Western Standard - September 02, 2022


FILDEBRANDT Alberta s next premier must pardon lockdown resisters

Topics
Jason Kenney's legacy and pardons
Mentioned
Ty Northcott Jason Kenney Ocean Weisblatt Chris Scott Kenny
Trudeau responds to allegations Canada smuggled British teens Parole records show Sask mass stabbing suspect had a violent history, 59 convictions

Episode Stats


Length

5 minutes

Words per minute

155.78

Word count

821

Sentence count

42

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged

Toxicity

3

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

During his time in office, Alberta Premier Jason Kenney has made criminals out of ordinary men and women who wanted nothing more than to just go about their lives in peace. Now, as he departs office, him or his successor has the chance to do the right thing. Every Albertan who resisted his government s arbitrary and, as it turns out, unscientific lockdowns deserves a full pardon. Every Albertaan who suffered financial loss deserves compensation. And every pastor who went to jail should receive a full apology.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 During his time in office, Alberta Premier Jason Kenney has made criminals out of ordinary men
00:00:04.600 and women who wanted nothing more than to just go about their lives in peace. Now, as he departs
00:00:09.500 office, him or his successor has the chance to do the right thing. Every Albertan who resisted his
00:00:15.820 government's arbitrary and, as it turns out, unscientific lockdowns deserves a full pardon.
00:00:21.960 Every Albertan who suffered financial loss deserves compensation, and every pastor who
00:00:26.860 went to jail should receive a full apology. For what we witnessed in Alberta was a gross pattern
00:00:32.540 of injustice perpetrated by the very people elected to ensure justice. Let's recap. After it became
00:00:39.680 apparent, at least to many of us, that lockdowns and mandatory masking did precious little, if
00:00:44.220 anything, to materially save lives from COVID-19, many ordinary people began to openly resist.
00:00:50.260 In December of 2020, Ocean Weissblatt was hauled away in handcuffs by the Calgary Police
00:00:56.700 Service for the crime of playing hockey on an outdoor rink during one of the many lockdowns, 0.98
00:01:03.580 but not before one of the hapless police officers said that she would, quote, fucking tase him first. 1.00
00:01:11.660 In March of 2021, the government arrested and jailed Pastor Coates and even denied him bail for a time. 0.98
00:01:19.180 In April, a massive police force raided Grace Life Church and erected a large barricade around it
00:01:24.540 with heavily armed police guards standing outside to keep worshippers out by force. Business owners
00:01:30.860 all over Alberta resisted nonsensical lockdowns of their businesses. One such owner was Chris Scott,
00:01:37.180 who owned the small Whistle Stop Cafe in the tiny town of Mirror. His business was raided by police,
00:01:43.500 his property seized, his locks changed, and he himself jailed. In May of 2021, Central Alberta
00:01:50.540 rancher Ty Northcott was facing financial ruin because his performance livestock were illegal to
00:01:55.980 use in rodeos, which had been banned by the government. In about the most Alberta thing possible,
00:02:01.980 Northcott decided to put on an illegal, no more lockdowns rodeo in defiance of the government.
00:02:07.660 Kenny called the rodeo disturbing, and some in the legacy media labeled it a super spreader event.
00:02:13.740 But Alberta Health Services was only able to link a single possible suspected case of COVID-19 to the
00:02:20.060 entire thing. For his defiance, Northcott was charged with violating Alberta's Public Health Act.
00:02:26.060 Uncowed, the rancher is fighting the maximum penalty of 1.5 million dollars in court,
00:02:32.060 hoping to overturn it as unconstitutional. All of this was followed by the broken promise
00:02:37.500 of a vaccine passport that saw many Albertans treated as pariahs for their personal health
00:02:42.300 care choices. With the government's blessing, businesses fired employees who did not comply
00:02:47.980 with the government's mandatory vaccination policy. Workers were fired from their jobs for
00:02:53.900 not complying with mandatory masking, even though they had legitimate medical exemptions.
00:02:59.660 All of this contributed mightily to Jason Kenney's forced retirement from the Premier's office.
00:03:06.220 Alberta's next Premier has a chance to, if not make things right, at least make amends. Here's how they
00:03:12.060 can start. Firstly, the next Premier should issue an official apology to those who resisted lockdowns,
00:03:19.420 mandatory masking, and forced vaccination. Secondly, the Premier needs to order his or her Attorney General
00:03:26.460 to issue a full pardon to those who were charged, convicted, fined, or jailed. They were treated as
00:03:32.940 criminals for justified civil disobedience, just as real criminals often escape justice. Open cases
00:03:40.220 against those who resisted must be dropped, although this should be done in consultation with the accused.
00:03:45.020 Many, like Ty Northcott, have been fighting protracted court battles attempting to strike down some of
00:03:50.460 these laws as unconstitutional. There is potentially some important legal precedent to be set here. So,
00:03:57.500 in these cases, Alberta's government should guarantee that if they lose, the province will compensate them
00:04:02.620 for their fines and legal costs and ensure that they never do any jail time, or at least any more jail time.
00:04:09.180 Which brings us to legal costs. All of those who resisted and faced expensive court battles should have
00:04:14.700 every red cent repaid by Alberta's government. They should never have faced these charges to begin with.
00:04:21.500 Those who paid fines should have the money paid back by the government. And those who did jail time,
00:04:26.380 lost their jobs, lost their businesses, or saw their businesses suffer, should all be compensated for the
00:04:31.740 injustices that they suffered from this government. And finally, the next Premier needs to repeal those
00:04:37.100 sections of the Public Health Act that allowed the government to fine, jail, attack, and raid innocent
00:04:43.500 Albertans in the first place. Pretty much everyone, save the most die-hard Branch Covidians, 0.99
00:04:49.420 want to put this whole mess behind them. But Alberta cannot move on until injustice is rectified by 1.00
00:04:56.060 justice and a guarantee that it will never happen again.
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