One minute before midnight June 14, the United Conservative Party (UCP) government pulled 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 if 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 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, 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-19 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 Monday 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-19 mitigation measures, including masking on public transit and mandatory isolation for people with COVID-19, 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-19 seriously. So the only real question now is how many people will die this summer and fall as a result.
New candidate seeks to succeed Kenney
Meanwhile, another candidate entered the race to replace 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.
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.
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-19 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 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 Kenney’s cabinet ministers, including some holding senior portfolios, there is relatively little information about Sawhney’s views on many important policy areas. That didn’t matter while 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 on Tuesday she too is running for Kenney’s job. She deserves extra points for finding a way to announce the same thing twice.
Sawhney and 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 Kenney’s leadership draws to a close.
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Nick Seebruch, editor
