An Alberta Health services ambulance in Calgary – an increasingly rare sight (Photo: Can Pac Swire, Creative Commons).

With EMS “red alerts” spiking in Alberta and both Calgary and Edmonton running out of ambulances to respond to emergencies roughly every 90 minutes, Health Minister Jason Copping yesterday announced he’s forming an advisory committee to study how to improve ambulance services in Alberta.

To be fair, Mr. Copping also announced a “10-point plan” he says will help “to quickly add capacity to EMS.” But not that quickly, probably, as the committee headed by two United Conservative Party MLAs, neither from Calgary or Edmonton, won’t have to report until May. 

Health Minister Jason Copping (Photo: Alberta Newsroom/Flickr).

Moreover, since literally half of the 10-point plan lists policies that have already been implemented to limited effect so far, the jury must remain out on how much impact this part of yesterday’s announcement may have. 

Several of the points in both parts of the 10-point plan seem more aspirational than practical – for example, “developing a strategic provincial service plan for EMS delivery.”

Still, the Kenney Government is obviously seriously worried about the public’s perception that Alberta’s ambulance service has seriously deteriorated since it forced Lethbridge, Calgary, Red Deer and Fort McMurray in 2020 to join the province-wide dispatch system run by Alberta Health Services that was imposed by Ed Stelmach’s Progressive Conservative government in 2009. 

Things got so bad a year ago that the Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo – the somewhat confusing official name for Fort McMurray and environs – went rogue for a few days and refused to hand off calls to the three AHS centralized dispatch centres.

If you want a hint of just how worried the government is, its news release yesterday included 14 canned quotes from worthies associated with the government or various stakeholder groups. Clearly the UCP wants to give the impression that everybody’s on board with the committee’s work. 

Earlier yesterday, the Opposition NDP published the results of a Freedom of Information request that showed Calgary and Edmonton saw 2,276 EMS red alerts between Aug. 1 and Dec. 6, 2021, an average of more than 17 per day.

This was a significant increase over nine red alerts recorded daily on average in Calgary in 2020.

In the first six days of December, the NDP said, Calgary and Edmonton experienced 31 red alerts every day. 

NDP Health Critic David Shepherd (Photo: David J. Climenhaga).

Red alerts are the code used by Alberta Health Services to describe times when there are no ambulances available to respond to emergency calls.

“That is an unacceptable failure from the UCP,” said Opposition Health Critic David Shepherd. 

At his news conference, Mr. Copping blamed the Omicron COVID-19 surge and holdups of ambulance parts in the sclerotic global supply chain as reasons for the situation getting worse. The news release admitted to a 30-per-cent increase in the number of EMS calls, but it didn’t provide a time frame in which that had taken place beyond “over the last several months.” 

At a news conference half an hour after the government’s, the president of the paramedics’ union pronounced himself “cautiously optimistic” about Mr. Copping’s plan of action. 

“I do have some concerns, though,” Health Sciences Association of Alberta President Mike Parker said, adding that there is nothing in the plan that is going to immediately support reduced response times. “What I need to hear is what is going to impact, today, response times.”

As for the NDP, Mr. Shepherd pointed to the dispatch consolidation and the government’s “consistent attacks on front-line health care, including their war with doctors and health care professionals,” as major contributors to the deterioration in service.

HSAA President Mike Parker (Photo: David J. Climenhaga).

He called on the government to begin reporting red alerts to the public daily, and to restore the Hospital EMS Liaison Officers Program that was scrapped by the UCP in October 2019. Under that plan, announced by the NDP government in 2018, hospitals were assigned liaison officers in Emergency Rooms to free up paramedics for other calls more quickly. 

Mr. Copping’s 10-point plan also included items that don’t sound all that reassuring, including stopping the automatic dispatch of ambulances to vehicle crashes where injuries have not been reported, sending ambulances from rural areas directly back to their communities even if they’re closer to another call than other available ambulances, allowing ambulances that have already been dispatched to be pre-empted by other calls, and transferring low-priority calls to other agencies. (Say what? More fire truck rides?) 

In addition, other points such as “pilot projects to manage non-emergency inter-facility transfers” and “a pilot project in Red Deer that will manage most patient transfers between facilities with dedicated transfer units” smack of coded language for privatization. 

The committee – co-chaired by UCP Caucus members R.J. Sigurdson, MLA for Highwood, and Tracy Allard, MLA for Grande Prairie – will report in May. Exactly who its other members will be, however, was left unclear by Mr. Copping yesterday.

Ms. Allard was briefly minister of municipal affairs before being pushed out of cabinet by Premier Jason Kenney after taking mid-pandemic Hawaiian winter holiday in 2020. 

Retired judge appointed to investigate Kaycee Madu’s notorious phone call

Retired judge Adèle Kent will investigate Justice Minister Kaycee Madu’s famously injudicious phone call about his distracted-driving-in-a-school-zone ticket to Edmonton Police Chief Dale McFee, the Premier’s Office said in a news release yesterday. 

Retired judge Adèle Kent (Photo: Court of Queen’s Bench of Alberta).

The former justice of the Alberta Court of Queen’s Bench retired last year.

Whether or not an investigation of Mr. Madu’s phone call is needed is a controversial topic in Alberta, where the opinion is widely held that his decision to contact Chief McFee about his traffic ticket was such an obvious breach that he should have been fired from cabinet on the spot. 

The details of the call, which the justice minister made in March 2021, were well known for months by nearly everyone in the Premier’s Office and UCP cabinet. They were only revealed to the public, however, when the CBC broke the story week ago. 

Ms. Kent has been instructed to report her findings by Feb. 15. 

Ms. Kent is the sister of former Conservative MP Peter Kent, who served in Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper’s cabinet alongside Jason Kenney from 2011 to 2013. 

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39 Comments

  1. Alberta is filled with the stupidest people alive.

    There is nothing that gives me more joy than to see Alberta fail so completely and disastrously.

    Voting for the UCP and Jason Kenney because he told everyone he was a genius stands as the most catastrophic blunder since that day some Albertan wiped their own arse with poison oak.

    It’s a thing of beauty.

    1. I will be exiting Alberta in about a year. I’m sure I won’t be missed even though the collective provincial IQ will significantly decrease. 😉

    2. I’m an Albertan, as many folks who post on this blog are, and I would wager a good number are smarter than you, in addition to not being a jerk about it.

    3. As an Albertan who has never voted conservative in 70 years I approve this message.
      There is some sort of magic perfection for the UCP to be able to answer every question ever posed and be wrong every time.
      It is the kind of disaster you can watch over and over, day after day , in its variations with hypnotic fascination not knowing what’s next, while knowing exactly what’s next.

    4. Just Me. The American oilmen that I was involved with certainly agreed with you. Albertans are the dumbest people on the planet was their call. Where else could you find people who would be dumb enough to let their politicians help their rich friends steal all your oil and tax wealth while you watch Norway and Alaska build up huge savings accounts and their oil production isn’t anywhere near what yours is.
      Those of us from the world of finance figure Albertans have lost $800 billion and Kenney is making it even worse with his tax cuts. Looking after the rich is far more important.

      The worse part was while we tried to stop it our ignorant fellow seniors called us names for not being as stupid as them, while they whined about their taxes going up and not being able to get medical when they needed it. Just too dumb to understand what these fake conservatives were doing to them.
      We are in such a mess we can’t even afford to fix the roads properly, paint lines on them and instead are driving in pot holes, destroying our vehicles. Nor can we afford to provide the people with proper snow removable, and we have no one to blame but these stupid Albertans who refused to listen to us.

      1. Anyone who thinks all albertans are idiots is mistaken. The fact is that democracy declines in direct proportion to a regions oil wealth, name somewhere else this is not true. Only an idiot would not consider the effect of gerrymandering on the last 40 years AT LEAST of Alberta politics.

        Seriously, labelling an entire population as stupid is ignorance at best, and looks a lot more like hubris from where I’m sitting.

        1. A Little Bird. No one is labelling a total population as total idiots but sadly many Albertans who called themselves conservatives stopped voting when Klein came on the scene. Their reasoning was “I only vote conservative and Klein isn’t a conservative so I won’t vote”. My late father was one of them and it made me furious. Instead of helping us kick him out of office to stop him from destroying what Lougheed created for us the vast majority of Albertans stopped voting letting the Klein supporters keep him in power and look at the mess we are in? Even Klein’s father Phil and daughter Angie tried to help us vote him out.

          The American oilmen were basing their opinion on what they were seeing .Albertans giving Klein a majority at every turn even though it was only about 32% of the population supporting him. The Americans knew what it would do to us.

          I can assure you that the only people supporting Kenney ,we know of , are some of the same seniors who refused to listen to us about supporting Klein. They are more than willing to let Kenney finish off destroying us like Klein started. Just too dumb to understand it. Most of the young Albertans are saying supporting Kenney was a huge mistake, they believed the lies he was spreading because their parents , and grandparents were and they won’t do it again.

          Former premier Don Getty said to me in 2003 “Inviting Liberal Ralph Klein into the Conservative party was the dumbest thing I ever did, I agreed with him. Lougheed refused to appear anywhere in public with Klein.

          1. Several people have at several different points referred to all albertans as idiots, I take offence and I will not accept it.

            As far as the UCP being supported exclusively by seniors, I wish that was the case. There are many a younger person just as ignorant and greedy as their folks, sounds like you’ve been fortunate enough to not meet these people. Who do you think was joining the proud boys, etc ? Geriatrics ?

  2. Oh, those red alerts, whatever could the problem be? Well probably a combination of the UCP not being too enthusiastic or effective in its war against COVID and being too effective and enthusiastic in its war against doctors, nurses and health care.

    Now when a government calls in consultants, it is either truly clueless or desperate, and/or wants to be seen to be taking the problem seriously and hoping a sympathetic consultant will obfuscate things enough. He or she will likely say something like there are serious problems but many reasons for it. Basically allowing the government to wriggle out of responsibility for the problem by blame sharing.

    Good news for Mr. Madu, his bosses search for a sympathetic judge seems to have yielded results. Ah, the good life for a UCP Minister. You can call a police chief about a ticket and then your boss gets to pick your judge … and we wonder why people are so cynical about politicians. They make the rules, ignore the rules, then prevail on those who enforce the rules and lastly get to pick those who judge them. I wish I could be so lucky if I ever get a ticket, but probably will be automatically considered guilty if I am even allowed to make a case under the UCP’s new rules.

    I suspect Madu will not get a full exoneration, but close enough so Kenney can find a way to keep him. Mr. Kenney’s UCP government is a prime example of Animal Farm in action. The pigs are more equal than the rest of the animals and Kenney is the one who constantly gets up on his hind legs to ensure it.

    1. I like your use of the language. Calling it a War on Covid hits the nail right on the head, just like the War on Drugs and the War on Terror, it’s a completely absurd concept. There is a real war in health care, but it’s not against doctors and nurses. They’re simply on the front line in the war against the public health care system. It’s basically the Strategy of Tension used to drive people into the arms of the state by terrorizing them.
      The million dollar questions for you folks who believe in Covidmania are, “did subjecting the population to stresses resulting from the bizarre, unscientific and unprecedented socio-economic restrictions have an adverse effect on public health? If so, what was that effect?”
      I’m still waiting on the cost-benefit analysis of the implementation of the kookery that began in March, 2020. Certainly every single aspect of the restrictions benefits the advance of neoliberal socio-economic agendas. Driving people into the arms of private coporate control in everything from leisure, to education, to healthcare.
      The Kons can always find the right kind of judge when they need one, so I am sure that this will all work out for Madu.

  3. The UCP are certainly in over their heads, and are not improving things for Albertans. Their Covid-19 response is an utter failure. There are people who blame the NDP for causing Alberta’s health care failures, and this isn’t a surprise. Postmedia can come with comments blaming Justin Trudeau or Rachel Notley for the UCP’s mistakes.
    https://calgaryherald.com/news/local-news/covid-19-update-national-truckers-group-denounces-convoy-protest-do-not-assume-pandemic-reaching-end-game-warns-who

    A retired judge with a Reformer politician for a sibling, is going to look into the Kaycee Madu distracted driving, and contacting the Edmonton police chief. What could possibly go wrong there? What else can you expect from these pretend conservatives and Reformers?

  4. Just one more way for these phony conservatives to put taxpayers money into the pockets of their friends. Screw up the system then pretend you are going to fix it by wasting taxpayers money. Ralph Klein was great at it. From what I remember they got $780. per day each for doing what they were told.

      1. Anonymous want to bet these fools are seniors? Too damn stupid to do any intelligent thinking. Kenney has convinced them that Notley is their enemy and they aren’t smart enough to look at the facts.
        I remember the words of a former university professor from Germany in 2000, who told me how easy it was for Hitler to teach their stupid people that the Jews were evil, and yes most were seniors. He said Klein was doing it with our doctors, nurses, and teachers and now we have seen Kenney play the same game.

        1. ALAN K. SPILLER: I wouldn’t doubt that these are older people, or seniors. Like Hitler, or even cult leaders, the many who are in the know, and have the power to stop it, and they simply do nothing, and just enable it. It causes great harm. Had evil people, like Hitler, been stopped to begin with, people, including some of my uncles, wouldn’t have had to fight in World War 2. They let it continue, and then act surprised when they see the damages done afterwards. Even in the 1960s, there were judges in Germany, who had long-standing Nazi party ties. The rot lasts so long.

  5. So, the latest UCP “sorry we got caught” investigation will be an exercise in how to make the Kenney/Madu boondoggle appear legal.

    Alberta same ole same ole…..

  6. If Madu’s actions were an ethics violation we have an Ethics Commissioner:
    http://www.ethicscommissioner.ab.ca/
    If they were illegal we have police departments. (Maybe a department other than Edmonton’s should investigate.)

    Has it been explained why Madu is getting this special treatment and not being investigated through the normal channels? Has Kenney already decided that they were not unethical or illegal, in which case what is Kent investigating?

    1. Police do not decide whether or not to lay charges, that would be the crown. Do you see why him being the justice minister is inappropriate?

  7. It is pretty much a foregone conclusion that Madu will be back in cabinet with a slap on the wrist. Notwithstanding the fact that Driving While Black (DWB) is a real thing and should be a matter of concern for all of us and that Madu has likely been on the receiving end of overt and covert racism many times, Madu should be fired for both the lack of judgement in calling a chief of police over a traffic ticket and for incredible stupidity. He is not cabinet material.

    As Minister of Justice and Solicitor General, Madu had quite a few levers at his disposal to investigate racial profiling by the police. Most Albertans would likely have welcomed an investigation into this to ensure that the police forces that operate within Alberta were applying the law fairly. However, when he phoned the chief of police, he turned it into a personal matter and abused his position. And, even if he did not raise the matter of the ticket during his call with the police chief, well, a wink is a good as a nod to a blind bat.

    The talent pool in the UCP caucus is slime-shallow. Madu is the only UCP caucus member from Edmonton. Kenny probably feels he has no choice but to find a way for Madu to get back into cabinet, if he wants to claim that his government represents all the province. Still, it stinks worse than a sour gas well, and is as toxic.

  8. How much of the increase in call volume is due to opioid issues because the safe consumption sites have been closed? Not all of the increase of course, but I would bet a significant number.

    Part of their plan is to hire to fill vacancies. Note they aren’t creating new positions, they are only hiring to fill vacancies. Why hasn’t this happened all along? There are paramedic schools in AB, every year there are graduates, why aren’t they all working?

    1. I’m sure some new hires get jobs in the oil & gas sector as on-site medics for private providers. There’s quite a number of such businesses out there … at least a half dozen here in Grande Praire alone.

  9. Anyone else think this is likely connected to a rash of drug poisoning in the communities of Edmonton and Calgary, in addition to the UCP closing SIS services ?

    A pal of mine who is a firefighter has some friends who work in the city, he told me in October they were averaging 48 drug poisonings in a 24 hour shift. The sirens are constant, basically, in the inner city.

  10. At least now we know why Jason Kenney was ranting on Twitter for two days about all the store shelves in the Wetaskiwin Walmart and virtually everywhere in the province being empty — empty I tells ya! No groceries anywhere, I tells ya!

    It’s all a distraction from the real issues facing Albertans, none of which will be addressed until after Herr Kenney’s spring leadership review.

    I suggest a solution that would kill two birds with one stone. Remember Kenney’s comment last week at a press conference, where he said Alberta wouldn’t be putting obese patients on a weigh scale before treating them? That gave me an idea. Forget about fire trucks as transport vehicles. Use big rigs! When all those freedom truckers return from the capital of this great nation, they’ll be free of their jobs. Put them to work driving Covid patients to hospitals. There is obviously a need for this service, with 10 people a day dying from Covid alone. Also, we could use some reefer units as mobile morgues if the current death toll continues.

    I think the truckers would be open to this idea. Just as they used stock images of trucks in Sao Paulo, Brazil and elsewhere (you’re fooling no one into thinking green grass is a feature of the harsh Canadian winter), Jason Kenney used phony stock images of empty grocery store shelves somewhere in the world at some time (who does he think he is — Laura Ingraham of Fox News?). It’s the same hive mind. Mind you, those truckers could be sitting pretty after a payout from the millions of dollars accumulating in that GoFu**Me account.

    It’s food for thought, of which there is enough to go around, although maybe not a specific brand name cereal. Mind you, I’m off the Special K ever since April 2019.

  11. This is the same issue that has existed since the beginning of time.

    Its called scarcity, and big government makes everything more scarce because there is another set of expectations that need to be met.

    Its like going from the 2 body problem in astrophysics to the three body problem.

    1. Scarcity is literally a creation of capitalism.
      Artificially in fact because we have had more than enough resources to feed clothe and house the worlds population since the 70s.

    2. Big Government has existed since the beginning of time? Does that also come from your study of astrophysics?

    3. Jees man!
      I’ve read your babbling contributions for a couple years now.
      There is zero chance that you understand the 3-body problem. Just as there is zero chance of a 2-body problem exists. It’s called physics.
      You know, basic science.

      As my friend Bugsy says, “What a maroon!”

      1. This is a variation on the “three thumbs down” comment from an earlier blog post. Three of anything is better than two, even if it means admitting to having three thumbs.

  12. “. . . . Health Minister Jason Copping yesterday announced he’s forming an advisory committee to study how to improve ambulance services in Alberta.”

    Six figure politicians elected to make decisions always seem to be fond of their ‘advisory committees’. Why is one even needed when ‘policy advisor’, Ben Harper is already receiving his UCP arranged ‘school allowance?

    The people who claim to hate government the most and give ample lip service to the myth of ‘meritocracy’, always seem to use and abuse government positions and the financial rewards that they offer to pay the rent, keep abundant food and alcohol on the table, hire their friends and relatives, and pay for the Ivy League education of their children. Why is that the case?

  13. You ask where the extra ambulances will come from? In the City of Red Deer, the local funeral homes supplied ambulance services until the 1960s and there was a mix of public and private until the 1980s. No record if a hearse mistakenly showed up to an ambulance call, but hey, the UCP were not in power then. You can read all about it here from a Red Deer Historian and City Counselor.
    https://www.reddeeradvocate.com/opinion/michael-dawe-how-city-of-red-deer-implemented-paramedic-service/

    BTW: could the appointment of retired Con-appointed judges to paper over Con scandals be part of their goal to politicize and ultimately discredit the Judiciary? Just asking for a friend.

    1. KANG: Excellent points. Don’t expect the UCP to care, because we know they won’t. Remember when Ralph Klein amalgamated paramedic services, and how the cost ballooned, and lives were put at risk?

    2. Ah, yes, who can forget the “scoop and dash” days of city ambulance service in this province, when competing ambulance companies would listen for crashes on the police scanner, then race to the scene to pick up bodies before the company that was dispatched could arrive? This led to disputes between drivers at times, while patients on stretchers waited. There was little dignity for patients, who seemed to be treated like slabs of meat.

      Yes to the second point. The UCP seems intent on tearing down public institutions and destroying public trust in such institutions, thus breaking down society. These people are anarchists at their core, IMO.

  14. Perhaps the answer to the ambulance crisis is prayer. I noticed another miracle today as the rates of unvaccinated among the new and active Covid cases tripled during the five days that there were no updates. Active cases were about 20% unvaccinated last Wednesday and miraculously the untouchables now constitute 59% of new cases and 55% of active cases. Yet another supernatural event has occurred in Alberta. I feel like I’m the Levant in the first century CE!
    Five days to bring the portion of vaccinated cases in hospital down to 37% from over 60%. Hallelujah! Something miraculous has likewise happened in the death tallies. Five days ago the over-80 deaths in the last 120 days were roughly 50-50 vaccinated to unvaccinated. In five days that changed to 67% unvaccinated in that age group.
    Will the circle be unbroken?

  15. Standard politics is—or used to be, anyway—a governing party gets the unpopular polices done early in the mandate and doles out the cookies as it nears the end, and if there are any faux pas in that crucial lead-up to the Big Day, extra effort is given to avoiding an investigation like this Madu thing or, failing that, pushing the due date past the election (again, not!) Why is Kenney’s government so bad at this? Surely a freshman term should be very careful that it passes the critical test of incumbency—hardly the propitious time to ram through controversial ideology—except, maybe, very, very early on.

    Maybe that was the original plan: get the attack on nurses and doctors, for ideological example, over with early and quickly, long enough for voters to forget about it before the election; then after re-election, proceed to do another batch of early pain infliction.

    No sympathy for bad-luck-Covid because a government worth re-electing puts ideological partisanship away and focuses on implementing stock pandemic protocols; even Ontario’s very disappointing D’ohFo figured that one out and, boom, his popularity rebounded, just like that. (I wonder whatever happened to the bromantic “finishing each other’s sentences”?) Only when K-Boy’s popularity pulled the party’s down with him did prudent signs of retreat appear which of course required leashing the obstinate premier. Yeah, the public Sasquatch inquiry was an embarrassment, laughable almost if Covid policy wasn’t such a tragic bust; but postponing rather than cancelling some of those other controversial polices now reeks of grudge instead of common sense. With just a little more than a year to go—when the bag of goodies should just be appearing on the horizon—it’d be a wonder if nobody’s told Jason to stop yanking on his own chain. And “coded language for privatization” of patient transfers when the shocking state of EMS red alerts is in the news is almost too dumb for words: at very least, it’s too risky because it’s too late in the standard stick-and-carrot cycle. Yeah, we get that there must be a high state of peeve in the UCP caucus, but experienced politicians should at least keep up appearances. That’s what makes them so loveable, no?

    Stock neo-right ideology is to privatize as much of the public enterprise as possible before voters twig. That’s why Harper was so disappointed with that second CPC minority: he knew it risked the cows coming home before he could get his centrepiece pipeline to the West Coast and other sovereignty undermining schemes past the point of no return; as the cows started to shorten the distance to the barn door, he started to rush and, as odds started to lengthen for an absolutely necessary CPC majority-incumbency, Harper got so rash he had to wear a niqab (and wear it he did). The whole sorry CPC arc ended like a kamikaze crash just short of the target. The party wasn’t designed to grow longterm affection, just get the job done, as conspicuous recruitment neglect, (especially of younger party members and voters) and serial, unnecessary knee-to-groin politics seemed to suggest. By 2015, voters could see through Harper’s blue-sweater firesides and tin-eared Beatles covers (and see-through niqabs hypocritical in “barbaric practices” terms). It was a very good year because the province Kenney and Harper represented went NDP for the very first time.

    I suspect Keener K-Boy would have liked to show off how much faster he could hack, slash and privatize the public enterprise in Alberta but, given he’s a sincere SoCon— like Harper only pretended to be before he relegated anti-abortion-homophobic MPs to the backbench— I would have thought building the UCP for the longer term, after the Wild Rose province had been scoured and sterilized of its collectivist notions, would have been given higher priority. Can’t be a show-off and build Eden II at the same time, not flying the kamikaze II.

    (And to think: Jason coulda been a contender.)

    I pray my Alberta compatriots know they really, really have to take care of themselves during this Omicron wave because—as most already know—K-Boy’s not gonna pull back on the ideological joystick for no damn Covid and, to judge by his remarkable consistency, neither is he gonna abort his undistractable diving: every cell in his brain is on airplane mode and, anyway, there’s not enough fuel in the tank to get back.

  16. It was with considerable glee I happened on the latest screw up featuring CON MP Melissa Lantsman.

    It seems that there are shortages of everything all over Canada. Lantsman knows this and went onto Twitter to present her evidence and outrage.

    The problem was that Lantsman’s evidence was a stock photo from a UK supermarket, not a Canadian one.

    https://pressprogress.ca/conservative-mps-photo-of-empty-canadian-grocery-store-actually-taken-in-northern-england-not-canada/

    Pressprogress caught her and noted that the stock image was Photoshopped doctored. What does Lantsman do? Fess up and declare that she did wrong?

    Hell, no.

    Like a good little CON, who has gone through all that GOP-sponsored dirty-tricks training seminars, she deletes the tweet, doubles down, and acts like there isn’t a problem.

    Besides, it’s probably PMJT’s fault she screwed up.

  17. False alarm with the vaccine miracle. The stats were were adjusted this evening to reflect vaccine reality in this province:
    72% of hospitalized Covid “cases” are vaccinated, 28% unvaccinated. 21.35% of new cases are triple-poked, 16.85% of active cases are thrice protected. Must have been a technical error that produced the Lourdes effect earlier today. The He-man Woman Haters Club is down to 18% of active cases.
    https://www.alberta.ca/stats/covid-19-alberta-statistics.htm#vaccine-outcomes
    Not bad for Moderna, considering they never built a medicine until Drumpf’s Operation Warp Speed.

    60% of the time, it works every time!
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65UhRV75wOQ

  18. Murphy, once again you show a complete and utter lack of understanding of how to read and interpret statistics. Either that, or you are just cynically cherry picking the data to confirm and promote your own bias. As I have pointed out to you before, the numbers you want to be looking at are the rates of infection/hospitalization, not the absolute percentages in hospitals by vaccination status. There are many more people vaccinated than unvaccinated. We know that, especially among people with co-morbidities, the vaccines are not 100% effective at preventing illness or hospitalization. So, yes, we are going to see more people from the larger cohort of the vaccinated who have Covid admitted to hospital either for Covid or some other condition as the primary cause than from the much smaller cohort of the unvaccinated.

    I suppose it is pointless asking you to look more carefully at the statistics and the obvious tables that very clearly show that the unvaccinated are at greater risk of hospitalization and serious illness, however. I am not sure you have the wattage to see them clearly. And, it is lost cause to keep pointing out to you nuances that you are clearly incapable of seeing or just don’t want to.

  19. Adèle Kent is the sister of (former, as of 2021) Conservative MP Peter Kent, who would’ve been in Harper’s cabinet at the same time as one Jason Kenney.

    Is this info something that all journalists should be putting into their articles? I am wondering how relevant it is considering Kenney’s history.
    Oddly, Adele has been scrubbed from Peter’s Wikipedia page – mentioned once with no details about her, but all the other illustrious sibs get their careers shown… curious.

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