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Tag: COVID
This content is restricted to subscribers
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.
This content is restricted to subscribers
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.
This content is restricted to subscribers
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.
Alberta Premier Danielle Smith is once again embroiled in controversy thanks to her shoot-from-the-hip style.
The premier at least twice stated that she spoke to prosecutors about outstanding Covid-related court cases and whether it was in the public interest to pursue those cases.
Given that a premier interfering with the justice process is improper, she walked the statements back and clarified that she actually spoke to the attorney general and the deputy attorney general.
During her regular weekend radio show, the premier said, “Of course, I’ve never called a Crown prosecutor. You’re not allowed to do that as a politician. Everyone knows that.”
Perhaps her initial remarks were just an exaggeration, short-handing the nature of her actions to jibe with her campaign to protect anti-vaccine mandate activists. Some of her other shaky statements have grown out of her continuing loyalty to the anti-vax crowd which supported her party leadership bid.
She had to clarify the intent of her keystone Sovereignty Act, for instance. It wasn’t really designed to give cabinet ministers authority only the legislature should have, apparently.
This latest gaffe continues in the same vein of a somewhat fuzzy interpretation of the role of the premier. But it also opened the door to a roiling controversy about whether the UCP government is interfering improperly in the administration of justice.
After Smith’s clarification, CBC News published a story with unnamed sources claiming a staff member in the premier’s office emailed a prosecutor challenging the prosecutors’ assessment and direction on cases related to the Coutts border blockades and protests. CBC admitted it had not seen the offending email.
The government shot back after a weekend of combing through the premier’s staff electronic record that there is no trace of such an email. On social media, a debate immediately erupted on who is more trustworthy, the premier of the province or the CBC.
By Wednesday, Smith was demanding an apology and retraction from CBC and the NDP, who had gleefully piled on to decry interference by the premier’s staff.
CBC is standing by its original story and doubled down Wednesday with another story saying the Justice minister’s office has been under heavy pressure from the premier’s office on the Covid file.
Smith is trying to put the issue to bed. Outside of the bombastic outrage, she admitted in her statement that she might want to wade into the Covid cases, but is resigned to the fact she doesn’t have the power.
“The Premier publicly campaigned for seven months on exploring ways to grant legal amnesty for individuals charged with non-violent, non-firearms, pandemic-related violations.
“After taking office, the Premier and her staff had several discussions with the Minister of Justice and ministry officials, requesting an explanation of what policy options were available for this purpose. After receiving a detailed legal opinion from the minister to not proceed with pursuing options for granting amnesty, the Premier followed that legal advice.”
The usual government critics are calling for an independent investigation into political interference in the judicial system. That’s not likely to happen given Smith’s efforts to close the book on this file. If it does, the government could easily drag it out until after the May provincial election, which would defang the process.
But last weekend Smith did have to defend herself in a different forum as the UCP caucus held an extraordinary Saturday meeting. There were no leaks from the gathering and there were expressions of continuing support for the premier afterward, but Smith’s predecessor Jason Kenney can attest that an unscheduled caucus meeting can be a signal of trouble. That said, a party with only four months to a vote isn’t going to drop its leader.
The question is whether voters are being turned off by the premier’s penchant for speaking too quickly off the cuff. Smith’s communication skills as a controversial radio host were excellent, but to fix her current credibility gap she needs to brush up on the communication skills required of a provincial premier.
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.
This content is restricted to subscribers
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.
This content is restricted to subscribers
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.
This content is restricted to subscribers
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.
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I don’t want to excuse or debate or even really dwell on the Ottawa occupation or border blockades.
But I do want to talk about something underneath these incidents that is worth our attention.
Regardless of the precise motivations of the organizers – and I fully concede there are extremists, seditionists and an actual fringe to these groups – I want to focus on why ordinary Canadians lined overpasses to cheer on the convoy across the country.
It’s more than just anger about COVID-19 restrictions; on the whole, Canadians have shown great solidarity with public-health measures.
Rather, I suspect and worry we are fully in an era of tension and of disparity that our politics seems dumbfounded about. Millennials are now in our thirties, and many feel homeownership is an impossible dream of a simpler time. Retirees worry about the rising cost of living. Gen Zers fear climate change. A Russian president speaks of imperialist ambitions that sound more fitting to a century ago than the modern world.
Again, this is not to excuse bad actors; I am not writing a column about “economic anxiety” as some sort of culpability panacea.
But I do take as a very fair and important point what Jeet Heer wrote recently in The Nation: “The Freedom Convoy is speaking to discontent that is widespread… Those who have sympathy for the convoy tend to be poorer, younger, and less educated…”
He goes on to say, “The burden of the pandemic has fallen on the working class… As the pandemic enters its third year, many Canadians have become more pessimistic and feel that governments are dealing with the problem by imposing duties without offering economic relief or a path forward. This is producing stress and anger. The Freedom Convoy isn’t a working-class movement. But it will be able to harvest and exploit working-class anger unless the plight of poorer Canadians improves. The Freedom Convoy should be a wake-up call for not just Canada but the wider world as well.”
Our politics feels broken, unable to get important things done. I’ve commented before favourably about Ezra Klein’s writings and interviews on this subject, and agree with his thesis that we’ve built up processes that make improving transportation systems, building housing and other key infrastructure projects we once considered nation-building harder and delayed or reduced in scope or cancelled.
As Klein said recently on his New York Times podcast, “You have a country in which it is… harder and harder and harder to get anything done. And I think one of the unhappy equilibriums of that is that you end up with representation, but not action. Because representation is fairly cheap.”
No wonder identity and polarization have become such potent forces in our politics; we can debate and fight over beliefs, rather than coming together to get things done.
Our politics needs a reset, a focus on persuasion and getting things done and less on animating a sliver of the left or right that can be reved up into a motivated voter base, and more of a focus on getting important projects delivered. Our politics needs to be about results, not animus, making daily life easier and more affordable and restoring a sense of ambition, a belief that we can actually get ahead, what Tony Blair used to call “aspiration”.
Or, as Alexandra Ocasio Cortez recently told The New Yorker: “That is the work of movement. That is the work of organizing. That is the work of elections. That is the work of legislation. That is the work of theory, of concepts, you know? And that is what it means to be in the arena.”
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.
