Where’s the War Room – fearless adversary of the New York Times – now that the UCP needs it? 

Where’s the Alberta Energy “War Room” now that the United Conservative Party needs it?

Yesterday The New York Times published a major feature story on Alberta’s burgeoning measles epidemic – which sends a big, fat message from Wild Rose Country to the world saying: Don’t Come Here! We’re the Measles Capital of the Americas! 

The story’s lead says: “Measles is spreading so quickly in Alberta, Canada, that health officials have stopped publicly releasing information about local exposures in the hardest hit areas and are instead issuing blanket warnings about travel to the northern or southern regions of the province.”

Nope, explain that as much as you like, it’s not a good look for this province.

The story’s mainly about the role a “culturally conservative” strain of the Mennonite faith is playing in the disease’s big comeback, for which Alberta has basically become Ground Zero of the Western Hemisphere.

But the report’s authors did get in a swipe at the role played by vaccine-skeptical Premier Danielle Smith and her anti-public-health UCP Caucus for their part in contributing to the spread of the highly infectious disease, which has resulted in Alberta recording more cases than the entire United States despite having only 1.5 per cent of the population. 

“The province has a distinct culture that emphasizes personal freedom, and Danielle Smith, its Conservative premier, has said that vaccinations are a personal choice,” the authors wrote. “Last fall, her government codified the right not to be ‘compelled or coerced into receiving a vaccine,’ limiting any future attempts to create immunization requirements.”

Well, at least from the UCP perspective, this passage indicates that the Times reporters have swallowed some of their risible propaganda. Alberta no more has a distinct culture from the rest of English Canada than Montana has from other Western states. 

Still, I’m sure it got up the noses of the premier’s strategic brain trust that the continent’s most influential newspaper was pointing at their boss as a major contributor to the most obvious symptom of Alberta’s current state of public health derangement. 

Which brings us back to the fossil fuel War Room, officially known as the Canadian Energy Centre Ltd., founded in 2019 by premier Jason Kenney to attack free speech by environmental groups and absorbed into the provincial bureaucracy by Ms. Smith’s government last year. 

Who can forget that time in February 2020 when the War Room took on the Times over a story headlined, in the paper’s delightfully old-timey all-caps style, “Global Financial Giants Swear Off Funding an Especially Dirty Fuel.” Bitumen, that is. Gritty granola …

Tom Olsen, then the War Room’s CEO, wasn’t having that, and in a series of tweets accused the Times of being “not the most dependable source,” called its track record “dodgy” and even accused it of having been “called out for anti-Semitism countless times.” (I know. You couldn’t make this stuff up.) 

Mr. Olsen was eventually forced to eat crow and apologize for some of the tweets… “The tone did not meet CEC’s standard for public discourse,” he admitted stiffly in yet another social media post. “This issue has been dealt with internally.”

It was all very well when the Times was writing stories about Alberta separatism – Premier Smith’s pet cause, as we have seen in the past 24 hours, whether she admits it or not – but the UCP may be regretting the demise of the War Room now that the famous newspaper is focusing on stories it’s unlikely to like so much. 

Of course, the question Albertans should actually be asking themselves isn’t “Where’s the War Room now that we need it?”

It’s “Where the hell is Adriana LaGrange now that we need a minister of preventative health services?”

“Preventative health services,” after all, has been part of Ms. LaGrange’s title job title since she was demoted from full-blown health minister in mid-May, when Ms. Smith apparently decided her government’s deconstruction of Alberta Health Services was so big a job it needed four ministers to do the heavy lifting.

Yet throughout the wildfire spread of measles, and on the cusp of implementation of the UCP’s plan to cut off access to COVID-19 vaccines to tens of thousands of Albertans and make those who can get them pay through the nose, we’ve hardly heard a peep from Ms. LaGrange. 

Other than showing up at a friendly roundtable with weekly newspaper bosses, who seem to have asked no difficult questions, the minister of primary and preventative health services has had nothing at all to say about preventable diseases running wild in Alberta. 

King’s Bench justice reserves judgment on referendum question review

As expected, Mr. Justice Colin Feasby reserved judgment yesterday on Chief Electoral Officer Gordon McClure’s request for the Court of King’s Bench to review a proposed referendum question by a separatist group that has the clear support of the Smith Government. 

As reported in this space, a letter from a government lawyer to Justice Feasby on Wednesday indicated the government opposes the Mr. McClure’s referral to the court on essentially the same grounds as those argued by its proposer, Mitch Sylvestre of the Alberta Prosperity Project.

Comprehensive reports on the events in court yesterday were filed by the CBC and Postmedia. Mr. Justice Feasby is expected to give his decision in writing on Aug. 14.