One minute before midnight tonight, the United Conservative Party Government will pull the plug on all public health measures intended to slow the spread of COVID-19, even as the disease continues to infect and kill Albertans.
The pandemic may not be over – we’ll see about that in the fullness of time – but no one can argue it’s not officially over in Alberta.
After that, I guess, we’ll have the best summer ever, just in time for the UCP to choose a new leader to replace Jason Kenney, scrutinize the polls, and call an early election of it looks like it’s working.
This isn’t sound public health policy, but it may please a majority of Albertans anyway – just as it did for a few weeks in June last year, when Mr. Kenney declared at an outdoor news conference overlooking the valley of the North Saskatchewan River and downtown Edmonton that we were on the cusp of the best summer ever and “the end of this terrible time.”
“It’s hard to believe, but it’s true,” he exclaimed then. It was hard to believe. Alas, it wasn’t true. By the fall of 2021, Alberta’s health care system was nearly overwhelmed by COVID-19 cases.
Now another year has passed, Mr. Kenney is in the process of being forced out of office by his own party in part because of its members’ opposition even to the government’s half-hearted COVID mitigation policies, and we’re going to try it all over again to see if the results will be different.
The government announced its decision at late yesterday afternoon. This time there was no hint it was coming and no press conference at which reporters could ask questions. Both Health Minister Jason Copping and Chief Medical Officer of Heath Deena Hinshaw were quoted in the government’s news release piously saying we need to learn to live with COVID-19.
And we will, too, since all COVID mitigation measures, including masking on public transit and mandatory isolation for people with COVID, are about to be dropped. Orders for continuing care facilities will end on June 30.
The timing of the announcement was a surprise, but the decision itself wasn’t. Alberta had already given up on tracking cases, making it harder – if not quite impossible – to conclude that the province continues to lead Canada in caseloads and deaths per capita, not to mention adding to the stress on the health-care system.
The UCP long ago gave up any pretence of taking COVID-10 seriously. So the only real question now is how many people will die this summer and fall as a result.
Meanwhile, another candidate entered the race to replace Mr. Kenney yesterday: Calgary-North East MLA Rajan Sawhney resigned as transportation minister and announced her intention to run at a news conference prudently held outdoors at the Alberta Legislature Building in Edmonton.
Ms. Sawhney had already telegraphed her intention to run when she announced she’d engaged Harper-era Conservative Party apparatchik Ken Boessenkool, nowadays a political consultant, “to test the viability of a leadership campaign.”
She will be an alternative to “more of the same,” she told reporters, pledging that if successful she would order a public inquiry into how the province dealt with the pandemic.
Lest you’re tempted to conclude that might be a sound idea – done right, it would be – consider her choice of campaign chair Angela Pitt.
Ms. Pitt, the MLA for the Calgary-area riding of Airdrie-East, is well known for her strident opposition to measures to control and mitigate COVID and her nutty rambling on social media about how maybe Alberta should become a semi-autonomous statelet like South Tyrol, a German-speaking region of Italy.
So Ms. Sawhney will need to clarify that any public inquiry she plans will not be a political witch hunt intended to attack Alberta Health Services leaders for trying to implement public health measures – as the only Kenney-era inquiry, the secretive and tendentious “Public Inquiry into Anti-Alberta Energy Campaigns,” tried to target opponents of continued oilsands development.
Like many of Mr. Kenney’s cabinet ministers, including some holding senior portfolios, there is relatively little information about Ms. Sawhney’s views on many important policy areas. That didn’t matter while Mr. Kenney was leader, since he made all the decisions anyway. Now it rather does!
Meanwhile, Calgary-Shaw MLA Rebecca Schulz resigned as children’s services minister and announced yesterday that she will announce torday she too is running for Mr. Kenney’s job. She deserves extra points for finding a way to announce the same thing twice.
Ms. Sawhney and Ms. Schulz both still appeared on the official Alberta.ca website last night as members of cabinet, suggesting a certain degree of disarray in the Alberta government as Mr. Kenney’s leadership draws to a close.
One thing I find most interesting is how the Conservative governments of Ontario and Saskatchewan also mishandled COVID, but don’t seem to be politically as punished for it. This leads me to believe the problems the UCP faces are more of a unique Alberta nature and not entirely related to COVID.
Obviously, one big problem was Kenney himself and he is apparently eventually on the way out, but I think there is much more to it than that. However, I am not sure the UCP really still gets that its problems are bigger than a leader who turned out to be quite a dud.
There seems to be a growing number of UCP ministers, MLA’s and supporters coming forward to run for the leadership. All seem to be promising they will do better, but they are not that clear about exactly how.
Most were a part of the Kenney government, seemingly happily going along with things until the underwheling leadership vote support that finally forced Kenney to announce his resignation. So, if they had different, new or better ideas it has not been evident before and it still seems a bit of a mystery. I feel it will take more than platitudes about listening better or whatever, however earnestly these lines are delivered, to establish credibility.
For me, Ontario was always going to be hit harder with COVID because it, along with BC, has the most international travel, and it has the highest population density as well as a significant racialized population (google ‘white people covid attitudes’ – turns out that telling white people that covid hurts non-white people more actually made lots of white people care less about covid precautions).
Alberta’s performance is less defensible – they had more opportunity to protect themselves than BC, Quebec or Ontario. Saskatchewan’s is beyond shameful but I haven’t been following them so won’t comment.
Dave: “Conservative governments of Ontario and Saskatchewan also mishandled COVID, but don’t seem to be politically as punished for it”… I’m not sure about Saskatchewan, but in Ontario the Ford government actually improved its pandemic management as the thing progressed and was given a lot of credit for it by pundits and opinion columnists. In addition, DoFo “picked a lane” and turfed the anti-vaxxers from his caucus.
Meanwhile, here in Alabamaberta, virtually all of the opposition to Mr Kenney from within his party and its base came from anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers who whinged about “freehdumb”, all while 4,591 Albertans and counting have died from this virus (and for the “it’s just a flu” types, we have had 12 flu deaths in the recent flu season).
So, he’s not being punished for not doing enough to fight COVID-19, but for doing too much. If it weren’t so tragic it would be risible.
Semi-autonomous statelet, says a member of the UCP brains trust. Hah. The attitude of the rich who want to stay that way and bugger everyone else. Catalonia with its HQ in Barcelona attempted to pull off that same stunt in Spain before being brought back to reality. Let the peasants without nice jobs suffer, don’t see why we should bleed ourselves to help THEM, is the sense of entitlement aroused in indignant bourgeois breasts. So by the historical accident of finding themselves sitting atop fossil fuel reserves, Albertans have developed airs and a sense of superiority — it seems to be the human condition. Soon,”intellectuals” embrace such forward thinking as what’s mine is mine and screw everyone else, and become rather rigid right wing conservatives. Yes, they attribute their good luck to hard-working citizens absent elsewhere, chuck money around like water, and advise the less well off to be more like them and embrace their political outlook. Mr harper’s wonderfulness summed up in a sentence or two, channelling his inner Preston and determined to change the face of Canada.
Saw the US ambassador giving an interview on the weekend. Not interested in more Alberta “oil”, thanks all the same, doesn’t jive with America’s need to decarbonize. But his eyes lit up in rhapsodic glee, describing his recent visit to Hydro Quebec’s giant dams and infrastructure, and the likely new contract for HQ to essentially power the US northeast, in an environmemtally sound and cheap way. HQ, of course, would apparently not consider supplying Ontario, and the moron grade Con pols they have there probably are only vaguely aware that Hydro Quebec is an electrical powerhouse. Any sane federal government would have a policy to look after its own citizens first, but LIbs and Cons never seem to think of that. So Quebec acts like Alberta, but in its own peculiar manner.
We seem to be but a stump of a country these days, faithfully bowing to the perceived whims of the giant neighbour next door instead of looking after our own best interests. But then, this seems to be the fate of federations where power is devolved locally and operating with constitutions written back in the mists of history that don’t reflect changing conditions. The way the US itself is going, it may well break up into smaller countries, given the obstinacy of Red states to even consider the opinions of Blue states, and vice versa. The cynical might observe that when everyone is reasonably well off, these separatist instincts rarely raise their ugly heads, but that when things go off the rails, a perpetual Canadian state of existence, politicians arise to connect the fears of their populace that living standards look like falling, with the idea that the circling of wagons is a superb idea. It’s the first trope to be advanced. Pretty easy to extrapolate from there how things will go, none of it pretty.
To take pressure of airports, vaccines are no longer mandatory. This PROVES the vaccines were never about health, and always about control. Covid was blown WAY out of proportion. Live your lives. Or dont. I dont care because COVID IS OVER
LockdownNOMORE: You seem like one who doesn’t understand much. Covid-19 was never blown way out of proportion. It’s real, and the very bad things it has caused to many people is also very real. This includes death, and for those who survived, permanent side effects.
You clearly do tho.
It doesn’t mean anything other than we live in a capitalist society that places private accumulation of wealth ahead of the well being of the planet and everyone on it.
What else is new ?
Additional we never had a single lockdown in alberta, so I’m not even sure what’s up with your name. You going to make this your entire personality for the rest of your life or nah ?
Bird: “LockdownNoMore” is one of several serial trolls who spend hours on my blog thinking up irrelevant comments, obscenities, insults and the like. This activity is a form of wankery, I believe, and they would do better to stick to Twitter or, even better, Truth Social. At any rate, as I moderate all comments and even correct the grammar in some if I have the time, most of them don’t make the cut. Occasionally, I’ll let one pass, as I did in this case, because they’re vaguely on topic and in the faint hope the author will learn that rational discourse has its rewards. DJC
My sympathies, sounds like quite a pain in the neck. On the bright side, I really think there is value in people getting out of their echo chambers, even if it’s only for sh*tposting. Any info they read here might be the only info they get aside from whatever Tucker Carlson told them today.
I wish there was a correlation between “believing easily falsifiable BS about covid” and “suffering from covid.”
So simplistic and uninformed. I hope your health persists while your face is in the sand.
“…we need to learn to live with COVID-19. ”
I spent the last part of my mis-spent youth during the AIDS epidemic of the mid- to late-1980s, and we had to learn how to live with AIDS. Relatively quickly condoms became normal for casual sexual encounters. People also became a bit more cautious about who they slept with. In other words, part of learning how to live with something is doing things differently.
Unfortunately, today the phrase ‘learning how to live with Covid’ seems to be a dog whistle for ignoring it. I haven’t heard the phrase ‘learning how to live with Covid’ from very many people that seem to be capable of learning anything.
“a certain degree of disarray ”
The hallmark of governance in Alberta.
The disarray is certain, the degree not so much. Just when you’ve become aware of the most egregious policy or pronouncement ever this UCP mob of drooling idiots comes up with something even worse.
I am confused. If one resigns from a Ministerial portfolio, one is still a MLA but no longer has access to cabinet confidences. With so many candidates, is there even a quorum? And if there was an emergency (floods, fires or the like) who would steer the good ship Alberta?
It seems we’re returning to the post-influenza times of the early 20th century. Many oldtimers from those days refused to go to a doctor or even visit someone in a hospital. Doctors and hospitals were to be avoided, for fear of contracting a deadly illness. Those oldtimers were alive in my days, so I learned about it first-hand.
It’s a good thing Kenney didn’t pretend-quit and turn this into the second-best summer ever. We all know how that worked out.
It’s also a good thing that none of us can read, because we might think these headlines are from 2020 or 2021:
https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/coronavirus/covid-in-u-k-at-record-levels-with-almost-5-million-infected-1.5845637
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/06/uk-has-detected-a-new-covid-variant-heres-what-we-know-so-far-about-omicron-xe.html
How many months did Rebecca Schulz live in Alberta before she became a UCP candidate?
Announcements of an upcoming announcement that announce what the upcoming announcement is going to announce, are the ultimate in modern meta-redundancy.
Maybe instead of a Minister of Red Tape Reduction, the government should have a Minister of Redundancy Reduction for the Reduction of Redundancy.
This is becoming down right hilarious how they all want to be leader but haven’t a clue what the people want. I think the vote will be split up so badly that anyone could win and the big losers could be Smith and Jean, the people saw what they stood for. No one I know wants either one of them back, they are great liars. As the former MLAs I got to know stated not one of these Reformers has ever been smart enough to suggest the obvious , like Notley did. Get Alberta back on the path that Lougheed had put us on by collecting proper royalties and run this province properly like Lougheed did and Norway and Alaska are doing. Have you noticed a lot of their ignorant supporters have finally got the message and aren’t hurling their sarcastic comments at us anymore. They know we are right.
Alan K. Spiller: If these people were paying any attention as to how Peter Lougheed was running things in Alberta, they’d see there is a big difference between what Peter Lougheed was doing right, and what these pretend conservatives and Reformers have been doing wrong.
Vying for future cabinet appointments seems to be the cause celebre among these folks. How many more? And just whom among them are looking into the potential ‘leaders’ of the ‘race’ to see if their claims on the ‘right’ are coincident with what these also-rans can muster adherence?
All the people who did and said nothing or close to it while people were squeezed, deceived, divided and died and are dying all for a paycheque and a pension are now the same people you should trust to take care of the people of the province now. If it wasn’t true you wouldn’t believe it or maybe even couldn’t.
Covid-19 is far from over. The UCP’s blatant negligence on this matter has cost many Albertans their lives, and has also caused many other Albertans long lasting suffering. Alberta was a Covid-19 hotspot in Canada, way too often.
Now, we have more pretend conservatives and Reformers from the UCP, trying to lead the UCP, and rule Alberta. A big no thank you. These are the types that Peter Lougheed was clearly against. He was a true conservative, and looked after Alberta, and Albertans, not like the UCP who looks after their wealthy corporate friends. Rajan Sawhney made inhumane and callous cuts to the A.I.S.H program. Those who receive A.I.S.H, no longer have their income indexed to the rate of inflation. They also had their payment dates shifted from four business days prior to the first of every month, to the first of every month. When you see the cost of groceries, power, utilities, (Ralph Klein deregulated those things, making them very costly), and rent in Alberta, (there is a very big lack of affordable housing in Alberta and the UCP’s strategy on this is an abysmal failure, which doesn’t help make things better), it makes things even harder. The rate of inflation in Alberta has been extremely high, and has led Canada, for a very long time, and this adds to the suffering A.I.S.H recipients face. Also, with the payment date change for A.I.S.H, many people on that program can’t pay their bills on time, and owe large amounts of money to things such as power companies. They also get behind on their rent. Rajan Sawhney doesn’t see that a society will be judged by how it treats the least of its members. I do not think that people can live off of $1,688 per month. Alas, this hearkens back to the Alberta PCs, when they shifted away from what Peter Lougheed was doing right. The UCP also does very pricey shenanigans, and they take it out on the ones in Alberta who can’t defend themselves. Elderly people, our teachers, and the pupils they teach, as well as our esteemed medical professionals, including doctors, and nurses, are the other targets. Why haven’t Albertans had enough of these pretend conservatives and Reformers? What will it take for them to come to their senses?
Wow. That’s a whole lot of underlings and hangers-on who want to be the top dog.
My suspicion is that this suddenly much wider leadership race has more to do with flooding the contest with kamikaze candidates to thwart and diffuse Ginger Kenney’s leadership bid by offering a buffet of possible choices and options among the candidates. Everyone knows that Kenney wants only one person to be his successor — Mr. Toes — but if Jean can get his game on and swamp Kenney’s acolytes in rural Alberta, he may have the win in the bag.
But offer candidates who, to me, sound pretty moderate on a whole range of issues (moderate enough to sound like they are coming from Rachel Notley) then Jean’s efforts in Edmonton and Calgary could be blunted. Jean can be based on his personal experiences sound like a moderate on certain policies. Indeed, he may actually put it out there that public health is worth defending and privatization is a non-starter. On the matter of urban centers having to deal with rising crime rates and general decay from neglect because of the absence of provincial support, Jean may say the province must step up and lead on urban issues. In regard to the O & G industry’s antics with a succession of governments, Jean may just do an ‘aw shucks, guys, Alberta is bigger than your industry’ before pulling a Stelmach. It’s this version of Brian Jean that could deny Kenney’s continued influence. So all the more reason to send in wave after wave of kamikazes to deny him the leadership to Kenney’s party.
I am not so sure what to make of this situation. $150,000 just to enter the ring is not chunk change and it isn’t tax deductible I think. So your running to preserve your cabinet post, assuming the United Chamber Pot is restored to power about a year from now. If it were me I’d much rather go to Vegas and gamble $75,000 and then invest $75,000 in energy stocks green and dirty. I suspect the return would be a whole lot better than what a typical candidate might find in the Ubiquitous Chamber Pot of Alberta, ie. not a load of night soil and gas from composted Preston Manning speeches, and old Alberta Reports. In short, never buy a negative cash flow.
Former Albertan The UCP can’t get donations so they are making these fools trying to become leader help them build up their war chest for the next election.
So now we have no transportation minister, no children’s services minister… and no one appointed to replace them. Are these MLAs using the leadership campaign as an excuse to get out of the Legislature?
The UCP might not be cogently united, but on the particular point of rescinding Covid pandemic protocols, it seems some considered calculus mended the schism that ended the spasm of Jason Kenney’s first and last premiership.
I heard National Observer’s Sandy Garossino on the radio the other day: she counted memory —or, rather, voters’ forgetfulness—as one of the most potent factors in popular politics. It would seem a large measure of that ingredient informed the amphibian UCP leadership’s recipe. It has to presume that a) Albertans will have forgotten all about Covid (and about what a shitty job the UCP did dealing with it), and/or b) that they will have become tolerant of any level of contagion (having been somewhat inured to the worst-case scenario: the swamping of hospitals so nobody can get any kind of ailment attended to), and/or some other Covid variant won’t come and test the healthcare system, perhaps even more gravely, at some point inconvenient to partisan demagoguery.
It’s as if this first-grade failure finally got religion in order its prayers be answered: that it can unite again, scrape its palette as clean as slate as if the whole sorry mess was just a bad dream, the aftertaste solved by gentle gargling. But, more likely, the prospect of being hung in the proverbial fortnight wonderfully concentrated minds of the two main factions of the governing caucus that they might avoid the prospect of hanging separately. They are, after all, captives of Dali in a time machine of melted pieces, subjects of du Champ stumbling blurred down the dark ladder, a peri-post premier who might as well wax ridiculous moustaches, a mandate that might as be a fortnight as a year.
K-Boy tried the same thing last year, but this time the caper has a much better chance of succeeding: attitudes of all kinds are changing about Covid, citizens may tolerably chose their own approaches to personal safety (as they’d be well advised to do now), summer is coming after a winter of unsurprisingly fomented tumult and, if prayers be answered the righteous, they can reassure themselves that they won. And then there’s the political-forgetfulness thing.
K-Boy will probably claim his own summer of fun wet-blankets was just a victim of circumstance, but politicians are supposed to deal with circumstances, whatever they are—“the art of the possible,” “the most good for the most people,” &c. His tone of defiance back then, however, contrasts with this Spring’s memory-fade which instead seems to feel the electorate’s tired resignation and wisely absolves citizens of staking partisan hills to die on, from taking down names, from steeling vengeance—in short, an approach that doesn’t seem like typical K-Boy: it’s too politic.
No argument that Kenney’s maiden premiership has been most unfortunate, but an unlucky politician is still a bad one. His thumbprints are all over his nose and, when his primary targets ignored him or targeted issues he himself ignored, he defied Sasquatch to take on his Public Inquiry, the big reveal of enemies caught squinting blindly into the laser of gotcha, names taken down, consequences threatened. Promising such a thing on campaign is one thing, but not finding a way to temper the rhetoric after winning, to relegate the silliness to memo-status or otherwise get it done and forgotten as quickly as possible was politically foolish: it was bound to be embarrassingly lame, so much so one wonders if Kenney had musta had his thumb in his eye instead of on his upturned beak. The only possible reference to a holy grail would have to be the knight-in-armour repeatedly daring his opponent as his arms and legs get methodically chopped off, one taunt at a time until only his visored head can animate the limbless torso, but his mouth preposterously challenging, “Come on! Think you’re tough?! Come on!” It’s funny, not politics—at least not seriously.
Likewise, the ‘best-summer-ever’ redux is the beginning of a narrative, not a gag. It’s perfunctory, not bellicose; but most of all, it’s going somewhere, not a bride checking her watch at the alter, not a helmed tabard of four squirting stumps. In camera, the narrative is cogent and, apparently, convincing: first, get rid of Kenney—which effectively kills the second bird, too: stop throwing gasoline on the fire of Covid controversy, the dumbest thing ever to centre a nucleus of cult enmity—then present a united front and a plausible slate of leadership contenders. It’s the best they can do and they did it. It stands out, for a’ that.
Still, there’s a difficult road ahead for the Knights of the Uniters of the Disunited Re-Reunited (personally, I would consider a name change, too—maybe BC Liberal leader Kevin Falcon will buy the rights to ‘Conservative’ which, in the way of neo-right perversity, wouldn’t be quite right, either. Then there’s always Lancastrian and Yorkist—bet they’re not taken yet). Declaring Covid unimportant might yet be shown foolish, as it was for Mr K, but at the moment, prayer seems tolerably appropriate—even if for the wrong reasons. Nevertheless, it’s the minimum that needed to be done, absolutely, for this very, very disappointing experiment in Franken-government. The next step, providing the bozo, buffalo, and bitch-to-men parts don’t become unstitched, is to change the channel back to the Nibelungenlied of Albetar. Of course this stoicism, if it can be maintained, will be challenged: hey, everybody’s a critic…see? Kenney never composed anything that writes itself like that.