Train. Unfortunately Heather Jackson is not able to join us tonight, so we’re going to forge on as best we can.

We were asked about the activity at the complex beside Elgin Manor on Fingal Line and we’re looking into it. It likely has to do with a purchase or preparing for a purchase.Next we chatted about the new Boston Dynamics headless dog-esque robot trotting around reminding people to social distance in the Singapore Bishan-Ang Mo Kio Park. Check it out if you haven’t seen it (https://www.straitstimes.com/…/robot-reminds-visitors…).

We next moved into chating about freedoms – what freedoms do we as a democratic society need? What freedoms define a democracy? Do the people in North America understand what oppression is? We’re so out of the habit of protesting – do we understand/remember how to properly protest in a democracy?

From there we moved into discussing the state of local news organizations and North American news in general. There is a snowball effect that happens when local issues aren’t covered and then local subscribers and advertisers stop seeing the relevance in the content. We also gave a shout-out to The Aylmer Express and our hope for their paper to one day have a St. Thomas edition – that has been rumoured about for over a year now (at least).

We also chatted about the emergency measures and the travel restrictions and how they could have been handled differently. How was it that the Canadian government didn’t have the experts in place to counter the World Health Organizations citing Chinese health officials in January that there had been no human transmission of the novel coronavirus within the country yet? That being said. You can’t be prepared to test for something that you don’t know exists. Another question was about the N95 face masks that Canada shipped to China to help them, without checking the state of own stocks. Then when the virus reached us and we had to order N95 equivalent masks from China we received at least a million N95 masks and thousands of swabs used in coronavirus test kits that failed to meet Canadian standards or were found to be contaminated. Now, federal government officials have said those supplies will be replaced at no additional cost to the federal taxpayer – but this should never have caused an issue to our ability to cope with a pandemic in the first time.

We then moved into a discussion about nursing homes, where an overly large percentage of COVID-19 deaths are occuring. This may actually point to a bigger issue with how nursing homes and care facilities are setup. COVID-19 may allow us to open the door to have the conversation about how we are taking care of our most vulnerable and then actually do someting about it – or do we just accept the disportionately high death rates?

We closed with Dan’s Favourite Paper Plane Cocktail Recipe.

We’ll catch you next week for the Rumour Train at 7:30pm during our Monday Night Live program!

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