Some Of The Inmates

Danielle Smith has fired Alberta's chief public health officer. Graham Smith writes that Canadians should pay attention to what Smith is doing:

If you can’t wait until the next movie in the Fast and Furious franchise, might I suggest you start watching Alberta politics.

Premier Danielle Smith is taking Albertans on a white-knuckle ride that, depending on your perspective, promises to be an exhilarating joyride to freedom or a maddened race into a brick wall.

Albertans should buckle up. So should the rest of Canada. Nobody will be a bystander to Smith’s erratic driving. Her tactics are aimed not just at her home province but could yet see the rest of the country involved in a pile-up involving the Constitution or health care.

Smith took aim at more people than Dr. Deena Henshaw:

On Thursday, Smith once again stomped on the gas, this time by dismissing the entire board of Alberta Health Services and replacing it with an official administrator.

“We need a health-care system that meets our growing demands and to take action to improve access and today we are doing just that,” said Smith in a comment bereft of any mention of the just-fired board.

Smith said she is simply trying to fix a broken health-care system. While it’s true Alberta’s health-care system needs improvement, Smith appears motivated as much by revenge as by reconstruction.

She won the recent United Conservative Party leadership race after promising to punish health officials who, in her expressed view, violated Albertans’ rights and freedoms by imposing mandates during successive waves of the COVID pandemic.

Smith pledged never to reimpose any pandemic-related mandates, even a mask mandate. In fact, she wants her justice minister to take steps to remove the power of school boards to impose their own mask mandates.

No province has reintroduced a mask mandate, despite a wave of respiratory illnesses, particularly among children, flooding emergency rooms across the country.

But no province has slammed the door on future mandates as deliberately and loudly as Premier Smith. While Ontario Premier Doug Ford has recommended people “wear a mask every time possible,” Smith will only say people can decide for themselves.

“I think it’s important that we not cause an overreaction or a state of panic,” she said this week, as schools reported massive rates of absenteeism due to illness.

Smith’s rhetoric has boxed not just her into a corner politically but every Albertan who sees a mandate not as a restriction but as a protection.

Clearly, some of the inmates have escaped from the asylum.

Image: The TorontoStar