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Alberta Premier Jason Kenney had a moment of blinding clarity this week as he described the ragtag protestors and malcontents intent on bringing down the province's Covid restrictions.

"It is increasingly clear that many involved in these protests are unhinged conspiracy theorists,"  tweeted Kenney.

Protests over the police shuttering of Grace Life Church west of Edmonton turned ugly on Sunday with hundreds of people gathering outside the church.  Some tore down part of the fence erected by the RCMP.

Some shouted racist insults at people from the Enoch First Nation which borders church property.  The Enoch chief's car was vandalized.

On Monday more than 700 protestors showed up at the legislature ranting about the unfairness of masks, the dangers of vaccines and the general affront to civil liberties of business restrictions.

Kenney huffed on social media that freedom of speech is one thing, but threats, vandalism and intimidation are something else altogether.

He particularly condemned a chant of "lock her up" when Chief Medical Officer of Health Deena Hinshaw's name was mentioned during Monday's rally.

Kenney shouldn't be shocked by the nasty turn of events in Alberta.  The alt-right fringe was already in the province.  These are the folks who agitated around the edges of the yellow vest movement.

Back in 2018, carbon tax, pipeline failures and perceived unfairness to the west were the targets of dissent.  But fuelled by the antics of Trump supporters in the U.S., more extreme agitators tinged legitimate protest with the taint of racism, anti-immigration, and bizarre right wing conspiracies.

The "lock her up" chant is the tip-off Alberta's own Trumpers are back at it, just hitching a ride on the Covid bandwagon.

Alberta was already deeply polarized politically, and Kenney himself played off that polarization during the last provincial election.  His policies have leaned to the right, loosening regulations and red tape, cutting public sector jobs and slashing budgets, edging into privatization of some health care functions.

The current public health crisis simply doesn't play into those scenarios and it's plain that frustrates the premier.  It's pretty tough to undercut the public sector when nurses and hospitals are so crucial.

His goal to open up the economy and unleash the business sector has been set aside.

Little wonder those who supported him in the last election are now set adrift, confused by a premier talking about responsible restrictions, lockdowns and limits.

As Kenney tries to reinvent himself as a prudent middle-of-the-road leader to meet the demands of the current crisis, his right wing base feels increasingly abandoned.

A recent poll shows most Albertans are unhappy with the way the premier has handled the pandemic.  About half of those disgruntled voters think the UCP policies haven't been tough enough to affect the trajectory of the virus.  The other half think the measures have been too tough and are killing small businesses.

The UCP government is perceived to be the enemy by fringe elements, who argue Kenney is bent on imposing masks and vaccines, closing churches and taking away liberties.

Alberta is becoming the epicentre in the west for protesters unhappy about the current state of affairs.  Ontario MP Derek Sloan, turfed by the federal Conservatives for his right wing views, has turned up in the province.  And libertarian Maxime Bernier is in the west calling for an end to lockdowns and dubbing the protests an 'ideological revolution'.

Kenney and Hinshaw are fond of saying the race is on between the rise of variant forms of Covid and the province's vaccination efforts.

But there is also a conflict developing as extremists feel empowered to spread conspiracy theories about whether the pandemic is real, the safety of vaccines and the true intent of government restrictions.

The only scenario that will calm the latest eruption of conspiracy thinking is one which ends the pandemic as quickly as possible and sends the trolls back into hiding.

Photo Credit: CTV News

The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.


What's good about Canada?  These days, I'm inclined to say very little.  The country as a whole has failed to protect people from the pandemic, and that's because of the way this country was built.

In B.C., the Brazilian variant was allowed to get completely out of control, mostly so the Whistler ski resorts could stay open.  Alberta currently has the highest proportion of active COVID cases, somehow outpacing Ontario where ICU's are a gentle breeze away from total collapse.  In Quebec, the social contract over lockdowns and curfews is cracking after the city of Montreal had its curfew moved up with essentially no evidence it would stem the rising tide of infections, beyond the feeling in the premier's gut that curfews work.

More than a year into the pandemic, huge workplaces that are one of the primary drivers of infection are allowed to stay open until they too have out-of-control outbreaks.  Just this week, a Cargill meat packing plant in London, Ont. closed only after 82 workers became infected.

There have been federal failures, too.  In January 2020 Health Minister Patty Hajdu said "The risk is low to Canadians."  A week later the WHO declared a global health emergency.  March break went ahead, cases flowed in, and the feds dithered to the point that cities and provinces had to send their own public health people to airports to give incoming travellers isolation guidance.

Those are pretty big failures.  Their ability to keep the variants from getting into the country have also failed.

But the thing is, from the very beginning we had premiers telling us that the federal government was failing.  What we haven't seen with any effectiveness is them mitigate those failures.

That is, at least, anywhere west of the Atlantic provinces.  There we can see what an effect proactive and serious provincial action can have in making up for the failures of the feds.  There, travel restrictions between other provinces, and sometimes between the "Atlantic bubble" provinces themselves, coupled with early and hard lockdowns have kept cases low.  More importantly, only 105 people have died.  That's it.  In the last year, only 105 people have died in Prince Edward Island (0), Nova Scotia (66), New Brunswick (33), and Newfoundland and Labrador (6).

That many people are dying every two to three days elsewhere in the country right now.

Let's take Ontario as an example.  There, Premier Doug Ford has been saying since the start of the year vaccines weren't coming fast enough.  Again and again, the federal Liberals were called out by Ford for not delivering vaccines fast enough.

What did he do to mitigate this?  Nothing.  He just said over and over he needed more vaccines in the province, but didn't do anything to make the need for the very hard to come by shots less urgent.  He could have imposed earlier restrictions, and blamed the feds if he wanted to.

Never mind that the rate of vaccine delivery is basically on schedule — minus some supply chain issues — even if the federal government wasn't fulfilling their obligations, other things could have been done.  They weren't.

You can see some version of this play out elsewhere across the country.

And when a province fails, there's no way for the federal government to step in and mitigate those failures.  If you live in a province where your premier has screwed things up — that is to say, if you're in most of the country — you're boned.

Leaders are happy to blame some other level of government for this or that failure, and then not do the things well within their powers to fix it.

The root of this problem, as I see it, is the way our federation is structured.  It's a weird amalgam of 19th Century ideas for how a country should be run.  Extreme decentralization makes a lot more sense when the telegraph is a new invention and a railway connecting the country is just a twinkle in the eye of the country's leadership.  Provinces are given huge heaps of power, but little ability to actually pay for the things they need.  The feds have huge fiscal powers, but little ability to act within the country.  It's a mess.

(We don't really have time to get into it, but cities are basically useless as political entities.  Little more than local tax collectors to get money to paint roads and hang street signs.)

Worse, there is now this idea within the country that there is nothing we can do to change the way this country is built.  Brian Mulroney tried that stuff decades ago and now it's a closed book forever.  But why?  Why do the failures of one man have to lock us into this constitutional order forever?

At the very least, our patchwork of health care systems should be cause for alarm.  One province finding its hospitals overwhelmed wouldn't be quite so dire in a truly national system.  A national system would be able to more effectively deploy resources, and relieve regional pressures.  Not just from city to city, but region to region.

Different provinces have different mixes of private and public options for their residents.  Here in Quebec, for example, there's a two-tired health system.  Public family doctors for some, private doctors for others.  Need blood work?  You can absolutely pay a clinic to get it done right away, but you better have the money.  Meanwhile, waiting to get a public family doctor can take ages (it took me something like 18 months to get mine).

Health is a provincial jurisdiction, but the feds foot huge parts of the bill.  All this does is create a situation where the premiers demand more money for health care but also demand no strings on that money.  The feds can't even convince the provinces to buy into a national vaccine tracking system.  It's a complete joke.

It's too late to fix the country in time to fix this crisis.  At the very least we need to start talking about how the country should run before the next one.

If things stay as they are, we're going to fail again.  Our country wasn't built for the modern world.  Unless we decide to remake it, that won't change.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.


By holding their biannual conventions simultaneously the Federal New Democrats and the Liberal Party of Canada provided voters and observers a glimpse of what is to come in the next general election.  Well, to observers, mainly, as most voters didn't care to tune in for their virtual proceedings, and those who did probably logged off at the first point of order of the NDP Convention, which happened a few minutes after it began; or after realizing the Liberal Convention was watching yet another Zoom video conference.

The stakes couldn't be different for the two leaders.  After the next election, Justin Trudeau will either be the Prime Minister of a renewed Liberal majority government, or his time will be over.  Meanwhile, Jagmeet Singh is facing either the possibility he could lead the NDP to a third consecutive loss of seats or succeed in preventing the Liberals from forming a majority.

To achieve their respective goals of growth, both parties are crafting a rebrand for the next election campaign.  Their conventions were an exercise in contrast.  There are some policy overlaps, no doubt about it.  But what delegates chose to adopt as party policies sends clear signals about where they are headed.

The rhetoric continues to be similar, in many ways.  Both parties are in favour of big-ticket social programs, such as national pharmacare and childcare, a better long-term home care system, a universal income benefit, they do not, however, see eye-to-eye on how to pay for all of this.  Who wants to Tax The Rich?

The NDP is now in favour of  a marginal tax rate of 80 per cent for individuals whose personal incomes are over $1 million, as well as a one-per-cent tax on those with assets over $20 million.

In the red corner, the Liberal delegates rejected a call to reduce the capital gains tax exemption to zero, in effect a tax increase.  Similarly, an inheritance tax on all assets over $2 million was rejected by a good margin.

So the contrast is not in the output as much as it is in the input.  The NDP is clearly targeting the younger voters' cohort, which has brought Trudeau to power and, to a lesser extent, helped him win a second mandate, albeit reduced.  The Liberals are looking to secure the support of middle-class voters, without scaring them about raising their taxes.

The Liberals also voted against putting an end to fossil fuel subsidies.  This too can allow the NDP to set a contrast and it also undermines, to some extent, the Liberal attack on the Conservatives, following their own vote against climate change being real.  In essence, the LPC says the CPC doesn't believe in climate change, the LPC believes in climate change but won't do anything bold about it.

Another contrast was set when New Democrats agreed to call for an end to "all trade and economic co-operation with illegal settlements in Israel-Palestine" and "suspending the bilateral trade of all arms and related materials with the State of Israel until Palestinian rights are upheld."  That position is in contrast with the Liberals and the Conservatives, for sure, but also a break from the traditional, balanced position taken by New Democrat leaders.

New Democrat delegates decided to go with a hard left turn.  You had an immediate sense of that right from the get go.  The first resolution to be debated during the weekend, in support of the establishment of a $15 minimum wage, was amended to $20 and resoundly adopted by delegates.  The amendment was moved by Barry Weisleder, the chair of the Socialist caucus, usually isolated from the rest of the party for its radical positions.

Meanwhile, Erin O'Toole is still struggling to contain his more socially conservative wing, with yet another MP moving forward with a bill about abortion this week.  For Liberal strategists, things could not be better, especially considering the current polls.  With a bolder NDP, they have more space on the left.  With the social conservatives causing trouble, they do not need to protect their right flank.  Justin Trudeau is in the middle of the ice, his head high, with the puck, and lots of space to manoeuvre.

Photo Credit: Press Progress

The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.