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Alberta

No lockdowns in Alberta if Emergency Management Agency was in charge – Former Executive Director David Redman

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As Canadians look south of the border it’s obvious different state governments have taken different approaches in the battle against Covid 19.  Some states have been opened entirely for months while in others, children haven’t been to school in an entire year.  But which approach is better when it comes to reducing Covid cases?  The State of Florida has been open during the entire second wave while New York State is just beginning to lift lockdowns. Despite the different approaches in Florida and New York, in both states cases are down to a third or less of where they were in early January.  Death rates are also down by two thirds since January in both states.

Alberta’s approach could have been vastly different too.  Premier Jason Kenney has the tough job of trying to balance the freedom to gather, to work and to worship, with the mandate to protect the health of Albertans by isolating us from teammates, workmates, and friendships.  As the ebb and flow of restrictions continues one year into the Covid experience, a growing number of people are convinced lockdowns are not an effective response.   But what is the alternative?

One person qualified to answer this difficult question is David Redman.  Redman is former Executive Director of the Alberta Emergency Management Agency.   Before that he spent over 25 years in the military, retiring as a Lieutenant Colonel with vast experience in logistics.  As ED of the Emergency Management Agency, Redman traveled side by side with then Premier Ralph Klein when tragedy struck the province.  His role included formulating plans to deal with a variety of emergencies, including pandemics.  When an emergency occurred, the staff would immediately gather with leaders from government agencies and relevant private companies (power companies, etc).  Within 36 hours, they’d revise an existing plan and present the Premier with options for moving forward.

The province of Alberta’s website makes a bold statement about emergency management.  As this screen shot indicates Alberta’s Emergency Management Agency “leads and oversees all emergency and disaster prevention, preparedness and responses.” 

There’s only one problem with this bold statement.  In what has become the farthest reaching emergency in modern Alberta history, for some reason Alberta’s Emergency Management Agency is not co-ordinating Alberta’s response. Premier Jason Kenney is co-ordinating Alberta’s response with Health Minister Tyler Shandro, Alberta’s Chief Medical Officer Dr. Deena Hinshaw, and others.

This is not sitting well with David Redman.  Redman says when the first wave hit and Alberta announced a general lockdown, Redman was shocked such drastic measures were being taken. He knew immediately the emergency response plan had been thrown out.

Redman began contacting all Canada’s premiers.  He put together a presentation to show what they were doing wrong and what they should be doing instead.  It’s taken months to gain traction, but the media is starting to pay attention to Redman as he shares his presentation to people all over Canada.

His main message; governments can do a far better job of protecting the vulnerable AND protecting the economy.  Even though the second major wave is ebbing and restrictions are slowly disappearing, Redman says the matter is still urgent.  He’s convinced Covid variants will ensure future waves and unless they pivot to a new approach, governments will go back to the tool they’ve been relying on… lockdowns.

This is an abridged version of the presentation Redman has been showing all over the country is his effort to get at least one Premier to show the rest of Canada a different way to react to this emergency.

Also part of David Redman’s presentation is this comparison between lockdown measures and Canada’s Annual Viral Infection Curve.  Redman shows the annual viral infection curve performed exactly as usual in the past year.  In this part of the presentation Redman shows how the lockdown restrictions have coincided with the curve and therefore lockdowns have not greatly affected the spread of Covid.

After 15 years as a TV reporter with Global and CBC and as news director of RDTV in Red Deer, Duane set out on his own 2008 as a visual storyteller. During this period, he became fascinated with a burgeoning online world and how it could better serve local communities. This fascination led to Todayville, launched in 2016.

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Alberta

Alberta judge sides with LGBT activists, allows ‘gender transitions’ for kids to continue

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From LifeSiteNews

By Clare Marie Merkowsky

‘I think the court was in error,’ Alberta Premier Danielle Smith has said. ‘There will be irreparable harm to children who get sterilized.’

LGBT activists have won an injunction that prevents the Alberta government from restricting “gender transitions” for children.

On June 27, Alberta King’s Court Justice Allison Kuntz granted a temporary injunction against legislation that prohibited minors under the age of 16 from undergoing irreversible sex-change surgeries or taking puberty blockers.

“The evidence shows that singling out health care for gender diverse youth and making it subject to government control will cause irreparable harm to gender diverse youth by reinforcing the discrimination and prejudice that they are already subjected to,” Kuntz claimed in her judgment.

Kuntz further said that the legislation poses serious Charter issues which need to be worked through in court before the legislation could be enforced. Court dates for the arguments have yet to be set.

READ: Support for traditional family values surges in Alberta

Alberta’s new legislation, which was passed in December, amends the Health Act to “prohibit regulated health professionals from performing sex reassignment surgeries on minors.”

The legislation would also ban the “use of puberty blockers and hormone therapies for the treatment of gender dysphoria or gender incongruence” to kids 15 years of age and under “except for those who have already commenced treatment and would allow for minors aged 16 and 17 to choose to commence puberty blockers and hormone therapies for gender reassignment and affirmation purposes with parental, physician and psychologist approval.”

Just days after the legislation was passed, an LGBT activist group called Egale Canada, along with many other LGBT organizations, filed an injunction to block the bill.

In her ruling, Kuntz argued that Alberta’s legislation “will signal that there is something wrong with or suspect about having a gender identity that is different than the sex you were assigned at birth.”

However, the province of Alberta argued that these damages are speculative and the process of gender-transitioning children is not supported by scientific evidence.

“I think the court was in error,” Alberta Premier Danielle Smith said on her Saturday radio show. “That’s part of the reason why we’re taking it to court. The court had said there will be irreparable harm if the law goes ahead. I feel the reverse. I feel there will be irreparable harm to children who get sterilized at the age of 10 years old – and so we want those kids to have their day in court.”

READ: Canadian doctors claim ‘Charter right’ to mutilate gender-confused children in Alberta

Overwhelming evidence shows that persons who undergo so-called “gender transitioning” procedures are more likely to commit suicide than those who are not given such irreversible surgeries. In addition to catering to a false reality that one’s sex can be changed, trans surgeries and drugs have been linked to permanent physical and psychological damage, including cardiovascular diseases, loss of bone density, cancer, strokes and blood clots, and infertility.

Meanwhile, a recent study on the side effects of “sex change” surgeries discovered that 81 percent of those who have undergone them in the past five years reported experiencing pain simply from normal movements in the weeks and months that followed, among many other negative side effects.

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Alberta

Why the West’s separatists could be just as big a threat as Quebec’s

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By Mark Milke

It is a mistake to dismiss the movement as too small

In light of the poor showing by separatist candidates in recent Alberta byelections, pundits and politicians will be tempted to again dismiss threats of western separatism as over-hyped, and too tiny to be taken seriously, just as they did before and after the April 28 federal election.

Much of the initial skepticism came after former Leader of the Opposition Preston Manning authored a column arguing that some in central Canada never see western populism coming. He cited separatist sympathies as the newest example.

In response, (non-central Canadian!) Jamie Sarkonak argued that, based upon Alberta’s landlocked reality and poll numbers (37 per cent Alberta support for the “idea” of separation with 25 per cent when asked if a referendum were held “today”), western separation was a “fantasy” that “shouldn’t be taken seriously.” The Globe and Mail’s Andrew Coyne, noting similar polling, opined that “Mr. Manning does not offer much evidence for his thesis that ‘support for Western secession is growing.’”

Prime Minister Mark Carney labelled Manning’s column “dramatic.” Toronto Star columnist David Olive was condescending. Alberta is “giving me a headache,” he wrote. He argued the federal government’s financing of “a $34.2-billion expansion of the Trans Mountain pipeline (TMX)” as a reason Albertans should be grateful. If not, wrote Olive, perhaps it was time for Albertans to “wave goodbye” to Canada.

As a non-separatist, born-and-bred British Columbian, who has also spent a considerable part of his life in Alberta, I can offer this advice: Downplaying western frustrations — and the poll numbers — is a mistake.

One reason is because support for western separation in at least two provinces, Alberta and Saskatchewan, is nearing where separatist sentiment was in Quebec in the 1970s.

In our new study comparing recent poll numbers from four firms (Angus Reid InstituteInnovative Research GroupLeger, and Mainstreet Research), the range of support in recent months for separation from Canada in some fashion is as follows, from low to high: Manitoba (6 per cent to 12 per cent); B.C. (nine per cent to 20 per cent); Saskatchewan (20 per cent to 33 per cent) and Alberta (18 per cent to 36.5 per cent). Quebec support for separation was in a narrow band between 27 per cent and 30 per cent.

What such polling shows is that, at least at the high end, support for separating from Canada is now higher in Saskatchewan and Alberta than in Quebec.

Another, even more revealing comparison is how western separatist sentiment now is nearing actual Quebec votes for separatism or separatist parties back five decades ago. The separatist Parti Québécois won the 1976 Quebec election with just over 41 per cent of the vote. In the 1980 Quebec referendum on separation, “only” 40 per cent voted for sovereignty association with Canada (a form of separation, loosely defined). Those percentages were eclipsed by 1995, when separation/sovereignty association side came much closer to winning with 49.4 per cent of the vote.

Given that current western support for separation clocks in at as much as 33 per cent in Saskatchewan and 36.5 per cent in Alberta, it begs this question: What if the high-end polling numbers for western separatism are a floor and not a ceiling for potential separatist sentiment?

One reason why western support for separation may yet spike is because of the Quebec separatist dynamic itself and its impact on attitudes in other parts of Canada. It is instructive to recall in 1992 that British Columbians opposed a package of constitutional amendments, the Charlottetown Accord, in a referendum, in greater proportion (68.3 per cent) than did Albertans (60.2 per cent) or Quebecers (56.7 per cent).

Much of B.C.’s opposition (much like in other provinces) was driven by proposals for special status for Quebec. It’s exactly why I voted against that accord.

Today, with Prime Minister Carney promising a virtual veto to any province over pipelines — and with Quebec politicians already saying “non” — separatist support on the Prairies may become further inflamed. And I can almost guarantee that any whiff of new favours for Quebec will likely drive anti-Ottawa and perhaps pro-separatist sentiment in British Columbia.

There is one other difference between historic Quebec separatist sentiment and what exists now in a province like Alberta: Alberta is wealthy and a “have” province while Quebec is relatively poor and a have-not. Some Albertans will be tempted to vote for separation because they feel the province could leave and be even more prosperous; Quebec separatist voters have to ask who would pay their bills.

This dynamic again became obvious, pre-election, when I talked with one Alberta CEO who said that five years ago, separatist talk was all fringe. In contrast, he recounted how at a recent dinner with 20 CEOs, 18 were now willing to vote for separation. They were more than frustrated with how the federal government had been chasing away energy investment and killing projects since 2015, and had long memories that dated back to the National Energy Program.

(For the record, they view the federal purchase of TMX as a defensive move in response to its original owner, Kinder Morgan, who was about to kill the project because of federal and B.C. opposition. They also remember all the other pipelines opposed/killed by the Justin Trudeau government.)

Should Canadians outside the West dismiss western separatist sentiment? You could do that. But it’s akin to the famous Clint Eastwood question: Do you feel lucky?

Mark Milke is president and founder of the Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy and co-author, along with Ven Venkatachalam, of Separatist Sentiment: Polling comparisons in the West and Quebec.

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