Western Standard - WS LIVE： Danielle Smith & David Redman： Alberta's failed COVID management

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00:03:30.000 I'm Derek Fildebrandt. Welcome to a special edition of the Pipeline on the Western Standard.

00:03:46.080 It's 7 p.m. Mountain Standard time coming to you from Calgary, Alberta. I'm joined today by a few,

00:03:53.540 both a special guest and a special guest host. We're going to be joined by David Redman,

00:04:01.140 former lieutenant colonel in the Canadian Armed Forces and the former head of Alberta's

00:04:07.640 Emergency Management. This is a special guest that I felt inadequately qualified to host,

00:04:14.440 so we're joined today by our special guest host, newly free agent Danielle Smith.

00:04:20.520 uh welcome thank you both for joining well thank you very much do you want me to just take it away

00:04:28.100 then from here derek uh just a couple quick actually uh i promised i'd be quick but now

00:04:33.120 that i got i got you in here i'm going to take actually just a minute real quickly

00:04:36.660 um uh just a couple of housekeeping uh measures uh everyone uh who's already western standard

00:04:43.360 member thank you very much for your support uh we are uh proud to have it uh if you're not yet

00:04:49.780 member of the Western Standard, please go to westernstandardonline.com membership. You can

00:04:55.300 become a member for as little as five dollars a month supporting independent Western journalism

00:05:02.340 that refuses to take a bell out from the government. That's it for us. But before we go,

00:05:08.420 we have a special mention of our sponsor, Kyrens. I always have a hard time pronouncing this one.

00:05:18.260 one. This one kills me. Kyren's Way is today's sponsor. Are you suffering from stress or anxiety

00:05:24.420 right now? I am. Right now, check out their natural and affordable plans during these natural

00:05:30.820 and unaffordable times. Check out kyrensway.com for more information and to support a great

00:05:35.600 local Alberta business. So with it, I'm going to stop embarrassing myself here. I'm going to hand

00:05:42.320 to hand the microphone over to Danielle, who is our special guest host. We're very happy to have

00:05:48.100 today. And she'll take it away with David Redmond for a special program. Take it away, Danielle.

00:05:53.720 Thanks. I'm going to need some of that stress buster, Derek. I asked my husband if he'd take

00:05:57.400 the dogs out of the room and he hasn't yet. So they might photobomb me with a bark or two.

00:06:02.400 Rookie move. You got to lock them up. This is my first time actually doing something independent

00:06:08.420 like this and I'm delighted to because I love independent journalism I found especially in the

00:06:12.600 last couple of years that some of the most interesting conversations are taking place

00:06:16.260 in this medium and I'm so grateful to you for asking me to be a part of it for those of you

00:06:21.720 who don't know me I used to be a radio host on Chorus Radio I ended my time there on Friday with

00:06:29.540 the song saying we'll meet again and I bet many of you didn't think we'd meet again this soon

00:06:33.780 but I've met David Redmond now a couple of times I'm delighted to be able to meet with him again

00:06:38.640 for a third time because I always felt like our conversations were cut just a little bit short

00:06:43.820 and he's been really waging a one-man campaign to try to get politicians to take a different type of

00:06:51.240 approach more along the lines of the Great Barrington Declaration of focus protection for

00:06:56.020 our most vulnerable not because he thinks that there's a trade-off but because he thinks that's

00:07:00.420 the best way to protect the most vulnerable and make sure that we've got the right balance.

00:07:04.820 He has extensive experience in emergency management, as Derek has alluded to,

00:07:10.500 and he has a presentation for us this evening. It's about 25 minutes long. The way we'd like to

00:07:15.780 do this is to go through his full presentation, but you can feel free to give your questions as

00:07:21.460 we go along. Derek, is there any special advice you want to give about the best way to get

00:07:27.300 the questions in i think there's a number of different mediums and they come through to you

00:07:31.060 is that right yeah i'm uh doing double uh double duty as publisher and comment editor today

00:07:38.500 uh so if anyone uh already we've got a hundred odd comments uh mostly people just telling us where

00:07:44.420 they're from uh we can't display all of those but uh people can we encourage people to share

00:07:49.540 their comments and their questions throughout the broadcast uh questions though uh if you

00:07:55.300 you want them answered if they're not just rhetorical you have to want them

00:07:59.020 answered by Danielle or Colonel Redmond we're gonna come I'm sorry I'm calling

00:08:03.580 you Colonel if you want them answered I've been called sir by a Colonel general

00:08:11.900 now okay so if you want them answered just save your questions for the very

00:08:18.100 once the slideshow is over get your questions in we're gonna do our best

00:08:22.120 we're not gonna ignore anyone but there's gonna be a lot of questions we're

00:08:24.700 to do our best to balance them out uh but share your comments uh comments will be displayed across

00:08:29.740 the screen but uh the usual caveats try to keep them uh clean uh this is a this is a family show

00:08:35.900 uh if they're too long and take up too much space on the screen i don't care if it's the 95 theses

00:08:40.460 it's uh not not gonna get shown uh so but yeah we encourage people to participate uh and be

00:08:46.700 interactive in this broadcast as much as they can that's perfect so yeah if you can keep them i know

00:08:51.100 none of us are on twitter anymore but twitter lengthen you have the greatest likelihood of them

00:08:54.940 having being displayed on the screen as david redmond is talking and then also we'll be able

00:08:59.260 to answer or get those asked at the end so without further ado let me hand it off to david redmond

00:09:04.300 there was a little bit of a private joke you saw there because i'm uh my husband uh is in the

00:09:09.660 reserves for the canadian armed forces so i always feel like i should use the honorific but but uh

00:09:14.620 david told me if i called him colonel he'd call me ma'am so so i'm gonna call him david for the

00:09:20.060 for the duration of the evening we uh he's prepared to take questions as long as you have them i think

00:09:24.620 the time we've allotted for this is two hours in total but let's get started sir you're up okay ma'am

00:09:33.340 okay so can are we pull up the slide deck

00:09:40.060 so folks what i'm going to do is walk you through uh the presentation that i've been giving to people

00:09:45.100 and trying to get government to listen because ultimately the only way we're going to change

00:09:50.700 our response is if we get the provincial governments to understand that the way we're

00:09:56.220 doing this we should never have done and it's time to pivot to a better way of doing it next slide

00:10:02.860 please next slide okay back one okay so first of all let's get the understanding that forward one

00:10:16.780 pandemics happen continuously in my lifetime there's been four before covid so it's something

00:10:23.260 that's going to happen again in your lifetime and it's going to happen many times the response that

00:10:28.860 we've done to this pandemic is unlike any pandemic that's happened in my lifetime and i sure hope we

00:10:35.100 don't do this for the ones that are in your lifetime the second point is emergency management

00:10:40.860 is the foundation to answering any emergency not just a pandemic and i'm going to show you why

00:10:47.900 emergency management that should have been the coordinating agency for everything we've done

00:10:54.220 clearly isn't but should be and why it should be next slide please

00:11:01.420 all right there's three types of agencies that are involved whenever there's an emergency first

00:11:05.980 of all there's a subject matter agency in the case of a pandemic that's health in the case of a

00:11:10.940 forest fire it's wildfire operations in the case of a flood it's the flood forecasting people

00:11:16.060 they're the people that are directly responsible for the hazard that is being impacting on the

00:11:21.980 communities. The second agency is the coordinating agency and that is your emergency management

00:11:27.660 organization, whether you're at the municipal order of government, the provincial order of

00:11:31.340 government or the federal order of government and there is only one for each order of government.

00:11:36.380 In a municipality there's one, at the provincial order of government one and at the federal order

00:11:41.340 of government there's one and that way that agency is trained to handle any emergency coordinating

00:11:47.580 what the needs are of the subject matter agency and bringing all the other supporting and logistics

00:11:52.940 agencies together and i'll show you that clear in a few minutes next slide please

00:12:00.460 so i need to say right from the start as well that a pandemic is not a public health emergency

00:12:08.700 it's a public emergency because the pandemic affects everyone next slide please i'll show

00:12:14.380 you this in detail here so it's hard to see but if you see all of the tubes in the background they

00:12:21.580 say energy agriculture health transportation education infrastructure ict finance small

00:12:28.380 business tourism all of those tubes are where all of our private sector public sector and citizens

00:12:35.100 live and work every day you fit into one of those tubes or there's more than that there's

00:12:39.340 tubes off to the side but all of us live and work in one of those tubes and it's important to note

00:12:45.820 that those tubes work independently and they work really well until an emergency hit that affects

00:12:52.300 them more than them or more than one order of government so as you see at the bottom as you

00:12:58.380 work your way up to the municipal order of government when a municipal order of government

00:13:02.380 is affected by an emergency that cuts across all of those tubes within a town or a city

00:13:07.500 they need a coordination to be able to respond to that so if there's a very localized flood the

00:13:12.780 little emo that's in that town takes over works with the mayor and makes sure that all of the

00:13:18.100 support from all of those tubes comes together to affect the ones that are most affected

00:13:22.100 at the provincial order of government here in alberta we call it the alberta emergency management

00:13:27.480 agency and it works every day monitoring across all of those sectors of our economy and monitoring

00:13:34.760 all hazards that may be impacting our province and they're watching for when either more than

00:13:40.500 one municipality or more than one sector is impacted and that's when they come into action

00:13:45.940 and work directly for the premier to try and pull together all of the support out of every one of

00:13:51.060 the tubes in order to support the subject matter expert, in this case health, to handle the entire

00:13:57.060 emergency. This structure lives and exists every single day. Next slide please.

00:14:04.760 So, that's the process we've got, and that's the process we should be using in this pandemic.

00:14:12.560 We had pre-written pandemic plans.

00:14:14.600 We had them in every single province in our country.

00:14:17.640 We had them at the federal order of government, and to some degree, there's even portions

00:14:22.160 or annexes in our municipal plans, and we wrote those plans based on really hard lessons

00:14:27.900 learned from the previous pandemics, four in my lifetime, and we put all of those lesson

00:14:33.420 learns into the exact goals and the outline of those plans now the one thing i really want to

00:14:39.180 emphasize is things called non-pharmaceutical measures and they're the things that we've come

00:14:45.020 to understand in the one word lockdown but they're not one thing there's actually about 15 or 16 of

00:14:51.340 them next slide please non-pharmaceutical measures include things like hand hygiene

00:15:00.380 isolation of sick individuals surface cleaning face masks avoiding crowding travel advice

00:15:06.220 and then you see all the other ones that i've shown in red on this slide contact tracing

00:15:10.380 quarantine of exposed individuals work measure closures the quarantining of exposed individuals

00:15:17.340 particularly important the ones shown in red are found to be ineffective in controlling the spread

00:15:27.580 of a disease and they are particularly concerning because they can cause extreme unintended

00:15:34.860 collateral damage and so you only use them if you actually read the who document that

00:15:40.060 was prepared in 2019 that gathered all of the best practices from the whole world together

00:15:45.500 and put it into that document you see on the left those non-pharmaceutical measures

00:15:52.780 were listed with recommendations of when they should be used and when they shouldn't be used

00:15:56.620 and the red ones should only have been used as an extreme last resort and the people that wrote that

00:16:03.100 document in my opinion never ever conceived that more than two or three of these would probably

00:16:09.820 ever be used and they never envisioned that they'd all be used at once but the recommendations

00:16:14.780 regardless are you only use them as the last resort next slide please

00:16:19.900 so here in Alberta we have a pandemic plan and there are four very clear goals and so you can

00:16:30.540 see each of the goals on the screen sorry we've lost the fourth goal if we can just drop down the

00:16:35.980 the banner so everybody can see thanks first one is controlling the spread of the influenza disease

00:16:41.480 reducing illness and death the second one is mitigating societal disruption the third one

00:16:49.080 is minimizing adverse economic impact and the fourth one is supporting an efficient and effective

00:16:54.520 use of resources. All four goals have equal weight. Next slide please.

00:17:02.760 So the purpose of writing that plan back in 2014 is the most current version but they're updated

00:17:08.600 every 10 years and I was part of the writing of the plan in 2005 that became the 2014 plan.

00:17:14.120 The reason we write them in advance is so that very quickly that plan could be taken,

00:17:20.360 could be adjusted for the exact disease that's hitting our province,

00:17:24.520 and it could be issued publicly as a written plan. And the reason you do that is so that everyone in

00:17:30.920 the province and everyone in each of our provinces can see the whole plan. They understand their role

00:17:36.840 and they know exactly what's going to happen. They can see the phases, they can understand

00:17:41.560 what the triggers are to move you between the phases and they know how they fit in that means

00:17:46.760 your plan is coherent and the things that you do are coherent the other key point of that is

00:17:53.560 the written plan then gives the requirement of due diligence where the government then

00:17:59.640 if required can declare a state of emergency not public health emergency a state of emergency

00:18:05.560 and in the worst-case scenario, could limit some Charter of Rights freedoms.

00:18:12.500 But to do that, you have to have done the due diligence and explain clearly what your plan is

00:18:17.880 and why they are required, how long they will last, and when they'll be lifted.

00:18:23.100 In my opinion, this simply has not happened.

00:18:26.040 Next slide, please.

00:18:29.160 All right.

00:18:30.480 So I put it to you that I believe in every province in Canada

00:18:33.980 and at our federal order of government, our COVID response has been totally incoherent.

00:18:39.080 And you see it reflected every night.

00:18:40.960 You see changes.

00:18:41.980 You see things happening where one side tells you that you're allowed to go skate on the

00:18:47.020 hockey rinks again, but somebody forgot to tell the municipal order of government, so

00:18:50.620 the rinks are all closed.

00:18:52.260 Nothing is being coordinated.

00:18:53.980 No one's working across all the tubes in the sector.

00:18:56.560 The coordinating agency has no role in this pandemic.

00:19:00.040 It's all being run out of the Ministry of Health.

00:19:03.980 Worse than that, I feel that the focus on case counts has led us to even fail at the first objective and I'll explain why I believe that.

00:19:13.980 Next slide, please.

00:19:18.980 The first thing you do when as an emergency management organization back in February, for example, being very specific to this, you look at the hazard and the hazard is this pandemic, this virus.

00:19:31.980 And we knew in February that the hazard was affecting people over the age of 60 with multiple comorbidities.

00:19:41.980 The data coming out of China, and I didn't trust the data coming out of China, to be honest, but coming out of Italy and Spain and all of the other countries, Japan, South Korea, the people who were most at risk, everybody's got a certain degree of risk.

00:19:57.540 We live with risk in everything we do.

00:19:59.200 uh sorry david uh you've been frozen for a little bit here um so if you want to maybe fix that and

00:20:05.360 uh danielle can just maybe maybe danielle just kind of uh sum it up and kind of go through some

00:20:10.480 of the comments we've had so far while you uh freeze yourself i should just tell you david

00:20:16.800 that we've been able to hear you clearly it's just that you are your image is frozen so he's

00:20:22.000 just going to restart and come back on so i think part of what you're hearing is very for those of

00:20:27.920 of us who live through a couple of crises in Alberta, like the floods of 2013 and the Fort

00:20:34.500 McMurray fire, I think what he's describing to you is very familiar to all of us. I think the

00:20:40.640 key point that he's making is about having this central coordinating agency and that function is

00:20:45.900 completely missing, which is why you end up with no coordination between any of the different

00:20:51.000 departments that are the implementers. And it also sounds like from what he's saying, without

00:20:55.100 having that coordinating role you're not getting the impact the feedback coming in also i thought

00:21:00.540 it was really interesting for him to point out that you have to demonstrate due diligence before

00:21:06.860 you leap to proposals that end up violating people's rights and that step has been completely

00:21:14.380 missed the question i keep seeing coming up the most is what is jason kenney's response to this

00:21:21.180 and i think that's uh but we'll be able to talk to to david about that um in the question and

00:21:26.780 answer session because he um has he cc's me on all of the documents that he sends to the premiers

00:21:35.340 but i don't know that the the premiers have had much chance to respond i don't know that they

00:21:39.420 receive it at all so i'm just going to zip on over here and look at some of the um at some of the

00:21:44.700 comments here that you've got uh i do have somebody saying get rid of the message banner so i don't

00:21:49.980 know derek maybe we can save the message banner until the end i don't know we'll see if others

00:21:54.940 are wanting to uh maybe the comments come in at the end i've seen those but uh you know uh it's

00:22:02.940 our show and uh we want it to we want it to be um we want it to be interactive uh we try to make it

00:22:09.180 not too distracting but i know some people don't want it but we're uh we're gonna keep doing it

00:22:15.180 derek you're the boss i just have a few people who are saying that so i thought i'd mention it tell

00:22:19.260 Tell me when David's back, cause I can't see the screen.

00:22:21.820 Oh yeah. No, no, I certainly didn't mean that to you.

00:22:23.580 I bet I just, I know we're getting complaints

00:22:25.740 with some people with the messages coming up,

00:22:29.840 but it's kind of the format of the show.

00:22:31.440 We can always review it.

00:22:32.940 But yeah, we'll have David Redmond back, I think soon.

00:22:37.020 But you know, if you want to maybe go through.

00:22:39.360 I'll go through a few, just stay in my ear

00:22:40.820 because I'm looking at the screen

00:22:42.400 and so I can't see the screen when he returns.

00:22:44.160 But Nancy says, thanks for your voice of reason, Mr. Redmond.

00:22:47.640 our elected representatives listen to your reasonable and common sense recommendations.

00:22:51.560 Hopefully more Albertans will get in touch with MLAs and demand a different approach.

00:22:56.840 We also have somebody wanting to send the documents. I don't know a couple questions

00:23:03.560 about whether this will be posted afterwards Derek so we can get to that also towards the end.

00:23:08.840 I have another one as well talking about asking questions about has anyone done

00:23:14.040 the valuation of all case, all cause mortality in affected countries and compared countries with

00:23:21.080 lockdowns and those without. I know that David Redman has been collaborating with Ari Jaffe

00:23:27.800 and Dr. Ari Jaffe has done some forward-looking estimates of how many all-cause deaths we're

00:23:36.280 going to have. This is part of the problem. The COVID deaths are immediate. The long-term deaths

00:23:41.160 associated with the downturn in the economy the deaths of despair alcoholism suicide untreated

00:23:46.440 cancers and other illnesses that'll take a number of years for it to play out so in some ways we're

00:23:52.040 looking at yet another projection and we won't really know until after the fact patricia likes

00:23:57.640 what she's hearing logical presentation so far thanks for that another person here says provincial

00:24:02.760 law does not supersede federal law correct why has the health minister not been charged with

00:24:08.440 breach of the criminal code there's a question there at some point there may be some kind of

00:24:13.800 a reckoning that happens derek how we doing are we still working on getting david on the line again

00:24:20.680 uh yeah i've uh i've actually got him in my other ear right here uh he's just having some technical

00:24:26.280 troubles but he'll he'll be back soon um he just said three minutes three minutes okay

00:24:33.960 Uh, another one here is, um, uh, they want, they want us to see the slides through and we'll get

00:24:43.060 involved after. Sorry guys. Like there's a whole pile of comments that are coming in here. I think

00:24:47.440 one of the things that we'll talk about after we finished listening to the presentation is to get

00:24:53.220 some thoughts. And if you have some, I think this is important because it's nice for us to get the

00:24:57.820 information. And David Redman mentioned that he's done probably 50 interviews since his first one,

00:25:03.540 The first time I saw him was with Peter Sean Taylor in the C2C Journal.

00:25:08.040 So if you want to look that up, it's an excellent summary of what you're hearing this evening in written form.

00:25:14.260 But the question is, how do you get from great information, knowing what the structure should be, to getting it adopted by government?

00:25:22.620 So if you have some thoughts on how you think that ought to be done, I would encourage you to send them along.

00:25:28.360 I know that some of you have been very frustrated because you've been attempting to get this

00:25:33.880 information to your MLAs and we could talk about that a little bit later. We also know that many

00:25:39.720 of you have been frustrated that the premier doesn't seem to be open-minded to hearing the

00:25:44.120 message. I have another suggestion for you for you to consider and I think this might be another

00:25:49.960 thing for us to to be thinking through as we're hearing the rest of the presentation because as

00:25:54.280 David mentioned there is an emergency response at each municipality as well when you get into a

00:26:01.480 local emergency they activate and then when they get overwhelmed they go at the provincial level

00:26:07.560 and I would contend that part of the reason maybe most of the reason why we have a province-wide

00:26:12.680 lockdown right now is because of Mayor Nhat Nanshi in Calgary and Mayor Don Iverson in Edmonton

00:26:18.600 who have been pushing the government to go for more and more restrictions.

00:26:23.240 And so, rather than just have Calgary and Edmonton singled out, they've ended up doing

00:26:28.440 a province-wide closure. Many of you got in touch with me and you can even go online and

00:26:33.880 look at the Alberta relaunch map. There's a lot of places in Alberta that have zero cases

00:26:39.400 or certainly below the 50 cases per 100,000 that was the initial benchmark for when we started

00:26:45.640 having the the open versus enhanced versus versus the highest category of restrictions now all of

00:26:52.280 us are in the highest category of restrictions so i just plant the seed with you to consider

00:26:56.600 this is an election year for municipalities this is an election year for those municipal leaders

00:27:01.960 that i think is where the pressure pressure point is likely to be the hardest if you look at what

00:27:06.280 wheatland county just did they passed a motion saying that they're going to reduce the restrictions

00:27:12.360 in their in their own territory i don't know if they're going to act on that i just saw the story

00:27:19.080 today but that is part of it if there can be some measures going back to what dr dina hinshaw put

00:27:25.400 out there as the original benchmark which is 50 cases per 100 000 if you're below that you should

00:27:31.400 be open and so going through and i know that doesn't help calgary and edmonton sorry about

00:27:36.120 that guys because i think calgary and edmonton will have zones that are in that situation

00:27:41.240 because it's one big city under one authority, it's going to be pretty difficult to get them to

00:27:45.160 move until they have dramatically lower cases. But that could be the measure is that if you

00:27:51.080 start putting pressure on your municipal councillors, start recruiting people who are

00:27:56.200 going to run for municipal council, who would take the approach that they would do exactly that.

00:28:01.400 Because if Nenshi and Iverson were able to push the premier in one direction,

00:28:07.160 surely the other 363 municipalities in Alberta should be able to push the premier in the other

00:28:14.040 direction. So I put that out there for you to consider. If you have some other thoughts

00:28:17.960 that you want to put on the table, then I encourage you to do that too. All right, how are we doing, Derek?

00:28:24.280 uh well a bit more tough uh than was expected um uh we're working on bringing uh mr redmond back

00:28:36.240 here um although i i wanted to ask you uh i know you've had mr redmond on your previous show with

00:28:42.420 qr 77 a few times uh i wanted to ask maybe you could tell our audience why it is uh that we feel

00:28:49.880 it's necessary to have him back on on this platform for more extended more

00:28:54.860 extended interview this time well I think one of the the main reasons is

00:28:59.240 because of his extensive experience in emergency management and it really

00:29:02.660 clicked for me because as you know I had a chance to see an emergency

00:29:06.260 operation center in action in High River and so I observed what he was what he's

00:29:11.640 describing about the coordinating agencies and it's kind of odd to think

00:29:15.440 think about it, like, put it in this perspective. What would have happened during the Fort McMurray

00:29:22.480 fires if it had been the head firefighter who was in charge of managing the entire coordinated

00:29:30.880 response? Like, it's sort of baffling to think that they would have done anything like that,

00:29:35.700 and yet that's kind of the approach that they have taken here. They've put sort of the doctor,

00:29:42.220 who should be responsible for one part of the response managing the whole response like what

00:29:48.860 does dr dina hinshaw know about how many kids should be on a skating rink in calgary what what

00:29:54.860 does what does she know about how many people should be allowed in a grocery store or how many

00:30:01.360 people should be or whether recreation centers should stay open like this is part of the issue

00:30:06.260 is that you need to have content matter experts feeding into the process so i think that that's

00:30:11.840 important one of the things that we need to get into though is what does a more balanced approach

00:30:18.000 look like what does focus protection look like because we know we've got two levels of seniors

00:30:24.480 who are most at risk those who are in long-term care in some ways that might be the easier

00:30:29.120 area to protect but in uh but the other side is that we have a large number of seniors who are

00:30:35.600 living in their homes in their communities and we have to make sure that we have a level of

00:30:39.840 protection for them as well so how do you find that balance and we'll get into that

00:30:43.280 am i hearing david back yes i am ma'am okay you're off i filled some time just reiterating some of

00:30:50.160 the things that you said absolutely and then also and you heard where where i hope we can go when

00:30:54.720 we get into the q a let's get back to your presentation here's what i would recommend

00:30:57.920 though david is that if you freeze again if we can hear you let's just keep on going and not

00:31:02.960 worry about the video okay works for me go ahead

00:31:09.920 okay there we go okay so what you can see on this slide is we knew in february

00:31:16.000 so if you can go to the next slide please

00:31:23.120 this is march and every week who produced the data and so again and again and again

00:31:28.960 what we saw coming at us in february and early march was that 95 of the deaths worldwide were

00:31:36.400 in people over the age of 60 with multiple comorbidities and just to be real clear

00:31:41.120 they were seeing three and four morbidities in very old people next slide please

00:31:52.560 so what we should have immediately done is found a way to protect concentrations of our seniors

00:31:58.880 over 60 with comorbidities. And to me, the very first thing that came into my mind in March was

00:32:04.740 our long-term care homes. If we could have protected them, we probably could have saved

00:32:10.300 a lot of people. So we know to date in Canada, 96.1% of our over 21,000 deaths have been in

00:32:18.920 seniors over the age of 60 with multiple comorbidities. That's 20,000, almost 21,000 of

00:32:25.540 our deaths, and that's reported daily. Next slide, please. The flip of that, of course, is that people

00:32:34.920 under 60 who don't have three or at least two comorbidities are really at very low risk from

00:32:43.480 COVID. The same stats are here in Alberta, 94% of our deaths, over 94%. Next slide, please.

00:32:49.300 And just to emphasize the point on comorbidities, if you look at it on the left, over 70% of

00:32:58.080 the people in Alberta who have died have had three or more comorbidities.

00:33:03.720 These are people who have severe heart conditions, severe diabetes, severe cancers, all together

00:33:10.260 before COVID hit.

00:33:13.600 Next slide, please.

00:33:18.200 So the whole point is, out of the over 21,000 deaths, 15,800 of these, because 73% of the

00:33:27.200 deaths in Canada, 73% happened in long-term care homes.

00:33:32.300 So if you protected the long-term care homes, and when I say quarantine, I mean both the

00:33:36.880 staff and the residents, and I don't mean in a draconian-like lockdown, but I mean the

00:33:42.940 staff can't go home at night.

00:33:44.740 They live in a government-provided hotel.

00:33:46.520 They have their meals provided.

00:33:47.980 They move back and forth to the long-term care homes.

00:33:50.580 They do a 30-day shift.

00:33:52.180 One example, they do a 30-day shift and then they go home to their family.

00:33:56.620 They quarantine in advance for 14 days and then they go do a 30-day shift.

00:34:00.560 For those of us in Alberta, that's how the oil sands has been working for the past two decades.

00:34:05.620 It's not inhumane.

00:34:07.200 And as well, what you also do in that quarantine centre is you bring entertainers in,

00:34:11.620 quarantine them for 14 days, and then they can go to the long-term care homes

00:34:16.520 and be available to the residents, other people that are bringing social services,

00:34:20.740 other people that are bringing methods to communicate with the families.

00:34:23.880 So you do it in a very humane way.

00:34:26.440 And unfortunately, in Canada, we ranked last in the developed countries of the world

00:34:32.220 in care for our seniors.

00:34:34.600 Next slide, please.

00:34:39.260 So, yes, it might have cost a lot of money, maybe $2 billion,

00:34:42.880 But instead, we chose to try and use non-pharmaceutical methods to lock down our whole society.

00:34:50.400 And it obviously didn't save our seniors.

00:34:52.760 We killed 20,000 of them and over 15,000 of them in our long-term care homes because we refused to quarantine the long-term care homes.

00:35:01.960 We spent over $400 billion trying to tell people who were well to stay home.

00:35:09.940 never envisioned in the non-pharmaceutical uses prior to the pandemic.

00:35:15.080 Next slide, please. 0.93

00:35:19.840 We didn't have to follow the very failed practices of China or Europe,

00:35:24.020 in particular Italy and Spain, which were all happening in March.

00:35:27.580 Instead of doing what they did, if we had just quarantined our long-term care homes 0.99

00:35:32.460 and then had the time to look at those other people who were over 60

00:35:37.140 with multiple comorbidities that were living out in society not in long-term care homes

00:35:41.540 we could have offered many solutions for them as well and we can talk about that later next slide

00:35:51.460 the other point that we constantly hear is that we have to protect our medical system 71 of the

00:35:58.020 hospital beds to date and 65 of the icu across canada are filled with people who are over the

00:36:05.220 age of 60 with multiple comorbidities if we had handled that issue there never would have been a

00:36:10.740 challenge in our hospitals but if you do believe you need surge capacity we should have been looking

00:36:15.540 at surge capacity for our hospitals both in terms of infrastructure and staff back in march next

00:36:22.260 slide please in my opinion we have completely ignored the other three goals that were written

00:36:33.220 right into our pandemic plans by ignoring those goals we have caused massive massive collateral

00:36:42.260 damage next slide please we see it in the papers every day the societal fabric just simply trying

00:36:52.740 to move between provinces nobody trusts each other in our next door neighbors our mental health we're

00:36:58.180 seeing reports on mental health the chief medical officer of health of canada back in in january

00:37:03.780 said it's crushing our mental health system these problems are going to last for at least two

00:37:10.020 decades we made them by inappropriately using non-pharmaceutical interventions when we never

00:37:16.020 should have and even worse we knew before they wouldn't stop the spread of the disease that's

00:37:21.780 That's why they weren't recommended in 2019 in that very extensive WHO document.

00:37:28.600 But one of the bullets on this slide that I can't miss and I definitely don't want

00:37:32.160 to miss is our children's education and socialization.

00:37:35.500 I have six grandchildren, all teenagers in junior and senior high.

00:37:39.640 The impact of this on the education of our children will also last us two generations,

00:37:45.040 their generation and their children's.

00:37:47.400 What we've done is we've stopped the socialization and we've taught our children that what do

00:37:51.720 you do in an emergency, you hide. And it's exactly the opposite of what we had planned

00:37:56.900 to do. The final bullet is our economy. And for anyone who doesn't think that spending

00:38:02.040 over $400 billion in our federal budget, plus all the additional debt provincially, if not

00:38:09.160 almost doubling our national debt in less than a year, if people don't think that's

00:38:14.740 going to have an impact on our health care system going forward, someone's got to pay

00:38:19.040 the taxes to service that debt, it's going to be monumental and it's going to last at least a

00:38:24.620 decade, if not longer. Next slide, please. The real tragedy of this, if you can make that slide

00:38:32.180 bigger in particular, there have been study after study in the last four months that have showed

00:38:39.320 over and over and over again that non-pharmaceutical methods that we now call lockdowns have had no

00:38:46.780 impact on the spread of the disease. The virus continues. It's a seasonal virus and it continues

00:38:53.660 exactly the same whether you try and lock down or not. We've seen it all through the northern

00:39:00.220 countries of Europe and through our countries here in North America. The curve is identical

00:39:06.040 to the seasonal curve and this is a peer-reviewed study that said that absolutely insignificant

00:39:13.840 The difference between the countries that didn't lock down and those that did, they

00:39:19.160 studied complete non-lockdown countries and compared them to lockdown countries, and you

00:39:23.800 can't see a tiny line, a difference between the two lines of the two countries in terms

00:39:31.000 of the spread of the disease.

00:39:32.520 And I'm talking about the spread of the disease, not the deaths, the spread of the disease.

00:39:37.300 Next slide, please.

00:39:40.860 It's a lesson that we've had to relearn the hard way yet again, and we'd already learned

00:39:46.140 it so many times before.

00:39:48.040 So how do we get out of this?

00:39:49.640 People want to know how do we get out of this.

00:39:51.820 I give you these following bullets.

00:39:53.620 First, we need a comprehensive four-gold plan issued by every one of our provincial governments

00:40:01.800 and our federal government.

00:40:03.540 It should show us what they're doing, why they're doing it, and show us the triggers

00:40:08.020 between phases and what the phases are. Still to this day, bullet number two, vigorously protect

00:40:13.900 the most vulnerable. Those are the people over 60 with multiple comorbidities and the others with

00:40:18.720 severe comorbidities living in our communities. And there's many ways to do it. If you bring the

00:40:23.960 emergency management agency in, they would have developed a plan for the long-term care homes

00:40:28.500 within 36 hours. They weren't included in the problem. And so we have outbreaks. At one point

00:40:34.580 in time in Ontario, just in January, 40% of long-term care homes halfway through the second

00:40:40.520 wave were having outbreaks. That's unconscionable. If we had isolated them and put them into a

00:40:46.860 caring and compassionate quarantine, we could have handled this issue. Third, we got to make

00:40:53.000 sure all our critical infrastructure is protected, not just our medical health care system. Go forward

00:40:58.480 slide please one more okay fourth bullet we've got to remove this campaign of fear and i constantly

00:41:09.360 see instead of ramping down as the curve is going down as we should have been opening up

00:41:14.320 we shouldn't have ever been closed let's put it that way but right now i can't understand why

00:41:19.040 we're not reopening up the curve is going down just like it does seasonally every year but

00:41:24.640 catching covid is not a death threat except for those people in the first two groups

00:41:29.120 yes some people will die but people take risk every day the chance for a 20 to 40 year old

00:41:35.520 person to die of covid is five times it it's five times greater chance of dying in a car accident

00:41:43.920 driving to work you got to put these things in perspective we take risk every day we've got to

00:41:50.480 remove this campaign of fear we've got to put covid in context with all the other risks we

00:41:55.040 take in our life and we've got to get on with our life next slide please

00:42:01.920 we got to talk the end of future lockdowns we're not going to go back to non-pharmaceutical methods

00:42:06.320 the science if you actually believe in science has proved there's no difference between lockdown and

00:42:12.080 non-lockdown countries in the spread of the disease so to try and tell a 20 or 40 year old

00:42:17.280 that they might catch a disease and it might do horrible things to them,

00:42:21.200 is nothing but a campaign of fear, which actually has no impact

00:42:24.860 because their chances of catching it are the same in a lockdown or a non-lockdown country.

00:42:30.340 We've got a guarantee that our schools are going to stay open

00:42:33.200 and our daycares are going to stay open with reduced social distancing

00:42:37.520 because we're impacting the psychology of our children for generations to come.

00:42:43.040 Anyone who's under the age of 60 without pre-existing conditions 0.94

00:42:46.720 should be allowed to go back to work if they're willing and able and then continue to vaccinate

00:42:52.320 as vaccines come available. It's going to take us at least to the end of March to vaccinate all our

00:42:57.760 seniors that are in the long-term care homes and we have to make sure we take care of them first

00:43:02.640 plus those other people who have serious comorbidities in our society but we don't need

00:43:09.100 to wait till April to do it. We need to quarantine them now and then allow them back into their

00:43:14.940 society. Next slide, please. This is a cartoon that represents what a teenager in our province 1.00

00:43:24.840 thinks of what we've done. The whole talk, we've got to protect our medical health care system,

00:43:29.980 but everything else around it is not important. We followed the wrong practice. Non-pharmaceutical

00:43:36.840 interventions should only have been used as a last resort. COVID-19 is deadly in particular.

00:43:43.860 96.1% of deaths in Canada are in seniors over the age of 60, and in Canada, the average age of death

00:43:52.940 is 84 with multiple comorbidities. It's simply not to others. It's less than 4% for people under

00:44:02.300 60, and the largest group of that 4% are, in fact, people 59 to 60 with multiple comorbidities.

00:44:09.740 Next slide, please.

00:44:13.860 So folks, that's my position. That's what I've been trying to tell the premiers since April. I've been sharing with them. I've been writing to them. I've been trying to get them to understand what's going on and to a stunning silence. And so I stand ready to answer any of your questions.

00:44:32.100 well I I should mention briefly David the problem we had bringing you back in I think we've solved

00:44:42.660 that so if you if you do want to fix your frozen screen I'm not as I'm not definitely terrified

00:44:47.760 that we're not gonna get you back anymore I was was freaking out that Daniel was gonna have to

00:44:54.100 read the rest of your slide and then we're gonna be a bust but if you want to try and unfreeze 0.84

00:44:58.380 yourself uh i have a reasonable degree of uh i will daniela mutant and cover me for a minute

00:45:05.820 all right well i think daniel's got a lot to work with there uh to cover for a minute uh

00:45:10.380 hopefully not much longer than that all right so derek has been putting a lot of uh comments

00:45:16.940 on the screen and he'll keep on on doing that but i'll tell you where we're going to go with

00:45:20.940 our discussion i think we have to to have a greater deeper conversation about what it actually

00:45:27.100 would mean to lock down the long-term care facilities because my my sense of it and i

00:45:32.460 don't know if we have any long-term care facility workers on on the call but if we do maybe you can

00:45:39.020 you can tell us whether you think your colleagues would be open to what david redmond is suggesting

00:45:44.700 when i was on the air and this was posed i got feedback saying that those who are are serving on

00:45:50.780 the front line are so terrified of being the one to bring covet into the facility that they would

00:45:55.820 welcome the opportunity to be two weeks on two weeks off or one month on one month off and so

00:46:02.220 that was one perspective i got the other perspective i got was there's no possible way

00:46:07.100 if especially if you've got uh individuals who are principal providers of large families

00:46:13.660 because as we've heard many of our frontline workers live in multi-family homes and as a

00:46:20.460 result they may have other obligations that for aging aging parents or for young ones that prevent

00:46:26.860 them from being able to be locked down for a month so is it even practical to consider that

00:46:31.900 and then i think we do need to explore some of the ideas around what do you do about those who are

00:46:38.140 not in a care home uh i must tell you i have the healthiest 86 and 96 year old people listening to

00:46:44.380 my show because they I do think they did send me texts all the time telling me that they were in

00:46:50.620 their homes and they were wondering when they were next up for the vaccine so we do have a

00:46:54.380 large number of healthy relatively healthy seniors who are still independently living

00:46:59.180 and so how do we make sure that they stay protected so Derek do we have uh David back yet

00:47:05.420 yeah David uh David's back he's uh I thought you could see him sorry he's right beside you uh

00:47:10.060 Beautiful. No, when I go over the chat. He's right beside you, ready to go.

00:47:14.880 Okay, let's go. So, David, let's begin with that because I think that there has been,

00:47:19.760 your proposal's been mischaracterized by those who don't want to listen to you. I think we both

00:47:24.240 know that. But how do you answer this question about long-term care that what you're proposing

00:47:28.960 is just not practical, that the staff would never agree to it, the unions would never agree to it,

00:47:33.940 you couldn't possibly have that kind of rotation with this particular employee group?

00:47:42.200 Okay. First of all, I don't believe that to be true. And I give you one example. It wasn't in

00:47:47.620 Canada. It was in France, where the staff in the long-term care home in France, right in one of the

00:47:53.120 biggest epicenters of where COVID was outbreaking in France. And we know France had a horrible 0.73

00:47:58.060 situation. They simply decided themselves they weren't going home. So they had mattresses

00:48:03.120 delivered and they moved in with their patients and they stayed there for 47 days they had

00:48:08.040 entertainers quarantined and brought in they had multimedia devices brought in i think you would

00:48:13.200 have found that a lot of the staff in our long-term care homes are just as dedicated to their to their

00:48:18.840 residents as as those folks were in france so so let's start with the first wave first wave was

00:48:25.460 short and and was a seasonal decline happened and we saw also what happened in the summer

00:48:31.500 And so I think, first of all, you offer the opportunity to the people that are working in the system.

00:48:36.480 And I think you would have found many, many of them would have volunteered.

00:48:39.600 If you didn't have enough staff to do it, then you put out the call.

00:48:43.540 And I think you would have also found many people in the community willing to come in and participate,

00:48:48.780 as well as some of the family members who may have been willing to quarantine into a government-provided facility

00:48:55.260 so that they can continue to provide that daily care to their parent or their loved one like they had been doing before.

00:49:01.000 The offer was never made. The other thing that you do when you run one of these process, it's not emergency management. Emergency management runs the process. They would have brought in the unions. They would have brought in the owners of the for profit, not for profit and publicly owned. And they would have had this discussion with them and brainstormed all the possible options. And in 36 hours would have presented a series of options to the premier saying these are the things that we believe are possible.

00:49:29.300 then it's unconscionable to me that once the first wave is over that we wasted all four months of the

00:49:36.840 summer doing nothing we knew this was going to come back anyone who's ever studied seasonal

00:49:43.060 viruses knew that the middle of october this curve was going to go up exponentially and it did

00:49:48.320 and we also know that it peaks in the second week of january and starts coming down now it's not

00:49:54.040 going to go all the way back down to zero like it does that doesn't happen till may it's going to

00:49:58.080 come down a lot, flatten off, and then drop off. So in that summer period, we should have

00:50:03.440 been developing full options for the care of our long-term care homes. We should have

00:50:07.480 had all the time to have all of the detailed discussions about extra funding, about whatever

00:50:11.900 we needed to do. And further to that, we could have developed an idea of consolidating perhaps

00:50:19.780 some of the long-term care homes, but as well, opening up new facilities that would have

00:50:24.680 been able to take in the seniors that were living out in the community, if they so wish,

00:50:29.020 into a similar type of isolated quarantine system, but in a really nice situation inside

00:50:35.760 of something like a hotel or whatever else with staff provided in it. We had four months to figure

00:50:41.460 this out before the second wave hit. And then we see the massive outbreaks in our long-term care

00:50:46.760 homes again, because we simply decided that if we locked down all of society, somehow COVID wouldn't

00:50:51.800 get in there and yet the staff went home every night it's unconscionable so so tell me how we 1.00

00:50:58.060 deal with the multiple family obligations because we do know that there would be a lot of women of

00:51:04.300 probably our moms and have kids at home and we know that in um in uh our cultural communities

00:51:10.660 it's part of their culture i've interviewed many from the south asian community part of culture to

00:51:14.800 have their their parents or grandparents living with them as well it becomes really difficult if

00:51:19.660 take that core person out of the mix of that family dynamic for an entire month so how do you

00:51:25.020 address the fact that they've got home obligations and that may make the that may cause them to be

00:51:30.380 reluctant to go into into lockdown for 30 days i mean it's different if you're a guy working on

00:51:35.100 the rigs or working up in fort mcmurray you've kind of bought in knowing that that's what the

00:51:38.700 job is but those who decide to work in long-term care many of them have multiple jobs and these

00:51:43.100 other obligations so how do you how do you try to to address that so so some of those people

00:51:50.220 wouldn't be volunteering or be able for that type of a process so that's where you have the whole

00:51:55.900 discussion about surge capacity that's where you look at other people that are out in our community

00:52:00.780 that would want those employment jobs and in particular you have the ability to do rapid

00:52:05.500 training for for people that volunteer for the process you bring other people in you you don't

00:52:10.460 just say the people that are there have to stay there you look for all the different ways you can

00:52:15.340 bring more people into the solution and you definitely want to build a surge capacity because

00:52:19.660 there will come a point in time where some of the staff get sick regardless of what you do and maybe

00:52:24.940 not from covid but too sick that you don't want them working in the long-term care home from

00:52:28.700 pneumonia or some other type of illness that they catch so you got to have standby staff that are

00:52:34.300 living in the quarantine center that go in the the challenge is if you don't even consider it

00:52:40.220 you won't come up with solutions and so yes those people that that are primary caregivers and were

00:52:45.580 not prepared to leave for for either ship okay but let me just jumping back into my head one of the

00:52:52.300 things that i always talk about as well is right from the very start in february one of the first

00:52:58.140 things that the federal government should have been focusing on was rapid testing somehow now

00:53:03.580 Now we're hearing, oh, the federal government's got lots of rapid testing.

00:53:06.080 Well, that sure wasn't the case back in March, April, May.

00:53:10.280 The federal government simply said they weren't reliable enough.

00:53:13.440 They weren't investigating them.

00:53:14.880 Yeah, now they say there's lots available that the province hasn't used.

00:53:17.640 They didn't even improve them until December.

00:53:20.220 Rapid testing has been used around the world in other situations.

00:53:23.840 If you have a rapid test and it's even only good for four hours,

00:53:27.600 that long-term care home staff could come in in the morning at 7.30, be tested, wait five minutes.

00:53:32.360 You're good until noon.

00:53:33.580 They can then go back, be retested at noon, finish their afternoon shift, and go home.

00:53:38.860 If we had put rapid testing in place, especially through that great gapping four-month period in the summer and found some that are effective enough, we wouldn't be having this discussion at all.

00:53:48.600 We never had that discussion because people that were presenting those types of ideas through other agencies other than health health said, we're not interested.

00:53:57.740 They're not as good as the test we've got.

00:53:59.680 Well, I'm sorry, you've just denied all those other tubes that are in our society the ability to work in perhaps a more safe manner.

00:54:08.000 But I do want to come back to the fact that there's lots of seniors living in the community who simply, the recovery rate for seniors over the age of 70 who don't have comorbidities is almost as good as those people who are 40.

00:54:23.200 it's the comorbidities attached to age and in particular multiple severe comorbidities but you

00:54:30.660 won't hear health saying that they keep saying anyone can die of covid and they're correct

00:54:35.340 anyone can but the risk of dying of covid or dying of heart disease for someone between 20 to 40

00:54:43.160 four times greater of dying of heart disease so yes anyone can but you can also die in a car accident

00:54:48.820 six times the chance we've got to put things in perspective and we're seeing that's intentionally

00:54:55.300 not done instead we're seeing campaigns appear saying if you catch covid it might have long-term

00:55:01.140 effects later in your life yes every disease could do that but the risk of it is tiny let me ask you

00:55:09.900 about this david because i i'm beginning to understand how it would work when you're trying

00:55:14.560 to manage the crisis the 30 days on 30 days off may have been the way to do it now we have other

00:55:20.000 alternatives now we've got rapid testing which would mean we wouldn't have to quarantine staff

00:55:25.120 necessarily as well if we absolutely okay i'm getting you now let's though talk about what the

00:55:30.240 powers are in an emergency because this is what i feared all along i've had this sense that nobody

00:55:35.760 wants to upset the unions that oh my gosh you can't manage this this way because you can't bring in

00:55:41.920 people who are not unionized into this environment because the aupe will grieve it or the health

00:55:47.520 sciences association or the nurses union like i i get the sense that in some ways collective

00:55:53.440 bargaining agreements are stronger than the charter of rights and freedoms and so what am

00:55:57.360 i missing here why is it that everybody is tippy-toeing around trying to make some of these

00:56:01.760 decisions that that can solve the issues that you're raising in the way that you've described

00:56:06.880 I can only take you back to the discussions I had during counterterrorism after September 11.

00:56:14.240 I always found, and I was one of those guys that ran these huge groups and ran them through the emergency management process and pulled ideas out of them.

00:56:22.960 If you bring people in at the start and they feel that they are part of the solution, you can get rid of a whole bunch of these concerns right at the beginning.

00:56:32.220 And I believe that by excluding the unions, by excluding the owners, by excluding people all the way through this process, we've seen every one of those tubes excluded except health.

00:56:47.820 If you bring people in, they will give you solutions.

00:56:51.400 You don't throw the solutions at them.

00:56:53.400 The emergency management process is bringing all the experts in and saying, how can we do this?

00:56:57.760 And they provide you solutions.

00:56:59.460 When we had the outbreak of mad cow disease, we brought in the owner-operators of the feedlots, the owner-operators of the cow-calf.

00:57:07.120 They had amazing ideas.

00:57:09.860 You don't exclude the people that are in the actual business.

00:57:13.300 They come up with the solutions.

00:57:14.940 And you actually bring in some of the workers in each type of the field, and they can tell you how things could be done quicker or easier.

00:57:24.020 and maybe wouldn't require someone with all of that training,

00:57:27.100 but maybe they could be trained much quicker if they only did this portion of it.

00:57:30.960 Those are the types of ideas that have been simply ignored.

00:57:34.000 Well, it's actually, it brings it into clear focus as well.

00:57:37.700 If you hire somebody whose job has principally been to protect Alberta Health Services and hospitals,

00:57:43.240 I guess it's not really much surprise that all of the messaging has been around,

00:57:47.360 we have to protect our health care system to the exclusion of everything else.

00:57:51.140 And so now I guess here's the question.

00:57:52.980 how do you move from the situation we've got ourselves into into the structure that you're

00:57:59.200 describing i mean one of the things i noticed when i saw emergency response is that there are

00:58:03.560 different periods there's sort of the critical 48 hour periods and then you're into another zone

00:58:07.540 where you're doing your repair but there you ultimately move into recovery and that's we

00:58:12.260 don't seem to be talking about when do we move into recovery and hand off decision making to

00:58:18.020 someone else is is that is that the next step and how would you even do that transition now that

00:58:22.480 got so locked in to having dr dina hinshaw at the helm of all this to me that that that is

00:58:30.080 the challenge that started in february because the very first day you recognize that there is

00:58:37.280 the potential for an emergency and we didn't declare here till the 15th of march all the time

00:58:43.120 up to then what we should have been doing is going the worst case scenario is this is coming here

00:58:48.320 we see who's most at risk we develop a plan for that but the minute you admit that there's a

00:58:54.680 probability that this is going to come to you remember that written plan i told you right in

00:59:00.540 that written plan is all the phases and the phase of recovery is written right into that plan and

00:59:07.360 you have a team starting led by emergency management working across every sector of your

00:59:13.160 economy developing the recovery plan and you issue it there's annexes to the main plan one for long

00:59:20.800 term care homes one for the actual hospitals one for for our energy industry one for our livestock

00:59:25.860 energy industry and we'll talk more about livestock don't let me forget to come back to livestock and

00:59:31.640 and transmission of virus but what we've not seen is all the auxiliary plans because we never had

00:59:37.500 the first plan but yes if i was running emergency management in march i would have taken one of my

00:59:45.060 best planners and and they're actually planners they're experts in running the planning process

00:59:49.200 and said tell me who you need to write the recovery plan and i would have the the how do

00:59:56.760 we get out of this i mean how do we ship it should be the premier with an emergency council which is

01:00:02.500 made up of the key ministers and their deputies with the emergency management agency working as

01:00:08.700 the coordinating across those probably 10 or 11 ministries with the deputies and you say to the

01:00:14.700 deputies I need a person who's an expert in this this and this they're going to go work on the

01:00:19.200 recovery team and you look at each one of the deputies you tell them the expertise you need

01:00:23.240 and the deputy provides that staff to you and they go up and they write the recovery plan

01:00:28.620 That recovery plan should already be written.

01:00:31.220 I'm hoping it is, but nobody's talked about it and nobody's heard about it, at least in Alberta.

01:00:36.940 That should have been written in March because the hardest thing to do, especially if you go too far into something like a lockdown, is deciding what's the mechanism to trigger the stop without losing face.

01:00:49.420 Well, I don't think we should ever have gotten into this situation.

01:00:52.180 but now if the premiers in each of the provinces don't re-establish and stuff they formed these

01:00:58.420 special councils or these special war rooms or these special it's not the deputies of their

01:01:02.900 departments it's these outsiders that they brought in and put in the little group i would have brought

01:01:08.020 some insiders in i would have brought in the alberta electric system operator the head of it

01:01:12.740 and said i need you here because i don't want the power grid to go down i would have brought

01:01:16.500 in a couple of people for natural gas distribution but they would work inside one of the planning

01:01:21.860 teams. The actual council should be the deputy ministers and the ministers of the 10 or 11 or 12

01:01:27.760 critical departments and on a daily basis the EMO briefs them and the premier on what's happened

01:01:35.620 in the last 24 and what's going to happen in the next 24. So having made the error in putting

01:01:43.040 calling this a public health emergency and putting a doctor in charge instead of calling it a public

01:01:48.000 emergency and putting head of emergency management in charge what is the mechanism for the premier

01:01:53.740 to take this power back and to reassign the roles like i get the sense that he feels powerless now

01:02:00.320 that he's got to wait until dr dina hinshaw tells him we can move on to the next step at what point

01:02:06.520 do the politicians step in and say no we're moving to the next stage and is there even a mechanism

01:02:11.040 for that okay so regardless of the province the premier's in charge and so to say that any person

01:02:18.380 working in the civil service isn't accountable to the uh to the premier in my opinion just means

01:02:25.760 lack of leadership the premier can immediately say today is the day we pivot he re-establishes

01:02:32.360 a new emergency council based on the deputies that that the emo probably tried to suggest to

01:02:39.180 him back in March. I don't know if they did or not, but they should have. And if not, he should

01:02:45.240 have turned to them today and asked the EMO, what should my emergency council look like in terms of

01:02:51.160 which ministries? With that in place, and that would take less than 20 minutes,

01:02:58.620 you then establish that council and the EMO says, okay, that eight-point plan that I had the last

01:03:06.480 two slides. First, we're going to make sure that we've protected our seniors. Second, we're going

01:03:12.000 to make sure that we've put in place the system to ensure that all our other critical infrastructure

01:03:17.180 is taken care of. He's going to turn to the Public Affairs Bureau and say, work with the EMO

01:03:22.060 to ensure that we have confidence-based messaging. And in my slide package, it's about two slides

01:03:27.060 down, there's a complete list of what that would look like. The Premier has the tools,

01:03:32.540 He just has to take charge. And very quickly, within two or three days, you should never see either the Minister of Health or the Medical Officer of Health on your TV screen. It should be the Premier, personally, with the speaking notes from across all those departments saying, this is how we're moving forward now.

01:03:54.380 it shouldn't be a daily brief by the moh it should be a daily brief by the premier until we walk our

01:04:01.040 way out of the emergency all right um laura i know is keeping track of when these emergency

01:04:07.300 orders ended i think they were supposed to come to an end today do we know if they renewed the

01:04:13.060 emergency orders or have they expired do you know the answer to that david i don't know but it's not

01:04:19.340 important because you can cancel an order at any time i'm just wondering if they renewed it if they

01:04:25.420 renewed it under the cert under this existing model then it's locking down to continuing to

01:04:30.300 keep dr hinshaw in charge of making the decisions let me ask you one more um aspect to this though

01:04:35.580 so i i have this suspicion i don't know if it's true i'm just going to put it out there though

01:04:40.140 i have this suspicion that the federal government has put pressure on our premier he did a 180 in

01:04:46.700 November and it was so out of character and I don't know all the reasons behind that and then

01:04:50.620 he has just been locked in to the position that he's taken since then. I thought he was very

01:04:54.540 reasonable and very balanced up until about mid-November and I don't know what happened

01:04:58.540 but when you start hearing the problems that we're having with vaccine procurement,

01:05:03.900 the danger of not getting our fair share, the threat of potentially having the federal

01:05:09.180 government step in with an emergency response of its own and declaring a federal order,

01:05:13.980 the fact that they're jailing people at the airports for three days they've demonstrated

01:05:18.780 that they're prepared to take power into their own hands here regardless of what it is that we

01:05:22.860 want to do i mean i'm just trying to understand the dynamic that happens between the provincial

01:05:27.820 and federal government are we even allowed to do what you're saying now that the federal

01:05:32.300 government is also locked into having public health lead this okay let's be clear a pandemic

01:05:39.820 is 99.9 percent in the hands of the provinces and so in my opinion this is up to the 13 premiers

01:05:48.380 it is their job to shift and turn do i believe that the federal government has taken the role of

01:05:55.340 chief in charge of supporting lockdowns absolutely i believe that our prime minister realized very

01:06:03.420 quickly that handing out hundreds of millions of dollars to support the lockdown helped his

01:06:08.220 poll numbers and i also believe that he's going to continue doing that and we saw very clearly

01:06:14.940 early in the second wave him making public announcements that the premiers had to do

01:06:20.860 quote unquote the right thing and by that he meant lock down longer harder and and faster and

01:06:31.340 then he said things like federal funding will be withheld if you don't so yes i believe he became

01:06:37.820 conspirator-in-chief later but the problem was is he had been given the model of lockdowns

01:06:44.540 and and we use that word lockdown like like it's a thing but the biggest challenge that we have

01:06:50.460 is to understand that those are non-primeceutical methods there are 15 or more of them and first

01:06:57.500 time in history we didn't just use one or two and we didn't just use them for short periods of time

01:07:02.700 to get over a little peak or a specific problem in a school we did it across the board no one ever

01:07:09.580 first they were recommended not to be used we didn't just use them we used all of them and and

01:07:15.580 it's incredible in my mind that a chief medical officer of health provincially would ever recommend

01:07:21.740 that based on all the the knowledge that was put into that 2019 document into every one of

01:07:28.700 our emergency plans so to be fair to the medical officers of health it's not their job to run a

01:07:34.460 province they should never have been tasked with it and and to put the entire response to this

01:07:39.180 pandemic on them in each of our 13 provinces and territories was a failure of leadership

01:07:44.620 of the premiers once it's done it can be undone it's the same person that put them in charge can

01:07:50.780 take the power back hey sorry i just want to mention uh dave you're frozen again i think

01:07:57.260 i'll just stay frozen because the picture of me it looks like i care it looks awesome it's an

01:08:03.020 inquisitive picture so let me continue then in this vein of if you were in charge because part

01:08:10.220 of what i've noticed is that there's something new to be scared about every single time we find

01:08:17.420 some progress in this in dealing with this uh this virus and this disease so for instance um

01:08:23.340 initially it was we can't allow our hospitals to get overwhelmed well when that didn't happen

01:08:29.100 then it's oh my goodness um we have variants and then when uh and now we're talking about well

01:08:37.340 yeah we can look at the stats and see that older people are most at risk but then there's 0.96

01:08:41.500 long haulers we don't know what the long-term effects of the disease would be and it does 0.99

01:08:46.780 just seem and now we're also being told well yeah you get vaccinated but you're still going to have

01:08:51.500 to wear masks and you're still going to have to be socially distanced and i i'm just trying to

01:08:56.140 understand how if you were not a doctor and not not um panicked by some of these uncertainties

01:09:03.580 how do you deal with these uncertainties like what if you happen to be wrong what if you open up and

01:09:08.380 all of a sudden uk variant does end up soaring cases up to 10 000 per day and 3500 people in

01:09:14.380 hospital as they predicted a month ago how do you deal with that level of uncertainty so that you

01:09:19.340 can move in a certain direction and not find yourself facing the worst case scenario.

01:09:25.620 So let me start back with the ever escalating campaign affair. And then I'll come to the

01:09:30.860 second part of your question. How do you deal with it? To me, the entire concept that we had

01:09:37.100 to protect our medical system and that that was the only thing. When you make an aim in a pandemic,

01:09:43.100 The first aim you always have is to minimize the impact on the pandemic on your jurisdiction.

01:09:50.300 So let's use Alberta as an example.

01:09:52.220 The aim should have been to minimize the impact of COVID-19 on the province of Alberta.

01:09:58.940 Instead, in the middle of March last year, what we heard was the aim is to minimize the impact of COVID-19 on our medical system.

01:10:09.640 Totally, if you start with the wrong aim, you end up with the wrong result.

01:10:13.100 but then we saw the shift in that and the shift is now even more gone to the aim is to make sure

01:10:19.100 no one catches covet 19. the problem with that is it's impossible in a country like canada

01:10:28.060 you can always throw up the example of new zealand new zealand's an island there's only

01:10:32.620 one way in and one way out a boat or plane sorry two ways in two ways out you don't have 30 000

01:10:40.140 trucks a day in the pandemic and i'm not talking about pre-pandemic 30 000 trucks a day across our

01:10:46.940 border canada us and you can't stop them because we have a just-in-time supply system for all our

01:10:52.380 food for all our medicine and for all our basic needs if you stop those trucks everyone in canada

01:10:59.340 dies they your grocery stores go empty so it's impossible to isolate canada from the world it's

01:11:07.980 simply not going to happen so what if you build that model and we've seen that that non-essential

01:11:13.660 travel represents six percent of the travel coming into our country every day so so clearly there's

01:11:19.020 lots of people coming back and forth once that in the first two weeks you have the opportunity to

01:11:25.180 use non-pharmaceutical interventions to slow the arrival but once the disease is in your country

01:11:31.180 it's going to spread non-pharmaceuticals have always said they are they do not slow

01:11:38.620 the the transmission of the disease once it's in your country and you never do things like

01:11:44.620 sending people who aren't sick home because they might have been exposed it says exactly not to do

01:11:49.660 that right right within those non-pharmaceuticals the studies that we're now seeing worldwide is that

01:11:56.300 yes it's a seasonal virus we kind of knew that before like definitely in the first wave but so

01:12:03.580 why was it such a big surprise in the second way but so if you can't control the spread and the

01:12:07.980 study that that's in the slide package that studied the first wave there's absolutely no

01:12:13.180 difference in spread of case count the great case count that we see on the tv every night if there's

01:12:18.140 no decrease in spread of case count between the non-lockdown countries and the wide open countries

01:12:24.780 then clearly not catching covid is is simply an impossible dream and to terrify people that if

01:12:34.480 you catch it you might die that's the most ridiculous thing i wrote a paper to the premiers

01:12:40.280 back in august and said fear versus confidence and i gave them how you do confidence and it's

01:12:45.700 in the slide package it's a full slide in the questions and answers it you never talk about

01:12:51.380 the fact that your hospital system is going to be overwhelmed. You talk about the fact that your

01:12:55.400 hospital system is resilient, that you're building a surge capacity, that you're going to segregate

01:12:59.980 COVID patients and you're going to make sure that you keep clean hospitals and COVID hospitals.

01:13:04.580 You tell them everything you're doing, that you're going to have extra staff, that you're building

01:13:08.840 extra facilities, but you don't think you're going to need them. And you carry on and carry on and

01:13:14.200 carry on with the confidence model. You say that you've checked all of industry and it's going to

01:13:18.400 stay open you tell people look the chances of you dying of covid are five times less than driving

01:13:26.360 your car to work and somehow the government hasn't ordered everyone to lock down in their

01:13:30.960 homes and never drive their cars well it's it's very true everything in perspective the other

01:13:37.840 thing you do with your hospital system i'll give you the example of ontario sorry daniel for running

01:13:41.960 but just one more idea. The hospital system at its peak in Ontario had 1,760 people in hospital

01:13:49.660 and it was presented as if this was a mind exploding tragedy. It is. You never want that

01:13:55.800 many people in your hospital, but lockdowns obviously didn't solve that. The other side of

01:14:00.740 it is, did you know there's 22,338 acute care beds in Ontario? 1,760 of them had COVID patients,

01:14:09.960 but the other 22,000 didn't.

01:14:13.340 So if something's overwhelming your hospital system, it's not COVID, right?

01:14:18.040 There's other diseases out there.

01:14:19.760 Yes, your hospitals are full.

01:14:21.420 They're full every November, December, and January.

01:14:24.380 If you read the reports out of Sweden,

01:14:26.760 particularly from the doctors that work right within the hospitals,

01:14:30.060 not the Western media, they say, yeah,

01:14:32.360 our hospitals are full this time every year.

01:14:34.920 Exactly.

01:14:35.400 And you know what we manage every year.

01:14:37.040 And, yeah, sometimes we have to put extra people here.

01:14:39.040 but you know actually this year didn't look any worse than any other year instead of a whole bunch

01:14:43.520 of uh sorry i see the one on my screen right now about my mustache um that if you see all all of

01:14:50.720 the the reports coming out of sweden they just simply managed it and they had full confidence

01:14:56.080 in their medical system they knew if they needed more they'd make more they they'd find staff

01:15:00.400 they'd bring back retired staff they would train some of their med students a little quicker and

01:15:04.400 and get them out of university.

01:15:05.740 There's so many ways.

01:15:07.240 You never use fear.

01:15:09.560 As a soldier, I learned right away,

01:15:11.160 you never let your soldiers be afraid.

01:15:13.220 You show confidence and you tell them

01:15:15.860 why they should have confidence,

01:15:17.660 not why they should fear everything.

01:15:19.880 Sorry.

01:15:20.720 You put so much on the table there.

01:15:21.880 Let me just reinforce what you said

01:15:23.300 because I had a grandma before I went off the air

01:15:25.580 tell me that her 10 year old grandson

01:15:28.020 is in such a state of terror about getting COVID.

01:15:30.400 He thinks he's gonna die or he thinks he's going to get it

01:15:32.800 and pass it on to his family 0.98

01:15:33.920 he's going to kill his family and this is what a 10 year old is being saddled with so I just want 0.85

01:15:38.820 to reinforce I don't even think we understand what we've done to the next generation but tell

01:15:43.900 me a couple more things because you know so much about the structure of emergency management so 0.86

01:15:49.200 the uh Laura's gotten back and told us that uh the order is supposed to end at midnight tonight

01:15:56.720 unless it's been renewed by cabinet what are the consequences of the emergency health order

01:16:01.440 ending tonight. Does that mean that we can go back to saying, hey, I have no cases in my community.

01:16:07.200 I'm going to see my parents for coffee. Or what is the consequence of it? Do all the health

01:16:12.100 orders stay in effect even if the emergency orders expired? Yes, they do. But the

01:16:19.920 ones that are actually breaking charter rights and the ones that are actually

01:16:27.500 inflicting some of these severe penalties on our society become less justifiable without the

01:16:36.320 extra powers. And if you look at the powers under the Public Health Act, they were always designed

01:16:42.900 for local outbreaks. They're sweeping powers though. But they were designed for where you

01:16:47.520 have one community with a smallpox outbreak or maybe two side by side. The entire concept of a

01:16:53.480 provincial state of emergency again has sweeping powers but when i was running counterterrorism

01:16:58.840 one of the things that i always said to to the premier at the time that was ralph klein was

01:17:03.160 sir we will never declare this unless we actually need the powers and if we declare it we will state

01:17:10.800 which specific powers we're going to use because the powers from left to right they're immense if

01:17:17.240 you look at the public emergency uh the declaration of a state of public emergency or a public health

01:17:22.540 emergency, they're sweeping. In the plan, you say, if required, we may have to invoke a public

01:17:30.380 state emergency, and at that time, we will state exactly which powers we're using, for how long

01:17:35.500 we're using them, and what the intent of those powers are. You've got to be more specific. You

01:17:41.640 actually have to say which powers you're using and why. You don't just declare the state of emergency.

01:17:47.980 What I've seen is it's a broad base because they don't have a plan. We're just going to have this

01:17:52.500 bucket list of powers that we use and we'll use them when we think we need them uh and and we'll

01:17:56.740 just surprise it to me the challenge all along is everything is done as a knee-jerk reaction

01:18:04.020 the first closures of our schools i can tell you this for a fact because i know people that work

01:18:08.900 in the school system they found out that schools were closed on monday after the 15th of march

01:18:15.460 declaration the same time everyone in alberta did when the medical officer of health made the

01:18:20.820 announcement on the television at 3 30 in the afternoon and the principals and vice principals

01:18:26.980 ran like hell for their schools why did they do that because first of all no kids were coming to

01:18:31.940 school tomorrow number two the teachers didn't have a clue what to do there had never been any

01:18:36.100 consultation there had never been any discussion at least at the school board and below level

01:18:41.620 and the challenge is i know for a fact in in most schools it's also part of our social safety

01:18:48.340 network so the children that weren't coming to school on monday for many of the children up to

01:18:54.560 two up to one third in many of the schools in alberta it's the only place they get a noon

01:19:00.840 lunch meal and it's in some cases the only full healthy meal of the day so those principals and

01:19:07.880 vice principals had to figure out sunday night how they were going to actually deliver lunch

01:19:14.680 to all those homes under the health restrictions that had just been jammed on them for all the

01:19:20.260 children that weren't coming to school tomorrow to get fed wow let me you've put again a number

01:19:26.720 there's been a number of questions that have come up and someone says they don't want me to leave

01:19:30.000 the livestock question but i want to ask you this other question because i asked you about

01:19:33.300 whether the orders expire after tonight sounds like the answer is no the other question though

01:19:39.300 was do the do the municipalities if if the if the public health or if that if the emergency response

01:19:46.580 has always been designed to be localized presumably local organization local municipalities have the

01:19:53.300 power to say we've assessed locally we have no one in our hospital we have less than 50 cases per

01:19:58.740 100 000 or zero cases we are now declaring ourselves open the way the initial plan was

01:20:06.340 rolled out last summer can they do that do they have the power to do that no they don't because

01:20:11.140 once you've declared a state of emergency or a public health emergency the powers are belong to

01:20:16.500 the province and you always have to remember in in every province in canada how municipalities

01:20:21.140 are structured is different municipalities are a product of the province and the province

01:20:25.860 establishes how the municipalities are made and i but i put it to you when i when i was in ema and

01:20:31.140 and when I was running EMA, at that time, there was 314 municipalities covered by the Emergency

01:20:36.140 Management Act in Alberta. And every one of those municipalities must have an emergency management

01:20:41.140 organization. In our small communities, it's one person. In larger communities, there's a whole

01:20:45.380 staff. And we worked directly from EMA to them. We had a system where we could communicate with

01:20:51.060 them in less than three minutes to every municipality in Alberta, the emergency public

01:20:55.060 warning system. We could send the information out, pull the information back. But let's take a step

01:20:59.980 back let's go back to march again who should have been in the room from from the middle of february

01:21:07.900 to the middle of march and i put it to you that our municipal structure our municipal order of

01:21:13.100 government was not in the room just like those teachers were surprised so was every municipality

01:21:19.260 in alberta because they weren't part of a planning team health ran everything they did all the

01:21:24.780 planning they did all everything and they never considered the municipal order of government

01:21:29.020 right at the table and i'll go back to counterterrorism i'll go back to the floods of

01:21:33.100 2005 which were catastrophic from edmonton south in our province groups like the alberta municipal

01:21:41.740 rural communities under amdnc and auma for the large centers of the the urban large urban centers

01:21:49.500 we had the chairs of those two associations with us all through the planning for counterterrorism

01:21:54.700 all through the floods because their job is to represent all the communities large and small

01:22:00.300 and to share that information out and to get the ideas back occasionally we would actually go

01:22:05.820 directly to the mayors of our three largest you know the the or the 11 sometimes we did it with

01:22:11.420 the 11 big uh when there was something that we knew we really needed their input or that we

01:22:17.980 wanted to make sure they didn't feel that they were excluded from the process how can the medical

01:22:23.820 officer of health say kids can go back and skate on rinks and just assume the rinks will magically

01:22:28.940 appear the municipal order of government owns the rinks in most cases it shows that there is no

01:22:36.260 structure across all the tubes and across all orders of government that's running this process

01:22:43.080 in our province and i tell you all the other provinces that i've done this briefing to i get

01:22:48.040 the same story over and over you've got to include it's a collaborative approach that doesn't mean

01:22:54.740 everybody gets an equal vote it means somebody called the premier is presented a series of

01:23:01.140 options and he says i want option b and that's with all the advantages and disadvantages for

01:23:07.220 each option listed so he knows exactly what he's choosing and when you're going to talk about

01:23:11.820 industry reopening when you're going to talk about social and recreational when you're going to talk

01:23:16.240 about tourism when you're going to talk about any part of it you have to make sure that it's

01:23:20.680 a sustainable and logical plan and the only way you do that is bringing all the players into the

01:23:26.700 room now clearly you can't have a room of 200 people so you do it in subsets and subgroups

01:23:31.960 and emergency management breaks those out into the sub plans under the major plan what do you

01:23:38.040 think the structure is now i'm like as you're talking it occurs to me that and i don't want

01:23:42.100 pick on tracy allard because there were others who traveled over the the christmas break but she was

01:23:46.980 minister municipal affairs and she was kind of seen as you're not really that essential here

01:23:51.300 we've got other things that were the other people that are more essential to this process you would

01:23:55.700 think that she would be kind of a key point person in bringing in the municipalities and it sounded

01:24:00.500 like it wasn't necessary for her to be here which it just strikes me as odd so i'm trying to

01:24:05.140 understand uh you've described the structure how it should be the different players who should be

01:24:09.380 involved what is the actual structure is it dr dina hinshaw meets with the head of ahs

01:24:14.820 and then they talk to some outside doctors telling them telling them how fearful they have to be and

01:24:19.300 then they go back to the premier and say you got to be really really really scared like that's what

01:24:23.060 it looks like from the outside is there any better process like do you know anything about how the

01:24:27.220 process is unfolding right now i don't to be honest with you i can't tell you how it's it's

01:24:33.460 exactly structured but what i can tell you is what i've been told and i don't know if it's true or

01:24:38.340 not that the minister of health the deputy minister of health and the medical officer of health have

01:24:44.580 an operation center that's running in the department of health and that they have a sub-advisory group

01:24:51.700 of about 10 people who are retired doctors are currently serving doctors and they are the planning

01:24:57.700 group for the whole pandemic the entire system is being run by doctors who are seeing sick people

01:25:03.620 every day and don't have any outside perspective or they've been brought back in on a special

01:25:09.980 commission again i don't know if that's true i certainly know that if emergency management

01:25:16.040 has been running the cross-government coordination and running the planning process

01:25:22.820 you should fire the head of emergency management but i know they're not so don't fire them it's

01:25:27.540 not his fault this is being directed and and the whole idea was if you need someone uh health

01:25:36.380 says we'll get them well but they haven't they the the messaging that you see every night is

01:25:42.840 100 health focus 100 protect our medical health care system and number two you don't ever want

01:25:50.520 to catch this disease even though we know for a fact that non-pharmaceutical measures do not

01:25:57.020 stop the spread of a viral disease in our community. We learned it before this pandemic

01:26:02.820 and world studies have proven that it's exactly the same thing that we knew before is true again.

01:26:10.320 Let's then go back to the point you didn't want me to leave and someone has already mentioned is

01:26:15.360 the livestock transmission of virus. I haven't actually considered that we've had a number

01:26:19.980 of emergencies based around viral transmission. Huff and mouth is one that we always worry about

01:26:26.780 then bsc of course was another we also had e coli and the devastation that that caused as well down

01:26:33.340 south so uh what is the tell me the crossover what was the point that you wanted to raise and

01:26:38.780 how what we could have learned from how we deal with agricultural viral outbreaks okay so there

01:26:44.860 also in my slide deck is what should have the task been to the medical officer of health

01:26:49.900 as opposed to it's in the question and answer period as opposed to the role that was forced

01:26:54.860 on them or that they asked for and got i don't know which way it happened i don't care the one

01:27:00.940 of the tasks should have been to watch for zoonotic transmission you do that for two reasons number

01:27:07.820 one you every virus known to man has shifted this is nothing new the fact that there's a south

01:27:16.140 african virus that there's a british virus that there's a brazilian virus that i'm telling you

01:27:21.340 right now there's a canadian virus we just haven't found it yet it's shifted here too and they're

01:27:26.760 going to continually shift and so if the line that we're now hearing is that because of these

01:27:31.840 shifts that we're going to have a third wave this month number one i don't believe it it's seasonal

01:27:36.240 but number two because look at great britain it's got the new virus and it's dropping off just like

01:27:41.240 we are but but even if it does it doesn't matter you can't stop the transmission they've now

01:27:47.280 discovered from from old tests that this has been here at least since january so so it's already out

01:27:53.920 in the community actually david if i may i think she's traced it back to december 15th you're

01:27:59.100 absolutely right it's been here for two months have the fact in front of me so that's why it's

01:28:03.600 january but it's here it's out there so the whole point of the two-stage process with zoonotic is

01:28:10.280 number one the fastest way a virus can mutate is by shifting from humans into pigs into another

01:28:17.240 part of the livestock chain back to pigs back to humans so we should have had the alberta pork

01:28:21.720 producers specifically in the room and saying we're going to come out and test you know because

01:28:27.320 we've got a really good system in the pork system like like there's only so many of the piglet farms

01:28:32.280 that go to to the fattening farms that go to the rendering site they've got little little pyramid 0.88

01:28:37.000 triangles and we could have tested in each one of those on a routine basis to see if the zoonotic

01:28:42.440 transmission had gotten in number one because we need to know whether or not eating something's

01:28:47.940 going to make us sick and and it obviously hasn't but but it would have been nice to actually

01:28:51.940 look at that scientifically instead of you know surprise uh and the second thing is to and it's

01:28:59.220 to see if we were going to get sick but the second thing was to watch for the shifts

01:29:02.380 and and it was like maybe it's happening but nobody's ever told us and wouldn't that have

01:29:08.460 been a comfort thing you know we're monitoring all of the different aspects of this virus we've got

01:29:14.060 it under control we have a plan for this we have a plan for this we have a plan for this if there's

01:29:17.940 ever a challenge we're going to tell you right why did why did you single out a pork in particular

01:29:25.320 is there some reason why that group of livestock producers would be particular way back in my past

01:29:31.200 life i told you that i helped i led the coordination of 10 deputy ministers to run what was called the

01:29:38.040 mission analysis, which then ultimately broke down into the estimate of the situation, which

01:29:43.500 wrote the 2005-2006 plan. In the room, I had all 10 deputies in the room, led by the Deputy

01:29:50.780 Minister of Health, with me sitting right beside her name, was Patty Mead at the time, and we ran

01:29:56.500 through that process together. And so the entire concept of all of this process, one of the things

01:30:04.260 that was brought forward, that previous viral infections had a really great relationship between

01:30:10.800 chickens and pigs. Now, this one, some people claim was a bat or whatever else. But a pig is

01:30:17.360 the closest, I was told, I'm not a scientist, I'm not a doctor, but I was told that the pig's

01:30:23.360 physiology was as close as possible to humans. And the reason why so many of these viruses come

01:30:30.600 out of china is because large-scale chicken large-scale pig and with humans interacting

01:30:36.600 on a daily basis and what happens is the virus will jump from chickens chickens that have a very

01:30:41.680 short lifespan and it jumps back and forth into the pigs that have a large but the pigs can actually

01:30:46.060 transmit it easiest it's not the only way but it's one of the more common ways that it jumps

01:30:51.260 into humans and so the virus is looking for a way to get out and it's not thinking about killing

01:30:56.980 to anyone it's just thinking about surviving and so it looks for hosts to live in and so if it can

01:31:02.440 jump from chickens it stays in the chickens for a long time and then it jumps over to a pig and

01:31:07.240 then that one survives and so another one and finally it gets to humans that's how it was

01:31:11.140 explained to me and so in my mind i would have said right away to the alberta pork producers

01:31:16.180 hey and i used to know the guy personally the the head of the association i say hey let's have a

01:31:21.300 talk right i need you to be part of this planning group because i would have wanted the doctors

01:31:25.760 there i would have wanted the because the other part of his transportation all the world those

01:31:29.440 pieces i would have put a group together and said we're looking for zoonotic transmission

01:31:33.360 you guys clearly have to be in the room but i also want someone from the cattlemen's association

01:31:37.920 uh someone from from from the four feathers association which is you know chickens turkeys

01:31:43.120 um um geese and and and i forget the last one sorry duck okay so the four feathers association

01:31:48.960 i would have had each of those associations where zoonotic transmission could have occurred and said

01:31:53.680 hey guys we need a monitoring plan i need you guys to come up with it tell me how this is possible

01:31:58.880 and and i would have done it with all the other experts in the room and said okay go away i'm

01:32:03.680 giving you one of my planning officers they're going to run around come back with options don't

01:32:08.080 come back with a plan come back with options i would have presented them to the premier and said

01:32:12.640 okay for zoonotic transmission here's your four options put your finger on the one you want premier

01:32:18.480 but we keep the other three just in case that one starts to slip we've got other ways of handling

01:32:23.520 right and guess what if we have to go from option c to option a the people that helped build it

01:32:29.420 know that that was option a like the park producers everybody was in the room so we say

01:32:35.060 okay guys c's not working we're going a done right okay you've already told us a number of players

01:32:41.620 who would have been central to this that weren't like the schools and the municipalities urban and

01:32:46.640 rural, the beef and pork and other livestock producers. You talked about having the major

01:32:53.920 utility companies involved to make sure critical infrastructure didn't go down. It doesn't appear

01:32:58.880 to me that any of those are at the table. Are there any other players that should have been

01:33:03.380 involved that you would have brought into the mix? Because you've broadened our mind into thinking

01:33:08.160 about how this could have been approached by bringing some of those other players. And I

01:33:11.920 should mention the long-term care facility operators too. They seem to have been missed

01:33:15.460 the mix also in in terms of consultation but is there anyone else that we need to understand

01:33:21.220 so that if you were to take a broader approach so that we can see what was missed in by by by

01:33:25.860 putting a doctor in charge with the zero narrow very narrow focus they had on one particular goal

01:33:31.220 what else have we missed out on what do what don't what do we don't know that we don't know

01:33:36.100 well i will take you back to the tube chart i really wish we could have had the tube chart up

01:33:41.860 and opened it one step at a time look at every one of those tubes now those are the tubes that

01:33:47.780 would fit on a graphic so you could actually read but there's a few more often on the left and right

01:33:52.340 but just look at those tubes every one of those tubes has an association if it's largely private

01:33:58.980 sector or if it's public sector they have a deputy minister the regulators of all those tubes fit

01:34:04.580 under the deputy ministers right but the actual private sector partners i would pull them in

01:34:09.620 one of the critical ones is information communications technology ict we want to

01:34:15.140 have better communications we don't want to go down and remember that bullet two making sure

01:34:20.260 that all credit critical infrastructure is available you're not trying to say that we're

01:34:25.380 going to send healthy people home but in a pandemic when people get sick and we see that

01:34:30.820 people of all ages do get sick what you're looking for in every one of those tubes is what i call

01:34:37.140 venturis i'm going to use livestock as an example now let's yeah let's use livestock because

01:34:45.300 otherwise you can get too touchy on other things at the at the the top end of the hopper is all

01:34:52.420 the cow calf operations right let's talk about cattle so you got all the cow caps and they're

01:34:57.140 spread all over alberta none of them are critical infrastructure because there's redundancy there's

01:35:02.660 speed of repair there's a whole bunch of reasons why they're not critical you just got a whole

01:35:06.500 muck of them then you come down to the abattoirs and everything comes to a funnel through that

01:35:12.420 abattoir when you hit that abattoir what you're worried about is are so many people sick that

01:35:18.880 work in a venturi that they actually cannot come to work not not are they going to give it to their

01:35:25.640 buddy can they not come to work all right and there's ways to make sure that we can help make

01:35:31.980 sure that it doesn't travel around but you never send healthy people home you bring in the surge

01:35:36.800 capacity you made and you worry about surge capacity for every one of those venturis so in

01:35:41.560 the power grid system you got lots of generators you got transmission you got distribution there's

01:35:46.880 certain key points in in transmission for for for ICT there's nodes that we're worried about

01:35:53.320 we make sure the staffing levels are guaranteed you talk to each one of those tubes talking about

01:35:59.360 critical infrastructure. We know what it is. Emergency Management Alberta holds the classified

01:36:05.300 secret lists of every piece of critical infrastructure in Alberta. I will bet you

01:36:10.680 none of them have been called. You know what's so interesting, David, is that it always seems like

01:36:15.680 the outbreaks at our processing facilities catches them by surprise. And then the first reaction is

01:36:21.900 for the unions to say, we've got to close this place down. You're proposing the opposite. Be

01:36:26.380 proactive and make sure that you develop strategies so that you can keep that

01:36:29.980 critical infrastructure open. It's flipping the whole strategy on its head.

01:36:33.700 And it should have been done in March.

01:36:35.600 All right. Well, let's, um, uh, I'm just trying to,

01:36:38.980 I'll keep on looking at the screen in the event that you've got some questions

01:36:41.860 there. One of the ones that came up a little bit earlier was how do we get out

01:36:44.780 of this? I guess that we've been sort of,

01:36:47.440 we now know what we should have done in the past if we could have done it all

01:36:50.280 again. But I think you've got, uh,

01:36:52.720 you've got people who are now so entrenched in the approach that we have taken. I guess,

01:36:57.700 what do we need to do? What's the call to action? I've mentioned, I think that there's some role to

01:37:02.440 put pressure on the municipalities, but you've said that they don't really have the legal status

01:37:07.020 to do anything differently. I mean, I suppose they could put enough pressure on the government

01:37:12.700 that the government might start opening up regionally. Is that the solution? I mean,

01:37:16.340 they've done that in Ontario. I can't imagine why we can't do it here. Why can't we go back

01:37:20.260 to the kind of relaunch map that we had last summer where if you've got below 50 cases you're

01:37:25.220 open you got 50 to 100 you got enhanced measures it's only when you get over 100 that you end up

01:37:30.180 with the stronger measures i've been trying to find some way now that we've gotten to this point

01:37:36.400 of easing us back into the kind of freedom that we that we should that we should be having i just

01:37:43.140 don't know that you can end all restrictions all at once i just don't know that the public is there

01:37:46.680 they've been so terrified so tell me how we get out of this okay so so two parts of an answer

01:37:54.840 the first answer is this has to come from the premier's office in every province in canada

01:38:00.680 the only way a premier will change their opinion at this point is by the public telling them they

01:38:07.400 have to so my call to everyone who's watching is first of all every one of you call the premier's

01:38:16.440 office and demand the eight-step process and so i'm going to go to that next but number one to

01:38:23.880 actually call the premier's office number two call your mla and tell them how unhappy you are

01:38:29.800 and that their reelection depends on getting out of this mess so this is a political process

01:38:36.600 you have to call the premier and you have to call the mla and yes you can send them an email and

01:38:41.720 And yes, you can send them a letter, but I'm told that if you actually phone the office and swarm the switchboards, that gets the most attention.

01:38:50.600 So no matter what province you're in, because I know this is being transmitted, in fact, as far away as Australia,

01:38:56.220 I know people are watching in Australia and they have the same attitude towards lockdowns as we do, non-pharmaceutical measures.

01:39:04.040 You have to get the politicians' attention.

01:39:07.460 This is a provincial jurisdiction.

01:39:10.300 we have to change our premier's minds the premiers then have to take their leadership role

01:39:16.700 and take back control and in my opinion put emergency management back in charge not and i

01:39:22.780 don't mean in charge they got to go back to being the coordinating agency taking the subject matter

01:39:27.660 agency's advice on the actual illness which is health but then talking to all the other sectors

01:39:34.700 you give them one week to build the exit plan they come up with options they present it to

01:39:41.100 the premier but within one week they have to have developed the options and put forward

01:39:46.300 a coherent plan that will be published to the public it will have some plans that may come out

01:39:52.620 in steps but you don't go to the municipal order and government say you can open up and you can't

01:39:58.140 in my opinion here in alberta that that would be the wrong thing to do because we got our

01:40:02.780 municipality side by each and so one's open one's not everybody goes nuts i say that within a week

01:40:09.740 we should reopen alberta and the reason i say within one week is we have massive mental health

01:40:16.620 issues that we've got to deal with we've got massive societal disruption that's been called

01:40:22.140 we have absolutely crushed our children's education and we have to rebuild that it's going to take us

01:40:28.620 at least a year and a half to put back missing academics the socialization is going to take a

01:40:33.900 generation so we've got to recognize that we've caused these problems and actually have a mental

01:40:38.860 health plan with additional funding a social development plan an education plan we need to

01:40:44.540 have a complete economy recovery plan and we need to put in place a plan for all those people who

01:40:51.020 had severe illnesses that were too afraid to go to the hospital because if they have felt a lump

01:40:57.020 in their breast odds are they didn't go for their mammogram and it's now much bigger than it was

01:41:02.300 a year ago if they had feelings of a heart attack they probably actually had one and now have heart

01:41:08.300 damage that's going to need to be dealt with we've seen this worldwide cdc the centers for disease

01:41:14.700 control in the u.s has estimated that there is a 20 bump in severe illnesses causing death and if

01:41:23.260 if not death, near-term death, because people have put up because they are so afraid.

01:41:29.440 We need to have, the Premier needs to be given a complete plan based on the confidence in

01:41:34.700 government slide that's in the bottom of that deck, and he needs to be in front of the cameras

01:41:39.300 every night for 30 days minimum, speaking to every point on that slide.

01:41:44.420 One night talking about these three, one night talking about those five, but the first night

01:41:49.220 talking about all of them and saying that he's going to talk about all of it.

01:41:52.300 And every day is confidence. The whole idea of basing reopening on case count is wrong.

01:42:01.040 Case count is simply not important. Case count doesn't tie into what we're talking about.

01:42:08.160 And that's by chasing case count. We've given credence to the fact that we thought that lock terms actually affected case count.

01:42:16.020 They don't. So what's going to bring the case count down? It's called spring.

01:42:22.300 well i mean i guess last year we had a little bit of a surge in spring and maybe that's where

01:42:28.960 the problem came is they thought that's when the disease first arrived the first disease first

01:42:34.160 arrived in february march and so it had its way and by the middle of april it started to go down

01:42:39.320 in fact it started going down uh if you say it takes two weeks for the for the lockdown to take

01:42:45.160 effect it started going down before that two weeks was up because that's april and may and if you

01:42:51.180 luck by the time it gets to the end of May it flattens out. So David then let me ask because

01:42:55.280 I think that's what they're fearful of is that because we had spring break last year and everybody

01:43:00.000 traveled and brought the disease back that's why we have to have this extra period of lockdown go

01:43:04.640 to your point about case counts I could hardly believe it we've seen an 80% reduction in COVID

01:43:11.040 in the last six weeks and there's a story today from a medical expert saying they calculate the

01:43:16.120 real r value at 1.09 and this is the reason why we have to be terrified and continue to stay

01:43:22.100 locked down i don't even know where they pull this information up however i think there is

01:43:27.120 something to this that because it emerged last year and we did the initial lockdown in march

01:43:31.760 april i think there's some sense that we'll get a third wave in march april and so what this is i

01:43:37.840 guess the problem the political problem that they have if they do as you're advising we open the

01:43:43.320 entire province up if we end up with a repeat of last year where you get a bit of a mini bump

01:43:48.260 then aren't we going to just have to aren't isn't the public prime to just lock back down again i

01:43:53.400 guess that's the problem is this is the argument that the premier is making i don't want to open

01:43:57.600 and then close and then open and then close how do you get over that now that that's been the

01:44:01.480 expectation that's been created you tell the public the truth you tell them that we should

01:44:07.320 never have faced anything in case count and i i put you that the way the seasonal curve goes it's in

01:44:13.880 the deck i'm sorry we can't show it but what it does is it goes up exponentially from the middle

01:44:19.160 of october it peaks in the second week the first and second week of january it drops down but it

01:44:25.240 drops down to a bumpy sort of halfway up halfway down level and so you're going to see ups and

01:44:30.600 downs all the way until we get to the middle of april and then it drops off almost exponentially

01:44:35.800 And by the end of May, we're coming out the other end.

01:44:38.520 And then we have our nice four months of summer and it goes back up again in October.

01:44:42.360 And that's what the worldwide studies have found in totally non-lockdown countries compared to total lockdown countries.

01:44:50.320 If you look at the graph, for instance, for Belarus, and I would never use Belarus as an example for anything other than Belarus,

01:44:59.620 the dictator in Belarus said, this is all a scam. 1.00

01:45:03.220 It's all bullshit. 1.00

01:45:04.240 I'm not doing anything. 1.00

01:45:05.800 he held huge covid parties they had mass gatherings if you look at the actual case

01:45:11.400 count curves for the uk which has done severe lockdowns and belarus you can't see a difference

01:45:19.240 between the line of the two graphs so using this whole idea is is the flaw so so if the premier

01:45:28.360 actually says we've got the hospital capacity we're not worried about it catching covid is

01:45:35.080 really serious for some people and you know what we've taken care of them we've taken care of our

01:45:39.960 seniors in some cases we fully vaccinated some long-term care homes we're going to use the uh

01:45:45.560 the the uh uh rapid testing and the ones that are left we're going to make sure that we can

01:45:51.640 take solid care of our seniors in long-term care homes 73 of all the deaths in canada

01:45:57.480 we're going to take care of our seniors that are living at large we're going to offer them

01:46:01.160 if they wish to come into a government-provided very, very nice quarantine center until we get

01:46:07.160 them vaccinated. And now it's only until we get them vaccinated, right? It's not for the second

01:46:11.840 wave, all the rest of that. You build this whole confidence. You don't talk about case counts ever

01:46:19.780 again because we know that what we're doing doesn't affect case counts. So if there's bumps

01:46:25.320 and hollows fine ultimately they go away do you do i think there's a third wave coming absolutely

01:46:32.360 correct but i i think there's bumps and hollows in the spring the third wave is going to start in

01:46:37.240 the middle of october just like it always does and third wave is going to have some variants in it and

01:46:42.040 it's going to go up exponentially until december unless we've got everybody vaccinated appropriately

01:46:48.840 for those variants so we so we've got to get up are we going to do this all over again and that's

01:46:53.400 what i fear i think you're right i see that drew barnsey is on the line now drew barnes of course

01:46:57.960 is an outspoken mla along with angela pitt who's been calling for a reduction in restrictions i'm

01:47:03.560 glad that he's tuning in on this he's been quite a voice for freedom even though it's in this

01:47:09.240 environment perilous to do so but he's wondering because i know that there's a step in the actual

01:47:14.520 pandemic plan about the economy he's wondering what steps you'd advise albertans to take to help

01:47:19.800 free enterprise restart the economy and to focus on the needs of their families is there i mean is

01:47:25.080 this is this something that will happen organically on its own and you just get out of the way or are

01:47:30.200 there things that emergency planning should do to to uh to help things along to to kick start

01:47:37.000 re-kickstart the economy what emergency management does is brings together the smartest people in

01:47:43.880 Alberta and asks them to help build a plan. They run a planning process with those smartest people

01:47:51.560 in Alberta across every one of those economies. And so in that one week period that I'm talking

01:47:57.480 about, there should be a group that is focused 100% on the economy, breaking it out into the

01:48:02.680 appropriate tubes. And I would suggest to you that places like tourism and small business

01:48:07.080 deserve a special nod in the planning process. They should be at the front of the line

01:48:11.320 because those are ones that have been really hit and restaurants and bars and all the rest of them

01:48:17.540 that have been actually physically shut. And so you bring them in the room and you say,

01:48:22.960 what's it going to take, folks? And you bring them all the best minds across all the different

01:48:28.300 sectors. You build options across each of the sectors and you present them to the bringer.

01:48:33.740 And the bringer says, I like option A, B, C, D, E. And then this one, I'll go for option A and that

01:48:38.660 went for b and and you get the whole idea from the people most involved the one thing that i

01:48:44.640 there's regulators in these sectors that tend to be from government right they should be in the

01:48:49.960 room too but you ask the actual people and you run a planning process because it's important that you

01:48:56.420 don't just hear what they have to say because you're allowed to disagree with them and go back

01:49:01.440 and forth until you come to a plan that you agree on with each other does it need money from

01:49:06.060 government a lot of cases probably not what it needs from government is for them to get out of

01:49:10.740 the way in some cases it will need money from government because they've been so crushed they

01:49:15.220 can't recover on their own and they might need a little help for a short period of time i'm not a

01:49:20.240 favor of long-term supports but i'm certainly in favor of short-term supports but that's dave

01:49:24.640 redmond's opinion dave redmond is the coordinator he runs the process he hears what people says

01:49:30.040 and we present the options of the premier and the premier has a huge problem because we're going to

01:49:35.180 need more money in mental health we're going to need more money in the education system we're

01:49:39.140 going to need more money to to recover the health care of the people that have the long-term there's

01:49:44.420 going to be money going in every direction and I'm talking large pieces for things to fix the

01:49:49.740 problems we caused by by lockdown but there's going to have to be some support to help industry

01:49:55.720 reopen and and so I'm not saying just to open up and go wild and crazy I'm saying bring them

01:50:01.860 together and develop a plan with them and do it sector by sector and let's get get their input

01:50:06.580 and then we can see whether or not there's enough money to do what they ask for or if they're just

01:50:11.180 saying get out of the way then we say okay option a is get out of the way let me let me um get your

01:50:17.040 response to the premier because whenever i've posed this to him he always bats down my argument

01:50:22.340 as some sort of libertarian talking point and not practical and i i put to him at the point i was

01:50:29.780 to make is exactly the one you made with belarus is that what didn't matter when if you look at

01:50:35.460 florida south dakota sweden belarus the the virus had its way with us whether you locked down or

01:50:41.940 whether you didn't that was the point i was trying to make to him and his response back was if we'd

01:50:46.980 done what south dakota did and had their death rate we would have had x many more albertans die

01:50:52.100 if we'd done what sweden did we would have had x many more albertans die and i i understand uh

01:50:58.340 And I don't know why he's making that comment is because, in fact, Alberta did a pretty darn good job of protecting our seniors in long-term care.

01:51:05.120 Certainly far better than in Quebec, where they were putting COVID-positive patients from hospitals into nursing homes and infecting everyone.

01:51:12.260 We did far better here.

01:51:14.300 And so we have a low rate.

01:51:16.300 But he's connected that somehow with the lockdown.

01:51:19.020 And I don't know how we make the argument to him that we can still maintain protection of our seniors without having the entire society locked down.

01:51:28.600 Because the notion I seem to get from them every time I've talked with somebody is that it's because we've got a lot of community spread,

01:51:37.520 that is causing us, as we're, I guess, going about our business at the shopping mall or whatever,

01:51:43.040 to inadvertently infect somebody who is a worker at a long-term care facility and they're taking

01:51:49.800 it in. Therefore, the way to stop it from getting into long-term care is to lock us all down. That's

01:51:54.540 the only thing I can understand about the argument. And I'm just wondering how you would

01:51:58.240 dismantle all of that because it feels to me like there's something not logical about what

01:52:03.680 they're putting forward, but I can't quite put my finger on how to challenge it to try to change

01:52:08.640 some minds on it? It's very simple. Deaths, if you look at deaths and use deaths as the entire

01:52:19.020 point, 96.1% of all deaths in Canada have been in seniors over the age of 60 with multiple

01:52:30.340 comorbidities. In most cases, three or more. We're talking about really sick people.

01:52:38.640 So the logic that started on the 15th of March, which is totally not logic, because prior to COVID, every plan that was ever written and all of the documentation on non-pharmaceutical intervention said you cannot control the spread of a virus by using lockdown, by using any of those non-pharmaceutical.

01:53:00.160 So you first of all have to disconnect the deaths from this idea that lockdowns caused less deaths.

01:53:07.900 they didn't what caused the deaths was not quarantining our long-term care homes 73 of

01:53:16.780 all deaths in canada happened because covid went into our long-term care homes locking down

01:53:23.420 clearly didn't stop that right we killed over 20 000 canadians over 15 500 of them in long-term

01:53:34.140 care homes because the staff went home at night and and so thinking that a lockdown would stop

01:53:40.380 the staff from catching covet is a complete misnomer we know that it spreads through the

01:53:44.460 community and lockdown communities and non-lockdown communities exactly the same we knew that before

01:53:50.460 we've now got scientific studies saying that it happened again we learned the hard way

01:53:55.500 so so the deaths aren't related to lockdowns so so 96.1 of the deaths are in seniors with

01:54:02.940 multiple severe coma, average age of death, 84. So the seniors with multiple comorbidities that

01:54:09.400 are living out in society should have been offered a safe quarantined area to go to in a very humane

01:54:15.740 and loving manner. And then you've dealt with the deaths. The rest of us have more chance of dying

01:54:23.740 of heart attack than we do of COVID in every age group, including seniors over the age of 60

01:54:29.600 without multiple comorbidities.

01:54:31.800 I need you to put another underscore under that

01:54:34.360 because I was on Ryan Jesperson's show today

01:54:36.800 and he repeated another talking point

01:54:38.660 that I've heard many times from doctors is,

01:54:41.380 yeah, but if you look at the comorbidities,

01:54:43.420 it's cardiovascular disease and it's diabetes

01:54:45.680 and it's heart disease and 75% of our society,

01:54:51.160 maybe it was over 75% even in the 40 plus age group

01:54:57.420 have a predisposition to some of those conditions like the notion think the notion there is that

01:55:04.680 you're just as at risk as a 40 year old with diabetes of dying as a 90 year old with three

01:55:10.480 conditions and i don't know if that's what the statistics show so how do you dismantle that

01:55:14.380 argument because i think what they're now trying to do is trying to make it as if everybody who

01:55:19.640 has a pre-existing condition is equally at risk and it's simply not true if you look at let's use

01:55:27.360 alberta statistics the government of canada hasn't produced statistics on on comorbidities but several

01:55:32.800 of the province have well they have i think i've seen you you didn't you print them yeah that was

01:55:38.240 the alberta stats okay yeah okay okay 70 had three or more comorbidities now what do you do for the

01:55:46.800 people that weren't in and most of them were concentrated in your long-term care homes so

01:55:51.680 let's talk about the ones that weren't we have family practice doctors they know their patients

01:55:58.600 really really well they know the ones that are severely ill who have two or three comorbidities

01:56:05.840 they also know the ones that have a well-managed single comorbidity so to say everybody's got a

01:56:12.380 comorbidity as some of the the doctors that are on tv are saying it's a red herring you got to

01:56:18.920 watch for the red herrings because they are trying to sell the campaign of fear to justify

01:56:23.420 lockdowns. Yes, if that one comorbidity is really severe, their family practitioners would know.

01:56:30.780 So instead of going for this blanket, we got to keep everyone from catching COVID,

01:56:37.340 which doesn't work, even if they wanted to say that, it doesn't work. We should have been working

01:56:42.960 with the family practitioners across our province saying we need to know from you who are most at

01:56:49.520 risk how many have three how many have two right start with three and how many have four right and

01:56:56.880 work your way down that aren't living in long-term care and gone immediately to offer their families

01:57:02.400 an opportunity to do some kind of an isolation quarantine system or even do it at home if one

01:57:08.960 family member wanted to stay at home with them and and and there was a family situation where

01:57:13.880 they could do that safely there's so many options but we didn't even talk about them

01:57:19.600 you bring the family practitioners in i don't know how many family practitioners i've talked to

01:57:24.640 across canada who are madder than hell that they weren't part of this discussion to handle that

01:57:30.620 comorbidity question right so so there yes there's lots of comorbidities out there but they're not

01:57:38.160 severe. They're managed well. Someone who's on diabetes, who's completely managed, their risk

01:57:42.960 of dying of COVID is pretty small compared to someone who's got diabetes, heart disease,

01:57:47.880 and a pre-existing lung condition, right? Family practitioners know. Yes, exactly. One more reason

01:57:55.680 to bring everybody in. Now, I know we said that we'd go for two hours and I think we're closing

01:57:59.520 in on the final and Derek may want to have a final question, but I wonder if I can ask you

01:58:03.480 kind of a philosophical question because it strikes me as strange that you as a military man

01:58:11.960 who we think of as the law and order guy the ultimate law and order guy you talk more about

01:58:17.160 rights and balance and restraint and having a really darn good reason to violate rights

01:58:23.360 than any medical practitioner than any of our premiers than any of the people who are in charge

01:58:29.320 of the public health response and what is it about your training and your discipline and your

01:58:34.000 approach to this that has you caring about rights and no one else does okay um i'm going to answer

01:58:41.540 it in a couple of parts first of all when i was officer in the army i trained my soldier on the

01:58:48.100 charter of rights and freedoms it was my personal opinion okay and i have to say my personal opinion

01:58:54.540 every officer in the army gets their commission from the governor general the queen

01:58:59.720 So it's called the Queen's Commission.

01:59:02.640 But ultimately, in my mind, while I followed the orders of the government of Canada on all my deployments and they decided which operations I went on,

01:59:12.600 I believe that as a soldier, my number one responsibility was to defend Canadians because governments come and go. 0.88

01:59:21.640 Canadians, in my opinion, are different than anyone else in the world.

01:59:26.000 And what makes us different?

01:59:27.120 People say, oh, there's no Canadian culture.

01:59:29.860 What makes it Canadian different is our Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

01:59:33.200 You show me one other country in the world that has a charter like ours,

01:59:38.180 that is written as well, and that defines individual rights versus those of the community,

01:59:45.300 and does it in such a manner.

01:59:47.420 And so I always taught my soldiers, read the charter.

01:59:50.140 I have a copy right here in my top desk store.

01:59:51.960 I've had it in my top desk store since the charter was issued.

01:59:55.820 I believe in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

01:59:57.940 So let me go to the second part of my answer.

02:00:00.240 When I was placed in charge on September the 12th to, first of all, lead a team to design, and I led a team.

02:00:07.920 Dave didn't write the Alberta Crisis Management Counterterrorism Plan.

02:00:11.540 I led a team of 26 of the brightest people in Alberta through a process, and we wrote the plan together.

02:00:18.020 And then Dave was ordered by the premier of the day to implement it.

02:00:21.200 It took two years to implement it with all of our private sector because 85% of critical infrastructure is owned by the private sector.

02:00:27.400 But at every step of the process, I never wanted to get a Patriot Act.

02:00:33.720 I wanted to ensure that the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in Alberta was never compromised.

02:00:40.100 And there would be times when we would have to declare in a terrorist attack a state of public emergency,

02:00:46.460 and I would limit the pieces of the charter that would be affected for the shortest period of time

02:00:54.620 with a full explanation of why and what the duration would be

02:00:58.560 and how we would get out of it, right?

02:01:00.660 What was the get-out-of-jail plan at the end of it?

02:01:04.120 To me, Canada is a wonderful, wonderful place.

02:01:09.040 I don't support inappropriate civil disobedience.

02:01:13.140 I simply don't because as a soldier,

02:01:15.620 I was going to be the one that was going to ultimately be called

02:01:18.060 to stop unlawful civil disobedience.

02:01:22.020 lawful civil lawful disobedience go for it don't expect me to be standing on the ledge steps with

02:01:28.840 you i'm the one working behind the scenes trying to get the premiers to do the right thing dave's

02:01:34.880 not the guy that's going to carry placards and run at the thing i saw what happened when confidence

02:01:39.960 in government got destroyed in many countries of the world where i unfortunately had to take

02:01:44.640 young canadians into and you never want to go there so my my idea of the charter has always

02:01:51.620 been to support the minimum imposition of any violation of charter rights right at for for

02:01:59.700 anything for a pandemic for counter-terrorism and and boy people were ready to throw their rights

02:02:04.660 rights in in september of 2001 and i was the guy who said no i briefed the privacy commissioner

02:02:12.180 personally and explained to him how i was going to minimize it but that there were times when i

02:02:17.060 might have to step into some privacy issues and and and we went through every step of that process

02:02:23.380 minimizing so in in the case of this pandemic i don't believe i i don't believe in the use of

02:02:30.740 non-pharmaceutical measures for for obvious reasons because i believe they were approved

02:02:35.620 to be ineffective before and they've been approved ineffective again that means to me that i don't

02:02:41.940 believe we should have had to impose charter restrictions except in perhaps some extreme cases

02:02:48.260 for a very short period of time and and so the the charter rights that that that i'm clearly

02:02:54.580 suggesting that i would violate was in long-term care of seniors homes right right and so if we

02:03:00.420 had taken a minimal approach then you'd have less civil disobedience and pastor james coats wouldn't

02:03:05.700 be in prison languishing because there he wouldn't have been violating any laws because they wouldn't

02:03:10.900 have gone to the extreme of forcing him to abide by rules that he didn't think he could. So if I'm

02:03:17.900 to hear you correctly, you probably don't support the pastor breaking the law, but you also don't

02:03:24.400 support the government having put such extreme measures in the first place where he felt it was

02:03:27.640 his only choice. So let me be very clear. I never support breaking law, right? A law is a law,

02:03:35.200 and as a soldier and as a citizen, that's not what I do, but that's me.

02:03:40.460 I have my reasons, and I understand civil disobedience.

02:03:43.440 I understand it.

02:03:44.160 It's just not me, and everybody makes that decision themselves.

02:03:47.760 I don't think you should have been put in that situation,

02:03:50.040 but when that rule is made, you follow it.

02:03:52.260 I also believe in leadership by example.

02:03:54.600 So to me, what happened with some of the MLAs when the government made rules,

02:03:59.200 as a lieutenant i was told by by a full colonel that that that i tried to emulate my whole life

02:04:07.100 one of the rules he told me as a young lieutenant is merit never make a rule that you either don't

02:04:13.360 plan to follow or you don't plan to enforce i was talking about lieutenant because the minute you do

02:04:19.780 that soldiers realize you're not genuine and that goes back to if you put a bunch of rules on

02:04:26.400 Albertans then don't hightail it out of the country so that you can enjoy restaurants and

02:04:30.800 and beach holidays when you have when you're not allowing us to see our our parents for Christmas

02:04:34.880 I think that's a good good note for us to end our conversation on let me hand it over to Derek

02:04:39.120 Filderrand Derek thank you so much for hosting this evening and allowing me to be a part of it

02:04:44.320 you know you were no you were the host uh I I was the technocrat um uh no I'm greatly appreciative

02:04:51.840 to both this fantastic interview uh you know this only kind of came together friday um some mutual

02:05:01.040 friends of all three of us kind of plugged everybody together um and i said hey uh what

02:05:08.640 what the hell and um and here we are uh this is uh not much of a to me a record viewership broadcast

02:05:19.280 at least on the live numbers so far for the Western Standard.

02:05:22.680 I have no doubt that it's going to be a record overall for people who listen

02:05:27.340 after the fact on Facebook, on YouTube, on podcasts.

02:05:32.760 I'm very grateful to you, Colonel, for your participation and what you've done here.

02:05:41.380 What's funny, I was actually kind of looking at your image,

02:05:43.420 and I was like, oh, you're really giving me a real army glare,

02:05:47.600 but you're actually just frozen. I remember getting the glare from officers when I was

02:05:55.920 a cadet, and you were giving me that look. It's kind of frozen in time. And Danielle,

02:06:03.500 hell of an interview. I don't think anyone could have done it like you here. You know

02:06:08.700 this stuff inside and out. Thank you so much for giving a very educational, very informative

02:06:15.680 of interview here we've had two hours if we were smoking weed this would be the

02:06:20.720 Joe Rogan show so yeah yeah we have to drop a few more f-bombs to make it fully

02:06:29.480 Joe Rogan but we're at Joe Rogan length right now I could go on but I've got to

02:06:34.820 go to the bathroom and actually outside right now there's a blizzard developing

02:06:43.140 I don't ever watch the forecast.

02:06:45.320 And for the first time ever, I've seen a flash of lightning in a blizzard.

02:06:49.560 I've never seen that.

02:06:51.060 It's very scary.

02:06:52.640 If COVID doesn't scare me, then a lightning blizzard will certainly scare me.

02:06:58.380 So I think that's a good omen for us to wrap it up with.

02:07:04.040 There's still a ton more comments we didn't get through.

02:07:06.520 I think we've had 1,500, 1,600 comments on this so far.

02:07:10.900 It's been absolutely huge.

02:07:12.040 but so thank you both for an absolutely excellent program I'm very very honored

02:07:19.660 to have you both on with the Western Standard here we're planning on

02:07:23.500 aggressively growing our broadcast and this is a certainly a great example of

02:07:29.020 what we could be doing now I'll can I just butt in for just a sec I just want

02:07:35.560 to say thank you and and people say that I glare all the time my dream actually was always to be

02:07:45.560 in the forces and once I started growing a beard I realized I could only be in the Navy so you can

02:07:55.060 grow anything you want I did see that and I actually started exploring joining the reserves

02:08:00.400 But then the Western standard just kept me too busy. I always have an excuse not to join the reserves

02:08:05.900 My dream job was always be a submarine captain, but I think I'm a bit old to start start down that career path

02:08:13.900 Now there's been two most frequently asked questions here

02:08:19.240 The first was how can I share this with people?

02:08:23.280 Like this is we're not getting this in the mainstream media

02:08:26.720 You know, the Western standard strives to be halfway between the mainstream media and the alternative media.

02:08:31.700 We're trying to give you kind of the credibility of professionalism for a lot, very much lack of a better term of the mainstream media,

02:08:38.980 but also the feistiness and the willingness to ask questions that the alternative media has.

02:08:44.420 We try to be between the two.

02:08:46.780 This video is going to be saved permanently on Facebook, assuming Facebook doesn't platform us at any time soon.

02:08:52.180 And the same goes for YouTube.

02:08:54.240 This is going to be saved on YouTube, and you can share it with people, even if they don't have a Facebook account, again, assuming YouTube doesn't platform us.

02:09:02.620 We also will have this on podcast.

02:09:04.940 Our podcast editor, Corey Morgan, who's been watching the whole time, loving this interview, he's going to be posting this very, very soon on our podcast stream.

02:09:14.560 You can subscribe through your favorite podcast provider, so you're going to be able to get it there.

02:09:20.480 I also, though, the Western Standard, we're kind of new to the broadcast side.

02:09:24.860 This is kind of a new frontier for us.

02:09:26.880 We're primarily the written word.

02:09:28.500 We do news and we do opinion columns.

02:09:32.960 To put you on the spot, Colonel, I'm going to invite you right now on the air,

02:09:37.960 so you better not embarrass me and say no.

02:09:40.120 We want you to do a guest column on this.

02:09:43.160 We have had controversial, very credible experts like Dr. Dennis Modry before.

02:09:49.760 who um what just the mainstream media would not listen to once they identified him as a dissident

02:09:56.000 essentially and uh we gave him space on the western standard to write an extensive letter

02:10:00.720 letter to the editor um i'm sorry an open letter to premier kenny uh i i i i think what you've got

02:10:07.680 to say is too important not to be heard so i want to invite you to uh to take take that great

02:10:14.240 powerpoint presentation you've got you can work with us and we uh i want to invite you to work

02:10:19.120 with us to uh boil it down into kind of a readable um open letter uh so that people can uh can can

02:10:26.800 read what you've had to say here today the powerpoint came from a letter i sent to all 13

02:10:32.960 framers so it should be an easy job oh that that's beautiful i uh i really hate editing

02:10:39.200 other people's work uh because they don't like me editing their work so that that works well

02:10:43.840 for me uh thank you so much we're gonna reach out to you uh uh colonel redmond to uh to make sure

02:10:50.000 we get that happening as soon as possible uh now the second most uh and i'm expecting a terse and

02:10:56.320 dismissive answer from you on this but the second most uh asked question we had as i was monitoring

02:11:02.400 the uh it actually froze my computer sometimes we had so many questions uh comments coming in

02:11:08.000 The second most common question and comment we had was, are you going to run for premier or prime minister?

02:11:14.940 I know you're a military man.

02:11:19.800 You're used to earning your job, not begging people in a popularity contest.

02:11:25.480 And I'm sure this probably not really crossed your mind.

02:11:29.560 But I got to put it out there because it was the other most asked question after how can we share this?

02:11:34.960 I have to be very honest.

02:11:36.580 My past life has left me with challenges.

02:11:41.440 And so while I'm totally willing to work with people and to offer advice, I simply don't have any time, not time, I don't have the ability to take a full-time job.

02:11:54.140 I have to deal with the issues that came from my career in the military and my time with the government of Alberta.

02:12:00.480 And I have to take care of my wife and my children and my grandchildren.

02:12:05.340 How long did I answer?

02:12:06.580 That's, you know, Danielle and I get asked this kind of question frequently enough, and no one ever believes us.

02:12:16.160 That was a very believable answer. I believe you.

02:12:19.000 I mean it, and I actually believe Danielle when she says, no way, but I really believe you.

02:12:26.220 So, okay, there we go.

02:12:29.020 Well, okay, before we wrap up, I want to thank everyone who's currently a Western Standard member.

02:12:33.080 you are contributing to bailout free independent Western media. You are the beating heart of the

02:12:39.140 Western Standard. We're very grateful for it. If you're not yet a member of the Western Standard,

02:12:43.640 what the hell are you waiting for? You're paying your taxes to the CBC. You're paying your taxes

02:12:48.520 to the mainstream media to support them. If you don't want to support us voluntarily with your

02:12:53.700 money, support other independent media. Give your money to anybody but the CBC and the big

02:12:59.000 corporate media who are sucking on the government teat uh but we prefer it's to us so thank you

02:13:04.680 very much for this um we also have to thank just a couple of groups who put this all together i 0.51

02:13:10.680 talked about these uh this kind of network of mutual friends i actually don't know everybody

02:13:15.160 there's a lot of people who are involved who i don't know so i hope none of them are too nuts

02:13:20.120 but uh i i love the people i know who were involved in putting this all together so we want

02:13:24.520 to thank rally for resources alberta blue skies and rally canada uh just a great network of people

02:13:30.920 came together to to make this happen uh very grateful to you all uh tip of the hat to you

02:13:39.000 uh and of course uh i should say the third most frequently asked question was what was

02:13:44.440 the premier's office's phone number so uh just because uh we've had to work late tonight we're

02:13:52.360 going to give it to you it's 780-427-2251 uh if you've got something to say that you saw tonight

02:14:00.440 call that number uh tell them uh tell them the western standard sent you okay well uh thank you

02:14:07.720 very much again to uh danielle uh excellent has uh guest hosting and uh to uh uh retired colonel

02:14:16.360 uh david redmond uh absolute pleasure thank you very much uh god bless yeah thanks again

02:14:24.680 bye everyone

02:14:46.360 .

02:15:16.360 .

02:15:46.360 .

02:16:16.360 You

Western Standard - February 23, 2021

WS LIVE： Danielle Smith & David Redman： Alberta's failed COVID management

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