Western Standard - November 16, 2023


Manning panel report delivers final COVID recommendations to Alberta government...

Mentioned
Dina Hinshaw Theresa Tam Kenny Neil Ferguson Kenney Corey Dave
Netanyahu rebukes Trudeau over ‘maximum restraint’ comment Subscribe to the Western Standard Today!

Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

184.71

Word count

891

Sentence count

62

Harmful content

Misogyny

3

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In this episode, we look back at some of the dumbest things the Alberta government did when it came to responding to the COID pandemic in the late 2000s and early 2010s. We talk about the lack of leadership, the overreactions, and the failure to act quickly enough.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 I mean, you can't plan for everything, but you try your hardest and you put something together.
00:00:04.140 And then when you just ignore it and fly by the seat of your pants, which contributed to the fate of Kenny, I think, in some ways.
00:00:11.360 What I was kind of hoping for, though, and it kind of seems a little back and forth in some ways, as we're looking in hindsight,
00:00:16.360 that was clarifying who's the authority when it comes to the big decisions.
00:00:19.720 We saw court cases now that were thrown out because they would bat it back and forth.
00:00:24.460 Well, it's Dina Hinshaw who brought this in. 0.96
00:00:26.120 Well, no, it wasn't Dina Hinshaw.
00:00:27.400 It was Premier Kenny who brought this in.
00:00:29.040 And in this case, it's talking about empowering the experts, but at the same time, empowering the legislature.
00:00:34.160 Well, I think it means they're taking the power out of the doctor's hands and they're giving it to elected officials.
00:00:40.300 Yeah, no, you're absolutely right.
00:00:41.240 So flexibility should land on them.
00:00:43.500 So if the emergency happens tomorrow, it's Dina Hinshaw's problem to deal with. 1.00
00:00:48.560 That's the kind of clarity I think we need to see now and looking back because it, I think, cost faith from the citizenship
00:00:55.740 when they'd see both sides kind of finger pointing at each other whenever things went badly.
00:01:00.060 Or another side would take credit when, you know, when numbers would go down, Premier Kenny would come out and say it was our government actions.
00:01:06.800 And when the numbers would go up, all that was a Dina Hinshaw. 0.99
00:01:09.700 I mean, as a piece of prose, this is about as interesting as a long drink of warm water, okay?
00:01:14.840 So it's not like people are going to be downloading it, sitting up at night by candlelight reading it.
00:01:19.840 But I will say this, that anybody who does take the trouble to do that, if they were on the right side of the issue during the COVID years,
00:01:30.560 they're going to take great encouragement that this has been written.
00:01:34.020 And I would have to hope that will be adopted by the government of Alberta.
00:01:38.880 Well, an interesting thing, because it was one of the dumbest moves of them all, was the school shutdowns, the playground shutdowns.
00:01:44.960 A year into it, we had some pretty solid evidence that whatever things COVID may be, children, thankfully, if they didn't have a bunch of other conditions, were virtually immune from it.
00:01:54.460 They were not at risk.
00:01:55.640 It was not killing kids.
00:01:57.300 So it should have been the last place that we'd be shutting down.
00:02:00.900 We've got a break on this.
00:02:02.540 You know, let's embrace that and carry on with their education and let them play basketball and skateboard and play hockey.
00:02:08.340 But we didn't do that.
00:02:09.800 But we might not be so lucky with the next one.
00:02:11.840 So we've got to be a little careful, too.
00:02:13.000 I mean, the Spanish flu, for example, decimated children.
00:02:15.740 If we had something like that that was infectious and really harming children, then closing schools would make sense.
00:02:21.960 The problem with this one, Corey, was it was an overreaction.
00:02:24.880 I remember Premier Kenney talking about having to put body bags at McMahon Stadium.
00:02:29.680 Yes.
00:02:30.120 Right?
00:02:30.340 I mean, come on.
00:02:31.680 Or the emergency hospitals.
00:02:32.980 Emergency hospitals.
00:02:33.940 The field hospitals.
00:02:35.300 That was an SNC level in scam, too.
00:02:37.760 By the way, too, I think.
00:02:39.020 But, yeah, you obviously got to, you have to watch with interest, watch with concern, see what's happening, and then make your decisions.
00:02:46.980 Back at the start of the COVID pandemic, every government overreacted at the same time.
00:02:52.780 And it became a mess across the country.
00:02:55.460 So let's just remember why that happened, Dave.
00:02:58.700 Everybody was, if you read the testimony given by Teresa Tam in February of 2020, before it was declared an emergency, she actually had a pretty good handle on what this was going to look like.
00:03:17.740 She told the Parliamentary Health Committee that this was something that was going to affect older people more than younger people, and that that is where they should be focusing their efforts.
00:03:30.300 So that was in February.
00:03:32.640 Then came March and an epidemiologist in London named Dr. Neil Ferguson.
00:03:40.480 Yes.
00:03:41.440 Remember?
00:03:42.100 I know as well.
00:03:43.020 Okay, and he came out and said, we're all going to die in three months.
00:03:47.580 He's got a long track record of bad predictions already.
00:03:50.240 But somehow or other, he is still the go-to guy for a situation like that.
00:03:55.780 And it so rattled the governments of Canada, and every other country, by the way, that all thought and reason was lost.
00:04:07.400 We were not the only province that had a plan and abandoned it.
00:04:12.560 Others did too.
00:04:14.520 Spectacularly, the federal government did.
00:04:17.380 And it also forgot everything that Teresa Tam had said before the thing was declared an outbreak.
00:04:24.100 She was even saying, masks aren't going to do you any good.
00:04:27.800 And she handled on to that for probably six or eight weeks after the declaration until finally, I think, I'm speculating here, but I think somebody said, look, you either fall in line on this, or we can find ourselves a new chief public health officer, because this is the narrative.
00:04:45.620 This is what we've committed ourselves to.
00:04:47.320 Politically, we are now on this.