Alberta premier Danielle Smith, defiant and unrepentant, continues to slough off criticism of the report on Alberta’s COVID-19 response produced by her government’s a handpicked panel of vaccine skeptical and conspiracy-theory-influenced contributors.

“This is the kind of approach you should always expect from me,” she told a reporter at a news conference yesterday on another topic. “I will always seek out contrarian voices just to make sure I make the best decisions.”

Never mind the reactions of the Alberta and Canadian medical associations the day before yesterday, or the critical letter about the COVID “task force’s” inaccurate and misleading findings from a group of 67 researchers and academic physicians with expertise in such topics as infectious diseases, pediatrics, virology, vaccinology, immunology, respirology, public health, and epidemiology.

That letter, signed by the long list of experts that began with the name of Timothy Caulfield of the University of Alberta Faculty of Law and School of Public Health, urged Premier Smith, Health Minister Adriana LaGrange and the members of the Alberta Legislature to immediately reject the report’s recommendations.

“The report appears to be influenced by a limited perspective that emphasizes concerns over vaccines and favours treatments like Ivermectin, a stance that does not reflect the broader scientific knowledge required for a comprehensive provincial health report,” it read in part. Ivermectin, of course, is the notorious veterinary de-worming paste beloved of enthusiasts of quack COVID cures like Premier Smith in her talk-radio era. 

“While ongoing research continues to refine and enhance available options, improve benefit-to-risk ratios, and boost health outcomes, it is essential that policies are founded on ongoing robust and well-established scientific data, rather than misrepresented data,” the letter continued. 

Arguably, it’s one thing to handpick a panel of experts in the social sciences to cook up an agreeable policy report, as former UCP premier Jason Kenney did with his “blue ribbon” finance panel that recommended cutting public sector salaries in 2019, but quite another thing to try the same stunt with the hard sciences.

But Premier Smith has now gone so deep into the MAGA netherworld that scientific expertise is presumably all the more reason to blow off the letter-writers’ urgent request that so-called “task force” report “be officially dismissed for use as a source of information for both public and provincial policy, as it inaccurately reflects the body of scientific evidence.”

The premier could have been channelling RFK Jr. during her news conference remarks: “Well, anyone who doesn’t think that science is a process of point-counterpoint, and then being able to synthesize information, is somebody who doesn’t believe in science, so I know there’s been a narrative, and the narrative has been enforced by shouting down contrarian voices, and that’s not what we’re going to do. 

“We’re gonna listen to every voice and we’re gonna make our best assessment based on what we’re seeing with the evidence. And the evidence, um, has changed.”

“We’re gonna take a look at that, and obviously we’ll make some decisions,” she said. 

So brace yourself, Alberta! What do you want to bet that the “contrarian voices” Smith ends up listening to are those of the panelists picked by Red Deer Emergency Room physician and former UCP nomination candidate Gary Davidson, who chose the contributors to the UCP report, the work of which seems largely to have been conducted in secret. 

Among the recommendations included in the final version of the Davidson report were that COVID-19 vaccines be denied to healthy children, mask mandates be forbidden, and that COVID vaccines no longer be given to anyone without “full disclosure” of potential risks – a move seemingly designed to discourage adults from being immunized against the disease. 

As reported here earlier this week, almost every one of the dozen members of the Davidson panel holds vaccine skeptical or related views common in the anti-vaxx online subculture. A 13th member listed in the first “final” version of the report, John Conly, late of the University of Calgary’s medical faculty, told The Globe and Mail he was not a member of the panel, didn’t endorse its conclusions, and had demanded his name be removed from the report. 

Dr. Davidson, meanwhile, is scheduled to appear at a March 3 “Injection of Truth” town hall meeting in Calgary organized by Calgary-Lougheed United Conservative Party MLA Eric Bouchard, a leading light in the party’s influential if informal anti-vaxx caucus. 

Dr. Davidson will be accompanied to the event two of the contributors to the report, David Speicher and Byram Bridle, a website for the event says.

Soon after the Davidson report was quietly posted by the government last week without a formal announcement, Bouchard called for immediate adoption of its recommendations, including a ban on COVID vaccines for young people. 

Premier promises future nest egg, appoints Lougheed offspring to run it 

Now, about that news conference, it was called to announce the government’s claim it is “taking action to grow the Alberta Heritage Savings Trust Fund to $250 billion by 2050.”

The news release on the purported plan began with a tribute to Progressive Conservative premier Peter Lougheed’s establishment of the Heritage fund in 1976 and ended with the announcement the government has appointed Lougheed’s son, Joe, to head something called the Heritage Fund Opportunities Corp. 

Why a new Crown corporation to manage the putative new Heritage fund is required was not immediately clear, but running it should give the younger Lougheed, a Calgary lawyer, something to do beyond lending his storied name to an enterprise that is unlikely to deliver on Smith’s promises of a huge future nest egg.

It will provide the government with a wonderful excuse not to fund needed public services in the name of balanced budgets, and it will also give the impression the UCP is not just pissing away money on tendentious $2-million COVID reports and the like. 

According to the news release, the new Crown corporation will operate at arm’s length from the government. According to the UCP, the Alberta Investment Management Corp. also operates at arm’s length, although as noted in the last post on this topic, there is now reason to doubt that claim in AIMCo’s case.

In November 2012, the CBC reported Lougheed had billed the Alberta College of Art and Design more than $5,000 a month for government relations services. In May 2013, Alberta’s lobbyist registrar found he had not breached the Lobbyists Act when he performed the work between 2009 and 2011. 

The public institution is now known as the Alberta University of the Arts. 

David J. Climenhaga

David J. Climenhaga

David Climenhaga is a journalist and trade union communicator who has worked in senior writing and editing positions with the Globe and Mail and the Calgary Herald. He left journalism after the strike...