i also watched evan solomon question trudeau before i left, and noticed the disconnect pretty staunchly.

trudeau has clearly been surrounding himself with supremely qualified people recently, and been fed a line that actually makes sense. evan solomon, less so.

i'm not trying to attack evan solomon's intelligence, exactly. i've sen enough of him to know that he's a moderately intelligent journalist that tries to follow the facts as best he can. he's not a demagogue; he's at least honest, whatever his defects. but, he probably never took a science course past grade 10, because the curriculum didn't force him to....and, he consequently has no ability to understand what he's talking about. like most people in his situation, he gets his information from cnn & cbc and takes it at face value. because what else do you do? you read what you understand.

so, he's legitimately concerned about the border, because he gets his information from shitty sources that tell him that you deal with this by shutting borders. why isn't canada shutting borders?

trudeau's response was surprisingly accurate, actually. we have to remember that trudeau, himself, isn't exactly a rhodes scholar....but he's got good people around him and it really does show. so, trudeau calmly explained that when the united states and italy clamped down on travel early (which is true.), it didn't work in stopping the spread. rather, people found ways around the barriers. in canada, we adopted a policy of accepting and documenting travel from hotspots, which allowed us to understand what was actually happening. as such, we think there's been much less random transmission.

so, the reason we're not shutting borders is that the science actually says that this makes things worse.

but, evan solomon kept pushing the point, because he didn't get it. and, trudeau started to get visibly frustrated - evan, why don't you fucking get it? it doesn't fucking work. lay the fuck off with the travel restrictions, k.

i just want to remind the government of something it knows - it has to stand firm on the science. it's going to run into a thousand evan solomons that want it to flex it's muscles and do something drastic, and they might even get a short term poll bounce if they give in, because people don't know, and don't care and don't want to learn - they want to follow their gut, they want to assert their male instincts to control, they want to take charge.

don't listen to them. hold your ground...

and, in the end, there will be data, and we can all hope the evan solomon's of the world learn the right lessons from it. most of them want to. really. they just don't have the tools to do it...