Pandemic polarization has infected Alberta
Remember, back in early spring, there was this constant chatter about how we're all in this together?
We were inundated with pious advertising campaigns and endless societal messaging about staying safe and bending curves. Short of asking us to link arms (difficult at six feet apart, admittedly) and sing Kumbaya, there wasn't a homespun homily not dusted off and presented as some part of our collective, stop-covid-inits-tracks campaign.
Well, even back then this seemed naive at best and manipulatively selective at worst. Today we're at least being honest with ourselves, so anyone daring to spout some limpid falsehood about such imagined togetherness of purpose will likely hear a strange guttural sound arising from behind assorted face masks.
Yes, the middle ground is gone — poof — as this pandemic morphs into the most divisive event ever witnessed in Alberta.
Which is why I have some sympathy for Premier Jason Kenney, though not so much for many of his team, politicians who increasingly seem like myopic deer in the headlights when he isn't standing by their shoulders offering even the most basic of advice: “This is a foot, that is a mouth; keep them separate.”
Of course, it was always going to be difficult navigating through that narrow gorge between the COVID rock and the hard place, trying to retain or resurrect some economic activity while dealing with the challenges of a virulent health threat.
Alberta's position was more difficult than in other provinces, right from the get-go. Our economy was already surviving on fumes, the deficit a runaway train of future debt, even before COVID-19 came knocking at our collective doors.
This was partly due to the gross negligence on behalf of the federal Liberals who, driven by either malice or stupidity, allowed a wholesale disabling of our energy industry. Therefore, when the pandemic duly arrived, it made the deliberate mothballing of what was left of Alberta's economy much more difficult for Kenney than for other premiers.
That's why, even after the initial pandemic measures were introduced in Alberta last spring, there was no boost in Kenney's popularity, unlike colleagues in Ontario and Quebec, for example, whose poll ratings soared despite having many more citizens getting sick and subsequently dying.
Fast forward almost eight months and we arrive in the divided landscape of today's Alberta, where the rhetoric from the shut-itall-down crowd, aimed at those considered science-deniers and conspiracy theory quacks, is matched only by the venom hurled back into their faces by those who reckon only the smug elite with guaranteed paycheques would willingly sacrifice the livelihoods of fellow citizens for a virus that mainly kills the old, sick and weak.
The latest pandemic-fighting measures announced Tuesday will probably placate nobody, being judged either too little and too late or too much and too soon. Whether they work in stopping the rise in hospitalizations is another question, one that'll be answered soon enough.
And as though things weren't tough enough for Kenney, the latest budget update released this week is a financial nightmare from which there seems little hope of waking any time soon.
Life and death issues dividing the population, an economy barely clinging to life, the need to borrow $21 billion to keep this year's lights on and the prospect of a new U.S. president with a mandate to cut carbon emissions: it's likely not what Kenney envisaged in becoming premier 19 months ago.
Meanwhile, Rachel Notley, while proving herself a lacklustre premier, is nevertheless a daunting Opposition leader.
She emotes sincerity and empathy, and, when not responsible for results, can afford to promise chickens in everyone's pot and a cure for all that ails us.
The next election is still distant, but unless Kenney gets a break — as always in Alberta, higher energy prices would solve many problems — he and the UCP might discover that jibe about “one and done” they happily levelled at the NDP could prove their own political epitaph.