The Fauci diaries have brought the abuses of the COVID regime back to the forefront for me this past week. I had pushed it all under after wrapping up the expanded version of the COVID book. I realize now that the effort to finish that book by the end of 2022 was cathartic. In some ways I wanted to have it all out and behind me, like most people did.
Reading the Fauci papers brought a great deal of it back, and has prompted me to think a few new things with the benefit of three and a half years of distance. [1]
The COVID experience was shockingly authoritarian and anti-human, notwithstanding its rhetoric and its claims about saving lives. The Fauci diaries confirm what many of us documented at the time: school closures ordered by telephone and later denied, mask guidance the man himself privately found indefensible, transmission claims sustained in public months after they had collapsed in private. [2] Hardly any different from what we saw in Canada.
The abuses notwithstanding, I feel fortunate to have been in Alberta at the time. That may be easy for me to say, given that I was neither a jailed preacher nor one of the persecuted Coutts Albertans. Pastors sat in remand cells in this province for holding church services. [3] Men from Coutts sat in remand for years awaiting trial on charges a jury ultimately rejected in their gravest part. [4] Alberta’s record contains real casualties, and gratitude must never become amnesia about them.
Fortunate ….because Alberta is unique in this country, and the COVID contrast demonstrates it. The difference can be measured.
The measurement
Many deny that Alberta possesses a distinct political culture. The denial usually arrives dressed as Laurentian sophistication: Albertans, we are told, vote like other Canadians, consume the same media, and hold roughly the same opinions, plus a pickup truck. Some of us have long argued otherwise. The Alberta disposition toward government, and toward personal autonomy in particular, differs in kind, formed by settlement patterns, by an economy that rewards self-reliance, and by a century of instruction in what Ottawa’s benevolence costs. [5]
None of this means one must be Albertan to care about liberty or individual conscience, or that these commitments are exclusively Albertan. Canadians elsewhere hold them, sometimes at real personal cost. The point concerns critical mass: the concentration of a value sufficient to make it part of a political culture, to give it electoral weight and institutional consequence, and that concentration does not seem present in the rest of the country. The objection that such values exist elsewhere does no harm to the claim, any more than the millions of French speakers around the world who are not Quebecois disprove that the French language sits at the heart of being Quebecois. A political culture rests on what a community holds in common and acts upon together; a monopoly on the value is never required.
Skeptics demand a test. The pandemic supplied one. Every province ran a restriction regime, often inhuman and brutal. Every premier made the same category of decisions: ditch the emergency plans, closures, mandates, passports, curfews in one case. The regimes varied in severity, and the political consequences varied with the political culture that received them. So here is the test in a single sentence.
Alberta was the only province in Canada where a premier lost his job as a direct political consequence of his government’s COVID regime.
The ledger, province by province
Consider the record from west to east. In British Columbia, John Horgan resigned in 2022, citing his health after cancer treatment, at high popularity; his government’s regime cost him nothing. [6] In Saskatchewan, Scott Moe imposed a vaccine passport in October 2021 and survived comfortably, winning again in 2024. His survival is instructive rather than inconvenient, and I return to it below.
In Manitoba, Brian Pallister resigned in September 2021 amid collapsed polling; pandemic fatigue contributed, but the proximate storm was the backlash to his remarks on residential schools, and the anger at his regime cut in both directions at once, some punishing him for a catastrophic third wave, others for the restrictions themselves. No single directional line runs from the COVID regime to his exit, and his party’s 2023 defeat mostly turned on healthcare and Wab Kinew’s appeal. [7]
Ontario is where the thesis should fail if it were false. Doug Ford imposed some of the longest school closures on the continent and won renewed majorities in 2022 and 2025. Quebec is stronger still. François Legault ran the harshest regime in North America, including a nighttime curfew enforced by police checkpoints, and voters rewarded him with a subsequent landslide in October 2022. [8] His later troubles concern software procurement, immigration, and the economy; none concern the curfew.
In New Brunswick, Blaine Higgs called a snap election in September 2020 and won a majority on the strength of his pandemic management; his 2024 defeat turned on Policy 713, healthcare, and caucus revolt against his style. In Nova Scotia, Stephen McNeil retired voluntarily at the peak of “stay the blazes home” popularity, and his successor lost in 2021 to a Progressive Conservative promising more health spending, with no anti-restriction dimension whatever. Prince Edward Island returned Dennis King with a landslide in 2023. In Newfoundland and Labrador, Dwight Ball announced his exit in February 2020, before the pandemic mattered, and Andrew Furey won in 2021. [9]
Where COVID regimes moved votes at all outside Alberta, they moved them toward the premiers who imposed them. Legault, Higgs in 2020, and arguably Ford were rewarded for stringency. The Canadian norm was gratitude for restriction, though less in the Prairies.
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The Alberta exception
Jason Kenney announced his resignation on 18 May 2022 after receiving 51.4 per cent in his party’s leadership review: 17,638 members voted yes, 16,660 voted no, and a premier who had said fifty per cent plus one would suffice concluded that the number before him would not. [10] Scraping by is never good enough here.
The line from the COVID regime to that number is short and well lit. The revolt began with the restrictions. Sixteen of his own MLAs signed a public letter against renewed measures in April 2021. The caucus expelled Drew Barnes and Todd Loewen the following month for saying aloud what much of the membership believed. [11] In September 2021, facing a fourth wave, Kenney introduced the Restrictions Exemption Program, a vaccine passport by another name, after months of promising Albertans he would never impose one, and apologized on television for having been wrong about his Open for Summer. [12]
Arrogance compounded the breach. Kenney had already placed protesting Albertans beyond the pale in the spring of 2021; I wrote about the insult at the time. [13] By March 2022, on a recording of a staff meeting leaked to the press, he dismissed his internal opponents as lunatics trying to take over the asylum, as kooky people, as bugs drawn to a bright light, and he refused to apologize for any of it. [14] He wagered openly that he could trade the base that built the party for a new and tamer one if the old base no longer wanted him. [15]
The passport broke the base’s trust in a way no fiscal quarrel ever could. His polling never recovered, the party’s nomination lists filled with his opponents, and the review vote followed.
Then came the part no other province can match. The contest to replace him was fought explicitly on COVID accountability. Danielle Smith won the leadership and, at her first press conference as premier on 11 October 2022, called the unvaccinated “the most discriminated against group that I’ve ever witnessed in my lifetime” and pledged to amend the Alberta Human Rights Act accordingly, [16] although that did not happen. [17] The membership removed a premier for the regime and then selected his successor on a promise to repudiate it. Political scientists call this a revealed preference. Albertans call it Tuesday. Since Ralph Klein, no premier has served two full consecutive terms in office. [18]
The objection, taken seriously
Careful observers will object that Kenney’s fall was multivariate, and they hold real cards. Duane Bratt argued at the time that the caucus revolt was “not about COVID-19” so much as Kenney’s top-down governance, with the pandemic merely magnifying tensions. [19] Jared Wesley’s focus groups found that Albertans had simply tired of a personality they once found useful. [20] The scholarly volume Blue Storm spreads the causation wider still: the energy war room, the Keystone XL write-down, the curriculum fight, the war with the doctors, Sky Palace, the December 2020 staff vacations. [21]
Each of these grievances was real. None of them survives as an alternative explanation. Kenney’s style was largely a constant; he told his party’s founding convention in 2018, “I hold the pen,” and won sixty-three seats months later. A constant cannot explain a change, and what changed after 2019 was the regime’s form. The two flagship “non-COVID” scandals, the Hawaii vacations and the Sky Palace dinner, were both scandals of COVID hypocrisy; they belong in the regime’s column, not against it. And the war room annoyed left-wing columnists, the curriculum annoyed teachers, the doctors’ fight annoyed doctors and became connected to COVID. Only the restriction regime united rural members, urban libertarians, dissenting MLAs, and tens of thousands of new party members into a single coalition with one demand.
The honest formulation is this: the COVID regime was the necessary condition and the organizing grievance, the pole around which every other complaint may have arranged itself. Remove it, and Jason Kenney is premier through 2023.
Saskatchewan proves the point from the other direction. Scott Moe faced the identical regional pressures, imposed a passport of his own, and survived. The difference was posture. Moe never insulted or lectured his base, publicly sympathized with the truckers, and buried his passport in February 2022 with a confession that it had “effectively created two classes of citizens.” [22]
Kenney fought his political culture (just last week he was still praising the vaxx on Twitter for its supposed effectiveness in saving lives) [23]; Moe bent to his. One premier formed government again; the other watched the review count from Spruce Meadows. Similar pressures, opposite outcomes, and the deciding variable was the relationship between a leader and the disposition of his electors. That is what political culture means.
There was no new base to acquire.
What followed the firing
The distinction did not end with the leadership review. In July 2023, in Ingram v Alberta, the Court of King’s Bench found the CMOH orders ultra vires the Public Health Act because cabinet, and never the statutory decision-maker, had made the final calls. [24] Candour requires the second half: the court also held that, had the orders been validly enacted, their limits on Charter rights would have been justified. [25]
That sequence tells the judicial story of the period. During the emergency, the courts failed massively, from Queen’s Bench to the Supreme Court, deferring to the orders while the orders ran. The Chief Justice of Canada himself, with convoy litigation alive in the system, described the protest outside his own court as “the beginning of anarchy where some people have decided to take other citizens hostage”; thirteen lawyers complained to the Canadian Judicial Council, and the complaint died at the screening stage. [26]
Relief on the law arrived only after the danger had passed: Ingram in 2023, on vires rather than rights, and in January 2024 the Federal Court’s finding that invoking the Emergencies Act had been unreasonable. [27] The courts, it seems, are waking up. They slept through the fire. The correction that mattered came from elsewhere.
Alberta struck the Manning panel to review its public health emergency governance, the only province to commission such an examination of its own conduct. [28] In 2024, the legislature amended the Alberta Bill of Rights to entrench medical consent. [29] Accountability arrived through party democracy and statute, through the political culture itself, rather than through judges defending Albertans’ rights and freedoms.
The same culture marked the national resistance. The trucker protest was no exclusive Alberta invention, and its grievances were federal. Yet its leadership carried a heavy Prairie and Alberta imprint, Tamara Lich of Medicine Hat foremost, and the legal defence of the protesters has been substantially an Alberta production, from the Calgary-based organization that helped pay for Alberta counsel in the Ottawa courtrooms. [30] Coutts, with all its cost, was Alberta’s own.
One irony completes the picture. Among the premiers, the loudest objector to the invocation of the Emergencies Act was Kenney, who called it unnecessary and disproportionate and announced the only provincial court challenge against it. [31] The instinct belonged to his province; the timing belonged to him. Too little, too late.
What comes next
None of this settles whether Alberta’s regime was gentler in its worst moments; a jailed pastor would rightly dispute any such claim. What it settles is narrower and more important. When the emergency passed, only one political community in this country presented the bill to their leader. Ten provinces ran the experiment. One returned a clear verdict.
That verdict is the datum. A political culture that treats personal autonomy as a condition of legitimate government, rather than a generous concession from it, behaves differently when government forgets.
The rest of the country largely thanked its restrictors; many still do. Alberta fired hers.
In the coming weeks I will turn from diagnosis to prevention. The Fauci diaries show how the machinery of emergency runs when nobody can stop it. The next question is how to build effective brakes, given the massive failure of the courts during COVID: not only what statutes, what sunset clauses, what personal liability for officials, and what constitutional protections would make a repetition impossible, but what parts of the culture and civil society to activate when all these fail.
Alberta has begun that work. It remains unfinished.
More on that soon.
Endnotes
[1] U.S. Senate HSGAC document releases of 24-27 July 2026; Fauci testimony of 29 July 2026.
[2] Diary entries of 15 March 2020 (pp. 55-56), 5 May 2021 (p. 727), 18 July 2021 (p. 811); citations per the 31 July 2026 Haultain brief.
[3] Pastor James Coates, GraceLife Church, remanded February-March 2021; Pastor Tim Stephens, Fairview Baptist, jailed June 2021.
[4] Coutts trials: jury acquittals on conspiracy to commit murder, August 2024, with convictions on lesser counts.
[5] The argument is developed across the Haultain corpus; see also Cooper and Navarro-Genie on the pandemic state.
[6] Horgan resignation announcement, June 2022, citing health.
[7] Pallister resignation, September 2021; Manitoba PC defeat, October 2023.
[8] Quebec general election, 3 October 2022, CAQ 90 seats.
[9] New Brunswick 2020 and 2024; Nova Scotia 2021; PEI 2023; Newfoundland and Labrador 2020-2021.
[10] CBC News, 18-19 May 2022; Globe and Mail, 18 May 2022. Vote totals per party announcement.
[11] Sixteen-MLA open letter, April 2021; Barnes and Loewen expelled 13 May 2021.
[12] REP announced 15 September 2021; Kenney: “it is now clear that we were wrong, and for that I apologize.”
[13] Marco Navarro-Genie, “Kenney places Albertans ‘beyond the pale’,” Haultain Research, April-May 2021.
[14] Leaked recording of a 22 March 2022 staff meeting, reported by CBC News (24 March) and the Globe and Mail (25 March): “The lunatics are trying to take over the asylum. And I’m not going to let them”; “kooky people”; “a bright light attracts a few bugs.” Kenney declined to apologize on 25 March 2022.
[15] Marco Navarro-Genie, “Kenney may be down, but not out,” Haultain Research.
[16] Globe and Mail and CBC News, 11-12 October 2022.
[17] Vaccination status was never added to the Alberta Human Rights Act; the 2024 reforms proceeded instead through the Alberta Bill of Rights.
[18] Premiers since Klein: Stelmach, Redford, Hancock, Prentice, Notley, Kenney, Smith. None has completed two full consecutive terms.
[19] Duane Bratt, quoted in CBC News, May 2022 (“this is not about COVID-19”).
[20] Jared Wesley, quoted in Canada’s National Observer profile of Kenney.
[21] Bratt et al., eds., Blue Storm: The Rise and Fall of Jason Kenney’s United Conservative Party (University of Calgary Press, 2023).
[22] Government of Saskatchewan news release, 8 February 2022; Moe remarks as reported by CBC and Global.
[23] Kenney’s recent social media defence of the vaccines.
[24] Ingram v Alberta (Chief Medical Officer of Health), 2023 ABKB 453, at para 3.
[25] Ibid., Charter analysis.
[26] Richard Wagner, interview with Le Devoir, published 9 April 2022; quote as reported in English-language coverage of the interview. Thirteen lawyers, including Bruce Pardy and Karen Selick, complained to the Canadian Judicial Council on 16 May 2022; the CJC dismissed the complaint at the screening stage as not concerning judicial conduct.
[27] Canadian Frontline Nurses v Canada (Attorney General), 2024 FC 42 (Mosley J), 23 January 2024: the invocation of the Emergencies Act was unreasonable and ultra vires.
[28] Final Report of the Public Health Emergencies Governance Review Panel (Manning panel), November 2023.
[29] Alberta Bill of Rights Amendment Act, 2024.
[30] Lich (Medicine Hat) and Barber (Swift Current, Saskatchewan); the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms, Calgary; Alberta counsel including Keith Wilson KC and Eva Chipiuk.
[31] Global News, 19 February 2022: Kenney announced Alberta would file a court challenge, calling the invocation “an unnecessary and disproportionate measure that can violate civil liberties, invades provincial jurisdiction and creates a very dangerous precedent for the future.”