00:00:00.000But Danielle Smith was doing her debut press conference this week and she was taking questions on a number of issues.
00:00:07.040She was talking about the Sovereignty Act first and foremost, which I don't think the media is really going to want to let her off on.
00:00:13.820But it wasn't until the tail end of the press conference where she got a question about her plan, which I think is a very good one, to put vaccine status in the Alberta Human Rights Code.
00:00:24.600So it would be illegal, illegal under Alberta law to discriminate against people based on their vaccine status.
00:00:34.120Now, Danielle Smith has been a longtime libertarian.
00:00:37.540She is an advocate for individual choice.
00:00:40.240She has been, throughout the course of the pandemic, an incredibly strong voice, incredibly strong voice on vaccine choice.
00:00:49.860She has been in her work since and she was during the campaign.
00:00:53.560She had a very clear position on this, a very clear proposal.
00:00:56.600She wasn't just saying I'm against mandates.
00:00:58.200She was saying I have a way that we can codify in law this opposition to mandates.
00:01:03.580And that was to put this human rights protection in place, which protects your right to be unvaccinated the same way as it protects your right to be free from discrimination as a racial minority based on your religion, your gender identity, your sexual orientation and all of these other things.
00:01:18.580And she gave a very good answer, which has gotten now millions of views online when asked about this.
00:01:27.540I have a question about vaccine choice and how you want to protect that under the Human Rights Act.
00:01:33.520I'm wondering how a vaccine choice, how you see that as equal to something like race, gender, sexuality, which we protect because those are not about choices.
00:01:44.960Well, I guess the way I look at it is that the community that faced the most restrictions on their freedoms in the last year were those who made a choice not to be vaccinated.
00:01:56.280I don't think I've ever experienced a situation in my lifetime where a person was fired from their job or not allowed to watch their kids play hockey or not allowed to go visit a loved one in long term care or hospital or not allowed to go get on a plane to either go across the country to see family or even travel across the border.
00:02:17.600So they have been the most discriminated against group that I've ever witnessed in my lifetime.
00:02:23.300That's a pretty extreme level of discrimination that we have seen.
00:02:26.960I don't take away any of the discrimination that I've seen in those other groups that you mentioned.
00:02:31.920But this has been an extraordinary time in the last year in particular.
00:02:37.560And I want people to know that I find that unacceptable, that we are not going to create a segregated society on the basis of a medical choice.
00:02:45.880The part that has a lot of people on the left just exploding their own minds, spontaneously combusting, is Danielle Smith saying that the unvaccinated are the most discriminated against group she's ever seen in her lifetime.
00:03:05.460But nevertheless, she says that the unvaccinated in her lifetime are the most discriminated against group.
00:03:10.320And on the surface, this does not sound like an inherently illogical thing to say.
00:03:15.000In the last two years, certainly, the unvaccinated have been not just as a matter of discrimination and bigotry they experience in society,
00:03:23.060but as a matter of systemic government-imposed policy discrimination, barred from working in the civil service.
00:03:33.480They were forced into quarantine, banned from trains.
00:03:36.180The amount of discrimination that has been heaped on the unvaccinated, not just by bigoted individuals, but by the state, is monumental.
00:03:45.940At the same time, I also don't want to get into this comparison game.
00:03:50.280But when you make a comment like no one else has ever had that discrimination, which is not what she said,
00:03:56.320but when you make that comment that it's worse than anything else, people start throwing their own understandable grievances there.
00:04:04.860For example, in Danielle Smith's lifetime, there were still residential schools.
00:04:08.840In Danielle Smith's lifetime, gay marriage did not exist with the force of law for much of it and so on.
00:04:15.660But I don't like the comparison for a number of reasons, because I think all discrimination is wrong on its surface, on an individual basis.
00:04:24.040You don't need to compare and shouldn't need to compare one person's discrimination against another.
00:04:29.520And it's doing that that always rubs me the wrong way, because people try to delegitimize or minimize other people struggling because they think theirs is worse.
00:04:39.460Whereas I take an equal opportunity approach on this.
00:04:41.760Let's say that, yes, racial discrimination is bad.
00:04:47.380The whole point of intersectionality, what we were told we're all supposed to move towards, is that we can't just look at these things in isolation.
00:04:54.940But I think we need to, in a lot of ways, call them out on individual terms and call them out individually when bad things are happening, when discrimination is taking place.
00:05:04.820And Danielle Smith, in the full context, in the full comment, does, by the way, say that she is not diminishing other discrimination that was raised in the question, such as racial and sexual orientation and so on.
00:05:19.440And she's not talking about diminishing or downplaying that.
00:05:22.540She's just saying that we need to call out the horrendous discrimination that has been taking place on the grounds of vaccination status.
00:05:31.580And this is a discrimination for which the federal government in Canada has been unrepentant, for which provincial governments in this country have been unrepentant, and for which no one in Canada, in Canadian politics who holds elected office, has taken the view that Danielle Smith has just done,
00:05:49.920which is to say this is wrong, which is to say this is wrong, and it will never happen, and to do so in a believable way.
00:05:56.660When she came out and said segregation would not exist in her province, Doug Ford said that in Ontario, that he would not support a segregated society.
00:06:04.520Danielle Smith's predecessor, Jason Kenney, had at one time taken it off the table.
00:06:09.920But Danielle Smith knows that history.
00:06:12.880And Premier Smith, I should say, is well aware of that.
00:06:16.660When she makes that commitment, I think she understands the weight of what it is she's committing to and what it is that she's promising.
00:06:25.460And that is that there will not be a lockdown, there will not be segregation, and there will be protection of vaccine choice in Alberta from here on out.
00:06:37.000And there's a reason that that clip has gone so viral, not just across Alberta, not just across Canada, but around the world.
00:06:43.500I've got American friends, Australian friends, British friends that are sending me this, being like, who is this woman?
00:06:48.660Like one person's like, I don't know what Alberta is.
00:06:50.680I think it's a Canadian thing, but I'm all for it.
00:06:53.500And that to me is exceptional, because right now we are in the midst of a global trend,
00:06:58.720where governments and countries can stand and look at the fork in the road and say we can choose freedom or we can choose not freedom.
00:07:07.160And most have been choosing not freedom.
00:07:10.320Most have been choosing to go so far away from this idea of individual freedom.
00:07:14.480In Australia, as Alexander Marshall, who's a tremendous commentator and writer for The Spectator, pointed out,
00:07:20.620Australia even still, we're approaching three years since COVID was discovered,
00:07:26.560and nearly three years on, Australia is still in some parts committing to vaccine discrimination.