The ‘hinterland vs. metropolis’ vaccine divide
Hoo boy. I got out of bed Friday morning to see a B.C. politician blaming Alberta for his province’s problems. I know, I know: this is supposed to be a newspaper, and somebody spewing on Alberta from outside her borders is as far from news as it gets. Hear me out.
The province of British Columbia mostly has pretty respectable rates of vaccination against COVID-19, and as a consequence has not suffered the overwhelming “fourth wave” hospital crisis that Alberta and Saskatchewan are now battling. The major exception to the rule in B.C. is the northern areas of the province adjoining Alberta — places that are really part of Alberta, economically and culturally.
My readers have seen me make sly chauvinistic references to “Greater Alberta,” a sort of quasi-nation that incorporates B.C.’S northern COVID hot zones as well as parts of B.C.’S southeast and Saskatchewan’s west.
COVID has done as much as anything to prove the validity of this concept, though this is definitely not how I would have liked to see it done.
Northern MLAS and other officials from B.C. are now making a special effort to boost vaccination uptake — a very courageous thing to do up north, where the public is suspicious of vaccines and venomous about social disease-control measures like masks and business restrictions. These politicians are bound to receive terrible abuse or worse for insisting politely on the obvious benefits of vaccination, and they are flirting with electoral destruction in order to stop what amounts to an ongoing mass suicide. Canadians outside Greater Alberta won’t take much note. I have, and it does feel unkind to pick nits.
But Peace River South MLA Mike Bernier sought to provide himself some cover in an unjust way, blaming “Alberta influence” on the region for low vaccination rates. Now, from my battered chair in the capital of Alberta, this strikes me as a hell of a thing to say. If you study vaccination rates in the Alberta regions you will detect a strong south-north gradient. In both provinces, the cities and towns of the resource-extracting north have been slow to take a life-saving preventive medication, even when paid $100 to do it.
Alberta’s major cities, like those of B.C., have high vaccination rates and correspondingly low case counts. At this point in the fourth wave, Alberta’s intensive care units are being flooded with severe COVID cases from the boreal hinterland, delaying health care and surgeries for Edmontonians and Calgarians who were quicker to get poked.
How exactly do I know that it’s not the B.C. influence on Alberta that is causing this carnage? If that sounds like a silly question, it’s no sillier than a Peace River block politician blaming vaccine resistance on epidemic Alberta stubbornness radiating harmfully onto the decent people of B.C. from across a meridian that, in the north, scarcely qualifies as an afterthought. This is a “hinterland versus metropolis” problem, not a “B.C. versus Alberta” problem.
In both provinces, political leadership failed to anticipate that people who have avoided large population centres and fallen almost beyond the pale of civilization might be slow to follow instructions from a central authority, or even to accept medical help from it. This isn’t, frankly, a failure of public health. It’s not as though trucks full of vaccine doses kept breaking down on the way to Fort St. John, B.C., or Grande Prairie, Alta. It’s a failure of political communications, or even sociological insight. The consequences were less drastic in B.C., only because B.C.’S north is less populated than Alberta’s — and not, despite what you may have read on Twitter, because B.C. is run by benign and wise philosopher-kings and Alberta by demented monsters.