Smith Attackers Defend Appalling Policies

Following a question at her first press conference as premier, Danielle Smith expressed sympathies for unvaccinated Canadians who were persecuted by the COVID-19 regime. Smith mentioned that these Canadians “have […]
Published on October 29, 2022

Following a question at her first press conference as premier, Danielle Smith expressed sympathies for unvaccinated Canadians who were persecuted by the COVID-19 regime. Smith mentioned that these Canadians “have been the most discriminated against group that I have witnessed in my lifetime.” It was an “extraordinary period,” whose prejudicial practices she found “unacceptable.” Smith’s subjective words are objectively true.

Harsh reactions to Smith’s words followed from those who drove the COVID-19 machine, in policy, in implementation, and in hatred toward fellow unvaccinated Canadians. The strongest pushback came from those who called on governments to use more punitive measures and those who actually implemented the draconian measures.

Take for example Rachel Notley, the leader of the Alberta NDP. Notley was at the head of the mob calling for the incarceration of pastors, whose rights of assembly were violated by unconstitutional protocols and by kangaroo-court blanket injunctions sought and obtained unlawfully behind closed doors. Let us remember that Alberta Health Services presided over the only jurisdiction in Canada that condemned churches and imprisoned preachers, but Notley wanted more. One naturally cringes to think how it might have been, had the NDP been in power.

A look at the most bizarre COVID-19 NDP policy suggestions offers an idea of what COVID-19 regime enthusiasts defend when they attack Premier Smith for her compassion and defense of citizen’s rights. Wanting to coerce more Albertans, in September 2021, Notley pushed “life-saving COVID-19 vaccinations.” Not satisfied with existing limitations, the next day she pushed the idea even further in her personal Twitter account. The NDP leader wanted to investigate and determine who was not vaccinated and why, which is a blatant violation of the privacy of individual Albertans. There is no legal requirement to disclose reasons not to submit to a medical procedure. She offered no information on how the illegal information would be gathered, but we know earlier that month an NDP MLA, Thomas Dang, hacked into an Alberta Health Services server, and unlawfully obtaining private health information on other people.

Regardless of whether Notley knew of this crime it is interesting that only weeks later she suggested using Albertans’ personal health information to create public policies. In her tweet, unjabbed Albertans should be “educated.” Short on details, the tweet does not spell out how such re-education would take place, but most people know what socialist regimes mean when they say they want to “re-educate” citizens. I trust Notley will not bring to Alberta the chilling atrocities that China or Cambodia inflicted on those needing re-education, but the idea that those who think differently need to be re-educated is just as crass. After “educating” citizens, Notley said she would “take the vaccine directly to them.”

When combining the gathering of confidential information, unveiling citizen’s motivations, and threatening to take it to them, Notley seems to imply going to private domiciles: “We need to figure out who isn’t vaccinated against COVID-19, why they’re not, educate them and then take the vaccines directly to them.” A CTV headline mentioned going door-to-door.

But for people, like Notley, claiming “to follow the science,” and eager to show that their opponents were anti-science, Notley was not paying attention to important COVID developments. Two full months before Notley called for the wholesale violation of citizen’s right to bodily autonomy and privacy, the Centres for Disease Control reported that the spread SARS-CoV-2 virus had already spread among 74 percent of vaccinated individuals in Barnstable, Mass. This was one of the first reported failures of the COVID vaccine in North America, which up to then was advertised by medical bureaucrats and politicians as a way out of the pandemic crises.

In fairness to Notley, she was not alone in ignoring the science. National politicians too claimed that the jabs offered immunity to infection, and presented the fictitious immunity as a reason for coercing people to be vaxxed. The same is true for Jason Kenney.

The immunization fiction also fuelled the paranoia of infection from the unvaxxed and served to justify firing citizens from their jobs, restricting their movements, and in some cases even prevent them from accessing shops and services. Newspaper and media pundits fuelled the animosity and stoked public anger against fellow Canadians. Not once, however, did Notley publicly call for calm or seek to comfort those targeted by ugly popular sentiments. She chose instead, against basic decency, scientific observations, and the mounting evidence to the contrary, to side with the “pandemic of the unvaccinated” narrative peddled by Justin Trudeau, Jason Kenney, and Joe Biden.

None of these leaders have acknowledged their colossal errors, and now they have doubled down on the urgency for more  vaxes, despite fresh evidence of rising harms from them. These folks led the COVID-19 regime of medical bureaucrats, so they now vigorously defend it. Let the attacks against Premier Smith’s new policies remind us of the hardships imposed, and those who wrongly imposed them.

 

Marco Navarro-Génie is a isenior fellow at the Frontier Centre and founding president of the Haultain Research Institute. He is co-author, with Barry Cooper, of the upcoming Canada’s COVID-19: The History of a Pandemic Moral Panic (December 2022).

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