00:19:18.980The 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.
00:19:31.980And we knew in February that the hazard was affecting people over the age of 60 with multiple comorbidities.
00:19:41.980The 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.
00:19:57.540We live with risk in everything we do.
00:19:59.200uh sorry david uh you've been frozen for a little bit here um so if you want to maybe fix that and
00:20:05.360uh danielle can just maybe maybe danielle just kind of uh sum it up and kind of go through some
00:20:10.480of the comments we've had so far while you uh freeze yourself i should just tell you david
00:20:16.800that we've been able to hear you clearly it's just that you are your image is frozen so he's
00:20:22.000just going to restart and come back on so i think part of what you're hearing is very for those of
00:20:27.920of us who live through a couple of crises in Alberta, like the floods of 2013 and the Fort
00:20:34.500McMurray fire, I think what he's describing to you is very familiar to all of us. I think the
00:20:40.640key point that he's making is about having this central coordinating agency and that function is
00:20:45.900completely missing, which is why you end up with no coordination between any of the different
00:20:51.000departments that are the implementers. And it also sounds like from what he's saying, without
00:20:55.100having that coordinating role you're not getting the impact the feedback coming in also i thought
00:21:00.540it was really interesting for him to point out that you have to demonstrate due diligence before
00:21:06.860you leap to proposals that end up violating people's rights and that step has been completely
00:21:14.380missed the question i keep seeing coming up the most is what is jason kenney's response to this
00:21:21.180and i think that's uh but we'll be able to talk to to david about that um in the question and
00:21:26.780answer session because he um has he cc's me on all of the documents that he sends to the premiers
00:21:35.340but i don't know that the the premiers have had much chance to respond i don't know that they
00:21:39.420receive it at all so i'm just going to zip on over here and look at some of the um at some of the
00:21:44.700comments here that you've got uh i do have somebody saying get rid of the message banner so i don't
00:21:49.980know derek maybe we can save the message banner until the end i don't know we'll see if others
00:21:54.940are wanting to uh maybe the comments come in at the end i've seen those but uh you know uh it's
00:22:02.940our 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
00:22:09.180not too distracting but i know some people don't want it but we're uh we're gonna keep doing it
00:22:15.180derek you're the boss i just have a few people who are saying that so i thought i'd mention it tell
00:22:19.260Tell me when David's back, cause I can't see the screen.
00:22:21.820Oh yeah. No, no, I certainly didn't mean that to you.
00:22:23.580I bet I just, I know we're getting complaints
00:22:25.740with some people with the messages coming up,
00:22:29.840but it's kind of the format of the show.
00:44:13.860So 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.
00:44:32.100well I I should mention briefly David the problem we had bringing you back in I think we've solved
00:44:42.660that so if you if you do want to fix your frozen screen I'm not as I'm not definitely terrified
00:44:47.760that we're not gonna get you back anymore I was was freaking out that Daniel was gonna have to
00:44:54.100read the rest of your slide and then we're gonna be a bust but if you want to try and unfreeze0.84
00:44:58.380yourself uh i have a reasonable degree of uh i will daniela mutant and cover me for a minute
00:45:05.820all right well i think daniel's got a lot to work with there uh to cover for a minute uh
00:45:10.380hopefully not much longer than that all right so derek has been putting a lot of uh comments
00:45:16.940on the screen and he'll keep on on doing that but i'll tell you where we're going to go with
00:45:20.940our discussion i think we have to to have a greater deeper conversation about what it actually
00:45:27.100would mean to lock down the long-term care facilities because my my sense of it and i
00:45:32.460don't know if we have any long-term care facility workers on on the call but if we do maybe you can
00:45:39.020you can tell us whether you think your colleagues would be open to what david redmond is suggesting
00:45:44.700when i was on the air and this was posed i got feedback saying that those who are are serving on
00:45:50.780the front line are so terrified of being the one to bring covet into the facility that they would
00:45:55.820welcome the opportunity to be two weeks on two weeks off or one month on one month off and so
00:46:02.220that was one perspective i got the other perspective i got was there's no possible way
00:46:07.100if especially if you've got uh individuals who are principal providers of large families
00:46:13.660because as we've heard many of our frontline workers live in multi-family homes and as a
00:46:20.460result they may have other obligations that for aging aging parents or for young ones that prevent
00:46:26.860them from being able to be locked down for a month so is it even practical to consider that
00:46:31.900and then i think we do need to explore some of the ideas around what do you do about those who are
00:46:38.140not in a care home uh i must tell you i have the healthiest 86 and 96 year old people listening to
00:46:44.380my show because they I do think they did send me texts all the time telling me that they were in
00:46:50.620their homes and they were wondering when they were next up for the vaccine so we do have a
00:46:54.380large number of healthy relatively healthy seniors who are still independently living
00:46:59.180and so how do we make sure that they stay protected so Derek do we have uh David back yet
00:47:05.420yeah David uh David's back he's uh I thought you could see him sorry he's right beside you uh
00:47:10.060Beautiful. No, when I go over the chat. He's right beside you, ready to go.
00:47:14.880Okay, let's go. So, David, let's begin with that because I think that there has been,
00:47:19.760your proposal's been mischaracterized by those who don't want to listen to you. I think we both
00:47:24.240know that. But how do you answer this question about long-term care that what you're proposing
00:47:28.960is just not practical, that the staff would never agree to it, the unions would never agree to it,
00:47:33.940you couldn't possibly have that kind of rotation with this particular employee group?
00:47:42.200Okay. First of all, I don't believe that to be true. And I give you one example. It wasn't in
00:47:47.620Canada. It was in France, where the staff in the long-term care home in France, right in one of the
00:47:53.120biggest epicenters of where COVID was outbreaking in France. And we know France had a horrible0.73
00:47:58.060situation. They simply decided themselves they weren't going home. So they had mattresses
00:48:03.120delivered and they moved in with their patients and they stayed there for 47 days they had
00:48:08.040entertainers quarantined and brought in they had multimedia devices brought in i think you would
00:48:13.200have found that a lot of the staff in our long-term care homes are just as dedicated to their to their
00:48:18.840residents as as those folks were in france so so let's start with the first wave first wave was
00:48:25.460short and and was a seasonal decline happened and we saw also what happened in the summer
00:48:31.500And so I think, first of all, you offer the opportunity to the people that are working in the system.
00:48:36.480And I think you would have found many, many of them would have volunteered.
00:48:39.600If you didn't have enough staff to do it, then you put out the call.
00:48:43.540And I think you would have also found many people in the community willing to come in and participate,
00:48:48.780as well as some of the family members who may have been willing to quarantine into a government-provided facility
00:48:55.260so that they can continue to provide that daily care to their parent or their loved one like they had been doing before.
00:49:01.000The 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.
00:49:29.300then it's unconscionable to me that once the first wave is over that we wasted all four months of the
00:49:36.840summer doing nothing we knew this was going to come back anyone who's ever studied seasonal
00:49:43.060viruses knew that the middle of october this curve was going to go up exponentially and it did
00:49:48.320and we also know that it peaks in the second week of january and starts coming down now it's not
00:49:54.040going to go all the way back down to zero like it does that doesn't happen till may it's going to
00:49:58.080come down a lot, flatten off, and then drop off. So in that summer period, we should have
00:50:03.440been developing full options for the care of our long-term care homes. We should have
00:50:07.480had all the time to have all of the detailed discussions about extra funding, about whatever
00:50:11.900we needed to do. And further to that, we could have developed an idea of consolidating perhaps
00:50:19.780some of the long-term care homes, but as well, opening up new facilities that would have
00:50:24.680been able to take in the seniors that were living out in the community, if they so wish,
00:50:29.020into a similar type of isolated quarantine system, but in a really nice situation inside
00:50:35.760of something like a hotel or whatever else with staff provided in it. We had four months to figure
00:50:41.460this out before the second wave hit. And then we see the massive outbreaks in our long-term care
00:50:46.760homes again, because we simply decided that if we locked down all of society, somehow COVID wouldn't
00:50:51.800get in there and yet the staff went home every night it's unconscionable so so tell me how we1.00
00:50:58.060deal with the multiple family obligations because we do know that there would be a lot of women of
00:51:04.300probably our moms and have kids at home and we know that in um in uh our cultural communities
00:51:10.660it's part of their culture i've interviewed many from the south asian community part of culture to
00:51:14.800have their their parents or grandparents living with them as well it becomes really difficult if
00:51:19.660take that core person out of the mix of that family dynamic for an entire month so how do you
00:51:25.020address the fact that they've got home obligations and that may make the that may cause them to be
00:51:30.380reluctant to go into into lockdown for 30 days i mean it's different if you're a guy working on
00:51:35.100the rigs or working up in fort mcmurray you've kind of bought in knowing that that's what the
00:51:38.700job is but those who decide to work in long-term care many of them have multiple jobs and these
00:51:43.100other obligations so how do you how do you try to to address that so so some of those people
00:51:50.220wouldn't be volunteering or be able for that type of a process so that's where you have the whole
00:51:55.900discussion about surge capacity that's where you look at other people that are out in our community
00:52:00.780that would want those employment jobs and in particular you have the ability to do rapid
00:52:05.500training for for people that volunteer for the process you bring other people in you you don't
00:52:10.460just say the people that are there have to stay there you look for all the different ways you can
00:52:15.340bring more people into the solution and you definitely want to build a surge capacity because
00:52:19.660there will come a point in time where some of the staff get sick regardless of what you do and maybe
00:52:24.940not from covid but too sick that you don't want them working in the long-term care home from
00:52:28.700pneumonia or some other type of illness that they catch so you got to have standby staff that are
00:52:34.300living in the quarantine center that go in the the challenge is if you don't even consider it
00:52:40.220you won't come up with solutions and so yes those people that that are primary caregivers and were
00:52:45.580not prepared to leave for for either ship okay but let me just jumping back into my head one of the
00:52:52.300things that i always talk about as well is right from the very start in february one of the first
00:52:58.140things that the federal government should have been focusing on was rapid testing somehow now
00:53:03.580Now we're hearing, oh, the federal government's got lots of rapid testing.
00:53:06.080Well, that sure wasn't the case back in March, April, May.
00:53:10.280The federal government simply said they weren't reliable enough.
00:53:33.580They can then go back, be retested at noon, finish their afternoon shift, and go home.
00:53:38.860If 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.
00:53:48.600We 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.
00:53:57.740They're not as good as the test we've got.
00:53:59.680Well, 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.
00:54:08.000But 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.
00:54:23.200it's the comorbidities attached to age and in particular multiple severe comorbidities but you
00:54:30.660won't hear health saying that they keep saying anyone can die of covid and they're correct
00:54:35.340anyone can but the risk of dying of covid or dying of heart disease for someone between 20 to 40
00:54:43.160four times greater of dying of heart disease so yes anyone can but you can also die in a car accident
00:54:48.820six times the chance we've got to put things in perspective and we're seeing that's intentionally
00:54:55.300not done instead we're seeing campaigns appear saying if you catch covid it might have long-term
00:55:01.140effects later in your life yes every disease could do that but the risk of it is tiny let me ask you
00:55:09.900about this david because i i'm beginning to understand how it would work when you're trying
00:55:14.560to manage the crisis the 30 days on 30 days off may have been the way to do it now we have other
00:55:20.000alternatives now we've got rapid testing which would mean we wouldn't have to quarantine staff
00:55:25.120necessarily as well if we absolutely okay i'm getting you now let's though talk about what the
00:55:30.240powers are in an emergency because this is what i feared all along i've had this sense that nobody
00:55:35.760wants to upset the unions that oh my gosh you can't manage this this way because you can't bring in
00:55:41.920people who are not unionized into this environment because the aupe will grieve it or the health
00:55:47.520sciences association or the nurses union like i i get the sense that in some ways collective
00:55:53.440bargaining agreements are stronger than the charter of rights and freedoms and so what am
00:55:57.360i missing here why is it that everybody is tippy-toeing around trying to make some of these
00:56:01.760decisions that that can solve the issues that you're raising in the way that you've described
00:56:06.880I can only take you back to the discussions I had during counterterrorism after September 11.
00:56:14.240I 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.
00:56:22.960If 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.
00:56:32.220And 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.
00:56:47.820If you bring people in, they will give you solutions.
00:56:51.400You don't throw the solutions at them.
00:56:53.400The emergency management process is bringing all the experts in and saying, how can we do this?
00:57:14.940And 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.
00:57:24.020and maybe wouldn't require someone with all of that training,
00:57:27.100but maybe they could be trained much quicker if they only did this portion of it.
00:57:30.960Those are the types of ideas that have been simply ignored.
00:57:34.000Well, it's actually, it brings it into clear focus as well.
00:57:37.700If you hire somebody whose job has principally been to protect Alberta Health Services and hospitals,
00:57:43.240I guess it's not really much surprise that all of the messaging has been around,
00:57:47.360we have to protect our health care system to the exclusion of everything else.
00:57:51.140And so now I guess here's the question.
00:57:52.980how do you move from the situation we've got ourselves into into the structure that you're
00:57:59.200describing i mean one of the things i noticed when i saw emergency response is that there are
00:58:03.560different periods there's sort of the critical 48 hour periods and then you're into another zone
00:58:07.540where you're doing your repair but there you ultimately move into recovery and that's we
00:58:12.260don't seem to be talking about when do we move into recovery and hand off decision making to
00:58:18.020someone else is is that is that the next step and how would you even do that transition now that
00:58:22.480got so locked in to having dr dina hinshaw at the helm of all this to me that that that is
00:58:30.080the challenge that started in february because the very first day you recognize that there is
00:58:37.280the potential for an emergency and we didn't declare here till the 15th of march all the time
00:58:43.120up to then what we should have been doing is going the worst case scenario is this is coming here
00:58:48.320we see who's most at risk we develop a plan for that but the minute you admit that there's a
00:58:54.680probability that this is going to come to you remember that written plan i told you right in
00:59:00.540that written plan is all the phases and the phase of recovery is written right into that plan and
00:59:07.360you have a team starting led by emergency management working across every sector of your
00:59:13.160economy developing the recovery plan and you issue it there's annexes to the main plan one for long
00:59:20.800term care homes one for the actual hospitals one for for our energy industry one for our livestock
00:59:25.860energy industry and we'll talk more about livestock don't let me forget to come back to livestock and
00:59:31.640and transmission of virus but what we've not seen is all the auxiliary plans because we never had
00:59:37.500the first plan but yes if i was running emergency management in march i would have taken one of my
00:59:45.060best planners and and they're actually planners they're experts in running the planning process
00:59:49.200and said tell me who you need to write the recovery plan and i would have the the how do
00:59:56.760we get out of this i mean how do we ship it should be the premier with an emergency council which is
01:00:02.500made up of the key ministers and their deputies with the emergency management agency working as
01:00:08.700the coordinating across those probably 10 or 11 ministries with the deputies and you say to the
01:00:14.700deputies I need a person who's an expert in this this and this they're going to go work on the
01:00:19.200recovery team and you look at each one of the deputies you tell them the expertise you need
01:00:23.240and the deputy provides that staff to you and they go up and they write the recovery plan
01:00:28.620That recovery plan should already be written.
01:00:31.220I'm hoping it is, but nobody's talked about it and nobody's heard about it, at least in Alberta.
01:00:36.940That 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.
01:00:49.420Well, I don't think we should ever have gotten into this situation.
01:00:52.180but now if the premiers in each of the provinces don't re-establish and stuff they formed these
01:00:58.420special councils or these special war rooms or these special it's not the deputies of their
01:01:02.900departments it's these outsiders that they brought in and put in the little group i would have brought
01:01:08.020some insiders in i would have brought in the alberta electric system operator the head of it
01:01:12.740and said i need you here because i don't want the power grid to go down i would have brought
01:01:16.500in a couple of people for natural gas distribution but they would work inside one of the planning
01:01:21.860teams. The actual council should be the deputy ministers and the ministers of the 10 or 11 or 12
01:01:27.760critical departments and on a daily basis the EMO briefs them and the premier on what's happened
01:01:35.620in the last 24 and what's going to happen in the next 24. So having made the error in putting
01:01:43.040calling this a public health emergency and putting a doctor in charge instead of calling it a public
01:01:48.000emergency and putting head of emergency management in charge what is the mechanism for the premier
01:01:53.740to take this power back and to reassign the roles like i get the sense that he feels powerless now
01:02:00.320that he's got to wait until dr dina hinshaw tells him we can move on to the next step at what point
01:02:06.520do the politicians step in and say no we're moving to the next stage and is there even a mechanism
01:02:11.040for that okay so regardless of the province the premier's in charge and so to say that any person
01:02:18.380working in the civil service isn't accountable to the uh to the premier in my opinion just means
01:02:25.760lack of leadership the premier can immediately say today is the day we pivot he re-establishes
01:02:32.360a new emergency council based on the deputies that that the emo probably tried to suggest to
01:02:39.180him back in March. I don't know if they did or not, but they should have. And if not, he should
01:02:45.240have turned to them today and asked the EMO, what should my emergency council look like in terms of
01:02:51.160which ministries? With that in place, and that would take less than 20 minutes,
01:02:58.620you then establish that council and the EMO says, okay, that eight-point plan that I had the last
01:03:06.480two slides. First, we're going to make sure that we've protected our seniors. Second, we're going
01:03:12.000to make sure that we've put in place the system to ensure that all our other critical infrastructure
01:03:17.180is taken care of. He's going to turn to the Public Affairs Bureau and say, work with the EMO
01:03:22.060to ensure that we have confidence-based messaging. And in my slide package, it's about two slides
01:03:27.060down, there's a complete list of what that would look like. The Premier has the tools,
01:03:32.540He 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.
01:03:54.380it shouldn't be a daily brief by the moh it should be a daily brief by the premier until we walk our
01:04:01.040way out of the emergency all right um laura i know is keeping track of when these emergency
01:04:07.300orders ended i think they were supposed to come to an end today do we know if they renewed the
01:04:13.060emergency orders or have they expired do you know the answer to that david i don't know but it's not
01:04:19.340important because you can cancel an order at any time i'm just wondering if they renewed it if they
01:04:25.420renewed it under the cert under this existing model then it's locking down to continuing to
01:04:30.300keep dr hinshaw in charge of making the decisions let me ask you one more um aspect to this though
01:04:35.580so i i have this suspicion i don't know if it's true i'm just going to put it out there though
01:04:40.140i have this suspicion that the federal government has put pressure on our premier he did a 180 in
01:04:46.700November and it was so out of character and I don't know all the reasons behind that and then
01:04:50.620he has just been locked in to the position that he's taken since then. I thought he was very
01:04:54.540reasonable and very balanced up until about mid-November and I don't know what happened
01:04:58.540but when you start hearing the problems that we're having with vaccine procurement,
01:05:03.900the danger of not getting our fair share, the threat of potentially having the federal
01:05:09.180government step in with an emergency response of its own and declaring a federal order,
01:05:13.980the fact that they're jailing people at the airports for three days they've demonstrated
01:05:18.780that they're prepared to take power into their own hands here regardless of what it is that we
01:05:22.860want to do i mean i'm just trying to understand the dynamic that happens between the provincial
01:05:27.820and federal government are we even allowed to do what you're saying now that the federal
01:05:32.300government is also locked into having public health lead this okay let's be clear a pandemic
01:05:39.820is 99.9 percent in the hands of the provinces and so in my opinion this is up to the 13 premiers
01:05:48.380it is their job to shift and turn do i believe that the federal government has taken the role of
01:05:55.340chief in charge of supporting lockdowns absolutely i believe that our prime minister realized very
01:06:03.420quickly that handing out hundreds of millions of dollars to support the lockdown helped his
01:06:08.220poll numbers and i also believe that he's going to continue doing that and we saw very clearly
01:06:14.940early in the second wave him making public announcements that the premiers had to do
01:06:20.860quote unquote the right thing and by that he meant lock down longer harder and and faster and
01:06:31.340then he said things like federal funding will be withheld if you don't so yes i believe he became
01:06:37.820conspirator-in-chief later but the problem was is he had been given the model of lockdowns
01:06:44.540and and we use that word lockdown like like it's a thing but the biggest challenge that we have
01:06:50.460is to understand that those are non-primeceutical methods there are 15 or more of them and first
01:06:57.500time in history we didn't just use one or two and we didn't just use them for short periods of time
01:07:02.700to get over a little peak or a specific problem in a school we did it across the board no one ever
01:07:09.580first they were recommended not to be used we didn't just use them we used all of them and and
01:07:15.580it's incredible in my mind that a chief medical officer of health provincially would ever recommend
01:07:21.740that based on all the the knowledge that was put into that 2019 document into every one of
01:07:28.700our emergency plans so to be fair to the medical officers of health it's not their job to run a
01:07:34.460province they should never have been tasked with it and and to put the entire response to this
01:07:39.180pandemic on them in each of our 13 provinces and territories was a failure of leadership
01:07:44.620of the premiers once it's done it can be undone it's the same person that put them in charge can
01:07:50.780take the power back hey sorry i just want to mention uh dave you're frozen again i think
01:07:57.260i'll just stay frozen because the picture of me it looks like i care it looks awesome it's an
01:08:03.020inquisitive picture so let me continue then in this vein of if you were in charge because part
01:08:10.220of what i've noticed is that there's something new to be scared about every single time we find
01:08:17.420some progress in this in dealing with this uh this virus and this disease so for instance um
01:08:23.340initially it was we can't allow our hospitals to get overwhelmed well when that didn't happen
01:08:29.100then it's oh my goodness um we have variants and then when uh and now we're talking about well
01:08:37.340yeah we can look at the stats and see that older people are most at risk but then there's0.96
01:08:41.500long haulers we don't know what the long-term effects of the disease would be and it does0.99
01:08:46.780just seem and now we're also being told well yeah you get vaccinated but you're still going to have
01:08:51.500to wear masks and you're still going to have to be socially distanced and i i'm just trying to
01:08:56.140understand how if you were not a doctor and not not um panicked by some of these uncertainties
01:09:03.580how do you deal with these uncertainties like what if you happen to be wrong what if you open up and
01:09:08.380all of a sudden uk variant does end up soaring cases up to 10 000 per day and 3500 people in
01:09:14.380hospital as they predicted a month ago how do you deal with that level of uncertainty so that you
01:09:19.340can move in a certain direction and not find yourself facing the worst case scenario.
01:09:25.620So let me start back with the ever escalating campaign affair. And then I'll come to the
01:09:30.860second part of your question. How do you deal with it? To me, the entire concept that we had
01:09:37.100to protect our medical system and that that was the only thing. When you make an aim in a pandemic,
01:09:43.100The first aim you always have is to minimize the impact on the pandemic on your jurisdiction.
01:36:52.720you've got people who are now so entrenched in the approach that we have taken. I guess,
01:36:57.700what do we need to do? What's the call to action? I've mentioned, I think that there's some role to
01:37:02.440put pressure on the municipalities, but you've said that they don't really have the legal status
01:37:07.020to do anything differently. I mean, I suppose they could put enough pressure on the government
01:37:12.700that the government might start opening up regionally. Is that the solution? I mean,
01:37:16.340they've done that in Ontario. I can't imagine why we can't do it here. Why can't we go back
01:37:20.260to the kind of relaunch map that we had last summer where if you've got below 50 cases you're
01:37:25.220open you got 50 to 100 you got enhanced measures it's only when you get over 100 that you end up
01:37:30.180with the stronger measures i've been trying to find some way now that we've gotten to this point
01:37:36.400of easing us back into the kind of freedom that we that we should that we should be having i just
01:37:43.140don't know that you can end all restrictions all at once i just don't know that the public is there
01:37:46.680they've been so terrified so tell me how we get out of this okay so so two parts of an answer
01:37:54.840the first answer is this has to come from the premier's office in every province in canada
01:38:00.680the only way a premier will change their opinion at this point is by the public telling them they
01:38:07.400have to so my call to everyone who's watching is first of all every one of you call the premier's
01:38:16.440office and demand the eight-step process and so i'm going to go to that next but number one to
01:38:23.880actually call the premier's office number two call your mla and tell them how unhappy you are
01:38:29.800and that their reelection depends on getting out of this mess so this is a political process
01:38:36.600you have to call the premier and you have to call the mla and yes you can send them an email and
01:38:41.720And 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.
01:38:50.600So no matter what province you're in, because I know this is being transmitted, in fact, as far away as Australia,
01:38:56.220I know people are watching in Australia and they have the same attitude towards lockdowns as we do, non-pharmaceutical measures.
01:39:04.040You have to get the politicians' attention.
01:45:05.800he held huge covid parties they had mass gatherings if you look at the actual case
01:45:11.400count curves for the uk which has done severe lockdowns and belarus you can't see a difference
01:45:19.240between the line of the two graphs so using this whole idea is is the flaw so so if the premier
01:45:28.360actually says we've got the hospital capacity we're not worried about it catching covid is
01:45:35.080really serious for some people and you know what we've taken care of them we've taken care of our
01:45:39.960seniors in some cases we fully vaccinated some long-term care homes we're going to use the uh
01:45:45.560the the uh uh rapid testing and the ones that are left we're going to make sure that we can
01:45:51.640take solid care of our seniors in long-term care homes 73 of all the deaths in canada
01:45:57.480we're going to take care of our seniors that are living at large we're going to offer them
01:46:01.160if they wish to come into a government-provided very, very nice quarantine center until we get
01:46:07.160them vaccinated. And now it's only until we get them vaccinated, right? It's not for the second
01:46:11.840wave, all the rest of that. You build this whole confidence. You don't talk about case counts ever
01:46:19.780again because we know that what we're doing doesn't affect case counts. So if there's bumps
01:46:25.320and hollows fine ultimately they go away do you do i think there's a third wave coming absolutely
01:46:32.360correct but i i think there's bumps and hollows in the spring the third wave is going to start in
01:46:37.240the middle of october just like it always does and third wave is going to have some variants in it and
01:46:42.040it's going to go up exponentially until december unless we've got everybody vaccinated appropriately
01:46:48.840for those variants so we so we've got to get up are we going to do this all over again and that's
01:46:53.400what i fear i think you're right i see that drew barnsey is on the line now drew barnes of course
01:46:57.960is an outspoken mla along with angela pitt who's been calling for a reduction in restrictions i'm
01:47:03.560glad that he's tuning in on this he's been quite a voice for freedom even though it's in this
01:47:09.240environment perilous to do so but he's wondering because i know that there's a step in the actual
01:47:14.520pandemic plan about the economy he's wondering what steps you'd advise albertans to take to help
01:47:19.800free enterprise restart the economy and to focus on the needs of their families is there i mean is
01:47:25.080this is this something that will happen organically on its own and you just get out of the way or are
01:47:30.200there things that emergency planning should do to to uh to help things along to to kick start
01:47:37.000re-kickstart the economy what emergency management does is brings together the smartest people in
01:47:43.880Alberta and asks them to help build a plan. They run a planning process with those smartest people
01:47:51.560in Alberta across every one of those economies. And so in that one week period that I'm talking
01:47:57.480about, there should be a group that is focused 100% on the economy, breaking it out into the
01:48:02.680appropriate tubes. And I would suggest to you that places like tourism and small business
01:48:07.080deserve a special nod in the planning process. They should be at the front of the line
01:48:11.320because those are ones that have been really hit and restaurants and bars and all the rest of them
01:48:17.540that have been actually physically shut. And so you bring them in the room and you say,
01:48:22.960what's it going to take, folks? And you bring them all the best minds across all the different
01:48:28.300sectors. You build options across each of the sectors and you present them to the bringer.
01:48:33.740And the bringer says, I like option A, B, C, D, E. And then this one, I'll go for option A and that
01:48:38.660went for b and and you get the whole idea from the people most involved the one thing that i
01:48:44.640there's regulators in these sectors that tend to be from government right they should be in the
01:48:49.960room too but you ask the actual people and you run a planning process because it's important that you
01:48:56.420don't just hear what they have to say because you're allowed to disagree with them and go back
01:49:01.440and forth until you come to a plan that you agree on with each other does it need money from
01:49:06.060government a lot of cases probably not what it needs from government is for them to get out of
01:49:10.740the way in some cases it will need money from government because they've been so crushed they
01:49:15.220can't recover on their own and they might need a little help for a short period of time i'm not a
01:49:20.240favor of long-term supports but i'm certainly in favor of short-term supports but that's dave
01:49:24.640redmond's opinion dave redmond is the coordinator he runs the process he hears what people says
01:49:30.040and we present the options of the premier and the premier has a huge problem because we're going to
01:49:35.180need more money in mental health we're going to need more money in the education system we're
01:49:39.140going to need more money to to recover the health care of the people that have the long-term there's
01:49:44.420going to be money going in every direction and I'm talking large pieces for things to fix the
01:49:49.740problems we caused by by lockdown but there's going to have to be some support to help industry
01:49:55.720reopen and and so I'm not saying just to open up and go wild and crazy I'm saying bring them
01:50:01.860together and develop a plan with them and do it sector by sector and let's get get their input
01:50:06.580and then we can see whether or not there's enough money to do what they ask for or if they're just
01:50:11.180saying get out of the way then we say okay option a is get out of the way let me let me um get your
01:50:17.040response to the premier because whenever i've posed this to him he always bats down my argument
01:50:22.340as some sort of libertarian talking point and not practical and i i put to him at the point i was
01:50:29.780to make is exactly the one you made with belarus is that what didn't matter when if you look at
01:50:35.460florida south dakota sweden belarus the the virus had its way with us whether you locked down or
01:50:41.940whether you didn't that was the point i was trying to make to him and his response back was if we'd
01:50:46.980done what south dakota did and had their death rate we would have had x many more albertans die
01:50:52.100if we'd done what sweden did we would have had x many more albertans die and i i understand uh
01:50:58.340And 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.
01:51:05.120Certainly far better than in Quebec, where they were putting COVID-positive patients from hospitals into nursing homes and infecting everyone.
01:51:16.300But he's connected that somehow with the lockdown.
01:51:19.020And 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.
01:51:28.600Because 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,
01:51:37.520that is causing us, as we're, I guess, going about our business at the shopping mall or whatever,
01:51:43.040to inadvertently infect somebody who is a worker at a long-term care facility and they're taking
01:51:49.800it in. Therefore, the way to stop it from getting into long-term care is to lock us all down. That's
01:51:54.540the only thing I can understand about the argument. And I'm just wondering how you would
01:51:58.240dismantle all of that because it feels to me like there's something not logical about what
01:52:03.680they're putting forward, but I can't quite put my finger on how to challenge it to try to change
01:52:08.640some minds on it? It's very simple. Deaths, if you look at deaths and use deaths as the entire
01:52:19.020point, 96.1% of all deaths in Canada have been in seniors over the age of 60 with multiple
01:52:30.340comorbidities. In most cases, three or more. We're talking about really sick people.
01:52:38.640So 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.
01:53:00.160So you first of all have to disconnect the deaths from this idea that lockdowns caused less deaths.
01:53:07.900they didn't what caused the deaths was not quarantining our long-term care homes 73 of
01:53:16.780all deaths in canada happened because covid went into our long-term care homes locking down
01:53:23.420clearly didn't stop that right we killed over 20 000 canadians over 15 500 of them in long-term
01:53:34.140care homes because the staff went home at night and and so thinking that a lockdown would stop
01:53:40.380the staff from catching covet is a complete misnomer we know that it spreads through the
01:53:44.460community and lockdown communities and non-lockdown communities exactly the same we knew that before
01:53:50.460we've now got scientific studies saying that it happened again we learned the hard way
01:53:55.500so so the deaths aren't related to lockdowns so so 96.1 of the deaths are in seniors with
01:54:02.940multiple severe coma, average age of death, 84. So the seniors with multiple comorbidities that
01:54:09.400are living out in society should have been offered a safe quarantined area to go to in a very humane
01:54:15.740and loving manner. And then you've dealt with the deaths. The rest of us have more chance of dying
01:54:23.740of heart attack than we do of COVID in every age group, including seniors over the age of 60
01:54:38.660that I've heard many times from doctors is,
01:54:41.380yeah, but if you look at the comorbidities,
01:54:43.420it's cardiovascular disease and it's diabetes
01:54:45.680and it's heart disease and 75% of our society,
01:54:51.160maybe it was over 75% even in the 40 plus age group
01:54:57.420have a predisposition to some of those conditions like the notion think the notion there is that
01:55:04.680you're just as at risk as a 40 year old with diabetes of dying as a 90 year old with three
01:55:10.480conditions and i don't know if that's what the statistics show so how do you dismantle that
01:55:14.380argument because i think what they're now trying to do is trying to make it as if everybody who
01:55:19.640has a pre-existing condition is equally at risk and it's simply not true if you look at let's use
01:55:27.360alberta statistics the government of canada hasn't produced statistics on on comorbidities but several
01:55:32.800of the province have well they have i think i've seen you you didn't you print them yeah that was
01:55:38.240the alberta stats okay yeah okay okay 70 had three or more comorbidities now what do you do for the
01:55:46.800people that weren't in and most of them were concentrated in your long-term care homes so
01:55:51.680let's talk about the ones that weren't we have family practice doctors they know their patients
01:55:58.600really really well they know the ones that are severely ill who have two or three comorbidities
01:56:05.840they also know the ones that have a well-managed single comorbidity so to say everybody's got a
01:56:12.380comorbidity as some of the the doctors that are on tv are saying it's a red herring you got to
01:56:18.920watch for the red herrings because they are trying to sell the campaign of fear to justify
01:56:23.420lockdowns. Yes, if that one comorbidity is really severe, their family practitioners would know.
01:56:30.780So instead of going for this blanket, we got to keep everyone from catching COVID,
01:56:37.340which doesn't work, even if they wanted to say that, it doesn't work. We should have been working
01:56:42.960with the family practitioners across our province saying we need to know from you who are most at
01:56:49.520risk how many have three how many have two right start with three and how many have four right and
01:56:56.880work your way down that aren't living in long-term care and gone immediately to offer their families
01:57:02.400an opportunity to do some kind of an isolation quarantine system or even do it at home if one
01:57:08.960family member wanted to stay at home with them and and and there was a family situation where
01:57:13.880they could do that safely there's so many options but we didn't even talk about them
01:57:19.600you bring the family practitioners in i don't know how many family practitioners i've talked to
01:57:24.640across canada who are madder than hell that they weren't part of this discussion to handle that
01:57:30.620comorbidity question right so so there yes there's lots of comorbidities out there but they're not
01:57:38.160severe. They're managed well. Someone who's on diabetes, who's completely managed, their risk
01:57:42.960of dying of COVID is pretty small compared to someone who's got diabetes, heart disease,
01:57:47.880and a pre-existing lung condition, right? Family practitioners know. Yes, exactly. One more reason
01:57:55.680to bring everybody in. Now, I know we said that we'd go for two hours and I think we're closing
01:57:59.520in on the final and Derek may want to have a final question, but I wonder if I can ask you
01:58:03.480kind of a philosophical question because it strikes me as strange that you as a military man
01:58:11.960who we think of as the law and order guy the ultimate law and order guy you talk more about
01:58:17.160rights and balance and restraint and having a really darn good reason to violate rights
01:58:23.360than any medical practitioner than any of our premiers than any of the people who are in charge
01:58:29.320of the public health response and what is it about your training and your discipline and your
01:58:34.000approach to this that has you caring about rights and no one else does okay um i'm going to answer
01:58:41.540it in a couple of parts first of all when i was officer in the army i trained my soldier on the
01:58:48.100charter of rights and freedoms it was my personal opinion okay and i have to say my personal opinion
01:58:54.540every officer in the army gets their commission from the governor general the queen
01:58:59.720So it's called the Queen's Commission.
01:59:02.640But 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,
01:59:12.600I believe that as a soldier, my number one responsibility was to defend Canadians because governments come and go.0.88
01:59:21.640Canadians, in my opinion, are different than anyone else in the world.
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02:09:20.480I also, though, the Western Standard, we're kind of new to the broadcast side.
02:09:24.860This is kind of a new frontier for us.
02:11:36.580My past life has left me with challenges.
02:11:41.440And 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.
02:11:54.140I have to deal with the issues that came from my career in the military and my time with the government of Alberta.
02:12:00.480And I have to take care of my wife and my children and my grandchildren.