Alberta `reached a tipping point' in COVID battle
Kenney defends decisions made as cases soar
E DMONTON • Two days after announcing Alberta was going into a four-week quasi- lockdown to try to control raging COVID-19 infections, Premier Jason Kenney is in a reflective mood.
“I’m a pretty stoic guy but at the beginning I had a lot of emotional moments ... as we realized, as I realized, the very profound impact this was going to have on so many people’s lives,” Kenney said in an interview with the National Post on Thursday. “It felt like, something like, analogous to sort of wartime leadership, I think, with everything coming at us in every direction.”
The COVID-19 numbers in Alberta are among the worst in the country, depending on which metric one uses. While the number of active cases are the highest, countrywide, Alberta is behind Ontario and Quebec and Manitoba on deaths per capita. Active cases in the province climbed above 20,000 this week; nearly 700 people are in hospital and more than 120 are in intensive care.
Since spring, more than 650 Albertans, ranging from their 20s to more than 80 years old, have died.
As case counts climbed steadily, Alberta’s government resisted imposing more and more stringent measures, citing concerns over constitutional rights to religion and assembly and leaving, at least in part, it up to Albertans themselves to follow the rules.
Still, the case counts and hospitalizations kept rising and now threaten to overwhelm the health-care system. On Tuesday, Kenney announced what he has resisted for weeks, banning socializing outside of one’s household, closing gyms and other fitness facilities, curtailing retailers and introducing a province-wide mandatory mask law.
“Clearly, we reached a tipping point where targeted measures were no longer adequate,” Kenney said. “We just had to cut social interaction. I think we’ve done the right thing.” Kenney’s critics have said it’s too little, too late, suggesting if he had been tougher earlier, a more prolonged lockdown could have been avoided. They wondered if lives could have been saved.
“We could have acted four weeks ago. Since then, an additional 317 people have died,” said NDP Leader Rachel Notley in response to the new restrictions.
In a radio interview Wednesday with Edmonton’s CHED radio station. Kenney lauded Alberta’s pandemic response in the spring, including when Edmonton held the National Hockey League playoffs in an isolation “bubble.”
That prompted host Shaye Ganam to interject: “Premier Kenney, with all due respect, you’re talking about things that happened several months ago, and we’re in a drastically different situation now. Things are far, far worse when you talk about our record in terms of pandemic response. It’s among the worst, especially in Canada.”
Kenney countered: “I don’ t accept the Alberta bashing that is going on here.”
Some commentators have even suggested the province’s chief public health doctor, Deena Hinshaw, seize control of the entire pandemic response; others have suggested Ottawa should step in and take control. Kenney himself has expressed umbrage at demands he take responsibility for the outcomes of his government’s decisions.
“At the end of all of this, every jurisdiction is going to look back and see that there were positive and negative aspects to the response, there will be many lessons to learn,” Kenney said in the interview Thursday. “But I believe that generally Albertans, and Alberta’s government, has done the best they can with a terrible situation.”
In some corners, the Kenney government has been accused of going too far. It faces a lawsuit from a conservative legal organization over its lockdown provisions, for example, and there have been rallies with hundreds of participants decrying mask laws and the effects of shutdowns on the economy.
Polling from mid- November, done right after the introduction of restrictions that stopped short of banning gatherings and mandating masks, showed that 51 per cent of Albertans felt they didn’t go far enough. But, crucially, 29 per cent thought the government got it about right, and 13 per cent felt they had gone too far.
“Everybody will have a chance to do a full retrospective next year when we’re finally past this terrible time and we’ll be happy to take on objective criticism about what we could’ve done better all throughout the pandemic,” said Kenney.
What might happen if the latest round of restrictions doesn’t work isn’t yet clear, though Kenney said “more stringent” measures are a possibility and that the province is considering more support for people to quarantine and isolate.
“I’ve a lot of friends who have lost their life savings, their businesses, their jobs. I try to keep in touch with people who are going through great adversity, to keep it real, and to remember that the burden that falls on people in leadership right now to do everything we can for them,” Kenney said.