Danielle Smith, populist-to-be
Alberta's new Premier is off to a great start towards rectifying some of the harms of the 2021 Fall of Shame.
In preparation for an interview with the German/Swiss radio station Kontrafunk (start after 36:00), I put together a timeline of Premier Danielle Smith’s recent statements regarding vaccination mandates and the treatment of unvaccinated people. Smith was elected United Conservative Party leader and successor of Alberta’s Premier Jason Kenney at the beginning of the month. Smith ran on a ticket heavy on provincial sovereignty and individual liberties, in line with her previous political stance and her views as an independent journalist. I had first heard of her in February 2021 when she interviewed retired army colonel and emergency management specialist Dave Redman for Western Standard Live and expressed her agreement with his harsh critique of blanket lockdowns.
In searching the Internet and looking through YouTube, it turns out that Smith alluded to many of her controversial plans in her first press conference as Premier on 11 Oct 2022. After responding to several journalist questions about issues of provincial sovereignty and jurisdiction, she replied with a rather emphatic “no” to the question whether she would retain Alberta’s Chief Medical Officer of Health, Dr. Deena Hinshaw, as her primary public health advisor. She explained that “we are in a new phase where we are […] treating coronavirus as epidemic as we do influenza”. She blames health care managers, in particular at the Alberta Health Services (AHS), for the current under-staffing of hospitals and wants to attract unvaccinated health care workers to the province who were let go elsewhere due to vaccination mandates.
Pressed for concrete ideas to increase acute-bed capacity in the province’s major hospitals in Calgary and Edmonton, the Premier referred to delays in discharging elderly patients, who cannot return home, to long-term care facilities and also hints at better promoting an existing home improvement program to facilitate “aging in place”. Similarly, she explained excessive ambulance response times with delays around the offloading of patients at hospitals. Overall, Smith gives the impression of a very well-informed, competent leader.
After showing off her knowledge of rural policy issues, the final question, from a Globe & Mail reporter, was about including vaccine choice in the Alberta Human Rights Act, and specifically how the Premier views it “as equal to something like race, gender, sexuality, which we protect because those are not about choices.” Here, Smith notes that the “community that faced the most restrictions on their freedom in the last year were those who made a choice not to be vaccinated.” She then goes on to say that she has never experienced a situation where people were similarly subject to dismissals, isolation rules, and travel restrictions, and concludes that “they were the most discriminated-against group that I have ever witnessed in my lifetime”. She did immediately acknowledge the other grounds for discrimination mentioned in the question, but reiterated that she finds the extreme level of discrimination of unvaccinated people unacceptable and promised that “we are not going to create a segregated society on the basis of a medical choice”.
In addition, the Premier refers to the non-sterilizing nature of the COVID-19 vaccines and the choice to take a flu shot or COVID booster for self-protection. Here, she implies that the vaccines do not stop infection and transmission of current virus variants, and therefore do not provide protection of others, making vaccination mandates obsolete. Smith warns of victimizing a group that made a different choice and acknowledges that it will be difficult to accept this approach for people who have held a different view of the COVID-19 vaccines for a long time.
A lot has been made of Smith’s use of the word “discrimination” in her statement. She was pressured hard enough to publish a clarification on the following day, explaining (again!) that she did not intend to diminish the discrimination faced in the past and present by minority communities in Canada and around the globe. She did not apologize, and frankly, there was nothing to apologize for.
On several occasions in the three weeks following that first press conference, Premier Smith provided further details on her pandemic-related intentions:
Speaking to the Edmonton Chamber of Commerce on 20 Oct, she commits not to bring vaccination passports back. Shutting down businesses does not protect the health care system, Smith argues. She also gives businesses and lower-level government a “fair warning” about the planned changes to the Alberta Human Rights Act that will make it illegal to discriminate based on COVID vaccination status.
On 21 Oct, immediately after presenting her cabinet ministers, she is paraphrased by the Toronto Star: “‘We are not QR codes’: Danielle Smith wants blanket amnesty for COVID rule breakers and no more World Economic Forum in Alberta”. The cancellation of all fines for breaking gathering limits, declining travel disclosure (ArriveCan app), or ignoring mask mandates makes sense since it appears that the vast majority of these fines are being dropped anyway when challenged in court. The interview request from Kontrafunk was made in order to find out more about that Canadian politician who considers “‘pardons’ for fines issued in connection with measures taken against the Corona pandemic and regrets the ‘purely political decisions’ that led to these fines.”
The Toronto Star, with the usual reference to an “expert”, calls Smith’s reference to the WEF a nod to conspiracy theories, yet all the Premier seems to be doing is push back against uncontrolled outside influence in her province’s affairs. Importantly, the reference to QR codes was made in conjunction with the plan to “purge” the provincial vaccination database, which should be applauded by anyone concerned about confidentiality of personal medical records.
The above quotes were extracted from a one-hour interview by the Western Standard Live. The Star article also refers to Smith’s promise to reform the AHS before the end of the year, but leaves out a couple of important and revealing details. Smith blames not the AHS itself but their scientific (advisory) committee for not looking “at the whole broad science”. She rejects the notion that a scientific committee could become permanent that “isn’t prepared to look at therapeutic options in the middle of a pandemic and throw out the [existing] pandemic [response] plan”. This is a superbly played card, topped only by Smith’s subsequent reference to “Event 201”.
Event 201 was a global pandemic simulation conducted only months before the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak started, which has eerie similarities with the actual pandemic. Smith points out that one of the first goals in the simulation was to find a therapeutic (treatment) to prevent deaths while a vaccine is being developed. Given the widespread suppression in Canada and the Western world of any attempt at developing treatment protocols including the promising, widely available drugs HCQ and Ivermectin, she correctly denounces the failure of public health and emergency management since the early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic.
On 22 Oct, a Rebel News journalist asked Smith about a campaign promise to apologize to the unvaccinated. To everyone’s surprise, the Premier proceeded to issue the apology on the spot: “I am deeply sorry for anyone who was inappropriately subjected to discrimination as a result of their vaccine status. I am deeply sorry for any government employee who was fired from their job, because of their vaccine status. And I welcome them back, if they want to come back.”
Lastly, on 29 Oct, the Premier issues a short and sweet statement regarding mask mandates in schools: “Our government will not permit any further masking mandates of children in Alberta’s K-12 education system.” She calls the harmful impact of face coverings on child development, mental health, and education “well understood” and directs her ministers “to reaffirm or clarify our government’s full authority with respect to this and other health and education matters.” This statement was in response to a judge’s ruling that the previous provincial government had overstepped its authority by telling school boards not to reinstate mask mandates without issuing a formal regulation.
In talking to Kontrafunk before the interview, I used the term “populist” for Premier Smith and was asked whether I meant this in a negative way? I had indeed always viewed the term as disparaging. Clearly, the left-leaning Canadian press thinks so too when they write “The disappointing populism of Danielle Smith’s political plan”; “Danielle Smith and the Alberta version of tactical populism”; or from our public broadcaster, “Danielle Smith's populist playbook: make the dominant feel marginalized”. But calling unvaccinated Albertans or Canadians “the dominant” is rather bold. Vaccination rates across the country are around 80% among those 5 years and older, making the unvaccinated a minority by definition. As populism is defined as politics that appeal to a broad group of regular people who feel ignored by a perceived elite, appealing to the unvaccinated is not a sign of being a populist.
Nevertheless, my answer to Kontrafunk was that I don’t think it’s such a bad thing to represent the people’s opinions and pressing concerns. I know from speaking to a broad range of new people over the last three years that our political, administrative and business leadership often do not know or understand what is happening on the ground. In addition, when such concerns flare up, as they did during the Freedom Convoy, the urban elites have a tendency to try to educate away these concerns rather than genuinely engage with their fellow citizens. This will not work and is a recipe for political disaster. In terms of the Premier, I hope that her prescient policies will heal some of the divisions and harms of the 2021 Fall of Shame and therefore become popular with Albertans. Perhaps that will make Danielle Smith a post-hoc populist?