Announcing one’s top priority after the election is manipulatively undemocratic. The unstated subtext is that Calgarians need not bother debating the climate emergency Gondek wants to impose on them. She knows what’s best for Calgarians. Even before taking the oath of office, the new mayor gave herself the authority to declare war on the city’s most beneficial industry without a real mandate for “a bold move like that.”

In the first week of October alone, the executive, the judicial and the medical bureaucracy failed Albertans again. The torqued blaming and punishing of the unvaxxed, Justice Germain’s offensive decision compelling speech to preacher Pawlowsky, and the naked attempt to manipulate the tragic death of young Nathanael Spitzer are all bold demonstrations of power still eroding trust.

My point is, extrapolating from the attitudes and acrimony expressed nowadays, further stoked by our authorities’ inflammatory rhetoric and restrictive policies, I am no longer so confident that some number of Canadians wouldn’t be okay with it if the worst-case interpretation were true—especially should breakthrough cases spike or new variants emerge.

People clamoured for and embraced the certificates or passports while still making fun of conspiracy theorists, apparently unaware of or indifferent to the fact that these technologies were literally the lynchpin of many conspiracy theories that long claimed that the pandemic was part of a plot to usher in the surveillance state and worse. I am aghast that with respect to the probable non-natural origin of the virus and now the vaccine passports I find myself discovering that the kooky crazy whacko nutjobs weren’t totally off-base about everything. I really wish they had been. Everybody: Please stop making the conspiracy theorists look good.

We all remember being told that the vaccines would grant us immunity, don’t we? Plenty of simplified pictorials and condescending cartoons told us so. “And now you’re immune!” People proudly declared that they took the shot to protect other people, adopting Facebook badges that smugly boasted “You’re Welcome!”

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau may be using Indigenous Canadians as human props to get their votes, and the votes of Canadians for whom better treatment of Indigenous people is important.

…for all that is being said about Alberta today, infected Albertans have so far survived COVID-19 at three times the rate of Quebeckers, and nearly at twice the rate of the average Canadian.

It is not people declining vaccination who are putting us in the gravest danger. It’s those who, perhaps fewer in numbers, continue to dream of, and push for, a global eradication of SARS-CoV-2. They drive the policies that subject us to lockdown cycles. They are far more dangerous than the virus itself.

Summer arrived and the inmates of Alberta’s province-wide quarantine camp soon received back from your government a few of their rights in the form of temporary privileges, though you did not call them that in your Open for Summer program.  Autumn is barely upon us and those privileges are already being withdrawn.

The conservative movement is fractured, to say the least. Brokerage, pragmatism, regionalism and old party cleavages have left the conservative intellect lost in the proverbial forest. Let’s heed the lessons of the past and not blame the usual suspects should the CPC fail to deliver voter growth in the next election.