Maybe being premier of Alberta means never having to say you’re sorry!
No sooner was she sworn in Tuesday as Alberta’s 19th premier than Danielle Smith was in hot water for a remark she made at the end of her first news conference that in all her born days she’d never witnessed a more persecuted group than Alberta’s vaccine refuseniks.
Smith’s actual words of succour to the province’s Great Unvaxxed, just to be clear, were: “They have been the most discriminated-against group that I’ve ever witnessed in my lifetime. That’s a pretty extreme level of discrimination.”
That comment struck a nerve – not so much among supporters of sensible public health policies, although them too – but among Albertans who had witnessed or experienced in their lives examples of discrimination considerably more severe than having to get a vaccination against a highly infectious disease to avoid an unpaid temporary leave from their work.
The criticism Monday night and yesterday morning was at times hot enough to reheat Alberta’s notorious Lake of Fire!
Yesterday, her second day on the job, Premier Smith issued a letter of explanation.
“My intention was to underline the mistreatment of individuals who chose not to be vaccinated and were punished by not being able to work, travel, or in some cases, see loved ones,” she said in the letter, which was distributed on social media where most of the brouhaha took place, but not on the government website, where a historical record is maintained.
It is of course a highly contentious claim by Smith that anyone was mistreated or punished by being required to be vaccinated to work in or visit health care worksites. The prevailing opinion among Premier Smith’s critics was that she’s standing up for people who faced consequences for their own irresponsible actions, not discrimination.
“I want to be clear that I did not intend to trivialize in any way the discrimination faced by minority communities and other persecuted groups both here in Canada and around the world or to create any false equivalencies to the terrible historical discrimination suffered by so many minority groups over the last decades and centuries,” the premier’s letter continued, concluding with her willingness to meet with members of minority communities so she could understand their concerns, as if they weren’t obvious.
It was soon noticed that while Smith explained, she didn’t really apologize.
And, it would seem, this wasn’t just observed by the excessively woke that Alberta’s conservatives normally constantly complain about.
A Twitter account associated with former Premier Jason Kenney published a sharply critical tweet about Smith’s unapologetic apology early yesterday afternoon
“An apology isn’t an apology without the words ‘I’m sorry’,” said the tweet from the @UniteAlberta account, which was often used in the past to slap back at Kenney’s critics. “Those words tend to be especially important when the apology is necessitated by a profound level of ignorance that many would consider disqualifying.”
“Yikes,” tweeted political blogger Dave Cournoyer. “I wonder if it was a former Kenney staffer who still had access to this Twitter account who posted this.”
“The account was run by a UCP comms staffer on behalf of Kenney’s office,” he noted.
Whatever it meant, the uncharacteristically woke-sounding shot from the right across Smith’s bow was deleted three minutes later.
Smith had supporters aplenty for her sorry-not-really-sorry explanation, though.
“I, and others, have been quite critical of Smith’s comment that the unvaccinated were ‘the most discriminated against group that I’ve ever witnessed in my lifetime’,” tweeted Mount Royal University political scientist Duane Bratt in a short thread about the uproar.
“Based on the vicious emails, voice mails, and tweets I have subsequently received, there are lots of people that agreed with Smith’s original comments,” he continued. “Yes they are a small minority of Albertans/Canadians, but they are angry. Very angry.”
“Those that are vaccine-hesitant or anti-vax, those that either didn’t get vaccinated or felt coerced in doing so are not going away. They support Smith and want to re-litigate covid restrictions,” he concluded. “They want payback and not just Kenney, Hinshaw, and other AHS officials.”
It was only Day Two of Danielle Smith’s Alberta, but it was hard to shake the feeling that not only is Bratt right about the new premier’s core supporters, but that things are likely to deteriorate from here.
Smith seems sincerely persuaded that “discrimination” by Alberta Health Services against front-line health care employees who refused to be vaccinated against COVID-19 played a significant role in the continuing shortage of nurses and other health care workers.
Never mind the fact the number of AHS employees called back to work after the Kenney Government caved last May on the restrictions wanted by AHS leaders was only about 750 out of more than 125,000 employees.
That’s 0.6 per cent of the AHS workforce. Even accounting for a few employees in excluded or management ranks – where vaccination rates were higher – and those who quit rather than fight to get their jobs back, the number of employees lost to the health care system for “their choice not to be vaccinated,” as Smith would put it, would still be well under one per cent.
Premier Smith can promise hard-pressed health care workers that “reinforcements are coming” if she likes. Rest assured, though, they are unlikely to come from the ranks of already-trained anti-vaccine health care workers suffering under the yoke of public health guidelines elsewhere.
Indeed, the direction now being taken by the UCP may have the opposite effect.
“Good morning #Alberta health care workers,” tweeted the president and CEO of the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario in Ottawa yesterday, apparently trolling former premier Kenney’s much-publicized attempt to woo skilled workers away from Ontario and B.C.
“At @CHEO we think racism is bad, immunization is good and we [HEART] occupational health+safety,” said Alex Munter. “Come join us if you’re vaccinated against Covid and your routine vaccinations are up-to-date (MMR, tetanus, Hep B, etc).”
The “We’re hiring” GIF attached to the tweet sure looked like the staircase in that Toronto subway station Kenney was bragging about how cheap it is to live in Alberta just days ago.
Meanwhile, I suppose we should be concerned that the wording of Premier Smith’s proposed amendments to the Alberta Human Rights Act to offer specific protection to vaccine refuseniks will be so broad that it will include not only COVID-19 inoculation but traditionally less controversial vaccines.
Will the requirement for vaccination against measles, mumps, rubella and other highly infectious diseases by post-secondary institutions that train health care workers have to go out the window as well to cater to Premier Smith’s allies in the COVID-conspiracy community?
Well, at least Day Three of Smith’s tenure as premier can’t be as fraught as Days One and Two … Can it?
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